A Macau Ginza Plaza computer shop owner has narrowly escaped an attempted murder earlier this week after a man tried to cut his neck.

The attempted murder took place on Monday at 10:40 a.m. The victim was opening his shop at the Plaza when he was attacked, sustaining a 20-centimeter-long and a 0.3-centimeter-deep cut on his neck.

The Plazas security reported the incident to the police. Bleeding was recorded but the victim, a 31-year-old local resident, did not suffer any life-threatening injuries.

According to some witnesses, the suspect is believed to be a customer of the victims shop. Furthermore, the suspect is said to have had a quarrel with the computer shop owner a day prior to the attempted murder.

However, rumors immediately spread online saying that the victim was randomly chosen. After a preliminary investigation, the Judiciary Police (PJ) confirmed that the case likely involved personal issues, and was not an attempted random killing.

The director of the PJ, Chau Wai Kuong, following a police force event that took place yesterday afternoon, said that the police is still trying to catch the criminal, who is on the run.
DALLAS  A white former suburban Dallas police officer who fired into a moving car carrying five black teenagers, killing one of them, says in a court filing that his actions were justified because he believed his partners life was in danger.

Former Balch Springs officer Roy Oliver said in Tuesdays federal court filing that he and his partner were in fear for their lives in April when the car carrying the teens sped past them. Oliver contends he was startled when he heard breaking glass and believed his partner was under threat.

A message left with Olivers attorney, Jim Lane, was not immediately returned Wednesday.

Oliver fired three to five times into the car and Jordan Edwards, 15, was mortally wounded. He also contends that gunshot residue was found on Edwards, who was identified in the filing by his initials.

Attorneys for Edwards family say the gunshot residue came from Oliver when he contaminated the scene, and that any implication that the teen handled a weapon is false.

Oliver, 37, was fired in May for violating department policies, but police officials havent specified which ones. A grand jury indicted him Monday on a murder charge and four counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon by a public servant related to the other four boys in the car.

Oliver, who was arrested on the murder charge less than a week after the shooting, turned himself in and is free on bond.

The shooting happened as the officers were responding to a report of drunken teens at a party. They had entered the home where the party was being held when the officers heard rapid gunfire outside. They ran outside to find cars leaving, including the one carrying Edwards. The driver of the sedan in which Edwards was a passenger disregarded several orders to stop, precipitating the shooting, Oliver said in court records, filed in response to a wrongful death lawsuit brought by Edwards family.

Oliver maintains the use of force was a reasonable response to a reasonable perception that the actions of the occupants of the black car under the totality of the circumstances created an immediate risk to another person of death or serious bodily injury.

He also asserts that others in the car acknowledged the driver should have heeded orders to stop.

Daryl Washington, an attorney representing Edwards father, Odell Edwards, said theres been a pattern in cases across the U.S. of police officers producing reasons after a deadly shooting for why they were afraid.

There was no gun in the car. My clients did not handle a gun, Washington said Wednesday. Nor was there ever any mention during or after this incident that officer Oliver fired shots into that vehicle because he thought the guys were armed.

He said Oliver was making meritless and unsupported allegations.

Lee Merritt, another attorney representing the Edwards family, said in an email that Oliver reached into the car to check Edwards pulse after the shooting, which violated department policy by possibly contaminating the crime scene.

The residue found on Jordans body was clearly transferred when Oliver illegally reached (into) the vehicle and checked his pulse, Merritt said.

Dallas County officials have cited the ongoing investigation in declining to release the teens autopsy report.

___

Associated Press writer Claudia Lauer contributed to this report.
MANSFIELD, Ohio  A Texas man has been charged with gross abuse of a corpse in Ohio after his wifes body was found in the hatchback of her sport-utility vehicle.

A judge in Mansfield on Monday set a $1 million bond for 35-year-old Dequalan Harris, of Cedar Hill, Texas, The (Mansfield) News Journal has reported (http://ohne.ws/2tppQoM ). Harris was arrested Saturday in Mansfield after Texas police asked officers to check on the missing woman, whose onboard system on her vehicle showed it was in Ohio.

Mansfield police subsequently found Tamara Harris body in the hatchback of her SUV. The Richland County Coroners Office said Wednesday that the cause of her death is pending an investigation. A spokeswoman for the Richland County Prosecutors Office declined to comment Wednesday when asked if Harris is a suspect in his wifes death.

Online court records dont show whether Harris has an attorney.

In addition to abuse of a corpse, Harris has pleaded not guilty to obstruction of justice and resisting arrest. Police used a stun gun on him after he tried to flee from Mansfield police, who said Harris told them he hadnt seen his wife since Thursday when he went to pick up a child at her home in Texas.

Richland County Children Services has taken custody of a child found with Harris and is working with authorities in Texas.
ATLANTA  A Russian man who helped develop and distribute malicious software designed to steal personal financial information was sentenced Wednesday in Atlanta to serve five years in prison.

Mark Vartanyan, also known as Kolypto, had pleaded guilty in March to a computer fraud charge after reaching a deal with prosecutors.

U.S. District Judge Mark Cohen said Vartanyan would receive credit for time served, including more than two years in a prison in Norway following his arrest there in October 2014. He will be turned over to immigration authorities for deportation once he serves his sentence.

Starting in 2011, Citadel was marketed on invite-only, Russian-language internet forums used by cybercriminals, and users targeted the computer networks of major financial and government institutions around the world to steal financial account credentials and personally identifiable information, prosecutors have said. Industry estimates indicate it infected about 11 million computers worldwide and caused more than $500 million in losses.

Vartanyan, a native of Moscow, was involved in the development, improvement, maintenance and distribution of Citadel from August 2012 to January 2013 while living in Ukraine and again from April 2014 to June 2014 while living in Norway, prosecutors have said. His attorney said he was working for a healthcare technology company in Norway.

Vartanyan didnt author the malware, federal prosecutor Steven Grimberg told the judge, but he was, for lack of a better term, the mechanic, the person who made it more pernicious.

Prosecutors requested a five-year sentence, much lower than possible, because Vartanyan quickly showed remorse and began helping the government, Grimberg said. Details of his cooperation were not revealed.

I have rarely come across an individual who has been as sorry for his role as Mark Vartanyan, he said.

Nevertheless, Grimberg said, cybercriminals often operate in countries that dont allow for extradition, so its important to send a message that anyone who is caught and prosecuted will serve significant time.

Addressing the judge in accented English, Vartanyan said he encountered the Bible in prison and felt an enormous weight lifted when he understood through prayer that he could accept what hed done and help make things right.

My intention is to see how I can lead this Christian life God showed me outside of prison, he said.

Court-appointed defense attorney Stephen Johnson said Lars Dahle, CEO of Dignio, a remote patient-monitoring company where Vartanyan worked before his arrest, was so impressed by him that he regularly visited Vartanyan while he was in prison in Norway and offered to fly to Atlanta for the sentencing. Norwegian prison officials also vouched for Vartanyans character, writing that hed been helpful to them and other inmates.

Jim Lenahen, pastor of a church in Roswell, told the judge that Dahle, an old friend, is eager to rehire Vartanyan once hes released. He said Dahle asked him to check on Vartanyan in custody, and the pastor was so impressed by his truthfulness and commitment to his newly discovered faith that he took to visiting regularly.

Given the seriousness of the crime but also taking into account his quick acceptance of responsibility and cooperation with the government, the judge said five years is appropriate, and he hopes Vartanyan will do good once hes free.

Sometimes getting into trouble can open up your eyes to a lot of different stuff, and I think it has done that for Mr. Vartanyan, the judge said, adding: You made a great start where you are right now in terms of your future life, and I hope that continues outside of prison.
The first trailer for Only the Brave has hit online  and the Land of Enchantment is at the forefront.

The film is based on the real-life Granite Mountain Hotshots, a firefighting squad that grew, against all odds, to become an elite group of wildland firefighters that courageously battled one of the worst wildfires in history  the Yarnell Hill Fire  to save an Arizona town. The fire overran the group and 19 were killed.

The film takes an intimate look at the camaraderie of their daily lives, sacrifices and heroic moments.

The production filmed in New Mexico from June through September 2016.

Some of the areas included Santa Fe, Pajarito, White Rock, Nambe Pueblo, Los Alamos, Pecos and Las Vegas, N.M.

While in production, the working title was Granite Mountain.

It stars Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jeff Bridges, Taylor Kitsch, James Badge Dale and Andie MacDowell.

According to the New Mexico Film Office, the production employed 190 New Mexico crew members, 40 New Mexico actors and about 1,300 New Mexico background talent.

The film is slated to be released on Oct. 20.
MARIPOSA, Calif.  A surging wildfire raced through California mountains and foothills west of Yosemite National Park on Wednesday, forcing thousands to flee tiny, Gold Rush-era towns, destroying 29 structures and wafting a smoky haze over the parks landmark Half Dome rock face.

The 4-day-old blaze nearly doubled in size overnight to 75 square miles (194 square kilometers), the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said.

At its closest, the blaze was still about 35 miles from the boundary of Yosemite, where campgrounds are open, park spokesman Scott Gediman said. The fire closed one of several roads into the park during its busy summer season, and rangers warned visitors with respiratory problems to be mindful of the haze, Gediman said.

Among park visitors Gediman talked to, people understand fire is a naturally occurring thing, he said. Nobody was upset about it.

Yosemite does not appear at risk from the fire, which was moving south Wednesday, away from the park, California fire spokesman Jordan Motta said.

The fire has forced almost 5,000 people from homes in and around a half-dozen small communities, officials said.

Heavy smoke hung in the air over Mariposa, a town of 2,000 with century-old wooden buildings, including whats touted as the oldest active courthouse west of the Rocky Mountains.

The fire was threatening about 1,500 homes and other buildings, after already destroying 29 structures. Its not clear what type of buildings burned. The flames are near Highway 49, a historical route winding its way up California foothills of the western Sierra Nevada dotted with little towns that sprouted along the gold Mother Lode that drew miners to California in the 1800s.

The fire got within a half mile of Mariposa but crews have been able to keep it out of the town, said Cal Fire spokeswoman Katherine Garver.

Tony Munoz, 63, and his wife, Edna Munoz, 59, were ordered out of their home outside Mariposa on Tuesday. They grabbed clothes, medicine and their three dogs and a cat before fleeing.

Driving out on narrow roads clogged by others getting out, you couldnt even see the sun in the ash-filled sky, said Tony Munoz, a school custodian.

Downtown Mariposa was empty except for firefighters and other emergency workers. Fierce flames were visible on slopes about a mile away.

Record rain and snowfall in the mountains this winter abruptly ended Californias five-year drought. But that has increased the challenge for crews battling flames feeding on dense vegetation.

Theres ample fuel and steep terrain, Cal Fire spokeswoman DeeDee Garcia said. It makes firefighting difficult.

Statewide, about 6,000 firefighters were battling 17 large wildfires, including about 2,200 at the fire near Yosemite.

Gov. Jerry Brown has declared an emergency, bolstering the states resources to battle the fire that he said has forced thousands of residents to flee and is expected to continue burning.

In Nevada, firefighters got a handle on a wind-driven wildfire that destroyed four homes and damaged several more. Bureau of Land Management spokesman Greg Deimel said Wednesday that no one was hurt in the fire that broke out in extremely windy conditions just east of Elko.

___

Kristin Bender in San Francisco contributed to this report.
GRANTS, N.M.  The Cibola County Detention Center is closing.

The Gallup Independent reports (http://bit.ly/2o70OE6 ) employees at the center were informed about the closure on Monday. County Manager Tony Boyd estimated it could take 90-120 days to fully close.

The county will replace the detention center with a transport program, which will utilize the services of other facilities.

Boyd says detention center officials have been contemplating closing for two years. He says the costs associated with running the center are extremely high.

The closure is expected to impact about 45 employees. Boyd says the Western New Mexico Corrections Facility in Grants is willing to absorb any employees who what to work there.

___

Information from: Gallup Independent, http://www.gallupindependent.com
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.  Attorneys general from Pennsylvania, New Mexico and more than a dozen other states are urging U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to keep in place protections for victims of sexual assault on college campuses.

The attorneys, all Democrats, sent a letter Wednesday to DeVos voicing their concerns about reports that suggest her office is preparing to roll back guidance from President Barack Obamas era for stepped-up investigations of sexual assault at universities and colleges across the country.

DeVos said last week that the current system isnt working. While allegations of sexual assault cant be dismissed, she said, a system without due process ultimately will serve no one.

The debate continues to percolate following remarks made by the Education Departments top civil rights official, Candice Jackson, who said the vast majority of sexual assault claims resulted from both parties having been drunk. Jackson has repeatedly apologized for her comments.

In their letter, the attorneys general say they see the effects sexual assault has on victims, the educational institutions themselves and the communities.

Were calling on Secretary DeVos to listen to law enforcement and trust survivors of sexual assault by keeping these protections in place and putting student safety first, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a statement issued Wednesday.

A dozen schools in Shapiros state are being investigated for improperly handling sexual assault allegations made by students.

In New Mexico, a 2016 investigation by the U.S. Justice Department found that states flagship university had failed in its handling of such cases.

Violence on Americas campuses must be taken seriously, said New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas.

He noted that rolling back the guidance would amount to turning back the clock on the progress some states have made when it comes to improving reporting and implementing programs aimed at curbing sexual assaults.

As of last week, there were 344 open sexual violence investigations at 242 postsecondary schools, according to a Title IX report provided by the Education Department.

The attorneys general said in their letter that any effort to address the problem of sexual assault on college campuses must be deliberate and allow for meaningful input from all stakeholders, and it must focus on the ultimate goal of ensuring that all students are protected from discrimination, including sexual harassment, assault, stalking and domestic violence, under Title IX.
Universal Television is back in New Mexico.

This time with the NBC drama, The Brave.

According to the New Mexico Film Office, the TV series, The Brave will begin principal photography this month through the beginning of December.

Its great to see the return of one of our best customers in Universal Television with the new series The Brave,  said New Mexico Film Office Director Nick Maniatis. This continued success speaks volumes about all our state has to offer. Our industry, our communities and the hard-working New Mexicans who make these productions possible have so much to be proud of  and were not taking our foot off the gas.

The Brave is a heart-pounding journey into the complex world of Americas elite undercover military heroes follows Captain Adam Dalton, played by Mike Vogel and his heroic Special Ops squad of highly trained undercover specialists carry out each mission on the ground.

His team is armed with incredible sniper Sgt. Jasmine Jaz Khan, played by Natacha Karam, CPO Ezekiel Preach Carter, played by Demetrius Grosse, combat medic Sgt. Joseph McG McGuire, played by Noah Mills and intelligence officer Agent Amir Al-Raisani, played by Hadi Tabbal.

This team works hand-in-hand with D.I.A. Deputy Director Patricia Campbell, played by Anne Heche and her team of analysts including veterans Cultural Specialist Noah Morgenthau, played by Tate Ellington and Mission Coordinator Hannah Archer, played by Sofia Pernas, as they wield the worlds most advanced surveillance technology from headquarters in D.C.

The production will employ approximately 600 New Mexico crew members, 180 resident actors and stunt players, and approximately 4,000 New Mexico background talent, according to the film office.

The series is produced by Universal Television and Keshet Studios. It will film in Albuquerque and Santa Fe and will be housed at Albuquerque Studios.

There are 16 local crew in key and head positions on this production.
WASHINGTON  Congressional Republicans are moving forward with legislation to roll back the Endangered Species Act, amid complaints that the landmark 44-year-old law hinders drilling, logging and other activities.

At simultaneous hearings Wednesday, House and Senate committees considered bills to revise the law and limit lengthy and costly litigation associated with it.

The bills come as a federal court lifted federal protections for gray wolves in Wyoming and the Trump administration moved to lift protections for grizzly bears in and near Yellowstone National Park. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke also is reviewing federal efforts to conserve the imperiled sage grouse in 11 Western states.

House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop said the bills would curb excessive litigation and allow officials to focus on actual species conservation.

All too often, the endangered species law has been misused to control land, block a host of economic activities important for jobs  proliferate costly litigation that drains taxpayer resources away from actual conservation efforts, said Bishop, a Utah Republican.

Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, the panels senior Democrat, said the law does not need congressional meddling to work better. What it needs is congressional support.

Despite years of Republican efforts to pass bills weakening the species law and cut funding for agencies responsible for protecting and recovering imperiled American wildlife, 99 percent of listed species have continued to survive, and 90 percent are on schedule to meet their recovery goals, Grijalva said.

Environmental groups called the simultaneous hearings a one-two punch on threatened wildlife.

While nine out of ten Americans want to protect endangered species and their habitat, Congressional leaders are spending their time dismantling the ESA in favor of special interests, said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife. Enactment of any of these bills will only hasten the disappearance of endangered and threatened species from our planet.

Five bills were being considered by the House panel, and a sixth bill was being heard in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. One of the bills would allow economic factors to be considered in some species-listing decisions, while another would cap attorneys fees in endangered species cases.

Both the House and Senate would delist the gray wolf as a protected species in the western Great Lakes and Wyoming, with management turned over to state officials in Wyoming, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. The bills also block further judicial review of a 2011 decision by the Fish and Wildlife Service to remove federal protections for the wolves.

Gray wolves were once hunted to the brink of extinction in most of the country, but now number over 5,500 in the lower 48 states, including nearly 3,800 in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan and nearly 400 in Wyoming.

Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., said the current law prevents Midwest farmers from killing wolves even if they attack cattle or pets. The states, not the federal government, are best equipped to manage their gray wolf populations by balancing safety, economic and species-management issues, he said.

Sen. John. Barrasso, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate environment panel, said the bipartisan Senate bill would enhance recreational hunting and sport fishing, ensure common-sense environmental regulation and protect wildlife and wildlife habitat. The bill reauthorizes several environmental programs, promotes public target ranges for recreational shooting and allows fishermen to continue using lead tackle, among other provisions.

Gregory Sheehan, acting director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the Trump administration generally supports the House bills, with some technical modifications.

His agency plays a key role in preventing extinctions and aiding recovery, Sheehan said, but states and the people on the ground who have long been stewards of the land are in the best position to be the primary caretakers of species over the long-term.

Follow Matthew Daly: https://twitter.com/MatthewDalyWDC
Work has begun on the home for some of the retail that will accompany the new Cabelas being built in the 21-acre Legacy Journal Center development at the intersection of Paseo del Norte and Interstate 25.

Titan Devlopment has begun construction on an 8,000-square foot structure that will include either three or four spaces depending on tenant needs, said Kurt Browning, chief development officer for Titan, managing partner on Legacy Journal Center.

Browning said the building has not yet been fully leased but that a restaurant and retail business he could not yet disclose have signed on. Leasing for the spaces is being handled by CBRE.

The construction, which began a month ago, will be completed in November and be ready for tenants to open their doors around Christmas, Browning said.

Cabelas, the Nebraska-based outdoor outfitter, is expecting to have a grand opening event in September. It is expecting roughly 3,000 people for the opening of the 70,000-square foot facility, which will be the first in New Mexico.

I was shocked. Cabelas openings are huge affairs. I mean they really do it, Browning said.

Five additional buildings are going to be built around Cabelas as part of phase one for redevelopment of the area. There is no timetable for when that construction will begin, but Browning did say the goal for all retail and restaurant space at Legacy Journal Center to be complete is roughly two years.

There is a five year target for completion of the entire Legacy Journal Center project, including a multi-family residential complex, according to Browning.

Browning said phase two will involve the west side of Lang Avenue where possible residential structures may be built.

Titan has also been working on other projects around the national outdoor outfitter. In recent months, Titan has bought the Marriott Courtyard near Legacy and the lot to the west of the Cabelas development. In addition, Titan spent about $300,000 developing the end of Headline Blvd.

That road used to connect to Paseo but it doesnt anymore, said Browning. So we built a parking lot and a bike trail and landscaped it.
A Chinese white dolphin was found dead this morning, floating in the sea near Cheoc Van beach in Coloane.

Local animal rights group Anima (Macau) was alerted to the presence of the deceased animal by a concerned citizen. Anima president, Albano Martins, speculated that the dolphin may have collided with a maritime vessel in the Pearl River Delta estuary.

Dolphins have a sense of orientation that can [help them to] avoid accidents even in these murky waters, Martins told the Times. We dont know what happened, but it seems like a boat cut it.

The Anima president also said that Macaus Marine and Water Bureau has retrieved the deceased animal and is arranging for the body to be disposed.

Sightings of dead dolphins off the coast of Macau are a relatively rare occurrence, but several have been documented in recent years.

A notable decline in the Chinese white dolphin population in neighboring Hong Kong has prompted that citys Dolphin Conservation Society to recently call for a new, extensive marine park in the territory to protect the species.

There was an estimated 188 members of the marine mammal species in Hong Kong waters when the citys Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department began monitoring the population in 2003.

Fourteen years later, the population has been reduced to just 47  a quarter of that recorded in 2003 and a historical low for the territory.

More worryingly, the pace of their disappearance seems to be increasing. It took about eight years for the 2003 population to halve, but only another six years for it to halve again.

The dolphin conservation group attributes the decline in the number of dolphins to the regions recent infrastructure development. Since the 1997 handover, numerous large-scale infrastructure works around Lantau Island have commenced, most notably the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge.

In addition, the growing frequency of high-speed ferries and maritime traffic is threatening the traditional territory of the mammals and other marine wildlife, the group said.

Chinese white dolphins are a variety of the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins, with a territory spanning Southeast Asia and the coast of northern Australia. Although they are often white in color  hence the species name 

the population along the Chinese coast are sometimes a striking shade of pink. DB
Technavio analysts forecast the autonomous tractors market in Europe to grow at a CAGR of almost 58% during the forecast period, according to their latest report.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170719005467/en/

Technavio has published a new report on the autonomous tractors market in Europe from 2017-2021. (Photo: Business Wire)

The research study covers the present scenario and growth prospects of the autonomous tractors market in Europe for 2017-2021. The market is segmented based on components (sensors, GPS, vision system), application (harvesting, seed sowing, and irrigation), and geography (France, Germany, Poland, UK, and Romania).

In 2016, the robotic technology became advanced and robots were introduced to perform several farm applications. Autonomous tractors were introduced to address challenges such as uncertain weather conditions and rising demand for high productivity and output. The autonomous tractors market has witnessed a lot of technical improvements and incorporation of advanced components. The introduction and use of artificial intelligence, advanced components, and robotic equipment in agriculture fields have proven to be beneficial for farmers and the agriculture industry.

This report is available at a USD 1,000 discount for a limited time only: View market snapshot before purchasing

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Technavio industrial automation research analysts highlight the following three factors that are contributing to the growth of the autonomous tractors market in Europe:

Increase in profit generated from farming

Benefits offered by autonomous tractors

Advancement in technology facilitating market growth

Looking for more information on this market? Request a free sample report

Technavios sample reports are free of charge and contain multiple sections of the report including the market size and forecast, drivers, challenges, trends, and more.

Increase in profit generated from farming

The agriculture industry has been using mechanical equipment that are tough to operate and demands manual assistance. However, robotic equipment that are being used in the farming applications has provided farmers with a higher opportunity of maximizing quantity and quality of crops.

Sushmit Chakraborty, a lead robotics research analyst at Technavio, says, Applications like harvesting demand long hours of farmers' duty, resulting in stress. In addition, under tough weather conditions, it is not possible for farmers to work on the field. This results in the loss of quality of crops and also delays the farming operations. With the use of robotic equipment, it is possible for farmers to operate from a remote location, thus empowering farmers to perform farming operations even under tough weather conditions.

Benefits offered by autonomous tractors

Farming operations have adopted robots in different applications. Different robotic equipment offers different benefits that allow farmers to increase the productivity. Autonomous tractors provide different benefits which include time, Increased efficiency and productivity, and reliability.

These autonomous tractors are equipped with advanced components such as GPS, sensors, and cameras that can also work in the dark. These tractors provide better precision in operations such as spreading fertilizers, insecticides, and pesticides, thus allowing farmers to prevent any wastage of agricultural products and increasing the efficiency of work and productivity, adds Sushmit.

Advancement in technology facilitating market growth

An increase in the number of technology providers has been witnessed with the adoption of robots in different fields of operations and industries. There are system integrators and suppliers who are developing technologically advanced robotic products. With the growth in start-ups such as Uber and Airbnb, there has been a significant growth in robotic technology and start-ups.

Companies like Google are the major players globally for developing and commercializing artificial intelligence and cloud computing. With the rising adoption rate of robotics, there are start-ups that are emerging to facilitate the robotic technology by developing different products and software. European companies and tech-providers are focused on both development of new technologies and enhancement of consumer services.

Top vendors:

AGCO

Kinze Manufacturing

New Holland

Yanmar

Browse Related Reports:

Global Industrial Robot Cell Market 2017-2021

Global Industrial Robotics Rental Market 2017-2021

Global Vision Guided Robotics Market 2017-2021

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions.

With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavios report library consists of more than 10,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavios comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com.

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We can help you make sense of the agribusiness industry, extending from chemicals and fertilizers used as inputs into agriculture, to the commodities, food and by-products that are an output to farming, with policy and regulation applied at every step of the value chain.
Samsung has just announced that a new update is rolling out to its Bixby app, and that it brings along voice capabilities. Do keep in mind that all the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus units in the US will have access to Bixby voice once the update hits, and that is a feature that has been awaited since Samsung introduced the Galaxy S8 and the Galaxy S8 Plus. As most of you know by now, Bixby did come along with both devices, but its voice capabilities were not available in the US, well, Samsung did roll it out to beta testers, but thats pretty much it.

Having said that, Bixby voice feature has been available in Korea for some time now, and Samsung actually said that quite a few people tested this feature in the US. According to Samsung, over 100,000 users signed up for the Samsung Bixby early access preview on the Galaxy S8 devices, which managed to surprise the company it seems and it definitely helped Samsung make Bixby voice stable and available. So, what will you get with this update? Well, Bixby will, essentially, become a full fledged virtual assistant, it will do its best to understand what youre asking, and comply to your request, without the need to do it manually by tapping the display. Bixby can do a number of tasks, which you can tell it to do using your voice, such as turning on the flashlight, taking a screenshot, taking a selfie, and so on. Bixby is also fully integrated into Samsungs native apps which come pre-installed on the Galaxy S8 and the Galaxy S8 Plus. The company also says that Bixby will be integrated into select third-party apps as well, which will make Bixby voice even more compelling, as it will allow you to control some new, non-Samsung apps, using your voice.

Now, Samsung also notes that Bixby is able to handle complex requests, it can, for example, group pictures from your latest vacation, and send them to your friends. If Bixby comes to a point where it does not fully understand what you said, it will complete a task to a certain point. There you have it, you can also check out the embedded videos down below, which will give you an even better idea of how Bixby voice functions.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34-LYLuq-aI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHEIU_kQuFI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzZH-InAF_8

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSGRWYgGUd4
The General Court based in Luxembourg has denied Qualcomms appeal for the suspension of a European Union decision to impose a daily fine of 580,000 euros or $665,000 on the chipmaker after the company failed to submit information requested by the EUs antitrust regulators. The European Commission charged Qualcomm with violating antitrust rules in the region for allegedly using unfair methods to beat its rival Icera, therefore squashing competition. Icera is a British phone software maker acquired by NVIDIA in 2011 with the goal of integrating cellular modems into its chips. However, Iceras operation was shut down in 2015 in what NVIDIA claimed to be the result of Qualcomms monopolistic business methods. The EU antitrust authorities then launched an investigation on the business practices of Qualcomm to determine whether or not the company complied with competition policies in Europe.

In its appeal to the General Court, Qualcomm described the EU antitrust authoritys decision as requiring a lot of work and hefty financial costs which are expected to reach more than 3 million euros. The demand also implicated over 50 employees at the company as well as 16 third-party advisers. In denying the companys appeal, Court President Marc Jaeger said Qualcomm lacks any claim that the penalty would tremendously affect its financial viability and market share, nor did the company explain why it would not be possible to seek compensation for the financial costs from the penalty if it submits the required information to EU competition authorities.

The General Courts decision to uphold the regulators penalty against Qualcomm comes as a major blow to the company amid a salvo of antitrust complaints the company is facing in other regions besides Europe. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission has charged Qualcomm with employing anti-competitive practices in January of this year for allegedly taking an unfair advantage of its market dominance to force device manufacturers to accept unfair licensing terms. Earlier than that, the chipmaker faced an $854 million fine in South Korea for allegedly violating a number of antitrust rules after the company reportedly coerced phone makers to pay for a variety of patents when they acquire Qualcomms chips. More details about Qualcomms antitrust battle in Europe are likely to follow over the coming months.
Former South Korean President Park Geun-Hye is still avoiding the trial of Samsung Group Vice Chairman and heir apparent Jay Y. Lee as she once again refused to testify on her dealings with him. Her latest refusal came on Wednesday, with Park claiming that she isnt able to appear at Lees trial due to her poor health caused by her own trial and incarceration. The two cases are closely connected, with Park and her associate Choi Soon-sil being accused of helping Lee complete a controversial merger of Cheil Industries and Samsung C&T in 2015, with the companys top executive reportedly looking to facilitate succession proceedings within the company through the deal that saw more corporate power being shifted to the part of Samsung Group controlled by its founding Lee family.

Lee himself already adopted a similar approach to that employed by Park, refusing to testify at her trial earlier this month and citing self-incrimination reasons for doing so. Samsung Group Vice Chairman and the de facto leader of the company since 2014 was previously accused of using corporate funds to finance several organizations connected to Park and Choi in exchange for obtaining their help to complete the aforementioned merger. Park and Choi allegedly pressured the National Pension Service (NPS) to approve the consolidation despite losing significant money on the deal as the largest shareholder of Samsung C&T. Park was already sentenced to three years in prison for her role in the scandal and may receive an even longer sentence after her separate trials for fraud and abuse of power are concluded. Lee is yet to be sentenced on any count, though the ordeal saw him facing official charges of perjury, embezzlement of corporate funds, bribery, and hiding the proceeds of a criminal act. Parks trial started in May and saw her face charges of abuse of power and other criminal transgressions.

Lees trial is currently expected to be concluded in mid-August, with the prosecutors previously announcing their intentions to make their final sentence demands on August 4. The initial verdict is expected to be given by the Seoul Central District Court two weeks after that date, though Lee will still be able to appeal it.
Newspapers and associated media outlets are under more threat from Google and Facebook than many may have guessed and the organizations responsible for the news have decided not to take that threat lying down. According to David Chavern, who acts as both the President and CEO of the News Media Alliance  an organization representing a group of 2,000 digital and print outlets in both the U.S. and Canada  as much as 70 percent of the advertising revenue generated by news organizations actually ends up going to either Facebook or Google. Perhaps more disturbingly and more importantly, studies have shown a decline in revenue for the industry of about a third over the last 10 years. Thats despite that ad revenues are the chief form of income for those organizations. The News Media Alliance has since asked representatives from the legislative branch in the U.S. for permission to collectively renegotiate the terms for sharing between news organizations and the two internet giants sites.

The request could not come at a more important point for the news organizations themselves. Google and Facebook are hard at work, finding new ways to increase revenue through new features and improvements meant to drive traffic to news sites and sources with greater accuracy. In the case of the search giant and its array of applications, some of which are designed specifically for news consumption, changes have been made that could effectively drive users to the larger news organizations. Tools to ensure users get their local news and can fact-check news sources play a large role in that. On the other hand, Facebook has its own features rolling out or planned with a similar goal in mind. One such feature, which is said to be available by the end of 2017, allows users to subscribe to news providers. The problem with all of this is that both Google and Facebook are effectively being paid for providing content that neither plays a major role in creating or in creating the market for. As Chavern says, they dont dig through public records to uncover corruption, send correspondents into war zones, or attend last nights game to get the highlights. Although having more readers directed to news organizations could drive up profits for those companies, he goes on to accuse both tech giants of expecting an already stressed industry to do all of the really costly work, while they collect the majority of the profits.

For their parts, Facebook and Google have both publicly stated that they will actively work with the organizations to address issues and concerns. The head of news partnerships at Facebook, Campbell Brown, stated that the company is committed to helping quality journalism thrive on Facebook. He went on to say that although progress has been made through its partnership with publishers, more work still needs to be done. Googles own statement echoed those sentiments, remarking that the tech giant is and remains deeply committed to helping publishers with both their challenges and their opportunities. Google also pointed to its creation of products and technologies with the specific goal of helping to distribute, fund, and support newspapers. Fortunately, both companies appear more than willing to work out any kinks that might exist in their partnerships with news agencies and media providers. So, it should be entirely possible to work out any new details or deals without legal intervention in either case.

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In the meantime, Chavern reiterates that a deal needs to be made that provides a better economy for legitimate news agencies. Brand awareness, he says, is going to need to be the first issue addressed. He points to Facebook, in particular, on that front, saying that news readers on Facebook often become confused and believe that Facebook is actually producing the content. That leads to an entirely separate issue as well, because it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate reliable news from the fake news that can spread on social media. Another issue that needs to be addressed, which also has the added issue listed above, is the problem with free news vs. paid news. When news is delivered for free, according to Chavern, it can lead to lazy reporting and it also takes money away from organizations that spend a lot of time and money trying to get the facts down correctly. Under current antitrust laws, it is not allowed for corporations or organizations within an industry to group together and negotiate on matters like these. Chavern says that they dont want to change the laws themselves, but want to be able to negotiate collectively when it comes to dealing with huge intermediary distributors in the tech world, such as Google and Facebook. Whether or not they end up with permission to do that remains to be seen.
Xiaomi is hoping to record more than $2 billion in revenue from its Indian business in 2017, resting its hope for local growth on its smartphones and marketing efforts, according to Xiaomi India chief Manu Jain. That figure is twice as large as the companys 2016 revenue in the country. During the first half of this year, Xiaomi has reported a growth of 328 percent compared to the same period in 2016, largely thanks to the robust sales of a slew of its handsets including the Redmi 4, Redmi Note 4, and the Redmi 4A, Jain was quoted as saying. Another popular Xiaomi device, the Redmi 3S, has sold four million units by May this year in India, despite only being on the market for nine months.

According to Jain, the Chinese smartphone maker is now working to grow its retail and after-sales footprint in the South Asian country, with 500 of its service centers already catering to the needs of local customers. Part of Xiaomis expansion plan is opening more Mi Homes in India to provide potential customers with a firsthand experience of the companys products before they decide to purchase one of the companys devices. According to Jain, the Chinese phone giant plans to set up 100 Mi Homes in the country in the near future, with two of them being slated to open this month in Bengaluru. Other places in India where Xiaomi intends to build more Mi Homes this quarter include Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, and Hyderabad, Jain said.

Earlier this year, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun said the company aims to capture 50 percent of the online and offline market in India. The company has been known for its intensive effort to sell its devices through offline channels in addition to online outlets, though it remains to be seen whether its recent efforts will translate to more sales in the coming years. Currently, Xiaomi is the second largest smartphone maker in India, surpassed only by Samsung, according to Counterpoint Researchs recent report. Time will tell whether Xiaomi eventually manages to surpass the South Korean original equipment manufacturer (OEM) in terms of local sales in India and if an update on its efforts to do so follows soon.
Japan called Monday for increased pressure on North Korea, saying this is not a time for dialogue.

Government spokesman Norio Maruyama said North Korea reached a new level with its latest launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile as Americans celebrated Independence Day on July 4.

The test marked a significant step toward the goal of North Koreas young leader Kim Jong Un to develop a missile with a nuclear warhead capable of reaching the United States. The ICBM reportedly landed in Japans exclusive economic zone in the Sea of Japan, where previous North Korean ballistic missile launches have also landed.

Despite condemning the ICBM test, South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Monday offered talks with North Korea, indicating for the first time since his inauguration in May that he wants to use dialogue to defuse the international standoff over the Norths nuclear and missile programs.

Maruyama said the Japanese government is aware of the announcement, but made clear that immediate talks arent the approach it supports.

This is not a time for dialogue, its a time for pressure, he said.

Maruyama explained that raising pressure now is essential in order to be able to conduct a serious dialogue with North Korea in the future.

Dialogue for the sake of dialogue is meaningless, he stressed.

He reminded Seoul of the joint statement issued by Moon, U.S. President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe after a meeting on the fringes of the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, on July 6 on a common understanding on how to deal with North Korea

The joint statement commits the three leaders to work together to counter the threat from North Korea and to apply maximum pressure on Pyongyang to change its path, refrain from provocative and threatening actions, and take steps necessary to return to serious denuclearization dialogue.

The three leaders also agreed to press for early adoption of a new U.N. sanctions resolution to demonstrate to North Korea that there are serious consequences for its destabilizing, provocative and escalatory actions.

In response to the ICBM test, the United States has circulated a resolution with proposed new sanctions to the other permanent veto-wielding Security Council members  China, Russia, Britain and France  U.N. diplomats said last week.

No details have been released. But U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley told the council earlier this month that if it is united, the international community can cut off major sources of hard currency to North Korea, restrict oil to its military and weapons programs, increase air and maritime restrictions, and hold senior officials accountable.

When pressed about possible restrictions on oil sales, Maruyama said, we are considering tougher U.N. sanctions. But he also stressed that, we need to see what sanctions are most successful.

He urged all countries to implement U.N. sanctions, and called on other nations to follow Japans move to bar North Korean ships from Japanese ports and impose additional sanctions.

What is important, Maruyama stressed, is to stop the flow of people, commodities and currency to North Korea.

China, North Koreas neighbor and closest ally, is responsible for 90 percent of trade with the country.

Maruyama said Japan is encouraging China to play a greater role in pressuring North Korea to halt its provocative actions and comply with Security Council resolutions.

He said Russia also has an extremely important role to play in dealing with the North Korean problem and we will encourage Russia to play some even greater role. Edith M. Lederer, United Nations, AP
Sands China launched a first-of-its-kind Sands China International Strategic Leadership Programme for Integrated Resorts, yesterday  a platform which focuses on the training and development of team members.

The customized program will send team members from the local management to study at Catolica Lisbon in Portugal, Cornell University in the United States and locally to the University of St. Joseph.

According to the gaming operator, team members will receive leadership development over the course of five months, enabling them to take advantage of the areas of industry expertise of the three educational institutions. The latest initiative of Sands China Academy is aimed at developing its local leaders and has 25 team members participating.

Wilfred Wong, president of Sands China Ltd, reiterated that the gaming operator would continually work alongside the MSAR and educational institutions to assist the growth of its team members.

We firmly believe that whats good for their [team members] future is good for the future of Macau, said Wong.

One of the employees chosen by the company to participate in the strategic leadership program, Kelly Ip, is working under the Special Events and Promotions Department for the companys five properties. Ip told the press, on the sidelines of the launch of the program, that such initiatives would allow local team members to mature professionally and contribute to the regions competency.

This is a tailor-made program for Sands China [so] I will be able to learn a lot of things especially from different professors from university. Its my honor, she said.

The program is a new way for us to look at things differently because were in Macau and were facing different challenges everyday, so if we dont have time to step out of Macau and look outside, its not good for us to develop ourselves, Ip continued.

The employee believes that the 25 team members will be able to establish a better outcome for their given responsibilities and will have the opportunity to be part of Sands Chinas team members.

Sands China has also recently launched the Manager Competence Development Programme, a nine-module training series dedicated to developing middle management and their ability to build teams for dynamic operators. With its career mobility opportunities, the company has offered nearly 18,000 promotions, involving 10,000 local team members  with over 2,400 promoted to managerial roles to date.

Also, according to the gaming operator, nearly 60 percent of its managerial leaders have been working with the company for more than 10 years.
He Jingtang, honorary Dean of School of Architecture of the South China University of Technology, gave a lecture last week on Design for Drastically Changing China, at Albergue SCM.

Urban construction in China is estimated to span an area of over two billion square meters each year. Around half of the overall recent construction projects in the world have taken place in China.

The prominent architect noted that the economy of China is growing rapidly, and then said that, while the extensive urbanization has greatly changed the appearances of Chinese cities, various problems emerged, in particular traffic congestion, environment degradation, and lost urban features.

The transformation from incremental growth to the stock upgrading in the urbanization process also gives rise to deep conflicts, he added.

According to the speaker, creating harmonious human settlements is the fundamental objective of urban development.

He, who directed the design project China Pavilion which was featured in the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, places a lot of emphasis on harmony.

Chinese civilization has valued harmony since ancient times, said He.

Faced with opportunities and conflicts brought by the drastic changes in China, He suggested that China needs to explore a path of architectural innovation through the integration of both Chinese and modern characteristics. He elucidated his recommendation by saying that the innovation should include innovative theory, innovative talents, and innovative teams, and explore the vision of a green and harmonious human habitat.

When talking about his architectural theory, He said that place, culture and time of architecture form a holistic concept. Place represents the basis for the subsistence of architecture, while culture means its connotation and taste, and time its spirit and development.

According to He, a logical design conception process normally involves exploring the useful genes from the place of the architecture, refining and upgrading concepts from the cultural perspective, incorporating modern technology and thinking and orienting the conception toward spatial integrity and time sustainability.

Besides having designed the China Pavilion in the World Expo, He also designed the new campus of the University of Macau.
There are now more women than men practicing law in Australia according to figures from the Law Society of NSW, which also shows a rise in the number of private law firms.The report shows that there were 71,509 practicing solicitors nationwide in 2016 with 35,799 women accounting for 50.1%, the first time that women have outnumbered men.We have made significant advances in all areas of practice to assist the retention and career progression of women in the profession however impediments still remain, said The Law Society of NSW Chief Executive Officer Michael Tidball.He added that figures showing that the number of women entering Australias legal profession was more than double the number of men (35% vs. 16%) there was more for law firms to do to promote women to leadership roles.Mr Tidball said that one barrier to women climbing the legal career ladder was a failure to translate flexible working policies into reality.The legal profession must assist men and women to better balance their professional and other commitments.The report reveals that many lawyers have moved to corporates with the share working in private practice down from 75% to 69% over the past 5 years.Between 2011 and 2016, there was a 59 per cent increase in the number of solicitors working in the corporate sector, compared to a 17 per cent increase working in the private sector, said Tidball.The figures also reveal that there was a 46% rise in the number of private law firms in Australia between 2011 and 2016, to 15,539.Diane Skapinker has joined Ashurst in Sydney as a partner in the real estate team.She joins from K&L Gates but was formerly head of the real estate group at Gilbert + Tobin and has extensive experience in property developments, infrastructure transactions, acquisitions, disposals and leasing.Ms. Skapinker is a former associate professor of law at the University of Sydney where she lectured in property law, conveyancing and equity.Staff and clients of Allen & Overy in Hong Kong have recently stepped into the shoes of refugees with a simulation of being a displaced person.The Crossroads Foundations Global X-perience Refugee Run programme aims to help participants understand some of the struggles and choices refugees face each day.The international law firm also held a discussion event with representatives from its global charity partner War Child, Crossroads Foundation and Liberty Asia.
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What started out as a legal chatbot that was widely successful in beating parking tickets has now expanded to cover 1,000 areas of the law.Joshua Browder, the 20-year-old Stanford student who created DoNotPay, the UKs first robot lawyer, has announced that he and his team have expanded the capabilities of his creation to cover even more areas of the law. The expansion comes after the system was tweaked to aid refugees , assist law firms in building their own robot lawyers , and help the homeless Browder, in announcing the expansion of the legal chatbot on Medium , said that it would be impossible to follow up on every single expansion idea pitched by lawyers, activists, charities, and students. There are other problems the legal world is facing, he said.Law firms have no incentive to innovate. The people making decisions (law partners) are old and will retire soon. They dont want to give up their share of profits to invest in long-term technology, Browder wrote.This presents a problem in raising money to develop technology as the traditional law firm partnership structure makes it difficult to raise outside capital beyond loans. In addition to being costly, technology scares lawyers, he said.Lawyers spend their entire day defending and initiating litigation. They know exactly what happens when something goes wrong, Browder said.Those who want to create a legal chatbot using DoNotPays technology can do so even without technical know-how by signing up here and sending the form to [email protected] . Creators would retain the rights to the document, but they do have to give permission to DoNotPay to create the bot and send the link.The expansion is starting with what Browder says is the lowest-hanging fruit, which is automating documents where all thats needed to changed are text variables.
And since the Green Hell isn't supervised by any air traffic controllers, the prototypes we mentioned above sometimes end up chasing each other on the infamous German track.The latest example of the sort can be seen in the piece of footage at the bottom of the page, with the highlight of the clip seeing the ZR1 following the 992 incarnation of the Neunelfer We are, of course, looking at entirely different animals here. While the next-gen 911 Turbo is currently testing on the Ring as an early mule wearing the body of the current car, the 992 featured in the video below is a Carrera (S) model, so it doesn't quite play in the same league as the 'Vette range-topper.As we recently mentioned , the C7 ZR1 could set a Nordschleife production car record. In fact, we've seen the slab of America flying on the Ring with a camera strapped to its nose and we can't wait for the thing to make its debut.Then again, the Nurburgring record part of the rumor mill also involves the Porsche 911, namely the 2018 911 GT2 RS.Thanks to hints such as the mind-blowing maximum velocity value dropped by Mark Webber, we have strong reasons to believe that the 700 hp rear-wheel-drive special is aiming for the said accolade.And with the Rennsport Neunelfer having recently been spotted in the proximity of the track, it shouldn't take all that long until the German automaker releases the chronograph number of the supercar.In fact, with the golden bowtie potentially dropping the Ring time of the new ZR1 at the launch of the vehicle, we're eager to see which announcement comes first.
Users of WhatsApp in China and security researchers have reported widespread service disruptions amid fears that the popular messaging service may be at least partially blocked by authorities in the worlds most populous country.

WhatsApp users in the country reported yesterday on other social media platforms that the app was partly inaccessible unless virtual private network software was used to circumvent Chinas censorship apparatus, known colloquially as The Great Firewall.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook and offers end-to-end encryption, has a relatively small but loyal following among Chinese users seeking a greater degree of privacy from government snooping than afforded by popular domestic app WeChat, which is ubiquitous but closely monitored and filtered.

Questions over WhatsApps status come at a politically fraught time in China. The government is in the midst of preparing for a sensitive party congress while Chinese censors this week revved up a sprawling effort to scrub all mention of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died last week in government custody.

A report this week by the University of Torontos Citizen Lab detailed how Chinese censors were able to intercept, in real time, images commemorating Liu in private one-on-one chats on WeChat, a feat that hinted at the governments image recognition capabilities.

It appeared that pictures were also the focus of the move to censor WhatsApp. Late yesterday, users in China could send texts over WhatsApp without the use of VPNs, but not images.

Nadim Kobeissi, a cryptography researcher based in Paris who has been investigating the WhatsApp disruption, said he believed The Great Firewall was only blocking access to WhatsApp servers that route media between users, while leaving servers that handle text messages untouched.

Kobeissi said voice messages also appeared to be blocked. But there was no evidence to suggest that Chinese authorities were decrypting WhatsApp messages, he added.

A Chinese censorship researcher known by his pseudonym Charlie Smith said that authorities appeared to be blocking non-text WhatsApp messages wholesale precisely because they have not been able to selectively block content on the platform like they have with WeChat, which is produced by Shenzhen-based internet giant Tencent and legally bound to cooperate with Chinese security agencies.

Because WhatsApp content is encrypted, they have moved to brute censor all non-text content, Smith said in an email. It would not be surprising to find that everything on WhatsApp gets blocked, forcing users in China to use unencrypted, monitored and censored services like WeChat.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said he had no information on the issue when asked by reporters.

Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. WhatsApp is one of the worlds most widely used messaging services, with over 1.2 billion users.

In 2015, China blocked Telegram, another encrypted messaging service, after it became a popular platform for activists and dissidents to share information. China has also blocked Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for years, with officials arguing that foreign social media services operating beyond their control pose a threat to Chinas national security. AP
The basic stuff involves renting entry-level models for a day on the French Riviera. You see, the Cote d'Azur is loaded with supercar rental companies and now Porsche offers an official alternative to this.Moving further up the range, you can go for various experiences that also involve the non-automotive forms of spoiling attenders.Forget the champagne (how difficult can it be to source a good bottle on your own?), the highlight of the part of the program is that you can get your posterior inside a 911 R. A freaking 911 R, which you can hoon on the Col de Turini.In our book, delivering the 911 R to the public in this form also makes for another nail in the coffin of the speculation market, which had pushed the price of the clutch special to anywhere between $500,000 and $1 million Nevertheless, those aiming for nothing but the best will be catapulted into the role of a Porsche racing drivers. Thus, you can get behind the wheel of the 911 GT3 Cup, with the racer being put at your disposal at the Porsche Le Mans experience center.This stunt also involves spending some time behind the wheel of the Porsche 918 Spyder , while the 911 GT3 RS is there as a... warm-up car.And no, we weren't kidding in the title above - this is a one-day experience that will set you back 29,000 (that's $34,000 at the current exchange rates). You know what they say: the Circuit Bugatti oblige...
Icon has started to deliver airplanes to customers and let them take them home and fly them wherever they want, the company said in its annual newsletter, issued on Tuesday. The first deliveries, completed in June and July, went to owners in Seattle, Montana and California. To support these A5s out in the field, Icon said it has trained authorized maintainers at the home airports of the delivered aircraft. We are continuing to grow the third-party partner network to service upcoming deliveries that arent near factory service centers, currently in Vacaville and Tampa, Icon said. The company also said it has trained more than 125 pilots at its first two Icon Flight Centers, located in Tampa and Northern California.

The company also reported that it has completed 21 aircraft at its production facility in Mexico, refining their quality standards in the process. They trained more than 125 pilots and logged about 5,600 flying hours on the flight training fleet, resulting in design and manufacturing changes that have been incorporated into a revised Model Year 2018 A5. The changes include improved nosegear that makes it easier to steer the aircraft during taxi, better lighting and legibility for the instruments, stiffer rudder pedals, no airspeed limit for windows-out operation and improved access panels in the wings and fuselage. The company plans to ramp up production of the new model in the first half of next year.

AVwebs features editor Rick Durden flew the airplane last year and reported on it for our sister publication, Aviation Consumer. You can read his report here.
President Trump has picked Jon Hunstman, the former Republican presidential candidate who served as Barack Obama's ambassador to China, to represent him in Moscow.

The White House said Huntsman, who was also a two term governor of Utah, had "a distinguished career as a politician, diplomat and businessman."

Huntsman will be tasked with steering U.S.-Russia relations at a time when Russia-related controversies and intrigues seem to pop up almost daily, and it will be interesting to see how much Trump and Rex Tillerson bring him into the fold when dealing with Vladimir Putin's government.

with steering U.S.-Russia relations at a time when Russia-related controversies and intrigues seem to pop up almost daily, and it will be interesting to see how much Trump and Rex Tillerson bring him into the fold when dealing with Vladimir Putin's government. Flashback to 2012, Trump tweets: "Jon Huntsman called to see me. I said no, he gave away our country to China!"
President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spent about an hour talking privately at a dinner during the G-20 meeting in Europe, according to a source familiar with the meeting. It happened during the dinner for heads of state when at one point Trump got up from his seat and moved to sit with Putin and Putin's translator.

Why this matters: It's highly unusual for a U.S. president to meet with a Russian leader with only Russian staff present and violates national security protocol (though Trump might not have been aware of that).

Stanford's Michael McFaul, a U.S. ambassador to Russia under President Obama, told MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell that holding such a conversation without talking points is "very difficult  very dangerous, I would say."

Update, Trump tweets: "Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is 'sick.' All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!"

The White House said in a statement that all the leaders circulated throughout the room during the dinner and Trump spoke "briefly" with Putin and they used the Russian translator since Trump was with a translator who only spoke Japanese. Saying the meeting was hidden is "false, malicious and absurd."

Full statement

The night of the G20 summit, there was, first, a concert for all the leaders in the new Hamburg opera house. The leaders were all photographed by the press in a group photo before going in. Later that night, Chancellor Merkel hosted a dinner for leaders and spouses only, and the German government set the seating arrangements. The concert and dinner were publicly announced on both the President's schedule and the G20 schedule, with the clear understanding that all visiting leaders would be present.At the dinner, President Trump was seated between Mrs. Abe, wife of the Prime Minister of Japan, and Mrs. Macri, wife of the President of Argentina. Mrs. Trump was seated next to President Putin.During the course of the dinner, all the leaders circulated throughout the room and spoke with one another freely. President Trump spoke with many leaders during the course of the evening. As the dinner was concluding, President Trump went over to Mrs. Trump, where he spoke briefly with President Putin.Each couple was allowed one translator. The American translator accompanying President Trump spoke Japanese. When President Trump spoke to President Putin, the two leaders used the Russian translator, since the American translator did not speak Russian.There was no "second meeting" between President Trump and President Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner. The insinuation that the White House has tried to "hide" a second meeting is false, malicious and absurd.It is not merely perfectly normal, it is part of a President's duties, to interact with world leaders. Throughout the G20 and in all his other foreign engagements, President Trump has demonstrated American leadership by representing our interests and values on the world stage.
To kick off what the White House is calling "Made in America" week, products made in various U.S. states were displayed at the White House. President Trump had a seat at the wheel of one of those products, a fire truck. The scene, per pool reports:

"And he then hopped up into the fire truck, as VPOTUS held open the door. 'Where's the fire?' POTUS said. 'I'll put it out.' He then added that the truck was beautiful."

Worth noting: Sean Spicer wouldn't say whether The Trump Organization and the Ivanka Trump brand would begin to make their products in America.
19 July 2017 14:40 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

Armenias outdated Metsamor nuclear power plant today remains among main threats to the environment and peoples lives in South Caucasus and the wider region.

The construction of the Metsamor NPP started in 1970. The plant was closed after a devastating earthquake of 1988 in the town of Spitak. However, the Armenian government renewed the operation of the NPP in 1995, despite numerous protests of international community.

A number of international experts have repeatedly urged that due to its deplorable state, the Armenian Metsamor NPP could repeat the fate of the Chernobyl NPP, thus threatening the lives of the Armenians and citizens of adjacent countries. The possible tragedy will also jeopardize the environment of the region. Moreover, its consequences will be felt in Europe and the Middle East.

Azerbaijan has repeatedly expressed its concern about the operation of the Metsamor NPP and raised this issue at the international organizations. The national leader of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev personally noted the threat of the Metsamor NPP at his meeting with former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed ElBaradei in 2002.

In his appeal President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev also drew attention of the world community on the issue of the Metsamor NPP, urging to take action against the risks that emanate from the operation of the outdated plant.

It is worth recalling that last year members of the Armenian Parliament claimed that Armenia has nuclear weapon, and Armenian general Arkady Ter-Tadovosyan said that the country could use a dirty bomb against Azerbaijani civilians.

A dirty bomb is a speculative radiological weapon that combines radioactive material with conventional explosives. Many scientists call the dirty bomb a 'weapon of terrorists'.

It is also noteworthy that public statements by Armenian politicians about the need for a dirty bomb were voiced after last years intensified calls for closure of the Metsamor NPP. Some international experts are sure that Armenia has already established production of nuclear materials.

Russian analyst Dmitry Verkhoturov believes that Armenians could expose Azerbaijans occupied territory of Nagorno-Karabakh to the radioactive contamination because they are well aware that sooner or later they will have to return the occupied lands.

The concern of environmentalists about the presence of nuclear power plants in seismically dangerous areas is quite reasonable, he told Day.az. Because of inability to hold Karabakh alone, Armenia could resort to nuclear provocation against Azerbaijan.

The expert added that Armenia cannot stop the Metsamor NPP because it produces one third of all electricity in the country.

By and large, the international community should pay due attention to the problem of Armenias Metsamor NPP. The plant poses a threat not only for Armenia itself, but also for the whole world, because any accident at the outdated NPP will lead to irreversible consequences that will be felt far away from the region. Moreover, Armenia should be checked for production of dirty bombs or other radioactive weapons that the aggressor country could use against Azerbaijan in the longstanding Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

---

Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
19 July 2017 15:10 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

Two days ago, Armenians held a rally  they marked the anniversary of one of Armenias most memorable events in 2016  the armed seizure of a police station in Yerevan.

Going back to the incident, on July 17, 2016, a group of 30 armed men entered the territory of the Armenian police patrol department in the Erebuni district of Yerevan and took several people hostage. For over two weeks the attackers killed two Armenian police officers, and then the armed group eventually surrendered. Among the demands the armed group named the resignation of the incumbent Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan.

The majority of ordinary Armenians supported the armed group. They were coming to the building of the seized police station to hold protests against the government.

Today, the socio-economic situation in Armenia is even worse than it was last July, and therefore the countrys population sees the members of the armed group as heroes who tried to liberate Armenia from the ruling regime.

On the eve of the seizures anniversary, one of the Armenian opposition websites made a poll asking the Armenians if they regard that incident as a rebellion or terrorism. No wonder, vast majority of respondents chose the first option, and the Armenian government immediately named the survey falsified.

The only thing president Sargsyan did after the seizure of the police station was the dismissal of the government. However, this changed nothing in the country because the only way to achieve progress in Armenias socio-economic situation is the resignation of Sargsyan himself and his corrupt team, which have been plundering the country for many years and continue to do so.

The Armenian people are already tired of the lack of competence of the Armenian government and the widespread corruption and unemployment in the country. Therefore, the Armenians, who live in poverty and constant despair in their country, supported the armed group last year.

Thousands of Armenians leave the country every year because they have lost any hope for the bright future of the country that the Armenian authorities had been promising for many years. Today Armenia continues bogging down in an even deeper and hopeless quagmire, and the Armenian government does nothing to stop this process.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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19 July 2017 11:59 (UTC+04:00)

By Sara Israfilbayova

Creditors of the International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA) adopted a plan of voluntary restructuring of its obligations.

The Bank announced at a general meeting on July 18 that the plan will come into force after the approval of the Financial Market Supervision Body (FMSB) and Nasimi District Court.

Creditors who own 94.1 percent of restructured liabilities took part in the voting process, 93.9 percent of creditors voted for voluntary restructuring, which is sufficient for the adoption of the plan.

The Law On Banks says that 2/3 of the creditors' votes are enough to make a decision.

Azerbaijani Finance Minister Samir Sharifov stressed that the successful outcome of the restructuring of the IBA's external obligations once again demonstrates the fact that the plan meets the interests of both the bank and creditors.

In turn, Rufat Aslanli, the Chairman of FMSB, noted that the adoption of a plan to restructure the external obligations of the IBA by most foreign creditors is a positive moment for the development of the banking sector.

Chairman of the IBA Board Khalid Ahadov said that the voting results are a historical event for the IBA, which underpins common efforts to ensure its long-term development.

When the restructuring process is over, the bank will continue its work with the Ministry of Finance to strengthen the balance by transferring part of the problem assets to Aqrarkredit closed joint stock non-bank credit organization in the amount of 4.9 billion manat," he added.

The IBA, has earlier announced that it would halt foreign currency-denominated loan repayments in order to restructure its foreign obligations and swap them for sovereign debt. It has $3.3 billion of outstanding debt.

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 major foreign creditors of the IBA include the American company Cargill, Citibank, Rubrika Finance Company Limited, Credit Suisse AG.

The Bank appealed to the New York court for support in the process of their restructuring. Foreign creditors will not be able to make claims against IBA assets in the process of voluntary restructuring of the bank's foreign obligations, according to the court decision adopted on May 12, 2017.

Then the London court took a positive decision on the IBA to prevent lawsuits in the UK from foreign creditors regarding the bank's assets.

The IBA has been operating since 1992 and is one of the country's two state banks.

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19 July 2017 12:28 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

In the coming months, Iran and Azerbaijan are expected to launch transporting goods and cargos through the International North-South Transport Corridor, a grand project that will intricately interconnect Europe and Asia.

Tehran and Baku are apparently making efforts to boom trade turnover, which surged by 78 percent to reach $221.2 million over the last year, through the expansion of bilateral cooperation and this effort is expected to boost trade ties between the two neighboring countries.

Mohammad Ebrahimi, economic consultant at Iranian Embassy in Baku, told Trend that the goal of cooperation between the two neighboring countries will be fulfilled in the near future as the construction of Qazvin-Rasht railway segment which is an essential part of a worthwhile project to connect the two countries railroads is almost complete and it will come on stream soon.

The two neighboring countries make efforts to connect the two countries railways within the same North-South Corridor, through Qazvin-Rasht-Astara route, which is aimed to increase both countries' import and export operations and trade turnover. The construction of Rasht-Astara railway is expected to be launched this year.

They have also agreed to finance the construction of the Astara (Iran) - Astara (Azerbaijan) railway line as part of the North-South corridor, which is forecasted to be inaugurated in the near future. The railway project will connect Iran to the Euro-Asian marketplace after its completion and shortly after completion of the inauguration, the two will launch transportation of goods through the corridor.

Azerbaijan earlier agreed to provide 60 million euros for developing railway facilities in Iranian city of Astara.



To complete the railway links of the transportation corridor, Iran had earlier agreed to construct inland railway segments in northern parts of the country in order to extend its railway network to the border area with the neighboring Azerbaijan through the two cities of Astara on both sides.



The initial plan included Qazvin-Rasht and Rasht-Astara railway segments. In the meantime, Azerbaijan has launched a construction project to extend its railway into Irans territory.



However, the sides still need to discuss the financing of the project for the construction of the 164 kilometer-long railway segment linking the two Iranian cities of Rasht and Astara.



The North-South Corridor will connect the railways of Azerbaijan and Iran, which in turn will provide a wider transport connection between India, Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.

Due to its location on the corridor and role as a transit country, Azerbaijan stands to gain substantially from the North-South project. Firstly, it will bring millions in foreign currency. Secondly, it will give an essential boost to the Azerbaijani non-oil sector. Thirdly, it should significantly improve the transport infrastructure of the region. And most importantly, it will open up access to the Arab Gulf countries for Azerbaijan in the future.

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Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli

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19 July 2017 17:00 (UTC+04:00)

By Sara Israfilbayova

Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey are doing a significant work for the development of the Silk Road.

Chairman of the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan Aydin Aliyev made the remarks during the trilateral meeting of Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey, with participation of First Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister of Georgia Dimitry Kumsishvili, Minister of Customs and Trade of Turkey Bulent Tufenkci on July 19, Trend reported.

Aydin Aliyev stressed that the three countries pay special attention and carry out large-scale work in the spheres of increasing freight traffic and ensuring energy security in the region.

In turn, Turkish Minister of Customs and Trade Bulent Tufenkci said that the construction of the Turkish part of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway, which is an important part of the historical Silk Road is planned to be completed by late 2017

The Minister added that in the past, there were certain problems with the project implementation but they have already been fixed.

The three sides signed declaration on establishment of a permanent commission that will help improve relations between the customs structures of the three countries, as well as business and customs authorities in the region.

The customs bodies of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey will jointly work on the development of transit cargo transportation, invest in the modernization of customs services, and create mechanisms for the exchange of information on subjects and goods passing through the borders of the three countries, in accordance with the declaration.

Moreover, the customs services of Azerbaijan and Turkey signed an agreement on the creation of an electronic system for the exchange of information on transit transport by road.

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.

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.

Currently, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey are working on the implementation of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway.

The BTK railway is being constructed on the basis of the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey intergovernmental agreement. The main purpose of the project is to improve economic relations between the three countries and gain 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.

The trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Turkey amounted to almost $1.2 billion in the first half of 2017, between Azerbaijan and Georgia-$270.35 million, according to the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan.

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And now her book, Secrets of the Art World: Getting Real about the Process, Business, and Selling of Your Work, serves as another means for Spanos to pay it forward and help others.



The book features autobiographical stories and business tips from Spanos and advice from several working artists, gallery owners and other industry professionals. Workbook pages encourage the artists to list goals, manage their schedules and develop their brand right in the book. Action steps prompt them to put what theyre learning into motion, like seeking out a mentor, researching trade shows and creating a marketing strategy. Theres a major focus on inspiration and positive thinking with motivational quotes from artists and other public figures and suggestions for self-care. A key takeaway is for artists to look at their work as a business.



Being an art dealer and selling art is one of the most exciting experiences, Spanos says. But, first and foremost, its a business. I you cant make money, you cant pay your artists, and they wont be able to make a living. I wrote the book to help artists be successful in business.



Its not just for artists, though. Much of the advice in the book  such as always researching your market, avoiding the use of industry jargon and never committing to unrealistic deadlines  are applicable to any entrepreneur, artist or not.



Secrets of the Art World garnered the approval of DAAP dean Robert Probst, who wrote the foreword. Spanos goal is for the book to be part of the curriculum in DAAP and in college classrooms across the country.



One of my dreams is to get this in every universitys art department and have it be required reading for every student, Spanos says. Because I think they need it. Thats why I thought having Dr. Probst write the foreword  because DAAP is so world-renowned as an art school  could really set the tone to get the book out to all these different art schools everywhere. That would make me so happy, if I could help young, emerging artists.

Learn more about Art Design Consultants

Purchase Secrets of the Art World

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19 July 2017 17:55 (UTC+04:00)

By Sara Israfilbayova

An agreement to establish a logistics center was signed in Kars In the framework of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway project.

Javid Gurbanov, the head of Azerbaijan Railways CJSC, said this while his visit to Kars province on July 19, one of the Turkish TV channels reported.

Gurbanov noted that entrepreneurs will annually be able to send 2 million tons of goods with preferences by the BTK railway, further adding that in the future the volume of cargo transportation along the BTK route will be increased.

He went on to say the BTK railway communication project will ensure the development of the region.

He also expressed the hope that in the future cargo transportation from Kazakhstan and China via the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway will increase to 500,000 containers.

The BTK railway is being constructed on the basis of the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey intergovernmental agreement. The main purpose of the project is to improve economic relations between the three countries and gain 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.

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19 July 2017 18:10 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

The trial on blogger Alexander Lapshin, detained in Azerbaijan, continued in the Baku Grave Crimes Court on July 19.

During the trial presided over by judge Alovsat Abbasov, Lapshins lawyer Eduard Chernin said that the articles written by the blogger didnt include appeals against the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, and asked the judge to acquit his defendant.

Later, Lapshin was given the last word. He pleaded not guilty and asked the court to make a fair decision.

Earlier, the blogger acknowledged that he visited the occupied Azerbaijani territories twice.

Lapshin illegally visited Azerbaijans Armenia-occupied lands and now is charged under the articles 281.2 (appeals directed against state) and 318.2 (illegal border crossing) of the Criminal Code of Azerbaijan. He violated Azerbaijani laws on state border in April 2011 and October 2012.

Helped by his accomplices in the occupied territories, Lapshin paid a number of visits to Azerbaijan`s occupied lands, where he voiced support for "independence" of the illegal regime, and made public calls against Azerbaijan`s internationally recognized territorial integrity on April 6 and June 29, 2016.

The blogger was arrested in Minsk in late 2016 and transferred to Baku in February 2017.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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19 July 2017 18:50 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

The OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs are preparing a meeting of the Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers in New York, Russias permanent representative to the OSCE Alexander Lukashevich said on July 19.

The co-chairs will continue to intensify their efforts, and they are preparing for a meeting with the foreign ministers of the two countries in New York, he said during a Moscow-Vienna video conference call. In order to arrange a new meeting at the highest level, measures will be taken to increase the level of work with the parties.

Last week, the OSCE Minsk Group, which deals with finding a fair solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, organized a meeting with Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers Mammadyarov and Nalbandian in Brussels to discuss modalities of further work on the settlement of the conflict. At the meeting, the co-chairs proposed a meeting at the level of presidents later this year.

Meanwhile, Russias Izvestia newspaper, citing a senior source in the countrys Foreign Ministry, reported that Russia will be the main organizer of a meeting between the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia Ilham Aliyev and Serzh Sargsyan till the end of the year.

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.

Azerbaijan has long ago stated it is ready to settle the conflict through direct negotiations with Armenia with mediation of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs. However, the Armenian side is constantly trying to make up reasons to avoid a constructive dialogue and preserve the unacceptable status quo in Nagorno-Karabakh.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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19 July 2017 15:26 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

The fourth trilateral meeting of the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Turkmenistan is being held in Baku July 19.

The agenda includes the issues of developing cooperation in the political, economic, energy, transport and humanitarian spheres and implementing of regional projects.

Turkmen Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov, addressing the meeting said that Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Turkey have a great desire to develop strong cooperation in a trilateral format.

Meredov noted that the parties express a desire to particularly develop cooperation in the political sphere, energy, trade and expand cultural ties.

He said that there is a strong intention of the three countries to hold a summit of the heads of the three countries in Turkmenistan until the end of 2017.

Our main goal for today is the preparation for the summit of the heads of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Turkey, noted Meredov.

The minister added that the issues of preparation for this summit were discussed during the Baku meeting, and he expressed hope that all the draft agreements prepared for today will be signed during the meeting.

Azerbaijans capital, Baku, hosted the 4th meeting of the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Turkmenistan, Elmar Mammadyarov, Mevlut Cavusoglu and Rashid Meredov on July 19.

Speaking at a briefing on results of the trilateral meeting Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that Azerbaijan, Turkey and Turkmenistan intend to bring the three countries economic relations to a new level.

The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway will be used to develop cooperation in the transport sector, noted Cavusoglu.

Touching upon the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Cavusoglu noted that Turkey calls on the OSCE Minsk Group to strengthen its activity on the conflicts settlement. Turkey supports the territorial integrity and fair position of Azerbaijan, said the Turkish minister.

Cavusoglu again emphasized that Turkey condemns the provocation committed by the Armenian armed forces against the civilians of the Alkhanli village of Azerbaijans Fuzuli district.

It should be recalled that on July 4 at about 20:40 (GMT+4 hours), the Armenian armed forces again violated ceasefire and, using 82-mm and 120-mm mortars and grenade launchers, shelled Azerbaijani positions and territories where the civilian population lives, namely the Alkhanli village of the countrys Fuzuli district, thereby grossly violating the requirements of international law, the Azerbaijani defense ministry said earlier.

As a result of this provocation, the residents of the village Sahiba Allahverdiyeva, 50, and Zahra Guliyeva, 2, were killed. Salminaz Guliyeva, 52, who got wounded, was taken to the hospital and was operated on.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

Azerbaijans FM Elmar Mammadyarov said that the FMs have agreed to develop a Road Map for Future Cooperation for 2017-2020.

We had fruitful and interesting negotiations. The three countries are carrying out numerous regional projects and we have discussed the progress in their implementation, said the Azerbaijani FM.

A declaration has been signed following the trilateral meeting.

The three FMs also discussed the issues of preparation for the summit of the presidents in Baku.

The summit will be held in Ashgabat till late 2017," Cavusoglu told reporters.

The first tripartite meeting of the three countries foreign ministers was held in Baku on May 26, 2014, the second meeting - in Ashgabat on January 29, 2015 and the third meeting was held in Antalya on August 28,

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19 July 2017 19:12 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

Azerbaijans Cabinet of Ministers has approved the schedule of non-working days in connection with Qurban holiday.

The press secretary of the Cabinet of Ministers Akif Ali said that Qurban holiday will be marked on September 1-2.

"Due to the fact that September 2 is Saturday, September 4, Monday, will also be a non-working day in the country", he said to Report.az

Thus, September 1-5 will be a vacation in connection with Qurban holiday in Azerbaijan.

Qurban holiday is one of the most sacred holidays in the Islamic world. In the lunar-based Islamic calendar, religious holiday falls on the 10th day of Dhu al-Hijjah and lasts for three days.

The history of religious sacrificing dates back to a story happened in the life of Prophet Abraham.

Over the course of this holiday period, Muslims across the globe sacrifice a sheep, ram, cow, or camel in the ceremony.

After Azerbaijan gained independence, according to the law on holidays of the Republic of Azerbaijan adopted by the Azerbaijani Parliament on 27 October 1992, Qurban holiday is celebrated in Azerbaijan at the level of state.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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19 July 2017 19:18 (UTC+04:00)

By Sara Israfilbayova

The average monthly pension in Azerbaijan increased by 6.4 percent.

Minister of Labour and Social Protection of Population of Azerbaijan made the remarks at the board meeting dedicated to the results of the State Social Protection Fund's activity for the first half of 2017 and the upcoming tasks.

Muslimov said that from January 1, 2017, the insurance part of all types of pensions was increased by 12.4 percent.

In general, as of July 1, the average monthly pension increased by 6.4 percent, compared to the same period of 2016 and reached 201.7 manats ($118.5).

The number of pensioners equals to 1.325 million people and it is 13.5 percent of the total population of the country.

The Minister went on to say that incomes of the State Social Protection Fund in the first half of this year increased by about 260 million mantas ($152.8 million).

"For 6 months of the current year, the fund's revenues increased by 259.4 million manats ($152.4 million) or 16.6 percent, as compared to the same period of last year and reached 1.9 billion manats ($1.1 billion). Revenues from compulsory social insurance increased by 105.3 million manats ($61.9 million) or 16.7 percent and reached 1 million manats ($587,600), Muslimov noted.

The fund's expenditures amounted to 1.70 billion manats ($999 million), of which 1.67 billion manats ($981.4 million) or 98 percent were used for payments for the population.

He said that the number of people who have an individual account increased by 3.7 percent and reached 124.770 people, as of July 1 the total number of people who have an individual account is 3.5 million people, of which 59.5 percent are men and 40.5 percent-women.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on May 2, 2017 approved amendments to the law "On Labour Pensions".

The amendments provide for the elimination of the concept of the basic part of the labour pension and the 12-year service required for the appointment of a pension, as well as the gradual increase in the retirement age for women and men up to 65 years.

The retirement age will increase every six months until 2021 for men, until 2027 for women. In view of the elimination of the concept of "basic part of the pension", the law introduces the concept of "minimum pension". The size of the minimum pension from January 1, 2017 is 110 manats ($64.4).

Another change is connected with the compulsory social insurance. So, now 90 percent of the deductions paid by employee on compulsory state social insurance will be reflected in his/her account.

Deductions are formed from two sources: the deductions made by the employer in the amount of 22 percent of the salary fund of the enterprise, and the deductions worth 3 percent of the employee's wage. Formerly, only 50 percent of these deductions were reflected in employees account.

The law comes into force from July 1, 2017 and does not affect persons who retired before that date.

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19 July 2017 18:27 (UTC+04:00)

By Kamila Aliyeva

The Visegrad Group stands for deepening strategic relations with Azerbaijan, especially in the energy sector.

The remarks were made by Hungarian Ambassador to Azerbaijan Imre Laszloczki at a press conference in Baku on July 19.

The Visegrad Four supports Azerbaijans aspirations for intensifying cooperation. It is interested in signing a new agreement on strategic partnership between Baku and the EU as soon as possible.

Speaking about the cooperation of the Visegrad Group with Azerbaijan, Laszloczki also informed about his intention to activate the announcement of the competitions by the Visegrad Fund to enhance mobility at the political, economic, infrastructural and social levels.

Ambassador noted that cooperation within the framework of Visegrad Group is a proof that the member countries want to remain active architects of the European future.

The member countries have all the opportunities for this, Laszloczki said.

For 26 years since the creation of the Visegrad Group, the importance of cooperation within its framework is constantly growing.

Thus, in recent years, the Visegrad Fund has supported 5,050 projects for a total of 75 million euros and awarded 1,950 scholarships.

"By this Visegrad Fund helped to stabilize our expanded region, including the Western Balkans and the Eastern Partnership countries," the ambassador added.

He noted that the member countries of the Visegrad Group are ready to contribute to the future development of the EU as equal partners.

Laszloczki also revealed the date of a meeting which will be held as part of the partnership between the Visegrad Group and the Eastern Partnership countries in Budapest on September 11-12.

He added that the ministers of the countries, participating in the meeting, will take part in it.

This meeting will be a stage of preparation for the EU Eastern Partnership summit expected to be held in November.

Laszloczki underlined that V4 + cooperation format between the Visegrad Four and other countries has recently become popular.

Ambassador of Czech Republic Witezslav Pivonka who also attended the press conference expressed his countrys interest in cooperation with the GUAM countries, in particular with Azerbaijan.

The Visegrad Group, also called the Visegrad Four, or V4 is a cultural and political alliance of four Central European states  Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia  for the purposes of furthering their European integration, as well as for advancing military, economic and energy cooperation with one another. Hungary chairs the Visegrad Group since July 1.

The Eastern Partnership initiative was launched in 2009 with the main focus on regional cooperation in the EU's eastern neighborhood. It sets out to promote political association and economic integration with the EU among six EaP countries such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and Armenia.

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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

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19 July 2017 19:07 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

Two energy giants Azerbaijani state company SOCAR and Russian Gazprom are discussing the general directions of cooperation, which can also include natural gas supplies.

Vice-President of SOCAR Vitaliy Beglyarbekov told reporters that this can be both gas supplies to and from Azerbaijan.

We have already conducted such negotiations before and are always conducted, because as a country that makes a serious contribution to the development of gas relations in the region, we periodically consult with each other and support a serious and forward-looking dialogue, he said.



Beglyarbekov found it difficult to name the volumes of gas and possible terms, noting that these issues are not yet a subject of discussion.

"The parties continue to work on the possible development of concepts of cooperation in the field of oil and gas supplies," the SOCAR representative added.

St. Petersburg hosted a working meeting between Chairman of the Management Committee of Gazprom Alexey Miller and President of SOCAR Rovnag Abdullayev on July 2, where the sides discussed cooperation issues, in particular, the supply of natural gas to Azerbaijan.

SOCAR and Gazprom were previously reported to have discussed an increase of Russian natural gas supplies to Azerbaijan for about 3-5 billion cubic meters per year.

Gazprom is a global energy company focused on geological exploration, transportation, storage, processing and sales of gas, gas condensate and oil, sales of gas as a vehicle fuel, as well as generation and marketing of heat and electric power.

SOCAR is Azerbaijan's largest state-owned petroleum company engaged in oil, natural gas and gas condensate exploration, production, processing, transportation and sales.

SOCAR includes such production associations as Azneft (the enterprises producing oil and gas onshore and offshore), Azerikimya (the chemical enterprises) and Azerigas (distributor of gas produced in the country), as well as oil and gas processing plants, service companies, and the facilities involved in geophysical and drilling operations.

Gazprom Export and Azerbaijan Methanol Company (AzMeCo) signed a mid-term Sales and Purchase Agreement on September 11, 2015 for up to 2 billion cubic meters of gas annually.

AzMeCo for the debts was handed over to Aqrarkredit CJSC non-bank credit institution in accordance with a decision of Azerbaijans Cabinet of Ministers. (Aqrarkredit CJSC manages the distressed assets of the International Bank of Azerbaijan).

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Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli

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19 July 2017 11:14 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

The US Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated 16 entities and individuals for engaging in support of illicit Iranian actors or transnational criminal activity, the US Treasury Departments official website reported.

These designations include seven entities and five individuals for engaging in activities in support of Irans military or Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as well as an Iran-based transnational criminal organization and three associated persons, said the statement.

The three networks supported Irans military procurement or the IRGC through the development of unmanned aerial vehicles and military equipment for the IRGC, the production and maintenance of fast attack boats for the IRGC-Navy, or the procurement of electronic components for entities that support Irans military, said the statement.

This Administration will continue to aggressively target Iran's malign activity, including their ongoing state support of terrorism, ballistic missile program, and human rights abuses," said Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin.

"These sanctions target procurement of advanced military hardware, such as fast attack boats and unmanned aerial vehicles, and send a strong signal that the United States cannot and will not tolerate Irans provocative and destabilizing behavior. We will continue to target the IRGC and pressure Iran to cease its ballistic missile program and malign activities in the region, said the statement.

In June, the US Senate voted to advance a bill that would impose new sanctions on Iran over its ballistic missile development, arms transfers and its alleged support for Islamist militant groups and human rights violations.



The measure in order to become law needs to be signed by President Donald Trump.

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19 July 2017 10:57 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Tripartite mechanisms of cooperation ensure regional stability, Turkish media cited the countrys Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu as saying July 18.

Cavusoglu made the remarks on the eve of his visit to Baku scheduled for July 19 as part of the meeting of the Azerbaijani, Turkish and Turkmen foreign ministers.

The Turkish foreign minister stressed that it is necessary to be a strong country to create tripartite cooperation mechanisms.

Cavusoglu said that following the meeting of the Azerbaijani, Turkish and Turkmen foreign ministers in Baku July 19, he will visit Northern Cyprus.

Azerbaijani, Turkish and Turkmen Foreign Ministers Elmar Mammadyarov, Mevlut Cavusoglu and Rashid Meredov will also consider the issue of implementing the framework program of cooperation of the three countries for 2015-2017, adopted at the Ashgabat Ministerial Meeting, in Baku on July 19, a diplomatic source told Trend July 18.

Moreover, the ministers will discuss the possibilities of expanding cooperation in the fight against terrorism and various challenges.

The first tripartite meeting of the Azerbaijani, Turkish and Turkmen foreign ministers was held in Baku on May 26, 2014, the second meeting - in Ashgabat on January 29, 2015, the third meeting - in Antalya on August 28, 2015.

These meetings give an opportunity to discuss the possibilities of regional partnership in a trilateral format, promote the development of bilateral relations based on mutual benefit, strengthening of regional prosperity, stability and security.

The cooperation of the three countries covers a wide range of issues, including energy, tourism, the humanitarian sphere and politics.

The ministers stressed the importance of developing cooperation in the transport and communication sphere at the meeting in Antalya.

The issue of creating the Afghanistan-Turkmenistan-Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey transport corridor was considered.

There are also Azerbaijan-Turkey-Georgia and Azerbaijan-Turkey-Iran formats. The summits of foreign ministers and presidents of those countries were held.

The Azerbaijan-Turkey-Kazakhstan format is planned to be created in the future.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
19 July 2017 13:11 (UTC+04:00)

By Kamila Aliyeva

Trade and economic relations were high on agenda as Washington hosted the Turkmen-U.S. business session on development of business ties on July 18.

The event was held with the participation of officials of Argus Ltd, Boeing, CNH Industrial, Ellicott Dredges, General Electric, John Deere, Lindsey, Microsoft, Oxbox Energy Solution, Caterpillar and Westport Trading Europe Ltd, said the Turkmen Foreign Ministry.

The Turkmen delegation included representatives of the countrys ministries, Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.

The issues of expanding cooperation in trade, economy, energy and transportation as well as in the oil and gas industry, mechanical engineering and agriculture were on the agenda.

The United States established diplomatic relations with Turkmenistan in 1992 following its independence from the Soviet Union.

U.S. foreign assistance objectives include strengthening Turkmenistan's capacity to manage its international borders and cooperate on regional security issues, encouraging citizens to play a greater role in civil society, increasing access to quality higher education and health, and promoting private sector development and economic reforms.

Turkmenistans vast natural gas and oil resources continue to attract foreign companies to explore business opportunities in the country, but the Central Asian nation has yet to implement reforms needed to create an inviting business climate where foreign investment and foreign investors are truly welcomed.

Turkmenistan has signed a trade and investment framework agreement with the United States and other Central Asian countries establishing a regional forum to discuss ways to improve investment climates and expand trade within Central Asia.

Such areas as the supply of agricultural machinery, the modernization of the technical fleet of civil aviation in Turkmenistan, and the supply of electric power equipment are the key points of the long-term cooperation.

The White House also supports regional gas pipeline projects from Turkmenistan, such as TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) and the Trans-Caspian pipeline, which will transport Turkmen gas to Azerbaijan and onward to Europe via Turkey.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
19 July 2017 14:13 (UTC+04:00)

By Kamila Aliyeva

Turkey will not give up on its plans to gain EU membership despite the recent obstacles, such as suspension of accession talks and PACEs decision to reopen monitoring process, and worsening relations with the European Union.

Turkeys EU affairs minister Omer Celik reaffirmed his countrys desire to become a full member of the European Union, Anadolu reported.

Turkeys strategic aim in the EU accession talks is to get full membership, he said while addressing the 36th Turkey-EU Joint Advisory Committee in Brussels on July 18.

The EU should support Turkey during this difficult period in the region by understanding the reasons for the fight against terrorism, by providing visa liberalization and especially by accelerating the accession process, Celik said.

Accession negotiations started in 2005, but until Turkey agrees to apply the Additional Protocol of the Ankara Association Agreement to Cyprus, eight negotiation chapters will not be opened and no chapter will be provisionally closed. The talks have reached a deadlock in 2007 as Turkey was not ready to change its position on Cyprus while German and French governments also opposed the countrys full EU membership.

Turkey has to successfully conclude negotiations with the EU over 35 policy chapters including reforms and the adoption of European standards in order to achieve its goal.

Celik said Turkey was ready to open EU chapters 23 and 24 about the judiciary and fundamental rights as well as justice and freedoms.

He noted that it was double standard to criticize Turkey without opening these EU chapters.

Turkey-EU relations have intensified due to the parties close cooperation to fight illegal flow of refugees and migrants into the EU. The visa liberalization scheme for Turkish citizens and the speeding up of Turkeys EU accession negotiations are also part of the migration deal.

However, Turkeys 12-year-long attempt to become EU member-state was recently undermined as the European Parliament adopted a resolution on July 6 calling on to suspend accession negotiations.

Celik at the time rejected any possible proposals to cooperate in other areas with the EU instead of accession talks.

Turkeys ties with the EU have worsened last July after a failed coup attempt. Relations further deteriorated following an April referendum which expanded the powers of the president. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe's (PACE) recent decision to reopen a political monitoring process against Turkey also negatively affected Ankara-Brussels ties.

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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
19 July 2017 17:37 (UTC+04:00)

By Kamila Aliyeva

The European Union (EU) will allocate 1.5 million euro for the work of an independent commission created by the decision of the UN General Assembly to investigate war crimes in Syria, statement issued by the European Commission on July 19 said.

"As the European Union, we reaffirm our commitment and support to the Syrian people, as well as the political process under the auspices of the United Nations, aimed at political settlement of the crisis," TASS quoted EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogerini.

The so-called international, impartial and independent mechanism to facilitate investigations into those responsible for the most serious crimes committed in Syria since March 2011 was established by the decision of the General Assembly in December 2016.

In accordance with the resolution adopted by the General Assembly, the commission is charged with collecting and analyzing evidence of offenses, as well as preparing materials to "facilitate and accelerate" the conduct of "unbiased and independent criminal trials" in national, regional or international courts.

A number of countries, including Russia, had originally spoken against the creation of a commission headed by the French judge Catherine Marchi-Uhel.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov called the investigation mechanism to be illegal.

"The decision to create such a body goes beyond the powers of the UN General Assembly and contradicts the Charter of an international organization," he stressed.

The civil war in Syria between the government and opposition with various terrorist groups involved, including Daesh (also known as ISIS or ISIL), began back in March 2011.

Syrian President Bashar Assad managed to turn the tide of war in his favor after Russia started an air campaign in September 2015, while Iran is an uncompromising supporter of the Syrian leader.

According to a report by the Syrian Center for Policy Research, the conflict has claimed the lives of over 470,000 people, injured 1.9 million others, and displaced nearly half of the countrys pre-war population of about 23 million within or beyond its borders.

Since the beginning of the war in Syria, a large number of violations of human rights and rules of warfare were recorded. This includes the use of chemical weapons, the deliberate killing of civilians, including children, executions, bombing of hospitals.

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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz




First up, Joe Biden is thinking about dropping tariffs against China. But theres a spy in prison this morning that helps us understand why he shouldnt. Ill explain.





Your second brief, If youre looking for a good paying job, you might consider being a CEO for a health insurance company. One executive made $142M dollars last year. Let's talk about that.





And as always, Im keeping an eye out for developing stories. Put this one on your radar. Mexican cartels are grooming American kids online and paying them cash to traffic illegals or run drugs across the border. Ill share details.





If you enjoyed this episode of the President's Daily Brief, remember to subscribe and listen daily at podfollow.com/pdb.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
7 Needles Removed From 3 Year Old Girls Body News oi-Lekhaka

In what can be called as the most challenging sugery, doctors at SSKM Hospital, Kolkata has successfully removed seven needles from the body of a 3 year old girl.

The girl hailing from Purulia is suspected to have been allegedly abused by here mother's employer. The mother initially had rushed the girl to the Bankura Sammilani Medical College from there she was referred to SSKM Hospital. The girl was admitted to the hospital in a critical condition.

A team of doctors from the hospitals which included a pediatric surgeon, gynaecologist, orthopedic and anaesthetist conducted a two hours long surgery on Tuesday and removed seven needles measuring 4 inches each. Three of the needles were in the liver and removing those were the toughest part of the operation.

The girl is doing fine after the successful surgery. But she needs to be kept under observation," Ajay Roy, Director of Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education & Research (IPGMER), was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, the doctors have also asserted that the girl was suffering from severe trauma due to alleged sexual assault.

Police are on the lookout for the accused man. According to the doctors, the child is recovering and is being kept in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit for 48 hours.
Brexit poses a fundamental challenge to the future of the United Kingdom by removing the European Union law that has helped to bind it together, a committee of lawmakers from the British parliament's upper house said on Wednesday.

Last year's vote to leave the EU has highlighted tensions among the United Kingdom's four constituent nations: England and Wales voted to leave, Scotland and Northern Ireland to remain.

It has prompted renewed calls from Scottish nationalists for a vote on independence, and members of the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments have complained the national government has not involved them enough its Brexit negotiation preparations.

"Brexit's impact on the future of the United Kingdom will be profound and unpredictable. At the moment, the internal politics are pretty toxic," said Michael Jay, a member of the Lords EU committee and former head of Britain's diplomatic service.

The committee's report "Brexit: devolutiion", said the supremacy of EU law and its interpretation by the EU's Court of Justice have helped ensure consistency of legal and regulatory standards across the United Kingdom's internal market.

"Brexit thus presents fundamental constitutional challenges to the United Kingdom as a whole," the report said. It called on the government to set aside party politics and adjust its Brexit approach to accommodate the needs of the different regions.

It also said Brexit would lead to a significant increase in powers and responsibilities for local institutions in the three devolved nations, in areas such as fisheries and agriculture. Any attempt at a "power grab" by either side would only add to instability, it said.

Scotland's governing Scottish National Party has threatened to try to block the progress of key legislation that will sever legal ties with the EU unless the government does more to account for Scotland's interests in Brexit.

The Lords' report said that if the UK-wide Brexit agreement does not adequately reflect Scotland's needs, a strong political and economic case can be made for making differentiated arrangements for Scotland.

"The UK Government must respect the devolved institutions. It's not enough saying it's listening to them, it's actually got to take account of what they say and adjust its approach to accommodate their specific needs," Jay said.

"Equally, the devolved administrations must work with, not against, the UK government to get the best Brexit for the whole of the UK." (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie
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Kingdom of Cameroon, United Republic of Cape Verde, Republic of Cayman Islands Central African Republic Chad, Republic of Chile, Republic of China, People's Republic of Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Colombia, Republic of Comoros, Union of the Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, People's Republic of Cook Islands Costa Rica, Republic of Cote D'Ivoire, Ivory Coast, Republic of the Cyprus, Republic of Czech Republic Denmark, Kingdom of Djibouti, Republic of Dominica, Commonwealth of Ecuador, Republic of Egypt, Arab Republic of El Salvador, Republic of Equatorial Guinea, Republic of Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Faeroe Islands Falkland Islands (Malvinas) Fiji, Republic of the Fiji Islands Finland, Republic of France, French Republic French Guiana French Polynesia French Southern Territories Gabon, Gabonese Republic Gambia, Republic of the Georgia Germany Ghana, Republic of Gibraltar Greece, Hellenic Republic Greenland Grenada Guadaloupe Guam Guatemala, Republic of Guinea, 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Republic of Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania, Islamic Republic of Mauritius Mayotte Micronesia, Federated States of Moldova, Republic of Monaco, Principality of Mongolia, Mongolian People's Republic Montserrat Morocco, Kingdom of Mozambique, People's Republic of Myanmar Namibia Nauru, Republic of Nepal, Kingdom of Netherlands Antilles Netherlands, Kingdom of the New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua, Republic of Niger, Republic of the Nigeria, Federal Republic of Niue, Republic of Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands Norway, Kingdom of Oman, Sultanate of Pakistan, Islamic Republic of Palau Palestinian Territory, Occupied Panama, Republic of Papua New Guinea Paraguay, Republic of Peru, Republic of Philippines, Republic of the Pitcairn Island Poland, Polish People's Republic Portugal, Portuguese Republic Puerto Rico Qatar, State of Reunion Romania, Socialist Republic of Russian Federation Rwanda, Rwandese Republic Samoa, Independent State of San Marino, Republic of Sao Tome and Principe, Democratic Republic of Saudi Arabia, Kingdom of Senegal, Republic of Serbia and Montenegro Seychelles, Republic of Sierra Leone, Republic of Singapore, Republic of Slovakia (Slovak Republic) Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia, Somali Republic South Africa, Republic of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands Spain, Spanish State Sri Lanka, Democratic Socialist Republic of St. Helena St. Kitts and Nevis St. Lucia St. Pierre and Miquelon St. Vincent and the Grenadines Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Suriname, Republic of Svalbard & Jan Mayen Islands Swaziland, Kingdom of Sweden, Kingdom of Switzerland, Swiss Confederation Syrian Arab Republic Taiwan, Province of China Tajikistan Tanzania, United Republic of Thailand, Kingdom of Timor-Leste, Democratic Republic of Togo, Togolese Republic Tokelau (Tokelau Islands) Tonga, Kingdom of Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Tunisia, Republic of Turkey, Republic of Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu Uganda, Republic of Ukraine 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Photo: RCMP A man was arrested Tuesday after a firefighter was allegedly threatened in Williams Lake Monday.

A firefighter near Williams Lake says he was threatened by a man who took exception to the fire crews' back burning operations.

On July 17, a firefighter was working in the Springfield Road area, west of Williams Lake, when a local resident allegedly told him he would kill firefighters if they kept up their back burning operations.

The firefighter said the man was with a group of other men, one of whom was carrying a handgun on his hip.

Tuesday, Williams Lake RCMP found the 44-year-old man the firefighter said made the threats, who acknowledged he had made the statements under extreme stress.

At this time, charges against this male are not being considered, however to mitigate the possible risk, his firearm has been temporarily seized, said Cpl. Janelle Shoihet in a statement.

The 57-year-old man who the firefighter said was carrying the handgun when the threat was made was also located.

Police found he was in possession of a loaded handgun and six rifles in his vehicle. Police seized the guns and arrested the man for having a loaded firearm in his vehicle. He's expected to appear in court in November.

We understand that tensions are running high, but we have to continue to pull together as a community to fight the fires in whatever way we can, said Inspector Jeff Pelley of the Williams Lake RCMP.
Hanil completes acquisition of Hyundai Cement

19 July 2017

Hanil Cement Co has completed the acquisition of Hyundai Cement Co in South Korea.



The consortium of Hanil Cement and LK Investment Partners has paid US$552.2m for a controlling stake of 84.56 per cent stake (or 14.17m shares) of Hyundai Cement from 32 creditors, including the Korea Development Bank and Hana Financial Investment Co. The two companies formed HLK Holdings, a special purpose company, to acquire the shares.



Hyundai Cement held a shareholders meeting on Tuesday, approving the Hanil Cement Vice-Chairman Huh Gi-ho and LK Investment Partners Chief Executive Officer Kang Sung-boo as new board members.



Hyundai Cement currently runs two factories producing 5.5Mta of cement.

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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.
The Travelers Companies, Inc., through its subsidiaries, provides a range of commercial and personal property, and casualty insurance products and services to businesses, government units, associations, and individuals in the United states and internationally. The company operates through three segments: Business Insurance, Bond & Specialty Insurance, and Personal Insurance. The Business Insurance segment offers workers' compensation, commercial automobile and property, general liability, commercial multi-peril, employers' liability, public and product liability, professional indemnity, marine, aviation, onshore and offshore energy, construction, terrorism, personal accident, and kidnap and ransom insurance products. This segment operates through select accounts, which serve small businesses; commercial accounts that serve mid-sized businesses; national accounts, which serve large companies; and national property and other that serve large and mid-sized customers, commercial trucking industry, and agricultural businesses, as well as markets and distributes its products through brokers, wholesale agents, and program managers. The Bond & Specialty Insurance segment provides surety, fidelity, management and professional liability, and other property and casualty coverages and related risk management services through independent agencies and brokers. The Personal Insurance segment offers property and casualty insurance covering personal risks, primarily automobile and homeowners insurance to individuals through independent agencies and brokers. The Travelers Companies, Inc. was founded in 1853 and is based in New York, New York.
16-year-old Christian boy is the latest victim of Pakistan's blasphemy law

A Pakistani boy has been charged with blasphemy for speaking with a colleague about Jesus, according to World Watch Monitor.

Shahzad Masih, 16, who works as a hospital cleaner in the city of Dinga, was arrested last week after his colleague accused him of insulting Mohammad.

The colleague, Ishtiaq Ahmed Jalali, is a member of Tehreek-e-Tahfuz-e-Islam Pakistan, an Islamist organisation devoted to Mohammad.

According to Masih's father, an argument broke out between them. 'My son told him that we follow Jesus and then their discussion became sour, at which point a doctor intervened and calmed them down,' he said.

However, another man, Nadeem Ahmed, reported Masih to the police and he was arrested for blasphemy.

A leader of Tehreek-e-Tahfuz-e-Islam Pakistan told a TV station the following day: 'If the blasphemer is acquitted of the charge then each member of our organisation would attack him.'

Former Punjab parliamentarian Tahir Naveed Chaudhry, leader of the largest Christian political party, told World Watch Monitor that he personally investigated the matter and found the initial argument was over Shahzad Masih's colleague's attempts to convert him to Islam.

'When our people try to defend themselves and their faith then often it becomes an issue and later such cases are lodged,' he said.

Pakistan's blasphemy laws have drawn international condemnation and are frequently used to settle scores against religious minorities. One high-profile victim, Asia Bibi, has been on death row for many years.
Middle East is 'going backwards' and Syria will get worse, warns head of SAT-7

The Middle East is 'going backwards in development terms', according to the founder and head of the Christian satellite TV broadcaster SAT-7, Dr Terence Ascott.

In its annual report, SAT-7 points out that while the Arab world comprises just five per cent of the global population, in 2014 it saw 45 per cent of global terror attacks, 58 per cent of the world's refugees, 47 per cent of its Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs) and 70 per cent of total battle-related deaths. Those numbers have dramatically worsened since then, the report shows, as by 2016 the ongoing conflicts in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Iraq directly affected 60 million people.

Last year marked 20 years of broadcasting for SAT-7, which is the region's largest Christian broadcaster.

Ascott said: 'In the midst of all this turmoil, pain and grief, and with the growing influence of "fake news", people are hungry for authenticity, truth and hope. There has, therefore, never been a more important time to be a Christian broadcaster and digital media provider in the Middle East.'

Ascott told Christian Today that he was pessimistic over Syria and its Christians, adding that the country may need 'more time' in its state of war before peace emerges after all parties are 'exhausted' by the fighting.

'While a lot of people are tired and half the infrastructure in Syria is destroyed  partially or fully  I am not sure that this is going to lead to a peace, unless the country is willing to be split up...[between] Kurds and the Sunnis and so on, and I don't think that is a solution the international community will want.

'If there's going to be a new united Syria going forwards there has to be change including, as many feel, that the Assad government would need to step down because there is too much bad blood between them and the other factions that would need to be included in a government of reconciliation. And him stepping down could lead to a further de-stabilisation so there is no obvious solution here.

'When you look at other conflicts such as the Lebanese civil war, it actually ended because everyone was exhausted, and they couldn't take any more of the killing and hopelessness. And I think it may need a bit more time in Syria despite the level of violence being remarkable. But people have to realise there is no future without compromise and while all the displaced people have reached that conclusion, I'm not sure the key players have, importantly the backers of the Syrian government  Russia, Iran and so on. All need to recognise that hard compromises have to be made.

'The other unknown in this is still the ultimate goals of the different factions that make up the Syrian Opposition groupings...which include some very dodgy characters. We do don't want to go from one bad regime to chaos or another oppressive regime, so this again complicates things. Really the only known quantity in this are the Kurdish groups  you know where they stand and can better predict their behaviour  but the others are mostly unknown quantities.'

Asked about the plight of Christians, Ascott said: 'The Churches in Syria are in a very difficult situation  many of the Christians are in the government-controlled areas which gives them important protection from Islamist groups, but it also makes them look like they are very supportive of the regime and they may pay the price for that if the regime goes. So they are caught between a rock and a hard place. The Russian media have made a lot of the idea that Assad, with Russian support, is protecting the Christians of Syria and this has been largely ignored by the western media.'
Two Catholic priests kidnapped in troubled eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Two priests have been kidnapped in the troubled eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Catholic priests, reportedly named Charles Kipasa and Jean-Pierre Akilimali, were taken in an area at the centre of more than two years of massacres by unknown assailants, the country's conference of bishops said.

The two priests were kidnapped from Our Lady of the Angels parish in Bunyuka, located between the towns of Butembo and Beni, by a group of around 10 assailants just before 10pm local time on Sunday, according to Reuters.

'Priests are men of God who devote their lives to the good of the population without a political agenda. To hurt them is to harm the community they serve,' the National Episcopal Conference of Congo (CENCO) said in a statement.

CENCO called upon the security forces to do everything possible to free the men. Three other priests, abducted in the same area in October 2012, still have not been freed, the statement said.

Congo's mineral-rich eastern borderlands, a tinderbox of ethnic tensions, has for more than two decades been the theatre of successive wars and rebellions.

Beni has been among the most volatile zones in the last two years. A series of night-time massacres that began in October 2014, mostly carried out with hatchets and machetes by unidentified assailants, has killed hundreds of civilians.

Over 930 prisoners were freed last month in an attack on the town's main prison that also killed 11 people. Another dozen people were killed when a so-called Mai-Mai militia coalition launched raids on the city centre.

Additional reporting by Reuters.
Was this Catholic cardinal a saint or a pro-Nazi war criminal?

Representatives of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches have agreed to disagree on the legacy of controversial wartime cardinal  seen as a criminal by Orthodox Serbs, and a saint by Catholic Croats.

Aloysius Viktor Stepinac has been the subject of a joint commission of Catholic and Orthodox leaders, debating the cardinal's cause for canonisation. At the close of the group's final meeting, a joint statement was released. It said:

'It has come to the conclusion that various events, speeches, writings, silences, and views are still subject to different interpretations. In the case of Cardinal Stepinac, the interpretations that were predominantly given by Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs remain divergent,' it said, according to Catholic News Agency.

The Catholic Church has sought the canonisation of Stepinac, while many in the Orthodox Church consider him a criminal who collaborated with the far-right Ustashe regime in the wartime Balkans.

The statement added that it was grateful for the conciliatory nature of the discussions, that allowed 'full freedom of expression'.

But why is the cardinal's legacy so hotly contested?

Stepinac was Archbishop of Zagreb from 1937 until his death in 1960 at the age of 61, and witnessed the pro-Nazi Utashe regime take power in Croatia during the war.

Catholics highlight his record of resistance to the regime, led by Ante Pavelic. 'Stepinac's sermons against the Ustashe were so strong. They [Soviet agents] prohibited them from being published, because they were so strong against the Ustashe,' said Catholic lawyer and jurist Prof Ronald J Rychlak.

Stepinac condemned the destruction of Zagreb's main synagogue in 1941 and challenged the racist ideology of the Utashe. He also stood up against the regime's genocidal atrocities committed against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.

However, in 1946 Stepinac was put on trial by the new Communist government, accused of working with the Fascist regime. His opponents said he was a Nazi sympathiser, highlighting that he supported the Ustashe regime when it first came to Croatia. He faced accusations of continued relations with the Ustashe, and of supporting forced conversions, at gunpoint, of Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism.

He was given limited representation and faced a system critics say was biased against him, and was found guilty of high treason and war crimes.

Stepinac died in 1960 while under house arrest, from an illness it's believed he contracted from poor prison conditions  with some Vatican studies suggesting he was poisoned. He was beatified as a martyr by the Catholic Church in 1998.

Though it remains conflicted, the bilateral commission concluded that it had helped to 'illustrate the life and ministry of an important Catholic pastor during a particularly troubling period of history'. It has granted the responsibility of Stepinac's cause to Pope Francis, who created the commission in May 2016 in response to Orthodox opposition to the canonisation.

The statement added: 'The study of Cardinal Stepinac's life has taught that, throughout history, all Churches cruelly suffered different persecutions and have their martyrs and confessors of the faith.

'In this regard, the members of the commission agreed on the possibility of a future collaboration in a common work to share the memory of martyrs and confessors of both Churches.'
Those who would never stoop to paint their own houses gladly expend far more energy sweating at the gym. During the decline in physical-labor jobs over the last 50 years, an entire compensating industry has grown up around physical fitness. As modern work becomes less physical, requiring hours at a desk or some sort of immobile standing, the fitness center has replaced the drudgery of the field, the mine, and the forest as a means to exercise the body each day. A forbidding array of exercise bikes and StairMasters not only works the body; it also reinforces the modern, scientifically backed conviction that physical fitness promotes general wellness, mental acuity, and perhaps longevity. A new slang has entered the Western vocabulary, from abs, glutes, and cardio to ripped and toned to describe the ideal results of daily exercise: a look of chiseled fitness. The ideal is much different from the appearance of the pipe fitter and welder of the past, whose protruding bellies and girth were not necessarily incongruous with physical strength and stamina incurred from daily physical labor.

Yet the modern idea of working out by no means denotes that someone is laboring at a physical task, except for wisely keeping fit. Our idea of exercising, then, is not quite the Odyssean notion of being equally adept in craftiness and brawnthe ability to build a raft or lead men into battleor versatile in outfoxing sexy sirens and ramming poles through the heads of dull-witted huge monsters. We are more like Alcibiades, whose high life and gifts for political craft and oratory were balanced by his studied Olympic training and sponsorship of chariotry.

One reason for our disdain for labor today is that the more physical work recedes in the twenty-first century, the more life superficially appears to get better, even for the vestigial muscular classes. Cheap cell phones, video games, the Internet, social media, and labor-saving appliances all make life easier and suggest that even more and better benefits are on the horizon. Formerly backbreaking industries, from the growing of almonds to the building of cars, are increasingly mechanized, using fewer but more skilled operators; in the future, this work might be all but robotized, without much human agency at all.

Anyone who has spot-welded or harvested almonds with a mallet and canvas has no regrets in seeing the disappearance of such rote drudgery, from the view of both the laborer and the consumer, who benefits from the cheaper prices brought on by labor-saving devices. But as we continue on this trajectory, initiated in the Industrial Revolution, from less demanding physical work to rare physical work, is something lost? Something only poorly approximated by greater leisure time, non-muscular jobs, and contrived physical exercise?

Until the early nineteenth century, hard workagricultural work, for most of the populationwas bifurcated: working as a slave, serf, or hired hand for someone else was the unfortunate lot of the accursed. In popular lore, hired or coerced labor led nowhere but to premature old age, illness, accident, poverty, and an early death. So the once-popular Edwin Markham, in his iconic The Man with the Hoe, laments the exploited toiler: Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Times tragedy is in the aching stoop; Through this dread shape humanity betrayed. Physical work was not just hard and dirty; it was also done for someone else. In contrast with physical work for wages (what the aristocratic Greeks deprecated as banausia), voices of the agrarian traditionfrom the seventh-century BC Greek poet Hesiod to the romantic paeans of the farmer voiced by aristocratic landowners such as Thomas Jefferson and later by the Southern agrarianspraised the yeoman and the homesteader. Ostensibly, the owner-operator calibrated his own drudgery by his own self-interest and profits; and in theory, at least, he controlled the conditions of his own physical exploitation.

Politicians still give lip service to the entrepreneur who gets up at 5 AM to open his bakery and goes home long after his employees have quit at 6 PM (akin to what Hesiod praised as work with work upon work). But Donald Trump was the first politician in recent memory to refer to working people with the first-person plural possessive pronoun of endearmentour miners and our farmers, as if physical work was still critical and honored. Otherwise, most of popular culture promotes the idea of a bachelors degree as the first stepping-stone of the cognitive elite on the path toward professional and graduate schools, certification and degree branding, interning, and ending up largely physically inactive but inordinately well compensated and intellectually and psychologically fulfilled. So inured are we to the ideal of a cursus honorum that we dont even need to mention that it is an obvious means to escape a supposedly limited life of laying tile or overhauling transmissions.

Yet talk long enough to the most accomplished academics, lawyers, and CEOswho also tend to be the most conscientious about biking, jogging, and weightlifting (obesity is mostly an epidemic of the poor and lower middle classes)and more often than not, they will brag about a long-ago college summer job waiting tables or an internship repairing hiking trails. They might praise the granite-counter installer who redid their kitchen, or offer an anecdote about the time they helped the tree-trimmer haul limbs from the backyard out to the trailer at the curb. There seems a human instinct to want to do physical work. We moderns want to be able to say that we have some residual firsthand familiarity with drudgeryor at least share our admiration for muscular labor when one sees the positive results of physical craftsmanship, or even the smallest physical alteration of the natural environment.

Anyone who has spot-welded has no regrets in seeing the disappearance of such rote drudgery.

The proliferation of hard-work reality-television programming reflects this apparent need, if only vicariously. Indeed, the more we have become immobile, urbanized, and distanced from hard work, the more we tune in to watch reality televisions assorted truckers, loggers, farmers, fishermen, drillers, and rail engineers. Usually, these supposed losers are filmed in rough physical landscapes of Alaska, Wyoming, Colorado, or out at sea, where they sweat, grunt, smoke, and swear as they toil to bring us our seafood, wood floors, arugula, and high-performance gasoline. The subtext of these shows is that the human dinosaurs who do such work are as tough and wild as the environment in which they labor.

In a society that supposedly despises menial jobs, the television ratings for such programs suggest that lots of Americans enjoy watching people of action who work with their hands, even if (or perhaps because) they are sometimes overweight, unkempt, and coarse. Mike Rowe became a media celebrity for his Discovery Channel reality series Dirty Jobs, in which he not only tried but also enjoyed said jobsto the delight of viewers.

The Public Broadcasting Services signature series This Old House and its later spin-off shows on cable television made physical work seem especially hip. Yuppies and upwardly mobile young urban couples during off-hours put on old clothes, strapped on leather tool belts, and took up sledgehammers to knock down walls and break up concrete to remodel older homes into their own dream-gentrified Victorians. Apparently, they had a blast getting dirty and using their muscles while slowly turning decaying structures into renovated palaces. Again, the subtext of This Old House was that doing a lot of physical labor in remodeling something decrepit into something beautiful was rewardingand preferable to contracting the hard labor out to experts.

What is it about physical work, in its supposed eleventh hour within a rapidly changing Western culture, that still intrigues us?

Physical work remains the foundation for twenty-first-century sophistication and complexity. Investors may know the oil trade better than oil drillers, but buying and selling based on intimate knowledge of Indonesian politics or the nature of the American automobile market are still predicated on someones knowing how to feed down steel casing to follow the drill bit. If there is no one to pump oil, there is nothing to sell. Selling plums to Japan is not the same as pruning a plum tree. Both aspects of the oil and plum industries are critical to their success, but the commercial tasks are cerebral and secondary, the physical ones elemental and primary.

Before any of us can teach, write, or speculate, we must first have food, shelter, and safety. And for a bit longer, at least, that will require some people to prune trees or cut grapes, nail two-by-sixes, and go through basic training in the muck. No apps or 3-D printers exist to produce brown rice and organic celery for the tables of Palo Alto and the Upper West Side.

It is often said that all jobs might yet be automated to the point of making muscular labor irrelevant. Can they? True, a slab of marble can be cut on a computerized saw, fed by forklift to a pallet, and delivered to its destination by a GPS-guided truck. But ultimately, human hands will lift the precut granite and carefully guide and attach it to the top of a counter. And that is not such an easy task. The almond farmer outside my window uses a computerized machine for seemingly every taskirrigating, cultivating, and harvesting. But this morning, two men are cutting out diseased limbs in the orchard, selecting their cuts with the help of an Echo chainsaw, whose basic tenets of portability, gasoline power source, and chain running on a guided frame have a 100-year pedigree. Another crew is taking honey by hand from beehives before attaching the hive boxes to a boom to be trucked away.

It is astonishing, the degree to which a high-tech, postmodern society still depends on low-tech, premodern labor, whether that is a teen in constant motion for eight hours as a barista at Starbucks or a mechanic on his back underneath a Lexus, searching to find a short that popped up in a computerized code on his tablet. In some sense, the end of hard physical work is a delusion. Even Bill Gatess high-tech automated estate will need a plumber to clear his sewer connections or a glass fitter to replace a broken window or an electrician to rewire a shorted-out ceiling fan.

Physical work has an intrinsic satisfaction in that it is real, in the primordial sense that nonphysical work is not. The head of the Federal Reserve Board may be more important to our general welfare than the city road crew patching asphalt roads, but there remains something wondrous in transforming material conditions through the hands, an act that can be seen and felt rather than just spoken or written about. Changing the physical landscape, either by building or destroying something previously constructed or altering it, lends a sense of confidence that the human body can still manifest ones ideas by concrete action.

Almost 20 years ago, in The Land Was Everything, I noted the effect of physical work upon the psyche, especially the creation of clarity, as the abstract becomes concrete and reminds one of the difference between talk and action:

Man fights nature and there arise clear, easily observable choices. Critical to this fight is the use of muscle. The abstract becomes flesh only through the right arm or left leg. Bolts are tightened, tree limbs sawed, concrete patched, all through the hands and back. Every idea is matched with the flesh. For the farm, then, there is no conception that is not realized in the physical world, no idea that is not carried to its ultimate and often tragic conclusion. Such an easily identifiable struggle! Such a wondrous thing, when you, alone, with your muscle and mind in tandem, with or without sufficient courage and endurance, can at least once still, just once yourself succeed or fail!

Until recently, this idea of hard work as a natural human need was relatively banal and went unquestioned. At one point in The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck paused to reflect on what made his Okie migrants noble:

The last clear definite function of manmuscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single needthis is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving.

We can assess the worth of particular generations by what they have built or let lapse. In February 2017, the Oroville Dam, the nations tallest, nearly lost both its concrete and earthen emergency spillways after near-record rain and snow runoff filled Lake Oroville, sending water lapping over the dams crest. The near-tragedy reminded postmodern Californians that a past generationnow nameless, forgotten, and mostly deadat great expense, and with some danger, had built the vast dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts of the federal Central Valley Project and the state California Water Project. (See Californias Promethean Past, Summer 2013.) The two efforts enabled vast water transfers from the states wet northern third to its southern and dry two-thirds. Yet the present generation not only failed to complete the water projectsso essential to irrigate farmland, foster urban development, provide flood control, offer recreation, and facilitate hydroelectric production in a state that had doubled its population; it also neglected simple periodic maintenance on the infrastructure, such as the crown jewel Oroville Dam, that it had inherited.

Physical labor also promotes human versatility: those who do not do it, or who do not know how to do it, become divorced fromand, at the same time, dependent uponlaborers, in psychological as well as concrete ways. Lawyers, accountants, and journalists living in houses with yards and driving cars to work thus count on a supporting infrastructure of electricians, landscapers, and mechanics. Without them, life grinds to a halt, unless one has rudimentary knowledge of such tasksor the time and willingness to learn them.

In that context, physical labor can provide independence and autonomy, at least in a limited sense of not being entirely reliant on a host of hired workers. By the same token, working with ones hands, however temporarily, gives some approximation of what physical labor is and what those who do it might be like. It may be economically sound to oppose arbitrary raises in the minimum wage, but that position becomes ethically more complicated when one has tried to drive a spray rig for 50 hours a week for $10 an hour while paying a $1,000-a-month rent. A dislike or disavowal of physical labor can lead to ignorance about how those who earn their living with muscles live, think, and act.

Especially valuable in muscular work is some appreciation of the tragic view of the world, best expressed sometimes by those who realize that their 40 years of active working life have been defined by physical deterioration and often chronically low wages. What makes a woman get up each morning, knowing that her waitress job will not lead to the sort of good life and leisure that the Internet and television constantly show her? Its not just lack of alternatives but also a determination to find meaning in doing a demanding job well.

For the past four decades, I have split my time between teaching classics and writing, and working on a farm. I cannot say that either world is nobler than the other. But I did learn that small farmers and farm laborers complained much less about their own often-unenviable lots than did academics about their comparatively enviable compensation and generous time off. Working outdoors, often alone, with ones hands encourages a tragic acceptance of nature and its limitations. Talking and writing indoors with like kind promote a more therapeutic sense that life can be changed through discourse and argument.

The diminished cultural awareness about those who work physically is a touchstone to a number of our present pathologies. Anyone who has watched videos of privileged Yale students shouting down professor of medicine and sociology Nicholas Christakisbecause his wife, Erika, had suggested that politically correct censorship of campus Halloween costumes was excessiveshould recognize that something has gone terribly wrong at our universities. The malady has metastasized well beyond the contempt for free speech and the prolonged adolescence of young adults squabbling about their preteen-like Halloween celebrations. The vast majority of students who encircled Christakis were affluent and privileged, regardless of the efforts of some to cite their minority status as proof of victimization. Had any of the professors accusers ever worked hard physically, thereby learning the difference between being a Yale student and picking grapes or painting houses? Yale compounds its cocooning problem by lavishing coffee bars, rec rooms, and elegant living quarters on twentysomethings, while investing them with the power to scream at and disrupt speakers not to their liking.

The physical workplace is a corrective for such a leisured Oz. The physical world of hard work imposes a hierarchy of far more important considerations than being happy or coddledsafety from injury, physical proof that one is industrious (or incompetent), and wariness about screaming and swearing at coworkers and supervisors, given that such speech is not rhetorical, as on campuses, but has immediate consequences.

I learned more from teaching students at California State University, Fresno, than from my students at Stanfordnot because they knew Greek and Latin better (most did not) or because they were more ethical (again, not necessarily true) but because they often worked 20 hours or more per week at minimum-wage jobs and thus had a far wider range of experience with (and empathy for) characters and events found in Aristophanes, Euripides, and Hesiod in the premodern world of the Greeks. They were also more circumspect in addressing their complaints, angst, or unhappiness, as if they had already learned from unenviable off-campus jobs, in a way that their Stanford counterparts had not, that the world is not necessarily kind and compliant.

Working outdoors, often alone, with ones hands encourages a tragic acceptance of nature and its limitations.

If incoming Yale students orientation or first-year community service required them to cut the quads grass, chainsaw tree limbs, fix clogged sewers, and work side by side with those who did, there might be less obsession over Halloween costumes and a greater reluctance to curse at faculty with the secure knowledge that they would only politely nod and smile back. Unfortunately for Yale students and for our elites in general, the world outside privileged bubbles operates on quite different premises. Perhaps this studied isolation accounts in part for why our governing classes have done such a poor job of understanding the global community in recent years.

The notion of physical work, or lack of same, also underpins the United States massive illegal immigration problem. Yes, Mexico seeks to export its dependent poor, to create a powerful expatriate community in the United States, and to garner over $25 billion in remittances; and yes, corporations demand cheap labor in hospitality industries, construction, and agriculture. On the political front, La Raza activists want a steady stream of unassimilated immigrants in need of parity with U.S. citizensand thus requiring self-appointed ethnic activists and a careerist industry of identity politics; and the Democratic Party hopes to turn the American Southwest from red to blue, given new demographics.

But physical work is central to all these considerations. Sometime in the 1970s and 1980s, millions of Americansfar more than just those constituting an economic elitedecided that a key to the good life was to be free from, say, the need to cook, watch children, mow the lawn, or rake leaves. Illegal immigration promised cheap help for the upper middle classes that had once been the exclusive domain of the aristocracy. In theory, skipping the gym for four hours a week would provide more than enough time to mow the lawn, prune the bushes, or vacuum the floor. Yet sweaty and studied exercise is often deemed preferable to rote labor, given that it is more scientifically calibrated to making one look and feel better. Repetitive muscular work is not seen as commensurately valuable, whether for the exercise it provides or for its psychic benefits. Yet for all ones degrees and income, a person can still retain some sense of autonomy and an ability to master the surrounding material landscape, if only for a few hours each week, and to appreciate how the other half lives that does such physical labor for wages. It is a choice.

In his final play, Bacchae, the Athenian playwright Euripides explored the nature of wisdom and who possesses it. After a frenzy of killing and destruction, he seems to conclude that neither the rational and conventional King Pentheus (Youve got a quick tongue and seem intelligent, but your words dont make any sense at all) nor the ecstatic emotion of the divine Dionysus and his bacchants (Angry gods should not act just like humans) were models for emulation. Best, instead, is the day-by-day life without pretense: Various men outdo each other in wealth, in power, in all sorts of ways. The hopes of countless men are infinite in number. Some make men rich; some come to nothing. So I consider that man blessed who lives a happy existence day by day.

Top Photo: Fernand Cormon, A Forge, 1893 ( RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY)
The city of Hoboken has spent three years and more than $200,000 of taxpayer money in an effort to impede the growth of its most successful school. HoLa (formally the Hoboken Dual Language Charter School) first opened in autumn 2010. The innovative 385-student charter school offers a content-rich curriculum delivered in both Spanish and English. Last year, HoLa ranked in the top 10 percent of all public schools in the state in terms of math and English test scores, and outpaced all other schools in Hoboken.

Like most charters, HoLa started with students in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade and then added a grade each year as students moved up. In 2013, with its oldest students about to enter sixth grade, and HoLas initial five-year charter up for renewal, the school asked the state department of education for permission to add grades seven and eight in order to continue to serve its current students until they reached high school.

The state granted permission, but the Hoboken board of education filed suit to prevent HoLas expansion. Why would the city not want its most successful school to expand? The simple truth is that the anti-charter board of education saw an opportunity to thwart a charters expansion. The lawsuit, however, alleged that HoLas expansion would aggravate racial segregation and harm the district financially. Both claims are spurious.

HoLa receives about $11,000 per student, with zero money for facilities, while the district spends double that amount per pupil in its district schools. The school survives financially only because it rents space from the Hoboken Boys and Girls Club, which offers HoLa a reasonable rate and uses the building during after-school hours.

Currently, the demographic composition of HoLas student population is 54 percent white, 31 percent Hispanic, 7 percent black, and 7 percent Asian; 12 percent of students come from families with income low enough to qualify for the federal free or reduced price lunch program. While its true that the student population of the district is less-white and more low-income, HoLas student body more closely reflects Hobokens general population: many affluent, white parents choose to send their children to private school. But Hobokens demographic composition is changing rapidly in any case: since HoLa opened in 2010, the percentage of white students in the district schools has increased from 22 percent to 33 percent and the percentage of students qualifying for the free or reduced school lunches has decreased from 69 percent to 53 percent.

The notion that HoLa is an instrument of segregation is especially noxious if one knows the history of the school and its founders. HoLa was created to embrace the rich diversity of our community here in Hoboken, notes Barbara Martinez, one of the schools foundersand a daughter of Cuban immigrants. Initially, HoLas founders didnt even want to open a charter. The original idea, explains Martinez, was to set up a dual-language program in Connors elementary, the citys most segregated, lowest-performing school. The district rejected that possibility, so HoLa was established as a charter.

After it opened, HoLa sought to institute a weighted lottery system that would give preference to low-income students. That option violated state policy, so HoLa officials went door-to-door in local housing projects, distributing leaflets to ensure that low-income parents knew about of the school. HoLas founders repeatedly tried to persuade the state to change its lottery policy, and when it did so in 2015, HoLa became the first charter school in New Jersey to adopt a low-income preference in its admissions policy.

Parents care most about the quality of education their children are receiving, and HoLa delivers high-quality learning. During a visit this spring, I saw a fourth-grade teacher conduct an inspired lesson, in English, based on Gwendolyn Brookss poem Cynthia in the Snow and the poets use of onomatopoeia. Students then had fun writing their own weather-themed poems using words like swoosh, splat, and slap. In a class across the hall, a teacher was conducting a similar lesson using Spanish poetry. After a week, the two classes would switch, thereby exposing students to both languages and cultures.

After the Hoboken board of education first filed its lawsuit against the state department of education in March 2014, the court requested that the department further study the boards complaints and issue a report. One year later, the department issued a report that found no evidence to back up the boards claims. Not satisfied, in April 2015, the board requested the court issue a stay preventing HoLas expansion. The motion was denied.

Facing criticism that continuing the lawsuit was a waste of taxpayer money, the Hoboken board of education then created a private legal fund in order to continue to fund the litigation. Four board members contributed. In June, 2015, the board again requested an emergency stay to prevent HoLas rising seventh graders from retuning in the fall. That request was also denied by the court.

In May, three appellate court judges heard arguments from both sides. On June 29, one week after HoLa graduated its first eighth-grade class, the court decisively rejected Hobokens claims that HoLa has a negative segregative and funding impact on the city: the courts decision repeatedly notes that the Hoboken board of education failed to provide data in support of its contentions. HoLa officials estimate that well over $200,000 in taxpayer money was spent by HoLa, the Hoboken board of education, and the New Jersey department of education on the litigation.

The board of education hasnt said whether it will appeal the decision, but seven of the nine members of Hobokens city council have issued strong statements urging the board of education to move on. Its about time we end this senseless lawsuit and start worrying about educating our children as our top priority, Councilman Michael Russo stated. Lets focus on providing our teachers the tools to make our public school system, which include our charter schools, the best in the state. Thats good advice, and it will best serve the children of Hoboken if it is heeded.

Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images
Muslim Aid has paid the Fundraising Regulators levy, after being indentified by Civil Society News last week as one of the four largest non-payers - but two others on the same list have not.

The Fundraising Regulator is funded by a levy on all charities spending more than 100,000 on fundraising, according to the Charity Commission annual return. The regulator launched its public register of those that have paid the levy last week and Civil Society News identified four large fundraising charities which appeared not to have paid - Muslim Aid, Harrow School, Vodafone Foundation, and the Ummah Welfare Trust.

These charities are all in the top 100 charities by fundraising income, according to a list published by Fundraising Magazine in 2017, and are all listed on the Charity Commission's website as having a spend of more than 100,000 on raising funds. The Fundraising Regulator said it was still in discussions with all four.

Muslim Aid says it has now paid the levy. A spokeswoman for Muslim Aid said: "Muslim Aid would like to confirm that we paid the fundraising levy to the Fundraising Regulator last week. We regret the late payment of the levy.

"We have been in touch with the Fundraising Regulator who have given us the name of the person they emailed with the original invoice. This person is no longer with our organization so we cannot say if the invoice was filtered out as spam or if it was misplaced within our organisation.

"What we can confirm is that it was not received by our finance team as all invoices they receive are logged on receipt. The Fundraising Regulator say they sent a hard copy of the invoice five months later in March but, again, we do not know if it was properly addressed and received as there is no record of receipt of the invoice in our Finance Department.

"Again what we can confirm is there was never any intention by our Finance Department to delay payment as it is Muslim Aid's policy to meet any payment deadlines promptly."

Harrow School says that it does not need to pay, because its sister charity, the Harrow Development Trust, does all fundraising from the public. The Fundraising Regulator has confirmed it is happy that this is the case and amended the Harrow Development Trusts entry on the register to make this clear.

The Vodafone Foundation has also said it does not need to pay, because it does not "seek funds from the public" - an explanation the Fundraising Regulator has not confirmed it will accept.

The Ummah Welfare Trust is yet to respond to a request for comment.


In his Warsaw speech earlier this month, kicking off a European tour, the American president went darkly negative from the start, invoking ISIS and terrorism, Syria and Iran. The fundamental question of our time, Donald Trump said, is whether the West has the will to survive.

And good morning to you, too, Mr. President.

The Trump presidency, dominated by images of decline and threat, American carnage and bad, bad people, has presented any number of challenges to the US press, whose instinct, after all, is to go dark itself. But Trump has taken that impulse and supercharged it, creating yet another conundrum for reporters tasked with making sense of where we are: Is it possible, in this age, to be too bleak? Is the unremitting negativity of the news itself part of Trumps approach to destabilizing the news business? Has this negativity in fact helped to facilitate Trumps rise to power? Is it possible, or even plausible, to modulate the negativity in some way?

NEWSPAPERS HAVE THEIR ORIGIN in the Enlightenment, one of whose central tenets was a belief in the perfectibility of humankind. History, Enlightenment thinkers believed, had a progressive motion. The purpose of the modern newspaper was to help ordinary people rationalize, improve and correct how they lived, how they judged, how they grasped the present and the future. In this sense, true news, or at least news in the historical sense, is closer to knowledge than to information. Information allows us to know about a subject; knowledge allows us to understand it. News, at its best, is information tending toward knowledge.

ICYMI: Journalists, heres what to do when things start to get genuinely bad

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The press has always liked to lead with what bleeds; thats not new. But the convergence of virulently polarized politics, isolated news silos, deepening class division and a general weakening of civic bonds have given the medias habitual negativity unprecedented political consequences. When you open the paper or your browser or turn on the TV or radio, the preponderance of dark stories becomes a critical mass. Spend a beautiful summer day without reading or listening to the news and you go to bed at night feeling that the world is a decent place, confident of your present and your future. Consume the news even intermittently throughout the dayor even once in the morning and once in the eveningand you go to bed convinced that the world is about to erupt into war, or be soon driven to extinction by natural disaster, or that your own personal safety and that of your loved ones is in imminent danger. This conviction of impending disaster and all-encompassing danger is not based on your own experience. It derives solely from what you read, watch, and listen to.

This menacing atmosphere has, without doubt, become worse in the Trump era, in which there is a growing sense that we are being led, if not over the cliff, then at least into a very dark and uncertain future.

EVEN IN OUR ULTRA-KNOWING and super-sophisticated digital age, the local evening news still quaintly ends with some uplifting tale about a rescued penguin that had been wandering around downtown Seattle, or something of that sort. But this is at the end of 30 minutes of murder and mayhem30 minutes of, you should pardon the expression, American carnage, a phrase coined by a man who knows, at least, the world of the media that created him.

Of course, raising the question of whether the news is too negative is on some level absurd. News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising, famously said Lord Northcliffe, one of the founders of modern mass journalism. Any news that someone wants suppressed is, by definition, disturbing in one degree or another. There hardly seems any point to reporting at length on politicians who are honest, countries that get along, governments that empower their citizens, or police officers who do not violate the norms of legality or decency.

Consume the news even intermittently throughout the dayor even once in the morning and once in the eveningand you go to bed convinced that the world is about to erupt into war, or be soon driven to extinction by natural disaster, or that your own personal safety and that of your loved ones is in imminent danger

But in our current situation paradoxes ensue when the media goes negative. Only by exposing the peril Trump has put the country inonly by being negativecan the media perform its function of improving and correcting public life. And yet stressing the negative aspects of Trumps reign will, along with stiffening the spines of his supporters, simply perpetuate the atmosphere of negativity that got him elected in the first place. Is it possible to strike a balance between exposing democracys threats and flaws on the one hand, and on the other, plunging so far into negativity that the news further alienates viewers and readers? Excess negativity could both prompt those viewers and readers to tune out the news, and accelerate their turn toward the loudest political voice promising safety and security.

ICYMI: The New York Times treads an increasingly slippery path between news and advertising



ESPECIALLY AT THIS MOMENT, talk about American democracy being an imperfect work in progress sounds like sentimental cant. The imperfections seem to far outweigh the progress. But the hallmark of American democracy is that it wears its imperfections on its sleeves. Without awareness of its flaws, democracy could not have the capacity to mend them.

Contrast the negativity of American media with the enforced sunniness of totalitarian regimes. It wasnt too long ago when Pravda, the state-sponsored media of the Soviet regime, didnt just offer endless paeans to whoever the Soviet leader at the time happened to be, but also endless reports on the workers paradise that the country hadin the perspective of the regimebecome under communism. The same enforced sunniness prevails in the Chinese media and in North Korea. Even in Putins sham democracy, the emphasis in the Kremlin-controlled mainstream media is on stories that portray Russia as an ideal society. Demagogues might use negativity in the media to gain power, but once they control the media, they project a seamless stream of positive images to maintain power. If negativity distorts perspective, an enforced or deliberate positivity disables clear vision altogether.

News has to be information tending toward knowledge. No matter how negative it might be, it should, at its best, reflect its origins in the philosophical belief that what constitutes the news seeks to correct a flaw, right a wrong, lead humanity along a path toward better individual and collective life. To enlighten is not a bad imperative to keep in mind when reporting the news, along with to inform.

The Scylla and Charybdis of the contemporary media landscape are a negativity that leads to dark politics on the one hand, and a sunniness that blinds people to dark politics on the other. But perhaps there is a navigational instrument to use in determining whether media negativity is for the public good.

All the News Thats Fit to Print. The phrase seems so quaint. But what the motto means is that publishing a story simply because it happened, or because it has commercial value and appeal, is not worth the paper it used to exclusively appear on. News has to be information tending toward knowledge. No matter how negative it might be, it should, at its best, reflect its origins in the philosophical belief that what constitutes the news seeks to correct a flaw, right a wrong, lead humanity along a path toward better individual and collective life. To enlighten is not a bad imperative to keep in mind when reporting the news, along with to inform.

There is a reason that, in that triumph of popular culture that sprang from deep inside the American psyche, Clark Kent worked at a newspaper, not at an investment bank or a real-estate development company. Superman is a fantasy of the perfectibility of humankind. New outlets should be the breeding ground, not of the type of alarming stories that create a yearning for a strong political hand, but of the knowledge of human imperfection and a way through or around it that puts a modest heroism within reach of the everyday reader.

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Lee Siegel , a widely published writer on culture and politics, is the author of six books and the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism.
LOCAL NEWS IS IN DIRE STRAITS. In a quest for profit, publishers have gutted newsrooms and hollowed out coverage of local communities. As the industry struggles to build the business model of the future, its missing an opportunity to embrace a funding mechanism that can enshrine journalism as a public service: the special service district.

The United States currently hosts more than 30,000 special service districts, which fund everything from local fire departments and water infrastructure projects to sanitation services and hospitals. Special service districts are paid for by taxes or annual fees assessed in a geographic area; and, in turn, they deliver services to the communities that fund them. They can be created by town councils or voted into existence via referendum.

TRENDING: Thank God the brain cancer waited for the Pulitzer

During the past year, my colleagues and I at Community Information Districts worked to lay the foundation for a special service district model for local journalism. Journalists we spoke with were intrigued by the idea, though some become apprehensive when asked to view the proposal as a taxpayer. But we also spoke with taxpayers, who were generally receptive.

At a series of New Jersey community forums on improving local media across the state, those residents in attendance understood the model and supported the mission. The community news and information needs raised at these events can be met, but not every community can currently support viable business models to meet those needs. Thats where a community information district (CiD) comes in.

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MY HOMETOWN OF FAIR LAWN, New Jersey, has a population of 32,000 people. An annual $40 contribution per household could deliver a $500,000 operating budget to a newsroom devoted to understanding and serving the local news and information needs of its community.

That budget could support print or online newspapers, or livestreaming town council meetings. A special service district for local journalism could convene community forums or media literacy classes, launch a text message and email alert system, or pay for chatbots that answer locally relevant questions, like Is alternate side parking in effect?

Access to news and information is key to democratic governance. The CiD model offers a financial engine for sustainable and radically local journalism.

Each community could shape its own information district through a needs assessment or a targeted engagement campaign. To prevent political interference, a board of trustees made up of residents and community stakeholders, could oversee their local CiD. Communities could allocate funding through a participatory budgeting process, and hold regular referendums to determine whether or not it should reauthorize the CiD.

Community information districts are not a cure-all, and there are obstacles to establishing them. Some communities might resist the notion of an additional tax. Others may not have the tax base to support such services in the first place. We are still looking for solutions to these issues, but they are not insurmountable. Next year, my colleagues and I plan to release a guide to help communities establish their own CiDs and navigate variations in state law. The guide will also establish good governance guidelines, offer samples of legislative language, and outline best practices in local journalism and community information for CiDs.

Access to news and information is key to democratic governance. The CiD model offers a financial engine for sustainable and radically local journalism, which supports the regional and national press in turn. It provides a direct financial incentive for journalists to leave the coasts, deeply engage their communities, and prioritize the impact of their work above pageviews. CiDs could revitalize and sustain local news, rebuild trust, and increase civic engagement across the country.

ICYMI: The man behind depressing, viral Trump Jr. tweet speaks

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Simon Galperin is a partner on Community Information Districts and media consultant. He holds a Social Journalism MA from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Find him on Twitter @thensim0nsaid. To learn more about the Community Information Districts project, email connect@infodistricts.org or tweet @infodistricts.
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Heidelberger Druckmaschinen Aktiengesellschaft, together with its subsidiaries, manufactures, sells, and deals in printing press and other print media industry products in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia/Pacific, Eastern Europe, North America, and South America. The company operates through Print Solutions, Packaging Solutions, and Technology Solutions segments. It offers printing machines, including digital, offset, narrow web, screen, and inline-flexo printing, as well as remarketed equipment; and finishing equipment comprising cutting, die-cutting and embossing, folding, inspection, folding carton gluing, hot foil stamping, and shingled folding. The company also provides technical services, such as installation and relocation, maintenance and cleaning, remote support, repair, and overhauling services, as well as service parts; and performance services consisting of performance evaluation, color management, training, upgrades and retrofits, monitoring, output optimization, print shop optimization, and investment planning. In addition, it offers financial services; and consumables, such as plates, films, chemicals, proofing, glues, digital and analog engraving, blankets, inks, dampening rollers, coatings, varnishes, blankets, rollers, pressroom chemicals, cutting knives, banderoles, ink duct foils, wash-up cloths and spray powders, dispersion glues, binding glues, stitching wires and sealing threads, and folding carton gluing supplies. Further, the company provides software solutions. The company was formerly known as Schnellpressenfabrik AG Heidelberg and changed its name to Heidelberger Druckmaschinen Aktiengesellschaft in 1967. Heidelberger Druckmaschinen Aktiengesellschaft was founded in 1850 and is based in Heidelberg, Germany.
Vipshop Holdings Limited operates online platforms for various brands in the People's Republic of China. It operates in Vip.com, Shan Shan Outlets, and Others segments. The company offers women's apparel, such as casual wear, jeans, dresses, outerwear, lingerie, pajamas, and maternity clothes; men's apparel comprising casual and smart-casual T-shirts, polo shirts, jackets, pants, and underwear; and skin care and cosmetic products, including cleansers, lotions, face and body creams, face masks, sunscreen, foundations, lipsticks, eye shadows, and other cosmetics-related items. It also provides shoes and bags, which comprises casual and formal shoes, purses, satchels, luggage, duffel bags, and wallets; handbags; apparel, gears and accessories, furnishings and decor, toys, and games for boys, girls, infants, and toddlers; sportswear, sports gear, and footwear for various sporting activities; home furnishings, such as bed and bath products, home decor, kitchen and tabletop items, and home appliances; and consumer electronic products. In addition, the company offers food and snacks, beverages, fresh produce, and pet goods; beauty products; and internet finance services, including consumer and supplier financing, and microcredit. Vipshop Holdings Limited provides its branded products through its vip.com and vipshop.com online platforms, as well as through its internet website and cellular phone application. Further, it offers warehousing, logistics, product procurement, research and development, technology development, and consulting services; software development and information technology support solutions; and supply chain services. Vipshop Holdings Limited was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Guangzhou, the People's Republic of China.
SkySea Cruise Line will add three more Chinese homeports to its operation in 2018 in addition to a plan to homeport in Keelung, Taiwan, as the Ken Muskat-led brand continues to mature with more than 80 cruises on offer in 2018.

A number of cruises in Keelung will be mainly aimed at Taiwanese guests, it is a solid step forward in the implementation of the greater China strategy of local cruise brands, said Muskat, CEO.

While Shanghai will still feature as a key turnaround port and source market, the Chinese brand, which is owned by Royal Caribbean Cruises and Ctrip, will add Xiamen, Qingdao, and Shenzhen.

More than ten destination ports in four countries and regions will be visited throughout the year, catering to the markets of eastern, southern and northern China as well as Taiwan, the company said, in a prepared statement.

There will also be more overnight and late night stays in ports as bookings for 2018 sailings will open on August 8. Overnight stays in Okinawa are among the highlights.

In addition, SkySea will extend its late night stays at some ports, launching themed evening shore excursions known as SkySea Nights.

SkySea will also visit Vietnam for the first time, docking at Halong Bay, Da Nang and other destinations.

SkySea will continue to promote its Cruise+ strategy through its best of sea and land programs focused on repositioning cruises to accommodate the increasing number of cruise guests in central and western China, the company said.
AstraZeneca PLC, a biopharmaceutical company, focuses on the discovery, development, manufacturing, and commercialization of prescription medicines. Its marketed products include Calquence, Enhertu, Faslodex, Imfinzi, Iressa, Koselugo, Lumoxiti, Lynparza, Orpathys, Tagrisso, and Zoladex for oncology; Brilinta/Brilique, Bydureon/Byetta, BCise, Byetta, Crestor, Evrenzo, Farxiga/Forxiga, Komboglyze/Kombiglyze XR, Lokelma, Onglyza, Qtern, and Xigduo/Xigduo XR for cardiovascular, renal, and metabolism diseases; Bevespi Aerosphere, Breztri Aerosphere, Daliresp/Daxas, Duaklir Genuair, Fasenra, Pulmicort, Saphnelo, Symbicort, and Tudorza/Eklira/Bretaris for respiratory and immunology; and Andexxa/Ondexxya, Kanuma, Soliris, Strensiq, and Ultomiris for rare diseases. The company's marketed products also comprise Synagis for respiratory syncytial virus; Fluenz Tetra/FluMist Quadrivalent for Influenza; Seroquel IR/Seroquel XR for schizophrenia bipolar disease; Nexium, and Losec/Prilosec for gastroenterology; and Vaxzevria and Evusheld for covid-19. The company serves primary care and specialty care physicians through distributors and local representative offices in the United Kingdom, rest of Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australasia. It has a collaboration agreement with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. to research, develop, and commercialize small molecule medicines for obesity; Neurimmune AG to develop and commercialize NI006; Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. to develop eplontersen, a liver-targeted antisense therapy in Phase III development for the treatment of transthyretin amyloidosis; Proteros Biostructures GmbH to jointly discover novel small molecules for the treatment of hematological cancers; Sierra Oncology, Inc. to develop and commercialize AZD5153. The company was formerly known as Zeneca Group PLC and changed its name to AstraZeneca PLC in April 1999. AstraZeneca PLC was incorporated in 1992 and is headquartered in Cambridge, the United Kingdom.
The following companies are subsidiares of MetLife: 10700 WILSHIRE LLC, 1201 TAB MANAGER LLC, 1350 EYE STREET MANAGER LLC, 1350 EYE STREET OWNER LLC, 150 NORTH RIVERSIDE PE MEMBER LLC, 1925 WJC OWNER LLC, 23RD STREET INVESTMENTS INC., 500 GRANT STREET ASSOCIATES LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, 500 GRANT STREET GP LLC, 6104 HOLLYWOOD LLC, AFP GENESIS ADMINISTRADORA DE FONDOS Y FIDECOMISOS S.A., AGENVITA S.R.L., ALICO HELLAS SINGLE MEMBER LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY, ALICO OPERATIONS LLC, American Life Insurance Company, BEST MARKET S.A., BLOCK VISION HOLDINGS CORPORATION, BLOCK VISION OF TEXAS INC., BORDERLAND INVESTMENTS LIMITED, BOULEVARD RESIDENTIAL LLC, BUFORD LOGISTICS CENTER LLC, CC HOLDCO MANAGER LLC, CHESTNUT FLATS WIND LLC, CLOSED JOINT-STOCK COMPANY MASTER-D, COMPANIA INVERSORA METLIFE S.A., CORPORATE REAL ESTATE HOLDINGS LLC, COVA LIFE MANAGEMENT COMPANY, DAVIS VISION INC., DAVISVISION IPA INC., DELAWARE AMERICAN LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, EURO CL INVESTMENTS LLC, EXCELENCIA OPERATIVA Y TECNOLOGICA S.A de C.V., FORTISSIMO CO. LTD, FUNDACION METLIFE MEXICO A.C., GLOBAL PROPERTIES INC., General American Life Insurance Company, Grand Bank N.A., HASKELL EAST VILLAGE LLC, HOUSING FUND MANAGER LLC, INTERNATIONAL TECHNICAL AND ADVISORY SERVICES LIMITED, INVERSIONES METLIFE HOLDCO DOS LIMITADA, INVERSIONES METLIFE HOLDCO TRES LIMITADA, LHC HOLDINGS LLC, LHCW HOLDINGS LLC, LHCW HOTEL HOLDING 2002 LLC, LHCW HOTEL HOLDING LLC, LHCW HOTEL OPERATING COMPANY 2002 LLC, LUMENLAB MALAYSIA SDN. BHD., Logan Circle Partners, MARKETPLACE RESIDENCES LLC, MC PORTFOLIO JV MEMBER LLC, MCJV LLC, MCPP OWNERS LLC, MCRE BLOCK 40 LP, MEC HEALTH CARE INC., MET 1065 HOTEL LLC, MET CANADA SOLAR ULC, METLIFE 1007 STEWART LLC, METLIFE 1201 TAB MEMBER LLC, METLIFE 425 MKT MANAGER LLC, METLIFE 425 MKT MEMBER LLC, METLIFE 555 12TH MEMBER LLC, METLIFE 8280 MEMBER LLC, METLIFE ACOMA OWNER LLC, METLIFE ADMINISTRADORA DE FUNDOS MULTIPATROCINADOS LTDA., METLIFE ALTERNATIVES GP LLC, METLIFE ASHTON AUSTIN OWNER LLC, METLIFE ASIA HOLDING COMPANY PTE. LTD., METLIFE ASIA LIMITED, METLIFE ASIA SERVICES SDN. BHD, METLIFE ASSET MANAGEMENT CORP., METLIFE ASSIGNMENT COMPANY INC., METLIFE BORO STATION MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CAMINO RAMON MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CAMPUS AT SGV MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CAPITAL CREDIT L.P., METLIFE CAPITAL LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, METLIFE CAPITAL TRUST IV, METLIFE CB W/A LLC, METLIFE CC MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CHILE ADMINISTRADORA DE MUTUOS HIPOTECARIOS S.A., METLIFE CHILE INVERSIONES LIMITADA, METLIFE CHILE SEGUROS DE VIDA S.A., METLIFE CHILE SEGUROS GENERALES S.A., METLIFE CHINO MEMBER LLC, METLIFE COLOMBIA SEGUROS de VIDA S.A., METLIFE COMMERCIAL MORTGAGE INCOME FUND GP LLC, METLIFE CONSQUARE MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CONSUMER SERVICES INC., METLIFE CORE PROPERTY FUND GP LLC, METLIFE CREDIT CORP., METLIFE DIGITAL VENTURES INC., METLIFE ENHANCED CORE PROPERTY FUND GP LLC, METLIFE EU HOLDING COMPANY LIMITED, METLIFE EUROPE INSURANCE d.a.c., METLIFE EUROPE SERVICES LIMITED, METLIFE EUROPE d.a.c., METLIFE EUROPEAN HOLDINGS LLC., METLIFE FINANCIAL SERVICES CO. LTD, METLIFE FM HOTEL MEMBER LLC, METLIFE FUNDING INC., METLIFE GENERAL INSURANCE LIMITED, METLIFE GLOBAL BENEFITS LTD., METLIFE GLOBAL HOLDING COMPANY I GMBH, METLIFE GLOBAL HOLDING COMPANY II GMBH, METLIFE GLOBAL HOLDINGS CORPORATION S.A. De C.V., METLIFE GLOBAL INC., METLIFE GLOBAL OPERATIONS SUPPORT CENTER PRIVATE LIMITED, METLIFE GROUP INC., METLIFE HCMJV 1 GP LLC, METLIFE HCMJV 1 LP LLC, METLIFE HEALTH PLANS INC., METLIFE HOLDINGS INC., METLIFE HOME LOANS LLC, METLIFE INNOVATION CENTRE LIMITED, METLIFE INNOVATION CENTRE PTE. LTD., METLIFE INSURANCE AND INVESTMENT TRUST, METLIFE INSURANCE BROKERAGE INC., METLIFE INSURANCE COMPANY OF KOREA LTD., METLIFE INSURANCE K.K., METLIFE INSURANCE LIMITED, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL HF PARTNERS LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS LLC, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL LIMITED LLC, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND I LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND II LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND III LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND IV LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND V LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND VI LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND VII LP, METLIFE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT EUROPE LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT HOLDINGS LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT HOLDINGS LLC, METLIFE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT LLC, METLIFE INVESTMENTS ASIA LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENTS LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENTS PTY LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENTS SECURITIES LLC, METLIFE INVESTORS DISTRIBUTION COMPANY, METLIFE INVESTORS GROUP LLC, METLIFE IRELAND TREASURY D.A.C., METLIFE JAPAN US EQUITY FUND GP LLC, METLIFE JAPAN US EQUITY FUND LP, METLIFE JAPAN US EQUITY OWNERS BLOCKER LLC, METLIFE JAPAN US EQUITY OWNERS LLC, METLIFE LATIN AMERICA ASESORIAS E INVERSIONES LIMITADA, METLIFE LEGAL PLANS INC., METLIFE LEGAL PLANS OF FLORIDA INC., METLIFE LHH MEMBER LLC, METLIFE LIFE INSURANCE S.A., METLIFE LOAN ASSET MANAGEMENT LLC, METLIFE LONG SHORT CREDIT FUND LP, METLIFE LONG SHORT CREDIT MASTER FUND LP, METLIFE LONG SHORT CREDIT PARALLEL FUND LP, METLIFE MAS S.A. DE C.V., METLIFE MEXICO HOLDINGS S. DE R.L. DE C.V., METLIFE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., METLIFE MEXICO SERVICIOS S.A. DE C.V., METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT FUND II LP, METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT GP II LLC, METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT GP LLC, METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT II RATED FUND LP, METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT PARALLEL FUND LP, METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT PARALLEL GP LLC, METLIFE MMPD II SPECIAL LLC, METLIFE MULTI-FAMILY PARTNERS III LLC, METLIFE OBS MEMBER LLC, METLIFE OFC MEMBER LLC, METLIFE ONTARIO STREET MEMBR LLC, METLIFE PARK TOWER MEMBER LLC, METLIFE PENSION TRUSTEES LIMITED, METLIFE PENSIONES MEXICO S.A., METLIFE PET INSURANCE SOLUTIONS LLC, METLIFE PLANOS ODONTOLOGICOS LTDA., METLIFE POWSZECHNE TOWARTZYSTWO EMERYTALNE S.A., METLIFE PRIVATE EQUITY HOLDINGS LLC, METLIFE PROPERTIES VENTURES LLC, METLIFE RC SF MEMBER LLC, METLIFE REAL ESTATE LENDING LLC, METLIFE REINSURANCE COMPANY OF BERMUDA LTD., METLIFE REINSURANCE COMPANY OF CHARLESTON, METLIFE REINSURANCE COMPANY OF VERMONT, METLIFE RETIREMENT SERVICES LLC, METLIFE SECURITIZATION DEPOSITOR LLC, METLIFE SEGUROS S.A., METLIFE SENIOR DIRECT LENDING FINCO LLC, METLIFE SENIOR DIRECT LENDING FUND LP, METLIFE SENIOR DIRECT LENDING GP LLC, METLIFE SENIOR DIRECT LENDING HOLDINGS LP, METLIFE SERVICES AND SOLUTIONS LLC, METLIFE SERVICES CYPRUS LTD., METLIFE SERVICES EAST PRIVATE LIMITED, METLIFE SERVICES EEIG, METLIFE SERVICES EOOD, METLIFE SERVICES SOCIEDAD LIMITADA, METLIFE SERVICES SP Z.O.O, METLIFE SERVICIOS S.A., METLIFE SINGLE FAMILY RENTAL FUND GP LLC, METLIFE SINGLE FAMILY RENTAL FUND LP, METLIFE SOLUTIONS PTE. LTD., METLIFE SOLUTIONS S.A.S., METLIFE SP HOLDINGS LLC, METLIFE STRATEGIC HOTEL DEBT FUND GP LLC, METLIFE SYNDICATED BANK LOAN LUX GP S.A.R.L., METLIFE THR INVESTOR LLC, METLIFE TOWARZYSTWO FUNDUSZY INWESTYCYJNYCH S.A., METLIFE TOWARZYSTWO UBEZPIECZEN NA ZYCIE I REASEKURACJI S.A., METLIFE TOWER RESOURCES GROUP INC., METLIFE TREAT TOWERS MEMBER LLC, METLIFE WORLDWIDE HOLDINGS LLC, METROPOLITAN GENERAL INSURANCE COMPANY, METROPOLITAN GLOBAL MANAGEMENT LLC, METROPOLITAN LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, METROPOLITAN LIFE SEGUROS E PREVIDENCIA PRIVADA S.A., METROPOLITAN LIFE SOCIETATE de ADMINISTRARE a UNUI FOND de PENSII ADMINISTRAT PRIVAT S.A., METROPOLITAN TOWER LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, METROPOLITAN TOWER REALTY COMPANY INC., MEX DF PROPERTIES LLC, MFA FINANCING VEHICLE CTR1 LLC, MIDTOWN HEIGHTS LLC, MIM CAMPUS AT SGV MANAGER LLC, MIM CLAL GENERAL PARTNER LLC, MIM CM SYNDICATOR LLC, MIM EMD GP LLC, MIM I LLC, MIM LS GP LLC, MIM METWEST INTERNATIONAL MANAGER LLC, MIM ML-AI VENTURE 5 MANAGER LLC, MIM OMD MANAGER LLC, MIM PROPERTY MANAGEMENT LLC, MIM PROPERTY MANAGEMENT OF GEORGIA 1 LLC, MIM SPOKANE INDUSTRIAL MANAGER LLC, MIM THIRD ARMY INDUSTRIAL MANAGER LLC, MISSOURI REINSURANCE INC., ML 300 THIRD MEMBER LLC, ML ARMATURE MEMBER LLC, ML BELLEVUE MANAGER LLC, ML BELLEVUE MEMBER LLC, ML CAPACITACION COMERCIAL S.A. DE C.V., ML CERRITOS TC MEMBER LLC, ML CLAL MEMBER LLC, ML CORNER 63 MEMBER LLC, ML DOLPHIN GP LLC, ML DOLPHIN MEZZ LLC, ML HUDSON MEMBER LLC, ML MATSON MILLS MEMBER LLC, ML MILILANI MEMBER LLC, ML OMD MEMBER LLC, ML ONE BEDMINSTER LLC, ML PORT CHESTER SC MEMBER LLC, ML SENTINEL SQUARE MEMBER LLC, ML SLOANS LAKE MEMEBR LLC, ML SOUTHLANDS MEMBER LLC, ML SOUTHMORE LLC, ML SPOKANE INDUSTRIAL MEMBER LLC, ML SWAN GP LLC, ML SWAN MEZZ LLC, ML TERRACES LLC, ML THIRD ARMY INDUSTRIAL MEMBER LLC, ML VENTURE 1 MANAGER S. DE R. L. DE C.V., ML VENTURE 1 SERVICER LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 1 LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 2 LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 3 LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 4 LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 5 LLC, ML-URS PORT CHESTER SC MANAGER LLC, MLIA MANAGER I LLC, MLIA PARK TOWER MANAGER LLC, MLIA SBAF COLONY MANAGER LLC, MLIA SBAF MANAGER LLC, MLIC ASSET HOLDINGS II LLC, MLIC ASSET HOLDINGS LLC, MLIC CB HOLDINGS LLC, MLJ US FEEDER LLC, MM GLOBAL OPERATIONS SUPPORT CENTER S.A. DE C.V., MMP CEDAR STREET OWNER LLC, MMP CEDAR STREET REIT LLC, MMP HOLDINGS III LLC, MMP OLIVIAN OWNER LLC, MMP OLIVIAN REIT LLC, MMP OWNERS III LLC, MMP OWNERS LLC, MMP SOUTH PARK OWNER LLC, MMP SOUTH PARK REIT LLC, MNQM TRUST 2020, MREF 425 MKT LLC, MSHDF HOLDCO I LLC, MSV IRVINE PROPERTY LLC, MTL LEASING LLC, MTU HOTEL OWNER LLC, NATILOPORTEM HOLDINGS LLC, NEWBURY INSURANCE COMPANY LIMITED, OCONEE GOLF COMPANY LLC, OCONEE HOTEL COMPANY LLC, OCONEE LAND COMPANY LLC, OCONEE LAND DEVELOPMENT COMPANY LLC, OCONEE MARINA COMPANY LLC, OMI MLIC INVESTMENTS LIMITED, PACIFIC LOGISTICS INDUSTRIAL NORTH LLC, PACIFIC LOGISTICS INDUSTRIAL SOUTH LLC, PARK TOWER JV MEMBER LLC, PARK TOWER REIT INC., PJSC METLIFE, PLAZA DRIVE PROPERTIES LLC, PREFCO FOURTEEN LLC, PREFCO XIV HOLDINGS LLC, PROVIDA INTERNACIONAL S.A., SAFEGUARD HEALTH ENTERPRISES INC., SAFEGUARD HEALTH PLANS INC., SAFEHEALTH LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, SOUTHCREEK INDUSTRIAL HOLDINGS LLC, ST. JAMES FLEET INVESTMENTS TWO LIMITED, SUPERIOR PROCUREMENT INC., SUPERIOR VISION BENEFIT MANAGEMENT INC., SUPERIOR VISION HOLDINGS INC., SUPERIOR VISION INSURANCE INC., SUPERIOR VISION INSURANCE PLAN OF WISCONSIN INC., SUPERIOR VISION OF NEW JERSEY INC., SUPERIOR VISION SERVICES INC., Safeguard Health Enterprises, Security First Group Inc., THE BUILDING AT 575 FIFTH AVENUE MEZZANINE LLC, THE BUILDING AT 575 FIFTH RETAIL HOLDING LLC, THE BUILDING AT 575 FIFTH RETAIL OWNER, THE DIRECT CALL CENTRE PTY LIMITED, TRANSMOUNTAIN LAND & LIVESTOCK COMPANY, UVC INDEPENDENT PRACTICE ASSOCIATION INC., VERSANT HEALTH CONSOLIDATIONS CORP., VERSANT HEALTH HOLDCO INC., VERSANT HEALTH INC., VERSANT HEALTH LAB LLC, VIRIDIAN MIRACLE MILE LLC, VISION 21 MANAGED EYE CARE OF TAMPA BAY INC., VISION 21 PHYSICIAN PRACTICE MANAGEMENT COMPANY, VISION TWENTY-ONE MANAGED EYE CARE IPA INC., Versant Health, WDV ACQUISITION CORP., WFP 1000 HOLDING COMPANY GP LLC, WHITE OAK ROYALTY COMPANY, WHITE TRACT II LLC, and Willing.

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Barnes & Noble Education, Inc. operates bookstores for college and university campuses, and K-12 institutions in the United States. It operates through three segments: Retail, Wholesale, and Digital Student Solutions. The company sells and rents new and used print textbooks, digital textbooks, and publisher hosted digital courseware through physical and virtual bookstores, as well as directly to students through Textbooks.com. It also offers First Day and First Day Complete access programs; BNC OER+, a turnkey solution for colleges and universities, that offers digital content, such as videos, activities, and auto-graded practice assessments; and general merchandise, including collegiate and athletic apparel, school spirit products, lifestyle products, technology products, supplies, graduation products, and convenience items. In addition, the company sources, sells, and distributes new and used textbooks; and sells hardware and a software suite of applications that provides inventory management and point-of-sale solutions to approximately 350 college bookstores. Further, it offers direct-to-student subscription-based writing services; and bartleby, a direct-to-student subscription-based offering that includes textbook solutions, expert questions and answers, and writing and tutoring services. The company operates 805 physical college and university bookstores; 622 virtual bookstores; 8 True Spirit e-commerce websites; pop-up retail locations; 73 customized cafes and 11 stand-alone convenience stores; and a media channel for brands targeting the college demographic. Barnes & Noble Education, Inc. was founded in 1965 and is headquartered in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.
A government crackdown in China has resulted elements of WhatsApp becoming unusable in what appears to be a partial blackout of the OTT messaging services.

WhatsApp users reported on various other social media sites  including Twitter  that they were unable to send images, although text messages were still functioning. Chinas government is reportedly tightening restrictions on social media ahead of the 19th Communist Party Congress, in a bid to quell any potential political unrest around the event.

The crackdown follows on from claims by the University of Torontos Citizen Lab that the WeChat and Sina Weibo services  which are essentially the Chinese equivalents of WhatsApp and Twitter respectively  appeared to have imposed significantly stricter censorship on search terms related to the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate and political prisoner Liu Xiaobo, who recently died while in the custody of Chinas government.

Ronald Deibert, director of Citizen Lab, said: concerned that martyrdom around Liu may spur collective action, as well as being concerned about saving face, the knee-jerk reaction of Chinas authorities is to quash all public discussion of Liu, which in todays world translates into censorship on social media.

WhatsApp is not as widely used in China as WeChat, which is operated by Tencent. However, WeChat is unencrypted and rigorously censored, with reports in December 2016 showing that certain keywords relating to controversial social and political issues within China were being censored in WeChat messages - even when users were travelling outside the country.

This has spurred users concerned about privacy to adopt WhatsApp, as it offers encryption. The use of virtual private networks to circumvent Chinese government censorship  colloquially referred to as The Great Firewall - has also increased, although the newfound popularity of such networks prompted another government crackdown on the tech.

China is not the only market where WhatsApp has faced a ban  it has been blocked several times in Brazil, largely for failing to reveal requested user data that would have been submitted to court in a legal case.
Polands master franchise operator of the Dominos Pizza fast food brand and system, DP Poland , reported total system sales as being 50% higher to PLN 27m in its first half on Wednesday, with 17% like-for-like growth in system sales year-on-year.

The AIM-traded firm said it was its 19th consecutive quarter of double-digit system sales growth, with 10 new stores opened to date in 2017.

DP Poland now had 45 stores in 18 towns and cities across the country.

It said 73% of deliver sales were now being ordered online, and confirmed its new commissary was close to completion.

We continued to see strong growth in system sales in the first half of 2017, thanks to robust double digit like-for-likes and 10 store openings, year to date, said DP Poland chief executive Peter Shaw.

Eight additional towns and cities have been added to the Domino's map in Poland so far this year.

Shaw pointed out the companys rate of growth in online sales was continuing with 73% of all delivery orders made online in the first half of 2017, compared to 71% for the full year 2016.

He said it was a trend that brought it in line with many of the more mature Domino's markets.

An effective online ordering system benefits both our customers and our operational efficiencies, making the ordering process easier and less labour intensive.

We expect the proportion of delivery sales made online to continue to grow as we invest in our digital technology and marketing.

Our state-of-the art commissary in odz is nearing completion and we expect it to come on stream in September, giving us the capacity to supply up to 150 stores with fresh dough and ingredients, in combination with our Warsaw facility.

DP Poland said it would release its interim results for the first half of 2017 on 18 September.
Facebook -owned messaging service Whatsapp has been partially blocked in China as part of the countrys latest crackdown on internet usage.

Users reported being unable to send anything via the app apart from text messages, with files, pictures and videos being blocked by censorship groups.

The blockage arrives just weeks ahead of an expected significant reshuffle in the top ranks of the Communist government at the next party congress.

Several popular Western internet platforms such as Google, Facebook and Instagram have been blocked in China in the past.

Whatsapp is not nearly as popular in China as it is in many other parts of the world, with the domestic alternative WeChat dominating - with more than 900m users.

The sensitive party congress will arrive later this year at a tense time following the death of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin held a second undisclosed meeting only attended by one Russian translator during the G20 summit in Hamburg, the White House said on Tuesday.

The US and Russian presidents held the meeting on July 7 amid a media frenzy about the two mens relationship following previous allegations of attempts from the Kremlin to influence last years US presidential election.

The statement from the White House did not confirm what was discussed during the meeting, but said it took place at the end of a formal dinner between several leaders.

The meeting was first reported by Ian Bremmer, the president of international consulting group Eurasia Group. Bremmer added that Trumps own translator was not present at the discussion, only that of Putin.

The consultant said: Its very clear that Trumps best single relationship in the G20 is with Putin. US allies were surprised, flummoxed, disheartened. Youve got Trump in the room with all these allies and whos the one he spends time with?

Trump condemned suggestions that the meeting was not disclosed by his administration, describing them as 'sick'.
Markets in Asia finished positive on Wednesday, with markets reacting to a weakened dollar, which hit 10 month lows overnight amid ongoing concerns for President Trumps reform programme in the US.

In Japan, the Nikkei 225 was up 0.1% at 20,020.86, as the yen strengthened against the greenback, last advancing 0.06% to JPY 112.00.

Petroleum company Idemitsu Kosan confirmed it was issuing 48 million shares, after a court rejected an attempt by the companys founding Idemitsu family to prevent the offer taking place.

The family disagreed with management plans to acquire Showa Shell Sekiyu, with the share issue being seen as a way to dilute the familys influence and thus their ability to block the acquisition.

Shares in Idemitsu Kosan were up 1.97% in Tokyo.

The Bank of Japan headed into the meeting room on Wednesday, for its two-day policy session.

On the mainland, the Shanghai Composite was up 1.42% at 3,232.87, and the smaller tech-heavy Shenzhen Composite was up 1.53% to 1,839.06.

South Koreas Kospi was up 0.16% at 2,429.94, and the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong was up 0.56% at 26,672.16.

The positive sentiment in the region was driven by a number of outside factors, including earnings season in the US, where around 80 of the S&P 500 companies which have reported beating their bottom line forecasts.

US President Donald Trumps reform plans were also in the spotlight globally, after his plans to repeal and replace Barack Obamas legacy healthcare legislation collapsing on Monday amid criticism Trumpcare would leave thousands of Americas poorest without access to basic healthcare.

The president said he would prefer to let Obamacare fail in the wake of his plans collapse.

But the collapse was also leading to questions across the world over the Trump administrations ability to enact reform, with doubt growing over whether his promised business-friendly tax reform could be enacted as planned.

The failure in the Senate to modify Obamacare followed immediately by a failure to cancel it outright are but the latest miscues suggesting a four-year lame duck presidency, noted analysts at DBS.

Reform, deregulation and fiscal stimulus that excited markets seven months ago are becoming evermore distant memories and expectations for GDP growth and Fed action are falling accordingly.

Locally, investors were also still reacting to the buoyant Chinese economic data released on Monday, after a delayed reaction in Shanghai earlier in the week as traders were focussed on regulation events over the weekend.

Oil prices were lower during Asian trading, although they picked up again during early European hours, with Brent crude last up 0.45% at $49.06 per barrel and West Texas Intermediate ahead 0.26% at $46.52.

Australias S&P/ASX 200 finished 0.79% firmer at 5,732.13, with the weighty financials subindex underpinning the benchmark, adding 2.44%.

The major regional banks were mostly higher, with Australia and New Zealand Banking Group up 3.92%, National Australia Bank growing 3.06% and Westpac Banking Corporation ahead 3.8%.

It came after regulators confirmed the capital requirement for the big four banks - the abovementioned three, plus Commonwealth Bank of Australia - would be increased before 2020.

Major miner Rio Tinto was also near the top of the agenda in Sydney, as analysts suggested the companys 2017 dividend could be the highest in the firms history as iron ore prices soared.

Rio Tinto had lowered its guidance for iron ore exports on Tuesday, however.

Across the Tasman Sea, the S&P/NZX 50 increased 0.2% to a fresh record high of 7,725.77, also led by dual-listed stocks of the big four regional banks.

New Zealand shares in Westpac were up 4% in Wellington, while Australia and New Zealand Banking Group was ahead 3.9%.

The weaker greenback led to a surge in both of the down under dollars, with the Aussie last ahead 0.21% to AUD 1.2605 and the Kiwi advancing 0.26% to NZD 1.3572.
European stocks were holding higher as a dip in the single currency and positive company updates helped to lift some of the selling pressure on equity markets, amid talk that the European Central Bank might not be as near as some may have thought to tinkering with its guidance.

As of 1230 BST, the benchmark Stoxx 600 was 0.38% or 1.44 points higher to 384.02 while Germany's Dax was up 0.12% or 14.77 points at 12,445.37 and France's Cac-40 ahead by 0.25% or 12.75 points to 5,185.97.

In parallel, euro/dollar was down 0.27% to 1.1524.

According to a sourced-report from Bloomberg the day before the Governing Council's next policy meeting, staff at the ECB were examining alternative scenarios for the future path of the central bank's bond purchase programme.

Nevertheless, the fact that such studies were being carried out did not mean a change in stimulus was imminent. No formal discussions about an end to so-called quantitative easing had yet taken place and the same sources told the newswire that officials had "limited" appetite for any significant change in policy.

Commenting on the outlook for Thursday's ECB decision, Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets UK, said: "President Draghi will certainly have his work cut out in keeping a lid on the euro at this rate, as the market gears up for tomorrows ECB rate meeting, with a move to the 1.2000 level a distinct possibility on a break of 1.1620 and last years high.

"While the economic outlook has improved in Europe markets are now betting it is only a matter of when the ECB starts preparing the ground for a slow retreat from its stimulus program."

In the background, ECB Governing Council member Francois Villeroy de Galhau reportedly said on Wednesday morning there was still a need for accommodative monetary policy.

Euro area construction output declined by 0.7% month-on-month in May, according to Eurostat, following a small rise of 0.3% in April.

Still ahead for later in the day was the National Association of Realtors's US housing starts figures for June, followed by a reading on Belgian consumer confidence for July at 1400 BST.

Electrolux was a top-gainer after management provided more upbeat forecasts for North America alongside the company's second quarter numbers.

US private equity groups Bain Capital and Cinven tabled a fresh takeover bid for Stada.

Germany's Daimler said it would invest 220m to upgrade over three million Mercedes-Benz diesel engine cars.

Akzo Nobel boss Ton Buechner resigned for health reasons.

Carrefour's Brazilian unit priced its shares at the lower end of the expected range ahead of its upcoming flotation.

A top executive at Spain's Iberdrola told Reuters his company was planning to enter the Italian retail electricity market by year-end.
BHP Billiton saw mixed results in its production numbers for the year to 30 June, with petroleum down 13% to 208 MMboe, copper off 16% at 1,326 kt, and metallurgical coal production 6% softer at 40 Mt.

The FTSE 100 firm did see a 4% uplift in iron ore production to 231 Mt, however, and a 7% improvement in energy coal production to 29 Mt, according to its operational review released on Tuesday.

Its board claimed to have achieved full year production guidance for petroleum and iron ore, with annual production records at Western Australia Iron Ore (WAIO), Spence and two Queensland Coal mines.

Lower copper production reflected the impact of industrial action at Escondida and the power outage and unplanned maintenance at Olympic Dam, BHP said, while the lower metallurgical coal volumes were said to be a result of damage to third party rail infrastructure caused by Cyclone Debbie.

BHP said it expected to achieve full year unit cost guidance at WAIO and Conventional petroleum, however industrial action and Cyclone Debbie had impacted unit costs at Escondida and Queensland Coal respectively.

Our people have stepped up to unlock low-cost latent capacity and achieve strong productivity gains across our tier one assets, said BHP chief executive officer Andrew Mackenzie.

Improved productivity led to record annual production at Western Australia Iron Ore, Spence and two Queensland Coal mines while production guidance was achieved by Petroleum and Western Australia Iron Ore.

Copper production is expected to rebound strongly in the 2018 financial year with the commissioning of the Escondida Water Supply project and ramp-up of the Los Colorados Extension project during the September 2017 quarter to enable utilisation of Escondida's three concentrators.

Group copper equivalent production was expected to increase by 7% in the 2018 financial year, and in its onshore US division, development activity was increasing with up to 10 rigs operating in the 2018 financial year.

BHP also confirmed the divestment of non-core onshore US acreage was progressing, with the sale of a portion of the southern Hawkville anticipated in the September 2017 quarter.

In petroleum exploration, drilling of the Wildling-2 appraisal well in the Gulf of Mexico was continuing, with results expected in the September 2017 quarter.

The board claimed all major projects under development were tracking to plan.

In Petroleum, the recently approved Mad Dog phase 2 project will extend low-risk oil volumes as supply tightens while in the near-term, onshore US development activity is to increase with up to 10 rigs planned for the 2018 financial year, Andrew Mackenzie added.

Our relentless focus on safety, productivity and capital discipline will support strong growth in shareholder value.
GlaxoSmithKline was in focus on Wednesday amid reports the pharmaceuticals giant is looking to sell off its Horlicks business.

According to the BBC, it wants to sell the business in the UK but keep it in India, where it is marketed as a nutritional drink to children and has seen strong growth.

Meanwhile, ITV's Robert Peston said a source was insistent that Glaxo was trying to sell off Horlicks as a preparation for Brexit. According to a second source, however, the sale plans have nothing to do with Brexit.

Glaxo declined to comment on the reports.

At 1130 BST, the shares were up 0.2% to 1,603.50p.
An expensive suit with dodgy shoes is never a good look on a guy. Whether youre heading crosstown to the office or weekend bar hopping in Chelsea, your outfit needs balance. And what better way to do it than with black leather cap toe monk straps, crocodile moccasins or two-toned Oxford wingtips?

For men who want the finest shoes in the city, here are the ten best New York shoe stores of the moment and why youll find yourself lacing up with their footwear.

Grenson

Add a touch of English heritage to your shoe rack by shopping Grensons first U.S. storefront in the heart of Nolita on Elizabeth Street. Since the 19th century, these iconic shoemakers have crafted a massive collection of handsome, brogue style shoes  including the highly recognised Triple Welt.

What does this mean for New Yorkers? Instead of finding curated Grensons in department stores, youre welcome to experience the brand first hand. Besides a knowledgeable and friendly staff, they offer exclusive models only sold in the States, as well as the Grenson Lab for bespoke services and designs.

250 Elizabeth Street, New York, NY 10021

Leffot

Whether bench-made brogues or a simple work boot, Taffels collection is guaranteed to adorn your feet for a lifetime. Sporting designs from Artioli, Edward Green and Pierre Corthay, these bad boys will pay dividends for the man who likes to invest in his feet. Simply step into the store and choose from made-to-measure machine or handmade shoes in a clean, relaxed space in West Village.

If there are queries just head over to Leffots active Twitter and Facebook, as well as an informational blog where Taffel himself responds to all questions regarding this high-end store and its carefully curated collections.

10 Christopher St, New York, NY 10014

J.M. Weston

J.M. Weston is associated with brilliant craftsmanship, an exclusive tanning process and chic Goodyear welting. Although one of the most globally-respected shoemakers, they only have one storefront in North America located in New York. This gem is where one will discover the workings of single factory, hand-cobbled French shoes that are often priced from $900 for basic Oxfords to $2,500 for crocodile moccasins.

600 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10022

John Lobb

Elite influencers admire John Lobb for their understated luxury and flawlessly detailed design. Under the creative direction of the eclectic Ms. Gerbase, Lobb chose to fuse modernity into their classic British craftsmanship and wed stay theyre quite on point.

Discover the Madison 800s whic is an Antique Mahogany custom colour shoe, sporting curved symmetrical vamps and seamless backs. Available in ready-to-wear or in-house bespoke fitting at a sizeable, yet worthwhile premium. The brand carried their legacy to this shoe store in New York and continue to offer a selection of shoes which will make a statement in any boardroom.

800 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10065

Allen Edmonds

Since 1922 Allen Edmonds has been the staple for American-made dress shoes in New York. The famous Park Avenue shoe has adorned the feet of U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and young George Bush. Using European calfskin and leather sole inserts, select collections act as the American counterpart to our beloved shoemakers Ferragamo and Santoni. They offer fashionably exclusive colours that you wont find anywhere else like bourbon, merlot, and chile.

24 E. 44th St., New York, NY 10017

Citishoes

Step into this multi-generation and family-owned shoe shop for a solid selection of affordable to mid-range shoe brands on Park Ave. Although not the sexiest shoe store in New York, men can still find calfskin, kid suede and shell cordovan shoes from brands like Alden, Churchs, and Cole Haan. Theres also more relaxed styles from Sebago and Paraboot which are perfect additions for casual spring afternoons stroll through Central Park.

445 Park Ave, New York, NY 10022

Cellini Uomo

This shoe store in New York offers a wide variety of designs from monk straps to lace-ups, slippers and half shoes under fine Italian shoe brands such as Capporicci, Toscana and Candini. Exotic yet professional, the Mauri Ostrich Leg Penny Loafer will easily spruce up any professional wardrobe. Want to make a statement at the next international conference? Sport the Mauri Burgundy Baby Crocodile Loafer or choose from one of the many skins and styles youll discover at Cellini Uomo.

133 Orchard St. New York, NY 10002

Paul Evans

Theres a big chance youll fall in love with the shoes from Paul Evans but you certainly wont be walking out of their store with a pair of shoes  and this is the exact business model these online shoe curators had in mind when they opened up their first guide shop in New York.

Come down. Try on The Newman Chukka Boots or The McQueen Driving Shoe, and theyll ship the right gear straight to your man cave. All their shoes are sourced and handcrafted from a family-owned factory in Naples, completely cutting out the middlemen so that you can get the best deals on Italian leather footwear.

35 Christopher St, New York, NY 10014

Jeffrey-West

Northampton born Jeffrey-West productised the spirit of rock-n-roll through their robust collections in this little West Village shoe store.. They specialise in original creations featuring red lining, signature cloven-hoof-cut-heels, and inscribed lyrics from stars like David Bowie and the Rolling Stones.

For the man of peculiar tastes, check out the Moon Flash Two-Eye Gibson in Metallic Violet/Bordo or Antiqued Two-Tone Crocodile Emboss with diamond punch detail. Although super cool, they are awfully pointy, but gentlemen with wide feet can have them stretched in shop.

19 Christopher St, New York, NY 10014

Crockett & Jones

Skip the trip to Barneys and head straight to the source of pure British shoemaking. From inception in 1876, Crockett & Jones acts as the grandfather of Northampton shoe brands. Using exclusive shell cordovan, aniline calf leather, and suedes, their collections offer exceptional construction and comfort, whilst looking dashing as hell. Explore the timeless collections in Midtown for a taste of British heritage.

Not From New York

11 East 55th St New York, NY 10022

Weve got you covered: These are the worlds finest shoemakers you need to know.
What is the HIRE Vets Medallion Program?

The HIRE Vets Medallion Program will recognize job creators for their efforts to recruit, employ, and retain our Nations veterans. President Donald J. Trump signed the Honoring Investments in Recruiting and Employing American Military Veterans (HIRE Vets) Act of 2017 into law in May 2017. The HIRE Vets Medallion Program is administered by the Department of Labors Veterans Employment and Training Service (VETS) and will launch in January of 2019. Please visit HIREVets.gov or email HIREVets@dol.gov for more information.

I just got out of the service. Where can I go for help finding a job?

The U.S. Department of Labor maintains the a network of more than 2,400 American Jobs Centers that can help you in-person, as well as online employment resources specifically geared towards the needs of veterans. Whether you utilize the in-person or online resources, you can find job listings, training opportunities, local labor market information and post your resume. If you need personalized service, every American Job Center has job specialists designated to work just with veterans. Find the American Job Center nearest you.

Are there people at American Job Centers with special knowledge to help veterans get a job?

Yes. Most American Job Centers have either a Disabled Veterans Outreach Program (DVOP) specialist or a Local Veterans Employment Representative (LVER) designated to serve veterans exclusively. Sometimes these employment representatives can be found at veterans hospitals or other locations. To find the DVOP or LVER closest to you, contact your state employment service.

I have a service-connected disability. Are there special programs for me?

The Veterans' Employment and Training Service (VETS) offers information on a variety of programs specifically designed to assist veterans in employment and other issues.

Im a federal contractor. Do I have to file any forms with Veterans' Employment and Training Service (VETS)?

If you are a contractor or subcontractor with a federal contract of more than $100,000 you must file a VETS-4212 form with VETS every year you have such a contract. A copy of the form is online, or you can call (866) 237-0275 or VETS4212-customersupport@dol.gov for more information.

What is a VETS-4212 form? Where can I get one?

A VETS-4212 form must be filled out annually by all contractors and subcontractors with a federal contract that exceeds $100,000. This form shows the number of targeted veterans in their work force by job category, hiring location, and number of new hires, including targeted veterans hired during the reporting period and the maximum number of employees of such contractor during the period covered by the report. You can get a copy of the form and instructions online, or contact 1-866-237-0275 or VETS4212-customersupport@dol.gov for more information.

How do I find out if I qualify for veterans preference?

Veterans' preference is available to certain categories of veterans when applying for jobs with the federal government. Eligibility requirements and other regulations dealing with veterans preference are regulated by the Office of Personnel Management. States may also have their own veterans preference regulations for state government jobs. If you believe your veterans preference rights have been violated, contact your local VETS office.

I will be discharged from the service in a few months. How can I get ready for civilian life?

More than 111,000 service members transitioning out of the military take advantage of a 3-5 day Transition Assistance Program (TAP) workshop offered at 174 military installations nationwide. TAP workshops give information on finding civilian and the benefits and services available to veterans and their families. Military personnel within one year of separating from the military service and service members within two years of military retirement can attend TAP workshops. For further information, contact your installation Family Support Center or military command. The e-VETS Resource Advisor is an online tool designed to help veterans preparing to enter the job market. It includes information on a broad range of topics, such as job search tools and tips, employment openings, career assessment, education and training, and benefits and special services available to veterans.

How can I get my resume to employers who may want to hire veterans?

The Disabled Veterans Outreach Program employment representative or Local Veterans Employment Representative at your local American Job Center can make sure that your resume gets to employers looking for someone with your job skills or interests.

I think I didnt get a job because the employer didnt want to hire veterans. Is there anything I can do?

Yes. The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) prohibits all employers from discriminating against any veteran, reservist, or National Guard member because of his or her past, present, or future military obligation. The law also requires that employers provide reemployment rights after a period of active duty or training. If you think your rights have been violated, please contact your state veterans employment and training office.

Must employers grant leave to employees called up by the National Guard or reserve?

Yes, an employee must be granted a leave of absence to perform military service.

What is the law that applies to the job rights for National Guard and reserve members being called up for active duty?

The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA). USERRA can be found at Title 38, U.S. Code, Section 4301 to 4335.

Has the U.S. Department of Labor issued regulations for the Uniformed Service Employment Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA)?

The U.S. Department of Labor has not issued USERRA regulations. The Department has developed an interactive USERRA eLaws Advisor system at webapps.dol.gov/elaws/userra.htm..

Does the Uniformed Service Employment and Reemployment Act (USERRA) apply to very small employers?

Yes, USERRA applies to all public and private employers in the United States, regardless of size. It also applies in overseas workplaces that are owned or controlled by U.S. employers.

Does the Uniformed Service Employment and Reemployment Act (USERRA) apply to part-time employees?

Yes, both part-time and probationary employees are covered by USERRA.

Must an employees job be kept open while the employee is on military duty?

Employers are permitted to hire persons to occupy a position vacated by an employee on active duty. However, the returning employee is entitled to reemployment upon completion of the military service, even if it requires termination of the replacement.

If an employee would have been laid off while he or she was performing military service, does an employer have to reemploy the person when the military service is completed?

No. The employee is reemployed in a layoff status with recall rights in accordance with the employer policy for recalls. The employee must be given seniority credit for the period of military leave up to the date he or she would have been laid off. If a complaint was filed, the employer would have a burden to prove the layoff would have occurred if the person had remained employed during the period of military service.

Can an employer require an employee to produce military orders before granting a military leave of absence?

No. The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USSERA) requires that an employee or a responsible military official provide advance notice to the employer of military service. The notice may be verbal or written. Notice is not required if the giving of notice is precluded by military necessity or is otherwise impossible or unreasonable.

Is an employer required to pay an employee while the employee is on military duty?

While many employers take the commendable step of providing all or part of employees pay while they perform military service, there is no obligation under the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) for them to do so.

Must an employer continue health insurance for an employee on military duty?

Yes, if the employee requests it. The entitlement is for up to 18 months from the date the absence from employment begins. For periods of service in excess of 30 days, the employee may be required to pay up to 102 percent of the total cost of the insurance.

What are the basic reemployment rights when an employee returns following military service?

The employer must promptly reemploy the service member. Promptly means within days, not months. Generally, the reemployment position should be the one the person would have attained had he or she remained continuously employed during the period of military service.

Does the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) require that an employee receive pension credit while absent to perform military service?

USERRA applies to a wide range of pension plans including defined benefit and defined contribution plans. Upon reemployment following qualifying military service, an employee must be treated for vesting and benefit accrual purposes as if he or she had been continuously employed. If benefits are tied to employee contributions, the employee must be allowed a specified period of time to make up contributions missed during the period of military service.

Where can I go for assistance concerning my employment and reemployment rights as a veteran or member of the guard or reserve?

Employment and reemployment rights for veterans and reservists are provided by the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA). The Department of Labors Veterans Employment and Training Service (VETS) administers and enforces USERRA. You should contact your local VETS office for help. You can receive USERRA information from VETS or file a complaint if you believe your rights have been violated. Another resource for National Guard and Reserve members is the National Committee for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve, an organization within the Department of Defense that can provide information and informal mediation services.

Where can I get information about veterans preference in federal hiring?

The Office of Personnel Management administers and interprets the laws relating to veterans preference. The U.S. Department of Labor has developed a Veterans Preference eLaws Advisor tool that contains information related to enforcement of veterans preference.

I believe my veterans preference rights may have been violated. How can I file a complaint?

Persons eligible for veterans preference who believe their rights under any law or regulation relating to veterans preference have been violated may seek information or file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labors Veterans Employment and Training Service (VETS). Complaints must be filed in writing and within 60 days after the date of the alleged violation. A directory of local VETS offices is located at www.dol.gov/agencies/vets/aboutvets/regionaloffices/map.
OSLO - In a new working paper, the Nordic Council, an inter-governmental body representing Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, has suggested swift regulatory action is required on per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFASs). The Council points to extensive evidence which suggests PFASs, and their degradation products are extremely persistent in the environment. The working paper draws on the outcomes of a workshop on joint strategies for PFASs, hosted by the Swedish Chemicals Agency (Kemi) in spring. Members of the European Commission, Echa (the European Chemicals Agency) and the European Environment Agency (EEA) were all in attendance.
By Dan Nosowitz

A beekeeper in Brooklyn, New York made an astounding discovery last week: A report of some bees in a bedroom was just the tip of a 35,000-bee iceberg.

After seeing a few bees in her bedroom, East Flatbush resident Cherisse Mulzac called in a local bee expert, Mickey Hegedus (also known as Mickey the Beekeeper), a man known for his chemical-free, cruelty-free extraction of bees. But even Hegedus wasnt prepared for what he found above the bedroom ceiling.

Turns out the Mulzac family was playing host to an enormous, 35,000-strong beehive, right above their bedroom. The bees, Hegedus told the New York Post, might have snuck in through some loose bricks on the buildings exterior and quietly built their hive for years, completely unbeknownst to the humans downstairs.

Even more interesting, Hegedus collected and gave a whopping 70 pounds of honey to the Mulzac family, saying its probably better than the stuff you can get in the store. In a side-note, Hegedus mentioned that the honey from urban bees is often cleaner than the honey collected from bees in more rural areas, which we found intriguing. Could it be true?

Beekeeping has been legally permitted in New York City since 2010, and there are now hundreds of urban beehives all around the five boroughs. And interestingly, despite terrifying downturns in the overall bee population, urban beehives have been thriving. Counterintuitive as it may seem, data from the greater Boston area show that bees actually do better in the city, writes Noah Wilson-Rich of Tufts University.

Nobody is exactly sure why urban bees have higher survival rates, but there are theories. In a time when monocropping and eradicate-all-weeds mentalities have taken over farming, theres actually not all that much variety in food sources for honey bees in the countryside. And those single sourcescorn, wheat, soyare heavily dosed with pesticides, many of which have been linked to bee colony collapse.

Urban areas are not nearly as heavily policedat least, not in terms of their plant life. Hardy local weeds spring up in every available corner. Backyards and parks have no reason to be sprayed with pesticides and so largely arent. Thats all great news for bees.

Research indicates that urban bees not only produce more honey than rural bees, but that the honey these city bees produce is actually cleaner, with fewer pesticide traces. And what could be more local than honey brewed a few feet over your head?

Reposted with permission from our media associate Modern Farmer.
By Alex Carlin

A recent New York Magazine article about the climate ruin we are facing, by David Wallace Wells, has caused a furor for describing the catastrophes that could happen to our planet by the end of the century if we do not mitigate the harms to our climate and reverse course. This op-ed by guest contributor Alex Carlin contends that those crises could happen much sooner, and he details steps he believes could help forestall disaster.

Yes, Virginia, we still have time to restore our climate. But the Climate Time Bomb is undeniably tickingand Trump has pulled out of the Paris agreement.

What should we do?

Trump climate policy is blind and deaf to the fact that the Climate Bomb can cause millionsor even potentially billionsof deaths by mid-century. I believe Trumps rogue refusal to defuse the Bomb is an unfathomably heinous crime against humanity.

While the Paris agreement focuses on lowering CO2 emissions, there is a second indispensable task we must also perform to defuse The Bomb: restoring the Arctic ice.

For thousands of years, the frozen Arctic has been keeping our climate hospitableuntil now. The Arctic is a critical part of the earths mechanism for controlling the planets temperature and climate.

But ominously, the Arctic Ocean has nearly finished changing from a state of perennial icecovered with sea ice in the winter and never substantially ice free in the summerto a state of seasonal icesubstantially ice free in the summer.

Completing this switchover would herald the biggest change in the global ecosystem since before the start of human civilization, and it would have a devastating impact.

Billions of people will face the risk of death in this century from adverse climate change outcomes such as starvation, heat stress, resource wars and disease if we dont restore the perennial ice.

Mass Starvation

The UKs Special Representative for Climate Change, Sir David King, warns us that with current climate policies we risk simultaneous collapses of basic crop production in the major breadbaskets of the Northern Hemisphere.

Dr. Peter Carter, an expert reviewer of the IPCC 5th assessment, says that the entire world depends on the high food productivity of the Northern Hemisphere. The IPCC 5th assessment and recent research shows that the worlds best food producing regions in the northern hemisphere are vulnerable to a high probability of multi-breadbasket failure from already committed (locked in) global climate change. Carter expects that, in this context, the effects of the Arctic sea ice switchover would end the great food production of the Northern Hemisphere, world food output would plummet and with that the world population, losing billions of lives by mid-century.

Here are three reasons why restoring sea ice in the Arctic is mandatory for preventing mass starvation.

First, an agriculture that provides enough food requires a predictable and favorable Earth Climate System.

A relatively unsung factor is surprisingly vital in this system: high-altitude atmospheric jet streams which circulate the planet in paths whose routes and speeds are critically important for the type of weather and climate that farms require to produce food.

The behavior of the jet streams depends on a particular temperature gradientthe difference in temperature between the Arctic and the Tropics.

For millennia, the perennial ice of the Arctic has been an important factor in keeping these jet streams consistent and stable. But since the mid-80s the Arctic has been heating significantly faster than the Tropicsa phenomenon called Arctic amplification. Diminishing sea ice has been playing a leading role in this, and the resulting smaller gradient has already caused the streams to change their speeds and typical paths.

This kind of jet stream disruption leads to unpredictable, unfavorable and extreme weather, with massive swings to heat or cold, devastating droughts, lingering blizzards and mighty floods.

When, perhaps within only a few years, the Arctic Ocean switches fully to seasonal ice conditions, the jet streams will almost inevitably take up new patterns of behavior, leading to weather that is quite different from what our farmers need to feed the population. By mid-century, much of our agricultural land will be toasted or floodedor both at different times.

A second threat to agriculture is methane, a greenhouse gas that heats the planet like CO2 on steroids. Gigatons galore of methane and other carbon products reside under the Arctic ice and in the thawing tundra and permafrost nearby.

For thousands of years we benefited from a perennial state of Arctic sea ice that acted as a cap that kept this methane out of the atmosphere. As we lose the cap, calamitous methane releases become ever more likely. Large releases of methane would accelerate global warming, and the Arctic amplification would further reduce the Arctic to Tropic temperature gradient, causing more jet stream disruption, worsen weather extremes and batter our farms.

Sev Clarke, a prominent inventor of green and climate restoration technologies described the methane threat this way: If we dont restore the ice, within 15 years methane and CO2 emissions from land and sea are likely to become so intense as to interfere substantially with normal cropping, to push land cultivation and population polewards, and to render much of the tropics unbearably hot during summer. My belief, reinforced by recent, and as yet unpublished, research by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists, is that we have just entered the phase of super-exponentially increasing methane releases from the Arctic.

A third threat to agriculture is sea level rise. Losing the perennial Arctic sea ice is speeding up the melting and partial disintegration of the great Greenland Ice Sheet, and is also having an effect in Antarctica, partly through disruption of the great ocean conveyor which sends Arctic-cooled water all the way to the Antarctic. Warming of this water has caused some Antarctic sheets to become unstable. These effects could lead to a devastating half meter of sea level rise by 2050, plus much more by 2100, which would wipe out huge areas of low-lying farmland.

So, as it turns out, if we want to feed our population, allowing the Arctic to lose its perennial sea ice is not an option.

Its very bad, but there are solutions.

The Arctic can be refrozen, and the sea ice restored.

Actions to restore the Arctic sea icecombined with reduced greenhouse gas emissions and removal of greenhouse gases from the atmospheredo give us a chance to survive.

Given the stakes, why are there not scientists, engineers, planners and all sorts of able-bodied citizens calling for a restoration of the Arctic ice?

Well, actually, there are.

Climate RestorationOne Answer to What Should We Do?

The above-mentioned inventor, Sev Clarke, is working with The Climate Restoration Foundation (CRF), spearheaded by the mathematician Kevin Lister. This group is working on what actually needs to happen to avoid Climate Ruin.

Do we really need to design techniques for restoring the Arctic sea ice? Why not just bring CO2 emissions down to near zero? Wouldnt that cause the sea ice to naturally restore itself, without any additional human action to restore it?

CRF says the answer is no. Thats because CO2 concentrations are so high already, and CO2 lingers in the atmosphere so long, that if we only reduce our CO2 emissions, the Arctic Ocean will not recover its lost ice anytime soon.

CRF emphasizes that we really must hurry: if the Arctic Ocean does switch its state from perennial ice to seasonal ice, it will stick there and, to a large extent, get locked into its new state, via a phenomenon known as hysteresis.

They say we are on a track to cross that line in a handful of years, and once we cross that line, going back to where we need to be to feed our population becomes a Herculean task.

The CRF website describes three major actions to keep us from getting caught in this death trap: Marine Cloud Brightening, Buoyant Nutrient Flakes, and Ice Cap Thickening. Lister explained, They are designed to keep us from getting stuck in a high temperature state. It will need all three technologies working together and on scale, and if this is done then the mutual reinforcement will be such that the sum of the effects will be greater than the individual parts.

CRF is also designing an ingenious way to pay for the task of restoring the ice via the insurance industry, where fossil fuel industries would pay an extra premium that fairly reflects the climate change liability they cause. If they refuse to pay then they would lose their ability to do business because they would be denied insurance coverage.

Keeping them firmly grounded, CRF includes the foremost authority in the polar field, professor Peter Wadhams, who for decades has been doing a magnificent job of exploring the Arctic sea ice, on top of the surface and under it by submarine, to get to the truth of what we face in this crisis. Recently he has come out with a must read book on this subject, A Farewell To Ice.

Also providing support to CRF is professor Paul Beckwith who has expertise on high-altitude atmospheric jet stream issues. His focus is on addressing the aspects of Abrupt Climate Change.

The Point of No Return?

Lister identifies the most important moment in this emergency.

Its not when the Greenland Ice Sheet melting becomes unstoppable, or other such ecosystem events, but rather its when it is no longer possible to develop and deploy an effective climate intervention strategy in time.

That point of no return has now arrived, and it is staring us in the face. If people fully understood how and why their families face a ruined world by mid-century, they would be demanding, with hair on fire urgency, If people really understood this truly existential crisis and the need for urgent action, they would be demanding that our political leaders scramble at full speed to restore the ice and, of course, to reduce our net CO2 emissions to zero.

Geoengineering?

Restoring sea ice will certainly require some local engineering intervention, but does the situation constitute enough of an emergency to justify risking the unexplored outcomes of intervention on a global scale, of geoengineering?

As far back as 2009, The Scotsman reported that scientists feared that the lack of action in the preceding 17 years, in which emissions of climate changing gases such as carbon dioxide soared, has set the world on a path towards potential 4C (7.2F) rises as early as 2060, and 6C (10.8F) rises by the end of the century.

The article quoted professor Kevin Anderson, who advises the UK government on climate change, and is the deputy director of the highly respected Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

Anderson said, The consequences are terrifying. For humanity its a matter of life or death. We will not make all human beings extinct, as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think its extremely unlikely that we wouldnt have mass death at 4C. If you have got a population of nine billion by 2050 and you hit 4C, 5C or 6C, you might have half a billion people surviving.

Anderson, no alarmist, is testifying that plausibly with business as usual we could have billions of deaths by 2050.

Can we avoid this catastrophe without geoengineering?

This is a question we all must consider with great care.

The Bright Side

John Nissen, founder and chair of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, cooperates with CRF.

He summed it up this way:

The climate science establishment is so focused on the fight to reduce CO2 emissions that it has ignored the bigger picture: that the Earth System is hurtling towards a new climate regime for the planet, led by abrupt changes in the Arctic as it becomes seasonally free of sea ice. The loss of ice cover means that the Arctic will warm even more rapidly than before, threatening

a reversal of air circulation at high latitude, disrupting climate at lower latitudes;

further escalation of methane emissions from land and undersea permafrost;

further escalation of melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet; and

a huge contribution to climate forcing and the warming of the whole planet.

These dreadful consequences add up to a new climate regime for the planet. They can only be avoided by cooling the Arctic and saving the sea ice.

While he said categorically that the prospect of geoengineering should never provide polluters or governments a get out of jail free card to avoid their absolute duty to drastically cut CO2 emissions, he maintains that climate change could actually be reversed with the help of geoengineering, and it would be far simpler, safer and cheaper than trying to adapt to ever worsening climate change, and sea level rise to boot.

He emphasized the bright side:

Lets be positive and appreciate the huge benefits that climate restoration would bring. Moreover, this could be the greatest collaborative venture ever undertaken, employing our best scientific and engineering talent. It could even be an opportunity for peace, as everyone works for the same goal. And by getting together to solve the greatest challenge ever faced by human civilization, we could demonstrate togetherness and counter the divisive politics of self-interest which is sweeping the world.

Nissen even wants oil companies to get involved. He pointed out that it is in their best interests to collaborate on climate restoration, since they would suffer the catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change just as much as everyone else. Moreover, they have valuable skills and resources to help in the restoration effort.

Lets Get Ready to Rumble

We still have a golden opportunity to restore our climate, and Trump has paradoxically brought Climate Ruin back onto the international agenda in the nick of time.

But now we need specific plans that diagram, step by step, how to motivate our entire society to fully acknowledge the climate problem, including what is happening in the Arctic, and then adamantly demand that the solutions be implemented immediately.

I believe that unconditionally, we must reach net zero CO2 emissions very fast, but science is now giving us a second required task: we must also save the Arctic ice.

As Winston Churchill once said, Its not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do whats required.

If you know how we can survive the threat of Climate Ruin without geoengineering, then, by all means, please share your ideas.

Reposted with permission from our media associate Center for Media and Democracy.
Bridgewater looks to become a regional nightlife hub in western PA

Bridgewater bars offer patrons a nightlife experience that is unique from any other in western Pennsylvania
Washington: Pakistan has once again exposed the issue of terrorism to the world community. On Wednesday, the US put the terrorists on the list of safe haven countries. The US said that terrorist organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are involved in operating terror activities from Pakistan, training terrorists and collecting money.

The State Department said in its annual Country Report on Terrorism submitted to the US Congress that Pakistani troops and security forces acted on an organization such as Tehrik-e-Pakistan, who attacked inside Pakistan, but Afghan Taliban and terrorist groups like Haqqani No action was taken against. Apart from this, Pakistan has also slowed down the terrorist organizations like Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

The report says, Pakistan did not take suitable action in 2016 against organizations such as Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed who targeted other countries. These organizations have continued to operate, train, organize and raise funds in Pakistan. It said that attacks on India are continuing, including the attacks of Maoists and Pak-based terrorists.

It said that Indian officials have continued to blame Pakistan for the attacks across the border in Jammu and Kashmir. The State Department said that in Jan 2016 there was a terrorist attack in Pathankot of Punjab, for which Jaish-e-Mohammad was held responsible. After this, the Indian government appealed to strengthen cooperation against terrorism and share information with the US.

The US had declared Hizbul Mujahideens gangster Syed Salahuddin as a global terrorist last month. During a recent US visit, during a joint statement of PM Modi and US President Donald Trump, Pakistan was told that it would not allow its use of land for terrorist attacks in other countries.

It has been said in the report that the Indian government has continued to monitor the threats arising out of terror organizations like ISIS and Al Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent (AQIS). There have been many arrests related to plotting the attacks inside India and recruiting ISIS related recruits inside India.

The report said that although the Lashkar-e-Taiba is banned in Pakistan, while the Lashkar branch is collecting funds by opening Jamat-ud-Dawa and Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation. It has mentioned that Hafiz Saeed continues to address large rallies. He also addressed rallies in February 2017.
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 19, 2017 -- Researchers have recently gained advanced understanding of a variety of processes through the information-theoretic concept of transfer entropy. Today, scientists are able to explain coupled dynamical systems like functional connective patterns in the brain and climate patterns all around the globe. Researchers from New York University's department of mechanical and aerospace engineering in Brooklyn found this method to hold great promise for advancing our understanding of animal behavior, particularly related to predator-prey interactions.

A research team led by New York University professor Maurizio Porfiri put forth a robotics-based study to control information flow in predator-prey interactions, as well as test the validity of transfer entropy when attempting to understand causal influences of the system. They report their findings this week in the journal Chaos, from AIP Publishing.

Specifically, the team studied the behavioral response of a zebrafish subjected to a fear-evoking robotic stimulus, modeled after the morpho-physiology of a red tiger oscar fish. They programmed the robotic threats to actuate along specific trajectories establishing a controlled, one-directional information flow. The predator motion in this interaction was independent of the response of the prey.

"Something which is really important from our community point of view is to be able to merge robotics and dynamical systems to address questions in animal behavior," Porfiri said.

As expected by the researchers, transfer entropy was able to isolate the causal relationship underlying experimental observations, and they were able to show a one-directional informational flow from the stimulus to the zebrafish.

Expanding on their validation of transfer entropy in the controlled robotics-based setup, the research team studied interactions between a zebrafish and a live red tiger oscar fish (whose response to the zebrafish could not be controlled). Unlike the robotics-based interaction, transfer entropy did not overly identify a direction of information flow in the presence of a live predator. So not only was the zebrafish influenced by the predator, but also the predator reacted to the zebrafish, in a two-directional interaction.

"We are able, from raw data, to understand that both the predator and the prey modify their behavior once one is in the presence of each other," Porfiri said.

To provide some biological basis for the observed difference in information flow, Porfiri and his group studied the specific reactions of the predator in response to the presence of the prey. Although their experimental setup could not fully replicate the habitat of the red tiger oscar fish, they observed basic behavioral reactions observed in the wild, verifying the fish's natural hunting instincts still played a role in their reactions.

Although there is still more to understand regarding the behavior of prey and predators, the researchers demonstrated the validity of transfer entropy to discover a cause-and-effect process, which has important implications in science and engineering. This is especially interesting from the perspective of the many potential ways robotics can help us understand how species share and use information.

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The article, "Information theory and robotics meet to study predator-prey interactions," is authored by Daniele Neri, Tommaso Ruberto, Gabrielle Cord-Cruz and Maurizio Porfiri. The article appeared in Chaos July 18, 2017 [DOI: 10.1063/1.4990051] and can be accessed at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4990051.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Chaos is devoted to increasing the understanding of nonlinear phenomena in all disciplines and describing their manifestations in a manner comprehensible to researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines. See http://chaos.aip.org.
But absolute risk small, so results should not be considered alarming, say researchers

Children exposed to antidepressants during pregnancy seem to be at a slightly higher risk of autism than children of mothers with psychiatric disorders who were not treated with antidepressants during pregnancy, finds a study published in The BMJ today.

However, the researchers stress that the absolute risk of autism was small, so these results should not be considered alarming.

Depression is common in women of childbearing age, and in Europe 3-8% of pregnant women are prescribed antidepressants during pregnancy.

Several studies have reported associations between antidepressant use during pregnancy and autism in offspring. But it is not clear whether this is due to the underlying illness, antidepressant drugs, or other unmeasured factors.

Such factors (known as confounding) can introduce bias and affect the results of a study, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions about cause and effect.

In a bid to minimise the effects of confounding - and better understand the reasons behind this association - a research team led by Dheeraj Rai at the University of Bristol applied a range of analytical methods to a large Swedish population.

They analysed data from 254,610 individuals aged 4-17, including 5,378 with autism, living in Stockholm in 2001-11 who were born to mothers who did not take antidepressants and did not have any psychiatric disorder, mothers who took antidepressants during pregnancy, or mothers with psychiatric disorders who did not take antidepressants during pregnancy.

Of the 3,342 children exposed to antidepressants during pregnancy, 4.1% (136) had a diagnosis of autism compared with 2.9% (353) in 12,325 children not exposed to antidepressants whose mothers had a history of a psychiatric disorder.

There was no evidence of any increased risk of autism in children whose fathers were prescribed antidepressants during the mothers' pregnancy.

The results of the various analyses seemed to be consistent with each other, say the authors, suggesting that the association between antidepressant use in pregnancy and autism might not be fully explained by confounding.

They point to some study limitations, such as lack of detailed measures of severity of depression. However key strengths were the large sample size and the range of analyses carried out to minimise bias.

So what should families and doctors making decisions about antidepressants during pregnancy make of such results?

It is important to note that the absolute risk was small (over 95% of women in the study who took antidepressants during pregnancy did not have a child with autism), stress the authors.

They estimate that, even if the association between antidepressant use and autism is causal, only 2% of cases would be prevented if no women with psychiatric disorders used antidepressants during pregnancy.

They call for "a balanced discussion in relation to clinical decision making in the light of evolving but yet inconsistent evidence" and say "it is important to continue investigation of possible underlying biological mechanisms that could help us to better understand the aetiology of autism."

In a linked editorial, Diana Schendel at Aarhus University in Denmark says the findings of this study "should be viewed through the kaleidoscope of possible causes of autism" and calls for future studies to be better powered, and include measures of maternal disease severity, more reliable measures of antidepressant use, and, ideally genetic markers.

She points to the "reassuring study message" that more than 95% of women in the study who took antidepressants did not have a child with autism.

Although such a small risk within a population might seem too high from an individual's perspective, "it must be carefully weighed against the substantial health consequences associated with untreated depression," she concludes.

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Sharks don't have tongues to move food through their mouths, so instead some use their... shoulders?

So say scientists who used a sophisticated X-ray movie technology to see, for the first time, that bamboo sharks swing their shoulders internally when they eat.

By pulling their "shoulder girdle" back, the sharks create the suction needed to draw food through the back of the mouth and further into the digestive tract, said Ariel Camp, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University and lead author of the research published in Proceedings B, a Royal Society journal.

"They have this long pharynx, and they have to keep food moving down it," Camp said. "We think this is part of a 'hydrodynamic tongue.' Sharks and fishes that don't have a tongue control the motion of fluid within their mouths to manipulate food."

That means bamboo sharks (Chiloscyllium plagiosum) use their shoulders, composed of a U-shaped girdle of cartilage and various attached muscles, for feeding as well as to control the front-most fins for locomotion, wrote Camp and colleagues from Brown, the University of Alaska at Anchorage and the University of Illinois.

To make the observations, Camp and colleagues used a technology developed at Brown called X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology (XROMM). The system combines CT scans of the skeleton with high-speed, high-resolution X-ray movies, aided by tiny implanted metal markers, to create precise visualizations of how bones and muscles move within animals and people. In the study, the team used XROMM to watch three bamboo sharks feast on pieces of squid and herring.

Bamboo sharks are among several species of shark (and many other fish as well) that use suction to slurp up prey, for instance out of rocky crevices or the silt of the sea floor, Camp said. By opening their mouths widely and quickly, sometimes using muscles deep in their bodies, fish can create the suction needed to draw prey into their mouths.

But many scientists had suspected that the shoulder girdle played no role in shark suction-feeding. It's not connected directly to the jaws or anything else in the head. While sharks use their pectoral fins to swim and even to position themselves over prey with something akin to a walking motion, the shoulder girdle was presumed to be still during feeding.

With the XROMM, however, the scientists could see inside the sharks as they fed and measured a surprising swing in the shoulder girdle of all three sharks tested. Just a fraction of a second after the mouth closed, the cartilage quickly rotated backward (from head to tail) by about 11 degrees.

Though this study only involved bamboo sharks, Camp said she suspects that other suction-feeding sharks also move their shoulders in this way. She further hypothesized that the research may help scientists inch toward answering the question of how the shoulder girdle evolved in sharks, and other fish, in the first place. The way fish skeletal structure evolved, for instance, can help explain how some creatures eventually became capable of making it to land.

"The girdle shows up [in the fossil record], around the time that jaws evolved," Camp said. "We aren't sure exactly what structures it evolved from or how that happened. Part of understanding that history is understanding what were the functions this structure had to carry out."

Apparently it was eating as well as moving.

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In addition to Camp, the paper's other authors are Cheryl Wilga of the University of Alaska at Anchorage, Bradley Scott of the University of Illinois and Elizabeth Brainerd of Brown University. Wilga and Scott were at the University of Rhode Island when they collected the XROMM data at Brown.

The National Science Foundation (grants 1655756 and ISO1354189) and the University of Alaska at Anchorage funded the research.
ITHACA, N.Y. - Geckos climb vertically up trees, walls and even windows, thanks to pads on the digits of their feet that employ a huge number of tiny bristles and hooks.

Scientists have long marveled at the gecko's adhesive capabilities, which have been described as 100 times more than what is needed to support their body weight or run quickly up a surface.

But a new theoretical study examines for the first time the limits of geckos' gripping ability in natural contexts. The study, recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, reports there are circumstances - such as when geckos fear for their lives, leap into the air and are forced to grab on to a leaf below - when they need every bit of that fabled adhesive ability, and sometimes it's not enough.

"Geckos are notoriously described as having incredible ability to adhere to a surface," said Karl Niklas, professor of plant evolution at Cornell University and a co-author of the paper. The study's lead authors, Timothy Higham at the University of California, Riverside, and Anthony Russell at the University of Calgary, Canada, both zoologists, brought Niklas into the project for his expertise on plant biomechanics.

"The paper shows that [adhesive capability] might be exaggerated, because geckos experience falls and a necessity to grip a surface like a leaf that requires a much more tenacious adhesion force; the paper shows that in some cases the adhesive ability can be exceeded," Niklas said.

In the theoretical study, the researchers developed computer models to understand if there are common-place instances when the geckos' ability to hold on to surfaces might be challenged, such as when canopy-dwelling geckos are being chased by a predator and are forced to leap from a tree, hoping to land on a leaf below. The researchers incorporated ecological observations, adhesive force measurements, and body size and shape measurements of museum specimens to conduct simulations. They also considered the biomechanics of the leaves, the size of the leaves and the angles on the surface that geckos might land on to determine impact forces. Calculations were also based on worst-case scenarios, where a gecko reaches a maximum speed when it is no longer accelerating, called "terminal settling velocity."

"Leaves are cantilevered like diving boards and they go through harmonic motion [when struck], so you have to calculate the initial deflection and orientation, and then consider how does that leaf rebound and can the gecko still stay attached," Niklas said.

The final result showed that in some cases geckos don't have enough adhesion to save themselves, he added.

Higham and Russell are planning to travel to French Guiana to do empirical adhesive force studies on living geckos in native forests.

The basic research helps people better understand how geckos stick to surfaces, and has the potential for future applications that mimic such biological mechanisms.

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The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Cornell University has television, ISDN and dedicated Skype/Google+ Hangout studios available for media interviews. For additional information, see this Cornell Chronicle story.
Researchers have performed the first ever quantum-mechanical simulation of the benchmark ultracold chemical reaction between potassium-rubidium (KRb) and a potassium atom, opening the door to new controlled chemistry experiments and quantum control of chemical reactions that could spark advances in quantum computing and sensing technologies. The research by a multi-institutional team simulated the ultracold chemical reaction, with results that had not been revealed in experiments.

"We found that the overall reactivity is largely insensitive to the underlying chaotic dynamics of the system," said Brian Kendrick of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Theoretical Division, "This observation has important implications for the development of controlled chemistry and for the technological applications of ultracold molecules from precision measurement to quantum computing."

The research addressed open questions about whether chemical reactions occur at a billionth of a degree above absolute zero and whether the outcome can be controlled. Scientists worldwide are addressing these questions experimentally by cooling and trapping atoms and molecules at temperatures close to absolute zero and allowing them to interact chemically. This field of chemistry, widely referred to as ultracold chemistry, has become a hotbed for controlled chemistry experiments and quantum control of chemical reactions, the holy grail of chemistry.

In a pioneering experiment in 2010, groups at Colorado's JILA (formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) were able to produce an ultracold gas of KRb molecules at nano-Kelvin temperatures. By merely flipping the nuclear spin of a KRb molecule they demonstrated that the ultracold reaction between these molecules could be turned on or off -- a perfect illustration of controlled on-demand chemistry.

But theoretical calculations of the reaction dynamics for such systems pose a daunting computational challenge. The calculations of the K + KRb reaction provide new insights into the reaction dynamics that is not revealed in the experiments -- that the rotationally resolved reaction rates exhibit a statistical (Poisson) distribution.

A fascinating finding of their study, Kendrick notes, is that while the overall reactivity is governed by the long-range forces, the rotational populations of the product K2 molecule are governed by chaotic dynamics at short-range. "The chaotic dynamics appears to be a general property of all ultracold reactions involving heavy alkali molecules," said Kendrick, "so the rotational populations of all such reactions will exhibit the same Poisson distribution."

This new, fundamental understanding of ultracold reactions will guide related technological applications in quantum control/computing, precision measurement and sensing important to the Los Alamos missions in information science and technology and global security.

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The paper "Universality and chaoticity in ultracold K + KRb chemical reactions" was published in the journal Nature Communications (DOI 10.1038/NCOMMS15897). It is by James Croft and Nadulvalath Balakrishnan of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Costas Makrides, Ming Li, and Svetlana Kotochigova of Temple University; Aleksandr Petrov of St. Petersburg State University and Brian Kendrick of Los Alamos.

Support for this research is from the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program at Los Alamos, as well as the Army Research Office's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, the National Science Foundation, and the US Air Force Office of Science.

The reaction proceeds from right to left. In the intermediate region a deep well is clearly visible which leads to chaotic motion. Image courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory.

About Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, BWX Technologies, Inc. and URS Corporation for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health and global security concerns.
Ruby Leung of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has been named a Battelle Fellow -- the highest recognition from Battelle for leadership and accomplishment in science. She is one of eight Battelle fellows at PNNL.

Leung is an expert on some of the most basic processes that influence our planet and make it habitable - how the energy that flows from the sun is distributed through the atmosphere, why rain and snow fall where they do, how everyday processes like agriculture and drought on one continent can affect the weather on land across the ocean, and how specific regions of the world are affected differently by an ever-varying climate.

Her insights that changing climate conditions globally translate to very different consequences in distinct regions of the planet have resulted in important information for planning and opened up exciting new topics for other scientists. For instance, under warmer temperatures, some regions are expected to suffer more drought while other regions will experience floods more often -- an example of the type of variation appreciated more fully thanks to Leung's research.

Much of her current research focuses on the interactions of atmospheric processes and global water cycles. She has explored the factors that lead to a healthy snowpack in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest and northern California, which provides water for the regions' summers and for agriculture. She has worked with colleagues around the globe to understand the formation of typhoons in the Pacific and has identified reasons why the powerful storms are strengthening. And she has helped discover the important role that powerful forces known as atmospheric rivers play in certain regions, including California.

Her impact has gone far beyond the specific findings she has produced and documented through more than 200 scientific publications. She has been a contributor or leader of many international teams of scientists mapping out future directions and studying issues of atmospheric science, climate and water resources, including DOE's Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy project, the science steering committee for the Community Earth System Model, the NOAA Science Advisory Board Climate Working Group, and DOE's Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee.

She has played a central role in the laboratory's climb to a research powerhouse in the realm of atmospheric sciences, and she connected many young scientists with opportunities that have helped launch their careers.

"This is an honor perfectly befitting a scientist like Ruby, who has contributed so much to our scientific understanding of earth systems," said Steven Ashby, director of PNNL. "Her contributions extend beyond her research studies; she has helped to form the nation's approach to important challenges and has spurred other scientists to focus on significant questions as well."

Leung has been recognized widely for her achievements, most recently through election to the National Academy of Engineering earlier this year. She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences.

Leung earned a bachelor's degree in physics and statistics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, then taught high school for two years before earning a master's degree and a doctorate in atmospheric science from Texas A&M University. She joined the laboratory in 1989, completing her research dissertation and then joining the staff as a research associate in 1991.

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Scientists from NCCR Robotics at EPFL and at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) developed an algorithm that adjusts how a mobile harness, suspended from the ceiling, assists patients suffering from spinal cord injury or stroke. In a clinical study with over 30 patients, the scientists showed that the patients wearing the smart walking assist immediately improved their locomotor abilities, enabling them to perform activities of daily living that would not be possible without the support. The results are published in the July 20th edition of Science Translational Medicine.

In rehabilitation involving neurological disorders or injury, teaching the nervous system to adopt the correct movements is a major challenge. The loss of muscle mass that prevents people from walking correctly, as does the neurological wiring that needs to be trained to relearn proper posture and walking movements. As long as the patient repeats unnatural movements, the nervous system will keep on remembering the flawed motion.

The idea of the smart walking assist is to promote natural walking in patients so that the nervous system learns how to walk normally again. Body-weight support systems are already used in rehabilitation. In this latest study, it is the first time such a support system operates in conjunction with an algorithm that tailors the assistance to each and every patient.

The algorithm is based on careful monitoring of the patient as he or she moves, including parameters like leg movement, length of stride and muscle activity. Based on these observations, the algorithm determines the forces to be applied to the trunk of the body, via the smart walking assist, in order to enable natural walking patterns. Concretely, this translates into either relieving the patient of his or her own weight, pushing the patient forwards or backwards, to one side or the other, or a combination of the above, for a more natural posture.

"I expect that this platform will play a critical role in the rehabilitation of walking for people with neurological disorders," says Gregoire Courtine, neuroscientist at EPFL and at the Lausanne University Hospital.

The research results triggered the development of the next-generation smart walking assist device, termed RYSEN, which is performed under the umbrella of EUROSTARS, a European Union subsidy project. The collaboration is European with partners in Switzerland and the Netherlands, including EPFL, Technical University of Delft, Motek, the EPFL spin-off G-Therapeutics and the clinical partner SUVA in Sion.

Quotes from other researchers:

Joachim von Zitzewitz, co-inventor of the RYSEN and project manager of the Eurostars project: "It is thrilling to see how a scientific idea materializes into a new medical product. I am looking forward to see patients benefiting from this research."

Jocelyne Bloch, associate professor at the Lausanne University Hospital Neurosurgery Department : "This is a smart, discreet and efficient assistance that will aid rehabilitation of many persons with neurological disorders."

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Whey protein supplements aren't just for gym buffs according to new research from McMaster University. When taken on a regular basis, a combination of these and other ingredients in a ready-to-drink formula have been found to greatly improve the physical strength of a growing cohort: senior citizens.

The deterioration of muscle mass and strength that is a normal part of aging -known as sarcopenia -- can increase the risk for falls, metabolic disorders and the need for assisted living, say researchers.

"Older people who do little to prevent the progression of sarcopenia drift toward a state where they find activities of daily living, like rising from a chair or ascending stairs very difficult or maybe impossible," says lead scientist Stuart Phillips, professor in the Department of Kinesiology and member of McMaster's Institute for Research on Aging.

While a number of isolated nutritional ingredients have been shown to fight sarcopenia, this is the first time such ingredients -- which include whey protein, creatine, vitamin D, calcium and fish oil - have been combined and tested for this purpose.

For the study, which was published today in the journal PLOS ONE, the research team recruited two groups of men aged 70 and older. One group took a protein-based, multi-ingredient nutritional supplement for six weeks without an exercise regimen, while the other group took a placebo. The objective was to evaluate whether daily consumption would result in gains in strength and lean body mass.

Following those six weeks, subjects continued to take the supplement (and placebo) while also undertaking a 12-week progressive exercise training program consisting of resistance and high-intensity interval training.

"We chose that combination of exercises to get a maximal benefit in terms of fitness and muscle strength" said Gianni Parise, scientific co-lead on the study. "I know many think older persons can't do that type of exercise, but that's simply untrue."

"The results were more impressive than we expected," says Kirsten Bell, a PhD student who worked on the study.

Most notable, the findings showed improvements in deteriorating muscle health and overall strength for participants both before and after the exercise regimen. In the first six weeks, the supplement resulted in 700 grams of gains in lean body mass - the same amount of muscle these men would normally have lost in a year. And when combined with exercise twice weekly, participants noticed greater strength gains- especially when compared with their placebo taking counterparts.

"Clearly, exercise is a key part of the greatly improved health profile of our subjects," says Bell, "but we are very excited by the enhancements the supplement alone and in combination with exercise was able to give to our participants."

The research, which was supported by the Labarge Optimal Aging Initiative within the McMaster Institute for Research on Aging, comes at a time when demographic trends lean toward older Canadians as the largest percentage of our population. The authors hope that continued work will include older women and different populations that can benefit from a supplement aimed at improving muscle health.

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Two commonly used drugs can repair damage caused by alcohol in utero

Study in rats showed thyroxine and metformin reversed memory and learning deficits caused by fetal alcohol exposure

Potential treatment for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder

"You can interfere after the damage is done. That's huge."

CHICAGO --- Two commonly used drugs erased the learning and memory deficits caused by fetal alcohol exposure when the drugs were given after birth, thus potentially identifying a treatment for the disorder, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study.

The scientists also newly identified a key molecular mechanism by which alcohol neurologically and developmentally harms the developing fetus.

"We've shown you can interfere after the damage from alcohol is done. That's huge," said lead investigator and senior author Eva Redei. "We have identified a potential treatment for alcohol spectrum disorder. Currently, there is none."

Redei is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the David Lawrence Stein Research Professor of Psychiatric Diseases Affecting Children and Adolescents.

The Northwestern study was in rat pups, and the scientists are trying to raise funds for a clinical trial.

In the United States, 1 to 5 percent of children are born with the disorder, which includes learning and memory deficits, major behavioral problems, a high rate of depression, low IQ, cardiovascular and other developmental health problems.

If the drugs are effective in the clinical trial, the infants whose mothers consumed alcohol during their pregnancy potentially could be treated with them, Redei said.

The paper will be published in Molecular Psychiatry July 18.

"There are women who drink before they are aware that they are pregnant and women who do not stop drinking during their pregnancy," Redei said. "These women still can help their children's future, if the current findings work in humans as well. The ideal, of course, is that women abstain from drinking when pregnant, but unfortunately that does not always happen."

In two separate arms of the study, Northwestern scientists gave either thyroxine (a hormone that is reduced in pregnant women who drink and in infants with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder) or metformin (an insulin sensitizing drug that lowers blood sugar levels, which is higher in alcoholics) to rat pups exposed to alcohol in utero. The pups received the drugs for 10 days immediately after they were born.

Then scientists let the pups grow up and tested their memory compared to control rats also exposed to alcohol in utero but who did not receive either drug.

"We showed in the adult animals that both these treatments reversed the memory deficits as well as some of the molecular changes caused by maternal alcohol consumption," Redei said.

Drinking alcohol reduces thyroxine levels and increases glucose in the pregnant rat -- and in humans as well, according to limited human data.

"These changes are dangerous to the brain development of the fetus and are at least part of the reason for learning and memory deficits of the offspring," Redei said.

Thyroxine is an essential hormone made by the thyroid gland that regulates multiple functions in the developing brain. Children born with very low levels of thyroxine are neurodevelopmentally disabled, a condition of severely stunted physical and mental growth.

Excessive glucose reaching the fetus also has a negative impact on brain development but scientists do not yet have a deep understanding of why. It also can affect any of the developing organ systems and cause Type 2 diabetes later in life.

The surprise finding was that both of these very different drugs worked to reverse the effect of maternal alcohol.

"When we got similar results we said, 'Wait a second. These are two completely different drugs. What could they have in common?'" Redei said. "We had no idea."

They delved deeper and discovered both drugs normalize genes that control the expression of DNA methyl transferase1, an enzyme critical for brain development via an epigenetic process called DNA methylation.

To further validate the role of DNA methyl transferase1 in fetal alcohol syndrome, the scientists took normal rat pups and gave them a drug to inhibit the gene. The result was alcoholic look-alike pups. When researchers then gave the pups metformin, the pups' memory returned to normal.

Recently, DNA methyl transferase1 has been implicated in the etiology of autism and neurodegenerative diseases.

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Other Northwestern authors on the paper are first author Elif Tunc-Ozcan, Stephanie Wert, Patrick Lim and Dr. Adriana Ferreira.

The research was supported by grant AA017978 from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health.
During the civil rights movement, activist groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) used geography and geospatial intelligence to identify protest sites and to plan civil rights protests. A new $373,000 National Science Foundation grant is letting researchers dig into those geospatial tactics to see what can be learned about patterns of racial inequality and how the SNCC collected and leveraged geospatial intelligence data to bolster its activist efforts.

"Geospatial intelligence has become a burgeoning field in geography," said Joshua Inwood, associate professor of geography and senior research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. "For us to understand this area fully, we need to consider how a range of different groups of people are engaged with the collection and understanding of geographic information and its potential to effect change. SNCC was a great collector of geography during its time."

Organized by Ella Baker, a longtime community activist from New York, SNCC was a group of mostly college-age students and workers who worked with civil rights supporters to conduct sit-ins, lead freedom rides and organize black voter registration in the southern states. A sit-in is a form of direct action that involves one or more people occupying an area for a protest while a freedom ride occurred when civil rights activists rode buses in segregated states to challenge the non-enforcement of racial integration by the federal government.

In addition, SNCC was involved with numerous efforts by black communities to create safe spaces and reliable networks among the communities during the era of racial segregation.

"We're researching how SNCC integrated a range of geographic information including photographs, maps and field reports, to understand segregation in the American South," said Inwood. "SNCC was integral in spreading information about these efforts and getting people involved."

Inwood said that understanding SNCC's use of geography during the civil rights era is crucial to advancing modern knowledge of geospatial intelligence.

"Civil rights activists were constantly thinking about the application of protess strategies in different geographical contexts," explained Inwood. "There are echoes of what they did in society today; for example, the Black Lives Matter and Black Twitter movements, like SNCC, seek to spread news on the social and political issues of interest to black communities."

According to Inwood, these movements exhibit the true power of geography, which is to provide the context to think through the decisions that people make and the ways in which these tactics make sense.

In addition to expanding the understanding of geospatial intelligence, Inwood believes that the grant will allow educators to incorporate more about the complexity of the African-American experience into educational curriculums in geography and other fields.

"Many of the issues from the 1960s are still relevant in 2017," said Inwood. "We need to see what we can take away from the long-term history of black geographies and what we can use to address the entrenched inequalities that still exist today. This grant gives us the opportunity to impact the way we think about civil rights across a broad range of disciplines."

During his research, Inwood plans to talk with surviving members of SNCC and to conduct archival work across the U.S., all in conjunction with Derek Alderman, professor and head of the Department of Geography at the University of Tennessee.

The grant is funded for three years.

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Given Pennsylvania's abundant natural resources, it's no surprise that the Commonwealth has become a mecca for hydraulic fracturing. Researchers, however, have recently discovered that releasing millions of gallons of treated hydraulic fracturing wastewater each year into area surface waters may have longer-lasting effects than originally thought.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, hydraulic fracturing accounted for more than one-half of U.S. oil production and two-thirds of U.S. gas production in 2015. That percentage is expected to rise as more states begin to adopt the practice. Although studies show that hydraulic fracturing does produce less greenhouse emissions than older technologies like coal, it does come with other environmental concerns. At the top of that list is the wastewater it produces, which contains a multitude of potentially hazardous contaminants. In 2015 alone, Pennsylvania's unconventional gas wells produced nearly 1.7 billion gallons of wastewater. While there are facilities dedicated to treating the wastewater before its release, they provide only limited treatment, leaving many of the pollutants intact.

To gain a better understanding of the impact of these contaminants on the environment, Penn State environmental engineering professor Bill Burgos and his colleagues studied sediment samples collected from a reservoir in western Pennsylvania. The study was published in the most recent issue of Environmental Science & Technology.

"There wasn't a water keeper who was sitting in these rivers collecting these samples at a great continuous clip, so in a way, a lot of information just flowed by," Burgos said. "But in certain reservoirs, where sediments collect over time, there are layers of sediment that are like rings of a tree; you can look into the sediments and capture time and spatially composite samples."

The objective of the study was to use the sediments that had built up to reconstruct the industrial oil and gas activity that was happening during the boom of the Marcellus Shale development in Pennsylvania, from roughly 2008 to 2015, in order to gain a better understanding of the historical impact of oil and gas wastewater disposal.

"You need a lake or a reservoir that allows sediments to lay down undisturbed in those layers," said Burgos. "The words we use are a 'coherent temporal record.' You only get a coherent temporal record if it's a lake that continuously accumulates sediments and isn't subject to a flood or scour."

Xiaofeng Liu, assistant professor of civil engineering, developed a computer model to reconstruct the layers of sediment in order to identify the best sampling location. The researchers chose the Conemaugh River Lake in western Pennsylvania. This site offered high wastewater concentration and low wastewater dilution, as well as a dam-controlled reservoir.

Once the location was decided, the team began collecting samples.

"We inserted a tube in the sediment like you would put a straw in a Slurpee or a slushy," Burgos said. "You put your thumb over the straw, and you pull it out."

In this case, they used agricultural drainpipe, plastic caps and tape, rather than a straw and a thumb, to collect the sediment samples, which were immediately frozen to preserve the content and then brought back to the Kappe Environmental Engineering laboratory at Penn State.

Once in the lab, the researchers pushed out the samples like a push-up ice pop, cutting them into slices.

"We split them up into different sections so that we could run different analyses on them," said Nathaniel Warner, assistant professor of environmental engineering at Penn State and co-author on the study.

Warner said the researchers, in collaboration with Colorado State University, looked for high radioactivity signatures and measured the pore water and the radioisotopes to determine the age of the sediments. They also tested the major mineralogy, particle size and grain size, in an effort to develop a full profile.

The results determined that the discharge of oil and gas wastewater did impact water quality and sediment quality on a larger scale than previously thought. Large quantities of oil and gas wastewater with high loads of chloride, barium, strontium, radium and organic compounds left high concentrations in the sediments and pore water.

Specifically, two important types of organic contaminants were found: endocrine disrupting chemicals (nonylphenol ethoxylates) and carcinogens (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons). The highest concentrations coincided with sediment layers deposited five to 10 years ago, during the peak of Marcellus Shale activity.

"The isotopes confirm these are unconventional oil and gas wastes," said Burgos.

Some isotope ratios, such as strontium and radium, are rather unique to the Marcellus formation. A previous study conducted by Warner found that radium levels immediately downstream from one plant were roughly 200 times greater than in sediments located upstream of the facilities. This current study demonstrates that elevated levels were found as far away as 12 miles downstream from the treatment plants.

"These are contaminants that passed through these centralized waste treatment plants, and they can be transported great distances," Burgos said.

Though the findings show long-term contamination of Pennsylvania watersheds, the researchers say the effects on the environment and human health are still unknown and difficult to assess.

"It's kind of an unknown, unquantified risk," Burgos said. "The thing that you don't know is the synergistic effect of all of these things together, the combined effect of radium and lead and surfactants and salt, all together. Does the combined effect of those things ratchet up the toxicity?"

The study did show a significant drop in the amount of contaminants released into surface waters following the voluntary ban on discharge of Marcellus waste requested by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which began in 2011, suggesting that tighter regulations of wastewater do help.

The researchers now want to use the materials they've collected to measure the biological toxicity of sediment layers throughout time. They also plan to test sediment samples at locations farther downstream toward Pittsburgh to see how far the contamination has spread and to what extent.

"Maybe they never make it to Pittsburgh," Burgos said. "But the thing is, you look at a map and there are other plants upstream of Pittsburgh on the main stem of the Allegheny River and there's no reason to suggest that these plants aren't contributing the same thing."

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Additional contributors include Luis Castillo Meza, Travis L. Tasker and Thomas J. Geeza, Penn State Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Patrick J. Drohan, Penn State Department of Ecosystem Science and Management; Joshua D. Landis, Dartmouth College Department of Earth Sciences; Jens Blotevogel and Molly McLaughlin, Colorado State University Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; and Thomas Borch, Colorado State University Department of Soil and Crop Sciences.

The U.S. Geological Survey, the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment, the School of Global Environmental Sustainability and Water Center at Colorado State University, the Fulbright Program in Colombia and the Universidad Pontifica Bolivariana provided funding for this study.
An international team of scientists digging in a sea cave in Indonesia has discovered the world's most pristine record of tsunamis, a 5,000-year-old sedimentary snapshot that reveals for the first time how little is known about when earthquakes trigger massive waves.

"The devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami caught millions of coastal residents and the scientific community off-guard," says co-author Benjamin Horton, a professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. "Our geological record from a cave illustrates that we still cannot predict when the next earthquake will happen."

"Tsunamis are not evenly spaced through time," says Charles Rubin, the study's lead author and a professor at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, part of Nanyang Technological University. "Our findings present a worrying picture of highly erratic tsunami recurrence. There can be long periods between tsunamis, but you can also get major tsunamis that are separated by just a few decades."

The discovery, reported in the current issue of Nature Communications, logs a number of firsts: the first record of ancient tsunami activity found in a sea cave; the first record for such a long time period in the Indian Ocean; and the most pristine record of tsunamis anywhere in the world.

The discovery was made in a sea cave on the west coast of Sumatra in Indonesia, just south of the city of Banda Aceh, which was devastated by the tsunami of December 2004. The stratigraphic record reveals successive layers of sand, bat droppings and other debris laid down by tsunamis between 7,900 and 2,900 years ago. The stratigraphy since 2,900 years ago was washed away by the 2004 tsunami.

The L-shaped cave had a rim of rocks at the entrance that trapped successive layers of sand inside. The researchers dug six trenches and analyzed the alternating layers of sand and debris using radio carbon dating. The researchers define "pristine" as stratigraphic layers that are distinct and easy to read. "You have a layer of sand and a layer of organic material that includes bat droppings, so simply it is a layer of sand and a layer of bat crap, and so on, going back for 5,000 years," Horton says.

The record indicates that 11 tsunamis were generated during that period by earthquakes along the Sunda Megathrust, the 3,300-mile-long fault running from Myanmar to Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The researchers found there were two tsunami-free millennia during the 5,000 years, and one century in which four tsunamis struck the coast. In general, the scientists report, smaller tsunamis occur relatively close together, followed by long dormant periods, followed by great quakes and tsunamis, such as the one that struck in 2004.

Rubin, Horton and their colleagues were studying the seismic history of the Sunda Megathrust, which was responsible for the 2004 earthquake that triggered the disastrous tsunami. They were looking for places to take core samples that would give them a good stratigraphy.

This involves looking for what Horton calls "depositional places" - coastal plains, coastal lake bottoms, any place to plunge a hollow metal cylinder six or seven meters down and produce a readable sample. But for various reasons, there was no site along the southwest coast of Sumatra that would do the job. But Patrick Daly, an archaeologist at EOS who had been working on a dig in the coastal cave, told Rubin and Horton about it and suggested it might be the place they were looking for.

Looking for tsunami records in a sea cave was not something that would have occurred to Horton, and he says Daly's professional generosity - archaeologists are careful about who gets near their digs - and his own and Rubin's openness to insights from other disciplines made the research possible. Horton says this paper may be the most important in his career for another reason.

"A lot of (the research) I've done is incremental," he says. "I have a hypothesis, and I do deductive science to test the hypothesis. But this is really original, and original stuff doesn't happen all that often."

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Researchers have manufactured microscopic versions of the cocoons spun by silkworms, which could be used to store sensitive proteins and other molecules for a wide range of uses

Microscopic versions of the cocoons spun by silkworms have been manufactured by a team of researchers. The tiny capsules, which are invisible to the naked eye, can protect sensitive molecular materials, and could prove a significant technology in areas including food science, biotechnology and medicine.

The capsules were made at the University of Cambridge using a specially-developed microengineering process. The process mimics on the microscale the way in which Bombyx mori silkworms spin the cocoons from which natural silk is harvested. The resulting micron-scale capsules comprise a solid and tough shell of silk nano-fibrils that surround and protect a centre of liquid cargo, and are more than a thousand times smaller than those created by silkworms.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team suggest that these "micrococoons" are a potential solution to a common technological problem: How to protect sensitive molecules that have potential health or nutritional benefits, but can easily degrade and lose these favourable qualities during storage or processing.

The study argues that sealing such molecules in a protective layer of silk could be the answer, and that silk micrococoons that are far too small to see (or taste) could be used to house tiny particles of beneficial molecular "cargo" in various products, such as cosmetics and food.

The same technology could also be used in pharmaceuticals to treat a wide range of severe and debilitating illnesses. In the study, the researchers successfully showed that silk micrococoons can increase the stability and lifetime of an antibody that acts on a protein implicated in neurodegenerative diseases.

The work was carried out by an international team of academics from the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Sheffield in the UK; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland; and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. The study was led by Professor Tuomas Knowles, a Fellow of St John's College at the University of Cambridge and co-director of the Centre for Protein Misfolding Diseases.

"It is a common problem in a range of areas of great practical importance to have active molecules that possess beneficial properties but are challenging to stabilise for storage" Knowles said. "A conceptually simple, but powerful, solution is to put these inside tiny capsules. Such capsules are typically made from synthetic polymers, which can have a number of drawbacks, and we have recently been exploring the use of fully natural materials for this purpose. There is potential to replace plastics with sustainable biological materials, such as silk, for this purpose."

Dr. Ulyana Shimanovich, who performed a major part of the experimental work as a St John's College Post-Doctoral research associate, said: "Silk is a fantastic example of a natural structural material. But we had to overcome the challenge of controlling the silk to the extent that we could mould it to our designs, which are much smaller than the natural silk cocoons."

Dr. Chris Holland, co-worker and head of the Natural Materials Group in Sheffield added: "Silk is amazing because whilst it is stored as a liquid, spinning transforms it into a solid. This is achieved by stretching the silk proteins as they flow down a microscopic tube inside the silkworm."

To imitate this, the researchers created a tiny, artificial spinning duct, which copies the natural spinning process to cause the unspun silk to form into a solid. They then worked out how to control the geometry of this self-assembly in order to create microscopic shells.

Making conventional synthetic capsules can be challenging to achieve in an environmentally friendly manner and from biodegradable and biocompatible materials. Silk is not only easier to produce; it is also biodegradable and requires less energy to manufacture.

"Natural silk is already being used in products like surgical materials, so we know that it is safe for human use," Professor Fritz Vollrath head of the Oxford Silk Group said. "Importantly, the approach does not change the material, just its shape."

Silk micrococoons could also expand the range and shelf-life of proteins and molecules available for pharmaceutical use. Because the technology can preserve antibodies, which would otherwise degrade, in cocoons with walls that can be designed to dissolve over time, it could enable the development of new treatments against cancer, or neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Diseases.

To explore the viability of silk microcapsules in this regard, the researchers successfully tested the micrococoons with an antibody that has been developed to act on alpha-synuclein, the protein that is thought to malfunction at the start of the molecular process leading to Parkinson's Disease. This study was carried out with the support of the Cambridge Centre for Misfolding Diseases, whose research programme is focused on the search for ways of preventing and treating neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

"Some of the most efficacious and largest selling therapeutics are antibodies," Michele Vendruscolo, co-director of the Cambridge Centre of Misfolding diseases, said. "However, antibodies tend to be prone to aggregation at the high concentrations needed for delivery, which means that they are often written off for use in treatments, or have to be engineered to promote stability."

"By containing such antibodies in micrococoons, as we did here, we could significantly extend not just their longevity, but also the range of antibodies at our disposal," Knowles said. "We are very excited by the possibilities of using the power of microfluidics to generate entirely new types of artificial materials from fully natural proteins."

The study, Silk microcooons for protein stabilisation and molecular encapsulation, is published in Nature Communications.

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IMPORTANT CORRECTION: In response to a question from a reporter, the authors reviewed their data on the number of patients seen by high prescribers per day to clarify this was the number of patients they billed for. Please see revised wording reflecting this in grafs 8, 10 and 11.

TORONTO, July 19, 2017A small number of physicians prescribe the majority of the drugs used to treat people in Ontario who are battling opioid addictions, a new study has found.

Most of those physicians work in addiction treatment centres located in urban areas of the province, according to the study published today in the journal Drug & Alcohol Dependence.

They see large numbers of patients every day and as a result bill the province hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, said senior author Tara Gomes, a scientist at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michaels Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences and a principal investigator of the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network.

Gomes said she conducted the study because little was known about how prescribing patterns differ among the physicians who provide opioid addiction treatment in Ontario, despite the growing number of people who have become addicted to opioids such as oxycodone and heroin. Patients receiving this therapy are often prescribed a longer-acting but less euphoric opioid such as methadone or buprenorphine (also known as Suboxone), which is taken under close medical supervision.

Using administrative health-care databases housed at ICES, Gomes team identified 893 who prescribed methadone or buprenorphine more than once in 2014 to people eligible for the Ontario Drug Benefit Program and stratified them into low-, moderate- and high-volume prescribers. About 30,000 physicians are licensed to practice medicine in Ontario.

The top 10 per cent of methadone prescribers (57 physicians) prescribed about 56 per cent of the total days of methadone, the study found. Similarly, the 64 high-volume buprenorphine providers prescribed 61 per cent of the total days of buprenorphine.

On average, each high-volume methadone prescriber treated 435 patients eligible for the Ontario Drug Benefits Program with methadone in the one-year study period. The patients had an average of 43 office visits that year, 43 urine drug screens and 190 days of methadone treatment. Gomes said that translates into an office visit and urine drug test every four to five days.

Furthermore, high-volume methadone providers billed for an average of 97 patients a day, approximately half of who engaged directly with the prescriber.

They billed OHIP an average of $648,352 for all physician services provided to methadone patients eligible for the ODB in 2014, of which 45.7 per cent was billed specifically for urine drug tests.

Patterns among high-volume buprenorphine prescribers were different, with these physicians treating only 64 patients with buprenorphine in 2014, and billing 22 urine drug screens per patient. Similarly, patient volume was lower among these prescribers, with each physician billing for an average of 51 patients daily, of whom six were treated with buprenorphine. Total OHIP billings for services provided to buprenorphine patients was lower than for high volume methadone providers due to a smaller patient population, but similar to methadone, 40.6 per cent of the total cost was billed for urine drug screens.

Gomes said the large number of patients seen by high-volume methadone prescribers could raise concerns about the quality of care patients receive, particularly when coupled with frequent clinic visits for urine drug screens. She said that while regular urine drug screens have been shown to be of benefit in the first few months of treatment, there is no evidence that routine, ongoing weekly clinic visits and urine drug screens are associated with reduced drug use. Furthermore, spending several hours a week travelling to and from clinics, waiting to see the physician and providing urine samples may interfere with the patients ability to meet his or her family and work responsibilities and can lead to patients discontinuing their addiction treatment.

Another cause for concern is the extreme clustering of opioid maintenance therapy services among a small group of physicians which creates a vulnerable opioid maintenance therapy system, Gomes said. It can be challenging to find physicians interested in treating this population, and any changes to this group of physicians may affect a large number of patients who are currently seeking treatment for their opioid addiction.

Overall, Gomes says that the high degree of clustering of addiction services within the province highlights the difficulties that patients may have gaining access to addiction services. Broadening access to addiction treatment  using both methadone and buprenorphine  would help improve the patient experience and would ensure that changes in the physician population do not negatively impact people actively seeking treatment for their opioid use disorder.

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About St. Michael's Hospital

St Michael's Hospital provides compassionate care to all who enter its doors. The hospital also provides outstanding medical education to future health care professionals in 27 academic disciplines. Critical care and trauma, heart disease, neurosurgery, diabetes, cancer care, care of the homeless and global health are among the Hospital's recognized areas of expertise. Through the Keenan Research Centre and the Li Ka Shing International Healthcare Education Centre, which make up the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, research and education at St. Michael's Hospital are recognized and make an impact around the world. Founded in 1892, the hospital is fully affiliated with the University of Toronto.

The Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) is an independent, non-profit organization that uses population-based health information to produce knowledge on a broad range of health care issues. Our unbiased evidence provides measures of health system performance, a clearer understanding of the shifting health care needs of Ontarians, and a stimulus for discussion of practical solutions to optimize scarce resources. ICES knowledge is highly regarded in Canada and abroad, and is widely used by government, hospitals, planners, and practitioners to make decisions about care delivery and to develop policy. For the latest ICES news, follow us on Twitter: @ICESOntario

Media contacts:

Leslie Shepherd, Manager, Media Strategy

St. Michael's Hospital

416-864-6094

shepherdl@smh.ca

Inspired Care. Inspiring Science.

http://www.stmichaelshospital.com

Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stmikeshospital

Deborah Creatura

Media Advisor, ICES

deborah.creatura@ices.on.ca

(o) 416-480-4780 or (c) 647-406-5996
Professor Timothy W. Tong, President of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), joined a Service-Learning trip with 34 students to serve the local community in Kyrgyzstan on 16 July 2017 and then signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan on 19 July.

In response to the HKSAR Government's call for supporting the Nation's Belt and Road Initiative and to prepare our students to tap the opportunities under this initiative, PolyU has embarked on a number of measures to enhance the engagement with the Belt and Road countries. Apart from being the local university which has admitted the largest number of students from those countries, PolyU has also been organizing many exchange activities for students.

The Service-Learning trip to Kyrgzstan is part of the credit-bearing SOAR (Serving heart, Open-mindedness, Aspiration, Responsibility) Youth Leadership Programme (2016-2017), organised jointly by PolyU's Global Youth Leadership Institute and Peking University. The programme requires students to complete designated leadership courses and to learn more about ethnicity and harmony, social responsibility and global perspectives by visiting and engaging in service-learning in countries along the Belt and Road.

In the Service-Learning trip, President Tong joined the students in performing eye checking and vision screening services for some 500 children and teenagers in Tokmok, a city with rich cultural heritage located in the ancient Silk Road.

President Tong said, "Not only did the service-learning trip benefit the local community, it benefits our students by igniting their sense of social responsibility, and enables them to understand the social issues, explore a different culture and widen their international outlook. This, in turn, has helped open up their minds and enhance their competitiveness."

To foster collaboration with universities in the Belt and Road countries, PolyU also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan on 19 July. The strengthened ties will result in more academic exchange, research collaboration, student and staff exchange, and enhanced collaboration within the network of the University Alliance of the Silk Road.

President Tong said, "We are delighted to develop a closer relationship with the Nazarbayev University. I am confident that this collaboration will form a foundation of a long-term and mutually beneficial partnership between the two universities, which also opens doors to more exchange and learning opportunities along the Belt and Road."

A Belt and Road Forum was organized by PolyU in Beijing in conjunction with Ming Xi Foundation on 15 July to promote cultural exchange among the youth from Hong Kong, Chinese Mainland and the Silk Road countries. The event is one of the celebratory activities for PolyU's 80th anniversary. More than 130 participants, including entrepreneurs, government officials and students from the "Silk Road International Summer School", attended the Forum and exchange their views on the challenges of globalization and youth engagement along the Belt and Road countries.

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Press Contact:

Ms Winnie Lam, Division Head (Public Affairs), Communications and Public Affairs Office

Telephone: (852) 2766 6377 (852) 9739 0807

Email:winnie.py.lam@polyu.edu.hk
Here's a challenge: Build a pump that can deliver a drug to you automatically when you're sick. Now make it smaller than a penny. And make it accurate enough that you can guarantee it won't pump one microliter more than prescribed amount (otherwise it might kill you). Now make it cheap enough to mass-produce for millions of people and make sure it runs on a tiny battery.

Think you can do it?

UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering postdoctoral researcher Karen Scida has an idea, and it's promising enough that the deans of the College of Engineering and the Division of Mathematical, Life & Physical Sciences at UCSB have awarded her this year's Otis Williams Postdoctoral Fellowship. The Otis Williams Fund at the Santa Barbara Foundation provides support for young Ph.D. scientists to work at the interface of biology and engineering. For her fellowship, Scida has a plan to engineer a solution to one of the world's largest epidemics: diabetes.

The human body runs on the sugar glucose. An elaborate distribution system turns the variable source of glucose (the food you eat) into a constant source of fuel to power your cells. Glucose is extracted from food by the digestive organs -- mouth, stomach and intestines -- and is then dynamically distributed throughout the blood stream to places where it's needed -- your brain when you're reading, your muscles when you're running, your stomach when you're digesting. When glucose isn't needed, it's shuttled to short- and long-term storage facilities, the liver and fat tissue, respectively, for later use.

The pancreas is a critical regulator of this dynamic control system. It tells the organs when to accept or pass on circulating glucose by secreting hormones, including insulin, into the bloodstream.

Unfortunately, in diabetes, the pancreatic control system is broken. People with diabetes need to do manually what a functioning pancreas does automatically, injecting insulin when glucose levels are too high, or eating sugar when glucose levels are too low. Failure to keep blood glucose levels within appropriate ranges can cause seizures, coma and even death.

Scida's idea is a small, non-toxic insulin pump. To make it easy to manufacture, she has removed all the mechanical parts. The pump is based on the properties of water, namely that electrical currents can turn water into bubbles of oxygen and hydrogen. She proposes to build a device so small and precise that the production of individual water bubbles can be predicted, controlled and deployed to push insulin.

Scida, an analytical chemist, has a long track record of using her talents to improve health care. She makes biosensors, devices that can quantify viruses, molecules or chemicals that are relevant to our health.

"Karen trained as a chemist, but she has the heart of an engineer," said Sumita Pennathur, associate professor of mechanical engineering and Scida's mentor. "That's why I wanted her in my lab. To do what we do, you have to love the science; you have to be absolutely fascinated by all the nerdy details. But you also have to make something that works, a device that can keep people safe. That's why Karen has been so successful and is only going to get better with the support from the Otis Williams Fellowship.

"Karen is talented and creative and she is unrelenting in her desire to make things better," Pennathur continued. "She takes what she's discovered and uses it to build devices that are better, faster, cheaper and easier to use than anything out there. It's not easy to do all those things at once."

The Otis Williams Postdoctoral Fellowship gives Scida one year of financial support to perform the fundamental electrochemical studies needed to optimize the design and function of her insulin pump.

"This is really an unbelievable opportunity," Scida said. "I'm an analytical chemist by training and an electrochemist at heart. I love designing methods and strategies that integrate the most basic chemical concepts into something tangible that can help people in their day-to-day lives. When I dreamed up the idea for this pump, I never imagined the response would be so overwhelmingly supportive. With this award, the resources at UCSB, and Dr. Pennathur's mentorship, this dream can become a reality."

"Working with Dr. Scida and Dr. Pennathur has completely changed my thinking about the future of medicine," said Bridget N. Queenan, research director of Pennathur's Nanolab at UCSB and associate director of the UCSB Brain Initiative. "I've been in biomedical research for 18 years. I never guessed that the answers to the problems we see in diabetes and cancer biology and neuroscience would be found in a mechanical engineering department. All this time, the engineers building nanochannels to study microfluidics and electrokinetics were the people we needed to talk to. Now I know what they're up to; I'm never going to leave them alone."

"The Otis Williams Fellowship embodies the spirit of UCSB, where we believe that the most important discoveries occur when fields collide," said Rod Alferness, dean of the UCSB College of Engineering. "Because we do not have a medical school, people may not think of us as being innovators in biology and medicine. But, in fact, researchers here perform important, leading-edge work in drug delivery, bio-imaging and informatics, nanomedicine, and biocompatible material engineering.

"The Otis Williams Fellowship recognizes our researchers working at the intersection of biology and engineering. We are therefore extremely excited about this fellowship and its contribution to UCSB's role in biology and medicine going forward."

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July 19, 2017 - More than half of cancer patients undergo radiotherapy, in which high doses of radiation are aimed at diseased tissue to kill cancer cells. But due to a phenomenon known as radiation-induced bystander effect (RIBE), in which irradiated cells leak chemical signals that can travel some distance to damage unexposed healthy cells, many suffer side-effects such as hair loss, fatigue and skin problems. This bystander effect may also make targeted cells resistant to radiation treatment, research suggests.

A new CU Boulder study, published today in the journal Nature, sheds new light on the precise mechanism behind RIBE, identifying both a protein released by irradiated cells and the pathway it takes to influence healthy ones. Ultimately, researchers hope it could lead to a medication patients could take before radiation treatment.

"Inhibiting RIBE would allow doctors to kill two birds with one stone," said lead author Ding Xue, a professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at CU Boulder who collaborated with colleagues in China, Taiwan and Japan for the study. "We could minimize the bad effects of radiotherapy on healthy bystander cells, and at the same time, enhance cancer cell killing by radiotherapy."

Nine years in the making, the study used a translucent, 1,000-cell worm called C. elegans, as a model to study the bystander effect in action.

First, to be sure RIBE occurred in C. elegans, researchers exposed a population of the worms to radiation, then took a medium secreted by the C. elegans cells and bathed healthy C. elegans in it. The once-healthy animals began to show increased embryo deaths and other signs of RIBE.

The researchers then systematically treated the medium with agents designed to destroy proteins, DNA, and RNA, in order to determine which may be a key compound at play in RIBE. When the medium was treated with a protease, which breaks down proteins, C. elegans exposed to it did not show signs of RIBE.

Once researchers discovered that the agent causing RIBE was a protein, they used a technique called mass spectrometry to establish which proteins present in the medium were at play. A protein called CPR-4 -- the C. elegans version of a human protease called cathepsin B -- emerged as the prime candidate. Cathepsin B is known to be a biomarker in several types of cancer.

Then researchers studied which biological pathway enabled CPR-4 to signal changes in healthy cells that were never exposed to radiation. They identified a pathway mediated by the insulin-like growth factor receptor DAF-2.

To confirm these findings, they irradiated the heads of C. elegans who either lacked the gene that codes for CPR-4 or lacked the gene that codes for insulin-like growth factor receptor DAF-2. The bystander effect was blunted, with cells elsewhere in the body remaining healthy.

The study also found that a tumor suppressor gene called P53 may be at play in RIBE, prompting cells to produce more of the damaging CPR-4 protein when a cell is exposed to radiation.

"This is basically the first comprehensive study to identify the factor and mechanisms behind this radiation-induced bystander effect in animals," said Xue, who hopes to work with other researchers in the future to identify other RIBE factors and mechanisms and help develop drugs that inhibit them.

"We are excited about these findings and believe they could have broad implications for patients as well as other important areas such as radiation protection and radiation safety," he said.

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Yu Peng, Man Zhang and Qian Liang from Tsinghua University in Beijing and Hanzeng Li and Lingjun Zheng from University of Colorado at Boulder are key authors of this study. Other researchers from Chang Gung University in Taiwan, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University in China, and Tokyo Women's Medical University School of Medicine also contributed to the study.

Contact:

Ding Xue

ding.xue@colorado.edu

Lisa Marshall

CU Boulder media relations

lisa.marshall@colorado.edu

303-492-3115

Follow us @CUBoulderNews
Scientists and students led by the University of Colorado Boulder and Rutgers University are calculating the environmental and human impacts of a potential nuclear war using the most sophisticated scientific tools available.

The lead researchers, CU Boulder Professor Brian Toon and Rutgers Professor Alan Robock, have been studying the threat in-depth for decades. They were among the first scientists to formulate the "nuclear winter" theory, which indicated that a nuclear war between two countries could cool parts of the planet and trigger famine and mass starvation, even in nations not involved in the war.

In 1983, Toon, Robock and others -- including Cornell University's Carl Sagan -- followed on the heels of Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen and now-retired CU Boulder Professor John Birks, who published a 1982 study concluding that smoke from burning forests, cities and oil reserves caused by nuclear blasts would block sunlight and cool Earth. The 1983 nuclear winter paper, which Toon co-authored, was published in Science and grabbed worldwide attention from scientists, politicians and the public.

"I find it surprising and frustrating that the potential catastrophic effects of a nuclear war have fallen off the radar of many people following the nuclear winter discussions that began in the early 1980s," said Toon. "One of our goals for this study is inform people how dangerous these weapons are by providing a solid scientific analysis of the issues."

Ongoing threat of 'nuclear winter'

The new study will calculate in detail for the first time the impacts of nuclear war on agriculture and the oceanic food chain and on humans, including food availability and migration activity, said Toon of CU Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. The team is using various scenarios to calculate how much smoke produced by fires in modern cities initiated by nuclear blasts would be produced by urban firestorms and their available fuels, Toon said.

"The most important factor is the amount of smoke which would be generated from fires started by nuclear detonations in cities and industrial areas and lofted into the upper atmosphere," said Robock, a distinguished professor in the Department of Environmental Science at Rutgers. "For the first time, we will model the fires and firestorms, using detailed estimates of what would burn, based on new credible scenarios of how a nuclear war might be fought."

Although the global nuclear arsenal was reduced by about 75 percent following the end of the Cold War in the 1980s, there are still about 15,000 nuclear weapons distributed among nine nations. While the United States and Russia have the bulk of the weapons, the other members of the world's "Nuclear Club" are Britain, China, France, Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea.

Toon stressed the threats of a nuclear incident have not diminished and could arise from miscommunications, international panic, computer hacking or malfunction, terrorism or action by a rogue leader of a nuclear nation. North Korea, which has 10 to 20 nuclear weapons, continues to flaunt its military power -- most recently with the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile believed capable of reaching Alaska or Hawaii -- that was condemned by many nations, including the U.S., Russia and China.

Supercomputers, climate models tell a nuclear war story

The team is using supercomputers and sophisticated climate models developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder to calculate the amount of fire fuels in major cities and how much smoke might be produced by nuclear blasts. The researchers also are using agricultural and world food trade models to assess the impact on crops from a potential nuclear war and the possibility of widespread famine.

"Calculations show there is enough food on the planet to feed people for about 60 days, and an average city has about enough food to feed residents for just seven days," said Toon, also a professor in the atmospheric and oceanic sciences department (ATOC). "The functioning of our society is based in large part on our ability to transport food, fuel and other goods -- activities that would be severely affected by a nuclear war."

In 2016 Robock and Toon authored a commentary piece in The New York Times titled Let's End the Peril of a Nuclear Winter. In it they point to their 2007 study on the potential impact of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with each country detonating 50 Hiroshima-sized bombs.

One result? Smoke from the explosions would make temperatures plunge, causing wheat, rice, corn and soybean production to be reduced globally by 10 to 40 percent for five years. The explosions also would cause severe depletion of the Earth's ozone layer, damaging human health and the environment, said Toon.

The new project is funded by a three-year, $3 million grant from the Open Philanthropy Project headquartered in San Francisco. Open Philanthropy focuses on funding projects in four broad categories: U.S. policy, global catastrophic risks, scientific research, and global health and development.

Students involved in research

As part of the Open Philanthropy effort, CU Boulder Professor Yunping Xi and his students will assess the amount of flammable building material in modern cities in various parts of the world, as well as the flammable contents in such buildings. CU Boulder Professor Julie Lundquist and her students will use sophisticated weather research and forecasting models developed at NCAR to run computer simulations on how terrain and surface roughness might impact fire behavior after a nuclear detonation.

Robock is working with several graduate students, including Joshua Coupe, who will be helping on climate modeling. Another of his graduate students, Guangoh Jheong, will work on agricultural modeling with University of Chicago postdoctoral researcher Florian Zabel. Rutgers Associate Professor Gal Hochman and graduate student Hainan Zhang will work on economic modeling for the effort, said Robock.

NCAR scientists Charles Bardeen and Michael Mills, who both received their doctoral degrees at CU Boulder, will use the latest atmospheric and aerosol climate models developed at the center to better understand the response of the climate system to the soot from fires. Based on current scientific knowledge, some could end up in the stratosphere 10 to 30 miles above Earth's surface and remain aloft for years or even decades, said Toon.

Working with Toon, Bardeen and Mills -- who previously collaborated with him on nuclear winter simulations -- will track the injections of gases and aerosols from city fires, calculating their transport, removal and the interaction of the particles with clouds, incoming sunlight and climate.

In addition, CU Boulder Assistant Professor Nicole Lovenduski and students will be studying how the oceanic food chain might change in response to the climatic disruption and enhanced ultraviolet radiation from nuclear explosions.

"Our work will provide a much clearer description of the global humanitarian consequences backed up with state-of-the-art calculations of the fires, the climate change and the impact on food production, prices and restrictions for a number of different possible nuclear wars," said Robock.

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CU Anschutz researchers say this may contribute to errors and hospital readmission

AURORA, Colo. (July 19, 2017) - Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have found serious gaps in communication between physicians and home health care agencies responsible for caring for often elderly patients discharged from hospitals. The problem, the study said, can contribute to hospital readmissions.

The research, published today in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, cites an array of communication challenges between HHC agencies and physicians following hospital discharge.

The study cited frequent discrepancies in medication lists, confusion over who was responsible to write patient care orders, inaccessible hospital records and resistance from clinicians and staff for accountability.

Led by Christine D. Jones, MD, MS, assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, the researchers conducted six focus groups with HHC nurses from six different agencies in Colorado to ask about their general experience with caring for patients after discharge from any of their referring hospitals.

"We found that communication breakdowns can have consequences for patients," said Jones, lead author of the study. "These are some of our most fragile patients, most are over 65, and more seamless communication is needed."

Some of the HHC nurses interviewed complained of a lack of accountability, medical errors and difficulty in reaching doctors.

"As a general rule, I've been told you're not to contact the hospitals. I actually got in trouble for contacting the hospital, trying to find out, get more information, trying to track a doctor down," one nurse said in a focus group.

Another nurse said even if they reach a primary care physician, they often say they didn't know the patient was in the hospital and they don't have a report on them.

"The communication between the hospital and the primary care providers is just as bad as it is for us because the PCP's don't have the information," the nurse said.

Dr. Jones said another complicating factor is that insurance often requires doctors to order HHC services. So if a nurse practitioner is providing primary care for a patient, obtaining HHC immediately becomes more difficult.

The researchers found another serious problem when it came to ordering medication. HHC nurses and staff said most of the medication lists they receive are incorrect due to the number of doctors and specialties involved.

"As hospitalists, we need to think about what happens beyond the hospital walls and how we can support our patients after discharge, especially when it comes to home health care patients who can be very vulnerable." Jones said.

She noted that the study did not focus on any one specific hospital, but hospitals in general.

The study proposes a series of solutions to these problems including the following:

- Hospitals and primary care physicians could provide HHC agencies direct access to Electronic Medical Records and direct phone lines to doctors. - Enact laws allowing nurse practitioners and physician's assistants to write HHC orders. A bill was under consideration to do this but was not acted upon by Congress. - Clearly establishing accountability for hospital clinicians to manage HHC orders until a primary care physician can see a patient and help HHC nurses with questions. - Create better communication methods with PCPs to ensure safer transitions

"Our findings suggest that improvements to accountability and communication could address patient needs and goals, avoid medication discrepancies and ultimately improve safety for patients and HHC nurses," Dr. Jones said.

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A scientific collaboration between researchers in Scotland and China has uncovered a new kind of `energy sensor' in our cells, changing our understanding of how the body monitors glucose levels and switches on the supply of alternative `fuels'.

It is thought the research, published in the journal Nature, could have particular implications for diabetes, in which the level of glucose in the blood is abnormally high.

The research focused on the activity of a protein called AMPK. Professor Grahame Hardie, of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee, first identified AMPK in the 1990s as a key player in energy production in our bodies, and is one of the world's leading experts on how it works.

The AMPK enzyme is switched on when energy levels in the cell fall, and drives processes which stimulate energy production, while preventing energy-consuming processes.

Working with the group of Professor Shengcai Lin, at the University of Xiamen in China, they have now made a new breakthrough in understanding how this happens.

"Glucose is the primary fuel that cells `burn' to sustain life," said Professor Hardie. "My work in the 1990s showed that AMPK was switched on when the cell's energy state (carried by the chemicals ATP, ADP and AMP, which form a kind of "rechargeable battery") was running low.

"AMPK is important because it enables the body to start burning other `fuels'. For example, during exercise, when the demand for energy is dramatically increased in muscle, AMPK switches on the uptake and metabolism of glucose and fats to provide the required energy.

"It has been known for years that starving cells of glucose switches on AMPK, but everyone had assumed that this worked via the known ability of AMPK to sense changes in the cell's energy status.

"We have now shown that cells can actually sense glucose by a completely different mechanism, in which AMPK is recruited to structures called lysosomes. It is by doing this that cells can switch on pathways for metabolism of alternative fuels, such as fats, when glucose becomes scarce but before cellular energy declines."

Professor Hardie said more work would be needed to understand the full implications of this for human health. However, given the extremely prominent role of glucose in diabetes it is likely to be of significant value in understanding more about the disease.

AMPK is thought to be implicated in other conditions and diseases, including obesity and cancer.

Professor Hardie said the project had combined excellent science from both the UK and China. "Shengcai Lin made the initial exciting findings for this and it has been very rewarding to work with his group in China to sort out how it works," said Professor Hardie.

Professor Shengcai Lin said, "We, the Xiamen team, are very grateful for the fruitful collaboration with Professor Hardie, pioneer of AMPK. I believe the main implication of the work is not only the delineation of the sensing mechanism for glucose levels, but also its enabling us to think glucose is a status signal, the decline of which causes cells to switch off synthetic pathways by inhibiting pro-synthetic activities mediated by another master metabolic regulator called mTORC1."

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The paper is published online by Nature - http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature23275

Professor Hardie's work is supported by the Wellcome Trust and CR-UK. Professor Shengcai Lin's work is supported by grants from the National Key Research and Development Project of China an the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Even in sediment cores extracted more than a mile beneath the ocean floor, you'll find them. Tiny organisms only a cell in size chug along ever so slowly.

Jennifer Biddle, a marine microbiologist at the University of Delaware, often wondered why these microbes living deep in Earth's crust look so similar to microbes up here at the surface, in forests and streams. What would it take these "locals" to adapt to a much slower lifestyle down in the depths?

Such pondering inspired a new research project that Biddle is leading, which has just been awarded a prestigious $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation. She and co-investigators Adam Marsh and Thomas Hanson, all faculty members in UD's College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, will peer deep into the lives of microbes to find out how their genes get toggled off or on.

Understanding how environmental factors such as stress and nutrition can flip the switch on specific genes -- a hot scientific field known as "epigenetics" -- is a major driver of precision medicine and its personalized treatments for cancer and other diseases in humans today.

Yet little is known about how such environmental factors can shape a microbe's destiny. Unlocking that black box could help humanity in many ways, according to Biddle. Consider finally gaining the upper hand in battling the persistent plague of antibiotic-resistant bacteria or better harnessing microbes to make clean energy.

"Receiving this impressive and highly competitive award from the Keck Foundation is a testimony to the excellence and creativity of our UD research community," said Charlie Riordan, vice president for research, scholarship and innovation. "This team's work is destined to uncover findings that will benefit science and society, in areas from human and environmental health to renewable energy."

"It's wonderful to see our faculty win funding support for this pioneering project," added Mohsen Badiey, acting dean of the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. "Our entire college joins me in congratulating Jennifer, Adam and Tom. We look forward to seeing their research results in this important scientific arena."

Unmasking a microbial mystery

"Microbes are these amazing powerhouses," Biddle says. "They often survive for long timescales in environments with little available energy."

The UD team hypothesizes that microbes have epigenetic signals -- just as humans do -- which coordinate their metabolism and growth, and that this mode of gene control is important in times of energy stress.

During the three-year project, Marsh will put his expertise in computational biology and statistical genomics to work developing a state-of-the-art method for detecting these epigenetic signals. They occur when tiny clusters of hydrocarbons called methyl groups attach to segments of DNA. Marsh previously created epigenetic screening platforms for cancer biology applications and recently co-founded Genome Profiling LLC, a startup company that produces high-resolution genome profiles for assessing DNA biomarkers for disease.

Most microbes in the environment, in engineered systems such as wastewater treatment plants, and in chronic infections grow slowly due to low available energy. Following that cue, the UD team will grow diverse model microbes at different energy states in Hanson's lab at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute, including photosynthetic green sulfur bacteria, on which he is a world expert.

These organisms are found in many environments and are low-energy experts -- they can grow with far less light than plants or algae and play important roles in nature. One strain from the Chesapeake Bay, isolated in Hanson's lab, can consume large amounts of toxic hydrogen sulfide under very low light conditions. Another strain, from a volcanic hot spring, appears to adjust its energy use depending on how much light is present.

Once the team has developed their new epigenetic profiling method and tested their hypotheses in model systems under controlled conditions, Biddle will actually test the epigenetic adaptation of microbes to slow growth in energy-limited sediments from Delaware's Broadkill River, which flows into the Delaware Bay near the UD campus in Lewes.

"If our hypothesis is correct, it will transform the current understanding of gene regulation across the tree of life and could have wide-ranging impact on many situations of microbial slow growth, including infectious disease," Biddle said. "Through this study, three self-professed molecular nerds in marine science will venture into medical science."

In 2015, a research team from the College of Engineering received W.M. Keck funding for novel work to develop a new kind of semiconductor nanostructure for increasing the light harvested by solar cells, among other applications.

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Based in Los Angeles, the W.M. Keck Foundation was established in 1954 by the late William M. Keck, founder of the Superior Oil Company. The charitable foundation supports pioneering efforts in medical research, science and engineering, and undergraduate education.
An international research team led by Universite de Montreal medical professor Christopher Rudd, director of research in immunology and cell therapy at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital Research Centre, has identified a key new mechanism that regulates the ability of T-cells of the immune system to react against foreign antigens and cancer. T-cells orchestrate the response of the immune system. This work outlines how a receptor termed LFA-1 on the surface of T-cells mediates adhesion to other cells such as cancer cells.

The work, published in Nature Communications, shows that LFA-1 mediates adhesion or de-adhesion by engaging a novel intracellular pathway in T-cells. International work over the past decade has underscored the importance of the manipulation of the immune system to combat cancers and infections. Manipulation of the new pathway outlined by Rudd and his co-researchers represents a new targeting strategy to promote immune-cell rejection of cancer.

"With this work," said Rudd, "we have found a new way to alter the overall immune response. We now have new tools to increase immune response against cancer and infections. The discovery could prove to be a major asset in the fight against several pathologies via the targeting of a single immune cell component."

"It is clear that Dr. Rudd's discovery represents a breakthrough in our ability to understand the immune system and to use it in the fight against cancer and infections," added Denis-Claude Roy, director of research at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital. "This new mechanism allows us to identify the weaknesses of our present immunological approaches and to develop new weapons that are even more effective."

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An international study

This research brought together the expertise of the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital Research Centre and the University of Cambridge. The lead author is Dr. Monika Raab of the University of Cambridge and J.W. Goethe University). The work was supported by grants from the Wellcome Trust (London) and the CR-HMR Foundation (Montreal).

About Dr. Christopher Rudd

Recently recruited to the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital Research Centre, Christopher Rudd specializes in signaling mechanisms that control the immune function of T lymphocytes. He brings impressive international expertise to the CIUSSS-EMTL research team. He was previously a professor at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University.

About this study

Monika Raab, Yuning Lu, Karsten Kohler, Xin Smith, Klaus Strebhardt & Christopher E. Rudd, "LFA-1 activates focal adhesion kinases FAK1 / PYK2 to generate LAT-GRB2-SKAP1 complexes that terminate T-cell conjugate formation", Nature Communications, 2017 July 12.DOI: 10.1038 / ncomms16001
If Plastic Man, Elastigirl or Mr. Fantastic ever encounter Magneto, they'd better hope the iconic X-Men figure hasn't read the latest research from Christian Binek.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln physicist has found that, under certain conditions, the magnetic properties of a material can predict the relationship between its elasticity and temperature.

His finding may point the way toward controlling the elasticity of certain materials by designing their magnetic properties or applying a magnetic field to them. Given the ease with which magnetic fields can now be manipulated, Binek said, that could eventually mean tailoring elasticity with the mere press of a button or turn of a knob.

In the meantime, knowing that magnetism alone can predict how elasticity will respond -- or not respond -- to changes in temperature might help engineers better select or design materials for specific purposes.

Binek cited the 1986 disintegration of the Challenger space shuttle as a prominent example of elasticity's importance in engineering design. The hardening and failure of an elastic O-ring on Challenger's rocket booster -- a consequence of cold temperatures -- ultimately caused the shuttle to break apart, killing its seven crew members.

"So you can find materials that do not change elastic properties with temperature," said Binek, professor of physics and astronomy. "You may find materials that change with temperature at will. And you may find materials where you can, at a given temperature, change the elastic properties by an external control."

The laws of thermodynamics describe the relationships among many factors -- temperature, entropy, volume, pressure -- that affect how heat gets converted into other forms of energy. And it's long been known that these laws encompass the properties of magnetism and elasticity.

But by deriving a new formula from existing ones, Binek managed to show that the elasticity-temperature relationship is basically encoded in the magnetism of a material.

Binek's formula does have limitations. For now, it applies only if a material's magnetic behavior changes linearly with the magnetic field being applied to it. Likewise, the material's elasticity has to be linear, meaning that the amount of strain it exhibits has to be constantly proportional to the amount of physical stress being exerted on it.

Even so, the formula applies to materials featuring various forms of magnetism. That includes the form technically found in every material: diamagnetism, which describes a tendency to repel magnetic fields so weakly that it goes unnoticed without specialized instruments.

Superconductive materials -- those that feature no resistance to electricity - display a pronounced form of diamagnetism below a critical temperature, at which point they begin completely repelling magnetic fields. Below that temperature threshold, Binek found something remarkable: The elasticity of superconductors no longer responds to temperature changes. That phenomenon held when he performed calculations for both ceramic and single-crystal superconductors, which have substantially different microscopic surfaces and atomic structures.

"My (mathematical) expression makes no claims about the material," Binek said. "It's very general. It only says: If the susceptibility (to magnetism) is constant, then the elastic property should be constant. If that is so, nothing else (about the superconductor) should matter, which is honestly a little difficult to believe.

"You wonder: How can something like an elastic property, which surely depends on structural details, be independent of anything related to the structure? But then you go to the (scientific) literature, apply your formula, and you find that, yes, it is correct."

The elastic-magnetic formula also applies to materials for which magnetic fields induce a weak attraction known as paramagnetism. And ferromagnetic materials -- those strongly attracted to magnetic fields and usually synonymous with the term "magnetic" -- obey Binek's formula above a certain temperature threshold that makes them behave more like their paramagnetic cousins.

Binek said the formula might even work for ferroelectric materials, whose alignment of positive and negative charges, or polarization, can be reversed by an electric field. Ferroelectricity facilitates the storage of electrical energy, making it useful in devices ranging from capacitors to random-access memory.

"Rather than tuning the elastic properties by a magnetic field, you may be able to tune them by electric fields," he said. "Technologically, that could be even more interesting.

"There are certainly many applications that one could think of, and I think many of them can be useful. I hope this is not the end of the story, but rather the beginning."

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Binek conducted his research as part of the Nebraska Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, one of 21 MRSEC centers funded by the National Science Foundation.
Aboriginal people have been in Australia for at least 65,000 years - much longer than the 47,000 years believed by some archaeologists.

The discovery, by a team of archaeologists and dating specialists led by Associate Professor Chris Clarkson from The University of Queensland School of Social Science, has been detailed in the Nature journal this week.

The researchers found new evidence at the Madjedbebe site on Mirarr land within the Jabiluka mineral lease, surrounded by the World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park.

Madjedbebe rock shelter has been excavated four times since the 1970s, most recently by an international team led by Dr Clarkson in partnership with the Mirarr Traditional Owners.

Dr Clarkson said more than 10,000 artefacts were revealed in the lowest layer at the site.

"The site contains the oldest ground-edge stone axe technology in the world, the oldest known seed-grinding tools in Australia and evidence of finely made stone points which may have served as spear tips," he said.

"Most striking of all, in a region known for its spectacular rock art, are the huge quantities of ground ochre and evidence of ochre processing found at the site, from the older layer continuing through to the present."

The dig discovered a maxillary (upper jaw) fragment of a Tasmanian Tiger coated in red pigment, giving insight to the central role ochre played in local customs at the time.

Dating carried out by Professor Zenobia Jacobs at the University of Wollongong has revealed that Aboriginal people lived at Madjedbebe at the same time as extinct species of giant animals were roaming around Australia, and the tiny species of primitive human, Homo floresiensis, was living on the island of Flores in eastern Indonesia.

In addition to showing the deep antiquity of Aboriginal occupation, the dig revealed new evidence of activities and lifestyle.

Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation Chief Executive Officer Justin O'Brien said a landmark agreement had made it possible for Dr Clarkson and colleagues to dig the site.

"This study shatters previous understandings of the sophistication of the Aboriginal toolkit and underscores the universal importance of the Jabiluka area," Mr O'Brien said.

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The study, funded through an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant, promotes discussion about the timing and ways that modern humans first left Africa.

Other UQ researchers involved in the study included Dr Tiina Manne, Dr Andrew Fairburn, Professor James Schulmeister and Kate Connell.

Numerous completed and continuing PhD and honours students Dr Kelsey Low, Dr Xavier Carah, Anna Florin, Delyth Cox, Jessica McNeil and Kasih Norman collaborated on the study.

Media: Dr Chris Clarkson, c.clarkson@uq.edu.au, +61 7 3365 3235; UQ Communications, communications@uq.edu.au, +61 7 3365 3439, 0448 410 364; Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, Sarojini Krishnapillai, sarojinikrishnapillai@gmail.com, 0418 388 600.

A downloadable video is available at: https://vimeo.com/224689034 (Password: MJB media)

Downloadable images: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/95a5388tl25bhug/AABDhPWN3MlDe4TNGHWOKiipa?dl=0

All images and video copyright of Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation.
The hunting of pangolins, the world's most illegally traded mammal, has increased by 150 percent in Central African forests from 1970s to 2014, according to a new study led by the University of Sussex.

The first-ever study of its kind, published in Conservation Letters, shows the true scale of local pangolin exploitation across the continent. The international research team, which includes researchers from academia and conservation organisations, state that up to 2.7 million pangolins are harvested annually from forests in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Democratic Republic of Congo and Republic of Congo.

The team used data from 113 sites in 14 African countries to estimate the total annual harvest of pangolins. Worryingly the new study reveals the mammal, which is more sought after than elephant ivory and reproduces slowly, is now making-up an increasing proportion of all animals hunted in Central Africa. The researchers also found that snares are still being used to capture pangolins despite the practice being illegal in most Central African countries.

Pangolins are hunted and traded for food and traditional medicine throughout their range in Africa, and recent evidence has also shown an increasing trade of African pangolins to some countries in Asia. The researchers show that the price of pangolins has increased in urban African markets since the 1990s, with a 5.8 times increase in price observed for the sought after giant pangolin despite it being protected.

The team are calling on governments across the continent to increase the capacity to enforce international trade bans, embark on education and outreach programmes, and monitor pangolin populations.

Daniel Ingram, lead author of the study from the University of Sussex, said: "Our new study shows that African pangolins are at risk. We now have the opportunity to ensure that these species do not follow the severe declines of the Asian pangolins. If we do not act now to better understand and protect these charismatic animals, we may lose them in the future.

"Compared to other species, relatively little is known about African pangolins, only gaining international attention in recent years. With hunting increasing, it is crucial we investigate how this links to the illegal wildlife trade. The engagement of governments and local people will be critical to the conservation of African pangolins."

Professor Jorn Scharlemann, from the University of Sussex, said: "Overexploitation is one of the main pressures driving wildlife, like the pangolins, closer to extinction, yet data to evaluate the pressures underlying species' declines are scarce.

"Collating data from local studies collected by hundreds of researchers allows us to provide vital information on the regional exploitation of African pangolins at a critical time for the survival of these species. Bringing these individual studies together allows us to see the bigger picture that can help inform conservation policy and provide the evidence to governments across the world required to take action to use natural resources more sustainably."

###

The collaborative study, entitled 'Assessing wide-scale pangolin exploitation by scaling local data', has been published in the journal Conservation Letters and can be found here.

The international team involved researchers from the Universities of Sussex, Stirling and Cambridge, University of Dschang, Chinhoyi University of Technology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Kyoto University, Duke University, University of Copenhagen, Montana Tech, University of Florida, and Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen; and from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Institut de Recherches en Ecologie Tropicale (CENAREST), Wildlife Conservation Society, Born Free Foundation, Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife Cameroon, and the National Park Agency Gabon.

Communications and External Affairs | University of Sussex

T +44 (0)1273 678888 | press@sussex.ac.uk?http://www.sussex.ac.uk/newsandevents

Notes to Editors:

The University of Sussex's School of Life Sciences is one of the largest academic schools at the University of Sussex. With 96 per cent of its research rated as world leading, internationally excellent or internationally recognised (REF 2014), it is among the leading research hubs for the biological sciences in the UK. The School is home to a number of prestigious research centres including Sussex Neuroscience, the Genome Damage and Stability Centre and the Sussex Drug Discovery Centre, where academics work with industry to translate scientific advances into real-world benefits for patients.
Canada's current wetland protection efforts have overlooked how the environment naturally protects fresh-water resources from agricultural fertilizer contaminants, researchers from the University of Waterloo have found.

In a recent study, engineering researchers at Waterloo found that small wetlands have a more significant role to play than larger ones in preventing excess nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer from reaching waterbodies such as the Great Lakes.

Excess nutrients are a primary cause of algal blooms, which have a number of impacts, including impairing drinking water quality, robbing aquatic life of needed oxygen and closing beaches to swimming.

"With agriculture and urbanization, Canada has lost a huge portion of its wetlands, which have had a number of environmental impacts," said Nandita Basu, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. "While we have made some progress in protecting larger wetlands that act as habitat for wildlife, we have been less successful in protecting smaller ones that continue to be removed to make way for things such as new housing subdivisions.

"What is often not appreciated is that different wetlands serve different purposes."

As part of their study, Basu and Fred Cheng, a PhD candidate in civil and environmental engineering at Waterloo, examined data from hundreds of studies that quantified the impact of wetlands from across the world on filtering environmental contaminants.

In reviewing the data, they found that small wetlands act as a better nutrient sink than larger ones because a greater percentage of their water touches soil either on the bottom or on the shoreline, which is key in removing excess nutrients and preventing them from making their way to downstream water bodies.

"We looked at wetlands from across the world and their impact on water quality," said Basu. "In looking at the data, it's clear that 10 one-hectare wetlands have a greater impact on water quality than one 10-hectare wetland."

Wetlands cover about 14 per cent of Canada's total land area. In Ontario, wetlands cover 21,000,000 hectares, with the majority located in the North. In Southern Ontario, 72 per cent of the original wetlands have been lost to development such as agriculture and urban sprawl.

Basu and Cheng's study was recently published in Water Resources Research.

###
Organs respond to injuries with the formation of new fibrous tissue, which can result in scarring. This process called fibrogenesis can now be monitored noninvasively on a molecular level, as American scientists report in the journal Angewandte Chemie. They have created a new gadolinium-based probe for magnetic resonance imaging that specifically reports the proteins involved in fibrogenesis. The imaging method may provide a quantitative assessment of the formation of the potentially harmful scar tissue.

Natural wound healing and tissue injury involves the formation of collagen-based fibrous tissue to close the wound. In normal healing, the fibrous material is eventually replaced by normal tissue. If the injury is large or if the tissue is repeatedly damaged, the wound healing process may not be complete, resulting in scar formation that threatens the loss of function and even organ failure. On a molecular level, fibrogenesis is the accumulation and then remodeling of collagen, mainly by cross-linking, to create more rigid and tight structures. To monitor this process, Peter Caravan and collaborators from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA, sought a molecular probe that could specifically recognize the components involved in fibrogenesis. They have created a functionalized gadolinium chelate as a probe for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The probe was developed to target allysine, an amino acid indicative of active collagen cross-linking. "In active fibrogenesis, an active pool of allysine would be generated, but in stable disease or with therapeutic invention, these allysine moieties would be converted to cross-links," the authors reasoned. Thus, they designed an oxyamine-functionalized gadolinium chelate termed GdOA that would form stable oxime links with allysine and is "therefore expected to result in a strong MR signal enhancement on binding to allysine," as the authors proposed.

The GdOA meets the key criteria for MRI technology, as the researchers proved in numerous tests. It was stable, water-soluble, and excretable through the renal tract with very good pharmacokinetics, and it displayed high target selectivity in both test tube and in real mouse models. The scientists quantified pulmonary fibrogenesis in mice noninvasively by MRI using this probe, and they also monitored the suppression of fibrogenesis when the mice were treated with a specific medication. In this report, they studied fibrosis of the lung, but fibrogenesis is a common feature of many chronic diseases of the inner organs, and also in many cancers. This work gives a promising outlook to new specific MRI probes for disease detection, prognosis, and monitoring disease progression or treatment response across a range of human conditions.

###

About the Author

Dr. Peter Caravan is the Co-Director of the Institute for Innovation in Imaging (i3) at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. His main research interests are in the development of novel molecular probes for use in positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, application to disease detection, staging and treatment monitoring, and ultimate translation to clinical practice.

https://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/user/7059
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The European Commission has asked the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to investigate isolated cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease.

The response to BSE after the crisis of the 1980s in Europe has significantly reduced prevalence of the disease in cattle.

However, isolated cases are still being reported in the EU and for this reason the European Commission asked EFSA to investigate their origin.

The key measure for controlling BSE in the EU is a ban on the use of animal proteins in livestock feed.

This is because BSE can be transmitted to cattle through contaminated feed, mainly in the first year of life.

Sixty cases of classical BSE have been reported in cattle born after the EU ban was enforced in 2001.

None of these animals entered the food chain. Classical BSE is the type of BSE transmissible to humans.

Contamianted feed

The Commission asked EFSA to determine if these cases were caused by contaminated feed or whether they occurred spontaneously, i.e. without an apparent cause.

EFSA experts concluded that contaminated feed is the most likely source of infection.

This is because the infectious agent that causes BSE has the ability to remain active for many years.

Cattle may have been exposed to contaminated feed because the BSE infectious agent was present where feed was stored or handled.

A second possibility is that contaminated feed ingredients may have been imported from non-EU countries.

Experts could not rule out other causes due to the difficulty of investigating individual cases.

Some constraints are the long incubation period of the disease and the lack of detailed information available from farms at the time of the trace-back investigation.

EFSA experts made a series of recommendations to maintain and strengthen the EU monitoring and reporting system, and to evaluate new scientific data that become available.
Defra is offering 400,000 of research funding for a project to help develop a more humane stunning method for pigs.

The Humane Slaughter Association (HSA) and Defra are joining forces to fund the research.

The stunning of pigs by direct exposure to high concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) is currently common practice for the commercial slaughter of pigs.

The use of CO2 in high concentration is permitted under EU and national regulations and this method is used in the UK as well as other EU member states.

Aversive

However, research has shown that pigs find direct exposure to high concentrations of CO2 aversive.

In 2003, the Farm Animal Welfare Councils (FAWC) report on animal welfare recommended that this method should be phased out.

The following year, a report by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) confirmed the effectiveness of the method, but noted that it resulted in respiratory distress in pigs.

Similar concerns were expressed for poultry and alternative controlled atmosphere systems are now in use within the poultry industry.

'Best practice'

A statement from HSA and Defra said: The funding aims to develop and or validate a more humane method which could replace high-concentration CO2 stunning of pigs.

The project aims to ensure that any proposed method is not only more humane but also practically and economically viable so that it is likely to be widely adopted by the pig industry.

The National Pig Association's senior policy advisor Georgina Crayford said: We are pleased funding has been made available for research into new methods.

We also welcome HSAs acknowledgement that new methods need to be commercially viable to ensure roll out but, until an alternative is found, CO2 stunning remains best practice.
Farmers will be looking to make the most of the fine weather as the harvest season approaches  but working in agriculture comes with dangers too.

Farmers and agricultural workers are being urged to take care when working close to power lines and other electrical equipment, at one of the farming calendars busiest times of the year.

According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), agriculture is Britain's most dangerous industry.

Although only 1.5 per cent of the working population is employed in agriculture, four people were killed in the UK last year and many more were injured when they come into contact with overhead power lines and cables.

With this in mind, UK Power Networks is asking farmers and agricultural workers to be vigilant when working out in the fields.

Safety experts from the company are visiting country fairs and shows to reinforce the safety message.

'Serious injury'

Farm workers are being urged to take care when they are ploughing, using irrigation pipes and ladders, using combine harvesters, loading or unloading vehicles, using tipper wagons or trailers in fields or stacking materials.

If a piece of machinery or equipment gets too close to or comes into contact with an overhead cable, electricity will be conducted through the metal machine or equipment to earth.

It may also pass through anyone who is touching it. Electricity can also arc  jump across gaps  so farm workers do not have to actually touch the lines to get a serious or fatal shock.

Ros Forbes, the power firms public safety and education adviser said: Working near an electricity supply network, whether substations, underground cables or overhead lines, can place employers and employees at risk of serious injury if they dont take care.

We want farmers to be extra vigilant and be aware of the potential risks. Accidents often happen when people are tired - for example, at the end of a long day. Taking these simple precautions can help significantly reduce the risk of death or serious injury. 
Farmers have warned that beavers are causing considerable damage on farmland after new research suggests they are "exceptional" at their ability to rebuild wetlands.

Researchers from the University of Stirling looked at the effects a small group of beavers had on a wetland originally drained for farming in Tayside, Scotland.

The 12-year study, partly-funded by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), found plant richness rose by 46% and the number of different plants recorded more than doubled.

Prof Nigel Willby from the university said wetlands were "tremendously important environments" for biodiversity, but were disappearing at an "alarming rate".

He said: "Beavers are renowned for their engineering skills, like dam building, and are now being considered as tools for restoring wetlands.

"They have been reintroduced widely, including in Scotland, partly for this purpose and our findings demonstrate the surprisingly large benefits they can bring to biodiversity."

Beavers were native to Scotland before being hunted to extinction in the 16th century.

'Proper management'

However, farmers have expressed concern about the increasing amount of beaver numbers.

Farming union NFU Scotland has insisted that 'proper management' of the species is fundamental in order to avoid impact on agriculture. Some farmers have warned of considerable damage to farmland.

NFU Scotland and other land management and environmental organisations wrote a joint letter to Scotland's Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham to set out broad principles and key components of an appropriate management regime.

Rob Livesey, NFU Scotlands Vice President previously commented about the situation, saying beavers must be 'appropriately managed' to minimise the risk of unacceptable impacts on agriculture.

He said it is a view that is shared by many within the conservation community.

'Illegal'

He continued: NFU Scotland believes the release of beavers into Tayside was illegal, should never have happened, and should not have been allowed to lead to the situation we have today. We expect any future illegal activity of this type to be dealt with as a wildlife crime.

In the announcement by the Environment Secretary, she acknowledged the impacts that beavers can have on agriculture, and accepts the need for a fit-for-purpose management regime.

It is essential that Scottish agriculture is not negatively affected by this decision.

NFUS said it is sceptical that beavers can be excluded from areas of highly productive farmland that are heavily reliant on complex drainage systems and flood banks.
Farmers have been told to support pollinators and crop pest predators to help improve crop yields, delivering a 'win-win' for farming and wildlife.

Two recent Campaign for the Farmed Environment (CFE) events spurred experts to share research as well as guidance on managing margins for pollinators.

They shared their findings from a six-year, large-scale study on a commercial arable farm with field beans, oilseed rape and wheat.

Improved pollination combined with natural pest control led to increased crop yields, especially in field beans which saw a 35% increase.

With improved yields overall, farm output was largely unaffected by taking 3% to 8% of land at field edges out of production to create habitats for beneficials. This will encourage farmers looking to increase crop yields while minimising their environmental impact.

Hertfordshire host farmer Robert Law said: Its all about having the right habitat, in the right quantity, in the right place. You dont need a lot to make a difference.

Bees' Needs

Bees Needs Week (17-23 July) raises awareness of the ways people can help pollinators and celebrates successful pollinator projects across the country.

Some 1,500 species of insects pollinate UK crops, contributing an estimated 600m to the nations economy.

CFE Project Officer Anna Cuckow said many farmers are taking steps to provide food and a home for pollinators.

Ways to help pollinators include looking after existing flower-rich areas, pollen and nectar mixes or grass leys with legumes and wildflowers, cutting hedges once every three years to allow flowering and planting hedge gaps with flowering native shrubs.

Tussocky grass and grass buffers also provide essential overwintering habitats for some bee species, according to CFE.

CFE said: These are measures every farmer can adopt voluntarily, outside or alongside a stewardship agreement, whilst farming productively.
Prince Charles has described the dairy industry as of 'great importance' as he made his annual summer tour of Wales.

Speaking as he was touring a dairy plant in LLanbadarn Fawr, near Aberystwyth he said he hoped to make an 'enormous difference.'

"Not only in terms of sales but also in terms of the dairy sector in Wales which is of such great importance."

Afterwards, he opened the new extension at the plant and met the founder who opened the dairy in 1982.

'Derailed for good'

Charles later spoke to a sustainability conference in Llandovery College, Carmarthenshire where he said humanity's place on Earth could be 'derailed for good' if 'terrifying' environmental issues are not tackled.

The Prince of Wales said British farms have been reduced to 'little more than factories' and must be brought into greater harmony with the planet.

"This is why I find it so unbelievable when people ask why we should bother with the conservation and protection of the Earths dwindling biodiversity, or why we should strive to make the terrifying environmental issues we now face such a priority," he said.

'Diversity of life'

Charles said: "It is, of course, the diversity of life on Earth which actually enables us to have our being."

"Deplete it, reduce it, erode and destroy it and we will succeed in causing such disorder that we risk derailing humanitys place on Earth for good.

"In my lifetime I have watched the industrialisation of food production turn the living organism of an individual farm into little more than a factory, where finite raw materials are fed in at one end and food of varying quality comes out the other."
GOODING  A man accused of organizing a cockfight at a Gooding farm earlier this year has pleaded guilty.

Jose Rosario Miramontes-Tostado, 44, of Gooding, pleaded guilty a week ago to a misdemeanor charge of exhibition of cockfights. He was sentenced to 83 days time served in jail plus $257 in fines and fees, according to court records. He had originally been charged with a felony, under a law that makes it a felony to organize a cockfight where drugs or gambling are present.

Sheriffs deputies busted the fight in March, detaining 150 people and seizing 80 roosters which were then euthanized. It was the first cockfighting bust in the state since 2007.

County Prosecuting Attorney Matt Pember said he still plans to file charges against more of the people who were at the fight.

Were still waiting for reports to come over, he said. The officer that was handling the reports switched over to Gooding city. We still intend to go forward with them.
A West Yorkshire farmer has been fined for feeding sandwiches filled with meat to his pigs.

Halifax council officers said the farmer broke legislation that prevented the risk of Food and Mouth disease.

47-year-old Simon John Tallis has since been left with a 4,000 fine and further costs of 2,000.

Foot and mouth disease affects cloven-hoofed animals including cattle, sheep and pigs. It doesnt affect humans.

The last outbreak in the UK was in 2007.

Inspectors visited Mr Tallis' farm in October last year and found sandwiches containing meat products on site.

Bradford Magistrates Court charged Mr Tallis with two counts of breaching disease legislation.

Highly infectious

Farmers and livestock keepers are banned from feeding meat and kitchen waste to livestock. The legislation ensures the prevention and introduction of the disease.

Foot and mouth disease is highly infectious. Animals can catch the virus through direct contact with an infected animal.

The virus is present in the fluid of the blisters that animals develop. It can also be found in their saliva, urine, dung, milk and exhaled air before signs of the disease appear.

The foot and mouth outbreak in the UK back in 2001 involved the slaughter of more than six million animals, causing dire emotional and financial impacts on farmers, vets and rural businesses.

Cumbria was the worst affected area of the country, with 843 cases.
COP27: Energy and food security must be addressed, farm leaders say
Priyanka Chopra

Reports claim that Priyanka Chopra missed the IIFA Awards due to gender pay gap.

Getting Miffed

She was miffed that a male superstar was given a fat cheque just to be present at the event.

Just A Myth?

Several reports state that the 'gender wage gap' is a myth and is stoked by feminists.

IIFA 201

IIFA committee approached Priyanka in January 2017 itself to perform and also host a segment at IIFA 2017.

Unhappy PeeCee

After several rounds of negotiations, she was unhappy with the remuneration, which was offered to her.

Standing Her Ground

After leaning that a male superstar got a bigger cheque, she called it quits.

Home Sweet Home

She flew back to India to spend time with her family and friends.

Maldives

For her 35th birthday, she headed off to Maldives and had a good time with her near and dear ones.

Real Or Myth?

While some studies claim that gender wage gap is real, several others show that it's just a myth.

Happy PeeCee

Nonetheless, PeeCee had a great time in Maldives and that's what really matters.
We had recently reported about the split of television couples Vivian Dsena-Vahbiz Dorabjee and Pankit Thakker-Praachi. We reported that Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon 2 actors Avinash Sachdev and Shalmalee Desai are also having trouble in their paradise! The couple is trying to make their marriage work.

Now, another bad news has hit the Telly town. Apparently, all is not well between Kasam actor Amit Tandon and wife Ruby. According to Spotboye report, the couple is facing numerous compatibility issues. The situation has reached a point, where Ruby and Amit are staying separately!



According to the website's report, a close friend of Ruby suspected Amit's loyalty towards her and informed Ruby that he has been ignoring her!

Apparently, Ruby met Amit on a social platform as his fan. They started talking to each other and eventually fell in love.

The couple got married in 2009 and are blessed with a 7-year-old daughter, Jiyana, who is staying with her mother. Ruby is a well-known dermatologist and many A-list TV actors are her clients.

When asked regarding the same, Amit didn't want to comment on it. He was quoted by Bollywood Life as saying, "I would not like to comment. This is my personal life, and I do not wish to talk about it. Anything work related is fine."

Well, we hope everything is fine between Amit and Ruby as we don't want the lovely couple to part ways.
TWIN FALLS  Summer heat caused many Idahoans to crank up the air conditioner this month, creating a new record demand for energy from Idaho Power Co.

The power company recorded a new all-time peak demand July 7, when total demand reached 3,422 megawatts between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. That beat the former record of 3,407 megawatts set July 2, 2013.

Idaho Power said the companys demand is highest in summer, when irrigation pumps and air conditioners contribute to the usual usage. The company typically has summer demand around 3,000 to 3,200 megawatts, spokesman Brad Bowlin said.

We had several days of temperatures at or near 100 degrees, he said. We were using all of our available resources, plus importing power as needed.

A record likely would have been set the previous day, Bowlin said, had Idaho Power not dispatched a program that credits irrigators who turn off pumps during hours of extreme electricity demand, between 2 p.m. and 9 p.m. Participant shutoffs are staggered to smooth that peak, Bowlin said.

Commercial and irrigation demand tends to remain steady throughout the summer, Bowlin said, but residential demand accounts for more fluctuations. Summertime demand peaks between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. as temperatures climb and residents return home from work.
Irelands five-time top British Friesian herd is now in its second year of using Holstein bulls.

Changing breeding policy represents a risk for Pat and Nora Flynn of the Coolmohan herd, Kilworth, County Cork, but they also see increasing demand for higher-output cows.

For two and a half years their herd was ranked the number one economic breeding index (EBI) herd, but the Flynns have fallen from the top spot and see an industry that is changing.

See also: Yeo Valleys Mary Mead on dairy industry hopes and Friesian cows

Commercial bull buyers seem to be looking for cows that can deliver 7,200 litres and more, explains Mr Flynn, who says he has two flasks of pure Friesian bulls he no longer deems worth using.

Cows ticking along doing 5,000 litres appear to be in less demand than they were.

But in only his second year of using Holstein straws, Mr Flynn stresses that he can make the switch back to Friesian if he needs to, with both Friesian and Holstein having their merits.

We sell around 50-60 bulls a year normally, but in 2016 we sold only 40, says Mr Flynn. It looks like we need a bigger cow, but a fertile one. We have bulls marketed by Cogent but most of our genetics stay in Ireland.

Fertility and components

A major effect of the EBI index, which rates all dairy breeds, has been the massive improvement it has brought to the national calving index.

At Coolmohan, the average calving interval is 364 days in a herd with many cows at fifth lactation or more.

I cull open cows and I cull at under 3.6% protein and under 5,000kg of milk as a heifer and 6,000kg as a second calver, says Mr Flynn, who supplies to Dairygold.

Components are important to the milk cheque here and I, like many bull customers, am paid on a protein plus fat minus milk basis.

Getting to the top

When the EBI replaced the relative breeding index (RBI) in 2001, Mr Flynn focused on buying the best bulls to lift the EBI value of his herd.

Since then Ive focused on fertility and protein within the herd and used fertile lines. I have used a lot of the Lakemead herd, which is fantastic, with some great blood lines.

He believes the EBI -ranking is the best marketing tool for bull buyers and commercial dairy farmers, which is why hes keen to get back up the rankings.

To do this, cows must be bred to be fertile with good protein production. These traits are worth more than 50% of the index at 35% and 18.9%, respectively.

If I see a heifer only doing 3.6% protein, I dont expect her to improve and I sell her. In terms of yield, though, I know the Friesian is a slow starter so you have to give them two lactations before they crank the milk output, but you do get 10 lactations out of them.

Switching to Holstein

In 2016 Mr Flynn phased in Holstein by serving only 20% of the herd with Holstein bulls, with special attention paid to selecting mature cows and easy calving bulls. However, this year five Holstein-Friesian bulls have been brought in.

This year around 80% of the herd has been bulled with Holstein-Friesian (50-85%) with 20% of the herd (all heifers) remaining pure Friesian, but the Flynns stress it will be simple to switch back.

They hope to have bigger cows with a higher cull value of +200 (176) a head and more milk, while also keeping solids and fertility strong.

We still have pure British Friesian clients, explains Mr Flynn. But my concern is the Friesian is getting too small with a reduced cull value and, from a marketing perspective, I have never known a bull or heifer buyer come to my yard and pick out the smallest animal.

Type is one of the key things the Flynns are looking for when selecting their bulls, with moderate calving ease scores to avoid problems with heifers with narrow pelvises in the future.

I dont want light, narrow calves. Type is one of the most important priorities for me, says Mr Flynn, who adds that he is also looking for EBI ratings, fertility, solids and milk.

We dont have problems with calving our cows and most heifers calve themselves. We breed cows to be efficient and easy to manage and this means Im hoping I dont need to feed these bigger cows more in the parlour, either.

This May the Flynns noted that the first crop of Holstein calves were six inches taller and six inches longer than the Friesians.

Breeding protocol

Tailhead scratch cards are used on heifers to monitor bulling behaviour.

This spring I had 80% of the herd served within two weeks, says Mr Flynn. Thats 70 cows with no synchronisation. We started bulling on 10 April for three weeks with AI only and on 8 May we had 90% served, with 40% on their first bulling.

Cows are tailpainted blue and then painted red at first service. Some cows repeat three days later but 95% of the time its because they werent actually bulling initially. She incorrectly displays heat as so many cows are bulling around her, explains Mr Flynn.

Theres also a trick to applying the tail cards on heifers. You have to wait half a minute or so for the glue to become tacky before sticking it on.

Commercial focus

Making the most from the grazing at Coolmohan is essential, although parlour cake is fed at the shoulders of the season at a budget of 1t a cow a year.

Winter feeding consists of chopped silage (8-10cm long) and up to 5.4kg of parlour meal, with no diet wagon or any mixed ration feeding.

When spring comes we start them off with 3.6kg/day until May and then drop it down to 1.8kg, with nothing being fed through the middle of the summer, says Mr Flynn.

Mobility and lameness are key breeding goals, with the sandstone tracks around the farm being the only regular lameness issue that might affect one cow a year.

Walking three-quarters of a mile up some steep hills to the 12-unit herringbone parlour promotes strong feet, which are checked and trimmed by Mr Flynn himself if problems do arise.

Somatic cell counts are also important but Mr Flynn explains he would rather do this with breeding than management.

We teat spray in the winter but not normally in summer, he explains. At winter housing I start drawing the cows each milking but I dont do this when theyre at pasture.

Cows are given standing time to allow the teats to close post-milking, which he says reflects commercial practice.

We think a black teat is a better, more robust teat, so weve started trying to breed that in. Were also aiming for perfect teats pointing inwards so they are protected when shes lying down.

What is EBI? EBI is a single-figure index tailored to breeding cows suitable for Irelands climate and market. This is a cow that can produce 500kgMS/year with a 365-day calving interval. A bull rated 200 (176) is predicted to be more profitable than a bull rated 150 (132). Is it working? Average cow performance from 2013-2016 saw an 86% submission rate, 46% pregnancy rate at first service, 81% pregnancy rate in 12 weeks and 81 days from calving to conception. Future fertility Teagascs elite EBI herd at Moorepark has a 92% submission rate (+6%), a first service pregnancy rate of 60% (+14%), a final 12-week pregnancy rate of 92% (+11%) and a 76-day calving interval (- 5 days). (bracketed figures are for comparisons to the national average)

Coolmohan Farm facts 100 pure British Friesians (85% Friesian)

80ha owned and rented

Yield average for 4 th lactation cows +8,169kg

lactation cows +8,169kg SCC: 72,000 Fat: 4.19% Protein: 3.8%

Selling 50-60 bulls a year

Bulls include Coolmohan Flynn

Sell 50% of heifers born at Coolmohan

Milk goes into Dairygold butter
Essential smartphone might be launched in UK, Europe and Japan News oi -Vijeta New reports suggest that Essential might launch its upcoming smartphone in the UK, Europe and Japan although the company has already missed the launch date of June in the US.

The Essential PH1 is smartphone will also be shipped to UK, Europe, and Japan if reports from Financial Times hold any truth. Moreover, it has also been reported that Essential officials are already trying to crack up a deal with several UK carriers including EE to come up with a launch date.

Essential is way behind its schedule and there is still no official announcement made on smartphone's final launch date. Android co-founder had announced at the unveiling that the smartphone will hit shelves in the US sometime in June. Well, we are halfway through July and all we have from Essential are speculations.

Now a new report from Financial Times suggests that the smartphone will also debut in Japan, Europe, and the UK. This is certainly a big step from Essential. UK, Europe, and Japan are the developed parts of the world and Essential's move to introduce its smartphone in the areas shows that it is aiming to disrupt the market for high-end devices from Apple and Samsung. The report states that Essential executives are in talks with carriers in the UK to come up with a final launch date for the device.

However, officials from Essential have not broken silence over the missed smartphone launch last month. Niccolo de Masi, chief operating officer of Essential did mention that the smartphone launch in the US is imminent. However, he did not provide an explanation for the delay.

The smartphone is certainly closing in on its release date. However, there is no specific date for the same.

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Meet the older cousins of the bovine clan: water buffalo! They're big, they're mysterious, and they haven't been to the family reunion in a couple of years. Here are a few fun facts to help you get reacquainted:

Frequent mud baths are the best remedy for a hot day!

1. Water Buffalo Are Aptly Named



In the wild, water buffalo spend much of their day cooling off in the muddy waters of Asias tropical forest. Because of their proclivity for this marshy terrain, water buffalo have wide, splayed hooves that enable them to move freely in the mud without sinking too deeply. If food is scarce, buffalo will even dive for plants growing on the beds of lakes and rivers!



2. Water Buffalo = The World's Largest Bovines

At their largest, bull water buffalo can clock in at 2,650 pounds with a height of 6 ft (not including their horns). Water buffalo cows are typically more petite ranging from 1,500 pounds and up. Their formidable stature has earned water

buffalo of both genders the nickname of "The Living Tractors of the East."



3. Water Buffalo can be Fast AND Furious

Though domesticated buffalo are gentle enough to be milked (and even ridden), wild buffalo are notoriously aggressive and aren't afraid to face off with their only natural predators: tigers and lions. And they are fast  when threatened, water buffalo can reach speeds of 30 mph.



4. You Have Probably Consumed Water Buffalo Milk

Compared to standard cow's milk, water buffalo milk contains higher levels of protein, calcium and iron, while sporting less cholesterol and lactose. Though not yet a popular drink in America, it is commonly used to make delicious, Italian-style mozzarella cheeses.

Vistacion and her husband Paquito, along with their grand children, take a photo with the family water buffalo.



5. Water Buffalo have been Domesticated for over 5,000 Years



Around the world, water buffalo are still giving humans a helping hoof. Besides cows, water buffalo contribute a significant percentage of the global milk population. In some areas of the world (like South Asia), buffalo are even the principal source of milk!



Did you learn something new or interesting about these magnificent bovines? Consider donating a water buffalo to a family in need! With the help of one of these magnificent "Living Tractors of the East" a smallholder farmer can plant more than 4 times the crops than he or she could by hand. These additional crops (and the milk a buffalo can give) provide nutrition and income to a family struggling with poverty.
FILER  The Filer City Council fired its police chief Tuesday night but has backed away from folding the citys police department into the Twin Falls County sheriffs office.

Some residents are gathering signatures to recall the mayor and all but one of the City Council members, and they say theyre a little more than halfway to getting enough to put it on the ballot.

For the first time in Filers history we have a community that has no faith in our leadership, said resident Amanda Bohr, who is involved in the recall effort.

After an executive session meeting Tuesday the Council came back into open session and voted 3-1, with Councilman Russell Sheridan opposed, to fire Chief Tim Reeves.

Mayor Rick Dunn wouldnt say why the Council decided fire Reeves, citing the confidentiality of executive sessions. He did say, though, that the Council has decided to keep the Filer Police Department. Last month, the Council heard a presentation from Sheriff Tom Carter on the possibility of getting rid of it and having the sheriffs office cover the town.

Dunn said the Council felt that having our own police department was a value to the city but that they compared their departments budget to other cities and felt it needed to be cut. The new fiscal year starts on Oct. 1, and the city is working on its 2018 budget now. Dunn said they will be making some changes to the police budget.

We determined we just need to reduce the police departments budget in order to stay in line, he said.

Carter said Wednesday that Dunn had contacted him a couple of days earlier, telling him the city is going to stick with its own police force.

I could offer them services that they dont have, probably for less money, but thats neither here nor there, Carter said, adding he would do what the city wants him to do.

While keeping the police department was one of the goals of the people who started the recall petition, firing Reeves without any public explanation hasnt pleased them.

Its more of a personal vendetta as far as all of us are concerned, said Natalie White, one of the administrators of the Save Filer Police Department Facebook page.

White thinks the Council was looking for a reason to oust Reeves, or that they thought he was behind the Facebook page, which she said he isnt.

We obviously live in a small community, but nobody that helps with this page works as a city employee in any way, shape or form, she said.

Tara Wiggins said the recall for her is about government transparency and goes beyond controversy over keeping the police department.

The Filer citizens do not have transparency, she said. They absolutely are being kept in the dark and they do not have a voice.

Bohr feels like the Council isnt listening to the communitys will. She said she has nothing against anyone on the Council and knows some of them, but I think this is our town and they need to do what our community wants. Ultimately, they work for us.

The petition calls for the recall of everyone on the Council except Sheridan for lack of transparency and denying input from the community on getting rid of the police department, as well as their handling of the June 6 City Council meeting at which Carter made his presentation. They need 195 signatures by late August.

Should they get enough signatures and the petition be certified, either the officials being recalled can resign within five days or, if they dont, the question will be on the ballot in November, according to the Secretary of States office. If it is on the ballot, for the recall to succeed they need to get both more votes to recall than not and also more votes in favor of recall than the person got last time they were elected, said county Clerk Kristina Glascock. This means 203 for Dunn, 129 for Ruby Allen, 123 for Gary Deitrick and 98 for Christina Hatch. Also, Dunn, Allen and Sheridan are going to be up for re-election in November whether the recall petition is successful or not, Glascock said.

This is the second attempt at a recall election in Filer in recent years  some people tried to recall the mayor and Council in 2014, after a police officer shot a dog and some people were angry when the city decided to let him return to work. This effort fizzled out when they didnt get enough signatures.
Should you bow or just pat that belly? Here's a quick primer on how people greet each other in the countries where Heifer works.

Click the image to download!

United States

In the United States, shaking hands is usually a pretty safe bet.



Latin America

If you're headed to Latin America, get ready for some kissing. Standard practice is for men and women to greet women with a cheek kiss to the left. Men usually greet other men with a handshake.



Haiti

In Haiti, tradition mirrors its French colonial pastLatin American rules apply here, but with an extra kiss on the right cheek. Good friends of the same sex might hold hands while they walk and talk.



Andean countries

One notable exception comes from Peru and other Andean countries. A man there might greet a good friend first with a handshake and an arm around the shoulders, then rest the right hand on a buddy's stomach for a bit while they chat.



Asia

In Asia, variations of bowing are common where we work. The most common practice is probably a small bow of the head with hands pressed together and placed in front of the chest.



China

In China, there's a little bit of bowing and then hand shaking. If you're close, you might hold both hands. Do not make eye contact, and execute the handshake lightly and with constant shaking.



Philippines

In the Philippines, younger people bow slightly and then place the right hand of their elder on their forehead. There might also be a pat on the shoulder for good measure.



Cambodia

It might be OK in Kenya and Tanzania, but do not touch anyone's head in Cambodia. That's really disrespectful.



India and Nepal

Although Namaste is the more familiear greeting for yoga practitioners, Namaskar is as common in India and Nepal. The latter is the more formal of the two.



Kenya and Tanzania

In Kenya and Tanzania, children and youth bow their heads so their elders might tap their head or place their hand on their head. For everyone, handshaking is done with the right hand, with your left hand holding the right elbow. Never shake with the left, as that hand is reserved for bathroom duty.



Cameroon, Ghana and Senegal

There's a lot to keep straight in Africa: In Cameroon, Ghana and Senegal, bow slightly when you come into the room and wait for elders to extend a hand first. Sometimes you might clap three times for the elder instead. Greetings are never rushed.



Zimbabwe and neighboring countries

A couple of handclaps are a good way to greet somebody.



Zambia

Zambians might include a thumb squeeze when saying hello.
Defense attorney denounces call for Absher resignation

The attorney for embattled School Board member Michael Absher on Tuesday strongly denounced a potential vote by the board to demand the resignation of Absher, who faces a criminal charge related to a group home his nonprofit agency operates and a civil complaint filed by a high school teacher.

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Duly elected by the voters last November, Absher should receive the same presumption of innocence that any citizen is entitled to under the Constitution, attorney Doug Pearson said in a statement.

"The citizens' popular vote that clearly elected Mr. Absher should be upheld in accordance with U.S. Constitution, the state Constitution, the N.C. General Statutes and each members oath of office to become a board member of the Henderson County Board of Public Education to support the same," Pearson said. "To call for action contrary to these pillars of democracy is simply unconstitutional."

Board Chair Amy Lynn Holt made the decision to call for the special meeting after conversations with School Board Attorney Dean Shatley and said that the board will be asked to request Absher's resignation.

We think this is in the best interest of the school system, Holt said Monday. The decision to call for the meeting was made Tuesday, she said, but it has been weeks in the works.

Elected to the School Board on his fourth try last November, Absher was arrested May 24 and charged with permitting a 15-year-old male resident of the Only Hope group home off Upward Road to drink alcohol, the Henderson County sheriff's office said. Only Hope is the organization Absher founded to serve homeless youth. Absher himself had been homeless.

At the time, Absher submitted a letter to the School Board asking for a leave of absence.

The offense of allowing the 15-year-old to consume alcohol "whereby he could become adjudicated delinquent and undisciplined," was alleged to have occurred between Nov. 1, 2016, and Jan. 1 of this year, according to the arrest warrant.

A month later Absher, 27, was served with a civil complaint for communicating a threat after an altercation with an East Henderson High School teacher.

The School Board may not force a sitting member to resign but it may request that a board member resign. Holt said if that Absher were to resign, a replacement would be appointed.

Here is Pearson's statement:

"The citizens of Henderson County voted and elected Michal Absher to the Henderson County School Board. The school board process was created by the legislators to give local citizens a voice in the operations and functions of the school systems. For this board to now request an emergency meeting to call for the resignation of a fellow constitutionally elected official gives me great pause. Beginning in elementary school students are taught the merits of the democratic system and the basic constitutional protections that each and every citizen is afforded.

"One provision of the Constitution is the presumption of innocence and another provision is due process. This emergency meeting appears to have an agenda of circumventing the U.S. Constitution, the N.C. Constitution and the General Statutes. Every school board member took an oath of office to uphold the Constitution, and the rights provided to citizens therein. Please ask yourself if this call for action is consistent with their sworn oath of office. I urge the public to review the oath administered to these elected officials. Regardless of what an individual school board member thinks based on politics or personal belief, the Board must set aside these differences to effectively represent the citizens of this county."
Kanuga widening alarms homeowners

More than 100 people showed up Tuesday for the North Carolina Department of Transportations public meeting on the Kanuga Road improvements held at the City of Hendersonvilles Operations Center.

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Residents pushed as close as they could to the engineering maps mounted on easels around the room, looking for their names and house numbers and the red, green, yellow and black lines that might indicate what would happen to their properties.

They quizzed the NCDOT engineers on everything from how it might affect the trees in their front yards to how long construction would take.

They got assurances that their concerns would be taken into consideration as plans move forward.

Some residents questioned the very need to change Kanuga Road from the tree-canopied, winding road that it is now into a wider thoroughfare that engineers say it must become to make it safer and to handle anticipated increases in traffic. But most were there to get more information and to be heard.

The proposed road improvements, estimated to cost $20 million, would start at Little River Road and continue to Church Street in downtown Hendersonville. Surveying is taking place on Kanuga now and is expected to be completed by October. Those results will provide the details that engineers need to move forward with the plan.

Right of way acquisition is scheduled to start in July 2019 and construction in July 2020.

The maps on display were created based on aerial photography, engineers said, so residents would have an idea of what was proposed. The engineering plans are in the very early stages of design  only 15 percent complete, they said.

An NCDOT handout explained that the improvements on Kanuga will provide a safer roadway for motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians.

The proposed improvements include widening travel lanes to accommodate bicyclists, dedicated turn lanes, sidewalks and other improvements, including the possibility of rotaries at the intersections of Hebron Road and Erkwood Road.

According to NCDOT, currently the average daily traffic along Kanuga from Little River to Church is estimated to be about 11,000 per day. This number is expected to increase to 14,000 by the year 2040.

Specifically, from Little River Road to Erkwood Road/State Street, the plans show 11-foot travel lanes, with 4-foot paved shoulders bordered by grass.

From Erkwood Road to Hebron Road, they include 5-foot sidewalks, 4-foot planter strips next to curbs/gutters, with a 4-foot bike lane. The travel lanes would be 11 feet with a 11-foot center turn lane.

From Hebron Road to Church Street, there would be 5-foot sidewalks with curbs, 4-foot bike lanes, 11-foot travel lanes and an 11-foot center turn lane.

The proposed design suggests roundabouts instead of stoplights at Kanuga and Hebron and Kanuga and Erkwood.

Public comments will be taken until Aug. 4. Write to Steve Williams, NCDOT division project manager, at 253 Webster Road, Sylva, NC 28779 or email sjwilliams@ncdot.gov.

A copy of the public meeting materials can be viewed on the NCDOT public meetings website at www.ncdot.gov/projects/publicmeetings.
Dot Marlow, 'our matriarch of philanthropy,' dies at age 85

Dot Marlow

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Dorothy Dellinger "Dot" Marlow, who died Tuesday at age 85, leaves a legacy of giving that prompted a friend to call her "our matriarch of philanthropy."

A retired First Union Bank vice president and the wife of the late Glenn C. Marlow, the former county schools superintendent, Dot Marlow served the county in numerous ways during her career in banking and marketing. In retirement she devoted even more time and energy to volunteering, fundraising and grooming a new generation of givers, many of them women in mid-career who were drawn to Marlow's extraordinary grace and sharp insight.

Marlow had been hospitalized in recent weeks and then released to hospice care at the Givens Estates Health Center, at the Asheville life-care center where she was a resident.

Always well-dressed and perfectly made up, Marlow brought a soft-spoken grace and impeccable manners to every meeting she attended and fundraiser she helped to lead. She brought sunshine and optimism to the table, friends and associates recalled, even when nonprofit boards struggled with intractable community needs.

Long a leader in civic life, Marlow expanded her volunteerism after her retirement from banking. After her husband's death in 1999, soon after his retirement as schools superintendent, she persevered with numerous projects that helped the community. She remained active in the Community Foundation, the Education Foundation, Johnson Farm, Glenn Marlow Elementary School, the Pardee Hospital Foundation and many other nonprofit agencies and causes in the Hendersonville area.

"She's our matriarch of philanthropy here in this community," said McCray Benson, executive director of the Henderson County Community Foundation. "The only thing she wasn't a part of was our original founding board but the older members of that said they were just the steering committee and she really was the original board."

A member of the foundation board from 1983 to 1991 and a vice president, "she was our first leader in the respect of actually helping develop the Community Foundation," Benson said. "She and Ken Youngblood would go out and start visiting folks and start talking about the Community Foundation. She was always a part of everything we did.

"When I came in as a new CEO she spent time with me and took me around and introduced me to the community," he added. "She certainly did a lot more than just Community Foundation. She helped with Johnson Farm, she was a champion for education in our community. When Glenn passed away, she and her family started a scholarship in his name. One of her greatest joys was meeting those scholarship recipients and getting to know them. I would say her greatest tool was her ability to use encouragement to guide people into doing more than they ever thought they could do. She looked at everything, no matter the challenge, as an opportunity.

"I can't say enough about Dot. She's going to be missed. She helped us learn how to carry the torch but now she's left it with us."

Marlow's giving spirit never wavered, even when she might have been able to relax upon her move to a tidy apartment in the Methodist Church-affiliated Givens Estates 11 years ago. No rocking chair could contain her. She drove, during the day, up until her death, making regular trips to Hendersonville for charitable work and to visit old friends.

"There is hardly a charitable organization in Henderson County that she didn't touch," said her daughter Valorie Songer. "She remained active when she moved to Givens Estate and she remained active here (at her new home)," taking on a fundraising project for the Givens Estates chapel and other projects.

"She just felt so strongly about giving back to the community you're in," Songer said. "She had a very strong faith and part of living that out was helping other people and giving back."

Longtime friends admired Marlow not only for her giving spirit but for her sense of humor and openness to anyone who called on her deep knowledge of her adopted hometown.

"She wanted to make this place an even better place to live," said Ruth Birge, who met Marlow when she moved to Hendersonville as publisher of the Times-News. "I've known her ever since I've been here. She's one of the first people I met, probably like everybody else who moved here" and had a need to find out what made the community tick. "She put everybody at ease."

In her banking career, she mentored up-and-coming youngsters like Tom Apodaca, who became a powerful state senator, and Ross Sloan, a fast riser who is now an executive at TD Bank.

"She just put them under her wing and taught them what they needed to do," Birge said. In addition, "she's had a huge impact on lots and lots of women."

"These last two weeks she's had the most amazing faith," she said.

Released from Mission Hospital into hospice care at Givens Estate, Dot knew that she would be receiving friends and she'd only receive friends if she was properly dressed and made up in a way that showed respect.

"One of the interesting things that happened was when she was released from Mission, somebody went to see her. They went to the room and they said, 'Where's Mrs. Marlow?' 'Oh, she's in the beauty shop.'"

Born in 1932 in Lincolnton, she graduated from Brevard College, spent a career of 26 years in banking and lived in the Hendersonville area for the past 65 years.

She was a member of the First United Methodist Church of Hendersonville, where she taught the Alma Lee Cheves Sunday School class up until her illness a few weeks ago, and was active in the United Methodist Women and other church committees.

She was active in the Henderson County community, having served as president of United Way and as a board member of the Community Foundation of Henderson County, the Hendersonville Symphony, the Chamber of Commerce, the Pardee Memorial Hospital, the Pardee Memorial Hospital Foundation and the Pardee Hospital Chaplaincy Association. She also served on the Boards of Givens Estates Retirement Community, Historic Johnson Farm, and SSEACO-Something Special, now Vocational Solutions. She was an active volunteer at the Historic Johnson Farm and at Glenn C. Marlow Elementary School. She was an honorary member of Delta Kappa Gamma and served as a trustee of Brevard College. She was active on committees at Givens Estates and sang in the Givens choir.

Mrs. Marlow was selected as one of Henderson Countys top 50 outstanding leaders by WHKP in 1996. She was the 1977 VFW Woman of the Year and recipient of the 2005 Sauer Charitable Leadership Award from the Henderson County Community Foundation. She was inducted into the Henderson County Education Foundation Hall of Fame in 2006. Dot was awarded the Pardee Hospital Foundations Philanthropist of the Year in 2010 and received the Outstanding Volunteer Fundraiser Award from the WNC Association of Fundraising Professionals in 2006. She was inducted into the Brevard College Hall of Fame in 1998.

She was predeceased by her parents, Samuel Thomas Dellinger and Bertha Mae Dellinger, her husband of 47 years, Glenn C. Marlow, seven brothers and sisters, and her son-in-law, Dr. Donald R. Songer. Survivors include daughters, Valorie Marlow Songer of Columbia, S.C.; Glenna Marlow White and her husband, Richard A. White of Charlotte; and Dottie Marlow Kinlaw and her husband, Dr. John L. Kinlaw of Rutherfordton; a son, Jeffrey A. Marlow, and his wife, Dr. Sherri H. Marlow of Harrisburg; grandchildren Michael J. Songer (Erica), Julie Songer Belman (Travis), Avery White, Anna White, John Cobb, Jacob Kinlaw, Clare Kinlaw and Nicholas Glenn Marlow; and great-grandchildren James, Raymond and Marlow Belman.

A Celebration of Life service will be held at First United Methodist Church at 11 a.m. Saturday, July 22. The family will receive friends following the service in the Christian Life Center at the church. A private burial will be held in Shepherd Memorial Park.

Memorials may be made to the Dorothy Dellinger Marlow Scholarship Fund at Brevard College, One Brevard College Drive, Brevard, NC 29712 or to the Glenn Marlow Scholarship Fund at the Community Foundation of Henderson County, P.O. Box 1108, Hendersonville, NC 28793.





For more on Dot Marlow's life and legacy return to the Hendersonville Lightning.
County remembers crash of Flight 22

Heritage Museum Chair Carolyn Justus introduces the program commemorating the 50th anniversary of the crash of Piedmont Flight 22.

At one minute after noon on Monday, bells rang at the Historic Courthouse, commemorating the 82 people who perished in the crash of Flight 22 and a Cessna at 12:01:18 in the blue sky over Hendersonville 50 years ago.

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Just under 200 people turned out under a hot summer sun on Wednesday morning to listen to accounts of the tragedy in the skies over a Hendersonville summer camp, to remember the victims and to thank, a half century later, the rescue squad members, law officers, Boy Scouts, medical personnel and average citizens who rose up to do what they could. There were no lives to save, noted Rescue Squad member Mark Shepherd, and so the task on the ground was a grim one  finding and identifying bodies, rounding up pieces of the small plane and the jetliner, comforting survivors who arrived in a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains to hear the worst news confirmed.

For all the sadness, Piedmont Flight 22 turned out to be significant in several ways, said Paul Houle, the author the most authoritative account of the crash. It was the first crash investigated by the newly formed National Transportation Safety Board. It led to a congressional inquiry into inadequate air traffic control systems. And it resulted in a requirement  10 years later  that every commercial aircraft be equipped with a crash avoidance system.

Shepherd said the air disaster, which attracted more than 400 rescue squad volunteers from communities from as far away as Salisbury, N.C., and Belton, S.C., became a model of mutual aid.

Houle told the people gathered that although most survivors of victims could not attend the ones he had been in contact with wanted to thank the people of Hendersonville for all they did to comfort and to console the families. The survivors would be impressed, Houle said, at the Heritage Museum exhibit coordinated by Terry Robinson and at the magnitude of this week's memorial to the crash victims.
When everything was quiet in the high-altitude Doklam where the armies of India and China are engaged in a stand-off for about a month, the Pakistani media suddenly went abuzz with reports of how Chinese soldiers have killed 158 Indian jawans.

With not a single media report coming from either China or India on the so-called Chinese attack, the news was obviously false.

Dunya News TV aired a fake video clip of injured Indian soldiers saying at least 158 Indian soldiers have been killed as China fired rockets across the border on Indian border installations.

#DunyaVideos: Clashes between #India and #China in Sikkim, 158 Indian soldiers died after the attack,#DunyaUpdatespic.twitter.com/jO46tEoyzc

; Dunya News (@DunyaNews) July 17, 2017

Dawn TV too aired a similar report. Twitter went abuzz with images and videos of the attack with some India-haters from the other side of the border even commending Chinas action.

It is likely that Pakistani media became victim to a fake war propaganda conceptualised by the Pakistani army as no mainstream media will run fake news knowing that truth will be out in the open in a matter of few hours leading to a loss of credibility.

India Vs China war begins : China killed more than 150 Indian soldiers today pic.twitter.com/AAKZuDvkCR  M Hanzala Tayyab MHT (@OfficialHanzala) July 17, 2017

Pakistani Media is spreading these photos stating China attacked India in Sikkim. Propaganda war reaching new heights. pic.twitter.com/N9c8h3OtaZ  Aggressive Indian? (@bharat_builder) July 17, 2017

Wonder what Dawns source is on this report: The Indian Army or the Chinese Army? pic.twitter.com/uHxGdC0loY  omar r quraishi (@omar_quraishi) July 17, 2017

Did the Pakistani government or army try to play mischief with the media by supplying them fake news? Old photos and videos were passed off as that of a new attack.A spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs said such reports are utterly baseless, malicious and mischievous. No cognisance should be taken of them by responsible media, the ministry said when asked about the Pakistani media reports.

India and China have several border disputes. The Indian Army and Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) are engaged in a stand-off at Doklam along the Bhutan-Sikkim-China tri-junction since the last one month.

The Chinese media has reported that a brigade responsible for frontline combat operations has held live fire exercises in Tibet with a focus on boosting its quick delivery of troops against India.

Pakistan is trying to add fuel to fire with fake news.

Source : India Today
New York, NY  Last July at GBTA clients of FCM met Sam, a travel-intelligent "chatbot" with the expertise of a skilled consultant that delivers invaluable assistance to business travelers' fingertips in the form of an app. One year later, Sam has matured; now Sam 2.0 is available in an android version and to clients of multiple Flight Centre Travel Group brands in the USA, including Corporate Traveler and Campus Travel. Originally launched within the FCM 360 suite of products, Sam, short for " S mart A ssistant for M obile," is available at all times: pre-, during, and post-trip. Later next month, for the first time ever, a live chat integration will be launched within the app, enabling clients to speak with an agent in seconds. Additional enhancements to the updated app that will assist travelers before, during and after the trip include:

City guides to 60-plus destinations: More than just a city overview these guides have local maps, all modes of available transportation, helpful hints (how to tip, public Wi-Fi, what converter/plug to use, etc.). There are medical resources and emergency contacts (it's not 911 everywhere), cost of living differences between hometown and current destination (for coffee, a beer, a burger), top three attractions and restaurants and much more.

Departure gate and baggage claim information: No searching for screens or straining to hear announcements needed.

Improved geo-location directions: Travelers can get around with ease with detailed, accurate instructions in cities they are unfamiliar with.

Designed to simplify life for corporate travelers, the anticipatory, travel-savvy "chatbot" will assist with all aspects of travel - itineraries, gate changes, driving directions, weather, restaurant recommendations and reservations. Because no man (or app) is an island, the "call or SMS my consultant" option gets you to a live FCM, Corporate Traveler or Campus Travel consultant 24 hours a day for live assistance on the go.

Sam 2.0 is highly interactive and speaks to clients how and on which chat platform they prefer. With the ability to communicate across numerous supported platforms (Facebook Messenger, SMS and more), Sam picks up on cues, such as travel patterns and preferences, and updates travelers accordingly. For example, if it is your first time in a particular city, you will receive more information and recommendations than if it was a standing monthly trip. With rules and settings that can be customized to fit a company's travel guidelines, Sam will, for example, send a reminder to use taxis over other transportation options if company policy so dictates. Sam can send a prompt to submit a lunch receipt thanks to the integration with Certify, an industry-leading travel and expense management solution. Sam is also integrated with Lyft, a national ride sharing service, to easily help travelers book rides.

FCM's largest clients put the app to the test with its most frequent travelers challenge Sam to be sure it was smart and anticipatory, without crossing the line and being intrusive with an abundance of notifications. The feedback has been extremely positive, hence the rollout to Corporate Traveler and Campus Travel now.

There is a self-booking option that is shaped by corporate travel guidelines and preferred supplier plans. Built with speed in mind, the entire process from search to booking can be completed in less than 10 touches (contract-specific option, not available to all).

Other features of Sam include:

User-specific customizable profiles that allow for anticipatory, savvy service delivery

Information-rich itineraries presented in chronological order

Gate and flight change notifications

Flight/Trip Change & Cancellation Options

Destination-specific weather updates

Car rental

Option to speak with an FCM consultant with the touch of a button (SMS option to connect to consultant also available)

Communication across multiple platforms

Lyft capabilities for ride sharing (company-configurable, and can be enabled or disabled upon request)

Expense management with Certify integration; Sam's savvy comes into play here as it knows the context of the trip and can prompt to photograph receipt and launch your camera app automatically.

Driving directions

Restaurant recommendations

Sam is live in the US iTunes App Store (search "FCM") for Apple devices and is also available for Android devices. For more and to download the app visit:

Media Contact: Carla Caccavale Reynolds, 914-673-0729, [email protected]

Carla Caccavale

Publicist
Last August, Mississippis governor introduced a local hotel developer to then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at a $1,000-per-plate private fundraiser in Jackson. The developer, Suresh Chawla, had long been a campaign donor to the governor, Phil Bryant. At the fundraiser, Chawla told Donald Trump and his son, Donald Jr., about his latest project: a boutique hotel in Cleveland, Miss., the home of a new museum devoted to the Grammy Awards. Donald Trump told Chawla to think grand, according to Chawla. Two weeks later, Chawla donated $50,000, roughly half to Trumps campaign and half to the Republican National Committee. By March -- two months into Trumps presidency -- Chawla and his brother were on the 26th floor of Trump Tower for contract negotiations. By June, the Trumps and Chawlas had a handshake agreement for not one but four Trump-branded hotels in Mississippi, signing the deal 10 minutes before a public announcement.

Read the full article at Forbes.com
BOISE  The Idaho Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld Gov. C.L. Butch Otters contentious veto of legislation repealing the states 6 percent sales tax on groceries.

The high courts decision comes after 30 state lawmakers filed a lawsuit claiming Otter took too long to veto the grocery tax repeal because he waited longer than 10 days as outlined in the Idaho Constitution.

Otter, along with other top elected officials, countered he was just following a 1978 high court ruling that said the veto deadline only kicks after it lands on his desk. The lawsuit originally singled out Secretary of State Lawerence Denney because he verified the governors veto. Otter was later named in the challenge at the Republican governors request because he argued that it was his veto that sparked the lawsuit.

However, the justices disagreed with Otter. Nestled inside their 21-page ruling, the court overruled the previous 1978 decision  a rare move inside the courts due to a preference to follow prior judicial precedent because they argued the Constitution clearly states the deadline starts when the Legislature adjourns for the year. That part of the Tuesdays decision will only apply to future legislative sessions and not the grocery tax repeal case nor any other prior vetoes.

The (1978 decision) did not interpret the Constitution; it purported to rewrite an unambiguous phrase in order to obtain a desired result, the justices wrote.

Otters spokesman did not respond to request for comment, though Otter is currently hospitalized recovering from back surgery and an infection. Denneys office also did not return request for comment.

For many Idahoans, Tuesdays ruling wont result in changes at the grocery checkout line. They will continue paying the tax and the state wont be at risk of losing the tax revenue, which helps pay for public schools and transportation projects. Instead, its the Idaho Legislature that will face dramatic changes when handling bills at the end of each session.

Thats because up until now, the Idaho Legislature has routinely adjourned before legislative leaders have handed over all of their bills passed during the session to the governors desk.

The Idaho Supreme Court now deems that practice as illegal. Instead, the court says the Idaho Legislature must present all bills to the governor before it can adjourn for the year.

For example, this year, lawmakers went home on March 29. Otter received the grocery tax repeal bill on March 31. Otter then issued his veto on April 11  11 days after adjournment.

If we declared the governors veto untimely, we would also have to declare the law he vetoed void because it had not been presented to him before the legislature adjourned sine die, the justices wrote. Both the presentment by the legislature and the veto by the governor violated the Constitution.

Overall, the lawsuit is the latest example of growing dissent inside the Republican-dominated Statehouse.

Otter issued an unprecedented number of vetoes this year, prompting many Republican lawmakers to say they look forward to having a new governor in 2019 when Otters term ends. Otter says he is not running for re-election.

Meanwhile, some lawmakers have also said they want more power to overturn vetoes. Under current law, state legislators cannot overturn vetoes after the legislative session has adjourned, but efforts to change the current system have stalled in the Statehouse.
WASHINGTON, DC  Chef Walter Staib has been named the recipient of the Historic Hotels of America 2017 Historian of the Year Award. Chef Staib will be honored with this distinguished award on September 28, 2017 at the Historic Hotels Awards of Excellence Ceremony & Gala at The Omni Homestead Resort (1766) in Hot Springs, Virginia.

The Historic Hotels of America Historian of the Year Award is presented to an individual for making a unique contribution in the research and presentation of history and whose work has encouraged a wide discussion and greater understanding and enthusiasm for American History and historic hospitality.

Chef Walter Staib has been an enthusiastic champion of American History. As author, culinary historian, and acclaimed international chef, his work continues to increase the recognition and celebration of our country's culinary heritage. Historic Hotels of America is pleased to recognize Chef Staib for his success as a culinary historian, his achievements and contributions to the exceptional culinary experience at numerous legendary historic hotels, and his inspiration as the enthusiastic founder and host of A Taste of History,, seen nationwide on Public TV, RLTV, and AMAZON Prime Video. The acclaimed show, A Taste of History has won 10 Emmy Awards and has been a creative way for Chef Staib to showcase 18thcentury cuisine. His passion and dedication has made a significant contribution bringing America's history to life through the food and recipes the founders of America enjoyed. Historic Hotels of America recognizes Chef Staib's extensive work as an exemplary culinary historian, his dedication to preserving and sharing recipes of America's early cuisine, and the books he has authored: Recipes from the Birthplace of American Cuisine, A Sweet Taste of History, and City Tavern Cookbook. In addition to his contributions in history, Chef Staib has opened more than 650 restaurants worldwide, authored 6 cookbooks, is a James Beard-nominated chef, and is currently the driving force behind Philadelphia's City Tavern, a recreation of the original 18th century tavern.

"Chef Walter Staib makes history interesting, fun, and tasty," said Lawrence Horwitz, Executive Director of Historic Hotels of America and Historic Hotels Worldwide. "We are delighted to recognize Chef Staib for his dedication and contribution to preserving and sharing America's stories about our nation's founding fathers and their favorite recipes through his books and A Taste of History."

"I may be best known for my work on television with A Taste of History or as a restauranteur at City Tavern, but hotels have been a very big part of my life starting from the very beginning," said Chef Walter Staib. "As a young man in Germany, I began my tutelage at Hotel Post; a hotel that was built in 1773 and hosted notable names in history such as Napoleon Bonaparte. As my career grew, I was called upon to consult for hospitality projects around the world. I helped design new resorts, all of which I am truly proud, but my dearest memories come from my work with historic hotels, such as the Parker House in Boston or Omni Royal Orleans. When I travel today, I prefer lodging at historic hotels with warmth and a story to tell and that experience cannot be created; it takes true history."

The 2017 Historic Hotels Awards of Excellence Ceremony and Gala Dinner will be held at The Omni Homestead Resort (1766) in Hot Springs, Virginia on September 28, 2017 at 6 pm. Tickets for the 2017 Awards Ceremony and Gala Dinner are $350 for one seat and $2,800 per table (for 8 seats). To register for the ceremony and gala, please contact Stephanie Calhoun

[email protected] or +1 202 772 8336. To view the video from the Historic Hotels 2016 Awards of Excellence Ceremony and Gala, click here.

About Chef Walter Staib

A third-generation restaurateur with more than four decades of culinary experience, Chef Walter Staib began his career in Europe, receiving formal training in many of Europe's finest hotels and restaurants. He was the first inductee into the Caribbean Culinary Hall of Fame.

Chef Staib's culinary excellence has earned him numerous other awards, among them the prestigious Chevalier de l'Ordre du Merite Agricole de la Republique Francaise, awarded in 1987. In 1996 he was also appointed the First Culinary Ambassador to the City of Philadelphia. In July 2006, he was named and remains the Culinary Ambassador to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The same year, he was also awarded the Seven Stars & Stripes Award for Excellence in Hospitality. German President Dr. Horst Kohler conferred the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany upon Staib in May 2007. He also won the National Restaurant Association Keystone Humanitarian Award (Pennsylvania) that year. In 2008, the German-American Chamber of Commerce, Inc. granted him the Award of Leadership & Service.

In 2009, he received Entree of the Year by Philadelphia Magazine. He was awarded the Silver Medal Award by the American Culinary Federation in 2010. The Colonial Society of Pennsylvania gave him the 2011 Contemporary Pioneer Award, and he was voted the Top Philadelphia Chef in the Conde Nast Cadillac Culinary Challenge in 2011. He was bestowed the Distinguished German-American of the Year in 2012 and won the regional 2012 Independent Restaurateur of the Year Award. In 2013, he received the WHYY Best of the Chefs Award, Best of the Chefs in America Award and the Charles Thomson Award given by the Harriton House foundation. In 2014, the Daughters of the American of Revolution awarded him the Patriot Award.

About City Tavern  Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The original City Tavern was a favorite meeting place of the Founding Fathers and unofficial site of the First Continental Congress. Originally built in 1773 and razed in 1854, the National Park Service built a replica of the building in 1975 as a working tavern. The existing operation provides a colonial themed restaurant and tavern atmosphere, with American Colonial style foods. The current operation provides a dining experience that immerses the customer in the historical atmosphere of the Colonial period. The customer can experience authentic 18th century American Culinary history. City Tavern offers a full 18th century lunch and dinner menu and serves ales of the revolution, and beers brewed with founding fathers' recipes. http://www.citytavern.com/

About Historic Hotels of America

Historic Hotels of America is the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation for recognizing, celebrating, and promoting the finest historic hotels in the United States of America. To be nominated and selected for membership in this prestigious program, a hotel must be at least 50 years old; designated by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior as a National Historic Landmark or listed in or eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places; and recognized as having historical significance. Of the more than 300 historic hotels inducted into Historic Hotels of America from 44 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, all historic hotels faithfully preserve their sense of authenticity, sense of place, and architectural integrity. For more information, please visit HistoricHotels.org

Heather Taylor

Manager, Marketing Communications

+1 202 772 8333

Historic Hotels of America
The Garrison Hotel in Dover, N.H. Joins Ascend Hotel Collection

The 66-room upscale boutique hotel was inspired by the rich history of Dover, N.H. and takes its name from the city's historic garrison buildings.

The Garrison Hotel, a new boutique property in the city of Dover, N.H., is the latest independent hotel to join the Ascend Hotel Collection from Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE: CHH), one of the world's leading hotel companies.

The 66-room upscale boutique hotel was inspired by the rich history of Dover, N.H. and takes its name from the city's historic garrison buildings. Throughout the hotel, the area's colorful history comes to life through design and decor. As soon as guests enter the lobby, they can learn more about Dover shipbuilding, mercantilism, and the colonial era through exhibits on display from The Woodman Institute, a Dover museum dedicated to preserving local history.

The Garrison offers travelers a range of guest room types, fitness center and indoor pool, business center, free wireless internet, free breakfast, pet-friendly accommodations, and local area recommendations to help make your stay more enjoyable. The hotel lobby features a communal table, comfortable sitting areas, a large fireplace, and an outdoor patio and lawn area with plans for a fire pit for year-round gathering.

The hotel is less than one mile from Dover's bustling downtown center and a short drive from the University of New Hampshire and downtown Portsmouth. The Garrison also serves as a pleasant stopping point along the way to the scenic White Mountains and Lakes Region. One hour from Boston, Portland, Maine, New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee, and within 30 minutes from New Hampshire beaches, Dover offers activities year round and is an ideal destination for travelers.
The U.S. hotel industry reported its 88th consecutive month of RevPAR growth (+2.8%) in June year-over-year comparisons, according to monthly data from STR, which also cited growth in occupancy (+0.7%) and ADR (+2.1%).

The U.S. hotel industry reported positive results in the three key performance metrics during June 2017, according to data from STR.

In a year-over-year comparison with June 2016, the industry reported the following:

Occupancy: +0.7% to 73.4%

Average daily rate (ADR): +2.1% to US$129.12

Revenue per available room (RevPAR): +2.8% to US$94.73

The industry sold more roomnights than any other June on record and achieved a record occupancy level for the month, said Jan Freitag, STRs senior VP for lodging insights.

Once again we were a bit surprised by the strength in room demand. Transient occupancy (bookings of less than 10 rooms) increased 1.4%, while Group occupancy (bookings of 10 or more rooms) was actually down 2.1%. So the current demand environment is driven by individual travelers, be they domestic or foreign summer travelers. As long as unemployment numbers remain low, and modest but healthy economic growth remains the norm, the hotel industry will continue to benefit.

RevPAR has now grown year over year for 88 consecutive months in the U.S.

Two Top 25 Markets posted double-digit growth in RevPAR for the month: Orlando, Florida (+11.5% to US$91.39), and Norfolk/Virginia Beach, Virginia (+10.7% to US$92.67).

Seattle, Washington, posted the largest growth in ADR (+7.8% to US$192.22).

Norfolk/Virginia Beach reported the largest increase in occupancy (+6.9% to 77.1%).

San Francisco/San Mateo, California, experienced the largest RevPAR decrease (-12.6% to US$197.97), due primarily to the steepest decline in ADR (-9.6% to US$225.58).

Houston, Texas, reported the largest drop in occupancy (-6.2% to 61.4%) and the only other double-digit decrease in RevPAR (-10.8% to US$60.22).

View monthly U.S. hotel performance review

STR provides clients from multiple market sectors with premium, global data benchmarking, analytics and marketplace insights. Founded in 1985, STR maintains a presence in 10 countries around the world with a corporate North American headquarters in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and an international headquarters in London, England. For more information, please visit str.com.
Are office dress codes still relevant?

Posted by Tim Newnham on Tuesday, 07-18-2017 7:44 pm

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Hi everyone - I found this and thought - hmmm. It is a great discussion point that I sure deserves a read - I originally found it here - have a read and share with you peeps. I am sure there are many opinions on this! Offices are getting more casual. The CEOs of some of the biggest companies in the world wear jeans and t-shirts black if you were Steve Jobs or grey if youre Mark Zuckerberg. Even themost conservative industrieslike banking are loosening up and allowing their employees to ditch the tie and the suit. Most companies dont have a formal dress code for many reasons: they want to attract top candidates in acompetitive job market. The millennial cohort, the biggest group of workers, may prefer a more relaxed work environment. Theres also the tech industrys influence (JPMorgan sent out a memo about relaxing their dress code after CEO Jamie Dimons visit to Silicon Valley). Finally, companies may think that no dress code allows employees to be creative with their dress...

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Berkshire Associates' Director of Regulatory Affairs to Deliver Three Dynamic Conference Presentations At The 2017 ILG National Conference In San Antonio

Posted by Press Releases on Wednesday, 07-19-2017 3:15 am

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Lynn Clements Pairs with Other Experts to Discuss Handling Pay Equity Issues, Using a Contingent Workforce, and Compliant Applicant Tracking.COLUMBIA, MD (PRWEB) JULY 18, 2017Berkshire announces today that Lynn Clements Director of Regulatory Affairs at Berkshire Associates, will collaborate with industry experts to discuss the latest issues concerning the federal contractor community on August 2 and 3 during the 2017 ILG National Conference in San Antonio, Texas. Lynn's workshop sessions include: The Compensation Interview: "Oh I didn't mean to say that" and Other SALSA Dance Moves to Try: In this interactive presentation, Lynn will present with Tim Orellano of The Human Resources Team. The two will discuss the dos and don'ts for answering the OFCCP's interview questions, and practical strategies that will allow companies to successfully explain and defend their pay practices to the government through role playing. This workshop takes place Wednesday, August 2 from 9:30 a.m....

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Clarity Wins Inavero's 2017 Best of Staffing Client and Talent Satisfaction Awards

Posted by Press Releases on Wednesday, 07-19-2017 3:11 am

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Earned by less than two percent of all staffing agencies in the U.S. and CanadaNEW YORK, NY (PRWEB) JULY 18, 2017Clarity, a leading staffing firm specializing in both temporary and permanent job placements, announced today they have won Inaveros Best of Staffing Client and Talent Awards for providing superior service to their clients and job seekers. Presented in partnership with CareerBuilder, Inaveros Best of Staffing winners have proven to be industry leaders in service quality based completely on the ratings given to them by their clients and the permanent and temporary employees theyve helped find jobs. Award winners make up less than two percent of all staffing agencies in the U.S. and Canada who earned the Best of Staffing Award for service excellence.Through Claritys commitment to their key tenets of transparent communication, tailored service and dedication to making the best quality matches, the firm received an average service satisfaction score of 9 out of 10 from all ...

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Mark Fischer Joins SRM Team as Vice President of Major and Complex Loss

Posted by Press Releases on Wednesday, 07-19-2017 3:08 am

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DSI Holdings is pleased to announce the hiring of Mark Fischer as Vice President of Major & Complex Loss to its ServiceMaster Recovery Management (SRM) business unit. Mark brings over two decades of experience in the large loss disaster recovery industry with much of that time spent developing businesses and servicing clients outside the U.S.CHICAGO, IL (PRWEB) JULY 18, 2017Mark returns to the ServiceMaster family after previously serving as Senior Director for International Expansion for ServiceMaster Global Holdings. In this capacity, Mark led the efforts to open new markets for the ServiceMaster Restore and Clean brands internationally.Prior to that, Mark held the role of Managing Director for SRM in which he played a key role in developing the standards, processes, training and promotion of ServiceMasters commercial large loss division. Additionally, Mark was instrumental in SRMs success during that time in its response to servicing clients abroad, most notably following the ...

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TWIN FALLS  Public officials came with questions Tuesday and left with answers from the attorney general.

About 40 city officials, school board members and journalists attended a workshop on open meeting laws and public record laws.

The open government workshop was held Tuesday at the Twin Falls Center for the Arts. The workshop was sponsored by the Times-News and held by Idahoans for Openness in Government. The group was formed in 2004 and is a nonprofit coalition for open government and freedom of information. There are similar coalitions in 44 other states.

Its the fourth workshop of its kind held in Twin Fall and the 40th presentation statewide.

The workshop centered on open meeting laws and public records law and what elected officials, media and the public need to know. The workshop was led by Attorney General Lawrence Wasden; Betsy Russell, president of IDOG and Deputy Attorney General Brian Kane.

Participants acted out several scenarios regarding opening meeting laws and public records requests were acted out in skits.

Open meeting laws allow you the right to observe Idaho law in action but it does not guarantee the right to participate, Kane said. Its like your ticket to the show. Its just a ticket to the show and a ticket to participate.

Kane said hes had some officials tell him public records law allows people to fish around for information. Thats true, Kane said, but there are also 100 exemptions within public record laws.
MOVE Guides CEO Brynne Kennedy Named a 2017 Workforce Magazine Game Changer

Posted by Press Releases on Wednesday, 07-19-2017 3:33 am

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Kennedy Recognized for Disrupting How Organizations Approach Global Talent Management and Mobile Workforce SAN FRANCISCO, CA and LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM (July 18, 2017) MOVE Guides, a technology leader that helps HR teams move their employees around the world, today announced that founder and CEO Brynne Kennedy has been named a 2017 Game Changer by Workforce magazine. The distinction honors Kennedy as one of the 25 leaders under the age of 40 making a significant mark on the HR profession. Kennedy founded MOVE Guides in 2012 after experiencing a series of cumbersome relocations, and went on to launch the first enterprise software platform and employee support model for managing the global mobile workforce. Since then, the company has experienced astronomical growth, nearly tripling in 2016 while earning significant market share in the U.S., Australia, Europe and Asia. Im thrilled to be one of Workforce magazines 2017 Game Changers and to be included among this elite group of ...

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Tags : ethical screening employment

What employers need to know about background check policy What if your employment screening company doesn't first positively identify your candidate? A case in point: Edwin Banner of the Des Moines Banners, comfortable but eternally bored in his plush Manhattan office on the 71st floor decided that the personal exploits intended on his next vacation needed a little more pizazz. Sixteen years after his second conviction for rape of a minor under the age of 14, and vowing to himself never to ply his craft in such a manner as to get caught again, Ed was getting restless and needed more than just the thrill of purposefully attacking defenseless children  he needed recognition. Criminal Psychologists and FBI Profilers call this progression of behavior escalating. Thank goodness Ed got bored with his job because if he hadnt, his intended ninth victim like the eight before them, would have gone silent, looking up from a watery grave in the deepest one of his hometowns four nearby lakes. In addition to Eds relentless pursuit of something more tangible with regard to his horrifying sexual appetite, and what led to his ultimate undoing, was Eds never-ending quest for bigger money and more grandiose professional recognition, which fortunately, for at least one little girl in a certain Southwestern city, drove Ed to seek employment with my client. Notwithstanding the clients...
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Montreal and Abuja, 18 July 2017  Opening the ICAO Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems Symposium in Abuja yesterday, ICAO Council President Dr. Olumuyiwa Benard Aliu stressed the importance of a globally coherent regulatory framework for the management of unmanned air traffic.



If you consider a company envisaging a global drone fleet to enhance its deliveries, the value of having a myriad of domestic national regulations aligned via globally harmonized international standards becomes clearly apparent, President Aliu remarked.



He also stressed the complexity of this task, notably in terms of the tremendous diversity of types and applications of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), and the need to place safety first. States are facing increasing pressure to open the door widely for unmanned aircraft, and while their socio-economic benefits seem clear, we must avoid the tendency to rush headlong into unmanned aircraft system operational frameworks which have not benefitted from all due diligence and the careful regard required for existing airspace users.



The ICAO RPAS Symposium provided an important and timely opportunity for operators and regulators to contribute their expertise to the airspace management framework ICAO will be developing. The UN specialized agency recently requested national governments, industry, academia and other stakeholders to submit concept proposals as of 15 July, and these will be reviewed by ICAOs UAS Advisory Group (UAS-AG) to assess their validity. Selected submissions will then be presented at DroneEnable, ICAOs upcoming UAS Industry Symposium.



In making these points, President Aliu noted that the implementation of the regulations demanded by UAS operations will likely increase the burden on States in terms of human resources. He highlighted ICAOs efforts to address this challenge, pointing in particular to its current collaboration with the African Civil Aviation Commission (AFCAC) on the ICAO Human Resources Development Fund (HRDF).



Dr. Aliu further expressed his optimism about UAS operations and the contributions they will make to socio-economic development in Africa and around the world.



We are already seeing new businesses and humanitarian operations leveraging these technologies and the opportunities they offer. This is occurring in ways that we had not envisioned even just a decade ago, and this evolution and innovation will only continue as more and more people allow their imaginations to take off, literally and figuratively, he said.

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 Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems Symposium  Africa and Indian Ocean

DRONE ENABLE, ICAO's Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Industry Symposium

ICAO's No Country Left Behind initiative

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 (mobile)

Twitter: @wraillantclark

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/raillantclark/




London, July 19 (IBNS): A major international event aimed at transforming how environmental and conservation issues are tackled in Bangladesh will be held in the UK on Thursday.

Birmingham City University will be hosting the Build Bangladesh: Environmental Education is a Basic Human Right event, which will bring together teachers, researchers and government representatives from across the globe to examine how climate change is taught in Bangladesh.



Bangladesh is one of the worlds most vulnerable countries to natural disasters due to its geographical location, flat, low-lying landscape, dense population, high levels of poverty and low levels of literacy.



But climate change is often overlooked, despite the country experiencing annual natural disasters, and the Build Bangladesh project aims to address this by connecting the countrys policy makers and educators with academics at Birmingham City University and the University of New South Wales.



The event will include a workshop with the aim of creating a new educational process for Bangladesh and transforming the Bangladesh governments approach to environmental issues.



It targets finding ways of equipping residents with the knowledge to help the country become more self-sufficient and make the best possible use of its natural resources.



Dr Lynsey Melville, Reader in Bioenergy and Biorefining at Birmingham City University, said: Education is a basic human right. According to UNICEF more than 75 million children across 35 of the poorest countries require more educational support.



It is important that these children and their communities have a sound understanding of their environment and how to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change to secure their future well-being and economic growth. The University is engaged in both research and teaching activities to support this.



From research into sustainable energy and waste management practices to empowering future engineers to think differently about how we address the impacts of climate change with communities in developing countries.



This workshop brings together some of the key actors across the UK to explore best practice in environmental education at the primary level and the outcomes of the workshop will inform a policy brief to be presented to the Bangladesh government.

Bangladesh is listed as one of seven of the worlds climate change hotspots, with natural disasters damaging the countrys development.

Results from the workshop will be relayed to the Bangladeshi government and officials in a bid to create a new form of education, to help residents fight against the issues created by climate change.

Speakers on the day will include Birmingham City Universitys Dr Lynsey Melville and Mr. Md. Nazmul Quaunine Hon. High Commissioner for Bangladesh in the UK.
Image: Internet Wallpaper

New York, July 19 (IBNS): A month before they are born, fetuses carried by American mothers-to-be can distinguish between someone speaking to them in English and Japanese.

Using noninvasive sensing technology from the University of Kansas Medical Center for the first time for this purpose, a group of researchers from KUs Department of Linguistics has shown this in utero language discrimination.

Their study, published in the journal NeuroReport, has implications for fetal research in other fields, the lead author says.

Research suggests that human language development may start really early  a few days after birth, said Utako Minai, associate professor of linguistics and team leader for the study. Babies a few days old have been shown to be sensitive to the rhythmic differences between languages.

Previous studies have demonstrated this by measuring changes in babies behavior; for example, by measuring whether babies change the rate of sucking on a pacifier when the speech changes from one language to a different language with different rhythmic properties.

This early discrimination led us to wonder when childrens sensitivity to the rhythmic properties of language emerges, including whether it may, in fact, emerge before birth, Minai said. Fetuses can hear things, including speech, in the womb. Its muffled, like the adults talking in a Peanuts cartoon, but the rhythm of the language should be preserved and available for the fetus to hear, even though the speech is muffled.

Minai said there was already a study that suggested fetuses could discriminate between different types of language, based on rhythmic patterns, but none using the more accurate device available at the Hoglund Brain Imaging Center at KU Medical Center called a magnetocardiogram (MCG).

The previous study used ultrasound to see whether fetuses recognized changes in language by measuring changes in fetal heart rate, Minai said. The speech sounds that were presented to the fetus in the two different languages were spoken by two different people in that study. They found that the fetuses were sensitive to the change in speech sounds, but it was not clear if the fetuses were sensitive to the differences in language or the differences in speaker, so we wanted to control for that factor by having the speech sounds in the two languages spoken by the same person.

Two dozen women, averaging roughly eight months pregnant, were examined using the MCG.

Kathleen Gustafson, a research associate professor in the Department of Neurology at the medical centers Hoglund Brain Imaging Center, was part of the investigator team.

We have one of two dedicated fetal biomagnetometers in the United States, Gustafson said. It fits over the maternal abdomen and detects tiny magnetic fields that surround electrical currents from the maternal and fetal bodies.

That includes, Gustafson said, heartbeats, breathing and other body movements.

The biomagnetometer is more sensitive than ultrasound to the beat-to-beat changes in heart rate, she said. Obviously, the heart doesnt hear, so if the baby responds to the language change by altering heart rate, the response would be directed by the brain.

Which is exactly what the recent study found.

The fetal brain is developing rapidly and forming networks, Gustafson said. The intrauterine environment is a noisy place. The fetus is exposed to maternal gut sounds, her heartbeats and voice, as well as external sounds. Without exposure to sound, the auditory cortex wouldnt get enough stimulation to develop properly. This study gives evidence that some of that development is linked to language.

Minai had a bilingual speaker make two recordings, one each in English and Japanese, to be played in succession to the fetus. English and Japanese are argued to be rhythmically distinctive. English speech has a dynamic rhythmic structure resembling Morse code signals, while Japanese has a more regular-paced rhythmic structure.

Sure enough, the fetal heart rates changed when they heard the unfamiliar, rhythmically distinct language (Japanese) after having heard a passage of English speech, while their heart rates did not change when they were presented with a second passage of English instead of a passage in Japanese.

The results came out nicely, with strong statistical support, Minai said. These results suggest that language development may indeed start in utero. Fetuses are tuning their ears to the language they are going to acquire even before they are born, based on the speech signals available to them in utero. Prenatal sensitivity to the rhythmic properties of language may provide children with one of the very first building blocks in acquiring language.

We think it is an extremely exciting finding for basic science research on language, Minai said. We can also see the potential for this finding to apply to other fields.

The study was funded by a National Institutes of Health Clinical and Translational Science Award grant awarded to the KU Medical Center. In addition to Minai and Gustafson, linguistics professors Robert Fiorentino, Allard Jongman and Joan Sereno worked together on the research project.
Kolkata, July 19 (IBNS): Skipper Foundation, the CSR and philanthropic arm of Skipper Group, brings around 700 girl children under the ambit of its CSR programmes aBETI PADHAO ABHIYAANa.

The occasion was graced by Keshari Nath Tripathy, Governor of West Bengal, as the Guest of Honour, Vivek Gupta, Member of Parliament, Hari Krishan Chowdhury, philanthropist and educationist, Sajan Kumar Bansal, Managing Director, Skipper Limited, Brahamananda ji Agarwal, Pashimbangal Marwari Shiksha Kosh, Ram Gopal Bansal. Master Kautilya Pandit, the 9-year-old world famous Google Boy made a special appearance to entertain the invitees.



Through a formal function organised at G.D. Birla Auditorium, educational scholarships were distributed today to around 700 girl children from 9 schools from Kolkata as a part of a noble endeavour to support the education of our daughters and sisters for the Right to Education. The children were selected by the schools through a need-based selection process. The occasion was inaugurated by our honorable Governor through a lamp lighting ceremony.

Expressing his immense delight, Vivek Gupta, Member of Parliament, stated, We are glad to be associated with such a cause. We have been always supporting individuals or corporates who have taken a step forward in the national mission of basic Right to Education.

With a renewed vigour Hari Krishan Chowdhury, renowned philanthropist and educationist said, I have my own educational institution in Haryana. It is extremely encouraging to witness Skipper Foundation participating and contributing to a social cause for the betterment of our next generation. Such a noble way of helping a girl child is truly an eye opener.

Brahamananda ji Agarwal, said, Our association with Skipper is more than 25 years long. Skipper has a long track-record of undertaking various kinds of social and charitable activities across different sections of the society covering various geographical areas. Today we are glad to witness a successful execution of a long nurtured thought.

Speaking on the occasion, Sajan Kumar Bansal, Managing Director, Skipper Limited said, We at Skipper Foundation believe that empowerment of an individual is possible only if India reads and learns. We want to extend the coverage of these programmes to a larger number of beneficiaries across the State of West Bengal and subsequently beyond the limits of the State to other parts of the country. We hope to receive encouraging response from teachers, students and their parents with a thought to reach out to larger number of students trying to bring a difference to their pursuit of their dreams.
New Delhi, Jul 19 (IBNS): India's Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar told a parliamentary panel on Wednesday that the China-India standoff in Doklam has has been blown out of proportion, reports said.

Briefing the members, he said that the MEA was trying to thaw the tension diplomatically and that the situation worsened due to excessive jingoism from certain sections in the country.

He also said that Delhi was constantly monitoring the situation with Beijing, keeping Thimpu in the loop.

Attending the meeting, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi questioned if the exacerbated situation in Kashmir was India's diplomatic failure.

Answering another question from Gandhi on China's increasing influence on its neighbours, Jaishankar said that it was the strategy of every country to increase its footprints and a similar approach had been adopted by Delhi too.
New Delhi, July 19 (IBNS): The Opposition attacked the ruling BJP-led NDA government in Parliament on Wednesday raising the farmer's issue that rocked Madhya Pradesh several weeks ago after a police firing on agitating peasants left several dead.

Farmers from the state of Madhya Pradesh protested for several weeks over the demands of better crop price and loan waive, but the whole scenario took a violent turn after police opened the fire, that led to the death of six farmers in Mandsaur.

Besides the Congress, Janata Dal (United) leader Sharad Yadav said that the government fired bullets instead of giving the compensation to the farmers.

While interacting with the media, Congress leader Ghumlam Navi Azad brought the issue of Jammu and Kashmir unrest.

He referred to Pakistan's ceasefire violation across the Line of Control in Balakote, which occurred just a day ago.

Attacking the government, Azad said: "The government is unable to control the situation in Jammu and Kashmir. So, all the claims made by the government that the situation is alright, are nothing but lies."

On Tuesday, the BSP chief Mayawati tried to bring the issue of the atrocities against the Dalits and later resigned after she was interrupted by the Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha.

However, the government requested all political parties on Wednesday to not engage in stalling the proceedings of the house.
Shimla, July 19 (IBNS): Massive protests continued throughout Himachal Pradesh on Wednesday as angry people hit the street as the rape and murder of a 16-year-old school girl in the state capital Shimla few days ago sent a shockwave in the state, media reports said.

The incident also got a bizarre twist on Tuesday when a Nepalese labourer accused in the case was killed allegedly by another accused in the Kotkhai Police Station.

On Wednesday people took to the street in many places of the state, including Shimla and Gumma, around 50 km off the capital to vent their ire.

The father of the victim, who also has an elder daughter, addressed the gathering and said: "I thank each one of you  young, old, women and children, who have made this fight as their own battle to pressurise the government for ordering a CBI probe."

"I sincerely hope that CBI will do justice, start the investigations immediately and get the guilty punished. My only request is that guilty should not be spared and innocent should not be framed" he added.

Agitators, who were protesting against the administration for shielding the culprits, demanded a fast track CBI probe.

Balakram Chauhan, a retired IB officer, called the protest as completely non-political, though the Left Party members raised their slogans against the police. even after the crowd dispersed.

Chauhan said: "Its a common cause as an innocent minor girl  our daughter  has lost her life at the hands of a few people, who resorted to the most shameful and barbaric act. We have no political agenda .Only goal is to build pressure on the government and also the investigating agency to make the probe time-bound."

The retired IB officer, who is the head of the Joint Action Committee fighting for justice, ensured that they will decide the next course of the protest after consulting the victim's family and urge CBI to provide justice within a week's time.

A special bench of the Himachal Pradesh High Court will hear a PIL related to the case on Wednesday.

Following the killing, the entire staff of the Kotkhai Police Station has been shifted and a judicial enquiry into the custodial death has been recommended.

Additional police force has been rushed to Kotkhai to tackle the law and order situation as it is feared that the incident would add fuel to the public rage over the rape incident.

The Class X student was raped and murdered at the Kotkhai area of Shimla district on July four after she took a lift in a vehicle driven by one of the accused,

The body of the victim was recovered from the nearby Halila forest two days later. Six persons were arrested in connection with the case.

Meanwhile, Rajendr alias Raju, one of the accused in the case on Tuesday night,

Police said Suraj Singh, one of the accused in the case, was allegedly killed by a co-accused, Rajender, alias is Raju, inside the jail.

Police said Raju had heated exchanges with Suraj which resulted in a scuffle. Raju then allegedly banged Suraj's head against a wall and he died.

Image: File picture of Shimla City
New Delhi, July 18 (IBNS): CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury on Wednesday doubted the central government's commitment towards national security as the "defence ministry is mostly run by part timers."

In a tweet, Yechury said: "25.3% of Modi govt so far (292 days out of 1148) has been with a part-time Defence minister. Is this govt's commitment to national security?"

25.3% of Modi govt so far (292 days out of 1148) has been with a part-time Defence minister. Is this govt's commitment to national security?  Sitaram Yechury (@SitaramYechury) July 19, 2017

Yechury said that the defence ministry under Modi government ran by part timers for around 25% of the total number of days of the tenure.

Presently, the ministry is in charge of the finance minister Arun Jaitley, who assumed the office after his predecessor Manohar Parikkar resigned.

Parikkar resigned to become the Goa chief minister this year.

Jaitley earlier also served as the defence minister for few months apart from finance, after Modi government came to power.

Yehchury's concern probably came after India's current standoff with China and the perpetual conflict with Pakistan.

The standoff started following a violation by the Chinese government, who started building a road in the Dongland area of Sikkim Sector.

The action is a violation of a 2012 agreement between New Delhi and Beijing.
Banswara, July 19 (IBNS): Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday attacked the Centre and said it is not concerned about the demands of the poor farmers of the nation.

Attacking the government over its midnight Parliament session to launch the GST on July 1, Rahul Gandhi said the government is not ready to discuss the issue of farmers for a minute.

"Parliament can open at midnight for GST but it cannot raise issue of farmers' plight for a minute," Gandhi said while addressing at the Kisan Aakrosh Rally here.

"Today in LS we wanted to speak on farmers' issues, even PM was present, but we were not allowed to do so," he said.

He said the Centre does not care about the poor.

Attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Central government, Gandhi said: "Big traders will have no issues with the GST. They can employ 10 accountants to fill required forms. But small traders of the country are going to suffer."

"They don't care about small businessmen, labourers, Dalits, they don't care what happens to them," he said.

Image: Office of RG Twitter page
Guwahati, July 19 (IBNS): A new twist was added in the ongoing political drama in Nagaland as TR Zeliang on Wednesday took oath as the Chief Minister of the north eastern Indian state after Governor PB Acharya dismissed former CM Shurhozelie Liezietsu after he failed to turn up in the special emergent session of the state assembly to take a floor test.

After Liezietsu failed to turn up for floor test, Governor Acharya appointed TR Zeliang as the new CM of Nagaland.

He was sworn in as the new CM at around 3 pm on Wednesday at Darbar Hall, Raj Bhavan in Kohima.



Governor PB Acharya administered oath to Zeliang.



The governor has asked Zeliang, who claimed to support of 47 legislators, to prove his majority by July 22.



Meanhile, Zeliang said in the letter sent to the Governor that he will prove his majority on July 20.



Governor had taken the decision to appoint Zeliang as the new CM after Nagaland state assembly speaker Imtiwapang Aier submitted his report to the Governor and stating that former CM Liezietsu didnt turn up in the special emergent session of the state assembly on Wednesday morning.

Zeliang, who was stepped down in February last in this year following large scale of violence created as well as several groups opposed to hold the civic poll in the state with 33 per cent reservation for women.



On the other hand, the Naga Peoples Front (NPF) on Wednesday had expelled Zeliang from the party for a period of 6 years.

(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)
Srinagar, July 19 (IBNS): The Indian Army on Wednesday paid homage to soldier killed in sniper fire from Pakistan in Nowgam area of north Kashmiras Kupwara district on Tuesday.

Lt Gen JS Sandhu, Chinar Corps Commander and all ranks paid homage to the soldier during a ceremony at BB Cant in Srinagar.

In a show of solidarity, officials of other security agencies also joined in paying their last respects to the deceased soldier, said a statement, issued by the army.

Rifleman Bimal Sinjali sustained bullet injuries due to enemy fire across the Line of Control while he was deployed at a forward post in Naugam Sector, it said.

Sinjali (21) had joined Army in 2015 and hailed from Village Sirukhark in Baglung, Nepal.

He is survived by his wife Yashoda Sinjali and a one-year- old boy.

His mortal remains will be flown for last rites to Subathu, HP, where he would be laid to rest with full military honours.

"In this hour of grief, the Army stands in solidarity with the bereaved family of the martyr and remains committed to their dignity and wellbeing," the spokesman added.

(Reporting by Saleem Iqbal Qadri)


New Delhi, July 19 (IBNS): Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav claimed that China is gearing up to attack India in collaboration with Pakistan.

Speaking in the Parliament, Yadav said: "China has joined hands with Pakistan. It has made entire preparation to attack India."

He even claimed that inorder to attack India, China has even 'buried nuclear weapons' in Pakistan.

Yadav made the remarks amid growing tension between the neighbouring nations.

India's Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar told a parliamentary panel on Wednesday that the China-India standoff in Doklam has has been blown out of proportion, reports said.

Briefing the members, he said that the MEA was trying to thaw the tension diplomatically and that the situation worsened due to excessive jingoism from certain sections in the country.

He also said that Delhi was constantly monitoring the situation with Beijing, keeping Thimpu in the loop.

Attending the meeting, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi questioned if the exacerbated situation in Kashmir was India's diplomatic failure.

Answering another question from Gandhi on China's increasing influence on its neighbours, Jaishankar said that it was the strategy of every country to increase its footprints and a similar approach had been adopted by Delhi too.
Forget about deporting every illegal immigrant. Dont bother nagging Mexico to pay for a wall that we dont need anyway. On second thought, lets keep the One China policy. President Donald Trumps best ideas invariably involve abandoning his extreme, unworkable and dangerous ones. The latest example concerns a reversal on his threats to pull out of or significantly redo the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he falsely claimed was responsible for losing millions of U.S. jobs.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The blueprint for a new Nafta shows the White House trying to navigate the shoals of striking a deal with its closest trading partners that can pass in U.S. Congress. It contains nods to Mr. Trumps base of voters fearful and angry over lost U.S. manufacturing jobsincluding the broad objective for reducing the U.S. trade deficit with Nafta countries and an effort to retain rules that favor U.S. firms in government procurement.

The plan also backs an unspecified mechanism to prevent countries from manipulating their currencies for trade advantage, an issue of increasing concern among lawmakers and some economists, though one less central to U.S. trade ties with Mexico and Canada. It also includes provisions meant to challenge Mexico on labor and environmental issues.

In other words, its a nothing-burger. At least that was the Canadian press reaction: The NAFTAs new objectives under the Trump administrationoffered in an 18-page summary released Monday by the U.S. Trade Representatives Officeare surprisingly tame, according to international trade and customs experts. The report added, They see as downright sensible the U.S. proposals calling for regulatory co-operation, the addition of a chapter to address the digital economy, raising the duty-free spending limit for Canadians, and even the scrapping of a dispute resolution mechanism. One trade guru is quoted as saying it is nothing close to tearing up the NAFTA and doesnt throw a lot of red meat for the protectionist crowd. Another noted, Notwithstanding some protectionist objectives and measures announced in the document, its actually something that Canada and Mexico can work with.

Reaction from Mexico was measured as well, as reported in Fortune:

Mexicos economy ministry said in a statement it would work to achieve a constructive negotiation process that will allow trade and investment flows to increase and consolidates cooperation and economic integration to strengthen North American competitiveness.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior Mexican government official said the list of priorities was not as bad as I was expecting and welcomed that the United States was not pushing to impose punitive tariffs, as Trump has threatened.

The Wall Street Journal sees things the same way. The quick Kremlinology says its the globalists, led by Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. president running the White House National Economic Council, it reported. That said, the battle isnt over. Many of the provisions remain vague. And Mr. Trump has reserved the right to pull out altogether-the goal of his nationalist advisers-if hes not pleased with the final result.

If hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue, then a Trumpkin trade policy is a nod to the benefits of free trade and the danger of trade wars. As frustrating as it might be to see Trump win office by touting nonsensical trade policy, it will be a relief if it turns out that he never meant what he saidor more likely, has no idea how trade policy should work.
Kolkata, Jul 19 (IBNS): In a major development in its ongoing investigation into Narada sting, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday served notices to three West Bengal ministers- Subrata Mukherjee, Suvendu Adhikari and Firhad Bobby Hakim, for interrogation, sources confirmed.

ED summons three Narada-tainted TMC ministers in West Bengal

According to reports, the lawmakers of the state's ruling party have been asked to appear at ED office at CGO Complex in Kolkata's Salt Lake area at the earliest.

The Central economic intelligence agency also sent its second summon to Kolkata Mayor and state fire minister Sovan Chatterjee, asking him to appear before it on July 25.

Meanwhile, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Wednesday quizzed Narada News's CEO Mathew Samuel for nearly three hours in connection with the same case in Kolkata and the senior journalist has been asked to stay in the city for next four days for more interrogation.

A CBI source claimed that the probe agency is planning to reconstruct the entire sting operation by next few days with the help of Mathew Samuel.

Since Mar 14 last year, news portal- Narada News- released several sting operation footage, where TMC's leaders, ministers, MPs and MLAs were allegedly taking bribes.

From the beginning, TMC leaderships had claimed that the sting footage was doctored and conspiracy of oppositions.

After getting direction from the Calcutta High Court and Supreme Court, the CBI has started probe into the case.

Earlier on April 17, the investigation agency registered an FIR in connection with the case under several non-bailable sections against 12 influential leaders, cabinet ministers, MLAs and MPs of TMC and one senior IPS officer, who were seen taking bribes in the sting footage, reports said.

Besides CBI, the Enforcement Directorate (ED), has registered a money laundering case in Narada sting and it's currently investigating the case.

(Reporting by Deepayan Sinha)


Mumbai, July 19 (IBNS): Actor Kartik Aaryan has been in the news off late for all the right reasons.

He's being approached by ace filmmakers and some exciting scripts are coming his way.

However the actor has not confirmed anything yet but one thing is sure that he's all set to begin shooting for his next film - Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety.

The actor left for Dubai recently to begin shooting for Luv Ranjan's next.

This is his fourth film with the director. Kartik who is super active on social media, took to Instagram and Twitter to share his travel pictures where we see him in his casuals and en route Dubai.



Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety announced their film title last month and it instantly caught everyone's attention.

The quirky title has worked wonders for Kartik's fans and soon people began talking about it and it went viral.
Mumbai, July 19 (IBNS): Bollywood lovebirds Bipasha Basu and her husband Karan Singh Grover are busy with their holidays in the US.

Bipasha has continuously shared images from her trip on social media to keep her fans updated.

Miami has a natural rhythm... loving itYYai @thelabellife A post shared by bipashabasusinghgrover (@bipashabasu) on Jul 18, 2017 at 3:53pm PDT

As per her Instagram post, Bipasha and Karan even visited the Universal Studios in the US recently.

Yay!! We did pretty much everything in one day:) Long day at the Universal studios ai Didi @sonibasu , @vi_basu and little Nia ..we missed you guys here today. #monkeylove A post shared by bipashabasusinghgrover (@bipashabasu) on Jul 17, 2017 at 4:17pm PDT

They are currently in Miami.

The best travel outfit ever from @falgunishanepeacockindia for @thelabellife ai Fun and Comfy ai A post shared by bipashabasusinghgrover (@bipashabasu) on Jul 18, 2017 at 3:47pm PDT

The power couple visited the US to attend the IIFA awards recently.

Since then they have been travelling in the country and spending some nice time together.

Image: Bipasha Basu Instagram page
Kolkata, Jul 19 (IBNS): Kolkata is the only city where she was asked about South African literature, about major art galleries and museums, on her multi-city tour in India, said Hanneli Slabber, Country Manager India, South African Tourism, at a recent meeting in Kolkata.

Here people seem keen to make the maximum use of their time while visiting South Africa, she said.

South African Tourism concluded the seventh edition of its annual travel trade training session in Kolkata on Tuesday.

Aimed at equipping travel agents with relevant tips to sell the destination, 'Learn South Africa' (Learn SA) was a 17-city training programme covering urban metros as well as tier II and III markets.

According to reports, Indian leisure visitor numbers to South Africa surged 21.7 per cent during 2016 to close at an arrivals figure of 95,377 78,385 in 2015) and eighth among South Africa's international source markets.

Overall spend by Indians (only in-country on-tour spends) in 2016 crossed 1,2 billion ZAR (South African Rand).

"2016 was a milestone year for us at South African Tourism in India and we are determined o set new benchmarks for the industry as well as ourselves by making 2017 bigger and better," said Slabber.

According to Slabber, South Africa Tourism has seen a substantial increase in the number of visitors from Kolkata over the past five years.

Kolkata has been one of the most rapidly growing source markets driving tourist traffic to South Africa, said Slabber.

Going by the 2017 New World Wealth Report, Kolkata localities Ballygunge and Alipore alone have emerged as the most affluent in India with the total wealth in Kolkata amounting to nearly $290 billion. Kolkata is also home to 9600 millionaires  which is more than Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai or Gurgaon.



The report has encouraged South African Tourism to tap into the HNI (High net worth individual) market of Kolkata through travel agent training programme.

Devesh Kumar Agarwal, Chairman - Eastern Region, Travel Agents Association of India (TAAI) said that besides West Bengal, their member travel agencies from Assam and Odisha have also seen an increased interest among customers regarding travelling to South Africa.

"Some of our members from Odisha have successfully marketed MICE travel to South Africa," he said.

Said Bettaiah Lokesh, Hon. Secretary General, TAAI, "With South African Tourism, this is the second time that we have undertaken this training. We are happy that the trade is getting exclusive marketing tips from the SAT team and stakeholders from SA who have come to India."

Learn SA helps ensure that Indian travel agents know how to choose the best quality hotels for their customers budget and needs. It also teaches them how to choose the best in-destination partners to escort the traveler while on holiday. It also gives them updates about new things to see and do in South Africa and basics like visa and logistical know-how to ensure that travelers are catered to efficiently, said Slabber.

South Africa is the perfect destination for the well-travelled Kolkatite with its variety of distinctive attractions, unforgettable experiences, world-class facilities and excellent infrastructure, said Slabber.

Apart from regular destinations such as Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and Kruger National Park , South Africa Tourism is keen to promote lesser-known destinations such as Oudtshoorn, Knysna, Plettenberg Bay, Port Elizabeth and the Drakensberg region.

One of the key problems as many agents pointed out was connectivity.

According to Hanneli Slabber, efforts are on to increase seat capacity on relevant flight routes ex-Kolkata. Presently, Kolkata is connected to South African cities by Emirates, Ethiopian Airlines, Etihad Airways, Jet Airways and Air Seychelles which fly via their respective hubs and domestic India connections.



The Rand (ZAR)-Rupee exchange rate has been relatively favorable for the India market. Since the South Africa product quote comes in ZAR and not US dollars, Indian travelers are able to buy more experiences and activities for less money thus, making South Africa a value-for-money destination, emphasised Slabber.

(Reporting by Uttara Gangopadhyay)
Guwahati, July 19 (IBNS) : Tourism and hospitality professionals from East India will soon gather under one roof to recognise and honour the best talents from the industry at the East-India Travel Awards 2017.

The glittering award ceremony, now in its fourth edition, will be held at Radisson Blu Hotel Guwahati on July 26.



The formal black-tie ceremony will have over 120 stalwarts from the industry attending the event and cheering for their colleagues.

India Travel Awards is an all-India platform to recognise the regional achievers of the tourism and hospitality industry, who have worked steadfastly towards empowering the tourism world.

To ensure fair and unbiased judgment, this one-of-a-kind award follows a unique system of jury judgment and internet voting.



Dignitaries from the travel and hospitality industry will grace the occasion with their presence.



SanJeet, Mentor, India Travel Awards said that, owing to the hard work and diligence of the members of the fraternity, the world of tourism has reached these heights today.



India Travel Awards is our endeavor to recognise the silent players who have made a difference through their consistent effort, SanJeet said.



India Travel Awards supports, promotes and develops the Indian travel and tourism industry by identifying and rewarding excellence and inspiring its practitioners to continuously raise the standards of their products and service offerings.

Based on a unique system of jury judgment and voting, these awards will be fair and unbiased, finally culminating in a formal black-tie ceremony that is glitzy, glamorous and graced by the who's who of the travel industry.



India Travel Awards is supported by Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, and is hailed as one of the most esteemed awards in the tourism industry of the country.



The awards are also braced by esteemed trade bodies like Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA), Association of Domestic Tour Operators of India (ADTOI), Outbound Tour Operators Association of India (OTOAI), Travel Agents Federation of India (TAFI) and IATA Agents (IAAI).

India Travel Awards runs and governs a comprehensive programme across a range of awards developed to recognise the industry's most vital sectors and product offerings. Awards are presented across four regions: South, East, West and North.

The awardees are recognised throughout the year, being regularly featured by our travel media partners.

(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)
New York, July 19(Just Earth News): United Nations, the Republic of Congo's Government and humanitarian partners on Tuesday appealed for $23.7 million to aid Congolese in the area of southern Brazzaville known as athe Poola, where fighting and insecurity has displaced one out of every three people.

The most pressing humanitarian needs are related to food security, nutrition, living conditions, and access to basic health services, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in the announcement.

People in the Pool are also vulnerable to attacks, threats, sexual violence, loss or family separation, OCHA said, stressing the need for protection.

The requested funding  which was made by national authorities, the UN and 16 aid partners  would provide emergency humanitarian aid to 138,000 people for the next six months.

Since the time that the violence began in April of last year, more than half of the families in the Pool are hungry, with up to 20 per cent of children under five acutely malnourished.

Access to health care, education and any market products is limited, OCHA said. Facilities for people who are displaced are virtually non-existent.

Photo: UNHCR/C.Schmitt

Source: www.justearthnews.com
New York, July 19(Just Earth News): Speaking to the media following his briefing to the United Nations Security Council, the Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Cyprus, Espen Barth Eide, urged all sides to work collectively and to build on the achievements thus far.

Not the time to engage in a blame game. There is more than enough of that going around, said Eide, speaking to the media at a press stakeout.

We have to admit that there was a collective failure at stitching together a deal in Crans-Montana, he added, noting the location of the most recent talks.

Recalling UN efforts there, including those by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Eide said that only once all issues on the table are settled, could it be said that a deal concerning the island has been reached.

In his remarks, the Special Adviser also highlighted that the UN would always remain available and at the disposal of the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders to facilitate the process and noted that the talks are led by the leaders and owned by them.

Referring to the Secretary-General's report concerning Cyprus, Eide said: We hope [the leaders] will not jump to conclusions [and that] they reflect seriously on what can be done now, after the Conference on Cyprus failed.

Given a number of developments in and around the island, it is crucial that the reflection is done in the spirit of understand and comprise, rather than by exasperating the differences, he stated

Speaking prior to Eide, Liu Jieyi, the Ambassador and Permanent Representative of China to the UN and the Chair of the Security Council for the month of July, announced that the Council members expressed their intention to renew the mandate of the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus for a further period of six months.

[The members also] urged the sides to sustain their commitment to a settlement [on the island] and maintain the gains achieved and reflect on the best way to re-start the process, he said.

In addition to Ambassador Liu and Eide, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Cyprus, Elizabeth Spehar, also spoke at the stakeout, expressing her appreciation to the Security Council for its support.

UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferre

Source: www.justearthnews.com
New York, July 19(Just Earth News): The United Nations human rights arm on Tuesday voiced deep concern for the safety of individuals taken prisoner by members of the Libyan army after recent fighting in Benghazi, noting that they may be at imminent risk of torture and even summary execution.

Our concern is based on reports suggesting the involvement of the Special Forces, a unit aligned with the LNA [Libyan National Army], and in particular their field commander, Mahmoud al-Werfalli, in torturing detainees and summarily executing at least 10 captured men, Liz Throssell, a spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), told journalists at a media briefing in Geneva on Tuesday.

We urge the LNA to ensure there is a full, impartial investigation into these allegations and also call on the group to suspend al-Werfalli from his duties as a Special Forces field commander pending the conclusion of such an investigation, she added.

According to OHCHR, on multiple occasions, there have been videos circulating on social media which allegedly show al-Werfalli executing kneeling men, or ordering them shot.

The latest video, which was posted on social media this month, seems to shows LNA fighters kicking and taunting prisoners, while al-Werfalli is apparently heard accusing two men who have their hands tied behind their backs of belonging to terrorist groups, added the OHCHR spokesperson.

The fight against terrorism cannot be used to justify summary executions or other grave violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, she stressed.

Also at the briefing, Throssell stated that, in March, the LNA announced investigations into alleged rights abuses but added that it has not shared any information regarding the status of the inquiries.

Photo: UNSMIL/Iason Athanasiadis

Source: www.justearthnews.com
New York, July 19(Just Earth News): Marking what would have been Nelson Mandelaas 99th birthday, the United Nations on Tuesday honoured his lifetime of service and dedication to justice and equality.

The best tribute we can pay this great man is not words or in ceremonies, but actions that improve our world, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a meeting of the General Assembly on the occasion of Nelson Mandela International Day.

Observed annually on 18 July, the Day is meant to inspire people all over the world to make a positive difference in their communities by volunteering at least 67 minutes of their time in recognition of Mandelas 67 years of public service.

Each of us can make a difference in promoting peace, human rights, sustainable development, and lives of dignity for all, Guterres said.

The UN chief said that he had met Mandela, also known as Madiba, and was struck by his wisdom, compassion, and humility.

Known as prisoner 46664 for 18 years on Robben Island, Mandela did not succumb to bitterness or personal animosity, but rose above it all to lead his country, Guterres said.

One of the most important lessons we can learn from Nelson Mandela is that to make progress, we must look forward, however difficult that may be, he said.

Also addressing the General Assembly, the UN bodys current president, Peter Thomson, noted that Mandelas fight for a world that is just and fair remains as relevant on Tuesday as it was during his lifetime.

With conflicts raging, human rights and democratic values eroded, widening inequality and over-exploitation of the environment, on Tuesdays world is one in desperate need of President Mandelas values of empathy, kindness, and respect for our common humanity.

His values, Thomson continued, urge the international community to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which envisions the world that Mandela wanted.

Delivering his keynote address, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Danny Glover called Mandela a beacon of humanity triumphing over inhumanity through the force of his love for all people.

Glover invited everyone to look to his legacy not as admirers, but rather in the spirit of ubuntu or humanity towards others, which Mandela embodied.

Mandela led us on a path of justice, democracy and equity... in the process he showed the world that non-violence resistance, when combined with sustained activism, is the key to transforming a potential dead-end into a new beginning, he said.

As part of the commemoration, the UN is on Tuesday partnering with the New York City Mayor's office on projects, including a clean-up of a public section of New York City.

Photo: Nelson Mandela Foundation/Matthew Willman

Source: www.justearthnews.com
New York, July 19(Just Earth News): Concluding a five-day visit to Sri Lanka, a United Nations independent human right expert on Tuesday noted aroutine and endemica use of torture against people detained on national security grounds.

The Tamil community has borne the brunt of the States well-oiled torture apparatus, said Ben Emmerson, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, adding that the law is used disproportionately against the minority group.

During his visit between 10 and 14 July to assess the progress Sri Lanka has achieved in its law, policies and practice in the fight against terrorism since the end of its internal armed conflict, Emmerson heard first-hand accounts of brutal torture.

These included beatings with sticks, stress positions, asphyxiation using plastic bags drenched in kerosene, pulling out of fingernails, insertion of needles beneath the fingernails, various forms of water torture, suspension for several hours by the thumbs, and mutilation of the genitals.

Emmerson said 80 per cent of all suspects arrested under the anti-terror legislation in late 2016 had reported torture and other physical ill-treatment.

The expert specifically pointed to the situation of a dozen prisoners who have been detained without trial for more than 10 years under the anti-terror act, and 70 others for more than five years.

These staggering figures are a stain on Sri Lankas reputation, the expert noted, urging immediate release of the 81 suspects and announcing a dialogue with the government on the shape of proposed draft legislation which is due to replace the act.

Although recognizing that Sri Lanka had faced tremendous security challenges in recent years, the expert emphasized that progress towards reform, justice and human rights was at a virtual standstill despite Government promises.

The Special Rapporteur did welcome small signs of progress, but said failing to deliver justice and reform risked prolonging grievances and even reigniting the conflict.

The Government has committed itself to ending the culture of impunity, ensuring accountability, peace and justice, achieving lasting reconciliation and preventing further human rights abuses he said, pointing to the steps set out in a Human Rights Council resolution.

A comprehensive report with his findings and recommendations based on the experts visit will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council.

Special Rapporteurs and independent experts are appointed by the Geneva-based Human Rights Council to examine and report back on a specific human rights theme or a country situation. The positions are honorary and the experts are not UN staff, nor are they paid for their work.

UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferre

Source: www.justearthnews.com
Image: Internet Wallpaper

Brindisi, Jul 19 (IBNS): Two persons, a Briton and an Italian died at an Italian beach while trying to rescue the former's daughter and father from a strong current, reports said.

The fatal incident took place at 10:00 am on Tuesday, at Bosco Verde beach, Ostuni, on the south-east coast near Brindisi.

The girl and her grandfather were playing in the sea when they were overcome by waves.

Seeing them struggle, the man along with a local rushed to rescue them but were eventually thrown off balance by another dash of strong currents and though they were rescued alive by rescuers, died shortly afterwards.

The girl and her grandfather however survived the onslaught.

Though the victim has not been identified officially, local media named him as Simon Alessandro Pearson, 48.

The other deceased has been identified as 49-year-old Martino Maggi.

In a statement the UK foreign office said that it was supporting the bereaved family.
Image: www.7-themes.com

New York, July 19 (IBNS): More than 1,400 new dams or water diversion projects are planned or already under construction and many of them are on rivers flowing through multiple nations, fueling the potential for increased water conflict between some countries.

A new analysis commissioned by the United Nations uses a comprehensive combination of social, economic, political and environmental factors to identify areas around the world most at-risk for hydro-political strife. This river basins study was part of the U.N.s Transboundary Waters Assessment Program.

Researchers from the United States, Spain and Chile took part in the analysis, which has been recommended by the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe as an indicator for the U.N.s sustainable development goals for water cooperation.

Results of the study have just been published in the journal Global Environment Change.

The analysis suggests that risks for conflict are projected to increase over the next 15 to 30 years in four hotspot regions  the Middle East, central Asia, the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin, and the Orange and Limpopo basins in southern Africa.

Additionally, the Nile River in Africa, much of southern Asia, the Balkans in southeastern Europe, and upper South America are all areas where new dams are under construction and neighboring countries face increasing water demand, may lack workable treaties, or worse, havent even discussed the issue.

If two countries have agreed on water flow and distribution when theres a dam upstream, there usually is no conflict, said Eric Sproles, an Oregon State University hydrologist and a co-author on the study. Such is the case with the Columbia River basin between the United States and Canada, whose treaty is recognized as one of the most resilient and advanced agreements in the world.

Unfortunately, that isnt the case with many other river systems, where a variety of factors come into play, including strong nationalism, political contentiousness, and drought or shifting climate conditions.

The conflict over water isnt restricted to human consumption, the researchers say. There is a global threat to biodiversity in many of the worlds river systems, and the risk of species extinction is moderate to very high in 70 percent of the area of transboundary river basins.

Asia has the highest number of dams proposed or under construction on transboundary basins of any continent with 807, followed by South America, 354; Europe, 148; Africa, 99; and North America, 8. But Africa has a higher level of hydro-political tension, the researchers say, with more exacerbating factors.

The Nile River, for example, is one of the more contentious areas of the globe. Ethiopia is constructing several dams on tributaries of the Nile in its uplands, which will divert water from countries downstream, including Egypt. Contributing to the tension is drought and a growing population more dependent on a water source that may be diminishing.

When you look at a region, the first thing you try to identify is whether there is a treaty and, if so, is it one that works for all parties and is flexible enough to withstand change, Sproles said. Its easy to plan for water if it is the same every year  sometimes even when its low. When conditions vary  and drought is a key factor  the tension tends to increase and conflict is more likely to occur.

In addition to environmental variability and lack of treaties, other factors leading to conflict include political and economic instability, and armed conflict, the analysis shows.

Sproles said one reason the Columbia River Basin treaty between the U.S. and Canada has worked well is the relative stability of the water supply. In contrast, climate models suggest that the Orinoco River Basin in northern Brazil and the Amazon Basin in upper South America may face drier conditions, which could lead to more strife.

Sproles is a courtesy faculty member in Oregon States College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, where he received his doctorate.


New York, July 20(Just Earth News): The United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is changing how it operates to become more flexible and mobile, the head of that mission on Wednesday said, by focusing on rapid deployment of troops and air surveillance instead of fixed bases.

The Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in DRC, Maman Sidikou, said the mission, known by its acronym MONUSCO, will close five fixed bases at the end of the month in the North-Kivu province.

MONUSCO changes its mode of operations, as it continues to to fulfil its mandate, that is, continuing to back Congolese authorities efforts for civilians protection, said Sidikou.

The new operations are already underway in the Kasai province, where some 350 MONUSCO troops have been deployed.

The Mission is setting up an early warning system and improve its access to people.

To make the device more effective, it would be critical that communities swiftly transmit all security-related information to MONUSCO, the Missions military authorities said.

In March, the UN Security Council extended the mandate of MONUSCO for another year, but lowered the approved number of military personnel and military observers from 20,815 and 760, respectively, to 16,215 and 660.

The Council tasked the Mission, with, among other responsibilities, ensuring effective and dynamic protection of civilians under threat of physical violence, including by preventing, deterring, and stopping all armed groups and local militias from inflicting violence on the populations.

Photo: UN Photo/ MONUSCO

Source: www.justearthnews.com
Toronto, July 20 (IBNS): Ontario Superior Court Judge Glenn Hainey last week gave the permission to Toronto-headquartered Canadian retail chain Sears Canada to start liquidation sales from July 21 next at 59 stores across the country it planned to close, media reports said.

Jeremy Dacks, lawyer for Sears Canada said in the court that it was crucial to allow the retailer to start selling its merchandise, furniture, and equipment as soon as possible so as to get the maximum profits for the stakeholders.

The motion, which was nearly 300-page long, was fully supported by the lawyers involved in the proceedings, including representatives of the company, the landlords, the monitor and current and ex-employees, CBC News reports said.

After announcement of its plan to shut down 59 stores and cut approximately 2,900 jobs, Sears Canada had been operating under court protection from creditors since June 22.

Sears Canada was founded in 1952 and operates in 239 locations, including department stores, Hometown stores, Home Stores, distribution centres and warehouses.

Besides, it also owns 16 franchises under the Corbeil banner, a specialty major appliances chain.

The chain plans to shut down 20 full Sears stores, 15 Sears Home Stores, all 10 outlet stores and 14 Sears Hometown stores, which is about one-third of its current retail stores.

The sales reportedly would be starting on July 21 and would continue till Oct. 12.

Only the 59 department and Sears Home stores that have been slated for closure would be offering discounts.

Signs permitted to be used, said News report, to advertise the sales in the Sears stores would be "Everything On Sale," "Everything Must Go," and "Store Closing" or similar wording while the motion prohibited signs to say "Bankruptcy," "Liquidation" or "Going out of Business."

While a third-party liquidator would reportedly be responsible for the majority of the sales, current employees were asked to stay on the job until completion of the sales and the locations are shut down.

Hainey also approved executives and other key employees be paid $9.2 million in retention bonuses by the retailers, while retirees would be compensated by getting their pension payments until Sept. 30 of this year.

(Reporting by Asha Bajaj)

Sears Canada: Twitter
The Ho-Chunk Nation and supporters are hoping the Trump administration will approve the tribe's off-reservation casino in Wisconsin.

According to The Beloit Daily News, local officials met with the Bureau of Indian Affairs last week to discuss the project in Beloit. They were told that the process is moving forward, the paper reported.

"This facility will help the Nation provide desperately needed services for our tribal members," Ho-Chunk Nation District IV Legislator Shelby Visintin told the paper. "Area tribal members will also be employed at the new facility and the revenues will allow us to expand educational opportunities, housing, health care services and nutritional programs for our members."

There was little movement on the project during the Obama administration. The BIA started preparing an environmental impact statement but it never advanced beyond a scoping report released in January 2013.

The tribe is pursuing the casino under the two-part determination provisions of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act . The law requires approval by the state governor in addition to the BIA.

An aerial view of the Ho-Chunk Nation's proposed off-reservation casino site along Interstate 39 in Beloit, Wisconsin. Image: Google Earth

Even if the state and the BIA agree, there's still one more step in the process -- the casino site must be placed in trust. Secretary Ryan Zinke , the leader of the Department of the Interior , has ordered such decisions to be made by political officials in Washington, D.C.

Jim Cason, the Associate Deputy Secretary at the department, has repeatedly told tribes and Congress that off-reservation acquisitions will be subjected to additional scrutiny.

The site in Beloit is more than 170 miles from Ho-Chunk headquarters in Black River Falls but the tribe also maintains a governmental office about 49 miles away in Madison. It's located off I-39, a major highway.

Read More on the Story: Beloit Ho-Chunk casino proposal gets a boost (The Beloit Daily News 7/18)

Federal Register Notice: Notice of Intent To Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for the Proposed Ho-Chunk Nation Beloit Casino Project, City of Beloit, Rock County, WI (November 26, 2012)

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From the Archive Aung San: A Legacy Unfulfilled

Aung Sans aspirations for a unified and democratic Myanmar are yet to be realized, writes Kyaw Zwa Moe.

Since the 32-year-old Aung San was killed in 1947, Myanmar has suffered from a crisis of leadership. The architect of national independence left a giant hole that no one has been able to fill over the past nearly 70 years.

Even now, as the country tries to scale back from the abyss after decades of military rule, it continues to struggle in the absence of strong and visionary leadership. Myanmar seriously needs another Aung San, but there is no one close to the widely revered general.

Myanmar people still remember him as a selfless leader with integrity, whose shrewd dealings with both the British and the Japanese in the mid-20th century helped Myanmar break free of imperialism and achieve independence.

Sixty-eight years since he was assassinated by a political rival, General Aung San remains an unrivaled political figure in modern Myanmar. As his centennial birthday approaches on Feb. 13, the country will embrace grand commemorative celebrations mainly organized by the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) party and its leader, the Generals daughter, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

The martyred Aung San is regarded as the father of modern Myanmar and the founder of the Myanmar Army. He is lovingly called Bogyoke, meaning General in Myanmar language.

Aung San worked for unity, equality, democracy and prosperity in Myanmargoals that are yet to be fulfilled. Myanmar people still long for these ideals and believe that if the General had survived, the country would have evolved along this path.

His immediate successor, U Nu, the most senior member of the Anti-Fascist Peoples Freedom League and Myanmars first prime minister after the country gained independence on Jan. 4, 1948, failed to build unity with the various ethnic groups. A coup was launched in 1962 and the military has since ruled, in various guises, without pause.

In January 1946, General Aung San said in a public speech that No man, however great, can alone set the wheels of history in motion, unless he has the active support and co-operation of a whole people. No doubt individuals have played brilliant roles in history, but then it is evident that history is not made by a few individuals only.

This reflected the value he placed on the participation of individual citizens in the building of the country. But it was an ideal that failed to materialize. In Myanmar since independence, only a handful of individuals made historythe military leaders that consistently ruled the country without the consent of ordinary citizens. When individuals strived to overturn the militarys influence, they were systematically defeated. Myanmar became a failed state.

Those new generations that fought for democracy were in fact struggling to achieve General Aung Sans own aspirations. Even now, whenever protestors stage demonstrations, images of the General are frequently held aloft. When demonstrations were crushed, so too were General Aung Sans photos scattered across the streets.

Aung San once said, I am never relieved when it comes to Burmas fate. Even in my dreams, I cry and am angry for my country as it is not independent. If he were still alive today to witness the oppression and disunity in Myanmar, he would undoubtedly shed even more tears.

Aung San urged politicians to work for unity among all citizens, including ethnic nationalities. Otherwise, the General said, Myanmar wont be able to fully enjoy the essence of independence.

He was absolutely right. Aung San always underscored the importance of unity and this led to the signing of the Panglong Agreement that enshrined equal rights and political autonomy for ethnic nationalities in 1947. But successive leaders failed to build on this legacy and Myanmar descended into civil war.

Aung San said, When we build an independent Burma, ethnic people and Bamar [Burman] must have equality without discrimination. One of his favorite quotes, applicable for all ethnic people, was: If Bamar get one kyat, Shan and Kachin must get one kyat respectively.

The military leaders who ruled the country with an iron fist after 1962 failed to honor Aung Sans pledge. They undercut unity, not only with ethnic people, but also pro-democracy groups and all those who spoke out against oppression.

Aung San may be long dead but the aspirations he articulated are still as relevant as ever. If Myanmar is to realize the Generals hopesof peace, democracy and prosperitycurrent leaders must create an atmosphere of collaboration with all stakeholders, including opposition parties and ethnic groups.

To work towards this, all thats needed is the genuine political will. Otherwise the country will remain in crisis.

Kyaw Zwa Moe is the editor of The Irrawaddy English edition. This article originally appeared in the Feb. 2015 issue of The Irrawaddy magazine.
From the Archive Erasing the General

More than 30 years ago, Ne Wins junta removed Gen Aung Sans name from his own tomb. But the architects who built it kept a card up their sleeves.

YANGON  Just after North Korean operatives remotely detonated bombs they had hidden in the ceiling of the Martyrs Mausoleum in Yangon, Sun Oo received a long-distance phone call.

Are they safe? asked the caller in a worrisome tone before telling Sun Oo, who was in Mandalay at the time, about the bloody blast of 1983. The safety in question had nothing to do with people but rather was referring to architectural survey drawings of the site drafted months before.

My professor was calling because he was worried that the drawings had been leaked to the North Koreans. So I told him they were safe at our department in the Yangon Institute of Technology, Sun Oo, an architect, recalled 33 years after the bombing.

The Oct. 9 blast at the mausoleum where Myanmar national independence hero Aung San and his eight colleagues are interred was an attempt to assassinate South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan who was on an official visit to Myanmar. He was scheduled for a wreath-laying ceremony at the monument on that day. The president narrowly escaped the bombing but 17 other people in his delegation, including four high-ranking ministers, were killed.

Thanks to the explosion, the building that housed the tombs was badly damaged, and needed to be rebuilt for the annual Martyrs Day commemoration which falls on July 19 to mark the 1947 assassination of Gen Aung San, the father of Myanmar State Counselor and de facto leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and his colleagues. For many Burmese, paying respect to the leaders at the mausoleum has been a ritual repeated for nearly seven decades.

In mid-1984, then-dictator Ne Wins government formed a 12-member Special Task Group led by Sun Oo to work on a new mausoleum design. The reconstruction was completed the following year.

The massive red mausoleum, adorned with a large white star on the upper left hand side, should have been the crowning achievement of his career. But for the last 32 years, Sun Oo, now president of the Association for Myanmar Architects, has felt little pride in the large red mausoleum.

Its nothing more than a structure. It lacks the core spirit it should have conveyed, said the veteran architect.

What they should have there, for example, are inscriptions of extracts from Aung Sans famous quotes. When Martyrs Day comes, his speeches should be played on a PA system while people are paying respect, the 61-year-old said.

What lies inside is of huge sentimental value to the people, he added. But you cant see anything related to the leaders there now.

Sun Oo is not exaggerating.

Until recently, the names of the nine interred were nowhere to be seen on the red mausoleum, which is located near the Shwedagon Pagoda. There are no pictures of the martyrs on the main platform, large enough to hold 600 people. Even the entrance gate lacks a sign which could educate visitors on the significance of the site.

Anything related to Gen Aung San and the other leaders has been intentionally wiped out, said Sun Oo.

Hiding the History

After the conceptual design for the new mausoleum was approved by the cabinet in April 1984, Sun Oo received an order to meet with the governments chief architect.

During the meeting, the official asked him to jot down what he dictated: Firstly, the new design of the mausoleum may not be a dedication to Gen Aung San and his colleagues. Second, if possible, it has to be a memorial site for every martyr.

It was the first time in my life I had ever heard they were trying to wipe out the identity of Gen Aung San and his colleagues, Sun Oo recalled. I had never thought that they could be that ruthless especially to Gen Aung San, who was the founder of the Myanmar Army. But on that day I heard it with my own ears.

Maw Lin, the current Vice Chairman of Association for Myanmar Architects, was a member of a Special Task Group that worked on the new design of the mausoleum. He said Ne Wins regime wanted to remove Aung San and the other leaders from history, even in 1984.

They rebuilt it, because they had to, but they tried their best to hide the significant roles of the leaders, he said.

Their attempt to erase the martyrs, especially Aung San, from peoples memories intensified after the rise of Aung Sans daughter as a leader of the Myanmar pro-democracy movement following the 1988 student uprising. Everything related to Aung San was pushed from view by the then-military dictatorship.

His portrait at government schools and offices was later replaced with former junta leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe. On Myanmar banknotes, Aung Sans image was replaced with the lion, the insignia of the military regime.

The Martyrs Day ceremony was not an exception. Public access to the mausoleum on July 19 was restricted until 2010 because the military government was afraid of the public gathering there.

Senior military leaders were rarely seen attending the event. In 2008, Yangons City Development Council, a municipal body, managed the Martyrs Day ceremony, and until 2011, the mayor was the most senior person to attend. Even under the previous government, Thein Sein, a former general-turned-president, never attended.

Yan Myo Thein, a Yangon-based political commentator, said Ne Win and successive military regimes wanted to remove Aung San from public memory because of his overwhelming political legacy.

Even though he was assassinated in 1947, Gen Aung San still is influential and earned respect from the people. U Ne Win may have been jealous of that, he explained.

The military regime at the time might have felt worried because what they were doing was contrary to what Gen. Aung San planned as the founder of the army, he added, referring to the armys repressive rule over the civilians and wars on ethnic groups in the border areas. The general believed the army should protect the people, not bully them.

Pushing the Envelope

Despite the orders to take out the identities of the martyrs, Sun Oo and his colleagues skillfully concealed additional spaces in their design for museum, inscriptions and plaques for their biographies and speeches to add the spirit to the mausoleum in the future. The authorities who reviewed the design were not aware of these details and approved it.

We added them with a faint expectation that they could be used someday, said Sun Oo.

With the new civilian government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, he is hopeful that his expectations will be met. While State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi goes every year, people are excited at the prospect of the countrys President Htin Kyaw attending this years commemoration on July 19 at the mausoleum. If he does, he will be the first Myanmar head of state to celebrate Martyrs Day publicly in many decades.

Currently, renovations are underway at the mausoleum in preparation for this years, 69th Anniversary of Martyrs Day. Sun Oo and the other architects who designed the monument had several meetings with authorities to put the spirit and legacy of Aung San and his colleagues back into the mausoleum. They are now waiting on the final approval from generals daughter.

If she wants us to make it happen, it will not be difficult for us because we have already prepared for it many years ago, he said.

This article was originally published on June 16, 2016.
Specials Interactive Timeline: Heroes in Myanmars History

In honor of Martyrs Day, The Irrawaddy remembers a number of individuals, now deceased, who committed their lives to the good of their country.

YANGON  As Myanmar prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of Martyrs Day on Wednesday, The Irrawaddy memorializes a number of individuals who committed their lives to causes for the good of the country. While the list is inspired by Gen Aung San and his eight colleagues assassinated on July 19, 1947, we admit that there are many others we are unable to mention below, due to constraints of time, space and information. They also deserve honor for their merit.

The years mentioned in the text below signify the date in which these individuals passed away.
Sam Varghese has been writing for iTWire since 2006, a year after the site came into existence. For nearly a decade thereafter, he wrote mostly about free and open source software, based on his own use of this genre of software. Since May 2016, he has been writing across many areas of technology. He has been a journalist for nearly 40 years in India (Indian Express and Deccan Herald), the UAE (Khaleej Times) and Australia (Daily Commercial News (now defunct) and The Age). His personal blog is titled Irregular Expression.
UK-based Cambium Networks has showcased new solutions to massively improve the performance of wireless networks at its Reach New Heights event at Twickenham Stadium.

The company tells us its new products showcase the ongoing work in R&D as it looks to make significant strides towards improving the performance and quality of wireless networking in the UK, where it is relied upon to deliver high-quality reliable connectivity to millions of users, including those in underserved or hard-to-connect areas".

Although Cambium Networks mentions the UK several times in its media release, as if massive wireless improvements wouldnt be of interest to anyone not living in the United Kingdom, there is mention, as youll see below, of Cambium products being used across the whole of Europe, although Id have imagined wanting to appeal to a global audience seeing as the companys boilerplate description states it is a leading global provider".

That oddity aside, Dan McCarthy, sales manager for the UK, Ireland and Nordics at Cambium Networks, says: As the industry advances and people, places and things become increasingly connected, the need for reliable, effective wireless connectivity is greater than ever.

These latest improvements to the Cambium Networks portfolio demonstrate how we are investing in developing solutions that match the needs of the UK market not just for now, but for the foreseeable future.

The nine new products  which were demonstrated in the UK for the first time at the event  included the cnPilot Wi-Fi platform for dramatically increased capacity and performance, its cnMaestro network management software and improvements to the ePMP product range such as its unique Elevate solution.

Also featured were the PTP 670, PTP 820 and PMP 450  the latest upgrades to its point-to-point and point-to-multipoint solutions that are designed to meet ever-changing market demands  and cnReach, a networking solution for Industrial Internet of Things deployments.

Alongside the product reveals and demonstrations, we're told the event "also saw presentations from senior Cambium Networks figures, including ePMP/cnPilot Distribution Manager Jeremy Vincent, senior director of Product Management Chetan Hebbalae and Regional Technical Manager Simon Staddon".

Case studies of how Cambium Networks equipment has been used in major projects across the whole of Europe were also highlighted.

More information is here, while its collection of recent media releases is vastly more international.
Its a Russian connection with no Donald Trump collusion. Ericsson, MTS and Qualcomm have successfully trialled Licensed Assisted Access technology in a live over-the-air demonstration in Russia.

Together with MTS, the largest mobile network operator in Russia, and Qualcomm, Ericsson has conducted the first successful live trial with a commercial small cell product of Rel-13 Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) technology in Russia".

It marks the first time a commercial Ericsson product has been used for Rel-13 LAA, and is the first of its kind in Russia".

But what is LAA, you ask? Its a technology which leverages the 5GHz unlicensed spectrum band together with licensed spectrum to deliver the enhanced performance of faster data speeds for mobile device users.

Ericsson says the demonstration was conducted in an MTS test lab over a live network and used Ericssons Pico RBS 6402 small cell and a Qualcomm Snapdragon X16 LTE mobile test device".

Were told that the amount of licensed spectrum is limited, and the need for spectrum is huge".

Indeed, the latest Ericsson Mobility Report forecasts that smartphones will be using 11 Gigabytes of data a month by 2022. This puts enormous strain on operators to meet the demands for performance in mobile connectivity for their subscribers.

To me, this figure of 11GB per month by 2022 is ridiculously conservative. My own mid-size post-paid plan from Telstra gives me 15GB per month, and MVNOs such as Amaysim and Kogan Mobile offer 14GB per month plans for just $50 per 28 and 30 days respectively.

Maybe Ericsson missed a couple of ones after the 11GB by 2022, I could believe 111GB or even 1111GB would be more what end-users would expect their plans to offer by 2022 in five years time, especially with 5G networks, 8K or even 16K content and plenty more to be standard by then.

Of course, seeing as Ericsson is generalising for all mobile phones at that time, I guess Im exaggerating somewhat, but still my own mid-size plan available to any consumer is well in excess of this supposed 11GB allocation and I guess this also heightens the need for technologies like LAA and the future that is 5G, and beyond.

In any case, Andrei Ushatskiy, MTS vice-president of Technology and IT, said: Delivering the level of mobile connectivity our subscribers expect, across a wide variety of environments, is a primary focus of MTS.

This successful demonstration is the first of its kind in Russia, and shows our commitment to exceeding our customers expectations with enhanced experiences.

Yulia Klebanova, vice-president of Business Development at Qualcomm Europe, said: LAA enables more operators globally to offer Gigabit LTE, which is an essential foundation when introducing the 5G mobile experience, and we look forward to working with infrastructure vendors, OEMs, and network operators to advance mobile connectivity for subscribers across the world.

Arun Bansal, senior vice-president, Europe & Latin America, Ericsson, said: LAA uses unlicensed spectrum to boost data speeds, offering subscribers the chance to enjoy enhanced LTE experiences on their devices. This technology allows LTE and Wi-Fi users superior performance in both indoor and outdoor environments by sharing the spectrum in unlicensed bands.

Ericsson finally notes that its RBS 6402 is a high-performance indoor Pico Cell offering three standards (LTE, WCDMA and Wi-Fi), 10 frequency bands and up to 300 Mbps LTE carrier aggregation. The flexibility, cost-effectiveness and performance in a tablet-sized footprint make it optimal for smaller buildings.
NBN Co has inked a deal with US-based networking equipment provider Adtran, in a supply agreement for software, hardware and services, to support the fibre-to-the-distribution-point (what NBN Co calls fibre-to-the-curb) component of the NBN rollout.

Adtran, based in Alabama, is a provider of software-defined networking and communications equipment, which enable voice, data, video and Internet communications across a variety of network infrastructures.

In a statement, both companies say that to date, a number of key milestones have already been completed including a GPON (optical fibre splitting) network interoperability proof-of-concept programme of work.

In addition, Adtran says its IT specialists have been working in "a collaborative, agile development process with NBN Cos IT team to implement Adtrans standards-based, multi-vendor DPU (distribution point unit) management solution, utilising an open microservices architecture".

What that essentially means is that NBN Co will employ Adtran to implement its FttDP rollout.

NBN Cos chief network deployment officer Kathrine Dyer said: The rollout of the NBN Co network is one of the most complex and ambitious telecommunications projects to be undertaken in any market around the world.

We look forward to working with Adtran on bringing the network into reality including working together on our world leading fibre-to-the-curb network that is set to serve more than one million homes and businesses around the country by 2020.

Rolling out new technologies can be a complicated and costly endeavour for network service providers, especially in multi-vendor environments, said Jay Wilson, Adtran senior vice-president for technology and strategy.

Adtrans highly programmable SD-Access solutions utilise an open microservices architecture that supports the adoption of network automation that reduces service provisioning times, human error and IT complexity, while enabling the desirable customer self-service capabilities.

As usual, how much the deal is worth has not been disclosed.
Cenk Uygur | (The Young Turks Video Report) |  

Republicans want to privatize, cut, and eventually kill Medicare. Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down.

If House Speaker Paul Ryan has his way, the 115th Congress wont just repeal Obamacare, it will dramatically reform Medicare, turning the program into a form of private insurance.
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |  

The intrepid Yaroslav Trofimov of WSJ said it all:

Good luck to the Saudi PR campaign about how Qatar is the source of religious extremism in the Middle East. https://t.co/cgGW7ytMiu  Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) July 18, 2017

Saudi Arabia is leading a propaganda campaign falsely accusing Qatar of supporting extremism in the Middle East, but it just arrested a young model named Khulud for taking a walk at a historic site in Najd wearing a halter and a skirt. The Saudi government insists, despite temperatures of 111 F. in the shade, that women cover themselves up in black robes.

That big black robe accompanied by a complete face veil, called a niqab, is actively forbidden in modern urban societies such as Egypt.

One of the reasons even Middle Eastern governments are afraid of the niqab is that it obscures identity. The state, as James Scott argued, wants its citizens to be transparent to it. Hence, the demand for a first and last name (that was imposed on Iran in the early 1930s by military dictator cum shah, Reza the Great). When somone is wearing a niqab you dont know their real gender or age. Guerrillas in Algeria during its war of independence from France used to fool the police by dressing as women in niqab. Youd be surprised what you can hide in those robes.

Making women non-transparent, as Saudi Arabia routinely does, renders them second class citizens.

The extremists who kill women and children in acts of terrorism first strip them of any human identity, which is easier if they are in essence already buried under a niqab and its robes.

The extremists who traffic in and enslave women, who beat and abuse them, are in part inspired by a Saudi/Wahhabi vision of gender relations. Women are erased in public, which therefore means woman are second class citizens. They cannot move around without a male guardian.

Khulud maintains that she had a male guardian when she visited the antiquities. She also says that someone posted the video of her in a skirt (the shame!) on her snapchat account without her permission.

Some Saudis on social media are making fun that a pron site is the 19th most visited in the kingdom but people are freaking out that a Saudi man might catch a glimpse of a clothed woman.

But it isnt funny, it is tragic, and points to a deep problem at the center of Saudi society. The Saudi officials who spread around Wahhabism or Salafism, the puritan form of Islam, are in danger of thereby also spreading around extremist ideas, in Europe and the Middle East. They seem not to realize that while Wahhabis inside Saudi Arabia are quietists, when the same ideas meet a dynamic Wsestern socity, it can turn youth to some brave endeavor.



Related video added by Juan Cole

Saudi womans miniskirt sparks outrage
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - July 18, 2017) - Sabina Gold & Silver Corp (TSX:SBB), ("Sabina" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has received a copy of the Second Final Hearing Report (the "Report") from the Nunavut Impact Review Board (the "NIRB"). In the report, the NIRB has recommended to the Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada ("INAC") that development of the Company's 100%-owned Back River Gold Project ("Back River" or the "Project") in Nunavut, Canada, should proceed to the licensing phase.

This positive recommendation by NIRB concludes a five year comprehensive NIRB review and public hearing processes involving Inuit, the Kitikmeot Inuit Association ("KIA"), Federal and Territorial governments, and community and other Northern representatives. This recommendation follows a direction of the Minister to the NIRB in January 2017 to reconsider the project after an initial negative recommendation from the NIRB in July 2016. In February this year, a Final Environmental Impact Statement Addendum was submitted to the NIRB focusing on the areas that were identified as outstanding concerns in the First Final Hearing Report. The review of this addendum by all parties culminated in a second final technical and public hearing that took place in Cambridge Bay during May 27th to June 3, 2017.

"After a multi-year environmental assessment, we are extremely pleased with the NIRB giving Back River the green light to move ahead to the licensing phase," stated Bruce McLeod, President and CEO. "NIRB's recommendation is a 400 page document that also includes recommended terms and conditions for the project which we are currently reviewing. We are moving ever closer to our goal of becoming a mid-tier gold producer in one of the world's best mining jurisdictions. We would like to thank the community participants from the Kitikmeot region, the KIA, and the numerous regulatory agencies for their ongoing contribution to the review and their support to advance the Project. In particular, we would like to thank the NIRB for a very well run, rigorous yet collaborative process that enabled valuable discussion and idea sharing between all parties. Back River is aiming to be one of the next gold mines in Nunavut providing much desired jobs, training, infrastructure and opportunities to the Inuit of the Kitikmeot Region."

Next Steps

The positive NIRB recommendation and associated Report is now before the Minister of INAC in accordance with Article 12 of the Nunavut Agreement. The Minister's responsibility now is to accept or reject the NIRB's recommendation. Should the Minister accept the NIRB's recommendation, a Project Certificate could be issued in Q4, 2017.

With the positive recommendation in hand, Sabina will commence the submission of applications for the various authorizations required for full-scale construction and operation. Sabina intends to submit Type A and Type B Water License Applications to the Nunavut Water Board within the next 60 days.

Sabina Gold & Silver Corp

Sabina Gold & Silver Corp. is a well-financed, emerging precious metals company with district scale, world class undeveloped assets in one of the world's newest, politically stable mining jurisdictions: Nunavut, Canada.

In September, 2015, Sabina released a Feasibility Study on its 100% owned Back River Gold Project which presents a project that has been designed on a fit-for purpose basis, with the potential to produce ~200,000 ounces a year for ~11 years with a rapid payback of 2.9 years. At a US$1,150 gold price and a 0.80 exchange rate, the Study delivers a potential after tax internal rate of return of approximately 24.2% with an initial CAPEX of $415 million.

The Project is advancing through the environmental assessment process with final public hearings with the Nunavut Impact Review Board completed during May 31 - June 3, 2017 in Cambridge Bay.

In addition to Back River, Sabina also owns a significant silver royalty on Glencore's Hackett River Project. The silver royalty on Hackett River's silver production is comprised of 22.5% of the first 190 million ounces produced and 12.5% of all the silver produced thereafter.

The Company had cash and equivalents of C$43m at March 31, 2017.
MONTREAL, QUEBEC--(Marketwired - July 19, 2017) - SRG GRAPHITE INC. (TSX VENTURE:SRG) ("SRG" or the "Company") today announced drilling results, which continue to expand the potential of the Company's Lola Graphite project in Eastern Guinea, West Africa. Assay results from 27 boreholes continue to confirm the high-grade potential of the Lola Graphite deposit with ten intercepts grading above 10% graphitic carbon ("Cg"). Composite results are shown in Table 1.

Highlights:

Surface weathered profile thicknesses are 32% thicker than the initially estimated 20 meters

Borehole LL45-011373 returned 31 meters grading 5.76% Cg, including 14.67 meters at 9.80% Cg

Borehole LL44-768470 returned 13 meters grading 14.22% Cg, including 4.50 meters at 36.97% Cg

Borehole LL45-011592 returned 19 meters grading 7.2% Cg, including 7.00 meters at 14.80% Cg

The current drilling program aims at producing the first mineral estimates for the property's surface weathered profile, which will be included in a preliminary economic assessment scheduled for Q4 2017. The weathered profile is approximately 32% thicker than the Company's initial estimate of 20 meters, with several holes demonstrating thicknesses of up to 50 meters. The drilling program will cover approximately 16% of the total surface area of deposit as defined by geological mapping, a geophysical Max-Min survey and previous drilling and pitting.

"Drill results continue to reaffirm our belief in the quality of this remarkable graphite asset," stated Dr. Marc-Antoine Audet, President and Chief Executive Officer, SRG.

Table 1: Composite Results

The following table presents a summary of the 27 drill hole results. Mineralized intervals were defined using 1.0% Cg cut-off grades ("cog").

HOLE-ID FROM (m) LENGTH (m) CG (%) LL44-768470 23.00 13.00 14.22 Including1 4.50 36.97 LL45-028438 0.00 26.50 5.09 Including1 10.50 8.00 Including2 3.00 10.90 LL45-052446 0.00 34.50 3.16 Including1 4.50 10.70 Including2 1.50 17.10 LL45-070451 0.00 39.00 3.34 Including1 9.00 6.20 LL45-011373 3.00 31.00 5.76 Including1 14.67 9.80 Including2 5.00 16.32 LL45-094198 0.00 33.00 4.30 Including1 9.50 9.00 Including2 3.50 12.41 LL45-112206 0.00 34.50 5.36 Including1 21.75 7.60 Including2 1.00 10.90 Including2 1.00 18.50 LL45-131212 0.00 22.70 4.56 Including1 9.00 6.60 LL45-148219 0.00 15.00 5.33 Including1 9.00 7.50 Including2 1.50 11.40 Including2 1.50 11.20 LL44-782476 3.00 18.00 2.17 Including1 1.35 10.50 LL45-033503 0.00 23.60 2.65 LL45-075510 0.00 24.50 5.38 Including1 6.50 12.09 LL45-004489 9.00 17.50 4.88 LL45-002536 7.50 24.00 6.82 LL45-174598 1.50 19.50 4.34 LL45-181651 1.50 16.60 5.09 LL45-162645 16.50 13.00 6.25 LL45-105625 12.00 7.50 4.68 LL45-067612 15.00 13.90 4.91 LL45-011592 3.00 19.00 7.02 Including1 7.00 14.46 LL45-030598 3.00 27.00 2.53 LL45-170756 0.00 14.50 5.66 LL47-796005 0.00 27.00 3.65 LL48-015012 0.00 24.30 7.27 LL48-033019 0.00 23.00 3.76 Including1 9.00 4.74 Including1 2.50 7.64 LL48-052026 4.00 20.00 4.97 LL48-071033 0.00 16.50 3.41

1 3% Cg cog. 2 10% Cg cog.

The Lola Graphite Project is 100% owned by Sama Resources Guinea SARL, a fully owned subsidiary of the Company. The Graphite Project is located near the town of Lola in eastern Guinea and within 50 km from the border with Cote d'Ivoire.

Core logging and sampling was performed at SRG's facility in the Lola village. Sample preparations were performed at Veritas Laboratory in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Sample pulps were delivered to Activation Laboratories Ltd., Ancaster, Ontario, Canada. The samples were treated through a multistage furnace process to remove organic carbon and carbonate carbon. The remaining graphitic carbon was measured as carbon dioxide in the infrared ("IR") cell as gases flow through the cell. Carbon dioxide absorbs IR energy at a precise wavelength within the IR spectrum. All analysis were performed using Eltra instruments.

About SRG Graphite Inc. (SRG)

SRG is a Canadian-based company focused on developing the Lola Graphite deposit, located in the Republic of Guinea, West Africa. SRG is committed to operate in a socially, environmentally and ethically responsible manner.

For additional information, please visit SRG's website at www.srggraphite.com.
VANCOUVER, BC--(Marketwired - July 19, 2017) - Sarama Resources Ltd. ("Sarama" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE: SWA) is pleased to advise that the Ministry of Mines and Quarries in Burkina Faso has issued, and Sarama has paid, the invoice for the transfer of the Djarkadougou Exploration Permit ("Djarkadougou"), which hosts the Bondi Gold Deposit ("Bondi Deposit"). This was acquired from Orezone Gold Corporation ("Orezone"), pursuant to the sale agreement between Sarama and Orezone (the "Agreement") (refer Sarama news release May 24, 2016).

This is the final step of the approval process before the official transfer becomes effective upon the Ministry of Mines delivering the new Djarkadougou Order (the "Arrete") in Sarama's name, at which point common shares and warrants issued by Sarama to Orezone as part of the Agreement will be released from escrow. The issuance of the Arrete is a matter of process and it is anticipated that this will occur during Q3 2017.

With Orezone's consent, Sarama commenced exploration activity on the property in Q2 2017 and has made progress in identifying and drill testing new exploration targets, the results of which will be provided in future news releases.

The Djarkadougou Property forms part of Sarama's 100%-owned(1) ThreeBee Project(2) (refer Sarama news release May 16, 2017) and will play an important role in any future development plans.

Sarama's President and CEO, Andrew Dinning, commented:

"Sarama is pleased to have received this government approval and we look forward to progressing and extracting further value from the Bondi Project.

We view this acquisition as an important step in the consolidation of the highly prospective southern Hounde Belt which is an area where Sarama has had significant exploration success and controls a large land position with significant interests in three advanced gold exploration projects."

ABOUT SARAMA RESOURCES LTD

Sarama Resources Ltd (TSX VENTURE: SWA) is a West African focused gold explorer with substantial landholdings in Burkina Faso. Sarama is focused on consolidating under-explored landholdings in Burkina Faso and other established mining jurisdictions.

Sarama's flagship properties are situated within the Company's South Hounde Project area in south-west Burkina Faso. Located within the prolific Hounde Greenstone Belt, Sarama's exploration programs have built on significant early success to deliver an inferred mineral resource estimate of 2.1 Moz gold(4). Acacia Mining plc is earning up to a 70% interest in the South Hounde Project by satisfying certain conditions, including funding earn-in expenditures of up to US$14 million, over a 4-year earn-in period and may acquire an additional 5% interest, for an aggregate 75% interest in the Project, upon declaration of a minimum mineral reserve of 1.6 million ounces of gold. Acacia has satisfied certain milestones and currently holds a 50% interest in the South Hounde Project and is continuing to sole fund exploration activities.

Sarama holds a 31% participating interest in the Karankasso Project Joint Venture ("JV") which is situated adjacent to the Company's South Hounde Project in Burkina Faso and is a JV between Sarama and Savary Gold Corp. ("Savary"). Savary is the operator of the JV and in October 2015, declared a maiden inferred mineral resource estimate of 671,000 ounces of contained gold(5) at the Karankasso Project JV.

Sarama has also agreed to acquire(1) a 100% interest in the Bondi Deposit from Orezone Gold Corporation (refer news release May 24, 2016). Bondi has a historical estimate of mineral resources of 0.3Moz Au (measured and indicated) and 0.1Moz Au (inferred)(3).

Together, the South Hounde Project, Bondi Deposit and the Karankasso Project form a cluster of advanced gold deposits, within trucking distance of one another, which potentially offers a development option for a multi-source fed central processing facility in the southern Hounde Belt region of Burkina Faso.

Incorporated in 2010, the Company's Board and management team have a proven track record in Africa and a strong history in the discovery and development of large-scale gold deposits. Sarama is well positioned to build on its current success with a sound exploration strategy across its property portfolio.

FOOTNOTES
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - July 18, 2017) - B2Gold Corp. (TSX: BTO) (NYSE MKT: BTG) (NSX: B2G) ("B2Gold" or the "Company") is pleased to announce it has secured an upsized $500 million Revolving Credit Facility (the "upsized RCF"). All dollar figures are in United States dollars unless otherwise indicated.

On July 7, 2017, the Company entered into an amended and restated credit agreement with a syndicate of international banks for an upsized RCF for an aggregate amount of $500 million, representing a $75 million increase from the principal amount of $425 million under its existing revolving credit facility. The upsized RCF also allows for an accordion feature whereby upon receipt of additional binding commitments, the facility may be increased to $600 million any time prior to the maturity date. HSBC, as Sole Lead Arranger and Sole Book Runner, will continue to act as the Administrative Agent. The syndicate includes The Bank of Nova Scotia, Societe Generale, ING Bank N.V. and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce as lenders.

The upsized RCF will bear interest on a sliding scale of between LIBOR plus 2.25% to 3.25% based on the Company's consolidated net leverage ratio. Commitment fees for the undrawn portion of the facility will also be on a similar sliding scale basis of between 0.50% and 0.925%. The term of the upsized RCF is four years, maturing on July 7, 2021. If the principal indebtedness outstanding under the Company's existing 3.25% Convertible Senior Subordinated Notes (the "Subordinated Notes") maturing on October 1, 2018, is greater than $100 million on December 29, 2017, then the sliding scale interest will increase to a sliding scale range of between LIBOR plus 2.50% to 4.00%. The upsized RCF will also be subject to customary lending covenants for a corporate facility.

Proceeds from the loan will be used for general corporate purposes and may be utilized to prepay or repay the Subordinated Notes and financing acquisitions.

The Company also believes that coupled with operating cash flows from the Company's existing mine operations, the upsized RCF ensures that the Company remains fully funded to maintain its operations, including funding for the construction of the Fekola Project (completion anticipated on October 1, 2017).

Along with the additional $75 million capacity under the upsized RCF, the $100 million accordion feature is expected to provide the Company with additional flexibility to access additional funding in the future for other corporate activities without the carrying cost of paying undrawn commitment fees.

About B2Gold Corp.

Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, B2Gold Corp. is one of the fastest-growing intermediate gold producers in the world. Founded in 2007, today, the Company has four operating mines, one mine under construction and numerous exploration projects in various countries, including Nicaragua, the Philippines, Namibia, Mali, Burkina Faso and Finland. Construction of the Company's Fekola Mine in southwest Mali is approximately three months ahead of schedule and on budget, and is projected to commence production on October 1, 2017. As a result, the Company is well positioned to maintain its low-cost structure and growth profile.

Based on current assumptions and updates to B2Gold's current year guidance and long-term mine plans, the Company is projecting consolidated gold production in 2017 of between 545,000 and 595,000 ounces (including estimated pre-commercial production from the Fekola Mine of between 45,000 and 55,000 ounces); and in 2018 significantly increasing to between 900,000 and 950,000 ounces, with the inclusion of the anticipated first full-year of commercial production at the Fekola Mine.
By Choi Sung-jin

Remember Nov. 22, 2011?

On that day, Korea's infamously "vibrant" parliamentary politics opened yet another chapter -- Rep. Kim Sun-dong of the leftist Democratic Labor Party exploded a tear gas canister during a plenary session of the National Assembly.

The reason: the then governing Grand National Party (GNP), the predecessor of the conservative Liberty Korea Party (LKP), railroaded a bill on Korea-U.S. free trade agreement (KORUS FTA) defying vehement opposition from liberal parties in the first closed-door plenary meeting in history.

Kim, who lost his Assembly seat later for violating the law on controlling gun and explosives, compared his act to those of Korean independence fighters who bombed the Japanese colonialists. Rep. Moon Jae-in, head of the then main opposition Democratic Party, called GNP lawmakers, including its leader Hong Joon-pyo, "traitors" who sold the country out to the United States.

The situations are now reversed  Moon has become Korea's top leader while Hong is heading the main opposition LKP. What have turned around are not just the positions of the two politicians but the five-year trade performances of Korea and the U.S. Contrary to initial concerns about what was perceived as the trade deal disadvantageous to Korea, Seoul's surplus in two-way trade with Washington totaled $23.3 billion in 2016, double the $11.6 billion in 2011.

U.S. President Donald Trump will be nothing if he looks this over. Aboard the Air Force One on his way to a summit with French President Emmanuel Macron a week ago, President Trump called the KORUS FTA a "horrible deal," vowing to "renegotiate" it. He then reportedly said, "We are protecting South Korea  but are losing $40 billion a year." LKP leader Hong is boycotting a meeting with Moon, demanding the President's apology for the "traitor" labeling about six years ago.

Conservative media outlets are also insinuating that the ruling liberal camp needs to "express regrets" for their mistaken denunciation of the trade deal.

Is the KORUS FTA such a resounding success for Korea and should President Moon and his party apologize for their opposition for opposition's sake in 2011, then? I doubt it. Above all, if all this brouhaha about bilateral trade deal results from Trump's short-sighted, narrow-minded views about free trade, too many experts around the world, including most of the renowned U.S. economists, have already pointed to the American leader's misguided notion. Washington's also bowed out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal and is renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Even when we narrow the focus to the two-way trade, Trump's remark of $40-billion loss is not just grossly overblown but hides too many truths as well. According to Professor Lee Hae-young of Hanshin University, Korea's customs-cleared surplus in goods trade stood at $25.8 billion in 2015. If we deduct the deficit of $14.1 billion in services trade, the black-ink figure falls to $11.7 billion. Subtract an additional $8 billion in arms purchase from the U.S., and $3.7 billion is left. Military experts also predict the mounting pressure from the Trump administration would redouble Korea's defense burden sharing to around $2 billion this year, leaving only $1.7 billion. What a big deal, indeed!

Even most of the $25.8-billion surplus in goods trade comes from the revenues of the U.S. offshoots of the major Korean businesses, like Hyundai and Samsung, Professor Lee points out. Unlike what Trump thinks, there are not national but industrial or corporate winners and losers in free trade. In the case of Korea, family-controlled conglomerates and large manufacturers are primary beneficiaries of free trade while farmers, small- and medium-sized enterprises and working-class families are losers because there are no "trickle-down effects" any longer with income gap polarizing between large and small companies and the people working there. Where are the officials who promised compensation for losers through inter-industry coordination?

The Moon administration is right to counter the U.S. trade offensive with a proposal to verify the structure of unbalanced trade or whether the surplus in goods trade is due to the KORUS FTA. Economists say the U.S. economy, which invests far more money than it saves and consumers far more goods than it produces, is bound to suffer chronic trade deficit. None other than the U.S. government agency  the International Trade Commission  has recently said the U.S. trade deficit might have widened to $40 billion had it not been for the KORUS FTA.

Most Koreans might wonder why their country has become one of the first targets of the Trump administration's trade offensive, following TPP and NAFTA. Korea's trade surplus with the U.S. is only eighth largest, smaller than Vietnam's $32 billion and one- twelfth of China's $347 billion. They might as well remember the so-called "deal artist" is good at looking one way and rowing another. For instance, Trump may complain about steel and auto trade but aim at opening up Korea's service markets wider. Or, he may use the trade pressure as leverage to hold sway on Seoul's diplomacy, such as President Moon's reconciliatory inter-Korean policy or its possible tilting toward China.

All this explains why Seoul needs to calmly deal with the upcoming bargaining with the strategy of offense is the best defense, gaining further grounds in controversial issues, such as intellectual property rights and investor-state dispute settlement scheme.

Six years ago, government officials said the KORUS FTA would result in an additional economic growth of 0.6 percent a year, 340,000 new jobs in the following decade, manufacturing export increase of $2.6 billion a year, and a sharp rise in foreign direct investment. None of these has turned into reality.

It's Hong and his party that should still apologize to the people for broken promises.



Choi Sung-jin is a contributing op-ed columnist for The Korea Times. Contact him at choisj1955@naver.com.
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A 21-year-old woman who was shot in the face as a teenager has become the youngest person in the United States to receive a face transplant.

The woman, who suffered severe trauma to her face as a result of the gunshot wound, underwent the 31-hour face transplant surgery in May at the Cleveland Clinic, according to a statement from the hospital.

A team of surgeons replaced 100 percent of the woman's facial tissue with tissue from a donor, in what's known as a "full face transplant." The surgery will allow the patient to speak more clearly, as well as breathe, chew and swallow more effectively, and better express emotions with her face, the hospital said. [The 9 Most Interesting Transplants]

"Knowing this patient now has the opportunity to live a functional life because of her face transplant is the greatest reward," Dr. Brian Gastman, a plastic surgeon who assisted in the surgery, said in the statement. "With a new nose, lips, palate, eyelids and jaw, she now has the full opportunity to re-integrate into society and have a future just like any other young adult."

The hospital did not release the identity of the patient or the donor to protect their privacy. But the hospital issued the following statement from the patient:

"To reach this point of recovery has often times been a difficult road to travel, but Im thankful there's been a road," the patient said. "I am forever grateful for the care this hospital has given me and continues to offer on my journey of recovery and healing  and to my donor and her family  words cannot express the appreciation I have for this incredible gift. With a grateful heart, I say 'thank you' to all who have made this possible for me."

The patient is now recovering well, and will go through intensive rehabilitative therapy, physical therapy, speech and swallowing therapy and occupational therapy, the hospital said. As with all transplant patients, the woman will need to take medication to suppress her immune system, to prevent her body from rejecting the transplant, for the rest of her life.

The surgery marks the third face transplant performed at Cleveland Clinic, and the hospital's first full face transplant. The hospital is one of six institutions in the United States that performs face transplants. Fewer than three dozen face transplants have been performed worldwide, according to the statement.

Original article on Live Science.
Deep beneath the waves, miles from the coast of Alabama, lies a primeval underwater forest, a grove of giant cypress trees so fresh that their trunks still ooze sap when they're cut.

Most of the ancient giants, now covered with sea anemones and schooling fish, last grew roughly 50,000 years ago, making this underwater forest the oldest of its kind anywhere in the world.

Its location kept hidden by scuba divers who hoped to protect the ancient grove, the underwater forest is slowly giving up its secrets to scientists. Many of those secrets are being revealed in a new documentary, called "The Underwater Forest." The program, which is now available for viewing on YouTube, will air on July 23 and 24 on Alabama Public Television. [See Images of the Underwater Forest]

The dramatic changes that this forest underwent during a volatile period of climate change may also hold clues for Earth's climate future, experts said.

Amazing discovery

Several years ago, scuba-dive-shop owner Chas Broughton discovered the bald cypress forest more than a dozen miles (20 kilometers) from Mobile, Alabama, in the Gulf of Mexico, about 60 feet (18 meters) beneath the ocean's surface. In the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a sandy, barren seafloor, was a watery world blanketed with sea sponges, schooling fish, octopuses and crabs. When Broughton took a closer look, he found a grove of massive tree stumps overlooking a meandering, ancient riverbed carved into the seafloor. Like a coral reef, the ancient trees had become home for thousands of different sea creatures.

"It was quite magnificent," Broughton said in the documentary.

In 2012, Broughton disclosed the existence of the site to Ben Raines, an environmental journalist for a local Alabama news site AL.com, but swore him to secrecy on the trees' precise location.

Mud and sand covered the forest for eons, creating an oxygen-free environment that protected the trees from the punishing environment of the ocean. But in 2004, Hurricane Ivan's powerful winds and waves uncovered some of the forest. Since then, scientists have slowly been revealing the site's hidden history.

The team is also working to make the forest a marine protected area, so salvage operations can't log the primeval grove and turn the ancient wood into high-end coffee tables.

Ancient grove

Tree scientists quickly identified the trees as the freshwater swamp-dwelling cypress species, notable for their craggy "knees," which anchor similar trees into the mud along the Gulf of Mexico today.

The team took cores from the trees to analyze the tree rings, then handed those samples on to Grant Harley, a dendrochronologist (a scientist who studies tree rings) at the University of Southern Mississippi. The growth rings, sap and wood fibers were still visible in the tree stumps.

"When we ran those samples through the band saw, you can smell the resin just like you were cutting into a fresh piece of wood today," Harley said.

The scientists said that though they originally thought, based on the depth of the site, that the trees were 10,000 years old, radiocarbon dating from nearby sediments suggests the forest dates to an ice age that prevailed more than 50,000 years ago.

Volatile period

Under a microscope, the growth rings are thinner than in modern-day bald cypress, the researchers said, suggesting that the trees faced higher levels of environmental stress (trees nowadays, with constant growing conditions, usually have fatter, more even tree rings). It may also have been drier and cooler than now.

Sea levels were 400 feet lower at the time than they are today, meaning the coastline extended far out into the sea.

At the time, the Gulf of Mexico was a volatile place, Raines said.

"The world was really rocking then, with sea level changing as much as 75 feet [23 m] in 1,000 years," Raines told Live Science.

Rising at a rate of about 8 feet (2 m) per 100 years, the changing sea levels exceed some of the worst-case scenarios currently predicted for modern-day climate change, Raines added.

Tree ring data revealed that all the trees lived and died in a 500-year period, with periods of stress and growth, and all the trees ultimately dying at the same time, Raines said. The team also managed to analyze pollen from sediments near the trees, and found a transition in the environment that occurred rather dramatically. At its height, the river delta was made up of grassland that then gave way to a vibrant cypress forest, the researchers said. As sea levels rose, the grassland gradually moved inland, with the grassy fringe closest to the water retreating, before rising waters swallowed up the whole forest.

The team said it is still learning more about the ancient climate during this ice age. But like everything in the ocean, the waterlogged cypress grove's time is limited. As storms and shifting tides continue to reveal more of the forest, it will gradually be devoured by shipworms and bacteria, like so much else in the sea, Raines said.

For now, however, thousands of tree stumps still stand, rooted in the mud where they first grew as seedlings.

Originally published on Live Science.
NASA and Elon Musks SpaceX are focused on getting astronauts to Mars and even one day establishing a colony on the Red Planet  but what if their attention is better directed elsewhere? A new paper in the Journal of Astrobiology & Outreach suggests that humans should instead establish a colony on Titan, a soupy orange moon of Saturn that has been likened to an early Earth, and which may harbor signs of "life not as we know it."

"In many respects, Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is one of the most Earth-like worlds we have found to date," NASA says on its website. "With its thick atmosphere and organic-rich chemistry, Titan resembles a frozen version of Earth, several billion years ago, before life began pumping oxygen into our atmosphere."

To be clear, Titan could have microbes  or, at the least, chemistry that resembles prebiotic life  but it is no Earth. The moon is perpetually covered in an orange cloud, and its atmosphere is not human-friendly. But Titan's gravity is walkable (14 percent that of Earth), radiation on the surface is less than on Mars due to its thick clouds, and it offers various sources from which visitors might generate energy.

As the paper's author, Amanda Hendrix, pointed out in a previous book that she co-authored, Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets, Titan has massive deposits of hydrocarbons  compounds generally associated with petroleum and gas. Data from NASA's Cassini probe has shown that Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all of the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth.

A simulation of the view from the ground on Titan. (Image credit: Kevin M. Gill)

Beyond Earth points out that people on Titan could get energy from these compounds if they use a separate combustion source that helps circumvent that fact that there's no oxygen in the moons atmosphere. But Hendrix's new research also discusses other ways of generating chemical energy, such as treating acetylene (an abundant compound) with hydrogen.

"In this paper, I wanted to dig into the chemical energy options a bit deeper and also look into alternative energy possibilities," said Hendrix, a staff scientist at the non-profit Planetary Science Institute. "My co-author, Yuk Yung, and I looked at chemical, nuclear, geothermal, solar, hydropower, and wind power options at Titan. The paper is designed to be a high-level first look at some of these topics."

RELATED: Saturn's Titan Moon May Offer a Glimpse of Life as We Don't Know It

While Hendrix said it's possible to generate such energy using technology that we have available today, she noted that there are ways that we could get even more out of Titans environment with the proper study. For example, more solar power would be generated if we learned about the capabilities of different photovoltaic cell materials  and most importantly, how they would behave on Titan.

Hydro power would require better mapping of Titan's abundant lake regions, including their topography and their flow rate. Even wind power would require some research into airborne wind turbines  but Hendrix said all of these options are promising.

"I imagine that, as here on Earth, a combination of energy sources will be useful on Titan," she said. "In particular, solar energy (using large arrays) and wind power (using airborne wind turbines) may be particularly effective."

RELATED: A City on Mars: Elon Musk Details SpaceX's Plan to Colonize the Red Planet

Delivered properly, the energy needs would be more than enough for a small outpost. Instead of just sending humans on a one-shot mission to look for life on the surface, for example, Hendrix envisions a future that could generate power for years. One scenario  solar arrays over 10 percent of Titan's surface area  would generate power needs of a population of roughly 300 million, equivalent to that of the United States.

"This is just an initial estimate, of course, but what we're talking about is something much larger than a short-term human science mission to Titan," Hendrix said.

With NASA's stated goal of sending humans to Mars by the 2030s, however, space agencies remain focused on Mars exploration. While the Cassini robotic mission at Saturn and its moons wraps up observations this September, NASA and the European Space Agency are planning even more missions to Mars in the coming years. Saturn doesn't really figure into the plans, although NASA is thinking about eventual missions to Uranus, Neptune, and Jupiter's moon Europa.

Originally published on Seeker.
Exactly 218 years ago today, on July 19, 1799, French troops in Rosetta, Egypt, uncovered a striking black stone carved with three ancient texts: two Egyptian texts and a Greek one.

The stone, now known as the Rosetta Stone, would be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. It would also land a place in the English language: Today, a search in a scientific journal database for "Rosetta Stone" yields many more metaphorical uses of the term than actual research on the Egyptian artifact. Topics ranging from medical imaging, to black holes, to "intensional dynamic programming" (it's an algorithm thing) have been described as a "Rosetta Stone" by hopeful researchers looking for a breakthrough. [Cracking Codes: 5 Ancient Languages Yet to Be Deciphered]

So what made the Rosetta Stone so special? It wasn't the message it contained. According to the British Museum collections page, the find was part of a larger slab carved with a decree passed by a priestly council affirming Ptolemy V's success as a ruler in 196 B.C., the first anniversary of his coronation. Rather, what made the stone important was how this decree was written: first in Egyptian hieroglyphs; then in demotic, another Egyptian script; and finally, again in ancient Greek.

The repeated texts allowed Jean-Francois Champollion, a French scholar, to decode the hieroglyphs in 1822, opening up masses of ancient Egyptian texts for study. Contrary to the metaphors of Rosetta Stones as keys to a sudden breakthrough, though, this was a painstaking process that took nearly 20 years.

Here's how it happened.

The discovery

The discoverer of the Rosetta Stone was a French military officer, Pierre Francois Xavier Bouchard, who spotted it while he and his men were demolishing a wall to extend Fort Julien in Rosetta, a port city now known as Rashid. The troops were part of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, in which he (temporarily) conquered the country  and brought a bevy of scientists along who were eager to study what was to them unfamiliar land.

The Rosetta Stone was one of the most important discoveries of the three-year campaign, and its ownership would become one of the key issues in the war. The soldiers who discovered the stone quickly reported it to Napoleon's scientific personnel in Cairo, according to "Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment" (University of California Press, 1999). Immediately, the scientific community recognized the potential of the stone as a key to cracking the code of hieroglyphic writing. [Photos: 5,000-Year-Old Hieroglyphs Discovered in Sinai Desert]

As the French campaign in Egypt started to crumble  the British sent troops to push back as they tried to protect their own influence in the region  the possession of Egyptian antiquities became a sticking point between the two colonial powers. In 1801, French Gen. Jacques-Francois de Menou held out in Alexandria and claimed that the Rosetta Stone was his personal property, in an attempt to ensure it remained in French hands, according to "Cracking Codes." There were threats and rumors that the French might destroy the antiquities rather than hand them over to the British.

Ultimately, the handover of the stone and other antiquities was negotiated between the British and the French, and by the terms of the Capitulation of Alexandria, the agreement that ended the French campaign, the Rosetta Stone ended up in British hands. It landed in England in February 1802 and became part of the British Museum's collection that June.

Cracking the code

Greek was known to be the administrative language of the Ptolemaic period, while demotic was used for daily writing and hieroglyphics were used for priestly missives. Thus, scholars were confident from the start that the stone would turn out to convey the same information in three different scripts. The first task they faced while studying the Rosetta Stone was to decipher the demotic script; only the ancient Greek was translatable at the time. In 1802, Swedish researcher J.H. Akerblad published a paper in which he unraveled a few of the demotic words by comparing them to the modern Coptic language. English scientist Thomas Young slowly started to crack some of the code between 1814 and 1818 (he did this on his summer vacations, according to "Cracking Codes") and was able to decipher Ptolemy's name. He was also able to infer the meanings of some of the hieroglyphs, though he could not understand how the script worked in a broader sense.

At the time, Egyptologists thought that each hieroglyph represented a single word. In fact, as the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone would eventually reveal, some hieroglyphs represent words or ideas, while others represent consonant sounds. Some symbols do both, and whether they should be read as a word or a sound depends on the context.

The breakthrough would come through Champollion, who was only 9 years old when the stone was first discovered. Champollion started publishing papers on ancient Egyptian linguistics when he was just 16, according to "Cracking Codes."

In 1814, according to the book, Champollion wrote to The Royal Society of England, asking for a cast of the stone, as he was working off of a printed engraving that didn't show the writing clearly. (He didn't get it, as the French and English were not on particularly good diplomatic terms at the time.)

Nevertheless, Champollion kept working on the problem. He didn't just use the Rosetta Stone; he also collected snippets of text from colleagues. Slowly, using the cartouches (royal names) on the Rosetta Stone and these other texts, he began to unravel that hieroglyphs were a mixture of two elements: symbols conveying words, and symbols conveying sounds. His nephew, Aime Champollion-Figeac, claimed that, the day Champollion made his breakthrough, he ran into his brother's office, cried "I've done it" and fainted dead away, according to "Cracking Codes." According to this tale, he remained unconscious for five days.

Champollion made his discovery public on Sept. 27, 1822. He died of a stroke in 1832, at age 41.

Rosetta Stone today

Champollion's discovery remained subject to scientific bickering and controversy until a much less famous stone proved him right in 1866, according to "Cracking Codes." Another decree  also written in hieroglyphic text, Greek and demotic  was found in Tanis, Egypt, and was studied by Prussian Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius that year. The Tanis Stone gave scientists a comparison for testing the Rosetta Stone translation and confirmed Champollion's findings. It is now kept in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The Rosetta Stone itself remains at the British Museum, where it is a popular tourist draw but no longer the subject of much research. Egyptian authorities periodically call for the return of the stone.

"[T]he artifacts stolen from Egypt must come back," Zahi Hawass, then-director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said in 2003. Hawass continued to call for the stone's repatriation to Egypt until he lost his position in the Egyptian government in 2011 amid the upheaval of the country's revolution that year. His successors have taken up the cause, with Egyptian archaeologist Ahmed Saleh calling for the return of the stone as recently as 2014. The British Museum has refused these calls, citing a 1970 UNESCO agreement that denies Egypt the right to demand any artifact taken from the country before 1970, according to the Cairo Post. Recently smuggled artifacts are regularly repatriated to Egypt, but objects taken during the colonial period have proved more difficult for Egypt to reclaim.

Original article on Live Science.
Apple's new green-and-toothy Tyrannosaurus rex emoji may be cute, but its anatomy is wildly inaccurate, a paleontologist told Live Science.

For starters, its lower teeth shouldn't be visible, and its ear and nostril are in the wrong places, said Thomas Carr, a vertebrate paleontologist and an associate professor of biology at Carthage College in Wisconsin.

Carr would know: He's helped describe several tyrannosaurs  including Daspletosaurus horneri, Teratophoneus curriei, Bistahieversor sealeyi and Appalachiosaurus montgomeriensis  all of which lived during the late Cretaceous period, before the 6-mile-wide (10 kilometers) asteroid slammed into Earth, killing the nonavian dinosaurs. [Gory Guts: Photos of a T. Rex Autopsy]

Carr noted several problems with Apple's new dinosaur emoji, which the company previewed on World Emoji Day (opens in new tab) (July 17) and plans to make available to users later this year, along with several other new emojis, such as a zombie and a "mind-blown" face. Carr listed a half dozen ways the T. rex emoji is imprecise:

In the emoji, the dino's eyes are above the snout, but in dinosaurs, including T. rex, the eyes are actually on the side of the head. In tyrannosaurs, the lower teeth are never in view when the jaws are closed, unlike those on Apple's emoji. The emoji's arms are too spindly. The ear is in the wrong place; it should be above the jaw joint. The shape of the head is wrong  it looks like the emoji creators followed the inaccurate depiction of T. rex from the "Jurassic Park" movies. The nostril is in the wrong place; it should be close to the front of the snout.

When asked whether he'd use the T. rex emoji, Carr did not mince his words.

"Unfortunately, not this version," Carr told Live Science in an email. "I'd use an accurate avatar."

Rather, he'd like to see "basic anatomical accuracy, especially skull shape, which lends the animals much of their identity and personality."

This is Apple's first dinosaur emoji, if you don't count the birds, which evolved from dinosaurs and are technically considered living dinosaurs.

But Apple might have gotten at least one thing right: It didn't give T. rex lips, as some researchers (most likely inaccurately) suggested the mega-beast sported. (In fact, Carr and colleagues' D. horneri finding suggested that T. rex likely didn't pucker up.)

The new emoji is also a step up from Barney, the purple T. rex that has entertained children on television for years.

"The lesson here is that it isn't hard to get dinosaurs right  it just requires a bit of attention and expert input to draft a stylized, but accurate, icon," Carr said. He added that if Apple is looking for dinosaur emoji suggestions, the 75-million-year-old Daspletosaurus horneri would be a fearsome pick.

The first D. horneri skull ever found, next to an illustration of what the dinosaur may have looked like in real life. The skull is about 32 inches (89.5 cm) long. (Image credit: Copyright Dino Pulera)

Apple did not immediately respond to comment about the accuracy of its T. rex, but Live Science will update the story if the company replies.

Original article on Live Science.
by Sarah Mahoney @mahoney_sarah, July 17, 2017

Invoking its retailing super powers, Walmart is shaking up its approach to back-to-school this season, expanding its omnichannel efforts and integrating lists from hundreds of thousands of classrooms around the country.

Besides its super-hero themed ad campaign for Walmart.com (created by Saatchi & and Saatchi), the Bentonville, Ark.-based company is making a bigger deal of the back-to-school and back-to-college items people can order, through both its Online Grocery Pickup and Pickup Today services, offering tens of thousands more items than in the past. It says it expects the pickup option to have special appeal for college kids, who can order online and retrieve in stores.

Walmart has also souped up the functionality of its site, incorporating TeacherLists, the website that works with schools, brands and retailers around the country, into its own dedicated site. (So far, 500,000 schools are signed up with TeacherList, but Walmart expects that to reach 1 million as the first day of school approaches.) People can find their school using a zip code, look for a specific teacher request, and with an Add all to cart button, finish shopping in a few clicks.

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And for those who do choose to shop in the store itself, Walmart is repurposing the Holiday Helpers squad as Back-to-School Helpers for the first time using designated associates to steer customers to the shortest lines or retrieve any last-minute items.

A new report from the NPD Group indicates Walmart.com is fighting an uphill battle in this effort: Last year, some 70% of back-to-schools buys were made in stores rather than online, and of the 14 categories the market research company analyzed, school supplies are the most likely to be bought in stores rather than via e-commerce, at 78%. (Sports equipment was lowest, at 61%.)

The NPD report finds that while Walmart and Target are among the favorite destinations, the decision about whether to shop online or in the store often comes down to an array of practical considerations that can trump convenience, from how much other shopping needs to be done, the chance to survey a number of trusted brands and wanting to take advantage of sales and discounts.

Back-to-school shopping is about satisfying a list of needs and the retailer or product that delivers value and ease in doing so will ring the sale, writes Marshal Cohen, NPDs chief industry analyst. Brick-and-mortar retail has been challenged this past year and overall online growth, while still strong, has begun to show signs of slowing. How well marketers re-engage consumers and meet their needs will determine who prevails as the back-to-school leader.
Music producer, Patrick Sika-Nartey , popularly known as DJ Breezy has heaped praises on missing Ghanaian musician Castro the Destroyer, insisting that among all the artistes he worked with, he enjoyed working with Castro most.

DJ Breezy, who was a guest on popular satirical talk show, Tonight with Andrew Tandoh Adote also revealed that Castros hit track Seihor was literally recorded out of nothing.

He told host Andrew Adote: To be honest will say Castro [ Enjoyed working with most] . Castro doesnt even write anything, he will be like, Charlie you get some beat for there?

DJ Breezy disclosed that the beat for Seihor was originally meant for Becca but after she and other artistes failed to make the most of it, Castro jumped on it and Seihor was born.

Siehor, that beat was made for Becca, Becca tried it didnt work, Joey came it didnt work, D-Black came it didnt work. So Castro came and ..I was like said as I do something for D-Black you have to do something for meHe said, you get some beat for thereHe enter the booth inside and that was it. Mehn Castro is a genius, DJ Breezy recounted.

Thursday, July 6, 2017 marked exactly three years since Ghanaian hip-life musician Castro and a lady friend, Janet Bandu, disappeared while cruising a jet-ski on the Volta Lake at Ada.

Castro had followed his friend Asamoah Gyan to Ada for holidays when he went missing in the river, and a combined search team comprising the Ghana Navy, Marine Police, local fisherfolks and professional lifeguards could not find his body.
Founder of Glorious Wave Church International, Prophet Emmanuel Badu Kobi has honoured maverick Ghanaian marriage counsellor Rev. George Lutterodt with a Kia Sorento during church service on Sunday.

This adds up to the over one hundred cars the man of God have given out people as gifts.

According to the prophet, the gift was a token to show love to the great man, Counsellor Lutterodt.

I will stand with you always. God is using you to change lives. You therefore need a good car to facilitate your movement that is why Ive been touched to bless you with this car, Prophet Badu Kobi said while presenting the car to Counsellor Lutterodt.

The gesture left Counsellor Lutterodt dump-founded as he failed to find words to express his gratitude to the man of God.
Ghanaian actress Tracey Boakye has appreciated Vivian Jill Lawrence for stopping her from aborting her only son when she planned to terminate the pregnancy.

The CEO of Shakira Films in a conversation on Celebrity Ride With Zionfelix show disclosed that she had the intention of aborting his son three years ago when she realized that she was pregnant for his then boyfriend, Yaya Mohammed. Giving reasons for her determination to get rid of the pregnancy, the Devil Between My Legs actress revealed that the former Kotoko player dumped her after she conceived and was not ready to father a child. Tracey continued that money was not a problem because her family was ready to take care of the child but the lack of attention and love from a man during the pregnancy period tempted her to have an abortion had it not be Vivian Jill Lawrence.

On how her Godmother saved the child, Miss Boakye told Zionfelix, host of the show that Vivian Jill Lawrence asked her not to contact her again if she proceeds with her plans to abort the pregnancy. The mother of one added that the threat changed her plans to get rid of the child who was few months old in her tummy.

"It was Vivian Jill who threatened to stop talking to me if I abort the child. In fact, I was tired of crying everyday. I didn't have a financial problem because my family was always ready to support but I never had attention and love from the man during the pregnancy period so I decided to get rid of it and move on with my life.

The time I planned on aborting the child, I had already told Vivian so she asked me to delete her number if I implement my plans so I just had to stop what I wanted to do. That was the best decision she (Vivian Jill Lawrence) helped me to take" Tracey Boakye told Zionfelix on the show.

Watch Tracey Boakye on Celebrity Ride With Zionfelix below:
Eminent art scholar and artist par excellence, Professor Ablade Glover, has been invited to deliver the keynote address at the launch of the maiden edition of an event dubbed 'Atuu Festival of Arts', slated for August 19 at the Golden Tulip Hotel in Accra, organisers have disclosed.

According to them, the decision to select Professor Glover, who has received several national and international awards, to deliver the keynote address was taken after much brainstorming and consultations with some industry stakeholders.

They added that there will be six special guests of honour at the launch, and Prof Glover as one of the special guests of honour will deliver the keynote address on behalf of all the guests of honour.

The other special guests of honour for the launch are Prof Attukwei Okai, Prof Esi Sutherland-Addy, Prof Kofi Anyidoho, Agya Koo Nimo and Nana Kwame Ampadu.

The festival which is being organised by the Joint Committee of Collective Management Organisations (JCCMOs) is aimed at promoting the diversity and uniqueness of Ghanaian music and culture, tourism, among others.

The maiden edition will have various artists from the length and breadth of Ghana to showcase indigenous Ghanaian culture.

Patrons of the 'Atuu Festival of Arts' will be treated to drama and dance performances, musical concerts, visual of arts exhibitions, symposiums, workshops, live musical performances and a host of others.

The festival which will be held annually will also showcase the arts in Ghana and place local creative arts practitioners and their works in the global market.

A number of local and international artists, including event organisers, have been invited to participate in the upcoming event.


Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Scratch Studios & Music Publishing, Kofi Amoakohene, last Wednesday organised a party dubbed 'Kofi @ 60' to mark his 60th birthday.

The party which was held at Kofi Amoakohene's residence (formerly the Guest Hotel) at East Legon in Accra attracted a large number of personalities, including celebrities and politicians.

There was plenty to eat and drink. Family members and friends, including a section of music stakeholders, were also there to grace the occasion.

Some of the celebrities who graced the occasion include Gyedu Blay Ambolley, Bibie Brew, Tagoe Sisters, Steve Bedi, Paulette, Owura, SSUE, Freman Ame, Shabo, New Morning Band, among others.

The event kicked off with performances from Gyedu Blay Ambolley, who sang some of his popular hit songs.

Paulette and SSUE also charmed the invited guests. Apart from exhibiting their usual vocal abilities and dancing skills, they got the entire audience singing along.

Bibie Brew, an award-winning international recording artiste, also put up a brilliant performance to the satisfaction of all present.

The event also witnessed energetic performances from Tagoe Sisters.
19.07.2017 LISTEN

Nigerian lawyer, entrepreneur, and founder of African Achievers Awards, a set of annual awards bestowed on Africas most accomplished achievers has eulogised the legendary Nelson Mandela on the international Mandela Day celebrated globally on 18th July.

In a short statement shared with his press aide, he noted Nelson Mandela Day does not only celebrates Nelson Mandelas life, but it is also a Universal call to action for people to recognise their ability to affect their community positively. The day hopes to inspire people to embrace the values that Mandela shared. These values include freedom, equality, reconciliation, and democracy etc.

He also shared the legacy of Nelson Mandela as the most reputable African Leader.

In another short statement shared via email, Lawyer Idaminabo noted

You can see from South African to across the Globe people from different race and culture are celebrating our African Icon.

We need African leaders to emulate our ICON. Nelson Mandela not only became the great example of a leader that Africa needed, he became a respected figure across the Globe. He also became a personal example to me.

His legacy on peace and forgiveness should be a Global template for both citizens and leaders.

Without his amazing personal leadership and ability to inspire people to forgive and reconcile, the world would not celebrate Him on this day. He is indeed a great example to emulate.

From Libya to Nigeria, from Somalia to Congo, Africa has been devalued and belittled with the Western media mockingly looking on and pretentiously aiding and abetting our constant leadership challenges.

Let our leaders pay adroit attention to African troubles and restore the pre-colonial pride and Eclair of yesteryears. Let our leaders find wisdom and inspiration in the immortal words of Franz Fanon when he said that  We are nothing on earth if we are not first of all slaves to the cause of the people, the cause of justice, the cause of liberty.

If our leaders believe and act on these words, then, a new dawn of positive actualization, accountability and development will smile on our Africa. Let us take back our Continent; others are taking back theirs!

We celebrate you Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela our African ICON

Profile of Barrister Rex Tonye Idaminabo

In 2015, Mr Idaminabo was ranked by Forbes Magazine among leading Young African Entrepreneurs. He is also an Executive Director of Reputation Poll International (a Global Reputation management Agency that focuses on creating, profiling and promoting brands. He is a winner of several Awards including 15th GAB Award London (for his contributions to the promotion of the positive image of Africa and Africans through Leadership), National Heritage Awards, British Award for African Development (It was a Private Parliamentarian Award Ceremony which was hosted by Pauline Latham MP and Jeremy Lefroy MP, UK Parliament, (He was decorated with the honour for his significant role in promoting African and Diaspora entrepreneurial developments as well as setting good models of business and development in the UK and Africa and has been nominated for several Awards which includes the All African Business Leaders Award (Organised by CNBC Africa). Most recently, The Mayor of Cambridge in England presented him with an award for His contribution for the Cambridge Leadership Academy.
Accra, July 18, GNA - President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on Tuesday lauded the Ghanaian media for continuously supporting government in informing and educating the public on governance and accelerating the growth of democracy.

President Akufo-Addo said the media played critical role in ensuring progress in governance, saying he could not overemphasise how diligent the Ghanaian media had worked towards making his thoughts known to the public.

Addressing the media at a maiden presidential press encounter held at the Flagstaff House in Accra, he said: 'I must commend the media especially the presidential press corps for their hard work and tenacity put into ensuring that our activities get the needed publicity'.

He also expressed support at the actions undertook by the media to propel the repealing of the criminal libel law which, he explained, had given the media the needed support to play its watchdog role efficiently and guard against unlawful national resources.

The President assured that his government would continue to create enough room for the media to contribute to the growth of democracy and the nation building as he said democracy at the local level was crucial for the country's economic and social growth.

'Ghanaian media continues to enrich government,'' he said and added that the media was to facilitate the efficient evaluation of public projects and ensure good use of national resources for the betterment all Ghanaians.

President Akufo-Addo called for the press briefing to interact with the Ghanaian media and to address the concerns of the public through the press. GNA

By Gideon Ahenkorah, GNA
Ouagadougou (AFP) - Work to rehabilitate a 1,260-kilometre (782-mile) railway that is a vital link between the Sahel and Atlantic coast will begin on September 15, the governments of Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast said Tuesday.

The two governments, along with the track's operating company Sitarail, signed an agreement setting the date at a meeting in the Burkinabe capital.

Under a deal reached with Sitarail's parent company, the French group Bollore, 400 million euros ($462 million) will be committed to modernising the route, Burkina Faso's Foreign Minister Alpha Barry said.

The first phase, costing 130 million euros, will last four years, Barry said, without giving a completion date for the overall project.

"The work will start on September 15, there will also be orders for new material, new locomotives," said Eric Melet, chief executive for development at Bollore Transport and Logistics.

"It will go ahead very quickly."

The unelectrified single-line track traces its origins back to the late 19th century, when France was looking for ways to link the colonised Sahel to its trading posts on the Atlantic.

After many interruptions, the line began operation in 1954. After an economic crisis in the 1990s, management of the railways was handed to Sitarail.

The line plays a key role for landlocked Burkina Faso in transporting cotton and manganese exports to the coast, and in importing oil, cement and fertiliser.

But it suffers from poor track and ageing rolling stock, limiting train speed.

Rehabilitation of the line had been announced in September 2015 but work did not advance.

In September 2016, all traffic was stopped for two weeks after a bridge on the Ivorian side collapsed as a goods train was passing over, although without causing casualties.

"Economic growth between Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast is dynamic and there are lots of goods which have to be transported by rail," Melet said.

By rehabilitating the northern branch of the line to the mining town of Kaya, 100 kilometres north of Ouagadougou, "a million tonnes of minerals could be transported over the next four years," he said.

Bollore has a 67 percent stake in Sitarail, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast each have 15 percent, and the remaining three percent is owned by the workforce.
US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, had another, previously undisclosed conversation at this months G20, the White House has confirmed.

They spoke towards the end of a formal dinner but the White House has not revealed what was discussed.

President Trump has condemned media revelations of the talks as sick.

The two leaders relationship is under scrutiny amid allegations of Russian interference in the US election.

US intelligence agencies believe Moscow tried to tip the election in Mr Trumps favour, something denied by Russia. Mr Trump has rejected allegations of any collusion.

The extra conversation happened during a private meal of heads of state at the G20 summit in Hamburg earlier in the month.

Mr Trump left his seat and headed to Mr Putin, who had been sitting next to Mr Trumps wife, Melania, US media said. The US president was alone with Mr Putin, apart from the attendance of the Russian presidents official interpreter.

Mr Trump had been seated next to Japanese PM Shinzo Abes wife, so the US interpreter at the dinner spoke Japanese, not Russian. No media were in attendance. Image copyright REUTERS

Image caption At the dinner, Mr Trumps wife, Melania, sat next to Mr Putin

The length of the talks has been disputed.

Ian Bremmer, president of the US-based Eurasia Group, who first reported them in a newsletter to clients, said: Donald Trump got up from the table and sat down with Putin for about an hour. It was very animated and very friendly.

No-one else was nearby, so the topics of discussion were not known, he said.

Mr Bremmer had not been at the dinner but said details were given to him by unnamed attendees who, he said, were flummoxed, confused and startled by the turn of events.

In a statement, a senior White House official said there was no second meeting, just a brief conversation after dinner.

Skip Twitter post by @realDonaldTrump

The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!

 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

The official said: The insinuation that the White House has tried to hide a second meeting is false, malicious and absurd. It is not merely perfectly normal, it is part of a presidents duties, to interact with world leaders.

National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton said it was not a meeting but a pull aside, adding: A conversation over dessert should not be characterised as a meeting.

Mr Trump later said on Twitter: Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is sick. All G20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!

The dinner and its attendees have always been known. Only the Trump-Putin discussion had not been reported before.

At the earlier, formal meeting, their first face-to-face encounter, Mr Trump said he had repeatedly pressed Mr Putin about the allegations of interference in the US vote.

I said, Did you do it? He said, No, I did not, absolutely not. I then asked him a second time, in a totally different way. He said, Absolutely not.'

There are congressional investigations, and one by a special counsel, into the allegations of Russian interference in the US election and possible collusion with the Trump team.

Trump at six months

Judge me on four things, said Trump. So we did

What has Trump said about your country?

Trumps promises before and after election

Meanwhile, the White House said Mr Trump would nominate former Utah governor Jon Huntsman as ambassador to Russia, a key post for a president who promised to improve relations with Moscow.

Mr Huntsman, who served as ambassador to China and Singapore, needs to have his name confirmed by the Senate.

The suspicions over Russian interference are likely to play a significant factor in his confirmation process, correspondents say.


Sus Snow is phonetic spelling of mispronounced American alias of Ghanaian facebook friend. I think her real Ghanaian name is Akumaa or something of the sort. Akumaa and myself had a heated debate on her facebook wall. She was reacting to The Guardian reportage in which the judicial term prosecutors was used to describe the procedural role leading to conviction. The report which read epigrammatically thus, "prosecutors convicted suspect." She wasn't cool with the fact that The Guardian could use the term "prosecutors" to volley round the message to its audience with direct reference with conviction of suspect in guilty verdict

Miss Akumaa argued that indeed. The Guardian was wrong in its reportage in respect to the medium of communication. That, the English language according to her, should have been the jury or judge convicted the suspect instead prosecutors. Well, myself being on the other side of the divide and beside myself made brief inhalation and exhalation and soliloquized. The soliloquy was that there are several revealing factors that would have dissuaded Miss Snow to change that position

One, the whole judicial process with effect to convict or acquit is called prosecution. That is why the term "prosecute" is used to refer to try or put through justice system. In essence if we have 'prosecute,' 'prosecution,' why not prosecutors as general concept couched in embodiment of the investigative police, bailiffs, jury selection, prosecutor and judge?' Two since it is the prosecutor, the one that indicts, initiates legal proceedings and doggedly pushes for conviction of potential offender/s. There wouldn't be anything wrong, if s/he apparently convicts suspect ( coarsely used )

That is my candid opinion though Miss Akumaa won't acquiesce. My personal encounter with my Ghanaian facebook fellow has a lot to do with the plan by the government led Nana Addo to set up Prosecutor Office. In Ghanaian political domain the yet to be implemented office is called of Special or Independent Prosecutor

I find a little odd to accept that special attachment to it ( special/independent ) because is going to be like any other state institution or Department. Take for instance; in Spain there is Supreme Court ( Tribunal Constitucional ) set up with the sole purpose of interpreting spanish federal laws or constitution. That is to say no other case is tried in this particular court apart from issues relating to what spanish constitution say

And this is the least said about one of the supreme courts in Spain. The Tribunal Constitucional simultaneously/spontaneously ( without the necessity of anyone filing a suit ) abrogated Catalonia's prohibition of Bullfight. Bullfight is considered to be one deeply revered traditions of Spain. And Spain allowing regional devolved governments. Catalonia's - located on the northeastern part of Iberian Peninsula - prohibition of the Bullfight within the Catalan demarcations was based on regionally made law/s. Also, there is Fiscalia Anticorrupcion, literally anti-corruption prosecutor specially set aside for anti-corruption fight

Incidentally, both Tribunal Constitucional and Fiscalia Anticorrupcion are neither called special nor Independent. Because other supreme courts and prosecutors, in likewise manner dispense other state duties with profiency

Now if we should go back to my characteristically unusual debate with a facebook account handler about prosecutions. Prosecution spanning the investigative law enforcement agents, prosecutor/s, court bailiffs, jury selection and ultimately the judge. Ironically according to international law and that of Ghana, prosecution procedure is incomplete without defense attorney. I will not hesitate to add the defense attorney/s to the cream of professionals that form the composition of elements of prosecution

My dear sister disdainfully and egregiously with naive approach narrowed it to the prosecutor that indicts and initiates legal proceedings as a dictates of procedural norm. In Ghana, the practice of using police officer as prosecutor of which the subject matter is about, is awkward must be reversed. For me, the function of prosecutor, mainly state attorney/s, is catalyst. And without the due diligently conducted forensic evidence, the work of prosecutor ( the one that indicts, initiates and pushes for conviction ) is 'ceremonial' without the work of the police force--CIDs or BNIs

Let me be empathic here that state attorney or prosecutor's prosecutorial powers can't supersede that of Minister of justice and Attorney General (AG). Just as everywhere around the globe they are under leadership and censorship of AG. And that under no circumstances should prosecutor special or independent be allowed to investigate criminal or political malfeasance. That will amount to breach of constitution. Only police can investigate criminal acts. Nana Akufo-Addo may be dreaming, then we revisit the question of whether he really understands legal issues?

The actions of the president shouldn't change constitutionally established norms or culture and the fourth republican status quo. Even in Spain 'special anti-corruption prosecutor' is strictly under the AG. In US it is the local police authorities, FBI and CIA that are in charge of investigations not civilian prosecutor otherwise known District Attorney's Office. The DAs are strictly under federal AG Department. It is not the same thing for civilian to tap your computer software system or phone in comparison to police

In other words, it is the law enforcement agents who gather the evidence for the prosecutor/s. Deductibility the evidence gathering is inviolable/imprescindible for prosecutor to earn conviction in court of law. Relatively, we are planning to select some state attorneys to set up the so-called special/independent prosecutor to deal with corrupt government officials past and present.

Finally expatriate prosecutor/s would be to espensive to afford. My objection is rooted in the question of why we have to pay very huge amount for a job that can be done with less amount by Ghanaian counterpart/s. So if you suggest that we would need expatriates to teach our investigative apparatus about forensic accounting tracking and what-have-you. Then you and myself will be on the same page. Please note that it is not the expertise of the prosecutor that matters rather the expertise to gather the evidences

And the flip flops that surround the expected office only go to embolden the corrupt officials. The earlier we get the so-called special or independent prosecutor and all it entails right the better it be

Agobodzo, Richard

You can contact me through [email protected] or www.facebook.com/ Agobodzo Richard
This is a private viewpoint.

Ugandan Muslims must be happy with President Musevenis conduct towards the Islamic University in Uganda (IUIU). So are Muslims across the globe from 57-member nations of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), that owns it.

They are thankful for the enormous contributions by Uganda under him for the birth, development and sustainability of this university since its inception in 1988.

In that year, with NRM government just two years old; IUIU was finally delivered. It remained the only second university to Makerere University until 1989 when Mbarara University of Science and Technology was founded. Ndejje University in 1992, Uganda Martyrs University in 1993, Nkumba University in 1994, and Uganda Christian University in 1997 pioneered the scores of other private universities in the country today.

The delivery of IUIU was welcomed as a huge relief following a long overdue gestation periodhaving been conceived decades earlier by president Idi Amin in 1974, but remaining a blueprint. Hence the euphoria and special manner in which it came to be.

Uganda offered a special act of parliament only for this university. This marked its first unique features from other universities in the country. The other is its line ministry being of foreign affairs even though, technically drawing policy guidelines from ministry of education and sports.

Over the years, under the support of president Museveni, IUIU has been treated as a proud child of NRM government gaining a number of opportunities. There is for example, the vast land allocations at its main campus in NkomaMbale district, prime land along Kampala roadhosting the Fahd Plaza endowment and another in Nsambya, also undergoing development as an endowment asset. This is not to mention earlier external loan guarantees for infrastructure development.

In 2004, for example, the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) extended a loan of US$3.9m for students hostels at Mbale. It was called IDB Phase I Project and both parliament and president Museveni approved it with the required sovereign guarantee. All along, these offers have been perceived in the sense of a responsible parent towards its lovely progeny.

Its, however, with profound shock that Muslims learnt of a recent decision by president Museveni blocking access to another IDB approved loan towards IUIUs continued advancement. It appeared like a parent choking its young to death!

This was unusual and it severally raised questions; key being, was he misadvised this time?

The basis of his judgment was rather a new insubstantial presumption that IUIU is a private university like any otherthus could not be extended sovereign guarantee! But that fact that Uganda offered to host it, in the first place, was a commitment to grant it sovereign security of any kind.

Besides, over the years the president knows pretty well that as host nation, Uganda owns IUIU more than any other OIC member. He knows that despite being Islamic 33% of student vacancies are today occupied by those with Christian backgrounds. Of the nearly 1,000 full time staff, more than 70% are Ugandans and others are outsourced from seven countries. On that basis, Uganda is obliged to protest any agent attempting to torpedo IUIUs progress and not the reverse.

Early this year, First Lady and minister for education and sports, Janet Kataha Museveni, visited IUIU, to among other roles, ascertain its level of readiness for phase II of the IDB loan.

In his brief to her, university rector Dr Ahmad Kawesa Sengendo demonstrated how the IDB phase I of US$3.9m was utilized and already repaid to zero balance. It had a repayment period of 25 years and a grace period of 7 but was cleared in 12 years.

Since 2013 when IDB accepted to loan IUIU US$13.8m for phase II, it has only been waiting for another sovereign guarantee, a requirement by all multi-national financial institutions. On its part, the bank offered a grant of US$150,000 for developing the universitys master plan and already delivered it.

The now blocked loan was to facilitate expansion of the university by establishing the faculty of engineering and technology, a modern library, a new students hostel, video-conferencing lectures from its four campuses and capacity building for staff. Its all blocked by stroke of a pen!

Whereas Muslims are optimistic for president Museveni to soon revisit and rescind his decision, they will think longer: Who misadvised him this time? Where had the old love disappeared?

Swaib K Nsereko,

Lecturer, Dept of Mass Communication, Islamic University in Uganda
19.07.2017 LISTEN

Facebook Messenger is now fully integrated in Jumia Travels system as a powerful channel for Customer Service. The integration of customer service for Messenger in Jumia Travels system marks a new dawn for its customer service experience, as it offers a live chat experience on Facebook Messenger. The tool can also be used to instantly request for a hotel room on the platform, where the companys professional Travel Advisors will offer counsel on the best accommodation options as well as make the booking.

As the first African company to integrate Facebook Messenger in its own system, Estelle Verdier, Jumia Travels COO and Co-Founder says that this is a show of our great commitment to always bring the latest technology and high-quality services to our customer in Africa.

On its recently published hospitality report for Africa, Jumia Travel states that 51% of searches done on the website are via smartphones, with 68% of the bookings. This compares to 49% and 32% of searches and bookings respectively done through the desktop.

In Africa, e-mail penetration has remained low especially because it doesnt provide a fluent conversational experience and is not fitted for mobile. With Customer Service for Messenger integration, we bring to our customers an instant and convenient way to chat with us on mobile from Facebook. We trust that Facebook Messenger will become a major channel in the coming years, and this new feature allows us to scale the communication with our customers on Messenger, says Stanislas de Dinechin, Jumia Travels Global Head of Customer Service.

The tool will also be used to handle customer queries and requests such as airport pickup, and booking modification among others. With a high mobile first population in Africa, Facebook Messenger provides a great opportunity to reach people in addition to other social media platforms, as compared to the conventional browser.
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, July 19, 2017 -/African Media Agency (AMA)/- Ten teams of 21 budding African social entrepreneurs have been selected as winners of the Resolution Social Venture Challenge at the Baobab Summit in Johannesburg. Winning teams earn a fellowship that includes seed funding, mentorship and access to a network of young global changemakers to pursue impactful projects in their communities. A collaboration between the Mastercard Foundation and The Resolution Project , the Resolution Social Venture Challenge provides a pathway to action for socially responsible young leaders who want to create change that matters in their communities.

"Giving back to your community is an important part of the Scholars Program, yet few young leaders have the opportunity to make an impact at a young age," explains Ashley Collier, Manager of the Scholars Community. "The Social Venture Challenge equips these young leaders with the tools, resources, mentorship and capital they need to ensure that their venture is successful, and to maximize their impact."

Winners of the 2017 Social Venture Challenge say that:

"Winning the Challenge is an important milestone that will allow me to address problems faced by tea farmers in my community," explains John Wanjiku, a Mastercard Foundation Scholar at the University of Pretoria. "With my project Ukulima Halisi, I hope to improve the tea collection process, both reducing the costs associated with spoiled tea leaves, and cutting down on the time Kenyan farmers spend waiting for tea collection. By shortening this process, Ukulima Halisi will provide farmers with additional time to engage in other economic activities that could increase their income, as well as preventing illnesses that occur when farmers spend long hours waiting for tea collection."

"Winning the Social Venture Challenge will help us achieve our goals, communicating to our community in Baringo County, the huge potential in honey production," says Sylvia Mwangi, a Mastercard Foundation Scholar from the University of Toronto. "With the mentorship offered to winners of the Challenge, we will design capacity-building workshops in bee-keeping that will change how women spend their days, and we will develop sales channels that will reduce the exploitation by middlemen."

In 2016, the Mastercard Foundation first partnered with The Resolution Project, offering 16 Scholars on five competing teams the opportunity to pursue their aspirations and increase their appetite for leadership and impact. Winning projects address a wide range of challenges Scholars observed first-hand in their communities, including food security, access to sanitation, and young women's access to reproductive health education.

Impact evaluation data reported by The Resolution Project shows that, while type and reach of impact varies, an average of 3,200 community members benefit per fellowship awarded. With over 350 Resolution Fellows active in 65 countries, more than 1.2 million people worldwide have been positively impacted by their work. They are driving progress in their communities, making each Resolution Fellow a change agent and a force for good.

"We are fortunate to have such an outstanding partner in the Mastercard Foundation," says George M. Tsiatis, CEO & Co-Founder of The Resolution Project. "The Foundation saw the work that we were doing and the ideas that their Scholars had-it was a perfect match, and we are thrilled to be expanding our efforts together to give these young leaders a platform from which to launch lifetimes of impact!"

The 2017 cohort of Social Venture Challenge winners include projects based in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ghana Uganda, Rwanda, and the United States:

* AgriMatters - Clive Matsika - Arizona State University

With his AgriMatters initiative, Clive will partner with local fertilizer companies in Zimbabwe, harnessing nanotechnology to manufacture Greenfert, a rich, environmentally friendly fertilizer that can be sold to farmers at a reduced cost.

* Baringo Asali - Sylvia Mwangi - University of Toronto

By working closely with marginalized communities in Baringo, Kenya, Sylvia aims to increase local revenue generated from honey production. Through partnerships with local and international apiaries, Sylvia will roll out training in advanced beekeeping techniques and local community skills training.

* Dash for Girls - Frances Aanyu, Agatha Akello and Lisa Anenocan - Makerere University

Frances, Agatha and Lisa are working to empower the girl child in Karamoja, Uganda, by providing access to correct and accurate information about the dangers of teenage pregnancy so as to help them make informed decisions.

* ECO Sanitation Services - Kwabena Adu-Darkwa, Abraham Addy and Justice Nyamadi - Ashesi University College

Kwabena, Abraham and Justice are working together to tackle the problem of the 2.4 billion people world-wide who lack access to safe toilets. Eco Sanitation Services (ECOSaS) provides environmentally friendly and affordable micro-flush toilets to low-income earners, supporting them with a flexible payment system.

* Prawji-Mama Food Bank - Pauline Nalumansi and Ephrance Kalungi - Arizona State University

With Prawji-Mama Food Bank, Pauline and Ephrance are working to develop a sustainable food bank system supported by youth entrepreneurship and technology to overcome hunger in rural communities.

* Rwanda Youth Initiative for Agricultural Transformation - Annet Mukamurenzi, Gerard Ndayishimiye and Yvette Abizeyimana - EARTH University

By working with vulnerable farming communities across Rwanda, Annet, Gerard and Yvette are committed to improving food security. They will equip smallholder farmers with modern farming skills, strategies and technologies to grow sustainable food security solutions and protect the environment.

* Sparky Thermal Dehydrator - Kayiza Isma and Nsubuga Thomas - Makerere University

To address post-harvest losses, a leading cause of food insecurity in Uganda, Kayiza and Nsubuga will introduce the Sparky thermal dehydrator. Sparky, which operates using bio-fuels as a source of energy, is a low-cost, efficient device that dries farm produce 10 times faster than the conventional sun drying methods.

* Strong Women, Strong Love - Ritah Arishaba and Alpha Ngwenya - Arizona State University

From Uganda to America, Ritah and Alpha are providing health education and feminine hygiene products to homeless and economically disadvantaged women. In Uganda, the pair will be teaching young women and girls to make their own sanitary products.

* Ukulima Halisi - John Wanjiku - University of Pretoria

Most tea farmers in Kangema, Kenya, spend a lot of time waiting for their tea leaves to be collected. But, John believes, if farmers had access to tea leaves collection schedules, farmers would have more time to devote to other farming activities and improve their incomes.

* ZAZI Growers' Network - Thabu Mugala, Tanyaradzwa Chinyukwi and Martinho Tembo - EARTH University

Thabu, Tanyaradzwa and Martinho are committed to empowering and connecting women farmers in rural Zimuto, Zimbabwe. ZAZI Growers' Network will provide women farmers with technical agricultural training and mentorship to help them improve their crop yields and enhance the community's development.
A senior journalist in the Brong-Ahafo region, Kwame Anning Frimpong, has given thumps ups for the organization of the maiden presidential press encounter in Accra with a section of the media, to assess the first six months of president Nana Akufo Addo's administration.

But was not happy with the kind of questions some journalists asked, judging from the magnitude of the occasion and the personality involved.

Giving his assessment of the press encounter on Space FMs Morning Flight 877 hosted by Dickson Smith on Wednesday, Mr. Anning said he expected some of the journalist who had the privilege to be invited, to have used the occasion to ask very intelligent and necessary questions, bearing in mind that the entire nation was looking up those journalists as their mouth pieces to solicit answers from the president on key national issues.

The senior journalist opined that some of the journalists were overwhelmed by the event and ended up messing up.

He was not happy how journalists were invited for the event, adding that such event should be national in character and not restricted to one particular area.

He commended president Nana Addo for playing key role in the repeal of the criminal libel law which has helped in promoting free press in the country.

A former BrongAhafo regional chairman of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) and regional manager of the GNA, Charles Coomson, noted that he was satisfied with the media encounter.

He said the president did well with his answers which covered his first six months in office, but was not happy about the lack of research about national issues on the part of some journalists.

According to him, some questions were substandard and journalists must be up and doing about their profession. Some of the questions our colleagues asked were not punchy enough to merit presidential response, he said.

Mr. Coomson said journalism must be done with utmost professionalism at all times. He therefore admonished the media to avoid praise singing in matters of national interest
Some aggrieved employees of the Electoral Commission (EC) have petitioned President Nana Akufo-Addo to dismiss the Chairperson of the Commission , Charlotte Osei.

The employees in a statement insisted Mrs. Osei should be impeached for among others, bringing the Commissions name into disrepute by single highhandedly petitioning EOCO on an alleged misappropriation of staff endowment fund for malicious reasons. 

They further revealed that following her appointment as EC Chair, Mrs. Osei compromised the independence and neutrality of the Commission by arranging for 2015 V8 Land Cruiser with registration WR 2291-15 from the office of the President for use as official vehicle without going through the procurement process or recourse to the Commission.

The aggrieved employees also alleged that Mrs Osei unilaterally awarded a contract to the tune of GHS 3.9 million for demarcation and partitioning of the said office complex without recourse to the Commission and engaged in cronyism by awarding another contract to the tune of $14,310,961 (United State Dollars) to her cronies for the construction of Pre-fabricated District offices without recourse to the Commission. 

The value of these contracts is in excess of the approved threshold by the Public Procurement Authority. One of the contractors by name Messrs Contracts & Cads Limited is related to Mrs. Charlotte Osei. Upon receipt of advance mobilization under the approval of the Chairperson, the company has failed to meet the contract terms.

The petition was signed by the employees Lawyer, Maxwell Opoku Agyemang.

The petition from the aggrieved employees follows the loss of some GHc480, 000 from the EC's Endowment Fund which prompted Mrs. Osei to ask the Commission's Deputy Chairperson in-charge of Finance and Administration, Georgina Opoku Amankwah and the Finance Director , Dr. Joseph Kweku Asamoah to proceed on leave.

Dr. Kweku Asamoah however refused to obey the directive, arguing that he was neither the Director of Finance nor holding any position to influence management's decision regarding financial administration of the Endowment Fund, when the scandal occurred.



By: Marian Ansah/citifmonline.com/Ghana

Follow @EfeAnsah
The role of an active and dauntless media in any given democracy cannot be marginalised. The practice must, however, be hinged on sincerity and morality if the desired dividends are to be realised.

The ethics of the profession must at all times be upheld so that the public interest which media practice seeks to uphold would not be compromised.

Media practice has witnessed its share of twists and bends over the years with the opening of the floodgates for the operation of newspapers and radio stations on the public space. Crooked practice devoid of decency and laced with outright sycophancy, juxtaposed with constructive reportage and commentaries to keep governments in check have all been experienced by the people of this country at various times.

While the freedom of expression maxim must be allowed to flourish without inhibition, there have been challenges, however, some of which sometimes constitute national security threats.

President Akufo-Addo, an old fox in the practice of democracy which he has fought for most part of his life to sustain and protect, cannot be one to fall in love with the sycophant media. This, he made, explicit when he engaged the media in a town hall style meeting.

He fielded the questions as best he could, although many would have wanted the session to be longer. No engagement of this sort is without a time limit and so it had to end at a point and to be moderated.

Periodic engagements of the kind, we witnessed yesterday, have the capacity of deepening our democratic practice, especially if it is underpinned by sincerity and candour.

President Akufo-Addo's stated preference for a noisy media as opposed to one enmeshed in sycophancy is the mark of a politician who understands the importance of journalism in a democracy.

Expectedly, there are many angles to the town hall engagement but in our estimation dwelling on the media segment has unlimited dividends because the health of a country's media determines the quality of the prevailing democracy. That has determined our choice of segment to the varied faceted engagement.

The president's preference should serve as a standard for his appointees to follow. For those who expect to be constantly praised the way sycophants do that cannot inure to the good health of democracy. If we must be robust in our criticisms of appointees or the government as a whole, we would do so with the utmost objective of safeguarding the national interest. The president has given the green light for this template.

When the media fails to mirror the true state of governance by feeding both the governed and the government with untruths laced with unrestricted pampering, it would not take long before things fall apart.

Engaging with the media as the president did is doing so with the people of Ghana who voted him into power. Therein lies the importance of the media which should not be taken for granted by bad appointees who have a warped concept about public service.

Stories about scandals not broken but concealed for favours would affect the quality of governance and those so withholding the negative developments would be doing more harm to the country than otherwise.
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Fidelity Bank has called for collaboration with the National Entrepreneurship & Innovation Plan (NEIP) to immediately double the $10 million seed capital pledged by government.

Jim Baiden, who made the appeal at the maiden Ghana SME CEOs summit in Accra, said for every cedi of the seed capital that passes through Fidelity Bank, the bank would match it with another one cedi to double the seed capital of $10 million.

Fidelity Bank recognizes the significance of the SME sector and has created a strong value proposition to meet the needs of SMEs in the various stages of their growth cycle. The bank also recognizes that SMEs in this era are better positioned than at any time to succeed. This is because the SMEs can leverage the technology to adapt to best practices and tap also into the social media space to project their business and sell products in a more cost efficient way.

He said the SME sector makes up 92 percent of all registered companies in Ghana, and contributes as much as 70 percent to Ghana's GDP.

Indeed, if the private sector has been described as the engine of growth for the economy, then I'll say that SMEs are the fuel that propel the engines, Mr Baiden said, adding that the SME sector in this country is poised to lead the transformation of our economy from a raw material export-led economy into one that exports value-added, processed and finished products. I urge all established CEOs in the SME sector, as well as young entrepreneurs emerging in the SME space to be resolute and then stay the course under all the circumstances.

Ernest De-Graft Egyir, CEO of the Chief Executives Network Ghana Limited, organisers of the CEOs Summit, in a speech, revealed that the Ghana SME CEOs summit would take place in November this year.

Mr De-Graft Egyir said the current economic growth figures did not translate into jobs and wealth distribution, because SMEs were not given the needed attention.

Ghana's economic growth (overall real GDP-including oil growth of 6.3%) is a classic case of growth that has failed to be inclusive, a term to describe economic growth with widest participation and benefits, De-Graft Egyir disclosed.

How can a 6.3 percent GDP growth rate fail to translate into a commensurate reduction in poverty and up scaling SMEs?, he asked rhetorically.

It all boils down to economic expansion with insufficient job creation due to no up-scaling of the local services and manufacturing sectors.

The summit is expected to feature an exhibition of local SMEs, panel discussions, plenary sessions, open forums and networking sessions all aimed at bringing SME CEOs and government together.

A business desk report


Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Strategic Communications Africa Limited, Esther Cobbah, has advised businesses operating in the country to be mindful of the kind of media they choose to communicate their messages to the masses.

She also urged businesses to pay critical attention to the kind of media content to produce and communicate to the masses for consumption.

Ms Cobbah was making a presentation on Thursday in Accra during the final day of the two-day Social Media 360 Summit 2017 held at the Kempinski Hotel.

According to her, rather than strategically using the plethora of media platforms available in the modern age for competitive advantage, most companies were using the media, especially social media platforms for 'popularity contest.'

She urged businesses to begin to strategically use the available media channels, especially social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp, to make meaningful impact.

We need to be more strategic in utilizing the multiplicity of media channels available, she said, adding that today's world presents a lot of channels but unfortunately businesses are not leveraging them for their advantage.

Ms. Cobbah said companies must understand that it was not about the number of social media handles they created but about how they managed such handles to their advantage.

She further stressed the need for businesses to understand the goal, target, kind of audiences, message and media, for which they create contents.

The conference was themed: 'Creating Digital Ideas, Building Your Business.'

BY Melvin Tarlue


Accra, July 19, CDA Consult  The African Court on Human and Peoples Rights (African Court) is to equip 40 lawyers on legal grounds for representing Indigent Applicants before the Court.

Justice Sylvain Ore, President of the African Court in a statement to CDA Consult in Accra on Wednesday explained that the August 3 to 5 training is aimed at familiarizing the lawyers with the Courts judicial and operational aspects and also update them on the legal aid scheme.

He said this is the first time such training is conducted, adding that at the end of the training, the lawyers would have been equipped with requisite skills in order to represent indigent applicants effectively.

Currently 61 counsels from 25 countries have registered with the Court to represent indigent Applicants.

The countries are: Algeria, Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, Congo (DRC), Dutch / French, Egypt, Gabon, Gambia, Italy, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The African Court was established by virtue of Article 1 of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Establishment of an African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, to complement the protective mandate of the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights, with a view to enhancing the protection of human rights on the continent.

By mid-July 2017, the Court had received 147 Applications, disposed of 31 while 112 pending and transferred 4 to the Banjul Commission. Of the 147 Applications received, 134 were from individuals, 10 from NGOs and 3 from the Banjul Commission.

The African Court received 12 requests for advisory opinions of which five are pending whilst seven have been finalized. Three requests for review all of which have been finalized and three requests for interpretation of judgment one of which has been finalized whilst two are pending.

To date the Court has issued eight judgments on merits, in which it has found States Parties in violation of various articles of the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights (the African Charter).

It has also issued judgments/ rulings on reparations and issued orders for provisional measures in at least 20 cases. Three requests for Review have been received and all three finalized whilst three were received on interpretation of judgment with one finalized and two pending.

CDA Consult provides tailor made development communication tools necessary for operational transformation and translating dreams into achievable goals and equips clients with mechanism for public education on specific issues.

It also provides effective back-up or frontline monitoring and evaluation tools to ensure value for money delivery of projects, whilst providing clients with skills to deliver timely and accurate information on their activities, work, programmes and projects.

CDA Consult is also aimed at building a responsive working culture for corporate growth through a social process at institutional levels based on dialogue using a broad range of tools and methods.

It also assists client to use continuous and adaptive process of gathering, organising and formulating information and data into argument and to communicate to policy-makers through various interpersonal and mass media communication channels.
The fall of the army worm invasion is causing havoc on the farms of our poor farmers as they helplessly and worriedly look on.

Not so long after the government launched the planting for food and jobs policy did this disaster hit our dear nation. It makes me wonder in my mind why this is happening at the time when government's focus is on increasing agricultural productivity to boost our economy as majority of the Ghanaian populace is fundamentally engaged in farming.

But what immediate measures are the Ministers of Agriculture putting in place to conquer this predicament? The president has appointed five ministers to the Agric Ministry to help his government deliver on its mandate but their sluggishness in rapidly combating this disaster dares me to use the most popular word used by politicians to describe the performance of their political rivals- "incompetent" on them.

Recently the agriculture minister became furious when this word was used on him but it is fast becoming evident that he is truly so.

If these ministers cannot collaborate with NADMO to within a matter of urgency fight the army worm disaster, then it makes me wonder if these were the men the president spoke about while in opposition.

I thought this was one of the reasons why the new government opted to use experienced men to salvage us from our predicaments rather than 'babies with with sharp teeth' whose arrogance as ministers under the Mahama administration cost the NDC their electoral defeat.

However, I'm beginning to see these experienced ministers are men with blunt teeth who travel overseas at the expense of our taxes while over 120,000 hectares of farm lands have been invaded by army worm across the country.

Currently as I write this article the agriculture minister is in Brazil for reasons best known to him.

We were recently in Wa West District, one of the most deprived districts in the Upper West Region, whose population is predominantly farmers. The situation is not different from other seriously affected districts as farmers wept in cold pain- losing their livelihoods to these worms.

The government's flagship policy of "planting for food and jobs" received an overwhelming endorsement from many farmers who were expectant of the enormous benefits they may accrue from the policy to improve their crop yield and expand their scope of farming,given the hype to the policy by the Ghanaian media. Many of the farmers, felt the second coming of Christ in their heart but when it commenced in June this year, their disappointments were became manifest. Why? The policy in practice, only provided seeds of maize, rice, and soya beans and fertilizers to the farmers.

The expectations were far beyond just seeds and fertilize, not even tractor services were provided to plough the lands.

That aside, the least said about extension extension services, the better. How would we deploy six extension officers to each district and expect dried results?

I would like to quote from a great philosopher, John Maxwell who once said"A leader who leads without followers is mere taking a walk". And in the president's inaugural speech, he said " I urge you to be citizens, not spectators citizens, not subjects". Draw your own conclusion!

Bamie Tahir-Ahmed

Wa
Communications Director of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Solomon Nkansah has said President Akufo- Addo has failed Ghanaians by giving an amount of GHS 20,000 to Alfred Woyome instead of retrieving the GHS 51million Judgement debt like he promised.

According to him, President Akufo- Addo is breeding corruption by giving out GHS 20,000 to Woyome. A man who already owes the state a huge amount of money.

Assessing the Akufo- Addo led Government's six months in office, Solomon Nkansah, speaking with Akwasi Boateng host of " Maakye" morning show on Hot93.9fm, indicated that President Akufo- Addo has failed woefully.

Making reference to the promise of Nana Addo, who was then the flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) during the 2016 electoral campaigns to retrieve the GHS 51million that was wrongfully paid to business man Alfred Agbesi Woyome since the erstwhile NDC government could not retrieve the money, Solomon Nkansah accused Nana Addo of giving an additional GHS 20,000 to Alfred Woyome during the latter's mother's funeral when he (Akufo-Addo) should be staying true to his word.

"Before Akufo- Addo became President he promised Ghanaians that when he is voted into power he will retrieve the Woyome money and use it to help in funding the free SHS policy but now the President has given out an additional GHS 20,000 to Woyome through a delegation he sent to the funeral of Woyome's mother. So I ask, now that the President has given Woyome this amount of money, when will he (Nana Addo) retrieve the old debt in addition to this one because as the President, what ever he does is on the expense of the state. You promise to retrieve the money for Ghanaians only to add more to it, that is not what he promised. Besides why would he give Woyome such an amount at his mother's funeral, did the President tell us that Woyome is his friend or did he say he will retrieve the money of Ghanaians from him" He quizzed.
From left: Dr Jeremiah Chakaya, Dr Paula Fujiwara, Dr Muyabala Munachitombwe-Muna and Dr Frank Bonsu

The International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (The Union) has announced the development of a new tuberculosis treatment model aimed at reducing the duration of treatment for the disease.

Dr Paula Fujiwara, The Union's Scientific Director, who disclosed this to the media, stated that the new regime which she labelled the '3-P Project', would help treat and eventually eliminate tuberculosis and other lung diseases in the next couple of years.

We have developed, in conjunction with partners, a new model for researching and developing an entirely new TB treatment regime and this is called the '3-P Project', Dr Fujiwara explained.

She said the '3-P Project' contains three elements  Push, Pull and Pool which has one of its primary goals to be the reduction of the length of a TB regimen to only one month long  a significant reduction from current treatment options that range from six months to two years.

And what this means is that we are pushing  we are going to push funding through grants so that pharmaceutical companies will say, this is something I want to do  I want to develop a new drug. Pull meaning that we are going to give out rewards to people or organizations that have actually reached their R&D objectives and finally, pool, meaning that the pharmaceutical companies can work together to develop new regiments. Tuberculosis needs more than one drug, we need regimens, Dr Fujiwara explained.

20th Conference of the Union

She was speaking at the media briefing session at the 20th conference of The Union, Africa region in Accra, where doctors, nurses and others in the healthcare field have come together to share solutions on lung diseases  primarily tuberculosis  in the African region.

The three-day conference, themed 'accelerating implementation through partnership to end TB, HIV/TB, tobacco and other related NCDs', holds a symbolic value as the first conference of The Union Africa region.

The Union's President, Dr Jeremiah Chakaya, said this year's conference  which will play host to more than 600 registrants  and The Union itself will focus primarily on the solutions to the problems of tuberculosis and other lung diseases and not the problems themselves.

We will mainly be focusing on not the problems but the solutions to those problems, Dr Chakaya explained.

The Union is an international non-governmental organisation dedicated to preventing, treating and eradicating lung diseases, including tuberculosis, HIV/TB, bronchial asthma and COPD around the world. The organisation was founded in 1920 in Africa and now operates in more than 90 countries.

TB Burden

Dr Frank Bonsu, the conference chair and head of the National Tuberculosis Control Programme, Ghana, mentioned that globally 10.4m TB cases were estimated in 2015 but only six million of them were identified and reported.

He said that Africa's 1.3 million reported TB diagnosis is disproportionately high, accounting for 21 percent of the world's cases but only 13 percent of the world's population.

This, he explained, is due to factors, including prevalence of HIV combined with Africa, having the largest population living below the poverty line.

Bringing home the figures, Dr Bonsu said about 15,000 new TB cases are recorded annually out of the 44,000 suspected cases in Ghana, a situation he attributes to the technology used in the past to detect TB.

This means that four out of every 10 TB cases are missed and the mortality is seven out of every 100 TB cases in Ghana, he said.

Dr Bonsu was hopeful that with the introduction of the new technology, GeneExpert, the missed TB cases will be identified for treatment.

Dr Muyabala Munachitombwe-Muna, President, The Union, Africa region, called on the media to be at the forefront of efforts to eliminate TB by 2035.

He said issues of stigmatisation can be addressed if the media begins changing the perception of people about the disease and focus more on prevention and awareness creation about TB, much like outreach efforts surrounding HIV.

By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri & Austin Hicks


The Students Representative Council (SRC) of Family Health Medical School (FHMS), in partnership with the Ghana AIDS Commission, has held a free health screening exercise for the chiefs and people of Teshie in Accra.

The day's event saw more than 700 people being screened for various disease conditions such as malaria, hepatitis B, HIV, blood pressure, blood sugar level and body mass index.

The FHMS is the teaching wing of the Family Health Medical Hospital located at Teshie, near the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Centre.

The SRC President of the Family Health Medical School, Amanda Wumbel, averred that the exercise was part of a joint effort by the Family Health Hospital & Medical School to strengthen relationship with the residents within its catchment area.

In the spirit of goodwill, it is only right that as a reputable medical facility which has over the years consolidated its track record as the country's premier private medical institution engage in a free medical service to sensitize the public, she stated

Mrs Wumbel further disclosed that the FHMS is the teaching wing of the Family Health Hospital which provides general and specialist medical services.

The Director-General of the Ghana AIDS Commission, Dr Mokowa Blay Adu-Gyamfi, in a speech read on her behalf, lauded the Family Health Medical School for the event, which she described as being a critical intervention for the people.

She reiterated the need for people to go for voluntary HIV testing and counselling for early treatment to commence for persons who test positive with the virus.

The representative of Dr Blay Adu-Gyamfi further urged the people to practise safe sex, and warned that HIV has no cure.

By Solomon Ofori




ABOUT 50 tutors of Kintampo Rural Health Training School, now College of Health, yesterday demonstrated against the Rector of the College, Prof Adu-Oppong calling for his removal from office alleging corruption and incompetence.

The Rector, Prof Adu-Oppong who was appointed by the Ministry of Health to head the College since August last year was accused by members of Health Tutors Association of Ghana, Kintampo branch, of incompetency, lack of leadership skills and conniving with the procurement officer to engage in corrupt practices in the school. They also accused the Rector of not being a permanent staff of the institution and that he is above 60 years so should have been on retirement by now.

The tutors who registered their displeasure yesterday on campus wore red armbands and went on a peaceful demonstration by calling on the Ministry of Health to heed their call by the end of this week to sack the man or they will desert the school.

Speaking to DAILY GUIDE on phone about their grievances, secretary of the local branch of the Association, Taadi Peter, explained that the school is facing a lot of challenges like lack of classrooms, lack of clinic for the training of physician assistants, lack of equipped laboratories and demonstration rooms for the training of students and lack of buses to convey students to health institutions for practicals, and rather, the Rector is using the school fund to do unnecessary things.

He accused the Rector of using GH463,000 of the school fund to buy V8 Land Cruiser though the school has a Nissan Navara pick up for him. He said external auditors who investigated the allegation found him culpable and he was asked to refund the money but till date he has done nothing about it.

Mr Taadi blamed Professor Adu-Oppong of giving contract to his family members and friends who supplied substandard materials to the college to the displeasure of students and tutors.

He insisted that the Rector is not a permanent staff of the school but rather of University of Cape Coast so is not always on campus to take care of the day to today running of the College. Currently he is attending an interview at the UCC campus to become the provost of that institution so cannot discharge both responsibilities at the same time. Last but not the least; the reactor is 63 years now so cannot continue to head the institution.

[email protected]

FROM Daniel Y Dayee, Kintampo


19.07.2017 LISTEN

A group calling itself the Concerned New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the Northern Region, is demanding the immediate dismissal of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Savanna Accelerated Development Authority (ASAD), Mr Charles Abugri.

The aggrieved group who trooped to the Modern City Hotel in Tamale on Wednesday morning, waited for several hours to see the Minister for Presidents Special Development Initiatives, Mavis Hawa Koomson to present to her their grievances.

In a petition which was later given out, they issued two-week ultimatum within which their demands must be met or they will embark on violent protestation.

Members of the group, who literally held the minister hostage at her hotel room, claimed Mr Charles Abugri is not a credible person and is alleged to have given $9million dollars from the authority to his friend to trade in tricycles.

As a result, we have resolved as NPP members that, we cannot work with him, since he has no integrity and therefore we dont have enough confidence in him to run the affairs of the Northern Development Authority or any other office under the Akuffo Addo led NPP administration. We however wish to call on you the sector Minister, Hon Mavis Hawa Koomson to facilitate the implementation of the recommendations in the coming days in order to ensure that, the depreciation of the machines that are kept under the mercy of the sun and the harsh weather condition and downpour will be curtailed.

The Minister who received their petition, promised to look into their grievances with consultation from the appropriate authorities.

Read full text of their release below:

CONCERN NPP YOUTH NETWORK

Hon Minister,

Special Development Initiatives

Accra-Ghana

PETITION TO MINISTER OF SPECIAL DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVES

It is with great excitement and hope we write this petition to you, the sector Minister of Special Development Initiatives. This is among the series of Petitions and Press Releases, we the above mentioned group have written in the last couple of months.

As a Concern Group, we monitored keenly the operations and activities of SADA especially its subsidiary component, Unik Savannah and brought to the attention of the government the dubious arrangements that were carried out prior to and during the operations of the company.

For this and many reasons, an Adhoc Committee was setup by your Ministry to establish the real facts behind the establishment of the company. Though, the SADA C.E.O, Dr. Charles Abugri and some Directors of the authority never relented on their efforts to thwart the efforts of the committee, the Inter-Ministerial committee came out with its findings and advise as well as some recommendations.

Key among the recommendations includes;



The agreement between SADA and Unik Savannah should be terminated per their TOR and therefore, the staff of Unik Savannah should have no further role to play and should therefore be asked to step aside. The interim management should be dissolved SADA should be responsible for the contractual agreements with the new companies and SADA should use four weeks to come out with modalities of engaging the new companies for the distribution of the existing stock and collection of the debts.

These are some of the recommendations of the committee which the Chief Executive Officer, Charles Abugri refused to adhere to.

We wish to reiterate that, the SADA Boss is not a credible person giving the fact that, he took $9million dollars from the Ghanaian taxpayer and gave to his friend, Dennis Anderson to trade in Tricycles and ultimately shared among his cronies and members of the erstwhile NDC government.

Again, we want to put on record that, Charles Abugri after the committees findings went to EOCO and requested for an Alternative Conflict Resolution between SADA and his friend Dennis Anderson (Former C.E.O of Unik Savannah). This we believe was an attempt by the SADA boss to defraud the people of Ghana by bringing his friend back to reclaim what do not belong to them.

As a result, we have resolved as NPP members that, we cannot work with him, since he has no integrity and therefore we dont have enough confidence in him to run the affairs of the Northern Development Authority or any other office under the Akuffo Addo led NPP administration. We however wish to call on you the sector Minister, Hon Mavis Hawa Koomson to facilitate the implementation of the recommendations in the coming days in order to ensure that, the depreciation of the machines that are kept under the mercy of the sun and the harsh weather condition and downpour will be curtailed.

This appeal comes at the wake when we have realized that, there is a deliberate attempt by SADA to delay the implementation process. We want to state without any equivocation that, if the roadmap set by SADA is not realized in one week, we would advise ourselves accordingly the following week. We will resist any attempt by any government official to reinstate Dr. Charles Abugri under any capacity within SADA or NDA. We would not miss our words; we shall resist him with all the contempt it deserves.

Thank You

..

Edward Mohammed

Copied to:

Northern Regional Minister

Mr. Salifu Saeed.

All Media Houses in Ghana
The writer

19.07.2017 LISTEN

I was happy to hear the number one gentleman of the State, His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo will address Journalists and accord them with the opportunity to ask him some critical questions about his six months in office today July 18, 2017.

Little did I know it was not for Journalists across the country but rather those in Accra and Kumasi. But let me ask, is Ghana Accra and Kumasi?

Did the President not campaign across the country to have him elected?

Why did the information Ministry decide to invite only Editors in Accra and Kumasi?

OK, enough of the questions. I am the News Editor cum Morning Show host of Tamale based North Star fm in the Northern region. I was excited to know maybe myself or any of my colleagues from the Northern region will be invited to the Media Encounter with the President because we have a lot of issues bordering us up North we would have pointed out to the President and his team of Ministers to address.

From my checks, no media personnel from Brong Ahafo, Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions of Ghana was invited.

We have issues of SADA bothering us, for the first time we heard an overhead bridge will be constructed in Tamale, how far are the plans advanced towards its achievement?

We were told some moneys have been secured for the construction of some bridges in the country including one in Daboya.

UNICEF statistics reveals that about 90 percent of people in rural areas of the Northern region can not afford three square meals a day hence your Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty program, Mr. President. What are you doing to empower people in abject poverty up North to also benefit from your government?

I think these questions will have to stay in my ink until a day the Presidency will remember we have capable Journalists up North who are the voice for the voiceless in our society to also ask him questions.

During the NDC regime under former President Mahama who was our brother, we were once again ignored so am not astonished it has repeated itself.

Mr. President, you promised us an all inclusive government, where is it after your six months of office if your media encounter was only with Accra and Kumasi Journalists.

I pray this my plea gets to you so that next time, we those up North might be considered to be part of this encounter. Thank you.

By Abubakari Sadiq Righteous

North Star Fm

Tamale
The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) has criticized the decision by the Information Ministry to exclude key media organizations from Tuesdays encounter by President Akufo-Addo.

Some notable media houses were missing from the Presidential encounter held at the Flagstaff House, to mark the first six months of the Akufo-Addo Presidency.

Deputy Information Minister, Perry Okudzeto is reported to have offered explanations as to why a popular station based in Accra, Radio Gold, was left out of the list.

Perry Okudzeto

Media houses in the country are many and so we found a way of pruning down the number. It was not because of any political affiliation ... .we had to send out invitation to some and not all. It is not only Radio Gold that was not invited; other stations in Accra were also not invited, Mr. Okudzeto told Peace FM.

But Executive Director of the Foundation, Sulemana Braimah in a post on Facebook hours after the event, said the Deputy Ministers explanation just doesn't wash.

Read Sulemana Braimahs post below:

WHY WERE SOME KEY MEDIA HOUSES NOT INVITED?

Why were some key media houses not invited to the Presidential encounter while others had more than one, even more than two representatives? I have read what is said to be an explanation by Deputy Information Minister, Perry. But the explanation just doesn't wash.

For such an important media event with the President, you cannot leave out a major station like Radio Gold. Yes, Radio Gold is Pro-NDC, so what? In fact, that is precisely the reason why they ought to have been invited even if it was only 10 media organisations that were invited.

According to latest figures for first quarter 2017, Radio Gold is Number 6 in Accra in terms of listenership and number 10 nationally. So what were the criteria for selecting the media organisations that were invited? Was it out of fear, malice or discrimination? Such a poor judgment!!!

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Jerry Tsatro Mordy | Email: [email protected], Twitter: @jerrymordy
MP for North Tongu constituency, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa says he was disappointed that President Akufo-Addo deferred questions to his Ministers to answer.

The President at his maiden media engagement at the Flagstaff House Tuesday to mark six months since taking office directed questions relating to the economy and the judiciary to the Vice president, Dr. Mamudu Bawumia and the Attorney-General Gloria Akuffo respectively.

When he drops the economic question like a hot potatothen I will say that it is not too inspiring; it is not too encouraging, the former Deputy Education Minister assessed.

Speaking on the Super Morning Show a day after the Presidents media encounter, Mr. Ablakwa said Nana Akufo-Addo failed to demonstrate to Ghanaians that he is on top of issues.

We want to see that our president is on top of the issues, Mr. Ablakwa stated.

He, however, commended the exercise which over the years has become part of the countrys democracy.

In many other jurisdictionsPresidents are really cocooned and shielded away from the media and for that matter, the citizenry. It is very good for our country moving forward. Lets agree that this exercise is good for the country.

Samuel Jinapor

Deputy Chief of Staff, Samuel Abdulai Jinapor in a response said: There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, indeed it is supported by the concept of our government.

Every Minister speaks for the president, Mr. Jinapor maintained, citing the era of John Agyekum Kufuor where the President directed his Ministers to respond to some of the questions posed to him during the peoples Assembly encounters organized during his tenure.

"It is never the case that this has never happened; President Kufuor on almost all the interactionsreferred questions to his Ministers," Mr. Jinapor explained.

Listen to the discussion in the audio attached:



Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Jerry Tsatro Mordy | Email: [email protected], Twitter: @jerrymordy
Two experts have called on the Legislature and Judiciary to render an account of their performance to the public through the media, just like the Executive has been doing.

Dr. Eric Oduro-Osae, the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at the Institute of Local Government Studies (ILGS), says Ghanas democratic dispensation would achieve significant gains if the other two arms of government meet the media periodically to discuss issues pertaining to their constitutional mandates.

I think it is a conversation that we need to start having as a nation because Parliament is made up of Parliamentarians, and it is true that they represent various constituencies, [but] whether or not they will account to them [public] at the various constituencies is another matter.

Nationally we should have a way of getting Parliament to account to us for what they have been able to do in terms of passage of laws, in terms holding other arms of government by way of checks and balances in the governance arena, he said.

Dr Eric Oduro Osae

The respected political analyst was speaking Tuesday on current affairs programme, PM Express, on the Joy News channel on Multi TV.

The programme focused discussions on President Nana Akufo-Addos first media encounter with selected journalists and civil society groups at the Flagstaff House on Tuesday.

The Presidency organised the event to mark the Akufo-Addo-led six months old government.

President Akufo-Addo speaking at Tuesday's event

Full Speech: Akufo-Addo's speech at 1st Media Encounter in Accra

In the past, Presidents have held similar engagement at least one year into their term of office, however, the Nana Akufo-Addo becomes the first President to meet the press in six months.

Related: Experts assess Akufo-Addo ahead of presser

The discussion focused on the economy, security, health among others, with some journalists demanding answers to very tough questions.

Dr Oduro Osaes assessment of the performance of both the Journalists and the President at Tuesdays presser was satisfactory, however, he wants the conversation to move from what he calls Executive Accountability to when the other two major arms of government can offer the public the same opportunity to scrutinise their work.

When it comes to the Judiciary too, the Judiciary is an important arm of government. The extent to which they have performed these functions [interpretation of the law]...they are also expected to account to us. So we shouldnt always look at Executive accounting to us, he told show host, Nana Ansah Kwao IV.

He suggests that in the future, the Legislature and Judiciary should be officially represented at such press encounters so that media personnel  who frame their questions based on public interest issues  can direct their queries at them.

Dr. Oduro Osae's suggestion resonated with another guest on the programme, Dr. Vladmir Antwi-Danso, a security expert and the Director of Academic Affairs at the Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College.

Dr . Vladmir Antwi-Danso

Dr. Antw-Danso said the presence of all three arms of government would be novel and would ensure "collective accountability".

He said the presence of all three arms of government at a media encounter will help them to find ways of curtailing their deficiencies.

"I believe that when we talk about accountability, we must look at the totality of governance and not just the Executive," he said.

Watch the full programme in the video link below



Nana Akufo-Addo took office in January 2017 after a first round victory in December last year, ending his partys stay in opposition after eight years.

He has, however, faced criticism over the handling of activities of political vigilante groups such as the Delta Force and Invincible Forces that have been responsible for some unlawful activities.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | George Nyavor | [email protected]
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is speaking so well, tough and good. Since his inauguration on January 7, 2017, the Presidents pronouncements are always on point and resonate so well with the citizenry.

It was precision leadership on display when the President addressed the traditional authorities last week with a bold pledge to stop the galamsey (illegal mining) menace ruining national development efforts. He even went a step further with a public declaration that he is prepared to put his job as President of Ghana on the line to safe-guard and secure the nationss interest and future.

To say the least, this is not the first time a President of Ghana has put his presidency on the line. The immediate former President, John Dramani Mahama, during the 2016 electioneering also did same when he stopped the teachers and nurses trainees allowances.

In September 2016, while addressing students of the University of Cape Coast, as part of his campaign tour, President Mahama said his government would not restore teacher and nurses trainees allowance, even if it would cost him the 2016 presidential election. He said his stand was grounded on principle rather than mere politicking, which was a stock in trade of his opponents.

For partisan politics purposes, you have your political opponent come and say when we come back we will restore training allowances to colleges of education and nurses. For me, it is better to lose the election on principle than win it on falsehood, he publicly stated. Yes, our former President, John Mahama, lost that election, but he also earned the respect of many Ghanaians who believed that in his mind he thought he was doing something very good for the nation Ghana and the well-being of its citizens.

Our two leaders, current President Akufo-Addo and former President Mahama, like other global leaders, have all taken this bold step of putting their presidency on the line because of their unalloyed belief and trust in knowing that they are doing something good for the nation.

Ghana will need such bold statements from their political leaders no matter how costly they will be for their political fortunes.

Bitter truth

However, the bitter truth in our governance processes over the years is that our political leaders speak a lot of good intentions until the time to act. That is where we see our leaders falter badly and terribly. This time round, we as citizens, and not spectators, must all pray for President Akufo-Addo not to falter badly and terribly but to walk his talk and match his promises and assurances with undertakings.

So far, having been in office for nearly seven months, President Akufo-Addo has been on point in speech delivery. He always resonates well with the people and everything he says attests to his commitment to the transformation agenda of the country.

Already, President Akufo-Addo has left no one in doubt that he is a man in a hurry and continuously demonstrates that in his public pronouncements.

However, talk can be cheap if it is not backed with concrete and practical actions. Therefore, going forward we as citizens shall expect nothing short of he and his appointees standing up to their words, promises and assurances.

Clearly, what the nation requires for accelerated growth are doers; leaders who are bold to hold the bull by the horn and take generational quick thinking decisions to transform the economy.

MMCEs must play roles

A few of our metropolitan and municipal chief executives (MMCEs) have also taken the bull by the horn and indicated their readiness and determination to doing things in the total interest of the nation. In some of the metropolis and municipalities, efforts are seen by some of these MMCEs to inject discipline and orderliness in their communities, but by and large, many of them are yet to hit the ground running and at best can be described as fast sleeping on their work.

High expectations

Recently, the Director of the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge, Dr Ha-Joon Chang, who was in the country on an Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) invitation, told the Daily Graphic in an interview that the high expectations of Ghanaians of the government of President Nana Akufo-Addo is a step in the right direction and very good as that would help the government to work harder to meet the expectations of the populace.

He, however, cautioned that in all those expectations, it was necessary for the people to be realistic.

To achieve this objective of high expectation requires both strong institutions and good and effective leadership and since the executive and his appointees have all given the signals of their commitment to deliver, Ghanaians expect nothing short of their pledges and promises fulfilled.

Campaign promises

Seven months down the lane, the government keeps on repeating its campaign promises such as one village, one dam, one district, one factory and one constituency, one million dollars slogan while the people wait with bated breath when those promises will see the light of the day. In September, the free Senior High School programme must roll out. With six or seven months in a government with a four year mandate, the time is ticking and tocking. It is time to match promises and assurances with concrete plan of action. After all, if any government will succeed, it will depend on how they undertake their promises and assurances.

For the President and his appointees, the thumbs of the electorates will determine whether he or his appointees deserve another mandate in the next elections in 2020.

As the President accounts for his stewardship to Ghanaians today, he will be expected to speak on a wide range of issues at a press conference which is in line with his pledge to be accountable to the people.

We, the citizens, will expect our president to tell us, the how, where and when the promises and assurances are being implemented or undertaking..

It also worthy to note that while expressing commitment, there is the need to strengthen and resource institutions to be able to monitor and sanction those who will fail to carry out the promises of government.

Time and again, we have seen some ministers and key appointees (MMCEs) under perform or falter to the extent that they have to face the music for their inaction or overactions, yet we see the executive dragging its feet when the time comes for the whip to be cracked.

It has been said that spare the rod and spoil the child but we hope this time round no one would be spared when it comes to taking drastic actions against ministers of state and key appointees who falter since the President himself has put his job on the line because he knows that his success also depends heavily on how his appointees perform.
Tamale, July 19, GNA - A ten-member regional team for the implementation of Infrastructure for Poverty Eradication Programme (IPEP) in the Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions has been inaugurated in Tamale.

The members are to aid in the restructuring of the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) into the Northern Development Authority (NADA) to uplift people from poverty and also minimise inequality among socio-economic groups in the three Regions of the North.

The members are also to see to the implementation of Infrastructure for Poverty Eradication Programme (IPEP) an initiative of the government to curb poverty in the Savannah ecological zone.

The IPEP is an innovative approach to enable government direct capital expenditure towards constituency level specific infrastructure and economic development priorities to combat poverty through industrialisation and job creation.

Under the IPEP, government would focus on infrastructure development and institute a number of inter-connected programme initiatives at the grassroot level to help eradicate poverty, to transform the economy.

Mr Solomon Boar, the Deputy Northern Regional Minister inaugurating the members, said government was committed towards enhancing the economy of the country hence the initiative.

He said the members are to ensure that the programme succeeded to improve agriculture production and growth of industries in order to eradicate poverty in northern Ghana.

He urged the members to work devoid of tribalism and focus on the purpose for which they had been tasked.

Mrs Mavis Hawa, Minister of Special Development Initiatives reiterated government's commitment towards reducing poverty and increasing opportunities for all Ghanaians, especially the poor and the vulnerable.

She said the multifaceted nature of development challenges coupled with the fast changing world demanded the cutting edge solutions that could positively impact on the lives of the people in the country.

She assured that the members would be attached to the NDA after the transformation period to contribute their quota to the development of the zone.

'Over the years, government has made efforts towards reducing poverty and bridging inequality among population groups and between the different regional areas of the country' she stated.

She advised the members to bring to bear their skills, knowledge and expertise in the implementation of the programme and must exhibit high level of commitment, team spirit, reliability and diligence.

The Technical and Economic Advisor to the Vice President Dr Mutaka Alolo said the IPEP would help improve on the small business and agricultural infrastructural development.

"They will also help to address the perennial water shortage; rehabilitate broken bridges as well as help work to improve the infrastructure of schools in the country" he added.

He said under the IPEP, government would allocate $275 million dollars to the development of basic infrastructure in 275 constituencies to embark on poverty alleviation projects.

He said the programme would focus on agriculture, agribusiness and slum upgrading as well as other government flagship programmes such as the 'One District, One Factory', 'One Village, One Dam' and 'One District, one Warehouse'.

The Upper West Regional Minister Sulemana Alhassan and the Upper East Regional Minister Mr Rockson Bukari took turns to advise the members to work with a unity of purpose.

They assured their preparedness to collaborate with the team to ensure success and to implement government's agenda of working to improve lives.

GNA

By Caesar Abagali, GNA
Kinshasa (AFP) - Five UN peacekeepers' bases in the Democratic Republic of Congo are to close at the end of July, the UN mission there announced Wednesday, describing it as a change in operational style.

But the closures come against the background of cuts to the overall peacekeeping budget pushed through under pressure from the United States.

The bases, all in the restive eastern province of Nord Kivu, on the border with Rwanda and Uganda, will close by July 31, according to a statement from MONUSCO, the peacekeeping mission.

"The new operational device consists in prioritizing flexibility and mobility in military interventions in line with the strategy adopted by the UN department of peace-keeping operations," said the statement.

The new system would include "long-distance patrols, presence demonstrations patrols, air surveillance and rapid deployment in the event of security incident", it added.

DR Congo's resource-rich east has suffered nearly two decades of brutal conflict.

As neighbouring states backed rebel groups in a civil war against Kinshasa's authority and armed militia forced civilians to flee their homes, part of MONUSCO's mission has been to protect the local population.

UN peacekeepers have been in DR Congo since 1999 and the operation there is the biggest -- and most expensive -- of its kind run by the United Nations.

But while the previous mandate authorised a force of 19,815 soldiers, police officers and military observers earlier this year, the UN voted to cut that back to 16,215.

Last month UN diplomats agreed to cut nearly $600 million from the peacekeeping budget after weeks of pressure from Washington.

That brought it down from $7.87 billion to $7.3 billion in the coming year.
Nairobi (AFP) - A Kenyan court on Wednesday sentenced three men to life for stripping and sexually assaulting a woman they believed was dressed too provocatively.

The verdict capped a case that prompted hundreds to march through the capital Nairobi in short, fitted clothing in 2014, calling for an end to violence against women after a video of the attack was made public.

"We are equal, but it is equally important to respect the dignity of a woman," chief magistrate Francis Andayi said as he handed out the sentences.

"This is what many uncultured men do out there," he added.

The assault at a petrol station on Nairobi's outskirts, in which the victim was stripped, sexually assaulted and had her phone and cash stolen by a violent mob, was captured on camera and widely circulated on social media.

It was part of a rash of assaults against women and led activists mobilised under the hash tag #MyDressMyChoice to demonstrate.

The three men, Edward Gitau, Nicholas Mwangi and Meshak Mwangi, were technically given the death sentence. However Kenya's ban on carrying out executions means the trio will spend the rest of their lives in jail.
Brazzaville (AFP) - Congo and several UN agencies have launched a joint appeal for $23.7 million (20.6 million euros) to help 138,000 people hit by fighting and insecurity in the southern region of Pool.

"The most pressing humanitarian needs are related to food security, nutrition, living conditions and access to basic health services,' said OCHA, the UN agency that coordinates humanitarian work.

They were vulnerable to attacks, threats, sexual violence, loss or family separation, said the statement, issued Tuesday.

Deadly violence broke out in the Pool region, which adjoins the capital Brazzaville, following Denis Sassou Nguesso's re-election as president in March 2016.

According to UN figures, one in three persons there were forced to flee the unrest. And a report by the World Health Organization said more than 17 percent of under-fives forced to flee were suffering from malnutrition.

Voting in the first round of parliamentary elections last weekend had to be postponed in eight out of 14 constituencies.

Rights groups had said earlier that it was impossible for people forced to feel the violence there to vote.
Traders in Kpeve Market in the South Dayi District of the Volta region have staged a protest against payment of market tolls which they claim does not inure to their benefit.

The aggrieved traders, mostly women accused the District Assembly of failing to renovate the deplorable market despite being a major source of revenue for the Assembly.

According to the women, authorities have remained insensitive to their plights despite calls to provide the market basic amenities such befitting stalls and sanitary facilities.

It becomes difficult to move about in the market when it rains, flooding most parts of it. A very serious side of it is where the yam sellers would have to incur double cost in getting their stuff to their side of the market. Sanitation is an important part of the struggle. Food brought to the market sometimes gets infested in the market due to the poor sanitation and waste management in the market. It will interest you to know that the market plays hosts to Zoomlion's waste containers that the whole town uses. Refuse is dumped all around the containers attracting flies and unpleasant smell within that area they lamented.

Aside health and sanitation challenges, the traders also expressed fears over their security as the market has become a home to criminals.

The place has also become a refuse dump, a smoking haven and a public place of convenience. All of these put us at the mercy of wee smokers and poor health

At the press conference today[ Tuesday ] to register their displeasure, the spokesperson for the market women, Madam Delight Ayoyo blamed their worsening case on the absence of a District Chief Executive for the area whose confirmation has been delayed by what she described as a noted stereotype against women aspiring for higher positions in the area.

She recounted how stakeholders have over the years suppressed dreams of women who aspire to occupy the office of the DCE.

We are practically angered at how the district, since its inception, has been blended with gender discrimination against women. The first District Chief Executive nominee in 2004 was first rejected and was only accepted by the intervention of people from all walks of life. Again, the DCE nominee in 2009 during the Atta Mills administration was out rightly rejected. Afterwards, a man being nominated, Mr Bekui, was accepted in both 2009 and 2013 without any problems just because he was a male DCE nominee. A female has been nominated once again and here we are, seeing another rejection.

The women are however insisting the district assembly leaves the collection of market tolls to them so they rather account to the assembly at the end of every market day and be involved in the efficient use of the funds.

Citi News tour of the market revealed the deplorable nature of the market with temporary stalls and palm frond sheds built by the women. The women have since been in red armbands and scarves to drum home their displeasure.



By: King Nobert Akpablie/citifmonline.com/Ghana
The Minority in Parliament is calling for the withdrawal of the Office of the Special Prosecutor bill over what it said is governments pathetic treatment of the bill.

The opposition lawmakers said 24 hours after the bill was laid before the House, MPs were yet to be served with copies to make for rigorous deliberation.

Speaking before Parliament Wednesday, Minority Chief Whip Muntaka Mubarak said the absence of copies of the bill flouts Order 75 of the Houses Standing Orders.

Minority Chief Whip Muntaka Mubarak

As soon as sufficient copies of the paper for distribution to members have been received in the office of the Clerk, notice of the presentation of the paper may be placed on the order paper and as soon as Mr Speaker announces papers of presentation, the paper shall be deemed to have been laid, he quoted Order 75.

This is the minimum requirement for any paper, Mr Mubarak said, adding it was not followed when the bill was laid Tuesday.

The government of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is seeking to dredge the country of corruption with the setting up of the Office of the Special Prosecutor.

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo

The creation of the Office forms part of his anti-corruption fight to bring dignity to the countrys governance.

But efforts to get the bill passed might suffer some delay if it is thrown out as demanded by the minority.

Mr Mubarak said the bill should be deemed as having not been laid because it falls short of the requirement.

Majority leader, Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu

But Majority leader, Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu retorted the absence of copies is not sufficient for the bill to be dismissed.

He said contrary to the minoritys argument, copies of the bill were sent to the Clerk of Parliament by government per Order 75.

If the issue is being raised that as of yet I dont have a copy [of the bill], it is a different matter, he said.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Austin Brakopowers | [email protected] | Instagram: @realbrakopowers
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The United States on Wednesday berated African countries for backing a bid by the Democratic Republic of Congo to win a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, saying the move would fuel the conflict in the African country.

The Geneva-based rights council is investigating atrocities allegedly committed by the DRCongo's forces and militias in the Kasai region, where more than 80 mass graves have been uncovered.

US Ambassador Nikki Haley said the decision to put forward the DRCongo as a candidate was "an inexcusable failure" to promote human rights by African countries.

"When the nations of the Africa Group put forward a country like the Democratic Republic of Congo to be a member of the Human Rights Council, it does more than just weaken that body -- it adds to the conflict that is causing so much suffering on that continent," Haley told a debate at the UN Security Council.

The UN's main human rights body can be an asset for the continent if African states put forward "credible candidates with strong human rights records," said Haley.

The General Assembly is expected to hold elections in October to fill seats at the 47-nation council, which monitors and investigates rights violations worldwide.

African countries have agreed to put forward four countries to fill the four seats reserved for the region at the council -- Angola, Nigeria, Senegal along with the DRCongo.

The United States has criticized the "clean slate" practice for choosing members of the rights council and has pushed for competitive elections to challenge countries with questionable human rights records.

During last year's vote, Russia failed to win re-election to the council, losing out to Croatia, but China and Saudi Arabia won their seats by running unopposed.

Human rights groups have also raised concerns about giving the DR Congo a seat at the council, citing the violence in Kasai, the murder of two UN experts who were investigating mass graves there, and the arrests of scores of opposition demonstrators.

"A seat for the Congolese government will be a huge blow to the council's credibility," said Akshaya Kumar, Human Rights Watch's deputy UN director.

The rights council decided last month to send a team of investigators to the DR Congo to look into allegations of killings, torture, rape and the use of child soldiers in the Kasai.
The Ho High court has freed some members of the Volta secessionist group, who were standing trial on treason felony charges.

The discharge of the seven persons follows a motion filed in court today by the Attorney General to drop the charge of treason felony and conspiracy to commit same against the suspects.

Before discharging them, the judge bonded them to six months good behavior.

The suspects allegedly held a press conference on February 26, this year, in Ho chaired by one Kudzordzi, who claimed that Western Togoland sovereignty was non-negotiable and that Ghanas hold on Togoland was illegal and must be denounced and decoupled immediately.

The Homeland Study Group Foundation last year intensified agitations for the declaration of Western Togoland as a sovereign state, which they claimed stretches from Kulungugu in the Upper East Region to Keta in the Southern coast.

They claim that the Gold Coast voted to be a unitary state on July 12, 1956 while the Western Togoland voted to be in union with Ghana on July 9, 1956 and that the union had not been established till now.
Dough Man Foods, a catering services company in Accra, won the Processing Startup of the year award, at the second edition of the Premium Bank Ghana Startup Awards 2017.

The award recognizes startups that have been outstanding in the provision of catering, packaging, processing or preservation services.

The ceremony held at the Movenpick Ambassador Hotel, saw many emerging startup brands receive recognition for their exceptional endeavors in various industries.

The Chief Executive Officer of Dough Man Foods, Francis Kofigah expressed gratitude to clients for their constant support and generous feedback which has pushed the company to deliver the best of their services.

We are very delighted with this recognition. It certainly means we are doing something right. This win means of course that there is more work to be done, and we will continue to provide the best of our brand to Ghanaians, he stated.

Dough Man Foods has set itself apart as the purveyors of delicious, traditional Ghanaian style doughnuts in the country. The company recently marked its first anniversary with an added value of new flavors and additional customized products.

The Premium Bank Ghana Startups Awards is an annual award ceremony that celebrates ambitious and indigenous start-up businesses that are making an impact, contributing to economic growth, meeting social needs and putting Ghana on the global economic map.

The Awards scheme is an initiative managed by The Startup Network, a network under The African Network of Entrepreneurs in partnership with KPMG, Avance Media, iConceptsPR, Edel Technology Consulting, Kumasi Hive, HapaSpace, TentMaker and Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology.
The Hague (AFP) - Judges must review whether to release the ageing former Ivory Coast leader Laurent Gbagbo for the rest of his crimes against humanity trial, an appeals court ruled Wednesday.

Gbagbo, the first ex-head of state to be tried by the International Criminal Court, won his appeal against a March decision which ordered him to be held in a UN detention centre until the end of the legal process.

Five appeals court judges found the trial judges had "erred" on several points by refusing the 72-year-old an interim release, including failing to consider his age and state of health.

The trial chamber should also "have considered the duration of time Mr Gbagbo has spent in detention... and whether Mr. Gbagbo's detention continues to be reasonable," said judge Piotr Hofmanski.

Gbagbo and his former militia leader, Charles Ble Goude, 45, have pleaded not guilty to four charges arising out of post-election violence which wracked Ivory Coast in 2010 to 2011.

About 3,000 people died in the turmoil that swept Abidjan in the aftermath of the November 2010 presidential polls when Gbagbo refused to accept his defeat by bitter rival Alassane Ouattara.

His highly-charged trial on charges of murder, rape and persecution opened at the tribunal in The Hague in January 2016, and is set to last three to four years.

ICC prosecutors accuse Gbagbo of trying to cling to power "by all means," while his defence team has charged that Ouattara seized power by force with the help of former colonial master France.

Abidjan was turned into a warzone between late 2010 to 2011 as clashes flared between the rival forces. After a months-long standoff, Gbagbo was arrested by Ouattara's troops aided by UN and French forces, and turned over to the ICC in 2011.

In March, his defence team made a new bid to win Gbagbo's release, arguing he had already been detained for almost six years "and has pathologies that affect his physical and psychological wellbeing".

The prosecution said the former Ivorian strongman still enjoyed a strong network of support and if he were freed "could abscond to a territory out of the reach of the court".

'Age, health at issue'

But the appeals judges found more consideration should have been given to Gbagbo's age, his health and the six years he has already spent in detention.

Reversing the original decision, they directed the trial chamber "to carry out a new review as to whether Mr Gbagbo should continue to be detained or should be released with or without conditions."

Gbagbo must remain behind bars until the review is complete, however.

Hofmanski stressed the appeals court was "not suggesting what the outcome of the trial chambers review should be."

Greying and balding, Gbagbo listened intently in court to the ruling, with a large beige scarf wrapped around his neck and wearing a casual blue shirt with a red print.

His lawyer, Emmanuel Altit, told AFP before Wednesday's ruling that they were urging the appeals chamber to "apply the law", saying there were strict criteria about keeping people in detention.

Gbagbo "wants to shed light on the truth, he wants to show what really happened. He wants to show the reality of the networks, which were implicated, including those of the French authorities," Altit said.

How any release of Gbagbo during his trial would work remains unclear, as he is required to attend court, but Altit told AFP all options, including a return to Ivory Coast, remained on the table.
19.07.2017 LISTEN

Personnel of the Ghana Police Service and other security personnel on government payroll are by law responsible for the arrest of wrong doers throughout the country. However, in a show of bravery, some citizen vigilante taxi drivers are currently playing a lead role in apprehending criminals who use motor bikes to rob innocent people of their cash, cars and other valuable items.

In the latest show of bravery, a taxi driver used his taxi to cause the arrest of robbers at East Legon to the admiration of onlookers around. The alleged robbers are Abudu Mohammed 27, and Sanusi Zido 18 who were arrested after the brave taxi driver knocked them off their motorbike in an attempt to escape after waylaying and robbing their Israeli victim of 4,000ghc.

In a rare show of bravery, another taxi driver recently assisted in the arrest of two armed robbers who were escaping from a robbery scene after attacking and shooting the leg of their victim, a lady around the Lands Commission area of Cantonments in Accra.

The Good Samaritan taxi driver managed to knock down the robbers motorbike as they tried to get away ending up in a gutter with broken legs but still shooting from their seated position. As a result of the feat he chalked, the taxi driver was rewarded by the employers of the victim Koala Shopping Center with a new car. The Ghana Police Service also rewarded him. In order for the nation to continue benefiting from the voluntary services of the vigilante taxi drivers, there is the need for them to be identified and counselled to be able to modify their methods of causing the arrest of robbers. Incentive packages in smart phones and intelligence gathering gadgets could be made available to all taxi drivers who wish to provide information on criminal activities especially around banks and important areas in city centers. This security service could be extended to other parts of the country.

The act of knocking people down with cars is an offence under the law. However, there is a good reason why the police and members of the general public consider these taxi drivers as heroes. Their voluntary actions have saved the robbery victims from losing their cash, valuable items and their lives.

These taxi drivers may not be alone in the voluntary pursuit as many taxi drivers and other professionals are known to have saved people from being robbed or killed by criminals. Unfortunately, in their efforts to avert criminal activities some people including policemen have suffered in the hands of criminals either by being shot dead or maimed. The latest to suffer from this mishap are two policemen attached to the Community Policing Unit of the Tesano Police Station. The two men suffered gun shots from robbers as they were about to prevent them from robbing people at Las Palmas Restaurant at Abeka la Paz in Accra. The robbers managed to escape from the robbery scene but fifteen persons suspected to have a hand in the shooting incident at Abeka la Paz have been rounded up to help in their investigation in the shooting incident .

As a result of the upsurge of criminal activities by young men using motorbikes to commit crimes, the Ghana Police Service has intensified action to confiscate unlicensed motorbikes in the Greater Accra Region. A large number of these bikes have been confiscated. That is good and must be carried out for a long time to come.

However, the government has a duty to confiscate more unlicensed bikes and embark on action to encourage taxi drivers being very close to the people, to continue with their voluntary service to the state.

The government must institute an award scheme for the brave taxi drivers and the fallen heroes, who died or got injured in line of duty together with police commandersand brave security men including policemen who are leading in the fight against criminals. This way a whole lot of people would venture seriously into and provide voluntary service towards elimination of robbery in the city of Accra and other parts of the country.
There were heated exchanges on the floor of Parliament on Wednesday over the laying of the Office of the Prosecutor Bill.

The Minority in parliament contended that the bill must be withdrawn from the house because it was not laid according to proper procedure.

The Caucus earlier yesterday tried to prevent the Bill from being laid on the same grounds.

The Minority Chief Whip cited Order 78 of Parliament's Standing Orders as being breached hence the need to withdraw and appropriately re-lay the bill.

But the Majority leader, Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu contended that Muntaka's claims were not legitimate.

Muntaka Mubarak argued that copies of the Bill brought to the House for perusal were not sufficient.

The first Deputy Speaker, Joe Osei Wusu, however, directed the Clerk of Parliament to make copies available for the MPs.

The setting up of the office of the Special Prosecutor was one of the key campaign promises made by Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo which he explained was necessary in the fight against corruption in the country.

Confusion over Special Prosecutor's office

There have however been varied opinions about the creation of the office.

Whereas some believe it is in the right direction, the Minority Members of Parliament had threatened to go to court over the matter.

The Minority Leader, Haruna Iddrisu, in an earlier Citi News interview insisted that, the Special Prosecutor's office could not be established without tinkering with Article 88 of the constitution, which deals with the role of the Attorney-General.

That is my understanding of the law. It belongs to the executive chapter of the constitution which is entrenched; therefore you cannot be seeking to review that through an Act of Parliament I am certain that article 88 is entrenched, and not that which can be reviewed simply through a process of an Act of Parliament, he explained.

Funding for special prosecutor in limbo  MP

Though the President has indicated that the office will be operational within the stipulated time, he failed to mention how government intends funding its operations.

The Chairman of Parliament's Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs committee, Ben Abdallah had earlier stated that he did not know where the funding for the office will come from although he maintained that the office is one of the priorities of government.

Government has given a deadline around next year 2018, so let's wait and see if the promise is not realized taking into consideration the deadline, then we will be right in taking government to task. Because as I'm talking, we don't even know where the money will be coming from, whether it will be provided outside this budget estimates, but by the government or it's going to come from somewhere else, we can't tell, he said.

But let's not be judgmental at this time of the day by saying that there would be a conflict of interest with respect to where government is to get funding from be it from a particular entity or individual. Probably the money will be provided for by the government itself, he added.



By: Duke Mensah Opoku/citifmonline.com/Ghana
The loud public outcry of the present endless insecurity in Ghana has taken over virtually all the media outlets of which social media is no exception. The magnitude at which Ghanaian populace is being threatened by the recent overtly and consistently escalating spate of insecurity and lawlessness is noticeable and can easily be seen even by anyone behind wooden spectacles.

It is on this grounds that a formidable pressure group calling itself, Movement For Fairness And Justice (MOFAJ), on the 18 July, 2017 issued a press release on the above title, citing a lot of pragmatic incidents that propelled them to issue that release.

The group headed by Mr. Denis Andaban, a very brilliant and vociferous young man who has gained both national and international recognition through his succinct and scintillatory write ups, registered their displeasure about the chaotic and dreadful nature of the country under the leadership of Nana Addo and Bawumia. The duo in the 2016 campaign touted their unmatchable competency beyond measure. It is intriguing to note that the duo who were very vociferous during the 2016 campaign can no longer hold on to their claims of competence superiority.

This is significantly clear to every nook and cranny, now the reality has dawned on them. The group stated, "we the members of the aforementioned group wish to register our displeasure of the increasing level of insecurity and lawlessness in this country".

The group considered security to be of grave significance in every setting hence deemed insecurity as a clear indication of lack of political commitment to enforce the laws of the country or a clear case of incompetence. They said, "we consider security as a primary function of government and hence insecurity is a manifestation of lack of political commitment to enforce the laws of the country or a clear case of incompetence".

Going forward, the group in its ingenuity, states ipso facto that what is happening presently regarding security, is the direct opposite of what the ruling government promised the good people of this country. They cautioned government to revisit its notes and get serious with the security of the citizenry.

On the score of the above, the group reminded government a social contract that gave the then opposition party, the NPP, the political power. They said, "we want to remind government on page 147 of its manifesto, ...Ghanaians are becoming increasingly concerned about their security due to the increasing levels of crime and lawlessness under the Mahama-led government. Today, Ghanaians do not feel safe. The Mahama-led government has failed the people of Ghana in terms of the security of the country and of its citizens. Our existing laws are largely not enforced, and when they are done, selectivity, often with much interference from the executive. The NPP government will secure peace and security for all Ghanaians. Under the NPP government, Ghanaians will feel safe on the streets and in their homes. Ghanaians will go about their daily business in the secure knowledge that their persons, properties and lives are safe under an NPP government ". What an irony!

The ascendancy of the lawlessness and insecurity in this country according to the group "is as a result of ineptitude, incompetence and hypocritical endorsement of vigilante groups". They went ahead to solidify their claims saying "the NPP militia groups like delta forces, invincible forces and others went on rampage, attacking and terrorizing innocent citizens, confiscating and vandalising people's properties". It is indeed an incontestable fact since all these uncharitable acts happened before our own eyes. Of course, these were acts that were suppose to be condemned to no uncertain terms and perpetuators sanctioned severely to deter others from toeing that line. However, the NPP thought otherwise hence perpetrators were freed under the cover of Nolli-prosequa.

The group bemoaned the inability of citizens to enjoy their constitutional rights of freely carrying out their daily activities. A classical example is what happened at Lapaz and other parts of Accra. They stated in the press release, "today as we speak, citizens cannot freely go about their daily activities.

The very interesting aspect is that the security personnel, who are suppose to protect us, are being killed publicly with impunity. They added that Armed robbery is on the ascendancy and it does appear that nobody has an oversight responsibility of security in this country ".

They therefore made a clarion call on the president through the minister of interior, minister of defense and the national security coordinator to urgently and swiftly act to restore public confidence in the security of this country. They said, "government should walk its talks by adopting pragmatic measures that can effectively reinforce law and order in society".

It is indeed a serious canker that government needs to act on with supersonic speed because the promise he made to Ghanaians during the 2016 campaign is still fresh in our minds. And your description of the previous government's attitude towards security in John Mahama's tenure, appears to be your own personal qualities.

Thank you.
Washington (AFP) - The Supreme Court dealt President Donald Trump's government a fresh setback Wednesday, saying its controversial travel ban cannot be applied to grandparents and other close relatives of people living in the US -- for now.

The court accepted a Hawaii district judge's ruling last week that the Trump administration had too narrowly defined what constitutes "close family relationships" to determine exceptions to the ban on travelers from six mainly Muslim countries -- Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

That left in place the judge's wider definition, which included grandparents, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and cousins of people living in the United States.

But in its brief order, the court backed the Trump administration by staying the part of the Hawaii judge's ruling that would have expanded exemptions to its 120-day ban on all refugees.

The order said the Supreme Court's ruling is temporary pending a federal appeals court's pending review of the issues.


The District Chief Executive for the Garu-Tempane in the Upper East Region, Emmanuel Asore Avoka, says the collapsed bridge over the Tamle River, will lock up a lots of food stuff at the Farm gates and affect the Assemblys Internally Generated Funds.

On Friday, July 14, the bridge collapsed when an articulated truck with registration number GT 2758 -12, loaded with bags of Soya Beans from Garu to Kumasi was crossing it.

The truck with the load, hung on one side of the bridge after the collapse. Some 200 bags of the Soya Beans could not be saved because they fell into the river. The Driver and his mate, according to the District Chief Executive are safe.

Visit to the district three days after the collapse of the Tamle Bridge, revealed that, many commercial activities have almost come to a halt, as traders who hitheto traveled to Bawku to buy their items for resale, cannot cross the river.

According to the District Chief Executive, the Tamle Steel Bridge was a temporal bridge and since it was constructed in 2008, to replace an existing one that collapsed, there has not been any serious maintenance.

He hinted that, at least 40 heavy trucks carrying gravels and stones to the Tamle Irrigation Project site use the Tamle Bridge on daily basis, aside the heavy articulated trucks that load Cereals from the District on daily.

 dont forget that, the bridge was a temperal one. Since 2008 there has not been any checks nor maintenance of the bridge. It was the main link between Garu-Tempane District and Bawku and the rest of the Upper East Region. If we dont get the bridge repaired as soon as possible, we will be cut off completely. There was so much pressure on the bridge, after the collapse of the Nalerigu bridge; heavy trucks from Nalerigu, Bunkprugu and Nakpanduri in the Northern Region used the bridge.

Hon. Emmanuel Asore Avoka said the Upper East Regional Minister, Rockson Bukari has assured that, some technocrats will be visiting the site to assess the level of damage on the bridge, and hoped that, that visit will result in quick repairs of the bridge.

As of Monday, July 17, no vehicle could use the bridge, and so heavy trucks from South and other parts the country that had come to load food stuff, were seen parked. Cereal Traders are worried over the delay and the subsequent charges by the truck owners, while traders whose food stuff are perishing have started counting their loss.

An alternative route would have been through Nalerigu, unfortunately the Steel Bridge at Nalerigu in the East Mamprusi District in the Northern Region also collapsed in the first week of July 2017, following a heavy down pour in the district.

Another route that links the Garu-Tempane District through the Binduri District is the Azimbasi Bridge, which has started developing cracks due to the continuous use by heavy trucks.

The constructions work on the Tamle Irrigation Project has caused water the stay around this bridge even with little down pour, thereby creating a booby trap.

The Garu-Tempane District Assembly depends largely on the levies collected from the trucks at the entrance and exits points to increase its Internally Generated Funds and with the inability of the trucks to move in and out with their load, the Assembly is very likely to suffer a short fall in its revenue for July and even August 2017.

Ebo Bruce-Quansah, Tamale
The Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC) Charlotte Osei has served notice of her decision to take legal action against persons who have petitioned the President to impeach her.

According to her, the petitioners made unsubstantiated claims intended to damage her reputation.

In a letter written by her lawyers, to the lawyer of the petitioners, she demanded the list of the names of workers who had made the claims for her removal.

She said this was to enable us commence legal action against them for the defamatory statements contained in their petition failing which our client will be constrained to proceed against you alone as defendant in the suit our client intends to commence against them since you are to all intents and purposes, their agent.

Some aggrieved employees of the Electoral Commission (EC) have petitioned President Nana Akufo-Addo to dismiss the Chairperson of the Commission, Charlotte Osei.

They insisted in a statement that Mrs. Osei should be impeached for among others, bringing the Commission's name into disrepute by single highhandedly petitioning EOCO on an alleged misappropriation of staff endowment fund for malicious reasons.

They further revealed that following her appointment as EC Chair, Mrs. Osei compromised the independence and neutrality of the Commission by arranging for 2015 V8 Land Cruiser with registration WR 2291-15 from the office of the President for use as official vehicle without going through the procurement process or recourse to the Commission.

But a letter from Charlotte Oseis lawyer, Thadeus Sory said they intend to proceed to court to seek protection for her reputation.

Read her lawyer's letter below:

19TH JULY 2017.

MAXWELL OPOKU-AGYEMANG,

LLM (UTAH), LLM (QUEENS), LLB (HONS) BL (GH)

SOLICITOR OF THE SUPREME COURT OF GHANA,

P.O. BOX 179, ACCRA.

Dear Sir,

RE: PETITION AGAINST THE CHAIRPERSON OF THE ELECTORAL COMMISSION (MRS CHARLOTTE OSEI).

1.0 We write as solicitors for and on behalf of Mrs Charlotte Osei (hereafter simply called Our client) who is the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission of the Republic of Ghana.

2.0 Our clients attention has been drawn to a letter dated the 13th day of July, 2017 on the above intituled subject written by your goodself and by virtue of which letter you presented to his Excellency the President of the Republic of Ghana, a petition for the impeachment of our client pursuant to the provisions of article 146 of the 1992 Constitution.

3.0 Having perused the said letter to which was attached the allegations on the basis of which the petition invoked the provisions of article 146 of the 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Ghana for our clients impeachment, we have noted several defamatory statements in respect of which we have our clients irrevocable instructions to take immediate action against your clients who have not been disclosed on the face of your letter.

4.0 At all times material to our present letter to you, your letter has received widespread publication in the mass and social media by way of radio broadcasts and discussions including comments in blatant violation of the confidentiality requirements of article 146 of the 1992 Constitution pursuant to which you have petitioned the President of the Republic of Ghana.

5.0 Be that as it may, having observed from your letter by virtue of which the petition to the President is conveyed that your clients are an amorphous group of people described as concerned staff of the Electoral Commission. Our client has instructed us to demand from you and we hereby so demand the full list of these concerned staff of the Electoral Commission to enable us commence legal action against them for the defamatory statements contained in their petition failing which our client will be constrained to proceed against you alone as defendant in the suit our client intends to commence against them since you are to all intents and purposes, their agent.

6.0 Our client's decision to seek remedy in court for the protection of her reputation without prejudice to the article 146 proceedings triggered by you.

7.0 Counting on your co-operation.

Yours sincerely,

SORY @ LAW.



By: Jonas Nyabor/citifmonline.com/Ghana
The Attorney-General (A-G) may drag former President John Mahamas brother to court if investigations into tax underpayment by two of his companies are concluded.

Gloria Akuffo told Joy News Evans Mensah Tuesday she had reviewed an initial docket submitted to her office on Ibrahim Mahama's companies and has asked for further investigations to be done.

The GRA had cited the two companies - MBG Limited and Holman Brothers - for issuing dud cheques to clear the debts.

Related Article: EOCO probes GRA over Ibrahim Mahamas dud cheques .

The responsibility of burden is very highthere is a high burden of proof and we want to make sure that if we put this issue it will be [be able to secure conviction], she said.

Attorney-General, Gloria Akuffo

She said government investigators have been asked to gather more evidence to make the case unassailable when it is sent to court.

A suspicion based on suspicion in itself cannot bring about prosecution, the lawyer said.

The Chief Executive Officer of Engineers and Planners dominated discussions in the media after the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) directed him to pay the sum of GHC12 million owed the state in May, 2017.

Related Article: GRA workers must be prosecuted over 'bounced' Mahama cheques - Bentil

The amount represented duty for some heavy equipment Mr Mahamas companies cleared at the Tema Port in 2015.

The Ghana Revenue Authority revealed MBG Limited owed it GHS13.15 million and Holman Brothers owed GHS3.71 million in duties.

After series of sessions with EOCO officials, Mr Mahama issued two separate cheques to defray the debts. One of the cheques had the amount GHS10, 216,258.47 and the second GHS2, 176,544.61.

Related Article: Ibrahim Mahama's companies settle over 12m debts

But the former Presidents brother may face prosecution if the A-G concludes investigations into his companies tax issue and he is found to have engaged in wrongdoing.

Ms Akuffo said the amount paid by the two companies was less than what was expected of them.

Who is responsible for that? she asked, adding investigators are looking into that.

She noted it will take time for the investigation to be concluded because it is not as simple as collecting papers.

But the opposition National Democratic Congress has maintained government is seeking to hunt the former Presidents brother by revisiting the matter.

Deputy NDC General Secretary, Koku Anyidoho said on Joy FMs Top Story Wednesday the buccaneering [works of government] must end.

Deputy NDC General Secretary, Koku Anyidoho

Although he welcomed governments position to thoroughly probe the matter, he said it deserves no applause for that.

It is a common sense positionif the President has woken up to the principle of common sense he will receive no extra applause, Mr Anyidoho said.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Austin Brakopowers | [email protected] | Instagram: @realbrakopowers
Ten Chinese illegal Miners have been arrested by police in Tarkwa in the Western Region.

They were arrested upon a tip off by one of the galamsey taskforces in the area.

The illegal miners were mining opposite the Tarkwa Senior High School very close to an area where the Lands Ministry was holding a National Stakeholders workshop on the Multilateral Mining Integrated Project (MMIP).

Deputy Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Benito Owusu who lead the team of police officers to make the arrest told journalists that the fight against galamsey is very difficult but the ministry will not give up.

Chinese people are doing this illegal activity; they've recruited our own people to be working with them. The pit that they are using is a very old pit and it's been there for years without any safety precautionary measure being put in place they are in there and they are mining. Tomorrow we will hear about a cave in and that becomes another issue.

The idea that they think they are not polluting any water or causing land degradation but we all saw the amount of water that they were pumping from the pit. So if they tell us that they are not polluting any water what do they mean by that?

Mr. Owusu also complained that the Electricity Company of Ghana's branch at Tarkwa provided the Chinese miners with electricity to undertake the illegality.

We saw Electricity Company of Ghana goes in and supply power to an illegal activity while their own regulation states that before they supply power to any premises, they must know who the owner is, they must know what work you are going to use the power for. And if it is an illegal activity they have every right to deny them power. When we get to Accra, we will report them to their main office so they know what their agency is doing here, he added.



By: Godwin A. Allotey & Kojo Agyeman/citifmonline.com/Ghana
A legal battle looms between lawyers of the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission and counsel for some unnamed workers of the Commission who are demanding the impeachment of the EC chair Charlotte Osei.

Thaddeus Sory who is Lawyer for Mrs Osei insists the content of a 29-point petition which is supposed to be the basis for the impeachment of his client were injurious and defamatory.

He has therefore written to Maxwell Opoku Agyemang, lawyer for the petitioners, demanding that he presents the names and identities of the workers of the EC so that legal action will be taken against them, failing which he the lawyer will be named as the defendant.

Maxwell Agyemang is yet to be served a copy of the letter but has called the bluff of his colleague insisting fighting defamation has always been part of his profession.

Petition

On Tuesday night, Joy News intercepted copies of a 29-point petition by workers of the Electoral Commission requesting for the impeachment of the Chairperson for stated misbehavior.

The unnamed workers alleged the Chairperson of the Commission in many instances breached the Procurement Law in procuring goods and services for the Commission.

In what the petitioners claim to be a one-woman show, Charlotte Osei was alleged to have unilaterally and without recourse to procurement procedures engaged the services of lawyers, [email protected] who represented the Commission in the pre-election legal banter with aggrieved parties and disqualified flagbearers.

She was also alleged to have abrogated an existing contract with Super Tech Ltd. (STL), unilaterally renegotiating and re-awarding the contract at new sum of $21,999,592 without serious regard to the tender processes.

The chairperson, Mrs Charlotte Osei unilaterally awarded a contract of about $25,000 to a South African company Quazar Limited to change and re-develop the Commissions Logo under the guise of rebranding without going through tender contrary to the Public Procurement Act, point 26 of the petition read.

Apart from the breaches of the Procurement Law, the petitioners claimed the EC chair compromised her position and the independence of the Commission by attending cabinet meetings during the tenure of the John Mahama administration and even caused the arrangement of a 2015 Land Cruiser with registration number WR 2291-15 from the office of the president for use as her official vehicle.

The petitioners also levelled allegations of managerial, administrative incompetence and ineptitude against the EC Chair.

So bad is her human relations, that the EC Chair is not on talking terms with the two other deputies and has not even visited any of the district EC offices ever since she was appointed, the petitioners claimed.

The chairperson has submitted an estimate of over 1 million for the renovation of the official bungalow for the Chairperson without recourse to the Commission or the appropriate staff in the commission, the petitioners claimed.

The July 13, 2017 petition has since been submitted to the presidency, for onward submission to the Chief Justice for preliminary investigations.

But Mrs Osei is not impressed with the content of petition and has caused his lawyers to take legal action.

Sory letter

Even before the hearing for impeachment will begin, Thaddeus Sory has fired his first salvo demanding names of the petitioners or he will cite his compatriot lawyer and counsel for petitioners as the defendant in the case he is about to file.

In letter written to Maxwell Boateng lawyer for the petitioners, Thaddeus Sory stated we have noted several defamatory statements in respect of which we have our clients irrevocable instructions to take immediate action against your clients who have not been disclosed on the face of your letter.

At all times material to our present letter to you, your letter has received widespread publication in the mass and social media by way of radio broadcasts and discussions including comments in blatant violation of the confidentiality requirements of Article 146 of the 1992 Constitution pursuant to which you have petitioned the president of the republic.

Our client has instructed us to demand from you and we hereby so demand the full list of these  concerned staff of the Electoral Commission to enable us commence legal action against them for the defamatory statements contained in their petition, failing which our client will be constrained to proceed against you alone as defendant in the suit our client intends to commence against them since you are, to all intents and purposes, their agent. The letter from Sory read.

Bluff

But Maxwell Agyemang who is representing the petitioners is not at all sorry for leading the petition.

In a posturing that says bring it on, he told Joy News Evans Mensah he is not one to be intimidated with jargons of defamation.

He said at the appropriate time, the names and identities of the concerned EC workers will be made known and when that time comes, the full evidence of all the allegations made will be made available.

More soon

Story by Ghana|Myjoyonline.com|Nathan Gadugah
By Laudia Sawer

Ashaiman, July 19, GNA - The Ashaiman Municipal Assembly (ASHMA) has threatened to prosecute residents who have refused to build toilets in their households.

Mr Albert Boakye Okyere, Ashaiman Municipal Chief Executive, told the Ghana News Agency that the only way to ensure that residents obeyed the Assembly's bye-laws to provide their households with toilet facilities, was to prosecute recalcitrant inhabitants.

Mr Okyere therefore issued a two-week ultimatum to residents to start the process of acquiring the toilet facility or be dragged before the law courts for prosecution.

'If you don't acquire a toilet, we will arrest you and send you straight to court to be prosecuted without passing through the police station', he emphasized.

He expressed worry that even though the World Bank had made funds available under the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA) Sanitation and Water Project to assist residents to acquire household toilet facilities, they had refused to heed to the Assembly's call for them to get one.

According to him, excuses of lack of money to pay the required half price of constructing a household toilet ' was unacceptable ' as according to him, the money used by households to pay for usage of public toilet facilities could be put together to fund the acquisition of one for the household.

The MCE indicated that residents, especially children and pregnant women in the Municipality stood the risk of contracting communicable diseases from public toilets hence the need to ensure that all households acquired a toilet facility.

A large number of residents of Ashaiman either make use of public toilets or resort to open defecation, a situation the GAMA project aimed to curtail by giving residents the opportunity to acquire a toilet facility at half price.

Even though the July 2018 deadline for the project was drawing near, most residents were yet to take advantage of the project which commenced in August 2014 with the excuse of poverty.

GNA
19.07.2017 LISTEN

Accra, July 19, GNA - The Korea Foundation for International Healthcare (KOFIH) has donated medical equipment valued at $24,629 to the Ghana Health Service (GHS) to improve maternal and child health in the Volta Region.

The items include ultrasound machine, fetal dopplers, stethoscopes, aneroid blood pressure, automatic blood pressure, delivery bed, optical microscope, suction machine and sterilizer.

The initiative is in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and the GHS for developing maternal new-born and child healthcare project in Krachi West, Krachi Nchumuru, Hohoe and Afadjato South districts.

Mr Sung-Soo Kim, the Ambassador of Korea, handing over the equipment, said the donation formed part of the Maternal and Neo-natal Healthcare (MNCH) project in the Volta Region to promote safe delivery and antenatal care.

He said this would improve the quality of care for pregnant women and new-born and encourage the medical staffs in the area to give off their best.

Dr Anthony Nsiah-Asare, the Director General of the GHS, expressed gratitude to the KOFIH for the numerous support it is rendering to Ghana and said this would enhance health delivery in the respective districts.

He said KOFIH, since 2014, had been providing support to the health sector including the National Health Insurance Policy Cooperation Project, middle to long-term invitational training for health workers, renovation of national Prosthetic and Orthotics Centre Project and carrying out (MNCH) improvement projects in the Volta Region.

Dr Nsiah-Asare said all these, especially with the modernisation of the prosthetic and orthotics centres, would increase the quality and quantity of service delivered, which would be forwarding steps of universal health coverage for disabled and injured patients.

GNA

By Samira Larbie, GNA
In a latest twist to Tuesdays fire that gutted the 10th floor of Job 600, Joy News has gathered smoke alarms fitted on the floor did not work at the time of the fire outbreak.

Minority Chief Whip, Mohammed Muntaka Mubarak has revealed on Joy FMs Newsnite Wednesday he was on the floor with other leadership of the House when their attention was drawn to the fire.

The smoke detectors were not working, he told Evans Mensah, adding they were super lucky to have been notified about the inferno.

Related Article: Breaking News: Tenth floor of Job 600 on fire

Minority Chief Whip, Mohammed Muntaka Mubarak

Thick smoke billowed from the 10th floor of the newly furnished Job 600 building which serves as office for Members of Parliament (MPs).

The Tuesday fire reportedly started at 6pm when most MPs had gone home after the days business.

As a result of logistical challenges fire fighters could not go beyond 4th floor. They had to rely on the staircase to get to the 10th floor in order to quench the inferno.

After several hours of fighting, fire officers were able to contain the blaze.

The office building was furnished by the past National Democratic Congress (NDC) and commissioned in 2015 for use as office complex by the MPs.

The name of the structure  Job 600 - was conceived by Ghanas first President Kwame Nkrumah and executed by collapsed State Construction Corporation (SCC) for the hosting of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit in 1965.

Ghanas first President Kwame Nkrumah

Years after his overthrow, the structure was left to rot by successive governments. It took a $25 million loan facility by former President John Kufuor from the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) to have the structure renovated.

The Tuesday fire in the building is the second after an earlier one in May 2012 when it was near completion.

Related Article: Fire Service shuts down Job 600, MPs officeless, stranded

The incident has left lawmakers stranded because they are unable to access their offices, deputy Minority leader, James Avedzi told Joy News.

Deputy Minority leader, James Avedzi

He said instead of MPs sitting to work on the business of the day, they are scattered.

But Mr Muntaka said the 12th floor building may not survive another inferno if the firefighting systems installed are not worked on.

We were super lucky that many of us were still around to scream for fire service, he said, adding it took more than one hour before the smoke detector on the eight floor went off.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Austin Brakopowers | [email protected] | Instagram: @realbrakopowers
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says a request for programme extension is crucial for them to complete Ghanas assessment.

The Fund's comment is in response to President Nana Akufo-Addos remark at a press encounter Tuesday that the IMF programme would not be extended.

According to the President, Ghana is committed to implementing the necessary reforms under the programme, but would not extend it when it ends in April 2018.

Finance Ministry clarification on the Presidents remarks

"Government will like to clarify that, Ghana will complete the IMF programme through our budget cycle of January 2018 through December 2018 as stated by the President," the Finance Ministry said in a statement.

The Ministry added that the 2018 budget would, therefore, be the last budget under the current IMF programme, after the completion of the programme at the end of the budget cycle in December 2018, government will not extend it."

The Ministry emphasised that the Presidents remarks should, therefore, not be interpreted to mean that the government is pulling out of the Programme.

On the contrary, government will continue with and complete the IMF program through the budget cycle of January 2018.

E-mail responds from the IMF

But in an email responds to JOYBUSINESS' set of questions sent to the Fund, the IMF added that the call by the President to move Ghana beyond aide is admirable.

This is because successful completion of the IMF-supported programme would help achieve this goal by restoring macroeconomic stability, adding that a request for program extension is essential for our ability to complete the review.

Postponement of IMF board meeting

On postponement of the executive board meeting, which should have happened on July 26, the Fund in the email said the change in date was due to certain issues, "therefore we decided to move it to the end of August also factoring in the summer Board recess."

The Fund was, however, quick to add that they have made significant progress in the programme discussions and it expects to reach an understanding on all remaining issues in the coming days.

However discussions have taken a bit longer than originally expected, impacting the Board date as we need to respect our internal rules and procedures for the preparation of Board documents," the Fund said.

Addressing prior actions before Board Meeting

The government has been working on the issues which need to be implemented before the Board meeting with the IMF said, We welcome the completion of the audit and financial viability analysis of SOEs and the approval of the Act aiming to reduce the level of revenue earmarking.

We have reached understandings with the fiscal framework for 2017 and the Bank of Ghana has been implementing its Roadmap for Financial Stability the IMF in a statement noted.

IMF and developments in the banking sector

The Fund has maintained that the countrys overall financial system remains adequately capitalized, however, it was of the view that specific banks and microfinance institutions could hamper credit growth and investment, create contingent liabilities for the government and ultimately add to the public debt burden.

The Fund noted that the Bank of Ghana has been taking important and welcome steps, in line with its Roadmap for Financial Stability.

These include addressing shortfalls in provisioning and capital, and weaknesses in some individual banks-a precondition for improving the availability and affordability of credit to the private sector.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Joy Business
Its official. Macro hedge funds have seen their worst first-half performance since 2013.

These types of funds try to profit from large-scale events or changes within the political and economic arenas. You would think with all the events weve had in 2017, macro hedge funds would outperform.

Yet, on average, macro hedge fund managers lost 0.8% for the half-year, after a 1% decline in June. And the broader hedge fund industry isnt faring much better. As reported by The Australian Financial Review:

The broader hedge fund industry returned 3.7 per cent in the first half after barely making any money last month, and returned about 4.9 per cent annualised over the past five years.

Even investing guru George Soros and his family fund, run by his son Robert, is struggling. Last month, the Soros Fund made fewer macro bets because of lacklustre opportunities.

But are fewer opportunities really the reason for poor performance? Unlikely. As mentioned, 2017 has been chockfull of political and economic changes.

A more likely reason why these Masters of the Universe havent performed is their inability to predict macro outcomes. Theyve just been wrong more times than theyve been right.

Warren Buffetts lifelong investment partner Charlie Munger said it best:

A lot of other people are trying to be brilliant and we are just trying to be rational. Trying to be brilliant is very dangerous, particularly when gambling.

Hedge funds are now paying for their brilliance with humbling returns. And it is frustrating many of their investors that are now seeking cheaper alternatives to active management. As reported by the AFR:

They [investors] pulled about $US3.8 billion from discretionary macro managers in the first quarter, the fifth straight quarterly outflow, while adding $US4.9 billion into computer-driven macro funds, HFR data show.

But its not just computer-driven macro funds. Equity investors are also looking for low-cost higher returns and are piling into cheap index-hugging strategies.

How safe is passive management?

Had you invested in Vanguards S&P 500 index fund at the start of the year, youd be up 9.3%. Had you invested a year ago, your returns would jump to a little over 13.2%. And over five years, your returns would be 80.7%.

Who wouldnt want to earn 16.14% annually by doing nothing?

Active managers in Australia are facing the same problem. Over the past five years, the All Ordinaries is up 40.3%, or 8.1% annually. Its not as attractive as the S&P 500. But its enough to beat many active funds over the same period.

Its why droves of investors have piled into exchange traded funds (ETFs) and other index-hugging strategies. Passive management has now turned into an enticing cycle. The more investors that jump into index funds, the higher they climb. The higher they climb, the more attractive passive returns look to other investors.

I urge you not to adopt this return-chasing strategy. Investors who chase returns often do worse than the funds they invest in. The reason why is because they buy near the top (when returns are high) and sell out at lows (when returns are low).

Renowned value fund manager Roger Montgomery elaborates on this point in his white paper, Why investors do worse than the fund they invest in:

Every investor wants to buy low and sell high, but most investors do exactly the opposite because investment decisions are often driven by emotion. Investors get excited when the markets rising and everyone else is buying. And of course the flip side, they panic and sell when the market is trending down. This behaviour leads to poor outcomes.

But its not just return-chasing which makes passive management, especially in the US, dangerous right now.

Take a look at the graph below. It shows the trends of both the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio (blue line) and earnings yield (white line) of the S&P 500.



Source: BigCharts

[Click to enlarge]



Think of the P/E as the price that investors are willing to pay for $1 of earnings. Thus, a P/E of 21.4-times earnings means investors are willing to pay $21.4 for every $1 of market earnings.

The earnings yield is just the inverse of the P/E  earnings divided by price. Think of it as the percentage earned of each dollar invested.

Over the last five years, prices have climbed, but earnings are struggling to keep up. Many investors have already bought into US stocks on anticipated growth. Passive investors who are getting in now are just added to already-high valuations.

What happens if there is a correction around the corner?

The market probably wont crash, but there is limited room for further growth unless corporate earnings significantly outperform. From here, the S&P 500 has a good chance of producing subpar returns, and youll be in the same boat as many hedge funds.

So how can you beat the Masters of the Universe?

Whats your edge?

Every successful investor has an edge. I would argue your edge is better than most large hedge funds. You might not have their investing experience or extensive resources. But you have something they dont.

Limited capital.

How is that an advantage? Well, you can invest in many smaller opportunities that hedge funds cant because of their size. Companies like Big Un Ltd [ASX:BIG] and GetSwift Ltd [ASX:GSW] are far too small for many large funds to jump in and out of. But, had you gotten into these smaller opportunities at the start of the year, youd be up 454% and 226% respectively.

Even Buffett acknowledges that hes limited by size. He said in a Businessweek interview in 1999:

If I was running $1 million today, or $10 million for that matter, Id be fully invested. Anyone who says that size does not hurt investment performance is selling. The highest rates of return Ive ever achieved were in the 1950s. I killed the Dow. You ought to see the numbers. But I was investing peanuts then. Its a huge structural advantage not to have a lot of money. I think I could make you 50% a year on $1 million. No, I know I could. I guarantee that.

I suggest you forget about jumping into a passive index-tracking fund. Instead, think smalland use the advantage you have to outperform the Masters of the Universe.

Harje Ronngard,

Contributing Editor, Money Morning

PS: Regardless of what you may hear, individual investors will always have some real advantages over large funds. You have more options, and the ability to earn far higher returns, albeit by taking on some greater risks.

Of course, you shouldnt invest all of your money into smaller stocks. How much you choose is up to you. But, with the right stock selection, you could potentially turn $1,000 into $10,000 in a matter of months. To find out how, click here.
Gov. Office Emergency Proclamation View Photos

Due to the effects of the Detwiler Fire Gov. Jerry Brown issued an emergency proclamation for Mariposa today. The proclamation requests the California National Guard to help as needed and states I find that conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property exists in Mariposa County

Citing how the fire has burned thousands of acres in extreme weather conditions and high temperatures, damaged power, water and communication infrastructure, threatened homes and caused the evacuation of residents the full text of the proclamation is below:

PROCLAMATION OF A STATE OF EMERGENCY

WHEREAS on July 16, 2017, the Detwiler Fire started in Mariposa County and has rapidly burned thousands of acres of land and continues to burn; and

WHEREAS this fire has destroyed structures and continues to threaten homes, necessitating the evacuation of thousands of residents; and

WHEREAS the fire has damaged power, water, and communication infrastructure, and has forced the closure of major highways and local roads; and

WHEREAS extreme weather conditions and high temperatures have further increased the risk of fires; and

WHEREAS the Federal Emergency Management Agency has granted a Fire Management Assistance Grant to assist with the mitigation, management, and control of the Detwiler Fire; and

WHEREAS the circumstances of this fire by reason of its magnitude, are or are likely to be beyond the control of the services, personnel, equipment, and facilities of any single local government and require the combined forces of a mutual aid region or regions to combat; and

WHEREAS under the provisions of section 8558(b) of the Government Code, I find that conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property exists in Mariposa County due to the Detwiler Fire; and

WHEREAS under the provisions of section 8571 of the Government Code, I find that strict compliance with the various statutes and regulations specified in this order would prevent, hinder, or delay the mitigation of the effects of the Detwiler Fire.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, EDMUND G. BROWN JR., Governor of the State of California, in accordance with the authority vested in me by the State Constitution and statutes, including the California Emergency Services Act, and in particular, section 8625 of the Government Code, HEREBY PROCLAIM A STATE OF EMERGENCY to exist in Mariposa County.

IT IS HEREBY ORDERED THAT:

1. All agencies of the state government utilize and employ state personnel, equipment, and facilities for the performance of any and all activities consistent with the direction of the Office of Emergency Services and the State Emergency Plan. Also, all citizens are to heed the advice of emergency officials with regard to this emergency in order to protect their safety.

2. The California National Guard shall mobilize as necessary under Military and Veterans Code section 146 (mobilization in case of catastrophic fires) to support disaster response and relief efforts and shall coordinate with all relevant state agencies, including the Office of Emergency Services, and all relevant state and local emergency responders and law enforcement within the impacted areas.

3. The Office of Emergency Services shall provide local government assistance to Mariposa County, if appropriate, under the authority of the California Disaster Assistance Act, Government Code section 8680 et seq., and California Code of Regulations, Title 19, section 2900 et seq.

4. The provisions of Unemployment Insurance Code section 1253 imposing a one-week waiting period for unemployment insurance applicants are suspended as to all applicants who are unemployed as a direct result of the Detwiler Fire who applied for unemployment insurance benefits during the time period beginning July 17, 2017 and ending on the close of business on January 17, 2018, and who are otherwise eligible for unemployment insurance benefits.

5. Vehicle Code sections 9265(a), 9867, 14901, 14902, and 15255.2, requiring the imposition of fees, are suspended with regard to any request for replacement of a drivers identification card, vehicle registration certificate, or certificate of title, by any individual who lost such records as a result of the Detwiler Fire. Such records shall be replaced without charge.

6. The provisions of Vehicle Code sections 4602 and 5902, requiring the timely registration or transfer of title are suspended with regard to any registration or transfer of title by any resident of Mariposa County who is unable to comply with those requirements as a result of the Detwiler Fire. The time covered by this suspension shall not be included in calculating any late penalty pursuant to Vehicle Code section 9554.

7. Health and Safety Code sections 103525.5 and 103625, and Penal Code section 14251, requiring the imposition of fees, are hereby suspended with regard to any request for copies of certificates of birth, death, marriage, and dissolution of marriage records, by any individual who lost such records as a result of the Detwiler Fire. Such copies shall be provided without charge.

I FURTHER DIRECT that as soon as hereafter possible, this Proclamation be filed in the Office of the Secretary of State and that widespread publicity and notice be given of this Proclamation.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Great Seal of the State of California to be affixed this 18th day of July 2017.

_____________________________

EDMUND G. BROWN JR.

Governor of California

Detwiler Fire Starts

Detwiler Fire Day 2

Detwiler Fire Day 3

Detwiler Fire Day 4

Map of where Detwiler Fire started


- Details of money paid to states and local governments in respect of the second tranche of Paris Club refunds have been released by the FG

- Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Delta, Kano and Rivers received the largest sum of N10 billion each in the details released

- The FG released a total N243.8 billion to the 36 states and Abuja in the second tranche

The federal government has released a state-by-state breakdown of another tranche of refund amounting to N243.8 billion being over-deductions on Paris Club, London Club Loans.

The minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun, in a statement on Tuesday, said that the debt service deductions were in respect of the Paris Club, London Club and Multilateral debts of the Federal and State government from 1995 to 2002.

President Muhammadu Buhari had earlier approved the release of N522.74 billion as first tranche of payment to states.

These payments, which totalled N243, 795,465,195, were made to the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory upon the approval of the president on May 4, 2017.

This is in partial settlement of long-standing claims by state governments relating to over-deductions from their Federation Account Allocation Committee for external debt service arising between 1995 and 2002.

The funds were released to state governments as part of the wider efforts to stimulate the economy and were specifically designed to support states in meeting salary and other obligations, thereby alleviating the challenges faced by workers.

The releases were conditional upon a minimum of 75 per cent being applied to the payment of workers salaries and pensions for states that owe salaries and pension.

The Federal Ministry of Finance is reviewing the impact of these releases on the level of arrears owed by state governments.

A detailed report is being compiled for presentation to the Acting President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, as part of the process for approval for the release of any subsequent tranches, she said.

READ ALSO: Top Boko Haram commander surrenders to Nigerian army

A breakdown of the payment, showed that Abia got N5.72 billion; Adamawa, N6.11 billion; Akwa Ibom, N10 billion; Anambra, N6.12 billion; Bauchi, N6.88 billion; Bayelsa, N10 billion; Benue, N6.85 billion; and Borno N7.34 billion.

Cross River got N6.08 billion, Delta, N10 billion; Ebonyi, N4.51 billion; Edo, N6.09 billion; Ekiti, N4.77 billion; Enugu, N5.36 billion; Gombe, N4.47 billion; Imo, N7 billion; Jigawa, N7.11 billion; and Kaduna, N7.72 billion.

Kano got N10 billion, Katsina, N8.2 billion; Kebbi, N5.98 billion; Kogi, N6.03 billion; Kwara, N5.12 billion; Lagos, N8.37 billion; Nasarawa, N4.55 billion; Niger, N7.2 billion; and Ogun, N5.7 billion.

The others were Ondo, N7 billion; Osun, N6.3 billion; Oyo, N7.9 billion; Plateau, N5.64 billion; Rivers, N10 billion; Sokoto, N6.44 billion; Taraba, N5.61 billion; Yobe, N5.41 billion; Zamfara, N5.44 billion; and the Federal Capital Territory, N684 million.

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Legit.ng had reported that a breakdown of the first tranche of Paris Club refunds paid to states to date has been released by the Nigerian federal government.

In the released figures, payments totaling a staggering sum of N516.38 billion, were made to the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.

According to a statement by Salisu Danbatta, director of information in the Ministry of Finance, the payments were accordingly made upon the approval of President Muhammadu Buhari on November 21 2016.

Legit.ng in this video asks Nigerians if they believe President Buhari has taken Nigeria out of recession.

Here are their responses:

Source: Legit.ng
Current environmental problems in Nigeria have become great threat to Nigerian environment and nature in general. Environmental pollution in Nigeria requires great attention! Lets have a look at most essential issues and discuss the best solutions to current environmental problems in the country.

Air pollution

Current environmental issues in Nigeria mainly include air pollution. This is one of the most important threats to the Nigerian environment. Compared to 1990, Nigeria became full of power plants. There began the development of heavy and automotive industry, construction of factories by American, European, Chinese companies, which led to the increase in the level of air pollution by 36%.

The number of deaths from the low-quality air is increasing every year. They already exceed death rates from AIDS and malaria combined. Environmental pollution has led to the increase in the rate of cardiovascular diseases and problems with respiratory tract.

Water pollution

Water is one of the most precious natural resources. It is important for the existence of all living beings. However, the number of threats to this valued resource is increasing every year. The main reason for this is that as the human populations grow, there is an increasing demand for more water of high quality for domestic purposes and economic activities.

Also, the management of the quality of this valuable resource is of special importance. Water pollution is dangerous to the health of all living beings. Fresh water pollution is especially detrimental to the health of people and aquatic animals as this is a main source of portable water for the world population and particularly in Nigerian communities.

The main causes of water pollution in Nigeria are:

 Domestic water pollution

 Industrial water pollution

 Agricultural based water pollution

 Oil spill water pollution

Water in Nigerian rivers mainly becomes contaminated with oil waste. A great number of factories operating in the Nigerian region put a lot of effort into oil extraction, but they do not pay enough attention to environmental issues in Nigeria.

OIL  great income and great Environmental damages

The main causes of environmental pollution in Nigeria lie in the activities of companies dealing with oil extraction, transporting, import, and export.

Oil production is the main source of revenue in Nigeria. Most of the Nigerian oil is extracted on the shelf of the Gulf of Guinea. Nigeria exports crude oil, and imports refined petroleum products. Between 1976 and 2009, the total number of accidents and disasters reached 9583. This had a significant impact on the ecology of the Gulf of Guinea.

The geographical position of the bay slows down natural processes of oil dispersing, which leads to a reduction and destruction of biological resources in the territorial waters of Nigeria. This then in turn has a large effect as it is one of the main food resources of the country.

In Nigeria, there are about twenty rivers, most of which flow through the oil-rich Niger delta and flow into the coastal waters of Nigeria. If a spill occurs as a result of damaged oil pipelines or for any other reason, in most cases these rivers carry oil to the coastal waters of Nigeria.

More and more claims in courts are against the company called Shell. Nigerian residents are complaining about their negligence to Nigerian nature and lack of desire to think about the environment and consequences brought on by their activities. It is estimated that the country needs to invest several million dollars to make to help towards the issue of Nigerian nature and its restoration.

READ ALSO: OPINION: How Shell's lies have made life unbearable to the people of Ogoniland

How to get rid of environmental pollution in Nigeria?

First of all, we might consider reducing the amounts of oil extraction. In addition, we should remember that this is a case that not only affects the big enterprises. So many poor Nigerians try to get oil by means of finding access to oil pipelines, thus contaminating the soil and air.

Secondly, there is a need to urge international companies that deal with oil extraction and processing to invest money in the elimination of environment pollution consequences.

Thirdly, the government should pay more attention to sanctions, fines, and punishment for deeds that lead to environmental pollution. This aspect is to be controlled by the government authorities and police officers.

It is not only the officials that can save Nigerian environment. The responsibility rests with every Nigerian citizen and every person who comes to visit Nigeria. The future of our country and the planet, in general, is in our hands.

Lets think about the environment more and dont neglect simple rules of its protection and maintenance of clean air, soil, and water.

READ ALSO: Oil Spillage in Nigeria - History

Source: Legit.ng
- The ultimatum given to Igbos living in the north by a coalition of northern youths is still fresh in mind

- Some groups have taken it upon themselves to resolve the issue

- One of such groups is the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State Biafra (MASSOB)

MASSOB on Tuesday, July 18, directed all Igbos residing in the northern part of the country to take advantage of the month of August 2017 to return to the south-east.

This was contained in a statement by the group's national information officer, Samuel Edesonu, who said the decision was taken to beat the October 1 deadline quit notice given by the Arewa youths.

MASSOB further said the decision was taken at its national executive meeting presided over by its leader, Comrade Uchenna Madu.

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According to the statement, August was chosen because of its significance in Igbo calendar as the period for new yam festival and womens August meeting.

The group charged the Igbo, especially women, to persuade their loved ones (husbands and children) to come home unfailingly.

MASSOB also directed all the Eze Ndigbo in the 19 northern states to commence immediately the compilation of names, residential addresses and villages/towns of all Igbos living in their respective northern cities, advising that such data collation of the people should end by September 10.

Part of the statement read: MASSOB insists and beckons on Biafrans living in Arewa land to intensify efforts in relocating their families back home.

MASSOB has resolved that the month of August being a significant month of special festivals of Iri ji (New yam festival) and women August meeting in Igbo land, should be a special month of mass return for all Igbo living in Northern Nigeria.

MASSOB also mandates all married Igbo women living in Northern Nigeria to start intimating their husbands about the dangers of staying in Arewa land which no longer guarantees their safety. They should also intensify their pressure on their husbands concerning the mass return next month.

MASSOB under the leadership of Comrade Uchenna Madu will continue undeterred in non-violence pursuant of Biafra actualization and restoration.

In a related development, the Ohanaeze Ndigbo Youth Council (OYC) met with the Northern Coalition of Youths on Saturday, July 15.

The meeting was with a view to charting a common course for the peaceful co-existence of various groups in all parts of the country.

In the meeting, which took place in Abuja, the northern coalition said it had begun the process of reviewing its demand asking the Igbos to leave the north by October 1.

The coalition however said it would not back down on its petition to the United Nations asking it to intervene in the affairs of the nation.

READ ALSO: For warning Buhari against Islamizing Nigeria, T.Y Danjuma, Ezeife under fire

Watch Acting President Yemi Osinbajo talk about the unity of Nigeria on Legit.ng TV below:

Source: Legit.ng
- To successfully blend with the society and meet their future challenges, the affected military officers are being trained on various vocations

- The Nigerian military says the vocational training is expected to last for six months

A total of 498 Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) of the Nigerian military are being prepared for retirement and have been sworn into a six-month course to get them set.

However, there seems to be anxiety among those to be retired over what the immediate future holds for them outside service to the country, Legit.ng learnt.

The Nation reports that the number comprised of 352 from the Army, 130 Air Force and 16 Navy and that they would spend the next six months at the Nigerian Armed Forces Resettlement Centre (NAFRC) in Oshodi, Lagos state.

At the centre, they are expected to learn various skills that would help them fit into the society upon retirement.

READ ALSO: For warning Buhari against Islamizing Nigeria, T.Y Danjuma, Ezeife under fire

The report listed some of the vocations to include: business management skills, fashion design, shoe making, laundry, fine arts, photography, printing, soap making, agriculture, wood work, building and civil engineering works, electrical/electronics, fabrication as well as welding to help them re-integrate into civilian life and provide a source of living for them after retirement.

Speaking at the event on Tuesday, July 18, the NAFRC Commandant, Air Vice Marshal (AVM) Ajibola Jekennu, said the skills acquisition programmes were specifically designed to help build up profitable post-retirement ventures and ensure self-sustenance.

Over the years, NAFRC has evolved from a rehabilitation centre for demobilised soldiers of the Nigerian Army, who were wounded in the second world war and the civil war, to a resettlement centre, which today, prepares retiring servicemen, women of the Armed Forces of Nigeria for productive life after service.

The objective is mainly to refocus your attention to the fact that a meaningful and productive life can be pursued even after leaving the service.

Hence, the main mission of this centre is to provide retiring personnel wirh requisite skills and trades that could empower you to set up your own cottage industries and enjoy productive life in retirement, he said.

The centre has been able to achieve its lofty objective. Feedback from the field indicated that quiet a good number of graduates of this noble centre are doing well in their various acquired skills in the larger society.

Today, some of them are even employers of labour. Hopefully, by the time you leave this centre in another six months, each and every one of you would have become skilled professionals, ready to explore and exploit the business world.

Your personal commitment, hardwork and sacrifice will propel you to your desired goal. It is important you realise that this is the first time the service is training you for your own benefit.

Your success therefore depends largely on how best you utilise the time made available in the programme.

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I enjoin you go be punctual and regular in all train activities; be prepared to learn from both your seniors and subordinates. Be open-minded, receptive and respectful to all your instructors, both military and civilians.

For us at the leadership level, our resolve is to make your stay here and eventual exit from service a pleasurable experience.

Major thrusts of our activities are geared towards adding value and improving general welfare.

We are determined to provide your basic needs and also create conducive environment for learning. However efforts have been made to enhance the quality of training, welfare and security in the centre, he added.

Meanwhile, the Nigerian Army recently issued a warning to citizens of the country saying the Boko Haram terrorists have adopted a new strategy.

The new disclosure, according to Colonel Onyema Nwachukwu, the deputy director in charge of public relations at the Theatre Command, followed information relating to recent arrests of some of the terrorists.

Watch how the Nigerian military has been bombarding Boko Haram hide-outs:

Source: Legit.ng
- The ultimatum given to Igbos living in the north by a coalition of northern youths is still fresh in mind

- Igbo indigenes have lauded moves by some groups who have taken it upon themselves to resolve the issue

- They also warned that some elements are hell-bent on fomenting trouble

Igbo indigenes in the north under the auspices of Ndigbo Youth Council in 19 northern states have cautioned some senior members of the Ohanaeze Ndigbo against utterances capable of heating up the polity and putting their lives in danger.

Leader of the group, Chief Obinna Nwankwo, gave the warning in a statement sent to journalists on Tuesday, July 18.

The group commended the Ohanaeze Youth Council (OYC) over its meeting with the Arewa youths with a view to resolving the October 1 deadline quit notice to the Igbo in the north.

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The statement expressed optimism that the meeting was the first practical step towards halting the planned sack of Ndigbo from the north.

We have always made it clear that the several meetings convened by the Acting President Yemi Osinbajo, though look worthwhile on the surface, lacked the capacity to stop this trouble when it starts.

We said this because the same elders who Osinbajo invited to the Aso Rock Villa had at the wake of the quit notice disowned it. How then would they have the capacity to call these youths to order if they are bent on carrying out their threat? the group said.

They hailed the OYC for initiating a workable solution to the looming danger and warned that efforts to truncate the recent peace process will be resisted.

There is no doubt that our lives and properties have been in danger ever since that threat was issued. We have for so long expected a situation where the youths are called for a discussion, but rather than do so, what we see is mere condemnation from various groups.

We, therefore, salute the courage of the OYC for taking this bold step. We also commend the Arewa youths for coming to the negotiating table with its counterpart from the south-east.

May we, however, caution that any plan by anybody to jeopardize this peace process will be resisted. We now have the feeling that some people are benefiting from this tension.

This could be the only reason why one Chuks Ibegbu, who said he is the deputy national publicity secretary of Ohanaeze Ndigbo saw nothing good in this parley with the Arewa youths. Are Ibegbu and his cohorts holding the opinion that no effort should be made to safeguard the lives and properties of Ndigbo in the North? What do they benefit from festering crisis?

As the deputy national publicity secretary which he claims to be, why has he taken over the functions of the substantive publicity secretary of Ohanaeze Ndigbo? Why is he issuing statements with reckless abandon without clearance from anybody for pecuniary reasons? We see his action as one borne out of utter jealousy and envy.

We the entire Igbo Youths in the 19 northern states wish to state categorically that we have absolute confidence in the leadership of OYC under Mazi Okechukwu Isiguzoro.

By extension, we equally have absolute trust on the peace process he has initiated with the Arewa youths. No price is too much for peace and that is why we shall not sit by and watch some persons derail this process.

At this point, we are sounding a note of warning that should this process be stalled owing to Ibegbus reckless utterances, and our people in the North face attack as a result of the collapse of that peace process, he shall be held responsible.

Any opposition to the leadership of Ohanaeze youths is indirectly calling for planned massacre and genocide against Igbo in the North and looting of Igbo properties in the 19 northern states.

We have uncovered plot by some shameless members of Ohanaeze Ndigbo to allow Igbo be massacred in the North by trying to interfere in the genuine efforts of national leadership of Ohanaeze youths, the statement said.

READ ALSO: For warning Buhari against Islamizing Nigeria, T.Y Danjuma, Ezeife under fire

In a related development, the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) on Tuesday, July 18, directed all Igbos residing in the northern part of the country to take advantage of the month of August 2017 to return to the south-east.

This was contained in a statement by the group's national information officer, Samuel Edesonu, who said the decision was taken to beat the October 1 deadline quit notice given by the Arewa youths.

MASSOB further said the decision was taken at its national executive meeting presided over by its leader, Comrade Uchenna Madu.

Watch Acting President Yemi Osinbajo talk about the unity of Nigeria on Legit.ng TV below: Read more:

Source: Legit.ng
- The clash reportedly followed the killing of a Fulani herdsman known across the village as a bandit

- The police and army reportedly tried to curtail the violence but it started again immediately they left the village

A clash between farmers in the Kajuru, Kajuru local government area of Kaduna state and Fulani herdsmen has led to the killing of at least 37 indigenes and farmers.

The village was reportedly attacked by the herders in a renewed clash between Sunday, July 16 and Monday, July 17.

The report said while many died, scores villagers were also injured in the clash.

Legit.ng learnt that the violence started when Kadara youths in the village attacked and reportedly killed a herdsman, who had been identified as one of those that had terrorized the communities for some time.

The killing of the herdsman reportedly prompted a reprisal attack from his colleagues, who allegedly stormed Ungwan Uka.

READ ALSO: Female Badoo member nabbed by mob in Ikorodu (photos)

According to a resident of the affected village, the killed herdsman was caught harassing people and then lynched.

He said even though the Fulani herdsmen in the area knew about the activities of the alleged bandit killed, they vowed to avenge his death.

The source reportedly said: The Chief of Kajuru even called them and spoke with them, but we were surprised that in the early hours of Sunday, they came and carried out the attack.

The reprisal initially led to the death of five youths said to be involved in the killing of the alleged bandit and this led to further clash between the Kadara youths and the Fulani settlers in the area.

The report quoted Salisu Mohammed, one of those who witnessed the attack as saying some security agents were drafted to the area for peace.

However, once the security agents left, the violence resurfaced with at least 10 people killed and properties destroyed.

These are the bodies that have been recovered. We do not know the actual number of casualties as our people are scattered all over running for dear life, he said.

According to him, those killed were buried in a mass grave.

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The acting police public relations officer of the command, ASP Yakubu Sabo, said the force knows about a misunderstanding among some individuals in the community, which later led to a clash.

He also said the clash was stopped by a combination of the police and army.

According to him, the police is not able to confirm the number of casualties.

Legit.ng had also reported that Fulani herdsmen allegedly besieged farmlands in the Igbo-Etche local government area of Rivers state, destroying crops and pointing gun and arrows, threatening anyone who dares to sound the alarm, Vanguard reports.

In reaction to this, angry women of the community led by Nkechinyere Nwosu, wife of the paramount ruler, Ekwu I of Umuekwune-Ohoro, Igbo-Etche kingdom, Eze Innocent Nwosu marched to the palace of the monarch, to urge him to take action.

Watch this video and see the mayhem caused by Fulani herdsmen clash with communities in Kaduna state:

Source: Legit.ng
- IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu, vows to resist the plan to Islamise any part of Igbo land

- Kanu assures Christians in the North that he would not abandon them after actualizing Biafra

- The IPOB leader says no election will be allowed in Biafra land beginning with the November 18 Anambra elections

The leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, has said the alleged plot to Islamise Nigeria was real.

BREAKING: FG releases details of Paris club payment to states (full details)

Kanu made the statement on Tuesday, July 18, when he addressed a huge crowd of Biafra activists when he visited Nri, the ancestral home of Ndigbo, Vanguard reports.

The IPOB leader who was in the company of his wife however, vowed to resist the plan to Islamise any part of Igbo land, adding that such an evil agenda will not succeed in his life time.

The Islamisation plot is real but they wont succeed in my life time. No, never; not when I am alive.

The struggle for Biafra which I proudly lead is not a secessionist aspiration of NdiIgbo only as some erroneously think. Biafra is not just a living agitation but a fight for the survival of Christians in Nigeria against the entrenched threats of radical Islamic fundamentalists and their political collaborators within and outside Nigeria, Kanu said.

The IPOB leader assured Christians in the north that he would not abandon them after actualizing Biafra.

Kanu said he would also defend them against any imposition of religious faith against their will.

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The IPOB leader reiterated his opposition to the November 18 Anambra governorship poll, insisting that no election will be allowed in Biafra land beginning with the Anambra election.

He urged the crowd to remain indoors and be non-violent on the day of the coming election.

If you want Biafra to be restored, sit at home on November 18. I am not saying you should fight or take up arms; rather you will see Biafra emerging like the rising sun very soon, Kanu urged supporters.

Nri which Kanu visited is regarded as the ancestral home of Ndigbo, the IPOB leader also visited the historic Ohianwehi revered as forest of life by Igbo tradition.

It is believed that it was where the first burnt offering was scarified by the Jewish Igbo ancestors when they migrated from Israel about 300 years ago.

Meanwhile, the Anambra state Police Commissioner, Garba Umar, has warned that security agencies in the state would deal decisively with any group that threatens to disrupt the upcoming governorship election in the state.

Legit.ng gathered that the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) had recently asked people to boycott elections in the state and the South East in general until a referendum is granted by the Federal Government.

However, Umar, in a statement he issued after a meeting of the Heads of security agencies in Anambra state said such directive would not be tolerated.

Umar warned that security agents will not fold its arm and watch disgruntled elements truncate the peace in the state which they are working assiduously to maintain.

In the video below Legit.ng TV takes a critical look at Nnamdi Kanu and the struggle for the actualisation of the Republic of Biafra.

Source: Legit.ng
- The Mayor of Bamako was in Nigeria on Tuesday, July 18

- The Mayor visited the minister of trade and investment Okechukwu Elenemah

- The Mayor visits was in tune with plans by Mali to purchase 400 vehicles from Innoson motors

The Mayor of Bamako, Mali Adama Sangare on Tuesday, July 18, visited the minister of trade and investment Okechukwu Elenemah in his Abuja office to promote the #MadeInNigeria campaign.

Legit.ng gathered that the Mayor came alongside some of his delegates from Mali to purchase 400 vehicles from Innoson Motors in Anambra.

READ ALSO: Tension rises in Kaduna again as Fulani herdsmen begin new attack, kill 37 villlagers and farmers

The Mayor visited the minister of trade and investment Okechukwu Elenemah. Source: Twitter, @TradeInvestNG

Legit.ng earlier reported that the former minister of trade and investment Olusegun Aganga while commending Innoson Vehicles Company said by producing a truly made-in Nigeria car, the company has put Nigeria in the global map of car manufacturing countries.

The Mayor visited the minister of trade and investment Okechukwu Elenemah. Source: Twitter, @TradeInvestNG

READ ALSO: BREAKING: Federal government releases details of Paris Club refunds to states (full details)

The IVC owned by Innocent Chukwuma is located in Nnewi, Anambra state.

The Mayor visited the minister of trade and investment Okechukwu Elenemah. Source: Twitter, @TradeInvestNG

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Recently, the governor of Anambra state Willie Obiano said the vehicle company was expanding the state's industrial base to meet the demands of the people.

The IVC on August 8, 2016, announced the launch of its new cars for low and middle class earners.

The cars, the company said, will be at Nigeria's auto-market at the price of N1.5 million.

You can watch this Legit.ng video of the reopening of the Nyanya Bus Terminal in Abuja:

Source: Legit.ng
- Sahara Reporters states that the cabal in the presidency will bring President Buhari to the country in July

- APC chieftain, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, says President Buhari is healing fast and would return home soon

- Former minister of petroleum resources, Tam David-West, says President Muhammadu Buhari would shock Nigerians positively when he returns from his medical trip to London hale and hearty

Online newspaper, Sahara Reporters, has reported that the cabal in the presidency have concluded plans to bring back President Muhammadu Buhari to Nigeria on July 27.

READ ALSO: BREAKING: FG releases details of Paris club payment to states (full details)

The newspaper in a tweet on Wednesday, July 19, also reported that the cabal has now permitted the wife of the president, Aisha, unfettered access to him.

Legit.ng recalls that the online newspaper had reported in June that President Muhammadu Buhari was not allowed to see his wife during her visit to the United Kingdom.

The newspaper stated that the cabal reportedly reduced access to Buhari in an effort to control information leaks to the public.

The news outlet also reported that the president has not spoken with Professor Yemi Osibanjo, who is acting on his behalf since he traveled on another round of medical treatment abroad.

However, Legit.ng has been unable to verify the claims by Sahara Reporters.

The media aides of President Buhari have already been contacted and their reply as well as the official reaction is expected soon.

President Buhari has been in London for over 60 days treating an undisclosed medical condition.

Meanwhile, former governor of Lagos state and All Progressive Congress (APC) chieftain, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has said President Buhari is healing fast and would return home soon.

Legit.ng gathered that Tinubu, made this statement during a condolence visit to Kano state governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, over the death of Maitama Sule.

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According to a report by Premium Times, Tinubu said: Although I am not the spokesperson of the president and I am also not in the presidential team, the president is healing very fast and God willing, he is coming back very soon."

Similarly former minister of petroleum resources, Tam David-West, has said that President Muhammadu Buhari would shock Nigerians positively when he returns from his medical trip to London hale and hearty.

Legit.ng gathered that Tam-West said contrary to claims by some Nigerians, he knew that the President was alive and recuperating well.

Speaking with Sun, the former minister also said Buhari, upon arrival, may shock Nigerians with cabinet reshuffle and a major re-thinking of method of governance.

In the video below, Legit.ng TV asked some Nigerians what they have to say about President Buharis absence away from the country for so long.

Source: Legit.ng
- Egmont group, a global body which monitors international money laundering activities, has suspended Nigeria

- The suspension is likely to affect the country's anti-graft war

- Nigerian may end up being expelled and this will affect the countrys ability to recover stolen funds abroad

Nigeria has been suspended and may likely be expelled from the Egmont group, a global company monitoring money laundering activities in the world.

Nigeria will be expelled from the global body which provides the backbone for monitoring international money laundering activities if it fails to comply with the groups demands for a legal framework granting autonomy to the Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) by January 2018.

According to a report by The Cable, if the country is expelled, it will no longer be able to benefit from financial intelligence shared by the other 153 member countries, including the US and the UK, while the countrys ability to recover stolen funds abroad will also be hampered.

The federal government of Nigeria is currently seeking to recover looted funds laundered globally by politicians and their associates.

Another consequence of an expulsion will be the blacklisting of Nigeria in international finance, and this could affect the issuance of Mastercard and Visa credit and debit cards by Nigerian banks.

READ ALSO: EFCC storms Adamawa, interrogate top officials over alleged contract scandal

It could also affect the international rating of Nigerian financial institutions, restricting their access to some big-ticket international transactions.

Nigerias admittance into the group in 2007 is considered to be one of the biggest achievements of the President Olusegun Obasanjo administration.

The membership ensured the removal of Nigerian banks from the blacklist of international finance.

The suspension was reportedly caused partly by the failure of the federal government to pass a law making NFIU autonomous.

The group mandates the Nigerian government to make NFIU autonomous in its funding, operations and management of intelligence.

But NFIU is currently domiciled at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), although the Nigerian government says it is run as an autonomous unit.

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The group is also said to be worried by the constant leaking of sensitive intelligence to Nigerian media, contrary to the global best practices the country signed up for.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump's government on Wednesday, July 12, inaugurated a web-based platform to support President Muhammadu Buhari's fight against corruption.

The platform is founded by the United States Department of States Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement and was developed by BudgIT.

Mr David Young in his remark said that the platform will seek to address the daily instances of corruption faced by millions of Nigerians.

Watch this Legit.ng video of the EFCC staging a walk against corruption:

Source: Legit.ng
- Korongilim village near Chibok local government area of Borno state has been razed to the ground by Boko Haram terrorists

- The villagers had however deserted the village before the insurgents arrived to wreck havoc after an accidental discharge from one of the terrorists warned them of the impending danger

- No live was lost but the villagers lost all their possessions after the village was set ablaze

Boko Haram terrorists have invaded Korongilim village near Chibok local government area of Borno state and razed the village to the ground.

According to reports, the terrorists arrived the village around 8pm and met a deserted village after villagers were alerted to their presence by a rogue gun fire.

READ ALSO: Boko Haram invades Korongilim village in Borno

The terrorists who were said to be on their way to the village was stuck in the mud and in efforts to pull out the vehicle, there was an accidental discharge by one of the insurgents.

This consequently alerted the villagers and saved them from untimely deaths.

While speaking on the incident, Barrister Lawan Abana, a resident of Maiduguri, narrated that: By the time terrorists eventually came to attack, nobody was around and they burnt the whole village. Soldiers arrived, but by then the terrorists wreaked havoc and left.

All the villagers dispersed and displaced with their houses burnt needs urgent help particularly in this rainy season. Thank God, no death was reported, he added.

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Legit.ng had reported that a high-profile Boko Haram terrorist, Konto Fanami, and three other repentant terrorists have surrendered to the Nigerian Army on Monday, July 17.

The army spokesperson, Sani Usman, announced this in a statement in Abuja on Tuesday, July 18.

Mr. Usman said that the four repentant terrorists willingly deserted their hideouts and surrendered themselves to 120 Task Force Battalion at Goniri in Borno.

Watch a Legit.ng TV video below of the army's operation again Boko Haram:

Source: Legit.ng
- 2 Boko Haram bombers were recently nabbed by some military personnel

- One of the bombers is reportedly a young man while the other is female

- The man was arrested at Dala village while the female was arrested at Cimari and No Man's Land

Two bombers belonging to the deadly terrorist group, Boko Haram, were arrested by the Nigerian army troops while they were attempting to detonate explosives attached to their bodies.

Legit.ng gathered that the male bomber was intercepted at Dala village while the female was arrested at Cimari and No Man's Land.

The male bomber was reportedly advancing towards a troops disregarding several warnings not to do so.

According to the director army public relations, Brigadier General Sani Kukasheka Usman, the suspects continue to advance, disregarding warning shots and the troops immediately neutralized him.

READ ALSO: Boko Haram invades Korongilim village in Borno

Usman said: "The Borno State Emergency Management Agency and the International Committee of the Red Cross have since been contacted to evacuate the suspect remains.

"It will be recalled that three days ago, on Sunday 16th July 2017, our troops deployed at Mammanti, also averted another catastrophe when they intercepted and neutralized 2 female Boko Haram terrorists bombers who tried to infiltrate and attack the village through troops parapet at about 10.15pm.

"Similarly, the troops of 251 Battalion also intercepted another female Boko Haram terrorists bomber on Monday 17th July 2017 at about 1.49am between Cimari and No Mans Land.

"This great efforts of the troops helped to save valuable lives and property.

"The public is please requested to continue to volunteer information to the military and other security agencies to help preempt suicide bombings and other atrocities by the remnants of the Boko Haram terrorists."

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Meanwhile, a high-profile Boko Haram terrorist, Konto Fanami, and three other repentant terrorists have surrendered to the Nigerian Army on Monday, July 17.

The army spokesperson, Sani Usman, announced this in a statement in Abuja on Tuesday, July 18.

Mr. Usman said that the four repentant terrorists willingly deserted their hideouts and surrendered themselves to 120 Task Force Battalion at Goniri in Borno.

Watch a Legit.ng TV video below of the army's operation again Boko Haram:

Source: Legit.ng
- The Kogi state chapter of the APC accuses INEC of commencing Melayes recall process based on a fictitious petition which contained names of dead persons

- The party asks the court to restrain INEC or its agents from continuing the process of recall of the partys sponsored member representing Kogi west

- The APC argues that Melayes recall was initiated and occasioned by witch hunt

The All Progressives Congress (APC) in Kogi has dragged the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to court over the recall process of Senator Dino Melaye.

READ ALSO: For warning Buhari against Islamizing Nigeria, T.Y Danjuma, Ezeife under fire

The APC in a suit filed by 12 principal officers of the party accused the electoral commission of commencing Melayes recall process based on a fictitious petition, which contained names of dead persons, The Nation reports.

The APC in the legal action instituted by the state party chairman and other principal officers of the party in Kogi is asking the court to restrain INEC or its agents form continuing the process of recall of the partys sponsored member representing Kogi west.

Among others, the party is praying that the court declares the petition submitted to INEC chairman for the recall of Melaye null and void.

The party is also seeking a declaration that the recall process initiated via a purported petition against Dino Melaye contravenes the rules of natural justice and the constitutionally guaranteed right to fair hearing under Section 36 of the constitution.

The plaintiffs urged the court to declare the petition submitted to INEC invalid having been purportedly written by persons who are either dead, fictitious, non-existent or those from outside Kogi west senatorial district.

The party contended that Melayes recall was initiated and occasioned by witch hunt, adding that those who purportedly signed the petition were either dead, non-existent or not registered members of Kogi west.

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Legit.ng recalls that INEC had said it would halt the process of recalling Dino Melaye, senator representing Kogi west in the Senate.

Cable reports that a national commissioner of the commission Adedeji Soyebi, who disclosed this on Thursday July 13, said the decision was in line with a court ruling.

Legit.ng gathered that last week, the federal high court, Abuja asked INEC and Melaye to maintain status quo pending the determination of a suit filed by Melaye to challenge the process.

Soyebi said INEC would appeal the ruling.

Watch in the video below as people queue to sign the petition on Dino Melayes recall.

Source: Legit.ng
- There is mayhem in Apapa, Lagos state as tanker drivers engage police officer in heavy fight

- A police officer today, July 19, reportedly shot and killed a tanker driver over money

- The protesters have already set ablaze Sterling and Diamond bank in Apapa

Reports reaching Legit.ng indicate that a mob has reportedly set Sterling and Diamond bank in Apapa, Lagos state on fire after a mobile policeman attached to the bank shot a tanker driver dead.

Banks in Apapa are shutting down and evacuating their personnel following the incident by protesting tanker drivers.

An eyewitness who spoke to Legit.ng said the incident started when the tanker driver refused to give the police officer money which led to a heated argument and the officer fired by mistake.

READ ALSO: Buhari to return from London on July 27 - Sahara Reporters

Tanker drivers set Sterling bank on fire Photo source: Twitter, Straightfromnaija

The police officer fled the scene when he realized the driver was dead.

The tanker drivers who were angry chased the officer into the bank where he was been protected by security guards.

The banks refusal to give up the policeman provoked the drivers the more. The drivers colleagues then moved to set the bank ablaze, destroying properties and other valuables.

At the time of this report, policemen from Rapid Response Squad (RRS), anti-riot squad and Area B command, as well as operatives from the Nigerian Navy Ship (NNS) BEECEOFT have arrived at the scene.

Tanker drivers burn two banks in Apapa over fight with police officers Photo source: Twitter, Oluwafemi

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In a previous report by Legit.ng, an officer of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence in Dutse, Jigawa, state, killed a man and injured a police officer after firing several shots on Friday, July 14.

The incident reportedly happened when some officers of the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) called NSCDC official for reinforcement after a clash with some members of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW).

In the video below, Legit.ng TV asked some Nigerians what they have to say about President Buharis absence away from the country for so long.

Source: Legit.ng
- Nigerian Senate vowed to separate Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit from the Economic and Financial commission

- NFIU is an arm of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission that helps tackle money laundering and monitor financial flows

- Egmont group, a global body which monitors international money laundering activities, recently suspended Nigeria

The Nigerian Senate said it would pass a new law that will separate Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) from the Economic and Financial commission (EFCC) and make it independent.

The Senate made this known on Wednesday based their decision on the reported suspension of the NFIU from the Egmont Group.

READ ALSO: Alleged plot by CABAL to return Buhari to Nigeria on July 27 exposed by popular media

Legit.ng reports that the NFIU is an arm of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission that helps tackle money laundering and monitor financial flows.

NFIU's membership of the Egmont Group allows members share intelligence relating to international finance and illicit flow.

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The Cable had reported that NFIU was suspended from the Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Units over Nigerias failure to provide a legal framework that will make the NFIU autonomous.

Legit.ng had earlier reported that Nigeria was suspended and may likely be expelled from the Egmont group, a global company monitoring money laundering activities in the world.

Nigeria will be expelled from the global body which provides the backbone for monitoring international money laundering activities if it fails to comply with the groups demands for a legal framework granting autonomy to the Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) by January 2018.

According to a report by The Cable, if the country is expelled, it will no longer be able to benefit from financial intelligence shared by the other 153 member countries, including the US and the UK, while the countrys ability to recover stolen funds abroad will also be hampered.

However, some people believe that separating the NFIU from the EFCC will weaken the EFCC.

Watch this Legit.ng video of the EFCC staging a walk against corruption:

Source: Legit.ng
- University of Maiduguri has debunked report that the institution was attacked by terrorists on Sunday July 16

- The institution said residents enjoyed good weekend on the said day

- Publishers of the said false report have apologized according to the institution

The University of Maiduguri has debunked widely circulated news that the institution was attacked by Boko Haram insurgents on July 16.

In a press statement sighted online by Legit.ng, the institution posited that the report which claimed that bombers attacked the institution and many lives were lost in the process was nothing but a false report.

READ ALSO: BREAKING: Senate vows to separate Financial Intelligence Unit, NFIU from EFCC

The press release claimed that the "university campus did not come under any attack on Sunday as residents enjoyed good weekend."

The university claimed that editors of news medium who published the said false report have apologised but the report remains in circulation, hence, reason for the press release.

Meanwhile, Legit.ng had contacted the institution to confirm the authenticity of the press release but as at the time of filing this report, the institution was yet to respond to the message sent to them.

Legit.ng had reported that a female bomber detonated an explosive device killing 10 worshipers who came for prayers at a mosque in Maiduguri, Borno state, on Monday morning July 17.

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The blast was confirmed by the head of the Borno state emergency agency, Ahmed Satomi, who stated that the explosion occurred at the London Ciki Area of the town.

The bombing is the latest of a series of bomb attacks carried out by suspected Boko Haram insurgents since the release of some commanders of the group in exchange for some of the kidnapped Chibok girls.

Legit.ng, recalls that at least 11 persons were killed in multiple bomb explosions on Tuesday night, July 11 in Maiduguri.

In the video below, Legit.ng visits the IDP camp near Abuja to see how children are being treated after the horrors they have experienced.

Source: Legit.ng
- The Nigerian Army said the women and children were intercepted while fleeing from a Boko Haram base in Yobe

- A statement by Sani Usman said the women and children are being held while investigation continues

Troops of the 120 Task Force Battalion of the 27 Task Force Brigade have arrested a total of 30 women suspected to have ties with the Boko Haram terrorists.

The army said those intercepted include eight women and 11 children.

READ ALSO: Multiple powerful explosions rock Maiduguri again

A statement by Sani Usman, the spokesperson of the Nigerian Army, the women and children were caught fleeing a Boko Haram base in Goniri, Gujba local government area of Yobe state.

The statement obtained by Legit.ng stated further that the troops also intercepted at least seven women and children escaping from Boko Haram terrorists at Kamuya, Yobe state.

They claimed that they escaped from Boko Haram terrorists hideout at Goropcha village, Damboa local government area of Borno state.

Both sets of escapees are currently being screened and profiled by the brigade, the statement said.

Legit.ng had reported that two bombers belonging to the Boko Haram were arrested by the Nigerian army troops while they were attempting to detonate explosives attached to their bodies.

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It was gathered that the male bomber was intercepted at Dala village while the female was arrested at Cimari and No Man's Land.

Watch the Nigerian military's effort to curtail Boko Haram:

Source: Legit.ng
- Nnamdi Kanu said his focus on achieving Biafra remains strong

- The IPOB leader said he was offered oil bloc and five states to drop the agitation but he refused

- He said seven states and five will make up Biafra and nothing can stop the agitation

Nnamdi Kanu has revealed that federal government offered him five south eastern states to make up the proposed Biafra state.

The leader of the Indigenous People Of Biafra (IPOB) made this comment when leaders of Igbo Civil Society Coalition led by Prof. Obasi Igwe paid him a solidarity visit at his Umuahia home.

READ ALSO: Tanker drivers set 2 banks on fire

Kanu who spoke on Wednesday, July 19, said while he was in detention, he was offered Imo, Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi and Enugu state to form Biafra but he rejected it.

He instead insisted that he wanted a Biafra with Rivers and Benue states.

He said: They gave me Biafra in Prison with only the five Igbo states; I said no, I want Benue and Rivers

Biafra is coming, there is nothing to stop it.

Kanu also lashed out Igbo leaders for being against Biafra saying they have no interest in Igbo masses.

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The IPOB leader also claimed he was offered oil bloc and mansion in Dubai to drop his agitation but said he declined saying he wanted only Biafra.

Meanwhile, Some Niger Delta militant groups declared their support for the leader of the IPOB over his decision to boycott the forthcoming governorship election in Anambra state.

The groups, Concerned Militant Leaders (CML), Niger Delta People Democratic Front (NDPDF) and Rainbow Marabas Squad (RMS) said they are unhappy over the May 30, 2016, when soldiers allegedly massacred harmless and innocent IPOB members.

Legit.ng gathered that leaders of the groups, General Ben (CML), General Playboy (NDPDF) and General Aneaja (RMS), in a statement issued via online after their meeting in Port Harcourt, Rivers state, demanded for justice for the victims of the May 30, 2016, Biafra Day celebration killings.

Watch a Legit.ng TV video below focusing on Kanu's Biafra agitation:

Source: Legit.ng
- APC has said that it would not hold its convention until Buhari comes back

- President Muhammadu Buhari had on May 7 left for London on medicals

- The party however said Buharis health condition is delaying its convention

The All Progressives Congress (APC) has confirmed that the health condition of President Muhammadu Buhari has largely been responsible for the inability of the party to hold its constitutionally mandated mid-term non elective convention but assured that processes leading to the programme will begin on Saturday July 29.

The Nation reports that the party also said it has set up a nine member committee headed by Kaduna state governor, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai to define and work out a shared understanding of what it meant by restructuring as contained in its manifesto in other to give a clearer understanding of the issue.

READ ALSO: Buhari to return from London on July 27 - Sahara Reporters

Legit.ng gathered that the chairman of Nigeria Governors Forum and Zamfara state governor who addressed newsmen at the end of a meeting between the governors elected on the platform of the party and the National Working Committee however said that the the party has decided to meet with the Acting President to discuss the issue and fix a suitable date for the convention.

When reminded of an earlier promise to meet with the Acting President after their meeting in May, Yari said even though the President is supposed to be present at the convention as leader of the party, they will still meet with the Acting President to decide on a date.

He however noted that they were conscious of the fact the Acting President is playing a double role of he at the moment and therefore has a very busy schedule.

He explained that in view of the relationship between the executive and the legislature and the need to forge a cordial relationship within the hierarchy of the party, they decided that principal officers of the National Assembly will henceforth be part of the regular meeting with the leadership of the party.

In his opening remarks, National Chairman of the party, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun said the turn out of the governors for the meeting was a clear indication that it was becoming an avenue to mobilize opinion towards the smooth running of the party.

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Governors at the meeting include Atiku Bagudu of Kebbi, Abdulaziz Yari Abubakar of Zamfara, Nasir elRufai of Kaduna, Simon Lalong of Plateau, Rochas Okorocha of Imo, Badaru Abubakar of Jigawa, Yahaya Bello of Kogi and Abdullahi Umar Ganduje of Kano, while the deputy governors of Lagos, Osun, Ogun, Nasarawa, Benue, Niger and Borneo represented their governors.

Governors of Ondo, Sokoto, Bauchi, Yobe, Adamawa, Kwara, Edo, Oyo and Katsina states were not present at the meeting and were not represented.

Legit.ng had previously reported that an online newspaper, Sahara Reporters, reported that the cabal in the presidency has concluded plans to bring back President Muhammadu Buhari to Nigeria on July 27.

In the video below, Legit.ng TV asked some Nigerians what they have to say about President Buharis absence away from the country for so long:

Source: Legit.ng
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Captain America and the Winter Soldier Special #1 takes Marvel's secret history to a whole new level with a real world historical figure

If you know who Gavrilo Princip is, prepare to be shocked
An analysis by John Bucknell (x-Spacex senior engineer) describes an 11 meter diameter robotic vehicle with a 6,000-megawatt nuclear thermal rocket in a NTTR arrangement. The rocket would be single stage to orbit and would be immediately be able to refly after landing and refueling much like todays airliners. Even fully reusable Spacex rockets where all stages are resused would need to be re-assembled.

He describes SSTOH missions to place a 21 meter minor and 214 meter major diameter toroidal habitat in space, capable of full terrestrial gravity simulation by spinning at 3 rpm. The habitat begins as two thin films defining the interior and exterior surfaces of the torus, which is then inflated with lunar-sourced water in a 1m thick shell and allowed to freeze.

Access to space is driven by the economics of launch vehicles. A previously published rocket propulsion cycle called the Nuclear Thermal Turbo Rocket (NTTR) is able to achieve payload fractions of more than 45% to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). This rocket is intended to be completely reusable for the launch mission as it is a Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) vehicle, which improves economics vastly. However, providing material to LEO is not always the most economical solution for permanent space-based habitation. In-situ resource utilization (ISRU) has been proposed as a method for avoiding the Earths gravity well for space-based construction with solutions proposed using Lunar, Martian as well as other resources.

The Air enhanced nuclear thermal rocket has been described a few at times at Nextbigfuture.



The proposed space station would be close to the size of Titanic but the space station would consist of mostly water ice

Water ice can be used as both reaction mass for propellant in liquid form and as structure in solid form. Nuclear Thermal rockets in particular are well-suited to in-space propulsion as they can add enthalpy to a variety of propellants for thrust without requiring processing plants to achieve chemically active reactants, thus saving on mission payload mass. A mission is proposed that leverages the NTTR vehicle as well as ISRU to construct an orbital habitat of Lunar water ice with a single terrestrial launch (Single Stage to Orbital Habitat  SSTOH).

The lunar water ice is extracted from permanently shadowed regolith on the Lunar south pole, where the NTTR vehicle propulsively lands and places 54 tons of payload. The lunar payload is comprised of a small 30 MWth nuclear reactor and associated mechanisms able to extract sub-surface ice.

NOTE  NASA will soon officially confirm that there is surface water ice at the lunar pole. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter did find evidence of frost on the moon earlier in the year, but there is a NASA paper that will be released soon that will confirm surface water ice.

The NTTR vehicle fills its propellant tank with 720 tons of lunar water, and using the water as a propellant delivers 400 tons of water to the habitat in LLO before returning to the Lunar water extraction plant. The reusable NTTR vehicle makes 100 trips to inflate the 40,000-ton habitat, with approximately one trip per 24 hours. Subsequently, the lunar water extraction reactor can be transported to the habitat as a power supply and the NTTR vehicle can push the habitat to a Lagrange point.

The 40,000 ton habitat would be just short of the max cargo of a Panamax container ship. The ISS weighs 450 tons.

In such a fashion, a single vehicle of low investment can produce a 199,000m^3 habitat within 5 months of launch.

In 2015, Bucknell presented the Nuclear Thermal Turbo rocket which added air-breathing to a nuclear thermal rocket. Bucknell design would have 1664 ISP. 60% more than the best prior nuclear thermal rocket designs.
1. Damien Turchi is a graduate of Drexel University in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, founder and former president of the Icarus Interstellar Drexel University Student Chapter and lead coordinator of the first Interstellar Hackathon at Starship Congress 2015 at Drexel University, PA. He is currently a director of Icarus Interstellar.

On the Development of a Permanent Lunar Settlement: A Micro-Literature Review and Suggested Action

Since the 1960s, humanity seriously discusses the idea of a permanent lunar settlement. In both academic and professional literature, many designs for an initial settlement are proposed to varying fidelity. NASA published a comprehensive review of the most promising designs in the 1990s. Recent literature is not as detailed in its scope.

This study analyzes the designs NASA considered to be of significance in the 90s and discusses the benefits and cons of each. In addition, several recent works are assessed. From this review, the author concludes that an initial lunar settlement is possible through further development of existing design work, but that a superior option is neither immediate nor obvious.

Selecting a single framework (or a specific hybrid of several) is critical to best funnel capital into the most promising technologies. An action path is proposed that leverages consideration of permanence and significance as feedback to clearly characterize the best design choice for initial funding. Permanence seeks to answer, How can we ensure that the construction of the first lunar base is able to expand into the foreseeable future in both population and space?, while significance seeks to answer, How can we ensure that the consequences of operating the settlement are economically beneficial to society? There is not much literature to answer these questions, despite the importance of the answers.

The solutions will no doubt be a culturally diverse response, considering the needs of society as a whole to serve as a safeguard for the temporal success of a permanent lunar settlement.

2. Haym Benaroya is a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers University. His research interests are focused on the conceptualization and analysis of structures placed in challenging environments. These include offshore drilling structures and lunar surface structures for manned habitation. Often, the characterization of the environment is the primary challenge, as with problems of flow-induced vibration.

The Moon as the Site for Humanitys Expansion into the Solar System and Beyond

The Moon offers numerous advantages, providing a foothold for humanity as it struggles to escape Earths gravity well to become a spacefaring civilization. While the battle for most has been between the Moon and Mars, the vision of the Starship Congress is beyond those, even beyond the Solar System. Here, our goal is the next star system, with a sophisticated exploration of the technologies that are needed to send a precursor robotic ship many light years from Earth.

Even with such a long-term mission, the Moon remains the ideal spot to develop technologies, understand the low and microgravity space environment, assess the effects of radiation on our machines and structures, and learn how to build these so that they can self-repair and be reliable in this way for decades.

We will provide a background to current thinking and the engineering and other issues regarding the Moon as a viable place for humans to begin the long journey into space.
In the summer of 1969, John Noble Wilford finished a long working day in Texas and glanced up at the moon.

There was a lot going on that year.

Hundreds of miles away in New York City, just around the corner from his home in Greenwich Village, a police raid on the Stonewall Inn had just turned his neighborhood into a focal point for the burgeoning gay rights movement.

He missed all of that.

Meanwhile, a counterculture movement was gathering pace, culminating in the Woodstock music festival in upstate New York just a few weeks later.
Betty Dukes, a Walmart worker who led a class-action lawsuit accusing the company of discriminating against female employees  a landmark case that went all the way to United States Supreme Court  died on July 10 at her home in Antioch, Calif. She was 67.

Her death was confirmed on Tuesday by her brother William Ponnell. The cause had not been determined, but she had recently had heart problems, he said. Ms. Dukes had continued to work for Walmart until her retirement last year, a company spokesman said.

A Walmart greeter who welcomed customers to the store, Ms. Dukes was portrayed as the epitome of a low-paid female retail worker taking on a huge multinational corporation.

She was a voice fighting for equal rights and against racial and gender discrimination in the workplace, her niece Rita Roland said.
Tim Pierotti, who once ran a consumer hedge fund for Martin Shkreli, said he had already lost faith in his boss by the end of 2012.

Then a letter from Mr. Shkreli came to his home, addressed to his wife.

Your husband has stolen $1.6 million from me, it read.

Your pathetic excuse of a husband, the letter added, needs to get a real job that does not depend on fraud to succeed.

I hope to see you and your four children homeless, the letter said. I will do whatever I can to assure this. Your husbands arrogance is infuriating, and making an enemy out of me is a mistake.
Bracha Graber, whose whistle-blowing over widespread fraud in New York Citys foster care bureaucracy in the 1990s was a catalyst for an overhaul of its practices, died on July 5 in Los Angeles. She was 68.

The cause was complications of lung cancer, her son Daniel said.

Ms. Graber, a midlevel city official, filed a lawsuit for damages in 1993 only after being repeatedly rebuffed by her bosses and disregarded by outside investigators when she confronted them with evidence that her agency was defrauding the federal government.

She accused the agency, the Child Welfare Administration, of claiming tens of millions of dollars in federal reimbursements that it had not been entitled to.

To qualify for those funds, paid to the city for providing foster care, city officials were required, every six months, to review how foster children were faring in private homes and under the supervision of private agencies.
Dear Diary:

It was 1941, I was 16, and it was not necessarily a better world when I answered a help-wanted ad for a junior public relations assistant.

I had just completed my sophomore year at Yonkers High School, but I told the prospective employer that I had graduated and that I was 18. The ad had asked applicants to identify their religion, a routine question at the time. I lied and said I was Protestant. I also didnt acknowledge that I was just looking for a summer job.

I got an interview, and I got the job. When my soon-to-be boss realized that I would be commuting to New York from Yonkers and that my fare would be 10 cents each way (a nickel for the trolley and a nickel for the subway), he said he would pay me $10.50 a week rather than the $10 listed in the ad.

No references were required. There was no mention of a minimum wage, Social Security or what the hours would be.
A nanny accused of stabbing two children under her care in a Manhattan apartment confessed to the murders as she lay in a hospital bed on Halloween in 2012. Unable to speak because she was on a ventilator, she pointed at a chart to indicate yes and no to questions from investigators, a former assistant district attorney testified at a pretrial hearing on Tuesday.

She admitted that she had killed the kids and that she had used at least two knives, the former Manhattan prosecutor, Gregory B. LeDonne, said. She indicated she was mad at the mom.

A defense lawyer, Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg, has asked Justice Gregory Carro to throw out several statements made to the authorities by the nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, arguing that prosecutors ignored messages from a defense lawyer hired by her family that she not be interviewed without him present. Ms. Van Leer-Greenberg has also asserted Ms. Ortega was too sick and too impaired by drugs to waive her right to a lawyer, much less to answer questions truthfully.

Justice Carro has granted a hearing on whether Ms. Ortegas constitutional rights were violated. He also ordered that the recorded and videotaped statements she made while hospitalized with a self-inflicted wound not be played in open court, though witnesses testified about them.
It will come as a huge relief to millions of Americans that Republican lawmakers have struck out in their attempts to destroy the Affordable Care Act  at least for now. But this ideological exercise in futility has already done great damage to the health care system.

First the good news, which came in two installments: No. 1, the Senates health care bill  which would have stripped 22 million people of their health insurance and increased premiums for older Americans and those with pre-existing conditions  collapsed Monday. Then, Tuesday, Mitch McConnells plan to repeal much of Obamacare without a replacement also fell apart as senators defected.

Now the bad news: While the Affordable Care Act is not collapsing, the Senate and House health bills and President Trumps promises to sabotage the A.C.A. have destabilized some of the health insurance marketplaces created by that law. Nearly 40 counties in Indiana, Nevada and Ohio are at risk of having no insurers participating in the marketplaces next year; other counties will have only one company offering policies.

In addition, policies sold in the marketplaces could cost a lot more if the Trump administration carries out its threats to stop providing subsidies to insurers to lower deductibles for low-income and middle-income people. It can do that through administrative action. House Republicans sued the Obama administration to block the payments on grounds that Congress had not voted separately to appropriate the money, even though the A.C.A. had authorized them.
FRONT PAGE

An article on Tuesday about missing paperwork for private student loans referred imprecisely to how debt collectors may garnish federal benefits like Social Security from borrowers. The collectors can in some circumstances take benefits after they are deposited in a bank account; they cannot garnish the benefits directly.

BUSINESS DAY

An article on Saturday about accusations that playlists on Spotify, the streaming music service, are dotted with hundreds of supposedly fake artists misstated the number of times videos using music by Epidemic Sound have been viewed. It is 10 billion a month, according to the company, not 10 billion total.



An article on Tuesday about efforts by the investor Nelson Peltz to gain a seat on the board of Procter & Gamble misstated the name of the company that bought beauty brands from Procter & Gamble last year. It is Coty, not Cody.

FOOD

An article last Wednesday about the baker Pascal Rigos plan to start a chain of boulangeries in France misstated the surname of an executive of Starbucks, which bought a business from Mr. Rigo. She is Sharon Rothstein, not Rothman.
The state agency investigating the fatal police shooting of an Australian woman in Minneapolis last weekend said on Tuesday that one of the officers in a police car had been startled by a noise outside the car moments before his partner shot the woman through the open drivers-side window.

The statement from the agency, which came three days after the shooting, gave a glimpse into an episode that has baffled the public and infuriated the family of the woman, Justine Damond, in both Australia and Minneapolis.

But it did not include information from Mohamed Noor, the 31-year-old officer who fired the shot that killed Ms. Damond. Officer Noor declined to be interviewed by investigators. Officer Noors attorney did not provide clarification on when, if ever, an interview would be possible, the statement said.

Investigators interviewed Officer Matthew Harrity, who has been with the Minneapolis Police Department for a year and was behind the wheel when the shooting happened.
WASHINGTON  It was men who started it. It may be women who finished it.

The Senate effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a process that began with 13 Republican men drafting a plan behind closed doors, collapsed Tuesday, as three Republicans said they would not support an ultimately futile attempt to simply roll back the current health care law without a replacement.

Though all three are women, their objections have little to do with their sex and more to do with the legislations cuts to Medicaid. In a twist, that aligns them with President Trumps campaign promise not to touch Medicaid, which helps low-income people, pregnant women and people with disabilities, among others, as well as those eligible under the Affordable Care Acts expansion of the program in 31 states and the District of Columbia.

Who are these senators, and why did they break with their partys leaders?

Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia
WASHINGTON  The State Department office charged with combating war crimes may become the latest casualty of Secretary of State Rex W. Tillersons plans to restructure his department, former American officials said on Tuesday.

Human rights advocates seized on the proposal as another example of what they assert is the Trump administrations indifference to human rights outside North Korea, Iran and Cuba.

They also say that shutting the Office of Global Criminal Justice, as the war crimes bureau is officially known, would hamper efforts to publicize atrocities and bring war criminals to justice.

The promise of never again has proven hard to keep, said Stephen J. Rapp, who led the office during the Obama administration. If this Office of Global Criminal Justice closes, it will become even more difficult.
WASHINGTON  The Trump administration is considering imposing sanctions on additional Venezuelan officials, one of several options under discussion as a rebuke to President Nicolas Maduros government and his efforts to consolidate authority.

Administration officials said they were using a number of tactics to persuade Mr. Maduro to hold off on constituent assembly elections seen by critics as a power grab, and more broadly to ease the authoritarian tilt of his government.

They stressed that the Trump administration was talking to other governments about how best to proceed. But they said they reserved the right to engage in unilateral actions, if need be.

A senior Trump administration official declined in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday to name the potential targets of sanctions. But the announcement came two days after an unusual election organized by opposition parties in Venezuela, in which more than seven million people cast votes to express their disapproval of Mr. Maduro. The government says that vote is illegitimate.
Two years ago there was talk of whether, with the nuclear dispute behind them, the United States and Iran might cooperate against the Islamic State and strike a deal over Syria. Traditional Sunni allies of the United States like Saudi Arabia wondered if Washington was about to pivot toward Iran, which has a predominantly Shiite population, for the first time since the Shahs fall.

Indeed, the deal was seen as a major gamble by the Obama administration. Over time, many officials thought, the two countries would use it as a foundation for building a larger relationship.

Today that foundation is crumbling. Administration officials say the debate over whether to ultimately scrap the accord continues, though they acknowledge that doing that would free Iran to resume enrichment of uranium and reprocessing of plutonium, the exact activities the deal sharply limits.

On Sunday, Iran disclosed that it had been holding Xiyue Wang, an American who is a Princeton University doctoral candidate in history, for nearly a year and has sentenced him to 10 years in prison on spying charges. The disclosure shocked Mr. Wangs colleagues at Princeton, who described Irans action as a colossal error. The incarceration of Mr. Wang, 37, also threatened to chill academic exchanges between Iran and the United States.

The reception Mr. Zarif receives now in Washington could not be more different than it was 24 months ago. He and Mr. Kerry developed a close rapport, even if it was often punctuated by shouting matches. But Mr. Zarif said he had never spoken with Mr. Kerrys successor, Rex W. Tillerson.

I havent asked for a meeting, and I dont think I will, he said.

Mr. Zarif said that if conversations do begin anew with the United States, they will be limited to the nuclear deal  and American compliance. But he did not sound hopeful, adding that Iran had no intention of renegotiating.
It might have seemed like it came out of nowhere when Saudi Arabia and its allies blockaded Qatar and President Trump accused it of supporting terrorism even though its an ally. But this all makes a lot more sense when you see that Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been rivals for 20 years. Their competition plays out across the whole Middle East and helps to explain the regions chaos. Qatar is this tiny country that, starting with its independence just in 1971, was dominated by the more powerful Saudi Arabia. No country likes to be dominated by a neighbor, even if they both speak Arabic, export energy and have Sunni monarchies. Qatar decides it has to rival Saudi Arabia if it wants autonomy, and it has some advantages. It makes friends with everybody. It opens trade relations with Israel. It improves relations with Iran, which is Saudi Arabias archrival. It hosts a United States air base. It starts a satellite network, Al Jazeera, to project soft power in the region. But most important, it gets really rich by exploiting huge natural gas reserves. The emir travels around the Middle East and the world, meeting with leaders, brokering peace talks, and throwing money around. The Saudis are not happy, but to some degree they come to accept Qatars independence. But then the Arab Spring happens. Popular uprisings spring up across the Middle East, in some places toppling governments or inciting civil wars. For Qatar, its an opportunity, because most Arab autocrats are aligned with Saudi Arabia. It backs the uprisings with Al Jazeera airtime, diplomatic support and, later, money and sometimes guns. But Saudi Arabia feels threatened by the uprisings. So each time a power vacuum opens, they both rush in. In some places, like Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Qatar each back opposing political parties. In Libya, they arm rival groups who will later fight a civil war. Their worst rivalry is in Egypt. Qatar backs the Muslim Brotherhood. But Saudi Arabia backs the Egyptian military, which takes over. Qatars big campaign began to collapse in 2013. Its allies faced mounting losses. The emir stepped down, passing power to a young son with less experience. Last month, President Trump received a warm welcome when he visited Saudi Arabia. Less than two weeks later, the Saudis announced the blockade. Its not clear exactly what led to the move, but President Trump surprised everybody when he went after Qatar on Twitter Qatars economy and security are now in peril. The huge United States air base was supposed to be a guarantee against getting bullied by the Saudis, but it did not work. The Saudis took a big step toward reasserting control over the region, which means promoting friendly autocrats and opposing Iran. For the United States, opposing Qatar seemingly overnight sends a troubling message to other allies. Will President Trump turn on them next?
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.  Coined in the West, the term Middle East is a cartographic convenience, a promotional hook, and a power tool. Politically, it reduces complex populations to a containable, controllable mass of allies and aliens. Culturally, it packages diversity for easy sale. In the past two decades, art from the Middle East has become a hot brand on the global retail market.

Branding is a problem for artists. It can turn ethnicity into destiny and put a cap on creative freedom. At the same time, art that emerges from a specific culture and history can be hugely valuable, generating knowledge where there was none. In an ignorant, wall-building time we need art to give us as much knowledge of the larger world, including the Middle East, as possible.

That seems to be the thinking behind the group exhibition No to the Invasion: Breakdowns and Side Effects at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. The 29 artists are associated, by birth or descent, with that geographic area alternatively (if inaccurately) referred to as the Middle East and the Arab world. All of the art is drawn from a single source, the Barjeel Art Foundation, based in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates.
The Met is close to a deal with the city under which the museum would accept a reduced annual allocation in exchange for the citys approval of the Mets plan to make up that revenue by charging $25 admission for visitors from outside New York State, according to a cultural executive in New York museum circles with knowledge of the negotiations, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized by the Met or the city to comment. (A Met spokesman would say only that the museum was still in discussions with the city about the proposed admission fee.)

Moreover, Mr. de Blasio is suddenly brandishing a stick after years of rarely visiting or championing cultural institutions, in contrast with his predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg. When asked directly at Wednesdays news conference whether hed ever been to MoMA/P.S. 1, a nearby museum, Mr. de Blasio answered simply, No.

Several board leaders of major museums did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Yet some city officials were quick to go on the offensive against any potential opposition.

There are people who will resist, who will resent, who will obstruct, said Melissa Mark-Viverito, the City Council speaker. Any moment for equality and inclusion doesnt come easily.

For now, the plan calls for maintaining city funding for New Yorks most popular museums, allaying concerns that some of their subsidies would be redirected to smaller arts organizations. Mr. de Blasio pledged on Wednesday to increase money for the less prominent groups, many in neighborhoods outside Manhattan.

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.

Mr. Finkelpearl acknowledged in an interview that the cultural plan was a road map rather than a guarantee of future changes to city arts funding. This is not a budget document, he said. This is a document that sets a course. All this stuff will be taken into consideration in future-year budgets.
But its better than good: a gorgeously produced stab at self-examination (it runs less than the length of a standard therapy session) that suggests a new direction for raps elder statesmen. It also demonstrates a way that certain black artists can reckon with middle age  by accepting the emotionalism, humor and self-criticism that come naturally to a current generation of younger rappers.

Anybody irritated by the posturing of Jay-Zs previous album, Magna Carta: Holy Grail (2013), was likely put off by the prospect of more. If a major rapper arrives at his mid-40s and wants to give us a song that mentions fine wines and a serial-killer drug dealer, then drops the name of a fashion-designer-movie-director more than a dozen times (Tom Ford), maybe he should be hosting the Grammys, too.

Its entirely possible that Jay-Z arrived to record Magna Carta aware that theres not much of a road map for a rapper in his 40s, especially one whose body of work and reputation are great enough to haunt him. His clever, brash, kaleidoscopically grim 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt, is as much a work of memoir of life in the street-level drug trade as it is an album.

On it, he raps with the impunity of a mafia don. Its a distinction thats always kept him seeming a little older than everybody else, while, eventually, holding his competitors youth against them. On songs like Change Clothes, with Pharrell, from 2003, and Off That, with a young-and-hungry Drake, from 2009, he was all too happy to display a cranky old-soul impatience, arguing that because he thinks he is grown up, his peers should, too.

Yall [epithet] acting way too tough/Throw on a suit, and get it tapered up, he implored on Change Clothes.
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown that lets you sleep  and lets us get paid to watch comedy. What do you think of it? What else are you interested in? Let us know: thearts@nytimes.com.

Letting Trump Fail

After the Republicans effort to replace the Affordable Care Act fell through in the Senate on Tuesday, President Trump said hed now like to simply let Obamacare fail. On The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon suggested that Mr. Trump knew a thing or two about failure himself.
THE HOME THAT WAS OUR COUNTRY

A Memoir of Syria

By Alia Malek

Illustrated. 334 pp. Nation Books. $27.99.

WE CROSSED A BRIDGE AND IT TREMBLED

Voices From Syria

By Wendy Pearlman

290 pp. Custom House/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.99.

I lived in a country where dying was taught to us from childhood, the writer Svetlana Alexievich said in her 2015 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. We were taught death. Alexievich was speaking of Belarus, where she grew up and where, during World War II, 2.2 million people died  nearly one person in four. The scale of this suffering seems impossible to fathom, numbers so large that the mind snaps shut. Yet one neednt cast back in history for such figures. Since the war in Syria began six years ago, 6.5 million people  more than one in three Syrians  have been internally displaced, and another 470,000 are dead. Now, as the war grinds into its seventh horrifying year, literature written in English and borne out of the conflict is finally beginning to reach the rest of the world.

Image Alia Malek Credit... Peter van Agtmael

Alia Maleks memoir, The Home That Was Our Country, is one of the finest examples of this new testimonial writing. Born in Baltimore to Syrian-American parents, Malek is a journalist and attorney who landed a job in the civil rights division of the Justice Department less than a year before 9/11. Unable to endure the political climate under President George W. Bush, she quit the United States for the Middle East, where she traveled and taught human rights for the better part of a decade. Her political and cultural fluency, as well as her deep familiarity with the landscape, allow her to become a human ear as Svetlana Alexievich calls it, recording the tragic absurdities of daily life that give way to dark humor. On an earlier trip, she had visited southern Lebanon and toured a prison that was recently closed. Her guide, a former inmate, instructed the groups members to cover their noses and mouths, so as not to inhale the germs of diseases that he was convinced still lingered. The disease that lingered, of course, was despair. She spotted a sign for the suffering yard  suffering, she writes, was their translation for torture.
On Happy Days, the Fonz infamously jumped over a shark. On Sunday, as part of the first night of the Discovery Channels annual Shark Week, Michael Phelps will race one. (Fear not for our Olympic hero. He and the shark will not be in adjacent lanes.)

As a literary companion to this years Discovery offerings, you might pick up Morten Stroksness Shark Drunk, which has arguably the years best subtitle: The Art of Catching a Large Shark From a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean.

Stroksness wry tone continues in the books opening sentences. Three and a half billion years, he writes. Thats the time it took from the moment the first primitive life-forms developed in the sea until Hugo Aasjord phoned me one Saturday night in July. Stroksnes and his friend sailed off the shore of Norway in search of a Greenland shark, which can grow up to 24 feet long and weigh up to 2,500 pounds, making it the worlds largest flesh-eating shark. (For bait, the pair bring along the carcass of a Scottish Highland bull.)

While circling his central subject, Stroksnes follows his capacious curiosity, touching on subjects from Rimbaud to the fauna and stones of Norway to the possibility of life on other planets. More firmly water-based observations include a lyrical paragraph about what happens after a whale dies and floats to the bottom of the ocean. The end result reads a bit as if Geoff Dyer had written Jaws.
Sam Glanzman, a comic-book artist and writer who for nearly 80 years brought a gritty, richly detailed style to illustrating war stories, including his own, died on July 12 in Maryland, N.Y. He was 92.

His death was confirmed by Drew Ford, a publisher who is editing reissues of Mr. Glanzmans works.

During World War II, Mr. Glanzman served in the Pacific on the destroyer Stevens, where the diary he kept, the sketchbooks he filled and the experiences of his shipmates became raw material for the comic books he created decades later.

In about 70 stories for DC and two graphic novels for Marvel, Mr. Glanzman vividly recreated his experiences in nearly three years of naval service  the training, the battles, the shore liberties and the mundane times when little happened.

In one story, he contemplated what the men dreamed about during months at sea when their ship becomes like a planet orbiting in space  a world in and of itself. A young sailor tears up at thoughts of his family farm. An older sailor hopes to return to Manhattans urban jungle. The ships cook wants to be a chief petty officer. And the torpedo man tied his dreams around the tubes of TNT hed someday direct into the enemy.
Who was at the meeting?

Trump associates Set up meeting Paul Manafort Former campaign manager Donald Trump Jr. Eldest son Jared Kushner Son-in-law, senior adviser Natalia Veselnitskaya Russian lawyer Anatoli Samochornov Translator Rinat Akhmetshin Russian-American lobbyist Irakly Kaveladze Associate of Russian businessman Rob Goldstone Music producer, publicist Trump associates Set up meeting Paul Manafort Former campaign manager Jared Kushner Son-in-law, senior adviser Donald Trump Jr. Eldest son Rob Goldstone Music producer, publicist Natalia Veselnitskaya Russian lawyer Anatoli Samochornov Translator Rinat Akhmetshin Russian-American lobbyist Irakly Kaveladze Associate of Russian businessman Donald Trump Jr. Presidents eldest son Jared Kushner Son-in-law, senior adviser Paul Manafort Former campaign manager Set up meeting Rob Goldstone Music producer, publicist Natalia Veselnitskaya Russian lawyer Anatoli Samochornov Translator Rinat Akhmetshin Russian- American lobbyist Irakly Kaveladze Associate of Russian businessman

How was it set up?

The meeting was set up over a series of emails between Donald Trump Jr. and Rob Goldstone, a music producer and publicist.

Mr. Goldstone offered potentially damaging information about Hillary Clinton that he said was part of Russia and its governments support for Mr. Trump.

Donald Trump Jr. responded within minutes. He gave no indication that he was surprised or disturbed by the provenance of the promised material  or the notion that it was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his fathers campaign. If its what you say I love it especially later in the summer, he wrote.

How are others connected?

Son Worked on Miss Universe in Moscow Aras Agalarov Russian businessman Emin Agalarov Russian pop star Donald J. Trump President Natalia Veselnitskaya Russian lawyer Irakly Kaveladze Associate of Aras Agalarov Rob Goldstone Music producer, publicist Donald J. Trump President Worked on Miss Universe in Moscow Son Aras Agalarov Russian businessman Emi Agalarov Russian pop star Natalia Veselnitskaya Russian lawyer Irakly Kaveladze Associate of Aras Agalarov Rob Goldstone Music producer, publicist

Mr. Goldstone said he was writing on behalf of Emin Agalarov, whose father, Aras Agalarov, wanted to share the information. According to Aras Agalarovs lawyer, the men had no idea what Mr. Goldstone was thinking when he wrote the email. It is absolutely not true, the lawyer said.

Mr. Goldstone arranged for Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer connected to the Russian government who had worked with Aras Agalarov on real estate deals, to meet with Donald Trump Jr. She had asked to be introduced as a favor, Mr. Agalarovs lawyer said.

Irakly Kaveladze, a business associate of Mr. Agalarov, was at the meeting just to make sure it happened and to serve as an interpreter if necessary.

What was discussed?

Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged that he was told that Ms. Veselnitskaya might have information helpful to the campaign, but said in the end she offered nothing meaningful. He said that the meeting turned to discussion of the adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that sanctions Russians for human rights abuses. Mr. Goldstone gave a similar explanation.

Ms. Veselnitskaya has denied that she discussed anything related to the presidential campaign, saying that she had never acted on behalf of the Russian government.

Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist, said he attended the meeting as part of an effort to amend the sanctions law.

President Trump defended his son on Twitter, writing on Monday, Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. Thats politics!

When were the names revealed?

The New York Times reports the existence of the meeting and the presence of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and Mrs. Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer.

Mr. Goldstone tells The Washington Post that he also attended the meeting.

Mr. Akhmetshin, the Russian-American lobbyist, confirms that he attended the meeting, and he identifies the translator in attendance as Anatoli Samochornov.
Spread the love

By Kingsley Chukwuka

Secretary to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Chief (Dr) Rose Oriaran-Anthony has called on Nigerians to take advantage of the on-going Continuous Voters Registration (CVR) exercise to register and get their Permanent Voters Card (PVC) ahead of the 2023 general election, saying that the exercise will end in June 2023.

Oriaran-Anthony said after the June deadline, unregistered electorates will not be allowed to vote.

It is the right of every Nigerian citizen from age 18 years and above to register and those who do not register till the end of June this year (2022), will not take part in the 2023 general election, she said.

The Commissions Secretary made the call at the weekend, as a guest speaker, at a public hearing, organised by the Association of Edo State Indigenes Abuja (AESIA), with the theme: Continuous Voters Registration: Creating Public Awareness and Sensitization, Impact and Significance on Polity, Governance and Dividend of Democracy held at the Labour House Abuja.

There is no democracy without voters, she stressed.

According to her: That is why of all various definitions of democracy, the most universally accepted is the one that refers to it as the government of the people by the people and for the people. By this definition, it means it is the people that give impetus to democracy and that without peoples participation, such a system cannot be referring to as democracy, she added.

She continued: In such a system, its the people that determines through their votes who occupies public office. However, you cant exercise this civic responsibility without first of all registering to vote, get your Voters Card and express your voice at the polls. It is a civic responsibility that should not be toyed with, as it is a responsibility that places our welfare and the future of our children and children yet unborn in our hands via PVC.

Also, the INEC Secretary, who cautioned against engaging in multiple registration, said that apart from the fact that it is a criminal offence, it invalidates the two registrations and renders one ineligible to participate in an election process.

In her words: Multiple registration automatically disqualifies you from voting. Almost half of the registrations the commission have had recently are illegal as a result of multiple registration.

While speaking against thuggery during election, the Commissions Secretary said its unfortunate that youths of Nigeria have been associated with electoral violence for too long, adding that thuggery has terminated the lives of people that would have been leaders today.

Warning against thuggery she said, what INEC wants is your ballot not your bullets.

Also lamenting against voters apathy in Nigeria, She recalled that for the first time in history since the return to civil rule in 1999, Nigeria has recorded the lowest rate of voter turnout of 34.75 percent as at the last presidential election in 2019.

That figure of voters turnout in 2019 is said to be the lowest of all recent elections held in African continent, according to the data from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IIDEA).

She reiterated that the dream of INEC is to conduct an election that is inclusive and of international standard that will meet the overall aspirations of Nigerians at all level, calling on Civil Society Organisations, Socio-cultural and religious bodies to do more in taking the message of sustainable democracy to the grassroots and let the People know the benefits of participation in the electoral process

Oriaran-Anthony who is also an Edo indigene, charged the Association of Edo State Indigenes Abuja (AESIA), to sensitize the people of Edo State to come out and register in the on-going Continuous Voters Registration (CVR), as the state has lowest registered voters in the South-South with 67,680, according to the latest weekly update released by the Commission on February 14, 2022.

Other states in the region recorded the following: Delta  176, 673; Bayelsa  168,191; Rivers  155,256; Akwa Ibom  106, 788 and Cross Rivers  80, 199, She said.

Earlier in his opening remarks, the AESIA President, Mr. Odiase Osagie charged the Association to take advantage of the lecture and do the needful.
Barely hours after he met with the Labour Party presidential candidate, Mr Peter Obi, former President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan yesterday held closed-door meetings with former military President General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida IBB and former Head of State General Abdulsalami Abubakar.

Jonathan met the former leaders in Minna, Niger State. He was received at about 1.30pm at Minna International Airport. He spent about one hour each in the residences of the former presidents.

Recall that former president Olusegun Obasanjo, had also met with the two former heads of state, barely two weeks ago in Minna.

Speaking to Journalists after his meeting with Abubakar, Jonathan urged Nigerians to elect leaders who will take national interest above self aggrandisement.

The former president said We all wish our country well, especially for the young people. Elections are coming. They have to select the person you believe will lead us well, serve us well, the leader is also a servant as a president you lead you serve.

Somebody that will take the interest of all of us, the interest of the country, somebody that will not compromise our own interest for his own aggrandizement he added when asked about his take on the 2023 general election.

He reiterated that Nigeria needs Somebody that will carry all Nigerians along and most especially take Nigeria as a project.

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Asked why he was visiting Minna he said he is the Most Junior among all the former presidents. From time to time I used to go round and greet them. For some time now I have not seen General Abdulsalami, so there is nothing special about the visit. It is a regular visit that I normally do.

Jonathan added, We are talking about election, you know he chairs the National Peace Committee that tries to midwife the Peace Process during elections, there is so much pressure on him now so that the 2023 election will be conducted freely, fairly and in an environment that there will be peace and love.

Confirming his meeting with Jonathan, Peter Obi, had in a tweet, said, I recently visited my senior brother, H.E. @GEJonathan to exchange views on an array of serious national interest questions. -PO

He also posted a picture with Jonathan.
From The Nation

The United States Senate is an undemocratic institution. Just do the math: Progressive California Senator Kamala Harris was elected in 2016 with 7,542,753 votes. Yet her vote on issues such as health-care reform counts for no more than that of conservative Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi, who was elected in 2014 with 121,554 votes.

This is an absurd imbalance. In fact, the only thing that would make it more absurd would be if voters were removed from the equation altogether.

Say "hello" to the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, the corporate-funded project to impose a top-down right-wing agenda on the states. ALEC is considering whether to adopt a new piece of "model legislation" that proposes to do away with an elected Senate.

The idea of reversing 104 years of representative democracy and returning to the bad old days when senators were chosen via backroom deals between wealthy campaign donors, corporate lobbyists, and crooked legislators, is not new. The John Birch Society peddled the proposal decades ago. But with the rise of the "Tea Party" movement, the notion moved into the conservative mainstream.

Then -- Texas Governor Rick Perry argued in 2012 that the direct election of senators "took the states out of the process." Several Republican senators apparently agree, with Utah Senator Mike Lee referring to the 17th Amendment as "a mistake" and Arizona Senator Jeff Flake saying, "I think it's better as it reinforces the notion of federalism to have senators appointed by state legislatures." What was once a fringe fantasy is being taken ever more seriously by conservative strategists.

Last year, ALEC published an article by a so-called "subject matter expert" arguing that the popular election of senators is "disenfranchising the States." The article made an old-school states' rights argument for taking the power to choose senators away from the people and giving it to the politicians who sit in state legislatures.

Click Here to Read Whole Article
What's up with NATO these days?

In 2009, NATO celebrated its 60th anniversary. With its recent deluge of new member states, it needed more space and announced it would build a new HD across the street from the bunker-like 1950s original one.



It was supposed to open in 2015, but in a fitting metaphor for the troubled organization, it was discovered that the half billion euro project would cost twice that, and would not be finished till 2017. Just in time, as the new US president was toying with the idea of dispensing with what he has called an expensive, obsolete organization, even as it continues to expand, long after what many considered to be its expiry date.





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High noon, mid-summer, clear skies, Washington, DC, 90 degrees plus.

Today is the second meeting of the newly established Commission on Election Integrity, a hand-picked group determined to prove that Trump, not Clinton, won the 3 million-5 million popular vote margin, in addition to his Electoral College "victory," that Hillary Clinton is credited with--the largest in history ever won by a presidential "loser."

The first meeting of the CEI was not publicized. Today's meeting is closed to the public but was accessible live at CNN's website (I wasn't watching it, so can't swear to this). Members of the committee include notorious villains who have polluted principles of election integrity in the past: the infamous Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation who outspokenly champions the existence of voter fraud and hence the necessity of voter ID; and Kenneth Blackwell, former Ohio secretary of state, who so distorted results in Ohio in Election 2004 that the electoral votes selected G. W. Bush instead of the rightful winner John Kerry.

The chair of this American "dream team" is Vice President Pence; the vice chair, vice-ridden, is the infamous KKKris Kobach (nickname courtesy of Greg Palast), Kansas's secretary of state and founder and executor of the Kansas-based interstate crosscheck program that eliminates voters from registration lists if their first and last names are similar. In this program, John Jones and Jonathan Q. Jones, living on opposite sides of the country, may be guilty of voter fraud and are hence eliminated from the lists.

But it was the CEI that has provoked opposition from citizens throughout the country that the RespectMyVote rally this morning objected to. The specific outrage was the letter sent out to all the states soliciting voter lists that include sensitive information, up to and including the last four digits of social security numbers. [I have read that given these four numbers, it is easy to figure out the preceding five.]

Around 100 angry activists representing dozens of groups turned out at the southwest corner of Lafayette Square, which borders the back of the White House. A permit had been secured in advance. The group first rallied in this area, with police standing behind us holding, I am told, semi-automatic guns. After 15 minutes of speeches, a police bullhorn rudely interrupted to herd us out of the park onto H Street. The park and back area of the White House were being cleared for security reasons, we were told.

When I asked an officer whether our rally was the reason, he said that we shouldn't consider ourselves so important. However, the minute the rally broke up the cordoned-off area (with police barriers as well as yellow tape) was opened up.

I hope that the police who continued to guard us from the back learned something from the many speakers, representing, in addition to #RespectMy Vote, the NAACP, League of Women Voters, ACLU, PFAW, AAUW, Color of Change, Common Cause, Election Protection, and many others.

At midday H Street is full of traffic and hence noise interfered with my ability to hear names and parts of speeches. Below are some highlights, history-making and deeply disturbing.

Rev. Lennox Yearwood, head of the Hip Hop Caucus, the parent organization of RespectMy Vote, said that in all his years of activism he had never encountered this violation of official permission for use of a rally site.

Today's occasion is the most signal event since the pre-VRA 1960s, another speaker said. Our grandparents died for the vote back then. We must honor them by fighting to keep this sacred right that is the bulwark of democracy.

"Can't stop/Won't stop" was the first chant shared between the speakers and the protesters; "Can vote/Can't block our vote" was another.

Karen Hobert Flynn, head of Common Cause, said that her organization of 1,000,000+ had filed a lawsuit last week; that there are federal laws that block this invasion of privacy. Thirty thousand Common Cause members sent in protest comments.

Representing the NAACP, attorney Todd Cox said that, at 80 years, it is the oldest civil rights legal organization in the country. He warned that the commission's "investigations" will focus on inner city voters, those most likely to vote Democratic. He called the group the Commission on Election Suppression.

It was close to this time at the rally that we were herded away. I was one of the last to leave, scribbling madly, photographing, holding up my cane so that I wouldn't be grabbed (my bones break easily).

I think that the first words spoken at our new location, were that no funding should be allocated to this sham vote-suppressing group. Kobach had previously bragged that his home state Kansas's crosscheck program required minimal if any taxpayer funds but I later read that the Koch brothers had treated him to it.

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From Consortium News

There are very few journalist in the U.S. or Europe who have the courage to report fairly on Israel's seemingly endless illegal occupation of Palestinian lands. Personally, as a Jewish-American, and the grandson of a revered Rabbi, I have been roundly denounced by pro-Israeli representatives and their Zionist lobbyists in the U.S.

I've stopped counting the number of vicious personal attacks that have labeled me a self-hating Jewish anti-Semite. Here's one that got my attention and the attention of journalist Robert Fisk of the Independent of London, who I introduced one night for a lecture in Berkeley, California, and who then wrote an article about the plight of Jewish journalists and activists in the U.S. who dare to write or speak honestly about Israel's brutal and illegal occupation of the Palestinians:

"You mother-f*cking-a**hole-self-hating Jewish piece of sh*t. Hitler killed the wrong Jews. He should have killed your parents, so a piece of Jewish sh*t like you would not have been born. God willing, Arab terrorists will cut you to pieces Daniel Pearl-style, AMEN!!!" The latter reference to the late Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and decapitated in Pakistan.

And at another level, the Israeli consulate in San Francisco has complained to my managers at KPFA/ Pacifica Radio repeatedly about my "pro-Palestinian terrorist" and "anti-semitic" reporting, and my apparent "hatred" for the Jewish State.

Emmy award-winning filmmaker and investigative reporter John Pilger is one of the rare exceptions who has plowed head-first into this crucial story of our time. Pilger has made two documentaries 25 years apart about Palestine, with almost the same name, Palestine is the Issue and then Palestine is Still the Issue.

I spoke recently with Pilger about Palestine and the brutality of the continuing occupation, and also about the responsibility for empowering and sustaining the occupation that falls at the feet of the Western press, based on its misreporting and, in some cases, not reporting at all the brutal realities of Israel's iron-fisted occupation of Palestinians, which many critics, as well as several UN officials, have labeled as a form of ethnic cleansing that borders on genocide.

I also spoke with Pilger about the recent G-20 meetings in Germany, where President Trump held his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin amid the Russia-gate frenzy. John Pilger's latest film is The Coming War on China. He recently gave a moving talk at the Palestine Expo in London on the ongoing battle for the liberation of Palestine, excerpts of which have been published by Consortiumnews.

Dennis Bernstein: Let's start with some current events. We just had the G20 meeting in Europe with a big deal made about the meeting between Trump and Putin and a lot of action in the streets. Your thoughts on what happened there and some of the goings-on?

John Pilger: I think it was very interesting on two levels. First of all, it was a clear demonstration of the continuing rebellion against remote governments, governments often justifiably referred to as oligarchic. The number of people in the streets of Hamburg accurately represented that rebellion.

The interesting thing about the G20 itself was that Germany clearly set out to determine the agenda. Merkel wanted to put her country forward as the undisputed leader now of Europe. Some would say it has been for quite a while and with Britain on the way out the opportunity does exist. But that didn't happen.



President Trump discusses his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7, 2017.

(Image by (Screenshot from Whitehouse.gov)) Details DMCA



The discussion was appropriated by the meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Putting aside all the grotesque, cartoon qualities of Trump, the one thing that he has been consistent about is doing some deal with Russia. This has gotten him in a lot of trouble because the Democratic Party and, in fact most of the beltway institutions in Washington, don't want this to happen. They would like Russia to remain a perennial enemy.

Without Moscow there as the demon, it is very difficult to justify a lot of the infrastructure of power in the United States, particularly the massive armament and military industries. Trump openly challenged this, virtually from the beginning. Although he seemed to have to prove himself to the pillars of power in Washington by firing missiles at Syria, this element in his presidency has remained pretty much constant.

This was of course the first meeting between Trump and Putin. They spoke for two hours and 20 minutes and, by all accounts, some kind of rapport was developed. In previous times that would be good news. It used to be called "detente." These days this is not good news, either in the US political establishment and corporate media or, to a large degree, here in Britain.

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As politicians and the media debate the legality and ethics of the infamous meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and an ever-expanding list of Russian characters, one of the more nauseating aspects of the efforts to explain it away, has been the claim that all they did was talk about "adoption."

This, of course, evokes warm and fuzzy images of providing loving families to needy children. To the contrary, as the subject line of Junior's email chain shows, children were the last thing on the minds of the friends of Trump, Putin, and the Russian oligarchs that were assembled at that meeting. The reference to adoption only makes sense when you understand the history of the Magnitsky Act, passed by the U.S. Congress.

As many readers likely know, the Magnitsky Act was passed by Congress to punish Russia for the jailing of a lawyer (Sergei Magnitsky) who had uncovered evidence of a massive case of tax fraud in Russia. According to a recent Atlantic Magazine article by Julia Ioffe,

"Magnitsky had been denied medical attention in jail despite his worsening gall stones pancreatitis, and appeared to have died a violent death."

As Ioffe further explains on MSNBC's All in with Chris Hayes (with Ari Melber guest hosting), the Magnitsky Act cut off the pipeline that Russian elites used to enrich themselves in the West. As the barring of American adoptions of Russian children was the Russian government's retaliation against the law (which ironically only hurt Russian children), the topic of adoption was merely a cover for the effort to repeal that law. Clearly, it also served nicely as a cover for the intentions of the Trump campaign in attending the meeting with Veselnitskaya and others. The use of orphans in the service of political expediency is especially disturbing, since the law being targeted was in response to the alleged torture and murder of a dissident.

Of course, while the Russians and the Trump Administration share this cover, it would not be the first time for the Trump's. Recall the story of Ivanka Trump's supposed emotional meltdown over the gassing of Syrian children as a cover for Trump's casually planned bombing? At least for a time, that story line allowed Trump to escape questions over the efficacy of the bombing, and its indiscreet planning. It also obscured the irony of Trump's alleged agonizing over the suffering of Syria children, while banning their refuge in the U.S.

No discussion of the hypocrisy of the Trump Administration (along with its Republican enablers) over their supposed concern for children would be complete, however, without reference to their relentless push to repeal - however they can - the Affordable Care Act. While Trump likes to bemoan the suffering of "innocent children" when it suits his agenda - whether it be in Syria or in the UK- Trump sheds no tears for the millions of children - and others - who would be devastated by his aggressive push to take health coverage away from other "innocent children."

(Article changed on July 19, 2017 at 08:52)

(Article changed on July 21, 2017 at 17:00)
From Smirking Chimp

I'm suing the Los Angeles Times. I'm the plaintiff. I'm the one who was wronged. The Times should be defending themselves from my accusations that they fired and libeled me as a favor to a police chief.

But this is America.

Deep-pocketed defendants like the Times -- owned by a corporation with the weird name Tronc and a market capitalization in excess of $400 million -- are taking advantage of America's collapsing court system to turn justice on its head. In worn-out Trump-era America, the corruption and confusion that used to be associated with the developing world has been normalized.

If you're a big business like Tronc, you may be the defendant on paper but you have all the advantages in court. Your money allows you to put the plaintiff on the defense. You're equal in the eyes of the law -- theoretically. But it doesn't feel like justice when the victim has to defend himself from the criminal. It's like that song "Lola," in which the Kinks sang "girls will be boys and boys will be girls"; the courts system is a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.

States like California passed anti-SLAPP laws to defend individuals with modest incomes (like me) against deep-pocketed plaintiffs (like the Times) that file frivolous lawsuits to intimidate and harass their critics. After an anti-SLAPP motion is filed, the case freezes until a judge decides whether the case is meritorious. If the judge says it's frivolous, it's dismissed and the poor individual defendant gets his or her attorney's fees paid by the deep-pocketed corporation plaintiff.

After I sued them for defamation and wrongful termination, the Times filed three "anti-SLAPP" motions against me. So if the judge decides I don't have a good case, this middle-class individual plaintiff will have to pay deep-pocketed defendant Tronc's legal fees. The Troncies want at least $300,000.

Talk about topsy-turvy! The legislature should fix this law but they won't because there's zero political movement in that direction. I may be the only journalist to have criticized anti-SLAPP laws in a public forum. Articles about anti-SLAPP feature nothing but praise.

There were three motions. I lost one on June 21st, against the individual Times employees and executives involved in libeling me. (I plan to appeal.) That loss prompted a parting of ways with my attorneys. What followed was a month of representing myself pro se (in California they call it in pro per).

I now have new lawyers, and we're waiting to hear how I did arguing against ace lawyer Kelli Sager's anti-SLAPP motions for the Times and Tronc in LA Superior Court on July 14th. It sucked. But representing myself gave me a full-immersion crash course in just how messed up the courts really are.

The big thing I learned was that poor people have zero access to justice.

Nor do the middle class.

After the June 21st debacle, a semi-retired lawyer friend advised me to file a Motion for Reconsideration, a request to the judge to take another look and perhaps realize that he made some mistakes. The law gives you 10 days to file.

My Motion for Reconsideration was one of numerous motions I would have to draft and file myself while pro se. It was incredibly expensive, wildly burdensome and so daunting I bet 99% of people without a lawyer would throw up their hands and give up.

I'm the 1%.

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From Our Future

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney had a Wall Street Journal column highlighting the benefits of "MAGAnomics." The piece can best be described as a combination of Groundhog Day and outright lies.

In terms of Groundhog Day, we have actually tried MAGAnomics twice before and it didn't work. We had huge cuts in taxes and regulation under both President Reagan and George W. Bush. In neither case, was there any huge uptick in growth and investment. In fact, the Bush years were striking for the weak growth in the economy and especially the labor market. We saw what was at the time the longest period without net job growth since the Great Depression. And of course, his policy of giving finance free rein gave us the housing bubble and the Great Recession.

The story of the 1980s was somewhat better but hardly follows the MAGAnomics script. The economy did bounce back in 1983, following a steep recession in 1981-1982. That is generally what economies do following steep recessions that were not caused by collapsed asset bubbles. Furthermore, the bounceback was based on increased consumption, not investment as the MAGAnomics folks claim. In fact, investment in the late 1980s fell to extraordinarily low levels. It is also worth pointing out that following both tax cuts, the deficit exploded, just as conventional economics predicts.

By contrast, Clinton raised taxes in 1993 and the economy subsequently soared. It would be silly to attribute the strong growth of the 1990s to the Clinton tax increase; other factors like an IT driven productivity boom and the stock bubble were the key factors, but obviously, the tax increase did not prevent strong growth.

The outright lies part stem from the comparison to prior periods' growth rates. Mulvaney notes that the 2.0 percent growth rate projected for the next decade is markedly lower than the 3.5 percent rate that we had seen for most of the post-World War II era. This comparison doesn't make sense.

We are now seeing very slow labor force growth due to the retirement of the baby boom cohort and the fact that the secular rise in the female labor force participation rate is largely at an end. MAGAnomics can do nothing about either of these facts. Slower labor force growth translates into slower overall growth.

Mulvaney also complains about government benefits keeping people from working. The idea that large numbers of people aren't working because of the generosity of welfare benefits shows a startling degree of ignorance. The United States has the least generous welfare state of any wealthy country, yet we also have among the lowest labor force participation rates. The idea that we will get any substantial boost to the labor force from gutting benefits further is absurd on its face.

Mulvaney apparently missed the fact that energy prices have plummeted in the last three years. Oil had been over $100 a barrel; today it is less than $50. While it is always possible that it could fall still further, any boost to the economy from further declines will be trivial compared to what we have seen already. It would be amazing if Mulvaney was ignorant of the recent path in energy prices.

In short, there is nothing here at all. Mulvaney has given us absolutely zero reason that Trump's policies will lead to anything other than larger deficits, fewer people with health care, more dangerous workplaces, and a dirtier environment.

Cross-posted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research
From Consortium News



President Donald Trump places a prayer in-between the stone blocks of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, May 22, 2017.

(Image by (Official White House Photo by Dan Hansen)) Details DMCA



A weakened, even desperate President Donald Trump must decide whether to stand up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or to repudiate the Syrian partial ceasefire, which Trump hammered out with Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 7.

Whether intentionally or not, this crossroads is where the months of Russia-gate hysteria have led the United States, making Trump even more vulnerable to Israeli and neoconservative pressure and making any cooperation with Russia more dangerous for him politically.

After meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Sunday, Netanyahu declared that Israel was totally opposed to the Trump-Putin cease-fire deal in southern Syria because it perpetuates Iranian presence in Syria in support of the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Netanyahu's position increases pressure on Trump to escalate U.S. military involvement in Syria and possibly move toward war against Iran and even Russia. The American neocons, who generally move in sync with Netanyahu's wishes, already have as their list of current goals "regime changes" in Damascus, Tehran and Moscow -- regardless of the dangers to the Middle East and indeed the world.

At the G-20 summit on July 7, Trump met for several hours with Putin coming away with an agreed-upon cease-fire for southwestern Syria, an accord that has proven more successful than previous efforts to reduce the violence that has torn the country apart since 2011.

But that limited peace could mean failure for the proxy war that Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other regional players helped launch six years ago with the goal of removing Assad from power and shattering the so-called "Shiite crescent" from Tehran through Damascus to Beirut. Instead, that "crescent" appears more firmly in place, with Assad's military bolstered by Shiite militia forces from Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah.

In other words, the "regime change" gambit against Assad's government would have backfired, with Iranian and Hezbollah forces arrayed along Israel's border with Syria. And instead of accepting that reversal and seeking some modus vivendi with Iran, Netanyahu and his Sunni-Arab allies (most notably the Saudi monarchy) have decided to go in the other direction (a wider war) and to bring President Trump along with them.

Neophyte Trump

Trump -- a relative neophyte in global intrigue -- has been slow to comprehend how his outreach to Netanyahu and Saudi King Salman runs counter to his collaboration with Putin on efforts to defeat the Sunni jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda and Islamic State, which have served as the point of the spear in the war to overthrow Assad.



President Donald Trump touches lighted globe with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Saudi King Salman and Donald Trump at the opening of Saudi Arabia's Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology on May 21, 2017.

(Image by (Photo from Saudi TV)) Details DMCA



Al Qaeda and Islamic State have received direct and indirect support from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Turkey, Israel and even the Obama administration, albeit sometimes unwittingly. To block Assad's overthrow -- and the likely victory by these terror groups -- Russia, Iran and Hezbollah came to Assad's defense, helping to turn the tide of the war since 2015.

In his nearly half year in office, Trump has maintained an open hostility toward Iran -- sharing a position held by Washington's neocons as well as Netanyahu and Salman -- but the U.S. President also has advocated cooperation with Russia to crush Islamic State and Al Qaeda inside Syria.

Collaboration with Russia -- and indirectly with Iran and the Syrian military -- makes sense for most U.S. interests, i.e., stabilizing Syria, reversing the refugee flow that has destabilized Europe, and denying Al Qaeda and Islamic State a base for launching terror strikes against Western targets.

But the same collaboration would be a bitter defeat for Netanyahu and Salman who have invested heavily in this and other "regime change" projects that require major U.S. investments in terms of diplomacy, money and military manpower.

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Turkeys state news agency recently decided to up and reveal the location of 10 U.S. military bases and outposts in northern Syria where US-backed forces are trying to defeat ISIS. The agency, Anadolu, was fairly extensive in their reveal, sometimes noting the number of US troops in certain locations, The Daily Beast reports.

While it is highly unusual for a NATO ally to so openly betray sensitive information, Turkeys anger against the US hasnt exactly been concealed. The US presence in Syria is directly against the wishes of Turkey (who believes the operations threaten their borders), and the US doesnt have the permission of the Assad regime.

A major point of contention is that Turkey believes the US is indirectly supporting the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK, which the US and other countries have labeled as a terror organization. Though the US denies it, Turkey believes weapons supplied to allies like Syrian Kurdish YPG militia are finding their way to the PKK. According to Turkeys National Security Council, This shows that both are the same organization.

These threats and leaks come only a month after Russia began threatening to target US aircraft in the region. The whole situation is turning into quite the quagmire.
The Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC) and the Ghana

Infrastructure Investment Fund (GIIF), following meetings in London have expressed their interest to co-invest in developmental projects in Ghana.



Projects such as railway infrastructure, power projects (generation and distribution), general infrastructure needs among others were under discussion for the investment.



This agreement was made when the Senior Minister, Hon. Yaw Osafo Marfo and other Government of Ghana officials visited the offices of the CDC in the United Kingdom.



CDC revealed that they had several investments in Ghana which included Cal Bank, SG-SSB Ltd., Ghana Leasing Company, Ltd., Tropical Glass Company,Ltd., as well as supported several private equity firms who had in turn invested in several other projects to promote development in Ghana.



Speaking on the agreement to co-invest, Solomon Asamoah, CEO of GIIF said,"Ive known and worked with the CDC for a very long time in my previous roles at the African Development Bank, the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) and IFC. It is very refreshing to hear the CDCs interest in Ghana.



He added that As the CEO of GIIF, my role and goal is not to simply invest the US$250m anchor money the GOG have provided for GIIF, but to also grow those funds. Investing or co-investing with the CDC is the kind of package or plan that I believe will allow us to achieve this.



He further appealed to the CDC to support Ghana through the infrastructure

expansion phase that the country is about to undertake.

The Director and Head of Infrastructure Team at CDC, Sameh Shenouda expressed CDCs intense interest in Ghanas development. CDC has a focus on the energy and utilities sectors of Ghana and will be happy to support investments into these sectors, he said.



According to him, a partnership with GIIF gave CDC the assurance and risk mitigation required to make some of the investments. We look forward to working with the GIIF and the rest of the team in Ghana to pursue investment projects that interests Ghana. He added.



The Senior Minister, Hon. Osafo Marfo explained that the current governments private sector focused approach to development expected to create more jobs through the private sector.



He encouraged the CDC to engage with the government of Ghana and Ghanaian businesses to enable them align their investment interests with that of the country. He also called on businesses to invest in the different sectors of the Ghanaian economy; agribusiness, railways, mining, energy, among others.



The other officials included the Minster for Railways, Hon. Joe Ghartey, the Deputy Minister for Energy, Hon. Joseph Cudjoe and the CEO of GIPC, Mr. Yofi Grant.



The visit was part of activities organized by the UK-Ghana Chamber of Commerce (UKGCC) with a big conference where over 250 British investors interested in Ghana met and deliberated on business opportunities in Ghana.

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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After the encounter with the media, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is believed to have demonstrated his inability to lead Ghana as promised.



According to NDCs Felix Kwakye Ofosu, the President was wrong to have called his vice and some of his Ministers to react to some questions posed to him by journalists during his maiden edition of meeting the Press.



He was of the view that the President is not on top of issues in this country. He is not abreast of sensitive information from all sectors. That is bad.



Speaking on NEAT FMs morning show, Ghana Montie, Felix Kwakye Ofosu said It was wrong for the President to allow his vice and Ministers to answer the questions. During President Mahamas era, he was informed and abreast with all necessary information for a similar event.



I wasnt surprise when the President goofed on some economic issue which forced his Minister of Finance to issue a release late in the evening to clarify that. Why should there be a clarification after the President has spoken? he questioned.



To him, The President should give the most authoritative words on all national issues. His words should be final. Some of his [President Nana Addo] answers were weak, and its obvious.





Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/Peacefmonline.com/ Twitter: @Washman5/ Instagram: Washman007









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Sammy Awukus bid to become the National Organiser of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has received massive boost in the Ashanti Region.



The partys delegates in the Ashanti Region, which is the stronghold of the NPP, welcomed him with shouts of unopposed during the Ashanti Regional NPP Annual Delegates Conference at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) on Sunday.



To the surprise of Awuku, the entire NPP Ashanti regional delegates in the region welcomed him to the venue with spontaneous shouts of unopposed.



Mr. Awuku arrived at the venue when the well-attended programme was already underway.



Wearing smock with NPP colours, Mr. Awuku, who is the current NPP National Youth Organizer, tried to sneak into his seat on the dais.



But the charged delegates spotted him and in unison shouted unopposed, unopposed, to disrupt the event for a while.



Realizing that he had been spotted by the NPP delegates, who admire him, Mr. Awuku waved back at the enthusiastic party members who chanted his name.



The MC for the event had to appeal to the enthusiastic NPP delegates to stop the chants for the programme to continue.



Some of the delegates stated that the intelligent and effective Sammy Awuku contributed immensely towards the NPPs victory in the 2016 general elections.



They stated that the NPP needs Sammy Awuku and cautioned other party members not to contest him in the upcoming polls.



According to them, all the party delegates have vowed to vote for Mr Awuku.

Source: Daily Guide









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Press Release

"No Ordinary Life."

Get after it.

Catching Up with DHaRCO Pro Riders Ryan Gardner and Derek Teel

How did you become affiliated with DHaRCO?

What makes DHaRCO a standout brand for enduro racers?

How long have you been sponsored by DHaRCO?

How long have you been racing enduro, and of that time, how long as a Pro?

What are your goals for this season?

What would be your theme song?

As a mountain biker, you know just what the DHaRCO motto means. The riding apparel company believes that mountain biking inspires an extraordinary lifestyle of adventure, freedom, exploration, and camaraderie. It's relaxed, casual clothing for both women and men feature high quality, eco-friendly fabric, great fit and common sense technical features compatible with this lifestyle. Whether out for a weekend shred, charging an intense race, or throwing in for a dig day, DHaRCO jerseys and shorts allow you to follow your bliss in comfort and style.The company's original objective was to create breathable, light yet tough downhill riding garments that transcended the typical cordura-style shorts and pants. With enduro rapidly gaining in popularity, DHaRCO found that its durable clothing line was ideal for the sport, as its as comfortable on the transfer climbs as on the timed downhill.DHaRCO counts California Enduro Series racers Ryan Gardner and Derek Teel among its sponsored riders, and the company came on board this year as a gold level sponsor of the series. M. Davis from DHaRCO explains, "It's our way of supporting our riders by supporting events they are attending."It also seemed like a perfect fit for the Sydney, Australia-based brand from a lifestyle perspective. Davis says, "The California vibe and weather are similar to that at headquarters in Australia, which is located near the beach and local trails. It seems like the perfect place to give back to the local mountain bike community and were excited to be a part of the enduro races."Series co-founder/sponsorship director Megan Gemelos says, "Were equally excited to have DHaRCO on board and were stoked to debut a tech tee they designed especially for us that highlights popular course trails from the 2017 venues." The tech tee will be available for purchase at the CES booth at events starting with the Crafts and Cranks Enduro. Proceeds benefit the series, which is a non-profit organization.DHaRCO recently opened a branch in Bellingham, WA to offer faster and easier access for US customers including a US-specific website, and local shipping (free with orders over $90), returns and exchanges. Increasingly popular here in the US, the brand can be found at more and more retail stores as well.Epic trails, great friends, and a zest for adventure. No Ordinary Life in comfort and style.: A few years ago a mutual friend put me in touch with DHaRCO when the company was looking at potential US riders. After checking out the products and talking with them, I knew it was going to be a great fit. It was great to have some fresh new styles that werent just the same neon colors everyone else was wearing.: I became affiliated with DHaRCO through the Nor Cal Cooperative team last year. The team was started by Kona and was also sponsored by e*thirteen and WTB. We focused on the California Enduro Series.: My experience with the DHaRCO products is that they blend technical performance with comfort really well. The shorts are by far the best I have used and stretch nicely allowing for full range of movement when racing. On top of that, everything fits well and is comfy enough to chill in after the race.: DHaRCO understands that riders want to not only feel protected on descents but also comfortable between runs or long days on the saddle. They also know that a proper fit is found in riding position and not just on a mannequin. Thankfully, they also have style and let the prints stay influenced by surf culture. It is a product that has the vibe of Enduro with the capability of racing.: 2017 will be my third year!: This is my second season wearing the product.: Oh man. I started racing enduro in probably 2012. At that time, it was mostly just Super D and a few one-off races. I started racing enduro as a Pro as I was already coming from a few seasons as a Pro DH racer. Enduro just ended up being way more fun than DH and it really fit my strengths as a racer. I am really proud to have raced for Kona for my entire career  I think we are going on something like eight years at this point! I also get support from FOX, e*thirteen, WTB, Bell, VP, and TRP.: This is my third season racing Pro Enduro.: I would like to improve on last years overall position in the California Enduro Series, which means taking that top spot! But the speed just keeps increasing and the series is getting even more competitive! Its really motivating to see the series and the progress of the sport. Im looking forward to elevating my game along with it.: My goals this year are actually to transition into content creation and begin to blend my personal training business into the mix.: Tough question! Id say "Gethsemane" by Rise Against.: My theme song would be "Young Blood" by The Naked and Famous. It gets me motivated and makes me relaxed at the same time. Most music I listen to is either one or the other.Learn more about DHaRCO at dharco.com and California Enduro Series at californiaenduroseries.com
Benjamin Wu Leads Triton Super High Roller Montenegro; Fedor Holz 6th

July 16, 2017 Ben Wilson

The Triton Super High Roller Series has a habit of attracting some of the international poker circuits best and brightest and the Triton SHR Montenegro 6-Max Event was no exception.

The six-max event saw 38 entries (including re-entries) pony up the HK$250,000 ($32,000) buy-in, each receiving 50,000 in chips with which to battle it out at the baize, with 25 eager entrants successfully circumnavigating the tournament minefield to return for Day 2 on Monday, July 17.

After nine 40-minute levels, it was Benjamin Wu who emerged on top, bagging up an impressive 152,000 in chips. Wu seized the lead toward the close of play after winning two sizable pots from Belarusian Mikita Badziakouski during the last two levels of the day.

Xuan Tan is the man hot on Wus heels with a stack of 135,300, dominating much of the Day 1 action and holding the chip lead for the majority of the day before losing two last minute pots to Germanys Fedor Holz at the close of play.

The man rounding out the top three is none other than high-rolling big hitter Steve ODwyer who bagged up a very respectable 129,100 in chips after busting the unfortunate Tony Cheng midway through the last level of the day.

ODwyer is currently sitting in seventh place on the Global Poker Index with Germanys Fedor Holz the only other player in the GPI top 100 (Holz is sitting in 21st) still remaining in the field, with the German player returning for Day 2 with 101,000 in chips after closing out the day with a last minute burst of aggression to win three out of the last five hands.

Other notables to make Day 2 included Germanys Manig Loeser (114,400), Canadas Lucas Greenwood, the UKs Sam Trickett (45,000) the USAs Daniel Cates (45,300) and Indonesias John Juanda (38,200), though Greenwood had to fire two bullets to make it.

Another man who fired twice was Marius Torbergsen, though unfortunately this was not enough to lock up a seat on Day 2 and the Norwegian failed to make the cut.

Day 2 Seat Draw

Table Seat Player Country Chip Count 1 1 Lucas Greewood Canada 64,600 1 2 Liang Yu China 61,500 1 4 Steve ODwyer Ireland 129,100 1 5 Su Hao China 53,900 1 6 Alan Sass USA 66,300 2 1 Daniel Cates USA 45,300 2 2 Predrag Lekovic Montenegro 122,800 2 3 Chi Ming Lee Hong Kong 92,000 2 4 Xi Luo China 35,200 2 6 Gabe Patgorski USA 68,500 3 1 Sam Trickett UK 45,000 3 2 John Juanda Indonesia 38,200 3 3 Devan Tang Hong Kong 59,700 3 5 Cheok Ieng Cheong China 80,600 3 6 Winfred Yu Hong Kong 48,600 4 1 Richard Yong Malaysia 45,700 4 3 Manig Loeser Germany 114,400 4 4 Keith Gipson USA 82,900 4 5 Salman Behbehani USA 84,000 4 6 Fedor Holz Germany 101,000 5 1 Mikita Badziakouski Belarus 43,500 5 2 Xuan Tan China 135,300 5 3 Zuo Wang China 78,200 5 5 Alexandros Kolonias Greece 63,000 5 6 Benjamin Wu USA 152,000

The remaining 25 players will return to the Maestral Casinos poker room on Monday at 1 p.m. CET with blinds starting for level 10 at 800/1,600 with a 200 ante. The event is scheduled to play down to a winner, and the PokerNews live reporting team will be there to provide all the updates. Join us then as we see whos got what it takes to become the 2017 Triton Super High Roller Montenegro 6-Max 6-max champion.
PR-Inside.com: 2017-07-19 15:05:01

SYDNEY, Australia and MINNEAPOLIS, July 19, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Medibio Limited (MEB or the Company) (ASX:MEB) (OTCQB:MDBIF), a digital health company that has developed an objective testing system to assist in the screening, diagnosis and treatment effectiveness of depression, chronic stress and other mental health disorders, is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr Adam Darkins, MB, ChB., MPHM, M.D., FRCS to the Board of Directors as Deputy Chairman. Dr Darkins has unique experience in taking national and trans-national virtual care delivery systems to scale.

Medibio Board member and fellow physician, Dr Frank Prendergast, M.D. said, "Adam is a wonderful addition to the Medibio Board. He complements our team, drawing on a wealth of experience gained from the practice of medicine, health care management, and having built one of the world's largest, telehealth programs. His proven track-record in tackling one of the current greatest healthcare challenges - how to introduce transformational new technologies that demonstrably increase access to care and reduce its cost - is what makes him so unique. His creativity and rigour, in design, and continuing development, of innovative care systems will help guide Medibio to meet anticipated milestones in our growth trajectory as we transition from clinical validation to regulatory approval, and then commence broader implementations. Adam will help us to lay the strategic foundations for large-scale operations in the pre-eminent health care systems of the future."

Dr Darkins developed an extensive understanding of patient care, clinical processes, and outcomes measurement from his physician training at Manchester University Medical School, UK, and further training/accreditation as a neurosurgeon and researcher at UCLA. Studying public health medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and pioneering shared patient decision-making programs at the King's Fund, London, grounded him in leading transformative change with a particular talent for safely and effectively taking long-established hospital-based practice into primary care, community care and non-traditional settings. Thereafter, already renowned for his ability to utilise new information and telecommunication technologies to empower patients, increase access to care and reduce cost, he gained widespread US and international recognition for his leadership of telehealth programs at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). At VA he developed health informatics, telehealth and disease management technologies to enhance and extend care and case management. Together with his team, Dr Darkins created a capacity that delivered virtual services to more than 480,000 Veteran patients each year via 1.4 million episodes of care. On any given day, 83,000 Veteran patients were using home-telehealth technologies to live independently at home and avoid institutional care.

Dr Darkins comes to Medibio from Medtronic Plc where, as Vice President for Innovation and Strategic Partnerships for the Americas Region, he worked on using new payment models to transform health care. He has been permanently based in the USA since 1997. Dr Darkins serves on the editorial board of Telehealth and e-Health Journal; is a former Medical Director in London; co-founded a start-up telehealth company; and has both written, and spoken widely on how to address the challenges and find solutions in establishing large virtual health care networks that meet major health care priorities and deliver high volumes of patient consultation/care as their return on investment.

Medibio CEO, Jack Cosentino said, "We are thrilled to have Dr Darkins join the Medibio board. As a visionary leader in telehealth, he shares our Company's passion for solving one of the world's most significant health epidemics. His experience in building virtual care systems will help us to address the significant, yet under-recognised need for mental health support services globally. His expertise and achievements in the telehealth, IOT and patient care arenas, and leadership experience at organisations, including the UK National Health Service, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Medtronic, complements an incredible team we are developing at Medibio, to exclusively focus on meeting this global need. We look forward to leveraging his knowledge, insights and relationships to heighten Mental Health awareness and identifying ways to reduce the stigma and isolation it can cause."

Medibio Chairman, Chris Indermaur stated, "We welcome Adam to the board of Medibio and value the addition of his leadership and passion to ours, as we collectively serve people with mental health conditions and seek to meet their aspirations for wellness and recovery."

Further Information: www.medibio.com.au Medibio Shareholder Enquiries:

Jack Cosentino

CEO and Managing Director Medibio Limited

jack.cosentino@medibio.com.au

T: +1 952 465 4787 Investor Relations Enquiries:

Peter Taylor

NWR Communications

peter@nwrcommunications.com.au

T: +61 (0)412 036 231

About Medibio Limited

Medibio (ASX:MEB) (OTCQB:MDBIF) is a digital health company that has developed an objective test to assist in the diagnosis of depression, chronic stress and other mental health disorders. Based on research conducted over 15 years at the University of Western Australia, this test utilises patented (and patent pending) circadian heart rate variability and cloud based proprietary algorithms to deliver a quantifiable measure to assist in clinical diagnosis. Medibio's depression diagnostic is being validated in clinical studies undertaken by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and The University of Ottawa, among others. The clinical trials will support Medibio's application to become the first FDA approved, objective, and evidence-based approach to the diagnosis of mental health disorders. Medibio's technology also provides an objective method for the assessment of stress and mental wellbeing that can be translated to the workplace stress/wellbeing market, wearable technology and App market. Medibio was founded in Perth, Australia with offices located in Melbourne (VIC), and U.S. offices in Minneapolis, MN and Palo Alto, CA. Medibio is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange Ltd (ASX) and trades on the OTCQB Venture Market. Investors can find Real-Time quotes and market information for the company on www.otcmarkets.com and www.asx.com.au.
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.




The Saudi-led coalition stopped a UN flight to fly from Djibouti to Sanaa, Yemen, because of security concerns. The flight was to carry an aid agency staff to the rebel-controlled city and also had three journalists from the BBC onboard.

Ahmed Ben Lassoued, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Yemen, revealed that the reasons forwarded by the coalition was that the security of the journalists could not be guaranteed in Sanaa and also advised the three journalists to travel on commercial flights.

The Saudi-led coalition controls the Yemeni airspace. A source from the coalition said the UN is not concerned with transporting journalists, except those who are coming to cover its own activities. The source also added the official point of entry for civilians is the Aden airport, under the control of the Hadi-led government.

It is unclear if the journalists had visas or not but the source underlined that foreigners must have visas issued by the Yemeni government and travel on commercial flights to Aden.

OCHA spokesman Lassoued thinks that such unfortunate measures partially explain why one of the worlds largest humanitarian crises, is not getting enough attention in international media.

The Saudi-led coalition began its military operations in March 2015 with the objective of reinstating Hadi as the legitimate president of the country. Progress on the ground has been slow since mid-2016 amid increasing hunger, poverty, disease, and lack of basic amenities. A recent cholera outbreak has worsened the situation.

Lassoued lamented that the lack of coverage is also hindering humanitarian efforts to draw the attention of the international community and donors to the humanitarian catastrophe the country is experiencing.

However, a statement released by the Hadi government and published by Saudi Press Agency alleged that the rebels are using the visit as a cover-up of their efforts in propagating their destructive project through humanitarian stories, manipulating catastrophic conditions of the Yemeni people living under difficult conditions and western media finds fatty stories to present to its audience. It also urged journalists to refrain from being used as propaganda tools by the rebel group.
born again

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-- Jan-Carol Publishing, Inc., of Johnson City, Tennessee, is proud to announce the release of Born Again, written by Abingdon, VA author, Jessica Helton.Jessica is a wife and mother; her hobby is writing and reading children's stories. She has an Associates Degree in education and she is passionate about educating the youth about God's love. Her hope is to lead children to a relationship with God at a young age.Born Again is Jessica's second book. Born Again is an allegory that takes the reader on a journey from the beginning of time, to the fall of mankind, the salvation of Jesus, to the reuniting of man with God. The story is told through the eyes of Tread, a tire, who decides to return to his Master.Jessica plans to give one dollar from all internet sales to the charity Samaritan's Purse, an evangelical Christian humanitarian aid organization.Born Again can be purchased through, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or through Jan-Carol Publishing, Inc.Jan-Carol Publishing, Inc., includes the imprints Mountain Girl Press, Little Creek Books, Express Editions, RoseHeart Publishing, and DigiStyle. Each imprint specializes in a particular genrefrom Appalachian stories to children's books and more.At JCP, we believe 'every story needs a book.'For more information or to schedule a book signing, call Jan-Carol Publishing, Inc., at 423.926.9983, or visit jancarolpublishing.com. Follow JCP on Facebook.Jan-Carol Publishing, Inc.Mountain Girl Press ~ Little Creek Books ~ Express Editions ~ DigiStyle ~ RoseHeartP.O. Box 701Johnson City, TN 37605423.926.9983www.jancarolpublishing.comwww.facebook.com/JanCarolPublishingInc
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-- 24-7 Intouch, a global leader in contact center solutions, today announced it will continue to expand its US footprint into Las Vegas.This will be the 14th campus for the company, currently operating in the United States, Canada, Guatemala, Jamaica and The Philippines.With construction scheduled to begin in early Fall 2017 at the Boulevard Center Mall, the 54,000 square foot Las Vegas campus will emulate the corporate culture, partner branding and unique design elements of 24-7 Intouch's current centers."We are very excited to continue to grow our presence in the Southwestern United States and partner with the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance to bring our innovative solutions and over 1,000 jobs to the area in the next 12 months," said Greg Fettes, President & CEO of 24-7 Intouch.In 2016, the company expanded globally into Jamaica and Asia, with a two brand new campuses in The Philippines.About 24-7 Intouch24-7 Intouch is an award-winning Global Contact Center Outsourcer that delivers innovative and value-driven customer service solutions across all industries via an omnichannel approach that includes voice, social media management, live chat, email, fraud, UAT, self-service, and back office administration. Using the most advanced technology in the industry, 24-7 Intouch's customizable customer care method allows their clients to utilize business insights to deliver lifetime consumer loyalty and increase incremental revenue. With over 17 years of experience, the 24-7 Intouch team takes pride in creating a top to bottom brand alignment for partners to create the ideal customer experience.
By: James Hilgendorf

James & Elizabeth in Reno, Nevada

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-- "Traveling to a New America", the journey this year and next of author James Hilgendorf to towns and cities all across America, stopped in Reno, Nevada this past weekend.James was accompanied by his wife Elizabeth, and together they talked to people on the street and interviewed people about their feelings about America at this time in our country's history.One young woman had the following comments:"I think it's an unfortunate time for America, not a breaking point, but I think this is the most divided America's been, politically, socially, economically, and I don't know what it's going to take to sort of reach across to the other side and communicate and regain common ground."I think people need to care more about a community and being part of that community, and what that means for individual roles. I feel that America right now is becoming very individualized. Like, what can benefit me more than what can benefit us as a greater country, as a community and a society. So I think a step toward improvement would be a focus on how to create community, and I think the basis for that is caring for one another."The author himself comments:"Humanity seems at a crossroads. We can destroy ourselves, as attested to daily by the rise and proliferation of nuclear warheads pointed at nations all around the world; or we can embark upon a totally new phase in our development, a transformation at the very roots of what it means to be a human being."The revolution the world is heading for and pining for can never come to fruition without a corresponding spiritual transformation, one that breaks down the old walls of our limited perception and re-connects all of our lives to the lilfe of all of humanity and to the cosmos itself - a revolution and transformation that creates a real sense of community."The author has been practicing Buddhism for over forty years with the Soka Gakkai International, the largest Buddhist lay organization in the world now, with 12,000,000 members in 192 countries around the globe.One of his books is "Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective", of which one reviewer wrote:"Having read all or parts of nearly a thousand books dealing with spiritual matters, I cannot recall another that so simply and effectively blends the fundamentals of religion and science." - Michael E. Tymn, Journal of Religion and Psychical Research.The author's website is at: http://www.jameshilgendorf.org People can follow his journey, "Traveling to a New America", on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/ NewDreamOfAmerica
Lumbacurve selected for promotion under Amazon innovation scheme

Lumbacurve Amazon Lauchpad2

Contact

David Pegg

***@lumbacurve.co.uk David Pegg

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-- LumbaCurve Back Pain Relief has been selected to be showcased on Amazon's Innovation Launchpad platform.Amazon Launchpad is a unique programme that showcases cutting-edge products to millions of Amazon customers.LumbaCurve is an innovative device designed to alleviate low back pain, naturally. Developed over six years in the UK and combining the best of East and West traditional therapies, LumbaCurve offers easy, effective and drug-free pain relief for sufferers.LumbaCurve International was formally set up by the founder David Pegg, leaving his job in engineering to build on a concept had previously been prototyped over several years with an acupuncturist friend to address lower back pain, estimated to affect some 60% of the population.Although LumbaCurve performed well, as demonstrated by customer testimonials, what was needed to differentiate it from other devices on the market (with variable levels of effectiveness against their claims). was actual clinical proof of its effectiveness in treating low back pain. The company was successful in gaining 100,000 of equity capital investment through Spark Ventures (North West Fund) , which financed clinical evaluation of LumbaCurve in the form of Randomised Control Group Trials (RCGT) The eagerly awaited results showed that LumbaCurve provided significantly higher levels of patient reported pain reduction, than the standard care control group, which was an amazing breakthrough for LumbaCurve.In 2016 LumbaCurve was voted winner of the Holistic Therapist Magazine "Product of The Year" award at Olympia London and has this year already been nominated for a Fitness Magazine award in 2017. The challenge now for the company, now based at Liverpool Science Park is to create an awareness of LumbaCurve globally In 2016 LumbaCurve achieved its first significant export order to a German consumer healthcare company, who have since entered into a long term supply contract Word is now spreading with consumer healthcare interest from Ireland, Slovenia, France and more recently Japan! There is currently interest from the NHS (NICE), and LumbaCurve is to be shortly to be launched into the fitness arenaCEO David Pegg commented "We are really pleased to get this level of recognition from Amazon, By partnering with Amazon Launchpad, LumbaCurve can gain instant access to Amazon's powerful distribution network and potentially millions of customers worldwide.A further design award has enabled us to plan further back pain relief products but this is on the back burner pending a successful commercialisation of LumbaCurve. This will help us with another step in our mission to make LumbaCurve the leading brand associated with back pain relief and prevention"In the meantime the LumbaCurve is ready for takeoff from the Amazon LaunchpadFor further information on Lumbacurve pain relief visit http://www.lumbacurve.com
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How has Los Angeles cuisine evolved over the last century? One way to answer that question is to look at Grand Central Market, a food market in downtown Los Angeles that founded in 1917. For the authors of The Grand Central Market Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, Oct.), the varied treats you can find at the market offer a picture of L.A.'s food scene.

The book is written by Adele Yellin, the president of the real estate company that owns and operates Grand Central Market, and Kevin West, who served as creative director of the market from 2012-2016. Featuring contributions from each of its 38 food vendors, the books recipesfor such things as fried chicken, beet soda, and avocado tacosspeak to the diversity of the markets offerings, which, according to the authors, reflect's the increasingly diverse nature of L.A.s culinary landscape.

According to Yellin, Grand Central Market started as a kind of grocery store with roughly 100 vendors selling items like pork, fish, and produce. Over time, it started to become more prepared foods, she said. Yellins late husband began developing Grand Central Square, of which the market is the focus, in the 1980s. (She took over day-to-day operations of the market after her husband passed away.)

After the 2008 recession, the market, which had already been struggling, began to lose vendors. At one point, 40% of the market's stalls were vacant. In 2011, Yellin hired West and Joseph Shuldiner, of the consulting firm Headspace, to revitalize the market. (West was previously an editor at W magazine; Shuldiner is the founder of the Institute of Domestic Technology, a culinary school in Southern California, and the author of Pure Vegan, a 2012 book from Chronicle.)

Yellin said she wanted to attract entrepreneurial young, chef-y chefs without making the market too commercial. Historically, the place had always been mom-and-pop, with authentic food.

The first vendor West and Shuldiner brought on was David Tewasart, who sells street-stall-style Thai sticky rice at the market. West said Tewasarts food exemplified their vision: David is tuned in to contemporary food priorities, he said. His sourcing is very careful, he has a lot of organic ingredients. It's also delicious, according to Yellin: You go into these Thai restaurants, and, its nice food, but it doesnt have that special-ness. Theres something in Davids food that feels almost made-at-home.

Other vendors that West and Shuldiner brought on, and that are featured in the book, include Belcampo Meat Co., which sells meats raised on a ranch in Northern California and butchered in-house, and Madcapra, an upmarket falafel shop operated by chefs Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson, who also own Kismet, a Mediterranean restaurant in Los Angeles.

West said that Grand Central Market is a microcosm of the culinary scene in Los Angeles, especially because it reflects the city's multiculturalism. Theres this incredible diversity of offerings, from pupusas to ramen to Texas barbecue," he explained. He added: "The cookbook becomes not just an experience of Grand Central Market, but also a peephole into the Los Angeles food scene at large.
Cable & Wireless has deployed a LTE-A Pro trial in Antigua and Barbuda supported by Ericsson technology.





The milestone is said to set the groundwork for the next generation of transformative 5G technologies, which will power a new level of mobile services, including mobile TV, across the Caribbean.According to Cable & Wireless , Antigua will be the country in the region with the most advanced pre-5G network, which will deliver download peak speeds of up to 800Mbps. In the trials next phase, the company expects to test a 5G prototype reaching 2-5Gbps peak speeds.The announcement was part of the companys CEO John Reids keynote address at the 33rd CANTO Annual Conference & Trade Exhibition in the Dominican Republic.These are exciting times for C&W Communications, as we continue to invest and develop more pioneering innovations to meet the needs of our customers and enable growth in the region through transformative technology, said Reid. This pre-5G trial in the Caribbean, is a significant step towards the evolution of C&Ws mobile networks across the region to 5G, and providing Gigabit speeds to our customers in Antigua.The trial is based on LTE Advanced Pro (LTE-A Pro), the latest LTE evolution that delivers lower latency, more capacity and improved reliability for customers. This means faster mobile internet experience where customers can better participate in advanced technology such as richer video experience and new apps.The company also announced that it expects to complete a 5G test in October 2017. Both C&Ws pre-5G trial and 5G prototype trials are part of a partnership with Ericsson , who will provide the equipment and software in Antigua and across the Caribbean.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will embark on a two-day tour in the gulf to take him to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar in an attempt to convince Qatars boycotters to normalize ties with the tiny-gas rich country where Turkey has been bolstering its military presence.

Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Egypt have severed ties with Qatar, accusing it of funding terrorism and undermining their internal security. The quartet also cut ground, air and sea links with Doha.

Turkey has involved itself in the crisis after Ankara began sending troops to Qatar.

Erdogan is expected in Saudi Arabia on July 23 and in Kuwait the same day. The trip of the Turkish leader will wind up in Qatar on July 24 with a meeting with Qatar ruler.

Erdogan, according to Turkish officials, is to tell protagonists in the crisis that the spat harms everyones interests and is unsustainable.

Ankara claims it is neutral in the crisis. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told media that Turkey will continue to play a constructive and active role to help solve the crisis.

Erdogans announced visit comes in the backdrop of increasing Turkish military presence in Qatar.

Qatars ministry of defence announced the arrival of the sixth batch of Turkish troops in Doha on Tuesday, to take part in joint exercises that have been taking place since last month, reports say.

Arrival of the 6th batch of Turkish forces to Qatar, to continue the ongoing joint cooperation in combating terror and violent extremism, the ministry said on Twitter.

Doha is expecting around 1,000 Turkish troops to be part of what it calls joint military cooperation against terrorism.

Anti-Qatar countries have voiced concern about Ankaras troops in Qatar. They called on Turkey to withdraw from Arab world affairs.

Our Turkish brothers need to recognize that the era of covert and to some extent unwanted intervention in the Arab world has long gone, said Saudi Arabias UN ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi.

If Turkey wants to play a constructive role they are welcome to do so, but trying to find the role through military bases or military intervention would not be productive, and would not fare well for Turkeys reputation in the Arab world.

President Erdogan is also expected to tackle economic issues with feuding sides, analysts say.

Turkey has strong economic relations with all of the countries involved. Erdogan, I think, will hold talks with the leaders to deal with the economic consequences of the Qatar crisis, the director of Al Sharq Forum, Professor Muhittin Ataman told Turkish media Daily Sabah.
Six Afghan girls who were initially denied U.S. visas to attend a robotics competition in Washington, D.C., have won a medal at the international event.

The Afghanistan team was awarded a silver medal for "courageous achievement" at the event, which ended on July 18. The award recognized teams that exhibited a "can-do" attitude even under difficult circumstances or when things didn't go as planned.

U.S. authorities had originally refused access to schoolchildren from a number of Muslim-majority nations to participate in the competition, decisions that followed implementation of stricter visa policies under President Donald Trump.

At Trump's urging, however, U.S. officials reversed policy and allowed the six girls from western Afghanistan's Herat region to enter the country for the FIRST Global Challenge.

The three-day international robotics competition was aimed at promoting science and technology among young people worldwide.

The Afghan team entered a robot they made that can recognize blue and orange and sort balls into the correct locations.

The competitions main gold medal went to the Europe team, which got the most cumulative points. Poland won silver and Armenia bronze.

With reporting by AP and ABC news


Firefighters in Montenegro battled for a third day on July 19 to control a forest fire on the Lustica peninsula near the border with Croatia. Earlier this week, Montenegro asked for international help to fight wildfires raging along its Adriatic coastline, forcing the evacuation of dozens of tourists. (Reuters)
Gunmen have shot and killed four members of a Shiite family and their driver in Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan, officials said.

Local police officials said the drive-by shooting took place on July 19 in the town of Mastung, about 75 kilometers south of the city of Quetta, Baluchistan's provincial capital.

"The Shi'ites were targeted because of their faith," said Mastung police chief Ghazanfar Ali was quoted as saying by Reuters.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Similar attacks in the past have been claimed by Sunni extremist groups who view Shiites as infidels who deserve to die.

Islamist militants have killed thousands of people in Pakistan since early 2000s.

Baluchistan has also been the scene of a low-level insurgency by separatists demanding more autonomy and a greater share in the region's resources.

Based on reporting by Reuters and AP
WASHINGTON -- Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor nominated by President Donald Trump to be the next U.S. ambassador to Russia, will have his diplomatic experience and business acumen put to the test should he represent U.S. interests in Moscow.

His posting, which still must be approved by the Senate, would face major challenges as the Trump administration struggles with congressional and FBI investigations into the Kremlins alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election that brought Trump to power. Russia has denied the claims.

A veteran diplomat who has served in the administrations of five U.S. presidents and was a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Huntsman has limited experience when it comes to Russia.

As President Barack Obamas envoy to China, he helped manage Washington's challenging relationship with Beijing. The 57-year-old billionaire also served as ambassador to Singapore under President George H. W. Bush.

For months Huntsman has been touted as Trumps choice for the post even though he has been critical of his future boss in the past.

During the 2016 presidential election campaign, he called on Trump to drop out of the race after a video featuring the Republican candidate boasting about groping women surfaced.

James Collins, who served as President Bill Clintons ambassador to Moscow between 1997 and 2001, spoke about Huntsman's prospects after reports of his possible nomination began appearing in the U.S. media in March.

"Mr. Huntsman is going to be seen as a solid professional appointment, someone who is politically relevant," he said. I think it will be read as a signal that Trump is picking someone with political experience."

If confirmed, Huntsman will head to Moscow amid troubled relations between the two superpowers.

Trump has sought to improve relations with Russia battered by the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria.

He met twice with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg earlier this month. In their first encounter, they were seen shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries in front of the cameras as they looked to project an atmosphere of cordiality.

The second time, however, occurred during a private dinner for leaders, without any accompanying U.S. advisers, something that has deepened suspicion about Trumps intentions.

Away from the smiles, bipartisan pressure on Trump has mounted as contacts between his associates and Russian officials prior to the election have unleashed a furor in Washington.

In recent weeks, Russia has been increasingly strident in its threats to confiscate U.S. diplomatic property in Moscow in retaliation for the U.S. seizure of two Russian compounds.

That decision was made by Obama in December, in response to U.S. intelligence conclusions that Russia had been actively interfering in the election campaign.

The Russian compounds, U.S. intelligence officials said, had been used for espionage and surveillance.

Recent U.S. ambassadors in Russia have experienced difficulties during their postings.

Outgoing Ambassador John Tefft is a career foreign service officer who has faced accusations -- including some that are demonstrably false -- by Kremlin loyalists of trying to foment discord in Russia.

Tefft's predecessor, Michael McFaul, encountered open hostility from the very beginning of his tenure.

On his second day on the job, in 2012, an anchorwoman on NTV (a Russian station owned by the state-controlled gas giant Gazprom) accused him on air of being sent to incite a revolution.

When reports of Huntsmans possible nomination first emerged in March, the Kremlin reacted guardedly.

"We will welcome any head of the U.S. Embassy to Russia who will be a staunch supporter of the idea of developing the dialogue between the two countries," presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a statement.

Potemkin Policy

Huntsman, who is married and has seven children -- including two who were adopted -- comes from a wealthy Utah family whose fortune was built on chemical manufacturing.

The company has substantial business holdings in Russia, mainly factories that manufacture polyurethane chemicals used in everything from foam mattresses, shoe cushioning, composites used in flooring, and other common household and industrial products.

Some critics have doubted that Huntsman would be able to negotiate with Moscow impartially, considering his family companys interests in Russia.

Huntsman also sits on the board of directors of the U.S. automaker Ford, which has multiple factories in Russia, and heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar, which has a large plant in the Leningrad region outside St. Petersburg.

In the past, Huntsman has reportedly divested himself of any relevant holdings and met ethics guidelines for federal officials.

Huntsman is also a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, known informally as the Mormons. The church is one of several religious denominations that have been subjected to increasing pressure from Russian authorities.

Huntsman serves as chairman of the Atlantic Council, an influential Washington think tank that frequently takes hawkish policy stands regarding Russia, but in the months ahead of his nomination he revealed little on his views toward Moscow.

Some insight into Huntsmans thinking about Russia comes from the website he set up in 2012 as he actively considered running for president -- and challenging Obama, who was up for reelection.

Huntsman took aim at Obamas reset with Russia -- a policy that had sought to improve U.S.-Russian relations after Moscows short 2008 war with Georgia.

Its a Potemkin policy, the statement said. Working with Russia to develop a more cooperative relationship is needed, but we should not make that relationship one that mirrors a Potemkin village in which we pretend the Kremlin is more of a partner than it is, more of a democracy than it is, more respectful of human rights than it is, and less threatening to its neighbors than it is.

The statement is no longer on the website, but can be accessed through Internet archives.
Toomaj Salehi's lyrical support for protesters in Iran has landed him behind bars before, but this time the popular rapper's fortune-telling has fans and family members fearing for his life.

Just days before his September 30 arrest, the 32-year-old Salehi released his latest music video, in which he makes foreboding predictions about the future of Iran's clerical regime if it continues its violent crackdown against ongoing anti-government demonstrations.

"I am the predictor, the fortune teller," he raps in the video for Omen, which shows him reading the patterns left in his coffee cup and warning that brute force will not prevail.

"I saw a cage in the coffee grounds -- a lion was hunting a jackal," he explains, alluding to a fairy tale about wisdom defeating physical strength. "We will rise from the bottom and target the top of the pyramid."

Salehi goes on to warn that the regime's protectors -- including the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the Basij paramilitary forces, the Intelligence Ministry, and the state media -- will all get their day in court.

Salehi followed up on the new video by posting on social media images of him standing alongside protesters and chanting against security forces in his native city in Isfahan Province. The rapper, an ethnic Lur who was arrested last year after releasing other songs critical of the government, offered to turn himself in if protesters detained in his hometown of Shahinshahr were released.

In subsequent posts, he called the provincial authorities "cowardly vermin" and "scum who suppress and arrest [innocent] people."

Shortly afterward, Salehi went missing and has not been heard from since.

State media reported on September 30 that Salehi had been arrested, and a news agency close to the IRGC published a photo of the blindfolded rapper inside a car.

A short video later released by a press club associated with Iran's state broadcaster purports to show the rapper admitting he made a mistake.

But the reports' claims he had been caught while "illegally exiting the western borders of the country" have been fiercely disputed, and the video confession has been labeled a fake by some and a coerced confession by others.

Family members as well as Salehi's official Twitter account have said the rapper was, in fact, arrested in the southwestern Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province, hundreds of kilometers from Iran's western border.

In a statement, Salehi's uncle Eghbal Eghbali said his nephew was in the province's city of Borujen on the morning of September 30 when he wrote saying "suspicious things" were happening outside his home. Soon after, Salehi stopped communicating. Eghbali said he learned from Salehi's neighbors and friends that security personnel had arrived to take the rapper away.

Later on September 30, a prosecutor in nearby Isfahan Province was quoted by the Meezan news agency, which is close to Iran's judiciary, as saying Salehi was arrested "in one of the provinces of the country." The prosecutor alleged the rapper had played a key role in "creating disturbances and inviting and encouraging the recent disturbances in Isfahan Province and in Shahinshahr."

The official IRNA news agency, meanwhile, quoted a judiciary official from Isfahan Province as saying Salehi stood accused of "propagandistic activity against the government, cooperation with hostile governments, and the formation of illegal groups with the intention of creating insecurity in the country."

Thousands of Iranians, many of them from the younger generation, have taken to the streets in recent weeks to protest the September 16 death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died shortly after being arrested for allegedly violating Iran's hijab law requiring that women cover their hair.

As the protests have continued, the authorities have intensified their crackdown, resulting in the deaths of at least 305 people, including 41 children, according to the latest figures released by the Oslo-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) on November 6.

Salehi is among the hundreds of prominent young voices, including activists, artists, and athletes, who have been arrested for speaking out against the states bloody crackdown on the protests. Overall, activists estimate thousands of people have been arrested by the authorities since the rallies erupted.

Faced with a potential existential threat to Iran's clerical rule, 227 of 290 Iranian lawmakers this week called for even greater force by urging the judiciary to "deal decisively" with those behind the protests.

In recent years, Salehi has gained notoriety for his open opposition to the country's leadership, using his music and social media presence to take on issues that resonate with Iranian youths.

In the song Normal, he highlights the effects of poverty, saying "Our children sleep hungry at night" and asking Iran's leaders how their conscience can let them sleep.

The song Rathole, released in 2021, accuses members of the media and art community both inside and outside Iran of being an "ally of the tyrant," a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In another song, he blasts Tehran's close relationships with Moscow and Beijing, asking: "Haven't you robbed us enough? Now, you want to give away half [of our resources] to China and the rest to Russia."

Salehi was detained in September 2021 after security agents raided his home in Isfahan, with Human Rights Watch decrying the detention of the artist for "exercising his right to freedom of expression."

Salehi was charged with "spreading propaganda against the state," but after more than a week was released on bail. In January, he was sentenced to six months in prison but was released on a suspended sentence in February.

While out, he continued his work and released Omen amid the states increasingly violent crackdown on anti-government protesters.

"Someone's crime was dancing with her hair in the wind," he raps. "Someone's crime was that she was brave and criticized."

Listing a litany of violent acts carried out by the authorities against protesters, Salehi asks, "How many young people did you kill building a tower for yourself?" and predicts that next year, the 44th year of the clerical regime's rule, will be its "year of failure."

Salehi's arrest has led to widespread condemnation inside and outside Iran, and his advocates have spread the #FreeToomaj hashtag on Twitter to shed light on his situation.

His family has said they do not know Salehi's whereabouts or health, leaving them wondering if he is even alive.

But the authorities have shed some light on the fate of another Iranian rapper arrested shortly before Salehi. The judiciary announced on November 7 that Saman Yasin, a rapper from Kermanshah Province -- a northwestern region with a significant Kurdish population and that has been a focus of the government crackdown -- has been accused of waging "warfare" against Iran and acting against the country's security.

Based on reporting by RFE/RL's Radio Farda, with contributions by RFE/RL senior correspondent Michael Scollon
WASHINGTON -- Iran continued to be the "foremost state sponsor of terrorism" in 2016, with groups supported by the country maintaining their ability to threaten the United States and its allies, a new report by the U.S. State Department says.

The report released on July 19 also noted that the Islamic State (IS) militant group, which it blamed for multiple attacks and "atrocities," was rapidly losing ground in Iraq and Syria, but it warned that fighters returning home could pose risks for countries in Central Asia and the Balkans.

The Country Reports on Terrorism has been issued annually since 2004 under a mandate that requires the State Department to provide Congress with regular updates on terrorism throughout the world.

The report took aim at Iran in a time of heightened tensions between Tehran and the United States, which has long accused Iran of sponsoring international terrorism and destabilizing the region. Iran has also been targeted by U.S. sanctions over its weapons programs and human rights violations.

Iran denies it supports terrorism or that it is seeking nuclear weapons.

'Destabilizing Role'

The State Department report said that "terrorist groups supported by Iran -- most prominently Hizballah -- continued to threaten U.S. allies and interests even in the face of U.S.-led intensification of financial sanctions and law enforcement."

It said the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and Iranian "partners, allies, and proxies" were playing a "destabilizing role in armed conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen."

The report accused Iran of recruiting fighters "from across the region to join Iranian affiliated Shi'a militia forces engaged in conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and has even offered a path to citizenship for those who heed this call."

The State Department called Sunni-led IS and its eight recognized branches as the "most potent terrorist threat to global security."

It noted, though, that the extremist group had been driven out of a quarter of its territory once held in Iraq and Syria at the beginning of the year by a U.S.-led coalition of differing forces and that the losses have continued in 2017.

The report said that, with improved border security, IS has been unable to replenish its forces in the country after its heavy battlefield losses.

Still, the report said, IS remained a threat to global security.

The extremist group's "attacks outside its territorial strongholds in Iraq, Syria, and Libya were an increasingly important part of its terrorism campaign in 2016, with most of the attacks in Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, it said.

IS "continued to commit atrocities against groups in areas under its control, including Yazidis, Christians, Shi'a Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Kurds, and other groups," the report said.

Homecomings Spark Concern

For Central Asia and the Balkans, the report highlighted the danger of "terrorists" returning home after fighting with extremists as territory controlled by the groups in Iraq and Syria rapidly declines.

It cited figures showing that about 1,000 Tajik citizens have joined IS and other extremist groups in Iraq and Syria.

But it also warned that some countries are facing risks of attack by domestic extremists.

In Kazakhstan, "the government has long feared the potential return of foreign terrorist fighters from Iraq and Syria, but attacks [in June and July] refocused government attention on home-grown violent extremists."

Highlighting the difficulties in battling extremism, the report cited analysts as saying the government's "repressive approach" to countering the risk "could backfire."

It also warned of threats of extremist violence in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina because of returning fighters and funding by "foreign organizations."

Mixed Conclusions On Russia

The State Department offered mixed conclusions regarding Russia's efforts against terrorism and cooperation with others in fighting international extremism.

It said Russia "continued to disseminate threat information and occasionally responded to requests for information, although its responses were often not substantive or timely."

It criticized Russia's adoption of the so-called "Yarovaya" package in 2016, containing a series of legislative amendments which authorities said were designed to combat terrorism.

The amendments give "authorities broad additional powers, ostensibly to counter terrorism and extremism" but mainly "targeted the unsanctioned religious activities of minority Christian denominations," the report said.
The parliament of Azerbaijan's breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region elected leader Bako Sahakian for a third three-year term on July 19.

Speaking on the same day, Hikmat Haciyev, a spokesman for Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry called the poll "yet another provocation by Armenia," and "a blatant violation of Azerbaijans constitution and of international law."

The ministry on July 17 had issued a statement condemning the upcoming poll as illegitimate.

Baku and Yerevan have been locked in a conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh for years.

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.

The international community still considers it as part of Azerbaijan and no country has recognized its 1991 declaration of independence.

With reporting by AFP
Several thousand people gathered in front of Warsaw's presidential palace and parliament in a peaceful protest against controversial judicial reforms late on July 18. Legislation passed by the ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party cuts the current Supreme Court judges' terms in office and gives parliament the power to choose 15 of the court's 25 members. Protesters chanted slogans against the conservative PiS and its chairman, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who is seen as the country's de-facto leader. (Reuters)
Saudi Arabia and its allies, which are boycotting Qatar, have presented Doha with six principles to be fulfilled in what appears an abandonment of the 13 demands issued last month as conditions to be fulfilled by Qatar for the normalization of ties.

Saudi Arabias permanent envoy to the UN Abdallah Al-Mouallimi briefed a group of UN reporters about the six principles, which, he said, would be easy for Qatar to abide by after it rejected the first 13 demands, arguing that they were unrealistic.

Mouallimi said the six principles came up during the July 5 meeting of foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Egypt in Cairo.

Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain and Egypt severed ties with Qatar over funding of terrorism. The bloc also cut ground, air and sea links with their neighbor.

The principles include Qatars commitment to combat extremism and terrorism, prevent financing and granting safe havens for such groups, and suspend all acts of provocation and speeches inciting hatred or violence.

The quartet says it will not negotiate the principles and that and the implementation and monitoring of these principles were necessary for the normalization of ties.

They however said they are open for details of the tactics and the tools of the implementation of the principles.

The bloc pointed out that if Qatar achieves curbing incitement to violence, the demand to shut down Doha-based Al Jazeera network channel will no longer be necessary.

If the only way to achieve that is by closing down Al-Jazeera, fine, Mouallimi said.

If we can achieve that without closing down Al-Jazeera, thats also fine. The important thing is the objective and the principle involved.

Kuwait and the US have been mediating the crisis between the US allies. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged Qatars gulf neighbors to reach a solution through dialogue after he indicated that some of 13 demands were not actionable.

Qatar and the US last week signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on terrorism financing. The Saudi-led group hailed the agreement but said it was not enough.

Wed like to see more of that, said UAE Minister of State for International Cooperation Reem Al Hashimy.

Wed like to see stronger measures taken and stronger commitment made to address that, she added.

Were looking for a serious change in behavior, serious measures, she noted adding that at this stage the ball is on Qatars court.
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BRUSSELS --The European Commission has called on Poland to suspend controversial judicial reforms it said would "have a very significant negative impact" on the Polish judiciary's independence, or face unprecedented sanctions as early as next week.

We will swiftly prepare infringement procedures for breach of EU law ... to be launched next week," The European Commission's First Vice-President Frans Timmermans said on July 19 after a meeting of the Commission in Brussels.

Since winning an election in 2015, the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party has sought to step up government influence over courts and prosecutors as well as state media.

Last week parliament, which is controlled by the PiS, adopted judicial reforms that the opposition and others see as a threat to the separation of powers.

The legislation would give the politically appointed justice minister the power to name the chief justices of Poland's common courts.

In addition, parliament would select members of the National Council of the Judiciary, whose role is to protect the independence of courts.

The PiS also tabled a separate bill in parliament that would subjugate the Supreme Court -- which supervises lower courts -- to executive power, in a move the opposition criticized as "the announcement of a coup."

Timmermans on July 19 warned that the Commission is "coming very close" to triggering article 7 of the EU treaty which could lead to Poland losing its voting right in the council.

"These laws considerably increase the systemic threats to the rule of law, Timmermans warned.

"Collectively, they would abolish any remaining judicial independence and put the judiciary under full political control of the government, he said.

On July 19, Polish lawmakers sent the bill on reorganizing the Supreme Court to a specialized commission.

The move came after a heated debate late on July 18 forced the deputy speaker to suspend proceedings overnight amid a protest against the draft legislation staged by thousands of people outside the Polish presidential palace.

During the debate, the opposition proposed more than 1,000 amendments to the draft, which, it says, kills judicial independence.

With reporting by Rikard Jozwiak, Reuters, and AFP
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has visited the line separating government-held and separatist-controlled territory in Georgia, calling it an "abyss between the past and the future."

The July 19 trip to the boundary with breakaway South Ossetia came during a two-day visit to Georgia, which like Ukraine has faced Russian military aggression and other forms of pressure in recent years.

Poroshenko and Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili used binoculars to observe a Russian military base on the South Ossetia side of the line.

Poroshenko likened the line to an "abyss" between a Russian-dominated past and a more hopeful future.

"What we see from the side of the abyss is what the Russian Federation has done," Poroshenko said. "Look into the eyes of these people -- tears, humanitarian catastrophe."

"We see a situation where people do not have basic rights to medical care, to a school for their children, to a livelihood, and most important: They have no hope that there will be any progress as long as there is a Russian Federation," Poroshenko said.

He said that for Kyiv "it is a huge motivation to reestablish territorial integrity of both Ukraine and Georgia."

Kyiv says Moscow has sent thousands of troops into eastern Ukraine, where a war between government forces and the separatists has killed more than 10,000 people since April 2014.

In March 2014, Russia seized control of the Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula after sending in troops and staging a referendum seen as illegitimate by most countries.

Russia has maintained thousands of troops in South Ossetia and another breakaway Georgian region, Abkhazia, after recognizing them as independent following its five-day war with Tbilisi in 2008.

In Tbilisi on July 18, Margvelashvili and Poroshenko issued a declaration on what they called a strategic partnership.

"We agreed to intensify our efforts in terms of integration into the European space," Margvelashvili said.

Poroshenko said that Georgia and Ukraine "have to defend our sovereignty, territorial integrity, and democracy together."

Poroshenko was wrapping up his visit by opening a Georgian-Ukrainian investment forum in the Black Sea port city of Batumi along with Margvelashvili on July 19.
It has definitely been difficult for Kyrgyzstan to realize construction of the Upper Naryn Cascade hydropower project.

One complication after another has put the project on hold.

On July 10, information was posted on the Kyrgyz president's website that a Czech company had been found to construct at least part of the Naryn Cascade and several other smaller hydropower plants (HPP).

Celebrations were short-lived as, just a few days after the announcement, a scandal over the deal started in Kyrgyzstan and the Czech Republic that has become more confusing and aggravated with each day.

Since it is so confusing let's start with some information that is certain.

The plan for the Naryn Cascade project dates back to 1986, when Kyrgyzstan was a Soviet republic.

The project calls for the construction of four HPPs along the Naryn River, in the northern half of Kyrgyzstan, which flows westward eventually joining and providing badly needed refreshment to the Syr-Darya, one of Central Asia's two great rivers.

The four HPPs are  Akbulun with a planned capacity to generate some 87.4 megawatts (MW) of electricity, Naryn HPP-1 with a capacity of 47.7 MW, Naryn-2 with 47.6 MW, and Naryn-3 with 55 MW.

According to a Kyrgyz government presentation for investors in 2014, the total project should cost some $727.65 million.

The idea to construct the Naryn Cascade, and also the much larger Kambar-Ata-1 HPP (capacity 2,000 MW) along the Naryn River, came to nothing after the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991.

Lack Of Funds

Kyrgyzstan has never had the funds needed to construct the Upper Naryn Cascade or Kambar-Ata-1, the latter with an estimated cost of some $3 billion.

In 2003 and 2004, Kazakhstan showed some interest in helping construct the HPP projects along the Naryn River (and the Rogun and Sangtuda HPP projects in Tajikistan) but that faded.

In late 2004, Russia started talking about the Naryn River projects and Russian company RusHydro (also seen as RosGidro) became Kyrgyzstan's partner in the project in the Upper Naryn Cascade project.

In early 2009, then-President Kurmanbek Bakiev announced Russia was providing Kyrgyzstan with a $450-million loan and would later extend an additional $1.7 billion for construction of Kambar-Ata-1.

Unfortunately, Bakiev's son Maksim, then in his early 30s, had been put in charge of Kyrgyzstan's economy and chose to use some of Russia's initial $450-million loan to invest in other projects.

The Kremlin quickly discovered the scheme and launched a soft-power attack on Bakiev using Russian television, which is widely available in Kyrgyzstan, particularly in the north.

Negative coverage of Bakiev on Russian television played a role in Bakiev's ouster in April 2010.

Plans for Kambar-Ata-1 and as a result, the Upper Naryn Cascade project, were put on hold again.

But Russia was back in 2011 and the Naryn River HPP projects seemed ready to advance.

Work did start but neither RusHydro nor RAO UES, which was the Russian partner in the Kambar-Ata-1 project, were enthusiastic about working in Kyrgyzstan, where the chances of showing a profit on their large investments was unlikely for possibly decades to come.

Falling Oil Prices, Sanctions



When Russia's economy started to suffer from falling oil and natural-gas prices and international sanctions imposed against Russia in response to the Kremlin's role in fighting in eastern Ukraine, RusHydro and RAO UES essentially stopped working on Naryn River HPP projects.

Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambaev said at the end of 2015 that it was clear "our Russian friends would not be able to implement these projects" and, in January, Kyrgyzstan's parliament annulled the HPP agreements.

Again, the Upper Naryn Cascade project was suspended, and worse, Russia insisted that Kyrgyzstan owed $37 million for work that the Russian companies had done.



That brings us to July 10, and the announcement that Czech company Liglass Trading was prepared to pay the $37 million to Russia, effectively buying out RusHydro's shares in the Upper Naryn Cascade project, and build Akbulun and Naryn HPP-1.

The seemingly good news did not last long.



Already by July 14, the Czech news outlet Blesk.cz reported on July 14 that Liglass was an "unknown company with little turnover."



The report said in 2014 that Liglass "had sales of only 345,000 crowns (about $15,000) and the loss of 1 million crowns."

Bankruptcy Claims



Later reports in Czech and Kyrgyz media would claim Liglass was bankrupt in 2016.



Kyrgyz website 24.kg reported on July 17 that the Kyrgyz embassy in Austria had sought information about Liglass.



A March 10, 2017, letter from the embassy said that, despite claims on Liglass' website that it had implemented hydropower projects in Slovakia, Italy, Great Britain, and cooperated with China, "the Kyrgyz Republic's Embassy in Austria could not find any facts confirming the successful realization of [Liglass] investment projects abroad."



On July 18, Liglass representative Jiri Vojtechovsky offered assurances that the company was prepared to invest some $500 million in the Upper Naryn Cascade project.



On July 17, the Czech news-site Neovlivni.cz posted a September 8, 2016, letter purportedly from Vratislav Mynar, the head of the office of the Czech president, which says Liglass had "successfully finalized the project of construction of solar and hydroelectric power plants" and "is well-established not only to our Czech but also in the European market"



Some reports say banks are prepared to help Liglass with financing of the Kyrgyz HPP project, other reports say banks turned down or never received any requests for financial help from Liglass.

The Czech newspaper Hospodarske Noviny provided RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service with photographs of Liglass's main office in Zelezny Brod which do not inspire much confidence in the company's financial state.

The chairman of Kyrgyzstan's State Committee for Industry, Energy, and Exploration, Duyshenbek Zilaliev, said on July 17 that Liglass has 50 days to start fulfilling its financial obligations or the deal with the Czech company will be scrapped.



Zilaliev also called for an end to the hysteria that is already surrounding this deal.



Whatever the outcome of this latest development, it is another example that construction of the Upper Naryn Cascade project, which is an important project for Kyrgyzstan, seems fated to be accompanied by complications.

RFE/RL Kyrgyz Service Director Venera Djumataeva and freelance correspondent in Kyrgyzstan Ryskeldi Satke contributed to this report.

The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect the views of RFE/RL.


Human Rights Watch and the Norwegian Helsinki Committee say Tajik authorities have detained, interrogated, and threatened relatives of 10 peaceful opposition activists who attended a July 9 conference in Germany.

The conference in Dortmund was held to mark the 20th anniversary of the signing of peace accords that formally ended Tajikistans 1992-1997 civil war.

In a joint statement issued on July 19, the two rights groups said Tajik authorities publicly shamed the activists relatives, banned from leaving the country, and threatened to confiscate their property.

The statement said that in one case, officials threatened to rape the daughter of an activist.

The Tajik governments vicious campaign of intimidation against dissidents relatives is widening and becoming ever more brazen, said Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Swerdlow said the actions suggest a policy of collective punishment sanctioned at the highest levels, which should end immediately.

Human Rights Watch and the Norwegian Helsinki Committee urged the United States, the European Union, and others to urgently address the growing pattern of retaliatory attacks in Tajikistan," which they called "part of the wider deteriorating human rights situation there," and to "publicly condemn the abuses.

Activists say longtime President Emomali Rahmon's government has intensified its crackdown on the opposition since 2015, when the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan was branded a terrorist organization and banned, and dozens of party officials were arrested.


A Russian lawyer whose meeting with President Donald Trump's eldest son has added to questions about Russia's role in the 2016 U.S. election claims she is prepared to testify to Congress to dispel what she called "mass hysteria" over the encounter.

Natalya Veselnitskaya met at Trump Tower in New York with Donald Trump Jr., who had been told that she was a Russian government lawyer who might have damaging information about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Revelations about the June 9, 2016 meeting, which was also attended by several other Russians and associates of Trump, has increased scrutiny on the ties between the U.S. president's campaign and Russia.

I'm ready to clarify the situation behind this mass hysteria -- but only through lawyers or testifying in the Senate," Veselnitskaya said in an interview with state-funded Russian channel RT released on July 18.

Veselnitskaya has said she is a private lawyer with no ties to President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin, and that she never obtained damaging information about Clinton. She has said the meeting focused on a U.S. sanctions law and U.S.-Russian adoption policies.

The new interview comes amid reports that an executive working for a Russian billionaire and one-time partner of Trump was the eighth person at the meeting at Trump Tower. Previously, seven participants had been identified.

Ike Kaveladze, who works for Azerbaijani-Russian developer Aras Agalarov, attended the meeting, The Washington Post, Reuters, AP, and CNN reported, citing an attorney for Agalarov, Scott Balber.

Balber told media outlets that Kaveladze was there to represent Agalarov and his son Emin, who partnered with Trump to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013 and were named in e-mails to Trump Jr. ahead of the meeting.

In an online profile, Kaveladze lists himself as a vice president of the Moscow-based Crocus Group, Aras Agalarov's firm, and says in a separate LinkedIn profile that he handled tax preparation for the company.

'Influence Campaign'

U.S. media cited Balber as saying that officials from Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office had contacted him about Kaveladze and that he and Kaveladze, who also goes by the first name Irakly, were cooperating with the investigation.

His comments were the first public indication that Mueller, who was appointed in May 2017 to investigate possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, is looking into Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with Veselnitskaya.

The U.S. intelligence community issued an assessment in January that Putin ordered an "influence campaign" targeting the U.S. election, with goals that included denigrating Clinton and helping Trump.

Trumps administration is currently under investigation by both Congress and the FBI over any possible collusion to affect the presidential race.

Putin has denied the allegations of interference, and Trump denies there was any collusion between his campaign and Russia.

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which also is investigating the Russian matter, said it is disturbing how long it took for news that Kaveladze attended the Trump Tower meeting to come out.

"The Trump family is not coming clean with information" about the meeting, Senator Mark Warner said on July 18. He noted that Kaveladze has been accused of involvement in money laundering.

"I doubt if this individual...was really there to talk about Russian adoptions," Warner said.

With reporting by AP, AFP, Reuters, Washington Post, and CNN


The Pentagon has voiced concerns to Turkey after the NATO ally's state-run news agency published U.S. base locations in northern Syria, in a move that could deepen distrust between the two NATO allies and endanger U.S. forces in the area.

In reports issued in both Turkish and English on July 18, Anadolu disclosed detailed information about 10 U.S. bases in northern Syria, which it said are assisting the People's Protection Units, or YPG, in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) militant group.

The reports, which included troop numbers and a map with the location of the U.S. forces in the Turkish version, noted that the military outposts are "usually hidden for security reasons, making it hard to be detected."

The YPG is a militia that Ankara says is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, a group that Turkey, the United States, and the European Union have listed as an extremist organization.



Despite a strong military alliance dating back decades, Ankara and Washington have been at odds for years now over the American cooperation with Kurds in Syria who are affiliated with separatist movements inside Turkey.

"The release of sensitive military information exposes Coalition forces to unnecessary risk and has the potential to disrupt ongoing operations to defeat ISIS," a Pentagon spokesman told RFE/RL, using an alternative acronym for IS.

"ISIS is the greatest threat to regional stability and it is critical that all parties operating in Syria remain focused on what is most important -- the annihilation of ISIS," Major Adrian J.T. Rankine-Galloway said.

"While we cannot independently verify the sources that contributed to this story, we would be very concerned if officials from a NATO ally would purposefully endanger our forces by releasing sensitive information."

"We have conveyed these concerns to the Government of Turkey," Rankine-Galloway said.

Levent Tok, an Anadolu Agency reporter on the story, told the Bloomberg news service that the information about U.S. troop positions wasnt leaked by the Turkish government.

He said the story was based on field work by Anadolus Syria reporters and some of the details on the bases were disclosed on social media by Kurdish fighters.

"The U.S. should have thought about this before it cooperated with a terrorist organization," he said.

With reporting by newsweek.com, bloomberg.com, and thedailybeast.com
A new round of talks aimed at fostering implementation of a cease-fire and peace deal for the conflict in eastern Ukraine was held in Minsk, Belarus, on July 19.

The talks involved representatives of Ukraine, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which are participants in the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG).

OSCE Ambassador Martin Sajdik said that there had been some progress in implementing aspects of the 2015 Minsk accords, which called for a cease-fire and steps to resolve the conflict.

In particular, Sajdik cited progress on prisoner exchanges between the Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces.

After a Moscow-friendly president was pushed from power by massive protests in Kyiv, Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine and fomented separatism in eastern Ukraine, where the ensuing war has killed more than 10,000 people since April 2014.

Officials in Ukraine, Russia, and the West said that the July 18 declaration by separatists in the Donetsk region of a new state called Malorossia, or Little Russia, ran counter to the Minsk accords and could jeopardize the already slow movement to implement them.


The U.S. State Department, Russia's envoy to Ukrainian peace talks, and the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe all voiced concern about the declaration of a "Little Russia" in Ukraine by Russia-backed separatists on July 18.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert called the announcement by Donetsk separatists that they would created a new state called Malorossia an "area of concern to us." But "beyond that, I don't want to dignify it with a response," she said.

"I am concerned about the provocative rhetoric we heard from Donetsk," said Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz, the OSCE's current chair.

Kurz warned all sides against "confrontational statements or actions jeopardizing" the Minsk peace agreement and "challenging the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine."

The Minsk agreement is a shaky truce deal which is currently being monitored by OSCE observers and which has never been fully implemented. More than 10,000 people have been killed in the conflict in eastern Ukraine since 2014.

Boris Gryzlov, Moscow's chief negotiator on Ukraine, also said "this initiative doesn't fit into the Minsk process. I take it merely as an invitation for discussion. This statement has no legal consequences."

Russia's ambassador to the OSCE also dismissed Donetsk separatist leader Aleksandr Zakhachenko's proclamation of a new state, saying his remarks were "incompatible with the parties' commitments" unfer he Minsk accords.

The initiaitve "can hardly been seen as real policy related to real political affairs," Russian OSCE enoy Aleksandr Lukashevich said.

Based on reporting by AP, dpa, TASS, and Interfax


The White House said on July 18 that it will nominate Jon Huntsman Jr., former ambassador to China, to be U.S. President Donald Trump's ambassador to Russia.

The U.S. Senate must approve the high-profile appointment, which comes amid allegations that Russia intervened in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Huntsman, 57, is a former governor of the U.S. state of Utah and was ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011. He has long been expected to be Trump's pick for the job.

He has served in the administrations of five U.S. presidents and was a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

The White House made the announcement shortly after it acknowledged that Trump had a previously undisclosed conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a dinner at the G-20 summit in Germany earlier this month.

Trump has said he wants to improve relations with Russia.

Reports in March that Huntsman would be named Russian ambassador were greeted with mixed reviews in Moscow, with one politician saying he was "not a dove" and the Kremlin saying it would welcome anyone who was a "convinced proponent" of establishing a dialogue with Russia.

However, a top Russian Foreign Ministry official on July 19 signaled that Huntsmans nomination wouldnt be opposed in Moscow.

"Weve given our consent," Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told state-run Channel One TV. "He is a superior professional, a man who has strong convictions. Hes very experienced and has seen a lot."

Based on reporting by AP, AFP, and Reuters


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A common bacteria is furthering evidence that evolution is not entirely a blind process, subject to random changes in the genes, but that environmental stressors can also play a role.

A NASA-funded team is the first group to design a method demonstrating how transposons  DNA sequences that move positions within a genome  jump from place to place.

The researchers saw that the jumping rate of these transposons, aptly-named "jumping genes," increases or decreases depending on factors in the environment, such as food supply. [The Strangest Alien Planets (Gallery)]

"This is a new window into how environment can affect evolution rates," said Nigel Goldenfeld, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We can measure evolution rates for the first time, and we can see evolution acting at the molecular level."

Thomas Kuhlman, a physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, said bacteria species can also play a role in jumping rates, as well as the environment.

"The activity of these transposal elements is not uniformly random; it's not just a pile of cells," he said.

Kuhlman and Goldenfeld recently published a paper on the research, "Real-time transposable element activity in individual live cells," in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The research was led by Neil Kim, a physics graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and also included work from fellow students Gloria Lee, Nicholas Sherer and Michael Martini.

The NASA Astrobiology Institute funded the research.

Twinkling transposons in live cells. (Image credit: Nigel Goldenfeld and Thomas Kuhlman)

True colors

Goldenfeld studies the role of the environment on evolution, while Kuhlman focuses on the biological processes of E. coli, a common bacteria that lives in the digestive tracts of humans and animals and the cause of infections by way of contaminated feces. The two researchers came up with a novel approach to watching the movement of jumping genes by engineering an E. coli that expresses a fluorescent protein when the transposons "jump" out of a genome. Because the cell lights up when this occurs, the researchers were able to record the cells that jump more than others.

"The cells light up only when a transposon jumps," Goldenfeld said. "So we can see how often they jump, and when they jump, and where they jump from."

Goldenfeld's team also constructed a computer simulation of the jumping activity that was able to rule out random activity as the primary reason for jumping. Once they compared the simulation with the laboratory trials, it was clear that the transposons were not jumping randomly. Goldenfeld said the findings shed more light on the mechanisms of evolution.

A fundamental assumption of evolution has been that mutations and other instabilities in the genomes randomly occur in an organism as a 'blind" evolutionary force, and those that are beneficial to the cell lead to reproductive success. Another possibility, less accepted by biologists, is that the environment prompts the cell or organism to mutate in order for the cell to prosper better. These adaptive mutations, or stress-induced mutations, occur in response to stressors in the environment.

"Our work shows that the environment does affect the rate at which transposons become active, and subsequently jump into the genome and modify it," Goldenfeld said. "Thus the implication is that the environment does change the evolution rate. What our work does not answer at this point is whether the transposon activity suppresses genes that are bad in the particular environment of the cell. It just says that the rate of evolution goes up in response to environmental stress.

"This conclusion," he added, "was already known through other studies, for certain types of mutation, so is not in itself a complete reversal of the current dogma. We hope that future work will try to measure whether or not the genome instabilities that we can measure are adaptive."

Kuhlman said he has hopes of future research on more complex organisms.

"The next step is operating in yeast, as a very simple eukaryotic cell. Then eventually much further down the road, we'll get [the process] working in mammalian or human cells."

The research is not only useful for understanding the origins of life, but also uncovering situations where cells undergo rapid mutations. One possible application could be routing out the pathways of cancer, which happens when cells abnormally grow and cause problems with the rest of the body.

Goldenfeld added that the findings also have clear implications to astrobiology.

"One of the things that astrobiology is concerned with is the interaction between the environment and the rate of evolution," he said. "Our work showed for the first time that there are environmental influences on the rate of transposon activity, because we could literally measure the effect. We did this quantitatively and compared it with theoretical predictions that assumed that transposon activity was random. We could show that the activity is not random at all."

This story was provided by Astrobiology Magazine, a web-based publication sponsored by the NASA astrobiology program. Follow Space.com @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+.
Crewmembers of the Mars 160 mission arrived at Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station, on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, on July 17, 2017

The second half of an ambitious, months-long simulated Mars mission is now underway.

Six crewmembers have arrived at the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS), an outpost in the Canadian Arctic that's run by the nonprofit Mars Society. The milestone marks the beginning of Phase 2 of the Mars 160 mission, which aims to help humanity prepare for real crewed missions to the Red Planet.

Phase 1 of Mars 160 took place last fall, when seven people spent 80 days living and working at the Mars Society's Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah. The FMARS phase will also last 80 days explaining the name of the overall mission. [Inside Mars 160: The Mars Society's Red Planet Simulation in Pictures]

Mars 160's length makes it special. While the Mars Society has mounted numerous missions to MDRS and FMARS, these previous efforts have generally lasted just a few weeks at a time.

The FMARS crew will be led by Frenchman Alexandre Mangeot. The other on-site team members are Japan's Yusuke Murakami; Australian Jonathan Clarke; Russian journalist Anastasiya Stepanova; Anushree Srivastava, who is from India but currently lives in England; and American Paul Knightly. All six are veterans of the MDRS portion of the mission.

Shannon Rupert, who served as principal investigator of the MDRS leg, is reprising that role for the FMARS phase. But this time, she's sharing PI duties with Paul Sokoloff, a senior researcher at the Canadian Museum of Nature, Mars Society representatives said. (Neither Rupert nor Sokoloff will suit up with the six crewmembers.)

During their time at FMARS, which is on Canada's Devon Island, the crewmembers will carry out research in a number of areas, from geology and microbiology to psychology (to investigate how small groups function in an isolated environment, for example). The protocols and programs will be similar to those employed at MDRS, to gauge how different locations affect the data collected, Mars Society representatives said.

"Mars 160 is a unique mission that combines and compares both desert and Arctic Mars analogs as field test environments for Mars mission operations research," Mars Society president Robert Zubrin said in a statement. "The Mars Society has opened up this vital field of research, which is now expanding worldwide. With this mission by an outstanding crew drawn from four continents, we will advance it substantially. On to Mars."

You can follow the Mars Society's Mars 160 mission here: http://mars160.marssociety.org.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
WASHINGTON  The government of Luxembourg has passed a bill giving companies the rights to space resources they extract from asteroids or other celestial bodies.

The parliament of Luxembourg, a unicameral body known as the Chamber of Deputies, voted 55 to 2 in favor of the space resources law July 13. Passage of the bill means the act will become law on Aug. 1.

"Luxembourg is the first adopter in Europe of a legal and regulatory framework recognizing that space resources are capable of being owned by private companies," Etienne Schneider, deputy prime minister and minister of the economy, said in a statement. "The Grand Duchy thus reinforces its position as a European hub for the exploration and use of space resources."

The law, which the government has been working on since last year, grants companies operating out of the country ownership of space resources they extract, similar to provisions in the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which became law in the U.S. in November 2015.

"Space resources are capable of being appropriated," the first article of the Luxembourg act states, according to an English translation provided by the government.

The rest of the act sets up a system for the government to authorize and supervise resource extraction and other space activities, with the exception of communications satellites, which are regulated by other laws in the country.

Passage of the law was expected. Schneider, speaking at an event organized by the Luxembourg government in New York in June, predicted that the parliament would pass the law by July. He said then that the law was similar in scope to the U.S. law, with the exception that companies need not be based in Luxembourg to take advantage of its provisions.

Both the U.S. and Luxembourg laws grant ownership to resources only after they have been extracted, avoiding potential conflicts with the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits companies from claiming territory on celestial bodies. Nonetheless, the U.S. law has been criticized by some nations in forums like the U.N.'s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

In its statement about the new space resources act, the Luxembourg government states that, in addition to the law, it seeks "to promote international cooperation in order to progress on a future governance scheme and a global regulatory framework of space resources utilization." An example of that work cited in the release is an agreement with the European Space Agency on studies of space resource exploration and utilization.

The passage of the law is the latest milestone for Luxembourg's SpaceResources.lu initiative, which seeks to make the country a key player in the emerging space resources industry. The country has committed to spent at least 200 million euros ($230 million) on the effort, including making investments in asteroid mining companies in exchange for them setting up offices in Luxembourg.

One of those companies is Planetary Resources, based near Seattle but with a European office in Luxembourg. "Luxembourg's new space resources law provides Planetary Resources with a strong basis for stability and predictability for our current and future asteroid mining operations," said Peter Marquez, acting general manager of the company, in a July 13 statement.

This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.
An innovative planet-hunting instrument, the second Multi-site All-Sky Camera (MASCARA), has made its first successful test observations over Earth's Southern Hemisphere.

This latest addition to the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) network of exoplanet-discovery machinery will allow scientists to make a complete scan of the night sky and create a catalog for future observations of alien worlds' characteristics, according to a statement from the ESO.

The newest MASCARA instrument is stationed at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. Now that it's operational, the instrument  which was developed by ESO researchers at Leiden University, in the Netherlands  can collaborate with its predecessor, the MASCARA at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, located on the Canary Island of La Palma, off the north African coast, ESO officials said in the statement.

This composite image shows almost all of the sky visible from the southern hemisphere of Earth, including the band of the Milky Way. The five cameras of the Multi-Site All-Sky Camera (MASCARA) station captured the images, which were later assembled into this collage. (Image credit: ESO/G. J. Talens and G. Otten)

The exoplanet-hunting method that MASCARA uses is called transit photometry. Using this method, MASCARA's five digital cameras can directly determine a planet's size and orbit as it passes by its host star. In certain cases, ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), also in Chile, can follow up to determine the characteristics of a planet's atmosphere, the researchers said.

MASCARA's cameras take repeated calculations of the brightness of stars all across the evening sky, and if its software detects that the light dimmed and then brightened, scientists can deduce that a planet may exist and might have passed in front of the star.

MASCARA will have its deep gaze set on finding star systems with planets known as "hot Jupiters." These gas worlds are about the same size as Jupiter, but unlike that planet, they orbit quite close to their parent stars and have high surface temperatures. That type of planet is often discovered by another method, called radial velocity, but finding them based on transits gives more details about the planets, the researchers said. They added that ESO's new technology may also be capable of discovering exoplanets closer to Earth's size.

The wide-angle lenses on each of MASCARA's five cameras allow the whole apparatus to capture just about the entire night sky at once. (Image credit: ESO/G. J. Talens )

Now that this type of instrument is in both the North and Southern hemispheres, researchers can obtain data from just about all points in the visible cosmos, the researchers added.

"Stations are needed in both the Northern and Southern hemisphere to obtain all-sky coverage," Ignas Snellen, a researcher at Leiden University and the MASCARA project lead, said in the statement. "With the second station at La Silla now in place, we can monitor almost all the brighter stars over the entire sky."

Follow Doris Elin Salazar on Twitter @salazar_elin. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
The newly developed Laser Weapon System (LaWS) is situated on the USS Ponce, which is deployed to the Persian Gulf.

The world's first laser weapon  one that can "kill" threatening, airborne drones  is ready for action, according to news sources.

The laser, known as the Laser Weapons System (LaWS), may seem as though it were pulled straight from a James Bond movie, but it's entirely functional and can shoot with stunning accuracy, the U.S. Navy told CNN. The LaWS is currently deployed aboard the USS Ponce, an amphibious transport ship, in the Persian Gulf.

"Operationally, it works just like a laser pointer," Lt. Cale Hughes, a LaWS officer, told CNN. "There's a chamber inside with special materials that release photons." [7 Technologies That Transformed Warfare]

The LaWS laser beam is completely silent and invisible. It's also fast: The laser travels at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second, or about 300,000 kilometers per second), meaning it's about 50,000 times the speed of an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile, such as the one North Korea is testing, the Navy told CNN.

The $40 million system requires a team of three to operate it and a small generator to power its electricity supply, according to the Navy.

However, each blast is relatively cheap. "It's about a dollar a shot," Hughes told CNN.

In addition to being able to take down threats in the air, the LaWS can hit and disable objects in the water. The laser's accurate blasts, heated to thousands of degrees, might even mean fewer casualties in combat, Inez Kelly, a U.S. Naval Forces Central Command science adviser, told CNN.

For instance, if the laser is aimed at an enemy boat, operatives can "take out exactly the engine, and not necessarily damage anything else," Kelly said. "That type of precision weapon work is something that you don't really get with conventional weapons, because there tends to be more collateral damage."

Under Geneva Convention rules, armed forces are not allowed to use laser weapons directly against people, reported Optics.org, a site that tracks the photonics industry. The U.S. will abide by that protocol, Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, chief of naval research, said in 2014 at a news conference in Washington, D.C., according to Optics.org.

The U.S. Navy is already developing second-generation systems that might be able to target threats other than drones and water vessels. These missions are classified, but when asked whether the LaWS could shoot and destroy missiles, USS Ponce Capt. Christopher Wells said "maybe" and smiled, according to CNN.

Original article on Live Science.
Elon Musk may be focused primarily on Mars, but he'd also like to see a human outpost on a world much closer to home.

"To really get the public real fired up, I think we've got to have a base on the moon," the billionaire founder and CEO of SpaceX said today (July 19) at the 2017 International Space Station Research and Development (ISSR&D) conference in Washington, D.C.

"Having some permanent presence on another heavenly body, which would be the kind of moon base, and then getting people to Mars and beyond  that's the continuance of the dream of Apollo that I think people are really looking for," Musk told NASA ISS program manager Kirk Shireman, who interviewed him onstage at the conference. [Moon Base Visions: How to Build a Lunar Colony (Photos)]

Musk and SpaceX are working to make the latter part of that vision a reality within the next 50 years or so. Last September, at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) meeting in Mexico, the entrepreneur unveiled plans for a reusable rocket-spaceship combo called the Interplanetary Transport System. The ITS would help colonize Mars and, potentially, allow humanity to explore more distant worlds, such as the Jupiter moon Europa and the Saturn satellite Enceladus.

Musk has been relatively quiet about the ITS since then, but he said he plans to give an update about the architecture at the next IAC conference, which will be held this September in Adelaide, Australia. And he teased an ITS tweak that SpaceX has been working on.

Downsizing the ITS spaceship a bit  the originally unveiled version would carry at least 100 people  and using it for some profit-generating "Earth-orbit activity" could help make Mars colonization economically feasible, Musk said at the ISSR&D conference today.

"That's one of the key elements in the new architecture," Musk said. "It's similar to what was [unveiled] at IAC, but it's a little bit smaller  still big. I think this one's got a shot at being real on the economic front. You know, that's the trick."

Musk also said today that another one of his ventures, The Boring Company, could aid in Mars colonization as well. The Boring Company's main goal is to construct tunnel networks beneath (and, eventually, between) traffic-choked cities such as Los Angeles, enabling speedier travel.

But advanced tunneling technology will also be in high demand on Mars, Musk said, citing the likely need to mine large amounts of ice and other natural resources. And Red Planet colonists may want to live underground, at least part of the time, to shield themselves from the relatively high radiation fluxes encountered on the Martian surface, he added.

"You can build a tremendous amount underground with the right boring technology on Mars, so I do think there's some overlap in that technology-development arena," Musk said.

But Earth-optimized tunneling machines won't do the job on Mars, he stressed.

"The Earth ones are really heavy. Like, really heavy," Musk said. "You're not worried about weight for an Earth tunneling machine; actually, you want one that's nice and heavy. But a Mars one, you'd have to redesign it to be superlight  that's a tricky one  and then just take into account the different conditions on Mars and everything else."

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
G unfire rang out as military police carried out a dramatic training exercise in a south-west London park.

Military police dressed in suits practised a close protection drill at Battersea Parks Old English Garden on Monday afternoon.

Park-goers were warned not to be alarmed by the sounds of blank gunfire as officers took part in the training which began at about 3pm.

The area was cordoned off and guarded by armed police while the military officers completed the exercise.

The close protection unit of the Royal Military Police specialises in protecting high-ranking personnel and other VIPs.

Training exercise: Military police take part in a close protection drill / @JasonRushworth1

Video footage filmed by journalist Jason Rushworth showed the suit-clad officers practising dealing with casualties during the training.

One officer threw his colleague, who was posing as a casualty, over his shoulder and carried him away.

Another officer could be heard shouting in the background: Pick him up, pick him up and put him over your shoulder now.

A military officer practices a close protection drill in Battersea Park / Jason Rushworth

Mr Rushworth said there were a large number of police and officers dressed in plain clothes carrying assault-style rifles.

He said there was slight panic among passers-by as gunfire rang out and the drill began.

An Army spokesperson said: This is a Royal Military Police exercise; part of the training for their unique role.

The area was cordoned off and the activity conducted with the permission of the Metropolitan Police, the park and Wandsworth Council.
F ormer EastEnders star Paul Nicholls is seriously injured in hospital after becoming trapped for three days at the foot of a waterfall in the Thai jungle with a smashed leg.

The 38-year-old, who played Joe Wicks in the BBC soap, plunged from a waterfall in a remote part of the island of Koh Samui.

He became trapped behind a rock pool and was only rescued after a local villager found an abandoned motorbike which he he had used to travel to the beauty spot, the Sun reported.

Police discovered that the actor had hired the motorbike and a huge rescue operation was launched.

Paul Nicholls, photographed in 2003 / Getty Images

After hours searching the undergrowth, he was found semi-conscious and suffering from hypothermia.

He was described by hospital medics as being seriously ill after he contracted a bug.

Speaking to the newspaper, the actor said: I'm lucky to be alive I had a phone with me but I fell from such a height into the water it was unretrievable.

Mr Nicholls is placed onto a stretcher during the rescue

It took such a long time to find me. Its an understatement to say it wasnt a great situation. It wasnt that I was lost.

The problem was I couldnt move to get out of there.

Ive got a broken leg and Im missing a kneecap. It needs complete reconstruction.

Video obtained by The Sun shows Nicholls crying out in pain as he is carried away on stretched by rescue workers and medics.

A source told the newspaper that the actor had flown to Thailand a week ago as he was "between filming".

The source is quoted as saying: He needs surgery. But its going to cost 90,000 for him to have it in Thailand."

Nicholls made his EastEnders debut in 1996 and left the show a year later.

He has also starred in Law & Order and has appeared in films including Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.
D ominic West has lifted the covers on what really goes on during sex scenes.

The star of The Affair says that rather than being boring as many actors claim, they can be sexy  at all the wrong moments.

But West admits they are also farcical, telling ES Magazine: I have to wear a sock over my bits for a start. An actor-y sock thing. There was one that was like a jockstrap, but all of them are ridiculous.

A lot of the time the girl is wearing stick-on patches on her nipples which are also ridiculous. You look like sexless dolls. Its farcical.

Steamy: Ruth Wilson and Dominic West star in The Affair (Steven Lippman/Showtime) / Showtime

"In your supposed moment of passion you have a guy with a boom going, Could you just move slightly to your left, mate? Then youve got some other poor sod putting make-up on your bum.

In response to the suggestion that this did not sound sexy, he said: Its not, its very agricultural. Its like giving birth. Or like a vet delivering a new calf. Sort of. I mean, it can be sexy sometimes... at all the wrong moments.

Asked if he had ever had a physical reaction, he said: Yes, of course! Youre covered up so it cant go anywhere. Its tied down so to speak.

"Also I think actresses dont mind when it happens  in fact they quite like it. Everyone likes to be thought of as attractive.

Dominic West hints that he was forced to turn down Game of Thrones role

He said that when he left drama school and filmed his first sex scene, he thought experienced actors walk around naked, just so no one bats an eyelid when you do get down to it.

"So thats what I did like an idiot. I remember this props guy came up to me and said, Didnt realise it was so cold in here, Dominic. I didnt do it again.

In The Affair he plays a married writer who falls in love with a waitress, played by Ruth Wilson. He said: We had to do so many bonking scenes in The Affair that there was always a battle between us over who was going to go on top.

Dominic West - In pictures 1 /37 Dominic West - In pictures Dominic West as James "Jimmy" McNulty in The Wire HBO Dominic West as Richard Burton and Helena Bonham Carter as Elizabeth Taylor in 'Burton and Taylor' in 2013 BBC Ruth Wilson as Alison Bailey and Dominic West as Noah Solloway in The Affair (Series 1) Showtime A selfie taken by Joan Collins at The Prince's Trust and Samsung Celebrate Success Awards with (left to right) Sam Bailey, Luke Evans, Pixie Lott, Vernon Kay, Dominic West, Joan Collins, Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons and Jools Holland in 2014 PA Dominic West attends a pre BAFTA party hosted by Charles Finch and Chanel at Annabel's in 2017 Dave Benett Dominic West in 'True Blue' (1996) Dominic West pictured in 2000 with James Frain, Damian Lewis, Kenny Doughty and Ioan Gruffudd Evening Standard Dominic West, Jason Flemyng and Timothy Spall in 'Rock Star' (2001) Sandra Bullock and Dominic West in '28 Days' (2000) Columbia Tristar Dominic West as James "Jimmy" McNulty in The Wire in 2009 HBO Dominic West as James "Jimmy" McNulty in The Wire in 2009 HBO Emily Watson as Janet Leech and Dominic West as serial killer Fred West in scene from TV drama 'Appropriate Adult' in 2011 ITV Rebecca Hall as Florence Cathcart and Dominic West as Robert Mallory in 'The Awakening; (2011) Dominic West as Simon Ambrose in 'Johnny English Reborn' (2011) Dominic West as Noah Solloway and Ruth Wilson as Alison Bailey in The Affair in 2012 British actor Dominic West with the Leading Actor Award for Appropriate Adult at the British Academy Television Awards in 2012 AP Dominic West as Jonathan and Joe Gilgun as Mike Jackson in 'Pride' (2014) BBC Films Dominic West as Le Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Donmar Warehouse in 2014 Johan Persson Dominic West as Hector Madden with Hannah Tointon as Kiki Delaine in 'The Hour' BBC/Kudos Miranda Raison and Dominic West on stage in 'The River' at The Royal Court Dominic West and Catherine Fitzgerald arrive at The 2015 London Evening Standard Theatre Awards in partnership with The Ivy at The Old Vic Theatre Dave Benett Idris Elba and Dominic West attend Harvey Weinstein's BAFTA Dinner in partnership with Burberry & Grey Goose at Little House Mayfair in 2015 Dave Benett Dominic West at his home in Shepherds Bush in 2016 Matt Writtle Dominic West with Caitriona Balfe in 'Money Monster' in 2016 AP George Clooney as Lee Gates and Dominic West as Walt Camby in 'Money Monster' in 2016 Jack O'Connell, Jodie Foster, Caitriona Balfe, Dominic West, Julia Roberts, George Clooney and his wife Amal Clooney arrive in 2016 for the screening of the film 'Money Monster' AFP/Getty Images Ruth Wilson alongside Dominic West in the third series of The Affair in 2016 Phil Caruso/Showtime Dominic West and Cressida Bonas attend a dinner co-hosted by Harvey Weinstein, Burberry & Evgeny Lebedev ahead of the 2017 BAFTA film awards in partnership with Grey Goose at Little House Mayfair Dave Benett

"If youre on the bottom, you dont have to take your clothes off or show anything. And Ruth always bloody won.

West, 47, who has four children with film producer Catherine Fitzgerald, is due to appear in a fourth series of the HBO drama and, next year, in the Tomb Raider reboot, which stars Alicia Vikander, 28, in the title role.

The actor plays Crofts father and admitted that being cast as older characters rather than the leading man hurts. It does and anyone who says it doesnt is lying, he said.

When he was cast as Keira Knightleys husband in new drama Colette, he initially felt better. He said: Great, I thought, a chance for my youthful, leading man swagger to come back a bit.

"I went to the costume department expecting to get something snappy and I was fitted for a fat suit and a bald cap. I thought, How unfair... the way one sees oneself is at times in contrast to the reality.

Amid unflattering castings, he finds it wonderful to be wolf-whistled at. Its The Affair of course, I wont take the credit, he said.

The breadth of people who are into it is staggering. We were filming in New York recently and this bunch of doddery 70-year-olds streamed past us and one of them shouted, Keep it up!
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@martindvassolo

The bitter state Senate primary between Republicans Jose Felix Diaz and Alex Diaz de la Portilla has spilled onto the television screens of Miami's District 40 voters, with a new Spanish-language ad funded by Rep. Diaz criticizing Diaz de la Portillas legislative and personal history.

Diaz de la Portilla, a former lawmaker of more than two decades, is bad for constituents, the narrator says to begin the 30-second attack ad, the first in the race.

The ad, which claims Diaz de la Portilla is facing foreclosure and that he supported tax increases and new taxes while in office, is part of a quarter-million-dollar TV campaign paid for by Rebuild Florida, Diaz's political committee, POLITICO Florida first reported. The committee shelled out $260,000 in the past two weeks to a consulting firm run by Diaz's political consultant David Custin, according to the committee's most recent expenditure filings.

At the expense of middle-class families, he voted to impose more than $2 million in new taxes and rates, the ad says. He supported the implementation of higher property taxes and raised taxes on small businesses. We cant count on [Diaz] de la Portilla.

According to Diaz's campaign, the ad refers to five Senate and House bills Diaz de la Portilla voted yes on, which increased license taxes for saltwater products dealers, fees for some certificates of titles and fees for some resident and non-resident hunting and fishing licenses, among other provisions.

Custin said the tax and fee increases added up to about $2 million. Diaz de la Portilla called the accusations outright lies" in a text message.

Diaz de la Portilla claimed he cut taxes by $20.3 billion during his time in the legislature, citing data from the Florida Office of Demographic Research, which releases annual revenue reports, and state budgets he said he supported. He did not specify how he came up with that figure, nor did he provide specific tax-cutting legislation he backed, saying he didnt have time to respond to dirty campaigns.

The Miami-Dade elections department will begin sending mail-in ballots Tuesday, which is why candidates are ramping up their media campaigns. Diaz de la Portilla, however, said he would not run any television ads, citing financial restraints. Diaz de la Portilla reported having $72,500 on hand in his most recent campaign-finance report. Diaz reported $279,182. Rebuild Florida also has $825,654 in its coffers.

Attacking Diaz de la Portilla with his first ad suggests Diaz has ground to make up in the race. Previous polls conducted for the well-known Diaz de la Portilla show him in the lead, although Diaz said his poll numbers are "healthier than Alex would ever want to admit." Diaz said he chose to go after his rival because, according to Diaz, Diaz de la Portilla is less conservative than he claims.

The third Republican candidate is attorney Lorenzo Palomares.

A special election was called to fill the vacant District 40 seat following the resignation of former Sen. Frank Artiles. The primary will take place July 25, followed by a general election on Sept. 26.
In mid-2017 the German Army received the last of the fifteen H145M special operations helicopters it had ordered in 2013 from European firm EADS. These light helicopters went through a few changes between the time they were ordered and when they were delivered. For one thing there was a name change. When ordered they were called the EC645T2 but even then they were to be modified to specifications provided by the German special operations command for use by the KSK (Kommando Spezialkrafte) commandos. The H145M/EC645T2 is similar to the American UH-72A Lakota.

In fact the H145M is a combat version of the UH-72A (AAH-72X), that was an unsuccessful effort to provide a replacement for the OH-58D armed scout helicopter back in 2009. While the AAH-72X did not win that competition (no one did and the 1960s OH-58 design will now remain in service until the 2030s), the design became widely known and that attracted several potential buyers.

The twin engine UH-72A is a transport that was previously called the UH-145 and costs about $9 million each, although the cost can be higher depending on the accessories. Its those high-tech accessories that make the H145M so much more expensive (about $20 million each). The U.S. Army originally ordered 322 of UH-72As in 2006 and later increased the order and eventually received 349.

The UH-72A is a militarized version of the EC145, a helicopter very popular with law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. The UH-72A purchase is a side effect of the cancellation of the Comanche scout helicopter eight years ago (mainly because of constantly increasing costs). Comanche was perceived as too expensive and complex. The UH-72A mainly replaces the few remaining UH-1 helicopters, which are being retired because of old age. The AAH-72X armed scout version (and the EC645T2) can carry about a ton of weapons (machine-gun pod, plus guided and unguided rockets) and sensors.

The UH-72A has about the same capacity as the UH-1, despite its smaller size. The 3.6 ton UH-72A has a top speed of 260 kilometers an hour and a max range of 660 kilometers. Average endurance per sortie is about two hours. The helicopter has a crew of two and can carry up to eight passengers or about three-quarters of a ton of cargo or weapons. The EC145 was introduced eight years ago and has been very popular with its users. This, and price stability, was one of the reasons the H145M has a market. The H145M is a 3.7 ton helicopter equipped for all-weather operation, has some armor, and can be equipped with weapons (that work with its extensive sensor equipment). But mainly it is designed to carry commandos on assault missions. The KSK version came with some lightweight armor, a fast roping system, an auto-pilot designed for commando operations and some electronic countermeasures.

The UH-72A has been popular with its users and has had a readiness (for flying) rate of 90 percent. The H145M is expected to be similarly reliable. Germany was particularly attracted by the H145M being compact enough to be easily transported in the new A400M transports (similar to the C-130). This allows KSK commandos to be quickly moved, along with their assault helicopters, to regional trouble spots.
PACIFIC OCEAN (July 15, 2017) A landing craft, air cushion assigned to Assault Craft Unit 5 exits the amphibious transport dock ship USS San Diego's (LPD 22) well deck off the coast of Hawaii during a sustainment exercise. San Diego is on a scheduled deployment with the America Amphibious Ready Group, which is comprised of more than 1,800 Sailors and 2,600 Marines assigned to the amphibious assault ship USS America (LHA 6), the amphibious dock landing ship USS Pearl Harbor (LSD 52), and San Diego. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Justin A. Schoenberger)

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by Austin Bay July 19, 2017

On July 10, Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi declared coalition forces had won a "total victory" in their fight to free the city of Mosul. Since June 2014, the unfortunate city had been occupied by ISIS terrorists.

Abadi's claim of total victory was premature. In the following days, several small firefights erupted around the city. ISIS fighters reportedly entered a liberated village outside Mosul. Had they been hiding, planning to stage "stay behind" attacks on coalition forces? Or were they fleeing? Who knows. In city fights, flickering resistance may continue for weeks after the major battle is done.

Offensive operations to free Mosul officially began on October 16, 2016. "Shaping operations" to prepare for the decisive assault arguably began in 2015. Throughout the campaign the Iraqi government, fragile as it is, remained patient and persistent. To defeat the Islamic State, Iraqi Army and police units conducted operations with pro-Iranian Shia militias of suspect loyalty and Kurdish militias who disdain Baghdad. The government sought U.S. and NATO help, air support first and foremost, but also special operations personnel, the U.S. Marines and Army artillery units, and intelligence and logistics support.

The result: ISIS has lost Mosul, the once upon a time capital of the terrorist caliphate.

The city is severely damaged, with neighborhoods reduced to rubble. Its people have endured sustained terror.

Blame ISIS for the terror and ruin. ISIS commanders relied on beheadings and torture to control the population. They obliterated numerous shrines and historic sites in the region, with the biblical city of Nimrud a special target. Why? Erasing history ISIS leaders deemed "un-Islamic" was a key political policy.

A Muslim shrine could be marked for elimination. In late June 2017, coalition forces had surrounded the city. Iraqi forces, fighting street by street, neared the Al Nuri Grand Mosque, a magnificent building that had defined the city of eight centuries. In June 2014, ISIS senior commander Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had proclaimed the ISIS caliphate from a balcony in the mosque.

But rather than let Iraqis retake the mosque, which would demonstrate the terrorists' impending loss, ISIS commanders blew it up.

Then they claimed an American airstrike destroyed the mosque.

So forgive prime minister Abadi his exuberance. His government conducted a complex political operation. It oversaw a complicated military operation, for which the forces it had available in 2015 were poorly suited.

One major operational goal stressed by Iraq officers was minimizing civilian casualties. ISIS fighters use civilians as "human shields" to deter coalition attacks on their positions. The thugs who commit this war crime always accuse their adversaries of targeting the civilians. ISIS also makes routine use of mosques as battle positions and supply depots. That complicates offensive operations where the attackers are trying to minimize the destruction.

Another key goal was protecting refugees. At one time, an estimated 1.5 million people were displaced in and around Mosul.

The coalition wanted to use air strikes and heavy artillery shelling very judiciously in order to minimize civilian deaths. However, in order to defeat ISIS the firepower edge, especially that provided by American airpower, had to be utilized. ISIS fanatics had fortified Mosul, particularly the Old City. They had mined the streets and placed improvised explosive devices in buildings. Firepower is an antidote for fanaticism.

Iraqi units also deployed tanks and armored infantry vehicles in Mosul. Armored vehicles are assets in urban warfare if they are protected by infantry on the ground. To successfully employ tanks and infantry in urban combat takes well-trained troops and experienced commanders.

"Mega-cities" -- think Tokyo, Seoul, Los Angeles, Berlin, Lagos, Cairo, Mumbai -- are 21st century political, economic and infrastructure realities. Urban combat in a mega-city will occur.

Mosul has some of the features found in mega-cities. The U.S. and its allies should conduct thorough and candid after action assessments of Iraqi and coalition operations in the liberation of Mosul.
A boarded up house has been completely gutted after being targeted by an arsonist.

Police says the fire service was called to 7 Shelley Court Lane in the Waikato after neighbours hear smoke alarms going on at about 5.30pm on Monday.

The Fire Service immediately responded and put out the fire which caused major internal damage to the house.

On their Facebook page, Waikato Police say the house is an unoccupied Housing NZ house that has been completely boarded.

Given the house was boarded up the persons who lit the fire were lucky to escape unhurt. Police would like to prevent further arsons from occurring and its likely those responsible have talked about it.

We would like to hear from anyone who saw people going to or leaving this address on July 17 or from anyone who has any knowledge regarding the arson.

The photograph shows a tag which was written inside the house and we would like to know whose tag it is.

Any information to Detective Andrew HAWKE of the Hamilton CIB.

Reference - 170717/5080
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It's been nearly three months since the Galaxy S8 /S8+ arrived. The handsets have received glowing reviews and are proving very popular with consumers, but the limitations of smart assistant Bixby have remained a problem - until today. Following several delays, the digital assistant's voice capabilities are finally rolling out in the US.

Samsung was so proud of its AI helper that it added a dedicated button to the side of the smartphone. But it took a month after release before the full version of the assistant was ready, and that was only in South Korea. Because Samsung experienced problems getting Bixby to understand the English language fully, the US launch of its voice element was delayed repeatedly. It was postponed again earlier this month due to a lack of "big data."

But the 100,000 users who issued over 4 million voice commands in the US Beta test that's been running since June seem to have helped. Samsung said the feedback has led to a faster response time by Bixby, better comprehension of the way questions are phrased, and improved hands-free operation.

Starting "tonight," US owners of Samsung's flagship devices will be able to use Bixby the way the company intended, which could result in fewer instances of third-party apps being used to remap the physical button. Samsung added that the assistant can now read aloud text messages and email, provided you use the S8's stock apps.

There's no word about Bixby's voice support expanding to other languages, but that seems like the next logical step. Samsung didn't mention when the full service will be available in other English-speaking countries, either, though English does work in South Korea.

We'll have to wait until tonight to see if the full version of Bixby is a true Siri/Cortana/Google Assistant rival. With a smart speaker powered by the service reportedly in the works, Samsung will no doubt be pleased to have finally overcome this hurdle.
Whether you consider yourself tech-savvy or a technophobe, in today's world, technology touches virtually everybody's lives in one way or another. It's an industry that comprises hundreds of thousands of companies and is worth trillions of dollars worldwide. Now, thanks to data solutions company Utopia, you can find out which is the biggest tech firm in each US state.

The data is based on company revenues listed on the 2016 Fortune 1000 list. For the lesser populated states, the Inc. 5000, which ranks the country's top 5000 fastest-growing private companies, is used.

As you can see from the breakdown infographic by Business Insider, there are huge differences between the revenues of the biggest companies in each state. It's no surprise to see that Apple, the largest company in the world, is also the biggest firm in California. It recorded a revenue of $215 billion in 2016 and has 115,000 employees. Whereas Montana's largest tech firm is Foundant Technologies, an online software service platform, which made $4 million in 2015 and has just 43 workers.

Despite its size, Apple doesn't sit at the top of the pile when it comes to largest number of employees. That distinction goes to General Electric (a tech firm is defined here as a company that describes themselves as developing new technology in communications, IT software, healthcare, aviation, or data solutions). The Boston-based conglomerate is Massachusetts' largest tech company, with 330,000 workers and a revenue of $123.7 billion last year.

It's noted that five of the biggest firms on the list - Apple, General Electric, AT&T, Verizon, and Amazon (Washington's largest tech company) - generate a combined revenue of over $764.5 billion and employ a total of 1.113 million people in the US.

Make sure to check out the full details at Utopia's website, which also shows the second-largest tech companies in each state.
While artificial intelligence has brought countless benefits to humanity, the danger that we might hand too much control over to the machines remains worrying. It's something that Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking have long warned against. Now, the second highest-ranking general in the US military has voiced his concerns over autonomous weapons systems.

Speaking at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing yesterday, Gen. Paul Selva was answering a question about a Defense Department directive that requires human operators to be involved in the decision-making process when it comes to autonomous machines killing enemy combatants.

The general said it was important the military keep "the ethical rules of war in place lest we unleash on humanity a set of robots that we don't know how to control."

"I don't think it's reasonable for us to put robots in charge of whether or not we take a human life," Selva added.

The Hill reports that Senator Gary Peters asked about the directive's expiration later this year. He suggested that America's enemies would have no moral objections to using a machine that takes human thinking out of the equation when it comes to killing soldiers.

"I don't think it's reasonable for us to put robots in charge of whether or not we take a human life...[America should continue to] take our values to war," said the general.

"There will be a raucous debate in the department about whether or not we take humans out of the decision to take lethal action," he told Peters, stressing that he was in favor of "keeping that restriction."

The general did add, however, that just because the US won't go down the route of fully autonomous killing machines, it should still research ways of defending against the technology.

Tesla and Space X boss Elon Musk has been warning people about the dangers of AI for years. At the recent National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Rhode Island, he said: "Until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don't know how to react because it seems so ethereal."

"AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it's too late."
Apple contractors Foxconn, Pegatron, Wistron, and Compal Electronics have filed an antitrust lawsuit against Qualcomm alleging that the company has violated two sections of the U.S. based Sherman Act. This is the latest and an ongoing battle between over wireless patent royalties.

Qualcomm is the market leader in smartphone modems and a primary supplier to Apple, yet Apple doesn't have a direct patent deal with Qualcomm. Instead, Qualcomm requires Apple's contractors to sign patent license agreements before purchasing chips, which the US Federal Trade Commission called in its own complaint a "no license, no chips" model.

Besides paying for the wireless chips themselves, Apple covers the licensing fees to the four manufacturers who then pay Qualcomm, this allows Qualcomm to take a percentage of the overall iPhone selling price in exchange for supplying the modem chips.

Apple stopped making royalty payments to its contractors after it sued Qualcomm in January for $1 billion. The dispute has been ongoing ever since, with Qualcomm filing a handful of countersuits of their own, accusing Apple of intentionally hindering chipsets on some iPhones, infringing on patents, and attempting to get an import ban of iPhones into the US with the FTC.

Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen recently, Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said the company's fight with Apple about patents was mostly a "fight about what to pay for the IP" that he described as the core of the industry. He expects that the Apple dispute will be resolved out of court as has been the case with similar legal battles in the 2000s.
@alextdaugherty

Jeff Flake sees an opening in Cuba.

The Republican senator from Arizona, a longtime critic of U.S. trade and travel restrictions on the island, is hopeful that the Trump administration is willing to compromise when it comes to writing out the rules that will comprise Trumps Cuba policy directive announced in Miami last month.

This is an area where Marco Rubio and I agree on, Flake said. Weve had broad disagreements with policy on Cuba, but we want to make sure that American travel serves a purpose and that it empowers entrepreneurs. I think what weve all recognized no matter where we are on the policy is that over the past couple of years a lot more Cubans have enjoyed a lot more freedom because of American travel.

Flake was on hand for an announcement on Tuesday by Engage Cuba and the Center of Democracy in the Americas outlining a number of policy recommendations as the White House figures out the nuts and bolts of the Cuba policy announced in June.

Their recommendations include allowing individual people-to-people travel, lifting restrictions on remittances and lifting limitations on bank transactions for Cubans who open U.S. bank accounts.

Ever since the speech by President Trump weve seen a lot of cancellations in our reservations by American travelers. The Americans are scared to come to Cuba, said Julio Alvarez, co-founder of a restoration garage for classic American automobiles in Havana. Its affecting my ability to come to the U.S. to get parts for my cars. Im not allowed to have a bank account here. This affects my business greatly.

The entrepreneurs also sent a letter to the departments of State, Treasury and Commerce outlining their recommendations.

The vast majority of U.S. individual travelers frequent private lodging, restaurants and transportation services, the letter said. Fewer travelers will have a direct negative impact on businesses in the hospitality sector as well as an indirect negative impact on connected enterprises.

Flake was joined by Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, two longtime proponents of ending the Cuban embargo.

Our government now criticizes that new opening, Leahy said, after he warmly embraced some of the entrepreneurs on hand and showed them pictures of the view from his home in Vermont. They say the only Cubans who benefited were Raul Castro and the Cuban ministry. Well, the Cuban government has benefited, thats unavoidable in any country where theres state-owned enterprises. Theres a whole lot of countries like that; China Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, we have no restrictions on travel there.

James Williams, head of Engage Cuba, said the recommendations announced Tuesday should appeal to politicians like Rubio who have made it clear their intention is to hurt the sprawling Cuban military apparatus and help private citizens engage in free enterprise.

Senator Rubio since the announcement has been very active in publicly pushing... that this is not against the private sector, Williams said. Hes going out of his way to say how much hes supporting it so we would hope that there should be common agreement.

Williams added that their recommendations represent the best chance of a compromise between Cuba hardliners and anti-embargo politicians, as they do not address ending the embargo or allowing tourism on the island.

If we cant find agreement on this, I dont think we can find an agreement on anything, Williams said. Im sort of less optimistic about Congressman [Mario] Diaz-Balart than I am about Senator Rubio.

Read more here.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk during a speaking engagement at the International Space Station Research and Development conference on Wednesday provided an update on his company's plan to send humans to Mars.

Musk's initial plan was to outfit its Dragon capsule with thrusters and landing legs that could be used to gently touch down on solid ground. The technique, known as propulsive landing, is being scrapped partially due to the fact that it would take a "tremendous" amount of effort to qualify it for safety for crew transport.

Musk later said on Twitter than they still plan to do powered landings on Mars albeit with a vastly larger ship.

At the conference, Musk said he's pretty confident that there's a far better approach which is what the next generation of SpaceX rockets and spacecraft will strive for. Unfortunately, he didn't delve into what the new approach might be or provide an updated timeline of when he plans to send a craft to Mars.

Dragon capsules will still feature the aforementioned thrusters albeit for emergency purposes only. For the foreseeable future, it seems as though the capsules will continue to reply on parachutes for landings.

Musk also downplayed expectations for SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. Essentially three Falcon 9 rockets strapped together, the rocket is still expected to conduct its maiden voyage sometime this year.

Musk said he would consider the flight a success if the rocket gets off the launch pad without burning it up. That said, the rocket likely won't reach orbit with Musk adding that those whose payloads are slated to fly on the first flight should be considered "brave."

Musk said he may have more details to share on SpaceX's Mars colonization plans at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, in September.
Tri Pointe Homes, Inc. engages in the design, construction, and sale of single-family attached and detached homes in the United States. The company operates through a portfolio of six brands comprising Maracay in Arizona; Pardee Homes in California and Nevada; Quadrant Homes in Washington; Trendmaker Homes in Texas; TRI Pointe Homes in California, Colorado, and the Carolinas; and Winchester Homes in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. As of December 31, 2021, its operations consisted of 112 active selling communities and 41,675 owned or controlled lots. The company sells its homes through own sales representatives and independent real estate brokers. It also provides financial services, such as mortgage financing, title and escrow, and property and casualty insurance agency services. The company was formerly known as TRI Pointe Group, Inc. and changed its name to Tri Pointe Homes, Inc. in January 2021. Tri Pointe Homes, Inc. was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Irvine, California.
@alextdaugherty

Miami Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Carlos Curbelo joined Democrats in an unsuccessful effort to keep ozone regulations proposed by Barack Obama that would lower acceptable ozone levels and require oversight from the Environmental Protection Administration.

Ros-Lehtinen and Curbelo were among 11 Republicans who voted against the Ozone Standards Implementation Act sponsored by Rep. Pete Olson, R-Texas. The bill delays the implementation of Obama's ozone rule and would require the EPA to reexamine the rule every 10 years instead of every five years.

Miami Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart voted in favor, along with four Democrats and the majority of Republicans. The bill passed with by a vote of 229-199. A slew of environmental and public health organizations opposed the bill while business and manufacturing groups were in favor.

Curbelo and Ros-Lehtinen are part of a group of House Republicans and Democrats concerned about climate change dubbed the Climate Solutions Caucus.

This post was updated to clarify that the Climate Solutions Caucus consists of Republicans and Democrats.
@amysherman1

A Miami federal judge ruled Monday that Florida election officials can only send public data to President Donald Trump's voter fraud commission.

U.S. District Court Judge Marcia Cooke declined a request by the the ACLU to issue a temporary restraining order to ban the commission from meeting Tuesday, according to a press release from the ACLU.

Cooke's ruling leaves the battle over the commission essentially in status quo.

In June, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity's vice chair Kris Kobach asked states to send publicly available voter roll data by July 14th. Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner initially said that he would provide data that is publicly available -- but not private information such as driver's license and social security numbers.

But Detzner never turned over the data because on July 10, the commission asked states to hold off due to litigation in Washington D.C. (The Florida litigation is separate.)

That's why Detzner has continued to hold off and not provide the data.

"The court ruled what the Department of State already said we would do weeks ago  only provide publicly available information as cited in Florida law and nothing beyond that," Detzner spokeswoman Sarah Revell said. "It is unclear why the ACLU felt the need to include the Department of State in their filing since they already agree with our position."

An attorney for the federal government went on record during the hearing that Florida should not produce any documents until a new directive is issued from the Commission, ACLU spokesman Baylor Johnson said.

We are pleased that the court acted swiftly in ensuring that Floridas chief election official maintains the privacy of voter information, which is protected from disclosure under state law," stated ACLU legal director Nancy Abudu in a statement. We look forward to arguing the merits of this case before the court and exposing the real motivation behind this Commission: to substantiate President Trumps and Kris Kobachs wild and unverified accusations of the existence of rampant voter fraud, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Cooke issued a verbal ruling -- a written ruling is expected Tuesday.

Lawyers for the federal government could not immediately be reached for comment Monday evening.
@PatriciaMazzei

A Miami Republican candidate appears eager to adopt some of President Donald Trump's political rhetoric a week before a special Florida House primary election.

Jose Mallea released a TV ad Tuesday decrying "falsehoods" lobbed against him in the House District 116 race. His opponent is attorney Daniel Perez, whose name is unmentioned in the ad.

"Like our President Donald Trump, the special interests attack anyone not on their side with lies and fake news," Mallea says, as the ad shows a photo of Trump signing his new Cuba policy directive last month in East Little Havana.

Mallea appears to be trying to tie himself to the president while Perez, a first-time candidate, has been questioning his Republican bona fides.

Mallea ran Marco Rubio's underdog U.S. Senate campaign in 2010, but backed Jeb Bush -- his former boss -- in the 2016 presidential election. Rubio has disapproved of Mallea's featuring him in a campaign flier, a sign that the presidential race bruised their friendship.


@jimwyss @PatriciaMazzei @alextdaugherty

Venezuelan lawmakers warned Tuesday the country could be headed for a catastrophic meltdown if the United States limits or blocks its crude exports amid an escalating struggle over the fate of the socialist administration.

The fears come as the White House confirmed its considering a range of political sanctions against the South American nation if it goes ahead with plans to rewrite the constitution, including a ban on oil imports.

All options are on the table, a senior White House official said. We understand that we are dealing with options that sometimes have consequences  of course, in Venezuela, but also in the United States.

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has slapped high-ranking officials in the country with sanctions, but in recent weeks there has been increased Capitol Hill chatter about hitting Venezuelas critical oil industry.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican working closely with the White House on Venezuela policy, said ending Venezuelan oil imports  once considered unthinkable  would directly target the government of President Nicolas Maduro.

I dont believe the Venezuelan people are enjoying the benefits of a declining oil industry, Rubio told the Miami Herald. Its going entirely to enrich those who are tied to it, and to pay for debt obligations.

If that happened it would decimate the countrys economy and send the nation into a tail-spin, said opposition congressman Angel Alvarado, who is a member of the legislative economic commission.

The consequences for Venezuela would be catastrophic, he said. It would be a collapse without precedent.

More here.

Photo credit: Ariana Cubillos, Associated Press
@MaryEllenKlas

Has U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio really taken sides in the bitter Republican primary contest for House District 116?

In a flier circulating this week, Rubio is featured in photographs with Jose Mallea, the small-business owner. Mallea is running against insurance attorney Daniel Perez in the race to replace Rep. Jose Felix Diaz, R-Miami, who is running for the state Senate.

Also featured in the pictures are Lieutenant Gov. Carlos Lopez Cantera and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

"Sen. Rubio did not see the mailer before it was sent, and he was never asked to approve the use of his name and picture,'' said Olivia Perez-Cubas, Rubio spokesperson.

Mallea responded in a statement. "I have high admiration and respect for Marco and his family. They have been dear friends for over 20 years,'' he said. "My campaign advertisement highlights my record of service to the Republican Party and I am proud to have served as Marcos campaign manager during his 2010 U.S. Senate campaign."
SAN FRANCISCOThe Walmart greeter who took the retail giant all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in the largest gender bias class-action lawsuit in U.S. history has died, a family member said Tuesday.

Betty Dukes died July 10 at her home in Antioch, Calif., said her niece, Rita Roland. Dukes was 67.

She was a very tough lady, very driven and passionate about what she believed in. She was persuasive. She just didnt want to tell her point, she wanted you to have an understanding so you could come to the same conclusions that she had, Roland said.

As the lead plaintiff in Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., she alleged in the 2001 lawsuit that the company violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of race, creed or gender.

Dukes said Walmart systemically paid women less than male counterparts and promoted men to higher positions at faster rates than women. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011, where it was dismissed. But Roland said the dismissal was not in vain for her aunt.

The one thing I do know is the work that she did is fluid. It has not stopped, said the Milpitas, Calif. woman who often travelled with Dukes when she was working on the case. She was one of many voices fighting for the same cause.

An ordained minister, Dukes faith was the foundation for everything she did, including taking on the retail giant, Roland said.

She believed in helping people, Roland said.

During her time off, Dukes helped organize community banquets with speakers celebrating Martin Luther King Day, Black History Month and the election of president Barack Obama. She also helped distribute food to the needy.

At least twice a year, she would also speak to groups about her past struggles and how people should work to fight for womens rights and against discrimination, Roland said.

And she always did it looking her Sunday best. Matching purse, shoes and accessories. She took pride in the way she dressed, Roland said.

Born in Louisiana in 1950, Dukes moved west at a young age with her mother, who was in search of work. She later married but had no children. In 1994 she enthusiastically accepted an offer to work the Walmart cash registers part time for $5 (U.S.) an hour. She dreamed of turning around a hard life by advancing, through work and determination, into Walmarts corporate management.

I was focused on Walmarts aggressive customer service, Dukes said in 2011 interview during her lunch break, after first saying grace over a meal of hamburgers and chicken nuggets. I wanted to advance. I wanted to make that money.

When Dukes needed change to make a small purchase during her break she asked a colleague to open a cash register with a one-cent transaction, which she claimed was a common practice.

She was demoted for misconduct. She complained to a manager that the punishment was too severe and part of a long campaign of discrimination that began almost as soon as she started working for Walmart in Pittsburg, Calif., a blue-collar city of about 100,000, about 72 kilometres east of San Francisco.

When those complaints were ignored, Dukes sought legal advice and ended up serving as the lead plaintiff in what would become the vast class-action suit.

Dukes worked for Walmart until last year.

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Its hard to imagine Jane Austen-mania hitting more of a fever pitch than it has in the past several decades, with a zealous global fan base snapping up everything from Bollywood remakes to Austen-inspired zombie fan fiction and guinea pig versions of Pride & Prejudice.

Still, here we are at the 200th anniversary of her death and the craze has somehow managed to kick up a notch.

To celebrate the British novelists legacy this year, Austen devotees  also known as Janeites  can attend exhibitions, talks, performances and calligraphy workshops, go on literary pilgrimages to her home in Hampshire and enter writing competitions in her name. They can don bonnets for themed picnics and gowns for Regency Balls, buy T-shirts and totes, collect the new Jane Austen British 10-pound note and, of course, share all on social media feeds in her honour.

Accompanying this frenzy of activity is a wave of new books about the literary celebrity, exploring her influence anew. Fans can read about her domestic life in Jane Austen at Home: A Biography by Lucy Worsley; about her politics in Jane Austen, The Secret Radical by Helena Kelly; and about the influence of plays on her writing in The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatreand Why She Works in Hollywood by Paula Byrne.

Those whove made it their lifes work to study Austen, such as Goucher College scholar Juliette Wells  author of the aptly titled Everybodys Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination  are well-positioned to make a mark. Her new book Reading Austen in America, which tracks the authors transatlantic popularity, is due out in October and already getting buzz.

Wells is an ideal person, then, to ask the pressing question: Why Jane? What is it about Austen thats so captured the public imagination for so long, across centuries and continents?

That a great question, Well says, and theres no one answer to it. The TV miniseries and Hollywood films of the 1990s  which were very likable, very audience-friendly  have no doubt played a role in endearing Austen to legions of fans, she says. As has the burst of fiction and non-fiction published in their wake. But Austen has long held appeal for readers, who began visiting her grave in Winchester Cathedral a good century before the swoon-worthy Colin Firth ever graced the screen.

Indeed, generations of readers have flocked to Austen for her expert storytelling and her wit and humour, which tend to stand the test of time. There are works published by her contemporaries that were considered humorous at the time, which are just so dated to us: they dont work at all, Wells says. But Austens humour continues to resonate. I hear from undergraduate students all the time who are just amazed when they realize how funny she is.

Still other readers are drawn to the moral universe Austen depicts, Wells explains, how much her main characters care about being good people.

And then theres the fact that Austen arguably wrote women with more depth than any writer who came before. Austen is unparalleled in her ability to create believable, realistic characters with inner lives, Wells says, and certainly she portrayed women with more attention, more thought, than anyone had done prior to her.

Then, of course, theres her artistic mastery  Virginia Woolf rated it on par with Shakespeares  which employed subtlety to powerful effect. Of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness, Virginia Woolf noted, writing in The New Republic in 1924. (Woolf also joked about Austens fanatical fans, even then a force to be reckoned with: There are 25 elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult offered to the chastity of their aunts.)

Add to all of this: Austen quietly provided a model for the professional woman, then such an anomaly. Writing in a time with few female voices, she focused novels such as Sense and Sensibility and Emma on drawing room dramas  and the classic marriage plot  but she herself elected to lead a solitary, literary life.

Austen possessed an extraordinary work ethic, Wells says, and was a consummate professional. Being aware, to any degree, of Austens home life and her authorship really deepens your experience of reading her novels. If you read her biography, or visit her house, you have some awareness of the choices she made in order to write.

Its only thanks to second wave feminists and their research, Wells adds, that we were able to move beyond the protective Austen family depictions of spinster Aunt Jane and see her for the ambitious working woman she was. She really valued her creativity and she was an incredibly determined writer, Wells says. She wrote for decades before she was published. Once her first novel was published in 1811, she published at an astonishing rate.

Its amazing, Wells adds. She died too young, but she left us so much.

Its no wonder, then, that readers continue to express their enthusiasm for Austen in myriad creative ways. Professionally, nothing can surprise me, Wells says of Jane-mania. What delights me is when someone can enter the very crowded field of tributes to Austen and create something exciting and new.

There (are) lots of different takes out there and Im interested in all of them, she adds. Im just fascinated by this phenomenon of popularity. Im really interested in what makes people dress up, and join Austen societies and take literary pilgrimages. And what makes them write another sequel to Pride and Prejudice when the world already has so many. Its about love and what it means to love literature. Its very personal.

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With his enormous mouth, cheerful eyes and frantic way of talking, Kermit always seemed like a cheerful frog.

But Kermits personality appeared to change in recent years. At least thats how Cheryl Henson, the daughter of Kermits creator Jim Henson, saw it.

So last October, Kermits longtime puppeteer, Steve Whitmire, was fired from Muppets Studio. After months of silence, last week he posted a blog item critical of the decision, calling it a drastic action that left him devastated.

In response, Cheryl Henson reportedly took to Facebook to criticize Whitmires version of the beloved frog. Whitmire, who took over the role when Jim Henson died in 1990, performed Kermit as a bitter, angry, depressed victim, she said.

Steves performance of Kermit has strayed far away from my fathers good hearted, compassionate leader of the Muppets, Henson wrote. Worst of all, she added, in the past few years he has not been funny or fun.

Perhaps Kermit did seem a little dour lately, albeit all played for laughs.

On a 2011 appearance on Ellen, for example, Whitmires Kermit complained that he is often mistaken for a green fire hydrant and bemoaned his relationship with Miss Piggy. With his misery seeking company, he appealed the studio audience, Maybe some of your audience has actually dated a pig.

Finally, when Ellen kissed the little green Muppet on the lips, he excitedly asked if he had turned into a prince. Upon realizing he remained a frog, he sighed.

Oh, well.

Read more:

Former voice of Kermit the Frog pens blog post after firing, says hes devastated

Kermit the Frog getting a new voice after actor switch

But it all simply seemed like part of the Kermit bit. The audience ate it up, laughing throughout the segment.

The 2015 ABC reboot of the The Muppets, meant to be a more adult portrayal of the fuzzy gang, was a different story. The show received a middling 62 out of 100 score on Metacritic, a website that aggregates television reviews. Many of the reviews pointed to an angry or depressed tone to the characters, specifically in Kermit and Miss Piggy, who break up in the pilot.

The Philadelphia Inquirers Molly Eichel wrote that the shows darker tone drained the Muppets of the warmth and love that made them so lovely in the first place.

Slates Willa Paskin wrote, The Muppet who comes off worst is Kermit, who spends his days sneakily managing Piggys moods, working up the nerve to disobey her, a mild-mannered middle manager. His voice, previously so adorable, began to sound to me mealy and weak, like the vocal equivalent of pleated khakis.

Uproxxs Alan Sepinwall wrote, making Kermit into a petulant frog who cant believe he still has to deal with his ex every day alters too much of what made him one of Hensons most special creations ... If this is the real Kermit, then Id rather go back to watching him act.

The show was cancelled after one season.

While its unclear what creative role Whitmire played in the show  he was not credited as a writer  it is clear is that critics didnt like this new Kermit.

Even with the failure of a fairly high-profile network television program, the termination of Whitmire had gone relatively unnoticed by the general public until last week when he published the blog post about his firing. It came a few days after his replacement, Matt Vogel, was announced as the new voice of Kermit.

I want all of you who love the Muppets to know that I would never consider abandoning Kermit or any of the others because to do so would be to forsake the assignment entrusted to me by Jim Henson, my friend and mentor, but even more, my hero, Whitmire wrote, describing the Muppets as a calling, an urgent, undeniable, impossible to resist way of life.

He said he suggested multiple remedies to the companys two stated issues, which had never been mentioned to me prior to that phone call.

But days later, Disney executives gave the New York Times a more detailed account behind the decision.

Debbie McClellan, head of the Muppets Studio, a division of Disney, told the Times that Whitmire displayed repeated unacceptable business conduct over a period of many years.

Some of Hensons family members told the Times they agreed with the decision to replace Whitmire.

He played brinkmanship very aggressively in contract negotiations, Lisa Henson, president of the Jim Henson Company, and Jim Hensons daughter, told the Times, adding that Whitmire staunchly opposed casting an understudy for Kermit.

Brian Henson, the companys chairman and Jim Hensons son, said that Whitmire would send emails and letters attacking everyone, attacking the writing and attacking the director.

The dispute over the recasting of the famous amphibian drew the attention of many journalists and commentators, including shock-jock Howard Stern.

On Tuesday, Stern gave what he called sensible advice.

Anybody who wants to be a puppeteer for a living, Stern said, the odds of you actually creating a money-generating career are next to nothing.

Now hes trying to debate the merits of the character, he added. Do not lose that job under any circumstances.

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Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau says secret corporate ownership in Canada will soon end with new rules compelling Canadian company owners to reveal themselves in government filings  a public policy move widely viewed as crucial in the battle against tax evasion and money laundering.

But he would not commit to making the identities of Canadian corporate owners public.

In order to get at the understanding of who owns what, theres really no other way to get at this, Morneau said an interview with the Star on Tuesday, vowing to lead a national initiative that will eventually require actual company owners  or beneficial owners  to list themselves in their corporate registrations.

We believe that this is important information to have to understand how people are arranging their affairs and to ensure that were not allowing people to inappropriately use corporate structures for tax avoidance.

Read more:Ottawa to close loopholes used by rich to dodge tax

While public corporate registries in Canada must include a list of directors, it is easy for beneficial owners to retain anonymity by hiding behind figureheads, lawyers and numbered companies.

As it stands in Canada, it is possible to register a corporation, open a bank account, and send and receive money overseas all without disclosing ones name  the same kind of secrecy offered by traditional tax havens.

A Star investigation earlier this year detailed how Canadas corporate secrecy has been identified internationally by an industry of tax avoidance experts who now sell this country as a safe place to hide wealth, free from prying eyes.

On dozens of global websites, the Canadian flag is used to entice foreigners seeking anonymous companies fronted by nominee directors that can be set up overnight and used to hide wealth without the stigma that comes with traditional tax havens  a service called snow washing.

Even the governments that collect corporate registrations in Canada dont know the identities of beneficial owners at the helms of the corporations they regulate.

Changing that will require consensus among the 10 provincial finance ministries, which oversee about 90 per cent of all corporate registrations in the country. (The federal corporate registry contains only about 10 per cent of the national total.)

When I came into this office, this (issue) was a challenge to get people to think about because they pointed out correctly that the issue  is a constitutional one, because youve got the reality that this is provincial jurisdiction in the case of 90 per cent of the corporations, Morneau said.

My response was that that is not a good enough answer and we need to get at this.

In three separate meetings with his provincial finance counterparts dating back to last year, there has been strong support for change, he said.

I will tell you that everyone else around the table understands  how important this is for the country, he said. Im not experiencing any resistance from any quarters  We are going to make progress on this. This is going to be an agenda item at every one of my (federal-provincial) meetings and I hope and expect that well have a more concrete set of timelines and deliverables by the next time that we get together.

Britain is the international model for beneficial ownership transparency. Last year, the country launched a public beneficial registry that requires owners to identify themselves.

It is now a publicly searchable website that details each companys owners and directors, their months and years of birth, nationalities, countries of residence, mailing addresses and dates of appointment, along with the corporations annual financial returns and filing history.

Law enforcement officials in Britain and beyond have hailed the registry as a breakthrough tool in helping investigators, accountants, investigative journalists and the public conduct due diligence on corporate activities including illicit wealth movement, money laundering, corruption and offshore tax evasion.

Morneau is not prepared to go that far.

Ill have to get back to you. There are obviously always going to be privacy concerns. We havent yet crossed that Rubicon with the provinces, he said. I havent yet got a complete consensus even in the federal government with the privacy issues, but they are significant.

The objective, he said, is a system that deters tax avoidance, not a system that allows people to pruriently look into their neighbours affairs.

Morneaus comments follow Tuesdays release of a 63-page plan, first reported in the Star, detailing proposed reforms that would target unfairness in Canadas taxation system benefiting the wealthy.

The reforms are designed to close regulatory gaps being legally exploited by sophisticated Canadians using private corporations to lower their tax burdens.

Among those strategies being exploited: sprinkling income among family members in private corporations in order to take advantage of lower corporate tax rates; holding income in passive investments inside a private corporation in order to benefit from lower tax rates than would be imposed on individuals; and converting a private companys income into capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate inside a corporation.

There are about two million private corporations now in Canada  an eightfold increase from the 240,000 that existed in 1972, Morneau said. Their share of gross domestic product has doubled in the past 15 years.

Knowing who is behind that ballooning number of corporations is part of the governments wider strategy to root out tax avoidance, he said.

The Stars reporting on tax avoidance and evasion has also highlighted the role that international tax agreements  many with traditional tax havens such as Barbados, the British Virgin Island and Panama  have played in the movement of Canadian wealth offshore.

Morneau said the governments strategy will address abuses of those agreements.

We are going to try to find ways to ensure that people arent taking that constructive business relationship we have with Barbados and turning it into a tax advantage, he said. That requires us to do some work. Were going to do that work. But were not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

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OTTAWANew mental health workers arrived in Pikangikum First Nation on Tuesday to help hundreds of people seeking support in the northern Ontario community, Health Minister Jane Philpott says.

Additional nurses are also being sent to the reserve that has long struggled with a high prevalence of suicide including  most recently, the deaths of two girls.

Health Canada is working with other departments and provincial ministries to co-ordinate an immediate response following the recent deaths, Philpott added, noting she had a conference call Tuesday with members of the community, including the chief, who are exhausted and shaken as they try to address the situation and plan funerals.

Read more:

Canada committed to improving mental health in Indigenous communities: Philpott

Suicide crisis meeting to address reducing bureaucracy faced by Indigenous leaders, federal health minister says

Health Canada offers support in wake of recent suicides in northern Ontario

There have been literally hundreds of people in this one community alone that have come forward asking for counselling, Philpott said in an interview. We are needing . . . to supply . . . safe spaces for people to receive counselling, looking at accommodations for health workers who are going into the community.

Many front-line workers and community members in other reserves are also experiencing a high-degree of burnout due to the suicide crisis, said Nishnawbe Aski Nation Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler, who leads an umbrella organization representing 49 First Nation communities in northern Ontario.

Communities including Wapekeka First Nation have also struggled to tackle the issue of youth suicide in recent months.

Thats something that is unfortunately not unique to Pikangikum, Fiddler said. Thats a reality for many of our communities and we cant sustain the current ways of trying to address this.

Fiddler said he plans to address the push for long-term solutions at a meeting in Ottawa next Monday with Philpott and Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins, noting communities must find a way to move beyond living crisis to crisis.

Each suicide is different, he said, and individual factors need to be examined by police to expose root causes.

Fiddler and others have linked the prevalence of sexual abuse in northern Ontario communities and the deaths of young people in those communities, particularly young women.

Indeed, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde said Tuesday that sexual and physical abuse, incest, poverty, overcrowding in homes and low levels of education all contribute to a loss of hope in some First Nation communities.

Within that mix . . . how do young people see that theres a way through that? Bellegarde said in an interview, noting bureaucratic red tape often stands in the way of delivering mental health services.

The message that I try to get to all of our young people is Hey, you are valued, you are important, you are special, you have a purpose. 

Philpott said Tuesday she was struck by a recent discussion that she heard during a visit to Wunnumin Lake First Nation, also located in northern Ontario, where the chief and community members openly discussed widespread sexual abuse at a community meeting.

The chief himself brought up the topic and others spoke to it including nurses and health workers who were in the room, Philpott said.

My sense would be from my understanding of the issue is when it is . . . brought out in the open and discussed more openly, it gives courage to people who have been abused to come forward and seek counselling.

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John Featherstone peruses online job boards every day since losing his job as a sheet metal and facilities manager at a Mississauga manufacturing plant about two years ago.

Im basically starting from square one again and Im 63-years-old, he said.

He worked at CTS Corp. for 38 years after emigrating from England as a young man. I worked there all my working life, he said.

The multinational corporation designs and builds sensors and electrical components for a range of sectors, including auto manufacturers like Toyota.

The company was in court this week after Featherstone and 75 other laid-off workers launched a class-action lawsuit, claiming a protracted delay in notifying the Ministry of Labour of the plants closing denied them crucial support services.

The judge presiding over an Ontario Superior Court in Brampton reserved his decision on Wednesday. A judgment is expected in the fall, said lawyer Stephen Moreau, who is representing the plaintiffs.

Lawyers for CTS said they would not speak with media as the case is ongoing. But the companys factum dismisses the workers claim as a technical breach that had no detrimental effect on the plaintiffs and does not entitle them to fresh notice.

The complex case hinges on provincial legislation governing mass terminations and events that occurred on April 17, 2014, when CTS Corp. issued severance letters to 77 workers. The termination date was set for almost a year later on March 27, 2015, which was later delayed by three months to June 26.

The plaintiffs allege that CTS breached the Employment Standards Act (ESA) by neglecting to immediately inform the ministry of its plan to close.

The ministry did not receive notice until May 12, 2015, over a year after workers were first informed, according to the workers factum.

The non-unionized plant closed its doors in late 2015 and relocated to Mexico. About 129 people lost their jobs.

The notice period is important because it kick-starts services employees need prior to their last days, said Dave Parker, co-ordinator at Steelworkers Job Action Centre.

Employment Ontarios Second Career program, for example, can provide $28,000 to help people re-enter the workforce, according to the workers factum.

CTS hosted outplacement sessions for some employees in January 2015 to facilitate job transition  workshops included resume building and interviewing tools, the defence factum said.

(The company) has a civic and corporate responsibility to help their previous employees while theyre leaving them in the dust. Less than seven weeks notice? Give me a break, Parker said.

Under the Employment Standards Act, when an employer gives notice, thats when the trigger is pulled, thats when you notify the Ministry of Labour, said Moreau, the plaintiffs lawyer.

As a result, the workers want the notice period and severance package deemed null and void, the clock reset.

Beyond this, new severance should be paid, according to the plaintiffs factum alleges.

The workers argue that notice period means informing employees and the ministry at the same time while the company argues the act sets out minimum notice  eight weeks, in this case.

The Ministrys website says that eight weeks notice must be provided to employees who are part of mass terminations within a four-week period.

CTS was 12 days late notifying the (Ministry of Labour) of the closure, not 13 months as the plaintiffs allege, the CTS lawyers say in its factum.

CTS lawyers say that workers are not entitled to fresh notice in their factum, arguing that the first day of the notice period started on May 1, 2015.

In their factum, the company concedes that it was initially told the Form 1 would not be required due to an original plan to stagger separation dates. The late filing was simply a mistake.

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It has been almost nine years since Laurie Odjick last saw her 16-year-old daughter Maisy and it is with mixed emotions that she waits for news as Quebec police divers search the waterways in and around her community.

Surete du Quebec police officers arrived in Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation on Tuesday, an Algonquin community about two hours outside of Ottawa, after they received a tip on the disappearance of Maisy Odjick and her friend Shannon Alexander, 17. The girls vanished on Sept. 8, 2008, leaving their wallets, clothes, purses and all their personal belongings behind at Alexanders fathers Maniwaki apartment. The girls had gotten together for a sleepover.

I have mixed emotions. I cant describe it, really, said Laurie Odjick on Wednesday. Kitigan Zibi, a community of nearly 2,300 people, is adjacent to Maniwaki, Quebec.

The Surete du Quebec (SQ) got a tip and they are here searching the waters. I have no idea what the tip is. It is better for me not to know sometimes. It must be credible because they are here, said Odjick, who was a key voice in the calls to create a national inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.

But why now? she said. The police are expected to be in the area until Thursday.

The inquiry was launched one year ago after families across Canada demanded one be held because for too long, they felt their loved ones cases werent being investigated properly and that not enough was being done to help vulnerable Indigenous women. The RCMP wrote a report in 2014 that said there are 1,181 murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls in Canada but many feel that number is low and the numbers could be as high as 4,000.

Odjick currently sits on the national family advisory committee, a group of families that advises the inquiry.

The SQ divers were searching the Pitobig Creek area for the girls. Kitigan Zibi is surrounded by freshwater lakes, streams and rivers including the Gatineau, Eagle and Desert Rivers. There are so many lakes in this community and all over. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, Odjick said.

Odjick implored those living in the area to come forward if they know something.

I believe that someone does know something, either here in the community or in the town of Maniwaki itself. Two girls just dont disappear without a trace, Odjick said.

I am a mother looking for answers and hopefully one day closure for our family, she added.

When the teens disappeared in early September, 2008, Odjick felt the cases were mishandled from the beginning. Odjicks case was originally investigated by Indigenous police from the reserve and Alexanders by the SQ as she lived off-reserve.

Odjick said the families were not listened to by police, who she said originally dismissed their concerns and even suggested the girls ran away.

As a result, there was no immediate search for the best friends. Nobody went looking for them, I did that. The first search was done by my family and friends. The second search was done by the reserve, Odjick previously told the Star.

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As a kid growing up in Toronto, Scott Goodyear may have visited Centre Island only two or three times, but each time felt like a big summer adventure.

It felt like you were going to a different country, said the retired Canadian race car driver. Youd see the carousel from the ferry and youd just get that feeling.

So Goodyear got a wistful feeling when he heard that the carousel is moving to a new home in Carmel, Ind., where he now lives with his family.

Its a part of history leaving Toronto, and a part of Toronto history coming here, he said.

Originally used at Bushkill Park in Pennsylvania, the carousel moved to Centreville Amusement Park in 1966. Built by the Dentzel Company in 1907, it is one of 150 of its type that has survived, and one of 125 large park carousels still in operation in North America.

The carousel has one of the widest varieties of hand-carved animals (52), including 20 menagerie animals, including domestic cats, ostrich, pigs and rabbits  animals that are less seen on carousels today.

This carousel was purchased for about $20,000 in 1964 by Beasley Amusements; today, its sale price is an estimated record-breaking $3 million  about $2.25 million (U.S.).

Bill Beasley, president at Beasley Enterprises, the company that owns Centreville, calls it one of their most valuable assets. Guernseys auction house in New York has approached them twice  once in early 1990s and more recently in October 2016  with clients looking to buy an antique carousel. After excessive flooding closed the island this year and led to the company losing over $6 million, Beasley said yes.

Were closed, and we have no revenue, and we have expenses, said Beasley, therefore we needed to sell some assets.

One of eight siblings, Beasley said in his childhood he would race to the carousel to beat his sister to the ostrich  his favourite animal on the ride. It will be a loss but its going to go to a home that will lovingly restore it in a central part of a city.

James Brainard, mayor of Carmel, wants to make the carousel a focal point in the downtown area of the growing suburb. Its an iconic piece of American memorabilia, he said. Imagine all the people who have ridden it who were children and now adults. Its such a great community amenity.

The carousel will stay at Centreville Park until November 2017, and will open for Carmel residents in the spring of 2018 or 2019.

Beasley is in talks with a manufacturer about a new carousel for spring 2018.

Al Cochrane, a local carver who has restored and refurbished the original Dentzel carousel twice before, will design replicas of the hand-carved, basswood animals but with a Canadian theme  similar to the horse he added to the original design with a Canada goose on its chest.

Theres a history of carousels moving from place to place. The King Arthur carousel at Disneyland used to be at Sunnyside Amusement Park in Toronto between 1922 and 1955. And the Ferris wheel at Centreville Park today used to be at a park in Fort Erie, Ont.

Kaitlin Wainwright, director of programming at Heritage Toronto says carousels have a nostalgia value. In fact, when Beasley was approached by Guernseys in the early 1990s, the talks sparked a public outcry.

There are privately managed spaces that are very much part of our public memory and I would say that amusement parks are definitely one of those, she said, citing Honest Eds and Sam the Record Man as other examples.

Wainwright would like to see a process to encourage private businesses to maintain spaces that have historic and cultural value. If the CNE opened and some of the rides we had known for 40 or 50 years werent there, there would be a great sadness to it, she said.

There is sadness to see the carousel go but there is also opportunity. Its bittersweet, said Cochrane, but maybe this will give opportunity to new carvers to reproduce the carousel.

Patrick Wentzel, the census chairman of the National Carousel Association in the U.S, is both shocked and excited by the prospect. We dont see many big carousels move anymore, not in the last 10 to 15 years, said Wentzel. Maybe now that its moving we can learn more about it.

Do you have a memory or photo of the Centre Island carousel? Email me at fsyed@thestar.ca

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WASHINGTONHours into a long dinner with world leaders who had gathered for the Group of 20 summit meeting, U.S. President Donald Trump left his chair at the sprawling banquet table and headed to where President Vladimir Putin of Russia was seated. Earlier in the day, the two presidents had met for the first time, yielding what the Trump administration later described as a warm rapport, even as they talked about Russias interference in the United States 2016 elections.

The July 7 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, was the single most scrutinized of the Trump presidency. But it turned out there was another, potentially just as important, encounter: a roughly hour-long one-on-one discussion over dinner that was only overheard by a Kremlin-provided interpreter.

No presidential relationship has been more dissected than the one between Trump and Putin, a dynamic only heightened by the swirl of investigations into whether Trumps campaign colluded with Russia to sway the election in his favour. Nevertheless, the meeting was confirmed by the White House only on Tuesday, after some attendees privately expressed surprise that it had occurred.

Read the latest news on U.S. President Donald Trump

The dinner discussion caught the attention of other leaders around the table, some of whom later remarked privately on the odd spectacle of an American president seeming to single out the Russian leader for special attention at a summit meeting that included some of the United States staunchest, oldest allies.

The White House acknowledged the conversation on Tuesday but said there was nothing unusual about it, batting aside the suggestion that it had been deliberately hidden from public view.

Late Tuesday night, Trump derided news reports about it as sick. He said the dinner was not a secret, since all of the world leaders at the summit meeting and their spouses were invited by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Press knew! he tweeted.

Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister! Trump added.

Read more:

Trump confronted Putin on election meddling in robust and lengthy meeting, Tillerson says

The first Trump-Putin handshake just happened (with the world holding its breath)

Trump tweets that U.S. should move forward with Russia

While the private leaders-and-spouses dinner was on Trumps public schedule, the news media was not allowed to witness any part of it, nor were reporters provided with an account of what transpired. Trumps traveling press contingent did note, however, that his motorcade left the dinner four minutes after Putins did.

The conversation took place at a private meal that lasted more than three hours after a concert for the leaders and their spouses at the Elbphilharmonie, a concert hall on the banks of the Elbe River.

In the earlier, formal meeting, Trump said later, he asked the Russian president twice about his role in the U.S. vote. Putin denied involvement, and the two men agreed to move beyond the dispute in the interest of finding common ground on other matters, including a limited cease-fire in Syria.

There is no official U.S. government record of the intimate dinner conversation, because no American official other than the president was involved.

Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesnt care, said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a New York-based research and consulting firm, who said he had heard directly from attendees. They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled.

The encounter occurred more than midway through the lengthy dinner, when Trump left his chair and approached Putin, who had been seated next to the first lady, Melania Trump. It was described to Bremmer by other guests as lasting roughly an hour; this was later confirmed by a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

But Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, disputed that account. He said Trump had described the exchange with Putin as purely social, and as lasting far less than an hour. It was pleasantries and small talk, Spicer said.

In a separate statement, the White House said the two presidents had spoken through the Kremlins interpreter because the American translator with Trump did not speak Russian.

Experts in United States-Russia relations said such an encounter  even on an informal basis at a social event  was a concern because of its length, which suggested a substantive exchange, and because there was no note taker or national security or foreign policy aide present.

Were all going to be wondering what was said, and thats where its unfortunate that there was no U.S. interpreter, because there is no independent American account of what happened, said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine who also specializes in Russia and nuclear arms control.

If I was in the Kremlin, my recommendation to Putin would be, See if you can get this guy alone, and thats what it sounds like he was able to do, added Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

The Trump administration is struggling to improve its relationship with Russia while under pressure from multiple investigations into possible ties between Trumps campaign and Moscow. Those inquiries have cast a shadow over what would normally be seen as an attempt at diplomacy between world leaders.

The evening after his two meetings with Putin  the first lasting 135 minutes and the second an hour  Trump returned to Washington. On the Air Force One flight back, his top advisers helped draft a statement about a meeting his son Donald Trump Jr. attended last year with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

We have the worst relationship as a country right now with Russia than we have in decades, and yet we have these two leaders that, for reasons that do not make sense and have not been explained to anyones satisfaction, are hell-bent on adoring each other, Bremmer said. You can take everything thats been given to us, and it doesnt add up.

Read more about:

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Members of the Trump campaigns inner circle, including his eldest son and son-in-law, are being called before Senate committees next week to talk about the 2016 election.

The week has the potential to deliver the most high-profile congressional testimony involving the Russian meddling probes since former FBI Director James Comey appeared in June.

Donald Trump Jr. is scheduled to appear July 26 before the Senate Judiciary Committee along with former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, according to a witness list released by the panel Wednesday.

Also, a lawyer for Trumps powerful son-in-law and adviser said Jared Kushner will speak to the Senate intelligence committee Monday.

As Mr. Kushner has been saying since March, he has been and is prepared to voluntarily co-operate and provide whatever information he has on the investigations to Congress, said attorney Abbe Lowell. He will continue to co-operate and appreciates the opportunity to assist in putting this matter to rest.

Read more: Russian lawyer who met Trump Jr. is ready to testify before U.S. Senate

Trump campaign was eager to accept campaign help from Russian government, emails show

That meeting will apparently take place behind closed doors.

Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump Jr., did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment about his scheduled testimony. Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said Manafort received the request Wednesday afternoon and is reading it over.

The three men will almost certainly be asked about their attendance at a June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer. That gathering was arranged via emails that advertised it would reveal damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, also said Wednesday she was ready to testify before the U.S. Senate and clarify the situation.

The meeting raised new questions about the Trump campaigns possible ties to Moscow, which are being scrutinized by federal and congressional investigators. These questions have only intensified as the identities of other Russia-connected participants have become known.

I am ready to clarify the situation behind the mass hysteria, but only through lawyers or testifying in the Senate, Veselnitskaya said in an interview broadcast Wednesday on Kremlin-funded RT television.

If the Senate wishes to hear the real story, I will be happy to speak up and share everything I wanted to tell Mr. Trump, she added. That appeared to be a reference to Veselnitskayas previous statement that the meeting with Trump Jr. focused on U.S.-Russian adoption policies and a U.S. sanctions law.

Veselnitskaya has denied working for the Russian government. She has not responded to repeated attempts by The Associated Press to reach her for comment.

Congressional investigators in both parties have said they want to hear from those involved in the meeting. The top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel, Virginias Mark Warner, said Wednesday afternoon that the panel hasnt yet invited Veselnitskaya to testify, but he wants to hear from her and others who attended.

Warner said its still being worked out whether some of his committees more high-profile witnesses, including Trump Jr. and Manafort, should testify publicly or privately. The Senate and House intelligence panels conduct most of their interviews in private, but occasionally hold open hearings.

Warner said Trump Jr. has no security clearances that I am aware of, so he should be able to testify in public.

The GOP chairman of Senate Judiciary panel, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, told Iowa reporters Wednesday that hes been talking to Trump Jr.s lawyer and didnt get any pushback when suggesting he testify this week. But he said its kind of rushy to call him in so quickly, and said Democrats had requested documents and emails that they wanted to see before a hearing.

Grassley had said he would subpoena the witnesses if necessary.

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing will review a law that oversees the registration of foreign agents. The panel has been investigating one of the participants at the Trump Jr. meeting, Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer Rinat Akhmetshin, as part of its probe into the law.

The top Democrat on the Judiciary panel, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, said this week that special counsel Robert Mueller has cleared Trump Jr. and Manafort for public testimony. Mueller is conducting the Justice Departments investigation and Grassley has said he wants to avoid conflicts.

The House Intelligence Committee is also probing the Russian meddling, and the top Democrat on that panel, California Rep. Adam Schiff, says the committee is contacting participants in the Trump Jr. meeting. Referencing Feinsteins comments about Muellers clearance, he said his committee may consider public hearings for particular witnesses but noted it rarely holds open hearings.

The House panel is reaching out to participants in the meeting with a request for testimony and documents, so that is very much in process at the moment, Schiff said.

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A significant portion of people with mild cognitive impairment or dementia who are taking medication for Alzheimers may not actually have the disease, according to interim results of a major study currently underway to see how PET scans could change the nature of Alzheimers diagnosis and treatment.

The findings, presented Wednesday at the Alzheimers Association International Conference in London, come from a four-year study launched in 2016 that is testing more than 18,000 Americans with MCI or dementia to see if their brains contain the amyloid plaques that are one of the two hallmarks of the disease.

Read more:The race to find biomarkers that can predict dementia

So far, the results have been dramatic. Among 4,000 people tested so far in the Imaging Dementia-Evidence for Amyloid Scanning (IDEAS) study, researchers from the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco found that just 54.3 per cent of MCI patients and 70.5 per cent of dementia patients had the plaques.

A positive test for amyloid does not mean someone has Alzheimers, though its presence precedes the disease and increases the risk of progression. But a negative test definitively means a person does not have it.

The findings could change the way doctors treat people in these hard-to-diagnose groups and save money currently being spent on inappropriate medication.

To get that right diagnosis, thats really important, said Cynthia Guzman of Napa, California, whose initial Alzheimers diagnosis was ruled out in an earlier PET scan study.

Guzman had unusual fluctuating memory problems. Some days she functioned normally. Others, shed stop her car at a stop sign without knowing how she got there or where she was going. Eventually, tremors and hallucinations led specialists to conclude she has Lewy body dementia. Knowing, Guzman said, has allowed her to avoid a list of common medications that could worsen her symptoms.

If someone had a putative diagnosis of Alzheimers disease, they might be on an Alzheimers drug like Aricept or Namenda, said James Hendrix, the Alzheimer Associations director of global science initiatives who co-presented the findings. What if they had a PET scan and it showed that they didnt have amyloid in their brain? Their physician would take them off that drug and look for something else.

For decades, diagnosing Alzheimers has been a guessing game, based on looking at a persons symptoms rather than testing for definitive evidence of the brain disorder. A firm diagnosis was not possible until an autopsy was performed.

Now, a spinal tap or PET scan can detect the telltale amyloid deposits, and researchers are trying to develop a simple blood test that would do so. PET imaging can quantify the amount of amyloid and also show where it is in a persons brain.

But spinal taps are invasive, and PET scans cost $3,000 to $4,000 (U.S.) and are typically not covered by insurance. In 2013 the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) declined to cover the tests, citing insufficient evidence that they would make a difference for patients with a disease for which there is no cure and limited treatment available.

But CMS agreed to fund the bulk of the $100 million IDEAS study by reimbursing participants for their PET scans, and researchers hope positive results will convince them to cover it in the future.

Over 400 physicians enrolled their patients in the study, and they initially filled out forms describing how they would care for them based on their clinical symptoms. After seeing the PET imaging results, they changed their care plans for two-thirds of the patients in the study.

We thought we would be able to see about a 30 per cent change, but were getting a 66 per cent change, so its huge, Hendrix said. We see high percentages of people who are on a drug and didnt need to be on those drugs.

Also on Wednesday, the Alzheimers Association announced the launch of a $20 million two-year clinical trial to see if lifestyle changes can prevent cognitive decline.

Modelled after a larger 2014 study in Finland that showed positive results, The US POINTER study will work with 2,500 older adults at risk for cognitive decline. It will test whether two years of intervention that includes physical exercise, nutritional counselling, social and cognitive stimulation, and improved self-management will help cognitive function in participants 60 to 79 years old.

Similar studies are also underway in Singapore and Australia.

Research has shown that each of these factors contributes to cognitive health, but researchers believe that, as with heart disease, combating Alzheimers is likely to require a multi-pronged, or cocktail approach combining drugs and lifestyle changes.

We all hope for a day when this will be critically important, said Dr. Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, who wasnt involved with the IDEAS study.

For now, in addition to people who qualify for the IDEAS study, the Alzheimers Association and Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging say:

 Unusually young dementia patients, younger than 65, also might be candidates for a PET scan.

 The scans shouldnt be used as a screening tool for people without symptoms or who worry theyre at risk.

 Nor are they for people who can be diagnosed by standard means, or to determine disease severity.

With files from The Associated Press

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WASHINGTONThe Russian lawyer who met with U.S. President Donald Trumps eldest son during the 2016 election campaign said shes ready to testify before the U.S. Senate and clarify the situation behind this mass hysteria.

Donald Trump Jr. agreed to meet with Natalia Veselnitskaya in the expectation of receiving incriminating information about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his fathers White House campaign, according to emails Trump Jr. has publicly released. Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort also attended the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower.

The meeting raised new questions about the Trump campaigns possible ties to Moscow, which are being scrutinized by federal and congressional investigators. These questions have only intensified as the identities of other Russia-connected participants have become known.

Read the latest news on U.S. President Donald Trump

I am ready to clarify the situation behind the mass hysteria, but only through lawyers or testifying in the Senate, Veselnitskaya said in an interview with Kremlin-funded RT television broadcast Wednesday.

If the Senate wishes to hear the real story, I will be happy to speak up and share everything I wanted to tell Mr. Trump, she added. That appeared to be a reference to Veselnitskayas previous statement that the meeting with Trump Jr. focused on U.S.-Russian adoption policies and a U.S. sanctions law.

Veselnitskaya has denied working for the Russian government. She has not responded to repeated attempts by The Associated Press to reach her for comment.

Congressional investigators in both parties have said they want to hear from those involved in the meeting. The top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel, Virginias Mark Warner, said Wednesday afternoon that the panel hasnt yet invited Veselnitskaya to testify, but he wants to hear from her and others who attended.

Warner said its still being worked out whether some of the committees more high-profile witnesses, including Trump Jr. and Manafort, should testify publicly or privately. The Senate and House intelligence panels conduct most of their interviews in private, but occasionally hold open hearings.

Warner said that for Trump Jr., hes got no security clearances that I am aware of, so he should be able to testify in public.

Read more:

Thats politics! Trump says about sons meeting with Russian lawyer  though few politicians agree

Donald Trump takes to Twitter to defend son, says media are distorting democracy

Trump and Putin had a previously undisclosed hour-long meeting at the G20 summit in Germany

Trump Jr. and Manafort could also testify publicly in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is conducting a separate investigation into Russian meddling. The GOP chairman of that panel, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, is asking them both to testify and wants them to appear before Congresss August recess.

Grassley told Iowa reporters Wednesday that hes been talking to Trump Jr.s lawyer and I didnt get any pushback when suggesting he testify this week. But he said its kind of rushy to call him in so quickly and also Democrats had requested documents and emails that they wanted to see before the hearing.

Grassley had said he would subpoena the witnesses if necessary.

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing will review a law that oversees the registration of foreign agents. The panel has been investigating one of the participants at the Trump Jr. meeting, Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer Rinat Akhmetshin, as part of its probe into the law.

Grassley said it could be before the days out wed have a date set.

The top Democrat on the Judiciary panel, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, said this week that special counsel Robert Mueller has cleared Trump Jr. and Manafort for public testimony. Mueller is conducting the Department of Justices investigation and Grassley has said he wants to avoid conflicts.

The House Intelligence Committee is also probing the Russian meddling, and the top Democrat on that panel, California Rep. Adam Schiff, says the committee is contacting participants in the Trump Jr. meeting. Referencing Feinsteins comments about Muellers clearance, he said his committee may consider public hearings for particular witnesses but noted they rarely hold open hearings.

The House panel is reaching out to participants in the meeting with a request for testimony and documents, so that is very much in process at the moment, Schiff said.

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WASHINGTONYou probably heard about Donald Trumps covfefe tweet. Maybe the one where he declared himself honered to serve the American people, or the one where he alleged there was a tapp on his phones.

So the president of the United States isnt a great speller. Were going to give him a pass here. We all have our flaws.

Whats more notable is how many mistakes there are in the official communications of Trumps administration. Over Trumps first six months in office, his White House has produced a steady stream of spelling errors and identification errors in formal statements, comments to the media and promotional graphics.

Read more:The complete list of every false claim Donald Trump has made as president

Barack Obamas administration wasnt typo-free. His White House misspelled such names as Ronald Reagan and even First Lady Michelle Obama (they once forgot one of the Ls). But the sheer volume of Trump errors would be unusual even for a small-town mayor, let alone a president with an army of proofreaders at his disposal.

Well exclude errors by Trumps lawyer, who once declared him the predisent, and agencies like the departments of State and Education. Here is a running list of errors in official communications from the White House itself:

1. John Huntsman Jr. (Jon. Statement announcing Huntsmans appointment as ambassador to Russia, July 18)

2. Walter Schaub Jr. (Shaub, resigning director of the Office of Government Ethics. Statement to the New York Times criticizing Shaub, July 17)

3. Innacurately. (Inaccurately. Twitter video criticizing the accuracy of the Congressional Budget Office, July 12)

4. President Xi of the Republic of China. (Peoples Republic of China; the Republic of China is Taiwan. Official transcript from press office, July 8)

5. Malcom Turnbull. (Malcolm, prime minister of Australia. Trumps Instagram account, July 8)

6. And we are putting our minors back to work. (Miners. Video on Trumps Facebook page, June 23)

7. Protecting our boarders. (Borders. Statement to the Huffington Post, June 3)

8. President Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine. (The U.S. does not acknowledge Palestine; quickly corrected to President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. Daily schedule, May 22.)

9. Promote the possibility of lasting peach. (Lasting peace. Statement on goals for Trumps Middle East trip, May 22.)

10. Secretary of Commerce Steven Mnuchin. (The commerce secretary is Wilbur Ross; Mnuchin is the treasury secretary. Email from press office, April 26)

11. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. (Sergey. Tweet and Twitter image, May 11)

12. Secretary of Educatuon Betsy DeVos. (Secretary of Education. White House Snapchat feed on annual Easter Egg Roll, April 17)

13. White Hosue. (White House. White House web page for submitting Obamacare horror stories, March 13)

14. Dr. (Scott) Gottleib. (Gottlieb, commissioner of food and drugs. Statement on Gottliebs appointment, March 10)

15. President Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau launched the United States-Canada Council for Advancement of Women Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders?????. (Note the five question marks. Statement, March 10)

16. The Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Aijit Pai. (Ajit. Daily schedule, March 6)

17. American Sonoma. (American Samoa. List of attorneys general who met with Trump, February 28)

18. Our veterans have delvered for this nation. (Delivered. Graphic tweeted by White House account, February 28)

19. The signal most important subject their is. (Single, there. Press secretarys statement on Michael Flynn, February 13)

20. Columbia. (Colombia. Readout of phone call with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, February 13)

21. Attaker. (Attacker. List of terror attacks the media supposedly did not pay attention to, February 6)

22. Denmakr. (Denmark. List of terror attacks the media supposedly did not pay attention to, February 6)

23. San Bernadino. (San Bernardino. List of terror attacks the media supposedly did not pay attention to, February 6)

24. President of Australia. (Prime minister. Official list of actions Trump has taken to make America safe, February 4)

25. Secretary of Defense John Kelly.) (Secretary of Homeland Security. Statement on Trumps accomplishments, February 4)

26. Richard Tumka. (Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO. List of business and labour leaders participating in manufacturing initiative, January 27.)

27. Marilynn Hewson. (Marillyn Hewson, chief executive of Lockheed Martin. List of business and labour leaders participating in manufacturing initiative, January 27.)

28. Teresa May. (Theresa. Official schedule for the U.K. prime ministers visit to the U.S., January 27)

29. Priority enery. (Energy. White House website, January 24)

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WASHINGTONU.S. President Donald Trump has decided to end the CIAs covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.

The program was a central plank of a policy begun by the Obama administration in 2013 to put pressure on Assad to step aside, but even its backers have questioned its efficacy since Russia deployed forces in Syria two years later.

Officials said the phasing out of the secret program reflects Trumps interest in finding ways to work with Russia, which saw the anti-Assad program as an assault on its interests. The shuttering of the program is also an acknowledgment of Washingtons limited leverage and desire to remove Assad from power.

Read more:

UN envoy for Syria opens new round of talks to wind down countrys civil war

Rival rebel groups fight each other in embattled Idlib

Two Canadians captured in Mosul: reports

Just three months ago, after the United States accused Assad of using chemical weapons, Trump launched retaliatory airstrikes against a Syrian airbase. At the time, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, said that in no way do we see peace in that area with Assad at the head of the Syrian government.

Officials said Trump made the decision to scrap the CIA program nearly a month ago, after an Oval Office meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser H.R. McMaster ahead of a July 7 meeting in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Spokespeople for the National Security Council and the CIA declined to comment.

After the Trump-Putin meeting, the United States and Russia announced an agreement to back a new ceasefire in southwest Syria, along the Jordanian border, where many of the CIA-backed rebels have long operated. Trump described the limited ceasefire deal as one of the benefits of a constructive working relationship with Moscow.

The move to end the secret program to arm the anti-Assad rebels was not a condition of the ceasefire negotiations, which were already well underway, said U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the secret program.

Trumps dealings with Russia have been under heavy scrutiny because of the investigations into the Kremlins interference in the 2016 election. The decision on the CIA-backed rebels will be welcomed by Moscow, which focused its firepower on those fighters after it intervened in Syria in 2015.

Some current and former officials who support the program cast the move as a major concession.

This is a momentous decision, said a current official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a covert program. Putin won in Syria.

The decision will not affect a separate Pentagon-led effort to work with U.S.-backed Syrian rebels fighting Daesh, also known as ISIL or ISIS. And the CIA-backed rebels were part of the larger moderate opposition.

Some analysts said the decision was likely to empower more radical groups inside Syria and damage the credibility of the United States.

We are falling into a Russian trap, said Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, who focuses on the Syrian resistance. We are making the moderate resistance more and more vulnerable . . . We are really cutting them off at the neck.

Others said it was recognition of Assads entrenched position in Syria.

Its probably a nod to reality, said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama administration official and director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

U.S. intelligence officials say battlefield gains by rebels in 2015 prompted Russias direct military intervention on the side of the Assad regime. Some U.S. officials and their allies in the region urged president Barack Obama to respond by providing the rebels with advanced anti-aircraft weapons so they could better defend themselves. But Obama balked, citing concerns about the United States getting pulled into a conflict with Russia.

Senior U.S. officials said that the covert program would be phased out over a period of months. It is also possible that some of the support could be redirected to other missions, such as fighting Daesh or making sure that the rebels can still defend themselves from attacks.

This is a force that we cant afford to completely abandon, Goldenberg said. If they are ending the aid to the rebels altogether, then that is a huge strategic mistake.

U.S. officials said the decision had the backing of Jordan, where some of the rebels were trained, and appeared to be part of a larger Trump administration strategy to focus on negotiating limited ceasefire deals with the Russians.

Earlier this month, five days into the first ceasefire in southwest Syria, Trump indicated that another agreement was under discussion with Moscow. We are working on the second ceasefire in a very rough part of Syria, Trump said. If we get that and a few more, all of a sudden we are going to have no bullets being fired in Syria.

One big potential risk of shutting down the CIA program is that the United States may lose its ability to block other countries, such as Turkey and Persian Gulf allies, from funneling more sophisticated weapons  including man-portable air-defence systems, or MANPADS  to anti-Assad rebels, including more radical groups.

Toward the end of the Obama administration, some officials advocated ending the CIA program, arguing that the rebels would be ineffective without a major escalation in U.S. support. But the program still had the support of a majority of top Obama advisers, who argued that the United States couldnt abandon its allies on the ground and give up on the moderate opposition because of the damage that it would do to U.S. standing in the region.

Even those who were skeptical about the programs long-term value viewed it as a key bargaining chip that could be used to wring concessions from Moscow in negotiations over Syrias future.

People began thinking about ending the program, but it was not something youd do for free, said a former White House official. To give [the program] away without getting anything in return would be foolish.

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The Black Experience Project shows that multiculturalism is a lie. The promise of multiculturalism is that Canada accepts and embraces all cultures openly and equally. For Black people that has never been true.

According to the Black Experience Project data released on Wednesday, 53 per cent of the surveys 1,504 participants  who were asked about their daily experiences as Black people in the GTA  identify primarily as Black.

If, as weve been promised, were all supposed to be able to represent our different cultures, then why do a majority of Black-identified people from different backgrounds choose to identify as Black?

Its fair to note that some participants identified primarily by their nation or culture of origin.

I can also understand that it depends on who you ask. On a government form, I self-identify as Black; its a strategy for ensuring the state collects data that is relevant to Black life. But when Im hanging out with Black people of a variety of backgrounds, I identify as African. Further still, when Im with African people, I identify as Kenyan.

Identity is a complicated, varied and wonderful thing.

Dont get it twisted though: Blackness is a political category.

Blackness has existed in Canada mainly as a political tool within white supremacy: initially, it allowed colonizers to keep Black people as slaves, then, following the abolition of slavery, it was a way of preventing Black people from accessing social and economic rights.

Where it began as tool to oppress Black peoples, it has evolved into a means for Black people to organize and advocate for themselves. If you contend with Blackness as a political identity then you can see why, according to the Black Experience Report, Black people in Toronto are more likely than average to engage with politics by voting or through activism. The language of politics and policy has defined the limits of our existence. We always have one eye open.

For its part, multiculturalism was introduced in 1971 and became official government policy in 1988. It is not by coincidence that Trudeaus 1969 White Paper called for Indigenous people(s) to be stripped of their nationhood and assimilated into communities of culture in the same way that the Italian, Irish and Portuguese have been.

These groups were once considered races too. They were also once non-white.

By nature of being Black, Black people have not been absorbed into whiteness. Nor should we aim to be. The multiculturalism project is simply white supremacy with a feel-good name.

The language of multiculturalism treats the political boundaries that have suppressed Black folks abilities and ambitions as little more than culture. Seen this way, Black peoples overrepresentation in the criminal justice can be explained away as cultural failings. With a nod at languages and traditions, the policy effectively erases a long history of anti-Blackness and discrimination in the police, courts and justice system. Instead, it is easier to point at our music, our clothes and our language as the problem.

Recent data shows the problem isnt us.

Although Black creators are a major part of the citys cultural landscape, a study from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education found that students in the citys art high schools are largely white. Another report concluded that Black students were twice as likely to be streamed away from academic courses.

While Black people are as likely as non-Black people to have a post-secondary education, we are half as likely to have university degrees.

In the schools that I attended, all the guidance counsellors were white; many advised me to aim lower than I wanted to as if I required their permission to achieve. Where I was lucky in having parents who were themselves educators and understood anti-Blackness, many others havent been so lucky.

While we are under-represented as teachers and leaders, we are overrepresented in jails and prison. Despite using marijuana at the same rates as white people, Black people who use drugs are more likely to be arrested and detained for pot possession. Its a disparity born entirely of race. Its not the only one.

The problem sits in the institutions  work, school, the state  that have created the stereotypes that they then insist Black people adhere to. It is in a national policy that promises to embrace diversity while doing nothing to address a long history of punishing Black people.

Vicky Mochama is a co-host of the podcast, Safe Space. Her column appears every second Thursday. She also writes a tri-weekly column for Metro News that mixes politics, news and humour.

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Re: West African denied release again, July 12

West African denied release again, July 12

I would like to clarify some points regarding the article on the Immigration and Refugee Board refusing to release four-year detainee Ebrahim Toure.

Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada hearings, including detention review hearings, are conducted in accordance with the law, including the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. All members make decisions based on the evidence and arguments presented by both parties at the hearing: the person concerned, and their counsel if represented, and a Canada Border Service Agency Hearings Officer appearing on behalf of the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness.

It is important to note that the statistical analysis referred to in the article does not ensure a comparison of like cases and, as a result, the comparison of release rates and the resulting conclusions are flawed.

Detention review decisions involve the analysis of many factors, including the grounds for detention, the level of risk posed by the person concerned, presence of counsel, presence of an alternative to detention, co-operation from the person concerned, country of citizenship involved, etc.

Therefore, release rates will invariably vary from one decision maker to another, as they deal with individual and different types of cases.

IRB hearings are public. The reasons and rationale for detention review decisions are clearly outlined and available upon request. Parties appearing before the IRB can apply to seek leave for judicial review at the Federal Court if they consider the decision unreasonable.

Mario Dion, chairperson, Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada

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Re: Quebec town narrowly votes against Muslim cemetery, June 17.

Quebec town narrowly votes against Muslim cemetery, June 17.

As a Canadian, I find it truly disheartening that three bigots in an insignificant town in rural Quebec could defeat the rights of a minority religious community to a cemetery of their own (voting 19-16 in a referendum against a proposed Muslim cemetery in St-Appollinaire). If this is symptomatic of Quebecers sentiments, then my Canada no longer includes Quebec.

Ron Brown, Toronto

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Lifestyle cable giants Discovery Communications Inc. (DISCA) - Get Free Report and Scripps Networks Interactive Inc. (SNI) are in talks to combine, the Wall Street Journal is reporting according to sources familiar with the matter, reviving talks of a merger between the two that fizzled in 2013.

Shares of both companies rose in after-hours trading on the news, which broke shortly after 6:30 p.m. ET. Discovery jumped more than 9% to $28.50 and Scripps shot up 13% to $76. The Journal didn't report any specifics, but noted that it's possible the deal could fall apart or that another bidder for Scripps could emerge.

A merger between the competing cable companies would bring channels including Scripps' Food Network, HGTV and Travel Channel and Discovery's Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet and OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network under one roof, as cable networks look to compete with a stream of programming from providers like Netflix Inc. (NFLX) - Get Free Report and Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) - Get Free Report .

This isn't the first time Discovery has considered an acquisition of Scripps. In December 2013, Variety reported that the Silver Spring, Md., company had discussed acquiring Scripps during a board meeting. But the deal never came together.

At the time, S&P Global Ratings had threatened to reconsider Discovery's rating if it proceeded with the acquisition. Currently, Discovery is rated an investment grade (barely) BBB- with a stable outlook by S&P, which notes the company's significant international presence and above-average domestic margins, as well as pressure from rising programming costs and shifts in the cable market. Revenue last year was $6.5 billion.

Knoxville, Tenn., headquartered Scripps Network, which is a subsidiary of E.W. Scripps Co., is rated a notch higher than Discovery, at BBB but was downgraded several notches in March following an announcement that the company would acquire a majority stake in Polish media company TVN S.A. Scripps posted $3.4 billion in revenue in 2016.

A spokesman for Scripps declined to comment on the report. Discovery also declined to comment.
It's no fun being a CFO when things go badly. It's even less fun when you work for a company that shrouds itself in secrecy; you can't explain what went wrong.

So when Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) - Get Free Report CFO Martin Chavez hosted a conference call on Tuesday to field questions about the firm's second-straight quarter of lousy trading performance, it was never going to be fun.

Over the course of questions that stretched out for more than an hour, 11 analysts from Wall Street's biggest brokerage firms -- coincidentally also Goldman's competitors -- needled Chavez with questions about the New York-based firm's 40% plunge in revenue from the fixed-income business, which includes bond, commodities and currency trading.

The analysts wanted to know why Goldman had so markedly underperformed rivals like JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) - Get Free Report , Citigroup Inc. (C) - Get Free Report and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) - Get Free Report in fixed-income trading. And they weren't content with Goldman's scant explanation: that markets were subdued.

After back-to-back flubs in the fixed-income division, analysts are expressing growing skepticism of Goldman's historic prowess in trading -- and for good reason. Not only is the division Goldman's biggest single revenue generator, representing almost 20% of the firmwide total, it's also the least understood.

For years, Goldman has been loath to give investors and competitors any deep glimpses into its sprawling fixed-income business, which encompasses dozens of separate trading desks that wield big bets every day in fast-moving markets for U.S. Treasuries, corporate bonds, interest-rate derivatives, exchange rates, gold futures and crude-oil cargoes.

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On a standalone basis, the division produces annual revenue of $8 billion -- on par with the entirety of brokerage firm Charles Schwab Corp. (SCHW) - Get Free Report Yet typically Goldman condenses its fixed-income division's results into a few pat sentences in a press release.

"It's not only the opacity of the press release but the opacity of the conference call," Ken Leon, an investment-banking analyst at CFRA Research, said in an interview. "They continue to have a Goldman approach to investor relations."

Goldman's stock price fell 2.6% Tuesday following the release of the dismal trading results, even though the firm's stock-trading and debt-underwriting units outperformed rivals; overall profit exceeded most analysts' forecasts.

There's a reason to care about the fixed-income division in particular. After all, some of the earliest signs of the 2008 financial crisis came when the once-thriving (and now-defunct) Wall Street firms Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers began to crack under the strain of mortgage-bond losses.

Also, Goldman, unlike most of its big-bank rivals, lacks consumer-banking branches, credit-card businesses and big commercial-lending operations that could steady the overall franchise if markets suddenly turned volatile. So Goldman can't afford to mess up on trading.

Which brings us to Chavez. On Tuesday's conference call, he answered analysts' questions with introductory phrases like "Great question" (five times) and "I would say" (seven times). Such time-stallers only served as painful reminders of how Chavez avoided answering the questions directly.

The CFO went out of his way to mention that Goldman had advised Swiss herbicide-maker Syngenta on its $43 billion sale to ChemChina. But nobody cared. The analysts just wanted to know what went wrong with trading.

At least one hard fact emerged from the conference call: Goldman's commodity-trading business had its worst performance in the 73 quarters since Goldman converted from a private partnership into a publicly traded company. Yet when UBS analyst Brennan Hawken asked if the commodities unit had lost money in the quarter, Chavez declined to say.

"There's a lot of reasons for that, but really we just think of it as a business that serves the clients holistically," Chavez said.

After that, it was mostly broad-stroke answers. Volatility was low, client activity was low, the market-making environment was difficult. That's all true; rivals reported a similar experience during the quarter. Yet JPMorgan managed a fixed-income trading decline of just 19%. Bank of America's fell 14%, Citigroup's slid 6.3% and Morgan Stanley's (MS) - Get Free Report just 4%.

By contrast, witness the optimism from Marianne Lake, JPMorgan's CFO, during her firm's own conference call: "We're exceptionally happy with the franchise we have and our competitive positioning, the completeness of the platform and the way our clients respond to the products we offer," she said.

At one point during the Goldman call, Chavez acknowledged that the firm didn't navigate the commodities markets very well. Upon hearing that, RBC analyst Gerard Cassidy asked how much of the downturn was due to low customer activity and how much was Goldman's fault.

"While it would be maybe a wonderful, utopian thing to be able to separate the two and say one is client activity and one is navigating the markets, they're really interwoven," Chavez said.

Clears things up.

To be fair, Goldman's rivals aren't much more forthcoming about their trading results.

"It's a good question," Chavez said when asked why Goldman's trading results were so much worse. "We don't have transparency into our competitors' fixed-income, commodities and currencies businesses, but I'll note that historically we've had strength in derivatives."

That remark led to a question from Nomura's Steven Chubak, who cited a U.S. government-commissioned report on the 2008 financial crisis, published in 2011, as stating that Goldman's fixed-income business got 50% of its revenue from derivatives (as opposed to actual bonds or physical commodities).

Not belaboring the fact that a six-year-old report (about a nine-year-old event) was the sole source of such a statistic, Chubak wanted to know if the ratio still held.

"Great question," Chavez replied. "We don't really break out the business in that particular way."

He acknowledged that senior executives and business managers have begun to analyze what Goldman might need to change in the trading division. Such a review is especially important now that hedge funds, ranking among Goldman's biggest trading partners, are in a slump.

Of course it's possible that Goldman's fixed-income division is so gigantic, technical and complex that analysts might not comprehend it all even if specifics were provided. And investors might not care anyway -- unless the slump continues.

"In bad times people jump all over you for everything," Dick Bove, a bank analyst at Rafferty Capital Markets in Lutz, Florida, said in an interview. "I personally don't really care about knowing what they're doing in municipal bonds versus Treasuries versus corporate bonds. What I want to see is numbers that are up."

More of What's Trending on TheStreet:
Shares of Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. (VRTX) - Get Free Report jumped 26.4% to $167.10 in premarket trading on Wednesday, July 19, after the Boston firm on Tuesday unveiled positive data from its Phase 1 and Phase 2 studies of three different triple combination regimens in people with cystic fibrosis.

"These safety and efficacy data are clear and compelling, indicating significant potential benefit for people with CF from each of these three different triple combination regimens," said Vertex Chief Medical Officer Jeffrey Chodakewitz in a statement.

"We will be collecting and evaluating additional data from these and other studies and will make a decision on which regimen(s) to take forward into pivotal program(s), which we expect to begin in the first half of 2018," he added.

Other biotech stock movers include FibroGen Inc. (FGEN) - Get Free Report , up 10.7% to $38.35. Six Wall Street analysts have a buy rating on the company, which in June was granted orphan drug status by the Food and Drug Administration for pamrevlumab, its treatment of pancreatic cancer. The drug is currently in phase 2 testing

Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc. (INO) - Get Free Report , down 7% to $7.28 after a run-up in the shares late last week. The company, which is, developing immunotherapies to combat cancer and infectious diseases, announced plans for a $75 million stock offering on Tuesday, July 18. Inovio expects to grant its underwriters an option to purchase up to an additional $11.25 million worth of shares. A number of analysts have a positive outlook on the shares. Aegis, which issued a note to investors Tuesday, has a $14 price target. HC Wainwright set a $13 target in a June 3rd buy rating.

-- Amanda Schiavo contributed to this article

Worried about how to finance your golden years? Register here to watch a free webinar in which TheStreet's Jim Cramer talks with Ken Fisher, founder of Fisher Investments, about the market trends shaping retirement planning today.

More of What's Trending on TheStreet:
Humana Inc., together with its subsidiaries, operates as a health and well-being company in the United States. It operates through three segments: Retail, Group and Specialty, and Healthcare Services. The company offers medical and supplemental benefit plans to individuals. It also has a contract with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to administer the Limited Income Newly Eligible Transition prescription drug plan program; and contracts with various states to provide Medicaid, dual eligible, and long-term support services benefits. In addition, the company provides commercial fully insured medical and specialty health insurance benefits comprising dental, vision, and other supplemental health benefits; and administrative services only products to individuals and employer groups, as well as military services, such as TRICARE T2017 East Region contract. Further, it offers pharmacy solutions, provider services, and home solutions services, such as home health and other services to its health plan members, as well as to third parties. As of December 31, 2021, the company had approximately 17 million members in medical benefit plans, as well as approximately 5 million members in specialty products. Humana Inc. was founded in 1961 and is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky.
Target Corporation has a long history dating back to 1902. The company began as Goodfellows Dry Goods, operated by George Dalton, and later changed its name via a progression of mergers and acquisitions. The first Target store was opened in Roseville, Minnesota in 1962 as the discount division of the parent company. The idea was discount or low-priced items could still be fashionable and desirable. After meeting great success in the home territory, the concept went public in the late 1960s was later expanded on a national level during the 1980s. Target Corporation is now the 7th largest retailer in the US and is projected to bring in more than $113 billion in revenue for fiscal 2023.

The department stores were shed in 2004 so today Target operates as a general merchandise retailer that serves on-trend items at discounted prices. It is known as a big box retailer and is a member of the S&P 500. The company listed about 2,000 stores in mid-2022 and had plans for growth. The company offers an assortment of everyday, household, and food goods in a bright and cheery atmosphere. It has set itself apart from other low-priced retailers as the chic choice for savvy shoppers. The companys stated purpose is to help families discover the joy of everyday life and it does so by offering quality products that families can afford.

The company sells its products through a chain of stores as well as eCommerce. eCommerce is about 20% of Targets total revenue and was boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Services like delivery, same-day pickup, and access to thousands of necessary and discretionary items are also driving adoption. Target also offers amenities like cafes and opticians, and it hosts Starbucks inside the stores.

Target Corporation has paid and increased its dividend for more than 5 decades. The company issued its 53rd consecutive distribution increase in calendar 2022 bringing the total annual payout to $4.32. In late October 2022, the payout was worth 2.7% in yield and came with a 40% payout ratio and a 9% distribution compound annual growth rate.

Target is a leader in ESG and giving back to the community. Among its many endeavors is to return 5% of its profits to community charities as well as to inspire its employees to volunteer. Volunteers donate more than 1 million man-hours per year.
The following companies are subsidiares of Molina Healthcare: Aetna & Humana - Medicare Advantage, Affinity Health Plan, AmericanWork Inc., Better Health Network, Camelot Care Centers Inc, Children's Behavioral Health Inc., Choices Group Inc., College Community Services, Dockside Services Inc, Family Preservation Services Inc., Family Preservation Services of Florida Inc., Family Preservation Services of North Carolina Inc., Family Preservation Services of Washington D.C. Inc., Family Preservation Services of West Virginia Inc., Florida NetPASS LLC, Hclb Inc., Magellan Complete Care, Maple Star Nevada Inc., Maple Star Oregon Inc., Mercy CarePlus, Molina Clinical Services LLC, Molina Healthcare Data Center Inc., Molina Healthcare of Arizona Inc., Molina Healthcare of California, Molina Healthcare of Florida Inc., Molina Healthcare of Georgia Inc., Molina Healthcare of Illinois Inc., Molina Healthcare of Iowa Inc., Molina Healthcare of Louisiana Inc., Molina Healthcare of Maryland Inc., Molina Healthcare of Michigan Inc., Molina Healthcare of Mississippi Inc., Molina Healthcare of Nevada Inc., Molina Healthcare of New Mexico Inc., Molina Healthcare of New York Inc., Molina Healthcare of North Carolina Inc., Molina Healthcare of Ohio Inc., Molina Healthcare of Oklahoma Inc., Molina Healthcare of Pennsylvania Inc., Molina Healthcare of Puerto Rico Inc., Molina Healthcare of South Carolina LLC, Molina Healthcare of Texas Inc., Molina Healthcare of Texas Insurance Company, Molina Healthcare of Utah Inc., Molina Healthcare of Virginia Inc., Molina Healthcare of Washington Inc., Molina Healthcare of Wisconsin Inc., Molina Holdings Corporation, Molina Hospital Management LLC, Molina Information Systems LLC dba Molina Medicaid Solutions, Molina Medical Management Inc., Molina Pathways LLC, Molina Pathways of Texas Inc., Molina Youth Academy, NextLevel Health Illinois, Pathways Community Corrections Inc., Pathways Community Services LLC, Pathways Community Support of Texas Inc., Pathways Health and Community Support LLC, Pathways Human Services LLC., Pathways of Arizona Inc., Pathways of Delaware Inc., Pathways of Idaho LLC, Pathways of Maine Inc., Pathways of Massachusetts LLC, Pathways of Oklahoma Inc., Pathways of Washington Inc., Providence Community Services, Providence Human Services, Raystown Developmental Services Inc., The Game of Work LLC, The RedCo Group Inc., Total Care Medicaid plan, Transitional Family Services Inc., Unisys -Health Information Management, and YourCare Health Plan.

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Baxter International Inc., through its subsidiaries, develops and provides a portfolio of healthcare products worldwide. The company offers peritoneal dialysis and hemodialysis, and additional dialysis therapies and services; intravenous therapies, infusion pumps, administration sets, and drug reconstitution devices; remixed and oncology drug platforms, inhaled anesthesia and critical care products and pharmacy compounding services; parenteral nutrition therapies and related products; biological products and medical devices used in surgical procedures for hemostasis, tissue sealing and adhesion prevention; and continuous renal replacement therapies and other organ support therapies focused in the intensive care unit. It also provides connected care solutions, including devices, software, communications, and integration technologies; integrated patient monitoring and diagnostic technologies to help diagnose, treat, and manage a various illness and diseases, including respiratory therapy, cardiology, vision screening, and physical assessment; surgical video technologies, tables, lights, pendants, precision positioning devices and other accessories. In addition, the company offers contracted services to various pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies. Its products are used in hospitals, kidney dialysis centers, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, doctors' offices, and patients at home under physician supervision. The company sells its products through direct sales force, as well as through independent distributors, drug wholesalers, and specialty pharmacy or other alternate site providers in approximately 100 countries. It has an agreement with Celerity Pharmaceutical, LLC to develop acute care generic injectable premix and oncolytic molecules. Baxter International Inc. was incorporated in 1931 and is headquartered in Deerfield, Illinois.
BayWa Aktiengesellschaft provides wholesale, retail, logistics, and support and consultancy services in Germany and internationally. The company's Renewable Energies segment plans, manages, and constructs wind farms and solar park. It is also involved in the power production activities. Its Energy segment supplies heating oil, fuels, and lubricants, as well as wood pellets and heating solutions. This segment also offers solutions in electromobility, liquified natural gas, and digital mobility fields. The company's Cefetra Group segment trades in grains and oilseeds, starch products, rice and legumes, and organic products. Its Global Produce segment sells dessert pome fruits for wholesalers and retailers in the food industry; and supplies organic pome fruits. It also collects, sorts, stores, packages, and provides services for fruit customers. The company's Agri Trade & Service segment collects, sells, and services value chain stages for farms, as well as supplies seeds, fertilizers, crop protection products, and feedstuffs to farmers. Its Agricultural Equipment segment offers machinery, equipment, and systems for agriculture areas. It offers tractors, combine harvesters, versatile municipal vehicles, road sweeping vehicles, and mobile systems, as well as forklift trucks; wood splitting and chipping machinery, forest milling cutters and mulchers, cable winches, and road and path construction machinery; chainsaws and brush cutters; and maintenance and repair services for machinery and equipment. The company's Building Materials segment trades in building materials for construction companies, tradesmen, commercial enterprises, and municipalities, as well as private developers and homeowners. Its Innovation & Digitalisation segment develops and markets NEXT Farming OFFICE and NEXT Farming LIVE software solutions; and offers analysis and advisory services, as well as hardware components. The company was founded in 1923 and is headquartered in Munich, Germany.
Occidental Petroleum Corporation is an international oil and gas giant founded in 1920 to explore for oil in California. The company made its name in the early 1960safter discovering the Lathrop Gas Field in Lathrop, California. The company expanded into chemicals manufacturing in 1968 and then in 1972 it became a pioneer in the quest to extract oil from shale. In 1993, the company made a historic move by exiting its coal operations, and then it did so again when it embraced a lower carbon future.

The company worked to realign its goals with a carbon-free future in 2021. After extensive review, new carbon emission targets were laid out along with a plan that the Transition Pathway Initiative recognized as being 1 of 3 coming from major oil companies that could realistically result in net-zero emissions by 2050. Since then the company has laid interim goals that include net zero from operations and energy by 2040 and no routine flaring by 2030.

Today, Occidental Petroleum is an integrated energy company with operations in the US, the Middle East, Africa, and Columbia along with some other smaller operations. The company operates a network of best-in-class production, delivery, and storage facilities with operations centered in the US. On a net basis, the companys US operations accounted for more than 75% of the total in 2022 with 19% from Middle East operations and the remainder from Columbia and elsewhere.

The company engages in the oil & gas business as an explorer, producer, and mid-stream infrastructure operator. The company operates through three segments that include Oil and Gas, Chemicals, and Midstream & Marketing.

The oil and gas segment explores for oil, develops new fields, and produces hydrocarbon liquids, gasses, and condensates. The chemicals segment manufactures a range of chemicals including chlorine, potassium chemicals, and vinyl. The midstream segment transports, stores, and markets hydrocarbons. It is the 6th largest oil and gas producer in the US by market cap. The company attained the position after its acquisition of Anadarko Petroleum in 2019, the 4th largest oil and gas acquisition at the time.

Berkshire Hathaway became Occidental Petroleums largest shareholder in mid-2022. The firm had purchased more than 26% of the shares as of 10/14/2022 and had regulatory approval to purchase up to 50% of the company in total.
Core Laboratories N.V. provides reservoir description and production enhancement services and products to the oil and gas industry in the United States, Canada, and internationally. It operates through Reservoir Description and Production Enhancement segments. The Reservoir Description segment includes the characterization of petroleum reservoir rock, reservoir fluid, and gas samples to enhance production and improve recovery of oil and gas from its clients' reservoirs. It offers laboratory-based analytical and field services to characterize properties of crude oil and oil delivered products; and proprietary and joint industry studies. The Production Enhancement segment provides services and products relating to reservoir well completions, perforations, stimulations, and production. It offers integrated diagnostic services to evaluate and monitor the effectiveness of well completions and to develop solutions to improve the effectiveness of enhanced oil recovery projects. In addition, the company markets and sells its products through a combination of sales representatives, technical seminars, trade shows, and print advertising, as well as through distributors. It operates approximately in 50 countries. The company was founded in 1936 and is based in Amstelveen, the Netherlands.
Boston Scientific Corporation develops, manufactures, and markets medical devices for use in various interventional medical specialties worldwide. It operates through three segments: MedSurg, Rhythm and Neuro, and Cardiovascular. The company offers devices to diagnose and treat gastrointestinal and pulmonary conditions; devices to treat various urological and pelvic conditions; implantable cardioverter and implantable cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators; pacemakers and implantable cardiac resynchronization therapy pacemakers; and remote patient management systems. It also provides medical technologies to diagnose and treat rate and rhythm disorders of the heart comprising 3-D cardiac mapping and navigation solutions, ablation catheters, diagnostic catheters, mapping catheters, intracardiac ultrasound catheters, delivery sheaths, and other accessories; spinal cord stimulator systems for the management of chronic pain; indirect decompression systems; and deep brain stimulation systems. In addition, the company offers interventional cardiology products, including drug-eluting coronary stent systems used in the treatment of coronary artery disease; percutaneous coronary interventions products to treat atherosclerosis; intravascular catheter-directed ultrasound imaging catheters, fractional flow reserve devices, and systems for use in coronary arteries and heart chambers, as well as various peripheral vessels; and structural heart therapies. Further, it provides stents, balloon catheters, wires, and atherectomy systems to treat arterial diseases; thrombectomy and acoustic pulse thrombolysis systems, wires, and stents to treat venous diseases; and peripheral embolization devices, radioactive microspheres, ablation systems, cryotherapy ablation systems, and micro and drainage catheters to treat cancer. The company was incorporated in 1979 and is headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts.
Royal Bank of Canada operates as a diversified financial service company worldwide. The company's Personal & Commercial Banking segment offers checking and savings accounts, home equity financing, personal lending, private banking, indirect lending, including auto financing, mutual funds and self-directed brokerage accounts, guaranteed investment certificates, credit cards, and payment products and solutions; and lending, leasing, deposit, investment, foreign exchange, cash management, auto dealer financing, trade products, and services to small and medium-sized commercial businesses. This segment offers financial products and services through branches, automated teller machines, and mobile sales network. Its Wealth Management segment provides a suite of advice-based solutions and strategies to high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals, and institutional clients. The company's Insurance segment offers life, health, home, auto, travel, wealth, annuities, and reinsurance advice and solutions; and business insurance services to individual, business, and group clients through its advice centers, RBC insurance stores, and mobile advisors; digital, mobile, and social platforms; independent brokers; and travel partners. Its Investor & Treasury Services segment provides asset servicing, custody, payments, and treasury services to financial and other investors; and fund and investment administration, shareholder, private capital, performance measurement and compliance monitoring, distribution, transaction banking, cash and liquidity management, foreign exchange, and global securities finance services. The company's Capital Markets segment offers corporate and investment banking, as well as equity and debt origination, distribution, advisory services, sale, and trading services for corporations, institutional investors, asset managers, private equity firms, and governments. The company was founded in 1864 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada.
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Here are the best options for upgrading your bike with an e-bike conversion kit.

But no electric bike is as cheap as the bike you already own. If youre trying to reduce your carbon footprint , live in a small space, or practicing minimalism , repurposing what you already have can be a win-win-win decision. So, if you love your current ride but want to add some juice for getting uphill or for powering your cargo bike when youre carrying a heavy load, you can, thanks to electric bike converter kits. To electrify your bike, you need a battery, sensors, controls, and a motorized wheel or a drive unit.

E-bikes are easier on the environment than cars . Theyre also easier to pedal than a standard person-powered two-wheeler. You get as much exercise riding an E-bike as you do a traditional bike. Thanks to improved technology and more people interested in alternative transit methods, E-bikes are also becoming more availableand more affordable.

Best Overall: BAFANG BBS02B 48V 500W Ebike Conversion Kit Courtesy of Amazon View On Amazon Since 2003, Bafang has been a leader in manufacturing e-mobility components and complete e-drive systems. Its products offer outstanding performance and reliability, and the BBS02B conversion kit is no exception, making it our top overall choice. This mid-drive motor kit is versatile and compatible with road, commuter, and mountain bicycles. All you need is a bike with a 68-73 millimeter bottom bracket and the battery of your choice. Installation is relatively easy, and the battery is included. Once the kit is installed, youll be ready to tackle any hill. Although several different conversion kits are available online from Bafang, those with more than 750 watts of power will be considered motorcycles in the United States.

Best Budget: BAFANG E-bike Front Hub Motor 48V 500W Bafang Brushless Gear 20/26/27.5/700C inch Electric Bicycle Conversion Kits Courtesy of BAFANG View On Amazon View On Aliexpress.com This front-wheel E-bike conversion kit is easy to set up and easy on your wallet. Electrify your bike in one hour by following the installation video and manual. Dont forget to choose the correct wheel size! After setup is complete, ride around the town with pedal assist or switch to E-bike mode for longer trips. Commuters, long-distance trekkers, and mountain bikers can cruise up to 24 miles per hour. The battery is not included.

Best for Commuting: Swytch Universal eBike Conversion Kit Courtesy of Swytch View On Swytchbike.com It's an Easy Swytch to Turn Your Bike Into an E-Bike Daily riders will love this easy-to-install, lightweight e-bike conversion kit. It is compatible with most mountain, road, hybrid, and step-through bikes, and disc brakes. Its as easy to install as swapping out your front tire. The controller and battery are combined into a 34.2-Volt power pack, which is included in the kit and mounts to the handlebars. That makes it easy to remove and keeps thieves at bay, but our tester did miss having the use of a handle bar basket. The battery pack is fitted with indicator lights that tell you how much juice remains and what assist mode youre in. Once the system is set up correctly, youll be able to top out at 15-25 mph. What Testers Say "In general, I love it. It makes my ride easier without feeling like Im riding a giant bulky e-bike. Its got a phenomenal amount of power for such a little machine and seems like it has a good battery life too." ~ Treehugger Tester

Best Premium: Ebikeling Waterproof Ebike Conversion Kit 36V 500W 700C Geared Electric Bike Kit Courtesy of Ebikeling View On Amazon View On Ebikeling.com Do you want to go farther or faster? You can do both with this setup from Ebikeling, with its 500-watt motor. Ebikeling makes it easy to buy different compatible batteries and other accessories in an a-la-cart way. There are seven different batteries that come in different shapes (bottle, triangle, rectangular), so that you can pick the one that suits your bike and needs best. The double-walled rim and motor are ready to install right out of the boxjust swap them out for your original bike tire. An LCD screen is included to help you stay within your towns speed limit. You can choose between a front or rear mount, as well as a thumb or half-twist throttle.

Most Powerful: AW 26"x1.75" Rear Wheel 48V 1000W Electric Bicycle Motor Kit Courtesy of Amazon View On Amazon Thanks to a 48-volt, 1000-watt battery, the AW wheel E-bike conversion kit satisfies anyone with the need for speed. A thumb throttle makes speed control simple. This kit is available as either a front wheel or back wheel conversion option. It fits any 26-inch bike frame with a 3.9 inch front dropout spacing (for a front wheel conversion) or 5.3 inch rear dropout spacing (for a back wheel conversion). The rear wheel kit weighs 24.7 pounds, the front wheel kit weighs 23.5 pounds. The aluminum frame offers durability and stability, which is essential when youre rolling at top speeds of 28 miles per hour. Hand brakes turn the motor off automatically to both improve safety and conserve battery power.
When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests. You can find out more about our use, change your default settings, and withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future by visiting Cookies Settings, which can also be found in the footer of the site.
- Catholic Bishop Cornelius Korir has issued a strong warning to President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto

- The bishop warned the two leaders to stop attacking the judiciary over the ballot printing court case

- This was after Uhuru and Ruto accused the judiciary of working in cahoots with NASA to sabotage the General election

Bishop Cornelius Korir of Eldoret Catholic diocese has sent a strong warning to President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto just days to the election.

READ ALSO: Ballot papers arrive in Kenya at night under tight security, but something is missing (Photos)

Speaking on Tuesday, July 18 during a press briefing, Korir asked the two leaders to stop attacking the judiciary in public.

He urged Uhuru and Ruto to use proper channels to air out their grievances instead of pointing fingers at the judiciary.

READ ALSO: Jubilee youths chanting pro-NASA slogans in Jubilee rally (video)

READ ALSO: Twice as tough: Matiang'i sends new ripples throughout the Education sector with new directive

The bishop said the leaders recent remarks over judiciary only show the public that the courts aren't working.

"They had said they will respect the institutions of the country, then they should respect the courts, let them appeal but not attack in public," said Korir.

READ ALSO: Has the West abandoned Raila Odinga and embraced Uhuru Kenyatta?

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Korir's remarks comes just days after Uhuru said he was disappointed and tired of the Judiciary, which he accused of attempting to sabotage the General Election, with the help of NASA.

Uhuru made the remarks barely two days after the High Court stopped the printing of the presidential ballot papers by Al Ghurair, a Dubai-based printing company.

Have something to add to this article or suggestions? Send to news@tuko.co.ke

What will Gatundu residents do if Uhuru Kenyatta loses in the August polls? They speak;

Source: TUKO.co.ke
- IEBC has won a case against NASA over the Intergrated Elections Management Systems

- NASA had wanted the polls postponed because IEBC has not installed a backup to their electronic systems incase voter identification and relaying of results fails

- IEBC, however, claimed they have systems in place

The Independent and Electoral Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has won another case against the National Super Alliance (NASA).

READ ALSO: NASA lawyer calls for the postponing of elections in case against IEBC

NASA through it's lawyer Paul Mwangi had called for the postponing of the August 8 GEneral election by hours or days over back up of electronic system.

The opposition alliance claimed the commission has no back up system in place in case the electronic system fails.

READ ALSO: DP Ruto goes hard on Raila after accusing Matiang'i of plan to rig election

READ ALSO: Outrage as Raila pays Kibra residents a glowing tribute 19 days to the poll

The party argued that IEBC has not put regulations in place to enable it to have a backup system that is not manual.

On Wednesday July 19, IEBC won the case on the Intergrated Elections Management Systems.

The court rule against NASA stating the commission had set standards for devices before the procurement process.

READ ALSO: Two men who stripped girl on a Githurai Matatu sentenced to hang

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Through its lawyers, Patrick Lumumba and Paul Nyamondi, IEBC argued that the system was in place to accommodate any failure to the system.

Jubilee Party was also opposed to the case saying an electronic system without any manual backup would only cause voter suppression.

General Nkaissery's final journey;

Source: TUKO.co.ke
-Musalia Mudavadi and Moses Wetangula are battling for the control of western region votes.

-Wetangula is said to be taking advantage of Mudavadis commitment to Raila Odingas presidential campaigns to frequently sneak out and popularize his Ford Kenya party in western.

-On Tuesday, July 18, the two leaders kept off the presidential campaigns to camp in the region and popularize their respective parties.

Serious supremacy battles have rocked the NASA coalition, derailing the partys countrywide hunt for votes as elections draw closer..

While the battle between Ford Kenya leader Moses Wetangula and ANCs Musalia Mudavadi has been an open secret for a while now, the duo have now engaged higher gears in the fight to control the western region. ODM leaders have also been sucked into the prizefight as the party has key candidates in the region.

Wetangula, who is defending his Bungoma senatorial seat, is said to be the chief antagonist as he seeks to ensure Ford Kenya trounces other NASA affiliate parties in the region. Only this week, ODM deputy party leader Wycliffe Oparanya accused him of forcing ODM candidates to step down for Ford Kenya party members in western.

NASA leaders during the unveiling of their alliance. PHOTO:Facebook.com/NASA light

READ ALSO: Uhuru shuts down Raila with job offer following attacks on Matiang'i

It has now emerged that he has been taking advantage of Mudavadis absence in the region to popularize his own party.

Apparently, Mudavadi, who is NASAs chief campaign manager, has been focusing on campaigning for Raila Odinga presidential bid across the country. Wetangula, as a principal, is also expected to be a permanent figure in the NASA campaigns.

ANC party leader Musalia Mudavadi enjoting a moment with NASA leader Raila Odinga in the past. PHOTO: Nation

READ ALSO: NASA and Jubilee youths clash in Kisii (video)

But not ready to lose influence in his own backyard, Mudavadi on Tuesday camped in the western region campaigning for ANC candidates. Wetangula also spent the day in the region campaigning for Ford Kenya candidates.

Boniface Nyongesa and David Makali, who will be contesting against Wetangula on an ODM and ANC ticket respectively, have already vowed to dethrone him, saying he should concentrate on the deputy premier position promised by NASA.

Have anything to add to this articel or suggestions? Share with us on news@tuko.co.ke

What will Gatundu residents do if Uhuru loses the polls in August? They speak:

Source: TUKO.co.ke
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The President General of the NUGFW and NATUC, James Lambert says, too many people in the cou
Militants launched 23 attacks on positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in ATO area in Donbas over the past day.

This is reported by the ATO press center.

The tensest situation was observed in Donetsk direction, where militants used 120mm and 82mm mortars, grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and small arms to shell Ukrainian positions near Avdiivka (18km north of Donetsk). Tanks were used to launch attacks on strongholds of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Krasnohorivka (29 km west of Donetsk). Militants also shelled residential districts of Avdiivka, using 82mm mortars. As a result, two civilians were wounded. Two Ukrainian soldiers were killed as a result of mortar and grenade launcher attack on positions near Zaitseve (67km north-north-east of Donetsk) and Nevelske (18km north-west of Donetsk).

In Luhansk direction, Ukrainian positions came under small arms fire outside Stanytsia Luhanska (16km north-east of Luhansk).

ol
The European Union intends to introduce duties of up to 33% on hot-rolled steel imports from Ukraine. This has been reported by Reuters with a reference to the European Commissions document.

The European Union is planning to impose duties of up to 33% on hot-rolled steel imports from Brazil, Iran, Russia and Ukraine to counter what it sees as unfairly low prices, according to a document seen by Reuters, reads the report.

The European Commission launched an investigation into hot-rolled steel from Brazil, Iran, Russia and Ukraine as well as Serbia in July 2016, following a complaint by European steel association Eurofer.

According to the results of the investigation, hot-rolled steel from all the countries, apart Serbia, grew to 2.6 % on the EU market in the mid-2016, from 7.5 % in 2013. At the same, prices fell by about a quarter.

The European Commission terminated its investigation into Serbian steel imports with no tariffs set and imposed duties for other producers, in particular for Ukraine's Metinvest Group in the amount of about 19.4 %, according to the document.

Definitive duties need to be applied by October 6.

iy
The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces, along with other structures, are discussing the issue of granting Ukraine specific types of defensive weapons. The final political decision is to be made by the American leadership.

Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Paul J. Selva said this during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

Selva, inter alia, addressed Russia and its actions in Ukraine. He said the Joint Staff is working with U.S. European Command to determine what lethal defensive aid might look like.

"It will be more than just a military recommendation. This will be a policy choice on whether or not we're going to give the Ukrainian government the tools they need to defend themselves against what we believe to be a Russian-supported insurgency movement in the Donbas," the American General stressed.

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Finance Minister of Ukraine Oleksandr Danyliuk hold a meeting with new International Monetary Fund (IMF) Resident Representative in Ukraine Gosta Ljungman.

In a post on his Facebook page, Danyliuk wrote: "Yesterday I met with new IMF Representative in Ukraine Gosta Ljungman and congratulated him on his appointment. We discussed further cooperation and steps for successful implementation of the IMF program.

Minister Danyliuk said he hopes that Ljungman will help Ukraine to continue the history of successful changes the country managed to achieve in a fruitful partnership with the IMF.

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Interior Minister of Ukraine Arsen Avakov has appointed Vitaliy Nevhad as Chief of the National Police Main Department in Donetsk region.

Colonel Vitaliy Nevhad, who had worked as deputy chief of the region's police, was appointed Chief of the National Police Main Department in Donetsk region, Avakov wrote on Twitter.

Prior to this, the National Police Main Department in the region was headed by Viacheslav Abroskin.

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Amnesty International Secretary General Salil Shetty calls on Ukrainian authorities to investigate the murder of journalist Pavel Sheremet.

"One year [has passed] after journalist Pavel Sheremet was killed by a bomb in his car and still no justice. Investigate who killed Sheremet," Salil Shetty has posted on his Twitter page today.

The human rights organization notes that the Interior Ministry of Ukraine in its letter to Amnesty International dated May 19, 2017 reported that the pre-trial investigation into the murder of Sheremet "is under the control of the leadership of the National Police of Ukraine."

"However, despite a large number of conducted investigative actions and the array of processed video materials, the operational investigation team led by chairman of the National Police of Ukraine still cannot identify the perpetrators of the murder," the Amnesty International stresses.

The investigation has also provided no convincing evidence in any of the official versions of the murder, human rights activists add.

As a reminder, Pavel Sheremet was blown up in a car downtown Kyiv on the morning of July 20, 2016. Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuri Lutsenko called the main version of the journalists murder a revenge for his professional activities. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov did not rule out the version that it could be Russian authorities behind the assassination.

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A 26-year-old man who pleaded guilty to smothering a 5-month-old infant last year was sentenced on Tuesday to 40 years in prison, with five of those years suspended.

The sentence imposed by special District Court Judge James Wheelis makes Marc Allen Palmer eligible for parole in just under nine years, and is only slightly more lenient than what prosecutors asked for, a maximum possible sentence of 40 years without any suspended time.

In the states view, 20 years is a light penalty for killing a 5-month-old child, deputy county attorney Brian Lowney said, referencing the part of his recommendation specifically for the charge of killing the infant.

Originally arrested and charged with deliberate homicide a year ago, Palmer pleaded guilty to an amended charge of negligent homicide in May under a plea agreement. He also pleaded guilty to felony criminal endangerment for covering the mouth of the infants sibling, and made what is called an Alford plea  meaning he agreed the prosecution could prove the charge at trial  to felony evidence tampering.

According to charging documents, emergency responders went to a Missoula home on March 30, 2016, after reports that child Brayden Beal wasnt breathing. The infant was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Medical staff noted bruising around the babys mouth, according to court documents, and an autopsy later determined the child died of asphyxia by smothering. Palmer, who is not the babys father, and the childs mother had been staying at Palmers mothers home. Palmers mother told police she had woken up the day Beal died and heard Palmer saying Knock it off, Brayden.

Blood on baby wipes found in the home were tested and found to match the infants DNA, although Palmer told police the blood was his after he used the wipes to clean up a bloody nose.

Myranda Palmer  Palmers younger sister who testified at Tuesdays sentencing  called her brother a very, very phenomenal man and my hero.

Hes never done anything wrong in my eyes, she said.

In response to a question from Chief Deputy County Attorney Jason Marks about this comment, Myranda said she did not believe her brother had committed the homicide to which he pleaded guilty, and accused the infants mother of having killed the boy.

Palmer and his siblings were taken away from their parents at a young age, his sister said, and were moved through many group and foster homes.

Psychologist Laura Kirsch, who performed the mental health evaluation on Palmer, said his upbringing likely had a significant effect on learning coping mechanisms and other skills that most adults use in times of stress. She said Palmer also scored very low on an intelligence test she administered.

At one point during Kirschs testimony, Judge Wheelis told Palmers family and friends in the gallery to stop making gestures and distracting reactions.

If you cant control yourself, Ill have you thrown out or jailed, he said.

Palmer has a juvenile criminal record of child rape and child molestation in Washington state, where he was found to have repeatedly abused an 8-year-old girl when he was 15.

Kirsch said the vast majority of people who commit sexual assaults as a child do not reoffend as an adult, and advocated treatment, counseling and appropriate medication for Palmer.

Public defense attorney Lisa Kauffman challenged the judge to take a stand against a system in Montana that works to treat children who are abused, then throws them in prison when they become adults and commit crimes. She requested that half of the 40-year sentence be suspended.

The state is asking this court to impose the maximum sentence ... all because of an accident, she said.

Wheelis said he felt Kauffmans case, and the testimony of Kirsch, were accurate in referencing Palmers difficult childhood, but that it didnt change what had been done in this case.

We have to face having someone like that, regardless of whose fault it is, he said.
U.S. lumber producers like a Trump administration move to drop part of the North American Free Trade Agreements dispute resolution system they say handcuffs their ability to fight unfair Canadian timber sales.

But Canadian timber analysts warn the move could further muddy a wood market already clouded by political maneuvers.

We applaud U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer for pushing the removal of the Chapter 19 dispute panel system from NAFTA, U.S. Lumber Coalition spokesperson Zoltan van Heyningen wrote in an email Tuesday. The Chapter 19 system is unconstitutional, unworkable in practice, and for decades has seriously undermined the enforcement of U.S. law against unfair trade practices by Canada and Mexico, to the detriment of U.S. industries and workers.

NAFTAs Chapter 19 provides a case-by-case negotiating court where governments can argue legal claims about unfair trade practices. The U.S. Department of Commerce believes Canadas federal government unfairly subsidizes wood harvested from its national forests, giving Canadian sawmills an advantage when they export the finished lumber to the United States.

Commerce Department attorneys also claim Canadian exporters sell their lumber below fair market value to U.S. buyers. But their case also must pass the Chapter 19 panel to be internationally binding.

The NAFTA dispute mechanism is unlike any other mechanism or trade agreement were party to, van Heyningen said Tuesday. Its unique because it allows foreign citizens, in this case Canadians, to sit on a panel that makes a binding decision interpreting U.S. law. They get to tell the U.S. government how to apply U.S. law to Canadian imports.

The now-expired U.S.-Canada Softwood Lumber Agreement specifically excluded that Chapter 19 panel in favor of a weaker international trade court. Since it collapsed last year, U.S.-Canada lumber disputes may now get settled under the NAFTA rules. The Chapter 19 dispute panels appoint two U.S. and two Canadian members, with a tie-breaking fifth member chosen by coin-toss.

Van Heyningen argued that system still hurts the United States because the panel members arent government trade officials. They come from a pool of private trade lawyers and professionals who, van Heyningen claimed, too often have conflicting loyalties to foreign clients.

They almost always side against the United States, van Heyningen said. The Canadians say to themselves, 'At the end of the day well use the panel system to dismantle U.S. trade cases, flood the U.S. market and cost U.S. jobs.' We think thats unfair and needs to be addressed.

In contrast, International Woods Market Group President Russ Taylor in Vancouver, British Columbia, argues the stiffening U.S. trade stance will result in higher prices for U.S. homebuyers.

We estimate that the U.S. can produce only about 70 percent of its own lumber demand, and, with Canadas market share in the U.S. dropping further, the way is paved for an increase in imported lumber from Europe, Russia and other countries  and at higher prices, Taylor wrote Tuesday. It seems that the objectives of the American side are clear: to raise lumber prices (and log prices) and create a windfall for U.S. sawmills and timberland owners, but with the consumer (and Canadian mills) paying for it.

According to Taylors analysis, the United States main timber source in the Southeast region has more trees than it can mill. That has kept log prices there down at a time when lumber prices for construction are rising.

The situation is different in the U.S. West, according to Taylor, because log exports to China and Japan have kept log prices up. He reported that Douglas fir sawlogs in the West were selling for $658 per thousand board-feet, compared to $178 per thousand board-feet for southern pine sawlogs.

Taylor wrote that 2018 could be a tough year for higher-cost Canadian mills, as the full bite of U.S. duties will be in effect and may lead to numerous curtailments across the country.

By 2019 the U.S. will need more Canadian lumber, so we anticipate that higher prices will begin to allow curtailed mills to restart," Taylor wrote. "The U.S. will need rising imports  if not from Canada, then from Europe and the Southern Hemisphere  and this means high prices for both logs and lumber.

Softwood includes tree species like pine, fir and spruce traditionally used for construction. From 2006 to 2015, the United States and Canada used a Softwood Lumber Agreement to manage imports and exports across the border. The now-expired treaty set import taxes for various levels of Canadian lumber shipments into the United States.

The U.S. Lumber Coalition and the Trump administration now propose a quota limiting the amount of lumber allowed to cross the border, with high tax penalties for any shipments above the quota.

Last year, Canada sent about 54 percent of its timber harvest to the United States, where it provided about a third of the U.S. lumber supply. Most of the U.S. lumber comes from private timberlands, with about one tree in five coming from public land such as national forests. Several measures are before Congress to open up more federal forest to timber harvest.

In the western half of North America, sawmills in British Columbia and Alberta compete with loggers in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. Van Heyningen rejected Taylors claims, saying the U.S. tariffs might add a few hundred dollars to the average $6,000 worth of lumber that goes into the average new American home.

The consumer isnt affected at all, van Heyningen said. It just means the Canadian producer cant enjoy the subsidy as much, and the home builder cant benefit from subsidized lumber. Taylor knows in a heartbeat the math doesnt add up.

Taylor maintains his math fairly looks at both sides of the border, and factors in the possible impacts of trade outside of North America. He warned that European lumber sellers await the rise in prices coming from the U.S.-Canada border tariffs, while Asian markets will also be competing for logs.

The mills in Washington and Oregon in particular are not making much money, Taylor said. With the log supply tight, theyre getting better returns selling to China and Japan. From the facts Ive got, it tells me a different story.
UNICEF/FatiAbubakar/2017

Photos available here.

MAIDUGURI/DAKAR/GENEVA/NEW YORK, 18 July 2017  During her visit to Nigeria, education activist Malala Yousafzai met today with girls displaced by the Boko Haram crisis.



While in Maiduguri, the epicenter of the crisis in northeast Nigeria, Malala visited schoolchildren in a camp for displaced families and secondary school girls at Yerwa Government Girls School.



Nigeria is the richest country in Africa, but has more girls out of school than any country in the world, said Yousafzai. Studies are clear  educating girls grows economies, reduces conflict and improves public health. For these girls and for their countrys future, Nigerias leaders must immediately prioritise education.



Over 2,295 teachers have been killed and 19,000 displaced, and almost 1,400 schools destroyed since the start of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2009. Three million children in the northeast are in need of support to keep learning.



While the 90 camps and camp-like settings in Maiduguri house thousands of families, more than three-quarters of the 600,000-plus displaced people are living with family, relatives or friends in host communities, placing an additional burden on local schools.

Beyond the crisis in the northeast, Nigeria already had the largest number of children out of school in the world  over 10.5 million. Among primary school-aged children not in school, only five per cent are dropouts: three-quarters of them will never step foot in a classroom, and the majority are girls.



Across West Africa, 46 per cent of primary school-aged children not in school are Nigerian. Globally, one in five children not enrolled are Nigerian.



We will do everything in our power to make sure all children can keep learning. We believe that education  especially for girls, is the single most important way to bring hope, peace and prosperity not just for this generation, but for also for future generations, said Mohamed Malick Fall, UNICEFs Representative in Nigeria.



UNICEF is working closely with the government and partners to put children in the northeast back into learning environments. More than 525,000 have been enrolled in school this year alone, over 37 temporary learning spaces established, and almost 92,000 packs of learning material distributed to help children continue their education.



UNICEFs education response in the northeast remains critically underfunded, with just 54 per cent of the $31.4 million appeal received, leaving a funding gap of $14.4 million.

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UNICEF/Hatcher-Moore

WASHINGTON D.C., 18 July 2017  This is a summary of a prepared statement by Justin Forsyth, UNICEF Deputy Executive Director  to whom quoted text may be attributed  today to the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Multilateral International Development, Multilateral Institutional Economic, Energy and Environmental Policy.



The statement came as UNICEF released its annual Humanitarian Action Study, highlighting UNICEFs global response in 2016. Last year, UNICEF responded to 344 humanitarian situations in 108 countries, more than ever before.



Children are paying a disproportionate price as famine looms across Somalia, South Sudan, north-east Nigeria and Yemen. Nearly 1.4 million children face imminent risk of death, and more than five million children face malnourishment this year.

The joint international effort to support national and local authorities and communities respond to this crisis is making a difference. Together we are saving lives. Humanitarian actors including UNICEF, other parts of the United Nations and non-governmental organisations are reaching at least 10 million people each month in the four countries with life-saving assistance.



But the threat of famine has not passed. Unless we sustain and further scale up our collective efforts, there is the risk that many more millions of children will die of hunger or be permanently stunted. And the longer these crises go on, the greater the risk of new emergencies within these emergencies  like the cholera outbreak in Yemen.



We must re-double our efforts to deliver at scale, to find ways to address the obstacles that so far are preventing us reaching some of the most vulnerable children and communities, avert new emergencies and help put millions of families on a path to sustainable recovery. And much more needs to be done to address the root causes of these crises, bringing an end to protracted conflicts and human rights violations and linking our emergency humanitarian response to effective development support which addresses the underlying vulnerabilities of communities.



Conflict, extreme climate events like drought, environmental degradation, climate change, loss of livelihoods and poverty all underpin these looming famines and crises. Unless we address these causes we will continue to get recurrent crises.



Civilians caught up in conflict need the United Nations Security Council and influential international actors to do more to require parties to these conflicts to meet their obligations under international norms and laws. Better protection for civilians caught up in conflicts and unimpeded access for every person in need, wherever they are, would rapidly reduce human suffering. A renewed diplomatic push is needed to end these protracted conflicts. The diplomatic efforts of the United States are needed more than ever.



This also means that countries, regions and the international community need to do more to prepare for and build resilience against environmental and climate-related crisis such as recurring drought.



The stakes for children across these four countries and their sub-regions could not be higher. Nearly 1.4 million children are at imminent risk of death, and many more millions of children are at risk unless we turn these crises around and build sustainable recovery. The longer we wait to address these childrens needs, the more we jeopardize their future. Children and families facing the gravest threats count on the leadership and generosity of the people of the United States to stand with them, to help them survive this crisis and go on to build a brighter future for themselves and their countries.



FULL STATEMENT

Children are paying a disproportionate toll as famine looms across Somalia, South Sudan, north-east Nigeria and Yemen. Nearly 1.4 million children face imminent risk of death, and more than five million children face malnourishment this year.



As we work to keep children alive, we must not forget that if children are subjected to malnutrition at a very young age, the long term impact on stunting brain development can be devastating. Stunting hampers not only the future ability of a child to learn and earn, but also has an impact on the social and economic progress of the countries in which they live. It cuts school performance, translating into a reduction in adult income by 22 per cent on average. It also leads to increased risk of health problems in adult life. As we work to save lives, this is also a struggle for the long term future of millions of children  a generation  and indeed the future of their countries.



The joint international effort to support national and local authorities and communities respond to this crisis is making a difference. Together we are saving lives. Humanitarian actors including UNICEF, other parts of the United Nations and non-governmental organisations are reaching at least 10 million people each month in the four countries with life-saving assistance. More concretely, in the first half of 2017 UNICEF treated more than 300,000 children suffering severe acute malnutrition. Along with our partners we have vaccinated 6.4 million children against measles. Over four million of those reached were in north-east Nigeria where we doubled our initial target due to increased access. More than 2.3 million people in the four countries have been provided with safe water.



But the threat of famine has not passed. Unless we sustain and further scale up our collective efforts, there is the risk that many more millions of children will die of hunger or be permanently stunted. And the longer these crises go on, the greater the risk of new emergencies within these emergencies  like the cholera outbreak in Yemen.



We must re-double our efforts to deliver at scale, to find ways to address the obstacles that so far are preventing us reaching some of the most vulnerable children and communities, avert new emergencies and help put millions of families on a path to sustainable recovery. And much more needs to be done to address the root causes of these crises, bringing an end to protracted conflicts and human rights violations and linking our emergency humanitarian response to effective development support which addresses the underlying vulnerabilities of communities.



The scale of the crisis for children

Conflict, drought, displacement and disease are combining to threaten children and families across the four countries, as well as the sub-regions of the Horn of Africa and the Lake Chad Basin.



In South Sudan, more than 1.1 million children are estimated to be facing acute malnourishment, with almost 276,000 severely malnourished at imminent risk of death. In Nigeria, some 450,000 children are estimated to face severe acute malnutrition in the conflict-affected states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe. In Somalia, the projected number of children who are or will be acutely malnourished is 1.4 million  including 275,000 who have or will suffer from severe acute malnutrition. And in Yemen, about 1.8 million children are threatened with acute malnutrition, 385,000 of them with severe acute malnutrition.



Malnutrition is compounded by the increasing threat of water borne diseases. Cholera has become a deadly factor in each of the four countries, and our response to this threat is increasingly critical to saving many thousands of childrens lives.



The cholera outbreak in Yemen has spread rapidly since April. Children under the age of 15 account for 41 per cent of the more than 300,000 reported cases of suspected cholera/acute watery diarrhoea, and more than a quarter of the more than 1,700 deaths have been children.



The health crisis in Yemen is a result of two years of heavy conflict  collapsing health, water and sanitation systems have cut off 14.5 million people from regular access to clean water and sanitation, increasing the ability of diseases to spread. There are no longer any doctors present in 49 of the countrys 333 districts, health workers in Yemen have not been paid for months, and there are only two functioning laboratories in the country.



In Somalia, prolonged drought has led to the largest outbreak of cholera in the last five years, with more than 53,000 cases of suspected cholera  close to half of them children under five  and 795 deaths. South Sudan is experiencing a protracted, widespread cholera outbreak, with nearly 7,000 cases reported this year, the highest since 2014.



Investing in safe water, sanitation and better hygiene practices is a critical step to saving children and families threatened by famine.



Forced displacement is a factor which compounds all the other drivers of this crisis. Whether fleeing the threat of fighting and attacks or in desperate search of food and water in drought-stricken areas, families who are forced to leave their homes also lose access to essential services like health clinics and water sources as well as livelihoods. Uprooted children and families are much more vulnerable, both to famine and disease as well as human rights abuses. Children on the move are at greater risk, especially when they are unaccompanied or separated from families. In contexts of conflict and displacements, women and girls face greater risk of sexual and gender based violence, and boys are increasingly vulnerable to forced recruitment into armed groups and other forms of violence.



Applying the lessons of the 2011 Somalia and East Africa famine

In 2011, Somalia faced a devastating famine that led to the tragic loss of more than 260,000 lives - around half children under five years old - we learned three vital lessons about what needs to be done better to save childrens lives.



1. We need to act early for children and to scale. Children cannot wait, even if famine is not declared or is averted in some areas. We know from the Somalia that by the time famine was declared in 2011, untold numbers of children had already died. Around half of all child deaths occurred before the declaration of famine, before funding started to pour in.



2. We learned that the threat of famine is more than a food and nutrition crisis. Water, sanitation and health services are critical to saving lives. In 2011, diarrhoea and measles were the major killers, especially among children on the move or in displacement camps. Waterborne diseases like cholera threaten childrens lives on a massive scale.

Severe acute malnutrition and diarrheal disease run in a vicious cycle, each making the other more severe and more likely to occur. Diarrhoea deprives the child of the nutrition necessary for growth and as a result is a major cause of malnutrition, while malnourished children are more likely to fall ill from diarrhoea due to their weaker immune systems. If a child is malnourished, it is much harder to diagnose and treat her for cholera: her risk of death is much higher. Our food and nutrition response needs to be fully integrated if we are to be effective in saving lives and helping communities build resilience and a path to sustainable recovery.

And protecting children in the midst of the turmoil of these crises from abuse and exploitation is critical, especially those made more vulnerable by displacement.



3. We learned that in order to address the recurrent threat of famine, more must be done to address the root causes. The deadly combination of drought, malnutrition and conflict pushes people passed their capacity to cope. And droughts recur. Protracted conflict in 2011 had left large parts of the Somalia population vulnerable, lacking basic social services and infrastructure which could help them cope. Humanitarian access in the conflict context was a significant obstacle. And when the famine passed, continuing conflict posed critical challenges to establishing governance and services to communities. These are bitter lessons which we know, but in 2017 communities and the humanitarian response is facing the same and even greater challenges across four conflict-affected countries simultaneously.



More needs to be done to bring an end to these protracted conflicts and to create the conditions for recovery and development. Political will and longer term investment from development actors are critical to find durable solutions and build resilience of the affected communities. Our efforts and investments must strengthen the long-term resilience of communities, making them better prepared and able to withstand the shocks of any future crises.



Response in 2017

In responding to the 2017 crises we have applied many of the lessons of the 2011 famine, and despite the enormous challenges in each of these conflict-affected countries we are achieving results and saving many thousands of lives. But there are challenges.



On the upside, the humanitarian system responded early to the threat of famine. In each country, UNICEF and humanitarian partners were already on the ground delivering before the full-scale threat of famine developed. Our situational awareness was good. We had developed innovative programmes to address humanitarian needs in extraordinarily challenging conflict-affected conditions. And the whole humanitarian system was in a good position to shift gear when the United Nations Secretary-General issued an urgent call to action in February this year.



But despite our preparedness, however, our ability to respond at scale in all areas has been mixed, in large part to funding gaps. Overall, and despite the fast and generous initial response of donors, the humanitarian response to this famine crisis is funded at approximately only 40 per cent, with a gap of around $3.82 billion for 2017.



Humanitarian organizations have made definite progress in running integrated humanitarian responses to famine-like conditions  delivering together health services, food and nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene. And even in harsh and often dangerous conditions, our teams on the ground continually find innovative ways to reach people in need.



In South Sudan, UNICEF with partners has established a Rapid Response Mechanism which enables it to move fast with humanitarian assistance when conflict affected areas become accessible, even for only brief windows of time. These fast missions deliver integrated assistance including WASH, health, nutrition, education and child protection. In 2017, UNICEF and WFP have conducted 26 rapid response missions to hard-to-reach communities in South Sudan, reaching more than 530,000 people, including over 100,000 children under five years old. A similar Rapid Response Mechanism is functioning in Yemen and one is being established in north-east Nigeria.



In Somalia, UNICEF with partners have treated nearly 99,000 children with severe acute malnutrition, more than double the number of admissions in the same period in 2016. This has been possible through the scale up in treatment services with UNICEF supporting over 750 nutrition facilities.



In north-east Nigeria, UNICEF and our partners are increasingly using mobile services to reach people displaced by the conflict, with an integrated approach to deliver nutrition including treatment for severe acute malnutrition, promotion of infant and child feeding, provision of micronutrient supplements and primary healthcare. This mobile approach is also especially important to allow us to reach newly accessible communities. To prevent cholera, with partners we are chlorinating and monitoring 680 water points in Borno State to bring safe drinking water for more than 300,000 displaced people living in camps or host communities.



In Yemen, WHO and UNICEF with support from the World Bank and other donors have rapidly scaled up response to try to bring the cholera outbreak under control. Together we are supporting 626 diarrhoea treatment centres and oral rehydration therapy centres in the worst affected districts across the country, and we plan to scale this up to a total of 1,156 centres. We have trained 16,000 community mobilisers, who are going house-to-house to give families information about how to protect themselves by cleaning and storing drinking water safely, good hygiene and hand washing, keeping food safe and how to handle a sick family member. We know from our response to the terrible Ebola crisis of 2014-16 how critical this kind of mass community outreach is to bringing such health crises under control.



In each country, UNICEF and our international and national partners are showing that when we have resources and access we are able to save lives even in the most challenging situations.



One of the greatest challenges confronting our humanitarian response is conflict and being able to access areas where fighting is underway. Unimpeded access to all people in need continues to be one of the greatest challenges confronting our humanitarian response. Parties to conflicts routinely deny access for life-saving humanitarian assistance, against all precepts of international humanitarian law. Our teams on the ground face this every day, in each of these countries. We know from our experience so far in 2017, that even in the harshest and most dire conditions when we get safe access to civilians we can save lives. In these conflict-affected countries, humanitarian workers are often blocked from reaching many hundreds of thousands of desperate people. Equally, the closure of Sanaa airport and the threat of attacks on Hudaydah port in Yemen for delivery of urgent humanitarian supplies are costing lives and causing preventable suffering. Humanitarian workers themselves have been targeted and killed  exacerbating the denial of assistance to civilians.



Just as the situation of humanitarian access is an area where insufficient progress has been made, our overall ability to address the root causes of these crises has so far proven limited.



Addressing the root causes of these crises

Conflict, extreme climate events like drought, environmental degradation, climate change, loss of livelihoods and poverty all underpin these looming famines and crises. Unless we address these causes we will continue to get recurrent crises.



Civilians caught up in conflict need the United Nations Security Council and influential international actors to do more to require parties to these conflicts to meet their obligations under international norms and laws. Better protection for civilians caught up in conflicts and unimpeded access for every person in need, wherever they are, would rapidly reduce human suffering. A renewed diplomatic push is needed to end these protracted conflicts. The diplomatic efforts of the United States are needed more than ever.



This also means that countries, regions and the international community need to do more to prepare for and build resilience against environmental and climate-related crisis such as recurring drought.



For example, in Somalia in 2011 we saw a deadly combination of drought, conflict affecting humanitarian access to communities in need, and lack of governance over a long period resulting in lack of basic essential services like health, water and sanitation. Somalia remains vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including rising temperatures and the frequency and severity of extreme weather events such as drought. What makes Somalia even more vulnerable is its dependence on agriculture for livelihoods and food. Peoples livelihoods are being destroyed by the erratic climate conditions, which destroy critical infrastructure and alter local ecosystems. During the 2011 famine, the largest number of deaths were among those forced to leave their homes in search of food and water.



Addressing the root causes behind these complex crises requires the international community to better integrate its humanitarian, development, human rights, peace and security approaches. Each aspect of our support must reinforce the other and the ultimate goal of supporting people and countries to return to a path of sustainable peace and development.



US assistance

We thank the United States for its leadership and generosity for life-saving humanitarian assistance to the worlds most vulnerable children.



The United States has played a leading role in support, providing not only cash, but also in-kind food and nutrition assistance to maintain the life-saving pipelines in the four famine areas. The additional $990 million in funding provided by Congress in May for humanitarian relief was an example of American leadership to help those in need and something for Americans to be proud of.



UNICEF has collaborated with a host of US based agencies such as USAID OFDA, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Food for Peace, and the State Departments Refugee Bureau to address the needs in countries affected by famine. The US resources, expertise and diplomatic efforts are saving lives and setting an example for the world to follow.



What more needs to be done?

If we return to our lessons from the 2011 famine crisis, and apply our experience of the past six months, our priorities in the coming months are clear.

We must keep scaling up our humanitarian assistance so that we are able to reach the most vulnerable people and so that we prevent and control new emergencies such as the cholera outbreak in Yemen. This means more funding and sources of finance to close the gap from the current level of approximately 40 per cent. We ask that the United States also use its diplomatic strength to convince parties to conflicts and those with influence over them to respect international humanitarian law, to protect children and respect their rights, and to allow UNICEF and our partners safe and unimpeded access to deliver life-saving assistance to every child who needs it, whoever controls the area they are in. And it is crucial that the United States continue to do all it can to lead a concerted effort to find solutions which lead to the end of each of these protracted conflicts which lie behind this catastrophe. Bringing about an end to the suffering requires not only humanitarian and resilience interventions, but political solutions, as well as sustained leadership and investment to help build sustained peace and stability, restore basic services, protect rights and rebuild lives. The link from humanitarian response to recovery and development phases presents the international system with a critical opportunity to implement a more integrated and effective approach. UNICEF, as an agency that is on the ground before, during and after these crises is committed to helping lead this new way of working. Very practically, the outbreak of cholera and malnutrition in Yemen are compounded by the collapse of the public systems, in particular the water, sanitation and health sectors. Frontline health personnel and sanitation workers have not been paid for more than 10 months. As much as we invest in supplies and infrastructure, we need to find a concrete solution to this issue and advocate with the parties and key stakeholders to prioritize the payment of salaries. As we advocate for full unimpeded humanitarian access to every person in need, there are specific challenges which the international community could help solve now. For example, UNICEF and our partners face challenges obtaining visas to deploy to Yemen. This creates a major bottleneck to scaling up our response. We need support in targeted advocacy and outreach to authorities to lift such restrictive visa requirements.

The stakes for children across these four countries and their sub-regions could not be higher. Nearly 1.4 million children are at imminent risk of death, and many more millions of children are at risk unless we turn these crises around and build sustainable recovery. The longer we wait to address these childrens needs, the more we jeopardize their future. Children and families facing the gravest threats count on the leadership and generosity of the people of the United States to stand with them, to help them survive this crisis and go on to build a brighter future for themselves and their countries.



Thank you.



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Download photos and videos from: http://weshare.unicef.org/Package/2AMZIFDD22
The opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party marked its five-year anniversary last week with a meeting of party officials in Hong Kong.

The CNRP formed in 2012 when the Sam Rainsy Party merged with the Human Rights Party, led then by the CNRPs current president, Kem Sokha.

Sam Rainsy, the CNRPs former president who now lives in self-imposed exile in France after being convicted of defamation, also attended the Hong Kong meeting.

Ruling Cambodian Peoples Party spokesman Sok Eysan mocked the CNRP in a message sent via the Telegram messaging app, saying the fifth anniversary meeting was considered a victory of Mr Kem Sokha.

Mu Sochua, a senior CNRP lawmaker, said the visit to Hong Kong was intended as a mark of respect to Rainsy ahead of the passing of amendments to the political parties law in Cambodia that will block the party from interacting with its former leader.

Once the law is adopted, we will obey the law. As lawmakers, a political party, we should be held accountable under the law even if the law is contradictory to the principle of democracy, she said.

Following the meeting, Rainsy wrote on his Facebook page, calling Prime Minister Hun Sen and other CPP leaders traitors, a charged that the CPP has often leveled against him.

However, Eysan said Hun Sen was praised and respected for his sacrifice for the nation and its citizens.

The new political parties law amendments were due to be passed on Wednesday and will mean political parties could face dissolution if they are seen to associate with people with criminal records.
Cambodian youth from two high schools in Siem Reap province are among 157 national teams participating in this years debut FIRST Global Challenge, an annual international robotics competition taking place in Washington, DC from July 16 to 18. The competition is aimed at encouraging young people to use science, technology and STEM subjects to solve global problems. This years competition focuses on future access to clean water.

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Thirty-one Chinese nationals were arrested by immigration police for running an online extortion scam.

The men and women were detained for operating the scam using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, which involves hackers targeting vulnerable internet protocol switches or phones to send costly international calls which are charged to the owner of the targeted VoIP device.

Khun Sambo, deputy director of the immigration department, said the detainees had committed a transnational crime and a cross-border extortion case.

The local Fresh News website reported Uk Heisela, chief of investigation at the immigration department, said three locations in the capital were raided as part of the operation.

San Chey, executive director of the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in Cambodia, claimed that crime involving expats was increasing.

It is not the first time [this has happened]. So the authorities should prioritize administrative checks on foreigners who are living in Cambodia, he said.

Another raid on a VoIP scam ring earlier this month saw some 70 Chinese nationals deported.
The ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) has been intensifying its efforts to reduce the democratic space for opposition parties, civil society and the media ahead of next years general election, according to political analysts and human rights workers.

They warn the CPPs legislative moves and a slew of arrests of opposition and civil society members in the past year signal that Prime Minister Hun Sens party plans to hold on to power at any cost.

Yoeurng Sotheara, a legal and monitoring officer with COMFREL, a local election watchdog, said the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party's (CNRP) is likely to come under increasing pressure as the July 2018 polls approach.

Its unavoidable that we will see more repression and pressure on the opposition in the run-up to the 2018 national parliamentary elections, he told VOA Khmer.

The CNRP made significant gains during last months commune elections, which were still won by the CPP with a wide margin. During the 2013 general elections, the CNRP narrowly lost to the CPP. The results were disputed and prompted large street protests that were met with violence by security forces.

Yoeurng Sotheara urged the parties to find ways to reduce tensions and avoid unrest around the 2018 elections. As time is running short, common political wills from both major parties are needed for a peaceful Cambodia, he said.

The CPP seems in no mood to comprise, however. Hun Sen, who has repeatedly used force to continue his three-decade rule, repeated earlier warnings ahead of the commune elections that civil war could erupt if the CPP loses power.

In January, CPP lawmakers passed the Law on Political Parties, which granted new powers to government and judiciary to suspend and dissolve parties. The law was immediately used to pressure the CNRP and longtime opposition leader Sam Rainsy was forced to resign in February to avoid dissolution of his party.

ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, a network of progressive lawmakers from across Southeast Asia, said the CPP is conducting a full-on crackdown on the opposition. It noted in March that 17 opposition lawmakers have been victims of harassment, lawsuits and violent attacks since July 2014. New CNRP leader Kem Sokha spent months avoiding questioning last year before being pardoned in a prostitution case against him that was widely seen as politically motivated.

Sebastian Strangio, a journalist and author of Hun Sens Cambodia, said during an event at the Stimson Center in Washington last month that the CPP have all the tools that they need to ensure that they hold on to power in the next elections and that the party is prepared to do whatever necessary.

CPP spokesman Sok Eysan defended the governments actions and said using the judiciary against opponents was legal and therefore fair.

When the government uses the laws and the courts, it is accused of putting pressure on its critics, but what else can we use? he told VOA Khmer. If we use guns, they say we are a dictator. If we use sticks, they say thats violence and a violation of individuals rights.

Rights workers said the government has been conducting a wide-ranging crackdown that also netted members of civil society groups, the media and individual social media users.

The arrests and jailing of political activists and human rights defenders has narrowed the civil society space - even political analysts have been under constant threat, Cambodian Centre for Human Rights director Chak Sopheap said.

In March 2016, a 25-year-old university student was sentenced to 18 months in prison on charges of incitement following a Facebook post calling for a color revolution.

In July 2016, popular commentator and political analyst Kem Ley was fatally shot at a gas station in central Phnom Penh. A man was later arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment, but rights groups questioned the police investigation and said it had the hallmarks of a cover-up.

Early this month, four human rights workers from local group Adhoc and an election official were released on bail after having spent more than a year in pre-trial detention. They are charged with bribing a witness in a case against opposition leader Kem Sokha.

Pa Nguon Teang, executive director of the Cambodian Center for Independent Media, said freedom of expression is shrinking at a time when Cambodians are increasingly aware of independent and online media, and are becoming less reliant on traditional media owned by politically connected businessmen.

In recent months, two analysts, Ou Virak and Kim Sok, have faced charges of defamation and incitement after they criticized the CPP government in media interviews. Their cases, which could result in prison time and hefty fines, are pending. Kim Sok has been held in pre-trial detention since February.

A journalist from Radio Free Asia and two reporters from The Cambodia Daily, including a Canadian national, also faced potential criminal lawsuits in recent months after authorities claimed their reporting work had violated laws.

The US and the EU have expressed serious concern over laws used to target the CNRP and the spate of arrests of civil society members, but Cambodia has turned a deaf ear to Western governments in recent years as it moves towards an ever-closer relationship with China.
In an interview with VOAs Persian Service, British MP Tulip Siddiq said she was pleased that the government held a parliamentary debate Tuesday on the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Siddiq spoke to VOA via Skype video from outside Parliament shortly after the debate concluded.
Russia says it reserves the right to retaliate in an ongoing dispute with the U.S. over the seizure of two Russian compounds last December by the Obama administration. Before leaving office, then President Barack Obama also expelled 35 Russian diplomats, accusing them of spying, and saying the actions were to punish Moscow for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Now Russia says its patience is running out. VOA Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports.
Prominent women rights defenders from Afghanistan and Pakistan have jointly called on their governments to push for the inclusion of women in any peace negotiations aimed at easing bilateral tensions and resolving an increasingly deadly Afghan conflict.

The two countries share a nearly 2,600-kilometer border, and landlocked Afghanistan relies mostly on Pakistani transit routes and ports for international trade.

Tensions in relations have undermined bilateral economic and political ties, however, because of allegations that Islamabad covertly supports the Taliban sustain the Afghan insurgency.

Pakistani officials deny the charges. In recent months, Pakistan repeatedly has closed border crossings with Afghanistan, alleging the neighboring country is sheltering militants and helping them in plotting attacks against Pakistan.

The unilateral border closure has added to the woes of war-hit Afghans and their business, according to traders on both sides.

Kabul dismisses accusations it is behind a recent spike in terrorist attacks in Pakistan.

While official dialogue has failed to improve rampant mistrust and suspicion-marred ties, members of an Afghan womens delegation visiting Islamabad to meet with their Pakistani counterparts are emphasizing the need to include women leaders in the peace-building efforts.

Need to include women



They say the Afghan war and tensions between the two countries are mainly hurting women and children on both sides of the border, but their problems have not been properly assessed and addressed.

So far only men have been involved in the peace process between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and they have not achieved the desired results, said Gul Maki Sultanzada, a lawyer by profession who hails from Afghanistans southern Kandahar province.

It is now imperative to include women in the peace process, talks and negotiations. And for this purpose the empowerment of women is a vital prerequisite and the two governments need to urgently address this gap, she noted.

Pakistani rights activist, Tahira Abdullah, acknowledges bilateral relations lately have worsened, but she says womens participation in any renewed peace initiative could help reverse the trend.

If any kind of peace process is going to happen in Afghanistan, and between Pakistan and Afghanistan, it will not happen without the inclusion, the participation and the inputs of women. There will be no peace without it, Abdullah observed.



The Kabul government alleges that Taliban insurgents use sanctuaries in Pakistan to plot attacks in Afghanistan. These are charges Islamabad strongly rejects, instead blaming the Afghan intelligence agency for sheltering and aiding anti-Pakistan militants.

Critics say that with the Taliban refusing to engage in peace talks with the Afghan government and instead inflaming insurgent activists in the country, there is virtually no chance of a peace process taking root in the foreseeable future.

The stalemate, observers say, will continue to be a stumbling block in any attempt aimed at normalizing relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Syrian rebel militias and Turkey appear to be preparing to intensify their military operations north of Aleppo aimed at taking back mainly Arab towns and villages the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units, or YPG, seized in 2015.

The fighting is a new sign that the United States Turkey, Russia and Iran are plunging deeper into a multifaceted conflict that's carved Syria into unstable zones of influence with no clear lines emerging of how piece it back together.

The Syrian Kurdish force is the United States' main ally in northern Syria. More Arab-on-Kurd clashes would complicate plans for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces to assault Raqqa, the Islamic State terror groups self-styled capital.

The situation in northern Syria is becoming more complex by the day, with patchwork micro-conflicts featuring a variety of rival militias, as fighting intensifies between Turkish-backed Arab rebels and Kurds.IS has tried to gain a foothold in Idlib province to the west of Aleppo, bringing it into confrontation with rival al-Qaida jihadists.

All the feuding groups are vying for territory.

Fighting in northern Syria between rebels backed by Turkey, a NATO member, and the Kurds risks undermining the battle against IS.

Arabs and Kurds

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based network of activists in Syria, warns there are continued preparations by Turkish forces and the factions backed by them" to launch an operation to regain control of areas they lost in late 2015 and early 2016.

Rebels whove been battling the regime of President Bashar al-Assad for years are still smarting from what they see as a Kurdish land-grab of mainly Arab towns north of Aleppo under cover of, and apparently coordinated with, a Syrian government offensive in December 2015.In some towns the YPG seized, only about 10 percent of the Arab residents who fled have been allowed to return, the rest are housed in camps along the Turkish-Syrian border.

This week, Turkish-backed Arab militias clashed with SDF units north of Aleppo despite efforts by Russia and the United States to prevent the conflict.

The Turks and Arab rebel militias Ankara backs fear the Kurds want to link up Kurdish cantons along the border with Turkey. The Kurds have made no secret of their determination to establish a self-governing entity in northern Syria.

Analysts say Arab skirmishing with Kurds, and Turkish shelling of YPG positions around the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, are forcing the SDF to reduce the forces it could use in the assault on Raqqa.That provides IS with a clear opening to exploit and there are signs the assault on Raqqa is being affected.

The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces appear to be struggling in the campaign for Raqqa, with reliable reports suggesting several hard fought for front-lines were relinquished over the weekend due to heavy IS pressure, says Middle East Institute analyst Charles Lister.

Meanwhile, leaders of the Syrian Coalition, the main umbrella organization of the anti-Assad insurgents, warn of a possible fight between Arabs and Kurds over control of Raqqa after IS has been evicted.Syrian rebels are demanding Raqqa be administered by local residents, not a council shaped by the YPG.

A 'gift' for IS

Speaking with political activists during a teleconference, the president of the Syrian Coalition, Riad Seif, stressed his his position that the Kurds should not participate in Raqqas governance.He said the SDF, which is commanded largely by YPG officers, should withdraw from the city once its cleared of Islamic extremists.

Disputes over the territory freed from IS in Syria and Iraq are gifts for the group, says Mideast analyst Lister.He says the extremists will adapt to the new security environ by conducting geographically disparate attacks, exploiting seams between anti-IS forces, and setting conditions to resurge in alternative terrain.

Turkey has not reduced its vehement opposition to U.S. support of the YPG, a militia it views as the Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers Party, a separatist Turkish Kurd group the U.S., European Union and Ankara all consider terrorists.

Monday, Turkeys National Security Council accused the United States of allowing weapons it provided to the YPG to be passed on to the PKK.This shows that both are the same organization, the council said.

The Turks offered no specifics to support their allegation.But a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in Syria and Iraq, told VOA the weapons the United States has supplied the SDF "will be returned to the coalition on completion of the mission.

In further evidence of Turkish anger, the state-run Anadolu news agency published the locations of nearly a dozen U.S. military bases across a 200-kilometer stretch of northern Syria.The bases listed by Anadolu are where American military advisers and Special Forces oversee the assault on Raqqa.
Robert Tuck, assistant professor of Japanese at the University of Montana, said he hopes Chinese authorities quickly release UM student Guthrie McLean.

"I'm deeply distressed to hear about this business in Zhengzhou," Tuck said Tuesday. "It's horrifying for everybody, and I really hope that he can be returned to his family as soon as possible in good health."

UM senior McLean was apprehended this week in China while on personal travel, said his mother, Jennifer McLean, in an email. Jennifer McLean, who teaches in the Henan province, said her son has not been charged and police are demanding money for his release.

She said the "shakedown" follows an altercation last month between the McLeans and a cab driver (see related story).

Tuck, in modern and classical language and literature, said Guthrie McLean works in the department, so the instructor saw the student daily. He said McLean is an East Asian studies major and has a passion for that region and thinks about issues such as the relations between the United States and China.

"He's hard working," Tuck said. "He's holding down a work-study job and also taking on a full load of courses."

UM legal counsel Lucy France said the student was abroad on personal travel, not a trip sanctioned by UM, so her office's involvement is limited. She said the legal office does not provide services in such cases, but it identifies those that are available.

France also said UM helps "connect the dots" and ensures that appropriate authorities such as the U.S. Department of State are notified. The UM legal office has not dealt with a student detained abroad since at least February 2013, when she started there.

In an email provided by Jennifer McLean, UM faculty member Zhen Cao also expressed distress at the situation.

"(I'm) very sorry and truly disturbed to hear of Guthrie's case," Cao said in a note to Jennifer. " ... Please trust we will do whatever we can to offer assistance."

A State Department spokesperson said the agency would not comment on the situation due to privacy concerns.
Asia's richest man, Wang Jianlin, suddenly finds himself cornered. The giant Dalian Wanda Group, which he heads, is facing a range of regulatory investigations and actions from the Chinese authorities.

The latest move involves asking banks to stop financing overseas forays of the Wanda Group, which owns an array of foreign assets, including a Hollywood studio and AMC Theaters, the biggest exhibitor of movies in the U.S.

The Group faced a regulatory probe into its financial deals in early June, which was followed by an announcement that Wanda had sold off part of its business to a Tianjin based real estate developer for $9.3 billion.

The government action against a businessman known for his strong connections with the Communist Party has caused a stir in the business community, with many asking if the government is sending out a political message to all privately owned businesses, informed sources said.

Role of politics

"That is a surprising development in a lot of different ways. Wang Jianlin has many friends all through the political establishment in China," said Christopher Balding, an associate professor of finance and economics at Peking University HSBC Business School.

The industry in China is debating about whether the Wanda Group has been hit by a policy measure or Wang has fallen from the grace of the political establishment.

I don't think this [action] is particularly targeting Mr. Wang, the chairman of Wanda Group, or purposefully targeting the Wanda group," said Peng Liu, professor of real estate and hotel management at the Cornell University. Actually, those [moves] are in line with the government action on control of financial risks.

Wanda Group's recent deals include the $930 million acquisition of the Nordic Cinema Group in January, and the $1.1 billion purchase of Carmike Cinemas, the fourth-largest cinema operator in America. But Wang faced a rare setback early this year when he was forced to abandon a $1 billion takeover of Hollywood-based Dick Clark Productions.

On the face of it, the government is asking companies to cut down on their financial risks and stop adding pressure on China's foreign exchange reserves.

But the signals go deeper than that because the action involves one of China's best-known companies and comes ahead of a crucial Communist Party meeting which will determine the fate of some of the countrys top leaders.

It is not far fetched to say that there is definitely a political message being sent, and they are using Wanda as an example to other companies, (to say) 'don't do this'," Balding said, adding, And it is also a signal that there is a political fighting going on behind the scenes.



Corporate vs government power

Giant multinationals are sometimes regarded as the sources of big power, who often influence government policies in different countries. Beijing may not be comfortable with additional power groups during its own influence gathering pursuit through the Belt and Road program, analysts said.

Yue Su, an economist with The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), pointed out the government has been investigating two other companies, Fosun and Anbang, who were engaged in aggressive buying of business assets overseas.

The government is also worried that these companies are trying to move asset abroad and keep their debt within the country, which is worsening domestic economic conditions, she said.

Wider impact

Besides Wanda, many Chinese companies have been forced to revise their investment plans as the government reversed its earlier policy of encouraging them to acquire foreign brands and assets.

Beijing has since intensified its battle against capital flight amid a reduction in foreign exchange reserves early this year. This came as a shock to several companies who were forced to cut down their long range plans for growth in the international market.

Another thing that needs to be pointed out is it was only 12-24 months ago that Chinese regulators were strongly encouraging Chinese companies to go out and make foreign acquisitions," Balding said. "So, this was not done in a vacuum. So while Wanda may have pushed the limits, they were doing nothing more than what they were being encouraged to do by Chinese regulators.

The government action to cut off funding to Wanda, and possibly to other companies, may have major consequences for China's industrial economy.

So consequently if their access is cut off, that could have a very significant impact on not just their ability to make foreign acquisitions but to do a lot of different things, Balding said.

Peng Liu said the government will make a distinction in the case of its Belt and Road program and allow overseas investments by Chinese companies who wish to do so under that program.

The belt and road program is the government's strategy. I think that is different. Corporations will find the match in terms (their) business vision and growth strategy and the government's strategy on infrastructure and global collaboration in development, he said.
With less than 20 days to the August polls Kenya is grappling with an increase in fake news.

The study by researchers from the communications consulting firms Portland Africa and GeoPoll reveals that 90 percent of Kenyans have seen or heard false news about this years elections. The survey was conducted in May this year and around 2,000 respondents countrywide of various ages, genders, religions and ethnicities participated.



John Murunga from GeoPoll says most Kenyans trust the media as their primary source of credible news with about 76 percent saying that information gathered from television is accurate. He says that using a multi-channel approach could be a way of countering fake news in the country. However, he notes that misinformation deprives the electorate crucial information to make informed decisions.

The ramifications of fake news is that we are actually having a citizenry that is deprived of the power to make informed decisions with regard to the coming elections and that affects their will, it affects their power to actually make informed decisions, he said.



High stakes



And the stakes could not be higher this election season. This past April residents in Busia, in Western Kenya, woke up to news that a leading opposition contender in the countys primaries, Paul Otuoma from ODM, had defected to the governing Jubilee coalition.



The "fake news" was carried on leaflets made to resemble the Daily Nation. a leading newspaper in the country. The area is largely dominated by the opposition coalition checkers.



Dorothy Ooko, Google's communications and public affairs manager for East & Francophone Africa, says the electorate and businesses ought to be aware of fake news and develop mechanisms for dealing with the same.

Ooko says the challenge lies in accuracy and speed at which the news is disseminated. Google, she says, has put in place systems to ensure users find correct information on its site by working with fact.



Our job is really to present news, to present information and make it accessible and relevant," she said. "They are the ones who are able to determine to verify whether it's truth or not, and then we are able to label that to guide the user who comes online to see that this has been fact checked its roughly news. It's 80 percent factual and therefore it gives you, the user, confidence that information has been verified and that labelling has really helped people.



Fact checking



Alphonce Shiundu from Africa Check, a non-profit and non-partisan organization that aims to improve fact checking and news gathering, spoke to VOA on the rising trend of fake news in Kenya. Shiundu says that fake news is a global phenomenon and Kenyan media is not an exemption.

We do spot checks on fake news," he said. "If something is going viral we check. If we see something that doesnt sit right we check and find out if its true or if its false and we put that information out there. We have partnerships with Google and Facebook so that when we put this stuff up the algorithms in the system bring the search for the fact checks higher in the search results.



According to a recent report by the content delivery network Akamai, Kenya is ranked as the fourteenth fastest out of 130 countries in terms of mobile internet speed. Most fake news, the report says, is published on Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp.



Bloggers



The rise of bloggers in Kenya according to the report is seen as a worrying trend in the fight against fake news. The Bloggers Association of Kenya (BAKE), which begun six years ago, brings together around 9,000 Kenyan bloggers and content creators.



BAKE chairman Kennedy Kachwanya says the organization ensures that its members adhere to strict guidelines of accuracy before posting any material. However Kachwanya says challenges still exist.



Last March the Media Council of Kenya (MCK), the body tasked with ensuring professionalism in Kenyan media, released the guidelines for elections reporting.



Victor Bwire, the deputy chief executive officer and programs manager at the council, says since then about 2,700 journalists have been given training in accurate and factual reporting.



Bwire says the council further encourages the public to report media houses that disseminate fake news.



The report notes that 35 percent of those interviewed say they are not able to access and verify credible information about the elections.



Kenyans will have their say at the polls on August 8.


Tensions between Germany and Turkey escalated Wednesday after Berlin summoned the Turkish ambassador to receive an official protest after Ankara arrested several human rights activists, including a German citizen. Berlin has warned that EU aid to Turkey could be at risk, putting in jeopardy a key migrant deal.

A Turkish court Tuesday ordered the detention of Peter Steudtner, a German national who was attending a human rights workshop in Istanbul and was among six rights activists held as part of an ongoing crackdown since a failed coup last year.

The Turkish government needs to immediately and directly hear the German government's outrage and incomprehension as well as its crystal clear expectations in the case of Peter Steudtner and, this time, without diplomatic niceties, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schafer on the summoning of the ambassador.

Absolutely unjustified, said German Chancellor Angela Merkel in response to Steudtner's detention. Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel cut short his vacation to deal with the increased diplomatic tension.

Steudtner is the 10th German national to be held in the ongoing crackdown. Turkish-German relations at the moment are incredibly stained, warns political columnist Semih Idiz of the al-Monitor website. But under normal circumstances ambassadors should be withdrawn and doors slammed and this is not happening

EU aid for migrants in question

Along with Turkey being key to counterterrorism cooperation, it is acting as a gatekeeper on stemming the flow of migrants into Europe following an agreement with the European Union. More than one million migrants escaping war and persecution in Africa and the Middle East have crossed into Europe using irregular land and sea routes back in 2015, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Observers say the deepening crisis between Germany and Turkey could jeopardize $3.4 billion in EU aid, which is part of the migrant deal.

Unfortunately we have constant cause to talk to Turkey about civil and press freedoms, government spokesman Steffen Seibert told a news conference. We think it is important to review aid in light of the latest developments.

Tensions have been simmering for years between the two NATO allies; but, Berlin's granting of asylum to dozens of Turkish diplomats and military personnel following the failed coup in July 2016 brought tensions to a boiling point.

International conspirators

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly accused Berlin of aiding conspirators against him. Erdogan made reference to what he called international conspirators Saturday in a speech to mark the defeat of the attempted coup.

There are so many enemies lying in ambush, unwilling to grant us the right of existence. If I name them one by one, we will be confronted by a very serious international crisis, Erdogan said.

Germany has become a gathering point for Erdogan's opponents, with opposition media, including a television station, broadcasting to Turkey. Erdogan has also criticized Berlin for failing to crack down on the activities of the Kurdish rebel group the PKK, which is fighting the Turkish state. Berlin refutes the allegations.

Suspicions are growing that detained German citizens are becoming pawns in the deepening crisis. When you focus on individuals, especially foreigners detained, there is a sense imprisoning people is almost a form of blackmail, a form of bargaining, said Emma Sinclair Webb, senior Turkey researcher for Human Rights Watch. Ankara dismisses any political motivation behind the detentions, maintaining that the judiciary is independent.

Germany moves planes

The war against Islamic State has also fallen victim to the increasingly acrimonious dispute. Germany is in the process of relocating its reconnaissance planes used against the jihadists from Turkey's Incirlik air base, after Ankara stopped German lawmakers from visiting its personnel at the base. The dispute has now spread to German forces operating at the Turkish Konya airbase.

Analysts say Berlin, along with the rest of the EU, could be paying the price for more than a decade of all but freezing Ankara's effort to join the regional bloc. Merkel has been one of most outspoken critics of the bid.

There is very little stick that Europe has to wield against Turkey, notes columnist Idiz. Merkel appears to be in a weaker position. Erdogan is very bullish. He is very uncompromising and European leaders, including Merkel, don't know how to handle him. So, Merkel looks embarrassed and that's how Erdogan is playing it.
Germany has called terrorism accusations against one of its citizens in Turkey absurd and demanded the immediate release of the activist.

"The Turkish government needs to immediately and directly hear the German government's outrage and incomprehension as well as its crystal-clear expectations in the case of Peter Steudtner, and this time without diplomatic niceties," Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer said.

After a meeting Wednesday with Turkeys ambassador, Schaefer said he told the envoy in no uncertain terms the detention of Steudtner was unacceptable and said the German sentiment would be delivered to Ankara.

Turkey earlier this month jailed six human-rights activists, including Amnesty International's Turkey chief, for allegedly aiding terrorists.

Police arrested the six during a raid on a hotel on the island of Buyukada on July 5, during a digital security workshop. On Tuesday a court in Istanbul ordered them to remain behind bars until a trial.

Human rights

Andrew Gardner, a researcher for Amnesty in Turkey, told VOA he believes the detained individuals were targeted solely for their work in human rights, and he called their detention an attack against the whole of human rights civil society in Turkey.

It is no exaggeration to say if this is allowed to pass, then none of us in Turkey have security and all of us working here could face the same in the days to come, he said.

In addition to Amnesty's director of operations in Turkey, Idil Eser, and Steudtner, Swiss human-rights workers also were among the detainees.

Turkish media reports said the six are accused of having been in contact with Kurdish and leftist militants, and suspected members of the movement led by exiled Muslim cleric Fetullah Gulen  once President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's close ally, but now at the top of the Turkish government's most-wanted list.

Turkey blames Gulen, a religious scholar who has lived in obscurity in the United States for decades, for last year's failed coup. The aged cleric denies the charges against him.

The United States also condemned the arrests.

"Prosecutions like these with little evidence or transparency undermine Turkey's rule of law and the country's obligation to respect individual rights," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters.

State of emergency

The U.S. urged Turkey to drop the charges, free the six prisoners, and lift provisions of the country's state of emergency that allow what the U.S. spokeswoman called the "indiscriminate prosecutions of individuals."

Turkey this week extended its post-coup state of emergency three more months, shortly after voters narrowly approved a referendum to amend the constitution and expand President Erdogan's powers.

U.S. President Donald Trump congratulated Erdogan on his referendum victory, but many European Union leaders fear the impending constitutional changes will further erode human rights and free speech in Turkey and muzzle the opposition.

More than 50,000 people have been arrested during a yearlong crackdown since last year's coup. In addition, 110,000 civil servants, members of the military and law enforcement agencies were dismissed for either participating in the coup or actively sympathizing with the plotters.



Tan Cetin of VOA's Turkish Service contributed to this report.
House Republicans are moving next week to fund President Donald Trump's $1.6 billion request to begin construction of his oft-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.



Aides said Tuesday evening that GOP leaders have decided to attach the money  to build 74 miles of fencing and levee wall in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and near San Diego  to a spending bill for the Defense Department and a handful of other agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs.



The wall money is strongly opposed by Democrats and some Republicans. But Trump is insistent on it and the GOP plan would give Trump a much-needed victory on Capitol Hill after the failure of the Trump-backed effort to repeal and replace the Obama health law.



Adding the wall money to the defense spending measure, which includes huge increases for the Pentagon, would appear to ensure its passage through the House, despite opposition among some border state Republicans, and could set up a clash with Senate Democrats.

Trump has promised that Mexico would pay for the wall but hasn't come up with a plan to force it to actually do so. Taxpayers will instead foot the bill.



House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., announced Tuesday that GOP leaders had abandoned a plan to bundle all 12 of the annual spending bills for the budget year beginning Oct. 1 into a single omnibus package. That appeared to be too much for rank-and-file Republicans to digest, so McCarthy instead announced that funding for the Pentagon, the VA and the Energy Department would be tied together in a smaller, national security-focused measure.



A McCarthy aide and a spokeswoman for Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., confirmed the plan to include the wall money in next week's bill. But there probably won't be an up-or-down vote on the funding.
Indonesia's move to rename part of the contested South China Sea appears to be a warning to the most powerful maritime claimant, China, that Jakarta intends to step up protection of its own claim without causing a spat for now.

On Friday, a deputy maritime affairs minister in Jakarta said Indonesia would rename a tract of water northwest of the island of Borneo as the North Natuna Sea, in line with oil and gas exploration projects with similar titles, according to the Indonesian Antara news service. The renamed tract is near the Natuna Islands, an Indonesian chain of 272 maritime features, and overlaps the southernmost part of Chinas so-called nine-dash line claim extending from its south coast.

Indonesia exerts authority

The name change may be largely cosmetic, analysts say, but it serves as a warning to China  normally a friend  as well as other countries to keep away.

I dont call it a storm in a teacup, but the reality is that Chinas fishing boats do come into Indonesian waters on this vague historical claim traditional fishing ground, and Indonesia has been pretty adamant in shooing them away, said Carl Thayer, Southeast Asia-specialized emeritus professor of politics at The University of New South Wales in Australia. But renaming the waters is not a claim to new territory.

China reacts

Chinas foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Friday at a briefing that it was totally meaningless for any country to change the sea's name. The name "South China Sea" is widely accepted by the United Nations and the international community, he said.

Officials in Beijing say their nine-dash line follows Chinese fishing patterns over the centuries and cite records dating back some 2,000 years. But in July 2016, a world arbitration court ruled that China lacked a legal basis for its claim.

Indonesias move follows name changes by Vietnam and the Philippines involving parts of the same sea, also contested by China, off their own coastlines. Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan have claims, as well, to the 3.5 million-square-kilometer tropical body of water thats prized for fish, fuel exploration and commercial shipping lanes. China says more than 90 percent of it falls under its flag.

Debate over impact

Name changes seldom make much impact, said Le Hong Hiep, a research fellow with ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

Various countries in the region have called the sea differently, but I think its not something too special, something that will cause objection among other Asian countries, Le said.

But Euan Graham, international security director with the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, said the move does have symbolic value.

I think it is more significant, its not just a cosmetic, nationalist re-branding, Graham said. I do think we are seeing a kind of subtle, coordinated implementation, post-award. If you connect the dots, China I think will receive the message that Southeast Asia has not rolled over in the way that it might have hoped and expected.

Incidents leading to the name change

China has irked Indonesia by passing vessels through waters Jakarta calls its own. Other countries along the sea resent Chinas landfilling larger islets for construction of military facilities capable of supporting combat aircraft and radar systems.

We can see this effort by Indonesia is also part of the regional response to Chinas recent assertiveness in the South China Sea, because to some people, especially China, when the sea is called the 'South China Sea,' it naturally entitles China some rights, which is false, Le said.

Last year Indonesia said it would step up patrols against foreign vessels in waters near its 13,000 islands. In March 2016, China and Indonesia entered a standoff when Indonesian authorities tried to stop a vessel and a Chinese coast guard vessel intervened. That month Indonesia said China had officially included waters near the Natuna Islands on a Chinese territorial map.

In May 2016, the navy arrested a Chinese fishing vessel despite Beijings coast guard backup. A month later the navy fired on another Chinese boat, possibly injuring a sailor, before impounding it and jailing the seven-person crew.

But Indonesia lacks the military might to resist China in a sustained conflict. At the same time, China is Indonesias top import source and second biggest export destination for items such as minerals and palm oil, muting Jakartas criticism of Beijing over the years and vice versa.

Trade and nationalism

Indonesian President Joko Widodo, widely known as Jokowi, has called on the two countries to raise two-way trade to $150 billion by 2020.

But Jokowi occasionally plays a nationalist card anyway, said Graham, adding the presidents view is very much framed by sovereignty and he doesnt want another country to use parts of the sea that it claims.

I am sure that Indonesia's move will also be viewed by other Association of Southeast Asian Nation members as 'encouragement' on how to deal with China in this regional dispute, said I Made Andi Arsana, geodetic engineering lecturer at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogakarta.

[Jakarta] wanted to bring awareness to the international community that political geography of the world is changing and it invites the world to make a new consensus," he said.
As fighting flared in parts of Syria on Wednesday, a U.S.- and Russian-backed cease-fire in the south appeared to be holding. U.S. officials said Russia has offered to send observers to the area to monitor the truce.

Brett McGurk, the U.S. special envoy for the anti-IS coalition, said last week that the U.S. has had "constructive" talks with Russian military officials on Syria in recent weeks and that both sides were keen to explore the possibility of cease-fires in other areas of the country.

Despite talk of enlarging the cease-fire, fighting flared up in the rebel-held province of Idlib, near the Turkish border. Arab media reported that fighters from two rival Islamic militant groups, the former Jabhat al-Nusra and the Ahrar al-Sham, battled each other using heavy weapons.

In the north of Syria, Islamic State militants were pushed back from southern sections of their base, Raqqa, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Arab media also reported clashes between Kurdish militia fighters and Turkish-backed Syrian rebels north and east of Aleppo. It said Turkey demanded the return of the bodies of several of its men killed in the clashes.

In the east of the country, Syrian state TV reported that IS militants had "fled en masse" from their stronghold inside Al Mayadeen, near the strategic eastern desert city of Deir ez-Zor.

The Saudi-owned al Hayat daily reported that Syrian government forces had captured large chunks of territory outside Deir ez-Zor and were 10 kilometers from the city. Syrian government forces have long controlled portions of Deir ez-Zor, but were under siege by IS militants surrounding them.

Syrian state TV also showed video of villagers rejoicing after government forces recaptured several villages in central Hama province. One man on camera said residents were elated after Islamic militants had been driven out of their town.

Meanwhile, Russian politicians have approved a plan for keeping forces in Syria for decades to come.

In January, the two nations signed agreements that would extend Russia's control of its Tartus naval facility for 49 years and give it sovereignty over the territory. The term can be automatically extended for additional 25-year periods if neither side objects. The deal also allowed Russia to modernize the site so that it can host up to 11 ships; it now has room for only a couple of midsized ships at a time.

The Tartus facility is the only such outpost Russia has outside the former Soviet Union. The Russian military has used Tartus to back its campaign in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Some information for this report came from AP.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled Wednesday that he's sticking to a decision to install metal detectors at a contested Jerusalem shrine, despite rising tensions and a Muslim call for mass protests in the city.

Netanyahu, who was in Hungary, spoke by phone with Israeli security chiefs about the escalation in Jerusalem and was to hold more consultations after his return to Israel on Thursday.

The mass protests are set for Friday, the highlight of the Muslim religious week, when tens of thousands of Muslims typically attend prayers in the walled compound in Jerusalem's Old City.

Meanwhile, several thousand Palestinian Muslims prayed Wednesday evening in the streets near Lion's Gate, one of the entrances to the shrine that was fitted with metal detectors. Such prayers, with the faithful kneeling in orderly lines on the pavement, have been the main form of protest this week, signaling their refusal to pass through the metal detectors, but protesters have also scuffled with police.

Conflicts over the holy site, revered by Muslims and Jews, have repeatedly triggered Israeli-Palestinian confrontations. The site  known as the Temple Mount to Jews and Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, to Muslims  is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.



The latest escalation began last week when three Palestinian gunmen launched an attack from there, killing two Israeli policemen at a gate to the Muslim-administered compound.



In response, Israel began installing metal detectors, a move Muslim religious leaders and Palestinian politicians allege is part of an Israeli attempt to expand control at the site.

Israel has denied such allegations, saying metal detectors are routine security devices used at holy sites around the world.

Muslim clerics on Wednesday urged the faithful to forego prayers in neighborhood mosques in the city on Friday and converge on the shrine, in an attempt to draw larger crowds. Worshippers were asked to pray in the streets rather than submit to the new security procedures.

Netanyahu spoke to Israeli security chiefs by phone on Wednesday.

There is no change regarding the metal detectors, he told reporters in Budapest.

Israeli media reported that security chiefs are at odds over the new devices. Israel's Shin Bet security service, which closely monitors Palestinian society, reportedly opposes the metal detectors as counterproductive, while police support the new measures.

Netanyahu said Israel is in close contact with Jordan, the traditional Muslim custodian of the shrine. Netanyahu said Jordan wants to end this as quietly as possible.

We expected everyone to help restore calm, he said.

Netanyahu rejected Muslim allegations that Israel is changing long-standing arrangements at the shrine.



We should look at the facts and the truth  the installation of metal detectors does not constitute any change in the status quo, he said. It is only meant to prevent a repeat of an attack with weapons.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said the key to restoring calm is to have Israel respect the "historic and legal status'' at the shrine, the state news agency Petra reported.

Safadi told ambassadors from Europe and Asia that ending tensions is in the hands of Israel which he said should immediately reopen the shrine without any hindrances.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who was in China, is returning to the West Bank to deal with the crisis, his office said in a statement.

In the meantime, Abbas is in touch with Arab and international leaders to try to prevent a deterioration of the situation, it said.

After last week's shooting, Israel closed the site for two days for searches. It was only the third closure since Israel captured the shrine, along with east Jerusalem and other territories, in the 1967 Mideast war.

The closure drew wide condemnation from the Muslim world. Israel began opening the site gradually on Sunday.

Jews revere the 37-acre raised platform as the site of their biblical temples. It is the holiest site in Judaism and the nearby Western Wall, a remnant of one of the temples, is the holiest place where Jews can pray.

Muslims believe the hilltop marks the spot from which the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. It is Islam's third-holiest site after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.
Former Governor of Utah Jon Huntsman Jr. has served in the administrations of four U.S. presidents and now is being considered by the fifth.

On Tuesday, the White House announced that President Donald Trump will nominate Huntsman as U.S. Ambassador to Russia.

Born in March 1960, Huntsman is the motorcycle-driving son of billionaire Jon Huntsman Sr., who founded a large chemical manufacturer.

The younger Huntsman dropped out of high school to play keyboard in a rock band, later finishing school and graduating from the University of Pennsylvania. He also served as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan, and speaks fluent Mandarin.

After university, Huntsman worked as an aide in President Ronald Reagan's White House, and, while still in his early 30s, President George H. W. Bush appointed him ambassador to Singapore.

Later he served as a trade official under President George W. Bush, and ran the Huntsman family's holding company.

In 2004, he ran for governor of Utah, promising to simplify the state's tax code, develop industry and reform the state's Mormon-inspired alcohol restrictions. He was elected governor with 58 percent of the vote.

After his re-election in 2008 with 78 percent of the vote, Huntsman began meeting national political consultants and his name started to surface in discussions about the Republican Party's prospects for the 2012 race.

In May 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Huntsman to be ambassador to China.

Toward the end of 2010, Huntsman told Newsweek magazine he thought he and his family "may have one final run left in our bones." In 2011, Huntsman resigned his post in order to return to the United States with his family to pursue the nomination of the Republican Party for president of the United States.

Initially, Huntsman looked like a promising candidate with his foreign policy experience, moderate position on some social issues, and fiscal conservatism. But shortly after a disappointing third-place finish in the 2012 New Hampshire Republican Primary, Huntsman resigned from the race.

In January 2014, Huntsman was named chairman of the think-tank the Atlantic Council.

Huntsman indicated in an interview with Politico that he would not run in the 2016 presidential election. In April 2016, Huntsman decided to endorse Republican nominee Donald Trump, but later retracted that endorsement.
Malawi's Anti-corruption Bureau, or ACB, has arrested a former agriculture minister and two others linked to a corruption scandal involving maize imports. Malawi was importing the grain to avert food shortages after flooding and drought wrecked last year's harvest.

ACB officials Wednesday announced the arrests of former agriculture minister George Chaponda, along with businesswoman Grace Mijiga Mhango and Rashid Tayub, an entrepreneur based in Blantyre.

They are accused of illegal actions in the procurement of 100,000 tons of maize from Zambia by Malawis grain marketer ADMARC, the Agriculture Development and Marketing Corporation.

Mijiga chairs Malawi's Grain Traders and Processors Association.

The arrests come after two commissions of inquiry established by President Peter Mutharika and parliament in January recommended the investigation into Chaponda and others linked to the scandal, dubbed Maizegate.



Reyneck Matemba is the ACB's deputy director. He told reporters the defendants have not yet been formally charged.

We normally charge our suspects towards the end, depending on the information we have received from them. Currently they are being interviewed, Matemba said.



The ACB, however, said in a statement Wednesday that Chaponda is likely to be charged with corruptly performing public functions, misuse of public office and possession of foreign currency" while Mhango is likely to be charged with forgery.

Tayub is expected to answer charges of influencing a public officer to misuse public office.

In February, President Mutharika fired Chaponda after investigators found nearly $200,000 in cash in the ministers home.

Documents leaked to local media in December point to irregularities. The documents indicate ADMARC bought the consignment of maize for $34.5 million from a private Zambian trader.

The records allege the maize could have been purchased from Zambia's government for about two-thirds of that, or $21.5 million.

Both Chaponda and Mhango deny wrongdoing. ADMARC has denied the allegations.

Charles Kajoloweka is among civil society leaders who have been pushing for justice in the scandal.

He told VOA that Chaponda's arrest has come too late.

Its a progressive action but it is coming a little late especially when you consider that these [commission of] inquiry reports were released some six months ago.

Kajoloweka says he feels the delay confirms that Chaponda, a senior member of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, had continued to enjoy protection under the current political leadership.

In a statement, however, ACB officials have ruled out any political interference in the matter, saying The process of investigations is complicated and needs to be conducted with due process and detailed care.
The Missoula Police Department is investigating after the body of a 41-year-old man was found in a van in a parking lot near Old Navy on Reserve Street.

Missoula County Sheriff and Coroner T.J. McDermott has identified the deceased man as Jesse Johnson, 41, of Missoula.

The cause and manner of death has not been determined pending complete of a toxicology report.

The Missoula Police Department is investigating the details surrounding the death.

Sgt. Travis Welsh said officers originally were called to the parking lot for a report of a suspicious vehicle on Friday around 1 p.m.

The investigation is ongoing into what happened to the man in the days before he was found, with Welsh saying it is unclear how long the body had been in the van. Detectives did not see any visible trauma to the man's body, which has been taken for an autopsy.
Mexico's economy minister on Tuesday expressed concern that the United States was insisting on reducing trade deficits in objectives it set out for the renegotiation of the NAFTA trade deal, a document he nevertheless said contained "no surprises."

Speaking on Mexican television, Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo also raised questions about U.S. hopes to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement's Chapter 19 dispute settlement mechanism that hinders the United States in pursuing anti-dumping and anti-subsidy cases against Mexico and Canada.

Talking by telephone from Japan, Guajardo likened the U.S. desire to cut trade deficits with its NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada to a "mercantilist" vision of international trade.

"What I have said insistently in my conversations with my colleagues is that we're delighted to review trade balances provided that we focus on how to improve them by expanding commerce, not by reducing it," he said.

U.S. President Donald Trump has pushed for a renegotiation of NAFTA, threatening to dump it if he cannot rework the accord to the benefit of the United States. He argues it has fueled a trade deficit with Mexico and cost thousands of U.S. jobs.

Guajardo said the document sent by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to lawmakers on Monday contained "no surprises," and he explicitly welcomed parts of it, including plans to enshrine anti-corruption provisions in NAFTA.

"What is positive is that [the United States] themselves paraphrased that they won't reintroduce quotas or tariffs during this process [of renegotiation]," he added.

Aside from his concern over Chapter 19, Guajardo also expressed doubts about the United States' intention to get rid of NAFTA's so-called "global safeguard exclusion" that curbs Washington's ability to impose measures on others.

"This will all have to be subject to the three sides being in agreement in the process," he said.

One Mexican official told Reuters on Monday he expected the Canadian government to fight to the "death" on Chapter 19, suggesting it could become a major bone of contention in negotiations due to begin next month.

Both Mexico and the United States face important elections in 2018 which could complicate the NAFTA revamp, and Guajardo has said it would be in the interests of both nations to wrap up the three-way talks by the end of this year.

However, there was no guarantee the process would be finished as quickly as they would like, Guajardo said.
Long lines wrapped around the block of downtown Yangons historic Secretariat building on Wednesday, with schoolchildren, adults and groups of friends waiting to get a rare glimpse of Myanmars history.

Closed to the public most of the year, the sprawling red-brick edifice was built by the British and turned over to the Burmese during independence in 1948. But months before, on July 19, 1947, an act of terrible violence occurred within its walls.

Political rivals gunned down nine people, including Aung San, the father of future Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Seventy years later the killings are enmeshed in the national psyche. July 19 is Martyrs Day.

But as Myanmar emerges from decades of military rule, the legacy of Aung San is coming in for new scrutiny, with some wondering whether the official version of his life fails to capture a far more complex portrait.

For half a century [there was] the sense of like an official hagiography. Hes a martyr and then his story is taught even in primary school and everyone knows it by heart and they keep on repeating that, said Khin Zaw Win, director of the Yangon-based think tank the Tampadipa Institute. But now, well especially now, with the new openness and the new generation and the benefits of things like the internet, of course people are starting to look even deeper.

The hagiography casts Aung San as an anti-colonial freedom fighter who founded the army and signed the historic Panglong peace agreement with ethnic armed groups. His tragic death in his early 30s scuttled chances of peace and an independent federal union.

But the narrative is flawed.

Glossed over are inconvenient details such as Aung Sans role in founding the Burma Communist Party, his ties to the Japanese who occupied the country during World War II  he eventually switched sides to help the Allied forces  his less than perfect relations with ethnic groups, and his political influences.

It doesnt mean that Myanmar would have been on a better path if he had been in charge. The rebellions after independence might not have happened, the people after him handled those things very badly. But certain aspects of his life are overlooked, Khin Zaw Win said.

He leaned very much towards a kind of centralized authoritarian state. Of course he borrowed heavily from the Leninist-Stalinist models of that day. And there is really quite a bit of doubt whether he would have really tolerated a real multi-party democracy.

His daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, who came to power after 2015 elections as part of Myanmars transition to democracy, has helped reinforce the official narrative by naming peace talks, launched last year, the 21st Century Panglong conference. Her party, the National League for Democracy, has also exposed conflicted opinions about Aung San in clumsy attempts to memorialize him.

In March, protests erupted over the partys proposal to name a bridge after Aung San in Mon State, while other memorials in his honor have been met with disapproval. According to reports, Mon States chief minister said the NLD decided that the biggest and longest bridges in the country would be named after Aung San, while the MP who proposed the idea dismissed the protestors as narrow-minded and said the project would honor the leaders sacrifice. The name stayed.

But the fact remains that Aung San was an incredibly important figure in Burmese history, and taking an iconoclastic position on his legacy may not be accurate either.

Matthew Walton, the Aung San Suu Kyi Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies at the University of Oxford, said in an email that he could see Aung San as the ultimate pragmatist.

He was single-mindedly focused on independence, so would do whatever he thought would get them there the quickest, he said. He was willing to engage with the non-Burman groups and negotiate, but it wasnt because he saw their cause of autonomy within a wider Burma to be just or particularly appropriate, it was because he knew he needed them (and all of them, traditional leaders and younger groups) in order to get independence.

Walton said there have been so few leaders in the countrys history that have been sympathetic or willing to engage with non-Burmans that hes about the best there is.

He also remains an esteemed and popular figure, as the lines around the Secretariat prove. The company that leased the property with plans for renovation has opened it to the public on July 19 for four years running.

Ma Thandar Win, spokesperson for the Secretariat Conservation Group, said this year visitors can see items preserved after the assassination and stored away at the National Museum. A ring from one of the deceased. Unsmoked cigarettes.

[They have] never been displayed to the public for 70 years.
Residents of one British Columbia town would be allowed to return home on Tuesday as wildfires that forced them to flee 11 days ago receded in parts of the Western Canadian province, emergency officials said.

Although fires are still burning in the area of Cache Creek, a ranching community of 1,000 residents some 350 kilometers (219 miles) northeast of Vancouver, the threat has reduced, British Columbia chief fire information officer Kevin Skrepnek said.

"Certainly we are seeing the numbers of active fires decreasing," Skrepnek said on a conference call with reporters.

Officials said rain expected in parched, fire-hit parts of the province on Thursday would bring some welcome relief although it also brought the risk of lightning, which has been blamed for starting several fires.

The fires, in an area between 150 km to 350 km northeast of Vancouver, have shut copper mines and timber operations in south-central British Columbia and threatened cattle operations.

Skrepnek said there were 155 fires across the province, including nine new fires since Monday. That was down from 162 on Sunday.

The estimated area of land burnt since the beginning of the wildfire season was 327,000 hectares, costing the province C$98.4 million ($77.93 million).

An estimated 45,806 people had been evacuated province-wide, Robert Turner, assistant deputy manager of Emergency Management B.C. said. That was up from a 39,000 estimate on Monday, largely due to more detailed information coming available to emergency services, he said.

($1 = 1.2626 Canadian dollars)
Poland's lower house of parliament voted Wednesday to send a controversial bill that would reform the nation's top court to a parliamentary committee.

The vote followed contentious debate in the chamber controlled by the ruling Law and Justice party and efforts by the opposition to delay the bill.

The measure would reorganize the Supreme Court and give lawmakers the dominant role in appointing its members.

The ruling party says the changes are necessary in order to make the court system efficient, while opponents say the move would violate judicial independence.

Street protests have accompanied debate surrounding the bill, including Tuesday night when several thousand people gathered outside the presidential palace in Warsaw.

The European Union has also expressed concern about the developments, and the European Commission was due to discuss the issue during a meeting Wednesday.

Poland is a relatively new democracy, having overthrown communist rule in 1989 and joined the EU in 2004.
A British opposition lawmaker campaigning for the release of a British-Iranian woman jailed in Iran for more than a year has welcomed signs that the British government is trying harder to free her.

In an interview with VOAs Persian Service, lawmaker Tulip Siddiq said she was pleased that the government held a parliamentary debate Tuesday on the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Siddiq spoke to VOA via Skype video from outside Parliament shortly after the debate concluded.

Siddiq asked British Minister for the Middle East Alistair Burt why the government has not explicitly called on Tehran to release 38-year-old Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a London-based charity worker who lived in the opposition Parliament member's district.

Burt responded by saying the government is taking the matter very seriously, Siddiq said, and assured the chamber that British authorities were fully aware of the living conditions Zaghari-Ratcliffe has faced at Tehrans Evin prison.

Iranian authorities detained Zaghari-Ratcliffe at Tehran's international airport in April 2016, as she was about to return home to Britain with her daughter after a visit to relatives in Iran.

An Iranian court sentenced Zaghari-Ratcliffe in September to five years in prison for undisclosed security offenses  a sentence upheld by Irans Supreme Court in April. British media have said she is accused of plotting to overthrow the Iranian government.

Zaghari-Ratcliffes British husband, Richard Ratcliffe, who also has campaigned for his wifes release, has said Iranian authorities kept her in solitary confinement in Evin prison for almost nine months last year, before transferring her to a cell with other women in late December.

Siddiq said she was especially heartened that lawmakers of Britains ruling Conservative Party urged the government to do more for Zaghari-Ratcliffe during Tuesdays debate  calling that a positive step.

In a statement earlier this year, Britains Foreign Office said Prime Minister Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson both had raised Zaghari-Ratcliffe's case with their counterparts in Iran, and continue to press the Iranians for access and for due process to be followed. It also said London was ready to help bring home Zaghari-Ratcliffe's three-year-old daughter, Gabriella, if requested. The infant has been staying with Zaghari-Ratcliffe's parents in Tehran since her mother was detained.

No British diplomats have been able to visit Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Iranian custody. British law does not automatically grant consular protection to citizens with dual nationality who are detained in countries such as Iran.

A group of 45 foreign diplomats visited Evin prison on July 5 in a tour organized by the Iranian judiciary, which said they were amazed by the comfortable living conditions they saw. But exiled Iranian Nobel Peace Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi said the tour excluded areas where Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other prisoners sentenced for security offenses were being held, prompting her to denounce the diplomats' visit as state-choreographed in a letter to the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in Iran, Asma Jahangir.

Siddiq said the foreign diplomats asked to see Zaghari-Ratcliffe during their prison visit two weeks ago, but they were denied access. The Parliament member said this account was relayed to her by British minister Burt.

The ministers explanation to me was that when (the diplomats) were offered a chance to go to the prison and look around, they did not feel they could refuse," Siddiq said.

Richard Ratcliffe, who has spoken to his wife by telephone several times in recent weeks, said on Tuesday she was in very low spirits. He called on the British government to finally call for the release of Nazanin and other British citizens who are being held without due cause.

Siddiq said two other British citizens with dual Iranian nationality also are detained in Iran: Kamal Foroughi and Roya Nobakht.

This report was produced in collaboration with VOAs Persian Service.
The pro-Russian rebel leader of a breakaway region in eastern Ukraine proposed on Tuesday replacing Ukraine with a new federal state, in comments that could further undermine a 2015 peace deal that is already faltering.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko rejected the idea, describing Alexander Zakharchenko, leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), as part of a puppet show, with Russia pulling his strings in order to relay a message.

France and Germany, which are involved in diplomatic efforts to end the Ukraine crisis, also condemned the proposal. However, the Kremlin said it warranted analysis, though it declined to discuss the matter or say if it knew beforehand of the plan.

U.S. names envoy

Ukrainian officials contend that Russia wants to show the world, and the United States especially, it can keep the crisis in a suspended state and deepen it if need be. A new U.S. envoy for the Ukraine crisis was appointed this month and Moscow and Washington are likely to start regularly engaging on the issue.

Zakharchenko, who scarcely would have expected anything other than outright rejection from Kyiv, said in a declaration that he and his allies were proposing a new state called Malorossiya (Little Russia) be set up with its capital in rebel-held Donetsk.

Malorossiya was the term used to describe swaths of modern-day Ukraine when they were part of the Russian Empire in tsarist times and is one many Ukrainians today regard as offensive. Ukraine, a country of about 42.5 million people, declared independence from Moscow in 1991.

Peaceful way out

We are proposing to residents of Ukraine a peaceful way out of a difficult situation without war. It's our last proposal, Zakharchenko said in a statement. The new state would be federal, with regions enjoying a large degree of autonomy.

He said the move was backed by delegates from different Ukrainian regions, but a statement from the neighboring rebel territory of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic said it had been unaware of the initiative and did not support it.

His declaration cast a shadow over the faltering Minsk peace agreement between the rebels and the Ukrainian government, which has failed to quell fighting between the two sides and has only been partially implemented since a pro-Russian uprising erupted in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Russia denies accusations it has delivered arms and provided troops backing rebels in the industrial, largely Russian-speaking east. On Tuesday the Kremlin said it remained committed to the Minsk peace deal.

Yevhen Marchuk, Ukraine's representative in the talks on implementing the peace deal, told Ukrainian TV channel 112.ua that Zakharchenko's declaration would complicate negotiations and looked like a Russian attempt to sabotage the process.

France, Germany oppose idea

France condemned the idea and demanded Russia do more to prevent a further escalation. A German government spokeswoman also criticized the move, calling it totally unacceptable.

Ukraine's top military commander, Viktor Muzhenko, said on social media that the Ukrainian people would bury Malorossiya, calling the plan one of the rebels' sick fantasies.

Three former rebel leaders told Reuters in May that a top aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin decides how the pro-Moscow administration of eastern Ukraine is run and who gets what jobs there, challenging Kremlin denials that it calls the shots in the region.
Police in Saudi Arabia have released without charge a woman who was arrested after she appeared in a posted video wearing a miniskirt and crop top, with her hair uncovered, in violation of the country's strict dress code.

The Saudi Ministry of Information said police released the woman Tuesday night after a prosecutor closed the case.

Police detained the woman, known on the social media app Snapchat as Model Khulood, for wearing suggestive clothing after someone posted videos of her walking through the historic fort of Ushaiqer, outside Riyadh, the capital.

According to the ministry, the woman confessed to breaking Saudi rules against being in public with her hair uncovered, but she said she did not know the video had been uploaded on the social media site.

The video, posted a few days ago, was widely shared on Twitter and Youtube, drawing both praise for the woman's bravery and criticism for her violation of Saudi dress code, which mandates that women wear a black "abaya" that covers everything except the face, feet, and hands. Women are also required to cover their hair while in public in Saudi Arabia, which has some of the world's harshest restrictions on women.

The debate exposed conflicting views on Saudi Arabia's strict rules for women. In addition to the specific dress code, women in the Muslim nation are required to get written permission from a male relative in order to travel anywhere outside their home and are forbidden from driving cars.

Supporters of "Khulood" noted that many foreign women have not covered their heads while visiting the country.

A screenshot of the video with the face of Ivanka Trump, U.S. President Donald Trump's daughter, and the caption Enough already, the situation has been solved" was among the images widely shared. Trump, along with first lady Melania Trump, kept their hair uncovered during a recent visit to Saudi Arabia.
With South Korea's offer to hold military talks with North Korea already putting the U.S. on edge, experts say Seoul's move risks further fraying relations with Washington rather than significantly advancing relations between the two Koreas.

In a bid to calm rising border tensions on the Korean Peninsula and ultimately to dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons program, Seoul on Monday proposed holding military talks and separate Red Cross talks with Pyongyang later this week at the heavily guarded border village of Panmunjom. This is the first formal overture to the North under President Moon Jae-in, who was inaugurated in May.

As Seoul looked to engage the Kim Jong Un regime, the Trump administration quickly signaled its discomfort, indicating that current conditions remain insufficient to have dialogue with Pyongyang, which has yet to respond to South Korea's invitation.

"I think the president has made clear in the past ... that any type of conditions that would have to be met are clearly far away from where we are now," White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told a media briefing on Monday.

There is a divergence of opinion between Washington and Seoul as to how to rein in the North's expanding nuclear weapons program, with President Donald Trump bent on restraining the Kim regime through sanctions and Moon preferring dialog and engagement.

"The U.S. is unlikely to come out against Moon's overtures, but Moon's overtures to Pyongyang will deepen the mistrust and push the U.S closer to cooperating with Japan on North Korea policy," said Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor of Korean studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Best-case scenario

Should North Korea respond positively to the proposal, the talks, in the best case, may result in agreements to cease propaganda broadcasts across the border and reopen the military-to-military hotline between Seoul and Pyongyang, which was cut last year after a nuclear test by the North. These and other steps would improve communications and reduce the risk of military clashes between the two sides, according to David Straub, a former State Department Korea expert who is currently at the Sejong Institute in Seoul.

"Genuine dialogue could reduce miscommunications and misunderstanding," Straub told VOA's Korean Service.

Christopher Hill, who served as the head of the U.S. delegation to the six-party talks, which stalled in 2008 during the George W. Bush administration, thinks a dialog between the two Koreas aimed at reducing tensions on their border is something the U.S. should not discourage.

"I think it's important for the Koreans to work these things out without the help of the Americans," said Hill, who was also the U.S. ambassador to South Korea. "The U.S. approach is in the security realm, especially on the nuclear weapons issue, so I don't think it's for the U.S. to be advising the South Koreans on peninsula talks."

'Always a danger'

Although there might be moves to reduce the risks of miscalculation, many analysts think the timing for talks is less than opportune, given that North Korea conducted what it called a successful test of a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile earlier this month. Many recognized the test as significant progress in meeting Pyongyang's goal of striking the U.S. with a nuclear weapon.

Jonathan Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said South Korea must be "realistic about [talks] rather than make wildly optimistic conclusions about what the possibilities might be."

"There's always a danger in being too far forward-leaning toward North Korea, because it's entirely possible that North Korea will see that as a sign of weakness," Pollack said.

Troubled by the signs of dialogue and inter-Korean contact coming out of the Moon administration, Tufts University's Lee described the recent initiative as "one-sided, capitulatory diplomacy" by Seoul, "aimed at getting the Kim regime to cease provocations and creating the illusion of peace and reconciliation."

"Heavily chaperoned separated-family reunions are one such measure of success in inter-Korean relations," said Lee. "In 2010, North Korea used military talks and talks on reopening Mount Kumgang tours as a smokescreen for the sinking of the [South Korean naval vessel] Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island." Pyongyang was blamed for both incidents despite its denials.

Past failures

Further clouding the chance of talks are South Korea's past failures to engage the regime, said Bruce Klingner, a former CIA deputy division chief for Korea, who is now with the Heritage Foundation.

"So you wonder how more effective Moon's entreaties will be than all of the other previous South Korean efforts at engagement with North Korea," Klingner said. "And indeed, since Moon was inaugurated, North Korea has shown it's going to act just as badly toward him as to [former Korean presidents] Park Geun-hye and Lee Myung-bak, just as it showed it would act just as badly" toward U.S. leaders during the administrations of former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

At this point, Lee said, the Kim regime likely will try to raise the stakes with yet another provocation  a nuclear or ICBM test  before accepting Seoul's offer to talk. The tactic could be used to extract concessions, he added, such as an agreement to avoid criticism of the Kim regime by the South, more government contacts and subsequent financial aid, a halt to U.S.-South Korean combined military exercises, and most importantly, a graduated downgrading of the U.S.-South Korea alliance.

Pollack of the Brookings Institution said North Korea may be expected to toe a tough, uncompromising line.

"The goal that North Korea has here is less improved inter-Korean relations per se," he told VOA. "Their real goal, I think, would be, to the extent possible, to delink [South Korea] from the alliance with the United States."

What is to be avoided, Pollack added, "Is the situation where it appears as if South Korea and the United States are taking steps that seem to be in contradiction to one another."
This week marks one year since South Sudan's First Vice President Taban Deng Gai was sworn in to replace Riek Machar after fighting broke out between the presidential guards and the SPLM-IO rebels loyal to Machar.

The spokesman for the Taban Deng faction of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, Agel Machar (no relation to Riek), told South Sudan in Focus that his party had brought much-needed changes to the people of South Sudan. Machar said much of the country's security had stabilized since the appointment of Taban Deng Gai last July.

"For example, in the Equatoria region, insecurity in Juba and the surrounding states, like in Yei River State, was in full-blown war. In Western Equatoria, the Arrow Boys were in full gear, but as we speak, I'm optimistic that the security is stabilizing," Machar said.

Bishop Erkulano Ludu Tombe, the Catholic bishop of the Yei Diocese, criticized the governor of Yei River State, David Lokonga Moses, for similar optimistic reports in which Lokonga announced the Yei-Kaya road was open and all roads leading to Yei were secure. Ludu said Yei residents were still living in fear and that false reports about the roads being safe had resulted in more abductions and killings of innocent civilians.

Machar insisted that conditions are better than they were a year ago in Yei.

"He may think that things are not as normal as they should be. All of us are hoping and working to make sure it gets done," Machar said. Asked about Taban Deng's promise to reunify SPLM forces, which has yet to be realized, Machar replied, "We have made progress on that."

Security in Juba

Machar said the first phase of Joint Integrated Police that are supposed to take control of security in the capital have been dispatched, "and they are working to secure the streets in Juba."

He also said cantonment sites for rebel forces have been established in former Unity State and that the deputy defense minister checked on those sites last month, "to make sure the forces at those cantonment sites are reorganized, are registered, and they are screened to make sure they are ready for reunification."

The SPLM-IO spokesman said he could not describe the size of SPLM-IO forces being reintegrated into the Sudan People's Liberation Army.

When asked about Deng's promise to repair South Sudan's broken economy, Machar responded, "The economy of the country is tied with the peace and tranquility of the country. So what the first vice president really means is that when you bring tranquility and peace and cooperation with President Salva [Kiir], that will allow the government to have breathing space to then concentrate on economic recovery."

Machar said there was now peace in areas of South Sudan in which there was no peace before.

"In fact, people used to be shot here in Juba by unknown gunmen," Machar added, "but now it's no longer there."

Machar said the same was true in Kapoeta, Wau, Yei and Torit.

He said that while there still were pockets of violence that erupt "from place to place, the government is working to contain those things."
British Columbia's government took the unprecedented step on Wednesday of extending a state of emergency by two weeks as it battled 155 wildfires that have forced nearly 50,000 people from their homes.

The province's Premier John Horgan said evacuated households would receive C$600 ($476.53) from the government to cover basic needs for every 14 days they cannot return home. The government issued the first such payment two weeks ago.

"Traditionally, when an emergency is declared, people are usually back in their homes within the two-week period. That may not be the case for many individuals," Horgan told reporters, in his first major announcement since taking office Tuesday.

On July 7, the Canadian province declared its first state of emergency since 2003 as gusty winds fanned fires that were caused by lightning and humans in the tinder-dry central and southern regions.

Canadian military aircraft have joined thousands of firefighters from as far away as Australia to battle the fires.

On Tuesday, 155 fires were raging in the province, down from 163 on Sunday, British Columbia chief fire information officer Kevin Skrepnek said.

Horgan said stipends to households would come from a C$100 million fund established by the province earlier in July to deal with the fires, which have shut mines and timber operations and damaged homes and electrical infrastructure.

The estimated area of land burnt since the beginning of the wildfire season was 327,000 hectares (808,034 acres), costing the province C$98.4 million.

Residents of Cache Creek, a small ranching town of 1,000 in south-central British Columbia, were allowed to return home on Tuesday after 11 days in shelters.

West Fraser Timber and privately held Tolko, among the largest Canadian producers of forestry products, and Norbord, the world's largest maker of oriented strand board used in the construction of houses, suspended some operations.

Tolko said on Monday that many of its employees had been forced from their homes.

Major pipeline companies in the region, including Kinder Morgan Canada Ltd., a unit of Kinder Morgan, have created fire breaks, installed sprinklers and taken other measures to protect operations.

Enbridge, which took a natural gas compressor station offline and canceled planned maintenance work, said on Sunday it had no timeline for restarting the station.
Waterton Lakes National Park officials in Canada prohibited open fires on Tuesday due to increasing wildfire danger.

The ban covers all front- and backcountry campgrounds and day-use areas in the park, including Waterton townsite. Some modern models of gas or propane stoves and barbecues, gas-powered lanterns, patio heaters and portable propane fire pits are still allowed under direct supervision of the owners.

For more information on Waterton fire rules, check the parks website at pc.gc.ca/apps/scond/Cond_E.asp?oID=28176&oPark=100429.

Glacier National Park across the Canadian border in Montana has not restricted open fires yet. However, the U.S. park experiences similar high fire danger and visitors should be extremely careful with campfires and open burning.
An international robotics competition in Washington was in its final day Tuesday, with teams of teenagers from more than 150 nations competing. The team getting the most attention at the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge was a squad of girls from Afghanistan who were twice rejected for U.S. visas before President Donald Trump intervened. But there are even more stories than there are teams. Here are a few:

Girl power

Sixty percent of the teams participating in the competition were founded, led or organized by women. Of the 830 teens participating, 209 were girls. And in addition to the Afghan squad, there were five other all-girl teams, from the United States, Ghana, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. Vanuatu's nickname: the "SMART Sistas."

Samira Bader, 16, on the Jordanian team, said "it's very difficult for us because everyone thinks" building robots is "only for boys." She said her team wanted to prove that "girls can do it."

The three-girl U.S. team included sisters Colleen and Katie Johnson of Everett, Washington, and Sanjna Ravichandar of Plainsboro, New Jersey.

Colleen Johnson, 16, said her team looked forward "to a day when an all-girls team is going to be no more special than an all-boys team or a co-ed team, just when that's completely normal and accepted."

The team competing from Brunei was also all female, though a male member previously worked on the project.

An unusual alliance

The United States and Russia were on the same side Tuesday. During the fourth round of the competition, the U.S. team was paired with teams from Russia and Sudan to work as an alliance.

The robots all the teams in the competition created were designed with the same kit of parts and did the same task: pick up and distinguish between blue and orange balls. To score points, teams deposited the blue balls, which represented water, and the orange balls, which represented contaminants, into different locations. Each three-nation alliance competed head to head in 2-minute games.

Both U.S. and Russian teams paid their counterparts compliments after their game Tuesday. Russian team member Aleksandr Iliasov said of the U.S. team: "They cooperate well." And U.S. team member Colleen Johnson called the Russian team's robot "very innovative," saying they had smartly used extra wheels and gears and zip ties to keep balls inside their robot.

Despite their good collaboration, U.S.-Russia-Sudan fell short, losing 40 to 20 to Zimbabwe, Moldova and Trinidad and Tobago.

A little help

The team from Iran got some help building their robot from American students. It turns out that the competition's kit of robot parts, including wheels, brackets, sprockets, gears, pulleys and belts, was not approved for shipment to Iran because of sanctions involving technology exports to the country. So the competition recruited a robotics team at George C. Marshall High School in Falls Church, Virginia, to help. Iran's team designed the robot, and about five Marshall students built it in the United States.

The team explained on its competition web page that "our friends in Washington made our ideas as a robot."

Because of the time difference between the countries, the three-member team and its mentor were sometimes up at midnight or 3 a.m. in Iran to talk to their collaborators.

Amin Dadkhah, 15, called working with the American students "a good and exciting experience for both of us." Kirianna Baker, one of the U.S. students who built the robot, agreed. "Having a team across the world with a fresh set of eyes is very valuable," she said.

A robot refugee

A group of three refugees from Syria competed as Team Refugee, also known as Team Hope. All three fled Syria to Lebanon three years ago because of violence in their country.

Mohamad Nabih Alkhateeb, Amar Kabour and Mahir Alisawaui named their robot "Robogee," a combination of the words "robot" and "refugee."

Alkhateeb, 17, and Kabour, 16, said they wanted to be robotics engineers, and Alisawui wanted to be a computer engineer. Kabour said it's important to the team to win, to "tell the world" refugees are "here and they can do it."

Alkhateeb also said that living as a refugee had been difficult, but he hoped to someday return home.

"I will go back after I have finished my education so I can rebuild Syria again," he said.

Eleven million people  half the Syrian population  have been forced from their homes by the civil war.
When President Donald Trump left his chair at this month's G20 summit while Africa was discussed and had daughter Ivanka sit in for him, critics blasted it as a breach of diplomatic protocol. But it also drew attention to the growing concern that when it comes to the continent of 1.2 billion people, the U.S. leader has been notably absent.

Six months into office, the Trump administration's policy toward Africa has been left to drift, observers say. They cite vacant diplomatic posts and a lack of strategic thinking on multiple issues, including extremist threats in East and West Africa and civil war in South Sudan.

It's always been a struggle to get Washington's attention on Africa, but "with this administration, I don't get the sense that it's even on the map . We're looking at blank page here," said Richard Downie, acting director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

A chief concern is that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has yet to appoint an assistant secretary in charge of African affairs, the top post in charge of Africa policy.

That has "stymied" State Department operations, said Steve McDonald, global fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington. "Ongoing, day-to-day things don't get decided on."

In addition, there is still no permanent Africa director at the National Security Council. It is the only region without one.

This month the Trump administration delayed a decision on whether to lift sanctions on Sudan, prompting Sudan's president to order that all negotiations with the U.S. be frozen until mid-October.

Other White House moves suggest that Trump's "America First" foreign policy is increasing focus on security and counter-terrorism efforts in Africa over the humanitarian and development agenda supported by previous administrations.

Several African nations face threats from extremist groups like Boko Haram and the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab. At the same time, millions of people are at risk of starvation in Somalia, South Sudan and northeastern Nigeria, and potentially violent elections are approaching in regional powers Kenya and Congo.

While the U.S. this month pledged nearly $640 million in humanitarian assistance to alleviate hunger in South Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen, critics said the aid had been approved months earlier by Congress but delayed by the Trump administration.

Trump moved relatively quickly on security. In March, he approved a Pentagon proposal to "conduct lethal action" in Somalia against al-Shabab. Less than a month later, Defense Secretary James Mattis visited Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the only permanent U.S. military base in Africa.

Tillerson has yet to visit Africa, according to the State Department's online log of his travels.

The White House's 2018 proposed budget reflects the shift toward security and away from aid. It includes a $52 billion increase on defense spending, made possible by proposed cuts to the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development by roughly a third.

The proposed budget would reduce funding from $30 million to $8 million to carry out the closure of the United States African Development Foundation, which supports local enterprises in 30 countries. It also would reduce funding by about $1 billion to the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which supports anti-retroviral therapy for over 11 million people, many in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Trump administration also wants downsizing of United Nations peacekeeping missions, many operating in Africa's most volatile areas. In June, the U.N. reduced its annual peacekeeping budget by more than half a billion dollars.

Current and former U.S. military leaders have warned that deep cuts to diplomacy and aid could jeopardize long-term U.S. interests overseas, and some lawmakers have pledged not to pass the budget as it stands.

"This budget, if fully implemented, would require us to retreat from the world diplomatically or put people at risk," Sen. Lindsey Graham told reporters in May. "You'd have lot of Benghazis in the making if this thing became law."

In Somalia, development programs meant to counter the lure of extremism could disappear under the proposed budget. USADF grants have reached nearly 6,000 direct beneficiaries there since 2012, said Abdinasir Ahmed Osman, project coordinator for the Somali Consultants Association, which monitors the work.

In the capital, Mogadishu, USADF-funded programs target youth between 18 and 35 - the same demographic that extremist recruiters go after, Osman said.

"We are giving them skills. We are giving them opportunity," he said. "They can compare which is better: being in battle, dying without a future, or getting skills and working?"

It's wrong to say that U.S. diplomatic efforts in Africa are not moving forward, said Brian Neubert, director of the State Department's Africa Regional Media Hub in Johannesburg.

He said several development and trade initiatives such as Power Africa and the African Growth and Opportunity Act continue and diplomats are going about their work. But South Africa, one of the continent's top economies, remains without a U.S. ambassador.

"It's pretty routine at this period, given the other challenges in the world," Neubert said.

Others disagree, saying that without a president visibly engaged in Africa - especially after President Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan - U.S. diplomatic efforts could flounder.

"What you have is a policy vacuum when it comes to basic, critical issues in Africa," said Steven Feldstein, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.

"Diplomacy will follow where the president signals his interest."
U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a second, previously undisclosed meeting at the G-20 summit earlier this month in Germany, White House officials confirmed Tuesday night.

The two presidents met face-to-face for the first time in Hamburg on July 7, for more than two hours of talks that were extensively covered at the time.

But it has now emerged that Trump and Putin had a second discussion during a dinner that same evening for the heads of state from the Group of 20 and their spouses.

Trump took to Twitter quickly to repudiate the media reports: "Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is 'sick.'"

There was no immediate word on what was discussed at the meeting, which lasted roughly an hour, according to Ian Bremmer, president of the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group.

'Just a brief conversation'

The White House had a sharply different account of what happened. Officials speaking on background, which meant they could not be identified, said: There was no second meeting between President Trump and President Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner.

Bremmer first reported the Trump-Putin meeting Tuesday in a newsletter sent to his clients. Appearing on U.S. networks as the news spread, Bremmer said he had been told about the Trump-Putin exchange by others attending the formal dinner. The press was barred from the proceedings.

The two presidents were joined only by Putin's translator as they spoke in a conference hall on the banks of the Elbe River. Others dinner guests were seated nearby, but the spacious table setting made it possible to keep the conversation private.

No US interpreter present

The fact that Trump was not joined in the conversation by his own translator raised eyebrows among other leaders at the dinner, according to Bremmer, who called it a breach of national security protocol.



The White House, however, said only one translator per delegation was permitted at the dinner, and Trump had with him an interpreter who spoke Japanese, but not Russian.

Bremmer told The Washington Post that other leaders who witnessed the U.S.-Russian meeting were befuddled by the conversation, held in full view  but not listening distance  of others.

Pretty much everybody at the dinner thought this was pretty weird, Bremmer told The New York Times.  Here is the president of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesn't care. They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled.

No official record of event

Media accounts of the second Trump-Putin conversation noted that the U.S. government had no official record of the U.S. and Russian leaders' meeting, since no other American official accompanied Trump for the talks, however brief or lengthy they were.

American news networks prominently covered the Trump-Putin exchange as urgent, breaking news, prompting commentators to observe the timing of the new disclosures was not good for the administration.

Last week, the news was dominated by reports of a meeting in June 2016 between Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son, and a series of Russians including a Kremlin-linked lawyer; a former Soviet spy; a translator previously investigated for money laundering; and a second Russian translator.

Trump Jr. tried to minimize that session in New York as a routine, brief and uneventful meeting, but piecemeal disclosures of what happened and who took part forced him to switch his story several times.

White House slow to respond

The president has continued to deny any collusion with Russia, and insists that the U.S. will benefit if he can build a friendship with the Russian leader.

There was some delay Tuesday evening before White House officials responded to accounts of the second Trump-Putin encounter in Hamburg.

When they issued their background statement later, the White House officials said any notion that the administration was trying to conceal the second meeting was "false, malicious and absurd."

Separately, the White House announced Tuesday night that Trump has decided to nominate former Utah governor and U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman to be the next U.S. ambassador to Moscow.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday said a voter fraud commission launched under his administration will be very transparent and the results will be made available publicly, once a report is written.

The panel's work will be "very open for everyone to see" Trump said during the commission's first meeting. "You will approach this important task with a very open mind and with no conclusions already drawn. You will fairly and objectively follow the facts wherever they may lead, he told the group.

The commission met to swear in members, formulate objectives and discuss next steps after requesting voter information from the 50 states last month.

Trump announced the creation of the commission early in his presidency after alleging, without proof, that millions of illegal votes caused him to lose the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump: Voter Fraud Commission Will be 'Very Transparent'

Vice President Mike Pence promised the commission would serve as non-partisan service to the American people, though several Democrats have voiced doubt over the effectiveness of the commission and called for the removal of Kris Kobach as vice chairman.

Critics of the commission say it is part of a voter suppression effort aimed at removing minorities and other typically Democrat voters from the voter rolls, and to justify Trumps claims of massive illegal voting.

In a letter sent Tuesday to Pence, four high-ranking Democrats  Reps. Elijah Cummings, John Conyers, Bennie Thompson and Robert Brady - said they were concerned the commissions request for voter data would openly flout federal privacy and transparency laws.

Mr. Kobach has repeatedly claimed, falsely, that widespread voter fraud exists and advertises his work on the Commission to promote his own campaign for governor of Kansas, the letter read. These actions undermine the integrity of the Commission and raise significant concerns that the Commission will be used as a tool for voter suppression.

Trump, though, said the commission will protect the sanctity of American elections and follow the facts wherever they may lead.

This commission is tasked with the sacred duty of upholding the integrity of the ballot box and the principle of one citizen, one vote, Trump said. Every time voter fraud occurs it cancels out the vote of a lawful citizen and undermines democracy -- cant let that happen.

Trump said more than 30 states had already agreed to share the data with the commission. Several states, though, refused Trumps request for voter information  which included voter names, voting histories and party registrations.

Trump chided those states during his remarks Wednesday, saying one has to wonder what they're worried about.
Turkey's prime minister announced a Cabinet reshuffle on Wednesday, replacing or swapping 11 ministers in the 26-member council of ministers, including the ministers for justice and defense.



The announcement came months after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan regained the leadership of Turkey's ruling party following a narrow win in a referendum ushering in a series of constitutional changes. Erdogan had complained of a "fatigue" within the ruling party, speaking of a need for rejuvenation.



Binali Yildirim named legislator Abdulhamit Gul as the new justice minister and former deputy prime minister Nurettin Canikli as the defense minister. They replace former minister for justice Bekir Bozdag and for defense Fikri Isik, who were both appointed deputy prime ministers.



Bozdag had largely overseen a major government crackdown following last year's failed military coup that Turkey has blamed on U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen. More than 50,000 people suspected of links to the coup or to Gulen have been arrested.



The key ministries for the economy, finance, foreign affairs, the interior and European Union affairs remained unchanged. Yildirim appointed Julide Sarieroglu as the minister for labor and social security, raising the number of women in the Council of Ministers to two.



Yildirim made the announcement following a previously unannounced meeting with Erdogan.



The referendum approved a series of constitutional changes abolishing the office of the prime minister and concentrating much of the executive powers in the hands of the president.



While most of the changes will come into effect after the next general elections in 2019, one amendment came into effect immediately  scrapping laws that require the head of the state to sever ties with political parties. Erdogan was re-elected chairman of the ruling party in an extraordinary congress on May 21.



The Cabinet reshuffle is seen as a major step toward his cementing his authority and putting his mark on the government ahead of the 2019 elections.



Erdogan co-founded the Justice and Development Party in 2001 and led it for more than a decade until he was elected president in 2014.
The U.N. secretary-general urged the international community Wednesday to, in his words, change the narrative about Africa. Antonio Guterres said countries should cooperate more with the continent to recognize its vast potential and prevent and manage conflicts there.

Guterres told a Security Council debate about enhancing peace and security in Africa that the African Union and the United Nations have a shared interest in neutralizing conflicts before they escalate and managing them effectively when they do happen.

Enhancing African capacities is essentially both in the context of our collective response to international peace and security challenges as well as for the self-reliance of the African continent, said Guterres, who noted the challenge posed by terrorism and extremist groups, including Somalia-based al-Shabab.

It is my deep belief that with enhanced support to AMISOM, the African Union Force, and predicable funding, along with a coordinated effort to build the Somali National Army and police forces, al-Shabab can be defeated, said Guterres.

Guterres welcomed the initiative by the Group of Five Sahel countries to create a joint force to fight terrorism, as well as the Lake Chad Basin Multinational Joint Task Force, which is battling Boko Haram.

Smail Chergui, the commissioner for peace and security of the African Union, told the Council that African troops face some of the most challenging situations without adequate equipment and financial resources.

He urged more investment in conflict prevention and management tools, as well as in countering the threat and spread of violent extremism.

The continent is also coping with potential famine situations in several countries, none of which are solely the product of drought. U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley criticized the actors responsible for conflicts which have led to these crises.

These famines are a sign of a collective failure and any effective response must begin with the nations of Africa themselves, said Haley. AU member states must ramp up their response to this crisis.

On July 8, the United States announced an additional $446 million in humanitarian assistance to people facing food crises in South Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia, bringing this fiscal year's total to $1.4 billion.
Russia says it reserves the right to retaliate in a dispute with the U.S. over the Obama administration's seizure of two Russian compounds last December.

Before leaving office, then-President Barack Obama also expelled 35 Russian diplomats, accusing them of spying. He said the actions were aimed at punishing Moscow for having interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Now, six months later, Russia says it's running out of patience with the Trump administration over the return of the compounds, and the State Department is being tight-lipped about negotiations with Russian officials.

Russia says the picturesque Russian compounds in Maryland and New York state are dachas, used strictly for recreation. But U.S. intelligence agencies say they were used for surveillance until they were seized.

Session at State Department

Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov met Monday at the State Department with U.S. Undersecretary of State Thomas Shannon. Caught by reporters as he was leaving, Ryabkov was asked whether Russia was close to getting its compounds back. He replied, "Almost."

Pressed by reporters at Tuesday's State Department briefing, spokeswoman Heather Nauert refused to comment on the status of negotiations or to say whether Secretary of State Rex Tillerson favored giving the compounds back to Russia under certain conditions.

"I wouldn't characterize it that way," she said, adding that "the priority here is to get the United States and Russia to a place where they could have a good, decent, solid relationship so we can work together on areas of mutual cooperation. ... One of them is Syria."

Nauert said the talks with Moscow would continue.

Russian threats

After Monday's talks, Russia was still threatening to retaliate in kind. Ambassador John Herbst, a veteran U.S. diplomat now with the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, told VOA this was standard procedure.

"This fits standard Soviet and then Russian diplomatic practice," he said. "When we catch their spies and then expel them, they immediately expel the same number of American diplomats. So they never acknowledge their culpability. When we take steps to deal with egregious actions on their part, they always take countersteps. It is simply the way they do business."

Herbst said it was unusual that Russian President Vladimir Putin did not retaliate in kind after the compounds were seized and its diplomats were expelled, saying Putin most likely expected the Trump administration would give the compounds back. Asked how the Kremlin might respond if its patience wore thin, Herbst said there were several options.

Closures in Russia

"Well, we also have dachas, or at least had a single dacha in Russia," he said. "Conceivably, they could take that away. I remember when Obama took these steps, there was speculation that they were going to close down the major school used by our embassy's children. That would be very nasty indeed. And I would hope and expect that that would prompt a very strong reaction by us if they were to do that."

The dispute over the compounds comes at a politically sensitive time as reports emerge of a previously undisclosed high-level meeting between Russians and top members of the Trump campaign last June.
A federal court in California has convicted the former head of South Korea's earthquake research center of accepting bribes and money laundering.

Prosecutors say Heon-Cheol Chi received more than $1 million from U.S. and British seismological companies in exchange for insider business information. He concealed the money through the U.S. banking system.

Chi was found guilty Monday after a trial that lasted just four days.

The American financial system is not to be used as a storehouse for the proceeds of corrupt activity, Acting U.S. Attorney Sandra Brown said. This conviction sends a message that should be heard around the world.

U.S. attorneys say Chi demanded bribes from the companies in exchange for information that would give them an unfair advantage in the South Korean earthquake research business. It included confidential information about competitors and the bidding process.

Chi laundered the cash through California and New York banks and investment houses before sending the funds back to South Korea.

Prosecutors say he got more in bribes than his government salary.

Chi will be sentenced in October.
Talks aimed at breaking down trade barriers between the United States and China appeared to hit a snag Wednesday in Washington, as the two sides canceled news conferences that were scheduled for the end of the meeting.

As the talks started in Washington, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin called for "a more fair and balanced economic relationship" between the United States and China.

Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang said trading cooperation between the two countries "is a realistic choice for both sides," but he warned "confrontation will immediately damage the interests of both."

Washington and Beijing govern the world's two biggest economies, but China sells more than $300 billion more to U.S. customers each year than American firms sell to China.

Analysts say domestic politics in both nations make it difficult for negotiators to make progress on trade issues. Derek Scissors of the American Enterprise Institute tells VOA that President Donald Trump's criticism of China during the election campaign means Washington has to press for significant concessions from Beijing in these talks. Scissors says the next step might be for the Trump administration to impose a tariff on steel or aluminum imports from China.

Meanwhile, Bookings Institution scholars David Dollar and Ryan Hass write that China's leadership cannot be seen as giving in to Washington in the run-up to the Party Congress, which is a major political event.

The U.S. Treasury chief said the U.S. and China had made progress earlier in their trade relations as a result of the April summit between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, with China's markets being opened to U.S. beef processors and American credit-rating agencies gaining new information to assess the creditworthiness of Chinese corporations.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday his country will stand firm against the United States and respond to any new sanctions the U.S. imposes on the Islamic republic.

"We will stand up to the United States," Rouhani said and, without elaborating, said, "The great nation of Iran will have an appropriate answer."

Rouhani's remarks, made during a televised Cabinet meeting, came one day after the U.S. imposed new sanctions on 18 individual Iranians and groups it accuses of backing Tehran's ballistic missile program.

Rouhani is a political moderate who has been increasingly outspoken about the U.S., describing ties with Washington as "a curvy road."

The State Department announced its sanctions against two groups linked to Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, saying they were involved in ballistic missile research and development.

It further said that Iranian activities in the Middle East "undermine regional stability, security and prosperity."

US Treasury sanctions

Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned five people and seven entities for their support of Iranian military purchases, as well as an "Iran-based transnational criminal organization and three Iranians it said are associated with it.

The sanctions freeze any assets the targeted Iranians might have in the U.S. and block Americans from doing business with them.

At the United Nations in New York, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif told VOA that sanctions have "unfortunately become a bad habit" with the United States, and that the U.S. can expect reprisals from Iran.

"It will involve people who have participated in terrorism and extremism in our region as well as supporting expansionism," Zarif said. He added that an announcement on retaliatory sanctions on the U.S. will come "in due course."

Middle East Institute senior scholar Zubair Iqbal says the U.S. sanctions will hurt economic growth in Iran, fueling income inequality and giving the hardline conservatives in the country more reason to continue an anti-American and anti-Western attitude.

"Under these circumstances, the forces that will be unleashed will likely be not particularly beneficial for the American longer-term interests," Iqbal told VOA.

Washington announced the new sanctions just a day after it recertified Iranian compliance with the nuclear agreement Tehran signed in 2015 with the U.S. and five other world powers. The deal requires Iran to limit its ability to enrich uranium and take other steps to ensure it is not working to develop nuclear weapons, all in exchange for sanctions relief.

A senior Trump administration official said that while Iran is technically meeting the terms of the nuclear deal, it is "unquestionably in default of the spirit of the agreement," adding that the U.S. is working with its allies to more strictly enforce it going forward.

Review of deal

The Trump administration has been conducting a months-long review of the nuclear deal and other aspects of U.S. policy toward Iran. Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says Washington is using the new sanctions to send a message to Tehran about that review.

The sanctions are designed to say that while this interagency [governmental] review is going on, this administration is dedicated to containing, rolling back and deterring Irans non-nuclear threats to the region, Taleblu said in an interview with VOAs Persian Service. Those threats include ballistic missile development and transnational crime, and that is why the sanctions that we have seen from the U.S. Treasury and State Department are so important.

Also Tuesday, the U.S. renewed its demand that Iran free three Americans held on what the U.S. calls "fabricated national security related charges." It also insisted Iran keep its promise to free former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who has been missing in Iran for more than a decade.
The U.S. State Department is urging Russia to reconsider their new ban on the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Monday, the Russian Supreme Court rejected an appeal on an earlier ruling that labeled the group extremist, ordering the Christian denomination to disband immediately on Russian territory.

The State Department called the court decision "the latest in a disturbing trend of persecution of religious minorities in Russia."

It said, "Religious minorities should be able to enjoy freedom of religion and assembly without interference as guaranteed by the Russian Federation's constitution."

The State Department urged Russian authorities to lift the ban on the Jehovah's Witnesses' activities in Russia, and to release any members of religious minorities unjustly detained for so-called "extremist' activities".

The Russian government maintains the religious group was distributing inflammatory pamphlets designed to incite hatred, including one that printed the novelist Leo Tolstoy's criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church.

According to the group, which is best known for door-to-door evangelizing, there are 175,000 Jehovah's Witnesses members in Russia. The ruling will allow the government to ban members from assembling and preaching, and force the group's headquarters in St. Petersburg to close along with 395 local chapters. The government will also seize Jehovah's Witnesses properties, known as Kingdom Halls.

Following the court decision, the Jehovah's Witnesses issued a statement asking "fellow believers worldwide [to] pray that the Russian government will reconsider its position and respect fundamental human rights."

"The worldwide community of Jehovah's Witnesses are deeply concerned for the welfare of their spiritual brothers and sisters in Russia," said Philip Brumley, General Counsel for the Jehovah's Witnesses. "They have become outcasts in their own country."

The denomination, which believes that Jesus Christ will soon return to Earth and establish a thousand-year Golden Age, have suffered persecution before.

The group is apolitical, refusing to vote in elections, fight in the military, or salute flags. American Jehovah's Witnesses were put in jail during World War II for evading the draft and a 1940 U.S. Supreme Court decision, now overturned, allowed schools to expel Jehovah's Witnesses children who declined to stand for the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Members were killed in concentration camps in Nazi Germany and were persecuted in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

The religious sect became legal in Russia in 1991.
Bullet-riddled roofs line the "boulevard of death" in Central African Republic's southeastern town of Bangassou, where almost everyone who enters is seen as an enemy.



The city, spared sectarian bloodshed until May, now has more than 2,000 Muslim residents forced to take refuge at the local cathedral after attacks by the mostly Christian anti-Balaka militia.



More than 300 people have been killed and 100,000 displaced since May as violence that began in 2013 moves into the impoverished country's central and southeastern regions, prompting warnings of a national conflict roaring back to life.



In Bangassou alone, more than 150 people have died in fighting between militias and U.N. peacekeeping forces.



"We were driven out by force. We have lost our parents, our homes and all of our belongings," said Djamal Haddine Mahamat-Salle, secretary-general of the organization representing the town's displaced Muslims. " It's been two and a half months since we've been here, blocked without the ability to even go beyond 100 meters."



Many said their departure from the cathedral could mean death.



"The anti-Balaka are everywhere. And as soon as you risk leaving, they will demand ransom," said Zarah Mahamat. She said she tried to go to the market one day to buy vegetables for her children, who no longer have even rice to eat, and was stopped.



"I had to contact my parents in Bangui and they sent me the money to pay the ransom," she said, still wearing the same clothes she had when she fled in May.



Another resident, Jean-Claude Gbienza, blamed the U.N. peacekeeping mission for provoking some of the violence. He said the forces arrived in May and started shooting, causing the local defense groups that are also part of the anti-Balaka to retaliate by burning homes and fighting.



Yvette Siolo said her hand was pierced by a bullet when the U.N. forces came in shooting. She said the rest of her family has fled to neighboring Congo, on the other side of the river.



On a visit to Bangassou this week, U.N. humanitarian chief Stephen O'Brien insisted that the U.N. is there to help, and he warned of the growing violence.



"We see the Muslim community who became the victims of attacks and this is an alarming situation. This cycle of violence must stop," he said, calling for more support from the international community.



"If we do not act now and keep the faith, we will see increasing need and even greater vulnerability of already weakened people," O'Brien said Tuesday.



The humanitarian crisis in Central African Republic, requiring some $497 million, is only 24 percent funded, the U.N. says. The world body says nearly 2.4 million people are in need of aid to survive.



During O'Brien's visit, children who haven't been to school for months held up signs that read ``No to this open prison'' and ``I have a right to life and education.''



Central African Republic has faced fighting since 2013, when predominantly Muslim Seleka rebels seized power in the capital, Bangui. Anti-Balaka militias, mostly Christians, fought back, resulting in thousands of people killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.



Attempts at peace deals, the latest signed in June by more than a dozen armed groups, have failed.



The head of the U.N. peacekeeping force of 12,000 troops has acknowledged that the mission is not enough to protect civilians around the country.



The U.N. refugee agency says more than 60,000 people have fled into remote northern Congo since May, the majority women and children, with some sleeping in the open and "desperately" in need of food.
Just days after Iraqi forces evicted Islamic State (IS) militants from the last parcel of land that they controlled in Mosul, Iraqi government officials say they are ready to rebuild the war-torn city and return an estimated 1 million displaced civilians to their homes.

Officials from the Iraqi Ministry of Planning told VOA that they had drawn up a 10-year plan to reconstruct the city, which came under full control of U.S.-backed Iraqi forces last week.

"This is a broad plan that will hopefully start in the beginning of next year and continue until 2027," Abdul Zahra al-Hindawi, ministry spokesperson, told VOA. "The plan will cost around $10 billion."

Al-Hindawi said the government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was not able to provide the entire planned budget, but its allies have shown willingness to step in and provide assistance.

Al-Hindawi added that a major conference would be held in Washington this month where Iraqi officials would discuss details of their plan and how allies and international organizations could contribute to the rebuilding.

Western side ravaged

Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, came under IS control in mid-2014. Months of IS occupation and the Iraqi battle to oust the terror group reduced much of the city's western side to rubble.

Watch: With IS Gone, Mosul Schools Reopen in Process That Could Take Months

The U.N. has warned that the road for Iraq to reconstruct the city and return civilians will be "extremely challenging" as the country wrestles with IS in other pockets that the terror group still holds.

Lise Grande, the U.N.'s humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, said that of the 54 residential districts in western Mosul, 15 were "basically flattened," while the rest were moderately or lightly damaged.

The cost of stabilizing western Mosul areas and making them livable could surpass $700 million, she said.

"That is double the estimate for stabilization due to fighting, which was so fierce and so much worse than what anyone else experienced," Grande told journalists in New York on Monday while speaking via videoconference from Baghdad.

More evacuations?

She added that U.N.'s top priority was to evacuate civilians who might still be trapped in Mosul's Old City.

"The fighting may be stopping but the humanitarian crisis has not," she said.

The U.N. agency estimates that close to 1 million civilians have left the city since the beginning of the Iraqi offensive last October. Some 700,000 people are from western Mosul, where most destruction from the fighting occurred.

While returning normalcy to western Mosul's Old City may take months, Iraqi officials said they expected most of the civilians from less damaged areas to return home after security has been restored.

"Fifteen percent of people have already returned home in eastern Mosul," Darbaz Muhammad, the Iraqi minister of migration and displaced, told VOA this month.

Muhammad pleaded for international support to speed up the return of more Mosul residents as 100,000 more civilians are expected to flee their homes by the end of this year, when Iraqi forces start an assault on IS in other areas of Nineveh, Anbar and Kirkuk provinces.
Young refugees from Somalia and Eritrea who are eagerly awaited by American foster families have been cleared to travel to the United States, Lutheran Social Services (LSS) tells VOA.



As VOA reported Friday, the Unaccompanied Refugee Minors (UMR) Program has been in a state of uncertainty since the Trump administrations travel order went into effect June 29.

The Supreme Court allowed the order to be implemented as long as travelers and refugees with bona fide relationships to people or businesses in the United States were admitted.

At that point, prospects looked dim for Americans waiting to foster the refugee teenagers because foster parents, were not included on the governments list of bona fide relationships. The list was restricted to family relationships that include a parent, spouse, child, adult son or daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law or sibling who is already in the United States.

Children accepted into the UMR program by definition are without family either in the United States or their country of origin.

While not related by blood, aspiring foster parents undergo considerable training and security checks as well as preparations to open their homes to children they have never met, and whose names they wont know until the child arrives.

Green light, but

Last week, a judge in Hawaii expanded the list of permissible relationships considered bona fide to include a relationship with a refugee organization.

In an email early Wednesday, LSS says that as a result of the Hawaii ruling, the children in the UMR program will be traveling. It will take some time to re-sort everything out and get all the kids who are matched across the country scheduled on flights, an LSS spokesman wrote to VOA.

LSS, whose parent program Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, is one of two U.S. refugee organizations that serves the URM program, says it has 39 children who have been matched with foster families.

A spokesman for the State Department confirmed Wednesday the department is still working to implement the Hawaii ruling even though the U.S. government has appealed that decision to the Supreme Court.

The high court set a deadline Tuesday for briefs to be filed in the case and could rule at any time.

What the court says could affect the young refugees who are getting ready to travel. This could also be interrupted, LSS cautions, by an appeal from the administration.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has acknowledged Iraqi forces committed human rights violations in the battle to retake Mosul from Islamic State, but maintained the crimes were "individual acts" and the perpetrators would be punished.

Abadi spoke Tuesday after videos circulated on social media showing troops hurling captured IS suspects off a high wall in Mosul and then shooting their bodies.

Some of the most recent evidence surfaced after the prime minister declared victory last week, including a video showing a soldier shooting an unarmed man on his knees.

Abadi's acknowledgement came as Human Rights Watch said international observers found an execution site in west Mosul and it has other evidence showing Iraqi forces wantonly killed men as they fled the city at the end of the battle to retake Mosul.

The findings were included in a report that calls on the Iraqi government to investigate murder, torture and other war crimes by security forces and to hold them accountable.

The rights group said Wednesday Abadi has not investigated the wrongdoing as promised nor has any soldier been held accountable.

"He is ignoring the flood of evidence of his soldiers committing vicious war crimes in the very city he's promised to liberate," said Human Rights Middle East Director Sarah Leah Whitson.

"Abadi's victory will collapse unless he takes concrete steps to end the grotesque abuses by his own security forces," Whitson added.

The rights group also accused Iraqi forces of forcing the relocation of dozens of children and women with alleged ties to IS to a tent camp near the Old City that authorities describe as a "rehabilitation camp."

News coverage of developments in west Mosul has been limited since July 10 when the Iraqi military banned media access to the area.

Iraqi forces regained control of Mosul after IS dominated the city for three years.
The Zimbabwe International Trade Fair is currently hosting a three-day Mining, Engineering and Transport (Mine Entra) running under the theme 'Exploring Linkages in the Mining Value Chain'. Several companies, miners, buyers and other stakeholders are attending the event that will be officially open on Thursday by Mines Minister Walter Chidakwa. Mine Entra is Zimbabwes biggest, most reputable exhibition for the mining, engineering and transport sectors and associated industries.

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Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai was greeted with cheers Tuesday by dozens of young women in northeastern Nigeria, where she spoke out for the many girls abducted under Boko Haram's deadly insurgency.

The Pakistani activist, 20, told The Associated Press she was excited by the courage of the young women who are undaunted as they pursue an education amid one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

"This is part of my girl power trip, visiting many parts of the world," said Yousafzai, who also met with the freed Chibok schoolgirls taken in a mass abduction by Boko Haram more than three years ago. "I am here now because of the Nigerian girls, fighting for them and speaking up for them."

Yousafzai visited internally displaced camps in and around Maiduguri, where thousands have sheltered from Boko Haram's violence. The extremist group continues to carry out deadly attacks there, often using young female suicide bombers.

"They have lived in the period of extremism," Yousafzai said of the young women around her. Many have seen family members killed.

Shot by Taliban

Yousafzai was 15 when she shot in the head by Taliban militants in 2012, targeted because of her advocacy for women's education.

The Nobel winner said her Nigeria visit was significant because it was the partial fulfillment of what she advocated the last time she was there. In 2014, she pressed then-President Goodluck Jonathan to ensure the rescue of the more than 200 abducted Chibok schoolgirls.

On Monday, Yousafzai met with more than 100 who have since been rescued and now stay in the capital, Abuja, for what the government calls rehabilitation.

While she told the AP she shared their joy at being freed, she said she was not happy that the girls haven't been allowed to reunite fully with their families.

She said she hoped they would "live with their family, live a normal life."

Many others remain in Boko Haram captivity, "and the government must unite so that they should make sure that these girls are released," Yousafzai said.

"Boko Haram themselves should learn that in Islam, such things are unacceptable," she added. "This is against humanity, this is against Islam."

Yousafzai also met Monday with acting President Yemi Osinbajo, speaking up for the more than 10 million children displaced by Boko Haram and pressing for the declaration of a state of emergency for education in Nigeria.

She also urged the international community to address the crisis in the country's northeast.

Inspired by visitor

Girls at the internally displaced camps said the Nobel winner's story of courage gave them inspiration for a brighter future.

"Her story gives us hope. That's why we, too, want to go to school and become something in life," said Fatima Ali, 15. "We have to bear all pains like hunger to go to school. We barely eat once a day here. We have not eaten since morning because government people no longer bring us food for about two months now."

Three million children in Nigeria's northeast are in need of support to keep learning, according to the U.N. children's agency. Nearly 1,400 schools have been destroyed during Boko Haram's insurgency, which began in 2009, and more than 2,295 teachers have been killed, the agency says.

Ali said she was in school when Boko Haram attacked her town three years ago. "I want to become a soldier so that I could help my community to fight and kill Boko Haram, because they are not good people," she said.

Another student, Fatima Grema, 15, said she saw herself in Yousafzai.

"Boko Haram abducted me and wanted to marry me," she said. After being taken from the town of Baga to a location near the Cameroon border, "I later managed to escape," she said. "I was not in school until I came to the camp here."

Grema said she now wants to become a teacher.

UNICEF's country representative, Mohamed Malick Fall, said Yousafzai's visit was a symbol of hope, and "we will do everything in our power to make sure all children can keep learning."
For months, Mark Serrano has been one of President Trumps fiercest defenders and most enthusiastic supporters on TV. In semiregular appearances on the Fox Business Network, the veteran Republican operative has praised Trumps leadership and bashed news media coverage of him. Hes called Ivanka Trump the most powerful or influential advocate for womens empowerment ever in our history.

Fox News and Fox Business have described Serrano variously as a Republican strategist, a crisis-management expert and a former adviser to President George H.W. Bush since he began appearing on the networks in 2014.

But Serrano has had another role this spring, one that wasnt disclosed to viewers as he was touting Trump: His firm was a paid consultant to the presidents 2020 reelection campaign.

Federal disclosure forms filed by the Trump committee Saturday show that it paid Serranos firm, ProActive Communications, a total of $30,000 for communications consulting. The records indicate that it paid $20,000 on April 17 to the company, based in Leesburg, Va., and another $10,000 on May 30.

TV news organizations, including Fox, typically screen would-be pundits and panelists for any financial connection to campaigns, issues or companies they might be asked to comment about on the air. Insiders, such as a campaign official or party strategist, are often welcomed, but only if their professional role is disclosed to viewers upfront.

The disclosures are a matter of transparency; they are supposed to flag a pundits potential conflicts of interest and to let viewers know when a commentator has a financial stake that might affect his or her commentary.

Serrano did not reply to multiple requests for comment by email and phone.

People at Fox said Serrano didnt disclose his connection to the Trump reelection campaign until the latter part of June, two months after his firm and ProActive apparently began working for Trumps committee.

Serrano subsequently made one appearance on the Fox Business program Risk & Reward, during which he was introduced as Trumps campaign senior adviser. He has not appeared on the air since that program aired July 6.

A person familiar with the networks internal discussions, who wasnt authorized to speak about them publicly, said Serrano wont be booked on Fox programs for the foreseeable future as a result of the nondisclosure of his work for Trump.

Fox Business issued a statement Monday after reporters inquired about Serrano. It read: It is the policy of the network to disclose all ties our guests have to any subject matter, and in the case of Mark Serrano, as soon as we were made aware of his new title last month, we made sure to disclose his role during his on-air appearances.

An official with Trumps reelection committee said Serrano and his firm were paid for communications strategy, not for his appearances or advocacy on Fox. The official also noted that Serranos support for Trump on TV predates his hiring by the reelection committee.

In fact, Serrano has spoken favorably about Trump on Fox and Fox Business from the earliest days of Trumps presidential campaign.

You got to remember, Donald Trump has something that none of these other candidates has, he said in August 2015, according to a transcript of the Fox Business program. Hes had the experience, on television, these past 12 or 14 years. That is a serious draw for a lot of Americans and thats why he is more unique than most of these other candidates.

Since Trumps inauguration, Serrano has defended him on several issues, including his firing of FBI Director James B. Comey and the various investigations into whether his campaign colluded with the Russian government.

The only collusion going on in Washington . . . [is] between the media, the Democrats and the deep state, which brings into serious question our national security leaks taking place from the White House, he said on Fox Business on May 16.

A week later, on the same network, he ripped the news media for their coverage of Trump. I really dont even reference it as fake news anymore, he said. I consider it E and O news  errors and omissions.
Jack, we should call someone. I dont think he can do this. Do you have reception here? Lets call someone. He cant do this.

Thats my mother-in-law, Maureen. Jack is her husband, and I am he, lying underneath a rented Toyota Sequoia on an unpaved road high above Leadville, Colo., trying to solve the SUVs complex spare-tire retention system so I can change a flat. It is 47 degrees and raining. Cold runnels of dull-orange mud are coursing around me. With Maureen and Jack are my wife, Cathleen, and our two kids Kai and Christina, all huddled around a small pine tree and nearly dwarfed by the pile of luggage we unloaded to access the jack.

Look, I love my in-laws. We get along fine and have, over 15 years, developed what feels like mutual affection and respect. And yet, if that disembodied voice had belonged to my mom or dad, I would have not responded with a chipper Almost got it!

Tension with in-laws, especially during the forced togetherness of travel, is rooted in the obvious, says Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at Cornell University. They arent your family, and you arent theirs. And youre under great pressure if not to like them then at least to get along with them.

How you handle that pressure can be the difference between having a nice vacation and really needing one.

The author with his wife, kids and in-laws in the Colorado Rockies, hours before a tire blow-out caused a spike in familial tensions. (John Briley/For The Washington Post)

[In Colorado, three generations achieve a peaceful family vacation at high elevation]

The ground rules: First  and people actually violate this one, shockingly  never invite your parents on a trip without talking to your spouse, says Anne Ziff, a marriage and family therapist who practices in Connecticut and New York City. Second, before agreeing to a trip, make sure people will have their own space and opportunities for enjoyment.

The point of a vacation is get away from the stresses of life, Ziff says. If you really dont get along, dont travel together.

A liberating notion, but because that parachute cord is often out of reach, your next move is to set boundaries.

Agree with your spouse on when to leave and return, and whether one of you needs time alone during each day, Ziff says.

Then, its up to the blood relative to deliver the message: Say, Heres what wed like to do, not Heres what were willing to do,  she advises. Tone matters.

The authors wife, Cathleen Kelly (center), helps their daughter Christina navigate a stream crossing while Cathleens father Jack looks on. (John Briley/For The Washington Post)

This can get tricky if, say, the trip is meant to celebrate your in-laws 40th anniversary, and theyre paying. In such cases, you may need to be more deferential, and heres hoping you saved some vacation time for yourself later.

Pillemer adds that for trips involving many people and divergent interests, a resort or a cruise might be a lot better than everyone being stuck in an isolated beach house for two weeks with only one car. Settings with service staff can also help alleviate the martyr complex for those who feel that they carry more of the chores load.

Pillemer suggests thinking ahead about how youll want to remember the vacation: Ask yourself, Will I feel better if I go off for the day and do my own thing? If the answer is yes, make that happen.

First trip with the in-laws: If I was in charge, this wouldnt count against your annual leave. But Im not, so focus instead on what to expect.

Pre-discuss how your new partners family likes to travel, says Brianna Marshall, a marriage and family therapist in Las Vegas. Some clans play everything by ear, or eat dinner at 10 p.m., or demand your cheery participation in all activities. (Sunrise yogilates!)

[10 tips for travel bliss with kids  from a dad who spent 300 days on the road with his]

If youre expecting to relax but their plan is to get everyone up at 5:30 a.m. to be out the door at 6, you need to know that and have mechanisms for managing it, Marshall says, such as curling into a ball and muttering Theres no place like home! until they leave you alone. Okay, she didnt say that. A better tack might be to acquiesce to their agenda one day but do your own thing the next.

Snipe hunting: If your unease derives from the occasional snipe  say, a mother-in-law telling a grandkid, Dont you have the BEST daddy in the world? with no mention of mommy  just let it go, Marshall says. Put up an invisible shield, and tell yourself, Im on a vacation Im having a good time, and its going to be very hard for someone to ruin my mood. 

If the bugaboo is politics or social issues, Pillemer asserts that during travel there can and should be a demilitarized zone, and that vacations are not for mining known areas of conflict. In the incredibly likely event someone breaks that rule, he adds, remind yourself its a limited amount of time that you have to spend with these people.

Also, if youre expecting to be provoked, Pillemer advises interior rehearsal, where you run through the difficult interaction in your mind and practice a defusing response. That way, when your sister-in-law mentions that your carefully chosen dinner outfit makes you look like a rodeo clown, you wont unleash a fury of biting insults  or that, if you do, youll nail your delivery. (Sigh . . . okay, he didnt say that last bit either.)

Get along with one but not the other: Oh boy, thisll be fun. Team up with your ally and battle your foe to the death!

Definitely dont do that.

Play the hand youre dealt, Marshall says. Go along with the one who likes you and dont worry about the other. You dont need their approval  you have your spouse. Just make sure that if theres any negativity its not coming from you.

If you really want to seek higher ground, Ziff suggests the fraught territory of a heart-to-heart talk.

Find time to say, I really love your daughter, and I know you do too. I also know you and I dont have a very warm relationship. Id like your help to make that better. Its very valuable to show that youre receptive to help. Youre trying to create common ground, Ziff says.

Full disclosure: This angle could elevate your vacation to a height of Zen or fast-track you to a nearby motel.

If you finally lose it: Dont hold back, surface every hurt youve carried around for 25 years and, pleasepleaseplease post a video of this tantrum on social media.

Actually, no. Our triad of experts all agree that issues will arise on most trips with in-laws  midnight ukulele practice, the mandatory pre-dinner seance, binge drinking  and when youre seriously careening off your axis its best to work through someone the offender trusts to get your message across. If you happen to be the offender, try to receive such overtures with grace, especially if theyre coming from the police.

Very rarely does open confrontation work, Pillemer says. He also cites studies showing that negative events have a much greater impact on mood than do positive ones  by a factor of 20 to 1.

That means that if everything has been great up to a point and then theres just one blowup, everyone will remember that incident. Therefore, ask yourself, Is it worth it to challenge grandpa on his stance on abortion or the death penalty on this trip? People arent going to change, and youre certainly not going to be able to change them, Pillemer says.

So be a good person, refrain from even thinking I told you so after changing the tire, and let the little things  and even a few big ones  slide. Youll be a happier traveler for it.

Briley is a writer based in Takoma Park. His website is Johnbriley.com

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Alexandria

These were among incidents reported by the Alexandria Police Department. For information, call 703-746-4444 or visit alexandriava.gov.

ASSAULTS

King and N. Saint Asaph streets, 11 a.m. July 12. An assault was reported.

Virginia Ave., 900 block, 6:05 p.m. July 5. An assault was reported.

Washington St. S., 1200 block, 11:22 a.m. July 11. An assault was reported.

ROBBERIES

Duke St., 400 block, 6:51 p.m. July 7. A robbery was reported.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Alfred St. S., 300 block, 6:32 p.m. July 7. A theft was reported.

Columbus St. N., 200 block, 6:02 p.m. July 8. A theft was reported.

Commonwealth Ave., 1700 block, 4 p.m. July 11. A theft was reported.

Diagonal Rd., 1900 block, 8:38 a.m. July 10. A theft was reported.

Duke St., 3000 block, 4:41 p.m. July 10. A shoplifting incident was reported.

Duke St., 3100 block, 12:44 p.m. July 7. A shoplifting incident was reported.

Fairfax St. N., 900 block, 12:54 p.m. July 10. A theft was reported.

Henry St. N., 1000 block, 3:30 p.m. July 8. A theft was reported.

Jones Point Dr., 100 block, 4:42 p.m. July 10. Property was stolen from a vehicle.

King St., 400 block, 2:45 a.m. July 6. A theft was reported.

King St., 500 block, 2:30 a.m. July 6. A theft was reported.

King St., 900 block, noon July 9. A theft was reported.

King St., 1000 block, 11 a.m. July 8. A theft was reported.

King St., 1000 block, 4 p.m. July 7. A theft was reported.

Quay St., 100 block, 5:33 p.m. July 4. Property was stolen from a vehicle.

Russell Rd., 800 block, 10:46 p.m. July 4. A theft was reported.

Saint Asaph St. N., 700 block, 12:01 p.m. July 11. A theft was reported.

Sweeley St., unit block, 8:51 p.m. July 10. A theft was reported.

Vassar Rd., 1000 block, 1:23 p.m. July 9. Property was stolen from a vehicle.

Washington St. N., 100 block, 12:34 p.m. July 11. A theft was reported.

Washington St. S., 400 block, 4:05 p.m. July 11. A shoplifting incident was reported.

MOTOR VEHICLE THEFTS

Eisenhower Ave., 2400 block, 3:40 p.m. July 7. A vehicle was stolen.

Mount Vernon Ave., 1700 block, 2:42 p.m. July 12. A vehicle was stolen.

Pendleton St., 300 block, 9:42 p.m. July 10. A vehicle was stolen.

VANDALISM

Alfred St. S., 500 block, 8:54 a.m. July 13. Property was damaged.

Gibbon St., 900 block, 11:30 a.m. July 13. Property was damaged.

John Carlyle St., 500 block, 2:54 p.m. July 6. Property was damaged.

King St., 300 block, 2:11 a.m. July 19. Property was damaged.

Princess St., 400 block, 3:17 p.m. July 11. Property was damaged.

Saint Asaph St. N., 500 block, 1:21 p.m. July 4. Property was damaged.

Saint Asaph St. S., 700 block, 8:10 p.m. July 10. Property was damaged.

Scroggins Rd., 2000 block, 5:17 p.m. July 8. Property was damaged.

Arlington

These were among incidents reported by the Arlington County Police Department. For information, call 703-558-2222 or visit newsroom.arlingtonva.us.

ARSON

11th St. S., 2600 block, 2:33 a.m. July 9. An arson incident was reported.

SEXUAL ASSAULTS

Kennebec St. N., 1100 block, 12:22 a.m. July 6. A sexual assault was reported.

Orme St. S., 900 block, 9 p.m. July 8. A sexual assault was reported.

12th St. N., 1500 block, 9:30 p.m. July 9. A sexual assault was reported.

ASSAULTS

Arlington Blvd., 1100 block. An assault was reported.

Culpepper St. N., 2100 block, 12:15 a.m. July 6. An assault was reported.

Fairfax Dr., 4200 block, 12:57 p.m. July 10. An assault was reported.

Langley St. S., 2000 block. An assault was reported.

Moore St. N., 1700 block. Threats were reported.

Pershing Dr. N., 4400 block, 10:20 a.m. July 10. An assault was reported.

Washington Blvd. and N. 10th St. An assault was reported.

Fourth St. N., 3900 block, 11:45 a.m. July 9. Two people fought.

16th St. S., 900 block. An assault was reported.

31st St. S., 4400 block. An assault was reported.

BOMB THREATS

Courthouse Rd. N., 1400 block, 8:57 a.m. July 5. A person called and said there was a bomb in the building. Multiple units responded to the scene and conducted a search. No bomb was found.

MISSILE TO AN OCCUPIED RESIDENCE

Buchanan St. S., 1200 block, 11:04 p.m. July 8. An object was thrown and shattered a residential window. A short time later, another resident reported that an object struck and broke their window. No injuries were reported. An investigation is ongoing.

Glebe Rd. N., 1100 block, 12:50 p.m. A man fired a BB gun. The pellet struck and shattered a residential window. An Arlington man, 35, was charged.

Thomas St. N., 500 block, 3:55 p.m. July 5. A missile to an occupied residence was reported.

Eighth Rd. S., 5300 block, 10:40 p.m. July 7. An object was thrown and shattered a residential window. No injuries were reported. An investigation is ongoing.

INDECENT EXPOSURE

Key Blvd. and N. Queen St., 3:40 p.m. July 10. A man exposed himself to a female. An investigation is ongoing.

ROBBERIES

Arlington Blvd. and N. Glebe Rd., 1:30 a.m. July 4. Three men assaulted a male and robbed him of property. An investigation is ongoing.

Dinwiddie St. S., 900 block, 10:04 p.m. July 9. Three males assaulted a man and robbed him of property. The three men were found. They were taken into custody after a brief foot pursuit. An Arlington man, 20, was charged. Warrants were obtained for two juvenile males.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Adams St. S., 2700 block, 9 p.m. July 9 to 5:30 a.m. July 10. Air bags were stolen from eight vehicles entered by force. An investigation is ongoing.

Columbia Pike, 2600 block, 10:55 a.m. July 7. A shoplifting incident was reported.

Columbia Pike, 2600 block, 11:06 a.m. July 7. A male concealed merchandise from a store and fled from the scene. The juvenile was found and charges are pending.

Columbia Pike, 3000 block, 4:02 a.m. July 11. A shoplifting incident was reported.

Columbia Pike, 5000 block. Property was entered.

Courthouse Rd. N., 1400 block. A theft was reported.

Eads St. S., 1600 block. Property was stolen from a vehicle.

Edison St. N., 2100 block, 9:18 p.m. July 10. A theft was reported.

Fairfax Dr., 4200 block, 8 a.m. July 10. A theft was reported.

Glebe Rd. N., 600 block, 1:05 p.m. July 7. A shoplifting incident was reported.

Glebe Rd. N., 800 block, 5:30 p.m. July 9. A theft was reported.

Glebe Rd. N., 1000 block, 11:10 a.m. July 8. A theft was reported.

Harrison St. N., 900 block, 2 p.m. July 9. A theft was reported.

Hayes St. S., 1000 block. A theft was reported.

Hayes St. S., 1100 block. Property was entered.

Hayes St. S., 1200 block. A theft was reported.

Highland St. N., 1800 block, 10 a.m. June 24 to 3 p.m. July 6. Property was stolen from a residence. An investigation is ongoing.

Ivy St. S., 300 block. Property was stolen from a vehicle.

Lee Hwy., 3100 block, 9:45 p.m. July 5. A theft was reported.

Lee Hwy., 3700 block, 10:57 p.m. July 8. A shoplifting incident was reported.

Lee Hwy., 4000 block. A theft was reported.

Old Dominion Dr., 4300 block, 3 p.m. July 5. A theft was reported.

Quincy St. N., 1400 block, 7:15 p.m. July 8. A theft was reported.

Underwood St. N., 1900 block, 12:32 a.m. July 6. A theft was reported.

Wilson Blvd., 1500 block, 5:55 p.m. July 12. A theft was reported.

Wilson Blvd., 2900 block, 5:55 p.m. July 7. A theft was reported.

Wilson Blvd., 5100 block, 4:30 p.m. July 12. A theft was reported.

Second St. S., 2900 block, 8 p.m. July 6. Property was stolen from a vehicle.

Fifth Rd. N., 4000 block, 11:01 a.m. July 6. A theft was reported.

Eighth Pl. S., 5400 block, identity theft was reported.

12th Court N., 2200 block, 6:30 p.m. July 6. Property was stolen from a vehicle.

15th Rd. S., 400 block. A theft was reported.

MOTOR VEHICLE THEFTS

Columbia Pike, 1900 block, July 11. A Silver 2004 Yamaha motorcycle was stolen.

Columbia Pike, 3200 block, July 5. A black 2014 Audi was stolen.

Stuart St. N., 900 block, July 10. A gray 2003 Honda Pilot was stolen.

23rd St. S., 500 block, July 11. A gold 2012 Acura TL was stolen.

VANDALISM

Columbia Pike, 1500 block. Property was damaged.

Florida St. S., 800 block, noon July 9. Property was damaged.

Greenbrier St. S., 800 block, 12:30 a.m. July 5. A vehicle in a parking garage was tampered with.

Greenbrier St. S., 800 block, 11:22 p.m. July 8. Property was damaged.

Oak St. N., 1600 block. Property was damaged.

Quinn St. N., 1500 block, 7:30 p.m. July 7. Property was damaged.

Eighth Rd. S., 5300 block. Property was damaged.

18th St. N., 6200 block, 10 p.m. July 7. Property was damaged.

36th St. N., 6300 block, 1:42 a.m. July 5. Property was damaged.
THE DISTRICT

Arrest in stabbing of bus driver

A man accused of stabbing a D.C. Circulator driver Tuesday night has been arrested, D.C. police said.

Anthony Lighty, 56, of no fixed address was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. A police report said Lighty had a verbal altercation with the driver after the driver declined to stop the bus, and he later stabbed the driver in the back of the head with a box cutter.

The man opened the door and fled near the 65 block of Massachusetts Avenue NW, police said. He was arrested shortly after the incident.

 Luz Lazo

MARYLAND

Teen fatally shot in Laurel area

A teenager was fatally shot Tuesday night in the Laurel area, Prince Georges County police said.

Dustin Khoury, 17, of Sparrows Point, Md., was found about 8:30 p.m. in the 13000 block of Larchdale Road, police said. He was in a car in the middle of the road, with the engine on, said Cpl. Tyler Hunter, a police spokesman.

Khoury was in critical condition when found, and died at a hospital, police said.

The site is about a half-mile east of Route 1. It is south of Contee Road and near the James H. Harrison Elementary School and the St. Nicholas Catholic Church.

 Martin Weil and Lynh Bui

THE REGION

Bill to commemorate Frederick Douglass

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) on Wednesday introduced a bill to establish a commission commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), the Districts nonvoting delegate, and Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) introduced the House version last month.

Van Hollen, of Montgomery County, noted that Douglass is considered a native son of Maryland, where he was born in 1818, and the District, where he died in 1895.

Two hundred years after Douglass birth, it is important to reflect upon his great achievements and pay tribute to his fight for freedom and justice, Van Hollen said in a statement.

Under the legislation, a 16-member commission would recommend to Congress by Dec. 1 whether to issue a postage stamp commemorating Douglass, convene a joint session of Congress or preserve artifacts of his life. This commission will explore how we can celebrate his legacy and redouble our efforts to make an ever more perfect union, Van Hollen said.

 Jenna Portnoy
Needle-exchange programs for drug users could be coming to six counties across Maryland, including Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties, as state health officials work with local leaders to stop the spread of infectious diseases in the face of a heroin epidemic.

The efforts are being led locally and are at various stages, but state officials are encouraging the programs, and are offering technical assistance and some funding, said Onyeka Anaedozie, deputy director of the Maryland Department of Healths Infectious Disease Prevention and Health Services Bureau.

Weve talked to leadership in the jurisdictions about the importance of having a standing syringe services program, she said. We want the efforts led by the local jurisdictions.

The counties in some stage of planning or consideration include Anne Arundel and Baltimore in the metro area, Frederick and Washington in Western Maryland, Dorchester on the Eastern Shore and Prince Georges near Washington. Baltimore City has the states only operating program, begun in 1994. It relies largely on mobile units, which provide services in 16 locations around the city 26 times a week.

The growing acceptance of needle exchange reflects changing attitudes toward the often controversial programs, which critics say use taxpayer money to promote drug use and cause drug users to congregate at exchange sites. Although the Baltimore program has been around for years, the state passed legislation only in 2016 allowing the programs to be established elsewhere around the state. The Republican-controlled Congress also passed legislation in early 2016 that allows federal funding for needle-exchange efforts.

[Needle-exchange program leads to big drop in D.C. HIV infections]

Anaedozie said the states push began in 2015 after rural Scott County in Indiana began reporting a spike in HIV and hepatitis C infections related to the opioid crisis there.

Maryland has not seen a related increase in infections; federal data shows HIV cases have been trending down in the state in recent years, especially among IV drug users. But officials recognize drug use poses risks, and leaders in the state have pursued prevention, treatment and harm reduction measures that can be folded into needle programs.

Overdose deaths continue to climb statewide, with more than 2,000 in 2016, up 66 percent from 2015. Most deaths were linked to heroin and fentanyl, opioids that can be injected.

Needle programs in some Maryland counties could be up and running by years end or early next year, and are expected to offer clean syringes, disease testing and counseling, and referral for treatment for infections and substance abuse, Anaedozie said.

Some drug users not yet ready for treatment could still get needles and perhaps naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of opioid overdose.

The counties have been working to get backing from local law enforcement agencies and elected officials, as well as neighborhoods and treatment communities  a requirement by health officials in the state, which passed a law in 2016 that allows the expansion of needle exchanges around Maryland.

It wont work unless there is buy-in from all the groups, Anaedozie said.

Getting such support is time consuming, she added. The counties need to determine how to provide testing for HIV and hepatitis, and how to link people to care. Some health departments will do the work in house and others will rely on federally supported health centers that already offer services. Some counties will open physical locations and others will operate mobile vans.

In Anne Arundel, County Executive Steve Schuh directed health officials to consider such a program because the transmission of HIV remains a public health concern in the county.

A spokesman for Schuh said the executive continues to have reservations that such programs would encourage peoples drug habits but that he wants to have an open mind and see if the programs could be effective.

[Maryland governor declares state of emergency for opioid crisis]

Councilman John Grasso (R-Glen Burnie) said he would support the program.

I would rather give someone a clean needle and prevent them from the possibility of getting AIDS, he said, adding a needle is a hell of a lot cheaper.

Peter Beilenson, a former Baltimore health commissioner who began the citys program, said more public officials seem to be overcoming their concerns and reaching that conclusion.

He said there is a wealth of scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of such programs at preventing disease and none that show an increase in drug use. And most opposition is political rather than community based. In fact, the Baltimore program initially went only to neighborhoods that requested such services, said Beilenson, now chief executive of the Baltimore health insurer Evergreen Health.

In the first five years of the program, I had seven people calling me about needle exchange: five positive and two negative, he said. There were no problems whatsoever with NIMBY, or not in my back yard.

He said opposition generally comes from politicians who fear the programs suggest their areas have a drug problem, possibly hampering economic development.

State officials say support is crucial to begin the programs. Counties must seek the state health departments permission for the programs, demonstrating in their applications that theyve received local support and that they have a specific plan. However, the states sign-off is a formality if those conditions are met.

Counties also can apply for funding for specific needs, although the department could not say how much money would be available.

Its not clear how each program will take shape, and all are likely to look a little different. In Baltimore County, for example, health officials have proposed adding needle exchange to the services provided to people with HIV and hepatitis C, said Monique Lyle, a county spokeswoman.

Patients who are treated for those diseases at county health centers would be offered the ability to exchange their needles, Lyle said. Those patients also would be offered education on using clean needles, wound care, prevention of sexually transmitted infections and immunizations. The patients and their family members also will be trained to use naloxone, the opioid overdose drug.

Leana Wen, Baltimores health commissioner, said she has worked to make all her county counterparts aware of how the city program works and has provided more specific assistance to those who have requested it.

The citys program costs about $800,000 annually and dispenses about half a million clean needles a year, in addition to providing other services.

Wen said a lot of stigma remains associated with drug use in general, but she hopes to clear misconceptions about needle programs that she said can prevent disease. She said when the city program began 23 years ago, 63 percent of those with HIV were IV drug users. By 2014, the only 7 percent were IV drug users, contributing to one of the nations largest drops in new HIV cases.

She called needle-exchange programs a powerful tool to prevent harm, although she has seen resistance nationwide.

Its not about condoning or supporting drug use, she said. The first principal of public health is to protect the population from harm.

Weve seen this result  That is why its important for us to share our experience.

 Baltimore Sun

Pamela Wood and Phil Davis contributed to this report.
Gov. Larry Hogan is greeted by Jay Tawes, the grandson of Gov. J. Millard Tawes, at the 41st annual J. Millard Tawes Crab and Clam Bake. (Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun)

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and four of the Democrats vying to challenge him endured steamy weather at this small fishing towns annual crab feast on Wednesday, networking with the states power brokers, posing for selfies with supporters and pressing palms with potential donors.

Hogan, wearing brown shorts and a black polo bearing his name, had the largest following at the J. Millard Tawes Crab and Clam Bake, with about a half-dozen people jostling for photos with him at any given time as he tried to make his way from one end of the event to the other.

The governor arrived at about noon and quickly crossed paths with the Maryland Democratic Partys new chair, Kathleen Matthews, who said she was at the event as part of an effort to remind Eastern Shore voters that her party hasnt forgotten about them. The two leaders exchanged pleasantries for about a minute before moving on.

Youre doing a great job, Hogan said.

Thanks, said Matthews, a former television anchor and Marriott executive who ran for Congress last year and is married to Hardball anchor Chris Matthews. I met your Republican chair of the state, and hes a nice guy. We all have the same goals  to make the country and the state do well.

Prince Georges County Executive Rushern L. Baker III (D), right, talks with Del. C.T. Wilson (D-Charles) at the 41st annual J. Millard Tawes Crab and Clam Bake in Crisfield, Md. (Josh Hicks/The Washington Post)

I agree, Hogan said. Say hi to your husband for me.

The Democratic gubernatorial hopefuls at the event were Prince Georges County Executive Rushern L. Baker III, state Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr. (Montgomery), Baltimore entrepreneur Alec Ross and attorney James Shea. Former NAACP president Benjamin Jealous, the other declared candidate, was not present.

Most of the candidates  for governor and other offices  eventually made their way to the largest tent at the event, sponsored by Bruce C. Bereano, one of the states most powerful lobbyists.

Below the canopy, which was ringed with a bipartisan array of campaign signs for Hogan, U.S. Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), state Comptroller Peter Franchot (D) and Howard County Executive Allan H. Kittleman (R), Baker, a former state delegate who is midway through his second term governing Prince Georges County, busily worked one table after another.

It is a lot different being here as a gubernatorial candidate, Baker said. The response is greater, the questions are greater, and the attention is greater.

Shea, relatively unknown in Maryland political circles, introduced himself to people and reconnected with others, including former colleagues from his tenure as chair of the University System of Maryland Board of Regents, clients of his law firm, fellow attorneys and officials with Salisbury University.

Its a reminder that if you want to run for office and serve the people of Maryland, you have to be ready to go anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances, he said, clarifying that the latter reference related to the 90-degree heat.

Jim and Nadine Jackson of Salisbury are regular attendees. (Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun)

Speaking to reporters, Hogan backed up a recent allegation from his spokesman that Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) threatened earlier this year to block the confirmation of Dennis Schrader, the governors pick to head the state health department, unless Hogan forced the state hospital commission to stop the creation of a new cardiac program at Anne Arundel Medical Center.

Miller has strongly denied the claim, but Hogan insisted on Wednesday that it was true.

Multiple people can tell you the exact same thing, the governor said. He said it to me seven or eight times, he said it to the cabinet secretary over and over again, he said it to numerous members of our staff. Its just a fact.

Hogan also said that he told Miller repeatedly, probably seven or eight times, that was illegal and improper, and there was no way we were going to do it.

Miller, a strong proponent of the Prince Georges hospital system and its planned cardiac program, has criticized the Maryland Health Care Commissions decision to authorize a similar program for nearby Anne Arundel.

In a statement Wednesday, the Senate leader called Hogans remarks an outright lie, adding that I am on record stating I would support Mr. Schrader, even though many thought he was a political hack who was unqualified for the position at a time when we could be facing a national health care crisis.

Hogan eventually withdrew Schraders nomination, along with that of acting planning secretary Wendi Peters, whose nomination was rejected by a Senate committee. He reappointed both officials after the legislative session ended.

But the legislature in the meantime had passed a law that prohibits the state from paying cabinet appointees who are reappointed after the legislature fails to approve their nominations.

Last week, Maryland Treasurer Nancy K. Kopp (D), under advice from the office of state Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D), refused to pay them past June 30, the end of the fiscal year.

Matthews said she was doing a sweep of the Eastern Shore this week, visiting with the Wicomico County Democratic Central Committee on Tuesday and meeting with the Democratic clubs of Worcester and Somerset counties on Thursday.

Its great that shes here, said Earle Hatton, a Democrat from Wicomico. Its a way to let the Republicans know that we mean business on the Eastern Shore.

Some regulars at the event said they have little interest in politics. Im a veteran, so I stay out of that kind of stuff, said Jesse Henry, a Salisbury resident who served with the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. Im just here to socialize, enjoy myself and eat seafood.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) on Wednesday will introduce a bill to establish a commission commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), the Districts nonvoting delegate, and Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) introduced the House version of the legislation last month.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is scheduled to consider the bill on Wednesday .

Van Hollen, of Montgomery County, noted Douglass is considered a native son of Maryland, where he was born in 1818, and the District, where he died in 1895.

Two hundred years after Douglass birth, it is important to reflect upon his great achievements and pay tribute to his fight for freedom and justice, Van Hollen said in a statement.

Under the legislation, a 16-member commission would recommend to Congress by Dec. 1 whether to issue a postage stamp commemorating Douglass, convene a joint session of Congress or preserve artifacts of the abolitionists life.

This commission will explore how we can celebrate his legacy and redouble our efforts to make an ever more perfect union, Van Hollen said. As Douglass once stated, The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful and virtuous. 
montgomery County

The following case was reported recently by the Montgomery County Animal Services Division. For information, call 240-773-5900. This number provides recorded information on topics such as the new animal services and adoption centers hours and location in Derwood, adoption and licensing procedures, and lost-and-found and field services.

Too free and aggressive: 21200 block Georgia Ave., Brookeville, July 3. Aggressive dogs were reported running loose. An animal services officer familiar with the dogs threatening nature requested police backup. Officers told the owner to contain the dogs. The owners spouse put the dogs in crates in the garage. The wife was told by animal services that her dogs were going to be declared potentially dangerous because of their aggressive nature. The woman chose to surrender the German shepherd mixes to the officer.

Cats at no-kill shelter

Cats and kittens will be available for adoption through the Animal Welfare League of Montgomery Countys no-kill shelter at the following location. Call 301-740-2511 or visit awlmc.org.

Animal Welfare League of Montgomery County no-kill shelter,

12 Park Ave., Gaithersburg.

Hours: 6 to 8 p.m. Friday, noon to 3 p.m. Saturday, 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday.

Humane Society adoptions

The Montgomery County Humane Societys private rescue shelter has dogs, puppies, cats and kittens available for adoption. Call 240-252-2555 or visit mchumane.org. MCHS Adoptions and Education Center, 601 S. Stonestreet Ave., Rockville. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, except holidays.

Reduced FEES FOR CATS

Cats and kittens will be available for adoption at the next open house of Friends of Montgomery County Animals at the following location. Call 301-977-4833, or visit fmca.org or facebook.com/fmcainfo.

PetSmart at Milestone Center, 20924 Frederick Rd., Germantown.

Hours: 2 to 5 p.m. Saturday.
PRINCE GEORGES COUNTY

These were among cases received recently by the Prince Georges County Animal Management Division. Call 301-780-7200 for directions to the county animal shelter, hours of operation, and adoption and licensing procedures. The department website is princegeorgespets4us.com.

Panting stray in back yard: Hummingbird Lane, 9800 block, Upper Marlboro, July 2. A woman reported a panting stray dog that had been lying by the basement steps in her back yard since the night before. She said the animal was blocking access to her home. An animal control officer removed the 4-year-old tan male Akita. The dog was returned to its owner July 7.

German shepherd at the gate: Marquette Lane, 12900 block, Bowie, July 4. A man requested pickup of a dog he found outside the back gate of his yard. An officer removed the 4-year-old black male German shepherd. The dog was claimed the next day.

Dog detained: Forestville Rd., 3500 block, District Heights, July 4. A state police officer requested pickup of a dog found at the site of an car accident. An animal control officer picked up the 3-year-old tricolor female beagle. The dog was reunited with its owner July 7.

Great Dane at large: Flagstaff St., 7200 block, Hyattsville, July 4. A woman called animal management to report a large stray dog that had run around in her yard most of the day. She said she hadnt given it any food or water because she was afraid to approach it. An animal control officer picked up the 2-month-old female fawn-colored Great Dane. When not claimed, the dog was taken to a rescue group July 8.

PET ADOPTION CLINIC

SPCA/Humane Society of Prince Georges County is sponsoring cat and dog adoptions noon to 2 p.m. Saturday atPetSmart, 4500 Mitchellville Rd., Bowie. The pets foster owners will answer questions and accept adoption applications for the animals. Adoption fees are $75 for cats, $180 for dogs. For information, call 301-262-5625 or visit pgspca.org.

VOLUNTEER NEEDS

SPCA/Humane Society of Prince Georges County, an all-volunteer organization, needs volunteers 18 and older to assist in a variety of tasks. Opportunities include photography and videography, social-media outreach, adoption show assistance, administration, and pet fostering. Call 301-262-5625 or visit pgspca.org/get-involved/volunteer.

County Animal Management Division seeks volunteers to assist animals in need by joining the pet foster-family program. Foster families provide a safe, loving home to animals that are injured, very young, recovering from surgery or in need of other special care until they are adoptable. Call 301-780-7219 or visit princegeorgespets4us.com.

Partnership for Animal Welfare needs volunteers to foster homeless dogs and cats, provide transportation to vet appointments and handle animals at adoption shows. For information, go to paw-rescue.org or leave a message at 301-572-4729.
Prince William County

These were among incidents reported by Prince William County police for this edition of Local Living. For information, call 703-792-5123.

DUMFRIES AREA

THEFT/BREAK-IN

Triangle Shopping Center, 18000 block, 4 a.m. July 11. A business was entered by breaking a front glass door. Nothing was reported stolen.

GAINESVILLE AREA

ASSAULT

Parville Loop, 6600 block, 8:52 p.m. July 9. During an argument, a man assaulted a female acquaintance. A Gainesville man, 27, was arrested.

HAYMARKET AREA

MANASSAS AREA

SEXUAL ASSAULT

Sudley Rd., 8300 block, 9:47 a.m. July 9. A man inside a store inappropriately touched a female juvenile. A Marshall man, 34, was arrested.

ASSAULT

Golden Leaf Cir., 11200 block, 10:30 p.m. July 6. Someone hit a towing company employee in the back of the head as he attempted to tow a vehicle. The employee lost consciousness and was later treated for injuries.

WEAPONS

Rainwater Cir., 8100 block, 11 p.m. June 30. Gunshots were heard. No one was reported injured.

INDECENT EXPOSURE

Portsmouth Rd., 10300 block, 10:47 a.m. July 5. A man in a store exposed himself to an employee and then fled.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Bland Dr., 7600 block, 1 a.m. July 10. A man entered a residence. He fled empty-handed when a male resident confronted him.

Crossbow Dr., 12600 block, 11 p.m. June 30 to 7 a.m. July 9. Several watches were stolen from a residence.

Remington Rd., 7500 block, 2:49 a.m. July 6. An attempt was made to enter a residence through a sliding-glass door.

Websters Way, 5700 block, 9 a.m. July 8 to 7:13 a.m. July 9. A church was entered by damaging several windows. Nothing was reported stolen.

NOKESVILLE AREA

ASSAULT

Misty Creek Ct., 2100 block, 7:48 a.m. July 9. A group assaulted a male acquaintance, who lost consciousness. They robbed him of a wallet, keys and jewelry.

WOODBRIDGE AREA

SEXUAL ASSAULT

Neddleton Ave., 5500 block, 6:30 a.m. July 5. A man sexually assaulted a female juvenile relative. A Woodbridge man, 49, was arrested.

ASSAULTS

Cloverdale Rd., 14800 block, 6:15 a.m. July 10. During an argument, a man assaulted a male acquaintance. A Woodbridge man, 47, was arrested.

Darbydale Ave. and Danville Rd., 12:45 p.m. July 11. Someone fired a BB gun, hitting three men. At 3:10 p.m. at Sudley Manor and Sudley Roads in Manassas, someone fired a BB gun at a male pedestrian. Two Woodbridge men, 19 and 22, were arrested.

Delaney Rd., 13500 block, 3:34 a.m. July 5. During an argument, a man assaulted a female acquaintance. A Woodbridge man, 58, was arrested.

Eisenhower Cir., 1300 block, 10:34 a.m. July 9. During an argument, a woman assaulted a female relative. A Woodbridge woman, 21, was arrested.

Enterprise Lane, 14900 block, 8:25 p.m. July 9. During an argument, a man assaulted a female acquaintance. A Woodbridge man, 52, was arrested.

Ripple Creek Ct., 12700 block, July 5. A man knocked on a door of a residence and then forcibly entered when a female acquaintance answered. He physically prevented her from leaving the residence. A man, 31, was arrested.

CHILD NEGLECT

Gunsmith Terr., 2100 block, 8:18 p.m. July 10. An unsupervised child was found outside. A Dumfries man, 21, was arrested.

ROBBERY

Bayside Ave., 1300 block, 10:30 p.m. July 10. A man grabbed a purse from a female pedestrian. After a struggle, the man fled with the purse.

THEFTS/BREAK-INS

Blacksmith Terr., 15300 block, 10:30 a.m. July 10. Two men attempted to kick open a door of residence.

Cloverdale Rd., 15200 block, 6:45 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. June 12. A residence was entered. Items were disturbed, but nothing was reported stolen.

York Dr., 2200 block, June 14 to July 9. A church was entered by damaging a side window. Nothing was reported stolen.

Manassas

No reports were received from Manassas police for this edition of Local Living. For information, call 703-257-8000.

Manassas Park

No reports were received from Manassas Park police for this edition of Local Living. For information, call 703-361-1136.
A District business owner received insider information on contracts and racked up more than $300,000 for services he never provided in a scheme with a former employee in the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education.

Purchase orders purported to show that Vashawn Straders tutoring and real estate businesses provided services for public school students over 18 months between July 2012 and January 2014. But the invoices were false and no work was done, according to federal court records filed in connection with Straders guilty plea Tuesday in the billing plot.

Strader, 38, paid cash to a then-employee in the OSSEs Division of Special Education who created false purchase orders that enabled Straders companies to be paid, court files show.

The employee, who is not named in the court records in Straders case, had an agreement with Strader to get a cut of about one-third of the amount his companies collected, according to court documents.

The education office cooperated fully in the investigation but declined to comment Tuesday on the case beyond a statement that said the employee referenced in the Strader case no longer works for the office.

In addition to the bogus purchase orders, the employee gave Strader confidential information on OSSE contracts, court files show. Strader made a dozen withdrawals from bank accounts he owned or controlled for a total of $37,100 that was paid to the employee from Aug. 1, 2012, to Jan. 27, 2014, according to court documents.

On his invoices, court files show, Strader used the names of people who had neither given him permission to use their identities nor done the work that Strader claimed.

In one case, Strader, while working with others, wrote a $6,800 check to a family member of the employee in the office for Independent Contractor fees, according to court documents.

Strader pleaded to a conspiracy charge that according to plea filings includes a maximum sentence of five years in prison, a term of supervised release of no more than three years, and a fine range of $10,000 to $100,000.
A 39-year-old D.C. woman was ordered held in D.C. jail Wednesday on charges she hired someone to kill her estranged husband, a plan that was never carried out.

Brandi Cherie Myles of Northeast Washington was charged Tuesday with one count of solicitation of murder after she agreed to pay a man about $25,000 to kill her estranged husband because he kicked her and her children out of their home and moved his new girlfriend into the house, according to an arrest affidavit.

According to the affidavit filed in D.C. Superior Court, the would-be hit man was arrested in an unrelated armed robbery in the 1200 block of H Street NE on Nov. 28, 2016. At the time of his arrest, the document states, he told officers thank God I didnt kill him.

The man, whose identify was not revealed because he is now a witness in Myless case, told authorities he recorded aconversation made the same November day in which Myles allegedly made the request. During the conversation, the court papers state, Myles told the man she expected to receive $200,000 in life insurance money upon her husbands death, and she could use that cash to pay him.

The court documents outline an elaborate scheme in which the man allegedly told Myles he needed a copy of her husbands car key so he could disable the vehicle. Myles told the man her husband drove a Kia Sedona van and described where her husband parked his car when he went to work, the documents state. Myles also allegedly provided the man with a copy of the car key, which was in his possession at the time of his arrest.

On the night of his arrest, the man said he was going to the estranged husbands vehicle to place a note to warning the man of his wifes plans. But before that happened, he was picked up in the robbery case.

On Feb. 21, according to court records, two detectives met with the man and placed a phone call to Myles, which was recorded. They told her that one of the officers was the mans cousin, and offered him up as a hit man.

Myles told the undercover detective that her husband and his girlfriend had married, and that the insurance policy payout could be affected if the new wife was now the beneficiary, the documents state.

On March 7, the undercover detective telephoned Myles and asked her who the next beneficiary would be if the new wife was killed as well, according to the affidavit. Myles said her children and nephews would be the beneficiaries.

The court papers say Myles asked the detective if he wanted the job.

The undercover detective said yes, according to the affidavit, but the fee was now $40,000. Myles allegedly said she would call back.

In court Wednesday, Myles said only her name, and a family member left in anger.

After the hearing, the man, who declined to identify himself, said Myles did nothing wrong and doesnt deserve this.
Sreedhar Potarazu was brilliant, everyone agrees, an ophthalmic surgeon who started college at age 15 and earned degrees in medicine and business.

The doctor from Potomac, Md., told friends and colleagues that he was using those talents to develop innovative software that would curb health-care costs. If they invested, they could help solve a major national problem and make some money along the way.

In fact, he was entangling his investors in a multimillion-dollar scam. Potarazu was sentenced Wednesday in federal court in Alexandria to 10 years in prison for shareholder and tax fraud.

Our lives will never be the same, said Anjali Mathur, a physician and one of the investors, at a hearing this year. To me, hes the Bernie Madoff of the Washington metro area.

From 2008 until his arrest in October 2016, Potarazu persuaded 174 investors to put a total of more than $49 million into a company called VitalSpring. He repeatedly told them that the company would soon be sold and their money returned many times over.

To back up his claims, he fabricated tax returns, business contracts, balance sheets and even an entire bank website. He persuaded one shareholder to increase her investment by claiming that a key backer had died in the 2013 Navy Yard attack. And he once had an impostor play the general counsel for a Fortune 500 company on a conference call. When under pressure from shareholders and investigators, he faked a letter from a doctor stating that he had testicular cancer, according to prosecutors.

In his defense, Potarazu argued that VitalSpring was a legitimate enterprise with real clients and some revenue, and that the vast majority of investment funds did go into the company. He said he lied to investors and failed to pay taxes only to buy time while trying to find a buyer or major contract.

I took an oath to do no harm, and yet I did, he said at sentencing.

Prosecutors presented testimony that the software produced by VitalSpring had little value.

At a hearing in May, victims testified that they had lost savings they needed for retirement or to care for children and sick relatives. They had believed Potarazu in part because, like many of them, he was a doctor.

Potarazu also treated the victims like family members and assured them he would encourage his wife or daughter to make the same investments. Now, several said, their own family members do not trust them. The fallout from the case includes divorces and lost homes.

He would touch my wifes feet every time he met her as a sign of respect, recalled Vijay Varma, a doctor who said he lost millions of dollars to Potarazu. He treated her as his own mother. . . . I trusted Sreedhar like a family member, and he threw my trust in my face.

Girish Jindia lamented that he had encouraged young people with families who work at his government contracting firm in Arlington to invest their savings in VitalSpring.

I see them every day, and they say, What did you get us into?  Jindia testified. I have to live with that the rest of my life.

When lies did not work, Potarazu turned vicious. He threatened balking shareholders with death and smeared them online as pedophiles and perverts, they said in court. He fabricated emails making them appear mentally unstable.

Jeff Waters, an investor, said at a court hearing in May that when he began investigating Potarazus financial claims, other shareholders received an email that directed them to a website claiming that Waters was being sought by D.C. police for molesting small boys.

This man is a monster, Waters testified. I still worry, when he is free, that I am not a safe person.

Potarazu used the money he took out of VitalSpring to position himself as a thought leader and inside the Beltway power player, prosecutor Caryn Finley said at sentencing. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars writing a book and getting himself booked for interviews on Fox Business. He donated heavily to the Democratic National Committee. (He has requested, through counsel, that the $330,000 he donated be returned and used to repay investors). He sponsored Indian dance performances at the Kennedy Center.

Potarazu launched VitalSpring in 1999, and several investors from the Netherlands put about $20 million into its early development. U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee concluded that everyone who invested after 2008  when VitalSpring was already on the verge of bankruptcy  did so only because they had been told lies. The company declared bankruptcy last month.

To cheat your own friends and even your mentors, my goodness, Lee said before imposing the sentence. It must have been ego; it must have been greed.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed testimony from one of the victims in the case. The statements were made by Jeff Waters not by Ken Logue.
A 33-year-old female driver was shot Wednesday morning in what police say was a road rage incident in Alexandria, and a suspect was arrested after an hours-long search.

The woman, who is from Bladensburg, has serious injuries but was able to walk and speak after the shooting, police said. She was taken to a hospital and is in stable condition, said Lt. Matthew Weinert of the Alexandria Police Department.

Maryland State Police took Ernest Stickell, 59, of Mechanicsville, into custody Wednesday afternoon, and he has been charged with malicious wounding and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.

Patrol officers responded to the shooting at 7:56 a.m. on Eisenhower Avenue near Clermont Drive, just off the Beltway. Police said the driver of one car fired at another but declined to elaborate on exactly what happened to prompt the incident.

There was some type of aggressive interaction between the vehicles that led to the shooting, police spokeswoman Crystal Nosal said, adding that officers spoke to the victim and witnesses after the incident.

Police said two people were in the victims black Chevy Tahoe  a man who was not injured and the female driver. The victim was shot in her neck and back, Alexandria Fire Department spokesman Rick Muse Jr. said. Nosal declined to say how many shots were fired.

The other vehicle left the scene, and police began a search. Stickell was arrested hours later. A woman who answered the phone at a number associated with Stickell declined to comment. Online court records dont indicate whether Stickell has a lawyer.

A female was in this black Chevrolet Tahoe when she was shot as Eisenhower Avenue remained blocked Wednesday morning. (Ellie Silverman/The Washington Post)

The incident tied up traffic for several hours.
THE DISTRICT

Bicyclist hit in June dies of injuries

A bicyclist has died after being struck last month in the District by a vehicle that left the scene, D.C. police said.

Burgess Johnson, 53, of Southeast Washington, died Sunday of injuries suffered in the June 30 crash at 29th and Erie streets SE, police said.

They said Johnson went through a stop sign as he tried to turn onto Erie. He was struck by a vehicle whose driver checked on him and then left, police said.

 Martin Weil

2 firefighters hurt while battling blaze

Two firefighters were injured while fighting a blaze at rowhouses in Northwest.

The two-alarm fire broke out about 1 a.m. Tuesday in the 200 block of Morgan Street NW near New York Avenue NW. The cause of the fire is under investigation.

 Dana Hedgpeth

VIRGINIA

Police: Babysitter left children unattended

A 30-year-old woman is on the run after she left a 2-year-old boy and a baby whom she was babysitting unattended outside their apartment in Dumfries, Va., police say.

Police in Prince William County said Amanda Sue Allen of Burbank Lane in Woodbridge is wanted on charges of felony child neglect. Just after noon Saturday in the 3500 block of Briarwood Drive, police officers investigated a report of child neglect. They found the boy and an 11-month-old girl unattended outside their apartment, police said. Officers found the babysitter asleep inside the childrens home.

At some point, Allen allegedly climbed out of a bedroom window and left the area, authorities said. The children were released into the custody of a family member.

 Dana Hedgpeth

County will donate to support residents

Prince William County will donate $30,000 to support the legal efforts of residents fighting against a proposed Dominion Energy transmission route in the Haymarket area.

The residents are trying to persuade the Virginia State Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities, to reverse its decision last month to allow Dominion to build a six-mile transmission route along Carver Road to support a new computer data center complex.

Dominion officials have said that the extra capacity is also needed to address the increasing demand for power in the area.

Residents want the state to order Dominion to build a route along Interstate 66 with the lines partially buried  an option estimated to cost $167 million. The Carver Road route would cost about $62 million.

 Antonio Olivo

Man found in pond, authorities say

The body of a Virginia man was found Monday night in a pond in Fairfax County, county police said.

The man was identified as Pedro Ramirez Matom, 28, of Centreville. Police said an autopsy would be conducted.

 Martin Weil and

Justin Wm. Moyer

MARYLAND

Sketch of slain man released to the public

Authorities are trying to identify a man who was found slain in a Riverdale roadway.

The man, Hispanic and 35 to 40 years old, was found shortly after 4 a.m. Sunday in the 6200 block of 60th Avenue.

A sketch showed that the man had facial hair and a mole on his chin. Police said there are no distinguishing marks or tattoos on his body.
1 of 32 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  Photos of the Detwiler wildfire raging in California View Photos More than 1,400 firefighters are battling the fire that has burned more than 45,000 acres, forced hundreds to evacuate the area and destroyed at least eight structures. Caption More than 1,400 firefighters are battling the fire that has burned more than 45,000 acres, forced hundreds to evacuate the area and destroyed at least eight structures. July 19, 2017 Flames approaches a home as the Detwiler fire burns through brush in Mariposa, Calif. More than 1,400 firefighters are battling the blaze, which has engulfed more than 45,000 acres, forced hundreds to evacuate the area and destroyed at least eight structures. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Wait 1 second to continue.

 The entire town of Mariposa  a Northern California enclave of about 2,000 residents west of Yosemite National Park  has been evacuated, along with thousands of other people from the surrounding county, as a wildfire continues to consume tens of thousands of acres in the area.

The Detwiler Fire, which is sending plumes of smoke through much of the region and into the Sierra Nevada, already has burned more than 46,000 acres and is just 7 percent contained. It is the latest flare in a string of large fires hitting California this month and is the second to qualify for funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Its also the first fire this year to trigger an official state of emergency declaration from California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), and it adds to an early and particularly intense fire season that already has burned nearly 130,000 acres across the state, a significant increase over 2016.

[Thousands of Californians flee their homes after Detwiler Fire doubles in size]

The emergency declaration is partly due to the size of the fire and because it is threatening entire communities. It also has led to the closure of Highway 140, a popular entry point to Yosemite. So far the park itself is not in the line of fire.

Yosemite is quite a bit east of where the fires at currently, but its at higher elevation, so anything could happen at this point, said Scott McLean, a spokesman for CalFire, the state fire agency.

The same highway was closed last month because of rock slides caused by the high volume of runoff from massive winter snows and heavy rain. The winter deluge also is playing a role in this fire, McLean said.

[Floods, then fires. California residents again face evacuations due to the elements.]

The winter rains promoted so much growth that the grass crop has really been supporting all these fires, McLean said. Its the fuse to the fire. Its like carpets of brush, not just a bush here or there. And its very dry because even with the wet winter, were still dealing with impacts of the drought, and we will be for several years to come.



A half-burned real estate sign stands on the side of the road on Wednesday in Mariposa, Calif. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

California is still covered with plants that didnt survive the extended drought. Dead and dry, theyre perfect fuel for wildfires, especially when paired with the acres of new grass brought on by the winter.

This years sweltering heat also hasnt helped. It was well above 100 degrees in Mariposa County on Wednesday, with low humidity. Firefighters typically will see gains at night, when temperatures drop and humidity increases, but thats happening less and less. And the weekend is expected to bring temperatures that could rise to 109 degrees.

Ive lived in California for a very long time, and Ive never seen temperatures this high this frequently, or for these sorts of prolonged periods, McLean said. Youre seeing 15-day stretches of 100-degree or higher temperatures. This fire is burning as hot and heavy during the night as it would during the day.

That means firefighters, including McLeans son, are working day and night. My sons had two hours of sleep in two days, McLean said. Its just a perfect storm of factors  the weather, the terrain, the fuel. Its not good.

Another factor: humans. Ninety-five percent of wildland fires are started by people, and just about 7 percent are arson, McLean said. He rattled off a list of potential causes: parking a vehicle on dry grass, trimming brush at the wrong time of day and hitting a rock that sparks.

Mariposa resident Noel Morrison has been evacuating people and pets for friends and family since evacuation orders came down Tuesday.

Its the summer and people are out of town, so Ive had a lot of friends asking for help with their animals, Morrison said, noting that she evacuated to a town about 30 miles away. Im staying in Oakhurst with a friend, and her house is starting to look like Noahs Ark.

Between trips back and forth, Morrison, who works with the Yosemite Mariposa Tourism Bureau, also is helping to field questions from local businesses affected by the evacuation order.

A lot of visitors to Yosemite stay in and near Mariposa, and all the hotels had to evacuate yesterday, both because of the fire and because we lost power, she said.

The cause of the Detwiler Fire is still unknown, and with high winds and particularly hot temperatures forecast, firefighters expect to be tackling the blaze for a while. Yosemite remains open, though CalFire is cautioning people to stay indoors as much as possible, because of the smoke.

Weve already got firefighters that have been on duty for 25 days straight, McLean said. And were not out of the woods yet  we just started. Usually our large fires are in September or October.
A significant portion of people with mild cognitive impairment or dementia who are taking medication for Alzheimers may not actually have the disease, according to interim results of a major study underway to see how PET scans could change the nature of Alzheimers diagnosis and treatment.

The findings, presented Wednesday at the Alzheimers Association International Conference in London, come from a four-year study launched in 2016 that is testing over 18,000 Medicare beneficiaries with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or dementia to see if their brains contain the amyloid plaques that are one of the two hallmarks of the disease.

So far, the results have been dramatic. Among 4,000 people tested so far in the Imaging Dementia-Evidence for Amyloid Scanning (IDEAS) study, researchers from the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California at San Francisco found that just 54.3 percent of MCI patients and 70.5 percent of dementia patients had the plaques.

A positive test for amyloid does not mean someone has Alzheimers, though its presence precedes the disease and increases the risk of progression. But a negative test definitively means a person does not have it.

The findings could change the way doctors treat people in these hard-to-diagnose groups and save money being spent on inappropriate medication.

(National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering)

If someone had a putative diagnosis of Alzheimers disease, they might be on an Alzheimers drug like Aricept or Namenda, said James Hendrix, the Alzheimer Associations director of global science initiatives who co-presented the findings. What if they had a PET scan and it showed that they didnt have amyloid in their brain? Their physician would take them off that drug and look for something else.

For decades, diagnosing Alzheimers has been a guessing game, based on looking at a persons symptoms rather than testing for definitive evidence of the brain disorder. A firm diagnosis was not possible until an autopsy was performed.

Now, a spinal tap or PET scan can detect the telltale amyloid deposits, and researchers are trying to develop a simple blood test that would do so. PET imaging can quantify the amount of amyloid and also show where it is in a persons brain.

But spinal taps are invasive, and PET scans cost $3,000 to $4,000 and are typically not covered by insurance. In 2013 the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) declined to cover the tests, citing insufficient evidence that they would make a difference for patients with a disease for which there is no cure and limited treatment available.

But CMS agreed to fund the bulk of the $100 million IDEAS study by reimbursing participants for their PET scans, and researchers hope positive results will persuade them to cover it in the future.

Over 400 physicians enrolled their patients in the study, and they initially filled out forms describing how they would care for them based on their clinical symptoms. After seeing the PET imaging results, they changed their care plans for two-thirds of the patients in the study.

We thought we would be able to see about a 30 percent change, but were getting a 66 percent change, so its huge, Hendrix said. We see high percentages of people who are on a drug and didnt need to be on those drugs.

(Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)

Also on Wednesday, the Alzheimers Association announced the launch of a $20 million two-year clinical trial to see if lifestyle changes can prevent cognitive decline.

Modeled after a larger 2014 study in Finland that showed positive results, the U.S. POINTER study will work with 2,500 older adults at risk for cognitive decline. It will test whether two years of intervention that includes physical exercise, nutritional counseling, social and cognitive stimulation, and improved self-management will help cognitive function in participants 60 to 79 years old.

Similar studies are also underway in Singapore and Australia.

Research has shown that each of these factors contributes to cognitive health, but researchers believe that, as with heart disease, combating Alzheimers is likely to require a multipronged, or cocktail approach combining drugs and lifestyle changes.
Let us consider the qualifications of President Trumps nominee to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Holy See: one Callista Gingrich of Virginia.

She is a former clerk on the House Agriculture Committee.

She is the author of childrens books about an elephant named Ellis.

She sings in the choir at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

She plays French horn in City of Fairfax Band.

And, she testified Tuesday, she has looked at some of Pope Franciss encyclical on climate change.

But really, Gingrich was receiving a confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee because of one qualification: She is married to Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and a major backer of President Trump.

And now, for his support of Trump, he is getting the ultimate patronage: the chance to live in Rome on the taxpayers dime while his wife, the president of Gingrich Productions, enjoys a plum posting. Newt, who converted to Catholicism several years ago, set his wife up nicely for the job by co-hosting two videos with her about Pope John Paul II, produced with a Gingrich political ally.

But if it is good news for the Gingriches, it is an(other) insult to Francis from Trump, who has sparred with the pope over immigration and climate change. Newt carried on a six-year extramarital affair with Callista in the 1990s when she, 23 years his junior, was a House staffer and he, as speaker, led the impeachment of Bill Clinton over his extramarital affair with an intern. National Catholic Reporters Michael Sean Winters called it astonishing that a party that celebrates family values at every turn has a president who is on his third wife and who has bragged about his extramarital affairs and who is appointing an ambassador to the Vatican who had a six-year affair with her future husband while he was still married to his second wife.

The nomination of Callista is also Trumps beatification of Newt, who has done as much as anyone to coarsen American politics  and to pave the way for Trump  with his name-calling, demonizing and brinkmanship.

[Callista Gingrichs hair is a fabulous shout-out to a mythic Washington]

All presidents reward supporters with patronage. New York Jets owner Woody Johnson will be our man in London. On Gingrichs panel Tuesday was George Glass, a big Trump donor, tapped to be ambassador to Portugal though he doesnt speak Portuguese.

But the choice of Callista Gingrich is another category of cronyism for an administration populated by friends and relations rather than appointees of merit. This has fueled the Russia scandal, stalled the agenda in Congress and made the administration seem singularly incompetent  yet Republicans in Congress have been unwilling to say that this is unacceptable.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) introduced Gingrich on Tuesday by noting that she was valedictorian of her high school class.

Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), who succeeded Newt in the House before moving to the Senate, declared that one of her great, great persuasive talents is to not only convince Newt to marry her, but convert him to Catholicism.

Gingrich testified that she has the full support of my husband, Newt, who didnt attend the hearing. Gingrich, an uncomfortable smile fixed on her face, provided, in lieu of actual answers to questions, strung-together snippets of cliches.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) asked about refugee policy, on which Francis and Trump disagree. Gingrich responded with a bromide about a deep commitment in this country to work to forward peace and stability.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) asked how she would work with the Vatican to counter extremism. Gingrich responded with a word salad about looking forward to working on those issues of our shared policy opportunities.

Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) asked about the popes climate change encyclical. She responded with boilerplate about how President Trump wants to maintain that we have clean air and clean water.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) asked if she had even read the encyclical.

I have looked at some of it, the witness replied.

Are there pieces of it that particularly resonate for you?

Well, Gingrich replied generically, I think were all called to be stewards of the land.

Staffers on both sides of the committee were now grinning at the pained responses.

What other two or three things do you see are key to your particular responsibility should you hold this post? Merkley inquired.

Gingrich came up with only one: fighting human trafficking.

Johnson, attempting to rehabilitate the witness, urged her to talk about her study of John Paul II and what she learned about U.S. and Vatican leadership. Gingrich retreated again to platitude: Its so important that we reach out to places like the Holy See to forward good in this world, she said.

That was enough for Johnson, who pronounced her perfectly suited for this position.

Perfectly situated, at least.

Twitter: @Milbank

Read more from Dana Milbanks archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Marine Brig. Gen. Roger Turner, center, and Afghan officials salute during a handover ceremony at Leatherneck Camp in Lashkar Gah in Helmand, Afghanistan, on April 29, the day U.S. Marines returned to Helmand. (Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

In his July 16 op-ed, Americas unauthorized wars, George F. Will gave us an interesting column about how our nearly perpetual military actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan may be sensible but not clearly authorized. Do we really want our every military action to await a vote from our perpetually dueling Congress? Is this not what President Barack Obama did in reference to the use of poison gas by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2013?

What we are currently engaged in is not warfare but crime prevention. Whether we like it or not, the United States is the worlds police force. We can no more wait for congressional approval to confront foreign criminals than the Chicago police can await the city councils permission to foil a bank robbery.

Bruce Herbert, McLean

George F. Will was right to point out that Congresss failure to exercise its authority over war is an abdication of its constitutional responsibility. But rubber-stamping unlimited presidential authority to wage war against unnamed terrorist groups anywhere in the world, as some have proposed, isnt the solution. Thats what got us into this mess.

The authorization enacted against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has been stretched past its original purpose to authorize what is now our nations longest war and to justify military operations in more than a dozen countries against more than half a dozen terrorist groups.

To prevent the use of wartime rules to kill and detain far beyond their battlefield purpose, Congress should consider only authorizations that are tailored to current threats for which military force is necessary and appropriate. Many proposals being considered today would merely cede Congresss power over war to the executive branch. Such an abdication would undermine our constitutional system, leadership role in the world and the human rights and freedoms that are critical to our national security.

Rita Siemion, Washington

The writer is international legal counsel

at Human Rights First.
The Democrats, Vice President Pence said recently, have already settled on their agenda, and it can be summed up in one word: resist.

He isnt the only one with that view of Democrats. In the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, only 37 percent of Americans think the Democratic Party stands for something, while 52 percent say it just stands against Trump.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House Democrats campaign arm, seemed to admit as much two weeks ago when it sent supporters an email with the proposed slogan: Democrats 2018: Have you seen the other guys?

Now Democrats are trying to fix that  and not a moment too soon.

On Monday, I am told, congressional Democrats  in the Senate and the House together  will roll out a legislative policy agenda, their de facto 2018 campaign platform. The details, after months of haggling and cat-herding, could yet disappoint, but the broad outlines as described to me are exactly what the doctor ordered.

(Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

As important as whats in it is whats not. Democrats jettisoned social and foreign policy issues for this exercise, eschewing the identity politics and box-checking that has plagued Democratic campaigns in the past, most recently Hillary Clintons. This will be purely an economic message.

They also resisted invitations to steer the party toward the center (as pollster Mark Penn advised) or in a more progressive agenda. This is meant to be a populist manifesto that doesnt conform to the left/right debate but instead aims to align Democrats with ordinary, middle-class Americans fighting powerful special interests.

Titled A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages, it is expected to have many Democratic staples  tax increases on the rich, affordable college, infrastructure spending, higher wages, job training, paid family leave and the like  and a few new ones.

Hashed out over several months by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), DCCC Chairman Ben Ray Lujan (N.M.), and Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), Cheri Bustos (Ill.) and David Cicilline (R.I.), it will be outlined Monday with a few sample proposals, to be followed in the coming weeks by more proposals, some to be introduced as legislation and some to be offered as Contract With America-style promises that a Democratic Congress would implement. Schumer told me in December that Democrats would have five, six sharp-edged [policies] that can be described in five words, although it sounds as if the plan hasnt come out quite so lean.

The goal is to avoid repeating Clintons problem in 2016. She had so many proposals, and she scratched the itches of so many Democratic constituencies, that she lacked a coherent economic message. The full-throated populist agenda should also make it harder for President Trump to claim that he is the one fighting special interests, which he did to great effect against Clinton.

Democrats have been little but the anti-Trump party lately, successfully fighting his legislative agenda, particularly health care, and raising a ruckus about the Russia scandal and Trumps other outrages. The danger is that an impression solidifies among voters that the party has nothing else to say.

As if to illustrate the point, 23 liberal House Democrats announced Wednesday morning that they were filing a resolution of no confidence in Trump. It contains no fewer than 88 whereas clauses (whereas the embassy of Kuwait held its national day celebration at Trump International, and whereas Trump referred to United States Senator Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas ). The idea might work  if Democrats had a majority and if the United States had a parliamentary system.

A reporter asked Rep. Steve Cohen (Tenn.), sponsor of the no-confidence resolution, if he was focusing too much on Trump over jobs. Bubble-gum chew and walk at the same time, he recommended.

Except Democrats havent been doing both. Some think they dont have to, because polls show that voters prefer a Democratic Congress. But as The Posts Mike DeBonis and Emily Guskin point out, more Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (65 percent) say they will definitely vote next year than Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (57 percent). To boost Democratic turnout, the party needs to be more than just anti-Trump.

Even if it doesnt help their electoral prospects, Democrats need a clear agenda so they can govern if they do win. If they win without a sharp agenda, they would end up where congressional Republicans are now: in power but without a popular mandate for their agenda.

On Wednesday, I asked Rep. Linda Sanchez (Calif.), the No. 5 Democrat in the House, about the search for a unified agenda, and she bristled. Were not searching for an agenda, she replied. Democrats have always known what we stood for.

They just did a really good job of keeping it under wraps.

Twitter: @Milbank

Read more from Dana Milbanks archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Chinese government leaders, subtle masters of propaganda, seem to have discovered a Sun Tzu formula for taming dissent on the Internet: The best strategy may not be to confront critics directly, but to lull or distract them with a tide of good news.

This intriguing argument is suggested by a recent article in the American Political Science Review titled How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument. With complex data, it supports a simple thesis about life in the Internet age: Arguing the facts often doesnt work; frequently, confrontation just makes people resist harder.

The study analyzes China, but its implications are relevant for America in the age of Donald Trump. As I noted in a column last August, Trumps supporters sometimes seem impervious to fact-based argument. Trumps base has mostly stayed loyal since his inauguration, despite his lack of legislative achievements and his impulsive, arguably unethical actions. Why is this so? Read on.

The Chinese case examines the same conundrum explored by Christopher Graves, an Ogilvy Public Relations executive-turned-behavioral scientist. He summed up the limitations of factual argument in an October 2016 article in Harvard Business Review, When Saying Something Nice Is the Only Way to Change Someones Mind. Thats a lesson Trump critics havent learned. Trump makes inflammatory statements, opponents howl in outrage, and his core supporters applaud. The impasse continues.

Lets get back to China. That country presents an Internet puzzle that was examined by Gary King of Harvard University, Jennifer Pan of Stanford University and Margaret Roberts of the University of California at San Diego. (Their work was highlighted for me by Eileen Donahoe of Stanford.) The paradox is that China probably has the most prolific social-media activity in the world, but its authoritarian government also fears opposition. So how does Beijing maintain control?

The three American researchers wanted to test the widely held theory that the Chinese government mobilizes an army of more than a million Internet commentators to combat criticism of the regime. This supposed cadre of thought police is often described as Fifty Cent, because analysts thought they were paid a small amount for every post that endorsed the party line and rebutted foreign critics.

To test how the system actually worked, the researchers studied a cache of 43,797 Fifty Cent posts that was leaked in 2014 from the Internet Propaganda Office of Zhanggong district in Jiangxi province in southeast China. Nearly all were from people who worked at government agencies (and there was no evidence they were paid anything, let alone 50 cents a post). Their missives spiked sharply on anniversaries of protests and other days when there might be public dissent, making clear they were well-organized.

The surprise was that the posts werent argumentative. Instead, they were bland party pabulum. About 80 percent of the posts were cheerleading about government activities, 14 percent were non-argumentative praise or suggestions, and almost none were outright attacks. Other Internet samples yielded similar findings.

The Chinese precept, concluded the American researchers, was do not engage on controversial issues. Only when there was a danger of collective action would the government intervene directly. It was as if the party propagandists were adapting the famous admonition of Sun Tzu, the revered sixth-century B.C. strategist: The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

The researchers offered a concluding thought thats relevant in this era, when information operations have become a domain of covert action (as demonstrated by the Russian governments hacking of the 2016 election) as well as domestic control: Letting an argument die, or changing the subject, usually works much better than picking an argument and getting someones back up.

What happens when we ignore this precept and attack our political adversaries head-on? The 2016 election and its aftermath may be an object lesson. Evidence of wrongdoing may seem overwhelming if it confirms your preexisting beliefs, but not if it challenges those core biases. Graves cited this backfire effect, as explained in a 2011 essay by journalist David McRaney: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.

The lesson of this social-science research? If a political narrative is repeated often enough, backed by a chorus of cheerleaders, its very hard to rebut directly. Quiet persuasion may be more effective than shouting; the gradual accretion of facts may have more impact than a barrage. To quote Sun Tzu again: The rule is, not to besiege walled cities if it can possibly be avoided.

Read more from David Ignatiuss archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Berin Szoka is president of TechFreedom, a technology policy think tank.

Last week, millions of Americans, mainly on the left, rallied behind a cause larger than themselves: maximizing President Trumps power over the Internet.

Wait. What?

If youre confused, dont worry. This is all more complicated than slogans and sound bites might suggest.

The concept of net neutrality has become something of an empty vessel for frustrations about the Internet, but theres broad consensus on the basics. Back in 2004, Republican Michael Powell, then-chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, declared that consumers have a right to access lawful content, run lawful apps and connect non-harmful devices to the Internet. More specific rules against blocking and throttling Internet traffic have never really been controversial. How to police anti-competitive conduct by broadband providers has been thornier, but if ironing out the details of net neutrality were the real issue, we would have resolved this fight long ago.

Congressional Republicans proposed to codify net neutrality in statute in early 2015, through a slight variant of legislation floated by Democrats in 2010. But Democrats have offered no response, except insisting that the FCC already has all the power it could ever need to do the job.

You might think Trumps election would have made so-called net-roots activists more skeptical about trusting the government with vast and arbitrary power over the Internet. Were not talking about a normal, neutral expert agency here. The FCC regulates the media and censors speech. Its the agency Democrats excoriated more than perhaps any other under President George W. Bush. Its the junior varsity Congress that Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig  godfather of the Digital Left  said requires immediate abolition. The agencys regulations, he said, offered the levers that lobbyists use to win favors to protect todays monopolists.

Would you trust any president with such leverage?

Starting under President Bill Clinton, there was a broad Hands off the net! consensus. John Perry Barlow, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, put it best:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

Barlow lost the first battle: Congress melded Internet censorship into the 1996 Telecommunications Act. But Congress also declared that the Internet should remain unfettered by federal or state regulation. And the Supreme Court blocked the censorship provisions anyway, calling the Internet a unique and wholly new medium of worldwide human communication.

Governments 1, Barlow 2.

But how to govern this new medium? Should broadband providers be regulated under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act  a law written for the old telephone monopoly? No, insisted a bipartisan group of senators in 1998, including Democrats John Kerry (Mass.) and Ron Wyden (Ore.), warning that such micromanagement and resulting uncertainty seriously would chill the growth and development of broadband.

Yet thats the power President Barack Obama told the FCC to invoke in 2014  on top of yet another sweeping claim the FCC made in 2010: The power to do anything the commission asserts will somehow encourage access to broadband services. Once Obama equated these broad claims of power with net neutrality, it became politically impossible for Democrats to separate them with legislation.

Powers invoked for net neutrality could be a Trojan horse  just as the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned about the Republican-controlled FCCs power grab in 2008.

Former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler insisted the agency was streamlining Title II. But selective enforcement simply means the chairman can reward some companies and punish others. And the commission has a long history of using its powers for political extortion, most obviously in reviewing mergers, sometimes for transparently partisan purposes.

Wheeler claimed this was just about keeping broadband companies in line, but all Internet companies are at risk. Google and Amazon (if not Facebook) have found themselves in Trumps crosshairs, right alongside fake news media companies.

The current FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has long criticized the FCCs abuses of power. Appointed to the commission by Obama and made chairman by Trump in January, Pais no stooge. He has consistently opposed the politicization of the agency and called for the FCC to constrain its discretion. But Pai wont be chairman forever, and his self-restraint is highly exceptional. Bushs second FCC chairman was criticized by the left and right alike for his abuse of power. Theres just no telling how future chairmen  Republicans or Democrats  might wield the powers claimed in the name of net neutrality.

Democrats should have worked out a legislative deal while they held the White House. Its not too late, but it soon might be. Republicans increasingly see Web companies as political enemies. That will only get worse without legislation. We could spend another decade, or more, fighting about this.

The good news? Some Democrats and Web companies are showing signs they might negotiate. The door remains open  for now.
Joel Clement was director of the Office of Policy Analysis at the U.S. Interior Department until last week. He is now a senior adviser at the departments Office of Natural Resources Revenue.

I am not a member of the deep state. I am not big government.

I am a scientist, a policy expert, a civil servant and a worried citizen. Reluctantly, as of today, I am also a whistleblower on an administration that chooses silence over science.

Nearly seven years ago, I came to work for the Interior Department, where, among other things, Ive helped endangered communities in Alaska prepare for and adapt to a changing climate. But on June 15, I was one of about 50 senior department employees who received letters informing us of involuntary reassignments. Citing a need to improve talent development, mission delivery and collaboration, the letter informed me that I was reassigned to an unrelated job in the accounting office that collects royalty checks from fossil fuel companies.

I am not an accountant  but you dont have to be one to see that the administrations excuse for a reassignment such as mine doesnt add up. A few days after my reassignment, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke testified before Congress that the department would use reassignments as part of its effort to eliminate employees; the only reasonable inference from that testimony is that he expects people to quit in response to undesirable transfers. Some of my colleagues are being relocated across the country, at taxpayer expense, to serve in equally ill-fitting jobs.

I believe I was retaliated against for speaking out publicly about the dangers that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities. During the months preceding my reassignment, I raised the issue with White House officials, senior Interior officials and the international community, most recently at a U.N. conference in June. It is clear to me that the administration was so uncomfortable with this work, and my disclosures, that I was reassigned with the intent to coerce me into leaving the federal government.

On Wednesday, I filed two forms  a complaint and a disclosure of information  with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. I filed the disclosure because eliminating my role coordinating federal engagement and leaving my former position empty exacerbate the already significant threat to the health and the safety of certain Alaska Native communities. I filed the complaint because the Trump administration clearly retaliated against me for raising awareness of this danger. Our country values the safety of our citizens, and federal employees who disclose threats to health and safety are protected from reprisal by the Whistleblower Protection Act and Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act.

Removing a civil servant from his area of expertise and putting him in a job where hes not needed and his experience is not relevant is a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars. Much more distressing, though, is what this charade means for American livelihoods. The Alaska Native villages of Kivalina, Shishmaref and Shaktoolik are perilously close to melting into the Arctic Ocean. In a region that is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, the land upon which citizens homes and schools stand is newly vulnerable to storms, floods and waves. As permafrost melts and protective sea ice recedes, these Alaska Native villages are one superstorm from being washed away, displacing hundreds of Americans and potentially costing lives. The members of these communities could soon become refugees in their own country.

Alaskas elected officials know climate change presents a real risk to these communities. Gov. Bill Walker (I) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) have been sounding the alarm and scrambling for resources to help these villages. But to stave off a life-threatening situation, Alaska needs the help of a fully engaged federal government. Washington cannot turn its back.

While I have given small amounts to Democratic candidates in the past, I have no problem whatsoever working for a Republican administration. I believe that every president, regardless of party, has the right and responsibility to implement his policies. But that is not what is happening here. Putting citizens in harms way isnt the presidents right. Silencing civil servants, stifling science, squandering taxpayer money and spurning communities in the face of imminent danger have never made America great.

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Now that I have filed with the Office of Special Counsel, it is my hope that it will do a thorough investigation into the Interior Departments actions. Our country protects those who seek to inform others about dangers to American lives. The threat to these Alaska Native communities is not theoretical. This is not a policy debate. Retaliation against me for those disclosures is unlawful.

Lets be honest: The Trump administration didnt think my years of science and policy experience were better suited to accounts receivable. It sidelined me in the hope that I would be quiet or quit. Born and raised in Maine, I was taught to work hard and speak truth to power. Trump and Zinke might kick me out of my office, but they cant keep me from speaking out. They might refuse to respond to the reality of climate change, but their abuse of power cannot go unanswered.
EVEN IF I am crushed into powder, I will embrace you with ashes. So wrote Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo about his wife, Liu Xia, as part of a statement he composed for trial in 2009. Ms. Liu, a photographer, painter and poet, steadfastly stood by her husband as he called for democratic freedoms in China  and faced relentless persecution for it. Now, even after his death , it is becoming clear that this persecution is not at an end.

Ms. Liu has been kept under unofficial house arrest since 2010. Though Chinese authorities have claimed she is free, she has been made to live under constant surveillance. She is rarely allowed to leave her home, and few visitors are permitted entry. Her mobile phone service was disconnected seven years ago, and she has had limited contact with the outside world ever since. These conditions, along with the deaths of both her parents and now her husband, have taken a toll: Ms. Liu is reportedly suffering from depression, and both her physical and mental health are deteriorating the longer she is held in isolation. Friends and family have been unable to contact her since her husbands death, raising new concerns about her well-being.

Is there no limit to the cruelty Chinas rulers are willing to deploy in their unending quest to squelch and punish free speech and free thought? Surely Ms. Liu has suffered enough. She watched as her husband was imprisoned four times, eventually dying without the care he could have received outside of China. She saw her younger brother face harassment, too: In 2013, Liu Hui was sentenced to 11 years in prison in a clear attempt to pressure her. His arrest prompted Ms. Liu to make one of her few public statements since her forced isolation: She shouted, I am not free. She is not and will not be until China stops its hounding of an innocent family.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson issued a statement on the day of Mr. Lius death calling on Beijing to release Ms. Liu from house arrest. And although President Trump came under heavy  and deserved  criticism for exuberantly praising Chinese President Xi Jinping that same day, he also reportedly brought up the issue in a private phone call with Mr. Xi. Congress, meanwhile, is considering legislation to commemorate Mr. Liu while simultaneously urging Beijing to free his wife. These are all important efforts, and they need to be sustained.

In 2012, Ms. Liu said of her house arrest, Kafka could not have written anything more absurd and unbelievable than this. We agree. It is time for Chinas Communist regime to leave this woman in peace.
Corey Stewart (R) has announced that he is running for the U.S. Senate. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

Regarding the July 15 editorial Mr. Stewarts indecent campaign:

Corey A. Stewart (R) was way off the integrity meter with his announcement that he will run a vicious and ruthless Senate campaign. I recognize that there are those who choose to inflame through vile and despicable language toward members of the other party and against our president. Those who use personal attacks offer no solutions and do not wish to dialogue.

I strongly advise Mr. Stewart to look at the definition of three words. Vicious means deliberately cruel or violent. Ruthless means having or showing no pity or compassion for others. Integrity means the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.

If I ran for Senate, I would promise to run with integrity and to treat my opponent with respect. We face many critical issues: health care, housing, transportation, taxes, the opioid crisis, immigration and Social Security.

Mr. Stewart said the days of kinder, gentler Republicans are over, and he will be more like a UFC fighter. He said he was disgusted back in 1988 when then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, the Republican presidential nominee, said that the United States should be a kinder and gentler nation with strength. Might I remind Mr. Stewart that Mr. Bush won that election.

Does any American deserve representation by someone who freely chooses to be vicious and ruthless? Wouldnt they prefer someone acting with integrity?

John Fuller, Fairfax
Neera Tanden is president and chief executive of the Center for American Progress. Topher Spiro is the groups vice president of health policy.

Youd think that Republican leaders would have learned their lesson after a second failed attempt to pass the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA)  the Senate GOPs replacement for the Affordable Care Act. It should come as no surprise that a bill drafted in secret  without holding a single public hearing or garnering the support of a single health-care stakeholder  would face widespread condemnation.

Nonetheless, once it became clear Tuesday that at least three Senate Republicans would block Majority Leader Mitch McConnells last-ditch, repeal-only bill, President Trump tweeted petulantly that Republicans should just let Obamacare fail. Setting aside the fact that, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, ACA insurance markets are actually in the process of stabilizing, the last thing Americans need right now is for policymakers to double down on partisan political games.

Theres a better path forward. The American people have voiced an undeniable desire to see leaders from both parties come together and forge a stronger health-care system for all. In fact, a recent Kaiser poll found that 71 percent of the public wants Congress to make a bipartisan effort to improve the ACA. That includes nearly half of those who voted for Trump.

We have proposed legislation that could easily command a supermajority in Congress and help to restore the publics faith in the ability of our political institutions to govern. Our plan calls for the Senate to pass those portions of the BCRA that would help stabilize insurance markets and eliminate those sections that would gut Medicaid funding and other federal subsidies while slashing taxes for the rich.

This approach consists of three core elements. First, it would provide greater certainty for insurers by guaranteeing continued payments of ACA subsidies, a step that could help reduce average premiums by as much as 19 percent.

Second, it would reimburse insurers for covering high-cost patients who need more expensive medical treatments. Such a solution has already proved effective in Alaska, which cut the rate of premium increases by 75 percent, and in Maine, where premiums fell by 20 percent in the first year after it was enacted. We estimate that providing $15 billion to states for this kind of reinsurance would help lower premiums by more than 14 percent. Furthermore, because this funding would lower premiums, it would save money on tax credits  resulting in an overall cost of slightly more than $4 billion per year. Working together, Congress could easily find health-care savings to pay for this reinsurance.

There should easily be majority support for both these proposals, as guarantees of ACA subsidies and reimbursements for high-cost patients are already found in the BCRA.

Finally, because the first two components of this plan would take time to fully transform market dynamics, our plan also seeks to assist those areas of the country that have one or no insurers. Republican senators such as Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri have previously supported the idea of filling insurance gaps for these underserved counties.

There are several gap-filling options that Congress can and should consider. In counties that were underserved as of July 1, insurers could be exempted from paying the health-insurance tax. The government could offer a public option in the form of a guaranteed choice plan in communities without sufficient competition, particularly rural areas. People in underserved counties could be allowed to buy into the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.

The three components of this proposed bipartisan solution would quickly earn the overwhelming support of insurance commissioners, actuaries, economists and policy experts from across the political spectrum. Most important, the plan would help to lower premiums, stabilize insurance markets and expand security for the American people.

The Republican Party faces two paths. It can continue to pursue its destructive efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or to fuel uncertainty, while the American public holds it responsible for all the repercussions. Or it can join forces with the Democratic Party to help make the vision of affordable health insurance a reality for every American.

Its time to stop using health care as a political weapon. With both parties invested in the solution, they would have an incentive to make it work. The time for bipartisan action should be now.
It wasnt quite a wicked-witch-is-dead Munchkin happy dance, but the white noise of foregone conclusions drowned out Republicans relatively muted regret over their failure to repeal and replace Obamacare.

It was never gonna happen. Not no how.

Partly this is because the GOP version of reform would have first done harm to our most vulnerable citizens  the elderly, the disabled and the poor. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) cited drastic Medicaid cuts as her reason for withholding support of the so-called Better Health Reconciliation Act. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also said he wouldnt support the bill, because it didnt go far enough in repealing Obamacare.

When two more GOP senators  Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas  defected Monday night, the deal was undone. Lee said the bill failed to repeal all of the Obamacare taxes. He also said the bill didnt go far enough in lowering premiums for middle-class families and in loosening costly regulations.

Thus, the weeks-long tornado of hot tempers and chill winds culminated Tuesday morning when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) realized he didnt have enough votes.

Health care is such a mind-numbing boondoggle that one must take frequent breaks from thinking about it. Therefore, let us pause for a moment to applaud the relatively unknown L. Frank Baum (1856-1919), author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Neither the passage of time nor the contempt usually bred by familiarity seems to dim the popularity or the seemingly eternal applications of his masterwork. In my experience as a columnist, Ive found few issues, characters or moments  whether writing about Bill Clintons steamy White House encounters or McConnells bland ruminations on regret  that dont benefit from Baums contextual frameworks.

There. Now to yawn-inspiring health-care reform in all its failed foregone-ness.

During almost a decade of writing sporadically about health care in its various iterations, Ive interviewed dozens of people from a mix of related fields  medical, business, legislative and political. Not once have I found a single person who thought the GOP could pull off a repeal-and-replace. Why?

First, because the vast majority of Americans are fundamentally opposed to allowing others to suffer. And second, sort of, the Affordable Care Act affects one-sixth of the U.S. economy. How does one untangle a knot of 20 million strings? Why not just repeal and replace California and call it a day? It would be easier.

The fact is, Obamacare was never perfect nor should anyone have expected it to be. Today, we have a health-care system in pitiful disrepair, as insurance companies opt out of exchanges, premiums continue to climb, and healthy, young people forgo insurance premiums that would have subsidized coverage for unhealthy, older Americans and the less fortunate.

Therein lies the crux of the least solvable problem inherent in such a gargantuan, multifaceted overhaul: It denies, emphatically, the nature part of being human, which is in constant tension with government-mandated insurance coverage. The central question is: How do you make it cost-effective as well as fair?

Many Americans simply dont see the fairness in a system that requires them to pay high premiums for others poor health, some of which is, lets face it, earned. Not deserved, but sometimes resulting from poor lifestyle choices. Why, indeed, should a single, childless 30-year-old male who runs three miles a day, eats rationally, and doesnt drink, smoke or take drugs be saddled with insurance premiums to cover pregnancy, abortion, alcoholism, addiction, or an abundance of health consequences resulting from obesity and inertia?

For that matter, why should women have to subsidize mens sexual- dysfunction curatives when, by the way, men dont have to pony up for womens corresponding, post-menopausal, medically appropriate intercessions? Here you see one of the finer-print dilemmas. Wed rather force nuns to concede tacit approval of abortion than insist that insurance subsidies be tied to healthy behaviors.

Im sorry if this sounds heartless; the brain calls it reality. No wonder Obamacare was so difficult to craft and a replacement equally so. There are simply too many moving parts to make the sucker float  and too many reasons not to sink it.

Since McConnells repeal-only idea seemed doomed Tuesday afternoon after GOP Sens. Collins, Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) said they oppose immediate repeal, perhaps, finally, Republicans and Democrats can snap on their wizard hats and cobble something workable together. After all, its the only thing they havent tried yet.

Read more from Kathleen Parkers archive, follow her on Twitter or find her on Facebook.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan face a very difficult choice as they survey the smoking ruins of their unified GOP government after nearly six months in office. They and their lieutenants could decide to pivot from health care to racking up small victories and awaiting reinforcements from the 2018 elections. Or they could go for a big deal with Democrats. Its a tough choice for Ryan and McConnell, but Im hoping they opt for the latter.

Putting off fixing the disaster that is Obamacare is risky, though not impossible. If Republicans score enough small victories between now and November 2018  cutting corporate taxes and confirming all Court of Appeals judges and perhaps next summer another member of the Supreme Court  it may be possible to hold both houses of Congress. Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) is a dead man walking for his role in pulling the first thread that led to the unraveling of repeal and replace, but McConnell (Ky.) might calculate that wins in Florida, Missouri and elsewhere may leave him in a stronger position in January 2019 than he was at the start of this year.

Ryan (Wis.) is in more dangerous terrain, as every member of his caucus owns the failure to repeal and replace  especially the Freedom Caucus, which threw the process into disarray only to retreat (too late) with a fig leaf  and as a result the carnage of the collapsing Obamacare experiment. Real people with real illnesses and deeply flawed Medicaid insurance will discover in increasing numbers that paper insurance doesnt deliver real health care when their children are sick. A watch it fail approach to Obamacare, when the crisis is real and the consequences for poor children are so enormous, is not just bad politics; it is also immoral.

The alternative to waiting for 2019 is a bipartisan approach  if Democrats will have it. A health-care deal could be done, leaving the fringes of both party caucuses on the outside looking in. Devolution of authority over Medicaid to the states, and repeal of the insurance mandate and absurd taxes such as the medical device tax, are the GOP must-haves. The Democrats will have their list.

Odds of success increase if the parties go big at the start by removing the sequesters limits on defense spending and adding immigration reform to the deal: appropriations for President Trumps wall paired with legalization of the law-abiding, undocumented population but no path to citizenship. A truly ambitious go big option could also include a settlement of the judicial confirmation wars, because the more moving parts, the better the chances of success. McConnell, Ryan and Democratic leaders Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) could get together with a half-dozen of the smartest members from both parties to work on an expedited basis and go big.

The GOP Congress has failed. Unless theres a Lazarus-like resurrection of the health-care bill, the session is effectively over. Tax reform isnt likely going to do any better than health-care reform, especially with Wall Street Journal ideologues demanding the end of the state and local income-tax deduction and the capping of the mortgage-interest deduction. (F.A. Hayek doesnt vote in large numbers. Blue-state voters with Republican congressmen do.) The GOP must get its appelate court nominees through the Senate, or the party wipeout could expand to seats previously thought safe.

The 2018 prospects look bad for both parties: The GOP lacks policy victories, thanks to imprudent Freedom Caucus members and scared moderates. The Democrats are lost in Trump hatred to the point where a large part of the country thinks that they and the mainstream media are deranged. Both parties have cause for concern. We are at a crisis point where citizens are giving up on representative government en masse. So why not swing for the fences?
The Supreme Court on Wednesday brokered a new compromise over President Trumps travel ban, saying the government for now may enforce tight restrictions on refugees but also must make it easier for people from six mostly Muslim countries to enter the United States.

The courts terse order means the administration cannot impose a blanket prohibition on people from those countries who have grandparents, aunts, uncles and other relatives in the United States. The Trump administration has advanced a stricter interpretation of what kind of family relationships could entitle a person to receive a U.S. visa, but a lower court in Hawaii ruled that the criteria were too tight.

The Supreme Courts action on Wednesday had two parts. In one, the justices said they will not disturb the lower courts decision that expanded the definition of close family ties.

But in another, the justices granted the governments request to put on hold a part of the lower courts order that would have made it easier for more refugees to enter the country. That order could have granted entry to about 24,000 refugees who were already working with resettlement agencies.

Wednesdays unsigned, one-paragraph order gave no reasoning for the Supreme Courts action. Three justices  Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch  said they would have granted the administrations request to put the entire order on hold.

The majority said the governments appeal of the lower courts ruling should go through normal channels, with the next stop at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

The Justice Department reacted to the action only by saying it looks forward to presenting its arguments to the 9th Circuit.

Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin said in a statement that the courts action confirms we were right to say that the Trump Administration over-reached in trying to unilaterally keep families apart from each other.

The National Immigration Law Center said in a news release that although family unity won today, it will continue to litigate to ensure that refugees can find the shelter they were offered by settlement agencies in the United States.

The courts decision was the latest development in the Trump administrations nearly six-month effort to temporarily shut down the nations refugee program and bar visitors from several majority-Muslim countries while officials examine vetting procedures.

[Supreme Court allows limited version of Trump travel ban]

The Trump administration has said the effort was needed to protect the country. Challengers have fought the ban as an unconstitutional effort at keeping out Muslims, a policy that Trump had advocated during the presidential campaign.

The latest version of the ban bars visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. These restrictions and the refugee ban had been put on hold by lower courts.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on the merits of the challenge to the administrations travel ban on Oct. 10. In the meantime, the court said last month that the ban could go into effect and be applied to those without connections to the United States but that foreigners with a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States must be exempted from the ban.

The justices did not define such a relationship but gave examples of what would qualify for the exemption: a close relative in the United States, a place in an American university, a job offer or speaking engagement.

The Trump administration interpreted the Supreme Courts requirement of a close familial relationship to be a parent, spouse, fiance, son or daughter, sibling, son-in-law or daughter-in-law in the United States. The government would continue to bar refugees who had offers from refugee resettlement programs.

The challengers went back to U.S. District Judge Derrick K. Watson of Hawaii, who had earlier issued a nationwide injunction against the ban. Watson ruled last week that the governments narrowly defined list of exemptions was not supported by either the Supreme Court decision or by the law.

[Judge rules Trump administration too restrictive in travel ban implementation]

Common sense, for instance, dictates that close family members be defined to include grandparents, Watson wrote. Indeed, grandparents are the epitome of close family members. The governments definition excludes them. That simply cannot be.

He extended the exemptions to include those with grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law. Watson wrote that refugees with assurances from resettlement agencies are also exempt from the ban.

The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to stay Watsons ruling.

Watsons interpretation of what kinds of family relationships qualify empties the courts decision of meaning, as it encompasses not just close family members, but virtually all family members, the administration said in its brief to the court. Treating all of these relationships as close familial relationships reads the term close out of the courts decision.

The administration added that Watsons ruling would cover virtually all refugees.

The state of Hawaii, which has been a leader in the challenge to the travel ban, told the justices that the governments argument was nonsense. Any rule that maintained that grandparents are not close familial relations was suspect as applied both to those who sought visas and to refugees, the state said in its brief to the court.

That argument is as wrong as it sounds, and nothing in this courts opinion, the immigration laws, or common sense supports it, the state wrote.
Vice President Pence arrived at the National Governors Association summer meeting with one mission: to revive support for the flagging Republican plan to rewrite the nations health-care laws.

He failed.

Instead of rousing cheers on the waterfront in Providence, R.I., Pence was greeted with an icy air of skepticism Friday as he pitched the legislation, which would reduce federal Medicaid funding and phase out coverage in dozens of states.

By Monday evening, when President Trump and Pence gathered a cluster of GOP senators in the Blue Room of the White House over plates of lemon ricotta agnolotti and grilled rib-eye steak, the measure was all but dead.

The president talked about France and Bastille Day, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) said in an interview Tuesday, recalling the presidents tales during dinner of parades and pomp from his recent trip to Paris.

President Trump, flanked by Vice President Pence and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, speaks Tuesday in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Daines described the groups conversation, which also touched on issues ranging from health care to the debt limit, as loose  as if Trump sat down and went out to dinner with friends, acquaintances, people you work with. It was just dinner to talk about whats going on.

As the dinner ended, reality returned. Two more Republican senators had suddenly bolted from supporting the health-care bill, lifting the total number of Republicans opposed to four and effectively killing it.

I was very surprised when the two folks came out last night, Trump told reporters Tuesday. We thought they were in fairly good shape.

Yet the dramatic collapse of the GOP proposal in the Senate was hardly a shock to most, especially those intimately involved in a venture that has been stalled and fitful since the House passed its version in May.

The upheaval Monday night was a tipping point after weeks of burbling discontent within the party about whether passing the legislation made sense. Nearly every GOP senator was eager to check the box of repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act they had long opposed  but many were also distressed by the possible costs of upending a law that has grown deep roots in states, risen in popularity and is relied upon by some Republican governors.

Moderates were always skittish about the drastic Medicaid cuts opposed by many of their governors. Conservatives were always unhappy with the scope of the Senates legislation, which they felt did not go far enough to gut the law.

And Trump was frequently disengaged, sporadically tweeting and making calls to on-the-fence senators but otherwise avoiding selling the bill at the kind of big rallies that he often holds on issues he champions.

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It has been obvious to me for some time, and likely obvious to the leaders, that up to 10 Republicans were uncomfortable with the bill and were thinking about voting against the motion to proceed, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a critic of the bill, said in an interview Tuesday. So its surprising to me that after the administration failed to win over the governors this past weekend, there wasnt more of a recognition of the fact that the bill was probably in fatal trouble.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has long cultivated a reputation as a canny operator, found it nearly impossible to wrangle together his conference amid the mounting concerns. He could offer them tweaks and adjustments but not the political cover that they coveted.

Neither could the White House, which kept tabs on GOP senators but did not drive the negotiations at all.

None of us knew what the meeting was about last night. We just were invited to the White House, Daines said. There was no topic given to us.

Still, a false sense of confidence from the White House and Senate GOP leadership came to define the entire process. Each day seemed to bring a wave of new assertions that Senate Republicans were committed to fulfilling what has been the partys signature pledge for nearly a decade  and then there would be new twists that threatened that ambition.

With Trump engulfed in the fallout from investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, Pence became the Trump administrations main advocate for the legislation. He went to Senate lunch after Senate lunch, and eventually to the governors meeting.

But Pence, like the bill, never caught on.

While Pence has clout with conservatives nationally, he drew blank stares from those in front of him in Rhode Island  despite being a former Indiana governor. When he targeted Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), who opposed the bill, he sparked outrage for appearing to incorrectly link waiting times for disabled people in Ohio to the expansion of Medicaid.

Kasich was newly furious about the hardball tactics. Other influential GOP critics of the bill, such as Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, also would not budge, in turn keeping Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) almost certainly in the no camp.

This is a dramatic change to what most of us have reacted to within the last four years, Sandoval told reporters over the weekend. He likened the health-care push to shaking an Etch-a-Sketch.

Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy (D), who attended the governors conference, summed up the Democratic view in a Tuesday interview: If hes treating a Republican governor in Ohio that way, how would he treat me?

Malloy singled out a private breakfast session Saturday, in which administration officials sought to win over governors on the Senate legislation, as particularly problematic for the White Houses sale. He said one official sought to discredit the Congressional Budget Office; less than a minute later, another official cited a CBO statistic to defend his argument.

It was heavy handed. It was ham-handed, Malloy said of the administrations approach at the summit.

The CBO had been set to release another report as soon as Monday on what the bill would do to insurance coverage levels, premium costs and the federal budget deficit. But it ended up not being released. A CBO report on an earlier version of the legislation projected that it would result in 22 million fewer Americans with insurance by 2026 than under current law.

Delays in the past week gave opponents of the bill more time to protest, over the July 4 recess and again this week due to Arizona Republican Sen. John McCains surgery.

Inside the West Wing, Pence and Trump advisers continued to operate as if passage was possible, regardless of the unsuccessful turn in Providence. When the dinner convened Monday, Pence was scheduled to dine at his residence later that week with undecided Republicans.

Regardless of the negative feedback, the White House believed that the NGA meetings went as well as they could have expected considering that the governors were expected to be clamoring for more federal money than the bill would provide. Pence and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price  both former House members  teamed up on the call list, wooing Sunday and Monday by phone.

Among the members who were being monitored closely by Pence was Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), according to a person familiar with the negotiations. In multiple discussions with Pence, Lee indicated that he had reservations but was not a firm no and was open to further talks.

But it was Lee and Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) who ended up announcing their opposition on Monday night as Pence and Trump dined with other lawmakers at the White House  a final, vivid reminder of how the rosy view among many senior Republicans rarely, if ever, tracked with the actual state of play.

Lee and Moran made it four Republican no votes. They joined Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Collins, who had declared their opposition days earlier. With a 52-seat majority, Republicans could afford to lose only two votes to pass the bill since all 46 Democrats and two independents were expected to vote against the proposal, with Pence as the potential tiebreaker.

One sign that the White House and McConnell didnt see it coming: the senators who were in the Blue Room on Monday night. They were not holdouts but mostly heavyweights of the Republican leadership: Sens. John Cornyn (Tex.), Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), and Roy Blunt (Mo.), among others.

Trump, impatient with the Senates glacial pace, asked for a candid assessment of the legislations status from the veteran lawmakers, according to officials familiar with the meeting. He implored them to hurry up and get the bill to his desk. But it was Paris and the flag-waving festivities he had witnessed alongside French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday and Friday that occupied much of his attention during the conversation, the officials said.

As difficult as the health-care debate had been, there was a pervasive feeling that McConnell would somehow prevail.

I wouldnt put it on him, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said on Tuesday about Trump. The bottom line is there are members here who understood the presidents preference and were willing to vote against it anyways.

Some Senate Republicans said McConnells strategy of working an inside game and largely leaving Trump to observer-cheerleader status was misguided from the start. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said the public should have been far more informed about the bill.

We didnt have the courage to lay out exactly what caused premiums to increase, Johnson said. We dont even have the [CBO] score on this latest version. Its an insane process. If you dont have information how can you even have a legitimate discussion and debate?

Tuesday brought more tension. There was finger-pointing and faction-forming as Pence and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus worked to repair relationships with senators, many of whom saw the president and his team as perhaps well-intentioned but fumbling in their understanding of Congress.

During a Senate lunch, when McConnell broached voting Wednesday on a bill that would simply repeal Obamacare, he was met with resistance, according to aides familiar with the meeting. McConnell had speakers lined up to support his plan, but a number of senators, fuming over the Monday drama and other issues, asked for a pause rather than quick legislative action.

After the lunch, McConnell did not say when a health-care vote would happen, other than the near future. By the end of the day, he said it would happen early next week.

Abby Phillip, Ed OKeefe and Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.
President Trump, who has repeatedly asserted without evidence that illegally cast ballots cost him the popular vote against Hillary Clinton, told his election integrity commission Wednesday to proceed with a very open mind and with no conclusions already drawn.

You will fairly and objectively follow the facts wherever they may lead, Trump told the panel, which was meeting for the first time but has already drawn heavy flak from critics who say it is stacked with members with a long history of overstating voter fraud.

In his remarks, Trump spoke in dark terms, saying every time voter fraud occurs it cancels out the vote of a lawful citizen and undermines democracy. He said the issue was important to him because he heard about it from voters concerned about inconsistencies and irregularities which they saw, in some cases, having to do with very large numbers of people in certain states.

But Trump stopped short of asking the 12-member panel to prove his claim about widespread vote fraud in the 2016 election  a fact that the panels vice chairman and driving force, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), told reporters was telling.

Thats not our job, Kobach said of the commission, which is tasked with improving the confidence of voters in the nations elections.

[Trumps voter commission hasnt even met  and its already off to a rough start]

Kobach later told MSNBC that we may never know whether Clinton actually won the popular vote. He said the commission will try to determine the extent of fraudulent voting last year but has no way to know whether illegally cast ballots helped Clinton or Trump more.

After the election, Trump claimed that he had not only prevailed in the electoral college but would have won the popular vote if he hadnt been thwarted by as many as 5 million illegal votes. He repeated that assertion numerous times on Twitter while calling for a presidential commission on voter fraud. Trumps claim has been dismissed by voting experts and state election officials.

Vice President Pence, who Trump tapped to chair the 12-member Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, presided over the groups first meeting Wednesday at the White House complex.

This commission, let me be clear, has no preconceived notions or preordained results, Pence said. Were fact-finders.

During his brief remarks, Trump repeatedly characterized the group as a bipartisan panel  it includes seven Republicans and five Democrats  and said it is engaging in very, very important work.

[Why almost every state is partially or fully rebuffing Trumps election commission]

President Trump, accompanied by Vice President Mike Pence, right, and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, center left, speaks at the first meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Both Pence and Kobach are Republicans. The vice president promised a healthy and robust debate in the months ahead.

Even before its first gathering, the commission had prompted intense controversy. A request for massive amounts of voter data from the states last month was met with resistance, even from Republican-led states, and prompted multiple lawsuits.

The suits accuse the panel of breaching the privacy of tens of millions of Americans and offering no indication of what it plans to do with the data, which include home addresses, dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers.

The commission has temporarily halted its collection efforts while awaiting a court ruling on whether it can continue. Kobach told reporters Wednesday that an adverse decision would be a big impediment to the commissions work.

Trump said hes pleased that more than 30 states agreed to provide information as allowed under their respective state laws and that other states should be more forthcoming.

If any state does not want to share this information, one has to wonder what they are worried about, Trump said. And I ask the vice president, I ask the commission, what are they worried about? Theres something, there always is.

The panel discussed several other sources of data that would be helpful to its mission, including lists of potential jurors dismissed by courts across the country because they are noncitizens. Juror polls are typically drawn from the voter rolls.

Members also suggested other areas to explore in coming months, as they hold meetings around the country, including whether election fraud is being prosecuted vigorously enough and the risks posed by online voting registration.

The panels Republicans include several members  Kobach chief among them  who have crusaded against election voter fraud, including voters registered in multiple states and undocumented immigrants on the voting rolls.

On Kobachs office wall in Topeka is a framed copy of a voting law he helped craft, the 2011 Secure and Fair Elections Act, which requires citizens who register to vote using the state voter form to provide certain proof-of-citizenship documents, such as a birth certificate or a passport. Those with incomplete voter registration applications are removed from the rolls after 90 days and must re-register. In the past couple of years, he has pushed for other states to require similar proof of citizenship.

During introductory remarks, one commissioner, Hans von Spakovsky, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, complained of unfair criticism that has been directed at the commission.

Von Spakovsky said he and other commissioners have been subject to vicious and defamatory attacks by those trying to avoid substantive debate on an important issue. He cited a database maintained by Heritage showing 1,071 documented instances of voter fraud across the country.

One of the Democratic members of the panel, Alan L. King, a probate judge in Jefferson County, Ala., told commissioners that he had seen no evidence of fraud in his jurisdiction.

King, who serves as his countys chief election official, said hed like to see the commission focus on keeping up with current technology on election equipment.

Critics dissected members of the commission in real time on Twitter, lambasting some as advocates for what they called voter suppression. Wendy R. Weiser, director of the Brennan Center for Justices Democracy Program, tweeted that public confidence in elections is important  but commission is the main engine of undermining it!

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, criticized Trump for his remarks about the states not handing over voter data to the commission, writing on Twitter that the panels requests were such federal overreach.

The Democratic National Committee also sought to call attention to the commissions work, staging a news conference ahead of the meeting.

Jason Kander, the former secretary of state of Missouri, said that Trumps commission started as a way to try and legitimize, to justify the biggest lie that a sitting president has ever told.

Sari Horwitz contributed to this report.
Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman will be nominated as the U.S. ambassador to Russia, the White House announced Tuesday, ending months of delay in formalizing the appointment amid deteriorating relations between the two countries.

The White House confirmed in March that it would name the former Republican presidential contender and U.S. ambassador to China under President Barack Obama to the Russia post. But the White House had delayed formally naming Huntsman and sending the nomination to the Senate for confirmation as the United States waited for the Kremlin to approve his selection.

The nomination comes amid what could be a thaw in U.S. relations with Russia following the first face-to-face meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany this month. The Trump administration is also under fire amid a widening investigation into Russias interference in the 2016 election and the possible collusion of Trump campaign associates.

Trump and Putin met for over two hours in a formal bilateral setting at the G-20. And the two met a second time for an additional hour at a dinner for G-20 leaders following the bilateral meeting. The White House on Tuesday confirmed the second meeting, but said that it was a brief conversation.

In their wide-ranging bilateral meeting, Trump pressed Putin on Russian interference in the 2016 election and the civil war in Syria. Both leaders reported that the meeting went well. But Russia and the United States remain locked in a dispute over sanctions imposed by the Obama administration.

Huntsmans nomination was announced one day after Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov met at the State Department with Undersecretary of State Thomas Shannon. They discussed what the State Department characterized as irritants in the U.S.-Russia relationship, including Moscows demand that the United States return two Russian-owned mansions in Maryland and New York that were seized in December in part as a response to Russian meddling in last years election.

White House officials have said that the United States is open to returning the sites to Russia, although the Obama administration had said they were being used for espionage.

The Kremlin approved Huntsmans appointment Monday night about the same time that the United States approved Russian politician Anatoly Antonov to serve as Russias ambassador in Washington, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak publicly about pending appointments. Ambassadors must be approved by the governments of the countries that will host them.

Huntsman, a Republican, was ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011 . He also was ambassador to Singapore from 1992 to 1993 under President George H.W. Bush. He ran for president in 2012.

The company owned by Huntsmans family has business interests in Russia, and he has traveled to that country in that capacity. . But he is better known for his expertise in China. He speaks Mandarin Chinese, and he and his wife have adopted a daughter from China.

Carol Morello contributed to this report.
Donald Trump holds up a fist after speaking during a campaign event in King of Prussia, Pa., on Nov. 1, when he said he would quickly repeal the Affordable Care Act. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

One week before the election, Donald Trump traveled to the Philadelphia suburbs to deliver a health-care policy speech that was light on details and heavy on grand promises and dramatic warnings.

In a hotel ballroom in King of Prussia, his running mate, Mike Pence, introduced him as a dealmaker, fighter and winner who never quits, who never backs down. Trump promised to convene a special session of Congress as soon as he was sworn in  an idea that confounded many, as Congress was already set to be in session  so that lawmakers could immediately repeal and replace Obamacare. All of this would happen very, very quickly, he said.

If we dont repeal and replace Obamacare, we will destroy American health care forever, Trump said. Its one of the single most important reasons why we must win on November 8th. We must win.

The invite-only crowd burst into cheers and chanted: Trump! Trump! Trump!

Since Trump became president, his promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act is nowhere close to being fulfilled, despite his repeated, confident assertions on the campaign trail that it could be done in just a day. The failure of health-care legislation in the Senate this week shows Trump still has not learned how to navigate Congress  and how much he is struggling to be the dealmaker, fighter and winner he portrayed himself to be to voters.

(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

One of the Republicans cheering Trumps speech in November was Renee Amoore, the deputy chairwoman of the Pennsylvania GOP who runs a health-care company and volunteered on Trumps transition team. Even though she knew that Washington did not work the way Trump was describing, she was confident he and Republicans could quickly repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it  after all, thats what they had promised to do.

When Amoore learned the legislation collapsed in the Senate this week, she thought to herself, Oh, Lord. Shes frustrated that the White House has become distracted by Russia-related charges and that Trump was not actively fighting for the legislation and clearly communicating with lawmakers.

This has got to stop, said Amoore, 64, of Trumps approach to legislation. So what do you do? You start banging on doors, you start calling people up. . . . Senators, they want to be called, they want to meet with the president.

More than eight months ago, Trump was gaining momentum in the final days of the campaign, and his advisers organized a health-care policy speech for Nov. 1, the first day of open enrollment on the marketplaces made possible by the Affordable Care Act. They chose a hotel near Valley Forge, where George Washington and his troops spent a miserable winter during the Revolutionary War, and invited several Republican members of Congress to warm up the crowd with grave warnings about Obamacare.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), an orthopedic surgeon, declared: Republicans are here today with solutions and relief. Rep. Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon from Georgia who is now Trumps secretary of health and human services, claimed Republicans have been working on that solution for years, literally. And Rep. Michael C. Burgess, a gynecologist from Texas, said elected leaders are champing at the bit to develop the policy that will then go down to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and be signed into law by President Trump that will end Obamacare once and for all.

Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), a general practitioner, warned that the United States is at a crossroads in health care. In an interview on Tuesday, DesJarlais said he had hoped that Republicans would have passed health care and tax restructuring by now. Although he defended the president as being pretty darn engaged, he acknowledged there has been a learning curve.

This is something the president has never done before, DesJarlais said. Hes learning that Washington is different than running Trump enterprises.

(The Washington Post)

In the crowd that day in November was Raymond Ray Ballone, 62, who was invited by a local politician. Ballone once worked for a steel company but was laid off when its operations moved to Japan. He then worked in construction and started his own company, only to find it increasingly expensive to get health insurance. As he neared retirement age, he searched for a job with benefits and started driving a school bus.

He said he never believed Trump would actually repeal and replace Obamacare within a couple of days, but he did believe that Republicans would eventually get a plan passed  and he is still hopeful it will happen.

When theyre running for office, they say a lot of things, and they may believe it, said Ballone, who lives in Plymouth Meeting, Pa. But when you get into the mix, you cant do it alone. . . . Hell get to those promises. It will take time, but he will get to them. Hes not a king. He cant just do it.

After Trumps speech in November, he and his entourage made a quick stop at a local Wawa convenience store  and ran into Tom Kohler, a local Democratic Party leader who works for a Democratic state lawmaker. Kohler was buying a hoagie on his lunch break and ended up in a photo with the Republican candidate looking less than impressed.

I still get introduced to friends of friends as the Wawa guy, he said Tuesday.

Kohler said that those living in his area  which heavily voted for Hillary Clinton  have long been worried about what could happen to their health care under Trump. He said the fact that the Republican-dominated Congress could not pass a health-care bill is a reminder that while Trump won the electoral vote, his views are not shared by many Americans, something that lawmakers seem to be keeping in mind as the 2018 midterm elections approach. Trump won Pennsylvania by a thin margin, and four of the 20 House Republicans who voted against the health-care bill were from that state.

Kohler said maybe now Trump supporters will realize that his promises are empty.

Were six months in, where is it? Kohler said of the better health-care system Trump promised. The answer is, there is no plan.

Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.
Amid the furor over health care weve lately witnessed, only wrong questions have been asked. With Washington Republicans trying to repeal and replace Obamacare, they have no idea how to do it without harming millions of people  including many thousands here in Montana, who currently have the comfort of healthcare they never had until Obamacare brought it to them. Its clear that politicians have only been nibbling around the edges of the issue.

Face it: The United States, despite having many wonderful doctors, nurses and medical facilities, still has one of the worst healthcare systems in the world. By two of the primary measures of any nations well-being, the U.S. falls way below other developed countries: In infant mortality, ranking number 52 behind such advanced countries as Costa Rica and Spain, and ranking number 31 in life expectancy, behind civilized nations like Slovenia and Greece.

All the countries who lead in these measures of caring for their citizens have universal, government-operated health care. Remember Donald Trumps assurance to Americans that the new healthcare system overseen by him would cover everyone, and would be much better coverage, and cheaper too?This ranks right up (down) there with the rest of his promises.

Weve all heard the objection from some that a single-payer, universal healthcare system, often described as Medicare for everyone, would in fact be that old bugaboo demonized among conservatives by Saint Ronnie (cue the shark music from Jaws): socialized medicine!

Well of course it would be! We accept socialized forms of many everyday necessities and institutions. I never hear the naysayers of socialized medicine complain about their socialized public schools and city parks, their socialized streets and highways, their socialized police and fire departments, their socialized military security establishment, nor the wonderful socialized national parks, wilderness and rivers that we in Montana cherish so highly.

How can anyone object to using tax dollars to assure the good health of our fellow citizens, whose healthy, productive lives contribute so much to the general welfare of state and country? We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on instruments of war designed to kill; how about dedicating billions toward enhancing American lives?

Medicares administrative costs are a fraction of what they are under current insurance plans. With Medicare as an example, the cost of administering universal health care would be lower as well. (The myth of free market competitive rates by insurers has long since been debunked.)

But when I cite Medicare for everyone as a desired goal, I would stipulate that it should be better than Medicare, which has numerous shortcomings, e.g., it offers nothing for either dental or vision care except, in the case of cataracts, replacement of the ocular lens. But for routine care, preventive maintenance, teeth cleaning, vision checks and eyeglasses when needed, forget it. Medicare does not care whether you can chew your food or even have teeth, can read a book or see road signs. There are numerous models out there upon which we can design an improved Medicare for America.

When enough venal politicians wake up (a majority of their constituents already favor single-payer universal healthcare), we will enter an enlightened age of guaranteed health care for everyone, as we ultimately must  so why not now? Then America can finally join the civilized societies of Canada, England, Germany, France and dozens more, as a country whose health care indeed fulfills the aspirations of our founders to promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, by assuring everyone the good health to enjoy and contribute to those blessings.
(Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

President Trumps ascendancy has reverberated across a workforce of 2.1 million civil servants, upending their sense of mission or empowering it, depending on where they sit.

The career employees, who form the backbone of the federal bureaucracy, have become targets of the presidents campaign vow to drain the swamp, and they heard White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon pledge the deconstruction of the administrative state.

Where Trump is putting resources and priorities, many employees describe a sense of validation and optimism. Where he is dismissive of their mission and their value as public servants, they are anxious, discouraged and sometimes hostile. And in offices where the White House envisions severe budget cuts and has set in motion buyouts, early-retirement offers and possible layoffs, civil servants are ill at ease, their futures uncertain.

Amid this upheaval, employees have kept the government humming. Social Security checks are still going out, and the Labor Department is still enforcing wage and hourly pay laws. But in some offices, employees say there is little direction from above and few initiatives underway.

After just six months, it is too early to gauge the effect of the Trump administrations zeal to shrink the size and reach of government. Congress controls not only spending, but also in many cases whether the White House actually can eliminate agencies and programs.

But this much seems clear: Across the far-flung bureaucracy, employees are either on edge or waiting with high expectations for the changes Trump promised, with few, it seems, weighing in at neutral.

***

For Thomas Decker, who works at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the change has been dramatic and welcome.

Right now, were enforcing immigration laws, said Decker, who is director of enforcement and removal operations for ICEs operations in the New York area. The morale is up. Were able to do what we were hired to do, which is making the homeland safe.

For the first time in years, he feels his agency is really doing the job, a reflection of the priority the president has put on cracking down on illegal immigration. And he feels the future is secure for ICEs 19,330 employees.

Arrests in his region were up 31 percent from January through the end of April over the same period in 2016, thanks to Trumps sweeping new immigration policies instructing ICE agents to move aggressively to take people into custody and rolling back Obama-era rules that prioritized the arrest of serious criminals.

Decker, who rose over the course of his career from interviewing immigrants applying for citizenship to supervising 340 agents, is used to his job being a center of public debate. Now, though, it has become more entwined with local politics in the Democratic-run city where he is based. New York has limited the types of felonies that require the police to hold undocumented immigrants in local jails to give ICE agents time to pick them up for deportation.

I would say that before [under President Barack Obama], there was a working relationship with New York, Decker said. Probably the difference now is the politics with the mayors office.

***



Charles Doolittle started working for the Department of Education four years ago. (Calla Kessler/The Washington Post)

Charles Doolittles experience has been just the opposite.

Doolittle was a rising star at the Education Department, hired four years ago through a prestigious fellowship for aspiring public servants. The self-described policy wonk was a good fit for the agencys policy shop, where he focused on teacher and principal issues and helping states carry out a sweeping federal law that gives them a larger role in deciding how to improve troubled schools.

Doolittle, 28, loved the work, putting in 60 to 70 hours some weeks.

This was my dream job, he said.

But he did not like what he saw in Trumps education secretary, Betsy DeVos. Doolittle considered her inexperienced, disagreed with the priority she put on private school alternatives to public education and feared that she would erode the federal role in education.

His tipping point came in May after the release of the White House budget proposal, which would cut 13.5 percent from the Education Department. Watching DeVos testify before senators on C-SPAN, Doolittle was aghast at her refusal to definitively say whether she would block federal funding for private schools that discriminate against LGBT and African American students and others from marginalized populations.

I just found it absolutely repugnant and inexcusable, Doolittle said. Were a civil rights agency. Thats our role, if nothing else.

So he quit. His last day was June 30.

A lot of people like me tried to hold on for the first six months, he said. I went from being so proud to say where I worked to avoiding the subject. . . . I could no longer stay there in good faith without considering myself part of the problem.

***

At the Commerce Department, a trade expert at the small International Trade Administration is anxious about the future. Buyouts are looming, and if not enough employees take them, layoffs could be next, she said.

This employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized by her agency to talk to a reporter, said she loves working in government. But Secretary Wilbur Ross is drawing up plans to get rid of 10 percent of the agencys 90 field offices and staffers.

Possibly my job will be eliminated, she said. Whats going to happen moving forward, I dont know. Im depressed.

The employee said she would prefer to be laid off than to take a buyout, because a severance package would be more generous. So she is waiting nervously to see what transpires and regrets that her job does not entail enforcing trade practices, since that is a priority for the new administration.

Other changes are also worrying her. Her boss is filling in for someone who is filling in for someone else whose boss is acting in a senior role because the department has just a handful of political appointees.

I have no supervisor, she said. Im having trouble keeping myself motivated. Im normally an extremely productive person, and yet I cant get anything done.

This month, she went shopping in the middle of a weekday. Frequently, she walks around the Commerce headquarters building to burn off stress, she said.

***



Brandon Coleman is feeling more upbeat about his job at the Department of Veterans Affairs. (Jarod Opperman/For The Washington Post)

Brandon Coleman, an addiction therapist who counsels veterans at risk of suicide for the Department of Veterans Affairs in Prescott, Ariz., had lost trust in VA.

But when Trump started making campaign promises to clean up the agency, Coleman paid attention. The presidents appointment of David Shulkin, who had run the veterans health program under Obama, to lead the agency has Coleman feeling a lot more upbeat about his job.

He has watched Shulkin make the cable news rounds to press Congress for legislation to make it easier for him to fire bad employees, a bill the president signed in June. Then there was the executive order creating a division within VA to protect whistleblowers.

Coleman was suspended for 15 months on what were found to be unsubstantiated charges of assault. These followed his decision to go public with concerns that large numbers of at-risk veterans were walking out of the emergency room at the Phoenix VA Medical Center without proper monitoring.

Coleman, a decorated Marine Corps veteran, was reinstated to an outpatient clinic last year. But he continued to call out the agencys culture, in which he says rule-breakers rarely are punished, three years after a scandal over falsified records for medical appointments.

Now Coleman sees sign of progress in the fight to expand veterans access to private doctors and improve mental-health services.

He shook hands with Shulkin in the Oval Office when Trump signed the executive order. The new secretary promised a meeting on protecting whistleblowers. Coleman is still waiting.

I was not a big fan of Shulkin, Coleman said. But hes trying to bring transparency to an agency that had none. I think we have a secretary that has a backbone.

President Trump has never described the work of his administration in modest terms. He boasts about the record-setting pace of accomplishments. Six months in, we look at how Trumps government is working.

ALSO READ: Trumps wall: The inside story of how the president crafts immigration policy

Who covers which federal agencies: reporter contact information
President Trumps senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will speak to the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed-door session Monday as part of the panels widening probe into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

The meeting was confirmed by Kushners attorney, Abbe Lowell, who said that his client is prepared to voluntarily cooperate and provide whatever information he has on the investigations to Congress and appreciates the opportunity to assist in putting this matter to rest.

Kushner is expected to answer the committees questions and not invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, according to a person familiar with Kushners thinking.

The interview comes as the Senate Judiciary Committee also announced its intention to have former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Trumps son Donald Trump Jr. testify in open session July 26. Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that they expect Manafort and Trump Jr. will comply voluntarily with invitations to testify, adding that they have agreed to issue subpoenas, if necessary for the two men.

Trump Jr.s attorney, Alan Futerfas, did not respond Wednesday evening to requests for comment about the Judiciary Committee hearing.

(Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)

A lawyer for Manafort said that he and his legal team are reviewing the request and have not made a decision on which committee Manafort will speak with first.

The Judiciary Committee also asked Manafort and Trump Jr., as well as the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign, to preserve all relevant documents related to Russian interference in the 2016 election and to furnish the committee by Aug. 2 with documents related to a June 2016 meeting with Russians purported to have ties to the Kremlin.

Kushner, Manafort and Trump Jr. are expected to be asked about several reported contacts they and other Trump surrogates had with Russian officials during the campaign and transition period. In particular, they are expected to be grilled about their participation in the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who Trump Jr. was told had Kremlin connections and could provide damaging information on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. There were also four other individuals in attendance: Russian American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, who once worked in a Soviet military intelligence unit; Russian real estate company executive Ike Kaveladze, who was once the subject of a congressional inquiry into Russian money laundering; music producer Rob Goldstone, who helped set up the meeting; and a translator for Veselnitskaya.

Its safe to say that the committees going to reach out to everybody we feel has some contribution to make, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said Wednesday. The Don Jr. meeting as of today has potentially eight individuals. All eight of those individuals will be important to us once we know the types of questions that we need answers to.

Burr would not say when the committee planned to schedule others to testify or whether any of those hearings would be public. Those decisions may depend in part on signals from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is conducting his own probe into purported ties between the Trump team and the Kremlin.

Mueller gave the Senate Judiciary Committee permission to interview Manafort and Trump Jr. publicly, Feinstein said Tuesday. But the two will not testify before the committee alone, if they agree to appear.

The Judiciary Committee has scheduled Manafort and Trump Jr. to appear alongside William Browder of Hermitage Capital Management and Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, the research firm behind a dossier that outlined various salacious but unverified details of Trumps dealings in Moscow.

Grassley has long pursued Fusion for its role in the dossiers production, demanding earlier this year to know why the Justice Department never required the firm to register as a foreign agent for work he charges was being done to further Russian interests at the time the dossier was being compiled . Grassley based his demands in part on a complaint Browder filed with the government last July.

Browder, who once did business in Russia, is best known in Congress for his efforts to get lawmakers to pass the Magnitsky Act  a 2012 law that applied human rights sanctions on Russia, named after one of his employees who died in a Russian prison after accusing officials of tax fraud. Russia responded to the passage of the Magnistky Act by banning Americans from adopting Russian children.

Veselnitskaya, a lawyer with the company Prevezon, has lobbied against the Magnitsky Act and its successor, the Global Magnitsky Act, which Congress passed in 2016. Fusion GPS once did research for the law firm representing Prevezon in a civil case.

Simpson declined to testify at a Judiciary Committee hearing that was scheduled for Wednesday of this week, but then rescheduled to July 26. That hearing will also be the venue at which Manafort and Trump Jr. are expected to testify. Officially, the topic of the hearing is the Obama administrations enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The committee also asked Simpson to preserve records and threatened to subpoena him if he did not appear to speak.

Carol Leonnig and Tom Hamburger contributed to this report.

Read more at PowerPost
Donald Trump Jr. is under scrutiny for a meeting he held with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 where he was told damaging information about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would be delivered. (Richard Drew/AP)

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to call Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to testify at an open hearing in the coming weeks, according to the committees top Democrat, a move that would give lawmakers their first chance to publicly question both men about the alleged ties between President Trumps campaign and Russia.

The special counsel in charge of the FBIs investigation, Robert Mueller, has given the committee the go-ahead to publicly interview Trump Jr. and Manafort, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said, although it remains unclear if either will appear.

Feinstein said she expects the testimony to be scheduled for sometime before Congress departs for the August recess  a break that has now been delayed until the middle of the month.

A member of the Manafort team declined to say how or when Manafort would respond to the Judiciary Committee request, but pointed out that the former campaign chairman previously indicated he would cooperate with the House and Senate intelligence committees.

He has made no determination which committee comes first, the Manafort ally said, commenting on the condition of anonymity because sensitive matters remain under discussion. Among other things, Manafort has still not recovered relevant documents from the Trump campaign, the Manafort ally said.

Don Jr.,s lawyer, Alan Futerfas, did not respond to requests for comment.

Manafort and Trump, Jr. may not be invited to appear before the committee alone.

According to Feinstein, Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) wants to merge their testimony with an examination of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA  something the committee had scheduled for Wednesday, but has now been postponed.

The chairman wants it attached to this, Feinstein said, referencing FARA. She added that she believed Grassley would schedule Manafort and Trump, Jr. to appear at the same hearing as Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, the research firm behind the infamous dossier detailing salacious but unverified accounts of Trumps dealings in Russia.

A spokesman for Grassley did not return a request for comment Tuesday afternoon.

Grassley has long sought to hold Fusion to account for the dossier, writing to the Justice Department earlier this year to demand answers as to why the firm was never required to register as a foreign agent and was allowed to operate as an unregistered agent of Russian interests at the time the dossier was being compiled.

In his letters, Grassley references a complaint filed last July by William Browder of Hermitage Capital Management, who pushed Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act  a law that applies human rights sanctions on Russia. It was named after Browders employee who died in a Russian prison after accusing Russian officials of tax fraud. Russia responded to the passage of the Magnitsky Act by banning Americans from adopting Russian children.

The issue is of particular concern to the Committee given that when Fusion GPS reportedly was acting as an unregistered agent of Russian interests, it appears to have been simultaneously overseeing the creation of the unsubstantiated dossier of allegations of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians, Grassley wrote in a March letter to then acting deputy attorney general Dana Boente.

In the letter, Grassley also asked why Rinat Akhmetshin  a former Soviet intelligence officer, and one of the individuals present at the Trump Tower meeting with Trump, Jr.  had not been asked to register as a foreign agent. Akhmetshin had been lobbying Congress against legislation that would apply Magnitsky Act sanctions worldwide.

The actions of Mr. Akhmetshin, Fusion GPS, and the others described in Mr. Browders complaint appear to show that they acted on behalf of a foreign principal, Grassley wrote. It is highly troubling that Fusion GPS appears to have been working with someone with ties to Russian intelligence.

On Thursday, Grassley wrote Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asking for more information on Akhmetshin.

Fusion declined to send Glenn Simpson to testify before the committee for the planned Wednesday hearing on enforcement of FARA. A lawyer for Fusion GPS declined to comment for this article.

Some committee members said the idea of interviewing Manafort and Trump, Jr. in a hearing focused on FARA isnt ideal, but wasnt objectionable, either.

Speaking very realistically, senators are going to ask whatever questions they want of any witness whos there, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said. And no senator can be ruled out of order because hes asking a question, shes asking a question, on a relevant but not directly germane topic.

Tom Hamburger contributed to this report.

Read more at PowerPost


A court fined Quicken Loans $11 million in an appraisal case. (Uli Deck/Uli Deck/AP IMAGES)

Quicken Loans arguably has the mortgage industrys most squeaky-clean image  named by J.D. Power as No. 1 in home loan customer satisfaction for seven years in a row and No. 1 in loan servicing for three years straight. It also has a reputation as a technology innovator: Witness its heavily advertised and popular Rocket Mortgage option that cuts time and red tape for applicants.

So it might come as a surprise that a federal-district court last week levied nearly $11 million in fines and damages against the company for homeowners who the court said were victims of an alleged appraisal-tampering scheme by Quicken during the housing boom and bust years in West Virginia.

The court found that Quicken provided appraisers advance estimates of property values in assignments on home financings, effectively communicating the amounts Quicken needed to fund the loans. Plaintiffs in a class-action suit affecting 2,770 homeowners said appraisers working for Quicken had overstated the market worth of their properties, putting them underwater on their loans from the start. One couple said in the original complaint that Quickens appraiser had reported their property was worth $151,000, significantly higher than its actual value of $115,500. The court determined that Quickens practices constituted unconscionable conduct under the West Virginia Consumer Credit and Protection Act.

[More Harney: Tax breaks for homeowners seem to be safe  at least for the moment]

Once an appraisal is tainted by the implication of influence over the appraiser, especially by the party compensating the appraiser, the court said, the resulting appraisal cannot by any established standard be fair, valid and reasonable. The court also found that by concealing its actions, Quicken deceived the plaintiffs. U.S. District Court Judge John Preston Bailey called Quickens conduct truly egregious in that it flew in the face of prudent lending practices for the benefit of Quickens bottom line.

In a statement for this column, Quicken strongly disputed the courts conclusions. The company said that it plans to appeal the decision and that there is no evidence that the provision of estimates of value in advance impacted the opinion of local independent, licensed, professional home appraisers in West Virginia. Quicken added that there is also no evidence that the valuations the appraisers issued at the time were inflated in any way or caused any damages whatsoever to a single plaintiff in the class. The facts of this case are clear and we are confident that both the judges ruling and the damages assessed will be overturned on appeal.

David Stevens, president and chief executive of the Mortgage Bankers Association, defended Quicken, a prominent member of the trade group, arguing that it was a common industry practice during the time these loans were made to provide [an] owners estimate of value to appraisers, until the law changed nationwide in 2009.

But was supplying advance estimates of value a commonplace industry practice back then? Appraisers I spoke with had differing opinions on the matter.

[More Harney: Credit repair firms pay $2 million to settle complaints of abusive practices]

Lori Noble, an appraiser with Real Property Consulting Group in Charleston, W.Va., told me that I never saw other companies do it  that is, include owners estimate dollar figures to appraisers along with order forms offering the assignment of work.

But Pat Turner, an appraiser in Richmond, said that during the boom years, before federal appraisal changes were enacted, lenders and loan officers werent shy about revealing the target value they needed to close a loan. In fact, he said, they got their message across far more bluntly than simply labeling the number needed as an owners estimate.

Major lenders actually supplied [appraisers] with the figure needed to make the deal work, he said. Frequently there was no subtlety about it. Some loan officers would call appraisers and say, If you cant make the value, dont do the appraisal.  And if the appraiser told the loan officer that there was no way he or she could hit that value, the loan officer would threaten to withhold future assignments. If you dont make value, you will never get another deal from us, they would say, according to Turner.

So what to make of this decision, which touches on one of the most sensitive issues in real estate?

Clearly this case is not over, given Quickens plans to appeal. The final judgment is not in. But it illustrates a fundamental point: Consumers expect and pay for accurate and independent valuations of their homes and the equity they have in it, totally free of outside influences, from any source.

Ken Harneys email address is kenharney@earthlink.net.
Afghan policemen stand guard at the site of a suicide attack in front of the Indian Embassy in Kabul in 2008. (Sardar Ahmad/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

 When a fake sewage tanker truck carrying 3,000 pounds of explosives managed to reach a high-security district of Kabul on May 31, then detonated in an explosion that left 150 people dead and 400 wounded, no insurgent or terrorist group asserted responsibility. But immediately, the rumors began to spread.

The Haqqanis. It had to be the Haqqani network, people said. No one else could have pulled off such a precise and spectacular crime. The Afghan intelligence police soon publicly accused the group, too, adding that it had gotten help from Pakistans spy agency. Seven weeks later, the bombing remains unclaimed, and the Afghan capital is still reeling from it.

By rights, the Haqqanis should be barely standing. For years, this clan-based Taliban offshoot has been a high-priority target for Afghan forces and their U.S.-led allies. The groups charismatic founder, Jalaluddin Haqqani, is believed to have died of illness, and most of his sons and senior commanders have been killed or imprisoned. Pakistan, which once allowed the Haqqanis to rule their own ministate in the border badlands, now claims to have driven them out.

So why does the name Haqqani network still evoke such dread? Why is this group of a few thousand fighters still center stage in a grinding 16-year war, and why have their elusive whereabouts become Exhibit A among those who say that the Trump administration must punish Pakistan, a longtime security and military ally, for harboring terrorists?

The answers to the Haqqanis survival have much to do with qualities that Jalaluddin Haqqani, a former Taliban minister and friend of Osama bin Laden, cultivated and passed on to his surviving son and successor, Sirajuddin. These include kinship bonds and unwavering religious ideology, strong discipline and careful planning, and an enduring ability to attract supporters, whether young suicide-bomber trainees or generous Middle Eastern backers.

Jalaluddin Haqqani, founder of the Haqqani network, speaks during an interview in Miram Shah, Pakistan, in 1998. (Mohammed Riaz/Associated Press)

This mix of assets helped the Haqqanis carry out a long list of deadly and high-profile attacks in Kabul during the past decade, including an assault on the Indian Embassy and another on the fortresslike Serena hotel. The group, always close to al-Qaeda, is widely said to have introduced suicide bombings to the Afghan conflict, and the one on May 31 was especially horrific.

[Pakistan pivots to China amid fresh concerns over U.S. ties with India]

U.S. officials have accused Pakistan of providing sanctuary to the Haqqanis  keeping them as a proxy force while purporting to want peace in the region. The issue has sharpened as the Trump administration grapples with what policies to take in the conflicted region and as U.S. military officials have argued for a stepped-up military presence.

The U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John W. Nicholson, told a Senate committee in February that the Taliban and the Haqqanis in particular are the greatest threats to security in Afghanistan and that their leaders enjoy freedom of action within Pakistan safe havens. The Haqqani network was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the Obama administration in 2012.

Pakistan has repeatedly denied that it harbors or assists the Haqqanis, saying they were driven out of its border tribal region of North Waziristan, along with other insurgent groups, in a counterterrorism campaign by the Pakistani army in 2014-2015.

The Haqqani network has no presence in Pakistan. It is being operated from Afghanistan, Pakistans Foreign Ministry spokesman said last month. He said that Afghans and their foreign allies are blaming Pakistan for their own failures. The terrorists are on the run, and they have settled in the ungoverned spaces in Afghanistan, he said.

An Afghan Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said in a telephone interview that while some families of Taliban commanders may still live in Pakistan as part of the Afghan refugee community, there is no truth to the allegations that any Taliban, including the Haqqani network, are being supported by Pakistan or living freely there.

In early June, the usually elusive Sirajuddin Haqqani posted a long audio message in Afghan Pashto on the Taliban WhatsApp account. In it, he condemned the May 31 bombing and said his fighters had been ordered to avoid attacks in public places where innocent civilians were likely to be harmed.

Yet he accused Afghanistans foreign allies of trying to occupy our land and take away the Islamic system from Afghanistan. How could we close our eyes? he said. Our aim is to free Afghanistan from their control and influence and enforce the Islamic system. We have lost thousands of lives, made thousands of widows and orphans in this jihad. So we have to take it to its logical ends.

Haqqani, believed to be in his 40s, has kept a low profile since succeeding his father as commander of the Taliban faction. With a $5 million U.S. bounty for his capture and a history of drone strikes killing his associates, he is said to be permanently on the move. Local supporters in Pakistan said they have not seen him in two years.

[Pakistan, accused of terrorist infiltration, starts to fence its border with Afghanistan]

But southeastern Afghanistan, especially Khost province along the Pakistan border, remains the Haqqanis wartime comfort zone. Sirajuddin Haqqani commands a guerrilla force of at least 5,000 motivated fighters who address him as khalifa, or Islamic spiritual leader. One civilian supporter said he had also met Afghan government soldiers and police who helped the Haqqanis carry out attacks in highly sensitive zones.

A spokesman for the Haqqanis in Pakistan declined to answer questions by phone. Supporters and analysts said that the group maintains ties with Pakistans intelligence service from their anti-Soviet collaboration but that it no longer enjoys free rein, largely due to U.S. pressure.

Pakistan is no longer a safe place for the Afghan Taliban, said Muhammad Israr Madani, an Islamic cleric and researcher in Pakistan.

In the past, he said, some got national identity cards, but now the government has blocked them. I cant deny the presence of Afghan Taliban and Haqqanis still living in Pakistan, but now it is very difficult for them to live here in peace.

Maulana Samiul Haq, a cleric whose seminary near Peshawar has produced many Afghan Taliban fighters, said that the Haqqani network is still the most active and dreaded Taliban entity but that Pakistans influence on the fighters has weakened under U.S. pressure. Once, he said, top military and spy officials welcomed them, but now they avoid meeting them.

Yet despite Pakistans efforts to distance itself from the Haqqanis, some of their supporters are convinced this is only a tactical retreat in Pakistans long-term campaign to dominate and weaken Afghanistan. Khalifa is the last hope, and Pakistan will not want to lose him, said a tribal cleric who is close to the Haqqanis.

From their murky border hideouts and camps, the Haqqanis are also known for kidnapping foreigners as hostages. A Canadian American family has been in their custody since 2012, when they were seized on a hiking trip. In a video released by the group in December, the American mother, Caitlin Coleman, 31, pleaded with then-President-elect Donald Trump to save them from our Kafkaesque nightmare.

The group has demanded that one of Sirajuddin Haqqanis brothers, who is in prison in Kabul under a death sentence, be spared. If he is executed, it has threatened to kill the family.

Constable reported from Kabul.

Read more:

In Pakistan, scorching Ramadan month highlights chronic water, power shortages

On July 4 visit to Kabul, GOP senators say U.S. needs to win in Afghanistan

Pakistans prime minister, having survived Supreme Court corruption ruling, now faces pressure

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, right, arrives at an opening ceremony for a new housing development in Pyongyang on April 13. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)

Efforts to hold the Kim regime accountable for decades of brutality against the North Korean people have so far amounted to little, but that isnt stopping human rights activists from trying to document the abuses.

The latest effort is an ambitious project by the Seoul-based Transitional Justice Working Group that aims to map sites of mass killings and mass burials in North Korea so that  one day  evidence can be collected and the regime can be held responsible.

Victim testimony was often given a limited place in previous hearings, like those on the former Yugoslavia and on the Holocaust, said Sarah Son, one of the authors of the mapping report, which will be published Wednesday. But location-based data provides a bigger picture on patterns of abuse within a country.

The research was backed by the National Endowment for Democracy, which seeks to bolster civil society and democratic institutions around the world and is financed by the U.S. Congress.

The working group interviewed 375 defectors from North Korea over the past two years. They were shown maps of their home towns and asked to identify places where abuses occurred. The researchers say they have been able to pinpoint 47 sites where bodies were buried or dumped, and hundreds more that might yield documentary evidence in the future.

There is no sign that Kim Jong Un, the third-generation leader of North Korea, or his regime is going to change or collapse anytime soon, but Son said it is not too early to plan.

People who have done this kind of work in Croatia or Southeast Asia keep telling us we cant be too prepared for what might happen in the future, she said.

The report says that the mapping project could contribute to the collective effort to support the push for accountability, as well as . . . future efforts to institute a process of transitional justice following a change in the political conditions in North Korea.

North Koreas regime is known to be one of the most brutal in the world, using repression and fear to keep its 25 million citizens under control. It has always denied human rights investigators access to the country.

A landmark report by a United Nations commission of inquiry in 2014 detailed a litany of abuses committed in North Korea over the decades, including torture, hard labor in political prison camps, forced abortions and infanticide, and brainwashing. This is in addition to the hunger and inability to speak their minds that ordinary people endure on a daily basis.

The commission recommended referring Kim to the International Criminal Court to face charges of crimes against humanity, a recommendation that elicited an unprecedented response from Pyongyang. North Korean diplomats at the United Nations began engaging critics for the first time, and the regime released its own report on American human rights abuses.

But the efforts did not result in Kim being referred to the ICC because the recommendations could not get through the Security Council, where China and Russia, North Koreas historic patrons, wield vetoes.

The commission of inquiry report was not the end, it was just the start, said Oh Se-hyek, a North Korean defector and another of the reports authors. We must continue that work.

The group asked North Korean defectors to point out places in their home towns where they had directly seen or heard executions or mass burials taking place, or where they had heard from a witness of such an event happening.

By cross-referencing the places the defectors identified, the group came up with 47 sites where forensic evidence might be collected in the future, and sites such as police stations or security offices where documents might be found.

Most of the sites were in North Hamgyong, a province that shares a long border with China. This province is the source of most defectors from North Korea because of the ease in crossing into China from there and because the residents  whose loyalty Pyongyang considers suspect  are most neglected by the regime.

Some interviewed defectors reported seeing or hearing about mass executions by hanging or shooting. Others described burial sites on or near the grounds of prison camps, or on mountainsides near police and state security buildings. Former prisoners described seeing or hearing of places were bodies were incinerated.

One former political prisoner reported having seen a list of more than 100 inmates who had been executed in secret over the course of a year, in 1999. The list was held by the state security agency and the local police office operating within the camp, the former prisoner said.

North Korea, like other authoritarian regimes, keeps systematic records, so securing these documents could be important for future trials, just as Stasi documents were important after the collapse of East Germany, the reports authors wrote. We aim to record the locations of these sites for future safeguarding of documents.

The group did not disclose the locations of the burial sites, saying it feared that the North Korean regime would seek to destroy any evidence if it knew certain sites had been identified.

Sandra Fahy, an expert on North Korean human rights who teaches at Sophia University in Tokyo, said that the report was an important and critical step in a long process of keeping track of North Koreas atrocities.

Its impact could be two-fold, she said. First, it will further the process of accountability and recordkeeping  with a move toward justice for victims and family members  in the future.

But, Fahy said, it could also inspire North Korean officials to take more precautions in killing and disposing of victims. North Korea does keep track and respond domestically to the pressures of the international community, but not always in ways we might like, Fahy said.

Read more

Chinese figures show trade is up with North Korea, but questions abound

He ran North Koreas secret moneymaking operation. Now he lives in Virginia.

North Korea missile launch marks a direct challenge to Trump administration

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news
Israeli soldiers stand next to food supplies being prepared for Syrian refugees at an army base in the Golan Heights. (Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)

Israel made public for the first time Wednesday the extent of its humanitarian aid to the civilian population living just across its northern border in Syria.

It is well documented that Israel has provided emergency medical treatment to Syrian fighters seeking help. As many as 3,000 wounded individuals have made their way to the border and received lifesaving medical treatment in Israeli hospitals before returning to their homeland.

There have also been media reports that Israel has provided financial and other support to some of the rebel groups fighting against the army of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in a conflict that started in 2011.

On Wednesday, the Israeli army opened its store rooms and briefed journalists on the full extent of a humanitarian operation it calls Good Neighbors. As part of the effort, Israel has transferred 360 tons of food, 450,000 liters of gasoline and 50 tons of clothing to Syria. It has also sent large quantities of painkillers, anesthetics and basic medicine for diabetes and asthma.

While its official policy has been to steer clear of the fighting raging a few miles from its border, Israel has been drawn into the conflict on numerous occasions, returning fire toward Syrian army positions, even killing fighters, when errant fire reaches into its territory.

On Wednesday, during a meeting with Eastern European leaders in Budapest, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was heard saying, too, that Israel had carried out dozens of attacks against arms convoys in Syria making their way to the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah.

We blocked the border not only in Egypt but in the Golan Heights, Netanyahu told leaders from Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. We built the wall because there was a problem with ISIS and Iran trying to build a terror front there. I told Putin, when we see them transferring weapons to Hezbollah, we will hurt them. We did it dozens of times. (ISIS is another name for the Islamic State.)

[Netanyahu accidentally reveals Israel has struck Iran-backed fighters in Syria]

The meeting was being held behind closed doors, but Netanyahus remarks were accidentally transmitted to reporters covering the event, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

During the trip to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Wednesday, military personnel shared with journalists that over the past year Israel has provided aid to some 200,000 civilians living on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.

As many as 6.5 million Syrians have been displaced in the fighting. Many of those have made their way to nearby countries and even Europe, but only the poorest Syrians have turned to Israel for assistance, Col. Barak Hiram, brigade commander of the Golan Heights, told reporters.

Israel and Syria have never had diplomatic relations and have been officially at war since Israels establishment in 1948. Until now, there was almost no human interaction between Israelis, who took control of part of the Golan Heights after the 1967 war, and those Syrians who live close to Israels border.

They have been taught all their lives that Israel is Satan and were afraid to come to the border for help, Hiram said.

Much of the Syrian population in that area lives in rural villages, and about 50 percent are under 18. There are also internally displaced people who have arrived in the area, with some 400 families living in tents close to the border, he said.

The fighting had left many residential areas with no running water or electricity, and educational and health-care facilities are almost nonexistent. Those that are still standing have only rudimentary equipment, Hiram said.

Since last summer, Israel has transferred infrastructure equipment such as generators and piping to repair the water system, as well as hundreds of tons of basic food supplies and medicine.

The Israeli army has also facilitated basic medical treatment for Syrian children and their parents in triage clinics set up along the border, allowing more-serious cases to be treated in Israeli hospitals.

Until now, most of the operation has taken place at night, but in roughly two weeks a medical clinic to be run by a team of American doctors and protected by the Israeli army will open in the area and operate during the day, Hiram said.

Noam Fink, who is the chief medical officer of Israels Northern Command and oversees the medical program in the Golan Heights, said children with basic illnesses or conditions could now receive simple treatment.

It makes me proud that we are doing this, and I hope that the international language of medicine will start relations with our neighbors, he said.

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Netanyahu urges Putin to block Iranian power corridor on Israels border

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The Justice Department announced a new federal policy Wednesday to help state and local police take cash and property from people suspected of a crime, even without a criminal charge, reversing an Obama administration rule prompted by past abuse by police.

Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein said the Justice Department will include more safeguards to prevent the kind of problems that have been documented in the past. Police departments will be required to provide details to the Justice Department about probable cause for seizures, and federal officials will have to more quickly inform property owners about their rights and the status of the seizures.

The goal here is to empower our police and prosecutors with this important tool that can be used to combat crime, particularly drug abuse, Rosenstein said at a news briefing. This is going to enable us to work with local police and our prosecutors to make sure that when assets are lawfully seized that theyre not returned to criminals when theres a valid basis for them to be forfeited.

[Jeff Sessionss Justice Department turns a $65 million asset forfeiture spigot back on]

Two years ago, then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. barred state and local police from using federal law to seize cash and other property without criminal charges or warrants. Since 2008, thousands of police agencies had made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program, which allowed local and state police to make seizures and then share the proceeds with federal agencies.

A Washington Post investigation in 2014 found that state and local police had seized almost $2.5 billion from motorists and others without search warrants or indictments since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The Post series revealed that police routinely stopped drivers for minor traffic infractions, pressed them to agree to searches without warrants and seized large amounts of cash when there was no evidence of wrongdoing.

Police then spent the proceeds from the seizure with little oversight, according to the Post investigation. In some cases, the police bought luxury cars, high-powered weapons and armored cars.

[Stop and Seize: A Washington Post investigation]

Youre never going to eliminate allegations of abuses, Rosenstein said, never going to eliminate mistakes 100 percent. But I think this new policy is going to position us very well to make sure there are very few credible allegations of abuse, and where there are were going to make it a priority to follow up.

The new policy from Attorney General Jeff Sessions authorizes federal adoption of assets seized by state and local police when the conduct that led to the seizures violates federal law. Rosenstein said that the department is adding safeguards to ensure that police have sufficient evidence of criminal activity when property is seized. Property owners will receive notice of their rights within 45 days, which is twice as quickly as required by current law. Law enforcement agencies will be required to provide officers with more training on asset forfeiture laws, he said.

State and local law enforcement officials supported the change, but Democratic and Republican lawmakers were skeptical.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) called Sessionss policy troubling and said it would expand a loophole thats become a central point of contention nationwide.

Criminals shouldnt be able to keep the proceeds of their crime, but innocent Americans shouldnt lose their right to due process, or their private property rights, in order to make that happen, Issa said in a statement.

[Jeff Sessions defense of civil asset forfeiture, annotated]

Holder tweeted that Sessionss policy was another extremist action and said the Obama administration policy was a reform that was supported by conservatives and progressives, Republicans and Democrats.

Kanya Bennett, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the action outrageous.

We are talking about people who have not been convicted of a crime and are often not given a day in court to reclaim their possessions, Bennett said. Civil asset forfeiture is tantamount to policing for profit, generating millions of dollars annually that the agencies get to keep.

At a meeting with county sheriffs on Feb. 7, President Trump made clear to law enforcement officials that he is a strong supporter of the civil asset forfeiture program and told the Justice Department to rescind the Obama administration restrictions.

On Wednesday, Sessions defended the reversal at a meeting with representatives from the Fraternal Order of Police, the National Sheriffs Association, the Major Cities Chiefs Association and other law enforcement officials who back the new policy.

Civil asset forfeiture is a key tool that helps law enforcement defund organized crime, take back ill-gotten gains and prevent new crimes from being committed, and it weakens the criminals and the cartels, Sessions said.

Earlier this week, Sessions told the National District Attorneys Association that no criminal should be allowed to keep the proceeds of their crime.

But the ACLUs Bennett said, The problem is that we are not talking about criminals.

We are talking about Americans who have had their homes, cars, money and other property taken through civil forfeiture, which requires only mere suspicion that the property is connected to a crime, she said.

Read more:

Jeff Sessions wants police to take more cash from American citizens

Holder ends seized-asset sharing process that split billions with local and state police

Sessionss Justice Department turns a $65 million asset forfeiture spigot back on
The Trump administration Tuesday added 18 more entities and individuals to its Iran sanctions list, just a day after it certified to Congress that Tehran has continued to meet the required conditions of its nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers.

Senior administration officials had made clear that the certification was grudging and indicated that new sanctions would closely follow for Irans malign activities in nonnuclear areas, such as ballistic missile development and support for terrorism.

We judge that these Iranian activities severely undermine the intent of the agreement as a force for international stability, one official said. Iran is unquestionably in default of the spirit of the JCPOA, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which took effect in January 2016 after years of negotiations, the official said.

International monitors and other signatories of the agreement have said Iran is meeting its terms, giving the administration little room for maneuver in providing the assessment required by Congress every 90 days.

The last certification of Iranian compliance, in April, was also followed by new sanctions on Iranian individuals and companies that the administration said played a role in ballistic missile tests not covered by the nuclear agreement.

The latest sanctions include seven entities and five individuals the Treasury Department said engaged in activities in support of Irans military or Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The list also includes an Iran-based transnational criminal organization and three associated persons.

In addition to aiding Irans military procurement, the Treasury Department said the networks helped the Revolutionary Guard  a branch of the military that answers only to Iranian religious authorities  develop unmanned aerial vehicles and fast attack boats.

Five of the companies that allegedly supported Iranian military procurement are based in China and one in Turkey. In addition, an Iranian company, Ajily Software Procurement Group, was said to have orchestrated the theft of U.S. and western software programs which, at times, were sold to the Government of Iran. U.S. export controls prohibit Iran from buying the programs.

The Revolutionary Guard itself was designated for sanctions by the Treasury Department in 2007. The State Department on Tuesday separately designated two Guard organizations for engaging in prohibited proliferation activities.
President Trump has decided to end the CIAs covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.

The program was a central plank of a policy begun by the Obama administration in 2013 to put pressure on Assad to step aside, but even its backers have questioned its efficacy since Russia deployed forces in Syria two years later.

Officials said the phasing out of the secret program reflects Trumps interest in finding ways to work with Russia, which saw the anti-Assad program as an assault on its interests. The shuttering of the program is also an acknowledgment of Washingtons limited leverage and desire to remove Assad from power.

Just three months ago, after the United States accused Assad of using chemical weapons, Trump launched retaliatory airstrikes against a Syrian air base. At the time, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, said that in no way do we see peace in that area with Assad at the head of the Syrian government.

Officials said Trump made the decision to scrap the CIA program nearly a month ago, after an Oval Office meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser H.R. McMaster ahead of a July 7 meeting in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Spokesmen for the National Security Council and the CIA declined to comment.

After the Trump-Putin meeting, the United States and Russia announced an agreement to back a new cease-fire in southwest Syria, along the Jordanian border, where many of the CIA-backed rebels have long operated. Trump described the limited cease-fire deal as one of the benefits of a constructive working relationship with Moscow.

The move to end the secret program to arm the anti-Assad rebels was not a condition of the cease-fire negotiations, which were already well underway, said U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the secret program.

Trumps dealings with Russia have been under heavy scrutiny because of the investigations into the Kremlins interference in the 2016 election. The decision on the CIA-backed rebels will be welcomed by Moscow, which focused its firepower on those fighters after it intervened in Syria in 2015.

Some current and former officials who support the program cast the move as a major concession.

This is a momentous decision, said a current official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a covert program. Putin won in Syria.

With the end of the CIA program, U.S. involvement in Syria now consists of a vigorous air campaign against the Islamic State and a Pentagon-run train-and-equip program in support of the largely Kurdish rebel force that is advancing on Islamic State strongholds in Raqqa and along the Euphrates River valley. The Trump administrations long-term strategy, following the defeat of the Islamic State, appears to be focused on stitching together a series of regional cease-fire deals among the U.S.-backed rebels, the Syrian government and Russia.

Syrian President Bashar Assad speaks to the Associated Press at the presidential palace in Damascus in 2016. The Trump administration is ending a CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels. (Syrian presidency via AP, File) (AP/AP)

Some analysts said the decision to end the program was likely to empower more radical groups inside Syria and damage the credibility of the United States.

We are falling into a Russian trap, said Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, who focuses on the Syrian resistance. We are making the moderate resistance more and more vulnerable. . . . We are really cutting them off at the neck.

Others said it was recognition of Assads entrenched position in Syria.

Its probably a nod to reality, said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama administration official and director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

U.S. intelligence officials say battlefield gains by rebels in 2015 prompted Russias direct military intervention on the side of the Assad regime. Some U.S. officials and their allies in the region urged President Barack Obama to respond by providing the rebels with advanced antiaircraft weapons so they could better defend themselves. But Obama balked, citing concerns about the United States getting pulled into a conflict with Russia.

Senior U.S. officials said that the covert program would be phased out over a period of months. It is also possible that some of the support could be redirected to other missions, such as fighting the Islamic State or making sure that the rebels can still defend themselves from attacks.

This is a force that we cant afford to completely abandon, Goldenberg said. If they are ending the aid to the rebels altogether, then that is a huge strategic mistake.

U.S. officials said the decision had the backing of Jordan, where some of the rebels were trained, and appeared to be part of a larger Trump administration strategy to focus on negotiating limited cease-fire deals with the Russians.

Earlier this month, five days into the first cease-fire in southwest Syria, Trump indicated that another agreement was under discussion with Moscow. We are working on the second cease-fire in a very rough part of Syria, Trump said. If we get that and a few more, all of a sudden we are going to have no bullets being fired in Syria.

One big potential risk of shutting down the CIA program is that the United States may lose its ability to block other countries, such as Turkey and Persian Gulf allies, from funneling more sophisticated weapons  including man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS  to anti-Assad rebels, including more radical groups.

Toward the end of the Obama administration, some officials advocated ending the CIA program, arguing that the rebels would be ineffective without a major escalation in U.S. support. But the program still had the support of a majority of top Obama advisers, who argued that the United States couldnt abandon its allies on the ground and give up on the moderate opposition because of the damage that it would do to U.S. standing in the region.

Even those who were skeptical about the programs long-term value, viewed it as a key bargaining chip that could be used to wring concessions from Moscow in negotiations over Syrias future.

People began thinking about ending the program, but it was not something youd do for free, said a former White House official. To give [the program] away without getting anything in return would be foolish.
U.S. Marine Brig. Gen. Roger Turner, center, and Afghan officials salute during a handover ceremony at Camp Leatherneck in Lashkar Gah in Helmand province, Afghanistan, on April 29. (Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

President Trump suggested in a visit to the Pentagon Thursday that he might hold off on sending more troops to Afghanistan, despite a recent order that he signed authorizing the Pentagon to add more forces.

Asked if he would send more troops to Afghanistan, where the Taliban have made significant gains in recent months, Trump replied: Well see. And were doing very well against ISIS. ISIS is falling fast.

The fight against the Islamic State in Afghanistan is only a tiny piece of the broader battle in the country to stabilize Afghanistans faltering central government and slow the Talibans battlefield momentum.

Trump gave Defense Secretary Jim Mattis the authority more than a month ago to send as many as 3,900 additional troops to Afghanistan on top of the 8,500 currently there. Most of those forces would be used to bolster the Afghan Army in its fight against the Taliban, rather than battle the relatively small Islamic State force in the country.

But Mattis has yet to send those additional forces and some U.S. officials have speculated that either he or the White House could be having second thoughts.

Hes clearly being cautious about cashing that check, said a former U.S. official who has participated in the administration debate. Mattis is either not persuaded that theres a strategic rationale for the troops or hes not persuaded that the decision will ultimately fly with the president  or both.

Trumps remarks at the Pentagon, where he met with senior commanders who gave him a briefing on the status of U.S. forces globally, is likely to add to the uncertainty surrounding the possible deployment of U.S. forces.

On Wednesday, Trump presided over a rare meeting of his full national security team Wednesday in the White House that focused on Afghanistan, Pakistan and the prospects for peace talks with the Taliban.

Trump has said little about Americas longest war since taking office in January, but the debate over how to stabilize the country and reverse the Talibans momentum has divided top officials in the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House in recent weeks.

The meeting Wednesday was designed to tee up final decisions for the president in what has been a long and difficult policy review, said current and former U.S. officials.

The meeting that Trump led in the White House did not focus on the size of the American force in Afghanistan but looked at Americas broader approach to the region and its strategy regarding Pakistan, which has provided a haven for the Taliban.

National security adviser H.R. McMaster and U.S. commanders in Afghanistan have pressed for a more punitive approach to Pakistan aimed at forcing it to cut ties to the Afghan Taliban.

But such an approach has been met with skepticism by senior officials in the Pentagon and the State Department, who said that Pakistan is unlikely to change its behavior and that efforts to pressure Islamabad would likely lead to greater instability in the region.

Top U.S. officials have also been divided over whether to seek peace negotiations with the Taliban now or wait until the new U.S. strategy has begun to shift the momentum on the battlefield. The McMaster view is that you should not negotiate with the Taliban while they are still ascendant, said the former U.S. official.

But the current U.S.-Afghan war strategy is built around a four-year plan to push back the Taliban that is not likely to yield significant results until its later stages, U.S. officials said.

Earlier this week, Trump met over lunch with service members who had fought in Afghanistan and suggested that his patience with the war might be running out.

Its our longest war. Weve been there for many years, Trump told reporters before the lunch. Weve been there for now close to 17 years, and I want to find out why weve been there for 17 years, how its going, and what we should do in terms of additional ideas.

One challenge for Trump is that there are not a lot of new options available to him that do not come with a big price tag. In recent months, Trump has loosened the rules governing American airstrikes, allowing U.S. forces to boost the air campaign against the Taliban to levels not seen since 2012, when the United States had 100,000 troops in the country.

Im skeptical that the strategy can be dramatically improved, said Michael OHanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. You can try to be tougher on Pakistan. You can try to make clear that we are there for a long-term commitment. But I dont expect a dramatic metamorphosis of this mission.
The Montana State Fire Marshal's Office is assisting Anaconda police and fire officials in the investigation of two fires that occurred within two days of each other on the same street in Anaconda, an official with the Anaconda Fire Department told The Montana Standard Tuesday.

Fire Chief RJ Tocher said the cause of both fires is yet to be determined and that his department is investigating the fires in collaboration with the two agencies.

The second incident occurred around 5:30 a.m. Monday at the KANA AM radio station at 105 Main St., just two days after fire destroyed an 1894 mansion on the corner of Main and 5th Streets late Friday night. The two fires occurred within three blocks of each other.

Tocher said his crews arrived at the second fire around 5:35 a.m., shortly after someone had called 911 to report smoke emanating from the building.

Fire crews entered the building and observed that fire was coming through the ground-level floor, which indicated the fire was likely coming from the basement, Tocher said. Crews found where the fire burned a hole through the floor and sprayed water through the opening. Afterward, Tocher said, firefighters descended into the basement, where they extinguished the blaze

No one was in the building at the time and no one was injured, the fire chief said.

Tocher said the fire at 105 Main appears to have spared the building, despite causing smoke damage to its main level and burning the joists that support the floor above the basement.

While the KANA building is likely salvageable, the same cant be said of the two-story historic mansion as flames destroyed much of the second floor, causing a portion of its roof to collapse.

On Saturday Tocher called the incident a fireball in the air and said that the fire likely originated in the middle of the building on the second story.

Because of the roof collapsed, the fire was ventilated, the fire chief said, causing the building to be engulfed in flames before crews arrived and preventing firefighters from entering the building. These factors could indicate that the fire was particularly hot, the chief said at the time.

Whether the two fires are related hasnt been determined, Tocher said, citing the ongoing investigation.

We are looking at everything, said Tocher, stating that his department and the other agencies are evaluating evidence and examining all possibilities.

Tim Barkell, Anaconda police chief, said detectives are looking into the matter, prompted by the close succession of the two fires.

Its just suspicious to us when we have two in two days, said Barkell.

In the interim, Barkell said, Anaconda police and fire officials are awaiting a report from the State Fire Marshal's Office.
Williamson, WV (25661)

Today

Cloudy with periods of rain. Morning high of 53F with temps falling to near 40. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%..

Tonight

Cloudy. A few flurries or snow showers possible. Low 33F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph.
Welcome to The Independent Herald E-Edition! Check back each week on Tuesday to see our[Read More]
Loews Corporation provides commercial property and casualty insurance in the United States and internationally. The company offers specialty insurance products, such as management and professional liability, and other coverage products; surety and fidelity bonds; property insurance products that include property, marine and boiler, and machinery coverages; and casualty insurance products, such as workers' compensation, general and product liability, and commercial auto and umbrella coverages. It also provides loss-sensitive insurance programs; and warranty, risk management, information, and claims administration services. The company markets its insurance products and services through independent agents, brokers, and managing general underwriters. In addition, the company is involved in the transportation and storage of natural gas and natural gas liquids(NGLs), and hydrocarbons through natural gas pipelines covering approximately 13,615 miles of interconnected pipelines; 450 miles of NGL pipelines in Louisiana and Texas; 14 underground storage fields with an aggregate gas capacity of approximately 213 billion cubic feet of natural gas; and eleven salt dome caverns and related brine infrastructure for providing brine supply services. Further, the company operates a chain of 26 hotels; and develops, manufactures, and markets a range of extrusion blow-molded and injection molded plastic containers for customers in the pharmaceutical, dairy, household chemicals, food/nutraceuticals, industrial/specialty chemicals, and water and beverage/juice segments, as well as manufactures commodity and differentiated plastic resins from recycled plastic materials. Loews Corporation was incorporated in 1969 and is headquartered in New York, New York.
A new trail overlooking Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park has been completed.

The path and overlook were originally pioneered by visitors, who were causing damage to the hillside. In 2014 a tourist from Taiwan was killed in the area when a falling tree hit him in the head.

This spring Yellowstone staff closed the area off to construct the new trail and overlook, which was recently opened to the public. To alleviate traffic congestion, safety concerns and resource impacts, the park also made a parking area near the Fairy Falls trailhead at Midway Geyser Basin. Parking is limited at the destination.

The trail crew rehabilitated the hillside and designed and built the trail with assistance from the Montana Conservation Corps and Yellowstones Youth Conservation Corps. The new trail gradually climbs 105 feet over a half mile from the Fairy Falls trailhead to an overlook with views of Midway Geyser Basin.

The trail and overlook protect a heavily visited part of the park. Superintendent Dan Wenk said that the trail and overlook provide a different view of Grand Prismatic Spring and minimize the growth of unsightly, unofficial social trails in the process.

Visitors to Yellowstone in this busy summer season are reminded to pack their patience, anticipate traffic and expect limited parking and delays.
The increasingly crisis-ridden character of the Australian federal parliament has been underscored over the past week by the unprecedented resignation of the two deputy leaders of the Greens, senators Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters.

Ludlam told a press conference last Friday he had been informed that he was ineligible to sit as a member of parliament, because he is a dual Australian-New Zealand citizen. Yesterday, Waters tearfully declared that, in the wake of Ludlams resignation, she too had discovered that she was a dual citizen and was therefore resigning.

Ludlam said he had been unaware he was a New Zealand citizen when he became a senator in 2008. His family migrated to Australia when he was only three-years-old. Waters was born in Canada to Australian parents who left the country before she was one-year-old. She has never lived in North America.

According to parliamentary tradition, both seatsLudlams in Western Australia, and Waters in Queenslandwill be taken by Greens representatives. However, if the Senate refers the matter to the High Court and the initial election of the Greens senators is ruled invalid, there will be a countback of the votes and members of other parties could be installed.

In the short-term, the resignations could limit Greens influence in the Senate, potentially aiding the Liberal-National government in pushing through legislation.

The government holds just 29 of the Senates 76 seats, meaning that it requires the support of at least 10 other senators to pass its legislation. The Greens had nine seats, but will now only hold seven for a period following the resignations. Aside from Labor, other minor parties and independents occupy 10 seats.

The resignations could further accelerate the instability of parliament. As many as 20 other MPs, including from Labor and the Liberal-Nationals, are reportedly investigating whether they are also dual citizens. Hostile inquiries, aimed at unseating political opponents, are doubtless also taking place.

The episode has underscored the anti-democratic character of Australian electoral laws. Section 44 of the constitution ostensibly bans dual citizens from sitting in the federal parliament.

The law potentially affects almost seven million people, who are either dual citizens, or are eligible to be as a result of having been born overseas. Revoking foreign citizenship can be a costly and difficult process. Labor Senator Sam Dastyari, for example, has revealed that he had to spend more than $25,000 in legal costs to renounce the Iranian citizenship he was born with.

The law is one of a series of deeply discriminatory clauses in the Constitution, which also bans anyone benefitting from the Commonwealth from holding federal parliamentary office.

What is most striking about the departure of Ludlam and Waters, however, is that they chose not to pursue the substantial legal grounds that exist to challenge their disqualifications under section 44.

In a High Court case in 1992, concerning two candidates for federal parliament who held dual citizenship, two dissenting judges stated that both were eligible to stand. The judges cited the candidates longstanding association with Australia, and the fact they had effectively renounced any foreign allegiances in a naturalisation ceremony. While this opinion did not prevail, it established a precedent for opposing attempts to remove parliamentarians on the grounds of dual citizenship.

The ruling of the five majority judges was based on a consideration of whether the candidates had taken reasonable steps to renounce their foreign citizenship. They stated that the definition of what constituted a reasonable step was dependent on individual circumstances. This opinion could clearly have been invoked by Waters and Ludlam, who both claimed to be oblivious of their dual citizenship. Waters is only a Canadian citizen because she was born one week before the countrys laws were changed.

More recently, in 2010, it was alleged that the prominent senator, Eric Abetz, who is currently a member of the federal Liberal-National government, was a dual Australian-German citizen. The case was not pursued, but it has been claimed that Abetz only formally renounced his German citizenship in 2010over a decade after his initial election to parliament.

The decision by Ludlam, Waters and the Greens as a whole to capitulate without any fight highlights the fraudulent character of their occasional claims to defend democratic rights. Rather than opposing the nationalist and discriminatory character of section 44 of the constitution, Ludlam and Waters fawningly apologised for their oversight.

Nor did Ludlam publicly question the dubious circumstances in which the issue of his citizenship emerged. It has been revealed that he was privately contacted by John Cameron, a Perth-based barrister, who professed to have inadvertently discovered documents revealing Ludlams New Zealand citizenship.

Camerons claims to be politically-disinterested appear questionable. According to the Guardian, Greens officials have privately speculated that he was provided the information, which is not publicly accessible, by sources in the New Zealand state apparatus or government.

However, Ludlam and senior Greens figures have not publicly raised the possibility that the revelation was part of a calculated attempt to end his political career. Attorney-general George Brandis rapidly pounced on the issue with the vindictive suggestion over the weekend that Ludlam may be forced to repay his entire parliamentary salary, which could be as much as $2 million.

Ludlam and Waters political demise coincides with a deep-going crisis in the Greens, stemming from its transformation over the past two decades into the party of environmental business, with a voter base primarily among the most affluent sections of the upper-middle-class.

Its ever-more open pro-business orientation provoked public conflicts within the party last month.

The federal party room voted to exclude New South Wales Greens senator Lee Rhiannon from discussions on contentious matters. She had publicly campaigned against the governments regressive school funding legislation which the Green leadership were in backroom negotiations to push through the senate.

At the same time, the partys federal leadership is demanding changes to the New South Wales Greens constitution, which requires its senators to adhere to state-based policy in the federal party room.

Those who spearheaded the attack on Rhiannon, including party leader, Richard Di Natale, are concerned that her left posturing jeopardises their attempts to forge deals with the government of the day. For the dominant faction led by Di Natale, such dealing is essential if the Greens are ever going to be able to enter into a formal governing coalition with either Labor or the conservative parties.

For her part, Rhiannon, who has decades-long ties to the trade union bureaucracy and pseudo-left organisations, is fearful that the open integration of the Greens into the political establishment will result in the party being bypassed by a developing radicalisation of the working class and young people.

Di Natale and former party leader Bob Brown have both indicated that they will exploit the two resignations to intensify their campaign against Rhiannon. They intend to push for the national leadership to exercise greater control over the nominally independent state branches of the Greens.

Brown told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the resignations indicated the need for greater centralisation. Di Natale said that the party would conduct a root and branch review of internal processes to ensure that it could be a party of government. Both unquestionably supported the regressive constitutional ban on dual citizens.

Waters and Ludlam voted for the exclusion of Rhiannon from the party room, a measure that was relaxed last week. At times, however, they have been associated with her and others in the so-called left grouping of the Greens.

Throughout his parliamentary career, Ludlam spoke-out against the most egregious attacks on democratic rights, and occasionally criticised Australias alignment with US militarism in the Middle East and the Asia Pacific. Like Rhiannon, Ludlums rhetoric has been aimed at channeling growing opposition to social inequality, the erosion of democratic rights and war behind the Greens and confining it to a parliamentary perspective.

The fraudulent character of this posture was made clear by the central role played by the Greens in propping up the minority Labor government of Julia Gillard from 2010 to 2013. That government, kept in office by the Greens, including Ludlam and Rhiannon, pushed through sweeping pro-business attacks on healthcare, education and welfare, while aligning Australia with the US pivot to Asia, a vast military build-up in preparation for war with China.

Ludlam said over the weekend that having left parliament, he will find some other way of stirring up trouble. His remark indicates that he intends to continue promoting the bankrupt perspective of protest appeals directed to parliament. Amid an unprecedented crisis of the official political establishment, Ludlam may also play a role in developing new political mechanisms aimed at preventing the working class from turning to a genuine socialist and internationalist alternative.
Beijing (AFP) - Flooding in China's northeast has left 18 dead and 18 missing, state media said Monday, after the latest deadly deluge to hit the country this summer.

The central and eastern parts of Jilin province were hit by driving rain Thursday and Friday, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

More than 110,000 were forced to flee the city of Jilin due to the heavy rain, it said, adding that the government had sent over 32,000 rescue workers to the area.

China has been hit by a series of fatal floods this summer, leaving dozens dead and displacing huge numbers of people.

Last week authorities said that at least 63 were killed by landslides and floods in central China, which forced 1.6 million to flee.

Authorities in the southern region of Guangxi earlier this month said two dozen people had been killed or gone missing due to flooding, which also damaged thousands of houses.




WASHINGTON  Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., has some questions about President Trumps daughter, Ivanka.

Beyer put together a group of over 20 Democratic members of the House of Representatives who sent a letter to acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe on Wednesday asking him to conduct a review of a potentially serious issue involving First Daughter and Assistant to the President, Ivanka Trump. The group wants to know if Ivanka properly filled out Standard Form 86 (SF-86), which is the security clearance required for federal officials.

Their questions stem from recent revelations involving Ivankas husband, Jared Kushner, who is also a top White House adviser, and her brother, Donald Trump Jr. The SF-86 asks whether you or any member of your immediate family has had any contact with a foreign government, its establishment  or its representatives in the past seven years. Kushner has updated his security clearance forms three times to add over 100 foreign contacts, including a meeting he attended with Donald Trump Jr. during last years presidential election, where they spoke with a Russian lawyer who offered them damaging information on President Trumps opponent on behalf of the Russian government. Beyer said the news raised questions about whether Ivanka has also updated her forms and whether she included all of her familys foreign contacts.

Beyer discussed the issue in an interview with Yahoo News that will air in full on SiriusXMs POTUS channel on Wednesday at 2 p.m. You can read the letter in full here.

Rep. Don Beyer celebrates the Democratic Gubernatorial primary win of Virginia Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam in Crystal City, Va., in June. (Photo: Cliff Owen/AP)

Were simply writing the acting head of the FBI  to say, Did Ivanka Trump fail to disclose many of her meetings? And under the law  shes also responsible to disclose the foreign contacts of her spouse and her siblings. So, did she make an effort to disclose the things that Jared Kushner had done, or Donald Trump Jr.? Beyer explained.

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story. Knowingly falsifying or concealing information on the SF-86 can result in penalties including up to five years imprisonment.

Story continues

Were really just asking [Acting FBI Director McCabe] to conduct a review of this serious issue involving the first daughter and assistant to the president, Ivanka. You know, maybe  I think this is unlikely  but maybe there was no problem, Beyer said. If  they come back and say, No. Everything was fine. OK, fine. But we dont have access to this information. The FBI does.

Beyer said he realized there may be issues with Ivankas SF-86 because he remembered filling out the form when he served as the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein from 2009 to 2013.

I had to talk to my wife, my brothers and sisters  Im one of six  [and] my dad just to make sure that any foreign government contacts they had were reflected on my SF-86, said Beyer.

The SF-86 forms, which can contain sensitive information, are not made public.

If there was a violation of the public trust, if they broke U.S. law, at the very least the security clearance should be revoked, Beyer said of Ivanka and Kushner.

Security clearance investigations for top White House officials are conducted by the FBI, which presents its findings to White House staff for a final decision. The president has the authority to reverse a White House staff decision on security clearance.

Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, right, leave an inaugural ball with her brother Donald Trump Jr. in January. (Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

One of the things weve tried to track down as well is who can revoke Jared and Ivankas security clearance, said Beyer. Near as we can tell, the only person that can do it is the president  their father or father-in-law.

While the concerns over Ivankas security clearance forms have garnered relatively little attention, Kushners clearance has generated extensive discussion since the revelation of his meeting with Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer. Kushner was granted an interim security clearance after he joined the White House with the final clearance pending review. Since last week, Kushners White House spokesman has not responded to multiple requests for comment from Yahoo News asking whether he still maintains his interim security clearance.

At the White House press briefing on July 10, Yahoo News asked deputy principal press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders whether the fact that so many foreign contacts were missing from Kushners initial forms raised questions about his competence or honesty. Sanders responded by saying his initial SF-86 was just an incomplete form.

All of his foreign contacts were listed in the updated version, not in the original, Sanders said of Kushner.

Beyer said this defense of Kushners omitted contacts is almost laughable.

You could see, oh, look, there are 100 contacts and maybe you forgot seven of them, or 12 of them, or three of them. But if you forgot all 100 its a pretty big problem, said Beyer.

In April when Beyer first called for Kushners security clearance to be revoked, just four other members of Congress signed onto his letter. He argued the fact that his latest letter has so many other co-signers is evidence of gathering concern following the revelations about Trump Jr. and Kushners meeting.

Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe listens during a news conference on July 13 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Beyer approached Republicans to sign his letter about Ivankas security clearance, but none of them took him up on the invitation.

The Republicans here are, in general, very reluctant to cross the president, said Beyer. The presidents approval rating may only be 36 percent, but that 36 percent are the ones who vote in Republican primaries.

Beyer claimed its a completely different story behind the scenes.

Off the House floor, in a corner, they will almost to the person tell you that they are embarrassed, and aghast, and worried about their own political future, Beyer said of Republican members of Congress. You know, you dont see them traipsing over to the White House every day for celebratory meetings. Theyre really worried.

_____

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Its been nearly two decades since actress and former Scientologist, Leah Remini, has been looking for Shelly Miscavige, the missing wife (and First Lady) of the Church of Scientologys de facto leader, David Miscavige. Shes dedicated entire episodes of her A&E series to her investigation, mentioned it innumerable times in the press, and even confronted church officials with questions at Tom Cruises 2006 wedding to Katie Holmes. Now, via viral thread on Twitter, Remini has detailed a new devel




Sara Carson and her adorable dog, Hero, nearly didnt make it past the audition for Americas Got Talent, but they were able to sneak into the shows finals. Previously, judge Simon Cowell had to beg the other judges to reconsider letting Carson and Hero through.

On Tuesdays episode, the pair amazed everyone. They reworked their routine around a bank-robber theme. Carson made Hero belly-crawl, dance on his hind legs backward, and perform backflips off her body.

This time the judges wowed the judges including guest judge Chris Hardwick, who exclaimed, The dog is a cat burglar!

Simon Cowell vowed to fight for the pair and without prompting Hero dashed into the audience and next to Cowell. Thankfully, Carson and Hero took one of the final seven spots in the competition.

Watch: Singing Trumps Backstreet Boys Medley Is Exactly What the World Needs

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A plane carrying General Abdul Rashid Dostum, Afghan vice president and former warlord, was turned away after trying to land in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

The vice presidents plane reportedly was forced to land in neighboring Turkmenistan, where Dostum remains.

Dostum traveled to Turkey in May, ostensibly for medical treatment, though his stay there was something closer to exile. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani chose Dostum as his vice president after the 2014 elections, but the two are embroiled in a mounting power struggle.

The central government, against all the laws of Afghanistan and the world, against the fact that the president cannot rule an ordinary citizen  let alone the vice president  a criminal until proven by a court, told the plane not to land, Raees Abdul Khaliq, a provincial council member who waited at the airport for Dostums unsuccessful return, told the New York Times.

Senior officials confirmed the account, but Dostums office later denied that he was on the plane that was turned back from Mazar-i-Sharif.

The vice president is also mired in a criminal investigation. Ahmad Ischi, a political rival, accused Dostum and his bodyguards of kidnapping, beating, and sexually assaulting him in November. In January, Afghanistans attorney general issued orders for the arrests of nine people, mostly bodyguards, in Dostums employ.

While in Ankara in July, Dostum and several other Afghan ethnic minority leaders formed a new alliance, called the Coalition for the Salvation of Afghanistan, to put pressure on Ghani to stop the investigation into Dostum, hold elections, and share power with other leaders.

The general helped the United States overthrow the Taliban in 2001. The U.S. State Department once called him the quintessential warlord  before deciding his brutality and swagger were a nuisance and threatening him by flying a B-1 bomber over his home a few years later. Dostum is suspected of killing hundreds of Taliban prisoners during the war.

MASSOUD HOSSAINI/AFP/Getty Images
Scientists are testing the DNA and composition of skeletons found in Greece to figure out whether the dozens of shackled men in the burial pit who were killed in political executions are the ancient army of Cylon, the first Olympic champion who later tried to conquer Athens.

According to a report from news service Agence France-Presse, archaeologists are using forensic and high-tech methods to learn more about how the men lived and died, including how old they were and where they were from. They were found last year among a mass grave of about 1,500 skeletons in Phaleron, near Athens, and could be from the 7th century BC.

Read: Ancient American Artifacts Show Advanced Culture

Although they have yet to confirm many details about the bones, experts say the men who were bound and executed  there is evidence of them meeting violent ends  could have belonged to the army of Cylon.

There are also skeletons in the excavation area from nonviolent deaths, including children and infants whose remains were stored in jars. The scientists are exploring their backgrounds as well to learn more about their lives and whether they died of disease. That in turn could teach us more about the experiences of the average person in ancient Greece, supplementing all the recorded tales from that civilization that focus on just the wealthy or important figures through its history.

acropolis

Photo: REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis

Cylon was a champion in a footrace known as the Diaulos in the ancient Olympic games around 640 BC. He was the first recorded Olympic winner. But the story goes that the man, who was born to a noble family from Athens, wanted to rule the city and later went on the offensive to install himself as a tyrant. He and his men were eventually beaten back and tried to find refuge in the Acropolis, the fortified hilltop site that served as a religious and cultural center and still stands today.

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They surrendered and, controversially, the army was executed, although Cylon himself may have escaped.

The bones of the 80 men in the unmarked grave who may have been part of Cylons army show that they were young and well-fed  based on the condition of their teeth  before being killed with blows to the head, according to AFP. Some of them were found lying on their backs while others were facedown, but all had iron chains around their hands. With some of the deceased, their hands were bound above their heads.

Read: Bones of Two Human Sacrifices Found at Palace

They would have died as Athens was becoming a democratic city against a backdrop of political turmoil, tensions between tyrants, aristocrats and the working class, bioarchaeological researcher Eleanna Prevedorou told AFP.

Besides being a prisoner of war, a bound person could have been a criminal or a runaway slave, she said.

When the bodies were uncovered last year, the archaeologists reported that pottery recovered along with the skeletons suggested they dated to between 650 and 625 BC, which puts their deaths within a reasonable time period to place them in the army of Cylon, if further evidence backs up that idea.

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Ann Coulter shared a text exchange from an unidentified flight attendant to Twitter Tuesday, ostensibly revealing that the conservative figure was targeted by Delta Air Lines. Coulter went on to warn fellow Republicans to avoid the airline altogether.

"BEWARE OF @DELTA REPUBLICANS. Texts from a flight attendant: It was political. @Delta still won't give a reason," she wrote in a tweet.

The claim follows a series of tweets in which Coulter spoke in opposition of Delta following Saturday's incident, during which she was allegedly forced to give up her preferred seat on a flight. Delta reportedly removed the conservative author from her seat on Delta flight 2852 from New York's LaGuardia Airport to West Palm Beach for an unknown reason.

Read: Ann Coulter Continues To Tweet Against Delta Airlines: Twitter Asks Her To 'Get Over It'

In the text exchange, the flight attendant claimed that "someone noticed her [Coulter], and just wanted to be a jerk and make her flight miserable."

The flight attendant, who asserted that they belonged to a secret Facebook group of airline employees, claimed members were "hating on Ann." However, group members reportedly "acknowledged it was a Delta employee who targeted Ann on purpose."

BEWARE OF @DELTA REPUBLICANS. Texts from a flight attendant: It was political. @Delta still won't give a reason. pic.twitter.com/Tcxp2DlPa0  Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) July 18, 2017

Coulter's tweet received backlash from Twitter users, including Chad Stowell, Growth Officer at DoSomething.org.

"A) This is a fake screenshot. B) If it is real so what?" he responded. "You said the free market should decide, no protections, remember?"

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Delta Air Lines has not commented on Coulter's text message reveal. They issued an apology on their website Sunday, claiming they were "sorry that [Coulter] did not receive the seat she reserved and paid for." However, they also went on to castigate Coulter's treatment of its employees as well as other airline customers, specifically the woman who was given Coulter's seat.

"More importantly, we are disappointed that the customer has chosen to publicly attack our employees and other customers by posting derogatory and slanderous comments and photos in social media," they added. "Her actions are unnecessary and unacceptable. Each of our employees is charged with treating each other as well as our customers with dignity and respect. And we hold each other accountable when that does not happen."

Coulter, who criticized Delta through a series of tweets moments after receiving the boot from the flight Saturday, continued to troll the airline in a Twitter rampage leading up to Tuesday's text message reveal.

Read: Delta Reacts To Ann Coulters Criticism, Twitter Supports Airline

The war against Delta began when Coulter was asked to give up her pre-booked seat Saturday, which reportedly accommodated extra leg room for an additional $30. The political analyst tweeted her frustration over her replacement, writing that "if it was so important for the dachshund-legged woman to take my seat, she should have BOOKED THE SEAT IN ADVANCE. Like I did."

Coulter also took a picture of the woman who took her seat, adding, "@Delta didnt give my extra room seat to an air marshall or tall person."

Hey @Delta, if it was so important for the dachshund-legged woman to take my seat, she should have BOOKED THE SEAT IN ADVANCE. Like I did.  Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) July 16, 2017

.@Delta didnt give my extra room seat to an air marshall or tall person. Heres the woman given my PRE-BOOKED seat: pic.twitter.com/iDNB8xXXOd  Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) July 15, 2017

Several Twitter users took issue with Coulter's comments, with some users making reference to her "white privilege." One user wrote: "If you say 'White privilege' into a mirror 3 times Ann Coulter appears behind you and tells you to move because she needs the leg room.'"

Documentarian Jeremy Newberger referenced Coulter's refund, claiming that "Delta should have charged Ann Coulter $30 more to check her white privilege."

"Captain America: Civil War" star Chris Evans also tweeted at Coulter Monday. "I totally get it," he wrote. "It costs me 75k to brush my teeth. I must pre-select a brush, investigate types of paste, and periodically spit bulls."

I totally get it. It costs me 75k to brush my teeth. I must pre-select a brush, investigate types of paste, and periodically spit bullshit  Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) July 17, 2017

Coulter's frustration is understandable, but the Delta Air Lines website reiterates that there are circumstances where there's an "occasional need to change another individual's pre-assigned seat, with bulkhead seats being particularly subject to reassignment." Changes can be arranged to accommodate individuals with disabilities, for example.

Ann Coulter

Photo: Getty Images

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County officials say their requests for several new staff positions are justified, including a proposal to pay Jon Sesso $45,000 a year from pollution settlement money to be a Superfund coordinator after he steps down as planning director.

But several commissioners have given the requests a cold shoulder, and one  Dan Foley  says Butte cant afford to keep adding government employees year after year when the city isnt growing and neither are taxpayers pocketbooks.

Many residents arent just saying they are on fixed incomes, Foley told department heads last week, they truly are on fixed incomes and commissioners need to listen to them.

We could fill every one of these positions, Foley said. Every single department could come up here and request a position and they are probably going to be legitimate positions, but the bottom line is, can we afford it?

They could use more staff, but we cant  until we get this community rolling economically and moving it forward  justify adding more government.

Foley, while chairing a recent council Budget Committee hearing, made a motion to reject all five new employee positions sought by Chief Executive Dave Palmer and department chiefs.

Five of the six committee members went along, endorsing a preliminary budget minus the staff additions. The full council could change that or any other details Wednesday night or anytime before a final budget is enacted in August.

Palmer wants to create five new positions, including a superintendent to oversee construction projects done by county workers. The job would pay $72,000 per year plus $33,000 in annual benefits.

He also wants to hire an arborist, have an in-house accountant for special taxing districts instead of contracting the work out, and create an accounting position for the Parks Division who also would assist the countys building manager.

Because of previous staffing and budgetary moves, the tree specialist wouldnt cost taxpayers more money and the county could save money by having an in-house accountant for two taxing districts, Palmer and Budget Director Danette Gleason say.

The Parks Division has taken on major projects, including the $8.7 million waterpark under construction and $2.5 million in upcoming improvements to Stodden Park, and an accountant is needed keep track of those and other financial matters, they say.

Parks Director J.P. Gallagher said the accountant would also oversee grants and donations and likely could leverage more money from those sources so the position would pay for itself.

Sessos proposed position wouldnt cost taxpayers anything, Sesso and Palmer say, because the $45,000 salary plus benefits would come from existing Superfund accounts funded largely by the Atlantic Richfield Co., or BP today.

Sesso has been planning director since 1991 and as part of that job, has overseen Superfund activities for the county the past 25 years. His annual salary is now $89,075, according to the Finance and Budget Department.

Under a plan backed by Palmer, Sesso said he would retire as planning director in the next few months but manage Superfund programs on a half-time salary paid through those programs.

One of his primary goals would be facilitating a settlement to Superfund litigation that will decide long-term, multimillion-dollar cleanup responsibilities for pollution on the Butte Hill. It has dragged on for more than 20 years, and the current consent decree" talks now involve the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Atlantic Richfield, two state agencies and Butte-Silver Bow County.

My job is to try to work myself out of a job over the course of the next 12 to 18 months and at the same time, begin to step aside for the new and young people to take over here at Butte-Silver Bow, Sesso told commissioners last week.

Palmer said it was crucial that Sesso remain in secret consent-decree talks since Atlantic Richfield flies in people from Texas who know the litigation landscape and would definitely take advantage of newer negotiators for the county.

Its really not costing taxpayers any money, Palmer said. It (Sessos salary) is coming out of the Superfund settlement dollars and it is money well spent.

But Foley said hes a member of the Planning Board and until just recently, neither he nor other commissioners knew anything about the transition plan Sesso and Palmer had worked out.

Regardless, Foley said, Buttes population isnt growing and neither are its economy or school system. But year after year, he said, county officials propose new positions and turn to government to solve all our problems and answer all our questions.

I think we have to demonstrate to the taxpayer out there that we are watching what we are spending here, he said.

Commissioner Jim Fisher, who is also on the Budget Committee, said that panels early recommendation against funding new positions was simply a signal to taxpayers.

We want to send word back to the public that we are doing our best to try to save them dollars, Fisher said.

Commissioner Dan Olsen said trees add to the appeal of a community, could help the local economy and the arborist position was justified. Commissioner John Sorich said county officials had made legitimate cases for all the positions and were trying to keep costs down.

We should look seriously at putting these positions back in the budget, Sorich said.

The council is expected to debate the staff additions again when it meets at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Courthouse, 155 W. Granite St. But it likely will be several more weeks before a final budget is passed.
Photo credit: NASA

From Popular Mechanics

A pair of old NASA computers and a large collection of tapes from early NASA missions has been discovered in the basement of a deceased NASA contractor. The computers are from the early Apollo missions in the 1960s, and the tapes contain data from Pioneer and Helios missions.

The computers were old IBM mainframes that were going to be thrown out, and the contractor-whose name is redacted in NASA's report-asked to take them home. The computers then sat in his basement for almost 50 years, accompanied by over 300 data storage tapes from several NASA missions.

When he died, his possessions were turned over to a scrap dealer, who discovered the old NASA equipment and contacted the agency.

After reviewing the equipment, NASA decided it doesn't need it, and that most of the tapes were in too poor of a condition to recover the data. If NASA is going to pass on those computers, there may be a chance for some dedicated hobbyist to claim and restore them.

Source: NASA via Ars Technica

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Humans must start removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as soon as possible to avoid saddling future generations with a choice between extreme climate change or spending hundreds of trillions of dollars to avoid it, according to new research.

An international team of researchers  led by Professor Jim Hansen, Nasas former climate science chief  said their conclusion that the world had already overshot targets to limit global warming to within acceptable levels was sufficiently grim to force them to urge rapid emission reductions.

But they warned this would not be enough and efforts would need to be made to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by about 12.5 per cent.

This, the scientists argued, could be mostly achieved by agricultural measures such as planting trees and improving soil fertility, a relatively low-cost way to remove carbon from the air.

Other more expensive methods, such as burning biomass in power plants fitted with carbon-capture-and-storage or devices that can remove carbon from the air directly, might also be necessary and would become increasingly needed if steps were not taken soon.

An academic paper in the journal Earth System Dynamics estimated such industrial processes could cost up to $535 trillion this century and also have large risks and uncertain feasibility.

Continued high fossil fuel emissions unarguably sentences young people to either a massive, implausible clean-up or growing deleterious climate impacts or both, said the paper.

We conclude that the world has already overshot appropriate targets for greenhouse gas amount and global temperature, and we thus infer an urgent need for rapid phasedown of fossil fuel emissions [and] actions that draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide.

These tasks are formidable and  they are not being pursued globally.

Cuts to emissions of greenhouse gases such as methane, nitrous oxide and ozone would also be required.

The study is to be used as part of a ground-breaking lawsuit brought against the US Government by 21 children in which the plaintiffs claim their constitutional right to have a health climate in which to live in is being violated by federal policies.

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If the case succeeds, environmentalists believe it could force the Trump administration to reduce greenhouse gases and take other measures to prevent global warming.

The paper pointed out that the last time temperatures were this high, during the Eemian period, global sea levels were about six to nine metres higher than they are today, suggesting significant rises are still to occur.

The paper said that the Paris Agreement, the tumbling price of renewable energy and the recent slowdown in the increase of fossil fuel emissions had led to a sense of optimism around the world.

But, speaking to The Independent, Professor Hansen said he believed this optimism was misplaced.

The narrative thats out there now  is that weve turned the corner, he said.

On the contrary, what we show is the rate of growth of climate forcing caused by increased methane [and other gases] is actually accelerating. Thats why its urgent.

Asked to assess the worlds current progress in fighting climate change, he said the s*** is hitting the fan.

Professor Hansen, now a scientist at the Columbia University Earth Institute in the US, said he believed the court case had a chance of winning.

A court would not be able to tell the Government what to do, he admitted, but would be able to say that failing to deal with the problem was unconstitutional and require politicians to produce an effective plan.

The paper said the need for prompt action implied by these realities [of climate change] may not be a surprise to the relevant scientific community because of the available evidence.

However, effective communication with the public of the urgency to stem human-caused climate change is hampered by the inertia of the climate system, especially the ocean and the ice sheets, which respond rather slowly to climate forcings, thus allowing future consequences to build up before broad public concern awakens, it said.

All amplifying feedbacks, including atmospheric water vapor, sea ice cover, soil carbon release and ice sheet melt could be reduced by rapid emissions phasedown.

This would reduce the risk of climate change running out of humanitys control and provide time to assess the climate response, develop relevant technologies, and consider further purposeful actions to limit and/or adapt to climate change.

It warned that sea level rise of up to a metre may be inevitable even if emissions decline and would have dire consequences.

Sea level rise of several metres would result in humanitarian and economic disasters.

Given the increasing proportion of global population living in coastal areas, there is potential for forced migrations of hundreds of millions of people, dwarfing prior refugee humanitarian crises, challenging global governance and security, the paper said.

About 65 per cent of the power produced by the massive Drax power plant in North Yorkshire comes from burning biomass, making it the largest single renewable electricity generator in the UK, although some dispute how green the process is.

If it was to be fitted with carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS), it would create the type of negative emissions system envisaged in the paper. Drax was involved in the White Rose project to build a 1bn CCS plant but pulled out after cuts to renewable energy subsidies by the Government.

It insisted that biomass with CCS could make a major difference to the fight against climate change.

A Drax spokesperson said: We are confident the technology we developed as part of the White Rose project has real potential in terms of delivering dramatic reductions to carbon emissions produced by power stations and heavy industry.

However, the current regulatory environment means any such project isnt viable at the present time. We are also awaiting the Governments response to Lord Oxburghs review into CCS.
If Hollywood were a high school, theres no doubt that Kristen Bell would be named Most Popular. Case in point? All the love shes getting for her birthday.

The actress turns 37 today and her friends, family, and co-stars have been posting tributes up a storm. While most are sweet, some are sweet and hysterical.

Bells former Veronica Mars co-star, Ryan Hansen, decided to celebrate his pals big day by carrying around a cardboard cutout of the actress. HAPPY BIRTHDAY @kristenanniebell, he shared alongside four photos. Thank you for sharing your special day with me. #brothers #superspouses.

Hansen took Bell with him to lunch and around town.

And to the mall, where they snapped a few selfies.

Bell seems to have gotten a kick out of the gag. She commented on his post, hahaha why on Earth do u have that?!

Dax Shepard may not have trekked around L.A. with a cutout of his wife, but he did give us all the feels while wishing her a happy b-day. Oh this day, many moons ago, the greatest wife, mother(of dragons) and friend arrived. HAPPY BIRTHDAY my [love], he tweeted.

On this day, many moons ago, the greatest wife, mother(of dragons) and friend arrived. HAPPY BIRTHDAY my lve @IMKristenBell  dax shepard (@daxshepard1) July 18, 2017

A runner-up in the aww department has to be Bells The Good Place, co-star, Ted Dansen.

Any place or thing in the universe can be up to 104% perfect. Thats how you got @IMKristenBell. Happy Birthday, KB! pic.twitter.com/kmz5sJjc0m  Ted Danson (@TedDanson) July 18, 2017

Ellen DeGeneres also gave her good friend, not just a shout-out, but a birthday montage.

Happy birthday to one of my favorite guests ever, @IMKristenBell. pic.twitter.com/xBjUEuYslU  Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) July 18, 2017

Thats a pretty good run of celeb well-wishers. Kristen thanked everyone for the birthday love with a cute post.

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I am incredibly happy to be alive. Im grateful for my mom, my dad, and my whole family for supporting me, challenging me, and keeping me grounded. 37 feels quite good A post shared by kristen bell (@kristenanniebell) on Jul 18, 2017 at 1:35pm PDT

With 110,000 likes and counting, its safe to say everybody loves Kristen.





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BEIJING (Reuters) - China said on Monday it had lodged a stern complaint with the United States after the U.S. House of Representatives passed its version of a big annual defense bill that would expand exchanges with self-ruled Taiwan. China considers democratic Taiwan to be a wayward province and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control. The United States has no formal ties with Taiwan but is bound by law to help it defend itself and is the island's main source of arms. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), passed by the House on Friday, also proposes expanding training and exercises with Taiwan. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said "negative content" related to Taiwan went seriously against the "one China" principle and was an interference in China's internal affairs. "China has already lodged stern representations with the United States about this," Lu told a daily news briefing. China resolutely opposes any form of official contacts between the U.S. and Taiwan militaries, he said. "We urge the United States to fully recognize the serious harmfulness of the relevant clauses in the act, and should not allow then into law, and not turn back the wheel of history to avoid damaging the broad picture of Sino-U.S. cooperation." China regularly calls Taiwan the most sensitive and important issue between it and the United States. China urged the United States last month to revoke immediately its "wrong decision" to sell Taiwan $1.42 billion worth of arms, saying it contradicted a "consensus" President Xi Jinping reached with his counterpart, Donald Trump, in talks in April in Florida. Beijing's relationship with Taiwan has been frosty since President Tsai Ing-wen won election on the island by a landslide last year. China suspects that Tsai, who leads the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, wants to declare the island's formal independence, a red line for Beijing. Tsai says she wants to maintain peace with China. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birsel)
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said President Trumps son Donald Trump Jr. was not colluding with Russia when he took the meeting during the 2016 campaign with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, but was simply a political novice who didnt know any better.

You got to consider the source of the information and the recipient of the information, Christie said Tuesday in an interview with MSNBCs Nicolle Wallace, referring to the email exchange the Presidents son released last week detailing the lead-up to his meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign where he was promised compromising information on Hillary Clinton The source of the information seems to be like a music promoter. I dont think this was a guy who was necessarily sophisticated in the language of government like you and I would be. And the recipient of the information, Donald Trump Jr., who I know very well, is by no means a sophisticated political actor.

This is a guy who loves his father and got involved in politics because his father got involved, Christie continued. But I dont think Don would have gotten involved in that level any other time.

The e-mail exchange that Trump Jr. released between himself and publicist Rob Goldstone showed the Presidents son was promised very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its governments support for Mr. Trump.

The meeting was not advisable, said Christie, but he told Wallace it doesnt necessarily represent collusion.

Christie also said he does not think Trump knew of his sons meeting. Hes not the holding back type, we would have talked about it, he said of the President.
Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor who finds himself getting lambasted frequently, caught a foul ball at Tuesday nights New York Mets game. Like most things involving Chris Christie, it probably didnt end the way he was hoping.

It was a pretty slick move for Christie, catching the ball on a quick hop from his seat near home plate.If youre thinking that might have finally gotten Christie some props, the answer was  NOPE.

Once the Citi Field fans saw who caught the ball, the boos were swift and loud. Heres a clip from the broadcast of the visiting St. Louis Cardinals, who would eventually beat the Mets 5-0:

Chris Christie caught a foul ball at Citi Field, then got heavily booed and dunked on by a dopey play-by-play guy pic.twitter.com/n2GpN0EEQd  Chase Woodruff (@dcwoodruff) July 19, 2017

Nope, no love for Christie there. Hes made himself a target for some people of New York and New Jersey, going back to the Bridgegate controversy and, more recently, when he closed a New Jersey beach only to be spotted hanging there himself.

The latter provided fodder for Cardinals play-by-play man Dan McLaughlin, who responded with this zinger:

Nice to see him get from the beach here to the ballpark.

Usually when a fan catches a foul ball, its cause for celebration. In Chris Christies case, it was a reason to get owned. Twice. To Christies credit, however, he gave the ball to a kid seated near him.

Chris Christie celebrates after catching a foul ball at Tuesdays Mets game. (MLB.TV)

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Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at mikeozstew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
Cosmo DiNardo admitted to two other murders in addition to killing four young men in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Now police are trying to determine whether there's any truth to his claims.

The man suspected of killing four young men in Bucks County, Pennsylvania may have murdered before, according to his own confession. Cosmo DiNardo, 20, told police he killed other people in the years leading up to the grisly deaths of the four missing men, a source told WCAU Tuesday.

While making his confession to police, DiNardo claimed he had killed two people in Philadelphia when he was a juvenile, according to WPVI.

DiNardo confessed to his role in the deaths of Jimi Patrick, 19, Tom Meo, 21, Mark Sturgis, 22, and Dean Finocchiaro, 19, last week. He revealed the locations of all four bodies and named his cousin, Sean Kratz, as an accomplice. In exchange for the confession, prosecutors vowed not to seek the death penalty against DiNardo. As part of the confession, he admitted to the two other murders, sources told local news outlets.

Read: Everything We Know About Murders Of Four Missing Pennsylvania Men

Now, however, police want to find out if there is any truth to his claims about having killed before.

Given what he was already been accused of, its certainly a possibility, Philadephia Police Commissioner Richard Ross told WCAU Tuesday. We would be remiss if we didnt investigate further.

Philadelphia homicide detectives had not yet spoken to DiNardo as of Tuesday morning, Ross noted, and couldnt independently verify his claims or their timeline.

In order for us to lend any credence to it, we would have to talk to him directly, said Ross. When youre dealing with someone who is pathological like that, you dont know where he is coming from.

DiNardos attorneys refused to comment about his claims or the current case against him.

Both DiNardo and Kratz were charged with criminal homicide Friday. DiNardo, however, was no stranger to law enforcement at the time of his arrest. The 20-year-old had contact with police more than 30 times since 2011, a law enforcement source told ABC News. The first incident involving DiNardo and police came when he was just 14.

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And its not the first time his name has come up in relation to murder. An unidentified friend of DiNardos told the Philadelphia Inquirer last week that DiNardo had spoken of killing in the past.

Hes told me and my friends, Yeah, Ive killed people before, I just havent been caught, the source said. We literally were just like, Yeah, all right Cosmo, sure you did. No one actually thinks someones capable of this.

Read: Cosmo DiNardo Motive: Why Were Four Missing Pennsylvania Men Killed?

According to DiNardos confession, the murders of all four men took place during or after he sold them marijuana. As for any further motive, authorities have yet to figure that out. Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub said investigators were still working to discern how minor marijuana deals led to the deaths of the four young men.

Im not sure, he said, we could ever answer that question.

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The current focal point of the Russia scandal is the confab at Trump Tower, an Apalachin meeting of sorts in which at least eight agents of the Trump campaign and the Russian government met to discuss the Russians opposition research on the Clintons. The Russians apparently offered this information in exchange for the Trump campaigns willingness to hear them out on the Magnitsky Act. Donald Trump Jr. has protested that nothing ever came of this.

Over the weekend, however, the Associated Press reported on an interview it conducted with one of the Russians at the meeting. Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer, claimed that the Russian lawyer who ran the meeting, Natalya Veselnitskaya, not only promised to give the Trump campaign dirt on the Clintons, but actually presented her interlocutors with a plastic folder with printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was the flow of illicit funds to the Democrats.

Apparently, Trump Jr. was unimpressed with the contents of the plastic folder and asked Veselnitskaya whether she had more concrete evidence. The plastic folder, therefore, may have just contained propaganda. Whether Trump Jr. took the plastic folder with him or whether he left it behind in the conference room is unclear. What was clear, however, was the intent. According to the AP report, Veselnitskaya presented the contents of the documents to Trump Jr. and suggested that making the information public could help the campaign. And receiving this plastic folder, assuming it really happened, may have implicated the participants in espionage.

The word treason has been thrown around to describe this and other putative efforts by members of the Trump campaign to court and be courted by the Russian government during the 2016 election. For reasons that have been described here, here, and here, nothing anyone in the Trump campaign did or conceivably could have done would meet the constitutional definition of treason. (Even being a vice presidential candidate does not make you a constitutional law scholar.)

In the alternative, Bob Bauer and Jed Shugerman have written superb technical posts explaining how Trump Jr., Jared Kusher, Trumps senior advisor and son-in-law, and Paul Manafort, Trumps campaign manager at the time, likely violated campaign finance laws. Helen Klein Murillo and Susan Hennessey made a very clear case for their liability as accomplices under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. On Saturday, Seth Abramson wrote a Twitter thread arguing that they violated 18 U.S.C.  3, as accessories after the fact to any number of crimes the Russians may have been committing. And Kushner could also have violated 18 U.S.C.  1001 by withholding information about this meeting on his security clearance forms.

But all of these legal theories, even if they prove to have merit, seem to miss the intuitive point that those who levy treason allegations seem to be making. When considered in terms of what the Russia scandal might actually involve  Americans courting an adversarial foreign power for the purpose of influencing the outcome of a presidential election  these crimes, though felonies, seem like technicalities. What makes things like the meeting at Trump Tower troubling is not simply that members of the presidents inner circle violated federal laws in order to compromise the integrity of the electoral process. It is that they appear to have compromised the integrity of the electoral process in a way that was disloyal to the country. They made themselves fellow travelers of a foreign power that is openly hostile to America and its liberal values, even if not an enemy of the United States in the technical, constitutional sense.

At the risk of resurrecting yet another obscure part of the U.S. code, I would argue that the national security concerns that prompt right-thinking people to reach for the word treason in these circumstances have a place. But that place is not the crime of treason. It is the admittedly problematic Espionage Act of 1917. And as innocuous as it may have seemed in the moment, Veselnitskayas plastic folder may have led Trump Jr. across a serious legal line.

We tend now to think of espionage as synonymous with spying, as providing information to a foreign power or leaking state secrets. But espionage, as it was understood in the Espionage Act, is a broader and a more reciprocal legal concept. The Congress enacting the Espionage Act was as, if not more, concerned with U.S. nationals acting covertly to facilitate a foreign powers infiltration of the political system. And a key provision of that aspect of the law remains codified at 18 U.S.C.  957.

Section 957 provides:

Whoever, in aid of any foreign government, knowingly and willfully possesses or controls any property or papers used or designed or intended for use in violating any penal statute, or any of the rights or obligations of the United States under any treaty or the law of nations, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

Section 957 was first enacted under slightly different terms as  22 of Title XI of the Espionage Act. Title XIs overriding purpose was to broaden the federal governments authority to seek search warrants for national security purposes and to seize foreign political propaganda, in particular. The crime was rarely charged, though in one high-profile case during World War I, the filmmaker Robert Goldstein was sentenced to ten years in prison for releasing a movie, The Spirit of 76, that depicted British soldiers committing atrocities during the Revolutionary War. This movie, it was determined, was made in the aid of the German Government and combined with the Espionage Acts various anti-sedition provisions, was sufficient to sustain his conviction under  957.

Prior to the Supreme Courts decision in Lamont v. Postmaster,  957 was used less as a criminal charge and more as a basis on which the Post Office could interdict communist propaganda being passed through the mails. In 1938, with the passage of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, 52 Stat. 631 (1938), the Postmaster General gained broad discretion to seize foreign propaganda on the theory that the senders failure to register with the State Department constituted a violation of the criminal laws, making the receipt of what was mailed a crime under  957 and the propaganda itself seizable as criminal property. In the lead up to World War II, then-Attorney General Robert Jackson specifically endorsed this daisy-chain use of the law.

Given its overriding use in combination with the Foreign Agents Registration Act,  957 was included among the other foreign relations crimes, such as the newly famous Logan Act, when it was incorporated into the U.S. Code in 1948. Since that time, there appears to have been only one contested prosecution under  957. In 1989, an American supporter of the Provisional Irish Republican Army was charged, among other things, with developing bomb-making plans. As a body of insurgents within a country with which the United States is at peace, the Provisional Irish Republican Army constituted a foreign government for the purposes of Title 18 and the bomb-maker was convicted. Alan Dershowitz brought an unsuccessful appeal against his conviction under  957 on First Amendment grounds, but the First Circuit rejected the contention that the law was unconstitutionally overbroad.

In thinking about what transpired in Trump Tower,  957 would seem to fit the known or reasonably suspected facts. Trump Jr.s emails confirm that Natalia Veselnitskaya was known to be an agent of the Russian government. It appears based on the current reporting that neither Veselnitskaya nor any of her confederates were registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which in the context of their explicit efforts to lobby against the Magnitsky Act, may have violated various penal statutes. And if Trump Jr. or one of the other American participants in the meeting took the final and crucial step of actually taking the plastic folder, he would have taken possession and control of papers that were the ostensible quid pro quo for his willingness to be lobbied about the Magnitsky Act. Even if the documents inside the plastic folder contained nothing but unsubstantiated rumors and even if he then threw it in the trash after he left the meeting, he still might have violated the Espionage Act. And even if the plastic folder was rejected as a nothingburger, the American participants in this meeting might still be liable for attempting or conspiring to violate the Espionage Act.

Isnt this just another technicality though? What is the big deal if he took a handout at a meeting? And isnt the century old Espionage Act rather dubious to begin with? In some respects, the answer to all three of those questions is yes. The First Amendment and overbreadth problems with the Espionage Act are significant, and it is unclear how the current Supreme Court, with its robust free speech jurisprudence, would evaluate them.

That said, the willingness to take the plastic folder is not as innocuous as it might first appear. The plastic folder is precisely the kind of paper or property that Congress had in mind when it passed 957. Espionage, like treason, is a crime of loyalty, and the evil it attempts to thwart is the covert insinuation of a foreign powers interest into the American political process. Even if the contents of the plastic folder were vague, ambiguous and made no sense, Trump Jr. would still have accepted propaganda from an unregistered foreign agent. Propaganda marked foreign propaganda bears a truth in advertising. And for that reason, it is presumptively less effective at swaying public opinion than information that comes from an ostensibly loyal source, such as a Presidential campaign. In the 1980s, the Supreme Court sustained this truth-in-advertising rationale for the labeling of foreign political propaganda, though reasonable First Amendment minds can disagree. And the original intent of this part of the Espionage Act was to prevent foreign governments from disseminating propaganda through American cutouts.

The willingness to knowingly and willfully possess or control the plastic folder also speaks to something deeper. It is one thing to aid a foreign power, even a foreign power that is adversarial and intent on violating the law. Doing so may violate political norms, but probably not laws. It is another thing to have something tangible in your hands.

The act of possession serves the same purpose in the Espionage Act as the overt act requirement does in the conspiracy statute. It is a clear line that can be identifiably crossed. It prevents the law from sweeping too broadly, from prosecuting mere inchoate desires that are untethered to an identifiable criminal act. It is not espionage to be favorably disposed to a foreign power. Nor is it espionage to welcome the assistance a foreign power may independently provide. It is espionage, however, to do a hand-off.

Will the facts ultimately show that Trump Jr., Kushner, or Manafort could be charged under the Espionage Act? Would such a conviction be sustained against a First Amendment challenge? There is no way to know. And while the reporting thus far has been damning, that may be a consequence of the sources on which journalists have been forced to rely. It is quite possible that innocent explanations could come to light. But if the confab at Trump Tower feels to you like treason, that is probably because it may actually be espionage.

Photo credit: John Moore/Getty Images
Yahoo News photo illustration; photos: AP, Getty

Yahoo News continuing coverage of the Republican efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare comes in the latest Health Care Declassified. Well combine our own reporting with the best insights from around the Internet to give you the latest on the future of health care in America.

President Trump scolded GOP senators for their inaction on health care reform Wednesday, saying they should not leave for the August recess without repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.

We can repeal, but we should repeal and replace, and we shouldnt leave town until this is complete and the bill is on my desk, Trump told the senators, who ate lunch at the White House a day after the latest effort to undo the ACA appears to have flopped.

Related slideshow: Protesters across the country oppose GOPs health care plan >>>

Trump has taken at least two contradictory stances on the matter in recent days, advocating at times for a straight repeal of the 2010 law without an immediate replacement, and on other occasions telling Republicans to allow the ACA to collapse on its own, bringing Democrats to the table to fashion a replacement.

On Wednesday, Trump appeared to change course again, demanding a bill to simultaneously repeal and replace Obamacare. This was the approach pursued by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., for the last several months, until it collapsed on Monday with the defection of four members of his caucus. McConnell then announced a plan to vote next week on a repeal-only measure, which also seemed likely to fall short. He did not have an immediate public response to Trumps latest position.

President Trump speaks to members of the media before having lunch with service members in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, July 18, 2017. (Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

Trump did not specify what form the replacement should take or indicate how he expected Senate Republicans to overcome the seemingly insurmountable obstacles they have faced in trying to write a bill that could win the support it needs to pass.

Trump also attempted to browbeat senators into supporting him on the issue. One of those barbs was directed at Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., who came out against McConnells original bill and has remained noncommittal on its successors.

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He wants to remain a senator, doesnt he? Trump said of Heller.

He said that senators who voted against bringing a bill to the floor for a vote would in effect be supporting Obamacare.

Any senator who votes against starting debate is really telling America that youre fine with Obamacare, Trump told the senators.

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GOP governors come out against latest proposal

Ohio Gov. John Kasich speaks during a news conference with Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper at the National Press Club in Washington on June 27, 2017, about Republican legislation overhauling the Obama health care law. (Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)

As Senate Republicans struggle to repeal Obamacare, they face not only unanimous Democratic opposition but also criticism from an unexpected source: Republican governors.

Five Republican governors signed a bipartisan letter to Congress on Tuesday opposing the proposal to repeal the ACA without immediately replacing it  the plan that was on the table that day but was possibly superseded as of Wednesday morning.

Republican governors John Kasich of Ohio, Larry Hogan of Maryland, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, Phil Scott of Vermont and Brian Sandoval of Nevada all signed the memo, which argued that a repeal-only plan would create more instability in health care markets.

Congress should work to make health insurance more affordable by controlling costs and stabilizing the market, and we are pleased to see a growing number of senators stand up for this approach, the letter said.

Kasich has been a longtime critic of the previous health care proposals that would slash funding for Medicaid and roll back the expansion of that program, which was a hallmark of the ACA. As governor, Kasich opted to expand Medicaid, a controversial move with some Buckeye State Republicans.

Saying Senate Republicans should begin to work with their Democratic colleagues to construct a new plan, Kasich told MSNBCs Morning Joe on Wednesday that he would like to see a plan that stabilizes the current system and also preserves care for those who already have it.

Kasich has said he had frequent discussions about the Republican bill with his states Republican senator, Rob Portman, R-Ohio, urging him to oppose it. In Nevada, Sandoval has been widely viewed as a key factor in Republican Sen. Dean Hellers opposition to the first draft of the Republican bill.

Vice President Mike Pence went to Rhode Island last week to lobby support for the bill at the National Governors Association conference in Providence.

Vice President Mike Pence waves goodbye as he wraps up an address to a NGA session titled Collaborating to Create Tomorrows Global Economy on the second day of the National Governors Association meeting on July 14, 2017, in Providence, R.I. (Photo: Stephan Savoia/AP)

Pence, along with Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma, told governors that under the Senates version of the bill, states could use funds to move more low-income people onto private plans. But this argument did not win over skeptics like Kasich and Sandoval, and drew opposition from more conservative governors.

I am talking with [Arizona] Sens. [Jeff] Flake and [John] McCain, and Im telling them what my opinion is, and Im letting them know that I dont want to see any Arizonan have the rug pulled out from underneath them, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey told a local radio station.

Sandoval was the first Republican governor to expand Medicaid in 2012, and joined Heller in a joint press conference last month to oppose the bill as it stood then. He has been critical of potential loss of those funds, which boosted Nevadas insurance coverage rates from among the lowest in the country to the middle of the pack.

Im greatly concerned and very protective of the expansion population. They are living healthier and happier lives as a result of their receiving coverage, and for them to lose that at this point would be very hurtful for them, Sandoval told CNN from Providence.

With that plan off the table for now, Kasich said, his colleagues are ready to join the conversation about bolstering the nations health care system.

The best next step is for members of both parties to ignore the fear of criticism that can come from reaching across the aisle and put pencil to pad on these and other ideas that repair health care in real, sustainable ways, Kasich wrote in a New York Times op-ed Tuesday. America needs it, and I know that a bipartisan group of governors, including myself, stands ready to help in any way we can to provide an affordable, sustainable and responsible system of health care for the American people.

 Andrew Bahl

_____

Single-payer proposal gains support as GOP proposals collapse

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., speaks during a hearing of the House Judiciary subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 4, 2017. (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP)

As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnells backup plan to repeal the ACA without a replacement crumbled on Tuesday after losing the support of four members of his own party, Democrats rallied around a policy thats nearly the exact opposite of McConnells  single-payer health care.

The bill, H.R.676, now has 115 cosponsors in the House and support from the majority of the chambers Democratic members. The bill has been gathering momentum since April, when it gained 32 co-sponsors, and it is winning converts as more lawmakers view it as an acceptable alternative to the Republicans various versions of the Better Care Reconciliation Act.

Passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act [i.e. Obamacare] was a step in the right direction, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the single-payer bills original sponsor, said in a statement after reintroducing it in January. The bill to establish a nationwide single-payer health care system was first introduced to Congress in 2003. It has provided health insurance to millions of our nations uninsured and eliminated many of the worst practices of the private health insurance industry. Rather than repealing it and taking a step back, we should build on that progress by expanding Medicare to All.

Additionally, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said embracing single payer was the next step for her party. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. have also expressed their support for the legislation in recent weeks. Even former Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore has spoken out in favor of single-payer health care.

The private sector has not shown any ability to provide good, affordable health care for all, Gore said at a promotional event for his new climate change documentary at Borough of Manhattan Community College on Tuesday. I believe we ought to have single-payer health care.

This is not the first time lawmakers have tried to bring single-payer health care to the U.S. The California State Senate passed a bill last month to create a single-payer health care system for all residents of the state that is now headed to the state assembly for consideration. A referendum on a proposed single-payer system in Colorado made it to ballots in November, but was rejected by voters.

Currently, the United States is one of the few developed nations in the world that does not provide government-funded health care for all its residents.

The bill to establish a nationwide single payer health care system was first introduced to Congress in 2003.  Taylor Rogers

_____

Photo op: GOP lawmaker jumps the tracks to avoid reporters

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., jumps over the Senate subway tracks to evade reporters as he arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday. Morans leap follows the collapse of the GOP health care bill, in which he played a key role. (Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, announced their opposition to the bill together on Monday night, which brought the total number of GOP senators opposed to the bill to four  and effectively stopped the legislation in its tracks.

There are serious problems with Obamacare.  We must now start fresh with an open legislative process, Moran wrote in a Monday statement. Reporters seeking more comment were left waiting at the platform.  Julia Munslow

_____

In wake of health care bill collapse, protests against GOP plan continue

A minister belonging to a group demanding that Congress to reject the Trump administrations budget proposals and health care bill is arrested during a demonstration in the Russell Senate Building on Capitol Hill in Washington on July 18, 2017. (Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

Protesters are still pressuring lawmakers to vote against legislation that would dismantle Obamacare, even after the Senate health care bill tanked.

A group of clergy members was arrested at the Capitol Tuesday during a protest against the federal budget cuts and the efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. The pastors were arrested as they sang and prayed in the Russell Senate Office building.

I have no doubt that even if the Republicans cannot repeal and replace [Obamacare], they will make every effort through the budget process to slash Medicare and leave millions without health care, Rev. Cynthia Hale, one of the protesters, said at a press conference in the Capitol, adding that there is a moral obligation to ensure that every Americans life and health are safeguarded and protected.

Even though the Senate bill was withdrawn after four GOP senators announced their opposition to the legislation, activists are still pressuring their senators to vote against any measures that would dismantle Obamacare.

Activists protested the idea of dismantling Obamacare Tuesday, with demonstrations at the offices of Republican Sens. Dean Heller of Nevada and Marco Rubio of Florida.

We want to encourage Dean Heller to remain steadfast  hes already come out and said hed vote no, but we want to keep the pressure on, one protester told KTNV.  Julia Munslow
President Donald Trump: AP

In a rare move, Donald Trump has conceded defeat  admitting that Republican efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare, one of his key campaign promises, have been unsuccessful.

In the days marking the end of his first six months as President, competing interests of Senate Republicans on healthcare came to a head, with multiple legislators announcing that they could not support the healthcare overhaul proposed by the Republican leadership.

Along with Mr Trump, several Republicans had ran on campaign platforms that called for repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare  a pillar of former President Barack Obamas legacy.

But rather than taking any responsibility for the failure of Republican efforts, Mr Trump still blamed Democrats and other Republicans for the loss on healthcare and focused on the faults of Obamacare law rather than internal party politics.

For seven years, I've been hearing repeal and replace from Congress, and I've been hearing it loud and strong, Mr Trump told reporters on Tuesday. And then when we finally get a chance to repeal and replace, they don't take advantage of it. So, that's disappointing.

So Im very  I would say Im disappointed in what took place, Mr Trump continued. Well go on and well win  were going to win on taxes, were going to win on infrastructure, and lots of other things that were doing.

Weve had a lot of victories, but we havent had a victory on healthcare. Were disappointed.

Mr Trump said that his plan was now "to let Obamacare fail, it will be a lot easier."

And I think we're probably in that position where we'll let Obamacare fail, the President said. We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We'll let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us.

About 20 million people gained health insurance coverage through Obamacare. But Republicans say that it has driven up premiums and forced consumers to buy insurance they do not want and cannot afford.

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Despite consistent criticism of the ACA, Republicans have been unable to agree on what a suitable replacement for the law should look like, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell struggled to gain support for his repeal and replacement bill.

Moderate senators worried that millions of people would lose their insurance following cuts to Medicaid  a healthcare programme for the poor  while conservatives asserted that the bill did not do enough to erase Mr Obama's signature domestic legislation.

Mr Trump was dealt a surprising blow when  while at a dinner on Monday night with Republicans discussing healthcare strategy  two other Republicans, Jerry Moran of Kansas and Mike Lee of Utah, declared they would oppose the Senate healthcare measure, effectively killing the bill.

Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky, a conservative, and Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate had already said they would vote against beginning debate on the legislation. With a majority of 52 senators in the 100-member chamber, the Senates Republican leadership could only afford to lose two yea votes and still pass the bill.

I was very surprised when the two folks came out last night, because we thought they were in fairly good shape, but they did, Mr Trump said.

After it became clear that he did not have the votes to pass his healthcare bill, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate would soon vote to take up a measure to repeal major parts of Obamacare, with it taking effect later.

Mr McConnell said the bill closely resembles legislation passed by the Senate in 2015  but vetoed by then-President Obama  which delayed repeal for two years in order to give legislators more time to come up with a replacement.

Mr McConnell told reporters that the two-year delay would give us the opportunity to work out a complete replacement on a bipartisan basis with our Democratic colleagues, appearing to show a move toward bipartisanship that Democrats and many Republicans have been calling for. Democrats had accused the Senate's Republican leadership of writing their first healthcare bill behind closed doors.

However, a straight Obamacare repeal could lead to 32 million people losing their health insurance, according to an analysis of the Republicans 2015 repeal legislation by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO had predicted that the previous Senate healthcare bill, released last month, would increase the number of people without health insurance by 22 million by 2026.

Less than 15 hours after Mr McConnell had announced his new plan, Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska immediately declared that they could not vote for a plan that repealed Obamacare without having a replacement ready.

In an extraordinary attack on her own partys plan, Ms Capito she rejected it because I did not come to Washington to hurt people.

Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer has also asserted that passing a repeal without a replacement plan would be a disaster to America's healthcare system.

Since Mr McConnell still needs 50 votes to move the legislation forward, the three female senators opposition appears to have already killed the bill.

But in a news conference following reports that the repeal plan would be dead on arrival, Mr McConnell expressed optimism, saying that sometime in the near future we will have a vote on the repeal of Obamacare.
By April Benshosan

Deja vu anyone?

Is it safe to eat at Chipotle? That's the question that's been on the minds of consumers since 2015s e. Coli outbreak. And now, after quite a few Chipotle frequenters in Virginia reported getting sick post gobbling up Mexican grub, the fast-casual chain has closed a Sterling, Virginia restaurant.

How Many People Got Sick?

Eight reports on iwaspoisoned.com, a site where diners can upload their personal horror stories, noted that about 13 customers fell ill after dining there on either Friday or Saturday.

What Are they Sick With?

Customers reported experiencing painful norovirus symptoms ranging from severe stomach discomfort, nausea, dizziness, and dehydration to vomiting and diarrheawhich even drove two victims to the hospital.

How Is Chipotle Responding To This?

"We are working with health authorities to understand what the cause may be and to resolve the situation as quickly as possible," Jim Marsden, Chipotle's executive director of food safety, told Business Insider. "The reported symptoms are consistent with norovirus. Norovirus does not come from our food supply, and it is safe to eat at Chipotle." Marsden also added that the illnesses were confined to just the single Sterling restaurant and that Chipotle plans to sanitize the location and reopen it on Tuesday. Contrary to those claims, iwaspoisoned.com users in other states like New York and Florida more recently reported similar symptoms as well.

Is It Safe to Eat At Chipotle?

So: is Chipotle safe to dine in? Since 2015, the company has gone to great lengths to sanitize its locations, and as a result, the official Eat This, Not That! recommendation gives dining there the green light. This recent discovery doesn't change our opinionyet. Well keep you posted about whether or not this reported outbreak spreads beyond Virginia. And in the meantime, click here for Every Dish At ChipotleRanked!





MORE FROM EAT THIS, NOT THAT!
Tbilisi (AFP) - The presidents of Ukraine and Georgia on Tuesday agreed to work together to further their ambitions to join NATO and the European Union, in defiance of threats from former master Russia.

Both of the ex-Soviet states have been torn apart by conflicts with Moscow-backed separatists as they seek to wriggle out from under the Kremlin's thumb and shift towards the West.

"We agreed to demand jointly and even more actively Georgia's and Ukraine's integration in the European and Euro-Atlantic space," Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili told the press.

The two countries' "independence and democracy face the very same threats," said Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko in Tbilisi, adding that they "will coordinate steps" in their quest for EU and NATO membership.

Kiev has been locked for over three years in a conflict with Kremlin-backed rebels who have carved out their own fiefdoms in the east of the country at the cost of some 10,000 lives.

Russia invaded Georgia in a brief war in 2008 and has recognised two separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent.

Both Kiev and Tbilisi have made joining US-led military bloc NATO and the European Union key long-term objectives.

However, there seems little prospect of either becoming members any time soon as Western allies are fearful of fuelling tensions with Moscow.
Photo credit: Ford

From Road & Track

As anyone who has ever driven one knows, the dual-clutch transmission in many Ford products has issues. The cars often slam into gear or feel like they are slipping. Repeated trips to the service department of the Ford dealer can result in nothing more than a reflash of the transmission control, which has little or no effect on the transmissions performance.

The good news is that a class action suit which is nearing completion offers what appears to be some pretty good relief for current and former owners of these cars. First, these cars refers to 2012  2016 Ford Focus and 2011  2016 Ford Fiestas equipped with the PowerShift dual clutch transmissions. If you own or have owned one of these cars, you may have already received a notice in the mail of the pending class action settlement.

The proposed settlement is 148 pages long so this will, by necessity, only cover the highlights of the agreement. But those highlights are impressive.

For example, one of the biggest complaints owners had about these cars was that the dealers kept reflashing the transmission controls without any noticeable improvement. If your vehicles transmission was reflashed more than twice, this settlement will get you paid for your inconvenience. Anywhere from $50 to $600 will be given to you simply to compensate you for that inconvenience.

Did the Ford dealer replace a bunch of parts on your transmission to no avail? You may be entitled to as much as $2,325 simply for the trouble you went through. Did you pay for any of these repairs yourself? Ford may reimburse you for those repairs as well.

The proposed settlement also includes a provision for an arbitration process for those who feel their PowerShift cars are lemons. And while arbitration is not always a preferable venue for consumers, this process specifically allows for the payment of attorneys fees should you choose to hire an attorney to walk you through the process.

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And if your car does not qualify under your states lemon laws specifically, the arbitrators will be empowered to order the buybacks of some of these vehicles so long as the transmission remains defective. This notion is quite valuable: I cannot tell you how many times people have called my office complaining of vehicles with transmission failures which were simply timed badly. They did not happen soon enough or often enough to qualify under the lemon law. And while lawsuits were still possible for these consumers under other legal theories, those can be much harder to pursue. That Ford has agreed to this particular remedy for consumers is telling.

As I mentioned above, there is more  much more  to this settlement and I urge you to study it before making any decisions. But you need to do a few things. First, watch your mailbox and read all notices you get about this. If you are a member of the class and you do nothing, you will remain in the class and the case will lock in your legal rights and remedies without your input. If you want to opt out, you can do that but it requires you to be proactive. And remember that this applies to former owners of these cars as well. You got rid of the car because of all the trouble with the transmission? You may still be entitled to compensation.

For more information, visit the website set up for the settlement. www.fordtransmissionsettlement.com. You can also call (844) 540-6011.

Whatever you do, do not call the court. And the settlement is not final yet. There is a hearing set for October 2, 2017. If all goes according to plan, the settlement will be finalized and blessed by the court. After that is when you can finally get compensated for having put up with that transmission for all those years.

Steve Lehto is a writer and attorney from Michigan. He specializes in Lemon Law and frequently writes about cars and the law. His most recent books include Preston Tucker and His Battle to Build the Car of Tomorrow, and Dodge Daytona and Plymouth Superbird: Design, Development, Production and Competition. He also has a podcast where he talks about these things.



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Frontier Airlines is a low-cost carrier based in Denver, Colorado, and its biggest hub is at Denver International Airport. But the airline, which was started in 1994, announced Tuesday that they will expand to 21 new destinations and add 85 new routes.

The move comes as the company prepares for its initial public offering, according to the Denver Post Tuesday. Frontier will offer the second largest number of destinations from the Denver airport. The airline competes with United Airlines and Southwest Airlines, both of whom run large hubs in Denver.

READ: Ann Coulter Continues To Tweet Against Delta Airlines: Twitter Asks Her To 'Get Over It'

Customers will benefit not only from the broad new selection of nonstop routes, but our growing network will provide more than 1,000 new connecting route options, Frontier CEO Barry Biffle said in a statement. By taking advantage of our natural share of connecting passengers, we can offer our low fares to even more of America. This is particularly important through our largest hub and our home in Denver.

The company adds four California destinations, including Fresno, Palm Springs, San Jose and Ontario. They also add two Florida destinations, Jacksonville and Pensacola; two Oklahoma destinations, Tulsa and Oklahoma City; and other destinations such as El Paso, Texas and Spokane, Washington.

The company will also be adding routes to its existing destinations that include Providence, Rhode Island and Tampa, Florida.

The company expects to expand its fleet to 76 jets by 2018. At the end of 2016, the company had 63 jets.

The new destinations and routes will begin in the fall and winter and the company will offer promotional prices to advertise the expansions, with some seats going for as low as $39.

READ: American Airlines Crew Forced Passenger To Sit Next To Masturbating Man, Woman Claims

In spite of its expansion plans, the company faced a public relations nightmare last winter. A December storm in 2016 caused major disruptions to the airline and caused many passengers to miss their holiday destinations. Frontiers chief operating officer and Vice President of Customer Experience both stepped down after the incident.

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The company earned $200 million in profit last year on $1.7 billion in revenue while carrying 14.9 million passengers, according to the Wall Street Journal in March. The company looks to compete with other discount carriers Spirit Airlines and Allegiant Travel.

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A mother comforts her son Palestinian boy Mohammad Shanty, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, sits next to his mother after receiving oxygen therapy during a power cut in their family house, which is equipped with a backup battery-powered system, in Gaza City, July 2, 2017. (Photo: Mohammed Salem/Reuters)

Ritta al-Jalees doesnt care whos to blame for the deteriorating state of health care in Gaza. All she wants is to ensure her three sons get the help they need to breathe.

The boys, aged nine months and six and seven years, all of whom suffer from cystic fibrosis, are getting weaker because Gaza is running out of the drugs needed to treat the inherited lung disease and because of cuts to power for oxygen pumps and ventilators.

I blame all sides, said Jalees, a mother of six, as she held her youngest at Al-Rantissi Hospital for Children in Gaza City. Are these children at fault?

Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007 after Hamas forces seized control of the territory following a brief civil war with security forces loyal to Mahmoud Abbas, the Western-backed Palestinian president based in the West Bank. Egypt, at odds with Hamas, also maintains a blockade.

Although the Israeli blockage has eased somewhat in recent years, a new stage in the struggle between Abbas and the Islamist Hamas is turning the screws on the enclave afresh.

In what is seen as the latest step in an effort to force Hamas to relinquish its control of Gaza, Abbas in June reduced the payments the PA makes to Israel for electricity it supplies to the territory.

The resulting cuts mean that Gazas two million people now have only 3 to 4 hours of power a day, forcing hospitals and other medical facilities to rely chiefly on generators and expensive fuel, while many private homes just go without.

Hamas says that Abbas restricted transfers of medicine to Gaza in March, accusing Hamas of failing to reimburse the PA for its purchases, and cut the salaries of its officials in May.

The spokesman for Gazas Hamas-run health ministry, Ashraf Al-Qidra, said PA shipments of medicine, especially drugs to treat cancer and cystic fibrosis, have dropped 35 percent since late March.

We believe the actions of the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli occupation together are undermining the entire health service system in Gaza, Qidra told Reuters.

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Hamas also accuses the PA of delaying the transfer of hundreds of seriously ill patients to Israel or the Israeli-occupied West Bank, actions which it says has resulted in 13 deaths since April.

The PA denies the allegations and accuses Israel of holding back permits. Israel denies the allegations.

Whoever is at fault, a U.N. report released last week said power shortages are deepening a humanitarian crisis, with hospitals in a precarious condition, water shortages increasing and raw sewage being dumped into the Mediterranean because treatment plants arent functioning.

The two million residents of Gaza are suffering through a humanitarian crisis that is entirely human-made, the report said. It represents a complete failure of all parties to uphold their fundamental human rights obligations, including the inalienable right to life. (Reuters)

Photography by Mohammed Salem/Reuters

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West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito strongly condemned Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnells plan to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan, announcing she could not support the former without the latter.

As I have said before, I did not come to Washington to hurt people. For months, I have expressed reservations about the direction of the bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, Capito said in a statement Tuesday. My position on this issue is driven by its impact on West Virginians, she continued. With that in mind, I cannot vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians.

McConnell said in a statement Monday night that since the Obamacare repeal bill did not have the necessary votes, the Senate would instead take up the debate and vote to repeal Obamacare. Capito said in a tweet she couldnt do that unless replacement legislation was proposed.

MORE: I will only vote to proceed to repeal legislation if I am confident there is a replacement plan that addresses my concerns.  Shelley Moore Capito (@SenCapito) July 18, 2017

Capito was not one of the three Senators who refused to support the Senates revised version of the House health care overhaul bill, leading McConnell to conclude he did not have the votes on a motion to proceed. Capito, however, never announced she would support the bill and came out against the original version, expressing reservations about the lack of funding for substance abuse recovery programs and the reduction in Medicaid spending.

I have serious concerns about how we continue to provide affordable care to those who have benefited from West Virginias decision to expand Medicaid, especially in light of the growing opioid crisis, Capito said in her statement Tuesday.
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenyans hoping to watch a televised debate between vice-presidential candidates in next month's election were left disappointed on Monday when only one of six meant to be on stage was left fielding questions alone for an hour. Surrounded by five empty podiums, Eliud Muthiora Kariara, a former banker turned running mate to independent presidential candidate Japhet Kavinga Kaluyu, answered questions posed by two moderators and the audience. Why the other candidates were not present was unclear although some had already voiced objections to the debate format. Broadcasters had planned to have six minor candidates, including Kariara, take the stage first, with the front-runners from the two biggest parties facing off separately later. A letter signed by the six and released on Sunday had said they intended to show up as long as all eight vice-presidential candidates would be debating simultaneously. "We made it clear that we shall take part at 8pm Debates that was to bring all candidates together," Ekuru Aukot, presidential candidate for Third Way Alliance, said on Twitter to explain why his running mate did not take part. He also rejected reports in local media that some candidates had arrived late and not been allowed in. "This is documented. We arrived in time," he said. Kenya's current deputy president, William Ruto, said on Twitter that he had not been given details of the event. "I am surprised no one has engaged me on the debate. Courtesy demands that date, time, rules of engagement would have been made available," Ruto tweeted on Sunday. But Debate Media Limited, the alliance of broadcasters that organised the debate, said in a statement that all the campaigns had been informed. It noted that one minor candidate had even lodged a court case insisting he should share the podium with the two larger parties. "The suggestion that the campaigns did not know about these debates is therefore at best dishonest," the statement said. Kenya will also choose legislators and local representatives in the Aug. 8 polls, which will see incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta challenged by veteran opposition leader Raila Odinga, the head of the National Super Alliance (NASA). Odinga also ran in 2007, when a disputed presidential poll sparked violence that killed 1,200 people, and in a peaceful election in 2013. Both major parties have published manifestos, although Kenyan voters have often split along ethnic lines in previous elections. According to polling firm IPSOS, the ruling party and NASA are likely to take about 90 percent of the vote, while none of the six independent presidential candidates is polling above 1 percent. [nL4N1K3443] Vice-presidential candidate Kariara used his unexpected place in the spotlight on Monday to call for leadership "to take Kenya to the next level". "There has been so much talk. What Kenya needs is action," he said. (Reporting by George Obulutsa; Editing by Katharine Houreld and Catherine Evans)
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri said on Tuesday the army would carry out an operation in an area of the border with Syria that has been a base of operations for militants including jihadist groups. Speaking in parliament, Hariri described the operation planned for the Juroud Arsal area as carefully studied, the National News Agency reported. The government had given the army the "freedom" to act, he added. Juroud Arsal, a barren area in the mountains between Syria and Lebanon, has been a base of operations for insurgents fighting in the Syrian civil war, including jihadists from Islamic State and the group formerly known as the Nusra Front. Rights group Amnesty International urged the army not to use excessive force in the operation in an area where many Syrian refugees live in crowded camps. Speculation has been building that the powerful Lebanese group Hezbollah and the Syrian military are set to mount a major operation against the insurgents on the Syrian side of the frontier. Earlier this month, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said time was running out for Syrian militants along the border near Arsal to reach deals with Syrian authorities, saying it was "high time to end the threat of militant groups in Arsal". Hariri however said "there is no coordination between the Lebanese and Syrian armies". A security source said the Lebanese army, a recipient of U.S. and British military aid, had increased its deployment in the Arsal area in the last 24 hours. The source said the militants in the Juroud Arsal area were estimated to number around 3,000, two-thirds of them belonging to Islamic State or the group formerly known as the Nusra Front, and the remainder members of other rebel groups. The Arsal area is home to thousands of Syrian refugees who were recently caught up in raids on camps as security forces searched for militants. Hariri said in a statement later on Tuesday that the army was separately investigating the "deaths of Syrians in Arsal", an apparent reference to the deaths in army custody of several Syrians earlier this month. In 2014, the Arsal area was the scene of one of the most serious spillovers of the Syrian war into Lebanon, when jihadists briefly overran the town of Arsal. The Iran-backed Shi'ite group Hezbollah has provided Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with crucial military support in the war, a role that has drawn heavy criticism from its Lebanese opponents including Hariri. (Writing by Tom Perry and John Davison; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt and Hugh Lawson)
London (AFP) - Distressed over a rise in acid attacks, some 200 delivery drivers protested in front of the British parliament on Tuesday, demanding the government takes action.

"Most of the time we get attacked or our bikes are stolen. I don't feel safe doing my work. Yesterday I felt threatened because some boys wanted to attack me," Musa, a young UberEATS driver told AFP.

The protest was organised after five people, including delivery driver Jabed Hussain, were attacked with acid in the space of just 90 minutes on the night of July 13.

Two teenagers aged 15 and 16 were subsequently arrested.

"I've been working for Deliveroo for 4 years. I don't feel safe to go on my bike. I don't know what I'm going to do for a living," Hussain, who suffered slight burns to the chest, told AFP.

"The government needs to take proper actions. There needs to be more police in the streets," he added.

London has seen a sharp rise in acid attacks in recent years.

Some experts have suggested that criminal gangs may be switching from carrying knives to acid because it could lower the risk of prosecution.

On Monday, MPs debated the best way to tackle the issue, with many backing tougher sentences and the introduction of a minimum age requirement to buy certain products.
(PHILADELPHIA)  A pot dealer who confessed to killing four men on his familys Pennsylvania farm also claimed to have killed two people in Philadelphia, but the citys police commissioner called the information sketchy.

City detectives are looking through their files to check on the claims made by 20-year-old Cosmo DiNardo, but they have not had a chance to question him, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross said Tuesday.

We have to talk to him directly in order to have a starting point, Ross said. Dealing with it third-hand is virtually impossible.

DiNardo was charged last week in neighboring Bucks County with four counts of first-degree murder in the case of four missing men whose remains were found on his parents farm. He also claimed that he killed a man and a woman in Philadelphia years ago but did not know the names of those victims, Ross said.

Philadelphia police said Bucks County authorities are still investigating DiNardos statements. The Bucks County district attorney declined to comment beyond court papers released last week, which dont mention the Philadelphia claims.

DiNardo told authorities that he lured the four men to his familys 90-acre farm under the guise of marijuana transactions before killing them there, according to the court papers. One man was last seen July 5, and the other three vanished two days later.

The bodies of three of the men were placed in an oil tank that was converted into a cooker that DiNardo called the pig roaster, according to court papers. He doused them with gasoline and lit them on fire before burying them more than 12 feet deep, investigators said.

Authorities found the body of the fourth man, 19-year-old Loyola University of Maryland student Jimi Taro Patrick, in a separate grave on a remote part of the farm after DiNardo told police where he buried him.

In exchange for that information, prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty.

DiNardos 20-year-old cousin Sean Kratz is also charged in three of the killings.

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Both he and DiNardo are being held in jail without bail.

DiNardos lawyers say he is remorseful, and he told reporters last week that he was sorry.

Kratz doesnt have an attorney, according to online court records. His mother declined to comment on the accusations last week.

The other victims are 19-year-old Dean Finocchiaro, 22-year-old Mark Sturgis and 21-year-old Tom Meo.

Sturgis family has hired a law firm to investigate whether other people besides DiNardo and Kratz are civilly responsible for the deaths, according to a statement from the firm.
Striker play as important in the Premier League as it is anywhere else in Europe.

Which isnt some expression of dutiful whimsy, mind you. Aesthetically pleasing, Englands top flight often isnt.

It prides itself on brutish roughhousing uninterrupted by the weeks-long winter breaks embedded into nearly every other leagues schedule. And minus one or two gargantuan clubs bursting at the seams with starpower that render other league title races formalities, the Premier League has had four different champions the past five seasons.

Working in such a compact pivot, manufacturing goals out of nothing and finishing the chances you get take on added importance. And Englands biggest clubs know it.

The latest move to that effect is Chelsea agreeing to a fee for Alvaro Morata, whos spent most of his senior career as a surplus good at Real Madrid and Juventus. But the 24-year-old Spaniard is undeniably talented, a striker who can hold up play, is good in the air and moves well in tight spaces. Those skills will serve him well in the Premier League, and Spain has already started placing an emphasis on him in major international matches.

Assuming Morata passes his medical, his signing also clears the way for Chelsea to sell disgruntled striker Diego Costa. A major factor in the clubs two league titles the past three years, Costa has nonetheless been told hes not part of the future at Stamford Bridge.

Costa clashed with manager Antonio Conte a number of times last season, and the Italian manager has a prior relationship with Morata, having signed him at Juventus before he left to take charge of the Italian national team.

Chelsea may not recoup Moratas reported 60 million price tag, but the Blues will surely make a ton of money back thanks to Costas fee, so its a good bit of business.

Given whats already happened this summer, its also necessary.

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Englands other major clubs have fortified their attacks with big signings. Arsenal appears to have finally solved its interminable search for an elite striker by paying 46.5 million for Lyons Alexandre Lacazette, whose quickness, passing and finishing could tilt the Gunners back toward the top of the table.

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Manchester United splashed a ton of money for Everton striker Romelu Lukaku, a sturdy, reliable goal-scorer whose abilities may not be in demand everywhere but click perfectly into place with Jose Mourinhos team at Old Trafford.

Going back even further to the January transfer window, Manchester City might have plundered the next Brazilian star in 20-year-old Gabriel Jesus, a clinical dynamo whose work rate and finishing had him looking like the real deal before a broken metatarsal in his right foot stunted the momentum.

As for Tottenham and Liverpool, the other teams in last years top six? Theyre blessed with gifted playmakers and scorers all over the attacking third.

So Chelsea needs Morata to be as good as promised. The Blues bought midfielder Tiemoue Bakayoko from Monaco earlier this month, and hell pair with NGolo Kante to provide Chelsea a constantly disruptive midfield engine that will supply Morata and the other attackers with chances going forward.

If Morata converts a healthy amount of those chances, Chelsea will be favored to lift the Premier League trophy again next May.

And if he doesnt? The other clubs have positioned themselves to poach.

More soccer coverage from FC Yahoo:

 Explaining the $97 million Manchester United sees in Lukaku

 Juventus is selling Bonucci to a rival for no apparent reason

 Does the Lacazette signing indicate Arsenal is changing its thinking?
Tens of thousands of troops are on the move from the Baltic to the Black Sea, as NATO and Russia open up a series of massive military exercises the size of which the continent hasnt seen since the Cold War.

Both sides claim the drills, which involve aircraft, warships, tanks and artillery, are purely defensive in nature. But it is clear the exercises are also meant to show off new capabilities and technologies, and display not only the strength of alliances, but how swiftly troops and heavy equipment can move to squash a threat at the frontier.

The most ambitious undertaking on the NATO side is Saber Guardian 17, a series of over a dozen distinct battle drills being carried out by 25,000 troops from 20 countries moving across Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

The scenario presented to ground commanders is that a technologically advanced land force has pushed into NATO territory and is threatening the alliance as a whole. The drills include air defense tests, live fire tank engagements, long advances by armored columns, fighter planes and helicopters supporting ground movements, electronic warfare, and airdrops.

Deterrence is about capability, its about making sure that any potential adversary knows that we are prepared to do whatever is necessary, U.S. Army Europe commander Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges told reporters during the exercise. What escalates tensions is when we look weak, not connected, not prepared, that is what invites aggression.

But increasing military capability doesnt have to mean war, he added. The Russians only respect strength, so if we demonstrate cohesion, if we demonstrate that we are together, that we are prepared, then I think we dont have to worry.

The generals blunt comments underscore the planning for Saber Guardian, which doesnt name Russia as the adversary, but clearly has the Kremlin in mind.

The scenario revolves around an incursion into NATO territory by a militarily advanced enemy intent on seizing the economic assets of Black Sea countries. A battle featuring 5,000 NATO troops at the Cincu training range in Romania saw U.S. Apache and Romanian helicopters coordinate with artillery on the ground, U.S. Abrams tanks, and 650 vehicles in support of a large infantry movement to halt the advance.

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The U.S. is planning to spend about $23 million on the sprawling Romanian base in order to conduct even larger, more complex battle drills there in the future.

On the other side of the deterrent fence stands Russia, which is preparing to surge as many as 100,000 troops into the field in a series of drills dubbed Zapad, or West in the coming weeks.

The Kremlin claims about 12,700 troops will be active in Belarus and Russia for Zapad. But experts and NATO officials say Moscow is more likely to conduct a series of engagements that will swell those ranks by tens of thousands. Under the Vienna Document agreement of 2011, foreign observers must be present for any exercise that exceeds 13,000 troops.

By coming in under that number while conducting several other large drills at the same time, Moscow can avoid the presence of observers and control the narrative of how its troops performed.

But NATO is wary.

Given that Russia used a massive military exercise in 2014 to obscure its incursion into Crimea, and invaded South Ossetia in Georgia in 2008 during another exercise that covered troop movements, the alliance is keeping a close eye on Zapad.

From previous experiences related to previous exercises, we have every reason to believe there may be substantially more troops participating than the official quoted numbers, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said recently when asked about Zapad.

We dont consider this years Zapad exercise in itself to be a direct threat to [NATO] or a cover for an attack, added Kristjan Prikk, undersecretary for defense policy at Estonias Ministry of Defense during a conference in Washington on July 11. But we have to keep in mind that the Russians have the nasty habit of hiding their actual military endeavors behind exercises.

The last Zapad, in 2014, focused on displaying how quickly Russia could move forces from one part of the country to another, and illustrated how the Kremlin underplays the number of troops involved in its intertwined military drills.

Moscow claimed about 22,000 troops took part in 2014, but outside observers later concluded that up to 70,000 were involved, once all of the smaller but related exercises were added up.

Whatever number of troops ultimately take part, Moscow is going to very actively signal what they can and cannot do militarily, said Olga Oliker of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And the fact that Russia often conducts nuclear exercises in conjunction with conventional movements adds an extra element of uncertainty for NATO and the West.

This year, Im looking to see what Kaliningrads role is in the exercise, and what supporting and concurrent exercises are being held in Belarus and Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea, Oliker said.

Three Chinese warships are slated to arrive in Kaliningrad in July 21 to take part in a series of drills with the Russian navy and air force.

The upcoming weeks worth of activities will include anti-submarine and anti-ship operations, and practice between the two nations communicating and coordinating while fighting. The main aims of the exercise are to increase the efficiency in cooperation of the two fleets to counter threats to security at sea, [and] train compatibility of the crews of Russian and Chinese combat ships, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

The naval activity in the Baltic comes months after NATO established new brigades in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, beefed up by prepositioned American tanks and heavy armored vehicles.

In June, the U.S. Air Force also sent B-1 and B-52 bombers to Europe to participate in the massive BALTOPs exercise with Baltic allies, which included 50 allied ships running through a series of defensive maneuvers to protect NATOs northern flanks.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Army deployed a Patriot anti-aircraft missile system in Lithuania for use in yet another NATO wargame, marking the first time the system has been brought to the Baltic region where Russia enjoys a robust air and missile defense capability. The deployment is temporary, U.S. officials cautioned, but officials in Lithuania are looking at purchasing the system. Romania recently committed to a $3.9 billion deal for seven Patriot missile defense systems in July.

Closer to Russias borders and Crimea is another NATO exercise related to Saber Guardian, dubbed Sea Breeze 2017. The 12-day naval exercise currently underway in the Black Sea is co-hosted by the U.S. and Ukraine, and features the U.S. Navy cruiser USS Hue City and the destroyer USS Carney, which join 16 other countries in the Odessa-based undertaking. American surveillance plans and a team of Navy SEALs are also participating.

The naval exercises will be closely watched by Russian forces, who are active in the Black Sea, and have vastly improved their surveillance capabilities in Crimea. Over the past year, Russian aircraft have repeatedly buzzed American warships and aircraft in international waters in the Black Sea, drawing protests from Washington.

In February, an armed Russian aircraft buzzed the USS Porter, and in May armed Russian jets came within feet of U.S. surveillance planes operating over the waterway.

Photo Credit: DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP/Getty Images
New details have emerged in the shocking death of a Minnesota yoga instructor who was shot dead by a police officer near her home.

Justine Damond, 40, who is known for her YouTube videos on yoga and meditation, was in her pajamas when she made the call to the police at 11:28 Saturday night to report a possible sexual assault.

Read: Woman Who Reportedly Lost Baby During Gender Reveal Party Shooting Wasn't Pregnant: Cops

In an audio recording, a police dispatcher can be heard saying, "Female screaming behind the building," in regard to Damond's report.

When a squad car arrived just four minutes later, Damond was talking to the police officer on the driver side.

Moments after, the officer on the passenger side, Mohamed Noor, suddenly opened fire, killing the bride-to-be.

A police officer reached out to a dispatcher:

Officer: Shots fired. Can we get EMS Code 3? We got one down.

Dispatcher: Acknowledged. Shots fired and one down.

Officer: I'm starting CPR.

Dispatcher: Copy. Starting CPR.

Almost a minute later, the officer asks about EMS as the situation appears to become more dire.

Officer: Where is EMS on this?

Dispatcher: EMS is coming. Rescue is coming.

At least two shots were fired and an autopsy revealed Justine died from gunshot wounds to the abdomen. Her death was ruled a homicide.

Neighbors held a vigil for the new-age healer and a memorial of chalk-written hearts and messages were spread across Damonds driveway.

"She cared about everybody, a neighbor said.

Noor became an officer in Minneapolis two years ago and was celebrated in the local press as the first Somali-American cop in his precinct, but there have been three complaints made against him.

One such complaint is contained in a lawsuit where it claimed that Noor grabbed a retired social workers right wrist, which left her injured.

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Damond was to wed her 50-year-old fiance, Don Damond, next month, but she had already taken his last name.

Don Damond was emotional as he spoke outside their home Monday.

She touched so many people with her loving and generous heart, he said. It is difficult to fathom how to go forward without her in my life.

Both of the responding officers were wearing body cameras at the scene, but neither was turned on.

Read: Officer Who Shot Philando Castile Leaves Department: 'Most Thoughtful Way to Move Forward'

Minneapolis cops were all issued body cameras following the fatal shooting of a black motorist, Philando Castille, last year.

Damond, originally from Australia, came to America three years ago. Her death is making headlines in her native Sydney.

Noors attorney said the officer extends his condolences to the family... and keeps them in his daily thoughts and prayers."

Watch: Meet the Hero Cop Who Killed the Gunman in the Congressional Baseball Shooting

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After months of President Donald Trump alleging that he lost the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election because millions of people  including undocumented immigrants  voted illegally, his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity will meet for the first time on Wednesday with the mission of investigating improper voter registrations and improper voting, including fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting.

While there is no data to back up Trumps claim, and in fact studies have found few documented cases of voter impersonation fraud in recent years, the presidents argument about immigrants is an old one.

In fact, its eerily reminiscent of voter-fraud claims made during the periods of heavy immigration to the U.S. more than a century ago, says Ron Hayduk, a political scientist at San Francisco State University.

In the early United States, the immigrant vote had not been such a concern. Though American fear of foreign enemies is as old as the nation, as demonstrated by examples like the anti-French Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 18th century, enthusiasm for the countrys brand-new democratic principles was given even greater weight in those early decades. Hayduks research found that at various points between 1776 and 1926, 40 states and federal territories permitted non-citizens to vote in local, state and even federal elections, and that non-citizens were able to hold public office at various points. After all, in the mid-19th century, one just had to be a white, male property-owner to vote, and so-called alien suffrage (granting the right to vote to non-citizens) was seen as a way to lure foreign laborers  white, male ones  to help settle the frontier.

Before the Civil War, Southern states were initially resistant to alien suffrage, given that many immigrants were abolitionists; the 1861 Confederate Constitution mandated a prohibition on voting by persons of foreign birth. But the region eventually relented after slavery was abolished, as the South needed as much cheap labor as it could get.



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In 1880s and 1890s, however, the state of immigration began to change.

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American cities experienced an influx of new immigrants in the period that followed: people from Southern and Eastern Europe who were not considered white enough at the time, people from Asia who were drawn across the Pacific by the Gold Rush, and people who were Jewish (a population that jumped from 80,000 in 1880 to 1.75 million in total by 1925 in New York City). And the numbers were huge: One U.S. Census report states that 23.5 million persons immigrated legally to the U.S. between 1880 and 1920. Many of these new residents became members of political machines like New York Citys Tammany Hall, which retained loyalty by providing services like job placement and clothing but were associated with corruption. If youve ever heard the phrase vote early and often, its a reference to multiple voting, and there are stories in the newspapers in the 19th century of partisans gathering a group of men, bringing them to a polling station, having them vote, buying them a whiskey, and then bringing them to another polling station, says Margaret Groarke, associate professor of Government at Manhattan College and co-author of Keeping Down the Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of the American Voter.

Because of the popular association between these new and different immigrants, who were already subject to discrimination, and organizations that were responsible for a lack of trust in the vote, many people changed their minds about whether alien suffrage was such a good idea.

A 1902 editorial in the Washington Post argued that a marked and increasing deterioration in the quality of immigration was leading to a need to keep those immigrants from voting (and to make it harder for them to become citizens). Men who are no more fit to be trusted with the ballot than babies are to be furnished with friction matches for playthings are coming in by the hundred thousand, the article asserted.

By 1900, only 11 states allowed non-citizen immigrants to vote, according to Hayduk.

And, as laws about alien suffrage changed, the narrative of the illegal immigrant vote emerged  as did steps meant to prevent that problem. It was not unusual for even immigrants who had already become citizens to be asked to unexpectedly show their naturalization papers, documents that many of them werent carrying around, before they could vote. (More infamously, similar methods, like literacy tests, were also used to disenfranchise black voters.) Some were told they could only register to vote at the county office. Most of those offices were only open during the day, effectively making it impossible for many poorer immigrants to do so, as a working-class day could easily be 12 hours long at that point. Some areas instituted residency requirements, requiring a voter to have resided in the same place for three to six months.

Measures designed to curb immigrant voting were one of several factors that marked the beginning of a decline in voter participation during the early 20th century, as the added difficulties of voting  both legally and illegally  kept voters away, as Hayduk explains in his book Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the U.S.

Then, as now, Groarke says, there was real debate about how much truth there was to the allegations of fraud and whether the safeguards worked or did more harm. We dont have adequate evidence to understand what the extent of fraud then was, she says, and there was a realization by some people that those changes would lead to some legitimate voters not being able to vote.
News that a local Saudi woman has been arrested for flouting the kingdom's dress code by wearing a miniskirt and crop top in a viral video, serves as a reminder to visitors to do their homework before traveling to conservative countries in the Middle East.

In the video, which went viral over the weekend after first surfacing on Snapchat, a young, dark-haired woman is seen walking around the historic fort in Ushayqir in the ultra-conservative province of Najd in Saudi Arabia.

The video stoked controversy on social media, with some calling for the model's immediate arrest, and others coming to her defense.

But whether or not you support the woman's actions and audacity, travelers to conservative countries are advised to read up on local customs and abide by their laws.

According to the US Department of State, women in Saudi Arabia customarily wear a full-length black cloak known as the abaya, and cover their heads with a scarf.

Women who choose not to conform to the dress code are advised that they face possible detention and arrest.

Likewise, men are advised to dress conservatively and not to wear shorts in public or go out shirtless.

Because as the Department of State points out, visitors are subject to local laws. Those who violate the rules -- even unknowingly -- may be expelled, arrested, imprisoned, subject to physical punishments, or even executed depending on the offense.

Unlike Saudi Arabia, women traveling to the UAE are not expected to cover their heads or wear traditional Muslim dress, points out the Embassy of the UAE website for the US.

When visiting a mosque, women will be asked to respect Muslim traditions and wear an abaya to cover their heads.

-- Countries with strict dress codes --

Meanwhile, it's not just Saudi Arabia that enforces a strict dress code.

In North Korea, locals are likewise expected to dress conservatively or risk attracting unwanted attention from government "fashion police."

Last year, the government banned body piercings (ears are allowed), jeans, ponytails and tight clothing as part of a major crackdown on any public expression or appreciation of Western culture, reported Japanese news service Asia Press.

Sudanese women also face lashings for wearing trousers, while women in Uganda can be arrested for wearing skirts or shorts above the knee.
Keegan-Michael Key dropped by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert where he reprised his famous role as Obama's anger translator, Luther. Colbert asked Key to share Luther's anger translations for some recent comments made by Barack Obama. On the subject of the Affordable Healthcare Act being repealed and replaced by Trumpcare, Obama posted on Facebook, "Simply put, if there's a chance you might get sick, get old or start a family, this bill will do you harm." Luther's translation for that was, "Come on people, Trumpcare? More like Trump don't care. Don, T, care -- Don't care. I fought for the A.C.A. to help people!" Obama spoke with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in May saying, "In this new world we live in, we can't isolate ourselves, we can't hide behind a wall." According to Luther, Obama meant, "I spent 8 years tearing down walls and this mother f**ker wants to put 'em all up!" Key tried retiring Luther back in January, but Luther announced on The Late Show that he has other plans. "I thought I was on a forced retirement," said the embodiment of Obama's anger, "but it looks like Obama still needs me and I am back!"
Velasquez (L) says the war on drugs has been lost: Jeff Farrell

Pablo Escobars top hitman has called on Theresa May to legalise cocaine and help prevent thousands of drug deaths in Britain.

John Jairo Velasquez, also known as Popeye, argued that the white powder should be dished out in pharmacies where it would be regulated and clean.

The once-feared assassin said cocaine in its purest form and in small doses is no more of a danger to health than fatty food or fizzy drinks.

Nearly 4,000 people in Britain died in 2015 after being poisoned by drugs sold on the streets.

The figure includes hundreds who fatally snuffed cocaine mixed with toxic ingredients including clothes detergent and horse tranquiliser.

Velasquez made the appeal to save lives despite a past in which he shot dead more than 300 people for drug lord Pablo Escobar. He is linked to nearly 1,000 murders.

The 54-year-old, speaking from Medellin where he is in hiding, said: Look, everything kills. The soft drinks, whiskey, the beer. Cigarettes, marijuana. The bread.

McDonalds food probably kills more than cocaine. But people have the choice to take these things.

If cocaine is legalised it will be sold only in pharmacies, and people who choose to take it will know it is clean.

Some 3,674 people died of drugs poisoning in 2015, latest figures show. It included deaths from cocaine which nearly trebled, jumping from 112 to 320.

Velasquez also argued that legalising coke would help wipe out deaths in gangland war feuds in Britain over the sale of the illicit drug.

He said the the move would suck the vast profits from the contraband and put traffickers and dealers out of business.

And he said legalising coke was needed because the US War on Drugs strategy, aimed at wiping out the cocaine trade at source in countries - including Colombia - that produced the drug, had failed.

Velasquez said: The Drug War is an illusion. It is all lies. Every day the illicit trade grows and grows.

And everywhere the Colombian cocaine goes: Great Britain, United States, South Africa, Ireland, it brings misery and bloodshed.

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In the transit of cocaine a lot of people die. Thousands die. It destroys everything.

More people are in danger when it is in the hands of the mafia.

In the moment it is legalised it will be sold in pharmacies, so your government should do that."

The authorities in Colombia freed Velasquez in 2014 after he spent nearly 24 years in prison on charges of terrorism and drug trafficking.

He has since dedicated himself to telling his story of his days as a feared hitman for his narco lord boss including in his book Surviving Pablo Escobar.

A 60-part TV series on his life - El Patron del Mal or Boss of Evil  is due to air on Netflix.

Velasquez recalled how when he was just 17 he fell under the spell of the Patron.

He said: It was like I had seen a God. He had this huge presence, like an aura around him. He had incredible magnetism.

And he enjoyed his work as an assassin for his boss, saying: For me it was like a dream.

I loved guns and Pablo Escobar was very friendly, very respectful, never shouted at anyone, and always paid the assassins for their work quickly.

He was a great leader. For us Pablo Escobar wasnt just a Patron, he was a religion. Pablo Escobar was our God.

Despite Popeyes spree of murder and rampage, he claims to be a reformed hitman.

He said: Today, now, I am regretful. I have changed.

But his reign of terror under the watch of his boss Pablo means he has gone into hiding  in fear of reprisal attacks.

He said: I move around a lot. I stay in my place, with family and in a farm.

But Popeye claims he is not afraid of being killed. He said: Either way Im with God, the Holy Spirit, the virgin, my guardian angel and Jesus.
MUSCATINE  The West Liberty school district hired Joseph Potts to serve as its new superintendent, effective Aug. 1.

Potts most recently served as principal of Kentlake High School in Kent, Washington. He will replace outgoing Superintendent Steve Hanson, who has been with the district for six years, and has retired after almost 40 years in education. Hanson said he has been considering retirement since the beginning of the academic year. He tendered his resignation in April and retired at the end of June.

I kind of arrived at a crossroads, Hanson said. I received the mailings from IPERS about my eligibility to tap into retirement and it seemed that at this point in time, after 37 years, it was time to tap into what I would receive from IPERS and think about what else Im going to do that would involve less time that you have to give when youre an administrator in K-12.

Hanson said he is not sure what is next for him, but that he would like to spend more time with his two grandchildren and continue his civic activities in West Liberty.

According to districts website, the West Liberty board of education convened four times in as many days at the end of June, conducting close sessions at each meeting. Board Vice President Lynne Sasmazer said each of the four sessions was dedicated to interviewing one of the four final candidates for the position. Prior to the meeting, candidates met with students, community members, teachers and administrators in the district.

On July 7, the board convened a special meeting once more to vote on the hiring of Potts and to approve other staffing changes in the district. The original agenda for that meeting did not include a motion to hire the new superintendent. Normally, boards stick to agenda items they publish ahead of time. The West Liberty board deviated from this practice, amending the agenda at the meeting. The reason for that change, according to the meeting minutes, was because of the importance of the position and need to begin transition duties.

Sasmazer said the board consulted with the districts lawyer about the legality of the move. The board voted on the hire in that July 7 meeting to give Potts enough time to move from the Seattle area, where he currently lives, to West Liberty, Sasmazer said.

Adding an item to the agenda during a meeting, Sasmazer said, is something that the board does rarely and only when absolutely needed. The boards regularly scheduled meeting would have taken place July 17 and they wanted to approve Potts contract early, so he would have enough time to move to the district before his start date on Aug. 1.

Also in that meeting, the board approved the hiring and releasing of other personnel from the district, something that Sasmazer said they wanted to do as soon as possible.

When we have those sorts of things going, we dont want to delay anyone, so scheduling that July 7 meeting would allow us to take care of that business and then offer to hire the new superintendent to give him time to make his own personal arrangements to come and begin his contract on Aug. 1. Its preferable to waiting until July 17, she said.

Sasmazer said the board elected to hire Potts because he is originally from Iowa, has had experiences working in both higher and K-12 education and has extensive history working with diverse populations of students.
Washington (AFP) - The United States reacted angrily Wednesday after Turkey's state news agency disclosed the locations of American military posts in northern Syria, a move the Pentagon warned could put lives at risk.

The Anadolu Agency (AA) published a report Monday detailing the 10 US military facilities' whereabouts and, in some instances, the number of special operations forces working there.

Pentagon spokesman Major Adrian Rankine-Galloway said the release of sensitive military information exposes coalition forces to "unnecessary risk."

"While we cannot independently verify the sources that contributed to this story, we would be very concerned if officials from a NATO ally would purposefully endanger our forces by releasing sensitive information," Rankine-Galloway said.

"We have conveyed these concerns to the government of Turkey," he added, noting that the Pentagon would not comment on whether the locations listed by AA were accurate.

AA said the bases -- two airfields and eight military outposts -- are being used to support the Kurdish Democratic Party (PYD) and its armed wing, the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which Ankara views as an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

Turkey views the PKK as a terrorist organization and the group has waged an insurgency since 1984 that has killed more than 40,000 people in Turkey.

Despite being NATO allies, the United States and Turkey have a fraught relationship over the current US-led coalition effort to defeat the Islamic State group in northern Syria.

America is relying heavily on YPG and other Kurdish elements to conduct the fighting on the ground. And it has shipped weapons to the Kurds in a move that infuriated Turkey, which worries the guns will end up in the hands of the PKK.

AA said one post in the town of Ayn Issah in northern Raqa governorate housed around 200 US soldiers and 75 French special forces troops.

Rankine-Galloway urged all factions to remain focused on the fight against IS.
Raymond Licon Junior: El Paso County Detention Facility

A police officer has been charged with negligent homicide after his infant son drowned in a bath while he argued with his estranged wife over the phone.

Raymond Licon Junior, 27, of the El Paso Police Department in Texas, put his eleven-month old son, Azrael, in the bath before stepping away to make a phone call.

Investigations showed he got into an argument with his wife via text message before continuing on the phone.

Records indicate he called the emergency services 45 minutes after the argument began, at which point the water had overflowed, flooding the upstairs of his flat.

Mr Licon allegedly told a neighbour and responding officers that in the midst of the argument he had forgotten his son was in the bathtub and blamed himself for the death.

Azraels grandfather, George Montenegro, revealed his daughter and Mr Licon are currently in the middle of a divorce.

Pure common sense. You dont leave a baby in the bathtub. You just dont do it, Mr Montenegro told KFOX-TV.

Speaking about his daughter, Mr Montenegro added that she was emotionally completely broken.

Mr Licon has been arrested and has been relieved of his duties with the police department.

He has been booked into the El Paso County Detention Facility under a $10,000 (7,600) bond.
President Trump staked out two dramatically different positions on how to handle health care over the course of a few hours on Tuesday.

After two more Republican senators said they would vote against the Senate health care bill on Monday, Trump called for lawmakers to repeal the Affordable Care Act first, then use the impending collapse of the individual insurance market to force Democrats to negotiate.

Republicans should just REPEAL failing ObamaCare now & work on a new Healthcare Plan that will start from a clean slate. Dems will join in!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2017

On Tuesday morning, he appeared to argue instead that Congress should leave the law in place without fixing any of its issues, and then use those problems to bring Democrats to the table later.

As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan. Stay tuned!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2017

Both strategies rely on the same principle: forcing Democrats to come together with Republicans to overturn the law by threatening major problems with the health insurance market.

It doesnt appear that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would approve of either approach, however.

Earlier this month, the Kentucky Republican said that if the GOP health care bill failed, Senate Republicans would need to work with Democrats to make minor fixes to the Affordable Care Act to keep the law from failing in some states.

No action is not an alternative, McConnell said during a stop in Kentucky. Weve got the insurance markets imploding all over the country, including in this state.
By Andrew Osborn and Natalia Zinets MOSCOW/KIEV (Reuters) - The pro-Russian rebel leader of a breakaway region in eastern Ukraine proposed on Tuesday replacing Ukraine with a new federal state, in comments that could further undermine a 2015 peace deal that is already faltering. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko rejected the idea, describing Alexander Zakharchenko, leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), as part of "a puppet show", with Russia pulling his strings in order to relay a message. France and Germany, which are involved in diplomatic efforts to end the Ukraine crisis, also condemned the proposal. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian agencies that Zakharchenko's statement was Zakharchenko's own initiative and that the Kremlin had learned about it from media reports. Ukrainian officials contend that Russia wants to show the world, and the United States especially, that it can keep the crisis in a suspended state and deepen it if need be. A new U.S. envoy for the Ukraine crisis was appointed this month and Moscow and Washington are likely to start regularly engaging on the issue. Zakharchenko, who would scarcely have expected anything other than outright rejection from Kiev, said in a declaration that he and his allies were proposing a new state called Malorossiya (Little Russia) be set up with its capital in rebel-held Donetsk. Malorossiya was the term used to describe swaths of modern-day Ukraine when they were part of the Russian Empire in tsarist times and is one many Ukrainians today regard as offensive. Ukraine, a country of about 42.5 million people, declared independence from Moscow in 1991. "We are proposing to residents of Ukraine a peaceful way out of a difficult situation without war. It's our last proposal," Zakharchenko said in a statement. The new state would be federal, with regions enjoying a large degree of autonomy. He said the move was backed by delegates from various Ukrainian regions, but a statement from the neighboring rebel territory of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic said it had been unaware of the initiative and did not support it. "SICK FANTASIES" His declaration cast a shadow over the faltering Minsk peace agreement between the rebels and the Ukrainian government, which has failed to quell fighting between the two sides and has only been partially implemented since a pro-Russian uprising erupted in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Russia denies accusations it has delivered arms and provided troops backing rebels in the industrial, largely Russian-speaking east. On Tuesday the Kremlin said it remained committed to the Minsk peace deal. Yevhen Marchuk, Ukraine's representative in the talks on implementing the peace deal, told Ukrainian TV channel 112.ua that Zakharchenko's declaration would complicate negotiations and looked like a Russian attempt to sabotage the process. France condemned the idea and demanded Russia do more to prevent a further escalation. A German government spokeswoman also criticized the move, calling it "totally unacceptable". Ukraine's top military commander, Viktor Muzhenko, said on social media that the Ukrainian people would "bury" Malorossiya, calling the plan one of the rebels' "sick fantasies". Three former rebel leaders told Reuters in May that a top aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin decides how the pro-Moscow administration of eastern Ukraine is run and who gets what jobs there, challenging Kremlin denials that it calls the shots in the region. (Additional reporting by Polina Devitt in Moscow, Margarita Antidze in Tbilisi, John Irish in Paris and Andreas Rinke in Berlin; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Gareth Jones and Richard Balmforth)
Beirut (AFP) - More than a dozen Syrian rebels have died in hit-and-run clashes with a US-backed alliance dominated by Kurdish forces in the country's north, a monitoring group said Tuesday.

The Turkish-backed rebels were locked in a second day of fighting on Tuesday with units from the Syrian Democratic Forces around the village of Ain Daqna.

"Since Monday, 15 fighters from Syrian rebel factions were killed in the clashes and four SDF fighters were wounded, including one in critical condition," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said.

Ain Daqna, in Aleppo province, has been held by the US-backed SDF since February.

It lies on a sliver of land contested by the SDF and Turkish-backed rebels.

A local official from the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) which make up the bulk of the SDF, said his forces had retrieved some of the rebels' bodies.

"We will hand over these nine bodies to the Kurdish Red Crescent in Afrin (west) for their families to retrieve them," Brusk Hasakeh said in a statement distributed to journalists.

Turkish-backed rebels fighting under the banner of "Ahl al-Diyar" said in a statement Monday they had attacked Ain Daqna because they see the SDF as "occupiers."

"We promise our people more flash attacks... We will make them regret occupying this land and displacing thousands," it read.

Syria's conflict erupted in March 2011 with anti-government protests, but it has since evolved into a complex civil war drawing in regional powers.

Turkey has backed rebels in Syria's north to take on both the Islamic State group and the YPG.

Ankara considers the YPG a terrorist group and the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has waged an insurgency inside Turkey since 1984.

That places it at odds with Washington over the United States' support for the SDF, which is fighting to oust IS from its Syrian stronghold of Raqa.

Rights groups including Amnesty International have accused the YPG of razing villages and displacing residents in northern Syria, which the militia has denied.
The New York Yankees are going for it. They boosted their lineup and the backend of their bullpen in a trade Tuesday with the Chicago White Sox thats sending slugger Todd Frazier and relief pitchers David Robertson and Tommy Kahnle to the Bronx.

Bruce Levine of 670 The Score in Chicago was first to report a deal was close, with multiple national reporters later saying the same. The White Sox announced it was a done deal shortly after their game with the Los Angeles Dodgers ended.

#WhiteSox have acquired Blake Rutherford, Ian Clarkin, Tito Polo & Tyler Clippard from NYY in exchange for Frazier, Kahnle & Robertson.  Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) July 19, 2017

The White Sox (38-52) were already in full rebuilding mode and this adds to their minor-league riches, as the Yankees send Chicago a package that includes outfield prospect Blake Rutherford (New Yorks No. 3 prospect) and left-handed pitcher Ian Clarkin (No. 19). Big-league reliever Tyler Clippard is also reportedly in the deal, as is outfielder Tito Polo.

Rutherford ranks No. 30 in MLB.coms overall top prospect list. Getting him gives the White Sox five of the top 30 prospects, including No. 1 overall Yoan Moncada and No. 6 Eloy Jimenez, and 10 in the top 100. The White Sox, acting quickly once the trade became official, called Moncada up to the big leagues.

David Robertson and Todd Frazier are headed to the Yankees. (AP)

The third-place Yankees (47-44), a surprise contender this season, are trying to stay viable in the AL East as the rival Boston Red Sox (52-42) try to open a bigger lead atop the division. The Tampa Bay Rays (50-44) have recently surged into second place.

The deal gives the Yankees one thing they covet and one thing they need. The Yanks of recent years love having a potent backend bullpen. With Dellin Betances struggling as of late and closer Aroldis Chapman not quite his dominating self this season, the Yankees now have another pitcher with closer experience in Robertson. Theyre familiar with Robertson after he pitched for them from 2008-2014, taking over as closer when Mariano Rivera retired. Kahnle, 27, also has a 2.50 ERA in 37 games this season out of the White Sox bullpen. Robertson is under control through 2018 and Kahnle is arbitration eligible in 2018, which gives the Yankees more controllable assets as they look to contend again next season.

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Frazier, who is due to be a free agent at seasons end, has some pop in his bat (hes hit 16 homers this season and 40 last year) but his .207 batting average might be a drain. Frazier can play first and third base, which is more important to the Yankees now that first baseman Greg Bird might be out the rest of the season.

Theres another advantage for the Yankees here too: The Red Sox were said to be interested in both Frazier and Robertson. So this move could, in theory, put twice as much pressure on Boston.

More MLB coverage from Yahoo Sports:

     

Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at mikeozstew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
The Royal Navy escorted a flotilla of Chinese warships through English waters - Rob Verkerk @GeneraalVerkerk/Twitter

The Royal Navy scrambled a warship to shadow a Chinese flotilla as it steamed through the English Channel en route to meet Russian vessels for manoeuvres in the Baltic Sea.

The trio of Chinese warships passed through the Strait of Dover under the watch of the HMS Richmond, a Type 23 frigate, at the weekend.

They then headed across the North Sea, where they were spotted being escorted by Dutch vessels earlier this week ahead of manoeuvres with Vladimir Putins navy which begin on Friday.

Chinas state-run Global Times newspaper said on Tuesday that the 052D, the countrys most advanced guided-missile destroyer, was taking part in the week-long joint drills.

The Chinese warships later headed through Dutch waters on their way to the Baltic Credit: Rob Verkerk

The ship is equipped with phased array radar and a vertical launching system, the newspaper said.

Russian media say ten ships will take part in the first phase of the exercise, joined by more than 10 aircraft and helicopters.

Route of Chinese warships

The drills mark the first occasion that Chinese warships have ever carried out manoeuvres in the strategically important Baltic Sea.

The Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) Navy had just completed exercises in the Mediterranean, another show of strength from Beijing as it rapidly expands its military reach across the globe.

The drills with Russia mark the first occasion that Chinese warships have ever carried out manoeuvres in the strategically important Baltic Sea Credit: Rob Verkerk

Professor Ni Lexiong, a Shanghai-based military expert, told The Telegraph the Baltic Sea drills were aimed at Nato, but were being carried out in response to drills that were recently staged by the US, India and Japan in the Indian Ocean, which were directed towards China.

China and Russia have pledged to enhance their strategic relationship by regularly staging military drills, said Prof Ni, director of the Shanghai University of Political Science and Laws Sea Power and Defence Policy Research Institute.

China also has its own plans, he added. Which is to show the world that it is a major naval power.

A Chinese naval fleet held a military exercise with the Russian navy in St Petersburg and Kaliningrad last month.

The two countries have held joint drills every year since 2012, and military officials in China said this years manoeuvres will focus on joint rescue efforts and protecting cargo vessels.

China and Russia both have veto powers on the UN Security Council, and regularly vote together on major issues such as the crisis in Syria. This position often puts them at odds with the United States and Western Europe.
As most people whove flown in an airplane have probably noticed, cabin seats have been shrinking over the past few decades. Since the 1970s, the average economy seat pitchthe distance between the seatshas shrunk from 35 inches to 31 inches, further pressurizing cabins and passengers tempers.

This has allowed airlines to squeeze more seats in, or to make more room for larger seats they can sell at a premium. Today, travelers need to purchase premium economy seats for the same amount of legroom they used to get with the old economy.

And its getting worse: In May American Airlines (AAL) said it would be shaving two inches of legroom in economy class, going from 31 to 29. Public blowback led the airline to partially reverse its decision and only cut one inch from most rows.

But passengers knees, legs, and elbows are on track to get a reprieve thanks to the dogged efforts of one member of Congress, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN).

Cohen is finally looking at a win in his third year waging war against shrinking seats, having steered a version of his Safe Egress in Air Travel (SEAT) Act into the FAA reauthorization bill as an amendment, after failing numerous times. (The FAAs budget and mandate must be authorized regularly.) The amendment would ask the FAA to study evacuations and issue regulations for minimum safe-seat sizes.

The bill is on the Houses agenda for a vote this week.

Evacuation with tiny seats could turn a plane into a coffin

While many people see comfort as the main problem of cramped seats, Cohen sees a public health and safety disaster waiting to happen. With more cramped and smaller seatsand increasingly large Americansevacuations may not go as smoothly.

I dont want to see a day when theres a plane crash and the [NTSB] ascertains that the plane couldnt be evacuated in the proper time and people lost their lives from smoke inhalation of fire, Cohen told Yahoo Finance. Often its a tragedy that gets Congress to act. Safety and health are issues, and thats the way weve framed it to get support.

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While every new aircraft model is tested for evacuation by the FAA, Cohen says the evacuations have not been tested with todays smaller seats. The legislation would direct the FAA to use the results of the study to issue regulations that establish minimum dimensions for passenger seatsnecessary for the safety and health of passengers.

Its about comfort, but also not about comfort

Though comfort is a concern, Cohen has been careful to focus on safety and less on legislating comfort, something that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has thrown his support behind the measure in the Senate, has been accused of recently.

This should be a fact-based matter, not an attempt to legislate seat comfort, former American Airlines president Bob Crandall told Yahoo Finance. I have no problem with requiring new tests, since 28-inch pitch strikes me as potentially dangerousunless it has already been tested.

Rep. Steve Cohen with actor Jane Seymour at an event for the Alzheimers Association. (Getty)

Cohens public-safety slant was enough to mobilize senators like Schumer, Ed Markey (D-MA), and others to push a version of his amendment into the Senates reauthorization bill.

It was also enough to get support from across the aisle. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) co-sponsored a standalone version of the SEAT Act earlier in 2017. We must ensure standards are in place to provide safe air travel for passengers, he said in June. Cutting down legroom to add more seats to the already crowded planes is simply dangerous.

Airline scandals have crippled Cohens formidable opposition

Cohen says the airline industrys friendship with members of Congress and members on the Subcommittee on Aviation has kept his fight protracted. [Industry groups] are politically savvy enough to be helpful in campaigns and therefore have political leverage, Cohen said. So people have been reticent to oppose industry groups that have PACs. So thats made it difficult.

In the past, Airline industry groups like Airlines for America have opposed Cohens measures to regulate seating in the past, noting that customers can vote with their wallet and choose something else if they dont want to fly. But one glance at the average seat pitch shows that market forces may not be enough.

Theres a limited amount of airlines and not much competition, says Cohen. There are lots of people without a choice. Often they have to do it as a necessity for someones funeral or to get a job. Its a big expense.

In a statement reacting to the FAA Reauthorization bill, Airlines for America did not reject Cohens amendment, and an A4A spokesperson told Yahoo Finance we continue to believe the governments role in seat sizes for all forms of transportation.

The FAA says planes can be evacuated in 90 seconds. (AP)

In the wake of airline scandals such as Uniteds forcible ejection of a paying customer from a plane, Cohen thinks the industry may not have the social capital to fight.

Multiple airlines, including Delta (DAL), Southwest (LUV), and American (AAL), told Cohens office they would not lobby against it. United (UAL), star of recent public relations disasters, was the only one of the big four absent from this list. A spokesperson for the airline did not comment on the legislation.

The industry, I think, doesnt want to have themselves look like a sore thumb again after the doctor was taken off the United plane and other highly publicized instances of consumer issues, said Cohen.

What happens next

Theres a light at the end of Cohens tunnel. If precedent is any indicator, the legislation will stay in. Itll stick in this time because the Senate put it in [their reauthorization] bill too, says a hopeful Cohen. Generally, when it connects on both sides, it stays in. I think itll stay in. I dont think theyll resist in the conference committee.

Without major opposition from the airlines and paths in both houses, Cohens amendment is looking at a string of green lights to President Trumps desk and pen. However, compromise is providing some of the bills fuel. The bill asking the FAA to establish safe minimums gives a year, a longer timetable than Cohen would have liked.

Even though the measures are likely to pass, consumers shouldnt expect instant relief even in that time frame. Cohen is wary of other speedbumps.

Im sure the industry would try to get them to slow-walk it, he said. They have influence in Congress and the administrative world. Its still a long way from being implemented, and the FAA is now going to be not as consumer-oriented under the Trump administrationwhich is not consumer-oriented at all.

Its also possible that the FAA tests may find evacuation is not an issue with current seats. An FAA spokesperson told Yahoo Finance: demonstration criteria require that an airplane must be evacuated in simulated emergency conditions in less than 90 seconds, regardless of the seat size. Aircraft manufacturers have tested seats below 30 inches.

For now, squeezed consumers are going to have to pony up for the premium economy if they want more room. But still, they might not get it.

Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumer issues, tech, and personal finance. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann. Got a tip? Send it to tips@yahoo-inc.com.

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Despite ramping up its nuclear weapons program, North Korea likely does not have the capability to effectively target the United States, according to at least one senior government official. The nation doesnt have the capacity to hit the U.S. with any degree of accuracy, according to Vice Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff General Paul Selva.

Selva appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday to discuss North Koreas nuclear capabilities.

Read: North Korea Ramps Up Plutonium Production For Nuclear Weapons, Report Says

Iam not sanguine that the test on the Fourth of July demonstrates that they have the capacity to strike the United States with any degree of accuracy or reasonable confidence or success, Selva said Tuesday, according to Reuters.

RTS13YAQ

Photo: Reuters

North Korea said it successfully fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, on the Fourth of July and that it finally had the technology to mount a nuclear warhead on such a missile. United States officials confirmed that the nation had, in fact, launched an ICBM.

Selva said that although the missiles had the range, they did not have the technological guidance to effectively target the U.S.

North Korea reportedly celebrated the great timing of the ICBM launch on the Fourth of July, according to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

The American bastards must be quite unhappy after closely watching our strategic decision, Kim Jong Un was quoted as saying by the KCNA. I guess they are not too happy with the gift package we sent them for the occasion of their Independence Day. We should often send them gift packages so they wont be too bored.

In addition to the Norths successful ICBM launch, the country might be ramping up its plutonium production in order to increase its weapons stockpile, according to a report released last week by U.S. think tank 38 North. The organization analyzed thermal imagery from the country and found that it had added additional plutonium and uranium at its main production facilities since September.

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Tensions between the U.S. and North Korea have escalated in recent months. The North warned earlier in July of an impending nuclear war if the U.S. did not immediately put a halt to joint military exercises with South Korea. The caution came after the U.S. flew two bombers over North Koreas demilitarized zone.

Read: Japanese Government Tells Citizens How To Survive Nuclear Attack By North Korea

A simple misjudgment or a mistake may lead to the outbreak of a nuclear war and that, in turn, is sure to start a new world war, a commentary in the states official newspaper Rodong Sinmum said. The U.S. saying it will regularly deploy strategic bombers to the Korean Peninsula is the same as a crazy act of playing fire on top of an ammunitions locker.

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Photo: Reuters

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Despite a June 19 supervisory order from Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Cady, Louisa County is not likely to alter its policy about carrying weapons in public buildings.

Louisa County is one of 28 counties in Iowa that does not ban weapons from its courtroom or county offices.

Louisa County Attorney Adam Parsons updated the county board of supervisors on Cadys order during the boards regular weekly meeting Tuesday.

In his order, Cady said the Iowa Supreme Court is vested under Article V, Section 4 of the Iowa Constitution with the power to exercise supervisory and administrative control over Iowas district courts, including a responsibility to promote safety in courthouses and court facilities.

Accordingly, under our constitutional authority and responsibility to supervise and administer Iowas district courts, the supreme court now orders that all weapons are prohibited from courtrooms, court-controlled spaces, and public areas of courthouses and other justice centers occupied by the court system, Cady wrote in his order.

Parsons said a follow-up opinion issued by the Iowa Attorney Generals office suggested county offices could continue to follow their own policies, provided they did not conflict with Cadys order.

He said it would appear the order would be in effect for the second floor of the Louisa County Courthouse, which includes the district and magistrate courtrooms and the clerk of court office.

Parsons also said common areas on the first floor of the courthouse, including entrances and hallways leading to other county offices would also fall under the order.

What does Louisa County do? supervisor Randy Griffin asked.

Parsons said Cady had provided some suggestions, including increased signage, metal detectors and other security improvements to comply with the ruling. He also said Cady had left it up to each districts chief judge to implement the order.

He said someone could contest the order, but that could mean ultimately having it decided by the Iowa Supreme Court, the same body that Cady heads.

I recommend doing nothing different," Parsons said, adding he would do his best to meet the new rules, but that Cady was likely not familiar with the inability of small rural counties to install most of the additional security he was proposing.

I would like to continue with the policy weve got, supervisor Randy Griffin said.

Others at the meeting agreed and suggested any control effort would not impact anyone intent on causing harm.

You are not going to stop the bad guys from carrying anyway, said Louisa County Technology Director Chuck Borschel, who formerly worked for the Hardin County Sheriffs Office.

Although no formal decision was made, the supervisors did suggest they might look into installing signs advising people that weapons were not allowed on some portions of the courthouse.

Other board business

In other action, the supervisors also informally agreed that some portions of the countys zoning ordinance likely needs to be revised. Supervisor Brad Quigley said changes were needed because of a recent ruling by the county board of adjustment declaring a turkey farm near Wapello did not require a building permit.

We cannot let it stay in its current status. We need to deal with it, Quigley said.

The board also held a public hearing on a proposed property vacation in Wyman and approved $477,978 in claims.
New York (AFP) - Shares of iconic US motorcycle company Harley-Davidson stumbled Tuesday following weak earnings that underscored its troubles finding new customers.

Shares were down 8.5 percent at $47.60 midday after earlier slumping nearly 12 percent following release of the results.

"These are challenging times for motorcycle sales and Amazon.com doesn't have anything to do with that," quipped Briefing.com, referring to the disruptive online retailer.

"It's a demand issue and demand for Harley-Davidson motorcycles has been weaker than expected."

A 114-year-old brand based in the Midwestern state of Wisconsin, Harley-Davidson has had a difficult time navigating shifting consumer tastes as its clientele ages in its home market.

The company also has struggled to drum up demand in overseas markets amid tough competition from "cruiser" bikes made in Japan and Europe.

Net profit through the first half of 2017 fell 16 percent to $445.2 million and revenues dropped 9.4 percent to $3.4 billion, the company said.

Worldwide motorcycle sales fell 5.7 percent during that period, with a 7.9 percent decline in the United States, its biggest market.

"While we expected the US industry to be challenged, we were disappointed by the unexpected magnitude of the industry softening in the quarter," said chief executive Matthew Levatich.

"Our international performance in the second quarter was down, but in line with our expectations and we continue to expect international growth in the second half of the year behind expanded distribution and availability of new high-impact motorcycles."

The company has been hailed for its American manufacturing presence by President Donald Trump, who invited Harley executives to the White House in February.

Yet in May it announced the opening of a new factory in Thailand, its third overseas plant after India and Brazil. Part of the objective behind manufacturing in Asia is to avoid tariffs in key Asian markets, Levatich said.

Harley-Davidson opened 13 new dealerships overseas in the second quarter, including in China, Thailand, South Korea, Switzerland, Italy, the United Arab Emirates and Russia.

"We know that our biggest opportunity for growth is outside the US," Levatich said.
Just a year after suffering a massive heart attack, Deadliest Catch captain Sig Hansen was experiencing chest pains while out on the Bering Sea. The captain had just dropped anchor off the island of St. Paul, when he started having stabbing pains on the left side of his rib cage. Despite taking medicine, the pain persisted. So Hansen decided to visit the St. Paul clinic and error on the side of caution. Hansen said, "Last time, I didn't think it was anything and it was a heart attack. So that's what got me all freaked out." While Sig was being checked out his brother Edgar Hansen paid a visit to the Saga. But it wasn't long before some bad news came over the radio from deckhand, Matt Bradley. "They're running an EKG. They said they had sent results to Seattle. One said 'yes,' the other said 'no'." The decision was made to fly Sig to Anchorage, AK. Edgar helped his brother to the Medevac jet and bid him goodbye. Now Edgar will have to captain the boat while his thoughts are of his older brother. "I'm worried about him. I know I'm scared that it could escalate and get worse. You know, we're all in this together -- I mean, we knew that there was a chance, it just sucks when it's your family."
Russia Week continued on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, as the host showed another video of his time in the foreign country. There have been many allegations swirling around Russia recently. So Colbert went to St. Petersburg to see how the people there felt about those allegations, and to, hopefully, find some common ground. While he was there, Colbert tried to root out some of the infamous Russian hackers who allegedly influenced our election. After caressing one gentleman's beard, Colbert asked him if he was a hacker. When the bearded gentleman said no, Colbert asked, "If you were a hacker, would you admit that you're a hacker?" And when the guy said he wouldn't, Colbert joked, "That's as good as admitting it right now." One of Trump's campaign promises was to build a wall along the Mexico border, and Colbert thought he'd try to help Trump fulfill that promise. While talking to the same bearded man, who is definitely not a hacker (Or is he?), Colbert brought up the wall, asking, "You guys built a really good one in Berlin, and you're not using it anymore, can we have it?" The gentleman said, "Well, I think the Germans do," and Colbert responded with, "The Germans took it? That's so like them."
Russia Week continued on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, as the host showed another video of his time in the country. There have been many allegations swirling around Russia recently, so Colbert went to Saint Petersburg to see how the people there felt about those allegations and to, hopefully, find some common ground.

While he was there, Colbert tried to root out some of the infamous Russian hackers who allegedly influenced our election. After caressing one gentlemans beard, Colbert asked him if he was a hacker. When the bearded gentleman said no, Colbert asked, If you were a hacker, would you admit that youre a hacker? And when the guy said he wouldnt, Colbert joked, Thats as good as admitting it right now.

One of Donald Trumps campaign promises was to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and Colbert thought hed try to help Trump fulfill that promise. While talking to the same bearded man, who is definitely not a hacker (or is he?), Colbert brought up the wall, asking, You guys built a really good one in Berlin, and youre not using it anymore, can we have it? The gentleman said, Well, I think the Germans do, and Colbert responded with, The Germans took it? Thats so like them.

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. on CBS.

Watch Colbert drink vodka while colluding with a Russian late-night host:

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Tell us what you think! Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, or leave your comments below. And check out our host, Kylie Mar, on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Forget petitions or protest: Trolling for social change is some of the best kind of activism there is.

Texas activist Ashely Smith recently decided to politely troll Texas Governor Gregg Abbott. Abbott, a strong supporter of the state's anti-trans bathroom bill, didn't seem to notice he was posing for a picture with a transgender woman and LGBTQ activist.

SEE ALSO: Meet 'Sam,' a transgender toy that's teaching kids about gender fluidity

"How will the Potty Police know I'm transgender if the Governor doesn't?" Smith wrote.

Abbott recently announced his re-election campaign for Governor. Smith, a member of Indivisible's Austin chapter, isn't exactly a fan of the governor, a strong social conservative who recently revived an anti-trans bathroom bill in the legislature.

Much like North Carolina, the governor wants to require people to use the bathroom according to the sex assigned on their birth certificate.

"We're about 1-in-300 people, we're all over the place, we're your friends and your neighbors," Smith said of the bill to My San Antonio. "Some of us are not immediately obvious as trans. And the idea that you are going to be able to enforce a bathroom bill, I mean the enforceability is just not there."

If Governor Abbott thinks he can force a bill like this, he should take a look at this joint selfie. It's actually a pretty good one.
As the White Houses controversial voter fraud panel gathered for its first meeting, President Trump accused states that didnt turn over data of hiding something.

Im pleased that more than 30 states have agreed to share their information with the commission, and the other states [where] that information will be forthcoming, said Trump. If any state does not want to share this information, one has to wonder what theyre worried about. I ask the vice president and I ask the commission: What are they worried about? Theres something  there always is.

The comments echoed a Trump tweet from earlier this month: Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was created by Trump after he was asked to back up his claim that millions of illegal votes were cast in 2016, which followed months of warnings that the election would be rigged against him. On the impossible-to-prove assumption that the illegal votes were all cast for his opponent, he claimed to have won the popular vote, which he actually lost by nearly three million ballots.

Although White House officials have repeated these claims frequently, they have offered no evidence, and almost no verifiable cases have been cited in the media or by election officials in the states. Multiple studies have found little evidence of fraud, with a large study in 2014 finding 31 instances of credible fraud out of one billion votes cast.

President Trump speaks alongside Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, left, and Vice President Mike Pence during the first meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House in Washington, D.C., on July 19, 2017. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

Trumps accusations were odd because Kansas  where the panels vice-chair, Kris Kobach, is the secretary of state  was one of the states unable to turn over all the information requested due to state laws. Kobach had previously said that it was perfectly fine for states to withhold information, but critics of the program said the commission made requests that it knew could not be fulfilled so its officials could then accuse the states of hiding something. The insinuation that states where officials refused to comply were hiding something was also made during an interview with Kobach on Fox News Wednesday morning.

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The backlash to the panel has been widespread and bipartisan. Republican secretaries of state joined Democratic colleagues in denying the White House information that wasnt available publicly, with others pointing out that its odd for a bipartisan commission to have both the chair, Vice President Mike Pence, and co-chair, Kobach, from the same party. Kobach also has said the commission would not release voters personal information, but the commission published the home addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of some people who emailed comments to its website.

Kobach, who has been called the king of voter suppression by the ACLU, lost a lawsuit last year and was forced to restore the registrations his office had stripped from nearly 20,000 Kansans. The commissions request for information has already caused voting rolls to be reduced, with 3,700 Coloradoans withdrawing their registrations after the state said it would hand over voter data.

One issue not mentioned by Trump Wednesday was the report from U.S. intelligence officials that Russia targeted 21 states during the 2016 election. This comes in conjunction with the news that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is considering closing the cybersecurity office at the State Department.

Appearing on CNN shortly after Trump spoke, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergran Grimes, a Democrat, blasted the need for the panel.

We have the president admitting the baseless claims for which this sham commission was put together are his insecurity for losing the popular vote, Grimes said. What we dont have and what we still dont have answers to is why this commission continues to waste taxpayer dollars on a claim expert after expert and even elected official after elected official continue to say doesnt exist  and that is three to five million folks voted illegally in this last election.

Matthew Dunlap, Maines Democratic secretary of state, attempted to find common ground in the opening remarks of the panel.

I listened very closely to the remarks of the president, but no one whos spoken  including the president  has questioned the legitimacy of the 2016 election, and I think thats a great place to start from, said Dunlap.

In fact, Trump has repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of the 2016 election. What he hasnt questioned is its outcome.

Read more from Yahoo News:
President Trump hasnt been settling on a single strategy to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.

Indeed, Trump has touted several different stances over the past 36 hours to fulfill the GOP campaign promise to dismantle Obamacare.

He started off this week pushing for a repeal and replace plan, under which an alternative approach to health care would be promptly implemented. He later switched to advocating doing nothing, allowing Obamacare to simply fail and give him more leverage in negotiations. He then pushed for a so-called clean repeal, which would give the Republicans two years to figure out Obamacares replacement. Finally, on Wednesday, he returned to repeal and replace.

Photo Illustration by Yahoo News; Photos: AP

During his presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to repeal and replace the bill, but since taking office he has struggled to pass the legislation through a Republican-controlled Congress. The House version of the bill passed in May by a narrow margin, but key Republican senators have since balked at various proposals.

Below is a timeline of Trumps changing positions on health care:

Nov. 13, 2016: Repeal and replace

In his first interview after becoming president-elect, Trump told CBS 60 Minutes that he would repeal and replace Obamacare.

Were going to do it simultaneously, he said of the strategy, saying hed keep parts of former President Barack Obamas signature health care law. Itll be just fine. Were not going to have, like, a two-day period and were not going to have a two-year period where theres nothing. It will be repealed and replaced.

2017: Repeal and replace

Trump has called for a repeal and replace strategy throughout much of the year.

Hopefully Republican Senators, good people all, can quickly get together and pass a new (repeal & replace) HEALTHCARE bill. Add saved $'s.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2017

So impt Rep Senators, under leadership of @SenateMajLdr McConnell get healthcare plan approved. After 7yrs of O'Care disaster, must happen!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2017

July 17, late evening: Repeal now, replace later

But by mid-July, Trump had changed his mind. On Monday of this week, the president endorsed an effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act immediately and to work on a replacement plan later.

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Republicans should just REPEAL failing ObamaCare now & work on a new Healthcare Plan that will start from a clean slate, Trump tweeted. Dems will join in!

July 18, morning: Let Obamacare fail and create a new plan

Tuesday afternoon, Trump switched up his message once more, stating that he wanted to let Obamacare fail first.

As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan, Trump tweeted at 7:58 a.m. Stay tuned!

As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan. Stay tuned!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2017

Let Obamacare fail, Trump told reporters Tuesday. Im not going to own it.

The president said he was disappointed in Congress for not passing the repeal and replace bill. If Congress lets Obamacare fail, Trump said, it would force Democrats to join the Republicans and work to develop a stronger solution.

July 18, mid-morning: Clean repeal again

Trump appeared to change course again on Tuesday, when Vice President Mike Pence announced Tuesday that he and Trump supported a clean repeal strategy.

Pence said in a speech that he and the president fully support McConnells effort to pass a clean repeal bill.

President Trump and I fully support the majority leaders decision to move forward with a bill that just repeals Obamacare and gives Congress time, as the president said, to work on a new health care plan that will start with a clean slate, Pence said. The vice president, who had played a key role in ushering the legislation through the House, urged lawmakers to replace now and replace later, in his speech.

July 19: Back to repeal and replace again

Trump urged Republican lawmakers Wednesday to continue working toward a repeal and replace plan to dismantle Obamacare.

We have to repeal and replace Obamacare, Trump said at a lunch with some senators Wednesday. We can repeal it, but the best is repeal and replace.

[The Republican health care bill] will get even better at lunchtime, Trump tweeted before his lunch with GOP senators.

The president also told senators that they should stay in Washington until they can come to an agreement.

Frankly, I dont think we should leave town unless we have a health insurance plan, Trump said. Because were close. Were very close.

Read more from Yahoo News:
Despite having an administration mired in controversy, President Donald Trump has maintained a slim margin of popularity over Hillary Clinton just six months into his inaugural term. Since starting his presidency, Trump has attacked the former Democratic presidential candidate as she's remained mostly out of the public spotlight.

A Bloomberg News poll released Tuesday found that Clinton is viewed favorably by 39 percent of voters, compared to Trump, who is viewed favorably by 41 percent of voters. Conversely, 58 percent view Clinton unfavorably compared to the 55 percent or Americans who have an unfavorable view of Trump.

The poll's findings came two days after the release of an ABC/Washington Post poll Sunday that showed Trump's support declining to 36 percent approval.

In the November election, Clinton lost the electoral college to Trump, only gaining 227 electoral votes to Trump's 304. However, she won the popular vote, despite continued unsubstantiated protests from the president.

READ: 2020 Democratic Candidate? California Sen. Kamala Harris Meets With Big Clinton Donors And Lobbyists

Trump has consistently referred to scandals surrounding Clinton and attacks against her even as his own scandals pile up against him and his administration. Her name resurfaced in the political fray last week as more questions swarmed about his son Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer during the election to obtain potentially damning information against Clinton.

"Hillary Clinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media?" Trump tweeted Sunday.

HillaryClinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2017

In a press briefing pushed in the wake of the Donald Trump Jr. revelations last week, Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders sought to cast blame on Clinton's relationship with Russia.

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"If you want to talk about having relationships with Russia, I'd look no further than the Clintons, Sanders said at a briefing last week. Bill Clinton was paid half a million dollars to give a speech to a Russian bank, personally thanked by President Putin."

READ: Trump Sunday Tweets: Defends Son, Watches Golf, Attacks Clinton And Approval Ratings

Clinton has made few public appearances since losing the election. She gave a speech on June 27 where she championed libraries and made self-effacing references to how she coped with losing the election.

"Long walks in the woods and the occasional glass of Chardonnay," she joked, making light of the first picture of her after her concession speech.

Clinton's approval rating is not reflective of all of Democrats, as other members of her party have fared better, according to the influential pollster J. Ann Selzer of Iowa-based Selzer & Co. who oversaw the Bloomberg poll.

"Theres growing discontent with Hillary Clinton even as she has largely stayed out of the spotlight," said pollster J. Ann Selzer, who oversaw the survey. "Its not a pox on the Democratic house because numbers for other Democrats are good."

By contrast, former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden both fared better than Clinton. Obama got 61 percent favorability and Biden got 60 percent favorability.

Hillary Clinton

Photo: Reuters

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Director of US Office of Government Ethics Walter Shaub speaks at the Brookings Institution: YouTube/Brookings Institution

Donald Trumps former ethics chief has claimed the President is making the United States an international laughingstock.

Mr Trumps unprecedented conflicts of interest  and unwillingness to disentangle from them  have created an ethics crisis, former Director of the Office of Government Ethics Walter Shaub said.

Its hard for the United States to pursue international anti-corruption and ethics initiatives when were not even keeping our own side of the street clean. It affects our credibility, Mr Shaub told The New York Times. I think we are pretty close to a laughingstock at this point.

Mr Shaub, who was appointed to his position by former President Barack Obama in 2013, announced his 19 July resignation earlier this month. His role as OGE Director was to promote laws concerning conflicts of interest in government, while overseeing White House employees' financial disclosures and providing ethics training.

Its clear that there isnt more I could accomplish [at the OGE], Mr Shaub told The Washington Post of his resignation.

He added: In working with the current administration, it has become clear that we need to strengthen the ethics program."

The Director has clashed with the Trump administration frequently since inauguration day, pushing the President to divest from his businesses and reprimanding one of his top advisers, Kellyanne Conway.

In November, the OGE tweeted at Mr Trump to say it was "delighted that youve decided to divest your businesses. Right decision! The President had not, in fact, divested.

Later, Mr Shaub publicly criticised Mr Trumps decision to set up a blind trust for his business interests, deeming it "not even halfway blind.

In a statement to the Times, the White House accused Mr Shaub of grandstanding and lobbying for more expansive powers in the office he holds.

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Mr. Schaubs[sic] penchant for raising concerns on matters well outside his scope with the media before ever raising them with the White House  which happens to be his actual day job  is rather telling, Lindsay E. Walters, a White House spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement.

In his new role at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan group of election law experts based in Washington DC, Mr Shaub will work to promote better ethics in government.

He has already proposed several changes to executive ethics laws, including giving the OGE power to subpoena records, and revising financial disclosure rules  plus, of course, requiring all presidents to hand over their tax returns.

The two ranking members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Republican Trey Gowdy and Democrat Elijah Cummings, have already signalled their interest in meeting with Mr Shaub.

Despite his well-earned reputation for pushing back against the President, however, Mr Shaub said he never intended to start a rift with Mr Trump.

I would not have picked this fight, he told the Times. But I have never been one to shy away from bullies.
A White House official has acknowledged the two presidents met again informally after their bilateral talks at the G20 summit in Germany in July

Trump shakes hands with Putin during the their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on 7 July 2017. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin held a second, previously undisclosed meeting during the G20 summit in Germany, the White House confirmed on Tuesday.

There was much media scrutiny of the leaders formal bilateral talks on 7 July in which, the US president later said, Putin denied allegations that he led efforts to interfere in last years US election.

Later that evening, Trump and Putin met again informally, a White House official acknowledged on Tuesday  but only after it was publicly revealed by Ian Bremmer, the president of the international consulting firm Eurasia Group.

Bremmer said there was a dinner that evening for the G20 heads of state and their spouses, though not all of them attended. There were a lot of empty seats, he continued. Donald Trump got up from the table and sat down with Putin for about an hour. It was very animated and very friendly. Putins translator was translating. I found out about it because people were startled.

There was no one else within earshot, Bremmer added, and it is not known what the men discussed. Trump was not joined in the conversation by his own translator, which is thought to be a breach of national security protocol. The White House later said that the translator who accompanied Trump spoke Japanese, not Russian, and that was why Trump and Putin spoke through the Russian translator.

Bremmer added: Its very clear that Trumps best single relationship in the G20 is with Putin. US allies were surprised, flummoxed, disheartened. Youve got Trump in the room with all these allies and whos the one he spends time with?



Such was the level of concern that someone decided to bring it to Bremmers attention. He said he had expected the White House to go public. I sat on this for days hoping they would talk about it. I knew last week. It didnt happen. Im an analyst; Im not in the business of breaking news, he said.

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There is no official government record of the meeting and it was not previously disclosed by the White House, which is facing investigations into the Trump campaigns Russia ties by the special counsel Robert Mueller and two congressional committees.

During the course of the dinner, all the leaders circulated throughout the room and spoke with one another freely, a senior administration official said in a statement Tuesday night, adding: There was no second meeting between President Trump and President Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner. The insinuation that the White House has tried to hide a second meeting is false, malicious and absurd. It is not merely perfectly normal, it is part of a presidents duties, to interact with world leaders.

Also on Tuesday night, the president tweeted to say the news coverage of the secret dinner with Putin is sick, insisting twice that the press was aware of the dinner. While it is true that the dinner was well known and covered by the news media, the press at large did not know about the private conversation between Putin and Trump.



Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

Trumps presidency has been overshadowed by allegations that his election campaign colluded with Russia. Last week it emerged that his son, Donald Trump Jr, held a meeting with a Russian lawyer and Russian American political operative with a view to receiving allegedly incriminating information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. Trump Jr claims it led nowhere and denies wrongdoing.

Trump has consistently and mysteriously refused to criticise the Russian leader. Bremmer said: Ive never in my life seen a relationship between two major countries where the interests are so misaligned while the leaders are so buddy-buddy. It doesnt add up.

Trump has been inconsistent on his China policy, hes been inconsistent on his Nato policy. On any foreign policy issue hes been on both sides. Except Russia. It doesnt make sense. The fact he was willing to do this in front of global leaders shows he just doesnt care how America is perceived.

The first meeting was scheduled to last 30 minutes but went on for more than two hours. During a flight on Air Force One last week, the US president said he raised the issue of election meddling twice and Putin denied it. I said, look, we cant  we cant have  now, he said absolutely not twice. What do you do? End up in a fistfight with somebody, OK?

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MUSCATINE  The Muscatine County Board of Health is working to improve fireworks safety, by researching injury risk, air quality and mental health.

Agencies throughout the county and city of Muscatine, plus the city council and elected officials, are brainstorming ways to prevent injuries, property damage and constant noise now that fireworks are legal in the state.

Fireworks sales began in Muscatine on June 1, but residents were not allowed to legally shoot off fireworks until July 1. According to the Muscatine Police Department, from June 1 to July 6, officers arrested eight people for illegal fireworks use.

The police department responded to 217 calls for service and issued 65 warnings. One minor was cited for purchasing fireworks without an adult present. UnityPoint Health Trinity in Muscatine assisted three burn patients during that time, according to City Administrator Gregg Mandsager.

While the county Board of Health cannot issue regulations for fireworks use, Christy Roby Williams with UnityPoint Trinity Muscatine Public Health said the board should use its expertise to guide policy changes in the future.

One issue the board is considering, she said, is how residents with mental health issues deal with the constant shooting off of fireworks around the Fourth of July.

At the Board of Health meeting Wednesday afternoon, Muscatine resident Michelle Servadio, a veteran and registered nurse, explained her experience listening to fireworks explosions every day leading up to July 4.

"I went up on the roof with my kids to watch fireworks ... and people were shooting bottle rockets off, literally 15 or 20 feet away from my head," she said. "That was a trigger, that triggered PTSD in me, and I went into some kind of trance. I don't know what happened."

Servadio said the constant explosions increased her anxiety, triggered a "fight or flight" response and brought up memories of war. Along with limited access to mental health services in Iowa, she worries the use of fireworks will worsen veterans' symptoms.

"Even though I have issues and suffer, I wouldn't say let's not let people make money and come in and sell fireworks," she said. "We just have to be intelligent with how we regulate and sell them."

Chris Anderson, who sold fireworks to about 1,000 residents at Burns & Sons Direct Appliance, said people working in the fireworks industry are also promoting stricter regulations, tighter enforcement and better education.

"It was like the entire state turned 21 on the same day," he said. "Some knew what they were doing, some didn't."

Board member Brian Wright said some states designate a public area, such as a park, for residents to shoot off fireworks, so residential neighborhoods are spared from noise and safety hazards.

The Board of Health is also looking into how air quality was affected by fireworks surrounding the Fourth of July.

John Gering, with the Iowa DNR, said the EPA's health threshold for fine particles, 35 micrograms per cubic meter, is based on a 24-hour average. The DNR saw hourly averages above that level between dusk and midnight on the Fourth of July in Muscatine.

Des Moines was the only location in Iowa that showed a 24-hour average above the EPA's health threshold. Des Moines limited the use of fireworks to the day of July 4, only from 4-10 p.m., according to The Des Moines Register.

During the holiday, the EPA said air quality will be affected by grilling and fireworks, and it is difficult to attribute a rise in fine particles with a specific cause.

Wright said local jurisdictions have had little state support when dealing with fireworks use. For example, the state agreed to legalize fireworks without implementing an enforcement plan for local police departments.

The Muscatine County Board of Health will work with law enforcement and other local agencies to help draft new regulations for fireworks use. The next time residents in the city of Muscatine can legally shoot off fireworks is from Dec. 26 through Jan. 3.
French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Donald Trump: AFP/Getty Images

Hundreds of climate scientists, including a number from the United States, have applied to work in France after the countrys president, Emmanuel Macron, appealed for them to come and help make out planet great again.

The slogan was a deliberate parody of the climate science-denying Donald Trumps campaign slogan, make America great again.

Germany has announced it is to set up a similar scheme.

While most of the researchers applied for short sabbaticals, 154 were seeking to work in France for four or more years, Dr Anne Peyroche, chief research officer of the CNRS, a national research agency, told the journal Nature.

Applications continue to come in every hour, she said.

In June, Mr Macron said those disillusioned by Mr Trumps dismissal of accepted science about climate change would discover a very different situation in France.

To all scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, responsible citizens who were disappointed by the decision of the president of the United States, I want to say that they will find in France a second homeland, he said.

I call on them: come and work here with us. To work together on concrete solutions for our climate, our environment. I can assure you, France will not give up the fight.

I call on you to remain confident. We will succeed, because we are fully committed, because wherever we live, whoever we are, we all share the same responsibility: Make our planet great again.

The French scheme, worth a total of about 53m, offers four-year grants worth up to about 1.3m. Officials were also headhunting some leading researchers, Dr Peyroche added. The 50 scientists given grants under the scheme will be announced towards the end of this year.

Ashley Ballantyne, a bioclimatologist at Montana University, is one of the applicants.

There are very few funding opportunities in the United States that promote research on carbon-climate interactions at the global scale, so the fact this programme was looking for visionary thinking was appealing, he told Nature.

A German fund, made up of 13m from the government and more money from research bodies, is also being created to attract climate scientists from overseas.






WASHINGTON  As the dust settled following Monday nights collapse of the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare, a flurry of finger-pointing and competing narratives emerged with both the White House and the office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell trying to minimize their own roles in the debacle.

Some White House staffers threw McConnell under the proverbial bus, suggesting that the majority leader rushed the vote and limited President Trumps involvement. McConnells allies denied he sought to dictate the process or have the president take a back seat. They said both Senate leadership and the White House did all they could to pass the bill.

The GOPs Obamacare repeal push initially fell apart in the House in late March. At the time, President Trump praised the unsuccessful efforts of House Speaker Paul Ryan to get a deal done. Ryan and the GOP went on to pass a bill out of the House a month later, and sent it to the Senate in early May.

But after negotiations in the Senate broke down Monday night, Trump didnt try to hide his disappointment with Congress.

For seven years, Ive been hearing repeal and replace from Congress, and Ive been hearing it loud and strong. And then when we finally get a chance to repeal and replace, they dont take advantage of it, Trump said. So thats disappointing.

Multiple sources inside the White House told Yahoo News that Trump took a lower-profile role in pushing the Senate bill than with the House version because McConnell asked to take the lead. A senior White House official who requested anonymity said McConnells team wanted Trump to step back and indicated they were sure they could get a health care bill passed.

McConnell said he had this, said the senior official.

But McConnells allies vehemently rejected the notion the majority leader headed the process. Don Stewart, the majority leaders communications director, said Trump personally actually did do quite a little bit of work to push the legislation. Stewart also denied that McConnell asked the White House to let him run the show.

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There was never a point where we said, Weve got the votes shut up. That never happened. The president was extremely helpful, Stewart said.

Stewart said McConnell and Trump talked all the time and that the president and other White House officials made phone calls to members any time we needed. He also disputed the senior White House officials claim that McConnell expressed confidence the health care bill would pass. According to Stewart, McConnell never said that we have the votes in his conversations with the White House, since the proposed legislation was being continuously amended.

The leaders never said he confidently had the votes. That would be a misunderstanding if somebody, some anonymous aide, told you that, said Stewart. Until recently we didnt have a product to whip votes on.

Josh Holmes, a former McConnell chief of staff who remains close to the majority leader, went even further.

Anybody who told you McConnell counts vote totals before they commit has never known him or been around him long enough to form an opinion, Holmes wrote in an email. Its literally never happened. Ever.

Holmes also disputed the idea that Trump was asked to step back from the process.

The president has been engaged throughout and Im certain the majority leader appreciates his full effort, wrote Holmes.

McConnell created a 13-man working group to craft the health care bill. However, his aide, Stewart, said McConnell brought in all of the Republicans in Congress about a month or so ago when he decided that all of our lunches with all of our members would be the working group.

The leader certainly, hes the leader, Stewart said of McConnell, adding, But he engaged all 52 members three times a week in lunches.

An official with the Trump campaign organization pushed back on the Senate teams efforts to distance McConnell from the unsuccessful push.

McConnell is in damage control mode, everyone in D.C. knows this health care failure is hung around Mitchs neck, the campaign official said.

Mitch McConnell speaking at a news conference on Capitol Hill, July 18, 2017. (Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)

A second senior White House aide also blamed McConnell for rushing the process. McConnell initially said he wanted a vote on the Senate health care bill before the July 4 recess, which sped up the push for votes. The White House aide said this was not our timeline.

The timeline was given to us on a chart from GOP leadership, the aide said.

While theres some truth to the idea that Senate leadership set the rapid timetable for the bill, Trump himself created the expectations, even before he was inaugurated. On January 10, he told the New York Times that Congress would repeal Obamacare probably some time next week  before his own Inauguration  and replace it very quickly or simultaneously, very shortly thereafter.

And Trump also sabotaged Ryan and McConnells plan to pass a simple repeal, set up a two-year replacement process, and move to tax reform. It will be repeal and replace, Trump said on January 11. It will be essentially simultaneously. It will be various segments, you understand, but will most likely be on the same day or the same week, but probably the same day. Could be the same hour.

A House leadership aide pointed right back at the White House, blaming the president for the failure in Congress. If the [White House] was organized and all in, it would be much easier, the aide said, noting the inability of the three entities  White House, Senate and House  to all be rowing consistently in the same direction toward the same end. 

The Trump campaign official countered with an extremely blunt assessment of congressional leaderships performance.

Republican house and Senate leadership was trusted to do their jobs, and have subsequently proven to be utterly incompetent and ineffectual, the campaign official side.

Trumps press secretary Sean Spicer and his deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, did not respond to an email asking if this view matches the official White House position. Since the spring, many observers and lawmakers have noted that the closed, nondeliberative process in both the House and the Senate was making it more difficult to get to a deal.

But an influential conservative intellectual said Tuesday that the problem was not just the rush to get a bill passed. More time might have made for a more functional process. But ultimately there was a lack of substantive coherence and clarity  especially on the part of the president, of course, but also in Congress  and Im not sure speed was behind it, this person said.

John Feehery, a former House leadership aide, said that Republicans were foolish to make health care their first major agenda item to begin with.

You can go fast on health care or slow on health care, but either way it was going to be a disaster. They could have moved quickly on taxes and infrastructure. No way could you move quickly on health care. Its too complicated, Feehery said. Republicans are better at taxes than health care.

A White House staffer said many in the West Wing share the view that infrastructure would have been a better area to begin with.

During the White House press briefing on Tuesday, Yahoo News asked Sanders, the principal deputy press secretary, if the administration had any regrets about moving on health care before infrastructure or another agenda item. Sanders, who said Trump was frustrated by the failure of the health care bill, offered a decidedly noncommittal answer.

No, not necessarily, she said.

The Trump campaign official suggested the president will take the health care fight to the polls if Congress is unable to pass a health care bill. With midterm elections coming up in 2018, Trump could push for members of Congress who dont back his agenda to be voted out.

Legislating is not the residents responsibility, so hes been waiting in the Oval Office for a bill to sign into law. If Republican leadership continues to fail the American people, the president will put the legislative process into receivership and the American people are going to fire those Republicans unwilling to support the Trump agenda.

Amid the finger-pointing and threats, McConnell is vowing to hold a vote in the coming days on full repeal of Obamacare, with a replacement to come later. There was widespread uncertainty Tuesday about when McConnell might schedule a vote on straight repeal. But Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who favors repealing Obamacare and replacing it later, cast a rare note of optimism when he said it could open the door to bipartisan negotiations with Democrats, which so far have not happened.

I suppose it is at least possible that it could become bipartisan if we had it repealed, Lee told Yahoo News. Perhaps the Democrats would decide they want to play a role in deciding what comes next.

Read more from Yahoo News:
A stunning family photo of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arriving at Berlin Tegel Airport with their children in tow was released on Wednesday by Kensington Palace.

Do widzenia Polsko! Thank you for all of your wonderful hospitality throughout # RoyalVisitPoland. We had a fantastic time! The family captioned next to the adorable snap, as they continued their Royal tour of Poland and Germany.

Although George, 3, and Charlotte, 2, appeared a little shy as they walked down the tarmac, Kate and William made a striking couple, both accessorizing different shades of blue. William kept it classy in a dark navy suit and light blue tie while Kate opted for a waist-fitted royal blue Catherine Walker coat dress that featured two self-covered buttons, three-quarter sleeves, shawl lapels and a pleated skirt. She complemented her look with towering Gianvito Rossi heels and a pulled-back do!

The children colour-coordinated with their parents George was dressed in traditional dark blue shorts and a light shirt while Charlotte opted for a white-and-blue print baby doll dress and a solid blue bow hair clip while (little Charlotte took a bit of a tumble at the top of the steps as she prepared to board the private plane, but continued forward like a trooper!)

Were loving the shades of blue! What do you think?

ALSO SEE: Williams most candid interview ever.

Click through the gallery for an ongoing look at official family photos released by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge!

Let us know what you think by commenting below and tweeting @YahooStyleCA!

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Amazon is expanding its war against all other forms of retail onto a new front: food. The internet giant has already announced its intention to acquire Whole Foods, but its foray into groceries wont stop there.

Its also rolling out a line of prepackaged Meal Kits, taking a concept thats already becoming popular and giving it the ole Amazon treatment.

Don't Miss: LG and Samsung are already making phones compatible with T-Mobiles new network

The Meal Kits are an expansion of Amazons existing Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service, and right now theyre only showing up for Fresh members in select locations. The kits generally contain a full meal for two people, and come with everything you should need to cook, including all ingredients and a recipe.

GeekWire spoke to Josh Chadd, a Seattle-based systems engineer who has already had the opportunity to try a Meal Kit. He described his experience in terms that should have the Amazon PRs mouth watering:

The steak was an 8-oz. serving packaged by Corfini and was at least of USDA choice quality, Chadd told GeekWire. It was not an odd or awkward cut which is often the case with other services. The peas were very fresh with no blotches and tasted very sweet. The onion came pre-diced. It also came with fresh green peppercorns which Ive never seen in another service even with a similarly named recipe. Overall the finished meal was a 9 out of 10 for any meal Ive made at home even with my own ingredients.

Right now, it appears that there are 17 Meal Box options available in Seattle, including Roast Chicken with Tarragon-Mushroom Sauce; Tacos al Pastor with Pork; Veggie Burger with Harissa Aioli & Smoked Eggplant; Wagyu Beef Burger with Bacon Jam & Sweet Potato Fries.

For now, the kits are only available to Amazon Fresh members in a few trial markets. Fresh membership costs $14.99 a month, which covers the cost of home grocery deliveries for members. Amazon does have a history of trialing new delivery options in a few markets before rolling them out nationwide, so depending on how the Meal Kits go, you might be seeing the option in your own Amazon store later this year.

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If youve been waiting for the perfect time to get your hands on the perfect smartphone, your wait is now officially over.

Theres no question whatsoever at this point that Samsungs Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ are as good as it gets. Inside and out, Samsung has achieved something special with these sleek new smartphones, and it all starts with the display. No other device on the planet even comes close to matching the stunning design of Samsungs Infinity Screen, which occupies an industry-leading 83% of each phones face. As a result, distractions fade away and the user is immersed in the content being displayed on the device.

Of course, the screen design is just the beginning. Samsung is known far and wide for making the best smartphone displays the world has ever seen, but the company has truly outdone itself with the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+. Super AMOLED technology Quad HD+ resolution mobile HDR certification 16 million colors 4.1 million pixels what else could you possibly ask for?

A smartphones display is easily one of the most important features of the handset. Think about it  anytime you interact with any content on your device, youre looking at the screen. And it simply doesnt get any better than the screen on the Galaxy S8 and S8+. If you already have one of Samsungs latest and greatest flagship phones, then you know exactly what were talking about. If you dont already have one, now is the time to remedy that.

Beginning today, Samsung is offering a killer promotion on its website and in the Shop Samsung App. Trade in your old smartphone while buying a new Galaxy S8, and Samsung will give you a second Galaxy S8 for free. Would you rather have a Galaxy S8+? No problem, buy one S8+ with a qualifying trade-in and your second one is just $100.

This killer deal is good on every major carrier, so anyone and everyone can take advantage. And dont worry, you dont have to pay for your phone in full up front. Samsung offers a 24-month payment plan just like carriers do. In fact, Samsungs monthly payment plan is probably better than the one from your carrier, since the Samsung payment plan doesnt require any money down.

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Samsungs Galaxy S8 offers the best smartphone display, and its packed into the best smartphone design on the market. Its among the most powerful phones in the world, the front and rear cameras are both terrific, the software is outstanding, and its all stuffed into a phone that is both dust- and water-resistant. Take advantage of this killer Samsung BOGO deal now, and you can thank us later.

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White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders chided Fox News White House correspondent John Roberts when he left her off-camera/audio-only briefing today, stopping her remarks to say, John Roberts is bored today, hes headed out.

Roberts was having none of that. If it were on-camera I might not be, he shot back, on his way out the door, giving the White House press team something to consider as the briefings remaining correspondents ooh-ed approvingly.

Before the briefing, Roberts had tweeted sternly:

Today's @WhiteHouse is off camera. The last on-camera briefing was June 29th.  John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) July 18, 2017

After his dramatic-despite-not-being-televised exit, Roberts tweeted:

To all who are musing over me leaving the @SHSanders45 BriefingI have a live shot. Had the brief been on camera, it would 1/2  John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) July 18, 2017

Would have been on TV, not me. I would have waited until it was over.  John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) July 18, 2017

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Rotem Bides visited the remains of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp six times, and each time she felt like she had left a part of herself there, or perhaps the other way around.

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The 27-year-old student, who has been preoccupied with the Holocaust for years, has sparked a controversy both in Israel and abroad with her final project at the Beit Berl Colleges Faculty of Art, which includes samples she collected without permission from the Auschwitz Museum: Shards of glass, small bowls, a metal screw, soil and even a sign clearly warning visitors not to steal anything from the camps grounds.

After learning of the theft, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum said it planned to file an official complaint against Bides with the Polish public prosecutor general. The Beit Berl College decided to remove the exhibition and summon the student for a disciplinary hearing. The college issued a statement, saying that stealing items from the former death camp pointed to the student's insensitivity towards the public and a failure to understand the criminal meaning of the act.

Some of the items displayed in the controversial exhibition

Bides late grandparents were Holocaust survivors. She says one of her grandfathers survived Auschwitz, the other one served in the Red Army, and her two grandmothers also managed to escape the horror alive. Like in many families, the Holocaust was hardly mentioned in her home, and there are still things she doesnt know. But the somber mood, she says, was always there, prompting her to investigate what had happened.

She visited Krakow as part of a student exchange program, knowing that was the place where she would find the raw material for her final art project at Beit Berl. I always felt my raw material was in Poland, not in Israel, she said as she began working on her exhibition.

What will remain after living proof is gone?

The exhibition aims to shock its visitors from the very first moment, with a tube connected to the wall, containing Bides blood. In the middle of the room, there is a large table with different objects on it, some taken from Auschwitz-Birkenau and others related to her personal stories. They include scorched soup bowls, a large screw, pieces of glass, water taken from the river the victims ashes were thrown into, and a sign explaining the sites importance and warning visitors not to remove anything.

Other items presented in the exhibition include spoons, a rabbits leg from Poland, rabbit skin glue she received from her instructor, Michal Neeman, a wooden rabbit, etc. Bides says she also took a tablespoon from Auschwitz, but unfortunately lost it.

Rotem Bides. Im concerned that after all the survivors are gone, the Holocaust will turn into a myth

She is well aware of the fact that she broke the law and that her act raises moral questions too, but says she had a choice whether to accept the rules of a place where all basic rules had been violated. She is concerned about the fact that there will be no more survivors left in a few years, and the theftbeyond its artistic statementprovides an answer to a question she has been asking herself: What will remain of the memory when the living proof is gone?

Of course shes afraid, one of her fellow students says, but she feels its her mission, because she deals with this issue all the time, both in life and in her art. Presenting these objects here in Israel, as the granddaughter of an Auschwitz survivor, is part of her investigation. She places it under the banner of art and asks questions.

This isnt the first time Israelis make headlines for stealing exhibits from Auschwitz. Moti Posloshani, a senior official at the Herzliya municipality, and his wife Dominique were convicted of stealing items from the camps museum several years ago. The couple, who are related to Holocaust survivors, said they had taken rusted cutlery and scissors as a souvenir. They were arrested at the Krakow airport, and a Polish court sentenced them to a suspended jail sentence and ordered them to pay a financial penalty.

I think the theft of the Arbeit macht frei sign made our story bigger, Posloshani said at the time, after being forced to leave his job at the municipality. People take all kinds of things from there, but were sorry. It was a mistake.

Bides has no regrets. I felt it was something I had to do, she said Sunday. Millions of people were murdered based on the moral laws of a certain country, under a certain regime. And if these are the laws, I can go there and act according to my own laws. The statement I'm making here is that laws are determined by humans, and that morality is something that changes from time to time and from culture to culture.

These are the things I want to deal with. I am a third generation to the Holocaust, but Im not saying Im allowed to do it because my grandfather was in Auschwitz. Im simply asking the questions. Im concerned that after all the survivors are gone, the Holocaust will turn into a myth, something that cannot be perceived.

Thats her way of doing things

Bides academic advisor for her final project was painter Michal Neeman, who won the Israel Prize for Plastic Arts in 2014.

I guide the fourth-year students, and thats where I met Rotem, she said Sunday. I was extremely interested in her work. Rotem leaves no stone unturned in the field she is exploring or investigating.

The interesting thing is she brings it to an extreme place in which she feels the need to shock herself before shocking us. She isnt manipulative in the uninteresting way: wanting money, success or publicity. Im referring to the Auschwitz theft of course. She takes pieces of the land, samples the water, finds a piece of iron that used to be a spoon or a knife, which she sees as something important. Because its a materialin plastic arts we deal with materialwhich is directly related to someone who lived at the time and experienced or didnt experience the horror. Thats her way of doing things.

Whether artistic or not, its an extreme statement.

She has very extreme work, in which she uses a process of extracting blood from her body. So here, shes bleeding in a different sense. What shes doing isnt simple. Shes trying to remove dust, makeup, something that has become stagnated and senseless. In other words, she wants to touch the exposed nerve, the events that have piled up under the title of the Holocaust.

Out of an understanding and appreciation of what shes trying to do, I didnt think there was anything wrong with it. On the other hand, I thought her effort to remove the barrier separating us from the initial aversion related to the events of World War II, for Jews specifically, is one of the things that art does sometimes.

Nevertheless, its theft.

Lets say she didnt steal, but took a piece of evidence through which she can be part of it. Its neither devious nor manipulative. The way I see it, she succeeds in creating a unique encounter between art and an event that has passed and has been wrapped in a lot of words, symbols and representations.

According to Dr. Gabriel Klasmer, dean of the Beit Berl Colleges Faculty of ArtsHamidrasha, The question of the schools role is raised here on a nearly daily basis. As one of the oldest art institutions in Israel for art education, we keep reaching the same conclusions that have hardly ever changed in about 71 years. Every time a conflict arises, we go back to the fact Hamidrasha is committed to creative and cultural freedom, to different opinions and perceptions, to multiple voices and pluralism. Hamidrasha is a home for art. Thats where our power lies and thats what we do. Its both rich and complicated simultaneously.

Art will always strive to be in no mans land. On the one hand, Rotems work violates legal and moral principles, and on the other hand, it brings the Holocaust from the Jewish ethos to the personal level. I dont know if theres a criminal aspect in the students work, or if the exhibits were indeed stolen or are just presented as stolen, and its not my job. We are leaving this matter to the relevant authorities, he added.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museums spokesman, Bartosz Bartyzel, told Yedioth Ahronoth on Monday that the museum expected Israels state attorney to intervene and return the items. We plan to report the matter both to the Polish Public Prosecutor General and to the Israeli ambassador in Poland, he said.

Its painful and outrageous. The Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial is a protected site that stands as testimony of the tragedy of the Holocaust and World War II, which should be preserved for the next generations. Its hard to imagine theft being justified in any way, even through art, which can be seen as an attempt to gain publicity, the museum said in a statement.

Bartyzel stressed that it was difficult to confirm from the pictures whether the displayed items really came from the camp, as Bides claims.

Itamar Eichner contributed to this report.
Following the retirement of Tim Nelson, executive vice president and senior loan officer, on June 30, 2017, the First National Bank of Muscatine Board of Directors has announced the promotion of Wayne Johanson to senior vice president and senior loan officer.

Johanson joined First National Bank in July 1984 as an installment loan officer. He was promoted to assistant vice president/lending in December of 1986 and then to vice president/commercial loan officer in November 1987. In February 2004, he was promoted to senior vice president/commercial loan officer.

Nate Meineke has been promoted to vice president, commercial loan officer. Meineke joined the bank as assistant vice president, personal banking in 2011, was promoted to assistant vice president, retail banking/consumer lending manager in 2014, and most recently served as vice president, manager of retail banking.

First National Banks Main Office is located at 300 East Second Street, Muscatine, Iowa. For additional information on First National Bank contact 563-263-4221 or visit fnbmusc.com.
One of the more curious and perhaps more serious aspects of the submarine affair is the Israeli approval given to Germany to sell advanced submarines to Egypt as well. This approval shocked past and present defense officials, because for many years Israel has decisively opposed deals that would allow Egypt to obtain advanced weapons systems similar to those Israel was procuring.

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To ensure its qualitative edge remains, Israel includes a clause in every agreement it makes with a foreign government barring the seller from selling the same weapons to other countries in the Middle East.

Despite that, in 2013 the defense establishment learned Germany had signed an agreement to sell Egypt four Type 209 submarines, which were built by German conglomerate ThyssenKrupp and are similar to the ones Israel bought.

Patrol Corvette, the vessel on which the new Navy ships will be based

But there was more than one deal. In 2009, when Hosni Mubarak was still in power, the Egyptians sought to purchase two submarines from ThyssenKrupp, the very same shipyard that sold Israel its submarines.

Then-defense minister Ehud Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acceded to the request from Cairo under the condition the submarines sold to Egypt would be less advanced than those sold to Israel.

Following Mubarak's ouster in 2011 and the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood and Mohamed Morsi, Netanyahu and Barak asked Germany to cancel the deal. The Germans said they could not withdraw from their agreement with Cairo at that point, and the submarines were delivered to Egypt in 2016.

In the second half of 2014, after the rise to power of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who had better ties with Israel, the Egyptians sought to buy four submarines of the more advanced models, as well as two anti-submarine ships.

The Israeli defense minister at the time, Moshe Ya'alon, and the heads of the relevant departments in the defense establishment, were not included in the discussions about the Egyptian request.

At that time, Egypt launched an accelerated process to build up its navel power in a scope and quality that did not match its economic abilities or its objective strategic needs. In recent years, the Egyptians purchased two aircraft carriers and advanced frigates and they are about to put the finishing touches on one of the largest modern fleets in the area.

The new submarine deal between Germany and Egypt was only discovered by the Defense Ministry by chance, and it caught Israel's top security officials by surprise. When Ya'alon asked Netanyahu about an Israeli approval to the deal, Netanyahu denied it.

In May 2015, the Defense Ministry sent an Israeli official, who was on his way to Germany, to make inquiries on the matter.

The Israeli official met with a senior German official in Berlin. When he asked why the Germans were selling submarines to Egypt in breach of their contract with Israel, the shocked German official presented him with documents showing an Israeli official had approved the sale to Egypt.

The Germans claimed these new agreements were made during their meeting with Netanyahu's representative, attorney Yitzhak Molcho. Molcho is a partner and relative of attorney David Shimron, who is a main suspect in the police investigation into the sale of the submarines to Israel.

Follow the money

In late 2014, at the same time the Germans and Egyptians were formulating their deal, the German government announced it was willing to subsidize a deal with Israel that would include the sale of four ships to protect Israel's natural gas rigs. The subsidy amounted to about a third of the deal127 million euros.

The condition: The Israeli Defense Ministry would have to cancel the international tender it issued for the ships and award the contract to ThyssenKrupp, without a bid.

As Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Monday, three South Korean shipyards were supposed to compete in the original tender, as ThyssenKrupp's ships were too big (1,800 tons) and too expensive, and Israel only needed 1,200 ton ships.

But thanks to the German subsidizing, ThyssenKrupp was awarded the contract and the South Korean bid was canceled. The Navy, meanwhile, supported the deal as it was all too happy to get a frigate twice the size of the most advanced missile boat it currently hasthe Sa'ar 5-class corvette.

The Navy's Sa'ar 5-class corvette (Photo: Elad Gershgoren)

But despite the German discount, the ships are still far more expensive than originally planned. The former head of the Defense Ministry's Directorate of Production and Procurement, Shmuel Zucker, learned this week the Navy went over the budget it was allocated by the Treasury, and the maintenance of the ships will be far more expensive compare to the smaller, Korean ships.

One should not rule out the possibility there is a connection between the change in the German position on selling subsidized ships to the Israeli Navy and the approval by Israel of ThyssenKrupp's deal with Egypt, from which the German shipyard made over 2 billion euros.

The three-way deal

Israel allows Germany to sell advanced submarines to Egypt, and in return it receives a considerable discount on the patrol boats deal. This way everyoneexcept, perhaps, state securitygains: The Germans, who get fat contracts with both Egypt and Israel, the Israeli representatives who work for the German shipyards and get their due reward, and even the Navy, which is getting bigger and more expensive ships (that serve no real need).

Police investigators will have to question ThyssenKrupp's representative in Israel, Miki Ganorwho is in talks to become a state witness whether there was a connection between the unprecedented strategic decision to allow the sale of advanced submarines to Egypt (unlike the far inferior submarines approved in the first deal) and the decision to purchase ships from the same German shipyard.

Furthermore, Ganor will have to answer whether the German commitment to subsidize the patrol vessels was given in return for Israel's approval to Berlin to sell advanced submarines to Egypt.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during their meeting Tuesday that despite Hungary's crimes in the 20th century, the country will never again tolerate anti-Semitism.

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Netanyahu said that Orban "promised" him unequivocally that the Hungarian government is on the side of the Jewish people.

This promise comes after the Hungarian government conducted an aggressive campaign against Jewish billionaire and Holocaust survivor George Soros, who over the past few weeks attacked Hungary's policy against immigrants and refugees seeking to enter the country on their way to Germany.

Photo: AP

According to Orban, Hungary's collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II was a "mistake" and a "sin" as it failed to protect its Jewish community.

Orban said he told Netanyahu that he was aware of the "difficult history behind us."

Some 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Orban and Netanyahu meet in Budapest (: ")

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"At an earlier time, the government of Hungary made a mistake, moreover, committed a sin when it did not protect its citizens of Jewish heritage," Orban said during a press briefing after his meeting with Netanyahu in Parliament.

"Every Hungarian government has the duty to protect all of its citizens, regardless of their heritage."

Orban continued, saying, "During World War II, Hungary did not comply with this moral and political requirement. This is a sin because at the time we decided that instead of protecting the Jewish community, we chose collaboration with the Nazis.

Photo: AP

"I made it clear to the prime minister that this can never happen again. In the future, the Hungarian government will protect all its citizens."

Netanyahu is the first Israeli prime minister to visit Hungary since 1989, when Hungary was still under communist rule.

Netanyahu said he thought about Hungary first in relation to the birth of modern Zionism, as Theodore Herzl, "our modern Moses," was born in Budapest in 1860.

He thanked Orban for Hungary's repeated support for Israel.

He cited French President Emmanuel Macron's recent statement drawing a parallel between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel. "Macron said there is a new anti-Semitism that is expressed in anti-Zionism, that is delegitimizing the one and only Jewish state," Netanyahu said.

"In many ways, Hungary is at the forefront of the states that are opposed to this anti-Jewish policy and I welcome it and I express the appreciation of my government and the people, many people in Israel for this."

Photo: AP

Orban, meanwhile, repeated his opposition to mass migration mostly by Muslims, which he has said would lead to irreversible changes in European culture and its population.

"I made it clear that Hungary has serious disputes in the European Union, as Hungary does not want a mixed population," Orban said. Hungary "does not want to change its current ethnic composition, it does not want to defer to any external, artificial influence."

Photo: AFP

"We'd like to remain as we are, even if, I have to admit, we are not perfect," Orban added.

On Wednesday, Netanyahu and Orban will meet with leaders of Poland, the Czech Republic and SlovakiaHungary's partners in the so-called Visegrad Groupand also visit representatives of Hungary's Jewish community.
WASHINGTON - The Trump administration slapped 18 Iranian individuals and groups with sanctions Tuesday for aiding the country's non-nuclear weapons programs, in a bid to show that President Donald Trump is staying tough on Iran despite his moves to let the nuclear deal stay in place for now.

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The latest attempt to clamp down on Iran's military financing ranged from an Iranian-based company that aided the country's drone program to a Turkey-based provider of naval equipment and a China-based network that helped secure electronics for Tehran. The sanctions freeze any assets in the US and prevent Americans from doing business with them.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the sanctions "send a strong signal that the United States cannot and will not tolerate Iran's provocative and destabilizing behavior."

US Secretary of State Tillerson and US President Trump (Photo: Reuters)

The announcement came only hours after the Trump administration told Congress for a second time that Iran is complying with the nuclear deal and can keep enjoying sanctions relief. The administration insisted Tehran was breaching "the spirit" of the deal.

Trump, who lambasted the 2015 pact as a candidate, gave himself more time to decide whether to scuttle it or let it stand. Instead, senior Trump administration officials sought to emphasize their deep concerns about Iran's non-nuclear behavior and vowed that those transgressions won't go unpunished.

During the campaign, Trump told the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC): "My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran." And he returned to that theme often during the presidential race, describing the deal as "catastrophic," among other things.

In a shift from that earlier threat to dismantle the deal, officials said the administration was working with US allies to try to fix the deal's flaws, including the expiration of some nuclear restrictions after a decade or more. The officials also said the US would slap Tehran with new sanctions penalizing it for developing ballistic missiles and other activity.

Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and "the entire administration judge that Iran is unquestionably in default of the spirit" of the agreement, one official said. That assessment carries no legal force, while Trump's certification that Iran is technically complying clears the way for sanctions to remain lifted.

The late-night announcement capped a day of frenzied, last-minute decision-making by the president, exposing deep and lingering divisions within his administration about how to deal with a top national security issue.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (Photo: EPA)

Since early last week, Trump's administration had been prepared to make the certification, a quarterly requirement. Trump first told Congress in April that Iran was indeed complying. With no final decision on his broader Iran policy, the White House had planned to let the status quo stand for another three months.

As planned, a public rollout began Monday morning involving close choreography among the White House, the State Department and other parts of government. The White House National Security Council distributed talking points to other agencies while national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin briefed outside policy experts who frequently comment on such issues in the media.

Then, just as the White House was preparing to brief reporters, the announcement was abruptly halted and the talking points temporarily recalled as the president reconsidered the decision, according to officials and others briefed by the administration. Among the options Trump discussed with Tillerson and other aides was to extend the sanctions relief but refuse to certify Iran's compliance, several officials said.

With a midnight deadline just hours away, officials disclosed the final decision to reporters on a chaotic conference call on the condition that it not be published until the White House had a chance to formally notify Congress.

Ultimately, the president's decision was the same on the substance to what his administration had been planning all along. Although the language was toughened to add the declaration that Iran is "in default of the spirit" of the deal, Iran will continue receiving the same sanctions relief that it did under former President Barack Obama.

In April, when Trump made his first certification, he paired it with new sanctions for non-nuclear behavior to show there was no softening of his stance toward the Islamic Republic. Earlier Monday, the White House had told outside experts it would repeat that playbook, by punishing more than a dozen Iranian individuals, organizations and procurement networks involved in ballistic missiles and other nefarious behavior.

But the day came and went with no such announcement, although officials said they expected more sanctions would eventually be coming. It was unclear why the administration held off or for how long, but typically the Treasury Department prefers to issue new sanctions during business hours.

"We receive contradictory signals," Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations before the decision was announced. "So we don't know which one to interpret in what way."

Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif (Photo: AFP)

For Trump, a vocal critic of the deal, the obligation to report to Congress on Iran's conformity has created an unwelcome, tri-monthly headache. Still undecided about whether to withdraw from the deal, Trump must either vouch for Tehran's compliance or try to claim Iran is breaching iteven though the International Atomic Energy Agency that monitors the deal says it is not.

Under the deal struck by Obama and other world leaders, Iran agreed to roll back its nuclear programlong suspected of being aimed at developing atomic weaponsin return for billions of dollars in sanctions relief.

The deal does not address global concerns about Iran's non-nuclear activities, but also doesn't prevent the US and others from punishing Iran for those activities. Iran remains on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism for its support for Hezbollah and other Shia militia groups, including in Iraq, Syria and Bahrain.

Scuttling the deal would put further distance between Trump and foreign leaders who are already upset over his move to withdraw from the Paris global climate change accord. Other powers that brokered the nuclear deal along with the US have said there's no appetite for renegotiating it.
The IDF released a video Tuesday detailing Hezbollah operations in southern Lebanon in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which states that the Shiite terrorist organization must remain north of the Litani River.

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The video was released ahead of a UN Security Council discussion on violations of the resolution, which is scheduled to be held on Thursday.

Hezbollah operatives attempting to gather intelligence on Israel (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

Hezbollah has established an intricate network of military infrastructure, which includes rocket launching sites aimed at Israel.

The video, published by the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, portrays how Hezbollah collects intelligence in southern Lebanon, beginning with two organization operatives who were observed gathering intelligence on Israel.

IDF video on Hezbollah border activities (:  ")

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The video also details a fictitious organization"Green Without Borders"established by Hezbollah and used as a cover for their illicit military activity in southern Lebanon. The organization ostensibly gathers ecological and agricultural information to be used to promote environmental protection in Lebanon.

The video even shows images of Hezbollah operatives, including Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, participating in activities on behalf of the phony organization, with the true intention of causing harm to Israel.

Hezbollah observation post (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

Last month, Israel had provided the UN Security Council with intelligence that Hezbollah had established a network of observation posts along the border under the guise of an innocent organization.

Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, sent a letter to Security Council members detailing an incident in April when a group of civilians blocked a UNIFIL patrol force access to an observation post flying a "Green Without Borders" flag.

Brig. Gen. Rafi Milo, who was appointed commander of the Galilee Division on Tuesday, said, "Our preparedness for escalation is constantly sharp. We continue to monitor developments in the field and constantly improve our defensive response and our offensive capabilities. When necessary, we will use them with full force.

"We have not lost sight of the fact that Hezbollah systematically violates UN Resolution 1701 and, in total contradiction, maintains a military presence even if it is hidden in dozens of Shi'ite villages south of the Litani River. The Lebanese army turns a blind eye to Hezbollah activity, camouflages the terrorist organization's tours in southern Lebanon, and even allows it to use its infrastructure against the State of Israel. The peace and stability in the region are important to all of us."
Dozens of Muslims prayed outside the Temple Mount's gates on Tuesday evening, with some of them throwing stones and bottles at police after the end of prayers in protest of the additional security measures at the entrance to the Temple Mount.

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Israel set up metal detectors and security cameras at the entrance to the Temple Mount after three Israeli Arab terrorists were able to smuggle firearms into the holy site, using them to carry out a terror attack on Friday that claimed the lives of two Israeli police officers.

Clashes on the Temple Mount on Tuesday (:  )

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Protesters called out "we will sacrifice our lives for al-Aqsa," "we'll die as martyrs," "there will be an intifada," and "there's nothing like killing soldiers."

Israel Police and Border Police forces dispersed the rioters.

Protest prayer outside the Lions' Gate (Photo: Gil Yohanan)

The protesters received support from Arab MKs from the Joint ListHanin Zoabi, Jamal Zahalka, Ahmad Tibi, Osama Saadi and Juma Azbargawho arrived at the Lions' Gate to attend evening prayers outside the Temple Mount complex.



Arab MKs at the Lions' Gate

"The metal detectors must be removed, they cause great unrest and in fact create a new reality that hurts the status quo," said MK Tibi, who chairs the Joint List's Al-Quds Committee.

"(Prime Minister) Netanyahu is the one who insists on this provocation, and he will bear the responsibility to any escalation here or in the region. The entire Arab world is up in arms. In addition to hurting the Palestinian people, this is hurting Jordan's special authority over the holy places," he added.

"I don't know how exactly people can tolerate such a situation, in which they pray under siege by dozens of police, Special Forces and military," said MK Zoabi. "This isn't just an occupation, it's also humiliation. We won't accept the new arrangement of electronic gates. We refuse any new security arrangement. We don't need security in our place."

Earlier Tuesday, the military wings of the different Palestinian factions in Gaza held a press conference threatening a forceful response if Israel does not remove the added security.

"The aggression against al-Aqsa will be the spark that ignites the blaze that can burn through the whole region," one Gaza militant threatened.

Gaza militant factions hold press conference (Photo: AP)

During the afternoon and evening on Monday, hundreds of Muslim worshipers clashed with police near the Lions' Gate. Police used stun grenades to disperse the rioters. Several protesters were injured and treated at the scene.

The protesters called out "we will sacrifice our lives for al-Aqsa" at the police officers, with one of them noting: "We won't honor the electronic gates. We will continue to fight to the death and die as martyrs here."
Turkey announced a new school curriculum on Tuesday that excluded Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, feeding opposition fears President Tayyip Erdogan is subverting the republic's secular foundations.

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The chairman of a teachers' union described the changes as a huge step in the wrong direction for Turkey's schools and an attempt to avoid raising "generations who ask questions."

Photo: Reuters

Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz said the main elements of evolution already underpinned the science curriculum, but there would be no mention of Darwin's landmark theory until university.

"Because it is above the students' level and not directly related, the theory of evolution is not part" of the school curriculum, Yilmaz told a news conference.

Opposition Republican People's Party lawmaker Mustafa Balbay said any suggestion the theory was beyond their understanding was an insult to high school students.

Photo: Reuters

"You go and give an 18-year old student the right to elect and be elected, but don't give him the right to learn about the theory of evolution...This is being close minded and ignorant."

The theory of evolution is rejected by both Christian and Muslim creationists, who believe God created the world as described in the Bible and the Koran, making the universe and all living things in six days.

Erdogan, accused by critics of crushing democratic freedoms with tens of thousands of arrests and a clampdown on media since a failed coup last July, has in the past spoken of raising a "pious generation."

Photo: Reuters

The curriculum, effective from the start of the 2017-2018 school year, also obliges Turkey's growing number of "Imam Hatip" religious schools to teach the concept of jihad as patriotic in spirit.

"It is also our duty to fix what has been perceived as wrong. This is why the Islamic law class and basic fundamental religion lectures will include (lessons on) jihad," Yilmaz told reporters. "The real meaning of jihad is loving your nation."

Jihad is often translated as "holy war" in the context of fighters waging war against enemies of Islam; but Muslim scholars stress that it also refers to a personal, spiritual struggle against sin.

Photo: Reuters

Mehhmet Balik, chairman of the Union of Education and Science Workers, condemned the new curriculum.

"The new policies that ban the teaching of evolution and requiring all schools to have a prayer room, these actions destroy the principle of secularism and the scientific principles of education," he said.

Under the AKP, which came to power in 2002, the number of "Imam Hatip" religious schools has grown exponentially. Erdogan, who has roots in political Islam, attended one such school.

Photo: Reuters

He has spent his career fighting to bring religion back into public life in constitutionally secular Turkey and has cast himself as the liberator of millions of pious Turks whose rights and welfare were neglected by a secular elite.

Liberal Turks see Erdogan as attempting to roll back the work of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Western-facing founder of modern Turkey who believed education should be free of religious teachings.

Some government critics have said the new curriculumwhich was presented for public feedback earlier this yearincreased the emphasis on Islamic values at the expense of Ataturk's role.

Photo: Reuters

But Yilmaz said on Tuesday nothing about Ataturk or his accomplishments had been removed. Changes only emphasized core values such as justice, friendship, honesty, love and patriotism.

He said discussion of the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), ISIS and the network of the US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames for last year's attempted coup, would also be added.

Balik, the head of the union, said the changes were being made in an attempt to stamp out dissenting ideas.

"The bottom line is: generations who ask questions, that's what the government fears," he said.
Even after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres ordered the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) to remove a report from its website accusing Israel of imposing an "apartheid regime" on the Palestinians, the agency continues promoting similar content on social media.

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ESCWA, which comprises 18 Arab states in Western Asia, released a report in March concluding that "Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole."

The report raised ire in Israel and in the United States. The accusationoften directed against Israel by its criticshas never before been made by a United Nations body.





ESCWA post on Facebook

UN Under-Secretary General and ESCWA Executive Secretary Rima Khalaf resigned after what she described as pressure from the secretary general to withdraw the report.

At the time, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the report was published without prior consultation with the UN secretariat and that it therefore does not reflect Guterres's position.

But even after the report had been removed, the NGO UN Watch has found at least 20 posts, tweets or releases by ESCWA accusing Israel of apartheid.

ESCWA post on Facebook

In a letter to Guterres, UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer urged the UN chief to intervene on the matter.

"In March, you rightly took action to remove ESCWA's unauthorized publication of a false report that obscenely demonized Israel as an 'apartheid' state... We are therefore alarmed to discover that, despite your clear and unequivocal stand, numerous ESCWA webpages, Facebook posts and tweets continue to display this same 'Israel Apartheid' slur."

The UN Watch noted that even after Khalaf's resignation, her quotes presenting Israel as an apartheid state remain on ESCWA's websites. The agency's Facebook page likewise still presents numerous posts from 2014 to 2017 claiming Israel is an apartheid state like South Africa.

"Former secretary-general Kofi Annan rightly described the General Assemblys 1975 'Zionism is Racism' resolution as the low point of the UNs experience with anti-Semitism. ESCWAs 'Israel apartheid' slurs are but the latest reincarnation of the same libeland we urge Mr. Guterres to order them removed immediately," Neuer added.
Three residents of the south who threw stones at police and rioted during a violent protest on November 30, 2013 in the Bedouin village of Hura against a bill to resettle Bedouins in the south were sentenced on Wednesday to three years in prison, suspended sentences and a fine of NIS 25,000.

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The controversial billcalled the Prawer Plan, which has since been shelvedcaused a day of rage to be announced by Israeli Bedouins and was followed by outbreaks of violent protests all over the country, with dozens injured and dozens more arrested in clashes with peace-keeping police forces.

Hura rioters, 2013 (Photo: EPA)

The riot in Hura lasted for hours, during which demonstrators threw stones at the police and set fire to a police cart, a police fence, an electricity pole, trees and nearby shrubs and bushes. Police vehicles were also pelted with rocks and a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the policemen.

The prosecution filed an indictment against five people involved in the riot. All the defendants have denied their guilt.

Hura riot, November 2013 (Video: Roee Idan) (:  ,  ,    )

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Judge Ron Sulkin of the Be'er Sheva Magistrate's Court convicted the defendants, each according to his offenses attributed, on all chargeswhich included assaulting police officers under aggravated circumstances, disturbing a policeman in the performance of his duties, rioting, and more.

The judge did not accept the defendants' claim that they "happened by chance" to be at the riot.

"It would not be an exaggeration to say that the intensity of the violence used in this gathering is one of the gravest," Judge Sulkin ruled. "The court must give (the policemen) the appropriate backing when they are attacked while fulfilling their duties."

Riot police in Hura, 2013 (Photo: Gettyimages)

The court sentenced three of the five defendants, Atef Abu Aish, Obeida al-Hawashleh and Osama Nasasreh, to three years in prison, suspended sentences and a fine of NIS 25,000 each.

The fourth defendant, Ataf al-Qian, was sentenced to six months of community labor, suspended prison terms and a fine of NIS 15,000.

The fifth defendant, Samir al-Sayyid, did not appear for the hearing, and therefore his sentence has not yet been handed down.

The Southern District Attorney's Office stated at the end of the hearing that "the court in its sentence made a clear and unequivocal statement that a public struggle cannot be conducted with violence, and the security and safety of Israeli police officers are not forfeited."
The IDF revealed Wednesday the scope of humanitarian aid that it helps provide the victims of the civil war in Syria. These efforts included transporting about half a million liters of diesel fuel, 360 tons of food, 77 tons of clothing and shoes, as well as dozens of generators and water delivery systems.

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A Syrian toddler treated at IDF medical center set up for Syrian refegees (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

The humanitarian aid is provided to some 200,000 Syrian citizens living in 80 villages and towns in the Syrian Golan Heights and controlled by rebel groups not affiliated with ISIS. It is a strip of land 15 kilometers deep into Syria and 40 kilometers long, from the Syrian village of Jubta al-Hashib in the north to the Tal Saki area in the south-central region.About a year ago, the Bashan division of the IDF, which is in charge of the Golan Heights, decided to set up an organized humanitarian aid system, by erecting a special unit focused on this mission, headed by Lt. Col. A., who served in intelligence positions in the past, as well as in the Civil Administration in the Gaza Division and Judea and Samaria.

IDF soldiers putting together aid packages for Syrian refugees (Photo: Avihu Shapira)

"We're going to be invaluable to the local Syrians," said Golan Division Commander Brig. Gen. Yaniv Ashur. "When other villages heard about the help we were providing, they also wanted to join in. In one of the villages, the aid from Israel received a religious seal of approval when the muezzin authorized alerted worshipers they can reach the border and receive help."

From the logistics center to the rebel-controlled villages

The items are stored in a protected logistics center near the border. From there they are transferred and placed on the eastern side of the perimeter fence and later collected by the Syrians.

A wounded Syrian is carried by IDF troops to treatment (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

"We are in telephone contact with people in the Syrian villages, including local doctors and village heads, but also with those involved in certain professions, such as electricity, to which we transmit generators," the IDF admitted for the first time on Wednesday.

Systemizing and streamlining the aid provided by the IDF to Syrian refugees is also reflected in the way the army communicates with the Syrians: For starters, the IDF speaks to the aid recipients directly and not through aid organizations or the UN. As such, flour is directly distributed to Syrian bakeries, and vehicles and mules are provided for transporting supplies.

A generator tranferred to Syria (Photo: Avihu Shapira)

"In my studies in Britain, before I took up this position, I learned about the military power that existed in providing 'soft means.' (In additioned), the IDF Military Intelligence Research Department explained to me how much the Americans failed to achieve in the war in Iraq, due to their not taking care of the local population."

IDF sources added: "One of the guiding principles here is maintaining continuity to create credibility on the other side. We supplied them with tons of flour, which reduced the price of bread by 50 percent, 80 percent. Once a week, a Syrian children's bus arrives at the border for a day of medical treatment in Israel, which also includes fun activities for children and providing clothing.

Red Cross balks at assisting

The aid project is funded mainly by foreign donations, with the IDF supplying some of the budget, mainly for the purchase of basic goods from the IDF food center and from funding the devices to the unit.

Baby formula for Syrian refugees (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

Ashur noted that international aid organizations, such as the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders, have not been involved in the project, apparently over concerns that doing so would limit their activities in Turkey and Jordan.

"We found civilian donors like a wealthy Syrian expatriate who lived in Chicago, who provided donations through the Haifa Port. We're looking to help the local population grow stronger and see the Shi'ite axis and global jihad elements weaken," he explained.

Photo: Avihu Shapira

Ashur added: "This plan will not guarantee the prevention of attacks from the border but will help restrain the area. We will continue our policy of non-intervention in the war." There are currently two refugee camps near the fence, on the Syrian side of the border.

3,000 Syrians treated in Israel

Military medical sources said that the assistance given to Syrian refugees has not come at the expense of Israeli patients in Israeli hospitals.

"In total, 3,000 Syrians have been treated so far, about 70 percent of whom are men (aged 20  30), in addition to 1,000 children who have been hospitalized for treatment and a respite over the past year. None of them have wanted to stay in Israel thanks to the assistance we provide their villages. We (also) supply insulin to one hundred Syrian diabetics. "

Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit

In two weeks' time, a new IDF clinic will be set up on the border with Syria, located in an old IDF post on the eastern side of the security fence. The IDF will provide the infrastructure, but the doctors, responsibility and funding will be provided by the US. This is in addition to the medical equipment transferred from Israel to the medical centers that were damaged in the Quneitra city area.

Syrian children brought to Israel for medical treatment and a day of fun activities (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

Syrian resident: 'When peace comes I will come to kiss the land of Israel'

The IDF's opinions differed as to whether to reveal the extent of the aid and the unit's activity. Following partial publications in the foreign media it was decided to officially address its aid efforts. In a video released by the IDF, a wounded Syrian man kisses the hand of a paramedic who treated him in an ambulance.

Other videos show interviews with Syrian residents who received medical assistance in Israel. One of the residents said: "We did not find any country that would stand by us except Israel, the soldiers treated us very well, they helped us in our area, took the wounded, treated them, gave them medicine."

Photo: Avihu Shapira

A girl who received medical treatment in Israel was asked if she was afraid to enter Israel and replied, "No, they are treating me." When asked to describe life in Syria, she added: "Over there it's bad, not good. The summer is always bad."

Another Syrian resident added, "We thank Israel, and with God's help, when there will be peace in Syria I will return here to kiss the ground in Israel."

An Israeli hospital to be erected beyond fence with Syria

On a related note, it was reported on Wednesday that Israel is planning to establish a new field hospital along the demarcation line with Syria.

The new field hospital would be located on the Syrian side of the fence but on the Israeli side of the demarcation line in the Golan Heights, which it occupied in 1967, Lieutenant Colonel Tomer Koler said.

The fence does not always follow the line precisely.

The new field hospital will treat some 50 people per day and will be operated by an international NGO, said Kotler, addong that he could not name the NGO nor say exactly where the field hospital will be located.

Koler said he hoped it would be operational in the next month.

Israel formerly had a field hospital in the area but closed it in 2016.

Koler said that because of the humanitarian efforts, he hopes "that they will see that we are good people on the other side."
- Nana Addo has expressed key interest in improving the lot of Ghanaians

- But amidst the promises, he may have failed to tackle some pertinent issues

- Click here for the latest stories in Ghana

President of the republic, Nana Addo Danquah Akufo Addo has resolved to move Ghana to an era of prosperity. But unfortunately, some key issues happening in the country might have eluded the president.

5 things Nana Addo failed to address in crucial press confab (Photo: presidency.gov.gh)

READ ALSO: President takes an innocent swipe at former NDC government Minister

The president continues to raise critical issues mainly from the economy to other matters regarding Ghana's sanitation issues, internet connectivity among others. But what about the very critical issues that he may have lost sight of?

1. GITMO two

Granted the pronouncement of the stay of the Gitmo two as illegal by the Supreme Court, one would have thought that the president could help us understand the arrangements he plans putting in place to repatriate these men from Ghana. Already, the issue of Ghana's relations with the US comes up but just a little sentence or two could have solved the mystery.

2. Terrorism

Let's be fair, Nana Addo always talks about security in Ghana and the strife to end "barbaric mob injustices". What he failed to touch one was the threat of home grown and external terrorism. This issue, which remains the world's headache should have seen the president lay out specific plans his government wishes to take in crippling any possible attack here in the country.

3. Massive deportations and treatment of Ghanaian immigrants

Should you have read the news in the past weeks you will know how many Ghanaians are not only been deported from various countries but also maltreated abroad. Yes, we know that the foreign affairs minister was very clear on government's steps to secure the dignity of Ghanaians abroad but a word from the president would have calmed nerves the more.

4. Ghana's stance of same sex marriages

This topic of homosexuality always raises eyebrows as Ghanaians, per the conservative culture, detest to even hear of the word. But let's face it. We currently are having one of the world's most powerful human right institutions called Amnesty International persistently knock on the door of parliament lobbying of the gay marriage to be legalized and also the rights of the LGBT community respected. The president's stance on this controversial issue would have clarified Ghana's stance once and for all.

5. Ghana's relations with China

It was a moment of controversy when the vice president, Dr Bawumia, suffered huge bashing over the 15 billion agreement from the Chinese government. Even now, we do gather that Chinese businesses are trooping into Ghana in their numbers. Call it economic colonialism, the question we sought to get from Nana Addo is why the sudden focus on China! Are we to gain in the process are they rather would?

What other issues did you think the president failed always fails to address? Share with us in the comments section below.

Apostle Opoku Onyinah reacts to Theresa Mays comments on LGBT rights in Ghana | Archbishop Duncan Williams warns the government:

Do you have any story to share with YEN? Get featured! We are available on Facebook and email via info@yen.com.gh

Source: YEN.com.gh
 

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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 []
Three students are expected to appear before the court for allegedly torching their schools dormitory.

The students of Muhuri Muchiri Secondary School in Ruai area, Nairobi are said to have carried out the arson attack on Monday night as other students were in night studies.

According to police, no one was injured in the inferno that was contained by fire fighters from Nairobi County. Property of unknown value was, however, destroyed.

Nairobi police boss Japheth Koome said the students are expected in court to face arson charges.

A team of detectives visited the school to launch a probe the incident.

Muhuri Muchiri Secondary School is a boys public boarding secondary school, located in Ruai location, Nairobi County.
When it comes to vacationing, no one does better than Oscar winner Lupita Nyongo.

Earlier in the summer, the Kenyan actress went on a tropical trip to Mexico, where she was born over 34 years ago.

The Black Panther actress stayed at Hotel Esencia, one of the most beautiful and Instagram-able places to stay in Mexico.

On her first trip to Esencia, Nyongo enjoyed a sun filled vacation in the North American country. From tacos on the beach to exploring the waters of Quintana Roo, Nyongo balanced Rest&Recuperation with avid exploration.

The vacay included lounging by the poolside, trying out paddleboarding for the first time, and visiting the Sian Kaan Biosphere Reserve and the Mayan ruins of Coba.

Adventures with Alessandro in the Mayan ruins of Coba Aventuras con Alessandro en las ruinas Mayas de Coba A post shared by Lupita Nyongo (@lupitanyongo) on Jul 17, 2017 at 5:08pm PDT



The pics
James Leo Prager passed away peacefully on July 11 2017, surrounded by family. Jim was born in Whittier California on June 22, 1933, the only child of Peter and Minnetta Prager. The family settled in Santa Ana, California where Jim grew up and attended Santa Ana schools. After spending a year at Marquette University in Wisconsin he joined the U.S. Navy, where he was a corpsman. During this time he married his best girl Imogene. After the Navy, Jim and his bride moved to Los Angeles where he attended USC. Following graduation, he joined his father in the insurance business in Santa Ana. Jim and Imogene lived in Santa Ana for 20 years, and raised seven children. Jim was active in his community. He was a president of the Orange County Insurance Agents, and as a deeply religious man was a cofounder of the First Friday Friars, an organization which brings together Catholic business and professional men in Orange County, which is still going strong 59 years later.

His interest in wine was heightened through George Starkys wine classes at a local Orange County college. After several vacations to the Napa Valley, and discussions with his port mentor, the late Professor James Guymon, Jim moved his family to Saint Helena in 1977 and founded Prager Winery and Port Works in 1979, which has become the preeminent producer of Port style wines in the Napa Valley.

Jims passion for wine and port was only exceeded by his love for his family. He was a loving son, devoted father, and a loyal and passionate husband.

Jim is survived by his cherished wife of 60 years Imogene, seven loving children and their spouses; Jeff (Roxanne), Peter (Karen), John (Carol), Mary (Richard), Katie (Kevin), Erica (Steve) and Julia (David); twenty- two treasured grandchildren and two beautiful great grandchildren.

A rosary will be held July 25 at 6:30PM and the funeral Mass will be July 26 at 10:00AM at the Saint Helena Catholic Church.

Jim supported his children and the children of the Napa Valley. In lieu of flowers, please consider donating to your local Boys and Girls Club. Memories and notes of sympathy may be shared at claffeyandrota.com.
Juanita Lopez Renteria passed away peacefully at home in Rutherford on Sunday, July 16 surrounded by family and close friends. Married to Carlos Renteria in rural Jalisco, Mexico at age fifteen, she recently celebrated their 64th anniversary with him. Juanita and Carlos were the first in their families to immigrate to the Napa Valley. They both helped many family members immigrate to the United States and the Lopez and Renteria clans are now large and continue to have an important influence in the wine industry in the valley as vineyard owners, wine makers, and vineyard managers. While Juanita was the foundation that supported the family, both Juanita and Carloss hard work and example inspired and enabled their children to prosper. Juanita is survived by her husband Carlos Renteria, now retired from vineyard management with the Usibelli Ranch; Dr. Adalberto Renteria, Regional Medical Director for Adventist Health West in Central California; Belinda Renteria, Hospitality Manager for Monticello Vineyards in Napa Valley; Carlos Renteria Jr.; grandchildren Teresa Renteria Tam, Lucas Renteria, and Elijah Renteria; great grandchild Tyler Tam. Their son Saul Renteria passed away a year ago; he was a long time resident of the valley.
A St. Helena father is warning local parents and kids of a potential hazard at Crane Park after his son suffered second- and third-degree burns to his feet at a playground.

Jorge Cortes and his family went to Crane Park at about 3 p.m. on Fathers Day, June 17, when temperatures reached a high of 102. Two-year-old Jorge Nicolas Cortes and some other kids were playing on the playground when he took off his shoes and started crossing a shiny black plastic bridge. He immediately started crying in pain. His father rushed over and saw hed burned his bare feet after only a few seconds of contact with the bridge.

The family rushed the boy to St. Helena Hospital, which treated him and sent him in an ambulance to Shriners Hospital for Children in Sacramento, which specializes in burns. Jorge Nicolas stayed in the hospital for a week before doctors allowed him to go home.

Cortes and his brother went to City Hall, explained what had happened and asked that the bridge be removed or replaced to prevent other kids from being injured.

The bridge is still there, but theres now a sign next to it that reads, Warning! No bare feet. Wear proper footwear. Surface may be hot!

Carlos Uribe, public works manager, said the playground is safe, and the city checks at least once a week for litter, broken equipment and any potential hazards. He said parents should be aware that during hot days playground surfaces get hot, and kids should wear shoes at all times.

Modifications to playgrounds require more attention because there are other factors at play like use zones and playground layout, he wrote in an email. The playground was designed to have shade provided naturally by trees.

A month after the incident, Jorge Nicolas is starting to walk again and his burns are healing. But his dad wants other families to be aware of the hazard and to always wear shoes on the playground. Hes concerned that the sign might get torn down, or that small children will ignore the sign or not be able to read it.

Toddlers who try to crawl across the bridge when its hot could burn their hands and knees, Cortes said. He noted that the playground at Stonebridge Apartments, where the Cortes family lives, has a similar bridge that appears to be made out of different material and doesnt get as hot as the one at Crane Park.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission warns that plastic and rubber playground surfaces can become extremely hot when exposed to direct sunlight, even on a mild day.
Napa Valley College will study the prospects of winning fresh bond funding from local voters, three years after its last effort fell short at the ballot box.

A study by Godbe Research of San Mateo, which NVC trustees approved last week, will explore the feasibility of putting a measure before voters in 2018 to raise millions of dollars toward upgrading the two-year schools half-century-old Napa campus. The survey, for which Godbe will receive $40,500, will be conducted both online and by telephone, according to college spokesman Doug Ernst.

Six trustees voted in favor of the study, with Amy Martenson abstaining.

A ballot proposition next year would be NVCs first fundraising bid since 2014, when the college placed Measure E before voters. College officials sought $198 million they said would pay for new and renovated classrooms, an expanded Veterans Center and modernized classroom technology, among other improvements.

However, the plan fell afoul of opponents who pointed to the lack of a specific to-do list and timeline for campus upgrades, or of sufficient citizen oversight to ensure wise spending. Amid resistance from local taxpayer advocates, the measure narrowly failed to reach the 55 percent share it needed for approval, gaining 53.8 percent.

A post-election report conducted by Godbe pointed to those problems, and added that rushed preparation and poor outreach to NVC faculty, students and the public also helped derail Measure E. Following that postmortem, the college board chose to skip the 2016 electoral season and wait at least two more years before bringing a new funding plan before Napans.

Among the additions included in NVCs master plan are two new buildings  one for the sciences and other for a student bookstore, activity center and classroom space. Up to 12 existing buildings would be renovated, including the schools Wine Education Center.
SAN FRANCISCO -- A group of boys shot a San Francisco Municipal Railway bus and driver with paintball guns in the city's Mission District on Tuesday morning, police said.

The paintball attack occurred around 10 a.m. while the driver, a 36-year-old woman, was parked on Cesar Chavez Street at Mission Street.

Three boys walked up and started shooting at the front of the bus with paintball guns.

When the driver got out, the three boys fled, but one of them turned and fired several paintball shots at the driver, hitting her several times in the body.

The driver was not injured.

No arrests have been reported in the case. Anyone with information is asked to call the Police Department's tip line at (415) 575-4444 or to send a tip by text message to TIP411 with "SFPD" in the message.
WINDSOR -- Sonoma County sheriff's deputies arrested a suspect in the theft of a large barbecue trailer from Oliver's Market in Windsor but the $6,000 trailer has not been recovered, a sheriff's sergeant said.

The 800-pound, 15-foot barbecue trailer was stolen around 11 p.m. on July 9 by a person who hitched it to a distinctive black truck with orange lights on the roof, Sgt. Spencer Crum said.

A store video camera recorded the theft and Windsor police posted pictures of the trailer on the sheriff's office's Facebook page.

A Santa Rosa resident who recognized the truck called police and the sheriff's office. Investigators then identified the truck owner as Gerald Corum, 24, of Santa Rosa, Crum said.

Detectives searched Corum's home in the 2400 block of College Park Circle Friday and found the dolly belonging to Oliver's Market that was used to move the barbecue trailer around the market, according to Crum.

Detectives interviewed Corum and confirmed he stole the trailer and dolly. He was booked into Sonoma County Jail on suspicion of vehicle theft and possession of stolen property. Corum has since posted bail and was released, Crum said.

The trailer is tow-able and is considered a vehicle, Crum said.

Anyone who knows the location of the barbecue trailer is asked to call property crimes detectives at (707) 565-2185.
I admit I am a part of the horrible "Deplorables as labeled by Hillary Clinton during her presidential election campaign. I am also one of the more recently identified Freeloaders, as Governor Jerry Brown labeled those who opposed his 12-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax imposed by SB1 in California.

My label has been earned (or developed) in part as I have considered some of the following listed facts:

California now has the nations highest state income tax rate, which is 34 percent higher than second-place Oregon.

At more than 69 cents a gallon, including the recent 12-cents-per-gallon SB1 Cap and Trade tax to combat global warming, California has the highest state gasoline tax in the nation. This tax rate is more than twice the national average of just 31.1 cents a gallon.

As a result of Assembly Bill 32 and Senate Bill 32 (Californias solution for global warming act) California has instituted the highest Cap and Trade tax in the nation  indeed, the only such tax in the nation. The cap and trade tax increases consumer costs for electricity, gasoline and manufacturing. Even proponents concede that since it was passed over 10 years ago it has had and will have zero measurable impact on global warming. However, some of the billions of dollars collected are being used to fund Jerry Brown's bullet train.

A good example of our future benefits is the construction which has started of an initial bullet train section, which will surely speed our frequent commutes between Merced and Bakersfield.

Napa County is getting into the Cap and Trade process with its own Climate Action Plan (CAP), which I have previously dubbed Napacare. A California building industry coalition has estimated that implementing Napas CAP will add $58,000 to the cost for each new home constructed in the county. Way to go for affordable housing in Napa.

The median California home cost is already three times that of the average for similar homes in the other 49 states.

Electricity costs 56.1 percent more on average per kilowatt hour in California than the average for the other 49 states. (The Napa CAP will add to these electricity costs.)

California has 12 percent of the nations population, but 33 percent of the countrys Temporary Assistance for Needy Families welfare recipients  more than the next seven states combined. Additional temporary funds in the form of parcel taxes and sales taxes of approximately $2.9 billion have been authorized in four of the nine Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) counties and are actively being promoted in the remaining ABAG counties (including Napa). These measures tax all residents in order to fund housing for the areas low income or homeless.

Sounds kinda socialistic to me.

Jack Gray, Director

Napa County Taxpayers Association
If a municipality wanted to preserve the ambiance of a single-family neighborhood, it wouldn't rezone it to residential high-rise. Over a short period of time, homeowners would sell to developers at a profit and the area would experience a fundamental transformation.

In Napa County, whenever a small winery pleads hardship, officials accommodate it with higher use permit limits of production and visitations. They say: "We all love small wineries. We must do everything to support them." Who can possibly argue with that?

But there is a problem. Even when wineries have been operating in gross violation of their use permits, their plea for survival becomes their passport to riches. Just like that, even without proof of hardship, the value of the winery is often doubled and tripled and sold within weeks.

Further proof of how this policy incentivizes small wineries to disappear from the supposedly intended idyllic landscape into big investor portfolios, is the current rampant winery consolidation activity, all fueled by the county's policies marketed by its disingenuous rhetoric as compared to its actions.

I often visit the northern foothills of the German Alps, dotted with small towns, forests and meadows where a dozen or so cows of small dairy farmers graze. These farmers make a living with milk, cheese, honey and schnapps. They are prohibited from increasing their grazing lands by clear-cutting their forests, a long view policy that provides them with a decent living but keeps the value of their holdings to levels not attractive enough to corporate takeovers.

Small farms are preserved in harmony with forests and crystal-clear streams. When visiting the region one is captivated by the agricultural serenity so beautifully preserved since 198 years ago, when it was memorialized in Beethoven's 6th symphony, so appropriately named: The Pastorale.

Meanwhile, the wine lobby myth our supervisors have bought into that wineries cannot make a living without direct sales has now mushroomed to 59 percent of total revenue and is fueling the market of runaway hotels and traffic congestion their drinking and merchandising tasting rooms generate.

Just over the Alps from Italy's Alto Adige to Sicily, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic in Spain, from the Languedoc to the Loire in France, from Germany's Rhineland to Austria's Burgenland, the direct sales model even for the thousands of wineries producing fewer than 8,000 gallons is an aberration. Instead, one finds their wines around the globe from Los Angeles to New York, Paris and London. Such marketing takes hard work, but it is enough to provide a decent living generation after generation, not just for a decade or two and then off to the Riviera.

Making a decent living from a "small" winery in the Napa valley means Maseratis and Teslas in the garage, government-assisted denuded forests, soiled streams and clogged highways. Sadly, it is us in our state of Napathy who allow the damage. Instead of voting for the right candidates, we let them displace us with second homers and luxury commercial rents.

To top it all off, the supervisors are scheduled to hear a "limited winery" ordinance that will "streamline the process" of approving "new small and/or family-owned wineries" producing a staggering 30,000 gallons. In the process they will shut the public out the door by installing a wine Czar to dole out permits without environmental review or public hearings. The problem is that 261 of the county's 510 existing wineries - more than half of them - produce less than that, 209 of them produce fewer than 20,000 gallons and one quarter of them produce fewer than 15,000.

Traditionally, existing wineries have enjoyed more, not fewer privileges than new ones. No one in the right mind believes the county's smoke screen that new wineries will enjoy this privilege while old ones will be compelled to undergo full review. It is so patently unfair that the furry paws can no longer hide beneath grandma's dress.

Potentially, in excess of 2.5 million more visitors to existing tasting rooms could be added to the 3.5 million who visit us each year and 8,000 vineyard acres could replace forests in the process. This does not even include the un-quantified hundreds of potential new wineries - those supposedly covered by the ordinance -- waiting to join the gold rush.

Within a decade, this devious under-the-radar effort by the county will have replaced forest green with the only green it is beholden to and will have silenced the Napa Valley Pastorale once and for all.

George Caloyannidis

Calistoga
Bremer Family Winerys efforts to create a vineyard in the mountains east of St. Helena have run afoul of a state agency that claims the winery improperly placed fill in a creek.

The San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board on July 6 issued a cleanup and abatement order. It is requiring Bremer to restore the creek to prevent sediments from entering waterways that ultimately drain into the Napa River.

Fine sediment clogs spawning and gravels and degrades rearing habitat, contributing to the decline of salmon and steelhead in the Napa River watershed, the order says.

Attorney Scott Greenwood-Meinert on behalf of the winery said that, as of Wednesday, the Bremers intended to comply with the order rather than file an appeal. Regional Water Board orders can be appealed to the state Water Resources Control Board.

We may still deep down in our heart dispute some things, but given the scope of the order itself, we believe moving forward with compliance is the best course of action, he said.

The Bremer Family Winery vineyard project included placing stones along the banks of the unnamed creek and installing temporary culverts. Greenwood-Meinert said the Bremers didnt know they were doing anything wrong when they made what he called improvements to the small, seasonal waterway.

They didnt know it was designated as a creek, he said. They thought it was a ditch and a nonfunctional ditch at that.

Bremer Family Winery is located at 975 Deer Park Road. Owners John and Laura Bremer are trying to create five acres of vineyards on the property  in addition to five acres already there  in a way far from typical for Napa County.

The rocky property targeted for the vineyard has proven a challenge for farming. Bremer Family Winery has imported soil by the truckload, including some left over from a Napa River restoration project on the valley floor. Unreinforced boulder walls as high as six to 10 feet help keep soil in place.

Napa County approved an erosion control plan in 2013 for the vineyard creation. The county and Bremer Family Winery have since clashed over whether Bremer is following the plan and construction work is on hold while the two parties try to work out a solution.

Meanwhile, the Regional Water Quality Control Board received complaints from people who fear the Bremer project will harm the environment.

On Sept. 19, 2016, Water Board officials inspected the site, accompanied by John Bremer, a state Department of Fish and Wildlife warden, county officials and project engineers. The resulting Dec. 13, 2016 report is the basis for the Water Boards order.

Inspectors concluded an unnamed stream channel feeding Canon Creek has been ditched and culverted, with rock walls now forming the banks.

The order says Bremer Family Winery failed to obtain a permit from the Water Board for the creek work. It also says the owners apparently failed to obtain necessary permits from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife or U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

As a result, the Water Board is requiring Bremer Family Winery to remove sediments, rocks and other materials and restore the creek and habitat. Owners must complete a technical report, a corrective action work plan and a mitigation and monitoring plan and pay associated Water Board costs.

Bremer Family Winery also built boulder walls outside of the creek bed for the soil reservoirs. The Regional Water Quality Board order doesnt apply to these walls, which the agency says are under Napa Countys purview.

The local law firm Dickenson, Peatman & Fogarty, of which Greenwood-Meinert is a member, submitted a letter on behalf of Bremer Family Winery to the Water Board in response to the tentative cleanup order issued in March.

The unnamed creek in question wasnt subject by the county to stream setbacks because it doesnt meet the county definition of a stream, the letter said. An environmental study from 2012 found that proposed erosion control measures would reduce soil erosion as compared to existing conditions.

As built so far, the project is doing just so, the letter stated.

The Water Board responded that the owners needed to apply for a Water Board permit as required by the California Water code and Clean Water Act. The success of erosion control measures is irrelevant to whether the owners violated these laws.

Placement of fill in the waters of the state has unreasonably affected or threatens to affect water quality and beneficial uses of Napa River waterways, such as fish habitat, the Boards written response said.

On another front, Bremer Family Winery in January applied to the county to update a 1979 marketing plan and other aspects of its use permit.

Among other things, the winery asked that the daily maximum visitation cap increase from 90 to 300 guests. It wants to add the existing bocce court, patio and pizza oven area as venues for tasting and events. It wants to have picnicking in outdoor tasting areas. It wants to increase wine production from 14,400 gallons annually to 50,000 gallons annually.

Napa County has yet to announce a date for a Planning Commission hearing.
The following letter was sent to Mayor Alan Galbraith, regarding Sara Cakebread July 13 letter "Revolving door of Adams Street property."

Sara is very articulate here. In short, can the Council not be "bullied" and influenced by the 100 residents who only want the status quo for their own self-interests and to prevent meaningful dynamic, community progress for the tax base and the city.

Please pay attention to San Francisco Board of Supervisors or even Yountville City Council who vote for the betterment of the community in spite of the vocal few who show up with the goal to not disrupt walking their dog or make any noise after 9 p.m. so they can sleep.

I technically live in the County on Conn Valley Road and have split residences here and Oakland, so all I can do is to try to spend my money at stores, restaurants, CIA, Meadowood, wineries and walk downtown after 9 p.m. to bring vitality and money to our city. Congrats on Acacia, Charter Oak, Davies Winery, the new knife store.

Thanks for listening. And caring and all you do.

Henry Loubet

St. Helena
In addition to the new payload tubes, the Navy is also developing a new Virginia Payload Module. The new modules will triple the number of Tomahawk missiles that Virginia-class submarines can carry, dramatically increasing each sub's firepower.



"As the Navy continues to modernize its subs, Raytheon continues to modernize Tomahawk, keeping this one-of-a-kind weapon well ahead of the threat," said Mike Jarrett, Raytheon Air Warfare Systems vice president. "Today's Tomahawk is a far cry from its predecessors and tomorrow's missile will feature even more capability, giving our sailors the edge they need for decades to come."



Virginia-class submarines are 7,800 tons and 377 feet in length, have a beam of 34 feet, and can operate at more than 25 knots submerged. They are built with a reactor plant that will not require refueling during the planned life of the ship reducing lifecycle costs while increasing underway time.



Virginia-class submarines are built to dominate the world's littoral and deep waters while conducting Anti-Submarine; Anti-Surface Ship; Strike; Special Operation Forces; Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance; Irregular Warfare; and Mine Warfare missions. Their inherent stealth, endurance, firepower, and sensor suite directly enable them to support five of the six Maritime Strategy Core Capabilities - Sea Control, Power Projection, Forward Presence, Maritime Security, and Deterrence.
Anna Beanie Little Eric Michelle Nicholas Sisters Anna and Michelle , and their brothers Beanie , Little Eric , and Nicholas , are very affectionate babies who love giving you kisses. We rescued their pregnant mother, a Cocker Spaniel named Mary Poppins from a government-funded shelter. She had reportedly been bred with a Scottish Terrier. We placed Mary Poppins in a loving foster home and she gave birth to these five angels and raised them there. Mary Poppins is going to be adopted by her foster family. Her puppies are now 3 months of age, spayed/neutered, and ready for adoption. Please carefully puppy-proof your home and yard for their safety and protection.
09:40

The Armed Forces Tribunal has ordered that troopers injured in pre-Independence wars be given 'war injury pension' like those wounded after it, in a relief to a 94-year-old war veteran.

Seeking to end the discrimination in injury benefits to soldiers injured in pre-Independence and post-Independence wars, the Chandigarh Bench of the tribunal said they should be treated equally.

The AFT has also directed the government to identify similarly placed soldiers and release their benefits without forced litigation.

Bhiwani-based 94-year-old Sowar Amar Singh of the Armoured Corps had approached the AFT with a plea that despite having been injured during World War II, he was being paid regular 'disability pension' as is admissible in cases of normal diseases incurred during service such as hypertension and heart diseases.

He was not being given a war injury pension that is granted to soldiers disabled in operational areas.

Singh aid that it made no difference that soldiers were fighting for the British Crown during those times since WWII was a war of humanity against fascist forces.

He said the same British Indian Army was inherited post-Independence and the governments of India and Pakistan had assured the British government that they would take care of all such cases. They had also taken over the serving soldiers and pensioners of pre-Independence India.





Singh in his petition had said that though he was being paid disability pension as per the existing government rules and rates, he was being refused the payment of war injury pension.

The government resisted Singh's claim, saying when war injury pension was initially introduced, it was applicable only to post-Independence wars and disabilities in international 'peacekeeping missions'.

The concept of war injury pension for disabilities incurred in 'international wars' was introduced only in January 1996 vide a letter issued in 2001 but since the soldier was a pre-1996 retiree, the said benefit could not be

granted to him.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-18 15:09:03|Editor: Song Lifang

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SEOUL, July 18 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's parliament on Tuesday adopted a resolution denouncing the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)'s test-launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) earlier this month.

The 300-seat National Assembly held a plenary session, where 216 lawmakers voted for the resolution with two in abstention.

On July 4, the DPRK announced its successful test-firing of an ICBM that flew about 930 km and was lofted as high as around 2,800 km.

The resolution strongly urged the DPRK to immediately stop all acts, including the nuclear development and missile launches that escalate military tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

The DPRK's continued nuclear test and missile launches, the resolution said, caused anger beyond concerns of the international community as well as South Korea.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-18 21:13:55|Editor: Zhou Xin

Refugees and migrants leave the Moria refugee hotspot on Lesvos island, Greece, on July 18, 2017. A group of migrants and refugees scuffled with Greek police forces on Tuesday inside Moria refugee hotspot on Lesvos Island during a protest against living conditions, Greek national news agency AMNA reported. (Xinhua/Anthi Pazianou)

By Maria Spiliopoulou

ATHENS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- A group of migrants and refugees scuffled with Greek police forces on Tuesday inside Moria refugee hotspot on Lesvos Island during a protest against living conditions, Greek national news agency AMNA reported.

According to initial information most people involved in the clashes are African nationals, as it had happened on July 10 when a riot broke out in the same refugee center.

During Tuesday's incident a fire also broke out in a neighboring olive grove and fire fighters were battling the flames, according to AMNA.

The number of protesters has yet not been clarified.

Approximately 3,000 people are housed in the hotspot. Many are stranded there since March 2016 when the EU- Turkey agreement aimed to stem the refugee flows into Europe came in force.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-18 22:45:04|Editor: yan

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BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- China supports a political settlement of the Palestinian issue on the basis of the two-state solution, President Xi Jinping said Tuesday.

China supports Palestine in building an independent, full sovereignty state along the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, Xi said in his talks with visiting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Xi said the UN Security Council Resolution 2334 should be effectively implemented, and all the settlement-building on the occupied territories of Palestine should be immediately stopped.

The resolution, adopted on Dec. 23, 2016, condemned Israel's settlements on occupied Palestinian territory as illegal, and urged it to halt building.

China is one of the first countries to support the just cause of the Palestinian people and to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian state, Xi said, calling both countries "good friends, partners and brothers."

In 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, which recognized the need to establish a Jewish state and an Arab state in the former British Mandate territory of Palestine.

The 1967 Middle East war resulted in Israel's occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. The last round of peace talks between Israel and Palestine halted in 2014, mainly due to the continuing expansion of Jewish settlements on the occupied territories of Palestine.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-18 22:55:08|Editor: An

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Liu Yunshan, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, addresses the 2017 China Investment Forum in Prague, the Czech Republic, July 18, 2017. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

PRAGUE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Visiting senior Communist Party of China (CPC) official Liu Yunshan said here Tuesday that the 16+1 cooperation mechanism has achieved fruitful results under the Belt and Road Initiative.

Addressing the 2017 China Investment Forum held in Prague, Liu said 16+1 mechanism has promoted connectivity in policy, infrastructure, trade, financing and people-to-people exchanges between China and 16 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries.

The China-CEE 16+1 mechanism is a platform created in April 2012 by China and 16 CEE countries.

Liu, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, said Chinese President Xi Jinping's speech at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, held in Beijing in May, pointed out a bright prospect for the initiative by setting forth the Silk Road Spirit, which features peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual learning and mutual benefits.

The speech also gave a strong boost to deepening and expanding the cooperation under the 16+1 cooperation mechanism, Liu added.

He called on all sides to seize the opportunity to integrate their development strategies, strengthen practical cooperation, push forward major projects and deepen people-to-people exchanges in order to further consolidate political mutual trust, expand cooperation and open a new chapter for the development of the 16+1 cooperation mechanism.

Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka also attended the opening ceremony of the 2017 China Investment Forum, hailing the Belt and Road Initiative as the most important one in the world at current times.

Sobotka said the Czech Republic fully supports and participates in the Belt and Road Initiative, and stands ready to act as a pioneer in promoting the initiative as well as the 16+1 cooperation mechanism.

"We believe the Belt and Road Initiative will achieve great success," Sobotka said, adding that the Czech Republic hopes to make itself a regional shipping center and a transportation hub under the initiative, so as to contribute to promoting the cooperation between China and the CEE.

The Belt and Road Initiative, proposed by China in 2013, refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. It aims to build a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along the ancient trade routes.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-18 23:00:11|Editor: Zhou Xin

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WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The United States on Tuesday slapped sanctions on 18 Iranian entities and individuals linked to Iran's ballistic missile program and other non-nuclear activities.

The new round of sanctions came hours after U.S. President Donald Trump's administration declared for the second time that Iran was complying with a 2015 nuclear deal but also called Iran "one of the most dangerous threats to U.S. interests and to regional stability."

According to a statement by the U.S. Treasury Department, 16 Iranian entities and individuals, including ones engaged in activities in support of Iran's military or the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, were designated for "engaging in support of illicit Iranian actors or transnational criminal activity."

Two other Iranian organizations involved in Iran's ballistic missile program were also targeted by the U.S. State Department, according to the Treasury Department statement.

"This administration will continue to aggressively target Iran's malign activities, including their ongoing state support of terrorism, ballistic missile program, and human rights abuses," the statement quoted Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as saying.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-18 23:10:25|Editor: Zhou Xin

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MANILA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The United States will deliver two surveillance planes to help the Philippine military in the ongoing fight against Islamist militants in the southern Philippines, U.S. Ambassador Sung Kim said on Tuesday.

In an interview with ABS-CBN News Channel's headquarters, Kim said the two military aircraft are expected to be delivered "in a couple of weeks."

He said the two Cessna 208s are fitted with "very useful ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) instruments" that the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) can use in its war against terror especially in Marawi City and the rest of the southern Philippines.

Philippine security forces have been battling extremists linked with Islamic State (IS) who occupied the southern city May 23. The war has dragged on for nearly two months, and has so far displaced more than 460,000 residents and killed nearly 556 people, including 413 terrorists, 98 security forces and 45 civilians.

Kim also confirmed that the United States will help rebuild and rehabilitate the war-torn city.

Kim said at the request of the Philippine government, the U.S. deployed a Special Operations Forces troops in the southern Philippines to provide advice to AFP.

The Philippines is a treaty ally of the U.S., and their military alliance in anchored in the Mutual Defense Treaty that Manila and Washington signed in 1951.

Outside the United States, Australia also sent two of its intelligence-gathering AP-3C Orion planes to help the Philippine military fight against the terrorists in Marawi City.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 00:21:40|Editor: yan

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MADRID, July 18 (Xinhua) -- A total of 10,751 undocumented immigrants were able to enter Spain by either land or sea during the first half of 2017, according to details confirmed by Spanish Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido on Tuesday.

The minister said the figure was over twice the number of illegal immigrants who entered the country during the same period last year.

Zoido said the Spanish North-African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla were a favored point of entry with 3,204 people travelling to Spain after passing through the two cities, which are officially on European Union (EU) soil.

Virtually the only ways for immigrants to enter Ceuta and Melilla are to attempt the dangerous swim to one of the cities' beaches, or to be smuggled over the border inside a vehicle (some of which are specially adapted by people smugglers for the task) or to attempt to scale the six-meter border fence, which is covered in razor wire.

Zoido said attempts to scale the fence had "intensified" in 2017 with 5,266 incidents recorded, in comparison with 3,472 in the first six months of 2016.

He also said that the "migration phenomenon," was one of the Spanish government's "priorities," and that following the recent deaths of 49 people in the Alboran Sea, "everything possible would be done to help" immigrants.

However, he said it was "not the responsibility" of the Spanish government that immigrants had "decided to run away from their homelands" in "boats that hardly float," and added that Spain's capacity to welcome immigrants was limited.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 01:02:09|Editor: Zhou Xin

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by Anthi Pazianou, Maria Spiliopoulou

LESVOS, Greece, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Five police officers were slightly injured and some 30 protesters were detained on Tuesday after a stormy protest inside Moria refugee camp on Lesvos island, according to local authorities.

Calm was restored after a group of migrants and refugees scuffled with police forces protesting against living conditions and delays in the assessment of asylum bids.

Most camp residents involved in the clashes were African nationals, police sources told Xinhua, as it had happened on July 10 when a similar riot broke out in the same refugee center.

On Tuesday, hundreds of refugees, including parents holding babies in their arms and elderly, left Moria, as protesters pelted rocks at police officers who used teargas to disperse the crowd and the Fire Brigade was extinguishing a fire in nearby olive groves.

According to police sources, protesters had started the fire as a distraction and were obstructing fire fighters. Eventually the blaze was put out by water dropping aircrafts, local Fire Brigade said.

"If it wasn't for the aircrafts, our farmland would have been scorched," Yannis B., a local farmer told Xinhua.

Last week five container units and three tents were destroyed by protesters, while last September a large section of the hotspot was destroyed by fire during another stormy protest.

Currently approximately 3,000 people are housed in Moria and more than 4,000 throughout Lesvos island. Many are stranded there since March 2016 after the closure of borders along the Balkan route to central Europe, when the European Union (EU)-Turkey agreement aimed to stem the refugee flows into Europe came into force.

Refugees and migrants are hosted in Moria's closed camp until their cases are assessed. Those who are not granted asylum are returned to Turkey, under last year's deal.

More than 60,000 people have been stranded in Greece and are hosted in accommodation centers and apartments throughout the country, according to official data released on Monday by the Greek Ministry of Migration Policy in Athens.

Although the living conditions of refugees and migrants have improved over the past year, and the number of arrivals has dramatically dropped after the implementation of the EU-Turkey agreement, there are still problems to be addressed in overcrowded centers on the Aegean Sea islands, such as Lesvos, according to officials.

Refugees and migrants complain about delays in the evaluation process of their bids.

According to figures released on June 20 by the Greek migration policy ministry on the occasion of World Refugee Day, since 2015, a total of 87,939 asylum requests have been assessed in Greece.

More than 2,000 individuals have been sent back to Turkey from Greece or willingly repatriated since the start of the EU-Turkey agreement, according to data released by Greece's Public Order ministry.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 01:12:12|Editor: Zhou Xin

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VIENTIANE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- A Lao company is investing 280 million U.S. dollars in a project to develop Vung Ang seaport in Vietnam's central Ha Tinh province to boost logistics and infrastructure and benefit Laos, neighboring Thailand and Vietnam, the state-run media reported on Tuesday.

The Lao government has approved a move by the Petroleum Trading Lao Public Company (PTL), one of Laos' leading private companies, and Lao Logistics State Enterprise to jointly establish the Vung Ang seaport Development Company Limited.

A joint venture agreement was signed by the PTL Chief Executive Officer Chanthone Sitthixay and the Director of Lao Logistics State Enterprise Khampheng Sisanga at an event held in Lao capital Vientiane on Monday. The signing was witnessed by Lao Deputy Minister of Finance Thipphakone Chanthavongsa and government and company officials.

Chanthone told local media his company will hold an 80 percent share in the newly established company while the rest of the stake will be held by the Lao Logistics State Enterprise.

"The development of this seaport has been carried out by the governments of Laos and Vietnam for a while but progress has been slow due to many factors. So our company will voluntarily represent our government to continue the project," he said.

The project will also pave the way for the smooth export of domestic goods and import of products by linking landlocked Laos with the outside world.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 01:27:19|Editor: yan

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Photo taken on Aug. 17, 2013 shows mountain climbers are seen at the glacier field near Mont-Blanc of the Alps. Mont-Blanc with the altitude of 4,810 meters is the highest peak in Europe. (Xinhua/Wang Xiaojun)

GENEVA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Seventy-five years after a Swiss couple disappeared near a ski resort in the Alps their frozen and mummified bodies have been found, Swiss newspaper Le Matin reported Tuesday.

The frozen corpses of Marceline and Francine Dumoulin were found lying near each other in the receding Tsanfleuron glacier not far from the famed Gstaad resort.

Swiss police said a DNA search would be carried out to definitively establish their identities, but the newspaper quoted 79-year-old Marceline Udry-Dumoulin as saying she believed the remains were of her parents, who went missing on Aug. 15, 1942.

The black, almost charred-looking remains were found by an employee of the ski station on July 13 engaged in what he believed was a routine inspection tour at an altitude of 2,600 meters.

"From afar, it looked like small rocks, but there were too many in the same place," explained Bernhard Tschannen who runs the nearby Glacier 3000, to Swiss public radio RTS.

"It was a man and a woman wearing clothes from the last (world) war", Tschannen was quoted as saying. "The ice preserved them perfectly and their belongings were intact."

Tschannen told Le Matin that the couple had probably fallen into a crevasse.

Udry-Dumoulin said, "We spent our whole lives looking for them, without stopping. We thought that we could give them the funeral they deserved one day."

Her father, a shoemaker, and mother, a teacher, went to milk their cows in a meadow above Chandolin in Canton Valais in 1942, but never came back.

Until now, "I can say that after 75 years of waiting this news gives me a deep sense of calm," Udry-Dumoulin said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 01:47:28|Editor: yan

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MOGADISHU, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations and African Union missions in Somalia on Tuesday launched a joint training program for police officers from Puntland and Galmudug states to carry out joint patrols in Galkayo, as part of a ceasefire agreement.

The UN Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM) and the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) said the trainees will also support ongoing initiatives to restore stability and the rule of law, and also act as focal points for rebuilding confidence and peace in Galkayo.

"The training aims to promote trust and confidence in Galkayo, by preparing a group of selected police officers to establish and implement joint police patrols in Galkayo, under a common command," UNSOM Police Commissioner in Somalia Christoph Buik said in a statement released in Mogadishu.

The trainees will also support ongoing initiatives to restore stability and the rule of law, and also act as focal points for rebuilding confidence and peace in Galkayo.

The training is taking place under the auspices of the Galkayo Ceasefire Agreement signed on Jan. 1 by the Puntland and Galmudug State Presidents.

Under the agreement, patrol teams from both states would be trained to help enforce the cessation of hostilities between the two administrations.

Buik said the joint patrol teams would provide security to the Joint Ceasefire Committee members, while on visits to a buffer zone established between both sides.

According to the UN, at least 100 police officers who will oversee the implementation of the Galkayo Ceasefire Agreement are taking part in the inaugural joint training launched at Galkayo Community Centre on Monday.

"We are ready to ensure the implementation of peace in Galkayo," noted Mohamed Hashi Abdi, the Vice President of Galmudug State.

"Somalis, we have to hold each other's hands, support one another and tell our people that we are one as brothers and sisters," he added.

Under the Galkayo ceasefire deal, leaders from the two states have also committed to withdraw troops and remove roadblocks, in order to allow free movement of people and goods.

Abdihakim Omar Amey, the Vice President of Puntland State said the joint police patrol is the beginning of the Somali integration process.

"We don't want to miss this opportunity," said Amey who added that Puntland was committed to spearheading the integration of the whole of Somalia, starting with the implementation of the Galkayo agreement.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 01:57:34|Editor: Zhou Xin

People are evacuated after a fire alarm went off at the United Nations headquarters in New York, on July 18, 2017. Around 2,000 people were evacuated on Tuesday from the United Nations headquarters complex in New York City after a fire alarm went off in one of the fan rooms in the second basement. UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters that "we have to evacuate as a precaution in case of a potential fire, but the alarm was checked and there was no fire." (Xinhua/Li Muzi)

UNITED NATIONS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Around 2,000 people were evacuated on Tuesday from the United Nations headquarters complex in New York City after a fire alarm went off in one of the fan rooms in the second basement.

UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters that "we have to evacuate as a precaution in case of a potential fire, but the alarm was checked and there was no fire."

"It was a problem potentially with the alarms," he noted in a briefing.

UN staff, diplomats, and visitors were allowed back into the buildings after the alarm was canceled within half an hour.

Haq said the Fire Department of New York came and helped find out that the rooms did not have fire conditions.

Meetings held at the UN headquarters were delayed, including a Security Council open meeting on the situation in Haiti.

Fire drills have been conducted regularly at the UN headquarters, though evacuation was rare in recent years.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 02:12:47|Editor: yan

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CAIRO, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry will visit Iraq on Wednesday to discuss various regional issues including counterterrorism, the Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.

"The visit comes at a critical time, amidst mounting challenges that constitute an imminent threat to the Arab national security, and require the Arab nation to stand united in countering them, especially the phenomenon of terrorism and extremism," Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid said in a statement.

During the visit, Shoukry is scheduled to meet with Iraqi President Fuad Masum, Vice President Iyad Allawi, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Parliament Speaker Saleem al-Jubouri, besides a number of other Iraqi political leaders.

The meeting come over a week after the Iraqi government declared victory in liberating the city of Mosul, the last stronghold of the Islamic State (IS) militant group in Iraq.

On July 10, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi officially declared Mosul as liberated from IS after nearly nine months of fierce fighting. This is regarded as a milestone in the Iraqi war on terrorism.

Since the Iraq-War and the fall of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 2003, the country has been going through chaos and sectarian strife even after the withdrawal of U.S. troops that was completed in late 2011.

Egypt has been facing a rising wave of anti-government terrorism since the military removed former Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.

Most of the attacks in Egypt, which have killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers ever since, were claimed by a Sinai-based group loyal to IS.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 03:58:39|Editor: An

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U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (C), Chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group Stephen Schwarzman (L) and founder and Chairman of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Jack Ma attend the 2017 China-U.S. Business Leaders Summit in Washington D.C. July 18, 2017. Jack Ma said here on Tuesday that Chinese and U.S. business leaders should join force to set for broader cooperation between the world's two largest economies in the future rather than focusing on "the problems of the past." (Xinhua/Ting Shen)

WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Jack Ma, the founder and chairman of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, said here on Tuesday that Chinese and U.S. business leaders should join force to set for broader cooperation between the world's two-largest economies in the future rather than focusing on "the problems of the past."

"We will certainly discuss today our individual company's priorities and outcomes, we must also seize the opportunity as a group to set out a vision for broader cooperation," Ma said in opening remarks at the first China-U.S. Business Leaders Summit.

"Our relationship today reflects a deep business partnership where capital, people, and ideas are fully integrated. In the future, I believe we will not talk about products being made in your country or mine, but rather on the internet," Ma told a group of prominent Chinese and U.S. CEOs, urging them to "see the big vision" of China-U.S. relations and "seize the future."

"We're here to solve future problems, not to solve yesterday's problems. We should not punish our tomorrow because of yesterday's problems," he said, adding the Chinese and U.S. business leaders should not "let problems of the past limit our future potential."

The business leaders should also offer "constructive advice" for the U.S. and Chinese governments with wisdom and professionalism, encouraging them to use existing mechanisms to resolve their disputes "respectfully and efficiently," Ma noted.

"As in all deep and complex economic relationships, disputes whether on trade or investment are natural and expected," he said.

The inaugural China-U.S. Business Leaders Summit, composed of around 20 prominent CEOs of the two countries, was one of the two proposals that Ma put forward in a meeting with the then President-elect Donald Trump in January. It aims to promote health development of China-U.S. economic relations, according to Ma.

The other was to hold a small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) summit, which took place in the U.S. city of Detroit last month, in a bid to help small U.S. businesses sell products to China through e-commerce platform.

Eyeing a growing middle class in Asia, Ma is confident that Alibaba will be able to create 1 million jobs in the United States in the next five years by helping 1 million small U.S. businesses sell their products to China and Southeast Asia.

The business leaders summit comes one day before the first round of China-U.S. Comprehensive Economic Dialogue in Washington D.C., one of the four major dialogue mechanisms the two sides established in April.

During the upcoming dialogue to be co-chaired by Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, the two sides will exchange views on economic and trade issues of common concern.
Aerial photo taken on March 22, 2017 shows the view of Mar-a-lago club at Palm Beach, Florida, the United States. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)

WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced Monday to issue up to 15,000 additional visas for temporary non-agricultural workers this budget year, in a bid to tackle with what it described as a shortage of labor force.

"Congress gave me the discretionary authority to provide temporary relief to American businesses at risk of significant harm due to a lack of available seasonal workers," John Kelly, secretary of the DHS, said in a statement.

Kelly made the announcement as he determined "there are not enough qualified and willing U.S. workers available to perform temporary non-agricultural labor to meet the needs of some American companies in fiscal year 2017," after consulting with the labor department.

To qualify for the H-2B visas, U.S. employers must attest under the penalty of perjury that "their business is likely to suffer irreparable harm" if it could not bring in those non-immigrant workers.

The H-2B program allows foreign workers from over 80 countries to be hired for seasonal, non-agricultural jobs needed by U.S. businesses at a government-set prevailing wage.

Industries, including resorts, landscaping, seafood harvesting and processing, and forestry, rely on the supply of cheap workforce through the H-2B pipeline.

Mar-a-lago resort, owned by U.S. President Donald Trump, has also used the program.

In May, Congress voted to allow Kelly to offer more than an annual limit of 66,000 H-2B visas.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 04:18:54|Editor: An

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ADDIS ABABA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Chinese companies, with close to 379 projects that were either operational or under implementation during the past five years, are on top of Ethiopia's investment landscape both in number and financial capital, an official at the Ethiopian Investment Commission (EIC) told Xinhua Tuesday.

According to Mekonen Hailu, EIC Communications Director, 279 of the total 379 Chinese companies were set operational in Ethiopia with projects that worth over 13.16 billion Ethiopian birr (over 572 million U.S. dollars) from 2012 to 2017 period, while the remaining 100 are under implementation.

Ethiopia's manufacturing sector takes the first spot in attracting companies from China both in number and financial capital, with a total of 276 projects either under implementation or operational, he said.

Construction, services and agriculture are said to be the other sectors hosting a great number of Chinese companies to Africa's second most populous nation.

According to Hailu, the Ethiopian government has given due emphasis to the manufacturing sector, as the country is shifting to industry-led economy from the largely agricultural one, and the contribution of Chinese companies is immense.

He said that the east African country has rolled out various incentives that include custom duty exemption, income tax holidays, and provision of land at competitive lease price to attract investors.

According to the Ethiopia's Foreign Ministry, Chinese companies have invested around 4 billion U.S. dollars in Ethiopia during the last two decades, creating job opportunities for over 111,000 Ethiopians on permanent and temporary basis.

Meles Alem, Ethiopia's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, told Xinhua recently that Ethiopia has targeted to attract new and existing Chinese companies to invest in various sectors in the country, the manufacturing sector in particular.

The Asian country is Ethiopia's largest trading partner, registering a bilateral trade volume of 6.37 billion dollars in 2015. Trade grew at an average rate of 22.2 percent annually for the last several years.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 04:18:56|Editor: Zhou Xin

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WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The United States on Tuesday slapped new sanctions on 18 entities and individuals linked to Iran's ballistic missile program and other non-nuclear activities.

The new round of sanctions came hours after U.S. President Donald Trump's administration declared for the second time that Iran was complying with a 2015 nuclear deal but also called Iran "one of the most dangerous threats to U.S. interests and to regional stability."

According to a statement by the U.S. Treasury Department, 16 entities and individuals, including ones engaged in activities in support of Iran's military or Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, were designated for "engaging in support of illicit Iranian actors or transnational criminal activity."

Two additional Iranian organizations involved in Iran's ballistic missile program were also targeted by the U.S. State Department, according to the statement.

"This administration will continue to aggressively target Iran's malign activities, including their ongoing state support of terrorism, ballistic missile program, and human rights abuses," U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the statement.

Under U.S. law, the State Department is required every 90 days to recertify to Congress Iran's compliance with the nuclear deal.

However, according to senior Trump administration officials who briefed reporters Monday night on the issue, the recertification did not indicate that the Trump administration was going soft on Iran.

Officials also stressed that the Trump administration was expected to implement new non-nuclear sanctions that pertain to Iran's ballistic missile program and fast boat program.

Blaming Trump's predecessor, former President Barack Obama, for taking a "narrow approach" that overlooked Iran's "broader behavior" by striking the nuclear deal, one official who spoke on condition of anonymity told reporters that the Trump administration was holding Iran accountable for "its misdeeds in all respects."

The Trump administration first declared Iran's compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal in April.

However, according to the New York Times, Trump's patience with the nuclear deal, which he repeatedly condemned as "the worst deal ever negotiated" during the presidential campaign, appeared to be fraying.

Citing one U.S. official, the New York Times reported that during an hour-long meeting last Wednesday, Trump spent 55 minutes of the meeting telling his major security advisers that he did not want to preserve the nuclear deal.

All of Trump's major security advisers recommended he preserve the nuclear deal for now while awaiting a new strategy to confront Iran, the Times reported.

From the outset of Trump's presidency, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had on several occasions reportedly expressed concern about U.S. relations with its European allies if Trump were to withdraw from the nuclear deal unilaterally.

According to the New York Times, some Trump advisers had argued that if the United States could "provoke Iran into being the one to scrap the nuclear deal, it will leave the United States in a stronger position."

Currently, the U.S. Congress was working on a new Russia-Iran sanctions bill.

Meanwhile, the Iranian side had accused the Trump administration of violating the spirit of the Iran nuclear deal and its top diplomat Mohammad Javad Zarif warned in a recent interview with The National Interest that Iran would withdraw from the nuclear deal if major violation occurs.

"If it comes to a major violation, or what in the terms of the nuclear deal is called significant nonperformance, then Iran has other options available, including withdrawing from the deal," said Zarif.

Iran and six countries -- Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States -- reached an agreement on the Iranian nuclear issue in July 2015 that put it on the path of sanctions relief but with more strict limits on its nuclear program.

The deal set limits on Iran's nuclear activities and allowed regular inspections of the facilities inside Iran.

In return, the United States and the European Union will suspend nuclear-related sanctions against Iran, with the lifting of all past UN Security Council sanction resolutions.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 04:29:08|Editor: yan

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ARUSHA, Tanzania, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Tanzania is set to host an international cultural tourism festival aimed at conserving, and sustaining four African languages and culture, which are on verge of extinction in the face of rising modernity, organizers said Tuesday.

The festival which will be held in September, this year in Haydom, a rural town in Manyara region north of Tanzania, has been organized by Four Corners Cultural Festival (4CCF) in collaboration with the Tanzania Tourist Board (TTB).

Nelson Faustine, project officer of 4CCP, and one of the organizers of the annual cultural event said: "This year's cultural celebration is all about sharing traditional lifestyles, unity, and sharing storytelling through dancing, drumming and singing."

He, however, said they have chosen Hydom as a venue for the event because it is the cultural melting pot centre, in which the four popular ethnolinguistics African tribes meet.

"These are the Bantu, Khoisan, Nilo-Saharan and the Afro-Asiatic. In the neighbourhood the Bantus are represented by Waisenye, Wanyiramba and Wakimbu from Singida region; the Khoisan is represented by Hadzabes."

"While Datogas represent Nilo-Saharan and the Afro-Asiatic family is represented by the Cushitic Iraqw, locals based in the Haydom sprawling rural and laid-back town."

He said that the four languages are on verge of extinction in the face of rising modernity in Tanzania and Africa at large.

"That's why we're meeting to among other things, discuss on how to preserve them for tourism and future generation."

"We want also to use the event as a platform to address issues related to education, environmental conservation, health and community development in a broader perspective ...we've invited local and international leaders and policy makers at the important event," said Nelson.

Paul Fissoo, manager for tourism services, Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority (NCAA) also described the September Haydom Cultural Tourism Festival as an important avenue for Tanzania to showcase the country's cultural tourism treasure.

"We view the event as a way of promoting a culture of the area and eventually encourage domestic tourism in the country," Fissoo said, adding that the event is expected to bring on board hundreds of participants from Tanzania and the rest of the world.

TTB spokesman Geoffrey Tengeneza described the festival as key towards promoting Tanzania's cultural tourism.

The festival, according to him, will also help to lift spirits and bring about hope and optimism into understanding the world of culture and part of their heritage.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 04:34:13|Editor: yan

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KIRKUK, Iraq, July 18 (Xinhua) -- A total of five people, including four civilians and a policeman, were killed on Tuesday in an attack by the Islamic State (IS) militants at a village near Iraq's northern city of Kirkuk, a local police source said.

The extremists early in the morning stormed the village of Chragh near the town of Debis, some 40 km west of Kirkuk, and shot dead a policeman, the cleric of the local mosque and three civilians, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The attackers had fled before Iraqi security forces arrived at the village, the source said.

Iraqi security forces have liberated Iraq's second largest city of Mosul, but the rural areas near the town of Hawijah in west of Kirkuk, the town of Tal Afar in west of Mosul, the sprawling rugged area in the eastern part of Salahudin province and the areas near the border with neighboring Syria are still under IS control.

On July 10, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi formally declared the liberation of Mosul from IS after nearly nine months of fierce fighting to dislodge the extremist militants from their last major stronghold in Iraq.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 04:34:14|Editor: yan

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LUSAKA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Morocco intends to open an embassy in Zambia in September in order to enhance relations between the two countries, a visiting official said on Tuesday.

Morocco's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Mounia Boucetta said the embassy will in the interim be headed by a charge d'affaires,

The visiting minister said when he paid a courtesy call on her Zambian counterpart Harry Kalaba that there was need for the two countries to have an action plan for the successful implementation of 19 bilateral agreements signed between the two countries when Moroccan King Muhammed VI visited Zambia in February this year.

The visit, she said, ushered in a new era in the relationship between the two countries, adding that the 19 agreements will boost ties.

According to her, the two countries share a common vision and desire to establish peace, stability and respect for the sovereignty of each country in Africa.

On his part, the Zambian minister said the establishment of the embassy will enhance the country's continental integration.

The Moroccan minister is here for the review of the 19 agreements in order for the two countries to come up with specific activities to ensure the objectives of the agreements were achieved.

On Monday, she held a meeting with agriculture minister Dora Siliya where they discussed specific areas of cooperation in the agriculture sector.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 05:30:04|Editor: Zhou Xin

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JERUSALEM, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Clashes between Muslim worshippers and Israeli police broke out in East Jerusalem on Tuesday night, for a third consecutive day, amidst tensions sparked by metal detectors installed at a Muslim shrine.

The clashes erupted after tens of Muslims held their evening pray outside the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, in an act of protest against metal detectors and CCTVs installed by Israel on Sunday.

"At the end of the prayer, some of the worshippers started to hurl stones and bottles at the police. A force of police and Border Police dispersed them using means (for dispersing demonstrations)," police spokeswoman Luba Samri said.

Palestinian media reported that "dozens" of protesters were injured during the clashes. According to Samri, two policemen were injured.

Clashes erupted also in Ras al-Amud, a Palestinian neighborhood of East Jerusalem, where youths hurled stones at the police, according to Samri.

The hilltop walled compound is Islam's third holiest site. Muslims revere it as the Noble Sanctuary and Jews as the Temple Mount. Jews see the site as the place of their historic temples, the last of which was ruined by the Romans in 70 A.D.

Israel occupied and subsequently annexed the area in 1967. But due to its special sensitivity, the Muslim Waqf was put in charge of running the site.

Under a long-held status quo, Israeli Jews are allowed to visit the site but not to pray there. In recent months, far-right Israeli lawmakers renewed their calls to change the status quo and to lift the restrictions on Jewish prays, escalating the tensions in and around the compound.

Israel says it implemented the new measures after three Palestinian citizens of Israel carried out a shooting attack near the gates of the site on Friday, killing two policemen. The assailants were shot dead by the police.

However, the move triggers an uproar in the Muslim world. The Palestinians accuse Israel of attempting to expand its control over the Muslim-run site.

Over the past three days, worshippers held prayers outside the compound after clerics of the mosque called on a protest against the new measures.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 05:40:07|Editor: Zhou Xin

Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa (R) meets with European Commissioner for Economic Affairs Pierre Moscovici in Lisbon on July 18, 2017. Pierre Moscovici said here Tuesday that Portugal's economic progress is very impressive and the growth will be above 2.5 percent this year. (Xinhua/Zhang Liyun)

LISBON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- European Commissioner for Economic Affairs Pierre Moscovici said here Tuesday that Portugal's economic progress is very impressive and the growth will be above 2.5 percent this year.

Speaking at a press conference, Moscovici said that since his visit to the country in February last year, the "economic progress of Portugal is very impressive", adding that Portugal's deficit is expected to be 1.8 percent and the economic growth will be 2.5 percent this year.

In the spring forecasts, the European Commission upgraded its growth forecast for Portugal to 1.8 percent this year and the forecast its budget deficit to be 1.8 percent of GDP as well.

Moscovici said that Portugal's priority must be "to turn this recovery into a lasting growth", which he considered to be possible, due to the increase in exports and boom in tourism.

He also said that Portugal should continue its efforts to further reduce its deficit.

Moscovici met with Portugal's Prime Minister Antonio Costa during his one-day visit to Portugal on Tuesday.

Portugal received a 78 billion euro bailout in 2011 when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. The country exited the bailout after three years of harsh austerity.

The EU decided to formalize the end of Portugal's excessive deficit procedure in May this year. The country had been under the excessive deficit procedure since 2009, when its budget deficit was at around 10 percent of GDP.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 05:45:10|Editor: Zhou Xin

Danny Glover, American actor and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Goodwill Ambassador, speaks during a ceremony marking Nelson Mandela International Day at the UN headquarters in New York, on July 18, 2017. Marking Nelson Mandela International Day, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday called for actions across the world in promoting peace, sustainable development and lives of dignity for all. (Xinhua/Li Muzi)

UNITED NATIONS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Marking Nelson Mandela International Day, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday called for actions across the world in promoting peace, sustainable development and lives of dignity for all.

"Nelson Mandela continues to inspire the world through his example of courage and compassion, and his commitment to social justice and a culture of freedom and peace," said Guterres at a ceremony held here in celebration of the Day.

"The best tribute we can pay this great man is not words or in ceremonies, but actions that improve our world," said Guterres.

In November 2009, the UN General Assembly declared July 18, Mandela's birthday, as "Nelson Mandela International Day" in recognition of the former South African president's contribution to the culture of peace and freedom.

Also on Tuesday, president of the UN General Assembly Peter Thomson said today's world is in desperate need of Mandela's values of empathy, kindness, and respect for common humanity as violent conflicts continue to rage and hate crimes against migrants as well as minorities are on the rise.

"His extraordinary strength of character, conviction, and devotion to duty will be an inspiration for all time," he added.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 05:50:12|Editor: Zhou Xin

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WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Three Republican senators said Tuesday they would oppose moving ahead on a new GOP plan only aiming to repeal Obamacare, leaving Republicans once again short of votes needed to carry on with their seven-year-old drive.

Lisa Murkowski, Shelley Moore Capito and Susan Collins indicated Tuesday that they would not vote to move forward a GOP repeal of the Affordable Care Act, known as the Obamacare, to the Senate floor without implementing an immediate replacement.

Their opposition came after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell conceded failure in efforts to repeal and immediately replace the Obamacare late Monday night as more Republican senators defected against the revised Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), a GOP bill designed to overhaul the Obamacare.

But McConnell said the Senate will vote to take up the House-passed bill in coming days while calling for a repeal vote on Obamacare with a two-year delay for substitute.

"I regret that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failures of Obamacare will not be successful," McConnell said on the Senate floor Tuesday. "That doesn't mean we should give up."

However, members of McConnell's caucus said a repeal-only bill would not have their support, shortly after he made those remarks.

"My position on this issue is driven by its impact on West Virginians," Senator Capito said in a statement.

"With that in mind, I cannot vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians," Capito said.

"To repeal there has to be a replacement," Senator Murkowski of Alaska told reporters. "There's enough chaos already, and this would just contribute to it."

Separately, Senator Collins of Maine said she was opposing the repeal and delay proposal as it is not constructive to repeal a law closely associated with the health care system but only plan to come up with a replacement over the next two years.

Republicans control a 52-48 majority in the 100-seat Senate. Under budget reconciliation rules, at least 50 votes are required to pass a plan, with Vice President Mike Pence to break a tie.

With Senator John McCain of Arizona recovering at home from surgery, two or more defections would stall any Republican proposal, were there a unanimous opposition from Democrats and independents.

The Senate's Obamacare replacement plan, the BCRA, collapsed Monday night when Collins and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky were joined by Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas in opposing the motion before McConnell shifted to advancing a repeal-only plan, stalled almost immediately the next day.

U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday he was "very disappointed" with the defeat in advancing the Republican health care plan, one of his major campaign promises during the 2016 presidential elelction.

"Let Obamacare fail," he said. "We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it."

The GOP effort to repeal and replace the Obamacare has stalled mutiple times in past weeks.

Republicans are divided amid unsolved concerns of rising costs and fewer insurers once the BCRA was enacted, while Democrats argue the GOP bill would cost tens of millions of people's coverage.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 06:35:34|Editor: Zhou Xin

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NEW YORK, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The ride-sharing company Uber was sued on Tuesday by disability rights groups for discriminating passengers with mobility disability in New York City.

In the proposed class-action complaint, Uber was accused of violating New York City Human Rights Law because 99.9 percent of its more than 58,000 vehicles in the city are unusable by people in wheelchairs.

"Uber purports to have some accessible vehicles in its fleet, but passengers attempting to use Uber's accessible service face extended wait times, or are still denied access to the service altogether, demonstrating that the new service is nothing more than window-dressing, designed to avoid government regulation and legal requirements," the complaint said.

The 31-page lawsuit was filed in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan by Disability Rights Advocates, a national nonprofit legal center, on behalf of advocacy groups and individuals including the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled, Taxis for All Campaign, Disabled in Action of Metropolitan New York, Valerie Joseph, and Gabriela Amari.

The case followed earlier lawsuits by civil rights groups in Chicago and Washington D.C. accusing Uber of failing to provide access to those in wheelchairs.

Uber said in a statement that its "technology has expanded access to reliable transportation options for all riders, including those with disabilities and has enabled people with disabilities to earn income in new ways."

"While there is certainly more work to be done, we will continue advocating for a solution that offers affordable, reliable transportation to those who need a wheelchair accessible vehicle," the company said in an email reply to Xinhua.

In August 2016, Uber NYC launched a pilot to provide UberX WAV to riders in wheelchair with the goal of expanding service over time. The company said it currently has nearly 200 WAV (wheelchair access vehicles) in New York City.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 06:40:36|Editor: Zhou Xin

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By Xinhua writer Yang Shilong

NEW YORK, July 18 (Xinhua) -- When Charles Laughlin was in college in the U.S. state of Minnesota about 30 years ago, Chinese was categorized along with Arabic, Swahili and Icelandic as a Less Commonly Taught Language" in the United States.

Now, the world's oldest written language is the second most commonly spoken non-English language, only after Spanish, in the United States, with over 2.1 million speakers, according to a latest survey by 24/7 Wall Str., a widely-quoted Delaware company.

CHINESE FEVER GOES DOWN TO PRIMARY & SECONDARY EDUCATION

"The most significant new aspect of this Chinese Fever, was that it went down to the level of primary and secondary education," said Laughlin, East Asian Studies and Department Chair, University of Virginia, in a recent interview via phone with Xinhua.

"For the first time across the nation, you saw Chinese instruction in elementary schools, middle schools and high schools... I think, it continues to grow," said Laughlin, who specializes in Modern Chinese Literature.

Laughlin's latest Chinese article, titled "Jazz, education and American Culture" and under his Chinese name, Luo Fulin, is carried by the 4th edition of 2017 Hua Cheng, or Flower City, one of the famous bi-monthly literary magazine in China.

Current figures reveal that over 200,000 students are actively studying Mandarin in the U.S. presently, with more expected to follow. The U.S.-China Strong Foundation said it aims to expand to 1 million the number of U.S. K-12 students learning Mandarin by 2020.

At the university level, Laughlin observed there was a large increase in numbers of U.S. students learning Chinese, but it has pulled back in the past four or five years.

"(It is) not because of a change of attitude, but I think maybe because some of the students were initially interested in taking Chinese... they might have overestimated their abilities to learn Chinese," he said.

"It is important to remember the increase at the university level is still much higher than it was 20 years ago, in another words, now Chinese, at most universities, is No. 3, sometimes No. 2 the most widely taken foreign language, after Spanish and French," Laughlin said. "This has never happened before, it was not the case when I was in the college."

However, Chinese language studies in the U.S. did not suddenly begin 10 or 20 years ago and there have been professors of Chinese in American universities since the late 19th century, Laughlin said.

Learning Chinese in the U.S. took off around 1950s and 1960s and the language turned increasingly hot when China started its reform and opening-up policy in late 1970s.

"Around the end of 20th century, China's achievements are so incredible, and its global influence developed very fast... (these) raised the profile of Chinese language very high," he said.

CHINESE-LEARNING APPS COMPLEMENT TRADTIONAL CLASSROOM TEACHING

Mary Hoffman, a teacher from Brooklyn, New York City, once felt learning Chinese was so hard because she did not have native speakers to practise the tone language.

"I studied Spanish because I used to work in a Spanish neighborhood, and I carry on a basic conversation with the parents now about their job, and I'm sure it's gonna take longer in Chinese, just because of the tones...So that's the challenge for Americans," Hoffman told Xinhua recently at the end of her first Chinese class at the China Institute in Lower Manhattan, New York City.

"(It was even harder) if you didn't have the ability to hear it many many many times when you went home, it's not like you can study it from a book in the same way that you could with Spanish, which is more phonetic, or any other language," she said.

"(Now) with the assistance of computer it would be a bit easier," said Hoffman.

She was referring to online resources including smart phone apps for Chinese learning that have sprung up over the years. A quick Google of "Chinese learning app" yields over 31,700,000 results.

"Smartphone's apps have been a really helpful tool because they allow me to study Chinese while I'm on the subway or in a coffee shop," wrote Sborto Zhou, an editor who has studied Chinese for over five years, in his article "The 12 best apps to learn Chinese on your smartphone or tablet."

In his opinion, the best apps for learning Chinese are Skritter (Learn how to write Chinese characters), FluentU (improve your language level through immersion in the language) and The Chairman's Bao (an online newspaper that has been simplified for people learning Mandarin), to name just a few.

Wechat, a sort of Whatsapp that is extremely popular in China, is also considered one of the best platforms for Chinese learners to interact with native Chinese speakers as it allows one to meet new people.

"All these simple and accessible resources have revolutionized traditional Chinese teaching," said Chen Jinguo, an instructor who has been teaching at the China Institute for more than 20 years. "By embedding them within curricula, my classes are more interesting, interactive and engaging with local students."
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 07:10:42|Editor: Zhou Xin

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MOSCOW, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The 13th International Aviation and Space Salon (MAKS) in Russia will facilitate further cooperation in the aerospace industry and promote Russian products both at home and abroad, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday.

"An extensive exposition will be deployed. Leading Russian and foreign companies will present their achievements," Putin said in a speech at the opening ceremony of the MAKS-2017 airshow, which runs from Tuesday to Sunday in the Russian city of Zhukovsky on the southeastern outskirts of Moscow.

Over 790 aviation and aerospace companies from 26 countries and regions are expected to showcase thousands of products and design projects at the airshow in search of cooperation opportunities.

"Conferences and seminars will take place on topical issues of the industry development. A number of negotiations and signing of major contracts are planned," Putin said.

"We expect that all this will contribute to the strengthening of production cooperation, the growth of international cooperation, the promotion of Russian products in the domestic and foreign markets. We have something to offer," the president said.

More than 73,000 professionals have signed up for a visit at the airshow so far, and the total number of visitors is expected to reach hundreds of thousands, according to the organizing committee of the airshow.

Founded in 1993, the MAKS is a biennial event aimed at displaying Russian aerospace-related high-tech products and promoting business cooperation with foreign partners in the aerospace sector.

The entire event usually lasts for six days, exclusively accessible to research and development institutions, business organizations and the press in the first three days, and then open to the public for the rest of the time.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 07:30:38|Editor: Xiang Bo

Palestinian boys draw on papers during a UN-run summer fun games week in Gaza City, on July 18, 2017. United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) launched a three-week Summer Fun Weeks for 190,000 Palestinian schoolchildren and registered refugee children throughout the Gaza Strip. (Xinhua/Wissam Nassar)
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 07:25:48|Editor: Zhou Xin

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LOS ANGELES, July 18 (Xinhua) -- A new computational method, to be demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2017 later this month in Los Angeles, California, is addressing a well-known bottleneck in computer graphics: 3D content creation.

The new generative model, GRASS, based on deep neural networks developed by an international research team, enables the automatic creation of plausible, novel 3D shapes, giving graphic artists in video games, virtual reality (VR) and film the ability to more quickly and effortlessly create and explore multiple 3D shapes so as to arrive at a final product.

With GRASS, "Everything is driven implicitly by the examples, or learned from data," Kai Xu, a co-author of a new research paper, said in a press release.

According to the paper, published in ACM Transactions on Graphics, the new method uses machine-learning techniques and artificial intelligence to eliminate the burden of generating multiple 3D shapes by hand.

Researchers believe that computational methods like GRASS could one day transform the video game, film, computer-aided design (CAD) and VR industries.

Generating new 3D shapes is challenging. "The time consuming process of 3D content creation prevents computer graphics from being as ubiquitous as we had hoped," said the associate professor of computer science at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), China, and soon-to-be visiting professor at Princeton University.

"Our work is a data-driven automatic shape generation computational method. Given a set of example 3D shapes, our task is to generate multiple shapes of one object class, automatically," Xu said.

As an example, Xu described given a set of chairs, the new method can create more chairs but with different geometric structures, and do so quickly and simply, allowing even a novice user to utilize the method.

According to the press release on Tuesday, the core ideas that led to GRASS were born out of two questions the researchers had been asking themselves for years.

The first is whether 3D shapes can be transformed into and generated through genetic codes mimicking human DNA. Fittingly, the first code name for the project was "Shape DNA". GRASS learns to encode an arbitrarily complex 3D shape into a fixed set of parameters, and regenerate it from those parameters.

The second question is how to best represent 3D shapes for computer-aided synthesis. The team, led by NUDT, eventually settled on a structural representation, describing a 3D shape as an organized hierarchy of its constituent parts.

The authors from NUDT, Adobe Research, IIT Bombay, Simon Fraser University and Stanford University are set to showcase their work at SIGGRAPH 2017, which is known for the spotlight it shines annually on the most innovative in computer graphics research and interactive techniques worldwide.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 08:56:11|Editor: Zhou Xin

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COLOMBO, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka and Singapore are to finalize a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) this year, Foreign Minister Ravi Karunanayake said on Tuesday.

Karunanayake said that during his discussions with visiting Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, particular attention was paid to ways and means of further strengthening bilateral trade and investment including the proposed Sri Lanka-Singapore FTA, which is expected to be finalized during the later part of 2017.

Speaking to reporters, the Sri Lankan foreign minister said that Sri Lanka and Singapore enjoy strong and robust bilateral relations that have been built on mutual understanding and respect as well as through people-to-people contacts.

He said the official visit by the prime minister of Sri Lanka to Singapore last July has opened a new chapter in further enhancing bilateral relations.

"I expressed my deep appreciation for the training opportunities offered by Singapore to Sri Lankan public sector officials. We discussed ways of further strengthening training and educational collaboration between two countries," Karunanayake added.

Balakrishnan has met Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena and will also meet Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 10:06:53|Editor: Zhou Xin

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TRIPOLI, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Libya's UN-backed Prime Minister Fayez Serraj earlier this week announced forming a new board of trustees for the country's Investment Authority.

The board includes Serraj, the ministers of finance, economy, and planning, as well as the governor of the central bank of Libya, the government's media office said.

The Libyan Investment Authority is a sovereign wealth fund investing in diverse areas to create wealth for the country. However, it has nearly 66 billion U.S. dollars of frozen assets.

The Libyan economy is suffering due to years of fighting and political rivalry. The unstable situation also affected oil production, the country's main source of income.

Serraj's Government of National Accord was appointed in 2015 based on a UN-backed peace agreement, which aims to end the country's political rivalry. The government, however, is still struggling to improve the political and economic situation in the North African country amid insecurity and chaos.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 10:06:54|Editor: An

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SINGAPORE, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese visitors spent an estimated 3.52 billion Singapore dollars (2.58 billion U.S. dollars) in Singapore last year, increasing 39 percent or 1 billion Singapore dollars (732 million dollars) from 2015, the Straits Times reported on Wednesday.

This was the second year in a row for China to be Singapore's top-spending market, beating Indonesia, which has traditionally been the top spender.

Statistics from the Singapore Tourism Board show 2.86 million Chinese visitors arrived in Singapore last year, up 36 percent year on year.

It also shows the growth in Chinese tourists has been fuelled by a rise in tourists from secondary cities in China.

Online travel booking site Hotels.com released the result of a survey of over 3,000 Chinese travellers on Tuesday, which says the tide of Chinese tourists will not be ebbing soon.

It found that Singapore is the top city in the Asia-Pacific that Chinese travellers want to visit in the next 12 months.

This was followed by Sydney, while third place was shared by Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Australia's Gold Coast.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 10:41:52|Editor: An

Tourists daub rice ash onto each other during the Hualian Festival in Qiubei County of southwest China's Yunnan Province, July 18, 2017. The Hualian Festival is a traditional annual festival of the Yi ethnic group in Qiubei County where people express best wishes by daubing black rice ash on face to get good luck. (Xinhua/Jing Huihui)
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 10:37:06|Editor: An

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SEOUL, July 19 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's farm goods exports slowed due to weak demand from China, a government report showed Wednesday.

Exports of farm goods and food to China reached 435.7 million U.S. dollars in the January-June period, down 11.4 percent from the same period of last year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

The agricultural product exports to China kept a monthly downward trend, after growing 7.4 percent in March.

The falling exports to China pulled down South Korea's overall farm goods exports. The growth rate of South Korea's exports of food and agricultural products fell from 11.3 percent in March to 6.5 percent in June.

The ministry said the South Korean government needed to continue investment in China, which is the world's largest food market.

It drew up a set of measures to expand food exports to China, including efforts to produce food tailored to Chinese consumers.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 10:47:19|Editor: Zhou Xin

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CANBERRA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Two Australian Senators who in the past week resigned after finding out they were dual citizens should not have to pay back 3 million Australian dollars (2.38 million U.S. dollars) in wages, according to leader of Greens party Richard Di Natale on Wednesday.

Under Australian law, any Australian who sits in the Senate must not be a dual citizen, but last Friday and on Tuesday this week, Greens Senators Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters both found out they were dual citizens of New Zealand and Canada respectively leaving them ineligible to hold their positions.

The revelations have left the Greens without both of its co-deputy leaders, but there have also been calls for the pair to repay their Senator salaries for their time in office, something Di Natale said was unnecessary.

Speaking on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio, Di Natale said they have both "already paid a high price" for their oversight, adding that the government did not pursue salary repayments from Senators Bob Day and Rod Culleton when they stepped down for separate misdemeanors.

"They've done their job, they've represented their states, they've continued to legislate in the parliament, they've attended I have to say more diligently and more often than most other senators," Di Natale said on Wednesday.

"Larissa's a young mother, she's made huge sacrifices there, and when you consider that when it comes to Senator Day and indeed Senator Culleton, that the government has indicated that they're not going to pursue them for the salary that they earned, I think it would be unthinkable that they wouldn't do the same for Senator Ludlam and Senator Waters.

"They've made a massive contribution not just to the Greens, to the Australian community."

Meanwhile Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said it was "extraordinary" that two Senators from the same party could make such a "careless" oversight.

"It is extraordinary that two out of nine Greens senators have made that mistake," he told Adelaide's 5AA radio.

"It's not as though it's a secret. It is in the constitution, that's one thing, but also when you nominate for parliament there's actually a question that says please tick the box and confirm that you are not in breach of Section 44 and there are various provisions that are set out there."
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 10:52:21|Editor: An

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Photo taken on July 18, 2017 shows the postmarks created for the commemoration of 45 years of diplomatic ties between Peru and China, in Lima. Peru on Tuesday issued two new series of stamps and postmarks to celebrate its longstanding ties with China. (Xinhua/Luis Camacho)

LIMA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Peru Tuesday issued two new series of stamps and postmarks to celebrate its longstanding ties with China.

The first series features images of Beijing's Temple of Heaven and Peru's Inca city of Machu Picchu, along with the words "Youyi" and "Khumpa," which mean friendship in Chinese and Quechua respectively.

"It is the fruit of Peruvian-Chinese friendship, highlighting 45 years of diplomatic ties," Eduardo Yong, president of the Peruvian-Chinese Cultural Institute, said during the presentation of the series at the Peruvian postal service.

The other series features Peru's unique Chinese-influenced cuisine, reflecting "the fusion, the sisterhood of Peruvian and Chinese cultures in gastronomy and cooking," said Yong.

The two countries established diplomatic relations in 1971, but their relationship dates back to the 17th century, when Chinese traders and workers arrived in Peru aboard ships that sailed between East Asia and what was then known as New Spain.

Today, Peruvians of Chinese descent constitute an estimated 4 to 5 percent of the whole population.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 11:07:28|Editor: An

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CANBERRA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Stronger demand for premium Australian wine in China has contributed to a 10 percent increase in Australia's overall wine export value, according to Wine Australia's export report released on Wednesday.

China maintained its position as the No. 1 export value destination for Australian wine in 2016-17, after export value to China grew by 44 percent to be worth 607 million Australian dollars (482 million U.S. dollars).

The total value of exports grew by 201 million Australian dollars (159 million U.S. dollars) to 2.3 billion Australian dollars (1.82 billion U.S. dollars).

While China remained at the top of the export value tree, the value of wine exports to the United States also grew, but by just 3 percent to 464 million Australian dollars (368 million U.S. dollars), while the value of exports to the UK fell by 7 percent.

While the export value of wine to the United Kingdom fell, the report said the UK remained the No. 1 destination for Australian wine exports by volume, indicating that UK consumers prefer cheaper Australian wines, while Chinese tastes are a little more expensive.

According to Wine Australia CEO Andreas Clark, there was also strong growth in exports of carbonated wines as well as premium wines.

"Pleasingly, nearly all price points experienced growth and there were benefits for exporters in all segments of the market," he said in a statement accompanying the report on Wednesday.

"An interesting development from last year was the growth in the carbonated wine category, which includes varieties such as Moscato."

"Exports (of sparkling wine) more than doubled to 30 million Australian dollars (23.8 million U.S. dollars). The United States was the destination for 35 percent of the carbonated wine exports, with mainland China (15 percent) and Japan (14 percent) the other major destinations."

Export director of Handpicked Wines James Hunt said the company's success in the Chinese market was on the back of hard work and recognizing that each market and its culture was unique.

"This is built on the back of tight brand guidelines, frequent market visits, engaged activity and communication with all levels of the distribution chain," he said in a statement.

"As the business grew we found the need to employ within the region to maintain the brand values and ensure the message was consistent across the region, particularly with local websites, trade material and social media accounts."

Meanwhile, the report also said that 24 percent of all wine imported into China is from Australia, second only to France, which has a 41 percent share of the Chinese import market.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 11:12:33|Editor: Zhou Xin

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CARACAS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The Venezuelan government on Tuesday said it has rejected U.S. pressure to cancel a constitutional initiative or face additional "economic sanctions."

"Obviously the U.S. government is used to humiliating other nations through its international relations and thinks it is going to get the subordination it is accustomed to," the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has called for a National Constituent Assembly (ACN) to review and possibly rewrite the constitution, in a bid to overcome the political crisis that has paralyzed the country.

Venezuelans are expected to elect the members of the ACN on July 30.

The conservative opposition, which has the support of the U.S. government, opposes the initiative, going so far as to organize an informal poll on Sunday to gauge support for the measure.

The next day, a White House statement from President Donald Trump warned that if the Maduro government "imposes its Constituent Assembly on July 30, the United States will take strong and swift economic actions."

The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry noted "it is not the first time we have denounced and confronted crazy threats such as those contained in this unusual document," and vowed to hold the vote as planned, despite this latest "brutal threat."

In a swipe at the indirect voting system of the United States, which filters citizens' votes through the so-called electoral college, the ministry highlighted that the constituent assembly "will be elected by the direct vote, universally and in secret, of all Venezuelans."

The anti-government protests organized by the opposition in Venezuela have killed more than 90 people since early April.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 11:57:48|Editor: Lu Hui

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YANGON, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar held a state ceremony here Wednesday to mark the country's 70th Martyrs' Day, commemorating fallen national heroes including General Aung San and eight others who sacrificed their lives in 1947 for regaining the country's independence from British colonialists in 1948.

General Aung San was the founder of Myanmar's armed forces.

Myanmar's national flag was flown half-mast across the country to mark the event.

First Vice President U Myint Swe paid tribute at the tombs of the martyrs in commemoration of the Martyrs' Day at the Martyrs' Mausoleum.

State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of General Aung San, laid wreathes at the tombs.

A siren was sounded by Myanmar Radio and Television at 10:37 a.m. local time to observe the time of the assassination of the martyrs.

Following the official ceremony, the martyrs' mausoleum was open to the public for paying tribute.

General Aung San, along with eight others including his bodyguard and seven councilor members, were all assassinated at Yangon's then prime minister's office on July 19, 1947 before Myanmar regained independence on Jan. 4, 1948.

The previous prime ministers' office in downtown Yangon was also open to the public for visit.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 12:17:59|Editor: Lu Hui

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JINAN, July 19 (Xinhua) -- An east China court on Wednesday sentenced seven people to prison terms for involvement in a telecom fraud case that led to the death of a teenager last year.

Chen Wenhui was handed a life sentence by the Intermediate People's Court of Linyi City, Shandong Province, for fraud and violation of personal information. The court also ordered to confiscate all his personal assets, and deprived him of his political rights for life.

The sentences for his accomplices range from three to 15 years, according to the court.

Xu Yuyu, a senior high school graduate from Linyi, died of cardiac arrest in August 2016 after losing 9,900 yuan (1,440 U.S. dollars), which she was supposed to use to pay her university tuition fees, to the fraudsters.

Police detained more than 19,300 telecom fraud suspects in 2016.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 13:03:14|Editor: An

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Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang addresses a business luncheon ahead of the first China-U.S. Comprehensive Economic Dialogue in Washington, the United States, on July 18, 2017. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)

WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang said here Tuesday that the recent fruitful cooperation between the world's largest two economies has proved that China-U.S. economic cooperation is sailing on the right course.

Speaking at a business luncheon ahead of the first China-U.S. Comprehensive Economic Dialogue, which is slated for Wednesday, Wang recalled that after the U.S. presidential election last year, many fretted that China-U.S. trade relations would "enter a stormy season of winter and even run the risk of a trade war."

At that critical juncture, Chinese President Xi Jinping's April trip to the U.S. state of Florida and meeting with his U.S. counterpart, Donald Trump, at Mar-a-Lago "set a constructive tone for China-U.S. relations in a new era," Wang added.

He noted that the two sides then decided to set up four high-level dialogue mechanisms, including the Comprehensive Economic Dialogue, and launched a 100-day plan for bilateral economic cooperation, "which was most reassuring to the business communities in both countries."

"Thanks to the painstaking efforts of both sides, the 100-Day Plan has delivered major outcomes," Wang said, noting that the American beef has found its way back to the Chinese market after 14 years and the policy barriers for U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to China have started to crumble.

"In the first five months of this year, China had already imported 400,000 tons of LNG from the United States, standing in sharp contrast to zero in the same period of last year," he added.

"More importantly, through 100 days of intensive engagement, our economic teams have built mutual trust, and managed to establish a way of communication featuring mutual respect and win-win cooperation," he said.

He thanked the two countries' business communities for their long-standing support and active participation, and reiterated that "China-U.S. business cooperation is market behavior" and "the underlying drivers lie in the people and the business communities."

"Although there may still be twists and turns in our cooperation going forward, as long as you have confidence, the overall direction of China-U.S. business cooperation will not change," he said. "Cooperation is the only right choice for our two countries."

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Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 13:03:16|Editor: An

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URUMQI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- A total of 3,300 students from northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region will attend vocational schools in inland cities as part of a program to increase the number of skilled workers in the region.

Of the students, 88.5 percent are from agricultural or pastoral areas in Xinjiang, according to the student enrollment office. This year, 15,658 students applied for the program, 1,085 more than last year.

Beginning 2011, students from Xinjiang have been able to apply to courses at 33 vocational schools located in nine municipalities and provinces in the central and eastern regions.

So far, the schools have enrolled more than 18,000 students, of whom more than 9,000 have graduated.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 13:43:32|Editor: Zhou Xin

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SEOUL, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The new South Korean government under President Moon Jae-in planned to push for a rapid recovery of wartime operational control of South Korean forces from the United States.

It was unveiled on Wednesday in the five-year plan for state management under the new administration, which was inaugurated on May 10, according to the presidential Blue House.

Under the preliminary version of the plan, South Korea would speed up preparations for the transfer of wartime command of its troops from Washington to complete it "within the five-year tenure" of President Moon.

It was altered in the final version into a "rapid transfer" based on the firm South Korea-U.S. alliance. On his campaign trail, Moon pledged an early recovery of its wartime operational control.

The alteration was made under the instruction of President Moon, a Blue House official told reporters.

South Korea handed over its operational command to the U.S. forces after the three-year Korean War broke out in 1950. The country won back its peacetime operational control in 1994.

Late South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun agreed with his U.S. counterpart in 2006 to regain the wartime control, and the transfer date was set at April 2012 during the following talks between defense chiefs of the two allies.

Former President Lee Myung-bak, Roh's successor, delayed the transfer to December 2015, and impeached President Park Geun-hye actually put it off indefinitely as she agreed upon the so-called "conditions-based" transfer in October 2014 citing the growing nuclear and missile threats from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Conservative politicians had opposed the early transfer, which they claimed could cause a security vacuum and the crisis in the South Korea-U.S. alliance. Major government, media and political posts in South Korea are occupied by U.S.-dependent figures.

Despite the domestic disagreement over the timing of the transfer, U.S. President Donald Trump agreed to the early transfer in his summit meeting with President Moon in Washington for two days through June 30.

According to the joint statement unveiled after the summit, the two leaders decided to continue the alliance's work to "expeditiously enable the conditions-based transfer of wartime operational control" of South Korean forces from Washington.

In return, the South Korean side promised to continue to acquire the critical military capabilities, necessary to lead the combined defense against the DPRK's nuclear and missile threats, through interoperable Kill Chain, Korean Air and Missile Defense (KAMD) and other alliance systems, according to the statement.

To enhance self-reliant defense capability, the Moon government planned to adopt its home-grown defense systems including the KAMD, the Kill Chain and the Korea Massive Punishment Retaliation (KMPR) systems.

The KAMD is a project to develop its indigenous missile defense system to shoot down incoming DPRK missiles at multiple layers. The project includes the development of interceptors such as medium-range surface-to-air missiles (M-SAM) and long-range surface-to-air missiles (L-SAM) that can intercept missiles at an altitude of less than 100 km.

The Kill Chain is designed to preemptively strike the DPRK's missile launch sites when signs of first strike are spotted. The KMPR is a project to preemptively strike the DPRK's leadership and headquarters with massive missile attacks when Pyongyang's first strike signs are detected.

To finance the development of the three systems, President Moon said Tuesday that he would raise the country's defense budget to 2.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) from the current 2.4 percent within his five-year presidency.

About 40.3 trillion won (36 billion U.S. dollars) was allocated to this year's defense budget of South Korea. It could rise to as much as 50 trillion won in the next five years.

Meanwhile, the Moon administration vowed to make all-out efforts to eliminate corruptions in the defense industry, which Moon depicted as "an act benefitting the enemy."

Last week, prosecutors raided the Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI), the country's sole aircraft developer and manufacturer, which was suspected of overstating production costs and embezzling company funds. Five KAI subcontractors were stormed by prosecutors on Tuesday as part of the ongoing investigation.

The investigation into the KAI was widely forecast to become a starting point of the overall probe into corruptions in the defense industry.

President Moon ordered the restoration of the government-wide anti-corruption committee meeting that was first introduced in 2004, vowing to root out the defense industry corruptions.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 13:43:33|Editor: Zhou Xin

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SYDNEY, July 19 (Xinhua) -- A team of 48 firefighters have been deployed to British Columbia State on Wednesday, to assist Canadian emergency services who have been battling 160 out of control wildfires for a number of weeks.

With more than 40,000 people already evacuated from their homes in the devastated region, the formal request for help was met with great support from Aussie firefighters.

"New South Wales (NSW) fire agencies have a longstanding tradition of helping out our fellow firefighters, no matter where they are, and we are pleased to be offering this support to the Canadian Fire Services." NSW Rural Fire Service commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons explained in a statement.

NSW emergency services minister Troy Grant also echoed these sentiments.

"NSW always stands ready to lend our friends overseas a helping hand in their time of need," Grant said.

The Australian task force's role during their North American excursion will be to fill specialist positions including incident control, operations, public information, logistics, aviation and fire behavior analysis, Fitzsimmons said.

They are expected to return to Australia in six weeks time.
Fashion changes, but never the heart for beauty. Inspired by the popular "100 Years of Beauty" videos, which highlight changes of fashion trends in a country or region over time, a Uygur man in northwest China's Xinjiang has released his own version to reproduce fashion trends of female Uygurs in the region over the past century.

In the video and photos, Mewlan Turaq in Kashgar of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region illustrates the changes of the ethnic styles in his hometown from the 1910s to the 2010s. He wishes to to show the beauty of Uygur women. His reproduction was based on historical documents and old photos. He also got help from Uygur photographer Kurbanjan Samat.

"The pursuit of beauty is a natural and sincere desire of people in all countries and of all ethnic groups," he says. "The world is changing. China is developing. So is Xinjiang. The change of society is reflected in local fashion trends."

The man spent five months sewing most of the following clothes with his mother.

- 1910s

In the 1910s, Uygur females wore Etles silk chapans and long dresses. Women with high social status were dressed in long Etles silk dresses for social events. They also wore gorgeous headwear and necklaces, and long trousers inside the dress. The trousers legs were embroidered with golden patterns.

- 1920s

In the 1920s, Uygur women wore fur caps and white long yarn dresses. The style of white dress shown in the picture was for married women. Silk was popular in Xinjiang as the ancient Silk Road ran through the region.

- 1930s

In the 1930s, style in northern Xinjiang was still affected by the Manchu, the ethnic minority that established the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Caps, cuffs and collars were decorated with embroidery. Skirts down to the ankle were worn. Women also wore earrings and necklaces with Central Asia-style tassels. Their caps were also decorated with feathers.

- 1940s

In the 1940s, modern fashion from foreign countries began to come in, and women enjoyed higher status. Xinjiang women began to wear shorter, tighter and more casual dresses. A vest over an Etles dress was trendy at that time. The floral caps also replaced the headscarf.

- 1950s

Since the peaceful liberation of Xinjiang in 1949, and the founding of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in 1955 in particular, life in Xinjiang has been better connected to and more influenced by the rest of the country.

In the 1950s, more Uygur women entered campuses. The costume in the above photo is inspired by an old photo of a female teacher in Tacheng, Xinjiang. Fashion at that time was deeply influenced by the former Soviet Union, and featured lace pleated skirts and round toe shoes. Women no longer had to have their bodies fully covered.

- 1960s

During the Cultural Revolution, the military style attire also became a fashion in Xinjiang, just like in other parts of China.

- 1970s

College fashion became trendy among young people all over China in the 1970s. Uygur young women loved to wear dotted dresses with puff sleeves.

- 1980s

Influenced by punk, clothing style in Xinjiang in the 1980s became exaggerative. Sequins and curly hair were common. The look shown above is inspired by the costume of the heroin in Xinjiang's famous romantic movie "Mai's Love" in 1987, who is a Uygur student of the Beijing Dance Academy.

- 1990s

At the end of the 20th century, jeans, leather jackets and sneakers were common on the streets in Xinjiang. Uygur women began to embrace international fashion trends.

- 2000s

At the dawn of the new century, Uygur women became more open and began to embrace bolder fashion. Leggings, tight dresses and sleeveless blouses were popular among them.

- 2010s

In the 2010s, people began to realize the importance of protecting and inheriting traditional cultures, and thus nostalgia surged in China's fashion. In Xinjiang, ethnic styles regained popularity. Designers loved to blend traditional Uygur elements, such as Etles silk, in their designs.

- 2017

Today, as Uygur women enjoy a broader horizon, parties and banquets in Xinjiang welcome more Uygur female guests. Evening gowns are must-have for female party goers.

To watch the video, follow Xinhua on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube:

http://www.facebook.com/XinhuaNewsAgency

http://twitter.com/XHNews

http://www.youtube.com/user/ChinaViewTV

(All photos provided by Mewlan Turaq)
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 15:28:47|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

Staff members of Henglin chair company deal with an online order of office chairs in Huzhou City of east China's Zhejiang Province, July 18, 2017. According to the Department of Commerce of Zhejiang Province, online retail sales of Zhejiang stood at 535.07 billion yuan (79.2 billion U.S. dollars) in the first half of 2017, up 31.6 percent year on year. (Xinhua/Tan Jin)
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 15:19:09|Editor: ying

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PYONGYANG/WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Tuesday said the United States has returned a diplomatic package seized from one of their delegations at JFK airport in New York and apologized.

The Korean Central News Agency quoted a spokesman of the DPRK Foreign Ministry as saying that the U.S. Department of State has made an official apology to the DPRK on behalf of the U.S. government.

The spokesman said the United States acknowledged that its security officials made a mistake and expressed its hope that the DPRK would understand that "the mistake was due to the security officials being oversensitive amid the deteriorating security situation in the United States."

The spokesman called on the United States to learn a lesson from the incident and "never again commit such an act of infringing the sovereignty of other countries, in flagrant violation of the universally recognized international norms and regulations."

The U.S. State Department did not respond to Xinhua's request for comment.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 16:20:05|Editor: ying

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LOS ANGELES, July 18 (Xinhua) -- A Video of a female street vendor violently arrested in the Southern Californian city of Perris last month has caused anger and controversy on social media.

When a motorcycle officer arrested the 52-year-old woman, Juanita Mendez-Medrano, she was selling flowers and Hawaiian-style leis without a permit to people attending the Perris High School graduation ceremony on the evening of June 6. The video footage of the conflict between Mendez-Medrano and the officer was later posted on Twitter, triggering online uproar.

According to a Riverside County Sheriff's Department news release on Monday, the video did not capture the officer's efforts to convince Mendez-Medrano to remove her stall. "As with most police events, the short, publicly produced video does not have the full context or content of the incident seen on the video," the statement said.

"During periods of traffic congestion, our officers saw numerous street vendors walking into traffic to sell products to people caught in the congestion. Due to the obvious traffic safety concerns, our officers contacted multiple street vendors who were found to be vending without a permit," said the release.

However, a witness at the scene said that vendors were not creating unsafe conditions by walking into traffic.

"The vendors were off in a corner near Perris High School and in a parking lot for the school -- not in the middle of the street," Jason Hernandez,the witness told KTLA (a television station based in Los Angeles) on Monday.

Unlike other vendors, Mendez-Medrano refused to cooperate as necessary to allow the officer to issue her a citation. She refused to provide her name, and attempted to walk away.

"After giving several fake names, attempting to leave, and pushing the officer away, our officer attempted to arrest Ms. Mendez-Medrano for violating the city ordinance and obstructing justice," the press release stated.

The officer held Mendez-Medrano's arm to prevent her from fleeing and "a very brief physical struggle ensued before she was taken into custody," according to police.

"Why do you do this to us?" Medrano can be heard yelling in Spanish to the officer in the video. "We're living our life."

The cellphone video has prompted controversy on Twitter and other social medias.

"Honestly, watching this puts a hole in my chest. Instead of arresting drug dealers, gangbangers, he's arresting a lady selling flowers," wrote Twitter user Jent.

"Are we claiming excessive force?" asked Twitter user Token Squre.

"I'm saddened by the brutality for the poor woman selling flowers. She should be compensated for her extremely traumatic treatment," wrote Facebook user Felix Cortes.

Other voices supported the police action.

"She should know that the way she's selling flowers is not legal," wrote Twitter user Germz," it's the law and the officers [are] there to make sure people follow the law."
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 16:30:17|Editor: ying

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MANILA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Philippine military said on Wednesday that communist rebels killed two marine soldiers and a militia man in separate attacks, clouding prospects for a resumption of formal peace talks between the government and the rebels next month.

Around 50 New People's Army (NPA) rebels in military uniforms disguising as soldiers ambushed on Wednesday a convoy of the Presidential Security Group (PSG) in Arakan town in Cotabato province in the southern Philippines, resulting in the death of a militia man and the wounding of five presidential guards.

Two unarmed marine soldiers were also gunned down on Wednesday by NPA rebels in Roxas town in Palawan province while buying vegetables in the wet market, according to the military.

The military also reported that communist rebels burned three construction equipments in an attack on Tuesday in Surigao City in the southern Philippines. The attack came barely three days after rebels burned last Saturday construction equipments being used to build road in Lopez town in Quezon, a province south of Manila.

The government called on the communist rebels to show "goodwill gesture" and reciprocate the efforts of the administration of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to usher in peace in the country.

Duterte met with the government peace negotiators Tuesday night and instructed the panel to discuss the possible signing of a bilateral ceasefire with the communist rebels.

During the meeting, Duterte also directed the panel "not to resume formal peace talks with the rebels unless the rebels agree to stop their attacks against government troops."

The government panel, led by chief negotiator Sylvester Bello, is scheduled to conduct back channel talks with the rebels to discuss the scheduled resumption of the formal talks next month.

However, government peace adviser, Secretary Jesus Dureza, said the talks can only resume if the rebel stops attacking the military and the police forces and the extortion activities.

Duterte's spokesman Ernesto Abella said "it is time for the (communist rebels) to reciprocate the (government's) gestures of goodwill by wending their extortion and criminal actives and re-directing their energy to help eradicate terrorism and violent extremism in Mindanao."

Abella issued the statement after the communist rebels denounced Duterte for asking the Congress to extend martial law in Mindanao in the southern Philippines up to Dec. 31 this year.

Duterte imposed a 60-day martial law in the entire Mindanao after Islamic extremists attacked Marawi City last May 23. However, the communist rebels said Duterte's decision to extend martial law will result "in worse military and police abuses."

The stalled negotiations to end the decades-long communist insurgency is scheduled to resume in August. But Duterte had warned that he would not allow peace talks to continue if the communist rebels continue its offensive against government forces.

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its NPA guerrillas have been fighting the government since 1969. The NPA, one of Asia's longest-running insurgencies concentrates its attacks in rural areas and small-scale skirmishes with the military.

Previous attempts to forge a peace pact with the communist rebels have failed. The Duterte administration restarted peace negotiations with the armed group with an estimated 4,000 guerrillas.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 17:10:51|Editor: Yurou Liang

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BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The daily output of China's 131 seawater desalination projects reached more than 1.18 million tonnes by the end of 2016, according to an official report released Wednesday.

The report on seawater utilization in 2016 issued by the State Oceanic Administration (SOA) said China's largest desalination project could produce 200,000 tonnes of water per day.

The cost of desalinated seawater per tonne ranges from five to eight yuan (0.74 to 1.19 U.S. dollars), the report said.

Of China's desalinated water, 66.61 percent has been used for industrial purposes and the rest for residential use, the report said.

China will speed up the legislation on seawater utilization, expand the use of seawater and address public concerns over drinking desalinated seawater, said Qu Tanzhou, head of science and technology department under the SOA.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 17:26:07|Editor: Yurou Liang

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BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- China has finally sealed a fresh onion export deal with New Zealand after 10 years of negotiations, an official statement said Wednesday.

A sanitary agreement was signed at the beginning of this year, paving the way for Chinese onion exports entering the New Zealand market, according to the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine of China (AQSIQ).

The New Zealand government has a very strict plant quarantine system to protect its own ecosystem, the statement read.

The AQSIQ has helped domestic onion exporters improve the level of management during the past years.

The AQSIQ vowed it will launch strict quarantine measures to ensure the quality of onion exports,

China is a world leading onion producer, with an annual onion output of 20 million tonnes. Exports account for merely 3.5 percent of its total onion production.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 18:01:30|Editor: Yurou Liang

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KATHMANDU, July 19 (Xinhua)-- Seven people, including four Indian nationals were arrested for smuggling 30 kg contraband hashish from central Nepal's Makawanpur District on Wednesday, police said.

The four Indian and three Nepali nationals carrying bags filled with the drugs were staying in a hotel at Hetauda when security personnel launched a search operation in the district headquarters of Makawanpur, about 90 km south of the capital.

The arrested have been taken into custody at District Police Office in Hetauda for further investigation, Deputy Superintendent of Police at Armed Police Force Tribhuwan Bista told local media.

Police have seized 30 kg of hashish, a vehicle bearing an Indian registration number, six sets of mobile phones and 33,000 Indian rupees from the arrestees during the checking.

Nepal has open border with India which helps smugglers, officials say.

In the past six years, a high number of Indian nationals were detained in drug trade in the Himalayan nation, statistics received from the Nepal police said.

According to the statistics, the Nepal police arrested 763 Indians.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 18:06:33|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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NAIROBI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Two consecutive strikes by health professionals in Kenya in 2017 have caused crippling consequences to the country's health system as a few facilities struggle with influx of patients, a global charity said on Wednesday.

The Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said the current nurses strike, which follows a 100-day doctors' strike earlier this year have left many public health facilities closed and thousands of people without access to essential medical services.

"It is crucial that all parties work on a solution to restore access to emergency and life-saving care, and referral services," Head of Mission for MSF in Kenya Abubakr Bashir Bakri said in a statement issued in Nairobi.

The charity said many Kenyans are unable to afford care in some of the private facilities, which remain open during the current nurses' strike.

It said other people have had to travel long distances to reach free services provided by non-profit organizations, sometimes ending up with grave outcomes due to delays.

In some ministry of health facilities that MSF supports, patients are simply not coming, assuming they are closed.

"During the doctors' strike for example, MSF covered the high costs of intensive care in private facilities for severely ill patients. This is unacceptable; life-saving services need to be reinstated as a matter of urgency," Bakri said.

The nurses have boycotted work in some parts of the country since June, citing a breach of a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) they signed with the government.

The response to the cholera outbreak in the country has also suffered as there are no nurses working in nearly all public facilities.

MSF said it had to open a cholera treatment unit in Nairobi's Mathare area, to treat patients who would otherwise not have received care.

"While essential medical services remain suspended, others may not be so lucky. With thousands cut off, we are urging that lifesaving activities are maintained to alleviate the suffering of those most in need," said Bakri.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 18:21:47|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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ISLAMABAD, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan summoned Indian deputy high commissioner and lodged formal protest on Wednesday over the recent ceasefire violations, resulting in the killing of two civilians and injuring six others.

The director general South Asian at the Foreign Ministry, who summoned the Indian deputy high commissioner, condemned the "unprovoked ceasefire violations" by the Indian occupation forces in Baroh and Tandar Sectors along the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir region on Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Two people, including one woman in Barho Sector and a man in Tandar Sector, were killed, the statement said.

"The deliberate targeting of civilians is indeed deplorable and contrary to human dignity and international human rights and humanitarian laws," the Pakistani official told the Indian envoy.

The director general also urged the Indian side to respect the 2003 Ceasefire arrangement, investigate this and other incidents of ceasefire violations, and instruct the Indian forces to respect the ceasefire, in letter and spirit and maintain peace on the LoC.

He said the Indian side should permit UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan to play its mandated role as per the UN Security Council resolutions.

Pakistan military spokesman Major General Asif Ghafoor told media on Sunday that Indian forces have committed 580 ceasefire violations so far this year, which he described as the "highest in any year."

Pakistan and India had declared ceasefire along the LoC, the de facto border, between the two nuclear rivals in Kashmir in 2003. However, both sides routinely accuse each other of ceasefire violations.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 18:21:50|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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LOS ANGELES, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Californian Governor Jerry Brown issued a state of emergency in Mariposa County Tuesday as a wildfire continues to grow.

The wildfire, coded "Detwiler Fire", began to rage to 25,000 acres from day two in the mountains just outside Yosemite National Park, with only 5 percent contained.

Under the order of Brown, about 2,000 residents were evacuated from Mariposa city, some 440 km north of Los Angeles.

In a state of emergency, the California National Guard could be mobilized if necessary.

According to California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), about 780 firefighters are currently battling the blaze, with at least 100 engines, nine airtankers, five helicopters, and four water tenders on the scene.

The National Weather Service also issued Red Flag Warnings & Fire Weather Watches which is the highest alert on Tuesday to warn fire departments of critical weather and dry conditions in the coming 12 to 72 hours that could lead to rapid or dramatic deterioration of the wildfire.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 18:21:55|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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CAIRO, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Egypt called on Israel Wednesday to stop violence at East Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque, warning against the consequences of conflict escalation at the Muslim shrine.

Israel should respect the freedom of worship, the religious sanctities and the rights of the Palestinians to practice their religious rituals freely and safely, Egyptian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Israel shut down the holy site and installed checkpoints and metal detectors at its entrances after three Palestinian Muslims with Israeli citizenship shot two Israeli policemen on Friday morning. The attackers were later killed by Israeli police.

The site, holy to both Muslims and Jews, includes the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

In protest against the new Israeli security measures, dozens of Muslim worshippers prayed outside the compound and refused to enter the site.

"Such measures would fuel conflict, stir up religious sentiments and increase the state of tension among the Palestinian people, undermining the chances for reaching just and comprehensive peace based on the two-state solution," said the statement.

Earlier on Monday, the Arab League condemned the Israeli practices at Al-Aqsa Mosque as a blatant breach of the right of worship and violation of relevant international laws and UN resolutions.

The recent measures added tension to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has lasted for decades, since the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the Western-backed creation of Israel in 1948.

Israel is blamed by the international community for the deadlock of the peace process because of its settlement expansion policy, which is rejected even by the United States, its strongest ally.

The Palestinians seek to establish an independent state in the light of the UN-proposed two-state solution based on the pre-1967 borders.

Egypt and Israel reached a U.S.-sponsored peace treaty in 1979, since when Egypt has been working to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and mediate inter-Palestinian reconciliation.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 18:52:13|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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Liu Yunshan, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, meets with Czech President Milos Zeman in Prague, the Czech Republic, July 18, 2017. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

PRAGUE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- China and the Czech Republic are willing to join hands to constantly enrich the strategic partnership between the two countries, senior official of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Liu Yunshan said here on Tuesday.

Liu, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, made the remarks while meeting with Czech President Milos Zeman during an official goodwill visit to the Czech Republic from July 16 to 19.

Under the political guidance and strategic plan by the heads of the two states, the China-Czech strategic partnership has seen vigorous development with the political mutual trust strengthened, practical cooperation expanded and people-to-people exchanges increased, Liu said.

Liu hailed the Czech Republic's active role in participating in the Belt and Road Initiative and the "China-CEE 16+1 mechanism". The Czech Republic is the first European country to sign the cooperation plan with China to jointly build the "Belt and Road", which has an exemplary effect, he noted.

The China Investment Forum has become a branded activity under the "China-CEE 16+1 mechanism" with its gradually bigger scale and influence, bringing actual benefits to the enterprises and people of the two nations, Liu added.

The "China-CEE 16+1 mechanism" is a platform created in April 2012 by China and 16 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries.

China is willing to further enrich the strategic partnership with the Czech side, and jointly explore cooperation potentials in the fields of trade, technology, culture, education, tourism and Chinese medicine, the Chinese senior official said.

Zeman, for his part, noted that the Belt and Road Initiative brought up by Chinese President Xi Jinping is a grand proposition that would connect and benefit the countries along the routes.

The Czech side attaches great importance to developing bilateral relations with China, and will fully support and push forward bilateral practical cooperation under the initiative, the Czech president said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 18:52:14|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- China has called for mutual trust and responsibility from all sides to safeguard and carry out the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, after the United States slapped new sanctions on 18 entities and individuals linked to Iran's ballistic missile program and other non-nuclear activities on Tuesday.

"All sides have the responsibility to safeguard and carry out the Iran nuclear deal," Lu Kang, foreign ministry spokesperson, said at a daily press briefing.

China is resolutely opposed to any form of nuclear proliferation activities and has always opposed so-called "long-arm jurisdiction" by any country based on its domestic law, according to Lu.

"Effective international cooperation relies on necessary mutual trust by all sides," he said.

Calling the nuclear accord "an important multilateral outcome" and "a paradigm" for solving international hotspot issues through political and diplomatic means, Lu said that since the deal was reached two years ago, Iran has been earnestly implementing relevant measures and strengthening economic and trade cooperation with different countries, which is in line with the will of the international community.

"Long-arm jurisdiction" is not conducive to enhancing mutual trust or solving international issues through cooperation, he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 18:57:20|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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by Gao Pan, Jin Minmin

WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- A group of prominent entrepreneurs from China and the United States pledged Tuesday to boost bilateral trade and investment and tap the tremendous potential of China-U.S. economic cooperation.

"Having grown out of a trade denominated bilateral relationship over the past decades, we see enormous potential for the two countries to benefit from a more comprehensive (economic) cooperation," said Jack Ma, executive chairman of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, and Stephen Schwarzman, chairman and CEO of the U.S. private equity firm Blackstone Group, in a joint statement released after co-chairing the inaugural China-U.S. Business Leaders Summit held at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.

During the one-day summit, 20 prominent CEOs from China and the United States held in-depth discussions for further cooperation in the areas of manufacturing, agriculture, energy, retailing, finance, pharmaceuticals and technology.

"We commit to encouraging continued investment between our two countries, as well as cooperation on joint investment in global markets and specific topics such as manufacturing, U.S. infrastructure, environmental protection and the Belt and Road Initiative," the statement said.

The group also committed to increasing bilateral trade, including the export of agricultural products, liquefied natural gas, and high quality consumer goods from the United States to China, according to the statement.

As some of the largest employers from both sides and key players in the global economy, these top companies agreed to establish the dialogue as an annual one for the purpose of offering both governments solutions to the challenges facing the China-U.S. economic relationship.

"We call on political leaders in the United States and China to strengthen cooperation and dialogues on regulation and supervision, (establishment of) standards, protection of intellectual property rights, free, fair and open market access and to eliminate procedures and practices that act as a hindrance to economic growth and job creation," the statement said, noting a stable China-U.S. economic relationship is beneficial to the two countries and to the world as a whole.

The business leaders summit comes one day before the first round of China-U.S. Comprehensive Economic Dialogue in Washington, D.C., one of the four major dialogue mechanisms which were all established by both governments in April.

During the upcoming dialogue to be co-chaired by Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, the two sides will exchange views on economic and trade issues of common concern.

As China is rebalancing its economy toward a services- and consumption- led model, Wang believes that there is more complementarity than competition between the world's two largest economies.

"The two countries have seen the space for cooperation expanded rather than narrowed," Wang told representatives from the U.S. and Chinese business community on Tuesday, noting cooperation is "the only right choice" for the United States and China.

During the summit, Ma also urged the U.S. and Chinese business leaders to "see the big vision" of China-U.S. relations and "seize the future" to expand bilateral cooperation.

"Our relationship today reflects a deep business partnership where capital, people, and ideas are fully integrated. In the future, I believe we will not talk about products being made in your country or mine, but rather on the internet," Ma said, adding no one could stop globalization and the two countries should not "let problems of the past limit our future potential."

"We're here to solve future problems, not to solve yesterday's problems. We should not punish our tomorrow because of yesterday's problems," he said.

The inaugural China-U.S. Business Leaders Summit was one of the two proposals that Ma put forward in a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in January, according to Ma.

The other was to hold a small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) summit, which took place in the U.S. city of Detroit last month, in a bid to help small U.S. businesses sell products to China through e-commerce platforms.

The members of the China-U.S. Business Leaders Summit include Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric, Mary Barra, Chairman and CEO of General Motors, Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Cao Dewang, Chairman of the world's top automotive glass manufacturer Fuyao Glass and Zhang Jindong, Chairman of Chinese electronic retailer Suning Holding Group.
A man sits next to a dead lion at a village in Opuwo, north-western Namibia, Feb. 13, 2016. The man gunned down the lion after it killed a bull, a dog and left a cow wounded in Opuwo. (Xinhua/Nampa)

WINDHOEK, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Human-Wildlife Conflict (HWC) has become frequent over recent weeks in Namibia and lions are at the short end of the stick, as up to 25 lions have died so far this year, an official has said.

Namibia's Minister of Environment and Tourism, Pohamba Shifeta on Monday at a press briefing addressing HWC said as a result of human population growth, wildlife population growth, unplanned agricultural activities and expansion of agricultural, human encroachment on previously wild and un-inhabited areas has been on the rise.

"As a result of the incidents of human-lion conflict around the Etosha National Park, eight lions were killed in the Omusati region, of which six were killed by members of the communities while two were killed by the Ministry officials after being declared as problem-causing animals," he said.

According to Shifeta, in the Oshana region, one lion was killed by community members while three other were destroyed by Ministry officials as they again were deemed problem animals.

Furthermore he said in the Kunene region 13 lions have been killed, with the bulk of the killings occurring at the hands of farmers and the community.

Shifeta said that his ministry has currently put in place measures that endeavor to avoid the conflict. These measures include the prevention, protection and mitigation strategies, that attempt to reduce the level of impact and lessen the problem.

"It is a complex and serious problem that if not addressed appropriately with the necessary understanding, can harm if not destroy conservation efforts and tourism benefits for the country," he added.

According to Shifeta the estimate population for lions the country is pegged at 700 with main concentration of 430 in the Etosha National Park and 120 in the Kunene and parts of the Erongo region.
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe is making his State Of The Nation inside Parliament in Harare, Zimbabwe, December 6, 2016. (Xinhua/Stringer)

HARARE, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwe's electoral body has said it is well prepared to hold elections set for mid 2018 and voter education is due to start soon.

Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) chairperson Rita Makarau told a parliamentary committee Tuesday that it will soon start countrywide voter education which will pave way for biometric voter registration exercise to be completed by December.

"We must complete voter registration by December 2017 for us to be able to hold elections on any date in 2018. It is the prerogative of the president to call for an election date but we stand ready to hold the elections," Makarau said.

She appealed to political parties that will contest in next year's polls as well as civil society organizations to start voter education now to give ample time for people to be educated about the requirements for voting.

Makarau said ZEC had submitted an election budget to Treasury which they were hopeful will be fully funded.

"It's a frightening figure but elections don't come cheap and we hope the money we have asked for will be released. Government has not failed us in the past and we don't believe funding will be a challenge for the 2018 elections," she said.

The ZEC chairperson said Zimbabweans with national identity documents showing that they are aliens should regularize their citizenship to ensure that they will be able to vote in next year's elections.

Zimbabweans born in Zimbabwe but with parents of foreign origin, regarded as aliens, have previously been denied the right to vote, a development that has largely been criticized by the opposition for disenfranchising many prospective voters.

Makarau said the electoral body was targeting to register 7 million voters for next year's polls, up from 6.8 million registered in the previous 2013 elections.

Meanwhile, Makarau appealed to political parties to shun violence and ensure a peaceful election.

Parties should also ensure the political environment is friendly to women and children, she said.

"As ZEC it will really be a sad day for us if at all there is going to be political violence in the run up, during and after elections. We call upon political parties to shun violence as a tool of campaigning and winning the hearts of prospective voters," she said.

Makarau said ZEC would set up mechanisms to prevent and deal with politically motivated violence during the election period.

ZEC was also working with several women rights organizations to ensure more women contested in next year's polls, Makarau said.

She also urged parliamentarians to lobby for legislation guaranteeing equal representation of women in the National Assembly, made up of 210 members.

Out of the 350 members in Zimbabwe's Parliament, only 125 are women, constituting 34 percent. This is the highest ever number of women parliamentarians that Zimbabwe has had since independence in 1980.

Zimbabwe is for the first time using the Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) system, which entails use of unique individual identification techniques such as fingerprints and irises to identify voters. Previously, voters just used their national identification documents to register.

Makarau said the electoral body had already paid 50 percent deposit to equipment provider, Laxton Group of China and was now awaiting delivery of 3,000 BVR kits.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has been endorsed by his ruling ZANU-PF party as its presidential candidate for next year's polls, when he will be 94.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 19:12:28|Editor: ying

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SHIBERGHAN, Afghanistan, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Police seized sacks of ammunition from a truck in the northern Jawzjan province of Afghanistan and arrested two peopleersons on charge of smuggling on Wednesday, provincial police chief Rahmatullah Turkistani said.

"The smugglers placed more than 100 mortar mines in several bags inside a truck that was carrying bags of ladyfingers and melons from Kunduz to Jawzjan province onward to armed insurgents in Faryab province but fortunately police discovered and seized the contraband," Turkistani told Xinhua.

Two persons have been arrested, the official said, adding that an investigation is underway.

"The arrested persons have admitted that they wanted to take the ammunitions to Taliban militants in Qaisar district of Faryab province," the official said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 19:17:34|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged officials to make "every possible effort" to solve public grievances.

He said officials must treat the handling of public petitions as important work to keeping abreast of public events, pooling people's wisdom, protecting the public interest and improving social solidarity.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, made the remarks in a written instruction conveyed to the eighth national conference on petition work, which was held in Beijing Tuesday to Wednesday.

He urged Party committees, government agencies and officials to handle people's legitimate appeals lawfully, in timely fashion and in the local areas, address the root causes of issues, and build a stronger grassroots system, Xi said.

The construction of the legal institutions and related system for addressing public petitions should be improved, Xi said, calling for efforts to make petition work more forward-looking, systematic and targeted.

Speaking highly of petition work in recent years, the president said those handling petitions have helped solve large numbers of problems concerning the immediate interests of the people and played an important role in safeguarding the country's reform, development and stability.

Xi ordered Party committees to enhance leadership over the work, show support and care for those handling petitions, and build a high-quality team that are loyal to the Party, dedicated to serving the people and good at working with the general public.

At the two-day event, model individuals and units were awarded for their contribution to the work and certificates of merit were granted to those who had handled petitions for more than 25 years.

China has established a system to handle appeals and petitions of the public, including citizens seeking government redress in cases ranging from illegal land acquisition, social security, education, to healthcare and environmental protection.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 19:22:38|Editor: ZD

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BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for more efforts to improve the country's military research and educational institutions to cultivate more talent for the armed forces.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), made the remarks while addressing heads of major military research and educational institutions Wednesday.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 19:27:38|Editor: ying

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BERLIN, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Major General Walter Spindler, former chief of Germany's Land Forces Training Command, offered a scathing criticism of German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen in the newspaper Stuttgarter Nachrichten on Wednesday.

Spindler was dismissed in April for his allegedly slow and incompetent investigation of physical, verbal and sexual abuse cases in the German Armed Forces' training units. Speaking to the Stuttgarter Nachrichten, he has now lashed out against Von der Leyen's handling of the scandal.

According to Spindler, the Ministry of Defense had harmed soldiers and individual army bases in a "generalizing, permanent and irresponsible" fashion.

The absolutism which von der Leyen attached to her accusations were without foundation, Spindler said.

Spindler described his own dismissal as reflecting an approach which was "tasteless", "undignified" and would "create distrust and plunge the Armed Forces into a crisis of loyalty and trust."

An administrative court in Sigmaringen, Baden-Wurttemberg is due to hear the claims of four soldiers who have brought a lawsuit against their dismissal during the military abuse scandal.

The four men were stationed in the Pfullendorf barrack and are accused of having participated in degrading hazing rituals. A ruling is expected for Thursday. Soldiers stationed in Pfullendorf have complained about sexual abuse and sadistic practices, including female soldiers being forced to perform pole dances.

The German Armed Forces have suffered from negative press following the revelation of degrading training practices in some barracks around half a year ago. An investigative report in January identified "grave deficits in leadership, training, education and administrative supervision."

In response, von der Leyen announced a thorough and systematic revision of abuse cases. The Ministry of Defense plans to increase administrative supervision and improve reporting and training mechanisms.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 19:57:56|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday sent a congratulatory message to Tallis Obed Moses, Vanuatu's new president.

In the message, Xi said China-Vanuatu relations have maintained sound momentum of development since the establishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries.

Fruitful results have been achieved in bilateral cooperation in such fields as trade, economy, agriculture, fishery and infrastructure, he said, adding that expanding people-to-people and cultural exchanges have also brought tangible benefits to the two countries and peoples.

Xi said he is willing to work with Moses to push forward the China-Vanuatu strategic partnership for greater development.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 20:18:39|Editor: ying

Afghan security force members take part in a military operation in Kunduz province, Afghanistan, July 19, 2017. Taliban militants who have lost ground in the northern Kunduz province amid government forces mounting pressure, launched major offensive in Baghlan-e-Markazi district of the neighboring Baghlan province on Tuesday to reduce stress on fighters in Kunduz, local observers said. (Xinhua/Ajmal Kakar)
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 20:13:05|Editor: ying

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Kabul, July 19 (Xinhua) -- At least 55 insurgents have been killed and 37 others injured during military operations in different provinces over the past 24 hours, Afghan Defense Ministry said in a statement released on Wednesday.

"The Afghan security forces launched series of operations across the country against enemies over the past 24 hours which had left 55 insurgents dead including three fighters of Islamic State (IS) and 27 others injured," the statement said.

The operations were conducted against militants in parts of Nangarhar, Kapisa, Khost, Ghazni, Logar, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Kunduz, Faryab, Balkh, Baghlan, Badakhshan and Helmand provinces, the statement added, without giving details on possible casualties inflicted to the security forces.

At the same time, five Afghan police were killed and few others injured after Taliban militants attacked a security checkpoint in Arghandab district of the southern Zabul province Tuesday night, a security official said on condition of anonimity.

Militancy and counter-militancy traditionally gets momentum in spring and summer commonly known as fighting season in Afghanistan.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 20:23:09|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- China's booming digital economy had been serving as a major engine for the country's economic growth.

China's digital economy surged 18.9 percent in 2016 to 22.6 trillion yuan (3.35 trillion U.S. dollars), according to a white paper issued by China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

The expansion was much faster than that of China's overall economy, which grew 6.7 percent in 2016.

Digital economy accounted for 30.3 percent of China's total gross domestic product (GDP) over the year, said the white paper. Taking its spillover effect into account, digital economy contributed 69.9 percent to the GDP in 2016, it added.

Digital economy, also known as the Internet economy, is based on digital computing technologies, comprising new business models such as e-commerce, cloud computing and payment services.

Technology is functioning as a driver of revenue and enabler of new business models for many Chinese companies, including China e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com.

China's digital economy grew significantly higher than the overall economy, becoming a major engine of growth, said the paper.

CAICT expects China's digital economy to be valued at 32 trillion yuan and account for 35 percent of the whole GDP by 2020, before taking up over half of the country's GDP by 2030, according to the white paper.

China has made a point of promoting digital economy as part of its measures to upgrade the economy, and the central and local governments had identified digital economy as "major development strategy."

At the G20 Hangzhou Summit in 2016, China put digital economy high on the agenda, making it part of the G20 Blueprint on Innovative Growth for the first time.

In March this year, Report on the Work of the Government called for more efforts to deepen the development of "Internet Plus" and accelerate the growth of digital economy. This is the first time that "digital economy" was referred to in such a report.

And the central government is to formulate and issue a strategic plan for promoting digital economy, according to the State Council executive meeting held on July 12.

Local governments had also geared up for digital economy, with Guizhou, Jiangsu, and Anhui among others, having made provincial-level plans to make their economy more digitalized.

For example, southwestern Guizhou aims to make added value created by digital economy grow 20 percent annually and carve up at least 30 percent of the province's GDP by 2020.

Digital economy has become an area where China's economic transformation and industrial upgrading can achieve major breakthrough, said MIIT Minister Miao Wei in April.

Miao pointed to smart manufacturing, industrial Internet, sharing economy, and the digitalization of traditional industries as areas that should be boosted.

The development of China's digital economy, however, is imbalanced, with the service sector adopting the digital economy more extensively than the primary and secondary industries, said Lu Chuncong, president of Communications Policy and Economics Research Institute, CAICT.

Regulation of market access does not suit the development of digital economy, said Lu, calling for establishing a mechanism of negative list where all market players can enter digital economy on an equal footing.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 20:33:17|Editor: ying

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PARIS, July 19 (Xinhua) -- France's armed forces chief Pierre de Villiers resigned Wednesday, in a move to protest against President Emmanuel Macron's decision to trim defense budget spending.

"Under the current circumstances I see myself no longer able to guarantee the robust defense force I believe necessary to guarantee the protection of France and the French people, today and tomorrow, and to sustain the aims of our country," de Villiers said in a statement.

"Therefore, I took my responsibility to present my resignation to the president, and he accepted it," he added.

At a parliamentary committee hearing last week, the 60-year-old top military official criticized the government's plan to cut defense ministry expenditure by 850 million euros (980.4 million U.S. dollars) this year in order to help the nation meet the deficit target of 3 percent.

On Friday, de Villiers wrote on his Facebook, "no one deserves to be blindly followed," referring to the French president.

As the row of his army bosses escalated, Macron rebuked, "I have made commitments, I am your chief. I don't need any comment."
A worker goes about her work at Bole Lemi Industrial Park in Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, April 6, 2017. (Xinhua/Michael Tewelde)

ADDIS ABABA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese companies, with close to 379 projects that were either operational or under implementation during the past five years, are on top of Ethiopia's investment landscape both in number and financial capital, an official at the Ethiopian Investment Commission (EIC) has told Xinhua.

According to Mekonen Hailu, EIC Communications Director, 279 of the total 379 Chinese companies were set operational in Ethiopia with projects that worth over 13.16 billion Ethiopian birr (over 572 million U.S. dollars) from 2012 to 2017 period, while the remaining 100 are under implementation.

Ethiopia's manufacturing sector takes the first spot in attracting companies from China both in number and financial capital, with a total of 276 projects either under implementation or operational, he said.

Construction, services and agriculture are said to be the other sectors hosting a great number of Chinese companies to Africa's second most populous nation.

According to Hailu, the Ethiopian government has given due emphasis to the manufacturing sector, as the country is shifting to industry-led economy from the largely agricultural one, and the contribution of Chinese companies is immense.

He said that the east African country has rolled out various incentives that include custom duty exemption, income tax holidays, and provision of land at competitive lease price to attract investors.

According to the Ethiopia's Foreign Ministry, Chinese companies have invested around 4 billion U.S. dollars in Ethiopia during the last two decades, creating job opportunities for over 111,000 Ethiopians on permanent and temporary basis.

Meles Alem, Ethiopia's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, told Xinhua recently that Ethiopia has targeted to attract new and existing Chinese companies to invest in various sectors in the country, the manufacturing sector in particular.

The Asian country is Ethiopia's largest trading partner, registering a bilateral trade volume of 6.37 billion dollars in 2015. Trade grew at an average rate of 22.2 percent annually for the last several years.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 20:38:24|Editor: ZD

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Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi holds talks with visiting Tunisian Foreign Minister Khemaies Jhinaoui in Beijing, capital of China, July 19, 2017. (Xinhua/Yan Yan)

BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- China is willing to make joint efforts with regional partners to seek a political settlement in the Libyan crisis, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Wednesday.

Wang made the remarks after talks with visiting Tunisian Foreign Minister Khemaies Jhinaoui.

Libya's sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity should be respected and maintained, Wang said.

"China is committed to a political settlement of the crisis," said Wang, identifying that Libya's future should be held by its people and all parties in Libya should resolve disagreement through dialogue and negotiation.

Wang emphasized the necessity of facilitating international cooperation on anti-terrorism, saying that since the war against terrorism in Iraq and Syria had advanced, Libya had become a potential target for terrorists.

He said that while insisting the UN lead Libya's peace process, neighboring countries' concerns should also be heard and taken into consideration.

China has always supported and participated in UN mediating efforts and had provided humanitarian aid to Libya and its neighbors within its power, Wang said.

While in talks with Jhinaoui earlier, Wang also expressed appreciation of Tunisia's support for the Belt and Road Initiative, and said China would encourage more companies to invest and develop in Tunisia.

Jhinaoui hailed China's position on the Libyan crisis and hoped that China could play a more important role to resolving the crisis in a peaceful way at an early date.

He also expressed Tunisia's willingness to cooperate with China on issues such as UN Security Council reform and anti-terrorism.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 20:43:26|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

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Yu Zhengsheng, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), meets with leaders of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA) and Bishops Conference of Catholic Church of China, in Beijing, capital of China, July 19, 2017. The CPCA celebrated its 60th anniversary at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday. (Xinhua/Zhang Duo)

BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA) celebrated its 60th anniversary at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing Wednesday.

Top political advisor Yu Zhengsheng met with leaders of the CPCA and Bishops Conference of Catholic Church of China, and called on the CPCA to contribute to national unity, ethnic solidarity, social and religious harmony and world peace.

On behalf of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the State Council, Yu, chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) National Committee, extended his congratulations on the CPCA's anniversary.

"The establishment of the CPCA marked the Chinese Catholic Church officially taking the road of self-administration and running religious affairs independently. This road is in conformity with socialist society," he said.

The CPCA has upheld the banner of loving the nation and religion, and adhered to the sinicization of the religion over the past 60 years, Yu said.

He called on the CPCA to better serve believers and society, to promote the integration of the Chinese Catholic Church and Chinese culture, and to adapt the Chinese Catholic Church to the socialist society with Chinese characters.

The CPCA should unite all believers and clergy to strive for the country's "two centenary goals" and the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation together with Chinese from all ethnic groups, Yu noted.

Yu also hoped the CPCA can strengthen training for believers and clergy, and ensure that the leadership of the Chinese Catholic Church is held firmly in the hands of those who love the nation and religion.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 21:26:58|Editor: Zhang Dongmiao

Kids learn traditional calligraph under teacher's direction in Hengshui City, north China's Hebei Province, July 19, 2017. The Sunjing School of Hengshui holds "Summer Camp of Traditional National Culture" during the summer vacation. Kids learn traditional Chinese culture and enrich their vacation time from activities like wearing Han Chinese clothing and learning traditional etiquette. (Xinhua/Zhu Xudong)
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 21:33:49|Editor: ying

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LUSAKA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Zambia's first President Kenneth Kaunda was on Wednesday admitted to a hospital in Lusaka, the country's capital, the government said.

Minister of Health Chitalu Chilufya said the 93-year-old Kaunda was admitted at the University Teaching Hospital on Tuesday evening for minor complications.

He said the former president's condition was stable after doctors conducted checkups on him and that he may be discharged on Thursday, according to state broadcaster, the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation.

Vice-President Inonge Wina visited the former president on Wednesday morning, according to the state broadcaster.

Kaunda ruled Zambia from 1964 after fighting for the country's independence to 1991.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 21:39:12|Editor: ying

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PARIS, July 19 (Xinhua) -- General Francois Lecointre was named the new chief of the French armed forces, government spokesman Christophe Castaner announced Wednesday.

Lecointre, a member of Prime Minister Edouard Philippe's cabinet, replaced Pierre de Villiers who decided to quit office over a dispute concerning cuts to the defense budget.

Castaner said the new armed forces chief would take up his duties in the new role on Thursday.

Quoting French President Emmanuel Macron, Castaner called Lecointre "a hero recognized as such in the army," and a general, "whose long-term action" would "accompany the great project that we carry for our army."

The 55-year-old top military official served in Bosnia during the wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He also headed a mission in Mali to help fight Islamic extremists.

Lecointre's nomination follows a row between Macron and the outgoing military chief, who had criticized the government's plan to cut defense ministry expenditure by 850 million euros (980 million U.S. dollars) this year.

Earlier on Wednesday, 60-year-old de Villiers resigned, saying, "in the current circumstances, I see myself as no longer able to guarantee the robust defense force I believe is necessary to guarantee the protection of France and the French people, today and tomorrow, and to sustain the aims of our country."

In his first political test at home, Macron, the youngest head of state in France's modern history stressed that despite the planned spending cut, the defense budget "will protect the country."

"The President of the Republic has reaffirmed his commitment to the gradual rise of the armed forces budget to two percent of gross domestic product by 2025, with a significant first step in 2018," the government spokesman said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 21:49:20|Editor: ying

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CAIRO, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Egyptian army said on Wednesday that it found and destroyed over the past six months 40 smuggling tunnels in North Sinai province bordering Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

"From January to June 2017, the border guard forces managed to discover and destroy the openings of 40 tunnels on the borderline in North Sina, in addition to busting more than 3,000 persons of different nationalities during their illegal infiltration and migration attempts," Egyptian military spokesman Tamer al-Refaay said in a statement.

North Sinai has been the center of anti-government terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers since the military removed former Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013 in response to mass protests.

A Sinai-based extremist militant group loyal to the regional Islamic State (IS) militia claimed responsibility for most of the attacks.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Egyptian military announced that its airstrikes destroyed five vehicles and two explosive depots used by the militants in North Sinai, killing those inside.

Meanwhile, the army in cooperation with the police killed hundreds of militants and arrested a similar number of suspects as part of the country's anti-terror war declared in 2013 by President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, who was then the army chief, following Morsi's removal.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 21:49:22|Editor: ying

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ANKARA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim reshuffled his cabinet on Wednesday, replacing or swapping 11 ministers in the 27-member government cabinet.

The announcement was made following an unscheduled meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Ministers of interior, economy and foreign affairs as well as deputy prime minister for economy are among the 15 ministers who have kept their positions.

In the new cabinet list, Bekir Bozdag, Mehmet Simsek, Fikri Isik, Recep Akdag and Hakan Cavusoglu were named as deputy prime ministers, where four were newly appointed.

A cabinet reshuffle has been widely expected since May, when Erdogan resumed his leadership of the ruling Justice and Development Party following the April 16 constitutional referendum granting him sweeping new powers.

Erdogan led the AK Party for 13 years starting in 2001. He had to step aside as the party chief when he became president in August 2014, because of a legal requirement for presidents to be politically neutral. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 22:04:26|Editor: Yurou Liang

(L-R) Czech Prime Minister Bohusalv Sobotka, visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico and Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo attend a joint press conference in Budapest, Hungary on July 19, 2017. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked the support of the leaders of the Visegrad Four (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia) regarding the critics of the European Union (EU) against Israel, in a joint press conference held here on Wednesday. (Xinhua/Csaba Domotor)

BUDAPEST, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked the support of the leaders of the Visegrad Four (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia) regarding the critics of the European Union (EU) against Israel, in a joint press conference held here on Wednesday.

Netanyahu is on an official visit in Hungary, the first by an Israeli prime minister in 30 years.

"I expressed appreciation for the positions taken by the Visegrad countries on several occasions for representing this position about Israel to the countries of Europe, there is an anomaly, I don't like it, we are often criticized by Europe, often more than any other place by western Europe, often by more than any other place in the world," he said.

The EU had critized the Israeli government for hindering the peace process in the Middle East by building settlements in the Palestinian territories.

Calling Israel "a bastion of European and Western values" in Middle East, he called for a "reassessment" in Europe about the relationship with Israel.

"We have much to offer in the realm of security, in technology, this is not only good for us but also I believe good for you," he said.

The host of the meeting, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban thanked Israel for its efforts in keeping Europe safe. "Once again we reiterate our acknowledgement towards Israel for what it does for the security of Europe, in the future we would propose that the cooperation between the EU and Israel becomes better," he said.

"If Europe does not cooperate with Israel it is punishing itself which is pointless, therefore we propose in the upcoming period that Israel and EU cooperation should return to the realm of common sense," Orban concluded.

Besides the ties between Europe and Israel, the other leaders of the Visegrad Four brought up subjects regarding the quality of foods within the EU.

Prime Minister of Slovakia Robert Fico said he was mandated by the Visegrad Four to start talks next Thursday with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker about the quality of foods, arguing that the citizens of the Visegrad Four feel themselves as "second grade citizens" due to the lower quality of food they often get from Western European producers. He hoped that the EU would adopt new regulations that would remedy that situation.

His Czech colleague Bohuslav Sobotka backed him up: "We don't want that the producers send the same product in different qualities in different countries." He called for a solution that was not to interfere with the functioning of the common market.

About Israel, Sobotka told that the talks between the Visegrad Four and Israel concerning the fight against terrorism, the illegal migration and Syria were very important, and the propositions of Israel to be supported by the Visegrad Four.

He also said that potential cooperation between Israel and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe were possible in the fields of water management and cyber security.

Beata Szydlo, prime minister of Poland said that beside the question of the quality of food, the subject of legal status of workers from the Visegrad Four in western Europe was a key issue, where the Visegrad Four would seek common representation as a group.

She also pushed for deeper cooperation with Israel in the fields of security, migration and fight against terrorism.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 22:04:27|Editor: ying

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HARARE, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Political temperatures are hotting up as Zimbabweans brace for elections slated for 2018 with hardly a day passing without political parties and ordinary citizens talking about the much anticipated polls.

Some media organizations are referring to the elections as "watershed" in the hope that they will offer a turning point to the country's political landscape, but preparations are still in their infancy as voter registration is yet to begin.

Zimbabwe will for the first time in history use biometric voter registration (BVR) for elections as it seeks to improve transparency and eliminate multiple registrations of the same people on the voters roll.

Unlike in previous registrations where voters were only required to provide their identity cards and proof of residence at polling stations, the new exercise will require verification of finger prints and digital photographs.

The BVR kit, to be supplied by Chinese company Laxton Group, and is expected in the country by the end of August.

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission said recently that it anticipated about 7 million people to register to vote and this week said it needed 274 million U.S. dollars to successfully steer the elections.

With the last elections in 2013 having been conducted on July 31, the 2018 elections are also expected to be held around the same time in line with the Constitution.

Veritas, a local organization that provides information on the work of Parliament and the laws of the country, said in its latest bulletin that according to the Constitution and the Electoral Act, polling days must fall within the 30-day period of July 23 to August 21.

It said suggestions that the president had a prerogative to choose any date in 2018 for elections and for gazetting his proclamation were not correct because the law no longer allowed him to do so.

"The president no longer has the discretion he previously enjoyed to force an early election on the country by dissolving Parliament.

"That may have been the case under the former Constitution, but it is clearly not possible under the present Constitution," Veritas said.

It said however that only Parliament could force an early election by either refusing to pass an annual budget or passing resolutions in both Senate and the National Assembly to dissolve Parliament, for which two-thirds majorities were required, or passing a vote of no confidence in the Government.

If President Robert Mugabe's ruling party Zanu-PF is determined to have early elections held, it may use its two-thirds majority in Parliament to refuse to pass the 2018 budget.

Mugabe is already on a whirlwind tour of the country holding campaign rallies which are being termed youth interface meetings attended by thousands of supporters and school children.

On their part, opposition parties have also been holding meetings with their supporters, although not at the magnitude of Zanu-PF, but with their preoccupation being the formation of a grand coalition to fight the elections on a united front in a bid to topple Mugabe.

However, there are many fissures within the opposition outfit as they subtly haggle over who should lead the coalition.

The opposition's trump card appears to be Mugabe's perceived failure to create within five years the more than 2 million jobs his party promised ahead of the 2013 elections, the continued deterioration of infrastructure and social services and the severe cash shortages affecting most citizens.

Mugabe said recently that people should create their own jobs instead of waiting to be employed.

Zanu-PF Member of Parliament for Highfield West in Harare Psychology Maziwisa said the party had not promised to create formal jobs and had in fact surpassed the 2.2 million mark since many people had gone into informal employment.

The police have said they are ready for the elections and will ensure that there is no political violence accompanying them.

Elections have been marred by violence since 2000 with MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai pulling out of the 2008 presidential run-off alleging that his supporters were being assaulted by Mugabe's supporters.

Street hawker Petros Njani said the next elections should be about food on the table and whoever promised a better future for the people would win.

"The truth is that many people are not happy at the moment. We are all low because we are not getting all the services that we should be getting. Drugs are short in hospitals; our roads are in a sorry state and we cannot withdraw our money from the banks.

"The opposition says that all our problems are there because Mugabe has failed to lead and Zanu-PF blames all this on what it says are economic sanctions imposed on the country at the behest of opposition parties. What we need now is for us to reclaim our future and build our children's future. I hope the best party will win," he said without indicating which party he would vote for.

Both the ruling party and the opposition are targeting the youth's votes, with the opposition also seeking to make inroads into rural areas which have hitherto remained Zanu-PF strongholds.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 22:09:29|Editor: Zhou Xin

Bangladeshi Minister of Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives Khandker Mosharraf Hossain delivers the keynote speech highlighting Dhaka development initiatives at the international conference of the World Bank in Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, July 19, 2017. The World Bank organized an international conference here on Wednesday, focusing on the future development of Bangladeshi capital Dhaka. (Xinhua/Salim Reza)

DHAKA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The World Bank organized an international conference here on Wednesday, focusing on the future development of Bangladeshi capital Dhaka.

The conference, titled "Towards Great Dhaka: International Conference on Development Options for Dhaka Towards 2035," aimed at rebuilding Bangladesh's capital into a dynamic and attractive urban agglomeration.

Dhaka will have more than 30 million inhabitants by 2030, the World Bank said in a statement.

Policy makers, senior government officials, urban planners, civil society representatives and private sector leaders from home and abroad, among others, joined the conference.

With 36 percent of the country's urban population living in Greater Dhaka, the World Bank said the capital of Bangladesh has become one of the world's most densely populated cities.

Bangladesh must manage Dhaka's urban growth, the bank said, suggesting taking full advantage of East Dhaka where there is ample availability of land near the core of the city and increasing the city's economic opportunities and livability.

With proper planning and implementation, East Dhaka can become a vibrant pole of activities with higher value added, while helping ease density and congestion in the rest of the city.

Bangladeshi Minister of Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives Khandker Mosharraf Hossain delivered the keynote speech highlighting Dhaka development initiatives.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 22:14:33|Editor: ying

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LONDON, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Scotland should have a different Brexit deal with the European Union to reflect the country's specific needs, a committee of politicians from the House of Lords said in a report Wednesday.

But the House of Lords' European Union Committee ruled out as impracticable Scotland staying in the EU single market if the rest of Britain leaves.

"Scottish membership of the single market while the rest of the UK leaves the single market, is politically impracticable, legally highly complex and economically potentially disruptive to the functioning of the UK single market," said the report.

Peers said in their report that while last June's EU referendum delivered a UK-wide vote to leave, the British government needed to recognize that the remain vote in Scotland, at 62 percent, was the largest and most decisive in any of the four parts of Britain.

They added in their report: "We consider that, in the event that the UK government does not secure a UK-wide agreement that adequately reflects Scotland's specific needs, there is a strong political and economic case for making differentiated arrangements for Scotland."

The report said the Scottish economy had particularly pressing needs, including its reliance on access to EU labor, which is acute in sectors such as health and social care, agriculture, food and drink, and hospitality.

"We also note Scotland's demographic needs, and its reliance upon EU migration to enable its population (and in particular, that of working age) to grow. Scotland's more sparsely populated regions are disproportionately reliant both on EU migration and EU funding," they said.

It could see Scotland setting its own immigration rules to control the flow of people into its region of Britain.

The committee called on the Westminster government, in its forthcoming immigration bill, to look for opportunities to enhance the role of the devolved institutions in managing EU migration in ways that meet their specific needs.

"Local and regional economic and demographic needs, rather than central targets, should drive decision-making," the committee concluded.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 22:19:36|Editor: ying

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BERLIN, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Following the arrest of German human rights activist Peter Steudtner in Turkey, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel summoned the Turkish Ambassador in Berlin to the Foreign Office.

The minister will consult with experts in the Federal Foreign Office on Thursday on how to react to the recent offense by Turkish President Erdogan. Stricter security recommendations by the German Foreign Office for travel to Turkey could be put into place.

Martin Schaefer, Foreign Office representative, said "The Turkish ambassador has been told clearly that the arrest of human rights activists is incomprehensible," stressing the importance of this "unambiguous" and "crystal clear" message. The Turkish diplomat had said that this message would be transmitted to the Turkish government immediately.

The Turkish Ambassador had been called to the Foreign Office on multiple occasions in the past. The Ambassador "certainly knows the route very well," Schaefer said. The federal government must now "seriously" consider how to continue German-Turkish relations.

Federal Minister of Justice Heiko Maas condemned the imprisonment of Steudtner.

Turkey had triggered an international outrage with the imprisonment of the German Peter Steudtner and five other human rights activists. The German was arrested two weeks ago at a workshop in Istanbul. The prosecution accuses them of supporting an "armed terror organization."

"We stand in solidarity with Peter Steudtner, who is unjustly imprisoned in Turkey," Speaker of Government Steffen Seibert said. The German Government would "support him at all levels."

In the wake of the attempted coup a year ago, 22 German citizens have been detained in Turkey according to the federal German government.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 22:19:37|Editor: ying

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MOGADISHU, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Security forces from Somalia's Jubabland State on Wednesday arrested three Al-Shabaab terrorists during an operation conducted in Dhobley town in southern part of the Horn of Africa nation.

Haybe Ahmed Abdullahi, Jubbaland State forces Commander for Dhobley town told reporters that the insurgents were planning to carry out explosive attacks in the town.

"We learned of possible terrorist attack here in Dhobley, we got an alert and began operations. We captured three Al-Shabaab members from the vehicle that came from Sakow town in Middle Jubba region. They wanted to carry out attacks in the town," Abdulahi said.

He said that African Union forces' Kenya Defence Force (KDF) helped them to defuse explosive elements in which they seized from Al-Shabaab fighters.

Dhobley town is located at the Somali border with Kenya and is one of the towns which have enjoyed relative peace in the southern Somalia.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 22:39:51|Editor: yan

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GENEVA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, on Wednesday said it was deeply shocked and saddened at reports of the deaths and injuries of a number of internally displaced persons (IDP) in an aerial attack on Yemen's Taizz governorate.

UNHCR said the incident was reported on Tuesday afternoon, and while the number of civilian casualties are still being verified, initial reports point to at least 20 deaths.

Most of those killed are believed to have been from the same family were reportedly displaced from another district in the Taizz governorate.

UN figures show that 27 percent of Yemen's IDPs originate from Taizz. The Taizz governorate itself is also host to 15 percent of Yemen's IDP's, or some 303,672 individuals.

According to the UN, there are two million internally displaced people in Yemen who have fled elsewhere across the country since the beginning of the conflict in 2015.

"This latest incident once again demonstrates the extreme dangers facing civilians in Yemen, particularly those attempting to flee violence, as they disproportionately bear the brunt of conflict," UNHCR said in a statement issued Wednesday.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 22:44:59|Editor: yan

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JUBA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Head of UN for peacekeeping operations is due in South Sudan next week for a series of meetings with political leaders and humanitarian actors, the UN mission said on Wednesday.

A statement from the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) said Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations will also hold talks with the internally displaced people living in Protection of Civilians' sites.

"He will visit the capital, Juba, as well as the northern towns of Malakal and Bentiu, where UNMISS is protecting more than 145,000 people living in Protection of Civilians' sites," the mission said.

It said Lacroix will advocate the cessation of hostilities across the country, the importance of an inclusive political solution for ending the current conflict, and greater cooperation with the UNMISS and humanitarian agencies.

UNMISS has an authorized peacekeeping force of up to 17,000 troops from 54 Troop-Contributing Countries and up to 2,100 police personnel, including individual police officers, formed police units and corrections officers.

Its mission is to work with the people of South Sudan to protect civilians and to build durable peace.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 22:49:58|Editor: yan

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PRAGUE, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Senior official of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Liu Yunshan paid an official goodwill visit to the Czech Republic from July 16 to 19, with both sides pledging to further explore cooperation opportunities within the frameworks of the Belt and Road Initiative and the "16+1 mechanism."

While meeting with Czech President Milos Zeman, Liu, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, said Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Zeman have reached a lot of strategic consensus on bilateral ties, thus giving the direction for the development of bilateral relations.

Since Xi's visit in 2016, China and the Czech Republic have established a strategic partnership, with mutual political trust increasingly growing stronger, and cooperation booming in various fields.

Liu praised the Czech Republic's active role in participating in the Belt and Road Initiative, and hopes that the two sides can further enrich the strategic partnership, and jointly explore cooperation potentials in the fields of trade, technology, culture, education, tourism and Chinese medicine.

Zeman, for his part, said that the Belt and Road Initiative is a grand proposition that would connect and benefit the countries along the routes.

He said the Czech side attaches great importance to developing bilateral relations with China, and is willing to become China's close partner as well as the gate for China's cooperation with Europe.

While meeting with Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka, Liu said the two countries enjoy a deep-rooted traditional friendship and delightful bilateral cooperation.

He urged the two sides to seize the opportunities arising from the Belt and Road Initiative and the "China-CEE 16+1 mechanism" to deepen mutually-beneficial cooperation and reap more achievements.

The China-CEE 16+1 mechanism is a platform created in April 2012 by China and 16 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries.

Sobotka, for his part, said his government would provide firm support for pragmatic cooperation with China within the the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative in order to benefit the two peoples.

During the meeting with Jan Hamacek, speaker of the lower house of the Czech parliament and deputy chairman of the Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD), Liu said the CPC highly values the relationship with the CSSD and hopes to maintain high-level contacts, enhance exchanges on state governance and party building and promote contacts in different aspects.

Hamacek said President Xi's visit to the Czech Republic last year had opened a new chapter for relations between the two countries.

Prague supports the Belt and Road's construction and is willing to promote bilateral cooperation with Beijing to achieve more results, Hamacek added.

Addressing the 2017 China Investment Forum held in Prague on Tuesday, Liu said the vision of the Belt and Road Initiative proposed by President Xi is becoming a reality.

The initiative has become an important cooperation platform for the international community, he added.

Within the framework of the Belt and Road construction, the China-CEE 16+1 mechanism has seen deepened policy connectivity, enhanced infrastructure connectivity, increased trade connectivity, expanded financial connectivity and strengthened people-to-people connectivity, which has achieved rich fruits, Liu said.

In May, China successfully held the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, which gave a strong boost to deepening and expanding the cooperation under the 16+1 cooperation mechanism, Liu said.

He called on all sides to seize the opportunity to integrate their development strategies, strengthen pragmatic cooperation, push forward major projects and deepen people-to-people exchanges in order to open a new chapter for the development of the 16+1 cooperation mechanism.

Addressing the 2017 China Investment Forum, Sobotka said Prague firmly believes that the Belt and Road's construction will achieve a huge success and hopes to get on board as quickly as possible to share the achievements.

Meanwhile, Bulgarian Deputy Prime Minister Valeri Simeonov, who also participated in the forum, said the Belt and Road Initiative reflects the notion that the world shares China's program.

Bulgaria welcomes more Belt and Road projects that can be implemented in the country, Simeonov added.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 23:00:06|Editor: Zhou Xin

Visiting Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry(L) and his Iraqi counterpart Ibrahim al-Jaafari attend a joint press conference in Baghdad, Iraq, July 19, 2017. (Xinhua/Khalil Dawood)

BAGHDAD, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry arrived in Baghdad on Wednesday for an official visit to Iraq to discuss counterterrorism cooperation.

Shoukry arrived in Baghdad airport before noon and was received by his Iraqi counterpart Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

The two officials held a meeting in Jaafari's office, where they discussed bilateral ties, intelligence and security coordination and fighting IS group in the region.

After announcing victory against IS group in Mosul, "the intelligence and security coordination must continue because we are not confronting a traditional army. They are terrorist suicide groups that can appear here and there," Jaafari said at a joint press conference with Shoukry after the meeting.

For his part, Shoukry said that Iraq has an experience in dealing with terrorism and the factors that fuelled such phenomenon "like funding such terrorist groups, providing safe haven for them and media to promote their ideology."

"We have the spread of terrorism in Iraq, which wouldn't spread without support (by regional countries), arming, funding and opening the borders wide (for terrorist) to enter Iraq. We are seeking to change policies that lead to support terrorism in the region, including the policy of the Qatari government," Shoukry said.

Shoukry's comment on Qatar came as Egypt itself is part a group of states, led by Saudi Arabia, who announced previously cutting diplomatic ties with Qatar, accusing the Gulf state of supporting and financing "terrorism" as well as interfering in their internal affairs. Qatar denies the accusations.

Early in June, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi regretted the crisis between some Arab nations and Qatar, saying that Iraq is not part of the Gulf crisis.

Later in the day, a brief statement issued by Abadi's office said that the prime minister received in his office the Egyptian minister who conveyed congratulation of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi over the victory of Iraqi forces against IS terrorist group in Mosul.

Shoukry "expressed his country's desire to strengthen brotherly relations with Iraq in all fields, and its willingness to cooperate with Iraq in the fields of security and reconstruction," the statement said.

"Abadi stressed on the need to respond strongly to Daesh (IS group) terrorist gang, which represents a common danger, with a greater cooperation and coordination," the statement added.

During his visit Shoukry also met with the Iraqi President Fuad Masum and is scheduled to meet the Parliament Speaker Salim al-Jubouri and other political leaders.

Shoukry's visit came came after Abadi on July 10 officially declared Mosul liberated from IS after nearly nine months of fierce fighting to dislodge the extremist militants from their last major stronghold in Iraq.

Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 that toppled the former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the country has been going through chaos and sectarian strife even after the withdrawal of U.S. troops that was completed in late 2011.

Egypt has been facing a rising wave of anti-government terrorism since the military removed former Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.

Most of the attacks in Egypt, which have killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers ever since, were claimed by a Sinai-based group loyal to IS.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 23:05:12|Editor: yan

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TEHRAN, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Three Iranian fishermen were detained by Qatari coastal guards in the Arab country's waters in the Persian Gulf.

The detained people, from Assaluyeh port of Iran's southern Boushehr province, were busy fishing in a boat near the oil rigs of Qatar, the Chief of Fishery Organization of Assaluyeh port, Abdolhossein Bahreini, was quoted by official IRNA news agency as saying.

The Iranian boat did not receive the required licence for fishing, and since it did not observe the marine border regulations, it was stopped and its crew were detained, Bahreini said.

The Iranian side is investigating the case and is trying to free the fishermen, he said without detailing on the time of arrest.

It is a frequent drama among the Persian Gulf littoral states for their fishermen to infringe, either deliberately or unwittingly, the marine regulations and to be detained by one another's coastal guards.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 23:10:13|Editor: yan

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HONG KONG, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Finance Committee of the Legislative Council (LegCo) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) Wednesday approved an extra funding of 3.6 billion HK dollars (about 461 million U.S. dollars) for education.

The committee held its final meeting Wednesday before the summer break. A number of items related to livelihood issues were on the agenda, including the education funding.

The Hong Kong SAR government announced on July 5 a package of new measures to address some of the issues in the education sector, which would involve an additional recurrent funding of about 3.6 billion HK dollars in a full year.

Secretary for Education Yeung Yun-hung said that after LegCo's approval, the new measures are expected to be implemented in September.

Yeung hoped that cooperation between the government and the education sector could be enhanced in the future to improve the education system of Hong Kong.

The new measures aim at addressing some of the resource issues in the education sector, which cover post-secondary, secondary, primary and kindergarten education, according to the SAR government.(1 U.S. dollar = 7.8 HK dollars)
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 23:15:16|Editor: Xiang Bo

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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang meets with visiting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, July 19, 2017. (Xinhua/Zhang Duo)

BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- China is willing to strengthen cooperation with Palestine on trade, infrastructure, human resources and capacity building to improve its economic development and people's well-being, Premier Li Keqiang said Wednesday.

Li made the remarks when meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is on a state visit to China from July 17 to 20.

"Peace and development are pre-conditions and guarantees for each other. China will deepen practical cooperation with Palestine to achieve mutual benefit," Li said.

Li called on both sides to carry out cooperation in key areas and push forward the cooperation through bilateral and multilateral consultation.

The premier said China had closely watched and supported the Middle East peace process and would always support the Palestinian people to restore their legitimate national rights.

A peaceful and secure Middle East is vital to the region and world at large, Li said. "China will continue to exert its influence, fully support and actively participate in the international effort for the resumption of peace talks."

Abbas said Palestine appreciates China's stance on the Palestine issue and thanked China for the long-term important support.

Palestine looks to maintain high-level exchanges with China and enhance cooperation in industrial park development, clean energy and personnel training, Abbas said.

Earlier on Wednesday, Abbas laid a wreath at the Monument to the People's Heroes in Beijing.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 23:20:21|Editor: yan

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NAIROBI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- At least four people have died, over 300 admitted to hospital and two major hotels are closed indefinitely in the capital Nairobi as Kenya fights against a cholera epidemic.

A crackdown on illegal food vendors has also been launched and all food handlers are ordered to undergo medical tests as authorities battle the disease associated with poor hygiene and sanitation.

On Wednesday, Health Cabinet Secretary Dr. Cleopa Mailu while giving an update on the disease announced in Nairobi that 67 people are currently admitted to Kenyatta National Hospital, the largest referral hospital, and 12 other health institutions across the city.

"We have so far recorded four cholera-related deaths in the city and several admissions to hospital," he said.

He added that the two hotels, Jacaranda and San Valencia, had been shut down indefinitely to help contain the spread of the disease.

The two Nairobi-based hotels are reported to have offered catering services at separate events where participants, including two Cabinet Secretaries, were later hospitalized after contracting cholera.

Mailu said the government will also inspect all water bowsers and water sources and food vendors to prevent the spread of the disease.

However, not only Nairobi County has been affected, according to the health ministry, up to 12 counties have been hit by the cholera outbreak with the capital and Garissa being the most affected.

Cholera is a severe diarrhoeal disease that if unchecked can kill victims in hours. Health experts note that it takes between 12 hours and five days for someone to show symptoms after coming into contact with contaminated food or water.

Statistics show every year some 1.3 million to 4 million cholera cases are reported across the world, resulting in 140,000 deaths.

Nairobi's cholera outbreak, which started in May, is however unique as the disease, which has for many years affected people in informal settlements due to poor sanitation and hygiene has invaded big hotels.

Director of Medical Services Jackson Kioko on Monday directed the county governments to ban food hawking and inspect all hotels in 21 days as the ministry appointed a taskforce to battle the disease.

Campaigns have also been launched to sensitize people on how to curb the disease through proper hygiene and sanitation.

City residents and others across the country have been asked to boil drinking water, wash their hands after going to the toilet and before they eat and ensure the environments they live in are clean.

The Nairobi cholera epidemic has become a hot campaign issue ahead of the August 8 polls that candidates running for the governor post are blaming the incumbent for the crisis.

"Dr Evans Kidero has no business seeking for re-election because he has completely neglected garbage collection and sanitation that we now have a cholera outbreak. The county has completely failed to invest in water management systems making people consume untreated water," Peter Kenneth, one of the aspirants, said Tuesday.

Kidero, the governor, however, has fought back noting the mounds of garbage and poor sanitation are not to blame for the epidemic. Kidero directed the blame on upcountry travellers entering Nairobi as the first case of the disease was reported at a wedding attended by visitors from western Kenya in May.

A month-long nurses' strike in the East African nation has hampered response to the outbreak, with people suffering from the disease failing to get adequate attention.

The nurses went on strike late June calling for the implementation of a collective bargaining agreement they signed with the government.

Attempts to end the stalemate have failed, with the nurses vowing to keep off work until their demands are met.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 23:30:21|Editor: yan

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BAKU, July 19 (Xinhua) -- A meeting between Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey was held here Wednesday, with the adoption of a final declaration by the three sides to expand cooperation in customs affairs.

The meeting was attended by Chairman of the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan Aydin Aliyev, First Deputy Prime Minister of Georgia Dimitry Kumsishvili, Minister of Customs and Trade of Turkey Bulent Tufenkci, and representatives of the three countries' border agencies and embassies.

Within the framework of the meeting, a joint declaration will be signed by the participants to promote their relations in customs structures, cargo transportation, service modernization, and information exchange.

Tufenkci said that "by taking some measures at customs checkpoints, we will be able to simplify mutual trade" between the three countries, to which he attached great importance.

The minister also emphasized that the corridor between Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey will help to ensure peace in the Caucasus, simplify trade with other countries and transport goods safely, adding that "we have already solved a number of problems in this regard."

Aliyev said that the three countries will "carry out large-scale activities to increase freight traffic and ensure energy security in the region."

For his part, Kumsishvili outlined the "strategic importance" of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway project as well as other mutually beneficial regional ones.

Turkey and Georgia are Azerbaijan's main economic partners. In the first half of 2017, Azerbaijan's trade turnover amounted to 1.2 billion U.S. dollars with Turkey, and 270.35 million dollars with Georgia, according to the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 23:40:31|Editor: Yamei

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Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), presents the heads of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Academy of Military Science with the military flag in Beijing, capital of China, July 19, 2017. (Xinhua/Li Gang)

BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping has called on the country's major military research and educational institutions to cultivate more talent for the armed forces, and to build world-class military research and educational institutions.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), made the remarks while addressing heads of major military research and educational institutions Wednesday.



After presenting the heads of the three institutions with the military flag at a ceremony that marked the reshuffling of the institutions, Xi called the reshuffling a vital decision made by the CPC Central Committee and the CMC to realize the Chinese Dream and build a stronger army.

In order to build a world-leading first-class military research institution, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Academy of Military Science, as the leading force of scientific research in the military, should meet the new demands of military research and further combine military theories and technologies, he continued.

Xi further stressed that the National Defense University of the PLA is a significant base to cultivate talent for joint operations as well as PLA officers, and should push forward innovation in its education, research and management to become a top comprehensive college on unified command.

As for the National University of Defense Technology, it must follow the worldwide trends of the development of military science, and work harder to make key technological breakthroughs, in order to build a world-class institution of higher education, according to Xi.

Also on Wednesday, Xi attended a symposium with the current chief officers of military education, research and training institutions.

"It takes first-class military talent, theory, and science and technology to build the PLA into a world-leading military," Xi said.

"Science and technology is the core fighting capacity in modern warfare," he noted.

China must make greater efforts to build stronger armed forces and boost fighting capability through science and technology innovations to gain a competitive initiative, Xi said, stressing military education, research and training institutions must assume this responsibility.

Xi ordered the chief officers to stick to the correct political direction by safeguarding the authority and the centralized and unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee, conforming to the CPC Central Committee, and upholding CPC's absolute leadership over the military.

In addition, he stressed efforts to ensure implementation of reform tasks, and improve capability and innovation in fostering military expertise and scientific research.

The president also urged the institutions to cultivate good work and fighting styles, be strict with their education and training, and promote the spirit of science and dedication.

The Chinese military authority has just reshuffled its military education institutions as part of an ongoing military reform in recent years to build a stronger military and boost real-combat capability.

As a result, there are now 43 military education institutions, including two -- the National Defense University of PLA and the National University of Defense Technology -- directly under the CMC, 35 specialized in specific armed services, and six of armed police forces.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 23:45:34|Editor: yan

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BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- China will establish national-level demonstration areas for the "Made in China 2025" plan, a blueprint to upgrade the country's manufacturing sector.

The national demonstration areas will be established in cities and city clusters in the eastern, central and western regions, according to a decision made at a State Council executive meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday.

The areas will help speed up the transformation of the country's manufacturing sector, create innovative mechanisms and facilitate opening up and cooperation.

The areas will focus on integrating the strategy of "Made in China 2025" with the Internet Plus Initiative as well as entrepreneurship and innovation, creating cloud platforms for advanced manufacturing and carrying out pilot programs in innovative system construction, smart and green manufacturing.

In the meantime, some favorable policies already carried out in national independent innovation demonstration zones will be expanded to these areas, with both domestic and overseas investments receiving the same treatment, according to the meeting.

Specifically, the demonstration areas will be encouraged to set up a "negative list" that identifies sectors within the manufacturing and information industry that are off-limits or restricted for investments, and will have certain jurisdiction in foreign investment management upon approval.

A variety of government and industry funds will be used to spur innovation and entrepreneurship, and guide more social capital to support advanced manufacturing. In the demonstration areas, the government will offer stock incentives for employees of some state-owned enterprises.

Land supply in the demonstration areas will receive extra support, with measures to transform old business and storage facilities, idle buildings and excessive commercial real estate into incubation centers for entrepreneurship.

The demonstration areas will also receive support in talent development, with subsidies given to college graduates that meet certain requirements and to those with difficulties finding jobs.

International cooperation will also be a focus of the areas, with advanced technologies and equipment from overseas to be introduced into the areas.

"The Chinese economy has shown a buoyant momentum, but the weakness lies in the manufacturing sector, which requires quickened expansion. We need to focus our efforts on strengthening the sector, which is the foundation of the real economy," Li said.

China's economy expanded 6.9 percent year on year in the first half (H1)of the year to about 38.15 trillion yuan (5.66 trillion U.S. dollars), well above the government's target for the year of 6.5 percent, reflecting a firming trend in the nation's economy.

The high-tech and equipment manufacturing sectors have seen fast growth, with value-added industrial output at designated large enterprises in these sectors increasing 13.1 percent and 11.5 percent in H1,respectively.

China has seen an increasingly strong manufacturing sector since the announcement of the "Made in China 2025" plan in 2015.

Average productivity was up by 38 percent for China's first 109 pilot projects in smart manufacturing, while operating costs dropped by 21 percent, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

According to Xin Guobin, vice minister of the MIIT, the national demonstration areas will encourage different regions to develop industries with unique advantages. The MIIT will make targeted plans for different regions to implement the strategy, he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-19 23:45:35|Editor: Zhou Xin

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TEHRAN, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Insistance on sactioning Iran over its missile program would cost "dearly" for the U.S., Commander of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said Wednesday, according to Tasnim news agency.

Iran's missile power in the air, sea and land is "rapidly growing," Jafari said at a gathering of IRGC ground force commanders in the city of Mashhad in northeast of Iran.

Iran's missile power is by no means "negotiable," Jafari said warning that in case the U.S. insists on imposing sanctions against Iran's missile program, it needs to dismantle its regional bases within a range of 1000 kilometers around Iranian borders.

Iran has become a major regional and even global power thanks to the "spiritual might of the Islamic Revolution, the weapons power of the Armed Forces and the roaring missiles of the IRGC," he was quoted as saying.

Washington should be aware that it will pay dearly for any miscalculations, he stressed.

The United States slapped Tuesday sanctions on 18 entities and individuals linked to Iran's ballistic missile program and other non-nuclear activities.

The U.S. officials said Iran's ballistic missile launches are threats to the U.S. interests in the world.

The Iranian officials however unanimously call the missile tests the "inalienable right" of the country to boost deterrent power.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan meets with Prime Minister Binali Yildirim in Ankara, Turkey July 19, 2017. (Reuters Photo)

ANKARA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim reshuffled his cabinet on Wednesday, replacing or swapping 11 ministers in the 27-member government cabinet.

The announcement was made following an unscheduled meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Ministers of interior, economy and foreign affairs as well as deputy prime minister for economy are among the 15 ministers who have kept their positions.

In the new cabinet list, Bekir Bozdag, Mehmet Simsek, Fikri Isik, Recep Akdag and Hakan Cavusoglu were named as deputy prime ministers, where four were newly appointed.

A cabinet reshuffle has been widely expected since May, when Erdogan resumed his leadership of the ruling Justice and Development Party following the April 16 constitutional referendum granting him sweeping new powers.

Erdogan led the AK Party for 13 years starting in 2001. He had to step aside as the party chief when he became president in August 2014, because of a legal requirement for presidents to be politically neutral.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 00:40:52|Editor: yan

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MANILA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Philippine government said Wednesday it has decided to cancel informal talks with leftist rebels scheduled "within the next few days" in Europe in the wake of the series of attacks launched by the rebels against government forces in the past few weeks.

Government Peace Adviser Jesus Dureza said in a statement that "the situation on the ground necessary to provide the desired enabling environment for the conduct of peace negotiations is still not present up to this time."

Dureza was apparently referring to the separate rebel attacks Wednesday on traveling presidential security men at Arakan town in Cotabato province in the southern Philippines that resulted in the killing of a militia man and the wounding of five presidential guards, and the killings of two unarmed marine soldiers who were buying vegetables at a market in Palawan province.

Wednesday's attacks in Cotabato and Palawan are among the latest offensives launched by the rebels in recent weeks.

With the cancellation of the "backchannel talks," the prospects for the resumption of the fifth round of formal talks between the government and rebels have further dimmed.

Last May, the government cancelled the fifth round of peace negotiations with leftist rebels in Noordwijk of the Netherlands after the rebels called on its armed wing, the New People's Army (NPA), to intensify offensive operations.

Norway is brokering the ongoing formal peace negotiations, acting as the third party facilitator of the talks since 2001.

The government said the fifth round of formal talks may resume next month, saying government negotiators plan to meet informally to decide on the details of the next round of formal talks.

But with the recent developments, talks to end one of Asia's longest running insurgencies will have to wait.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 00:40:54|Editor: Zhou Xin

Syria's Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem (R) speaks during a meeting with the visiting Iranian Assistant Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Jaberi Ansari (C) in Damascus, Syria, July 19, 2017.(Xinhua/Ammar Safarjalani)

DAMASCUS, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Syria's Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said Wednesday that his government will continue to fight terrorism "relentlessly," according to state news agency SANA.

Al-Moallem made the remarks during his meeting with the visiting Iranian Assistant Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Jaberi Ansari, during which the minister expressed Syria's gratitude to Iran's support to Syria in all fields.

Ansari stressed that Iran will continue to support Syria on all levels and in the battle on terror in order to reach a solution to the long-standing crisis without foreign intervention.

The Iranian official also highlighted the importance of the coordination between Syria, Iran, and Russia to reach the hoped-for political solution in Syria.

Iran has emerged as a main regional backer of the Syrian government, with military advisors and Shiite fighters aiding the Syrian army in the fight against the rebels.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 00:40:57|Editor: Zhou Xin

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LISBON, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Portugal placed 1.75 billion euros (2 billion U.S. dollars) in six- and 12-month treasury bills on Wednesday at average yields more negative than the previous comparable auctions, according to Portuguese Treasury and Debt Management Agency (IGCP).

Portugal placed 1.25 billion euros in 12-month bills at an average yield of minus 0.259 percent, against minus 0.153 percent in the similar auction on May 17.

Portugal also placed 500 million euros in six-month bonds at an average yield of minus 0.292 percent against minus 0.210 percent in the similar auction in the same day.

The demand for the 12-month bills was 1.7 times the amount placed while that for the six-month bills 2.77 times the amount placed.

The IGCP plans to raise 4.5 billion euros through treasury bills auctions between July and the end of September this year.

The agency placed 1 billion euros in 10-year and 28-year bonds last Wednesday.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 00:46:01|Editor: An

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Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi meets with visiting United Arab Emirates (UAE) Minister of State Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber in Beijing, capital of China, July 19, 2017. (Xinhua/Yan Yan)

BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- China is confident that Gulf countries have the wisdom to resolve divergence and is willing to play a constructive role to help ease tensions according to the will of regional parties, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Wednesday.

Wang made the remarks when meeting with visiting United Arab Emirates (UAE) Minister of State Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber.

China is a good friend of the Gulf countries, said Wang, expressing the hope that the current Gulf crisis can be properly resolved.

Wang said that China stands by the principle that the crisis should be resolved through political and diplomatic means and all relevant parties should take due responsibility.

According to Wang, the crisis should be settled within the framework of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and outside countries should play a constructive role.

"Concerned parties should sit down for talks as soon as possible and show flexibility in dealing with each other," Wang said, adding that reaching a consensus on fighting terrorism of all forms is the first priority.

Al Jaber said that the UAE is committed to resolving the crisis through political and diplomatic means and has no intention to interfere in the domestic affairs of Qatar or other countries.

The UAE hopes that relevant parties can reach consensus on fighting terrorism and honor the agreements already signed and their commitments already made, he said.

"China is an influential and responsible country," said Al Jaber, adding that the UAE appreciates China's objective and impartial position on Gulf affairs.

The two sides also agreed to facilitate cooperation in energy, industrial parks and ports under the Belt and Road Initiative.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 00:56:07|Editor: yan

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BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- China is buttressing the Made in China 2025 strategy with new national-level demonstration areas to spur the development of smart, green and service-oriented manufacturing.

The decision is made at a State Council executive meeting presided over by Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday.

One focus is to foster the development of emerging industries and upgrade traditional sectors by furthering the integration of manufacturing sector and the internet. Market-oriented reform, supporting policies will be rolled out to ensure that businesses of all origins can receive the same national treatment.

"We need to select some cities or city clusters in China's eastern, western and central regions for the demonstration areas. The key is to support their piloting in system and policy innovation, and to develop an innovative atmosphere and industrial clusters for smart manufacturing," Li said.

"We must enable the manufacturing sector to become smarter, greener and more service oriented, boost the transition from traditional to new growth engines and the economy climbing upwards the value chain," he said.

Made in China 2025 was first unveiled by the premier in his Government Work Report in 2015.

Two years on, the country has seen increasingly stronger industrial capabilities, smart manufacturing, innovation, product quality and branding. Average productivity was up by 38 percent for China's first 109 pilot projects in smart manufacturing, while operating costs dropped by 21 percent, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The meeting on Wednesday decided that the government will take advantage of a variety of government and industry funds to spur innovation and entrepreneurship, and guide more social capital to support advanced manufacturing. In the demonstration areas, the government will offer stock incentives in State-owned enterprises.

The government will also further cut red tape and streamline approval procedure, improve business environment, and make bigger efforts in attracting foreign investment. The use and protection of intellectual property rights will be strengthened and government compliance oversight will be reinforced.

"Local authorities are highly motivated after the unveiling of the Made in China 2025 strategy. Many countries are also upgrading their manufacturing sectors right now," Li said.

"The Chinese economy has shown a buoyant momentum, but the weakness lies in the manufacturing sector, which requires quickened expansion. We need to focus our efforts on strengthening the sector, which is the foundation of the real economy," he said.

Li highlighted the importance of opening-up and international cooperation and absorbing experience worldwide.

The meeting also decided to step up the development of innovation centers for manufacturing and technology and to establish a number of public service platforms for entrepreneurship and innovation.

The demonstration areas will also receive support in talent development, and encourage researchers and Chinese talents overseas to set up businesses in the demonstration areas.

Land supply in the demonstration areas will receive extra support, with pilot measures to transform old business and storage facilities, idle buildings and excessive commercial real estates into incubating centers for entrepreneurship.

"The innovation in system and mechanism should be on par with technological innovation. Main constraining factors for the manufacturing sector still are in the system and the mechanism, as the access threshold for manufacturing is still too high," Li said.

"The organizational structure of enterprises has changed profoundly. With the help of entrepreneurship and innovation platforms, enterprises of different sizes are developing in an integrated manner. We need to draw on experience learned and see the reform through," he said.

The premier said funding support to the demonstration areas should be in line with market principles. The government should explore new paths of development, encourage competition, play an enabling role in building platform and drawing talents, he added.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 01:01:07|Editor: yan

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LAGOS, July 19 (Xinhua) -- At least 33 people lost their lives in clashes between villagers and herdsmen in southern part of northern Nigeria's Kaduna State, a top police officer said Wednesday.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 01:01:09|Editor: yan

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TAIPEI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Four people were killed and nine others injured after a pileup on Yangde Boulevard in suburban Taipei on Wednesday, according to local police.

The accident occurred at around 8:16 a.m. when a cement truck failed to stop as it approached an intersection on the boulevard.

A total of nine fire engines and 12 ambulances were dispatched to the scene.

Three men and one woman died. Five houses, 13 cars and nine motorcycles were damaged due to the accident, local authorities said.

The truck's driver said his vehicle's brakes failed. Further investigation is underway.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 01:06:11|Editor: yan

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NICOSIA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations on Wednesday moved fast in a bid to preserve the UN-led negotiating process for the reunification of Cyprus following the collapse of an international conference 12 days ago in the Swiss resort of Crans-Montana.

A Cypriot government spokesman announced that UN Secretary General's special adviser on Cyprus, Espen Barth Eide, will be back in Cyprus on Monday, for meetings with the Cypriot community leaders. Before coming here, he will brief the UN Security Council in New York.

Eide will talk with Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, who represents the Greek Cypriot community, and Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci, to urge them to reflect seriously during a cooling off period and return to negotiations.

The move comes amid clear indications that the UN rejected a suggestion by Turkey that a Cyprus solution must be sought outside the UN parameters.

In remarks to the press in New York, Eide said the Security Council is unanimously in support of the reunification of Cyprus.

"We, as United Nations, have only one set of parameters which leads to the reunification. This is something which is soundly based on many years of support of this procedure by the Security Council," Eide told a Turkish journalist who asked about Turkey's idea of preparing a new road map on Cyprus.

Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, on a visit to northern Cyprus on Tuesday, said the United Nations procedure could not go on forever and that from now on there will be other procedures on Cyprus.

The Security Council is set to approve a resolution extending for a further six months the mandate of the UN peace force in Cyprus, the longest UN peace operation ever, in which it will also urge the parties in the Cyprus dispute to return to the UN-led process.

The United Nations was not the only side to distance itself from Turkey's suggestion.

Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci said in a televised speech that the Turkish Cypriot will not shake off their responsibility to work for building a peaceful future in a Cypriot state based on UN parameters. These include a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation in which Greeks and Turkish will share power with political equality.

"Our vision is very clear to become one of the equal partners who, by finding a solution, will together (with Greek Cypriots) unite Cyprus," said Akinci.

Turkish Cypriots will celebrate on Thursday Turkey's military operation. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim is scheduled to fly to northern Cyprus to inspect a military parade and meet with Akinci.

Cyprus has been divided since 1974 and the Republic of Cyprus joined the EU as a divided country in 2004. Leaders of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots have been talking with each other for two years on how to reunite Cyprus.

Turkey occupied part of the territory of Cyprus in 1974 in reaction to a coup by the military rulers of Greece at that time, leading to one of the most intractable international problems and one of the longest issues on the UN agenda.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 01:11:23|Editor: yan

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LAGOS, July 19 (Xinhua) -- At least 33 people lost their lives in clashes between villagers and herdsmen in southern part of north Nigeria's Kaduna State, a top police officer said Wednesday.

Twenty-seven herdsmen living in Kajuru area of the state were killed by villagers in two separate attacks, while six villagers died, Agyole Abeh, the state commissioner of police, told reporters in Kaduna.

The police chief said his officers would arrest and prosecute those responsible for this dastardly and callous act.

He, however, said that calm has been restored to villages affected.

The renewed crisis was said to have erupted since Sunday when some Fulani youths reportedly went to a village at Ugwan Uka to avenge the killing of their kinsman.

Kajuru Local Government is about 50 kilometers drive from the state capital.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 01:16:31|Editor: Zhou Xin

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NAIROBI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Kenya and China are set to sign a Memorandum of Understanding in order to boost cooperation in the media sector, a Kenyan official said on Wednesday.

Ministry of Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) Principal Secretary Sammy Itemere told Xinhua in Nairobi that under the agreement Beijing will build a media center for state owned Kenya Broadcasting Corporation.

"The centre will provide capacity building for the Kenyan media industry as way to increase Sino-Kenya exchanges," Itemere said during the inauguration of the council members of the Universal Service Advisory Council (USAC).

Itemere said the deal with China, will enable Kenyan media practitioners to access the latest media technology.

"The end result is that Sino-Kenya cooperation will facilitate local media to play its role in development especially through dissemination of critical information," he added.

The PS said that the collaboration will provide a platform for citizens of Kenya and China to learn about the cultural diversity of their respective countries.

Itemere said that as a result of the digital migration, Kenya has been able to attract Chinese investments into the media industry.

"The Chinese investment has enabled Kenya to reap from the digital dividends as a result of switching from the analogue broadcasting," he said, noting that such media firms as StarTimes has invested heavily in Kenya to develop a digital terrestrial and satellite network that has enabled rural areas to access digital television services.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 01:26:45|Editor: yan

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by Alessandra Cardone

ROME, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Twenty-five years after he was killed by mobsters, top anti-mafia judge Paolo Borsellino was commemorated with various initiatives across Italy on Wednesday.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella led a special ceremony to honor the slain magistrate at the High Council of the Judiciary (CSM) in Rome, appealing for a "a final word of justice" in the long path to identity and condemn masterminds and authors of his killing.

"Borsellino fought the mafia with resolution, convinced as he was that the mafia is not an ineluctable evil, but a criminal phenomenon that can be defeated," Mattarella told the CSM.

The president also stressed that "too many uncertainties and mistakes have accompanied the search for truth on this slaughter, and still many questions about those responsible for his heinous killing are open."

Paolo Borsellino was killed on July 19, 1992, in a car bombing in Palermo, along with five police officers of his escort.

"His tragic death, along with the deaths of those escorting him, still awaits a final word of justice," Mattarella told the CSM.

Borsellino's murder occurred 57 days after the killing of fellow top anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone, in a similar bomb on a motorway in Sicily.

Borsellino and Falcone had developed new methods of investigating the mafia since the early 1980s, reaching unprecedented results against what was the most powerful crime syndicate at the time: the Sicilian mob, or "Cosa Nostra."

Their murders represented the most brutal attack by the Sicilian mafia against Italy's state and judiciary, and marked one of the darkest moments in the country's recent history.

Commemorating Borsellino in Parliament on Wednesday, Senate Speaker Pietro Grasso -- a former anti-mafia prosecutor himself -- told lawmakers: "We have defeated the 'Cosa Nostra' violent and bloodthirsty, but not that (part of) mafia that is able to change its skin and disappear from the public opinion's eye, and to infiltrate all levels of Italian society," he warned.

As is common on this date, several events to honor Borsellino's life were held by anti-mafia and civil society groups across Italy.

Key celebrations were planned in Palermo, Sicily's regional capital where the magistrate was born and began his career in the judiciary.

Citizens, national and local politicians, and public officers marched through the street where Borsellino was killed.

Besides achieving results in the fight against the economic and criminal power of the three major mafia organizations operating in the country -- Cosa Nostra, Naples-based Camorra, and Calabrian 'Ndrangheta -- Italy has seen stronger anti-mafia awareness develop in its civil society.

However, the full truth about the slaughter of Borsellino has yet to be discovered, according to both his relatives and major anti-mafia experts.

Three trials have been held since 1994, resulting in some 47 people being convicted in connection with his murder.

A fourth trial began in 2013, after new allegations by a mafia informer on the true masterminds and deep reasons behind the slaughter of the magistrate.

This first-grade trial ended in April 2017. Two mafia bosses were sentenced to life in prison for being among the perpetrators, and another two mobsters to 10 years in jail for giving testimonies that misled previous investigations.

Some aspects of Borsellino's murder (as much as of Falcone's), however, have remained a mystery so far.

These include the disappearance of the red diary in which Borsellino used to write down details of his work during the year of his death.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 01:31:47|Editor: yan

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MOGADISHU, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said Wednesday it has secured 8.5 million U.S. dollars from Sweden to accelerate high impact reproductive, maternal, new-born and adolescent health interventions in Somalia.

The UNFPA Representative Nikolai Botev said the funding comes at a critical moment when the UN agency is reaffirming its efforts to working towards achieving universal access to sexual and reproductive health, realizing reproductive rights, reducing maternal mortality, and improving the lives of adolescents, youth and women.

"The grant from Sweden is another expression of strong confidence in the work that UNFPA is undertaking towards the betterment of the lives of the people of Somalia," Botev said in a statement issued in Mogadishu.

He said the funding from Sweden is fundamental in contributing to Somalia's social and human development, particularly in the National Development Plan areas of health, youth, gender, resilience and capacity building in pursuit of the common goal of a better and healthier Somalia for all.

"We are enormously grateful for the Swedish contribution. It comes at a critical time and will be vital in helping the many Somali people, especially women and young people, whose lives have already been so traumatically disrupted by a number of adverse conditions, including the current drought," said Botev.

Botev reiterated UNFPA's commitment to supporting increased availability and use of integrated maternal and new-born health services that are gender-responsive and meet human rights standards for quality of care and equity in access.

Millions of women in Somalia remain at great risk during pregnancy and childbirth.

Every year, one in 22 women dies prematurely due to pregnancy or childbirth related complications.

Most of these complications and illnesses are easily preventable and treatable. Strong political will and long-term financial commitment is urgently needed to address the high rate of maternal deaths.
Egypt says on July 19 to build largest petrochemical complex in the Middle East. A huge Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) tanker DUHAIL passing through the Suez Canal, Egypt. (Reuters Photo)

CAIRO, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Egypt's Suez Governor Ahmed Hamed had talks Wednesday with a petrochemical investment firm on the establishment of the largest petrochemical complex in the Middle East, the state-run MENA news agency reported.

Former petroleum minister Osama Kamal, the project's consultant, said the 10.5 billion dollar complex will be set up in three areas in el Ein el Sokhna.

The construction of the complex will start in the first quarter of 2018 and will last for four or five years, he said.

The complex will create 3,000 direct jobs and 20,000 indirect jobs, he said.

The project is meant to cater for local market needs of petrochemical products and secure needed row materials for the current and future petrochemical projects in the Suez Canal axis in addition to exporting the surplus, Kamal said.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 02:17:15|Editor: yan

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WINDHOEK, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The British government has sent out its trade policy minister Lord Mark Price to engage southern African countries ahead of Brexit.

Price, who has already met the Mozambican trade minister Max Tonela and some trade ministers from the Southern Africa Customs Union (Sacu), is expected in Namibia Thursday.

The British High Commission in Namibia said Wednesday that Price will meet trade and industrialization minister Immanuel Ngatjizeko during the visit.

According to the statement, the two are expected to discuss how the Sacu to which Namibia is a member will do business with Britain after Brexit.

Price, the statement said, will also meet representatives from countries that have signed the European Union's Economic Partnership Agreement.

These countries are Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland.

The visit, the statement also said, shows the commitment of the British Government to securing trade links in both developed and developing countries around the world.

The statement quotes Price as saying that his visit to Namibia will "strengthen existing trading links with the region and build a mutually beneficial trading partnership".

"As we look towards our future outside the European Union, we will continue to be a champion for free trade and an advocate for the benefits trade can bring, socially as well as economically," the statement quotes Price.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 03:17:39|Editor: yan

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LAGOS, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Nigeria has deployed warships and troops in a massive operation to end pirates' attacks on local and international merchant ships in the Gulf of Guinea, the Nigerian navy said Wednesday.

The operation sought to contain high spate of attacks by thieves on critical oil and gas installations and other criminality prevalent in the nation's territorial waters, the country's Chief of Naval Staff (CNS), Vice Adm. Iboke-Ete Ibas, said.

He spoke at the launch of the special operation, code-named "Tsare Teku V", in Onne, Rivers State.

The operation was a continuation of an earlier operation launched in the first quarter of 2016 to protect offshore oil and gas facilities and economic activities, he added.

According to him, the operation has yielded positive results with significant improvement in the safety of shipping and offshore oil and gas facilities.

"It is gratifying to note that between January and June 2017, there were only four successful attacks on shipping within Nigeria's waters as against 36 between January and June 2016," he said.

"This improvement in security situation within Nigeria's offshore maritime domain is attributable to the intensive patrols and efforts of Operation Tsare Teku," the navy chief added.

Ibas said the International Maritime Bureau in its first quarter 2017 report on piracy and armed robbery in the Gulf of Guinea attributed current decline to the efforts of the Nigerian navy.

The navy chief added that the report observed that the area remained a kidnap hot spot for criminals, especially hijackers.

"This report re-emphasizes the need for sustenance of the operation, and as such, made it imperative to extend the operation by another six months," he said.

"The Nigerian Navy remains absolutely committed to creating a secure and enabling maritime environment for economic activities to thrive toward national growth," Ibas added.

The Gulf of Guinea, which is believed to hold as much as 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, has been plagued by pirates, smugglers and other criminals.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 03:43:00|Editor: Zhou Xin

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ROME, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Italian police on Wednesday seized mafia assets worth some 60 million euros (69 million U.S. dollars) in a major operation against a powerful clan in Sicily, authorities said.

At least 34 people allegedly belonging to Palermo-based Brancaccio mafia family were arrested during raids carried out in Sicily and across five other Italian regions.

All of the suspects were variously charged with extortion, illegal possession of weapons, criminal threat, and malicious mischief, Italy's Interior Ministry said in a statement.

"The clan exerted a full control on an entrepreneurial group operating in several (Italian) regions, but rooted in Sicily and Tuscany most of all," the ministry stated.

Overall, some 42 companies were seized in the operation, according to Italy's finance police contributing to the raids.

The operation was ordered by prosecutors of the Anti-Mafia District Directorate (DDA) in Palermo

Among those put in jail were a mafia boss, Pietro Tagliavia, who allegedly kept running an extortion business for the Brancaccio clan despite being under house arrest, police said.

The major operation was carried out as Italy commemorated the 25th anniversary of the murder of top anti-mafia magistrate Paolo Borsellino, killed by mobsters in 1992.
Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang (C), U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuch (L) and U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross pose for group photos during the first China-U.S. Comprehensive Economic Dialogue in Washington D.C., the United States, on July 19, 2017. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)

WASHINGTON, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang on Wednesday called for cooperation between China and the United States instead of confrontation to address their differences.

"China and the U.S. are each other's biggest trading partner and important source of investment. Cooperation is a realistic choice for both sides," Wang said in his opening remarks at the first China-U.S. Comprehensive Economic Dialogue here Wednesday.

"Dialogue cannot immediately address all differences, but confrontation will immediately damage the interests of both," said Wang.

He noted that cooperation between China and the U.S. not only benefits businesses and peoples of the two countries but the world as a whole.

According to the vice premier, the primary task of the one-day dialogue is to increase mutual understanding, mutual trust and consensus.

With down-to-earth and visionary approaches, Wang called on both sides to make sure that China-U.S. economic relationship will move forward along the right track and continue to produce tangible results.

Wang said that China was ready to work with the U.S. to achieve win-win results for both sides.

Wang co-chairs the first China-U.S. Comprehensive Economic Dialogue together with U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross.

Both sides are discussing a range of economic issues that will have long-term and strategic importance to the economic cooperation between the two countries.

The dialogue is one of the four major dialogue mechanisms the two sides established in April.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 04:48:32|Editor: yan

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BUDAPEST, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the prime ministers of the Visegrad Four countries (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia) signed a joint statement here on Wednesday on global issues such as migration, fight against terrorism and the peace process in the Middle East.

The statement was adopted on the occasion of the annual summit of the prime ministers of the Visegrad Four and Netanyahu, who is on an official visit to Hungary, the first by an Israeli prime minister in 30 years.

The leaders agreed to exchange views on their efforts aimed at fighting terrorism and countering violent extremism and incitement, and agreed to explore the possibility of further strengthening joint cooperation in the areas of defense and defense industry, cyber security, hybrid threats, non-proliferation and information and know-how sharing.

The leaders agreed that tackling the current migration crisis requires addressing its origins and shared the view that close cooperation with the states of origin and transit should be maintained.

They emphasized the importance of diplomatic efforts aimed at peaceful resolution of lasting conflict and stabilization. They also discussed the need to foster good governance and sustainable economic growth in states of origin of economic migrants.

They strongly and unequivocally condemned recent terrorist attacks, including those in Israel and across the world, stressing that terrorism continues to be a troubling phenomenon of our times and represents a serious threat to international peace and security.

About the Middle East Peace Process, the leaders of Visegrad Four countries affirmed their support for a viable two-state solution and the right of Israel to live in security and peaceful co-existence with all its neighbors, including Palestinians. They stressed their opposition to any attempt to undermine Israel's legitimacy.

One of the key points of the statement is the goal of developing the relations between the European Union (EU) and Israel. The five leaders reiterated their commitment towards the enhancement of EU-Israel relations in areas of mutual interest, including cooperation on economic, political, strategic, regional, innovation, and people-to-people issues. To this end, they underlined the need to promote an improved relationship between Israel and the EU.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 05:03:39|Editor: yan

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Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan meets with Prime Minister Binali Yildirim in Ankara,TurkeyJuly 19, 2017. (Reuters Photo)

ANKARA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Turkey reshuffled cabinet Wednesday by replacing or swapping 11 ministers as part of Erdogan's plans aiming victory in 2019 elections, according to a local expert.

"This new cabinet will carry out performance for preparations of elections in 2019," daily Hurriyet columnist Abdulkadir Selvi said.

These ministers will perform a six-month program of the government, which is expected to be announced short after the cabinet change, according to Selvi .

President Erdogan earlier stated that they will outline a six-month roadmap to be better prepared for the 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections, in a bid to address problems concerning the economy and democracy.

2017 will be the year for strengthening party organization for Erdogan, and 2018 will be the year for implementation of the government program to lay grounds for 2019 elections, Selvi noted.

President Erdogan earlier complained of a "fatigue" within his party and voiced necessity for rejuvenation.

A cabinet revision has been expected after President Erdogan regained the leadership of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party's (AKP) in a referendum in April 16 for constitutional amendments which abolishes the office of the prime minister and empowers the president.

Most of the constitutional changes will come into effect after the next general elections in 2019 and the president will be able to assume extended powers at that time.

Erdogan achieved a narrow win in April referendum with nearly 51 percent support which he sees risky for upcoming presidential elections.

Therefore he needs a strong and stable economic program and enthusiastic team to lay grounds for tough election period.

"This is a blood change. Cabinet revision takes place occasionally when a change is needed," Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Wednesday at a press conference for announcement of reshuffle after meeting with President Tayyip Erdogan.

The key ministries such as for the economy, finance, foreign affairs and the interior remained unchanged.

Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek, who has a respected reputation for international financial markets and investors, has preserved his seat, even empowered his position.

There were two deputy prime ministers responsible for economic affairs in previous cabinet, but former Deputy Prime Minister Nurettin Canikli is appointed as new Defense Minister.

Yildirim appointed former minister for justice Bekir Bozdag as Deputy Prime Minister and he is also expected to be spokesperson of the government.

The Turkish government has blamed a U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen for masterminding the plot and nearly 50,000 people suspected of links to the coup or Gulen have been arrested and almost 150,000 people dismissed from public services.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 05:08:48|Editor: yan

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KHARTOUM, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Sudan said Wednesday it is ready to provide all support and facilitation to help reduce the personnel of the UN-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), in collaboration with the joint committees founded for the same purpose.

Sudanese Defence Minister Awad ibn Auf made the announcement after meeting the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix, who visited the country to review means of implementing the UN decision on reducing the UNAMID forces as scheduled.

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, ibn Auf welcomed UN's decision to reduce forces in the region, adding that the change is an indication of improved stability and humanitarian situations in Darfur.

The defense minister also expressed hope that UNAMID continues its efforts to meet requirements for peace in the area, where UNAMID would redeploy its forces and work to persuade the rebels to return to the negotiation track.

Lacroix, arrived in Khartoum Tuesday, will later visit El Fasher, the capital city of North Darfur State and where UNAMID's headquarter is based.

The mission said earlier that it began implementation of a reconfiguration process according to the recently adopted UN Security Council Resolution 2363 on 29 June on reduction of the mission component.

It noted that the reconfiguration process would be conducted in two phases, and would reduce military personnel to 8,735 from the current 13,627 and police personnel to 2,500 from 2,994 by 30 June, 2018.

The UNAMID also includes 748 international civilian personnel, 2,151 local civilian personnel and 120 volunteers.

The UNAMID was deployed early 2008 in Darfur region, which has been witnessing military clashes between the Sudanese army and the rebels since 2003, which left 300,000 people dead and displaced around 2.5 million others according to UN statistics.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 05:13:56|Editor: yan

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TIRANA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The reconstruction of the entire Albanian railway network is estimated to cost 427 million euros (492.4 million U.S. dollars), officials from the Albanian Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure said Wednesday.

The ministry said in a press release that it already had an economic evaluation report which included all existing lines, from Han i Hotit in North of Albania to Vlora in South and Pogradec in Southeast.

It includes Tirana-Durres line and two segments used for goods transport, one line that goes to Ballsh and another one to Fushe-Kruja cement factory.

Meanwhile, the statement said that the project for the Tirana-Durres line was ready and funds were granted.

Study showed that the rehabilitation of only this segment mounted up to 40 million euros.

The Rinas airport segment is not related to this study, and its total is 46.4 million euros.

Railways are being seen as an opportunity to reduce the transportation of goods and connecting it through the entire region, cutting the travel time, since the current trains only travel at a speed of 40 km/h.

The Albanian railway has 66 passenger wagons, 225 wagons for goods and 25 locomotives. The capacity in theory is 2 million passengers and 500 million goods a year.

The Albanian government has signed an Association-Stabilization agreement with the European Union (EU) which foresees a reconstruction of the Albanian railway based on EU principles.
Photo taken on July 11, 2017 shows houses burned down by forest fires in Boston Flats, British Columbia, Canada. (Xinhua/Vicnews.com/Arnold Lim )

OTTAWA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Forest fires caused by strong winds have been sweeping over British Columbia Province in western Canada for more than a week, forcing thousands of people to evacuate.

The Canadian government has declared a state of emergency to address the severity of the situation on July 7.

Currently 3,000 firefighters, including 415 sent in from surrounding provinces, and 203 aircraft are involved in battling the fires, while this operation has cost Canadian authorities more than 80 million U.S. dollars, said Canadian Minister of Forests John Rustad, CBC broadcaster reported.

Photo taken on July 11, 2017 shows houses burned down by forest fires in Boston Flats, British Columbia, Canada. (Xinhua/Vicnews.com/Arnold Lim )

Rapidly spreading wildfires have not only driven thousands more out of their homes, but also disrupted the timber and mining industries.

"Employees who have been able to report for work have been reassigned to maintain mill operations at the expense of mining operations, which have significantly reduced," Imperial Metals Corp. said. "Should critical supplies such as fuel not be available due to road closures, the mine may be forced to suspend operations."

The massive wildfires also compressed the supply of wood products and raised prices when they disrupted some forestry companies' timber operations, analysts said.

A total of 178 wildfires were reported to be actively blazing in British Columbia, the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System said Sunday.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 05:39:22|Editor: yan

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ACCRA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Members of Parliament (MPs) in Ghana will return to their offices on the Job-600 building after it was shut down by the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS) following a fire outbreak.

Kate Addo, Acting Director of Public Affairs in parliament, briefed the media here on Wednesday about the fire that broke out on the 10th floor on Tuesday evening.

According to her, the GNFS would have completed its investigation into the cause of the fire incident which started from the East Wing.

Workers of Parliamentary services working within the office complex were left stranded on Wednesday due to the closure by GNFS.

Public Relations Officer of the Ghana National Fire Service Prince Billy Anaglate told the media that preliminary investigation suggests electrical fault as the cause of the fire incident.

"There is no report of any fatalities here yet and there is no confirmation how many offices have been gutted by fire, but people have to be very careful with electricals so such things don't happen again," he cautioned.

The multi-storey office complex of Ghana's Parliament caught fire late Tuesday. The fire incident, which started while Members of Parliament were still going about their busy schedules in the chamber of the House, was on the east wing of the 10th Floor of the 12-sotrey office building.

Majority Leader Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu told the media they were alerted about smoke emanating from the 10th floor.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 06:04:53|Editor: Zhou Xin

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SAN FRANCISCO, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Two researchers at Oregon State University have built a framework for autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs, to plan energy-efficient trajectories through disturbances that are strong and uncertain, like ocean currents and wind fields.

AUVs such as underwater gliders are valuable research tools limited primarily by their energy budget, meaning every bit of battery power wasted via inefficient trajectories cuts into the time they can spend working. And greater energy efficiency means the AUVs can gather data longer and better.

"Historically, a lot of oceanography data sets and sampling came from using ships, which are expensive and can only really be out for a few days at a time," noted Dylan Jones, a Ph.D. student in OSU's robotics program and lead author on the study published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. "With autonomous underwater vehicles, you can get months-long monitoring. And a way to extend those vehicles' missions is through smarter planning for how they get from one point of interest to another."

Built by Jones and Ph.D. advisor Geoff Hollinger, assistant professor of mechanical engineering in OSU's College of Engineering, the framework involves an algorithm that samples alternate paths, and comparison metrics that let a vehicle decide when it makes sense to switch paths based on new information collected about environmental disturbances.

They tested the framework in a simulated environment, namely a data set of currents from the Regional Ocean Modeling System, and also on a windy lake with an autonomous boat. The results show that the algorithm can plan vehicle paths that are more energy efficient than ones planned by existing methods, that it is robust enough to deal with environments for which not much data is available, and that three of the framework's five path comparison metrics can be used to plan more efficient routes compared to planning based solely on the ocean current forecast.

"These are under-actuated vehicles - they don't go fast in relation to the strong ocean currents, so one way to get them to travel more efficiently is to go with the flow, to coast and not use energy," Jones said, noting that overcoming strong disturbances is a critical component of putting any kind of robot in a real-life environment, and past planning algorithms haven't always considered the dynamics of the vehicle they were planning for.

"We're building more intelligence into these vehicles so they can more reliably accomplish their missions," he was quoted as saying in a news release from OSU in the U.S. Pacific Northwest on Wednesday.

Future research will also deal with "informative path planning," namely gathering information about the environment and disturbances that the algorithm can use later to plan energy-efficient routes. "How do we combine these two ideas - planning a path for energy efficiency while also trying to gather information that will inform efficient path planning?" Jones said. "There will be tradeoffs and it might come down to, do I pay five hours now to save six hours later on?"
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 06:35:01|Editor: yan

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MEXICO CITY, July 19 (Xinhua) -- A former Mexican governor in jail on corruption charges is being watched round-the-clock to prevent his escape, a local official said on Wednesday.

The ex-governor of the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, Javier Duarte, was extradited on Monday from Guatemala, where he was in hiding, and taken to a penitentiary in northern Mexico City.

According to Mexico City's government secretary, Patricia Mercado, in Duarte's cell, "there is a surveillance camera, but above all there is a guard on watch ... he is permanently close to him every 24 hours in the cell," Mercado said in an interview with Grupo Formula news network.

"He is under the same conditions as the other inmates, but with special care," Mercado added.

The scandal has gripped Mexican society, which is following the case closely to see whether the governor (2010 to 2016) accused of stealing millions in public funds and leaving the state penniless will be held accountable or allowed to evade justice.

On Tuesday, Duarte met with his lawyer and had a "family visit," said Mercado, without giving further details.

Mexico's Attorney General's Office (PGR) has requested Duarte be admitted to a federal prison hospital in the neighboring state of Morelos, because he suffers from hypertension, fatty liver and anxiety.

Should a federal judge decide there is enough evidence against him to go to trial, Duarte is expected to be housed at a federal facility.

Mexico is known for its high-profile prison escapes, with the notorious drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, twice breaking out of high-security facilities here, before being extradited to the United States to face drug trafficking charges.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 06:45:11|Editor: Zhou Xin

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SAN FRANCISCO, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Inspired by natural organisms that cover distance by growing, such as vines, fungi and nerve cells, mechanical engineers at Stanford University have created a new type of robot as a proof of concept.

The robot, which has been through some challenging tests, can grow across long distances without moving its whole body.

"Essentially, we're trying to understand the fundamentals of this new approach to getting mobility or movement out of a mechanism," explained Allison Okamura, professor of mechanical engineering and senior author of a paper published Wednesday in journal Science Robotics. "It's very, very different from the way that animals or people get around the world."

The basic idea behind this robot is straightforward. It's a tube of soft material folded inside itself, like an inside-out sock, that grows in one direction when the material at the front of the tube everts, as the tube becomes right-side-out.

To investigate what their robot can do, the group created prototypes that move through various obstacles, travel toward a designated goal, and grow into a free-standing structure. And in the prototypes, the material was a thin, cheap plastic and the robot body everted when the researchers pumped pressurized air into the stationary end.

In testings, the research group tried to move the robot from one place to another in several ways. It grew through an obstacle course, where it traveled over flypaper, sticky glue and nails and up an ice wall to deliver a sensor. It completed the course even though it was punctured by the nails because the area that was punctured didn't continue to move and, as a result, self-sealed by staying on top of the nail.

A primary advantage of soft robots is that they can be safer than hard, rigid robots not only because they are soft but also because they are often lightweight. Another benefit, in the case of this robot, is that it is flexible and can follow complicated paths.

"The body lengthens as the material extends from the end but the rest of the body doesn't move," noted Elliot Hawkes, a visiting assistant professor from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper. "The body can be stuck to the environment or jammed between rocks, but that doesn't stop the robot because the tip can continue to progress as new material is added to the end."

Some iterations of these robots included a control system that differentially inflated the body, which made the robot turn right or left. The researchers developed a software system that based direction decisions on images coming in from a camera at the tip of the robot.

Joey Greer, a graduate student in the Okamura lab and co-author of the paper, was quoted as saying in a news release that controlling a robot requires a precise model of its motion, which is difficult to establish for a soft robot. "Also, using a camera to guide the robot to a target is a difficult problem because the camera imagery needs to be processed at the rate it is produced. A lot of work went into designing algorithms that both ran fast and produced results that were accurate enough for controlling the soft robot."

In the future, the researchers would like to create versions that may also grow using liquid, which could help deliver water to people trapped in tight spaces or to put out fires in closed rooms, and possibly with new, tougher materials, like rip-stop nylon and Kevlar. In addition, they hope to scale the robot much larger and much smaller to see how it performs.
Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-20 07:00:14|Editor: Zhou Xin

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LOS ANGELES, July 19 (Xinhua) -- A class action lawsuit of 10 homeless people has been filed in federal court against the City of San Diego, Southern California, from citing homeless people for placing their tents and belongings on public sidewalks.

The ordinance was enacted in 2007, which originally intended to address the business owners for dumping the trash cans and planters in the public right of way.

But now the law is used to target the homeless people and thousands of tickets have been issued, failure to pay the fine or show up to court has resulted in many arrests, Kath Roger, the attorney of plaintiffs was quoted as saying by San Diego Union-tribune on Tuesday.

The homeless people allege that they are unfairly targeted. Eric Arundel, who has been living in the street for almost two years, said as they cannot afford to pay the tickets, they would have a lot of criminal records, and no landlord would possibly accept them. In this situation, it is impossible to get homeless people like Eric out of the street.

Nevertheless, some other people believe that the public places should not be possessed by homelessness, and they make the community unsafe, CBS8.com reported.

"It's unconstitutional and counterproductive. If people are living on the streets, where do you expect them to put their belongings", said Kath Roger.

She also pointed out the city now is making a crime, since anybody cannot avoid of being targeted by this law.

On behalf of 10 homelessness, Roger said the lawsuit claims the constitutional rights of the 10 people, and if it is successful, the city will stop issuing the citations to the people living on the streets for placing the belongings on public property.

The office of city attorney gave the response that the case is under the review and they will consult with all clients who are named in the suit and City Council members.

Statistics show that number of citations and arrests grew from 200 in 2009 to 1,400 in 2013, and to 2,200 last year, according to the report of San Diego Union-tribune.
CAL cancels flights

According to a notice issued by the airline, flight BW 448 yesterday from Port of Spain to Barbados was cancelled as was BW 449 from Barbados to Port of Spain and BW 415 from Port of Spain to Barbados. Another flight BW 438 scheduled to fly last evening from Port of Spain to Grenada was also cancelled. The airline yesterday advised its customers to visit its website www.caribbean-airlines.com or call Caribbean Airlines Call Centres before going to the airport.

The airline says customers travelling between yesterday and today will be allowed to change or cancel their reservations without penalty once they have a confirmed ticket
PM: Couva Hospital is an option

He made this disclosure at a news. conference at Tower D of the Portof-. Spain International Waterfront. Centre, following a three hour. meeting with Opposition Leader. Kamla Persad-Bissessar.

The Prime Minister reminded. reporters that Government has. been advised that the central block. of the city hospitalis structurally. unsound and unsafe and likely to. collapse in the event of an earthquake.

He said Cabinet recently. took a decision to demolish the. central block and construct a new. building in its place.

Rowley said this would result. in the loss of 400 beds which is,. of great concern to the national. community and the Government.. While Government is hoping to. enter into a public private partnership. to run the Couva Hospital,. Rowley said, Unfortunately the. response has not been very encouraging.. Noting the area of coverage. provided by the city hospital. the Prime Minister said as Government. examines how to address the. resulting bed shortage, the new. hospital in Couva will have to be. factored in how we treat with that. development. Rowley said he assured. Persad-Bissessar that the. non-opening of the hospital was. not the result of any government. policy.

The hospital was constructed. under Persad-Bissessars former. administration but never commissioned. before the September 7,. 2015 general elections. On internal. self governance for Tobago, Rowley. said there needed to be a clear. understanding of what that entails.

He said Persad-Bissessar agreed. that a committee of the House of. Representatives would receive. documents which already exist on. Tobago self governance and this. would involve some element of. public consultation Rowley said. Persad-Bissessar agreed with him. that the time had come to legislate. on campaign finance reform as. well.

He said this matter would be put. before the Law Reform Commission.

Rowley said in his discussions. with Persad-Bissessar on a. Code of Conduct for parliamentarians,. there was agreement that. the Clerk of the House could see. if the Commonwealth Parliamentary. Association can assist in this. exercise. The draft code of conduct. covers issues such as no improper. enrichment, opposition to corruption. and use of confidential information.

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Kamla to roll out crime fighting plan

Addressing the UNCs Monday Night Forum at the Tulsa Trace Hindu School in San Francique, Persad- Bissessar told party supporters no one was safe in the country and cited a video which was circulating on social media about a young woman who managed to escape an attempted abduction.

There is nobody in this land who would say otherwise that not one person is safe in Trinidad and Tobago, she said, adding, You know the last time I spoke I got a text message and I mentioned a kidnapping? Well I got criticisms from some quarters that I should not have said that but the fact is no one is safe in Trinidad and Tobago, no one.

But you see the Rowley government, they want to downplay the crime problem. Where are the policies and programmes to deal with before the crime happens? None. They are not even bringing any suggestions. Even the anti-gang legislation only kicks in after the crime has been committed. She told the enthusiastic crowd her party would not be relegated to a state of irrelevance during her watch as political leader.

The party that I intend to lead into the next government will be characterised by performance, it will be characterised by a citizen conscious culture, those who will be a part of our new government will have to demonstrate a willingness for intelligent hard work, for service, for building a governance that will be participatory governance.

You the people will have a more direct say in the choice of candidates for local government elections and general elections. She continued: We have a plan for economic recovery, we have a plan to fight crime, we have a plan for infrastructure development and we will be rolling those plans out to you in the coming weeks and months. She said government had already accumulated a debt of $57 billion dollars and was about to take a US $300 million loan from the Andean Development Bank.

They want to borrow and borrow where they will take what is known as the debt to GDP ratio to about 70 percent and they will have nothing to show for it, she said But the one thing you can see is the Tarouba stadium - a $1.3 billion dollar cowshed of shame.

The Tarouba stadium which took so many years and so many dollars later, not the childrens hospital, not the Debe campus, nothing to benefit the people of Trinidad and Tobago. She also called on government to come clean on their plan to wind up CL Financial, and I am asking tonight if this is designed to fire sale the assets to the one percent financiers. Persad-Bissessar also said the TT dollar had quietly depreciated in value with the exchange rate being just over seven to one on the Amazon website.

I heard the prime minister said some time ago in Parliament, he was multiplying by seven, so he admitted the exchange rate is no longer six something, it is now seven. If you go up on Amazon.

com they have the exchange rate as seven point something, so the TT dollar has devalued and depreciated quietly and nobody is saying anything about it.
PNM Tobago marks one year

Callendar said the executives first success was the 10-2 victory in the Tobago House of Assembly (THA) elections in January.

He said the executive recently concluded an in depth analysis of the THA election campaign and is now in a position to take the council forward.

Callendar said the council fully supports the efforts of THA Chief Secretary Kelvin Charles and other members of the Assembly, as they grapple with the challenging economic and social scenario at this time on the island. Callendar was confident that solutions on greater autonomy for Tobago; a lasting resolution to the air and sea challenges between Trinidad and Tobago and the regularisation of land titles in Tobago.

He congratulated former THA chief secretary Orville London and former THA deputy chief secretary Tracy Davidson Celestine on their respective diplomatic postings in the United Kingdom and Costa Rica. Callendar also welcomed Tobago East MP Ayanna Webster- Roy as the councils new lady vice chairman.

He expressed the councils sadness of the passing of former government minister Rennie Dumas earlier this year.
The education authority of a city in eastern Japan has apologised to a fourth grade boy and his family for verbal and physical abuse by his form teacher.

A male teacher in his 40s from a public elementary school had scolded the boy after class last Wednesday (July 12), said officials from the municipal board of education in Tokorozawa city in Saitama Prefecture.

He reportedly told the youngster to "jump out the window" and to "stop coming to school", according to NHK World, the international service of NHK, Japan's largest broadcasting organisation.

The scolding happened after a classroom scuffle reportedly involving the boy.

After the scolding of the boy, the teacher allegedly told the other children in the class: "Let's have fun with 33 members from tomorrow."

The class has 34 children, according to NHK World.

The boy has been absent from school since last Thursday.

Jul 19 (TomoNews Japan) - aYcZcaaacaa aaaaaaa4aacaacaaaa40aceaacaaeaeaSaaaaaaaeaaaaYaaaaaaaYa718aaaaeaaasaceaaYa
The number of tourists coming to Japan hit a record high in the first half of 2017. The Japan National Tourism Organization says more than 13.75 million people visited Japan in the 6 months.

That's up 17 percent from a year ago and the highest ever for the January-to-June period.

An increase in air routes between Japan and South Korea helped spur the rise. Cruise ships from China and Taiwan making port calls in Japan were another factor.

Visitor spending also reached an all-time high. For the most recent quarter, between April and June, the total was around 9.6 billion dollars.

But expenditure per traveler fell 6.7 percent from the same period last year to around 1,300 dollars.
An appeals court in Sale handed jail terms ranging from two-year imprisonment to life sentence to 23 individuals accused of killing 11 members of the Moroccan security forces during the dismantling of the Gdim Izik camp near Laayoune.

In 2013 a military court sentenced the defendants to jail terms ranging from 20 years to life imprisonment. Despite the fact that this trial respected international rules and regulations, Moroccan authorities decided to cancel the military tribunal sentences and referred the case to a civilian court following a recommendation made by the Moroccan national council of human rights.

In July 2016, the Court of Cassation ordered a civilian court to re-examine the case.

The court sentenced eight individuals to life in prison, while three received a sentence of 30 years in prison and five people were handed a 25-year jail sentence.

Three were handed 20-year prison sentence and two others received prison terms of six years and a half and four years and a half respectively. Two defendants who were on interim release were sentenced to two-year prison term.

The court also decided to drop the charge of forming a criminal gang against some of the accused while maintaining the charges of attacking security agents while performing their duties.

Several national and foreign observers and attorneys attended the proceedings in the Sale court before a civil magistrate, ensuring that the defendants get a fair trial.

Among the foreign observers who were present there were representatives of NGOs and human rights watchdogs from Germany, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland.

Bringing the Gdim Izik events before a civilian court has earned Morocco the praise of several international rights watchdogs, saying the move shows the North African Kingdoms attachment to the Rule of Law.

The families of the victims of Gdim Izik events had set up an association to defend the rights of the law enforcement agents who lost their lives on duty.

The association had said the retrial was an opportunity to highlight the sufferings endured by the victims families.

According to the news portal le360, the families of the victims said they were satisfied with the verdict and hoped they would win the case they lodged for indemnification for the serious prejudice they suffered.
Morocco is set to boost its footprint at the diplomatic and economic level in English-speaking African countries with the announcement of the opening of an Embassy of the Kingdom in Zambias capital, Lusaka, next September.

The news was unveiled during an official visit to Zambia by Secretary of State in charge of Foreign Affairs, Mounia Boucetta, who said that the Embassy willl help foster ties with Lusaka.

During her visit, Boucetta held talks with Zambian minister of Foreign Affairs, Harry Kalaba, on means to further strengthen cooperation relations between the two countries.

In a comment on her visit, Boucetta noted that Zambia, which remains a potential gateway to the Southern African region, shares with Morocco a common vision and willingness for the consolidation of peace, stability and respect for the sovereignty of states as well as for the promotion of democracy in our continent.

She added that Morocco is always ready to share with Zambia its experience in different fields to facilitate and develop bilateral exchanges in all areas of common interest.

In the same vein, Kalaba praised the visit paid last February by King Mohammed VI to Zambia, stressing that the many agreements signed during the royal visit have given a new impetus to relations between Morocco and Zambia.

He also voiced satisfaction with the results of the visit to Zambia by a Moroccan delegation led by Boucetta in order to take stock of the 19 partnership agreements signed during the royal visit to this African country.

During a meeting with the Moroccan delegation, Zambian Minister of Agriculture Dora Siliya called on Moroccan operators to invest in the fertilizer industry. She explained that Zambia, which remains a net importer of fertilizers, has continued to record increased crop production, and that investing in fertilizer manufacturing locally would help reduce the cost of crop production.

Last February, a Royal visit to Lusaka by King Mohammed VI set relations between the two countries on the track of progress and economic cooperation. The visit was marked by the signing of 19 political and economic partnership agreements covering air services, investment promotion and protection, finance and banking, insurance, education, tourism, and agriculture.

Zambia is the final step in an African tour by a Moroccan delegation, led by Boucetta, to Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania and Madagascar. The visit was meant to ensure the timely, effective and efficient implementation of the partnership agreements signed during the royal visits to these countries.
The Egyptian interior ministry Tuesday announced in a statement the killing of a prominent member of the Islamic State group (IS) in the Sinai after security forces clashed with militants in a raid in the city of Arish, north Sinai.

Ahmed Hassan Ahmed Al-Nashu, also known as Ghandur Al-Masri, was killed in a building under construction, in the raid, the statement noted.

He was killed in shootout with security forces. A second high profile member reportedly managed to flee. Ghandur Al-Masri was responsible for recruiting new members for Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis group, which pledged allegiance to IS in 2014. Masri was also responsible for operations against security forces, the ministry pointed out.

Egyptian security forces have been facing militancy from Islamists since 2013 following the removal of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi by General al-Sisi who was then defense minister.

Several security personnel have been killed in suicide attacks and coordinated gun attacks.

Earlier Tuesday, the interior ministry also announced the killing of two members of the Hasm militant group in a shootout near New Cairo. The members identified as Ahmed El-Bahnasawy and Emad El-Far were shot dead in police raid.

They are suspected of involvement in two deadly attacks in May against security forces, including a drive-by shooting in Cairos Nasr City that killed three policemen and injured five others.

The ministry also linked the suspects to a June bombing that killed a Central Security officer on Cairos Autostrad Road, as well as the 2016 attempted assassination of the Nasr City Criminal Court head judge Ahmed Abdel-Fotouh, Al Ahram media notes.
The 36th Turkey-EU Joint Consultative Committee kicked-off in Brussels on Tuesday with Ankara pressing for a full membership to the European body despite EU member states harsh criticism of its human rights record and political openness.

Turkeys European Union Affairs Minister Omer Celik urged the EU to support Turkey during this difficult period in the region by understanding the reasons for the fight against terrorism, by providing visa liberalization and especially by accelerating the accession process.

Negotiations have been ongoing for 12 years but reached their lowest point in 2007 over the disputed Cyprus territory that is under Turkish control.

After the closed door meeting with EUs permanent representation in Brussels, Celik said that Cyprus was discussed while admitting that the latest chance to arrive at a solution has been missed during the talks in Switzerland. Turkey is certainly on the side of the solution, he said, but rejected calls for Turkish troops to be withdrawn from the island at the beginning of talks. This is out of the question.

The Eastern Mediterranean Island has been divided since 1974 when a Greek Cypriot coup was followed by violence against the Turks on the island and Ankaras intervention as a guarantor power.

Turkeys ascension to the EU could further be complicated following the approval of a 2016 commission report on Turkey by the European Parliament in a non-binding vote. The report recommended that accession talks be suspended if Turkey upheld the then planned constitutional changesreforms that were approved a few months ago.

Berlin and Paris are also against granting full membership to Turkey.

Celik stressed that joining the EU is a strategic aim for the government as he criticized the double standard experienced during negotiations. Turkish and EU officials have had an exchange of words over reforms that Turkey wants to introduce, such as the death penalty, as well as the implementation of agreements signed between the two sides, especially the migrant deal.
Not it. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Now that it appears the Republican Partys seven-year crusade to repeal Obamacare and replace it with their own mysterious alternative is finally dead (for now, at least), the GOP is on the hunt for someone to scapegoat. As New Yorks Jonathan Chait argued, the real reason for Trumpcares defeat is that it was never possible to reconcile public standards for a humane health-care system with conservative ideology. Thats not an explanation you can present to voters, so for months Republicans have been trying to shift the blame for their health-care struggles, pointing at times to House Speaker Paul Ryan, the Freedom Caucus, moderate House Republicans, the Congressional Budget Office, and, of course, Democrats.

Though senators carefully avoided being labeled the Republican who saved Obamacare, conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt suggested true conservatives wont soon forget the list of defectors.

We know the list to blame. It's like #AryaStark list. And it just keeps getting longer: Heller, Johnson, then Collins and Paul, then Lee and https://t.co/HIBo1go3j2  Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) July 18, 2017

But ultimately, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was the one caught holding the hot potato (or in this case the widely hated bill that would have uninsured millions of Americans). McConnells reputation as a master tactician is a large part of the reason the bill got as far as it did. Speaker Ryan initially had to call off a vote on the American Health Care Act in the House, and when it passed in May several House members said they only voted for it on the assumption that the Senate would make it less horrible.

McConnell decided complete secrecy was the best approach to this process. He spent May and June crafting his bill behind closed doors, then unveiled legislation that looked like AHCA with an even less catchy name (the Better Care Reconciliation Act, or BCRA). While the impossibility of resolving conservative and moderate Republicans goals for the health-care system was the biggest obstacle to passage, McConnells underhandedness helped seal its fate. Shortly before senators Mike Lee and Jerry Moran came out against the bill, Republicans learned McConnell had been making wildly different claims about what BCRA would do, depending on whom he was talking to.

Senator Ron Johnson called this a breach of trust, and on Tuesday he wouldnt say if he would continue to support McConnell as speaker. I dont know whats going to happen moving forward, Johnson said, according to Politico. I didnt develop the process, lets put it that way.

The health bills failure has seriously damaged McConnells reputation and raised doubts about his ability to push through the rest of Trumps agenda, but the vast majority of Republican senators remain supportive.

And McConnell is not done maneuvering. Though it became even clearer on Tuesday that a straight repeal of Obamcare cant make it out of the Senate, McConnell said he intends to hold a vote anyway. As New Yorks Ed Kilgore explained, this is a way for McConnell to absolve himself from blame:

Most likely he wants to preempt any future conservative argument that he never intended to repeal Obamacare fully, and didnt even try it. And in particular, he wants to deflect any fire coming from the White House, which has been promoting the revived repeal-and-delay strategy in recent days. McConnell is also giving conservatives a shillelagh with which to beat Republican moderates who fail to go along with repeal, and perhaps even to mount primary challenges against them in 2018 or beyond. He understands that, like every GOP congressional leader, he holds his gavel at the sufferance of the right.

And what of that other figure in all this, the person who the GOP health-care plan is named for, despite his objections? President Trump said on Tuesday that hes disappointed, but made it very clear that he bears no responsibility for the failure of Trumpcare:

He also said his plan was now to let Obamacare fail, it will be a lot easier. And I think were probably in that position where well let Obamacare fail. Were not going to own it. Im not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. Well let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us.

The president appeared disengaged from the Senate health-care battle, which was McConnells doing. The majority leader reportedly said he could handle the job himself, and the White House trusted him because hes the Bizarro World Olivia Pope.

But even before the bill reached the Senate, Trump veered between inaction and actively thwarting efforts to draft a workable GOP health plan. And theres a difference between giving McConnell room to work and using what was ostensibly a dinner to discuss health-care strategy to regale senators who already supported the bill with tales from his trip to France. Per the Washington Post:

By Monday evening, when President Trump and Pence gathered a cluster of GOP senators in the Blue Room of the White House over plates of lemon ricotta agnolotti and grilled rib-eye steak, the measure was all but dead. The president talked about France and Bastille Day, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) said in an interview Tuesday, recalling the presidents tales during dinner of parades and pomp from his recent trip to Paris.

Daines described the groups conversation, which also touched on issues ranging from health care to the debt limit, as loose  as if Trump sat down and went out to dinner with friends, acquaintances, people you work with. It was just dinner to talk about whats going on.

Some White House staffers were willing to admit (without using their names) that theyd miscalculated on the health bill. When you stack a White House with people whove never worked in Washington, people who openly disdain Washington, youre basically trying to elevate people who dont understand Congress, dont understand how you make a law, one senior White House aide told the Daily Beast.

Politico reported that many White House aides appeared eager to move on from the health-care debate  but if someone needs to take the blame, they nominate White House chief of staff Reince Priebus:

He pushed health care first, one senior administration official told Politico in the weeks leading up to Monday evenings Senate blowup. He owns the outcome. Another senior West Wing aide noted dismissively that the goose was cooked with the first House bill  and that was Reince and his friends.

 The president  who for weeks has been calling around asking friends for advice about how to replace his chief of staff  did not immediately blame Priebus on Tuesday for the bills cratering. But White House aides say theres a broader sense that the former Republican National Committee chairman has failed to leverage his relationships on Capitol Hill, including his close friendship with Ryan  the main qualities that made him an attractive hire back in December  on Trumps behalf.

Priebus unwittingly illustrated this dynamic during a trip to Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

This photo, courtesy of @tedbarrettcnn: Reince Priebus ducking out of Senate lunch for a phone call, obscured by giant trash bin pic.twitter.com/hoD8QDOnvu  MJ Lee (@mj_lee) July 18, 2017

One person has reportedly turned down an offer to be Priebuss successor  and, presumably, the person lambasted for Trumps next legislative failure.
Thought criminals. Photo: Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

The state of Israel maintains a military occupation of territories that were assigned to Palestinians by international law. Palestinian residents of the occupied West Bank are subjected to the discriminatory rule of a foreign army, while their Israeli neighbors enjoy the full rights of citizenship  a situation that many former Israeli officials have likened to South African apartheid.

The United Nations has repeatedly held that Israels maintenance  and expansion  of settlements in the occupied West Bank constitutes a violation of international law. Nevertheless, the occupation persists, as it has for half a century. At present, there is no discernible, diplomatic path for bringing it to an end.

In light of these facts, some American citizens and businesses have decided to avoid purchasing goods that are produced by Israeli companies in the West Bank, in the hope that such a boycott might nudge the Jewish state into compliance with international law. Others avoid conducting business with entities located anywhere in Israel for similar reasons.

Reasonable people can object to this tactic. They may deride it as counterproductive, or disproportionate; or defend the occupation, itself, as a tragic necessity that safeguards the Middle Easts only advanced democracy.

Alternatively, if such people are U.S. senators, they can try to make avoiding the purchase of Israeli goods for political reasons a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Forty-three senators, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have decided to take the latter route. As the Intercept reports:

But now, a group of 43 Senators  29 Republicans and 14 Democrats  want to implement a law that would make it a felony for Americans to support the international boycott against Israel, which was launched in protest of that countrys decades-old occupation of Palestine. The two primary sponsors of the bill are Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland and Republican Rob Portman of Ohio. Perhaps the most shocking aspect is the punishment: anyone guilty of violating its prohibitions will face a minimum civil penalty of $250,000, and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison.

The proposed measure, called the Israel Anti-Boycott Act (S. 720), was introduced by Cardin on March 23. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that the bill was drafted with the assistance of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC]  The bills co-sponsors include the senior Democrat in Washington, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, his New York colleague Kirsten Gillibrand, and several of the Senates more liberal members, such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Maria Cantwell of Washington. Illustrating the bipartisanship that AIPAC typically summons, it also includes several of the most right-wing Senators such as Ted Cruz of Texas, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Marco Rubio of Florida.

A similar bill has already attracted 234 co-sponsors in the House.

The ACLU is not amused. In an official statement denouncing the bill, the civil-liberties group noted that businesses and individuals who do no business with Israel for purely pragmatic reasons would not be subject to criminal punishment  only those who do so on the basis of their political beliefs. Which is to say, the bill would punish businesses and individuals based solely on their point of view. Such a penalty is in direct violation of the First Amendment.

In the Intercepts account, the lawmakers supporting this bill arent necessarily comfortable with putting people in prison for the crime of allowing their beliefs about Israeli policy to dictate their consumption habits. Rather, many appear to have simply signed their names to a piece of legislation because AIPAC put it in front of them.

[S]ome co-sponsors seemed not to have any idea what they co-sponsored  almost as though they reflexively sign whatever comes from AIPAC without having any idea whats in it. Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, for instance, seemed genuinely bewildered when told of the ACLUs letter, saying whats the Act? Youll have to get back to me on that.

 Perhaps most stunning is our interview with the primary sponsor of the bill, Democratic Senator Benjamin Cardin, who seemed to have no idea what was in his bill, particularly insisting that it contains no criminal penalties.

Its understandable that our senators dont have time to read every bill they sponsor. These people have a lot on their plates. For example, on Tuesday, the Senate held hearings on the threat that campus protests pose to First Amendment rights in the United States.

Correction: An earlier version of this article suggested that senator Bob Menendez had told The Intercept that he had not read the anti-BDS bill. His office says that this quote was misrepresented, and that Menendez was referring to the ACLUs critique of the bill, not the legislation itself.
Rebels. Photo: New Syrian Army

President Trump has put an end to a covert CIA program that armed and trained rebel fighters in Syria, the Washington Post reports. The death of the program, which began in 2013, is seen both as an acknowledgement that Assad is unlikely to be removed from power and an indication of Trumps willingness to work with Russia in Syria.

Anonymous sources told the Post that Trumps decision was made nearly a month ago, before his bilateral meeting with Putin at the G20 summit in Germany. At that meeting, Trump and Putin brokered an agreement to support a ceasefire in parts of Syria near its borders with Jordan and Israel. The end of the CIA program was not a condition of the ceasefire, sources told the Post.

One anonymous official currently working in the government panned the decisions, telling the Post that Putin won in Syria. Another suggested that the end of the rebel training will make Syria more dangerous.

The apparent concession to Assad remaining in power comes just three months after Trump sought to punish him with airstrikes for using chemical weapons. Also in April, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Assad had no role in governing Syria and Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said theres no solution to the problem in Syria that involves Assad remaining in power.
Vladimir Putin talks with Melania Trump, before her husband cut in. Photo: Pool/Getty Images

One weird element of the Russia scandal is that President Trump doesnt seem to care about disproving the idea that hes too close to Russian president Vladimir Putin. While he once passionately insisted hes no puppet, now his administration will unabashedly mull returning seized Russian compounds in the U.S., and float the idea of a joint U.S.-Russia cybersecurity unit to prevent election hacking.

The latest example is Trumps decision to have a long private chat with Putin in view of many other world leaders. We learned Tuesday that after his first meeting with Putin, which took place at the G-20 summit in Germany on July 7, Trump approached Putin again during a dinner.

The first meeting lasted two hours and 45 minutes and was attended by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and two interpreters. Trump asked Putin if he meddled in the U.S. election (Putin said no) and they agreed to a cease-fire in Syria. The second talk reportedly lasted nearly an hour, but we dont know what was discussed because the only people involved were Trump, Putin, and Putins interpreter.

The chat occurred at a private dinner for G20 leaders and their spouses, which the press was not allowed to attend. The New York Times reports that more than halfway through the three-hour event, Trump left his chair and approached Putin, who was seated next to Melania Trump. Other leaders watched their animated conversation, but couldnt hear what they were saying. Trump and Putin were among the last to leave. According to pool reporters, Putins motorcade left at 11:50 p.m., and Trumps departed at 11:54 p.m.

Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a New Yorkbased research and consulting firm, broke the news of the second Trump-Putin meeting, which he said he heard about directly from people attending the dinner.

Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesnt care, Bremmer said. They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled.

The White House released a statement rejecting the idea that Putin and Trumps interaction constituted an undisclosed second meeting. They said that during the meal all the leaders circulated throughout the room and spoke with one another freely, and suggested Trump only spoke briefly with Putin. They said they used Putins translator because each couple was only allowed one translator, and the president chose a Japanese speaker because Trump was seated next to the wife of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe.

White House statement says Trump only spoke "briefly" to Putin at the dinner pic.twitter.com/83WjLuyxW3  Steve Lookner (@lookner) July 18, 2017

The president attacked the press explicitly:

Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

Why does the press think the American people need to know about every 55-minute chat between the president and a foreign leader who tried to hack our election?
Dohnald Trumps man in Russia. Photo: David Becker/Getty Images for National Clean

The White House announced on Tuesday that Jon Huntsman will be nominated as the U.S. ambassador to Russia, which is awkward for a number of reasons. First, theres the whole Russia-election-hacking scandal, which was highlighted again on Tuesday when it emerged that President Trump had an undisclosed meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Then theres Huntsmans personal history with Trump. As noted when reports emerged in March that the former Utah governor  who previously served as ambassador to Singapore and China  was headed to Moscow, Trump attacked Huntsman about a month after he ended his 2012 campaign:

Jon Huntsman called to see me. I said no, he gave away our country to China! @JonHuntsman  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 9, 2012

Huntsman endorsed Trump for president in 2016, only to call on him to drop out of the race when the Access Hollywood video emerged.

Finally, the Trump administration found a way to make the announcement even more uncomfortable: spelling Huntsmans name wrong in the statement announcing his nomination.

Inbox: Trump officially nominates Huntsman as Ambassador to Russia pic.twitter.com/OuhLaKjkO5  Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) July 18, 2017

To be fair, sometimes its hard to remember whos a John and whos a Jon  but different spellings of his name within the same paragraph probably should have raised some flags.
This Don Jr. meeting is like that Coolio video where the people keep coming out of the trunk.

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YES. I always loved that mv when I was a kid.

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omg I completely forgot about this video. So much nostalgia.

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Omg this is making me nostalgic

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LMAO *BOPS*

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Throwback jam. <3

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The US Babushka doll

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This comment is gold

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I can.

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He's a vile piece of shit. I hope he loses all of his money!

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it's especially crazy because if he did fix the parts of the ACA he doesn't like then he could ~re-brand it to his followers and still be the savior they all think he is.

he's too much of a bb to do his job.

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cruel AF. like thats some devil shit

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He is such trash. His comeuppance can't come soon enough. I really hope his cunt daughter Ivunka suffers.

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Petty in Chief.

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it just makes my blood icy to think someone who's supposed to care about so many people can blatantly not and actually be in power

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I'm so fucking tired of this fucking country NOT DOING SHIT ABOUT THIS FUCKING TRAITOR!

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Mte, sis...mte.



I always thought Russian collusion would be the one step too far for either party. Apparently I thought wrong.

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THIS! I don't care about celeb reactions when it comes to this. I just want to hear that he's out of the WH and in prison.

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Mueller, bb. Slow and steady.

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actually doing something about it will take the Mueller investigation and flipping congress in 2018 :-/ what pisses me off is that the gop have zipped their mouths shut and arent calling trump and his admin out on their shady shit.

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fucking really. proves money really runs this country

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Agent orange is so crooked. And nothing will come of this. Republicans ain't shit and don't aspire to be shit.

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some repubs need to finally get on board with impeaching him cause damn he's throwing some of them under the bus lmao. i know they wont but lol have some dignity! this fool is kinda calling yall fools? and you still stick by him while getting nothing accomplished?????

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right they aren't even accomplishing the major thing the 2016 election was about lmao

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The 2016 election wasn't about Obamacare. It was about racism and misogyny.

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but they're getting paid in IOUs why would they want to do anything??

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grass is green

water is wet

more than four ppl were in the meeting

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you'd think all of the people who hated russia 30 years ago in the cold war would be up in arms about this but where the fuck are they

they probably voted for trump because they are stupid fucks

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This this this



If youd told me back when Gorbachev was doing Pizza Hut ads and Yeltsin was dancing in an alcoholic stupor on stage during an election campaign that in 25 years the Russians would take over US political life like this and using REAGAN stans no less I would have laughed in your face.



And yet here we are



/



.....but Jane Fonda



....but her emails

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don has the tea on trump

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sketch

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We're so dead lol

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Not before fucking Rainbow comes out or Star Wars EP8/9.

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They are so incompetent that I wonder if they can walk and chew gum at the same time. There is absolutely no reason why they shouldn't have disclosed this meeting as soon as it happened because if they had, I doubt anyone would be suspicious. They had to be pressured into releasing it. They claim there is no collusion with the Russians yet everytime we turn our heads, there they are, in bed with the russians. Jesus Christ!!!!

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honestly if you work in the medical field and voted for this man then shame the fuck on you



Edited at 2017-07-19 12:52 am (UTC)

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I work in the medical field and know at least a couple people who did. But they're fucking idiots so it wasn't really surprising, unfortunately.

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all the doctors trash him where I work and I know bc one of them called him "loco". one of the few words I know in Spanish!

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My aunt is a retired nurse and she voted for him. But she also thinks universal healthcare is literally slavery to nurses and doctors (yet my uncle who is a doctor is all for it). She went on this whole rant about "Everyone is so mad about Trump but how has your life REALLY changed since he's been elected? It hasn't." And now she's all "Well I'm on Medicare now, so I don't actually care what happens with the healthcare bill because I'm covered." She doesn't realize that Trump/Repubs plan to dismantle Medicare and social security. Then she'll really be fucking sorry. I'm on Medicare and disability and I'm terrified.



God, it took everything I had to keep my mouth shut. My step-dad ended up arguing with her for awhile though, so major props to him lol.

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I work for female dentist who I found out this week voted for Trump and I just can't look at her the same.

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i know some doctors who are only doctors to be rich and they're anti universal healthcare because they think their salaries will go down :/

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I know someone who works at a refugee center (in a city where the refugee intake has significantly contributed to keeping them from collapse these last 20 years) that voted for him.



There's no bounds to ignorant idiots.

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I'm a nurse and met another nurse that did. Our benefits suck, so she's on Covered California (basically the ACA for California). IDGI

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Why wouldnt medical professionals who are Big Pharma and insurance shills be pro-Trump?

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SAME

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I'm low-key angry about Republican inaction now but I know it'll kick into high gear in 2018 when I start seeing political ads where those hypocrites talk about their love of country.

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Republicans are coming out against repeal of Obamacare as well

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see they are soooo dumb to come out with "repeal now...replace eventually" right now. like if you couldnt get all repubs on board with the shit bill, that their constituents hate, how the fuck are you gonna get them on board with the repeal thats 10x worse???? like omg the insanity is mind blowing

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McConnell assumed because they all voted for that bill in 2015, they should vote for it now. and I'm thinking to myself: Does this idiot know that it's no longer 2015 and Obama is no longer in office and the republicans run the government?

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I can't say I typically wish Reagan were still alive but in this case, I wish he were. He'd most likely be the one person conservative voters would listen to about Russia. His head would be fucking spinning.

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I can't believe it either, but I'm right there with you. I simply cannot wrap my mind around all these diehard chest-beating, gun-totin', Bible-thumpin' real true so-called 'Murricans are bending all kinds of backwards to defend Russia.



RUSSIA.



What the hell kind of Twilight Zone realness...

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Love the red text 

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because they're uneducated burdens on society that think that russia is some kind of macho christian utopia where vodka comes out of every water tap, everyone is assigned a rank within some paramilitary group, guns are god, and life is a game of COD set in a land of milk and caucasian honeys... the implosion of the deeply flawed white american male ego has truly been a vile splendor to witness...

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Nah fuck Reagan. He'd support trump because he's the dingleberry not far from Trump on satan's butthole.

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Trump is everything Reagan supported so no.



Edited at 2017-07-19 01:27 am (UTC)

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Fusion is the epitome of high risk, high reward scientific research.

If we were to ever successfully harness the forces that power the stars, mankind could have access to power that is almost literally too cheap to meter. However, as Visual Capitalist's Nick Routley notes, reaching that goal will be a very expensive, long-term commitment  and its also very possible that we may never achieve a commercially viable method of fusion power generation.

How Fusion Works

Fusion involves heating nuclei of atoms  usually isotopes of hydrogen  to temperatures in the millions of degrees. At extreme temperatures, atoms are stripped of their electrons and nuclei move so quickly that they overcome their mutual repulsion, joining together to form a heavier nucleus. This process gives off massive amounts of energy that investors and researchers hope will propel mankind into an era of cheap and abundant electricity, but without the downsides of many other forms of energy.

I would like nuclear fusion to become a practical power source. It would provide an inexhaustible supply of energy, without pollution or global warming.

 Stephen Hawking, award-winning theoretical physicist

Stars are so large that fusion occurs naturally in their cores  but here on Earth, were trying a number of complex methods in the hopes of replicating that process to achieve positive net energy.

The Cost of Bottling a Star

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), an experimental reactor currently being built in the south of France, will house the worlds largest ever tokamak  a doughnut-shaped reactor that uses a powerful magnetic field to confine plasma. Construction of the facility began in 2013 and is expected to cost 20 billion upon completion in 2021.

(Click to enlarge)

Source: Visual Capitalist

Research organizations see ITER as a crucial step in realizing fusion. Though the facility is not designed to generate electricity, it would pave the way for functional reactors. Related: Kuwait: Oil Market To Balance By March, No Deeper Cuts Needed

Competition is Heating Up

There are some who claim that the bureaucracy of government-funded labs is hampering the process. As a result, there is a pack of private companies, fueled by high-profile investors, looking to make commercially-viable fusion into a reality.

Tri Alpha, a company in southern California, is hoping their method of spinning magnetized plasma inside a containment vessel will be a lower-cost method of power generation than ITER. In 2015, they held super-heated hydrogen plasma in a stable state for 5 milliseconds, which is a huge deal in the world of fusion research. The company has attracted over $500 million in investment in the past 20 years, and has the backing of Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen.

Helion Energy, located in Redmond, Washington, believes they are only a few years away from creating nuclear fusion that can be used as a source for electricity. Their reaction is created by colliding two plasma balls made of hydrogen atom cores at one million miles per hour. Helion Energys ongoing research is funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energys ARPA-E program, which the Trump administration slated for elimination. Thankfully, Helion still counts Peter Thiels Mithril Capital and Y Combinator as supporters

General Fusion, located in Burnaby, B.C., is taking a different approach. Their piston-based reactor is designed to create energy bursts lasting thousandths of seconds, rather than a sustained plasma reaction. Heat recovered bursts would be used to generate electricity much like nuclear power plants, minus the long-term radioactive waste. General Fusion has attracted millions of dollars in funding, including investment from Bezos Expeditions and the Business Development Bank of Canada.

Time Horizon

Though commercially viable fusion is still a long way off, each new technological breakthrough brings us one step closer. With such a massive payoff for success, research will likely only increase as we get closer to bottling a star here on Earth

(Click to enlarge)

Source: Visual Capitalist

By Zerohedge.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Arctic oil drilling may be controversial and expensiveand is generally not a top priority in the energy industrybut Italys energy major Eni begs to differ. The company last week received approval for its drilling plans in the Beaufort Sea from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and plans to start drilling at the end of this year.

Eni still needs to obtain other approvals on the state and federal level before drilling begins, but media covering the news note that once the BOEM gives a company the green light, other approvals come easily.

Enis leases for the Arctic waters off the Alaskan coast date back a decade, but the Obama administrations did not look kindly on Arctic oil and gas exploration. This changed with Trumps coming into power in January with a top priority of expanding the U.S. energy industry. A review of Enis leases started in March, and according to media, approval has been quick. Yet some challenges remain.

Environmentalists have slammed the approval, arguing that it was granted too quickly, leaving too little time for comments from the public, especially regarding the environmental review that is required by federal law. Opposition is bound to grow as Eni moves closer to the start of drilling operations before its leases expire at the end of 2017. The Center for Biological Diversity, for one, plans to fight the drilling approval.

Separately, Alaska lawmakers this weekend approved a change in the state oil production tax that will cancel cash disbursements to energy companies active in the state for new discoveries they make. The bill still needs to be signed by the governor, but there isnt much doubt that this will happen, since Governor Bill Walker supported many of the changes it proposes. Related: Ecuador Abandons The OPEC Deal: Whos Next?

This move has had the industry worried that motivation for new discoveries will wane, especially given that the environment in the Arctic is much harsher than elsewhere and exploration is already costlier. On the other hand, the Arctic waters around Alaska are estimated to contain a wealth of oil and gas, still untapped, and the approval of Enis exploration plans for the area might prompt other energy companies to reconsider their Arctic plans.

Arctic exploration seems to be high on Enis agenda. The Italian company is the operator of the Goliat field in the Norwegian section of the Barents Sea, which started production last year and is slated to pump 100,000 bpd. Earlier this year, Eni signed a cooperation agreement with Russias Rosneft that will focus on exploration in the Russian part of the Barents Sea.

The foray into the Arctic, however, has not been cloudless. The Goliat field went into operation after a costly two-year delay, and since its launch, several incidents such as power outages and gas leaks have taken away from the potential advantages of the project.

Environmental opposition to Arctic drilling is already strong because of the sensitivity of Arctic ecosystems and the specific challenges present in dealing with an oil spill there. This opposition is only likely to intensify further after Washingtons opening up of parts of the Arctic shelf for oil and gas drilling. With the high cost of drilling in the Arctic and possible obstacles that various opponents can put in its way, the profitability is in question. Still, Eni seems to be ready to stick to its priorities even though its doing much better than some of its peers in the reserves replacement department: as of end-2016, its reserves replacement ratio was a healthy 139 percent.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
The blockade of Qatar could persist for quite a long time, according to the foreign minister of the UAE, who insisted that the Gulf States that have imposed the punitive barricade are not looking for a quick fix.

The UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash told Bloomberg earlier this week that the blockade would be in place for weeks, monthsas long as it takes them to realize that this is not a crisis that we are looking for a quick fix. This is a crisis that we want to get to the bottom of, and we want to take away Qatars huge, huge support for this extremism and terrorism that we are seeing everywhere.

Despite the bluster, the blockade for the past month and a half has not gone according to plan. Qatar has still been able to import food and other necessities, while its exports of oil and gas have gone on uninterrupted. Moreover, the blockade by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt has not succeeded in isolating Qatar. In fact, Qatar has grown closer to Turkey and Iran, a development the Gulf States were hoping to avoid.

"As with their disastrous war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the UAE radically overstated their prospects for success and failed to have a plausible plan B in case things did not go to plan," wrote Marc Lynch, of George Washington University, according to the Washington Post. "The anti-Qatar quartet seems to have overestimated Qatari fears of isolation from the GCC and their own ability to inflict harm on their neighbor."

The U.S. government has been trying to lower the temperature in the region and help resolve the crisis diplomatically, U.S. President Donald Trumps vocal attacks on Qatar notwithstanding. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson shuffled between Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia last week to mediate, and while it wasnt initially clear that he had come away with anything concrete, the U.S. and Qatar did sign an agreement to combat terrorism financing, a move that would seem to offer the Gulf States some consolation while also simultaneously taking away a bit of their leverage. Related: U.S. May Halt Oil Imports From Venezuela

On Tuesday, the Gulf States revised their demands against Qatar, a sign that international pressure is starting to wear on them. The original 13 demands have been trimmed to just 6, which no longer include the shuttering of Qatar-based news outlet Al-Jazeera. But Gulf officials scrambled to maintain an appearance of resolve and strength after the revision. Of course we are all for compromise but there will be no compromise on these six principles, said Abdallah Al-Mouallimi, Saudi ambassador to the U.N., according to the Wall Street Journal.

Qatar feels that it won the initial round against the Gulf States in the court of international opinion. Its not because they are showing a sign of good faith as much as responding to the heat they received for the unreasonable demands they initially made, Qatars ambassador to the UN said on Tuesday, the WSJ reported.

Qatar has maintained that the blockade will have a minimal impact on its export of oil and gas. "Despite the illegal siege currently enforced on Qatar, [it] has never failed a single shipment and has not compromised on its longstanding image of being a reliable supplier of energy to all corners of the world," Qatars energy and industry minister Mohammed al-Sada said earlier this month at an industry conference.

If anything, the blockade has spurred Qatar to get more aggressive about its production levels. In early July, Qatar announced plans to ramp up natural gas production by 30 percent over the next few years. It is soliciting interest for an expansion of the massive North field, which stretches into Iranian waters (where it is known South Pars). Also, French oil giant Total SA just began work on a Qatari oil field. We arent reluctant to invest in Qatar, Totals CEO Patrick Pouyanne said a few weeks ago. We are here to make profits.

What remains to be seen is how the standoff affects compliance with the OPEC cuts. Qatar is not a major oil producer, but has cooperated with its regional rivals within OPEC to restrain output, posting high compliance rates. However, earlier this week, Ecuador, another OPEC member, announced that it would no longer adhere to the groups cuts because of the financial burden of doing so. The blockade of Qatar could yet push the Persian Gulf nation to also pull out of the agreement. At that point, it would be just a matter of time before the whole thing started to unravel.

However, that is still speculation at this point. Qatar is still complying with its commitments and has not seen oil and gas shipments interrupted. But with the promise from the Gulf States to keep the blockade up for a long period of time, compliance through March 2018 is not guaranteed.

By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Two Saudi teachers are standing trial in Saudi Arabia on charges that they have allegedly spied for arch-rival Iran in gathering information about a 5-million-bpd oil pipeline for the purposes of planning to blow it up, Reuters reported on Wednesday, quoting two Saudi newspapers.

According to the Makkah and Al Weeam newspapers, as carried by Reuters, the two men are charged with collecting information about the East-West Pipeline in Saudi Arabia, known as Petroline, which ships crude oil from the desert Kingdoms eastern provinces to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, to be exported to North America and Europe. The Petroline can handle up to some 60 percent of Saudi Arabias total oil exports.

According to Makkah newspaper, the Public Prosecutor at the Specialized Criminal Court has asked the judge in the trial to issue a verdict, but the judge allowed the defendants to defend themselves in another hearing and gave them three weeks to do that. The charges by the prosecutor include spying for Iran and feeding it secret information about the Petroline to destabilize Saudi Arabia, according to the Saudi newspapers.

In February last year, Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia put on trial 32 peoplealmost all of whom are members of the Shia minorityaccused of spying for Iran. In December, a court sentenced 15 of the defendants to death, and another 15 to prison terms of between six months and 25 years. In that case, Saudi prosecutors had charged the defendants with treason, with creating a spy ring, and with providing secret information on military zones. Amnesty International slammed that trial and verdicts, saying that Saudi Arabias sentencing of 15 people to death today after a grossly unfair trial is a travesty of justice.

The entire legal proceedings in this case have made a mockery of justice, Samah Hadid, Deputy Director for Campaigns at Amnesty Internationals Beirut office, said back then.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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SC pointedly inquired about Nawaz Sharif foregin properties money trail

A day after the Supreme Court (SC) pointedly inquired about Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's money trail, the premier's counsel reiterated that his client had presented details of all his assets to the joint investigation team (JIT) that was mandated to probe allegations of money laundering against the Sharif family.



Senior counsel Khawaja Harris on Wednesday told the three-member apex bench, headed by Justice Ejaz Afzal and comprising Justice Sheikh Azmat Saeed and Justice Ijazul Ahsan, that the prime minister had provided details of all assets and sources of income in the form of tax returns.



We will take a decision after looking at all the evidence, Justice Ejaz Afzal told Harris as he completed his arguments before the bench. Bring the [money trail] record and the discussion on the documents will end.



Have you also brought a Qatari letter with you? Justice Azmat Saeed asked Finance Minister Ishaq Dar's lawyer as he began his arguments before the bench.



The lawyer's defence bore similarities to the arguments presented by Harris, as he told the court that the JIT had exceeded its mandate. An objection to the JITs report was included in the documents submitted to the apex court on Dars behalf on Monday.



If you have a lot of objections, you should go to the trial court, Justice Azmat Saeed remarked.



During his arguments on Wednesday morning, Harris said that according to the laws of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), "an individual cannot be held accountable for the properties and assets that are in the name of his wife and children." He added that the PM's relatives had also not concealed any assets.



In reference to the judges' observation that the PM had remained evasive in answering the questions put forward by the JIT, Harris responded that the team had not inquired about any other properties, maintaining that his client had not concealed any assets, nor did he own any benami properties.



The real question is where did the money for [the Sharif familys] properties in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and London come from?Justice Ijazul Ahsan remarked. We have not yet received an answer to this fundamental question.



The judges told the lawyer that Chapter Four (Gulf Steel Mills/Gifts) of the JITs report contains dangerous documents and talks about the trust deed of the four Avenfield flats in Londons Park Lane neighbourhood, executed between Maryam Nawaz and Hussain Nawaz in February 2006, which was declared false by the JIT in its report over.



Harris told the bench that the PM, when asked about the trust deed by the JIT, had acknowledged that he was aware of the settlement, but did not know the details. He added that his client can only be held accountable for the properties under his name, maintaining that the PM has no connection to the London flats.



Are there any records available with Hassan and Hussain Nawaz that can prove that the PM does not have any connection with the London flats? asked Justice Ejaz Afzal.



If Hussain is the beneficial owner of the flats, then proof for the same should be provided, he remarked, noting that in the documents received by the court, Maryam Nawaz is shown as the beneficial owner.



The connection between the PM and the London flats is based on speculation. There are no documents available to prove this, the lawyer said.



Why do you keep insisting that all the records are available? Justice Ijazul Ahsan asked the lawyer, directing him to show the documents relating to the agreement signed with Minerva Financial Services Limited  the holding company for Nescoll Limited and Nielson Enterprises Limited, the owners of the four London flats  to ascertain who signed them.



During Tuesday's hearing, the apex bench had asked about the PM's money trail, saying, "We've been waiting for it since day one." The prime minister and his family members had remained evasive in answering the questions put forward by the JIT, added the judges.



The bench had reminded the PM's lawyer that the onus of establishing a money trail after claiming ownership of the Avenfield flats was on the Sharif family, adding that the money trail of the flats "remained shrouded in mystery  even to this day."



The apex bench had also asked the counsel point-blank whether the judges should form their own opinion over the concealment of facts by his client or refer the matter to an accountability court.



Harris had argued that the JIT had exceeded its mandate by recommending the SC to reopen 15 cases against his client. He also questioned the authenticity of the documents obtained from the UK and the UAE that were included in the JIT's report.



The bench had resumed the Panamagate case on Monday, nearly three months after ordering the formation of a JIT to investigate the allegations of money laundering against the Sharif family.
Our company is able to offer wood pellets.
FUJIFILM Corporation Announces Results from Phase II Clinical Trial of "T-817MA" in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease in the United States

Details Category: Small Molecules Published on Wednesday, 19 July 2017 18:04 Hits: 1316

TOKYO, Japan I July 19, 2017 I FUJIFILM Corporation (TOKYO: 4901) (President: Kenji Sukeno) announced that the companys Alzheimers Disease drug T-817MA, did not meet its primary study endpoints of cognition or global clinical function in its Phase II clinical trial conducted in the United States on patients with mild to moderate Alzheimers Disease (AD). There were no significant differences in secondary outcomes. In exploratory analyses, change of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarker phospho-tau (p-Tau) benefited from the higher dose treatment while hippocampal*1 volumes decreased less in the lower doses group with statistical significance. Post hoc analyses also suggested T-817MA treatment with shorter duration of illness and symptoms was associated with better cognitive outcomes with statistical significance. Fujifilm will review the results of the Phase II clinical trial with regulatory authorities including FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) and will take necessary steps toward further development including Phase III clinical trial of this compound.

A pre-clinical research, led by Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, and Vice-Chair of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, revealed that T-817MA acts on microglia*2 that have a risk gene for AD and promotes the clearance of amyloid- (A).

These results suggest that T-817MA may act on p-Tau and A, major causal substances in AD.

ADs main symptoms are abnormalities in cognitive functions, including memory. It is believed that abnormality of neurological functions in AD manifests as a result of A protein deposits (senile plaques) in the brain. The progression of the disease has strong association with the formation of abnormal assemblies caused by hyperphosphorylation and fibrillization of tau proteins, found in the axons of nerve cells (neurofibrillary tangle), synapse*3 loss and atrophy of the brain including hippocampus.

The number of people suffering from dementia is estimated to be 44 million around the world. The number is projected to increase to 76 million by 2030 with the aging of the world population. Over half of these dementia cases suffer from AD, and the trend is set to continue.

AD drugs currently available on the market include acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, such as donepezil hydrochloride. As these drugs address the deficit in neurotransmission to give temporary improvement to the patients' symptoms, there is an unmet need for a new class of therapies to treat AD.

T-817MA is an AD drug discovered by the Fujifilm Group company, Toyama Chemical. It has potent neuroprotective effect and promotes neurite outgrowth through the activation of sigma receptors*4, demonstrating strong efficacy in animal models.Fujifilm is committed to further accelerating the development of T-817MA under possible partnerships, and contributing to resolving social challenges through the delivery of innovative pharmaceutical products. *1 Hippocampus is a region of the cerebrum, associated with memory. AD causes neuronal loss, which results in hippocampal atrophy. *2 Microglia are a type of glia cells, which are component of the central nervous system. Microglia provide immune defense in the brain, while also being involved in repairing abnormal neural cells, and eliminating the aggregated A. At the same time, excessively activated microglia are known to play a role in neuro-degeneration in the central nervous system. *3 Synapse is a structure connecting neurons, allowing them to pass electrical signals to convey information between them. *4 Sigma receptors are protein that exists on the membrane of endoplasmic reticulum in cells, and have the function of mitigating neuro-degeneration in the central nervous system.

SOURCE: Fujifilm
GLENS FALLS  Residents disappointed that Price Chopper is closing its store at Cooper Street and Dix Avenue can take heart in the companys plans for marketing the site.

As soon as we close the store, we are going to start marketing it, said Mona Golub, Price Choppers vice president of public relations and consumer services. We are certainly not going to let it sit fallow. We want to sell the site.

The store is scheduled to close July 29. It employs 33 people, all of whom have been offered jobs at other local Price Chopper or Market 32 stores.

The 2-acre site, along a busy street, is assessed at $1.1 million.

Golub said the company would have no problem with selling it to a company that wanted to keep it as a grocery store.

There is a need there, but perhaps not as a full-service grocery store. Maybe as more of a convenience-type store.

The Cooper Street store is the only Price Chopper in Glens Falls, but the company has a supercenter on Glen Street in Queensbury.

The Cooper Street store opened in 1962 and has been an institution in the citys East End.

The company, which runs 134 Price Chopper and Market 32 grocery stores in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, recently opened two new Market 32 stores in Fort Edward and Clifton Park and is converting numerous other stores to the Market 32 brand.

Ed Bartholomew, president of the Warren County Economic Development Corp., said his group is continuing discussions with Price Chopper about the sale, the price of the property and other issues.

One of the things we were wondering about was whether there would be a moratorium on selling it as a grocery store. Sometimes, you will see banks do that for a period of time, Bartholomew said after Tuesdays EDC board of directors meeting. I just need to get final confirmation on that.

Bartholomew noted Price Chopper has closed other similar stores. He said the company has also announced the closing of their store in Lee, Massachusetts, effective at the end of this month, and closed its North Adams, Massachusetts, store last year.

The Glens Falls store is less than 19,000 square feet, and the smallest Market 32 store the company has opened is 40,000 square feet, Golub said.

Just as we do a market analysis on deciding whether to convert to a Market 32, we scrutinize the financials on other stores as well, she said. It is something we have to do.

A petition calling for Price Chopper to keep the store open has gathered 265 signatures. The petition is at www.ipetitions.com/petition/saving-price-chopper-006.

Most grocery chains in the region have much larger stores than the Cooper Street site, but one chain that does run smaller stores is Tops Markets. Tops has its headquarters in Williamsville (Erie County) and employs more than 15,000 people at 173 supermarkets (five more are run by franchisees under the Tops banner) in New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Massachusetts.

In this area, Tops stores are located in Corinth, Warrensburg, Chestertown, Bolton Landing and Hoosick Falls.

Officials at Tops did not return a telephone call for comment on interest in the Glens Falls site, but the company continues to expand, recently opening a new store in Angola (Erie County), at a site previously occupied by a Shurefine grocery store.
Warren County has experienced a significant rise in suspected heroin overdoses this year, with nine people dying so far in 2017  more than double the total reported for all of 2016.

So far this year, 11 people who died of suspected overdoses were brought to Glens Falls Hospital, where the Warren County Coroners Office handled the death certificates and requests for autopsies. Nine of them were from Warren County, one from Washington County and one from an unspecified county, Warren County Undersheriff Shawn Lamouree said.

State Department of Health statistics show four opioid overdose deaths in Warren County for all of 2016, although Warren County Coroner Terry Comeau said that figure will likely increase as toxicology tests, pending for some deaths in 2016, are received.

I expect that number will rise, Comeau said.

Lamouree said the overdose deaths were discussed at a recent meeting of the Hometown vs. Heroin Coalition. It was unclear whether the deaths were all attributed to heroin, or could involve the more powerful, synthetic opioid Fentanyl, which has been found locally in recent months.

Hudson Falls Police Detective Scott Gillis, who works as part of the regional drug task force, said there has not been any indication of stronger or more pure heroin making its way to local users in recent months.

David Saffer, executive director of The Council for Prevention in Hudson Falls, said drug overdoses are tough to track for a number of reasons, and are typically under-reported to authorities. Sometimes, police or emergency medical responders arent called.

Washington County Undersheriff John Winchell said the opioid antidote Narcan is now available to the public, so police likely arent being called to as many non-fatal overdoses, as family members or loved ones administer Narcan.

Lamouree said a coalition member who tracks private Narcan distribution estimated there had been 35 Narcan uses in Warren County so far this year.

I can say I do not see much of a decrease (in overdoses), Saffer said of the recent trend.

No matter the final numbers, local police and EMS providers continue to deal with opioid overdoses at a shocking pace, despite efforts made in recent years by the Hometown vs. Heroin coalition and others involved in law enforcement and treatment.

At the request of The Post-Star, local police and the Glens Falls Fire Department tracked overdose calls for the month of June. The fire department, which provides emergency medical services in Glens Falls, dealt with three overdoses, while police in Warren and Washington counties responded to at least five drug overdose calls, with no apparent fatalities.

Overdoses were reported in Glens Falls, Warrensburg, Lake George, Cambridge and Salem.

Winchell said the three overdose calls in June seemed about average for a month.

And July has picked up where June left off, as sheriffs officers in Washington County have responded to two overdose calls so far this month, including one where two men in a vehicle had been incapacitated by heroin.

The men were both unconscious in the parked car on July 12 in Kingsbury when Washington County sheriffs officers arrived. Police immediately suspected heroin overdoses and began administering the opioid antidote Narcan.

It took eight doses of the drug to reverse the effects, which was notable to Winchell. Typically, one to two doses is all that is needed. Gillis said Hudson Falls Police also responded to an overdose last week.

Despite the continuing run of overdoses and deaths, Saffer said he is optimistic progress is being made by the local organizations that have taken aim at the heroin and prescription painkiller problem.

People are talking about it, people are concerned about it, and new programs are being put in place, he said.

It really has touched every level of society, Lamouree said.
GLENS FALLS  Glens Falls Hospital will use $19.95 million, the largest grant in hospital history, to create a medical village that will dramatically change the face of the hospital and how it takes care of patients.

The grant will fund the construction of a comprehensive outpatient health facility, including a new emergency department, on the west side of the hospital in an area currently used for parking.

The building where the current emergency department exists will be torn down, and that area will be used to replace the built-over parking area.

This is a transformational event for Glens Falls Hospital, for Glens Falls and for the five counties that we serve, hospital President and CEO Dianne Shugrue said at a Wednesday afternoon press conference. This is huge for us, and we are thankful, humbled and thrilled. This award recognizes Glens Falls Hospital as a major health organization in the region. There were a lot of competing applications.

The funding was announced Tuesday by Gov. Amdrew Cuomo as part of the state Department of Healths Statewide Health Care Facility Transformation Program. Shugrue said the hospital had sought similar grants in four previous years.

Planning to be done

The designs for the building, a total project cost and a completion date have not yet been determined, but Shugrue said the state mandates the money be spent within three years.

We have not dotted all the is and crossed all the ts yet, she said. There are a couple of different scenarios.

At 30,000 square feet, the building will cover the space of a mid-size grocery store, and while the grant will pay for a one-story building, Shugrue said the hospital will look at its funding sources and its master plan to see if additional floors could be possible.

The medical village concept focuses on bringing together a wide range of outpatient medical services in one location. It is also designed for easier access and coordination of patient care and making it easier for health-care providers to communicate with each other.

One of the most important aspects of the new facility is that it will offer wrap-around services for patients who come to the emergency department needing detoxification from drugs or alcohol.

The new facility will also allow for urgent care and primary care, something the current emergency department is not equipped to do.

We have people coming into the emergency department who do not have a primary care physician, and this way we can get them the care they need, Shugrue said, noting the new building will also have telemedicine facilities that will cut back on the need to transport patients.

The Statewide Health Care Facility Transformation Program is intended to strengthen and protect continued access to health care services in communities throughout New York state. Funding for these grants was authorized in the last two state budgets. In all, the state awarded $491 million in hospital improvements and projects as part of the program.

Tremendously gratified

At its core, Shugrue said, the project will increase the quality of care and decrease its cost.

We will be matching the patient with the care they need, so we can give better care to the patient at a lower cost to the patient, she said. It makes the health-care system more efficient.

Shugrue said she felt the hospital was able to get the grant because it presented the kind of overall care program the state was looking for.

A lot of people talk about the medical village. Its the new buzzword, she said. I think we had the right idea about providing the right care at the right time in the right place. Everybody is experimenting with the best way to take care of patients within the system.

We are tremendously gratified that the state has the confidence in us to give us this grant, Shugrue said.

The expansion will also give the hospital a chance to make other, necessary changes, Shugrue said.

We want to shrink the campus as much as we can, which will make us more efficient, Shugrue said. We have some buildings that are 100 years old, and the newest construction we have had is the northwest tower.
QUEENSBURY  A Pennsylvania man was killed Wednesday afternoon on Route 9 after falling off his motorcycle and into the path of an oncoming dump truck, police said.

The Warren County Sheriffs Office identified the victim as 49-year-old Peter J. Connor. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The crash happened shortly after 3 p.m. near the Route 149 intersection.

According to police, Connor and Robert H. Lafferty Jr., 55, also of Pennsylvania were traveling together when Connor changed lanes abruptly, causing an impact between the two motorcycles that sent both vehicles sliding sideways across the highway. Connors bike slid across into the southbound lane, and was struck by the truck.

Lafferty Jr. was sent to Glens Falls Hospital for minor injuries. The dump truck carried Caitlyn E. Kasuba, 17, of Salem and two passengers, none of whom were harmed.

Officers from the Warren County Sheriffs Office were joined at the scene by the Queensbury Central and Lake George Fire Departments. The West Glens Falls and Bay Ridge Rescue Squads also provided assistance.

Police say alcohol does not appear to have been a factor in the crash.
FORT EDWARD  No news is good news, so far, on the proposed rail car manufacturing plant at the former General Electric dewatering facility.

The contract for which a China-based company would build the plant in Fort Edward has still not been awarded to anyone, eight months after bids were opened.

The contract has been the focus of much talk and hope in Washington County this year, with some predicting it could replace some of the tax revenue lost now that General Electric has closed its dewatering plant and its capacitor plant.

But as the months stretched on, some officials speculated the contract had been won by some other company.

Thats not true. The MTA in New York City has not yet made a decision on who will build 1,025 subway cars.

Bids were opened Dec. 15 and MTA officials said it would take several months to pick a winner.

Eight months later, they still havent made a decision, officials said this week.

They indicated they may be in the negotiation stage, in which they are talking with a few of the many companies that bid on the project.

Its not a straight bid, where the lowest bidder might be chosen. Instead, each bidder submitted a proposal, detailing its plans. There are many factors to be considered, including safety records, whether the manufacturing plant is in the state and details of the test track the bidder will use to test the subway cars, officials said.

Once the MTA has a short list, it starts negotiating with those companies before picking a winner. The whole process takes several months, spokesman Kevin Ortiz said in December.

CRRC, which runs a plant in Springfield, sent in a bid, with the promise to open a manufacturing plant at the Fort Edward Industrial Park if it wins the contract.

CRRC was confident it would win, promising to speak with The Post-Star in March about its plans. But the company wont divulge details until the contract is won (or lost).

Company officials toured Fort Edward last year and described some of their proposal to Supervisor Mitch Suprenant. He said the company intended to hire 150 to 200 workers, at an average pay of $50,000 to $60,000.

The company would also put up a new building at the site and construct a 2-mile test track, which is one of the requirements in the MTA contract. Because the site already has railroads, completed subway cars could be shipped to New York City by rail as well.

The one negative is that the contract calls for the successful bidder to finish the subway cars within five years. CRRC officials said they would try to get other contracts during that time, including bids to build Canadian rail cars. But their manufacturing plant would only employ people for as long as the company could get contracts.

CRRC has become a successful bidder in the United States by pledging to build rail cars in the state in which they are to be used. To get the contract for subway cars in Boston, CRRC promised to build a plant in Springfield. Likewise, it offered the Fort Edward site for the New York City contract.
QUEENSBURY  Five young men have been arrested in recent days for two armed robberies that occurred within hours of each other one night last week, police said.

The five men are believed to be responsible for a July 12 home invasion robbery on Indiana Avenue, where a man was threatened by a group of masked men, one of whom had what appeared to be a handgun, according to the Warren County Sheriffs Office.

The victim was assaulted and robbed of marijuana before the suspects fled, police said.

A short time later, three of the men involved in that holdup allegedly robbed a taxi cab driver after he gave them a ride from Glens Falls to Van Dusen Road in Queensbury, police said. The driver was threatened with what appeared to be a handgun and robbed of $88 before the men fled, according to the Sheriffs Office.

Sheriffs investigators were able to link the men to the two cases because one of the victims believed he could identify one of the suspects, sheriffs Lt. Steve Stockdale said.

That led to police questioning potential suspects and linking three Queensbury residents and two teens from Glens Falls to the robberies.

According to police, charged with two counts each of first-degree robbery, a felony, for alleged involvement in both robberies were:

Andrew M. Jabot, 25, of Timber Lane, Queensbury, who police tracked to Carthage, where he fled to a relatives home after the holdups.

We got some intel that he was out there and notified police out there and they found him, Stockdale said.

Ty M. Willett, 20, of Briwood Circle, Queensbury; and

Devin M. Marr, 16, of Woodland Path, Queensbury.

Charged with one count of first-degree robbery was Jayden G. Heym, 17, of Grant Avenue Extension, Glens Falls, and Alajhed A.J. Carl, 18, of First Street, Glens Falls.

They are accused of involvement in the Indiana Avenue home invasion, but Heym also faces a felony escape count for trying to run out of the Sheriffs Office station in Queensbury after his arrest, and Carl was charged with resisting arrest, police said.

The weapon involved was found to be a pellet pistol, and it was recovered from Marrs home, police said.

All five were arraigned and sent to Warren County Jail for lack of bail. Heym is on parole for a 2016 burglary at a Queensbury store.

The cases were investigated by the Sheriffs Office Criminal Investigation Division.
No need to shift goal post as far as inflation target of 2-6 pc is concerned, even though there is debate on target shifting: RBI Governor Das.
As Quad-City leaders seek to improve air service, one of the possibilities raised at a meeting Wednesday is improving revenues for the Metropolitan Airport Authority of Rock Island County.

That includes this notion: Asking people in Scott County to contribute.

The idea of seeking revenue from Scott County residents, if possible at all, appears to be a long-term proposition. However, at a wide-ranging discussion about the airport's future Wednesday, area leaders batted around the possibility of expanding the tax base for the authority, which currently levies property taxes on just seven of Rock Island County's 18 townships.

"If people want a growing, thriving airport, then the question becomes how do we pay for it?" asked Dave Heller, chairman of the Quad-Cities Chamber of Commerce's air service committee. Heller is co-owner of the Quad-Cities River Bandits.

Heller, who recently became chair of the committee that advises the airport authority, said he is trying to generate discussion about what kind of airport the Quad-Cities wants.

Raising revenue could make it easier to gain more air service. Airport costs are important to low-cost carriers. In addition, some airports offer perks to try to lure people to their doors, which could increase passenger counts.

Peoria's airport, for example, offers free parking.

The Quad-City International Airport has seen a decline in passenger traffic over the past several years. Often, area residents complain that fares here are too high. And while the airport's consultant, Mike Bown, of Trillion Aviation, said during a presentation Wednesday that passenger trends going back to 1990 are more positive, the short-term is of concern to some officials.

Rock Island Mayor Mike Thoms said he believes the airport authority is "on top" of the latest changes. But he added, "Anytime you have down numbers, it's disappointing."

During the discussion, which occurred at a meeting at the airport of area elected officials and members of the air services committee Wednesday morning, the possibility of broadening the tax to apply to more people within Rock Island County, as well as other Illinois counties, was brought up as a possibility.

Iowa was mentioned, too.

Thoms told the group that he thinks a broader tax base is needed to support the airport. "Jumping to the Iowa side and spreading that base, I think, makes some sense too," he said.

A random survey of cars in the airport's parking lot over the past 17 years showed 69 percent of vehicles had Iowa's license plates, according to a presentation given by Aviation Director Bruce Carter.

Molly Foley, an airport commissioner, said the discussion of broadening taxing authority is in its "early infancy" stage. But it is something the group has discussed in the past.

"We are a regional airport," she said.

The authority didn't raise additional property taxes for 2018 in its annual meeting Tuesday. It approved levying about $1.4 million, the same as last year. But it did take steps to enable commissioners to raise more additional property taxes in the future if they choose to do so.

Unless the base is broadened, though, raising property taxes would require going back to the seven townships that are currently taxed.

Expanding in Illinois would likely mean going to the legislature or seeking voter approval.

Expanding to the Iowa side of the river could also be difficult. Scott County Board of Supervisors Chair Carol Earnhardt was cool to the idea after Wednesday's meeting. "I think they need to take care of their side of the river before they look to us," she said.

Earnhardt did say, though, the discussion was worth having.

In his presentation, Bown said additional revenues could help to draw air service in certain instances. But, he added, it's not "the magic bullet."

The Quad-City airport continues to see leakage to other markets, especially Chicago, and some participants in the meeting said they still would like to see more area residents, including business travelers, use the airport. But one of the things Bown also emphasized was that airport use is generally driven by economic conditions.

Passenger use of Des Moines' airport has expanded dramatically as the area's economy has grown, he noted. The Des Moines area has been successful at luring technology firms, like Facebook and Microsoft.

In 2016, there were about 1.2 million passengers leaving the Des Moines airport, according to FAA data. That's up from about 900,000 in 2010.

"Things change and it's driven by the economy," Bown said.

Non-farm employment in the Des Moines area has grown about 15 percent between 2010 and 2016. In the Quad-Cities, non-farm payrolls grew by about 4 percent during the same period.
The Rock Island County Metropolitan Airport Authority got a sobering outlook Tuesday, as its consultant predicted the number of passengers flying out of the Quad-City International Airport would fall this year. Meanwhile, June figures continued to show a significant drop in traffic.

Meanwhile, the authority approved a budget for fiscal year 2018, which is somewhat smaller than the year before. It also passed a measure that holds the line on its share of Rock Island County's property taxes.

Declines haven't been unusual for the Quad-City airport over the past five or six years, but the number of departing passengers for June dropped 10 percent from the previous year, to 29,288. The year before, it totaled 32,329.

Much of that decline came from United, which saw a 30 percent drop. But American was down 11 percent and Delta 2 percent. Allegiant saw a 10 percent increase.

The June decline was the third consecutive month in which the airport saw double digit percentage declines in departures. The airport reported declines of 15 percent and 18 percent in April and May, respectively.

Some of the decline in monthly traffic in June could still have come from the loss of the United flight to Washington, D.C., which operated for eight days last June. However, the airport did not collect data for those days, so the extent to which that contributed in the year over year decline isn't clear.

Still, the overall trend was downward. Mike Bown, vice president of Trillon Aviation, the airport's consultant, said he expected the figure for calendar year 2017 to only hit 320,000. That, he said, would be a 10 percent decline year over year.

Bown said that load factor, a measure of how full a plane is, is a major contributor here. Airlines that had been competing on price over the past few years have stabilized their yields, and that's pushed load factors down.

"A lot of its being load factor driven, which is being affected by the fares. And based on what the airlines are telling me I dont expect that to change through Labor Day and probably thereafter," Bown told commissioners. He said it would be "a reach" for the airport to hit 340,000 for the 2018 fiscal year, which is about the passenger numbers included in the authority's budget.

There was some encouraging news. Allegiant has scheduled a twice weekly flight to Punta Gorda, Florida, from mid-December to mid-February. That should improve traffic numbers.

Last year, the flight had operated on an abbreviated schedule, but there is intense interest in some quarters for its return. Cathie Rochau, marketing director for the airport, said the flight is popular with people who have condominiums in Florida. The Punta Gorda flight takes people to the Fort Myers, Florida, area.

Also, Bown said he expects new Florida service to be added next year. He did not elaborate in front of the commission and declined to be more specific afterward.

In other business, the airport authority approved a budget for fiscal year 2018 that appropriates $25.7 million. That's down from $27.4 million in 2016. The decrease came as about $1 million less was budgeted for capital expenditures, while the rest came from savings in debt service and insurance expenses.

The commission also approved a measure that levies property taxes of a little more than $1.4 million. That is the same as it was for fiscal year 2016, said Angela Burch, the controller.

The commission did reallocate how those proceeds are accounted for. Previously, it was capped by state law at how much property taxes it could levy for overall maintenance and operation. However, by re-distributing $1 million of those funds to other purposes, such as retirement and insurance costs, the authority has given itself more room.

The authority also approved a collective bargaining agreement with AFSCME Local 3744, which covers about 50 people. The deal calls for a pay increase of 0.75 percent in the first year, 1.25 percent in the second year and 1.75 percent in the third and fourth years. There also were some changes in benefits that will result in savings to the authority.
In some ways, Sara Tubbs is nothing like her character.

To portray Millie in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which opens this weekend at Circa 21 Dinner Playhouse, Tubbs covers her short brunette hair with a long blonde wig and gets into the mindset of a formal-dress wearing woman of the pioneer days.

But in other ways, Tubbs, a Moline-based actor and longtime performer at Circa 21 and other area theaters, connects with Millie.

As a mother of three, Tubbs, 36, easily relates to a song Millie sings to her newborn baby: I just pretend like its my kids. Theyll be at some of the shows, so I told them, When Mommys singing that song, shes singing it to you.

On that note, she also knows what its like keep a bunch of unruly men in line.

Its funny because I have two boys at home, Tubbs said, So Ill say something like Boys! here on stage and then go home and be like, Boys! to them.

And even though more than a century separates them, Tubbs shares another trait with her character.

Millie has such strength, she said. I also consider myself to be a strong woman, so I can relate to her. She reminds me that its OK to be a strong woman and stand your ground in what you believe in.

Indeed, it would take a heavy dose of strength to be Millie.

In the show, after Millie meets  and marries  the woodsman-esque Adam, she discovers her new husband has six wild, ill-mannered brothers.

She wasnt expecting that at all, Tubbs said. At first, theyre crazy and unkempt and shes horrified. But then shes like, Alright, lets do this. Shes not one to ever quit or give up.

Millie teaches the brothers how to behave better (including how to dance, clean and court a woman) in hopes that theyll each find their own brides, which they do only to later kidnap them. Dont worry  Tubbs promises a happy ending.

Her cast-mate, Jon Reinhold, who plays Millies husband, Adam, points out that the fast-paced musical, which is based on a 1954 movie of the same name, was ahead of its time in certain aspects.

They werent afraid to show the strength of a woman and have her really take the reins, he said. Its this battle of the sexes in that classic movie musical style. Its boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy learns something and theres a reckoning.

However, parts of the show are more of a stretch for modern times.

Its very funny in 2017 to justify seven men carrying seven women off to say, Oh, well just marry them, but theres an innocence to these men, Reinhold said. Theyre lovable and they learn as they go and theres something endearing about that.

Reinhold previously played Adam in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers six years ago with the Fireside Theatre in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. This production marks his debut to the Circa 21 stage. He only learned he got the part about two weeks ago  just in time to fly into the Quad-Cities from New York City for rehearsal.

Hes happy to be returning to the monster of a show, which includes a cast of 20 and as many musical numbers.

Theres more depth to the show than people realize, Reinhold, 33, said. There are touching scenes about what it means to be a man, a father, a son, a brother.

Thats one of the reasons  along with big dance numbers and catchy songs  Reinhold said Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is still being performed today.

At the heart of the show, I think its remained so popular because its light, innocent and its a family story, he said. Youll laugh and youll cry.

Plus, it's a fitting show for anyone who loves a good love story, Tubbs said.

You get to see 14 people fall in love, she said. And theyre all totally different characters  everyone can relate to at least one of those people.

Thats the case for the actor, who begins a two-month run of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, on Friday. It runs through Sept. 16.

Earlier this week, Tubbs posted a quote on Instagram that she says was probably subconsciously inspired by Millie.

It said something along the lines of: Every person you meet you can learn from, which Tubbs considers a lesson learned from her character.

That's one of the things (Mille) has learned is that she shouldnt judge people and that we can all learn from each other," she said. "We all learn a lot from our characters. I think thats one of the things we all love the most about doing theater."
Man arraigned in Rock Island murder case

A Rock Island man has pleaded not guilty to the beating death of 43-year-old Rochelle Davis and the assault of two juveniles in June.

Sean E. Rogers, 49, was arraigned on first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated battery during a hearing Tuesday morning at the Rock Island County Justice Center.

He will be back in court Aug. 18. Rogers remained in the Rock Island County Jail Tuesday on a $500,000 cash bond.

Rock Island Police were called at 10:12 p.m. June 2 to the 700 block of 25th for a battery complaint.

When officers arrived, they found an 11-year-old and a 16-year-old who had suffered injuries. Both were taken to Trinity Rock Island; the 11-year-old was then airlifted to OSF St. Francis Medical Center, Peoria.

Police also found Davis dead inside the home.

Prosecutors allege that Rogers struck Davis in the head with a bat and the act was "accompanied by exceptionally brutal or heinous behavior indicative of wanton cruelty," according to court documents.

He also struck the 11-year-old in the face with a wooden object, which fractured his skull, and struck the 16-year-old in the head with a "bludgeon," according to court documents.

Police took Rogers into custody June 4 at Genesis Medical Center-West Central Park, Davenport

--Tara Becker

Two plead in assault case

Two brothers have pleaded guilty in connection with an assault that left a man seriously injured at a Davenport strip club in 2015.

Juan D. Shelton, 33, and Trenton D. Shelton, 31, pleaded guilty Friday in Scott County District Court to willful injury resulting in serious injury as a habitual offender, according to Scott County court records.

They face up to 15 years in prison and, under the habitual offender statute, must serve a minimum of three years in prison before they are eligible for parole.

Trenton Shelton also pleaded guilty to assault while participating in a felony, a Class D felony punishable by up to five years in prison, according to court records.

The two will be sentenced Aug. 31. In exchange for their plea, Scott County prosecutors will dismiss an additional charge of attempted murder at sentencing.

Prosecutors also will dismiss an unrelated charge of failure to comply with sex offender registry requirements, an aggravated misdemeanor, against Trenton Shelton, according to court records.

At 12:26 a.m. Oct. 15, 2015, Davenport police officers responded to a fight at Chorus Line, 4128 Brady St.

Police say Juan and Trenton Shelton and their brother, Kamden, were involved in a fight with Joshua Sutton, 41, who was knocked to the floor.

According to police, Sutton was kicked in the head and torso several times and stomped on.

Kamden Shelton was arrested the day of the incident. Juan Shelton was arrested the next day after police say he led them on a five-minute car chase from Rock Island into Davenport via the Interstate 280 bridge.

Trenton Shelton was arrested in December 2015 in Mississippi by the U.S. Marshals Service. He was charged in federal court with failing to register as a sex offender, and in November, he was sentenced to 16 months in prison.

He was released from custody and booked into the Scott County Jail on Feb. 8.

Kamden Shelton, 26, entered an Alford plea to willful injury causing serious injury in May 2016 and was sentenced the following month to up to 10 years in prison.

In an Alford plea, a defendant does not admit guilt but concedes prosecutors have enough evidence to win a conviction.

--Tara Becker
Two brothers have pleaded guilty in connection with an assault that left a man seriously injured at a Davenport strip club in 2015.

Juan D. Shelton, 33, and Trenton D. Shelton, 31, pleaded guilty Friday in Scott County District Court to willful injury resulting in serious injury as a habitual offender, according to Scott County court records.

They face up to 15 years in prison and, under the habitual offender statute, must serve a minimum of three years in prison before they are eligible for parole.

Trenton Shelton also pleaded guilty to assault while participating in a felony, a Class D felony punishable by up to five years in prison, according to court records.

The two will be sentenced Aug. 31. In exchange for their plea, Scott County prosecutors will dismiss an additional charge of attempted murder at sentencing.

Prosecutors also will dismiss an unrelated charge of failure to comply with sex offender registry requirements, an aggravated misdemeanor, against Trenton Shelton, according to court records.

At 12:26 a.m. Oct. 15, 2015, Davenport police officers responded to a fight at Chorus Line, 4128 Brady St.

Police say Juan and Trenton Shelton and their brother, Kamden, were involved in a fight with Joshua Sutton, 41, who was knocked to the floor.

According to police, Sutton was kicked in the head and torso several times and stomped on.

Kamden Shelton was arrested the day of the incident. Juan Shelton was arrested the next day after police say he led them on a five-minute car chase from Rock Island into Davenport via the Interstate 280 bridge.

Trenton Shelton was arrested in December 2015 in Mississippi by the U.S. Marshals Service. He was charged in federal court with failing to register as a sex offender, and in November, he was sentenced to 16 months in prison.

He was released from custody and booked into the Scott County Jail on Feb. 8.

Kamden Shelton, 26, entered an Alford plea to willful injury causing serious injury in May 2016 and was sentenced the following month to up to 10 years in prison.

In an Alford plea, a defendant does not admit guilt but concedes prosecutors have enough evidence to win a conviction.
While the exact details have yet to be ironed out, the cities of Davenport and Bettendorf are in agreement on a shortened window for the discharge of fireworks.

Both cities and Scott County have been in discussion about drafting uniform ordinances to curb the use of fireworks after the first test of Iowa's new law saw an increase in calls for service, complaints and injuries.

Davenport and Bettendorf gave separate updates to their City Council members on Tuesday.

Davenport City Administrator Corri Spiegel said both city staffs were fine with allowing fireworks discharge on July 3-4 and New Year's Eve, but likely not much more.

"Through discussions, we've heard Saturday to Saturday at most," Spiegel said during Davenport's management update meeting.

Municipalities have been under siege since for more than a month after the state's new fireworks law came into effect.

The law permits the use and sale of fireworks June 1-July 8 and Dec. 10-Jan. 3 although it does give local governments the ability to modify the window of use.

Local governments elected not to modify the window to see how residents would react to the new law. But, with what was perceived to be rampant abuse, Davenport reinstituted its local ban after the Fourth of July.

Spiegel said a complete ban would not be realistic, but a few members of the City Council, including Aldermen Mike Matson, 7th Ward, and Rita Rawson, 5th Ward, disagreed.

"Every single public safety group is against this," Matson said. "From a public safety and disruption of neighborhoods issue, I can't see why anybody is OK with this."

During the Bettendorf City Council meeting, City Administrator Decker Ploehn said enforcement would also receive further scrutiny.

Besides potential stricter enforcement of the noise ordinance, Ploehn said cities could charge violators as a disorderly house if it were not possible to pinpoint the person who discharged the firework.

As part of the ordinance being drawn up, the cities and county will also look at restricting sales through land-use and increasing fines.

The aldermen were in agreement that the city should follow the same plan as Des Moines, which only allowed a handful of tents to sell fireworks, by determining areas appropriate for sales.

By comparison, there were nearly 50 tents selling fireworks in Scott County.

The topic of fines, however, produced some disagreement and need for more discussion.

Alderman Kyle Gripp, at large, proposed keeping the fines at $250 while Alderman Maria Dickmann, 2nd Ward, called for a $1,000 fine.

"If you can spend hundreds of dollars to torment your neighbors, I don't really feel bad for penalizing you if you get caught," Dickmann said. "This isn't an issue of 'Oh, we're penalizing people who are impoverished if they are getting a speeding ticket.' You are knowingly spending your money and doing something that is dangerous to yourself, dangerous to your neighbors and disruptive to the city."
DES MOINES  Low-income and rural women could be negatively impacted at higher rates by a new law requiring Iowa women to obtain an ultrasound and wait 72 hours before receiving an abortion, several expert witness argued Tuesday during the second and final day of a hearing challenging the state law.

Based on my 30 years of research on poverty, I believe the act will cause financial, logistical and emotional stress and challenges for women living at or near the poverty line, said Jane Collins, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies low-income laborers, poverty and gender.

I believe it will cause women to skimp on food and other basic necessities for themselves and their families, take on debt or leave bills unpaid.  Some women, in trying to pull together what is needed, will not be able to and forgo the abortion they desire and instead carry to term the pregnancy.

Senate File 471  which went into effect briefly earlier this summer before the Supreme Court intervened  requires a 72-hour wait before a woman can obtain an abortion.

The ACLU and Planned Parenthood Federation of America, on behalf of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, are challenging the state, stating the second appointment is medically unnecessary and burdensome. The state argues that regulatory agencies have a legitimate interest in regulating the medical profession in promoting public safety and protecting life.

More than 50 percent of the women seeking abortions at Planned Parenthood facilities in Iowa live at or below 110 percent of the federal poverty line, Collins said. This means the law could add logistical and financial burdens to about 2,000 of the 4,000 women seeking abortions in the state each year.

She added that number is a conservative estimate as many poverty experts typically include those living between 100 and 200 percent of the federal poverty level as poor or low-income.

To further illustrate her point, Collins put together several hypothetical situations illustrating what low-income women living in more rural areas would have to spend per trip to obtain an abortion under the new law.

For instance, a woman without access to a car and living in Sioux City  which recently saw its Planned Parenthood close after the Republican-majority legislature worked to move Medicaid dollars away from abortion-providers  would have to spend three days travel time due to bus schedules and clinic hours, and more than $270 on public transit costs and motel stays, to attend an appointment in Des Moines.

Adding further complications, Collins said, is the fact that low-wage workers are far less likely than other workers to have paid sick days or personal days.

It can be very challenging to get time off for two trips out of town within two weeks of each other, she said. She couldnt really do that without explaining where she is going and therefore not keeping the procedure confidential.

Iowa Solicitor General Jeffrey Thompson of the state Attorney Generals office tried to get Collins to further quantify the population of low-income women who could be negatively affected by travel and making two trips. He pointed out that in 2015, only 10 women from Sioux City received surgical abortions and another 76 percent received medication abortions. That is .5 percent and 3 percent, respectively, of total abortions performed in Iowa overall, Thompson said.

Is that a significant number?, he asked Collins.

A significant number of women would be delayed and a significant number would be prevented from receiving an abortion, Collins said. It is an important question  what is a significant number? I cant give you an exact number, but if it was 100, would we say thats OK?

Additional testimony discussed complications women may run into when it comes to finding a physician able to perform an ultrasound. Sixty-six of Iowas 99 counties do not have OB-GYNs, physicians associated with Catholic health systems, may not be able to perform an ultrasound for abortion purposes, and many physicians require a referral or new patient appointment.

The state did not call any witnesses Tuesday, but submitted written testimony into the record.

Fifth Judicial District Judge Jeffrey Farrell told attorneys on both sides that he plans to be relatively prompt in coming to a decision, but cautioned he would take his time to do things right.
CEDAR RAPIDS  The politics-as-usual approach to state government by Republicans and Democrats is unsustainable and hurting vulnerable Iowans, according to Jake Porter, a Libertarian who is joining the race for governor.

Were having this huge budget crisis, and I dont see other candidates proposing real changes, Porter said Tuesday.

Instead, Statehouse lawmakers and the governor are using the budget as a weapon, according to Porter, who will formally announce his candidacy on The Simon Conway Show on WHO Radio between 4 and 7 p.m. Thursday.

Theyve decided were having a budget crisis, so were going to cut the services people use most, whether its mental health services, sexual abuse hotlines, domestic abuse shelters (or) hearing aids for kids, Porter said.

Theyre not actually going after any of the waste that could easily be cut. Theyre going after the things that are going to hurt the most people, probably as an excuse to raise the sales tax next year.

Porter, 29, a Council Bluffs business consultant long active in the Libertarian Party, previously ran for secretary of state. He thinks his views and priorities are more closely aligned with voters than either the Democratic or Republican platform.

He wants to make medical cannabis available, restore voting rights for felons who have served their time, end corporate welfare, return Medicaid to its pre-privatization status and phase out the state sales tax.

He opposes corporate welfare on libertarian principles. Its wrong, Porter said, to ask Iowans to pay millions of dollars to financially sound corporations. He singled out the Research Activities Credit that refunds tax money to corporations even if they have no tax liability.

Theyve put the tax bill on the smallest Iowans and smallest companies, he said. I dont think the state should favor one business over another.

Porter called turning over Medicaid management to private companies an example of big government cronyism by former Gov. Terry Branstads administration. He would return management responsibility to the Department of Human Services and then make improvements.

The state has messed around for far too long while people who could benefit from medical cannabis have suffered, Porter said. While he would favor legalization of marijuana for recreational use, I dont think the Legislature is going to pass that.

Despite the changes the Legislature has made, current law makes it difficult, nearly impossible, for Iowans who need cannabidiol to get it, he said.

As a Libertarian, Porter said, he would have the advantage of being able to work with and around the major political parties by using the governors bully pulpit to open a dialogue with voters and pressure lawmakers to act on his priorities.

As governor, you can go around and talk about issues and you can pound the issues until (lawmakers) basically have to do something about it, he said.

Porter said his campaign website, jakeporter.org, will go live Thursday afternoon.
With about an 18-month window until Rock Island County workers in the historic courthouse move into new offices and courtrooms in the Justice Center annex, County Board members wanted to hear from the public what should be done with 1890s-vintage building in downtown Rock Island.

Listening to a dozen speakers Tuesday night, board members were told basically to do what can be done to save the courthouse without having it cost taxpayers any money.

Gary Segal, of Rock Island, said he had read of an idea by County Administrator Dave Ross to ask for a tax increase to pay for remodeling the courthouse, which was built in 1896. It courtrooms no longer meet standards set by the Illinois Supreme Court.

Im totally against that, Segal told 24 of the 25 board members present. Brian Vyncke, Moline, was absent.

Number one we just got a 32 percent tax raise in the state of Illinois, Segal said. Basically, were losing population, were losing jobs and were losing a hell of a lot to the state of Iowa and I dont think we can afford another tax increase.

Dave Jasper, of Cordova, said he is probably not against tearing the building down, but a better solution would be instead of remodeling and moving offices over to the courthouse, vacate this building (the County Office Building) tear it down and build a new building in its place. And then maybe gut the courthouse and rent it to a corporation. But nobody is in favor of any tax increases.

DeAnne Bloomberg, manager of the Rock Island County Farm Bureau, told the board that county has a lot of deferred maintenance to pay for, and in the process has done a great deal of expense-cutting.

But, Bloomberg said, The palate for a tax increase is not there. I would keep those words in the back of your mind as you move on.

Charlie Van De Sampel, of Rock Island, said that since he returned to the area from military service, he has watched Rock Island Countys historic buildings deteriorate.

If you look at Davenport across the river, theyve got almost every historic building still up, Van De Sampel said. What do we have? Not much.

Van De Sampel told the board to get the proper personnel to gut the courthouse and save it.

Bill Long, of Rock Island, said he could not support any tax increase for anything to do with the courthouse.

Tyler Pannell, of Rock Island, told the board he was making a plea for justice and mercy and a stay of execution for the Rock Island County Courthouse.

It is the only building of Spanish Renaissance architecture in the Quad-Cities, Pannell said. Although its exterior has been butchered over the years the beauty of its design is still evident, he said.

The cost of removing the old courthouse will tally into the millions as many other counties have learned, Pannell said.

Im asking you to save our courthouse, he said. It would be too costly to the taxpayers to remove. It is a long-term asset that can be repurposed. It is an iconic landmark on the Mississippi River, and it is an important part of the artistic and historical legacy of this community.

Ross said that no decision on a tax or sales tax increase have been made.

Rock Island County Circuit Judge Clarence Darrow, who sits on the Public Building Commission, said after the meeting that what becomes of the courthouse is in the hands of the County Board. However, there is a lot of research to do.

The problem is we dont have the figures on what it would cost to renovate or tear it down, Darrow said. There likely will be many different estimates, based on the number of ways the courthouse could be remodeled, he added.

But something had to be done and the $28 million Justice Center Annex with its four courtrooms and offices for the Circuit Clerk, States Attorney and Court Administrator was the way to go.

Darrow said the courthouse is not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that the courtrooms could not be brought up to state requirements.

Well see what costs are and then a decision can be made, Darrow said.
What is so special about seeing a total eclipse that you're willing to take time off from work to travel hundreds of miles and spend hundreds of dollars to see something that lasts two minutes?

Jeff Struve, president of the Quad-Cities Astronomical Society, opened his laptop computer. "This will show you why we're going," he said.

He clicked a few keys and up popped an image of the sun, totally blocked by the moon, with only its corona, the outermost part of the sun's atmosphere, glowing like a round diamond ring in the darkness of space.

"It's beautiful," he said.

And if you don't grasp that, then words won't explain it.

***

Paul Levesque, from Moline, grew up in New England, with the 1972 hit song "You're So Vain" by Carly Simon playing in his head. The tune was about an unnamed, self-absorbed lover who, among other things, "flew (his) Learjet up to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun."

The haunting words and melody referencing an eclipse in 1970 planted an interest for Levesque that grew through the years.

About a year ago, he realized he would be near a total eclipse said, "Holy cow! I've got to see it! It's a bucket list thing. I cannot miss this."

He is traveling to Missouri for his brush with totality, although he's not saying exactly where. "I'm psyched about it," he said.

"It's like a spiritual thing. It touches you. I mean, the sun goes dark in the middle of the day! What the heck? How is that even possible?"

***

Robert Mitchell, physics professor at St. Ambrose University, got hooked on astronomy when he found two books  one on constellations and one on planets  in his elementary school library.

"It just clicked with me," he said.

Although he's all about science, he finds it "the most incredible coincidence that the distance of our moon and the distance of our sun are just right so that their apparent sizes are almost exactly the same (from Earth) even though the sun is 400 times as big as the moon and is 400 times as far away."

It is those relative distances and sizes that make the eclipse possible.

"It's coincidental. Or is it?" he said.

In addition to teaching, Mitchell is director of the university-owned Menke Observatory at the Wapsi River Environmental Education Center near Dixon.

*********

What is it about deep space that attracts you?

Mike Ombrello, of East Moline, came to his interest in space through photography. One of his nighttime photos happened to capture the Milky Way, the galaxy that includes Earth, "and the next thing you know, I bought a telescope," he said.

"Since then, I've been photographing deep space objects."

Looking through a telescope, you can see things that seem like make-believe because you have never seen anything like them before. You see great galaxies with literally billons and billions of stars and great nebula, or gas dust, flaring forth.

You can hardly believe these things exist because when you look at the sky with your naked eye, you can't see them. So you wonder if the telescope is playing tricks. But no, those things are real. They exist. And Ombrello takes pictures of them.

He says his equipment isn't especially expensive, but he's able to capture nebula, the nearby galaxy called Andromeda, that appears as a big whirlpool, and many other objects.

This has led to more exploration and learning.

"I never knew where the Milky Way was or how to find it," he said.

Now astronomy and peering into space is something of an addiction.

"I can't wait for it to get dark enough to see something else," he said.

****

Alan Sheidler, president of the Popular Astronomy Club, grew up on a farm in Ohio in the 1960s. There wasn't much light pollution so he could see lots of interesting things in the night sky and, with the Kennedy Administration space program in full gear, "science was king."

Those two elements combined to spur his interest, and he received an inexpensive telescope as a present from his parents for better viewing.

Then one sunny day when he was in late grade school, he and his brother were playing in the barn when they noticed something unusual. They noticed the sun pouring through a knothole in the barn siding at just the right angle that it cast an image on the opposite wall.

"We could see a circle of light on the other side of the barn," Sheidler recalled. "We looked at it in closer detail and realized we had a perfect image of the sun. The knothole was like a pinhole viewer.

"We got a piece of paper and held it up and we could see sunspots on the sun. We tracked this over a series of weeks, and we could see the spots move. We had a solar observatory in the barn with knotholes."

Eventually the brothers weren't satisfied with the knotholes that existed, so they got a hand drill and made new ones, allowing them to have viewings at different times of the day or year.

They didn't tell their dad until years later. He just smiled, Sheidler said.

Sheidler retired from Deere & Co. in product development about a year ago, so he's had more time to pick back up on astronomy. He's traveling to Missouri to see the eclipse.

He also has made trips to areas of "dark sky," such as Arizona, the Big Island in Hawaii and the outback of Australia.

"That is the most amazing sky I've ever seen because there is zero light," he said of Australia. "You'd swear there are clouds in the sky. But it's the Milky Way.

"We have no idea what we're missing here," he said.
Once again, Republicans in the Iowa Legislature are inviting an out-of-state attack on the economic security of Iowa families.

Their target is the Iowa Public Employees Retirement System (IPERS), a well-managed, effective pension system that contributes $1.6 billion each year to the Iowa economy. Actuaries using audited, industry standards, offer the 350,000 people contributing in the IPERS system what Iowa has long promised -- a secure retirement that the state can afford.

Now Iowa Republicans are threatening to break that retirement promise by putting the Reason Foundation, an out-of-state special interest group, in charge of an official review of IPERS. Nothing is more critical to assuring a secure pension system than using good data  either in managing the system, or in considering changes to it. To provide data for this review, Republicans have entrusted a so-called foundation funded by the Koch Brothers, which has a history of attacking public pension systems across the country. One Republican state senator claims that no decision has been made about the future of IPERS, but their decision to outsource their review to a highly questionable group with a track record of siding against workers is like picking a player from one team to referee a game. How can we trust their credibility?

Unfortunately, this is just the latest unwarranted and baseless attack against working families by Iowa Republicans. We saw it on collective bargaining, where backroom deals produced legislation that gutted workers rights at the bargaining table. We also saw it on workers compensation. No noteworthy problems were identified that needed to be changed, no calls were made for change by voters during the 2016 election campaign, nonetheless backroom deals turned the systems upside down when the political levers were in place for it to happen. We have also seen it with the states switch to a privatized Medicaid system. No fair and unbiased committees with experts in the field of medicine, business and other industries affected were formed to study the states system to determine the best path forward. Instead, the governor and Republicans legislators swiftly scrapped a system and sent it to the highest bidders. We now have a complete collapse with thousands of Iowans potentially left uninsured.

None of these laws and programs demanded radical change  if any at all. But all of the changes were driven by political and ideological motivation to the detriment of the working men and women of Iowa. Now IPERS is their next target, and Republicans are using this out-of-state, Koch-funded group to tilt the scales in favor of policies they want to pursue. A look at Reason's own "pension reform handbook" from 2014 sets forth a strategy to push states away from "defined benefit" pension systems (IPERS is one), toward "defined contribution" plans such as 401k plans that pose significantly more risk to the family depending on their retirement. This is a clear message from the handbook. In addition, Reason has received more than $3.5 million from one notable critic of public pensions, John Arnold. Add to this the clear preference of the new governor, Kim Reynolds, for a look at a 401k-style plan, and it will not be surprising when Reason produces a "study" recommending significant changes to the structure of IPERS, to the detriment of employees either now, in the future, or both.

Its time for the legislature to stop the partisan attacks on Iowans, and provide honest scrutiny of who is advising our policy makers. The Reason Foundation should not be consulted by the state, let alone be empowered as they are by Republicans in the legislature. Iowa families are under attack, and retirement security is the latest target. The question is, will Iowas economy and families survive another all-out assault?
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HOT SPRINGS | Dozens of tourists experienced the instant gratification of seeing a nearly 900-pound, 26,000-year-old mammoth skull hoisted from a natural bone bed and lowered safely onto pallets Tuesday at the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs.

But for the people who did the digging, it was a brief milestone on a continuing journey measured in days, years and even millennia.

Many of those people are volunteers  a term that is only partially accurate in their case, because they do more than work for free. They donate up to $3,000 for the privilege of spending two weeks of their summer painstakingly picking, scraping and brushing at mounds of ancient dirt and rocks as they labor to uncover more mammoth tusks, skulls and bones.

Many of the excavation participants, as they are also described, come from afar and have been returning for years, even decades, to work under the direction of the Mammoth Sites science team.

There have been three excavating sessions this summer, each with up to 10 participants, and the current group is the third. The participants range in age and origin from a New Jersey retiree to a 19-year-old Californian on a Make-a-Wish trip after successful treatment for cancer.

Ruth Clemmer, a retired corporate finance professional from Pennsylvania, has been returning to dig annually at the Mammoth Site since her first exposure to it 11 years ago.

I came as a tourist and fell in love with the place, Clemmer said. I walked through the doors and said, I want to dig here.

A friend and fellow excavator standing near Clemmer declined to be identified but explained the allure of the work.

No humans have ever seen what we uncover, she said. Were the first.

Jim Mead, the Mammoth sites chief scientist, confirmed that statement but added a qualifier: Weve found no indication that people were here, he said. That doesnt mean, definitively, that such evidence will never be found.

Mead said there is good evidence of human beings in North America as far back as 13,000 years ago, but whether people roamed the continent prior to then, and for how long and to what extent, is a question with an answer that depends on who you believe.

The mammoths at the Hot Springs site died at least 26,000 years ago. On the face of a geologic clock, said Justin Wilkins, curator at the Mammoth Site, that would be the last several minutes of Earths history. The relative recency of the mammoth deaths is evident from the look of the bones, which are not petrified and appear only slightly deteriorated. Despite their fresh appearance, the bones are dry and fragile and can easily break.

One hundred twenty-two tusks  attributable to 61 mammoths  and various other bones have been found at the Mammoth Site since construction workers unearthed the first bones in 1974 while excavating for a housing development.

Protecting the site

A nonprofit organization was formed to preserve, protect and promote the site, and eventually a climate-controlled structure about the size of a retail superstore was erected over the ancient sinkhole where the mammoths died. Researchers think a cave collapsed under the mammoths, and the resulting depression filled with muddy groundwater that trapped the giant beasts.

Some of the mammoth bones have been removed and taken to an on-site lab for preservation, storage and research. But many of the bones remain in the ground, partially excavated, to be seen and enjoyed exactly as they were found. The Mammoth Site also has an exhibit hall and a gift shop.

The skull that was removed Tuesday was discovered in 1989. Excavation has continued around it since then, leaving it in a precarious position and also causing curiosity among excavators and scientists about what might be underneath it. So, the Mammoth Site crew spent the past two months preparing the skull to be moved, in part by wrapping it in burlap and coating it with plaster.

When they finally used a crane hanging from an overhead beam to move the skull Tuesday, they found the tip of a tusk below it, perhaps attached to one of the partially excavated tusks nearby or perhaps a new find.

Future excavation will reveal more about the tusk. The skull will be left on display for a while and eventually moved into the lab for preservation. Much of the preparation, preservation and research on the bones at the Mammoth Site occurs during the winter, between the summer excavation program and another excavation program in the spring and fall.

Wilkins said the skull removed Tuesday came from a mammoth that was probably 10 to 12 feet in height, 8 to 10 tons in weight and 20 to 25 years in age (which made it a youngster in a species that had individual lifespans of perhaps 80 years).

In other words, the mammoth was much younger when it walked into the sinkhole  in some cases four decades younger  than some of the volunteer excavators who finally helped extricate it.

Susan Kloss, a 68-year-old pharmacist from Indiana, watched the removal of the skull and quickly returned to work excavating some bones nearby, including a long portion of a tusk. She wore shorts, revealing a tattoo of a mammoth that she had inked on her lower leg when she was 55.

Kloss said she is on vacation and will return to her regular life and job on Monday.

Until then, shell be digging.

Its exciting, she said. You never know whats going to come up.
MILES CITY, Mont. Concerns over hot, dry weather and the resulting heightened fire danger has prompted the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to institute fire restrictions on lands it manages in Harding County, S.D.

Stage 1 fire restrictions begin Friday, July 14. BLM managed lands in Carter, Custer, Garfield, Powder River, Richland, and Wibaux counties in Montana are already under Stage 1 restrictions.

Under Stage 1 restrictions, campfires and other fires are prohibited except in approved recreation sites, as designated on the fire prevention order. Liquid petroleum and LPG stoves that can be turned on and off are allowed. Smoking is prohibited outside of vehicles, buildings, and developed recreation sites, unless you are in a 3-foot-diameter area cleared of all burnable vegetation.

Fireworks are prohibited on state and federal lands all year. Exploding targets available for sale to recreational shooters are also considered a pyrotechnic product and are prohibited year-round.

Any individual who causes a wildland fire intentionally or through negligence will be held accountable for damage and suppression costs.

For additional information on fire restrictions, visit the fire restrictions website at www.firerestrictions.us.
As many know, the Capitol News is now a combination of the Capitol News and the Tie Creek News. Back in history, Elizabeth Babb wrote the Tie Creek News. Betty Loken wrote the Capitol News for many years. When Karen and Charlie Odell began writing, after Betty moved to town, they combined the two areas for a longer column, which would include both areas.

The big news in Capitol and on Tie Creek this week was the heat and the Wickham Gulch Picnic. Alvin Cordell recorded the temperature at 106 one day and the heat broke 100 degrees several days this week.

On Tuesday, Marlee Cordell went to Belle Fourche to take her mother to an appointment. At home there was two tenths of an inch of rain. Alvin went to Buffalo on Wednesday for a chiropractor appointment. Then on Friday, Norm Henderson met with Alvin at Ryans to discuss a dirt project there. On Saturday the whole family went up to Wickham Gulch for the annual picnic and fish fry in the Long Pines. Denin Cheguis got word on Friday that his grandmother in Canada had passed away. He had recently been up to visit with her and the entire family. We send our condolences to Denin.

Charlie and Karen Odell were out of range for writing news last week. They left on Thursday for Billings. Then on Friday they went to Ennis, MT to the Diamond J Ranch to meet all of their children and grandchildren. Mollie, Kyia and Jeff flew from Minneapolis. Cody, Kylie, Kellan, Kenna, and Carson drove and made a trip through Yellowstone Park. Micki, Jesse, Rowan and Murphy drove from Washington. Micki Odell and Jesse Hinds were married in a western ceremony on Saturday after the group returned from a trail ride into the mountains. There was no TV and little need for technology, and everyone had a really peaceful time on the ranch. Mollie Smith sang for the wedding and Charlie gave the bride away while Karen played the Wedding March and recessional on the violin. The grandmas and kids put on a puppet show and everyone helped with an out-door barbeque with special brownies and Welsh cakes.

Charlie and Karen got home on Sunday evening. Ernie Melum called to tell Charlie about sick cows over at Capitol. It turned out that some of their cows had polio from watering at the dam. The water table is getting low and polio is a worry now. Ernie, Daniel, Nathan and Noah helped Charlie move cows over to their well tanks and save most of them. A few had died while Charlie and Karen were gone, but Charlie got vaccine for three days and saved some that were sick. Micki, Jesse, Rowan and Murphy came on Monday to visit. On Tuesday Charlie brought some cows home and the shots helped. Ernie, Rachel, Tommy, Daniel, Nathan, Noah, Junior and Shirley joined Karen, Charlie, Micki Jesse, Rowan, and Murphy at the Over the Edge on Wednesday night for supper. Charlie helped Steve Hanson move the swather on Thursday morning. Then after giving the cows shots, Jesse helped Charlie pull the well at the house. After they did some figuring and got the pipe lowered again the water pressure was great and stable again. It had been very hot that day and both men were a little sick the next day after that work. Karen took Micki, Jesse, Rowan and Murphy to Ekalaka to visit the museum and have lunch at the Wagon Wheel on Friday. Charlie went the other way to Spearfish for a chiropractors appointment and to visit with Maurice Overn. They all headed to Buffalo that evening to hear Zeona Road play at Saloon Number Three. The music was great and the crowd filled the room. Zeona Road is scheduled to play for the Harding County Fair Dance, too. On Saturday, Mike and Liam Odell stopped by for a visit. They had spent the night at Gene and Carol Odells. That evening Charlies family went up to Wickham Gulch for the fish fry and picnic. It was a good time and many people enjoyed the evening. Jesse spent time building a railing for the loft in the cabin. On Sunday they all went to church in Camp Crook and had lunch at the Over The Edge. It was a hectic week with water worries, but it was great that Micki and Jesse were there to help out.

Gene and Carol Odell went to Rapid City on Monday. On Thursday, Carol helped with a mission project in Buffalo. Mike and Liam Odell came from Clearwater, NB on Friday for the weekend. Carol went to Buffalo on Saturday for Desiree Penns wedding. That evening Gene, Carol, Chancey, Mike and Liam joined in the picnic at Wickham Gulch where they got to visit with many friends. They went to church at Little Missouri on Sunday and that afternoon they visited the Carter County Museum in Ekalaka.

Dorothy and Ashley Padden made a trip to Hettinger and Bowman for repairs on Wednesday, but the parts werent exactly right and needed to be exchanged, so the boys made another trip the next day. On Saturday Brandon took Dorothy, Ashley and his family up to Wickham Gulch where Bryce had been frying fish for the picnic. The cooks did a great job as usual and everyone had plenty to eat.

Billy Roadifer spent the week haying and working on machinery and chores in the heat.

Dale Moncur was out to the ranch for the weekend. The Moncur boys had gotten the sheep in very early on Sunday to be wormed. They felt the coyotes hadnt been too hard on the sheep this year. The heat came later in the day and the very early morning work had been a good idea. Lloyd is doing well. He inherited eye problems, but gets by. Daeson was out for the week and on Friday, Alex took him back to Rapid City.

Erma and Dick Albert went to town on Thursday to take the boat in for a tune-up. Erma had her chiropractors appointment with Stuart. She made a trip to Buffalo on Saturday.

Justin Kerr is enjoying his central air at the ranch. He remembers fighting fires in Florida when he could not get enough water. The fire danger is very high and he has not ventured far from home because of that danger. Last week he received eight loads of hay from Oelrichs, SD. On Sunday evening he again watched for fires as a lightning storm passed through.

Donna Lewis has had lots of family visits this week. Pam and Gary Gorder, Derek, Michelle, Jaycee, Ryann, and Kale came to set up campers for the family gathering later in the summer. They brought Bodie, the dog along. Gary brought some new water tanks for the ranch. Jeb Larson stopped by. Anna LaBree came to visit and got to meet cousins from Norway. Alex and his son, Justin, Redford were visiting from Black Diamond, Alberta, Canada. Alexs mother, Venka and Vegjaern Smaaberg were also there from Bergen, Norway. Her mother is a second cousin to Donna.

Clint Zolnoski and Mike Pacetti spent lots of time unloading the delivered hay this week. On Monday, Greg and Paula Richter came to Ronda Cordells to look at the hay and stayed to have tea with Ronda. Denise and Darby joined Ronda, Clint and Mike for lunch on Thursday.

At 5 AM on Saturday morning, Ronda gave Lowell Cordell a haircut. Later, Denise and Darby came with Luke, Angie and Carter Crea from Sundance. They had come to spend a couple of nights. Carter had been born the first week in May and it was his first visit to Rondas. He is nearly as big as Darby who was born in January. They all went up to Wickham Gulch for Eric Lokens annual barbeque on Saturday. The many chefs did a fabulous job, and as always the pot-luck was in over abundance. As hot as the day had been, in the Gulch it was very pleasant.
BROOKINGS- Wessington Springs 4-H Range and Soil Judging teams will be representing South Dakota in 2018 at the National 4-H Range and Soil Judging Contest held in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in May 2018.

The teams placed first during the 34th Annual South Dakota Rangeland Days and 13th Annual Soils Days hosted by the East Pennington Conservation District and held in Wall and Wasta, South Dakota on June 20-21, 2017.

More than 110 youth and adults participated in the event.

Members of the Wessington Springs 4-H Range Team include: Logan Wolter, Coy Fastnacht, Dalton Howe and Rylie Stevens. Members of the Wessington Springs 4-H Soils team include: Landon Wolter, Keah Munson, Chandler Flowers and Alicia Jackson.

The travel to Oklahoma City for the 2018 national competition is partially funded by sponsorship through the 4-H Livestock Industry Trust Fund and the South Dakota Section of the Society for Range Management.

Hunter Eide of Gettysburg won the speech competition and will be representing South Dakota in the High School Youth Forum at the Annual Society for Range Management convention to be held in Sparks, Nevada in February 2018.

The South Dakota Section of the Society for Range Management provides a sponsorship to cover the travel and participation expenses for Eide.

The Rangeland/Soils Days program is an annual event that moves to a different location within the state every two years. The East Pennington Conservation District hosted the event in 2016 and 2017. The Spink County Conservation District will host the event in 2018 and 2019. Area ranchers, personnel from SDSU Extension, USDA-Natural Resource Conservation Service, USDA-Forest Service and the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies provided instruction and expertise.

"This event is an opportunity for youth and adults to learn more about two of the state's most important resources, our rangelands and the soils found in the state," said Dave Ollila, SDSU Extension Sheep Field Specialist.

The event's learning activities were designed for a variety of age groups and expertise, from 8 years of age through adults. Beginners learned about plant morphology and identification and worked their way up to evaluating rangelands for suitability as livestock and wildlife habitat. Once the rangeland has been given a "rating" for habitat quality, recommendations for improvement are discussed and made to meet the goals of the cooperating producer.

After a day of active learning, participants had the opportunity to measure how much they learned by participating in a contest suited to their age and expertise.

County 4-H teams and FFA Chapters, of three to four members, participated in team competition with the top 4-H team in their respective area of Range Judging or Soil Judging earning the right to represent South Dakota at the National Range and Soil Judging competition held in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in May 2018.

Rangeland Day participants also competed for awards in the Rangeland Educational display competitions and Rangeland related speech contests in all the youth divisions.

A Top Hand is selected in each youth division.

This award is based on the participants combined weighted scores in the three areas; range judging (40 percent),range displays (25 percent) and range speeches (35 percent).

The Top Hand in each youth division is awarded a Maynard belt buckle and the Top Hand in the Go-Getter Division also received a 3-foot tall traveling trophy to be displayed in their home for a year.

This Top Hand Award year's recipients include:

New Ranger Division: Bennett Gordon, Whitewood;

Wrangler Division: Matea Gordon, Whitewood; and

Go-Getter Division: Danika Gordon, Whitewood.

For further information about South Dakota Rangeland Days and South Dakota Soils Days please contact Dave Ollila at david.ollila@sdstate.edu.
By Brett Nachtigall

HOT SPRINGS  The regular meeting of the Hot Springs School District was a brief one, on Monday, July 10, and primarily took care of a number of annual organizational agenda items, as it was the first official meeting of the new school year.

Highlighting the meeting was the swearing in of new board member Frances Stokes, who is a retired elementary school teacher from the district. She was appointed to the position by the board to fill Kory Bosserts seat at the table, after his terms expired. Bossert, who was not present at the meeting, was thanked for his service to the district from 2013 to 2017.

The approved board re-organization saw Scott Thompson being re-elected by his peers as the Board President, and Kim Henningsen being re-elected as Board Vice President.

Board committees were also announced, which Henningsen recognized and something new for the board and something he greatly appreciated, saying it will help steer the board in the right direction of accomplishing its goals by giving people with knowledge in certain areas to provide their input.

Committees are as follows:

Building/Grounds/Transportation  Mark Walton (chair), Tim Maciejewski, Dustin Kleinsasser

Finance/Negotiations  Thompson (chair), Henningsen, Walton

Black Hills Special Services  Henningsen, Brandi Christiansen

Title I  Frances Stokes

ASBSD/Legislative/Delegate  Kleinsasser

Food Services  Christiansen, Stokes, Maciejewski

Curriculum/Policy  Henningsen (chair), Thompson, Stokes

Technology  Kleinsasser (chair), Christiansen, Henningsen

Equalization - Maciejewski

Also ss part of the newly approved Board Organization, it was pointed out by Business Manager Deb Ollerich that the two primary changes to last years information was a change in the food service prices.

Student breakfasts and lunches increased about 10 cents, while adult lunches were lowered slightly in hopes of increasing the amount of teachers and parents who take advantage of the meals at the school.

New prices are as follows:

Student Breakfast Reduced - $.35, Full Price - $1.65; Student Lunch Reduced - $.45, Full Price - $2.80 Elem, $3.00. Adult Breakfast - $2.85, Adult Lunch $4.70, Extra Milk - $.60.

Ollerich said another change was to the schools Imprest Fund, which is set up in order to have immediate funds available to pay bills and expenses in the event of an emergency and/or to take advantage of certain discounts or to avoid finance charges. Ollerich said previously $20,000/month was allocated to that fund. She lowered it to $15,000 and said simply changing the due date on some of the regular bills will eliminate the need to have so much money available in the Imprest Fund.

A brief discussion was also held in regards to the schools planned boiler project. The school has been planning and budgeting for a number of years to replace its current boiler system. Progress has been made, including getting engineering and consultant bids. Superintendent Kevin Coles said more discussion is needed, and said it will be brought up again at future board meetings, since a few of members were absent at the July 10 meeting, including Kleinsasser, Walton and Christianson (she joined briefly via conference call while on vacation out of state).

Supt. Coles also reported that the elementary playground resurfacing project this summer is nearing completion. Henningsen noted how the success of this project was made possible thanks to the committee system recently put in place, which allowed board members with construction knowledge to provide input.

Prior adjournment, the board set Monday, July 31, at 5 p.m., as a special Budget Hearing meeting.
Tuesday Jason Ingalls met friends Cole and Kyndra Elshere at Maurine and they all went to Bozeman MT to visit her family and other friends.

They came home on Saturday. Jason said it wasn't as hot out there and cooled off quicker in the evenings, didn't get hot as early in the morning, was a lot greener and still liked home the best. He caught a summer cold in the process also, which sure hasn't been enjoyable.

Rod and Tracy Ingalls kept their Friday morning appointments in Rapid City. Tracy spent the rest of the day with friends Traci Donavon, Sherry Seymour, and Val Samuelson. They went to Hill City, had lunch, back to Rapid City where Tracy had her second appointment, then the group went to Spearfish for the Arts in the Park event, supper at AppleBees and back home. Rod went up to Ben Ash Monument to pick Tracy up that night as he had come on home early as he hates to be away with it being so dry and fear of fires.

Kay Ingalls also had appointments in Rapid City on Friday then went back to Sturgis to spend the weekend with Freda Wilson. Freda and I went up to Spearfish Friday afternoon, driving through the maze to find our way to Walmart where I hoped to get a haircut. I sure got one and won't need another one until Christmas as I got my money's worth, so to speak.

Saturday Gladys Edwards, Nancy Carpenter and Clara Beth came to Freda's in the afternoon for a good visit. I came home Sunday forenoon before it got 100 degrees.

Dwayne, Zona and Hope Vig joined JT and Kelsey Vig and children at their home for a Thursday night Bible Study.

Friday morning Dwayne, Zona, Hope and Morgan Vig moved pairs to summer "hay field". No haying to be done so letting the cows take what forage there is off now. That afternoon Dwayne and Zona flew over to visit Cheryl Vig on her birthday and got to see her sons Ryan and Justin also.

Dwayne has a very steady job flying on cattle, water tanks and checking for water line leaks. Water is very precious this year, mostly provided by wells.

Carmen Heidler reported a good crowd attended the sewing gathering held at the Opal Church basement on Friday.

Dwayne, Zona and Hope Vig drove to Sturgis for services on Sunday. Tom Rucker from Texas gave the lesson. They enjoyed lunch with Keith and Sue Keffeler and other family and friends. On the way home Dwayne brought the tractor home from Big Draw after putting more gravel around a water tank.

Not much new from this area and for my readers in the Sturgis Paper it is not being printed half the time as is what happened in the July 12th issue. I don't know about other rural mail subscribers, but my paper that is supposed to come on Wednesdays arrives the FOLLOWING Monday. Old news, old ads so not much to look forward to. Don't know what the problem is but I have informed them at least twice what is going on.

Hope they can find the problem and attempt to fix it.

Coming up this weekend is reunion week for the Ingalls Families on Saturday at the Mark's Park north of Sturgis where it has been held for a couple previous years. Potluck close to the noon hour. Sunday is the Simons Families reunion to be held at the air conditioned community center in Union Center. Potluck at 1 in the afternoon and music and dancing in the afternoon. Come early to get your visiting in.

JULY 12 OPAL NEWS

Little catch up again. July 4th holiday schedule changes things. We haven't melted or burned up yet but is really trying it's best. 107 one day and Sunday the 9th was 108 with a 40 mph wind, at least. Had one lightning caused fire north and east of Faith on that hot Sunday. Tough times.

June 27th several community people attended the funeral services held in Faith that forenoon for Vicky Waterland. Our condolences to out to Harold and Lacey and all the families that will really miss her.

John Heidler attended the funeral that day while Carmen made a trip to Rapid City to keep an eye appointment.

Darrell Vig has been keeping busy with helping keep water systems up and going. He went to Rapid City Tuesday the 27th for supplies and to visit with his dad, Merle Vig.

Kelly Keffeler visited at the home of Kay Ingalls on Thursday morning.

Rod and Jason were here for awhile also, but that is an every day deal.

Sunday the 2nd Carmen Heilder went to Plainview area to help Lucille O'Grady. Since Lucille lost her only sibling she was going through things at the ranch with the help of other friends, also.

Sunday afternoon when the guys got back from the hay field John and Carmen went to Faith for a birthday party for a special little 6 year old granddaughter, Braylie Heidler.

Several ranchers from the area have taken on the project of haying a 6 section wheat field for hay. Rod and Jason Ingalls, the Heidler family, Ryan, Justin and JT Vig, Grueb and Fees, Hanson and Brooke and McMurtry team are getting it done. Jonathan Cowles helped the Heidler crew a few days and Justin Ingalls helped his family a bit, also.

Dwayne, Zona, Hope and Rose Tysdal attended services at Northern Hills Sunday the 2nd of July After lunch with the Winkler children they picked up bulls at the Winkler Ranch. Late Sunday night Aurora and Autumn Keffeler came from Gillette to help Vig's prepare for the 4th of July Community Picnic. Tuesday the 4th was a HOT day but 55 people enjoyed the community picnic at Dwayne and Zona's home. There was plenty of good food, great visiting, stock tanks of water for the kids for everyone attending from Florida, Rapid City, Sturgis, Gillette, Newell, Faith and, of course, Opal.

Hope Vig took Rose to the Rapid City airport on Thursday and then gave Zona a ride home from Sturgis that afternoon. Bible Study that evening was held at the home of Todd and Janelle Goddard because of the heat.

Friday evening Tammy Vig came to spend time with Darrell Vig. Saturday they went to Rapid City for supplies and then visited Merle Vig. He was quite happy to see them.

Saturday was John Hiedler's birthday so they went up to spend some time with Mr. Ryden Heidler. Carmen said Ryden was really happy to see grandma but didn't pay much attention to grandpa so later grandpa made grandma stay home and he went alone to play with Ryden.

Norman and Susan Delbridge came to Dwayne and Zona's on Saturday evening to get the pickup and camper to use at Bible Camp in North Dakota.

Friday the 14th is the day the sewing group plans to meet at the Opal Community Church basement. Check with Carmen Heidler if you want to know more.
A man who robbed a convenience store in Eagle Butte last summer was sentenced Monday in federal court.

Kobe Houston, 19, of Eagle Butte, was sentenced to 12 months and a day in custody, followed by 2 years of supervised release, according to release from the South Dakota Attorney General's office. Houston and three other defendants were ordered to pay $1,743 in restitution and a $100 special assessment to the Federal Crime Victims Fund.

According to the release, Houston and three other people  Ryker Talbot, Dominic Houston and a juvenile  robbed the Eagle Stop convenience store at around 1 a.m. July 2, 2016.

Houston was indicted on a robbery charge by a federal grand jury on Feb. 15, and pleaded guilty April 24, the release said.
The revised version of health care reform legislation, reintroduced Thursday in the U.S. Senate, faces yet another difficult road to passage.

One hallmark of the American Health Care Act that remains in the new iteration, though, is deep cuts to Medicaid. An estimated 23 million Americans would lose their current health insurance plans if the measure were to pass.

Given the reach of Medicaid  which covers nearly 240,000 Nebraskans, some 13 percent of the state population, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation  the significant cuts still present in the legislation would wound far too many in Nebraska to be prudent.

Medicaid was never designed to serve the number of Americans it does today. A variety of factors are to blame, including slow wage growth, runaway costs for health care and cuts to other services at the state and federal levels. The most productive way to turn the tide is to reverse increasing demand that far exceeds the intended goal.

In Nebraska, Medicaid accounts for one-fifth of Nebraskas general fund spending and one-third of its federal funding, Kaiser reports. Yet the state would see tax credits for marketplace consumers fall by an average of more than $4,200  fifth-most in the nation, per the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Those dollars serve an important purpose, and agencies that continue to try doing more with declining financial resources say the state has done an excellent job controlling costs. But it would be much more productive long term for that money to instead be invested in programs that serve the target populations now while decreasing the future demand.

Today, one in three Nebraska children is on Medicaid, accounting for 67.1 percent of its clients in the state at the end of 2016, according to the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. Thats more than 50 percent higher than the national average of 43 percent reported by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Children arent alone, either. AARP Nebraska noted the bill would come down particularly hard on those nearing retirement. One estimate placed the annual out-of-pocket hike at more than $13,000 for a 60-year-old resident of western Nebraska, where there are fewer providers, who earns $20,000 a year without employer-subsidized health insurance if this legislation were to pass.

This social safety net was originally created to serve only the most vulnerable families. Now, the American Academy of Pediatrics notes nearly two-thirds of children on Medicaid come from households with at least one full-time worker. The status quo isnt sustainable.

Without question, the American health care system is in dire need of reform and increased efficiencies. But in this bills current form, Nebraskans would undoubtedly be hurt worse than nearly any other state  an outcome we cant endorse.
Russian Economy ex-minister Ulyukayev appeals against extension of house arrest

MOSCOW, July 19 (RAPSI, Lyudmila Klenko) - Russia's former Economy Minister Alexey Ulyukayev, who stands charged with extorting a $2 million bribe, filed an appeal against extension of his house arrest until August 15, RAPSI learnt in Moscow's Basmanny District Court on Wednesday.

Last week, Ulyukayev finished reading the case materials. The Investigative Committee is expected to forward the case to court for hearing until the end of the summer.

Ulyukayev was arrested while receiving a bribe in mid-November 2016. He allegedly demanded Russian state-controlled oil giant Rosnefts representative to pay him $2 million for lawfully providing a positive review and evaluation of a deal that allowed Rosneft to acquire governments share in mid-sized producer Bashneft. According to the Investigative Committee, the former minister threatened to create obtrusions for Rosneft with use of his position.

Ulyukayev has pleaded not guilty.

On November 15, the ex-minister was put under house arrest. Later in the evening, President Vladimir Putin has relieved Ulyukayev of his post because of loss of trust.

The Basmanny District Court has seized Ulyukayevs property valued at over 564 million rubles ($9.3 million).




Nemtsov murder case defendant appeals his sentence

MOSCOW, July 19 (RAPSI, Yevgeniya Sokolova)  Temirlan Eskerkhanov filed an appeal against the sentence he had received in the murder case of prominent Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, lawyer Anna Byurchiyeva told RAPSI on Wednesday.

Other defendants are also going to appeal their sentences, attorney Dagir Khasavov told RAPSI.

On July 13, the Moscow District Military Court sentenced murderers of Nemtsov to prison terms varying from 11 to 20 years. The court ruled in accordance with the will of the jury panel founding all defendants guilty. Zaur Dadayev, Nemtsovs first-hand killer was sentenced to 20 years. Anzor Gubashev was sentenced to 19 years, Shadid Gubashev to 16 years, Temirlan Eskerkhanov to 14 years and Khamzat Bakhayev to 11 years. All defendants will serve their time in a high-security penal colony. The court fined defendants 100,000 rubles (about $1,670). |Shadid and Anzor Gubashev, Eskerkhanov and Bakhayev were also subjected to additional restriction of freedom for two years.

A prosecutor has requested to sentence Dadayev to life. She also demanded a 23-year prison term for Anzor Gubashev, a 21-year prison sentence for Shadid Gubashev, 19 years in prison for Eskerkhanov and 17 years for Bakhayev. Bakhayevs lawyer Zaurbek Sadakhanov asked the judge to pardon his client. A lawyer representing Nemtsovs family also reinforced previously stated opinion that there is not enough evidence to prove Bakhayevs guilt.

In late June, jurors found all the defendants guilty of involvement in the politicians murder and illegal trafficking in firearms and ammunition. According to the verdict, they did not deserve leniency.

The jury panel stated that one of defendants, Dadayev, conspired with others, was stalking and collecting data on Nemtsov, prepared murder and killed the politician himself, shooting his victim at least six times from an unidentified gun.

Boris Nemtsov, 55, a prominent opposition politician, who held a number of high-ranking posts in the Russian government in the 1990s and in the 2000s joined the opposition, was shot down in the center of Moscow as he walked across a bridge near the Kremlin on the night of February 28, 2015.

Investigators believe that the conspirators in the murder had thoroughly prepared to commit this crime and spied on the victim.

Five men have been charged with contract murder, illegal acquisition, carrying and keeping of weapons.

Ruslan Mukhudinov, a former officer in Chechen Interior Ministry, is believed to be a mastermind of the murder. He was placed on the international wanted list in November 2015. Beslan Shavanov, who allegedly was also implicated in the crime, reportedly killed himself when police tried to arrest him.

Criminal prosecution of Shavanov was dismissed because of his death. Investigation into Mukhudinov is underway.
Social network group admin gets over 3 years in prison for pushing teens to suicide

ST. PETERSBURG, July 19 (RAPSI, Mikhail Telekhov)  The Tobolsk District Court of the Tyumen region in Russia has sentenced Philipp Budeykin, aka Philipp Lis, 21, to 3 years and 4 months in a penal colony settlement for inducing teenagers to suicide, Vitaly Lazarev, the courts spokesman told RAPSI on Wednesday.

As the court has found out, Budeykin, failing to find a job after graduating from a secondary school, established a group in Russian VKontakte social network, where he put on display photos and videos demonstrating dead people and killings of people and animals.

According to investigators, Budeykin was behind suicides of 15 teenagers; nevertheless, only two counts of inducement to suicide could be proved in court.

For the crimes Budeykin had committed, he was sentenced to 3 years and 4 months in a penal colony, although the judgement is not yet final, according to Lazarev.

In May 2017, Budeykin pleaded guilty.

A criminal case was opened in May 2016 after several Russian media outlets reported about so-called Groups of Death, numerous groups where young people were encouraged to kill themselves.

Investigators claim that from December 2013 to May 2016 eight Groups of Death were registered on Vkontakte network. Fifteen teenagers from various regions of Russia were members of these groups and committed suicide. Searches were conducted in ten regions of Russia.

The investigation is currently ongoing in Russias Krasnodar Territory, Republics of Komi and Bashkortostan and Moscow, Volgograd, Voronezh, Tula, Kemerovo, Novosibirsk and Omsk regions. Investigators also claim that admins of Groups of Death have been found in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the Russian Investigative Committee says it continues to work to establish identities of other persons involved in inducing teenagers to suicide via social networks.




State Duma adopts bills on procedures related to Russian citizenship

MOSCOW, July 19 (RAPSI)  The State Duma, the Russian Parliaments lower house, has passed in the third reading a package of bills permitting to strip convicted terrorists of citizenship and introducing an oath of allegiance to the Russian Federation when obtaining the citizenship.

The amendments approved by the State Duma introduce the text of the oath to be obligatory given by persons 18 years of age and older wishing to acquire the Russian citizenship.

Besides, a special procedure is to be introduced for Ukrainian citizens submitting documents for obtaining residence permits or Russian citizenship. Instead of providing a certificate confirming the renunciation of their previous citizenship issued by Ukraine, they would be able to present notarized copies of renunciation statement.

Another bill approved by lawmakers regulates more thoroughly the issues relating to the grounds, on which decisions granting Russian citizenship may be revoked. In particular, it is proposed that in case the citizenship is acquired with the aim to undermine the foundations of the constitutional system of the Russian Federation manifested via committing, planning, or attempting crimes of terrorist or extremist nature as confirmed by a court ruling, it may constitute a breach of the obligation to comply with the Constitution and the laws of the Russian Federation, and, therefore, be qualified as the presentation of knowingly false statements.

According to the draft law, the Russian citizenship may be withdrawn, for instance, for taking hostages, organization of illegal extremist communities and financing of extremist activities. Final judgements in cases related to crimes of terrorist and extremist nature should be treated as court rulings establishing facts of making knowingly false statements.
Forest service officials are developing area closures on both the Lolo and Bitterroot national forests near the fire. The affected roads and trails, along with maps, will be posted on Inciweb (https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/) when they are finalized.

Due to the fires current location in remote, rugged and inaccessible terrain, firefighters are not directly engaging this fire on the ground at this time. Officials are considering aviation suppression tactics.

The fire isn't threatening any structures or private property.

A plume in the Sapphire Mountains east of the Ambrose Saddle area is from the 170-acre Slide Rock Fire near Rock Creek, which also is on the Lolo National Forest.

"It's very deceptive; it looks like its west of Florence and on the Bitterroot side," McKay said. "But both that fire and the Lolo Peak Fire are on the Lolo National Forest."
A new trail system for off-highway vehicles or OHVs, nearly ten years in the making, officially will open to the public in Darby on Saturday.

A celebration at Rye Creek Lodge at 9 a.m. on Saturday will include guided rides, a barbecue and a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The festivities are in conjunction with Darby Logger Days, which celebrates the skill and bravery of those who work in the time-honored tradition of logging.

Darby Trails, in the Rye Creek and Sleeping Child Creek drainages, offers two loops for OHV riders.The longer OHV loop trail runs about 28 miles, and a shorter loop runs about 14 miles. Any off-road vehicle less than 50 inches wide qualifies as an OHV and is permitted on the trails.

The U.S. Forest Service purchased the land from the Darby Logging Company in 2005; at the time the landscape included clearcuts and was crisscrossed with unimproved logging roads. In addition to the human-caused impacts, the forest fires of 2000 exacerbated the deterioration of the area.

The logging and fires damaged the soils and negatively impacted the watershed with increased sediment levels, according to a Bitterroot National Forest press release. So the forest service and Ravalli County Off-Road User Association partnered to restore the land, decommission unnecessary roads, and make sure the new trails cut into the area are sustainable for the future.

Dan Thompson and volunteers from the Ravalli County Off-Road User Associations mapped out the area after it was acquired by the U.S. Forest Service from the Darby Logging Company. In three years, Thompson and two dozen volunteers contributed more than 1,300 hours of their time.

Its a good study in the impact of big wildfires and their aftermath, Thompson said. Its a valuable addition to whats available on the Bitterroot National Forest.

The Darby Trails system will fill a much needed void in the Bitterroot Valley for OHV riders, according to Thompson. Prior to completion of the Darby Trails, most OHV riding available was on tough backcountry trails unsuitable for beginner riders.

The Bitterroot National Forest has very few OHV trails in the first place, and the ones in the backcountry are challenging for novice riders, Thompson said. These are suitable for family groups and novice riders.

Because of the extensive road system the logging company created, the Ravalli County Off-Road User Association only needed to build about two miles of new trail in order to make the loop system. Thompson said that the association made its recommendations after mapping the area extensively.

We learned a lot and that was exciting to a lot of our members, Thompson said. Its always exciting - the spirit of exploration - and we felt like we were doing something worthwhile. The satisfying thing for us was that the recommendations we made were generally accepted by the agency.

The funding for the project came in part from the Yamaha and Polaris corporations, which both have grant programs for trail maintenance and development. Their grants totaled $27,000. Another grant was transferred from the Montana Trail Vehicle Riders Association, another OHV advocacy group, after one of its projects failed.

The Ravalli Off-Road User Association also received a small amount of money from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks to create information kiosks about the history of the area.

Wed like to focus on the educational aspects of how the area was intensely burned and is recovering, what that entails and the improvements to the watershed, Thompson said.

Not everyone welcomed the new OHV trail system though. Jim Miller is the president of Friends of the Bitterroot, an organization that advocates for the preservation of wildlands. Miller said he doesnt think building an OHV or ATV riding loop is consistent with a restoration project.

The Darby Lumber Lands Restoration project was undertaken by the Bitterroot Restoration Committee, which Friends of the Bitterroot sits on, and we advocated significantly against road development, Miller said. I believe theyve done some good work there, but I believe putting an ATV area in a place that is already severely damaged is problematic.

If the trails were built with ATV use in mind. there is the possibility that little erosion damage occurs, according to Miller. But Miller said he has not yet had an opportunity to see the completed project.

ATV riders need some areas to recreate, and we recognize that, Miller said. Our position is that we believe roads are for motor vehicles and that trails are for people and horses. An ATV is a vehicle and we believe forest service roads are the best place for them.

Managing multiple uses for public lands is one of the perennial problems on National Forest lands throughout the American West, and competing interests put groups at odds with one another. But for now, Thompson and the OHV riders in the Bitterroot Valley are excited theyll be able to share the same scenic views of the Bitterroot Mountains others get.

OHV riders go out in the woods for all the same reasons everyone else does, Thompson said. Were pretty pleased with this outcome.
University of Montana student Guthrie McLean has been detained in China in an apprehension his mother and a family friend are calling "a shakedown."

Chinese police arrested McLean on Sunday, July 16, but he has not been charged with a crime, said Jennifer McLean, his mother, in an email Tuesday. She is requesting diplomatic intervention.

"He is in one of the worst detention centers in China," wrote Jennifer McLean, who teaches in China. "There are no separate facilities for foreign detainees, and they can hold him indefinitely without charges.

"This is a shakedown. They brought him in and demanded money for his release."

A family friend, Tom Mitchell, Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times, said the arrest took place a few weeks after an altercation between the McLeans and a cab driver.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said Tuesday the agency was aware of Guthrie McLean's detention but declined further comment.

"We are aware of media reports that a U.S. citizen was arrested in China," the spokesperson wrote. "When a U.S. citizen is detained overseas, the Department works to provide all appropriate consular assistance. Due to privacy considerations, we have no further comment."

***

In her email, Jennifer McLean said her son spent most of his childhood in China and earned an advanced diploma from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She said he transferred to Montana from a university in Dalian, China.

On May 24, Guthrie McLean left Montana on a bus to Seattle and flew into Zhengzhou on a U.S. passport, McLean said. She said Guthrie had planned to visit historical sites and a panda rescue center.

Mitchell, who has known the McLeans since 2001, provided a narrative of the events that led to Guthrie McLean's detention.

On June 10, a taxi driver returned Jennifer McLean to her residence in Zhengzhou in Henan Province, said Mitchell. He said she handed over Chinese currency of Renminbi 100 for a RMB 70 fare, but the driver refused to provide change.

He said McLean is deaf but reads lips and speaks softly.

"In the argument that followed, the driver started to rough up Jennifer," Mitchell said. "Guthrie came down from the residence, pulled the driver off Jennifer, and pushed him to the ground. Then they went back to their apartment."

On July 16, he said, the police arrived at Jennifer's apartment, took Guthrie to a station, and told him to pay the equivalent of $14,800 for the injuries the driver said he sustained.

"I'm sure it didn't take the police and taxi driver very long to realize Jennifer doesn't have much money, and their price came down to RMB 60,000 ($8,878), which Jennifer also doesn't have," Mitchell said in an email.

Guthrie McLean was detained overnight, formally arrested Monday, July 17, and transferred to a detention center, he said.

***

Jennifer McLean said she and her son both had to sign statements about the incident with the cab driver.

She said Guthrie McLean told her the authorities said he would go to jail if he didn't sign the statement because he would be interfering with an investigation, but said he could go home if he signed it.

After they gave their statements, she said she and her son were placed in a "listening room" where the authorities could record their conversation. She said they compared notes about the incident and talked about how to proceed.

"I asked to be excused to the ladies' room for a moment, and they assured me I could come back, but they lied, and they locked me out and made me leave," McLean said.

"They brought me there in a police car, and I didn't know where I was. I had to walk home, (and) I don't need to tell you I am a little wary of taking taxi rides alone at night these days, and it was nearing midnight."

Jennifer McLean said she has not been allowed to have any contact with her son since his apprehension.

"Only the U.S. Embassy or consulate representative may visit him, but they are refusing because they require a formal notification from the Chinese authorities to do so," McLean said in her email.

"They also refuse to speak with me about this situation because they require him to provide a privacy waiver first.

"So he is alone, scared, (and) has no idea what is going on."

Jennifer McLean said her son is an only child, and she is a single parent. She urged people to contact U.S. Sen. Jon Tester here and request action on her son's case.

Tester's press secretary Dave Kuntz said the senator acted on word of the detainment earlier this week as soon as he learned about the situation.

Senator Testers office was informed of this incident on Monday, and within minutes contacted the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in China," Kuntz said in an email. "Senator Tester is working closely and urgently with officials here and abroad to secure Mr. McLeans quick release and to safely resolve this matter.

***

Mitchell has requested that the U.S. Embassy in Beijing demand immediate visitation for Jennifer McLean, given its knowledge of her son's detention. He also said Guthrie McLean appears to be ensnared in a Catch-22.

According to an email he provided from the U.S. Embassy, Chinese authorities will notify the embassy or relevant U.S. Consulate when an American is arrested or detained in China. Once contacted, the embassy or consulate will work with Chinese authorities to set up a meeting with the American citizen and check on their welfare.

At the meeting, the consular officer will give the detained American the opportunity to sign a privacy waiver, which allows the officer to contact family and friends, the email said: "Without a signed Privacy Act waiver, the U.S. Embassy or Consulate cannot release any information regarding the detained individual."

Tester's office does not yet have assurance that the Chinese authorities have communicated with the U.S. Embassy. And the State Department spokesperson said the agency was not commenting due to privacy concerns.

Mitchell said he is worried the Zhengzhou police are deliberately stalling contact in an attempt to "shake down Jennifer." But he said she does not have a lot of money and her financial circumstances will make it difficult for her to pay for a lawyer.

"Today, the police lowered their 'settlement' price to RMB 50,000 ($7,400) and are pressuring her to pay up as soon as possible," he said.

***

Tuesday, Guthrie McLean should have been on his way to Sichuan to help take care of panda bears at a rescue center, Jennifer McLean said.

"He had been saving for that trip for quite a while," she said. "He was very excited about it."

Instead, Jennifer McLean said she took fresh clothing to the police station and police will take it to her son Thursday, "if they are to be believed."

She said her son's return to the United States to study at UM was a big event, and he has assimilated well despite being shy and sometimes getting tongue-tied.

UM said McLean is a senior enrolled in East Asian studies with a minor in media arts.

"He is what sociologists call a third culture kid (TCK), so part of a rising new phenomenon of a rapidly globalizing world," McLean said. "Of course he speaks English without a foreign accent, so people expected him to understand (jargon), so that led to some confusion.

"He loves Montana, especially the wildlife and mountains."

She said her son's return ticket is for Aug. 29.
Its safe to assume most people who sip a cup of tea here in Montana or around the world dont realize that theyre consuming a product that may have contributed to a vast decline in elephants in Asia.

Tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world next to water, according to the Tea Association of the U.S.A., and Americans consumed more than 3.8 billion gallons of it in 2016.

In places like India and Southeast Asia, elephant habitat has been cleared for decades to make way for plantations.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources estimates that the Asian elephant population has declined 50 percent in the past 75 years. There are now only 40,000 to 50,000 wild Asian elephants, and much of the decline correlates with human-elephant conflict and loss of habitat.

Thats why the University of Montanas Broader Impacts Group has partnered with the Wildlife Friendly Enterprise Network to launch the worlds first tea certification program designed to protect the endangered Asian elephant.

The farm-to-cup program means that tea growers who practice elephant-friendly techniques, such as not installing deep and narrow irrigation ditches that kill baby elephants, can get certification. And conservation-minded consumers in places like Missoula can find the Certified Elephant Friendly Tea at local companies like the Lake Missoula Tea Company, Cafe Dolce and the Good Food Store.

We are encouraged by the interest we are seeing from tea growers and buyers who want to join the Certified Elephant Friendly Tea partnership, said Lisa Mills, UM liaison for the project. With a percentage of every sale going back to support elephant conservation in the communities where the tea is grown, tea drinkers can directly support human-elephant co-existence.

Improperly installed electric fencing and the chemicals used in conventional tea production can harm elephants. So can humans when they believe a herd has trampled their field.

The impact of human development on elephants has been tremendous, according to Mills, and there isnt much time left to preserve the genetic diversity that will allow the population to thrive well into the future. Unlike in Africa, where poaching is the major issue, tea seems to be the biggest threat to the future of the Asian species, Elephas maximus.

Certified Elephant Friendly Tea also will link conservation action to a science-based evaluation of impacts on elephant populations.

We are working with scientists at UM and in India to determine how implementation of elephant friendly practices will actually help reverse the declining trajectory of Asian elephant populations, Mills said.

Jake Kreilick, who owns Lake Missoula Tea Company with his wife Heather, said elephant-friendly tea is a real crossover issue between conservation and sustainable business development.

We are carrying two teas, the Bodo Black Assam and Bodo Green Assam, and, aside from their delicious flavor, these teas represent a community development and conservation success story, he said.

UMs Broader Impacts Group is part of the Office of Research and Creative Scholarship. In addition to partnership with WFEN, an international conservation organization, on the project, support also is provided by the Blackstone LaunchPad, the School of Business Administration and the Wildlife Biology Program at UM.

To learn more email Mills at lisa.mills@mso.umt.edu or visit elephantfriendlytea.com.
Photo by Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- In a sale worth more than $4 billion, McCormick & Company is expected to purchase the food business of the company that owns French's, Frank's RedHot and Cattlemen's brands.



In a press release from Reckitt Benckiser Group, which owned the condiments, the company's CEO, Rakesh Kapoor, says that he is "pleased to be selling to owners who can provide the necessary resources, market expertise and global platform, whilst being a good home for our people."



In its own press release, McCormick said that acquiring the "beloved products enables McCormick to become a one-stop shop for condiment, spice and seasoning needs."



Reckitt Benckiser has shifted its focus away from the food division in recent years, the New York Times notes. The company has instead focused its business on health products, such as Durex condoms, Dr. Scholl foot care and Nurofen pain relievers.



The sale is expected to be completed later in the year and is subject to regulatory approval.

Copyright  2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Kathmandu, Nepal: It is likely that Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba would expand his Cabinet today. The leaders of the government allies shave been consulting now to this effect.

It is said that at least 13 ministries will be given to the Nepali Congress. As the Nepali Congress already has the ministries of finance, education, and labor and employment, nine ministers will be included today.

The major government allies, Nepali Congress and CPN Maoist Centers have already agreed in principle to the ministries. However, the government allies have yet to reach on the conclusion after holding consultations with the fringe parties.

Though the Nepali Congress and the Maoist Center have already agreed to share the ministerial portfolios, consolations is going on with the Rastriya Janata Party at Prime Minister Deubas official residence Baluwatar to this effect today.

According to the source, Nepali Congress will get the Ministry of Information and Communications, the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport, the Ministry of Water Supply and Sanitation and the Ministry of Irrigation.

Likewise, the CPN Maoist Center will get nine ministries including the Ministry of General Administration, the Ministry of Livestock Development, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Agriculture Development, the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare.

The source has also a claim that Nepali Congress is sending Mohan Basnet, Ram Krishna Yadav, Bal Bahadur KC, Bhimsen Das Pradhan, Kamala Devi Panta, Min Bahadur Bishwokarma, Rajan KC, Dipak Khadka in the cabinet.

Likewise the CPN Maoist Center is sending Giriraj Mani Pokhrel, Shyam Kumar Shrestha, Asha Khanal, Tek Bahadur Basnet, Mahendra Bahadur Sahi, and Shiva Kumar Mandal in the Cabinet.
EVERYTNING IS UP TO US

Tajani: EU ready for Montenegros accession

Montenegro is progressing on its path to the EU and in these eforts it enjoys suport of the official Brussels, European officials and administration, said European Parliament President Antonio Tajani at a meeting with Montenegrin Prime Minister Dusko Markovic in Podgorica earlier today.

President Tajani said that the EU is willing to integrate Montenegro in the shortest possible time, depending on the speed of fulfillment of tasks from our European agenda. He said that he will continue to back up Montenegro to join the EU, and that his visit to Podgorica is a strong message not only to the country, but also the region. Noting that the arrival of the European Parliament President will give additional impetus to the Montenegrin administration to work more intensively towards meeting the European agenda, Prime Minister Markovic stresed that progress has been made in relation to the latest meeting of the two officials in February.

Today, Montenegro has 28 open and three temporarily closed chapters, and is strongly committed to meeting the criteria for opening the remaining negotiating chapters. The Government's intention is to pledge additional commitment not only to closing the chapters, but primarily to fostering European values and standards that will contribute to the changes in the Montenegrin society.

PM Markovic also informed President Tajani about financial consolidation measures that produced positive results, emphasizing that public finances were stabilized, favorable business environment preserved and that economic growth in the first quarter of the year was at the rate of 3.2%.

He added that it is necessary to further strengthen the economy, especially in the areas of tourism, energy and agriculture, and he agreed with President Tajani that it is important to further stimulate industrial production. President of the European Parliament said that he is personally dedicated to strengthening economic diplomacy and highlighted potentials of Montenegrin tourism that need to be further valorized.

EP President particularly praised the role of Montenegro in the region - as a country that has always contributed to stability in the Balkans. He said that in the forthcoming period the country should continue pursuing such a policy, as, the two officials agreed a stable Balkans means a safe and stable Europe.
Two-Vehicle Crash Claims the Life of a Salem Man on Highway 20

Even in the best of conditions, driving can be risky.



Two-vehicle crash on Highway 20 near milepost 34.5 claimed one life.

Photo: OSP



(LINN COUNTY, Ore.) - A Salem man was killed yesterday when the motorcycle he was operating crashed into the side of a Kenworth log truck.

Oregon State Police Troopers and emergency personnel responded to the report at about 10:30 a.m. of a two-vehicle crash on Highway 20 near milepost 34.5 (east of Sweet Home).

Police say a black 2015 BMW Motorcycle, operated by 65-year old John Harvey Weeks, of Salem, was travelling eastbound on Highway 20 east of Sweet Home when for unknown reasons, the BMW veered into the oncoming lane and struck the side of a green 2016 Kenworth log truck. The truck was operated by 59-year old Kenneth Keil Reynolds, of Sweet Home, that was travelling westbound.

Weeks suffered fatal injuries and was pronounced deceased at the scene. Reynolds was not injured.

A witness stated that Weeks was possibly looking over his shoulder behind him while negotiating the curve.

Highway 20 was closed for approximately three hours following the crash. OSP was assisted by the Sweet Home Fire & Ambulance District and Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT).

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" " Not even Washington, D.C. is off limits to rising sea levels. Here a park bench sits in the waters of the Washington Channel during high tide in September 2016. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

When a mass of ice the size of Delaware broke off in Antarctica the second week of July 2017, scientists weren't overly concerned that the 1 trillion tons (907 billion metric tons) of ice  the largest ever recorded  would cause an immediate rise in sea level as it melted. However, they were disturbed that the 2,240-square-mile (5,801-square-kilometer) iceberg was symptomatic of a larger problem: the future collapse of the entire ice shelf known as Larsen C. If it melted right away, scientists said, it would cause the oceans to rise almost a half inch (1.2 centimeters).

A collapse of Larsen C is probably decades away, but instances like this are the exact reason why scientists have always kept a close eye on rising sea levels, especially in recent decades. Over the past 100 years, Earth's climate has warmed about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius). As a result, the water bound up in ice caps, ice fields and glaciers has slowly melted, adding more water to the planet's oceans. In addition, heat causes water to expand, a concept known as thermal expansion. All of this has conspired to raise sea levels around the world nearly .07 inches (2 millimeters) a year.

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" " A mass of ice more than twice the size of Delaware broke off the Larsen C ice shelf in July, spawning one of the largest icebergs on record. ESA via Getty Images

But how do you even measure the level of the oceans? You can't just stand on the shoreline with a ruler  the levels fluctuate constantly in part due to waves, tides, and planetary and solar orbit. Not to mention there are hills and valleys, mountains and canyons  under the oceans as well as on land. And water in deep ocean basins also changes based on climate. To complicate matters even more, some coastal areas, such as New Orleans, Louisiana, and Venice, Italy, are sinking, while others, such as Alaska, are rising.

To measure this constant rise and fall of the oceans, scientists use a variety of tools, including tidal gauges, which are placed around the world in harbors, breakwaters and piers. In the United States the job falls to National Water Level Observation Network (NWLON), which has 210 permanent observing systems throughout the United States and its territories.

Before computers, the process was pretty rudimentary. Tidal gauges were placed inside tide houses that contained analog data recorders attached to floats. The floats were in "stilling wells" (long metal tubes that minimized waves) beneath the tide houses and the gauges recorded changes in water level. Nailed to one of the pier pilings was essentially a large measuring stick that scientists used to manually observe tidal levels and then compare the readings taken by the floating data recorder.

Today the process is much more advanced and uses computerized tidal gauges. Unlike older tide-measuring stations that simply used floats and recorders, most of NWLON's 210 stations use acoustics and electronics placed inside a "sounding tube." Sensors send an audio signal down the tube and measure the time it takes the signal to return. The data is collected every six minutes and timing is controlled by a Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) network. The computerized system is more accurate and it measures, among other things, tidal heights, wind speed, wind direction, barometric pressure, along with air and water temperature.

NWLON is continuing to improve the ways it measures sea level. Its newest tools use microwaves to measure the distance from a fixed point above the water to its surface. The agency is in the process of updating most of its monitoring stations with microwave radar water level sensors, which are superior to acoustic sensors. About 40 of the 210 stations use this technology. Scientists also use a variety of satellites orbiting the planet to measure changes in sea level, as well as the reasons causing them to do so.

Now That's Cool Nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population lives in coastal counties, while eight of the 10 largest cities in the world are on the coast. While tide stations are a good indication of local sea level changes, worldwide satellite measurements give scientists with the average sea level of the world's oceans.
In Luc Besson's latest film, the extravagant science-fiction, hypercolor seizure Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, a pair of space cops set off on a devil-may-care adventure to save the universe. Or something like that.

Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevigne) are the above mentioned space cops, but not just any space cops, they are the super space cops, the ones who get the call to complete the impossible tasks. After completing the particularly tricky job or stealing a rare creature from a transdimensional and nigh infinite flea market, they are summoned to Alpha, the titular city of a thousand planets to deliver the goods and continue the mission.

The next leg, however, presents a bit of a problem as their oddly douchey commanding officer is quickly abducted and the pair takes off after his captors. What follows is a chase through Alpha toward a mysterious and forbidden inner zone that may house the end of the world as they know it.

Besson is one of my absolute favorite filmmakers, and one of the great remaining European auteurs to have survived the last thirty years, largely making esoteric popcorn films. In his best work, films like The Professional, The Fifth Element, La femme Nikita, and even the recent underappreciated gem Lucy, Besson is a force of nature who manages to concoct wild stories that frequently teeter on the edge of spinning out of control. Absurd stories are kept in check by rich screenplays and tender performances from actors who, under Besson's careful eye, are able to deliver heart-wrenching emotional performances even in the most ludicrous circumstances. Until now.

There is no doubting Besson's sci-fi chops at this point, I've gone on record stating that The Fifth Element is as close to a perfect science fiction film as I'm ever likely to see. However, as amazing and groundbreaking as the visuals of that film were, that's not what made it great. The unmistakable chemistry between the I'm-getting-too-old-for-this-shit former cop Dallas (Bruce Willis) and the too-pure-for-this-world Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) was the real heart beating behind the flash.

The same goes for The Professional, while it was in no way science fiction, it is an equal contender to the throne of greatest action film of the last 25 years. And again, as great as the action is, the film would be nothing without the tender relationship between Mathilda (Natalie Portman) and Leon (Jean Reno). Which is why Valerian is so disappointing.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a supremely indulgent mess of a film, which in Besson's hands would normally have been just fine and dandy. However, the writing and acting performances fail to live up to their most basic requirements: (1) make sense, and (2) make me care.

From the very beginning of the film, the relationship between Valerian and Laureline is a will-they-or-won't-they tease that never really leaves much to the imagination. Their destination is clear, there's a bit of attempted fun in the twists and turns along the road, but there's no thrill of the chase from either character. In this case, the blame lays equally at the feet of Besson's screenplay and the performances from DeHaan and Delevigne - which circles back to Besson anyway.

I don't think I've seen a more impressively dense charisma vaccuum than the coupling of DeHaan and Delevigne in this film. Both performers are absolute wisps in roles that may not exactly demand a Dwayne Johnson or a Jason Statham, but at least some physical presence would've made them a lot easier to believe as intergalactic ass-kicking machines.

Delevigne's wooden performance in the ill-fated Suicide Squad was one of the worst things I saw last year, but I chalked that up to a mess of a production and the director not knowing what to do with her, or anyone else in that film. However, her performance in Valerian is somehow even less engaging, leaving me to question whether she's even a real performer or just a text-to-speech app that someone fed the Laureline dialogue into.

DeHaan does a bit better with his material, though it's largely the fact that his character is written much smarmier and more arrogant, and while those are not exactly endearing character traits, they are at least easily demonstrable. Though they state their feelings for one another over and over again throughout the film, it's hard to believe any of it when it just sounds like a couple of chess computers talking to one another.

Unfortunately for the pair, they were easily shown up by some of the more capable supporting cast at every opportunity. Notably interesting to watch were Sam Spruell as General Okto Bar, one of Valerian and Laureline's immediate superiors, Clive Owen as Commander Arun Filitt, John Goodman in a voice-only appearance as the black marketeer Igon Siruss, and a trio of conveniently well-informed cutesy aliens known as the Doghan Daguis. While no one exactly steals the show, these characters provide some welcome tension, emotion, and often levity to the frequently flat character dynamic between the leads.

All that said, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is often an absolute hoot to watch. There is no denying that very few visual stylists can do what Luc Besson can, and he's at his untethered best here. Though the set pieces often feel as though they're more than a little inspired by other films - including Besson's own - he manages to cast them in a new light and extend the boundaries of what those previous works were capable of depicting.

There are obvious traces of The Fifth Element throughout the film, both in terms of plot and character design, which shouldn't be surprising since one of the writers on that film is the co-creator of the Valerian and Laureline comic on which this film is based. However, it doesn't end there, there are touches of Star Wars (the good ones), Men in Black, Hellboy, Harry Potter, Blade Runner, and many, many more throughout the film. Besson incorporates and embellishes those influences to match his own aesthetic, and it's amazing to watch.

The lack of tension between the characters from the very beginning coupled with a clumsily told story that requires a exposition dump in the third act that you can practically hear hitting the floor the second it begins, making Valerian a bit of a slog at well over two hours, and that's just criminal. At the end of the film, Valerian says to his cohort that he's afraid she'll just have to spend two hours alone with him as they journey to safety. It's meant to be a romantic intimation, but unfortunately it sounds more like a threat by the time it rolls off his lips.

Yes, it's a very sparkly movie, and I enjoyed watching Besson's imagination run wild all over the screen, but there just isn't enough "there" there, and really just makes me want to watch The Fifth Element again.

I think I'll go do that.
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As noted in this prior post, on Monday Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech in which he indicated that a "new directive on asset forfeiture" was forthcoming that, "especially for drug traffickers," sought "to increase forfeitures." This new AP article, headlined "US restoring asset seizures - with safeguards," reports on what this new directive is going to include. Here are excerpts from the AP piece:

The Trump administration will soon restore the ability of police to seize suspects money and property with federal help, but The Associated Press has learned the policy will come with a series of new provisions aimed at preventing the types of abuse that led the Obama Justice Department to severely curtail the practice.

At issue is asset forfeiture, which has been criticized because it allows law enforcement to take possessions without criminal convictions or, in some cases, indictments. The policy to be rolled out Wednesday targets so-called adoptive forfeiture, which lets local authorities circumvent more-restrictive state laws to seize property under federal law. The proceeds are then shared with federal counterparts.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder significantly limited the practice in response to criticism that it was ripe for abuse, particularly with police seizures of small amounts of cash. Attorney General Jeff Sessions plans to ease those restrictions, but also impose new requirements on when federal law can be used, a senior Justice Department official briefed on the policy said Tuesday. The official, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity, was not authorized to discuss the changes before their unveiling.

Key changes include requiring more detail from police agencies about probable cause justifying a seizure before federal authorities get involved. Also, the Justice Department will have to decide more quickly whether to take on local seizures and also let property owners know their rights and the status of their belongings within 45 days of the seizure, faster than federal law requires.

Another key change will make it harder for police to seize less than $10,000 unless they have a state warrant, have made an arrest related to the seizure, have taken other contraband, such as drugs, along with the money, or the owner has confessed to a crime. Without at least one of those conditions, authorities will need a federal prosecutors approval to seize it under federal law.

Old rules set that threshold at $5,000, the official said. The old process rarely required a federal prosecutors sign-off, said Stefan Cassella, a former federal prosecutor and expert on asset forfeiture and money laundering law.

Sessions support for asset forfeiture is in keeping with his tough-on-crime agenda and aligns with his oft-stated view that the Justice Departments top priority should be helping local law enforcement fight violent crime. Police departments use the seizures for expenses, and some agencies felt Holders restrictions left them without a critical funding source. When he forecast the rollback of the Holder provision at a conference of district attorneys, the announcement drew applause.

But an embrace of asset forfeiture follows bipartisan efforts to overhaul the practice, and as a growing number of states have made their own laws limiting its use. Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California, who sponsored legislation this year to tightly regulate asset forfeiture, told the AP that Sessions move is a troubling step backward that would bring back a loophole thats become one of the most flagrantly abused provisions of this policy.

Im glad that at least some safeguards will be put in place, but their plan to expand civil forfeiture is, really, just as concerning as it was before, Issa said. Criminals shouldnt be able to keep the proceeds of their crime, but innocent Americans shouldnt lose their right to due process, or their private property rights, in order to make that happen.




Summer in San Francisco is, well, a unique beast: one day youre riding your bike down a long hill, the rush of air like a cooling fan, and the next day, youre stubbornly reaching for a sweater when the fog rolls in. Predictable summers are for the weak! (Southern California can keep those sweat-soaked boardwalks, thank you very much.)



That said, one of the best things about summer in this mercurial city is the opportunity to leave. With tourists, traffic, and tech bros gone wild, getting out of Dodge can be the right way to spend a weekend if you value your sanity. But where to go? For a dose of serenity in the literal wilderness, Point Reyes National Seashore is about an hour north of the city by carso if you leave work on a Friday, youll arrive with plenty of time to enjoy a sunset walk on the beach. (Yes, its pretty romantic.)



Officially incorporated as a National Seashore in 1962, Point Reyes is abundant in natural beauty, and it offers such a dearth of cell service that you can truly check out from all those pesky work emails and text messages. To really get out and commune with nature, the Phillip Burton Wilderness is located at the southern tip of Point Reyes, covering 33,000 acres of unbridled wildlife habitat. From fir-topped ridges to coastal grasslands, its the only dedicated wilderness in the Bay Area. Pack a picnic lunch and bring a canteenyoure going to want to stay a while.





For adrenaline-fueled folks a more at home in the water, or for those who merely want to dress for a Point Break-inspired lifestyle, the Point Reyes Surf Shop has you covered, from glossy boards to beachy novelty t-shirts. Its also a great place to purchase gimmicky items for your woefully landlocked family members who cant regularly enjoy the beauty of the California coastline. Those poor, poor people.



Speaking of on-brand shopping experiences, trot on over to Spirit Matters if you require a physical object to cure your metaphysical problems. Jokes aside, their selection of jewelry, incense, and talismans sourced from around the world is enough to briefly calm the nerves of any city-weary traveler, and if you arrive on a lucky day, you can even get your Tarot cards read.



Also, it goes without saying that if youre in an area famous for its coastline, youre going to need a good book (or two, or seven) as you sit on the beach. Enriching the literary community since 2002, Point Reyes Books is not to be missedthey sell work by the areas local authors, so a visit to the shop is a good way to support the Point Reyes creative community, one publication at a time.



Point Reyes is also home to the general store to end all general stores: Tobys Feed Barn (yes its a working feed barn!) slings all sorts of local goodies, from produce to handmade gifts, and even...goat food? Stop by their coffee counter for a cup of jo if you feel that afternoon slump approaching, and feel free to stay for the yoga classes for some added energy. Tobys also hosts a farmers market on summer Saturdays, and theyre home to a prestigious art gallery, as if the operation doesnt have enough on its resume already.



Point Reyes (istockphoto)

No trip to Point Reyes would be complete without a visit to Cowgirl Creamery, purveyors of award-winning organic cheeses that hit all those funky, grassy, bloomy, and downright delectable flavors that will satisfy even the most critical food snobs. Just try to buy a wheel of Mt. Tam and resist eating the entire thing in one sittingseriously, we dare you.



And, if for some reason, cheese does not constitute an entire meal for you (but really, give it a shot one day), take a trip to the Station House Cafe where the kitchen has served the community with local and sustainable fare since 1974. Yum.



Sometimes, the best part of summer in the city is getting out of town. So in celebration of extraordinary everydaysfrom weekend getaways to those sporadic moments of newfound joyFrancis Coppola Diamond Collection wines are expertly crafted for those who live in the moment. Made from grapes grown in vineyards across California, these wines are the perfect complement to your next adventurejust remember to drink responsibly.

Ready to seek out your own extraordinary everyday? Celebrate summer with the Francis Coppola Diamond Collection wines today.

This post is a sponsored collaboration between Francis Coppola Diamond Collection and Gothamist staff.
There has not been a new Uber scandal breaking today (though we're still a while from the end of the business day Pacific Daylight Time). There is, however, an epic, 6,500-word expose from BuzzFeed News that goes deep into Ubers asshole culture and interviews dozens of current and former Uber employees. The BuzzFeed News piece does not contain any new revelations on Ubers well-documented sexual harassment scandals, regulatory and criminal shenanigans, alleged theft of other companies intellectual property, and rampant executive immaturity that led to the ouster of CEO Travis Kalanick. But it sheds new light on the recent suicide of an Uber engineer in what employees call a culture of finger-pointing that makes them hella uncomfortable.

Asshole culture is promoted at Uber, one recently departed female employee told BuzzFeed News, summing up the whole enchilada with an obvious sentiment. Youve got to be a certain assholeish type of personality, otherwise youre considered weak, she said, describing Uber as a workplace where Either you are an asshole, or you are considered not valuable.

The entire BuzzFeed News report is a nearly 7,000-word opus that will take you an hour to read. So SFist has summed up the good parts in a TL/DR analysis, with the most surprising findings represented in bullet points below:



Uber had a creepy algorithm to determine the lowest salary that an employee would accept before making an employment offer



Top executives routinely humiliated individuals in all-company emails and at all-hands company meetings



Uber employees were not compensated for being on-call 24/7, nor for putting out fires at 3 a.m and on weekends



At one point in 2016, Uber asked employees to drive Uber routes on evenings and weekends as a means of better understanding the organization  but the employees werent paid for it



Employees were workplace-harassed whenever they used their sick days, and held to the expectation that working seven-day, 80-hour workweeks was just how Uber works



Employees received free dinner, but it wasnt served until 8:15 p.m., in order to keep employees around longer



Uber had internal knowledge that drivers wages were roughly equivalent to an employee at McDonalds



Top-performing employees were treated to workcations as if this were a perk, though employees had to pay their own airfare out of pocket



We have a general sense that Uber drivers are treated quite poorly while corporate employees live large. This BuzzFeed News analysis puts the lie to that, noting burnout-inducing culture of little sleep and constant work. There was a three- to four-month period where I was getting woken up every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 3 or 4 in the morning to fix something, an Uber engineer said anonymously. Months of that, on top of working 10-plus hours a day.

BuzzFeed also notes the rampant drug and alcohol use at the company, where a not-so-soft bias was in place against employees who did not drink or party enough. There was a lot of pressure to go to events and drink. That was seen as making your way up, one former employee told BuzzFeed News. If you werent participating in that party culture and going to all those drinking events, you werent going to get promoted. Youd get sidelined.

The report does not come out and use the word cocaine, but does make repeated references to substance abuse and self-harm as common workplace coping mechanisms.

The real shocker is that Uber employees are actually paid pretty poorly on the tech sector continuum. What they are lured with is the tease of stock compensation from a constantly delayed IPO that still has not yet occurred. Its a money cult. People are putting up with massive amounts of abuse, mental abuse, constant threats to fire you so youre losing your equity, one former employee said. The equity, people see that as their future, their retirement, the reason they moved to America, or why they moved halfway across the country, or across the country.

Its probably no accident that so many Uber employees are chirping to the press right now. It may be the effect of a Ding, dong, Travis is gone sentiment wherein the lack of a current CEO presents less threat of retribution toward leaking employees. Or given that Ubers new chief human resources officer Liane Hornsey goes on record extensively in the article, it may be a PR attempt show that a new Uber is here and putting the old Uber culture behind it. Or it could be that employees companywide have hit a breaking point with Ubers asshole culture.

You cant change the culture. Its set, one former senior employee told BuzzFeed News. Travis cant hire Eric Holder or Arianna Huffington and change the culture of a 10,000-person company. Its unrealistic. People pay lip service to change knowing its not coming.



Related: Nobody Wants To Be Uber's Next CEO
Maybe you, too, have thought about what a shame it is that with all the tools technology has brought us, we remain connected mostly just to the familiar  our own friends and family. An art installation project now several years in the making seeks to change that, offering "portals" of communication to other places around the globe with no purpose other than to learn about each other's lives, or share a moment.

The San Francisco Portal created by the group Shared Studios originally made a brief appearance in Hayes Valley in the fall of 2015, as you can see in the Instagram post below. At the time, KALW wrote about the project, begun in 2014 by artist Amar Bakshi, placing gold shipping containers in cities across the world, connected by Skype.

The SF Portal is now returning for a stay at Crissy Field beginning today, where it will remain through September 24, as NBC Bay Area reports.

Inside, visitors will get to spend 20 minutes talking to strangers with the help of UN interpreters, beginning today with a direct line to the portal in Mexico City. Over the next two months, you'll also be able to talk to people in cities in Afghanistan, Honduras, Iraq, Jordan, Germany, and Rwanda.



The idea is to have "purposeless" interactions, as Bakshi told KALW. "In the context of art, people can come in and do it without feeling like they have to ask the right question or what they say will be tweeted." One example KALW saw in the Hayes Valley installation was two trombonists from the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra playing a duet for a couple of Syrian teenagers in a refugee camp in Jordan.

Bakshi also hopes that the interactions can be inspirational. "There's a lot of excitement in a lot of our Portal connections to connect to San Francisco, he said. It's imagined as a place of incredible entrepreneurship, world changing ideas, incredible financial resources, and really smart people here. Our portal locations as people know are similarly talented, they are not as well financially resourced, but have incredible amounts to contribute."

The current Crissy Field edition was a collaborative project by the National Park Service and Golden Gate National Parks Conservatory with Shared Studios, and the container just arrived and got outfitted with its solar power last week.

Visits are free, but you're asked to pre-book an appointment, and there are currently plenty available. Tomorrow (Thursday), you'll be talking to Nairobi. On Saturday, Kigali, Rwanda in the morning, and San Pedro Sula in Honduras in the afternoon.

You might find out you have a lot to talk about.

Related: Rad New Interactive Art Installation At Urban Putt


Present at the event were Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, President Tran Dai Quang, National Assembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, Deputy Prime Minister Truong Hoa Binh, Secretary of the Hanoi Party Committee Hoang Trung Hai, and President of the Vietnam Fatherland Front Central Committee Tran Thanh Man, and a number of former leaders.



The Lao delegation at the ceremony was led by Vice President Phankham Viphavanh.



Addressing the event, Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong recalled the relations between Vietnam and Laos over the past 55 years as well as the context of setting up their diplomatic ties on September 5, 1962.



This is a significant historical event in bilateral relations, affirming the vital attachment of the two nations in their struggle for national independence and unity, he said.



In order to deepen the bilateral partnership, Vietnam and Laos signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation on July 18, 1977, which emphasised that nothing can change the special relations between Vietnam and Laos as well as the solidarity and friendship between people of the two nations.



Over the past 40 years, the treaty has become an important political and legal foundation for the unceasing reinforcement and development of the bilateral relations, serving national construction and defence in each country.



Showing his delight at the growth of the special ties between the two nations, the Party chief underscored that the relationship has been developed sustainably from traditional to special friendship.



The relationship also shows the wish of the two peoples in supporting each other to fight the common enemy and build a partnership of equality, self-reliance and friendship and win-win cooperation, he said.



Analysing the regional and international situation, Trong affirmed that historical lessons of the relations between the two countries as well as the spirit and contents of the Treaty maintain their value and role as a direction for the development of the ties between the two Parties, States and people.



He also highlighted the need to continue completing mechanisms, policies to effectively realise agreements and strategic targets set by both sides, thus further expanding the special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between the two countries.



By all means, we must maintain and protect the Vietnam-Laos relations like protecting the pupil of our eyes, stated the Party chief.



On his part, Lao Vice President Phankham Viphavanh showed deep gratitude to the Party, State and people of Vietnam, affirming the Party, State and people of Laos

are determined to preserve the friendship and special solidarity between the two nations, which have been nurtured with blood of soldiers and people of generations in both countries.



At the event, Huynh Dac Huong, a 97 years old veteran who represents the Vietnamese volunteer soldiers and experts in Laos, expressed his belief that the young generations in both countries will continue promoting the tradition of bilateral ties.

Vietnamplus
Ordering an Old Fashioned with brandy is as much of a Wisconsin tell as asking for a bubbler, reminiscing about the career of Don Majkowski or bragging about your moms hot dish. But the reasons behind the Badger States love of brandy is as shrouded in mystery as Haunchyville or the ghosts at the Pfister.

Brandy, which is actually a spirit distilled from a kind of grape wine, has traditionally been treated as an after-dinner drink, served in snifters in homes of the upper crust. But at some point after the repeal of Prohibition, the sweet spirit became a staple of the Wisconsin corner tavern. While the Brandy Old Fashioned was the cocktail of choice, brandy was also popular on the rocks, in boilermakers, or mixed straight with sour or sweet soda. It was enjoyed in nearly every way, both at home and out on the town, except in the traditional post-meal snifter.

The present-day leading local producer of brandy, Milwaukees Great Lakes Distillery, cites the demographic makeup of Wisconsin as the reason behind brandy mania. The tradition of drinking brandy in Wisconsin was initially because of the large settlement of western Europeans in the state who were seeking to enjoy a bit of the homeland in their new county, says Guy Rehorst, Lakefronts founder and owner.

But other states with similar European settlement patterns drink only a portion of the brandy Wisconsin does. Other explanations given for the spirits popularitythe cold climate, wartime liquor taxes or an affinity for sweet drinksgive hints as to the states favor for brandy, but cannot explain why similar areas sip it while Wisconsin guzzles. Perhaps the Milwaukee Journal got it right way back in 1966 when they investigated why Wisconsinites so loved their brandy. Alas, the paper concluded after talking to various liquor distributors, bartenders and drinkers, every real expert knows the truth: Nobody knows.
Milwaukee Musaiks Philomusica Quartet performs al fresco at SummerStage in Delafield, the Sadarabad Dancers perform at Armenian Fest, If/Then is performed by Greendale Community Theatre in Henry Ross Auditorium of Greendale High School, and the West Allis Players present Jesus Christ Superstar! at West Allis Central Auditorium.

MUSIC

Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and More al Fresco

Milwaukee Musaiks Philomusica Quartet will be performing the second in a series of chamber music concerts at SummerStage of Delafield. Generally speaking, any classical music performed live in summer months tends to be of the more light-hearted, accessible kind; the Philomusica Quartets program falls well within that anticipated norm.

A highlight of this outdoor concert is the Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato (slow movement) to Ludwig van Beethovens String Quartet No. 1 in F Majora lovely piece that, according to the composers friend, Karl Amenda, was inspired by the Tomb Scene of William Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet. Another is Pyotr Tchaikovskys String Quartet No. 1 in D Major, from whence we get one of this splendid-melody-weaving composers greatest hits: the Andante cantabile second movement, said to have been inspired by an overheard tune being whistled by a housepainter.

6:30 p.m., Sunday, July 23 at SummerStage at Lapham Peak, W329 N846 County Highway C, Kettle Moraine State Forest. For tickets, call 262-337-1560 or visit summerstageofdelafield.org.

DANCE:

Sardarabad Dancers at Armenian Fest

Last fall, the Sardarabad Dance Ensemble gave a spectacular multi-media spectacle of music, motion and light at their Milwaukee debut. This weekend they will focus on the timeless dance steps of Armenia, an ancient nation from the borders of Asia and Europe whose rhythms are in keeping with the traditions of Greece, Persia and other nearby nations of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East.

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Afternoon of Sunday, July 23 at Armenian Fest, 7825 W. Layton Ave.

THEATRE:

If/Then

If/Then is a musical set in contemporary New York City. Premiering on Broadway in 2014, it ran there for a year, racking up more than 400 performances. Its cast album debuted at number 19 on the Billboard 200the highest-charting Broadway cast recording since 1996s Rent. In If/Then, composer Tom Kitt and lyricist and writer Brian Yorkey tell the story of Elizabetha divorced, middle-aged woman whos returned to The Big Apple to hit the reset button on her life. Fortuitous encounters with old pals in Madison Square Park present her with some options. The action then follows two possible life paths for Elizabeth out of the park. Which oneif eithermight lead her to the success and personal fulfillment she seeks? This production is by the Greendale Community Theatre.

July 20-29 in Henry Ross Auditorium, Greendale High School, 6801 Southway, Greendale. For tickets, call 414-817-7600 or visit greendaletheater.org.

Jesus Christ Superstar!

Jesus Christ Superstar! is a rock opera take on the Biblical story of Jesus last days. Interestingly, it started as a 1970 concept album, not as a musical, play or film. But composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice took it to Broadway in 71, and the rest is history: Apart from something of a performance break in the 1980s, Jesus Christ Superstar! has continually been on U.S., U.K. and Australian tour productions (and famously made into a 1973 feature film). It boasts several terrific musical highpoints: a thrilling Overture and songs such as Hosanna and the dynamic Superstar, sung by Judas, the Soul Sisters and Angels. The West Allis Players present the show.

July 21-30 at West Allis Central Auditorium, 8516 W. Lincoln Ave. For tickets, call the WAWM Recreation Department at 414-604-4900 or visit recreation.wawmrec.com.
The much-circulated line about snatching victory from the jaws of defeat could have been coined to describe Dunkirk. The 1940 evacuation from the French coastal town saved nearly 350,000 British, French and other Allied troops from German captivity. Confident in the superiority of its air force, the Nazis surrounded the retreating Allies at Dunkirk and expected to bomb them into destruction or submission. Instead, they were given a lesson in British ingenuity and fortitudeand the improbability of winning a war from the air alone.

Dunkirk Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Rated PG-13

With Dunkirk, British writer-director Christopher Nolan turns away from the form and content that had preoccupied him in recent years. In contrast to the special-effects sprawl and global comic book themes of the Dark Knight trilogy, he embraces an inspiring episode from his nations history, skillfully condensing it in less than two hours.

Dunkirk is a World War II movie unlike any other. We see no generals huddled around maps plotting strategy; there are no sentimental Steven Spielberg conversations amongst the troops at the fireside as the enemy closes in. There is no strategy beyond figuring out survival and not much talk beyond bloody hell! Except for a brief blur at the end, the Germans are invisible, apparent only for the markings on the planes they fly: the Stuka dive bombers, shrieking as they descend; lumbering Heinkel bombers circling like vultures; the Messerschmitt fighters engaging not in dogfights with the handful of British flyers who sally forth, but in deadly aerial ballet.

Land, sea and air: Nolan tells his story in three panels, flipping back and forth through seamless editing. The British and French forces maintain remarkable discipline on the beach, waiting with uncertainty for what will come next and ducking as German warplanes swoop upon them. The British pilots crammed into tight cockpits are few in number but determined to shoot down as many Germans as ammunition and fuel will allow. The sea story is most remarkable as the British people rallied to save their endangered army. Civilian craft by the hundreds crossed the choppy English Channel, evacuating the troops from the beach as Nazi planes buzzed overheadfishing boats, sailing yachts, tugs, scows, dinghies.

Although Dunkirks cast includes familiar faces such as Tom Glynn-Carney, James DArcy and Kenneth Branagh, the story is the star, not the actors. The bravery is collective as well as individual. Nolans decision to shoot Dunkirk on IMAX 65mm film stock provides a richly immersive experience whose drama is heightened by his use of period airplanes and boats, thousands of extras and minimal deployment of computers. Its a story about one of historys turning pointsfailure at Dunkirk might have led to a Nazi victory in World War IIand a movie to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
 Expand Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

Republicans who hate the big, bad federal government often argue state governments are better suited to become the laboratories of democracy. States are smaller, more flexible and, for a while at least, can get away with conducting experiments on their citizens. The problem is mad scientist Republican governors keep creating terrifying monsters in their laboratories that rampage through their states, devouring school children and destroying their economies.

The carnage got so bad in Kansas and Illinois that legislative Republicans finally wrestled two of the nations most deranged right-wing governors into straitjackets and began repairing the damage theyd done. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker remains at large with no intervention in sight.

Massive, irresponsible Republican tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy are politically popular right up to the point where government can no longer deliver basic services that make every community livable and ordinary lives bearable. And its all to make the richest people on Earth richer.

Welfare for the Wealthy

The diabolical experiments in Kansas and Illinoisjust like Walkers experiments on Wisconsin workersexposed the fraudulence of a right-wing myth: that taking money and government services away from poor people and middle-class workers struggling to survive to give massive tax cuts to the wealthy benefits everyone. Well, at least it benefits everyone Republicans care about. Most economists say the only beneficiaries of trickle-down economics are those at the top who amuse themselves by trickling down on all the rest of us. That doesnt stop Republicans from continuing to give their wealthy donors bigger and bigger tax cuts. At least until their states go broke from all the lost revenue.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, like Walker, was a Republican extremist elected in the 2010 racist Tea Party backlash against President Barack Obama. Brownback vowed to make Kansas a real live experiment to prove once and for all the Republican theory that cutting taxes for the wealthy would create an unbelievable economic boom. It turned out to be totally unbelievable, all right. Brownback eliminated his states top tax rate, resulting in a 26% tax cut for the states wealthiest taxpayers. He also exempted owners of Kansas businesses from having to pay any income tax at all.

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Brownback created a sort of business boom, but not the kind he expected: Before the business tax cut, Kansas had 191,000 small businesses; after he created that handy loophole, 330,000 Kansans suddenly pretended they were small businesses so they wouldnt have to pay any taxes. Instead of an economic boom, Brownbacks enormous tax cuts over seven years created an economic disaster. Guess what? Enormous state tax cuts create enormous state deficits.

After burning through every cash reserve and drastically cutting all state services, Kansas still faced a $900 million budget shortfall this year. School years were cut short under what the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in March was an unconstitutionally underfunded school system. Brownbacks completely unfounded belief that enormous tax cuts for the wealthy would somehow magically create more government revenue as a result of a booming economy should sound familiar. One of House Speaker Paul Ryans earliest political jobs in Washington in 1995 was as Kansas U.S. Sen. Sam Brownbacks legislative director.

GOP Lawmakers Back Away from Economic Extremists

Kansas Republicans joined Democrats last month to override Brownbacks veto of their budget proposal to begin rolling back the states massive tax cuts, restore a higher tax bracket for the wealthy and raise $1.9 billion in needed revenue. Illinois Republicans and Democrats did much the same a few weeks later, overriding a veto by Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner to finally pass a budget to fund public services. Illinois was in even worse shape financially than Kansas, facing $15 billion in unpaid bills, a $6 billion state deficit and threats that credit-rating agencies would reduce state borrowing to junk bond status.

Finally, Republican governors are paying for their reckless tax cuts and financial mismanagement. In Wisconsin, Walker got away with murder in his first budget when he closed a $3.6 billion budget deficit by destroying public employee union rights and taking those billions directly out of the paychecks of state workers and his states economy. Now, Walker is actually running for re-election bragging about producing $8 billion in tax cuts as governor. It might not be so smart to remind voters of that.

Walkers tax cuts, like all Republican tax cuts, overwhelmingly went to the wealthy. Walker not only balanced his budget on the backs of working people but rubbed it in by showering the money he took from them on millionaires and billionaires. And, as his second term closes, Walker still hasnt created the 250,000 jobs he promised for workers in his first term. With working people throughout the state still struggling to climb out of the deep economic hole Walker dug for them, he might not want to boast about sending billions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest people in Wisconsin.
 Expand Employees working at Bright Cellars, a Milwaukee-based wine startup

As technology becomes more ubiquitous in our lives, the companies behind these innovations are growing increasingly paramount to the economy. The technology industry accounted for 7.1% of overall GDP and employed 6.7 million people in the U.S. in 2015 according to data by CompTIA, a nonprofit technology trade association. Forty-six states saw an increase in tech industry jobs during this time. While these numbers show the industrys growth on a national level, some recently released statistics are not as optimistic for Milwaukee.

For the third straight year, the Milwaukee metro area (which includes Waukesha and West Allis) ranked 39thtied for last place with Pittsburghin the Kauffman Foundations annual startup activity rankings. These numbers have caused alarm among the local startup community.

It should be a serious wake up call, said Matt Cordio, founder of both Skills Pipeline, a recruiting company geared to the tech industry, and Startup Milwaukee, a nonprofit organization that provides resources to local tech entrepreneurs. Its data, and anytime data doesnt rank you in the top 10, theres room for improvement. Were not in the top 10, and that should concern people.

The index is compiled through publicly available data and comprised of three factors: rate of new entrepreneurs, or the percent of the adult population that became entrepreneurs in a given month (0.15% for Milwaukee); opportunity share of new entrepreneurs, or the percentage of new entrepreneurs who were not unemployed before starting their business (67.53%); and startup density, which measures the number of startup firms (defined here as firms less than one year old that employ at least one person besides the owner) per 1,000 firm population.

Some business leaders have criticized the index for the narrow factors taken into account. The thing that we believe really requires our attention and effort is to support the ability for businesses to grow, said Elmer Moore Jr., executive director of Scale Up Milwaukee, an initiative of the Greater Milwaukee Committee that seeks to drive business growth in Southeast Wisconsin. I dont think that is necessarily captured in this index.

A Risk-Averse Investor Class

While the Kauffman ranking isnt perfect, it is the gold standard according to Joe Kirgues, co-founder and managing director of gener8tor, a startup accelerator with offices in Milwaukee and Madison that was recently given a gold ranking by the Seed Accelerator Rankings Project. We believe that the Kauffman numbers are credible in part because we see such a scarcity of venture capital going into the Milwaukee market, Kirgues said. In fact, startups in nearby Madison, which was ranked the number 10 high-tech metro area in the nation by a 2017 Cushman & Wakefield index (the Madison metro area is not large enough to be ranked by the Kauffman index), have seen more than three times the number of venture deals in recent years according to Chicago Inno, a Chicago tech publication.

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Experts cite an older, more risk-averse investor class as a reason for the lack of capital going into local startups.

Theres a lot of older money in the Milwaukee area, Cordio said. Its traditionally put into less risky investments because youre focused on preserving wealth. There is some investor education that needs to be done on getting more people into the venture capital or angel investor space. I think a lot of people have gone out there and maybe invested $25,000 in a family friends startup and never seen that money returned. Good angel investors say that it takes 10 investments to get one that pays you back and then some for all of your failed investments. There just isnt a strong culture of that here in the Milwaukee area. Thats something that needs to change.

This risk-averse attitude, perhaps more alarmingly, emerges once deals are finally in the process of being made through strict terms that heavily favor the investor.

There are people in the area whose proposals for investment are unfair to entrepreneurs, said Tim Keane, director of Golden Angels, a group of angel investors based in Brookfield and the former director of the Kohler Center for Entrepreneurship at Marquette University. Golden Angels, and many other investors in the area, use standard National Venture Capital Association documents, which give investors some normal rights when putting money into companies. But some local investors go beyond these standard terms.

He cited a specific term sheet for a company he was advising, which asked for: the right to force the entrepreneur to sell their company in a pre-set amount of years; participation rights, which is a set percentage that the investor receives on top of their stake at the sale of the company, just for being investors; and annual compounding dividends, which multiplies the amount of money the company owes the investor every year until the company is sold. Its very unfavorable! Keane said. Ive never seen anything set up that way come out well.

If these terms were so unfavorable, why would anyone agree to them? The entrepreneur Keane was advising did not, but inexperienced entrepreneurs who need funding can sometimes have little other choice than to take these bad deals. If youre not very savvy, and this is the only offer, and youve been looking for three months and think this is it, you take it, Keane said. But, if you take it and later find out that youre in a difficult situation, its too late. A lack of options puts those with capital in even more control.

These particular investors also put people on boards that have no experience, according to Keane. They say things like, Im here representing Investor Group B, he explains. Corporate law says that the directors are responsible to the stockholders of the company, not some group that got the right to elect them. [These investors] try and control the company with people that maybe dont exactly have a grasp and are not adding a lot of value.

Keane said these are not terms entrepreneurs would see in West Coast startup hubs like Seattle and Silicon Valley, and that some startup founders have hired out-of-state law firms that agreed that these are not standard terms.

A Lack of Available Tech Talent and Mentorship

For a startup community to be successful, you need to have a strong tech community, Cordio said. Thats where you get the talent from. While most agree that there is plenty of tech talent in the city, most of the qualified tech workers are not working at startups. Milwaukee unemployment is currently at its lowest level since 1990, and big firms like Johnson Controls, Northwestern Mutual and Rockwell Automation employ many of the qualified workers in engineering, software, hardware and other tech-related fields.

I think that for the tech talent in Milwaukee, its less that theyre not here and more that it seems irrational to associate with a startup because of the comparatively poor outcomes those startups have achieved in the last 10 years, Kirgues said. In that case, its better to go to a corporate job.

While the shortage is a challenge, many of these young companies have successfully built staffs with local talent. Weve grown the team, and a good portion of them come from UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison, said Richard Yau, co-founder and CEO of Bright Cellars, a subscription-based wine startup. Yau and his co-founder, Joe Laurendi, created the company while they were students at MIT before bringing it to Milwaukee through gener8tor. I think weve been able to grow the team very well locally, and, in a lot of cases, we have employees who wouldve otherwise moved to Silicon Valley or Chicago, Yau said. I do get the sense that there are people with the right talent to grow startups here.

Yau sees the lack of mentorship in the area as a challenge. Without many successful startups, there arent many leaders entrepreneurs can turn to for advice.

Both my co-founder and I got to work at a Boston startup for three and four years before starting Bright Cellars, Yau said. So we got the chance to be early employees at venture funded startups. I think thats something that may be missing, or not yet developed, here. So, when I think about why the rate of startup creation is relatively low, I think a new crop of entrepreneurs that have startup experience is still developing. Were still in the early stages of that. Like all successful startups, they had to begin small, taking risks and seizing opportunities to get to where they are today. Milwaukees startup community is no different.

The New Resources for Milwaukee Startups

There has been an incredible amount of effort in the last couple of years to organize the many stakeholders and actors working to support entrepreneurship in this region, said Moore of Scale Up Milwaukee. This place is percolating with incredible opportunity for people who want to start and grow businesses. Whats even better is that we are getting to a place where we are coordinated and working in concert.

Organizations like Scale Up Milwaukee, Startup Milwaukee, BizStarts, Startup Grind Milwaukee, Ward4, The Commons and many more are working to strengthen Milwaukee as a hub for entrepreneurs. No event more perfectly encapsulates this synchronized effort than Wisconsin Startup Week.

Launched last year by Matt Cordio as Milwaukee Startup Week, the event featured more than 25 events hosted by more than 28 community partners over six days at various locations around Southeastern Wisconsin.

Coby Skonord, founder and CEO of Ideawake, a software company that allows managers to crowdsource ideas from their employees, participated in a number of workshops at last years Startup Week. He praised the events potential to create a useful community around peoples individual businesses. Its really helpful to connect with other entrepreneurs, he said. Theres always synergyeven if youre in completely different industries.

This year, Cordio is expanding the event to the full state and is hoping that, through networking and education, he can help jumpstart the states startup community. [The event] is an easy way to plug in to the community and see all of the different organizations that are there to help entrepreneurs, and there are a lot of serendipitous things that happen throughout the week, he said.

And, while venture and angel funding remains relatively low, a number of grants and programs are now available to entrepreneurs that can get them tens of thousands of dollars to help grow their businesses. Kiva, WWBIC, WEDC, WERCBench Labs and even a local Shark Tank styled television show now all have options for entrepreneurs to fund big ideas.

While three years in a row of last-place rankings is definitely disheartening, entrepreneurs are carrying on.

The community has built a lot of momentum, and there is still a lot of momentum, Cordio said. I think that a lot of people in the community dont really care that were ranked dead last. Where theres a dearth of activity, theres a lot of opportunity. There are people that say that it takes about 20 years to build an entrepreneurial community in your community, and I dont think that it really started until maybe 2010. Weve still got a ways to go.
Clafouti is the name of a wonderful classic, country French batter cake, sort of a cross between a flan and a fruit-filled pancake.

In the Limousin region of France, where it is spelled clafoutis, the dish calls for un-pitted cherries because the pits are believed to add flavor to the cake. Any fruit can be used, including apples, pears, peaches and plums.

This clafouti uses fresh apricots, their creamsicle-orange skins blushing pink during their very short season. When eaten out of hand, apricots are bland and blah. But when they are cooked, they turn tart and zingy with flavor.

To make clafouti, scatter the chopped fruit in a baking dish, then pour a sweet batter, similar to pancake batter, over it. The eggy batter then bakes around the fruit, creating a light, airy, pudding-like texture. It puffs up dramatically during baking like a souffle, then collapses. Let the clafouti cool slightly, before serving. A last-minute shower of sugar adds a bit more sweetness. Leftovers make a delicious breakfast treat.
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The unidentified pilot had to be flown to Mercy Medical Center -- Sioux City due to the severity of their injuries.

According to a Pierce County Sheriff's Office press release, around 2 p.m. authorities were called to a field seven miles west and two miles north of Pierce in reference to the crash. It was determined the crop duster, owned by Bloomfield Ag & Aerial Service, was spraying beans in the area when it crashed, the release said.
SPENCER, Iowa | Two 18-year-olds from Spencer allegedly committed felony burglaries days after they bonded out of jail for felony theft charges.

According to a criminal complaint, Corey Wilhite and Austin Strang were reportedly seen with a stolen boat in the Lost Island area on July 12.

When deputies with the Clay County Sheriff's Office arrived, they were detained and questioned. The complaint said Strang admitted to taking the boat from Spencer the day before.

It was also determined the pickup Wilhite was driving was stolen from Gustoff Salvage in Spencer.

They were transported to the Clay County Jail. Both were charged with second-degree theft and Wilhite was cited with no valid driver's license.

They were released after posting bond and arrested again on Tuesday for two burglaries, according to a Spencer Police Department press release.

The first was a report by the Spencer Dream Center of a burglary during the overnight hours Monday. The second was at Salon M Spa, which reported being burglarized between July 15 and July 18.

The release did not detail the burglaries.

Strang was charged with two counts of third-degree burglary, a class D felony. Wilhite was charged with one count of third-degree burglary.

They were both booked in the Clay County Jail in lieu of a $5,000 bond.
SIOUX CITY | The employee waiting on people in department wings of the Woodbury County Courthouse may be carrying a concealed gun.

The Woodbury County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a change to the employee handbook that allows county employees who have concealed-carry permits -- but not open-carry permits -- to bring guns to work in the courthouse and two other county building spots.

The move was the latest in the controversial machinations that seek to find a path forward in the wake of a new expanded gun rights law and an Iowa Supreme Court order that says no guns should be brought by people to court-controlled areas.

For the third meeting in a row, the supervisors aired contentious issues related to the courthouse's security plan, which seeks to keep weapons out, and the disconnect between Sheriff Dave Drew and a majority bloc on the Board of Supervisors on how to proceed.

In late June, a majority of the supervisors voted to rescind a prior ban on weapons on county property, including the county courthouse. The supervisors said that was necessary to comply with the new state law expanding gun rights. However, Drew said he plans to keep enforcing the security program in the courthouse.

At last week's meeting, the supervisors discussed a new piece in the county employee handbook, aimed to allow them the go-ahead to bring guns into the courthouse. Drew said he doesn't want any guns brought by people into the courthouse, but added that there was enough gray area in the Iowa Supreme Court order that he wouldn't stop it.

The Supreme Court in June issued a statewide order banning weapons in all courthouses and court-controlled areas by people other than law enforcement.

The new law, among other things, broadens the states so-called stand-your-ground provision, so a law-abiding citizen does not have a duty to retreat in a public place before using deadly force when confronted with danger to life or property.

In the week since the handbook was discussed July 11, Supervisor Jeremy Taylor said he'd gotten legal help to craft the best changes to the employee handbook. The supervisors on a 4-1 vote approved the handbook wording he proposed, which says employees can bring guns if they have concealed-carry permits, and those can be brought into the courthouse widely, with the exception of courtrooms and a few other areas.

Taylor said that was preferable to having employees with open-carry permits having guns in the county courthouse, located at 620 Douglas St.

Taylor explained employees could not put the guns in desks or other places unattended, but they must be kept on them at all times, so they could not be taken and used by another person.

Employees with concealed-carry permits may also carry guns in two other buildings where there are some law enforcement functions -- the Woodbury County Law Enforcement Center, at 407 Seventh St., and the Trosper Hoyt Building, at 822 Douglas St.

Taylor, Matthew Ung, Keith Radig and Rocky De Witt were the supervisors voting for the Tuesday change to the employee handbook, while Marty Pottebaum voted against it.

"This whole thing has gotten so convoluted now," Pottebaum said, saying it is illogical to allow employees but not members of the public to bring weapons into the building. Pottebaum said he agrees with Drew that the security crew at the sole entrance with metal detectors provide sufficient security scans, so no one else needs a gun in the courthouse.

De Witt said "at the risk of sounding contradictory," it sends the wrong message if patrons of the courthouse see employees openly carrying guns.

"I think concealed carry is the only method," De Witt said.

Drew said no other Iowa county in a major metro area will let guns into courthouses, following the new law, which took effect July 1. Drew said Iowa sheriffs are required to help carry out rulings by courts.

Woodbury County District Judge Duane Hoffmeyer spoke against what he saw as incongruity in the new work rule. Hoffmeyer said if county workers with guns can't put them off their bodies into a drawer, how would a custodian working in a courtroom know what to do with his gun.

Two former county supervisors, Jackie Smith and Larry Clausen, who left office in December, came to the meeting and spoke against having guns in the courthouse. Smith said she believes a majority of courthouse employees don't want guns in the building.

"I cannot imagine what this is doing to your employee morale," Smith said.
SIOUX CITY | The Woodbury County Board of Supervisors said their hands were tied Tuesday, as they unanimously approved the final plat for the CDR Swine Addition subdivision in rural Lawton, Iowa.

Several members of the public who live near the pending Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, or CAFO, spoke against approval of the subdivision plat, saying it would have a bad smell that would ruin their enjoyment of rural living and negatively impact the environment.

Randy Riediger said he plans to build a hog barn structure as part of a livestock business near County Road D-12, some miles south of where he lives. Riediger had filed to create a 25-acre parcel with two lots, one of which will hold a large number of hogs in a 102-by-159-foot structure.

The subdivision plat was recommended for approval by county Planning and Zoning Department Director John Pylelo. Pylelo said he was forwarding the recommendation of the county Zoning Commision, after a public hearing and prior airing of the issues in June.

The action taken doesn't ensure that the hog business will advance, but Riediger plans to apply for a building permit and Pylelo said there is no likely reason to deny the permit. Pylelo said the key point is that the Zoning Commission and the county supervisors recognized that Iowa law does not allow people to halt rural farm businesses they may not like, so long as the addition matches the existing zoning.

"This facility will go forward either way," County Supervisor Jeremy Taylor said.

Supervisor Rocky De Witt said "I don't want one near my house," but the land lies in an Agricultural Preservation county zone, so the subdivision plat application can't be denied.

Duane Reeder, who lives adjacent to the Riediger land on the north side, urged the supervisors to deny the subdivision approval. Reeder said he wants to enjoy his rural home, free of "flies and stink."

Another nearby resident, Walt Reinholdt, said, "It won't be good for development once those hog houses are there." Other Lawton area residents observed the discussion but did not speak.

Riediger said it is hard for young people to get started in agriculture. He aims to turn the new facility over to son Riley Riediger in the future.

"They have been open and fair in releasing information," Pylelo said of the Riedigers during the subdivision details process. Pylelo said he had no definitive information on whether the hog lot would negatively impact acreage and land values of adjacent owners.

Pylelo said people in other Iowa counties who have sought to prevent such farming operations at times have pursued civil lawsuits. He said if people don't like the current Iowa law, their quest for change should not be directed at county supervisors but at the Iowa Legislature.

Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said Riediger lives on County Road D-12.
SIOUX CITY | Cathy Glasson has a lot of experience in Iowa labor politics. Now she wants a shot at being governor.

Glasson, 58, is exploring a run for the Iowa Democratic nomination in 2018, along with more than half a dozen other contenders.

In her first campaign visit to Sioux City Wednesday and Thursday, she stopped for an ice cream party at a supporter's home and took part in the annual River-Cade parade.

A native of Spencer now residing in Coralville, Glasson is the president of the Service Employees International Union Local 199. She first became involved in organized labor while working as a nurse in the late 1990s, during a period of upheaval in the industry that impacted Glasson and her colleagues.

Except for the union, she has never held elective office.

"I am not a professional politician," Glasson said. "I'm a union leader, an organizer, registered nurse, mom and grandmother."

The biggest problem Glasson sees in Iowa today is that too many Iowans are poor.

"When you have a third of your families in your state that are struggling to pay their basic expenses month to month, and where two-thirds of our jobs pay less than $20 an hour, and people are struggling to pay childcare expenses at over $900 a month, we have an economic problem," she said.

The progressive platform described by Glasson is largely in keeping with her work in organized labor. She wants to make Iowa a more welcoming state for labor unions, enact a $15 minimum wage for Iowans, and push for universal healthcare.

Though these goals may sound lofty, Glasson indicated she doesn't see them that way.

"Even $15 an hour is a low bar for a lot of folks struggling to make ends meet," she said.

Her vision of universal health care, she said, would be something like Medicare-for-all or Medicaid-for-all, but on a state level. She suggested she might model it on California's proposed single-payer healthcare bill.

Iowans would be in favor of her vision for publicly funded healthcare, Glasson reasoned, because it would be more affordable.

Glasson did not specify exactly how her administration would make it easier for Iowans to join labor unions, but she made clear that her governorship would be strongly pro-union -- although she conceded that the legislature might not stand with her on that issue.

"I'd be on the picket line for workers struggling to have a union, I can tell you that," she said.
It was the Friday afternoon surprise  news that developer Lew Weinberg was going to transform the Warrior Hotel and Davidson Building into a 146-room Marriott hotel with space for apartments and retail outlets.

While residents knew Sioux City officials were keen on building a hotel connected to the Sioux City Convention Center, few had an idea there was another hotel waiting in the wings.

One too many? That was the quick reaction, particularly since City Council members werent greeted with a champagne salute when they pledged support for the attached hotel, also a part of the Marriott family.

But a different-purpose hotel could be the answer to a question we werent asking: What would complement the Orpheum Theatre and prove to be its own destination?

The revitalized Warrior could give the city another preserved piece of our past and space for more nightlife downtown.

As much as Weinberg has wanted to put something in the Warrior (including a casino and low-cost apartments), none of the ideas has had as much sizzle as this one. Figuring out a way to give new meaning to old landmarks, he hit upon a mix of uses that would meet a number of demands. Twenty-two upscale apartments, for example, would be a way for residents to enjoy the amenities of a hotel without the bother of actually living in one. A six-lane bowling alley could answer the cry of those lamenting the loss of others. A rooftop bar and bistro might give some that urban ambiance they say downtown Sioux City needs.

Certainly, Weinberg has a great partner in Restoration St. Louis. The company has done more than 300 historic renovations, including a similar one in Davenport, which has made the Blackhawk Hotel a destination in its own right.

Because the Warrior and Davidson buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, its foolish to say they should just be leveled. Theyre a part of our history and need to somehow be brought back to life.

A plan such as this seems grand, but it might just be the thing that works. Weinberg fills his buildings, Sioux City gets a new jewel in its crown and visitors get a chance to experience the grandeur that once was a hallmark of the neighborhood.

While there are plenty of details to be worked out, this plan bears investigating.

Theres still a need for rooms adjacent to the convention center.

But there also may be another reason for those visitors to explore what else Sioux City has to offer.

Sometimes the best surprises are the ones you never thought you needed.
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.
SFGNs Speak OUT is a weekly feature giving a regular voice to South Florida LGBT community leaders, activists and business people.

This week I asked the SFGN Speak OUT list to comment on a recent story in SFGN Local Log Cabin Repubs Praise Trump; Blast Pride where Vincent Foster, president of the Miami-Dade Log Cabin Republicans, said Pride Month events were just acts and overt displays of sexual indulgence with people tossing condoms and lube out and men in assless chaps. Foster added, Its debauchery. It really makes our community look terrible. I dont think that its significant at all that President Trump did not recognize Pride Month. As a gay conservative, I think Pride does more damage to our community than anything positive. It does nothing to promote our rights.

Below are some of their answers:

The basic rights achieved by LGBTQ people have been hard fought for. While folx like Vincent Foster seem to know less about his own community then he does about what they part take in. The narrow minded analysis leads one to believe that he's maybe never even ventured out into the LGBTQ Community.

 Gabriel Garcia-Vera, Community Activist/ Organizer

Vincent Foster needs to come out of the closet and do a reality check. PrideFest is a time of celebration, a family reunion of sorts, and a festival that raises awareness for our youth, our seniors, and everyone in between. This year after Palm Beach Pride, Compass reigned in over 400 HIV tests, received an influx of about 80 new LGBT youth and 50-60 new LGBT elders that came into the center for services through our programs. Together at Pride festivals here and around the country, we can plug into the energy of the larger community and re-energize ourselves knowing that we are a part of the movement.

 Julie Seaver, COO of Compass

I don't like debauchery either, but if celebrates our feeling of freedom and pride, what the hell  do it. And if anything is called" debauchery" let the Log Cabin Republicans take a look at the debauchery of their president and the people he has chosen to work with

 Ruth Berman, LGBT activist

Where do you even start with these people? Are they even still a thing? I can honestly say I havent heard anything about them in a couple of years  which has been ideal. I hope we can restart that clock again.

 David Jobin, Executive Director of Our Fund

Some call it the Stockholm Syndrome. I call it something else. It doesnt take a genius to read Vincent Fosters criticisms of Pride Month as a deliberate dismissal and minimization of what most LGBT people feel about Pride Month, its celebration of our diversity and its ahopeful commemoration of our journey in America. Colorful Pride festivals all around the world lift high their communities in joyful solidarity. However, for whatever reason which I cannot understand, the Log Cabin Republican leadership has been unable to experience Pride the way the rest of us do. Instead, like Vincent Foster, they take a page from the Religious Right to bash, marginalize and denigrate themselves, along with the rest of us. And they do it with a straight face. I do now know who they are...and why they exist.

 Paul Smith, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel & retired Clinical Social Worker

As someone who grew up in New York City and saw countless Greenwich Village parades, it seems that the media loves to highlight the most extreme stereotypes of the gay community. It's unfortunate that is what they focus on and that's what most people end up seeing. I don't agree with the LCR statement because there are SO many other positive representations of the LGBTQ community.

 Tom Hantzarides, Host and producer of "GET OUT! South Florida, an LGBT radio show

You see what you want to see. My first Pride March was in 1974 in Detroit. We had so few people we had to stay on the sidewalk and wait for the light to change. Pride for me was the opportunity to affirm my identity in the company of others, including the men in dresses or bare-assed in chaps. Initially, I was scared and embarrassed by these few men. With time, I realized it was my internalized heterosexism and homophobia which made me uncomfortable. Most people I know are energized, not sexualized, by their participation in Pride.

 Brian McNaught, noted columnist, author and LGBT activist



Visit SFGN.com/SpeakOut to see all of this weeks responses. EmailThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you know of a LGBT community leader that you believe should be a part of this list.
Le Collectif Cheikh Yassine a organise un certain nombre dactivites et de festivites pour les enfants de Gaza sous le theme  La joie des enfants de Gaza pour lAid . Ces activites ont commence le premier jour de lAid et continue jusquau 4eme jour de lAid dans la bande de Gaza.



Plusieurs activites, ont ete organisees parmi lesquelles : des competitions recompensees par des prix, des jeux, des animations et des chants presentes par un groupe ainsi que des distributions de cadeaux et daides financieres.




Mars And Its Moons NASA

The origin and nature of Mars is mysterious.

It has geologically distinct hemispheres, with smooth lowlands in the north and cratered, high-elevation terrain in the south. The red planet also has two small oddly-shaped oblong moons and a composition that sets it apart from that of the Earth.

New research by University of Colorado Boulder professor Stephen Mojzsis outlines a likely cause for these mysterious features of Mars: a colossal impact with a large asteroid early in the planets history. This asteroid  about the size of Ceres, one of the largest asteroids in the Solar System  smashed into Mars, ripped off a chunk of the northern hemisphere and left behind a legacy of metallic elements in the planets interior. The crash also created a ring of rocky debris around Mars that may have later clumped together to form its moons, Phobos and Deimos.

The study appeared online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, in June.

We showed in this paper  that from dynamics and from geochemistry  that we could explain these three unique features of Mars, said Mojzsis, a professor in CU Boulders Department of Geological Sciences. This solution is elegant, in the sense that it solves three interesting and outstanding problems about how Mars came to be.

Astronomers have long wondered about these features. Over 30 years ago, scientists proposed a large asteroid impact to explain the disparate elevations of Mars northern and southern hemispheres; the theory became known as the single impact hypothesis. Other scientists have suggested that erosion, plate tectonics or ancient oceans could have sculpted the distinct landscapes. Support for the single impact hypothesis has grown in recent years, supported by computer simulations of giant impacts.

Mojzsis thought that by studying Mars metallic element inventory, he might be able to better understand its mysteries. He teamed up with Ramon Brasser, an astronomer at the Earth-Life Science Institute at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, to dig in.

The team studied samples from Martian meteorites and realized that an overabundance of rare metals  such as platinum, osmium and iridium  in the planets mantle required an explanation. Such elements are normally captured in the metallic cores of rocky worlds, and their existence hinted that Mars had been pelted by asteroids throughout its early history. By modeling how a large object such as an asteroid would have left behind such elements, Mojzsis and Brasser explored the likelihood that a colossal impact could account for this metal inventory.

The two scientists first estimated the amount of these elements from Martian meteorites, and deduced that the metals account for about 0.8 percent of Mars mass. Then, they used impact simulations with different-sized asteroids striking Mars to see which size asteroid accumulated the metals at the rate they expected in the early solar system.

Based on their analysis, Mars metals are best explained by a massive meteorite collision about 4.43 billion years ago, followed by a long history of smaller impacts. In their computer simulations, an impact by an asteroid at least 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) across was needed to deposit enough of the elements. An impact of this size also could have wildly changed the crust of Mars, creating its distinctive hemispheres.

In fact, Mojzsis said, the crust of the northern hemisphere appears to be somewhat younger than the ancient southern highlands, which would agree with their findings.

The surprising part is how well it fit into our understanding of the dynamics of planet formation, said Mojzsis, referring to the theoretical impact. Such a large impact event elegantly fits in to what we understand from that formative time.

Such an impact would also be expected to have generated a ring of material around Mars that later coalesced into Phobos and Deimos; this explains in part why those moons are made of a mix of native and non-Martian material.

In the future, Mojzsis will use CU Boulders collection of Martian meteorites to further understand Mars mineralogy and what it can tell us about a possible asteroid impact. Such an impact should have initially created patchy clumps of asteroid material and native Martian rock. Over time, the two material reservoirs became mixed. By looking at meteorites of different ages, Mojzsis can see if theres further evidence for this mixing pattern and, therefore, potentially provide further support for a primordial collision.

Good theories make predictions, said Mojzsis, referring to how the impact theory may predict how Mars makeup. By studying meteorites from Mars and linking them with planet-formation models, he hopes to better our understanding of how massive, ancient asteroids radically changed the red planet in its earliest days.

The research was funded by the John Templeton Foundations Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution (FfAME) in support of the Collaborative for Research in Origins (CRiO) at CU Boulder. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the researchers and do not neccesarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.
Size Comparison With WISEA J110125.95+540052.8 NASA

One night three months ago, Rosa Castro finished her dinner, opened her laptop, and uncovered a novel object that was neither planet nor star.



Therapist by day and amateur astronomer by night, Castro joined the NASA-funded Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project when it began in February  not knowing she would become one of four volunteers to help identify the projects first brown dwarf, formally known as WISEA J110125.95+540052.8.

After devoting hours to skimming online, publicly available flipbooks containing time-lapse images, she spotted a moving object unlike any other. The search process involves fixating on countless colorful dots, she explained. When an object is different, it simply stands out. Castro, who describes herself as extremely detail oriented, has contributed nearly 100 classifications to this specific project.

A paper about the new brown dwarf was published on May 24 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Four citizen scientists are co-authors of the paper, including Castro. Since then, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 has identified roughly 117 additional brown dwarf candidates.

The collaboration was inspired by the recently proposed ninth planet, possibly orbiting at the fringes of our solar system beyond Pluto.

We realized we could do a much better job identifying Planet Nine if we opened the search to the public, said lead researcher Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Along the way, were hoping to find thousands of interesting brown dwarfs.

Its been roughly two decades since researchers first discovered brown dwarfs, and the scientific community opened its eyes to this new class of objects between stars and planets. Although they are as common as stars and form in much the same way, brown dwarfs lack the mass necessary to sustain nuclear fusion reactions. They therefore do not have the energy to maintain their luminosity, so they slowly cool over the course of their lifetimes. Their low temperatures also render them intrinsically dim.

For years, Kuchner has been fascinated by infrared images of the entire sky captured by NASAs Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), launched in 2009. The space telescope is specially designed to observe cold objects emitting light at long wavelengths  objects like brown dwarfs. With its initial mission complete, WISE was deactivated in 2011. It was then reactivated in 2013 as NEOWISE, a new mission funded by the NEO Observations Program with a different goal: to search for potentially hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs).

Previously, Kuchner had focused on stationary objects seen by WISE. But the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project shows the WISE and NEOWISE data in a way custom-tailored for finding fast-moving objects. His team layers many images of the same location to create a single, comprehensive snapshot. These are then combined with several similarly co-added pictures to form flipbooks that show motion over time.

Anyone with internet access can scour these flipbooks and click on anomalies. If they would like to call the science teams attention to an object they found, they can submit a report to the researchers or share their insights on a public forum. Kuchner and his colleagues then follow up the best candidates using ground-based telescopes to glean more information.

According to Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen scientist Dan Caselden, participants are free to dig as deep into the results as they choose. A security researcher by trade, Caselden developed a series of tools allowing fellow participants to streamline their searches and visualize their results, as well as aggregate various user statistics. He also helped identify several of the additional brown dwarf candidates while the first discovery was being confirmed.

Kuchner and his co-author, Adam Schneider of Arizona State University, Tempe, agree WISEA J110125.95+540052.8 is an exciting discovery for several reasons. Whats special about this object  besides the way it was discovered  is that its unusually faint, Schneider said. That means our citizen scientists are probing much deeper than anyone has before.

While computers efficiently sift through deluges of data, they can also get lost in details that human eyes and brains easily disregard as irrelevant.

However, mining this information is extremely arduous for a single scientist or even a small group of researchers. Thats precisely why collaborating with an enthusiastic public is so effective  many eyes catch details that one pair alone could miss.

While Kuchner is delighted by this early discovery, his ultimate goal for Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 is to find the smallest and coldest brown dwarfs, called Y dwarfs. Some of these Y dwarfs many even be lurking closer to us than Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun.

Their low temperatures make Y dwarfs extremely dim, according to Adam Burgasser at the University of California San Diego. Theyre so faint that it takes quite a bit of work to pull them from the images, thats where Kuchners project will help immensely, he said. Anytime you get a diverse set of people looking at the data, theyll bring unique perspectives that can lead to unexpected discoveries.

Kuchner anticipates the Backyard Worlds effort will continue for several more years  allowing more volunteers like Caselden and Castro to contribute.

As Castro put it: I am not a professional. Im just an amateur astronomer appreciating the night sky. If I see something odd, Ill admire and enjoy it.

Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 is a collaboration between NASA, UC Berkeley, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Arizona State University, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and Zooniverse, a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop and manage citizen science projects on the internet.

NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the NEOWISE mission for NASAs Planetary Defense Coordination Office within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, visit: http://backyardworlds.org

For more information about NASAs WISE mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/wise
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Trainer Roger Hughes Jr. has been waiting a lifetime for Sultan Of Cash, and the two-year-old trotting colt is delivering for Hughes and his family in a big way.

The son of Cash Hall trotted to a lifetime best 1:57.1 en route to winning his $40,000 Ohio Sires Stakes-Leg 2 test handily on a blisteringly-hot and steamy Tuesday (July 18) at Scioto Downs. It was one of a quartet of Ohio Sires Stakes (OSS) for freshman trotting colts held that afternoon.

It was the fourth consecutive victory for Sultan Of Cash in as many lifetime starts, and pushed his career earnings to $43,615. Driver Ronnie Wrenn, Jr., was in the sulky behind the youngster, whom Hughes says has been perfect in every way.

My grandfather had horses and thats how I got into the business, said Hughes, Jr., who works full time as a manager for an automotive manufacturing company, and trains at the Wilmington, Ohio county fairgrounds in his spare time. I bought this colt last year at November Blooded Horse Sale after his pedigree caught my eye. I wasnt actually even at the sale; I was at work, but I called a buddy and said if this colt is available, I want him. I really didnt think Id be able to touch him, but I got very lucky.

When the gavel fell for the last time, Hughes, Jr., had purchased the yearling trotter for $4,000.

I was just looking through the sale book and saw that he had three full brothers who had taken marks of 1:56 or faster and that really appealed to me, Hughes Jr., admitted. Hes been a dream come true for my family. My sister and mother are involved with the horses too and having a horse in the sires stakes at this level is just anything beyond our wildest dreams.

Sultan Of Cash is the seventh foal out of the unraced Conway Hall mare Anything But Love and is a full brother to Catch The Dream, 7, 1:52s ($548,463); My Future Ex, 6, 1:55.4s ($100,990); and Moneydontbuyulove, 3, 1:56.4f ($10,860).

Sent off as the even money favourite, Sultan Of Cash was content to sit behind the leading Manny L (Kayne Kaufmann) through a :28 first quarter and :58 second quarter clocking before taking over the lead. Once on top, he trotted comfortably through a 1:27.1 third panel with a :30 final quarter brush to finish one length in front of 3-1 Countthebenjamins (Chris Page) with 11-1 Mr Jubilant (Aaron Merriman) nabbing show honors.

Count On Cody (Jason Brewer) captured his OhSS test in 1:57.1 for trainer Marty Wollam and owners-breeders Acadia Farms of Canfield, Ohio and G&B Racing of New Wilmington, Penn. The son of Full Count was on the front end for nearly the whole mile and now has $33,400 in earnings after finishing second in Leg 1 of this series on July 8 at Northfield Park. In My Dreams was second at 5-1 for trainer Hugh Beatty, while 10-1 Dontforgetmaster (Josh Sutton) was third.

Sugar Top (Peter Wrenn) and Joggintothebank (Dan Noble) gave the Scioto fans a healthy duel as they battled down the stretch in the third OhSS division with the former prevailing by a head over the latter in 1:57. Woof, a 12-1 shot, was third for Dave Palone. Sugar Top, a son of Manofmanymissions, out of the Sir Taurus mare Sugar, was fifth in Leg 1 of the series at Northfield Park on July 8. Conditioned by Melanie Wrenn, Sugar Top is owned by Gene Oldford of St. Clair, MI and Wrenn Racing of Carmel, Ind. and now has $22,000 in career earnings.

Driver Kayne Kauffman piloted 12-1 Cash Lane to a wire-to-wire victory in the final OhSS division, with the son of Cash Hall stopping the timer in 1:56.2. Owned by Richard Finfrock of New Carlisle, Ohio, Cash Lane upped his career earnings to $23,200 with the win. Trained by Mike Polhamus, Cash Lane had finished a modest fourth in Leg 1 at Northfield. Win Chaser was second, two lengths behind the winner, at 5-2 for trainer Anthony MacDonald, while 43-1 longshot Banker Twentyfive was third for Ronnie Wrenn, Jr.

(with files from OSDF)
Before coming to the Hippodrome 3R back on June 20, three-year-old trotting filly HP Run Like Mom was winless in seven starts, never even finishing in the top three.

The daughter of Kadabra then moved into the barn of trainer Jean Tourigny for breeder Claude Hamel, who co-owns HP Run Like Mom with Michel Damphousse, and the switch to racing at H3R has resulted with five straight wins.

Tuesday evening was the third and final preliminary round of the Breeders Cup Series for three-year-old filly and colt trotters. There were three divisions, all non-wagering races due to short fields.

HP Run Like Mom was in the first non-wagering division and driver Stephane Brosseau wasted no time going right to the lead and holding the field at bay by five lengths at the opening quarter mile in :29.4.

Then HP Run Like Mom switched into high gear, pulling away from the field to lead by ten lengths at the half mile in :59.3, then 24 lengths at the three-quarters in 1:29.3 and cruised home to win by the length of the stretch, 25 and one-half lengths in a lifetime best clocking of 1:59.4.

Lindas Jewell (Mario Lachance) was a distance second with Southern Queen (Mario Charron) third. The time of the race was just two fifths of a second from tying the track record for three-year-old trotting fillies.

She (HP Run Like Mom) was a normal filly as a youngster, Claude Hamel said. As a yearling, she gave us a fright with a shoulder injury but that healed up well.

So, we then we sent her as a two-year-old to Toronto to Benoit Baillargeon to train since she was eligible for the stakes there, Hamel explained. Benoit considered her to be special, but she only qualified once at age two and we were disappointed. Then at age three, she showed some speed on occasion, one mile in 1:58.4, the last quarter in :28.4, but still not good. It was then that Benoit advised us to bring her back to Quebec and that was the right decision.

Jean (Tourigny) took her on and the results have been instantaneous, Hamel said. Five straight wins, new record of 1:59.4. I think now we will consider sending her to a few stakes in Ontario while we wait for the final here on September 3.

The second non-wagering division for colts saw Capteur De Reve post his first win of the 2017 season for driver Pierre Luc Roy with a hard-fought victory over undefeated Kinnder Dangerous (Justin Filion) in 1:59.4.

It was Bastiano and driver Stephane Gendron going to the early lead with Kinnder Dangerous sitting the pocket trip through a :29.3 first quarter and then backed it down to the half mile in 1:01. That forced driver Pierre Luc Roy to come first-over with Capteur De Reve, who collared Bastiano by the three-quarters in 1:30.4 with Filion then moving three-wide on the final turn with Kinnder Dangerous. All three-horses then made it a dash to the wire with Capteur De Reve the strong horse, winning by a neck over Kinnder Dangerous with Bastiano third.

Sired by Muscle Mass, Capteur De Reve was the series champion last year. He is trained by Maxime Velaye for the Provoquante Stable of Mirabel, who also bred the colt.

In the second filly division, it was the team of driver Pierre Luc Roy and trainer Maxime Velaye returning to the winners circle, this time with Affirmee.

Affirmee shot out to the early lead with Taurus P V (Jocelyn Gendron) following right on their heels as those two horses pulled away from the field by 15 lengths at the opening quarter mile in :29.2. They raced that way past the half-mile and the three-quarters with Affirmee pulling away at the finish to win by five open lengths in 2:04.1. Taurus V P was second with Magestic M (Kevin Maguire) third.

It was the second straight win for Affirmee, a daughter of Angus Hall, who was also bred and is owned by the Provoquante Stable.

The opening round of the C$220,000 Future Stars Series for two-year-old trotting fillies and colts got underway Tuesday.

In the first division for fillies, it was Precieuse CC and trainer/driver Claude Beausoleil coming first-over against pacesetter Luckys Dream (Jerome Lombart), taking command at the three-quarters and winning by two lengths in 2:06 over race favourite Magic Lady (Yves Filion) with Justice Rules (Stephane Brosseau) third.

It was the maiden victory for Precieuse CC, a filly by Angus Hall, owned by Marie Andree Cournoyer of Chicoutimi. She paid $20.80 to win.

Owner, trainer and driver Rosaire Renaud of Mirabel at age 76, made his first drive of the 2017 a winning one with a big upset score in the colt division with Y A Muscle Mass.

Leading from start to finish, Renaud and Y A Muscle Mass were able to hold off SG Goliath King (Sylvain Grenier) by three-quarters of a length to win in 2:09.4. Yankee Photo (Pascal Berube) was third.

Sired by Muscle Mass, Y A Muscle Mass was overlooked by the bettors and went off at odds of 22-1, paying $46.20 to win.

Track Notes: Driver Stephane Brosseau was the top driver of the night, winning four races on the program. It is the first time he has achieved that feat this season. Brosseau widened his lead in the driving standings over Stephane Gendron, 29 to 24. Four Starz Speed, the old man of the field in the Invitational Trot Tuesday, showed his heels to his younger rivals, leading from start to finish for driver/trainer Kevin Maguire in 1:59.4, paying $8.70 to win.

Live racing resumes at H3R on Sunday afternoon, first race post time at 12:30 pm. Featured will be the opening round of the C$220,000 Future Stars Series for two-year-old pacing colts and fillies.

For results, click the following link: Tuesday Results - Hippodrome 3R.

(with files from the Quebec Jockey Club)
The publicity department for the Grand Circuit has sent out its weekly recap and preview of Grand Circuit races.

This Week: Joe Gerrity Memorial, Saratoga Casino Hotel, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; Delvin Miller Adios eliminations, The Meadows, Washington, Pa.; and Tompkins-Geers and Kindergarten Series, Meadowlands Racetrack, East Rutherford, N.J.

Schedule of events: Grand Circuit action will be held this weekend at three different racetracks.

Action will begin on Friday (July 21) at the Meadowlands Racetrack with the second leg of the Kindergarten Series for two-year-olds of both sexes and gaits. There will be two $10,000 divisions of the Kindergarten for two-year-old trotting colts and single $10,000 divisions of the Kindergarten for two-year-old trotting fillies, pacing colts and pacing fillies. On Saturday (July 22), the Meadowlands card will offer the $59,370 Tompkins-Geers for three-year-old trotting colts and the $49,870 Tompkins-Geers for three-year-old trotting fillies.

Also on Saturday, Saratoga will host its marquee event, the $260,000 Joe Gerrity Memorial for older pacers. The field of eight is led by Mach It So, winner of last weeks William Haughton Memorial at the Meadowlands.

Finally, the Meadows on Saturday will offer a pair of $25,000 eliminations for the Devlin Miller Adios for three-year-old colt pacers. The $400,000 Adios final the following Saturday afternoon anchors a blockbuster card that features six Grand Circuit stakes.

Last time: Meadowlands Racetrack hosted 11 lucrative Grand Circuit events this past Saturday, led by the $738,550 Crawford Farms Meadowlands Pace for three-year-olds. In that race the heated rivalry between Huntsville and Downbytheseaside reached a fever pitch.

Huntsville held on by a head, gaining a 4-3 advantage in their eight showdowns. The only time neither got the victory was last month in the North America Cup  won by Fear The Dragon  where Huntsville was second and Downbytheseaside third.

Fear The Dragon was not nominated to The Pace, leaving Huntsville and Downbytheseaside to battle it out.

And battle they did.

Huntsville got away fourth in the early stages before charging past Blood Line to grab the lead down the backstretch. The 1-5 favourite appeared comfortably in charge on the final turn as Downbytheseaside tipped outside for a long, grinding challenge.

Huntsville flashed past the three-quarter pole in 1:20.3 and the torrid pace started taking a toll. In a display of guts and determination, Huntsville dug deep while Downbytheseaside relentlessly ate into his lead. The finish line arrived just in time for last seasons two-year-old Dan Patch Award champion to earn his first major win of this campaign.

It was the fifth Pace victory for driver Tim Tetrick, trailing only the recently retired Hall of Famer John Campbell, who had seven wins in the Meadowlands Racetracks signature event for three-year-olds.

Trainer Ray Schnittker improved his Pace record to 2-for-2. He combined with Tetrick to win in 2010 with One More Laugh.

Huntsville continued his remarkable consistency with a 12th win in 18 lifetime starts. He has never finished worse than second.

My horse was tired late, Tetrick said. He kept pushing all the way to the wire.

The time for the mile was a lifetime best 1:47.4 for the son of Somebeachsomewhere-Wild West Show, who earned $350,812 for the ownership team of Schnittker, Ted Gewertz and Steven Arnold.

Grand Circuit Standings: In 2017, the Grand Circuit leaders in three categories (driver, trainer and owner) will once again be tracked on a points system (20-10-5 for the top three finishers in divisions/finals and 10-5-2 for the top three finishers in eliminations/legs). Winbak Farms is the sponsor for the 2017 Grand Circuit awards.

Here are the leaders through and including the races on July 15.

Drivers: 1. Yannick Gingras  383; 2. David Miller  316; 3. Scott Zeron  280; 4. Tim Tetrick  279; 5. Jason Bartlett  236.

Trainers: 1. Ron Burke  359; 2. Jimmy Takter  193; 3. Rene Allard  159; 4. Ray Schnittker  147; 5. Peter Tritton  132.

Owners: 1. Harry von Knoblauch Stable  103.5; 2. Burke Racing Stable  79.7; 3. Jeff Snyder  75; 4. J&T Silva Stables  73.5; 5. Determination  67.

Looking ahead: Grand Circuit action will be taking place next weekend at the Meadows, Plainridge Park, and Meadowlands Racetrack. The Meadows will host eight Grand Circuit events, led by the final of the Delvin Miller Adios for three-year-old pacing colts; Plainridge will feature the inaugural Spirit of Massachusetts for older trotters; while Meadowlands Racetrack will host eliminations for three lucrative stakes, led by the Hambletonian Oaks for three-year-old filly trotters, as well as the Reynolds Memorial for three-year-old colt trotters.

(Grand Circuit)
This past weekend Standardbred Canadas I Love Canadian Harness Racing Fan Club partnered with 12 racetracks across Canada to host the fifth annual Bring A Friend promotion, introducing many new people to the sport!

The three-day event challenged members of the industry to introduce their friends to harness racing at their local track.

Thanks to the efforts of our members and fans, the Bring A Friend event proved to be a success! With rides in the starting gate car, rides in double seated jog carts, winners circle presentations, meet & greets with drivers, beginner handicapping workshop and behind the scenes tours, newcomers received the full VIP experience.

The Bring A Friend promotion kicked off Friday evening at Grand River Raceway in Elora, Ontario and continued on Saturday at Northside Downs, Hiawatha Horse Park, Kawartha Downs, Hanover Raceway, Mohawk Racetrack and Truro Raceway. Things wrapped up on Sunday at Century Downs Racetrack & Casino, Clinton Raceway, Dresden Raceway, Georgian Downs and Rideau Carleton Raceway.

Heather MacKay, Director of Marketing & Special Events at Kawartha Downs said Our night was fantastic, we had a huge crowd, fantastic weather and more than $42,000 bet on track. There were lots of newcomers and people who had never attended the races before.

Dresden Agricultural Society President Lucille Laprise, who helps with the special events at Dresden Raceway, also commented on the success of their Bring A Friend day.

We had people from all over -- Cambridge, Kitchener, Windsor, Essex, Ridgetown and Merlin -- that had never been to the races at Dresden before and came because they heard it on the radio or from a friend. Dresden Raceway provided each with a free program, $2.00 bet voucher and a half-price food voucher. They also registered for starting car rides, paddock and 'behind the scenes' tours and even had the chance to meet the drivers before the races.

The I Love Canadian Harness Racing Fan Club would like to thank all industry members and fans who brought a friend to the track to be an ambassador and promote our sport!

To view more photos from Bring A Friend weekend, click the following link: 2017 Bring A Friend Photo Gallery.

LIDSTONE WINS BRING A FRIEND CONTEST

Rick Lidstone of Charlottetown, PEI was the winner in the I Love Canadian Harness Racing Fan Clubs Bring A Friend online handicapping.

After calculating the results six of the entrants finished with eight out of a possible 24 points. Rick was declared the winner following a blind draw.

Lidstone is a current racing fan and former owner. He enjoys watching live races at Red Shores Racetrack and Casino at Charlottetown Driving Park.

The horses I owned or co-owned were, Hazeldale Ace, Charles Pacey, Absolute Proof and Belle Marica. My favourite horse was Sand Olls Dexter. He won the Gold Cup & Saucer race in 2003 and 2004. My daughter Jennifer was chosen to represent him and was Miss Gold Cup Ambassador for 2004. The best race ever, even on a muddy track.

Congratulations to Rick who has won a $50.00 gift certificate to the Canadian harness racetrack of his choice and a Fan Club swag package.
Yonkers Raceway's Tuesday night (July 18) card played host to the New York Sire Stakes' Bruce Hamilton Trot for two-year-fillies.

Six divisions, ranging in value from $26,000-$27,000, went postward. The results were quite formful, as in five favourites (four at odds-on) and one second choice.

The evening fastest femme was Super, as in Supergirl Riley (Scott Zeron, $3), who took the final ($27,000) event in 1:57.3...a tick off Barn Bellas local track record for this sorority. From the pole, she led through intervals of :30.1, 1:00.1 and 1:28.4.

Supergirl Riley defeated Fury Road (Ake Svanstedt) by two lengths, with Eunice (Jason Bartlett) third.

For Supergirl Riley, a daughter of Muscle Mass trained by Erv Miller for co-owners Paymaq Racing, George Coleman and Harvey Eisman, shes won both of her career starts. The exacta paid $6, the triple (three wagering choices in order) returned $29 and the superfecta (Big Checkmate [Donald Dupont]) paid $254.

She trained down really good and has done all weve asked, Miller said. Shes always been very quiet, but Scott (Zeron) said she seemed a bit keyed up tonight.

Svanstedt, as trainer/driver, won consecutive ($26,000 and $27,000) sire stakes divisions with Lucky Ava ($5) in 2:00 and Plunge Blue Chip ($2.50) by 8-3/4 lengths in 1:59.

Both lasses made it two wins in as many statebred starts. Lucky Ava, a daughter of Lucky Chucky, co-owned by Svanstedt (with Little E LLC and Van Camp Trotting), won her two-move effort by 4-1/4 lengths. Ooteeny (Mark MacDonald) was second, with Ithinkthatsmine (Chris Lems) third.

The exacta paid $18.20, with the triple returning $49.

Plunge Blue Chip, a Muscle Mass miss, is co-owned by his trainer/driver and (breeder) Blue Chip Bloodstock. White Cheetah (MacDonald), Money Dew (Mark Whitcroft) and purse-debuting Michando (Brent Holland) chased home the winner for gimmick purses.

The exacta paid $32, the triple returned $187.50 and the superfecta paid $856.

The evenings other Hamilton events, each worth $26,500, were taken by:

Electro Pump (by Muscles Yankee); co-owners West Wins Stables, McKinlay Fielding/trainer Casie Coleman/driver MacDonald; (first-start) 2:00.4/$7.50;

Lucky Rainbow (by Credit Winner); owner Pinske Stables/trainer Nifty Norman/driver Jeff Gregory; (maiden-breaking) 2:01/$2.30;

Lima Novelty (by Chapter Seven); owner Ken Jacobs/trainer Linda Toscano/driver Bartlett; (life-best 1:59.2)/$2.90.

The event again honoured the memory of the longtime Executive Secretary of the Harness Horse Breeders of New York, one of the Empire States true movers and shakers who also happened to be one of its finest people. Bruces brothers, Scott and Keith, joined friends and other family to make winners circle presentations.

(with files from Yonkers)
Judicial Watch Sues for Voter Registration Data Under National Voter Registration Act

Defendant Montgomery County, Maryland Has More Registered Voters Than Voting Age Citizens



Contact: Jill Farrell, Judicial Watch, 202-646-5172



WASHINGTON, July 18, 2017 /Standard Newswire/ -- Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit today in order to gain access under federal law to voter registration lists in Montgomery County, Maryland. The suit was filed against Montgomery County and the Maryland State Boards of Elections under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA). The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Baltimore Division (Judicial Watch vs. Linda H. Lamone, et al. (No. 1:17-cv-02006)).



In an April 11, 2017, notice letter sent to Maryland election officials, Judicial Watch explained that there were more registered voters in Montgomery County than there were citizens over the age of 18. The letter threatened a lawsuit if the problems with Montgomery County's voter rolls were not fixed. The letter also requested access to Montgomery County voter registration lists in order to evaluate the efficacy of any "programs and activities conducted for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and currency of Maryland's official eligible voter lists during the past 2 years." On July 7, Maryland denied Judicial Watch access to the voter registration list because Maryland laws supposedly restricts the release of voter registration information only to Maryland registered voters.



But Section 8(i) of the NVRA provides that "[e]ach State shall maintain for at least 2 years and shall make available for public inspection and, where available, photocopying at a reasonable cost, all records concerning the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voter."



Judicial Watch, in its lawsuit, noted that the registration list it requested from the Maryland and Montgomery County boards is covered under Section 8(i) of the NVRA:

"Section 8(i) of the NVRA contains no requirement that only an individual person or a registered voter may request the documents that the statute describes. Accordingly, Section 8(i) authorizes and entitles Judicial Watch to inspect and copy the requested voter list."

Judicial Watch regularly requests and receives records from state and local governments pursuant to Section 8(i) of the NVRA.



In April, Judicial Watch sent letters notifying to 11 states having counties in which the number of registered voters exceeds the number of voting-age citizens. The states are: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina and Tennessee.



"Maryland needs to make this voter registration information available as federal law requires," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. "Maryland doesn't want its voter rolls mess to be exposed by Judicial Watch, and we hope the courts move quickly so we can begin the process of cleaning up the voter rolls. This is a national problem and Maryland is one of many legal battles for clean elections."



The director of Judicial Watch's Election Integrity Project is senior attorney Robert Popper, who was formerly deputy chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.



MORE: www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-sues-voter-registration-data-national-voter-registration-act
NAPA, Calif., July 18, 2017 / Standard Newswire / -- Yesterday Judge William Orrick held David Daleiden, the Center for Medical Progress, and two of David's criminal defense attorneys in civil contempt for violating a court order prohibiting the release of video footage related to NAF conferences and related meetings. The footage was posted to a private website in May.Daleiden's criminal defense attorneys argued that the videos are essential to providing David with a robust public defense after California Attorney General Xavier Beccera charged Daleiden and Sandra Merritt with 15 felony counts of eavesdropping. The first set of charges were dismissed by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Christopher Hite in the criminal case for lack of specificity. Beccera recently amended and refiled the charges, this time including the file names of certain videos. However, the charges still do not name the individuals involved in the conversations during which Planned Parenthood doctors and other abortionists discuss the sale of fetal body parts for profit.Judge Orrick's contempt order awards approximately $137,000 to the National Abortion Federation for attorney fees and for alleged staff time to scour the internet looking for links to the Daleiden videos.On a positive note, Judge Hite was receptive to arguments that the amended charges against Susan Merritt were not properly filed. An update will follow as soon as we know whether these charges will be dismissed."As always, the abortion cartel is furious that its trade in baby body parts and its willingness to violate laws that protect preborn babies from gruesome abortion procedures are being exposed," said Life Legal Defense Foundation Executive Director Alexandra Snyder. "Since the first video release two years ago, they have been waging a vicious campaign to punishand permanently silenceour client."About Life Legal Defense FoundationLife Legal Defense Foundation was established in 1989, and is a nonprofit organization composed of attorneys and other concerned citizens committed to giving helpless and innocent human beings of any age, and their advocates, a trained and committed voice in the courtrooms of our nation. For more information about the Life Legal Defense Foundation, visit www.lldf.org
The Defense Ministry in Seoul proposed to talk at the border village of Panmunjom, while the Red Cross proposed separate talks to discuss family reunions.

So South Korean President

has made up his mind  after his inauguration on May 10 and Pyongyang's ICBM test on July 3.

Pyongyang may also be inclined to talk  as it had already indicated. But there may be preconditions, as in the suspension of those provocative, annual US-South Korean military drills. The US will say no. Once again, it's all about Washington.

It's unclear whether US intelligence has 100% proof that Pyongyang, apart from the ICBM, is on the path to soon achieve other technological breaks, such as building a guidance system and a miniaturized, functional nuclear weapon capable of surviving both the missile launch and re-entry into the atmosphere.

Now for some crude, hard facts. Kim Jong-un very well knows that nuclear weapons are absolutely essential for the survival of the Kim dynasty. Beijing not only knows it  but also calculates that Pyongyang does not exactly see it as a trustful ally. During the Korean War  whose memory is pervasive all across the North  Mao's key concern was to protect China's borders, not the safety of its neighbor.

 REUTERS/ KCNA Now You Know How Kim Compensates North Korean Engineers for Building Ballistic Missiles

The open secret though is that a nuclear North Korea may represent a perennial dissuasion against the US, much more than a threat, but not against China. So that frames the case, once again, as a Washington-Pyongyang drama.

Beijing's margin of maneuver against Pyongyang is rather limited  something that President Trump as well as the US deep state still do not understand. And North Korea is not a Chinese national security priority  unless the regime would collapse and there would be an uncontrollable influx of refugees.

The only thing that matters for the Chinese leadership is  what else  trade. And as far as China-South Korean trade is concerned, business is booming anyway.

Feverish speculation in the US about a "strike" against Pyongyang is idle. Anyone with minimum knowledge of the Korean Peninsula knows that the response would be Pyongyang virtually wiping Seoul off the map. Not to mention that US intel is clueless on where all the dispersed North Korean nuclear and missile development sites are.

A minimally competent US "attack" would requires a lot of infiltrated US Special Forces, as in boots on the ground, with no guarantee of success. In a nutshell; Washington, realistically, is incapable of eliminating North Korea's nuclear and missile programs.

Enter the Trans-Korean Railway

So what to do? The only logical strategy would be to admit  just as with India and Pakistan in the late 1990s  that North Korea is a de facto nuclear power.

Pyongyang's strategy, after all, is actually a small marvel; you imprint the feeling you're a totally unpredictable actor, and you scare the living daylights out of everyone while preventing any attempt at destabilization. As much as wishful thinking prevails, that a US surgical strike would be able to paralyze the North Korean political/military/command/communication structure, US intel is clueless when it comes to predicting Pyongyang's actions.

A Western intel source familiar with the high stakes in the Korean peninsula adds a few stark observations; "The point that is not even touched upon is that South Korea already is within the range of North Korean nuclear bombs even if the United States is not, and can be liquidated by North Korea. We have to examine the nature of the defense alliance with South Korea. Does it mean that we can and will attack North Korea to protect ourselves when we cannot protect South Korea, triggering their destruction in our self-defense?"

The point is that if South Korea is virtually destroyed by Pyongyang's response to American strikes, "then our allies around the world will have the uneasy feeling that they too would be sacrificed as allies should they get in the way. I would say that would be the end of the entire US alliance structure, which actually is already imaginary."

The informed source is convinced that "the South Koreans have forced the United States to agree to forbear on any strike on North Korea, as to support such a strike would be national suicide for South Korea. The United States will do nothing."

All this is happening just as what Seoul really wants is to do business  in a Korean variant of the China-driven New Silk Roads, renamed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Seoul wants to build a Trans-Korean Railway, and go even beyond, connecting it with the Trans-Siberian and, what else, the Chinese-built Eurasian land bridge. That happens to be the so-called Iron Silk Road concept, which South Korea has been dreaming about since an Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) summit in 2004.

"Overcoming the land divide between Asia and Europe", connected to the vast trans-Eurasia network, means the fifth-largest export economy in the world would be getting even more business. Handicapped by North Korea's isolation, South Korea is de facto physically cut off from Eurasia. The answer to all this trouble? The Trans-Korean Railway. If only President Moon could entice Kim Jong-un towards a connectivity dream  and make him forget his nuclear toys.




Firefighters are battling large wildfires across different countries of southern Europe.

Dry hot weather and strong winds have caused fires to spread and forced evacuations in France, Croatia, Italy, Montenegro, among others.

Wildfire rages toward coastal Split (Croatia) at least one dead.

firefighters are battling wildfires since 3 days in CROATIA. They were able to control a forest fire along the Adriatic coast that has damaged and destroyed buildings in villages around the city of Split, reaching the Split suburbs late Monday.

Croatian TV reported that the blaze near the key port and tourist center of Split has reached houses in some parts of the city, with residents joining firefighters in efforts to contain the flames. Some parts of the city were without water or electricity.

The blaze, which started shortly after midnight, has spread across 20 km and first threatened the villages of Srinjine, Sitno Gornje and Sitno Donje. Scenes in Srinjinje, Gornje Sitno, and Donje Sitno and Zrnovnica have been described as apocalyptic, with a number of houses burnt down already in Zrnovnica.

Wildfire rages near coastal Lustica in Montenegro as country asks for help

MONTENEGRO has asked for international help to fight wildfires raging along its Adriatic coastline, forcing the evacuation of dozens of tourists and campers.

According to officials, the situation at Lustica is critical. The interior ministry of Montenegro asked for the European Union Civil Protection Mechanism to be activated to help extinguish the fire. Mayors of the threatened coastal towns of Kotor, Tivat, and Herceg Novi urged the government to ask neighboring nations  Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia  to send fire-extinguishing aircraft. Well, it will be hard for Croatia to help as their coastline is also on fire.

Wildfire burns near coastal Nice in France

Hundreds of firefighters are working to extinguish a forest fire about 15 kilometers (9 miles) from the French Riviera city of Nice, as unusually hot and dry weather has hit much of FRANCE.

Jean-Gabriel Delacroy of the Alpes-Maritime regional administration said Tuesday that the fire near Nice is under control but not yet over after breaking out Monday night.

Three firefighters were lightly injured in the blaze, which consumed 120 hectares (about 300 acres) of forest and reached the town of Castagniers, inland from Nice. No homes have been hurt so far. Fires in recent days have also hit Provence and Corsica.

Portugal hit again by devastating wildfires

The Continent got a taste of what was to come last month, when a blaze tore through central Portugal, leaving more than 60 people dead.

Portugal hasnt been spared from the latest devastation, with fires now burning in the Mangualde district, about 75 miles north of where the blazes spread last month.

Italy is burning down

Officials reported nearly 900 wildfires in ITALY on Monday, with people evacuated from residential as well as touristy parts of Rome and Naples, and around Mount Vesuvius, near Naples.

On Monday, firefighters extinguished a wildfire that destroyed a vast portion of the Castelfusano pine forest near the coast south of Rome, and the authorities arrested a man suspected of arson.

Fires have also ravaged the national park on Vesuvius for several days, and a beach resort on the western tip of Sicily was evacuated last week.

Thousands of acres of pine forests, national parks, fields and pastures have burned in central and southern Italy in recent weeks.

Did you see the giant skull above Italian volcano Mount Vesuvius in clouds of smoke thrown up by wildfires? Have a look again!

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With thousands of people set to descend on Washington D.C. on Monday to rally support for single-payer health care, local activists are also planning to take to the streets.

On July 24, the Cowlitz County Democratic Women will be organizing and waving signs outside the Monticello Hotel at 10 a.m. as part of the National March for Medicare for All.

The groups president, Sherry Davis, said the goal is to be part of a national movement that raises awareness about the benefits of a single-payer health care system and forces the countrys elected leaders to take note.

Under a single-payer system, the federal government would act as the nations sole payer and cover health care costs for medical expenses with tax money. Liberal activist groups are calling the proposal Medicare For All because the government currently acts as a single payer system for people aged 65 or older who are covered under Medicare.

Some people say that they dont want government-ran health care, Davis said, but this wouldnt be that.

With Medicare, doctors and hospitals are reimbursed directly by the government instead of private insurance companies. Advocates of single-payer say expanding the program to cover all Americans would cut costs by reducing administrative overhead and improve health outcomes by increasing access to care.

Opponents argue that single-payer would lead to the rationing of health care services and place the federal government in between doctors and patients.

They also point to countries that have universal single-payer health care, such as Canada, where patients may experience longer wait times to receive treatment.

In Congress, Senate Republicans efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare faltered on Monday when three undecided senators issued statements opposing the plan.

The proposed legislation would have cut about $762 billion from future Medicaid spending over the next decade and resulted in a loss of coverage for about 22 million people, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office analysis. Medicaid, as opposed to Medicare, helps low-income people get health care and expanded dramatically under Obamacare.

Davis said her group has been frantically making calls, mailing letters and signing petitions in opposition to the bill. With the Republican Party divided on how to proceed on health care reform, Davis said now is a prime opportunity to press the case for a single-payer system.

According to recent polling, Americans attitudes toward single-payer have improved since President Donald Trump took the oath of office in January.

In a Pew Research Center poll released last month, 33 percent of respondents said they favor a single-payer system in which the federal government uses tax money to pay for medical expenses. Thats an increase of 5 points since Trump assumed office.

The same poll found that 60 percent of the public believes the federal government should provide health care coverage to all Americans, compared to 39 percent who said thats not the governments job.

Its going to be a fight, but I think its a fight thats worth it, Davis said.
A Rose Valley house fire displaced two adults, nine children and 15 pets on Tuesday afternoon, according to fire and Red Cross officials.

No people or pets were injured and the house is salvageable, but the fire gutted the kitchen and the left the house uninhabitable for now, according to Cowlitz 2 Fire & Rescue.

The Red Cross said it is providing the residents temporary with housing, food and clothing. The fire broke out in the 100 block of Derek Road around 11:30 a.m., according to Cowlitz 2 Lieutenant Jason Sanders.

Firefighters could not definitively determine the cause, but the fire most likely started in a kitchen garbage can, ignited by something that was still hot when placed inside, Sanders said.

Eight firefighters from Cowlitz 2's main station in Kelso responded and had the flames out within about 10 minutes, but firefighters remained on the scene for about two hours to make sure the fire did not reignited, Sanders said. Kalama Fire and the Cowlitz PUD also responded to the fire.
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iPhone chip supplier Qualcomm Inc faces a fresh set of antitrust allegations from a group of four companies that assemble the iPhone and other products on behalf of Apple Inc. Foxconn parent Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, Wistron Corp, Compal Electronics Inc and Pegatron Corp alleged that Qualcomm violated two sections of the Sherman Act, a US antitrust law.

The accusations, made in a filing late Tuesday in US District Court for the Southern District of California, are counterclaims to a Qualcomm lawsuit filed in May seeking to force the contractors to pay Qualcomm license fees that Apple directed them to stop paying. "Qualcomm has confirmed publicly that this lawsuit against our clients is intended to make a point about Apple and punish our clients for working with Apple," Theodore J. Boutrous, a lawyer for the four companies, said in a statement. "The companies are bringing their own claims and defences against Qualcomm."

The allegations are part of broader dispute between Apple and Qualcomm, which supplies so-called modem chip technology that lets iPhones connect to cellular data networks, over the nature of Qualcomm's business model of linking the sale of chips and patent licenses, which has come under scrutiny by regulators in South Korea, the United States and several other countries.

In January, Apple sued Qualcomm alleging that the company had withheld nearly $1 billion of patent license rebates it owed Apple in retaliation for Apple's cooperation with South Korean regulators. Apple told its contract manufacturers to withhold license payments from Qualcomm while the dispute played out, which prompted Qualcomm to sue them in May.

"Despite Apple's claims against Qualcomm, Apple suppliers remain contractually obligated to pay royalties to Qualcomm under their license agreements with us, including for sales of iPhones to Apple," Qualcomm President Derek Aberle said of the dispute on the company's conference call in April.

Much of the language in the contractors' allegations mirror Apple's objections to Qualcomm's business model. A senior Apple official confirmed that the company is helping to fund the contractors' legal defence as part of an indemnification agreement among the firms. Apple has also formally joined the contractor case as a defendant. The lost license revenue from Apple has been a hit to Qualcomm's sales. Analysts expect $5.2 billion in revenue for the June quarter, down from $6 billion a year earlier.

Reuters
London: Scientists claim to have developed a pill which could treat a variety of brain conditions including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis.

The new class of drug, which can be taken orally, is designed to protect the brain by combating the damaging effects of inflammation.

Studies on animals suggest the therapy could be effective against a wide range of conditions which also include motor neurone disease and complications from traumatic brain injury, 'The Telegraph' reported.

Two drugs in the new class, known as MW151 and MW189, have already been patented by researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago.

The drugs work by preventing the harmful overproduction of damaging brain proteins called cytokines, which scientists believe contribute to a number of degenerative brain conditions, as well as brain damage following stroke or injury, by killing nerve cells and damaging connections within the brain.

The finding published in the Journal of Neuroscience suggest it could be effective against a plethora of devastating brain conditions.

Researchers reported that mice which were genetically programmed to develop Alzheimer's did not develop the full-blown condition if they had taking the drug from six months of age, when their levels of the damaging proteins

began to rise.

In humans, this would coincide with the point when patients begin to experience early symptoms such as memory loss, they said.

At eleven months, the mice's brains were analysed. Levels of the proteins in the mice which had been treated were normal, whereas those which had not been treated had unusually high levels and were showing signs of brain deterioration.

"The drug protected against the damage associated with learning and memory impairment. Giving this drug before Alzheimer's memory changes are at a late stage may be a promising future approach to therapy," said co-author Dr Linda Van Eldik, director of the Sanders-Brown Centre on Aging at the University of Kentucky.

The results from early stage clinical trials are yet to be announced.

PTI
PTI

Expressing concern over the growing gap between the overarching goals of the bilateral Indo-US defence relationship, a powerful Senate Committee has asked Pentagon to work with New Delhi in cyber and space operating domain.

"Looking ahead to the future of the US Major Defense Partnership with India, the committee encourages the Department to work closely with India in the cyber and space operating domains at appropriate strategic, operational, and tactical levels," the Senate Armed Services Committee said in its report to the Senate as it passed the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2018.

"As a rising economic power and key security partner, it is the committees judgement that India deserves a seat at the table as the US works with our other key allies and partners to increase resiliency, strengthen deterrence, and secure superiority in both operating domains," said the Senate Armed Services Committee in its voluminous report running into more than 600 pages.

Pleased to see progress in the US-India defence partnership, the report said the positive adjustment of US export controls for defence articles sold to India is in accordance with National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 that required an assessment regarding such an adjustment.

Furthermore, the US and India have continued to refine their annual Exercise Malabar, which has benefited from the recent inclusion of Japan. The Malabar exercise concluded in the Bay of Bengal on July 7. The committee supports the exercises consistent focus on maritime patrol, reconnaissance scenarios, and anti-submarine warfare operations, the report said.

Chaired by Senator John McCain, the Senate Armed Services Committee plays a key role in shaping the defense and national security policy of the US. However the committee said it is concerned by a growing gap between the overarching goals of the bilateral defense relationship and the Departments implementation of these objectives. The Joint Strategic Vision (JSV) agreed to by the US and India in 2015 codified a common commitment to maritime awareness and freedom of navigation as overarching defense missions, it noted.

The key body in the Department of Defense implementing and coordinating defense cooperation with India is the 2012 Defense Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI).

Its six "pathfinder" initiatives are (1) development of a chemical-biological protective ensemble for troops; (2) development of mobile electric hybrid power stations; (3) a next generation small unmanned aircraft; (4) a roll-on/roll- off intelligence and surveillance module for transport aircraft; (5) digital helmet-mounted displays; and (6) the joint biological tactical detection system.

While the Committee supports all of these initiatives, it is concerned that several of these projects lack focus and are underdeveloped, and therefore urges the Department to prioritize elements of the DTTI that most closely align with the JSV, the report said. The report pulled up the Pentagon for not appointing the point person for India in the Department of Defense to coordinate and expedite bilateral defense cooperation.

Appointing such an individual would bring a refined approach to prioritising defense cooperation and aligning it with missions like maritime awareness and anti-submarine warfare, and eventually joint naval patrol of the Indian Ocean, the report said.

Aware that key defence cooperation agreements Communications Capability and Security Agreement and the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for Geospatial Intelligence ? have not been completed, the report said the Department of Defense has approached negotiation of these agreements with consistency and good faith, as evidenced in the successful signing of the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement with India earlier this year.

The report commended both the Department and the Ministry of Defense for this progress, and hoped to see similar agreement with the two outstanding documents as well.
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The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) heard arguments on Wednesday over whether to allow a class action suit against Facebook, brought by Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems - and about 25,000 other users across the globe. Schrems is claiming 500 euros ($576) in damages for each signatory to his lawsuit, one of a series of European challenges to U.S. technology firms and their handling of personal data.

Schrems's lawsuit concerns alleged violations of privacy by Facebook through its use of personal data and tracking of users on external pages, among other things. Schrems argues it is vital that the case be treated as a class-action suit. He believes 25,000 individual lawsuits on user privacy would be "impossible" due to the financial burden on users and the inefficiency for judges. "If privacy claims cannot be grouped, they (Facebook) can get away with violating the law," Schrems said in a statement.

While common in the United States, class action suits are generally not recognised in Europe. Facebook calls the suit a way to get around that, brought by an activist so well-known he has merited an exhibit dedicated to his campaign against Facebook in Berlin's Spy Museum. Schrems launched the lawsuit in August 2014 at his home court in Vienna against Facebook Ireland Ltd, the subsidiary offering the social network to more than 80 percent of active users worldwide.

Around 25,000 other Facebook users transferred their financial claims to him, forming an artificial class action suit, although legally the case remains between two parties. Austria's Supreme Court referred two questions to the European court. Firstly, it asked whether people lose the status of "consumer" when they publish books, deliver lectures, collect donations and operate websites.

Secondly, in the event that Schrems could be considered a consumer, it asked whether it could hear the class action case when some of the consumers involved may not be based in Austria or even in the EU. Facebook argues that Schrems cannot be considered a "consumer". He has spoken and written extensively on privacy law, and, according to Facebook, used the social media platform to further those professional activities - something Schrems denies.

A Facebook spokesperson said: "Mr. Schrems's claims have twice been rejected on the grounds that they cannot proceed as 'class action' on behalf of other consumers in Austrian courts. We were pleased to be able to present to the CJEU and look forward to resolving these claims." European consumer group BEUC backed Schrems's bid to have the case handled as a class action.

"Consumers are often powerless when tech giants breach data protection rules," said BEUC's Christoph Schmon. "It makes sense to bundle multiple claims and avoid parallel procedures in different countries." A court adviser, Advocate General Michal Bobek, is expected to issue his opinion on November 7, with the final judgment to come by the end of the year.

Reuters
IANS

Reliance Group's Internet of Things (IoT) for enterprises arm, Unlimit, on Wednesday announced that it signed an agreement with China's Fibocom to bring latest wireless communications modules and solutions for IoT and mobile internet to India. "The partnership will allow innovative design and next-gen applications, which will narrow the gap between India and other developing and developed countries with the introduction of a robust infrastructure set-up for digital growth," a joint statement said here.

Commenting on the development, Unlimit Chief Executive Juergen Hase said that with the number of connected devices in India projected to rise from 200 million to 3 billion by 2020 "nearly every part of the economy will be positively impacted by IoT". "We are delighted to partner with Fibocom to unlock the full potential of the Internet of Things for our customers. The partnership will be dedicated to design and manufacture wireless modules and provide IoT solutions to enable secure communications among machines, equipment, vehicles and assets over wireless networks," he said.

"With the extensive customer base and channel network of Fibocom, China's innovative design and famous applications will be brought to the Indian market, thus accelerating the realisation of the 'Digital India' plan," said Fibocom Vice President Qi Guangzhi. Reliance Group's Unlimit IoT platform aimed at the enterprise users was launched in April this year. Unlimit services will allow businesses to connect any device over any network and manage, monitor and store asset data. Unlimit aims to provide a common platform for vertical industries such as automation, healthcare, agriculture, financial services and asset tracking.
Credit: Alex LakeAfter much controversy, Radiohead's concert in Israel will be held tonight. According to a report from Time Out Tel Aviv, a Palestinian fan has received a permit to attend the show.

The fan, who lives in the West Bank, went to Reddit asking for advice about how to gain entry to the show. Due to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, travel between the two areas is extremely limited. After hearing about his case, the production company Naranjah, which is putting on the Radiohead concert, reportedly reached out to the proper authorities and obtained a travel permit for the fan.

Radiohead's Israel concert has been met been with criticism, particularly Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which calls for a cultural boycott of Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. In response, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke said, "It's deeply disrespectful to assume that we're either being misinformed or that...we can't make these decisions ourselves."

As the New York Post points out, Radiohead may have a personal motivation for playing Israel: the country was the first to give "Creep" significant airplay, which helped save the band's then-floundering career.

Copyright  2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
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HARRISBURG  The ACLU on Tuesday filed a motion on behalf of the staff at the Illinois Youth Center in Harrisburg citing criminal charges against the Department of Juvenile Justice/IYC Harrisburg Youth Center.

The charges stem from the alleged ongoing practice of malicious prosecutions for minor disciplinary matters a news release from the ACLU said.

Several dozen youth in custody at an Illinois Youth Center in Saline County have been unfairly and unnecessarily prosecuted by the Saline County States Attorneys office for what are often trivial charges, including spitting on staff members, the news release said.

ACLU Director of Communications and Public Policy Ed Yohnka said furthermore these events which should be prosecuted as internal disciplinary matters are being handled in courts with adult charges attached.

The lawsuit said this is a deliberate and concerted attack upon the DJJ disciplinary structure put in place by a 2012 Consent Decree and remedial plan.

As part of that agreement with DJJ, U.S. District Court Judge Matthew F. Kennelly approved an end to lengthy, isolated confinement as part of punishment.

When the threat of solitary confinement was removed, the lawsuit alleges that certain DJJ staff at IYC Harrisburg created their own, alternative correctional system, engineering a steady stream of youth prosecutions for staff assaults.

According to the lawsuit, information Plaintiffs counsel obtained between June 16 and June 27, alleges there have been over 40 such charges brought against IYC Harrisburg youth for incidents from January 2016 through March 2017.

Those 40-plus charges, which sometimes charge the same young people more than once, resulted in some youth who had turned 18 years-old being sentenced to multiple years in the adult correctional system, the news release said.

Typically, DJJ internal discipline, not prosecution in the criminal justice system, addresses all but the most serious infractions. Harrisburg is currently the only place where these sort of routine prosecutions take place the news release said.

Camille Bennett, a lawyer with the ACLU representing the youth detained by DJJ said Ending extended, isolated confinement was a critical step in fixing what is wrong with DJJ  but the Saline County States Attorney and a group of staff believe they know better than court-appointed experts and the court itself. This must be fixed.

The suit alleges that without the intervention of the Court, IYC Harrisburg youth will continue to be thrust into the alternative punishment system created by the Saline County States Attorney, the Circuit Court of Saline County, and IYC Harrisburg staff, in which any youth who are old enough are fast-tracked into the Illinois Department of Corrections.

The lawsuit charges the DJJ to immediately develop and present a plan to address the ongoing practice of IYC Harrisburg staff pursuing charges against youth in cases in which the department itself does not pursue prosecution.

In the interim, it asks that any further placements of youth to IYC Harrisburg must be halted to minimize the risk of further harm.

Calls to the Saline County States Attorneys Office were not returned before press time.
Gaege Bethune, the man charged with two counts of murder in the death of an SIU student, entered a plea of not guilty at his arraignment Tuesday in Jackson County Court.

A trial date has not yet been set.

An Illinois State's Attorney Appellate Prosecutor charged Bethune with the murder counts in connection with the February 2014 death of Pravin Varughese.

The special prosecutor alleges that Bethune committed robbery and battery of Varughese. His body was found in a wooded area behind Buffalo Wild Wings in Carbondale, five days after he was reported missing. The Jackson County Coroner's Office found he died of hypothermia, with no evidence of foul play.

Bethune, 22, allegedly was the last person to see Varughese alive the night he died.

Bethune told investigators he had given Varughese a ride home from a party when a fight broke out between them, authorities said. He said that during the argument, Varughese exited the vehicle and fled into the wooded area.

A special prosecutor was appointed to take over the investigation of Varugheses death in July 2016, after Jackson County States Attorney Michael Carr declined to press charges and then recused himself.
CARBONDALE  City leaders have approved an additional suspension of Hollywood Lounges liquor license in response to a July 9 shooting inside the establishment that left one person injured.

At a Local Liquor Control Commission and regular City Council meeting Tuesday night, commissioners OKd the recommended suspension along with $2,000 in fines.

Mayor Mike Henry, acting in his capacity as chairman of the Local Liquor Control Commission, originally suspended the bar's liquor license shortly after the shooting on July 9.

Reached by phone on Wednesday, Henry said the commission would have penalized any local liquor establishment where gunshots had been fired inside the business.

This is just part of an initiative to try to quell the gun violence in Carbondale and the surrounding area, Henry said.

Asked whether the Liquor Control Commission had ever suspended a businesss license after a violent incident, Henry said he did not know of another case.

Carbondale police officers heard a gunshot from inside the bar at 104 W. Jackson St. while on patrol in the area.

According to a hearing officers report available on the citys website, the clear sound of a single gunshot at 1:41 a.m. could be heard on a sergeants patrol car video. The video shows people fleeing the establishment and saying, There is a gun. The victim appears to walk in front of the patrol car at 1:47 a.m., the report states.

During the police investigation, Hollywood Lounge owner Bobby McBride and staff members told police they believed the sound was from fireworks, not a gunshot, Sgt. Guy Draper testified at the Liquor Control Commission hearing. Draper said there is a clear difference between the sound of a gunshot and fireworks. An officer found a spent Winchester .380 shell casing and bullet 10 to 15 feet from the bar area inside the building.

About 15 minutes after the shooting, police learned that a gunshot victim had arrived at St. Joseph Memorial Hospital in Murphysboro. The victims girlfriend told police that he had been shot at a club in Carbondale.

At the hearing, which was held privately July 13, McBride reiterated that he thought the sound inside the bar was fireworks. When City Attorney Jamie Snyder asked whether McBride was familiar with the Illinois concealed carry law requirement that says all liquor establishments must post a no concealed carry sign, McBride said he had not been aware of the requirement and did not have a sign posted.

The license holder said that they do pat-downs and that they have metal detecting wands that they check people with, and I asked him how he thought a weapon could get in there, and he just didnt have a good answer.  Probably they just werent thorough enough in doing their checking, Henry said.

City Manager Gary Williams said in the report that McBride and his staff did provide false information to officers in an attempt to minimize and discourage investigation into the gunshot. For a charge of obstructing justice, Williams recommended a fine of $1,000. Another $1,000 fine was recommended for responsibility for the unlawful discharge of a firearm on the licensed premises.

I let them know that our police department is at their disposal if they need some training on how to check people; if they have someone in the bar that is suspicious, they can call us. I even said that if (McBride) feels threatened, he can go to a back room and call us from back there, Henry said. So there are ways to deal with this.

McBride could not be reached for comment Wednesday afternoon.

Frankly, this is something that weve been concerned about happening, and unfortunately, it happened to this gentleman. You know, hes a good man, and hes trying to have a neighborhood business, but its just unfortunate that it happened to him. But I felt that we needed to really give an indication that this is something were not going to tolerate, Henry said.

Although Williams had recommended an additional 30-day suspension, the commission chose to show leniency and restore the businesss license before a scheduled event on Aug. 3, Carbondale Public Relations Officer Amy Fox said. Hollywood Lounge will have its liquor license back Aug. 2.
"Tracy and I can't thank the people of Southern Illinois enough for their support and their prayers. Our victory tonight sends a powerful message to out-of-touch politicians everywhere that we're unified and unyielding in the fight for our conservative values. Joe Biden's going to be held accountable for destroying the economy, ignoring the border crisis, and taking us from America First to America Last in two years flat. But none of this would be possible without the trust of voters from across our vast 12th District. Serving you is truly the honor of a lifetime."
MURPHYSBORO  Dozens of people crowded into a Jackson County Board meeting Tuesday night, pleading for and arguing against a proposed resolution that would have designated the county as safe and welcoming to immigrants.

In the end, the Jackson County Board members voted 6 to 6 on the resolution, which needed a simple majority to pass.

Voting against the resolution were Jose Mendoza Jr., Dan Bost, Emily Burke, Andrew Erbes, Cheryl Endres and Keith Larkin.

Voting for the resolution were Tamiko Mueller, Milton Maxwell, Julie Peterson, Scott Comparto, John Rendleman and Liz Hunter.

Steven Bost was not at the meeting and the seat recently vacated by Orval Rowe is still vacant.

While some in the packed audience spoke about the need to help immigrant students and professionals feel safe in this area and make them feel safe asking for law-enforcement protection and other help, others talked about the U.S. borders needing better security and questioned why a resolution would attempt to prevent law-enforcement and others from asking about a persons legal status. At least two people, who said they were immigrants who became citizens, spoke against the resolution, noting that they had gone through the process of becoming a citizen and felt the measure might diminish their work to gainfully secure legal status here.

Jackson County citizens made it clear that they were not willing to compromise the ability of law-enforcement to protect them, board member Burke said. Im glad that were moving beyond this divisive issue to work on other important matters for Jackson County.

Disappointed was how Becca Tally, a member of the Southern Illinois Immigrant Rights Project that proposed the resolution, said she felt about the boards decision. At the meeting, the group presented the board with 100 to 150 signatures in support of the resolution.

She said she feels that people dont understand what the average undocumented immigrant is: someone who has been living and working in this country for about 10 years, in a household with at least one U.S. citizen and someone who supports the economy of this country. She said she felt the non-approval of the resolution would have a negative impact on undocumented immigrants and even legal citizens who are thought to be undocumented, inhibiting them, for instance, from asking for assistance when needed.

That, she said, would make everyone unsafe.

The group was also supported by SIU Law professor Cindy Buys who frequently works with immigrants. She noted that students and even friends of hers were impacted by the current political climate in this country.

I do hear from many non U.S. citizens, even if they were here lawfully ... that they do become afraid when they hear the anti-immigration rhetoric in the news or in the community, Buys said. I have had friends who have had very negative anti-immigration comments (made to them) .. and sometimes people assume that they're really here (illegaly) and they are not. So I think were living in a time when people feel freer to make those kinds of negative comments, and it really creates a fearful and uneasy atmosphere for some people.
It wasn't quite a wicked-witch-is-dead Munchkin happy dance, but the white noise of foregone conclusions drowned out Republicans' relatively muted regret over their failure to repeal and replace Obamacare.

It was never gonna happen. Not no how.

Partly this is because the GOP version of reform would have first done harm to our most vulnerable citizens  the elderly, the disabled and the poor. Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins cited drastic Medicaid cuts as her reason for withholding support of the so-called "Better Health Reconciliation Act." Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul also said he wouldn't support the bill, because it didn't go far enough in repealing Obamacare.

When two more GOP senators  Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas  defected Monday night, the deal was undone. Lee said the bill failed to repeal all of the Obamacare taxes. He also said the bill didn't go far enough in lowering premiums for middle-class families or in loosening costly regulations.

Thus, the weeks-long tornado of hot tempers and chill winds culminated Tuesday morning when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell realized he didn't have enough votes.

Health care is such a mind-numbing boondoggle that one must take frequent breaks from thinking about it. Therefore, let us pause for a moment to applaud the relatively unknown L. Frank Baum (1856-1919), author of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." Neither the passage of time nor the contempt usually bred by familiarity seems to dim the popularity or the seemingly eternal applications of his masterwork. In my experience as a columnist, I've found few issues, characters or moments  whether writing about Bill Clinton's steamy White House encounters or McConnell's bland ruminations on regret  that don't benefit from Baum's contextual frameworks.

There. Now to yawn-inspiring health care reform in all its failed foregone-ness.

During almost a decade of writing sporadically about health care in its various iterations, I've interviewed dozens of people from a mix of related fields  medical, business, legislative and political. Not once have I found a single person who thought the GOP could pull off a repeal and replace. Why?

Firstly, because the vast majority of Americans are fundamentally opposed to allowing others to suffer. And secondly, sort of, the ACA affects one-sixth of the U.S. economy. How does one untangle a knot of 20 million strings? Why not just repeal and replace California and call it a day? It would be easier.

The fact is, Obamacare was never perfect nor should anyone have expected it to be. Today, we have a health care system in pitiful disrepair, as insurance companies opt out of exchanges, premiums continue to climb, and healthy, young people forgo insurance premiums that would have subsidized coverage for unhealthy, older Americans and the less fortunate.

Therein lies the crux of the least solvable problem inherent in such a gargantuan, multifaceted overhaul: It denies, emphatically, the nature part of being human, which is in constant tension with government-mandated insurance coverage. The central question is: How do you make it both cost-effective as well as fair?

Many Americans simply don't see the fairness in a system that requires them to pay high premiums for others' poor health, some of which is, let's face it, earned. Not deserved, but sometimes resulting from poor lifestyle choices. Why, indeed, should a single, childless 30-year-old male who runs three miles a day, eats rationally, doesn't drink, smoke or take drugs, be saddled with insurance premiums to cover pregnancy, abortion, alcoholism, addiction, or an abundance of health consequences resulting from obesity and inertia?

For that matter, why should women have to subsidize men's sexual dysfunction curatives when, by the way, men don't have to pony up for women's corresponding, post-menopausal, medically appropriate intercessions. Here you see one of the finer-print dilemmas. We'd rather force nuns to concede tacit approval of abortion than insist that insurance subsidies be tied to healthy behaviors.

I'm sorry if this sounds heartless; the brain calls it reality. No wonder Obamacare was so difficult to craft and a replacement equally so. There are simply too many moving parts to make the sucker float  and too many reasons to not sink it.

Since McConnell's repeal-only idea seemed doomed Tuesday afternoon after GOP Sens. Collins, Shelley Moore Capito and Lisa Murkowski said they oppose immediate repeal, perhaps, finally, Republicans and Democrats can snap on their wizard hats and cobble something workable together. After all, it's the only thing they haven't tried yet.
Former Elloree Police Chief Preston Avinger put aside his badge and put on his walking boots on Friday, July 14, embarking on a hike of more than 2,200 miles -- the entire length of the Appalachian Trial.

Avinger is undertaking the journey to raise money for the Semper Fi Fund, which provides immediate financial assistance and lifetime support to post-9/11 wounded, critically ill and injured members of all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces. He's excited about the adventure, he said.

Im looking forward to helping the Semper Fi Fund out, helping some veterans who need some assistance, Avinger said. Im trying to raise $20,000. Some people said thats a lofty goal. But it takes $25,000 to do one wheelchair-accessible bathroom at a veterans home.

The long trek

Avinger began the journey at what some say is the wrong end of the Appalachian Trail, traveling to Maine, and setting out from Baxter State Park.

The park is named for Percival P. Baxter, who served as governor of Maine from 1921-1924. An avid outdoorsman and nature lover, Baxter purchased the first 6,000 acres of what would become the state park and donated it to the state in 1931. That original parcel of land includes Mount Katahdin, Maines highest peak.

When I get up there, I plan to get started right away, Avinger said before heading out last week. Even though Ive been doing some walking and a little bit of training, its pretty steep in Maine in certain parts. So, Im just going to take it slow to start with, for the first couple weeks, to get acclimated to walking every day with a pack and going up and down hills.

My main concern is injuries during the first couple of weeks and just making sure my body gets accustomed to that type of exercise and movement, he said. Then after those first few weeks, I plan to try to start upping my mileage up into the 15 miles-per-day range. 

After a few weeks of doing that, I hope to move into the 20-25 miles-per-day range and try to stay there as long as the terrain allows it, Avinger added. If its real rough, its going to be hard to keep up that kind of mileage. When I get into flat portions of the trail, I hope to move at a pace of 20-25 miles per day.

He is carrying a backpack that weighs about 40 pounds.

I have mapped out my water resupply points in a little book. I purify my own water and, that way, I wont have to carry so much water in my pack and have so much weight on me, Avinger said. For the first month or so, Ill be adjusting what I keep in my pack.

Im going to stop at different supply points and different streams and purify my water and carry what I need as I need it instead of carrying five or six liters of water at a time, he said. Im going to try to get it as I go.

Through the wilderness

Once I climb Mount Katahdin in Maine, I will go pretty much into the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, Avinger said. The most difficulty that most people have with the Appalachian Trail is that they do (the northernmost section) at the end. Im doing it at the beginning.

In the beginning, I expect challenges because I havent been acclimatized to hiking and camping every day, he said. Thats going to be the most challenging part of the trail.

After I come out of the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, every two or three miles, you go through some type of little community or town all the way back home, Avinger noted.

The journey home will take him through forests and wild places in New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina before he reaches Springer Mountain in Georgia.

Not many people walk the trail southbound, Avinger said. The ranger station at Baxter State Park has a good count of people who are signing the log going southbound. I dont think theres been more than 300 people who have checked in at the lodge there this year to go southbound. But tons of people have come up from Georgia.

As of July 5, more than 2,000 people had checked in at the state park this summer after walking up from Georgia, he said.

Avinger prefers the direction less traveled for several reasons.

If you leave from Georgia, youve got to worry about getting up there and getting done, and then having that trip to come back, he said. Ill be walking home so I wont have to worry about that trip coming back.

Baxter State Park closes in mid-October so traveling southbound will give him a bit more flexibility in terms of his schedule.

Additional challenges

No matter how good a time he makes, however, Avinger expects to encounter snow somewhere along the trail in autumn. He faces health challenges as well.

Ive got a couple of things going against me, he said. My age is one thing. Im 50. A lot of the people doing the trail are just out of high school or college.

I also have diabetes and high blood pressure, and I have to manage those while Im on the trail, which will make it even more challenging. Im on shots (for diabetes) but, hopefully, after the first couple of weeks on the trail, walking anywhere from 5-10 hours a day, I can slowly move off the shots and that will make things easier on me.

A couple of years ago, he was running to help control his blood pressure and diabetes, Avinger said. I ran the Cooper River Bridge Run two years ago for the Semper Fi Fund. During the training for that, I came off all my medication.

But its hard to keep that tempo up when you have work and family obligations and different things going on, he said. Some people do it, but I couldnt keep it up. I gained a few more pounds and went back on the shots.

Hopefully, all the additional exercise (hiking the trail) will help me out in the long run."

The reason for it all

The most important part of my trip will be bringing awareness to veterans issues and raising money for the Semper Fi Fund to be able to provide a little bit of help to someone who really needs it but couldnt get it otherwise, Avinger said.

The Semper Fi Fund provides immediate financial assistance and lifetime support to post-9/11 wounded, critically ill and injured members of all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces and their families. The fund ensures that they have the resources they need during their recovery and transition back to their communities," he said.

This includes qualifying post-9/11 Marines, Sailors, Soldiers, Airmen, Coast Guardsmen and Reservists with amputations, spinal cord injuries, traumatic brain injury, severe post-traumatic stress disorder, burns, blindness, other physical injuries, or those suffering from life-threatening illnesses. Semper Fi Fund also helps spouses and children of active duty service members who face a life-threatening illness or injury. The Semper Fi Fund works hard to ensure that no one is left behind."

Supporting the cause

Ill hit the Semper Fi Fund fundraising hard as soon as I hit the trail, Avinger said. I plan to do updates on my phone and try to garner some attention that way and by taking pictures of some things out on the trail. So well see how it goes.

To support Avingers quest to help the Semper Fi Fund assist veterans, visit https://www.gofundme.com/avinger0311?d=167972384.
Two individuals have admitted their roles in a 2015 forgery scheme.

Lashandra Andreal Washington, 27, of 134 N. Romney Street D, Charleston, and Ashton Eugene Robinson, 25, of 159 Doberman Lane, Orangeburg, both pleaded guilty last week to forgery, valued less than $10,000.

Circuit Judge Ed Dickson sentenced Washington to prison for five years, suspending the term to five years of probation.

He ordered her to pay $3,000 in restitution, joint and several, to BB&T bank.

Dickson sentenced Robinson to two years in prison, suspended to one year of probation.

Robinson must also pay $1,000 in restitution, joint and several, to BB&T bank.

BB&T bank reported losing $19,000 in 2015 to a scheme that involved multiple co-defendants.

The case was handled by the Orangeburg Department of Public Safety.

In other cases:

* Myron Brabham Padgett, 53, of 15 Third Street, Bamberg, pleaded guilty to breach of trust with fraudulent intent valued more than $2,000 but less than $10,000.

Dickson sentenced him to time served at the Orangeburg County Detention Center and ordered him to pay $6,044 in restitution to Youngs Food Store.

* Corey Calloway Jr., 21, of 406 Representative Circle, Orangeburg, pleaded guilty to grand larceny, valued more than $10,000, and three counts of breaking into motor vehicles.

Dickson sentenced him under the Youthful Offender Act to five years in prison.

* Forrest Robertson, 37, of 221 Pinewood Drive, Rowesville, pleaded guilty to second-degree domestic violence.

Dickson sentenced him to prison for three years. After he serves 60 days, the sentence will be suspended to three years of probation.

Dickson said Robertson is allowed to serve time on weekends and must undergo random drug/alcohol testing.

Robertson must complete anger management and batterers treatment programs.

While on probation, Robertson must also take part in drug/alcohol treatment.

* Soloris Katrena Grant, 27, of 126 Herlong Avenue, St. Matthews, pleaded guilty to hit and run causing property damage.

Dickson sentenced her to prison for six months or a fine of $100.

* Raynard Huggins, 28, of 308 Dorchester Road, Orangeburg, pleaded guilty to possession of a controlled substance.

Dickson sentenced him to prison for six months, suspending the term to probation for nine months.

* Amanda Paige Hightower, 19, of 128 Azalea Street, North, pleaded guilty to failure to stop for blue light and child endangerment.

Dickson sentenced her to prison for two years, suspending the term to 18 months of probation.

* Desi Lamar Miller, 29, of 351 Camden Road, Vance, pleaded guilty to failure to stop for blue light, possession of crack cocaine and simple possession of marijuana.

Dickson sentenced him to prison for three years, suspending the term to two years of probation.

* John Henry Davis, 23, of 953 Santee River Road, Elloree, pleaded guilty to forgery, valued less than $10,000.

Dickson sentenced him to prison under the Youthful Offender Act for two years, with the balance suspended to 30 months of probation.

Davis must also pay $375.15 in restitution to IGA of Elloree.

* Willie Guinyard, 33, of 117 Percheron Drive, Orangeburg, pleaded guilty to third-degree domestic violence.

Dickson sentenced him to jail for 90 days, suspending the balance to two years of probation.

Guinyard must also complete a batterers treatment program.

* Antwan Christopher McMillan, 24, of 253 Jet Ridge Road, Holly Hill, pleaded guilty to failure to stop for blue light.

Dickson sentenced him to prison for six months to be served concurrently to the sentence hes currently serving for strong-arm robbery.

* Deborah Gregory Hoxworth, 55, of 145 Sinkler Avenue, Eutawville, pleaded guilty to strong-arm robbery and malicious injury to personal property.

Dickson sentenced her to prison for 10 years, suspending the term to two years of probation.

He credited her for having served 152 days in jail.

Shes required to pay $60 in restitution.

* Tommie Pearson, 48, of 251 Avocada Drive, Santee, pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and battery.

Dickson sentenced him to prison for two years, suspending the term to 70 days in prison.

Dickson said hes allowed to serve time on weekends and must not have any contact with the victim.
From Monday through July 23, law enforcement agencies across the Southeast are focused on a goal: no traffic fatalities.

While Target Zero is the goal every day, the South Carolina Department of Public Safety on Monday kicked off a new speed-enforcement campaign, Operation Southern Shield, joining its counterparts across four other Southeastern states.

Through Sunday, law enforcement serving the Southeastern states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Tennessee are mobilizing to increase enforcement of speed violations -- as well as driving under the influence, distracted driving, and failure to buckle up -- with the goal of achieving zero fatalities.

There is good reason to focus on speeding.

Consider these statistics from 2014 from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration:

 32,675 people died on the highways, with 9,262 (28 percent) in speeding-related crashes.

 36 percent of 15- to 20-year-old male drivers involved in fatal crashes were speeding, the highest among all age groups.

 41 percent of all speeding drivers in fatal crashes had BACs of .08 or higher, compared to 17 percent of non-speeding drivers involved in fatal crashes.

 33 percent of motorcycle riders involved in fatal crashes were speeding, more than drivers of any other vehicle type.

 In fatal crashes, about half (51 percent) of speeding passenger vehicle drivers were restrained at the time of the crash, compared to 78 percent of non-speeding passenger vehicle drivers. The pattern was seen for those under age 21 as well as those 21 and older.

 13 percent of speeding-related fatalities occurred on interstate highways.

SCDPS Director Leroy Smith said too many lives are lost on roadways in the Southeastern United States as a result of those who violate the most basic traffic safety laws.

It is tragic to see a summer vacation end with a highway fatality because someone chose to violate or ignore traffic laws that  if followed  could prevent crashes and save lives, Smith said. If the motoring public would take one important step  reduce their speed behind the wheel  we could start to see lives saved immediately on our roadways.

Operation Southern Shield focuses on a heavy summer travel period when the rate of fatal and injury crashes in the Southeast is higher than any other time of the year. According to the NHTSA, 37 percent of all fatal roadways collisions in South Carolina in 2015 were speed-related.

We all know that summer brings increased congestion on our roads as residents and tourists alike enjoy all that South Carolina has to offer from the mountains to the coast, new Highway Patrol Commander Chris Williamson said. Our goal: help people arrive alive by reducing traffic crashes, injuries and fatalities.

With 525 people having died on South Carolina roads so far this year, meeting the Target Zero goal, even for just this week, would be great news to report.
Great white shark tracked off N.C. island

BALD HEAD ISLAND, N.C.  A great white shark followed by the research group OCEARCH has been tracked off the coast of North Carolina.

The Fayetteville Observer reported the shark, named Hilton, pinged Friday morning roughly 20 miles south-southeast of Bald Head Island.

Hilton is fitted with a tag that pings to transmit his location when his fins break the surface.

OCEARCH's Global Shark Tracker indicates that Hilton had swum 120 miles during the preceding 72 hours, and had pinged off Orlando, Florida, nine days before his appearance in southeastern North Carolina, indicating good health.

Hilton was tagged March 3 by a team working out of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. OCEARCH says the shark measures 12 feet, 5 inches long and weighs 1,326 pounds.

Top S. Carolina prosecutor hires new second-in-command

COLUMBIA  South Carolina is getting a new second-in-command at its top prosecutor's office.

Attorney General Alan Wilson says Jeff Young has been named as his chief deputy. Young replaces Robert Bolchoz, who has been Wilson's chief deputy since October and also served in the same role under Attorney General Charlie Condon in the 1990s.

Bolchoz is returning to private practice. He has been mentioned as a possible nominee to serve as South Carolina's U.S. Attorney.

Young has served as a state representative, and circuit court and family court judge. The graduate of The Citadel and the University of South Carolina School of Law is also a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

S. Carolina county prison farm director arrested after fight

DARLINGTON  The director of a facility that helps inmates prepare for life after incarceration has been arrested after a fight.

Local media outlets report Darlington County Prison Farm director Ulanda Green was arrested Monday and charged with third-degree assault and battery. Darlington County deputies say they went to the facility after getting a call about a fightGreen has been put on administrative leave. Jail records listed no attorney for her, and no details about the fight have been released.

According to its website, the Darlington County Prison Farm has contracts to house state and county inmates while they are serving their sentences. The facility says it offers a structured work environment while teaching accountability and life management skills.

Remains believed to be missing S.C. couple

CONWAY  Two people are charged in the death of a missing South Carolina couple whose remains are believed to have been found.

Authorities tell local media outlets 21-year-old Jordan Hodge and 28-year-old Kenneth Carlisle were jailed on murder and credit card fraud charges.

Horry County police say they found skeletal remains under a bush after getting a call Saturday morning. Deputy Coroner Darris Fowler says the remains are believed to belong to a man and a woman missing since July 1.

Authorities say they are waiting on test results, which they think will confirm the remains belong to 64-year-old Linda McAllister and 45-year-old William Clemons.

Police haven't said how Carlisle and Hodge are connected to the couple. It wasn't known if the suspects had attorneys.

4 struck by lightning first in S.C. this year

ISLE OF PALMS  The four people injured in a lightning strike this past weekend are the first recorded individuals to be struck by lightning in South Carolina this year.

The Post and Courier of Charleston reports that National Weather Service meteorologist Ron Morales says lightning strikes are common in South Carolina, but strikes on people are not. Sunday afternoon's strike happened on Isle of Palms, a coastal city about 40 miles (64 kilometers) east of Charleston.

Isle of Palms Fire Chief Ann Graham says three adults had red streaks on their bodies and a child was in the arms of one of the adults injured and was dropped, suffering a head injury. None of the injuries were life-threatening.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says six people have died nationally from lightning strikes this year.
It's not been a good last two years. Even ignoring the effects of the pandemic and the complete shutdown of outdoor live events since t...
By Azernews





By Kamila Aliyeva

The U.S. has decided to exert additional pressure on Islamic Republic by expanding sanctions over Irans ballistic missile development and said that Tehran's "malign activities" in the Middle East undercut any "positive contributions" coming from the 2015 Iran nuclear accord.

The United States brought 18 organizations and individuals to the list of sanctions on Iran's missile program, the State Department and the U.S. Treasury Department said in statements, RIA Novosti reported.

In particular, the list of sanctions included two Iranian organizations that the U.S. believes are involved in the ballistic missile program, seven organizations and five private individuals supporting the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), the elite component of the Armed Forces, as well as a "criminal organization, two Iranian businessmen and a company that organized the theft of American and Western computer programs," the U.S. Treasury Department said in a statement.

The State Department in its statement reiterated the long list of U.S. claims to Iran, including support for Hezbollah, Hamas and the Islamic Palestinian Jihad, "threats to Israel and stability in the Middle East," support for Syrian authorities and Husit rebels in Yemen.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told CBS News in an interview that the sanctions "poison the atmosphere" and violate the "spirit" of the nuclear agreement.

Earlier, the U.S. confirmed that Iran is in compliance with the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) for the nuclear program.

The Iran nuclear deal was negotiated in July 2015 between Iran, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany. By ratifying the plan, Iran agreed to scale down its nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief.

The agreement envisions that in return for verifiable abiding by its commitments, Iran receives relief from U.S., European Union, and UN Security Council nuclear-related economic sanctions.

At the same time, the U.S. retains sanctions against Iran on the missile program, human rights and on suspicion that Tehran sponsors terrorism.

Currently, presidential administration is reviewing policy on Iran, not only looking at Tehran's compliance with the nuclear deal but also its behavior in the region.
By Trend





The Gulenist network try to divert the perception towards Turkey by producing alternative facts and a false narrative in an attempt to defame Turkish leaders and institutions, Director of News of TRT World Fatih Er told Trend.

Unfortunately, Turkey has been subjected to a large smear campaign especially in Europe, which is also led by the Gulenist network worldwide, Er said.

He noted that they even try to stop any other narrative from being heard by blocking the events and talks organized by relatively pro-government institutions and think-tanks.

We, as TRT World, aim to tackle this issue by bringing the actual facts and figures regarding the coup attempt on our air as well as organizing events and talks worldwide to create a more inclusive environment where the actual story of July 15 can be heard, he said.

According to Er, Turkish government has been carrying out operations against FETO [Fethullah Gulens movement] Terror Organization since 2014 after it became apparent that the group had a secret agenda to overthrow the government. He noted that the FETO had long been infiltrated into the government institutions, especially the Turkish military and even the media, and this terror group created a global network by exploiting the state resources.

What we, as a nation, witnessed on the night of July 15, 2016 was the groups latest and most obvious attempt in order to achieve their secret goals. Turkey survived a bloody coup attempt that was carried out by an army faction associated with Fethullah Gulens sinister, secretive congregation which deployed tanks, troops, helicopters, snipers and fighter jets to bring down Turkeys legitimate government, he said.

Speaking about the Gulens movement activity in the US, Er noted that in 2014, the FBI launched an investigation into the Gulenists more than 130 charter schools in the US, for which they have received more than 2 billion dollars in government funds since 2010. He went on to add that the group was (and is) accused of using these funds outside their legally designated objectives, thereby diverting the money to the Gulenist network.

This demonstrates that there is a great suspicion over the groups activities in the US as well, he said.

Er reminded that after the attempted coup last year, the Turkish government has repeatedly called for the extradition of Fethullah Gulen by providing evidence for its accusations about him being behind the attempted coup. However, the US administration has been reluctant to proceed the extradition.

Unfortunately, the US stance on this issue remains ambiguous considering the statements from the administration which support democracy and the elected government of Turkey, he said.

On July 15, 2016, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country as a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them. However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed. More than 200 people were killed during the attempted coup.
The UAE-based Commercial Bank International (CBI) has announced a net profit of Dh52 million ($14.16 million) for the first half of 2017, a 24 per cent decline compared to the first half of 2016.



The profit fall was due to higher provisioning, necessitated by market conditions, said the bank. The NPL ratio increased to 9.3 per cent owing to local business pressures experienced across the UAE market. The ratio increase was driven by one exposure where the bank is fully secured, it said.



The net profit for the second quarter of the year was Dh32 million, up 53 per cent from Q1 2017 and flat versus Q2 2016.



Net interest income increased by 10 per cent to Dh263 million from Dh240 million in H1 2016 and operating Income increased by 2 per cent to Dh405 million versus Dh397 million in H1 2016.



Operating profit increased by 3 per cent to Dh183 million versus Dh178 million in H1 2016, the bank said.



Net loans and advances increased by 2 per cent to Dh13,572 million from the end of 2016, up 6 per cent y-o-y. Customer deposits increased by 1 per cent to Dh14,030 million from the end of 2016, up 19 per cent y-o-y.



Mohammad Sultan Al Qadi, chairman of CBI, said: CBIs financial position is strong, including robust liquidity as the bank continues to reduce non-core assets and optimise its balance sheet. In addition, the bank continues to grow in a near flat market, with core net interest income growing by 10 per cent year-on-year thanks to the strong performance of the retail business.



Mark T Robinson, CEO of CBI, commented: Over the first half of this year, CBI focused on further strengthening the customer experience for its local UAE customer base. The recent upgrade of our core banking platform has significantly modernised the banks operations and technology, streamlining services for customers and improving operational efficiencies. We are confident in our strategy to invest in our people and infrastructure, and continue to focus on providing simple, high-quality banking services for our wholesale and retail customers in the UAE. -TradeArabia News Service


Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority (DSOA), the regulatory body for Dubai Silicon Oasis, the integrated free zone technology park, in collaboration with NXN (formerly neXgen), the leading smart city consulting and digital service provider, has been awarded the prestigious Best Infrastructure Innovation Award for its Silicon Park project at the annual Global Telecoms Business (GTB) Innovation Awards ceremony held in London.



Currently under construction at an estimated total cost of Dh1.3 billion ($356 million), Silicon Park will feature 71,000 sq m of office space, 25,000 sq m of commercial space, 46,000 sq m of residential area as well as 112-key business hotel and 59-room furnished apartment Radisson Red Dubai Silicon Oasis on a 150,000 sq m area.



In addition, it will feature value-added contemporary lifestyle facilities, such as restaurants, cafes, prayer rooms, a shopping centre and an underground parking space that can accommodate more than 2,500 cars, said a statement from DSOA.



Recognizing the industrys most significant project partnerships and showcasing the very best projects in telecommunications, the award celebrates DSOAs collaboration with smart city advisory and managed services provider NXN in establishing Dubais first integrated smart city project at the high-tech park.



The award was received based on several criteria including the overall Smart District ICT concept design, technology blueprint and service delivery framework for the Silicon Park project in Dubai Silicon Oasis, it added.



The project defines Smart District Services and value propositions, as well as develops detailed technical designs and specifications that make it future proof, readily able to take on more smart services as they became available or relevant in the future, said a top official.



"The award endorses our determination and efforts to transform Dubai into the smartest and happiest city in the world as envisioned by our leader His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai," remarked Muammar Al Katheeri, the executive VP Engineering and Smart City at DSOA.



"We are committed to continuing our focus on smart services, and including them in our infrastructure planning and development. Partnering with leading smart city experts such as NXN will lead to a more thorough and rounded approach to smart integration, and eventually improve the experience of all our business partners, residents, and visitors within our developments," he added.



NXN chief executive Ghazi Atallah said: "We are honoured to have been selected for this award. I take this opportunity to thank DSOA for partnering with us in developing a global benchmark for smart communities. Together we will reimagine the future of smart cities as we work towards common goals and write a new chapter in Dubais smart city development."



Completely free of regular vehicles, Silicon Park will use electricity-powered alternatives as the primary mode of transportation.



All residents and visitors owning electric vehicles will be able to access the charging stations set up across the premises. In addition, they will have the option to use smart rechargeable electric bikes as a means of conveyance, stated Atallah.



The project reflects Dubais ambition to offer harmonious living for individuals through endorsing smart criteria across services and facilities that are built around the six pillars mandated by Dubai Government for smart cities - life, society, mobility, economy, governance and environment, he added.-TradeArabia News Service
National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia (Bahri), a leader in logistics and transportation, was recently recognised with Best Shipping Line of the Year  Breakbulk Operator award at the India Maritime Awards 2017.



The ceremony, one of the most prestigious annual awards programmes for Indias maritime industry, was held recently at The St. Regis Hotel in Mumbai in the presence of a number of industry stalwarts from the maritime and logistics sectors.



Held every year, the awards is organised by Daily Shipping Times, the oldest and most widely read shipping newspaper in India.



Captain Jiten Bhosale, Bahris country manager for India, received the award on behalf of the company, said a statement from Bahri.



Ahmed Al Ghaith, president, Bahri Logistics, said: We are proud to have won such a coveted award against very strong competition.



This accolade confirms we are on the right path to achieving our goals and strengthens our resolve to expand our presence in India, which is an important strategic market for Bahri, he said.



Matthew Luckhurst, vice president  liner services, Bahri Logistics, said: The recognition bears testimony to our commitment to the Indian market as well as the trust reposed in the company by our growing base of customers.



We believe the Indian maritime sector has boundless potential for growth, and the countrys ongoing investments in upgrading its port and allied infrastructure are creating significant business opportunities that we are keen to capitalise on, he added.



Bahri recently opened a new office in Mumbai as part of efforts to consolidate its presence in the fast-growing Indian maritime industry.



Bahri India works with major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as Tata, Maruti, Mahindra & Mahindra, Atlas Copco, and JCB for moving cargo exports out of India.



Bahri also works with its partner Hoegh Autoliners for shipment of Volkswagen units to Veracruz, Mexico, it added.  TradeArabia News service
The increasing emphasis on energy efficient lighting technology is reshaping the lighting industry, according to industry experts.



The upcoming Light Middle East 2017, to be held from October 17 to 19 in Dubai, UAE, will spotlight the new market trends in the region.



The event, a leading trade, networking and business generating tradeshow for the lighting design and technology industry in the region, will be organised by Messe Frankfurt Middle East. The show is expected to be at least 10 per cent larger than the previous edition in terms of both area and number of exhibitors, underlining the increasing appeal of the region to global players.



According to analysts Frost & Sullivan, the global lighting industry is at a crucial tipping point, with new technology driving innovative solutions and energy efficient lighting solutions. Solid state lighting solutions powered by LED is expected to form as much as 50 per cent of the total global lighting market, which is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5 per cent till 2020 from the 2015 value of $87 billion.



In the GCC, the LED lighting market was estimated to comprise about 38 per cent of the total lighting market in 2015. It is expected to clock a CAGR of 16-17 per cent and cross 50 per cent of the total market by 2019-2020, it said.



Growth of the LED lighting market is largely driven by greenfield investments in the real estate and infrastructure sectors in the Gulf Cooperation council, which is still an attractive market for the construction sector, it added.



Ambitious plans by governments are also driving the progress towards energy efficient and integrated lighting systems, with Dubai's retrofitting of its public lighting systems with LED lighting, expected to same about 300 gwh of energy consumption by 2030.



Ahmed Pauwels, CEO of Messe Frankfurt Middle East, said: The latest in innovative technology and cutting-edge developments as well as key insights into the road ahead for lighting technology and design, will all be on offer at the upcoming edition of Light Middle East, which is expected to be even more comprehensive in reach and content than before.



The exhibition continues to be the premier launching platform for global players looking to engage with this promising region, as well as the most diverse sourcing destination for traders and buyers looking for the latest in lighting technology, he said.



Leading provider of intelligent and sustainable lighting components, Fulham sees LED lighting the way ahead. Srinivasan PS, general manager of Fulham, said: The LED market today is about 50 per cent new construction and 50 per cent retrofit.



Customers are increasingly aware that LED lamps and tubes that use existing fluorescent, HID or induction power systems are not the best way to reduce energy use. Therefore, we are seeing more and more use of complete retrofits  either via the luminiaire (which come from Fulham OEMs) or from retrofit kits that go in existing luminaires. While the market continues to grow at 20 per cent, we see emergency lighting systems and controls are our next growth areas, he added.



Also returning to the event are PUK Italia Group, leading manufacturers of outdoor lighting fixtures. Simone Ferrari, export manager of PUK Italia, said: The Middle East market is more and more important for us, we have so many clients in the Gulf area that our business volume is increasing year after year.



We will display a selection of our new items 2017, some prototypes that will enter into production in 2018 and some of our most significant products into regular production, Ferrari said.



Among the other key exhibitors who will be returning to Light Middle East 2017 include: 3S International (Canada), Al Zubair General Trading Establishment (UAE), Bjb (Germany), Decolight (UAE), ERCO (UAE), FIVEP (Italy), Forma Lighting (Italy), LEDS-C4 Lighting (UAE), Light Factor Enterprise (UAE), SLV Middle East (UAE) and Switch Made (UAE), said a statement.



Hoping to make a big splash in the Middle East market on their debut include: Elettrico Lighting (UAE), ELT Especialidades Luminotecnicas (Spain), Opple Lighting (UAE) and TCI Middle East (UAE).



Supplier to the Kuwait Government for their street lighting components, ELT Especialidades Lunimotecnicas from Spain are hoping to capture the market's imagination with their range of products at their Dubai debut.



Sergio Vilalta, export manager, ELT Especialidades Lunimotecnicas, said: By meeting with the core market actors at Light Middle East, well gain an insight into how to make it in the industry according to trends, competitors offer, buyer demands and tailor-made requests while also meeting new potential partners to identify new incoming perspectives and challenges to gain, transforming our exhibition into a successful investment.



Also returning to the event, will be the Future Zone, a showcase of innovative technology, cutting edge design and trends; Ready, Steady, Light - a competition that invites manufacturers, lighting designers and students to install an exterior lighting scheme under time, budget and equipment constraints; Light.ication, which promotes lighting design through education; and the popular Light Middle East Awards gala ceremony, celebrating the regions outstanding projects, products and lighting design, it stated.  TradeArabia News Service
Netherlands-based AkzoNobel, a leading global paints company, announced today (July 19) that its chief executive officer Ton Buchner has stepped down with immediate effect due to health reasons.



The company has announced Thierry Vanlancker as the new chief executive officer.



Buchner joined AkzoNobel in 2012 and has been responsible for significantly improving the performance of the company, increasing profitability and cash flow to record levels, said a statement from the company.



He put in place a solid operational and financial foundation, which enabled the company to recently announce the creation of two focused high performing businesses; paints and coatings and specialty chemicals.



Vanlancker was most recently head of specialty chemicals at AkzoNobel, having joined the company in 2016.



A Belgian national, prior to joining AkzoNobel he was president  fluoroproducts for Chemours, the spin-off company of DuPont's chemical businesses formed in 2015.



Vanlancker joined DuPont in 1988 and held a number of senior positions both in Europe and the US, including Vice-President Performance Coatings and Business Manager of Refinish Systems across Europe, Middle East and Africa.



Antony Burgmans, chairman of the supervisory board, said: It is with great regret that Buchner is stepping down due to health reasons. He has been an outstanding leader for our company, transforming the company and setting it up for future success.



His focus on delivering for our customers and operational excellence has driven profitability to record levels, increasing returns to shareholders, he said.



Burgmans continued: His passion for the business and personal commitment has helped create a strong culture across the company. He will be greatly missed in the boardroom and by many colleagues of our company around the world. I wish Buchner well and hope he is now able to focus fully on his own health.



Our remains focused on delivering for our customers every day. In Vanlancker we have an outstanding executive who is well placed to continue building momentum for the company. This includes the creation of two focused businesses, delivering sustainable growth and profitability, he added.



His extensive experience in the chemicals and coatings industry gives him a unique perspective and I look forward to continuing to work with him in his new role as CEO, he concluded.



Buchner commented: It was a privilege to work for AkzoNobel and I am extremely proud of all the achievements the team delivered during my five years at the company.



The company is full of highly engaged, talented and passionate people who deliver every day for our customers and I want to thank all of them for their contribution and support over the years, he said.



Our commitment to value creation, sustainability, innovation and the communities in which we operate is a major driver of our success, he added.



Buchner stated: Vanlancker is a great addition to the team and is well placed to take AkzoNobel forward, delivering long term value creation for all stakeholders. I wish him all the best.





A successor for the head of specialty chemicals will be announced in due course, it stated.  TradeArabia News Service
The shift to a unified national tax has set off a wave of change in Indias notoriously inefficient logistics sector as companies alter the way they store, move and account for goods, according to the Agility Mid-Year Emerging Markets Review.



Indias Goods and Services Tax (GST), introduced July 1, rolled more than a dozen state and federal levies into a single tax. The GST is already prompting logistics providers and their customers to consolidate warehousing, revamp road freight strategies, and invest in system upgrades to improve the efficiency of their supply chains, said the report by Agility, a leading global logistics provider.



The GST could cut logistics costs in Indias formal, organized logistics sector by 20 per cent and provide a dramatic boost to the countrys surging economy, according to the report, which also examines the impact of the UKs Brexit on emerging markets.



Essa Al-Saleh, CEO of Agility Global Integrated Logistics, said: The GST eliminates borders and checkpoints between Indias 29 states, paving the way for big efficiency gains.



Companies can carry less inventory, move to hub-and-spoke warehousing, take advantage of long-haul trucking, and look to third-party logistics providers to improve operations and save, he said.



The Agility report was prepared by Transport Intelligence, a leading analysis and research firm for the logistics industry.



The report indicates that Indias overnight decision in late 2016 to introduce new bank notes sapped economic growth and curtailed activity in the countrys massive, cash-based informal sector of small merchants, truckers and others. But it concludes that the impact of demonetisation will be short-lived.



In its look at Brexit, the report highlights hurdles faced by the UK in its effort to cut and paste existing European Union trade rules into an exit agreement with the EU. The more difficult the terms of a UK-EU divorce, the more likely the UK is to seek ambitious new trade deals with emerging markets countries, particularly Commonwealth countries in Southeast Asia and Africa, the report finds.



Brexit leaves key emerging markets exporters  South Africa, Kenya, Turkey and others  exposed because the value of the pound has declined and the UK economy is expected to be smaller as a result of the UKs departure from the EU.



The report also suggests that emerging markets countries using the UK as a gateway to Ireland and other EU countries will need to find new routes to those markets.



UK exports to the EU could face burdensome checks and customs procedures unless the UK hews to EU product standards and British transporters conform to EU transport rules, it stated.  TradeArabia News Service
Four Arab nations that have cut ties with Qatar urged the country to commit to six principles on combating extremism and terrorism and negotiate a plan with specific measures to implement them, a report said.



Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain broke diplomatic relations with Qatar in early June over allegations that it supports terrorist and extremist groups. They initially made 13 demands, which Qatar dismissed, said an Arab News report.



Saudi Arabias UN Ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi told a briefing for a group of UN correspondents that the four nations are now committed to the six principles agreed to by their foreign ministers at a meeting in Cairo on July 5, and hope Qatar will support them as well, the report said.



The principles include commitments to combat extremism and terrorism, prevent financing and safe havens for such groups, and suspend all acts of provocation and speeches inciting hatred or violence.



Al-Mouallimi said the four-nation quartet thinks it should be easy for the Qataris to accept the six principles. He stressed that implementation and monitoring must be essential components, and there will be no compromise when it comes to principles.



But he said both sides can talk about details of the tactics and the tools to implement them  and thats where we can have discussion and compromise.



Al-Mouallimi stressed that stopping incitement to violence is essential, but he said closing Al-Jazeera might not be necessary.



If the only way to achieve that is by closing down Al-Jazeera, fine, he said. If we can achieve that without closing down Al-Jazeera, thats also fine. The important thing is the objective and the principle involved.



Al-Mouallimi stressed that Qatars future lies with its neighbours not with faraway places, a clear reference to Turkey and Iran which are supporting Doha.



Our Turkish brothers need to recognise that the era of covert and to some extent unwanted intervention in the Arab world has long gone, he said. If Turkey wants to play a constructive role they are welcome to do so, but trying to find the role through military bases or military intervention would not be productive, and would not fare well for Turkeys reputation in the Arab world.



Diplomats from the four countries who attended the briefing said there have been discussions about possible next steps.



UAE Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh said that if Qatar is unwilling to accept core principles around what defines terrorism or extremism in our region, it will be very difficult for it to remain in the Gulf Cooperation Council with the quartet.



So it may be a parting of ways for a little while in order to work things out, she said.
Batelco, a leading digital solutions provider in Bahrain and AFS, a top payment services provider in the region, have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to roll-out a state-of-the art mobile wallet solution in the kingdom.



AFS chairman Sael Al Waary and Batelco Bahrain CEO Muna Al Hashemi signed on behalf of the two firms at Batelco headquarters in Hamala, Bahrain.



The innovative solution will add convenience to accelerate Bahrains journey towards a cashless digital society with added security for both consumers and merchants. A full range of integrated features will be available on the mobile wallet such as, person-to-person money transfers and loyalty points in a secure and convenient manner for both consumers and merchants and many other services.



The mobile wallet will utilize the latest Quick Response (QR) technology and will have near field communication (NFC) capability, allowing customers to tap and pay at participating outlets. The full solution will be rolled out in phases over the next several months.



Al Hashemi said: We are very excited to partner with AFS to launch the mobile wallet solution in Bahrain. This will enhance the lifestyles of customers by providing a convenient cashless, secure and agile payment method.



Al Waary said: This is a complement to AFSs suite of digital products and reach as a FinTech enabler in the region. This demonstrates Bahrains lead in the mobile payment solutions in the region. It is another step to promoting cashless payments and financial inclusion putting Bahrain at the forefront of the FinTech revolution.  TradeArabia News Service
Uninformed or careless employees are one of the most likely causes of a cybersecurity incident  second only to malware, said a new report, adding that staff hide IT security incidents in 44 per cent of businesses in Saudi Arabia.



With 46 per cent of IT security incidents caused by employees each year globally, this business vulnerability must be addressed on many levels, not just through the IT security department, said the report titled Human Factor in IT Security: How Employees are Making Businesses Vulnerable from Within from Kaspersky Lab and B2B International.



While malware is becoming more and more sophisticated, the sad reality is that the evergreen human factor can pose an even greater danger.



In particular, employee carelessness is one of the biggest chinks in corporate cybersecurity armour when it comes to targeted attacks. While advanced hackers might always use custom-made malware and hi-tech techniques to plan a heist, they will likely start with exploiting the easiest entry point human nature.



According to the research, targeted attacks on businesses in the last year had phishing/social engineering at its source. For example, a careless accountant could easily open a malicious file disguised as an invoice from one of a companys numerous contractors. This could shut down the entire organizations infrastructure, making the accountant an unwitting accomplice to attackers.



Cybercriminals often use employees as an entry point to get inside the corporate infrastructure. Phishing emails, weak passwords, fake calls from tech support  weve seen it all. Even an ordinary flash card dropped in the office parking lot or near the secretarys desk could compromise the entire network  all you need is someone inside, who doesnt know about, or pay attention to security, and that device could easily be connected to the network where it could reap havoc, said David Jacoby, security researcher at Kaspersky Lab.



Sophisticated targeted attacks do not happen to organizations every day  but conventional malware does strike at mass. Unfortunately though, the research also shows that even where malware is concerned, unaware and careless employees are also often involved, causing malware infections in their businesses.



Staff hiding the incidents they have been involved in may lead to dramatic consequences, increasing the overall damage caused. Even one unreported event could indicate a much larger breach, and security teams need to be able to quickly identify the threats they are up against to choose the right mitigation tactics.



But staff would rather put organizations at risk than report a problem because they fear punishment, or are embarrassed that they are responsible for something going wrong.



Some companies have introduced strict rules and impose extra responsibility on employees, instead of encouraging them to simply be vigilant and cooperative. This means that cyberprotection not only lies in the realm of technology, but also in an organizations culture and training. Thats where top management and HR need to get involved.



The problem of hiding incidents should be communicated not only to employees, but also to top management and HR departments, said Slava Borilin, Security Education program manager at Kaspersky Lab.



If employees are hiding incidents, there must be a reason why. In some cases, companies introduce strict, but unclear policies and put too much pressure on staff, warning them not to do this or that, or they will be held responsible if something goes wrong. Such policies foster fears, and leave employees with only one option  to avoid punishment whatever it takes. If your cybersecurity culture is positive, based on an educational approach instead of a restrictive one, from the top down, the results will be obvious.



Borilin also recalls an industrial security model, where a reporting and learn by mistake approach are at the heart of the business. For instance, in his recent statement, Teslas Elon Musk requested every incident affecting worker safety to be reported directly to him, so that he can play a central role in change.



The human factor: corporate climate and beyond



Organizations around the world are already waking up to the problem of their staff making their businesses vulnerable: 42 per cent of companies surveyed in Saudi Arabia admit that staff is the biggest weakness in their IT security. The need to implement personnel-focused measures is becoming more and more evident: 37 per cent of Saudi businesses are looking to improve security through delivering training to staff, making this the second most popular method of cyber defence. This ranks second only to the deployment of more sophisticated software, as per 41 per cent of Saudi businesses.



The best way of protecting organizations from human-related cyberthreats is to combine the right tools with the right practices. This should involve HR and management efforts, to motivate and encourage employees to be watchful and seek help in the case of an incident. Security awareness training for staff, delivering clear guidelines instead of multipage documents, building strong skills and motivation and fostering the right working atmosphere, are the first steps organizations should take.



In terms of security technologies, most of the threats aimed at targeting unaware or careless employees -including phishing - can be addressed with endpoint security solutions. These can cover the particular needs of SMB and enterprise companies in terms of functionality, pre-configured protection or advanced security settings, to minimize risks.  TradeArabia News Service
Emirates iconic A380 aircraft will make a one-off landing at the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) in Colombo on August 14 as the airline joins local authorities in the celebration of the airports resurfaced runway.



The special flight, operating as EK654 from Dubai, will be the first A380 aircraft to disembark passengers in Sri Lanka after completing a commercial service.



The one-off A380 aircraft will arrive at 16:10 hours and be on ground for more than six hours before it returns to Dubai as flight EK655 departing at 22:10 hours, enabling airport executives, VIPs, trade partners and media to enjoy a guided static tour of the double-decker aircraft.



Colombo has welcomed us from the day Emirates commenced daily flights from Dubai in 1986, just a year after the airline launched its operations. We are honoured to work alongside the city, airport, and the Sri Lankan Civil Aviation authorities, to bring our flagship A380 to this vibrant destination. For BIA and for aviation enthusiasts in Sri Lanka, this will certainly be a special day and we look forward to showcasing our unique on board products in this market, said Ahmed Khoory, Emirates senior vice president, West Asia and Indian Ocean.



Customers in Sri Lanka can experience Emirates double-decker aircraft by connecting through the airlines Dubai hub to more than 45 A380 destinations. With its quiet cabins, onboard lounge and shower spas in premium cabins, Emirates A380 products and services are unparalleled in the industry, giving all our passengers on board an unsurpassed travel experience.



As the first and only airline in the world to operate a fleet of all Airbus A380 and Boeing 777 aircraft for its passenger flights, Emirates operating fleet remains modern and efficient while offering customers a high level of comfort. Since 2008, Emirates has flown over 80 million passengers on its A380 fleet.



Emirates operates a total of 34 flights a week from Colombo -- 27 flights westward to Male and Dubai and seven eastward to Singapore connecting onwards to Melbourne, Australia. The airline has deployed ultra-modern Boeing 777-300 ER aircraft on scheduled flights serving Sri Lanka. - TradeArabia News Service
U.S. coal exports rose sharply in early 2017 amid increased demand in Asia and Europe.

The U.S. Department of Energy said Tuesday that exports are up by 8 million tons to 22.3 million tons through March.

Thats a 58 percent jump over the 14.1 million tons exported during the same period in 2016. The increase comes after five years of declines.

Exporting Wyoming coal has long been an idea on the backburner for state leaders eager to find more places to sell the Powder River Basin rock. But the economics simply havent lined up. Only Cloud Peak Energy, the Gillette-based company with mines in northern Wyoming and across the border in Montana, has plans to export to Asia this year. The company has 3.3 million tons of exports under contract for the year. It sent .5 million tons across seas in the first three months of the year.

Other companies operating in Wyoming have shown interest in developments like the Millennium Bulk export terminal in Longview, Washington, which if completed would open up another conduit to send U.S. coal to Asia. The terminal was first proposed in 2012 and has experienced repeated delays in permitting and pushback from environmental opponents. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is set to release a final environmental review of the project later this year.

Export volumes in the first quarter of the year were up most significantly through ports in Norfolk, Virginia and New Orleans. Top destinations for U.S. coal were the Netherlands, South Korea and India.

Despite the increase, volumes remain well below industry expectations when plans were announced over the past decade to build or expand coal ports in Oregon, Louisiana, Washington state and California.

Most of those projects have stalled or been cancelled. Federal officials say theres still more export capacity than needed.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
After his friend and fellow Casper firefighter died, Patrick Stafford made a New Years resolution in 2015 to record a song every month.

He wanted to focus more on his music, and more importantly, record it for others to hear. His friends death reminded him that life is fleeting. He wanted to get outside of his comfort zone.

Just seeing what he went through, I just want to leave something for my kids, Stafford said. The fact that my kids can have an album, and they can listen to me sing the songs that Ive written  that kind of means more than anything, to be honest with you.

The Casper firefighter completed his goal that year. Every month, he posted a YouTube video of himself singing one of his songs.

But he didnt stop there. Last weekend, he finished recording his first album of original country music. Its slated for digital release within the next few weeks on several online outlets, including iTunes, Spotify and Amazon.

The title, Full Tilt, reflects the momentum of Staffords musical pursuits.

Its been all or nothing: lets get this done, lets do this. he said. Its six months of working hard on this to get it finished. Everythings just right there on the edge  full tilt.

Songs about Wyoming life

Stafford started writing songs in his late teens, but his firefighting career and family life hasnt often left much time for music. In fact, hed set down his guitar for years to enjoy parenting after his two boys were born, he said.

But when his friend Capt. Jeff Atkinson died, Stafford started thinking more about the music he wanted to create. At first, he started posting songs hed already written onto YouTube. But Stafford soon found itching to write new songs.

When you really enjoy something and love it you should keep doing it if it makes you happy, he said.

Stafford said his songs are about life  he makes music about what he knows. Some of his songs describe growing up in Wyoming, like Red Little Truck, which is about heading out to the lake with a date.

Some are about his family, like one with lyrics about cooking bacon and waffles on Sunday afternoon, looking for the remote control and asking the kids to clean their rooms.

Often, his songs are sparked by something someone says.

I say it all the time to the guys I work with, they laugh at me, he said. Ill say, Man, that sounds like a good song.

One song is about an old guitar he picked up for $10  the same guitar that he used while recording the album track. Another, The Wyoming Way, is an homage to his native state.

Another song was inspired by a Coors brewery tour and his own praises of the beer.

I think about the first time that it first touched my lips/swiped it off a coffee table in a little town called Mitch, the song goes.

The song had to go on the album, Stafford said. He recorded a Youtube video of him singing it while sitting in the tailgate of the truck of his friend, Matt Trott, after touring the Coors brewery. Trott later died of cancer and the song reminds Stafford of his friend.

He always had a way of just being there and saying the right stuff, Stafford said.

But one topic his songs havent touched is firefighting. He likes to keeps work separate from his music, though he might sing about his profession after he retires, he said.

Doing proud

Stafford looks forward to more people hearing his music when Full Tilt comes out. An official music video filmed in Casper for the single Red Little Truck has collected nearly 5,000 views on Facebook since its July 4 release.

The Cowboy Joe Radio station in Sheridan has played the song many times, and Casper stations have played snippets of it, he said. Its even playing in the UK by someone who connected with Stafford on Twitter.

If 5,000 people listen to one of my songs after the album is over, it was worth it, he said. It got out there and people got to hear it. And I think people really enjoy it.

He hopes to release a CD of the album at some point, and eventually have it pressed on vinyl  his favorite music format.

And hes not stopping with one album. Stafford plans to keep writing and singing songs.

Get out and do something that youre proud of and that your family will be proud of, he said. If I write a song that everybody loves and that my family can be proud of, then I think that a person would be successful.
Wyoming Sens. Mike Enzi and John Barrasso  two key architects of the Senates failed attempt to reshape American health care  suggested Tuesday that they would vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act before a replacement bill is ready.

Since the passage of the ACA  commonly called Obamacare  seven years ago, congressional Republicans have vowed to repeal and replace the measure. In the first six months of Donald Trumps presidency, party leadership has busied itself with dismantling then-President Barack Obamas landmark bill.

In June, 13 Senate Republicans, including Barrasso and Enzi, unveiled their replacement for the ACA. But on Monday, it became clear the bill did not have the votes to pass, throwing the future of health care in America into limbo as Republican leadership decides what to do next.

Trump tweeted Tuesday that senators should just repeal the Affordable Care Act and decide on a replacement later. In a statement response to questions from the Star-Tribune, Barrasso said that he voted to repeal this failed law in the past, and Ill vote to repeal it again.

In an email to the Star-Tribune, Enzi was more cautious on whether he supported rolling back Obamacare without a replacement bill. But he reiterated his opposition to the ACA and said he, too, had voted to repeal it in 2015.

Wyoming health officials have warned for months that repealing without replacing will cause chaos for patients, employers and hospitals. Vickie Diamond, the former CEO of the Wyoming Medical Center, said it would cost the hospital millions. Other officials say any gap between a repeal and a replacement will cause uncertainty and price increases.

Even with Enzi and Barrassos support, Republican leadership likely wouldnt have the votes needed for an immediate repeal. Three Republican senators  Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia  said they wouldnt support a straight repeal.

Collins also said she opposes the repeal and delay approach. Its not constructive to repeal a law so interwoven within the health care system and then hope over the next two years to come up with a replacement, she said.

Despite seven years of promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republicans have been unable to deliver. Nonetheless, Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky insisted he would move forward with a vote on his measure to repeal the law, effective in two years, with a promise to work  along with Democrats  to replace it in the meantime.

Trump has said he may let Obamacare fail, and he repeated that stance Tuesday morning.

I think were probably in that position where well just let Obamacare fail, he said. Were not going to own it. Im not going to own it. I can tell you that the Republicans are not going to own it. Well let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us and theyre going to say, How do we fix it?

Asked if he supported allowing the ACA to completely unravel, Enzi demurred.

I have consistently said that we need to fix the system to help those struggling under the failures of Obamacare, he said.

Rep. Liz Cheney, who supported the Houses replacement for the ACA, did not respond Tuesday to a list of questions from the Star-Tribune.

Despite the current laws problems, most health care experts do not believe it is at immediate risk of outright failure, and Democratic cooperation to adjust the law is far from assured.

The low likelihood of bipartisanship wasnt lost on Enzi.

I have always been willing to work with Democrats, but the Senate minority leader (Chuck Schumer) sent a pretty clear message that members of his caucus would not work with us, he told the Star-Tribune.

Whats next?

Go back to the committee room and work on a bipartisan basis in a way that the public feels that we are really working toward their best interests, Murkowski said. Its where we should have started. ... And yes, this is hard.

Sure enough, later in the day health committee chairman, Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, announced he planned hearings on the issue in the next few weeks, a step Senate Republicans have not taken to date.

Its unclear what Enzi and Barrassos roles will be going forward. Both helped craft the Senates measure, but when asked, Barrasso did not answer, and Enzi simply said he will continue to work with Senate colleagues.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
CODY  A Wyoming psychiatrist is being held on $50,000 cash bond after authorities say he violated court orders by drinking alcohol.

Cody police say they arrested an intoxicated Matthew Hopkins on June 30.

Two days earlier Hopkins had been placed on unsupervised probation for backing into a parked car. His probation terms included no alcohol.

In addition, Hopkins is scheduled to go on trial Oct. 12 on charges that he caused another collision last March by getting high off of compressed air. The charges include a felony count of aggravated assault.

Last week, the judge in that case increased Hopkins' bond because of his latest arrest.

Hopkins, whose medical license has been suspended, argued against increasing the bond, saying he wasn't a danger to anyone.
RAWLINS  State lawmakers will recommend that the governor immediately provide funding to address water issues at the beleaguered state prison after listening to hours of testimony Tuesday from Department of Corrections staff, engineering firms and private prison companies.

The members of the Legislatures Joint Appropriations Committee gathered Monday and Tuesday in Rawlins to consider one of Wyomings largest looming expenses: the repair or replacement of the Wyoming State Penitentiary. Lawmakers and news reporters toured the prison Monday afternoon and evening.

Late Tuesday afternoon, the committee passed a motion recommending that the governor fund the solutions to drainage and grading issues at the facility as recommended by two different engineering firms. The motion also asks that a construction management expert oversees the projects. They did not have a total cost estimate for the solutions.

This is a mechanism to take care of the immediate problems, said Rep. Bob Nicholas, R-Cheyenne, who chairs the committee. We may be back here doing this again next year.

Heaving and sinking soil beneath the prison is causing continual damage to the prisons buildings. Doors hang off-kilter, cracks spider across floors and walls separate from each other, leaving gaps large enough for someone to stick a hand into them. Prison staff said the shifts require daily maintenance  filing doors so they continue to latch, creating small ramps when floors sit at different levels, replacing caulking as it falls into gaps between walls and floors.

Bob Lampert, director of the Department of Corrections, put it bluntly: The department needs to keep all 682 operational beds at the prison available and as of Monday, he said, the prison was at capacity. The prison population in Wyoming continues to grow and the beds at the departments facilities are expected to be at 99 percent capacity by 2020, though it could be sooner.

Those additional people will need to be housed somewhere as we cant refuse service or hang a no vacancy sign, he said.

Lampert and department staff assert that the buildings shifts pose no immediate danger to inmates or staff. They do have concerns about the security of the facility, however, as crucial doors in the facility become temporarily disabled due to the building shifts.

***

Committee members heard from two engineering firms, which each offered proposed fixes to the prison. The two firms disagree what is causing the issues at the facility. While the Martin and Martin group believes the movement is caused by expanding and collapsing soil just beneath the prison, engineers with Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates believe some of the heave is originating further beneath the surface and will slow in the coming years.

There can be a misconception that these soil movements will continue forever, said John Reins, an engineer with WJE Associates. Thats not the case.

Both groups agree on one issue, however. The prisons drainage and grading issues need to be resolved as fast as possible.

The committee also listened to presentations from two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic, which offered a variety of options for building a new prison. Representatives from GEO Group also said the company could consider leasing and operating the current facility.

The state currently contracts with CoreCivic to house the prisons inmates should the prison become uninhabitable. The contract, which was extended in May to last until June 2018, allows the state to house up to 750 inmates in the companys facilities at a cost of up to $5.1 million. Lampert emphasized Tuesday that the contract is only a contingency plan. The company also owns and operates the Cheyenne Transitional Center.

The committee  the group that drafts the first version of the budget bill  considered four proposals:

Have the state build a new prison on its own, which is estimated to cost about $173 million to construct plus the cost of the land.

Do extensive repairs  including partially demolishing parts of the main facility and replacing some of its slabs  that would extend the life of the prison for decades, which would cost approximately $80 million.

Fix the locations drainage and grading issues as well as replace damaged doors, windows and other equipment to the tune of about $7.5 million. The state will then continue to monitor the shifts at the facility for at least two years.

Contract with a private prison company to build a new prison and allow the business to operate it, or let the company build the prison and lease it from them, or lease the current facility to a company.

Three members  Sen. Bill Landen, R-Casper; Rep. Lloyd Larsen, R-Lander; Rep. Tom Walters, R-Casper  said they support pursuing the $7.5 million in repairs as recommended by WJE Associates. Lawmakers assured concerned Rawlins leaders that the prison would remain in the city. Many expressed frustration at the slow pace at which change has occurred.

There is no perfect answer, said Rep. Donald Burkhart, R-Rawlins. I think we need to get off our fat behinds and make it happen.

***

Multiple people came forward during the time for public comment to warn against contracting with a private prison company. Dee Garrison, president of the Wyoming Association of Correctional Employees, said that private prisons are less safe for employees and staff and are subject to less accountability than publicly run facilities.

Sabrina King, policy director for the Wyoming chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, also warned against contracting with the businesses and asked for broader criminal justice reform that will keep more low-risk, nonviolent offenders out of prison.

During the last interim session, a task force of lawmakers and Wyoming leaders studied the issues and recommended that the Legislature authorize funds to repair the prison.

However, during the 2017 session, legislators declined to answer the question of whether the prison should be repaired or replaced. Instead, they opted to create a savings account for an eventual decision, asked for a peer review of previous findings and authorized up to $15 million in spending from the states rainy day fund in case of a failure that would require the relocation of prisoners.

Inmates moved into the prison in 2001 and the facility was expected to last at least 50 years. Staff began monitoring the buildings cracks and shifts in 2013.
CRAIG, Colo.  Thirty-one homeowners in Colorado have a pesky raccoon to blame for a power outage and fire on Sunday.

The raccoon had climbed on a power pole transformer, causing it to spark and igniting a fire that burned about 7 acres on private property southwest of Craig.

Firefighters were able to extinguish the blaze in about an hour. No other structures were impacted by the fire.

Yampa Valley Electric Member Outreach Specialist Tammi Strickland says the raccoon knocked out power for 31 homeowners.

Strickland says the raccoon unfortunately did not survive the incident.
Authorities are asking anyone who recently camped in the Bridger-Teton National forest near where police are searching for a triple-homicide suspect to contact the Teton County Sheriffs Office.

Individuals who stayed at the Pacific Creek Campground in the forest between June 1 and Monday should call 307-733-2311.

Sheriff deputies recently found a car registered to a suspected victim of Gerald Mike Bullinger parked at the campground and began a search of the area on Monday. The campground is near the national forests boundary with Grand Teton National Park and about seven miles from the town of Moran.

Bullinger is about 6-feet-1-inch tall, weighs about 240 pounds and has brown eyes and gray hair. He was last seen wearing a ball cap.

Authorities warn residents and visitors to remain alert and to report any suspicious activity to the Teton County Sheriffs Office by calling 911 or 307-733-2331. Bullinger is considered armed and possibly dangerous, according to a news release from Teton County.

Bullinger is wanted in connection to the deaths of his wife, Cheryl Baker, a teen girl and another adult woman. On June 19, a sheriffs deputy found the three dead of single gunshot wounds in a shed on a property owned by Bullinger and Baker in Caldwell, Idaho.

All three bodies were decomposing and investigators are still working to identify the two other victims.

The Teton County Sheriffs Office is working with officials with the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Teton County Emergency Management, the FBI and the Canyon County Sheriffs Office of Idaho.

Authorities are patrolling the area and are using dogs in the search, the release states.

The forest service closed the Pacific Creek Campground, the area around Enos Lake and the Lava Creek, Box Creek and Clear Creek trails for the duration of the search, according to a news release. The Pacific Creek Road is closed at the national forests boundary.

For more information about closures, contact the Blackrock Ranger Station at 307-543-3900.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Following the U.S. declaration of war against Germany in April 1917, the Wyoming National Guard assembled a regiment of almost 1,700 men at Fort D.A. Russell, now F.E. Warren Air Force Base. The soldiers were taken by train to Camp Greene, North Carolina, where they were divided into three battalions.

One battalion was assigned to the 148th Field Artillery Regiment, with the remaining troops going to the 116th Ammunition Train. Those soldiers would responsible for transporting cannon shells for the American guns.

The 148th landed in France in February 1918, where they would continue training for several months.

The Wyoming guardsmen and their 155mm howitzers were sent to the front lines for the Second Battle of the Marne, the last major German offensive of the war. They fired their first shells against an enemy on July 14, 1918 and remained in action for two months.

In all, the 148th Field Artillery spent 134 days on the front, firing more than 67,000 shells. About 75 men were killed, including Wyoming commander Col. Joseph Cavender.

After being stationed in occupied Germany after the surrender, the Wyoming soldiers were shipped home in the summer of 1919.

Source: Wyoming Military Department, Public Affairs Office
We've collected a few front pages from newspapers.com to give you a look at some July 19 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.
Has it really only been four years since the whole concept of fast-casual pizza became a thing?

One of the early purveyors, Phoenix-based Fired Pie, is marking the anniversary Tuesday, July 18, with a deal we can sink our teeth in: $4 pizza or salad when you buy a beverage.

That's roughly half off the regular $8-ish price tag for the artisan pizzas/salads and the deal's good all day today at Fired Pie's two Tucson locations:

 Downtown at 350 E. Congress St., in front of the Cadence student housing complex.

 In midtown at 2645 E. Speedway.

Fired Pie, which opened its first pizzeria in Tempe in 2013, has 18 locations mostly in the greater Phoenix area. It entered the Tucson market with the downtown location in late 2014.

Tucson was introduced to the fast-casual pizza concept earlier that year when locally owned Pionic Pizza and California import Pizza Studio opened within days of one another in August 2014. Pizza Studio, located across from the University of Arizona, pulled out of Tucson 18 months later; Pionic, at 2643 N. Campbell Ave., is still going strong.

Other chains have since made Tucson inroads:

 Seattle's MOD Pizza, with three locations: 6351 E. Broadway in the Wilmot Plaza; 4386 N. Oracle Road at Wetmore; and 10580 N. Oracle Road in Oro Valley.

 Pasadena, California's Blaze, 5615 E. Broadway.

 California-based Pieology Pizzeria, 914 E. Speedway across from the University of Arizona.
Parenting adult children sounds weird. By the time they are adults our children should be on their own, right? Not these days. For the first time since 1940 more children between the ages of 18 and 34 are living in their parents home than are in any other living arrangements.

Some of these children are going to college or working at a low-salary job. Some are boomerang kids who were living independently or at college but for financial or other reasons returned to the nest. From what parents tell me many children today cannot find a job that pays enough for them to live independently including, sadly, some of those who are college-educated.

The economic, social, and political upheavals in our country today have created what I call the un-American dream. Living as well or better than ones parents is not possible for many of our young people while in my generation it was a given.

Recent questions on my desk deal with the pragmatic problems of two-generational households. My daughter is a college freshman living at home so she doesnt have to take out loans. She just turned 18 and wants her boyfriend to sleep over weekends. We are horrified she would even ask us. My son lost his job and has moved back in. He is 26 and tells us he needs money to make his car payments to look for a job but he also wants money for weekends.

Both the parents and adult children are likely to have have strong, rarely spoken feelings. The parents may look forward to, or already enjoy, their empty nest. The college student seeks autonomy and probably would rather be in a college dorm than under her parents thumbs. The adult child was definitely happier when he had both autonomy and a paycheck.

I always advocate prevention. Take the time to write a contract stating expectations of both sides in the areas of common space, privacy, hours, noise, chores, and meals. When we had a boomerang child we did this. It may sound like we lived in a boarding house instead of a family but it worked for us.

Decide together how common space like the kitchen and TV room will be shared. Be specific about hours. Decent attire for all and at all times. Respect locks and boundaries and remember both children and parents need pivacy.

Courtesy demands that all adults let each other know when they are leaving and when they expect to be back. If there is a delay, call.

Housekeeping? List tasks and agree on who does what. Parents should not do a grown childs personal laundry or room. Wise parents remind the children about parental idiosyncrasies like freaking if anybody leaves dirty dishes in the sink (one of my personal intolerances).

Noise can lead to conflict. Decide what decibels are OK for TV and music. Merely using the microwave or the washing machine at 2 am can wake others.

Meals and food shopping can also be problematic. When one of our adult children came back home after being on his own for several years, we learned to get everybodys schedule in advance so we did not purchase and prepare too much or too little. The rule for everybody was always a phone call, never a no-show.

Call a family meeting to tweak any arrangements that need tweaking. Communication before seething is the best way to coexist.

Moving in ideally includes a plan for moving out. Flexibility may be needed in these uncertain days but an adult child should be job-hunting or in school, not a couch potato in Mom and Dads pad.

That was the easy stuff. Here come the tough topics: money and sex. We dont know anything about either the son or parents finances. Yes, a car is an essential but an allowance for partying at age 26? Even if the parents can afford it? There is a danger in doing so because the man might feel like an adolescent and men, not juveniles, get hired. Gas and lunch money if he is flat broke? Of course. However as soon as the son is getting on his feet he should be paying rent based on the costs of running the house. The daughter at college should know these costs so she understands the magnitude of her loan-free ride.

Sex in adolescents is not an easy issue. As in many issues I can see both sides. An 18-year-old is legally an adult and if the daughter in todays question was living in college, parents would not know if the boyfriend was sleeping over. But parents are people with strong feelings too and it is their house. You can say no.

Over the years as sexual mores have changed I have wrestled with and dealt with the sleeping-over issue. Parents today tell me they would rather know what their teen is doing and be confident that their teen (both daughters and sons) knows how to prevent a pregnancy and avoid a sexually-transmitted disease.

I have come to feel the same way. For me my childs health and the assumption of responsibility to avoid pregnancy far outweigh other considerations.

What I am most squeamish about today is the combination of binge-drinking and promiscuous sex as well as campus rape. If I had adolescent kids today I would talk with both my daughters and sons about party binge drinking and casual sex. An important goal of adolescence and early adulthood is to find love and a lifetime mate. Falling into oblivion and waking up in bed is the antithesis of love. Parents, teachers, preachers, and all the responsible adults our kids look up to should take this stance.
The landscape along one stretch of the Nogales Highway south of Tucson might leave travelers groping for a word to describe it.

Weird has been used more than once.

Other options:

Strange.

Jumbled.

Badlands.

Lying within an area identified by the Arizona Department of Water Resources as the Green Valley Land Subsidence Feature, the site east of the Santa Cruz River appears to be dramatically eroded into a maze of channels and berms. Its an erosion pattern strikingly different than those along most watercourses.

Land subsidence, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, is a gradual settling or sudden sinking of the Earths surface owing to subsurface movement of earth materials. It sometimes occurs when large amounts of groundwater have been withdrawn from certain types of rocks, such as fine-grained sediments.

But experts say land subsidence isnt necessarily the cause of the eroded landscape in question.

What created the strange, jumbled landscape at the site near mile marker 52 on the highway?

Experts with Water Resources and the Arizona Geological Survey have some ideas, but they couldnt identify a cause with certainty.

It looks a little bit like a badlands type of topography, said Michael Conway, chief of the Geologic Extension Service with the Arizona Geological Survey.

The land west of the Nogales Highway in that area is badly disturbed by human activity, Conway said. That disturbance and erosion is a more likely culprit than subsidence.

Frank Corkhill, chief hydrologist with the Department of Water Resources, examined photos of the area supplied by the Arizona Daily Star.

The photos do not look like what we would commonly call an earth fissure, Corkhill said. Its definitely an erosional feature of some sort, but we cant say what the cause might be.

He said the landscape features are somewhat similar to sites near San Xavier Mission to the northwest.

Those sites, Corkhill said, might be the result of soil conditions rather than land subsidence.

Desiccation cracks have been offered as explanations, but not necessarily related to subsidence, he said. They are things that can start out as a crack and then get eroded. Whatever the reason for the cracking, it may not be a result of subsidence but of the soil conditions.

Conway said that such landscape features can be sculpted out of very poorly consolidated clay deposits.
Local and federal authorities arrested nine people last week, in connection with a Tucson-based drug trafficking ring that ran between Arizona, Nevada and Illinois, officials said.

As part of a three-year investigation, agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations, FBI investigators, Chicago police, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Arizona Department of Public Safety and the Pima County Sheriff's Department employees worked together to dismantle the ring which is believed to have smuggled significant quantities of cocaine, according to an ICE news release.

On June 28, a federal grand jury in Arizona issued a multi-count indictment which includes charges of identity theft, money laundering and possessing, manufacturing and selling illegal drugs, the news release said.

On July 10, agents arrested six Tucson residents in connection with the indictment, including the organization's suspected ringleader, 44-year-old Rene Marcos Vera. Also arrested were 35-year-old Raquel Ann Stansberry, 50-year-old Cesar Diaz German, 58-year-old Rosella Maria DeLeon, 38-year-old Richard Andrew Leon and 22-year-old Rene Marcos Vera II.

Tawney Warner, 31, and Joseph Sorce, 41, were both arrested in Chicago in connection with the incident.

The ninth person arrested was not named in the news release.

In addition to the arrests, the investigation has resulted in the seizure of more than 85 pounds of cocaine, 17 vehicles, eight properties estimated to be worth more than $2.5 million, four bank accounts and more than $145,500 in U.S. currency, the news release said.
The first official trailer for the movie "Only the Brave," about the Granite Mountain Hotshot crew that died in the Yarnell Hill Fire, has been released.

The Sony Pictures movie is scheduled to be released Oct. 20. It stars Josh Brolin, Jeff Bridges, Miles Teller and Jennifer Connelly.

Nineteen members of the elite firefighting team died in the June 2013 wildfire when winds shifted and trapped them in a brush-choked canyon near Prescott.

Filming took place in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to media reports.
Two local fire districts have consolidated to meet a state-mandated deadline.

The Golder Ranch Fire District will absorb the Mountain Vista Fire District, Golder Ranch said in a news release earlier this week. The two districts have worked together for more than a year with technological support, fleet services and training. The new consolidation includes firefighters, administrative staff, and the elimination of Mountain Vista as a separate entity.

Golder Ranch encompasses 222 square miles in Oro Valley, Catalina, SaddleBrooke, and southern Pinal County, with eight stations and 192 employees. Mountain Vista covers 19 square miles in northern Pima County, Marana, and parts of Oro Valley, with two stations and 60 employees.

This consolidation will help us to continue to put our community first by providing exceptional services and efficient response times, said Mountain Vista Fire Chief Cheryl Horvath.

The governing boards for the districts voted this week to approve the consolidation, said Golder Ranch spokeswoman Anne-Marie Braswell.

Residents in the Mountain Vista area who call 911 may see Golder Ranch firefighters and paramedics during the next few months, but residents will not see any other changes in responses to their calls, Braswell said.

The districts had discussed the consolidation for more than a year, but a new law hastened the process, the Arizona Daily Star reported in May.

Gov. Doug Ducey signed House Bill 2414 in April. As of Aug. 9, the law will restrict the use of a document that is necessary for fire districts to provide ambulance services.

Golder Ranch has a certificate of necessity, which is required of ambulance operators and is issued by the states Department of Health Services. But Mountain Vista does not have a certificate and has depended on private ambulance service since the district was formed in 2008.

Under the previous law, a merger or consolidation of two districts expanded the boundaries of the certificate, but the new law no longer allows for that.

No job losses are expected under the consolidation. District tax rates will remain the same for Golder Ranch residents, and Mountain Vista residents will see a slight decrease.
One side sought to prove that Arizonas former attorney general and schools chief had racist motives against Mexican-Americans in crafting and enforcing a state law banning ethnic studies programs, while the other side painted him as a crusader against racism.

In the second week of bench trial to determine whether state officials had discriminatory intent in enacting and enforcing the 2010 law, Tom Horne took the witness stand Tuesday. The trial is overseen by U.S Circuit Judge A. Wallace Tashima in Tucson in the U.S. District Court in Arizona.

The case was brought forward by former teachers and students of Tucson Unified School Districts Mexican American Studies program, saying the law violated their constitutional rights. Tashima dismissed their claim in 2013, but the case was remanded by a federal appeals court two years after that.

The chain of events that led to the programs eventual demise in 2011 began with a speech in 2006 at Tucson High Magnet School by Dolores Huerta, a civil-rights activist and co-founder of a farmworkers union. During the speech, she reportedly said Republicans hate Latinos.

In response, Horne, a Republican, sent his deputy, Margaret Garcia Dugan, to speak at the school to present the other side. When she spoke, several students, some of whom were Mexican American Studies students, staged a silent protest, which Horne characterized as rude and educationally disruptive.

Horne said he concluded that Mexican American Studies teachers, who he said were ideological and radical, were responsible for mobilizing the students after talking with other former teachers and sought to eliminate the program.

Attorney Jim Quinn, who represents the plaintiffs, pointed out through his questioning that Horne used selective sources and outdated information to issue findings that MAS has violated the ethnic studies law.

The attorney also alleged that Horne did not investigate other ethnic studies programs or a Tucson charter school named after Paulo Freire, a Brazilian philosopher, whom both he and Huppenthal took issue with. Horne said repeatedly during the trial that he was opposed to any educational program that divides students based on race, which he said was racist.

Quinn also exhibited material and video clips from when Horne was campaigning for the state attorney generals seat that showed him boasting about having fought to end MAS and the states bilingual education program, and supporting other policies or actions that many Latino Americans opposed, including suing Maricopa Community College to end in-state tuition for undocumented students who were granted protection against immediate deportation.

Horne said his support for anti-illegal immigration is conflated with anti-Mexican or anti-immigration.

Im an immigrant myself, he said. Horne is from Montreal but has lived in Arizona since the 1970s.

The former attorney general repeatedly said he wanted to eliminate Mexican American Studies because of the number of complaints he had received and because he found evidence of violations. In his findings, Horne cited interviews with teachers and quotes from classroom material.

Robert Ellman, an attorney working with the state, asked Horne about his role in starting an anti-racism program in the Paradise Valley Unified School District, where he was formerly a board member, and his work with officials in Mexico.

Horne testified that he had good relations with the education department in Sonora, Mexico, and that as attorney general, he helped train Mexican attorneys in oral trial.

My whole life has been a crusade against racism, Horne said.
Prosecutors wont bring charges against former House Speaker David Gowan for getting more than $12,000 in taxpayer funds for time and travel spent during his ill-fated campaign for Congress.

Attorney General Mark Brnovich said his attorneys and investigators found a lot of questionable, even I would say unethical behavior in the actions of Gowan. These included multiple trips that Gowan took around the state in 2016 while running for Congress  many far from his legislative district  while saying he was on state business, a claim that enabled him to get reimbursed by the state for his expenses.

And Brnovich said staffers found multiple uses of a state vehicle for what appear to be personal purposes.

But it did not rise to the level of criminal conduct, he said, because there is insufficient proof that Gowan had both actual criminal intent as well as knowledge of the laws that were being broken. And that, Brnovich said, ends the matter.

At the end of the day as a prosecutor your job is not to win at all costs, he said.

Its not to throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks, Brnovich continued. If theres not a reasonable likelihood of conviction, you dont move forward on a case.

But Brnovich sidestepped the question of whether he believes that Gowans conduct clearly was unethical.

I believe that the facts in this case speak for themselves, he said.

I do think that when youre a public official its very, very important to avoid any sort of appearance of impropriety, the attorney general continued. I will leave it to the people to make their own judgments.

Despite the lack of any prosecution, the investigation has had positive effects.

Even before the probe started, Gowan reimbursed the state more than $12,000, saying that it was simply an error that he got all that money.

And Brnovich pointed out that, even as investigators were reviewing evidence against Gowan, current House Speaker J.D. Mesnard enacted new travel restrictions on members, a move he said he took specifically in reaction to the problems with Gowans travel.

That new policy limits when lawmakers can charge mileage to the state for trips to the Capitol and around their legislative districts. Mesnard said the rules, coupled with public disclosure, should prevent abuse.

And Mesnard has pretty much made the use of state fleet vehicles off-limits to House members, saying that should be reserved only for the most limited of circumstances.

In a prepared statement, Gowan said the findings back his claim that mistakes were made but any errors were unintentional and that no laws were broken. But he took a shot at those who were critical of his practices, calling them a handful of opportunists looking to settle a political score or score political points.

Gowan eventually dropped out of the 2016 congressional race. But he is seeking a political comeback of sorts: He already has filed paperwork to run for the state Senate from his Southeastern Arizona legislative district.

It was Gowan, a Sierra Vista Republican, who initially sought the probe after the Arizona Capitol Times reported on his travels in early 2016.

He called them errors and nothing more, saying there was no nefarious intent, despite the cynicism that pervades some of the newspaper accounts.

Assistant Attorney General Todd Lawson who headed the investigation, said Gowan himself precipitated some of the problems in 2015, changing policy to allow some members of House leadership of both parties to claim expenses for as many days as they wanted. That was a sharp change from before where such expenses were limited to twice a week when the Legislature was not in session.

Now the per diem pay for members of leadership was at their control  they could set up meetings each day, and get additional pay,Lawson wrote.

In this case, Gowan began to schedule a large number of official activities well beyond the boundaries of his Southeastern Arizona district, the report says. He said Gowan argued that it was justified because, as speaker of the House he was a representative of all of the state.

But Lawson said it was not that simple.

This change coincided with Gowans decision to seek a congressional seat in a district that largely did not overlap with his legislative districts boundaries, he reported. The change permitted him to spend significantly more days traveling to locations across the state on official business  trips for which he would seek reimbursement.

Still, Lawson said it was a staffer who felt that she needed to submit the reimbursement forms despite not having good communication with Gowan.

This does not meet the standard for criminal intent, the attorney wrote.

Lawson found similar problems in investigating Gowans claims for travel reimbursement, saying these, too, were submitted by a staffer.

And Lawson said Gowans calendars, provided to investigators, were unclear in which events were for political purposes and which were in his official capacity.

There is only one clear allegation of a political event where Gowan arrived in a state vehicle  a political event in SaddleBrooke on Oct. 14, 2015, the report states. To file a charge based upon this allegation, additional corroboration would be needed  and that corroboration has not been found by investigators.

Lawson did find some other incidents, like when Gowan arrived at a Flagstaff radio station to talk about policy matters. Gowan said it was the host who asked him about his political campaign, which he answered.

This does not seem like a clear-cut violation of the statute, given the mixed purpose of the event, Lawson wrote. A conviction based on these facts seems unlikely.

In making the reimbursement, Stephanie Grisham, Gowans publicist, said at the time that nearly $9,700 of what he was paid was claimed for mileage in his personal car but actually was driven in a state vehicle. That amount, she said, also included overestimating distances on trips in his own car.
For many of us, the first thing we do in the morning is reach for the phone to find out what happened overnight. And when life has calmed down a bit in the evenings, we grab our tablets to lean back and catch up with our worlds.

Thats why were rolling out a new Tucson.com today that better reflects the way we live.

The new website has a cleaner design that was created with mobile readers  from phones to tablets  in mind. We hope youll find it easier to navigate and more attractive. The photos are larger, its easier to scroll through stories and the site is less cluttered.

The new design also will make it easier for news from Southern Arizona to show up on all your feeds. Google will now index mobile sites first, which means that stories posted there will rank higher in searches.

The new mobile design is the model for all the news sites of Lee Enterprises, the owner of the Arizona Daily Star and tucson.com

So we not only want to know what you think, we need to hear from you so we can tweak and refine the design to give you a better user experience as well as a better user experience for our readers across our company.

Please send your feedback to Senior Editor Debbie Kornmiller, dkornmiller@tucson.com

And enjoy!
ALBUQUERQUE (AP)  Laughter can combat trauma. Spiritual cleansings could be used to fight an opioid addiction. Cactus extract may battle diabetes and obesity.

These insights are from curanderismo  traditional indigenous healing from the American Southwest and Latin America.

University of New Mexico professor Eliseo "Cheo" Torres' has included these thoughts in a new, unique textbook connected to his internationally-known annual course on curanderismo.

"Curanderismo: The Art of Traditional Medicine Without Borders," released last week, coincides with Torres' annual gathering of curandero students and healers around the world at the University of New Mexico. For nearly 20 years, healers and their students have come to Albuquerque to meet and exchange ideas on traditional healing that for many years were often ignored and ridiculed.

Torres, who is also the university's vice president for student affairs, said the popularity of the annual course and a similar online class he teaches convinced him that there needed to be a textbook on curanderismo.

"This textbook came out of the experience of this class and the ideas that have been shared through the years," Torres said during a special morning ceremony with Aztec dancers on campus. "From healers in Mexico to those in Africa, many have long traditions of healing that are being rediscovered by a new generation."

Curanderismo is the art of using traditional healing methods like herbs and plants to treat various ailments. Long practiced in Native American villages of Mexico and other parts of Latin America, curanderos also are found in New Mexico, south Texas, Arizona and California.

Anthropologists believe curanderismo remained popular among poor Latinos because they didn't have access to health care. But they say the field is gaining traction among those who seek to use alternative medicine.

"I believe people are disenchanted with our health system," Torres said. "Some people can't afford it now, and they are looking for other ways to empower themselves to heal."

The textbook gives a survey of medicinal plants used to help digestive systems and how healers draw in laugh therapy to cope with traumatic experiences.

Ricardo Carrillo, a licensed psychologist and a healer based in Oakland, California, said he's seeing younger people look to curanderismo to help with challenges like addiction and physical pain.

"Yes, you have to go through detox and do all that you are supposed to do to get yourself clean," said Carrillo, who came to the Albuquerque workshop to speak. "Curanderismo can give you the spiritual tools to keep yourself clean and look to a higher power."

Among the ailments curanderos treat are mal de ojo, or evil eye, and susto, magical fright.

Mal de ojo is the belief that an admiring look or a stare can weaken someone, mainly a child, leading to bad luck, even death.

Susto is a folk illness linked to a frightful experience, such as an automobile accident or tripping over an unseen object. Those who believe they are inflicted with susto say only a curandero can cure them.

___

Follow Russell Contreras on Twitter at http://twitter.com/russcontreras
The Republicans always say they are going to defund Planned Parenthood. However, the government does not fund PP; it reimburses it for costs covered by Medicare and Medicaid, just as they do every healthcare facility that accepts Medicare and Medicaid. If the Republicans pass a law that says Planned Parenthood will no longer be reimbursed for covered expenses, they will be denying Americans the right to choose where they get their health care.

Also, the government does not allow reimbursement for an abortion to any healthcare facility. So even if you are not pro-choice, there is no reason to let the Republicans single out Planned Parenthood. Since Trumpcare failed, the Republicans are now trying to just repeal the Affordable Care Act without replacement and cut off Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to PP. This unwarranted preoccupation with destroying Planned Parenthood has got to stop.

Cecilia Laspisa

East side
"I did not come to Washington to hurt people," said West Virginia's Republican Sen. Shelley Capito, on why she opposed dismantling the Affordable Care Act. Evidently, Martha McSally has no such compunction. If the bill she championed had passed, tens of thousands of Arizonans would have lost access to medical care. Cuts to Medicaid could have forced many nursing homes and rural hospitals in our state to close. Rep. McSally chose party politics over the best interests of her constituents. The voters of southern Arizona will not forget how she put us in harm's way.
Re: The July 18 op-ed column by John Yoo and David Marsten, Its not a crime to meet with a Russian. I have no disagreement with the point of this piece as to what constitutes a crime, particularly treason. But the argument that one can be accused of the crime of treason by providing aid and comfort to an enemy (only) in the context of war, (parenthetical word mine) is certainly questionable. When was the last time that the United States was at war, as declared by Congress, per the Constitution? Hint: try the early 1940s. And when was the last time that someone was accused of treason, whether or not formally, tried in court? There certainly seem to be a disparity here, a flawed argument at least. Also, not to make an ad hominem argument per se, but wasnt John Yoo the attorney who formally advised former president George W. Bush that theres nothing wrong with torture?
Help India!

By TCN News

A national delegation from Popular Front of India visited the homes of members of the organisation who were arrested and lodged in jail for conducting a peaceful democatic protest march in Pakur, Jharkhand against the lynching of Muslims by right-wing goons masquerading as Gay Rakshaks. The Delegation met the protestors on July 17 who were demanding strong police action against local BJP leader Hisabi Roy for his hatred message on social media.

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National Executive member advocate A. Mohamed Yusuff, district president Obaidur Rahman, area level and Unit level leaders were part of the delegation.

The delegation visited 25 families along with zonal president Moulana Kaleemulla and zonal secretary Haneef.

Prior to yesterdays house visit, a team of lawyers went to Pakur district jail and met the leaders and members.

The press statement from the delegation said, The mob lynching and brutal attack on Muslims Jharkhand by gau rakshak has been increasing for the past two years. Popular Front intervened in so many issues to get justice to the victims.

Popular Front filed a public interest litigation before the high court in the lynching of two Muslim oxen traders and it is still pending.

Ten days before the start of Ramzan, in Saraikela district situated 45 kms away from Jamshedpur, four Muslim cow traders were beaten to death on false charges by the so-called Gau Rakshaks.

A fact-finding team including Abdul Hannan from Front went there and built confidence in the victim families and the villagers.

After the lynching of Hafiz Junaid in Haryana during the end of Ramzan, Alimiddin was lynched in Ramgarh (Jharkhand) and Usman was brutally beaten and his house was set on fire in Giridih (Jharkhand).

After these incidents, Hisabi Roy, a local BJP leader of Pakur circulated a whatsapp message as what was happened in Ramgarh and Giriti should be repeated in Pakur also. Police and new SP are our persons. We will make the Muslims silent with the help of police.

Popular Front Pakur district president Abdul Hannan filed a criminal complaint in Pakur town police station on June 30 and the police was in the compulsion to lodge FIR against Hisabi Roy, but neither arrested nor interrogated him.

Popular Front Pakur district committee conducted a protest march on July 5, against the mob lynching and demanding the arrest for hate message The march which rode from Gandhi chowk to town police station, had more than 300 people.

Police denied permission to the protesters, resorted lathi charge and arrested 65 people, most of them are the members of Popular Front including state vice-president Moulana Hanjela Shaikh, state general secretary Abdul Wadud and few state committee members.

After 30 hours of illegal custody and harassment, 43 members and leaders were remanded and lodged in Pakur jail. Rest of the 22 members were let off by foisting a petty case under section 107 of CrPC.
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The 13-day-long historical Yatra that began from Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh reached Delhis Jantar Mantar on Tuesday to overwhelming reception of farmers from across the country. The Kisan Mukti Yatra, starting from July 6, covered six states. With this begins the second phase of the Yatra that has received support of more than 150 farmers organisations.

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Thousands of farmers from all over the country poured in at the Kisan Mukti Sansad at Jantar Mantar to support the fight for their rights. The farmers have made two specific demands: Farming be made remunerative and farmers be made debt free.

Farmers of Tamil Nadu, who have relaunched their agitation, also joined the Kisan Mukti Sansad under the leadership of Aiyyakannu. On the other hand, the children of farmers from Maharashtra who have committed suicide performed a skit at the Kisan Mukti Sansad to bring attention to their plight.

Ashok Patil, one of such children present at Jantar Mantar said, I am suffering because my father committed suicide. But I want to tell all the farmers of this country that suicide is not an option, the only option is that we have to fight for our rights.

Responding to the appeal made by leaders of All India Kisan Sangarsh Coordination Committee to the Members of Parliament to join the farmers at Jantar Mantar, various Members of the Parliament joined the Sansad and offered their support to the farmers. MPs Raju Shetty, Tapan Kumar Sen, Dr. Dharamvir Gandhi, Sitaram Yechury, Sharad Yadav, Ali Anwar, Mohammad Saleem, Jitendra Choudhary, Arvind Sawant, BR Patil, Shailendra Kumar, Mohammad Murtaza, Shankar Dutta, Shri Moti, and Nagendra Pradhan marked their presence at the Kisan Mukti Sansad and offered their support to the famers in their fight for their rights.

Speaking at the event, MP Raju Shetty said, I campaigned for Narendra Modi, I supported him, only because he promised to waive off loans of farmers but later his government in the Supreme Court gave an affidavit claiming that waiving off farm loans is not possible. I want to ask him that if this was not possible, why did he make this promise to me and in his election manifesto, to the people of this country.

Sitaram Yechury also marked his presence at the Kisan Mukti Sansad. Speaking at Jantar Mantar, Sitaram Yechury said, Along with all of you, I take the pledge to fight for the rights of farmers and I promise you that I am going to take this fight to the Parliament.

Moderator of Sansad Dr. Sunilam demanded that action must be taken against the police officers who shot dead 6 farmers in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh.

Sharad Yadav, who also joined the farmers at Kisan Mukti Sansad said, This is not just a fight of the farmers, this fight is of the whole country. And while you are fighting this fight here outside the parliament, I assure you that I will take this fight inside the parliament. He also promised to rally the whole Opposition to support the farmers in their fight.

Prashant Bhushan addressing the Kisan Mukti Sansad said, The government is deliberately designing policies that are anti-farmer and pro-corporates. The govt is supporting products such as GM Mustard which are deigned to benefit the corporates and destroy the farmers as well their farming

Yogendra Yadav said in his address, It is nit the farmers that are under debt but the whole country is under the debt of the farmers. The farmers have been giving a subsidy of Rs. 1,50,000 crores to this country and this has been happening since decades so we are not asking for a debt waiver but freedom from debt. It is not the farmer that is indebted to this country but the country that is indebted to the farmer.

V M Singh, Convenor of AIKSCC, while addressing the Kisan Mukti Sansad said, This government is not going to hand over your rights to you, we will have to fight for our rights and in this fight we all will have to be together. He also added that this is not just a fight of farmers but of all citizens of tis country. Why should a farmer, despite feeding the whole country, be unable to feed his own family, Singh asked.

The leaders of Kisan Mukti Sansad said that the Sansad will continue its proceedings tomorrow as well and the agitation will continue till the demands of farmers are not met.

Among other leaders who addressed Kisan Mukti Yatra included Chandrasekhar, Sundar Vimlnathan, PS Sharda, Lingaraja, Prem Singh Gehlot, Purushottam Sharma, Ishwaree Prasad Kushwaha, Upendra Singh, Hemendra Chaudhary, Bhagat Singh Verma, Ramvir Singh, Veerpal Singh, Zorwar Singh, Bramhapal Singh, Chaman Singh, Ravi Kant Tupakr, Dasrath Sawant, Professor Prakash Pofle, Deepak Pagar, Bapusaheb Karande, Sagar Shambhushete, Jagdish Inamdar, Ruldu Singh and Gurnam Singh.
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Panaji, (IANS): Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar on Wednesday told the state assembly that Sadhvi Saraswatis controversial speech in Goa last month, where she said that beef-eaters should be hanged in public, did not contain any religious sentiment.

In his written reply tabled on Wednesday during the ongoing monsoon session of the state assembly, Parrikar said that no FIRs were filed in connection with the speech because no complaint was received by the state police.

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The speech as reported, do(es) not have any issue of religious sentiment, nor has any complaint been received by police, Parrikar said replying to a question by Leader of Opposition Chandrakant Kavlekar.

Madhya Pradesh-based Sadhvi Saraswati, who was in Goa to attend a four-day All India Hindu Convention, had said that those who eat beef should be hanged in public.

People who take eating beef as a status symbol, I request the Centre to hang them in public. People will then understand that cow protection is our responsibility, Saraswati had said.

Several legislators of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, including Deputy Speaker Michael Lobo, have in the recent past demanded that an FIR be filed against her for her hate-speech.

Beef is popularly consumed by the states Catholic and Muslim minorities, who account for nearly one-third of the coastal states population.

However, to a question by Kavlekar, who sought to know the details of the action taken by the government against Sadhvi Saraswati as the issue would spark communal hatred, Parrikar in his reply said: No complaint has been lodged nor any religious matters were reported in media reports.
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By TwoCircles.net Staff Reporter

Kozhikode: The suicide of a Dalit teenager in Kasargod has been turned into a political tussle, with Congress leaders visiting the family of the deceased and demanding that concerned authorities be booked under charges of abetting suicide. On Tuesday, 18-year old Vinayak committed suicide after he was released from police custody for his alleged role in a chain-snatching incident.

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While addressing the media persons in Kasargod, Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president M M Hassan demanded the government action against the cops who tortured the victim and said that the police was acting as moral police.

Relatives of Vinayak also alleged the youth committed suicide due to police torture. According to reports, Vinayak told his friends about police torture and police compelled him to confess that he had committed the crime of snatching a chain. Vinayak, who was undergoing training in beautician course, was found hanging on Tuesday afternoon.

Local media reports said police humiliated Vinayak by pulling his hair and directed his father Krishnankutty to cut off his long hair. Vinayak cut his hair after he was compelled by Krishnankutty.

Congress also observed Hartla in the Pavaratty, Elavally, Mullassery, Venkitangu and Engandiyur panchayats following the tragic incident. A delegation of Congress, led by V T Balram MLA visited Vinayaks family on Wednesday.
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By Shafeeq Hudawi, TwoCircles.net

Thiruvananthapuram: The Indian Union Muslim League students outfit Muslim Students Federation (MSF) has decided to launch an online survey to address complaints from students who are barred from wearing hijabs in educational institutes in Kerala.

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This is not to force anyone hijab, but to ensure none is denied the right to wear a headscarf, said MSF national vice president Fathima Thahiliya.

The organisation has so far received complaints from more than 60 persons through an online campaign, launched last month.

Muslim girls are not permitted to wear hijab in some of the educational institutions. Schools deny the right citing dress and disciplinary code. In colleges, girls are questioned by authorities even if they are allowed to wear it, Thahiliya says.

Last year, issues regarding wearing hijab had sparked protests in a college in Kozhikode while a science institute in Kochi witnessed stir against the college management for imposing stringent disciplinary code and denial of the right to wear hijab.

According to MSF, they have intervened in more than 50 cases where students and parents have complained about the ban on hijab.

This is a case of mere violation of fundamental right. MSF has been holding protests for past few years across the state. Still, complaints are pouring against the ban, said MSF national president T P Ashraf Ali.

Last year, three schools were asked by the Kerala State Commission For Protection Of Child Rights (KeSCPCR) to permit hijab following complaints issued with the commission. The commission had also demanded the State Government to issue a Government Order asking all schools to permit headscarf. In an order, the commission asked education secretary and director of public instruction (DPI) to issue an order allowing Muslim students to wear scarves matching the colour of their school uniforms. The order was in response to a complaint filed by a Muslim student at Taliparambu in Kannur.

Religious and personal freedom has been granted by Constitution. Besides, we are obliged to follow section 14 of UN convention on child rights in 1989. India is a signatory of that convention, said KeSCPCR former member Nazeer Chaliyam.

After the survey is completed, details of the schools not allowing hijab will be published. MSF has sought legal opinion in this regard and will go ahead with the cause, Ashraf Ali said.
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New Delhi, (IANS): The opposition on Wednesday took the government to task in the Rajya Sabha over violence against Dalits and minorities, accusing it of entering into a tacit understanding with cow vigilantes who indulged in violence and lynchings.

The Narendra Modi government, however, termed such incidents as plain crime, saying such incidents should not be given a communal colour.

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Opening a discussion on cow vigilantism and atrocities against the Dalits and minorities, Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said there is an implicit or explicit hand of the people from the parivar (a reference to the Sangh Parivar or Hindutva groups) in mob violence in the last three years.

We suspect this is happening with a tacit understanding between the government and the cow vigilantes. The Prime Minister is giving statements but this is going on and nobody is being caught, Azad, a senior Congress leader, said.

Azad urged the Bharatiya Janata Party not to vitiate the atmosphere in the country in the name of caste or religion.

Samajwadi Party leader Naresh Agarwal said the National Democratic Alliance government should declare that mob lynching on any pretext will no longer be tolerated.

He said cow vigilantism was hurting the poor as weekly animal fairs/markets had ended and stray cows along with neelgai (blue bull) are becoming a menace in rural areas by destroying standing crops overnight.

Earlier, his remarks to link Hindu Gods with alcohol evoked loud protests from BJP members and led to the adjournment of the house for about 20 minutes.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said Agrawal had hurt the sentiments of the majority population in the country. The SP leader later withdrew the remarks and expressed regret.

Communist Party of India-Marxist leader Sitaram Yechury demanded a ban on cow vigilante groups.

Today, when I speak here, my head hangs in shame. What has our republic come to? Yechury said.

He said: Private armies taking law into their hands cant be stopped by states alone and they must be banned by the Centre.

Yechury recalled how the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the ruling BJP, was banned in 1948 by then Home Minister Vallabbhai Patel on the charge of indulging in disruptive activities.

Yechury also drew a parallel with German leader Hitlers idea of nationalism and the Hindutva nationalism and stressed that those indulging in cow vigilantism are not fringe or anti-social elements, as is claimed by the government.

What is happening is antithetical to all the constitutional values that we have given ourselves, Yechury said as he invoked Swami Vivekananda, the Bhagwad Gita and the Vedas.

Trinamool Congress member Derek OBrien said the government must name the groups and individuals behind mob violence, which he said was not cow vigilantism but cow terrorism.

Only then we will take you (government) seriously. Otherwise, we will be suspicious, he said.

OBrien said the opposition would not be cowed down by the fear of the Central Bureau of Investigation, Enforcement Directorate or political vendetta by the ruling party.

Bahujan Samaj Party leader Satish Chandra Mishra said Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi should either show courage and raise his voice against mob lynchings of members of the minority community or should resign like Mayawati did.

He said that people are being killed in mob violence in BJP-ruled states.

However, Naqvi said these incidents did not involve any party or the government but individuals. He called for a united fight to isolate and tackle those behind such crimes.

These are purely incidents of crime and one should not turn them into communal ones. If you give a communal colour to such heinous crimes, it will only serve the purpose of criminals who want these incidents to be associated with religion, Naqvi said.

The Minister said the opposition had been raising the issue as they could not find any instances of corruption in the Modi government.

He said Azads claim of inaction against the perpetrators of lynchings was untrue as cases were immediately registered and suspects arrested in Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharashtra.
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New Delhi, (IANS): Leaders of different political parties on Wednesday extended their support to a draft bill against lynching prepared by a civil society organisation and urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to get it passed in the ongoing Monsoon Session of parliament.

The Manav Suraksha Kanoon (MASUKA), which defines the words lynching and mob and lists the measures that should be taken, including making it a non-bailable offence, to curb the crime, was prepared by National Campaign Against Mob Lynching  a committee of social activists and student leaders  of which social activist Tehseen Poonawalla is a core member.

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Speaking to media, senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh said that the Sangh Parivars line of thought is responsible for the recent lynchings and that it works in a two-faced manner.

On one side, they are (Sangh) saying that lynchings in the name of cow protection is wrong, while (VHP leader) Praveen Togadia asks for training for Gau Rakshaks so that they can correct people who kill cows, he said. Theyre playing it together.

The Congress leader said that Sangh and its 150-odd organisations plant seeds of hatred seeds in the minds of children at a very early age and now with fake news and social media, this has increased fivefold.

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said that the government has failed to take up the issue. Lynchings are rampant and are happening with impunity. I hope the government, Prime Minister and Home Minister will adopt it (Bill) or come up with a law of their own.

Leaders said that lynchings happen not just in the name of cow, but against Dalits, Muslims, Africans and even Hindus.

A pledge to not remain mute spectators to lynching and not allow lynchings was also taken at the 100-people strong gathering.

Poonawalla said that the government is trying to make lynching a Hindu-Muslim issue and added that it goes beyond it.

We condemn the lynching of Ayub Pandith as we do the lynching of Junaid or Pehlu Khan. Today its minorities, tomorrow it would be women for the clothes they wear or transgenders, he said.

Poonawalla told IANS that if the government does not take up the Bill in the current session, then 10,000 people with their cattle and victims will go and stay at the PMs residence.

Not at Jantar Mantar, but at the PMs house as its the only safe place in the country, he said.

CPI-M MP M.B. Rajesh told IANS that even though the situation is not as grave in Kerala as in other parts of the country, hell take up the issue with the Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

DMK MP T.K.S Elangovan said that states run by BJP are supporting mobs who violate laws and take law into their hands.

In Tamil Nadu there is no law against eating beef or cow, but even there people carrying bovines were attacked, he said.

On being asked why there is need of a special law against lynching, former Union Minister Salman Khurshid said that it is needed when existing laws are not effective and in case of special circumstances and problems that pose.

We have passed special laws in the past for protecting women, children, Dalits and Tribals, he said.

Social activist Shehzad Poonawalla, Aam Aadmi Party leader Sanjay Singh and RJD leader Manoj Jha were also present at the function.
Young Tories have lent their support to former prime minister David Cameron after he said the Conservative Party must do more to inspire people.

Mr. Cameron, who is currently writing his memoirs, told the Evening Standard that his party should not focus entirely on economics, but continually modernise and inspire people. However, he ruled out a return to front-line Politics.

Members of Conservative Future, the Tories' youth wing, have spoken out in favour of the former prime minister's comments. Adam Lawless, who joined the Conservatives at the age of 12, said: 'I think the real goal should be about reinvigorating the young Tory spirit.

If this means having youth groups in the party, then that means that.

'Stop them from supporting Corbyn's unrealistic socialist paradise.'

'We need a wider message to get our young Tories out there and be active. I also believe the young are clearly the next generation of voters, so trying to stop them from supporting Corbyn's unrealistic socialist paradise, or at least that way of thinking, is key.'

Some members of the Tory youth wing are less convinced by Mr. Cameron's intervention. Leon Nicholls said: 'He is the reason why the Conservative Party has lost millions of voters to both Labour and UKIP.'

Other CF members were quick to come to the former Tory leader's defence. Liam Pem said: 'I completely agree with Cameron.

I believe the Conservative Party should endeavour to broaden its message to young people like myself.

'We could be bound to a lifetime on the opposition benches.'

'The general consensus from people who attend my school would be that they endorse the policies of Labour: scrapping tuition fees and free sweets. We need to make young people aware that scrapping tuition fees and fixing the NHS can't all be solved by throwing money at it; these things take time.'

Alexander Willis, a young Tory who has written to both Theresa May and Conservative Party Chairman, Patrick McLoughlin, about how the party needs to start changing its tactics by appealing to younger people, said: 'I think David Cameron is absolutely on point.

We could be bound to a lifetime on the opposition benches after the next election.

'It's imperative for the survival of our party. The Conservatives give young people the opportunity to succeed in life, no matter what background, and we need to capitalise on that.'

'David Cameron is not a proper Tory.'

However, Mr. Nicholls insisted the former Tory leader's comments do not matter.

He dubbed the Cameron years as a period in the Conservatives' history all Tories should just walk away from. He added: 'Our die-hard supporters are in UKIP, or worse, nowhere on the radar. Why, one might ask? They are alienated. David Cameron is not a proper Tory. He is a Heseltinian Tory (in reference to former deputy prime minister, Michael Heseltine). That's the huge difference.'

Essex CF campaigner Cameron Winstanley said the Tories need to be more positive and less focused on anti-Corbyn rhetoric.

But active CF activist Ben Walker said the young are not really different to the old. He said the Conservatives should appeal to all sections of the population with good ideas based on integrity, honesty and responsibility.

He added: 'Cameron's "hug a hoodie" b******s was only ever cringey.

'The Tories can do more to appeal to young people. Firstly, they should end the war on drugs by regulating substances better. They could also advocate a nationalist spirit that inspires today's youth. Jacob Rees-Mogg is probably the most popular MP among young people. Housing is the number one priority, as he says. Most people just want a house and a family, not world peace, equality or anything like that.'

Wellow Conservative councillor Harmeet Singh Brar welcomed Cameron's statement, saying the Tories need to work for everyone. He added that his association in Romsey has managed to combat the decline in young members throughout the party.

Despite this, Mr. Nicholls said the former Conservative leader is doing nothing more than 'throwing rocks from the sidelines.'

David Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party in 2005 after beating David Davis to the role. He formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats after the 2010 General Election due to his failure to achieve a working majority that year. He went on to lead his party to victory in the 2015 General Election. He resigned last year after failing to win the EU Referendum on the Remain side.
Lunar dust and some tiny moon rocks collected by Neil Armstrong are going to be auctioned off by Sothebys New York, to mark the 48th anniversary of the first lunar landing on July 20, 1969.

The moon dust scooped up by Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, is expected to fetch an estimated 1.5 million to 3 million.

Other items on the block include a photograph of fellow Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon and a documented flight plan that the NASA astronauts used to return to Earth.

Armstrong & Aldrin have just raised US flag. Buzz salutes Old Glory while Neil takes a photo. #Apollo11 pic.twitter.com/NNzkfNCmDu  Apollo 11 (@ReliveApollo11) July 21, 2015

The mystery of the moon dust

According to Astronotes, Armagh Planetariums official blog, one thing that surprised the astronauts who visited the moon was the strong smell of the lunar dust which they were able to smell only when they got back inside the Lunar Module.

After coming into contact with oxygen for the first time inside the Lunar Module, the four billion years old moon dust produced a pungent smell. Neil Armstrong described the scent as similar to wet ashes in a fireplace. Other astronauts compared the odour to that of gun powder. To this day, the distinct smell remains a mystery as the lunar dust and gun powder has no similar compounds.

Mission Apollo 11: A giant leap for mankind

#OTD in 1969, Apollo 11 Astronauts @TheRealBuzz, Neil Armstrong & Michael Collins launched into space, pushing humanity to new frontiers pic.twitter.com/w21C01z5Xu  NASA Moon (@NASAmoon) July 16, 2017

On July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 took off from Kennedy Space Center with the commander of the mission Neil Armstrong and fellow astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins aboard.

Three days later, the mission entered a lunar orbit. On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin climbed into Eagle, the Apollo lunar module, to reach the lunar surface while Collins remained in the command module.

A few hours later, Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface and Armstrong immediately radioed to Mission Control in Houston, Texas: The Eagle has landed, a now famous phrase.

These were the first words spoken on the moon.

According to NASA, Armstrong had to improvise and pilot the craft manually past an area littered with boulders. He piloted the craft even farther from the landing site, and descended to the surface of the moon four miles (6.4 km approx.) from the original landing site with less than a minute of descent fuel remaining, states a CNET report.

Thats one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, Armstrong remarked as he took his first step on the moon. Aldrin joined him shortly, and described the moons surface as "magnificent desolation." The duo explored the surface for two and a half hours, collecting samples of lunar dust and rocks and taking photographs, noted NASA.

Along with the American national flag, the Apollo 11 mission left behind a small collection of items that included medallions honouring Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin, the first human to journey into outer space, and Vladimir Komarov, both of whom had tragic deaths; Gagarin in 1968 when the MiG-15 training jet he was piloting crashed, and Komarov due to parachute failure when his Soyuz capsule crashed after re-entry in April 1967.

This made him the first human to die in a space flight.

The mission began its journey home on July 22 and safely splashed down 1,480 kilometres south-west of Hawaii on July 24.

According to Guinness World Records, an estimated 600 million people watched the Apollo 11 landing live on television. A world record that was later broken by Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencers wedding in July 1981 which was viewed by 750 million people worldwide.
The Bank of England Governor Mark Carney unveiled yesterday a new 10 bank note featuring the famous British novelist Jane Austen at Winchester Cathedral, where Austen has been inhumed since her death in 1817. The new note will be put into circulation on September 14th in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of her death.

Speaking at Winchester Cathedral, Carney declared that Austen is worthy of commemoration on English pieces of money because she has accessed the British collective memory. Carney also emphasized the importance of bank notes in cherishing the "Glorious British history".

Jane Austen's portrait is engraved by William Home Lizars

The portrait featured is an engraving by William Home Lizars that was approved by Austen's family and inspired by an original sketch of Jane by her sister Cassandra. Below the portrait is Austen's famous quote "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!" from her most famous book "Pride and Prejudice." There's also an illustration by Isabel Bishop of "Pride and Prejudice" 's main character, Elizabeth Bennet undertaking "The examination of all the letters which Jane had written to her." Austen's writing table and her brother's house, where she used to spend her days, are also featured on the new ten-pound note.

Jane Austen's works

Jane Austen is probably the most famous female novelist of the United Kingdom. Her works are renowned worldwide and many have been adapted to movies. According to publishersweekly.com, her best six novels are:

"Northanger Abbey"

"Persuasion"

"Persuasion" "Pride and Prejudice"

"Emma"

"Sense and Sensibility"

Jane Austen featured on the new banknote, along with other novelties

Besides from the novelist's portrait, quote, and other illustration related to the life of the British novelist, the Bank of England announced many other novelty features in the new 10 banknote.

The new features are a see-through portrait of the British Monarch Queen Elizabeth, the Cathedral Winchester where Austen is buried in gold foil on the front of the note and silver on the back, the word Ten that changes to Pounds if the note is tilted, a three-dimensional hologram of the British crown that becomes very colorful when the note is tilted, microscopic letters and numbers beneath the Queen's portrait, and the phrase Bank of England in raised ink along the top of the note. Last but not least, the note includes a tactile feature for blind people.
It was a tragic end to the weekend plans of a Phoenix family that had come to celebrate a birthday. They wanted to cool off in a creek in the Tonto National Forest in Arizona and the spot they had selected was a Swimming Hole near Payson. However, things did not go as per plans and nine of them were swept away in a flash flood while a man is believed to be missing.

Details of the tragedy

Los Angeles Times reports that it was a warm summer day in Arizona and the group had made preparations to enjoy the cool surroundings when a severe thunderstorm happened in a nearby area and it dumped heavy rainfall on the mountain.

As a result, the floodwaters came rushing down the canyon and the revelers were caught unawares.

Gila County sheriff's office has clarified to the media that search-and-rescue crews recovered nine bodies that included five children and four adults. The recovery was nearly two miles down the river from the swimming hole and the victims included a 60-year-old woman and a two-year-old girl. Four others were rescued and hospitalized for treatment of hypothermia.

The sheriff's office also added that the waters gushed for about 10 minutes before it disappeared in the narrow canyon and, according to estimates, the floodwaters were not only high but wide as well. The National Weather Service had issued a warning of Flash Floods but no one had expected it to strike the way it did.

Probable reasons for flash floods

Weather is always an unpredictable factor and, the weatherman makes forecasts to caution the people about possible disturbances to enable them to take necessary precautions. These forecasts are usually based on past data that is available superimposed with latest trends and observations from satellites.

In this case, there were thunderstorms in the area as predicted, but there was no rain where the people were swimming. Obviously, the flash flood in the swimming hole took them by surprise and led to the tragedy.

Incidentally, loss of lives in flash floods is not new. There are past instances like the one in 2015 in Utahs Zion National Park where the toll was seven.

Earlier to that, in 1997, flash floods killed 11 hikers near Page, Arizona.

Flash floods fall in the category of natural disasters but the blame cannot be assigned to the vagaries of nature. The man has an important role to play. It all boils to his disregard for the well-being of the environment. The loss of green cover due to deforestation is one factor because the roots of the trees bind the soil and, in the absence of trees, this soil is swept away and gathers momentum as the rain water hurtles downstream. The end result is disaster and death.
After a Navy destroyer crashed into a container ship off the coast of Japan over the weekend, seven members of the United States Navy were found dead. When President Donald Trump finally acknowledged the incident with a tweet, social media users were not impressed with how long it took him to speak out.

Trump on Twitter

On Saturday, the USS Fitzgerald was traveling just off the coast of Japan when they collided with a Philippine-flagged container ship. According to the Associated Press, the majority of the 300-person crew was likely asleep when the collusion occurred, which was around 2:20 a.m.

After roughly 48 hours of searching, officials found the bodies of the seven missing sailors. The sailors were located after being found in flooded berthing compartments. "We have found a number of the remains...of our missing shipmates," Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin confirmed on Monday, before adding, "our deepest sympathies go out to the families of those shipmates." The sailors have since been identified as Dakota Kyle Rigsby, Shingo Alexander Douglass, Ngoc T Truong Huynh, Noe Hernandez, Carlos Victor Ganzon Sibayan, Gary Leo Rehm Jr., and Alec Martin. Donald Trump decided to speak about the incident days after the crash first took place, doing so in a June 19 tweet.

My heartfelt thoughts and prayers are with the 7 @USNavy sailors of the #USSFitzgerald and their families. https://t.co/a4Sm8SrLv7 pic.twitter.com/uDbkXoBtkZ  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2017

Taking to Twitter on Monday night to address the Navy ship collision was Donald Trump.

"My heartfelt thoughts and prayers are with the 7 @USNavy sailors of the #USSFitzgerald and their families," Trump tweeted.

U.S. Navy confirms all 7 missing sailors from USS Fitzgerald found dead https://t.co/amOOEjsg7h pic.twitter.com/NTQCetvr2E  Reuters Top News (@Reuters) June 19, 2017

Twitter reacts

Within minutes after Donald Trump sent out his tweet about the fallen sailors, social media critics didn't hold back their thoughts.

"Doesn't count when you had to be reminded a million times," Bryson Masse tweeted, while adding, "America literally had to nag you to do this."

Hey @realDonaldTrump, why do you keep blocking those who question you? Silencing dissent is a violation of our First Amendment rights  William LeGate (@williamlegate) June 19, 2017

america literally had to nag you to do this  Bryson Masse (@Bryson_M) June 19, 2017

He makes me feel physical hatred. Just pure straight loathing.  Dana Smith (@Brady5thOrBust) June 19, 2017

"Trump's half-hearted reply is too little, too late.

While the 7 sailors were dying, he was tweeting about his pathetic approval numbers," William LeGate wrote, which was answered by another Twitter user who replied, "He makes me feel physical hatred. Just pure straight loathing." "How nice of you to get around to this after stroking your own ego with fake poll stats," another tweet read.

Look at this normal American couple.. being so normal and very average pic.twitter.com/ET74DTsF69  SCROTUS (@_NotFakeNews_) June 19, 2017

I agree and it's more like inconsistency, with this administration, well, except for the lies - they seem to be consistent.  Paula Stone-Buckner (@psbuckner1) June 19, 2017

How nice of you to get around to this after stroking your own ego with fake poll stats.  valued at 5.7 (@JustinCaffier) June 19, 2017

"A little late are you Donny?

I believe Obama beat you to this as well. And Michelle even wished him a happy fathers day too. Melania didn't," an additional tweet stated. As the backlash continued, it was made clear that the political division in the United States was not going to end anytime soon.
Five fast facts about the police officer who shot and killed soon to be wedded Australian woman Justine Damond have emerged. Across Australia and in Minneapolis where the shooting occurred, questions continue to be asked about how her death could have possibly happened? The BBC reported that the Australian PM had described her death as "inexplicable."

It was meant to be the other way around. It needs to be written -- It was widely reported that on Saturday night officers responded to a 911 call made by Justine Damond, whose maiden name was Ruszczyk.

She had apparently heard a noise in a nearby alley that sounded like an assault. After approaching the police vehicle, one officer shot her. Emergency back-up was requested, but Justine, who was soon to marry her American fiance died at the scene.

Little information other than the fact that Justine seemed to have been shot for no apparent reason emerged and this has raised interest in the case, and most particularly in the motive behind the shooting. Below the video news report are five fast facts about the police officer who pulled the trigger and destroyed the happiness of a family.

Officer who shot Justine is named

According to a report by CNN, the name of the police officer is Mohamed Noor.

The officer is not responding to calls by mainstream media to say something and his lawyer, Tom Plunkett stated in a statement that was reported by ABC News, that "He (Noor) takes their (family) loss seriously and keeps them in his daily thoughts and prayers." He went on to say that "the current environment for police is difficult, but Officer Noor accepts this as part of his calling."

Mohamed Noor's police career

According to a city official who was cited by CNN, Officer Noor joined the Minneapolis Police Department in March 2015, and after he had completed his training, he was assigned to the "Fifth Precinct, which covers Southwest Minneapolis," about a year later.

He was notable as a Somali-American officer in the department.

When he was first deployed there, Mayor Betsy Hodges mentioned this in her introductory post on Facebook, saying, "I want to take a moment to recognize Officer Mohamed Noor, the newest Somali officer in the Minneapolis Police Department. Officer Noor has been assigned to the 5th Precinct, where his arrival has been highly celebrated, particularly by the Somali community in and around Karmel Mall.

The community even hosted a meet and greeted event (see pics) to welcome him. A beautiful sign of building trust and community policing at work.

Justine's killer was well educated

In his life before joining the police, Mohamed Noor was well educated. According to the police department, he graduated from Augsburg College in Minneapolis with "a degree in economics and business administration," before seeking employment in commercial and residential building management.

Noor's family background

Not much is known about Mohamed Noor other than the fact that he is a police officer and shot dead a woman who called the police to attend what she thought was an assault. It was noted by Star Tribune that he came to America at a very young age.

He was married, and the news outlet cited divorce documents that indicate he is "a caring, involved father who was at times consumed by the demands of his job." It was also mentioned that Noor's mother is alive and often babysits his son.

Somali community devastated over the shooting

Officer Mohamed Noor was held in high regard by the Somali population of the city. The Sixth Ward City Council candidate who shares a similar name but is not related to the officer said that while the community is shocked by yet another civilian death by a police officer, that the "police should be held accountable as (in) any other police shooting.

According to Star Tribune, a Somali activist who knows officer Noor said that his "becoming an officer was a dream come true." For Somali's, Noor being an officer was considered an example of successful integration into the USA.

Noor has declined to make a statement. CNN reported that Mayor Betsy Hodges is disappointed that Noor has not made a statement or said more about what compelled him to open fire on Justine Damond. "We cannot compel Officer Noor to make a statement. I wish we could. I wish that he would make a statement, is what I want to say," she said.
Fugitive illegal immigrants enter the United States to escape prosecution in their homeland or other countries overseas. Unfortunately while they use the United State as a Safe Haven they commit multiple crimes here, endangering US citizens. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deploy their Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) fugitive operations teams to enforce our laws, arrest known fugitives and coordinate with the country they are wanted in, so removal can take place. In 2016, 240,255 illegal fugitives were removed and returned to their country.

A total of 174,923 were apprehended while attempting to illegally enter the United States, and 65,332 were were apprehended inside the U.S., most of them were already convicted criminals.

Guatemalan commits multiple crimes while in U. S.

Today, it was announced that three fugitive illegal immigrants were captured by ERO and are being processed through the appropriate channels. ERO was notified by Guatemalan authorities that Fredy Mariony Alvarado-Calderon, from Guatemala, was wanted for homicide and attempted homicide after he attempted to shoot an individual on October 2016 in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Alvarado-Calderon first attempted to enter the U. S. near Laredo, Texas in 2001, when U. S.

Border Patrol officers apprehended him and placed him in removal procedures, which was to take place on October 2001. But he was not removed from the U. S. till April 2007.

During his brief stay at that time, he was convicted of assault in Pennsylvania in 2006 and was convicted of two felons in New Jersey on July 2006. He re-entered the U.

S. illegally and was convicted of battery in Cook County, Illinois, in 2008 and currently has an active warrant for his arrest in Trenton, New Jersey. ICE ERO is currently detaining Alvarado-Calderon at the Howard County Detention Center in Maryland, pending his removal to Guatemala. They are also reviewing this case to determine if charges of unlawful re-entry, which is a felony punishable by 20 years in federal prison, should be brought against Alvarado-Calderon.

U. S. provided shelter for two criminal Mexicans

Also on Monday, Jose Manuel Sustaita-Velez, aka El Pelon, 33, was handed over to the Mexican authorities on a warrant that alleged he murdered an individual in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Sustaita-Velez was also found guilty of illegally re-entering the U. S. five times and was serving time in federal prison for these offenses. Eduardo Cervantes-Ruiz, 35, was also delivered to Mexican authorities on an outstanding warrant for a 2008 homicide in Mexico. He is allegedly said to have shot a man twice in the leg and allowed the man to bleed to death. Cervantes-Ruiz was apprehended at his residence in Waco, Texas.
A team of scientists in china has for the first time successfully teleported an object from Earth to space using quantum entanglement. They published their findings online on the open access site for scientific papers 'arXiv.'

What object did they teleport?

The team of scientists sent a photon from Earth to an orbiting satellite that was over 300 miles (482.8 kilometers) above by using quantum entanglement. This is the farthest distance ever that the researchers have achieved in their teleportation tests. For around the last month, the team in China has been teleporting million of photons into space from their ground station in Tibet to the low-orbiting Micius satellite above.

They have done this by using crystals and lasers to beam the photons and in more than 900 cases, the photon was successfully teleported to the satellite.

What does this mean?

Despite it only behind a photon that was teleported, this is one of the first in many steps that will pave the way for more ambitious breakthroughs in the future. The team acknowledged in a statement that their work here with quantum entanglement was only a first but essential step towards global scale quantum Internet, which would essentially be unhackable.

This could also lead to amazing advances in data encryption. It also establishes what is the first ground-to-satellite up-link, which will hopefully lead to reliable and ultra-long distance quantum teleportation. Obviously, achieving any of these goals are still far in the future, by science must go one step at a time to get there.

What are photons and quantum entanglement?

Photons are particles which transmit light in many atomic models. They are elementary particles that are their own antiparticles and each has a characteristic quantum of energy in quantum mechanics. They are fundamental particles that can be destroyed and created, however, their lifetime is infinite.

The modern concept of photons was steadily developed by Albert Einstein over the early 20th century.

The process of quantum entanglement is what happens when two photons, or any type of particle, react with each other even though they have no physical connection. They become permanently linked in such a way that the link exists no matter where the particles are located. It is a phenomenon that physicists cannot really explain but have only observed. Einstein, along with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, first discovered and discussed it in a 1935 scientific paper.
The drama surrounding Donald Trump and Russia seems to take a new turn each day. After the latest round of reports found that Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a second meeting at the G-20 summit, the United States president was quick to lash out.

Trump on Twitter

Not long after Donald Trump announced his plan to run for president, he was quickly forced to push back against allegations that he was in cahoots with Russia. As the election moved on, speculation grew about what role Russia had in regards to the billionaire real estate mogul.

However, the pressure increased following Trump's shocking upset win over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, as multiple well-respected news outlets as well as various government agencies all reported that the Kremlin hacked the election with a Trump victory in mind. Fast forward to earlier this month and it was reported that Trump and Vladimir Putin met for a brief period of time during the G-20 summit. While that meeting has been confirmed by all sides, a new report is not being received well by the president and the White House. As reported by NBC News on July 18, Trump and Putin also held a follow up meeting, which the president was quick to comment on during his latest tweetstorm.

Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

Taking to Twitter on Tuesday night, Donald Trump was quick to address the latest report that he met with Vladimir Putin for a second time earlier this month.

"Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is 'sick,'" Trump tweeted, before adding, "All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!"

The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

In a follow up message, Donald Trump continued to double down on his attack on the alleged "fake news." "The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest!" Trump tweeted out, while noting, "Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!" Trump pushing back against media reports have become his normal course of action, as the president has made it a routine to bash the press, using Twitter as his number one form of communication to attack reporters and journalists.

Trump and Putin had second, previously undisclosed meeting at G-20 Summit https://t.co/GJuCal0rko pic.twitter.com/7qyPwzg3Lx  NBC News (@NBCNews) July 18, 2017

Next up

Despite Donald Trump denying the validity of report of his meeting with Vladimir Putin, a White House official contradicted the president by confirming the story to NBC News. While the details of the meeting are unknown, it appears that the former host of "The Apprentice" is not going to back-down from his denial anytime soon.
Vladimir Putin was recently filmed in Beijing Playing The Piano as he awaited a meeting with President Xi Jinping. Much of the media saw the incident as evidence of a musical talent and some softer side to his hardnosed ways. But I ask all those journalists who reported that Putin plays the piano: have you gone mad? He doesnt do that unless you count tinkling a few ivories with two fingers in the middle register. Children trying to sound out "Chopsticks" use more keys. Clearly, this pathetic performance was a public relations stunt with a musical instrument at the ready - complete with its lid up, concert-style - and a camera in place, courtesy of Russian state television.

Does talent trump derangement?

But even if Putin, the dictator, were a virtuoso on the keyboard, it wouldnt make him softer. A split-personality is a dissociative identity disorder with each disparate parts living unaware of the other and it's far from uncommon. A new Netflix psychosexual drama titled Gypsy tells the story of a wife and mother and respected psychologist, who helps troubled people but who leads a double life by indulging in secret relationships with her patients loved ones.

Does art-making soften an evil-doers heart?

History records the dark side of several well-known people. Some famous painters, for example, have committed crimes or otherwise behaved in reprehensible ways that contradict the high-mindedness of their work.

Caravaggio who rendered devoutly religious works had an uninterrupted record of crimes, including murder. Alonso Cano, known as the Spanish Michelangelo, and an ordained priest whose figure art is absolutely saccharine, was often thrown out of cities he worked in, and on one occasion for killing his wife. None of the talents here served to soften the will to cause pain.

Frailties hold firm before fame and fortune

Celebrated architect Frank Lloyd Wright not only abandoned his first wife and six children to run off with the wife of a client, but his second wife also accused him in a divorce proceeding of wife-beating. Then theres Napoleon, Emperor of France, who was bent on ruling all of Europe, forced to abdicate for preventing peace among nations.

Yet it was the spoils of all the wars he waged that filled the Louvre with its famed art collection. Again, as in the case of Putin, et al, none of the positive traits of these men softened their will to mow down those in their way.

The big disconnect

Granted, we all have different sides to our personalities, but theyre usually integrated and consciously lived. The two sides of Putins way of being  one who murders those who disagree with him  and one who tenderly taps out the melody lines of songs from his childhood like some dutiful little boy  compares to the villainous differential that Naomi Watts enacts in Gypsy. Scary!
Last season on the wildly popular series, viewers watched as Sig suffered a major heart attack as he was coming in to dock at the Aleutian Islands port called Dutch Harbor. Since then, he's had to be mindful that there are certain things like too much stress and smoking that could cause him problems. After being cleared by his physician, he returned this season to Captain his fishing vessel the Northwestern.

The captain previously suffered what doctors call a 'widow maker'

Sig has fishing in his blood, and he was captain of the boat by the time he was 24.

Although crab fishing is extremely dangerous, Hansen also has an outstanding safety record. Since he has been at the helm, no deckhands have been lost to the sea. He works hard to insure that every year he meets his quotas and that every member of his loyal crew gets paid.

A storm over the Bering Sea brings MASSIVE waves to the fleet this week! Get a sneak peek: https://t.co/QSeWMTOueD pic.twitter.com/DlZZwfjb9L  Deadliest Catch (@DeadliestCatch) July 17, 2017

There is really no way for Hansen to completely avoid the stress that comes along with being a crab boat captain on the Bering Sea. Frigid weather conditions, treacherous seas, staying on top of the crew, and maintaining the crab count all contribute to rising stress levels.

Even though he was advised to quit smoking, he hasn't been able to stop yet, so it's no surprise when Sig began having chest pain on his left side. As he drives himself to the clinic, he explains that his heart attack is always there in the back of his mind, and that it is something that always worries him. He adds that it is making him feel like a "basket case" and that surely can't be helping his current condition.

The news is troubling for the family and friends of Sig Hansen

Sig's brother Edgar Hansen is visiting family friend and captain of the F/V Saga, Jake Anderson, when he gets a call from one of the Northwestern's deckhands. An exclusive sneak-peek video from Monsters and Critics reveals that when Hansen went to be examined at the local clinic, it was difficult to determine what exactly the EKG was telling the doctors there, so it was recommended that he be medevaced to Anchorage, where more testing will most likely be performed.As Jake hears the news he grows concerned, saying that the situation doesn't sound good at all.

This could definitely put an immediate halt on Sig's fishing season, hopefully he is fine and can resume doing the job he loves. If it is something more serious, he could be facing not just an early end to the fishing season, but to the end of his career as a fisherman. Are you a fan of the show? What do you think about Sig Hansen's heart problems, should he retire from fishing before it's too late? Leave your comments, thoughts, and opinions below. "Deadliest Catch" airs Tuesday, July 18 at 9 p.m. ET on the Discovery Channel.
On July 14, a team of young students and engineers in Russia launched Mayakthe first crowdfunding satellite in the history of Russia. For the next one month, this small CubeSat will orbit the Earth, appearing as a very, very bright shooting star in the Night Sky. According to its makers, Mayak may even surpass planet Venus in terms of brightness in the night time.

What is Mayak?

Mayak, meaning beacon in English, is a tiny CubeSat probeabout the size of a loaf of bread. Its creators raised more than $30,000 on a crowdfunding website to launch the satellite into orbit.

The project was led by Moscow State Mechanical Engineering University (MAMI). Mayak was launched through a Soyuz 2.1v rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 14. The rocket carried with it 72 satellites that were deployed in three different orbits.

Mayak is currently circling the Earth at an altitude of about 600 kilometers. After reaching the desired position, Mayak will unfurl its 170 square feet of solar reflectors made of Mylar sheetabout one 20th the thickness of a human hair. This pyramid-shaped contraption will enable this tiny satellite to reflect a good the amount of Suns light towards Earth. Mayaks designers claim that this tiny satellite will have a brightness of magnitude -10, thus making it appear even brighter than Venus in the night sky.

This means it will be the second brightest object, after the moon, in the night sky. Some experts, however, dispute the claim and assert that Mayaks brightness level will probably be close to magnitude -3.6.

Tracking the movement of the satellite

Mayaks team has created an Android app to track the movement of the satellite in space.

The access to this app will, however, be limited only to backers of the crowdfunding project. The team hopes the data received from Mayak will enable them to find a solution for space junk problem by designing larger devices able to be attached to pieces of space junk to bring the junk pieces down in the atmosphere and then burn up.

The team also hopes that their effort will raise the interest of people in space technology.

Many astronomers have also raised their concerns about the appearance of a new bright object in the sky that is expected to interfere with their telescopic observations. Astronomers already have to carefully time their observations to avoid unwanted light spilling over from celestial bodies, and after the launch of Mayak, they will need to make additional adjustments while conducting large-scale surveys.
A Vueling flight was about to take off from Barcelona in Spain headed for Dakar in Senegal on Saturday. A hand-cuffed passenger, accompanied by two border guards, boarded the plane. He immediately started screaming, saying he was ill and didnt want to go home, leading a group of Passengers taking pity on him and refusing to let the flight leave.

Passengers spontaneously mutiny on Vueling plane

Passengers were boarding the Vueling flight at Barcelona El Prat airport, bound for Dakar in Senegal when it happened. Two police officers boarded the plane with a hand-cuffed Senegalese man, who was in the process of being deported, as he had no residence or work permit or permission to stay in Spain.

The man had tried to illegally enter the country, but due to his lack of paperwork on arrival at Barcelona airport, he was immediately put on a flight back home.

It was the Spanish language news service, EM Cataluna that called it a mutiny, as a number of passengers spontaneously attempted to stop the plane from leaving the airport. That news report quoted six passengers as being involved, however it was 11.

A spokeswoman for the protesters who supported the Senegalese man told the Spanish media that he had started screaming on entering the plane, saying he was ill and did not want to return to Senegal. According to the English language newspaper RTN, this led to some 11 passengers quite literally standing up for the man and refusing to take their seats to allow the flight to leave.

They stood in protest, demanding the Senegalese man be allowed to stay in Spain.

After an hour and a half of protesting to the pilot to free the Illegal Immigrant, Spanish Civil Guard officers boarded the plane, demanding that all passengers leave the aircraft.

The officers then identified the 11 protesters and removed them from the group of passengers, allowing the plane to take off a few hours late for Senegal, with the illegal immigrant and the balance of the passengers on board.

Vueling had to accommodate 176 passengers in Dakar

A spokesman for Vueling said that due to the delay in takeoff of their weekly flight to Senegal, the incident then affected a flight from Dakar to Barcelona on the same day.

This forced the airline to pay for hotel rooms for 176 passengers in Dakar. Those passengers finally flew to Barcelona the following morning.

As noted by RTN, a Spanish journalist by the name of Anna Palou Sole posted a video clip of the incident on Twitter as it happened. The clip shows the mutinous passengers blocking the aisle of the plane, with a caption in Catalan which said they had succeeded in their efforts to help the immigrant. The caption continued by saying the deportation flight had been stopped and that authorities were about to take the man off the plane, adding that solidarity was their best weapon. However, Palou must have been very disappointed to discover that it wasnt the Senegalese man being removed from the flight, but the protesters themselves.

Ho hem aconseguit! Vol de deportacio aturat. Ara venen les autoritats a emportar-se la persona! La solidaritat es la nostra millor arma! pic.twitter.com/x8OSUzu2Dx  Anna Palou Sole (@annapalou) July 15, 2017

The protesters got together and held a press conference on Monday in Barcelona, demanding the airline explain why they were removed from the flight and accusing Vueling of violating the deportees human rights. Their lawyer, Andres Garcia Berrio, who has worked on pro-migrant campaigns in the past, said they were looking at all legal routes to proceed against the airline. At that stage, the protesters were said to be facing hefty fines of between $52,000 and $104,000 along with being blacklisted from flying with Vueling.

A petition was drawn up, asking people to give "Support for the 11 people expelled from Vueling flight VY778." A tweet quoted 351 organizations and 2,232 people as having already supported the petition and asked others to sign up.

351 organitzacions i 2232 persones ja han donat suport. I tu, has signat? #TeGustaViajar https://t.co/SFJBxyQrVz  #TeGustaViajar (@TeGustaViajar) July 18, 2017

Vueling will not fine the protesters

As noted by RTN, Vuelings headquarters in Barcelona have now, in return, taken pity on the protesters, responding in a statement to say they would face no fines and have not been blacklisted by the airline. According to their spokesperson, the 11 passengers could purchase new tickets to travel to Dakar and could, if they wished, file a complaint for compensation for their removal from the flight.
Editor's Note:

China's gross domestic product jumped to an unexpected 6.9 percent growth year-on-year in the first half of 2017. In a series of interviews, China Daily put four crucial questions to economists, analysts and business leaders about the prospects of economic growth in the country and wider business issues.

Q1: What are the most encouraging signs you have seen in the Chinese economy during the first half of 2017 and what has impressed you the most about the macroeconomic data currently available for the first half?

Q2: Based on your research or business operations, what are your projections for China's economic growth in the second half of this year?

Q3: What factors will help China increase growth and what are the key challenges?

Q4: What would be your advice to achieve stable, balanced and sustainable economic growth in the years ahead?

John Litwack, lead economist for China at the World Bank. [Photo by Cong Ruiting/chinadaily.com.cn]

A1: There are a number of encouraging signs. This includes stronger than expected numbers on economic growth and greater confidence in the business community.

Relative to 2015 and 2016, we are particularly encouraged by recent macroeconomic and regulatory policies aimed at bringing debt under control.

While China has experienced strong economic growth by international standards in 2015 and 2016, the buildup in debt raised questions about sustainability and growing risks.

We think that the experience in the first half of 2017 represents an important break from the past in that regard. The government has been pursuing important measures to bring debt and shadow banking under control.

For us in the World Bank, progress toward reducing macroeconomic imbalances that emerged in China since the global financial crisis is more important than the question of GDP growth being a bit higher or a bit lower than expected.

We believe that the fundamentals in China's economy are still quite strong, and that macroeconomic imbalances, if not addressed, would represent the biggest threat to China's ability to sustain high growth during the medium and longer term.

A2: We had been projecting 6.5 percent growth this year, but anticipate that we will revise our projection upward following the release of data for the first half of the year on Monday.

We do think that China will likely experience somewhat slower growth in the second half of the year, assuming that it continues to pursue tighter monetary and regulatory policies to constrain growth in debt. However, we believe that the continual pursuit of these policies is very important for China's future growth and development prospects.

A3: A more favorable external environment has been a major factor in supporting higher-than-expected growth in China in the first half of 2017. The recovery in trade is one reason why China has been able to sustain strong growth, while also tightening policies and regulations to control debt.

Although current expectations about the external environment continue to be generally favorable for the second half, these prospects are always uncertain.

A4: During the medium term, China cannot rely on increasing export volumes to sustain its relatively rapid pace of economic growth. Rebalancing toward domestic demand remains a key condition to sustain rapid growth here.

For demand-driven growth, it is critical that incomes and consumption of the population continue to increase at a rapid pace. That should become an even stronger primary driver and stimulate private investment.

Potential remains for China to support productivity growth and efficiency through strengthened institutions for market exit. This includes reforms to boost competition policy, manage insolvency, bankruptcy, and ensure an active and appropriate role for creditors in restructuring insolvent firms. We are happy that China is making significant progress in these areas, and we believe that continued progress will be of first order importance for future growth prospects.
Rancher Jay Wolf of Bartlett, Nebraska, shows off some of his cattle. [Photo by Amy He/China Daily]

As US beef exports to China resume, Nebraska, the No 1 exporter of beef and beef products in the US, is optimistic that its biggest crop exportcornalso will benefit.

The state suffered a huge blow in 2014 when China banned genetically modified corn from the United States. Before that, the state was shipping millions of metric tons of corn to the country, but that dropped to between 150,000 and 200,000 tons last year.

About 95 percent to 97 percent of corn produced in Nebraska is genetically modified, but most of it consists of varieties that are now approved in China and other markets, said Kelly Brunkhorst, executive director at the Nebraska Corn Board.

"When we talk about corn, we look at corn in all forms. It may be raw product corn or it may be the value-added beef industry," Brunkhorst said.

"Nebraska's blessed with being the No 1 cattle-on-feed state, and having that strong beef industry" is a "fantastic opportunity to move corn as a value-added product into China, along with building upon what that means for corn in raw form," he said.

The first shipment of US beef to China left Omaha, Nebraska, on June 14, on a flight to customers in Shanghai. More than 6 million cattle in Nebraska feed on corn and corn byproducts. Cattle feed is composed of roughage, raw corn, corn sweetener byproduct, and ethanol byproduct, also known as distillers grains.

Corn and beef work in tandem with each other, said Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts.

"One of the benefits we have here is what we call a 'golden triangle' between the corn that we produce, our ethanol plantswhich create fuel, and in fact Nebraska supplies about 1.5 percent of the overall liquid fuel supply for the United Statesand a byproduct of that ethanol process, the distillers grains that then go into feeding our cattle," he told China Daily in an interview.

"That's a great synergistic way we leverage our corn and add value to our commodities we produce here, to help create the best products in the world," he said.
Alibaba Group's cashier-free retail store Tao Cafe attracts customers in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. [Photo by Wang Zhuangfei/China Daily]

Chinese e-commerce giant and data technology provider Alibaba Group has just unveiled a cashier-free retail store.

The online group has joined other retail chains and tech startups flocking into the market with their own solutions, making staff-less retail one of the hottest tech trends.

Tao Cafe opened for a trial run on July 8. In the footsteps of the Amazon Go store that made a big debut last year with its use of tracking cameras, it utilizes a facial and voice recognition system.

Purchases are tracked by a facial recognition camera, and the system automatically generates bills as soon as customers walk out of the specially designed gate that can identify them with biological sensing technology.

Kicking it off before Alibaba, Guangdong-based tech startup BingoBox started to spread its version of staff-less stores, after being granted 100 million yuan ($14.8 million) in its first round of financing.

Unlike Tao Cafe, Bingobox is more of a hybrid between convenience stores and vending machines, where customers can walk in and pay by scanning QR codes on their phone. This bypasses eye contact and small talk that normally take place with cashiers in traditional stores.

"By the end of August, we are expecting to open 200 more Bingobox stores," said Chen Zilin, CEO of Bingobox.

"We only cost a quarter of a traditional convenience store, and running costs are one-eighth."

Neil Wang, president of global consulting firm Frost & Sullivan China, said staff-less stores will bring the "next spring" to the retail industry.

"Staff-less stores are a combination of digital payments, radio frequency identification technology, biological recognition, big data and AI," Wang said.

"They will lower the risk of shop lifting, optimize the goods and reduce costs, from running and maintenance costs to human labor."

Chen Haibo, CEO of Shenlan Technology Co, said that rental and human labor costs were holding the traditional retail sector back.

"In 2017, staff-less stores will boom," Chen added.

Beverage giant Wahaha Group Co Ltd recently signed a nearly 10 billion yuan deal with Shenlan Technology (Shanghai) Co to build 100,000 self-service Take Go smart stores in three years.

Japanese convenience store chain Lawson Inc is currently running trials with an unmanned store in Osaka which is expected to go into commercial use soon.

Whleeys Cafe, a Silicon Valley backed startup, has taken its vision of future retail one step further with Moby Marta staff-less self-driving vending car with an AI hologram assistant.

"We will have a membership system where we can collect our users' data, so we can deploy our cars into the areas with the optimized products selection," said Per Cromwell, lead designer of Moby Mart.

Cromwell said China had the world's largest number of mobile payment users. It had gone much further than Europe and made Moby Mart possible.

"Currently it costs $200,000 to $300,000 to make one Moby Mart, and we can lower it down to $40,000 when it comes to mass production," he said.

"Also, we don't need to pay rent but something like a parking fee," he added.

As a retailer and staff-less solutions provider, Cromwell said mobility would become the next turning point. He said they were talking with some of the world's top retail chains, which were interested in upgrading from the traditional retail mode, but preferred not to to disclose names.

One potential road block, however: Cromwell said the startup was still waiting for the self-driving car to be legalized before they could achieve their vision of a future retail where the shop comes to the customers' door.
WASHINGTON  Jack Ma, the founder and chairman of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, said here on Tuesday that Chinese and US business leaders should join force to set for broader cooperation between the world's two-largest economies in the future rather than focusing on "the problems of the past."

"We will certainly discuss today our individual company's priorities and outcomes, we must also seize the opportunity as a group to set out a vision for broader cooperation," Ma said in opening remarks at the first China-US Business Leaders Summit.

"Our relationship today reflects a deep business partnership where capital, people, and ideas are fully integrated. In the future, I believe we will not talk about products being made in your country or mine, but rather on the internet," Ma told a group of prominent Chinese and US CEOs, urging them to "see the big vision" of China-US relations and "seize the future."

"We're here to solve future problems, not to solve yesterday's problems. We should not punish our tomorrow because of yesterday's problems," he said, adding the Chinese and US business leaders should not "let problems of the past limit our future potential."

The business leaders should also offer "constructive advice" for the US and Chinese governments with wisdom and professionalism, encouraging them to use existing mechanisms to resolve their disputes "respectfully and efficiently," Ma noted.

"As in all deep and complex economic relationships, disputes whether on trade or investment are natural and expected," he said.

The inaugural China-US Business Leaders Summit, composed of around 20 prominent CEOs of the two countries, was one of the two proposals that Ma put forward in a meeting with the then President-elect Donald Trump in January. It aims to promote health development of China-US economic relations, according to Ma.

The other was to hold a small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) summit, which took place in the US city of Detroit last month, in a bid to help small US businesses sell products to China through e-commerce platform.

Eyeing a growing middle class in Asia, Ma is confident that Alibaba will be able to create 1 million jobs in the United States in the next five years by helping 1 million small US businesses sell their products to China and Southeast Asia.

The business leaders summit comes one day before the first round of China-US Comprehensive Economic Dialogue in Washington D.C., one of the four major dialogue mechanisms the two sides established in April.

During the upcoming dialogue to be co-chaired by Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, the two sides will exchange views on economic and trade issues of common concern.
A patient consults a doctor at a private clinic in Guangzhou, Guangdong province. [Liang Xu/Xinhua]

Medical professionals are pushing for greater openness in the registration mechanism that can tie them to a single establishment for their entire career, as Yuan Quan reports for Xinhua China Features.

Editor's note: In the run-up to the 19th Communist Party of China National Congress, China Daily is reporting on a number of key projects of national importance that showcase the country's great improvements in crucial fields, such as recent reforms aimed at improving living standards and creating a moderately prosperous society by 2020. Today's report focuses on changes to China's medical system.

Despite appeals by his superiors, gynecologist Kang Kai was determined to resign from the hospital in which he had worked for nearly 20 years.

He said he left "for freedom and respect".

Kang, 45, worked at a leading public hospital in Chongqing, Southwest China. In the eyes of his colleagues and patients, the gray-haired doctor was eminent and respectable, but he describes himself as a slave: working around the clock, with just half a day off each week and "always ready for overtime".

As head of the gynecology department, Kang was responsible for dealing with hundreds of administrative inspections, meetings, medical disputes and studies that took up a huge amount of his time every year for no extra pay.

He also dealt with strained doctor-patient relations that could result in violence. Kang was even threatened twice himself.

"It was very disheartening," he said. "I didn't want to work that way."

In 2015, he moved to Beijing and became a freelance specialist, seeing patients at different hospitals, mainly private ones. Last year, uniting about 100 leading doctors nationwide, Kang set up Woyi, which means "fertile ground for doctors", China's first group for gynecologists.

He is one of a growing number of Chinese doctors offering their services outside the public hospital system where they made their reputations. "I feel like a fish swimming from a pond to an ocean," he said.

Imbalances

Giving doctors the freedom to choose where they see patients helps to tackle China's chronic imbalance in medical resources, according to Kang.

About 80 percent of the country's medical resources are found in big cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, and 30 percent of them are in big public hospitals, which are flooded with patients eager to see eminent physicians.

The process of seeing a doctor at a big hospital is a miserable one. The sick must line up overnight for tickets, competing with scalpers, whose prices can be 1,000 times the official fee.

The time a doctor has for each appointment is tight. Kang once saw as many as 80 outpatients a day, each for just 2 or 3 minutes. "It was the only way to get away from work at a reasonable time," he said.

Doctors grumbled about "being nailed to a chair all day" without even time for a toilet break, Kang said.

He admires how medical staff in the United States and Europe can work for more than one hospital, either public or private. Moreover, thanks to the hierarchical medical systems in those regions, patients can receive high-quality services at nearby clinics.

In China, medical staff and facilities are in great demand, so hospitals struggle to attract and retain good doctors. In 1999, a law was passed that required doctors to be registered with one hospital, which would be responsible for their pay, welfare and professional position until retirement.

Doctors who were not registered with a medical institution were often considered quacks.

The regulations began to be eased in 2009, when the State Council published a plan that allowed doctors to offer their services at more than one hospital. In October, the government released the Healthy China 2030 blueprint to "explore the practice of freelance physicians and doctor groups".

Regulations issued in March also supported doctors who want to run their own clinics.
China is strengthening the Made in China 2025 strategy with new national-level demonstration areas to spur the development of smart-, green- and service-oriented manufacturing.

The decision was made at a State Council executive meeting presided over by Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday.

One goal is to foster the development of emerging industries and upgrade traditional sectors by furthering the integration of manufacturing and the internet. Support policies for market-oriented reforms will be rolled out to ensure that businesses of all types can receive the same national treatment.

"We need to select some cities or city clusters in China's eastern, western and central regions for the demonstration areas. The key is to support their piloting in system and policy innovation, and to develop an innovative atmosphere and industrial clusters for smart manufacturing," Li said.

"We must enable the manufacturing sector to become smarter, greener and more service oriented to boost the transition from traditional to new growth engines and to keep the economy climbing upward," he said.

Made in China 2025 was first unveiled by the premier in his Government Work Report in 2015.

Two years later, the country has seen increasingly stronger industrial capabilities, smart manufacturing, innovation, product quality and branding. Average productivity was up by 38 percent for China's first 109 pilot projects in smart manufacturing, while operating costs dropped by 21 percent, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Wednesday's meeting determined that the government will take advantage of a variety of government and industry funds to spur innovation and entrepreneurship, and to guide more social capital to support advanced manufacturing. In the demonstration areas, the government will offer stock incentives in State-owned enterprises.

The government will also further cut red tape and streamline approval procedures, improve the business environment and make bigger efforts to attract foreign investment. The use and protection of intellectual property rights will be strengthened, and government compliance oversight will be reinforced.

"Local authorities are highly motivated after the unveiling of the Made in China 2025 strategy. Many countries are also upgrading their manufacturing sectors right now," Li said.

"The Chinese economy has shown a buoyant momentum, but the weakness lies in the manufacturing sector, which requires rapid expansion. We need to focus our efforts on strengthening the sector, which is the foundation of the real economy," he said.

Li highlighted the importance of opening-up and international cooperation.

The meeting also decided to step up the development of innovation centers for manufacturing and technology and to establish a number of public service platforms for entrepreneurship and innovation.

The demonstration areas also will receive support in talent development, and encourage researchers and Chinese talent overseas to set up businesses in the demonstration areas.

Land supply in the demonstration areas will receive extra support, with pilot measures to transform old business and storage facilities, idle buildings and excessive commercial real estate into incubation centers for entrepreneurship.

The premier said funding support to the demonstration areas should be in line with market principles. The government should explore new paths of development, encourage competition, play an enabling role in building platform and drawing talented people, he added.

Zhu Sendi, a special consultant for the China Machinery Industry Federation, said the demonstration zones should be in either major cities or city clusters with strong manufacturing sectors. He helped draft guideline for the Made in China 2025 initiative.

By setting these zones as examples, the manufacturing sector can further integrate with new technologies, such as cloud-computing, big data and artificial intelligence, to evolve into new models, he said.

Traditional manufacturing can develop into smart, green and services-based manufacturing on the way to advanced manufacturing, the consultant said. That should be the way to elevate China's manufacturing industries and achieve the goal of becoming a competitive manufacturing country by 2025, Zhu added.

contact the writers at xuwei@chinadaily.com.cn
President Xi Jinping presents the PLA flag to Major General Deng Xiaogang, president of the National University of Defense Technology, at a ceremony on Wednesday in the Central Military Commission headquarters building in Beijing. LI GANG / XINHUA

Embrace tech, president tells military leaders

President Xi Jinping urged Chinese military institutions on Wednesday to recruit and train top-level professionals and to develop world-class theories and technologies.

Xi, also chairman of the Central Military Commission, said well-educated personnel, good theories and advanced technologies are essential to building a top-class military.

He said science and technology determine military combat capabilities so the Peoples Liberation Army must make more effort in research and development and continue to boost innovation.

Xi made the remarks at a ceremony on Wednesday at the Central Military Commission headquarters building in Beijing that marked the establishment of the new PLA Academy of Military Science, PLA National Defense University and PLA National University of Defense Technology.

He presented the PLA flag to leaders of the three top military institutions.

The president asked the Academy of Military Science to adapt to new situations in research and development and to strengthen interorganizational and interdisciplinary innovation. He ordered the National Defense University and National University of Defense Technology to produce more commanders and professionals who are qualified for modern joint operations.

This is the second time this year that Xi has publicly raised the importance of science and technology to the PLA. In a meeting with national legislators from the military in March, he said the PLA should take advantage of Chinas achievements in science and technology to help modernize weapons and equipment.

The president told officers to look for, support and make full use of advanced technologies that can serve the militarys modernization and to assist the transfer of defense technologies to the business sector.

Wednesdays moves seem to represent the completion of PLAs reshuffling in its research and training system, which started at the beginning of this year. The reshuffling is part of the ongoing massive reform on Chinas national defense and military, guided by Xi.

By the end of February, the PLA had 74 schools and an Academy of Military Science. Thirty-one schools were merged with others before the end of June. There are 43 military schools plus a new Academy of Military Science, according to information from the Defense Ministry.

The new Academy of Military Science, National Defense University and National University of Defense Technology have new leaders.

Lieutenant General Yang Xuejun is president of the Academy of Military Science. He was head of the former National University of Defense Technology since 2011. Yang specializes in supercomputing technology.

Lieutenant General Zheng He is president of the National Defense University. He was president of the former Academy of Military Science.

Major General Deng Xiaogang is president of the National University of Defense Technology. As an expert in aerodynamics, he served as vice-president at the university before the appointment.
Kentucky Fried Chicken has been in China now for almost 30 years, and what better circa-2017 way to celebrate that anniversary than with a smartphone rollout.

KFC knew enough to partner with a Chinese company to produce the phone. It chose Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, based in Shenzhen, which also happens to be celebrating its 30th anniversary.

Huawei has steadily gained market share in China and is expected to overtake Samsung for No. 2 behind Apple.

KFC made the announcement about the Huawei partnership on its Weibo account on July 7, featuring a bold, one-minute, 43-second video. The clip starts out with black-and-white images of China from 1987 as techno-rock music blasts in the background.

It fast-forwards to 2017, where young Chinese are shown celebrating in a KFC restaurant as someone plays Happy Birthday in English on the phone's K-Music app. In another scene, a young man presents a rose to his sweetheart as Here Comes the Bride blares on the phone.

The bright-red KFC Huawei 7 Plus phone features a 5.5-inch screen, a Snapdragon 425 processor, 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of storage, a microSD card and an Android 7.0 OS. There's also a fingerprint scanner on the back (make sure those digits are finger-licking clean first) above a miniature image of Colonel Sanders.

The limited edition model includes KFC's mobile app and 100,000 "K dollars" (virtual credits). The phone also features K-Music - KFC's new jukebox function.

A total of 5,000 phones will be released, KFC said on Weibo. They cost 1,099 yuan ($161.91) apiece and went on sale on Tmall on July 13.

In November 1987, KFC opened its first restaurant in China near Beijing's Tiananmen Square. The company founded as a roadside stand in 1930 by Colonel Harland D. Sanders in Corbin, Kentucky, now has more than 5,000 restaurants in China.

In November 2016, Yum China Holdings Inc was spun off from its US parent Yum Brands. Yum China now operates more than 7,600 restaurants in 1,100 cities.

The company has the rights to the KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell brands in China and owns the East Dawning and Little Sheep concepts outright.

Shares of Yum China, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker YUMC, took a hit on July 6, falling more than 10 percent as second-quarter earnings released that day, while solid, fell below expectations. The shares have since rebounded.

Barrons.com suggested the selloff could have been an overreaction. Morgan Stanley analyst John Glass told the financial website that selling pressure was exaggerated given the "in-line" and "improving second-quarter" results.

Glass has a $41 price target on the stock, which closed at $37.07 on Monday.

One reason he is optimistic is that revenue from delivery and mobile payments are expected to grow.

CEO Mickey Pant confirmed that on the last earnings call: "We are making progress in the key themes we are investing in - loyalty programs, digital and delivery capabilities, and continued upgrades of restaurant assets and optimization of store formats."

So that KFC smartphone looks like a decent way to increase those online fried chicken orders.

Contact the writer at williamhennelly@chinadailyusa.com.
Home Credit Group, the financial giant from the Czech Republicthat employs more than 80,000 Chinese staff, will receive 2 billion yuan ($296.5 million) "immediately" from PAG Asia Capital, a Hong Kong-based private equity firm, said the group's top management.

The cooperation is aimed at ensuring Home Credit Group's China operation will eventually be listed on the stock market.

Jiri Smejc, chairman of Home Credit Group, made the announcement in Prague, where the China Investment Forum, with the theme of promoting the Belt and Road Initiative, was kicked off on Tuesday by Liu Yunshan, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee. He was joined by Czech Republic Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka.

The two companies signed the cooperation agreement on Tuesday. It will allow Home Credit Group to accelerate its pace of localization by seeking Chinese shareholders after having had a presence in China for up to 10 years.

It is expected that it will take another three to five years to complete the process of gaining approval from regulatory bodies that will make PAG become the group's shareholder in China.

Smejc said his group's partnership with PAG has showcased its confidence in the stability and promising prospects of China's financial market. He added that China's regulatory bodies have made tremendous efforts to beef up the robust market in previous years.

The registered capital of the Home Credit Group's operations in China amounted to 7 billion yuan and the new input will make PAG a minority shareholder.

"The investment will be in place immediately," Smejc said before the signing ceremony on Tuesday.

He said the partnership was finalized after two years of negotiations andexplained that his group had been trying to identify "qualified" local partners and investors for some time.

"This is a very big and strategic decision for us, which has showcased our confidence and commitment to this dynamic market," he said.

Shan Weijian, chairman of PAG Group, an alternative investment management firm, said: "We are very pleased to form a partnership with one of the world's most innovative consumer finance providers."

Shan said his company will contribute its knowledge in the China market to help Home Credit Group further grow and better serve its customers, while both entities have set a goal of "eventually listing Home Credit Group's China operations on an internationally recognized stock market," after all necessary regulatory approvals.

According to their agreement, both sides have committed to help develop a healthy consumer finance sector in China, recognizing the sector's great potential.

Home Credit Group said partnering with PAG will enable it to open a dialogue with additional local partners regarding strategic cooperation and investment.

Smejc said China is his group's largest and fastest-growing market, with 7.5 billion euros of total assets and more than 13.2 million active customers as of the end of March. It has 178,00points of saleacross the country.

Thanks its success in China, Smejc said his company is also the biggest consumer finance provider in several countries in Asia,but not in India.

"But very soon, we will be the most competitive one in that country as well," said Smejc, who added that his company mainly offers small loans to individual borrowers.

fujing@chinadaily.com.cn
US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany July 7, 2017. [Photo/Agencies]

WASHINGTON  US President Donald Trump had another, previously undisclosed conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit in Germany this month.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer and National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton confirmed that Trump and Putin spoke at a dinner for world leaders and their spouses at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

The conversation came hours after Trump and Putin's first official face-to-face meeting on July 7, which was originally scheduled to last just half an hour but stretched on for more than two. The two world leaders were also captured on video shaking hands and exchanging a few words after they arrived at the G20 summit of industrialized and developing nations earlier that day.

Anton would not specify the duration of the conversation. But he said the discussion was casual and should not be characterized as a "meeting" or even a less formal, but official, "pull-aside.""A conversation over dessert should not be characterized as a meeting," he said.

The dinner, hosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was open only to world leaders and their spouses, as well as one translator per couple, according to a senior White House official who described the event on condition of anonymity despite the president's criticism of un-named sources.

The official stressed that Trump spoke with many leaders over the course of the dinner and said that he spoke briefly with Putin, who was seated next to first lady Melania Trump, as the event was concluding. Trump spoke with Putin using Russia's translator, since the American translator did not speak Russian.

But Ian Bremmer, who said he spoke with two people who attended the dinner, said that Trump and Putin spoke for nearly an hour while sitting among the other world leaders and their spouses at the dinner. Bremmer is a foreign affairs columnist and the president of the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm.

Attendees described the meeting as startling, said Bremmer, who was told Trump was very animated as he spoke with Putin, often using his hands to gesture.

Trump and Putin's relationship has been under scrutiny since the election campaign, when Trump repeatedly praised Putin as a strong leader and publicly encouraged him to hack then-rival Hillary Clinton's emails. Trump aides have since said he was joking.

US intelligence officials have concluded that the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election in order to help Trump. Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on their findings and dismissed investigations into potential collusion between his campaign and Moscow as a "witch hunt."

AP
US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks to the media about plans to repeal and replace Obamacare on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US on June 27, 2017. [Photo/Agencies]

WASHINGTON - Three Republican senators said Tuesday they would oppose moving ahead on a new GOP plan only aiming to repeal Obamacare, leaving Republicans once again short of votes needed to carry on with their seven-year-old drive.

Lisa Murkowski, Shelley Moore Capito and Susan Collins indicated Tuesday that they would not vote to move forward a GOP repeal of the Affordable Care Act, known as the Obamacare, to the Senate floor without implementing an immediate replacement.

Their opposition came after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell conceded failure in efforts to repeal and immediately replace the Obamacare late Monday night as more Republican senators defected against the revised Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), a GOP bill designed to overhaul the Obamacare.

But McConnell said the Senate will vote to take up the House-passed bill in coming days while calling for a repeal vote on Obamacare with a two-year delay for substitute.

"I regret that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failures of Obamacare will not be successful," McConnell said on the Senate floor Tuesday. "That doesn't mean we should give up."

However, members of McConnell's caucus said a repeal-only bill would not have their support, shortly after he made those remarks.

"My position on this issue is driven by its impact on West Virginians," Senator Capito said in a statement.

"With that in mind, I cannot vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians," Capito said.

"To repeal there has to be a replacement," Senator Murkowski of Alaska told reporters. "There's enough chaos already, and this would just contribute to it."

Separately, Senator Collins of Maine said she was opposing the repeal and delay proposal as it is not constructive to repeal a law closely associated with the health care system but only plan to come up with a replacement over the next two years.

Republicans control a 52-48 majority in the 100-seat Senate. Under budget reconciliation rules, at least 50 votes are required to pass a plan, with Vice President Mike Pence to break a tie.

With Senator John McCain of Arizona recovering at home from surgery, two or more defections would stall any Republican proposal, were there a unanimous opposition from Democrats and independents.

The Senate's Obamacare replacement plan, the BCRA, collapsed Monday night when Collins and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky were joined by Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas in opposing the motion before McConnell shifted to advancing a repeal-only plan, stalled almost immediately the next day.

US President Donald Trump said Tuesday he was "very disappointed" with the defeat in advancing the Republican health care plan, one of his major campaign promises during the 2016 presidential elelction.

"Let Obamacare fail," he said. "We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it."

The GOP effort to repeal and replace the Obamacare has stalled mutiple times in past weeks.

Republicans are divided amid unsolved concerns of rising costs and fewer insurers once the BCRA was enacted, while Democrats argue the GOP bill would cost tens of millions of people's coverage.
Eight prominent business leaders from China, led by Jack Ma, founder and executive chairman of the Alibaba Group, and 12 from the US, led by Stephen Schwarzman, chairman and CEO of The Blackstone Group, gathered in Washington for the inaugural US-China Business Leaders Summit on Tuesday.

Both sides agreed to establish an annual dialogue to offer both governments solutions to pressing challenges in the China-US economic relationship, according to a joint statement released after the summit.

The first meeting was marked by "constructive and positive" dialogue, it said.

The group discussed economic issues of mutual importance to both countries. Both sides agreed that as business leaders, they have critical interests in and a responsibility to promote a steady and positive economic relationship between China and the US.

"As entrepreneurs, we should utilize our wisdom and capacity to solve trade issues, rather than create trouble," Ma said.

"We're here to solve the problems of the future, not the problems of yesterday," Ma continued. "The economic dialogue between China and the US should have a good vision that helps to solve problems rather than fight with each other."

The summit was first proposed by Ma to US President Donald Trump in January, with the purpose of encouraging business leaders from China and the US to get involved more actively in the steady development of China-US economic relations.

Trump celebrated American-made products on Monday.

"We want to build, create and grow more products in our country using American labor, American goods and American grit," Trump said on Monday.

"China is the best market for commodities that are made in America," Ma said. "In the future, there will be less and less 'Made in China' or 'Made in America'. There will be 'Made in internet'. Everything in the world is all connected. We call it e-commerce today; we'll call it e-business in the future."

Ma said globalization could not be stopped. "The good thing is that I think President Trump listens. Initially, President Trump and I had different viewpoints. After I talked with him, he thinks what I said made sense. Then I found out he did change and follows a path that leads to a better way," Ma said.

The success of the meeting was rooted in the foundation established in President Xi Jinping's and Trump's meeting in April at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

"The first 100 day has been reached. But I think the past 100 days is just a start. We should create more 100 days for China and the US. And it requires the efforts of us entrepreneurs," Ma said.

leshuodong@chinadailyusa.com
From beautiful botanical gardens, and parks to an array of attractions and great restaurants, Buffalo, New York, offers visitors plenty to see and do. Take the kids to the zoo, explore the Buffalo Museum of Science and enjoy an array of activities offered in downtown Buffalo. Other top things to do in Buffalo, NY, include the Erie Basin Marina, the Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin D. Martin House Complex, and Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site.

We recommend that you call the attractions and restaurants ahead of your visit to confirm current opening times.

1. Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens  Courtesy of Zack Frank - Fotolia.com

The Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens are located in South Park in Buffalo, and are dedicated to inspiring and encouraging an appreciation for plant life. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of New Yorks famous Central Park, the gardens were also created to provide a place for the public to enjoy an impressive living plant collection, as well as a community cultural institution and center for research and education. If you are looking for best romantic things to do in Buffalo, this is a great place to visit. The gardens are home to a beautiful tri-domed glass, wood, and steel conservatory designed by Lord & Burnham, and host a variety of exhibitions, educational programs, and events throughout the year. The gardens are open seven days a week and are fully handicapped accessible. 2655 South Park Avenue, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-827-1584

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2. Erie Basin Marina, Buffalo, New York  Courtesy of Neelrad - Fotolia.com

The Erie Basin Marina is a beautiful riverfront park and marina located on Buffalos downtown waterfront. The marina, situated next to the Erie Canal Harbor, is home to a private marina, a public park, and gardens with a waterfront observation tower, restaurants, and a lovely winding waterfront path to stroll along. If you are wondering what to do in Buffalo on a sunny day, this is a beautiful place to visit. During the summer, the marinas glorious garden features a variety of flower collections and an award-winning rose garden set against the backdrop of the tranquil water and bobbing yachts and boats of the marina. During summer, the marina is packed with walkers, joggers, boaters, kayakers, and families enjoying the lovely surroundings and views.

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3. The Buffalo Zoo, Buffalo, New York  Courtesy of Peter - Fotolia.com

Located in Delaware Park, the Buffalo Zoo is home to a diverse collection of wild and exotic animals, as well as over 320 different species of plants. Founded in 1875, the Buffalo Zoo is the third-oldest zoo in the United States, and it serves as a source of conservation, recreation, and education for the people of Western New York. Major exhibits at the zoo include Sea Lion Cove, Rainforest Falls, Otter Creek, and the special childrens zoo, Heritage Farm. The Buffalo Zoo is one of the best things to do in Buffalo with kids. There is also a new exhibit called Arctic Edge, which has two polar bear enclosures with underwater viewings for guests. 300 Parkside Avenue, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-837-3900 More places to visit: The Ultimate Niagara Falls List: 15 Best Things to See & Do.



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4. Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York  Burchfield Penney Art Center



The Burchfield Penney Art Cente is a museum exclusively dedicated to the art and artists of Western New York. The museum plays host to more than 30 major exhibitions a year, featuring works by various famed artists, including American watercolorist Charles E. Burchfield. The museum also offers a variety of educational programs and learning opportunities for the community in the form of outreach programs, workshops, classes, partnerships, and collaborations for students, educators, and adults. If you are looking for romantic date ideas, head to the Burchfield Penney Art Center. The museums inviting cafe serves a tempting menu of delicious homemade soups, sandwiches, snacks, and desserts, as well as beer and wine, with a special brunch menu on Saturdays. The museum is open every day of the week and is fully wheelchair accessible. 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-878-6011

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5. Hotel Henry, Buffalo, New York  Hotel Henry



Hotel Henry is a charming urban resort set on 42 acres near Buffalo's downtown district, providing convenient access to top area attractions such as Delaware Park and the city's Museum District. The full-service concept hotel, which is housed within the National Historic Landmark Richardson Olmsted Campus, is connected to the beautiful Elmwood Village and set amidst a landscape of beautiful public parks and lakes. 88 guest rooms and suites infuse the campus' historic architecture with modern flair, offering amenities such as flat screen televisions, loaner tablets, and complimentary wireless internet. Dining options range from the ingredient-focused 100 Acres restaurant to the vibrant Lounge at Hotel Henry cocktail bar. 444 Forest Ave, Buffalo, NY 14213, Phone: 716-882-1970

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6. The Buffalo Transportation Pierce-Arrow Museum, Buffalo, New York  Courtesy of venerala - Fotolia.com



Located at the corner of Seneca Street and Michigan Avenue, the Buffalo Transportation Pierce Arrow Museum pays homage to the rich transportation history of Western New York. Opened in 2001, the museum features an extensive collection of transportation memorabilia, historical artifacts, and vintage vehicles, including a 1903 Pierce Stanhope. The museum also boasts a replica of the 1927 Buffalo filling station designed by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The station was never built, however. Guided tours through the museum and its impressive collection by expert guides can be arranged. 263 Michigan Ave, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-853-0084

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7. Things to Do Near Me: Elmwood Village, Buffalo, New York  Courtesy of eldadcarin - Fotolia.com

Located in central Buffalo, Elmwood Village is a friendly neighborhood situated between Elmwood Avenue and Delaware Avenue. It is home to a number of retails stores, businesses, restaurants, and popular attractions and historic buildings. If you are wondering what to do in Buffalo today, this is a great place to start exploring. The village features over 300 shops, coffee houses, cafes, and museums, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Burchfield Penny Art Center, the H.H. Richardson Complex, and the historic Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church. With its range of boutiques, brand stores, and specialty shops, the Elmwood neighborhood is a shoppers paradise, and it also has a vibrant nightlife. 875 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-881-0707



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8. Things to Do Near Me: Buffalo Museum of Science, Buffalo, New York  Courtesy of Roman_23203 - Fotolia.com

The Buffalo Museum of Science is a popular science museum located near the Kensington Expressway. It is dedicated to the exploration of science, technology, and astronomy. Situated in a historic building in Buffalos downtown district, the museum is home to a variety of exhibitions that cover subject matter such as astronomy, geology, biology, and space technology, including Our Marvelous Earth, Bug Works, and Our Place in Space. The Buffalo Museum of Science is one of the best things to do in Buffalo with kids. The museum offers a range of workshops, classes, and educational programs, as well as field trips and guided tours to the museum, and a traveling outreach program. The museum has a cafe that serves freshly made snacks, light meals, and beverages. 1020 Humboldt Parkway, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-896-5200



9. Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin D. Martin House, Buffalo, New York  Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin D. Martin House

World-renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Darwin D. Martin House Complex, which is considered to be one of his greatest works. Built in the early 20th century for Buffalo businessman Darwin D. Martin, the residential compound has been hailed as one of Wrights most famous works from his Prairie School Era, and it received a National Historic Landmark status in 1986. Located at 125 Jewett Parkway and dedicated to preserving, interpreting, and promoting world-class architecture, the complex offers a variety of educational programs, youth workshops, and adult classes and lectures on architecture and design. 125 Jewett Parkway, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-856-3858

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10. Things to Do Near Me: Buffalo River History Tours, Buffalo, New York  Steve/stock.adobe.com

Take a cruise through history with a fascinating 90-minute narrated tour along the Buffalo River. Buffalo River History Tours cruise the waterways of the river and provide narrated tours on the 48-seater River Queen, which include the Buffalo River City Tour and the Silo City Tour. Learn the story of the Erie Canal and admire the beautiful buildings of the city on the Buffalo River City Tour or see the nation's largest collection of standing grain elevators and find out more about the citys history as the greatest grain port in the world on the Silo City Tour. The River Queen can be rented for special functions and private events with full catering facilities. 44 Prime St. Buffalo, NY 14202, Phone: 716-796-4556 Next read: Best Time to Visit Niagara Falls & Other Travel Tips



11. Things to Do Near Me: Buffalo Pedal Tours, Buffalo, NY  Buffalo Pedal Tours

Buffalo Pedal Tours is a tour company that offers visitors a great new way to see the city and share their experience with old and new friends. Buffalo Pedal Tours is a green pedal limo that takes guests on a tour of the city, highlighting famous attractions, architectural gems, and historic buildings, as well as the best restaurants, cafes, and bars. The tour bus is pedal-powered and directed by a driver. It is not only environmentally-friendly but it is also a comfortable and safe way to visit some of Buffalos best bars without having to worry about driving. General tours are open to all ages and the tour bus can also be hired for private events and special functions. Phone: 716-984-3834

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12. Things to Do Near Me with Kids: Larkin Square, Buffalo, NY  Larkin Square

Located in Buffalos Larkinville district, Larkin Square is a unique neighborhood that opened in 2012 at the location of the historic Larking Soap Company warehouse. Larkin Square is envisioned as a gathering place and a neighborhood hub, with a range of ever-changing activities. The whimsical architecture and colorful furniture in the open space create a great background for community gatherings, live music, and various events. The Filling Station, a former 1930s gas station, is now a popular restaurant during the day, while in the evening it hosts events such as Food Truck Tuesday or the KeyBank Live at Larkin concert. On Tuesdays, up to 40 food trucks from Rochester and Buffalo gather at Larkin Square and the party starts with great food, cool beer, and live music.



13. Buffalo and Erie County Naval and Military Park, Buffalo, NY  Courtesy of Pierrette Guertin - Fotolia.com

The Buffalo and Erie County Naval & Military Park is a museum that pays tribute to the history of the American Navy. Located on the shore of Lake Erie in Buffalo, the museum is home to several decommissioned US Naval vessels, including the Fletcher-class destroyer USS The Sullivans, the Cleveland-class cruiser USS Little Rock, the and the submarine USS Croaker. In addition to the large ships, the museum also has smaller vessels, vehicles, and aircraft with ties to the Navy on display, and it hosts a variety of events relating to major historical moments of the Navys past. The Park hosts traditional Scout overnight encampments, as well as educational tours and fun-filled field trips for young people. One Naval Park Cove, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-847-1773



14. Spirit of Buffalo - Buffalo Sailing Adventures, Buffalo, NY  Spirit of Buffalo - Buffalo Sailing Adventures

Experience Buffalo from the water with a sailing adventure on the Spirit of Buffalo. Cruise the waterways of the Erie Canal as you take in the sights and sounds of the city on this beautiful 73-foot schooner, which is sailed and manned by a professional crew. Enjoy magnificent sunsets over Lake Erie on the sunset sails or sip wine from the Niagara region and enjoy a cheese and cracker buffet on the special Wine in the Wind cruise. Sample some of Buffalo's best craft brews and light snacks on a two-hour craft beer cruise or entertain the kids with a fun-filled pirate adventure with treasure hunts, face painting, pirate stories, and music. Combine a romantic sunset cruise with dinner at the Pearl Street Grill for a perfect evening overlooking the water. 44 Prime Street, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-796-7210



15. Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site , Buffalo, NY  Courtesy of Zack Frank - Fotolia.com



Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site is a museum dedicated to the life of the United States 26th President, Theodore Roosevelt. The museum is home to a range of interactive and immersive exhibitions and displays, following the life of Roosevelt from birth to the presidency and the pivotal role he played in leading the nation and the world. Daily guided tours through the museum take you back in time to Buffalo's heyday and the Pan-American Exposition, along with other ground-breaking events that changed the face of history. The museum also leads group and private tours, and it is open year-round. 641 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-884-0095

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16. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY  Courtesy of Sam Spiro - Fotolia.com



Established by the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy in 1862, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery is located on Elmwood Avenue and presents an outstanding collection of modern and contemporary art. Dedicated to fostering the understanding and appreciation of contemporary and modern art, the Gallery acts as an artistic, cultural, and educational resource for both the public and community, and it boasts a collection of works by celebrated nineteenth-century artists such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, and Piet Mondrian, amongst others. Educational programs include classes like Art with Artists, Directors Lecture Series, and Art of Jazz. Furthermore, the museums library and archives are an invaluable sourced of research for students and budding artists alike. 1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-882-8700 More NY destinations: 50 Best Things to Do in the Hudson Valley.



17. Things to Do in Buffalo, New York: Buffalo City Hall Tour  Courtesy of Zack Frank - Fotolia



Buffalo City Hall is world-renowned Art Deco building and one of the largest city halls in America. The building is the seat of the municipal government of the city of Buffalo, and it is an architectural masterpiece open to the public through guided tours. Designed by John Wade, the building was completed in 1931 and is currently listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Docent-led tours of the building are free and include viewings of the Council Chambers, the Mayor's Office, and an observation deck that offers breathtaking views of Buffalo. Suite 201, 617 Main Street, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-852-3300

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18. Things to Do in Buffalo, New York: Delaware Park  Courtesy of suti - Fotolia.com



Designed by the father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted, Delaware Park is one of three parks that make up part of the Buffalo Olmsted Park System. Simply named The Park by Olmsted, this beautiful 350-acre refuge acts as Buffalos Central Park with a collection of gardens and meadows, forests and lakes, picnic lawns, and playgrounds for the public to enjoy. It is also home to many of Buffalos renowned cultural institutions. The historic Parkside Lodge features manicured Parkside Lodge croquet and picnic lawns for rent while the Quarry Garden, a magnificently landscaped garden, has lovely reflective pools, stone walls, and arched bridges. 84 Parkside Ave., Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-838-1249



19. Canalside, Buffalo, NY  Courtesy of mbruxelle - Fotolia.com



Situated in the heart of Buffalos waterfront gentrification, Canalside is a public area along the riverfront that boasts a variety of entertainment and activities for the whole family. It has plenty of space for vessels and lovely open areas for visitors to relax and appreciate the views. Canalside hosts hundreds of events every year and an array of activities for everyone to enjoy, such as paddle and pedal boating, cycling, exercise and yoga classes, horse and carriage rides, boxing and martial arts classes, haunted history walks, and Canalside pub crawls. There are a range of places to eat and drink along the waterfront, which can be accessed through entrances off Scott Street and Marine Drive. 44 Prime Street, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-574-1537

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20. Things to Do in Buffalo, New York: Shakespeare in Delaware Park  Courtesy of jgolby - Fotolia.com



Shakespeare in Delaware Park is a professional theater company that presents free entertainment in the form of high-quality theater productions to a wide range of audiences. The theater company presents shows throughout the summer on a Grand Tudor-Style stage in Delaware Park, a historic park designed by landscaping guru Frederick Law Olmsted. They particularly focus on the works of William Shakespeare. The company is dedicated to encouraging both children and adults to develop an interest and appreciation for theater and the phenomenal works of Shakespeare. To accomplish this endeavor, they offer a range of educational programs and summer camps and present outstanding entertainment at no cost. 716-856-4533



21. Things to Do in Buffalo, New York: Tommyrotter Distillery  Tommyrotter Distillery



Tommyrotter Distillery is a craft small-batch distillery in Buffalo, opened to the public in 2015 by San Insalaco and Bobby Finan within the city's historic Hydraulics district. The distillery, which is housed within a century-old factory building, has been the recipient of gold medals and best-in-show awards from prestigious international liquor competitions, including the San Francisco World Spirits Competition and the New York World Wine and Spirits Competition. Craft vodka, whiskey, and gin variants are offered, with all products distilled and packaged onsite at the distillery's 2,700-square-foot production facility, which may be explored as part of guided tours. 500 Seneca St #110, Buffalo, NY 14204, Phone: 716-312-1252



22. Things to Do in Buffalo, New York: Tifft Nature Preserve  Courtesy of vchphoto - Fotolia.com



Tifft Nature Preserve is a 264-acre nature reserve established for the preservation and conservation of the local environment and for the public to enjoy a range of outdoor activities. Once part of a huge dairy farm owned by George Washington Tifft and later serving as a coal and iron ore transshipment center, the nature reserve was opened in 1976 and has since offered the public a lovely natural space in which to relax. The park features over five miles of walking trails and guided walks, as well as three well-maintained boardwalks with viewing platforms for wildlife and bird watching and fishing at Lake Kirsty. 1200 Fuhrmann Boulevard, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-825-6397

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23. Buffalo Lighthouse  lucky-photo/stock.adobe.com The iconic Buffalo Lighthouse, also known as the 1833 Buffalo Lighthouse, was lit for the first time back in the year 1833 and continued to serve as a lighthouse for the harbor until 1914. Situated within the citys Outer Harbor, this historical lighthouse also acts as the Lighthouse Point Parks main focal point. During the weekends, guests can take in scenic views, explore artifact displays, and learn more about the lighthouse through historic and informational signs. Tours of the lighthouse tower are available by appointment. Panoramic views of the Buffalo waterfront can be seen from the top of the Buffalo Lighthouse. Fuhrmann Boulevard, Buffalo, NY 14203



24. Buffalo Harbor State Park  leungchopan/stock.adobe.com In addition to offering gorgeous views of scenic Lake Erie, Buffalo Harbor State Park features bicycling paths, picnic tables, a spacious beach for sunbathing and strolling, public restrooms, a fish cleaning station, a dock for personal watercraft, boat launches, an on-site restaurant and a snack shop, walking trails, a bait shop, a ship shop, and a 1,000 slip marina. There is also a nautical-themed playground for children of any age. Along with all of the outdoor recreation opportunities provided at Buffalo Harbor State Park, theres more fun to be found at the adjacent Tifft Nature Preserve as well. 111 Fuhrmann Boulevard, Buffalo, NY 14203, 716-822-1207



25. Shea's Performing Arts Center  Shea's Performing Arts Center Shea's Performing Arts Center in downtown Buffalo is a full-service performing arts center with the historic Buffalo Theatre as its crown jewel. First opening to the community in 1926, the theatre was a result of Michael Sheas dream and received the nickname of the Wonder Theatre. The Buffalo Theatre originally operated as a movie house. Guests of the performing arts center today can watch a wide array of performances, such as family shows, concerts, ballets, operas, and touring Broadway musicals. Shea's Performing Arts Center also hosts a free classic film series and educational programs, as well as local school presentations. 650 Main St, Buffalo, NY 14202, 716-847-1410



25 Best Things to Do in Buffalo, New York

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Buffalo Touring Company

Buffalo Touring Company offers visitors historical tours on a Segway, a two-wheeled personal transporter powered by an electric motor that moves in response to the riders center of gravity. The tour takes visitors past some of the citys most famous attractions, buildings, and historic sites such as the Buffalo History Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Hoyt Lake, Delaware Park, and the Buffalo Zoo.

Experienced tour guides will share the history and interesting facts about the "Queen City" as you cruise in safety and style.

Buffalo History Museum, One Museum Court, Buffalo, New York, Phone: 716-259-4887

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Attraction Spotlight: Buffalo Museum of Science

The Buffalo Museum of Science has a grand history, and there has never been a better time to visit this long-time staple of the community. The museum has recently undergone a major renovation and is now embracing the modern age. What was once educational and interesting, if a little dusty, is now sparkling, immersive, engaging, and fun. We learn better when were enjoying ourselves, and the Buffalo Museum of Science is a day out that stimulates our brains as much as our sense of fun.

The museum can trace its roots and genesis all the way back to 1836, when the Young Mens Association first founded. They were the city of Buffalos organisers of cultural affairs and dealt with literature, art, the public library, and sciences. The museum started life as a sort of happy accident, and the library, as was customary, was receiving a lot of donations of curios, specimens, minerals, shells, insects, paintings, and fossils. So many in fact, and of such value of interest, that the YMA decided to put them on display, a decision that essentially birthed the first iteration of the Buffalo Museum of Science.

Over the years, it moved from space to space, growing and evolving but always temporary, until 1929, when it found its home in the building it inhabits today. Its still growing and changing and has done so since its inception, but never as aggressively or on such a grand scale as the refurbishment that has taken place over the past couple of years. What was largely a look but dont touch collection of exhibits and dioramas has now been transformed into halls that let the visitor dive in and get their hands filthy in the sciences. The next mission they want to achieve is the completion of the observatory on the roof and they are seeking donations and funding to finish what they have started.

The museum is still home to a range of fascinating exhibits and has curated to one of the countrys largest collections of specimens from the Niagara region. Its a study in botany, entomology, anthropology, palaeontology, zoology, and mycology. You can trace the history of the region through the flora and fauna that have inhabited it, and the exhibits provide an in-depth understanding of the area to both locals and visitors alike.

With a plethora of specialist events and exhibitions as well as the permanent display and collections, its always a good idea to check on the website to see what is coming up on the schedule.

Address

1020 Humboldt Parkway, Buffalo, New York 14211, Phone: 716-896-5200

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Attraction Spotlight: Buffalo Botanical Gardens

The beautiful Buffalo Botanical Gardens is a green oasis nestled in the heart of South Park. The site is home to a diverse and varied range of flora from across the globe, and as you wander through the installation you will be transported around the world, viewing native plants from different regions and continents. The carefully curated exhibition is planted with attention to synergy and symbiosis, and the plants work together to provide the healthiest and most vibrant and fruitful arrangements.

The design and architecture behind the layout of the gardens, flowerbeds, greenhouses, and conservatories that make up the main complex were the work of Frederick Law Omstead, who is most famous for his work on New York Central Park. The breathtaking majesty of the design has meant that the gardens have received adequate funding and protection and are now safeguarded on the National Register of Historic Places.

Built in the 1890s, the Victorian design of the glass domes that make up the gardens are as stunning now as they were when it was first opened to the public. If you take a bird's eye view of the plan for the gardens, you will see the tranquil symmetry of this perfect space, and as you stroll through the flowers and trees, this effect is emphasized while you can enjoy the beautiful smells and sights at whichever pace you decide to set.

There are not just flowers, though. The gardens host various different exhibitions and events over the course of the year and make full use of the setting. Whether its yoga in the healing gardens or attending the botanical brew tasting evenings, when the park opens later and you can sample local alcoholic treats, youll be sure to find something to pop along to thatll make your friends positively green with envy.

Address

2655 South Park Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14218, Phone: 716-827-1584

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 South Texas Institute for the Arts



The South Texas Institute for the Arts collects, preserves, exhibits, and interprets works of visual art with a particular focus on the Americas and surrounding regions.

Established in 1945 to raise awareness of art and its role in society, as well as inspire an appreciation and enjoyment of art, the South Texas Institute for the Arts stands today as both a recreational and educational resource for students, educators, and the public alike.

The museum features a permanent art collection with over 1,500 works of art in various mediums, from painting, drawing, and sculpture to ceramics, collages, and textiles, as well as evolving exhibitions and architecture.

The South Texas Institute for the Arts is one of the best things to do in Corpus Christi, Texas. The museum also presents a variety of programs, which include lectures and bilingual gallery talks, workshops and art classes, and dance, theatrical, and musical performances.

1902 North Shoreline Boulevard, Corpus Christi, Texas, Phone: 361-825-3500





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This month I begin seeing spiritual direction clients -- a.k.a. "directees" or, in Hebrew, mushpa'ot. (The name for a spiritual director in Hebrew is mashpi'ah; the two words share the root  which denotes divine abundance or flow.) As I've mentioned this milestone to people in my life, many have asked, "what exactly is spiritual direction?" And I've thought: aha! A blog post is in order!

Spiritual direction is a relationship, a process through which one person helps another discern the presence of the sacred in their life. This discipline exists in many religious traditions (I know, for instance, that Jesuit priests in formation are required to be in spiritual direction -- as are ALEPH rabbinic students.) In my corner of the Jewish world, this relationship is called hashpa'ah (which, again, derives from the root meaning abundant flow from God.) In the words of my training program, "Hashpa'ah is the traditional term for the relationship with a spiritual director or mashpia who offers guidance and teaching on matters of Jewish faith and practice, and on a personal relationship with the Divine."

(As the wikipedia entry on spiritual direction notes, this Hebrew term is common in the Chabad-Lubavitch community and also in the Jewish Renewal community. Among Orthodox Jews who come from the less mystical and more rationalist end of the spectrum, a spiritual director is more likely to be called mashgiach ruchani. A mashgiach is someone who advises on the kashrut of a kitchen, and a "mashgiakh ruchani" is someone who advises on the spiritual lives of others.) In English, the name for this process or relationship is spiritual direction.

A variety of answers to the question "what is spiritual direction" can be found here at Spiritual Directors International. Among those answers, my favorites are Liz Bud Ellman's assertion that "Simply put, spiritual direction is helping people tell their sacred stories everyday" and James Keegan's assertion that "Spiritual direction is the contemplative practice of helping another person or group to awaken to the mystery called God in all of life, and to respond to that discovery in a growing relationship of freedom and commitment."
One day recently, two friends from completely different quadrants of my life sent me a gorgeous Rilke poem that Father Richard Rohr had posted on his website. I had run across the poem myself a few months before, and had already tacked it up over my desk. But when two people sent it to me within an hour of each other, I couldn't help feeling as though someone wanted me to be paying attention -- both to that poem once again, and to Richard Rohr who had posted it.

Then my friend and teacher Rabbi Jeff Fox, with whom I was privileged to study a few weeks ago, recommended Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, by the same Richard Rohr. I ordered the book right away.

Rohr writes:

There is much evidence on several levels that there are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong "container" or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold.

The basic argument of Falling Upward is that most of us get caught up in "first half of life" issues and struggles and never make it to the work of the second half of life -- work that can only be done after one has done the internal work of the first half. Of course these two halves don't necessarily map to chronological age, and Rohr acknowledges that; it's possible to be quite young and already be doing one's second-half-of-life work, and vice versa. (If these ideas resonate, I recommend From Aging to Sage-ing, by Reb Zalman z"l.)

One of the challenges of spiritual life is staying open to being changed. Father Rohr writes:

The familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently. The new is always by definition unfamiliar and untested, so God, life, destiny, suffering have to give us a push -- usually a big one -- or we will not go. Someone has to make clear to us that homes are not meant to be lived in -- but only to be moved out from... The soul has many secrets. They are only revealed to those who want them, and are never completely forced upon us. One of the best-kept secrets, and yet one hidden in plain sight, is that the way up is the way down. Or, if you prefer, the way down is the way up.

The Hasidic masters had an aphorism for that one:    / yeridah l'tzorech aliyah -- descent for the sake of ascent. That's a frequent theme in Torah (the Joseph story is a paradigmatic example), and it's a frequent theme in spiritual life. Often we have to fall in order to rise. We descend or fall further from God (the language of distance is of course metaphor, but it's a good way of describing internal experience, even if we know that God isn't any "further away") and that descent itself sparks the yearning to ascend and seek closeness.

Reading this book during the Three Weeks, I was struck by how Rohr's teachings suit this season in the Jewish calendar year:

By denying their pain, avoiding the necessary falling, many have kept themselves from their own spiritual depths -- and therefore been kept from their own spiritual heights... The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling or changing or dying.

Of course the ego wants to avoid falling or changing or dying -- that's the ego's job. Part of our work is ensuring that one has enough ego to be able to live healthily in the world, without necessarily allowing the ego to be in the driver's seat, as it were. It's natural to resist change and loss and "falling." And yet all of those things are built in to the rhythms of human life. As I learned recently in a beautiful text from R' Shlomo Wolbe, our times of distance and sorrow are an important part of spiritual life too. If we deny our pain and avoid falling, we're slipping into the trap of spiritual bypassing, and that's not a path of genuine growth.

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage -- as if it were God! ... This resistance to change is so common, in fact, that it is almost what we expect from religious people, who tend to love the past more than the future of the present.

Change -- or one might say  / hitchadshut, renewal -- is core to spiritual life. One of my tradition's names for God is    / Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, "I Am Becoming Who I Am Becoming." God reveals God's-own-self to us through the unfolding of perennial change. The voice of revelation always sounds from Sinai, and it's our task to be attuned so that we can continue to enliven the world. That's the work of renewing Judaism, and the work of my rabbinate, and it's the work in which I believe Rohr is engaged, too, on his Christian path. And... I resonate deeply with his words about the profound irony of religious people, who should be pursuing growth, becoming attached instead to the status quo and fearing change.

There's much in this book that puts me in mind of my spiritual direction training and my experiences in spiritual direction, both as someone who has worked for many years with a spiritual director and as a mashpi'ah myself. The Hebrew term for spiritual direction is  / hashpa'ah, which comes from a root connoting divine abundance or flow. In Rohr's words:

More than anything else, the Spirit keeps us connected and safely inside an already existing flow, if we but allow it... Like good spiritual directors do, God must say after each failure of ours, "Oh, here is a great opportunity! Let's see how we can work with this!"

I love the idea of God as the ultimate spiritual director, sitting across from me and helping me grow. Often on long drives I imagine God sitting in my front seat -- a practice I learned from Reb Zalman z"l, who spoke of imagining Shechinah "dressed down" in blue jeans as his listening passenger -- and I pour out my heart to the One Who always hears me. Sometimes I even hear a response in return. (The title poem of my next collection of poetry came out of that experience...) On that note, the final quote I'll share here is one about being in I-Thou relationship with God, and being wholly seen. Rohr writes:

Many of us discover in times of such falling the Great Divine Gaze, the ultimate I-Thou relationship, which is always compassionate and embracing, or it would not be divine. Like any true mirror, the gaze of God receives us exactly as we are, without judgment or distortion, subtraction or addition. Such perfect receiving is what transforms us.

On the Jewish liturgical calendar we will shift soon (at the end of this Gregorian month -- erev Tisha b'Av is July 31) from the Three Weeks of mourning and brokenness to the Seven Weeks of consolation that lead us from Tisha b'Av to the Days of Awe. The challenge now is to let ourselves experience the "falling" of these Three Weeks, and to let ourselves be fully seen and fully known not despite our falling but even in and through it, so that our falling can be what Rohr might call "falling upward" -- descent for the sake of ascent, and for the sake of growth, and for the sake of becoming who we are most truly meant to be.
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HA NOI  National power utility Electricity of Vietnam (EVN) says increased production and decreased transmission loss will allow it to meet power needs in the 2017 dry season.

The utility announced on its website a first half production of 94.9 billion kW, a year-on-year increase of 7.23 per cent.

Commercial electricity production increased 8.47 per cent year-on-year to 82.9 billion kW, with domestic supply increasing by 8.78 per cent over last year. The most productive day on June 2 saw a record 628.4 million kW generated at the maximum transmission capacity of 30,206 megawatts.

EVN affirmed that the company would supply sufficient electricity to meet demand across all regions and purposes. It also promised to generate enough to meet increased consumption in the 2017 dry season which saw a prolonged heat wave in the Northern and Central Highlands at the beginning of June.

The general trend is southward transmission, EVN noted, with electricity transmitted from the north to the Central Highlands and southern regions.

The highest recorded electricity transmission capacity on the 500 kilovolt southward line was 3,600 megawatts. On average, total transmitted amount was 79.95 billion kilowatts, an increase of 4.7 per cent over 2016.

For the second half of 2017, EVN has set a production goal of 102.1 billion kW, in which commercial output including exports to Laos and Cambodia would reach 92.1 kW.

For 2010 to 2015, EVN spent VN492 trillion (US$21.8 billion) on 34 power generators and many other projects that laid a total 13,100 kilometres of power lines.

The company expects power demand to increase 10 per cent on a yearly basis, and plans to invest VN710.6 trillion ($31.3 billion) during the 2016-20 period.

Its official financial report for the year 2016 showed that total outstanding public debt was approximately VN487 trillion ($21.5 billion), up 7.1 per cent over 2015.

The funds were borrowed to invest in numerous power plants in order to meet national demand, it said.

EVNs Deputy Director General inh Quang Tri commented earlier this year that the company relied mainly on two financial sources, revenue power prices and capital arrangements.

Tri also said that each year, EVN would need between five and six billion dollars, and with little support from the Government, the utility had been working with the World Bank on ways to raise funds.

He said the company hoped to raise enough funds next year from various sources including the issuance of international bonds.

EVN also reported an improvement in its power loss index at 7.25 per cent for the past six months, 0.22 per cent lower than the set target. It attributed this achievement to a concerted effort by the companys numerous technology and operation departments, in order to minimise blackouts and risks within the national power grid.

In the first two quarters of 2017, EVN focused on enhancing customer service and improving the electricity accessibility index.

Since May 15, technical and administrative procedures have been minimised and all customers duly informed.

The company has also signed an agreement with the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry for the latter to perform regular surveys on and assessments of service quality.

Reliability indexes for EVN have increased significantly from last year. For the first six months of 2017, the System Average Interruption Duration Index reduced by 47 per cent, the Momentary Average Interruption Frequency Index by 40.2 per cent and the System Average Interruption Frequency Index by 47.6 per cent.

EVN has worked closely with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and its Water Resources Department, as well as other operational agencies on managing hydroelectric reservoirs to supply water for irrigation purposes.

There are still three releases left for the spring summer crop in the Red River Delta this year.  VNS
Viet Nam CEO Summit 2017 attracted the participation of more than 400 Vietnamese businesses from the countrys 500 biggest firms (VNR500), top 500 fastest developing firms (FAST 500), Best Prospect 500 and Top 1,000 biggest tax payers.  Photo bizlive.vn

HA NOI  Although Viet Nam is a relative late comer to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it can be confident of catching up if it adopts correct policies and measures, Nguyen Anh Tuan, CEO of the Boston Global Forum, told the Viet Nam CEO summit in Ha Noi yesterday.

Viet Nam is a big potential market for arfitical intelligent (AI), Tuan said, noting that the countrys population was nearing 100 million, many of them young people who could help Viet Nam access high-quality technologies and new knowledge.

In addition, Viet Nams consumption of new technologies has been relatively high, making the market attractive to high-tech investors, such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Samsung, according to Tuan.

On the other hand, Viet Nam has big IT firms well-known in the world, including Viettel and FPT, which are seeking new markets in banking, healthcare, education and transport. Viet Nam has been listed as one of the leading automation markets in the world.

In the context of the Fourth Revolution, Viet Nam should develop products with high added value to become a centre of high-tech, especially of AI, in the Southeast Asia region, he added.

He suggested that Viet Nam adopt preferential policies to encourage new AI products as well as facilitating the entry of American AI start-ups into the country.

Deputy Minister of Public Security, Nguyen Van Thanh, said the Fourth Industrial Revolution had wrought changes, such as big data, smart cities, virtual currency, AI, renewable energy, robots and nano technology.

Thanh said local businesses should develop a vision and actions to adapt to the fast-moving revolution affecting their production, organizational structure and customer demands.

Associate Professor Vu Minh Khuong, a senior expert on economic development policy from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy said Viet Nam had outstanding achievements over the past 10 years in terms of catching up with IT. The world and Southeast Asia had been impressed with Viet Nams achievements, he said, noting that the country had quickly integrated into the world despite of the low income of many of its residents.

Professor Fredmund Malik, chairman of the Malik Institute for Complexity Management, Governance and Leadership, spoke of successful management models and measures which had been applied in the worlds leading groups.

Viet Nam CEO Summit 2017 attracted the participation of more than 400 Vietnamese businesses from the countrys 500 biggest firms (VNR500), top 500 fastest developing firms (FAST 500), Best Prospect 500 and Top 1,000 biggest tax payers.

Vu ang Vinh, the general director of the Viet Nam Report that organized the conference, said the event aimed to connect business leaders, specialists on Viet Nam and international partners to exchange experiences, discuss the development of the local market and how to better integrate it into the global market.

During the event, Viet Nam Report honoured the top 10 commercial banks and top 10 insurance companies in the country.  VNS
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc (R) receives Osamu Masuko, Chief Executive Officer of Mitsubishi Motors Corp, in Ha Noi yesterday.  VNA/VNS Photo Thong Nhat

HA NOI  Viet Nams development strategy for the auto industry involves facilitating investors engagement in the effort, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said yesterday.

Receiving Osamu Masuko, Chief Executive Officer of Mitsubishi Motors Corp, in Ha Noi yesterday, he lauded the corporations plan to increase its investment in Viet Nam, particularly in promoting green designs in the market.

He said he looks forward to the company making further investment in modern assembling technology and boosting the sale of its electric vehicles in Viet Nam, contributing to the countrys environmental protection efforts.

The expansion plans of Mitsubishi Motors also helped realize agreements reached by Vietnamese and Japanese leaders to strengthen bilateral partnership, Phuc said.

Osamu Masuko said Mitsubishi had received significant support from Vietnamese authorities during the 20 years it operated in the country.

He said electric cars would be particularly suitable for the Vietnamese market, given their energy efficiency and environmental friendliness.

He said the corporation intended to scale up its investment in Viet Nam and in the ASEAN region, and revealed a Nissan-Mitsubishi joint venture plan to build a factory in the country.  VNS
HA NOI  Steel imports from India posted a whopping increase in the first six months of this year, customs statistics revealed.

Viet Nam imported 812,000 tonnes of steel from India worth US$422 million, representing a rise of more than 20 times in volume and 13 times in value over the same period last year.

The General Department of Customs said the huge increase in steel imports from India was attributed to low prices. Average price of steel from India was VN11.8 million (US$519) per tonne, VN1 million lower than China, the worlds largest steel producer, and VN1.4 million lower than the average steel import price to Viet Nam.

India is the worlds third largest steel producer.

According to o Duy Thai, chairman of steel company Pomina, Indian steel was now more competitive in price in comparison with Viet Nams top steel exporters, including China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, which had average prices of between $564 and $573.

Viet Nam imported a total of more than 7.9 million tonnes of steel in the first half of this year at total value of $4.61 billion, dropping by 17.3 per cent in volume but up 21.8 per cent in value over the same period last year. Steel import prices averaged $582 per tonne.

Viet Nam mainly imported steel from China - 3.95 million tonnes worth $2.23 billion - decreasing 23.8 per cent in volume but increasing 12.3 per cent in value, with average price of $564 per tonne.

More than one million tonnes were imported from Japan at a value of $646 million during the period.  VNS
HA NOI  Bien Hoa Sugar JSC has announced its 300 million shares traded on the HCM Stock Exchange will be delisted to complete the merger with Thanh Thanh Cong Tay Ninh Sugar JSC.

The company said in its statement on Monday that the shares were being delisted to conduct a share swap with Thanh Thanh Cong Tay Ninh Sugar JSC in accordance with the M&A agreement between the two companies.

Shares of Bien Hoa Sugar JSC will be delisted from the stock exchange on August 30 and the last trading day is August 29.

Shares of the two sugar producers have gained significantly since May on market speculation of a merger between the two largest companies in the sugar industry.

The two sides on June 7 signed a merger agreement to create the largest sugar company in Viet Nam with 30 per cent market share.

Under the agreement, Thanh Thanh Cong Tay Ninh Sugar JSC will swap its shares with more than 300 million shares of Bien Hoa Sugar JSC at the rate of 1:1.02, which means each share of Bien Hoa Sugar is equal to 1.02 shares of TTCS.

Shares of both companies are listed on the HCM Stock Exchange. SBT is the code for Thanh Thanh Cong Tay Ninh JSC and BHS is the code for Bien Hoa Sugar JSC.

SBT has surged 51.5 per cent in the last two months and BHS has gained 30 per cent in the same period. BHS stocks closed unchanged on Wednesday at VN21,100 (US$0.93) a share while SBT increased 0.7 per cent to settle at VN38,450 each.

At the current price level, total market capitalisation of SBT after the merger will reach $950 million.

The merger will increase the chartered capital of Thanh Thanh Cong Tay Ninh by more than VN3 trillion ($133.3 million) to VN5.57 trillion. The new company will have total assets of VN14.67 trillion and total payable assets of VN7.86 trillion.

Thanh Thanh Cong Tay Ninh expects its combined revenue will reach VN8.35 trillion following the merger and combined pre-tax profit will touch VN674 billion.

Also in May, Thanh Thanh Cong, the parent company of Thanh Thanh Cong Tay Ninh Sugar JSC, spent over VN1.33 trillion to acquire entire stake in the HAGL Sugar JSC from Hoang Anh Gia Lai Group.  VNS
HCM CITY  Pork prices have risen recently following programmes to stimulate demand and to control the number of pigs raised by farmers, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Nguyen Xuan Duong, deputy head of the ministrys Department of Livestock Production, said that a rise in exports to other countries, especially China, had helped raise prices.

As of today, pork prices are from VN40,000 to VN49,000 (US$1.8-$2.1) per kilo, increasing from VN25,000 per kilo of the last three months.

According to a representative of C.P. Viet Nam Corporation, which raises pigs, the pork price rose to VN41,500 per kilo today.

Nguyen Kim oan, deputy chairman of ong Nai Province Livestock Production Association, said that more and more traders were visiting farmers to buy pigs, but many farmers did not want to sell as they were waiting for higher prices.

Hoang Thi Lien, a pig-breeding farmer in the southeastern province of ong Nai, said that traders offered to pay VN44,000 per kilo but she had decided to sell at a later date.

Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade o Thang Hai said that this was a positive sign for farmers.

Hai, however, was concerned that the farmers might raise more pigs because of the rising prices.

The increase in growing pigs was one of the factors that contributed to low prices, according to Hai.

Huynh Thanh Vinh, head of the ong Nai Provinces Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, said that farmersdependence on the Chinese market to sell pork presented price risks.

The province is now focusing on reducing the number of pigs raised at small-size farms.

Quach Van Tay, head of Livestock Production and Animal Husbandry Division in Soc Trang Province, said farmers should carefully study market information and warnings from agricultural agencies.

They also should meet with local authorities to receive counselling about breeding practices.

Duong of the Department of Livestock Production said that the farmers should focus on disease control, provide vaccines for pigs, and disinfect farms.

State management agencies and enterprises will continue to enhance domestic and foreign consumption, he added.

He recommended the restructuring of breeding and livestock production by using co-operative chains, and diversifying livestock products to meet demand.

The ong Nai Province Department of Industry and Trade reported that the provinces total number of pigs was 1.6 million, a drop of 500,000 compared to the last three months.

Luc Van Thuy, head of the departments commerce division, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that the provinces pork market was now stable.

Phan Ngoc Chau, head of the Livestock Production and Animal Husbandry Division in Long An Province, said that reduced prices in the last three months had led to a decrease in the number of pigs in the province from 280,000 to 230,000.

Nguyen Van ong, head of Hau Giang Provinces Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, said the province would focus on raising 12,000 breeding pigs to prepare for the market when it recovers.  VNS
HA NOI  The State Bank of Viet Nam (SBV)s Governor Le Minh Hung on Wednesday gave approval in principle to the Singapores United Overseas Bank Limited (UOB) to open a 100-per cent foreign owned bank in Viet Nam.

The Governor also passed the UOB Vieetnams personnel list comprising names of people to be appointed as members of the board, supervisors and the general director.

The UOB will still need to continue completing the dossier, according to the SBVs regulations and guidance in order to be considered and granted a business licence for establishment and operation in Viet Nam. It will then have to be submitted to the Governor for consideration.

The SBV has also permitted the UOB to set up an affiliate based on the takeover of the banks HCM City branch right after being granted business licence.

In mid-2015, the Ministry of Planning and Investment urged the Government to instruct the SBV to issue a licence for UOB to operate a wholly foreign-owned bank in the country. The ministry said that Singapore is a major business partner, but does not yet have a fully-owned bank in Viet Nam, while other countries, even with smaller investments, have already established such banks.

The UOB is one of Asias leading financial institutions with a network of 500 offices in 18 countries and territories. It already operates a branch in HCM City.

So far, ANZ, Hong Leong, HSBC, ShinHan, Standard Chartered, CIMB, Public Bank Berhad and Woori Bank have opened wholly foreign-owned banks in Viet Nam.

According to experts, more foreign banks are expected to enter Viet Nams market which has major potential with a population of roughly 93 million.

They recommended that Vietnamese banks must operate on a larger scale, with huge investments in technology and products through consolidations and mergers to create better and stronger banks that can compete with foreign banks.

By 2020, in accordance with the commitment to the World Trade Organisation, Viet Nam will have to completely open the doors of its banking sector.  VNS
PARIS  One of the worlds greatest private collections of modern art is to be shown outside Russia for the time, exhibition organisers said on Tuesday.

The Louis Vuitton Foundation gallery in Paris, which had a smash-hit show earlier this year with another rarely seen Russian collection of early 20th-century masters, said the paintings amassed by the Morozov brothers will shown in the French capital in 2020.

The rich Moscow industrialists Mikhail and Ivan Morozov gathered a staggering trove of paintings by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir and Monet before the Russian revolution.

Some 200 canvasses including some by Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Derain will go on show in Paris for four months, the foundation said.

More than 1.2 million people flocked to see a show called the Icons of Modern Art drawn from the equally eye-catching collection of Sergei Shchukin, who was once the Morozovs great rival.

Such huge numbers flocking to the modest-sized private gallery, paid for by the French fashion tycoon Bernard Arnault and designed by Frank Gehry, caused a stir.

"The Morozovs and the Shchukins... dominated Moscows cultural life at the beginning of the 20th century, and helped contribute to the international recognition of French model painters," the foundation said.

But the art collections of both families were seized by the Soviet state after the revolution.

The Morozovs collection, which is now split between the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, the Tretyakov State Gallery and Pushkin Museum in Moscow, was regarded at the time as even more discerning than Shchukins.

It also includes works by Russian artists.

Jean-Paul Claverie, art advisor to LVMH boss Arnault, the head of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, said the Morozovs art has never been shown together on such a scale anywhere since it was seized.

"This is a major international event at the same level as the Shchukin show," he added.

The Shchukin and Morozov exhibitions will travel back to Russia for shows in St Petersburg and Moscow at a later date, the foundation said.

The exhibition is the fruit of years of negotiations between Arnault and the Russian authorities, with a partnership agreement signed last year between the foundation and the Hermitage and Pushkin museums.  AFP
Twitter/Afghan Embassy, D.C.(WASHINGTON) -- The six Afghan girls who were twice denied U.S. visas before President Donald Trump intervened at the last minute, won a silver medal for "courageous achievement" Tuesday at the robotics competition they traveled thousands of miles to attend.



The young women, who arrived in the U.S. shortly after midnight on Saturday, participated in the inaugural FIRST Global Challenge, in which teams of young women and men from around the world showcase robots they created. The three-day competition kicked off Sunday at Washington, D.C.'s DAR Constitution Hall.



The Afghanistan team's "courageous achievement" recognizes teams that exhibited a "can-do" attitude even under difficult circumstances or when things didn't go as planned. The gold medal in that category went to the South Sudan team and bronze to the Oman team, whose students are deaf.



The competition's top honors went to the Europe team, which won a gold award for getting the most cumulative points over the course of the competition. Poland got silver and Armenia snatched bronze.



The Afghan embassy in Washington tweeted photos of Ivanka Trump meeting the girls, writing, "Our #STEMGirls are doing so well at @F1RSTglobal #FGC2017 that @IvankaTrump had to see. Thanks for supporting #Afghanistan & #womeninSTEM."

The State Department's Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs also tweeted a photo of Ivanka with the Afghan team at the competition.

And Jennifer Korn, special assistant to the president, tweeted photos of the first daughter sitting down with the Afghan team, and at the competition, writing, "Amazing visit 2 @FIRSTweets w/ @IvankaTrump celebrating girls empowerment & STEM at Global Robotics comp & mtg / teams USA & Afghanistan."

Amazing visit 2 @FIRSTweets w/ @IvankaTrump celebrating girls empowerment & STEM at Global Robotics comp & mtg / teams USA & Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/Yj4eog6fzm  Jennifer S. Korn (@jennifersks) July 18, 2017

The team, from western Afghanistan's Herat region, had twice been denied visas to enter the country by the U.S. State Department, although the reason was never publicly disclosed. Still, many critics pointed to Trump's travel ban executive order and his administration's policies, which some perceive as hostile to some foreigners, for the girls' denial of entry.



But the president stepped in, and the team was soon U.S.-bound.



"The State Department worked incredibly well with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that this case was reviewed and handled appropriately," Dina Powell, deputy national security adviser for strategy, said in a statement following the president's intervention. "We could not be prouder of this delegation of young women who are also scientists -- they represent the best of the Afghan people and embody the promise that their aspirations can be fulfilled. They are future leaders of Afghanistan and strong ambassadors for their country."

Copyright  2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
HA NOI  A ceremony was held in Ha Noi on July 18 to mark the 55th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Viet Nam and Laos and 40 years since the signing of the Viet Nam-Laos Treaty of Amity and Cooperation.

Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, President Tran ai Quang, National Assembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, Deputy Prime Minister Truong Hoa Binh, Secretary of the Ha Noi Party Committee Hoang Trung Hai, and President of the Viet Nam Fatherland Front Central Committee Tran Thanh man and a number of former leaders joined together at the event.

The Lao delegation at the ceremony was led by Vice President Phankham Viphavanh.

Addressing the event, Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong celebrated the relations between Viet Nam and Laos over the past 55 years, which began officially with the establishment of diplomatic ties on September 5, 1962.

"That date is a significant historical event in bilateral relations, affirming the vital attachment of the two nations in their struggle for national independence and unity," he said.

In order to deepen the bilateral partnership, Viet Nam and Laos signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation on July 18, 1977, which emphasised that nothing can change the special relations between Viet Nam and Laos as well as the solidarity and friendship between people of the two nations.

Over the past 40 years, the treaty has become an important political and legal foundation for the unceasing reinforcement and development of the bilateral relations, serving national construction and defence in each country.

Showing his delight at the growth of the special ties between the two nations, the Party chief underscored that the relationship developed sustainably from a traditional to a special friendship.

"The relationship also expresses the wish of the two peoples in supporting each other to fight common enemies and build a partnership of equality, self-reliance, friendship and win-win cooperation," he said.

Analysing the regional and international situation, Trong affirmed that historical lessons of the relations between the two countries as well as the spirit and contents of the Treaty maintained their value and role as a direction for the development of the ties between the two Parties, States and people.

He also highlighted the need to continue completing mechanisms and policies to effectively realise agreements and strategic targets set by both sides, thus further expanding the special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between the two countries.

By all means, we must maintain and protect the Viet Nam-Laos relations as if we were protecting the pupil of our eyes, said the Party General Secretary.

On his part, Lao Vice President Phankham Viphavanh showed deep gratitude to the Party, State and people of Viet Nam, affirming that the Party, State and people of Laos were determined to preserve the friendship and special solidarity between the two nations, which had been nurtured with blood of soldiers and people of generations in both countries.

At the event, Huynh ac Huong, a 97-year-old veteran who represented the Vietnamese volunteer soldiers and experts in Laos, expressed his belief that the young generations in both countries would continue promoting the traditional ties.

Ceremony in HCM City

A solemn ceremony was held in HCM City yesterday (July 18) to mark the 40 years of the signing of the Treaty on Amity and Cooperation (July 18) and the establishment of 55 years of diplomatic relations (September 5) between Viet Nam and Laos.

The ceremony was attended by the citys Party Committee Secretary Nguyen Thien Nhan, leaders of the city Peoples Committee, and members of the Peoples Council as well as city agency officials and residents. Representatives from the Laos Government and people also participated in the meeting.

Speaking at the ceremony, Nhan said the Party, State and people appreciated the Lao Party and the countrys people because of the comradeship between the two nations soldiers and the benefits shared between the two countries.

The city has established friendship and co-operative relations with Vientiane, the capital of Laos, and Laos provinces such as Champasak, Xieng Khouang, Hua Phan and Attapeu.

Santiphab Phomvihance, a politburo member of the Lao Peoples Revolutionary Party Central Committee, thanked the citys Party, Government and people for their warm sentiments and assistance.

He said that he believed the two nations would continue to support each other on national defence, building and development.

On this occasion, HCM City received the first class Labour Medal from the Lao Government for its contribution to strengthening the special relationship between the two countries.

A photo exhibition highlighting the countries traditional friendship, special solidarity and cooperation is on display in downtown HCM City from July 18-22.  VNS
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc receives Vice President of Laos Phankham Viphavanh in Ha Noi yesterday.  VNA/VNS Photo Thong Nhat

HA NOI  Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc pledged yesterday that Viet Nam would continue backing Laoss nation-building efforts in the face of all difficulties.

Speaking at a reception for visiting Vice President of Laos Phankham Viphavanh in Ha Noi, he said he highly valued the co-ordination between two countries in organising a host of meaningful activities to mark the Viet Nam-Laos Friendship and Solidarity Year 2017.

He said he expected both sides to strengthen educating younger generations on preserving the special bilateral relations enjoyed by both countries, boost people-to-people exchanges, and accelerate investment and trade.

The PM also expressed his hope that both countries would continue reforming their laws and policies to take new strides in international integration, and share their experiences in this effort.

Phankham Viphavanh stressed the importance of the governments instructions in determining the outcomes of co-operative programmes between the two countries.

The huge assistance that Laos had received from Viet Nam had yielded a lot of socio-economic achievements, he noted.

He thanked Viet Nam for helping Laos build the National Assembly House, describing it as a gift of extreme significance.

He said "Viet Nams socio-economic achievements are a source of encouragement for Laos", adding that the experiences that Viet Nam continues to share will serve as a foundation for Laos development.

Presidential reception

Also yesterday, President Tran ai Quang welcomed the visit by Phankham Viphavanh, saying that the leadership of the Lao Peoples Revolutionary Party would help the people of Laos implement successfully resolutions adopted by the 10th National Party Congress and the nations eighth five-year socio-economic development plan.

He said he was delighted at the success of the meeting between the two Politburos, the 39th meeting of the Inter-Governmental Committee and the recent visits by the two countries leaders.

The President told his guest that the Party Central Committees Secretariat held a conference in May to instruct ministries, agencies and localities to implement the Viet Nam-Laos high-level agreement with an aim of making bilateral ties work in the peoples interest.

He said the two countries should continue working closely on organising activities celebrating the Year of Solidarity and Friendship until the end of the year.

Such activities would educate the people on the special relations that the two countries enjoy, he said.

For his part, Viphavanh underscored the significance of educating young generations on the tradition of solidarity and special bond between the two Parties, States and peoples.

He said he was honoured to confer Laos most noble distinctions on Vietnamese Party and State leaders in recognition of their contributions to fostering solidarity, friendship, and close-knit attachment between the two nations. VNS
The Vietnamese and Japanese governments are discussing an action plan to improve implementation of their bilateral extensive strategic partnership, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said yesterday.  VNA/VNS Photo Thong Nhat

HA NOI  The Vietnamese and Japanese governments are discussing an action plan to improve implementation of their bilateral extensive strategic partnership, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said yesterday.

Speaking at a reception held in Ha Noi for Kawai Katsuyuki, Special Advisor to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Phuc also expressed his hope that he would meet PM Abe again at the APEC Summit 2017 in Viet Nam.

He told Katsuyuki that Viet Nam would offer all possible support for Japan to launch key investment projects in the transport and energy sectors in Viet Nam, delivering on commitments reached by the two prime ministers.

Coveying PM Abes greetings to his Vietnamese counterpart, Katsuyuki said Japan highly values Viet Nams strategic position and wishes to further enhance their bilateral extensive strategic partnership.

He said PM Abe was delighted to meet the Vietnamese PM at the recent G20 Summit and looks forward to meeting him at APEC Summit 2017 later this year in the central city of a Nang.

He also affirmed that Japan will support and accelerate the progress of key transport and energy projects in Viet Nam.  VNS
Party General Secretary and President Bounnhang Volachith delivers speech at a meeting to celebrate Laos-Viet Nam relationship in Vientiane yesterday,  VNA/VNS Photo Pham Kien

VIENTIANE  Top Lao leaders, including Party General Secretary and President Bounnhang Volachith, Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith and National Assembly Chairwoman Pany Yathotou, gathered in Vientiane yesterday to celebrate Laos-Viet Nam relationship.

Laos and Viet Nam marked the 40th year of their Treaty of Amity and Cooperation on July 18 and the 55th anniversary of their diplomatic relations on September 5 this year.

A high-level delegation of Vietnam, led by Politburo member and National Assembly Vice Chairwoman Tong Thi Phong, attended the celebration.

The establishment of diplomatic ties and the signing of the Viet Nam-Laos Treaty of Amity and Co-operation were vital to the great friendship, defence alliance and special solidarity between the two nations, Lao Party General Secretary and President Bounnhang Volachith said in his speech.

They also provided a firm foundation and a driving force for the comprehensive cooperation between the two Parties, States and the people, as well as was an important factor to ensure peace, stability, cooperation and development in the region and the world, he said.

Bounnhang highlighted the time-honoured relations between the two countries, stressing that the two nations stood shoulder to shoulder and supported each other during the long struggle for national independence, which was the decisive factor in the success of each countrys revolution, and the basis of their exemplary relationship.

He affirmed that under any circumstances, the bilateral relations would always be nurtured and fostered in a practical and effective manner, for the sake of the citizens.

The Lao leader expressed deep gratitude to the Vietnamese Party, State and the people for their huge and effective assistance to his country in the past and at present.

He also congratulated Viet Nam on its great achievements during the oi moi (renewal) process, saying that his country considered it a great source of encouragement and valuable experience for Laos national defence and development.

Addressing the ceremony, Vietnamese National Assembly Vice Chairwoman Tong Thi Phong said the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1962 was an important landmark in the bilateral ties, while the signing of the Treaty of Amity and Co-operation laid an important political and legal basis for further strengthening the bilateral ties, serving the national development and defence of each country.

She thanked the Lao Party, State and the people for the great support they had given Viet Nam during its past struggles for national liberation, and for its current national development and defence.

The Vietnamese legislative leader called for joint commitment and efforts to maintain the exemplary and faithful relationship, which she described as a valuable common asset for the two nations.

While congratulating Laos on its achievements during the 30-year renewal process, Phong expressed her belief that under the leadership of the Lao Peoples Revolutionary Party, the governance of the Lao Government, and the supervision of the Lao National Assembly, the country would successfully implement the Resolution of the 10th Party Congress and its five-year socio-economic development plan for the period between 2016 and 2020, thus increasing its position in the region and the world.

The same day, on behalf of the Vietnamese Party and State, Phong presented the Gold Star Order to Lao Politburo and Prime Minister Sisoulith, the Ho Chi Minh Order to six members of the Lao Party Politburo, and the Independence Order, first class, to three secretaries of the Lao Party Central Committee, in recognition of their great contribution to the traditional friendship, special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between Viet Nam and Laos.  VNS
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc received ASEAN Secretary-General Le Luong Minh and President of the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA) Hidetoshi Nishimura yesterday.  VNA/VNS Photo Thong Nhat

HA NOI  Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc received ASEAN Secretary-General Le Luong Minh and President of the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA) Hidetoshi Nishimura yesterday.

The ASEAN officials are in Ha Noi to discuss measures to boost intra-bloc links.

The Prime Minister hailed the contributions of the ASEAN Secretariat, especially those made by ASEAN Secretary-General Minh.

Among the initiatives and cooperative programmes of the bloc, Viet Nam was particularly interested in implementing the Initiative for ASEAN Integration Work Plan III and the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2025, he said.

The group must strongly promote its role and strengths, contributing to building a better world, he said, affirming that Viet Nam would continue to be a responsible member in realising ASEANs common goals, as well as in solving challenges in the development process of the group.

ASEAN and Viet Nam should work closely to seek ways to lift the trade turnover between the two sides, he said.

The Prime Minister affirmed that with many free trade agreements being signed and some under negotiations, Viet Nam was willing to serve as a bridge for ASEAN, an important market in the region and the world.

He also underlined the importance of the intra-bloc connectivity and expressed hope that the connection among the ASEAN member nations would be maintained and enhanced to overcome the challenges based on the principle of consensus.

The Prime Minister hailed the contributions of the ERIAs scientific research outcomes in promoting ASEANs development, in the context of regional and global integration.

Minh said 2017 was important for ASEAN and Viet Nam, as the 50th founding anniversary of ASEAN and completion of 22 years since Viet Nam officially joined the bloc would be celebrated.

He praised Viet Nams efforts in integrating globally, expanding markets, and promoting investment links and people-to-people exchanges.

Viet Nam has made active and crucial contributions towards building the ASEAN community, as well as in stepping up cooperation between ASEAN and big economies worldwide, he said.

Minh also pointed out the difficulties and challenges facing the bloc, noting that the talk themed ASEANs 50 years: ASEAN Economic Community and opportunities for Vietnamese business circle aimed to seek solutions.

Meanwhile, ERIA President Hidetoshi Nishimura pledged to continue supporting Viet Nam in the process of regional and international integration, and towards upholding Viet Nams role and position in the ASEAN community.  VNS
HA NOI -- Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong will pay a State visit to Cambodia from July 20-22 at the invitation of Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni, the Party Central Committees Commission for External Relations has announced.

Yesterday, one day before the visit, Deputy PM Trinh inh Dung and his Cambodian counterpart Kim Ke Yan hosted a ceremony inaugurating a road linking Le Thanh-O Yadav international border gate in the Central Highlands province of Gia Lai.

According to current agreements, around 500 commercial vehicles are allowed to travel from each side at seven border gates. However, only five out of seven border gates are in operation.

Viet Nam has supported Cambodia with preferential loans to upgrade Road No. 78 in Cambodia and the road connecting two checkpoints of Le Thanh-O Yadav international border gate.

Speaking at the ceremony, Cambodian Deputy PM Ke Kim Yan expressed his thanks to the Vietnamese Government, ministries and agencies and Gia Lai Province for supporting Cambodia in upgrading infrastructure at border areas and facilitating the two sides to soon begin operation of the Le Thanh-O Yadav international border gate.

He said that the inauguration of the road helps the border gate optimise its effectiveness, ensure benefits for local people and promote the two nations economic, trade and tourism development as well as realise the connection capacity between road projects and other projects serving the people from the two sides.

On behalf of the Vietnamese Government, Deputy PM Trinh inh Dung hailed the two nations achievements in economic, trade, investment, national defense and security, culture, education and tourism cooperation.

Cooperation between localities, especially border provinces, has been enhanced. The two sides have promoted close cooperation in border management, the prevention of smuggling, trade fraud and criminal activities.

The operation of the road will help reduce expenditure and time as well as facilitate transport between the two nations in particular and the region in general, contributing to the two nations socio-economic development, said the Deputy PM.

In the future, the Deputy PM proposed the two sides Governments direct the Steering Committee on Land Border Demarcation to soon complete land border marker planting to establish a border line of peace, stability, cooperation and sustainable development.

He proposed the two sides continue cooperation in facilitating transport and enhancing management and guaranty of transport to develop the neighboring friendship and comprehensive cooperation relations between the two nations.--VNS
The Viet Nam Protestant Church (Southern Region) began its quadrennial general confederation congress in HCM City yesterday.  VNA/VNS Photo httlvn.org

HCM City  The Viet Nam Protestant Church (Southern Region) began its quadrennial general confederation congress in HCM City yesterday.

Attended by 3,000 representatives from 34 provinces from the south up to Quang Tri in the centre, it is considered the most important and biggest event for Protestants.

The five-day congress will review its operations during the 2013-17 period, amend charter contents, elect a new executive council for the confederation, and approve the 2017-21 working plan.

Addressing the gathering, deputy head of the Government Committee for Religious Affairs, Tran Tan Hung, said the event is a major festival for all members of the Viet Nam Protestant Church.

The members significantly contributed to the nations poverty reduction programmes and charitable and humanitarian works and the nations defence and construction.

The Party and the Governments religious policy always respects and ensures freedom of belief and religion, and encourages improved religious activities for the benefits of the country and people.

The Government Committee for Religious Affairs had considered and green lighted the changes to the charter proposed by the confederation, which would discuss them at the session, he said.

He hoped delegates would actively contribute during the discussions to amend the charter in keeping with the good traditions of Protestantism, compliance with the law and harmony with other religions.

The Government strongly believes that under the leadership of the new executive council of the confederation 2017 -2021, members of the Viet Nam Protestant Church (Southern Region) will continue to sustain its patriotic traditions and continue to contribute to national development.

The largest Protestant organisation in Viet Nam, the Church has received favourable treatment from the administration, he added.

The Church has set up hundreds of chapters in the Central Highlands, rebuilt many churches and printed Protestant publications and the Bible in the languages of the Ba Na, E e and Gia Rai ethnic groups.

It has some 700,000 believers in 34 central and southern provinces and cities. -- VNS
HCM CITY  More than 600 local and international traffic experts and policy-makers will participate in the 12th International Conference of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies (EASTS) to be held in HCM City and Binh Duong Province from September 18-21.

Speaking at a press conference in HCM City yesterday, Khuat Viet Hung, vice chairman of the National Committee for Road Safety, said that measures to address traffic problems among EASTS-member countries would be discussed.

Hung, who is also the head of the conferences organising committee, said the biennial event also aimed to promote transport research cooperation among EASTS-member countries.

This year, the National Committee for Road Safety plans to combine the EASTS conference and an annual traffic safety conference in the city and Binh Duong Province.

The conference in HCM City is themed Vision and Action Programme for Safe, Green and Integrated Transport.

The conference will discuss management of personal vehicles, application of intelligent transport system (ITS), traffic safety for vulnerable commuters like motorbikes drivers and pedestrians, public transport development, and sustainable transport development to adapt to climate change, among others.

Meanwhile, the conference in Binh Duong will have the theme Binh Duong: Vision of a Safe Transport System, a Smart City.

The conference will focus on various issues, including road safety management, responses after traffic accidents, railway safety and inland waterway safety.

Short-term and long-term solutions for sustainable transport development in the province will also be discussed.

Participants will take technical tours to the Underground Metro Construction Site (metro Line No. 1) in HCM City, including the Ben Thanh Market underground station and the Centre for an Intelligent Transport System at the HCMTrung Luong Highway, among others.

Hung said that traffic safety required solutions from a range of fields, including construction, engineering, health, education, communication, law-making and enforcement.

To ensure safety, rapid information collection and processing are needed before making decisions.

Scientific research and technological applications especially information technology, has become more urgent than ever.

The conferences will help improve traffic situations in Viet Nam as an EASTS member state by sharing lessons learned and solutions with other member countries, he said.

EASTS seeks to foster and support excellence in transportation research and practice, and to stimulate professional exchange in all aspects and modes of transportation among the members.

EASTS was founded in 1994 as a result of a meeting held in Japan with experts in transportation from East Asian countries.

They included Viet Nam, Australia, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand, among others.

In 2001, under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Transport, the Viet Nam Road and Bridge Association organised the 4th EASTS conference in Ha Noi.

Ensuring sustainable traffic safety and order remains a big challenge in Viet Nam.

The country faces increased traffic congestion and accidents in large cities, overdevelopment of personal vehicles and high transport costs.

Nearly 9,600 traffic accidents resulting in 4,134 deaths and 8,000 injuries were reported in Viet Nam in the first half of this year, according to the National Committee for Road Safety.

As many as 33 traffic jams lasting more than 30 minutes were reported in the last six months nationwide, while 25 were reported in the same period last year.  VNS
HA NOI  A 61-year-old patient recently treated for a skin disorder at the National Hospital of Dermatology and Venereology was aghast when she realised that 70 per cent of the money she spent buying her prescriptions were for a supplement that cost some VN2 million (US$88).

The supplement was prescribed by her doctor in a separate "medicinal suggestion form", along with the prescription itself, with advice to "strictly follow doctors instructions, re-examine in case of abnormal symptoms".

I thought the supplement was a medication, so I bought it, she told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

Doctors in some major hospitals in the capital city are causing confusion among patients when prescribing supplements without clearly explaining their nature and usage.

Not written on a separate document, supplements were included in the prescription form received by a resident of the capitals Hoan Kiem District whenever she took her son to hospitals for medical exams.

[The doctors] did not explain what types of vitamins they were, saying the child was ill so he needed the prescribed supplements. And they werent cheap at all, she told Viet Nam News.

I only knew they were supplements when bringing the prescriptions to the drugstores, she said. The pharmacists told me it wasnt compulsory for me to buy them.

Most of the patients at the National Hospital of Dermatology and Venereology receive two types of forms after examinations: one prescription and one "medicinal suggestion form", according to Tuoi Tre.

The latter is where doctors suggest supplements and products that patients should use, including shampoos, shower gels, and body lotions. However, the title of the form does not clarify that it is not a prescription. The doctors often do not make it clear to patients that the additional products are not compulsory.

Not knowing how to discern supplements from medicines, many patients end up buying everything, even though the cost of supplements and additional products often make up two thirds of their total medical expenses.

Blurred lines

Although it is hard to validate the quality of all supplements in the market, some doctors still prescribe ones they found safe and effective, according to doctor Nguyen Viet Anh from the Ha Noi Medical University Hospital.

However, the Ministry of Health has regulated that supplements must be prescribed in a separate form  not on the prescription, and this form must clarify that the products are supplements, not medicines.

To include supplements in the prescription would be against the rule, since all types of medicines must go through several strict testing procedures before being sold, he said.

Nguyen Van Thuong, director of the National Hospital of Dermatology and Venereology, said a technical issue messed up the hospitals "medicinal suggestion form".

A printing error made patients think it was a prescription, he told the Tuoi Tre. We will correct the mistake and send written documents to doctors, asking them to explain to every patient what are medicines and what are supplements, he said.

According to Thuong, some 90 per cent of skin disorders require the use of vitamins, minerals and medicinal cosmetics  together with specialised medicines  for effective treatment, but in Viet Nam all vitamins and minerals are currently registered as supplements.

Several types of specialised dermatological medicines are also registered as supplements, while in Viet Nam there is no difference between medicinal cosmetics and beauty products, he said.

Those dermatological medicines were first registered as medicines when imported to Viet Nam, but then their registration expired, and they remained in the country as supplementary products, he said.  VNS
HA NOI  Ha Noi has about 35 congestion hotspots and the maximum time spent stuck in traffic has been cut to just 20 minutes.

According to Ha Nois Transport Department six of the worst spots for traffic were eased in the first six months of the year.

The spots include Lo uc - Tran Khat Chan - Kim Nguu; Trung Van - To Huu; Chuong Duong Bridge, Trau Quy - National Highway No 5 and a spot near the Vinamilk Factory on National Highway No 5, reported Giao thong (Transport) online newspaper.

A number of streets that suffered standstills of up to an hour, such as Pham Hung, Le Van Luong, Tran Duy Hung, Nga Tu So, Truong Chinh and Cau Giay, now only witnessed traffic jams for 5  10 minutes.

Nguyen Van Thai, a taxi driver said, traffic congestion on the Trung Van Intersection currently only lasted about 10-15 minutes.

In the past traffic was brought to a standstill for up to 40 minutes, he added.

Now its much shorter, he said.

On the two streets of Cau Giay and Xuan Thuy, where the construction site of the Nhon  Ha Noi Station elevated railway is located, road users spent around 1-2 hours between the times of 7-9am and 6:30-7:30pm daily because of heavy traffic, but at present, the time spent stuck was about 10-20 minutes.

Director of the transport department Vu Van Vien said traffic jams often happened in specific spots because of construction sites and the increasing number of private vehicles.

Vien said the city was aware of the problem and was working with relevant agencies to come up with solutions as soon as possible.

At first, the traffic hotspots were classified following the cause of congestion, and then authorised agencies would issue appropriate solutions, he said.

For locations near construction sites, the department asked investors to speed up progress, he said.

Especially, investors of the Cat Linh  Ha ong Elevated Railway and Nhon  Ha Noi Station Elevated Railway were told to not only speed up construction but also assign staff to direct traffic and minimise trouble for road users, he said.

Ongoing plans

Vien said the department planned to remove another six spots of traffic congestion: La Thanh  Hoang Cau; Hoang Cau  Xa an; Nguyen Khang  Cau Giay, Lang  Nguyen Chi Thanh, Moc Brigde  Tam Trinh  en Lu over the last six months of this year.

In a related move, the Ha Noi Peoples Committee said the city would issue a set of solutions to bring traffic congestion under control. The solutions include improving the capacity of public transport and limiting private vehicles.

Ha Noi is also scheduled to invest US$31 billion in improving the capacity ofpublic transport by 2030. The city is developing a public transport system, which by 2020 will be able to serve the needs of 30 to 35 per cent of citizens in the inner city and 15 per cent of citizens in satellite cities. By 2030, it will be able to serve the demands of 50 to 55 per cent of people in the inner city and of 40 per cent in the satellite cities.

Additionally, on July 4 the city Peoples Council approved a project of private vehicle management in 2017-20, with a vision towards 2030.

Data from the transport department showed that the city now has about 5.2 million motorbikes and 500,000 cars.  VNS
The Department of Preventive Medicine under the Ministry of Health has proposed measures to prevent diseases during the rainy season.  Photo baovinhphuc.vn

HA NOI  The Department of Preventive Medicine under the Ministry of Health has proposed measures to prevent diseases during the rainy season.

According to the department, when heavy rains and floods affect the country in July, it is the peak time for epidemic diseases such as petechial fever, malaria, typhoid, diarrhea, flu and red eyes. Microorganism, dust, garbage and waste overflow and cause pollution and diseases.

To prevent diseases during rainy season, people need to select and process food in a hygienic way, wash hands with soaps before and after processing food and going to the toilet.

People should wash daily, use mosquito nets even in daylight, wash and dry toes after touching flood or contaminated water.

People are also advised to kill larva and mosquitoes by covering water containers, wash containers and wells, and using chemicals to sterilise domestic water after floods recede.  VNS
The Nui Phao Mine Exploitation and Process Company Ltd, the project investor, will have to pay a fine of VN510 million (US$22,000) for its violations.  Photo tuoitre.vn

HA NOI  The Nui Phao mining project, Viet Nams biggest polymetallic operation, has seriously violated regulations on environmental protection, mining, and use of land and water resources, according to the results of an inspection conducted last year by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MoNRE).

The Nui Phao Mine Exploitation and Process Company Ltd, the project investor, will have to pay a fine of VN510 million (US$22,000) for its violations.

The MNRE conducted a 45-day inspection of the Nui Phao mine, a large polymetallic project located in the northern mountainous province of Thai Nguyen, after receiving complaints from local residents about the projects environmental impact.

Under the investment license granted by Thai Nguyen Province, the Nui Phao project was permitted to exploit and process tungsten, fluorspar, bismuth and copper for 30 years, starting from 2004.

In terms of land use, the company was found to have taken lands not planned for the project. The company had not processed land leasing procedures with State agencies and did not use the land according to the registered purpose. Compensation and resettlement assistance to local residents dislocated by the project has been slow against the approved schedule.

After 13 years of operation, the Nui Phao Company had still not completed ground clearance and the move of households in areas of high risk of environmental impact.

Toxic solvents

The company violated mining exploitation regulations and had not drawn up plans for restoring the mined land as required in the mining licence. The inspection activity also found many violations on collecting and processing industrial waste in reservoirs inside the projects land.

The company did not install automatic monitoring systems of waste water and air emissions as per regulations. During the mine exploitation and process, the factory emitted toxic solvents to environment.

In terms of water resource use, the company dug 120m deep for underground water without permission.

The MoNRE has ordered Nui Phao Company to stop its violations and to control air, smell and chemical pollution affecting nearby residential areas.

To solve the negative pollution impact, the company will also have to take environmental protection measures and submit them to the MNRE for approval.

The company is also required to present a road map for reducing its factory operation capacity and ensuring adherence to waste processing and environment protection demands.

During operation, the company must totally control toxic substances such as arsenic, cyanide, and beryllium (alkaline earth metal). Especially, the company needed to comprehensively study and evaluate berylliums impact on the environment and health of people working in the factory and living nearby.  VNS
HA NOI  Two women were killed in a fire that broke out in a house in Ha Nois Hai Ba Trung District in the early hours today.

The victims are 81-year-old Nguyen Thi Ngoc and her 49-year-old daughter, named Nguyen Thi Thuy.

The fire started around 2am at the 60sq.m house on Vong Street.

Tens of firefighters from the Ha Noi Department of Fire Prevention and Fighting and eight fire engines were mobilised to the scene. However, they struggled to get water to the house as it is located deep inside a small alley.

It took firefighters 1.5 hours to put out the fire.

The firefighters managed to rescue a 17-year-old girl who was stuck in the house.

The cause of the fire has not yet been identified. Investigations are underway.  VNS
HA NOI  An intensive training class opened on Tuesday at the Ha Noi Medical University for doctors who will be sent to disadvantaged areas to work under a pilot project of the Ministry of Health.

Twenty-four doctors, who have been recruited for the project to send young doctors to disadvantaged areas, including mountainous, border areas and islands, will be trained in eight different specialities, including surgery, internal medicine, obstetrics, paediatrics and anaesthetisation.

The project, approved by the Ministry of Health in 2013, prioritises 62 poor districts where healthcare services need to be improved at the grassroots level.

They will work in impoverished areas that they had volunteerily registered to after completing a 24-month training course, deputy head of the ministrys Training Department Nguyen Minh Loi said.

Male doctors will work in district hospitals in deprived localities for three years and female doctors for two years. They will have favourable conditions in terms of salary, allowances and working conditions.

The training programme was compiled by the Ha Noi Medical University and was appraised by the health ministry.

This is the fifth training course being organised under the project, so far. The first four courses trained 78 doctors for the programme.

The first seven volunteer doctors were sent to work in poor districts in the northern mountainous provinces of Lao Cai, Bac Kan and ien Bien last month.

According to the ministry, these 62 poor districts need some 600 doctors. Some district hospitals in Binh inh, Quang Ngai and Thanh Hoa have only four or five doctors, and some dont even have one.  VNS
KON TUM  The Ministry of Industry and Trade said a shortage of oxygen was responsible for the recent mass fish deaths in the Tay Nguyen (Central Highlands) province of Kon Tum.

The deaths were not related to the discharge of water by the Plei Krong hydropower reservoir in ak Ha District, as reported by the media recently.

On July 14, Dan tri online newspaper reported that the provincial Agriculture and Rural Development Department confirmed the mass fish deaths in the reservoir, which had nearly 72 tonnes of fish in 28 cages.

Some media reports also said the quick discharge of water in the reservoir was to blame for the fish deaths.

However, following inspection, the provincial Industry and Trade Department and relevant agencies said after discharging water, the water level on July 11 decreased only 1m instead of 7m, as claimed in media reports earlier.

The Ialy Hydropower Company reported the situation to the Electricity of Viet Nam so that it could provide support to farmers to resume production quickly.

On July 14, local authorities took water and fish samples for testing.

The province also requested the industry and trade department to review the operation of the hydropower reservoir and reservoirs of business establishments in the region.

The police will work with the environment department to inspect the discharge of water of businesses.  VNS
BEN TRE  Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc yesterday called on the youth in Ben Tre Province to intensify their pursuit of entrepreneurship for self-growth, making greater contributions to the society and the country.

Speaking at the opening night of the Ben Tre ong Khoi Start-up Festival in the Mekong Delta province, Phuc hailed its efforts and achievements in promoting start-ups.

Ben Tre was a leader in implementing the Governments guidance and plans for start-ups, he said.

There are many young people here who have started doing business and succeeded at a very early age. I am very touched to see that many young men and women have come up with new products welcomed by the society within a year of starting the ong Khoi Start-ups and Develop Enterprises programme, he said.

Phuc said Ben Tre has experienced many socio-economic changes over the past 10 years, creating a better improvement for people to start new businesses.

However, the province still lags behind other localities, facing several development challenges, he said.

The youth need to realise the provinces difficulties and try harder to change the situation, he added.

The ong Khoi Start-ups and Develop Enterprises programme was launched last year to promote entrepreneurship as an effective means to boost economic growth and alleviate poverty.

The first start-up competition was held this February. It received 45 start-up ideas and 22 business models proposed by people of various ages, mainly the youth.

At the opening of this years festival, 7 ideas and 11 business models were awarded prize money of VN305 million (US$13,400) in total.

The festival has also become a place for local companies, small and medium-sized businesses, household businesses and co-operative groups to introduce their products to customers, and look for partnership and potential investors.

It also promotes key local products, especially in the agriculture sector, to encourage the Vietnamese people use Vietnamese products campaign.

The festival opened a day before the Ben Tres investment promotion conference that will be held today.

On this occasion, the province is calling for investment in 63 projects in 11 sectors, including renewable energy, eco-tourism, building infrastructure for industrial parks, high-tech agricultural and aquatic products processing, building urban areas and trade centres and solid and water waste treatment.VNS
BANGKOK  A Thai general is among more than 100 defendants facing a verdict on Wednesday in a sprawling 2015 human trafficking case which saw thousands of Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants abandoned at sea and in jungle death camps.

Thailands administration launched a crackdown in May that year on a multi-million-dollar network running migrants through southern Thailand and onto Malaysia.

It unspooled a crisis across Southeast Asia as gangmasters abandoned their hungry and desperate human cargo in jungle camps and at sea in overcrowded boats which were then "ping ponged" between Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian waters.

Bangkok Criminal Court is due to begin reading verdicts for 103 defendants on Wednesday morning in what is expected to be a lengthy hearing.

They are accused of offences spanning human trafficking, ransom and murder - a charge that can carry the death penalty.

Army Lieutenant-General Manas Kongpan, a powerful figure in the security apparatus covering the south, is the highest-ranking official on trial.

He denies the charges.

The crisis emerged after Thai officials uncovered dozens of shallow graves in hidden camps dotting the steep hills along the Thai and Malaysian border area.

They revealed the horrors endured by migrants, who were starved and held in bamboo pens by traffickers who demanded ransom for their release.

The verdict is being closely-watched inside and outside Thailand.

Amy Smith, from Fortify Rights, described the trial as "important and unprecedented".

The senior policeman who initially headed the probe, Major General Paween Pongsirin, fled Thailand under threats to his life.

Days before he left he said the case had been pulled before it could fan out further into the complicity of officials.

Stateless Rohingya Muslims have fled neighbouring Myanmar in their tens of thousands since sectarian violence flared in 2012.

They were joined by Bangladeshi economic migrants on a rickety boats southwards across the Andaman Sea, seeking work and sanctuary in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Thousands are believed to have died at sea, in a migrant flow that garnered few headlines until the trafficking crackdown in 2015.

The sea route south has been quiet since the crackdown.  AFP
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Retirees potluck slated Thursday

WATERLOO  The Supervisors Club will host the monthly retirees potluck on 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.

Music scheduled

at amphitheater WATERLOO  The Brazilian 2wins will perform live at the Waterloo Center for the Arts RiverLoop Rhythms from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. Friday at the amphitheatre.

Admission is free with food and beverages, featuring SingleSpeed Brewing on tap available for purchase.

The Brazilian 2wins pulls aspects of pop, rock, funk, fusion, hip hop and Latin.

Church to host giveaway events

WATERLOO  Grace Reformed Church will host a Jesus Give-Away for the community from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and July 29.

The event will take place at Shady Lane Youth Center, 1322 Shady Lane, next to the Grace Reformed Church, 520 Maxwell St.

The congregation has collected good used items to give away to those who need them.

Items include mens, womens and childrens clothing, shoes, furniture, housewares, televisions and computers, kitchen utensils, appliances, pots and pans, books, tapes and DVDs and various miscellaneous articles. A free lunch will be served. Prairie walk

set Saturday

CEDAR FALLS  A prairie walk is planned for Saturday at Cedar Hills Sand Prairie, led by Daryl Smith and assisted by Bruce Stiles.

Its hosted by the Cedar Prairie Group of the Sierra Club, Iowa Prairie Network Region 3 and Friends of the Tallgrass Prairie Center at the University of Northern Iowa.

Cedar Hills Sand Prairie is an 80-acre upland prairie underlaid with eolian (wind-blown) sand. The site is a diverse mixture of dry prairie, mesic prairie, wet prairie and a fen.

People should plan to meet at 9:30 a.m. at the Thunder Ridge Mall parking lot in Cedar Falls and car pool/caravan to the prairie. For those who wish to join the group at the site at 9:45 a.m., the prairie is at the intersection of Butler and Mark roads.

Ice cream social set in Brandon

BRANDON  The Brandon/Jefferson Township Historical Society will host an ice cream social from 12:30 to 3 p.m. Sunday at the Brandon Park.

There will be hot dogs, walking tacos, cookies and beverages, along with games and live music by Larry Roster from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m.

Proceeds go to the Brandon Bank restoration project.

Humane society sets meeting

WATERLOO  The community is welcome at the Cedar Bend Humane Society annual meeting Tuesday at 1166 W. Airline Highway.

The meeting starts at 6 p.m.

Fair trade event set at library

CEDAR FALLS  Worlds Window will take part in a Cedar Falls Public Library program Fair Trade Artisan Women in Developing Countries at 7 p.m. July 26 in the library meeting room.

Worlds Window carries many items made by women working in fair trade programs. Guest speaker Margaret Jessen, a co-manager at the store, will discuss what fair trade means to these women and how it has transformed their lives. Questions are welcome.

Blood drive set in New Hampton

NEW HAMPTON  New Hampton community blood drive will take place from noon to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday at New Hampton Community Center, 112 E. Spring St.

Schedule an appointment at lifeservebloodcenter.org or by calling (800) 287-4903.

Lodge planning coming events

WASHBURN  The Moose Lodge 328, 6636 La Porte Road, has several events planned.

A LOOM meeting is set for 5:30 p.m. Monday. Brisket is on the menu from 5 to 7 pm. July 28.

Breakfast will be served from the menu from 9 a.m. to noon July 30.
WATERLOO  One teen has been taken into custody in the investigation into a string of attacks involving youths on bikes Sunday.

A 15-year-old was taken into custody Tuesday for felony second-degree robbery and misdemeanor assault causing injury, according to Waterloo police. The case was referred to Juvenile Court Services.

Police said the investigation into the assaults is ongoing.

A cyclist reported being punched and chased after he passed a group of youths on bikes as he was riding on the recreational trail under the U.S. Highway 218 bridge near Falls Avenue around 6 p.m. Sunday.

Police said they also received a report of a man being punched outside the Waterloo Center for the Arts and a worker attacked at the parking ramp at West Fifth and Commercial streets in about the same time frame.

The robbery charge pertains to the parking ramp crime. Police said the worker was struck multiple times after he told the youths to leave, and the suspects took his cell phone. He was taken to the hospital for his injuries.

The misdemeanor assault charge stems from the arts center attack, where police said the youths had asked to use the mans cell phone. He was punched when he declined.

No arrests have been made in the incident where the bicyclist was punched under the bridge.

Police said Tuesdays arrest came with the help of a homeowners surveillance camera, which captured footage of a group of youths riding down the street. One person in the group can be seen removing a bike from the porch in the video.

Police said they were investigating to see if the bike theft was related to the attacks, and an officer recognized the 15-year-old in the video, according to police.
WATERLOO  A plan to install cameras to cite motorists running red lights and speeding in Waterloo easily passed its first test.

All seven City Council members voted Monday in favor of an ordinance allowing the use of automated traffic enforcement cameras in the city.

Two more ordinance readings must pass before the devices can be used in the city limits. The council also would be asked to approve a contract with the private company to install and operate the cameras for a percentage of the fine revenue.

Police Chief Dan Trelka sought approval for the cameras, which would record video of violations and lead to citations being sent to the vehicles owners.

Trelkas initial plan would utilize a mobile trailer camera and handheld devices to issue speeding citations while placing fixed cameras at some of the 13 intersections currently experiencing high crash rates.

Were confident that if we install cameras  at six of those intersections, we will decrease our crash rate, Trelka said.

The ordinance under consideration by council members is modeled after a similar program in Cedar Rapids, which has been using traffic cameras for years. The Iowa Department of Transportation has disallowed the use of speed cameras on Interstate 380, which does not affect Cedar Rapids use of cameras on city streets.

While automated traffic citations do not count against a persons driving record, the civil offense does carry a fine. Trelka has suggested the city set a $60 to $70 penalty for violations.

There were few public concerns voiced when council members voted on the ordinance.

Eric Donat, a member of the Waterloo Commission on Human Rights, said there has been some worries about how the cameras would be used.

The (Commission) would have some concerns about how placement and positioning of speed cameras and monitoring cameras would affect minority populations, he said.

Trelka said law enforcement would be able to access recorded footage to search for evidence following events like an abduction or bank robbery. But he said routine footage would not be shared with other agencies.

Resident Jim Chapman was concerned about whether the cameras would incorrectly ticket motorists running yellow lights.

Ive got a little problem with it, he said. I would just as soon see high-crime areas have cameras rather than the red lights.

Discussion about automated traffic enforcement cameras has been creating some confusion for some residents as council members also have been talking about putting up traffic monitoring cameras throughout the community that could be accessed by law enforcement to help solve crimes.

Automated enforcement cameras would be funded and operated by a private company because they are supported by future fine revenue. But the city will need to find money to pay for the public safety cameras, which do not generate direct revenue, and necessary communications infrastructure.

Councilman Steve Schmitt questioned the wisdom of police officers using handheld speed cameras when they could just as easily use radar guns and issue actual traffic tickets.

Trelka said the current fine levels for speeding  a ticket for going 11 mph over the limit now runs $222  have made law enforcement officers nationwide reluctant to write the tickets, making a less costly civil citation a better option in some cases.

He said an officer who pulls over someone on the way to a low-wage meatpacking job and sees two car seats in the back is more likely to give a warning.

The cops are human, Trelka said. Thats hard to write that ticket.

The second reading of the camera ordinance is expected at next weeks Monday council meeting.
WAVERLY  A few council members took the opportunity during a review of the annual audit of the utilities company to inquire about whether Waverlys utility rates are too high  and whether they had the potential to go higher in coming years.

An audit review was presented by Waverly Utilities director of finance Vicki Hall during Monday nights Waverly City Council meeting, after which Ward 4 council member Mike Sherer kicked off the conversation by asking why wholesale increases had risen so dramatically since 2009.

Waverly Utilities CEO Darrel Wenzel explained a federally-controlled market for electricity began in 2006, tying the price to what electricity was worth instead of coal prices. It also was around the same time Municipal Energy Association of Nebraska, or MEAN  an association of 68 municipal utility companies in four states, including Waverly Utilities  invested heavily in several different sources of energy.

Ward 1 council member Dan Lampe and at-large council member David Reznicek then began a line of questioning about the rates.

Im curious  where do you see that going in the future, and what leverage do you have to pull to stop that train? Reznicek asked.

Wenzel said he sits on the MEAN board, which formed an ad hoc committee three years ago to attempt to level off rates that would jump with weather patterns and market volatility.

They were seeing huge spikes the way they had their rate structure set up, Wenzel said. Once I got on the board, I said, We cant have this volatility. We need to get these stabilized. And we have changed that to a fixed-cost rate structure.

He said Waverly pays a demand charge based on a three-year load average, plus an energy cost of just more than 4 cents. He expected customers rates to go up by about 2 or 3 percent in the next few years.

Our chart shows a little bit of a gradual increase, because were conservative, but I think what were going to see is probably just flatten out, Wenzel said.

Reznicek said a competing utility, MidAmerican Energy, was announcing they would keep their rates flat. Wenzel said he thought MidAmerican was unique, noting another competitor, Alliant Energy, had announced a 10 percent rate increase.

Were doing everything we can through the MEAN connection to get lower-cost power going forward, Wenzel said.

As Lampe and Reznicek continued questioning the financials of the utility company, including whether it was in the citys best interest to be a part of MEAN, Mayor Charles Infelt said he felt the discussion was getting beyond the scope of the audit review.

Lampe said he thought it was the right time to discuss it.

Right now theres over 120 residential properties for sale in the city of Waverly, said Lampe. Ive heard several comments that the reason those are being sold, or the reason people want out, is because their utilities are too high and their taxes are too high. And I guess that concerns me.
In his book The Secret War, British historian Max Hastings describes the different ways dictatorships and democracies regard intelligence and other independent sources of information.

The nations that gathered and used information best in the Second World War were those committed to intellectual honesty and the pursuit of truth, while those that failed were the dictatorships to which truth was inherently alien, unacceptable, antipathetic, he writes. While democracies do not always trade in frankness, as the modern experience of the 2003 Iraq War vividly demonstrates, at least most of their citizens are reared to regard truth as a virtue, while those of dictatorships are not.

Hastings point is deeply relevant in the age of Trump, where the principles of intellectual honesty and truth as a virtue are undermined every day. The president and his supporters dont just offer alternative facts, they dispute the concept facts exist at all, that truth can be determined by trained professionals  economists and scientists, journalists and intelligence agents  conducting unbiased inquiries.

As the dictators of WWII discovered, when truth is inherently alien, when leaders make decisions based on mythology or theology or just plain stubbornness, they are doomed to failure.

Trump is not Adolf Hitler or Hideki Tojo. But in countless instances, from climate change to immigration, he is failing to learn from their mistakes  pushing policies that are motivated by politics and prejudices, not reality. Here are just three particularly egregious examples:

Voter fraud. Trump keeps arguing he would have won the popular vote if not for millions of illegal votes cast for Hillary Clinton. Hes even appointed a commission to validate his delusion of massive voter fraud, which has been thoroughly debunked by election analysts from both parties.

Prof. Justin Levitt of the Loyola Law School tracked every specific credible allegation of voter fraud since 2000 and found 31 cases  out of more than 1 billion votes cast.

That and many similar studies led The Washington Post to editorialize: President Trumps claim that 3 million to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in last falls elections is as evidence-based as the assertion that space aliens are bombarding the planet Earth with marshmallows. Even Wyomings Secretary of State Republican Ed Murray told the Post: I have not experienced any secretary of state who has expressed any concerns or worry about fraud.

Health care choice. The White House is backing a proposal by Sen. Ted Cruz that would end Obamacare requirements that individuals buy insurance or pay a penalty, and that insurers offer policies with certain standard benefits. This is what freedom looks like, Vice President Mike Pence told Rush Limbaugh.

But every health care economist, conservative and liberal alike, comes to the same conclusion: Consumer choice might make a good political slogan but would be inherently destabilizing as actual policy, Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation told Politico.

Under Cruz proposal, healthy people would buy cheap policies or none at all, while sick people would purchase more extensive coverage. As a result, premiums would skyrocket, especially for policyholders with expensive pre-existing conditions. I think that really would be the definition of a death spiral, said Tara ONeill Hayes of the conservative think tank American Action Forum.

Steel tariffs. Trump is contemplating increased duties on imported steel as a way, he says, of preserving American jobs and protecting national security. Experts strongly agree such a move would accomplish neither objective.

Trumps argument about national security is intellectually dishonest, says the Post, because the countrys security is not jeopardized by importing steel; most of our leading suppliers, from Canada to South Korea, are strong allies. More seriously, protecting steel jobs would raise the price of goods that use steel, like cars, and trigger a backlash against American-made products and services.

If he actually pulls the trigger, it could be highly disruptive to world trade, Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who has advised Trump, said in The New York Times. Its not even going to really work in terms of helping American workers.

Experts are far from perfect, but an administration that rejects their advice and regards fact-finders as inherently alien is making a huge mistake.

Informed analysis will sometimes be wrong, Douglas Elmendorf, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office, told the Wall Street Journal, but Id rather bet on informed analysis than ignorant guesses.

In Trumps White House, impetuous ignorance is winning, to use the presidents favorite word. Informed analysis and the public interest are the losers.
WATERLOO  A cyclist reported being assaulted while riding on the recreational trail near Black Hawk Creek on Sunday.

The 47-year-old man told officers he was traveling under the Highway 218 bridge near Falls Avenue around 6 p.m. Sunday when he attempted to ride around a group of youths on the path.

One of the youths punched him, striking his head as he passed, said Capt. David Mohlis with the Waterloo Police Department. The rider, who was wearing a helmet, remained on his bike and continued riding, with one of the youths briefly giving chase, Mohlis said.

The cyclists suffered minor bruising from the assault, police said. No arrests have been made.

Police investigate pawn shop burglary

CEDAR FALLS  Police are investigating a break-in at a Cedar Falls pawn shop.

Officers were called to an alarm at Duees Pawn, 2024 Center St., about 4:40 a.m. July 5. They discovered someone broke in through the back door of the building and took electronics, cash and one firearm.

No one has been arrested in the burglary.

Vinton man

dies in crash

DYSART  A Vinton man was killed and two others injured in a Tama County crash Saturday.

The deceased was identified as Donald G. Selken, 81, who was pronounced dead at the scene of the crash on Highway 21 near Dysart about 8:40 p.m.

The injured were identified as Lois M. Schmitt, 73, of Vinton, who was transported to Covenant Medical Center in Waterloo, and David Keidel, 74, of Cedar Falls, also taken to Covenant.

The Iowa State Patrol said Keidel was driving a pickup truck northbound on Highway 21 when he entered a bridge construction zone where the highway was reduced to one lane. Donald Selken was southbound in the construction zone and the vehicles collided head-on.

The crash remains under investigation.

Motorcycle driver

in serious condition

STANLEY  A Waterloo man is in serious condition following a motorcycle crash during the Memorial Ride and Drive for Lyric and Elizabeth on Saturday.

Mitchel Lee Tyler, 67, was flown to University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City following the collision at Highway 3 and J Avenue near Stanley around 1:05 p.m. Saturday, according to the Fayette County Sheriffs Office.

Another driver, Jerry Lee McNamee, 63, of Waterloo, sustained minor injuries and was treated and released, and a third driver in the crash, Brian Wade Sampson, 56, of Waterloo, was uninjured, according to the sheriffs office.

Deputies said the motorcycle rally was traveling through the county when three motorcycles struck each other and crashed to the ground.

Mercy Oelwein Ambulance transported the victims to Oelwein Hospital, and Tyler was air lifted to Iowa City.

The Fayette County Sheriffs Office Traffic investigation Team is investigating the accident.
Advertisement

By West Kentucky Star Staff

Jul. 18, 2017 | PADUCAH, KY

By West Kentucky Star Staff Jul. 18, 2017 | 06:50 AM | PADUCAH, KY

The Friends of the McCracken County Public Library summer book sale concludes today at St. Paul Lutheran Church in downtown Paducah.



Proceeds are donated to the McCracken County Public Library to enhance its collection and programming.



This years sale includes more than 20,000 books sorted by subject, hundreds of audiovisual media titles sorted by format, and a selection of local and special interest books.



The sale will take place Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.



Most hardback books and trade edition paperbacks are offered at $1 each. Most of the other paperback books are sold for 50 cents each. Media materials are individually priced. The special interest and collector titles are offered at prices well below market value.



Saturday is Bag Day. Grocery sacks are provided and book sale patrons are invited to fill them with books for $5 per bag.



Cash or check is accepted for all sales. Credit cards are accepted for purchases worth $10 or more.



This year the Friends of McCracken County Public Library celebrate 25 years of supporting the library. The organization was established in February of 1992 with 22 members. Today, more than 360 households are represented in its current members.
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SNC-Lavalin and Holtec team up on SMR development

18 July 2017

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The USA's Holtec International has signed a teaming agreement with Canada's SNC-Lavalin to collaborate in the development of Holtec's SMR-160 small modular reactor (SMR).

Holtec's vision for SMR-160 (Image: Holtec)

Under the agreement, SNC-Lavalin - parent company of Candu Energy - will provide Holtec with a range of nuclear engineering services, including supporting the licensing of the SMR-160 reactor.

Holtec said, "The partnership aims to vigorously accelerate the reactor system's ongoing development and international licensing efforts by linking SNC-Lavalin's world-class nuclear team with Holtec's SMR team."

Holtec's 160 MWe small modular reactor uses low-enriched uranium fuel. The factory-built reactor's core and all nuclear steam supply system components would be located underground, and the design incorporates a wealth of features including a passive cooling system that would be able to operate indefinitely after shutdown. No active components, such as pumps, are needed to run the reactor, which does not need any on-site or off-site power to shut down and to dissipate decay heat.

Preston Swafford, SNC-Lavalin chief nuclear officer and executive vice president of nuclear, said: "We know that the global nuclear market for safe, economic nuclear power continues to grow. Partnering with Holtec in the SMR-160 brings us a 'walk away safe' reactor design that will deliver a clean, affordable and reliable electricity supply satisfying regional and nation state power needs."

Holtec CEO and president Kris Singh added: "With SNC-Lavalin's contribution of a high calibre cadre of experts, Holtec is poised to deliver on our SMR promise, to re-invigorate nuclear power for a world in dire need of a weather-independent and carbon-free source of energy."

Holtec has previously secured engineering, design and qualification support for its work on the SMR-160 from the Shaw Group and URS Corporation, and has a strategic alliance with utility PSEG Power, operator of three nuclear units at Salem and Hope Creek in southern New Jersey. In August 2015, Mitsubishi Electric Power Products Inc signed a long-term partnership agreement with Holtec to develop the instrumentation and control systems for the SMR-160.

The project was selected by the US Department of Energy in 2012 as one of three SMR projects to potentially be demonstrated at its Savannah River site in South Carolina. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is carrying out pre-application activities on the reactor design.

Holtec said it expects the initial licensing application by the end of 2018.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

Related topics
Morales said Trump's plan to sanction Venezuela is part of the ultimate U.S. goal of intervention and domination of Venezuela in order to appropriate its oil.

Bolivia's first Indigenous President Evo Morales took to Twitter Tuesday to condemn threats by U.S. President Donald Trump to impose economic sanctions against Venezuela if the country goes ahead with its National Constituent Assembly on July 30.

Morales said that Trump's plan to sanction Venezuela is part of an economic conspiracy, explaining that the ultimate goal of the U.S. government is intervention and domination of Venezuela in order to appropriate its oil.

The head of state spared no expense condemning several former Latin American presidents whose position against Venezuela was congruent with the U.S. interventionist plans. In doing so he affirmed that such positions were nothing short of shameful and that economic sanctions imposed on a democratically- elected government comprised a political conspiracy aimed at toppling Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Invited by the right-wing opposition Venezuela, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, along with four other Latin American heads of state, traveled to Caracas as "observers" of the non-binding plebiscite held Sunday. The four other former presidents, seeking to lend prestige and legitimacy to the mock plebiscite, were Andres Pastrana of Colombia, Jorge Quiroga of Bolivia, and Laura Chinchilla and Miguel Angel Rodriguez, both from Costa Rica.

On Monday, Trump characterized Maduro as a bad leader who harbors aspirations of becoming a dictator. He threatened that the U.S. government would impose strong and swift economic sanctions on Venezuela if the country proceeds with its constitutionally-backed ANC.

Amid growing right-wing violence and sabotage which included the torching of 40 tons of subsidized food, a helicopter terrorist attack against the Supreme Court and Ministry of Interior, Justice and Peace headquarters, and a Black youth, Orlando Figuera, being set on fire and killed by an anti-government crowd, Maduro called for the ANC to help foster dialogue and peace in the country.

At least 95 people have died and over 1,000 have been injured since the violent opposition protests began in early April. Maduro and former foreign minister and ANC candidate Delcy Rodriguez have said that the real plan behind the protests is to instigate widespread chaos which would further destabilize the country, with foreign intervention and the toppling of the Bolivarian government being the end game.
A startup needs to test an idea quickly. For this, an MVP is created. MVP, Minimal Viable Product  a test version of a product or service with a minimum set of functions (up to one or two), which allows you to see the product's value for consumers and the market. MVP is created to test hypotheses and check the viability of the intended product: is it worth developing the project further, what changes should be made? The sooner a startup brings its MVP to market and tests the idea, the better. This article will look at how no-code technology can help founders achieve their business goals.

This article will try to cover everything that a founder needs to know about no-code at the initial stage of creating a startup.

What is no-code?

No-code, zero-code platform is a tool for creating websites, applications, chatbots, and other programs without the need for direct code writing by programmers. No-code is a valuable alternative to traditional development.

No-code is confused with low-code, but there is a difference in these terms. Low-code includes no-code and the ability to "finish code", add parts of code and the functionality.

A user of a no-code platform usually does not need to know layout, programming languages, or hire a team of programmers. The user of the no-code tool creates an application using a visual block constructor, which he fills with the necessary content and functions, and the no-code platform itself does the processing of requests, compiling the application and other "magic." It generates code using AI and/or contains blocks of code pre-written by programmers.

No-code allows the startup founder to create an MVP himself, entrust it to his employee with basic technical literacy and understanding of the project, or hire a no-code developer. Even in the case of hiring a no-code developer, the cost of creating an MVP will be significantly lower than with classical development with programmers. For example, you can read the interview of a startup and no-code developer on our website, who initially worked as a Product Manager and was able to master no-code for his project himself.

Benefits of no-code for a startup founder

There are the following key advantages for a startup founder in using no-code technology:

a large selection of no-code tools, platforms, and their integrations at the moment  already in 2022, there are many tools and platforms for creating an MVP, a larger project, or even a finished product on no-code, but few people still know about them, and others are far from all startups and founders use their potential;

cost  no-code development saves the money by speeding up the development process, not hiring professional programmers or no need to maintain a developer department, monitoring functions and quick bug fixes, avoiding or reducing the growth of technical debt;

speed is the main advantage over classical development  no-code allows you to build a simple application in a weekend, and a more complex one can be built in a month. In this way, you can test an MVP and even several versions of an MVP very quickly;

low entry threshold  to master a no-code platform, you often do not need technical education at all, but only an understanding of a company's business processes or product from the inside. In the case of pro-level no-code platforms, technical education is required, but you can get used to it hundreds of times faster than with any programming language. This makes no-code available to almost everyone who wants to work with technology;

ease of use  no need to write hundreds of code lines  just move the blocks and assign links between them. Work on a project can be entrusted to your employee without communicating with a team of third-party developers. You can speak "in your language" without the need to understand the "inner kitchen" of developers;

flexibility  with the help of no-code, it is easy for a startup founder to add new functionality and new features right during a project or a MVP testing without a significant increase in development costs.

Possible disadvantages of no-code for a startup founder

As often, any property can be, under certain conditions, both a disadvantage and an advantage. In no-code, many of the benefits with the wrong choice of tool can turn into disadvantages:

no-code is not always a budget solution for a project. Sometimes in a no-code development package, you get unnecessary functions and additions (on AppMaster.io you can separately connect the frontend and pay only for the backend or only for those functions that you are using); if you do not understand the needs of your project, then you can make a mistake with the choice of a no-code tool and not be able to implement the necessary functions on it, or it will be too difficult to implement them; often, no-code tools fail to ensure proper data security and contribute to data leakage (but AppMaster.io allows you to host a finished application on any server); no-code tools often do not provide the ability to upload source code or provide uploading in an inconvenient format, which makes it difficult to move to another tool or to your development. You have to choose a no-code tool "once and forever immediately" (AppMaster. io gives you the ability to download the source code. Also, we generate human-readable code and you will not have any difficulties with its transportation); most no-code tools on the market are not suitable for creating a finished product, and there are significant difficulties with scaling the project if the MVP is successful (AppMaster.io is a professional no-code platform and our capabilities allow us to implement and support the finished product and scale it in the future).

Forewarned is forearmed. Choose your no-code tool wisely and take full advantage of your choice.

Types of no-code platforms

Conventionally, all no-code tools can be divided into several types: no-code devices with a low entry threshold (you can create frontend and not very powerful backend on them), integrators that help connect applications and services, and professional no-code platforms (they strive to replace the code completely, provide the ability to create a robust backend and high bandwidth).

The basic principle of operation of your MVP and the choice of a no-code platform depend on such a conditional division into types. For example, if you make a simple application like a diary, you can limit yourself to a no-code tool with a low entry threshold and a beautiful design.

If your application has powerful potential, high bandwidth, multi-user interface, and works with large amounts of data or real-time data, it is better to choose a professional no-code platform like AppMaster.io or Direcual.

If you use several services at once, link them on integrators like Integromat and Zapier.

Adalo

An easy-to-learn designer with a relatively user-friendly interface. The free version is helpful for learning. The free version contains Adalo watermarks and does not allow you to upload your applications to GooglePlayMarket and AppStore. Beginners often choose this no-code platform to create their first applications with simple logic.

Bubble

It will take more time to learn Bubble , but the platform allows you to work with the backend, databases, business processes, and layout. There are many plugins. The free plan allows you to master the tool, and you can start developing at the middle rate. The price increase is due to the rise in the number of users.

Integromat

It is an integrator. Experts talk about it as a simple and affordable platform for linking applications and services. Scenarios can be created personally, or you can use templates. If you need to connect an application with a service not from the Integromat database, fill out the form and connect to its API via HTTP.

Zapier

This is an integrator for linking applications with each other or with other external services. You can transfer data between thousands of applications. There is a script constructor (one event starts a chain of necessary actions).

Directual

The no-code platform positions itself for creating MVP applications (Minimal Viable Product, minimum viable product) and full-fledged applications of finished products. Scenarios are the backbone of the platform. Using scripts, you can automate the backend logic of the application, create and combine workflows. The Directual catalog includes out-of-the-box connectors, HTTP requests, webhooks, database listeners, and integration with popular services.

AppMaster.io

No-code next-generation platform for creating native and web applications on a real backend. Visual drag-and-drop designer, user-friendly business process designer, one-click app publishing to AppMaster Cloud, or integration with any cloud platform. Push notifications, authorization using social networks. Networks, email, and more. Connect applications to hundreds of services or programmatically access them using APIs. The ability to upload source code and documentation in a human-readable format and transfer it to your servers. Documentation auto-generation. Modern and fast language GoLang at the core.

No-code perspectives for startups

No-code development is gradually gaining popularity around the world. There are already more than 500 no-code tools for creating websites and various types of applications.

According to the forecasts of IT world experts, no-code will develop more and more actively and capture parts of the market responsible for medicine, small online business, small business, and all niches where it is possibly necessary to optimize and automate development processes.

The mass shift of businesses and their customers online and to gadgets has increased the demand for the fast and inexpensive creation of mobile applications that would work according to a single quality standard and have a simple, understandable, user-friendly interface.

Conclusion

No-code is visual programming in the form of a constructor without directly writing code. Usually, basic knowledge in development is enough to build applications on no-code.

The logic of no-code constructors is intuitive: the application interface is assembled from blocks, icons, buttons, and text which are connected to the database. Usually, you can choose a suitable template or do everything from scratch. Speed and economy are the main advantages of no-code tools.

No-code is suitable for creating an MVP, testing an idea or new features in a product, saving time for solving standard tasks. PRO level no-code platforms can provide you with a finished product, an application.

If you don't have an account on AppMaster.io yet, join us. After registration, you will be given a free trial period for 14 days, in which all the basic functionality of the platform is available. It will allow you to learn the intricacies of working with a professional-level no-code platform and understand its potential.


Sometime back, we had revealed that a month long schedule is being planned in Bulgaria for Pawan Kalyans next. The latest we hear is that the entire unit has left for this beautiful location earlier today.

Trivikram directs this film and he has based most of the film in Europe. Pawan plays a software engineer in this film and he is on a mission in Bulgaria where some key scenes of the film and a few songs will be shot.

Anirudh has already composed most of the music score for this film which has Keerthy Suresh and Anu Emanuel as the female leads. Harika and Haasini Creations produce this big budget family drama.

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"I think it is important for people to understand that a farmer doesn't want to collect crop insurance but has to have it to stay in business." states, Berg.

RITZVILLE, WA, July 19, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- How many people can go multiple years without being paid for the work they do? For farmers, that situation is all too common, as a crop can be destroyed by hail, fire, drought, etc., ruining a year's worth of work very quickly. The only way to survive is through crop insurance. Crop insurance is a vital part of producers' financial plans, although most of them hope they never need to fall back on it. Benton County grower Nicole Berg sent in these photos that illustrate just how critical crop insurance was on their farm two years ago.



In 2015, parts of Benton County were in the third year of a four-year drought. The Berg's dryland wheat crop was especially hard hit. Nicole used a clothes hanger to illustrate how the lack of water had severely stunted the wheat's growth. The insurance company pulled the plug on the crop, which was subsequently mowed down. Fast forward to this year. Nicole took another hanger out to the same spot to illustrate what a healthy, dryland wheat crop should look like. Without crop insurance the Berg's wouldn't have been able to survive those four years of drought. Here's Nicole's thoughts:



"I think it is important for people to understand that a farmer doesn't want to collect crop insurance but has to have it to stay in business. Nobody gets rich from crop insurance. You just hope it is enough to repay your loans and cover your costs.



"When you purchase crop insurance, you only cover a percentage of your crop, and you decide how much to insure based on the cost of coverage, the cost of production, and how conditions at the time of the purchase of crop insurance look. For example, in our case, if we believe we have to have crop insurance, then we purchase it at the 85 percent level. If we think it is going to be an okay year, we may purchase coverage at 75 percent or 65 percent.



"During this drought, we ended up having to collect on crop insurance in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016, which goes to show how bad the drought really was. If we hadn't had crop insurance, there's no way our farm would have survived."



About WAWG: Education and outreach are the heart of Washington Association of Wheat Growers activity, all of which is aimed at helping Washington wheat families. Since 1954, WAWG has been dedicated to the enrichment of the Washington wheat industry as a nonprofit trade association, which depends on volunteers, membership dues and donations to carry out activities as representatives on the state and national levels. WAWG monitors state, transportation, research and natural resources policy and partners with the National Association of Wheat Growers to monitor national farm policy. Visit wawg.org for more information.



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Jul 19, 2017 | By Tess

Los Angeles startup Mira has launched a pair of easy-to-use and affordable augmented reality glasses. Dubbed Mira Prism, the AR glasses are now available for pre-order for the low cost of $99. At that price, Mira is aiming to fill a gap in the AR headset market, which is currently dominated by either low-end (e.g. Google Cardboard) or high-end models (the $3,000 Microsoft HoloLens being the most obvious example).

How is the Mira Prism headset so inexpensive? Well, for starters, the glasses do not have any built-in electronics, and basically consist of a lightweight plastic headband and the goggle-esque lenses. To use Prism, users simply have to download and open a Mira-enabled app on their iPhones, and insert the phone (with the screen facing away) into the headset.

The Prism lens then reflects the image from the iPhone screen, which gives the illusion of the graphics floating in front of the user. Moreover, users can interact with the images they are seeing, and even play games, using a small remote that accompanies the Prism headset. Seems pretty straightforward, huh?

Additionally, using Miras Spectator Mode option, other people have the opportunity to visualize what the Prism user is seeing via their own iOS device. Not only can friends see the AR experience of the Prism user with Spectator Mode, but it also allows them to capture videos or photos of the AR experience.

Current apps for the AR headset include individual and multiplayer games, such as mixed-reality puzzles, digital warship battles, and holographic chess.

Those who tested the new Prism augmented reality headset had generally positive reviews. The Verge noted that, while the devices graphics were a bit rough around the edges and did not measure up to those of Microsofts HoloLens, its field of vision and overall quality for cost were satisfactory.

Mira, which was founded by three studentsBen Taft, Matt Stern, and Montana Reedfrom the University of Southern Californias Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy, has been developing its AR headset for some time now.

The Mira team, which reportedly went through thousands of 3D printed prototypes before arriving at the current Prism design, attracted some interest from investors earlier this year and managed to raise $1.5 million in funding from investors such as Will.i.am, Jaunt VR founder Jens Christensen, Sequoia Capital, and others.

Now, the startup is preparing to bring its $99 augmented reality headset to market. As mentioned, customers can already pre-order their Prism glasses, and can expect them to be delivered this fall.

As the technology currently stands, the Prism headset is compatible with the iPhone 6, 6s, and 7.

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THE TRUTH FUCKIN HURTS wrote at 7/20/2017 2:32:48 AM:ewwww black people cannot be poster children for high technology. looks like an ape.Hendrik wrote at 7/19/2017 10:29:05 PM:Clever hobbitses...




Jul 19, 2017 | By Tess

A research team from the University of British Columbias Okanagan campus has developed a 3D printed quality sensor device that is capable of monitoring drinking water. The small device, which gives feedback in real time, was designed to reduce the risk of waterborne illnesses, such as E. coli infections.

Professor Mina Hoorfar, Director UBC Okanagan School of Engineering

(Image: UBC Okanagan)

The project, which is being led by Professor Mina Hoorfar, the director of UBCs School of Engineering, offers a low-cost and reliable way to test drinking water. As Hoorfar explained, the 3D printed device is built to operate continuously and to be used at any point in the water distribution system.

Importantly, the 3D printed tool offers an alternative to current water testing methods, which rely on manual testing and which cannot be done as frequently as an automated testing system. Current water safety practice involves only periodic hand testing, which limits sampling frequency and leads to a higher probably of disease outbreak," said Hoorfar. "Traditional water quality sensors have been too expensive and unreliable to use across an entire water system.

The new water testing devices created by UBC researchers can overcome this challenge. Because they are 3D printed, they can be made quickly and cheaply, which means they can be repaired or replaced with ease as well.

3D printed at UBCs Advanced Thermo-Fluidic lab, the sensor-equipped devices are designed to operate wirelessly, and can read water samples no matter what the temperature or water pressure is. The researchers say that the devices were also created to work independently, which allows the water testing system to keep working, whether or not there is a problem with one of the devices.

"This highly portable sensor system is capable of constantly measuring several water quality parameters such as turbidity, pH, conductivity, temperature, and residual chlorine, and sending the data to a central system wirelessly. It is a unique and effective technology that can revolutionize the water industry, said Hoorfar.

The idea behind the 3D printed water testers is to increase water safety, even in places where water testing is already pretty stringent. Hoorfar uses the tragic example of Walkerton, Ontario, where hundreds of people fell ill and four died from water tainted with E. coli.

"Although the majority of water-related diseases occur in lower- or middle-income countries, water quality events in Walkerton, for example, raise serious questions about consistent water safety in even developed countries like Canada," she said. "Many of these tragedies could be prevented with frequent monitoring and early detection of pathogens causing the outbreak."

Unlike current water testing processes, which are upstream of the water distribution system, the 3D printed devices could be deployed virtually anywhere, even within homes. This, said Hoorfar, could provide an extra layer of water safety and protect consumers from any tainted or unsafe water.

The study was recently published in the journal Sensors. The full research report can be found here.

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Jim Kozubek in Nautilus:

William Ludwig was a 64-year-old retired corrections officer living in Bridgeton, New Jersey, in 2010, when he received a near-hopeless cancer prognosis. The Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania had run out of chemotherapeutic options, and Ludwig was disqualified from most clinical trials since he had three cancers at onceleukemia, lymphoma, and squamous cell skin cancer. In a later interview, the scientist Carl June described Ludwigs condition as Almost dead. Alison Loren, an oncologist at Penn, had been taking care of Ludwig for five painful years. If chemotherapy is not effective early on, each new round brings diminishing returns, and it becomes more and more toxic, she told me. In Ludwigs case, its toxic side-effects were outdoing any progress scaling back the battalions of cancer cells. The chemo was suppressing Ludwigs immune system, since it was his immune systems B cells, precisely the cells being targeted by the chemo treatments, that were cancerous, expanding uncontrollably in his bone marrow. An infection from an old chicken pox virus broke out in his right eye. And the cancer now appeared to be mobile, or what doctors call motile, riddling far-flung sites in his body. Ludwigs skin cancer looked to Loren as if it had spread, or metastasized, from his bones.It was about that time when Loren approached Ludwig about a new arrow that doctors at Penn had in their quiver. It was an indigenous strategy, and a radical and dangerous one. William is the most lovely, humble human being, Loren said. I dont think he realized how groundbreaking this would be at the time. He was almost casual about it. He looked at me, and shrugged, Ill give it a shot.

In short, the Penn scientists wanted to use engineering tricks to replicate the precision targeting ability of antibodiesY-shaped proteins that come in billions of varietiesto target a marker on Ludwigs cancer. Antibodies normally bind to molecular markers called antigens, tagging them to be disposed of by scavenger cells. B-cells and other antigen presenting cells can also lock onto the antigen. Then other immune system cells, such as helper T-cells notice the resulting structure, lock onto it, and unleash a powerful wrath of signaling molecules called cytokines to stir up the immune response. Killer T-cells also carry out lethal attacks on microbes carrying unauthorized antigen badges. T-cells carry a powerful thwack on their own, but theyre less effective without the precision targeting of the antibodies.

More here.
Sen. John McCains unexpected surgery on July 14 made headlines because it delayed a vote on the U.S. Senates health care bill. It also turned attention to a health problem that is common although not well understood: blood clots on the brain.



Blood clots are common in the 50+ population, and it is important to know how dangerous they are and to recognize warning signs.

The word 'clot' can be confusing, says Vikram Nayar, a neurosurgeon at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C. In the most common cases there isnt a blockage, he says, but rather bleeding outside the blood vessels. The danger is that the clots can put pressure on the brain, causing problems from disorientation to, in severe cases, coma or death.



The Arizona Republican's clot reportedly was found during a routine exam, but clots in or on the brain can be confirmed only through an MRI or CT scan.



In most cases a subdural hematoma, which most experts believe is the type of clot the 80-year-old McCain suffered, is diagnosed after a patient shows some of the typical symptoms. These include headaches, seizures, confusion, weakness involving one side of the body, and problems with speech. A stroke  a blood flow blockage within the brain that begins to kill brain cells  can cause similar symptoms. But not all clots lead to stroke.



The older we get, the higher the risk for a hematoma, Nayar explains, because our brains shrink with time. This causes the veins that bridge the brain to the skull to be more susceptible to tearing. The most minimal trauma can lead to a tear, he adds, even a shaking of the head without actually hitting the head. So a minor fall could cause it. In younger people it is typically caused by severe head injuries.



Anyone at risk should see a doctor immediately if symptoms appear, Nayar says. He advises people to take extra care to avoid falls, and to make sure a doctor is carefully monitoring the dosage if they are taking blood thinners.



McCain's doctors report that he is likely to make a full recovery after rest at home.
The study looked at 129 mothers in committed relationships over the course of a week to assess overall relationship satisfaction, stress, partner support and intimacy. Women reporting sexual relations at least once during the week had significantly longer telomeres. This held true even when adjusting for other factors such as perceived stress and relationship quality.

There are so many exciting questions to ask regarding sexual intimacys role in health! Baca told PsyPost. One major question that needs to be addressed involves hypothesizing how the effects of sexual intimacy may translate to better health. There are many physiological and psychosocial mechanisms that may mediate the sex-telomere relationship. For instance, we proposed that sexual intimacy may dampen the effects of stress by down-regulating stress response systems and up-regulating immune response. Over time, these patterns of stress function should result in longer telomere length.



The researchers note that the study is small and observational and that the correlation could be because the healthiest women are the most sexually active, not the other way around. They said the study should also be expanded to include men.



Positive attitudes about aging help in the bedroom

In related news, a separate study shows that having a positive attitude about aging can improve your sex life. Researchers from the University of Waterloo in Ontario published a study analyzing the data from a 10-year national survey in Canada. The authors found that while participants did report a drop in frequency, quality and interest in sex over time, having positive aging attitudes predicted increased ratings for quality of sex.

In other words, feeling younger than you really are may improve the quality of your romantic life, even if it doesn't increase the quantity. Researchers studied questionnaire responses of 1,170 adults over the age of 40 to look at participants subjective age, which is the difference between actual age and the age they feel, as well as the frequency and quality of their sex lives.

If you feel good about getting older, and if you feel younger than you are when you do get older, you're more likely to have better-quality sex later in life," study author Amy Estill told the CBC. And it's something that's often not considered for older adults because there is a stigma around it. Having a positive attitude about aging and feeling young at heart can have a real impact in the bedroom as you age.
When it comes to getting a meaningful raise, its up to you. Youll need to take charge and ask your boss. Success will require preparation, timing and a heavy dollop of self-confidence.

Not sure you're well placed to get one? Think about your situation. Have you been asked to take on another employee's responsibilities because your company downsized? Have you been laying down extra hours to help your department meet its objectives? Has your company profited from your top-of-the-charts performance? Yes to any of these? Then it may be time to ask for a raise.

Youll need to channel your inner salesperson. Like it or not, we are all in sales, Daniel Pink, best-selling author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others, told me when I interviewed him for my book Love Your Job: The New Rules for Career Happiness. Its not about going door-to-door selling products, but about moving people, convincing them to go along with your idea.

You can succeed, because your workplace's payroll accounts may have money set aside for people like you. U.S. salary increase budgets are expected to grow by 3.2 percent in 2018, up from a 3.1 percent increase in 2017, according to Planning Global Compensation Budgets for 2018, a report by the compensation analysis firm ERI Economic Research Institute. Its findings are based on data from more than 20,000 companies and government statistics.

There are a lot of misconceptions out there about how to proceed. So here are seven salary negotiation myths that youll need to set aside if youre going to land a raise.

Myth 1: You're not in the driver's seat. Not so. You have more power than you believe. Employers are worried about losing their best workers. Few younger workers can fill slots that need the kind of experience you have as a more seasoned employee. Millennials switch jobs more frequently than boomers, so employers really do have a motivation to keep you happy.
9AA: Wall tops Parkston for first state football title in 28 years
Frontier Resources Ltd (ASX:FNT) is pleased to announce that assay results from drilling at the Komsen Prospect in West New Britain, Papua New Guinea continue to increase the strike length of gold mineralisation and demonstrate a consistent higher grade gold zone. The intersections reported are from the eastern sector of the mineralised Komsen structure, at shallow to moderate depths.
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The best performing sub-indices for the month were the China Hydro Index with a 6.5% gain and the China Wind Index with an 4.6% gain. The two weakest sub-indices through October were the China Environment Index and the China Waste Index that both recorded losses of 2.5%.
Boonanarring Mineral Sands Project: The next cab off the mineral sands rank



Managing Director Presentation at Noosa Mining Conference

Perth, July 19, 2017 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Image Resources NL ( ASX:IMA ) ( IMREF:OTCMKTS ) provides the Company's latest Managing Director presentation at Noosa Mining Conference.



Company Description and Focus



Image Resources NL

Emerging mineral sands producer



Actively focused on fast-tracking the development of its 100%-owned, high-grade and high-zircon flagship Boonanarring mineral sands project in the North Perth Basin in Western Australia.



First production targeted for early 2018.



Project Location



- North Perth Basin in Western Australia



- 80 km north of Perth CBD



- Proven mineral sands address

o Including majors Iluka and Tronox



- Infrastructure rich

o paved roads, power, gas pipeline water, telecommunications etc.



- Local communities and landowners experienced with, and accepting of, mineral sands mining.



Ore Reserves



- QUALITY ORE RESERVES

o JORC Code (2012) Compliant

o High HM, VHM and very high zircon at Boonanarring



Bankable Feasibility Study



Base Assumptions



- Start mining at Boonanarring



- Dry, open-cut mining



- Production rate - 500 dry tonnes per hour

o 3.7M dry tonnes per year



- Conventional gravity separation using spirals



- Product: Heavy Mineral Concentrate (HMC)

o Production rate: avg. approx. 220K tonnes/annum

o Truck to Bunbury for bulk shipments to China



Offtake Agreement



Advantages of HMC Offtake vs Zircon Offtake



- results in securing 100% of revenue instead of 65-70% for zircon only;



- provides faster access to revenue;



o letters of credit can be converted to cash as soon as each shipment of HMC departs the Bunbury port, compared to having to wait until the HMC is processed into final products and the zircon is loaded and departs the port of loading;



- reduces total working capital requirements by A$7-8M (due to the faster receipt of revenue); and



- eliminates risks and potential extra costs associated with HMC processing (separation) including processing and delivery schedules, product quality issues, administration and marketing.



- Reduces overall project capital (no capital contribution for HMC processing)



Upside Potential



Upside potential at and near Boonanarring



- Confirmed potential to extend mine life with high grade mineralisation;



- Potential to process lower grade overlying layer of mineralisation;



- Several other deposits with high grade mineral resources in the vicinity.



To view the full presentation, please visit:

http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/885GL97G





About Image Resources NL





Image Resources NL (ASX:IMA) is a mineral sands focused mining company operating an open-cut mine and ore processing facility at its 100%-owned, high-grade, zircon-rich Boonanarring Project, located 80km north of Perth in the infrastructure rich North Perth Basin.

Boonanarring is arguably one of the highest grade, zircon-rich mineral sands projects in Australia. Construction and project commissioning were completed on-time and on-budget in 2018. Production commenced in December 2018 and HMC production ramped-up to exceed name-plate capacity in only the second month of operation. The Company achieved profitability in Q1 2019 and was cashflow positive in Q2 2019 and is now at steady state production.


Appointment of Nick Lindsay to the Board of Directors

Brisbane, July 19, 2017 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Argentinean focused lithium exploration company Lake Resources N.L. ( ASX:LKE ) ("Lake" or "LKE") is pleased to advise that it has significantly strengthened its Board with the appointment of a new Non-Executive Director with considerable expertise in the South American resources sector.



Director Appointments



Dr Nick Lindsay has been appointed as a Non-Executive Director of the Company. Nick has over 25 years' experience in Argentina, Chile and Peru in technical and commercial roles in the resources sector with major and mid-tier companies, as well as start-ups. Nick has an BSc (Hons) degree in Geology, a PhD in Metallurgy and Materials Engineering as well as an MBA. A fluent Spanish speaker, he has successfully taken companies in South America, such as Laguna Resources which he led as Managing Director, from inception to listing, development and subsequent acquisition. Mr Lindsay is currently CEO of Manuka Resources Ltd, an unlisted company, having previously held the position of President - Chilean Operations for Kingsgate Consolidated Ltd and is a member of the AusIMM and the AIG.



LKE's Chairman, Mr Crow said: "As Lake enters a much more active period of exploration of its assets in Argentina, it is important that we have greater South American resources sector expertise at Board level. Nick will deliver such expertise and we are delighted to have secured his services.



"Nick holds more than 25 years' experience in Argentina and Chile, and this enhanced guidance to our technical and commercial team on the ground will be invaluable as we begin to develop our projects. We look forward to updating shareholders on progress in this regard."



Mr Peter Gilchrist has advised of his decision to step down from the Board after more than 10 years' service. Mr Gilchrist was instrumental in establishing Lake Resources privately and listing the Company, focused on copper-gold assets, including leases in Argentina, and was central to the successful acquisition of the lithium projects of Lith NRG Pty Ltd. The Board thanks him for his assistance and good guidance of the Company.



To view figures, please visit:

http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/6GLZC7R3





About Lake Resources NL





Lake Resources NL (ASX:LKE) (OTCMKTS:LLKKF) is a clean lithium developer utilising clean, direct extraction technology for the development of sustainable, high purity lithium from its flagship Kachi Project, as well as three other lithium brine projects in Argentina. The projects are in a prime location within the Lithium Triangle, where 40% of the world's lithium is produced at the lowest cost.



This method will enable Lake Resources to be an efficient, responsibly-sourced, environmentally friendly and cost competitive supplier of high-purity lithium, which is readily scalable, and in demand from Tier 1 electric vehicle makers and battery makers.


Greatcell & Jinko Sign MOU

Canberra, July 19, 2017 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Greatcell Solar Limited ( ASX:GSL ) ( DYSOY:OTCMKTS ) (formerly Dyesol Limited) is pleased to announce that it has signed a non-exclusive Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with JinkoSolar ( NYSE:JKS ), an international Chinese headquartered company and one of the world's largest photovoltaic (PV) solar panel manufacturers. The relationship has formed over several months of discussion and with the close support of Nanyang Technology University (NTU), our academic research collaboration partner in Singapore.



Greatcell will make available developmental Perovskite Solar Cell (PSC) devices and associated information on a strictly confidential basis to enable Jinko to further evaluate the technology with the long-term aim of entering into a formal agreement with Greatcell to commercialise the technology and establish large scale manufacturing.



Managing Director, Richard Caldwell remarked:



"We are delighted to jointly explore commercialisation opportunities with Jinko for our revolutionary technology in China. Jinko is very progressive, recognises the potential of our emerging technology and is a world leader in the solar sector. Moreover, Jinko has a deep understanding of risk-managed technology development and the benefits of economies of scale in manufacture. The possibilities for collaboration are enormous."



About JinkoSolar Holdings Co., Ltd



JinkoSolar ( NYSE:JKS ) is a global leader in the solar industry. JinkoSolar distributes its solar products and sells its solutions and services to a diversified international utility, commercial and residential customer base in China, the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Chile, South Africa, India, Mexico, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, and other countries and regions. JinkoSolar has built a vertically integrated solar product value chain, with an integrated annual capacity of 5.0GW for silicon ingots and wafers, 4.0GW for solar cells, and 6.5 GW for solar modules, as of March 31, 2017.



About PEROVSKITE SOLAR CELL TECHNOLOGY



Perovskite Solar Cell (PSC) technology is a photovoltaic (PV) technology based on applying low cost materials in a series of ultrathin layers encapsulated by protective sealants. Greatcell Solar's technology has lower embodied energy in manufacture, produces stable electrical current, and has a strong competitive advantage in low light conditions relative to incumbent PV technologies. This technology can be directly integrated into the building envelope to achieve highly competitive building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV).



The key material layers include a hybrid organic-inorganic halide-based perovskite light absorber and nano-porous metal oxide of titanium oxide. Light striking the absorber promotes an electron into the excited state, followed by a rapid electron transfer and collection by the titania layer. Meanwhile, the remaining positive charge is transferred to the opposite electrode, thereby generating an electrical current.





About Greatcell Solar Limited





Greatcell Solar Limited (ASX:GSL) (OTCMKTS:DYSOY) is a global leader in the development and commercialisation of Perovskite Solar Cell (PSC) technology  3rd Generation photovoltaic technology that can be applied to glass, metal, polymers or cement. Greatcell Solar Limited manufactures and supplies high performance materials and is focussed on the successful commercialisation of PSC photovoltaics. It is a publicly listed company: Australian Securities Exchange ASX (GSL) and German Open Market (D5I). Learn more at our website and subscribe to our mailing list in English and German.
US President Donald Trump met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at a second, previously undisclosed chat during the G20 summit in Germany this month, the White House confirmed on Wednesday, raising new questions about their relationship.

After his much-publicised two-and-a-quarter-hour meeting on July 7 with Russian President Putin in Hamburg, President Trump chatted informally with the Russian leader for up to an additional hour later the same day, the Washington Post reported.

The second meeting, undisclosed at the time, took place at a dinner for G-20 leaders, a senior administration official said.

During the meal, Trump left his own seat to occupy a chair next to Putin. Trump approached alone, and Putin was attended only by his official interpreter, the report said.

In a statement issued on the night of Tuesday after the US media published reports of the second conversation, the White House said that there was no second meeting between President Trump and President Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner.

The insinuation that the White House has tried to hide a second meeting, it said, is false, malicious and absurd.

All the leaders circulated around the room throughout the dinner, and President Trump spoke with many leaders, the statement said. As the dinner was concluding, it said, Trump spoke briefly with Putin, who was seated next to first lady Melania Trump.

Each couple was allowed one translator. The American translator accompanying President Trump spoke Japanese. When President Trump spoke to President Putin, the two leaders used the Russian translator, since the American translator did not speak Russian, the White House said.

The two leaders relationship is under intense scrutiny amid allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign during the US presidential polls.

US intelligence believe Russia helped Trump in last years presidential election, something denied by Moscow. Trump has rejected any collusion.

Trump also said that Putin was unlikely to have preferred him over Hillary Clinton as president, since his goals include taking international energy business away from Russia and building up the US military.

The dinner encounter appeared to underscore the extent to which Trump was eager throughout the summit to cultivate a friendship with Putin. During last years election campaign, he spoke admiringly of the Russian leader and at times seemed captivated by him, the Post noted.
Describing China as a bigger threat to India than Pakistan, Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday sought the governments response on the military stand-off at Doklam.

Speaking in the Lok Sabha, the former Defence Minister also accused China of conspiring against India and urged the government to openly support the independence of Tibet and ban Chinese products in the country.

China is a bigger threat to India than Pakistan. Pakistan cannot do anything to India. I have been saying this since the last 20 years. Now, its clear that China is conspiring against us. In Kashmir, China is supporting Pakistan even with arms and ammunition. This should be strongly protested, Mulayam Yadav said during Zero Hour.

Mulayam Yadavs remarks came after the opposition parties staged a walk out of the Lok Sabha demanding immediate discussion on the issue of farmers plight.

The SP leader said that the Chinese army and their weapons have been seen in Kashmir. China is even constructing a road in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

We should diplomatically protest it. Pakistan with China has adopted a strategy to infiltrate Kashmir, which is very dangerous, he said.

Yadav said that India has accepted Chinas authority on Tibet, which was a blunder.

Now, India should openly support Tibet for its independence. India should also help Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama as much as it can. This will be a befitting reply to China, he said.

The veteran leader also demanded a ban on Chinese products in India in the nations interest.

If China continues to help Pakistan and interferes in Kashmir, India should ban Chinese products. If need be, we should have a rethink on diplomatic relations, Yadav said.

He also demanded a complete review of Indias relations with China.

The stand-off between the armies of India and China in the Doklam plateau in the Sikkim sector has led to strain in diplomatic ties, with the Chinese state-run media openly talking of war.

The government last week briefed the leaders of political parties and assured them that the issue will be resolved diplomatically.
The Shiv Sena corporators have demanded that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) file a defamation suit against a popular radio jockey and a local FM channel for allegedly making fun of the civic body in a video over the bad condition of city roads.

The BMC has also issued a notice to RJ Malishka, working with a private FM channel in Mumbai, after mosquitoes were found breeding at her house in suburban Bandra.

Yuva Sena members and corporators Sadanand Sarvankar and Amey Ghole, in a joint letter to the BMC Commissioner Ajoy Mehta yesterday, demanded that a Rs 500 crore defamation suit be filed against the channel.

The radio channel and its RJ Malishka have knowingly targeted the BMC to tarnish its image for problems that are not under its jurisdiction, Sarvankar alleged.

Everyone knows that the maintenance and supervision of the big roads like Eastern Express Highway and Western Express Highway is the responsibility of the state government agencies. But the RJ, in her video, has portrayed that the BMC is responsible for all the potholes (on the citys roads), he said.

He alleged that the video has not only maligned the image of Mumbai and the BMC, but has also shaken the confidence of thousands of BMC employees who work hard to keep the city free from water-logging during the rains.

Another corporator, Amey Ghole, said the BMC chief has assured them of appropriate steps over the issue.

We hope that the BMCs legal department will swing into action, Ghole said.

RJ Malishka was featured in a 1.23-minute-long video footage, titled Mumbai tula BMC var bharosa nai ka (Mumbai, dont you have faith in BMC) in Marathi and uploaded on YouTube. In the footage, she purportedly poked fun at the bad state of roads filled with potholes in the city as well as the delays in suburban train schedules.

She is purportedly seen taking a dig at the BMC and other authorities over the issues related to the problems of traffic jams during the rains.

The BMC, meanwhile, has served a notice to the RJ alleging that mosquitoes were found to be breeding at her flat in Pali Hill area of Bandra.

We have served a notice to RJ Malishka under section 381-B of the Mumbai Municipal Corporation (MMC) Act for the mosquito breeding at her house on the 6th floor of a building at Pali Naka in Bandra, a BMC official said.

During a routine inspection, our team found Aedes mosquitoes breeding in a clay bowl kept under a pot as well as indoor breeding in the pots of plants, he said.

The notice has been served to the RJs mother.

The RJ could not be reached for her comments on the issue.

Mumbai BJP president Ashish Shelar, however, termed the civic bodys action to serve notice to the RJ as unfair.

Completely unfair that authorities turn up at @mymalishkas house and find faults. Spoke to BMC Commissioner & ward officers to bring peace, Shelar tweeted.

Congress MLA Nitesh Rane said he stands behind the RJ, who is like a sister to him.








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(TORONTO - AgoraMedia.ca Wire) --There is a good chance that you will make it all the way through life and never decide to settle in the drivers seat after having a little too much to drink. Even so, it never hurts to have some idea of what could happen if you are charged and ultimately convicted of driving under the influence. Knowing these four basic facts will come in handy if you do find yourself in this situation and need to take action as quickly as possible.

1 - You Do Need Legal Counsel

A charge of driving under the influence is a serious matter. This is not something you want to face on your own. The best approach is to contact one of the DUI lawyers in the area and arrange for representation.

The lawyer will be able to evaluate the circumstances leading up to the arrest and know how to present you when the court date arrives. This is crucial since a conviction will have an impact on your ability to secure insurance and could cause problems with finding employment in the years to come.

2 - You Have the Right to an Adjournment

There will be a hearing that must be attended shortly after the arrest. At that hearing, you do have the right to request what is known as an adjournment. This is a two to three week period that allows the accused party an opportunity to find legal counsel, begin to prepare a defense, and make whatever other arrangements that are appropriate.

There will be restrictions on your movements during the adjournment period. That especially relates to the ability to travel outside the immediate area. If your work requires that you take a business trip during the two to three week period, you will need permission from the court to leave the area. Your lawyer can help you file the proper documents for the request.

3 - Not Everything Can Be Taken to the Courtroom

Your lawyer will advise you to leave your phone at home. The same goes for a lengthy list of items that may not be carried into the courtroom. That list includes any type of sharp objects like knives. Before assuming its fine to take prescription medication into the courtroom, check with your legal counsel.

If you have any doubts about what you may or may not take along, consult your lawyer. Your legal counsel will be aware of any current additions to the list of prohibited items and be in a position to ensure you are acting in full compliance with the rules of the court.

You Do Have the Right to Fight the Charge

While DUI laws are strict in Ontario, every accused party has the opportunity to answer those charges. If anyone has told you that fighting is a waste of time, dont listen. As your lawyer will point out, there are a number of drunk driving news and articles online that detail how an accused party was ultimately cleared of the charges. Given the way a conviction can haunt you for years, its in your best interests to fight if there is any indication that the arresting officer did not follow procedures or some other mitigating factor exists.

Should you find yourself facing a DUI charge, seek help immediately. With a lawyer at your side, it will be simpler to determine what course of action would be in your best interests.

Mass Tsang DUI Lawyers

34 Eglinton Avenue West Suite 810

Toronto, ON M4R 2H6 Canada

Tel: (416) 800 1322
Grant Wiseman, co-chair of the Aiken Citizens Review Board, bottom right, explains the process of how the board will handle complaints of police misconduct. Pictured, clockwise from bottom left, are board members Philip Howell, Ann Dicks, Brandon Upson, Geoffry Alls, Bonnie Fulgham, James Gallman, John Lindsay, Carmen Landy and Wiseman.
SCDHEC will hold an informational meeting about developing the capacity use program for the Western area (including Aiken) at a meeting in Blackville on Tuesday.
Assyrian Fighters in Raqqa Report ISIS Using Drones to Drop Bombs

An Assyrian fighter burns an ISIS flag on the front line on the western side of Raqqa, Syria, on July 17, 2017. ( AP/Hussein Malla) Christian forces fighting to oust ISIS from its declared capital of Raqqa said today that while "hundreds, maybe thousands" of terrorists fled before the Syrian Democratic Forces laid siege to the city, the remaining terrorists have resorted to "dirty tactics" including dropping bombs on their forces from drones. The Syriac Military Council (MFS), which consists of Assyrian men and women fighting alongside Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen and other ethnic groups under the umbrella of the SDF, also warned that the Turkish government and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are trying to stop the SDF's offensive by attacking the anti-ISIS coalition. In a video message today, MFS spokesman Kino Gabriel said that the operation to "liberate the so-called caliphate of the Islamic State," in particular the current Wrath of Euphrates operation to liberate Raqqa and surrounding territory that began in November, is going according to plan. "The importance of this operation for us is very huge ... liberating [Raqqa] would mean another step in the battle to defeat ISIS and to defeat terrorists that have been persecuting the Syrian people and its components for so long," Gabriel said, noting that ISIS has been attacking different groups including "the Syrian Christians who have been living in different areas like Jazira, like Raqqa, Homs." MFS participation is important, he said, "in order to revenge the persecution that Syriac Christians have taken, to revenge the persecution that we see and that people have been living under since 2013 and 2014." He also emphasized the role of the Bethnahrin Women's Protection Forces, "the Syrian women who have taken part in the operation since its first stages" who comprise the women of the MFS. "There have been several Christian families, living and still living in the city of Raqqa, some of them managed to get out and got the support of the Syriac Military Council and other groups," Gabriel said, adding that there are "so many civilians" still trapped in Raqqa "that are still living there alongside the few Christian families," whose status is "currently unknown." He said the MFS is "taking different measures in order to locate those families and be able to rescue them as the operation and the offensive is continuing." The goal is to "completely liberate the city" and allow the civilian administration to take over and "get the people back again to their normal lives and to be able provide the necessary services the people need." "Our goal is to completely liberate Raqqa and continue fighting Daesh in the territories under its control," he said, using the pejorative Arabic name for ISIS. Gabriel said the MFS and allies "are trying to do our task and kick the terrorism out," but "so far we have been attempted to stop by different forces like the Turkish state and the Turkish army alongside some Free Syrian Army groups who are affiliated with Turkey and attacking different areas that are controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces." "They attempt to stop or slow our operation to reach Raqqa," he said. "The same thing goes for the Syrian regime supported by its allies, which attempted to slow down and attacked our forces in different locations ... military and defensive measures have been taken and several airplanes belonging to the Syrian army have been dropped." A month ago, a U.S. Navy F/A-18E Super Hornet shot down a Syrian Su-22 that was dropping bombs on SDF positions southwest of Raqqa. The U.S. military said the Syrian regime attack wounded "a number" of SDF fighters. "Our goal, as we said, is to liberate Syria from the terrorism of Daesh and the different terrorist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and the others," Gabriel said, and let the Syrian people thrive in "a democratic system that is pluralistic" and gives a voice to all of Syria's ethnic and religious groups. "ISIS has been defeated so far inside the city, hundreds maybe thousands of fighters maybe escaped during the first stages of the operation and just before the siege of the city from all sides," the spokesman continued. "Those who are left, maybe they will be in the thousands, and they are fighting very hard against our forces, mostly using, let's say, dirty tactics including dropping bombs from drones, snipers, VBIEDS [car bombs], and are using tunnels that have been built under the city to infiltrate our forces. So far, our forces have been able to do the task and stop any attacks from Daesh." ISIS released a lengthy video in January unveiling their weaponized drone program. After the Mosul operation began in October, a U.S. general described ISIS' drones as "commercial, off-the-shelf" unmanned aircraft. Gabriel noted that they have been able to "liberate several neighborhoods and are continuing our operations to liberate the others." "We are sure that our battle is for the good and the righteousness of our cause and we are going to succeed, and we are going to be victorious in this battle and in this operation," he said.
July 18, 2017

NEW YORK  Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Tuesday that Iran was still not certain whether the Donald Trump administration wants to scrap the Iran nuclear deal. But he said critics of the deal  reached in 2015 after years of intensive negotiations  are wrong to think that a better agreement is available.

We still do not know what they want to do, Zarif said. They have been talking about scrapping the deal.  But they seem to have come to the realization that scrapping the deal is not something that would be globally welcome.  [So] they now try to make it impossible for Iran to get the benefits from the deal.

Zarif spoke to a small group of American journalists at the Central Park residence of Irans ambassador to the United Nations, a day after the Trump administration grudgingly certified that Iran was complying with the nuclear deal while slapping sanctions on 18 Iranian entities for non-nuclear concerns. Unlike its predecessor, Trump aides insisted, the new administration refuses to be held hostage by the nuclear accord in devising a more aggressive posture to counter Iranian actions in the region.

Under the Barack Obama administration, the nuclear agreement was the tail that wags the Iran policy dog, a senior Trump administration official told journalists on a White House call Monday night. We are determined not to continue that.

Zarif, who has served as Irans foreign minister since 2013 and as Irans envoy to the United Nations in New York before that, did not seem overly rattled by the Trump administrations tough talk. But he mentioned reports that Trump had urged fellow Group of 20 leaders in Hamburg, Germany, this month not to invest in Iran; Zarif said that would be a violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Its become a rather tired routine, Zarif said. Each time they want to certify [Iranian compliance] they make sure to do something negative. It is obviously a sign of bad faith.

Zarif said that the Trump administration was hardly the only party to be dissatisfied with the nuclear deal, but that there was not a better deal to be had.

The JCPOA is not a deal that anyone loves, Zarif said. It was the only deal possible.

Believe me, I had to go through hell every other day in Iran, if not every day, Zarif said, referring to hard-liners criticism that the deal did not give Iran sufficient economic benefits. Pointing to his deputies and fellow nuclear deal negotiators in the room, deputy foreign ministers Abbas Araghchi and Majid Ravanchi, Zarif added, and my colleagues Araghchi and Ravanchi go through hell every hour.

We could not get a better deal, Zarif reiterated. The US could not get a better deal. I assure [you], the US could not get a better deal.

The JCPOA was negotiated and drafted based on mutual distrust, Zarif said. It is not an agreement based on trust.  [You] will see mistrust in every sentence and paragraph of the deal. And it is mutual.

That is why there are mechanisms to deal with minor violations, major violations and major breaches, [and] significant noncompliance, Zarif said. We have avenues for dealing with them.

If we have a case of significant non-compliance  then Iran has the option to walk out, Zarif noted. I dont think we are there yet.

Zarif said he has had no communications yet with his new US counterpart, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

No, I have not asked [for a meeting], and I dont think I will, Zarif said. He said he and Tillersons predecessor, John Kerry, did not often formally request meetings. If we were in the same place at the same time, and the possibility arose, we would meet, Zarif said of Kerry.

The United States and Iran are expected to hold a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Joint Commission meeting on implementing the JCPOA in Vienna on Friday, diplomats said. US Undersecretary of State Tom Shannon will lead the US delegation to the Vienna meeting, and Araghchi and Ravanchi will both attend on the Iranian side.
July 19, 2017

Iranian authorities are struggling to address smuggling in border areas, and particularly the Kurdish region, where local economies are in tatters after decades of government neglect and discriminatory policies. Thousands of Kurds carry illegal goods into the country from Iraqi Kurdistan for a fee in order to provide for their families, in operations commonly organized by wealthy smuggling rings in Tehran and other big cities. The Kurdish men are known as "kolbar"  porters crossing the remote mountains between Iraqi and Iranian Kurdistan with goods smuggled on their backs.

The Iranian government was expected to finally take action on the issue last year as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made a rare intervention. Be determined in fighting smuggling. When I say smuggling, I dont mean a poor kolbar from Baluchistan who goes to the other side of the border and carries a thing on his back to this side.  This is not important, it won't matter even if you dont confront them," Khamenei told officials last year. "I am talking about big coordinated smuggling [rings]; we need to fight them, we are the state, we have the power.

But despite the supreme leaders warning, the numbers of kolbar killed by Iranian border guards are rising fast. In the early hours of July 1, a group of eight kolbar was operating in the border area near the Iranian town of Baneh when the kolbar came under fire from border guards. One kolbar was reportedly killed and another suffered serious head injuries. Incidents such as these have become a weekly occurrence in the Kurdish areas in western Iran. In 2016, at least 49 kolbar were either killed by direct fire from Iranian border guards or due to natural incidents such as avalanches. In comparison, the first six months of this year have seen at least 40 kolbar killed and 87 others wounded. The renewed violence between Kurdish militants and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in these border areas is another factor that is contributing to the rising number of casualties, as the kolbar face the risk of being caught in the occasional crossfire.

Border smuggling is big business in Iran. It is estimated that kolbar carry $3.6 billion worth of goods into the country each year. While significant, some experts consider this figure to constitute only some 30% of the value of the goods that enter Iranian markets without payment of duties and tariffs.

Only a small part of smuggling revenues stay in the Kurdish areas, mainly in the form of courier fees; most profits are pocketed by big merchants in Tehran and other major cities who find it cheaper to smuggle rather than legally import their goods into the country. While the smuggling damages domestic manufacturing and production, creating unbalanced competition, the Iranian government has yet to deal with this phenomenon in a constructive way that entices the thousands of kolbar to abandon their dangerous work and instead seek alternative job opportunities. Indeed, Iranian Kurdish parliamentarians consistently complain that the government is not serious about resolving smuggling. To address the issue, they have called on the authorities to develop the border crossings with Iraqi Kurdistan into free trade zones, where some of the kolbar can find sustainable employment. However, as noted by Mohsen Biglari, an Iranian member of parliament from Kurdistan province, one of the main challenges in the countrys Kurdish areas is the difficulty in attracting investment.

The main reason for why so many Kurdish men turn to smuggling is the high unemployment rate in the border areas. While the government says the official unemployment rate is 12.6% this year, Iranian Kurdish parliamentarians say the actual unemployment rate in their constituencies has reached somewhere between 40% and 50%.

In the absence of effective measures to tackle joblessness, the authorities have taken the step of extending social security coverage to the kolbar  albeit only those who are considered as official porters. Earlier this month, Rasul Khezri, a parliamentarian from Sardasht and Piranshahr where thousands of people are engaged in the smuggling trade, announced the signing of an agreement to extend insurance coverage to between 14,000 and 18,000 kolbar in these two towns. The insurance will include coverage of disability as well as pensions for those who have worked over 15 years or are over 65 years of age. The annual premium is set at 4.83 million rials ($148) according to the agreement, of which 95% will be covered by the state. Thus, eligible kolbar will only need to pay 241,500 rials ($7.40) per year.

Nonetheless, official kolbar  meaning those who hold licenses to work at the official border crossings  only find such employment a few days a month. Thus, even these kolbar often have to resort to smuggling of goods across the mountains to have sustainable livelihoods.

Seeing the people of this region carrying heavy and bulky loads to make a living is painful and we need to find a solution to help them, First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri said while visiting Kurdistan province July 8. To resolve this issue, the government supports new ideas and alternative plans and even financial assistance to meet the needs of this sector of society and so that 'kolbari' [illegal porter services] is removed from the social life of Kurdistan as a profession.

President Hassan Rouhani has repeatedly pledged to the people of Iranian Kurdistan, where he received 75% of the vote in the May 19 elections, that more investment will be provided and that the issue of unemployment will be tackled. But his pledges have yet to turn into real change  especially for the kolbar.
July 19, 2017

Just over half a year after Donald Trump entered the White House, the first public dispute between him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, i.e., Netanyahu, has surfaced. Israel opposes the cease-fire agreement in southern Syria, Netanyahu told reporters July 16, after a meeting in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron. Netanyahu argued that the agreement, announced by the United States and Russia July 7 at the G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, perpetuates Iran's presence in Syria.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, an Israeli source intimately familiar with what is happening behind the scenes told Al-Monitor emphatically, This is not just some disagreement. This is a real clash, pitting Israel against Russia and the United States. It reflects Israel's conspicuous disappointment with the way that the Americans let [Russian President Vladimir] Putin outmaneuver them, leading to the sellout of Israeli interests in the Golan Heights and Lebanon versus the Shiite axis.

Netanyahu allowed the disagreement to come to the forefront, taking all possible responses by Trump into account. Still, unlike previous presidents, Trump cannot be analyzed. He is unpredictable, and there is no way to assess his reaction in advance. As of this article's publication, there has been no official response from the president or Washington. On the other hand, the Americans have been investing quite a bit of energy behind the scenes in an attempt to convince the Israelis that their concerns are exaggerated. So far, the Israelis have not been convinced.

Over the past few months, Israel had been involved in the contacts between the parties that led to the implementation of the cease-fire. Israel had a foothold in all matters concerning the region discussed by the superpowers  the southwest, which Israel borders. Israel participated in these talks with the Americans, Jordanians and Russians. It also conducted separate talks with each of the parties.

While discussions were underway, Israel reiterated on numerous occasions that there must be no Hezbollah or Iranian presence whatsoever in the buffer zones that will be declared along the various borders. Another Israeli demand was that Iran be prevented from establishing military bases in Syria, from creating or leasing a port along the Syrian coast and from rebuilding Syria's arms industry.

In a separate effort, Israel made it very clear that it would not accept the creation of Hezbollah factories to produce precision missiles in any part of Lebanon. Their precision [missiles], a senior Israeli military official told Al-Monitor on the condition of anonymity, constitute Hezbollah's greatest threat against us right now. We will not just sit here with our arms folded if that group gets anywhere near obtaining the capacity to produce precision missiles independently.

The emergence of an agreement between Russia and the United States irritates an old wound. The last time Washington reached a similar agreement was the nuclear deal with Iran, during the Barack Obama administration. Netanyahu fought against that until the very last minute and even beyond.

Now, with the president most supportive of Israel ever in the White House, Netanyahu finds himself facing the same situation. The only difference is that in these talks, Israel had a voice at the table before an agreement was reached. This contrasts sharply with the situation during the Iranian nuclear talks, in which Israel was kept out of the room and had to rely on intelligence for information. The Americans completely conceded to the Russians, a senior Israeli military official told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. The very names of Iran or Hezbollah do not appear in the agreement, and there is no expression of Israeli concerns at all. Our security needs are completely ignored. The question now is what will Israel do about it?

One senior Israeli military official told Al-Monitor on the condition of anonymity, For the first time ever, we have a conflict between the superpowers on our border. The Russians have between 3,000 and 4,000 troops in Syria, including special forces, fighter jets, bombers, anti-aircraft batteries and radar installations. The Americans have special forces there, too. The two parties have partitioned Syria between them, with the Americans north of the Euphrates River and the Russians south of it. Given these circumstances, it is only natural that our own freedom of action has been reduced, even if we don't admit it.

Meanwhile, Israel is raising the ante with increasingly belligerent statements and even insinuating threats against Iran. We will not let the Iranians and Hezbollah be the forces that will win, said Maj. Gen. (Res.) Yaakov Amidror July 17. Amidror, who is thought to be close to Netanyahu, continued, stating, At the end of the day it is our responsibility, not the responsibility of the Americans, or the Russians, to guarantee ourselves. He added that keeping Iran and Syria from building launching pads in Syria was a primary goal and that Israel would not allow Iran and Hezbollah to take advantage of their victory in the long war in Syria and turn their focus on Israel.

It is safe to assume that the precise wording of Amidror's comments, made to the foreign press, originated in the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem. His remarks constituted an escalation in Israeli statements  which have consistently become more aggressive since the crisis began  as they included a significant threat: if Iran constructs certain kinds of infrastructures in Syria (or Lebanon), the Israeli military will be forced to attack and destroy them. While these statements were made in Israel, they were noted in Moscow, Washington, Tehran and other world capitals. Netanyahu is raising the threshold and drawing another red line along Israel's northern front.

The question is how seriously these threats will be taken by the superpowers and by Israel's enemies. The last time Netanyahu made such a threat and drew red lines, it turned out to be an idle threat. Over the past few years, Netanyahu has stated time and again that if the international community does not know how to block Iran's race to obtain nuclear arms, Israel will act alone. From Netanyahu's perspective, the nuclear agreement not only fails to prevent the Iranians from obtaining a nuclear capacity, it also turns Iran into a nuclear threshold state at the end of the agreement's 10-year timeframe. Yet, even though Netanyahu knew this, he preferred not to act. He allowed an operational window to pass, leaving Iran to enter the immune zone.

According to fresh leaks, which apparently could be sources from Israeli intelligence, Iran is still planning to construct a precision missile factory in Lebanon several dozen meters underground. That is also a kind of immune zone.

Will Netanyahu and his defense minister, Avigdor Liberman, allow this to happen? Since the whole issue is still in its infancy, it is too early to speculate. With investigations into Netanyahu piling up, it is in no way certain that he will even be prime minister when the possibility of launching such an attack becomes relevant.

In the meantime, Netanyahu considers his statement on the cease-fire to be particularly germane. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responded quickly to restore a sense of calm, noting that Israels security interests were fully taken into consideration in the agreement. In contrast, Washington responded with a thunderous silence.
July 19, 2017

Since May, Netanyahu has attended four important diplomatic summits with influential world leaders.

The whirlwind bout of diplomacy started with US President Donald Trumps first visit to Israel in May. After that, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived for a historic visit on July 4, and on July 16, Netanyahu landed in Paris and spent quality time with the young new president of France, Emmanuel Macron, who promised to visit Israel soon. From Paris, Netanyahu continued to Budapest, where he met with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Anyone following Netanyahus well-tended and well-updated Facebook page has been inundated by video clips, photos and posts of Israels prime minister striding on red carpets, taking off and landing in different countries, flying in a helicopter over the skies of Israel and walking on the beach with world leaders. The photo album of Trumps visit effectively conveys the extent of the friendship between the leader of the free world and the prime minister of Israel.

No one would dispute that Netanyahu is now considered one of the worlds prominent leaders. Hes impressive, and he conveys prestige, seniority and power. Hes a welcome guest at almost all important world capitals  Moscow, Washington, Berlin and Paris. He enjoys the prestige of the local high-tech industry and Israels economic and military might, and he projects international savvy in polished English and with broad erudition.

Since he discovered the power of social media, he no longer needs the good graces of the local media, which he claims does not treat him fairly. So every such visit includes handshakes that are photographed to exhaustion.

Netanyahu has become the master of online photos. Before every takeoff or landing, he shoots a short video clip, speaking casually. At the Likud meeting on July 10, he gave members a general survey of his successes in the diplomatic arena. He spoke of economic cooperation with India and billion shekel agreements signed following Modis visit. He updated the Likud members that another friend of mine visited, President of Rwanda Paul Kagame, a man who has done much to save his people from a terrible genocide and now advances Rwanda with our aid.

Kagame, according to Netanyahu, was one of the people who helped me more than anyone in organizing my two trips to Africa, whose attitude to us is quickly changing  everywhere they welcome us with honor, with respect, Im telling you  with admiration, Netanyahu boasted. They admire the State of Israel for the technology, for the cyber, the high tech, the intelligence, our stalwart stand against terrorism  its certainly refreshing, and it raises the status of Israel among the nations and also gives us advantages in national security.

We shouldnt discount Netanyahus self-congratulatory descriptions. They do reflect, to some extent at least, the treatment he receives around the world and Israels status as an important economic power.

But of course its only a partial picture. Netanyahu skillfully succeeds in pushing the occupation and the settlements outside the frame of these visits. Discussions of developments in the global arena and the rise of Islamist terror help him easily skip over these potholes. Trumps election helps him navigate the international sphere without former President Barack Obamas reprimands and arm-twisting, which didnt let Netanyahu escape from dealing with the Palestinian issue. Even when Macron spoke of Frances support for the two-state solution in their meeting, the issue was not at the top of the agenda and it sounded more like an off-hand remark.

The corruption investigations, which are closing in on Netanyahu on all sides and threaten his hold on power, dont damage his status as an international icon. Its as if Netanyahu exists in two parallel universes: jumping from the parlors of world capitals to a bloody political and regional reality.

From a political standpoint, his rule is secure for now, but his future is shrouded in the fog of corruption. From a regional standpoint, it seems Netanyahu isnt using his time and the alliances forming in the Arab world against Islamist terror to advance a solution with the Palestinians. While the big wave of terror has subsided and Israeli citizens are enjoying relative quiet, the Palestinian problem has not disappeared; its alive and kicking. The quiet is temporary.

This is precisely where leadership is measured  in the ability to see a future vision for Israel in another generation, certainly when it comes to a senior leader with the experience and global connections of the prime minister of Israel. Netanyahu could deal with Israeli societys most acute problem: the occupation. Not only does Netanyahu ignore it, but hes adding more and more fetters that would make it harder for his successors to solve the problem, from legislation that tries to prevent the division of Jerusalem (a bill requiring a special Knesset majority for any diplomatic solution dividing Israel was approved at a preliminary vote today) to continuing construction outside West Bank settlement blocs.

He creates roadblocks even in the way he presents the conflict with the Palestinians to the Israeli public. Netanyahu doesnt speak of hope or a desire to solve the problem that wont go away on its own; rather, he focuses on terror threats and Palestinian incitement, and he blinds his people with the international prestige he garners.

One recalls what his father, the late professor Ben-Zion Netanyahu, said about him in an interview with journalist Ari Shavit of Haaretz, conducted toward the end of Netanyahus first term as prime minister in 1998: He also has diplomatic skill and the capacity for diplomatic influence, and it may be hes more suited to be foreign minister than prime minister.

Netanyahu is probably the best foreign minister Israel has ever had, but as prime minister, he isnt able to contend with the biggest task put to him as a leader in this generation.
July 19, 2017

Turkey is working hard to find a place for itself in Mosul's future now that the Iraqi city is rid of the Islamic State (IS). But tensions with Baghdad during the past couple of years will make it difficult for Turkey to attain the profitable role it seeks in the city's economic and political restructuring.

There are many in Turkey who feel Mosul should have remained inside Turkish borders after the War of Independence in the early 20th century  hence the nostalgic comments and affection one hears from the Turkmens of Mosul and some Sunni families who were loyal to the Ottoman palace.

But Turkmens, who were drawn into sectarian rifts when IS arrived, are no longer a reliable card for Turkey to play. Turkeys claim as Sunni guardian caused Shiite Turkmens oppressed by IS to turn against Turkey.

Turkeys affinity for some Sunni Islamists who had welcomed the IS capture of Mosul also backfired on those who were advocating IS rise as freedom for Sunnis against Shiite rule. Turkey had problems justifying that attitude, even with its friends.

Further compounding Turkey's shortsighted vision was its heavy reliance on the Sunni forces of Al Hashd al-Watani led by former Ninevah province Gov. Atheel al-Nujaifi. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan added to the acrimony by branding Iraq's Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) fighting IS as "terrorists" and saying only Sunni Arabs, Sunni Turkmens and Sunni Kurds should be in Mosul. These actions are all emerging as obstructions to the role Turkey wants to play in reconstructing Iraq, despite the impressive accumulation of experience by Turkish companies in undertaking major projects in that country.

The Turkey-Iraq Business Council, linked to the Foreign Economic Relations Council, met July 11 in Istanbul to assess the situation. Representatives of 150 companies participated. The business council's chairman, Emin Taha, said there are attractive opportunities from construction to textiles that those companies want to work on.

Several sources told Al-Monitor that Turkey's refusal to evacuate the Bashiqa army base despite Baghdad's demands is also preventing Turkey from opening a new page in relations with Iraq. Turkey is aware of the importance of good economic relations with Iraq, and there have been some efforts to improve bilateral ties since Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim visited Baghdad on Jan. 7. But every major step is blocked by the Bashiqa issue. Iraqi reactions on this matter affect not only political-diplomatic contacts but also economic ties.

This is how various sources assessed the situation for Al-Monitor:

It's not easy to erase the negative perceptions arising from past mistakes and wrong political choices. But Turkey is truly trying to use diplomatic channels for improvement. Although Bashiqa remains unresolved, Turkey persistently says it is ready to do all it can for Mosul's reconstruction.

Turkish companies' field experience can't be ignored. Despite Baghdad's objections, these companies will be awarded contracts.

Even if foreign companies win some contracts, they will still be able to cooperate with Turkish firms and buy Turkish-made materials. Iraqi companies likewise can make use of Turkish companies through subcontracting.

It is too early to conclude that Turkey will be excluded from the entire process.

Turkey will soon disclose its plans to contribute to Iraqs reconstruction and may even offer Iraq limited credit facilities.

The Economic Development Agency of Turkey is preparing some projects to restore Iraqs antiquities.

There's also the matter of Mosul projects that were left half-finished because of the IS occupation. Turkish companies hope to resume their work there, and the Iraqi government owes $3 billion to Turkish companies. Although Yildirim said the Iraqi government is making payments, not much progress has been achieved.

Now eyes are on international donors for reconstruction. Kuwait wants to host a conference on that topic, possibly at the beginning of 2018. Iraq's government says it will need about $100 billion for a 10-year national plan.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari had said Iraq needs an assistance program similar to the Marshall Plan implemented to rebuild Eastern Europe after World War II. Many countries, including China, are keenly interested in Iraq's reconstruction. Chinas Baghdad Ambassador Chen Weisheng on July 11 delivered a letter to Iraqi President Fuad Masum promising $11.7 billion in financial assistance.

Britain promised a $12 billion credit facility for Iraqi projects; the two sides signed an agreement on the deal April 4.

Iran, which provided substantial support to Iraq and the PMU in the fight against IS, is also determined not be left out of Iraqs reconstruction projects.
July 18, 2017

Over a month has passed since the campaign to liberate Raqqa, the so-called capital of the Islamic State, was launched and Turkey is still smarting from the US administrations decision to conduct the operations in tandem with a Syrian Kurdish militia that Turkish leaders insist are terrorists. Some view Turkeys escalating attacks against the group known as the Peoples Protection Units (YPG) in and around the city of Afrin as a calculated effort to weaken them there while the Syrian Kurds devote the bulk of their assets to the Raqqa front.

Turkish bitterness was on full display recently at a press conference at the Turkish Embassy in Washington to mark the first anniversary of the failed July 15 coup. In a keynote address, Turkeys ambassador, Serdar Kilic, called the decision to liberate Raqqa with the YPG and its Arab allies in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) a strategic mistake. Kilic argued, The operation to liberate Raqqa could have been done by the United States and Turkey, thus reviving the debate about the US decision to partner with the Syrian Kurds.

In separate comments to Al-Monitor Pentagon correspondent Jack Detsch, Kilic confirmed earlier reports in the pro-government Turkish media that Turkey offered tens of thousands of troops for the US-led campaign against IS. Kilic went on, Each and every time we made the [troop] proposal, we received the same arguments, noting that the Pentagon had initially asked for 80,000 troops for the Raqqa operation, more than Turkey believed was required. He did not elaborate on what the Pentagons arguments were. Kilic then appeared to contradict himself, saying, We did not give any troops numbers because we did not get to the planning stage.

Officials familiar with the substance of the tortuous talks over a possible Turkish role suggest there is more to the story. A Turkish official told Al-Monitor before Turkey's Euphrates Shield incursion in Syria last August that Turkey's military leaders were far less enthusiastic about sending large numbers of Turkish troops into battle in Syria and that this reluctance was palpable in their conversations with members of the anti-IS coalition.

In a research paper tracking the US decision to partner with the Kurds, Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said that US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford met in February with his Turkish counterpart at the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey to discuss a fresh Turkish plan for Raqqa.

Stein recalled that Dunford toured a Turkish training camp during this visit but was not permitted to meet any of the Syrian rebel recruits reportedly because of their anti-American views.

The fog of mystery shrouding the Turkish-trained rebels prompted commentators to label it a "unicorn force."

Stein reports the Turkish proposal foresaw Turkish-backed Euphrates Shield Syrian rebels with a combination of Turkish armored and special operations forces moving to Raqqa via SDF-held Tell Abyad. Turkey apparently updated this formula to include Arab elements in the SDF, also seen as part of an effort to spin the Arabs away from their Syrian Kurdish partners.

Drawing on multiple interviews with US officials, Stein cited the main flaws of the Turkish plan as a lack of US confidence in the rebel recruits, Turkeys weak performance during its campaign to capture the IS-held town of al-Bab and the difficulties of assuring a safe corridor for Turkish forces to move from Tell Abyad to Raqqa, given the mutual distrust and hostility between Turkey and the YPG.

Steins assessment does not mention, however, what sources privy to the Turkish scheme say was a glaring nonstarter from the Pentagons point of view: Turkey wanted for tens of thousands of US troops to take the lead in the fight, effectively consigning their own forces and the rebels to a supporting role.
July 19, 2017

Turkeys state-run Anadolu news agency has revealed what it claims to be the locations of 10 US military bases in the Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Syria, a move that will likely put a further dent in the rocky relationship between the two NATO allies. US officials told Al-Monitor that they had conveyed their concerns about the disclosure of sensitive information to Turkish authorities.

Anadolu dropped its bombshell complete with maps pinpointing the locations of US special forces in Kobani, Manbij and Rumeilan, among others, via its Turkish-language service this week. The story was picked up by local newspapers but generated remarkably little fuss considering the sensitive nature of its content. The report included the numbers of US troops in several locations and the presence of French forces as well who are working with the Syrian Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) to combat the Islamic State.

Turkey is furious about the partnership, claiming that weapons provided to the YPG are winding up in the hands of the Kurdistan Workers Party, a Kurdish rebel faction that is waging war for self-rule inside Turkey. The claims were repeated at a meeting of the National Security Council on July 17, the day the Anadolu story first ran.

On July 18, Anadolus English-language service ran a translation, which was swiftly picked up by the Daily Beast and carried to an international audience.

Roy Gutman, who penned the Daily Beast piece, revealed the anger felt by the Pentagon. A spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, the US-led coalition fighting IS, asked Gutman not to share the information published by Anadolu, saying it would be professionally irresponsible and put coalition lives in jeopardy. A spokesman for the Central Command requested the same.

As Gutman noted, however, the Anadolu stories were already out there and Turkish security officials confirmed their accuracy  unsurprising as Turkish security officials were probably the main sources for the triple-bylined article.

US officials regard Anadolus story as more churlishness from Turkey over the US-YPG alliance if not an outright hostile act. A spokesperson for Operation Inherent Resolve said that while they cannot independently verify the sources that contributed to the Anadolu story, "we would be very concerned if officials from a NATO ally would purposefully endanger our forces by releasing sensitive information.

"We have conveyed these concerns to the Government of Turkey, the spokesperson added.

To be sure, when paired with Turkeys ongoing attacks against YPG forces in Afrin and its refusal to allow any humanitarian aid, not even baby formula, destined for Kurdish-controlled areas in Syria to pass through its borders, the story fits the broader pattern of Turkish attempts to torpedo the Syrian Kurds efforts to cement their newfound autonomy and any potential American support for it. The Anadolu story may well be intended as some kind of warning to the United States that it's watching its every move.

Ragip Soylu, the Washington correspondent for the pro-government Turkish daily Sabah, concurred in a (now deleted) tweet: "Exposing 'secret' US bases in Syria seems like a Turkish attempt to trouble the Pentagon for its cooperation with YPG that endangers Turkey."

In March, Turkey shuttered the Oregon-based Mercy Corps, which along with other Western humanitarian relief organizations delivering aid to Syria via Turkey became a target of a smear campaign by pro-government media outlets. The newspapers alleged that the outfits were staffed by spies and that their main beneficiaries were the YPG. As a result, all humanitarian relief supplies to Kurdish-controlled northern Syria are now being delivered via the Semelka border crossing in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

A Turkish official speaking on condition of strict anonymity told Al-Monitor that a renewed request in June by the United States to allow aid through, including supplies for an estimated 200,000 Sunni Arab civilians displaced by the fighting in and around Raqqa, had been denied.

Geolocation experts contacted by Al-Monitor said military surveillance drones could have obtained the data in Anadolus story. Turkey is known to have many such drones flying over northern Syria. Some of the information could also be garnered through satellite imagery and even geolocation apps. The US government shares some coordinates with Turkey, if not at the level of specificity outlined by Anadolu, in order to deconflict their respective forces.

The need for deconfliction gained urgency after Turkish jets struck YPG targets in April near the northern Syrian town of Derik. US special forces were about 6 miles from the strikes and Turkey gave the United States less than an hours notice before carrying them out.

Editors note: July 19, 2017. This article has been updated to include a response from Operation Inherent Resolve.
A family in south Florida is searching for answers after waking early Saturday to a loud noise accompanied by about 15 pounds of Italian pork sausage.

Deerfield Beach resident Austin Adair said his family and dogs were startled awake about 4 a.m. to an "extremely loud" thud on the roof. They went outside to check out the noise, but couldn't find anything.

Austin Adair and his family were startled awake last weekend when 15 pounds of Italian pork sausage fell on their roof. (Courtesy)

Adair's mother later found two packages of Italian sausage in the side yard outside the house. Upon inspecting the roof, they found three more packages, all in bags marked William Land Service.

The family googled William Land Service and the first business to pop up was a land clearing business in North Alabama. They gave the Somerville company a call, hoping to learn more about the mystery meat.

"He basically said, 'I have no idea where that came from,'" said Adair, who sent pictures of the sausage to the business owner. "I think he thought I was a little bit crazy."

Adair soon contacted his local TV station, who ran a story on the unusual finding early this week. Since the news broke in Florida, Adair has been contacted by multiple media outlets and will appear tonight on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!"

Donnie Williams owns Williams Land Service with his wife, Garnet. The 7-year-old company provides forestry mulching, selective tree thinning and tree stump grinding to parts of north and central Alabama and southern Tennessee.

Williams has talked with nearly a dozen news agencies about the story, but said he still doesn't know why the sausages were dropped on the Adair home or why his company's name is on the packaging.

"We have a land clearing business and so far we haven't gotten into the sausage making business," he said. "My friends and all have had a lot of fun with me on this."

The Adairs still don't know what happened, but have received lots of theories from people online.

The most basic theory is it was a drone delivery, while the craziest came from people asking if it was really sausage or a ground-up human body ditched from a plane.

"I'm completely baffled," Adair said. "I don't have any clear thoughts about how odd it is and I'm kind of blown away by how big it's gotten."
Two of Huntsville's largest projects are pushing for a Trader Joe's.

Bridge Street Town Centre and the Village of Providence this week have been encouraging Facebook fans to request a Trader Joe's at their respective developments. By requesting a Trader Joe's, the company said there "are no guarantees, but being wanted matters to us."

The specialty grocer from California opened its first Alabama location at The Summit in Birmingham in 2015. Until that time, Trader Joe's was consistently one of the most-wanted retailers in the state.

It remains one of the top new businesses Huntsville residents ask for again and again. Asked if there have been any discussions about bringing Trader Joe's to the Village of Providence, founder David Slyman said, "All we can say is yes."

"We have been in discussions with Trader Joe's for many years, dating back to before they set up an eastern U.S. distribution center," he told AL.com.

Slyman said there are several possible locations at Providence for a Trader Joe's. The proposed site is behind the park where the temporary stage resides.

Village of Providence's urban setting is "ideal" for Trader Joe's, Slyman said.

"We have a proven and vibrant town center," he said. "Our retailers have record-breaking sales when compared to their other stores and Trader Joe's would have the same results. We have daily discussions with existing and future residents that want Trader Joe's in the Village."

Bridge Street's Facebook post on Sunday asking fans to let their voice be heard has more than 850 likes and over 500 shares as of July 16.

"We know everyone loves Trader Joe's," Bridge Street spokesman Van Geroux said. "And since they ask for feedback from the public on where they should expand, our Facebook post was a fun way to help our followers let Trader Joe's know they would like them to open in Huntsville at Bridge Street Town Centre."

Trader Joe's spokeswoman Alison Mochizuki said Huntsville and Madison are currently not in the retailer's two-year growth plan. She did not have a timetable on when a store could possibly open in the area.

City of Huntsville Director of Urban Development Shane Davis said he cannot speak on any details of proposed retailers that may be looking at the local market.

Although Trader Joe's doesn't label itself as a health food store, none of its private-label products have hydrogenated oils, artificial flavors, preservatives, synthetic colors or GMOs. The retailer also specializes in organic and all-natural foods.
After donating a kidney and then climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, Bob Kuykendall found out the two things have something in common.

"It's an amazing, transformative experience," Kuykendall said.

Donating the kidney was definitely easier than climbing the mountain, he said. "It took zero out of my life," Kuykendall said. "I was able to help another human."

Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest mountain, was an arduous challenge of physical endurance. But like donating a kidney, it was also worth it.

"It is indescribable," Kukyendall said. "You can't possibly imagine what it's like to wake up above the clouds."

Kuykendall, 49, a Birmingham-based special agent who has worked for the Federal Food and Drug Administration for the past 15 years, has also earned his real estate license.

That's what prompted Greg Hasberry to call him in 2014 with some questions he thought Kuykendall could answer.

"I needed some advice on real estate things," Hasberry said. The two met each other working out together at an Alabama gym on U.S. 280 in 2005. Hasberry called Kuykendall, and they met for coffee.

Fitness trainer on dialysis

Kuykendall noticed that Hasberry had tape and gauze on his arm and asked about it. Hasberry explained that he had just been to kidney dialysis, and that he was waiting for a kidney transplant.

"I was in dialysis three or four days a week," Hasberry said. "He asked me a few questions."

Hasberry said his prospects for a kidney donor and were slim and he was preparing to die.

"I wasn't sure it was ever going to happen," Hasberry said. "The odds were very slim."

His brother was a good match, but he had high blood pressure and other health issues.

Meanwhile, Hasberry's health was declining. "I'd had close calls with pneumonia, fluid on my lungs," he said. "I felt my time was getting shorter and shorter. I had grown to the point of just accepting it. I started preparing my family."

Hasberry, who will turn 47 on Aug. 15, said he had no idea that soon after their meeting, Kuykendall started getting tested to see if he would be a suitable kidney donor.

'I'm going to give him a kidney'

Kuykendall had the thought cross his mind when he was meeting with Hasberry over coffee.

"I didn't tell him," Kuykendall said. "But I was thinking, 'I feel like I'm going to give him a kidney.'"

Then Kuykendall visited his daughter at Auburn and began talking to the restaurant owner where they went out to eat. "We sat and drank a beer," Kuykendall said. "He said, 'I've only got one kidney. I donated one to a student eight years ago. It was the best thing I've ever done.'"

Kuykendall was stunned by the coincidence, except he didn't see it as a coincidence. After years of losing his faith and feeling his prayers weren't being answered, Kuykendall felt he heard God speaking directly to him.

"There's no doubt God's hand was involved," he said. "Greg was struggling physically, but he had a great faith. I was fine physically, but I had no faith."

The events leading to the kidney donation changed that.

"My faith has grown," Kuykendall said. "Prayer to me now is not asking for stuff. Prayer for me now is saying, 'I don't know what this is, but I'm open to it.'"

Dr. Michael Hanaway, surgical director of UAB's Kidney Transplant Program and Hasberry's transplant surgeon, told Kuykendall he would have to be at least a 20 percent match for Hasberry. Kuykendall had not told Hasberry he was testing to be a donor, because he was afraid of disappointing him if he wasn't a match. He was an 80 percent match.

"He called and said I'm your donor," Hasberry said. "I had zero idea he was testing. I was in shock. Next thing I know we were on the table."

In 2015, after four years of dialysis, Hasberry finally had a kidney donor and received his kidney transplant. The surgery was a success.

"Within a month, we were texting each other, 'How far did you walk today?'" Kuykendall said.

Climbing a mountain

After his quick recovery, Kuykendall began looking for a way to bring attention to kidney donation. He struck on the idea of climbing a mountain, as a metaphor for people making an effort to help each other. "It's a daily climb," he said.

"Kidney donation is so easy and there's so many thousands of people in Alabama who need one," Kuykendall said. "It's so easy."

Dr. Hanaway made the point that kidney donors can go back to doing whatever they could have done before.

"After you donate a kidney, your life doesn't change," Dr. Hanaway said. "If you're healthy enough to donate, your life will go back to normal with no restrictions. You will have good health and can take on whatever challenges you want to pursue."

Kuykendall formed a non-profit agency called Team Mountain, lined up sponsors such as Planet Fitness, and prepared for a June 2017 climb at Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Hasberry had planned to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro with Kuykendall.

"I wasn't quite physically ready," Hasberry said. "I had a few injuries and was not quite up to where I should be."

The youngest climber

Kuykendall made the trip with his son, Cade, 14, as part of a group of 12, many of whom also had causes they wanted to promote.

Kuykendall sees it as a call to "Take a minute and consider what another person is going through, and how you can help each other," he said. "It's about how we wish people would listen to each other and work together for one goal. We wanted to share that with other people."

Cade said he had to overcome personal anxiety issues that made it difficult to get on a plane to Africa, let alone climb a mountain.

"It was something difficult that I didn't want to do," Cade said. "But the more I thought about it, I thought this is a really cool thing."

Altitude sickness hit Cade hard on the fourth day of the climb. "It was really difficult," he said.

But they made the summit on June 9 and descended safely. "It takes six days to go up, and one and a half days to come down," Kuykendall said. "We wanted to get a group together that didn't know each other. Each one is fighting a battle, and we get them together to fight one battle."

They bonded with the group of 40 porters, Tanzanians who served as guides, gear carriers, cooks and medics for their group. At the end of the trip, the porters picked up Cade and hoisted him high on their shoulders in celebration. He was the youngest mountain climber that the group of porters had ever taken to the summit.

New fitness center

Since his kidney transplant, Hasberry, a personal fitness trainer for elite athletes, has opened his own fitness center on Valleydale Road.

"I'm very much grateful for the gift of life," Hasberry said. "I'm probably a lot more direct. I don't waste time on things that are not positive things."

Facing death after years of dialysis and then finally finding a kidney donor who saved his life has put everything in perspective for him.

"It's only strengthened my faith," Hasberry said. "God puts people in your life for a reason. I see God every day, in almost everything. You almost can't put it into words. If you have an opportunity to save someone's life, there's nothing more powerful you can do. It takes a very strong person to do that."

Kuykendall is already organizing another trip to Mt. Kilimanjaro next year for Team Mountain. He wants to continue teaching the lesson he has learned, and he's working with Fair Travel Tanzania and the Kilimanjaro Children's Fund to help improve the lives of the people of Tanzania.

All of that came from a conversation with a casual friend, and a life-changing offer to donate a kidney.

"It's amazing to see how a kind act can stretch so far across continents," Hasberry said.

Consider others

The simple lesson is that people have the power to change each other's lives for the better, Kuykendall said.

"Stop for a second and consider others," he said. "Slow down, listen to somebody. Maybe you can help each other."

More on kidney donation

Surgeons in the UAB School of Medicine's Department of Surgery have performed more living donor transplants than any other group in the United States since 1987. UAB's Transplant Program is one of the three largest kidney-transplant centers in the nation, and the ongoing UAB Kidney Chain is the world's longest kidney transplant chain.

More information about kidney donation is available on the National Kidney Foundation website. To find out whether you can be a living donor for a family member, friend or stranger, fill out the UAB Living Kidney Donor Transplant Form.
Social group restores young peoples confidence by teaching them how to perform circus tricks in Mardin.

Mardin, Turkey  When he was younger, Khaled Kasim grew accustomed to juggling multiple burdens. Now, the 15-year-old Syrian refugee just juggles.

At the beginning, explains Khaled, I didnt take this as seriously as the other children. I wasnt in the mood to do it.

But my friend told me they had a lot of nice things to do. I decided to come and try it and since that day, I havent left.

Hes talking about the Sirkhane Social Circus School, which is located in an old house in the city of Mardin, on the Turkish-Syrian border.

READ MORE: Turkeys Syrian refugees carve out their own opportunities

Run by a Turkish nonprofit organisation called Art Anywhere, the centre teaches children how to be circus performers as a form of therapy.

Khaled once took classes here. Now, he teaches them. But thats not all  like others at this school, hes also performed for children in refugee camps in Turkey. Knowing how fortunate he is, its a way of giving back.

The moment I see a child looking at me while Im doing the show and I see him laugh, I really get like Im in another world, says Khaled as he smiles.

No matter if I did a good or bad show, the only thing that matters to me is that the child laughed.

In another room, children try spinning colourful plates. Its a tough job, but even when the plates fall, the mood remains lighthearted  and frustration is nowhere to be found.

Pinar Demiral who cofounded the organisation in 2012, tells me the programme helps these war weary children overcome trauma, adding that it is based on a very basic principle.

We want to make the children happy, says Pinar.

The children who deserve their happiness, their childhood  they need to have a space where they  can feel fully like they are living their childhood as it should be.

READ MORE: Were missing the point about Syrian refugees

You cannot fight in here, insists Pinar.

Because all the things we are doing in here, its against all the things that are happening in the world. So we want to grow children with this idea  to make friends, new friends and to not fight, to not hurt each other. Just lets play together.

Lets learn together in a peaceful environment like this.

While the majority of the students are Syrian, there are Turkish children attending as well.

Walk through another door and youll see a group being taught how to be trapeze artists, learning about the importance of balance and harmony  in ways both literal and figurative.

Fourteen-year-old Syrian refugee Sidra Yasin mastered these skills here as well. Now she wants nothing more than to help other members of her community.

Like Khaled, she is a member of a group at the centre called Circus Heroes.

READ MORE: Syria chemical attack survivors vow to fight for justice

They are older than the remainder of the students and help train the younger ones, while also putting on shows of their own.

When they come here they get to enjoy this and then go back to their homes happy. Thats it. The important thing for me is that they be happy here, Yasin said.

A quick glance around is all you need to see how good a job she is doing on that front. Here, its hard to tell which is higher, the level of enthusiasm or energy.

Either way, the playful mood is infectious and does not subside.

The Sirkhane Social Circus School is located just about a half-hour drive away from Syria. But when you see the looks of joy on these kids faces, when you watch just how much they love performing, you realise why, at this centre, Syria seems so much farther away.

Outside, the Circus Heroes begin walking on their stilts. As the music starts blaring, its clear were in for a surprise and that dancing is also part of the routine theyve choreographed and are rehearsing.

As they stand tall and move gracefully, its a remarkable showcase for just how much theyve overcome.
Recorded in the historic San Quentin State Prison, the new Ear Hustle podcast paints a human image of life in lockup.

A bunk bed with mattresses. A toilet and sink side by side. Two lockers. A television. A handful of permitted appliances. Pictures of family, friends and loved ones pinned up on the walls. Six cubic feet of personal belongings. And two men.

This is the claustrophobic scene inside most of the drab, four-by-nine feet (1.2 metres by 2.7 metres) cells in the infamous San Quentin State Prison, a medium security institution in northern California.

In this environment  where San Quentin prisoner Emil says nothing is safe  who you end up with as a cellmate is of colossal importance.

Although people in US prisons most often are not allowed to choose their cellmates, they are sometimes afforded the opportunity to apply for an exception based on compatibility.

Emil, who has been in prison for two decades, was lucky enough to choose as a cellmate his brother, Eddie, in another prison a few years back.

The first few nights were great, Emil says, but things soured quickly. His brother is a devout Seven-Day Adventist who doesnt watch television on Saturdays.

The two were at each others necks by the first weekend. I thought he was just trying to convert me, Emil recalls, explaining that it later came out that the theme songs of the soap operas he watched triggered Eddies memories of the domestic violence his mother endured when they were children.

The brothers found themselves fighting over headphones, the odour of their antiperspirants, smoking cigarettes in the cell and every other seemingly benign matter.

They quickly applied to swap cellmates with others.





Ear hustle

This story and others like it are recollected and broadcast on Ear Hustle, a new podcast supported by Radiotopia and produced by Earlonne Woods and Antwan Williams, inmates at San Quentin, and Nigel Poor, a Bay Area visual artist.

Their anecdotes shed light on the day-to-day hardships prisoners deal with inside San Quentin State Prison, the oldest prison in California and home to the states only death row for male inmates.

Ear Hustle, which is prison lingo for eavesdropping, is enlightening, sad and often chock-full of humour.

And most importantly, because most news consumers rarely hear about the situation behind bars unless there is a mass hunger strike or riots, the podcast informs listeners of aspects of life neglected in mainstream media coverage and popular culture.

READ MORE: Is the US failing its inmates?

For Poor, a 54-year-old who has worked as a visual artist for 30 years and is a professor at Cal State University  Sacramento, the connection to San Quentin started in 2011, when she started working on news-driven radio stories with prisoners for a closed-circuit station inside the prison.

A little more than a year ago, Poor teamed up with Williams and Woods to start Ear Hustle with the hope of telling first-person narrative stories from inside prison for an outside audience.

Challenging stereotypes

The goal is, first of all, to put a human face on people who are incarcerated and to get the outside world think about who is in prison in a more three-dimensional, complicated way, she tells Al Jazeera.

Explaining that basically everything that happens outside also goes on inside [prisons], Poor says they kicked off the first episode with an exploration of choosing a cellmate because everyone can relate to that.

Poor, Williams and Woods hope to communicate a more accurate and nuanced picture of prison life that moves beyond the stereotypes and inaccuracies they say characterise popular television programmes like Orange is the New Black and Prison Break.

And for Poor, her own assumptions have been challenged along the way. Before Id gone into prison, all my ideas were based on movies and TV and not-so-good journalism, she recalls.

The first assumption is that its always dangerous, that people arent educated, that people are just thinking about what they can do to get one over on the administration, she explains, but, of course, there are all sorts of people in prison.

READ MORE: Is this the end of prison for profit in the US?

Other episodes explore race dynamics inside the institution and others allow San Quentin prisoners to tell their own stories in their own words.

Some episodes are quirkier. In the third episode  Looking Out  a 40-year-old prisoner nicknamed Rauch talks about the various pets he has had while in lockup: snails, cockroaches, swallows, hamsters and toads, among others.

I do not call animals pets, Rauch says. I call them critters. I hang out with these guys or girls. Theyre friends. I dont own them.

The episode navigates between bouts of humour and recollections of Rauchs tragic upbringing oscillating between foster homes and homelessness. It goes on to examine how people in San Quentin nurture  looking out  their companions and support one another.

Challenges

Poor says the podcasts reception has been overwhelmingly positive. On June 30, Ear Hustle was ranked number one on the iTunes US podcasts chart.

Among the criticisms she has encountered are accusations that Ear Hustle isnt political enough, which she describes as strange because anything you do inside a prison is inherently political.

In a country where prison reform is among the most debated topics in the political discourse, Poor, Williams and Wood hope that compelling stories that humanise the incarcerated can contribute to changing the public perception of prison life and thus highlight the need for change.

The production of Ear Hustle hasnt been without its challenges, either. Although she says the prison administration has been generally supportive of the project, navigating the red tape of coming and going has been difficult at times.

Once she is with Woods and Williams inside San Quentin, there is no access to internet. After leaving, they are unable to communicate via telephone or email and must wait until her next visit.

READ MORE: The American prison factory

Once I leave, that wall really does come up, she says, adding that they generally work for 10-to-12 hours a day. And if theres a lockdown, were incommunicado. So, we have to be super prepared and thorough.

The prisons communications department also must vet the episodes before they can be released.

Despite the challenges, Poor, Wood and Williams hope to continue expanding the project. They plan to have Ear Hustle broadcast in some 34 prisons across California and others in England and Scotland.

Emphasising that Ear Hustle is not a journalistic project so much as an artistic one, Poor says reporters often forget that inmates are at constant risk of paying the price for potentially provocative or inaccurate information they publish once theyve left the prison.

People seem to forget that you are really speaking to people whose voices have been [stripped from them], and you have to respect that. There is a responsibility for us to tell stories that are accurate, she concludes.

Theyre [the inmates] very aware of how often the press comes in and tries to tell their stories for them, and its a battle cry for them to be able to tell their own stories.

Follow Patrick Strickland on Twitter: @P_Strickland_
Observers warn that if land and property are not returned, there will be no peace in the Central African Republic.

Bangui, Central African Republic  M Babakir Ali cuts a lonely figure sitting on a plastic chair outside a rundown cafe in the PK5 district of Bangui.

Once the owner of five houses and 18,000 square metres of land in the Foulbe district of Pk13, on the outskirts of Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic, Ali is now reduced to a pair of jeans and a short white sleeved shirt. The thin vertical stripes are faintly visible beyond the creases. He is a refugee in his own city.

I left for Chad in January 2014 because of what happened on the streets of Bangui, Ali says.

Ali says he watched as bodies of young Muslim men were dragged through the streets of the capital and then piled at a local mosque in what was to signal the changing fortunes for Muslims in the country.

He was right.

In early January, Muslims in the PK5, PK12, PK13 districts of Bangui were hunted down, mutilated, burned alive and left on the streets. Muslims in the towns of Bossangoa, Bozoum, Bouca, Yaloke, Mbaiki, Bossembele and others also fled, as Anti-balaka embarked on a reign of terror across the northwest and southwestern regions.

Ali gathered his family, and fled to neighbouring Chad, too.

With the unrest in Bangui lifting in 2016 as the country neared elections, he decided to come home.

But he knew he would face a new struggle on his return.

I knew my houses and my land, that everything had been taken, 45-year-old Ali says. I knew I would be coming back to nothing.

Ali speaks in short and abrupt sentences. The already battered plastic chair bends and shifts with his every gesture. There is a calm dissonance in his moist, jaundiced eyes even as he explains that his property was sold to a third party by a local chief.

I am not the only one. So many from my district have returned, and have nowhere to go, Ali says, looking away.

Exodus of historic proportions

Thousands have been killed since the Central African Republic fell into a slow-churning civil war following a coup in 2013. Close to a million others fled their homes fearing catching a stray bullet or becoming the victims of targeted killings.

At first, when the Muslim-led Seleka rebels took Bangui, the Christian community was attacked.

Later, when Christians formed self-defence groups into what became known as the Anti-balaka, and many Seleka rebels disarmed, the Muslim minority was attacked.

Muslims were shunned, forced to flee into enclaves and displaced camps or into neighbouring Cameroon or Chad in a cascade of violence.

Amnesty International warned of a Muslim exodus of historic proportions. And when the Muslims left, their homes, property and lands were confiscated, sold or occupied.

In June 2016, the country held presidential elections and a new government led by President Faustin-Archange Touadera was voted in. Security returned to the capital Bangui.

Under a sizeable UN peacekeeping force, many thousands of people like Ali began returning to districts in and around Bangui.

But many others refuse to come back, either out of fear or because they have no home to return to. One-fifth of the countrys population is currently either displaced internally or abroad in neighbouring Chad, Cameroon or the Democratic Republic Congo.

Reclaiming property

Humanitarian organisations in Bangui are concerned that if left unresolved, unlawful and illegal occupation of homes or properties could easily become another driver of conflict in a country already overwhelmingly riveted on land, resources and power.

Addressing housing, land and property is a crucial component of sustainable peacebuilding efforts, Ingrid Beauquis, spokesperson for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Bangui, says.

If people displaced by violence cannot return to their communities, reclaim their property or relocate with the support of authorities, small conflicts over land may escalate to violence, communities may remain divided, and long-term stability may become impossible, Beauquis told Al Jazeera.

The NRC has been working with the local government in tackling what they call Housing, Land and Property (HLP) rights in an effort to facilitate the process of returning homes and land to the rightful owners. But results have varied.

For instance, out of the 475 cases the NRC is directly mediating, including illegal selling and occupation, destruction and encroachment of land or houses, just 18 cases have been successfully solved.

But resolving these cases is complicated.

For instance, Alis family is one of 280 households who has been reportedly displaced in the PK13 district. Given the sensitivities of broaching an issue that encompasses theft, sectarianism and desperation, simply asking the new occupants to leave is not possible.

Once we verify all 280 cases, the local community and local authorities will approach the secondary occupants, Beauquis says.

But amid mass displacement, insecurity and a crisis of authority, the government is simply unable to prioritise housing, land and property rights.

We have to work with local leaders and movement on the cases is dependent on their willingness to push ahead with the cases. Jennifer Jecolia, a programme coordinator with the NRC, says.

Justice for social cohesion

Jean Emmanuel Gazanguenzas pinstripe suit hangs from his gaunt body. The mayor of Begoua or PK12, one of the 134 district of Bangui, chooses his words slowly and meticulously. His organised thoughts are a far cry from the chaos that is his desk: a melange of reports and loose papers, unopened envelopes, an assortment of plastic pink roses that remarkably match the surrounding four walls of his office.

Gazanguenza says that it was only a few months ago that he was displaced too, and that he only just moved back home and into his office.

He says that his office has identified 231 houses in his district that were sold illegally. A majority of which originally belonged to Muslims, he admits.

Many regret what they did, because they never had issues before and they realise they got carried away in the chaos, he says.

Gazanguenza is clear that people will need to get their lot back.

Else we will have a problem here, the mayor says slowly. If people feel that there is impunity, then everyone will do what they like, and there will be revenge, he says, his hands slowly forming a steeple.

Justice and reparation are necessary for social cohesion, he says.

But even he understands that this is easier said than done.

Part of the problem is many home or property owners, especially outside the capital Bangui, simply do not have title deeds.

If individual owners have the financial capability to approach the courts, the countrys property law does not sufficiently protect the rights of the displaced to return to their property. In circumstances where title deeds or ownership cannot be established, the displaced have simply nowhere to turn.

According to the NRC, a new framework law on property is currently being drafted with the dual ambition of protecting the very particular rights of the displaced and helping to facilitate the resolution of future land or property conflicts.

But like so many other facets of CAR, law enforcement is likely to remain a major obstacle, especially outside the capital, the NRC says.

As it stands, the state starts and ends in Bangui. The countryside remains firmly within the ambit of armed groups. Groups belonging to the Seleka or Anti-balaka can be observed running towns and villages often in the full view of UN peacekeepers.

Even in Bangui, individuals who want their land back are most likely to find traction via the NRC or through their local mayors, who focus on discussions and negotiations in an effort to have secondary occupants give up the stolen property.

Forty-five-year-old M Osman from PK13 lost five of his houses in 2013. Osman is still not able to return to his properties because they have been occupied by people who were displaced by the violence themselves.

In Osmans case, the NRC, together with the head of the district, approached the new residents and explained that the owner wanted to return. They agreed to leave. But Osman is still not convinced that the area is safe enough for Muslims to return. Until more Muslims return, he wont go back.

I told them that I will give them one month notice before I want to move back, Osman told Al Jazeera. Until then, he will be living in the PK5 district.

It is not clear how much longer people will wait. Noumou Waziri, 60, an Imam who lost his home and his mosque in PK13 in 2014, says he continues to remind people to be patient.

I tell them not to take revenge. I tell them that despite what has happened, we do not accept that people can take action in their own hands.

Ali agrees that vigilantism is not the solution, but his response is a little more cryptic.

I came back because this is my home. I didnt want to live as a refugee, he says. But if the land is not returned, it means we cannot live together.

Follow Azad Essa on Twitter: @AzadEssa

Follow Sorin Furcoi on Twitter: @FurcoiSorin
Tibetan activists fear World Heritage Site status for Hoh Xil may lead to displacement of Tibetan population.

UNESCO has declared Chinas Hoh Xil plateau a World Heritage Site.

Hoh Xil, located in Qinghai province bordering the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), is home to a large Tibetan population.

It is the worlds largest and highest plateau at a height of more than 4,500km above sea level and maintains sub-zero temperatures year round.

Tibetan activists, including Tibetan scholar Tenzin Choekyi, have warned the UN cultural body that the decision will give the Chinese government an opportunity to displace more Tibetan nomads from the area, as well as threaten the unique biodiversity of the region.

The Chinese foreign ministry told Reuters that local herders will not be displaced and their lifestyle would be respected after activists expressed concerns regarding rights of Tibetan nomads.

READ MORE: Roof of the world cries for climate action

Traditionally, Tibet consisted of three main areas: U-Tsang, Amdo and Kham. In 1965, the Chinese government formed the TAR, making it the only official Tibetan space, and incorporated parts of Kham and Amdo into Chinese provinces.
Canadas Islamophobic, homophobic and sexist spies remain unpunished in the malleable name of national security.

Canadas spy service is a rat hole.

That blunt, malicious description of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was not proffered by an invective-hurling anarchist, but by Michel Simard, a 34-year veteran police and intelligence officer in 2000.

At the time, I was the so-called national security reporter for a Canadian newspaper  a stock term I loathe since it implies that reporters are an appendage of sorts of the security state.





In any event, Simard agreed to speak to me on the record about the near mutiny he led enveloping CSIS and its vindictive leadership in the context of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit launched by more than 100 intelligence officers against the security service for back pay, bonuses and benefits arising from their decision to move to the new civilian spy service from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the early 1980s.

As if to prove his point, Simard was suspended immediately by the senior CSIS officers at whom he had publicly pointed an accusatory finger and who, not surprisingly, insisted that he had only been placed on special administrative leave. (Subsequently, Simard successfully appealed against his suspension before retiring.)

Though CSIS may have attempted to muzzle Simard, scores of other intelligence officers agreed to talk to help strip away the many myths associated with the bloated, capricious bureaucracy and the largely pedestrian talents who populate it and, in so doing, reveal the espionage agencys incriminating modus operandi.

This led to a pile of front-page stories and a thick book that, taken together, laid bare the rampant corruption, nepotism, law-breaking and discrimination that is endemic not only at CSIS but arguably every other intelligence service  an oxymoron, if there ever was one  and the impunity that spies enjoy in the malleable and exculpatory name of national security.

OPINION: Canadas Willy Wonka

Canadas spies are, in effect, the Untouchables and the existing parliamentary and impotent quasi-judicial oversight mechanisms meant to keep them in check are a mirage, intended to convince the gullible that the rule of law and criminal code still apply.

In the years since the publication of my expose in 2002, this overarching thesis has been corroborated by other reporting.

On cue, word emerged last week of yet another lawsuit filed by yet another band of CSIS officers against a spy service that its apologists in politics, academia and punditry claim is a shining model of probity, already burdened by too many prying eyes.

The congenital Islamophopbia, homophobia, sexism and bigotry that prompted these public servants finally to go public will remain stubbornly entrenched at CSIS and the spooks who enabled, participated in, and relished such deplorable conduct will happily continue to work for the service, confident they are in fact 'The Untouchables'. by

This time the accusers, however, remained anonymous, but their accusations had a chilling and disturbing ring.

In a $35m lawsuit, five intelligence officers and analysts allege that CSIS is a cesspool of Islamophobia, homophobia, sexism and racism where anti-Muslim slurs and gay-bashing are an institutional norm and tolerated by supposedly enlightened CSIS managers in 2017.

The 54-page lawsuit drips with one sorry episode after another of bigotry that, once again, puts an emphatic lie to the absurd notion that CSIS has, in the years since its inception in 1984, become one of Canadas top 100 employers.

One Toronto-based intelligence officer who is gay and has a Muslim partner alleges, for example, that he received the following email from a CSIS manager: Careful your Muslim in-laws dont behead you in your sleep for being homo.

For vile measure, another top CSIS officer allegedly added: Youre just a fag hiding in your little corner sobbing.

Heres more of the litany of CSIS-sanctioned bile contained in the lawsuit:

A Muslim analyst smeared as a sand monkey by his boss.

A veteran Muslim analyst encouraged by her superior to complain to Allah.

A Muslim intelligence officer who wears a hijab under constant suspicion by her colleagues.

A female black intelligence officer told: Its people like you the Service like to promote.

A senior CSIS officer shouting all Muslims are terrorists at a social function.

A Muslim officer reporting that during training for an overseas assignment a colleague said: Muslims and armed weapons are a bad mix.

A lot of Canadians and several high-profile politicians were shocked by the shameful allegations. They shouldnt be.

The graphic portrait of a spy service-cum-frat house rife with copious on-the-job drinking, dominated by an old white-boys culture that considers it de rigueur to tar homosexuals as fag boys and Muslims as disloyal, closet terrorists is, regrettably, not new, nor is it the slimy work of a smattering of bad apples.

For much of my career as an investigative reporter, I issued repeated and detailed warnings that CSIS is indeed a rat hole brimming with venal bureaucrats who know they have immunity from any real measure of accountability because of their secret work.

OPINION: Canada joins failing war on terror

The powers-that-be have, for decades, not only knowingly permitted but, by virtue of their unconscionable silence and somnolence, countenanced this signature and disgraceful behaviour and, as a result, allowed it to fester and thrive.

Like Simard and company, these latest CSIS officers and analysts went up the chain of command  to no avail.

And like Simard and company, they are seeking redress outside the established political and oversight instruments because they well understand these checks and balances are seen as little more than an irritating nuisance and are routinely treated with overt contempt inside CSISs insular, haughty orbit.

In response to the most recent lawsuit, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his hand-picked top spy trotted out the usual bromides about getting to the bottom of the lengthy indictment and CSIS does not tolerate harassment, discrimination or bullying under any circumstance.

Predictably, Trudeau has entrusted the spy service with investigating itself. This pat prescription should reassure everyone at CSIS that no one at the security service will be punished or lose their job for libelling their colleagues as would-be terrorists or fags.

How do I know?

Fact: Not one CSIS officer has ever been convicted of a criminal offence during the 33 years the spy service has been in business. Not one.

There are only two conceivable explanations for this: First, CSIS has historically hired saints who, without fail, abide by the rules and law; or, perhaps much more plausibly, intelligence officers are comfortably aware that as long as they remain faithful to the services unofficial motto  Lie, deny, then act surprised  theyre safe from any personal or professional liability.

So heres what I suspect might happen. The five officers and analysts will be pressed to settle out of court to spare CSIS future exposure and embarrassment. In return, they will pocket some money  later rather than sooner.

(In this regard, its worth noting that members of other nations national security apparatus, including black FBI agents, have often gone to court as well to win restitution for the systemic abuse and racism they endured in the workplace.)

Despite an apology they may or may not ultimately receive, their careers will certainly be over. The victims of a toxic environment have become toxic themselves.

Meanwhile, the congenital Islamophopbia, homophobia, sexism and bigotry that prompted these public servants finally to go public will remain stubbornly entrenched at CSIS, and the spooks who enabled, participated in, and relished such deplorable conduct will happily continue to work for the service, confident they are in fact the Untouchables.

Andrew Mitrovica is an award-winning investigative reporter and journalism instructor.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Group of girls from war-torn country, whose US visas were twice rejected, win silver medal for courageous achievement.

A team of Afghan girls whose plight resounded with the world won a silver medal for courageous achievement at an international robotics contest in the United States, with judges praising the groups can-do attitude.

The First Global Challenge event in Washington ended on Tuesday, having attracted teams of teenagers from more than 150 nations.

But all eyes were on the squad of girls from Afghanistan, who had twice travelled 800 kilometres to the American embassy in Kabul, only to have their visa applications turned down.

They were finally granted entry with just one week to go until the event began after their story had gone viral.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, before US officials decided to allow them in the country, team member Rodaba Noori said: We wanted to show our talents to the world so they would know that we do have skills.

Another team member, Fatima Qadari, had told Al Jazeera: Afghanistan is a country at war and doesnt have a lot of resources at hand. Other countries should consider this; they shouldnt be so strict with us.

Afghanistan is not part of Trumps order to temporarily ban travel from six Muslim-majority countries. Teams from Syria, Iran and Sudan  which are on that list  were granted visas to compete. Members of the team from The Gambia were also granted visas after initially being denied.

Robogee

Other teams also had unique journeys.





A group of three refugees from Syria competed as team Refugee, also known as team Hope.

The war forced Mohamad Nabih Alkhateeb, Amar Kabour and Maher Alisawui from Syria to Lebanon three years ago.

The trio named their robot Robogee, a combination of the words robot and refugee.

Alkhateeb, 17, and Kabour, 16, said they want to be robotics engineers, while Alisawui dreams of becoming a computer engineer.

Kabour said it was important for the team to win, to tell the world refugees are here and they can do it.

Alkhateeb said living as a refugee has been difficult, but he hopes to someday return home.

I will go back after I have finished my education so I can rebuild Syria again, he said.

Some 11 million people  half the Syrian population  have been forced from their homes.

Girl power

Sixty percent of the teams participating in the competition were founded, led or organised by women.

Of the 830 teens participating, 209 were girls.

In total, there were six all-girl teams, not only the Afghan squad but also teams from the US, Ghana, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu.

Its very difficult for us because everyone thinks [building robots is] only for boys, said 16-year-old Samira Bader, on the Jordanian team said.

She said her team wants to prove that girls can do it.

READ MORE: The Gambia school robotics team granted US visa

The US team comprised sisters Colleen and Katie Johnson and Sanjna Ravichandar.

Colleen Johnson, 16, said her team looks forward to a day when an all-girls team is going to be no more special than an all-boys team or a co-ed team, just when thats completely normal and accepted.

Iran, US join forces

The team from Iran got some help building their robot from American students.

It transpired that the competitions kit of robot parts including wheels, brackets, sprockets, gears, pulleys and belts was not approved for shipment to Iran due to sanctions involving technology exports to the country.

So the competition recruited a robotics team at George C. Marshall high school in Falls Church, Virginia, to help.

READ MORE: Could artificial intelligence lead to world peace?

Irans team designed the robot, and about five Marshall students built it in the US.

The team explained on its competition webpage that our friends in Washington made our ideas as a robot.

Amin Dadkhah, 15, said working with the American students was a good and exciting experience for both of us.

Overall, the Europe team won a gold award for getting the most cumulative points over the course of the competition. Poland got silver and Armenia bronze.

The 2018 competition will be held in Mexico City.
Victims describe time at prison-like school as marked by helplessness and fear, says lawyer probing cases.

Priests and teachers physically or sexually abused more than 500 boys at a Catholic choir school in Germany between 1945 and 1992, according to a report.

Allegations in Tuesdays report involving the Domspatzen choir at the Regensburg Cathedral Sparrows school were among a spate of revelations of abuse by Roman Catholic clergy in Germany that emerged in 2010.

Many of the 547 victims remembered their time at the school as the worst time of their lives, marked by fear, violence and helplessness, said lawyer Ulrich Weber, who was commissioned two years ago by the diocese to probe the cases.

The victims said the school was prison, hell and a concentration camp, he added.

READ MORE: Sexual abuse and the Catholic Church in the Philippines

The report counted 500 cases of physical violence and 67 of sexual violence, committed by a total of 49 perpetrators.

The lead investigator criticised senior church figures for failing to do enough to prevent the abuses at the boarding school in the Bavarian town of Regensburg

Former choirmaster Georg Ratzinger, 93, the elder brother of former Pope Benedict XVI, was among those criticised.





Alexander Probst, a victim, said many were abused more than once.

This was an ongoing practice over decades where 547 children were tormented, abused, mistreated and socially harmed, he said.

They are severely traumatised to this very day. This upsets me. I thought I had gotten over it after a seven-year battle but, in fact, this greatly upset me today.

Weber also criticised 69-year-old Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, the former bishop of Regensburg, for dragging his feet in clearing the scandal.

The Vatican announced on July 1 that Mueller had been replaced as the churchs chief of doctrine by Pope Francis.

The pair had clashed over key reform issues and the Churchs handling of the worldwide clerical sex abuse scandals.

The investigator also pointed to a culture of silence that aimed to protect the reputation of the choir of boys and young men that has made many recordings and performed around the world.

Made mistakes

The known victims are now expected to receive 20,000 euros ($23,000) each in compensation.

The diocese apologised in a statement and said that we all made mistakes and we have learnt a lot.

Weber agreed that the diocese had improved on organisational weaknesses and that there was a heightened awareness about past abuses.

The abuse scandal is one of several to have rocked the Catholic Church in recent years, notably in Ireland where one priest admitted sexually abusing more than 100 children.

Several German institutions have also been engulfed by the scandal, including an elite Jesuit school in Berlin which admitted to systematic sexual abuse of pupils by two priests in the 1970s and 1980s.

The document presented Tuesday was Webers final report on abuses between 1945 and the early 1990s at the famed cathedral choir with a thousand-year history.
Laurent Gbagbo, 72, is charged with crimes against humanity following election violence that killed around 3,000 people.

War crimes judges will rule whether former Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo can be released from prison for the rest of his trial on charges arising from deadly election violence in 2010.

Gbagbo, the first ex-head of state to be tried by the International Criminal Court (ICC), has appealed a March decision that he must stay behind bars in a UN detention centre until the end of the legal process.

A five-judge appeals court will deliver its judgement on the appeal at 1430 GMT on Wednesday, the court said in a statement.

Both Gbagbo, now 72, and his former militia leader Charles Ble Goude, 45, have pleaded not guilty to four charges of crimes against humanity including murder, rape, and persecution in five months of bloodshed that wracked the Ivory Coast.

READ MORE: Simone Gbagbo cleared of war crimes charges

Ivory Coast descended into civil war in 2011 after Gbagbos refusal to accept defeat to Alassane Ouattara in a presidential runoff election.

About 3,000 people were killed in the conflict.

Gbagbos highly divisive trial at the tribunal in The Hague opened in January 2016.

Gripping power by all means

ICC prosecutors accuse him of trying to cling to power by all means, while his defence team has charged that Ouattara seized power by force with the help of former colonial rulers, France.

After a months-long standoff, Gbagbo was arrested by Ouattaras troops aided by United Nations and French forces, and turned over to the ICC in 2011.

In March, his defence team made a new bid to win Gbagbos release, arguing he has already been detained for almost six years and has pathologies that affect his physical and psychological wellbeing.

READ MORE: Does Ivory Coast need a new constitution?

The prosecution said the former Ivorian leader still enjoyed a strong network of support and if he were freed could abscond to a territory out of the reach of the court.

In a majority two-to-one decision, the judges ruled he had to stay in jail.

But in a dissenting opinion  which Gbagbos defence has seized on  judge Cuno Tarfusser said his detention has exceeded the threshold of a reasonable duration and that, in light of his age and health, the risk that he might abscond from justice becomes increasingly unlikely.

Rights activists thought it was unlikely he would be freed. Carrie Comer of the Federation International for Human Rights (FIDH) said her organisation shared concerns that Gbagbo was a flight risk and highlighted the sheer gravity of the crimes that he is accused of.
Laurent Gbagbo to stay behind bars as trial judges review decision denying him interim release during mass crimes trial.

International Criminal Court (ICC) appeals judges have ordered a review into whether Laurent Gbagbo, the former Ivory Coast president, should be released from detention while his long-running trial continues on crimes-against-humanity charges.

Presiding Judge Piotr Hofmanski on Wednesday struck down a decision by trial judges denying the 72-year-old Gbagbo interim release.

Gbagbo has been in The Hague-based ICCs detention unit since late 2011 and will remain jailed pending the review.

Both Gbagbo and his former militia leader Charles Ble Goude, 45, have pleaded not guilty to four charges of crimes against humanity including murder, rape, and persecution in five months of bloodshed that wracked the Ivory Coast.

About 3,000 people died in the violence.

READ MORE: Simone Gbagbo cleared of war crimes charges

Prosecutors accuse Gbagbo of engineering the violence to stay in office after losing a runoff to current President Alassane Ouattara.

The trial opened in January 2016 and could last three to four years.

The appeals court said the trial judges had failed to take into account Gbagbos advanced age, his health, and the fact that he has been in detention since he was handed to the ICC in November 2011.

The trial chamber should have considered the duration of time Mr Gbagbo has spent in detention  and whether Mr Gbagbos detention continues to be reasonable, said Hofmanski, reading a summary of the ruling.

Directing trial judges to carry out a new review, Hofmanski stressed that the appeals court was not suggesting what the outcome of the trial chambers review should be.

Gbagbo is the first ex-head of state to be tried by the ICC.
Indonesia has banned the Hizb ut-Tahrir group under a controversial presidential decree that gives officials the authority to disband organisations deemed to threaten national unity.

The legal status of Hizb ut-Tahrir, which campaigns for the country to adopt Islamic law and become a caliphate, was revoked on Wednesday to protect Indonesias unity, according to Freddy Hari, the director-general of the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights.

The group condemned the ban and said it will not remain silent, vowing to challenge the decision in court.

The governments move comes a week after President Joko Jokowi Widodo signed a presidential decree that gives the government almost unfettered power to ban groups that go against national unity and the existence of the Indonesian nation.

Legal expert Refly Harun said it was the first time in the reform era that the government had disbanded an organisation without due process of law.

The presidential decree is a blank cheque for the government to disband any group without due process of law, he told the AFP news agency.

READ MORE: Joko Widodo  Islam in Indonesia is moderate

The decree followed months of sectarian tensions and protests, partially organised by Hizb ut-Tahrir, which saw Jakartas Christian governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama sentenced to two years in prison for blasphemy against Islam.

The move is seen as targeting hardline Islamic organisations and has been criticised by human rights groups as a threat to freedom of association.

About 2,000 people from Islamic groups protested against the order in Jakarta on Tuesday, denouncing the government as repressive and tyrannical. Another protest is planned for Wednesday.

This is tyranny

In May, the government had said it planned to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir because its activities were not in line with the states secular ideology and were causing friction in society.





Following last weeks decree, Hizb ut-Tahrir members vowed to seek a judicial review in constitutional court.

This is tyranny, said Ismail Yusanto, a spokesman for the group in Indonesia.

The move just shows an arbitrary action aimed at disbanding Hizb ut-Tahrir.

[Hizb ut-Tahrir Indonesia] is a legal religious organisation and has been spreading its messages peacefully, in an orderly manner, in accordance with the law.

Hizb ut-Tahrir, which says it uses non-violent means to achieve its goal of a caliphate, is active in Australia and the UK but is banned in several Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries.

The group is estimated to have tens of thousands of members in Indonesia.
Tensions grow in occupied East Jerusalem after Israel implements new security measures at al-Aqsa compound.

Palestinian worshippers have clashed with Israeli security forces outside a gate to the Old City in Jerusalem, as tensions continue over the new security measures implemented at the al-Aqsa Mosque compound.

Israeli security forces were seen dragging a worshipper, while another police officer appeared to punch a Palestinian man during the confrontation on Wednesday.

Stun grenades were fired as police forces tried to disperse the crowd, while several people were seen throwing objects in response, said Al Jazeeras Harry Fawcett, reporting from the scene of the clashes in East Jerusalem.





We have another [round] of violence here right in front of al-Aqsa compound. This shows you how sensitive this period is.

Security forces have cleared the area outside al-Aqsa compound, ordering vehicles out, and the situation have since calmed down, he said.

The confrontation followed clashes between Israeli security forces and protesters after evening prayers in the occupied city on Tuesday.

President Mahmoud Abbas Fatah party has called for a Day of Rage after metal detectors and turnstiles were installed at the entrance of al-Aqsa following Fridays deadly shoot-out that left two Israeli security officers and three Israeli Palestinians dead.

In another development on Wednesday, Jerusalems top Muslim leader called on all of the citys mosques to be closed on Friday in protest against the new Israeli security measures.

Grand Mufti Muhammad Hussein said Palestinian Muslims should all gather outside the gates of al-Aqsa Mosque for the weekly Friday prayer.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad  two Palestinian groups  have also called for protests on Wednesday in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

READ MORE  Timeline: Critical events at the al-Aqsa Mosque

Sheikh Azzam Khatib Tamimi, head of the Waqf, the Islamic authority in charge of al-Aqsa, said earlier on Wednesday that the authority had instructed imams in all the mosques in the city of Jerusalem not to hold prayers in their mosques and to come to al-Aqsa.

The Waqf indicated in a statement on Wednesday that the longer Israel delays the removal of the metal detectors, the worse it is going to get.

Palestinians have already been performing prayers outside the compound in protest since it was reopened on Sunday after a two-day closure.

Al Jazeeras Fawcett said the protests are not just about the implementation of the new security measures by Israel.

This isnt about one isolated installation of a security measure, he said.

For Palestinians this is about the fact that Israeli forces are an occupying force and the potential that Israel is in contravention of the UN articles guaranteeing freedom of worship, guaranteeing that occupying forces do not change any part of the status quo within the city.

Also on Wednesday, Israeli authorities closed the compound to Jewish visitors after what they descrfibed as a violation by some Jewish individuals who appeared to have prayed at the site, which is forbidden to non-Muslim worshippers.

Under the status quo, Muslims are given religious control over the compound and Jews are allowed to visit but not pray there.

READ MORE: Israels closure of al-Aqsa a collective punishment

On Friday, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israels prime minister, said he did not want to alter the status quo, but Palestinians fear Israel is trying to retake control of the site by stealth.

The site houses the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock shrine, Islams third holiest site after Mecca and Medina, as well as the ruins of the Biblical Jewish Temple.

Questions about control of the site frequently lead to outbursts of fighting

Additional reporting by Ibrahim Husseini.
The private conversation took place during a dinner for G20 leaders in Germany this month, says White House official.

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin had a previously undisclosed conversation during a dinner for G20 leaders at a summit earlier this month in Germany, a White House official said on Tuesday.

The two leaders held a formal two-hour bilateral meeting on July 7 in which Trump later said Putin denied allegations that he directed efforts to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election.

Trumps interactions with the Russian leader were scrutinised closely because of those allegations, which have dominated his first six months in the White House, and Trumps comments as a presidential candidate praising the former KGB spy.

Trump and Putin first met at the G20 during a gathering of other leaders, which was shown in a video. They later held the bilateral meeting, which was attended briefly by a pool of reporters.

OPINION: Trump and Putin  An awkward first date

In the evening, both men attended a dinner with G20 leaders. Putin was seated next to US first lady Melania Trump. The US president went over to them at the conclusion of the dinner and visited with Putin, the official said. That conversation had not been previously disclosed.

There was no second meeting between President Trump and President Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner. The insinuation that the White House has tried to hide a second meeting is false, malicious and absurd, the official said.

In a tweet late on Tuesday, Trump said: Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is sick. All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!

A breach of national security protocol

News of the conversation, first reported by Ian Bremmer, the president of political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, could raise renewed concern as congress and a special counsel investigate allegations by US intelligence agencies that Russia interfered to help Trump, a Republican, win the presidency.

Trump says there was no collusion and Russia denies interference in the election.





Bremmer said Trump got up from his seat halfway through dinner and spent about an hour talking privately and animatedly with Putin, joined only by Putins own translator.

The lack of a US translator raised eyebrows among other leaders at the dinner, said Bremmer, who called it a breach of national security protocol.

Al Jazeeras Heidi Zhou-Castro, reporting from Washington, DC, said the White House was trying to downplay the encounter as a conversation over dessert, rather than a meeting.

But the reason that this has stirred up so much attention is because the relationship between Putin and Trump is under close scrutiny. The US intelligence agency has determined that Moscow attempted to interfere with the US election in favour of Donald Trump, and now multiple entities are investigating whether Trumps campaign colluded with Russia, she said.

Now, the revelation about this meeting, which was not revealed until now, adds to the perception that Trump and Putin may have a closer relationship than previously thought.

OPINION: Why Trumps foreign policy is dangerous

The White House official said the leaders and their spouses were only permitted to have one translator attend the dinner. Trump sat next to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abes wife. His translator spoke Japanese.

When President Trump spoke to President Putin, the two leaders used the Russian translator, since the American translator did not speak Russian, the official said.





A US official who was briefed by some of his counterparts about the encounter said some of the leaders who attended the dinner were surprised to see Trump leave his seat and engage Putin in an extended private conversation with no one else from the US side present.

No one is sure what their discussion was about, and whether it was purely social or touched on bilateral or international issues, the official said.

Lawrence Korb, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told Al Jazeera that other world leaders would likely look at this encounter and try to get Trump on his own in the future to have this kind of private conversation.

Because they can get him to commit to things that, on the surface, may sound reasonable, but when you dig underneath you find out really that this is against American interests, he said.

The relations with countries are very complicated, nations dont have permanent friends or enemies  they have permanent interests. And so, we dont know what Putin was able to get [Trump] to agree to  those are the type of things that I think the diplomats rightly worry about.
Qatari official says four countries imposing illegal blockade on Doha regularly issue conflicting statements.

A government official in Qatar said on Wednesday that the four Arab countries blockading it have acted dangerously and in a disorganised manner after apparently changing their demands.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain said Tuesday that Qatar should commit to six principles on combatting terrorism and negotiate a plan to implement them. The four countries had initially made 13 sweeping demands, including shuttering Al Jazeera, which Qatar dismissed as an infringement on its sovereignty.

Sheikh Saif bin Ahmed Al Thani, director of the Qatari governments communications office, said the four countries have regularly issued conflicting statements.

OPINION: The turning point of the GCC crisis

He said there had been no official communication made to Qatar directly or via Kuwait or the United States, who have tried to mediate the crisis.

These latest comments are another example of the dangerous and disorganised manner in which the illegal blockade has been conducted, he said in an emailed response to questions from The Associated Press.

At first there were no demands, but following pressure from mediating countries, the blockaders leaked a list of demands that was quickly deemed neither reasonable nor actionable, he added.





The apparently new list of six demands includes commitments to combating extremism and terrorism, preventing financing and safe havens for armed groups, and suspending all acts of provocation and speeches inciting hatred or violence.

Qatar denies it has ever sponsored or supported terror groups and says the accusations are politically motivated.

The new list drops old demands that Qatar close down Al Jazeera; curb ties with Iran; kick out troops from NATO member Turkey, which has a base in Qatar; expel wanted figures; and pay reparations for damages allegedly caused by its policies.

The four countries accuse Qatar of supporting groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and say Qatar has given citizenship to wanted Brotherhood members and other figures.

Qatars foreign policy stances have at times sharply contradicted Saudi and Emirati policy in the Middle East.

Qatar has backed opposition groups across the region, which Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt deem a threat.

READ MORE: Can Qatar-Gulf rift be repaired?

The US state department in its annual country reports on terrorism released on Wednesday said Qatar had maintained a strong partnership in the fight against terrorism in 2016 and collaborated to foster closer regional and international cooperation on counterterrorism, law enforcement and rule of law activities.

Qatar, it added, has made significant progress in combating terrorist financing but terrorist financiers within the country are still able to exploit Qatars informal financial system.

The six principles:

Abdallah al-Mouallimi, Saudi Arabias ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters on Tuesday that the four countries are now committed to the six principles agreed on by their foreign ministers at a July 5 meeting in Cairo.

Commitment to combat extremism and terrorism in all their forms and to prevent their financing or providing havens.

Suspending all acts of provocation and speeches inciting hatred or violence.

Full compliance with the Riyadh Agreement of 2013 and the supplementary agreement and its implementation mechanisms of 2014 within the framework of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Adherence to all the outcomes of the Arab Islamic American Summit held in May 2017 in Riyadh.

Refraining from interfering in the internal affairs of states and from supporting illegal entities.

The responsibility of all states of the international community to confront all forms of extremism and terrorism as a threat to international peace and security.
Court sentences 23 civilians for 2010 Western Sahara clashes in retrial boycotted by defendants over fairness concerns

A Morocco court has sentenced 23 civilians to prison terms ranging from two years to life over the killing of 11 members of the Moroccan security forces in contested Western Sahara.

A verdict was delivered at dawn on Wednesday by the Court of Appeals in Sale near Rabat, the official news agency MAP reported.

The defendants and lawyers have boycotted court proceedings since May, announcing they would no longer attend what they said was a mock trial.

The killings took place in November 2010 as Moroccan forces moved to dismantle a camp in Gdim Izik camp where thousands of displaced Western Saharans, known as Sahrawis, were living.

READ MORE: Moroccos al-Hoceima gears up for million-man march

Morocco and the Algeria-backed Polisario Front independence movement have accused each other of provoking the deadly clashes, which spread to a nearby city where businesses and public buildings were looted and torched.

The defence has 10 days to appeal.

The defendants, who include several advocates of human rights and independence for Western Sahara, were initially tried by a military court in 2013, and sentenced to jail terms ranging from 20 years to life imprisonment.





International rights groups condemned the trial as unfair, saying allegations of forced confessions were never addressed, leading the court of cassation to order a retrial.

The civilian court issued its verdict on Wednesday after 12 hours of deliberations, issuing sentences against 19 defendants ranging from 20 years to life.

Four others were given lighter sentences but were not detained as they had already served their time.

The international rights monitors Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued a joint plea this week urging the Moroccan authorities to ensure that the verdict was not based on confessions or statements obtained under torture or other ill-treatment during police interrogations.

The Moroccan authorities have sought to underline what they called the transparency and fairness of the civil trial, which was open to the press and international observers.

Morocco says Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony mostly controlled by Rabat, is an integral part of the kingdom.

The Polisario Front demands a referendum on self-determination for the territory.
UN demands access to report on Yemens man-made catastrophe after BBC journalists are blocked from traveling to Sanaa.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen prevented a UN flight carrying aid agency staff travelling to the Houthi-controlled capital, Sanaa, because three international journalists were also on board, aviation sources said.

The coalition, which intervened in the Yemen conflict in 2015 in support of the internationally recognised government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, controls the airspace over Yemen and can prevent any flights made without prior permission.

Aviation sources said on Tuesday that the flight was prevented from taking off from Djibouti to Sanaa because three BBC journalists were on it.

Confirming the report, the United Nations has demanded media access to report on what it called a man-made catastrophe.

READ MORE: Yemens unfathomable pain and suffering

Steps like this do not help, Farhan Haq, the UN spokesman, told reporters in New York. This has been a large man-made humanitarian problem, the world needs to know and journalists need to have access.

The coalition claimed the journalists security could not be guaranteed in rebel-controlled areas, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Yemen.

They were instead advised to travel on commercial flights, a spokesman for OCHA said.

Hakim Almasmari, editor-in-chief of the Yemen Post, said the media should be able to cover the massacre and the viewers allowed to judge who is wrong or right.

Its very sad to see that theres no international pressure from the UN and world leaders, he told Al Jazeera, from Sanaa.

A source in the coalition said that the Yemeni government was the only party entitled to issue visas for foreigners and that entry must be made via commercial flights through Aden airport, which is under its control.

The United Nations is not concerned with transporting journalists, except those who are coming to cover its own activities, a source in the coalition told Reuters news agency, adding that the UN must ensure the journalists safety and make sure they do not carry out any other activity.

The impoverished Arab country has been engulfed in a civil war since September 2014 that has killed more than 10,000 people and displaced more than 3 million.

The lack of coverage is also hindering humanitarians effort to draw the attention of the international community and donors to the humanitarian catastrophe the country is experiencing, Ben Lassoued said.
UN deeply disappointed by attack that killed at least 20 civilians who had fled fighting in countrys southwest.

At least 20 civilians, including women and children from the same family, have been killed in a Saudi-led coalition air attack in southwest Yemen, according to the United Nations and witnesses.

Local sources told Al Jazeera that Tuesdays attack targeted an area west of the city of Taiz, where a number of displaced families have sought safety.

Those killed are believed to have been in their homes when the attack took place, with the majority of the victims said to be from the same family.

Yemens internationally recognised government confirmed that around 20 people were killed in the al-Atera village. It gave no further details on the attack.

Yemen has been torn apart by conflict since 2014, when Houthi rebels, allied with troops loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, captured large expanses of the country, including the capital, Sanaa.

A coalition of Arab countries assembled by Saudi Arabia launched an air campaign against the rebels in March 2015 to try to restore the internationally recognised government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to power.

INSIDE STORY  War, famine and cholera: Is no one able to help Yemen?

Yemens human rights minister, Mohammed Askar, on Tuesday called for a government investigation into what he described as an unfortunate incident, while Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul-Salam condemned the attack as a monstrous crime.

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said in a statement that it was deeply shocked and saddened at reports of the deaths and injuries of a number of internally displaced persons in an aerial attack on the area.

The statement said the civilians had fled fighting in the nearby al-Makha (Mocha) district, on the Red Sea coast.

This latest incident once again demonstrates the extreme dangers facing civilians in Yemen, particularly those attempting to flee violence, as they disproportionately bear the brunt of conflict, UNHCR said.

Coalition-backed forces recaptured the port of al-Makha earlier this year as part of a major ongoing offensive to drive rebels from Yemens lengthy coastline.

READ MORE: Yemens unfathomable pain and suffering

Tuesdays attack was the latest in a series of coalition bombings that have hit schools, hospitals, markets and private homes across northern Yemen.

Since the Saudi-led coalition began its attacks, the conflict has killed more than 10,000 people, forced millions from their homes, damaged infrastructure and pushed the country to the brink of famine, according to the UN.

Earlier this month the UN agency for children, UNICEF, said nearly 10 million children in Yemen were in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.

The country is also facing the worlds worst cholera outbreak, according to the UN.
Many of the victims found in mass graves were Rohingya Muslims  a persecuted minority from Myanmars Rakhine state.

An army general in Thailand was one of the most prominent figures found guilty in a major human trafficking trial that included more than 103 defendants accused of involvement in a modern-day slavery trade.

Lieutenant-General Manas Kongpaen was convicted on Wednesday of several offences involving trafficking and taking bribes.

At least one other defendant considered a kingpin in the illegal trade, Pajjuban Aungkachotephan, was also found guilty. He was a prominent businessman and former politician in the southern province of Satun.

By Wednesday evening, 62 people were found guilty, with sentences ranging from four years to the maximum 50 years allowed under the criminal code, officials said. Individual sentences were not immediately announced.

READ MORE: Thailand and the daily travail of human trafficking

As well as the general, Myanmar nationals, Thai police officers and local politicians are among those accused.

Arrests began in 2015 following the discovery of 36 bodies in shallow graves in southern Thailand.

That discovery exposed networks which trafficked Rohingya Muslims fleeing persecution in Myanmar and held them for ransom in jungle camps before they were granted passage to Malaysia.

The trial began that year, when authorities said traffickers held migrants in the camps as hostages until relatives were able to pay for their release.

Many never made it out.

The case drew special attention when its lead police investigator, Major-General Paween Pongsirin, fled to Australia and said he feared for his life after his findings implicated influential people in Thailand who wanted to silence him.

Thailands military government has said it is making the fight against human trafficking a national priority.

Thailand has yet to release a full report on the graves and the results of post-mortem forensic testing.

Rights groups say trafficking networks were largely left intact by the 2015 crackdown and trial.

We believe that the crackdown is only a disruption of a trafficking network but that network is still very much well in place, said Amy Smith, an executive director of rights group Fortify Rights.

Smith also said the current trial has a narrow focus.

We expect there are many more perpetrators out there, she said. This is a big business with big money.

Sunai Phasuk, a senior researcher on Thailand at Human Rights Watch, said: There needs to be more prosecution against traffickers as well as more work on rehabilitation of trafficking victims.

Lengthy legal process

The legal process in handing down verdicts is lengthy in Thailand, and it may take hours before the judge reveals the exact details of the verdicts to a packed Bangkok court.





The trial has been marred by allegations of intimidation against witnesses, interpreters and police investigators.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University, said this trial will serve as a litmus for Thailands military government, which is marred by controversies and corruption scandals.

Overall, this case is going to decide whether this government has any lasting legacies or achievements at all and they are putting a lot of emphasis on the trial to show its credibility, he told Al Jazeera, from Bangkok.

Thailands government denies that trafficking syndicates are still flourishing and has said it has largely eliminated human trafficking in the country.

Journalists were not allowed in the court room on Wednesday, but proceedings were relayed on television screens provided by the court.

Thailand has historically been a source, destination and transit country for men, women and children who are often smuggled and trafficked from poorer, neighbouring countries including Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar to work in Thailand or further afield in Malaysia, often as labourers and sex workers.

Mass grave

Last month the US state department left Thailand on a Tier 2 Watchlist, just above the lowest ranking of Tier 3, in its annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report because it did not do enough to tackle human smuggling and trafficking.

Al Jazeeras Scott Heidler, reporting from Bangkok, said the scale of the trial meant the verdicts would take several hours to read and the hearing could last into tomorrow.

Most [human rights] observers are hoping that there are going to be follow-up cases because they also believe  when you look at this case  were looking at a very small area; this one mass grave they found along the border in 2015 and one ring that supplied those camps with the people coming across down from Myanmar, he said.

Human rights observers are hoping that this is just the beginning and there will be many more cases to come.

All the defendants earlier pleaded not guilty and were placed under pre-trial detention.
UNESCO recognition of slave-era harbour as heritage site prompts debate about discrimination in present-day Brazil.

The issue of anti-black racism in modern Brazil has been reignited following the induction of Rio de Janeiros former harbour area, where millions of African slaves landed in Brazil, as a UNESCO world heritage site.

Valongo Wharf, where two million slaves landed between the 1760s and the 1830s, was added to the prestigious list by the UNs cultural body earlier this month to preserve evidence of what it called one of the most brutal episodes in the history of humanity.

Brazil was the last country to officially abolish slavery in 1888.

READ MORE: Heartache and suffering  Slavery in Brazil

While historians have embraced the award, many believe discrimination continues, with black people considered second-class citizens, earning 40 percent less than their white colleagues.

President Michel Temer has also faced criticism for his all-white cabinet.

The way I see it, black people in Brazil are still slaves, said Antonio Rodrigues A Silva, a historian at the Memorial Museum.

Silva alluded to the fact that 50 percent of the black population lives in Brazilian slums, or favelas, and that some 75 percent are extremely poor.

We are still slaves to a historical process that keeps growing in the cities, Silva told Al Jazeera.

Mass grave discovery

In 1996, historian Mercedes Guimaraes was renovating her house, which now stands as a memorial museum and research centre, when she found a mass grave containing the burned bodies of thousands of slaves.

People say there is no racism in Brazil, but there is, said Guimaraes,I discovered racism in Brazil while fighting for this history.

The Memorial Museum has been integral to UNESCO recognising the region as a world heritage site.

Al Jazeeras Daniel Schweimler, reporting from Rio, said many in Brazil have never celebrated their African roots or marked the countrys history of slavery.

Afro-Brazilians are saying, its about time the country did, he said.

Schweimler said that many hope UNESCOs recognition of the countrys slave history will help people understand the issues of race and tackle racism.

Historians are hoping Afro-descendants are able to draw strength from the award and look beyond their past.

It will give strength to us as Brazilians to recognise that a huge crime against humanity was committed here, Guimaraes said.








Venezuelas opposition keeps up its pressure on the embattled president, calling for further protests.

Venezuelas government has responded with anger to a threat by the United States to impose economic sanctions on senior officials. It has called the threat brutal and imperial.

The measures are aimed at forcing President Nicolas Maduro to abandon a controversial plan to rewrite the constitution. Maduro wants to hold a vote on July 30th for a new assembly.

More than seven million people voted against the proposed changes in an unofficial referendum on Sunday. There are fears it could enshrine one-party rule.

Over the past three months, there have been almost daily demonstrations in Venezuela, with anti-and pro-government protesters taking to the streets, which has plunged the country into an economic and political uncertainty.

So can the government solve the biggest crisis in decades  or will it be up to the opposition?

Presenter: Hazem Sika

Guests:

Phil Gunson  Senior Analyst with the International Crisis Group

Antonio Mora  Political Analyst and Lawyer

Diego Arria  Former Venezuelan Ambassador to the United Nations
The foreign minister of Cyprus on whether the island needs further assistance from the international community.
The Land Policy Initiative (LPI) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), will on Thursday hold an inception workshop in Accra, Ghana, to launch the Monitoring and Evaluation of Land in Africa (MELA) project, a pilot study to track progress in the implementation of the African Union Declaration on Land Issues and Challenges in []http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Appa-sourceTheAfric...
"The Nazi hunters from Germany were midway through a four-hour interview with Judith Meisel when they pulled out a photo of a young S.S. guard the 88-year-old Holocaust survivor hadn't seen for nearly 75 years."

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported on July 8, 2017:

In a desperate, final dash to bring the guard and others to account for Nazi atrocities committed decades ago, investigators from Germany's Federal Justice Office, aided by FBI agents, visited Meisel's St. Louis Park, Minn., home last month after once thinking that there were no more living survivors of Stutthof. Founded by German authorities after an internet search, Meisel offers a rare chance for prosecutors to present one more survivor's account of a brutal camp in Poland where 60,000 died. "I think it's important to send the message that no matter how long ago these crimes were committed that humanity will seek justice until it can no longer do so," said Gregory Gordon, a former federal prosecutor who worked on cases involving Nazi war criminals.

Although history will never forget the lessons and memories of Holocaust, ironically, history repeats itself with similar events. The dates and the names of the players may change, but the general motifs remain the same.

Zohreh Heydari was a 17-year-old Iranian woman from the city of Qom (125 kilometers by road southwest of Tehran). She was part of the first group of people who were taken away during the massacre in the summer of 1988, executing more than 30,000 people in Iran. She was sentenced in court to 70 lashes, and the night prior to her execution, she received those 70 floggings.

The massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in Iran was a crime against humanity. Khomeini desired to get rid of his main opponents and guarantee the survival of his regime. After three decades, there is a movement seeking justice for that massacre and the other crimes conducted by the Iranian regime.

Zohreh Heydari is certainly an inspiration to all those women now continuing the struggle against Iran's corrupt, misogynist mullahs. Her courage and bravery, her capacity to take risks, and her strong willpower contributed to her mature appearance.

"She was arrested while trying to escape the country," said her fellow inmate, "on her way to joining the resistance. She underwent a tremendous amount of torture and used to recount her memories from the period of interrogation. She used to say, 'The torture room seemed so small to me that upon my return to my cell it felt as if I have stepped in to a hotel. I would take advantage of that space until it was time to return for more torture the following day.'"

Zohreh used to stand steadfast against the interrogators from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Whenever the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRG) in Evin Prison would rush into our cells to attack us, they would directly go to Zohreh and assault her, assuming she was guilty and responsible for everything.

She used to suffer from severe migraine headaches. "They used to rush into our cells with their lashes, beating everyone. Due to Zohreh's headache, she had not partaken in our protest this time around. However, Halvaee, that evil executioner who had a particular hate for Zohreh, directly approached Zohreh and started kicking her with his heavy boots. Zohreh started yelling, 'You malicious, dirty guard, leave me alone! Don't you get close to me!' It was exactly because of her continuous persistence that we had nicknamed her 'Waterfall.' Her shouts were similar to the roar of the waterfall as it continuously pounds upon falling."

Zohreh and I were on a hunger strike together for a month in Gohardasht Prison. When we were transferred to solitary confinements, our cells were near each other, so we were able to know how the other was doing.

We preoccupied ourselves by learning various languages and dialects such as Azeri, Shomali, and Kurdish. Ever since those days, the Azeri word "oushachlar," meaning "friends" or, more colloquially, "guys," has become very popular and is still used to this day. That's how we used to refer to each other. And that's how the word "waterfall" (Aabshar in Farsi, phonetically similar to Oushachlar in Azeri) came to signify Zohreh.

Whenever we were moved or transferred to different cells, Waterfall was the one in charge of announcing wake-up calls and blackouts. In fact, her voice was so loud and clear, as if it were coming through a speaker, reaching from one side of the hall to the other. She was also in charge of announcing daily prayers while in solitary confinement. Each morning, she would yell out, "Hey, oushachlar [guys], good morning!" At the time of prayers, she would call, "Oushachlar, it's time for prayers. Let's pray together." And at the end of prayers, she'd say, "May God accept our prayers, oushachlar." When they turned off the lights at nights, Zohreh's loud and clear voice would break the silence in our cells by wishing everyone a good night. All the guards recognized Zohreh's voice and knew that Waterfall was her nickname. She was not afraid of anyone and would face them all singlehandedly.

The female guards were not capable of punishing or silencing her, hence they always sent brutal male torturers. One day, as dusk was falling, she called everyone to prayers. "Oushachlar, it's time for prayers!" We all stood up in our cells for prayers. Like the usual routine, she called out, "May God accept your prayers" once we had finished. She hadn't fully completed her sentence when we heard her cell's door open, followed by the voices of three men. We realized they had been waiting to attack her after our prayers. On the one hand, we could hear the beatings of those three heinous torturers, and on the other hand, Zohreh's voice, shouting, "Get out of my cell, you evil bastards! Don't you touch me!"

An hour of this unjust but proud battle continued. The rest of us who were in the surrounding cells started banging on our doors and yelling to leave the poor girl alone. We didn't know what had happened to Zohreh, as she had gone silent. The beatings had continued for more than an hour. Only the voices of those three who were taking out their revenge and hatred on her could be heard. They left her cell after a while, and although we kept calling Zohreh, she didn't respond to any of us.

We were all very sad and worried about her health. A heavy silence fell upon our ward. That night, we didn't hear Waterfall's voice calling out the usual "Goodnight, oushachlar!" But somebody else repeated the exact line on her behalf. We had no news of her state all night long.

Shortly before dawn, at the time of prayer, our heroine once again, with her waterfall-like roaring voice, stronger than ever, yelled out, "Time to wake up, oushachlar! It's time to pray." And it was Waterfall's voice that ended our prayers with the usual "May God accept our prayers."

She made our enemy understand that even with violence, torture, and brutality, they cannot stop our roaring Waterfall from defending her rights against misogynist mullahs.

Hassan Mahmoudi is a human rights advocate, specializing in political and economic issues relating to Iran and the Middle East. @hassan_mahmou1
I woke up very early this morning with the tortured picture of an infant running through my mind.

Charlie Gard has a tube through his nose into his lungs, connected to a machine that breathes for him. He has all the latest electronics monitoring his status. But he is unable to provide any indication of his pleasure or pain at the process. He is dying from a horrendous genetic disease that robs his body of the ability to move, breathe, or respond.

Next I saw his parents. Their expression conveyed the pain that Charlie cannot. But their pain is not physical; it is emotional. That is understandable, since their child is dying. And their anguish is magnified by an emotionless megalith against which they flail to no avail. Single-payer "health care" has taken their child from them, even while he is still alive.

Such pictures are not new to me. During my time in critical care medicine, I saw many hopeless cases. Their diseases had reached a stage where there was no medical reason to continue treatment. They had no material chance to recover to a point where they would have any meaningful life away from extensive (and expensive) medical support. And because these medical circumstances were not rare, I helped write my hospital's policy on Futility of Care. But Charlie Gard's case is different from the ones I was involved with.

When Charlie Gard entered Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, England's single-payer health system, the National Health Service, took over. At first, it seemed that this was a good thing, since his parents didn't have to pay extra for his care. But they didn't have a choice. They weren't in the small minority who are either wealthy enough or favorably employed to access private insurance. So Charlie was swallowed by the Blob.

Thus far, there didn't seem to be any difference between single-payer and private insurance. Both start with the same level of medical care. But shortly, the differences became manifest. When Charlie's rare diagnosis became clear (only 16 known cases), the NHS refused to allow any sort of alternative approach. Charlie had struck the iceberg, and the Carpathia was nowhere to be seen.

After first contact with a doctor who might be able to help, Charlie's parents set up a crowdfunding page and raised 1.3 million (about $1.7 million). That's enough for any conceivable therapy. They had become financially able to relieve the NHS of any need to care for Charlie. All the NHS had to do was say, "Yes." Instead, the NHS asserted its ownership of Charlie, and multiple courts agreed. The hospital got court orders to discontinue life support.

What would have happened in the U.S.? When there is no reasonable probability of returning a critically ill patient to meaningful life, the situation is to be presented to the patient's health care surrogate. This "Legally Authorized Person" is encouraged to recognize that further care is futile and should not be undertaken. With the LAP's consent, it would become possible to withdraw futile care.

It is critically important to note that the LAP (typically close family) has the authority to tell the medical staff to continue care or not. It is not up to the doctors or the hospital. It does not matter that continuing futile care burns out staff and consumes resources. The family is the final authority, because the family members are the ones who own all rights in this situation. It would be unethical to proceed without their consent, because they are protecting the patient's natural human rights, even if they conflict with the medical prognosis.

I know that speaking in terms of "ownership" sounds strange coming from a doctor. But this is the key fact, based in natural law. Charlie Gard's parents "own" him. They begot him. They cared for him. And when he became ill, they cared even more for him by seeking expert assistance. They are primarily responsible for Charlie. But single-payer NHS changes everything.

When Charlie Gard came through that Emergency Department door, the NHS took ownership of him. It's a classic case of the Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules." (Apologies to Saint Matthew.) In essence, the NHS said that since it is paying the freight, Charlie is now the property of the State. His parents were involuntarily dispossessed of their son. The NHS stole him by force of law. Parental rights inherent in natural law were "stripped away by strangers."

The therapy proposed by Dr. Hirano from America supposedly has about a 10% chance of success. That's significantly better than the zero the courts have offered. But let us suppose that it fails. Is it a total loss? Almost certainly not. Knowledge will be gained. It may not help kids with Charlie's condition, but it may lead to help for others. And Charlie's parents are able to afford it now. The NHS would incur no further expense.

Even at this late date, with doctors and world leaders lining up to volunteer help for Charlie, the NHS still acts on the basis that it owns the child. His parents were not allowed to appeal. Only the hospital had that right.

This conceit is at the center of the single-payer controversy, but no one is willing to actually argue it. If it were debated, it would show that the "payment" idea is a diversion. Instead, single-payer advocates have taken the position that the State owns its citizens.

Right now, I have been forced into Medicare. I don't like it, and I would happily take an alternative, but legally, I cannot. Further, if Medicare declares that I can't have a particular treatment, I can't even buy it for myself. That's exactly the same situation Charlie Gard's parents are in. The federal government owns me through Medicare.

My only alternative is to go out of the country for unauthorized care, or to find a cash-only doctor who does not accept Medicare. And how many of those are there? I've saved enough to have such an option, but how many others can do that? And suppose I'm in the hospital when the need arises. I'd have to sign out AMA (Against Medical Advice). Fortunately, I still have that small shred of personal ownership.

Every time someone proposes single-payer, throw Charlie Gard in his face. He is single-payer  state ownership of the individual. After single-payer is instituted, will it be possible that this "government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth"?
My wife Michelle and I have three sons and one daughter. Much to the dismay of foolish, so-called feminists like Jody Allard, were raising every one of them to be dangerous, though, not in the sense that Ms. Allard imagines. Its worse -- much, much, worse.

In case you missed it, Ms. Allard is the infamous mother who -- while longing for safe, feminist men, and lamenting the allegedly numerous men who populate the so-called rape culture, -- has more than once publicly shamed her two sons. I suppose the young men -- both in their late teens -- should at least be thankful that their angry, deceived, corrupted-by-liberalism mother didnt kill them in the womb.

Last year, in a piece for the Washington Post, Ms. Allard stunningly declared, My sons are part of the [rape culture] problem. What makes her conclusion so stunning is that this mother deems her own boys part of the problem, not because of some wicked sexual activity, but merely because they are males and they refuse to participate actively in ending the rape culture.

This year, Allard followed up her 2016 hyperbole with this:

If the feminist men -- the men who proudly declare their progressive politics and their fight for [e]quality -- arent safe, then what man is? No man, I fear. I know Im not supposed to cast an entire sex with a single paint brush -- not all men, Im sure some readers are thinking and preparing to type or tweet. But if its impossible for a white person to grow up without adopting racist ideas, simply because of the environment in which they live, how can I expect men not to subconsciously absorb at least some degree of sexism? White people arent safe, and men arent safe, no matter how much Id like to assure myself that these things arent true. (Emphasis mine.)

Of course, unsafe men include her own sons. Again, Ms. Allard intolerantly labels her own boys unsafe because they have a penis and because they refuse to acknowledge the rape culture their mother insists exists.

There is a terrible bit of tragic irony here. Because theyve been raised by an extremely liberal mother and without a father, almost certainly Ms. Allards sons are saddled with a psychology and a worldview that most likely will take them down regrettable paths. As Ive often noted, the absence of fathers has had a devastating effect on children in America.

Among many other sad outcomes, fatherlessness is one of the leading predictors of future criminal activity. Children living with their married biological parents are the least likely to commit criminal acts. On the other hand, according to Effects of Fatherless Families on Crime Rates,

Children of single-parent homes [almost always without a father] are more likely to engage in questionable behavior, struggle academically, and become delinquent. Problems with children from fatherless families can continue into adulthood. These children are three times more likely to end up in jail by the time they reach age 30 than are children raised in intact families, and have the highest rates of incarceration in the United States According to Rolf Loeber, Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology and Epidemiology at the Western Psychiatric Institute in the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, A close and intense relationship between a boy and his father prevents hostility and inappropriate aggressiveness. This inappropriate aggressiveness is an early indication of potential delinquency later on, particularly in boys.

According to Edward Kruk at Psychology Today, among other disastrous results, fatherless children are much more likely to be involved in violent crime (such as sexual assault). Kruk reports that 85 per cent of youth in prison have an absent father; fatherless children are more likely to offend and go to jail as adults. As Maggie Gallagher warned in the late 1990s, Fatherless Boys Grow Up Into Dangerous Men.

Additionally, multiple studies note that fatherless children (and children from broken families in general) are far more likely to themselves be victims of violence and sexual assault. The National Childrens Alliance reveals,

Family structure is the most important risk factor in child sexual abuse. Children who live with two married biological parents are at low risk for abuse. The risk increases when children live with step-parents or a single parent. Children living without either parent (foster children) are 10 times more likely to be sexually abused than children that live with both biological parents. Children who live with a single parent that has a live-in partner are at the highest risk: they are 20 times more likely to be victims of child sexual abuse than children living with both biological parents (Sedlack, et. al., 2010).

In spite of these sobering facts -- that anyone with a sound biblical worldview did not need to read -- liberals like Ms. Allard continue to wage war on the family in America. What does the perverse redefinition of marriage achieved by liberals reveal if not that they believe that fathers and mothers dont really matter? The sexual sin and violence that plagues our culture are the direct result of the efforts of liberals across the U.S. -- from our campuses to our courts. In other words, on sexual assault (or rape culture), liberals like Ms. Allard are mourning a culture that they helped to create.

Ms. Allard claims to have talked with her boys about consent, misogyny and rape culture since they were tweens, but has she talked to them about what it truly means for a husband to love his wife and for a wife to love her husband? Has she taught them to remain sexually pure until they are married? Has she warned them about the dangers of promiscuity, pornography (and its link to sexual aggression), and the homosexual lifestyle?

Among many other lies and perversions promoted by modern liberalism, my wife and I are warning our children about these dangers. Whats more, we are raising them to be agents of truth in this era of lies. We are teaching them to obey the Word of their Creator when it comes to marriage, sex, the family, and so on. We are teaching them to be witnesses to the world of all that is good and right, but given where we are with the sad state of the family in America, this is especially true of matters in the sexual realm.

In other words, we are teaching each of our four children to be dangerous to the cause of the father of lies and all of those who aid and abet him in this world.

Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.

www.trevorgrantthomas.com

Trevor is the author of The Miracle and Magnificence of America

tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com
In December 2012, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced changes to its official guide to classifying mental illnesses. Gender identity disorder had been classified for decades in their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as a mental disorder. The new DSM eliminated gender identity disorder and replaced it with a new term, gender dysphoria. Dysphoria is the distress a person experiences as a result of the sex and gender they were assigned at birth.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is published by the APA and offers a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders. The most important aspect of the DSM is that it serves as a universal authority for psychiatric diagnoses. There are few parts of America the DSM doesnt touch or influence. It is used, or relied upon, by clinicians, researchers, psychiatric drug regulation agencies, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, the legal system, and policy makers. The publication of the DSM, with tightly guarded copyrights, now makes APA over $5 million a year, historically totaling over $100 million.

The LGBTQ community lobbied long and hard for the changes in the DSM. Their efforts were successful in that being transgender is no longer a mental disorder in the DSM. After the change, many LGBT activists felt that the new gender dysphoria diagnosis would be a powerful legal tool when challenging discrimination in health insurance plans and services. The new criteria represent some forward progress on issues of social stigma and barriers to medical transition care, for those who need it.

The change in the DSM also means that when gender identity disorder was diagnosed as a mental illness, corrective surgery was not warranted. The appropriate treatment for a mental disorder was therapy. With the new DSM, no longer is gender identity disorder considered a mental disorder, it is now considered a medically-correctable condition, like surgery needed to correct a physical birth defect such as cleft lip and palate.

Those who lobbied for the change in the DSM argued that nonconformity to birth-assigned roles and victimization from societal prejudice do not constitute mental pathology. There was more interest in changing the DSM to correct a perceived social injustice than understanding and treating a longstanding mental disorder. The greater issue, though, may be the larger sociopolitical impact the new category will have, wrote Dr. Dana Beyer, a public health and LGBT civil rights advocate who also served on the American Psychiatric Association's working group. Dr. Beyer wrote of their successful lobbying of the APA, in "The End of Transgender as a Mental Illness:" Our greatest accomplishment on the Working Group was reconceptualizing the state of being trans from a mental illness to a normal human variant.

As a rebuke to the lobbying efforts of LGBTQ activists to change the DSM and redefine mental disorders to achieve acceptance as a normal human variant, Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital reiterated that transgenderism is a mental disorder that merits treatment, that sex change is biologically impossible, and that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder.

The assumption that ones gender is only in the mind regardless of anatomical reality, has led some transgendered people to push for social acceptance and affirmation of their own subjective personal truth.

The lesson here is not that a mental disorder is wiped off a list because over time, the population of sexual identity disorders got healthy and no longer exhibited the symptoms of transgenderism, as would be done in removing the bald eagle from the endangered species list. No, the lesson here is that if activists lobby long enough and hard enough, they can affect significant numbers of a voting block to get the offending language removed from the DSM.

Will the Lefts/LGBTQ activists lobbying of the APA to end transgenderism as a mental illness be a pyrrhic victory, subject to being overturned, or will it be the precursor to something more odious? The money is on mission creep. Apparently, with enough leverage and a sufficiently good cover story and effective activists, it wont be long before there is another effort to reconceptualize the state of being pedo from the mental illness of pedophilia to another normal human variant. What if a transgender self-identifies as a wolf or an elf or a dragon? Activist psychiatrists are hard at work laying the ground work for otherkin. It's a difficult issue, one compounded by the fact that many otherkin also identify as transgender themselves.

Dr. Marc D. Feldman, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Alabama, suggests that otherkin didn't seem like a good fit for mental health treatment. People in advantaged countries like to think of themselves as especially complex, colorful, and special. The otherkin phenomenon certainly reflects this first-world preoccupation. But it isn't illegal, doesn't victimize other people, and isn't a form of mental illness (unless people become delusional about it), so I don't see a particular need for treatment. In other words, if you self-identify as a wolf or an elf or a dragon youre just another normal human variant, like transgenders. That is until you seek employment or demand your insurance company to pay for your conversion to a wolf or an elf or a dragon. See the transgender Dragon Lady and recall DODs recent policy change in tattoos. Eva Medusa should be on the next DOD recruiting poster.

The DSM as the U.S. universal authority for psychiatric diagnoses has been corrupted by external pressures. Various authorities criticized that many DSM-5 revisions or additions lack empirical support; inter-rater reliability is low for many disorders; several sections contain poorly written, confusing, or contradictory information; and the psychiatric drug industry unduly influenced the manual's content. Many of the members of work groups for the DSM-5 had conflicting interests, including ties to pharmaceutical companies. Various scientists have argued that the DSM-5 forces clinicians to make distinctions that are not supported by solid evidence, distinctions that have major treatment implications, including drug prescriptions and the availability of health insurance coverage. General criticism of the DSM-5 ultimately resulted in a petition, signed by many mental health organizations, which called for outside review of DSM-5.

Theres only so much accomplished APA members, like Dr. Paul R. McHugh, can do against a social justice steamroller. The APA and their DSM have been fully compromised and subject to social engineering, undue influence, and new definitions that are not supported by the evidence.

Sex change is biologically impossible, said Dr. McHugh. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.

If you thought you had problems with men in your daughters locker room or men winning womens track events, wait until the LGBTQ activists are able to remove their next offending personality disorder, pedophilia, from the DSM. As for transgenders in the military, Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter of California said people should decide what sex they are before signing up. Figure out whether you're man or a woman before you join. U.S. taxpayers shouldn't have to foot the bill.

The Trump administration needs to take the APA to court and decertify the compromised DSM as the universal authority for psychiatric diagnoses in the United States and reject the APAs guidance and the DSM-5 as the source reference for the Obama policy of transgenders in the military.
On Friday, two Israeli policemen were murdered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The same day, Seth Siegel wrote in The New York Times, "A Good Story about Israel and the Palestinians," detailing how Israeli and Palestinians sat on a dais to announce an update on the Red Sea-Dead Sea project. Siegel, author of Let There be Water, is probably Israel's greatest water expert, and his understanding of the challenges of water use and distribution in Israel and with its neighbors is unsurpassed. But what he passes off as a "good story" is simply the old story of Israel giving something to the Palestinians (and Jordan) in exchange for a phony smile.

The agreement includes no change in the Palestinian Authority's nasty attitude or incitement to violence against Israel. No decision to stop paying terrorists for killing Jews. There was condemnation of Israeli security measures after the murders from P.A. strongman Mahmoud Abbas, King Abdullah of Jordan, and the Arab League  not a positive comment from any of them about the water project. The extent of the good news appears to be that Palestinian water officials were permitted to accept Israeli-generated improvements in Palestinian life.

Reviewing Siegel's excellent book a year ago, I wrote:

Rawabi, a planned Palestinian community, is a case in point. Existing Palestinian-Israeli protocols require the two sides to meet to discuss new pipelines for the town, but for years the PA refused to convene a meeting on principle. After the developer was nearly bankrupt and the PA was telling the world Israel was withholding water from thirsty Palestinians, Israel finally just turned on the water. The PA called it a win, but for the Palestinians who invested in the construction of the town and the Palestinians who hoped to live and work there, the delay was no win at all.

Siegel acknowledges precisely that in the Times:

Beginning in 2008, the Palestinian leadership decided to turn water into a political tool to bludgeon Israel. The claim, which gained currency among some in the human rights community and the news media, was that Israel was starving Palestinians of water to oppress them and to break their economy. Never mind that Israel was scrupulously adhering to the Oslo Agreement and providing more than half of all of all of the water used by Palestinians in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority and its supporters began to speak of Israel's "water apartheid."

In short form: Palestinian leadership subjects its people to limited dirty water or no water so it can blame Israel for the limited dirty water or no water.

It did the same in Gaza, as I wrote then in covering Siegel's book:

Gaza is a disaster ready to happen  happening already, in fact  between illegal wells draining the aquifer, salt water running in to fill the space, and lack of sewage treatment. When Israel had farms inside Gaza, the deal was to supply an amount of water to Gaza authorities equal to the amount used by the farms. When, in 2005, Israel left Gaza, the government continued providing the water  and later doubled the amount. But that doesn't address the underlying issues.

The underlying issues are that a) Palestinian leadership  Hamas and the P.A.  is perfectly willing to force its people into misery; b) Israel can be counted on to ameliorate that misery to the best of its ability; c) to the extent that other people think Israel can do more to help the Palestinians, that's where the remonstrance goes, not to Hamas or to the P.A. for causing the problems in the first place.

Expecting Israel to continue protecting the Palestinians from themselves, Siegel writes, "The strategic genius of the plan is that it weaves vital economic interests of these sometimes-antagonists together. Even should Jordan or the West Bank someday fall to radical rejectionists, it would be nearly impossible for those leaders to entirely break the water ties established here without creating substantial hardship for their populations."

"Substantial hardship for their people" is not an impediment as long as Israel can be blamed. Cement sent by Israel to Gaza for reconstruction following the 2014 Hamas-initiated missile war against Israel has been diverted to build tunnels for Hamas terrorists. Hamas hid weapons in UNRWA schools and hid its leadership under the main Gaza hospital during the war. And it is the P.A. that generated the current electricity shortage in Gaza, causing horrendous discomfort for the civilians of the Strip. How much less "radical rejectionists" (as if Hamas isn't a radical rejectionist) could care about civilians is unclear.

Richard Haas, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, told the JewishInsider last week, "I would emphasize economic development in the West Bank. I would work with the Israelis on placing some restraints on where they build settlements. I would focus a lot with Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians on crisis prevention in Jerusalem."

That's the formula: economic development for the Palestinians and restraint on Israel. And "crisis prevention," which might mean stopping murderous terrorism by Palestinians against Jews  or it might not. He wasn't specific. Where is the burden placed on Palestinian leadership for the ruination of its own people?

President Trump's envoy, Jason Greenblatt, has said Mr. Trump wants the Palestinian economy and quality of life to improve. Most people of goodwill do  clearly, the Israelis do. The actual "good news" in the good news story is that not for the first time or the second time, Israel will try to ameliorate some of the difficulties endured by Palestinian civilians caused by the well known nastiness of those Palestinians' own leadership.
Not since President John Tyler was abandoned by his own party has a major political party abandoned its own president  until now, that is.

Back in 1841, Tyler, after the death of President William Henry Harrison, became the first vice president to succeed to the presidency. Remarkably, because he differed with the Whig Party he represented, the party's congressional leaders actually managed to expel their own president from their party. This was due in part to Tyler's belief in a strong president  one who sets national policy rather than following Congress's lead.



President John Tyler

The Whig Party's repudiation of its own president led directly to the demise of the Whig Party and the rise of America's only successful third party, the Republican Party.

Once again, history is repeating itself.

Specifically, by abandoning the man who gave them the White House, today's congressional Republicans are repeating the mistake made by congressional Whigs 175 years ago. In the process, they are creating a de facto third party, forcing their own president to either go his own way or to support congressional and senatorial candidates who  regardless of party affiliation  will support him.

With the Republican-fostered collapse of the bills to repeal and replace Obamacare, the RNC's abandonment of Trump is now complete. Never a traditional "party man," Trump nonetheless ran and decisively won as a Republican. He had electoral coattails as well, ensuring that the party retained control of both houses of Congress. With that decisive majority, the president and his party should have been able to not just repeal and replace Obamacare, but implement many  most  of the sweeping changes candidate and President Trump has promised the American people. Instead, it's been Congress as usual  with the Republican congressional leaders either actively or passive-aggressively blocking changes, even those promised to and expected by their constituents.

It is not too late for congressional Republican leaders to come to their political senses and start supporting their Republican in the White House. However, this will require a major change of heart by those leaders. Absent such a dramatic turnabout, look to President Trump to start governing by executive order  just as his predecessor did, for many of the same reasons  and to see him start cherry-picking 2018 candidates for Congress, regardless of party. This, in turn, will inevitably lead to a fracturing of the Republican Party  at least on the national level  a process that, by their opposition, Republican congressional leaders have already begun.

Ned Barnett is both a historian  he's appeared nine times as a guest historian on the History Channel  and a political strategist. He's headed state-level media and strategy in three presidential campaigns and has worked in similar roles for governors, congressmen, and senators. Barnett has also advocated for conservative approaches to solving health care and environmental issues, including testifying twice before Congress on national health care reform. Barnett regularly ghost-writes or co-writes books, blogs, and articles for business and political clients, as well as advising them on strategies to leverage their writing with the news media and targeted audiences. In addition to currently ghost-writing three clients' books, Barnett is currently writing three books on a. How to win political campaigns, b. How to successfully market and promote books, and c. How individuals and businesses can survive Katrina-level natural disasters. Based in Las Vegas, Barnett can be found at www.barnettmarcom.com.
Palestinian Authority leader Rami Hamdallah has just warned of "grave consequences" and called on Muslims to "shoulder their responsibilities and put a stop to Israeli violations against Al-Aqsa Mosque and to provide international protection for our people and holy places." The Fatah Party of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has called for a "Day of Rage." Other Palestinian Authority spokesmen condemned the Israeli "fierce and organized attack against Jerusalem Arabs." There have been nightly violent protest riots, in which large groups of Palestinians have assaulted Israeli police with rocks and bottles.

Reading the above, one would surmise that the Israelis must have done something horrific.

The Israelis' crime? Installing metal detectors on the Temple Mount, and closing the Mount for two days due to extreme security concerns, immediately after Muslims shot two Israeli policemen dead there last Friday in a terror attack. There was also the discovery of numerous weapons being stored by Muslims on the Temple Mount.

Yes, the Israeli "crime" was that the nation dared to install metal detectors at the scene of a double-murder of its policemen and take basic security precautions. The Muslim terrorists are not the villains; that would be the Israeli police, who keep the Mount safe and allow innumerable Muslims to safely ascend there for prayer every day.

And there is more: Grand Mufti Mohammed Hussein, the Temple Mount's chief Muslim cleric, has just warned Muslim worshipers that they should violate security protocol and refuse to enter through the metal detectors, as "Allah will not accept offered prayers through a Zionist metal detector" (!). Never mind that Saudi king Salman, who is the official custodian of the Temple Mount's mosques, expressed a full understanding of the Israeli security upgrade. Never mind that the Saudis themselves have mandated the use of GPS bracelets at the annual Hajj pilgrimage to prevent violence and injury amid the millions of Muslims who travel to their prayer site in packed crowds for the Hajj's rock-throwing ritual. Never mind that the violence and terror at the Temple Mount are solely the work of Muslims, and that the Israelis have acted with civility to assure security. Palestinian leadership, whose tools are deception, intimidation and violence, know better.

The West Bank security wall has greatly curbed Palestinian terror. Hopefully, the Temple Mount metal detectors will do the same. But the ingrates who ascend the Temple Mount to ask Allah to curse the Israelis, and who celebrate terror against Israelis, have it too good. Most countries would severely crack down on them, shut the Mount's mosques for an extended period, and take really forceful action.

The Israelis act with restraint but with a strong dose of reality. And Palestinian leadership responds with lies, delusion and violence.

God have mercy.

Avrohom Gordimer is a senior rabbinic fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, a public policy institute reflecting traditional Jewish thought. He serves on the editorial board of Jewish Action magazine; is a staff writer for the Cross-Currents website; and is a frequent contributor to Israel National News, Yated Ne'eman, and a host of other publications. He is a member of the Rabbinical Council of America and the New York Bar, and he works as an account executive at a large Jewish organization based in Manhattan. The views expressed in the above article are solely those of the writer.
It may go down as the biggest vote of "no confidence" ever seen. This is a report from the New York Times:

Millions of Venezuelans signaled their disapproval of President Nicolas Maduro's plan to hold a constituent assembly by casting ballots on Sunday in a vote unlike any other in this nation's history. More than 98 percent of voters sided with the opposition in answering three yes-or-no questions drafted with the aim of weakening Mr. Maduro's legitimacy days before his constituent assembly is expected to convene. Opponents see the assembly as a power grab by an increasingly unpopular leader and fear he may use it to do away with democratic elections. Sunday's exercise, known as a popular consultation, was organized by a slate of opposition parties that dominate Venezuela's National Assembly. Organizers had hoped that a large turnout and a lopsided result would widen rifts within the governing party and deepen the government's international isolation, undermining Mr. Maduro's plan to appoint an assembly of handpicked supporters to draft a new Constitution.

We have not seen such a one-sided vote since Saddam Hussein carried 100% of precincts in Iraq! Seriously, it was huge and fantastic.

My friend Daniel Duquenal posted that it was a victory for the opposition. He points out that the Maduro regime tried to disrupt the vote but failed. They even tried to use government resources to keep the people down but couldn't.

I would go farther. It is a huge victory for the people of Venezuela, who have been marching and demanding change.

I am happy that the U.S. may impose new sanctions. President Trump has a huge opportunity to stand with a frustrated middle class that sees its country stolen by socialist demagogues. Go for it, President Trump. Don't worry about hearing from the Maduro apologists that the "yanquis" are engaging in gunboat diplomacy again.

It is also up to the other Latin American leaders to stand with the people of Venezuela. We hear that Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos is meeting with Raul Castro to find some regional solution. Involving Cuba for a solution to Venezuela? Are you kidding me, President Santos? Cuba is a big part of the problem.

Latin American leaders have historically avoided sticking their noses in their neighbors' business. I think the people of Venezuela just gave them 7 million reasons to stick their noses in and do a lot more.

President Trump should lead a "coalition of the willing" calling on President Maduro to resign or face more sanctions. Where are the U.N. Security Council and the OAS when we really need them?

P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk), (YouTube) and follow me on Twitter.
The Israeli government has again rejected the notion of adoption by same-sex couples, affirming that adoption should be by a man and a woman and that adoption by same-sex couples places "additional baggage" on the adopted child.

This position is important, as it stands apart from what has become the norm in most Western and industrialized countries of permitting adoption by same-sex couples.

In the United States, before 1973, states commonly barred same-sex adoption. With the rise to prominence of gay rights groups and the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality from the list of mental disorders (please also see here), states have decided or have been compelled to permit same-sex adoption.

Proponents of same-sex adoption argue that the practice poses no risk to children. Well, aside for the example of gross immorality set by parents who live as a "gay couple," the facts say otherwise. Some headlines of note:

There is, unfortunately, plenty, plenty more...

A comprehensive and controlled study documented that children of same-sex couples fare far worse across the spectrum than do children of heterosexual couples. Among the data reported is that such children:

Are much more likely to have received welfare (IBF 17%; LM 69%; GF 57%)

Have lower educational attainment

Report less safety and security in their family of origin

Report more ongoing "negative impact" from their family of origin

Are more likely to suffer from depression

Have been arrested more often

If they are female, have had more sexual partners  both male and female

And regarding children of lesbian mothers, the data states that these children:

Are more likely to be currently cohabiting

Are almost four times more likely to be currently on public assistance

Are less likely to be currently employed full-time

Are more than three times more likely to be unemployed

Are nearly four times more likely to identify as something other than entirely heterosexual

Are three times as likely to have had an affair while married or cohabiting

Are an astonishing 10 times more likely to have been "touched sexually by a parent or other adult caregiver"

Are nearly four times as likely to have been "physically forced" to have sex against their will

Are more likely to have "attachment" problems related to the ability to depend on others

Use marijuana more frequently

Smoke more frequently

Watch TV for long periods more frequently

Have more often pled guilty to a non-minor offense

God established the universe with order  a physical order and a moral order. Attempting to tamper with either order yields disaster; the above study and news reports evidence this quite clearly. What more need be said?

I think the Israeli government knows this; if only other nations would follow suit.

Avrohom Gordimer is a senior rabbinic fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, a public policy institute reflecting traditional Jewish thought. He serves on the editorial board of Jewish Action magazine, is a staff writer for the Cross-Currents website, and is a frequent contributor to Israel National News, Yated Ne'eman, and a host of other publications. He is a member of the Rabbinical Council of America and the New York Bar, and he works as an account executive at a large Jewish organization based in Manhattan. The views expressed in the above article are solely those of the writer.
Like almost every article written and every news report, not once does this article show actual spending for this year and actual proposed spending for next year. The amount is almost always higher for entitlement programs.

Instead, journalists take previous fictional ten-year projections and compare that number to new pretend ten-year projections, and then they dutifully repeat the Democrat talking points of disastrous cuts. Then the media search for victims, and it is easy to find victims, because politicians from both parties have done such a good job making people dependent on government.

It is no wonder we are so broke throughout the country, because whenever anyone attempts to do even minor controls on spending, the media cry wolf.

If the media printed the actual numbers, the majority of the public would know the truth and would know that the spending proposals are neither mean nor disastrous.

Look at what happens when able-bodied citizens are required to work. A significant number of people were obviously abusing the system.

A few excerpts from Fox News:
History shows that leadership is critical to formulate and implement strategy.

"A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way," according to John C. Marewell.

Over the past three decades, leaders, scholars, and policymakers have implemented policy and strategy on a global scale that shaped the world's future. While some of the policies brought about positive impact, others had horrible consequences, such as the expansion of terrorism, destruction, and war.

Among the policies that harmed the world was Obama's disastrous Middle East policy, especially regarding Iran and Syria. Obama's patience, inaction, and indifference toward Iran and Syria gave Iran a free hand to act aggressively toward its neighbors, while Iran's sponsorship of terrorism enabled Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to starve and bludgeon his country's population into surrender using chemical weapons. Iran supported Assad through its Revolutionary Guards, who recruited and trained Hezb'allah and militias in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Iran and Assad took advantage of the Obama administration's passivity in the Middle East.

In January 2017, as Obama left office, the world was a lot less stable than that of his predecessor.

Leaders have different notions about how to face the crucial tasks, often forcing them to make tough decisions. As declared aptly by American director and comedian Woody Allen, "one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

In the wake of the second anniversary of Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), otherwise known as the Iran deal, there is a growing rift between the United States and Europe over how to engage with Iran via the JCPOA.

For Europe, the nuclear deal facilitates and opens a vast consumer and energy market to companies. The French energy giant Total signed a $5-billion investment gas deal with Iran this month, with its chairman and CEO, Patrick Pouyanne, stating, "We're here to build bridges, not walls" in an interview with Agence France-Presse at the signing ceremony in Tehran.

U.S. senators, meanwhile, are demanding action against Iran and calling on the secretary of state to denounce Iran for its violations of the deal as well as its belligerent activities. Several Republicans in Congress wanted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to deny certification this time around so that Congress can restore some sanctions.

Four senators  Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), David Perdue (R-Ga.), and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)  wrote to Tillerson on Tuesday.

"The law Congress passed to hold Iran accountable requires the Secretary of State and president to certify that this deal is in the vital national security interest of the United States," Mr. Cotton said on Fox News. "I simply wouldn't certify that if I was the secretary of state or president."

The defeat of Obama's doctrine, which was most obvious in its policy of appeasement toward the fundamentalist regime of Iran, is now witnessed in the fate of JCPOA and will definitely have great consequences in the future. The events revealed that the Iranian regime, despite having access to a vast new cash stream as a result of President Obama's Iran deal, nevertheless continues to prioritize illegal military activity over serving the needs of its people. Its refusal to render aid to its stricken provinces after devastating storms shows in stark terms how the deal has been an unmitigated failure. Since the nuclear agreement was adopted last year, the latest rocket launch by Iran was the fourth of its kind, in defiance of a United Nations resolution. Iran is using the cash it has received from the Obama administration's ransom payment for just such military expansion, as well as its terrorist activities.

On Jan. 9, 2017, five Iranian vessels under the command of the IRGC approached the USS Mahan and two other U.S. ships as they were entering the Strait of Hormuz, south of Iran. A newly emerged video clip shows a top IRGC commander threatening to unleash terror in the United States. Hassan Abbasi, who is known as an IRGC strategist and theorist, threatened to lead "global guerrilla organizations" against the United States' military and vulnerable targets: "If only 11 people carried out 9/11, do you realize that the possibility exists for us to do what we want? We don't need nuclear weapons."

On May 25, 2017, less than a week after the election, IRGC Air and Space Force commander General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh said: "I announce today that in recent years we have built a third underground factory for the manufacture of missiles[.] ... We are going to develop our ballistic power."

A former United States ambassador to the United Nations had a profound thought about the Iran nuclear deal. "For the first time in at least eight years, I can say that we have a president of the United States who is completely and totally opposed to the regime in Tehran," said John Bolton at the Free Iran Rally in Paris. "[President] Trump had made clear during the election campaign and in numerous statements  and even in tweets  since that he completely opposes the nuclear deal signed by Obama," Bolton added.

"I believe President Trump understands how it would be extraordinarily dangerous for the world to have a nuclear Iran," said Mayor Rudy Giuliani at the Free Iran Rally. "You only need to read his speech in Saudi Arabia to see that he is laser-focused on the danger of Iran, not just to the freedom of the region, but the freedom of the world. He realizes how dangerous for the world it is to have an ayatollah who is a theocratic dictator and a madman. And he also realizes, as we do, that the only way we're going to have stability in the Middle East and stability in the world is exactly the theme of your conference: a free Iran, built on the principles that we all share." Then he said: "Not only do we have regime change, but we have an alternative, and that alternative is you. It's a democratic alternative. It's a force for change. It's well organized. It has popular support."

Hassan Mahmoudi is a human rights advocate, specializing in political and economic issues relating to Iran and the Middle East. @hassan_mahmou1
Venezuela's ruling Chavistas want to drop all pretense of democracy and turn their country into a full-blown Cuba-style tyranny. They're doing it with a bogus Chicago-politics-only-filthier-style fake referendum on July 30 with rigged votes, whose only certainty is its outcome. They would have us believe that people willingly vote themselves into slavery.

That's what all of Venezuela's recent gigantic protests have been about  see Javier Caceres's firsthand account from Caracas that ran at American Thinker here  and don't imagine that the Trump administration hasn't been watching closely.

A day or two ago, Trump's people delivered a chemical weapons-style strike-back on the Chavista Maduro regime pulling this stunt, by launching in with a new round of shock sanctions.

Today, they went one farther and explicitly warned the thugs of Caracas that no options are off the table now if that fake referendum goes through on July 30. The Telegraph reports:

On Tuesday a senior White House official said that "all options are on the table" if Venezuela goes ahead with the vote. "The president is very concerned about the well being of the Venezuelan people, the incredible erosion of democracy right before our eyes," the official said. "And he has instructed us to do everything we can to support democracy there."

Code: Marines.

At least that is how the Chavistas are going to take it. The Trump administration knows how their pinched little imaginations work.

They've been yelling "Marine invasion" for at least 16 years now, always crying wolf about how President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, name your president, at any minute, would be ready to send the Marines and continue the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt-style gunboat diplomacy at the drop of Uncle Sam's striped hat.

Well, now it looks as though President Trump has just told them they can worry freely about that. "No options are off the table."

And of course, they won't forget that President Trump can strike hard and unpredictably  as the Taliban learned under the MOAB and as Syria's dictator learned after his chemical weapons attack on his own people. They know.

It sounds like some hella sophisticated psychological warfare. As the late, great CIA covert actions chief Dewey Clarridge wrote in his memoirs: "We're pretty good at making people paranoid."

Sounds as though this is what is going on.

Will such a gambit work? I argue yes, because Chavistas have been beating that dead horse for decades, and the locals are sick of it. What's more, times have changed. The locals are starving due to Maduro's push toward Cuba-style socialism (funny how if you try a Cuban socialist system, you get a Cuban socialist result), and quite a few out in the hilltop slums, known as ranchos, are up in arms and angry. Others are so hungry and destitute that they are unable to protest, and others still have fled the country. Bottom line: This is not the same Venezuela it was when the late strongman Hugo Chavez used to bellow about Marine invasions.

If the Marines really did invade, the result would probably resemble Grenada in 1982, where hostage students and grateful locals ran out and kissed their feet.

But wouldn't the rest of Latin America scream and point, saying Uncle Sam is up to his bad old ways and no one is safe? I argue no on that, too. Latin American states, particularly Colombia and Brazil with their long borders to the country, are terrified of the disintegration now taking place in Venezuela. They fear floods of refugees and massive exports of crime. They would probably like nothing better than to see a Marine invasion and might even send troops of their own to help out. Even if they didn't, the reality is that they are terrified and would at a minimum probably say nothing.

Marine invasions aren't the only option on the table for that hellhole on the Caribbean. Heavier sanctions, some sort of blockade, a barrage of spies, some sort of sowing discontent with the military  all of these things are on the table too, as well as plenty of others not thought of offhand.

It's probably significant that President Trump has shipped the State Department's top professional diplomat, Tom Shannon, to go make nice with Russia's President Vladimir Putin, taking him off the Latin America desk, where he feels most at home. Shannon is a fine diplomat with exceptional talents  Hugo Chavez, for instance, used to call Shannon in the dead of night in his pajamas and splatter out everything that was on his addled socialist mind. But he's been around a long time and may be a bit passive, well aware of U.S. history on Latin America.

This is not a criticism; what he did may have been exactly right for the time. But it doesn't hurt to adjust to the times. Shannon will do a great job with Putin, while it appears that some harder men and women are taking over U.S. policy on Latin America, by all indications associates of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Florida's former Republican leader, Helen Aguirre Ferre, who is now a White House staffer. Both are Miami Cubans with a perfect understanding of what Cuban communism is and a perfect recognition of what is going to happen in Venezuela. President Trump has made many trips to Miami and has had plenty of opportunities to confer with people who know the deal.

That's why this policy is so well thought out and so likely to work, no matter what the president has in mind.

Slowly, steadily, the walls are closing in on the brutal Maduro tyranny.
On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland. Stalin helped defeat the Nazis, but it was not with the intention of freeing the Polish people. Under communist rule, 150,000 Poles were massacred and thousands tortured and imprisoned.

The long years of oppression ended when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, and the last of the USSR troops left Poland in September of 1993. However, the beginning of their liberation came with a spiritual awakening sparked by the election of John Paul II as the first Polish pope in Catholic history.

On June 2, 1979, when the world watched Pope John Paul II speak in Victory Square, Warsaw, Poland, it was a prophetic moment foreshadowing freedom for the Polish people.

While John Paul II was giving his sermon, the crowd erupted in a chant of "We want God! We want God! We want God!" Millions of Polish citizens were moved not only by his words, but also by the response of the audience. "We want God" reverberated across Poland and resonated in the hearts of its people.

On July 6, 2017, President Donald Trump spoke to the Polish people, recalling John Paul's speech. Mr. Trump said, "Every communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down. They must have known it at the exact moment during Pope John Paul II's sermon when a million Polish men, women and children suddenly raised their voices in a single prayer: 'We Want God!' ...

"We can still hear those voices that echo through history. Their message is as true today as ever. The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out, 'We want God.'"

Is that the cry of America? Do we in fact want God? Many of us do. It is indisputable that American courage and resilience have been rooted in Christian faith since the pilgrims arrived on this continent. George Washington believed that without the Providence of God, he could not have led the colonies to victory in the Revolutionary War. On March 3, 1787, Mr. Washington wrote:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morals are indispensable supports[.] ... And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion[.] ... [R]eason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle[.] ... The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.

Some Americans still agree with this sentiment. Many do not. The question we face today is whether the moral disposition expressed by President Washington and other Founders will prevail. Or will we experience the cultural degeneration of other once great nations?

The cry of "We want God" is the plea for a nation governed by self-evident truths rather than politically correct lies. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union entered a secret agreement before WWII to divide Poland between the two countries. After the war, this truth was suppressed.

There are forces at work in America that seek to deny truth and reality in order to usher in their version of a brave new world. Do we really want God? Some clearly do not.

Christians who dare voice the belief that marriage is a union between one man and one woman are being fired from their jobs and losing their businesses. The clear message is, "Espouse Christian values at your peril."

In this atmosphere, many pastors engage in self-censorship for fear of being booted off television and radio or having liberal media, politicians, and even their own church members attack them.

It is not merely the government we must guard against. This descent into the madness of totalitarianism is being led by individuals and institutions of cultural influence. They are the new "thought police."

What is needed to combat this threat to liberty is an army of courageous pastors, churches, and Christians reclaiming their role as the nation's moral thermostat, setting cultural standards rather than submitting to them.

The Polish people realized there was a deep spiritual sickness  a cancer  invading their nation. Politics can provide limited relief, but not a cure. Americans must awaken to this truth. "We want God" is the cry for a Christian Awakening to transform the American heart. Therein lies the key to our freedom, our children's future, and our destiny.

E.W. Jackson is a Republican political analyst, a nationally syndicated radio host on American Family Radio and Urban Family Talk, founder and president of S.T.A.N.D. (www.standamerica.us), and presiding bishop of The Called Church. He was the 2013 Republican nominee for lt. governor of Virginia.
(ANSA) - Milan, July 18 - A Milan prosecutor on Tuesday requested that right-to-death activist Marco Cappato be sent to trial for helping tetraplegic ex-disc jockey DJ Fabo commit assisted suicide in Switzerland earlier this year. Prosecutors had initially requested that the case against Cappato be dropped but a preliminary investigations judge rejected that petition and told them to press for an indictment.

Radical Party member Cappato reported himself on February 28 for helping 2014 car crash victim Fabo, 39, kill himself in Zurich's Dignitas clinic on February 27.

Assisted suicide and euthanasia are illegal in Italy.

Cappato, also a leading member of the Coscioni right-to-die association, said that he hopes to face a trial.

"It will be a chance to put an unjust law on trial", he said.

"I hope to be charged and to be able to defend myself at a trial," he said. "In Italy there is the crime of instigation to suicide, but in this case there was no instigation".

The case highlighted parliament's failure to legislate on end-of-life issues and give people the ability to make out living wills.


France: Senate approves anti-terror bill Draft legislation to be examined by National Assembly in October

(ANSAmed) - PARIS, JULY 19 - The French Senate has approved a new anti-terror bill presented by the government.



The bill was approved by 229 votes against 106 and will go to the National Assembly in October.



The Senate voted in favor of changes drafted by the parliamentary commission, setting the validity of measures risking to limit individual freedoms to December 31.



The draft legislation is meant to come into effect after November 1, to replace current state of emergency legislation imposed in the wake of the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris in which 130 people died.



The bill has been criticized by several organizations including Amnesty International, the Human Rights League and Magistrates' union who have said the draft legislation vies to make permanent some emergency measures that are currently in place.(ANSAmed).




Germany summons Turkish envoy over arrest amid tension Die Welt files appeal against reporter's detention

(ANSAmed) - ISTANBUL, JULY 19 - German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel has interrupted his summer holiday due to diplomatic tensions with Turkey.



The Turkish ambassador has been summoned to the foreign ministry and relations between the two countries are in a ''serious and sad'' state, Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesperson Steffen Seibert said in a Berlin press conference. Merkel and Gabriel are weighing options on how to proceed. Meanwhile, the publisher of the German daily Die Welt has announced that it is filing a claim with the Turkish Constitutional Court against the detention of its correspondent in the country, the Turkish-German reporter Deniz Yucel, who has been jailed for the past five months on charges of terrorism and spying, in connection with alleged ties to the Kurdish PKK, outlawed in Turkey and registered as a terrorist organization in the US and the EU. His case led to a harsh diplomatic clash between Ankara and Berlin, with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan explicitly calling him a ''German spy''. On Tuesday, Merkel once again spoke out against Turkey in relation to the arrest of German activist Peter Steudtner, who was jailed as part of a round-up operation that also led to the detention of Amnesty International country director Idil Eser.



(ANSAmed).




TEL AVIV - Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Sheikh Muhammad Hussein has called for all the city's mosques to remain closed on Friday and for Muslims to instead go to the Al-Aqsa complex to pray all together. This will be possible only if Israel metal detectors installed at some access points are removed, otherwise the collective prayer will be held in nearby streets. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas meanwhile opted to interrupt his official visit to China and return to Ramallah in the West Bank to follow a crisis with Israel over new security measures at the Al-Aqsa complex, known also as Temple Mount, reports WAFA. On his arrival in Ramallah, Abbas will be presiding over an emergency meeting with Palestinian Authority leaders, said spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina.
Paestum Tourism Bourse launches cooperation with Tunis Guide who saved Bardo tourists invited at next edition

(ANSAmed) - NAPLES, JULY 19 - The organizers of the Mediterranean Bourse of Archaeological Tourism in Paestum travelled to Tunisia to work with a group of experts on the development of agreements on cultural cooperation with the North African country.



The director of BMTA, Ugo Picarelli, met in Tunisia with the minister of tourism and craft, Selma Elloum Rekik, and the minister of cultural affairs, Mohamed Zine al Abidine, at the invite of Tunisian ambassador to Italy, Moez Sinaoui: at the center of talks were possible cooperation initiatives with the Bourse that every year in Paestum commemorates the deadly attack at the Bardo Museum.



The Bourse's organizers travelled to Tunisia, according to a statement, with Culture Ministry Undersecretary Dorina Bianchi.



During the meeting in Tunis, Picarelli invited the minister, Selma Elloum Rekik, to the Conference on ''Inter-cultural dialogue as a universal value of identity and cultural heritage:#notforgetting the Bardo museum'' which will be organized in cooperation with Unesco and the World Tourism Organization with the participation of the tourism and culture ministries of Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Iraq and Serbia. The Tunisian ministers, in light of a recent reform of cultural heritage, discussed future cooperation concerning twinning initiatives with Roman era-cities, the restoration of artworks, shared experiences on virtual archaeology, excavation work in new archaeological missions.



The Paestum Bourse, to stress the friendship with the Bardo, will invite Hamadi Ben Abdesslem, the tour guide who saved 45 Italians during an ISIS terror attack, escorting them to a safe exit. (ANSAmed).




The Dubai-based airline is set to take delivery of 100 Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft ordered at the 2013 Dubai International Airshow by the end of 2023. This is AARs first agreement to support the new aircraft and will utilise the companys extensive global supply chain network, including its new parts warehouse in Dubai.

AAR is honored that flydubai will be AARs launch customer for the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, said AAR Chairman and CEO David P. Storch at a signing ceremony in Dubai to mark this important event. We have been supporting flydubais current fleet since September 2016, and it is a privilege to be entrusted with this new opportunity.

As the first customer of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 in the region, we are looking forward to bringing further fuel and operating efficiency to our young modern fleet, said Flydubais CEO Ghaith Al Ghaith. AAR is a key partner with an enduring commitment to innovation and reliability, and we look forward to continuing our partnership.

Our imbedded team and proprietary systems enable the fastest possible response times and streamlined operational efficiencies, said John Holmes, President and Chief Operating Officer, AAR. This is another big win for our Integrated Supply Chain Solutions team who have a done a great job of expanding AARs flight-hour support services around the world.




Bahrains Minister of Transportation and Telecommunications, Engineer Kamal bin Ahmed Mohammed, attended the Russian aviation showcase to meet with a variety of Russian organisations including Rostec, Russian Helicopters, Rosoboronexport, National Space Agency and Roscosmos to discuss their participation in the forthcoming show which takes place from 14th-16th November 2018.



The Bahraini Government is committed to building stronger ties with Russia and working together so that both our countries benefit from the fast growth in Russia and the GCC. Russian businesses have participated at BIAS since the inaugural event and we are delighted to see their continued support. Yousif Mahmoud, Head of the Bahrain International Airshow, who was also attending MAKS added, The Bahrain International Airshow provides the perfect venue to explore business opportunities in Bahrain and the Middle East. Our exceptional civil and military delegation programme means that the event is becoming more and more attractive to companies looking to showcase their aircraft or other technological advances in aviation.



 The Bahrain International Airshow will take place from 14th-16th November 2018 and is the fastest growing airshow in the Middle East. While the show has grown, it still retains the unique qualities of its first show in offering an exclusive business environment for high-level business meetings. Its civil and military delegations programme is unparalleled and the exhibition feature hall has allowed even more international businesses to participate in the show. Furthermore, its unique location at the Sakhir Airbase means it can display just about any type of aircraft. With the show still more than a year away, chalet and exhibition space is already 75% sold or reserved.


This cooperation results in a shared vision of the current situation by the two companies.



For SCAC, the purpose is the continuous improvement of SSJ100 aftersales programme including analysis of the supply chain, stock sizing optimisation and stock configuration in order to bring cost effective solutions to SCACs customers and to mitigate the risks related to delivery and repair of spare parts. For OEMServices, it is a new milestone in its strategic development for SSJ100 programme, supported by its OEM partners and thanks to its core competency in aftermarket services.



Didier Granger, President-CEO of OEMServices said: This agreement is a key step forward to become one of the major players in the SSJ100 component support. This platform is a major aircraft for us and we expect the relationship with SCAC to be a long term cooperation that will provide a world class service towards airline across the globe.



The President of SCAC Vladislav Masalov noted: As aircraft manufacturer, we always want to improve our airlines customers experience. We entrust OEMServices to develop state of the art aftermarket services towards airlines. This cooperation represents also an opportunity to share good practices between our organisations, for the benefit of our customers as a result.
Commencing August 2, the award-winning airline will introduce an extra daily flight on the Doha-Moscow route to meet growing demand to Moscow, a destination popular with both business and leisure travellers. The additional frequency will be served by an Airbus A320 aircraft.

Moscow is renowned for its stunning architecture and iconic historical landmarks such as the Kremlin and Red Square, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Russian capital is a cultural treasure trove, famous for its symphonies, classical music, theatre and ballet, offering visitors a vast array of enriching activities to choose from.

Qatar Airways Group chief executive, Akbar Al Baker said: In celebration of going to Moscow together for 14 years, and as part of Qatar Airways ongoing efforts to expand our presence in Eastern Europe, we are very pleased to offer an additional frequency to this iconic city. Passengers from the Russian capital will have even more flexibility in travelling seamlessly through our Doha Hub, Hamad International Airport, to any of our destinations across our growing network, while travellers from all over the world will now have the opportunity to taste the delights of the Russian capital, as well as experience our renowned world-class service.

The airline, which in August will celebrate 14 years of direct service to Moscow, first began flying to the Russian capital in 2003.
Mr Lohani also reportedly wrote that an ownership change will usher in a corporate culture where merit would be better rewarded.

Air India and its subsidiaries have nearly 20000 employees. Among them Air India has only 11,500 employees. Air India management has not offered their employees for voluntary buyouts, an Air India spokesperson said..

New Delhi: Air India CMD Ashwani Lohani on Tuesday reportedly assured employees that their interests would be safeguarded amid concerns among some employees over possible layoff following the governments recent decision on disinvestment in the national carrier. The airline also officially dismissed as baseless an international news agency report that Air India was drawing up a proposal to offer voluntary buyouts (voluntary retirement scheme) to just over a third of its 40,000 employees.

Air India and its subsidiaries have nearly 20000 employees. Among them Air India has only 11,500 employees. Air India management has not offered their employees for voluntary buyouts, an Air India spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, Air India CMD Ashwani Lohani was quoted by news agency PTI as saying, I would like to reassure all my employees that during the process of disinvestment, the government and the airline management would like to safeguard your genuine and valid interests and ensure that suitable measures to this effect are put in place.

Mr Lohani also reportedly wrote that an ownership change will usher in a corporate culture where merit would be better rewarded.

Mr Lohani was further quoted as writing, It is the firm conviction of the government that the process of disinvestment is only meant to make Air India a much stronger world class airline capable of competing with others successfully, adding, This decision is primarily an offshoot of the inability of the airline to service the huge accumulated debt of over Rs 50,000 crore.

Meanhwile, a section of Air India employees today staged protest against the government's decision to privatise the national carrier, saying they were always ready for turnaround of the airline.

Around 300 employees, associated with the Air Corporation's Employees Union (ACEU), gathered outside the Air India office near the Indira Gandhi International airport here.

They chanted slogans opposing the decision taken by the Union Cabinet last month approving disinvestment of Air India. The ACEU is the biggest union of Air India employees and represents nearly 8,000 of the total 24,000 staff members. It is a grouping of non-technical staff of the airline. We appeal to the government of India not to go for privatisation and disinvestment of Air India. We are always ready to turnaround Air India, the ACEU said in its statement. The union also plans to hold similar protests in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Chennai later this month, according to a union member.
In fact, during 2003-04, the entire textiles sector was subjected to central excise duty, says Arun Jaitley .

New Delhi: Finance minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday ruled out meeting the main demand of the textile traders not to put any tax on fabrics under GST.

Textile traders have been protesting against GST in many parts of the country. GST council has imposed 5 per cent tax on fabrics.

Nil GST on fabrics will break the input tax credit chain and then the garments/made ups manufacturers will not be able to get the credit of tax on previous stages, said finance minister in a written reply to the Parliament.

Mr Jaitley said that zero GST on fabrics will result in zero rating of imported fabrics, while domestic fabrics will continue to bear the burden of input taxes.

It is not correct to say that textiles sector was never taxed in independent India. In fact, during 2003-04, the entire textiles sector was subjected to central excise duty, said the finance minister.

Generally, the GST rates are equal or lower than the pre-GST tax incidence. And therefore, the price of fabrics is not likely to go up, he said. Under the GST regime yarn and fibres made from silk, wool, cotton or other vegetable fibres attract 5 per cent tax.

While garments and made up clothings costing less than `1,000 attract either 5 per cent and those exceeding Rs 1,000 attract 12 per cent levy. Yarns made of man-made fibre or filament attract 18 per cent GST, while the same is 5 per cent for fabrics.

Finance minister said the GST rate structure for the textiles sector enables ease of classification and determination of rate.
RCEP aims at liberalising norms for trade in goods and services and boost investment among 16-member countries.

Mumbai: Amidst escalating border tensions between India and China, 16 nations are working on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in Hyderabad that will seek solutions to critical trade issues.

This mega Asia pact includes big economies like China and Japan but does not involve the US, said a Bloomberg report. RCEP aims at liberalising norms for trade in goods and services and boost investment among 16-member countries.

China, which is currently facing a standoff with India over the Dokalam issue, has been pushing the member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), along with India, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan to hurry the process. Qian Keming, China's vice minister of commerce, said at a briefing in Beijing last week that China, in cooperation with Southeast Asian Nations would like to wrap up the talks by the end 2017. However, India seems to have slowed the pace ever since it refused to budge from its demand for greater market access.

India putting its foot down on this issue indicates that it will not make any hasty conclusions and will rally its efforts for greater mobility for its highly-skilled professionals. According to the Bloomberg report, other Asean counties may be viewing Indias demand as a threat to their economies.

India is expected to engage with other nations, including China to insist on concessions regarding the service sector, sources familiar with the matter said. While it is willing to offer broader tariff cuts on goods to the RCEP member countries, it expects similar concessions on services.

The service sector accounts for over 50 per cent of Indias GDP. This trade pact must therefore uphold the welfare of this sector.

"We have certain reservations in terms of how it needs to be taken forward, like seeing more progress on the services track," said Ashok Kantha, the Indian ambassador to China until 2016 and now director of the New Delhi-based Institute of Chinese Studies. He added that Indias USD 51 billion trade deficit with China is a strong concern as it seeks a more balanced opening that will cover goods and services.

"The challenge for RCEP is that China would want a quick end to the deal so that it can establish itself as a leader of world trade," said Amitendu Palit, a senior research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. "Japan, New Zealand won't be in favor of concluding early as they would want a high quality agreement. However RCEP is a low-quality agreement as it is not going beyond tariff cuts and investment," he added.

Experts familiar with this trade deal suggest that other countries will have to play a neutral, balanced role in this atmosphere of tension between India and China. While India must be firm on its demand, it should not risk polarization with other Asean countries, they said.
The Australian foreign minister also met her Indian counterpart, Sushma Swaraj, for the Indo-Australian Framework Dialogue of Foreign Ministers.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Minister for Foreign Affairs, Australia, Julie Bishop in New Delhi. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi here on Tuesday met visiting Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop and welcomed Australias joining of the International Solar Alliance.

Australias membership will provide a boost to the alliance, he said.

The Australian foreign minister also met her Indian counterpart, Sushma Swaraj, for the Indo-Australian Framework Dialogue of Foreign Ministers.

Australia has condemned the recent terror attack on Amarnath yatra pilgrims in the Kashmir Valley and expressed the common resolve of both the countries in the fight against terror.

The Australian foreign ministers visit is taking place in the backdrop of the Sino-Indian border face-off in Doklam, and increasing Indo-Australian naval cooperation. Indias concerns over Australias recent decision to abolish the 457 visa programme  under which a large number of Indians work in that country  may have also come up during Ms Bishops current visit.

Ministry of external affairs (MEA) spokesperson Gopal Baglay tweeted, Foreign Minister @JulieBishopMP signs Framework Agreement to join #International SolarAlliance.

The MEA said, The PM and Ms Bishop discussed regional and global issues of mutual interest. Prime Minister Modi welcomed Australias joining of the International Solar Alliance, and said that Australias membership will provide a great boost to the Alliance.

In a statement in Canberra ahead of her visit to New Delhi, Ms Bishop had said ways to boost defence, security and trade ties would be explored during her visit to India.
After the crucial 40-minute meeting, RJD chief Lalu Yadav summoned top RJD leaders; sources say efforts on find out a middle path to save alliance.

Patna: Amid mounting pressure to sack deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar on Tuesday held a closed-door meeting with him.

The agenda is not known as the meeting between the chief minister and Tejashwi Yadav was official, RJD leader and finance minister Abdul Bari Siddiqui said.

After the crucial 40-minute meeting between Mr Tejashwi Yadav and Mr Kumar, RJD chief Lalu Yadav summoned top RJD leaders to discuss the issue.

Sources said efforts are being made to find a middle path to end the ongoing political tussle and save the grand secular alliance government in Bihar.

RJD sources said Mr Tejashwi Yadav during one-on-one meeting with Mr Kumar said his family has decided to fight a legal battle instead of giving a detailed public clarification on the corruption charges against him.

Seeking resignation on the basis of an FIR is not right as the family has decided to fight a legal battle, an RJD insider told this newspaper after the meeting on Tuesday.

This was the first meeting between the two leaders after the charges of corruption were brought against Deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav. The meeting has now set off speculations on the future of grand secular alliance in Bihar.

Observers said Mr Lalu Yadav had earlier floated an idea to resolve the issue by asking RJD ministers, including his two sons, to resign and provide an external support to the JD (U), but the offer was rejected by Mr Kumar.

Sources said the compromise formula being worked out between two parties will save Mr Tejashwi Yadav for the time being  at least, till the CBI files a chargesheet against him.

Mr Kumar has been hinting his party would prefer Mr Tejashwi Yadavs resignation. Sources said Congress is trying to mediate between the two leaders to save the alliance.
After two adjournments, when the House re-assembled, Agrawal said he did not intend to hurt sentiments of anyone.

SP leader Naresh Agrawal made the comment while participating in a short duration debate on 'rising incidents of lynching and atrocities on minorities and dalits across the country'. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: A controversial remark by a Samajwadi Party (SP) leader against Hindu gods on Wednesday triggered uproar in the Rajya Sabha, forcing its two adjournments before he expressed regret.

SP leader Naresh Agrawal made the comment while participating in a short duration debate on 'rising incidents of lynching and atrocities on minorities and dalits across the

country'.

The comment triggered an uproar as the ruling party members said he had hurt religious feelings of the majority of people and this also was "lynching". They insisted that he should apologise.

"He has linked each of the Hindu Gods with a brand of alcohol. If he would have made this statement outside Parliament, he would've been booked. Do you have the audacity of repeating this in relation to any other religious denomination? Would you do this?" said Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, demanding an apology.

After two adjournments, when the House re-assembled, Agrawal said he did not intend to hurt sentiments of anyone.

"If someone has been been hurt, I express my regret," the SP member said.

Later, Deputy Chairman P J Kurien ruled that part of Agrawal's remarks had been expunged and asked the media to guard against using these.

Earlier, while taking strong objection to the usage of words by Agrawal, Leader of the House and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said: "He (Agrawal) has linked up each of the

Hindu Gods with brands of alcohol. If he had said this outside, he would have been liable to prosecution.You have not realised the gravity of what you have said. Do you have the audacity to say about other gods?"

Seeking apology, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said, "He cannot hurt the sentiments of the majority people who are Hindus. He cannot hold the House to ransom."

BJP member Bhupender Yadav said, "In this House, no member should hurt the feelings of others. This is also lynching."

The ruling party members were on their feet demanding apology and shouted slogans 'Bhagwan ka apman nahi chalega (disrespect to Gods will not be tolerated).

Kurien, who missed the remark as he was busy speaking to a member, said he will check the records and expunge the comment.

"I have called for records. I will check and expunge the comment if any derogatory remarks are made," he said.

Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi requested the Chair to adjourn the House till the records were checked. The House was then adjourned for 10

minutes.

As soon as the House re-assembled at 1521 hours, both the Treasury and the Opposition members were on their feet and trading barbs. Trying to bring the House to order, the Deputy Chairman said, "I have gone through the records. It is per se derogatory and hurting the sentiments of majority community...I have expunged these remarks...He should not have made the remarks..."

However, the uproar continued with Agrawal reiterating that cowsheds are run by Agrawal community and "if my statement has hurt members, I withdraw it."

But the BJP members continued to demand apology from him. The Deputy Chairman intervened, saying he had already "disapproved" of and "condemned" the remark and urged the members to not to fight on the issue.

The remarks were "hurting" members sentiments and "it is not on record", Kurien said.

He urged Agrawal to express regret and react to the situation to bring the House to order.

Agrawal said, "Lynching is a major issue..." To this, Kurien insisted that he should express regret.

CPI-M leader Sitaram Yechury tried to intervene, saying the matter should be allowed to rest.

"Naresh Agrawal has said something offensive. you (Chair) have gone on record condemning that. It is my appeal that let the House function," Yechury said.

However, the ruling party members were adamant on Agrawal tendering apology. Ananth Kumar said, "He has not insulted a single person. He has insulted a community."

Amid slogans like "Bhagwan ka apman nahi chalega (insult to the God will not be allowed)", "Sri Ram ka apman nahi chalega (insult to the God will not be allowed)" and "Apne devo ka apman nahi sahega Hindustan (India will not tolerate insult to its deities)."

Ram Gopal Yadav, another party leader of the SP, said Agrawal will not tender apology even if the entire session has to function like this. Naresh Gujral (SAD) suggested sending the issue to the Privileges Committee of the Rajya Sabha for a decision on it.

Anand Sharma (Cong) said the Gods belong to all and not only to the ruling party members. He said the ruling party should not become the "custodians of God".

He said last year, during the JNU agitation, a Cabient Minister had made certain "derogatory" remarks against Goddess Durga and refused to apologise.

He said the issue pertained to faith of all and urged for a solution to it. However, the ruling party members continued to raise slogans and the Chair adjourned the House till 4 pm.

When house re-convened, Ananth Kumar again condemned Agrawal's remarks and said he should apologise.

He said the government wants the House to function and the SP member should not make it a prestige issue.

Ram Gopal Yadav then referred to Anand Sharma's comment about a Cabinet minister making "derogatory" remarks against Goddess Durga last year.

Yadav said if the Cabinet minister has apologised, then Agrawal will also apologise. "There cannot be double standards," he added.

Agrawal then expressed regret and said in his entire political career, he has never hurt sentiments of any caste and religion.

The SP leader said he has never made any personal allegations as well. Earlier, IT and Law Minister Ravi Shanker Prasad said that Agrawal's commenets were not correct and the SP leader should regret.

After Kurien's ruling about expunging the remarks, Congress leader Anand Sharma said it should be ensured that these comments do not surface on the social media and passions are not inflamed.

Prasad said he would convey this to the authorities concerned. At the same time, he said the character of social media has changed and "we will have to collectively ensure that this does not spread" on the social media.
The governor has asked Zeliang, who claimed to have the support of 47 legislators, to prove his majority by July 22.

Guwahati/Nagaland: In a dramatic turn of the event, Nagaland Governor P B Acharya on Wednesday administered the oath to T R Zeliang as the new chief minister of the state.

Zeliang was administered oath soon after former chief minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu failed to turn up in the state assembly to prove his majority, forcing the governor to sack him for violation of his directive.

The governor has asked Zeliang, who claimed to have the support of 47 legislators, to prove his majority by July 22.

Though, the governor has given time till Saturday, sources in the rebel camp said that Zeliang would be proving his majority on the floor of the house by Friday.

Earlier, Nagaland Governor P B Acharya dismissed the government headed by chief minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu and invited former chief minister T R Zeliang to form new government in the state.

The governor in his order said, "According to report received from Nagaland Legislative Assembly chief minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu did not attend the emergent assembly session convened on July 19 at 9.30 am for the purpose of testing majority of the cabinet led by him. 48 MLAs including speaker attended the session. Therefore it is obvious that Shurhozelie Liezietsu has failed to obtain vote of confidence despite the repeated opportunity given to him."

The Governor in his order further said, "By virtue of powers vested in me by Clause (1) of Article 164 of the Constitution of India, I, Mr P B Acharya, Governor of Nagaland hereby withdraw my pleasure from chief minister of Nagaland and the council of ministers headed by Mr Shurhozelie Liezietsu is hereby dismissed with immediate effect."

The governor had directed the Speaker Imtiwapang Aieyer to summon an emergent special session of the assembly at 9.30 am for the chief minister, who is facing a rebellion from MLAs of his party Nagaland Peoples Front (NPF), to seek confidence vote.

Former chief minister T R Zeliang, leader of the rebel NPF MLAs, was present in the House along with his followers.

The motion to prove the majority of the chief minister could not be taken up as he was not present and the House was adjourned sine die, the Speaker Imtiwapang informed the Governor.

Chronology leading to political crisis in Nagaland:
Memes comparing President Xi Jinping to the bear circulated online.

New York: The world-beloved honey-loving teddy bear has been nearly banished from China's cyberspace, and the reason for doing so is equally bizarre.

The online ban on Winnie the Pooh came to light after the Financial Times covered the topic in a front page story Monday, reports CNN.

The newspaper printed a picture showing the bear strolling with his tiger friend Tigger next to a photo of Chinese President Xi Jinping walking with his then-US counterpart Barack Obama in 2013.

After the image appeared online, Chinese netizens began posting photos of Jinping in similar poses by putting pictures side by side.

Out of the many creative pictures, one depicted a frosty handshake between Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe along with Pooh and his donkey friend Eeyore.

The pictures were clearly meant to be taken lightly, but the mirth was lost on the government.

Some internet users have pointed out a recent photo as a possible trigger for the latest restrictions. In the picture, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo and his wife each held a Pooh mug.
I am cautioning you. Give good advice, the judge said to the lawyer representing Kejriwal.

New Delhi: The Delhi high court on Tuesday said that chief minister Arvind Kejriwal was not being reasonable in the civil defamation case against him by Union minister Arun Jaitley, and cautioned his lawyers over their conduct.

You (Kejriwal) are not being reasonable. Your conduct is not reasonable. It cannot be like this. We cannot have proceedings go on in this manner. Otherwise tomorrow we will have fist-fight in court. The whole system is on the brink of collapse, justice Manmohan said.

I am cautioning you. Give good advice, the judge said to the lawyer representing Kejriwal.

The oral observations by the court came on an application moved by Jaitley to expedite the recording of evidence in an orderly and fair manner in a `10 crore defamation suit filed by him against Kejriwal and five other Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaders namely Raghav Chadha, Kumar Vishwas, Ashutosh, Sanjay Singh and Deepak Bajpai for allegations of corruption made by them against the BJP leader.

When the application came up for hearing, senior advocate Rajiv Nayar, appearing for Jaitley, said the union minister has been compelled to move the plea as every hearing before the joint registrar cannot prompt a fresh defamation case.

Advocate Ramesh Singh, appearing for Kejriwal, sought time to file his reply to the application and, thereafter, the court listed the matter for further hearing on July 24.

The application, filed through advocate Manik Dogra, was moved subsequent to the use of an objectionable word against Jaitley by the Delhi chief ministers lawyer Ram Jethmalani, during the union ministers cross examination in the suit.
Police is yet to make any arrest Medical test confirms rape.

The police is yet to identify the accused and is scanning the CCTV footage from the nearby vicinity of Chhatrasal Stadium where the crime reportedly took place.

New Delhi: A 16-year-old national-level Kabaddi player was allegedly raped by a man in his thirties who identified himself as a Chhatrasal Stadium official. The minor filed a complaint with the Model Town police station on Monday.

The police is yet to identify the accused and is scanning the CCTV footage from the nearby vicinity where the crime reportedly took place.

We are going through attendance records of all employees of the stadium who were on duty on the day of incident. We have got some leads in the case, said a senior police official.

The teenager told the police in her statement that on July 9 when she was outside the stadium premises, a man approached her introducing himself as a stadium official. He later asked her to sit in his car under the pretext of showing around the complex and served her drinks laced with sedatives.

The victim, however, could not recollect the events after that and has not been able to identify the accused. The man later took her to a flat where, the minor girl alleged, she was raped by the unidentified man repeatedly. We are trying to establish the exact sequence of events, said a senior police official.

Since the girl has claimed that she was unconscious and was unable to give more details about the accused who is said to be in his 30s. The police took the girl to a hospital for medical examination, which confirmed rape. The police is yet to make any arrests.

The woman approached police on Monday morning and said that she was in trauma because of which she could not approach police before. She alleged the man dropped her at a road outside the stadium and threatened to kill her if she reported the matter.

Deputy commissioner of police (northwest) Milind Mahadeo Dumbere said that a case of rape, along with several Sections of the POCSO Act, has been registered at Model Town police station after receiving the complaint.
Union leaders have said they will sit with the joint action committee and come to a decision by Monday on when to go on strike.

Mumbai: The Brihanmumbai Elec-tric Supply & Transport (BEST) recognised union in a secret ballot has voted that around 40,000 conductors, drivers and fitters, also known as foremen, should go on a strike. The strike will be mainly over unpaid salaries.

The BEST Workers' Union (BWU) on Wednes-day held a ballot in which 18,537 workers voted for the strike while 496 voted against it. A total of 19,094 employees participated in the strike ballot.

Union leaders have said they will sit with the joint action committee and come to a decision by Monday on when to go on strike.

The joint action committee is known as Sanyukta Kamgar Kriti Samiti (BSKKS) and has been formed by all major labour unions including BEST Workers Union.

BEST Workers Union leader Shashank Rao said the vote was carried out because many accuse leaders of pushing for a strike and that the conductors and drivers are actually against it.

He said, A common public opinion is that the conductors and drivers don't want to for the strike and that we coerce them into it. That is why we decided to take a secret ballot by which every worker is independent of any pressure.

He added, The vote as you have heard has been 97 per cent in the favour of the strike, so it's the driver and conductor taking the decision about the strike.

The workers whose salaries have been delayed for the past five to six months received their salary for the month of June on Tuesday. Despite this, there is a feeling among workers of being cheated and they are anxious over delay in paying their housing loan instalments.

It costs the BEST Rs 150 crore per month to pay the salaries of the drivers and conductors.
The imported mix costed the civic body Rs 70 lakh as two such packets costing Rs 35 lakh each were imported between June and July.

Mumbai: The civic body has received a total of 343 WhatsApp complaints from the city in the month of June itself. As of June, K (west) ward (Andheri West) alone recorded 122 complaints pertaining to potholes, followed by P/North ward (Malad) with 27 complaints.

This year, BMC had introduced the concept of milling and carpeting wherein the whole road isnt dug up; rather the top layers are scraped and resurfaced. However, the new technique seemed to have failed, taking into consideration the number of complaints. In a bid to tackle potholes, BMC had bought imported mix from Austria and Israel.

The imported mix costed the civic body Rs 70 lakh as two such packets costing Rs 35 lakh each were imported between June and July. This mix was circulated to all the 24 administrative wards to address pothole complaints. The BMC has trained the ward officials to use the imported mix efficiently. We are in a process to make our own mix in our plant at Worli. The BMC team and professors from IIT are currently working for this and this mix can be used by next year, said a senior civic official on the request of anonymity.

Once the residents record their complaint, the ward officer would be responsible to attend the complaint by sending the team to the spot. The wards are expected to use the imported mix to fill potholes.
The investigators said that it will help in getting the money trail and ascertaining if the loan money was laundered in these countries.

Mumbai: A team of Enforcement Directorate (ED) officials has landed in the United Kingdom (UK) to submit the charge sheet and other documents against fugitive liquor baron Vijay Mallya to build a watertight case against him.

The ED officials UK visit comes a month after they filed a charge sheet before the special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court in Mumbai in June this year.

While in the UK, the officials will brief Crown Prosecution Services (CPS) officials about specific details of the charge sheet, which will be put up before the UK court in December when the latter will hear Indias extradition plea on Mallya.

The ED is also in the process of sending letters rogatory (LR) to at least six countries, including Ireland and Mauritius, for gathering details about Mallyas monetary transactions in these countries for the time period when his company sought loans from the bank consortium.

The investigators said that it will help in getting the money trail and ascertaining if the loan money was laundered in these countries.

An ED officer said, A team headed by joint director of ED has gone to the UK. The laws in both countries are different and hence authorities there have to be briefed in detail about the investigation .

They will also be infor-med about furtherance of the investigation and LRs that ED is planning to send to six countries with which Mallya had business ties or where he is alleged to have diverted the funds, officials said.

In June, the ED filed a charge sheet in the money-laundering case related to default of the Rs 900 crore loan taken from IDBI Bank under the pretext of utilising funds towards Mallyas now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines. The ED also submitted a detailed dossier to CPS on the web of shell companies that Mallya used to remit over Rs 3,500 crore outside India.
GST became a reality as a process of cooperative federalism was followed led by the finance minister.

Citizens expect governments to intervene when the markets fail. If the Chinese Army is to be stopped on the Doklam plateau well north of the tri-junction between India, Bhutan and Tibet/China, then only the Indian forces, funded by taxes, can do the job. This is a satisfactory arrangement for all Indian and Bhutanese citizens, who otherwise may be hard-pressed to secure their territory.

But not all government actions have an obvious rationale. Demonetisation was unleashed in November 2016 to end black money. Few believe that this objective has been achieved. Black money is not an outcome of market failure. It is an outcome of governmental failure to tax income effectively; control corruption or control crime. Poor governance only encourages the generation of black money, which then requires another intervention to root out black money. Economist Shanta Devarajan of the World Bank believes such iterative interventions are ineffective in improving the quality of governance, and can reduce the legitimacy of governments. Far better instead to rethink how to deal with the underlying market failure.

So why do governments tax ineffectively? Most commonly, multiple objectives in the tax policy are to blame. The sale of loose groundnuts  the ordinary persons food  may be tax-free but packed groundnuts, even if unprocessed, are taxed. This creates a five per cent tax differential for arbitrage between the two categories, which are difficult to administer separately. A single rate of tax levied on a non-evadable tax base is the most effective. But consider that this would be akin to the colonial poll or head tax  levied on each person uniformly. Effective, but terribly inequitable.

Admittedly, mechanisms like transfer of a basic income to the poor can neutralise such an inequity. But transfer of a similar amount of cash, to each poor person, itself creates huge inequities, even among the 40 per cent population vulnerable to poverty. Transferring differential amounts, depending on need, attracts the same inefficiencies as trying to administer progressive tax rates fairly.

Why is corruption or crime so hard to control in India? At the heart of these failures of the State is a market failure. In this case relating to the market for political power. If citizens feel that political power can be acquired by subverting the popular vote, it reduces their faith in the power of their vote. It also delegitimises the government and undermines its ability to rule, in the eyes of those who voted against the government. Bihar faced this conundrum for two decades. It does not help that, in India, governments can be formed even with a minority of the total votes cast in elections, so long as each elected member of the ruling party gets more votes than the next candidate. This first-past-the-post system fractionalises politics. It encourages parties to form coalition governments, which are unable to discipline errant behaviour by their constituents. This coalition dharma fosters crime and corruption. An alternative explanation for pervasive crime or corruption is that laws are out of sync with local customs. And not enough has been done to change social behaviour beyond legislating transformative rights and duties. Ending open defecation  a prime driver to reduce the vulnerability of women to crime  is one such example. The benefits from ending open defecation are dependent on collective action. One reason why we did not do more earlier could be that the political incentives are perverse. They favour exaggerating, rather than bridging, the social cleavages of caste and religion, which inhibit collective, progressive decision making.

Low public accountability and lackadaisical collective action can also be traced to the continuation of feudal traditions of governance and poorly distributed income growth. Richer citizens are more resilient to State encroachment of their rights and less dependent on State largesse. Luckily, over the past three decades, we have become less poor, better educated and more aware of our rights versus the State.

But the extent of inequality remains significant as does the infrastructure deficit across rich and poor areas. The privileged crust is thinner than a hand-tossed Neapolitan pizza  possibly just 10 per cent of the population. The rest seethe in forlorn frustration. Can we get away from this low-level equilibrium? Yes, we can by fixing the market for political power.

First, bridge the trust deficit and distance between citizens and the State. Empower state governments versus the Union government and local government versus state governments. Hopefully, the 15th Finance Commission will carry forward the trend of forcing the Centre to devolve functions and Central taxes to states and directly to local governments based on performance criteria.

Second, cut the colonial fat; abolish the titular but unedifying position of state governors. These are unelected nominees of the Union government exercising oversight over elected state governments. Transfer this role to the President, who is elected. This will level the playing field between states and the Centre versus the presidency.

Third, make Parliament and state Assemblies more representative. Sharply reduce the size of constituencies. Only directly-elected members should be eligible to become Prime Minister or chief minister. A candidate should be able to contest an election for only one seat at a time. The winner must secure a simple majority of the available votes and two-thirds of the votes cast. Municipalities must be headed by elected mayors.

Fourth, the functioning and finances of recognised political parties must be made transparent. Inner-party elections must conform to common but effective guidelines. The Election Commission must be empowered to determine constituency boundaries and diversified beyond the administration, to include citizen representatives and the judiciary with the chief election commissioner chosen specifically.

GST became a reality as a process of cooperative federalism was followed led by the finance minister. Reforming the market for political power could benefit from a similar approach.
PM Modis handpicked candidate for President is Ram Nath Kovind, a dalit gentleman who was governor of Bihar until recently.

Thespian Dilip Kumar used an interesting metaphor in his movie Kranti, or revolution. The earthy couplet went thus: Kulhadi mein lakdi ka dasta na hota, to lakdi ke katney ka rasta na hota. (But for the wood in the axe, there would be no axe to cut the wood.) The words came to mind strangely enough because of this weeks presidential election in India.

Though they are constitutional heads, not executive chiefs, Indian Presidents, like the speakers of Parliament, can play a critical role in tipping the balance when the headcount is vague. And sometimes even when the numbers of MPs or MLAs is crystal clear, the chair can devise its own logic to decree otherwise.

West Bengal governor Keshari Nath Tripathi, for example, split the Bahujan Samaj Party when he was Speaker of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly, giving his Bharatiya Janata Party undue political advantage. Hermann Goring, as Speaker or president of the Reichstag, deliberately avoided looking at President Hindenburgs signed orders to dissolve the German Parliament. His agenda was to take a sham vote to consolidate Hitler as a powerful Nazi chancellor. When he did deign to see the presidential decree on his desk, Goering concluded it was too late to consider as the House had already elected a Nazi government. The Speakers verdict became the prelude to a global tragedy.

President Shankar Dayal Sharma need not have invited Atal Behari Vajpayee for an arbitrarily contrived 13-day tryst as Prime Minister. The BJP was in a hopeless minority in 1996, and Vajpayee resigned without facing the trust vote. Rajiv Gandhi had more seats as the largest party in 1989 than Vajpayee got in 1996, but he chose to sit in the Opposition. President Kalam would have been well within his rights to invite Sonia Gandhi to be Prime Minister as she had the highest tally. It is a matter of surmise whether he did invite her.

Mrs Gandhi had a better chance of enduring the required vote of confidence than did Vajpayee.

Prime Minister Narendra Modis handpicked candidate for President is Ram Nath Kovind, a dalit gentleman who was governor of Bihar until recently. He was previously a spokesman for the BJP. It was a shrewd move to name Kovind as next President, and it has already driven fissures in the Oppositions ranks. The fractious groups for better or worse have put up former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar as their face-saving candidate. She is also a dalit. The current arithmetic favours Kovind, but we are told that the men in Nagpur who control the BJP are not pleased about his candidature.

Seen from legendary dalit stalwart B.R. Ambedkars view, Kovind and Kumar would both seem to be the wood in the axe, a metaphor Dilip Kumar used for Indians who betrayed their own people on behalf of the colonial rulers. Ambedkar regarded the Congress as an upper-caste Hindu party, and he would not have a very different view of the BJP. There are black Americans and American Muslims who voted for Donald Trump. Dalits voting for the Congress or the BJP is not altogether surprising.

It shouldnt really matter whether a dictator or a regime is Christian or Muslim or Jewish, or atheist. What is astonishing is that victims of their tyranny often become ardent supporters of the oppressor who targets their flock. This behaviour in essence and texture is different from the Stockholm syndrome as more often than not it involves dollops of opportunism driven by a human desire to be on the winning side.

There were Jews who supported the Nazis and there are dalits, no matter how minuscule, who are at peace with Hindutva. This is regardless of the fact that Hindutva in its essence was originally the brainchild of orthodox Bengali brahmins. Their Maharashtrian cousins honed it into a political vehicle subsequently.

Such deals with the tormentors may involve members of other groups and communities too. It cannot not be disturbing, after all, that Muslim ministers in Mr Modis Cabinet or Muslim politicians in the BJP are able to sleep soundly without a pinch of remorse when a Junaid is lynched here or a Pehlu Khan is murdered there by Hindutva mobs.

There are other groups that are critical of Mr Modi but seem to be convinced that there are bigger fish to fry. The left, for example, is on the same side as the BJP in their anti-Mamata Banerjee hostility. Loyal leftists are distraught that the communist party in West Bengal sees the staunchly anti-BJP chief minister as a more immediate threat to its existence, a fear that is at variance with the way the rest of worried India regards the problem. The fight between the Dravida parties in Tamil Nadu, or the Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav bad blood in Uttar Pradesh, contributes to their collective peril ahead.

Meanwhile, according to the data compiled from Indias National Crime Records Bureau, a crime is committed against a dalit by a non-dalit every 16 minutes. Every day upper-caste men rape more than four dalit women; every week, 13 dalits are murdered and six dalits are kidnapped. In 2012 alone, which was during Congress rule, the year of the Delhi gangrape and murder, 1,574 dalit women were raped. The rule of thumb is that an inordinately low percentage of rapes is reported or gets registered. Dalits were exploited and abused regardless of who ruled Delhi, and their lot doesnt seem to be heading for a better future under the BJP.

And as we write, another axe is being readied, inevitably with the help of the wood, of course. There is a metaphor of hope, however, to foil to the axe. It is said that the oak tree creates the very acorn from which it was born.

By arrangement with Dawn
The entire portfolio offers next-generation features such as AC 2 x 2 Wifi connectivity, Type C USB ports and immersive audio.

Both convertibles come with NVIDIA graphics, FHD screen and a fingerprint reader. The devices feature JBL Speakers and Dolby Audio Premium in the Yoga 720 and Harman Speakers in the Yoga 520. The optional Lenovo Active Pen provides a natural, intuitive pen experience with pin-point accuracy, palm-rejection technology and pressure sensitivity.

Lenovo has unveiled its latest collection of future-ready laptops. The entire portfolio offers next-generation features such as AC 2 x 2 Wifi connectivity, Type C USB ports and immersive audio which are yet to be seen even on premium notebooks that are currently available.

Yoga 720 and Yoga 520 comes with up to 7th Gen Intel Core i7 processor. The Yoga 720 weighs only 1.25kgs at 0.75" (19 mm). The Lenovo Yoga 520 is another addition to the Yoga line-up with up to 128G PCIe SSD + 1TB SATA HDD hybrid storage.

Both convertibles come with NVIDIA graphics, FHD screen and a fingerprint reader. The devices feature JBL Speakers and Dolby Audio Premium in the Yoga 720 and Harman Speakers in the Yoga 520. The optional Lenovo Active Pen provides a natural, intuitive pen experience with pin-point accuracy, palm-rejection technology and pressure sensitivity. Consumers can now get creative with the Windows Inking feature to sketch portraits, write notes or share on-the-go.

Ideapad 720s, 520s, 320s

The Ideapad 720S has angled edges to look even thinner than it already is. It is ideal for those who are looking for feather-light portability with heavy-duty performance. It also comes with a backlit keyboard, up to 8 hours of video playback battery life, JBL Speakers with Dolby Atmos and a starting weight of just 1.12kgs.

Ideapad 520 and 320

The Ideapad 520 and 320 offer the latest multimedia capabilities to customers with top-of-the-line processing and advanced graphics up to NVIDIA GeForce 940MX. The Ideapad 320 has Dolby Audio-optimized speakers that deliver crystal-clear audio with minimal distortion at any volume. The Ideapad 520 offers a boost from the sound of the Ideapad 320, featuring Harman Speakers with Dolby Audio. The device also features a redesigned chassis with angled edges and metal surfaces. Preloaded with Windows 10 Home, both laptops guarantee lightning-fast responsiveness and reliable battery life.

Prices and availability

Yoga 720 : RS 74,500

Yoga 520 : RS 39,600

Ideapad 720S : RS 74,850

Ideapad 520S : RS 47,450

Ideapad 320S : RS 34,750

Ideapad 520 : RS 42,400

Ideapad 320 : RS 17,800
Facebook plans to add 20,000 entrepreneurs from 100 cities in India in the next six months

The social network company has tied up with Gandhinagar-based Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDII) to train people to achieve the target.

Facebook plans to add 20,000 entrepreneurs from 100 cities in India in the next six months as part of its "Boost Your Business" programme to help them scale up their businesses, its top executive said here today.

The social network company has tied up with Gandhinagar-based Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDII) to train people to achieve the target.

The initiative was launched today at EDII by Chief Minister Vijay Rupani.

"Our 'Boost Your Your Business' initiative was launched in 2015, but with EDII, we plan to go to 20 states and 100 cities in the next six months in its first phase, expanding five times than what we have achieved so far," said Ritesh Mehta, head of programmes, South Asia.

Mehta said apart from EDII, Facebook will also continue to take up other initiatives to connect people through Facebook to help them do business.

"The programme is designed to equip small and medium businesses with the knowledge, skill and technology to stay innovative and increase markets across globally," he said.

Mehta said the programme is part of Facebook's public partnership policy, and aimed at giving back to the community.

"They (businesses) see a measurable difference (when connected to Facebook). First, the cost of business goes down. The service is free (setting up a Facebook page is free, communicating with your customer is free, and reaching new customers is free).Money that you spend on marketing can be spent on other things, like improving your business, scaling your business, hiring more people," he said.

"Secondly, it is essentially allowing you to reach a lot more customers. Facebook allows you to reach out to expand nationally and internationally," he added.

India has 201 million active people on Facebook, with 95 per cent of them accessing it on the mobile. Globally, over 65 business million SMBs have pages on Facebook, and 57 per cent people on Facebook in India are connected to at least one small business, the company said.
Doka La is the Indian name for the region which Bhutan recognises as Dokalam, while China claims it as part of its Donglang region.

Heather Nauert was responding to questions on the ongoing standoff between Indian and Chinese troops in the Dokalam area of the Sikkim sector.

Washington: The US has expressed concern over the ongoing standoff between Indian and Chinese troops in the Sikkim sector and said the two countries should work together to come up with some sort of arrangement for peace.

I know that the US is concerned about the ongoing situation there, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert told reporters at her daily news conference.

She was responding to questions on the ongoing standoff between Indian and Chinese troops in the Dokalam area of the Sikkim sector.

We believe that both parties, both sides should work together to try to come up with some better sort of arrangement for peace, Nauert said.

Chinese and Indian soldiers have been locked in a face-off in the Dokalam area of the Sikkim sector for over a month after Indian troops stopped the Chinese army from building a road in the disputed area.

China claimed that they were constructing the road within their territory and has been demanding immediate pull-out of the Indian troops from the disputed Dokalam plateau.

New Delhi has expressed concern over the road building, apprehending that it may allow Chinese troops to cut Indias access to its northeastern states.

India has conveyed to the Chinese government that the road construction would represent a significant change of status quo with serious security implications for it.

Doka La is the Indian name for the region which Bhutan recognises as Dokalam, while China claims it as part of its Donglang region.

Of the 3,488-km-long India-China border from Jammu and Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, a 220-km section falls in Sikkim.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection ordered evacuations for some residents living southwest of Yosemite National Park.

Mariposa (California): 2,000 residents of a small California town in the foothills flanking Yosemite National Park were ordered to evacuate on Tuesday as crews battled an out-of-control wildfire that has already destroyed eight structures.

Residents of tiny Mariposa, in the Sierra Nevada mountains southwest of Yosemite in central California, were ordered to flee after flames from the so-called Detwiler Fire jumped over Highway 140 and marched toward the community, threatening 1,500 structures.

"Fire activity continued to grow throughout the night due to ample fuel, and steep terrain," the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) said on its tracking website. "Today firefighters expect unfavorable weather conditions and aggressive fire behavior."

A photograph posted on social media showed empty downtown streets as an orange and pink glow from the fire hovered on the horizon. Downtown Mariposa had its power cut off, according to one reporter on a local Fox affiliate.

Cal Fire said utility lines supplying power to the national park were also in the path of the flames.

The Detwiler Fire, which broke out on Sunday afternoon and has since blackened 25,000 acres of forest land, was only about five percent contained as of Tuesday afternoon, according to Cal Fire, and also posed a threat to several other small foothill communities.

There were no immediate details on the structure destroyed or another listed as damaged. Highway 49 was closed in sections except to residents.

"I haven't seen these conditions in a long time, it's a wind-driven, slope-driven, fuel-driven fire," Jerry Fernandez with Cal Fire told an ABC affiliate in Fresno.

Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for Mariposa County on Tuesday as the fire was approaching. The proclamation sends resources to the area.

The Detwiler was among more than three dozen major, out-of-control wildfires burning across the US West as windy, dry conditions prompted authorities to issue evacuation orders and red flag warnings in California, Oregon and Nevada.

Flames have charred more than twice as much land in California so far in 2017 compared with the same time last year, according to Cal Fire.
The Lahore high court (LHC) declared Pemras order null and void as the federal government had no objections regarding the same.

Islamabad: A Pakistani court on Tuesday lifted a ban imposed by Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra) on the airing of Indian teleplays.

The Lahore high court (LHC) declared Pemras order null and void as the federal government had no objections regarding the same.

Pemra had issued a notification imposing a blanket ban on all Indian content on October 19, 2016 as relations between Pakistan and India soured after the Uri attack last year.

M/s Leo Communications, TV channel Filmazias parent organisation, sought to overturn the ban as it had not been imposed by the government of Pakistan.

The petition challenged the Pemra circular as being beyond the powers of the regulatory body and the constitution, and claimed that the government was indulging in selective patriotism because even though Indian movies were allowed to be screened all over the country, they could not be aired on

television.

The petition claimed that the government was involved in selective patriotism because even though Indian movies were allowed to be screened all over the country, they could not be aired on television.

Although Pemras ban on the airing of Indian films was lifted in February this year, permission to air teleplays or television dramas was not granted.

The petitioners counsel Asma Jehangir argued in court that a ban on Indian teleplays appeared strange while Indian films were being openly aired.

Pemras counsel claimed that the ban had been imposed since India had imposed similar restrictions on all Pakistani content.

LHC Chief Justice, Mansoor Ali Shah, said that Indian content with objectionable or anti-Pakistan content could be censored but there was no need for a complete ban. The world has become a global village, Justice Shah said
The peace process has been fraught with breakdowns and allegations of breaches of unilateral ceasefires by the military and the NPA.

Police and military officials said the attack did not appear to be targeted as the unit were traveling in civilian clothes in unmarked vehicles. (Photo: Representational/AFP)

Manila: Four members of the Philippine presidential guard were wounded in a firefight with dozens of Maoist rebels disguised as soldiers at a checkpoint on the southern island of Mindanao, the military said on Wednesday.

The attack on the elite Presidential Security Group (PSG) in North Cotabato province will be a another blow to a stuttering peace process between the government and National Democratic Front, the political arm of the communist rebels. President Rodrigo Duterte was not in the region.

"Four of our troops in two vehicles were slightly wounded in the firefight," PSG commander Brigadier-General Louie Dagoy said, adding that the rebels fled.

Dagoy said the New People's Army (NPA) guerillas opened fire on the presidential guards and were wearing soldiers' uniforms.

The peace process has been fraught with breakdowns and allegations of breaches of unilateral ceasefires by the military and the NPA.

Informal talks in the Netherlands are due to take place at the weekend to restart stalled negotiations to end the nearly 50 years of conflict, which has killed more than 40,000 people.

The encounter at the checkpoint came a day after Duterte requested both houses of Congress to extend martial law in Mindanao until the end of the year as security forces needed more time to deal with Islamist militants.

Duterte on Tuesday met his peace negotiators and instructed them not to agree to any bilateral ceasefire until the NPA ceased attacks on government troops and called on the Maoists' political leaders to keep their fighters under control.

The latest incident highlights the challenge facing a military stretched on multiple fronts in Mindanao, an island of 22 million people with a long history of rebellion.

Government forces are battling to defeat Islamic State-allied rebels who have occupied the heart of Marawi City for 58 days, while operations continue on islands in the west of Mindanao against heavily armed Abu Sayyaf bandits behind kidnappings and piracy.

The presidential guard unit is usually deployed ahead of activities by the president to secure areas in advance. Dagoy said the PSG was carrying out other work and not preparing for a visit by Duterte.

Police and military officials said the attack did not appear to be targeted as the unit were traveling in civilian clothes in unmarked vehicles.
The adviser reaffirmed that Pakistan stood behind Kashmiris in extending political, diplomatic and moral support to their just struggle.

Islamabad: Pakistan on Wednesday said Kashmir remained the core dispute between Pakistan and India, and its resolution was imperative to bring peace to South Asia.

Speaking to a nine-member delegation of All-Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) here, adviser to the Prime Minister on foreign affairs Sartaj Aziz underscored that the people of Kashmir were waging a heroic and just struggle against India.

Pakistan pays rich tribute to Kashmiris for their unmatched sacrifices and unparalleled resilience, Mr Aziz said.

The adviser reaffirmed that Pakistan stood behind Kashmiris in extending political, diplomatic and moral support to their just struggle.

Pakistan, he said, continues to pursue its principled position on Kashmir and extends its steadfast support to the Kashmiris, as Kashmir cause remains close to the hearts of every Pakistani. The adviser underlined that the international community had rejected Indian attempts to equate the indigenous self-determination movement of Kashmiris with terrorism.

In this regard, he mentioned the outcome document of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Summit in Istanbul last year, and the resolution adopted at the Council of Foreign Ministers, which was held in Abidjan last week.

He noted that Kashmiri diaspora abroad, and members of the civil society in various countries had been holding events to highlight Indian atrocities in Kashmir.

The Kashmiri delegation briefed the adviser on the grave human rights situation in Kashmir and expressed concern over the policy of genocide being pursued by Indian forces as manifested in the continued bloodshed of defenceless Kashmiris with impunity.

They expressed deep appreciation of Kashmiris for the effective efforts and strong support of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to the Kashmiri cause.

The delegation underscored that the indigenous movement of Kashmiris for their right to self-determination had entered an important phase since the death of Burhan Muzaffar Wani on July 8, 2016.



Todays meeting is significant, as the day marks the observance of Youm-e-Ilhaq-e-Pakistan (accession to Pakistan), on 19 July 1947, a foreign ministry statement said.
Foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said that Indian forces had to leave the area to avoid an 'escalation of the situation.'

The most recent dispute flared in June after Chinese teams began building a road onto the Doklam (Representational Image)

Beijing: China renewed a call for India to immediately withdraw its troops from disputed territory high in the Himalayan mountains, following a report that Chinese forces recently held live firing drills in the region.

Foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said that Indian forces had to leave the area to avoid an "escalation of the situation."

"We have stated many times that we hope the Indian side will get a clear understanding of the situation (and) immediately take measures to withdraw the troops that illegally crossed the border back to the Indian side of the border," Lu said at a regular news briefing Tuesday.

Beijing and New Delhi have engaged in more than a month of saber-rattling as officials from both sides talk of a potential clash even bloodier than their 1962 war that left thousands dead.

Lu's comments came after Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported late last week that an army brigade equipped with rocket launchers, heavy machine guns and mortars recently practiced a simulated live-firing assault on an enemy position in Tibet. The drills also involved tracking and targeting enemy aircraft, the report said.

The current standoff is in the southernmost part of Tibet in an area also claimed by Indian ally Bhutan, although the report did not say exactly when or where the drills took place.

The slow-motion crisis is expected to be discussed when Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval visits Beijing on July 27-28 to take part in a security forum under the BRICS group of large developing nations that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

However, with nationalist sentiments among the public running high in both nations, neither side is expected to back down before the bitter Himalayan winter arrives in a few months, according to experts.

China insists Indian troops withdraw before talks can take place to settle what has become the longest protracted standoff in recent years between nuclear-armed neighbors who share a 3,500-kilometer (2,174-mile) border, much of it contested.

The most recent dispute flared in June after Chinese teams began building a road onto the Doklam, or Donglang in Chinese, Plateau that is claimed by both China and Bhutan, which cooperates closely with India on security matters.

Although China and Bhutan have been negotiating the precise border for decades without serious incident, the tiny Himalayan kingdom turned this time to help from New Delhi, which sent troops across the border from the northeastern state of Sikkim.

China retaliated by closing a nearby mountain pass that Indian pilgrims use to reach Mount Kailash, a sacred Hindu and Buddhist site in Tibet. China's foreign ministry has also presented to reporters historical documents that it says prove China's claims to the plateau.

Although the Doklam Plateau is not part of Indian territory, New Delhi has been particularly sensitive to Chinese building activity in a region with strategic significance.
The Supreme Court, however, continued with its proceedings, including hearing the Panama Papers leaks case.

Islamabad: Lower and higher courts in Pakistan came to a standstill on Wednesday as lawyers across the country held protests demanding Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's resignation after a probe recommended filing a graft case against him and his family.

The protests were called by Pakistan's top lawyers' associations, including the Pakistan Bar Council (PBC) and the Supreme Court Bar Association.

The courts, where protests were organised, did not hear any case. The Supreme Court, however, continued with its proceedings, including hearing the Panama Papers leaks case.

The Lahore High Court was also paralysed by a partial strike by the lawyers.

The organisations have urged Sharif to "honourably" resign as he has "lost the moral and legal authority" to continue in his office after a joint investigation team (JIT) report accused him and his family of evading tax by setting up offshore companies to purchase high-end properties in London.

Bar council Vice Chairman Ahsan Bhoon said the lawyer community has expressed solidarity with the Supreme Court and asked Sharif to step down.

"We haverequested the Supreme Court to take the Panama Papers case to its logical end and disqualify the prime minister and other public office-holders declared guilty of corruption in the JIT report."

He said the bar councils have also sought the resignation of Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and the prime minister's son-in-law Muhammad Safdar.

"The JIT report has proved that the prime minster and his family members have been involved in corruption," he said, adding that the apex court should refer the case to the National Accountability Bureau for a reference against the Sharif family as recommended by the JIT.

He claimed the evidence collected by the JIT was enough to disqualify Sharif.

Sharif has dismissed the JIT report as a "bundle of baseless allegations" and refused to quit. "The people of Pakistan have elected me and only they can remove me from this post."

The scandal, nonetheless, threatens Sharif's position. If the Supreme Court finds him guilty of corruption he will have to resign, throwing the country into turmoil.
Violence started at the end of the evening prayer. Worshippers prayed outside the mosques in protest against the presence of metal detectors. Fatah called for the "Day of rage".

Jerusalem (AsiaNews/Agencies)  Dozens of Muslims were wounded in clashes with Israeli police that broke out yesterday after the evening prayer. One man was seriously injured.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz said 14 Palestinians were injured, but Palestinian-Israeli news website Arab48 put the number at 34, citing the Palestinian Red Crescent.

Violence broke out on Temple Mount-Haram esh-Sharif at the end of the evening prayer. More than 3,000 worshippers, including Palestinian-Israeli lawmakers, had gathered to pray outside the mosque, photographer Mahfouz Abu Turk told Middle East Eye. He said some 350 security officers were involved in the crackdown.

Israeli police spokeswoman Luba Samri said that, after prayers ended, some worshippers started throwing rocks and bottles at police officers, and dispersal means were used. Two officers were lightly hurt, she said.

Fatah, which runs the Palestinian National Authority, called for a day of rage on Wednesday, to protest the Israeli measures around the mosque in Jerusalem.

For Palestinian authorities, tighter controls by Israel are an attempt to assert Israeli sovereignty over the area. This had already occurred during a prisoners hunger strike in April.

The current situation began on 14 July after a shootout left five people dead, the worst incident in the area for years. This led to al-Aqsa being closed and Friday prayers cancelled.

When mosque reopened on Sunday, the installation of metal detectors outraged Muslim worshippers, who have prayed outside the mosque ever since.

Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, the grand mufti of Jerusalem who was injured on Tuesday, said Palestinians will continue to pray outside al-Aqsa. "We will continue praying around al-Aqsa until they remove the electronic metal detectors," he said.

Tensions remain high over Temple Mount-Haram esh-Sharif. Under the existing status quo, the area is under Jordanian custodianship, and only Muslims are allowed to pray inside.

Many Palestinians fear that the status quo is being challenged by Israel. Jewish extremists have exacerbated tensions by regularly visiting it and demanding that the mosque be torn down and replaced with a Jewish temple.
Sentences were expected this morning. A general is among the 103 defendants. Charges include human trafficking, kidnapping, and murder.

Bangkok (AsiaNews)  A court in Thailand has handed out 21 guilty verdicts for human trafficking over the 2015 Rohingya refugee crisis.

Some 103 people are on trial on charges that include human trafficking, kidnapping and murder. One of them is a high-ranking Thai military officer, Lieutenant General Manas Kongpan.

The 2015 crisis has its roots in the severe repression against stateless Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, a Buddhist majority country.

The crisis worsened after international pressure pushed Thai authorities to crack down on smuggling networks.

This led traffickers to abandon the refugees on their sea and land routes with no neighbouring country willing to take them in. Thousands found themselves stranded on their own in the high sea or in the jungle.

The current trial was sparked by the discovery of 36 bodies in shallow graves in jungle camps near the Thai-Malaysian border.

Most of those on trial are Thai, but many are from Myanmar and Bangladesh.
Beijing (AsiaNews/RFA) - Tibetans opening a three-day summer festival this week in northwestern Chinas Gansu province were forced by authorities to parade on horseback with Chinese national flags, angering Tibetan onlookers and participants, a source in the region says.



The festival, which officially begins the traditional picnic season in the area of Tsoe (in Chinese, Hezuo) city in Gansus Kanlho (Gannan) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, was launched on July 17 and will run for three days, a local source told RFAs Tibetan Service.



This year, the Chinese authorities ordered ordinary Tibetans to carry the Chinese flags, warning them of severe consequences if they fail to comply, RFAs source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.



The Chinese already had the flags ready to use in the procession. But those who were forced to carry them were deeply angered and offended, he said.



Similar orders had been given at a festival three years before, but local Tibetans defied the instructions by carrying religious flags instead, the source said.



So the Chinese sent about 150 Chinese soldiers to put on traditional Tibetan dress and carry the flags in their place.



Authorities said afterward that seven Kanlho counties would be required to participate in future parades, the source said, adding that four districts of TsoeTsoe Dentro, Dzoege To, Khagya To, and Dokarwere forced to take part this year.



Tibetans living under Chinese rule often chafe at forced displays of loyalty to Beijing and stage protests asserting Tibetan national and cultural identity.



On May 2, a 16-year-old student from a farming family named Chagdor Kyab set himself on fire near Kanlhos Bora monastery, calling out for Tibetan freedom and the return of exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama while he burned.
Bishop Edwin de la Pena comes out against the government, which wants to extend the state of emergency and martial law. For the bishop, the latter was needed at the beginning, but now it is no longer necessary. In all, more than 465,000 people have been evacuated. The Church is playing a leading role in providing humanitarian aid. Caritas set aside another 200,000 dollars.

Manila (AsiaNews)  The bishop of Marawi, a city on the island of Mindanao in southern Philippines, is opposed to the governments plan to extend martial law in the area. Since May 23, the city has been the scene of heavy fighting.

In a statement, Mgr Edwin de la Pena said that the 60-day military rule to meet the emergency was a necessity, but now extending it is not only no longer required but it could be harmful. The government can already deal with the situation.

I am against martial law extension, de la Pena said. The first martial law declaration was fine but if they are going to use Marawi again to justify its extension, I dont think its right.

Since late May, the Maute terrorist group is holed up in the predominantly Muslim city. According to recent government estimates, fighting between government forces and militias has forced more than 465,000 people (or 102,000 families) to flee, resulting in a major humanitarian emergency.

Almost 5,000 families found shelter in 85 different reception centres, in Iligan and nearby cities. But many refugees were able to stay with friends and relatives.

After President Rodrigo Duterte warned of the danger of ethnic-religious tensions, local Muslim leaders distanced themselves from Maute's extremism.

Since the start of the crisis, the Catholic Church has called on people to unite and show solidarity and began providing assistance to the displaced and other victims of the conflict.

Meanwhile, the Filipino air force is continuing its raids against the last Maute holdouts, which appear to be weakening compared to the first phase.

With all the resources at their command, the government can address the crisis now even without martial law extension, Mgr Edwin de la Pena said.

However, the president appears increasingly set on extending it until 31 December. Congress will convene a special session this Saturday, 22 July, to tackle the matter.

For its part, the National Secretariat for Social Action (NASSA), also known as Caritas Philippines, allocated another 10 million pesos (nearly US$ 200,000) to meet the needs of people displaced by the violence.

The money will be given to the group  which includes nuns and lay volunteers from the diocese of Iligan  set up for the emergency. It will cover the basic needs of 3,000 families, or 15,000 people, such as halal food and hygiene kits.

NASSA executive secretary Fr Edwin Gariguez said that assistance will include psychological support and some training. (DS)
New sanctions against the Islamic Republic are due to its support for terrorist groups and the Syrian regime as well as its missile programme. Some 18 entities or individuals are targeted. Washington is deeply concerned" about Iran's "malign activities". Tehran slams the sanctions as illegal, pledges sanctions of its own against the US.

Tehran (AsiaNews)  Tensions are rising between Iran and the United States following Washingtons decision yesterday to impose new sanctions on Tehran for its ballistic missile programme and support for organisations the United States defines as terrorist.

The US state department said 18 entities or individuals would be affected by the new measures because of their involvement in Irans weapons programme or their support for the Syrian government or movements like Hezbollah and Hamas.

In its statement, the US state department said it was "deeply concerned" about Iran's "malign activities" in the Middle East, which "undermine regional stability, security and prosperity."

For the US, the Islamic Republic "continues to support terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It also shows steadfast support for the [Syrian] Assad regime, despite Assad's atrocities against his own people."

For Washington, Iran is also prolonging the conflict in Yemen by providing support for Houthi rebels against the Saudi-backed government.

Responding to the US move, Irans foreign ministry condemned "the United States' worthless act of imposing illegal sanctions", announcing its own new sanctions against American people and entities that have acted against the Iranian people and other Muslim peoples of the region, state-owned IRNA news agency reported.

For General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, who heads the Guard's aerospace wing and missile programme, "The Americans... want to weaken the capabilities and strength of the Islamic regime; and in view of this, "We propose reciprocal actions with a high cost.

The new US sanctions came a few hours after the White House admitted in a statement that Iran was respecting the commitments it undertook with the nuclear deal, which the IAIE had confirmed in October.

In 2015 after years of embargo, the West partially eased economic sanctions against the Mideast country in exchange for a deal over its controversial nuclear programme.

Theoretically, Iran had the means to develop nuclear weapons. Under the terms of the agreement, Iran would reduce its uranium enriching centrifuges from 19,000 to 5,000, and would guarantee access by intendent UN inspectors to its nuclear facilities,

The agreement, which will remain in force for at least ten years, also limits Irans uranium stocks, which must remain below 300 kg for the next 15 years.

With few exceptions like Israel and the US Congress, the international community welcomed the agreement.

Despite it, the United States has maintained a number of sanctions because of Tehran's ballistic missile programme, as well as its support for armed Shia groups in the Middle East, including Lebanons Hezbollah, the Assad regime in Syria and Yemens Houthi rebels. (DS)
Shahzad Masih worked as a sweeper at the Shahmim Riaz Hospital, Gujrat District. His accuser, Ishtiaq Qadri, is a member of Tehreek-e-Tuhafaz, an Islamist extremist party. Death threats have forced his family to flee. Now the boy could die.

Lahore (AsiaNews/Agencies)  A 16-year-old Christian boy, Shahzad Masih, has been accused of blasphemy by a member of Tehreek-e-Tuhafaz, an Islamist extremist party, and was arrested by police in in Dinga, a city in Gujrat district, Punjab.

Since the boys arrest, his family has been unable to find him. Police have refused to acknowledge holding the boy, and will not give the family access to him.

Despite his young age, Shahzad worked as a sweeper at the Shahmim Riaz Hospital. The family says that last month the boy was involved in a disagreement over religious matters with Ishtiaq Qadri, his accuser, and had come out of it with the help of Dr Tariq, one of the hospitals physicians.

On 13 July, the radical Islamist again tried to provoke the young man, who allegedly insulted the prophet Mohammed.

The boy's mother has rejected the accusation. "I have raised Shahzad as a devout Christian. I have never taught my son to hate people of other religions. This is why I'm sure the charges against him are false."

Yesterday, after the 16-year-old's arrest, his family was forced to flee the city of 80,000, home to about 150 Christians, after death threats were made at a nearby mosque. On social media, the young mans picture began circulating with the word "laanat" (shame).

Speaking on behalf of the Islamist group, imam Gazi Saqib Shakeel said that "the judicial system should inflict the worst possible punishment on Shahzad Masih so that no one will dare commit blasphemy again ever.

In Pakistan blasphemy is punished with the death penalty. Even suspicion alone can provoke violent reactions on the part of the Quran's defenders.

For Wilson Chowdhry, chairman of the British Pakistani Christian Association, the arrest of the Christian boy is a source of sorrow.

"These draconian [blasphemy] laws are being used as a tool for discrimination and forcible conversion every day and the world stays silent, Chowdhry noted.

This poor boy will now face a most daunting court case and will lose most of his life in prison; moreover, in the current climate a sentence could lead to his death via judicial or extrajudicial process.
Morning News Brief For July 19, 2017

Morning Minute: iPhone 8 Rumors Confirmed + Bieber's Major Milestone

As you start your day, it can be overwhelming to try to make sense of everything you missed while you were getting on with your life. Morning Minute is here to bring you the news you need to know to start your day, all broken down into tidbits you can consume before you finish your morning constitution. Here are this morning's headlines.

Leak Confirms Most iPhone 8 Display Rumors

A journalist got a hold of some CAD blueprints from a case manufacturer, and it appears everything we've heard so far will be true: the 10th anniversary iPhone will have a 5.8" display, virtually no bezels and no physical home button. [Geek.com]

'Despacito' Quickly Becomes Most Streamed Song Of All Time

Thanks to having two incredibly popular versions, the Luis Fonsi smash has now racked up an almost unbelievable 4.6 billion streams. On YouTube alone, the official video was the fastest ever to climb to 2 billion views, and the remix with Justin Bieber adds another nearly half-billion. "Despacito's" streams break a record previously held by Bieber's "Sorry," meaning Justin Bieber's been involved in the two most-streamed songs of all time. [Fobes]

What's Up With Trump's Secret Putin Meeting?

Trump reportedly had a secret, hour-long informal meeting with Vladimir Putin two weeks ago at the G20 summit, and it purportedly only included Trump, Putin and Putin's translator. This is highly irregular! The White House swears it was just extended small talk following a dinner attended by several world leaders, others aren't so sure. WaPo has some theories. [Washington Post]

Harley-Davidson To Cut Jobs Following Losses

Iconic U.S. motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson is having trouble selling bikes because millennials don't want loud, heavy, incredibly expensive organ harvesters. Due to reduced production and shipping forecasts, the company is cutting about 180 jobs, mostly from plants near Milwaukee and Kansas City. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

Chris Christie Booed After Catching Foul Ball

New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a man despised by most of his constituents and despised by all New Yorkers by virtue of being the governor of New Jersey, made the mistake of attending a Mets game last night. When the crowd realized it was Christie who caught a 3rd inning foul ball, the crowd erupted into a chorus of boos.

Chris Christie caught a foul ball at Citi Field, then got heavily booed and dunked on by a dopey play-by-play guy pic.twitter.com/n2GpN0EEQd  Chase Woodruff (@dcwoodruff) July 19, 2017

Glorious, and also the only good thing that's ever happened at Citi Field. [NJ.com]

Family Claims They Were Booted From Flight Over Toddler

A family of five is at odds with JetBlue after they say the airline forced them off their flight after their 1-year-old started kicking the seat in front of her. JetBlue, however, says they were asked to deplane after the toddler's parents got into a verbal altercation (including threats) with the passengers in the row in front of them. [NY Daily News]

Google Glass Is Back, Baby!

Google Glass, the dopey augmented reality headwear worn exclusively by nerds a few years ago, is back in a very cool way. Glass Enterprise Edition has been adopted by several industrial, technological and healthcare companies, and the results are pretty dramatic  mechanics don't have to stop working to look up instructions, and doctors spend less time typing notes into a computer, for instance [PCMag]
Kelloggs and Sanitarium drop Halal certification





Kelloggs and Sanitarium have both decided not to renew Halal certifications for their cereal products.

If a food product is Halal certified it indicates to Muslims that the food is permissible for them to eat under their religious law.

Halal and religious certification has been a hot topic in the Australian food industry over the past several years, with some members of the public calling for boycotts of halal certified food brands.

Kelloggs Australia however told Australian Food News that its decision to not renew halal certification, which occurred in 2016, was a commercial decision and not the result of any public pressure or backlash.

As most of our cereals are plant-based, theyre inherently halal, so we chose not to renew our certification in 2016 as part of a regular review of all certifications for our foods, the Kelloggs spokesperson said.

Sanitarium never had Halal certification symbols on Australian sold products

Sanitarium said it has never used Halal, or Kosher, certification symbols on its Australian or New Zealand sold products.

It has however previously obtained Halal certification for exported foods.

However, Sanitarium does not currently hold either Halal or Kosher certification although it may choose to do so in the future depending on the requirements of our export markets, Sanitarium said.

Sanitarium said its products are suitable for people who want Halal or Kosher foods as it does not use meat-based ingredients or alcohol.

In July 2016, Australian Food News reported on yoghurt brand Jalnas decision to stop religious certification whilst a Senate inquiry into third party certification went underway. Jalna however changed its mind on Kosher certification after receiving complaints.

Related articles
Online tool launched to help farmers start co-operatives





A new online tool has launched to help guide Australian farmers on how to start a co-operative.

The tool is operated by the Australian Federal Governments Farming Together resource for primary producers. Since it first launched a month ago, 70 new agriculture co-operatives have used the tool to help establish themselves.

Lorraine Gordan, Project Director of Farming Together, said many do not realise how simple it is to form a co-operative.

A co-op structure has so many benefits  including tax benefits, Gordan said.

They traditionally underpin equipment and infrastructure to value-add primary production. And we are seeing a growing appetite for co-operative marketing structures, she said.

The co-operative building tool provides assistance on putting together registration paperwork, writing constitutions and links to other resources.

The tool can be accessed here.

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Vanilla producers fight against market volatility





New Zealand vanilla producer, Heilala, has turned to selling extract mixed with flavouring as global vanilla prices continue to rise.

For the second year running, international prices for vanilla has skyrocketed as demand outstrips supply.

The African nation of Madagascar, responsible for most of the worlds vanilla supply, also experienced a damaging cyclone in April 2017, affecting global pricing further.

Spice traders predict the current market turmoil will continue into 2018.

Although Heilala gets most of its vanilla from the island of Tonga, Chief Executive Officer of Heilala, Jennifer Boggiss, said Heilala has turned now offering vanilla extract mixed with flavouring so consumers have more reasonably priced options.

We have recognised that we will continually be faced with external forces which are out of our control, Boggiss said.

The Naturals range will allow customers to continue using a high-quality vanilla throughout this crisis and into the future, she said.

Heilalas Naturals range is a combination of vanilla extract and natural plant-based vanilla flavour. The range is available now for food service and will hit retail shops in September 2017.

Vanilla harvesting methods unsustainable

Boggiss said unsustainable harvesting methods in Madagascar, and elsewhere, is decreasing vanilla bean quality and adding to supply problems.

According to Boggiss, vanilla beans are sometimes picked too early as a theft prevention method.

We believe the quick curing of green vanilla is a practice that has contributed to the current state of the market, Boggis said.

It has an extremely negative social impact on the vanilla trade as ethical and sustainable procurement practices have been abandoned in favour of any vanilla at any price, she said.

Heilala is not the only company addressing skyrocketing vanilla pricing, with stevia producer, PureCircle, this week announcing a vanilla-stevia blend partially aimed at addressing the high prices.

Related articles
ADDIS ABABA  Chinese companies, with close to 379 projects that were either operational or under implementation during the past five years, are on top of Ethiopia's investment landscape both in number and financial capital, an official at the Ethiopian Investment Commission (EIC) told Xinhua Tuesday.

According to Mekonen Hailu, EIC Communications Director, 279 of the total 379 Chinese companies were set operational in Ethiopia with projects that worth over 13.16 billion Ethiopian birr (over $572 million) from 2012 to 2017 period, while the remaining 100 are under implementation.

Ethiopia's manufacturing sector takes the first spot in attracting companies from China both in number and financial capital, with a total of 276 projects either under implementation or operational, he said.

Construction, services and agriculture are said to be the other sectors hosting a great number of Chinese companies to Africa's second most populous nation.

According to Hailu, the Ethiopian government has given due emphasis to the manufacturing sector, as the country is shifting to industry-led economy from the largely agricultural one, and the contribution of Chinese companies is immense.

He said that the east African country has rolled out various incentives that include custom duty exemption, income tax holidays, and provision of land at competitive lease price to attract investors.

According to the Ethiopia's Foreign Ministry, Chinese companies have invested around $4 billion in Ethiopia during the last two decades, creating job opportunities for over 111,000 Ethiopians on permanent and temporary basis.

Meles Alem, Ethiopia's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, told Xinhua recently that Ethiopia has targeted to attract new and existing Chinese companies to invest in various sectors in the country, the manufacturing sector in particular.

The Asian country is Ethiopia's largest trading partner, registering a bilateral trade volume of $6.37 billion in 2015. Trade grew at an average rate of 22.2 percent annually for the last several years.


(Langstrup Photography/Bigstock.com) (Langstrup Photography/Bigstock.com)

The Australian Government has updated the occupations lists for a range of temporary and permanent skilled visas, with the new lists effective from this weekend.According to Immigration Minister Peter Dutton the update will ensure the lists continue to reflect genuine skill needs in the labour market.He also announced that as part of a range of reforms to skilled migration announced in April, the Government will update the lists on a six monthly basis rather than annually.Dutton believes that this will lead to the best outcomes for Australian workers and employers alike and pointed out that they are based on 'extensive consultation' with industry and advice from the Department of Employment and the Department of Education and Training.All visa applicants are now required to undergo mandatory criminal checks as part of their application. The exemption to English language testing for subclass 457 visa applicants whose salary is over $96,400 has been removed, with the exception of employees transferring between a foreign parent company to an Australian arm of the company.From now on all permanent skilled visas will have tightened English language and lower maximum age requirements. Additional measures will also be introduced to improve the integrity of permanent employer sponsored visas, including removal of some exemptions to mandatory skills and English language testing.Full implementation of the Temporary Skills Shortage (TSS) visa will be complete by March next year and it will include increased English language requirements, stricter labour market testing and a test to ensure employers are not discriminating against Australian workers.From March next year, employers nominating a worker for a TSS visa will be required to pay a contribution to the Skilling Australians Fund to support additional education and training for Australian workers. Employers must continue to show they are making every effort to employ and train Australians in their businesses.Dutton said the changes to the lists protect Australian workers, while allowing employers to recruit overseas workers in occupations which are known to be in high demand and face skills shortages in the Australian labour market.'The Government recognises the importance of enabling Australian businesses to tap into global talent to remain internationally competitive and support a strong national science and innovation agenda,' he explained.'The occupation lists are designed to be dynamic. Revisions to the occupation lists are just one element of the Government's reforms strengthening the integrity of Australia's employer sponsored skilled migration programmes and raising the productivity of skilled migrants,' he added.Further details of the revised lists of occupations eligible for temporary skilled migration and the other elements of the Government's reform package are available on the Department of Immigration and Border Protection's website.


(Robyn Mackenzie/Bigstock.com) (Robyn Mackenzie/Bigstock.com)

People from overseas looking for a job in Australia using websites in languages other than English are being warned that adverts are using illegal pay rates, particularly in the hospitality sector.Many students and young people travelling using websites in their own language to look for work while they are studying or working in Australia, but an audit has found that four out of five in Spanish, Chinese and Korean offer wages that are below the legal minimum.The research report from Unions NSW looking at job advertisements on Chinese, Korean and Spanish language websites said it found 'a high prevalence of migrant exploitation and wage theft'.Separate audits in 2016 and 2017 examined 200 jobs, with 78% advertising pay rates below the legal minimum. A 2017 audit of Mandarin and Cantonese job advertisements found 100% of rates offered below the minimum.The audit found hospitality was a particularly bad offender where the average rate of pay advertised was $13.60 an hour when the minimum for an introductory level worker in the restaurant industry is $18.29 per hour.For the 200 jobs audited, the survey found a total annual underpayment of $1.62 million, equating to $8,000 per business per year or $31,100 per week.'This is wage theft on a massive scale. And it's being perpetrated against people ill-equipped to fight back. Migrants often know they are being ripped off but lack the language skills, confidence and support to stand up for their rights. Often migrant workers are threatened, or must consider how a complaint will affect their visa or residency status,' said Mark Morey, secretary of Unions NSW.'We intend to keep shining a bright light on this problem while taking action against wage theft employers. Our research finds that some employers believe they can offer a Korean, Chinese or Spanish rate of pay. Your pay rate is not determined by passport or ethnicity. We are all entitled to Australian standards,' he pointed out.Sally McManus, secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) called for the practice to be outlawed. Wage theft is a national crisis, and temporary visa workers are being hit hardest.'Our laws make it too hard for working people to enforce their basic rights. This is why wage theft has grown out of control. This has to change. Workers' wages are being stolen,' she said.In Australia, ripping off workers isn't the exception, it's becoming the rule. We've seen restaurants in Melbourne only paying workers $10 an hour for 10 hour shifts. One restaurant floor manager lost his job and had his visa application threatened because he asked for the wage theft to end,' she added.Unions NSW has set up a new website to name and shame companies that refuse to comply with minimum wages. www.wagethieves.com.au
Mulcahy

Mercedes-Benz commercial vehicles division in Dublin has appointed Jason Mulcahy to the new position of national fleet sales manager.

In his role, Mulcahy will support fleet customer and commercial vehicle dealers to help implement the automaker's growth in commercial fleet sales, according to the automaker. His role will be to expand van and truck commercial vehicle fleet sales.

Mulcahy, a resident of Ferns, County Wexford, a town in the Republic of Ireland, joins the Mercedes-Benz team at their Naas Road headquarters in Dublin.

He takes up his new appointment having held senior positions with Eircom, a mobile telecommunication company, and a sales manager position with van hire specialist, Northgate.
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Jacksonville Jaguars defensive end Dante Fowler was arrested on charges of simple battery and criminal mischief, both misdemeanors, St. Petersburg Police said.

Police say Fowler, a Lakewood High School and University of Florida alum, was driving in the Trellis at the Lakes apartment complex Tuesday night when a man walking nearby criticized his driving.

Fowler then got out of his car, exchanged words with the man before hitting him, investigators said. The hit knocked off the man's glasses, and Fowler stepped on them. He then grabbed the man's grocery bag and threw it into a nearby lake, police said.

The victim was not hurt.

Fowler was arrested without incident and booked into the Pinellas County Jail.

Fowler is scheduled to report to training camp next week.
Students are going back to school in just a few weeks, and if one Manatee County school board member has his way they won't be turning in any homework.

Board member Charlie Kennedy supports no homework idea

Idea revolves around parents, children spending more time together

Related: No more daily homework for Marion County's youngest students



"I hate to see 8- or 9-year-olds who already hate school because it's such a high pressure environment," said board member Charlie Kennedy.

Marion County Superintendent Heidi Maier recently implemented a no homework policy for elementary school students, and Kennedy jumped on board with the idea.

"We educate kids in Florida under what is already a very high stress environment with the importance of test scores and school grades," Kennedy said. "Teachers feel that pressure and that pressure gets put on the students."

Child psychiatrist Dr. Christina De Guia describes it as stress that gets trickled down.

"The struggles where teachers and parents have with getting the kids to get their homework done, fights at home over it, less time spending quality time together," she said. "In a way I think it could be a good thing to eliminate that in the schools."

The no homework policy does not mean students should do nothing after school, but it can be switched out for something else. The idea starts with elementary schools in the county hoping to bring students and parents closer together at home.

"You know, reading on a daily basis with a parent or a family member has much more positive outcomes for education than does just daily homework," Kennedy said.

Kennedy plans to bring up the idea at the next school board workshop.

The Manatee school district as a whole has not stated its position on Marion County's decision.


Administrator of Bellingham, Wash.-based Pacific Rim Outpatient Surgery Center Gary Rihcberg, RN, discusses ASC leadership and strategy in the wake of uncertain healthcare reforms.

Q: How do you approach strategic planning with the uncertainty surrounding healthcare at the national level?

Gary Richberg: The best strategy will be to continue to improve efficiencies by staffing, case costing, supply management and contract negotiations. The uncertainty in healthcare laws and regulations has been a distraction, however the principles of great management have not.

Q: What future healthcare reforms do you expect to affect ASCs and physicians the most?



GR: The providing of joint replacement surgery in ASCs is a great indicator that the need for ASCs is greater than ever. Bundled payment models and improving delivery models will also play key roles in how these reforms will affect ASCs. ASCs and physicians will need to be as flexible as possible in their operations with keeping in mind that Washington, D.C. can change how we are paid for services from one year to the next.

Q: Where is the biggest opportunity for ASCs to succeed in healthcare today?

GR: ASCs will need to identify those procedures that they can do to improve their bottom-line and maintain their viability. ASCs will be a national campaign to show the cost benefits to patients and that we are the most therapeutic and economic choice for ambulatory surgery services.

Mr. Richberg will be speaking at the Becker's ASC Review 24th Annual Meeting in Chicago, Oct. 26-28. Click here to learn more and register.
The American Society for Healthcare Engineering will grant Barnesville (Ohio) Hospital the 2017 Energy Champion Award for becoming a more energy efficient facility.

The award recognizes a single facility that has shown impeccable leadership throughout the year to reduce energy use. In particular, Barnesville Hospital recorded an Energy Star score of 99, meaning it is performing better than 99 percent of buildings.

In addition, dozens of other hospitals across the country will receive the Energy to Care Award for reducing their annual energy consumption by 10 percent or more. Last year's recipients can be eligible for the award again if the facility reduces it's annual energy usage by an additional 5 percent.

The society will present the awards at its annual conference and technical exhibition in August.
California Department of Health Care Services Director Jennifer Kent mentioned in recent social media posts that there is a child in the state whose medical expenses totaled $21 million in 2014, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Those costs were covered by Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid program, which is run by the Department of Health Care Services.

Ms. Kent declined to offer any additional details about the patient, but said patients with the highest costs tend to have severe genetic disorders.

"They are very expensive people with really expensive needs," she told the Los Angeles Times. "Your disease defines the treatment you require, and the costs are joined to that diagnosis  That's just the nature of the beast."

Medi-Cal isn't the only payer challenged to cover the costs of treating these conditions. In 2016, Des Moines, Iowa-based Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield sent letters to its customers telling them it was raising premiums for 2017 by about 38 to 43 percent. The insurer said the higher rates were partially due to a single member who receives $1 million of care per month. Earlier this year, Wellmark Executive Vice President Laura Jackson said the high-cost member is a teenage boy who suffers from hemophilia, a genetic disorder that keeps blood from clotting.

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Burlington, Mass.-based Lahey Health appointed Kathy Schuler, RN, COO and chief nursing officer of Winchester (Mass.) Hospital, effective Oct. 1.

Here are three takeaways:

1. Ms. Schuler currently serves as vice president of patient care services and CNO at the hospital.

2. She joined Winchester Hospital in 2003, prior to which she served as vice president of patient care services for Anna Jaques Hospital in Newburyport, Mass., and at Boston Regional Medical Center in Stoneham, Mass.

3. She completed the Johnson & Johnson/Wharton Fellows Program in Management for Nurse Executives.
Amir Rubin, executive vice president and divisional CEO within UnitedHealth's Optum, is leaving to take on the CEO role at One Medical, according to a CNBC report.

One Medical is a primary care group with 60 locations across the country. It also offers a virtual medical team and mobile applications. Members pay an annual fee and can get access to same-day appointments, scheduled electronically.



Companies can also offer One Medical's services as a benefit. The group has gained more than $180 million in investor funding since its inception a decade ago, according to the report.



Mr. Rubin has led one of Optum's divisions since January 2016, prior to which he served as president and CEO of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care. His previous leadership roles include serving as COO for the UCLA Health System in Los Angeles and COO at Stony Brook University Hospital in New York City.



Mr. Rubin succeeds One Medical founder Tom X. Lee, who will stay on as executive chairman of the group. Mr. Rubin will assume his new role on Aug. 7, according to One Medical.

Editor's note: This article was updated on July 19, 2017, at 2:30 p.m. It incorrectly stated that Amir Rubin was CEO of Optum and that One Medical was a concierge medicine firm.



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Baylor Scott & White Medical Center-Centennial names new CEO: 3 notes















https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-07/uomm-sfo071817.php
A bipartisan group of governors released a statement Tuesday targeting GOP healthcare efforts and calling on Congress to include governors in any future discourse regarding healthcare, according to The Hill.

The governors behind the statement were Gov. John Kasich, R-Ohio, Gov. Steve Bullock, D-Mont., Gov. Larry Hogan, R-Md., Gov. John Bel Edwards, D-La., Gov. Bill Walker, I-Alaska, Gov. John Hickenlooper, D-Co., Gov. Charlie Baker, R-Mass., Gov. Tom Wolf, D-Pa., Gov. Phil Scott, R-Vt., Gov. Terry McAuliffe, D-VA., and Gov. Brian Sandoval, R-Nev.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has undergone criticism by lawmakers of both parties for the closed nature with which he drafted the Better Care Reconciliation ACt. Efforts to pass the bill were thwarted when four Republican senators announced they would vote against a motion to bring the bill to the Senate floor.

"Going forward, it is critically important that governors are brought to the table to provide input, and we stand ready to work with lawmakers in an open, bipartisan way to provie better insurance for all Americans," the statement read.

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Some Senate Republicans are already speaking out against a plan to dismantle the ACA without implementing replacement legislation, proposed Monday night, reports Politico.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., proposed the strategy after two Republican senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas, defected from the GOP healthcare bill, effectively killing the Senate repeal and replace legislation. Mr. McConnell's proposed strategy includes repealing the current health law and initiating a two-year delay to allow time for the development of a potential replacement plan, according to the report. He said in a recent statement the Senate would vote to take up the House GOP's American Health Care Act with an amendment the Senate supported in 2015 to repeal major portions of the ACA.

But three Senate Republicans  Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine  already indicated they won't support a procedural motion to take up a repeal-only bill, reports Politico. Their votes are necessary for the procedural motion to pass.

Still, Mr. McConnell said Tuesday via another statement that he expects a vote will take place "in the coming days."
The Senate GOP's revised Better Care Reconciliation Act stalled indefinitely Monday evening after two more Republican senators defected from the bill. With the bill dead, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has proposed a full ACA repeal strategy that involves repealing the ACA and initiating a two-year delay.

Here are six reactions from the healthcare industry, provided via emailed statements.

American Medical Association President David Barbe, MD, stressed that the debate over healthcare reform is ongoing, and said a collaborative process must commence among lawmakers "that produces a bipartisan approach to improve healthcare in our country."



"The status quo is unacceptable. Near-term action is needed to stabilize the individual/nongroup health insurance marketplace. In the long term, stakeholders and policymakers need to address the unsustainable trends in health care costs while achieving meaningful, affordable coverage for all Americans. The American Medical Association is ready to work on short- and long-term solutions."

American Hospital Association President and CEO Rick Pollack called for "protect[ing] care for patients."

"This [consistent call from the organization] is grounded in the belief that coverage must be preserved for all who currently have it. Repeal without any effort to replace would leave millions of patients at risk during their most vulnerable times. We have urged Congress to consider advancing solutions aimed at making our healthcare system stronger, protecting access and coverage, and exploring new delivery system reforms that have the potential to make care both more affordable and safer. Our hope is that the Senate will use this opportunity to regroup and work in a bipartisan manner to make the much-needed repairs and refinements, creating a healthcare system that can stand the test of time. We ask Congress to extend the Children's Health Insurance Program and vital rural health programs and stabilize the health insurance marketplaces by funding the cost-sharing reduction payments."

Association of American Medical Colleges President and CEO Darrell Kirch, MD, said his organization has maintained that an ACA repeal "must be accompanied by a simultaneous replacement that provides at least comparable healthcare coverage."

"Patients  particularly those with complex conditions  require stability and continuity in their care. Without access to affordable meaningful coverage, many would forego or delay necessary medical care. This puts millions of Americans, including the most vulnerable patients, at risk. Any healthcare reform legislation must put patients first by maintaining or improving current levels of coverage."

America's Essential Hospitals President and CEO Bruce Siegel, MD, said his organization welcomes the BCRA failure.

"We hope lawmakers seize on this opportunity to bring all stakeholders to the table and develop a plan to protect coverage for everyone  especially those in greatest need. The newly surfaced plan to repeal the ACA's core provisions with a two-year delay is not the way to protect coverage and almost certainly would jeopardize care for people who face financial hardships."

He added, "The repeal-and-delay strategy would leave millions of lives in limbo and create uncertainty that would destabilize insurance markets and paralyze hospitals and other providers. Needed improvements and expansion of services would stall without a clear path forward, threatening access in communities across the country. Insurers might abandon the ACA marketplace, further degrading access."

Physicians for Reproductive Health Board Chair Willie Parker, MD, hopes congressional leaders realize " it is time to cease efforts to destroy what is a literal lifeline for millions of Americans."

"It's time to stop inventing ways to deny people the right to affordable, comprehensive health care. It's time to stop targeting women's healthcare via making it more expensive and finding new ways to restrict care. It's time to start treating abortion care as what is it is: a part of comprehensive healthcare that should be covered by all forms of insurance, including public insurance. It's time to listen to evidence: birth control without extra copays has helped patients be healthier and thrive, access to preventive care saves lives, and comprehensive sex education and resources work. It's time for healthcare equity for all. It's time to stop attacking Medicaid, one of the most successful health care programs in our country's history. It's time to close the gap between Americans who have healthcare and those who don't. In short, repeal of the ACA is an idea whose time will never come."

Catholic Health Association of the United States President and CEO Sister Carol Keehan penned a letter to senators.

"On behalf of the Catholic Health Association of the United States, the national leadership organization of more than 2,000 Catholic healthcare systems, hospitals, long-term care facilities, sponsors, and related organizations, I strongly urge you to start anew in an open dialogue and bipartisan effort to improve healthcare coverage in our country. We believe that this moment calls for statesmanship on the part of both political parties to work together to make the improvements in our healthcare system that will stabilize the individual insurance market, improve affordability, and strengthen and expand the coverage gains already achieved."
Investigators believe a 10-year-old Miami boy may have overdosed and died after inadvertently coming into contact with the extremely potent synthetic opioid fentanyl, according to the Miami Herald.

Fentanyl, which is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, is frequently cut with heroin and has been linked to a growing number of overdose deaths across the nation. The substance and its synthetic analogs  which can be even more powerful  are so potent that simply touching or inhaling a miniscule amount may spur an overdose.

Alton Banks began vomiting June 23 after returning home from a trip to the local pool in his Overtown neighborhood, a hub for heroin and fentanyl distribution. Paramedics were called after he was found unconscious later that evening, and the fifth grader was pronounced dead at Miami-based Jackson Memorial Hospital. Preliminary toxicology tests indicated the child had fentanyl and heroin in his system, according to The Washington Post. Investigators found no evidence to suggest drug exposure occurred in the home.

"He was out playing, like we want all our children to do. It's unclear whether [the opioid exposure] was at the pool or on the walk home," said Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, according to the Herald. "We're anxiously hoping that someone comes forward to help us solve this horrific death."

There were more than 300 overdose deaths in Miami-Dade County involving fentanyl or its analogs in 2016, according to data from the county's medical examiner's office cited by the Miami Herald.

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Gov. Eric Greitens, a former Democrat turned Republican, signed an executive order on Monday directing the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services to create prescription drug monitoring database to curb opioid overprescribing.

The unilateral move comes after state legislation to establish a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program failed in the House after passing in the Senate. The Senate plan included a privacy provision that would require data on prescription monitoring to be purged after 180 days. House leaders said the timeframe was too short and said the plan would permit highly addictive medicines like Adderall to go untracked. Missouri is currently the only state without a PDMP to track the possible overprescription of opioids, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

"We need to be honest and clear about the scale of what we are up against: Opioids are a modern plague," said Gov. Greitens. "There's not a corner of our state that hasn't been visited by this curse. There is no single program, or law, or executive order that can fix this crisis. This program is a step  and it's a big step  We won't wait for this problem to get worse. That's not an option."

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The issue of Libya should be addressed through political solutions, and the international community should strengthen cooperation to fight terrorism and prevent the north African country "from becoming the next Syria", Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Wednesday.

As the counter-terrorism war in Iraq and Syria are developing, the international community should work together to prevent terrorist forces from fleeing these regions to Libya, Wang said in a joint news conference with his Tunisian counterpart Khemaies Jhinaoui in Beijing.

Wang expressed China's position on the Libyan issue, pointing out that while sticking to the United Nations' leadership in mediation efforts, countries should "listen more to Libya's neighbors, including Tunisia, and take care of their reasonable concerns".

Also, China insists that the Libya's sovereignty, independence and the integrity of its territory should be respected and safeguarded, and that its future should be decided by its people, Wang said.

"The key is to continue urging all groups in Libya to dissolve differences through talks and negotiations, and to find a solution that takes into account interests of all parties through a political approach," Wang added.

"Development is the first priority for countries in west Asia and north Africa. Peace and stability is an important prerequisite for achieving development," the minister said.

The situation in Libya has worsened since civil war that broke out in 2011.

Jhinaoui told reporters in Wednesday's news conference that China and Tunisia, which "shares a long border with Libya", reached a consensus that the Libyan issue should be solved through peaceful ways.

Jhinaoui is in China for a five-day official visit that started on Monday. It is his first visit to China since he took office. Wang visited Tunisia in May last year.

Wang and Jhinaoui signed an agreement on establishing a consultation mechanism between the two countries' foreign ministries on Wednesday before the joint news conference.
Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox has said it is confident the Culture Secretary will make her decision on whether to refer its bid for Sky to the competition watchdog in the "coming days".

Fox said Karen Bradley should dismiss "flagrant political attempts to interfere" after a Government spokesman last week reportedly said she would not make a decision until after the parliamentary summer recess.

This would mean Fox would have to wait until at least next March to find out if its 11.7 billion swoop for Sky can go through, if Ms Bradley chooses to refer the deal to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

But in a letter from its lawyers Allen & Overy, Fox hit out at "political pressure" and took a swipe at former Labour leader Ed Miliband after he recently urged Ms Bradley "not to do a grubby deal with the Murdochs".

Ms Bradley said at the end of June she was "minded" to refer the deal to the CMA over concerns about diversity in the UK's media sector.

Mr Miliband has since joined forces with other higher profile senior MPs including Sir Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat leadership candidate, in a letter to the Government claiming broadcast regulator Ofcom made "fundamental failures" in its investigation and calling for a full CMA inquiry into the deal.

But Fox said: "Bowing to the political pressure of the Miliband letter would constitute the most blatant form of political interference, and would critically undermine the integrity of the quasi-judicial nature of the Secretary of State's role in this process.

"21st Century Fox trusts that the Secretary of State will dismiss these flagrant political attempts to interfere in the regulatory process and its timing, which are in stark contrast to the respect for the independence of Ofcom that the authors of the letter had until recently promulgated. By doing so, 21st Century Fox is confident that the Secretary of State should be able to reach a final decision on a reference to the CMA in the coming days."

It said Ms Bradley must ensure the case is dealt with "expeditiously and fairly".
The company said the challenges experienced in the first half of 2017 are expected to continue through the rest of the year.

Independent News & Media has issued a profit warning, blaming in part the costs of an independent review of corporate governance undertaken following a high profile board level disagreement late last year, and the high cost of libel cases.

Ireland's leading media group, which publishes the Belfast Telegraph and the Sunday Life, cited a number of factors for the warning, including ongoing uncertainty arising from Brexit, lower than expected growth in digital revenues and increased costs arising from legacy libel awards as well declines in circulation and advertising.

"INM announces a material reduction in its expectation for full year Profit Before Tax to below market consensus driven by the challenges the media industry and INM continue to face. These include a decline in circulation and readership, a decline in advertising revenues, ongoing uncertainty arising from Brexit, lower than expected growth in digital revenues and increased costs arising from legacy libel awards and the Independent Review," the company said in a trading statement.

The company said the challenges experienced in the first half of 2017 are expected to continue through the rest of the year.

Libel awards paid out by the business are identified as a particular issue, in the trading statement.

"The significance of a long tail of legacy libel cases and the unpredictability of the level of recent awards has materially impacted this year's performance and management are reviewing the provisioning of outstanding cases to adequately protect against any risk," it said.

INM said continued publishing advertising decline and lower than expected growth in digital revenues means total advertising is forecast to decline by around 7pc year on year. Circulation continues to decline at 7% year on year.

The group said cost saving plans are in place to partially mitigate revenue declines.
Finance giant Citigroup has said the opening of its latest EU hub in Frankfurt will not affect jobs at its large Belfast base.

The new office could see up to 200 jobs leave the UK due to Brexit.

Between 150 and 200 client-facing roles in sales and trading could be relocated from the UK to its Frankfurt office - which currently houses around 350 staff.

Citi's Belfast operation employs around 1,500 staff.

The bulked-up Frankfurt office will become a broker-dealer entity, allowing the US bank to continue serving EU clients after the UK leaves the bloc.

However, the move will not impact the location of its European headquarters, which will remain in London.

Citi currently employs around 9,000 staff in the UK, 6,000 of which are based in the City.

The announcement will be the culmination of months of planning, with the bank's Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) boss, James Cowles, having told staff in an internal memo earlier this year that it was looking at moving some front-office staff out of the UK.

Mr Cowles said in the memo that the bank had been preparing for Brexit since before the referendum last June, and that company decisions were being made on the assumption of a hard Brexit.

"A hard Brexit would require certain changes, including relocating certain client-facing roles to the EU from the UK, and the possible creation of a new broker-dealer entity within the EU," he said.
Northern Ireland may be a small corner of the world but some of music's most talented guitarists hail from right here.

Inspired by the latest Bushmills #AnswerTheCall event 'Whiskey and Strings', take a look at the best known guitarists from Northern Ireland and ask who do you think is the greatest?

1. Vivian Campbell (Def Leppard and Whitesnake)

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Hailing from Co. Tyrone, Viv Campbell is a global icon.

The rock hero hasnt yet forgotten his roots and continues to visit his hometown of Donaghmore. You never know if you might see him down in The Brewers House.

Playing guitar from the age of 12, Campbell eventually got to play with his all-time favourite band, Thin Lizzy in 2010, showing that passion and perseverance is a powerful duo.

2. Eric Bell (Thin Lizzy)

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As one of the founding members of Thin Lizzy, Eric Bell is cemented as one of the greatest guitarists of all time.

The Belfast-bred star defiantly walked out of his first job as an apprentice mechanic after hearing the Rolling Stones on the radio for the first time, inspired to follow his own dreams of becoming a musician.

With credentials like the opening riff for Whiskey in the Jar on his CV, Erics legacy will keep Belfast on the international music map for decades to come.

3. Van Morrison

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Belfast native, Van Morrison needs no introduction.

One of the most innovative and unique musicians in the world, his classic songs like Brown Eyed Girl, Domino and Wild Night were influenced by his fathers collection of blues, country and gospel.

Van the Man is a guitar icon who continues to collaborate with other musical greats like Ray Charles and Tom Jones as he builds one of the most revered catalogues in music history.

4. Nathan Connolly (Snow Patrol)

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With global hits like Chasing Cars and Just Say Yes under their belt, its easy to forget that rock band Snow Patrol had humble beginnings right here in Northern Ireland.

Lead guitarist and backing vocalist, Nathan Connolly hails from Belfast, and is credited with having heavily influenced Snow Patrols sound.

In 2013, Connolly also formed his own side project, Little Matador along with musicians who have played for The Frames, Bell X1, Turn and Concerto for Constantine.

Watch out for Little Matador who will play a Belfast gig as part of Belsonic on August 17 this year.

5.Paul Mahon (The Answer)

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Paul Mahon, of The Answer, and his bandmates count Jimmy Page and Def Leppard frontman, Joe Elliot as their fans.

The Answer has also supported rocknroll heavyweights Aerosmith, AC/DC, The Rolling Stones and Whitesnake.

Its safe to say Paul has secured his place in the Guitar Hall of Fame and has done a thing or two for Northern Irelands reputation on the riff scale too.

6. Gary Moore (Thin Lizzy)

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Also a member of Thin Lizzy, Robert William Gary Moore was born in Belfast and went on to become one of the world's most iconic guitar players.

Gary started playing the instrument at just eight years old and never looked back, performing with Thin Lizzy, Skid Row and Colosseum II.

He said his musical influences included Fleetwood Mac, Elvis Presley and The Beatles

7. Paul McMordie

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A lauded guitarist and instructor, Paul McMordie has put the NI guitar scene firmly on the map, teaching local stars Nathan Connolly from Snow Patrol and Paul Mahon from The Answer, as well as running the Belfast Guitar Festival which celebrates homegrown skills and has created a fraternity for local guitarists.

Paul takes inspiration from left-field players, carefully refining his methods and style to teach some of the worlds best musicians.
A furious former professor who taught in Northern Ireland has declared his home a "republic" in protest against Brexit.

Retired university lecturer Dr William Riches has made his wife Judith president, and granted his children and grandchildren citizenship.

The 77-year-old, who lectured around the world, including at Ulster University, says when the UK does eventually exit the European Union, visitors will require a visa costing at least 50 to step over the threshold of his three-storey home that overlooks the Bristol Channel.

He said: "I am a staunch Remainer and cannot see a future for this country now.

"All our literature, all our art, all our culture, all our history is intertwined with Europe, so the idea that we are not part of Europe, that we are some small, but significant little island, just annoyed me so much I had to do something.

"I was so mad after the vote to leave that I decided to put signs up and declare my home an independent republic.

"I feel very strongly that the wishes of the 48% of us who voted Remain are being totally ignored, so this is the only way I have left to protest.

"If I could declare us a republic and join Europe, I probably would.

"Maybe I'll look into it."

A notice in the front window of Europhile Dr Riches' terraced home - Middlewatch - in the village of Newnham, Gloucestershire, reads: 'The Independent Republic of Middlewatch. This Republic is a proud member of the European Union. All non-EU residents wishing to visit the Republic must have a valid EU passports.'

His notice has echoes of the 1949 Ealing comedy Passport To Pimlico, which starred Stanley Holloway and Margaret Rutherford as residents of a small part of London claiming links to the House of Burgundy so it can avoid the strict rationing and other post-war restrictions in force in the rest of the UK.

Dr Riches could not find a dark blue EU flag anywhere locally to adorn his home, but his Germany-based son sent one from the Continent, where they are commonplace, so he could display it alongside his notice in the window.

The former academic and his wife have been issuing visas to friends and family after going to the effort of designing and printing them.

They also plan to make their own passports, although they have not yet decided what colour they will be.

It has been claimed that the hard Brexit promised by Prime Minister Theresa May could encourage a hard border that will undermine 20 years of normalisation since the end of the Troubles.

Dr Riches said the family are "going to adopt the euro and sign the Maastricht Treaty" after establishing a consul in the neighbouring village Lydyney.

He joked: "The next stage will be to negotiate for membership and to appoint an ambassador in Brussels."

Dr Riches plans to hold elections annually and he expects to replace his wife as president after next year's vote.

The well-travelled former lecturer, who was born in Gloucestershire and has worked in universities in Canada and America, added that he felt the vote to leave the European Union was an assault on the United Kingdom's youth.

Dr Riches and his wife had put a notice in the window of their Middlewatch home before the June 23 referendum on the EU imploring older people to consider the wishes of the majority of the 18-35-year-olds who wanted to remain in Europe.

He added: "I don't understand why the older generation voted against their children.

"And I'd bet that the majority of people in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales would not be able to pass the citizenship exam that people have to take now."

Wife Judith said: "I think it's about time older people got their heads out of the clouds and recognised that the world doesn't go backwards, that things will never go back to the way they were when they were young."
Lord Jay of Ewelme, a member of the Lords EU Committee and former head of the Diplomatic Service

Political stability in Northern Ireland cannot be allowed to become the "collateral damage" of Brexit, a major new report warns.

A House of Lords committee also blamed Brexit for worsening divisions between the Protestant and Catholic communities.

The fallout from the vote to quit the EU contributed to the collapse of the Executive and this year's Assembly election in March that left Sinn Fein within one seat of the DUP at Stormont, the peers said.

The EU committee of the upper House further called on the Government to "raise its game" in consulting the devolved administrations and give them "real influence" - even though devolution has been suspended in Northern Ireland since January.

It warned that given the deal between the DUP and Conservatives to prop up Theresa May, the Government should seek to maintain confidence among nationalists.

Last year's referendum exacerbated divisions in the two-party Executive with the DUP campaigning to leave and Sinn Fein focused on remaining - divisions which sharpened after the UK-wide poll resulted in a Brexit verdict.

Sinn Fein called for a border poll on Irish unity and special designated status for Northern Ireland within the European Union, while the DUP stressed the province must leave on the same terms as the rest of the UK.

"These tensions may have contributed to the breakdown of relations that led to the collapse of the Northern Ireland Executive in January," the report said. The committee visited Edinburgh and Cardiff to take evidence from the devolved administrations there - but did not come to Belfast because the Executive had collapsed.

The report warned that the appointment of new Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and the fact that no nationalist MPs sit at Westminster due to Sinn Fein's policy of abstentionism and the SDLP's loss of its three representatives in the general election "created new uncertainty, underlining the fragility of the political settlement in Northern Ireland".

It stated that the 1998 Good Friday deal "established a delicate equilibrium" and it is "imperative that Brexit does not weaken this equilibrium or the commitment and confidence of both unionist and nationalist communities in the political process".

While the agreement between the Conservative Government and the DUP provides an opportunity for Northern Ireland's interests to gain attention and prominence, the Government must also take account of the interests of the nationalist community in order to maintain its confidence, it added.

"Political stability in Northern Ireland must not be allowed to become 'collateral damage' of Brexit."

It recommended a Joint Ministerial Committee from the regions which could meet monthly as negotiations towards a spring 2019 departure from the European Union go on - but Northern Ireland would not be represented because it has no Executive at Stormont.

"Obviously we all would like to see this problem resolved," Liberal Democrat committee member Baroness Suttie said yesterday.

"I think the report shows how absolutely key it is that we get an Assembly and Executive back in place."

The report was agreed before the publication of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill last week in the House of Commons.

It sparked a joint response from the Scottish and Welsh administrations that they could seek to withhold legislative consent for the deal.

The Lords report, however, concluded that a durable outcome to the two years of Brexit talks will need the consent of all the nations of the UK, and of their elected representatives.

Lord Jay of Ewelme, a member of the Lords EU Committee and former head of the Diplomatic Service, said: "The UK Government must respect the devolved institutions.

"It's not enough saying it's listening to them - it's actually got to take account of what they say and adjust its approach to accommodate their specific needs."
The alleged offences relate to searches carried out at his home after police stopped a BMW car he was in on April 27.

An alleged drugs supplier returned to custody after flouting a mobile phone ban was just filming a loyalist band parade for his Brazilian girlfriend, the High Court heard on Wednesday.

Paul Edgar, 31, missed out on the cultural highlight of his year - the Twelfth of July march - because of the "incredibly stupid" decision to record a procession the night before, a defence lawyer said.

Edgar, of Claragh Court in Strathfoyle, Co Derry, was readmitted to bail with a warning that he may be kept in prison for any further breaches.

He faces charges of possessing and being concerned in the supply of cocaine, supplying cannabis, having Class B drugs and handling stolen goods.

The alleged offences relate to searches carried out at his home after police stopped a BMW car he was in on April 27.

Prosecution counsel said quantities of drugs, cannabis grinders, scales and list of names and monetary values were seized.

Messages and contacts from 365 pages of phone reports have still to be fully examined, the court heard.

Edgar had been granted bail back in April, with conditions including a prohibition on keeping a mobile.

But the prosecutor said he was detained again when police spotted him with a phone in Castlederg on the Eleventh night.

Sean Doherty, defending, argued that Edgar had been innocently filming a parade through the village for his Dublin-based Brazilian girlfriend.

"This man is proud of his loyal and Orange cultural background," the barrister said.

"He explained to her a little about it and she asked him to record part of the band parade and send it to her in a message."

Mr Doherty insisted his client denies any involvement in commercial drugs supply, and only purchased the phone that day.

He told the court Edgar ended up paying a significant penalty in missing the main Orange Order parade.

"This man looks forward to the Twelfth of July every year, it's the most important day in his cultural existence," he added.

"He was incredibly stupid in taking the action that he did."

Granting Edgar bail once more, Madam Justice McBride stressed he may not get another chance.

She told him: "If you continue to behave the way you have then you will find yourself spending many more days (in Maghaberry prison)."
The Joint Ministerial Committee (European Negotiations) allows ministers from the UK, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to discuss the Brexit process

The UK Government needs to "raise its game" and make talks with the devolved administrations over Brexit more effective, a committee of Lords has said

The Joint Ministerial Committee (European Negotiations) was set up to allow ministers from the UK, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to discuss the process, but a new report said it " is clear that at a basic level its meetings are not being treated with respect or organised efficiently".

Peers on the House of Lords EU Committee insisted "this needs to change" as they said the committee should be allowed to agree common positions on the Brexit issues of most importance to the governments in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast.

The call comes after Scottish Brexit Minister Mike Russell demanded the JMC meetings be urgently reconvened by the UK Government.

In their report, looking at the impact of exiting the European Union on the devolved administrations, peers said they back " the view of most of our witnesses that the UK Government needs to raise its game to make the JMC (EN) effective".

This should include better preparation, including bilateral discussions ahead of meetings, a structured work programme, greater transparency "and a willingness to accept that the JMC (EN), even if not a formal decision-making body, is more than a talking-shop", according to the report

Here the Lords suggested the JMC "should be authorised to agree common positions on key matters affecting devolved competences in time to inform the UK Government's negotiating position"

The report highlighted concerns over the " apparent deterioration of relations between the UK and Scottish governments" as a result of the UK's vote to leave the EU.

After almost two-thirds (62%) of Scots voted to remain in the 2016 referendum, the Lords also stressed there is a " strong political and economic case for making differentiated arrangements for Scotland".

However they dismissed Scottish Government calls to remain in the European single market after the rest of the UK leaves the trading bloc as being "politically impracticable, legally highly complex and economically potentially disruptive to the functioning of the UK single market".

The report made clear the " integrity and efficient operation of the UK single market must be an over-arching objective for the whole United Kingdom" during the Brexit process - but added "that objective does not preclude differentiated arrangements for Scotland in some areas, and nor does it justify excluding the Scottish Government from the Brexit process".

Ministers in London and Edinburgh need to "set aside their differences and work constructively together to protect the interests of the citizens of Scotland in the final Brexit deal", the Lords said.

While they made clear they did not want new areas of powers to be devolved, the report said the " specific labour market and demographic needs of the devolved nations should be accommodated in the context of Brexit".

With Scotland having relied on immigration to boost its population, the report said the UK Government should use its forthcoming Immigration Bill "to look for opportunities to enhance the role of the devolved institutions in managing EU migration", adding that "local and regional economic and demographic needs, rather than central targets, should drive decision-making".

In Northern Ireland it " appears that the Brexit debate has undermined political stability and exacerbated cross-community divisions", contributing to the collapse of the Northern Ireland Executive and the calling of an early Assembly election, the report said.

Consequently the Lords warned: " Political stability in Northern Ireland must not be allowed to become 'collateral damage' of Brexit."

Meanwhile, they said Wales could be " profoundly affected" by leaving the EU as the economy is "highly reliant" on membership of the single market - with the report saying it is "therefore particularly vulnerable" if UK access to this is reduced.

Lord Jay of Ewelme, a member of the committee and former head of the diplomatic service, said: " Brexit's impact on the future of the United Kingdom will be profound and unpredictable. At the moment the internal politics are pretty toxic, and we saw only last week the start of what could become a deep and bitter dispute on the role of the devolved institutions in passing the EU (Withdrawal) Bill.

"We can't afford this. The UK Government must respect the devolved institutions. It's not enough saying it's listening to them-it's actually got to take account of what they say and adjust its approach to accommodate their specific needs. Equally the devolved administrations must work with, not against, the UK Government to get the best Brexit for the whole of the UK."

Mr Russell said: " As is becoming clearer by the day, Brexit is causing deep uncertainty across Scotland - and an extreme Brexit outside the single market and customs union will cause severe long-term economic damage, hitting jobs, growth and living standards.

"This report makes clear Brexit should not be used as cover for a 'power grab', and that powers in areas such as fisheries, agriculture and environmental protection should be returning from Brussels to Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast - not Westminster.

"But just as there should be no power grab, there should be no attempt to use Brexit to cut Scotland's budget, and under the current constitutional arrangements the Scottish Government supports the retention of the Barnett Formula.

" This report also calls on the UK Government to 'raise its game' in consulting the devolved governments - UK ministers should heed that call by resuming the JMC process, as this report calls for, and by agreeing to involve the Scottish and other administrations directly with a seat at the negotiating table.

"Our clear position is that we want a way forward that allows Scotland to remain within the single market and this report notes the need for a specific Scottish solution. We will do everything we can to help deliver the best possible deal for our society and economy."

A UK Government spokesman said: "We have been clear that the Repeal Bill will not take away any decision-making powers from the devolved administrations immediately after exit.

"Instead, to protect the UK internal market, some decision-making powers being transferred into UK law will be held temporarily to allow intensive discussion and consultation with the devolved administrations.

"As the Secretary of State has made clear, it is our expectation that the outcome of this process will provide a significant increase in the decision-making power of each devolved administration and we are committed to positive and productive engagement."
James Brokenshire said an extra 90 million has been allocated to health and education services in Northern Ireland

An extra 90 million has been allocated to health and education services in Northern Ireland, James Brokenshire said.

School principals had faced making "impossible" budget cuts while funds covering NHS nurse training have been under pressure and doctors have threatened to leave the public system due to problems with GP care.

With powersharing stalled in Northern Ireland there are no ministers to take decisions and civil servants have been running public services.

The Northern Ireland Secretary has stepped in, using civil service advice to reallocate budget money, taking into account extra funding provided in the Chancellor's Spring Budget.

The total of extra money is worth 131 million for everyday services as well as capital infrastructure expenditure. That compares to an overall spending package worth more than 10 billion.

It includes money carried forward from last year's budget and an increase in rates income, the tax paid by property owners, plus a reduction in welfare reform costs.

The bill for Assembly members at Stormont, which has not sat in months, has also reduced slightly.

Mr Brokenshire said: "While agreement remains possible, it is clear that an Executive will not be capable of being formed before the autumn.

"During that time pressures will continue to build, particularly in health and education services.

"And so, as I set out in my written statement on July 11, I consider it necessary to provide further clarity to support Northern Ireland permanent secretaries in addressing those pressures, maintaining public services and continuing to uphold the commitments arising from the Stormont House and Fresh Start Agreements."

The extra money includes 60.1 million for health and 30 million for education.

The allocations do not include an extra 1 billion pledged to Northern Ireland as part of the Conservatives' deal to ensure DUP support at Westminster.

Mr Brokenshire added: "This Government recognises the unique challenges faced by Northern Ireland as a result of its distinct history and geographical position.

"However, a restored Executive will need to agree how it wishes to allocate these funds to projects within the priority areas."

He said the Government had ultimate responsibility to uphold political stability and good governance in Northern Ireland.

"Accordingly, I reaffirm that the UK Government remains prepared to take forward legislation at Westminster to give authority for the expenditure of Northern Ireland departments should an Executive not be restored in the autumn.

"If resolution continues to prove intractable beyond that point, we will take further steps to provide the necessary political decision-making in the best interests of everyone in Northern Ireland."

Devolved ministers in Belfast have not taken up their posts for months after Sinn Fein pulled out of the institutions.

Late deputy first minister Martin McGuinness resigned in January in protest at the DUP's handling of a botched green energy scheme which threatens to cost the taxpayer millions extra.

Alliance Party deputy leader Stephen Farry said real damage to the economy and public services had already occurred.

He said: " Major investments and reforms have been delayed in the absence of any devolved Executive.

"Bearing in mind the tight public expenditure context, every day entails opportunity costs in terms of any strategic approach to spending decisions and frustrates efficiency and effectiveness in terms of spending decisions."
Plans for a facility to process hazardous liquids near one of Ireland's most environmentally sensitive coastal regions have been abandoned.

Waste company Re-Gen confirmed it had cancelled an application for a permit for Warrenpoint port on Carlingford Lough and said it did not want to cause further distress or concern.

Oyster farmers, environmentalists and politicians had raised fears over the proposal, with the harbour authority also warning that a hazardous waste facility was not part of its 35-year plan.

Joseph Doherty, managing director of Newry-based Re-Gen, said the company spoke to local representatives and assessed the port's blueprint before pulling the plan.

"We have seriously considered their views along with those of the wider community on both sides of the lough and, despite our confidence that the facility would not have had in fact any negative impact, we have concluded that we do not wish to cause them any further distress or concern," he said.

Re-Gen applied to the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) for a licence for Pollution Prevention and Control (PPC) in February.

There was no obligation to seek consent from the Environmental Protection Agency in the Republic despite the port overlooking the border.

Thousands of tonnes of oysters and mussels are harvested every year from the waters in Carlingford, regarded as one of the most pristine shellfish producing regions in Ireland.

Campaigners opposed to the hazardous waste facility also claimed the port site is too close to the Area of Special Scientific Interest (ASSI) on the northern shore, it is 1km from a special area of conservation and the wider lough area also includes a marine conservation zone and a special protection area.

Re-Gen insisted that any processing, storage or transport of hazardous waste would not have had a detrimental impact on the environment, health and wellbeing of the community.

"As a company operating in the waste sector we are fully committed to applying the highest possible duty of care to our employees, the environment and the wider community," Mr Doherty said.

The No Toxic Lough group, which campaigned against the facility, said the worry of leaks or spills weighed heavily on people's minds.

"We recognise that a solution to manage hazardous waste that we produce in this country is badly needed but you simply cannot build such a facility in a highly populated residential area that is prone to high tide flooding and which has significant ecological importance," a spokeswoman said.
CCTV footage of missing Dean McIlwaine has been released by the police.

As the search for the 22-year-old Newtownabbey barber continued, police made public images of Dean entering a Spar shop in the hope that memories might be jogged and the mystery of his disappearance solved.

Last night, a team of 15-20 police officers, with four members of a search and rescue team, continued the search of wasteland behind Carnmoney Cemetery near his home.

Meanwhile, friends and family were continuing with their efforts to find him. Posters have been widely distributed and different locations combed.

PSNI Detective Inspector Chris Millar last night said: "Dean was last seen in the Carnmoney Road area of Newtownabbey shortly before 1pm on Thursday of last week, 13 July.

"Dean is described as being 5'8" in height; of medium build with blue eyes, dark hair and a beard. He also has sleeve tattoos on both arms.

"It has now been established that Dean was wearing a short sleeve maroon shirt, denim knee length shorts and dark coloured canvas shoes. He was wearing a gold watch on his right wrist.

"Police continue to conduct searches in the local area and we would appeal to Dean, or anyone who has seen him or knows his whereabouts, to make contact with police by calling 101, quoting reference number 121 of 14/7/17."

On Monday night, a huge crowd gathered at Belfast City Hall to volunteer to help take part in the search.

His brother Glen told the Belfast Telegraph: "We are all distraught - it's totally out of character for him."
Glenavy: The scenes of three road accidents across Northern Ireland yesterday

A driver in his sixties has lost his life in Glenavy and another man was seriously injured near Newry.

A third crash saw a lorry overturned near Belfast International Airport, while the fourth incident happened elsewhere in Co Antrim.

The victim of the fatal accident was the driver of a black Skoda that crashed around 10am on the Moira Road in Glenavy, close to the junction of the Carnkilly Road.

No other vehicles were involved.

Police cordoned the scene off for hours yesterday to conduct their investigations, reopening the road shortly after 5pm.

No details about the man's identity were released.

SDLP councillor for the area Conor Quinn said he was deeply saddened to learn of the death.

"There is ongoing concerns in the community about safety on that stretch of road," he said.

"It is very busy, being the main road between Nutts Corner and Moira

"My thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved family."

It brings the total deaths on Northern Ireland's roads this year to 32, four fewer than the same time last year.

Police have appealed for anyone travelling on the Moira Road yesterday morning who witnessed the accident to contact officers in Lisburn or the Collision Investigation Unit on 101, quoting reference number 297 of June 18, 2017.

A second single-vehicle crash was reported just after 2pm yesterday on the A1 at Sheepsbridge near Newry.

Police confirmed the male driver of the car was taken to hospital, where his condition is described as serious.

The A1 was closed in both directions throughout the afternoon before being reopened around 8pm.

A third incident saw a lorry overturn on the Ballyrobin Road near the airport at around 2pm.

A recovery vehicle was soon on site to clear the upended tanker, with the obstruction cleared around 7pm.

No injuries were reported from the incident.

Yesterday evening there was a fourth incident, with a single-vehicle crash reported shortly after 7pm on the Carnlough Road near Broughshane.

Police confirmed they had closed the road with diversions in place between Munie Road and Hazelbank Road.

The surge in incidents follows a dramatic rescue on Saturday in Co Donegal when the car of a married couple entered a river in Porthall, just outside Lifford.

Andrew Johnston, an Ulster University student from Lurgan, spoke of how he made four attempts to rescue Loreta McKinlay from the vehicle.

He recalled: "I saw the wreckage of a car and a man, whose face was covered in blood, and standing on the top of an upturned car.

"I'm not a gold medal swimmer but I got out to him and asked him if there was anybody else in the car.

"He told me his wife was in the car. To be honest, it wasn't the answer I wanted to hear, but I knew I had to do something."

With help from the injured Mr McKinlay, both escaped the sinking car.

The McKinlays were later taken to Altnagelvin Hosptial, with Mrs McKinlay later transferred to Letterkenny Hospital.
Stephen Nolan has defended his BBC salary, saying he always set out to earn as much as possible.

Speaking on Radio Foyle, he outlined the facts of what he does to earn his over 400,000 a year salary also saying he cared about the people he engaged with.

<<< Read the full list here >>>

He said: "I would not be as arrogant to say what I am worth. But I am fair game and ready and prepared to answer questions.

"The facts are that I am doing five radio shows a week on Radio Ulster. I'm doing three Nolan shows on 5 Live, it's a network job. Then I do Question Time Extra time, another job I managed to get. And then I am doing 18 Nolan Live television shows a year.

"Now it's for others and its for the BBC to decided.... The BBC has very skilled negotiators who understand the market and they try to negotiate what they think they need to pay for the presenters they want.

"And I want to work at the BBC.

"I have always said from day one I want to work as much as I can, as hard as I can, be the best I can be and yeah I want to earn as much as I can."

I care about the BBC, I care about the people who engage with my programmes. Stephen Nolan

He refused to disclose what he was paid from his production companies saying it was "commercially sensitive" but freely available through company records. He also said he could not disclose his exact salary as it was BBC policy but if the broadcaster wanted to do that he would be supportive.

And he said he had received other offers from rivals for "more money and less work".

"But it is a pleasure for me to work at the BBC."

The presenter said the coverage of the salaries since their release had been "fair" but would not comment on other stars' pay.

"Whether people believe it or not. Not only do I care about the BBC, I care about the people who engage with my programmes. It is a privilege to do so. Don't forget the BBC wouldn't let me in the door, I had to fight to get in.

"Let others decide what they want to say about me."

His appearance on Radio Foyle was at odds with his earlier statement that he would speak about pay on his Thursday Radio Ulster Show. He was offered the chance to go on BBC Talkback, which went out at the same time as his Radio Foyle interview, but he declined.

"This will be an interesting day," the broadcaster said on opening his Radio Ulster show on Wednesday morning before his earnings were revealed.

I will be as accountable to all of you as we do every other day with other people. Stephen Nolan

The corporation published the long-awaited list of what it pays its biggest stars at as part of its Royal Charter and in its annual report.

Broadcaster Nolan was at odds with fellow BBC presenter William Crawley ahead of the disclosure by the corporation.

Speaking on his Radio Ulster show, Mr Nolan - who dubs his programme "The biggest show in the country" - said he had turned down opportunity to talk about the revelations on Mr Crawley's Talkback show as he wanted as big an audience as possible to hear him.

Earlier Crawley tweeted: "Stephen Nolan has turned down an invitation from @BBCTalkback to be interviewed on today's programme about BBC salaries."

Nolan referred to the tweet during his show, telling his listeners: "What I actually said to William is, I think it is really important for the maximum amount of people to have a chance to listen to someone interviewing me, and I think it is therefore important not to go on the smaller phone-in show but to go on the show which has the bigger audience."

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In response, Crawley tweeted: "I well understand that @StephenNolan would prefer to manage a story about himself on his own show rather than face me in an interview today."

In response to the Belfast Telegraph, which claimed Nolan was "joking" when he gave his justification for not going on Talkback, Nolan replied to the story link on Twitter: "Not joking. Important that I speak on the most listened to show in NI."

He told his listeners he would not have advance sight of the questions he would be asked on Thursday's show.

He said he was inviting an "independent" interviewer to ask the questions to ensure he was fully scrutinised and also promised to field callers' questions on his salary.

"I will be as accountable to all of you as we do every other day with other people," he said.

However, he later appeared on Radio Foyle to give his first interview.

The list of top BBC earners revealed that Nolan, who works seven days a week, is paid more than a number of well-known broadcasters and presenters, including Radio Four's Today presenter Nick Robinson (250,000 to 299,000), newsreader and Antiques Roadshow presenter Fiona Bruce (350,000 and 399,000), and the BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg (200,000 to 249,000).

He was the only Northern Ireland-based BBC broadcaster on the list of those paid at least 150,000.

There were 96 people named on the list, a third of which are women.

It is the first time the information has been made public. The BBC has expressed fears that the revelations will spark pay claims among staff and also reveal to other broadcasters what it pays saying the list could become a "poachers' charter" leading to a bidding war.

The salaries of senior management is already published. The head of BBC Northern Ireland, Peter Johnston is paid 153,000 a year.

The DUP MP Gregory Campbell questioned the timing of the announcement, which the BBC branded as "nonsense".

It will be interesting to see how fair the reporting around that is. Stephen Nolan

Speaking on the BBC on Wednesday morning, Mr Campbell added: "The issue is one of openness and transparency.

"If there is a big event and the BBC sends hundreds or employees we are entitled to know if it is value for money.

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"The BBC can not hide behind a veil of secrecy. They can't get on a soap box and now say they are committed to openness and transparency when they have been anything but in the last 20 or 30 years.

"The BBC need to go much further but it is progress."

People will forget that Im working three jobs, seven days a week. Stephen Nolan

Mr Nolans has been the source of much discussion and speculation over the years. He has been notoriously tight-lipped on his wage packet, despite using his BBC Radio Ulster morning show to repeatedly blast politicians and public sector workers about their pay. He has often been challenged by Gregory Campbell on his own show to reveal his earnings.

He works seven days a week presenting nine radio shows as well as television commitments.

On Saturday he dodged the latest question about how much he is paid. A caller to his Radio 5 Live show, which he broadcasts from the BBCs Manchester headquarters, asked him what the revelations would show.

Nolan laughed off the question and said he could not comment.

The presenter of BBC Radio Ulsters so-called Biggest Show In The County also last year dodged claims live on air he is paid 300,000 a year by the BBC.

He dismissed as pure speculation press claims he gets the equivalent of 800 a day to front his two television shows and his programmes on Radio Ulster and 5 Live.

It was revealed earlier this year Nolan is worth more than 1.7million after opening three new private companies to focus on TV production activities.

Last October, Nolan said: If the BBC decides to publish my salary I will be putting up no opposition whatsoever and no doubt it will be discussed on the show openly.

I think they publish a total figure which is why Im thinking it will combine the three jobs. Its going to be a lot of money.

It will be interesting to see how fair the reporting around that is, and if people will forget that Im working three jobs, seven days a week.
The leader of a group that commemorates dead IRA members has denied in court he was involved in an "arranged" traffic accident.

Martin Lafferty (55), from Clady, Strabane, sued the driver of a rented car, as well as Hertz Rent-a-Car itself, for injuries arising out of a collision in Lifford, Co Donegal, on June 28, 2011.

Mr Lafferty was driving with three passengers while the other car, driven by Gareth Feeney, with addresses in Strabane and Middlesex, had a total of five people in the vehicle.

Seven out of the nine, including Mr Lafferty, were awarded sums of less than 10,000 in Buncrana Circuit Court in 2015 for injuries. Hertz is appealing the awards to the Republic's High Court.

The court heard a Garda officer who arrived at the scene saw extensive damage to the rear passenger side of Mr Lafferty's car and some damage to the front of the other vehicle.

Under cross-examination Mr Lafferty said he had been involved in three other traffic accidents in the last 14 or 15 years, including one that was settled and one he was still pursuing.

He was injured in 1993 when he was shot by a British soldier in Newtownards. His father was Neil Lafferty, who was in charge of the West Tyrone brigade of the IRA and who died in Long Kesh.

He agreed he was the person carrying a tricolour at the head of a commemoration march by the Joseph Plunkett 1916 Society - which commemorates the republican dead - in November 2011, a few months after the accident in which he claimed he suffered pain in his head and right shoulder.

He said he was the leader of that society but disagreed that carrying the flag was difficult with his injuries.

He said all the people in his car were members of the society while a person in the other car was a member of a similar group, the Charlie Darcy 1916 Society.

Hertz's lawyer put it to him this was "an arranged accident between you and Mr Feeney".

He replied: "That is a very serious allegation and it is untrue."

The case continues.
David Mundell was challenged to explain the deal by SNP MP Pete Wishart

David Mundell has sidestepped calls to explain if he objected to the UK Government's 1 billion DUP deal.

SNP MP Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) said it was wrong to describe T heresa May's agreement as "back door", adding: "This is locked away in secure accommodation."

He highlighted pre-agreement remarks from Mr Mundell, in which the Scottish Secretary said he would not agree to anything which could be interpreted as back door funding for Northern Ireland and meant Scotland and other devolved nations missing out.

Extra money offered to Northern Ireland helped Theresa May secure the support of the DUP's 10 MPs to help prop up her minority administration.

Speaking in the Commons, Mr Wishart said: " The Secretary of State could not be more clear 'I'm not going to agree to anything that could be construed as back door funding to Northern Ireland'.

"This isn't just back door, this is locked away in secure accommodation."

Mr Wishart challenged Mr Mundell to explain what representations he made to Prime Minister Theresa May and if he offered "any objections on behalf of Scotland" at the time the deal was being considered.

Mr Mundell replied: "On June 8 the people of Scotland delivered their verdict on which party in this House stands up for Scotland and Scotland's financial arrangements.

"The Scottish Conservatives got 12 additional MPs, Scottish National Party 21 less."
Francis Teague appeared at Omagh Magistrates Court accused of claiming 9,899 in benefits he was not entitled to

Three men have been convicted of benefit fraud after appearing in court in separate incidents.

Francis Teague appeared at Omagh Magistrates Court accused of claiming 9,899 in benefits he was not entitled to.

The 64-year-old, of Letteree Road, Dromore, claimed Jobseeker's Allowance while failing to declare an occupational pension. He was given a three-year conditional discharge.

In the second case, Steven Weldon was convicted at Belfast Magistrates Court for wrongly claiming 18,812 in benefits.

The 32-year-old, of Roden Street, Belfast, claimed Jobseeker's Allowance and Housing Benefit while failing to declare employment. He was given 60 hours' community service and 12 months' probation.

Separately, Desmond Hood was convicted at Belfast Magistrates Court for claiming 10,251 in benefits.

Hood (64), of Skegoneill Avenue, claimed Jobseeker's Allowance and Income Support while failing to declare an occupational pension. He was given a two-year conditional discharge.
Julie Jones, who taught Business Studies at Glenlola Collegiate in Bangor, is said by her family to have died peacefully at the Ulster Hospital, Dundonald on Sunday

Tributes have been paid to Northern Ireland teacher Julie Jones who has died suddenly.

Julie Jones, who taught Business Studies at Glenlola Collegiate in Bangor, is said by her family to have died peacefully at the Ulster Hospital, Dundonald on Sunday. She was married with two children.

A tribute on the school website states: The staff and pupils of Glenlola Collegiate are deeply saddened and shocked by the sudden death yesterday of Mrs Julie Jones.

Julie was a very popular and dedicated teacher and will be greatly missed by us all.

We would like to convey our sincere sympathies to her family and friends and to let them know that they are in our thoughts and prayers at this very difficult time.

Mrs Jones, nee McBrien, was one of three Business Studies staff at Glenlola.

A funeral notice placed by her family said she was the beloved wife of Stefan, dearly loved mother of Callum and Ben, devoted daughter of George and the late Betty McBrien, as well as a much loved sister of Gail, Joanne and Barbara.

The notice added Mrs Jones, who lived in Holywood, would be lovingly remembered by her family and all the family circle.

Friends and family were said to be too distraught to speak yesterday. One pupil told the Belfast Telegraph: Its just sad and shocking.

A condolence book has been opened at a Spar shop on the Rathmore Road in Bangor, in memory of Mrs Jones.

In an emotional Facebook message, marked for past and present Glenlola pupils, the Spar worker who organised the tribute wrote: It has come to light that a much loved staff member has suddenly and very sadly passed away.

Mrs Jones was an amazing teacher with such a kind and warm heart.

We would like her family to know that we are all with them during this very sad time, so we have made a book of condolences to be given to her family.

Please fill the book with your fondest memories, kind words and even photos. The book will be collected on the morning of Thursday, 20th July to be given to the family.

Mrs Jones funeral service will be held tomorrow at Ballycassidy House funeral home in Enniskillen.
Sir Richard Branson helped establish a group of international statesmen known as The Elders a decade ago

Sir Richard Branson has called on people to follow in Nelson Mandela's footsteps as he urged redoubled support for global peace and tolerance.

The British business tycoon helped establish a group of international statesmen known as The Elders a decade ago. Former Irish president Mary Robinson is among its members.

The Elders, led by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, have launched their Walk Together campaign, a year-long initiative to promote empathy, diversity and tolerance and "bridge the fault lines" of nationalism and xenophobia.

At a special event in Cape Town, Sir Richard said: "Mandela's legacy of moral courage and compassion endures to this day.

"It is a fitting celebration of this legacy that The Elders today launched this new campaign, Walk Together."

The Elders came together after a conversation between Sir Richard and musician Peter Gabriel.

They asked Mr Mandela whether a small group of people could use their collective influence to tackle world problems.

With the late South African president and anti-apartheid campaigner's support the organisation came to life.

It has worked to help build peace and heal divisions in Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel and Palestine, the Korean Peninsula, Burma, Sri Lanka, Sudan and South Sudan, Syria and Zimbabwe.

One of the Elders, Graca Machel, said: "Whilst this event is an opportunity to reflect on the past 10 years, it's much more important that we continue to look forward, and to work together in order to drive change at both a community and governmental level.

"With this in mind, we're hugely excited to have launched the Walk Together campaign, and to further inspire people across the world to work for the freedoms for which Madiba (Mandela) dedicated his life."

Attendees at the launch took part in a symbolic walk from the Grand Parade outside Cape Town City Hall, where Nelson Mandela made his celebrated freedom speech in 1990 upon his release from prison.
SDLP leader Colum Eastwood has defended a ex-Irish diplomat who controversially called for Ireland to follow Britain out of the EU.

Earlier this month, Ireland's former ambassador to Canada, Jamaica, and the Bahamas Ray Bassett came in for a barrage of criticism after proposing the idea of 'Irexit' in a report produced for UK-based think tank Policy Exchange.

In it, Mr Bassett critiqued the Irish government's current position, and suggested that in the event of the UK leaving the Single Market and the Customs Union, it would be in Ireland's best interests to follow them out.

Mr Eastwood was speaking at the annual political gathering at MacGill Summer School in the Glenties, Co Donegal.

Responding to Mr Bassett's analysis, the SDLP leader said: "Ray hasnt convinced me and Im pretty sure he never will - but there is a difference between disagreeing with someone and throwing them under the bus.

"In Ireland were sometimes too fond of those kinds of buses and less fond of allowing the development of ideas.

"Not only is Ray Bassett entitled to his considered view but its a view which actually calls on all of us with the opposing argument to improve and deepen our own positions on the European Union and our nations relationship with it.

"Thats how good public debate is supposed to work and its how good politics develops."

Mr Eastwood went on to state that the challenge of a hard border "is almost unmeasurable and unimaginable" - pointing out that 1.85 million cars, 177,000 lorries, and 208,000 light vans cross the border each month.

"In truth, the main effect of the imposition of a hardened border in Ireland would rip up and rip apart what have become the familiar pattern of life from Derry to Dundalk," he said.

"It would bring a shuddering halt to the familiar which we have all been living with since the beginning days of the peace process."

Speaking about the challenge facing countries across Europe, he said that "Brexit had been the catalyst through which Europe has rediscovered its mojo" and that the "twin pillars of Macron and Merkel have injected a renewed sense of purpose into the European Project".

Mr Eastwood also bemoaned the approach of the British government to the Brexit negotiations, saying that "meaningless mantra after meaningless mantra is a pitiful offering for what was once the most effective diplomatic machine on the planet".
The parents of terminally-ill baby Charlie Gard have lost the latest fight in their legal battle over his treatment.

Chris Gard and Connie Yates and doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London had been in disagreement over a brain scan carried out on the 11-month-old prior to a gathering of specialists.

The couple said an electroencephalogram (EEG) should be carried out for no longer than 30 minutes.

But specialists at Great Ormond Street, where Charlie is being cared for, said a scan would have to be carried out for at least four hours in order to generate useful data.

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Mr Justice Francis has ruled in favour of Ormond Street doctors.

He said the scan should be of such duration as treating clinicians may advise.

The judge did not analyse the dispute at a normal court hearing.

He had considered competing written arguments on Saturday, prior to experts gathering at Great Ormond Street on Monday and Tuesday.

But he has made detail of the out-of-hours dispute available to journalists.

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Charlies parents want Mr Justice Francis to rule that their son, who suffers from a rare genetic condition and has brain damage, should be allowed to undergo a therapy trial overseen by a specialist in New York.

Great Ormond Street specialists say the therapy is experimental and will not help.

They say life support treatment should stop.

Charlies parents, who are in their 30s and come from Bedfont, west London, have already lost battles in the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court in London.

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They have also failed to persuade European Court of Human Rights judges to intervene.

But the couple say there is new evidence and want Mr Justice Francis, who in April ruled in favour of Great Ormond Street and said Charlie should be allowed to die with dignity, to carry out a fresh analysis of their case.

In April, the judge ruled in favour of Great Ormond Street and said Charlie should be allowed to die with dignity.

Mr Justice Francis has considered the couples latest claims at preliminary hearings in the Family Division of the High Court in London.

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Last week, Mr Justice Francis suggested that the American specialist, Michio Hirano, a professor of neurology at the Columbia University Medical Centre in New York, should travel to London to meet Great Ormond Street doctors and other clinicians.

Dr Hirano has examined Charlie and discussed his case while visiting Great Ormond Street on Monday and Tuesday.

Mr Justice Francis is due to oversee further court hearings in the next few days.

The dispute about the scan arose at the weekend, prior to the expert gathering.

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On Wednesday, Mr Justice Francis released the order he made after analysing emailed arguments from rival legal teams on Saturday.

The order gives an outline of the dispute and his decision.

Mr Justice Francis said Charlies parents had agreed in principle to further imaging being carried out on the little boys brain prior to the expert gathering.

He said the disagreement was over how long any scan should last.
Paul Flynn urged MPs to break the law by smoking cannabis in the Palace of Westminster (Gareth Fuller/PA)

An MP has urged people to break the law by using cannabis at the Houses of Parliament.

Labour former frontbencher Paul Flynn said using the Class B substance at the Palace of Westminster was the only way we can get through the common mind of the Government.

He said his call would challenge the Government and authorities to arrest them and take them in.

Speaking during a debate on drugs policy in the Commons, Mr Flynn said: I would call on people, and I know were not supposed to do this as members, to break the law.

To come here and use cannabis here and see what happens and challenge the Government, the authorities, to arrest them and take them in.

Thats the only way we can get through the common mind of the Government, which is set in concrete and the whole laws are evidence free and prejudice rich  lets see them do that.

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Mr Flynn also repeated a story of how a campaigner drank cannabis tea while with him on the House of Commons terrace.

He said he had committed a terrible crime with multiple sclerosis sufferer Elizabeth Brice, who campaigned as Clare Hodges for the legalisation of medicinal cannabis before her death in 2011.

She came to this House and together, collaborating with her, we committed a terrible crime on the Terrace of this House because I supplied her with a cup of hot water into which she put cannabis and she drank cannabis tea, he told the Commons.

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He said she was liable to go to prison for seven years for the act, and added: I probably would have been accompanying her, but I think we have to say to those who put up with the barbaric stupidity and cruelty of Government policy that denies seriously ill people their medicine of choice weve got to call on those who are in this position to act in a way of civil disobedience.
British Airways' mixed fleet cabin crew will strike for a further 14 days from August 2 after a current 14-day walkout ends, in a dispute over pay (Steve Parsons/PA)

Members of British Airways mixed fleet cabin crew will strike for a further 14 days from August 2 after a current 14-day walkout ends, in a dispute over pay.

The new action by members of Unite means the cabin crew will have been on strike for four weeks, showing a deepening resolve to win their campaign, said the union.

The workers have already taken 46 days of strike action in what is becoming one of the longest-running disputes in the aviation industry.

Unite claimed that cabin crew who are covering for striking workers would be getting perilously close to their legal number of flying hours.

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National officer Oliver Richardson said: Attempts by British Airways to bribe cabin crew into not striking with a 250 bung represent a crude attempt to sow division and will ultimately fail.

Such actions by British Airways will only serve to deepen the resolve of our members and the support they are receiving from the public and politicians.

Covering cabin crew are perilously close to their legal flying times and could ultimately be pushed over the number of hours they are allowed to fly in the next 28 days.

Rather than spending money on crude bribes and millions on wet leasing aircraft to defend its low pay and bullying behaviour, its time British Airways started talking about resolving this dispute, which will further tarnish its brand.

Unite has launched legal action against the Governments decision to give the go-ahead to the wet lease of nine Airbus aircraft from Qatar Airways during the strike.
Theresa May urged senior ministers to show "unity" around the Cabinet table as she told them to keep details of their discussions private.

Following a weekend of vicious briefings against Chancellor Philip Hammond, the Prime Minister told Cabinet that some members of the Government had failed to take their responsibilities seriously.

She told the weekly meeting at 10 Downing Street that she had tried to encourage open discussion of policy within Cabinet, but it was vital for the Government that this remained private, her official spokesman told reporters.

The Prime Minister said: "There is a need to show strength and unity as a country and that starts around the Cabinet table."

Mrs May told the Cabinet that the briefings and counter-briefings seen last weekend were "a case of colleagues not taking their responsibilities seriously", said the PM's spokesman.

She told the meeting that as Prime Minister she had introduced a more genuine and collective process of discussion in the development of policy, in the belief that this would result in better decision-making, but that privacy was essential for this to work.

The spokesman told reporters that ministers showed "widespread agreement" with the PM's message.

The attempt to instil Cabinet discipline comes after a series of newspaper headlines about Mr Hammond's comments at last week's meeting, culminating in a story quoting an unnamed minister accusing the Chancellor of trying to "f*** up" Brexit.

According to newspaper reports, Mr Hammond was slapped down by the Prime Minister for saying that women could "even" become train drivers - a claim he denied.

A separate report said that he had told colleagues that public sector workers were overpaid compared to the private sector.

The Chancellor used a TV appearance on Sunday to accuse Cabinet rivals of trying to undermine his agenda for a "softer" business-friendly Brexit prioritising jobs and the economy.

But The Daily Telegraph quoted one minister as saying: "What's really going on is that the Establishment, the Treasury, is trying to f*** it up. They want to frustrate Brexit."

As Brexit negotiations continued in Brussels, Mrs May used a speech at a Tory drinks party on Monday evening to warn against "backbiting and carping" and tell MPs to prepare for "serious business" after Parliament's summer recess.

She warned that infighting could result in Labour and Jeremy Corbyn winning power.

Without a Commons majority, Mrs May will be forced to rely on DUP votes to get Brexit legislation through the Commons and she will require iron discipline from her own party to secure its progress.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd said that ministers had "frank and full discussions" at Cabinet, but said she found reports of infighting "perplexing".

She rejected suggestions that Mrs May had lost her authority as a result of the botched election, telling ITV's Good Morning Britain: "She is respected by the Cabinet, she is our Prime Minister, we do have 54 more seats than Labour and we are getting on with the job in hand."

Asked whether members of the Cabinet were seeking to undermine Mr Hammond because they regard his vision of Brexit as too "soft", Ms Rudd told Sky News: "The Cabinet is united in wanting to make sure that we deliver a Brexit that does protect the economy, that does protect businesses ... Philip Hammond has talked about that and he is absolutely right to do so."
A baby found abandoned at a bus shelter may be well enough to be discharged from hospital soon, police said as they made a fresh appeal to find her mother.

The baby girl was discovered in the bus shelter near the Magpie and Stump pub in Towyn, North Wales, at 7.15am on Tuesday.

Police released photos of the infant, who is being cared for at Glan Clwyd Hospital, a week on from her discovery as they appealed for the mother to come forward and give her daughter a name.

In a video released by the force, Helen Douglas, of North Wales Police, made a direct appeal to the mother.

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She said: We think that you placed your daughter somewhere where she would be found and that is why it is important that you know your daughter is making good progress and actually may be well enough to be discharged soon.

Your daughter needs a name and we want you to tell us what you want for her even if you dont feel able to look after her yourself.

She said police were still really concerned about the welfare of the mother and wanted to make sure she could be provided with any medical treatment and support needed.

Anyone with information should North Wales Police by calling 101, quoting reference number V103529.
Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva denies any wrongdoing and remains free pending a decision on his appeal (AP)

Brazil's central bank has frozen four bank accounts belonging to ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva due to his recent conviction on corruption charges, a judge said.

The assets in question amount to more than 600,000 Brazilian reals (146,000), according to the office of Sergio Moro, who sentenced Mr Silva to nine-and-a-half years in prison in connection with a sprawling graft probe involving state-run oil giant Petrobras.

Mr Moro also barred the ex-president from using three apartments, a piece of land and two cars linked to him.

None can be sold until there is a final ruling on the case.

A spokesman for Mr Silva confirmed the assets were frozen but did not comment further.

The former president denies any wrongdoing and remains free pending a decision on his appeal.

His defence has called the graft conviction politically motivated and a ploy to sideline Mr Silva, widely considered a front-runner for next year's presidential election.

Last week the judge also seized a beach-front apartment in the city of Guaruja, Sao Paulo state, that is the centrepiece of the corruption and money laundering case against Mr Silva.

The apartment is valued at about 2.2 million Brazilian reals (536,000), according to investigators.

Mr Moro, who is hailed as an anti-corruption hero by supporters and loathed as a zealot by detractors, said construction company OAS promised to give the apartment to Mr Silva as a bribe for three contracts with Petrobras.

Mr Silva says the apartment was never his and he and his wife only visited once before declining to buy it.

AP
Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai was greeted with cheers by dozens of young women in north-eastern Nigeria, where she spoke out for the many girls abducted under Boko Haram's deadly insurgency.

The 20-year-old Pakistani activist told the Associated Press on Tuesday that she was excited by the courage of the young women who are undaunted as they pursue an education amid one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

"This is part of my girl power trip, visiting many parts of the world," said Ms Yousafzai, who also met the freed Chibok schoolgirls taken in a mass abduction by Boko Haram more than three years ago.

"I am here now because of the Nigerian girls. Fighting for them and speaking up for them."

Ms Yousafzai visited internally displaced camps in and around the city of Maiduguri, where thousands have sheltered from Boko Haram's violence. The extremist group continues to carry out deadly attacks there, often using young female suicide bombers.

"They have lived in the period of extremism," she said of the young women around her. Many have seen family members killed.

Ms Yousafzai was 15 when she shot in the head by Taliban militants in 2012, targeted due to her advocacy for women's education.

The Nobel laureate said her Nigeria visit was significant because it was the partial fulfilment of what she advocated the last time she was there. In 2014, she pressed then-President Goodluck Jonathan to ensure the rescue of the more than 200 abducted Chibok schoolgirls.

On Monday, she met more than 100 who have since been rescued and now stay in the capital, Abuja, for what the government calls rehabilitation.

While she told the AP she shared their joy at being freed, she said she was not happy that the girls have not been allowed to reunite fully with their families.

She said she hopes they will "live with their family, live a normal life".

Many others remain in Boko Haram captivity, "and the government must unite so that they should make sure that these girls are released", she said.

"Boko Haram themselves should learn that in Islam such things are unacceptable," she added. "This is against humanity, this is against Islam."

On Monday, Ms Yousafzai met acting President Yemi Osinbajo, speaking up for the more than 10 million children displaced by Boko Haram and pressing for the declaration of a state of emergency for education in Nigeria.

She also urged the international community to address the crisis in the country's north-east.

Girls at the internally displaced camps said the Nobel winner's story of courage gave them inspiration for a brighter future.

"Her story give us hope, that's why we too want to go to school and become something in life," said 15-year-old Fatima Ali. "We have to bear all pains like hunger to go to school. We barely eat once a day here. We have not eaten since morning because government people no longer bring us food for about two months now."

Three million children in Nigeria's north-east are in need of support to keep learning, according to the UN children's agency. Nearly 1,400 schools have been destroyed during Boko Haram's insurgency, which began in 2009, and more than 2,295 teachers have been killed, the agency says.

Fatima Ali said she was in school when Boko Haram attacked her town three years ago. "I want to become a soldier so that I could help my community to fight and kill Boko Haram, because they are not good people," she said.

Another student, 15-year-old Fatima Grema, said she sees herself in Ms Yousafzai.

"Boko Haram abducted me and wanted to marry me," she said. After being taken from the town of Baga to a location near the Cameroon border, "I later managed to escape," she said. "I was not in school until I came to the camp here."

She said she now wants to become a teacher.

Unicef's country representative, Mohamed Malick Fall, said Ms Yousafzai's visit is a symbol of hope, and "we will do everything in our power to make sure all children can keep learning".

AP
Al Haj Murad Ebrahim said Islamic State-linked militants wanted his group to broker their possible withdrawal from Marawi but he refused to intervene (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

The leader of the Philippines' largest Muslim rebel group says Islamic State-linked militants wanted his group to broker their withdrawal from Marawi city during a major military offensive against them.

Al Haj Murad Ebrahim of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front told The Associated Press that intervening would have been difficult because President Rodrigo Duterte has declared his government would not negotiate with terrorists.

The nearly two months of insurrection in Marawi is the worst he has seen in his more than four decades as a rebel in the country's south, Mr Murad said.

He added the attackers have said through religious emissaries they are ready to fight to the death.

The violence underscores the urgency for the government and the Moro rebel group to implement a 2014 Muslim autonomy deal to help stop the rising tide of extremism, he said.

More than 550 people, including 413 militants, have been killed in Marawi since May 23, when hundreds of gunmen, waving Islamic State group-style black flags, stormed into the city centre, occupied commercial buildings and villages and took hostages.

Mr Duterte ordered troops to crush the attackers and declared martial law in the south for 60 days, which he now wants to extend up to the end of the year to deal with the worst crisis he has faced in his year-long presidency.

Amid the intense fighting that has forced nearly 400,000 people to flee from their homes, Mr Murad said his group met the president and offered to help rescue hundreds of residents, who have been trapped and starving in their homes in the battle zones.

Mr Duterte welcomed the offer, he said, and the government and the rebels worked to establish "peace corridors" through which trapped residents were extricated to safety.

A group of Muslim religious scholars managed to enter the conflict zone and urged some of the militant leaders to end the siege and withdraw from the beleaguered city.

The militants replied they would leave but that Mr Murad's group should intervene.

"I said it'll be hard for us to intervene because the president is very clear in his statements that he will not negotiate with the terrorists," Mr Murad told AP.

He said he asked the religious leaders to convince the gunmen to withdraw without any mediation, but they c hose to fight it out.

"What they said, if nobody will intervene, then we will die here," Mr Murad said.

After weeks of setbacks, the militants have grown desperate, he said.

One of the leaders, Abdullah Maute, had a rift with another militant and killed him, while his brother, Omarkhayyam, had been wounded in battle and is no longer seen on the ground, he said.

Mr Murad's rebel group has a vast encampment in Butig town, near Marawi, and hundreds of its fighters have been ordered to stay in a designated zone to prevent them from being entangled in the clashes.

He travelled to Manila to witness government and rebel representatives submitting to Mr Duterte draft legislation that aims to establish a more powerful Muslim autonomous region in the south of the predominantly Roman Catholic nation.

The 69-year-old says he met late al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden when he was sent as a young insurgent for combat training in Afghanistan decades ago.

He said if the autonomy deal was set in place, the more moderate rebels in his group can provide crucial help in dealing with the smaller but radical groups that have emerged in the south.

AP
An Illinois sheriff's office said it has identified a Minnesota runaway as one of the victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

In a news release, the Cook County Sheriff's Department said the remains of a person whose body was found under the crawl space of Gacy's Chicago area home in 1978 were those of 16-year-old James "Jimmie" Byron Haakenson.

The teenager had left his home in 1976 and was last heard from in August of that year when he called his mother and told her he was in Chicago.

Gacy was convicted of killing 33 young men and was executed in 1994.

Mr Haakenson was one of eight of Gacy's victims who were buried without being identified.

Tom Dart's office exhumed the remains of all eight in 2011 in an effort to identify them using DNA testing.

At the time, Mr Dart asked that relatives of young men who vanished between 1970 and Gacy's 1978 arrest submit saliva samples so that their DNA could be compared with the DNA of the remains.

He said he hoped advances in scientific technology would allow investigators to figure out who the eight victims were.

Two siblings of the teen were among the scores of relatives who submitted saliva samples.

Mr Dart said there was a "strong genetic association" between the siblings and the teen's remains.

Mr Haakenson is the second of the eight victims to be identified.

Months after Mr Dart had the bodies exhumed, his office announced that it had identified one of the victims as William George Bundy, a 19-year-old construction worker.

The investigation has also solved four cold cases that were not related to Gacy, locating five missing persons who were still alive and two who had died elsewhere in the US.

For example, in 2013, Mr Dart announced that thanks to the DNA collection in the Gacy case, investigators were able to identify remains found in a wooded area in New Jersey as a teenager who ran away from a nearby orphanage in 1972.

Gacy is remembered as one of history's most bizarre killers, largely because of his work as an amateur clown.

The Chicago-area building contractor lured young men to his home by impersonating a police officer or promising them construction work.

There, he stabbed one and strangled the others before he buried most of them in the crawl space or dumped the others in a river.

AP
The House of Lords EU Committee's report on the impact of Brexit on Northern Ireland contains little that has not been said before, but it draws all the concerns together in one neat package and, importantly, brings them out of our partisan politics

The House of Lords EU Committee's report on the impact of Brexit on Northern Ireland contains little that has not been said before, but it draws all the concerns together in one neat package and, importantly, brings them out of our partisan politics.

It could even be argued that the Lords have shown greater awareness of the sensitivities of Brexit here than the Tory government which will be negotiating on our behalf.

While it has to be accepted that Brexit is a reality - even if Northern Ireland voted against it - the impact it has had already in souring political relationships between unionists and nationalists could worsen if efforts to mitigate its effects are not made.

The Upper House does not underplay the impact of Brexit - worsening divisions, raising the spectre of a border poll, and contributing to the fall of the devolved government - and warns it threatens the fragile political settlement in Northern Ireland.

And they also underscore the need for the Government, which now has a working relationship with the DUP, to take account of nationalists' interests, noting that due to Sinn Fein's abstentionist policy, that section of the community is now voiceless at Westminster.

Perhaps the one part of the report which will displease the Prime Minister most is the Lords' call for the government to up its game in relation to involving the devolved administrations in the Brexit negotiating process.

Many critics have noted that the Government has paid virtual lip-service to concerns voiced in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales and that Theresa May has made only a flying visit here.

There is merit in the Committee's suggestion for a Joint Ministerial Committee from the Regions to meet monthly as a way of ensuring the voices of the regions are heard.

Except, that is, for Northern Ireland which would have no representation on such a committee since there is no devolved administration operating here.

Brexit, arguably, is the most fundamental challenge facing the UK in generations and our political parties will have little input into how the province will fare.

One worrying example noted by the Lords was whether EU funding given to the regions would be replaced by Treasury funding based on the Barnett Formula, which would leave Northern Ireland worse off.

Another compelling reason for a return to Stormont, but are the parties listening?
Bangladeshi police escort a convicted militant after a court in Rangpur sentenced him to death for the murder of a Japanese citizen, Feb. 28. 2017.

Terrorism increased significantly in Bangladesh in 2016, with the extremist group Islamic State (IS) claiming as many as 18 attacks in the South Asian nation, the U.S. State Department said in a report published Wednesday.

Both IS and al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) claimed responsibility for a significant number of terrorist attacks in Bangladesh  a nation of more than 163 million people, about 87 percent of whom are Muslim  the State Department said in its 445-page Country Reports on Terrorism 2016.

Bangladesh experienced a significant increase in terrorist activity in 2016, according to the report. The Government of Bangladesh has articulated a zero-tolerance policy towards terrorism, made numerous arrests of terrorist suspects, and continued its counterterrorism cooperation with the international community.

Among 18 incidents claimed by IS in Bangladesh, the most lethal attack carried out last year was the July 1-2 siege of the Holey Artisan Bakery, the report said. The attack left 29 people dead, including 20 hostages, two police officers and the five militants who had stormed the cafe in Dhakas diplomatic quarter, the report said.

The country launched an aggressive counter-terrorism crackdown following the cafe siege. At least 70 people have been killed since then in police raids on suspected militant hideouts.

Authorities continued to insist that Islamic State has no presence in the country despite its claim of responsibility for the cafe attack and photos it released of the perpetrators.

All of them are the people of Bangladesh. They brand themselves in different names at different times, Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said of the attackers, in an interview with BenarNews ahead of the first year anniversary of the attack.

The forces that opposed Bangladeshs independence through a freedom struggle have been committing these sorts of incidents one after another in a bid to get stronger, he said, referring to faith-based opposition party Jamaat-e-Islam.

In 2016, the report went on to say, Bangladesh suffered several other small-scale attacks for which there were no public claims of responsibility, including a bomb blast at an Eid-gathering in Sholakia, north of Dhaka, that killed four people  including two police officers  and injured seven.

The extent of ISs presence in Bangladesh could affect the countrys garment industry, which employs millions of people and earns more than $20 billion a year in exports, political observers said, explaining that any sign of a major militant influence in the nation could force Western brands to look elsewhere for cheaper labor.

The report said Bangladesh took steps to further strengthen control of its borders and ports of entry by cooperating with the United States and sharing law-enforcement information with Interpol, although the country does not have a dedicated list of suspected terrorists.

Despite lacking laws specific to foreign terrorist fighters, Bangladesh has arrested suspected foreign terrorist fighters or facilitators of such fighters on other charges under existing law, the report said.

IS remains No. 1 terrorist threat worldwide

The yearly report from the State Department documents terrorist activity in countries around the globe and national responses to the threat.

In 2016, terrorist groups continued to exploit ungoverned territory and ongoing conflict to expand their reach. ISIS remained the top terrorist threat in 2016, directing and inspiring terrorist cells, networks, and individuals around the world, the report said, using another acronym for IS.

Of the terrorist attacks that took place in 104 countries in 2016, about 55 percent of them occurred in five countries  Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and the Philippines.

In the Philippines, the emergence of ISIS affiliated extremist groups, persistent kidnappings by the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), attacks on government forces, and bombings, all indicated that domestic and international terrorism remained a serious problem, the report said.

It listed the southern Philippines in its section on terrorist safe havens, defined as ungoverned, under-governed, or ill-governed physical areas where terrorists are able to organize, plan, raise funds, communicate, recruit, train, transit and operate in relative security because of inadequate governance capacity, political will, or both.

In Southeast Asia, the coastlines of the Sulawesi and Sulu seas are also terrorist safe havens, according to the report, which noted that the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia had increased efforts to police these waters that lie between their three countries.

The number of islands and maritime traffic in this region make it hard to secure, the report said.

Traditional smuggling and piracy groups supported terrorist networks, including the movement of personnel, equipment, and funds. Kidnapping-for-ransom remained an ongoing threat and a source of funding for terrorist networks in the region, it said.
Freddy Harris (third from right), the director general of legal administration for the Indonesian Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, reads a statement about a government decree ordering Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia to disband, in Jakarta, July 19, 2017.

Indonesias government used an executive decree Wednesday to officially ban Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI), the domestic chapter of a hardline international group that is pressing for an Islamic caliphate in the worlds largest majority-Muslim country.

The government had the authority to disband non-governmental organizations (NGOs) considered as a threat to Indonesia and its pluralist state ideology known as Pancasila, a top official with the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights told a news conference in Jakarta.

The government believes that the revocation of the decree for the legal entity of the HTI was not done arbitrarily, but after a synergy between governmental agencies in the fields of politics, law and security, said Freddy Harris, the ministrys director general for legal administration.

Last week, President Joko Jokowi Widodo approved the decree, or government regulation signed in lieu of the law, referred to as a Perppu in Indonesia. Officials said it was aimed at making it easier for the government to disband civil society groups seen as fomenting social unrest and threatening Indonesias unity by not having to take such organizations to court under a 2013 law that regulates NGOs.

As written, the decree did not identify Hizbut by name, but government officials had warned they were moving to disband it.

The president said the decision was legal and made after careful consideration.

The government has studied for a long time and considered the inputs from ulemas and the community, Jokowi said.

While HTI claims Pancasila, a philosophy emphasizing national unity and pluralism, as its own ideology, in reality its activities violate this, Freddy alleged.

They broke their own articles of association, he said.

Anyone having any objections to the decision may take legal action in accordance with the laws and regulation, he added.

No activities allowed

The local branch of HTI, which is believed to have about 2 million members, campaigned for a caliphate and implementation of Sharia law in the country.

The Council of Indonesian Ulema (MUI), a group of Muslim scholars, supported the ban on HTI.

The dissolution of HTI is indeed a process that has been taken. The government has the right to say that HTI is not in accordance with Pancasila, MUI chairman Maruf Amin said, according to Kompas.com.

Police said they would continue to monitor members of the organization. Police spokesman Setyo Wasisto said officers would not issue any permits for HTI activities.

If they continue to carry out activities, we will stop them and process them according to applicable law, he told BenarNews. Those who violate the ruling could face prison sentences of six months to life.

HTI responds

HTI spokesman Ismail Yusanto said the decision proved that the government is despotic.

We never knew what mistake we had made because there had never been a warning letter (to us) as regulated in the Perppu, he told BenarNews.

Ismail accused the government of breaking its own rules.

HTI will not remain silent. HTI will take legal action, he said.

The organizations lawyer, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, who served as minister of justice and Human Rights from 2001 to 2004, said his side would appeal to the State Administrative Court.

Perppu opens opportunities for the government to become a dictator. The government unilaterally dissolves mass organizations without their right to defend themselves and without a fair and proper law enforcement process, he said in a written statement.
After an 18-year run in Goose Creek and unforeseen challenges presented by COVID-19, Dreamalot Books has gradually  but decidedly  gained a steady foothold in the Moncks Corner community as a welcoming haven of second-hand books for both area bibliophiles and those traveling in from Myrtle Read moreThe 'happy place' for used books: Dreamalot Books emerging as a go-to hot spot in Moncks Corner
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In life as in music, timing is everything. For Dr. Jeremy Wallach, a professor of popular culture, his 1997 trip to Indonesia to conduct research for his doctoral thesis came at a pivotal moment in the political and social life for that country, and his topic  the Indonesian music scene  played a role in the change that led from dictatorship to democracy the following year, when the authoritarian government of President Soeharto was toppled.

Wallach used his research, which took him to college campuses, cafes, recording studios, rock concerts, rural villages and urban neighborhoods, for his 2008 book, Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia 1997-2001, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. The book also received a Gustave Reese publication grant from the American Musicological Society. Hailed by music writers and fellow researchers when it was released, it has now been translated into Bahasa Indonesia by Jakarta publisher Komunitas Bambu, with a new introduction by Wallach and a new title: Musik Indonesia 1997-2001: Kebisingan and dan Keberagaman Aliran Lagu.

Its a very good translation, Wallach said. They changed the cover and the title but the rest is pretty much unchanged except for the introduction.

The new preface reflects on the change in Indonesias political structure and also validates some of Wallachs optimistic predictions, notably that Indonesias national culture was strong because it embraced diversity, an embrace exemplified by the hybrid popular music genres explored in the book. This boded well for democracy . . . Indonesian democracy would succeed because the urge for inclusiveness was stronger than the urge to fragmentation and rejection of others. Because Indonesian life was lived in a state of togetherness, fundamentally social.

He also argued that underground rock music was important in a newly democratic Indonesia, and today the Indonesian president is a diehard metalhead, Wallach notes humorously in the new editions introduction. This is also an indicator of the genres enduring and pervasive popularity.

Wallach and his wife, Dr. Esther Clinton, have recently returned from an invited visit to Indonesia, where he gave a presentation about the book at the American Embassy in Jakarta to a record crowd. This was arranged by Rebekah Moore, the cultural outreach representative with the embassy and herself an ethnomusicologist. Co-presenting were music luminaries Wendi Putranto, senior editor at Rolling Stone Indonesia, and Arian Tigabelas, frontman for heavy metal legends Seringai and former vocalist of Puppen, a seminal underground group from the 1990s to early 2000s. Wallach has known both of them for 20 years. The embassy presentation, which ended with a performance by the industrial metal band Koil, was followed by a four-hour seminar at a cafe for Indonesian scholars who asked to extend the conversation.

The new edition and Wallachs visit and presentations were covered by Indonesian and Singaporean media that reach millions of readers, including an in-depth article in the Jakarta Globe.
By John McKinley

In part 1 of this series of posts on the office of deacon, I briefly presented support for reading 1 Timothy 3:11 as best understood to refer to woman deacons, not wives of male deacons. Additionally to that exegetical and historical evidence, I observe that the only person identified with anything close to the title of deacon in the Bible is a woman, Phoebe, a diakonos of the church at Cenchreae (Rom 16:12).

In part 2, I join Gregg Allison in challenging the prevailing definition of the deacons function in the church as physical needs. The office of Deacon has some ambiguity to it in church practice. This is due in part to the minimal details provided in the New Testament. Some churches have no deacons (e.g., Calvary Chapel), some have deacons that actually function as elders[1] (e.g., some Baptist churches), and some churches have deacons functioning alongside elders (e.g., the Reformed Church of America). For churches with deacons and elders, the common practice is to distinguish duties so that deacons are responsible for the physical needs of the congregation and the building, while elders focus on the spiritual matters of teaching, supervising staff, and participating in denominational activities.

The common spiritual-physical distinction of elder and deacon functions neatly follows the difference in the qualifications that elders must be able to teach (1 Tim. 3:2), and be able to exhort in sound doctrine and refute those who contradict it (Tit. 1:9) while nothing similar is stated as a qualification for deacons. The spiritual-physical distinction also follows the typical reading of Acts 6:16, where seven men take the task of managing the distribution of food for church widows and relieve the Apostles to focus on the spiritual tasks of prayer and the ministry of the Word. Since the seven are male, many churches commonly limit the office of deacon to men.

Alongside our consideration of the office of deacon for the evangelical church, I observe that the recent revival of the permanent order of deacon in the Roman Catholic Church does not limit the office to physical care. The catechism of 1997 specifies deacon service to the People of God through the ministry of Worship, Word, and Charity in communion with the bishop and his presbyters.[2] While tradition is helpful, our interest is first in the biblical teaching, and whether the spiritual-physical distinction is warranted. We will consider both tradition and Scripture.

First, the evidence from the early church does not support the typical interpretation that Acts 6:16 is the origin for the office of deacon. At best, the seven men are prototypes of the office of deacon; much like the Apostles may be a prototype for the office of elder.[3] Even if that were true, the historical incident of the prototype should not be taken as the determination in limiting ways as has been the practice for some churches, such as that deacons are only responsible for physical needs of the church, that there must be only seven, and that they must be men.[4] We have nothing in Acts or the rest of the New Testament indicating these determinations. The seven men are not called deacons, and the cognate verb to serve is used alike for ministry at the table and distribution (Acts 6:12) and for ministry of teaching the word of God (Acts 6:4). Stephen and Philip are later described in other ministry than physical care: preaching (Acts 6:87:60) and evangelism (Acts 8:413, 2640).[5] Luke does describe Philip with a title, the evangelist (Acts 21:8), with his daughters who are Prophetesses. Extant writings from the early centuries of the church do not show that those teachers understood Acts 6 as determinative for the office of deacon. The earliest case of identifying the seven as deacons is Irenaeus (c. 185), a view not shared by his contemporary Clement of Alexandria writing on the same passage.[6] Therefore, Acts 6 is not the right starting point for defining the office of deacon as limited to physical needs.

Second, early church practice did not follow a limitation of deacons to the physical needs of the church or a limitation to only male deacons. In the third and fourth centuries, the office of deacon had four kinds of duties: liturgical, educational, charitable, and administrative. Among these functions, deacons assisted the elders in the serving of the Eucharist, reading the Gospel, teaching catechumens, preaching in the absence of an Elder, and sometimes attending general church councils. Sometimes, deacons were full-time paid positions, similar to church staff of today. Women deacons were particularly involved in these liturgical, educational, and charitable functions with women, assisting in the instruction and baptism of women, visiting the sick, and providing care for orphans.[7] The early church even developed a female form of the term deacon (diakonissa) that appears earliest in the canons of the Council of Nicaea (325). Despite the high regard for female deacons by Tertullian, Origen, Basil, and Chrysostom, and the ordination of women deacons as shown in the canons of church councils, the office evaporated from the church in the West by the sixth century and in the East by the twelfth century.[8]

What changed to lose both the office of deacon and the scope of ministry beyond care for physical needs? The rise of monasticism for men and women has been blamed for having taken over what were deacon functions. Also, the reversion to a theology of the New Covenant in terms of the Old Covenant structures of priesthood and the Lords Supper as a sacrifice excluded women.[9] Accordingly, the womans menstrual cycle, seen as ritual defilement of the altar and temple in the Old Covenant cult, was again now viewed in the medieval church in the East and West as defiling for the altar of the Eucharist.[10] Such were some of the changes resulting in the exclusion of women from the diaconate.

The recovery of many things at the time of the Reformation included deacons, but in a diminished capacity from early church practice. Ross observes that sixteenth-century church leaders established the contemporary functions of elders and deacons along the lines of spiritual matters and physical matters. Elders were responsible to maintain godly discipline; deacons were responsible to distribute the churchs charity to the poor.[11] In a strange development to the current time, what the early church had as deacon functions are now what elders commonly do in churches to assist the pastor(s): distributing the elements of the Lords Supper, visitation of members, assisting in teaching, attending synods, and sharing the discipline of the church.[12] With awareness of this confusion about the deacon function in church practice, we can turn from tradition to the passages in Scripture that directly reveal the office of Deacon (Part 3 in this series).
For Immediate Release, July 18, 2017 Contact: Brian Segee, (805) 750-8852, bsegee@biologicaldiversity.org House Appropriations Committee Greenlights Trump's Destructive Border Wall WASHINGTON Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday approved the Trump administration's $1.6 billion budget request to expand the U.S.-Mexico border wall as part of the Department of Homeland Security's fiscal year 2018 spending bill. The $1.6 billion down-payment will go toward building a new border wall in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and replacing an existing border wall in San Diego, Calif., only a decade after its completion. Part of the Texas wall would destroy the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, one of the top birding destinations in North America and home to endangered ocelots. Republicans are making a grave mistake supporting Trump's bizarre fantasy of a border wall, said Brian Segee, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. Throwing billions of dollars at the border wall boondoggle and demolishing an iconic wildlife refuge won't make our country safer. But it will be a disaster for people and communities, and tragically sacrifice the fragile borderlands environment and endangered species like jaguars and ocelots.



A recent report by Democratic staff on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee estimated that Trump's border wall could cost at least $70 billion to construct (as much as $36.6 million per mile) and $150 million a year to maintain. These estimates don't include the costs of acquiring hundreds of miles of private land needed for border wall construction, particularly in Texas. On June 7 the Center expanded an existing lawsuit against proposed border wall prototype construction in San Diego. The lawsuit challenges the Trump administration's failure to conduct any environmental analysis or release any information about the San Diego border wall replacement, which would be partially funded by the fiscal year 2018 appropriations bill (it is already partially funded under the 2017 appropriations law). The existing San Diego border wall was built under extensive waivers from environmental laws issued under the George W. Bush administration. Replacing the San Diego border wall only a decade after it was built shows that the border wall has always been stupid, ineffective and incredibly expensive, Segee said. Trump's border wall would compound this travesty by dividing and destroying more communities, wildlife and wild places. A recent study by the Center identified more than 90 endangered or threatened species that would be harmed by proposed wall construction along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. The Center and U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the ranking member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, sued the Trump administration in May over the proposed border wall and other border-security measures, calling on Homeland Security to conduct an in-depth investigation of overall border-security environmental impacts. Beyond jeopardizing wildlife, endangered species and public lands, the U.S.-Mexico border wall is part of a larger strategy of ongoing border militarization that damages human rights, civil liberties, native lands, local businesses and international relations. The border wall impedes the natural migrations of people and wildlife that are essential to healthy diversity.
For Immediate Release, July 18, 2017 Contact: Amy Atwood, (503) 504-5660, atwood@biologicaldiversity.org

Kristen van de Biezenbos, kbiezenbos@gmail.com Senator Whitehouse Supports Ethics Complaint Against EPA's Scott Pruitt WASHINGTON, D.C. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) today filed a lengthy statement supporting a formal ethics complaint against Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. The complaint was filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and law professor Kristen van de Biezenbos. In response to the complaint, the Oklahoma Bar Association is investigating possible ethical violations stemming from Pruitt's misrepresentation to senators about his use of a personal email address for official business while Oklahoma Attorney General. Thanks to Senator Whitehouse for supporting this effort to hold Scott Pruitt accountable for lying to Congress, said Amy Atwood, endangered species legal director at the Center. Pruitt's callous disregard for the truth about his ties to the fossil fuel industry reveals his compromised ethics. In March, shortly after the Center and Ms. Van de Biezenbos filed the complaint, the Oklahoma Bar Association opened an investigation and requested a response from Pruitt. Sen. Whitehouse's statement adds support for the allegations and expresses concerns that Pruitt's misstatements have compromised the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to confirm and oversee him as EPA Administrator. Mr. Pruitt's pattern of misstatements and attempted obfuscation of his email use, linked with his abjectly' delayed [public records act] responses regarding those emails, has been a self-serving effort to conceal his ties to industries that have given money to him in the past, and which he now regulates, wrote Sen. Whitehouse in his statement. This conduct on its face appears to violate the standards of professional responsibility that Mr. Pruitt has taken an oath to uphold. In an article published today, a representative of the Oklahoma Bar Association told the Huffington Post the investigation is ongoing and may take many months to conclude. In May the Center filed a federal lawsuit pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, seeking Mr. Pruitt's emails and schedules since he became EPA administrator. That case is pending in Washington, D.C. Bar Complaint and Investigation Timeline

January 18, 2017  During a hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to consider Pruitt's appointment to EPA administrator, Pruitt states three times that he used his official Oklahoma attorney general email address only to conduct official business. January 24, 2017  Pruitt follows up with written responses to questions from the Senate committee. In response to a question from Sen. Whitehouse, Pruitt states that he used two email addresses during his time as attorney general, one for personal email and another, scott.pruitt@oag.ok.gov, for official state business. February 17, 2017  Pruitt is confirmed as EPA administrator. February 21, 2017  In response to a Oklahoma Open Records Act lawsuit brought by the Center for Media and Democracy, the Oklahoma attorney general's office releases thousands of emails from Pruitt's time as attorney general which reveal several instances where he used a @me.com personal email address to conduct official state business, contradicting his Jan. 24 written responses. Released emails show communications with the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers about rolling back renewable fuel standards set under the Obama administration. The emails also reveal correspondence with representatives of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing organization that works to weaken environmental laws that Pruitt administers at the EPA, such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. March 17, 2017  Sens. Whitehouse, Carper, Sanders, Markey and Duckworth write to Pruitt asking why he told the EPW Committee that he did not use a personal email address for official state business. The letter also notes Pruitt failed to mention several public speeches or presentations that he has made related to energy or the environment, including to the Federalist Society. March 21, 2017  The Center and law professor Kristen van de Biezenbos file a formal ethics complaint with the Oklahoma Bar Association, requesting an investigation into Mr. Pruitt's misrepresentations to the Senate EPW Committee regarding use of a private email address for official state business while Oklahoma Attorney General. The complaint lists Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse as a witness to the allegations. March 30, 2017  The Oklahoma Bar Association opens an investigation. June 14, 2017  The Washington Post reveals that Mr. Pruitt used a third email address while Oklahoma attorney general, esp@oag.ok.gov, another government email address that was not previously disclosed to the EPW Committee. Documents reveal that this second government email address was used to discuss talking points related to the Clean Power Plan and Mr. Pruitt's responses to Open Records Act requests. June 15, 2017  Sens. Whitehouse, Carper, Sanders, Markey and Duckworth write Mr. Pruitt, asking why he failed to disclose the third email address that he used as Oklahoma attorney general. July 18, 2017  Sen. Whitehouse files 68-page statement in support of ethics complaint.
For Immediate Release, July 19, 2017 Contact: Ileene Anderson, (323) 654-5943, ianderson@biologicaldiversity.org Lawsuit Launched to Protect Snowy Plovers From Off-road Vehicles at Oceano Dunes State Parks Must Control Reckless Driving That Kills Federally Protected Shorebirds OCEANO, Calif. The Center for Biological Diversity today filed a formal notice of intent to sue the California Department of Parks and Recreation for allowing motorized vehicle use at the Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area, which has killed protected snowy plovers. Western snowy plovers are one of the most threatened shorebirds in North America. The birds have been protected under the Endangered Species Act since 1993, but their population continues to decline. In 2016 six snowy plovers were found dead in vehicle tracks at Oceano Dunes. Letting dune buggies crush imperiled snowy plovers is indefensible and illegal. The sandy beaches and fragile dunes where these tiny birds feed and breed have to be protected, said Ileene Anderson, a Center scientist. Despite decades of data showing that plovers have been terrorized and killed by vehicles, Parks and Recreation has failed to protect them. These officials must be held accountable. This recreation area in southern San Luis Obispo County includes about 1,500 acres of sand dunes and 5.5 miles of beachfront that motorized vehicles can use. The Department's Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Division operates and manages the area, where street-legal vehicles can drive on the beach in the northern portion, and the southern portion is open to off-road vehicles and motorized campers. Snowy plovers nest and breed in the area between March and September, with most individual birds returning year after year to the same nesting spots, generally in flat open areas such as beaches and sandspits. Many snowy plovers also remain after the end of breeding season and throughout the winter, where they are vulnerable to vehicular disturbance. The endangered California least tern also nests on these beaches and is also at risk from harassment and disturbance by vehicles. In 2016 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service warned the Parks and Recreation Department that it was in violation of the Endangered Species Act for harassing and killing plovers at Oceano Dunes without any authorization or permit and recommended measures to avoid future plover deaths, including increased monitoring and decreased vehicle numbers. The Fish and Wildlife Service expressed concerns with the state's decades-long delay in developing a habitat conservation plan that would protect the plovers and other plants and animals. In June the Air Pollution Control District cited the Department of Parks and Recreation for violating air-quality rules, including monitoring violations and increased dust and other particulate emissions resulting from off-road vehicle use at the Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area. California Senate Bill 249 (Allen) would provide needed reform to off-road vehicle management at Oceano Dunes and other state vehicular recreation areas, including additional safeguards for natural and cultural resources. For a species as imperiled as the snowy plover, the death of any individual and ongoing harm or harassment must stop  that's the goal of our action, Anderson said. The state can't keep allowing this off-road recklessness to continue. The Department also permits special off-road vehicle events and races at Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area. As the result of a previous Center lawsuit regarding special events and impacts to plovers, additional monitoring has been in place for special events. Today's notice to the Department of Parks and Recreation follows a similar notice in 2009, after which protective measures were increased at the beach and plover deaths declined. But with plover deaths again increasing, the Center warned that a lawsuit might be necessary to save these rare and vanishing birds.
Influential MIT Researcher Recognized for Advancing the Use of Analytical Techniques and Multilayer Analysis for Characterization of Biopharmaceuticals

Agilent Technologies Inc. announced that Ram Sasisekharan, Ph.D., has received an Agilent Thought Leader Award in recognition of his contributions in the field of biologics characterization.

A more efficient development of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), against novel cancer targets and emerging pathogens (such as pandemic influenza, Ebola virus, Zika virus, and multi-drug resistant bacteria) is becoming critical, as the typical timeframe to develop these biopharmaceuticals from discovery to human clinical trials can be up to several years.

This Agilent Thought Leader Award will help Dr. Sasisekharan and his lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, continue to evolve their radically different approach that aims to shorten the development time between product design to the clinic. The proposed approach represents a new paradigm, characterizing and optimizing both the product and the process in a highly rich, parallel and multilayered fashion.

Agilents 6545XT AdvanceBio LC/Q-TOF System, AssayMAP Bravo Platform (sample preparation solution), 1260 Infinity II Bio-Inert LC System combined with the 1290 Infinity II LC System, and MassHunter software will be used to help enable this new paradigm.

The Sasisekharan team will focus on the advancement of analytical techniques for mAb characterization to explore the utilization of critical quality attribute measurements, earlier in the clone selection and drug development process, as a strategy to bring biologics to market faster.

I am gratified by this honor and pleased that Agilent has stepped up to support our ongoing work in the area of biopharmaceutical characterization and development said Dr. Sasisekharan, who is Alfred H. Caspary Professor of Biological Engineering & Health Sciences and Technology, Department of Bioengineering at the Koch Institute for Cancer Research at MIT.

We are very excited to be working with Dr. Sasisekharan and the entire team at MIT on these innovative methods and approaches. Fundamentally improving the biopharmaceutical development process and timelines will ultimately result in more effective therapies being available sooner, said Todd Christian, general manager of Agilents Cell Analysis Division, and executive sponsor of this award.

The Agilent Thought Leader Award promotes fundamental scientific advances by contributing financial support, products, and expertise to the research of influential thought leaders in the life sciences, diagnostics and applied chemical markets.
Emerging Markets Telecommunication Services Limited (EMTS), which previously traded as Etisalat Nigeria' has changed its name to 9mobile and states that the name change serves as a further testament of their unwavering commitment to ensure business continuity as Nigeria's fourth largest telecom operator.

The companys new trading name, 9mobile represents their 0809ja heritage, their 9ja-centricity, and their evolution over 9 years of operations in Nigeria. Although the trading name has changed, the company says it remains true to the same values on which it was built.

Measured approach

In a press release issued, the new 9mobile says that in order to ensure the change of name is delivered efficiently and responsibly, the company will take a measured approach to the migration to the new brand over the next few months. Therefore, as they go through this transition, they ask their subscribers for patience and said they want to reaffirm their commitment to remain a listening brand.

It also said it will remain committed to working together with their various business partners and exploring possibilities to achieve their mutual goals. They also thanked their stakeholders, and said theyll ensure that their core values of innovation, customer-centricity, and superior quality of service remain the pillars upon which we operate. They ended off stating that the soul of their business will remain authentically Nigerian.
KIGALI, Rwanda - Dentsu Aegis Network, one of the leading global media and digital marketing communications networks, has extended its footprint in Africa with the signing of Impact Africa Limited (iAfrica), a leading marketing and public relations agency, as its affiliate full-service agency in Rwanda.

Dentsu Aegis Network Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) is part of the global media group that specialises in media, digital and creative communications and spans over Southern Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania with owned businesses and affiliates and affiliate partnerships in another 32 markets across SSA.

iAfrica offers a diverse range of services which includes public relations, media planning, advertising, media research, out of home and events, creative strategy and sales promotion. Their business strategy is deeply invested in research intelligence and they take an in-depth approach to understanding their audiences.

The team at iAfrica consists of 11 talented and passionate people who service blue-chip clients including BBC, Coca-Cola, KLM, Canon, Colgate, East African Breweries and African Trade Insurance Agency to name a few.

iAfrica is based in Kimihurura in Kigali City, Rwanda, and was incorporated in 2005. iAfrica has offices in Rwanda and Burundi with affiliates in Tanzania, Kenya, Congo DRC, Congo Brazzaville, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Uganda. They execute a wide range of services in the East African region through this network which will complement Dentsu Aegis Networks existing footprint in the region.

Speaking on the affiliation, the Group Chief Operating Officer for Dentsu Aegis Network Sub Saharan Africa, Bevis Hoets, stated, Impact Africa have been providing research, planning, strategic and buying services to their clients in the region for over twelve years. This experience, over multiple product categories, has positioned them us thought leaders in the region and we, as Dentsu Aegis Network, are excited about partnering with them to deliver innovative brand experiences for our clients. They will also assist us in rolling out our unique operating model in the region as we continue to extend our footprint into Africa.

Hoets also revealed that the new affiliation will significantly increase the collective firepower of Dentsu Aegis Network and iAfrica to provide industry-leading solutions for clients.

Also speaking on the affiliation, George Keango, Managing Director for Impact Africa Limited, said, This partnership opens up a great new era not only for DAN and iAfrica but for our clients too. Together we will be able to provide our clients with more services and coverage area. As iAfrica, we are proud to be part of the great DAN family.

This affiliation opens up a whole new level of opportunities not just for Dentsu Aegis Network, but for the industry and clients within the East African region.




Three public advocacy groups - Section27, the Helen Suzman Foundation and Save SA - are taking joint action over the probe into the conduct of controversial PR firm Bell Pottinger, which has been accused of fuelling racial tensions in SA on behalf of the Gupta family.

 Rabia Elif Aksoy  123RF.com

The groups noted Bell Pottinger's "unequivocal and absolute apology" of last week, in relation to the work it had undertaken over the past year for the Gupta-owned Oakbay, and the fact that it has commissioned an international law firm to review the work done.

They have now sent a letter to Bell Pottinger with a request for access to the terms of reference and all information that will form the basis of the investigation, which is to be undertaken by the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills. This action follows the DA lodging a complaint with the UK regulatory body that the company violated the Public Relations and Communications Association's (PRCA) professional charter and code of conduct.

The PR firm was pressured into dropping the Guptas as clients after it emerged that terms such as "white monopoly capital" had derived from the UK-based consultants. Bell Pottinger has also been accused of being behind campaigns targeting journalists who have been critical of the Guptas.

The three organisations said in a statement on Tuesday that they intend "to make recommendations to the relevant UK regulatory bodies, in order to assist these bodies in coming to a proper understanding of the social, economic and potential legal implications of Bell Pottinger's conduct".

"These organisations are hopeful that, in light of the expressed commitment in its apology to accountability and transparency, Bell Pottinger will respond positively to their approach."

Source: BDpro
The Special Investigations Unit (SIU) has partnered with the private healthcare industry to create a forum to help detect and prevent corruption and abuse in preparation for National Health Insurance (NHI).

Fraud, waste and abuse in healthcare remain challenges in the well-funded private healthcare sector, which faces risks from both patients and healthcare providers, with the industry losing billions every year, said SIU head Andy Mothibi at the Board of Healthcare Funders conference.

The unit had been in talks with various associations in private healthcare about the creation of a joint forum that would result in law enforcement agencies and funders collaborating to prevent criminal activity.

Data generated by the BHF suggest that about 7% of all medical aid claims are fraudulent. It is estimated fraud costs the private sector R22bn a year - compared with about R24bn in irregular expenditure recorded for provincial health departments in 2009-13.

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has released the white paper on NHI, which proposes that all public funds be pooled. These funds, experts say, will need to be protected.

Mothibi said the SIU would be signing a memorandum of understanding with stakeholders including the Council of Medical Schemes, the BHF and the Health Professions Council of SA to come up with strategies the forum would deploy.

Prevention was key in fighting fraud and waste and the forum would collaborate to mitigate risk under NHI.

"Our view is that this space [healthcare funding] deserves attention," Mothibi said.

Gregory Pratt, senior clinical adviser at Medscheme's forensic unit, said fraud and abuse posed a material threat to the affordability and sustainability of medical schemes, and to any national insurance scheme.

There was an entitlement factor among doctors who sometimes charged triple the amount for patients who suffered a condition covered under the prescribed minimum benefits, Pratt said.

He cited a psychologist charging R4.3m in 102 days, pharmacies in Soweto claiming more than R100m in three years and more than R5m being paid to a radiographer in one year, as examples of how practitioners abused the system.

The enforcement of codes of ethics was critical at this point because fraud, waste and abuse would seep into NHI.
En primeur or 'wine futures', is a method of purchasing sought-after wines early while the wine (a vintage) is still in the barrel, usually one or two years before it's released to the market. This trading model, originated in Europe, offers the customer the opportunity to invest before the wine is bottled.

Umberto Leporini via 123RF

Bordeaux has long offered their top wines en primeur, providing an efficient system for communicating the merits of the vintage and distributing their wines around the world. Every year wine professionals and merchants from across the globe flock to the region for the opening of the wine futures campaign, to taste barrel samples of the previous year's harvest.

A similar event was held in Johannesburg recently with a focus on the 2015 Stellenbosch Cabernet Sauvignon - regarded as the "greatest modern day vintage" by some experts. Twenty-four Stellenbosch winemakers, including Kleine Zalze, Delaire Graff, Waterford and Glenelly - showcased their 2015 Cabernet Sauvignons en primeur style.

Following the event, Wine Cellar Fine Wine Merchants, which has been offering Bordeaux en primeur for over a decade, sold the 2015 Stellenbosch Cabernet Sauvignon en primeur for the first time  offering an approximate 10% discount on the future release price, or farm price.

We chatted to Roland Peens, director of Wine Cellar Fine Wine Merchants, who explains the benefits of the wine futures model, why he believes 2015 Stellenbosch Cabernet Sauvignon should be taken more seriously and how the local wine market is evolving in response to international demand.

Roland Peens, director, Wine Cellar and James Pietersen, SA portfolio manager, Wine Cellar.

For the uninitiated, explain how the concept of wine futures or en primeur works?

En primeur is the French word meaning newly produced and made available, also commonly known as wine futures. These terms refer to the sale of the recent vintage before its released. Bordeaux has offered their top wines en primeur for over two centuries, but became more speculative from the great 1961 vintage.

How does the model benefit both customers and businesses involved in the supply chain?

Bordeaux en primeur provides an efficient system to sell over 500 different wines from one vintage at the same time. Therefore the customer doesnt have to worry about the different release dates of each chateau. It is also the first opportunity and the lowest price available. Bordeaux is also able to communicate the merits of the vintage and distribute their wines around the world in one campaign.

As a company that has been offering Bordeaux en primeur for over a decade now, what is the general response to the offering from your market?

Wine Cellar has been offering Bordeaux en primeur since 2002 and has recently offered the fine 2016 vintage. It is, of course, a very small market, but in top vintages we can fill a container of pre-orders of the finest Bordeaux. Bordeaux is still the world's luxury red wine and has the best reputation for ageing and investment.

Wine Cellar for the first time applied the wine futures concept to Stellenbosch Cabernet Sauvignon 2015. Tell us more about this move

Stellenbosch is South Africas foremost wine region and Cabernet Sauvignon is king! With the first event 'Stellenbosch Cabernet  The Collection' held in Johannesburg in June, the consumer had the opportunity to taste the exceptional 2015 vintage at this early stage. Wine Cellar offered to sell the wines en primeur and be the important merchant communicating, handling and distributing the wines. The sale of these en primeur wines was on offer on the Wine Cellar website until Wednesday, 19 July.

Stellenbosch Cabernet Sauvignon needs to be taken more seriously; it is world class, underpriced and can age beautifully!

Your brand has built strong relationships with an array of producers both locally and abroad. Which elements would you say are key to profitable relationship building in your line of business?

Much like all industries and businesses, the consumer seeks value and trust in order to keep coming back. Many wines take two decades to mature and naturally demands a long relationship with the customer. Wine Cellar aspires to offer value at every price point and never offers a wine that we dont believe in. Trust is of course very important for en-primeur, as it takes up to two years for delivery once the wine is purchased!

Considering that youve been in the wine business for over a decade, can you share any interesting South African consumer trends that youve picked up?

The South African wine industry is still rather immature when compared to the fine wine regions of the world. As we develop, our wines are getting better at each price point. Specifically, local and international demand for our top wines has surged over the last five years.

There is a trend therefore of our top wines becoming more expensive and pushing away from the every-day drinking wines. The consumer needs to understand that a bottle of mass-produced, Tuesday night Sauvignon Blanc is a completely different product to a single vineyard, old vine Chenin that produces a mere barrel or two of exquisite wine!

Shop Wine Cellar products online and connect with the brand on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
According to Lauren Buzzeo, the managing editor of the US-based publication Wine Enthusiast read worldwide, South Africa stands the strongest chance of making an impact in the US by linking its wine marketing message with a single varietal in the way New Zealand has done with Sauvignon blanc and Argentina, with Malbec. Buzzeo has been covering South Africa for the magazine since 2010 as its tasting director and senior editor.

Lauren Buzzeo

She was in the country in early July to judge in the 2017 Standard Bank/Chenin Blanc Top 10 Challenge along with five other, South African-based panel members, including two Masters of Wine. "To associate Chenin blanc with South Africa in the minds of US consumers is a way to begin the conversation. It's easier for them to first get their heads around South Africa as a producer of this amazingly refreshing wine that's so food-friendly than to tell them the country's strongest suit is its ability to make wine in a huge variety of different styles.

"Instead of staking your claim by saying you can do everything," she urged producers to "highlight what you do best. If you brand Chenin blanc as a South African specialty, you stand a better chance of connecting with wine-lovers, of providing them with something to attach to, an entree into understanding the wines of the country. Because, sadly, South Africa is not yet widely known or understood in the American market."

The US is currently the world's biggest wine market by value and has been since 2013.

Be wary of under-pricing wines

"As awareness and demand grow, there will be a mainstream place for bright, lively, approachable South African Chenins characterised by ripe stone fruit and citrus flavours - not too sweet - and pristine acidity - wines that can comfortably retail between $10 and $20.

That said, producers of South African Chenins should be wary of under-pricing their wines. To over-deliver on quality in relation to price is to run the risk of implying the wines are not worthy and that they don't deserve to be taken seriously. We need to see mid- to top-level bottlings priced higher, $25 and above, to demonstrate a pride and confidence in their world-class stature."

From workhorse to glamour grape

South Africa has more Chenin blanc plantings than any other country in the world, with 18,5% of the country's 95,775 hectares planted to the varietal. Not only is it the most widely cultivated local grape but local plantings represent more than those established anywhere else in the world combined.

A popular choice for South African brandy producers for much of the 20th century, it has been transformed from workhorse to glamour grape under the Chenin Blanc Association, chaired by well-known producer Ken Forrester, who has played a major role in rehabilitating its image. Today, many of the country's foremost winemakers choose Chenin for their flagship offerings, winning widespread international recognition for these wines.

Thought to have originated in the Loire region of France, Chenin blanc is a very versatile grape that features in an array of dry, fruitier and noble late harvest wines.

Buzzeo believes South African Chenins tend to be more fruit-forward than their French counterparts: "Not flashy, but more immediately accessible than those from the Loire, that have a more austere and saline character."

SA's elegant wines

She is not suggesting that all South Africa's marketing focus should be on Chenin, though. "I'm really excited by the quality of South African Chardonnays and also Pinotages. It's a new day for Pinotage - time to move on from those negative perceptions of acetone and burnt rubber flavours. There's a new generation of wine consumers keen to taste interesting and unusual wines. They aren't aware of the baggage around Pinotage and are ready and willing to taste the refined and elegant wines of today."

She also praised South African Cabernets.

Thrilled by Standard Bank/Chenin Blanc Top 10 candidates

Commenting on the wines entered for this year's Standard Bank/Chenin Blanc Top 10 Challenge, she said they reflected an ongoing improvement and innovation. "I was thrilled by many of these wines. There's an amazing gees (spirit) and ability to push boundaries. These Chenins are an expression of what makes South Africa such an appealing country.

"I love the people, the wine, the food, the stories, the architecture and the fact that there is such a strong focus on eco-sustainability. Now, with social media, you have the chance to talk not just in words but in the most beautiful pictures, which is something that American consumers absolutely need more of to better understand the complete beauty of this country.

"There is something I'd like to see more of, and that's greater evidence of diversity in prominent winemaking positions. There are many encouraging initiatives and that makes me very optimistic."

The winners of the 2017 Standard Bank/Chenin Blanc Top 10 Challenge will be announced on 23 August.
Internationally, rum has been enjoying a comeback and is believed to be the next hottest category following the recent gin revolution in South Africa.

Truman and Orange, a Cape Town-based premium spirits company, has launched Spytail Black Ginger Rum, a premium spiced rum imported from France. Based on a 19th-century French tradition of ageing Caribbean rum with fresh ginger and spices in the barrels, it is distilled in the Caribbean and then aged, spiced and blended at a small family distillery in the Cognac region of France.

Submarines of old inspire the name and the bottles round shape is based on a bathysphere, a primitive form of submarine. The distillery where it is made is located near the river Charente where some of the worlds first submarines were built and tested.

The Spytail bottle has a porthole embossed on the front and back and hidden within it are the coordinates of the final resting place of Jules Verne. The navy blue and orange striped label, based on a French Naval signal flag, is adorned with engineering details from original submarine designs. The heavy stopper is crafted from metal and embossed with the words Voyages Extraordinaires, a nod to underwater adventurers.

The new rum is available nationwide in liquor stores and bars and restaurants in a 750 ml bottle, with 43% Vol Alc. and will be priced at approximately R350 bottle.
African Fashion International (AFI), owner and operator of the two Fashion Week platforms - Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Joburg (MBFWJ) and Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Cape Town (MBFWCT), has announced Mall of Africa as the new official venue for MBFWJ'17 Spring/Summer.

South Africas top designers will showcase their Spring/Summer collections from 17 to 19 August at the retail giants outdoor amphitheatre, with impressive views of Waterfall Country Estate forming the backdrop for this years affair.

MBFWJ17 Spring/Summer is a premiere event and we are privileged to be able to partner with some of the most well-respected businesses and companies in the country each year, says Dr Precious Moloi-Motsepe, AFI Founder and CEO. I am thrilled to have Mall of Africa as our new venue host for the 10th anniversary Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Johannesburg event, and we look forward to a truly memorable event at this stunning location.

Mall of Africa is one of the largest malls on the African continent and houses over 300 shops from local and international brands. It's also conveniently located for access from Johannesburg, Midrand, and Pretoria.

Nicola van Kan, event manager for Mall of Africa, says, We are extremely proud to host such a renowned and extravagant affair, and management looks forward to a long and fruitful relationship with African Fashion International.

Designer applications and media accreditation are currently open on the AFI website.
We are in need of housing, that is why we're here, said Woodstock resident Faghmeeda Desiree Ling. She was part of a group of supporters of Reclaim the City carrying placards and standing outside the fourth annual Affordable Housing Africa Conference held at a hotel in Cape Town's CBD on Tuesday, 18 July.

Mayoral committee member for urban development Brett Herron speaks to supporters of Reclaim the City during the fourth annual Affordable Housing Africa Conference in Cape Town. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks

Mayoral committee member for urban development Brett Herron was announcing that ten City-owned sites in inner city areas, including Woodstock and Salt River, will be used for social and affordable housing.

Herron characterised his announcement as the citys 180-degree change in its approach towards the urgent demand for housing.

He announced plans to develop two erven (plots of land) along Pine Road to be followed by six erven along Dillon Lane. The proposed development will be between two and four storeys, with a mixture of studio, one, and two-bedroom units. The two sites will provide about 240 social housing units for those with a monthly income less than R15,000. Beneficiaries must be registered on the citys housing database and able to pay rent, he said.

Herron said the tender for the projects would only be ready in two to three months. He added that once the development of the Salt River Market in Albert Road was completed, it would also provide a combination of 476 affordable housing units.

It will have subsidised rental units for households with a monthly income of less than R15,000 to GAP rental housing for households earning between R3,500 and R20,000. Retail and office space will form part of the development to cross-subsidise the housing opportunities and to ensure its long-term financial sustainability, he said.

Scuffle outside

The announcement was slightly marred by an earlier scuffle between protesting residents and hotel staff who were seen pushing the residents and members of the media in the doorway as protesters tried to force their way inside the room where Herron was scheduled to speak.

After about 15 minutes, the group was allowed in and was asked not to disrupt proceedings. Herron began his speech saying: Reclaim the City and their members are welcome here. I welcome their request to be heard.

He told delegates attending the conference that the city has estimated that about 650,000 families earning less than R13,000 a month would be reliant on the city for housing between now and 2032.

This is partly as a result of unemployment, slow economic growth, and rapid urbanisation, he said. Herron said there are about 320,000 people on their housing database.

The dire need for housing for Cape Towns most vulnerable households is the single biggest challenge we are facing as a local government today. Our task is exacerbated by the unprecedented growth in the property market in areas close to key nodes of employment, and along public transport routes, he said.

Outside the venue, Herron spoke to the group of residents about their concerns. Ling also apologised on behalf of the protesters who were involved in the earlier disruption outside the conference room.

Referring to the Albert Road court case, Ling said: We have approached the council for a report on possible places to live. Today you mentioned social housing being implemented. We are in the process of being evicted and we dont know where we stand. What happens to us if we are evicted? When will we see infrastructure?

Herron responded: The affordable housing will be rentals driven by the private sector. For those of you who face almost immediate eviction, we need to assess whether you qualify for social housing.

We can assist the family and make offers available in the current social housing developments in Steenberg and Milnerton. If youre moved to the social housing for immediate assistance, you can then apply to come back to Woodstock once those buildings have been completed. Those who dont qualify will be accommodated in our transitional housing space in Wolwerivier, but we are looking to develop transitional housing in a number of areas across the city.

Herron assured residents that the city would be providing a report to the court with options for alternative accommodation for the Albert Road group.

This is not going to happen over night. We are catching up with work that hasnt happened in the past  I understand your frustration. Ive been doing this for five months now and Im trying to catch up, he said.

Reclaim the Citys Ntombi Sambu asked Herron: Have you been to Wolwerivier? What will happen to those in the transitional housing who dont qualify? How will they travel into the city for their livelihoods?

To which he responded: The Constitutional Court last week found [Wolwerivier] to be acceptable as transitional housing. We are still looking for other sites so people will have more of a choice.

Reclaim the City supporters picket during the fourth annual Affordable Housing Africa Conference in Cape Town. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks

Welcome change

In a press release following the event, Reclaim the City said it welcomed the plans: They are a step in the right direction and Councillor Brett Herron should be commended for showing the leadership this city requires.

The statement continued: But we are also cautious. We have heard many promises before only to be disappointed. What we need now is firm deadlines and implementation. Until that happens, many of us still face evictions and removal to relocation camps. We are clear in saying We wont go! Nobody is moving from their homes to camps like Wolwerivier. We will resist to stay in our homes until we see bricks, front doors and keys!
A recently arrived species of armyworm has spread to 21 African countries and threatens the continent's main food staple, maize, report experts from the US Agency for International Development. USAID senior biotechnology advisor Joseph Huesing says the Fall armyworms - transported from their usual habitat in the US state of Florida or the Caribbean - are attacking maize crops all over sub-Saharan Africa.

Mikhail Kochiev via 123RF

"From Nigeria and Ghana all the way to South Africa to Ethiopia. The most recent one is South Sudan, which reported Fall armyworm infestation toward the end of June," Huesing tells VOA's Horn of Africa service.

Fall armyworms pose a big threat to the continent's agriculture, says Huesing. When they invade a maize field, he says, the pests can eat 30 percent or more of the crop. They consume other crops too. We assume that anywhere there is a green plant or maize in Africa, Fall armyworms will show up in a short period of time," Huesing says.

Challenge to Control

Fall armyworms got their name from the time of year when they do the most damage in the northern part of the United States. The first publication describing their presence in Africa came out in early 2016, which suggests the pests had already been there for a year.

For several reasons, the Fall armyworms may pose more problems for farmers than the indigenous African armyworm. Fall armyworms can breed continuously under warm and humid tropical conditions and can feed off more than more than 80 species in 27 plant families, says Yene Belayneh, senior technical advisor for pests and pesticides at the USAID.

When they assume their adult form as a moth, fall armyworms can fly up to 100 kilometers per day if pushed by winds, or much longer if the pests hitch a ride on a jet. If there is an outbreak for example in Ethiopia, alerting Sudan or Eritrea would be a wise thing, he says.

In fact, there is an outbreak in Ethiopia. The country's Plant Protection Directorate said that as of 10 July, Fall armyworms have infested more than 440,000 hectares of crops. It said that about 305,000 hectares had been protected, either through "cultural means," such as picking up the pests by hand and crushing them, or chemical spraying.

Harder to detect

But spraying may be less effective with the new invaders than with indigenous armyworms. The Fall armyworm "penetrates the plant and feeds from inside," says Belayneh, making it harder to detect and harder to kill.

The species is vulnerable to freezing temperatures, but those happen rarely if ever in much of Africa.

Regina Eddy heads the USAID's armyworm response team. She says her departments priority is to provide training and technical options, taking Brazil as a model. Brazil spends an estimated $600m per year to control armyworms, according to a recent USAID report.

One control measure experts are taking is to more carefully inspect food arriving at African airports. The Fall armyworms may have arrived on the continent through a food shipment from abroad.

Eddy says the fall armyworm is not causing a crisis yet. For now the infestation is relatively at an early point, and we havent seen widespread food insecurity as a result of crop loss from the fall armyworms, and experts are in the fields assessing, she says.

But Belayneh says no one is taking the situation lightly. Africans are used to coping with the native armyworms, he says, whereas, with this new species, everybody is trying to find out the best options to prevent, control and manage."
Foreign fishing vessels, many from China, prowl the waters off West Africa every day. They capture millions of fish - catches that used to go to local boats. The fish are then shipped to China, Europe, and the United States, satisfying a global demand for seafood and fueling a multi-billion-dollar industry.

skeeze via pixabay

The foreign vessels make life hard for West African fishermen.

Foreign trawlers from Asia and Europe have cost West Africa's economy 300,000 jobs and $2bn in income, according to John Hocevar, a marine biologist with Greenpeace.

However, what to do about the problem - and possible damage to regional fish populations - has eluded experts and officials.

Chinese presence

Exact numbers are difficult to come by, but experts agree no single country has a greater presence off the coast of West Africa than China. In a 2015 report, Greenpeace estimated that, two years earlier, China had 426 distant water fishing vessels off Africa's West Coast. Between 2000 and 2011, 64 percent of China's average annual catches, valued at more than $7bn, came from that area, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Fishing isn't a big part of China's economy, representing less than one percent of total gross domestic product. But for many in China's coastal provinces, it's both a livelihood and way of life, according to Haibing Ma, the China programme manager for the Worldwatch Institute, a nonprofit group that researches sustainability.

Chinese fishers have travelled to Africa because their own fish stock has nearly run out. "Overfishing has destroyed the sustainability of China's inshore fisheries," Ma said.

Lack of oversight

Fishing practices are inherently difficult to monitor and regulate. Oceans are vast, vessels are hard to reach, and a mix of local and international laws and regulations complicates enforcement. Domestic laws regulate waters up to 200 miles off the coast, and international laws control waters past that, according to Todd Dubois, assistant director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Office for Law Enforcement.

This complex environment has led to a variety of creative ways to maximise profits without breaking the law.

For example, legislation in Guinea-Bissau has kept large industrial fishing vessels away from its coast. So, fishing companies have deployed small boats that don't need licenses from nearby countries such as Senegal. Those boats will fish in Guinea-Bissau and return their catches to a large "mothership," which in turn takes its bounty back to Senegal to be traded.

In other cases, "floating factories" - large, nearby vessels used for processing and packaging catches - have enabled other boats to catch small pelagics, such as mackerels and sardines, quickly and on a massive scale for prolonged periods.

And bottom trawls, a kind of gear that contributes to overfishing, were installed on most Chinese vessels studied by Greenpeace in 2015.

Many see international fishing off Africa's West Coast as an exploitation of local resources by foreign powers. But some of the most damaging practices occur within the law, and local African economies sometimes benefit from illegal fishing. In Mauritania, for example, a Chinese company made a secret deal with the local government to build a fish-processing factory and bring 80 large vessels to the coast in exchange for a $100m investment in the country. That deal may have benefited both countries, says Andre Standing, an adviser at the Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements, but it has had a profoundly negative impact on small-scale fishermen.

Responsible practices

Fishing, even when done on a massive scale, can be sustainable, provided there are adequate planning and reporting. That means understanding the vulnerability of local fish populations and managing catches accordingly.

"Some reproduce very fast and can handle quite heavy fishing, such as tuna, and some of the small pelagics like the sardines," Standing said, but other fish, such as sharks, develop very slowly. "We're already seeing across Africa and across the world that industrial fishing and long line fishing, in particular, they've decimated populations of the other types of fish."

Standing cautions against drawing conclusions about the entire Chinese fishing industry. Individual fishing companies need to be judged on their own merits, he said. There are good Chinese companies, just as there are bad European companies.

China's presence off Africa's west coast shows no signs of shrinking, though. The Chinese government has enabled the industry to expand far beyond the country's own shores. In 2013, the government gave the fishing sector about $6.5bn in subsidies, according to a brief Standing wrote for the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.

Whether considering the actions of China, the European Union, or local African governments and businesses, the root of the problem comes from a lack of focus on long-term sustainability, according to Standing. "In many areas, there really isn't this careful, precautionary approach to managing fishing intensity," he said. "A lot is being driven by short-term profit, and that's really at the heart of the unsustainable nature of fisheries."

Zhan Yang, Teng Xu and Ricci Shryock contributed to this report.
The Department of Labour has welcomed a CCMA ruling which states that Uber drivers are fully protected by the South African labour laws.

The decision [of the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration] is in line with the Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995, as amended. It means that any person who falls in that category is an employee and therefore fully covered in terms of labour legislation, the Department of Labour said in a statement on Tuesday.

Following the death an Uber employee, the department has clarified the position in terms of labour legislation.

With regard to the Uber drivers, like any employees, there are no exceptions. They are fully protected by the South African labour laws, including the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act 130 of 1993 (COIDA), Compensation Fund Commissioner Vuyo Mafata said on Tuesday.

The COID Act compensates employees who are injured during the course of duty or deceased thereof.

It therefore means the beneficiaries of the Uber driver, who passed on after he was allegedly attacked in Pretoria last month, qualify for compensation, as per the act.

The fund will have to be provided with all the required documents in order to process the claim. Employees will not be penalised or forfeit their benefits because of unregistered employers. Instead, such employers will be fined, the Department of Labour said.

Employers must register their companies with the Compensation Fund so that employees are covered under the COID Act.
As retrenchments deepen in South Africa, employers need to understand the tax implications applicable to retrenchment packages to ensure that they leave the retrenched employees in the best possible financial position.

Understanding tax implications of retrenchment payments

To qualify for the special tax rates applicable to severance benefits due to retrenchment, an employer must have paid a lump sum to an employee because of their employment having been terminated or lost for the reasons listed below:

Employment ended due to the employer having ceased trading or



Employment ended due to a reduction in staff numbers

Employees over the age of 55 or who have lost their jobs due to the incapability to perform their work (such as sickness or disability) will also qualify for the severance benefits.

The second point of importance is that the first R500,000 of a severance package is not subject to tax, as a once in a lifetime benefit (meaning once this has been utilised, any subsequent lump sums will be taxable). Any amounts above the R500,000 will be taxed at special tax rates applicable to severance benefits.

Thirdly, it is very important to know that any pro-rata bonuses and leave pay paid at the time of retrenchment will not be considered to be part of the severance benefit and will be subject to normal tax rates.

Utilising special tax rates

To qualify for the special lump sum tax table, the employer needs to submit a tax directive to SARS. SARS will calculate the applicable tax rate, based on the tax directive, and the employer will pay out the nett amount to the employee. The employee needs to declare the severance pay on his/her income tax return.

An important point for retrenched employees to remember is that a severance benefit cannot be conserved in the employers retirement fund or in a preservation fund. If the employee wants to invest the retrenchment package, he or she can invest the after-tax amount in a retirement annuity fund.

Should the employee decide to transfer their retrenchment package to a retirement or preservation fund, it will cease to qualify as a severance benefit. Should they wish to access these funds before the age of 55, they will forfeit the tax-free benefit and will be taxed at the normal tax rates.

To ensure that retrenched employees get the best possible tax benefits on their retrenchment packages, employers are strongly advised to not only consult with HR and IR specialists when determining retrenchment packages but to also consult with a tax specialist.
You don't need to be qualified to be a councillor, which is why people are killed over the coveted posts.

 Paul Michael Hughes  123RF.com

University of KwaZulu-Natal professor Paulos Zulu told the Moerane Commission into political violence yesterday, 18 July 2017, that this was one of the main drivers of political violence.

Anyone could be elected a councillor in South Africa, regardless of their qualifications, Zulu said.

He told the commission that if politicians, especially at councillor level, had to be qualified to take up their posts, murdering for positions would be greatly eliminated.

Zulu said that there was more competition for councillor positions than there was in the national assembly or provincial legislatures.

"This country is anarchic. When there are street demonstrations, they turn into violence. Say, if I don't like my employer, I block the N3 [highway]," he said.

Zulu said that stipulating qualifications for political positions should be a priority.

"To be in council, one must appreciate the budget, have a grasp of the statistics and know that if you have 'X' and not 'Y', you cannot get there. There's a serious dearth of skills. But [instead], those who shout the most and sing the most at rallies get the positions," he said.

"If you have a qualification you won't go to the extent of killing because you are marketable."

He said current violence was different from that of the 1980s in that it "targets people who occupy positions in society".

Source: The Times
Airbus Defence and Space has successfully tested a new type of aircraft that will aid the development of future unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for series production.

SAGITTA, the unmanned jet-propelled demonstrator, flew completely autonomously for nearly seven minutes over the test site in Overberg, South Africa, on a pre-programmed course. The flying-wing construction demonstrated excellent flight characteristics during the test.

This flight marked the successful completion of the first test phase, which also comprised an extensive series of ground tests.

The demonstrator is the product of the Open Innovation / SAGITTA national initiative launched by Airbus in 2010. The project sees Airbus working together with institutes from the technical universities of Munich and Chemnitz, the University of the Federal Armed Forces (Universitat der Bundeswehr) in Munich, the Ingolstadt University of Applied Sciences, and the German Aerospace Centre DLR to jointly develop advanced technologies for unmanned flight. The project started with a feasibility study of the flying-wing configuration.

Design criteria

Criteria for the design included a high degree of autonomy, variable mission profiles and low levels of perceptibility. To achieve this, the inter-institutional research team adopted approaches from academic and industrial research, developed these further and incorporated them into solutions for industrial application.

Airbus facilitated the continuous exchange between experts, doctoral students, and developers during the development stage. In addition, the company provided the industrial facilities required for integrating the technologies in the demonstrator at Airbus Defence and Spaces Military Air Systems Centre in Manching, Germany.

With SAGITTAs first flight, we have proved just how successful a cooperation between industry and academic partners can be in the area of basic research, said Grazia Vittadini, head of engineering at Airbus Defence and Space.
PLEASE NOTE!

Due to the March 23, 2020 NM DOH Public Health Order, These Event Listings Are Not Accurate!

All non-essential businesses are closed, public gatherings are prohibited!

(One day some of these events will be rescheduled or will resume, but they are not happening now!)
The Eskom board has decided to take disciplinary action against executive Matshela Koko, the utility's interim chairperson said.

"The board has taken a decision to pursue disciplinary action against Mr Koko. The minister of public enterprises has been informed of this decision," Zethembe Khoza said at a briefing to announce Eskom's financial results.

Matshela Koko, former CEO: Eskom. Photo: Buzz South Africa

The decision followed an investigation by law firm Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr and Nkonki.

Koko, who was acting CEO after Brian Molefe's departure from Eskom, was suspended earlier this year after allegations of a possible conflict of interest involving his stepdaughter, who was a director of a company that scored R1 billion in business from Eskom.
Itec SA, a digital and communications solutions provider, earlier this year announced the expansion of its Carbon Neutral programme. The aim behind the initiative is to reduce its customers' printing-related carbon footprint by offsetting this through sustainability specialists and partner impactChoice.

Gavin Meyer, executive director, Itec SA

We interviewed executive director Gavin Meyer to find out more about Itec SA's Carbon Neutral programme, the potential impact of digitalisation on the triple bottom line, and where he believes the gaps are in the South African business community in terms of environmental sustainability.

Tell us a bit about Itec SA's Carbon Neutral programme and what it entails?

Gavin Meyer: There is no doubt that South African businesses can no longer afford to dig their heads in the sand about the impact that their products and services have on the environment. This is no different for us as a business, operating within the technology sector  whom many still consider to be lagging to some extent when it comes to driving a greener economy.

Therefore, in a bid to embrace the green economy, we launched our Carbon Neutral programme in 2009  a first in the office automation industry - to save our customers money, while also reducing their carbon emissions through our sustainability specialist and partner, impactChoice.

Over the years, the programme has been extremely well received by our customers and, as a result, we announced the expansion of the programme earlier this year aimed at further reducing the environmental impact of the equipment that we offer all our customers, as well as future customers  without them having to bear the cost of doing so.

As mentioned, we have partnered with environmental agency impactChoice to deliver this solution to our clients. To this end, impactChoice audits our carbon offset each year to ensure validity of the initiative so that customers can be assured that their solution is, in fact, 100% carbon neutral. Following this, the company is then awarded a certificate that will indicate their carbon offsets purchased.

As a digital solutions company, how could digitalisation contribute to sustainability in terms of people, profit and planet?

Meyer: There is no doubt that digitalisation has penetrated almost every business sector, including ours. In fact, if anything, the emergence of digitalisation has opened myriad opportunities for us as a digital solutions company.

From a profit's sustainability perspective, a report by BI Intelligence reveals that there will be 24-billion digital devices on earth by 2020, which is approximately four devices for every human on earth  demonstrating that businesses need to make operational changes at a fundamental level and take the migration towards a more digitised enterprise more seriously or, in fact, they might lose relevance among consumers. This is ever more critical in a time when the modern consumer has a strong affiliation to 'speed' and 'digital' internet-enabled services.

Looking at the environmental aspect of digitalisation, the uptake in technology devices has also made it easier for consumers to research a brands green footprint which, according to Nielsen, is among one of the most importance considerations that consumers make before purchasing a brand/service. In fact, the report also highlights that approximately 55% of global online consumers say that they are willing to pay more for products and services provided by companies that are committed to positive social and environmental impact. These statistics should, therefore, drive businesses to make green practices a core element of their operations should they wish to keep up with evolving consumer trends.

Further to this, digitalisation has enabled productivity and less reliance on resources, such as transport for example, where they can digitally connect to one another remotely instead of driving into the office, thus reducing carbon emission outputs. It has also provided a platform for employees to choose their place of work  instead of the brick and mortar traditional office  which is going a long way to improving productivity and driving stronger output in the workplace.

Do you think South African businesses are doing enough in terms of limiting their impact on the environment? Where do you think are the gaps?

Meyer: According to Minister of Environmental Affairs Dr Edna Molewa, there is increasing global recognition that todays economic growth and development trajectory is driven by the worldwide shift to sustainable green economies. What this tells us is that the business market, as we know it, will no longer be merely driven by profits  despite this being an important part of a business. However, it is becoming more and more about being actively involved in addressing critical environmental issues.

I believe that local businesses, are beginning to take heed of the role that they play in the environmental impact of their operations and are realising that going green is no longer just a concept, but an active way of doing business, despite a slow start in comparison to international counterparts.

As with anything, there is always room for improvement, which I believe we will see more of from local businesses in the future, particularly given the nature in which environmental issues have escalated  no longer making this the sole responsibility of government, but very critically, of corporate South Africa.

Even with general consensus amongst the science community and mounting information that climate change is a reality for us all, not everyone is convinced all sectors of society need to reduce carbon emissions. How does Itec SA convey the necessity of its Carbon Neutral programme amongst its customers?

Meyer: Our Carbon Neutral Programme is a core offering  one that helps ensure that we remain a responsible corporate citizen. Therefore, to ensure that the programme is impactful, there is no opt in process. In fact, all our customers are now signed onto this programme  at no additional costs  when they use any of our printing services, which makes the process of convincing our customers of the necessity of the programme that much easier.

Previously, our customers had to pay for this service  related to number of prints made per month, however, due to intensified efforts by government for all members of society to take heed of the role that they play in contributing towards current environmental issues, we decided to restructure the offering, and make it available to all our customers, giving them carbon offsets without anything in return.

Give us some numbers - what has the Carbon Neutral programme achieved since launch in terms of emissions reductions?

Meyer: Last years figures alone revealed that we offset as much as 594,977kg of CO2-e  which is the equivalent amount of carbon that would be sequestered by over 15,000 tree seedlings grown for 10 years*. And this only represents a portion of our clients. We expect this to grow substantially when we report at the end of this year, given that our full customer base is now making use of this service.

How important is it to align your CSR strategy with your brand and what are the benefits of doing so?

Meyer: Modern consumers have influenced brands in a number of ways. One such way is in their approach towards corporate social responsibility. With that said, the reality is that brands today can no longer operate effectively when putting their CSR strategy on the back burner, especially as the concept of triple bottom line (TBL) reporting has become critical to a businesss success.

As such, businesses need to be strategic about their CSR strategies, and develop ones that align to what they do, and in doing so, the rollout becomes an authentic one. The benefits of doing this are endless.

Not only does a well-thought-out CSR strategy assist businesses in improving the brands image among consumers, becoming a brand of choice, but in a country built on the spirit of ubuntu, companies are also able to improve the conditions for stakeholders in the communities in which they operate, which I believe is extremely rewarding.
The Creative Business Cup, a global challenge for entrepreneurs working in creative fields, will be staged at the Small Business Expo from Monday, 31 August to Saturday, 2 September at the TicketPro Dome; giving budding creatives an opportunity to pitch their businesses, network with potential partners and investors, and stand a chance of winning a trip to compete in the international Creative Business Cup finals staged by Global Entrepreneurship Network (Gen) in Denmark in November this year.

Rick Ed, a co-founder of Creative Mzansi and one of the partners bringing Creative Business Cup to Johannesburg, says the challenge aims both to raise awareness of the value of creatives in business, and to help creatives grow profitable businesses.

We find that creatives are often not respected and taken seriously as business people. As a result, many skilled creatives are forced to do their creative work as a sideline, and cannot make a living from it. The Creative Business Cup programme aims to raise their profile and change mindsets, helping creatives learn strategy, money management and marketing techniques that enable them to grow their businesses. Noting that creative businesses contribute an estimated R90bn to the economy each year, Ed says growing a more formalised and flourishing creative sector could reduce unemployment and contribute significantly to the economy.

Entries are open

Entries are now open to creatives working in design, architecture, music, film and video, the performing arts, gastronomy, craft and artisan, advertising, fashion, radio, photography, 3D printing, visual arts and toys and games fields. Entries close on Monday, 31 July 2017, after a panel of judges will select ten promising businesses to participate in the challenge finals at the Small Business Expo. Show visitors will be able to attend their pitches and a series of creative business workshops, as well as enjoying networking and business development opportunities with the finalists. An exhibition focusing on local creative businesses will run alongside the event.

The Small Business Expo, focused on empowering South Africas small businesses, showcases various products and services across a broad range of sectors  from food and retail to technical and education opportunities. The Small Business Expo and #BuyaBusiness Expo features a number of dedicated business development workshops which are free to attend to all visitors and exhibitors. These will include a Development Den, Dear Businessman Entrepreneurial Boot Camp, Woman in Business, Eskom Powering your World Indaba focusing on procurement and partners, Nedbank Money Matters workshop, The Business Theatre for business services and trends, and the BuyaBusiness Workshop on franchising and other business opportunities.

For more information about the Creative Business Cup, or to enter the challenge, click here.
The Durban FilmMart (DFM), the industry development programme of the eThekwini Municipality's Durban Film Office and Durban International Film Festival (Centre for Creative Arts, UKZN) ended on a high note with an awards ceremony at the Tsogo Maharani Hotel in Durban, South Africa on Monday, 17 July 2017.

DFM award winners with awards partners

The DFM is one of the most important film finance platforms and industry events on the African continent, and this years eighth edition has certainly been our biggest. said Toni Monty, head of the Durban Film Office. We hosted over 600 delegates with over 30 countries participating in this years market; 17 of which were from Africa. We are thrilled that we have had a record number of 70 projects presenting at this years finance forum.

Central to the Durban FilmMart have been the networking sessions and meetings held over four days between delegates comprising filmmakers, producers, distributors, agents, broadcasters and film funders and government agencies. Our annual programme would not be possible without our partners and sponsors, and we extend thanks and appreciation to the partner markets, funding bodies and development organisations who have continued to work with us in bringing African cinema to the world, and enabling us to expand the number of projects participating in the forums.

Platform to connect with the world

This year 22 official DFM film projects in development were presented at the Finance Forum through the partnership with Cinemart and IDFA, Netherlands. Durban Talents was able to host 30 young filmmakers through the support by Berlinale Talents, the Goethe-Institut and the German Embassy.

Four scriptwriters projects were hosted at the DFM in the Realness Script Writing Residency, while Produire au Sud, France, supported the Jumpstart Project, a mentorship programme to introduce six emerging filmmakers to the art of the pitch. Two documentary projects were supported by Hot Docs Canada, and six CineFam projects were rigorously mentored by Caribbean Tales, Canada.

The Durban FilmMart was made possible by our principal funder, the eThekwini Municipality, and we are privileged to have the ongoing support of a City government that recognises, supports and promotes the value of our industry, and understands the importance of providing African filmmakers a platform to connect with the world, and, importantly, to connect with African filmmakers throughout the continent.

Together with partners, NFVF, KZN Film Commission, and Department of Trade and Industry, we hosted three co-production delegations this year from Canada, Germany and Kenya, and special thanks go to the Canadian High Commission, the German Embassy and Kenya Film Commission for supporting these programmes.

This year we were able to host a vigorous Women Led Film Focus together with the DIFF, through the support of M-Net and NFVF, as well as support from the Industrial Development Corporation for an insightful Film Finance: State of the Industry.

The awards/grants:

The International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA) awarded the most promising documentary project at the DFM, Lobola: A Brides True Price (South Africa, producer: Sarah Basyouny, director: Sihle Hlophe) with an opportunity to attend the IDFA Forum, one of the top gatherings for documentary filmmakers, producers, commissioning editors, funds, private financiers and other documentary filmmakers in Europe, in November.

The broadcast stream, Afridocs, that flights African and other international documentaries across 49 countries of sub-Saharan Africa on a weekly basis, gave a 3000 grant to Uasi (Kenya), producers: Matrid Nyagah, Linda Ogeda, director: Sam Soko.

The CineMart Award, sponsored by the co-production market of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, went to the fiction project, Miles from Nowhere (South Africa), producer: Bongiwe Selane, director: Samantha Nell. The project is given an opportunity to attend the Rotterdam Lab, is a five-day training and networking event for producers from all over the world.

Produire au Sud of Festival des 3 Continents (Nantes), awarded the fiction film Miles from Nowhere (South Africa), producer: Bongiwe Selane, director: Samantha Nell an opportunity to attend its developmental workshop program, PAS, where they will be given tools, expertise, and opportunities to develop European networks.

Videovision Entertainment awarded the Best South African Film Project to the Dabulaphu (The Short Cut), producers Zikethiwe Ngcobo, David Max Brown, director Norman Maake. They receive a prize valued at R75,000, which guarantees its release once it is completed. The prize also includes marketing and distribution support from Videovision Entertainment.

Versfeld & Associates, publicity consultants will develop publicity material and advise on publicity profiling through the development two projects: Womxn: Working (South Africa), producer Tiny Mungwe and director Shanelle Jewnarain, and Richard Was Here (South Africa), producer: Akona Matyila and director: Jack Chiang.

Srfond awarded the project Uasi (Kenya), producers: Matrid Nyagah, Linda Ogeda, director: Soko Sam with an opportunity to pitch at the Srfond Pitching Forum in Oslo later this year.

CineFAM-Africa Incubator Accelerator Programme award to pitch at the Caribbean Tales Film Festival in Toronto, went to Mary Ann Mandishona for Mamba Kazi  African Warrior Queens.

For more information about the DFM, click here.
#Newsmaker: Reimagining an education brand in Red & Yellow

Helene Lindsay recently joined the disparate, quirky bunch at Red & Yellow, where she's taking on the customer side of things.

Helene Lindsay Her appointment coincides with the school's brand repositioning, which will be unveiled at the end of August. It's part of our ongoing evolution to ensure we're always one step ahead of the curve, and that our students  from C-suite to school-leavers  are equipped for the realities of the 21st century and what looks like a vastly different future, she says. The entire management team was restructured, and head of customer was one such role that was created to help bring the reimagined brand to life. I am part of a team that gets to reimagine an education brand of the future, while celebrating a 23-year legacy of proudly producing graduates whove gone on to become innovators, entrepreneurs, creators and industry leaders. Now I get to play a part in moulding the next generation, adds Lindsay. Here, she tells us why theyre rebranding and colours in her part in it, in red and yellow, of course. Comment on your new role, what it entails. Comment on your new role, what it entails.

I am responsible for the entire customer experience. Put differently, my role is to ensure that every touchpoint  from brand comms to experience to process  lives up to our brand ethos, and never fails to delight and add value to everyone who comes into contact with it. Why are you repositioning the brand and how do you plan to do so? Why are you repositioning the brand and how do you plan to do so? Because evolving means offering our students an even better learning experience. The digital explosion and exponential rate of impact on the world as we know it, amplified as AI increasingly permeates every industry sector and aspect of our lives, means that no one has the latitude of complacency any more. This applies to brands, as well as to individuals.

We are very excited about the opportunities that will arise, and we want to be sure we are not only prepared within the School, but more importantly, that we are leading the way in preparing humans for this vastly different future.

What do you love most about your career and working in customer experience in particular? What do you love most about your career and working in customer experience in particular?

Well, this is my first formal role in customer experience. But throughout my career, it has always been a particular obsession of mine. A brand is a living entity that needs to be nurtured and played out consistently, by everyone that represents it. It needs to stand for something, have a point of view and be on a mission to add value to the world, no matter how small or big.

And now I once again get to work with a leadership team that is driven by this conviction and commitment to taking a much-loved brand to the next level.

What's at the top of your to-do list (in terms of work)? What's at the top of your to-do list (in terms of work)?

Oooh, where to start? Currently, its crafting how the refreshed visual identity comes to life, setting up a network of people/companies who share our vision and want to collaborate (yes, this in an invitation!), working on the new website, and a gazillion other things  most of all, trying to get my head around the academic aspect, which is all new to me.

What motivates you? What motivates you?

Making things happen; connecting unexpected dots; the energy when a group of people are on a mission; learning new things; a jar of coloured pencil crayons and my two, beautiful Bedlington Terriers.

What are you currently reading/listening to for work? What are you currently reading/listening to for work?

The usual (Fast Company, HBR, TedTalks, Bizcommunity, etc.) and the unusual, such as white papers on the future of education/the world. Im also an avid fan of Billions and House of Cards  a girl needs her downtime (which makes her more productive for work).

Tell us something about yourself not generally known.



I think Brussels sprouts are ridiculous vegetables.
Vega has broadened its range of world-class IIE qualifications following its assimilation with its sister brand, The Design School of South Africa (DSSA). Vega's expanded portfolio of IIE qualifications which now includes a new post-graduate degree and a range of exciting undergraduate degrees in the Bachelor of Arts design disciplines.

Having already established three schools to accommodate its IIE Design, including brand and business portfolios, Vega will combine the DSSAs IIE academic offerings into its own. This will strengthen Vegas position as South Africas leading private higher education institution in design disciplines, giving Vega a stronger brand presence in the market.

Both schools acknowledged an overlap between The IIE offerings, and what was delivered at DSSA was a natural fit with Vegas core portfolios, says Shevon Lurie, managing director at Vega. We now have one of the broadest higher education design IIE portfolios in SA, including everything from photography, graphic design, copywriting, gaming, interior and fashion design.

Additional degrees

Following the expansion of the degree portfolio at the school, in addition to the existing range of business, branding and design degrees the following is available:

Bachelor of Arts: Honours in Graphic Design  a one-year postgraduate qualification aimed at students who want to engage with graphic design on a higher intellectual and professional level.

Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design  a three-year degree for those who live and breathe the art of telling stories through both traditional and digital imagery.

Bachelor of Arts in Fashion Design  a three-year degree aimed at students who want to enter the fashion industry.

Bachelor of Arts in Interior Design  a three-year degree specifically designed to meet the requirements of the challenging and ever-expanding fields of interior design, including corporate, retail, hospitality, exhibition and residential design.

Bachelor of Arts in Multimedia Design  a three-year degree that equips students with the necessary skills to stand out in both the interactive (web design, UX design, application design) and motion (3D and 2D animation, motion graphics, SFX, video editing) fields.

Bachelor of Arts in Creative Brand Communications  a three-year degree which provides students with the kind of strategic thinking and inspired planning skills that are in high demand across a broad range of the brand communication industry including copywriting, advertising and more.

This expansion ensures students get the best of both worlds from their studies, and allows us to further develop our facilities and the resources available to students, providing them with an all-encompassing learning experience recognised on an international scale.

Prospective students and their parents can get a feel for the Vega way of life and find out more about Vegas highly sought-after, world-class education at the upcoming Open Day, taking place in on Saturday, 5 August 2017 at Vega campuses countrywide. Parents and prospective students can gain a better understanding of IIEs offerings at Vega by clicking here. Applications for 2018 are now open.
Advertising Week, the world's largest annual gathering of marketing, media, and technology leaders, makes its long-anticipated debut in Africa on 14-19 February 2023, after the planned launch was delayed by the global pandemic.
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The South African National Editors' Forum has condemned the recent harassment of a journalist. Micah Reddy, a journalist at the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism, was verbally assaulted and harassed by members of the Black First Land First movement along with its leader, Andile Mngxitama, as he was leaving a TV production set in Braamfontein.

As it obtained a court interdict against BLF, two weeks ago, Sanef has called on the South African Police Service to ensure that similar incidents do not occur in the future.
Stanbic Bank Botswana has no immediate plans to list on the Botswana Stock Exchange, bank Chief Executive, Leina Gabaraane, has revealed.

Gabaraane told this publication that they dont have an appetite to list on the local bourse as the current situation does not attract them to do so.

As we stand now there is no immediate plan to list. There are many factors that we need to consider before listing and none of them has met our requirements. One of them is to raise capital and we dont need to raise capital, said Gabaraane.





He said the bank was performing well on the local financial service market and will continue to do so without listing. We believe that our contribution to the financial services sector in Botswana continues to be in existence and will continue and we dont need to do it through listing, he explained. He said listing on the stock exchange is important and this is why their bonds are listed on the BSE.

Listing on the stock exchange is said to be the best platform for citizens to participate in the businesses operating in the country through buying shares. There has been calls by some analysts for the bank to float its shares on the BSE, with emphasis placed on its market share. Even the central bank has also made similar calls.

Unlike its peers, Stanbic is not listed on the Botswana Stock Exchange. The non-existence of the bank on the domestic bourse could be misinterpreted to mean lack of long-term commitment and willingness to have the Botswana public participate in the ownership of the bank, said Bank of Botswana Governor, Moses Pelaelo.

He was speaking at the bank event to market its 25 years of existence in Botswana some few months ago. Ben Kruger, the co-Chief Executive of parent company, Standard Bank has told Botswana Guardian before that the time is not ripe for the bank to go public.

Stanbic bank is a member of the Standard Bank Group, the largest bank in Africa by assets. The bank is one of the largest and best performing commercial banks in Botswana. In its annual report for 2016, the financial institution recorded a profit after tax of up to 48 percent at P195 million.

The CEO said despite the closure of businesses, threats of closure and the challenges in the agriculture sector in the country, the bank still performed well. They recorded above budget profit and double digit year-on-year growth.

Stanbic Bank provides the full spectrum of financial services and operates within the two divisions namely the Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) and Personal and Business Banking (PBB).

In Botswana, the bank employs over 600 workers and has a national footprint of 10 branches. Last year the bank successfully launched a new three year Road To Excellence strategy aimed at enabling and positioning the bank as the market leader.
First National Bank Botswana is the best bank in Botswana. They were bestowed the award at the recently-held Euromoney Awards for Excellence in London recently.

According to a press statement, the Euromoney Awards for excellence have been running for more than 25 years. Only those institutions that bring highest levels of service, innovation and expertise to their customers are honoured, said the statement.

All banks in Botswana are eligible to enter the awards. Steven Bogatsu, the Chief Executive of FNBB is over the moon. We are pleased to have been recognised as a leading player in the banking sector in Botswana, he said. According to the CEO, the bank is driven by the need to provide best banking services to its clientele. Our eBucks Rewards programme also scored us points, he added.





The bank is better known for being the first to introduce cell phone banking, online banking, FNB APP, eWallet among others. Bogatsu has expressed gratitude to clients for their loyalty to the bank which turns 26 this year. Meanwhile, the bank has announced to shareholders that they will publish full year results on or about the 30th of August 2017. The bank, which is a subsidiary of FNB South Africa, has since declared a closed period. During this period members of the board and staff of the company are prohibited from dealing directly or indirectly in the listed securities of the company, said company Chief Finance Officer, Makgau Dibakwane.
The possibility of another debilitating split at Botswana Democratic Party (BDP)exists, says political science professor, Zibani Maundeni following last weekends central committee elections in Tonota.

There is division in opinion between members of the Nonofo Molefhi lobby and their followers regarding the results of the BDP central committee elections that were held last Saturday at the congress.

The Molefhi faction lost all the six positions to the Mokgweetsi Masisi faction. However, despite fears that the losers would protest the results amid allegations of vote-buying by the winning group, the losers publicly pledged unconditional support for the winners in the press conferences they held after the announcement of the results.





Meanwhile, their followers, just a few metres away from them, were fretting about the same results. This is not about me but about an institution with a culture and tradition. This is about the BDP. We have to mature and go beyond individuals. Todays results must not cause divisions between us, said Molefhi who pleaded with the BDP members to desist from the tendency to impute improper motives when somebody contests for a position.

Molefhi promised that no one from his supporters is going to move away from the party. It is well with my soul, he said after embracing the winner. Molefhi has been accused of intending to use the chairmanship position, if he won it, as a stepping stone to the Presidency of the party later, that of the country.

For his part, Botsalo Ntuane said after he lost to Mpho Balopi, I appreciated there was going to be one winner. I respect the decision of the BDP members. Two years ago, I was in the position of our winner today. I beat my competitor for the position of secretary general at the Mmadinare congress, said Ntuane after he lost to Mpho Balopi on Saturday.

Meanwhile, the winners, in both instances, congratulated the losers and pledged to work closely with them. Beneath this veneer of solidarity however, there was turbulence. Hordes of BDP members outside the hall sat in their cars or stood on the corridors in small groups dismissing the elections as neither free nor fair. The conversations outside the hall were dripping with mistrust, disgruntlement and bitterness from the losers as they averred that Masisi is power hungry.

Many spoke to this publication without identifying themselves as they left the Tonota College of Education (TEC) alleging vote-buying. We are going to cross the bridge very soon, some of them said as they vowed to decamp to the opposition. Many were overheard claiming that the playing field was not level. A lady who sat in her car with a group of friends when this reporter passed by accused Masisi of being selfish. He is a Member of Parliament (MP), Chancellor of the University of Botswana (UB), party chairman and will be President soon. Why cant he allow the other people to lead? she said as her companions joined the chorus of condemnation.

We are going to form a new party or defect en-masse to the opposition to block Masisi from achieving what he wants. He will never be the President of Botswana, she said pleading for anonymity. It remains to be seen whether ordinary members of the losing faction will change their minds and rally behind the Masisi lobby.

However, condescending and triumphant statements such as Re kgalemeste lenyatso,(We have humbled them) uttered by one of the winners immediately after disengaging from the embrace of the loser can only bode ill for the party which has not known internal stability for years now. What may make it difficult for the two camps to work together is the strong belief among the Molefhi camp that the playing field was not level.

There have been complaints by this faction that, while it struggled financially, their competitors had truckloads of cash from the business community which had been instructed to donate only to the Masisi faction. Matters are not helped by the fact that, not only did Khama publicly endorse Masisi, government resources were used to support the Masisi campaign effort by virtue of him being Vice President.

Observers believe that President Khama, who has publicly called upon the two factions to reach a compromise arrangement instead of competing against each other, should have used the special nomination dispensation to appoint members of the Molefhi faction into the central committee.

We are happy that Ntuane is there as an additional member of the central committee but that is not enough, said an observer who thinks that Khama would have made a bigger impact to the unity effort had he nominated Nonofo Molefhi himself to the central committee. Those who doubt that the BDP emerged united from the congress are informed by comments such as, Once an enemy, always an enemy, by a Masisi aide who boasted to this publication that an extermination campaign to wipe out the Molefhi camp is in place.

Firstly, according to him, a cabinet reshuffle, which he said is looming, will purge members of the Molefhi. According to him, there is also a grand plan by the winning group to ensure that the members of the Molefhi group lose primary elections. Indications are that, one of the reasons the BDP ran a conflict-ridden primary elections process ahead of the 2014 general election is that, the losers alleged underhand tactics by the party leadership to eliminate them.

Observers say that, history might be repeating itself. For instance, after the 2009 BDP congress, disgruntled members were targeted for sidelining and elimination. This led to a split which is blamed for the poor electoral performance by the ruling party in the 2014 general election.Should this happen this time around, the BDP will have failed to learn a lesson and the consequences of the partys failure to read history will be too ghastly to contemplate come 2019. When asked for comment, University of Botswana don, Professor Zibani Maundeni noted that President Khama has never been a unifier.

When President Khamas faction lost most of the seats at the Kanye congress a few years ago, he nominated people from his faction to neutralise the winning faction. This time around, his faction won all the seats but we do not see him nominating members of the losing side to the central committee despite the fact that he was concerned about party unity before the congress, said Maundeni.

According to Prof Maundeni, President Khama is only concerned with strengthening the faction he belongs to. In his view, had the Masisi faction lost, he would have flooded the central committee with Masisi loyalists because that is the faction he supports. Under the circumstances, the possibility of another debilitating split exists, observed the political science professor
By of the

Madison  Users of heroin and other drugs would be immune from liability if they called 911 to report overdoses and more first responders could carry drugs to counteract overdoses, under bills a committee unanimously sent to the Assembly on Thursday.

"I have seen things that nobody should ever see," Alex Hoffmann of Menomonee Falls told the Assembly Criminal Justice Committee.

Hoffmann's son Shay died of a heroin overdose in July at the age of 22.

"I watched my son shoot up heroin before I stopped him," he said. "I watched him try to withdraw from heroin on his own. I watched him battle schizophrenia, which is brought on by heroin, induced by it. I watched my family disintegrate as we tried to save him. And I watched him die."

The bills are expected to go before the Assembly on Tuesday, along with ones requiring people to show identification when they pick up many prescriptions and allowing communities to more easily set up drug-disposal programs.

The Senate also is scheduled to approve them early this year, and Gov. Scott Walker supports them.

The bills are being promoted by Rep. John Nygren (R-Marinette), whose daughter Cassie has struggled with heroin addiction.

He said he planned to introduce two other bills on the issue next week. One would create a pilot program for treatment alternatives in rural areas and the other would create a "rapid response" for those with drug problems who violate the terms of their probation or parole. Under that program, offenders would face swift sanctions, such as a short stint in jail, in an attempt to break a cycle that sees offenders committing new crimes and winding up with long prison sentences.

Of the measures approved by the committee Thursday, one would make people immune from criminal prosecution for drug possession if they brought someone to an emergency room or called 911 because they believed the person was suffering from an overdose.

Michael Miller, a doctor who serves on the board of the Wisconsin Medical Society, praised that bill but said it should be extended to other circumstances. For instance, those under 21 should not be charged for possessing alcohol if they call 911 when their friends drink too much, he argued.

"Nine-one-one is emergency health response. It doesn't mean emergency 'lock me up,'" he said.

While the bill provides immunity from prosecution for drug possession, it does not do so for drug dealing or other drug crimes. That means police would be able to pursue suspects if they uncovered a drug house.

Another bill approved Thursday would allow any first responders to administer naloxone, if they were trained. Known by its brand name Narcan, naloxone counteracts overdoses from heroin and other opiates. The drug, given intravenously or as an inhalant, does not provide a high, so there is little risk of abuse.

"No one dies from Narcan. They die from not getting Narcan," Miller said.

Currently, only certain emergency medical technicians are allowed to administer the drug. The bill would make it more widely available, and all EMTs trained in its use would have to carry the drug whenever they were on duty. Police officers and firefighters also would be able to administer the drug, and they would be immune from liability for giving it.

It also would allow anyone to carry and administer the drug so that the family and friends of addicts could have it on hand, and they also would be granted immunity. Currently, it is illegal for someone with a prescription for Narcan to use the drug on someone else who is having an overdose.

A third bill, also approved unanimously Thursday by the Criminal Justice Committee, would allow communities to set up programs to dispose of prescription and illegal drugs.

Also Thursday, the Assembly Health Committee unanimously approved a fourth bill that would require people to show identification to pick up prescriptions that are considered to have a high potential for abuse.

Nygren said his daughter and many others have progressed from abusing prescription drugs to a catastrophic heroin addiction.

"There is no doubt that the abuse of prescription drugs is directly linked to the use of heroin in our state," Nygren said. "This is where it starts in a lot of cases."

The bill would still allow people to pick up prescriptions for family members, Nygren said. The names of those picking up prescriptions would be recorded and kept by the pharmacy but wouldn't be shared with the government unless requested by law enforcement for an investigation.

All the bills have the backing of Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen.

"These bills will save lives," said a statement issued by Van Hollen. "Law enforcement alone will not defeat the spiral, devastation and death heroin promises. This action by the Legislature joins that of parents, friends, law enforcement and first responders across the state fighting to prevent and reduce opiate addiction."

Jason Stein of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.

Twitter: twitter.com/patrickdmarley
There were hundreds of people sleeping on the decks and the kids had to wear life jackets in case the ship hit a mine.

And so many of us came to be evacuated to Australia on the mine sweeper MV Katoomba  a very slow voyage as the ship had to also search for mines along the way.

Kevin flew many of our Parer family members from Wau to Port Moresby in late December 1941 as Japanese forces threatened New Guinea.

His father, also Kevin, owned and operate three aircraft in the Parer Air Service which was based in Wewak. The photograph below left is of him after a flight into the highlands.

MY cousin Kevin Parer is same age as me and lived in Wau and Wewak before World War II.

Tragically, a few weeks after he had flown us to safety, Kevin was killed at Salamaua during the first Japanese air raid.

His wife, my Aunty Nance, told me that just a few weeks before he was killed Kevin flew on a secret mission from Wewak to Aitape. The Aitape District Officer did not know he was coming so Kevin had to walk to the office and after delivering the package walked back to the airfield and slept under the wing of his plane. No night flying in PNG then. In the morning he flew back to Wewak.

Young Kevin, his son, went to Nudgee College in Brisbane with me and then to Gatton Agricultural College. We both returned to Aitape in December 1954.

Kevin worked at Karlai Plantation in Wide Bay, New Britain, owned by our uncles Bernard and Cyril. He moved to Toriou in Open Bay before deciding to study medicine. After he became a doctor, he practiced in Lae for 12 years.

Some years ago Kevin wrote a book about his life, entitled A Time B4 - Memoirs of Dr Kevin J Parer.

Some time ago I told him about Donna Harvey-Hall and her plan to set up a care centre for orphans in Wau using her own land and buildings and Kevin decided to donate the proceeds of further book sales to make Haus Pikinini a reality.

As Dr Kevin is not well enough at this time to administer the project, I am doing that for him.

The price of the book is $A20 plus postage from Brisbane. If anyone is interested in purchasing a copy please let me know by emailing me here.


Rafale fighter jet. Photo: Dassault Aviation

NEW DELHI (PTI): Chief of Air Staff B S Dhanoa on Tuesday flew a sortie in a Rafale fighter jet from a French airbase to gain first-hand experience of the aircraft, 36 of which are being procured for the Indian Air Force.



Dhanoa is a on a four-day visit to France to ramp up cooperation between the air forces of the two countries in a range of areas.



He flew the fighter at the Saint-Dizier airbase -- a prominent installation of the French air force, an IAF official said here.



India is procuring the Rafale multi-role fighter jets from French aviation major Dassault under a Euro 7.87 billion (approx Rs 59,000 crore) deal inked in September last year



Air Chief Marshal Dhanoa will also take stock of progress in their supply.



The fighter jets are capable of carrying nuclear weapons and will be equipped with the latest missiles that will give the IAF greater "potency" over arch-rival Pakistan.



The Rafale combat aircraft will come with various India-specific modifications including Israeli helmet mounted displays, radar warning receivers and low band jammers, among others.



The Inter-Governmental Agreement for the supply of the jets was signed in September last year, 16 months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced India's plans to buy 36 Rafale aircraft in fly-away condition.



According to the deal, the delivery of the jets will start in 36 months and will be completed in 67 months from the date the contract is inked.


Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 19/07/2017 (1942 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A man who allegedly stabbed himself to frame his ex-girlfriend and mother after he assaulted them has been released on bail.

During the accuseds bail hearing, Crown attorney Rich Lonstrup said a witness told police that the accused had stabbed himself.

Just prior to police arriving, the accused stabbed himself in the left shoulder to make it appear that he was the victim, Lonstrup said on Monday in Brandon provincial court.

Lonstrup said that police were called to a downtown apartment shortly before noon on Friday. The caller reported that a man was assaulting his ex-girlfriend and his mother.

Police found the suspect at the apartment with his ex, his mom and his current girlfriend.

The man seemed to be under the influence of a drug, and was bleeding from cuts to his shoulder. He claimed that his mother had stabbed him with a kitchen knife, which was located in the hallway.

The mans injuries were treated at the scene, but he was arrested for the following accusations.

The ex said she and the man were arguing when attacked her by punching and kicking her. She was treated at hospital for bruises and released later that day.

The man had also repeatedly punched his mom when shed tried to intervene in the attack. He pushed her to the floor and stomped on her chest, but she didnt need medical attention.

The suspects current girlfriend said that, after 911 was called, he grabbed a knife from the kitchen, stood by the door waiting for police to arrive and shouted for his mother and ex to stop stabbing him. He also yelled for his mother to put the knife down.

The shouts could be heard by neighbours.

Just before police arrived, the witness said, the accused stabbed himself in the shoulder.

The suspects mother and ex-girlfriend corroborated that story, said Lonstrup, who also noted there were two young children in the home at the time.

Kyle Justin Craig Bradshaw has been charged with two counts of assault. Hes to return to court on Aug. 3. The allegations against him havent been proven and hes presumed innocent.

 ihitchen@brandonsun.com
A burglar was identified after he was caught on CCTV having his hair cut in the barbers next door to the premises he broke into, a court has heard.

By Fiona Ferguson

Matthew Ahern (53), of St Brigids Court, Raheny, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to burglary at Collins Avenue East, Killester on February 17, 2016.

He has 48 previous convictions including seven burglaries and one robbery.

Garda Laura Nulty told Grainne ONeill BL, prosecuting, that the homeowner heard rustling noises at a dresser and initially thought it was her husband but when she turned to look saw Ahern with her iPad and laptop. She grabbed them back and he took two phones before leaving the house.

The court heard he had gained entry to the house by smashing a panel in the front door.

Gardai recovered CCTV from the barbers next door which showed Ahern having a hair cut immediately prior to the burglary. He was arrested and initially denied involvement.

Gda Nulty agreed with Seoirse ODunlaing BL, defending, that although it was traumatic for the woman to find an unknown male in her home, there had been limited interaction between them.

She agreed he had no implements on him and it had been a smash and grab.

Mr ODunlaing said Ahern had worked with his father after leaving school but entered a cycle of offending behaviour after falling into drug addiction. He submitted that prior to 2016 there had been a gap of seven years in serious offending while he was engaging with various agencies.

He handed a number of reports into court and said Ahern wished to apologise for the offence.

Counsel asked Judge Karen OConnor to allow Ahern complete a stabilisation program to address his long standing drug addiction.

Judge OConnor said it was hard to take Aherns apology seriously when he had initially denied being the culprit.

This ladys home was violated and I take that very seriously, she said.

She noted the reports handed into court and adjourned sentencing until October to allow Ahern complete the stabilisation program. She ordered a probation report to be prepared and asked it address his risk of re-offending.
As New York City mass transit users brace for the "summer of hell," Gov. Andrew Cuomo's poll numbers may be in for a rough few months, too.

Cuomo's favorability, job performance and re-election ratings dropped in the latest Siena College poll released Tuesday. His favorable rating fell from 61 percent in May to 52 percent this month. A majority of New Yorkers  55 percent  gave him a fair or poor job performance score. That's down from 51 percent who said in May that he was doing an excellent or good job as governor.

On the question of whether voters would re-elect Cuomo in 2018, 46 percent said they would support the governor for a third term. That's a seven-point drop from May when 53 percent said they would vote for the Democratic incumbent.

Siena pollster Steve Greenberg attributed Cuomo's declining ratings to the problems with the subway system and mass transit in New York City. He noted that the governor's job performance scores dropped 25 points among New York City voters and 32 points with downstate suburban voters.

"It appears likely that a major reason for Cuomo's lower poll numbers relate to issues surrounding the (Metropolitan Transportation Authority), for which only about one-quarter of voters downstate and upstate rate Cuomo positively," Greenberg said.

The MTA oversees mass transit in the New York City area, including the Metro-North commuter line and the Long Island Railroad. Sixty-two percent of voters rate the MTA's job performance as fair or poor.

Cuomo's handling of the MTA also received low marks. Fifty-nine percent of voters said he's done a fair or poor job managing mass transit issues.

Voters believe more money is needed to improve MTA service. Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed  72 percent  say the state should invest more and 64 percent said New York City should provide more funding for mass transit.

There's disagreement on whether the city or state should take on most of the financial burden of supporting the MTA, according to Greenberg.

"Those in the MTA region say the state should be primarily responsible for providing funding by a 59-33 percent margin, while those outside the MTA region say the city should be primarily responsible, 67-26 percent," he said.

Cuomo has sought to address the issues involving the MTA. He's pledged to add $1 billion to the agency's capital plan and has declared a state of emergency. He appointed Joe Lhota to chair the MTA.

While Lhota serves as chair, the agency's executive director will be responsible for the day-to-day operations. Ronnie Hakim currently holds that position.
A protest is being planned in Galway's Eyre Square this afternoon over ambulance cover for the West.

A Connemara campaign group claim their human rights are being violated over a lack of vital services.

Patricia Keane from the Ambulance Crisis Group says patients often have to wait two to three hours for an ambulance.

The group is meeting at 2pm with a clear message for the Health Minister Simon Harris over what they believe is an unacceptable problem.

Ms Keane said: "Thisi si a problem not just in Connemara but in Galway city and throughout the whole country.

"So we will be informing people of that and after that we will march to the HSE office and we will be presenting a letter there stating our concerns and our needs.

"Then we will proceed to the University College Hospital Galway and again we will have some speakers there."

If you cannot see the Facebook post above, click here.
Residents in Galway are urging the HSE to take action over waiting times for ambulances.

Up to 100 protesters marched in the city this afternoon saying waiting times can often reach up to, or even exceed, three hours from call out time.
Update - 9.57am: A post mortem examination on remains found in Coolmine Woods in Dublin 15 has proved inconclusive.

Tests are still being carried out to try and identify the remains.

Gardai are looking to speak to a man, who they believe has left the country, to help them with their inquiries.

Earlier: Forensic checks are continuing in West Dublin where a woman's remains were discovered yesterday.

Gardai have again appealed for witnesses.

The scene of the discovery at Coolmine Woods, between Clonsilla and Blanchardstown remains under scrutiny while gardai continue to investigate the circumstances surrounding the woman's death.

The remains were found just yards from a local school where hundreds of children had been attending a summer camp.

Preliminary post-mortem results are not currently being released for "operational reasons".

However, it is understood forensic tests are being carried out on personal possessions found with the remains.

The body was discovered by gardai searching for 29-year-old Linda Christian, who went missing in Blanchardstown last month.
A murder trial jury was today shown CCTV footage of the moment a biker was shot dead at the gates of his motorcycle club, reports Eoin Reynolds.

The jurors were also shown a sawn-off shotgun gardai found in a wooded area behind the accused mans home and they heard that a search of the club premises yielded a bullet-proof vest and weapons including an improvised firearm and a pipe bomb.

Alan Cookie McNamara (51), from Mountfune, Murroe, Co Limerick has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Andrew ODonoghue on June 20, 2015 at Mountfune.

Also on trial is Mr McNamaras stepson Robert Cusack (28), of Abington, Murroe who has pleaded not guilty to impeding Mr McNamaras apprehension knowing or believing him to have committed a serious offence. The trial has previously heard that the deceased was a member of the Road Tramps motorcycle club while Mr McNamara was associated with the rival Caballeros.

Garda Nicholas Jones told prosecuting counsel Michael Delaney SC that he compiled CCTV footage from various locations between Doon in Limerick to the Road Tramps clubhouse where Mr ODonoghue was shot dead.

On the afternoon of Saturday June 20 a camera at the clubhouse gates showed Mr ODonoghue coming in and out with a green bar in his hand when a green Honda CRV arrived. Just before 2.45pm an individual emerged from the same direction as the Honda. The man appeared to be wearing gloves and brandishing a firearm, the garda said.

Garda Jones said the man appears to discharge the firearm and then make an attempt to reload by breaking the barrel and reaching in and out of his left pocket. At one point he dropped one of his gloves onto the ground.

Less than one minute after the shooting, a silver Ford Focus passed the club followed 15 seconds later by a navy VW Passat. When the Passat pulled up the man handed the gun to a person in the back seat and picked his glove up off the ground before leaving the scene. The prosecution says the Ford Focus was driven by Road Tramp member Seamus Duggan who was being chased by members of the Caballeros in the navy Passat.

CCTV footage collected at various locations showed the Ford Focus followed closely by the Passat travelling from Doon to the gates of the motorcycle club in the lead-up to the shooting. Mr Duggan said that he drove at speeds up to 100mph in an attempt to get away from the Caballeros and into the clubhouse yard for safety. But when he arrived the clubhouse gates were shut and Mr ODonoghue was lying on the ground fatally wounded.

Garda Brian Begley told Mr Delaney that he was involved in the search of Mr McNamaras home at Mountfune on June 21, the day after the shooting. At the back of the property there was an area of trampled grass leading to a wooded area. He followed the trampled grass and, using a slash hook, made his way into the wooded area where he found a black plastic bag. Inside it was a sawn-off shotgun.

Sergeant Andrew ORiordan told Mr Delaney that he carried out a search at the Road Tramps clubhouse. Inside there was a well-stocked bar, a lounge, meeting room, kitchen and motorbike repair garage.

He found a bullet-proof vest in the lounge and in a safe in the kitchen he discovered e2,500 and seven cans of pepper spray. In a small room off the meeting room he found a pair of jeans with two shotgun cartridges in the pocket. A box he found on a patio contained 30 rounds of ammunition, some of which were so rusted they could not be used.

Outside the building there were several mobile homes, most of which were unlocked and in disrepair. One stuck out because it was locked and seemed clean and well cared for. When he searched inside he found a decommissioned grenade, rounds of ammunition, an improvised firearm and a pipe bomb.

A car on the premises contained a pump action shotgun with two rounds, a balaclava and more pepper spray. He also found a knuckle duster and one knife, plus an "assortment of weapons" including sticks, batons, an axe, a hurl and various piping "all within easy reach around the compound".

Under cross examination the garda told Hugh Hartnett SC, representing Mr McNamara, that he did not know if anyone had been prosecuted in relation to possession of those weapons.

Detective Garda Niall Fitzgerald and Detective Garda Brendan Casey told the court that they arrested each of the accused at a home in Garryowen in Limerick on the evening of June 20, 2015.

Det Gda Fitzgerald also found a typed document inside a red notebook in a bedroom during the search of Mr McNamaras home. The document contained 41 names alongside phone numbers. The list included the names "Cookie" and "Rob Cusack".

The trial continues in front of Justice Paul McDermott and a jury of seven men and four women.
Update 6.46pm: The family of a young student who was tied up and repeatedly raped throughout the night have arrived in Dublin to care for her, it has been reported.

The 18-year-old Spanish student met an Irish man in the city centre on Saturday before she was brought to the Pigeon House Road beside Sandymount Strand in Ringsend, where the prolonged attack took place.

The scene has been examined by forensic experts. Investigating gardai say they have spoken to a number of people, and they are also gathering CCTV footage.

A 24-year-old man arrested in connection with the incident has since been released without charge. Gardai say a file is being prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions "as a matter of urgency".

It is understood that the victim walked with the man from Eden Quay to Store Street, took the Luas to The Point stop, before walking to Tom Clarke (East Link) Bridge to the coast, near Pigeon House Road.

Gardai have appealed to any witnesses to contact them.

Earlier:

Gardai in Irishtown are investigating the alleged serious sexual assault of a young Spanish woman in Dublin.

The 18-year-old has reported the attack took place at the weekend on Pigeon House Road in Ringsend.

She said she met an Irish man in the city centre on Saturday but was persuaded to take a southbound DART.

It is alleged she was subjected to an horrific attack over a number of hours, and when she escaped she went to Gardai who immediately launched an investigation.

A 24-year-old man was arrested yesterday in connection with the alleged assault.

He has since been released without charge and a file is being prepared for the DPP.

Local councillor Chris Andrews described the incident as "horrifying".

He said: "I have spoken with a number of local residents and it is horrifying what happened to that poor young girl. My thoughts are with her and her family and I hope she can find the strength to get through her ordeal.

"I have asked that the local Gardai in Irishtown make it a regular area for them to visit and increase visibility.

"Unfortunately because of the housing crisis there is a number of people who have to live in tents in this general area.

"Obviously the vast majority get on with their daily struggle, but it is important that the residents are assured that they are safe in this area which is a regular recreational spot for young and old."
Sinn Fein says Taoiseach Leo Varadkar needs to act and remove Noirin O'Sullivan as Garda Commissioner.

A report from the Public Accounts Commitee yesterday was critical of her delay in telling the Justice Minister and the Comptroller & Auditor General, about financial irregularities at the training college in Templemore.

Despite this, several Government Ministers continue to express confidence in Commissioner O'Sullivan.

However, Sinn Fein's Mary Lou McDonald says its time for change at the top of the Garda force.

She said: "For Charlie Flanagan or anyone else to suggest that the current Commissioner, with the current senior management at An Garda Siochana, are the new brooms that will sweep clean, the ones that will bring reforms, that will rebuild public confidence in An Garda Siochana, is quite frankly the stuff of cloud cuckoo land."
The Government has been warned that more post offices will close around the country, because postmasters cannot make a living from the business.

Postmasters are holding a protest outside the Department of Communications at noon today seeking the involvement of the Minister in their stalled talks with An Post.
The Government has won its High Court bid to obtain a permanent ban on industrial action by prison officers.

The Ministry of Justice's application followed a move in February by the POA - the Professional Trades Union for Prison, Correctional and Secure Psychiatric Workers - to call on its members to take action short of a strike.

That led to an interim injunction requiring the POA to withdraw a circular instructing members to refuse to undertake certain voluntary tasks.

Daniel Stilitz QC said earlier this month that the case was brought "to ensure that POA does not seek to breach the law again".

John Hendy QC, for the POA, said each of the activities referred to in the circular were voluntary in nature and there was no evidence that any of the 35,000 members had been asked to disobey any lawful instruction.

He said steps were taken to ensure members fully complied with the February order and the court was being asked to consider the lawfulness of a circular which was no longer extant and never implemented.

On Wednesday in London, Mr Justice Jay said the Ministry of Justice was entitled to a final injunction.

Mr Stilitz said that, in view of the importance of maintaining discipline and security within the prison service, Parliament had enacted a prohibition on inducing prison officers to take industrial action under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.

Despite this, he added, the POA had recently called or threatened to call industrial action on a number of occasions.

"Any inducement which leads prison officers to cease to provide services which they otherwise would have done is unlawful."

The history of "unlawful" industrial action, together with the "inflammatory rhetoric"used by the POA, suggested a continuing willingness to call for industrial action despite Parliament having "clearly and deliberately" outlawed it.

"The Secretary of State is concerned that, unless the position is determined definitively by the court, there will be renewed calls for unlawful industrial action in the future.

"It is therefore critical to safeguarding the proper and safe functioning of the prison service that the scope of the statutory prohibition is confirmed."

The judge said: "The POA has lost not just on the facts - the wording of the circular, and the finding that the circular was likely to generate a risk to the safety of prisoners and staff - but also on the important point of principle."
A coroner has recorded an open conclusion on the death of a Polish-born teenager who was found hanged in toilets at her school after complaining that she had been bullied and called a ''stupid Pole'' and told to ''go back to your own country'' by other pupils.

Dagmara Przybysz, an aspiring photographer who was looking forward to her year 11 prom and shopping for a dress, told her mother and her boyfriend that she was being taunted by girls at her school before she was found dead at Pool Academy in Britain on May 17, 2016.

One recent message from the sporty teenager to her boyfriend Lewis Simpson read: ''Not the best day at school, people saying things about me because I am from Poland. I don't even know their names.''

During a three-day inquest into the 16-year-old's death, Dagmara's parents criticised the school over the length of time - more than 90 minutes - it took to find their daughter after she went missing from class and questioned why incidents she reported to staff had not been recorded as bullying.

On Wednesday Cornwall Coroner Dr Emma Carlyon said that "although the evidence pointed to a self inflicted death" there was no other evidence that Dagmara had intended to end her own life, such as a note.

She said: "Although she was clearly upset in the previous 48 hours she was reportedly fine at school and she took her dyslexia test to help her in college.

"She was clearly enjoying the relationship with Lewis and was making plans for the school ball."

Dr Carlyon added there was no evidence of mental health issues "or any significant racism or bullying issues immediately prior to death although she had been clearly upset by incidents that occurred particularly on May 16/17".

Dagmara, who was about to take her GCSE exams, had a place to study photography at Truro College the following year but was concerned about doing well in her exams and worried she might have dyslexia, the inquest heard.

Statements from teachers, read out during the hearing at Cornwall Coroner's Court in Truro, described her as a friendly, happy, "lovely girl", with one teacher saying she had a fiery character and enjoyed playing football.

In a statement Dagmara's mother, Ewelina, said her daughter, who was a ''very beautiful lady'', got on better with boys and most of her friends, including her boyfriend, went to another school.

Mrs Przybysz said her daughter had been having a problem with one girl who had ''called Dagmara names''.

''I don't know exactly what was said,'' she said. ''This incident occurred only a few days before Dagmara passed away... I don't know whether these incidents were racist in nature; however, I can say that on several occasions she overheard comments such as 'stupid Pole'.''

She added: ''We think the biggest problem for Dagmara was not racism, but bullying.''

Lewis said Dagmara told him that other pupils made racist comments to her such as ''go back to your own country'' and he said: ''I think it got to her a little bit.''

However staff at the school, including assistant principal Lisette Neesham, said there was no record of Dagmara suffering from either bullying or racism which she said the school took very seriously.

CCTV from the school showed Dagmara entering the toilets at 12.14.

Her science teacher marked her as being absent, which the inquest heard should have sparked a series of actions resulting in Dagmara being found within 20 minutes or with the matter being escalated.

Detective Sergeant Steve Panter, who investigated the case, said there was no evidence such a search was carried out.

The alarm was raised more than an hour and a half later when two young pupils aged 11 or 12 spoke to staff co-ordinator Paula Hosking after using the facilities twice and realising Dagmara was still in there the second time.

Ms Hosking went to the toilets and called for help.

Ms Neesham and pastoral support worker and first aider Rodney Peasley were the two who answered the call.

Paramedic Christopher Taylor said they found Dagmara on the floor covered from head to toe in a blanket, with no evidence of any attempt at CPR, adding she was warm to touch.

The inquest heard staff members believed Dagmara to be dead when they found her and decided not to carry out CPR despite being asked to do so by the 999 call handler.

However Mr Taylor said he did not think the outcome would have been different if CPR had been attempted ''on this occasion''.

Both Mrs Przybysz and Dagmara's father, Jedrzej, became frustrated at times throughout the hearing and had several heated exchanges with staff from the school.

In one they questioned Ms Neesham why a conversation between their daughter and pastoral support manager Susan Kent the day before she died had not been logged on the system as it should have been.

The inquest heard Dagmara told Ms Kent said she had problems and was worried about her sister being bullied as she had been previously.

Mrs Przybysz said: ''She does not have to use that word (bullying). She does not have to know that word."

Ms Neesham said the school had a racism, bullying and homophobia log for the most serious incidents and Dagmara was not in it.

Less serious incidents reported to members of staff were logged in a different system she said, adding she could not explain why the conversation with Ms Kent on May 16, 2016, had not been recorded.

Mr Przybysz said the system did not work but Ms Neesham replied she did not think there was a problem with the system.

''As a school we take bullying, racism and homophobia really seriously,'' she said.

''You (Dagmara's parents) didn't as a family report any concerns about Dagmara.''

In a statement read out to the hearing, pathologist Dr Juliane Stolte, who carried out the post-mortem examination, said the cause of death was hanging.

Det Sgt Panter said: ''We have evidence that Dagmara spoke of incidents of being bullied and being made to feel unhappy but this was in a very non-specific way and we simply don't have details of the scale, frequency or have any real understanding of how significant these incidents were in Dagamara's decision on May 17.''

Asked if bullying or racism played a part in her death, Det Sgt Craig Daddow said: ''I am unable to say.''
President Donald Trump had a second, previously undisclosed conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit in Germany earlier this month.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Mr Trump and Mr Putin spoke during a world leaders' dinner at the G20 summit in Hamburg.

US intelligence officials have accused the Russian government of meddling in the 2016 election to help Mr Trump win.

Mr Trump and Mr Putin had a formal meeting that lasted more than two hours earlier that day.

It was not immediately clear how long the informal conversation lasted or what was discussed.

But Mr Trump defended the dinner in two angry tweets that noted the dinner had been on his public schedule.

He wrote: "Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is 'sick.' All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!"

A few minutes later he added: "The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!"

National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton said: "A conversation over dessert should not be characterised as a meeting."

The news came as Mr Trump announced his intention to nominate former Utah governor Jon Huntsman to be US ambassador to Russia.

If confirmed, the former 2012 Republican presidential candidate would take over the post amid the investigations into contacts between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.

Mr Huntsman has twice served as an ambassador. He was the nation's top diplomat to Singapore under President George HW Bush. He then served in that role in China under President Barack Obama before returning to the US to run for president.

Earlier, it emerged that a Russian developer's representative was the eighth attendee at a Trump Tower campaign meeting arranged by Mr Trump's oldest son.

In emails, Donald Trump Jr enthusiastically agreed to the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others after he was promised dirt on his father's rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The special counsel investigating possible Trump campaign ties to Russia wants more information about the meeting.

Officials from the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller have contacted a lawyer for Ike Kaveladze, who also goes by the name Irakly Kaveladze, lawyer Scott Balber told The Washington Post and CNN.

It is the first public indication that Mr Mueller is probing the June 2016 gathering in Trump Tower.

Mr Kaveladze works for a Russian developer who once joined with Mr Trump to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow.

Mr Balber told the media outlets that Mr Kaveladze works for developers Emin and Aras Agalarov and was there to represent them. The father and son, who worked with Mr Trump on the pageant in 2013, were named in the emails that promised damaging information on Mrs Clinton.

Ms Veselnitskaya has denied she works for the Russian government and said the meeting focused on US-Russian adoption policies and a sanctions law.

Mr Balber said Mr Kaveladze attended the meeting to help translate, but did not have to because Ms Veselnitskaya brought her own translator.

The meeting was also attended by Mr Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, music publicist Rob Goldstone and Rinat Akhmetshin, a prominent Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer.

Mr Trump Jr scheduled the gathering after Mr Goldstone, a British publicist for Emin Agalarov, said Ms Veselnitskaya might have damaging information on Mrs Clinton she could share.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his panel wanted to talk to the meeting's attendees.

He said: "I doubt if this individual who had a history of setting up thousands of fake accounts in Delaware was really there to talk about Russian adoptions."

Mr Warner appeared to be referring to a 2000 New York Times story about Mr Kaveladze.

It identified him as running a company cited in a Government Accountability Office report for laundering $1.4bn in wealthy foreigners' funds via US banks using thousands of Delaware corporations. No criminal charges were filed in the case.

AP
U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer is continuing his push to boost malting barley production in New York and help the state become the "Napa Valley of craft beer."

On a conference call with reporters Wednesday, Schumer, D-N.Y., said he's urging the U.S. Department of Agriculture to extend the malting barley endorsement  a form of premium crop insurance  to New York farmers.

The malting barley endorsement is available to farmers in select states, but not New York. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, at Schumer's request, recently made general malting barley crop insurance available to 44 counties in New York.

Schumer said the endorsement is important because it would help farmers insure the malting barley crop at a higher level. And that could give growers more of an incentive to produce malting barley, which is a delicate crop.

Droughts, floods and excessive heat could damage malting barley crops. Schumer said having the insurance for malting barley is "more crucial" to aid farmers that have been reluctant to plant it.

Malting barley is a key ingredient in brewing beer. It's also used by distillers in the production of spirits.

"If you're a brewer, you need a lot of malt barley to make the entire process work," Schumer said. "Growing malt barley should be a great opportunity for our farmers, but there are many obstacles, risks and costs that stand in the way."

Congressional approval isn't needed for New York growers to be eligible for the malting barley endorsement. Schumer said the U.S. Department of Agriculture can take administrative action to extend the program to the state's farmers. He's hopeful that will happen soon.

There's another reason for Schumer's push. A farm brewery law enacted in 2012 requires beer producers to acquire a minimum amount of hops and other ingredients from within New York.

The current standard, which will be in effect until the end of 2018, mandates that no less than 20 percent of the hops and 20 percent of other ingredients used by breweries must be grown in New York. The percentages will increase to 60 percent beginning in 2019 and 90 percent in 2024.

Schumer said securing the malting barley endorsement will increase the number of farmers who want to grow the crop and increase the supply, which will help breweries meet the 90 percent goal in seven years.

"If we don't get more malt barley that won't happen, so that'll hurt us," he said.

Upstate New York is home to 213 craft breweries, according to Schumer's office. There are 27 in central New York.

The craft breweries in Cayuga County include Aurora Ale & Lager Co. in King Ferry, Good Shepherds Brewing Co. in Auburn, Lunkenheimer Craft Brewing Company in Weedsport, Prison City Pub & Brewery in Auburn and Summerhill Brewing in Summerhill.
General Francois Lecointre has been nominated France's military chief after his predecessor quit in a dispute with President Emmanuel Macron over budget cuts.

French government spokesman Christophe Castaner told reporters that President Macron has nominated Gen Lecointre as the new chief of staff of the armed forces, replacing Gen Pierre de Villiers.

Gen Lecointre served in Sarajevo during the Yugoslavia wars in the 1990s and recently led the EU military training mission in Mali to help fight Islamic extremists.

President Macron's office sought to play down tensions over de Gen de Villiers departure, even as French defence commentators described their public dispute as a serious crisis.

Gen de Villiers' office said the general submitted his resignation to Mr Macron at a security council meeting on Wednesday and the president accepted.

President Macron's office did not immediately comment.

Gen de Villiers lashed out at new spending curbs during a closed-door parliamentary commission meeting last week, according to leaked reports.

The dispute escalated over the past week, with Gen de Villiers issuing an appeal on Facebook saying "Watch out for blind trust... Because no one is without shortcomings, no one deserves to be blindly followed".

Without naming him directly, President Macron then publicly admonished Gen de Villiers to military officials, saying, "it is not dignified to air certain debates in the public sphere. I made commitments (to budget cuts). I am your boss."

President Macron's own behaviour has elicited criticism, notably by those who accuse him of authoritarian tendencies after he overwhelmingly won election in May and saw his new centrist party dominate last month's parliamentary elections.

French Army Chief of Staff, General Pierre de Villiers, arrives at the Elysee Palace to attend an emergency security meeting in Paris, France.

The resignation foreshadows the battles Mr Macron will likely face as he tries to reduce the deficit and government spending and boost the stagnant economy.

While President Macron has promised to boost defence spending to 2% of GDP by 2025 as part of France's commitments to Nato, his budget minister last week announced limits on this year's military expenses as part of an overall spending squeeze.

Gen de Villiers, head of the military since 2014, insisted that it was his "duty" to express his concerns about military resources amid the sustained threat of extremist attacks.

"I have always taken care ... to maintain a military model that guarantees the coherence between the threats that weigh on France and Europe, the missions of our armies that don't stop growing, and the necessary budget means to fulfil them," he said his resignation statement.

"I no longer consider myself in a position to ensure the durability of the military model that I believe in, to guarantee the protection of France and the French," he said.

AP
Five men believed to be victims of a human trafficking network have been rescued, while a man and woman linked to a car wash business have been arrested.

The five men are thought to have been trafficked into the UK from Slovakia and forced to work with little or no access to the money they earned, according to the National Crime Agency (NCA) which led the operation.

The man and woman, both aged 41, who are connected to a car wash business in Bristol, were arrested in the Brentry area of the city on Tuesday morning.

They are believed to be part of a wider organised crime group and are also being investigated over associated money laundering and fraud offences.

NCA officers, supported by Avon and Somerset Police, arrested the pair while the five potential victims, all Slovak males, were taken to safety.

The men all volunteered to enter into the National Referral Mechanism, a government scheme to support trafficking victims.

They were escorted to a reception centre provided by Bristol City Council and spoken to by the NCA's vulnerable persons team.

NCA branch commander Ian Glover said: "Criminal networks involved in modern slavery and human trafficking operate by lying to innocent people about the promise of a better life.

"Very often, victims end up being controlled; they are treated as commodities and exploited into forced labour or servitude.

"The NCA targets those involved in trafficking, working robustly with partners to protect the vulnerable and tackle criminals responsible for their trafficking and exploitation."

Pete Anderson, Bristol City Council's Safer Bristol Manager said: "Modern slavery and human trafficking have no place in our society but regrettably they exist, resulting in the exploitation of innocent people.

"We do not tolerate this criminal behaviour and work with partners in the Avon and Somerset Anti-Slavery Partnership to pre-empt and disrupt activity as well as providing support and advice to victims.

"We will not stop in our efforts to reduce this abhorrent crime."
The Trump administration can strictly enforce its ban on refugees, the US Supreme Court has ruled

However, the court is leaving in place a weakened travel ban that includes grandparents among relatives who can help visitors from six mostly Muslim countries get into the US.

The justices acted today on the administrations appeal against a federal judges ruling last week.

US District Judge Derrick Watson ordered the government to allow in refugees formally working with a resettlement agency in the United States.

He also vastly expanded the family relations that refugees and visitors can use to get into the country.

The high court blocked his order as it applies to refugees for now, but not the expanded list of relatives.

The justices said the federal appeals court in San Francisco should now consider the appeal.

It is not clear how quickly that will happen.

In the meantime, up to 24,000 refugees who have already been assigned to a charity or religious organisation in the US will not be able to use that connection to get into the country.

"This ruling jeopardises the safety of thousands of people across the world including vulnerable families fleeing war and violence," said Naureen Shah, Amnesty International USAs senior director of campaigns.

That part of the courts ruling was a victory for President Donald Trump, who rolled out a first ban on travellers and refugees after just a week in office, prompting a legal fight that has raged ever since.

However, the Supreme Court also denied the administrations request to clarify its ruling last month that allowed the administration to partially reinstate a 90-day ban on visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and a 120-day ban on refugees from anywhere in the world.

The courts ruling exempted a large swath of refugees and travellers with a "bona fide relationship" with a person or an entity in the US.

The justices did not define those relationships but said they could include a close relative, a job offer or admission to a college or university.

Judge Watsons order added grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins to a list that already included a parent, spouse, fiance, son, daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law or sibling in the US.

The expanded list of relatives remains in effect, and the State Department already has instructed diplomats to use the broader list when considering visa applicants from the six countries.

Hawaii Attorney General Doug Chin said the courts order "confirms we were right to say that the Trump administration over-reached in trying to unilaterally keep families apart from each other".

Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas would have blocked Judge Watsons order in its entirety.

Those same three justices said last month they would have allowed the Trump travel ban to take full effect.

The travel ban is already on the courts calendar for October, though the 90-day pause will have expired by then.

- AP
Thunderstorms are continuing to affect parts of Britain, with lightning and heavy downpours expected to hit both the morning and evening rush hours.

Torrential rain could cause some localised flooding, and people are being warned of the risk of disruption to power networks from lightning strikes.

A yellow weather warning is in place right through the day for large swathes of England and Wales, with the Met Office predicting a month's worth of rain could fall in some places in a matter of hours.

The intense conditions caused flash flooding in a coastal village in Cornwall on Tuesday, with some 50 properties affected and several people having to be rescued from their homes.

A council spokesman confirmed some properties in Coverack and one of the roads suffered structural damage and are due to be inspected by structural engineers.

Two people were rescued by a coastguard helicopter, and one witness described the flooding as "quite horrendous".

A meeting for residents, attended by council officers, will be held at a local hotel later.

Commuters in the Midlands and east of England could be caught up in downpours this morning, while those in north-east Wales and the North West will bear the brunt this afternoon, Steven Keates from the Met Office said.

"This morning it's probably going to be parts of the Midlands and eastern England that see potential for some heavy rain, some thunderstorms, and then a bit of a lull," he said.

Flash flooding has hit Cornwall tonight - and forecasters say the storms are coming our way: https://t.co/cuws6lbvPc pic.twitter.com/naMCw13aNp  The Yorkshire Post (@yorkshirepost) July 18, 2017

"Then just in time for the evening rush hour, a different location, this time across parts of northern England, north-west England in particular by the looks of it, will see the worst of the weather in places."

He said the nature of the thunderstorms would be "hit and miss" and that the showers should move through the country "relatively quickly".

After a warm night, temperatures are expected to remain high on Wednesday for parts of eastern England where the mercury could rise to the low 30s, Mr Keates added.

Cambridgeshire police said the adverse weather conditions have caused problems with its non-emergency 101 service.

The force tweeted: "We are experiencing problems with the 101 lines due to the weather, 999 lines are ok you can also contact us via the website if you need us."

Water had to be pumped out of a number of properties in Tunbridge Wells, the fire service said, after it received more than 60 calls to the 999 line within one hour.

Crews from Kent Fire and Rescue Service attended but, despite two of the calls stating that people were trapped inside properties, no rescues were needed.
The ACT police minister has pushed back against the opposition's renewed calls for tough new anti-bikie laws legal experts have labelled "blunt instruments".

The opposition renewed calls for anti-consorting laws similar to other jurisdictions following Canberra's third bikie-related shooting in a fortnight on Tuesday morning.

The recent feud is believed to be between rival Comancheros and Nomads bikie gangs.

Anti-consorting laws previously proposed in the ACT would make it an offence to associate with convicted criminals with no right to appeal the decision in an ACT court.

Speaking on Wednesday morning, police minister Mick Gentleman said he was alarmed by the recent spate of bikie activity but was concerned about the human rights aspect of anti-consorting laws.
Kylie Catterick's fourth child, Josh, was her easiest pregnancy and, the midwives said, the "best delivery".

But it wasn't until Josh was four months old the Catterick family discovered he was born with a serious brain tumour, leading to multiple surgeries over his short life.

The Catterick family, Josh, 4, Riley, 7, Terryn, 12, Dean and Kylie who are encouraging Canberran's to support Jeans for Genes. Credit:Rohan Thomson

The brain cancer and surgeries ultimately left Josh with permanent side effects including cerebral palsy, autism and epilepsy, leading to his family connecting with several patient support groups in an effort to help others facing similar circumstances.

In particular, the family look with cautious optimism for other families to the promise of a $10 million Children's Medical Research Institute initiative called ProCan.
Canberra public school teachers have received almost $6 million in compensation since 2012 with new figures showing almost 700 school staff were assaulted in a single year.

Figures released by the Education Directorate show public school teachers received $4.27 million in the past five years for physical injuries and diseases, a total of 328 claims, and $1.6 million for psychological injury, equating to 42 claims.

ACT teachers are paid about $1 million a year in compensation for physical and psychological injuries. Credit:Janie Barrett

The directorate has separately revealed there were 679 reported incidents of verbal and physical violence towards public school staff in 2015-16. Of those, 349 were teachers, 282 learning support staff and 48 principals.

Education Minister Yvette Berry and the Education Directorate have vowed to take the problem seriously. The directorate will employ three specialist staff to help teachers combat occupational violence - a move revealed in the recent ACT budget.
The ACT Law Society says hearings of an ACT corruption commission should be in private as the norm, other than in special cases.

Society president Sarah Avery has urged a public interest test, such as the one that applies in Victoria, to decide whether hearings are private or public.

The Greens' Shane Rattenbury, left, with Labor leader Andrew Barr. Mr Rattenbury chairs the inquiry into a corruption body for the ACT. Credit:Jay Cronan

In Victoria, hearings are private unless there are "exceptional circumstances" and a public hearing is in the public interest because the corruption is systemic or especially serious. Public hearings are only held if they can be held without causing unreasonable damage to someone's reputation.

Ms Avery said the ACT could devise its own public interest test, but the promised commission must be able to balance "public interest in disclosing and exposing corrupt behaviour with the potential disproportionate damage to reputation".
A community organisation that raised $12 million for a rescue helicopter service for the ACT and southern NSW regions over two decades has been honoured.

The Southcare Trust was wound up after the aeromedical rescue contract they previously ran in partnership with Snowy Hydro was taken over by Toll Group.

The partnership between Southcare and Snowy Hydro ended in April.

Interim chief executive Carol Bennett handed over their final fundraising cheque to the ACT government on Wednesday as a commemorative plaque was unveiled.

Ms Bennett said they had passed a "wonderful legacy" on to government.
July 19, 1994

Comic books have been a part of American culture for more than 50 years. For Auburn residents, a local comic book store has been part of the community for almost 20.

Kim Draheim of Seneca Falls opened the first comic book specialty shop in Auburn in 1975. Kim's Comics and Records is located at Five Points on Franklin Street.

In that year, comic book specialty shops were practically unheard of.

"The first shops were opened up about 1973, '74, so we were one of the first in the world," Draheim said. At that time, he pointed out, there weren't even shops in major cities such as Boston or Syracuse. The closest ones were in Rochester.

When Draheim opened his shop, an average comic book cost 25 cents, and the hot book of the day was Marvel Comics' Uncanny X-Men No, 94, the first appearance of the "new" X-Men.

Draheim's comic book fascination began when he was around eight years old.

"That's when I was really into them," he said. "Then about eighth grade I thought I was too old so I stopped collecting."

He returned to collecting in his junior year of high school when he no longer cared what people thought of the genre.

"Comic books are still looked down upon in the states," he said. "This is the only country where that happens. Everywhere else they are just another media; words and pictures."

As Draheim grew older, he would drive to newsstands to get his weekly fix of graphic literature, but even the most reliable of newsstands would miss an issue now and then. This unreliability caused Draheim to drive to Rochester to get his comics.

After a while, the owner of the Rochester store suggested he open his own shop. All he needed was a store front. He found one at 69 Franklin St. in a building owned by barber John Daugenti. Draheim traveled to Rochester to pick up the issues he needed for his customers.

It was Christmas 1978 when Draheim decided to leave the comic book business and pursue his musical career  another talent  in Chicago. Gary Amidon, Draheim's biggest comic book customer, bought the business. During Draheim's going-out-of-business sale, he met comic book collector Thaddeus E. Fus, who would eventually become Draheim's partner in a future reentry into the comic book business.

When Draheim was away, Amidon kept the store open for more than two years, with Fus helping out. That incarnation went under when the store Amidon was buying stock from folded and went out of business.

After being gone four years, Draheim returned to the area. "When I came back the shop had been empty for about six months," he said. "I talked to the barber and in January '83 I reopened."

Eight years after he originally opened, Draheim was back in the comic book business, and Uncanny X-Men was still the top selling title.
Emerging midfielder Jack Sinclair has extended his contract with St Kilda by a further two AFL seasons.

The 22-year-old, who has re-signed to the end of 2019, has played 38 games with the Saints since his 2015 debut, including 11 this year.

He averages 21 disposals in 2017, having played every game since his round-six inclusion against Hawthorn in Launceston.

"It's a really exciting time to commit to the club for the next two years," Sinclair said in a statement on Wednesday morning.
Melbourne small forward Jeff Garlett is in doubt for Saturday's clash with Port Adelaide after returning home to Western Australia to deal with a family bereavement.

Garlett is believed to have travelled straight to WA from Darwin after Saturday night's loss to Adelaide.

Jeff Garlett of Melbourne. Credit:Getty Images

The club is unsure exactly when Garlett will return to Melbourne, but the Demons will allow him to take as much time as he needs.
Metcash's departing CEO, Ian Morrice, has a bit of housework to do before he saunters out the door some time before Christmas.

His replacement, former Tesco executive Jeff Adams, will join in September and Morrice will have to show him the ropes  assuming Adams is lucky enough to nab one of those troublesome 457 visas.

And this week there were those pesky Metcash shares to dispose of.

On Monday, Morrice dumped most of his stock, selling 275,000 shares at $2.50 each.
Liquor brands will think twice about using "glitter", models with "youthful looks" and messages about "the morning after" in their advertising, after a complaint about a Vodka Cruiser advertisement on Instagram was upheld by the Advertising Standards Bureau.

The ad series was featured on Instagram and included an image of a young female model with glitter under her eyes, alongside the caption "How to cover your dark eye circles the morning after".

Other images posted by the pre-mixed beverage brand depicted a cut-out love heart, colouring pencils and confetti.

The ads prompted a complaint from Cancer Council Victoria, which argued that they were primarily directed towards children, with one consisting "solely of an image of the face of a child who appears to be under 14 years of age".
BHP has hit its annual production target for iron ore for the financial year and posted strong growth from its thermal coal mines at the same time an industrial action overseas trimmed its copper operations.

Releasing its latest operational review, the world's biggest miner said iron ore production hit 231 million tonnes in the year to June 30, up four per cent on the previous year.

Output was about 60 million tonnes in the June quarter, up from 56 million tonnes a year earlier, the Melbourne-based company said in a statement on Wednesday morning. This compared with a 61.5 million ton median estimate of four analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

Record iron ore production from its WA operations was attributed to "productivity improvements across the supply chain and additional capacity at Jimblebar", one of the seven iron ore mines BHP runs in the Pilbara.
Getting a sandwich in the city at lunchtime is taking a lot longer these days, with office towers near full capacity due to the national vacancy rate sitting at the lowest level for four years.

And given that the next wave of developments is at least three years away, particularly in Melbourne and Sydney, space is getting progressively tighter.

Co-sharing offices such as WeWork, are the new CBD tenants pushing down vacancy rates

According to the latest data from JLL head of research Australia Andrew Ballantyne and head of office leasing Australia Tim O'Connor, the national CBD office market vacancy rate fell to 10.9 per cent in the three months to June 30, the lowest rate since March 2013.

In Melbourne the vacancy rate is 7.1 per cent, the lowest since March 2012, while Sydney tightened to 6.4 per cent, the lowest since June 2008.
Make Column 8 again. Who can trump the oldest contributor? After Allan Gibson nominated the late Eric Shackle, of Castle Hill, James Cartwright, of Ingleburn, says: "I think my first C8 contribution was 1994, with various items published up until about 2012." Any other candidates?

In an idle moment at lunch, Anthony Healy, of Willoughby East, happened to look at the use-by date on his large jar of Vegemite. "It stated "K16MAR18 13:05". With such a precise time you have to wonder what is going to happen at five past one." Perhaps it's toast?

The marvels of mail getting through (C8) led Geoffrey Toon, of Wagstaffe, to recall his barber in North Sydney in the '70s and '80s getting postcards from his regulars on holiday around the world addressed to: "The Best Barber in North Sydney." Murray Hutton, of Mount Colah, remembers a letter that was delivered to Donald Bradman during an Ashes tour of England. "The envelope had a picture of the great man on the front, with the address: "Somewhere playing in England." Joan Brown adds: "I was most impressed with our local postal service a few years back when a letter arrived in my post office box addressed to: 'Ms Joan Brown, Sydney Morning Herald letter writer, Orange NSW 2800'."

Derek Hume asked if seeing seven types of wildflowers is the first sign of spring (C8). Graham Galbraith, of Bayview, says: "In many areas the first sign of spring is when the first blowfly enters your house." This winter, time flies.

More mangling of language (C8). Ryszard Linkiewicz, of Woolooware, says his two favourite Franglais phrases are: "Pas de deux" (father of twins) and "coup de grace" (lawn-mower). Sheila Benning, of Bowral, says in her part of Wales, television in Welsh was "tellywelly". Elaine Taylor, of Potts Point, says Billy Connolly, in describing a Glasgow terrorist incident, said the flames were "skooshing" out of the back of the terrorists' jeep. "He said he hadn't heard the term for ages, so would it be a reference to shaken-up lemonade coming out of a bottle of skoosh?"
It will be a sad day for all Australians if the long running push for indigenous recognition in the constitution hits a brick wall of voter hostility and indifference when a proposal is put to a referendum.

Given more than 90 per cent of the voters supported the 1967 referendum, which gave the Commonwealth the power to implement laws to benefit Aboriginal people, such an outcome would suggest this country had gone backwards.

This is the spectre that is confronting indigenous and non-indigenous Australians alike following the release of the Prime Minister's referendum council proposal for a special Aboriginal advisory body to the parliament.

On the one hand senior indigenous figures, namely Linda Burney and Pat Dobson, have criticised the council's failure to recommend the removal of the "race powers" inserted in the constitution following the 1967 referendum.
At the same time, global demand for coal is dropping asinvestment in renewable energy increases, making the support of Adani look like a risky move. To make matters worse still, Adani is now talking about its Galillee Basin mine (or mines) producing about 40 per cent less coal a year than originally proposed, and making the entire operation, from mine site to ship-loading facility, entirely automated: there won't even be the paltry 1464 jobs (of which 1200 were to be in Queensland)  there will be virtually none. This all seems to me a very expensive  and destructive if potential further damage to the Great Barrier Reef is considered  way of pork barrelling and waving the ideological flag. Douglas Mackenzie, Deakin Kelly's comments

Letter writers have scoffed at Craig Kelly's comment that people will die due to the payment of subsidies for renewables. The following study, found at The Lancet site, might help to acquaint you with some facts: Dr Antonio Gasparrini study  'Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study'. Some scoff at the idea that rising heating costs will kill people. But check out the number-one temperature-killer in 74 million deaths across 13 countries in the study. It's not the extremes that we need to worry about, the deadly phrase is "mildly suboptimal temperatures". Craig Kelly is correct on this point. It is an unfortunate fact that wind turbines often produce little electricity during very cold or very hot weather. There is no need to reduce fossil-fuel use. Even SA has finally realised that renewables can't do the job and are installing over 200MW of diesel powered generators as an interim measure and are planning to build a new gas fired plant in an effort to stabilise electricity supply in SA.

Too little too late, I fear. John McKerral, Batemans Bay, NSW Full details needed The report of the Indigenous Referendum Council, tasked in 2015 to come up with a workable proposal on constitutional recognition of Indigenous people, was released by the Prime Minister on Monday, July 17. Instead of proposing a pathway to constitutional recognition, the council has instead recommended holding a referendum to amend the constitution: "To provide in the Australian Constitution for a body that gives Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples a voice to the Commonwealth Parliament."

The Prime Minister is said to have described the recommendation as a "big idea" short on detail. Mark Leibler, co-chairman of the council, is reported to have said that "some details of how the representative body would operate needed to be fleshed out before a referendum was held, but most could be finalised afterward". Mr Leibler, that is not the way Australian referendums work. The full detail of any constitutional change and the implications of that change must be advised to the Australian people before they are asked to vote. However good the intentions may be, voting on something with details "to be finalised afterward" could well see a powerful body incorporated into the constitution alongside the Parliament with eventual powers that may totally undermine our Westminster system of Parliamentary democracy. Come up with the full details of your proposal prior to any vote. 'We'll sort it all out afterwards' simply won't do. Philip Benwell, National Chair Australian Monarchist League

Facing consequences Bill O'Chee, former Nationals senator for Queensland, wrote a hard-hitting article about Greens Senators Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters both forced to resign because of their dual nationality ("Great Senate electoral fraud: Voters have been duped", canberratimes.com.au, July 18). Section 11 of the backgrounder provided to prospective candidates and referred to by Mr O'Chee states: "Division 137 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth) (the Criminal Code) makes it an offence to provide false or misleading information or documents in purported compliance with a law of the Commonwealth, with a maximum penalty of 12months imprisonment." I can see no reason why this pair should not face the full weight of the law. Gary J. Wilson, Macgregor

PM's soul Malcolm Turnbull will pay a princely sum for selling his soul to Peter Dutton. And the country will be the poorer in the longer term. D. J. Fraser, Currumbin, Qld Where there's smoke... In the same week in which Reuters published Philip Morris' leaked global plan to thwart effective tobacco control, we get a letter from Associate Professor Colin Mendelsohn suggesting that the company really wants to help smokers quit and switch to e-cigarettes.

Philip Morris, like all transnational tobacco companies now investing in e-cigarettes, continues to oppose all tobacco control policies known to deter smoking (eg, tax, graphic health warnings, plain packs). Its interests are in smokers not quitting instead of smoking but vaping as well as smoking. Professor Robert West, arguably England's most senior researcher in smoking cessation, has calculated that in one year some 16,000-22,000 English smokers who would not have otherwise quit did so because of e-cigarettes. In a population of 8.46 million smokers [see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.13343/full]. This tiny increment is not remotely compatible with the breathless promises that have been made for e-cigarettes by people like Dr Mendelsohn. Australia's alleged failure to see smoking decline in three years is largely explained by the tobacco industry engaging in huge price discounting and promoting cheap roll-your-own tobacco, and the gutting of the national quit campaign. Many nations have ratified the WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Article 5.3 of that Convention warns against involvement of Big Tobacco in any aspect of tobacco control. Dr Mendelsohn seems to know better. It has been many years since we saw a doctor in Australia cheering on a tobacco company.

Simon Chapman AO, Emeritus Professor of Public Health, University of Sydney Some poor shots I read John Coyne's article about Australia's counter-terrorism mechanisms ("Army no magic bullet", July 18, p.16) and in particular his comments about police capabilities with interest. I have been teaching people  including police and defence personnel  to shoot, for close to40 years. My observation over that lengthy period is that police officers, as a class, including "tactical" officers, are poor shooters.

This is not, I must stress, because they either can't or won't learn to shoot, but because their masters, almost universally, will not provide the time and resources necessary for them to achieve and maintain appropriate levels of skill. Peter Moran, Watson A question of density John L.Smith (letters, July 14) denigrates the concept of higher density development along tram routes but finds the idea of densification within 300 metres of every suburban centre "attractive". He may not know, or have forgotten, that no lesser planner than Walter Burley Griffin in his plans for Canberra proposed higher density development along the main avenues which were also to be the tram routes (see "The Griffin Legacy", NCA,2004).

Regrettably later planners departed from this sensible approach. Also, the ACT Planning and Land Authority introduced the concept of higher density development around suburban centres more than 20 years ago. Of course, it was hotly opposed at the time but remains a policy of the Territory Plan to this day. Richard Johnston, Kingston This is a gamble So Clubs ACT wants a gambling intervention officer (only one?) to monitor and deal with problem gamblers ("Clubs ACT call for territory-wide exclusions for problem gamblers", July 18, p2).

The real problem  about which no information has been provided  is exactly how problem gamblers will be identified. It is not always easy to identify problem gamblers from their personalities and behaviours. Once identified, how will these gamblers be encouraged into treatment for their addiction rather than just being banned from venues? Yes, reduce access to cash. However, responsible gaming officers in ACT clubs have told me that they do not even have information about gambling expenditure by their members, much less know how much any individual can afford to lose. Clearly, much more could be done, with options including a Territory-wide linked club card; setting a maximum monthly loss limit; programming poker machines to track gambling losses and provide on-screen displays of time and loss information; programming machines to make gloomy, unhappy sounds to coincide with losses rather than just "happy" sounds to accompany "wins"; and programming the machines to automatically shut down after every 20 minutes.

Karina Morris, Weetangera High-speed a no-go As a lifelong rail fan, I have read the letters on high-speed rail with interest. I am probably unique in this city, having travelled in the cab of a TGV, the French high-speed train, from Paris to Lyons and Geneva with the driver at 270km/h. My companion on that day in 1995 was the International General Manager of the French National Railways. He didn't think we have the population in Australia for high-speed rail, especially given the distances, and he would know. I am not surprised it hasn't eventuated. Various instances have been quoted of where high speed rail has worked, eg, South Korea, China, but their circumstances are vastly different.

The closest parallel is probably Canada where, in the 1990s, it was considered for Montreal-Toronto. They found it wasn't a goer and implemented an upgraded conventional service instead. If the conventional service between Canberra and Sydney ran express (no stops), like the buses, it would be just as fast. Stan Marks, Hawker SCOTT LETS THE CAT OUT

As the Greens Senator Scott Ludlam announced he was leaving politics because he was not eligible to be in parliament, he indicated there were other ways to "make trouble". Good to see the Greens' true agenda being made public. We all know they are not there to help improve the country. Anthony Reid, Murrumbateman, NSW DON'T PITY YASSMIN I wondered how long it would be before someone came out to protect poor Yassmin. (Julia Baird, July 15, p.10). Julia, Yassmin "reaped what she sowed" and I reckon most people think the opposite to your comments.

Mark Urquhart, Palmerston FOOT IN THE MOUTH No doubt Kelly Slater's broken foot is very painful ("Slater describes pain of breaking foot", July 19, p. 35) but to equate it to the pain of childbirth is stupidly arrogant. How could any man possibly know? Frances Cornish, Spence ORWELLIAN OCCASION

If Messrs. Turnbull and Dutton are looking for a suitable place to launch their new national security super department, opening night of 1984 is on at the Canberra Theatre on Tuesday 25th. Maria Greene, Curtin ARMY ISN'T POLICE Hear, hear to Neville Barry (letters, July 17). Having come to Australia 49 years ago escaping from a military dictatorship, it saddens me to see our PM militarising our police. Please Mr Turnbull let our civilian police ensure the safety of our streets and the ADF defend our borders. John Rodriguez, Florey

VALE VAL JEFFERY Unfortunately with the passing of Val Jeffery, the current management of the ESA and RFS will not realise what they have lost with his death. As Val has told you many times, "the greatest threat to the ACT is and will always be from bushfire, coming from the west". Pat Barling AFSM, Holder THEY'LL BE MISSED I share Sue Wareham's dismay (Letters, July 18) at the loss of Scott Ludlam from the Senate. And now Larissa Waters.

Both were shining lights in Parliament. It is disastrous that they have gone. Jenny Goldie, Michelago, NSW ELECTORAL LESSON Call people with different opinions, delusional (Malcolm Turnbull) or deplorable (Hillary Clinton); you still end up in tears when the votes are counted. When the argument is weak, revert to name calling. Jeff Bradley, Isaacs
Bernie Shepherd was a public educator, school leader, scientist, researcher and writer like few others. Rising from humble beginnings he became widely known in recent years for his pioneering analysis of the data behind the My School website and telling the story of what it revealed about our schools, and in a real sense, about our nation.

In his early years he achieved against the odds, including the death of his mother and an anything-but-usual family life. Like so many of his generation he was able to get a start in his working life courtesy of a teachers' scholarship for tertiary study. He completed his initial teacher training at Sydney Teachers College and was then appointed to Liverpool Boys High School.

Bernie Shepherd, helped shape education in NSW.

Garry Richards, his lifelong close friend and colleague, tells of their passion for the cinema and live theatre. They both worked with the Elizabethan Theatre Trust and walked away with a commitment not only to stagecraft and lighting design, but to the dedication, teamwork and professionalism needed for success. In Shepherd's case he also walked away with Meg, his future life's partner.

Like so many successful teachers and future school leaders, Shepherd was influenced by a significant mentor, Jim Rowe at Liverpool Boys High. This set him on the path of tertiary study in science and a very successful career.
Ransom Bethune Welch and the Welch classroom building are the forgotten presences of Seminary Square. The Welch name dropped off the red sandstone trim above the entrance many years ago, and the marble tablet in the hallway celebrating Welchs life as a professor at Auburn Theological Seminary was sold before the Community Preservation Committee could buy the property in the late 1980s. The two-building complex is often referred to, misleadingly, as "Willard Chapel.

The history of the Welch family and its building is less familiar than that of the Willard sisters and their chapel, but perhaps no less interesting.

Ransom Bethune Welch was born in Greenville, New York, in the Catskills on Jan. 27, 1824, the youngest of 14 (or 15) children of John and Esther Welch. His father, a farmer, is described as having refined manners and gentlemanly tastes, and both parents are noted for piety and interest in religious affairs. John Welch might better be described as a wealthy landowner.

Welch studied at the district school and at Greenville Academy, where his "earliest religious impressions came from prayer and daily reading of the Bible. His teacher then was a woman named Thankful Smith. He was known as the best scholar, and at the age of 15 taught classes of pupils older than himself.

His father was apparently wealthy enough to provide his son with eight years of higher education: four at Union College, two at Andover Seminary and two at Auburn Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in 1852. The normal course was three years at one school, so Welch got to pick and choose. Welch spent some time in New York City, sampled schools and hobnobbed with the brightest scholars of the day.

During his career as a minister, Welch had four parishes, at Oswego, Gilboa, Catskill and Albion, all in New York, for a total of about six years. For months in the mid-1850s he was a colporteur, traveling by horseback in the South distributing religious tracts. Welch seems to have had poor health most of his life, but nevertheless managed to do a prodigious amount of work. The problem seemed to be in his lungs. His lungs were weak, the lake winds strong, and the confinement of the study taxed him severely," stated Willis Beecher, an Auburn seminary colleague, about Welchs pastorate at Oswego.

Welchs remedy was to take an extended vacation in Europe: a 10-month grand tour of the continent that eventually included Egypt and the Holy Land.

During these years, Welch wrote and published many articles in both religious and secular publications. Eventually he wrote three books on religious topics. He had the reputation of being an engaging preacher, a tireless worker and a good, caring minister. Everyone who met him seems to have been impressed.

In the late 1840s, he taught at the Jonesville Academy, near Saratoga. It was here, when he was in his late 20s, that he met Lydia Kennedy, daughter of Roscius Kennedy, who founded the school. Lydia, who was born in 1835, was 11 or 12 at the time. Ransom and Lydia were married some dozen years later, on June 5, 1861.

Roscius Kennedy (1804-1874) was a commanding figure. His is a story of riches to rags, with the rags coming late in the day.

The Daily Saratogan of May 18, 1874, contains his obituary, where Kennedy is noted as once one of the wealthiest and most influential men in this county. He was once supervisor of the town of Clifton Park in 1842 and a member of the state assembly in 1849. He founded the Jonesville Academy (a private school), was instrumental in removing one cemetery and establishing another, and was part investor and owner of a section of the plank road to Saratoga. According to Ed Haight, on the Jonesville Cemetery website, Kennedys fortune was founded on agriculture and business.

It all came to an end late in his life when unfortunate investments in western railroad enterprises involved Mr. Kennedy and at one sweep all his large fortune was taken to satisfy creditors. Kennedy, upholding his reputation for honesty and integrity, relinquished every possession, and began life again in poverty. At the time of his death he had held a position at the U.S. Custom House in New York for several months.

What effect, if any, this disaster had on Ransom and Lydia Welch is unclear. It is obvious by now that Welch was financially independent. It is plausible that Roscius gave part of his fortune to his only daughter and son-in-law at their marriage in 1861, as a wedding gift long before his difficulties. There is no reason to think that their marriage was anything but loving; but when Ransom and Lydia married, one fortune was very probably united with another. And without money, the Welch building would never have been built.

Since Welchs health was still uncertain, the couple passed the Civil War years at Clifton Park, where Welch read, studied and published, and (presumably with his wife) traveled extensively in the (northern) United States. Extensive travel seems to have been Welchs therapy of choice. Finally, in 1866, Welch took a position at Union College in Schenectady, teaching logic, rhetoric and English. In 1876, the Welches moved to the Auburn seminary, where Welch taught until his death in 1890 at the relatively early age of 65.

Ransom Welch was very busy during his 14 years in Auburn. Whatever his health problems, he wrote and published many articles along with teaching metaphysics and theology. He edited a Presbyterian magazine. He was awarded three honorary degrees. He was a scholar of international reputation, and a member of several learned societies. He attended international conferences in Europe. (Did Lydia accompany him? It is not said.)

The couple lived at 15 Seminary St., in a seminary house long since demolished. In 1889, his health began to fail for the last time. With Lydia, he went to a healing spa in Virginia to seek a cure, and died there on June 29, 1890. He was a gentleman and a scholar, admired by all of his colleagues.

During ceremonies nine years later, in 1899, the marble sculpture commemorating Welchs life was installed in the hallway of his building.

The sculpture is no longer visible in Auburn, but photographs reveal it to be an impressive work. Made of Carrara marble, measuring 78 by 51 inches, it consists of three panels. The central panel features a low-relief portrait of Welch in profile. The two flanking panels show low-relief allegorical female figures representing religion and learning. The tablet is the work of Herbert Adams and his wife, well-known sculptors of the day, who both signed the piece.

Before the Community Preservation Committee bought the buildings, the previous owner, an antiques dealer, sold the sculpture. After several years in storage, it was sold again at auction. Its present location is unclear. Even today, however, the visitor can discern the former place of the tablet on the hallway wall by the slight difference in coloration of the wood. I have been told of an effort to make a cast of the sculpture, but for some reason  probably the cost  it fell through.

During the installation ceremonies, the one false note in this story is heard. Lydia Welch had her prepared remarks read by professor G. Darling, who succeeded her husband as the chair of Christian theology. They include the following:

It seems to me simple justice to perpetuate the memory of one who was a professor in the seminary, and who, by systematic saving from a salary never large, was enabled to make this building a possibility.

A few moments later, John H. Osborne, chairman of the committee of grounds and buildings, who accepted the tablet, echoed her words: Of such self-denying benevolence, Dr. Welchs whole earthly record offers a surpassing example: Out of the meagre salaries paid him in country pastorates or by college board, he acquired and saved a competency, being cordially assisted in this by the care and cooperation of his faithful wife.

It is hard to take these words at face value. The Welches together possessed a fortune, and most of the people at the seminary must have known it. Genteel poverty was not and had never been their style.

Ransom Welch left $36,000 for the construction and maintenance of Welch hall. That is almost a million of todays dollars. John Quincy Adams, in his "History of Auburn Seminary," states that full professors received a salary of $3,000. Even with his salary at Union, and regular budgeting, there is no way Welch could have financed his project from salaries alone. Why do his widow and John Osborne try to make him seem nobler than he was? Out of some sense of guilt about inheritances, or obscure shame at the fact that he was not a self-made man? Who is? Welch was given much, and gave back much.

Lydia Welch, born in 1835, died in 1922 at age 87, having outlived her husband by some 32 years. According to her obituary, she traveled extensively. In 1895, she went to Norway. In 1901, she went with the Auburn seminary Palestine party that toured Egypt and the Holy Land. In 1906-1907, she took a trip around the world with Mrs. C. G. Dwight. She also supported the First Presbyterian Church, the city hospital, The Faatz-Crofut Home on Grant Avenue and many other organizations. After her husbands death she lived at 115 North St., although not in the present structure.

With an anonymous poet, one hopes that He and she / rejoice beside the glassy sea.
The former senator Scott Ludlam has had some bad luck. He found out he was a New Zealander. Boom, boom.

Things have moved beyond a joke since Friday when Mr Ludlam resigned immediately after discovering he was a dual citizen of Australia and New Zealand and so, ineligible to stand for Parliament, let alone sit in it. Now the Greens' other co-deputy, Larissa Waters, has gone the same way with the realisation that she is a dual citizen of Canada despite having left there as an 11-month-old.

Former Greens senator Scott Ludlam has resigned after discovering he held dual citizenship. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

"This was my error, something I should have checked when I nominated for pre-selection in 2006," Mr Ludlam said in a statement in which he apologised "unreservedly". Ms Waters, too, took full responsibility and apologised for her "grave mistake and oversight".

We could say mistakes of such magnitude are an insult to voters. The two senators have failed to uphold the exemplary standards we expect of our elected representatives and should pay back every cent they've earned from Parliament, where Mr Ludlam has served since 2008 and Ms Waters since 2011. But who among us is faultless when it comes to managing personal paperwork? To be sure, the flippant manner in which Mr Ludlam announced his resignation on Twitter  "hey everyone, i'm sorry about this, but it's a thing"  did not endear him to critics, even if it was accompanied by a rueful explanation and mea culpa. Ms Waters learnt the lesson and handled her resignation with appropriate gravitas.
What a mess! We lose a tireless champion for her fellow Australians and the environment in Larissa Waters, and callous Peter Dutton, who paid Cambodia $55 million to host three of our desperate refugees and surreptitiously coughed up $70 million to compensate abused Manus Island prisoners, gets promoted ("Rise and rise of Dutton, our security tsar," July 19). The "Peter Principle" on steroids. Mark Paskal Clovelly Like many Australians I am shocked that two senators who are known for their hard work and integrity have been forced to resign. How is this possible? Both Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters have demonstrated their commitment to Australia. How does renouncing a citizenship prove a commitment to the new home country? What is so deeply concerning about this situation is the timing, which so perfectly aligns with Peter Dutton's Frank Underwood-style manipulations to achieve a position of ultimate power. What future a humane and democratic Australia? Jennie Lindbergh Darlington A literal reading of section 44 of the constitution would perhaps see all our federal MPs disqualified for pledging allegiance to the head of state of a "foreign power".

They pledge this allegiance because they are required to do so under section 42! The system is broken. David Hope Davidson My late husband was born in Auckland to an Australian father and New Zealand mother. They were advised to move to a drier climate due to health problems. When Kevin applied for a passport in late '80s, he was told he wasn't an Australian citizen despite living here from six months old and having served with the army. He was told he could go down to Newcastle to be naturalised. All OK, but two days before this ceremony, a new call. "Sorry Mr Quirk, we can't naturalise you because you are an Australian citizen." They needed proof of his arrival in Australia, as in flight number and time of arrival. He came by flying boat in 1944, landing at Rose Bay for goodness sake. He was very pleased when he finally received a Certificate of Australian Citizenship and had it framed. My heart goes out to those senators who thought they were OK. Glenys Quirk Forster

Shanghai Sam is happy to take donations from a foreign businessman whose country wants Australia's assistance in creating a new world order, but isn't stupid enough to have retained his Iranian citizenship. Well, that's a relief. Fraser Rew Summer Hill I am sorry to disappoint Christopher May and Dick Barker (Letters, July 19), but it is possible to renounce British citizenship. According to my Google research, Tony Abbott did this in 1994, the year he was first elected to Parliament and he has a letter from the British high commissioner to prove it. However, there are nine other MPs born in the UK; do they all have similar "declarations of renunciation"? Terry Lanz Mona Vale One wonders whether  despite his impeccable moniker  English-born (and died) Stanley Melbourne Bruce, and Welsh firebrand Billy Hughes, were dual citizens. The heart and soul of R.G. Menzies always resided in Britain. And was, perchance, Genghis Dutton born in a yurt in Outer Mongolia?

Bob Cunningham Camperdown Could Richard Di Natale be Italian? Terry O'Brien Randwick Absence of passion for teaching a sad development As a teacher, it does my head in to read what apparently motivates young people to be teachers these days ("Class attraction: study reveals reasons men and women become teachers", July 19). After discovering, in 'Class Attraction:study reveals reasons men and women become teachers', that people become teachers ... well, because they can, we read that "men are also likely to choose teaching because they are interested in a particular subject". How depressing. Gone are the days when people with a passion for a particular subject longed to share that with young people.Where are our delightfully eccentric chemists? Where are our loopy Shakespeare buffs? Where's the history teacher who travelled the world as a young woman researching Egyptian artefacts? One huge problem for education these days is the absence of people - men or women- with a passion for "a particular subject". No, now every one can teach just so long as you can survive lectures in the theory of education and demonstrate competency with the latest technology. No need to have a passion for any particular subject. All skills no content. Shame.

Kate Englebrecht Forbes No bridge too far for tolls in Sydney Why stop at a toll on the northern trip across the Harbour Bridge? ("Harbour Bridge tolls set to soar", July 19.) There are plenty of other opportunities for toll raising. What about the Spit Bridge (that'll stop rat runners trying to avoid tunnel tolls), the Narrabeen Bridge, Roseville Bridge, Gladesville Bridge, Tom Uglys Bridge and more. In fact the opportunities for raising funds for the northern beaches tunnel (that we don't want) are endless. Go for it Gladys! Slug all of Sydney for your roads! We understand, we just want lots of toll roads. Then the cost of visiting family on weekends will be so exorbitant we can just stay home. Yippee! Sue Wilson Mosman I note that the tolls on roads around Sydney are due to rise substantially in the short, medium and long term. I also note that NSW is being lauded as one of the richest regions on earth. There seems to be a dichotomy her  why can't this wealth be used to provide our road system? In the UK all motorways are free, except for a short length around Birmingham, and guess who owns it? Macquarie Bank.

Martin Burton Bayview What's with all the tolls? I thought the sale of the state's assets, mainly the poles and wires, were meant to pay for all this new infrastructure. Todd Hillsley Homebush Mind boggling ... huge plan/expense for zillions of cars to get to Sydney gridlock faster. Cecile Hunt Paddington

Dutton's poor record on overstayers Malcolm Turnbull has announced that Peter Dutton, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, is soon to be put in charge of our version of a "Home Office" including ASIO, the AFP, Border Protection and Immigration ("Experts lukewarm on Turnbull shake-up", July 19). If "more than 64,000 are in Australia illegally" ("12,000 people overstayed their visas by over 20 years", July 19) and only 12,966 were located last year by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection under Dutton's control, who are and where are the others? If this is viewed as successful border protection and warrants a promotion of the minister responsible, what is failure? Peter Fuller Narrabeen

Tony Cohen produced TISM's 1992 album The Beasts of Suburban. When Malcolm Turnbull appeared to Trump-et his government's new Home Affairs super portfolio, I had to take a second look ... I thought it was to announce a reunion tour for Australian rock-satire troupe TISM. Katherine Bashar Maroubra David Bowie was a creative genius but why on earth did he try to look like Peter Dutton when he made his final Lazarus music video. The button eyes was the genius bit. Megan Heaney Kincumber

Peter Dutton is doing the job the majority of Australians want him to do. Mother Teresa could be Immigration Minister and would be subject to the same unhinged letters as published yesterday. Garrett Naumann Cammeray By the tone of the letters, it is obvious that none of the scribes were in the Lindt cafe. David Sayers Gwandalan US police and citizens are trigger happy

We are all horrified by the shooting of Australian woman Justine Damond. That more than 500 people have been shot by American police this year is a serious, outrageous situation. It seems American police, and many American people, are far too trigger happy. The very least we should demand is a formal apology from the US President  to the family of Justine Damond and to the Australian people. Especially if he thinks it's fake news. Margaret Hamilton Blackheath I would like to send my condolences for the death of Justine Damond. While I cannot speak on behalf of anyone but as an individual resident of Minneapolis-St Paul, I am confident my feelings are shared by the people who live here.The people of Australia need answers as the why one of their citizens was killed by a man who was sworn to protect her. All of us living in the Twin Cities, regardless of origin, who are now reeling from the third such incident in as many years need those answers just as badly. I highly encourage that people reach out to the Australian consulate-general in Chicago (which covers Minnesota) as well as to our cities' main newspapers, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and St Paul Pioneer Press, and let them know that anything less than a thorough, transparent investigation and a full follow-through will not be tolerated. Benjamin O'Donnell St Paul, Minnesota

Worner gets off lightly in ugly assassination I agree with Elizabeth Knight (''Total victory for Goliath Seven against Harrison", July 18) that Seven bankrupting Amber Harrison "doesn't seem like a fair fight". I was surprised more women didn't object to this ugly and unnecessary assassination. From what I've read, Channel Seven could have fixed this problem much earlier had they spoke more supportively to Ms Harrison at the time of her objections to the broken affair. She has as much right on her side as Tim Worner, who gets off lightly. Stephen Wallace Glebe It ain't fair, to be sure. But a line should be drawn under the dramatic consequences of workplace affairs and the unfairness befalling the victims when it all turns toxic. The rule of thumb has always been that one should never take up with a lover who has not got as much to lose as you have when it all turns to muck. Joe Whitcombe Bronte
The Turnbull government has named investment banker and former ABC director Steven Skala as the new chair of its $10 billion green investment agency in a move welcomed by the renewable energy industry.

Mr Skala, vice chairman of Deutsche Bank, will replace Jillian Broadbent, whose five-year term as chair of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) expires next month.

Terms of three of the other five board members also end in August, and the government has filled the roles with three women with extensive experience in business and corporate governance.
London: He has no idea when he will cease being High Commissioner, but Alexander Downer is already planning for life after Australia House, when the government finally decides on who will be his replacement in London.

Mr Downer, Australia's longest-serving foreign minister, will become the chairman of one of Britain's most influential centre-right think tanks, Policy Exchange, it has been revealed.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull with Alexander Downer, High Commissioner to London. Credit:AP

Mr Downer told Fairfax Media the Policy Exchange is the UK's "leading think tank and very well-resourced."

The organisation last week hosted Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was awarded the Disraeli Prize by British Home Secretary Amber Rudd in London. It lists former prime minister John Howard as one of its previous "high-calibre" international speakers, while former Australian ambassador to China and the World Trade Organisation Geoff Raby is head of the organisation's trade policy.
Federal MPs and senators born overseas insist they meet the constitutional requirements to sit in Parliament, claiming or even providing evidence to prove they have renounced or never had citizenship with other countries.

In the wake of shock resignation of two Greens senators due to dual nationality, Fairfax Media contacted all parliamentarians who according to their profiles on the Parliament House website were born overseas.

Some renounced their citizenship decades ago, but others, such as Labor MP Anne Aly, only did so at the last minute, contacting the Egyptian Consulate in Melbourne on the day the writs were issued for the 2016 federal election.

Greens senator Nick McKim revealed on Wednesday he held dual UK-Australian citizenship for his entire stint in the Tasmanian parliament, including as the state's party leader, before relinquishing it in 2015 just prior to moving to Canberra.
Three weeks before she was shot dead by police, Justine Damond climbed into a storm drain and rescued a group of trapped ducklings near her Minneapolis home.

Video footage has emerged of the 40-year-old Australian gathering the eight ducklings into her lap, before she carries them out of the drain in the fold of her skirt.

Ms Damond, also known as Justine Ruszczyk, was killed when two police officers responded to a 911 call about a possible assault in an alley behind a home about 11.30pm on Saturday, local time.

She was a trained veterinarian who worked as a spiritual healer and meditation teacher.
Sixty children aged from six months to five were taught at a Newcastle childcare centre how to play with fire, powertools and knives  everything most modern parents avoid.

Far from resulting in burnt fingers or broken bones, the researchers found exposing toddlers to "risky play" such as access to open flames and genuine tools increased confidence while building safety and risk awareness, according to the University of Newcastle study.

Benji, Rose, Eden, Bowie, Theo and Vivienne. New research shows exposing toddlers to risky play such as access to open flames and genuine tools during early learning increases their safety awareness and promotes risk aversion. Credit:Marina Neil

Over a nine-month period even six-month-old babies were exposed to fire, starting with tea lights on the table at lunchtime and graduating to fire pits, while under careful staff supervision.

The research program was conducted at the Adamstown Early Learning and Preschool, which has a philosophy of encouraging risky play.
The grandmother held her baby grandchild, feeling sad as she looked at a bruise on the girl's forehead.

"I cuddled her and I said, 'I'm so sorry.' I was talking to her, so she was giving me a little smile," the grandmother told the NSW Supreme Court on Wednesday.

She told court she asked her daughter, the baby's mother, about the bruise, and the daughter said it was possible an older sibling was responsible.

Early the next day, on August 12, 2014, the grandmother was woken by her daughter, who said the girl was not breathing properly.

The grandmother held the eight-week-old girl and told her daughter to call triple zero.
Mourners pay their respects to Justine Damond at Freshwater Beach during a vigil on Wednesday. Credit:Kate Geraghty She feared a sexual assault was taking place. When Ms Damond approached Officer Noor's squad car in her pyjamas, he shot her in the stomach from the passenger seat of his police car. Ms Damond was unarmed but was believed to have been carrying a mobile phone. Police officer Mohamed Noor has been named as the one who fired at Justine Damond. Credit:AP Fresh revelations about the possible setting off of fireworks near where she was killed could provide an explanation as to why Officer Noor fired.

A source with knowledge of Minneapolis law enforcement, who asked not to be identified, said it "would be good common sense to investigate" the fireworks link. The sound of fireworks may have startled Officer Noor. The reference to fireworks is heard during the police radio conversations between Officer Noor, Officer Harrity, the police dispatcher co-ordinating the emergency call and other officers rushing to scene. At one point, the dispatcher asks for a precinct sergeant to acknowledge a report of "two shots heard from the east". "We heard those sounds from the station," an officer responds. "Those are probably aerial fireworks."

Pressure is mounting on US authorities to explain how Ms Damond was gunned down outside her home after making an emergency call. Minneapolis Attorney Mike Freeman, the country's chief law officer, has been demanding an explanation from the police but told Channel Nine they have not been overly co-operative. "We are hoping in the very near future they will talk but until they do we don't know," he said. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the government wanted an explanation for the "tragic killing" of the Sydney-born yoga teacher, who was due to marry her American fiance, Don Damond, in August.

"This is a shocking killing," he told Channel Nine. "It's inexplicable. "How can a woman out in the street in her pyjamas seeking assistance from the police be shot like that? We are demanding answers on behalf of her family. It's truly a tragic killing there in Minneapolis. Something clearly went tragically wrong. It seems inexplicable. It's a tragic loss." Mr Turnbull expressed his sympathy to Ms Damond's grieving family and friends. "Our love, our condolences, our sympathy go out to her family who suffered this terrible loss," he said.

Australian consul-general in Chicago, Michael Wood, is in talks with US authorities to find out why Officer Noor opened fire. Minneapolis Assistant Police Chief Medaria Arradondo addressed a lengthy press conference on Tuesday local time, accompanied by Mayor Betsy Hodges, telling media they could not release more information until the independent BCA investigation was complete. Mr Arradondo defended the officers involved, saying they were fully qualified and describing the shooting as an "isolated case". He said an internal review was under way, which would include the use of force and address why the officers' body cameras were switched off when Ms Damond was shot. A transcript of the 911 emergency call would also be made public, he said.

Ms Hodges urged Officer Noor to speak to the BCA but conceded he could not be compelled to do so. "We can't force the officer to make a statement but I wish that he would," she said. "There are big questions. We all want answers to those questions." Earlier on Tuesday, she told Good Morning America: "I don't know what the answers are. "That's the trade-off of an independent investigation. We aren't in charge of it. "I know the BCA is doing the best they can and moving as swiftly as they can.
Almost 8000 people have put their name to a petition calling for "excessive" parking costs at Brisbane's Lady Cilento Children's Hospital to be reduced.

Leichhardt resident Kat McGowan launched a petition online about a week ago asking Health Minister Cameron Dick and Mater Health Services to stop capitalising on families' misfortune and children's illnesses and cut the costs of hospital car parking.

A resident has gained almost 8000 signatures on a petition calling for cheaper car parking at Lady Cilento Children's Hospital.

Ms McGowan wrote her three-year-old son required several hospital admissions and visits a year, and the costs of parking were excessive.

"His [Ms McGowan's son] main visitors are family. As he grows, we worry that friends will be unable to visit him, due to the prohibitive cost of parking," she wrote.
"Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government. Ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would, like Esau, sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money. Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess?"

Well, that's a bit harsh, but only a wee bit. Yet that excerpt from Oliver Cromwell's 1653 speech, in which he described lawmakers as having "contempt of all virtue" and in which he dissolved the famous Rump Parliament, is not totally inappropriate for our time, three and three-quarter centuries later.

Because of all the wretched ideas that have come out of Washington this year, one of the worst is the notion  first proposed by a president frustrated with Capitol Hill's paralysis on health care and the Democrats' success in blocking his appointments  that Congress should stay in Washington rather than disperse for its summer holiday.

There is some poetic justice in making the members of the House and Senate swelter in the capital's relentless August heat and labor under the remorseless blanket of humidity that descends on the city. And it is well known that Congress acts only under extreme deadline pressure, which would of course be amplified by the peculiar sort of extreme climactic tyranny that only the Federal City can provide.

Besides, punishing members of Congress for their "immoral principles and wicked practices" and for having "grown intolerably odious to the whole nation" - again, Cromwell's words, but well-chosen  has a certain sadistic allure. It says to lawmakers: You didn't do the work you were called upon to do, so you don't get to go away. Repent, and tough luck if you have non-refundable tickets to a beach enclave.

I admit, it is an appealing thought. But Cromwell's indictment, and his verdict that "you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed (and) are yourselves become the greatest grievance," are the very reason members of Congress should go on vacation.

The Founders worried that members of Congress might drift far from the public, its sentiments and interests, a concern that political figures on the left and on the right have cited across the generations. More recently, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a devout conservative, has written that the Founders believed that "(f)reedom itself depended on an elected legislature of citizen lawmakers." Today's citizen lawmakers, if in fact that is what they are, need to be exposed to the rest of the citizenry as often, and as deeply, as possible. Another two weeks in Washington is not the prescription they need.

From a professional politician's point of view, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell  who has been in government for 42 years and is married to a woman who has been in government for nearly a dozen years, serving under three presidents  had ample reason to want to keep the Senate in session.

"In order to provide more time to complete action on important legislative items and process nominees that have been stalled by a lack of cooperation from our friends across the aisle," the Kentucky lawmaker said in a statement Tuesday, "the Senate will delay the start of the August recess until the third week of August."

That is McConnell as Mr. Dutiful, with a dash of partisanship, but it is not difficult to imagine Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York issuing the exact statement were the partisan profile of Washington reversed.

But I cannot repress from my memory a remark from a member of the inner circle of the late Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York, another dutiful soul who, on a visit to Disney World to give a speech in Florida, spent the entire time in a hotel room with the blinds closed. Cuomo's greatest character flaw, this associate said, was that he never took a vacation.

A study released early this year by the international market-research firm GfK showed that the city where people took the fewest days off was Washington, D.C., which gives the lie to the notion that the capital is full of slackers. (The city where people take the most vacation is Pittsburgh.) No one on Earth  certainly not this typist, who lived in the capital for nearly a quarter-century but who now resides happily amid the hills and along the shores of the three rivers  argues that people in Washington have greater perspective than people in Pittsburgh.

The point is that the nation's lawmakers would be better served by spending some time in mountainside contemplation or lakeside leisure  both available here, in the mountains of New Hampshire -- than by spending an additional fortnight hearing mind-numbing legislative mumbo-jumbo, fighting over rules of order, fulminating at cable hosts, obsessing over presidential tweets and preparing statements seeking to explain the inexplicable to the incredulous.

Nor would it hurt members of Congress to walk the streets of their hometowns and encounter the members of the public who sent them to Washington, only to see them bicker among themselves and belittle each other. Yes, they just recently had a recess. But truly they cannot be amid the people too often.

The work will always be there, and in most cases  perhaps not on health care, where additional hearings might be of value  the work can be accomplished in a fraction of the time Congress usually consumes. Here's advice from the pages of the Harvard Business Review: "If you plan ahead, create social connections on the trip, go far from your work and feel safe, 94 percent of vacations have a good (return on investment) in terms of your energy and outlook upon returning to work."

So, members of Congress: Take a swim. Take a hike. Awaken to the sunrise and gaze at the sunset. Hold a town meeting or two and keep your ears, and your mind, open. Listen, too, to Cromwell: "Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!"
An Uber driver who allegedly raped a woman earlier this month has been charged with the rape of a teenager in 2015.

A 47-year-old man was remanded in custody on July 7 after he was charged with three counts of raping a woman he allegedly picked up from the Fortitude Valley nightclub precinct earlier that week.

The Uber driver, who was charged with three counts of rape earlier this month, was charged on Wednesday over the alleged rape of a teen in 2015. Credit:AP

He was also charged with stealing and wilful damage relating to the victim's phone.

The following day police put out a call for any women who may have been sexually assaulted in a vehicle in a two-year period using the Uber app to contact police.
More than 600 prisoners are sharing cells designed for one person at a major south-east Queensland jail.

The figures have been revealed in Building Queensland's June Infrastructure Pipeline Report.

Prison upgrades are among the projects listed in Building Queensland's latest report.

And it is not the only prison over capacity.

Building Queensland says the capacity of Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre, a male remand centre, has been exceeded by 35 per cent, leaving more than 600 remandees sharing cells designed for single occupation.
One of four Christians charged with the wilful damage of a Toowong war memorial told Brisbane Magistrates Court he had "a higher permission" to remove a sword from a cross in the war memorial in March 2017.

Jim Dowling, 61 said he had come up with the idea of removing the sword from the cross and "beating" it into a hoe a month before the sword was removed while at an event to commemorate voters rejecting conscription.

Catholic activist Jim Dowling outside Brisbane Magistrates Court. Credit:Tony Moore

In a video interview played to the court Mr Dowling, a carer and member of the Catholic Worker Movement from Ocean View, said he had no concerns with the war memorial itself.

"We had no desire to damage war memorials," Mr Dowling said.
Some of the best questions in estimates have been coming courtesy of maverick Ipswich politician Jo-Ann Miller, who was yet again shying away from the traditional Dorothy Dixers.

The member for Bundamba quizzed her own government's Labor ministers on everything from mining, Queensland Rail and land clearing.

Member for Bundamba Jo-Ann Miller questioned the Queensland Deputy Premier Jackie Trad at the Infrastructure, Planning and Natural Resources Committee Estimates on Wednesday. Credit:Samantha Manchee/AAP

Ms Miller quit cabinet after demotion as police minister in 2015, and proved a formidable opponent to the government during estimates hearings last year.

On the second day of estimates on Wednesday, Ms Miller pushed Mining Minister Anthony Lynham on a mining memorial in Redbank.
The Queensland government has confirmed cladding on Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital is combustible, but says further testing is required to see if it is dangerous to patients and staff.

Health Minister Cameron Dick says the government is waiting on the results of final testing and would speak to experts about how to deal with the problem.

It has been confirmed non-fire retardant cladding was found on Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital. Credit:Robert Shakespeare

But he remains confident the hospital is safe, saying it was well built and fitted with sprinklers and fire alarms throughout.

"Every building in Queensland has combustible material in it, we have to determine what is the risk and what is the response to that risk," Mr Dick told reporters on Wednesday.
It's been a question ever since last year's ultimately recalled Samsung Galaxy Note 7 devices kept catching fire: Will customers come back for more?

Samsung is set to unveil a brand-new Galaxy Note 8 at a New York City event in late August, according to Reuters and South Korea publication The Bell. Following a tradition of August updates to the Note line  and jumping ahead of the anticipated iPhone 8 launch in September  the new phone is expected to have a slightly larger display than the Samsung Galaxy S8+'s and sport two rear cameras.

Last year's brand-damaging and expensive recall of the popular Note 7, caused by batteries in the device that overheated, would have seemed to put the nail into the Note coffin. The repeat recall followed weeks of reports on consumers burned, jolted awake or surprised in mid-air by phones smoking and catching fire. But Samsung's mobile chief had vowed to bring back a better, safer Note 8.

Samsung's Note customers have traditionally been its most loyal, and the company has repeatedly apologised for the Note 7 fiasco. In January, Samsung blamed design and manufacturing flaws associated with the phone's batteries (which were produced by the company's battery suppliers) for the problems. And Samsung implemented an 8-point battery safety check across the product line that included a durability test, visual inspection, x-ray test and other tests.
The boyfriend of missing Melbourne woman Sophie Dowsley has been found dead in the Canadian wilderness, sparking fears for the fate of the missing hiker.

Ms Dowsley, 34, and her Canadian boyfriend Greg Tiffin, 44, have been missing since a hiking trip around Statlu Lake on July 8.

Search crews told CTV Vancouver News that Mr Tiffin's body had been retrieved from the waters of Statlu Falls by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police dive team.

His body was found on July 18. It is believed Mr Tiffin fell into the falls.
Prominent Perth musician Graham Wood passed away after a long battle with cancer on Wednesday.

Wood, who co-owned Perth's premier jazz lounge The Ellington Jazz Club, was an Associate Professor at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.

Graham Wood co-owned The Ellington Jazz Club. Credit:Graham Wood

He was also a finalist for the 2013 Western Australian of the Year Award.

Wood has released 3 CDs and in he won a West Australian Music Industry award in 2010 for Best Jazz Act after playing more than 100 shows in 2009 and 2010.
The lawyer for one of the US police officers involved in the shooting death of Australian Justine Damond says it is "certainly reasonable" his client feared he was the target of an ambush.

Minneapolis lawyer Fred Bruno, who represents Officer Matthew Harrity, pointed to the recent execution of a New York police officer gunned down as she sat in her car.

"It's certainly reasonable to assume that any police officer would be concerned about a possible ambush under these circumstances," Mr Bruno told the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper.

"It was only a few weeks ago when a female NYPD cop and mother of twins was executed in her car in a very similar scenario."
Specialist lender La Trobe Financial has announced a series of executive changes including the departure of two of its most senior leaders.The firms chief operating officer Brian Ford left on 1 July following more than 35 years of service. He joined La Trobe in 1982 as a senior accountant and worked his way up becoming chief financial controller in 1986 and group general manager in 1994 before taking up the mantle of COO in 2000.Brian has left an astonishing legacy that will not go unforgotten and we wish him the very best with his next chapter, La Trobe president and CEO Greg ONeill said.On leaving the firm, Ford is now running his own promotional swimming club, La Trobe head of communications Caterina Nesci told Australian Broker.Rowan Donohoue has since stepped in as senior vice president  chief operating officer following Fords retirement. Donohoue joined La Trobe in 2009 and was previously chief legal counsel.Nesci said that Donohoues legal background qualifies him for his new role.He has discipline, integrity and quality. Hes a great listener, makes good decisions and gets the job done.La Trobe also announced the departure of vice president  head of major clients Daryl Hill who worked at the firm for 41 years. He began his career in 1976 as an account manager. After holding a number of management roles in the business development team, Hill was promoted to his latest position. He also left the company on 1 July.Daryls role in the growth of the organisation is immeasurable, he epitomises all of our company values and he will be sorely missed by all La Trobe Financial staff, ONeill said.Although retired, Hill has been appointed as an authorised representative at La Trobe, Nesci said.Michael Watson has now been appointed executive head of major clients following Hills departure. Watson joined La Trobe in 2013 as a senior manager of client partnerships.Michael will help strengthen the relationships that he has been working on, expand them and help expand the growth of our award-winning Credit Fund, Nesci said.The firm has also announced a third appointment with Martin Barry becoming senior vice president, chief corporate treasurer. Barry joined La Trobe in 2014 as vice president, head of institutional mandates.Following the opening of our new office in Hong Kong and the appointment of these new executives to help lead the company, we are well positioned to continue our success, grow and evolve as one of Australias most respected independent non-banks, ONeill said.
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Talk about a jolt of excitement!

Massive electric-car race Formula E zoomed into Red Hook last weekend for its inaugural competition in New York City, and while fans said the green sport drew smaller crowds than its gas-guzzling older brother, it still satisfied their need for speed.

Overall, it was a great event, said David Cippitelli, a Long Island resident who regularly attends Formula 1 races. Everybody said the crowds were insane, but I didnt think they were that bad. Im used to the crowds for Formula 1 races, which are a lot bigger.

Drivers zipped around the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal at speeds up to 140-miles-per hour as fans including actors Chris Hemsworth and Leonardo DiCaprio looked on.

DS Virgin Racing driver Sam Bird took first place in the races on July 15 and 16, popping champagne on the podium with Sir Richard Branson  the teams owner and back-up driver for the weekend  to celebrate.

The action extended from the track to the events fan village, where Cippitelli said his two youngsters were captivated by displays that educated attendees about the battery-powered sport.

They loved all of the stuff there, he said. They were totally enthralled with all of the fan activities.

Race-goers flooded area businesses after the big event, according to Cippitelli, who said the wait at Red Hook Lobster Pound was an hour-long when he tried to grab a bite.

Local merchants confirmed the hordes, and some said the weekends festivities brought them more business than ever before.

Saturday was our busiest day yet, and Sunday ran a close second, said Kristina Frantz, co-owner of Dolce, a gelateria on Van Brunt and King streets.

The sweet shop served a special, event-inspired gelato made with espresso and glycerine  the tasteless, edible liquid Formula E racers use to power their cars  and drivers, fans, and some very important people who Frantz declined to name all sampled the frosty treat, she said.

The Soul Fuel flavor has been so popular that Dolce will continue to serve it for the near future, according to the co-owner, who called Formula Es visit to the neighborhood a success and cheered the sport for its environmentally-friendly sensibility.

It was great for Red Hook, Frantz said. And I think its a great thing in general to work with sustainable energy rather than polluting everything.
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88th Precinct

Fort GreeneClinton Hill

Laundry loot

A burglar broke into a Washington Avenue apartment building and stole its laundry card machine on July 12.

The sneak entered by breaking the basement door of the residence near Greene Avenue around 1:53 and ripped the machine  containing an unknown amount of cash  off the wall. The thief then fled through the same door, hopped on a Citi Bike, and rode off, surveillance video shows.

Bus bash

Two punks wearing bandannas over their faces robbed a guy waiting for the bus at knifepoint on Fleet Walk on July 10.

The victim told police he was waiting at the B54 bus stop near Myrtle Avenue at 1:20 am when he was approached by the bruisers, who had bandannas covering part of their faces.

One of the baddies flashed a knife and took his backpack, while the other bandit acted as look out, a report said.

Bag blitz

A cab driver drove away with a womans bag as she popped into a fish market on Myrtle Avenue on July 12.

The lady had paid the livery taxi driver his fee and told him to wait while she went into the market between Clermont and Vanderbilt avenues. But when she exited the store, she discovered the snake had driven off with her bag containing her bank card, $180, and her drivers license. She told police the driver knew her bag was in the backseat because she had told him, a report said.

Attacked

Cops cuffed a guy who allegedly dragged a woman across the ground after stealing her phone and attacking her on Cumberland Street on July 15.

The 15-year-old suspect followed the woman as she was walking between DeKalb and Lafayette avenues at 12:53 am, hissed, Give me your phone, and grabbed her arm, she told police.

He then punched her in the face, snatched her phone from her hand, and pushed her to the ground, dragging the woman by her pocketbook. The bag was strapped across the ladys body, cutting her as she was pulled, according to a report.

Slashed

Police are searching for three brutes who they say cut a man on the side of the face with an unknown object on Classon Avenue on July 13.

The victim was walking towards Atlantic Avenue at 9:45 am when the trio approached him and cut him after hitting him around, he told authorities.

 Lauren Gill
Over 1,200 mail-in votes added to Montco totals; Bucks still in limbo

Two of Montgomery County's three commissioners said they did not support disenfranchising more than 1,200 voters because of a handful of rule breakers
After a very active Tuesday monsoon moisture remains in place for today over central Arizona. The air mass over central to northwest Arizona has been worked over a bit from the last two days of convective activity. As a result, for today across this area, we are anticipating that the general thunderstorm character will be weaker/more short lived. However, an isolated stronger storm or two will be capable of producing 1 to 3 inches of rainfall in an hour and with saturated surface conditions in some locations there will exist the threat for flash flooding. If you are out and about stay aware especially from the afternoon into the evening hours. Drier air from New Mexico looks to be moving into the northeast corner of the state with a downturn in activity across that portion of Arizona.
Islingtons once thriving Sea Cadets unit is a step closer to being revived, after a leading building materials supplier donated 13 fire doors.

Islington Sea Cadets was forced to shut down in 2012 after its Canonbury Road centre was deemed unfit for purpose. Now, after years of hard work behind the scenes, the unit is almost ready to be relaunched.

Selco Builders Warehouses local branch in Tottenham provided a major boost by donating hundreds of pounds worth of materials, including fire doors, hinges, frames and smoke seals.

Derick Vellosa, a committee member at Islington Sea Cadets, said: It was gutting when we had to close the doors to the Canonbury Road centre after more than 70 years of Sea Cadets in Islington. We had around 15 Cadets who had to switch to units in Clapton, Haringey and City of London.

It has been a hard slog, but we are now nearly ready to re-open, with a target date of the end of this year or the beginning of the next. This donation by Selco is a massive help. Its fantastic to see a local company getting involved with the community in this way.

The Cadets centre was converted from an electricity substation in 1982.

It is decked out internally with a nautical theme. Since the centre was closed the building has also had a new roof and windows installed, and the committee is working on a new heating system.

Marc Jones, manager at Selco Builders Warehouse Tottenham in White Hart Lane, said: Were delighted to support our local Sea Cadets unit. The organisation does great work with youngsters and its such a shame that the Islington unit was forced from the centre.

The new-look centre will be a much better facility  and much safer, too. Its a real privilege to be actively involved in the community in ways like this.

Selco Tottenham supplies everything needed to build a house or carry out refurb jobs, including doors, windows, insulation, roofing, heating, plumbing supplies, lighting, electrical products, kitchens, bathrooms and timber.

As with all Selco branches, Tottenham offers an in-branch cafe, trade services, direct-to-site delivery options and van size parking spaces, all designed to make it easier for tradespeople to get back onto the job as soon as possible.
Teen visits South Jersey in 50-state Flowers and Flags tribute to vets

Preston Sharp of Calif. visits veterans graves in Cinnaminson cemetery in South Jersey on 50-state Flowers and Flags tribute to their sacrifices
On Thursday the announcement came:, who won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, had died at 61 of liver cancer in a hospital in the northeast city of Shenyang, China. He lived most of the last 30 years of his life under some sort of house arrest, imprisonment or restraint.

Because of tight censorship, most Chinese had no idea Liu had even won the Nobel. China resisted all efforts to free him, or even secure him emergency treatment abroad.

Lius miserable death reminds us of something true all over the world: It is dangerous to write in the public sphere.

So it was, long before the printing press. Long before Giordano Brunos agony at the stake in 1600 or Galileos 1642 death under house arrest, all the way through to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris and beyond, writers have been hounded, murdered, locked up, or otherwise suppressed.

Whos worried? The powerful. Why? They fear the contrary voice, the least shred of contrary fact. Theyre afraid itll spread, once out, and the infection of truth will sap their authority. If they cant bully it down, theyll choke it off at the source.

You see it amid the protests in Venezuela, where journalists are routinely harassed, threatened, thrown in jail. You see it throughout the Middle East, and in Somalia, a leading site of such attacks, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Not all these are government-driven; about 40 percent of attacks on journalists are by ISIS or similar extremist groups.

Those in power must surely think writers can change things. Why else would you chase a poet like Pablo Neruda (another Nobel winner) over the mountains, as Chile did in 1948-49 (as recounted in the great movie Neruda)? Why chase down a blogger and hack him to death with machetes, as the Jamaat-e-Islami party did to Ahmed Rajib Haider in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2015? Why turn 30 years of a mans life into a living prison, as China did to Liu Xiaobo?

(For years in the U.S. academy, you used to hear, again and again, that art and literature change nothing; the best it could do, in this view, was tighten the chains of language and institutional coercion around us. Sounds quaint, I know.)

Our own country is now convulsed over fake news, sourceless reporting, and a failed press. Plenty of yelling. Lots of chest-beating. Eruptions of aggressive words. All that hogwash, though, is actually a good thing, a sign of healthy, vigorous, effective, free media.

Sure, you can bully reporters, or you can at least try. You can mischaracterize what they do, even lie about it. A truly free media world  in which, short of libel, slander, and incitement to break the law, speech is protected  is and always will be messy, confusing, loud and nasty. To be sure, that can be wearying and sad.

But all that is far from what happened to Liu Xiaobo.

When the Tiananmen Square demonstrations broke out in 1989, he left his safe post as a visiting scholar at Columbia University and hurried home. At the square, he joined in a hunger strike and tried to head off bloodshed. For his efforts he was thrown into prison, for the rest of his life subject to incarceration, under the governments eye, forbidden to publish in China. (He tried to keep publishing under various names.) He couldnt go to Sweden to receive his Nobel; too busy being in prison.

The Croatian musician and activist Nenad Bach once brought home to me what it was like growing up in the former Yugoslavia.

Day to day, he said, life was pretty much the same as it is here. You get up, go to work, do what you do. But in the back of your mind, you know they can take everything away from you, at any time, whenever they want.

Thats what they did to Liu Xiaobo. They could have done it by killing him, as the powerful do to dozens of journalists and writers every year. But they chose the more perfect revenge: life as prison, where you live having lost everything, and know it, minute by slow, empty minute, until you die, as reports tell us, from cancer, septic shock, and respiratory and renal failure.

In the name of Liu Xiaobo, who died horribly for truth, I hereby embrace every insult, every bad name, every lie anyone wants to hurl at investigative journalists, essayists, poets, artists, historians, and anyone else whose work challenges in public the official story, whatever that story is.

Want to call it fake news? Bring it on.
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The warm weather is set to continue into today, as temperatures reach up to 25C this afternoon, Tuesday, July 18.

Expect another warm and dry day with plenty of sunny spells across the afternoon. Don't forget to find a fan out before heading to bed too, as it's expected to become increasingly humid as we head towards the evening.

It seems the good weather might be over tonight though, as the Met Office has put out a yellow weather warning for rain from just after midnight.

A band of heavy thundery showers is set to push northwards with a risk of hail through the night, and areas hit by the thunderstorms could face torrential downpours and lightning with a minimum temperature of 15C.

The good news is that the thunderstorms will clear through the morning, making way for bright spells across the area. The rest of the day is set to remain mainly dry with a few isolated thunderstorms in the afternoon. The maximum temperature tomorrow will be 26C.
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A 32-year-old man went on a shoplifting spree across Swadlincote over seven weeks, but denies assault and stealing a games console and games.

Matthew Kendall, of no fixed address, has added to the large list of shops he has targeted after stealing hundreds of pounds worth of items including meat and laundry detergent.

Kendall appeared at Southern Derbyshire Magistrates Court where he admitted stealing 12 steaks worth 36 from Iceland, on April 25; stealing meat worth 54 from Sainsburys, Newhall, on May 8; stealing meat worth 31 from Sainsburys, Midway, on May 15; stealing meat worth 25 from Sainsburys, Midway, on May 18; stealing laundry detergent worth 16 from Tesco, Church Gresley, on May 20; and stealing meat worth 41.60 from Sainsburys, Midway, on May 30.

Moving into June he also admitted stealing cleaning products worth 52 from Asda, Woodville, on June 4; stealing meat worth 60 from Sainsburys, Midway, on June 5; stealing meat from Sainsburys, Newhall, on June 6, and stealing detergent worth 20 from Poundworld, Swadlincote, on June 14.

However, Kendall is to reappear at the court to stand trial after denying stealing a PS4 console and games worth 450 from a man in Midland Road, Swadlincote, on May 8, and assaulting a woman in Sainsburys on June 6.

He is due to stand trial on July 21 and has been remanded into custody.
This story was first published in Business Standard on 18/07/2017



Air India is drawing up a proposal to offer voluntary buyouts to just over a third of its 40,000 employees, a senior company official said, one of the largest such offers in India's state sector, as the carrier slashes costs ahead of a 2018 sale.

The official, who could not be named as the plans are not public, said the state-owned airline had also put fleet expansion on hold, scrapping a proposal to lease eight Boeing 787 wide-body aircraft. Air India's board approved the proposal in April but nothing further had been done.

India's flag carrier is on the block after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's cabinet last month approved plans to privatise the loss-making airline - selling part or all of the company and ending decades of state support.

Founded in the 1930s and known to generations of Indians for its Maharajah mascot, Air India has a complex fleet, too many staff relative to its peers and $8.5 billion in debt. Since 2012, New Delhi has injected $3.6 billion to keep it afloat.

An official in Modi's office said the leader, under pressure to cut spending and boost basic infrastructure like ports and roads, is in "no mood" to provide fresh monetary assistance to any loss-making public sector company.

The official said that top bureaucrats in the civil aviation ministry and at Air India had been asked to present a report on how a Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS) could be offered to about 15,000 of Air India's 40,000 staffers, including contractors.



"Nothing has been finalised but our aim is to make the strategic sale as simple as we can," said a second top official in New Delhi, involved in the airline's daily operations, adding that any fresh investments would be put on hold.

Previous attempts to offload the airline have failed mainly because of the scale and complexity of problems at Air India, as well as its influential unions.

If Modi can pull the privatisation off, it will buttress his credentials as a reformer brave enough to wade into some of the country's most intractable problems.

United Front

In its heyday, Air India boasted of a talent pool that newly founded airlines dipped into.

The government will, however, need to convince seven trade unions to accept the plan to make the company attractive to potential buyers, including buyouts and other efforts to slash costs. Their initial response was not positive.

"The government will propose a VRS scheme and we will throw their proposal in the dustbin," said J.B. Kadian, leader of a union that represents 8,000 non-technical staff of Air India.

Kadian said a joint forum of unions representing Air India employees will launch "an agitation" in August if the government pursues its plans to privatise the national carrier.

A committee of five senior federal ministers, led by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, is expected to meet this month and begin ironing out the finer details of the privatisation plan.

In the meantime, Civil Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju said he wants Air India to begin cutting at all levels.

Earlier this month, the airline decided to stop serving non-vegetarian meals in the economy class on domestic flights, in a bid to save up to 100 million rupees ($1.6 million) over 10 months.

The action provoked uproar on social media and was belittled by aviation experts, who argue Air India management needs a massive structural overhaul, tackling thornier issues like fleet and staff, not meals.

The airline is also working to reduce the time its planes are not flying and launching direct flights to new international destinations. In July, Air India started a direct flight to Washington. It will start flying to Stockholm, Copenhagen and Los Angeles later this year.

"Keeping planes in the hangar makes no sense when Air India is trying find new sources of income. We should optimise the use of all possible resources," Raju said. "The idea is to present a robust company to potential buyers," the minister said.
Wipro Chairman Azim Premji on Wednesday said that clients are looking to spend on technology in markets such as US, where the economy is little better than the volatile environment seen across the world.

"Looking ahead we continue to see a volatile economic environment but the economic prospects for our main countries of exports are a little better. And clients are looking to spend on technology as tech is becoming a major differentiator," Premji told shareholders of Wipro at the annual general meeting held on Wednesday
Bhushan Steel has a liability of around Rs 43,000 crore towards more than 20 banks while Bhushan Power has a liability of around Rs 37,000 crore towards a number of banks
The Coconino County Public Health Services District (CCPHSD) is sponsoring a low-cost Rabies Vaccination Clinic on Saturday, July 22 from 1-4 p.m. at the Coconino Humane Association, 3501 E. Butler Ave.

Rabies vaccinations will be $10 per dog and cat. Fees for other vaccinations will vary and only cash or check will be accepted. The Kaibab Veterinary Clinic will provide services.

CCPHSD Animal Management will also be offering the opportunity to license your canine companion for $12 altered and $25 unaltered. Spay/neuter vouchers ($30 value) will also be available for canine owners with current rabies vaccinations and licensing.

Arizona State law requires all dogs to be properly vaccinated and licensed. The CCPHSD strongly recommends that cats be vaccinated against rabies.

For more information, call the CCPHSD Animal Management Program at 679-8756 or visit www.coconino.az.gov/health.
This story has been amended to rectify an error



Eight years after Gitanjali Jewels conducted its first ever brand evaluation exercise, the company is reconfiguring its labels and organising them under a single identity, hoping to draw more value from its portfolio while rationalising retail costs. The brand restructuring underway is also expected to help build a seamless experience between online and offline points of access. However, the challenge will be to maintain the differentiation between Gitanjalis brands that were valued at Rs 2,709 crore by Brand Finance in 2009.
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Realty major Lodha Developers sold properties worth Rs 2,300 crore during April-June period, its highest quarterly sales, beating demand slowdown in the real estate market, according to a top company official.

The Mumbai-based firm invested Rs 1,100 crore on construction of ongoing projects and achieved a record quarterly collection of Rs 2,600 crore during April-June period of 2017-18 fiscal, MD Abhishek Lodha said.

"For our India business, this has been a very strong quarter for us. We achieved a net sales of Rs 2,300 crore and a collection of Rs 2,600 crore. We delivered about 2,000 units during the quarter," Lodha told PTI.

The sales have grown by about 70 per cent from the same quarter of last fiscal, when the company did business of about Rs 1,300 crore.

Lodha said the company has been able to achieve healthy sales bookings because of strong focus on project execution.

"Our construction spend for the June quarter was Rs 1,100 crore. The focus on execution of projects is helping in huge employment generation. At present, we have about 26,000 workforce at our various project sites," Lodha said.

"We are strongly focused on delivery, which is a critical reason why customers are happy and investing in our projects," he said, adding that the overall investment on construction would be in the range of Rs 4,000-4,500 crore this fiscal.

Asked about new launches, Lodha said the company launched two projects during the first quarter of this fiscal and plans to have 8-10 projects more by March next year.

On London business, he said the company's sales bookings crossed 200 million pounds till June quarter.

Lodha's MD had recently pegged a sales revenue of 1.5 billion pounds (over Rs 12,000 crore) in the next three years from two ongoing housing projects in central London.

had forayed into the London realty market in 2013 with the acquisition of the landmark MacDonald House at 1 Grosvenor Square in prime Central London from the Canadian government for over GBP 300 million (Rs 3,100 crore).

The group acquired another site in central London, New Court at 48 Carey Street for 90 million pounds in 2014.

Lodha UK launched first project 'Lincoln Square' last year and the second project 'No 1 Grosvenor Square', located in the heart of Mayfair, last month.

Privately-held is currently developing around 41 million sq ft area and has 31 ongoing projects in London, Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Pune, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. It has a land bank of 350 million sq ft for future development.
As many as 48 Amarnath pilgrims lost their lives due to a terror attack, accidents and health reasons in a span of 18 days, an official said on Wednesday.

A 60-year-old pilgrim from Madhya Pradesh died on his way back from the Amarnath shrine, taking the death toll in the ongoing annual yatra to 48, officials said.

Romeshwar Patidar died at Pissu Top, on his way back from the cave to Nunwan base camp in Pahalgam last evening according to a police official.

He said the cause of Patidar's death is being ascertained. "Between June 29 and July 16, 19 pilgrims died due to medical reasons and 20 were killed in accidents. On July 10, eight pilgrims were killed in a terror attack on their bus," said Umang Narula, the CEO of the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board (SASB).

Till today, the board had spent Rs 14,66,975 on transportation and Rs 1,34,75,000 towards ex-gratia payments, he added.

Narula said a decision had been taken to enhance the amount of ex-gratia relief to the next of the kin of those killed in the terror attack in south Kashmir's Anantnag district.

The CEO had earlier ensured that the cost of sending the mortal remains of the terror attack victims by air to their respective home towns was borne by the board.

In 37 cases, the board had also borne the cost of providing an escort with the coffin of the attack victim.

Sixteen pilgrims were killed on July 16 in a bus accident near Banihal, said Narula.

The mortal remains of the deceased, along with the escorting attendants, were sent to their respective home towns yesterday by Air India and Indigo flights.

Besides the attendants, who were selected from among the pilgrims, Jammu and Kashmir Police personnel had also been deputed to accompany the dead bodies, he added.

"The mortal remains of 12 yatris were transported by air to the nearest airports in Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh," said the CEO.

The coffins of three pilgrims were transported in ambulances to Sikar (Rajasthan), Panipat (Haryana) and RS Pura (Jammu), he added.

The mortal remains of one female pilgrim, Chaya Devi, the wife of Vijay Chourasiya Singh and a native of Bihar, was kept in a mortuary at Jammu as her husband and son, both of whom had received injuries in the Ramsoo road accident, were still undergoing medical treatment at Jammu, said Narula.
Smog chokes Delhi, declared the the New York Times on November 7 2016, informing readers around the world that contaminating particulates in the air in the Indian capital had soared in some places tomore than 16 times the limit Indias government considers safe.
Three years ago, Christina DAmbrosio went to her first spin class, pedaling fast on a stationary bike to the rhythms of popular music as an instructor shouted motivation.
Police here have booked city Congress leader Rohit D Tilak, a descendant of legendary freedom fighter Lokmanya Tilak, on charges of rape following a complaint lodged by a woman, an official said here on Tuesday.

"He has been booked under Indian Penal Codes' section 376 (rape) and other charges on Monday night. Further investigations are on in the matter," an official of Vishrambaug Police Station told IANS.

Tilak is the great-great-grandson of Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a grandson of former Maharashtra Assembly Speaker Jayantrao Tilak, and son of Dipak Tilak, the Vice-Chancellor of Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth.

His aunt Mukta Tilak is the current Bharatiya Janata Party Mayor of Pune.

Deputy Commissioner of Police Basavraj Teli said that the victim and the accused have known each other since 2015.

Speaking to a large contingent of media persons outside the police station on Tuesday, the victim noted that she is under "severe pressure" ever since she registered the complaint against the Tilak descendant who is also a prominent Congress leader.

"I am under constant threats from the family... There is a danger to my life, I have not been keeping well," claimed the woman whose face was covered by a veil.

A lawyer by profession, she has been separated from her husband since over a decade and came in touch with Tilak two years ago at a public function.

She has alleged that he lured her with the promise of marriage and repeatedly raped her, assaulted and threatened her. On at least two occasions in the past, she had even attempted suicide, police said.

Teli said a woman officer of a neigbouring police station has been assigned to investigate the case and proceed further.

A scion of the one of the most illustrious political families in Maharashtra, Tilak had been given a Congress ticket to contest the assembly elections from Kasba constituency twice in the past, but he proved unsuccessful against the BJP candidate.

Besides rape and unnatural offences, Tilak - who is not yet arrested - has been charged on various counts of assault, criminal intimidation and threats to the complainant-victim.

(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.)
In 1985, the Supreme Court of India issued directions to various authorities to clean up the river Ganga. The Supreme Court's intervention in M C Mehta versus the Union of India was seen as unprecedented at that time. The apex court became the epitome of judicial activism and innovation. The concept of 'continuing mandamus', the 'Polluter Pay Principle' and 'liberal locus standi', led to judgements of the Supreme Court being quoted the world over. Environmental jurisprudence in India was born principally out of the various orders to clean the most polluted, yet, sacred river. The 'Ganga Pollution case' as it is known, is a test case to examine the efficacy of public interest litigation (PIL) as a panacea for environmental problems.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal. They do not reflect the view/s of Business Standard.
PHOENIX  Storms that flooded Burton Barr Central Library over the weekend will leave it closed indefinitely, sending patrons and staff to other library branches in Phoenix.

But the librarys rare book collection, kept in a vault, is safe, library officials said.

Scott Krushak, assistant chief for the Phoenix Fire Department, said Monday a microburst damaged the roofs sprinkler system, sending 50 to 60 gallons of water a minute cascading through the librarys five floors.

Library officials let in staff to retrieve personal belongings. Patrons and staff will be sent to other library branches during repairs. Its unclear how long that will take.

Krushak said its not a small job. The library is about 280,000 square feet, or more than eight times the size of a grocery store.

We want to do this right, said Lee Franklin, community relations manager for Phoenix Public Libraries. We love books. We love the library and what it does.

Franklin said library officials appreciated the outpouring of support from the community.

We are rallying to make sure we are back up and providing full services as soon as possible.
The Karnataka government on Monday transferred DIG (Prisons) D Roopa from prisons department to the post of DIG, Commissioner for Traffic and Road Safety. The transfer came days after DIG Roopa exposed the VIP treatment given to AIADMK chief and convict VK Sasikala in Bengaluru's Parappana Agrahara Central Prison. This transfer has led to a huge controversy and reactions are coming from all corners.
Amid a protest march taken out in Gujarat by members of Dalit community over allocation of land and other demands, four Dalit families in Lavara village of Dhanera district were given back their agricultural land from illegal occupants almost after four decades.

The district administration of Banaskantha gave back the tracts of lands, which were actually owned by the Dalit families, but were allegedly forcibly being used by some villagers.

Dalit leader and convener of Rashtriya Dalit Adhikar Manch, Jignesh Mevani, whose 'Azadi Kooch' (Freedom March) ended at Dhanera town today, reached nearby Lavara village with other Dalit activists and celebrated the "victory" by putting a blue flag on one of the allocated pieces of land, a statement said.

"While four Dalit families in Lavara got possession of around nine acres of land yesterday, three such families from this village would get around 2.5 acres of land each in the next few days," Banaskantha Collector Dilip Rana said.

When asked Rana, however, claimed that the land allocation had nothing to do with the Dalit protest march.

"On paper, these families are the actual owners. They were given this land by the government in the 1980s. We have no idea who was using it or how they were not able to use it. We gave them possession as soon as we received their representation," he said.

Rana declined to comment about the charges of illegal possession of land by some persons for these many years.

The 'Freedom March' led by Mevani that had begun in Mehsana town on July 12, ended at Dhanera today. The march was planned to mark the first anniversary of the Una dalit thrashing incident, which had rocked the state.

The key agenda of the march was to mount pressure on Gujarat government to allocate agricultural land to Dalits, so that they can give up their ancestral work of cattle skinning or sewage cleaning and start a new life with dignity.

Meanwhile, Kantibhai Solanki, one of those who got back his land yesterday, approached Dhanera police today with the help of Dalit activists and lodged a complaint against four men, who he alleged had been using the land for the last 35 years.

In the complaint, Solanki alleged that the agricultural lands had been allocated by the government to his father around 35 years back.

He claimed that some people of Lavara village had grabbed the land until the Collector gave its possession back to him yesterday.

After receiving the complaint, Dhanera police lodged an FIR of criminal intimidation as well as under various sections of Prevention of Atrocities Act, said Dhanera police inspector, G J Chavda.

"Solanki alleged that when he was putting up a fence around the land, four persons of a particular community, who allegedly grabbed that land, had threatened him of dire consequences. We have not only taken the complaint, but also provided police protection to him," he officer said.

(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.)
Braving Pakistani shelling from across the Line of Control (LoC), authorities in Rajouri district of Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday evacuated 217 students and 15 teachers from three schools where they were trapped for over six hours.

All the schools in Nowshera and Manjakote sectors of Rajouri district have been closed for an indefinite period in view of repeated firing and shelling by the Pakistani Army, officials said here.

Villages like Kalsian, Sair, Bahwani, Namb and Jhangar, which are close to the LoC, have been bearing the brunt of the Pakistani shelling, the officials said.

Altogether 217 students were rescued from three schools, according to Deputy Commissioner of Rajouri Shahid Iqbal Choudhary.

Officials said 15 teachers were also evacuated by the police and civic authorities.

They were evacuated in bullet-proof vehicles and three buses, they said.

From the Government High School, Bhawani, 150 students were shifted while 12 trapped students were evacuated from Middle School, Kaladi, the officials said.

The team of rescuers had a narrow escape in Bhawani as they came under heavy shelling, with shells landing a few meters away from the school.

Likewise, 55 students and teachers of Government High School in Sair had a narrow escape as the building came under direct hit of shells, damaging its large portion, they said.

The students and teachers were rescued amid heavy shelling, they said.

More than 150 students have been shifted to camps while other students were handed over to parents.
A joint team of the ED and the CBI is in London to brief UK prosecution, working on the extradition of fugitive liquor baron Vijay Mallya, and submit fresh proof in the case, officials said on Wednesday.

The visiting officials of the two central probe agencies will also submit the charge-sheet filed by the Enforcement Directorate in the case last month in Mumbai, said a senior official in the Mallya probe team.

"The Indian investigators will also brief Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) officials about the contents of the ED charge-sheet and the evidence produced in it. Some other legal issues will also be discussed," the official said.

The CPS will argue the case in the court on behalf of the Indian government.

The official added that the ED's legal advisor will explain in detail the charges made out against Mallya, some more evidence, attachments made by it and other legal points mentioned in the charge-sheet filed under various sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

The ED will also seek cooperation from countries like France, Singapore, Mauritius, Ireland, the US and the UAE to probe certain transactions and the shell companies involved.

Nine accused have been named in the charge-sheet filed by the ED. The list includes Mallya, Kingfisher Airlines (KFA), United Breweries (Holding) Limited and senior employees and executives of the now-defunct airline and the IDBI (Industrial Development Bank of India) bank.

The agency has called Mallya "prime mover of the entire plot" in the charge-sheet and described how funds obtained from the bank loan were allegedly routed illegally, including "substantial payments" being diverted to the Formula-1 car racing event abroad.

Mallya, who is wanted in India for Kingfisher Airlines' default on loans worth nearly Rs 9,000 crore, has been in the UK since March 2016 and was arrested by Scotland Yard on an extradition warrant on April 18.

A United Kingdom court recently rejected Mallya's request to shift the final hearing date in his extradition case to next year and fixed it for December 4.

Both the ED and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) are probing Mallya and others for alleged charges of corruption and money laundering.

(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.)
Two Army jawans were killed and 6 people, including 3 civilians, were injured as Pakistani troops pounded several villages and forward areas with mortar bombs along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir today, officials said.

Terrorists also made a bid to infiltrate into Kashmir from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) via the Gurez sector which was foiled by the Indian troops who killed one of the infiltrators, the officials said.

Over 8,000 people have been affected by Pakistani shelling during the last two days and 3,361 border migrants have been housed in camps.

Nine people, including 6 soldiers, were killed and 18 injured in over a dozen ceasefire violations by the Pakistani Army along the LoC this month.

The Pakistani troops targeted several areas of Rajouri, Poonch and Kupwara districts of along the LoC, they said, adding that the Indian troops retaliated.

The Pakistani shelling put lives of hundreds of school children at risk in Rajouri district.

The authorities rescued over 250 people. Among them were 217 students, who were trapped in three schools in Kadali and Seha areas of Rajouri near the LoC for 6 hours. They were evacuated in bulletproof vehicles, according to Deputy Commissioner of Rajouri Shahid Iqbal Choudhary.

"Pakistani troops initiated unprovoked firing on Indian Army posts in Naushera sector in Rajouri at around 1350 hours today. The Indian Army retaliated strongly and effectively," the defence spokesman said.

An Army sepoy Jaspreet Singh was killed in the Pakistani shelling in Naushera sector in Rajouri district, a defence spokesman said.

The 24-year-old jawan hailed from Talwandi in Moga district of Punjab. He is survived by his parents, he added.

"The nation will always remain indebted to him for the supreme sacrifice and devotion to duty," he said.

Three civilians were injured in Pakistani shelling along the LoC in Naushera sector, the DC said, adding that they have been hospitalised.

The reports said that three Army jawans also suffered injuries in exchanges of the firing and shelling along LoC. They were hospitalised.

Another Army jawan was killed in Pakistani firing in the Nowgam sector of Kashmir Valley, an army official said.

Over 8,000 people, including 3,000 in Naushera and 5,000 in Manjakote-Rajdhani-Panjgrain-Naika, have been affected by Pakistani shelling during the last two days.

"3,361 border migrants have been given shelter in camps set up by the government in safer areas along the LoC in Rajouri district," the DC said.

Earlier day, the Pakistan Army in unprovoked and indiscriminate firing, used small arms, automatics and mortars from 0645 hours in Bhimbher Gali (Rajouri) and Poonch sectors along the LoC, the spokesman said.

According to reports, one jawan suffered minor splinter injuries in the exchange of the fire in the Bhimbher Gali sector.

The Pakistani Army also targeted civilian areas and Indian Army posts along the LoC in Bhimbher Gali and Balakote sectors of Rajouri district as well as the Poonch sector triggering fear among residents.

Yesterday, the Pakistan Army had fired on Indian Army posts in Rajouri, Poonch and Baramulla districts, officials said.

Naik Muddasar Ahmed was killed when mortar shells landed on his bunker. Ahmed, who hailed from Duchoo village, is survived by his wife and two children.

Pakistan had shelled mortars on civilian areas yesterday in which nine-year-old Sajada Kouser was killed at Baroti, officials said, adding that two other civilians and a jawan were also injured in Rajouri.
The Chinese Army moved tens of thousands of tonnes of military vehicles and hardware into the remote mountainous Tibet region after the standoff with Indian troops in the Dokalam area in the Sikkim sector, the PLA Daily said on Wednesday.

The vast haul was transported to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command - which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India, reported the PLA Daily, which is the official mouthpiece of the Chinese military.

The move took place late last month and involved hardware being moved simultaneously by road and rail from across the entire region, the report said.

China's state-run media has stepped up its rhetoric against India in recent weeks but there was no way to confirm the veracity of such claims.

Early this week, state-run CCTV had broadcast People's Liberation Army troops taking part in heavy military exercises using live ammunition on the Tibetan plateau.

The location was not far from the disputed Dokalam area where Chinese and Indian troops are locked in a standoff, the Hong-Kong based South China Morning Post reported.

The PLA Daily report, however, did not say whether the movement of the military equipment was to support the exercise or for other reasons.

Wang Dehua, an expert on South Asia studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, said the scale of the troop and equipment movement showed how much easier it is for China to defend its western borders.

"Military operations are all about logistics," he said. "Now there is much better logistics support to the Tibet region."

Chinese and Indian soldiers have been locked in a face- off in the Dokalam area of the Sikkim sector for over a month after Indian troops stopped the Chinese army from building a road in the disputed area.

China claimed that they were constructing the road within their territory and has been demanding immediate pull-out of the Indian troops from the disputed Dokalam plateau.

New Delhi has expressed concern over the road building, apprehending that it may allow Chinese troops to cut India's access to its northeastern states.

India has conveyed to the Chinese government that the road construction would represent a significant change of status quo with serious security implications for it.

Doka La is the Indian name for the region which Bhutan recognises as Dokalam, while China claims it as part of its Donglang region.

Of the 3,488-km-long India-China border from Jammu and Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, a 220-km section falls in Sikkim.
India and China should work together to come up with "some better sort of arrangement" for peace, the US said today, expressing concern over the standoff between their troops in the Sikkim sector.

Chinese and Indian soldiers have been locked in a face- off in the Dokalam area of the Sikkim sector for over a month after Indian troops stopped the Chinese army from building a road in the disputed area.

"I know that the US is concerned about the ongoing situation there," State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert told reporters at her daily news conference.

She was responding to questions on the standoff between Indian and Chinese troops in the Dokalam area.

"We believe that both parties, both sides should work together to try to come up with some better sort of arrangement for peace," Nauert said.

Earlier, a State Department official told PTI that the US encourages India and China to engage in a direct dialogue to reduce border tensions.

China claimed that they were constructing the road within their territory and has been demanding immediate pull-out of the Indian troops from the disputed Dokalam plateau.

New Delhi has expressed concern over the road building, apprehending that it may allow Chinese troops to cut India's access to its northeastern states.

India has conveyed to the Chinese government that the road construction would represent a significant change of status quo with serious security implications for it.

Doka La is the Indian name for the region which Bhutan recognises as Dokalam, while China claims it as part of its Donglang region.

Of the 3,488-km-long India-China border from Jammu and Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, a 220-km section falls in Sikkim.

(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.)
Bhiku Daji Bhilare, who was claimed to have saved Mahatma Gandhi from being killed by Nathuram Godse in 1944, passed away today after a brief illness.

The 98-year-old Gandhian, popularly known as 'Bhilare Guruji', was cremated at his village, Bhilar, in Mahabaleshwar Teshil in western Maharashtra's Satara district, family sources said.

Bhilare, born on November 28, 1919, is survived by three sons.

While there is no documented history about Bhilare having foiled Godse's earlier attack, the great grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, Tushar Gandhi, in his new book has dwelt on how fundamentalists had planned and made many attempts on the life of the Father of the Nation before he was finally killed.

According to him, there were four attempts on the Mahatma's life, before Godse killed him in 1948.

The attack at Panchgani in 1944, where Bhilare Guruji overpowered Nathuram, was the second of these attempts, he has claimed in the book.

"(In) July 1944, after his release from the Aga Khan Palace Prison Camp in May 1944, Gandhi contracted malaria and was advised rest by his physician. He retired to Panchgani, a mountain resort near Poona (now Pune), where he stayed at Dilkhush Bungalow.

"A group of 18 or 20 men reached Panchgani by a chartered bus from Poona and held a day-long protest against Gandhi. When Gandhi was told about this, he contacted the leader of the group, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, for a discussion. Nathuram rejected the invitation and continued with his demonstration," the book says.

"During a prayer meeting that evening, Nathuram Godse, dressed in a Nehru shirt, pajama and jacket, rushed towards Gandhi. He was brandishing a dagger in his hand and shouting anti-Gandhi slogans. Godse was overpowered by Manishankar Purohit, the proprietor of the Surti lodge of Poona, and D Bhilare Guruji of Satara, who later became a Congress legislator from Mahabaleshwar. The other youth accompanying Godse ran away," it said



In 2008, at an event in Mumbai, Bhilare was lauded for having had the presence of mind and the daring to twist the knife out of Nathuram Godse's hand as he rushed to kill Gandhiji in a frenzy.

In 1944, Bhilare was the taluka pramukh of the Rashtra Seva Dal.

"It was a wet July evening in Panchgani in 1944," Bhilare Guruji had recalled at the event.

"All of us had assembled in the Batha High School hall for the evening prayers when suddenly a door opposite me opened and in rushed Nathuram Godse. He was wielding a knife and muttering incoherently."



Bhilare blocked his path and twisted the knife out of his hand.

"My colleagues in the Seva Dal were also quick to react, and threw him out of the premises," he had recalled.

Bhilare had also claimed that Gopal Godse and Narayan Apte, who were implicated in the Mahatma's assassination, were present at the spot.

The Panchgani incident has been documented in the memoirs of Gandhiji's close associate, said Pyarelal, a functionary of Mani Bhawan in Mumbai from where Mahatma Gandhi initiated satyagraha and propagated the cause of swadeshi.

(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.)
Memes may be all the rage in these heady days of digital trending, but theyre not a new thing. Ever since Richard Dawkins coined the term in his popular 1976 book The Selfish Gene, scientists have been putting memes under the microscope.
A Congress member in the Rajya Sabha today raised the issue of 39 missing Indian nationals in Iraq for the past three years and asked the government to provide information about their fate.

Raising the issue during the Zero Hour, Pratap Singh Bajwa said 39 Indians, of whom 90 per cent were from Punjab, were kidnapped in Iraq by the ISIS in 2014.

The Congress member said one Harjit, who had managed to escape, in a statement had claimed that the remaining 39 youths had been shot dead.

Bajwa said the External Affairs Minister, on the other hand, was informed that these people were alive.

On Sunday, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had said that 39 Indians abducted in Iraq by the ISIS three years ago may be lodged in a jail in Badush in north-west Mosul in Iraq.

He said that the minister had earlier said on the floor of the House that the youth were alive and in Mosul.

Observing that Mosul has now been freed from ISIS, Bajwa said the government is now saying that 39 Indians have been taken to a village about 30 km away from the town. "Tell us where are our youths," the Congress member said.

Referring to the visit of Minister of State for External Affairs V K Singh to Iraq, Bajwa suggested that the government should have sent an all-party delegation along with the minister and "ensure that those people are either brought in or their parents and relatives should be told that they are no longer alive".

"Don't mislead the country and Parliament," he said.
Federal wildlife managers in charge of a new draft recovery plan for the endangered Mexican gray wolf received a barrage of questions during a public meeting Tuesday night that suggest the plan still has many skeptics.

Many people during the three hour event in Flagstaff asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to defend both its wolf population targets as well as provisions in the newly released plan that limit the wolves to an area south of Interstate-40 in Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico.

Alicyn Gitlin with the Sierra Club was one of those who questioned why the Fish and Wildlife Service didnt consider areas near the Grand Canyon for potential future Mexican wolf habitat, noting it is a relatively conflict-free roadless area with prey availability and the necessary vegetation.

How can you be so sure that the Grand Canyon was not part of the historic range of the Mexican wolf? Gitlin said.

Others questioned the more than $7 million a year the recovery program is expected to cost and pushed for more local input when it comes to decisions on how to deal with wolves that have threatened livestock.

Now, the process seems real one-sided, said Tad Dent, who used to work for Babbitt Ranches. Before the meeting, Dent said he would like the Fish and Wildlife Service to leave it like it is when it comes to the wolves and not to turn any more loose. He didnt want any more taxpayer dollars going to a program he had no confidence would succeed.

About 30 wolf advocates also held a rally before the meeting where they held signs like The road to recovery runs north of I-40 and Recovery or bust. As they chanted and mimicked wolf howls in unison, groups of cowboy hat-clad ranchers gathered in their own circles nearby, providing a striking visual cue of the still-divided debate about recovery of the Mexican wolves in the Southwest.

Among the topics discussed at the meeting:

The plans population recovery goal of 320 wolves in Arizona and New Mexico and 170 wolves in Mexico, which is far less than the 750 wolves a 2012 panel of wolf experts said would be needed for recovery. Sherry Barrett, the Mexican wolf recovery coordinator with the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the different numbers represent differences in visions on how recovery could occur, as well as new data plugged into population models. The 320 target also reflects the highest number the agency determined would be socially tolerable before the wolves would start affecting native ungulates like deer and elk as well as livestock, Barrett said.

The plans focus on wolf recovery in only two areas in Arizona and New Mexico south of Interstate 40 as well as in Mexico. That also goes against the recommendations of the previous scientific panel, now put on hold indefinitely, which called for two more wolf populations to be established in the Grand Canyon region in northern Arizona and southern Utah and the Southern Rockies region in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Those areas are some of the last best places for wolves, said Craig Miller, with Defenders of Wildlife in an interview before the meeting. Barrett said the team decided to limit its analysis to an area south of I-40 because that is where science agrees wolves historically lived, while evidence of gets murkier about historic Mexican wolf habitation in other areas to the north.

The fact that climate change could push wolf habitat northward. But John Oakleaf, the Mexican wolf field projects coordinator, said models show climate change wont have major impacts on ungulate populations that are wolves main food source.

The impact of construction of a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico Border. Tracy Melbihess, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said that the plan doesnt expect much movement between the Mexico and U.S. wolf populations. With human aided translocations between the populations and releases of captive wolves, we could still achieve recovery, Melbihess said.

The ability for residents to legally shoot Mexican wolves if they feel the predators are threatening their life or someone elses. A resident is also allowed to shoot a wolf on non-federal land if the animal is attacking a non-feral dog, Barrett said.

Provisions in the plan that leave the responsibility for timing, location and circumstances of wolf releases up to the states of Arizona and New Mexico without any sort of way to enforce that the states stick to the wolf releases necessary for recovery. Those states have historically been against releases of wolves from captivity as evidenced by the Arizona Game and Fish commissions 2015 vote to oppose all new releases of adult wolves and the state of New Mexicos lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to halt wolf releases in that state.

How can you be certain they will do everything they can to help recovery of the wolf? asked Regan Downey with the Wolf Conservation Center in New York.

Barrett didnt offer any guarantees or any potential enforcement mechanisms for ensuring state compliance with wolf releases, but only said that she has confidence the states will assist the federal wolf managers in getting the releases done.

Im an optimist, she said.

Other wolf supporters expressed a similar distrust with state agencies.

No (I dont trust the AZGFD) they have a proven record not being a caretaker to the wolves or using scientific methods to run the program, said Edwina Vogan.

Several spoke to the importance of Mexican wolves in the larger ecosystem.

Any predator will help keep nature in line, there has been research done at Yellowstone that shows predators help bring a balance, said Donna Cassano. Also extinction is forever.

OTHER GROUPS WEIGH IN

Other organizations on both sides of the wolf issue werent happy with the plan either.

Its pretty bad actually, said Emily Renn, executive director of Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project said about the plan. At this point I think conservation groups have been pushing for new recovery plan for the last 15 years and this is like the worst possible plan we could expect.

Dave Parsons who was the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Mexican wolf recovery coordinator from 1990 to 1999, also criticized the fact that the plan was created without input from stakeholders outside of representatives with Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah wildlife agencies and a small group of scientists. The previous recovery process included a full range of stakeholders including the states, local tribes, sportsmens groups, outdoor recreation representatives and the conservation community, said Parsons, who is now with the nonprofit Project Coyote.

Patrick Bray, executive vice president with the Arizona Cattle Growers' Association was equally opposed to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services plan.

He called the plan beyond recovery and said that with a current count of 113 wolves the federal government should be looking to end its involvement in the program and hand over wolf management efforts to the states.

Its time for the federal government to move on Bray said. This is a predator it doesn't need extra help it knows how to hunt and survive. Lets leave it alone.

Bray was also frustrated by the Fish and Wildlife Services closed process.

His group had absolutely no input, Bray said.

We would have preferred to be at the table, he said.
Industry body on Wednesday approached the Defence Ministry seeking relaxation for stringent bank guarantee norms required for private sector shipyards, which are looking to bid for the construction of ships to be used by the Indian Navy.

As per the latest policy changes incorporated in June this year, the shipyards, to which the contract is awarded are required to furnish performance cum Warranty Bank Guarantee (PWBG) of 10 percent of the value of the contract.

Besides, the shipyards also need to furnish Advance Bank Guarantee (ABG) for all milestone payments and Integrity Pack Bank Guarantee (IPBG).

These bank guarantees remain in force till delivery of the vessels. While this is a measure to safeguard the interest of the Government of India, it puts an unsustainable burden on the shipbuilding companies, which will make the projects unviable, the wrote to Defence Secretary Sanjay Mitra.

The letter said the defence shipbuilding is possibly the only industry wherein government contracts require all milestone payments to be backed by equivalent amount of ABG as well as PWBG.

In all other industries in India such as infrastructure, the requirement is restricted to a PWBG of about five percent and/or an ABG for the first advance.

"Given the programme size, this is a very challenging task for any shipyard. There are restrictions imposed through Reserve Bank of India (RBI) guidelines on the maximum credit exposure that a bank can take on a single entity or a single group. The total amount of bank guarantees issued by all schedule commercial banks in India across all industries in India and outside India as of March 31, 2016 was Rs. 10,58,116 crore," the letter added.

Adding to this, the total value of Naval Defence contracts awarded and to be awarded in the next few years is in several lakhs of crores. Hence, the requirement of bank guarantees for defence shipbuilding alone would be a substantial percentage of the total Bank guarantees issued by the banks in India.

Presently, the Defence Public Sector Units (PSUs) in case of orders on a nomination basis are allowed to submit indemnity bonds in lieu of bank gaurantees.

"It is recommended that a similar provision may be made applicable in case of private sector shipyards," the letter read.

(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.)
Amid reports of cigarette prices surging post the rollout of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) Chairman Vanaja N Sarna said only a rectification of an imbalance was made, and thus it will have no impact on the price of cigarettes itself.

"Cigarettes will not get costlier. There was an imbalance that needed to be rectified. This will not affect the price," she said, while speaking to media post an interaction with members of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), about the GST.

Clearing the air regarding the final GST rate levied on cigarettes, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday reiterated that the earlier proposed figure of 28 per cent will remain, and so will the five percent ad valorem, as part of the compensation cess, effective midnight.

Addressing the media post the 19th meeting of the GST Council, Jaitley said that while the ad valorem remains the same; the numerical amount for each category of non-filtered cigarettes (under 65mm, 65-70mm, 70-75mm) has been increased by Rs 485 per 1000, Rs 621 per 1000 and Rs 792 per 1000 respectively.

Also, the filter cigarettes, under 65mm, will attract a five percent ad valorem plus on Rs 2076 per 1000, while those between 65 to 70mm will attract a five per cent plus on Rs 3688 per 1000.

It was also decided that the fourth category of filter cigarettes will attract a 31 per cent increase in ad valorem.

Speaking about the demands raised by textile traders, who ended their fortnight-long strike today, Sarna notified that unless there is a relevant justification, no rates will be altered by the council.

"The issue raised by the textile sector has snowballed but is not something that cannot be resolved. The strike has been called off, and markets in Surat and Ahmedabad are operational once again. It is certain that any new tax will cause a pinch. However, a balance needs to be struck," she added.

Textile traders from Surat, Ahmadabad and other states staged a fortnight-long protest over the implementation of the new tax regime.

The protestors, who lashed out at the government over the lack of clarity in the GST, claimed their strike already has caused a loss of Rs. 6,000 crore to the government.

In Surat and Ahmadabad, markets remained closed with traders blocking traffic in certain areas, as they feel that the tax is too complicated for their understanding.

However, Jaitley on Tuesday clarified that the demand of the textile traders to not levy any tax on fabrics cannot be accepted.

He pointed out that nil GST on fabrics will break the input tax credit chain and then the garment manufacturers will not be able to get the credit of tax on previous stages.

Additionally, on the import front, he said that there will be zero rating of imported fabrics, while domestic fabrics will continue to bear the brunt of input taxes.

He also pointed out that the organised traders and unorganised sellers in the textile sector have not been affected by the GST.

With regards to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's intervention, Sarna pointed out that no specific issues were raised by the former, adding that the focus was to primarily ensure a smooth rollout of GST.

"Prime Minister Modi wanted to ensure that all governments are integrated to work as one unit. Our emphasis has always been on making sure that price surge and fall are monitored, no hoarding of goods takes place, and that there should be no shortage. In short, the common man should not suffer," said Sarna.

The CBEC Chairman further noted that a team of over 200 officials are monitoring the implementation, with each team monitoring four districts each, governed by a central government officer and other officials providing feedback at the ground level.
Energy theft continues to remain high despite concerted efforts by the Centre and the states, which signed up for the power distribution reforms  Ujwal DISCOM Assurance Yojana (UDAY).
The Cabinet decision on Wednesday to sell the governments 51.11 per cent stake in Hindustan Petroleum Corporation (HPCL) to Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC, also a state-owned entity) wont do much for the formers public shareholders, say experts. It will help the government ease its fiscal deficit and also benefit ONGC, but industry experts do not expect much to change for HPCLs public shareholders.
India and Russia will soon sign a contract for jointly developing the much-delayed fifth-generation fighter aircraft, a top Russian official has said.

Sergei Chemezov, the CEO of Rostec State Corporation, said that all decisions over the multi-billion dollar project to jointly develop the fifth-generation fighter aircraft (FGFA) will be finalised in the "nearest future".

India and Russia inked an inter-governmental pact for the FGFA project in 2007.

"As for the 5th generation (fighter aircraft) - the work is underway. Stage one is over. Now we are discussing the second stage. And I think that in the nearest future, all decisions will be made and the contract documents will be signed," Chemezov told reporters on the sidelines of Russia's premier air show MAKS 2017 here.

"But the work is going, it is very complicated, so it is not going fast," said the head of Rostec, Russia's umbrella organisation of 700 hi-tech civilian and military firms.

He stressed that Russia was the only country for India that without any restrictions transfer all technologies.

Chemezov's remarks came more than two months after government sources in New Delhi had said that almost all the ground work had been completed to finalise the deal for the design of the FGFA jet as well as some other critical issues.

"The contract for the detailed design would be signed soon and that will be a major milestone. It should be signed in the second half of the year," a top official involved in the negotiations with Russia on the project had said.

The official had said that both the countries are co-developers and India will have equal rights over the technology.

In February last year, India and Russia had revived talks on the project after a clearance from then defence minister Manohar Parrikar.

Since then, a lot of issues related to work share, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and technology transfer among others have been sorted out between the two sides, along with the monetary commitments.

In December 2010, India agreed to pay USD 295 million towards the preliminary design of the fighter, which is called in India as the 'Perspective Multi-role Fighter' (PMF).

However, negotiations faced various hurdles in the subsequent years.

Chemezov also talked about Russia's own fifth generation fighter jet programme PAK FA.

"Today one of Rostec's key project milestones is the development of the second stage engine for PAK FA. New construction solutions have been used in the development process, which are unparalleled in Russian engine building," he said.

Talking about other projects of Indo-Russia cooperation, Chemezov said apart from the Ka-226, the two sides have an enterprise that has been working for a long time producing cruise missiles Brahmos.

"They are already completely localised today. Already completely produced in India. This is one of the first projects that we implemented in India. As well as, T 90, Su- 30MKI. That is a fairly large number of projects - some have already been implemented, some are being implemented," he added.

(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.)
Police firing on agitating farmers of Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh which killed six people last month rocked Parliament for the second day on Wednesday with the opposition lead by Congress launching a scathing attack on the government for being insensitive to the plight of growers.
India's increased to 13.53 lakh tonnes in 2016-17 from 13.36 lakh tonnes in the previous financial year, Parliament was informed on Wednesday.

In value terms, however, the export declined to Rs 27,184 crore in the last financial year, from Rs 27,528 crore in 2015-16.

Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, said no complaint was received at her ministry with regard to prevention in the production of meat and leather.

However, she said, as per data, export of buffalo meat has declined.

During April-May 2016-17, the buffalo export stood at $554 million whereas, for the same period in the current year, it came in at $530 million.

She also said the export of leather products and footwear declined during 2015-16 and 2016-17 in value terms due to various factors, including some external ones like recession in European market, instability in the Middle-East countries.

In a separate reply, she said the government has received some representations for ban or restriction on meat exports.

"Some of the representations were received from GauVansh Vikas Prakoshth, Shree Bharat Vashiya Digamber Jain Mahasabha Charitable Trust, Akhil Bharat Krishi Go Seva Sangh and Govanshi Hatya Evam Niryat Nidhi Parishad," she added.

In another reply on e-commerce, the minister said the government has received communications from All India Online Vendors Association and others raising issues relating to e- commerce, including payment settlement.

"The issues raised by the associations regarding payment settlement emanated from disputes arising out of business operations of the entities involved," she said.

She added that the government takes action under suitable laws or statutes in such issues routed through appropriate authorities.
A recent National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) order has sent corporate lawyers and promoters to seek guidance from the higher courts as the NCLT said the personal properties of promoters can be auctioned even when the process of insolvency is pending before it.
The 19th round of negotiations on the proposed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which began on Tuesday in Hyderabad, may see some of the most concerted protests by civil society groups so far.
Even as the Rs 50,000-crore textile industry in the diamond city of Surat limps back to life after a month-long stir against the goods and services tax (GST), Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitleys comments have not gone down well with traders and weavers alike.
Law enforcement agencies in Coconino County are hiring; the problem is qualifying for the job.

The Flagstaff Police Department and Coconino County Sheriffs Office are looking for new officers and deputies. The Flagstaff City Council even dedicated a property tax hike toward adding to the force of 114 commissioned officers.

Flagstaff Police currently have five openings while the sheriffs office is looking to fill six positions.

Flagstaff Police Public Information Officer Sgt. Cory Runge said his department has been sitting at five openings for a while because as new officers join the force others leave for retirement or new job opportunities.

We have five openings right now and we expect to stay at that number for the foreseeable future, Runge said. When we finally fill a position someone else leaves and we havent been able to gain much ground lately.

The hiring process is made even more difficult by the six-step application process that eliminates a candidate if any step is failed.

All prospective officers and deputies must pass a written exam, a physical exam, an oral board, background check, polygraph test and medical examination, which includes a psychological evaluation.

Runge said that half of their prospects dont make it through the first day.

We lose 50 percent of our applicants between the written test and the physical test and then we lose another 10 percent to the oral board, to test if they have the emotional maturity to be a police officer, Runge said. That is just the first day.

Sheriffs deputies go through the same screening; however, their office seemed more upbeat about their prospects.

We are making good progress, Sheriffs Office Spokeswoman Erika Wiltenmuth said. We are looking to fill six more positions, but we have already filled nine with a couple still in training.

Sheriffs Office Public Information Officer Jon Paxton said that although their application process was going well, the application process did weed out a number of unqualified candidates.

He said he did not know what part of the application candidates struggled with, but said many of them do not make the cut.

Runge said the polygraph test is another candidate killer. It is during that test that police learn about disqualifying issues such as past drug use.

The police and sheriffs office both put a strong emphasis on the polygraph test, despite the fact that Arizona courts do not find them admissibly reliable.

We find the polygraph test to be a pretty good indicator, Runge said.

Marijuana is a big candidate killer, since any officer or deputy must have no marijuana use within three years and used it no more than seven times within a lifetime. A candidate must also have never used a narcotic drug within the last seven years.

Marijuana has been a big job killer for us, Runge said. Legalization in a lot of states has hurt our candidate pool and some people lose interest in the job when they cant use the drug.

The other elephant in the room for potential candidates is pay.

The starting salary for a Flagstaff police officer is about $47,000 per year; for a new deputy, about $45,000 a year. However, each department gives a pay increase after completion of the police academy.

Runge said that living in an expensive city like Flagstaff can discourage recruits.

Cost of living and pay are a problem for us, Runge said. Some candidates dont want to deal with the expense.

The city offers a matching housing down payment of up to $7,000 for qualified police department personnel.

Despite problems finding qualified candidates Runge said that the department would rather not hire anyone at all than hire the wrong person.

We will always be more concerned about hiring the wrong person, Runge said. The amount of responsibility and authority given to a police officer would be detrimental with the wrong individual.
With the cost of education rising, more students seem to prefer education . But, many are finding themselves without jobs, even after paying for expensive education.
All-women India Reserve Battalion

The Government of India had approved raising of 5 India Reserve Battalions for J & K Police on 10.02.2016. Subsequently State Government raised a demand to create a Women Police Battalion for J & K Police to address the issues relating to gender based violence faced by Women. Keeping in view the need raised by the State Government for creation of a Women Police Battalion for J & K Police, the State Government of J & K was asked to raise one or two Women Battalions out of the 5 India Reserve Battalions sanctioned for J & K.

It was also mentioned that MHA policy is to reserve 33% seats for women; therefore, MHA would encourage J & K Government to raise 2 women battalions. However, citing that the process of recruitment of 5 India Reserve Battalions has already been set in motion, the State Government has reiterated its proposal for creation of one new exclusive Battalion for women.

State Government of Jammu & Kashmir has issued and Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for dispersal of unlawful assemblies/crowd control in Jammu & Kashmir and use of force.

This was stated by the Minister of State for Home Affairs, Shri Kiren Rijiju in a written reply to question by Smt. Renuka Chowdhury in the Rajya Sabha today.
ILO Convention on Child Labour

After the enactment of the Child Labour (Prohibition & Regulation) Amendment Act, 2016, Government has recently ratified the International Labour Organization (ILO) Conventions No. 138 concerning minimum age for employment and No. 182 concerning prohibition and elimination of worst forms of child labour.

The Child Labour (Prohibition & Regulation) Amendment Act, 2016 provides for stricter punishment and cognizable offence for employing any child or adolescent in contravention of the Act. The penalty provisions against violation of the Act are as under:

(i)In case of first offence of employing any child or adolescent in contravention of the Act, punishment would be imprisonment for a term not less than six months but which may extend to two years or with fine not less than Rs.20,000/, but which may extend to Rs.50,000/- or with both.

(ii) In case of a second or subsequent offence of employing any child or adolescent in contravention of the Act, the minimum imprisonment would be one year which may extend to three years.

This information was given by Shri Bandaru Dattatreya, the Minister of State (IC) for Labour & Employment, in a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha today.
North Eastern Regional Agricultural Marketing Corporation Limited (NERAMAC), inter alia, facilitates processing of horticulture produce; assists processing units to market their products; and helps in developing linkages of farmers with the market. .

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The data related to total number of farmers being provided support by the said corporation is not centrally maintained. NERAMAC in pursuance of the objectives mentioned above, has provided support to large number of farmers, particularly those growing pineapple, ginger and large cardamom. .

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NERAMAC has engaged with some Self-Help Groups and farmers groups to serve as an aggregator and provide marketing support to them. It has also undertaken marketing of processed items sourced from local entrepreneurs. .

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This was stated by the Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances, Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr. Jitendra Singh in written reply to a question by Shri Janak Ram and Shri Vishnu Dayal Ram in the Lok Sabha today. .

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Re-Development of Stations

Indian Railways has advertised its plan to offer A-1 and A category stations on as is where is basis for redevelopment by inviting proposals from interested parties with their designs and business ideas. The entire cost of station redevelopment is to be met by leveraging commercial development of land and air space in and around the station.

A large number of Foreign Railways have shown keen interest in the stations redevelopment program and an agreement has been signed with the French Railway (SNCF) for joint study on Renovation Concept Design of Ambala and Ludhiana stations. Korean railway has also expressed interest in the redevelopment of New Delhi Station. Governments of Belgium, Germany, China and UK have also expressed interest in the program of station redevelopment.

No, Madam. Since Railways is taking up Station Redevelopment in a big way (about 400 A-1 & A category stations), cooperation with foreign countries/companies does not pose any problem to indigenous companies/firms.

The companies/firms can also partner with foreign companies for adapting best International practices and technology transfer. All the station redevelopment is through open bidding process only.
The BBC published the salaries of its top-earning stars for the first time on Wednesday to address concerns that on-air talent at the UKs public broadcaster was being overpaid. The truth: theyre taking home a lot less than their global counterparts.
Following reports emerging of Donald Trump having a second, undisclosed meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit, the US President asserted that it was no secret meeting and that the press was informed.

Taking to Twitter, the President continued his attack on 'fake news' saying that story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick" and that the press knew that all G 20 leaders and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany.

"The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!" Trump added.

Trump's livid reaction comes after it was revealed that besides their 'overtime' bilateral meeting at the G20 Summit, the US President and his Russian counterpart spoke for a second time on the same day.

"There was a couples-only social dinner at the G20. Toward the end, the President spoke to Putin at the dinner. No staff or Cabinet was at the dinner at all, for any of the countries," National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton told CNN of the previously undisclosed meeting.



Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

Anton further informed that Trump and Putin did not go to a separate room for their conversation, but remained in the main room where the dinner was being hosted.

Reporters travelling with the White House were not informed about the second meeting, and there also was no formal readout of the chat.

The development was first reported by Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group think tank.

Trump and Putin sat at opposite ends of a long table at the G20 dinner. Putin was seated next to first lady Melania Trump during the dinner, with a translator between them.
Over the weekend, the conservative commentator Ann Coulter posted a series of tweets, each more scathing than the last, criticizing Delta for moving her to a different seat. While her complaints were fairly successful, leading the airline to refund her the extra $30 it cost to sit an a row with extra leg-room, the carrier also labeled her actions inappropriate. The exchange raised questions even for those passengers who arent as politically polarizing as Ms. Coulter: What is the most effective way to get good customer service?
After three years of violence, Islamic State has encountered a major defeat that could mean that its end is near. On July 10 2017, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi, after a successful nine-month military offensive to liberate the northern city of Mosul, declared total victory over IS in Iraq.
When Marin Alsop conducted the Last Night of the Proms, she said that she was quite shocked that it can be 2013 and there can still be firsts for women. The following year, Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman to win the Fields Medal, awarded to mathematicians under 40 for their contribution to the subject. Now, after Mirzakhanis sad death from breast cancer at the age of 40, I am struck by the stark reality that in the 80 years since the award was first given, there has still been only one female winner so far.
I am writing this letter in response to the situation with the Mexican gray wolves.I am a physician and outdoors person who deeply cares about human and animal wellbeing. I am upset with the proposed recovery plan because it seems the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has chosen to serve politics over science.

The previous recovery planning science team clearly identified what the wolves need, yet those findings are being ignored in the proposed recovery plan.The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to hand the management of the Mexican gray wolf recovery program to the states. This was unsuccessful in the past and wolf numbers diminished and genetic diversity decreased. If this continues, it will likely drive the lobo to extinction.

The Mexican gray wolf draft recovery plan includes shortsighted delisting criteria for the critically endangered wolf. The plan allows for delisting the wolf after 22 wolves released from captivity reach reproductive age. But we know that just reaching reproductive age does not ensure their genes will be contributed to the wild population.

Poaching is a one major threat to survivability. Also Mexican gray wolves need connectivity between wild populations in order to recover. Connectivity would be easy were they allowed to establish in the two additional suitable habitats in the U.S.: the Grand Canyon area and the Southern Rockies.

Instead, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service the proposal restricts the wolves to south of Interstate 40. These are just a few issues.

PEARISH SMITH

Flagstaff
Embattled Pakistan Prime Minister today contested the graft charges against him and his family in the Supreme Court, saying the Panama probe panel did not produce any document to prove that he was the owner of the posh London flats which are at the centre of the high- profile case.

The apex court had started hearing the scandal on Monday after the JIT submitted its final report on July 10, recommending that a corruption case be file against Sharif and his family for alleged money laundering in the 1990s, when he twice served as prime minister, to purchase assets in London.

Sharif's lawyer Khawaja Harris stressed that the JIT "did not level any specific charge of corruption against Sharif."



He also said that the JIT has not produced any document to prove that Sharif, 67, was the owner of the London flats.

Harris's arguments were directed at the six-member JIT, two of whom were from the Inter-Services Intelligence and the Military Intelligence.

He said the JIT had overstepped its mandate given to it by the court and had based its findings on the documents, which were of no evidentiary value as per the Pakistani laws.

If Sharif loses the case in the Supreme Court, it could cost him his premiership, throwing Pakistan into a turmoil.

Sharif has refused to quit, calling the JIT report a compilation of "allegations and assumptions". His decision to stay in power was endorsed by the federal cabinet last week.

However, the three-member apex bench observed that Sharif has not provided the details of all assets and source of income in the form of his tax returns.

Justice Ijazul Ahsan said the Sharif family has not produced any document to prove that the prime minister's son Hussain Nawaz was the original owner of the London flats. He said JIT has found that Sharif's daughter Maryam was the real owner of those apartments.

Justice Ejaz Afzal told Sharif's counsel that the Sharif family has not provided the money trail to establish that the London flats were legally purchased.

"We have been waiting for them since day one to come forward and provide the money trail," he said, but added that the court would decide the case on the basis of evidence and it was not bound by the findings of the JIT.

Justice Azmat Saeed Sheikh raised questions about the sources of funds used to set up the Hill Metal steel company in Saudi Arabia, which is allegedly owned by the Sharifs.

The judges appeared quite aggressive and grilled Sharif's counsel about the source of money used to establish businesses in Gulf and the UK by the Sharif family.

"The real question is where did the money for [family] properties in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and London came from? We have not yet received an answer to this fundamental question," Justice Ijazul Ahsan said.

The bench also asked Sharif's counsel whether the court should decide the case by its opinion over the concealment of facts or refer the case to an accountability court for trial.

The counsel urged the court to decide it on merit and stressed that the JIT was biased and his client had done nothing illegal.

Later, finance minister Ishaq Dar's counsel began his arguments but the court adjourned the case until tomorrow.

The scandal surfaced when the Panama Papers leaks last year revealed that Sharif's sons - Hassan and Hussain - and his daughter Maryam - owned offshore companies which managed their family's properties. The assets in question include four expensive flats in Park Lane, London.

Opposition parties say the London flats were purchased through illegal money which Sharif and his family have rejected. But so far they are unable to satisfy the court about the source of money used to purchase these properties.

(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.)
The worlds most destructive mud volcano was born near the town of Sidoarjo, on the island of Java, Indonesia, just over 11 years ago  and to this day it has not stopped erupting. The mud volcano known as Lusi started on May 29, 2006, and at its peak disgorged a staggering 180,000 cubic metres of mud every day, burying villages in mud up to 40 metres thick. The worst event of its kind in recorded history, the eruption took 13 lives and destroyed the homes of 60,000 people. But although the mud is still flowing more than a decade later, scientists are not yet agreed on its cause.
US President Donald Trump had a second undisclosed meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of G20 summit in Germany early this month, according to media reports.

The White House has confirmed that the two leaders spoke during the G20 dinner, but said it is incorrect to describe it as the second meeting.

"There was no "second meeting" between President Trump and President Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner. The insinuation that the White House has tried to "hide" a second meeting is false, malicious and absurd," the White House said last night after various media reports came about the second meeting.

The meeting lasted for about an hour and was in addition to the two and half hour meeting the two leaders had as part of the structured dialogue, the media reports claimed.

"It is not merely perfectly normal, it is part of a President's duties, to interact with world leaders. Throughout the G20 and in all his other foreign engagements, President Trump has demonstrated American leadership by representing our interests and values on the world stage," the White House said in support of the meeting.

The White House said during the night of the G20 summit, there was, first, a concert for all the leaders in the new Hamburg opera house. The leaders were all photographed by the press in before going inside.

Later that night, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosted a dinner for leaders and spouses only, and the German government set the seating arrangements, it said.

The concert and dinner were publicly announced on both the President's schedule and the G20 schedule, with the clear understanding that all visiting leaders would be present, it added.

"At the dinner, President Trump was seated between Mrs Abe, wife of the Prime Minister of Japan, and Mrs Macri, wife of the President of Argentina. Mrs Trump was seated next to President Putin," the White House said.

During the course of the dinner, all the leaders circulated throughout the room and spoke with one another freely, the White House explained.

"President Trump spoke with many leaders during the course of the evening. As the dinner was concluding, President Trump went over to Mrs Trump, where he spoke briefly with President Putin," it said.

"Each couple was allowed one translator. The American translator accompanying President Trump spoke Japanese. When President Trump spoke to President Putin, the two leaders used the Russian translator, since the American translator did not speak Russian," the White House said.

Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, the absence of American translator in the meeting was breach of national security protocol.

"Never in my life as a political scientist have I seen two countries -major countries -with a constellation of national interests that are as dissonant, while the two leaders seem to be doing everything possible to make nice and be close to each other," he told Bloomberg in an interview.

The New York Times said the meeting raises new questions about Trump-Putin relationship.

"The intimate dinner conversation, of which there is no official US government record, because no American official other than the president was involved, is the latest to raise eyebrows. Foreign leaders who witnessed it later commented privately on the oddity of an American president flaunting such a close rapport with his Russian counterpart," the daily reported.

"Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the US, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesn't care," Bremmer was quoted as saying by The New York Times.

Bremmer said he heard directly from attendees.

"They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled," he said.

But in a series of two tweets, Trump slammed the media.

"Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany," Trump said.

"Press knew about it. The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!" Trump said in another tweet.

Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017
The US Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that while President Donald Trump's administration can continue to bar refugees from entering the country, officials will have to show greater flexibility in enforcing the accompanying ban on travellers from six Muslim-majority countries.

The Justice Department had asked the high court to stay an order issued last week by a federal district judge in Hawaii who found the administration's definition of close family in allowing exemptions to the travel ban was too narrow, Efe reported.

US District Judge Derrick Watson also said that the government could not prohibit entry by refugees assured of placement in the US by recognized refugee agencies.

The Supreme Court sided with the Justice Department on the refugee question, staying that portion of Watson's decision, but they supported the district judge's finding on the government's exemption criteria.

More broadly, the nine justices declined to rule definitively on the Trump administration's appeal of Watson's ruling, insisting that the case would have to follow the usual course through the federal appellate courts.

Last month, the Supreme Court set aside injunctions issued by federal appellate courts and said that portions of Trump's March 6 executive order could take effect.

That document barred citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the US for 90 days and excluded all refugees for 120 days.

But in allowing the order to take effect, the Supreme Court said that the travel restrictions could not be applied to people with "a credible claim of a bona fide relationship" with a person or entity in the United States.

Under the Trump administration guidelines, spouses, parents, parents-in-law, children, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, fiances and siblings of those already in the country can be admitted.

But grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law are excluded.

Watson struck down those restrictions.

"Common sense, for instance, dictates that close family members be defined to include grandparents," he wrote last week.

"Indeed, grandparents are the epitome of close family members. The government's definition excludes them. That simply cannot be."
The budding relationship between US President and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit in Hamburg was the crowning image of a fractious gathering of world leaders. Yet the promise that a historic agreement has been reached over Syria is a hollow one.
The largest non-life insurer New India Assurance hopes to launch its initial share sale by October. as it expects the final government go-ahead for it anytime now, a senior company official said on Wednesday. New India and GIC Re are the two government-run non- life insurer and the reinsurer, respectively, which are likely to hit the first with IPOs.
The projection of a normal monsoon this year might have brought some cheer to Indian farmers, but they are still facing the prospect of having to pay higher prices for potash, or fertiliser potassium. Reason: China, the worlds largest buyer of potash, has signed an annual agreement with producers at a higher price, which traditionally acts as a benchmark for the whole market. So, India, another important potash consumer, which will soon start negotiations, could find it difficult to seal the deal at last years price.
In a move that will set the stage for setting up a spot exchange for gold trading, help make gold trade transparent and eveolve an India-based gold price, the government is considering formulating good delivery standards and responsible gold practices for trading in the precious metal.So far, in most trading centres across the globe, London Bullion Market Association or LBMA delivery standards are accepted. Even on Indian futures exchanges, it is the LBMA standard gold that is regarded as good delivery to the extent that gold refined by Indian refinery, but not having LBMA recognition, is not acceptable on MCX.

In India, only MMTC-PAMPS refinery has been recognised by LBMA. The government is discussing this issue with stakeholders in the bullion industry, including Indian Bullion Jewellers Association (IBJA), World Gold Council (WGC), Ficci, hallmarking and refinery associations and Indian Gold Policy Centre under IIM-A among others. As per the discussions held so far, a rough road map has been proposed for gold spot exchange, which will be refined further.
The hearing will continue in the Delhi High Court on a plea seeking cancellation of the anticipatory bail granted by the trial court to senior Congress leader Sajjan Kumar, in a case related to killing of three Sikhs in west Delhi area during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

On July 13, a second judge of the Delhi High Court recused from Kumar's case. Earlier too, one Judge had recused from hearing the matter.

The Special Investigation Team (SIT) had approached the Delhi High Court seeking cancellation of the anticipatory bail granted by the trial court to Kumar.

On June 10, the first Delhi High Court Judge recused himself from hearing Kumar's bail cancellation plea in connection with the riots, as the appearing advocate was his relative.

Earlier in April, the Delhi High Court had reopened five cases in connection with the 1984 anti-Sikh riots that were closed in 1986.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had also filed appeals against the acquittal of Kumar and light sentence to ex-councillor Balwan Khokar.

The High Court had taken suo motu cognizance as during course of the arguments Kumar's lawyers mentioned these matters as precedents since co-accused Mahender Yadav, Balwan Khokar and Kishan Khokar had been acquitted in them.

The court noted that eyewitnesses had not been examined in those cases and there was a "travesty" since investigation was not done properly.

The court took suo motu cognizance of the "errors" in the 1986 trial judgment, adding that key eyewitnesses were not examined and cases were closed "very rapidly" seemingly without proper investigation and trial.

The bench passed this order after taking note of the trial court judgments passed in 1986 in the five cases.

The apex court had also directed the Centre to deposit more than 190 files in connection with this case.

Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi told the apex court that the SIT in as many as 263 cases had no case files and there was no trace of any victim or witness.

On February 20, the Centre filed a status report in the top court on the investigation conducted by the SIT into anti-Sikh riots cases.

The anti-Sikh riots that broke out after the assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi, claimed 2,433 lives in Delhi alone.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Jharkhand and Karnataka Police busted a gang of cyber criminals, arresting 21 of them on Wednesday.

One of the accused is from Bihar, while the rest 20 are from Karnataka.

The kingpin of the gang Karu Singh, who is also from Bihar, is still absconding.

An FIR has been registered and investigation is underway.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A nine-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court today will hear the petitions challenging various issues pertaining Aadhaar with the main focus on whether 'right to privacy' is a fundamental right or not.

The apex court would decide whether the right to privacy of an individual is a fundamental right or not.

The nine-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice of India (CJI) CJI Jagdish Singh Khehar would start hearing the case today.

In yesterday's hearing, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court prima facie disagreed with the Centre's argument that citizens did not enjoy right to privacy. The judges, however, referred the case to a nine-judge Constitution Bench which will decide if privacy was a Fundamental Right.

Petitions challenged validity of Aadhaar, alleging that collection of biometric data and its linking to all activities violated right to privacy.

In its first hearing, a five-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court yesterday referred Aadhaar matter to the Chief Justice of India (GJI) for the constitution of a nine-judge bench to decide whether Aadhaar breaches an individual's privacy or not.

The bench, comprising Chief Justice of India J.S. Khehar, and Justices D.Y. Chandrachud, J. Chelameswar, S.A. Bobde and Abdul Nazeer, was to hear a total of 22 cases that challenge several aspects of Aadhaar and the use/sharing of data collected under it.

Among these challenges are-making Aadhaar mandatory for social welfare benefits, infringement of right to privacy, making Aadhaar mandatory for filing income tax returns (ITRs) as well as for obtaining and retaining PAN.

The petitioners have argued that right to privacy is part of Article 21, the right to life, and interspersed in Article 19, though not expressedly said in the Constitution.

Former Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi told the Supreme Court in 2015 that Indian citizens don't have a fundamental right to privacy under the Indian Constitution.

On July 7, three judge bench of the apex court, headed by Justice J. Chelameshwar and also comprising Justices A. M. Khanwilkar and Navin Sinha, asked the petitioners to mention it before the Chief Justice of India (CJI) for the Constitution bench to hear the matter.

On 13 July, the Supreme Court ruled for the setting of a constitution bench to address the long standing question of whether Indian citizens have the right to privacy, and if Aadhaar breaches that right.

The Income Tax Department has stepped up its efforts to encourage people to link their PAN with Aadhaar.

The government had earlier made Aadhaar number mandatory for filing income tax returns and applying for a PAN card.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In a major haul, the Andhra Pradesh police caught a gang of seven members, who tried to exchange demonetised currency worth one crore in Vijayawada.

Joint Commissioner of Police B. V. Ramana Kumar said that the gang has been taken into custody when they were exchanging the demonetised currency.

"This amount was found in demonetised currency with a Chennai-based financier Jayachandran from Tiruvottiyur, who failed to change Rs 5 crore worth currency in the designated time by the government. Later, he approached few members who assured to exchange Rs 3 crore and eventually got cheated and received fake currency," he added.

In a similar incident, the Border Security Force (BSF) yesterday seized Rs 2000 denominatised Fake Indian Currency Note (FICN) with face value of Rs. 1.96 lakhs from Malda's Sabdalpur area of west Bengal.

The armed force recovered the currency on June 17 on receipt of information regarding the trafficking of fake currency in the area of Khumbhira.

The apprehended miscreant revealed his identity as Nijamul Haque and hails from Malda district.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress party leader Ghulam Nabi Azad on Wednesday criticised the government for not taking steps to stop the rise in mob lynchings across the nation.

Azad said in the Rajya Sabha, "The government is not doing anything on the issue of lynching plaguing the country. Also the lynching of Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Ayub Pandith in Srinagar on June 22 was a shameful one which was against humanity".

Taking potshots at the Centre, he said that Jharkhand had become an 'akhara' of lynching.

"There is no place left from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, where lynchings did not happen. I'm not saying lynchings never happened in the past. But those were at individual level. This time one or other ruling party person is involved," Azad said.

Earlier in the day, the Congress raised issues like mob lynching and farmers' suicide as the third day of the Monsoon Session of the Parliament began.

The Lok Sabha was adjourned yesterday following an uproar by the Opposition.

The Lower House was adjourned for the day on Monday too after an obituary to former members and victims of the Amarnath terror attack was given.

The Monsoon Session of the Parliament will continue till August 11.

The Opposition had also raised issues like China, Jammu and Kashmir and Darjeeling unrest and impact of Goods and Service Tax (GST) among other issues.

Apart from this, the Centre will introduce 16 new bills in both the houses of the Parliament for consideration and passing.

Ahead of the Monsoon Session, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while addressing the floor of leaders of parties of the Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha at the capital, said that for preserving the institution of Democracy in India, it is important that all political parties support the Government to conduct business in both Houses of the Parliament without disruption and constructive discussion takes place on issues of importance.

Prime Minister Modi further urged all parties to extend their support to the Government in fighting corruption and the issue of communal violence in the name of cow protection.

The Prime Minister also called upon all the parties to support the war against corruption, which has been initiated by the government.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The world-beloved honey-loving teddy bear has been nearly banished from China's cyberspace, and the reason for doing so is equally bizarre.

The online ban on Winnie the Pooh came to light especially after the Financial Times covered the topic in a front page story Monday, reports CNN.

The newspaper printed a picture showing the bear strolling with his tiger friend Tigger next to a photo of Chinese President Xi Jinping walking with his then-US counterpart Barack Obama in 2013.

After the image appeared online, Chinese netizens began posting photos of Jinping in similar poses by putting pictures side by side.

Out of the many creative pictures, one depicted a frosty handshake between Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe along with Pooh and his donkey friend Eeyore.

The pictures were clearly meant to be swallowed with a pinch of humour, but the mirth was lost on the government.

Some internet users have pointed out a recent photo as a possible trigger for the latest restrictions. In the picture, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo and his wife each held a Pooh mug.

China is already infamous for having one of the world's most restrictive internet filtering and censorship systems- the Great Firewall of China.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Senior Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday raked up the China issue in the Rajya Sabha during the ongoing Monsoon Session.

Mulayam said China has installed a nuclear bomb in Pakistan and has prepared itself to attack India anytime now.

"Today, India has immense threat from China. I have been informed that China has installed nuclear bomb on Pakistani soil. China has prepared fully to attack India," Yadav said.

He added that China is conspiring against India, taking Pakistan under its fold.

"Protecting Bhutan and Sikkim is our responsibility. China is our enemy, not Pakistan; it can do us no damage," he asserted.

Raising the matter in the Lok Sabha against the backdrop of tension between India and China, he asked the government to inform the Parliament what it has done to meet any likely challenge from the neighbouring country.

Meanwhile, the members of the Opposition belonging to the Congress, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), Left, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) staged a walkout in the Lok Sabha after the House met at 12 noon after the first adjournment.

As the House resumed, in the Zero Hour, Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge demanded immediate discussion on farmers' plight and suicides.

Speaker Sumitra Mahajan, while rejecting the adjournment motion, said the issue would be discussed as it is listed under 193 in the business of the House.

Parliamentary affairs minister Ananth Kumar also pleaded with the opposition members saying the Government is committed for welfare of farmers. However, unrelenting opposition members staged a walkout.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
China's aggressive postures in the Doklam Plateau is but a scene setter for the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in which President Xi Jinping is expected to be crowned as the undisputed strong leader of the nation with his handpicked politburo and perhaps a change in the party constitution which would allow him to remain president beyond 2022.

This change in tone comes months ahead of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The fear should be that Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is hoping to completely choreograph and orchestrate personnel and policy arrangements at the Party Congress, could begin to see the Doklam impasse as an opportunity to underline his credentials as a strong leader.

A miscalculation about China's abilities and India's willingness to respond could, at short notice, convert the current stand-off into a shooting war between the two nuclear armed neighbours. It must be the intent of key governments in the region and around the to ensure that this does not happen.

Interlocutors between India and China need to ensure that the current display of resolve on the border between India and China is defused in a manner where neither side suffers a loss of face. The Indian Foreign Secretary seems to have shown the way during a speech in Singapore a few days ago, where he noted that both sides have ample experience of dealing with such issues and need to go back to the negotiating table.

Sadly, China's response has been to ratchet up the rhetoric, with its Foreign Ministry saying that this section of the border was already delimited, and insisting that there was no reason for China to step back unless India withdrew its troops.

An earlier example of China's new assertiveness was its insistence that significant parts of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) did not apply to it, and that a decision of the Permanent Court of Arbitration on the Philippines' challenge to China's claimed sovereignty over islands in the South China Sea was not worth the paper it was written on.

The second type has most recently been witnessed in one of the stranger geo-political developments of recent years. China and India have been engaged in a face-off in an area close to the tri-junction between these two and Bhutan, an territory that belongs to Bhutan.

On being challenged for building a road in an area under Bhutanese sovereignty, China has resorted to quoting from a single article of a Sino-British convention of 1890.

That the has moved on since then, during which the British have left India, Imperial China is now the People's Republic of China, and realities have altered, seems not to have registered with Beijing.

The Indian Foreign Ministry pointed out on 30 June 2017, that the Special Representatives of both India and China had reached agreement in the year 2012 that the tri-junction boundary points between India, China and third countries would be finalised in consultation with the concerned countries.

So, China is choosing to base its claims over territory on a 127-year old convention which primarily dealt with the manner in which tea, and other goods would be traded between British India and Imperial China, while completely ignoring the understanding it reached with India just five years ago.

The developments in the Doklam Plateau area have occupied premium space in Chinese media for nearly a month, and have consistently featured in the statements of the spokespersons of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The nub of such media coverage has moved on from asserting China's claims, to something more aggressive and jingoistic, with more recent coverage talking of possible war, and reminding India of the short war of 1962, the scars of which many Indians continue to carry to this day.

In all this, the smallest voice has been of Bhutan, which is the rightful owner of the area where China has built a road, and in whose support the Indian Army has deployed its troops. China and Bhutan do not have diplomatic relations, and China seems to be using this current episode to try and force not only a boundary resolution with Bhutan, but also coerce that small country into accepting a diplomatic relationship that it does not desire at this point of time.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Following reports emerging of Donald Trump having a second, undisclosed meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit, the U.S. President asserted that it was no secret meeting and that the press was informed.

Taking to Twitter, the President continued his attack on 'fake news' saying that story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick" and that the press knew that all G 20 leaders and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany.

"The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!," Trump added.

Trump's livid reaction comes after it was revealed that besides their 'overtime' bilateral meeting at the G20 Summit, the U.S. President and his Russian counterpart spoke for a second time on the same day.

"There was a couples-only social dinner at the G20. Toward the end, the President spoke to Putin at the dinner. No staff or Cabinet were at the dinner at all, for any of the countries," National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton told CNN of the previously undisclosed meeting.

Anton further informed that Trump and Putin did not go to a separate room for their conversation, but remained in the main room where the dinner was being hosted.

Reporters traveling with the White House were not informed about the second meeting, and there also was no formal readout of the chat.

The development was first reported by Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group think tank.

Trump and Putin sat at opposite ends of a long table at the G20 dinner. Putin was seated next to first lady Melania Trump during the dinner, with a translator between them.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Hours after a gang rape and murder accused died in police custody, Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh on Wednesday assured police investigation into the matter.

"Police is investigating the matter. Guards on duty at that time are called for interrogation. Action will be taken against them," Singh told the media.

Earlier in the day, villagers pelted stones and staged protest outside Kotkhai Police Station after one of the six accused in gang rape and murder of minor girl died in custody.

According to the police, the person was murdered by another accused.

At least six people were arrested last week in connection with the gang rape and murder of a minor girl in Kotkhai region of Shimla district.

The victim, who was a student at Mahasu government school in Kotkhai, was returning back from school when she was kidnapped and raped on July 4.

Two days later, police recovered her body from Halaila forests of Kotkhai.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) enquiry in the case.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Expanding access to credit for technology savvy and mobile population and bringing a transformation in the small ticket size personal loan market, Home Credit India Finance Pvt. Ltd., one of India's fastest growing non-banking financial company (NBFC), has launched an innovative and one of its kind online Mini Cash Loan across the country.

Targeted at customers who require a small loan to fulfill an urgent need or buy a product that has been on their shopping list, the Mini Cash Loan enables eligible applicants to borrow any amount ranging from Rs. 1,000 to Rs. 10,000.

A differentiating feature of these loans are that they are approved within 10 minutes of completing an online application form. In just a few steps, a customer can avail an instant cash loan without speaking to a loan advisor or visiting a branch and no physical signatures. The loan is disbursed directly into a customer's account within a day through RTGS and NEFT electronic payment systems.

The only document that a customer requires while applying for this loan is an Aadhaar card. Only in cases where the current address is different from the one mentioned on the Aadhaar card, the customer will be required to submit an address proof. These real time small ticket size smart loans are designed keeping in mind the ease of application and quick approvals. Since its launch, there have been around 58,000 registrations for the Mini Cash Loans.

With the launch of this new loan, Home Credit India has become one of the few consumer finance firms in India to offer such a product. The Mini Cash Loan is available to all and not just the existing customers of Home Credit India.

The applicant needs to be a salaried employee, self-employed or a pensioner. The complete process of applying, approval and disbursal of mini cash loan is available at https://www.homecredit.co.in/loans/mini-loan.aspx.

"We are constantly investing and innovating in technology at Home Credit India to ensure that we provide to the market products that are easy, simple to understand and require minimum documentation. The biggest advantage of applying for an online personal loan is convenience and hassle-free experience, something that the customer of today wants. The Mini Cash Loan is part of our digital strategy to offer technology driven and latest financial products that provide an intuitive and seamless experience to customers," said chief marketing officer Home Credit India, Tomas Hrdlicka.

Home Credit India has been at the forefront of redefining customer experience through innovative products and services. The company recently launched a Mobile App that provides the customers access on the go to his/her loan details, repayment schedule and information on the due amount.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A special NIA Court in Shimla has held Bengaluru youth Abid Khan guilty under various sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

The matter has now been fixed for pronouncement of judgement or quantum of punishment on July 21.

This case was initially registered as FIR under section 18 and 20 of UA (P) Act and section 419 IPC at Police Station Banjar, Kullu and accused Abid Khan was arrested.

Later it was re-registered at the Police Station NIA headquarters, New Delhi as per the orders of the Ministry of Home Affairs and Central Government.

The charge-sheeted accused Abid Khan, 23 years, a resident of Bengaluru, Karnataka was found closely associated with four arrested accused persons in ISIS case.

He got converted to Christianity after the arrest of aforesaid four accused persons by the NIA in January, 2016, to evade his arrest.

After obtaining passport in March, 2016, he went to Colombo, Srilanka for about one month. Thereafter, accused Abid Khan took shelter in a Church, at Kullu, Himachal Pradesh. During this period he remained in contact with his handlers through various social media platforms.

Abid Khan was found to be a member of a newly formed organisation, "Junood-Ul-Khilafa-Fil-Hind" which was working to further the ideology of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an international proscribed Jihadi terrorist organisation with a motive to establish caliphate by indulging in terrorist activities across different countries in the world including India.

After the completion of investigation, the NIA had filed a charge-sheet in the Special NIA Court, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, in this case on June 12, against Abid Khan under section 120B, 201 of the IPC and sections 18, 18B, 20, 38 and 39 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 (as amended) and section 4 and 5 of the Explosive Substances Act, 1908.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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Air India Chairman and Managing Director on Wednesday said that the of the disinvestment of the airline has affected the morale of the staff, but they are determined to give their best to see their company perform well anyhow.

"The of disinvestment definitely affects the morale of every person, because the future becomes uncertain. I don't think that it's much of a concern, because the staff is in love with the company and they'd like to see their company do well always," Lohani told ANI.

On June 28, the Cabinet gave 'in-principle' nod for disinvestment of stakes in the airline after the NITI Aayog suggested on the same.

The state-owned airline has total liabilities of about Rs 60,000 crore, out of which Rs 52,000 crore is bank debt and it owes Rs 8,000 crore to oil PSUs and Airports Authority of India.

The airline was given a bailout package in 2012 by the UPA Government of which it has so far received Rs 24,000 crore.

The Air India was nationalised in 1953.

(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.)
The Muthoot Group, one of India's leading conglomerates with a family legacy of over 800 years and financial services arm of over 130 years, launched its Muthoot Skill India project in association with Centum Foundation, the CSR arm of Centum Learning, a Bharti Group company, to impart employability linked skill development training to the underprivileged youth in Haryana.

The first Muthoot Skill India Centre was also inaugurated on the same day in Tigaon Village of Faridabad. The centre has been built in an area of over 4000 sq. ft. and is equipped with all state- of the -art equipment required for conducting trainings.

Under the project, free of cost skill training will be provided to 500 underprivileged individuals in courses like Sewing Machine Operator, Call Centre Executive and General Duty (GD) Assistant/Nursing Assistant in the villages of Faridabad.

Muthoot Skill India aims to make these individuals self-reliant as it will not only impart employable skills to them but also facilitate wage employment as well as self-employment. Those opting for self-employment will be assisted in starting their own businesses. The project also aims at encouraging entrepreneurship and thereby contributing in the national cause of make in India.

"I am very happy to announce our Muthoot Skill India project under which we will set-up Skill Development Centres to provide vocational training to the economically weaker sections of the society. This initiative is an important part of The Muthoot Group's larger vision of enriching lives of the masses while contributing back to the society. This project is also special to us because it supports and strengthens our commitment to the growth of our nation," said chairman The Muthoot Group, M G George Muthoot.

"Centum has been taking up philanthropic causes to provide employability related trainings to underprivileged youth across the country. We are privileged to be associated with The Muthoot Group for this very potent initiative in this part of India. Such partnerships would help achieve the vision of bringing sustainable transformation in the country's prevailing employment scenario," said MD and CEO Centum Learning, Sanjay Bahl.

"At The Muthoot Group, we have always endeavored to contribute to the society in sustainable ways through our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Individual Social Responsibility (ISR) initiatives. I am very glad to flag-off this new project towards the larger cause of skilling young Indians and making them self-reliant. I am confident that this modest step will contribute in a big way towards creating inclusive growth in the country," said Deputy Managing Director - The Muthoot Group, Alexander George Muthoot.

Since its inception, The Muthoot Group has been providing quick and easy finance to the underserved and unbanked masses of the society and this initiative of the company furthers its objective of facilitating Sustainable Financial Inclusion across rural and semi urban areas of the country.

The Muthoot Group decided to join hands with Centum Foundation, a part of skilling major Centum Learning, owing to its vast experience in the domain for over a decade across 15 countries. Centum is the largest partner of the National Skill Development Council (NSDC).

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Nagaland Governor PB Acharya has invited former chief minister TR Zeliang to be sworn-in as the Chief Minister at 3 pm.

The Governor has further directed him to prove majority in the Assembly on or before July 22.

This comes after the Nagaland Assembly was, earlier in the day, adjourned sine die after Chief Minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu failed to turn up at the floor test session.

The floor test was called on after Acharya directed the Speaker of the State Legislative Assembly to summon an emergent special session to test the majority support of the present cabinet led by the Chief Minister.

Earlier, the writ petition filed by Liezietsu at the Kohima Bench Guwahati High Court was dismissed.

The Kohima Bench observed that the Governor had taken the right decision to ask the Chief Minister to have a vote of confidence in the floor of the House to see which out of the two contesting claimants of Chief Ministership had a majority in the House.

The Court further stated that there was no merit in the writ petition filed by Liezietsu and the same was accordingly dismissed.

The Governor had requested the Chief Minister to prove his majority support on the floor of the Assembly on or before July 15, following which both sides took to media to assert their point of view regarding it.

While the Governor had said that incumbent Chief Minister Liezietsu is not a leader of the house, as he is not elected, while Zeliang is a leader as well as the chairman of the DAN, adding Shurhozelie, anyhow, had to go on polling in next six months, Liezietsu rejected his directive to seek trust votes, saying the government is going strong and there is no point to go on floor test.

Liezietsu is facing a rebellion by 43 Naga Peoples Front MLAs led by TR Zeliang demanding a change of leadership in the present house of 59.

He filed the petition on July 14 appealing for a stay on the Governor's directive.
Congress Vice-President on Wednesday questioned the government as to why his party and other members of the opposition were not being allowed to speak on farmers' issues in the Parliament: .

"For the Goods and Services Tax (GST) roll-out, Parliament was open till midnight, but to talk on farmers' issues, they won't do the same. Today in the Lok Sabha we wanted to speak on the farmers' issues, even Prime Minister Narendra Modi was present there, but we were not allowed to speak," Gandhi said at a rally in Rajasthan's Banswara district.

He added that the opposition had suggested to the government not to pass the GST in a hurry, but they did not listen.

"Big traders have no issues with this GST as they can employ ten accountants and fill as many forms, but the small traders will suffer," Gandhi said.

He said that during his election campaign in 2014, Prime Minister Modi had promised to help farmers but it was not fulfilled.

Gandhi is also scheduled to hold rallies in other Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

BJP chief Amit Shah is also scheduled to visit the state later this week.

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Ryan Reynolds recently made one dying boy's dreams come true by video calling the 5-year-old who has just months to live.

The 40-year-old Canadian actor FaceTimed with Daniel Downing, who was recently diagnosed with a very aggressive type of cancer called pontine glioma, from the sets of his upcoming film 'Deadpool 2.'

After Downing was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, his family sought to lift the little boy's spirits by setting up a phone call with the 'Green Lantern' actor, which quickly turned into a FaceTime session. The whole thing lasted for 15 minutes.

In the emotional video, Downing asks if he can FaceTime with the his idol so he can show off his Deadpool T-shirt, to which Reynolds agrees and as soon as the actor sees the shirt, he says, "Ah that's awesome, what an awesome T-shirt! You know I'm the only guy who doesn't have one of those T-shirts, I need to get one of those."

The 'Van Wilder' actor then asks the little one if he wants a sneak peek at the sequel, which is set to be released in 2018, "Yeah I am outside, you know what I doing right now? I'm filming Deadpool 2. I'm about to walk into the set and shoot Deadpool 2."

A JustGiving page, set up by family friend Biffy Lynch to help Downing and his family, explained, "Daniel is the most amazing 5 year old 'young man' you could ever wish to meet. Full of life, mischievous, polite, intelligent, innocent, and above all, loving. He is adored and cherished by his mum Steph, his dad Robbie, his brother Jack (8 yrs old), and Steph's partner, Ady. Daniel has such an adorable character that he really fits the phrase 'once met, never forgotten.'"

One of the posts read, "So if you have a short weekend at home you should at least do something to make it memorable ..right? How's about the best hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows?? Or how's about a FaceTime call from your most favouritest superhero..deadpool live from the set of deadpool 2...Thank you Mr Ryan Reynolds for putting a smile on a special boys face .. oh and his mummy was also fairly smiley?? Thinking of you all as you start your week at the amazing Bristol Royal Hospital for Children.

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A Saudi woman was arrested and questioned for donning a skirt in the highly conservative Muslim country where woman are required to cover their full body.

The video, posted on Snapchat over the weekend by a social media user named Khulood, shows the woman walking along an empty street in Ushayqir, a village in the conservative province of Najd in Saudi Arabia, according to some reports.

The clip has stirred up a storm on some social media with many natives demanding her to be thrown in jail.

Saudi state TV channel Ekhbariya said on its Twitter account, "Riyadh police have detained the woman who appeared in indecent clothing in Ushaiqir and referred her to the public prosecutor.



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The Bharatiya Janata (BJP) on Wednesday demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) enquiry in the Shimla gang rape and murder case.

Earlier in the day, one of the six people accused in the rape and murder of a minor girl in Shimla was found dead while in custody on Wednesday.

According to the police, the person was murdered by another accused.

The police will now approach magistrate for further directions.

On July 13, six people were arrested for raping and murdering a minor.

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One of the six people accused in the rape and murder of a minor girl in Simla was found dead while in custody on Wednesday.

According to the police, the person was murdered by another accused.

The police will now approach magistrate for further directions.

On July 13, six people were arrested for raping and murdering a minor.

On July 14, the Himachal Pradesh government announced that the case will be handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

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The Supreme Court today is set to hear the bail plea of self styled godman, Asaram Bapu, who is facing charges of rape.

In another case registered against him, the Supreme Court had earlier dismissed bail plea of Asaram in a Rajasthan harassment case, where a teenager had accused him of sexually assaulting her during celebrations in a village near Jodhpur ashram.

Earlier in April, the Supreme Court had asked Gujarat trial court to consider Asaram Bapu's case urgently and finish the trial in a time bound manner.

Last February, the Apex Court had directed Uttar Pradesh and Haryana Government to provide full protection to the witnesses in the Asaram rape-case.

The Jodhpur Police arrested Asaram on August 3, 2013 and since then he is in prison.

The apex court had in October last year sought the Centre's response and five states on a plea seeking a Central Bureau of Investigation ( CBI) probe into the alleged murder of children through black magic and attacks on ten witnesses in Asaram's rape cases.

Asaram Bapu's son Narayan Sai, has also been named in connection with a rape case registered against him by the Gujarat state.

Sai was arrested for allegedly raping a Surat-based woman who was his father's disciple between 2002 and 2005

The Gujarat Government had earlier told the top court division bench that the rape case registered against Asaram would very likely precede in an expeditious manner, adding that the trial would be completed within six months so the bail should not be granted to him in the case.

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The division bench of the Calcutta High Court on Wednesday directed the lower court to complete framing of charges against Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) leaders by August 17 in All India Gorkha League president Madan Tamang murder case.

Earlier in June, GJM chief Bimal Gurung claimed innocence in the murder case of Tamang and expressed hope that the matter would be resolved in the coming days.

"This is a matter of the High Court. I am innocent. But since my name has been sent to the court, this matter would be resolved in the coming days," Gurung had earlier said.

The Calcutta High Court had earlier directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to arrest GJM leaders, including it chief Bimal Gurung, in connection with the murder case till the disposal of their anticipatory bail plea.

A city court had on June 6 issued arrest warrants against Gurung, his wife, party MLA Harkabahadur Chettri and 20 others in connection with the case.

Following this, Gurung and 10 others had moved the Calcutta High Court for anticipatory bail.

Tamang was hacked to death in Darjeeling on May 21, 2010.

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IndiGo decides to lift the said ban on Telugu Desam Party (TDP) MP J C Diwakar Reddy, who was a part of their "no fly" list due to the ruckus he had created at the Vizag airport last month.

On Wednesday, senior IndiGo officials met Reddy at a launch event, hosted by senior TDP MP Y S Chaudhary. The meeting between the two ended on a positive note, with the issue being amicably resolved.

"Senior IndiGo officials today met Honourable Member of Parliament Mr. Diwakar Reddy, at a lunch hosted by senior Member of Parliament Mr. Y S Chaudhary, to resolve the issue of Honourable Member Mr. Diwakar Reddy's ban on IndiGo flights. The issue is amicably resolved between the two and IndiGo has decided to lift the said ban with immediate effect and Mr Reddy is withdrawing the case he has filed," read a statement by Indigo.

Adding, "The Federation of Indian Airlines has also been informed about the decision. IndiGo appreciate and thanks the member airlines for their continued support."

For the unversed, Reddy allegedly manhandled IndiGo's ground staff at Vizag Airport on June 15, after which, he was banned from flying.

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The Donald Trump administration has retained Pakistan's name in its list of nations and regions providing "safe havens" to terrorists.

In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the State Department said that Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) continue to operate, train, organise and fundraise inside Islamabad and Pakistani military and security forces undertook operations against groups that conducted attacks within Pakistan such as Tehrik-eTaliban Pakistan.

"Pakistan did not take substantial action against the Afghan Taliban or Haqqani, or substantially limit their ability to threaten US interests in Afghanistan, although Pakistan supported efforts to bring both groups into an Afghan-led peace process," the State Department said.

"Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in 2016, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan," the report said.

India, it said continued to experience attacks, "including by Maoist insurgents and Pakistan-based terrorists".In January, India experienced a terrorist attack against an Indian military facility in Pathankot, Punjab, which was blamed by authorities on JeM. Over the course of 2016, the Government of India sought to deepen counterterrorism cooperation and information sharing with the United States.

ISIS's formal branch in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Islamic State's Khorasan Province, remained active in 2016, although counterterrorism pressure from Afghan and U.S. Forces removed hundreds of fighters from the battlefield and restricted the group's ability to control territory. Nevertheless, the group was able to conduct a number of high-profile, mass-casualty attacks in Kabul against sectarian and Afghan government targets. The group also claimed a number of mass-casualty attacks in Pakistan's settled areas, likely conducted in collaboration with anti-Shia terrorist groups like Lashkar-i-Jhangvi.

Country Reports on Terrorism in 2015 as well listed Pakistan as a safe haven for terrorist groups that includes Haqqani Network that hides in or operate from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, a mountainous region along Pakistan's northwest border with Afghanistan. The National Action Plan (NAP) calls upon the government to "ensure that no armed militias are allowed to function in the country," although claims about the NAP's uneven implementation was a frequent feature in Pakistani media. As in 2014, Pakistan launched military operations to eradicate terrorist safe havens, although their impact on all terrorist groups was uneven.

Some UN-designated terrorist groups, such as Lashkar e-Tayyiba (LeT) affiliates Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation, were able to fundraise and hold rallies in Pakistan. LeT/JuD leader, Hafiz Saeed, who is also a UN-designated terrorist, was able to make frequent public appearances in support of the organization's objectives, which were covered by the Pakistani media, for much of the year, the report had said.

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The United States (U.S.) on Wednesday said that terrorists have a free run in Pakistan. In its annual 'Country Reports on Terrorism, the Donald Trump administration has accused Pakistan of not prosecuting or convicting any terrorists or prohibiting terror outfits from raising funds for unleashing terror.

In the report, the State Department said Pakistan is a member of the Asia Pacific Group on Money Laundering, a Financial Action Task Force (FATF)-style regional body. Pakistan criminalizes terrorist financing. However, there has not been a significant number of prosecutions or convictions of terrorist financing cases reported by Pakistan in recent years due to a lack of resources and capacity within investigative and judicial bodies.

In 2015, the report says, FATF removed Pakistan from its review process due to progress on countering the financing of terrorism (CFT).

In October 2016, FATF noted with concern that Pakistan's outstanding gaps in the implementation of the UN Security Council's sanctions on ISIL (Da'esh) and al-Qa'ida had not been resolved, and that UN-listed entities - including Lashkar e-Tayyiba (LeT) and its branches - were not being effectively prohibited from raising funds in Pakistan.

Despite Pakistan's CFT laws, its freezing of several relevant bank accounts from March 2015 to March 2016, and other limited efforts to stem fundraising by the LeT, the group and its wings continued to make use of economic resources and raise funds in the country in 2016.

It is notable that 'Country Reports on Terrorism in 2015' as well listed Pakistan as a safe haven for terrorist groups that includes Haqqani Network, which hides in or operate from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, a mountainous region along Pakistan's northwest border with Afghanistan.

Some UN-designated terrorist groups, such as LeT affiliates Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation, were able to fundraise and hold rallies in Pakistan.

LeT/JuD leader, Hafiz Saeed, who is also a UN-designated terrorist, was able to make frequent public appearances in support of the organisation's objectives, which were covered by the Pakistani media, for much of the year, the report had said.

The Islamic State remained "the most potent terrorist threat to global security", the report said, "with eight recognised branches and numerous undeclared networks operating beyond the group's core concentration in Iraq and Syria".

Iran continues to be the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, the Trump administration said in a new report that also noted a decline in the number of terrorist attacks globally between 2015 and 2016.

In its annual "Country Reports on Terrorism" released Wednesday, the State Department said Iran was the planet's "foremost" state sponsor of terrorism in 2016, a dubious distinction the country has held for many years. It said Iran was firm in its backing of anti-Israel groups as well as proxies that have destabilized already devastating conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. It also said Iran continued to recruit in Afghanistan and Pakistan for Shiite militia members to fight in Syria and Iraq. And, it said Iranian support for Lebanon's Hezbollah movement was unchanged.

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After certifying Iran's compliance with a major nuclear agreement reached two years ago, The Trump administration has announced new sanctions against those with ties to Iran.

"The United States remains deeply concerned about Iran's malign activities across the Middle East which undermine regional stability, security and prosperity," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement.

She also noted Iran's support for US-designated terrorist groups, militias and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as well as domestic human rights concerns, reports CNN.

Nauert further slammed Iran for continuing to develop its ballistic missile program, which is considered as a violation of UN Security Council resolutions by the United States and other countries as well.

On Monday, the U.S. Government announced that it would certify that Iran was abiding by the terms -- but not the "spirit" -- of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an agreement reached in 2015 between Iran, the US and five other powers under which Iran agreed to roll back its nuclear program in exchange for some sanctions relief.

On Monday, Iran Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tore into the U.S. sanctions policy at a New York think tank event.

"I think people in Washington should get it through their minds that sanctions are a liability, not an asset," he said, adding that a separate set of sanctions under consideration by the US Congress would be a violation of the JCPOA.

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The United States Embassy in Pakistan has announced the delivery of over 50 " class" Fido X3 explosive device detectors to the Pakistan Army.

The Fido is a hand-held device allowing Pakistani soldiers to determine in less than 10 seconds whether an item contains explosive material or not. These new military devices are a part of an ongoing USD 128 million initiative funded by Washington to help the army counter illegal explosives.

The 50 " class" Fido X3 explosive device detectors was delivered to the army by the U.S. Embassy's Office of the Defence Representative Pakistan (ODRP), the Dawn quoted an embassy handout, as saying.

"These Fidos will be added to those previously provided to the Pakistan Army and being used in various counter-terrorism operations throughout the country," the statement said.

ODRP Chief Brigadier General Kenneth Ekman said the "advanced system improves on previous versions used to great effect by the Pakistan Army".

He added: "A primary way to stop a bomb is to catch the bomb maker or attacker before he puts the device in position. Keeping explosives out of the wrong hands helps everyone."

A counter-explosive assistance programme undertaken by both countries includes provision of armoured vehicles, bomb disposal robots, training, and the construction of a laboratory for the detailed analysis of explosive samples, the US Embassy press release said.

"The U.S. and Pakistan are also partners in a programme to support amputees," it added.

Brigadier Ekman highlighted the partnership between the US and Pakistan Army in ongoing efforts combating terrorism, particularly in the Pak-Afghan border region, the handout read.

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Union Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu on Wednesday epitomised the role of parliament in asserting the principle of democracy.

Addressing the Lokmat Parliamentary Award function here, Naidu, the NDA's vice presidential nominee, said "The principle of democracy is as a government I propose; as an opposition you oppose and later let the House dispose".

Last month, it was reported that Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) leader and Lok Sabha member N K Premachandran had won the Best Parliamentarian award which was given out by the Lokmat Media Group.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Hindustan Unilever's net profit rose 9.28% to Rs 1283 crore on 4.76% growth in total income to Rs 9335 crore in Q1 June 2017 over Q1 June 2016. The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 18 July 2017.

Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) rose by 14%. Profit after tax before exceptional items, PAT (bei), rose 15% to Rs 1292 crore. Under volatile market conditions, the company's domestic consumer business grew at 6% and underlying volume growth remained flat. During the quarter, trade sentiment remained cautious, particularly in the run up to GST implementation. Despite high promotional intensity, stock pipelines remained low and varied across categories, channels and geographies. In these challenging circumstances the company managed to deliver yet another quarter of resilient and profitable growth.

Harish Manwani, Chairman commented that both growth and margin improvement were delivered through a combination of sustained innovations, a comprehensive savings program and a relentless focus on execution in the market place. The company remains positive on the medium term outlook for the industry and will continue to drive consumer value, which also delivers profitable volume driven growth for the company.

Power Grid Corporation of India said that POWERGRID Kala Amb Transmission, wholly owned subsidiary of the company secured though Tariff Based Competitive Bidding (TBCB), has declared commissioning of its project on 12 July 2017. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 July 2017.

Ashok Leyland has formed a strategic alliance with SUN Mobility to develop electric mobility solutions. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 July 2017.

CRISIL's consolidated net profit rose 9.33% to Rs 67.25 crore on 7.26% growth in total income to Rs 415.79 crore in Q2 June 2017 over Q2 June 2016. The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 18 July 2017.

MOIL said that in terms of Cabinet Committee of Economic Affairs (CCEA) decision dated 16 January 2015, it has been decided by Government of India to offer upto 6.65 lakh equity shares of face value of Rs 10 each of MOIL to the eligible employees of MOIL at a discounted price of Rs. 346.75 (this price is at 5% discount to the cut off price of Rs 365 discovered in the offer for sale of shares of MOIL carried out by Government of India on 24 & 25 January 2017). The minimum and maximum number of equity shares which can be applied for by eligible employees is 10 and 576 equity shares, respectively. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 July 2017.

KDDL announced that the company's subsidiary - Ethos has launched a new store (EMSW) with effect from 25 June 2017 at Navi Mumbai, Mumbai. The total number of stores as on date is 36 only. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 July 2017.

Bhansali Engineering Polymers announced that a production capacity expansion programme is proposed to be undertaken by the company at its ABU Road Plant at Sirohi, Rajasthan to enhance its ABS production capacity from the existing 80 kilotons per annum (KTPA) to 137 KTPA by 31 December, 2018 with the estimated capex of Rs 300 crore to be funded through internal accruals only. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 July 2017.

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, announced that it has entered into a development, license, manufacture and commercial supply agreement with Cyndea Pharma S.L., granting exclusive rights to use their technology for developing generic, soft-gelatin capsule formulations of certain pharmaceutical products.

Under this agreement, Glenmark receives exclusive rights to the United States and Canada markets for these soft-gelatin formulations in exchange for sharing development costs and profits from future sales. In addition, the agreement provides for the companies to add furthersoft-gelatin product candidates for development and commercialization, as new branded, softgelatin, capsule-based drug products become available in the marketplace. The announcement was made before market hours today, 19 July 2017.

Can Fin Homes announced that at the meeting of the board of directors of the company scheduled to be held on 21 July 2017 a proposal is being placed for approval and authorisations for raising secured non-convertible debentures to the extent of Rs 6000 crore on private placement basis. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 July 2017.

Majesco said that Majesco, USA, (Majesco) the insurance arm and a subsidiary of Majesco announced about the selection of the Majesco CloudInsurer platform by a leading provider of financial protection benefits globally, to transform their collections operation across multiple geographies. In the first phase, they will implement Majesco CloudInsurer to modernize their collection operations in one country to be followed by other Latin America countries and additional territories in the Middle East and Asia. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 July 2017.

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Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh on Wednesday said as many as 11,400 farmers committed suicide in 2016.

"According to National Crime Records Bureau data for 2016, which is yet to be published, 11,400 farmers committed suicide. In 2015, the number was 12,602," he said in his reply after a discussion in the Lok Sabha on the agrarian crisis.

He said farmers suicides could be checked only by increasing their income and the government was taking necessary steps, including increase in budgetary allocations to the agriculture sector.

Earlier, Congress member Jyotiraditya Scindia criticised the government for failing to ensure remunerative prices to farmers.

The Minister said the Bharatiya Janata Party had promised Minimum Support Price (MSP) for agricultural produce to be 1.5 times the input cost to farmers before the 2014 general elections.

He said a premium of Rs 3,560 crore was paid under the crop insurance scheme and Rs 3,548 crore distributed as insurance claims to farmers.

Similarly, the total premium in 2015-16 was Rs 3,760 crore while Rs 4,710 crore was given as insurance claims.

Responding to allegations of benefitting private companies under the garb of crop insurance, Radha Mohan Singh said: "We are using space technology to solve the problem. We have written to states that they have to decide crops to be brought under insurance scheme. They have to issue tender and set up their own companies if they do not want to give any benefits to (private) insurance companies. The Punjab and Gujarat governments are going to form such companies."

In order to save farmers from clutches of private money lenders, he said, the government had allocated Rs 10 lakh crore for farm credit this year, he said.

He said the government had taken up various schemes and initiatives such as integrated farming, agro-forestry, deep fishing, Gokul mission, and organic farming to increase farmers' income.

--IANS

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At least four members of a family of ethnic Hazaras, part of the Shia Muslim minority, were killed and another was injured on Wednesday in Pakistan's Mastung area, officials said.

The attack took place around 6.30 a.m. when unidentified assailants opened fire on a vehicle in which the victims were travelling, some 40 km from Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province, city police spokesperson Sajad Hussain said.

Police said it was a sectarian attack against the Hazara Shia minority.

The attackers fled the site and were yet to be identified.

Sectarian attacks, especially against Shias, who account for 20 per cent of the Pakistani population, are relatively common in the country, despite a general dip in the number of terror incidents since 2014.

--IANS

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An 86-year-old serial jewel thief in the US, whose crimes date back to the 1950s, has again been charged with theft.

Doris Payne was arrested on Monday at a Walmart store in Chamblee, Georgia, with items worth $86.22, police said. Although she was quickly released on bond, Payne was re-arrested on Tuesday and jailed on a probation violation stemming from an earlier theft conviction, NBC News reported.

Payne, who was found wearing an ankle monitor from a previous arrest for shoplifting, said she forgot to pay for the items when she stopped by Walmart to pick up some medicine. "Thieving was the farthest thing from my mind," she said in a phone interview to NBC News.

The octogenarian said she had taken some medicine that muddled her mind before she went shopping. "It causes me to forget," she said.

Payne claimed that since she didn't have a basket, she dropped the items in a shopping bag and thought she told the cashier about them.

However, the police said a security officer at Walmart watched Payne pile items from the pharmacy department in her purse and then transfer other items from her shopping cart to her purse and a shopping bag. The guard caught her as she left the store and the items were returned to the store.

Payne served multiple jail terms for her crimes. She is thought to have stolen $2 million in jewellery and was profiled in a 2013 documentary, reports said.

Her lawyer, Drew Findling, said: "This is a sharp contrast to all the cases in the past. We're not talking about high-end jewellery. We're talking about what an 86-year-old woman needs to survive on a day-to-day basis, food supplies and medical supplies."

"This doesn't fit into anything she has done before and we are going to look at the video and see what's going on, see if this is maybe forgetfulness," he said.

Payne had recently pleaded guilty of stealing a $2,000 diamond necklace from a department store in a suburb of Atlanta. She was then sentenced to house arrest and banned from shopping centres in the city's area.

--IANS

soni/dg

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Beijing, July 19 (IANS/WAM) Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday announced his support for the peace initiative of Chinese President Xi Jinping, which calls for achieving a two-state solution between Palestine and Israel, boosting mutual security cooperation and peace.

Abbas, addressing the Chinese Academy of Governance in Beijing, said that he was ready to cooperate with China on setting up the appropriate mechanisms to achieve the initiative.

He also declared his support for holding Chinese-Palestinian-Israeli political conferences in China to examine ways to advance peace in the Middle East region.

"Our hands are extended to peace in spite of the suffering we are facing from the occupation, settlements, repression and violence. We look forward to getting back to negotiations.

"We look forward to the role of your country, China, the international Quartet, the Arab states, the Security Council and the effective countries in making peace a reality in the land of peace," Abbas added.

--IANS/WAM

soni/bg

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Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop visited a school here on Wednesday as part of bilateral students and teachers exchange programme.

BRIDGE (Building Relationships through Intercultural Dialogue and Growing Engagement), started in 2015, is an international programme that creates partnership between teachers, students and school communities, encouraging students to collaborate on projects, practice language skills and develop friendships with their peers at partner schools.

The Minister did a live interaction with BRIDGE students in Australia and India and talked about "careers of the future".

"This is a time of unprecedented change and we see technological advancements disrupting the way we live, the way we communicate and the way we work. We can see that jobs of the future, careers of the future are very different," said Bishop.

She said that Australia is the second most popular destination for international students and 70,000 Indian students enrolled to study in Australian universities last year.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The BJP on Wednesday termed a purported 32-page Congress dossier on cow vigilante lynchings and attacks on Dalits and other issues as a "dossier of disruption" aimed to divide the country on communal lines and disrupt the Parliament session.

The Congress has in turn accused the BJP of circulating "fake" documents to some news channels to discredit the party.

Addressing reporters, BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said: "The document reeks of conspiracy because if you look at the priorities, the devil lies in the detail. Their priority is to draw out of lynching, mob violence and cow vigilantism.

"The Congress party is today trying to disrupt Parliament. The first 5-6 issues in the Congress document are those which would spread divide in the country in the name of religion and caste. We would like to call this document a dossier of disruption. A conspiracy is being hatched and documents are being prepared in a planned manner.

"This is because of the fact that, though they begin by saying these are key issues to raise in the Parliament, we firmly believe after going trough the whole document that this is not the key, but this is to put a lock and put a brake in the path of development of this country," said Patra.

"The irony is while Modiji is sweating it out day in and day out to see to it that India moves ahead, we have the Congress party which is conspiring to work against this very development, conspiring not to allow the Parliament to function," he added.

Patra said: "We believe in democracy, debate, discussions and that issues of importance should be raised on the floor of the House.

"The PM has been extremely critical as far as cow vigilantism is concerned and condemned it thrice, yet the Congress wants to divide the country based on communal polarisation.

"That's the reason why they do not prioritize national security as the most important issue in Parliament. They do not prioritize national security or aggression by Pakistan," he added.

Patra said that one of the sub-heads of the document says 'Mob Violence and Lynchings from Akhlaq to Junaid'. "This is very sad and no individual should lose their life in this manner. PM has condemned promoting criminal elements in the name of Gau Rakshaks."

"But, they (Congress) want to discuss communal agendas and that's what is in their priority list. I want to ask where in this 32-page document, if they want to talk about lynching, is the name of Ayub Pandith (DSP who was lynched in a Srinagar mosque).

"According to intelligence reports, Junaid was lynched because of seat-sharing, while beef was drawn in by the opposition. Based on these rumours the opposition wants to gain political mileage and wants to stall Parliament.

He accused the Congress of having "sympathies towards the separatists, like one their leader Mani Shankar Aiyar. They have a selective approach".

"There is no mention of Pakistan till the 13th page of the document. One of the last priorities of Congress is Pakistan as an aggressor or a terror sponsoring state. Why doesn't Congress keep that as a first priority?" asked Patra.

Patra said that the document mentions that screening of certains films and documentaries is being blocked by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. "They want to disrupt proceedings with all these things," he alleged.

"We all know how in the name of films like 'Indu Sarkar' the director, producer and actors of the movie are being targeted and attacked, their programmes being disrupted in many places and how the freedom of expression is under threat," he added.

--IANS

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The Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Wednesday approved revision of the Indian Community Welfare Fund (ICWF) guidelines, to expand scope of welfare measures that can be extended through the fund to overseas Indian nationals in times of distress and emergency.

The ICWF, set up in 2009, is aimed at assisting overseas Indian nationals in times of distress and emergency in the most deserving cases on a means tested basis.

"The revised guidelines being made broad-based seek to expand the scope of welfare measures that can be extended through the fund. The guidelines would cover three key areas - namely Assisting Overseas Indian nationals in distress situations, community welfare activities and improvement in consular services," said an official statement.

"They are expected to provide Indian Missions and Posts abroad greater flexibility in swiftly addressing to requests for assistance by overseas Indian nationals.

"Apart from assisting Indian nationals in distress abroad, ICWF has been a critical support in emergency evacuation of Indian nationals in conflict zones in Libya, Iraq, Yemen, South Sudan and other challenging situations like assistance extended to undocumented Indian workers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during the Nitaqat drive in 2013 and the ongoing Amnesty drive in 2017," it added.

Noting that the scale and speed of these evacuations and assistance rendered through the fund has been universally appreciated, the statement said that it "also created a sense of confidence among the migrant workers going overseas about the support they can expect from India during critical times".

"ICWF stands extended to all Indian Missions and Posts abroad and is primarily funded by levying service charge on various consular services rendered by Indian Missions and Posts abroad," it added.

--IANS

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All appointments made during the Samajwadi Party rule in Uttar Pradesh will be probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation and no guilty spared, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath announced in the assembly on Wednesday.

While 1.5 lakh vacancies exit in the Police Department, thousands of appointments have been made in 10 years in the state but none is above doubt, he said adding that "all the scams will be unearthed and no one found guilty will be spared".

Referring indirectly to former Haryana Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala, who is lodged in Tihar jail after conviction in a teachers recruitment scam, Adityanath said by burning papers and official files no one will get away from the long arm of the law.

Responding to posers by the opposition on the 2017-18 state Budget, Adityanath targeted the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party for what he said was the mess the state was in.

He patted Finance Minister Rajesh Agarwal for presenting a "balanced and development- oriented Budget".

The Chief Minister said the state had been dominated by caste and family in the past few decades, pushing it down on the ladder of progress and development.

Adityanath also took on opposition lawmakers who slammed his government on the law and order, saying that if he started speaking many people in the house will be exposed.

He said more than 1.53 lakh cases of land encroachment had come up in four months and said no one will be allowed to take law in their own hands.

"Neither will my government patronise criminals like the previous governments," the Bharatiya Janata Party leader added.

The Chief Minister accused the earlier government of patronising the illicit liquor mafia in Azamgarh, because of which 60 persons died last year.

--IANS

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The opposition on Wednesday took the government to task in the Rajya Sabha over violence against Dalits and minorities, accusing it of entering into a tacit understanding with cow vigilantes who indulged in violence and lynchings.

The Narendra Modi government, however, termed such incidents as plain crime, saying such incidents should not be given a communal colour.

Opening a discussion on cow vigilantism and atrocities against the Dalits and minorities, Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said there is an implicit or explicit hand of the "people from the parivar" (a reference to the Sangh Parivar or Hindutva groups) in mob violence in the last three years.

"We suspect this is happening with a tacit understanding between the government and the cow vigilantes. The Prime Minister is giving statements but this is going on and nobody is being caught," Azad, a senior Congress leader, said.

Azad urged the Bharatiya Janata Party not to "vitiate" the atmosphere in the country in the name of caste or religion.

Samajwadi Party leader Naresh Agarwal said the National Democratic Alliance government should declare that mob lynching on any pretext will no longer be tolerated.

He said cow vigilantism was hurting the poor as weekly animal fairs/markets had ended and stray cows along with neelgai (blue bull) are becoming a menace in rural areas by destroying standing crops overnight.

Earlier, his remarks to link Hindu Gods with alcohol evoked loud protests from BJP members and led to the adjournment of the house for about 20 minutes.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said Agrawal had hurt the sentiments of the majority population in the country. The SP leader later withdrew the remarks and expressed "regret".

Communist Party of India-Marxist leader Sitaram Yechury demanded a ban on cow vigilante groups.

"Today, when I speak here, my head hangs in shame. What has our republic come to?" Yechury said.

He said: "Private armies taking law into their hands can't be stopped by states alone and they must be banned by the Centre."

Yechury recalled how the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the ruling BJP, was banned in 1948 by then Home Minister Vallabbhai Patel on the charge of indulging in disruptive activities.

Yechury also drew a parallel with German leader Hitler's idea of nationalism and the Hindutva nationalism and stressed that those indulging in cow vigilantism are not "fringe or anti-social elements", as is claimed by the government.

"What is happening is antithetical to all the constitutional values that we have given ourselves," Yechury said as he invoked Swami Vivekananda, the Bhagwad Gita and the Vedas.

Trinamool Congress member Derek O'Brien said the government must name the groups and individuals behind mob violence, which he said was not cow vigilantism but "cow terrorism".

"Only then we will take you (government) seriously. Otherwise, we will be suspicious," he said.

O'Brien said the opposition would not be cowed down by the fear of the Central Bureau of Investigation, Enforcement Directorate or political vendetta by the ruling party.

Bahujan Samaj Party leader Satish Chandra Mishra said Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi should either show courage and raise his voice against mob lynchings of members of the minority community or should resign like Mayawati did.

He said that people are being killed in mob violence in BJP-ruled states.

However, Naqvi said these incidents did not involve any party or the government but individuals. He called for a united fight to isolate and tackle those behind such crimes.

"These are purely incidents of crime and one should not turn them into communal ones. If you give a communal colour to such heinous crimes, it will only serve the purpose of criminals who want these incidents to be associated with religion," Naqvi said.

The Minister said the opposition had been raising the issue as they could not find any instances of corruption in the Modi government.

He said Azad's claim of inaction against the perpetrators of lynchings was untrue as cases were immediately registered and suspects arrested in Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharashtra.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
China has moved tens of thousands of tonnes of military vehicles and equipment into Tibet amid a continuing stand-off between Chinese and Indian troops in Doklam in the Sikkim sector of the border.

The hardware was moved simultaneously by road and rail from across the entire region in late June, a report in the PLA Daily run by the Chinese Army said.

The report comes as the Chinese Army held a live-fire drill last week in Tibet, which borders India.

According to the Chinese media report, the drill was conducted not far from Doklam, which is at the tri-junction of India, China and Bhutan.

The PLA report did not say if the military supply was linked to the drill in Tibet.

"The vast haul was transported to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command, which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India," the South China Morning Post quoted the PLA Daily as saying.

"Diplomatic talks must be backed by military preparation," Ni Lexiong, a Shanghai-based military commentator, was quoted as saying by the Post.

Wang Dehua, an expert on South Asia studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, said the scale of the troop and equipment movement showed how much easier it now was for China to defend its western borders.

"Military operations are all about logistics," he said. "Now there is much better logistics support to the Tibet region."

Now, the military can "easily transport troops and supplies to the frontline, thanks to the much-improved infrastructure including the Qinghai-Tibet railway and other new roads connecting the plateau to the rest part of China", Wang said.

There is no let-up in the tensions between India and China over the stand-off in Doklam. China has adopted a tough stand over the issue and has been issuing warnings to India every other day.

The state-run Chinese media has even warned of war with India.

The borders of India, Bhutan and China meet at Doklam, which holds a strategic importance to all three.

China calls Doklam its own, but India and Bhutan call it Bhutanese territory.

India, a close ally of Bhutan, stopped the Chinese Army from building a road in Doklam in June, leading to the face-off between New Delhi and Beijing.

Now, both armies are eyeball-to-eyeball at Doklam. India says it wants to resolve the issue diplomatically.

But China says it won't talk to India unless New Delhi withdraws troops from Doklam.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Reacting to the BJP charge that its documents on cow vigilantes was aimed at dividing the country, the Congress on Wednesday accused the ruling party of spreading false news and challenged the government to a parliamentary debate on issues of national interest.

The BJP earlier said that the 32-page Congress dossier on cow vigilante lynchings and attacks on Dalits and other issues is a "dossier of disruption" aimed at dividing the country on communal lines and disrupting the ongoing Parliament session.

"The BJP, by sending fake papers to some editors, are busy spreading false news," Congress spokesperson Randeeep Singh Surjewala hit back and said the Congress document was prepared by the Research Department of the All India Congress Committee.

"An internal Congress document has reached the media, about issues facing the nation and it needs to be talked in Parliament to hold the government accountable for its mistakes and misdeeds," AICC Research Department head Rajeev Gowda said.

"If the BJP has the guts, let them come to the floor of the house and debate. Let them come and tell us how they are going to defend their sorry record of incompetence and governance failure," he added.

"We are not here to disrupt; we are here to hold the government accountable," the Congress leader said.

Gowda said issues like inability to roll out the Goods and Services Tax through proper implementation, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act scheme wages, failures in education sector, farmers' distress and their suicides, border stand-off with China, Kashmir, mob lynchings, communal and caste violence, would be raised in Parliament.

"These are issues that have been burning the nation between the last session and the present one. That is exactly what we are going to hold up. We are going to hold up a mirror to the government and show their incompetence, their hidden hands which are encouraging mobs to go out and attack the Dalits and minorities and others. This is something we are going to expose on the floor of the house," the Congress leader added.

--IANS

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Counting of the ballots cast in the July 17 presidential election will be taken up on Thursday to decide the fate of two contenders - the ruling NDA's candidate Ram Nath Kovind, who has a clear edge, and the combined Opposition nominee Meira Kumar.

Officials said all preparations have been made for the vote count and that all ballot boxes have already reached Parliament House by Tuesday evening amid tight security.

They said the counting will begin at 11 am simultaneously across four tables. There will be eight rounds of counting, and announcements made after every round.

Polling to choose the successor to President Pranab Mukherjee, who demits office on July 24, was held simultaneously at 32 polling stations -- one in Parliament House and one each in 29 state assemblies and two union territories with assemblies.

Lok Sabha Secretary General Anoop Mishra is the Returning Officer for the election, and will issue the certificate to the winning candidate.

Officials said the seals of ballot boxes will be opened on Thursday in the presence of representatives of the two candidates - former Bihar Governor Kovind and former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar - and the observers of the Election Commission.

In Monday's polling, several states registered 100 per cent polling. The overall poll percentage was pegged at 99.41 per cent. A total of 776 members of Parliament and 4,120 legislators were eligible to cast votes.

In the electoral arithmetic, Kovind has a distinct advantage over his rival as parties like the Janata Dal-United and the Biju Janata Dal, otherewise not allied with the Bharatiya Janata Party, had decided to vote for him.

The Janata Dal-United has about 1.91 per cent of electoral college votes, while the BJD of Odisha has 2.99 per cent.

In addition, the ruling Telengana Rashtra Samithi in Telangana (two per cent), different factions of AIADMK (5.39 per cent), and the YSR Congress (1.53 per cent) also had announced their backing for Kovind.

The value of vote of an MP is 708 while that of an assembly member varies from state to state depending on the size of its population.

The total value of votes of the presidential electoral college is 10,98,903, and the NDA candidate is slated to get over 63 per cent votes.

In the last presidential election in 2012, Pranab Mukherjee had defeated P.A. Sangma and got over 69 per cent votes.
A special court on Wednesday rejected a plea by lawyers of former Uttar Pradesh minister Gayatri Prajapati, an accused in a gang-rape case, for the removal of POSCO charges on him.

Uma Shanker Sharma, the judge of the special court, fixed August 1 as the next date of hearing wherein evidence would be submitted against Prajapati.

The court also framed charges against the senior Samajwadi Party (SP) leader and six others under the POSCO Act.

The court also observed a strong doubt was enough as an evidence and added that there were eye witness accounts and other evidence as well against the accused Gayatri Prajapati, Vikas Verma, Ashish Shukla, Ashok Tiwari and others in the chargesheet.

Keeping these things in mind, the court observed, revoking the charges under POSCO would not be correct.

Prajapati, one of the most powerful ministers in the previous Samajwadi Party government in Uttar Pradesh, is languishing in prison in gang-rape charges. He was given bail a few weeks ago but it was cancelled after a furore.

A committee formed by the Allahabad High Court to probe the granting of bail had discovered that the former minister was given bail by a judge set to retire a day later at a bribe fixed at a round Rs 2 crore.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Asking the Congress not to give a communal twist to crimes by cow vigilantes, Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi on Wednesday said these incidents did not involve any party or the government but individuals.

He also called for a united fight to isolate and tackle those behind such crimes.

"These are purely incidents of crime and one should not turn them into communal ones. If you give a communal colour to such heinous crimes, it will only serve the purpose of criminals who want these incidents to be associated with religion," the Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs said in the Rajya Sabha.

Naqvi's remarks came after Leader of the Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad blamed the Centre for the growing number of communal lynching in the past three years.

The Minister said the opposition had been raising the issue as part of a conspiracy since they could not find any corruption in the Modi government.

"So they are using this issue to defame the government," he said.

He said Azad's claim of inaction against perpetrators of lynching was untrue as cases were immediately registered and suspects arrested in Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharashtra.

"Even during the all-party meeting (July 16) where Azadji was present, the Prime Minister said some anti-social elements had turned the issue of 'gau raksha' (cow protection) into a tool for spreading anarchy," he said.

Modi had made it clear that such incidents were negatively impacting the nation's image and had asked state governments to take strict action against anarchist and anti-social elements, he added.

He pointed out that such incidents occurred even during the earlier United Progressive Alliance government.

"We should come together to isolate and eliminate the forces behind these incidents, instead of giving them a communal colour."

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The first round of new talks on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will take place in Washington, D.C. from August 16-20, US Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Lighthizer announced on Wednesday.

John Melle, assistant USTR for the Western Hemisphere, will serve as chief negotiator for the US to revamp the trilateral trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, Xinhua reported.

The upcoming trade talks immediately follows the 90-day consultation period with US Congress and the public initiated on May 18, when Lighthizer notified Congress of President Donald Trump's intent to renegotiate NAFTA to get a better deal, according to the USTR's Office.

The USTR's Office on Monday released objectives for the renegotiation of the NAFTA that aims to reduce US trade deficit and includes new aspects, such as digital economy, labour and environmental obligations.

It's the first time that USTR has included deficit reduction as a specific objective for NAFTA negotiation, reflecting the Trump administration's determination to address the trade deficit.

Trump has called NAFTA a "disaster" and blamed it for the hollowing out of the US manufacturing sector.

He has also threatened to quit NAFTA so as to ramp up pressure on Canada and Mexico to renegotiate the trade agreement.

During phone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Canada in April, Trump said he agreed not to terminate the NAFTA "at this time" but would proceed swiftly to renegotiate it with the other two countries.

US Secretary of Commerce Department Wilbur Ross said last month that he hoped renegotiation on the NAFTA could be done by the end of this year.

--IANS

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The head of the French armed forces, General Pierre de Villiers, tendered his resignation on Wednesday after a clash with President Emmanuel Macron over proposed cuts in military spending.

Gen. de Villiers said in a statement that he could no longer "guarantee the durability of the Army model" that he considered necessary to ensure France's protection, BBC reported.

"In the current circumstances, I see myself as no longer able to guarantee the robust defence force I believe is necessary to guarantee the protection of France and the French people, today and tomorrow, and to sustain the aims of our country," he said.

He added that as a result he had tendered his resignation to Macron and that it had been accepted by the President.

France's government last week revealed major cuts to bring its budget deficit below the level of an EU cap. Macron had proposed an 850 million-euro ($975 million) cut in the military spending budget for 2017 and said he would not tolerate dissent from the military.

"If the military Chief of Staff and the President are opposed on something, the military Chief of Staff goes," Macron had said. But he also said that the General had his "full trust" as long as he "knows the chain of command and how it works".

Gen. de Villiers had reportedly said the President should not mess with him on the matter, using a far stronger expletive.

Jean-Jacques Bridey, Chairman of the parliamentary committee on defence, was among those announcing his opposition to the cuts "while our men risk their lives every day", the Independent reported.

The far-right Front National and left-wing opposition groups also opposed the move as French troops continued to fight Al Qaeda-linked insurgents in Mali and remained stationed in other countries, including the Central African Republic, Chad and Libya.

France is also a member of the US-led coalition bombing ISIS territories in Iraq and Syria.

--IANS

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Accra, July 19 (IANS/MAP) The Ghana Immigration Service has opened a new border check post in the Suaman district of the western region of the country bordering Ivory Coast.

The new border post at Antokrom near Dadieso would enable the Service to control movement of persons and goods as well as check illegal immigrants and smuggling from Ivory Coast, the media report said on Wednesday.

Deputy Commissioner of Immigration Prosper Asima said that the border post would serve as security checkpoint and will help the immigration service to profile all immigrants entering Ghana from Ivory Coast.

Asima added that the new office would also help the Immigration Service to properly check illegal mining, human trafficking, drug peddling, armed robbery and other menace in the border towns such as Antokrom, Yaakese, Sewum of the Suaman district.

The Suaman district's Chief Executive Christian Baah and the paramount chief of Suaman traditional area Nana Osei Kofi, who were all present at the commissioning, said that the move would bring economic benefits as well as security checks in the area.

--IANS/MAP

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The Delhi High Court on Wednesday issued a notice to the city government on a plea alleging that the government, under its pension scheme, was only considering senior citizens and those with disability of 40 per cent or more.

The Delhi government took over the responsibility of providing pension from the civic agencies which provided monetary benefit to destitute persons, disabled, widows, those who are insane, divorcee women, eunuchs and also to orphans till they turn 18, besides senior citizens, said NGO Social Jurist in its plea.

However, after taking over, the government has restricted the benefit to only some categories, alleged Advocate Ashok Agarwal and asked whether the government can do that.

A division bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C. Hari Shankar asked the Delhi government to file its response on the plea.

The government had taken over the scheme after the civic agencies stopped the monetary benefits due to lack of funds.

--IANS

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More than half of the terror attacks in the world in 2016 took place in five countries, including India and Pakistan, a senior US counter-terror official has said.

Justin Siberell, Acting Coordinator for Counterterrorism, in a media briefing on the release of the Country Reports on Terrorism by the US State Department, also said that the total number of terror attacks in 2016 were lower than in 2015.

"And although terrorist attacks took place in 104 countries in 2016, they were heavily concentrated geographically, as they have been for the past several years.

"Fifty-five per cent of all attacks took place in Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, and 75 per cent of all deaths due to terrorist attacks took place in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria, and Pakistan," Siberell said.

He also said the total number of terrorist attacks in 2016 decreased by 9 per cent, and total deaths due to terrorist attacks decreased by 13 per cent compared to 2015.

"This was largely due to fewer attacks and deaths from terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Yemen. At the same time, there was an increase in terrorist attacks and total deaths in several countries, including Iraq, Somalia, and Turkey."

He said the Islamic State was responsible for more attacks and deaths than any other perpetrator group in 2016. In 2015, it was the Taliban that was responsible for more attacks and deaths.

He pointed out that the statistics were compiled by the University of Maryland and "they are not a US government product".

To a question, Siberell said: "The broad trend, however, is a slight decrease from 2015, and that -- in 2015 had a slight decrease from 2014. 2014, of course, was a year of significant increase -- really a spike, frankly -- in global terrorist attacks due largely to the -- coinciding with the rise of ISIS, vicious attacks in Nigeria conducted by Boko Haram, et cetera."
Budget passenger carrier IndiGo on Wednesday said it has decided to revoke the ban on flying TDP MP J.C. Diwakar Reddy on its flights.

"Senior IndiGo officials today met Honourable Member of Parliament Diwakar Reddy, at a lunch hosted by senior Member of Parliament Y.S. Chaudhary, to resolve the issue of Honourable Member Diwakar Reddy's ban on IndiGo flights," the airline said in a statement.

"The issue is amicably resolved between the two and IndiGo has decided to lift the said ban with immediate effect and Reddy is withdrawing the case he has filed."

The airline added that it has informed the Federation of Indian Airlines (FIA) about its decision.

As of June 16, all the major seven domestic airlines -- Air India, Jet Airways, IndiGo, SpiceJet, GoAir, Vistara and AirAsia India -- had barred the TDP MP from their flights.

It was alleged that Diwakar Reddy on June 15 created ruckus at the Visakhapatnam airport after he was denied a boarding pass for an IndiGo flight as he had not showed up in time.

The Telugu Desam Party lawmaker from Anantapur was also said to have damaged a printer and misbehaved with IndiGo staff.

The MP had apparently reported at the check-in counter 28 minutes before the scheduled departure of the flight against the regulation of 45 minutes. As the airline staff told him they could not issue him a boarding pass, he got angry and entered into a heated argument with them.

--IANS

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Flying in the face of Pakistani denials, the US has not minced words in saying how numerous terrorist groups, including the LeT and JeM, continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2016, and how LeT chief Hafiz Saeed, a UN designated terrorist, freely addressed large gatherings.

The US State Department, in its Country Reports on Terrorism, and under the subtitle Terrorist Safe Havens, said: "Numerous terrorist groups, including the Haqqani Network (HQN), Lashkar e-Taiba (LeT), and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2016."

It said that although LeT is banned in Pakistan, LeT's wings Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FiF) "were able to openly engage in fundraising, including in the capital".

"LeT's chief Hafiz Saeed (a UN-designated terrorist) continued to address large rallies, although, in February 2017, Pakistan proscribed him under relevant provisions of Schedule Four of the Anti-Terrorism Act, thus severely restricting his freedom of movement."

It said a 2015 ban on media coverage of Saeed, JuD, and FiF continued and was generally followed by broadcast and print media.

"The Pakistani government did not publicly reverse its December 2015 declaration that neither JuD nor FiF is banned in Pakistan, despite their listing under UN sanctions regimes, although in January 2017, Pakistan placed both organisations "under observation" pursuant to Schedule Two of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

"While not a ban, this allows the government to closely scrutinise the activities of both organisations."

It said that on November 11, 2016, Pakistan's National Counterterrorism Authority published its own list of banned organisations that placed the JuD in a separate section for groups that are "Under Observation," but not banned.

Pakistan continued military operations to eradicate terrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, although their impact on all terrorist groups was uneven.

Throughout 2016, the government of Pakistan administered an Exit Control List intended to prevent terrorists from travelling abroad.

Pakistan's former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, in an interview in April this year claimed that Hafiz Saeed was not involved in the 2008 Mumbai attack and "in Pakistan, we don't call him a terrorist.

In the beginning of July, a fund-raising campaign was organised in the name of Kashmir by Falah-e-Insaniyat in Rawalakot, Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
Janata Congress Chhattisgarh founder and former Chief Minister Ajit Jogi said on Wednesday that he had no plans of returning to the Congress.

He was responding to a statement by newly appointed Congress party in-charge P.L. Punia, who said Jogi will be welcomed if he rejoins the Congress.

"Congress leader Bhupesh Baghel kept saying that many big faces from Janata Congress are in touch with the Congress and will join it soon. I will say this with certainty that big faces not only from the Congress but also from the BJP are in touch with Janata Congress and will join us soon," Jogi told reporters here.

He welcomed Jagdish Kalash, former president of the Public Works Department, and Raipur Municipal Corporation President Tejkumar Bajaj's entry to his party. Both Kalash and Bajaj have resigned from the Congress.

"I was associated with the Congress for 35 years. But I was not given importance after Baghel became the state president. He publicly insults senior leaders and doesn't even invite them for any programme," Kalash said.

Bajaj added: "I have been an active member of the Congress for 30 years. Instead of respect, the party has insulted me.

Jogi accused the BJP government in Chhattisgarh of taking away farmers' money in the name of insurance. "This has become an annual scam of Rs 600 crore. Corruption is at its peak."

He said that a tribal farmer, Manthir Dhruv from Bagbahara, gave Rs 4,000 as premium for his crop. After his crop got destroyed, he got only Rs 40 as insurance money. He committed suicide due to this.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A day after Pakistan's Supreme Court inquired about Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's money trail, his counsel said details of all his assets had been presented to the Joint Investigation Team (JIT).

Sharif had provided details of all assets and sources of income in the form of tax returns that was mandated to probe allegations of money laundering against the Sharif family, Dawn online quoted senior counsel Khawaja Harris as telling the three-member apex bench.

On the court's observation that Sharif had remained evasive in answering the JIT's questions, Harris said the team had not inquired about any other properties, maintaining that his client had not concealed any assets, nor did he own any benami properties.

Harris argued that according to the laws of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), "an individual cannot be held accountable for the properties and assets that are in the name of his wife and children".

He maintained that the Prime Minister's relatives had also not concealed any assets.

During Tuesday's hearing, the court had asked about Sharif's money trail, saying: "We've been waiting for it since day one."

The Prime Minister and his family members had remained evasive in answering the questions put forward by the JIT, it added.

The apex bench had also asked counsel whether the judges should form their own opinion on the concealment of facts or refer the matter to an accountability court.

Harris had argued that the JIT had exceeded its mandate by recommending the Supreme Court to reopen 15 cases against Sharif.

He also questioned authenticity of the documents obtained from Britain and the UAE that were included in the JIT's report.

The bench had resumed the Panamagate case on Monday, nearly three months after ordering the formation of a JIT to investigate the allegations of money laundering against the Sharif family.

--IANS

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Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Wednesday requested the Centre to consider the proposal of declaring the Paika Rebellion of 1817 as the First War of Independence in Indian history.

The move by the Chief Minister came a day after the state Cabinet approved a proposal to recommend to the Centre to declare the Paika Rebellion as the First war of Independence in Indian history.

The Paika Rebellion took place in Odisha in 1817, which is 40 years before the Sepoy Mutiny.

"I request the Government of India to consider this proposal positively so that the people of India appreciate, in correct perspective, the events that led to the Indian freedom struggle and our historic independence from foreign rule," said Patnaik in a letter to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh.

He said it would be a befitting tribute to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Paika rebellion.

"The Paika Rebellion (1817 AD) of Odisha, which took place 40 years before the Sepoy Mutiny (1857 AD) eminently qualifies to be called as the 'First War of Indian Independence' not simply because it took place four decades prior to the Sepoy Mutiny but due to its very nature and characteristic features," said the Chief Minister.

He said the Paika Rebellion, popularly known as 'Paika Bidroha', was a broad-based and well-organised struggle against the oppressive rule of the British East India Company.

"It involved all sections of the people. It cannot be a mere coincidence that the Paika Rebellion, measured by its form as well as content, provides a marvellous analogy with the subsequent freedom movement and its outcome," he added.

Since the colonial rule of India had its origins in the East India Company, the genesis of the events that led to the Sepoy Mutiny and their further consequences need to be traced back to the earlier instances of organised rebellion against the East India Company, said the Chief Minister.

He said that of such earlier resistances and rebellions, the Paika Rebellion stands out prominently as it was essentially a broad-based people's movement.

It played the role of a torch-bearer and catalyst in shaping a people's movement of resistance, which ultimately led to the Indian Independence Movement, said Patnaik.

--IANS

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As lawyers challenging the Aadhaar scheme put up a strong defence of the right to privacy, a judge of the nine-judge constitution bench raised several questions, observing that it was an amorphous right and not absolute.

Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, who is part of the bench headed by Chief Justice J.S. Khehar, also felt that everything that falls under liberty need not necessarily fall under privacy, which is a very small part of liberty.

The lawyers for the petitioners challenging the Aadhaar scheme pointed out that Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had in the Rajya Sabha in March last year described privacy as a fundamental right.

Opening the arguments, senior counsel Gopal Subramanium told the constitution bench, that "Privacy is a part of personhood and is therefore a natural right. This is why natural right is not conferred but only recognised by the Constitution."

He said that privacy as a right need not be carved out, it is there embedded in the right to liberty and dignity.

Subramanium, who led the arguments on behalf of the petitioners, said: "The right to privacy is recognised as a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution. The concept of privacy is embedded in liberty as well as honour of a person."

Besides Justice Khehar, other judges on the bench are Justice J. Chelameswar, Justice S.A. Bobde, Justice R.K. Agrawal, Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman, Justice Abhay Manohar Sapre, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice S. Abdul Nazeer.

The nine-judge bench is examining the nature of privacy as a right and also the correctness of two judgments of 1954 and in 1962 which had held that right to privacy was not a fundamental right.

Petitioners include former Karnataka High Court judge Justice K.S. Puttaswamy, first Chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights and Magsaysay award recipient Shanta Sinha, feminist researcher Kalyani Sen Menon and others who have challenged the validity of the Aadhaar scheme on grounds of it being violative of the right to privacy.

The first day of the hearing saw the bench asking the lawyers appearing for the petitioners as to what was privacy, its contours, and limitations.

"It is all well and good to argue about privacy in abstract but what are (its) contours and limitations? What is this right to privacy? What does it entail and in what aspects is it applicable and what are its limitations?" the court asked the senior counsel at the fag end of the hearing on Wednesday, which will continue on Thursday.

The bench asked the counsel for the petitioners to address it on the question that "If privacy is a fundamental right what are the contours of challenging it. On what grounds can it be challenged and what would be its ambit".

Telling the petitioner lawyers that even if privacy was read into Article 21 of the Constitution - guaranteeing right to life and liberty - it would form a very small part of it.

"Everything that falls under liberty need not necessarily fall under privacy. Privacy is a very small part of liberty," said Justice Chandrachud describing right to privacy as an amorphous right which is not absolute.

Citizens don't surrender their privacy when they put themselves in public dominion as part of technology in digital age, Justice Chandrachud said, pointing out that there was no social media in 1954 and 1962 when the top court had said that right to privacy was not a fundamental right.

Justice Chandrachud said that "My right to cohabit with my wife or sexual orientation is a right to privacy, but your right to decide to which school your child will go is a matter of choice."

"I will not say what privacy means ... it is more elastic," Subramanium told the bench, addressing the poser from it. He said that it has to be catalogued which will not be exhaustive and depend on case to case.

He said privacy is not just your bedroom or what you do within four walls, but is about your liberty and dignity to be your own self.

Subramanium said that "The right to privacy is recognised as a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution. The concept of privacy is embedded in liberty as well as honour of a person."

Taking forward the argument that privacy is a fundamental right, senior counsel Shyam Divan told the bench that "privacy includes bodily integrity that is your own. Your body belongs to the State only in totalitarian regimes".

Referring to a debate in Parliament on the Aadhaar Bill in March 2016, Divan said that even Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley during a debate on the Aadhaar Bill in the Rajya Sabha had asserted that privacy was a fundamental right embedded in right to liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution.

Moving the Aadhaar Bill in the Rajya Sabha on March 16, 2016, Finance Minister Jaitley had told the Upper House that: "The present bill (Aadhaar) pre-supposes and is based on a premise that it is too late in the day to contend that privacy is not a fundamental right. So I do accept that probably privacy is a fundamental right."

Jaitley had told the Rajya Sabha that "It is contended and now it is accepted that privacy is a part of personal liberty. So when Article 21 says, 'No person shall be deprived of his right of life and liberty without procedure established by law' then let us assume that privacy is a part of liberty and no person shall be deprived of his privacy without procedure established by law."

However, the Finance Minister had also said, "The underlying point is that privacy is not an absolute right ... that it can be restricted by procedure established by law, now that procedure established by law, ..., has to be fair, just and reasonable."

Having quoted the Union Finance Minister in support of his contention that privacy was a fundamental right, Divan said that in the past 40 years since the mid-1970s different benches of the top court have consistently held that privacy was a fundamental right.

He urged the bench to reaffirm this right.

--IANS

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Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Wednesday denounced the new sanctions imposed by the US on Tehran as incompatible with the logic and spirit of the nuclear agreement signed with six major powers in July 2015.

At a government meeting, Rouhani criticised Washington saying Iran is fulfilling the terms of the nuclear deal, while the US administration is imposing sanctions under different pretexts, Efe news reported.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the new sanctions were damaging already frayed Tehran-Washington ties. "It violates the spirit of the deal. We will see whether it violates the letter of the deal, and we will act accordingly," said Zarif.

He said that Tehran will respond to the new sanctions with reciprocal measures.

The US government announced on Tuesday the latest sanctions against 18 Iranian individuals and entities by freezing their assets and prohibiting them from engaging in transactions with Americans.

The measure was adopted a day after Trump's administration told Congress that Iran continues to meet the terms of the nuclear deal, signed in 2015, to limit its nuclear programme. Rouhani said his country is set to announce an appropriate response.

He said Washington is currently conspiring to have Iran abandon its commitments but such a move will never succeed. He stressed that his country had always fulfilled and will continue to fulfill its commitments.

Rouhani added that Washington takes such steps because it is concerned about Iran's good relations with Europe and Asia.

The Iranian government declared that Washington took this action due to "its failure to persuade its European allies into withdrawing from the nuclear deal", according to Iran's news agency IRNA.

Tehran urged Donald Trump to lift the sanctions to comply with the terms of the 2015 nuclear agreement. The Iranian authorities said that in retaliation for Washington's move they would impose sanctions on US individuals and bodies acting against the Iranian people.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar on Wednesday told the state assembly that Sadhvi Saraswati's controversial speech in Goa last month, where she said that beef-eaters should be hanged in public, did not contain any "religious sentiment".

In his written reply tabled on Wednesday during the ongoing monsoon session of the state assembly, Parrikar said that no FIRs were filed in connection with the speech because no complaint was received by the state police.

"The speech as reported, do(es) not have any issue of religious sentiment, nor has any complaint been received by police," Parrikar said replying to a question by Leader of Opposition Chandrakant Kavlekar.

Madhya Pradesh-based Sadhvi Saraswati, who was in Goa to attend a four-day All India Hindu Convention, had said that those who eat beef should be hanged in public.

"People who take eating beef as a status symbol, I request the Centre to hang them in public. People will then understand that cow protection is our responsibility," Saraswati had said.

Several legislators of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, including Deputy Speaker Michael Lobo, have in the recent past demanded that an FIR be filed against her for her "hate-speech".

Beef is popularly consumed by the state's Catholic and Muslim minorities, who account for nearly one-third of the coastal state's population.

However, to a question by Kavlekar, who sought to know the details of the action taken by the government against Sadhvi Saraswati as the "issue would spark communal hatred", Parrikar in his reply said: "No complaint has been lodged nor any religious matters were reported in media reports."

--IANS

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Rome, July 19 (IANS/AKI) Saudi Arabian Police have interviewed and released a model who sparked a furore when a video of her bare-headed and wearing an 'indecent' miniskirt were posted to Snapchat, the Saudi government said on Wednesday.

The woman, who has been named in media reports as Khulood, told police the video was posted on Snapchat without her knowledge, the Saudi Ministry of Culture said in a statement.

She was released without charge and the case has been closed by the prosecutor, according to the statement.

The news came soon after Italian junior Culture Minister Dorina Bianchi launched a petition on change.org calling for Khulood's release.

Bianchi described as "courageous" Khulood's stroll around an historic fort in Ushayqir wearing a miniskirt and cropped top which was initially shared on Snapchat at the weekend.

Ushayqir, about 155 km north of the capital Riyadh, in Najd province, is one of the most conservative regions in Saudi Arabia and is the cradle of Wahhabism - the austere form of Sunni Islam practised by the Saudi royal family and religious establishment.

The video of Khulood sparked heated debate among Saudis on social media.

Some Saudi Twitter users called for Khulood's arrest for breaking the country's strict dress code that requires women to wear full-length robes known as 'abayas' in public as well as a headscarf if they are Muslim.

But other Saudi Twitter users praised Khulood and insisted she should be allowed to wear what she wanted.

--IANS/AKI

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Bhiku Daji Bhilare, who had once saved Mahatma Gandhi from a knife attack by his assassin Nathuram Godse at Panchgani in July 1944, passed away due to old age here on Wednesday, a close aide said. He was 98.

Bhilare is survived by two sons, said state Congress Vice President Ratnakar Mahajan, who has been a close family friend since many years.

Renowned in political circles as 'Bhilare Guruji', Bhilare breathed his last at home in native village of Bhilar, sandwiched between the twin hill stations of Mahabaleshwar and Panchgani.

His funeral was held late on Wednesday in Bhilar in the presence of a large number of Congress leaders, freedom fighters and legislators.

"Always engaged in social and public services, he was twice elected as a legislator from Mahabaleshwar constituency and was a very active figure fighting for rights and benefits of freedom fighters. Though active almost till his last breath, for the past few years, he rarely stepped out of his village," Mahajan told IANS.

Revered in the Congress and political circles, Bhilare, as a 25-year-old sub-district president of the Rashtra Seva Dal, one of the frontal groups of the Congress, prevented one of the six assassination attempts on the Mahatma made by Godse.

"Gandhiji used to visit Mahabaleshwar-Panchgani during the summer months. On one such trip in July 1944 after he was released from the Aga Khan Palace prison in Pune (following his arrest during the Quit India movement), he went to Panchgani to recuperate," Mahajan recalled.

One evening during a prayer meeting near a school, Godse, along with two other associates, rushed towards Gandhi with a knife, but Bhilare saw them, blocked their way, and after a brief struggle, succeeded in disarming Godse and one of his associates, Narayan Apte, with the help of M.S. Purohit, a proprietor of a local lodge, Mahajan said.

Years later after India secured Independence on August 15, 1947, Godse succeeded in assassinating the Father of the Nation on January 30, 1948, in Delhi, gunning him down at Birla House.

Top Congress leaders, including party Vice President Rahul Gandhi condoled the death of Bhilare.

"A staunch Gandhian and a freedom fighter, Bhilare Guruji was a selfless custodian of the values we hold dear. Very sad to learn of his passing," Gandhi said in a tweet.

Nationalist Congress Party leader Jitendra Awhad recalled the services of of Bhilare Guruji, describing him as the man "who bashed Nathuram Godse when he attacked Mahatma Gandhi in Maharashtra".

Several Congress state units across India have also expressed grief at Bhilare's demise.

--IANS

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The Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing drug racket in Hyderabad has summoned three major courier companies in connection with the case.

Officials of DHL, Blue Dart and Fedex have been asked to appear before SIT, said a statement from the investigation team on Wednesday night.

As the role of postal department has also come under scanner, SIT has written a letter to Chief Post Master General seeking his support in the investigations.

SIT, comprising official from enforcement wing of Prohibition & Excise Department of Telangana, is is focusing on how the courier services and also postal department neglected identifying drugs supplied from abroad.

The accused arrested in the sensational case told SIT during the questioning that they received drugs from Netherlands, Germany, US1, Britain and other countries through couriers and post.

SIT will seek explanation from courier companies on the negligence.

The investigators served notices on the courier companies on a day when they grilled Telugu film director Puri Jagannadh for over 10 hours. They are probing the links of some Tollywood personalities with the drug racket.

SIT has served notices on 12 film personalities including some top actors and actresses for questioning in connection with the case.

The racket was busted earlier this month when the enforcement officials arrested Calvin Mascrenhas and other accused, who revealed that they have been supplying drugs to school and colleges students in the city and some Tollywood artists.

--IANS

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Britain's Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Stuart Peach, is visiting India this week and will meet Indian ministers and military officers to further reinforce the bilateral defence and security partnership.

Under the umbrella of the 2015 Defence and International Security Partnership, Stuart will meet Indian ministers and officers, a British High Commission statement said.

His meetings will cover the growing strategic defence relationship through the recently established Capability Partnerships, the threat of terrorism and extremism faced globally, multinational cooperation, upcoming exercises and UN Peacekeeping, the statement said.

Stuart, the most senior military officer in the UK Defence Forces, last visited India in April 2015 as Britain's Vice Chief of the Defence Staff.

Ahead of his visit, Stuart said: "I very much look forward to visiting India again. It is not only our shared history and democratic values that bind us together; but increasingly it is the threats and challenges to these values, that we face in an ever changing global environment, that bring us closer together, making the UK and India truly strategic defence partners.

"Whether standing shoulder to shoulder in countering terrorism and violent extremism, undertaking UN Peacekeeping operations, or forging ahead on developing advanced equipment programmes, the UK-India partnership is an enviable one internationally.

"I intend to ensure that my visit demonstrates further that the UK's commitment to India and our relationship is undisputed, now and for the future."

Stuart will visit New Delhi and Kolkata over four days. In addition to official calls and engagements, he will pay his respects to the 74,000 Indians who served and died in the World War I by laying a wreath at India Gate.

UK's Secretary of State for Defence Michael Fallon visited New Delhi in April 2017.

Stuart will also touch upon the defence industry and the UK's support to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Make in India' campaign.

--IANS

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CPI-M chief Sitaram Yechury on Wednesday attacked the Narendra Modi government over growing incidents of lynchings in the country and demanded that cow vigilante groups must be banned.

"Today when I speak here, my head hangs in shame. What has our Republic come to?" Yechury said while participating in a debate in Rajya Sabha on mob lynching in the name of cow protection.

He said that India is the only country with universal suffrage, or right to vote for all, from the very beginning "which was a revolutionary step at that point of time".

"Seventy years earlier we felt pride in saying that no other western democracy could have the courage to say that from Day One we gave universal suffrage to everybody in our country irrespective of their religion, caste, gender."

Noting that the basis of recognition at the time was equality, Yechury said: "It is that equality today that is being questioned and being severely trampled upon by these instances of lynching."

He questioned the level of intolerance these days in the country.

"You have people who question who eats beef and who doesn't to identify Hindus and non-Hindus today. Is this what my country is coming to?"

And these private armies are roaming around freely, he said.

"The Prime Minister said that it is a state subject as it is a law and order issue. These private armies that are taking law and order in their hand need to be banned by a central order. They cannot be banned by the state governments."

He stressed that this was the only way to stop the mobs, adding that such incidents were on a rise because a certain ideology was at work.

Lashing out at such fringe groups, Yechury asked why is it that one is only patriotic when they say "Bharat Mata Ki Jai" as if saying "Jai Hind" is anti-national.

"Bhagat Singh raised the slogan of Inquilab Zindabad. Was it anti-national?" he asked.

The Communist Party of India-Marxist leader said it is Indian nationalism that needs to be inculcated, not Hindu nationalism.

Meanwhile, Trinamool Congress member Derek O'Brien said that the central government was "lighting a fire" in states.

He said the important thing to discuss today is the cases of the poor and marginalised being lynched and killed across the country and asserted that opposition parties will not cow down against the "political terrorism" of the ruling party.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
It was Madhya Pradesh all the way in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday when the agrarian situation in the country was being discussed. Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan castigated Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia for repeatedly interrupting Rural Development Minister Narendra Singh Tomar while he was making his submission on the issue. Mahajan is a long-time member of Parliament (MP) from Indore in Madhya Pradesh, while Tomar has been a legislator from Gwalior for a while now. Scindia is an MP from Guna, also in the state. The trigger for the discussion was the police firing on agitating farmers in Mandsaur district, which is close to Indore.
Adani Wilmar had obtained a from Oriental . This policy covered building, plant and machinery, silo operator, and other fittings and equipment, as well as stock of raw materials, semi-finished goods and finished goods. An add-on cover was taken to include the risk of spontaneous combustion.
Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar today told a parliamentary panel that supranationalism and media hype on the issue has blown out of proportion the Dokalam military standoff between India and China.
Samajwadi Party leader and former Defence Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday said China, in collaboration with Pakistan, was readying to attack India. He asked the Centre to reverse its stand on recognising Tibet as an autonomous region of China, and support the region's independence.
Four persons have been booked for allegedly duping some people of over Rs two crore by giving "fake" allotment letters to them for MHADA houses in suburban Mankhurd, police said today.

"On the direction of a local court, a case under sections 420 (cheating), 425 (dishonest or fraudulent removal or concealment of property), 406 (criminal breach of trust) of the Indian Penal Code was registered on July 17 at the Mankhurd police station," a senior police official said.

"A complaint in this regard was registered by Balram Shirsathe (62), resident of suburban Chembur," he said.

"As per the complaint, the accused Sachin Siddhu, his wife Kiran, father Ranjeet and one Bansilal Gupta duped Shirsathe and four others of Rs 2.10 crore by promising them to give houses constructed by the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA)", the official said.

"The complainant also claimed that the accused even gave them fake allotment letters", he said, adding no arrests have been made so far and a probe was on.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Online home furniture brand Urban Ladder has appointed Ajit Joshi as its President and Chief Operating Officer.

Joshi was previously the CEO and MD of Croma - A Tata Enterprise.

He also led operations and institutional sales business for Shoppers Stop as Vice President (Operations).

Over the past five years, Urban Ladder has built a strong product brand online, a company release said.

The brand will scale its retail presence across the city and other cities to become the largest furniture brand in India by March 2018, it added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Security forces today seized about 600 rounds of ammunition and few grenades during an anti-Naxal operation in Jharkhand's Palamu district, officials said.

They said the operation was jointly carried out by a squad of the CRPF and state police in Salaia forest area of the district where troops busted a suspected Maoist hideout.

599 bullet rounds of various calibres, five hand grenades and 127 grenade base plugs were seized after the raid, a senior security official said.

Another official said personnel of the 134th battalion of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and Palamu police were part of the operation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Army personnel led by general- officer-commanding of 15 Corps Lt General J S Sandhu today paid tributes to the jawan killed in ceasefire violation by Pakistani troops in Kashmir.

Rifleman Bimal Sinjali sustained bullet injuries due to enemy fire from across the Line of Control while he was deployed at a forward post in Naugam sector yesterday, a defence spokesman said.

He was provided immediate first aid and evacuated from the post but unfortunately succumbed to his injuries.

Hailing from village Sirukhark in Baglung area of Nepal, the 21-year-old soldier had joined the Army in 2015 and is survived by his wife Yashoda and a one-year-old son, the spokesman said.

In a solemn ceremony at Badamibagh Cantonment here, Lt Gen Sandhu and all ranks paid homage to the martyr on behalf of the nation.

In a show of solidarity, officials of other security agencies also joined in paying their last respects to him, the spokesman said.

He said the mortal remains of the jawan were later flown for the last rites to Subathu in Himachal Pradesh, where he would be laid to rest with full military honours.

"In this hour of grief, the Army stands in solidarity with the bereaved family of the martyr and remains committed to their dignity and wellbeing," the spokesman added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
NDA's vice presidential nominee M Venkaiah Naidu today asked lawmakers to be "extra careful" not only about their image but also the institution of Parliament, saying people were "watching".

Addressing an award function here, Naidu, in his speech, urged them to ensure that Parliament was allowed to take decisions after the "government proposes and opposition opposes".

He also asked young MPs to learn from the "inspiring" contributions made by great parliamentarians, including the Constitution's architect BR Ambedkar, first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and first home minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

"There is no dearth of TV channels these days. The essence of what I'm trying to say is the message is reaching people...People are watching all of us (through media). So, we have to extra careful, not only about the image, but also the institution," he said.

Naidu made the remarks at Lokmat Parliamentary Awards 2017, organised by the media house from Maharashtra.

BJP veteran LK Advani and senior JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav, members of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha respectively, were among those felicitated at the function.

The event was attended by Vice President M Hamid Ansari, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, senior Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge, former Lok Sabha Speaker Shivraj Patil and NCP chief Sharad Pawar among others.

Naidu said lawmakers should allow Parliament to take decisions after the "government proposes and opposition opposes" and stressed there be no disturbances in the House.

"I say, in the Parliament, the opposition must have a say, but the government must have its way at the end of the day. That is the principle of democracy.

"We are all there in Parliament, we are not enemies, but we are political rivals. You should not treat others as your enemies," he said.

Gadkari praised Advani for building the party and taking it to a pinnacle by sticking to its ideology.

"We cannot forget the way he fought against Emergency (between 1975 and 1977). He is one of the major contributors who saved the democracy. Advani ji is our guide, philosopher, source of inspiration. It is matter of pride that he received this award," he said.

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BJP today took a dig at actor Kamal Haasan's tweet on his possible entry into politics, wondering why the celebrity,'without doing any service to the people,' has a 'sudden awakening' on entering the field.

The party's state unit president Tamilisai Soundararajan told reporters here that actors, before entering politics, should think about their contributions to society, as many leaders are already there to serve the people.

"Without doing any service to people and society, why this sudden awakening for Kamal Hassan?" she asked.

The BJP leader said Kamal Hassan has not so far expressed any social concerns like his colleague Rajanikanth, who from the beginning has touched on various issues concerning society and people.

"Politics is not cinema, where one can become Chief Minister in a day," she said, adding that it was not on Twitter but on people's platform.

The actor had tweeted about 11 lines late last night indicating his possible entry into politics.

Asked about former Karnataka DIG (Prisons) D Roopa's report that there was "a talk" that Rs two crore had exchanged hands to give preferential treatment for AIADMK (Amma) chief V K Sasikala at the central prison in Benglaru, she said the truth had finally come out that corruption prevailed in the prison of a state where Congress is in power.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Hindustan Times 3



Hindustan Times has deleted the below article from their website due to pressure from who else but Modi. Currently, it is deleted from the desktop version of the site but still available on the mobile version of the site. We are expecting it to be deleted shortly from there as well. Here is the link:

India and China have been engaged in a military standoff since early June in the Sikkim sector over the construction of a road by the Chinese army in disputed territory, which is also claimed by Bhutan. (AFP file)

The India-China military standoff near Sikkim continues. The rhetoric from both sides is very revealing of their states of mind. India is adopting a conciliatory tone but China is uncompromising. India will be patient and peaceful in dealing with its neighbours, says the Narendra Modi government; commentators emphasise Delhis moderation and maturity. China insists that withdrawal of Indian troops from the disputed Doklam area is a precondition for dialogue. Chinese experts are not mincing words. Victor Gao, a former diplomat and once an interpreter for Deng Xiaoping, has said any other country in Chinas situation of seeing foreign (Indian) soldiers on its territory would send troops to drive them out. He says the longer India keeps troops in Doklam the more likely a military confrontation is.

The reaction in Indian media to the standoff with China is markedly different from what tensions with Pakistan usually provoke. Television channels are not dishing out angry hashtags about Beijing as they usually do about Islamabads misdemeanours. The Indian establishment clearly wants to avoid a confrontation. In Delhis muted reaction and Beijings belligerence there is perhaps a tacit acknowledgment in both capitals that the reason China is being aggressive is because India now is the weakest it has been for years.

China wants to symbolically establish dominance in Asia and it has chosen a moment when the contours of Indias path to decline are fairly well-established, three years into Modis rule. This is the lesson that Delhi should take away from this standoff, that not only is India militarily not in a position to challenge China now (short of a nuclear exchange), the direction that the BJP is taking the country undermines Indias capabilities as a power and leaves it in no position to deter Chinas aggression for years to come. This is the time to starkly assess Indias situation, let go of the positive spin the BJP government puts out, and view India as how its adversaries would.

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This may be a counter-intuitive argument to make because India certainly has some impressive attributes: a large youthful population, a formidable military machine with nuclear weapons, a sizeable middle class and elite to keep foreign companies interested for years and, like any happening power, it convenes several high-profile business and think-tank conferences. China is evidently not daunted by these because some indicators of Indias power make for grim reading.

Indias vulnerabilities are manifest in four areas. The first is in the economy, where India has recently endured a series of self-inflicted wounds. India has had a weak investment climate for years owing to regulatory bottlenecks and because banks are saddled with bad loans. Demonetisation was needlessly introduced in an already difficult situation and it brought cities to a standstill for weeks and compounded an agrarian distress by short-circuiting billions of transactions in rural India and disrupting supply chains. Growth slowed to 6.1% in the last quarter; one economist believes it may have permanently damaged the countrys informal sector. After demonetisation came changed rules for cattle slaughter which essentially constitute a form of trade war against Muslims, Dalits and the meat export industry at large. The subsequent introduction of GST has bred widespread confusion; one businessman simply warns that small traders will die.

Alongside the effects of recent decision-making, India has a jobs crisis, an education crisis and a skills crisis. PM Modi claimed his leadership would yield 100 million manufacturing jobs by 2022; around 135,000 materialised in eight sectors in 2015  far shorter than the 12 million that reportedly enter the workforce each year. The government has simply abandoned the goal of training 500 million Indians as part of its Skill India plans.

The education sector looks almost irredeemable. A committee appointed by the ministry of human resource development has conceded that large segments of the education sectorface a serious crisis of credibility in terms of the quality of education which they provide, as well as the worth of the degrees which they confer on students. There are simply too many bad teachers in government schools, many of whom get their jobs through patronage or corruption. Students are not failed in schools and colleges for political reasons  since parents would be angry if governments provided their children bad education to begin with and then failed them. India thus has millions of youth with college degrees often lacking foundational skills let alone employable ones. Thats the reason why, as Rajesh Mahapatra writes, no one any longer speaks of Indias youth bulge as a demographic dividend. It is, as we speak, fast turning out to be a liability of monstrous consequences in the time to come.

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If challenges in the economy, education and skills werent enough there is now an active attack on Indias social cohesion, the one thing that held the country together despite all its problems. The BJPs rule has seen a spike in hate speech directed at Muslims, leading to their targeting and lynching. The Indian Muslim is being constantly represented as a hate figure, with a view to snap the associational life between Hindus and Muslims. All this corrodes social life and undermines economic productivity -- a divided and fear-ridden country is hardly in a position to pool its energies and talents to tackle present and future challenges.

Several other fissures have come to the surface since 2014. In addition to intensifying Hindu-Muslim strife, there is the North-South divide which we are increasingly seeing because of the NDAs attempts to impose the Hindi language. There is continuing conflict in Kashmir and great restiveness among different social groups elsewhere: Patels and Dalits in Gujarat, Rajputs in Rajasthan, and farmers in various states, including Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu.

Not only is society polarised by identity politics, the Modi government is also instinctively anti-intellectual and waging a war against knowledge, particularly targeting the liberal arts and social sciences. There is not a single form of independent intellectual endeavour that is potentially not under threat in India now, either by regulation, censorship or physical intimidation  be it a play, film, comedy sketches, documentaries, political discussions in universities or academic publications.

This is a disturbing trend with real implications because the Modi government is letting its antipathy toward liberal intellectuals undermine the transmission of social science knowledge in India  which is indispensable for a society to understand itself and the world. The problem here is two-fold. Progressive intellectuals dominate the social science scene in India, perhaps not in number but in the standing they have in their disciplines. On the contrary, there is no credible right-wing intellectual ecosystem in India  in that one can scarcely find historians or sociologists sympathetic to the BJP who are capable of being published by university presses, the gold standard of academic publishing. Rather than treat progressive intellectuals as a national resource, the BJP government is hell bent on marginalising them, thereby threatening to snuff out forms of knowledge that have developed with some difficulty over the decades. If India is struggling with its quality of education to begin with, it makes little sense to undercut whatever little intellectual capital it has. The Modi government may well note that in the US, a few years ago, around 58-66 percent of social science professors identified themselves as liberals, only 5-8 percent as conservative. Liberal intellectuals are often critical of America and yet its governments do not interfere in academic life as universities advance knowledge and ultimately Americas cultural power.

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The real source of Indias weakness at the moment is that the Modi government is concentrating its energies on achieving political and ideological dominance, rather than addressing the countrys glaring deficits. Politics of polarisation has taken precedence over governmental efforts to facilitate cooperation among citizens that can yield productive outcomes. All regimes in big countries aim to consolidate their own power, but they strive for excellence as well (in the hope of compensating for weaknesses). In India we are seeing the former without much evidence of support for the latter. The Chinese Communist Party is unflinching about exercising political control but it is also pushing the country towards new frontiers. It wants to introduce 100,000 industrial robots every year and plans on having 150 robots in operation for every 10,000 employees by 2020. It is making major investments in artificial intelligence; this year an international conference of AI researchers in the US had to be rescheduled because Chinese delegates could not attend as it clashed with the Chinese New Year. China takes social science seriously too and is making strenuous efforts to get Western academics to teach and undertake research projects in China, through initiatives such as the Thousand Talent and Thousand Foreign Experts programmes.

India, by contrast, is grappling with basic issues of social order, the rule of law and constrictions on the life of the mind. The military standoff with China is an important opportunity to take a hard look at its own realities and see how they stack up against the priorities of other countries. If the Modi government does not change course now, the gap between India and China will increase in the future and give Beijing more reason to continue bullying India.

(Views expressed are personal. The writer tweets as @SushilAaron)
Samajwadi Party leader and former Defence Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav today claimed that China was ready to attack India in collaboration with Pakistan and asked the government to reverse its stand on the Tibet issue by supporting its independence.

Raising the matter in the Lok Sabha against the backdrop of tension between India and China, he asked the government to inform Parliament what it has done to meet any likely challenge from the neighbouring country.

He also claimed that Chinese military personnel have been seen in Pakistani military facilities in the Pak-occupied- Kashmir and China was also building roads there. It must be opposed at the diplomatic level, Yadav said.

"India is today facing a big danger from China. I have been cautioning central governments for many years. None of them paid adequate attention. China has joined hands with Pakistan. It has made full preparation to attack India.

"China is India's biggest opponent. What has the government done? In Kashmir, the Chinese army has allied with the Pak army," Yadav, known for his tough stand on China, said during the Zero Hour.

He also claimed that China had buried nuclear weapons in Pakistan to target India, adding that Indian intelligence agencies "would know better".

Without naming then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, he said the Congress stalwart made a "big mistake" on the Tibet issue and added that he had even then spoken against it. Tibetan leaders like Dalai Lama had always supported India, he said.

Time had come to support the independence of Tibet as it had been a traditional buffer between the two big nations and India should give maximum support to the Dalai Lama.

"China is our enemy, not Pakistan. Pakistan can do us no damage," he said.

It was India's responsibility to protect Bhutan and China was eyeing Nepal, he said.

He also spoke against massive amounts of Chinese goods finding a market in India.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A Thai court found dozens of people guilty of human trafficking offences today in a mass trial exploring links between corrupt officials, including a senior army general, and the grim but lucrative trade in Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants.

Thailand's junta launched a crackdown in May 2015 on a network funnelling desperate migrants through southern Thailand and onto Malaysia, holding some for ransom in jungle camps.

It unspooled a crisis across Southeast Asia as gangmasters abandoned their human cargo in the camps where hundreds died from starvation and malaria, and at sea in overcrowded boats which were then "ping ponged" between Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian waters.

Rights groups long accused officials of ignoring -- and even orchestrating -- the trade in humans through Thailand's southern provinces.

The area was the crucial link in a criminal trail that stretched from Myanmar to Malaysia.

The crackdown revealed a lattice of military, police, local political and mafia figures acting as traffickers, agents and logistics men, all soaking up cash from some of Asia's poorest and most vulnerable migrants.

On Wednesday judges at Bangkok Criminal Court began delivering a stream of verdicts for the 102 defendants. One other accused died while on remand.

The offences include human trafficking, ransom and murder. All deny the charges.

Media were barred from the court itself, relying instead on an audio relay of the complex proceedings.

Judges placed heavy reporting restrictions on much of the testimony, citing national security concerns. But the case has still lifted the lid on the power networks dominating southern Thailand.

Army Lieutenant-General Manas Kongpan, a top figure in the security apparatus covering the south, is the highest- ranking official on trial.

In 2013 he was promoted to head the Internal Security Command (ISOC) for the south. Current junta leader Prayut Chan-O-Cha was army chief at the time.

Another well-connected alleged kingpin is Pajjuban Aungkachotephan, better known as Ko Tong or 'Big Brother Tong'.

Police accused him of using private Andaman Sea islands, close to tourist spots such as Koh Lipe, to shift boatloads of migrants to the mainland, where they were packed into lorries and taken to the fetid camps straddling the Malaysia border.

An army captain, four ranking police officers, a nurse and several officials, including the mayor of Pedang Besar in Satun province, are also among the accused.

By the lunch break a drip feed of 38 defendants had been convicted for a range of offences including human trafficking and slavery.

Among them were guards at the jungle camps where migrants were held, including a Rohingya man who acted as an interpreter, and a string of local officials.

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A 26-year-old Dalit man was allegedly assaulted and threatened by the husband of a village head over a dispute in the district, police said today.

According to a complaint lodged by the victim, Man Singh allegedly came to his house at Bhup Kheri village yesterday, and beat him up with a lathi and used objectionable remarks.

A case was registered against the accused under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Prevention of Dalit Atrocities Act. The injured was admitted to a hospital, police added.

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Director Nitesh Tiwari has revealed that he is definitely looking to cast Varun Dhawan in his next film but nothing has been finalised yet.

The "Dangal" director is working on Siddharth Roy Kapur and Ronnie Screwvala's next film, an adaptation of Varun Agarwal's 2012 bestseller "How I Braved Anu Aunty and Started a Million Dollar Company".

When asked about approaching Varun for the film, Nitesh told PTI, "We are thinking about him. But he is busy right now. We were looking for a good, young hero who has a great screen presence."



Nitesh said he did bounce the idea of the film to the "Student of the Year" actor.

"I did speak to Varun about the film. He is more than happy about it (film). But only time will tell if he can do the film or not as he has a very busy schedule so I don't know what the future holds."



Besides this, Nitesh is excited about his director wife Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari's upcoming directorial, "Bareilly Ki Barfi". He has co-written the romantic comedy with Shreyas Jain.

"I think she did a good job. I was moved watching the scenes that I had written, it means it has turned out to be better on screen."



Starring Kriti Sanon, Ayushmann Khurrana and Rajkummar Rao in the lead, "Bareilly Ki Barfi" will release on August 18.

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Disney's upcoming live-action reboot of the 1992 animated classic "Aladdin" is facing blowback for casting a non-Arab actress to play Jasmine.

After a months-long worldwide search Disney roped in actress Naomi Scott to play Jasmine in the film.

Scott is of British and Indian heritage and some critics of the decision see it as a suggestion by Disney that women of Indian and Middle Eastern heritage look the same, reported Fortune.

Mena Massoud, who plays the role of Aladdin in the film, is of Egyptian descent.

Aladdin, the story of a rough-and-tumble kid from the streets who enlists a genie to win the love of Princess Jasmine, is set in fictional Agrabah, which is largely seen as representing a Middle Eastern city.

A critic of the decision said it was one more instance of Hollywood believing that "brown (people) are interchangeable," while another said fans are "upset that their representation was taken away, and rightly so."



Disney did not return Fortune's request for comment on the story.

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The Kakinada city crime wing of the police today claimed to have busted a drugs racket after the arrest of eight people here.

An officer said that ganja and other banned drugs worth over Rs 2.5 lakh along with cash worth Rs 2 lakh were seized from the arrested accused.

According to police, the accused were in the business of selling the drugs to students and others in and around Kakinada.

"Eight people, including two rowdy sheeters, who used to secure the drugs, two couriers who used to supply it to the clients and four medical shop owners, have been arrested," East Godavari SP Vishal Gunni told reporters.

The four medical shop owners were identified as Dasari Satyanarayana, Kankatala Venkata Malleswerarao of Angara village, Nanduri Satyabhaskararao of Bhimavaram and Nadipudi Durgaprasad of Eluru.

"They used to sell in bulk the drugs that causes sedation and intoxication to arrested accused Bezwada Ravi (40) and Pemmadi Siva Prasad (41), both rowdy sheeters from Kakinada, who in turn supplies the drugs to two couriers- Kondepudi Bhimaraju (30) and Kampa Ramana (55)," Vishal said.

He said that police would keep a hawk's eye on the illegal drugs business operating in and around Kakinada and deal with the offenders with iron hand.

Further investigation is on.

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The Delhi University today announced that it will release its 6th cut-off for various merit-based undergraduate courses on 22nd July.

The varsity had initially announced five cut-offs, but kept options open for further ones in case of availability of seats.

It has also extended its admissions for the fifth cut-off list till tomorrow (July 20).

"Admissions for the sixth cut-off will happen between 22 and 25 July (except Sunday) for all the categories," the DU Registrar said in a release.

The university has also decided to start another admission drive for students of reserved categories including SC/ST, OBC, persons with disablity (PWD), children/widows of armed forces, Kashmiri migrants and sports.

"The drive for such admissions will happen between 31 July to 5 August," the release said.

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Following are the top business stories at 1930 hours today:



DEL45 BIZ-GST-JK



New Delhi: The Cabinet today approved a draft bill to replace ordinances that were promulgated to introduce the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in Jammu and Kashmir, a senior government official said.

DEL26 BIZ-RBI-NOTES



Mumbai: The Reserve Bank will shortly issue bank notes of denomination Rs 20 in Mahatma Gandhi series 2005 that will be similar in design to those currently in circulation.

DEL38 BIZ-CAB-ONGC-HPCL



New Delhi: The Cabinet today approved sale of government's stake in Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd (HPCL) to India's largest oil producer ONGC for Rs 30,000 crore, a top government source said.

DEL20 BIZ-RSQ-MATERNITY



New Delhi: There is no proposal by the government to cut down maternity benefits in the draft on Labour Code on Social Security, Parliament was informed today.

DEL16 BIZ-LD STOCKS



Mumbai: The Sensex today bounced by over 244 points to close at 31,955 after metal, healthcare and FMCG stocks set the tone on the back of better-than-expected corporate earnings so far.

DEL9 BIZ-NOTES-PAR PANEL



New Delhi: The parliamentary panel on finance is likely to finalise its report on demonetisation of high value currency notes tomorrow, sources said.

BOM1 GJ-TEXTILE STRIKE-CALLED OFF



Ahmedabad: The traders in Surat have called off their two-week-long strike against the imposition of five per cent GST on textiles following the Centre's assurance to look into their demand for its rollback.

DCM47 BIZ-RSQ-MEAT



New Delhi: India's meat export increased to 13.53 lakh tonnes in 2016-17 from 13.36 lakh tonnes in the previous fiscal, Parliament was informed today.

DCM84 BIZ-RSQ-PENSION



New Delhi: Retirement fund body Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has issued directions to its field offices to settle pension benefits to employees on the day of retirement itself, Parliament was informed today.

DEL34 BIZ-RUPEE CLOSE



Mumbai: Advancing its gains for the third straight day, the rupee today rose by 5 paise to end at a near six-week high of 64.28 against the US dollar on steady selling of the American currency by banks and exporters.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Following are top stories at 1930



hours today:



DEL 24 POL-BJP-CONG



New Delhi: The BJP accuses the Congress of conspiring to disrupt Parliament during the monsoon session by giving issues a "communal colour".

CAL 15 NL-ZELIANG LD SWORN-IN



Kohima: On a day of fast-moving political developments, T R Zeliang is sworn-in as the new chief minister of Nagaland replacing Shurhozelie Liezietsu, who has been sacked by Governor P B Acharya.

DEL 29 PM-SCIENCE



New Delhi: Applying science to solve the country's problems is a priority for the government, Prime Minister Narendra Modi says and asks officials to come up with specific targets which could be achieved in the field of science by 2022.

DEL 21 RJ-RAHUL-RALLY



Banswara(Raj): Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi hits out at the NDA government alleging that it was not willing to discuss farmers' issues in Parliament and that its decision to implement the GST was taken in a haste.

DEL 5 GST-BJP



New Delhi: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley describes the Goods and Services Tax (GST) as a "win-win" deal for all as it will expand the tax net, end "inspector raj" and bring down prices of goods.

DEL 27 TL-LD SCHOOLBAGS-WEIGHT



Hyderabad: The sight of children trudging to school, puffing and panting, may soon become a thing of past, with the Telangana government capping the weight of their school bags between 1.5 kg and 5 kg.

DEL 36 VP-NAIDU



New Delhi: NDA candidate M Venkaiah Naidu so far enjoys committed support of 485 of the 788 members of the electoral college that will choose the next vice president on August 5, election managers of the former Union minister say.

DEL 14 BIZ-LSQ-AADHAAR



New Delhi: About 210 websites of the central and state government departments have been found to be displaying personal details and Aadhaar numbers of beneficiaries, Parliament is informed.

MDS 3 TN-MLAS SALARY HIKE



Chennai: The Tamil Nadu government almost doubles the salary and allowances of MLAs, taking their new pay packet to Rs 1.05 lakh per month.

FGN 14 CHINA-SIKKIM-PLA



Beijing: The Chinese Army moves tens of thousands of tonnes of military vehicles and hardware into the remote mountainous Tibet region after the standoff with Indian troops in the Dokalam area in the Sikkim sector, says the mouthpiece of the PLA.By K J M Varma



FGN 21 US-INDIA-2NDLD CHINA



Washington: India and China should work together to come up with "some better sort of arrangement" for peace, the US says, expressing concern over the standoff between their troops in the Sikkim sector.By Lalit K Jha



FGN 22 INDORUSSIA-2NDLD AIRCRAFT



Zhukovsky (Russia): India and Russia have entered the second stage of negotiations for jointly developing the fifth-generation fighter aircraft and the two sides will sign a contract "in the near future", says a top Russian official.

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Following are top stories at 2100



hours today:



DEL 53 RS-LD REMARK



New Delhi: A derogatory remark by a senior Samajwadi Party (SP) leader in the Rajya Sabha linking names of Hindu gods with alcohol sparks an uproar forcing two adjournments and triggers demands for his apology.

CAL 15 NL-ZELIANG LD SWORN-IN



Kohima: On a day of fast-moving political developments, T R Zeliang is sworn in as the new chief minister of Nagaland replacing Shurhozelie Liezietsu, who was sacked by Governor P B Acharya.

DEL 55 DEF-INDIA-CHINA-TROOPS



New Delhi: There is no significant rise in deployment of troops by China along the Sino-India border and its recent military exercise in the Tibet region should not be linked to the current standoff between the armies of the two countries in Dokalam, say top government sources.

FGN 21 US-INDIA-2NDLD CHINA



Washington: India and China should work together to come up with "some better sort of arrangement" for peace, the US says, expressing concern over the standoff between their troops in the Sikkim sector.By Lalit K Jha



DEL 51 JK-2NDLD CEASEFIRE



Jammu/Srinagar: A Junior Commissioned Officer (JCO) injured in Pakistani firing dies while a civilian is wounded in fresh ceasefire violations along the LoC in the Poonch- Rajouri belt of Jammu and Kashmir.

DEL 49 TL-SCHOOLBAGS-2NDLD WEIGHT



Hyderabad: The sight of children trudging to school, puffing and panting, may soon become a thing of past, with the Telangana government capping the weight of their school bags between 1.5 kg and 5 kg.

DEL 42 RJ-RAHUL-LD RALLY



Banswara (Raj): Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi seeks to corner the NDA government over the GST issue claiming the indirect tax regime was rolled out in a hurry to "impress" the world, ignoring the interests of small businessmen in the country.

DEL 44 MHA-MALLYA-JAIL



New Delhi: India has told UK authorities that all wanted Indians, including liquor baron Vijay Mallya, will get equal treatment like any other prisoner in India and the facilities in its jails are no less than what European nations have, says a senior official.

DEL 36 VP-NAIDU



New Delhi: NDA candidate M Venkaiah Naidu so far enjoys committed support of 485 of the 788 members of the electoral college that will choose the next vice president on August 5, election managers of the former Union minister say.

MDS 3 TN-MLAS SALARY HIKE



Chennai: The Tamil Nadu government almost doubles the salary and allowances of MLAs, taking their new pay packet to Rs 1.05 lakh per month.

LGD 17 SC-LD PRIVACY



New Delhi: Right to privacy cannot be an absolute right and the State may have some power to put reasonable restriction, says the Supreme Court while examining the issue whether it can be declared as a fundamental right under the Constitution.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The support group for Alzheimers caregivers will meet on Monday, July 24, at 6:30 p.m. in the small conference room at Jefferson Community Health and Life.

The program will include a video on "Making Visits Valuable  Senses (Sight, Hearing, Touch and Smell)" by Teepa Snow.

Visitors will have easy access by parking in the H Street parking area and entering through the JCHC main entrance. Follow the signs in the lobby to Hospital. The meeting rooms will be on the left. The small conference room is the second door.

The Alzheimers caregivers' support group meets on the fourth Monday of each month at 6:30 p.m. at Jefferson Community Health and Life. It is designed for caregivers and family members of those who have Alzheimers Disease or other forms of dementia.

The group is designed to provide an opportunity for anyone interested to share their experiences with Alzheimers disease. There is no cost, and no pre-registration.

For more information, contact Lana Likens at Jefferson Community Health and Life at 402-729-6855.
Terrorist attacks and fatalities from terrorism declined globally in 2016 from levels seen in 2015, the US State Department said today in a report.

The report also said that the Islamic State (ISIS) remained "the most capable" terror group, directing and inspiring terror cells, networks, and individuals around the world even as it faced increased military pressure in Iraq and Syria and suffered considerable territorial losses throughout the year.

"Terrorist attacks and fatalities from terrorism declined globally in 2016 from levels seen in 2015," Justin Siberell, Acting State Department Coordinator for Counter terrorism told reporters after the release of annual 'Country Report on Terrorism'.

ISIS, he said, lost considerable territory it controlled in Iraq and Syria through 2016.

Iraqi Security Forces supported by the coalition delivered a series of defeats on ISIS through 2016, beginning with the liberation of Ramadi in February, the recapture of Fallujah in June, and the seizure of the Qayyarah Air Base in northern Iraq in July, and finally the launch of the broad offensive in Nineveh in October that led to Iraqi Security Force penetration deep into eastern Mosul by the end of the year, he said.

Siberell said although terrorist attacks took place in 104 countries in 2016, they were heavily concentrated geographically, as they have been for the past several years.

"Fifty-five per cent of all attacks took place in Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, and 75 per cent of all deaths due to terrorist attacks took place in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria, and Pakistan," he said.

The total number of terrorist attacks in 2016 decreased by nine per cent, and total deaths due to terrorist attacks decreased by 13 per cent compared to 2015.

"This was largely due to fewer attacks and deaths from terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Yemen. At the same time, there was an increase in terrorist attacks and total deaths in several countries, including Iraq, Somalia, and Turkey," the State Department official said.

The ISIS was responsible for more attacks and deaths than any other perpetrator group in 2016. In 2015, it was the Taliban that was responsible for more attacks and deaths, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The government has approved revival of the three operating units of state-owned and will shut down the non-operating units of the company, Parliament was informed today.

In a written reply in the Rajya Sabha, Minister of State for Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises Babul Supriyo said that the government has approved "revival (of Cement Corporation of India) as a public sector enterprise" through closure of non-operating units and revival of three operating units.

The Board for Reconstruction of Public Sector Enterprises had recommended closure and sale of non-operating units and revival of operating units as a public sector enterprise.

However, in its reply, the government was silent on the sale of the non-operating units and said it has approved their closure.

(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.)
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today said the Goods and Services Tax (GST) was a "win-win" deal for all as it would expand the tax net, end "inspector raj" and bring down the prices of goods.

While he spoke on the GST at the BJP parliamentary party meeting, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj briefed party MPs on the recent foreign visits of Narendra Modi and said no visiting Indian prime minister had received the kind of welcome accorded to him by US President Donald Trump during his recent to that country.

"It was unprecedented," BJP sources quoted her as saying at the meeting.

Pitching the GST as a measure beneficial for the country, Jaitley said the prices of goods had come down between four to eight per cent since its roll-out on July 1.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar briefed reporters about Jaitley's remarks.

The GST was in the interest of people and states as well as the latter would get 80 per cent of the revenue leading to more development, Jaitley said.

There was no longer tax on tax and the transport of goods across the country was going unhindered now, he said.

More than one crore firms were expected to be migrating to the new tax regime against around 80 lakh companies earlier, Kumar quoted him as saying.

"The tax net has expanded. The country's market has been integrated. Inspector raj is over. The tax burden on the masses has gone down. It is a win-win situation for all," Kumar quoted the finance minister saying.

BJP sources said Swaraj highlighted various aspects of Modi's visits to the US, including a working dinner at the White House, Trump giving him a guided tour of his residence, and said it was a rare honour for a visiting Indian prime minister.

She also noted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took Modi out on a drive on a beach.

Kumar asked the BJP members to ensure their presence here during the vice presidential election on August 5, which is a Saturday.

Parliamentarians hailing from different states often leave the national capital during sessions on Friday evening and come back by Monday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Unidentified gunmen today opened fire on a vehicle carrying minority Shias near Pakistan's restive Balochistan province, killing at least five persons, police said.

The incident took place in the town of Mastung, about 75 kilometers south of Quetta, when gunmen riding a motorcycle targeted their car en route to Karachi. The assailants escaped after carrying out the attack, Geo TV reported.

"The indiscriminate firing killed four family members of the Hazara Shiite community, including a woman. Later, the driver succumbed to his injuries in the hospital," police official Muhammad Ishaq said.

Police and other Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) personnel reached the site and started an investigation into the incident.

However, no group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Balochistan Chief Minister Sanaullah Khan Zehri has strongly condemned the incident and grieved over the loss of precious lives. He has asked the police officials to prepare a report of the incident and bring the culprits behind the bars.

This is not the first time that the Hazara Shia Muslim community has been targeted by extremist outfits in Balochistan and in the last few years hundreds have been killed in either suicide bomb attacks, planted bomb blasts or target killings.

Official reports say that they have been around 1200 incidents of violence against the Hazara community in the last 15 years.

In March, an explosion targeting a convoy of the security forces occurred on Saryab Road. Four people were injured including three Frontier Corps personnel and a passer-by.

On May 12, a suicide bomb blast targeting the convoy of a senior politician in Balochistan killed at least 26 people and wounded 30 others. The blast in Mastung struck a vehicle carrying Senate Deputy Chairman Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Haideri, shortly after Friday prayers.

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At least four members of a Shiite family were killed today and one another injured when unidentified gunmen opened fire on their vehicle near Pakistan's restive Balochistan province, police said.

The incident took place in the town of Mastung, about 75 kilometers south of Quetta, when gunmen riding a motorcycle targeted their car en route to Karachi. The assailants escaped unhurt after carrying out the attack, Geo TV reported.

The police and rescue teams reached the area and started an investigation into the incident. The injured were shifted to a hospital in Quetta.

A woman was among the four family members killed on the spot while one other was injured. They were all from the same family, it said.

However, no group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Balochistan Chief Minister Sanaullah Khan Zehri has strongly condemned the incident and grieved over the loss of precious lives. He has asked the police officials to prepare a report of the incident and bring the culprits behind the bars.

In March, an explosion targeting a convoy of the security forces occurred on Saryab Road. Four people were injured including three Frontier Corps personnel and a passer-by.

On May 12, a suicide bomb blast targeting the convoy of a senior politician in Balochistan killed at least 26 people and wounded 30 others. The blast in Mastung struck a vehicle carrying Senate Deputy Chairman Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Haideri, shortly after Friday prayers.

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The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) today arrested a health officer of the Chhattisgarh government for allegedly takinga bribeof Rs 7,000 in Dantewada district.

Dantewada District Ayurved Officer (DAO) Dr Prakash Singh had demanded the bribe amount from two persons of the health department, one of them retired, for clearing their pending arrears, an ACB official here said.

One of them had retired from service last year and his arrears related to time-scale (increment) were pending. The other person, posted as pharmacist in Dantewada, was waiting for disbursement of amended grad-pay arrears.

Both approached Singh for clearance of their pending dues and he demanded a bribe of Rs 7,000 to release their payments, he said.

Meanwhile, the duo lodged a complaint with the ACB which laid a trap at the office of DAO, Dantewada, and caught the officer accepting Rs 5,000 from one of them and Rs 2,000 from the other person, he said.

Singh was arrested and booked under various sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, he said, adding further probe was one.

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The Hyderabad police today claimed to have busted two drug rackets by nabbing nine persons including two foreigners and seized high-end narcotics like LSD and MDMA besides cocaine from their possession.

In the first case, six persons including two foreign nationals -- a Nigerian and a South African -- were apprehended from Banjara Hills, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Task Force) B Limba Reddy said.

He added, police found that they allegedly indulged in procuring, peddling and supplying the narcotic substances to the customers, Reddy said.

Those nabbed include a Nigerian identified as Chika Ohycowusi, who is running cloth business in Goa, South African national Lucky Bongani, a student, who resides in Manikonda here, besides N Raghu, Abhinav Mahender, V Mallikarjun Rao (all residing in different parts of Hyderabad) and Christopher H H Giddens, who is into real estate in Bengaluru, he said.

"They also visited different pubs, hotels in Goa, Mumbai and Hyderabad where they befriended drug consumers and sold cocaine to them at higher price," the DCP said.

In another case, three persons identified as P Revanth, Irfan Najeeb Khan and Zain Khan were nabbed from Masab Tank here on the charge of selling and possession of narcotics.

The task force has handed over the accused and the seized material to local police station for further formalities, said the official.

In both the cases, police seized 300 grams cocaine, 42 grams of MDMA, 27 LSD blots, one car and one airgun, said the DCP.

Some among those nabbed were previously arrested for drug peddling and most of them are also addicted to narcotics, the senior police official said.

Further investigations are being conducted to unearth their network with other local and foreign drug dealers.

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India can work on a trilateral basis with the US and Afghanistan to ensure security of the war-torn country and stability of the region, a powerful US Congressional committee has said.

Concerned over the current stalemate in Afghanistan, the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, headed by Senator John McCain, said the US should leverage the capabilities of allies and partners to more effectively secure regional stability and security.

In a report attached along with the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2018, the committee said it believes that India, as a regional partner to Afghanistan and a major defence partner of the US, is well-suited to assist Afghanistan Government to improve the security of the country and the broader region, and can work on a trilateral basis with the US and Afghanistan to do so.

"The committee also believes that timely actions by the Indian government to fill identified needs in Afghanistan would significantly benefit the short and long-term security and stability of the region," the Senate Armed Services Committee said as it passed the NDAA-2018.

"The committee believes that the US needs to recommit to the fight in Afghanistan and that India, as a major defence partner of the US and a contributor to regional security, has a critical role to play in this effort," it said.

The Pentagon and the Trump Administration have praised India's efforts in Afghanistan.

On February 9, General John W Nicholson, Commander of US Forces-Afghanistan, testified before the committee that "With over USD 2.0 billion development aid executed since 2002, and another USD 1.0 billion pledged in 2016, India's significant investments in Afghan infrastructure, engineering, training, and humanitarian issues will help develop Afghan human capital and long-term stability".

In its report, the committee noted that General Nicholson highlighted significant short-term materiel and training needs within the Afghan Air Force (AAF), and has personally urged India to provide this targeted support to meet urgent gaps.

As such it encouraged the Secretary of Defence, in coordination with the Secretary of State, to enhance trilateral cooperation between the Governments of Afghanistan, India, and US for the purposes of strengthening the sovereignty and security of Afghanistan.

In doing so, the committee expects that any increase in investment and assistance pursuant to this trilateral cooperation would take into account the mutual priorities of the three respective governments.

"This assistance could include logistical support; joint training; combined military planning; threat analysis; intelligence, materiel, and maintenance support for Afghan National Defense and Security Forces for humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, security assistance, and any other areas deemed appropriate," it said.

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today denounced Brussels' repeated criticism of Israel as an "anomaly" and called on Europe to reassess its relationship with the Jewish state.

The EU has repeatedly condemned Israel's building of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and crackdown on civil society groups critical of the government.

"There is an anomaly, we are often criticised by western Europe, often more than any other place in the world. Israel is a bastion of European and western values in the heart of a very dark place," the premier said in Budapest on the second of a three-day visit to Hungary.

"It's time to have a re-assessment in Europe about the relationship with Israel."



Netanyahu made the remarks after holding talks with leaders from the so-called Visegrad Four group - Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic - whose nationalist anti-immigration stances have also put them increasingly at odds with Brussels.

The Israeli premier praised the Visegrad nations for supporting Israel "on several occasions" at European Union meetings.

Observers say Israel is seeking closer ties to nations that can help defend its interests in international forums.

"With their backing, it will be harder for the EU to pass resolutions critical of Israel," Middle East expert Peter Lintl told Austrian newspaper Kurier.

Netanyahu is the first Israeli leader to visit Budapest since the fall of communism in 1989.

His Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orban, a virulent opponent of Muslim immigration, has hailed Netanyahu as a "patriot".

"We share Israel's notion of protecting external borders," said Orban whose government has erected fences on its southern EU frontiers to keep out illegal asylum-seekers.

"If Europe does not cooperate with Israel, it is punishing itself," he added.

Both men are right-wingers enamoured of US President Donald Trump and with a disdain for the left-leaning liberal global order bankrolled, as they see it, by the likes of US Jewish billionaire George Soros.

Netanyahu's trip comes at a sensitive time for Orban, who is under fire at home over his running battle against Hungarian-born Soros and praise of a Hungarian Nazi-allied wartime leader.

Many in Hungary's 100,000-strong Jewish population - one Europe's largest - have accused Orban, in power since 2010, of turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism or even encouraging it to stave off growing support for the far-right.

However Netanyahu defended Orban yesterday, insisting that Hungary, as the birthplace of modern political Zionism founder Theodor Herzl, was "at the forefront" of countries fighting anti-Zionism.

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Kamal Haasan's allegations of corruption in the Tamil Nadu government drew a sharp response today from Chief Minister K Palaniswami who said the actor "does not know politics" and he would give a proper response once the film-star takes the "political plunge".

"He is into acting... Does not know about politics. After he comes to politics and says (such) things, we will give a proper response," the chief minister said.

Palaniswami's remarks comes in the wake of his cabinet colleagues, including state Finance Minister D Jaykaumar, tearing into the actor for his remarks on corruption in the government.

Jayakumar had asked Haasan to refrain from making "generalised comments" and wondered why he had not made such allegations when late chief minister J Jayalalithaa was alive.

The finance minister had also asked the popular actor to make such comments after entering politics, but said Haasan did not have the "guts" to do so.

Ministers S P Velumani and C Ve Shanmugam had also hit out Haasan for his statement.

Velumani had sought evidence from Haasan to back his charge and also asked whether the actor was ready to furnish details of the taxes he had paid for his films.

The Law Minister, Shanmugam, wanted a case to be filed against Haasan.

The 62-year-old actor, however, was supported by many opposition parties, including the CPI (M) and the CPI.

Rebel AIADMK leader and former Chief Minister O Panneerselvam had said everyone was entitled to express their opinions in a democracy and suggested that a proper reply be given to a differing opinion.

The BJP also took a dig at the actor's tweet on his possible entry into politics, wondering why the celebrity, "without doing any service to the people", had a "sudden awakening" on entering the field.

The party's state unit president, Tamilisai Soundararajan, told reporters, earlier in Coimbatore, that actors, before entering politics, should think about their contributions to society, as many leaders are already there to serve the people.

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Rural Nebraska artists who want to show and sell their paintings, sculptures, drawings or photographs are encouraged to submit samples of their work to the Nebraska Rural Living Online Art Gallery by Aug. 1.

Art submissions are juried by a professional sculptor, painter and photographer who also live in rural Nebraska, and chosen artists will gain a storefront on the Nebraska Rural Living online art gallery where they can promote, display and sell their art.

The online gallery launched in the one year ago, and now 21 artists are promoting their art to thousands of Nebraska Rural Living readers around the world at www.nebraskaruralliving.com/art-gallery. Artists have also benefitted from additional opportunities to share their work at public events through their selection into the gallery.

The Nebraska Rural Living online artist submission form is also available in Spanish online, to encourage a culturally-diverse group of artists to submit their work.

The goal of the gallery is to give artists a platform to share and sell their art while at the same time increase knowledge and appreciation of life in rural Nebraska.

Art will be accepted throughout the year for future consideration in the gallery. Submissions will be juried each quarter with the following deadlines: August 1, November 1, February 1 and May 1. New artists will be added each quarter if selected.

To submit art for review, artists must have a Nebraska address in a rural town with a population of 10,000 or less. Artists must also have a website so that patrons can purchase their work if they are chosen for the gallery. Four types of art can be submitted: paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs.

Nebraska Rural Living, founded in 2006, educates its more than 30,000 readers that rural Nebraska is vibrant and business-friendly, with amenities that appeal to families, retirees, entrepreneurs and tourists.

For rules and criteria and to submit art to be juried for the online gallery, visit www.nebraskaruralliving.com/fine-art. Artists will be asked to upload five high-quality images of their work and submit an artists statement and a short biography.

The Nebraska Rural Living Fine Art in Towns Under 10,000 gallery is funded with the support of the Phelps County Community Foundation, the Nebraska Arts Council, the Nebraska Cultural Endowment, Great Western Bank and private donors.

For more information, contact gallery coordinator Kristine Jacobson at krjacobson@nebraskaruralliving.com.
: A high-power committee headed by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan today decided to expedite the process of land acquisition for Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode light metro projects.

The committee also entrusted Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) Principal Advisor E Sreedharan to decide the technology to be used for the two projects, estimated to cost over Rs. 6,000 crore, a government press release said.

The Thiruvananthapuram light metro will cover 21.8 km from Karamana in the city to Technocity in Kazhakootam. It was also decided at the meeting to conduct a study with regard to extending the light metro from Karmana to Papanangode.

The light metro projects were approved in 2015.

The project was to be implemented through 20 per cent capital investment each from the Central and state governments and remaining 60 per cent was to be raised through loans.

The government has already given sanction to acquire 1.98 hectares land in the capital city and 1.44 hectares in Kozhikode, the release said.

The amount for the land would be sanctioned from Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board (KIFB).

The state government is moving ahead with the project with the expectation that centre would participate and provide clearance.

DMRC has been engaged as interim consultants to identify and take up preliminary preparatory works for the two projects.

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A doctor who was abducted from east Delhi's Preet Vihar area was today rescued from Meerut by the police after a shootout with the kidnappers.

Four men have been nabbed in this connection, the police said.

One of the accused also suffered bullet injuries in the shootout, said SSP (Meerut) Manzil Saini.

Shrikant Gaur, who practises at a hospital in east Delhi, was kidnapped on July 6 from Preet Vihar while travelling in a cab. After kidnapping him, the abductors demanded a ransom of Rs 5 crore from his family members, who informed the police.

The policemen then spoke to the kidnappers posing as representatives of the cab aggregator. They told the kidnappers that they would pay the ransom amount since it was their customer who had been kidnapped.

The police managed to track down the location of the accused in Daurala village in Meerut. They also requested for assistance from the Meerut police in the operation.

On July 16, they were following a vehicle being driven by the kidnappers. However, after their vehicle got punctured, the accused left their vehicle and fled through some fields there, the police said.

The police identified two of the accused as Sushil and his brother Anuj, residents of Dadri village.

It also emerged that two others -- Ombir and Gaurav Sharma -- were involved in the kidnapping. Sushil is a driver with the cab aggregator firm and he had planned the kidnapping, the police said.

After they were identified, the police started questioning their families and their teams also started scanning nearby villages.

This evening the Delhi Police team received information that the doctor was being held captive at a house in Partapur village in Meerut.

The police team surrounded the place where the doctor was being held captive.

Following an exchange of fire between the Meerut and Delhi Police teams and the kidnappers, the doctor was rescued and four accused were nabbed, said the officer.

The doctor is being brought to Delhi by a police team.

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Lower and higher courts in Pakistan came to a standstill today as lawyers across the country held protests demanding Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's resignation after a probe recommended filing a graft case against him and his family.

The protests were called by Pakistan's top lawyers' associations, including the Pakistan Bar Council (PBC) and the Supreme Court Bar Association.

The courts, where protests were organised, did not hear any case. The Supreme Court, however, continued with its proceedings, including hearing the Panama Papers leaks case.

The Lahore High Court was also paralysed by a partial strike by the lawyers.

The organisations have urged Sharif to "honourably" resign as he has "lost the moral and legal authority" to continue in his office after a joint investigation team (JIT) report accused him and his family of evading tax by setting up offshore companies to purchase high-end properties in London.

Bar council Vice Chairman Ahsan Bhoon said the lawyer community has expressed solidarity with the Supreme Court and asked Sharif to step down.

"We haverequested the Supreme Court to take the Panama Papers case to its logical end and disqualify the prime minister and other public office-holders declared guilty of corruption in the JIT report."



He said the bar councils have also sought the resignation of Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and the prime minister's son-in-law Muhammad Safdar.

"The JIT report has proved that the prime minster and his family members have been involved in corruption," he said, adding that the apex court should refer the case to the National Accountability Bureau for a reference against the Sharif family as recommended by the JIT.

He claimed the evidence collected by the JIT was enough to disqualify Sharif.

Sharif has dismissed the JIT report as a "bundle of baseless allegations" and refused to quit. "The people of Pakistan have elected me and only they can remove me from this post."



The scandal, nonetheless, threatens Sharif's position. If the Supreme Court finds him guilty of corruption he will have to resign, throwing the country into turmoil.

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The bodies of eight missing Malian soldiers have been found following a presumed jihadist attack on July 9, official sources told AFP today.

The soldiers were ambushed in Mali's northeast and two escaped with their lives, but until now there had been no trace of the missing.

"Eight soldiers missing after clashes with terrorists near Menaka have been found Monday killed by bullets," a senior army official told AFP.

A local official in the area said eight bodies were found in Inkadogotane, 60 kilometres (37 miles) from the town of Menaka, and added that they were captured alive before being executed.

The Malian army said meanwhile a staff sergeant had been killed by "bandits" in the Tessit area close to the border with Niger on Sunday.

The under-equipped Malian army is struggling to contain jihadists and armed criminal groups in the north and centre despite being backed by French troops and UN peacekeepers.

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India has told UK authorities that all wanted Indians, including liquor baron Vijay Mallya, will get equal treatment like any other prisoner in India and the facilities in its jails are no less than what European nations have, a senior official said.

This was conveyed by Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi to his British counterpart Patsy Wilkinson, the second permanent secretary in the British Home Office, during a meeting last week in London.

The Indian delegation led by Mehrishi told the British authorities that whoever is extradited from the UK, he or she will be lodged in a proper jail with facilities on par with European jails, said the official, who did not want to be quoted.

However, the Indian team made it clear that no extradited persons will be given preferential treatment but would be treated like any other prisoner and asked the British authorities to convey this to the court in London.

This bears significance as Mallya has challenged the Indian government's move in the court to get him extradited from the UK saying the conditions in Indian jails are below standard.

The Indian delegation told their British counterparts that the cells in Indian jails are bigger than European jails and all jails have medical facilities with a proper hospital, the official said.

The home ministry has already written to the Maharashtra government to improve the conditions of its Arthur Road jail, where Mallya would be lodged if extradited from the UK, he said.

Mallya, who is wanted in India for Kingfisher Airlines' default on loans worth nearly Rs 9,000 crore, has been in Britain since March, 2016.

A court in London is hearing a case regarding his return to India.

India has already assured Britain of all assistance in extradition matters to allow the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to present water-tight cases before the courts there against Mallya.

Mehrishi visited London in the wake of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's talks with his British counterpart Theresa May in Hamburg, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting there recently.

Modi had asked for Britain's cooperation in sending "economic offenders" back to India.

A joint team of the ED and the CBI is currently in London to brief UK prosecution, working on the extradition of Mallya, and to submit fresh proof in the case.

The visiting officials of the two central probe agencies will also submit the charge-sheet filed by the Enforcement Directorate in the case last month in Mumbai, said a senior official in the probe team.

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A man was today caught by Assam Rifles personnel today for illegal possession of gold bars worth more than Rs two crore during frisking at Khudengthabi check post in Tengnoupal district, a Customs official said.

The man was coming from the Indo-Myanmar border town of Moreh in Manipur and was heading for the state capital in a van.

SP Luwang of the Moreh-based Custom Preventive Force told media the gold bars were estimated at Rs 2.81 crore.

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A man admitted killing 19 people, including his parents and three children, when he went on trial in southwest China today, the court said.

After returning to his home village in Yunnan province on September 28 last year, Yang Qingpei murdered his parents when they refused to give him money, the Qujing City Intermediate People's Court said on its official microblog account.

Fearing he would be discovered, Yang then killed 17 of his neighbours and fled to Yunnan's provincial capital Kunming, it said, adding that the murder weapon was a pickaxe.

Yang, who was born in 1989, pleaded guilty to all charges and apologised to the relatives of the dead, it added.

The court adjourned today afternoon for sentencing.

While mass killings are rare, violent crime has been on the rise in China in recent decades as the economy has boomed and the gap between rich and poor has expanded rapidly.

Studies have also described a rise in the prevalence of mental disorders, some of them linked to stress as the pace of life becomes faster and support systems wither.

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A mentally challenged Muslim man was assualted at Dharjori in Jharkhand's Dhanbad district by people allegedly on suspicions that he was a cattle thief.

Reports reaching the district headquarters here today said the incident took place on Tuesday evening when Mohammed Afroz(27), a resident of Wasseypur, had gone Dharjori Chowk. Some youths there allegedly found his activities unusual and assaulted him sticks before fleeing.

His injuries were, however, minor, said the doctors at Patliputra Medical College Hospital where he was rushed by the police after being informed by a passerby.

East Basuria outpost in-charge Prem Chandra Hansda, who rushed in immediately said "All the miscreants had fled before I reached the spot."



He said no arrests were made as no complaint was lodged. However, investigation into it is on.

The family members of Afroz also reached Dharjori Chowk on being informed by the passerby and showed documents of Ranchi mental hospital, where Afroz is being treated.

The family members of the man said that he is under treatment for last six years.

Dhanbad superintendent of police Manoj Ratan Chouthe did not receive any telephone calls made to him.

Three days ago a Hindu man, who gives private tution to students, was thrashed at the same place by miscreants on suspicions that he was a child lifter.

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Morgan Stanley has picked Frankfurt as a new temporary hub to operate in the European Union when Brexit takes effect, a person familiar with the situation said.

The New York investment bank will double staff in the German city from 200 to 400 in order to be ready to continue to operate in Europe by the March 2019 deadline for Brexit to take effect, the person said on Wednesday.

"It's a short-term solution," the person said, adding that Morgan Stanley executives continued to consider other cities for its long-term headquarters.

Morgan Stanley currently employs about 5,000 people in London but will relocate some traders as well as marketing and administrative staff to Frankfurt.

The bank also plans to shift a smaller number of banking and trader jobs to Paris, Dublin, Madrid and Milan, the person said.

Morgan Stanley plans to later take a decision on the permanent headquarters for the EU operations. French President Emmanuel Macron, among other European leaders, has been actively trying to lure bankers to Paris for the post-Brexit era.

Frankfurt has already been picked as the EU headquarters by Standard Chartered and Nomura.

JPMorgan Chase has transferred hundreds of jobs to Dublin but has not announced plans for a permanent headquarters for the EU.
Vice President M Hamid Ansari today pitched for a healthy democracy and asked members of Parliament to prevent "erosion of the vitality" and spirit of democracy, which he said, is the lifeblood of the parliament.

He stressed that a parliamentarian must first believe in the democracy himself or herself and underscored the need for proper personal conduct by MPs to stoke assurance among public to ensure them of the efficacy of the institutions of parliamentary democracy.

He said this addressing 'Lokmat Parliamentary Awards 2017' ceremony, organised by the media house from Maharashtra.

The Vice President felicitated BJP stalwart L K Advani and senior Janata Dal (United) leader Sharad Yadav, both members of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha respectively, with 'life time achievement awards'.

CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury was also felicitated during the event which was attended by political heavyweights cutting across party lines.

"Our Constitution provides a framework for our democracy. A framework is one aspect; its spirit is another and more important aspect.

"It is the duty of the elected representatives of the people of India to prevent erosion of the vitality and spirit of democracy that is the lifeblood of our Parliament." Ansari said.

He also quoted former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whom he described as one of the most charismatic parliamentarians in the history, to stress that House of Parliament is a place "where hopes, aspirations and frustrations of people of this country should be reflected and echoed".

Describing parliamentarians as a "bridge" between overarching national interests and local dynamics and interests that affect the constituents who have elected him/her, Ansari said reconciling the two takes not only "political dexterity", but also a broader vision and foresight that should characterise his/her functioning.

"The third quality that sets a good parliamentarian apart is the ability to communicate effectively with an economy of words," he said, and insisted MPs must strive to bring the highest possible level of clarity, erudition and civility to their public discourses.

He also praised Advani in this context, saying the BJP veteran would always tell party parliamentarians that "ideology alone would not suffice, but there is a need of proper conduct".

NDA's vice presidential poll candidate M Venkaiah Naidu, who also attended the event, stressed that parliamentarians should conduct themselves properly keeping in mind that Indian parliamentary system is "recognised, appreciated" worldwide.

He also praised Advani in this context, saying the BJP veteran would always tell party MPs that "ideology alone would not suffice, but there is a need of proper conduct".

Stating there is "no dearth of TV channels" these days, Naidu told the attendees, comprising parliamentarians in big number, to drive point that the public representatives should conduct themselves well as "people are watching".

He also asked budding parliamentarians to read more to perform well inside the House.

BJP's New Delhi MP Meenakshi, NK Premchandran of RSP and Congress' Kumari Sushmita Dev -- all from the Lok Sabha -- received the awards in the category of best debutant (woman) parliamentarian, best parliamentarian and best woman parliamentarian awards respectively.

From Rajya Sabha, Congress' Rajani Patil, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury and SP's Jaya Bachchan won the awards in best debutant (woman) parliamentarian, best parliamentarian and best woman parliamentarian awards respectively for the same year.

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, BJP veteran Murli Manohar Joshi, NCP supremo Sharad Pawar, former Lok Sabha Shivraj Patil, National Conference's Farooq Abdullah, senior Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari were among the key leaders present at the event.

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GILLETTE  A man who has pleaded guilty to stealing about $16,000 worth of items from a former Wyoming law enforcement officer's house told a judge he picked the house to steal from because a porch light was on and it looked like nobody was home.

Sean E. Kinion, 39, accepted a plea agreement in which prosecutors will recommend a prison sentence of eight to 10 years in exchange for not filing felony theft charges against him. He pleaded guilty to aggravated burglary.

Kinion says it only took him about 10-15 minutes to steal 150 items from the house in July 2015. He says he pawned most of it afterward.

Kinion is scheduled for sentencing Sept. 18.
Nepal and China have launched a programme to offer free training to up to 200 tourism entrepreneurs in Mandarin to attract more foreign visitors from China.

Chinese ambassador to Nepal Yu Hong today inaugurated a new batch of tourism entrepreneurs who will be trained in the Chinese language in Kathmandu.

A group of 40 people, consisting of tour operators and tourism entrepreneurs, will be trained during the six-month programme.

The classes being run at the initiative of the Chinese embassy will not only help to promote Chinese tourists in Nepal, but it will also strengthen people-to-people relations between Nepal and China, Yu said.

The classes will be provided at free of cost.

More than one billion Chinese tourists visited foreign countries between 2013-2016 and Nepal can tap the opportunity by training its tour operators in Chinese language, she said.

Nepal could generate USD 22 billion every year if the country can attract one million Chinese tourists, she added.

Nepal currently attracts 125,000 Chinese tourists annually and the number has been increasing steadily. Nepal is the third-largest country after India and Sri Lanka to receive Chinese tourists.

"We are aiming to train 200 tour operators and travel trade entrepreneurs in Chinese language within the next five years, with the objective to promoting Chinese tourists into Nepal, said Maniraj Lamichhane, director at Nepal Tourism Board.

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No FIR was lodged against Sadhvi Saraswati over her statement against beef consumption as her speech, as reported, had nothing against any "religious sentiment" Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar told Goa assembly today.

"The speech (of Sadhvi), as reported, did not have any issue on religious sentiment, nor any complaint was received by the police," Parrikar stated in a written reply to a question raised by Leader of Opposition Chandrakant Kavlekar who had sought to know the reasons behind not filing any FIR against the Sadhvi over her remarks made at the All India Hindu Convention held near here last month.

"Various newspapers reported on the matter regarding her demand on beef consumption. No complaint was lodged ... neither any religious matter was reported in the said media report (on the Sadhvi's speech)," stated Parrikar, who also holds the state's Home Department portfolio.

While addressing the convention at Ramnathi, Sadhvi, who was one of the speakers during a session, had reportedly said that those who consider eating beef as a status symbol should be hanged.

"I would recommend the Government of India that those who consider it as a status symbol to eat the meat of one's own mother (cow) should be hanged in public. Then only people will realise that it is our duty to protect 'gau mata'," she had reportedly said.

Notably, Goa Deputy Speaker and BJP leader Michael Lobo had yesterday demanded a police action against the Sadhvi over her controversial remarks.

He also demanded that the government should ban people of the Sadhvi's ilk who give hate speeches from entering the state.

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Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik today alleged that a part of the land allotted to the state government in New Delhi was subsequently leased out to a petrol pump and urged the Centre to return it.

Patnaik said this in a letter to the Union Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan. The chief minister was replying a letter of Pradhan who wanted steps to popularise Odia cuisine, art and culture of the state in the national capital.

Patnaik said that the state government was unable to add to its activities in Delhi due to lack of required land.

"In fact, for Odisha Bhawan, we have only half of the physical area as compared to the adjoining state Bhawans since half of the originally allotted land in our favour was subsequently leased out to a petrol pump," Patnaik said in the letter.

Stating that there seems no justification for the said petrol pump as there are two operating petrol pumps adjoining each other, Patnaik said "appropriately, the said plot of land, originally allotted to the Odisha government and subsequently leased out to a petrol pump, may be restored back to us so that we can add capacity to our state Bhawan."



Patnaik said that the state government had been making concerted efforts since 2006 with the Union Ministry of Urban Development to allot a suitable land of 2000/3000 square meter to the Government of Odisha for setting up an integrated cultural centre which could be used effectively to showcase the state's rich culture, heritage and cuisine.

The chief minister said Odisha government's request for the land had not received any positive response from the Ministry of Urban Development though some other states like Gujarat and Jharkhand had been allotted a large chunk of land in central Delhi.

"I take this opportunity to request you to prevail upon the Ministry of Urban Development to allot a suitable land to the Government of Odisha to enable us to have an integrated cultural centre in Delhi," Patnaik said adding that the Centre might return the land presently being used as a petrol pump.

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The US today listed Pakistan among the nations providing "safe havens" to terrorists, saying terror groups like the LeT and JeM continued to operate, train, organise and fundraise inside the country.

In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the State Department said the Mumbai attack mastermind and UN-designated terrorist Hafiz Saeed continued to address large rallies, although in February 2017 Pakistan proscribed him under relevant provisions of Anti-Terrorism Act.

"Although LeT is banned in Pakistan, LeT's wings Jamaat- ud-Dawa (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FiF) were able to openly engage in fundraising, including in the capital," it said.

"LeT's chief Saeed continued to address large rallies, although in February 2017, Pakistan proscribed him under relevant provisions of Schedule Four of the Anti-Terrorism Act, thus severely restricting his freedom of movement," it noted.

The 2015 ban on media coverage of Saeed, JuD, and FiF continued and was generally followed by broadcast and print media, it said.

The report listed Pakistan as one of the safe havens of terrorism and said that numerous terrorist groups, including the Haqqani Network (HQN), the LeT and JeM continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2016.

It said Pakistan did not take substantial action against the Afghan Taliban or Haqqani, or substantially limit their ability to threaten US interests in Afghanistan, although Pakistan supported efforts to bring both groups into an Afghan-led peace process.

"Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups, such as LeT and JeM in 2016, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan," the report said.

The Haqqani network has carried out a number of kidnappings and attacks against US interests in Afghanistan. The group is also blamed for several deadly attacks against Indian interests in Afghanistan, including the 2008 bombing of the Indian mission in Kabul that killed 58 people.

India, it said, continued to experience attacks, "including by Maoist insurgents and Pakistan-based terrorists".

Indian authorities continued to blame Pakistan for cross-border attacks in Jammu and Kashmir, it said.

"In January, India experienced a terrorist attack against an Indian military facility in Pathankot, Punjab, which was blamed by authorities on JeM. Over the course of 2016, the Government of India sought to deepen counterterrorism cooperation and information sharing with the United States," the State Department said.

The Indian government continued to closely monitor the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), which made threats against India in their terrorist propaganda. A number of individuals were arrested for ISIS-affiliated recruitment and attack plotting within India, the report said.

According to the State Department, the Pakistani government did not publicly reverse its December 2015 declaration that neither JuD nor FiF is banned in Pakistan, despite their listing under UN sanctions regimes, although in January 2017, Pakistan placed both organisations "under observation" pursuant to Schedule Two of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

While not a ban, keeping the outfits under observation allows the government to closely scrutinise the activities of both organisations.

On November 11, Pakistan's National Counterterrorism Authority published its own list of banned organisations that placed JuD in a separate section for groups that are "under observation" but not banned.

Pakistan continued military operations to eradicate terrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, although their impact on all terrorist groups was uneven, it said.

In its report, the State Department said in 2016, India and the US pledged to strengthen cooperation against terrorist threats from groups including al-Qaeda, the ISIS, JeM, LeT and D-Company (Dawood Ibrahim's group), including through greater collaboration on designations at the UN.

Indian and US leaders directed officials to identify new areas of collaboration through the July US-India Counterterrorism Joint Working Group, applauded finalisation of a bilateral arrangement to facilitate the sharing of terrorism screening information, and called upon Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of terrorist attacks against India to justice, the report said.

The United States and India worked together to designate JeM leader Maulana Masood Azhar, although the listing was blocked in the UN 1267 Committee, the State Department said.

Other areas mentioned in the report as safe havens are Afghanistan, Somalia, the Trans-Sahara, Sulu/Sulawesi Seas Littoral, Southern Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Columbia and Venezuela.

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Pakistan is committed to resolve all issues with India, including Kashmir, through talks, Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua said today.

Janjua's remarks came during her meeting with Islamabad- based Heads of Missions of the European Union Member States, according to Foreign Office.

She reaffirmed Pakistan's commitment to dialogue with India for the resolution of all outstanding issues, including Kashmir issue.

She accused India of human rights violations in Kashmir.

The Foreign Secretary also briefed the EU representatives on the evolving peace and security situation in the region and highlighted Pakistan's efforts for pursuing the objectives of a peaceful neighbourhood.

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The Uttar Pradesh government has said the powdery substance detected in the state Assembly has tested positive for explosive PETN in preliminary examination at the state forensic science laboratory here and no sample has been sent to FSL, Agra.

Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar dismissed reports that the substance was not found to be PETN in tests conducted at Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL), Agra. He clarified that no sample has been sent to the Agra lab as it does not have the machines to conduct the requisite tests.

He also said that the report of two confirmatory tests conducted at SFSL here is expected by tomorrow.

"Reports have been carried in some sections of media that in tests conducted at FSL, Agra, the substance detected in UP Assembly hall is not PETN.

"It is to clarify that no sample has been sent to FSL, Agra of the substance as they do not have the machines or wherewithal to conduct the requisite tests," the official said,



The "factual position", he said, is that SFSL, Lucknow in its report dated July 14 has found the substance as water insoluble, the different reagents confirm the presence of a nitrate and that the preliminary test conducted using explosive detection kit is positive for PETN, he said.

"Two confirmatory tests are being conducted at SFSL, Lucknow -- Infrared Spectrum and Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrum, the report of which is still awaited and is likely to come by Thursday," he added.

About 150 grams of the white powdery explosive PETN (Pentaerythritol tetranitrate) was found wrapped in a paper close to the seat of the Leader of the Opposition Ram Govind Choudhary on July 12, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had told the Assembly soon after it met on July 14.

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A Delhi court pulled up today the police for not filing an action taken report (ATR) despite several opportunities in a complaint seeking lodging of an FIR in the Ramjas College incident in which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised in February this year.

Taking note of failure of the police in filing a detailed ATR on merits, Metropolitan Magistrate Abhilash Malhotra directed the joint commissioner of Delhi Police, Crime Branch, to look into the matter and file the report in the court by August 3.

"I find merit in the submissions of the complainant that the police have failed to file the ATR and have delayed it. In view of the circumstances, the joint commissioner of police concerned is directed to look into the matter, expedite the inquiry so that the ATR be filed on or before the next date before this court," the magistrate said.

During the proceedings, the police filed a status report stating that the inquiry committee, which has been probing complaints relating to the incidents of February 21-22 this year, has recorded the statements of 62 people, including students and police officials.

The report said that video recording produced by the media and other witnesses and a CD given by complainant Vivek Garg have also been examined by the committee.

It said the inquiry wass at a final stage and sought time to conclude it.

Complainant and advocate Garg, however, opposed it saying despite various opportunities no ATR has been filed and as the police was not filing the report, the court should proceed for direction to the probe agency to register an FIR.

The court noted that the ATR was sought from the police by its March 6 order and since then numerable opportunities had been given to file the report.

"No ATR has been filed on the merit of the case. Due to this, the application of the complainant is getting delayed. Even today, a similar report was filed citing pendency of the inquiry and seeking time," it said.

On July 1, the chief metropolitan magistrate had dismissed a plea filed by the police seeking transfer of the complaint to another court after the investigating officer failed to appear before it.

The court was hearing the complaint seeking lodging of an FIR into the February incidents during which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised at Ramjas College by members of students groups AISA and SFI.

The plea had said a similar incident had taken place in JNU last year.

It alleged that "anti-national slogans/activities were being carried out by leaders/students of AISA/SFI in Ramjas College, shamelessly and openly which supported India's enemy Pakistan. The criminal acts of accused were also boosting the morale of terrorists against our country."



It claimed that the organisers of a seminar had misled the college administration to obtain its nod for the event and "conducted activities against the nation and tried to wage a war against the country".

The plea sought lodging of an FIR for alleged offences of sedition, criminal conspiracy, waging war against the State and defamation under the IPC.

On February 21, members of RSS student wing ABVP had gathered outside the college and shouted slogans in protest against the seminar for which JNU students Omar Khalid and Shehla Rashid were invited.

The ABVP members allegedly pelted stones, vandalised the venue and disrupted the seminar.

The next day violent clashes erupted between Left and ABVP students leaving several of them and three teachers injured.

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The Shiv Sena corporators have demanded that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) file a defamation suit against a popular radio jockey and a local FM channel for allegedly making fun of the civic body in a video over the bad condition of city roads.

The BMC has also issued a notice to RJ Malishka, working with a private FM channel in Mumbai, after mosquitoes were found breeding at her house in suburban Bandra.

Yuva Sena members and corporators Sadanand Sarvankar and Amey Ghole, in a joint letter to the BMC Commissioner Ajoy Mehta yesterday, demanded that a Rs 500 crore defamation suit be filed against the channel.

"The radio channel and its RJ Malishka have knowingly targeted the BMC to tarnish its image for problems that are not under its jurisdiction," Sarvankar alleged while talking to PTI.

"Everyone knows that the maintenance and supervision of the big roads like Eastern Express Highway and Western Express Highway is the responsibility of the state government agencies. But the RJ, in her video, has portrayed that the BMC is responsible for all the potholes (on the city's roads)," he said.

He alleged that the video has not only maligned the image of Mumbai and the BMC, but has also shaken the confidence of thousands of BMC employees who work hard to keep the city free from water-logging during the rains.

Another corporator, Amey Ghole, said the BMC chief has assured them of appropriate steps over the issue.

"We hope that the BMC's legal department will swing into action," Ghole said.

RJ Malishka was featured in a 1.23-minute-long video footage, titled 'Mumbai tula BMC var bharosa nai ka' (Mumbai, don't you have faith in BMC) in Marathi and uploaded on YouTube. In the footage, she purportedly poked fun at the bad state of roads filled with potholes in the city as well as the delays in suburban train schedules.

She is purportedly seen taking a dig at the BMC and other authorities over the issues related to the problems of traffic jams during the rains.

The BMC, meanwhile, has served a notice to the RJ alleging that mosquitoes were found to be breeding at her flat in Pali Hill area of Bandra.

"We have served a notice to RJ Malishka under section 381-B of the Mumbai Municipal Corporation (MMC) Act for the mosquito breeding at her house on the 6th floor of a building at Pali Naka in Bandra," a BMC official said.

"During a routine inspection, our team found Aedes mosquitoes breeding in a clay bowl kept under a pot as well as indoor breeding in the pots of plants," he said.

The notice has been served to the RJ's mother.

The RJ could not be reached for her comments on the issue.

Mumbai BJP president Ashish Shelar, however, termed the civic body's action to serve notice to the RJ as "unfair."



"Completely unfair that authorities turn up at @mymalishka's house and find faults. Spoke to BMC Commissioner & ward officers to bring peace," Shelar tweeted.

Congress MLA Nitesh Rane said he stands behind the RJ, who is like a sister to him.

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Unlike the previous Rajapaksa regime, the current Sri Lankan government will not follow the policy of confrontation with the UN over the human rights violations committed during the three-decade long civil war, government spokesman Rajitha Senaratne said today.

Senaratne, who is also the Health Minister, was responding after Minister of Justice Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe severely criticised the conclusions made by United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism Ben Emmerson at the end of his four-day visit last week.

"We are aware how the former government was sidelined by the international community as a result of its policy of clashing with the UN. We will not follow the same policy," Senaratne said.

He said the government's policy will be diplomatic engagement and not clashes with the UN.

Rajapakshe told Emmerson that he had been misinformed on the situation and that government would not cooperate with the UN rapporteur.

The UN Rapporteurs were not welcomed during former President Mahinda Rajapaksa's time who even failed to cooperate with the UN Human Rights Council resolutions passed against Sri Lanka.

Senaratne was asked about President Maithripala Sirisena's reported unhappiness about Emmerson's meeting the Tamil prisoners arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) during his visit.

He said Sirisena had raised concerns on the fact that the Ministry of Defence which he holds had not been kept informed on Emmerson's meeting the Tamil prisoners.

Emmerson criticised Sri Lanka's slow progress to address key human rights related issues. He even dubbed Sri Lanka as among one of the world's worst countries for torture in custody.

Emmerson said that Sri Lanka's transitional justice commitments were inadequate to ensure real progress, and there was little evidence that perpetrators of war crimes committed by members of the Sri Lankan armed forces were being brought to justice.

According to UN figures, up to 40,000 civilians were killed by security forces during Rajapaksa's regime that brought an end to the brutal civil war with with the defeat of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009.

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Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has said that TASMAC, one of the major revenue grossers for the Tamil Nadu government could not integrate its activities at various levels through computerisation even after 15 years and it has to evolve an IT Policy.

The CAG said though such "deficiencies" were pointed out in 2008-09, Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation (TASMAC) could not integrate its activities even after 15 years.

"The company having an annual turnover of more than Rs 30,200 crore could not integrate its activities at CO (Corporate Office), depos, SRM (Senior Regional Managers) and DM (District Managers) offices as well as RV (retail vending) shops through the computerised environment even after the lapse of 15 years," CAG observed.

TASMAC oversees the sale and distribution of liquor in Tamil Nadu.

Liquor sales is a major revenue grosser for the state government.

In its report for the year ended March 2016, CAG said, non-integration was mainly due to absence of an IT policy and strategic plan, besides execution of computerisation in a "piece-meal" manner without covering the offices of SRM, DM and RV shops.

"Further, the present levels of computerisation lacked adequate controls (and) validation checks, resulting in the data generated becoming unreliable," the auditor said.

Though these "deficiencies" were pointed out in 2008-09, and the company also agreed to overcome them, "persistence of same deficiencies even in 2015-16 revealed the lackadaisical approach to bring in computer-based decision making to manage its massive activities," it said.

The CAG report on PSUs was tabled in the Tamil Nadu Assembly today, on the last day of the ongoing session.

The CAG said there was "an urgent need" for TASMAC to frame an IT policy and reorient its activities for installing uniform software at CO, SRM, DM, depts and RV shops.

Regarding state-run discom Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation (TANGEDCO), CAG said its thermal power plants were found violating various pollution norms.

The power plants include those at Ennore, Tuticorin, Mettur and North Chennai.

"It was found that the thermal plants of TANGEDCO continued to be functioning without adhering to the norms for air, water and noise pollution," it said.

For instance, suspended particle matter (SPM) levels at stack and carbon emission remained "high" due to non usage of clean beneficiated coal, keeping the station heat rate higher than the prescribed level, the report noted.

The plants also "polluted" sea and river water due to "absence" of effluent and sewage treatment plants, CAG said.

"The management of hazardous waste was also not as per the requirement of TNPCB (Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board)," it added.

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The four Billings mayoral candidates at Tuesdays forum  Bill Cole, Randy Hafer, Jeff Essmann, Danielle Egnew  split on hypothetical issues, such as whether theyd endorse a second run at a nondiscrimination ordinance or join other Montana mayors in support of the Paris Climate Accord.

For the record, Egnew and Hafer were ayes on both, while Essmann and Cole were opposed, although for nuanced reasons.

But on other topics  including handling growth, paying for public safety, making Billings attractive for people under 40 and using tax increment financing to help eliminate blight  the four frequently found common ground.

About 75 people turned out for the 90-minute forum, sponsored by the Yellowstone Democratic Club, held in the Fortin Culinary Center at the Billings Food Bank and moderated by former Mayor Chuck Tooley.

While answering questions posed by the audience, candidates managed a few quips. Cole noted the job comes with a parking space, which cinches the deal. He also said Billings cant be a Blockbuster city in a Netflix world.

Egnew said she talked to city utility engineer Louis Engels about the possibility of inserting turbines into the Yellowstone River to help offset the water treatment plants annual million-dollar energy bill. There are ways to lessen our footprint and pass on savings to customers, she said.

Hafer said it took only an hours chat with Public Works Director Dave Mumford to sign off on the home he designed for himself and his wife, Janna  a house thats off the grid and doesnt require city water and sewer service. We can do things, he said, that cant be done anywhere else.

During a dinner he attended with Montana State University President Waded Cruzado, Essmann heard her talk about a sense of malaise she encountered early in her term leading the university. After listening to a certain amount of staff grousing, she got tired of it and told her staff to focus not on what they dont have, but the tools they do have, Essmann said. That struck a chord with me, and thats the vision that I want to bring to the job of mayor.

Asked about legislative efforts to constrain tax increment financing, Essmann  himself a longtime state legislator  said the Legislature got a bad rap in terms of some of the bills produced. He said Billings might be wise to look at managing TIF districts internally, rather than hiring people for the job.

For Cole, TIF districts are critically important and have been very successful in Billings. Egnew said that her ancestors received TIF funds and have made areas of the community absolutely gorgeous. Hafer noted that 225 downtown projects have been paid for in part by TIF dollars. Its why the downtown looks the way it does and not how it looked 25 years ago, he said.

Hafer said reconsideration of a nondiscrimination ordinance  which the City Council turned away by a 6-5 vote in August 2014  fits with his pledge to make Billings happy, healthy and equitable.

We need to be a tolerant, welcoming community, he said. Thats part of what will make us attractive.

Essmann said hes never discriminated as an employer  instead firing four customers for verbally abusing his employees. But he would not support an NDO, because I believe it would be divisive.

Cole said its premature to address an NDO since theres no proposal before the council, and that the U.S. Supreme Court or a state constitutional amendment could well decide the issue. As an evangelical Christian, he said he had concerns about the rejected NDOs impact on people with seriously held religious beliefs.

Egnew, a Christian pastor whos married to a woman, said she was fired years ago in Billings for being gay. Thats not a comfortable place to be in, she said, adding that technology companies have told her they wont locate a facility in Billings because we have no hate policy in place. She also said that her memory of the NDO is that it exempted religious organizations.

City leadership, she said, has the responsibility for making it a non-issue in our city.

Candidates closed by telling the crowd why not holding local office can be an advantage.

Essmann said as mayor hed like to reorganize public hearings to reflect the Legislatures process and not allow council members to ask those testifying random questions.

Cole said he and the other candidates recognize they dont have the degree of knowledge that longtime local elected officials have, but most of us are pretty familiar with the process.

Egnew said she wont come to the job with hinky, jaded, upset feelings toward anyone. I come in genuinely excited to see what everyone has to offer.

We have a fabulous city staff, Hafer said. They know I sometimes try to push a little harder, but they are willing to try new things. Ive never had anyone say no because that was the easy thing to do.

A bonus, Hafer said, is that the city is embarking on a two-year rewrite of its zoning ordinances.

If anything is critical, its that, he said. How fun is that? We make it, and its ours. We can set it up however we want. Its an opportunity to do major exciting things.

The primary election is Sept. 12. The top two vote-getters will advance to the general election Nov. 7.
A teenage boy and a minor girl allegedly committed by consuming poison in Surajgarh area of Rajasthan's Jhunjhunu district after her family did not approve of their relationship, police said today.

The 19-year-old boy, a resident of Kuloth Kalan village, was in a relationship with a 16-year-old girl but the latter's family was against their relationship and even lodged a case against the boy, they said.

They were found unconscious last night in the Surajgarh panchayat samiti bhawan. The boy died at the SMS Hospital in Jaipur while the girl succumbed during treatment at a hospital in Chirawa area, police said.

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Three persons have been arrested for alleged involvement in a case of dacoity at Pure Tomar village in Amethi district, police said today.

The accused were held near Kasimpur area in Amethi by a team led by Jais SHO R P Shahi and sub inspector S K Pandey. They "confessed" to committing the crime on April 24, SP Balramachari told reporters today.

A country-made pistol, some live cartridges and two cellphones were recovered from them, he said.

The accused have been booked under relevant sections of the IPC and the Arms Act, the SP said.

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A Kenyan court today sentenced three men to life for stripping and sexually assaulting a woman they believed was dressed too provocatively.

The verdict capped a case that prompted hundreds to march through the capital Nairobi in short, fitted clothing in 2014, calling for an end to violence against women after a video of the attack was made public.

"We are equal, but it is equally important to respect the dignity of a woman," chief magistrate Francis Andayi said as he handed out the sentences.

"This is what many uncultured men do out there," he added.

The assault at a petrol station on Nairobi's outskirts, in which the victim was stripped, sexually assaulted and had her phone and cash stolen by a violent mob, was captured on camera and widely circulated on social media.

It was part of a rash of assaults against women and led activists mobilised under the hash tag #MyDressMyChoice to demonstrate.

The three men, Edward Gitau, Nicholas Mwangi and Meshak Mwangi, were technically given the death sentence. However Kenya's ban on carrying out executions means the trio will spend the rest of their lives in jail.

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The former head of Spanish bank Caja Madrid, who was convicted of graft along with ex-IMF chief Rodrigo Rato, was found dead with a gunshot wound to the chest, police said.

The body of Miguel Blesa, 69, was discovered today inside a car at a private estate in Villanueva del Rey in the southern province of Cordoba, a Guardia Civil police spokeswoman said.

Spanish media said his death appeared to be a suicide but police refused to confirm it, saying only that the authorities were investigating.

Spanish daily El Pais said Blesa was having breakfast with friends at the hunting estate and left the table to move his car. He was found dead shortly after, it added.

His body will undergo an autopsy at a forensics institute in Cordoba on Thursday to determine the cause of death, the regional government of Andalusia said in a statement.

Blesa, one of the figureheads of Spain's financial crisis who had links to senior members of the governing Popular Party, was chairman of Caja Madrid until it merged with six other troubled savings banks to create Bankia.

A court in February sentenced him to six years in jail for misusing the bank's corporate credit cards.

Rato, the one-time head of the International Monetary Fund who chaired Bankia between 2010 and 2012 when it was nationalised, was sentenced to four-and-a-half-years in prison over the same scandal.

The two men had appealed against their sentences and had been released on bail while the case was resolved.

In total, 65 former staff were found guilty of using corporate credit cards for irregular expenses such as buying jewels, paying for holidays or expensive clothes.

A total of 12 million euros is said to have been spent on the so-called "black cards".

The case sparked widespread anger when the scandal first broke in 2014, at a time when Spain was recovering from years of recession and a banking crisis partly triggered by Bankia's massive bailout.

Blesa was accused of setting up the scheme and was found guilty of having misappropriated 435,00 euros.

In 2013 he because the first prominent banker to go behind bars since the start of Spain's financial crisis.

He was jailed as part of a probe into Caja Madrid's purchase in 2008 at an inflated price of the City National Bank of Florida, but was released 15 days alter after that case was dropped.

Blesa was in the middle of another lawsuit involving irregular bonuses during his time at Caja Madrid. He always denied any wrongdoing.

"This has affected my image, my honour and my family," he said last year during his trial for the "black cards" affair.

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US President Donald Trump has announced his intention to nominate veteran diplomat and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman as next Ambassador to Russia, the White House has said.

Heading the Atlantic Council, a top US think-tank, Huntsman had previously served as the US Ambassador to China and Singapore.

Huntsman has an adopted daughter Asha from Gujarat, who he is raising in Hindu faith.

"Huntsman has had a distinguished career as a politician, diplomat, and businessman," the White House said announcing Trump's intention to nominate him as the US Ambassador to Russia.

"His robust record of public service includes service as US Ambassador to China and to Singapore, Deputy United States Trade Representative,Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Trade Development," the White House said.

He was also twice elected Governor of Utah. In the private sector, he is a director on numerous corporate boards including Hilton, Chevron, Ford Motor Company, and Caterpillar.

He and his wife Mary Kaye are the parents of seven children.

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US President Donald Trump met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at a second, previously undisclosed chat during the G20 summit in Germany this month, the White House confirmed today, raising new questions about their relationship.

After his much-publicised two-and-a-quarter-hour meeting on July 7 with Russian President Putin in Hamburg, President Trump chatted informally with the Russian leader for up to an additional hour later the same day, the Washington Post reported.

The second meeting, undisclosed at the time, took place at a dinner for G-20 leaders, a senior administration official said.

During the meal, Trump left his own seat to occupy a chair next to Putin. Trump approached alone, and Putin was attended only by his official interpreter, the report said.

In a statement issued last night after the US media published reports of the second conversation, the White House said that "there was no 'second meeting' between President Trump and President Putin, just a "brief" conversation at the end of a dinner.

"The insinuation that the White House has tried to 'hide' a second meeting," it said, "is false, malicious and absurd."



"All the leaders" circulated around the room throughout the dinner, and "President Trump spoke with many leaders," the statement said. "As the dinner was concluding," it said, Trump spoke "briefly" with Putin, who was seated next to first lady Melania Trump.

"Each couple was allowed one translator. The American translator accompanying President Trump spoke Japanese. When President Trump spoke to President Putin, the two leaders used the Russian translator, since the American translator did not speak Russian," the White House said.

The two leaders' relationship is under intense scrutiny amid allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign during the US presidential polls.

US intelligence believe Russia helped Trump in last year's presidential election, something denied by Moscow. Trump has rejected any collusion.

Trump also said that Putin was unlikely to have preferred him over Hillary Clinton as president, since his goals include taking international energy business away from Russia and building up the US military.

"The dinner encounter appeared to underscore the extent to which Trump was eager throughout the summit to cultivate a friendship with Putin. During last year's election campaign, he spoke admiringly of the Russian leader and at times seemed captivated by him," the Post noted.

The New York Times said the undisclosed Trump-Putin meeting raises new questions about their relationship.

"The intimate dinner conversation, of which there is no official US government record, because no American official other than the president was involved, is the latest to raise eyebrows. Foreign leaders who witnessed it later commented privately on the oddity of an American president flaunting such a close rapport with his Russian counterpart," the daily commented.

The dinner conversation with Putin was first reported on Monday by Ian Bremmer, president of the New York-based Eurasia Group, in a newsletter to group clients.

The absence of American translator in the meeting was breach of national security protocol, he said.

"Never in my life as a political scientist have I seen two countries -major countries -with a constellation of national interests that are as dissonant, while the two leaders seem to be doing everything possible to make nice and be close to each other," Bremmer told Bloomberg.

"Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the US, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesn't care," Bremmer was quoted as saying by The New York Times.

Bremmer said he heard directly from attendees.

"They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled," he said.

But in a series of two tweets, Trump slammed the media.

"Fake story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany," the US president said.

"Press knew about it. The Fake is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!" Trump said in another tweet.

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The senior-most military officer in the United Kingdom's Armed Forces will visit India this week to reinforce the UK-India defence and security partnership.

The Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS), AirChief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach GBE KCBADC DL, will meet senior Indian ministers and defence officers under the umbrella of the Defence and International Security Partnership.

He had last visited India in April 2015 as the UK's Vice Chief of the Defence Staff.

"I very much look forward to visiting India again. It is not only our shared history and democratic values that bind us together; but increasingly it is the threats and challenges to these values, that we face in an ever changing global environment, that bring us closer together, making the UK and India truly strategic defence partners," Sir Stuart said on the eve of his visit today.

"Whether standing shoulder to shoulder in countering terrorism and violent extremism, undertaking UN Peacekeeping operations, or forging ahead on developing advanced equipment programmes, the UK-India partnership is an enviable one internationally. I intend to ensure that my visit demonstrates further that the UK's commitment to India and our relationship is undisputed, now and for the future," he said.

His meetings will cover the growing strategic defence ties through the recently established Capability Partnerships; the threat of terrorism and extremism faced globally; multinational cooperation; upcoming exercises, and UN Peacekeeping, the British High Commission in New Delhi said.

He will visit Delhi and Kolkata over four days this week, with full details of his itinerary not revealed.

Stuart will also pay his respects to the 74,000 Indians who served and died in the First World War by laying a wreath of marigolds at India Gate.

"The UK and India's Armed Forces continue to benefit from a long-standing and close relationship. Both countries' Armed Forces are undergoing a transformation, and the learning experiences from each other in areas such as the joint aircraft carrier project, to combatting terrorism, to United Nations Peacekeeping, develops best practice between these global partners," an official UK statement said.

It added that the visit would complement and build upon that of the UK's Secretary of State for Defence, Sir Michael Fallon, who visited New Delhi in April this year.

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The municipal corporations have "derelicted" their duty to prevent unauthorised buildings from coming up in the city, an exasperated Delhi High Court today said, pulling up the civic bodies for the "hopeless" situation in the national capital.

A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar said that citizens are able to get away with not following the law because the municipal officials, who are responsible for implementing the regulations, are allowing it to happen.

The court said that the officials swing into action and book properties only after notices are issued in PILs. After that demolition orders are issued, but never enforced on the grounds that police force was not available.

"That is the standard operating procedure. We are exasperated with these (unauthorised construction) matters. How can someone even dig a hole in the ground to build a structure without your (MCDs) permission?



"What have you done to the city! If only you would do your job, Delhi would not be like this. It is such a hopeless situation," the bench said.

The court further said that the corporations are expected to "act with promptitude" when any illegal construction starts.

"Failure to do so is dereliction of duty and must entail disciplinary action apart from attracting penal consequences under the IPC," the bench said.

The court also said that the thousands of tonnes of garbage generated by the city is also on account of the illegal constructions.

In one of the matters related to encroachment of forest land by multi-storeyed buildings in Neb Sarai area of south Delhi, the court said somebody from the forest department and the south Delhi municipal corporation (SDMC) "must go to jail".

The bench said such buildings could not have come up without either authority being aware of it and directed them to comply with its earlier orders to take action against the encroachment and unauthorised construction in the area.

In another PIL related to unauthorised construction in Lado Sarai area of south Delhi, the court directed the corporation of the area to file a status report indicating action taken against illegal buildings.

The report shall also indicate the names of the officials of the building department of SDMC who were responsible for that area for the past several years.

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Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said today that all the appointments made in the Provincial Civil Services in Uttar Pradesh by the state public service commission since 2012 will be probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

A "strict law" will also be enacted to deal with those patronising criminals and the next session of the state legislature will be convened soon to pass the legislation if it cannot be done in the ongoing session, he said.

The chief minister was winding up discussion in the state Assembly on the annual budget for 2017-18.

In hard-hitting remarks apparently aimed at the previous Samajwadi Party government, Adityanath said, "What have you done to the UP PCS...Its credibility is in question. We will get all the appointments in UP PCS made since 2012 probed by the CBI."



His reference was to the period when Akhilesh Yadav headed a Samajwadi Party government in the state.

"There has not been a single appointment made since 2012 over which no accusing finger has been raised," the chief minister said, noting that there were at least 1.5 lakh posts in the police department lying vacant as "your intentions were not clear".

He said that the court had stopped the appointments which now his government will take up.

The chief minister also asserted that the crime graph had come down during the last four months of his government.

"During the present government, one hundred per cent FIRs were being lodged," he said.

Referring to the arrest of the main accused in the recent hooch tragedy in Azamgarh, he asked, "Does the arrested person not have links with Samajwadi Party? He was flourishing under political patronage."



The chief minister said that his government will not just act tough against criminals but bring a strict law to deal with those patronising them.

He also referred to recent murders in Sitapur and Raebareli to stress political patronage to criminals but did not elaborate for sake "political courtesy".

Lauding the budget for its "sabka saath, sabka vikas" vision, he said provisions had been made for every section of society "without any appeasement".

"For the first time in the history of the country, the state has got a such a big budget, which will be remembered by farmers for the loan waiver," he said.

The Adityanath government presented its first Rs 3,84,659.71 crore budget for 2017-18 in the Assembly on July 11, making a special provision of Rs 36,000 crore to honour BJP's poll promise of farm loan waiver through debt redemption.

The chief minister said every department had got higher allocation this time compared to the previous fiscal.

Pointing towards the opposition benches, he said, "You had nothing to do with development of the state. You were bothered only in self development."



He said, "You must thank God that I have not brought out a white paper. It would have made the state 'SP-BSP mukt', on the lines of 'Congress-mukt Bharat'."



Adityanath sought cooperation from opposition parties for ushering in all-round development of Uttar Pradesh to make it a developed state.

He said the government was keen on development of important religious places like Ayodhya, Kashi (Varanasi), Mathura-Vrindavan, and holy places on Buddha circuit "without caring for any criticism from any quarter", evoking 'Har Har Mahadev' and 'Jai Shri Ram' chants in the House.

Referring to the decision to provide power to all villages irrespective of its political importance "unlike the previous government", he said, if electricity is supplied to Deva (Deva Sharif), it will also be given to 'Mahadeva' temple.

However, dissatisfied with his nearly two-hour speech, the entire opposition staged a walkout, saying they were not allowed to seek clarifications.

The budget, which was presented by Finance Minister Rajesh Agarwal last week, is 10.9 per cent higher than last fiscal's and earmarks Rs 55,781.96 crore for new schemes.

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The United States remains commited to advancing regional integration among South Asian countries and is a key advocate for strengthening regional economic connectivity, US Consul General Craig Hall said today.

The US Consulate Kolkata is part of the effort, in part due to the city's strategic location at the crossroads between South and South-East Asia - which makes it a natural hub for regional connectivity," Hall said after a roundtable conference on Indo-Asian connectivity at the American Center here.

The meet was organised by US Consulate General in partnership with the Consumer Unity and Trust Society (CUTS International).

"Private sector participation and engagement are crucial to our approach, which seeks to create an enabling environment for business, stimulate investment and enhance regional stability and security through inclusive growth," Hall said.

"Working hand-in-hand with local partners, the United States is committed to making greater connectivity a reality in South Asia," he underscored.

At the roundtable meet, Hall referred to the large conference on Indo-Pacific connectivity in last December in which 300 participants, including three U.S. Ambassadors from across the region discussed US priorities in the region as well as heard from regional stakeholders.

CUTS Associate Director Prithviraj Nath told PTI on the sidelines, the "Kolkata roundtable meeting shared, discussed in a brainstorming session how to take forward the the agenda on connectivity at the 'Indo-Asian Connectivity for Shared Prosperity' conference on December 14-15, 2016 in Kolkata and subsequent Dhaka meet 'Facilitating Connectivity in the Bay of Bengal region'.

The Dhaka meet took place in the run-up to the Kolkata roundtable.

The conference brought together key policy makers - businessman, corporate, government officials, media, academics and civil society members from India, South and Southeast Asia and the US to identify and discuss common issues of concern obstructing the free flow of goods, services, explore investment opportunities and recommend possible solutions.

Nath said Kolkata can be the nodal centre for the reginal connectivity due to it's strategic location, "but we need pro-active action from central and state governments.

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BOZEMAN  The Gallatin County sheriff's office is investigating after shots were fired at a crop dusting airplane as it applied fungicide to a wheat field near Belgrade.

Headwaters Flying Service owner Cody Folkvord says his plane was hit twice Tuesday morning by shots fired from the ground. He was not injured and was able to land safely.

Folkvord says one shot hit the aircraft's left wing and the other hit its right wing, at most about 18 inches from the cockpit.

Undersheriff Dan Springer said detectives are investigating.
The US has provided more than 50 sophisticated hand-held explosive detectors to to combat terrorism, the American embassy said here today.

The Fido X3 explosives detectors were provided by the embassy's Office of the Defense Representative - Pakistan (ODRP) under a $128 million counter-explosive initiative.

"The Fido is a sophisticated hand-held device that will allow Pakistani soldiers determine in less than ten seconds whether an item is composed of explosives," the embassy said in a statement.

It said that new Fidos will be added to those previously provided to the Pakistan army, currently used in various counter-terrorism operations throughout the country, helping to seize explosives and save lives.

"This delivery from the US government provides world- class technology to the . A primary way to stop a bomb is to catch the bomb maker or attacker before he puts the device in position. This advanced system improves on previous versions used to great effect by the to safeguard the nation," said Brigadier General Kenneth Ekman, Chief of the US Embassy's ODRP.

He said the provision of equipment highlighted the US' partnership with the Pakistan Army in its ongoing efforts to combat terrorism, particularly in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region.

The shipment of Fido devices is part of an ongoing $128 million initiative funded by the US government to assist the Pakistan Army in defeating illegal explosives, the embassy said in a statement.

The US-Pakistan counter-explosive assistance programme includes armoured vehicles, bomb disposal robots, training, and the construction of a laboratory allowing for detailed analysis of explosive samples.

In recognition of the sacrifices made by Pakistani military personnel in the line of duty, the US and Pakistan are also partners in a programme to support amputees, the statement said.

This partnership will provide specialised medical equipment and training to allow Pakistan Army medical technicians to manufacture prosthetic limbs to improve the quality of an amputee's life, it added.

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Wi-Fi Local Area Network (LAN) was launched today at the Arunachal Pradesh secretariat making it the first secretariat in the country to be fully under wireless coverage.

Speaking at the inaugural programme, Chief Minister Pema Khandu said that the facility would overhaul work culture in the civil secretariat.

"With the civil secretariat going wireless I foresee seamless and smooth communications between ministries and departments and accelerated work delivery to the people," he said adding it was a positive step towards fulfilling the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a 'Digital India'.

"Our government from day one has focused on digitalizing all its offices with the sole motto of rooting out corruption. Paperless working system once it is in place will ensure transparency and accountability and leave no space for corruption.

"For this to happen the government needs the cooperation of its officers as well as the citizens," he said.

Reiterating his commitment to provide wi-fi facilities to citizens too, Khandu said soon the state capital complex (Itanagar-Naharlagun) will have specific wi-fi zones where people would get free accesses.

He advised the IT department to coordinate with departments like power and home to select specific zones in and around the capital that can be turned to free wi-fi zones.

The chief minister, however, cautioned against misuse of free access to wi-fi internet and asked National Informatics Center to put in place a mechanism for secured connectivity and prevent misuse of data on offer.

The wireless LAN project comprises state-of-the-art wireless access points with 1 Gbps bandwidth in each of its four blocks powered by 10 Gbps NIC backbone link, officials connected with it said.

The secured network can offer connections to up to 6000 employees and 500 visitors can access it at one go.

Officials can get access through their official (NIC) email ids, while visitors have to access through the SWAGAT mode that generates an OTP for login in.

The 157 access points installed across the secretariat premises would allow round the clock wifi access to officials and 8 hours per day to visitors, they added.

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Prince William and his wife Kate embarked today on a three-day visit to Germany billed as a "charm offensive" by local media as Britain begins thorny Brexit talks in earnest.

William, who is second in line to the British throne, and Kate touched down in Berlin from Poland accompanied by their young children George and Charlotte.

The first stop for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will be a luncheon at the giant modern office complex of Chancellor Angela Merkel, widely considered the European Union's most powerful leader.

German media said the long-planned visit was auspiciously timed as the negotiations on Britain leaving the EU get under way in fits and starts.

National broadsheet Sueddeutsche Zeitung called the young family "Her Majesty's Secret Weapon" and the German tour a "diplomatic mission" with the enthusiastic backing of the Foreign Office.

"They know better than anyone else on the island that the image of the United Kingdom on the continent is not the best at the moment," it said.

"What could you do in this situation to indicate to your neighbours that Britain is of course a stable nation? Obviously, you send in the royals."



website Spiegel Online called the visit a "charm offensive".

"The royals represent a kind of common sense that this hard ideological government of the Tories seems to have completely lost at the moment," its commentator Thomas Huetlin said.

Conservative daily Die Welt called the royal visit to Germany "a kind of rescue mission" a year after the fateful Brexit referendum which stunned the remaining 27 EU member states.

"William and Kate are in Germany with their children to lighten the mood," it wrote.

In Poland, the royal couple met freedom icon and Nobel peace laureate Lech Walesa and visited a former Nazi German concentration camp.

While in Berlin, William and Kate will greet the public at Brandenburg Gate, the landmark symbol of German unity, and view the sprawling Holocaust Memorial in the heart of the capital before meeting President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at his urban palace.

The couple will on Thursday move on to Heidelberg in the west, Cambridge's twin city, where they will take part in a rowing competition.

They return to Berlin late Thursday for a party at a century-old dance hall to meet Berliners working in "creative industries" before completing their European tour on Friday in the port city of Hamburg at the spectacular new Elbphilharmonie concert hall.

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A man divorced his wife by uttering 'talaq' thrice on the phone in Jaisalmer following which she approached the Rajasthan Women Commission.

The woman was married to Sabir Mohammad three years ago in Jodhpur, but had returned to her parents' home after two years alleging that she was harassed by her in-laws, Sudha Purohit, a member of Rajasthan Women Commission, said.

The couple has a one-year-old daughter.

The woman approached the panel yesterday claiming that her husband had divorced her over the phone, Purohit said.

She said the woman had earlier lodged a complaint about the harassment with Pratap Nagar police station in Jodhpur but later reached a compromise with her in-laws.

Since the harassment continued, she moved to Jaisalmer to be with her parents. She also lodged a complaint with the Mahila Thana of Jaisalmer police.

"Investigations into the alleged triple talaq matter are almost complete. We will present the case before the court for its decision in the matter," SP Jaisalmer Gaurav Yadav said.

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Indian Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has called upon WTO members to find a "permanent and lasting" solution on public stockholding of grains for food security programmes.

Speaking at the Graduate Institute here yesterday, she said a successful resolution of this issue without any undue concessions, compromise or unreasonable conditions would send out a strong signal that trade openness and addressing hunger need not be in conflict.

She also said India has often been perceived as being less than enthusiastic towards new issues such as e-commerce in the negotiations and is even sometimes accused of standing in the way of the WTO's progress.

"Nothing could be further from the truth. The world is not static. Nor are the challenges and issues that affect global trade," she said, adding that "but we have good reason to be cautious".

"Now, we must take the matter forward to its logical conclusion and bring about a permanent and lasting solution so that developing countries such as India have the freedom to use food reserves to feed their poor without the threat of violating any international obligations," the minister said further.

Developed countries, including the US, are pushing for inclusion of certain new issues like investment facilitation and e-commerce in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) agenda.

The minister said discussions on new issues divert attention from priorityareas for which mandates exist.

"What is the rationale for new issues when agreed issues well understood and critical to the world community are languishing. In contrast, new issues are yet to be fully understood," Sitharaman added.

Procurement and public stockholding for food security are invaluable instrumentalities used in developing countries where agriculture is mainly rain-fed and markets are imperfect and not integrated.

The food security issue concerns several developing nations which provide subsidised foodgrains to their poor.

A peace clause exists till a permanent solution is found for the food stockpiling issue. This clause has enabled India to continue procurement and stocking of foodgrain for distribution to the poor under its food security programme without attracting any kind of action from WTO members even if it breaches the 10 per cent subsidy cap as prescribed by the multilateral trade body.

The minister said many developing countries face daunting challenges, including a stagnant farm sector, inadequate domestic food stocks and volatility in food prices in international markets.

This is an issue of interest not just for India, but for a large number of other developing countries, she said.

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By Nidhi Verma and Nigam Prusty

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India has approved explorer Oil and Natural Gas Corp's (ONGC) plan to buy its 51.1 percent stake in state-refiner Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd (HPCL), a government source said on Wednesday, as New Delhi seeks to create a large integrated oil firm.

India has about a dozen state-owned oil and gas companies, with significant overlaps in operations. Alone they do not have the financial power to rival global oil majors in bids for overseas exploration and production assets.

India, the world's third-biggest oil consumer, imports about 80 percent of its crude needs and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set a target to cut dependence on oil imports by 10 percent by 2020.

The proceeds from the HPCL stake sale will also help the government pay for welfare programmes. Asia's third-largest economy aims to raise 725 billion rupees ($11.24 billion) through government stake sales in various companies.

The finance minister Arun Jaitley announced in February the plan to form a giant national oil company by combining other state-owned firms.

"The benefits of synergy would be huge," ONGC Chairman Dinesh K. Sarraf told .

"Today crude prices are down, so ONGC's profitability is down while gross refining margins and marketing margins of refiners are up so it makes a lot of sense for ONGC to make this acquisition," Sarraf said.

At current market prices, the government's 51.1 percent stake in HPCL is worth about $4.65 billion, according to calculations. At the end of March, state-run ONGC, the country's top explorer, had cash equivalents and bank balances of about 130 billion rupees ($2 billion), the company's website showed.

Sarraf said ONGC had yet to draw up a funding plan for the acquisition.

At a later date ONGC's refining subsidiary Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals will be merged with HPCL, the government source said.

"Though the idea is meritorious, a decision on this will be taken by the boards of HPCL and MRPL," Sarraf said, adding HPCL would continue to operate as a separate entity.

He said ONGC would not be required to make an open offer to buy HPCL's shares from the market.

HPCL control India's 11 percent refining capacity through its three plants, which can process 276,000 barrels of oil per day.

Oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan has said the merged oil company would have less risk and give it more leverage to go abroad as low oil prices hit producers' revenue and higher prices hurt fuel refiners.

In March, Pradhan said the integration of ONGC and HPCL was expected to be completed by the end of March next year.

(Editing by Susan Thomas)

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By Philip Scipio

NEW YORK (IFR) - Morgan Stanley beat arch rival Goldman Sachs in debt trading for the second quarter in a row, posting revenue of US$1.24 billion, down 4% compared to last year.

On Tuesday, Goldman set off alarms reporting revenue from fixed income commodity and currency trading of US$1.16bn, down 40%.

The result was stunning considering Morgan Stanley cut its FICC group by 25% more than a year ago. Despite the cut, the bank said it would wring more than US$1bn a quarter from FICC trading and this was the fifth consecutive quarter the bank beat the benchmark.

"The quarter was basically flat," said Morgan Stanley financial chief Jonathan Pruzan told IFR. "The one are area where we saw some decent activity was in foreign exchange and emerging markets where there was some volatility and geopolitical events."

But across the board there were no real stand outs, he said, just solid results reflective of the environment and existing opportunities, he said.

Rival Goldman pointed to its commodities trading business as one of the anchors dragging down its FICC performance.

Morgan Stanley said its commodities trading business, obviously very different than it was in the past, is more of a traditional sales and trading business around hedging and facilitating client activity and while down didn't materially impact performance in the quarter.

BEATING EXPECTATIONS

Morgan Stanley held onto its top ranking in equity trading, reporting revenue of US$2.2bn in the segment, easily beating a tough benchmark set by Goldman on Tuesday when it reported its best quarter in equity trading in two years. In equity trading, derivatives remained solid, partially offset by lower cash revenues driven by lower volatility.

The bank reported net income of US$1.8bn, or 87 cents a share, on revenue of US$9.5bn, up 7% from the year ago quarter. Analysts had expected earnings of 76 cents per share, on average, according to Thomson I/B/E/S, according to .

In investment banking Morgan Stanley saw revenue rise 35% on the strength of debt and equity underwriting. In equity underwriting revenue rose 87% to US$504m, the best in the quarter among big US banks and easily outperforming Goldman which was the only one of the five major US banks to see its equity underwriting revenue fall in the quarter.

In the quarter Morgan Stanley worked on roughly 30 IPOs, double what the bank did in the first quarter and double the average rate per quarter last year.

"Underwriting has recovered quite well there was good activity in follow-ons as well," Pruzan said. Global footprint we have continued to invest in that global footprint post crisis where others have not.

Revenue from debt underwriting at Morgan Stanley was up 77% at US$504m, reflecting higher non-investment grade loan and investment grade bond fees. Revenue from advisory was down 8% at US$504m.

(Reporting by Philip Scipio; Editing by Jack Doran)

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(Reuters) - Qualcomm Inc reported a 40 percent slump in quarterly profit as its escalating patent battle with Apple Inc took a toll on its business.

Shares of the company were down 2.3 percent at $55.40 after the bell on Wednesday.

The chipmaker said its results took a hit as Apple's contract manufacturers did not pay royalties due on sales of Apple products.

There has been long-running tension between the company and the iPhone maker over Qualcomm's practise of taking a cut of the total price of the phone in exchange for modem chips, which connect phones to wireless networks.

Apple Inc first sued the chipmaker in January, accusing it of overcharging for chips and refusing to pay some $1 billion in promised rebates.

Since then both companies have filed a series of lawsuits against each other.

Qualcomm's patent-licensing practices have also come under scrutiny from governments across the world and other customers.

The company said third-quarter results included a reduction in operating cash flow due to a $940 million payment to BlackBerry Ltd and a $927 million payment related to the Korea Free Trade Commission (KFTC) fine, in addition to the payments withheld by Apple to its contract manufacturers.

Qualcomm forecast current-quarter adjusted profit of 75 cents to 85 cents per share and revenue of $5.4 billion to 6.2 billion.

Analysts were expecting an adjusted profit of 90 cents per share and revenue of $5.48 billion, according to Thomson I/B/E/S.

Net income attributable to the company fell to $866 million, or 58 cents per share, in the third quarter ended June 25 from $1.44 billion, or 97 cents per share, a year earlier.

Revenue fell 11.1 percent to $5.4 billion. (http://bit.ly/2uAg96t)

Excluding items, the company earned 83 cents per share. Analysts had expected a profit of 81 cents per share.

(Reporting by Rishika Sadam in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A top U.S. Republican trade lawmaker on Wednesday questioned the Trump administration's plans to renegotiate a trade deal with U.S. ally South Korea, as well as the White House's focus on bilateral trade deals.

"I was a little surprised by the announcement on Korea by the president, mainly because that agreement's worked well for us," Representative Kevin Brady told in an interview.

The U.S. Trade Representative's office notified South Korea last week of its intent to negotiate amendments to the pact, calling for talks to start in August. Republican President Donald Trump said in April he planned to renegotiate or terminate what he called a "horrible" trade deal.

Since the pact, known as KORUS, went into effect in 2012, the U.S. trade deficit with South Korea has more than doubled to nearly $28 billion last year.

Brady, who chairs the trade- and tax-focused Ways and Means Committee in the House of Representatives, said the United States should be "aggressively stepping into the Asia-Pacific market."

"That's not an easy task if you're going to go at trade country-by-country ... This is a question of, do we want American trade values in the world or do we want China's trade values?" Brady said.

Three days after taking office in January, Trump officially withdrew the United States from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, keeping an election campaign promise and emphasizing a preference for bilateral trade deals.

Some critics of that move have said it opened a trade policy vacuum in Asia that China would move to fill.

"Clearly, this administration believes it can achieve more in the bilaterals. They deserve an opportunity to prove that's the case," Brady said. "I think regional agreements, multilateral, work because you can set standards across a broad number of countries."

(Reporting by Kevin Drawbaugh; Editing by Frances Kerry)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump, asked by a reporter on Wednesday if he would impose tariffs on steel imports, said it "could happen."

Trump initiated a 'Section 232' review of the U.S. steel industry that allows for the imposition of tariffs or quotas on imports if they are found to threaten national security. His Commerce Department has not yet issued its findings.

(Reporting by Steve Holland, writing by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

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MISSOULA  Robert Tuck, assistant professor of Japanese at the University of Montana, said he hopes Chinese authorities quickly release UM student Guthrie McLean.

"I'm deeply distressed to hear about this business in Zhengzhou," Tuck said Tuesday. "It's horrifying for everybody, and I really hope that he can be returned to his family as soon as possible in good health."

UM senior McLean was apprehended this week in China while on personal travel, said his mother, Jennifer McLean, in an email. Jennifer McLean, who teaches in the Henan province, said her son has not been charged and police are demanding money for his release.

She said the "shakedown" follows an altercation last month between the McLeans and a cab driver (see related story on page A1).

Tuck, in modern and classical language and literature, said Guthrie McLean works in the department, so the instructor saw the student daily. He said McLean is an East Asian studies major and has a passion for that region and thinks about issues such as the relations between the United States and China.

"He's hard working," Tuck said. "He's holding down a work-study job and also taking on a full load of courses."

UM legal counsel Lucy France said the student was abroad on personal travel, not a trip sanctioned by UM, so her office's involvement is limited. She said the legal office does not provide services in such cases, but it identifies those that are available.

France also said UM helps "connect the dots" and ensures that appropriate authorities such as the U.S. Department of State are notified. The UM legal office has not dealt with a student detained abroad since at least February 2013, when she started there.

In an email provided by Jennifer McLean, UM faculty member Zhen Cao also expressed distress at the situation.

"(I'm) very sorry and truly disturbed to hear of Guthrie's case," Cao said in a note to Jennifer. " ... Please trust we will do whatever we can to offer assistance."

A State Department spokesperson said the agency would not comment on the situation due to privacy concerns.
1. The phrase ____ is more effective than planes and tanks is a reference to a favorite remark of Mao about the relative unimportance of weaponry in deciding the outcome of a conflict. One company has been inspired by this and has crafted this into its products & branding. Name the relevant products and the company.
The China's virus policy prompted Apple to lower its forecast for shipments of the premium iPhone 14 models this week, dampening its sales ...

Some media companies, such as The New York Times and The New Yorker also had the labels as of 9 pm Pacific time, while others, like The Wall ...
As the Supreme Court hears petitions whether the right to privacy is a fundamental right, there are some key aspects that Aadhar Card holders should bear in mind, especially, because the government has made Aadhaar mandatory for a number of schemes and official purposes, including the filing of income tax returns.



Linking of PAN with Aadhaar: What it means

The government claims that by linking the Aadhaar with PAN, authorities will be able to crack down on people with multiple PAN cards, and those who are escaping the tax net. The government has also made it clear that all bank accounts will have to be linked to Aadhar by the end of this year. This, essentially, implies that the government will be able track financial transactions.

Amit Maheshwari, Partner, Ashok Maheshwary & Associates LLP, says, "As the bank accounts of the person would already have PAN as his/her KYC requirement, once Aadhaar is linked with PAN, it will certainly lead to automatic link with the bank accounts as well."

"Since Aadhaar is based on biometrics, the chances of duplication are much less as compared to PAN, which is not based on biometrics," Maheshwari adds.

According to the latest data, there are more than 24.37 crore PANs registered in the country, while Aadhaar card has been issued to 113 crore people. Against this, only 2.87 crore individuals filed income tax returns (in the assessment year 2012-2013), out of which 1.62 crore did not pay any tax - leaving the number of taxpayers at just one per cent of the country's total population. Given the abysmally low number of tax payers in the country, the government intends to keep a close watch on tax evaders with this move.

Although the judgment is awaited, here's a low-down on how to link your PAN card with Aadhaar:

Register on the e-Filing portal of the Income Tax Department, www.incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in

Enter log-in ID, password and date of birth

After logging in, go to your profile setting which has the option of linking your Aadhaar Card. Generally, a pop-up window appears, prompting you to link your PAN card with Aadhaar card.

Check if the details such as name, date of birth and gender appearing on screen match with those on your Aadhaar card.

Enter your Aadhaar card number and click on the 'link now' button. If details on both the cards match, your card will be linked instantly.

Many civil rights activists have raised concerns about privacy and security of data under Aadhar. Bangalore-based civil society group, The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), has expressed concerns over the lack of security features associated with Aadhaar-linked financial transactions.

Authored by Amber Sinha and Srinivas Kodali, the CIS report pointed out that unless sufficient security features are added, the system is prone to financial frauds.

"The availability of large datasets of Aadhaar numbers along with bank account numbers and phone numbers on the Internet increases the risk of financial fraud," the report said.

According to the authors, social engineering is often used to find out bank account details, credit card numbers and passwords to steal money from people's accounts.

"One of the prime examples is individuals receiving phone calls from someone claiming to be from the bank. Aadhaar data makes this process much easier for fraud and increases the risk around transactions. In the US, the ease of getting Social Security Numbers from public databases has resulted in numerous cases of identity theft. These risks increase multifold in India due the proliferation of Aadhaar numbers and other related data available," the report pointed out.

How secure is Aadhar Pay?

In May, when malicious ransomware (in which the attacker locks down your computer and demands money to unlock it) infected hundreds of computers in different countries, questions were raised on how safe are we from cyber attacks, especially when digital transactions are increasing by leaps and bounds?

The government launched Aadhaar Pay, a platform that allows you to make payments using Aadhaar number-linked bank accounts. It is a merchant version of Aadhaar-enabled payment system which lets you make payments without a smartphone. One just requires the fingerprint of the payer for authentication; there is no need for a POS machine to swipe the card.

However, when passwords are fallible, how reliable can biometric authentication from Aadhaar Pay be, particularly when there have been cases of leakage of Aadhaar data? According to some experts, Aadhaar authentication is pretty strong because you cannot connect to the Aadhaar database except through secured APIs.




The Cabinet today approved sale of government's stake in Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd (HPCL) to India's largest oil producer ONGC for Rs 30,000 crore, a top government source said.

Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) will buy government's 51.11 per cent stake in HPCL but will not have to make an open offer as the government's holding is being transferred to another state-run firm and the ownership isn't changing.

HPCL will become a subsidiary of ONGC and will remain a listed company post the acquisition, the source said adding the boad of the refining and marketing company will continue to remain in place.

Flowing from Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's Budget announcement of creating an integrated oil company, the government plans to divest its entire 51.11 per cent shareholding in India's third-biggest fuel retailer HPCL to oil producer ONGC. As part of the transaction, HPCL may takeover operations of Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd.

ONGC currently owns 71.63 per cent of MRPL while HPCL has 16.96 per cent stake in it. The source said it makes better sense for ONGC to consolidate all the refining operations in one unit, he said.

MRPL will be the third refinery of HPCL, which already has units at Mumbai and Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. HPCL stock closed at Rs 368.75, down 2.32 per cent, on BSE, while ONGC ended 1.06 per cent up at Rs 161.75.

After the Cabinet nod, the government will move to appoint valuation and transaction advisers while ONGC too may decide to hire merchant bankers to arrive at the valuation of government shareholding.

ONGC had evaluated options of acquiring either HPCL or Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd (BPCL) - the two downstream oil refining and fuel marketing companies. It found the nation's second-biggest fuel retailer BPCL too expensive and conveyed its choice to the parent oil ministry, which relayed it to DIPAM.

ONGC has cash reserves of Rs 13,014 crore and to fund the government stake acquisition in HPCL, it will have to borrow at least Rs 10,000 crore, the source said.

BPCL has a market cap of Rs 1,01,622.07 crore and buying government's 54.93 per cent would alone have entailed an outgo of Rs 55,821 crore.

HPCL on the other hand has a market cap of Rs 56,162.88 and buying government's entire 51.11 per cent stake would entail an outgo of Rs 28,700 crore. Another Rs 14,600 crore or so would be required in case open offer for an additional 26 per cent has to be made.

Sources said the government was initially looking at creating an integrated oil company through merger of an oil producer with a refiner but the idea was dropped for the fear of repeating the Air India-Indian Airlines kind of a merger which is not considered successful.


As directed by the Supreme Court, the Haj subsidy has been gradually reduced since 2013. It has come down from Rs 680 crore in 2013 to Rs 405 crore in 2016.

The Supreme Court, while dealing with the Special Leave Petition (Civil) No. 28609 of 2011 vide its judgement dated 08.05.2012, inter alia, observed that Haj subsidy is something that is best done away and directed the Union Government to reduce the amount of subsidy and finally eliminate it.

Haj expenses are incurred due to pilgrims' air travel to Saudi Arabia, their accommodation, travel expenses for visiting Makkah and Madinah and other miscellaneous expenditure.

The Indian government does not extend any direct subsidy to individual pilgrims. However, it provides a certain amount of subsidy to the airlines flying the Haj pilgrims, which is the difference between the airfare fixed through tender and the uniform fare paid by the pilgrims to the Haj Committee of India (HCoI).

Pilgrims pay the HCoI a fixed amount for airfare, and this amount is decided every year. The balance fare payable to the airlines is paid by the Ministry of Civil Aviation as a subsidy.

Going by the statement presented in the Lok Sabha, the gradual reduction in subsidy may see a rise in the airfare for the Haj pilgrimage, but it will not affect other expenses, which are borne by the pilgrims on an actual basis.

In February 2017, the Lok Sabha also provided a cost comparison of Haj expenditure featuring Indian Hajis and pilgrims from other countries who send the largest number pilgrims to Saudi Arabia for Haj.
It has been over a month since Indian and Chinese forces have been on the edge over the tri-junction -India, China and Bhutan- dispute at Sikkim border. The conflict started with China's attempt to construct a road through Dokalam area which was opposed by Indian troops.

Now, China wants India to withdraw its forces from the area, but the area in strategically important to New Delhi. It cannot afford to allow Beijing to change the status-quo.

China has refused to start a dialogue with the Indian government unless it pulls its armed forces out of Dokalam area. Given the tough stand that both the countries have taken so far, it seems that the current face-off between two Asian giants could last for a while. India isn't the only country that China is engaged in at the border, it has a history of getting into conflict between its neighbouring countries.

According to the journal Council on Foreign Relations, China claims roughly 90 percent of the South China Sea as its exclusive economic zone. The Council in its report referred to a US Geological Survey which estimated that the South China Sea contains as much as 290 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and also accounts for about one-tenth of the entire annual global fish catch.

China's Geological Resources and Mining ministry estimated that the South China Sea may contain 17.7 billion tons of crude oil which is higher than that of Kuwait's 13 billion tons. The area is also important because, by some account, more than half the world's crude oil transported by sea passes through the South China Sea. Here are the main disputes:

China vs Japan: The Senkaku Islands are at the midst of dispute between China and Japan. The Senkaku Islands are located in the East China Sea between Japan, China, and the Taiwan. The Senkaku Islands dispute concerns a territorial conflict over a group of uninhabited islands known as the Senkaku Islands in Japan, the Diaoyu Islands in China, and Tiaoyutai Islands in the Taiwan. According to Korean academic Lee Seokwoo, it was only in the the latter half of 1970 when China started mulling over the the question of sovereignty over the islands after evidence related to the existence of oil reserves surfaced.

The matter became worse in 2012 when the Japanese government purchased three of the disputed islands from their private owner which prompted large-scale protests in China. Reacting to Japan's move, China set up the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone which included the Senkaku Islands. China also announced that it would require all aircraft entering the zone to file a flight plan and submit radio frequency or transponder information.

The United States Department has made it clear that it does not have any official position on the merits of the competing sovereignty claims. However, the US will have to come to Japan's aid if conflict escalates as it is bound to provide security to Japan under the 1960 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan. Top US government officials declared on multiple occasion that the islands fall under the 1960 Treaty between the United States and Japan which requires the US to assist Japan in defending the Senkaku islands if anyone attempts to control Japan-administered Islands.

China vs Philippines: Philippines dragged China to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS over China's "nine-dotted line" claim. The nine-dotted line claim refers to the demarcation line used initially by China and Taiwan for their claims of the major part of the South China Sea.

The contested area in the South China Sea includes the Paracel Islands, the Spratly Islands, and various other areas including the Pratas Islands, the Maccles field Bank and the Scarborough Shoal. China, however, refused to participate in the arbitration case. Earlier in 2016, the tribunal ruled in favor of the Philippines saying that China has "no historical rights" based on the nine-dash line. China, however, rejected the Tribunal's ruling.

China vs Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia: China and Vietnam fought their first long-drawn border war from 1979 to 1990. But after that they worked to improve their diplomatic ties. However, the two countries remain in dispute over territorial issues in the South China Sea. At the center of territorial conflict is Spratly Islands and Paracel Islands. The Philippines, Malaysia and other countries have also claimed the region in Spratly Islands. In one such development, former Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos in 1978 issued Presidential decree No 1596, declaring the north-western part of the Spratly Islands as Philippine territory.
Reserve Bank of India is set to release currency notes of denomination Rs 20 under the Mahatma Gandhi series-2005. The new notes will be released with the inset letter 'S' in both the number panels.

Another change that will be seen in the new currency notes will also carry the signature of RBI Governor Urjit Patel, which the older Rs 20 notes did not have.

The design of the new notes will not be changed in anyway and will remain the same as the ones released in September 2016 with the inset letter 'R'.

The older Rs 20 notes in circulation will continue to be legal tender.

An image of a note of Rs 200 denomination was being widely shared on social media earlier this month, even though no official confirmation about its authenticity came from the responsible authorities. Reports suggest that the printing process had begun and the central banks would soon issue the new notes.

The RBI reportedly intends to issue the Rs 200 notes to make daily transactions easier for people.

Last month, the RBI introduced a new series of the recently introduced Rs 500 notes.

"In continuation of issuing of Rs 500 denomination banknotes in Mahatma Gandhi (new) series from time to time which are currently legal tender, a new batch of banknotes with inset letter "A" in both the number panels, bearing the signature of Dr Urjit R. Patel Governor, Reserve Bank of India; with the year of printing "2017" on the reverse, are being issued," the central bank said in a statement.

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The World Bank will help orchestrate the Indian Railways ambitious Rs 5 lakh crore investment for a grand revamp, transforming the 164-year old network and making it a key contributor to the country's growth.

The World Bank is looking to help the state transporter break away from its colonial-era setbacks through strategic planning, digitisation, technological development, establishing a Railway University and Rail Tariff Authority.

The bank will also provide advisory services and programme management consultancy for this transformation exercise that is estimated to take 2-3 years.

"We needed this arrangement to build our capacity and deliver projects on a mission mode. World Bank's expertise would be a great gain," said a top rail ministry official, reported by The Economic Times.

In terms of planning, the bank has planned to create a body that will work on forecasting models, traffic optimization, etc.

"Further, an infrastructure plan for the next 10-15 years, after a detailed analysis on freight and passenger growth expected in India, is also envisaged to be created. The bank would be drawing that up as well," added the official.

Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu and his long-standing turn-around plan for the Indian Railways have seen many results over the years.

Most recently, Prabhu launched the Indian Railways' SAARTHI app that will now ease the burden on commuters by way of taking care of all their railway services.

The integrated mobile application will cater to various passenger requirements, including ticket booking, inquiry, on-board cleaning and ordering meal on a single platform.

From India's first solar-powered DEMU train, increased state-of-the-art facilities, faster express lines to better grievance redressal forum and plans of private railway stations, the complex transport system is witnessing a shift gradually.

Suresh Prabhu's ambitious investment of Rs 5 lakh crore for the Indian Railways in the next four years would see the Indian Railways spending Rs 1.31 lakh crore to augment capacity.

Finally, keeping in line with Prime Minister Modi's Digital India Programme, the Indian Railways will soon launch a 'digital enterprise' which the World Bank will play a key role in by integrating infrastructure and managing database.
The government is working on a consolidation plan for various public sector banks in order to create 3-4 global-sized banks and reduce the number of state-owned lenders to about 12 from the existing 21, an official told PTI.

The 21 public sector banks would get consolidated to 10-12 in the medium term, the official said. As part of a three-tier structure, the official said, there would be at least 3-4 banks of the size of State Bank of India (SBI), the country's largest lender.

Some region-centric banks like Punjab and Sind Bank and Andhra Bank will continue as independent entities while some mid-size lenders would also co-exist, the official added.

Last month, finance minister Arun Jaitley said the government is 'actively working' towards consolidation of public sector banks but declined to provide details, saying this was a price-sensitive information. Enthused by the success of SBI merger, the finance ministry is considering clearing another such proposal by this fiscal if bad loan situation comes under control by then.

According to former RBI governor C. Rangarajan, the system will have some large banks, some small banks, some local banks and so forth. "What is needed in the system is variety," Rangarajan said.

One of the possibilities is that large public sector banks (PSBs) like Punjab National Bank, Bank of Baroda, Canara Bank and Bank of India could try looking for potential candidates for acquisition, another official said, who did not wish to be identified.

Factors like regional balance, geographical reach, financial burden and smooth human resource transition have to be looked into while taking a merger decision, they said, adding a very weak bank should not be merged with a strong one "as it could pull the latter down".

In the last consolidation drive, five associate banks and Bharatiya Mahila Bank (BMB) became part of SBI on 1 April, 2017, catapulting the country's largest lender to among the top 50 banks in the world.

State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur (SBBJ), State Bank of Hyderabad (SBH), State Bank of Mysore (SBM), State Bank of Patiala (SBP) and State Bank of Travancore (SBT), besides BMB, were merged with SBI. With the merger, the total customer base of SBI reached around 37 crore with a branch network of around 24,000 and nearly 59,000 ATMs across the country. The merged entity began operation with deposit base of more than Rs 26 trillion and advances level of Rs 18.50 trillion.

The government in February had approved the merger of these five associate banks with SBI. Later in March, the cabinet approved merger of BMB as well. SBI first merged State Bank of Saurashtra with itself in 2008. Two years later, State Bank of Indore was merged with it.

(with inputs from PTI)


Dozens of Billings students with disabilities require intensive services to keep them safe and healthy at school. Billings Public Schools has had costs of up to $250,000 for one medically needy student for one year, according to Judy Povilaitis, director of special education.

Other students need full time occupational, physical or speech therapy. Some require licensed nurses to accompany them on the school bus. Others need personal care for toileting and tube feeding. The district provides $40,000 Hoyer lifts to assist disabled students, and has stair-climber equipment to allow wheelchairs to be pushed up staircases in the event of emergencies. Medicaid reimburses the district for only a portion of these special needs costs, but that reimbursement adds up to millions per year.

We pay for it up front and get a percentage back from Medicaid, Povilaitis explained.

If Congress and President Donald Trump cut or eliminate Medicaid programs  as has been proposed in pending legislation and in the president's budget  public schools will still be required to provide services to medically needy children. The money will have to come from the general fund that pays for teachers, technology, utilities and all other educational expenses.

Nationwide, about $4 billion a year in Medicaid reimbursement goes to K-12 schools to pay for services for special education and low-income students, according to Kimberly Hefling, writing for Politico earlier this month.

More than 300 Montana public school districts receive Medicaid reimbursements totaling roughly $55 million a year, according to Kirk Miller, executive director of School Administrators of Montana. About $35 million of that is federal funding.

Because Medicaid is traditionally spent on high-cost services such as occupational and physical therapy, nursing and specialized equipment like wheelchairs and power scooters, cuts to Medicaid would mean schools will have an even more difficult time providing a free and appropriate education to all students, Miller wrote in a May 25 Gazette guest opinion.

Montana public schools already spend a portion of their general fund budget to provide special education services, Miller told The Gazette this week. Loss of Medicaid reimbursement would have a direct impact on all students.

In addition to covering some costs of special education students, Medicaid covers certain mental health care for low-income students with diagnosed psychiatric disorders. A substantial portion of Medicaid reimbursement to Montana schools is for students served by Comprehensive School and Community Treatment, Miller said. CSCT puts teams of mental health professionals in schools to work with students, teachers and parents.

Washington, D.C., politicians have created tremendous uncertainty about health care policy this year. Private health insurers, insurance customers, employers, Medicaid enrollees, taxpayers, health care providers and schools really dont know what to expect.

We call on Montanas delegation  Sens. Steve Daines and Jon Tester and Rep. Greg Gianforte  to oppose any legislation that will harm our school kids. Medicaid helps ensure that public schools can fulfill their mission to serve all children.

Tester is on the record solidly in favor of protecting Medicaid for Montanans who need it. Daines has been ominously noncommittal in public comments. Gianforte has the opportunity to do right by the state that elected him just two months ago. That means rejecting proposals to cap federal funding, rejecting per capita limits and rejecting converting the program to block grants. The school kids whose care Medicaid partially pays arent average cost, they are high cost. If Medicaid doesnt pay, the costs will remain and our K-12 students will lose.
Reliance Jio has been drawing eyeballs since its launch in September and is most likely not going to break tradition when Reliance Industries holds its Annual General Meeting (AGM) on Friday. Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani is expected to make some crucial announcements revolving around telecom disruptor Reliance Jio which may include higher speeds and cheaper devices.

Reliance AGM will be held on July 21 and the most-anticipated declaration at the event this year is the launch of a really cheap 4G feature phone, along with launch of company's broadband network JioFibre. There might be more announcements related to Jio that might surface at the annual meet.

With so many things likely to happen, here's what to look out for related to Jio at the Reliance AGM:

Cheapest 4G phone, ever!

Internet users across India have been going gaga since pictures of what has been touted as the cheapest 4G phone were leaked earlier this month. Chairman Mukesh Ambani is likely to launch the device during the AGM.

The leaked pictures show a phone in black with physical alpha-numeric keypad and a huge torch button at the centre of the direction keys - visual characteristics reminiscent of the long-gone era of feature phones. The back of the phone shows a two megapixel camera unit.

The leak also suggests that the 4G VoLTE phone by Jio will come with 512MB of RAM paired with 4GB of internal storage, which is expected to be expandable up to 128GB via a microSD card.

The most striking aspect of the phone is its price; some reports suggest that the handset could be priced at an unbelievable Rs 500. Even if this proves to be merely wishful thinking, the phone will most probably be priced between Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,500.

It would seem that the company is sourcing handsets from various manufacturers. As recent reports suggest, Reliance has roped in Indian smartphone manufacturer Intex Technologies to make the handsets in India with Reliance Jio as a vendor. However, it will not have a say in the pricing or marketing of the phone. Earlier reports stated that Reliance has contacted Foxconn to manufacture the phones.

Reliance Jio's growth was exponential in the initial months of its launch but has gradually slumped. One of the biggest hurdles the company faces is the limited number of 4G-capable phones in the country. However, with Jio launching a cheap 4G handset, the number might go way beyond the existing user-base.

Pay less for 4G with Jio

Mukesh Ambani may announce a cut in Jio tariffs when he addresses the Reliance AGM on Friday. This will again be to expand consumer base, similar to the cheap 4g phone. Both the low-priced phone and smaller and lower tariffs are expected to complement each other.

Reports also suggest that Ambani might put an end to the freebies Jio customers have been enjoying since its launch, and introduce minimum floor rates. Minimum floor price, for both data and voice calls, has been demanded by a section of incumbent telecom operators, but implementing it could mean an end to freebies in the market.

4G to your home

This new announcement from Reliance Jio about JioFiber is expected to shake-up the broadband industry of the nation. Earlier this year, the company announced that they will be launching JioFiber in Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Ahmedabad, Jamnagar, Surat and Vadodara for free under its JioFiber Preview Offer.

Last week, a picture was posted on Reddit, showing us a glimpse of what the JioFiber plans might look like. The image shows that the company will be offering 100Mbps speed with a cap of 100GB per month at Rs 0 for 3 months.

The data is free but the user will have to pay Rs 4,500 for the installation.

However, even this amount can be refunded later, according to the company. One of the biggest factors with the new service will be a free-period of three months.

Later when the offer period ends, the broadband service prices are expected to start at Rs 500 for 600 GB data and for 1000 GB data at 100Mbps speed subscribers would be required to pay Rs 2,000 a month.

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Leading telecom players Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular on Tuesday sought an increase in the interconnection usage charge (IUC) from the current level of 14 paise per minute on the ground that terminating incoming calls from other telcos on their networks costs 30-35 paise per minute.

Any increase in IUC would lead to higher mobile call rates as the charge is included in the overall tariff paid by consumers.

New entrant Reliance Jio, however, came out strongly in favour not levying any charge on incoming calls.

The IUC is fixed by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. At present IUC of 14 paise per minute is levied on every incoming domestic call by the telecom operator receiving it.

When asked if telecom operators suggested increasing mobile termination rate in the range of 30-35 paise from 14 paise levels at present, Trai chairman Sharma answered in the affirmative without naming any particular operator.

Today

all the major operators participated. Some operators asked for reducing it, some said keep it constant at current level. Some others said that it should be increased,'' Sharma told journalists after a day long workshop meeting with telecom operators.

He said there are other charges that are part of IUC but 14 paise charge for handling domestic calls dominated the discussion during the workshop because of the high volume of calls that are subjected to these charges.

He did not give any timeline for firming up the IUC recommendations but said they will be finalised soon.

Airtel has said their cost of carrying incoming call is 30 paise and hence IUC should be raised so that they are able to recover their cost, said a senior industry executive who did not want to be identified.

Vodafone said the cost of carrying incoming calls on its network is 30 paise without taking into account the licence fees and 34 paise after including it, he disclosed.

Aditya Birla group company Idea Cellular has said that cost of carrying incoming call on its network is around 30 paise as per methodology used by Trai, while as per its own calculation the cost is 35 paise per minute. The company stated that it is unable to recover its basic cost at the current IUC rates.

Idea wants IUC to be raised so that telecom operators are able to recover cost of carrying load of incoming calls from other networks.

Trai in a Supreme Court affidavit in 2011 had said that telecom operators should be given time till 2014 to move to bill and keep regime. Under this, operators only keep record of incoming calls on their network but don't raise any demand from other operators.

The meeting comes amidst the ongoing price war between the incumbent players and new entrant Reliance Jio which has been offering free calls and data at dirt cheap rates.

The established players have been forced to slash tariffs to protect their market share and as a result while some companies have plunged into a loss in recent quarters others have seen their profits plummet.

The incumbent players claim that around 30% of the telecom sector earnings go to the government in taxes and levies, including spectrum usage charge and licence fees. The total debt for the sector is at around Rs 4.5 lakh crore.

The government has started looking into the issue as the decline in profits will not only hit its revenue but could also lead to bad loans in the telecom sector having a cascading effect on banks.


While Montana has made progress in reducing youth smoking, Im very concerned that rates of both e-cigarette and cigar use among our states high school students are among the highest in the country.

Nearly 30 percent of Montana high school students use e-cigarettes compared to 13 percent who smoke regular cigarettes. Almost 17 percent of high school boys smoke cigars.

Im not surprised that these products are so popular  my friends and classmates think theyre harmless and fun because they come in sweet flavors. Its mind-boggling that tobacco products can still be sold in flavors that clearly appeal to kids, like gummy bear and pop tarts for e-cigarettes or banana smash and sticky sweets for cigars.

Research has found that most kids who use e-cigarettes or cigars started with flavored products. Congress should be doing all it can to prevent kids from using these tobacco products.

But some in Congress want to do the complete opposite  and they want to include provisions in critical funding bills that would weaken Food and Drug Administration rules to protect kids from these candy-flavored products. As members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Jon Tester and Sen. Steve Daines can help stop these harmful proposals. They must vote against any proposals that weaken FDA rules for e-cigarettes, cigars or other tobacco products. I hope we can count on Montanas leaders to protect kids, not the tobacco industry.

Willow Peterson

Bridger
A Mandan man indicted in a large-scale drug conspiracy was arrested in Bismarck early Tuesday morning by members of the U.S. Marshals Services High Plains Fugitive Task Force with assistance from Bismarck-Mandans Metro Area Narcotics Task Force.

Christian H. Rivera-Rivera, aka Albino, 23, was taken into custody without incident at about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday at a construction site located near the intersection of Burlington Drive and Rock Island Place in Bismarck. Rivera-Rivera was arrested as the result of information received from an Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force in San Juan, Puerto Rico, according to a statement released by Dan Orr, Acting U.S. Marshal for the District of North Dakota.

Rivera-Rivera had an initial appearance in federal court at 1:30 p.m. in Bismarck. He pleaded not guilty and was held in custody pending a detention hearing.

Rivera-Rivera, among 27 co-defendants, was indicted in federal court in Puerto Rico on July 12. Simultaneous to the arrest operation in Bismarck, U.S. Marshals in Puerto Rico arrested 25 of the other 26 defendants. During those arrests, automatic weapons, large quantities of cocaine and cash were seized.

The alleged drug conspiracy is to have occurred in Puerto Rico and the continental United States.

According to officials in the Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Marshals in Puerto Rico, the alleged criminal organization obtained large quantities of drugs from multiple sources, including a government official from the nation of Haiti.

This arrest was a well-coordinated effort to remove from the community a man alleged to have committed serious crimes with a dangerous group of drug traffickers," Acting U.S. Marshal Dan Orr said. "This group is not known to have operated here in North Dakota, but the danger for that to occur has now been prevented. Im very proud of the work our task force officers did today.

The High Plains Fugitive Task Force is led by the U.S. Marshals Service. Other member agencies include U.S. Border Patrol, Cass County Sheriffs, North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, North Dakota Probation and Parole, Fargo Police Department, West Fargo Police Department, Moorhead Police Department and Grand Forks Police Department.
Ahmed Abba, le correspondant de RFI en langue haoussa via Facebook profile

The Committee to Protect Journalists will honour journalists from Cameroon, Mexico, Thailand, and Yemen with its 2017 International Press Freedom Awards.

The journalists have faced government harassment, death threats, or imprisonment in their pursuit of the truth. CPJ is also honouring PBS journalist Judy Woodruff with its inaugural Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award.

CPJ's 2017 IPFA awardees are:

Ahmed Abba, a correspondent for Radio France Internationale's Hausa service, who was imprisoned in Cameroon in July 2015. He was convicted of terrorism-related charges and sentenced in early 2017 to 10 years in prison in connection with his coverage of the extremist sect Boko Haram.

Patricia Mayorga, a correspondent for the Mexico City-based newsmagazine Proceso, who has received threats over her coverage of alleged links between Mexico's ruling party and organised crime, forced disappearances, and human rights issues.

Pravit Rojanaphruk, a reporter and longtime press freedom advocate in Thailand, who has maintained his critical tone and probing reporting style despite being under military threat.

Afrah Nasser, a leading Yemeni reporter and blogger, who covers tensions in her home country from Sweden, where she lives in exile. Nasser, who also reports on human rights violations, women's issues, and press freedom, fled Yemen after receiving death threats over articles that criticised the regime during the 2011 uprising.

"Journalists around the world face growing threats and pressure," said CPJ executive director Joel Simon. "Those we honour are the most courageous and committed. They stand as an example that journalism matters."

CPJ's inaugural Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award will be presented to American Judy Woodruff, the award-winning broadcast journalist and managing editor of PBS NewsHour. Woodruff has covered news and politics at CNN, NBC, and PBS for more than three decades. The award honours the memory of Gwen Ifill, the award-winning PBS NewsHour journalist and CPJ senior advisor and former board member, who died in November 2016. The award will be presented to individuals who show extraordinary and sustained achievement in the cause of press freedom.

All of the winners will be honoured at CPJ's annual award and benefit dinner in November.
Volker Turk, Haut-Commissaire Assistant du HCR Archives

The senior official of the UN organization would come to inquire about the situation of the Nigerian refugees

The Assistant High Commissioner for the Protection of the United Nations for refugees, Mr. Volker Turk, is conducting an official visit to Cameroon from 18 to 19 July 2017. For the organization, the objective of this displacement is to meet with the Cameroonian authorities in order to exchange on the programme of Assistance and protection of Nigerian refugees living in the far North region.

The German Volker Turk is the second personality of the UNHCR. He has held several strategic functions within the organization and arrives in Cameroon in a context where the country is experiencing a refugee crisis. In fact, the media accuse Cameroon and UNHCR's representation, not to do anything to prevent the Nigerian refugees from returning to their villages when the security conditions are not guaranteed. One of the evidence of this malaise is the words of Issa Tchiroma, the spokesman for the Cameroonian government, who said that "Cameroon has no purpose to shelter refugees."

Accusations of course refuted by the two entities, but which nevertheless denote an increasing malaise caused by the presence of refugees. During his stay in Cameroon, Mr Turk will meet with the highest authorities in Cameroon, the representations of the donor countries, and the representatives of the international bodies (United Nations system, international NGOs, etc.).

As a reminder, in Cameroon, UNHCR provides protection and assistance to nearly 330 000 refugees and asylum-seekers living mostly in the eastern, Adamawa, northern and far north regions. UNHCR interventions also target nearly 228 000 internally displaced persons.
| BY Ricki Green |

Its no secret that Brisbane is home to some of the brightest creative minds in Australia, and with the annual Brisbane Advertising and Design Club (BADC) awards fast approaching, production company Light + Shade has solidified its support by stepping up to take over the mantle from The Empire Posts two year reign to become this years platinum sponsor. The Empire Post remains as a valued gold sponsor.

Celebrating its 43rd year, BADC is the longest serving industry club of its kind in Australia and with a record number of entries for 2017, BADC President Garry Smith says the support of Light + Shade further highlights the importance of the BADC Awards to the industry.

Says Smith: Were thrilled to welcome Light + Shade back to the BADC family at an elevated sponsorship status this year, and not only are they sponsoring the Awards Night but also the After Party, so it is sure to be another fantastic night. Celebrating the advertising and design industrys creative talents with such great support and backing from some of Brisbanes top companies is a real privilege. BADC is an ideal platform to help sponsors raise their profile across the industry, and were proud to have Light + Shade on board at this level for 2017.

Light + Shade co-director, Josh Zaini says aligning with BADC offers a unique opportunity to support the best and brightest in the advertising and design community.

Says Zaini: Brisbane is a bubbling pot of creative talent and we are thrilled to be throwing our support behind such a renowned event which celebrates great ideas within our local industry.

Brisbane is well and truly on the map and the work stemming from our city is absolutely world class and we cannot wait to see the standard from this years entries.

The BADC awards is Brisbanes only creative advertising and design awards with over 550 people attending last years event.

Says Smith: With a record number of entries this year, it is shaping up to be a fantastic night yet again.
| BY Ricki Green |

Says Stephanie Malkin, director of marketing, Jenny Craig: We are extremely excited about appointing Practicology as our digital strategists. We know that the digital platform is key to the success of our customer journey and the guys at Practicology have the drive and the vision to make our overall online consumer experience even better. Their strength in user experience, customer journey, conversion and analytics really stood out for us in the pitch process and we look forward to having the team take us into the future.
| BY Ricki Green |

Murdoch University has launched its Free Your Think platform across TV, radio, print, outdoor and online, via J. Walter Thompson, Perth.

The campaign idea plays off the notion that everyone is born with their own way of thinking that can be nurtured at Murdoch University, and aims to cut through the clutter of university marketing with its unconventional language and unique visual approach.

J. Walter Thompson, Perth creative director Paul Coghlan said most importantly, it truly embraces Murdoch Universitys core belief system of challenging convention and promoting innovation.

Says Coghlan: In this highly competitive sector, we knew Murdoch has a potent differentiator  Sir Walter Murdochs founding philosophy think for yourself. Free Your Think is a contemporary platform born directly out of this unique DNA, and marks a focussed direction for the brand, from student recruitment communications, to research and beyond. Hats off to a great client who has embraced this idea from the very top down.

The campaign showcases the unique stories of different students and staff who make up the University, each of whom have had their own Think brought to life, demonstrated in their achievements.

Says Neil Cullingford, A/director marketing and communications, Murdoch: A campaign platform such as Free Your Think brings to life the philosophy and people who make Murdoch unlike other universities.The campaign directly ties back to our founding principles and allows us to showcase the breadth of talent the University helps to thrive.

The campaign has been launched in collaboration with Initiative Media and Equilibrium.

Murdoch University:

Neil Cullingford  A/Director Marketing & Communications

Kristen Tyler  Marketing Manager

Toni ODonnell  Marketing Manager

Phil McVey  Manager Marketing Production

Vanessa Beal  Marketing Planner

Evelina Forde  Senior Digital Marketer

Beverly Ng  Marketing Coordinator

Chelsea Andreotta  School Marketing Coordinator

Agency: J Walter Thompson, Perth

Executive Creative Director: Simon Langley

Creative Director: Paul Coghlan

Creatives: Wilora Keeley, Tim Newton, Steve Dodds, Gerhard Myburgh

Designers: Mike Spiers, Nick Doring

Executive Production Director: Paul Friedmann

Associate Planning Director: Meredith Simpson

Account Management: Andrew Douglas

Production: Helium

Post Production & VFX: Vandal

VFX Creative Director: Richard Swan

VFX Exec Producers: Brenden Johnson & Anna Greensmith

Photography production: Luke Carter Wilton Photography

Sound production:

Brainestorm

Music: Mike Fragomeni
| BY Ricki Green |

Revlon has today launched a social video content campaign via Emotive, for its 24hour ColorStay Foundation, aimed at connecting with millennials and conveying the fast paced 24-hour lifestyle they lead.

The campaign is titled #GoSlay with ColorStay and features Australian actress and rising star, Isabelle Cornish.

Says Andrew Cameron, creative director, Emotive: The #GoSlay with ColorStay platform was born from a desire to inspire and empower woman to make the most of every day by doing what they love and doing it well. We wanted to connect with their core target in a social, relatable and engaging way.

In this 2 minute video, Revlon challenges Cornish to put the ColorStay 24hour long wear foundation to the test and hit the streets of New York City. Viewers see Cornish combing the vibrant streets as she attempts to seek out and photograph the women who were slaying it in their own way. The catch? Unbeknown to Cornish, her photos were put up on the big screen in Times Square.

The video celebrates the inspiring women of NYC, while also empowering women to own their success, embody goals and generally kick ass. The incredible photos of these NYC women perfectly captured the spirit of the #GoSlay mantra.

Says Marisa Laria, senior brand manager, Revlon: Revlon ColorStay foundation is absolutely iconic and has been the leader in long wear since the 1990s however, there are millennials who are unaware of the 24hour technology. So we wanted to create something that would cut through and appeal to a younger audience in a less traditional way. The campaign message GoSlay is a challenge not only for our millennial Isabelle but for all women to slay all day, push their limits, embrace their unique qualities and focus on their passions. So I hope we have inspired women to do just this.

The campaign launches nationally today (Wednesday 19th July), rolling out across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat and Twitter via both Revlon and Cornishs channels.

Client: Kaitlin Rady & Marisa Laria, Revlon

Creative & Production Agency: Emotive

Digital Amplification: Emotive

Creative Director: Andrew Cameron

Senior Producer: Lee-Ann Hyman

Local New York Producer: Tim Duffy

DOP: Evan Papageorgiou

Photographer: Lynda Churilla

Editor: Uthayan Selvaraj
The dogs rescued, including new-born puppies, passed their days in small, elevated cages or on chains. Photo by Jean Chung/For HSI

1.7K shares







As South Koreans get ready for the Bok Nal days of summer, which trigger a sharp increase in dog meat consumption in the country, Humane Society International (HSI) has pulled 149 more dogs from the terrible fate of being inhumanely killed and then carved up for use in soup.

The dogs weve saved from the pot  including new-born puppies  lived in small groups on a property in Yesan County, in western South Korea. Some passed their days in small, elevated cages, as is typical of dog meat farms, while the owner had others on chains that were hitched to dilapidated dog houses. The dogs were emaciated, with ribs that barked for food. Not only were they fearful and frustrated, they suffered from eye conditions, open sores, and foot and leg deformities. Those posture problems almost certainly stemmed from a combination of nutritional deficiencies and awkward maneuvering on metal caging since puppyhood.

The flies harass the dogs incessantly, on their bodies and within their cages, said Kelly OMeara, HSIs senior director of companion animals, who is on the ground to work on the rescue. The hot and humid weather worsens the living conditions, as the dogs dont get water or food regularly, and they struggle just to get through each day.

Instead of being funneled to a nearby dog meat market for Bok Nal, the dogs are now finding their way to animal shelters and rescues in the United States, thanks to our intervention. The first of them arrived stateside yesterday, and others will continue to land here in coming weeks. Fifteen puppies who are too young to fly will remain with their moms at a foster home in Korea until they can make the trip to the United States.

One of the dogs we rescued has been named Emily, and shes a beautiful young mastiff-cross suffering from painful skin diseases and swollen paws. HSI found her cowering in her cage, too afraid to lift her head or make eye contact. Angel, a four-month-old puppy who had been kept in isolation, was so desperate for company that she leapt into the arms of our HSI team when they first opened her rusty cage. Our team never needed that motivation to conduct these operations, but what a signal and what an affirmation of the life-saving, life-changing work our team is doing.

This is the ninth dog meat farm that HSI has permanently closed since 2014, rescuing and rehoming nearly 1,000 dogs by working in cooperation with dog meat farmers. The farmer whose dog meat farm we just closed approached HSI because he is considering a move into crop growing. HSI will help him with a business plan to transition into a more humane livelihood, as we have with other dog meat farmers. We are grateful for the support of the Eric S. Margolis Family Foundation in making this rescue possible.

Although fewer and fewer Koreans now consume dog meat, farmers raised more than 2.5 million dogs on thousands of dog meat farms across South Korea  the only country in the world to commercially raise dogs for human consumption. The dogs have a miserable life, followed by a terrible, sometimes prolonged death. Electrocution is the most common method of killing, and it can take up to 20 minutes for some dogs to die. Dog meat traders also hang the dogs, and often they are killed in full view of their kind, making their final moments a social nightmare, packed with dread and hyper-anxiety.

While we recognize that its impossible for us to save every dog trapped in a cage or on a chain and destined for the meat trade, we can change the world for the ones we take into our care. Whats more, we are attacking the problem at many levels to bring an end to this trade altogether. With the farm closures, we are not only freeing individual dogs trapped in this cruel trade and giving them a new lease on life while raising awareness about the dog meat trade, but we are also providing the South Korean government with a successful blueprint for change to scrap the entire, sordid industry.

We are working to dispel mistaken beliefs around consuming dog meat. Although eating dog meat is a dying practice in Korea, many Koreans who dont otherwise eat it are likely to do so during Bok Nal in the mistaken belief that it invigorates the blood in the sluggish heat.

Throughout the summer, HSI is taking its campaign to the streets of Seoul to raise awareness, including iDog, our virtual reality experience that shows Koreans the disgusting conditions in which the dogs are forced to live on the dog meat farms. Most Koreans are unaware of what a dog meat farm really looks like. We are also trying to dispel a widespread misconception that farmed dogs are somehow different from companion dogs.

We rolled out on the Seoul subway an eye-catching advertising poster featuring Korean-American actor Daniel Henney, and next we are launching Korean language PSAs with national TV stars Hunter and Sam Hammington. HSI is also running a petition in English and Korean with campaign partners Korea Animal Rights Advocates.

With all the work we are doing, there is cause for hope. Increasingly, farmers are finding exit strategies from the trade because of the dropping demand for dog meat, as opposition to eating dog grows among Korean citizens and politicians. In December last year, officials in the city of Seongnam expressed their desire to close down the dog meat section of Moran Market, the largest in the country, and transition traders to other livelihoods, much like HSI does. While some Moran dog traders are still resisting the move, others have already taken the opportunity to move into other businesses.

Recently, South Koreas newly elected President Moon Jae-in adopted a dog named Tory. Tory was rescued from living life on a dog meat farm. What a hopeful and extraordinary sign that is, as the world focuses attention on South Korea in the run-up to the 2018 Winter Olympics there.
| BY Ricki Green |

Former Clemenger BBDO Melbourne creative director and one of Australias most awarded creative talents, Emma Hill has returned to the industry in the role of managing partner and CD at The Shannon Company.

Responsible for many of Australias most iconic campaigns for brands including HBA/BUPA, Pure Blonde, Just Jeans, Libra, Sorbent, Ski Yoghurt, NAB and Dulux among others, Hill said she was excited to be back and for this next chapter in her career.

Says Hill: I loved my time in agency world. I worked with some amazing people, learnt a lot and created some cool work. But after 17 years, and then some time away creating an awesome little family, I got to a point in my career where what mattered to me completely changed, and it became a question of what do I really want to be about, what legacy do I want to leave?

As fun as it was, a traditional agency just didnt feel like the right fit anymore.

The Shannon Company isnt an agency. Its very different. Its a chance to create ideas that appeal to peoples sense of self, community and integrity that can ultimately change the way people are in the world, in all kinds of positive ways. And it feels like really important and meaningful work everyday.

Throughout her career, Hill has won awards internationally and nationally, and been a judge at Cannes, Clio, AWARD and locally.

Partner Ian Forsyth said the company was thrilled to welcome Hill: Emma is an amazing talent with an outstanding track record of delivering effective creative campaigns. She brings to the team a new perspective and a boldness in approach. Were delighted to welcome her on board as a fellow managing partner.
| BY Lynchy |

HSAds South Korea has release new print work for K2. The concept behind the campaign is a very simple one: wherever climbing enthusiasts look, they see the world around them as a challenge.
Tuesday, July 18, 2017 at 8:40PM

With the LG V30 coming out at the end of August, which is the day before IFA kicks off in Berlin, anticipation is high for the new flagship. Now, we get to see more about the device as its been spotted on GeekBench app. It seems to be sporting the same specs that flagships coming out this year have: a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor and 4GB of RAM. Itll also reportedly run on the latest version of Android Nougat (7.1.2). Based on the GeekBench leak, it shows that the multicore score of the V30 is well over the 6,300 mark but it still doesnt beat the Xiaomi Mi 6 with its score over 6,700. That said, benchmark scores arent the only indicators whether a device will work well in real life. Wed just have to wait for the device to launch on August 31st in Germany.

Source: GSMArena
"We're just at the beginning of what Canberra's going to see. We wanted to get it out there as of [Wednesday], but we're continuing to talk to new restaurant partners and as soon as we have enough restaurants in place then we will open up to all of those areas," she said.
"Given [our] school is under review it's only fair and reasonable to request that money continue until you complete your review and a decision is made, and failing that, at the very least, continue funding until the end of the school year," the spokesperson said.
"There's been an impasse at a federal government level for many years now so it becomes the responsibility then of local leaders to be the heroes of this story and say 'You know what? We're going to take matters into our own hands'," Ms McKenzie said.
From Taysha Murtaugh, Country Living

The golden retriever is 1/2 of the popular Instagram duo, Watson and Kiko. Kiko's best friend, Watson, is a white golden retriever who is famous for his "trust falls". The cute canines can be seen cuddling (sometimes with their feline friend, Harry) in countless images on the account.

But despite his adorable appearance, Kiko has a sad secret. He suffers from anxiety. Yes, you read that right: Animals can have anxiety issues, too.

"Anxiety in pets is much the same as it is in humans. It's a chemical response in the brain," explains Gary Richter, MS, DVM, and author. "Just as with humans, it is not voluntary and neither your pet nor a human can easily make a conscious decision to 'turn it off'."

Sometimes, pets are genetically predisposed for anxiety, Richter says. " In other cases, anxiety is a learned behavior. Dogs and cats are creatures of habit and pattern. When their normal routine is disrupted it can cause stress and anxiety. For example, if a person works from home every day, their pet gets accustomed to them being there all the time. If the person then gets a new job, which takes them out of the house, this is a disruption in routine and may cause anxiety."

Loud noises like fireworks and thunderstorms may also lead to anxiety, as can inadequate socialization as in youth and experiences of abandonment. That's what happened to Kiko, who was stolen from his owner at the age of one. Three sad years later, she finally gave up hope of his return and got a new dog, Watson. Incredibly, Kiko was found in California shortly after and returned, skinny, flea-ridden, and anxious, to his original owner in Washington.

How to Know if Your Pet is Anxious

"If they begin behaving in ways that are outside their normal pattern, it could be a sign of stress," Richter says. Behaviors such as pacing, vocalization, inappropriate urination/defecation, etc. are all signs of an anxious animal. They may either seek out more attention and get 'clingy' or they may isolate themselves and hide. Some pets may even try to run away. It all depends on the individual."

Kiko is afraid of being alone and used to lick his paws and legs to self-soothe, leading to sores, his owner explained on Instagram. He also barks if they stop too long on walks and sometimes acts aggressive around other dogs. His owner works hard to make sure he feels safe, but the biggest source of comfort has come from his fellow dog, Watson. "Slowly I learned that Watson was helping [Kiko] with his anxieties," she shared. "They quickly became inseparable and best friends."

What To Do if You Suspect Your Pet is Anxious

Seek out the professional help of a veterinarian, trainer, or behaviorist with experience treating anxiety. "Just like in humans however, anxiety is tough to deal with because it is not a 'rational' behavior," Richter says. "It's instinctual and chemical. If you can't talk a person out of a panic attack, you certainly can't talk a dog down from one."

The solution could be as simple as spending more time with your dog, Richter says, but in more serious circumstances, a vet may also prescribe medications. " In my practice, we use natural alternatives (valerian, l-theanine, lavender, CBD) to help with anxiety as well," Richter explains. For Kiko, extra love and attention from his family-especially Watson-seems to have worked wonders.

"Although this Instagram account started just about Watson it has become more than that. It's about two golden retriever brothers who found each other to love and help one another," reads a caption on Kiko and Watson's Instagram. "To inspire people with there [sic] story and to teach others and myself about compassion, love and the true value of friendship. I think I wasn't meant to be Kiko's best friend but Watson for sure was. And even though I love Kiko so much I know that Watson is his true love and if that makes him happy it makes me happy."
We need to talk about those goals.

The long-term targets states have put forward in the Every Student Succeeds Act have gotten a lot of attention, positive and negative. Whats a goal? Think about things like 75 percent of students scoring proficient in English/language arts in 13 years, or getting a certain share of kids to graduate on time in eight years.

But theres something else you should know here: In several situations there may not be any consequences for missing these big targets.

Lets focus on districts first. Under ESSA, if a district falls short of reaching a goal on any particular indicator, nothing has to happen to that district. By contrast, under the No Child Left Behind Act, ESSAs predecessor, the adequate yearly progress targets applied to both schools and districts.

And what about schools? Nevada plans to use its goals two different ways in school accountability. They want to use them when identifying schools for interventions, and for awarding overall points in school ratings. But theres nothing forcing states to incorporate goals directly in this sort of way into ratings and other policies impacting individual schools.

ESSA gives states a lot more flexibility in how goals are used and how prominent they are in state accountability systems than No Child Left Behind, said Anne Hyslop, an Education Department official in the Obama administration who now works at Chiefs for Change.

ESSA technically requires achievement and academic indicators to be based on these goals, but in practice they can be aspirational. In fact, weakening the link between goals and consequences for schools began before ESSA, Hyslop notes, when the Obama administrations waivers saved schools from the most severe consequences of missing out on academic goals. So ESSA sort of continues a trend and doesnt start a new one. In general, goals are less high-stakes now than under No Child Left Behind.

So is this a good or bad thing? In Hyslops view, states can use those goals to create aligned (and helpful) accountability systems, even if they dont require interventions or other consequences for schools that miss them. And states can also use interim goals to identify and even reward schools that are clearly on the right track, even if they might ultimately fall short of the long-term targets. A key feature of any system for school leaders, Hyslop noted, is to have a clear sense of what performance expectations are.

Video: ESSA Explained in 3 Minutes

Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .
Our Promise: Welcome to Care2, the world's largest community for good. Here, you'll find over 45 million like-minded people working towards progress, kindness, and lasting impact.

Care2 Stands Against: bigots, racists, bullies, science deniers, misogynists, gun lobbyists, xenophobes, the willfully ignorant, animal abusers, frackers, and other mean people. If you find yourself aligning with any of those folks, you can move along, nothing to see here.

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You are our people. You Care. We Care2.
By Vinod Lobo

For years, weve been talking about how adult English language learners (ELLs) make up a significant part of the estimated 36 million adults in the U.S. who read at a 3rd-grade level or below. Only 10% of adult ELLs are able to take advantage of federally funded programs. So what about the forgotten 90% who are severely underserved? Its time to stop talking about teaching adults English reading and start taking action .

Recent data shows that adult ELLs engaging in a blended model of in-person and at-home smartphone-based learning improved at an average of 7.8 points on the CASAS scale. (CASAS is an assessment designed to test language proficiency and mastery.) These are significant gains achieved in just 10 weeks. This tells us that the blended approach works. Now, we have to scale it up.

First, the Funding

Up until three years ago, there was virtually no state funding for adult education programs , and federal funding was hard to come by. Adults with a desire to learn English would get on waiting lists for in-person classes, attempt to learn the language on their own, or try to learn it from their children.

In 2015, California launched the Adult Education Block Grant (AEBG ), which created 71 consortia around the state that include community colleges, school districts, and other education providers. The goal was to improve coordination and better serve the needs of adult learners within each region. In two years, $500 million of state AEBG funding was divided among the consortia and providers to support adult education programs throughout the state. Since the funding was put in place, there has been increased coordination and accountability for all members of the consortia, which has had a positive impact on Californias adult ELL programs. For example, the AEBG requires educational providers to test and report on learners improvements using assessments such as the CASAS test.

Increased Enrollment

A few years ago, budget cuts forced the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to dramatically decrease the size of its adult education program from about 300,000 students to fewer than 100,000. Since then, thanks to the AEBG funding, LAUSD and a number of other programs across California have slowly been able to build their programs back up by adding more educators, resources, and in turn, more students.

The AEBG has also allowed a number of adult education programs, like the one at Sweetwater Union High School District in Chula Vista, CA, to expand access. Sweetwater serves more than 25,000 adult learners spread among four district schools and 20 off-site locations. While some students take courses virtually and check in with teachers via phone or email, a majority engage in a blended approach of in-person and at-home learning.

Educators at Sweetwater understand that the key to success for any adult ed program is flexibility. Unlike young students, adult ELLs often have other responsibilities such as a job (or multiple jobs) and families, making it more difficult for them to regularly attend classes. The grant has allowed Sweetwater to expand its offerings and provide digital resources that support students learning outside the classroom.

Learning English on the Go

Low-literate adults often do not have computer or Internet access at home. However, a report from Digital Promise notes that an estimated 75% of students enrolled in adult education programs own smartphones. For many of the adult ELLs, an app is the answer. Today, thousands of adult learners are using Learning Upgrade , a differentiated app-based curriculum featuring songs, videos, and games in 300 English and 600 math lessons . Although users may only have time to engage with the app for a few minutes in a row, those minutes add up. Learners who used to spend 30 minutes per week on a lab computer at an adult school can now spend two to four (or more) hours per week on their phones. Learners complete lessons everywhere including but not limited to - on the bus, at school waiting for children, on work breaks, or at the doctors office.

By offering a curriculum of sequenced lessons that offer step-by-step proficiency and can be completed on a learners smartphone, adult schools can increase time-on-task. This naturally leads to an acceleration of learning and engagement, allowing learners to reach proficiency more quickly. Once they make a breakthrough in adult basic education courses, adult ELLs are able to see new opportunities like earning a high school diploma or GED, getting better jobs, and even aiming for secondary education. More importantly, these blended learners are less likely to drop out since they experience incremental success.

Blended learning using smartphones is an exciting new frontier for adult education, and opens up new opportunities for large-scale success of apps that teach reading. The $7 Million Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE presented by Dollar General Literacy Foundation, a global competition challenging teams to develop mobile applications for adult learners that result in the greatest increase in literacy skills in just 12 months. The Learning Upgrade team has been selected as one of eight semi-finalists. More than 1,000 learners will be enrolled in the app for a one-year field trial to measure results. We are one the cusp of a mobile learning revolution and providing flexible and affordable education for adults with a desire to learn English.

A Literate Family is a Happy Family

Its not an uncommon sight to see parents and children reading together in the Sweetwater community. Many students in the Sweetwater adult ed program are parents themselves, which makes for powerful interactions with their children.

For years, California non-profit literacy programs have emphasized family literacy, or dual-generation learning. Thanks to the AEBG funding, adult education programs like the one at Sweetwater, are able to offer family-focused services. Particularly in English learner families, addressing the needs of the entire family makes a big difference. For example, as parents gain confidence in English and learn the basics of how schools work, they can converse with teachers, attend school meetings, and help their children with homework.

In addition to the progress being made at Sweetwater, the AEBG has allowed libraries to expand tutoring services and technology services; non-profits are offering access to the app and monitoring progress remotely; community colleges are trying out mobile-based distance learning; and workforce programs are investing in their employees by providing the app as a way for them to learn English.

Statistics show that a 1% rise in literacy skill scores can boost U.S. labor productivity by an estimated $225 billion per year. We now have the tools including smartphone-based learning apps and blended learning to scale up adult literacy efforts. If we can provide effective and flexible instruction to more adult ELLs , we can improve our economy--and help individuals reach their full potential and live the American dream.

Vinod Lobo is the founder and CEO of Learning Upgrade. He can be reached at vinod@learningupgrade.com and tweets @learningupgrade .
The results of the Research Eligibility Test (RET) 2017 has been released by the Gauhati University. Candidates can now check it out online on the official website of the university. Results have been declared for the 47 disciplines for which the exam was held.

Why is GU RET held?

Gauhati University Research Eligibility Test is held for granting admission to different PhD (Autumn Session) Programmes.

Where to find the GU RET 2017 Results?

The GU RET 2017 results are available at the online web portal of the University at gauhati.ac.in.

About GU RET

Gauhati University RET is the first screening test after the Central Application Process (CAP) for admission into the MPhil and PhD Programmes offered by the University. Results for the PhD programmes have been declared.

How to check GU RET 2017 results?

In order to check GU RET 2017 results, follow the steps given here:

Log on to the official web page of the University

Click on ' GU RET 2017' link

link Click on the discipline, for which you have appeared

Download the result file in .pdf format

Check your roll number

GU RET 2017 Paper pattern

GU RET 2017 comprised two papers: first paper comprising of reasoning and aptitude, mental ability, basic computer knowledge and second paper which tested the applicant's knowledge in the subject concerned.

What does the official notification read?

'The final admission of exempted applicants into the M.Phil./Ph.D. programme will be limited to a maximum of 50% (fifty percent) of total admitted applicants in any discipline in any academic year. Therefore, a candidate who is exempted from GU-RET may appear in GU-RET for admission through GU-RET, if the candidate is unable to get a seat out of the 50% seats.'

CA Finals and CPT 2017 Exam Results Declared: Check Now!
Consistently exposing English-learner students to the language before they begin their formal education could pave their path to bilingualism, according to new research from the University of Washington.

A research team from the universitys Institute of Learning & Brain Sciences traveled to Madrid, Spain, to work with English-learners there, using a language-intensive, small-group, play-based method that demonstrated encouraging results.

The tutored children outperformed peers who were enrolled in traditional bilingual programs, speaking in English five times as often and retaining their language skills more than four months after the program ended.

Published in the academic journal Mind, Brain and Education, the research offers insight into how to teach English to young children whose parents dont speak the language.

If the research team can reproduce the results in the United States, the work could have implications for how and when the nations English-learners are taught the language.

Even waiting until kindergarten to introduce English-learners to English could hinder efforts to help them learn the language, the lead researchers argue.

What were finding here is that ... you dont need a whole lot of time to expose babies to another language and have them start developing these bilingual skills, said Naja Ferjan Ramirez, a research scientist at the University of Washington. Its just that doing this earlier, as opposed to later, is much more efficient from the brains perspective.

Ferjan Ramirez and co-author Patricia Kuhl, a professor of speech and hearing sciences and co-director of the institute, designed the study, and hand-picked and trained a team of University of Washington students and recent graduates before sending them to Spain.

Close to 300 infants and children, from ages 7 months to nearly 3 years old, were split into two groups: Children who received daily, hour-long English tutoring sessions for 18 weeks, and those who remained in an existing bilingual program.

All the children were enrolled in public child care centers in Spain.

The children in the first group spent that hour in small groups with University of Washington tutors. Using a play-based method, the tutors spoke to the children in what the researchers called infant-directed speech or parentese"the high-pitched, simple grammar speech style parents use to talk to babies.

In the bilingual program, children spent two hours a week in a traditional classroom setting with higher student-teacher ratios.

The differences in performance were stark.

By the end of the 18-week program, children in the University of Washington program spoke an average of 74 English words or phrases per hour. The students in the traditional bilingual program only spoke 13 English words or phrases.

The study found that the native language skills of the children in the experimental program were not negatively affected by introducing a second language.

Some people are still concerned that bilingualism causes confusion, or that it slows down language learning, Ferjan Ramirez said. Science does not support either one of these two arguments.

While the researchers want to adapt the programs stateside in hopes of transferring the lessons learned in Madrid to families in the United States, they do acknowledge that smaller class sizes, highly-motivated tutors, and other variables could have influenced the studys results.

We have this existing program that worked in Spain for Spanish children learning English, Ferjan Ramirez said. We definitely believe that it has to work in the United States as well.

But the conditions to reproduce the results, at least on a grand scale, may not exist in the United States because of early-childhood policies and cultural divides.

Though a growing number of states are pushing for increased access to prekindergarten classes for 4-year-old ELLs, participation among Hispanics, and English-learners in particular, often lags behind other groups.

Historically, Hispanic parents have been less likely to enroll their children in early-childhood-education programs and Head Start, the federal education program designed to support the needs of low-income children and get them ready for elementary school.

Even when families want to enroll in early-childhood programs, transportation and costs can emerge as roadblocks.

For Further Reading

Building ELLs Early Literacy is Crucial

Pre-K Literacy Key to English-Language Learner Reclassification, Study Finds
Audi is proving badvertising is alive and well following the release a new ad which has stirred plenty of controversy in China.



As Advertising Age reports, the short commercial shows a couple getting married when the grooms mother interrupts the ceremony to inspect her soon to be daughter-in-law. She then proceeds to grab her nose, pull her ears, and inspect her mouth.

The mother eventually gives the groom the okay sign before noticing the brides less than blossoming bosom.

The clip then cuts to an Audi Q5 and says An important decision must be made carefully before promoting the companys lineup of pre-owned vehicles which have been certified by trained technicians.

While its obvious the commercial was trying to be light-hearted, it hasnt gone over well with a number of consumers who say the ad is degrading to women. As the publication notes, users took to Weibo to leave comments such as Audi in China regards women as secondhand cars.

The ad has sparked a lot of controversy but its interesting to note the automaker has already released another commercial where a womans boyfriend is compared to a used vehicle.

Video
The Honda Civic Tour is still going strong and this year the company is celebrating by revealing a Civic Type R designed by OneRepublic.



Featuring a relatively restrained appearance, the unique model has a gloss and matte black exterior with red accents on the hood, side skirts, and rear spoiler. The car also features two-tone alloy wheels, OneRepublic badging, and autographs from everyone in the band.

The car will be shown alongside a custom Honda Rebel motorcycle and the company says both vehicles were inspired by the bands love of modern architecture and clean design.

Honda will also be launching several contests including the Which Civic R You? sweepstakes which will award one lucky winner with their choice of a brand new Civic Sedan, Coupe, Hatchback, Si, or Type R. Fans will also be given the opportunity to win a Rebel motorcycle and a chance to see OneRepublic live in Los Angeles.

The 2017 Honda Civic Tour kicked off earlier this month and sees OneRepublic touring with special guests Fitz and The Tantrums as well as James Arthur. Before the tour wraps up on September 12th, it will visit a handful of cities including Dallas, Montreal, Phoenix, Toronto, and Mountain View, California.

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Court: Medical Board's Right to Records Outweighs Patients' Privacy Rights

The California Supreme Court said the state medical board did not need a warrant or subpoena to obtain a doctor's prescription history for his patients.

In Lewis v. Superior Court, the court said that the board's interest in protecting the public outweighed any privacy rights. The board acquired the patient information through the state's Controlled Substance Utilization Review and Evaluation System, "CURES."

"[W]e find that the balance tips in favor of the Board's interests in protecting the public from unlawful use and diversion of a particularly dangerous class of prescription drugs and protecting patients from negligent or incompetent physicians," Justice Goodwin Liu wrote.

CURES

CURES was created in 1996 to move California's drug monitoring system online. It is maintained by the state Department of Justice to ensure appropriate prescribing and dispensing of controlled substances.

The system allows doctors to check if patients are receiving drugs from other physicians, and also gives law enforcement and regulators access to the information.

The California Supreme Court considered the law after the medical board suspended Dr. Alwin Carl Lewis for unprofessional conduct, negligence, and failure to maintain adequate records. Lewis challenged the board's action in state court, alleging the board had violated "fundamental privacy protections."

A court of appeals ruled against him, and the supreme court affirmed in a unanimous opinion. Justice Liu, however, also wrote a concurring opinion to say that the doctor had properly alleged an invasion of privacy claim.

Invasion of Privacy

"The fact that the government regulates controlled substances does not eliminate patients' reasonable expectation of privacy," he wrote.

Liu said a pervasive regulatory scheme has "less significance when the area being regulated is particularly sensitive." Moreover, the patients did not choose to participate in the drug monitoring program.

"The electorate was concerned about more than public disclosure when it passed the Privacy Initiative in 1972," he said. "The voters were concerned that their privacy was violated whenever their personal information was used or accessed without reason."

In disclosing CURES data, however, Liu said the government's interests in monitoring controlled substances outweighed the patients' privacy rights.

Related Resources:
Photo: CTV A 73-year-old man has been charged in a double homicide in Vancouver's West End.

A 73-year-old man has been charged with two counts of murder in the July 9 double homicide in Vancouver's West End.

Police found the bodies of 57-year-old Sandra McInnes and 51-year-old Neil Croker in an apartment building at 1835 Morton Avenue on the Sunday afternoon.

While two suspects were initially taken into custody, they were released pending further investigation.

Leonard Landrick was arrested Monday night and charged with two counts of second-degree murder.

Police have not disclosed if the victims and accused knew each other, but they all lived in the building where the two victims were found.

Landrick has no prior criminal record in B.C.
Photo: verywell.com

As our understanding of the human brain improves along with our imaging technology, we are finally starting to unravel some of the unknowns about many psychiatric conditions.

For many years, bipolar disorder has been understood primarily based on its symptoms and the way patients respond to different treatments.

A study conducted by researchers at Salk Institute in California and published in 2015 in Nature is the first to show how bipolar disorder affects the brain at a cellular level as well as demonstrating how lithium works for some patients and not others.

This study took skin cells from six people with bipolar disorders, transformed them into stem cells and developed them into neurons.

When comparing these neurons with those from healthy volunteers, they found the ones from the bipolar patients were much more sensitive to stimuli than the others. They also found the mitochondria inside those cells were more active.

Of the six volunteers with bipolar disorder, half had responded well to lithium while half had not. Initially, all the cells from bipolar disorder were equally sensitive. When researchers tested their reaction to lithium exposure though, they behaved differently.

Cells from patients who responded to lithium treatment became less sensitive when exposed to the drug, but those from people who had not been helped by lithium remained highly sensitized.

Of course, this was an early study. We need to test findings on many more than six patients before we have a definitive result and we still dont know why some people respond to medication while others do not.

Yet, this is a good starting point and it is exciting to finally have the ability to observe reactions like these.

We can now continue to examine cells and probe them to discover why they react in different ways. This kind of research also gives us a chance to test potential new drugs for whether they affect the sensitivity of cells.

Chances are, if a new compound reduces the excitability of a neuron, it could have some effect in bipolar disorder.

Researchers from this study continue to observe cells over longer periods to learn whether the hypersensitivity is a long lasting characteristic or if cells eventually crash into a less active state  perhaps triggering a shift from mania to depression in the patient.

All this information continues to offer us more glimpses into the way psychiatric conditions affect our brains and will lead to better, more targeted and effective treatments in the future.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
Photo: Contributed Janice Foster, former board president of NONA, left, On Ouch, owner of The Rice Box, and Mark Nawrot, manager of Atlantis Waterslides.

The Rice Box and Atlantis are teaming up to raise money for the North Okanagan Neurological Association Child Development Centre (NONA).

The popular Atlantis Waterslides Family Night will be held Sunday, July 30 and will raise money for NONA, which helps special needs children and their families.

NONA Child Development Centre is thrilled to once again be part of this amazing event in support of the new clubhouse. NONA's families had a blast at last year's event and are looking forward to joining the fun again, said Helen Armstrong, executive director of NONA Child Development Centre.

The night includes hours of swimming and slides, dancing, a treasure hunt, a performing magician, and silent auction.

Live music will be performed by The Noble Crew, and the Vernon volunteer firefighters have donated their time to man the barbecue, which will be serving burgers donated by A&W, fruits and veggies donated by Khun Khun Farm, ice-cream donated by Marble Slab Creamery and Asian dishes donated from The Rice Box.

Theres a lot of fundraisers that cater to adults. I want to have a fun night for families, because I have my own family. Its a lot of fun for the kids, said On Ouchs, Rice Box owner and event organizer.

Limited spots are available, and online registration for the event will be open at 3 p.m. Saturday, July 22 at TheRiceBox.com.

Last year, spots filled in less than 24 hours. The event runs from 5:30-9:30 p.m.

This year, the theme is Superheroes so everyone attending can dress up as their favourite cinematic or comic book hero for the night.

Entry is by donation, and 100 per cent of the proceeds go to NONA in support of their Build the Clubhouse Campaign.

Donations for the silent auction are still needed.

Any businesses wishing to support this event can bring silent auction items to The Rice Box or 27th Street Florist by July 28.
Photo: Sean C Miller North Westside Fire Rescue quickly doused a suspicious brush fire Tuesday evening.

The timing could not have been any better when a suspicious brush fire was spotted on the Westside.

North Westside Fire Rescue Fire Chief Jason Satterthwaite said the brush fire in the Killiney Beach area was reported at around 6:30 p.m. Tuesday  the same night the NWFR holds its weekly practice.

It was a regularly scheduled practice night, so everyone was at the hall dressed and ready to go, said Satterthwaite, noting crews knocked down the fire quickly.

The fire grew to 15 square meters, but given the current conditions it could have been much worse.

We were fortunate there was no wind. It was on a hillside. The terrain here is very similar to Lake Country. If the conditions were different it could have been much worse, said Satterthwaite, referring to the Okanagan Centre fire that destroyed several homes on the weekend.

Satterthwaite said the fire is being considered suspicious because it started in an vacant lot at the bottom of the hill and witnesses said a truck was seen speeding from the lot minutes before the fire was reported.
Photo: The Canadian Press

As wildfires rage throughout the western U.S., one California blaze in the rugged mountains outside of Yosemite National Park destroyed eight structures and forced thousands of nearby residents to flee their homes.

As of Tuesday evening, the fire had scorched 39 square miles, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The blaze burning since Sunday was making its way to the hills on the edge of Mariposa, a town of about 2,000 people under a mandatory evacuation order.

Record rain and snowfall in the mountains this winter was celebrated for bringing California's five-year drought to its knees, but it has turned into a challenge for firefighters battling flames feeding on dense vegetation.

"There's ample fuel and steep terrain," said California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokeswoman DeeDee Garcia. "It makes firefighting difficult."

The Northern California blaze is threatening at least 1,500 homes as well as powerlines that provide electricity to the park, officials said. The park remained open Tuesday but several roads frequented by tourists were closed.

The wildfire near Lake McClure, a reservoir about 50 miles east of Modesto, was 5 per cent contained Tuesday evening as at least 1,400 firefighters battled it on the ground and from the air.

Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday declared an emergency, bolstering the state's resources to battle the fire that he said has forced thousands of residents to flee and is expected to continue burning.
Photo: Contributed

Calling 911 to report a stolen bag of cocaine probably wasn't the best idea for a self-described Florida drug dealer.

But Okaloosa Sheriff's officials wrote on Facebook that 32-year-old David Blackmon did just that on Sunday morning.

The post says Blackmon called 911 to report a robbery in Fort Walton Beach. Blackmon told the responding deputy that someone entered his car and took $50 and about a quarter ounce of cocaine from the centre console.

The report says the deputy spotted some cocaine and a crack rock on the console and a crack pipe on the floorboard by the driver's side door.

Blackmon is charged with possession of cocaine and resisting arrest without violence. He was released from jail on Tuesday, but records don't list a lawyer.
Photo: Contributed Putnam County Sheriff Steve Deweese

Authorities in West Virginia say a five-year-old and a two-year-old took their mother's car for a three-mile ride before crashing it.

News outlets report the boys took the car from their mother's house Monday. One child steered the vehicle while the other child pushed the gas and brake pedals. The ride ended when the car crashed into a ditch.

Putnam County Sheriff Steve Deweese says deputies did not find the children's mother until nearly an hour later. He says she thought the boys were playing in the front yard.

The children were taken to the hospital to be checked out but had no injuries.

No charges have been filed against the mother, but Deweese says authorities are working with the prosecutor's office and Child Protective Services.
Photo: The Canadian Press

The new B.C. government is extending the state of emergency for another two weeks as wildfires continue to sweep across the province's Interior.

Premier John Horgan says additional support is necessary for the communities affected and those responding to the fires.

The current state of emergency expires on Friday and Horgan says he regrets having to extend it.

He says the extension means people who are kept out of their homes for more than 14 days will get a second payment of $600, that will be paid out of a previously announced $100-million fund administered by the Canadian Red Cross.

Horgan says the fires are unprecedented, and traditionally when an emergency is declared, people are usually back quickly, but he notes that some people are still out of their homes from the spring floods and they will also be compensated with the funding.

He says two of his ministers will co-chair a cabinet task force to make sure that the transition between governments for the emergency response is as seamless as possible.
Photo: Police handout The body of 13-year-old Marrisa Shen was found in a Burnaby park early Wednesday.

UPDATE: 2:50 p.m.

Police are investigating a potential homicide after the body of a 13-year-old girl was found in a wooded area of a popular park in Burnaby.

Cpl. Meghan Foster with the Integrated Homicide Investigations Team said Marrisa Shen's family contacted RCMP late Tuesday night, reporting the teen missing.

Shen's body was found less than two hours later, at about 1:10 a.m. Wednesday morning, in some brush on the southeast side of Central Park.

The scene suggested the teen, who was set to start high school in September, may have been the victim of a homicide, Foster told a press conference Wednesday afternoon.

"It's still early in the investigation. Right now, this death is a suspicious death," she said.

An autopsy is being conducted to determine what caused Shen's death.

The teen was last spotted at her family's home near the crime scene around 1 p.m., and Shen wasn't in distress when she was last contacted by phone at 5 p.m., Foster said.

Police are asking anyone who saw Shen between 1 p.m. and 1 a.m., or anyone who witnessed suspicious circumstances in the park, to call investigators.

There are no suspects in Shen's death at this time.

"We understand there will be many questions, but until we know more and can provide more updates, we ask that the public remain vigilant," Foster said.

"This is an opportunity to remind your kids, and all members of your family, in fact, about the importance of personal safety and to not take it for granted."

RCMP said the current risk to the public is unknown because details in the case are minimal.

- with files from CTV Vancouver

ORIGINAL: 10:55 a.m.

Police are investigating a suspicious death in a Burnaby park Wednesday morning.

The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team has taped off an area of Central Park and has told CTV news they are looking into a suspicious death in the area.

Police are holding a press conference at 1:30 p.m., where more details on the investigation are expected.

They say the investigation is into the death of a 13-year-old female.

- with files from CTV Vancouver
Texas Judge Smokes Pot, Drinks Cough Syrup, Sexts Bailiff, Gets Suspended

Judge Hilary Green of Houston, Texas, was recently suspended after confirming allegations of illegal drug use, sexting with her bailiff, and illicitly taking prescription drugs. While the suspension is temporary, pending the final outcome of her case before the Texas Supreme Court, her own admissions are rather damning.

In her responses to written questions from the state's judicial council, Judge Green admits to taking marijuana, ecstasy, and cough syrup. In a deposition of her former "boyfriend," Claude Barnes, he details that Green also used cocaine and hired prostitutes. Barnes filed a complaint with the judicial commission allegedly after finding out that Green had been lying to and cheating on him. Along with Barnes' complaint, other allegations of judicial misconduct in actual proceedings surfaced, which Green contends are related to the nasty divorce she was a party to.

Like Stealing Pot From a Defendant in Court

Perhaps one of the more comical allegations to surface involves Judge Green taking the marijuana that her bailiff confiscated from a defendant that brought it into her courtroom. While this allegation has not been confirmed by Green, others have provided evidence regarding the incident. Based on the detailed allegations, it appears that Green sought out drugs from several parties. Interestingly, it seems that she was very determined to seek out prescription cough syrup. At one point, she allegedly asked her bailiff to find some for her, stating she would pay $500.

In addition to the sex and drugs, Green is also facing trouble for being deceptive and not being forthcoming with information related to the commission's investigation. In several of the responses Green provided, the commission noted inconsistencies. One such inconsistency included her instance that she stopped "misusing" cough syrup in 2013, when a doctor submitted an affidavit explaining she sought treatment for abusing cough syrup in 2014.

Want More Details of the Derailment?

For those interested in seeing some of the gory details, some of the texts that were sent have been excerpted in Above the Law's treatment on the recent order. Warning: the text messages are graphically descriptive of sexual conduct and could be considered NSFW.

For those who can't get enough gossip about judge's gone wild, the full petition, with exhibits attached, can be found online thanks to CourthouseNews.com. Claude Barnes' deposition, along with Judge Green's actual responses to the commission's questions can be found in the exhibits to the petition to the Texas Supreme Court filed by the judicial council.

Related Resources:
Photo: Contributed A paint spill has closed Highway 1 at Three Valley Gap.

UPDATE: 7 p.m.

Revelstoke RCMP responded to a collision 30 kilometres west of Revelstoke to find 60 individual buckets of 18.9 litres of paint spilled all over the highway, covering all the lanes.

The tractor trailer swerved to avoid rear-ending a tractor trailer on the highway and as a result the buckets broke free.

Police said vehicles were also covered in white paint, but no one was injured.

Trans-Canada Highway was closed for about 90 minutes while crews worked to clear up the mess.

A 32-year-old B.C. man was issued a violation ticket for having an unsecured load.

Crews are on scene working to still clean up the spill. According to police, the spilled paint possesses no harm on the environment and a further clean-up will take place on Thursday.

UPDATE: 2:40 p.m.

A person who was previously stuck at the highway closure near Three Valley Gap says traffic has started moving.

UPDATE: 2:20 p.m.

A witness who drove through the paint spill shortly after it happened says it looked like a truck had spilled its load of several large paint containers at about 12:30 p.m.

"It smashed all over the highway," Adam said. "Cars were getting it all in their tires and wheel wells and on their skirts and stuff."

Adam says he slowly drove through the spill, but still managed to get some on his passenger-side tires.

"The whole road was just doused in white paint," Adam said. "Hopefully I can get that off somehow."

Police arrived at the scene and closed the highway just as Adam drove through.

UPDATE: 1:55 p.m.

Highway 1 near Three Valley Gap is closed after a large amount of paint was spilled on the highway.

Pictures from the scene show several vehicles covered in the light-coloured paint, along with large portions of the road.

It's unclear how the spill occurred.

DriveBC is expected to update the situation at 2 p.m.

ORIGINAL: 1 p.m.

The Trans-Canada Highway is closed at Three Valley Gap.

The route between Sicamous and Revelstoke is closed in both directions because of debris on the highway.

According to DriveBC, the situation is being assessed.

There is currently no timeline for a reopening of the highway. No detour is available.

More information when it becomes available.

Send pictures, video to [email protected]
Hi readers, it seems you use Catholic Online a lot; that's great! It's a little awkward to ask, but we need your help. If you have already donated, we sincerely thank you. We're not salespeople, but we depend on donations averaging $14.76 and fewer than 1% of readers give. If you donate just $5.00, the price of your coffee, Catholic Online School could keep thriving. Thank you.

No evil shall befall you, nor shall affliction come near your tent, for to His Angels God has given command about you, that they guard you in all your ways. Upon their hands they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.

Psalm 91: 10-12 A heavenly spirit assigned by God to watch over each of us during our lives. The doctrine of angels is part of the Church's tradition. The role of the guardian angel is both to guide us to good thoughts, works and words, and to preserve us from evil. Since the 17th century the Church has celebrated a feast honoring them in October throughout the Universal Church. Since the last calendar revision this feast is Oct 2.

He has charged His angels with the ministry of watching and safeguarding every one of His creatures that behold not His face. Kingdoms have their angels assigned to them, and men have their angels; these latter it is to whom religion designates the Holy Guardian Angels. Our Lord says in the Gospel, "Beware lest ye scandalize any of these little ones, for their angels in heaven see the face of My Father." The existence of Guardian Angels, is, hence a dogma of the Christian faith: this being so, what ought not our respect be for that sure and holy intelligence that is ever present at our side; and how great our solicitude be, lest, by any act of ours, we offend those eyes which are ever bent upon us in all our ways!

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Prayers to our Guardian Angels
If you have just started your journey in an online casino or are looking for a new site to play,...
Most people who follow Trump on Twitter will either cheer him on, shout back at him, or run the other way. But SNL writer Josh Patten responds to Trump's tweets as if Trump had texted them directly to Patten, and Patten's casual, breezy responses had me laughing out loud.

The fun seems to have started on July 5, when Trump tweeted, "Getting ready to leave for Poland, after which I will travel to Germany for the G-20. Will be back on Saturday." To which Patten responded, "Call when you land."

Other exchanges include:

Trump: "I am at the @USGA #USWomensOpen. An amateur player is co-leading for the first time in many decades  very exciting!" Patten: "sounds neat keep me posted"

Trump: "Congratulations to Sung Hyun Park on winning the 2017" Patten: "sorry just seeing this"

Trump: "Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That's politics!" Patten: "Oh for sure. Any good info?"

And there are many more where these came from. Patten "unveiled" his horseplay a few days ago on Twitter, and I look forward to finding more in the days and hopefully weeks to come.

Thanks CNN!

Image: Gage Skidmore
Looking at the world through the eyes of the Web
Entertainment / Music

by Staff reporter

DURBAN-based entertainer, Zodwa Wabantu, who has become an Internet sensation after rocking up at the Vodacom Durban July pantyless in a black figure hugging dress that exposed her entire thigh, will be visiting Bulawayo later this month to party.Popularly known as the Queen of Vosho, the party freak initially rose to fame after videos of her custom dance moves at the Eyadini Lounge holding a Savanna cider in her hand went viral, often leaving many in awe.According to sources, Zodwa, real name Zodwa Rebecca Libram, who is touring different countries 'just to party', has heard a lot about the Bulawayo nightlife from South African artistes who usually perform here and wants to have her own experience."She apparently settled for Club Connect and will be partying there next Saturday if all goes according to plan. She will be joined by other local socialites who will host her.Club Connect spokesperson, Zandile Moyo, confirmed that Zodwa's team had contacted them adding that they were looking forward to partying with her."Zodwa said she's heard a lot about the nightlife in Bulawayo and wants to join in on the fun. We're more than excited to host her at our VIP club and any other socialite or Zim celebrity," said Moyo."We've spoken to her and she's confirmed that she's bringing the Durban vibe to Bulawayo all for fun."Zodwa confirmed she would be in the country on her Instagram page where she invited people to party with her."Bulawayo, Zimbabwe come hangout with your Zodwa Wabantu at Club Connect," wrote Zodwa.The Bulawayo party comes at a time when Zodwa is said to have made over R1million in a period of three weeks through endorsement deals, giving her more reason to celebrate her milestone.The socialite posted on her Facebook page which has over 100 000 followers that she clinched a deal with an energy drink brand  Angel Factor with sources close to her saying she was paid R340 000 for being the face of the brand. #AngelFactorEnergy Drink deal in the bag. I can't thank God enough and thanks to that first person who decided to take a video while I was dancing living my simple life, not aware that I can get paid for it," she wrote.She clinched a second deal with a Vodka brand with sources saying she was paid just over R100 000 to promote the Vodka."Yes, Zodwa was paid R110 000 to promote the Vodka. She doesn't drink Savanna that much anymore. She is the Vodka girl who's in the process of getting another deal."She's likely to make the announcement in the next few days," said Zodwa's friend who did not want to be named.
Clariant announced the opening of a new office for its Catalysts business in Yinchuan city, capital of the Ningxia Hui autonomous region in China. With the new branch, Clariant becomes the first multinational catalyst provider based in northwest China, a region that is home to a majority of the nations coal-to-chemicals producers as well as numerous syngas and polyolefin companies.



Located in downtown Yinchuan, the new office will allow closer cooperation with regional customers, enabling Clariant to offer faster, tailor-made engineering services and sales assistance. The local team will be supported by Clariant specialists both within China and from around the world. The companys expansion is part of its China Insider strategy, which stresses the importance of local expertise for technologies specific to China, combined with full access to global innovations. Through this model, Clariant continues to intensify partnerships throughout China, and serve the market with optimal catalyst solutions.



The Yinchuan office is Clariants fifth branch in China. Clariant has two state-of-the-art catalyst production facilities in China, one in Jinshan district of Shanghai, and the other in Panjin city of Liaoning province. The facilities develop and produce a variety of catalysts specifically for Chinas market requirements and conditions. At the end of 2015, an R&D team has been established to better support the local technical needs. Clariant is also present in Beijing, offering engineering services and sales assistance to customers in the area.



Thomas Wenger, Head of Business Unit Catalysts, Clariant China, described the companys expansion plans, stating, Clariants continued developments and investments in China reflect our solid commitment to our current and prospective customers. Proximity brings mutual opportunities, and enables optimized catalyst solutions based on the best of local and global resources. We are proud to be the first multinational catalyst company which establishes a permanent office in northwest China, and more firsts will follow.
Five Minutes With Damien Geter Audio Article Vocalist, composer and Richmond Symphony artist in residence Damien Geters musical roots sprouted when he was a boy in the Matoaca District of Chesterfield County, where he was raised and...
Chicagoan Steve Lehmann has taken his expertise in early business development nearly 6,000 miles away to the Turkish border town of Reyhanli.

His mission: to teach Syrian teens how to launch startups of their own.

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Even as war rages in the nation, there are still students learning business and plenty of people who can't find work. With unemployment soaring, interest in starting small businesses has grown.

"There are entrepreneurs (in Syria), just like everywhere else," Ahmad Sufian Bayram, a regional manager at Techstars, told the Guardian. "For the majority of women, they're starting small businesses to support their families, making handmade items, for example, jewelry, homemade clothes. (Others) are doing freelance work, such as translation services. When we asked them why would you like to be an entrepreneur, it was one of the only options left to make money."

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Since 2011, Syrian refugees in Turkey have invested about $334 million to start more than 6,000 registered companies, many of which are small- and mid-sized businesses, according to a report from the global nonprofit Building Markets.

Lehmann, who's also assistant director of the Polsky Center's $20 million Innovation Fund, wants to strengthen the startup trend and "instill a sense of hope" in entrepreneurial-minded teens, he said.

"I'll be within a short bike ride of the Syrian border and one of the hottest zones in the conflict," Lehmann said before departing from O'Hare International Airport on Friday. "You never know how these things are going to go, but I'm probably more nervous about being in front of a bunch of kids I don't know."

The two-week trip was planned in collaboration with local youth center Karam House, where Lehmann is staying and holding a "hands-on entrepreneurship boot camp" for 15 selected Syrian teens. The work isn't directly affiliated with the Polsky Center.

The training sessions Lehmann is participating in focus on customer engagement, product prototyping and developing successful business models. Material also pulls from the latest research on how good startups get founded, he said, and includes insights from the National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps and IDEO.org's human-center design approach to problem solving.

"Students had to apply and come with a business idea already put together," Lehmann said. "Within the first four hours of the training, they're going to be walking the streets of Reyhanli talking to potential customers."

Toward the end of the boot camp, which wraps up July 28, the 15 teens will each pitch their refined ideas to the group and outline what the next steps are, he said.

The war in Syria has claimed more than 470,000 lives and forced 4.8 million people to seek refuge abroad, according to the independent Syrian Center for Policy Research.

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Gayle Tzemach Lemmon  a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert in entrepreneurship in conflict zones  said business development and job creation are vital to a country's long-term stability, as even small economic losses can drastically affect a country's risk of civil war.

"This isn't going to replace the need for medicine or the need for support for education. It's about helping people get the tools to rebuild their own lives and to create more jobs for other people who will then go on to rebuild their lives," she said. "It has a multiplier effect that, when done correctly and connected to markets, is powerful."

Up-and-coming entrepreneurs living in conflict areas, however, largely lack access to much-needed capital and key markets, Tzemach Lemmon said. A lack of skills training, in particular, is another barrier, she said.

Syrian business-owners overwhelmingly identified a need for marketing, customer service and management training when surveyed as part of the Building Markets report.

"Often times, people have an idea or they have a skill, but they don't necessarily know how to take that idea to market," Tzemach Lemmon said. "An even small intervention by our standards can be a big difference."

The Business Council for Peace, which pairs entrepreneurs in conflict zones to volunteer U.S. business mentors, and Mercy Corps, which supports community-led initiatives, are organizations doing a good job of training in conflict zones, she said.

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"We really need to think about how people support themselves before, during and after war," Tzemach Lemmon said. "Entrepreneurship during conflict is almost the most important it ever is, in that it's creating hope, opportunity and likely jobs in an incredibly desperate, difficult time."

Besides serving as assistant director of the Innovation Fund, Lehmann is co-founder of the childhood trauma social enterprise Threadies, a "sort of Toms-for-teddy-bears-type model," he said.

Handmade by at-risk women living in the West Bank, Threadies teddy bears come with a psychological first-aid kit to help children cope with emotional shock. Additionally, for every colorful, $35 teddy bear purchased online, Threadies donates a "twin" to a child in need.

Lehmann's trip to Turkey is his second to the Middle East. In 2015, he tested the Threadies model by working with Syrian refugees in the "nastiest, scariest, most hopeless" refugee camp in northern Jordan.

Before coming up with the idea to train Syrian teens in business development, his trip to Reyhanli was solely planned for distributing more teddy bears and evaluating how well they're working, he said.

"The Threadies idea started when I was on a trip to Haiti one year after the earthquake," Lehmann, who studied engineering in college, said. "The thing that I saw missing, which seemed totally, totally critical, was a response for trauma in kids."

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Threadies has sold "in the range of" 2,000 teddy bears and has shipped hundreds more, according to Lehmann, who said shipping has, at times, proven difficult. Recently, the Turkish government seized and destroyed a shipment of teddy bears valued at about $20,000, he said.

"I'll bring as many (teddy bears) as I can," he said. "We anticipate having 1,500 delivered from Palestine, but that may or may not happen."

Threadies raised $32,440 from 463 backers on its Kickstarter campaign in 2015.

Robert Holly is a freelance writer.

Twitter @robertwadeholly
News / Local

by Tendai Ruben Mbofana

Workers are up in arms with the Bulawayo Labour Court, which they accuse of what they called 'rampant corruption', urging authorities to intervene.The Zimbabwe Network for Social Justice (ZimJustice) has received several reports from workers who allege that they had been subjected to gross injustice at the court.The workers mostly accused the judge at the court of this travesty of justice, urging authorities to investigate her activities.The main accusation levelled against the judge is that she has declined 'hundreds of draft orders from labour officers in employees' favour without reasons'.These workers allege that there is widespread corruption at the Bulawayo Labour Court that needs to be urgently rooted out, if workers' rights are ever to be realised.They further reported to ZimJustice that employers' lawyers were openly conniving with employee legal representatives on court premises, a situation that has further hampered efforts for workers' justice.This is not the first time that ZimJustice has received such reports from workers, and we urge the relevant authorities to conduct thorough investigations into activities at the Bulawayo Labour Court - and all others throughout the country.ZimJustice is also calling upon all those workers who have been similarly affected to come forward with any evidence - even anonymously - so that we may compile a dossier of such cases.We also urge current and former court officials, who can not stand the rot anymore, to also contact ZimJustice with any evidence or vital information that might assist in bringing to book all those involved in corrupt activities at labour courts throughout Zimbabwe.In my past work with an anti-corruption watchdog, we exposed - and helped bring to book - several corrupt magistrate court officials, and as such, I believe that in working together as a nation we can bring an end to this scourge at all labour courts.Zimbabwean workers have suffered enough, and it is high time that we acted.It is the highest form of callousness and evil to further oppress people that would have come for help, after being oppressed by their employers.It is no different from a police officer who rapes a woman who would have come to him to report that she had been raped.How much more suffering does this nation want to see workers endure?Workers have already endured years of being given an inadequate salary, that was not even enough for the most basic of needs.They spent years not being able to provide for their families - not managing to pay school fees, rentals, and buying nutritional food, and others basics.Then they had to further endure more hellish years of not even being given that inadequate salary - most being laid off without so much as a cent.Do those in authority ever dare to spend a minute of their comfortable lives to ponder on how these workers are surviving?Do they even bother wondering that if these workers were already suffering whilst they were being paid fully, how are they surviving when they are now getting nothing?If those in authority have never spent even a minute trying to understand this situation, then they are nothing short of heartless and lack a conscience.It is truly nothing short of bewildering for anyone entrusted with ensuring that these workers receive justice, to decide that they also should further oppress such people through acts of corruption.Never again should such heartlessness be tolerated in this country, and we all should come together to put a stop to it.Let's report any such corruption.Let each and every one of us bring to ZimJustice any information and piece of evidence that we may have, so that we may compile a dossier, and finally ensure that workers' justice is realised, because if we allow this oppression to continue - God will surely judge us. Tendai Ruben Mbofana is Programmes Director at the Zimbabwe Network for Social Justice (ZimJustice). Please WhatsApp/call: +263782283975, or email: tendaiandtinta.mbofana@gmail.com. Please also 'Like' the ZimJustice page on Facebook.
The Anixter Center has a deal to sell one Clybourn Avenue building, and on July 19, 2017, it put this larger building across the street, at 2032 N. Clybourn, on the market. The buildings are just east of the former A. Finkl & Sons steel plant, where a multibillion-dollar mixed-use project is planned. ( Jay Rubinic/Rubinic Photography )

A nearly century-old nonprofit organization has agreed to sell one Clybourn Avenue building to a developer while putting a larger structure across the street up for sale in deals that could bring in well over $20 million combined.

The properties owned by Anixter Center, which serves people with disabilities, could help set the bar on property values in a 3.7-mile stretch of longtime industrial properties along the Chicago River where the city is in the final stages of approving zoning changes to allow previously forbidden uses such as residential development.

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The North Side buildings are within the 760-acre North Branch Industrial Corridor and happen to be alongside the largest property that's planned for redevelopment: the former A. Finkl & Sons steel plant. Developer Sterling Bay is planning a multibillion-dollar mixed-use development of more than 40 acres once used by Finkl and adjacent businesses along the river.

"There's been so much interest focused on Finkl Steel, so you're next to the prettiest girl at the dance," broker Tom Kirschbraun, a managing director at Jones Lang LaSalle, said of the Anixter buildings. Kirschbraun and fellow JLL brokers Daniel Reynolds and Lindsey Fahey are representing Anixter Center in the two deals.

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After putting a four-story, 27,000-square-foot office building at 2001 N. Clybourn Ave. up for sale last year, Anixter Center has a contract to sell it to Chicago developer R2, said R2 Managing Principal Matt Garrison. He and Kirschbraun declined to say the price, which is believed to be more than $3 million.

Meanwhile, JLL on Wednesday began marketing the 154,000-square-foot building at 2032 N. Clybourn Ave. for sale on Anixter's behalf. That property, made up of several three- and four-story brick buildings that were later connected, could sell for more than $20 million, Kirschbraun said.

The sales will help fund social services Anixter provides to 8,000 people, mostly on the North Side and in Skokie and Evanston, said Teresa Garate, the organization's president and CEO. Anixter would, for example, like to add more housing for homeless, mentally ill and developmentally disabled clients, Garate said.

Workers in the smaller Clybourn building will move across the street and to a building on Clark Street in Rogers Park that Anixter owns, she said. Once both buildings on Clybourn have sold, workers could move to other buildings Anixter owns and to yet-to-be-identified space it will lease, Garate said. The 97-year-old nonprofit has about 400 full- and part-time workers, she said.

Garate said much of the Clybourn space is unused at a time when property values are expected to rise because of the zoning changes. "Now is the time to do it and see what the market can bear," she said.

R2, which owns about 500,000 square feet of loft office space and 15 acres of development sites in the Clybourn Corridor and across the river on Goose Island, plans to upgrade the 2001 N. Clybourn building and lease the space to new office tenants.

"It's an adaptive reuse building right on the edge of Finkl, which doesn't hurt," Garrison said. R2 also may make an offer on Anixter's building across the street, he said.

JLL is marketing 2032 N. Clybourn as an opportunity to redevelop the vintage building as well as build 107,000 to 295,000 square feet of new office or residential space on a parking lot behind the existing structure. JLL will accept offers contingent on obtaining zoning from the city for the new construction, Kirschbraun said.

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Since 2032 N. Clybourn is one of the first deals to hit the market amid the city's zoning changes, and because buyers are likely to seek city approval for new uses, the property could be a test case for future deals.

"I think it makes both (of Anixter's) properties more valuable," said Mike Drew, a principal at Structured Development, a longtime real estate investor in the area that previously attempted to buy the larger Anixter building. "It seems as if values are beginning to rise. What you're seeing is a positive response by the market to the pending ordinance codifying the (zoning) changes."

rori@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @Ryan_Ori
Experts in teen pregnancy prevention were nervously holding their breaths as the Trump administration stocked key positions at the Department of Health and Human Services with advocates of ineffective abstinence-only sex education programs and opponents of birth control.

Now their fears have proven to be justified. Over the last couple of weeks, 81 teen pregnancy programs around the country have been informed that their grants will end in the next fiscal year, or as of June 30, 2018. At least one program that funded educational outreach by Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles, among other institutions, was cut off immediately  just as it was beginning the second year of a five-year plan. In all, more than $200 million in annual funding is being ended, according to an analysis by the Center for Investigative Reporting, which made the shutdown public.

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In most cases, the grantees were unaware that their programs were under a death sentence until they received their formal annual notices at the start of the grant year, July 1.

Wed been expecting that funding could be cut. But we didnt think it would happen this way, and expected that there would be discussion about it.  Luanne Rohrbach, USC

Some of the notices were chilly indeed. "Due to changes in program priorities, it has been determined that it is in the best interest of the Federal government to no longer continue [your] funding," read a July 5 letter sent to Meagan Downey, the head of Vermont-based Youth Catalytics, which has been coordinating a project involving Childrens Hospital of L.A. and four other institutions, including the University of Michigan and the University of Massachusetts. She says the notice blindsided her, because as recently as last month the program had been praised by federal officials.

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"There's been no substantive change in the federal government's 'best interest,'" Downey told me. "The only thing that has changed is the appointment of some very extreme, misinformed appointees in HHS."

She's referring to a gang of three extremists whose views I outlined in a column in mid-June. They're Charmaine Yoest, the former head of a prominent anti-abortion group who is now assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services; Teresa Manning, a former lobbyist for the National Right to Life Committee and legislative analyst for the Family Research Council who is deputy assistant secretary for population affairs; and Valerie Huber, the former president of Ascend, a Washington group that advocates for abstinence-only sex education, who is chief of staff to the assistant secretary for health.

Yoest's group has promoted the claim that abortion increases a woman's chance of breast cancer and of "serious mental health problems." Both claims have been conclusively refuted by medical science. Manning stated during a 2003 NPR interview, "Of course, contraception doesn't work. ... Its efficacy is very low." In fact, hormonal methods are 91 percent effective, and IUDs are 99 percent effective.

As a promoter of abstinence-only sex education, Huber's approach has been moralistic, not empirical. "As public health experts and policymakers, we must normalize sexual delay more than we normalize teen sex, even with contraception," she told PBS last year. But studies consistently show that what reduces teen pregnancies is increased use of contraceptives.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show a steady decline in teen birth rates, but a persistence of higher rates among black, Hispanic and American Indian/Alaska Native women. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

The Department of Health and Human Services didn't acknowledge that these appointees' personal views had anything to do with the nationwide funding cutoff. Instead, according to an email I received from department spokeswoman Diane Gianelli, "the President's FY 2018 Budget eliminated funding for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, so our grants office informed the grantees of their June 30, 2018, end date, to give them an opportunity to adjust their programs and plan for an orderly closeout."

The problem there is that the president's budget is merely a proposal. It hasn't been enacted by Congress, so there's no evidence that the lawmakers concur with his priorities.

"We'd been expecting that funding could be cut," says Luanne Rohrbach of the Keck School of Medicine at USC, which is in the third year of a $10-million grant to provide educational outreach to as many as 20,000 teens in South Los Angeles and Compton who are at risk for unintended pregnancies. "But we didn't think it would happen this way, and expected that there would be discussion about it. We thought there would be an opportunity at least for the program to be deliberated."

Penny-wise and plain foolish: The bottom line of this chart from a Brookings Institution study shows that pregnancy prevention programs pay their way many times over. (Brookings Institution)

The programs being shut down by Trump's Health and Human Services Department were the product of a major push by the Obama administration for evidence-based approaches to social problems such as teen pregnancy. The idea was to use scientific methods to identify what worked, and apply them in the field. Rohrbach's program, which has been operating on a second five-year grant after receiving a first grant in 2011-2015, is the largest in California and one of the largest in the country.

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The program brings comprehensive sex education to students in middle schools in the L.A. Unified and Compton school districts, teaching them everything from anatomy to how to choose high-quality friendships, resist offers of sex if they're not interested, and avoiding STDs through contraception. One part of the program is directed at the parents of at-risk children.

The program "absolutely presents abstinence as a favorable option," Rohrbach says, but recognizes that it's not enough. A great deal of evidence suggests that programs emphasizing abstinence can work, but abstinence-only programs don't. "This is what people with certain political beliefs who have an agenda don't quite understand," she says.

Opponents of such educational programs sometimes argue they're ineffective, but also that they're unnecessary. That's because teen pregnancy rates have been coming down in the U.S. for years  and especially since the advent of the Affordable Care Act, which vastly expanded the availability of contraceptives, typically at no cost.

The decline of rates in general involves a couple of factors. One is that the decline in rates is at least partially the result of programs like these. "One reason people in the field see a difference is that far more attention is being paid to the issue, and to the kinds of interventions we know will work," Rohrbach says.

Another factor is that the pregnancy rates for some teens in some socio-economic environments are still way out of line with the national average. Figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which document a decline in the national teen birth rate to 22.3 births per 100,000 women aged 15 to 19 in 2015 from 41.5 in 2007, also show that the rates among black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska native teens remain stubbornly higher than the national average, which itself shows that nearly a fourth of U.S. women give birth before they're 20.

According to data from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, the birth rate for women 15 to 19 in the health planning district that includes South L.A. and Compton is 44.3 per 100,000 females in that age range. That's nearly twice the rate of the county as a whole (22.8) and the national average. As Rohrbach observes, that district is burdened by many poor health and socioeconomic indicators, including lower educational levels, more poverty, poorer health generally, and higher chlamydia rates among teens than any of the county's other seven health planning districts.

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Eliminating the funds for prevention programs isn't only bad policy from a social standpoint, it's pound-foolish. Adam Thomas of Georgetown University showed in 2012 that such programs pay for themselves many times over. Every dollar spent returned from $2.50 (for evidence-based teen pregnancy interventions) to $5.60 (for expanded access to Medicaid family planning services).

Nothing could be more damaging to these crucial programs than their abrupt defunding. Although Rohrbach's program will still have funds through next June, the momentum it has built over eight years, during which it planned for a steady expansion to more schools serving more students, will wither away. "Obviously," she says, "we're not going to be able to grow."

Rohrbach says a conference call has been scheduled for later this week among some of the grantees and Health and Human Services officials, but she doesn't hold out much hope for a reprieve. If it were a question of money or empirical results, perhaps some appeal could be based on budgetary principles or hard data.

But the presence at the department of ideologues such as Yoest, Huber, and Manning suggests that isn't the case. Their history suggests, instead, that they're invulnerable to facts. Trump signaled the threat to evidence-based teen pregnancy intervention by placing them near the top of the Health and Human Services hierarchy, and now that threat has become reality.

Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see his Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.

Return to Michael Hiltzik's blog.
Jose Lopez hauls equipment out of his flooded garage July 12, 2017, in Round Lake Beach, in Lake County. As of April, there were about 2,825 National Flood Insurance Program policies in force in Lake County, but the program is set to expire Sept. 30, 2017. ( Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune )

As the floodwaters that inundated northern Illinois last week start to recede, the nation's main flood insurance program is facing potential changes that could hit residents with increased premiums.

The National Flood Insurance Program, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency administers, is set to expire Sept. 30. About half a dozen bills to address the issue have been introduced in Congress, at least one of which looks to increase premiums to help pay for the debt-laden program.

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If the insurance premiums become too expensive, people could be priced out of their homes, said Dennis Sandquist, director of planning and development for McHenry County, one of the areas drying out from last week's flooding.

"We understand that the NFIP can't continue to operate at a deficit, but we also realize flood insurance needs to be affordable to homeowners," Sandquist said. "For better or worse, we have these homes in the flood plains, and we need to manage construction of new ones. They need to continue to have flood insurance."

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McHenry County has more than 1,825 acres in the flood plain, which FEMA defines as an area that would be underwater during a flood that only has a 1 percent chance of occurring each year. There are 3,150 residential properties in the county where the flood plain covers more than 50 percent of the parcel.

Heavy rains last week triggered record flooding in areas along the Fox and Des Plaines rivers north of Chicago. The ground became saturated and basements flooded. Once the rains subsided, water flowing down from Wisconsin continued to inundate communities.

Gov. Bruce Rauner on Friday issued a disaster declaration for Lake, Kane and McHenry counties and later added Cook County.

The National Flood Insurance Program will be critical as the floodwaters recede and McHenry County starts assessing the damage, Sandquist said.

The program provides $1.25 trillion in coverage for about 5 million policyholders nationwide. While the lion's share of those policies are in coastal areas, more than 42,000 were in Illinois as of April. Nearly half those were in the four counties covered by the disaster declaration.

Private companies sell the National Flood Insurance Program's policies, but FEMA backs them. Private flood insurance is rare, as it doesn't spread the risk out for companies.

The federal program, however, carries $24.6 billion in debt to the Treasury Department and pays nearly $400 million per year in interest. Payouts from Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy and a few other recent and devastating flood events saddled the program with debt. The challenge facing Congress is how to get that debt down without placing too heavy a burden on policyholders.

Some argue that updating FEMA's flood plain maps would help ease some of that debt.

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Flood insurance rates are calculated in part based on flood zones. FEMA maintains and updates maps of those zones that include aerial photos and information on river flows, storm tides, rainfall, topography and more.

While FEMA does update the maps  parts of Lake and McHenry counties were revised in the past several years, for example  it's largely up to participating communities and policyholders to provide updated data.

"We don't have a big eye in the sky watching what's going on," said David Schein, regional flood insurance specialist for FEMA. "The communities in the program are responsible for telling us what is going on ... so we can keep the maps current."

All too often that doesn't happen, Schein said.

Some hope legislation can streamline that process.

"We've got some people who should probably be paying more (for) insurance (and) some people who shouldn't be paying it at all," said Karen Robertson, a broker associate and real estate agent for Shorewood-based Spring Realty. "We're basically guessing, Do we or don't we need flood insurance? We're wasting time and literally thousands of dollars."

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Policyholders can dispute the maps if, for example, they've raised their home and reduced its flood risk. Some argue that process is expensive for property owners.

Communities must abide by federal standards in order for their residents to be eligible for flood insurance through the program. That can involve passing ordinances for construction in flood zones.

Some maps in northern Illinois date back to the late 1970s or early 1980s, Schein said.

As the maps are updated, it's common for the flood plains to get bigger. The National Flood Insurance Program currently allows policyholders who bought homes before the maps changed to keep paying the lower, or grandfathered, rates.

"Grandfathering is a huge discount on the actuarial premium," Schein said. "We're not charging them for the actual risk of flooding; we're charging them for the risk it was before we mapped the flood zone."

A bill introduced by Rep. Sean Duffy, a Wisconsin Republican, calls for no new grandfathered rates after 2021 and would raise premiums on some existing grandfathered policies annually until they reach full-risk rates.

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The bill also aims to develop more accurate maps through use of technology and provide some assistance to low-income policyholders.

Since the maps are relatively new in McHenry and Lake counties, that means "there are probably a substantial number of folks that are paying grandfathered rates," Schein said.

Lake County is dependent on those grandfathered rates, said Mike Warner, director of the county's stormwater management commission.

"It'll be like your insurance company for your car telling you, 'OK, well, you're paying $1,000 a year for car insurance and it's going to go up another $2,000 a year,'" he said. "How do you handle that personally on your limited budget?"

There were about 2,825 policies in force in Lake County as of April, more than double the number in McHenry County.

In the village of Gurnee in Lake County, which was hit hard by the flood, there were 87 policies in force.

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Gurnee has had some storied floods, village spokesman Jack Linehan said. One in 1986, when floodwaters crested at 11.9 feet, held the record until last week.

"But anyone who's been through both can tell you the '86 (flood) was worse," Linehan said.

Gurnee has been taking steps to prevent flood damage with funding assistance from FEMA. It has bought out 26 properties in flood-prone areas and relocated a grade school out of a flood zone. "That helped tremendously" when the floodwaters came this time, Linehan said.

Properties don't have to be in the flood plain to get flood insurance. But flood insurance is required to get a mortgage from a federally backed lender on a home in a flood plain.

That is why it is critical that the program does not lapse, like it did back in 2010, McHenry County's Sandquist said. While existing policies would remain intact, home purchases in flood-prone areas could stall.

"Congress needs to reauthorize this program or else it will be total chaos," Sandquist said.

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amarotti@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @AllyMarotti
Whether you're buying a home, selling, or both, picking a real estate agent is a big decision. Experts advise that you interview at least a few agents and ask questions about their background, experience and strategies. (Gary Waters / Getty Images )

So you're looking for a real estate agent. You're buying a home, selling a home or perhaps both. And you know the real estate agent you choose could make or break things for you  including your bank account and your sanity.

This is a big decision. You'll want to choose wisely. Where do you start?

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"I've found that word of mouth is the best," said Debbie Tyree, an insurance broker who lives in Glen Haven, Colo. Tyree said she has bought 32 homes in her life and sold 25 of them, working with eight realty agents in three states. She is closing on her latest home purchase, in the Chicago suburb of Cary, this month.

You'll want to talk with at least three agents before you commit to one, said Christina Manzano, director of Northside Community Development Corp., a housing agency in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood that offers education and training to homebuyers. Talk to agents "just to get an idea of their background, credentials, referrals," she said. "Comparing what they can do for you."

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When you're ready to start interviewing agents, real estate experts suggest that you start with these questions.

1. How long have you been in business?

"When it comes to picking a Realtor ... experience matters," said Greg Nagel, managing broker of Ask Nagel Realty in Chicago's West Town community area. "I wouldn't go with the younger Realtor unless they were part of a team and they are getting supported."

Inexperienced agents, Nagel said, may not know the best way to prep a home for sale. They might miss details such as condo association regulations. And they may not know the nuances of certain building materials and how they hold up over time.

Tyree agreed. "You want somebody that's seasoned," she said. "You don't want a newbie. It's not in your best interest." When she is looking for agents, she said she only looks at those who have been in business for at least five years.

Christina Manzano is director of Northside Community Development Corp., a housing agency in Chicagos Rogers Park neighborhood that offers education and training to homebuyers. She advises consumers to talk with at least three real estate agents before committing to one. (Carolyn Variano/Chicago Tribune )

2. What's your recent track record in the area?

"I think probably the most critical (question) is, 'What is your knowledge and experience in this area?'" said Ed Pluchar, a broker for Real People Realty out of the Chicago suburb Mokena. "You'd want to know how many transactions have they done in the area."

And you want to get specific, said Derick Anderson, director of the housing resource center at Northside Community Resources, the parent organization of Northside Community Development Corp. Buyers or sellers should ask about an agent's experience not just in the desired market, Anderson said, but also in the submarket, "be it their neighborhood, their town, their village, whatever."

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Nagel advised that you ask an agent who will be selling your home, "How many homes in this neighborhood have you sold in the last 12 months?" You should also ask for the contact information of the agent's last three clients so you can reach out to them and ask what their experiences were like, Nagel said. "If you go by the last three," he said, "they can't just cherry-pick the best people."

Make sure the realty agent has experience not just in your area, but in your type of property too, Nagel said. "If they're doing condos, tell me the last three condos that you've closed," he said. "If it's houses, it should be houses."

It helps to dig into financials when you're a seller, said Pluchar, who advises you to ask agents, "When you list, what's your average sale price as a percentage of the original listing price?" And both Manzano, the director of the Rogers Park housing agency, and seasoned homebuyer Tyree advise that you ask how long an agent's homes are typically on the market before they're sold.

Derick Anderson is director of the housing resource center at Northside Community Resources, the parent organization of Northside Community Development Corp. He said buyers and sellers should ask about an agents experience not just in the desired market, but also in the submarket, such as a neighborhood, town or village. ( Carolyn Variano/Chicago Tribune )

3. What are your contract requirements?

Before you sign an agreement to work with a realty agent, you should fully understand what that agreement entails, Manzano advised.

"There are some Realtors that are very good at explaining, 'This is what I do and this is what it means to sign a contract and you have to be prepared for whatever happens,'" Manzano said. "And then we have Realtors that are just like, 'All right, let's sign a contract, let's get going.' And our clients are not fully aware of what is going to happen between signing the contract and after that, whether you can get out of it or not."

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Make sure you know what costs you're responsible for, said Anderson, including the agent's commission rate. "I think it's pretty standard," he said  about 3 to 5 percent for a selling agent. "But it's still a good question to ask."

4. How will we communicate, and how often?

"I think most Realtors now email," Manzano said. "I think many now text."

However you prefer to be in touch with your real estate agent, your communication expectations should be set at the beginning.

"How much are we going to be in contact?" Pluchar advised to ask. "Are you going to talk to me once a week, or do I list with you and then you disappear?"

You can always check with previous clients to make sure their experiences match what the agent has promised you, Pluchar said.

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5. Are you willing to tell it like it is?

If you're selling your home, said Tyree, "You need somebody  who's not afraid to work with you and talk to you and tell you, 'You've got to fix this in your house. You've got to bring your price down.'"

And buyers should ask, "Are you willing to tell me things that are hard for me to hear?" Pluchar said. "Are you willing to advocate for me and not let me make an emotional mistake when I'm buying this house?"

Northside Community Development Corp. is a housing agency in the Rogers Park neighborhood that offers education and training to homebuyers. Northside Community Resources is its parent organization; both are housed in the office at left. ( Carolyn Variano/Chicago Tribune )

6. How do you monitor the market?

"You need somebody who stays on top of the market" when you're looking to buy a house, said Tyree.

So, said, Pluchar, it helps to ask how an agent does that. "How would they characterize the way they stay abreast of the market in that area?" he said. "Are they looking at the hot sheets? Are they staying on top of home sales? Things like that."

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7. What's your marketing strategy?

When you're selling a home, you want to make sure your agent will get the word out, said Tyree. "What do you do to sell my house?" Tyree advised asking. "What type of advertisement?"

Get detailed, Anderson added. "Are they (working) primarily online? Are they primarily in person doing open houses? Is it a mix?" he said. "Do they have fancy 3-D virtual tours" or just conventional ads on real estate websites?

And you want your agent to make your home look great, Tyree said. "People do judge books by covers, so you want to make sure you have good quality photos or you're going to turn people off."

To that end, staging a home can make a huge difference, said Nagel. "If they don't believe in staging and they don't work with stagers, they're probably not superstrong brokers in my estimation," he said, adding that he believes good staging can increase a home's resale value by $10,000 or more.

Perhaps the most important question you can ask before you commit, though, is of yourself: Do you feel comfortable with this real estate agent?

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"Try to go for a feeling," Anderson said. "Sometimes it's about what vibes with you."

Nicholas Padiak is a freelance writer.

ctc-realestate@chicagotribune.com

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Hebron Venture LLC plans to convert the vacant building at 9330 Broadway in Crown Point into a NeuroPsychiatric Hospital site. (Joe Puchek / Post-Tribune)

The former Veterans Administration outpatient clinic on the southwest corner of 93rd Avenue and Broadway Street in Crown Point has a new owner and new purpose.

Hebron Venture LLC plans to convert the vacant building at 9330 Broadway into the fourth NeuroPsychiatric Hospital site in Indiana. The Hamstra Group Inc. of Wheatfield, the project developer, recently was granted the necessary special use to operate a hospital at the site from the Crown Point City Council after unanimous approval from the city's Board of Zoning Appeals.

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Mayor David Uran said he supported the project that would breathe new life into the long vacant building. The VA originally received a special use to operate an outpatient clinic at the 5.1-acre site in 1986, according to the special use application. The site has been unoccupied since the VA relocated in the fall of 2011 to the new Adam Benjamin Jr. VA Outpatient Clinic at 9301 Madison St., directly west of the former clinic.

"It's a good repurpose of the building," Uran said.

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NeuroPshyciatric Hospital specializes in stabilizing psychiatric patients that need additional medical care until they can be relocated to an appropriate facility. The hospital will have 66 beds and is expected to employ up to 200 people, according to the application.

Cameron Gilbert, hospital CEO, said the hospital focuses on short term treatment and stabilization of patients who are too sick for a traditional hospital setting. Most patients are in the facility short term until their condition is stabilized and they can return to a more long-term care situation be it a hospital or long-term care facility.

"These people are really, really sick," Gilbert said.

The hospital specializes in care of adult and geriatric patients suffering from neurodegenerative, psychiatric and medical disorders, according to an overview provided by the hospital. About 60 percent of the patients treated at the facility have Alzheimer's disease. Other conditions include vascular dementia, Parkinson's dementia, mixed dementia, post-traumatic brain injury and Huntington's disease among other neurodegenerative conditions.

John Fulkerson, director of leasing and development with the Hamstra Group, said the building will be gutted and the interior will be redesigned. Some of the mechanical equipment will remain, but the existing rooms are too small for a residential setting so they will all be redesigned, he said. An ambulance bay also will be added.

Gilbert said patients will arrive and leave the facility by ambulance.

This will be the fourth NeuroPsychiatric Hospitals facility in Indiana. The network also operates Doctors NeuroPsychiatric Hospital in Bremen, Medical Behavioral Hospital in Mishawaka and NeuroPsyhciatric Hospital of Indianapolis.

Carrie Napoleon is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Burt Katz drove home. It was the middle of the day. He worked downtown but lived in Skokie. His wife, Sharon, watched him come through the door. She was throwing a birthday party for their son, who was 5. "What are you doing home?" she asked. Burt, who was in his early 30s, explained that he had words with his boss, that he threw the guy up against a wall and shouted at him, and so, though fascinated with business, he hated the institutional sensibilities of white-collar work and abruptly quit. He had three kids, a mortgage and no plans. He also stopped shaving on that day, slightly longer than 40 years ago -- April 12, 1971.

He has not shaved since.

Burt is 74 now. He's still married to Sharon; they've been married since 1962. Her hair is still dark and wavy; and like Burt, Sharon seems young and quick, the result of a busy life. Burt'sbeard, however, is white, sparse and long now, so unusual that it doesn't quite resemble a beard; it explodes outward, unkempt and chaotic. If such a thing as hair coral existed, that's what his beard would be called.

Anyway, here's what Burt did once he decided what he was going to do with the rest of his life -- he opened a pizza place in Morton Grove and named it Pequod's for the whaling ship in "Moby Dick." He named it that simply because he liked Herman Melville. Also, years earlier, before leaving the restaurant business for his ill-fated corporate detour, he opened another pizza place with a literary pedigree, Gulliver's in Rogers Park, named for "Gulliver's Travels"; and also, the pizza place Burt owned before Gulliver's, The Inferno in Evanston, had been a nod to Dante.

In fact, since 1963, Burt Katz has owned so many pizza places in the Chicago area that in 1989 -- a few years after he burned out on Pequod's and sold that one too -- he opened his next and final pizza place and named it simply Burt's Place. He named it that because by the late '80s he had a cult following -- or rather, a lineage, a pizza DNA that, 50 years after Burt started making his pizza, continues today.

Sharon describes this style, matter of factly, as "pizza in the pan," meaning pizza made in a thick, round skillet -- not entirely deep, not quite thin. Except pizza in the pan, of course, is not aBurt Katz creation; the phrase "pizza in the pan" is often used interchangeably with "deep dish." A Burt Katz pizza is more of a "medium-dish pizza," said devotee Gary Wiviott, one of the founders of Chicago-based food site LTH Forum. "I think of it as medium crust -- not low, not high -- a skirt of caramelized crust. That's Burt."

Indeed, this caramelized crust, accomplished by ringing the pie with a touch of cheese and baking it until it becomes oil-black, is Burt's signature -- a craggy halo that begins halfway down the back of his pizzas then leaps above the lip of his crusts, creating flaky stalagmites of char.

Remarkably, if you want to taste how that style has evolved since 1963, the DNA is mostly out there: Begin with the original Gulliver's on Howard Street, which Burt opened in '65. Next, head to Morton Grove for the original Pequod's, which opened in '71. And finally, order a pizza at Burt's Place, just a block away from Pequod's.

Burt owns only Burt's now, but Gulliver's and Pequod's (the Inferno has been closed for decades) carry his distinctive touches: caky crust, blackened grace notes, ingredients that are more embedded than placed.

Asked how much this style evolved between, oh, opening Pequod's in 1970 and opening Burt's Place in 1989 --

"I opened Pequod's in 1971," he said, interrupting.

"Their menus say 1970," I said.

"I don't care what they say. They don't know what the hell they're talking about."

Asked, instead, what a Burt Katz pizza tastes like, Burt Katz's back lowers and he replies earnestly, "It's all one thing. I make my pizzas myself, only me, so I don't see the evolutionary aspects, to be honest. I've been busy making it, adjusting it, playing with it, until I arrived at a pizza where frankly I can't see the point of doing any more research on it. But here's why I think it works: It's not too much of any one thing.

"It's not too much cheese or spice. Overwhelm it with any one ingredient, you kill the whole meal. Life is balance. So this is balanced. You concentrate on overall taste. The crust is not a platform for the ingredients. To taste my pizza, you have to eat the crust of my pizza. Eat the whole damn thing, please! Otherwise don't eat it."

A handful of tweaks, to accommodate for how Pequod's and Gulliver's later fiddled with Burt's formula -- Gulliver's is more of a yellow cornmeal crust now; Pequod's sauce is now much sweeter than Burt's -- and Burt's pizza philosophy is also not a bad description of a Burt-style pizza. It also jibes with what University of Denver history professor Carol Helstosky, author of "Pizza: A Global History," calls the "Ur pizza mentality of purists who feel the beauty of pizza is found in the combining of separate tastes into one big taste." And yet, to borrow a term from music producer Phil Spector, credited with "wall of sound" pop song arrangements so dense that no single element overwhelms the final mix, a Burt Katz-style pizza is a kind of Wall of Pizza.

On the other hand, there's one thing that only Burt's Place offers, and that is Burt himself. Or as Wiviott said, "I like the care he gives to food, and I like the freshness, but what I really like isBurt, who refuses to change for anyone. Burt is his own person"

For instance, to eat at Burt's, you must phone in an order; you should not just show up. Call ahead, say when you want to eat, what you want to eat, and Sharon (who typically answers) tries to make it happen.

A trip to Burt's is an appointment.

"We don't do this because we're selfish but because we don't you waiting around," Burt said. And also because Burt and Sharon are normally the only two employees.

Incidentally, that phone you call? It's a rotary phone. The restaurant's phone number is unlisted (but easily found online, 847-965-7997). Burt doesn't own a cell; doesn't have cable; when Anthony Bourdain profiled Burt on a 2009 episode of "No Reservations," it was the first time Burt had even heard of the celebrity chef. When I ask about his lack of a website, he picks up a pencil and waves it: "I have paper, and I have a pencil. What do I need a computer for? My computer is a pencil and piece of paper. OK, write that down."



Random but perfect

The building that houses Burt's Place was built in the late 19th century. It was a blacksmith shop; there's a picture of it from the 1880s on the back wall. After he bought the building, to retain some link to its history, he accented the facade with a cascade of rounded logs, which gives the outside of Burt's Place the incongruous appearance of a semi-completed log cabin in the middle of a residential neighborhood. It's random, but perfect.

Because Burt's Place is pretty random. The front window features several Marx Brothers figurines, a Hamilton Beach blender, old radio microphones. The dining room is a riot of frayed rugs and antique technology, most of it collected by Burt: old telephones, shortwave radios, radios from military destroyers, old radio microphones with the station call letters still attached. Ancient projectors. A post-war TV with a 3-inch screen. A giant whisk and a giant ruler. Ham radio frequency cards. A souvenir bat from the 1932 World Series (Chicago Cubs versus New York Yankees).

On the ceiling, a rendition of Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: the famous image of God giving life to Adam, except someone put Burt's wizened face over God's wizened face.

"I like real things," Burt said. "I like stuff that's real, people who are real." He ran his hands over a large, life-size doll, the face sewn on, the clothing clearly handcrafted. "Someone spent months on this, for the love of doing something right, which is always better than something stamped out. I don't understand that mentality. I like real things. That's what I understand."

Burt grew up in Wicker Park; his mother died when he was 10, his father died while he was in the Marines. He studied history at Roosevelt University. He has no culinary background. He said he ended up in the pizza business because it was "one of those things. You see a sign, and one day later you're a NASCAR driver or a pizza shop owner." Despite the long beard and anxiety over corporate sensibilities, his son, Adam, a Chicago homicide detective, said, "Don't let the beard fool you; he's no hippy. I just think he takes the attention his pizza gets in stride. He's flattered, but not the kind who needs to be patted on the back to be proud of what he accomplished."

Ric Lindahl, a retired schoolteacher from Skokie, said he actually prefers Gulliver's now to Burt's, but he can't stay away from Burt's, "because when I was in high school, I was in rock bands and we would go to Pequod's after practice, and at this stage in my life, Burt's a reminder of that time. But it should be said, the Pequod's called Pequod's is not Burt's Pequod's."

In fact, if there's irony here it's that despite Burt's iconic status in Chicago pizza annals, Gulliver's and Pequod's now feel like intentional, not-entirely-friendly repudiations of Burt and his philosophies. Gulliver's, which Burt opened with Jerry Freeman (who died in 2006), expanded from its tiny storefront into a sprawling, pseudo-Greek-ish revival pizza joint/antique shop/quasi salute to Liberace, with enough gilded mirrors and lamps to give Versailles a headache. (Burt left soon after opening: "I was more interested in what was on the plate than being a great host.")

And as for Pequod's, Burt said he simply burned out. He sold it in 1986 to businessman Keith Jackson, who, when asked about Burt, said, "I never had the displeasure of being Burt'spartner." Asked to elaborate, he said Burt's famous crust is actually the result of Burt's being "a sloppy individual." He also said that comparing Pequod's pizza now to Burt's pizza is "like comparing a French dining experience to a meal of Kraft macaroni and cheese."

Besides tweaking Pequod's pizza recipe, he also tweaked the old whale logo that Burt created for Pequod's. Which was a whale. Now it's a whale in a thong. Asked if his distaste for Burthad anything to do with Burt's opening around the corner, Jackson said that Burt was within his rights to do that but that his moving so close to his old place was "disappointing."



'You chew slow'

On a Sunday night, I watched Burt come out of the kitchen, survey the room, examine the pizzas. "I'm watching your chew rate," he said to a surprised diner. "You chew slow. You chew slow in relation to the amount of pizza you're eating."

"Huh?" the man said, confused.

"You do," Burt said, then walked off.

The kitchen in Burt's Place seems like the kitchen you would find on a submarine -- built 70 years ago. It's dark and spotless, and there's a single light illuminating the table where Burtmakes pizza. Above this table is a row of clothespins, which is how Burt tracks orders. His oven looms behind him. And on a shelf overlooking everything is a darkroom timer, used for each pizza; like the rounded black pans stacked across the top of the oven, the timer is coated in grease so thick and gnarled it's now a rough outline of its former self.

Burt has had two heart attacks, two open-heart surgeries and three angioplasty operations. So every morning at 5:30, he works out at a gym. Then, around 7 a.m., he comes in and starts making dough. Once that's started, he heads to local markets and buys tomatoes for sauce, mushrooms, fresh spinach. The only corporate food supplier you will ever see pull up out front in a truck, he says, is his beer distributor.

When I asked if he would ever consider expanding, he scoffed: "It would destroy this. I don't want anything bigger. I want to do this well, and I would only want someone involved in it who has the heart for it."

When I told him Pequod's is moving next year from his old 1,600-square-foot shanty of a restaurant into a new, two-story 7,000-square-foot McMansion, he said nothing. He walked over to the foyer and found the guest book and brought it back.

Note after note read: "Great pizza!" "Best pizza ever!" "My favorite!" "Incredible pizza! Thanks Burt!"

He has three thick books of comments like this, but he said he never reads them.

"Why? This is not for my ego," he said, smoothing the pages, his dark knitted cap sinking to his brow and a slight crack creeping into his cranky, no-nonsense steamroller of a voice. "You know why I have this? For my grandkids, and their kids, who will never know my wife or myself. So they know what I built. So they will see what people wrote, and it will all make sense and maybe has some meaning."



Burt by the numbers

74: Years of age

49: Years married to his wife, Sharon

48: Years in the pizza business

4: Number of pizza shops owned since 1963

40.5: Years since his last shave

2: Number of open-heart surgeries
A framed poster, "The Periodic Table of Scotch Whisky," sits behind the counter at Independent Spirits in Edgewater. For proprietor Scott Crestodina, the squares of pseudo-chemical data  malt, grain and blended whisky distilleries color-coded by owner  is a visual reminder of who controls what.

"See all the pink squares? Those are Diageo," he explains, pointing to the many distilleries owned by the industry giant. "And the blue ones? Pernod Ricard." Meanwhile, small or independent producers are left white. You could say that since it opened in 2013, Independent Spirits has made a business of promoting these "white squares."

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It goes beyond scotch, though. With a focus on small-production libations  from French wines to fernet; boutique bitters to "fast-aged" bourbon  the specialty shop lives up to its name. While some retailers use "independent" as a synonym for "edgy" or "hip" (describing style more than substance), Crestodina takes the word seriously, deploying it to mean self-sustaining, community-oriented and socially responsible: "a little guy who supports the little guy."

After working for years at other people's stores  Fine Wine Brokers in Lincoln Square, Warehouse Liquors in the South Loop  as well as imbibing wine knowledge in his spare time, Crestodina was eager to pursue his own independent venture  an idea he'd uncorked a dozen years prior. "I really don't know what else I'd be doing," he says with a laugh.

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The store design may not aspire to unprecedented levels of hipness, but despite, or probably because of this, it's a pleasant, inviting space. Persian carpets cover the floors, and bottles of wine fill shelves and recycled crates, many accompanied by staff-written tasting notes and fairly reasonable prices (from about $9 on up). Adorning the walls are brightly colored maps, hand-painted by Crestodina, of the world's wine-producing regions. Before he could open in the space on North Broadway, located across the street from his former apartment, Crestodina had to appeal to Ald. Harry Osterman and his 48th Ward neighbors to temporarily lift a liquor moratorium and allow for a zoning change. How long did that take? "The time it took me to paint all these," he says, gesturing at the many maps. "In other words, a while."

Independent Spirits is its own unique cocktail: a fine wine selection  in-depth; extensive; what employee Ben Madeska calls "encyclopedic"  mixed with a thoughtfully curated array of small-batch spirits, including local brands such as Letherbee and Koval.

Particularly impressive is the variety of cocktail bitters: neat rows of beautifully packaged botanical infusions from the likes of Bittercube, El Guapo, Shrub and Co. and more. Meanwhile, approximately 25 varieties of vermouth in three basic styles  red, dry and blanc  prove the aromatized aperitif is still enjoying a roselike upswing in popularity in the States.

"It's all the stuff I like to drink," Crestodina says of his inventory. Currently, the staff is hung up on sherry. "You can enjoy it in a variety of ways. I think there's a misconception that sherry is a dessert wine," he says, and predicts brandy will take off the way bourbon has. In fact, Independent Spirits will soon have a barrel of 18-year-old California brandy in stock. Also worth perusing is the very pro selection of barware, much of it from Cocktail Kingdom: shakers, strainers, muddlers, thermometers and (at the moment) nine different types of bar spoons.

Besides the fierce focus on small wineries and distilleries, what really distinguishes Independent Spirits is its customer service. Crestodina and staff are happy to assist with pairings, answer questions and offer ideas and recommendations, meaning you don't have to feel overwhelmed if you have no idea what kind of vermouth you like. Or what vermouth is, exactly, besides a martini/Manhattan component. Or how to make a martini/Manhattan. (And so on.) You'll be squared away in no time.

Independent Spirits, 5947 North Broadway, Chicago (773-989-2115, independentspirits.com)

Pearson is a freelance writer.
When you're cooking with sherry, what wine do you pair with the finished dish? The key lies in the acidity. Because sherry is highly acidic, you need a lower-acid wine for balance. For dinner tonight, make this simple chicken that's finished off in a reduction of sherry and chicken broth, and pair it with any of the wines below or a bottle of a similar style.

MAKE THIS

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Chicken with onions, olives and capers

Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a skillet over medium-high heat; add 2 cloves garlic, minced, and 1 slice bacon, chopped. Cook, stirring, until garlic turns golden, about 2 minutes. Add 4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves; season with salt. Cook until browned, 3 minutes per side. Transfer chicken to a platter. Add 1 onion, thinly sliced, to the skillet; cook until onion wilts, about 4 minutes. Stir in 1/4 cup dry sherry and 1/4 cup chicken broth. Reduce until sauce has thickened, 10 minutes. Return chicken to skillet. Add 1/2 cup chopped green olives and 1 tablespoon capers; simmer until chicken is cooked through. Makes: 4 servings

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Recipe by Bill Daley

Eat. Watch. Do. Weekly What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now. >

DRINK THIS

Pairings by sommelier Nate Redner of Oyster Bah, as told to Michael Austin:

2013 G.D. Vajra Kye Langhe Freisa, Piedmont, Italy: The freisa grape variety has a range of expressions from bone-dry to very sweet. This dry one offers notes of thyme and oregano, which will help intensify the savory character of the sherry/chicken stock combination. The wine's dark berry and fig notes will nicely match the smoky bacon, as well as the briny capers and green olives. The wine's zippy acidity will balance the dish's richness.

2015 Mahi Sauvignon Blanc, Marlborough, New Zealand: A less tropical and ripe expression of New Zealand sauvignon blanc, this wine is full of lemon and grapefruit zest with subtle notes of tarragon and fennel. Its rich and creamy mouthfeel, along with citrusy acidity, will help prevent the dish from being overly salty. There is also enough fruit character in the wine to keep the pairing from being overly acidic, as sherry has a lot of acidity.

1995 Caves San Joao Poco do Lobo Arinto, Bairrada, Portugal: The 1995 vintage is actually the current release of Poco do Lobo. Arinto, especially in a single varietal wine, is a grape that needs time to tame its acidity. Twenty years of bottle age has turned this into a lovely, nutty rounded wine that will mimic the character of the dry sherry and amp up the salinity of the capers.

food@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @pour_man
News / National

by Staff reporter

ZANU-PF Bulawayo province has banned party members from holding unsanctioned meetings at the party's provincial headquarters - Davies Hall.Bulawayo provincial chairman Dennis Ndlovu said the political landscape was becoming tense ahead of elections next year hence the need to tighten security at the offices.He said those intending to hold a meeting at Davies Hall should first seek clearance."That is our headquarters, we can't just allow people to use it. We had relaxed so that members could have their meetings but it's our headquarters and we are heading towards elections so we can't continue letting people use the offices for whatever reason," Ndlovu said.He said the party wants to guard against members who would use the offices to further their agendas."The fact that people were coming to hold their meetings without the party's knowledge is not good anything can happen there. And the best way is to control and know who is in the offices at a particular time. But members can continue holding their meetings provided they are cleared to do so," said Ndlovu.He did not single out individuals and groups who have been barred from illegally using Davies Hall.Previously, unauthorised meetings were being held at Davies Hall with rival groups congregating to plot against each other.In March, anti-riot police and the Dog Section had to be called to restore order as scores of Zanu-PF Youth League members in Bulawayo demonstrated against the provincial leadership accusing it of being corrupt.It later turned out that the demonstrations were illegal resulting in the party suspending those who staged the protests.Ndlovu said it was against the spirit of unity for members to be demonstrating against each other, calling on the province to forge as a united front ahead of next year's elections."If you see someone demonstrating against the party at its offices, it shows that the demonstration will be unknown. I will also want to urge the party's members to be united as we head for next year's elections where we want to win," he said.
South Side songwriter-activist Rhymefest said Chicago's musical talent should come together as a community to give back to the neighborhoods with more than just annual toy giveaways.

"We could do more for more people together," Rhymefest told the Tribune. "This is the aspiration. We don't have any like beef or hard feelings or, you know, jealousies. All I see is what the opportunity could bring if it happened. I'm starting to see that. And it makes me wonder, and it goes beyond a Chance and a Rhymefest or a Common and a Kanye."

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Rhymefest talks the "sound of Chicago" on an episode of "The A.V. Club Hosted by John Teti" that is scheduled to air 8 p.m. Thursday on Fusion TV. The weekly show is taped at a West Town production space.

Rhymefest's appearance comes weeks after he performed at the Blues Festival in Millennium Park. The 40-year-old Grammy and Oscar winner, who was born Che Smith, worked with AARP to create the intergenerational music program Bridges to the Blues to connect young musicians with established blues artists.

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He's concerned about preserving Chicago's black cultural legacy and emphasized that artists need to dismiss the "narrative of one" and recognize their accomplishments stem from team efforts.

For his part, Rhymefest said he's reconciled with Kanye West, his longtime collaborator. As West debuted "The Life of Pablo" and reignited his feud with Taylor Swift in February 2016, Rhymefest tweeted that West needs to undergo spiritual and mental counseling and step out of the public eye.

@JakeChatty my brother needs help, in the form of counseling. Spiritual & mental. He should step away from the public & yesmen & heal  Rhymefest (@RHYMEFEST) February 12, 2016

"We're brothers, that's what brothers do, and then we called each other, 'How are you doing and how are your children? And maybe if you do this or that.' That's what family does. For all intents and purposes, his mother was my mother too," Rhymefest said.

Rhymefest, who co-wrote West's hits "Jesus Walks" and "New Slaves," and his wife Donnie run Donda's House, an organization supporting Chicago's young aspiring artists that is named for West's late mother Donda.

He said he collaborated with two Donda's House alumni on one of the songs for "The Public," Emilio Estevez's upcoming drama that follows a standoff between police and Cincinnati library patrons -- many of whom are homeless and mentally ill. Rhymefest plays a homeless man who helps lead the library occupation.

He is also recording an album with DJ Jazzy Jeff and working on a project to help barbers and estheticians spot trauma and deliver mild therapy in their communities -- an idea that stemmed from Rhymefest being robbed at gunpoint in the Bronzeville area in August 2016.

Not on the docket: Running for alderman anytime soon. In 2011, he lost to South Side Ald. Willie Cochran (20th), who pleaded not guilty last year to federal charges that allege he misused charity funds. Rhymefest said he may consider another candidacy when he's "done setting the world on fire."

"I just did a film with Emilio Estevez where I'm going head to head with Alec Baldwin. Gabrielle Union jumped in my arms and looked at me in the face and said, 'You're my hero.' At that point, how could I run for city council right now? Like, I got things to do. I got money to bring back to the South Side. I got kids to grow. I've got villages to build here," he said.

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Rhymefest says mayor's crime plan too enforcement-heavy, offers own idea







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)
Daniel Meyer, director and university archivist for the University of Chicago Special Collection Research Center, discusses the 500 new Vivian Maier prints that the university now houses. July 19, 2017. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune) (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)

Almost 500 never-before-shown Vivian Maier prints have found a new home at the University of Chicago Library, the university announced Wednesday.

Maier, the Chicago-area nanny who has become famous posthumously as a street photographer  and as the subject of extensive legal wrangling  has had museum and gallery shows but has not previously had her work held by a research institution.

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The gift, from Chicago collector John Maloof, who owns the great majority of known Maier work, will give art historians, photography students and other interested parties the chance to examine a new range of Maier work in the close detail of an archival setting.

"We would like to simply make the collection available to researchers," said Daniel Meyer, director of special collections at the library. "We are very interested in seeing what students and researchers are able to provide in the way of interpretation and analysis."

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Maloof, co-writer and co-director of the Academy Award-nominated 2013 documentary "Finding Vivian Maier," said the gift may help boost the artist's stature.

"That's part of the hope," he said. "I hope that being in the collection  being that they accepted it and are going to share it and maybe do some exhibitions in the future  will give an institutional backing to the artist."

A key element of the gift, which also includes a Maier camera and other personal effects, is that the images were selected by Maier herself for printing, which she did with only a small fraction of the more than 135,000 negatives she is known to have shot during more than four decades working in Chicago and New York and on overseas trips.

"We make a lot of contemporary prints through the galleries and offer them to people that want to own a Vivian Maier print or whatever," Maloof said. "I think that this is a good body of work for anybody looking to research Vivian Maier. People fascinated by her, her story, her body of work can learn more about her through this donation."

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 14 This vintage photograph made by posthumously discovered Chicago photographer Vivian Maier is among the 500 photographic prints donated to the University of Chicago by collector and filmmaker John Maloof. The prints are expected to be available to researchers by the end of the year. Photograph  2017 The Estate of Vivian Maier. All rights reserved. (Vivian Maier /  2017 The Estate of Vivian Mai)

Indeed, the photographs in the donation, which range from small color shots printed commercially by Kodak up to some black-and-white 8-by-10s and larger thought to have been printed by Maier when she had access to a darkroom, can be viewed as a much fuller representation of the artist's intention than has previously been displayed.

"I put the collection together to show Vivian Maier in as many ways as possible," Maloof said.

Before these photos, Maier's work has been seen mostly in images selected and printed by Maloof and other men who came into possession of it after she was unable to keep up payments on a storage locker in 2007 and the contents were auctioned off.

"There is, I think, a difference between many of these photographs and the photographs people have seen in the exhibitions or in published books," said Meyer. "These are in a sense the collection she made herself. Included are images she cropped and enlarged or that she would print in several different ways. So you get a sense of Vivian Maier as a practicing, working photographer who is experimenting and also testing different approaches to her work."

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Having the images find a home at a research institution may prove to be a key moment in Maier's artistic reputation, said Joel Snyder, a University of Chicago art historian and photography expert who has seen the photos in the donation.

"It's going to play a role in that sorting-out process, and the sorting-out process is going to take years and years," Snyder said. "To me her sensibility is a sensibility that comes out of the '40s and '50s and gets sort of canonized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By the standards with which people in art museums judged prints in the '50s, '60s and '70s, these are very, very strong pictures. ... It's really a fascinating collection."

In addition to some of her well-known subject matter  people on streets unaware they are being photographed, close-ups of hands and feet, portraits made on the fly  the collection is said to contain streetside photographs of celebrities including Frank Sinatra, John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt and Pope John Paul II.

Like the artist herself, a new North Avenue mural of Vivian Maier by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra is drawing new fans. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)

For an artist, being more than a short-term sensation is often dependent on the reception from collectors and institutions, Snyder said.

"We're at the very starting point, really," he said. "We're in the process now of trying to figure out whether 'the right' kinds of buyers will buy them. Then over 10, 15 or 50 years families will give them to university collections or museums.

"The community, I can't imagine, is going to say something worse than, 'She was really good at doing something that people admired in other photographers at that time.' Now, will she get a head of steam, have exhibitions at the 'right' institutions? You can't tell yet, and I can't make a judgment other than the fact that I really like quite a large number of them."

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Born in New York in 1926, Maier began working as a nanny for a North Shore family in 1956. She shot steadily but apparently very rarely printed her negatives, toting boxes with her from one live-in domestic job to another. Poverty-stricken in the 2000s, she lost her stored possessions to the auction block. Maier never recovered from a late 2008 fall on ice and died in a nursing home the next year.

By then, Maloof and two other collectors had purchased the contents of her storage locker. The photographs of hers that Maloof posted on Flickr in 2009 became an Internet sensation, and fascination with this mysterious, reclusive, camera-toting nanny, and an attendant cottage industry, were born.

Maloof and Chicago collector Jeffrey Goldstein thought they had made a deal with the Meier heir whom Maloof located, a French cousin, paying for rights to the work. Maloof, who holds about 90 percent of the known negatives, and Goldstein, who had about 10 percent, published books, staged exhibitions and sold prints, and Maier's renown grew.

But in 2014 Virginia lawyer and photographer David Deal surfaced with another French cousin. His filing in Cook County probate court on behalf of the new relative led to an estate takeover by the county's public administrator on the grounds that Maier had left no will and heirship was unsettled.

Faced with sharing control with the county, Goldstein defiantly sold his Maier negatives to a Toronto art dealer, who has since sold them to investors in Switzerland. Just this spring the county sued Goldstein seeking to claw back his profits from Maier's work.

Meanwhile, the county government reached an agreement with Maloof that essentially allows him to continue owning the negatives while paying the estate an undisclosed royalty on his earnings from them.

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The U. of C. donation, however, is not caught up in any legal fight, both Maloof and university representatives said. The Vivian Maier estate "signed off entirely. They're happy with it," Maloof said.

And both said they hope that in the future Maloof, who said he has about 3,500 more vintage prints made by Maier of wildly varying degrees of quality, will be donating more to the university.

"We're very pleased John Maloof has selected the university as a permanent home for these photographs," said librarian Meyer, who said the library expects to have them cataloged and ready for visitors to see by the end of the year. "We're looking forward to having the collection grow and presenting her work more fully over time."

The donation provides a satisfying resolution to at least one aspect of Vivian Maier's complicated legacy, said Snyder, the photography expert.

"It's the right thing to have it in a university collection that serves a lot of people, a lot of students, who are interested in photography," he said.

sajohnson@chicagotribune.com

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Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 15 The Chicago History Museum has on display several photographs taken by amateur street photographer Vivian Maier, who became celebrated and famous posthumously. Her work has been the subject of a long-running legal dispute. (Phil Velasquez / Chicago Tribune)

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 5 Pedestrians and vehicles pass a Vivian Maier mural painted by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra in the 1600 block of West North Avenue on July 17, 2017. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)






Roger Waters is a sometimes reluctant road warrior. He expressed his disconnect from touring (among many other issues) in the '70s and famously wrote much of Pink Floyd's 1979 album "The Wall" in response. When he got around to touring "The Wall" as a solo artist in 2010, he suggested it might be the last time he hits the road on such a massive scale. Yet here he is again, presiding over a similarly gargantuan worldwide excursion for his latest solo album, "Is This the Life We Really Want?" It brims with Floydian sonic signifiers and functions as both a humanistic plea and decidedly unsubtle political commentary.

For Waters, the question posed by the album title applies to his own life, a continual self-interrogation about what matters that has informed all of his albums. In an interview, the former Pink Floyd bassist discussed the lessons he is still learning and reflecting upon in his music. Here are a few excerpts from that conversation:

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Q: In one of our previous interviews, you said you were "still looking for an ending to 'The Wall.'  Twenty years of therapy later I'm just starting to get a handle on what it means." Did your recent tour for "The Wall" bring you to a greater understanding of what it means?

A: It's interesting the way it finishes on stage after all the bricks have tumbled down, a symbolic demonstration of what good can come out of a wall coming down as opposed to building one. We'd all stand and grin and bathe in connection, a deeply felt connection with the audience. We get it in this show as well. This a bit more radical than "The Wall" is, but it's pointing in the same direction philosophically and politically. With the nincompoop president, we're building a nation with walls. You can't be a nation without walls? Yeah, you can. We haven't arrived at the end of the story. The story is a personal one for me, about my father (who died in World War II in Italy only a few months after Waters was born), and I've come to some answers to my questions. This lovely man, an Englishman living in Italy, found the exact spot where my father was killed. He persuaded the people of Aprilia, a town near Anzio, to build a monument (to the soldiers who died there). I was invited to unveil it, and I did it with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. I found some closure in that little bit of rural Italy. This is what you find, if you ever have the opportunity to travel the world. You discover what the show is about: We're all the same. No matter what color or religion, we're all in this together. This is a small, fragile place, we're in rough waters and we can't navigate it without doing it together.

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Q: Nothing gets an artist in trouble quicker with his fan base than taking a strong stand on a political issue. Given the overt political messages on the current tour, do you feel any backlash?

A: Inevitably, the biggest roar of approval comes at the beginning and end of "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" from "Animals," which is a full-frontal attack, to ridicule the idiot president. There may be a few Trump supporters who take their disgruntlement out on us and leave. Mostly there is a huge wave of "Thank God someone is saying this in a rock 'n' roll show out loud."

Q: Can artists play a role in changing the way the world works?

A: Of course there is a role. I have a platform, I can say things in my songs. If people listen to the work, they hear what I'm feeling. If I'm a painter, I don't choose what I paint. If you're living in Provence (in southern France), and your brain is full of beauty in observing the changing light on the landscape, you're Cezanne. If you're moved by and disgusted by the tragedy of war, you're Goya. What I see is what I paint. I cannot stop trying to understand it, shuck off the burden of what I feel, and responsibility to shout my belief in love. I need to shout it from rooftops as loud as I can. That's my job. When I wrote "The Wall" it was because I didn't feel any connection with audience. I felt I was at a party I wasn't part of. And I was part of something else on stage they weren't part of. "The Wall" started from that feeling. I don't feel that anymore. At the end of the shows, there is a lot of love in the room. You can't mistake it, I can feel it. We built this edifice in the middle of an auditorium for us and them. You see them drawn in, and they realize, "All he's saying is that we're all human beings."

Q: How did you come to work with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich on the new album?

A: We got Nigel in to mix the sound for "The Wall" tour documentary, and we got on great. We started discussing the idea of making an album, I played him some new songs and we spent a week or so in LA cutting two or three tracks. We both realized, "This could work," and he did a brilliant job. He is the producer. This is not co-produced like most of my work. I sat on my hands with lips zipped. You've rented this dog, let it work.

Q: A lot of fans are noting how these new songs echo the classic Floyd sound. Was that intentional?

A: There aren't too many departures, because Nigel's also a great fan of '70s Pink Floyd. There was a lot of putting up big tape loops and running them to make all those segues, a lot of techniques that we used to make those '70s albums. We're both big fans of found sounds. Where I used voices in (Floyd's 1973 masterpiece "The Dark Side Side of the Moon"), he does similar thing with this album.

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Q: You seem to be visibly enjoying touring for the first time in decades. Why?

A: At a certain point, I made myself vulnerable, I embraced the idea of exposing myself. That's what the end of "The Wall" is. In one version I wrote for the rock 'n' roll shows of "The Wall," the wall comes down and  I know it sounds crazy  but I'm naked. It won't happen, but in this treatment I wrote I'm standing there naked, like John Lennon on the "Two Virgins" album cover  just a weedy bloke, naked, exposed. I think I found through my work the courage to expose myself and discovered that I shouldn't shy from vulnerability. People embrace you if you're vulnerable. And to love is to be vulnerable. The more you love, the more you risk. Can you imagine the desperation you have to feel to leave your home for generations and you walk away, get in a boat and risk drowning in the Aegean or Mediterranean, trying to find refuge where your family can be safe? If you're capable of feeling love for others in need, you're blessed beyond belief.

Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.

greg@gregkot.com

Twitter @gregkot

When: 8 p.m. Saturday, Sunday and July 28

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Where: United Center, 1901 W. Madison St.

Tickets: $55-$450; www.ticketmaster.com

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Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 122 Sophie Turner as Jean Grey, anger management student, in "Dark Phoenix." The film, the latest in the "X-Men" franchise, costars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jessica Chastain. Read the review. (Twentieth Century Fox)
Rahm Emanuel needed a desk.

His predecessor, Richard M. Daley, took his desk with him when he left office after his 22-year tenure, and the new mayor's fifth-floor office at City Hall was deskless.

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So one of the very first things Emanuel did when elected mayor in 2011 was to have some folks retrieve from the corporation counsel's office an even older mayoral desk, the one used by Anton Cermak, whose two-year term came to an abrupt end in 1933 when he was killed in Miami by an assassin's bullet meant for President-elect Franklin Roosevelt.

After spending time behind the desk, Emanuel would later say, "Each day I reflect on the legacy that Mayor Cermak left on the city of Chicago."

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No one better appreciates that than Michael Greitzer. He is a writer. He has published short fiction. He is a musician/songwriter and musical dramatist who released an album in 2007, "Welcome to the Eldorado Lounge," and had his first play produced in 2012, "Waiting for Dr. Storlazzi." He is also, more to the point, the writer and librettist of an ambitious musical titled "Pushcart Tony: The True Story of Anton Cermak and Chicago."

Anton Cermak in 1931 (Chicago Herald and Examiner)

Like a lot of local historical figures, Cermak is largely forgotten. Yes, there is a street named for him and there are the Cermak Fresh Market Foods stores, Cermak Auto Center and Cermak Auto Auction. But there is no Anton Cermak statue in Chicago, no respect.

Greitzer first "met" Cermak in 2012, while doing historical research. "What most intrigued me was learning that Cermak was the first and, as far as I have been able to tell, the only immigrant to become the mayor of a major American city," he says.

So he dug further into what is, by any reckoning, a fascinating life.

In short, Cermak was born in 1873 in the small town of Kladno in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), coming to America the next year. He worked as a laborer and then was able to buy himself a horse and began to haul discarded lumber around the city, selling it as firewood. He was hardworking, tough and shrewd and started his political career as a precinct captain. Then he became an alderman and in that job, and other positions, he exercised a great ability to recognize the power of, and to organize, the new ethnic groups  Poles, Czechs, Jews, Ukrainians, Italians and African-Americans  that had begun to settle in Chicago in the early 1900s. In so doing he became the father of Chicago's Democratic machine. And, of course, there was his bloody end, punctuated by the famous (and quite dramatic) line he allegedly uttered to Roosevelt after being shot: "I am glad it was me instead of you."

"What a life, and set against the background of an amazing time for Chicago. There's the 1893 World's Fair, Al Capone's rise to power," says Greitzer, who has waited tables, done web design and worked other jobs to pay for his creative endeavors. "So much."

It's a bit surprising that with all the characters who have inhabited the mayor's office, so few have inspired theatrical works.

One of them was Richard J. Daley, who was brought to life in "Boss," a 1973 musical comedy that premiered at the bygone Forum Theater in Summit and was based on Mike Royko's best-selling biography of Daley. With book and lyrics by Frank Galati and starring Richard O'Neill as the mayor, it was deemed "half fun and half dull" by Tribune critic William Leonard. (Daley came more powerfully to the stage in playwright/star Neil Giuntoli's "Hizzoner" a decade ago at the Prop Thtr; Giuntoli was distant nephew of Cermak's).

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Greitzer gives a lot of credit to Alex Gottfried's biography "Boss Cermak of Chicago: A Study of Political Leadership" (University of Washington Press, 1962) as well "as every old newspaper clipping I could get my hands on."

He began to write and found his composer via the internet, a musician named A.J. Braman, who lives in Buffalo, N.Y. "I sent him the lyrics to the song titled 'The Levee' and he sent back a composition that was just brilliant. And we were off and running," says Greitzer.

Occasionally, Braman would fly in for face-to-face collaboration. The duo soon hooked up with TesserAct Theater Ensemble, a non-Equity group in Palatine. Director Julie Price came on board. Auditions were held and a cast chosen. A Kickstarter campaign helped raise money.

And in early June 2016, the show was on. With a cast of 20, 30-some songs and three acts, the musical had its world premiere in the form of a short showcase run at the Vittum Theater.

For each of the four shows there were four seats reserved for Emanuel and any others he might want to bring. "Cermak was a true hero and his story, in the form of a Chicago musical, is no doubt something Mayor Emanuel would be excited to get involved with, or at least support," says Greitzer. "As you know, the mayor loves stage theater."

Emanuel was a no-show, but the musical packed the small house and got some serious recognition, being named best new work of Chicago theater in 2016 by the well-regarded website Broadway World (www.broadwayworld.com).

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"This was a great accomplishment, having audience members vote for us," says Greitzer.

Over the past year, Greitzer and Braman have been reworking and polishing their script and songs. (You can get samples of the music at www.pushcarttony.com).

The musical has made its way "into the hands of a few people in New York," says Greitzer. "My wish though is to have this show performed by a strong Equity theater company here. But the truth is most theaters don't have the financial resources to produce a musical on this scale.

"I have spoken with a few reps of corporate entities in Chicago that are interested in helping 'Pushcart Tony' move on to bigger things here. I am determined. This is, to use the cliche, a labor of love."

He was encouraged by the May arrival of One Chicago (www.onechi.org), a city-sponsored initiative/campaign begun in response to the emerging needs of Chicago's immigrant/refugee communities affected by new federal policies and intended to celebrate the contributions of immigrants to the city.

"The first immigrant mayor, that was Cermak, and that is one of the reasons why I am trying so hard to get this play, this incredible man, into the Chicago consciousness," says Greitzer. "I have sent out messages to City Hall, to the mayor and to members of his staff."

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He doesn't know if that message has reached Emanuel. Maybe it's sitting on his desk.

rkogan@chicagotribune.com






Kate Baldwin and Kate Shindle, Broadway stars and alumni of Northwestern University, are both 2017 winners of the The Sarah Siddons Society of Chicago's Actor of the Year Award.

Baldwin recently garnered a Tony nomination for "Hello, Dolly!" on Broadway and last appeared in Chicago in Lyric Opera's production of "The King and I." Shindle is currently on tour with "Fun Home" and serves as the president of Actors' Equity Association.

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Baldwin and Shindle will receive their awards at an event slated for Sept. 18th at the Hilton Orrington Hotel in Evanston. The ceremony will feature performances by the actresses, along with appearances by Chicago musical theater artists and this year's scholarship winners.

The Sarah Siddons Society, a volunteer organization of Chicago theater supporters, was created in 1952, with Helen Hayes as the first recipient of the award and a following number of prominent stage and screen actors.

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More information is available at sarahsiddonssociety.org.

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The burned-out remains of the Whispering Pines Motel in Tasley, Va., in February 2014 after the former motel was destroyed by arson. (Bonnie Jo Mount photo)

Tonya Bundick and Charlie Smith weren't exactly Bonnie and Clyde. They lacked the glamor, the panache and, in the end, the loyalty. But they may have been the closest to those legendary outlaws that down-on-its-luck Accomack County would ever come.

A feature writer for The Washington Post, Monica Hesse encountered the couple after their arrest in connection with a string of nearly 80 arsons on Virginia's Eastern Shore. In "American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land," she has expanded her newspaper reportage into a wry, gently meandering narrative that strains to find deeper meaning in a tale of love gone awry.

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The book situates both the Bundick-Smith romance and the fires  all involving more-or-less deserted structures, and none causing loss of life  against the backdrop of the area's economic decline. Hesse sees that decline as emblematic of the hollowing out of rural America, and the couple as avatars of the resulting frustrations.

Scenic Accomack County, Hesse reports, was once one of the country's richest rural counties, its boom fueled by potato production, the growth of railroads and tourism. But falling potato prices, the replacement of rail by trucking and the advent of big-box stores cost the region jobs and residents.

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Chicken processing plants picked up some of the economic slack. But the county remained pocked with abandoned houses and businesses, from the dwellings of migrant workers to the once-chic resort Whispering Pines. "It was a uniquely perfect place to light a string of fires," Hesse writes.

She begins with an intimate account of one of those blazes, and of the men  and at least one woman  who volunteered to fight them. In time, as fires erupted night after night, those volunteers were overcome by exhaustion and bafflement. Law enforcement officials called on expert profilers for help, installed motion-detection cameras and dispatched men in tents to stake out potential arson sites. Worried residents formed a vigilante group called the Eastern Shore Arson Hunters, designed T-shirts and conducted their own stakeouts.

With the pacing of a slow country melody, and some of the attitude, "American Fire" shuttles between the arsons and the unraveling lives of Smith and Bundick. Their involvement is clear early on. The book's suspense revolves around the manhunt and the motivations for the crime spree.

Hesse portrays Smith, a principal source for the book, as hapless but congenial. "Charlie Smith's life had been a mess," she writes, "though he was the first to admit it was mostly his own fault, which was one of the things people liked about him."

(Chicago Tribune)

Smith was a high school dropout  "Not the sharpest crayon in the box," his acquaintances said. A drug addict, he stole from his uncle to buy crack, and served some prison time. But Hesse describes him as a skilled auto mechanic, courageous volunteer firefighter and devoted father to a daughter from a short dalliance. Smith's life involved "bouts of great heroism mixed with bouts of great boneheadedness," she writes.

As for Bundick, she was a high school misfit from an old Eastern Shore family who worked as a nursing assistant and parented two mixed-race sons. At 40, Hesse writes, she was a pretty and popular barfly whose provocative fashion choices were admired and imitated.

When Smith first ran into her, at the bar Shuckers, he was convinced that she was out of his league. But after Bundick took the initiative, the relationship sparked. The two moved in together, and, for a while, they enjoyed "a modern romance of limited budgets and modest expectations and the simplest of pleasures." They even contemplated a gala wedding.

There were worries, too, including Smith's sense that Bundick never revealed her emotional core. At some point, they both began running small businesses  he an auto shop, and she a clothing store. Neither did particularly well. And as their finances and relationship both spiraled downward, the fires began.

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Hesse pads "American Fire" with chapters on the crime of arson and various pairs of criminals, including Bonnie and Clyde and Leopold and Loeb. But as she zooms in on the two lovers, their deteriorating relationship, Bundick's troubled past, and their capture and interrogation, her discursive narrative becomes more engrossing.

"Love is a weird act," Hesse concludes. "An optimistic delusion. A leap of faith and foolishness. Sometimes when it is tested, imperfections that were there from the beginning, lurking deep, can begin to work their way to the surface." And mayhem can result, as it did in Accomack.

Her book's title and premise notwithstanding, Hesse is ultimately modest in her conclusions. She suggests that rural America isn't so much dying as adapting  and that "nostalgia is the only good America will never stop producing."

Julia M. Klein was a finalist this year for the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

'American Fire'

By Monica Hesse, Liveright, 255 pages, $26.95






Haircuts, color and products can add up quickly at the salon, and while you may not want to cut corners when it comes to your hair, it's possible to cut costs while keeping your cut fantastic. We reached out to salon experts across the country to learn the behind-the-scene secrets to savings at the salon.

Ask about referral discounts. Many salons will offer a $15 referral discount, said Jamie DiGrazia, stylist, colorist, hair care brand ambassador and owner of Logan Parlor in Chicago. "Salons and stylists love giving discounts for referrals," DiGrazia said. "It really helps the salon gain new and loyal business when the salon is referred by friends."

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Go to a gender-neutral salon. If you're a woman with short hair, you can save money by going to a salon that charges by the length of your hair rather than by gender, said DiGrazia, whose salon's pricing structure goes by the time and length of the cut instead of by gender. "It's now become a very popular way to charge," DiGrazia said. "It is fair and equal to the guest and to the service provider."

Ask about being a hair model. Often, stylists are looking for models to enter into a hair show or competition, or to add diversity to their portfolio, said Greg Auer, stylist at PureBeauty Salon & Spa at Macy's in Chicago. Many salons also require hair models for on-site training. "This is a great way to get a new look on a dime  or even for free," Auer said.

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Speak up. Your relationship with your regular hairdresser is important, said April Masini, a relationship and etiquette expert and author of four relationship advice books. "Usually, people don't realize this importance until things go wrong, but if you're looking to save money, and you have a regular relationship with your hairdresser, simply talking to them about your budget concerns is step one," Masini said. The hair dresser may suggest more time between appointments, leaving out special treatments you didn't realize you were paying for, or simply avoiding the cost of blow dry services, especially in the summer when you may not need or want it. "Many people don't talk frankly to their hairdresser, and this creates miscommunication and second-guessing," Masini said. "If you start skipping appointments because you're trying to save money  but you're not cluing your hairdresser in, they may think you're not happy with them, or you're finding someone else to go to." If you speak with them, but don't want to lose their services, they may try to help. If you don't tell them, they won't have that opportunity.

Seek out a new stylist. Go to a high-end salon and choose a new stylist who is in the beginning of his or her career. "Typically, a newer stylist will come with a lower price tag, but while they may lack experience on the floor, they are usually in the middle of a high-level training program," said Tony Gordon, stylist with Gordon Salon, which has four locations in Illinois. At his salon, new stylists are $39, as opposed to master stylists, who can charge upward of $60.

Look for discounts. Even higher-end salons, like the Mario Tricoci chain, will offer discounts, said Tammy Baltrus, a top stylist there. Baltrus said her salon accepts Spa Finder gift cards, which can be purchased at Costco, saving clients $20 for every $100 they spend. "Some salons are on the AAA list to receive 10 percent off products and services," Baltrus said. She also recommends asking every salon if they would accept other salons' coupons, as well as offering your email and phone number to your technician so she or he can keep you informed about current promotions.

Danielle Braff is a freelancer.

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Linda Johnson Rice handles some of the photos in the archives at Johnson Publishing in 2015. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

Tesla billionaire Elon Musk this week responded to calls to beef up independence and diversity at Tesla by adding Chicagoan Linda Johnson Rice to its board.

But Johnson Rice's appointment comes at an awkward time for corporate governance at Ebony, the historic black magazine founded by her father whose parent company she once again leads.

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The National Association of Black Journalists last week handed Ebony a mocking "Thumbs Down Award" for failing to pay freelancers owed as much as $200,000  while the National Writer's Union announced plans to sue Ebony on behalf of the unpaid freelancers.

After #ebonyowes trended on Twitter, the struggling magazine, which recently laid off staff and relocated its editorial operation to Los Angeles, was accused of blowing its own June 30 deadline to make good on the debt to a group of 30 writers represented by the union, some of whom have allegedly been waiting a year to be paid.

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Johnson Rice, 59, on Tuesday declined through her office to comment on the dispute, referring all questions to Tesla, which did not immediately respond. Ebony Media Chairman Michael Gibson told Chicago Inc. that the company aims to pay its debts to all freelancers by the end of the week, adding that problems with a new accounting system predated Johnson Rice's return to the CEO role from an "emeritus" position in March.

"We're all working as judiciously and quickly to fix this," Gibson said, adding that Ebony management was "very sorry" for the delays.

Unsurprisingly, a Tesla news release announcing the appointment of Johnson Rice and Rupert Murdoch's son James Murdoch sidestepped the issue. Tesla, which has been under pressure to diversify a board that contains five members with personal or business ties to Musk and  until Johnson Rice's appointment  only one woman, instead pointed to Johnson Rice's history of service on the boards of major corporations including Bausch & Lomb, Continental Bank, Quaker Oats, Dial, MoneyGram and Kimberly-Clark.

Johnson Rice's compensation package at Tesla includes the option to purchase up to 16,668 shares of Tesla stock, which would have been worth more than $2.4 million over the last 12 months, though Musk has repeatedly suggested that Tesla stock is overpriced.

kjanssen@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @kimjnews
Robert Boudreau aboard Point Counterpoint II on the Des Plaines River in Lemont in 2015. The boat, designed by architect Louis Kahn, could be saved from the scrap heap if a town in New York can come up with the money to buy it from Boudreau. ( Phil Velasquez/Chicago Tribune )

Two years ago, Chicago had a chance to add a futuristic floating concert hall designed by one of the 20th century's great architects to its renowned collection of iconic structures. The vessel could have adorned the city's downtown Riverwalk and moved up and down the branches of the Chicago River, entertaining audiences on shore.

But the chance to buy Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn's "Point Counterpoint II," which opens like a clam shell to present classical music concerts for listeners on shore, came and went with the closing of the first Chicago Architecture Biennial exhibition in 2015.

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Now, after the eminent cellist Yo-Yo Ma made a passionate plea to save the 41-year-old vessel from being shipped to a Louisiana scrap yard, it could be going elsewhere  to a New York state artists' haven, about 90 miles north of Manhattan, that just hosted two Bob Dylan concerts and is home to a maritime museum.

Officials and activists in the Hudson River town of Kingston, N.Y., plan to meet with the boat's owner Aug. 4 to discuss the possibility of transporting the vessel there from its current berth on the Illinois River in Ottawa, Ill. Late last month, musicians performed aboard the boat in the town, some 80 miles southwest of Chicago.

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"We think this could be a great opportunity, one more reason why people would come to Kingston," the town's mayor, Steve Noble, said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "I am excited to meet with them in August to figure out how best we can help."

"Help" will definitely involve raising money: The boat's owner, Robert Boudreau, is asking for $2 million  nearly 5 percent of Kingston's annual budget, the mayor acknowledged. To buy the boat and have it towed to Kingston, the town of roughly 24,000 people will almost surely need grants from foundations or gifts from "angel" philanthropists.

Boudreau is hopeful such manna will fall from heaven.

"Kingston is a perfect place. They're going through a very creative time," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Mars, Pa., near Pittsburgh.

Asked about published reports that someone in Ottawa might be interested in buying the boat, Boudreau replied: "They're still talking about it. I can't wait anymore."

Boudreau, who recently turned 90 and has decided he and his wife, Kathleen, cannot keep operating "Point Counterpoint II," is nearing the end of a remarkable, decadeslong career.

He is the founder and conductor of the American Wind Symphony Orchestra, a traveling ensemble of musicians from around the world who perform on the Kahn-designed craft. Before Kahn died in 1974, he designed the vessel for Boudreau in anticipation of the nation's bicentennial in 1976.

Nicknamed "the music boat," the silvery, 195-foot-long craft has traveled rivers, lakes and other waterways in America, Europe and the Caribbean. Resembling a spaceship as much as a barge, it houses sleeping quarters and an art gallery in addition to its glittering, pop-up concert stage.

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With its oversized circular windows, the craft is far more playful than Kahn's greatest buildings, like the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, which are revered for their monumental solidity and repose. Yet, the boat's advocates argue, it has a significance all its own.

Sparked by a recent survey of Kahn's life and work in The New York Review of Books, Ma wrote a letter to the publication that called Boudreau a friend and said the boat "sails as a powerful, living testament to American creativity and to the elemental role that culture plays in human life."

"Lacking an alternative, in late July, at the conclusion of the (American Wind) Orchestra's 2017 tour, this remarkable, mobile cultural institution will be broken down to scrap in a Louisiana shipyard," wrote Ma, who lives in Cambridge, Mass. The letter, already published online, is to appear in a future issue of the Review.

Ma's plea caught the eye of Peter Wetzler, a Kingston-based composer of music for film and television. He thinks the town can use the vessel for concerts, theater performances and education  and that the necessary funds can be raised to bring it there.

"I don't have deep pockets," Wetzler said. "I do have access to friends who do."

Kahn's son Nathaniel, who featured the boat in "My Architect," his Academy Award-nominated documentary about his father's life, lovers and buildings, is hopeful that the vessel will have a second act.

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"I have complete confidence that we have not turned into a country that is going to let something like this go," Kahn said in a telephone interview from New York.

Before the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Boudreau had the boat towed to the Des Plaines River town of Lemont. He belatedly tried to schedule a performance in Chicago but was rebuffed by city officials who said they never had an agreement with him to tie up at a prime spot on the downtown Riverwalk. "They have that beautiful amphitheater," he said of the Riverwalk. "I'm sorry we can't be part of it."

After the biennial, the boat remained in Lemont. It did not tour in 2016, Boudreau said.

A spokesman for the city's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events reiterated Tuesday that the city has no plans to bring the vessel to Chicago.

Wherever it lands, the most important thing is that Kahn's "music boat" survive and thrive. It's a unique element in the architect's catalog of works and a prime example of how architectural innovation can bring the benefits of culture to the broadest possible audience.

bkamin@chicagotribune.com

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The Cook County sheriff's office layoffs are in addition to more than 300 county job cuts announced last week being cut to make up for the loss of anticipated revenue from the soda tax. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)

More than 110 Cook County sheriff's office recruits and trainees were laid off this week after a proposed countywide tax on soda was put on hold, officials said.

The sheriff's office layoffs are in addition to more than 300 county job cuts announced last week to make up for the loss of anticipated revenue from the soda tax.

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"These are very difficult times for everyone," said Cara Smith, chief policy officer for the sheriff's office.

Sixty-six incoming recruits who were expected to start training next week have been notified that their class is suspended, and 47 trainees who began at the academy last month were laid off.

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In addition, 12 other employees, including eight people who work at county courthouses, were laid off. Members of two specialty units will be reassigned to the Cook County Jail.

Smith said she is hopeful that the budget crisis passes and the training classes can be resumed, but in the meantime, security is the first priority.

"We're going to do everything we can to keep our staff safe and keep the public safe," Smith said.

The sheriff's office is responsible for several essential operations in the county's justice system, including the Cook County Jail, the sheriff's police and courthouse security.

Other county agencies felt the budget pinch last week as 10 percent across-the-board cuts were ordered after the soda tax was held up by a Cook County judge.

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The Cook County state's attorney's office announced last week that 17 prosecutors and 22 other employees would be laid off. The Public Defender's office cut 69 employees, most of them lawyers.

The soda tax was supposed to go into effect July 1. But a judge issued a temporary restraining order June 30 after the Illinois Retail Merchants Association and several grocers filed a lawsuit against the county Department of Revenue seeking to block the tax as unconstitutional and too vague.

Circuit Judge Daniel Kubasiak is scheduled to take up the county's motion to dismiss the lawsuit on Friday, but he isn't expected to announce his decision until a week later, according to Frank Shuftan, County Board President Toni Preckwinkle's spokesman.

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"We can't predict what the judge may or may not do, how long the court case may last, and, as such, have to proceed with the holdback," Shuftan wrote in an email to the Tribune last week.

Cook County had projected collecting about $67.5 million in revenue from the tax this year and more than $200 million for fiscal year 2018.

mcrepeau@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @crepeau
News / National

by Staff reporter

MATABELELAND region will be a hive of activity on Friday, as President Robert Mugabe and MDC-T leader, Morgan Tsvangirai descend on the region to canvass for support ahead of next year's general elections.Mugabe will be in Lupane for a Zanu-PF youth interface rally, while Tsvangirai will be updating the party's Bulawayo provincial structures on the on-going coalition talks with other opposition parties.Both rallies were initially set to be held last week, but were cancelled, as both Mugabe and Tsvangirai flew out for medical check-ups in Singapore and South Africa, respectively.Zanu-PF national youth leader, Kudzanai Chipanga confirmed on Monday that Mugabe's Matabeleland North rally was on this week.MDC-T provincial spokesperson, Felix Magalela Sibanda yesterday confirmed Tsvangirai's Friday's interface meeting with party structures, adding several issues would be discussed.The meeting is scheduled for McDonald Hall in Mzilikazi high-density suburb."Tsvangirai will be interfacing with the Bulawayo provincial assembly in Bulawayo on July 21," Sibanda said."Subject: Interfacing and meeting the local structures, covering various topical issues, be they internal, regional or otherwise."The meeting shall be attended by all bona fide structures. However, journalists, severally or individually, shall be accorded special time afterwards to interface with him in whatever way they please."This comes amid reports that MDC-T supporters in Bulawayo were against the ongoing coalition talks, saying they had enough gravitas to challenge Zanu-PF without the support of other opposition parties.Tsvangirai's deputy, Thokozani Khupe, is on record saying the MDC-T only needed a coalition deal in provinces where it has fared badly in previous elections.The MDC-T meeting also comes at a time the party's Bulawayo provincial executive has clashed with councillors after the latter sanctioned the disconnection of water supplies to residents with bill arrears.The local council recently launched a blitz on rate defaulters, cutting water supplies to induce payments.The party leaders said the ongoing water cuts would portray them as anti-social and derail their campaign efforts ahead of next year's elections."The position is that there must be no arbitrary water disconnections," Sibanda said."The BCC (Bulawayo City Council) executives or personnel should not cut water, but invite defaulters and agree on payment plans first."Notwithstanding that, BCC must accept that there is 95% unemployment, hence, they should be tolerant to defaulters."BCC and our councillors know our position. We had a closed meeting with councillors, who are policymakers, but they defied properly resolved issues for reasons best known to them."
Charles "Chuck" Forsyth, former Hometown police chief, walks through the Leighton Criminal Courthouse in Chicago after a court appearance July 19, 2017. Forsyth appeared in court Wednesday after being accused of stealing $65,000 in towing fees from the suburbs coffers. ( Alyssa Pointer/Chicago Tribune )

Last summer, without explanation, Charles "Chuck" Forsyth abruptly ended his nearly four-decade career in law enforcement when he resigned his post as police chief in the small southwest suburb of Hometown.

City officials offered little public comment at the time and, citing a pending criminal investigation and other issues, refused for several months afterward to make public even the most basic of information about the chief's departure that was sought in a Tribune open records request.

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But just as mysterious as his resignation, Forsyth was quietly arrested more than two months ago and charged with four felony counts of theft and official misconduct. He is accused of stealing $65,000 from city coffers by raiding tow fees paid by motorists whose cars were seized during traffic stops.

Forsyth, who turned himself in May 11, was charged as part of a joint investigation by Hometown and the Cook County state's attorney's office, court records showed. He was released that same day on his own recognizance and was never processed through the county jail.

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Prosecutors did not publicize the charges, which is unusual given the serious nature of the case and the former public official's position of trust in the community. A spokeswoman on Wednesday said the office had no comment on the case or why the charges were not announced.

The Hometown city clerk, Mary Jo Hacker, said that the city prepared a news release dated the day Forsyth was charged but "no one ever asked for it."

Forsyth, 61, a longtime Hometown resident, declined to comment Wednesday when leaving the Leighton Criminal Building in Chicago after a routine status hearing. He pleaded not guilty during an earlier arraignment but, prosecutors alleged in court records, he "has made admissions to taking the tow seizure fees in order to cover bank overdrafts from gambling losses."

During the brief court appearance, defense attorney Bruce Brandwein told Judge Neera Walsh that he is trying to reach an agreement with prosecutors to swiftly end the case.

Forsyth was appointed Hometown's police chief in October 2004 after a 26-year career on the Hickory Hills police force. He achieved the rank of lieutenant before retiring from Hickory Hills earlier that same year with a pension and long record of commendations.

In Hometown, a small suburb with an estimated 4,300 residents and 1,900 modest duplex homes, Forsyth led a part-time police force of about 40 sworn officers. His tenure was without fanfare, though he took heat in summer 2014 when he terminated a veteran officer who fatally shot a local family's dog after it escaped the homeowner's yard. The officer sued, but the federal suit was dismissed.

Nearly 12 years after his appointment as police chief, Forsyth abruptly resigned his estimated $60,000-a-year chief position on Aug. 8. Michael Cainkar, a city attorney, told the Daily Southtown shortly later that the city was investigating Forsyth. Cainkar declined to comment on the nature of the probe but later confirmed city officials planned to turn over the results of an independent audit to county prosecutors.

Months later, on Feb. 17, the Tribune filed a Freedom of Information Act request regarding Forsyth's departure after receiving an anonymous letter alleging that the city had not properly investigated the matter.

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In its March 9 response, Hometown officials denied most of the Tribune's records request, stating the documents either were not available or exempt from public disclosure due to a pending criminal investigation or because they were part of attorney-client and work product privileges.

The Tribune appealed to the Illinois attorney general's office, whose public access counselor division found the inquiry merited further review.

City officials had notified the attorney general's PAC division in early May that the criminal investigation had concluded, but the Tribune was not alerted until June 30. At the Tribune's request, city officials provided the Tribune a copy of the independent audit July 6.

According to the audit, there were 260 missing paid tow sheets equaling $65,000 between April 1, 2008, and Aug. 7, 2016. The money was generated from a $250 administrative fee the city adds to the cost for motorists to get back their seized and towed vehicles.

City officials became aware of the "possible misappropriation of city funds by the defendant" on Aug. 2, prosecutors said. Forsyth resigned a week later.

It is alleged he initiated a procedure in which the cash tow fines were kept in a safe in the police station. As police chief, he was supposed to deliver the cash-filled envelopes to the city clerk, who then counted the money, recorded the amount, and deposited the funds in the bank, court records said.

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"Defendant would make a daily request for the tow fee envelopes from the safe," prosecutors alleged in their written proffer. "However, the city clerk/collector would receive the tow envelopes from the defendant on a bi-weekly or monthly basis."

Brandwein said his client has cooperated with authorities from the start and wants to make things right.

"I brought him into the state's attorney's office (May 11) and we cooperated as far as we could," the attorney told the Tribune. "We're trying to work out a restitution agreement."

Brandwein acknowledged Forsyth has a gambling problem.

"He made some very poor decisions based on some personal problems and he's trying to rectify that," he said.

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Forsyth does not have a prior criminal record. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in prison for the more serious offense of theft.

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He filed for bankruptcy protection three times, mostly recently in early 2016, according to federal court records. His debts included nearly $60,000 in taxes owed to the Internal Revenue Service, the records showed. The bankruptcy records show Forsyth also receives pension payments from his Hickory Hills police service and worked a second job as a security guard.

Forsyth is due back in court later this summer.

Hometown has "implemented additional internal controls recommended by the auditor to prevent a similar occurrence," according to the city's May 11 news release, which was provided Wednesday.

Tribune reporters David Heinzmann and Steve Schmadeke contributed.

cmgutowski@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @christygutowsk1
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart announces on July 19, 2017, the identity of another victim of John Wayne Gacy. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

Jimmie Haakenson set out on an adventure more than 40 years ago, traveling to Chicago from his Minnesota home at just 16.

But the boy with a sunny smile disappeared without a trace, and on Wednesday, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said Haakenson fell victim to Chicago's most notorious serial killer  John Wayne Gacy .

DNA supplied by a brother and sister helped confirm that Haakenson was Victim 24, whose remains were found buried with many of the other victims in the crawl space of Gacy's Chicago-area house.

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"My brother has been missing for so long, and it's so nice to know that we've found our brother now, even though now it's not good," Lorie Sisterman, Haakenson's sister, told the Tribune in a phone interview Wednesday evening from her home in Minnesota. "It's so wonderful, but it's also, you know, horrible at the same time."

Gacy was convicted of killing 33 boys and young men in the 1970s, 32 of them strangled. All but four of the victims were found in the crawl space of Gacy's home in Norwood Park Township. He was executed by lethal injection in state prison in 1994 after his appeals failed.

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Six years ago, Dart announced his office had reopened the Gacy investigation in hopes of identifying eight victims whose names still remained a mystery decades later. Haakenson was the second to be identified.

Haakenson told his family in St. Paul that he planned to explore Chicago on his own, Dart said at a crowded news conference.

The teen called his mother on Aug. 5, 1976, to let her know he had arrived in Chicago, but his family never heard from him again, according to Dart.

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 48 John Wayne Gacy is arrested on Dec. 21, 1978, at the Des Plaines Police Department. (Des Plaines Police Department)

Haakenson's nephew  who had never met him but had taken an interest in his disappearance  recently persuaded Haakenson's brother and sister to submit DNA samples for testing.

The nephew "felt very, very compelled throughout his life to find out about his uncle," Dart said. "He wanted to bring some type of closure himself."

Sisterman described the nephew as "the hero of the family."

"He started the ball rolling," she said. "He was like, who the heck disappears? ... He was so curious, like, obsessed with finding Jimmie."

The DNA testing showed a "strong genetic association" with Victim 24, authorities said. In addition, detectives examined other data, including the initial missing person report, to conclude that Victim 24 was in fact Haakenson.

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The sheriff's office formally notified Haakenson's family of the identification Monday.

"It's beyond heartbreaking when you're explaining to them that their worst possible horrors are actually, unfortunately, true," Dart said.

Haakenson's mother had come to Chicago in 1979 after Gacy's arrest and the discovery of the bodies in his crawl space, Dart said. Her attempt to find out if her son was among Gacy's victims failed because she did not have his dental records  then the main method of identifying remains, Dart said.

She died in 2008 without ever knowing what happened to her son, Sisterman said.

"She wasn't able to know where her son was, and that's kind of sad," Sisterman said.

The Cook County Sheriff's office has identified another victim of the notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy. (CBS)

Haakenson was a normal teenager, Sisterman said, and the siblings had a happy childhood despite their parents' divorce. They were raised by their mother, she said.

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Haakenson was born in Chicago, and their father had worked there, Sisterman said.

"Maybe he wanted to go back where he was born or something," she said. "Maybe he thought he'd see his dad."

Sisterman and the rest of Haakenson's family plan to visit the Chicago-area grave where the remains of Gacy's then-unidentified victims were laid to rest.

They will hold a memorial service and have Haakenson's name engraved on the tombstone, she said.

"We're still processing everything," she said. "We're kind of overwhelmed.'

Dart reopened the Gacy investigation in October 2011 in an effort to use modern scientific methods and technology  unavailable at the time of the murders  to help identify the eight victims whose names remained a mystery.

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The next month, the sheriff's office confirmed the remains of William George Bundy through DNA as one of Gacy's unknown victims. Bundy, an accomplished diver and gymnast at Chicago's Senn High School who worked construction jobs after dropping out, was 19 when he disappeared in October 1976.

In addition, through its efforts to identify the Gacy victims, the sheriff's office solved four cold-case murders and located five missing persons alive and two others who had died without their families' knowledge. But none of those were related to Gacy.

Dart said his office continues to try to uncover the identities of the six Gacy victims whose identities remain unknown.

About 170 different leads have been provided to the sheriff's office from families who suspect their loved ones may have been killed by Gacy, officials said, and investigators so far have looked at about 130 of them.

In addition, 55 people have submitted DNA samples to be analyzed in connection with the investigation since the case was reopened in 2011, said Sophia Ansari, a spokeswoman for the sheriff's office.

"Every family deserves to have closure," Dart said Wednesday.

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Investigators may never know just how Gacy and Haakenson crossed paths. Gacy was known to lure his victims with job offers at his remodeling and construction business. In addition, he would frequent areas heavily populated by gay men or parts of the city where he knew young men would likely be alone, Dart said.

Haakenson's identification could aid in determining the identity of the remains found buried just below his in Gacy's crawl space, Dart said.

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Because authorities now know Haakenson likely died in early August 1976, the body buried beneath his  Victim 26  was probably killed a short time before, Dart said.

The body found buried above Haakenson's was long ago identified as the remains of Rick Johnston, who was last heard from on Aug. 6, 1976, the day after Haakenson called his mother from Chicago.

"The bodies were buried almost consecutively as he was murdering people and filling up the crawl space," Dart said.

The sheriff's office has DNA records on file for Victim 26 as well as the other unidentified remains, and Dart encouraged anyone who suspects their loved one might have been killed by Gacy to come forward.

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"All we need to do is supply DNA from living relatives."

mcrepeau@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @crepeau
Jason Van Dyke, represented by Daniel Herbert, left, attends a hearing on the Laquan McDonald shooting case on July 19, 2017, at the Leighton Criminal Courts Building in Chicago. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

A lawyer for Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke said Wednesday he plans to seek to move the hot-button trial outside Cook County.

Van Dyke's lead lawyer, Daniel Herbert, made the announcement for the first time in court. But in the weeks after Van Dyke's murder indictment in the killing of Laquan McDonald, Herbert had proposed the possibility to reporters, citing pretrial publicity and alleged death threats.

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"We think at the end of the day we're going to present some very compelling evidence to demonstrate that it's impossible for my client to get a fair trial (in Cook County) in this case," Herbert told reporters in January 2016.

Such a motion for a change of venue would mean the defense was contemplating letting a jury decide Van Dyke's fate  a surprise given the notoriety of the case. Most Chicago police officers by far have opted to have their misconduct trials heard by a judge.

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It is rare for trials to be moved outside of Cook County because of concerns over finding a fair jury. Among the exceptions are two of the most notorious murder cases in modern Chicago history.

For the 1980 trial of John Wayne Gacy Jr., who was convicted of killing 33 young men and boys in the 1970s, jurors were selected in Rockford, but the trial was held in Chicago. Richard Speck, who was convicted of killing eight students nurses in a Southeast Side town home, had his trial moved to downstate Peoria half a century ago because of the immense pretrial publicity.

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No trial date has been set for Van Dyke as the lawyers and the special prosecutor  Joseph McMahon, the Kane County state's attorney  continue to work out pretrial issues with Cook County Judge Vincent Gaughan.

Van Dyke's indictment has garnered intense interest. The court-ordered release in November 2015 of video showing the white officer shooting the black teen 16 times as he walked away with a knife in his hand ignited weeks of protest, provoked a political crisis for Mayor Rahm Emanuel and led to a blistering report by the U.S. Department of Justice that portrayed the Chicago Police Department as broken.

Herbert has maintained that Van Dyke should not even be required to come to his court hearings, citing alleged threats to his safety. Gaughan so far has declined to excuse Van Dyke from attending court.

At the brief court hearing Wednesday, lawyers discussed if prosecutors can use statements Van Dyke made to police union representatives at the scene of McDonald's shooting. The matter was continued until next month when a former Fraternal Order of Police spokesman could be called to testify.

Van Dyke, who is suspended without pay, has pleaded not guilty to six counts of first-degree murder, 16 counts of aggravated battery and one count of official misconduct.

mcrepeau@chicagotribune.com

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Miguel Petryszyn, 78, was reported missing Tuesday afternoon when he didn't return home. (Chicago Police Department )

Chicago police are seeking the public's help in finding a 78-year-old man with dementia who has not been seen since leaving his Northwest Side home Tuesday afternoon.

Miguel Petryszyn was last seen about 1 p.m. in the 2900 block of West Belmont Avenue in the Avondale neighborhood, police said.

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He may not be able to return home on his own, police said.

Petryszyn is described as 6 foot 1 and 180 pounds with brown eyes and white hair.

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Anyone who may have seen him should contact Area North special victim's unit at 312-744-8266.
A man found shot to death Monday night in a vacant South Side lot has been identified.

The man, identified as 25-year-old Tony Haywood, was shot in the 7900 block of S. South Chicago Avenue, police said. Officers responded to shots fired and discovered him lying in the lot in the South Chicago neighborhood.

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A vehicle was seen fleeing, police said.

Haywood died of multiple gunshot wounds, and his death was ruled a homicide, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office.
A Glenview man who attacked a nurse at a suburban hospital has been sentenced to two years of probation and mental health treatment.

James Mette, 27, pleaded guilty in Cook County court Tuesday to aggravated battery in connection with the attack at Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights.

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Authorities said Mette was being treated at the hospital when, shortly after 4 a.m. Nov. 25, he jumped over a counter at a nursing station and began pulling a nurse's hair, putting her in a headlock and striking her head against a wall. The nurse suffered a concussion and bruises and some of her hair was ripped out, and two other employees were slightly injured during the incident, prosecutors said.

Judge Jill Cerone-Marisie ordered Mette to follow the direction of court-assigned mental health counselors and take any medications prescribed for him.

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Other felony counts were dropped in exchange for his plea, and Mette apologized in court for the attack.

"I am very, very sorry," he told the judge. "I was really not all there that day."

George Houde is a freelance reporter.
A 12-year-old girl is missing and the Chicago Police Department is seeking help from the public in locating her.

Gisell Fierros was last seen Monday in the 4500 block of West Thomas Street in West Humboldt Park, according to a news release from the police. Fierros suffers from depression and she's expressed that she sometimes has suicidal thoughts, the release says.

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Fierros often frequents the area of Division Street to North Avenue and Pulaski Road to Hamlin Avenue, authorities said.

Fierros is Hispanic with a medium complexion, she stands about 5 feet tall and she weighs about 110 pounds. She has scars on her wrist.

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Anyone with information about her whereabouts is asked to call detectives with the Area North Special Victims Unit at 312-744-8266.
Beat #0123  Jerry Powell heard the shots from the balcony of his new luxury apartment in the South Loop early Tuesday.

He asked his partner, who was sitting outside with him, "fireworks or gunfire?" It sounded like a big boom followed by a succession of about six loud noises. It came from behind the neighboring Target parking garage at West Roosevelt Road and South Clark Street.

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After getting calls from residents just after midnight, police officers found an 18-year-old man there, shot in the abdomen and buttocks. The teenager was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in serious condition, police said. The circumstances of the shooting were not known, police said.

The sounds and alarming discovery didn't entirely surprise Powell, who has lived in the building next door for about nine months. The shooting was another example of security issues Powell has flagged since moving to1000 South Clark. And he thinks the trouble stems from Target when it's not supervised at night.

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A media representative from Target could not be reached on Tuesday.

In January, a man fired a gun, robbed a woman and carjacked another person inside the Target parking garage.

"It seems to be an area where they allow a lot of parking in there overnight," Powell said Tuesday morning. "They don't enforce their parking, and it seems to be a hot spot for drug activity and middle of the night less-than-desirables, so it's no surprise that this has occurred here."

Two months after the Target carjacking, authorities arrested a 19-year-old in Atlanta and charged him with a string of carjackings from the same day. Carnell King, of the 6900 block of South Merrill Avenue, was charged in connection with the Jan. 10 incidents.

Media outlets at the time reported that the gunman first stole a woman's purse and then fired half a dozen shots at the second woman as he was trying to steal her car, which had her newborn in it. The woman was able to grab her baby in time, and no one was hit by the shots, though he did make off with her BMW.

Powell said the gunman also fired at him as he rushed to help.

He said he is disappointed that Target hasn't made changes to better secure their property since January.

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"We're actually moving from the neighborhood because of some of the safety concerns," Powell said. "Target doesn't appear to have taken any corrective actions to secure the premises at night. They do not have security patrolmen to enforce the parking. It's just a constructive nuisance to the neighborhood."

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Anyone can drive into the parking garage because there are no blockades, he said.

A narrow stretch of West Taylor Street separates the apartment building and the parking garage. Motorists turn onto Taylor and drive by the apartments to enter the garage. There are also railroad tracks and space behind the garage, which is where the 18-year-old man was found.

The 1000 South Clark building's glass facade glistens 29 stories high. The 469-unit building opened in July 2016.

Numerous calls seeking comment from 1000 South Clark, the motto for which is, "the new urban in the South Loop," went unreturned. Multiple leasing office representatives said a manager would answer questions, however, they eventually said they had "no comment."

John Wright, 28, who also lives in the building, said he too is trying to move for safety reasons.

"I just wish they would secure this building more," he said, referring to the area around the apartment. "We moved here because we thought it was luxury and safe, and this isn't safe at all."
A man shot to death on his own block in the West Garfield Park neighborhood on the West Side early Saturday has been identified.

Christopher J. E. Johnson Jr., 20, was pronounced dead at 4:27 a.m. Saturday at the scene in the 4400 block of West Monroe Street, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office.

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Johnson was among 8 killed people in shootings in about 12 hours between Friday afternoon and early Saturday in Chicago, including a 10-year-old boy.

About 4:15 a.m. Saturday, officers responded to the 4400 block of West Monroe Street in the West Garfield Park neighborhood for a call of a person shot. Officers found the 20-year-old man in the street with a gunshot wound to the head.

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Police did not release additional details about the shooting.
Courtney Bailey, 18, arrested on weapons charges days after two people chased down and shot to death a man on the West Side in 2015, has now been charged with murder in the killing, authorities said July 19, 2017. (Cook County sheriff's photo / )

A man arrested on weapons charges days after two people chased down and fatally shot a man on the West Side in 2015 has been charged with murder in the killing, authorities said.

Courtney Bailey, 18, was ordered held without bail Wednesday in the May 31, 2015, killing of Byron Driver, 27, in the 100 block of North Cicero Avenue. Bailey, of the 4800 block of West Superior Streetthree blocks from where Driver was killedalready was being held in Cook County Jail on charges of aggravated battery of a peace officer in an attack June 17 in the 4800 block of North Ravenswood Avenue, according to records.

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Driver, of the 2800 block of West Polk Street in Lawndale, was killed as he walked on Cicero Avenue about 7:15 p.m. on May 31, 2015, officials have said. Baileywho was 16 at the time of the killingand several other people drove onto West End Avenue east of Cicero in a small SUV and jumped as Driver walked south toward West End, Cook County Assistant State' Attorney Jamie Santini said.

Several witnesses saw Bailey, who was holding a gun, get out of the SUV, walk to Cicero and West End and head toward Driver as he walked on Cicero, prosecutors said.

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Bailey and another man pointed their guns at Driver and started firing, and Driver tried to run away but was hit and fell to the street, prosecutors said. As he lay facedown on Cicero, Bailey and the other man shot him again at point-blank range.

Driver suffered gunshot wounds to the spine, both thighs and his back, prosecutors said. He was pronounced dead at 7:48 p.m. the same day at Stroger Hospital.

Bailey, the second shooter and the others ran back to the SUV and started to drive off, as an off-duty Chicago police officer who had witnessed the shooting tried to catch them, prosecutors said. A Toyota sedan blocked the officer's pursuit of the SUV, but the officer was able to get the license plate number of the Toyota.

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Detectives found out the Toyota was rented in Des Plaines by someone who is a member of the same Gangster Disciples gang faction which Bailey belongs to, prosecutors said.

June 2, 2015, police stopped the Toyota with Bailey and the man who rented the Toyota in the car, and found a .40-caliber Beretta with 8 live rounds in car, according to prosecutors.

Bailey, who has listed the 1800 block of West Touhy Avenue as a home address, was arrested along with the other man, Demetrius Reynolds, 26, in the 5200 block of North Broadway, according to records. Unlawful use of a weapon charges against Reynolds remain pending, and he is being held in Cook County Jail on $30,000 bail.

Illinois State Police tests determined that the shell casings from the scene of Driver's killing matched the Beretta, prosecutors said.

Multiple witnesses identified Bailey as one of the people who shot Driver as he lay on the street, prosecutors said. No one else has been charged in the killing, according to court records.

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On Wednesday, not long before Bailey appeared in court, three people were wounded in a shooting in the same block where Driver was killed.

The Chicago Tribune's Megan Crepeau contributed.
News / National

by Staff reporter

STUDENTS in tertiary institutions are demanding flavoured condoms as compared to the cheap freely distributed ones, MDC senator for Bulawayo Metropolitan Province Siphiwe Ncube has said.Debating a report on HIV/Aids in institutions of higher learning in Zimbabwe, Ncube said their visits to several institutions across the country was an eye-opener, as students are fighting to live an expensive life which for most is beyond their means."At colleges there are some students who want a high lifestyle that they cannot afford for example having expensive cell phones and hairstyles."What also disheartens me is the issue of condoms which they highlighted that there are some condoms that they do not want freely distributed but prefer the expensive flavoured ones," Ncube said.She said students must learn to live within their means and appreciate the reason they are at school."If you really want to behave like a normal human being, you must appreciate your situation and not refuse to use freely given condoms whilst you do not have enough money to buy expensive ones."Throughout our tour, we combined all the students and elderly people; we talked to them differently so that they will freely talk on what they want. Some of them highlighted that they want the perfumed condoms."As parents, honestly how do you feel when you hear your child saying such things? If we are parliamentarians, it does not mean we are not parents anymore, we are parents and we go out and hear such things from students, it is really disheartening," she said.The report comes after Health and Child Care minister David Parirenyatwa recently said his ministry and development partners should look for ways to "to close the tap" of new infections caused by the key populations.According to the National Aids Council statistics, one of the country's biggest universities, Midlands State University, with an enrolment of 23 000 is the major driver of the Midlands Province's high rate of HIV, with cases of Sexually Transmitted Infections shooting from 5 814 to 6 727 in one year.1, 5 million people are living with HIV in Zimbabwe, with about 790 000 estimated to be women above the age of 15 years.Ncube said that students must not succumb to peer pressure and indulge in unprotected sexual activities that will destroy their future."You would have spent four years at the university or even progress to PhD and at the end of the day you will not be able to use those certificates."There is an adage that says when you stay at the same place; you will not be able to learn other things. They say cancer and BP cannot be cured. Some of them will say it is better to have HIV/Aids because it can be cured."If someone can have the boldness to say there are some people who are referred to as 'blessers' and others say if I engage in sex without a condom I must be paid $50. Why honestly should someone demand $50 that can buy groceries that can fit in two small plastic bags; before the end of the week, that grocery will be used up but you would have destroyed your future?" she said.During the debate, Ncube also said students are also suffering accommodation problems in all the provinces that they visited."When we went to Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo Polytechnic, students were complaining a lot, especially on the issue of accommodation. Even if the accommodation is there, it is not enough to accommodate all of them. Even to the other places that we were touring, it was the same, although with Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo, the problem was a bit too much," Ncube said.
An alderman's crusade to open up bathrooms in Chicago restaurants and other businesses to people walking in off the street stalled Wednesday after he said he was told there's already such a rule on the books.

South Side Ald. David Moore, 17th, said he was moved to introduce his plan after a constituent told him a clerk at a business refused to let her use the toilet unless she bought something.

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Moore said he went back to the store and flashed his aldermanic badge, but he too was told to make a purchase if he wanted to get into the bathroom.

His proposal would require that "any licensee that provides public toilet facilities to its customers must allow individuals who have an emergency and need to use the toilet facilities to do so without having to make a purchase. Furthermore, a fee cannot be charged for the use of the toilet facilities under these circumstances."

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The ordinance was set for a hearing Wednesday in the City Council License Committee, but it was held up. Moore said city officials told him there was already a regulation ordering businesses to let people walk in and go to the toilet.

A spokesman for the city Law Department said he could not immediately confirm the statute exists.

But as many people who have searched for a public restroom can attest, if such a rule is in place, many restaurants aren't following it.

At a time when city inspectors are already stretched thin trying to enforce tobacco sale regulations and other business standards, Moore said he was confident the democratization of public bathrooms would be prioritized. "Absolutely, for an alderman like me that's walking around checking and seeing, and if they're not doing it, then they have to fine people," he said.

"Not only do I expect people to make complaints, as an alderman, I'll go test it myself," Moore added.

He said he would meet with officials to confirm the existing statute meets his demands, and would again push his own version if that isn't the case.

jebyrne@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @_johnbyrne
Terrill Swift at his home in Lisle on Feb. 28, 2017. Swift was exonerated for a murder and sexual assault he did not commit. On Wednesday, a $5.6 million payout to settle a lawsuit alleging malicious prosecution was approved by the Cook County Board. (Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune)

A $5.6 million payout to settle a lawsuit alleging malicious prosecution of a teenager who was wrongfully convicted of raping and killing a South Side woman was approved Wednesday by the Cook County Board.

The settlement comes five years after DNA evidence exonerated Terrill Swift  one of the Englewood Four teens wrongfully convicted in the 1994 case.

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The city of Chicago has also approved a tentative settlement in the case, which alleged police misconduct in addition to wrongdoing by prosecutors. The amount of that payout won't be known until it goes before the City Council Finance Committee.

Swift's case was filed in the county's circuit court. The other three teens have filed lawsuits in federal court that have yet to be resolved. All four were acquitted and issued certificates of innocence.

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Swift was 17 when he was arrested for the rape and murder of Nina Glover, 30, a prostitute whose body was found in a trash bin behind a liquor store. She had been strangled.

Swift and the other teens spent close to 16 years in prison before being cleared in 2011 when DNA from Glover's body matched that of Johnny "Maniac" Douglas, a convicted murderer and serial sex offender.

hdardick@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @ReporterHal
A Syrian rebel fighter fires a weapon in Ain Tarma, in the eastern Ghouta area, a rebel stronghold east of the capital Damascus, on July 17, 2017. (Abdulmonam Eassa / AFP/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON  President Donald Trump has decided to end the CIA's covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.

The program was a central plank of a policy begun by the Obama administration in 2013 to put pressure on Assad to step aside, but even its backers have questioned its efficacy since Russia deployed forces in Syria two years later.

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Officials said the phasing out of the secret program reflects Trump's interest in finding ways to work with Russia, which saw the anti-Assad program as an assault on its interests. The shuttering of the program is also an acknowledgment of Washington's limited leverage and desire to remove Assad from power.

Just three months ago, after the United States accused Assad of using chemical weapons, Trump launched retaliatory airstrikes against a Syrian air base. At the time, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, said that "in no way do we see peace in that area with Assad at the head of the Syrian government."

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Officials said Trump made the decision to scrap the CIA program nearly a month ago, after an Oval Office meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser H.R. McMaster ahead of a July 7 meeting in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Spokesmen for the National Security Council and the CIA declined to comment.

After the Trump-Putin meeting, the United States and Russia announced an agreement to back a new cease-fire in southwest Syria, along the Jordanian border, where many of the CIA-backed rebels have long operated. Trump described the limited cease-fire deal as one of the benefits of a constructive working relationship with Moscow.

The move to end the secret program to arm the anti-Assad rebels was not a condition of the cease-fire negotiations, which were already well underway, said U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the secret program.

Trump's dealings with Russia have been under heavy scrutiny because of the investigations into the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 election. The decision on the CIA-backed rebels will be welcomed by Moscow, which focused its firepower on those fighters after it intervened in Syria in 2015.

Some current and former officials who support the program cast the move as a major concession.

"This is a momentous decision," said a current official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a covert program. "Putin won in Syria."

The decision will not affect a separate Pentagon-led effort to work with U.S.-backed Syrian rebels fighting the Islamic State. And the CIA-backed rebels were part of the larger moderate opposition.

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Some analysts said the decision was likely to empower more radical groups inside Syria and damage the credibility of the United States.

"We are falling into a Russian trap," said Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, who focuses on the Syrian resistance. "We are making the moderate resistance more and more vulnerable. . . . We are really cutting them off at the neck."

Others said it was recognition of Assad's entrenched position in Syria.

"It's probably a nod to reality," said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama administration official and director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

U.S. intelligence officials say battlefield gains by rebels in 2015 prompted Russia's direct military intervention on the side of the Assad regime. Some U.S. officials and their allies in the region urged President Barack Obama to respond by providing the rebels with advanced antiaircraft weapons so they could better defend themselves. But Obama balked, citing concerns about the United States getting pulled into a conflict with Russia.

Senior U.S. officials said that the covert program would be phased out over a period of months. It is also possible that some of the support could be redirected to other missions, such as fighting the Islamic State or making sure that the rebels can still defend themselves from attacks.

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"This is a force that we can't afford to completely abandon," Goldenberg said. "If they are ending the aid to the rebels altogether, then that is a huge strategic mistake."

U.S. officials said the decision had the backing of Jordan, where some of the rebels were trained, and appeared to be part of a larger Trump administration strategy to focus on negotiating limited cease-fire deals with the Russians.

Earlier this month, five days into the first cease-fire in southwest Syria, Trump indicated that another agreement was under discussion with Moscow. "We are working on the second cease-fire in a very rough part of Syria," Trump said. "If we get that and a few more, all of a sudden we are going to have no bullets being fired in Syria."

One big potential risk of shutting down the CIA program is that the United States may lose its ability to block other countries, such as Turkey and Persian Gulf allies, from funneling more sophisticated weapons - including man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS - to anti-Assad rebels, including more radical groups.

Toward the end of the Obama administration, some officials advocated ending the CIA program, arguing that the rebels would be ineffective without a major escalation in U.S. support. But the program still had the support of a majority of top Obama advisers, who argued that the United States couldn't abandon its allies on the ground and give up on the moderate opposition because of the damage that it would do to U.S. standing in the region.

Even those who were skeptical about the program's long-term value, viewed it as a key bargaining chip that could be used to wring concessions from Moscow in negotiations over Syria's future.

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"People began thinking about ending the program, but it was not something you'd do for free," said a former White House official. "To give [the program] away without getting anything in return would be foolish."
Every summer, in the third week of July, scores of white-bearded men wearing safari jackets and cable-knit sweaters descend upon Key West, Fla. They've come for the Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest, staged annually since 1981 at Sloppy Joe's Bar, the onetime hangout of the acclaimed writer, whose birthday is July 21. There's just one problem: The Hemingway these men are mimicking bears little resemblance to the virile, chest-thumping bard who made Key West his home base in the 1930s.

Those Key West idolaters aren't alone in their anachronistic devotion to the Nobel laureate. A few summers ago, I chanced upon a lunchtime meeting of the Rotary Club of Oak Park-River Forest. The group displayed a large banner emblazoned with the images of two men who had once called those Chicago suburbs home: Frank Lloyd Wright en chapeau and a hoary, hirsute Hemingway.

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You may know the image: the white-bearded author, head and cap tilted, the bill of the cap casting a shadow over his eyes. It was shot in Spain in 1959, the year Hemingway turned 60. But as in so many of the photos from the last years of his life, the writer looks much older  in other words, nothing at all like the dimple-cheeked child and, later, handsome, clean-shaven young man who spent most of the first 20 years of his life living in Oak Park.

An updated photo of Ernest Hemingway is shown. (AP)

Which makes the image a curious choice to evoke the town's link to this literary lion. Or rather, it would be curious if the choice were not so common. Oak Park used the photo in 1999 to tout events honoring the author's centenary. It has hung above the entrance to the village's museum devoted to the writer, and it continues to materialize whenever the need arises to quickly conjure Hemingway's ghost.

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It was not always thus. Though during his lifetime Hemingway cultivated (as his biographer Carlos Baker noted) a variety of "luxuriant beards," his public persona was more often mustachioed. Recall those pictures from the cafes of Pamplona in the mid-1920s, where a young man in a beret flashes a wicked grin from beneath a dark mustache. And then there's the picture of Hemingway on the dust jacket of 1940's "For Whom the Bell Tolls": manly forearms bared, the writer  'stache, no beard  pecks away at a typewriter in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Twelve years later, Life magazine published "The Old Man and the Sea," accompanied by photos of Hemingway in Cuba. His steady gaze confronted legions of readers  the issue sold 5.3 million copies in two days  from above a close-cropped, salt-and-pepper mustache. Once again, there's no hint of a beard.

A younger Ernest Hemingway, without a beard.

Only in subsequent years did full, white facial hair become de rigueur for the author. That's the man in the oft-seen photograph shot in 1957 by Yousuf Karsh, the one where a sun-bronzed, silver-bearded Hemingway wears a dark turtleneck sweater. More than any other picture, the Karsh photo, especially when paired with the sobriquet "Papa," best exemplifies, in today's parlance, the Hemingway brand.

Back in Key West, Sloppy Joe's has adopted as its "classic logo" the Karsh portrait, which adorns shot glasses, T-shirts and other merchandise. And that's generally the template for participants in the bar's annual look-alike contest. Those fleecy-faced gents are entitled to their fun (though it would be nice if one of them, just once, got the sweater right). But this veneration of Papa's graven image does the writer they so admire a disservice. Not only does it blur our perception of Hemingway the man but it also burdens first-time readers of his novels and stories with a set of facile, preconceived notions.

What's the solution? Next July, instead of following the grizzled gang south to Key West, try heading north to Petoskey, Mich., the resort town on Lake Michigan's Little Traverse Bay. As a boy, Ernest (a name he despised) spent idyllic summer days nearby, and there he recuperated from the wounds, psychic and otherwise, suffered in World War I. At 602 State St., the white clapboard house where he boarded for three months in 1919 still stands. I once stopped by the place during a nighttime stroll through Petoskey and found the house dark  except, that is, for a solitary light radiating from a second-story window. It seared onto my mind the indelible portrait of a young man with shrapnel-riddled legs and a broken heart laboring through the godless night over a sheaf of papers. He is focused, he is disciplined, he is earnest. Deadly so. And though he doesn't have a beard, I know exactly who he is.

Geoffrey Johnson is a Chicago writer.
Jared Kushner allegedly tried to arrange a secret back-channel with Russia that would have cut out U.S. intelligence and relied on Russian communications. It was one of many Russian contacts that he and other members of the Trump team failed to list on security clearance forms.

That meeting is not to be confused with the eight-person confab in June 2016 involving Kushner, then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and a flock of Russians, including a former counter-intelligence operative, a suspected money-launderer and a Russian legal insider. That meeting was also "forgotten"  before Trump Jr. came clean, sort of, with a series of story-changing admissions.

Now we learn that the president also failed to disclose a one-on-one meeting this month with Russian President Vladimir Putin at which only a Russian translator was present. No one in the Trump delegation sought to disclose this in all the press briefings and interviews. The incident came to light only because European leaders agitated by the president's private chat decided to spill the beans. The Washington Post reports:

"At some point during the meal, [President] Trump left his own seat to occupy a chair next to Putin. Trump approached alone, and Putin was attended only by his official interpreter.

"In a statement issued Tuesday night after published reports of the conversation, the White House said that 'there was no "second meeting" between President Trump and President Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner. The insinuation that the White House has tried to "hide" a second meeting,' it said, 'is false, malicious and absurd.'

" 'All the leaders' circulated around the room throughout the dinner, and 'President Trump spoke with many leaders,' the statement said. 'As the dinner was concluding,' it said, Trump spoke 'briefly' with Putin, who was seated next to first lady Melania Trump."

Actually, the meeting lasted about an hour, according to Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, who broke the story. "The odd issue here, as has been the case with this White House when it comes to connections with the Russians, is that the Administration didn't disclose this meeting when it had many opportunities to do so," Alina Polyakova of the Atlantic Council observes. "As a result, suspicions grow."

Trump's eagerness to chat up Putin beyond the prying ears and eyes of U.S. officials and/or allies fits the pattern of incessant, hush-hush conversations between the Trump team and Russian officials.

"I have more questions than answers right now," former ambassador Eric Edelman says. "Did POTUS debrief senior staff after the meeting? Do we have a record of what was said? Did they agree on anything? What will the Russians claim about it? Why didn't [Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson brief on it?"

We certainly have a bonanza of "colluding"  secretly during the campaign (at Trump Tower), publicly during the campaign when Trump encouraged Russian hacking of Democrats and (undisclosed) during the transition when Kushner and Michael T. Flynn continued their forays without supervision from the Obama team. But let's not forget the administration's immediate efforts after taking office to roll back Russia sanctions, its current foot-dragging over new sanctions, Trump's sharing of code-word intelligence information with Russian officials in the Oval Office and now this unsupervised confab in Hamburg that no one thought to bring up until now.

Each time the Trump team has a meeting with Russians out of the purview of intelligence professionals it creates the potential for confusion and risks compromising the presidency (as to what might have been said and as to the meeting itself). Recall former acting attorney general Sally Yates warned that when Flynn lied about contacts with Russians, he became a security risk. "We weren't the only ones who knew about all of these. The Russians knew what General Flynn had done," Yates said in testimony in May. "They likely had proof of this information. And that created a compromise situation, a situation where the national security adviser essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians."

The plethora of furtive conversations with Russian officials underscores the sense of desperation Trump exudes to stay in the Kremlin's good graces, perhaps as a result of indebtedness (either political or financial). These tete-a-tetes convey to Putin how weak and easily manipulated the egocentric, clueless American president really is. And of course, these exchanges raise the possibility that the Trump team is giving something improper to Russia (or vice versa) as part of an unholy alliance between the American blunderbuss president and the leader of our greatest international foe.

No other president during or after the Cold War has interacted in this manner with the Russians. Fortunately, special counsel Robert Mueller is on the case, already seeking to question the participants in the Trump Jr. meeting last June.

Remember once upon a time (like last month) Trump spinners still claimed that there was no collusion between the Trump team and the Russians? Good times, good times.
With Illinois making national headlines as the likely scene of the most expensive statewide election in U.S. history, state government for the next 16 months will be viewed through a lens imprinted with the word "campaign." It's an ugly enough sight already. But prepare to be bombarded with more nasty campaign materials, negative commercials and vicious trash talk.

Maybe we Illinoisans should ask Michigan and Wisconsin residents, who know more about such things, for advice: That 2016 presidential election which, in Illinois, was over before it started? The governor's race of 2018 will present this state with the all-consuming furor that voters in presidential swing states routinely endure.

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Gov. Bruce Rauner parked $50 million in his war chest in December. Democrat J.B. Pritzker has set aside $14 million since he jumped into the race in April. Democrat Chris Kennedy will compete via his pedigree while state Sen. Daniel Biss of Evanston, Chicago Ald. Ameya Pawar and state Rep. Scott Drury of Highwood will highlight their policy chops. And the list of hopefuls continues to grow. Also expect intense battles for seats in the General Assembly, where the GOP will try to build on its six-seat gain of 2016.

A modest proposal: How about all candidates "campaign" less by posturing and more by actually getting things done, or detailing how to get them done? By moving Illinois forward? By advancing smart policy ideas and deeds?

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In other words, don't subject the citizens of this state to 16 more months of brinkmanship and little-to-no progress. Which reminds us:

Remember what Democrats said after they imposed their 32-percent hike in the personal income tax rate? They hadn't sent Rauner any of the meaningful reforms that could have offset that gouge, but they said they weren't finished. They promised as they left Springfield they would continue working on a pro-growth workers' compensation bill, property tax relief, tax credit reform and a pension bill that would cut costs for taxpayers.

So, Democrats, where are your reforms? When will you be back in Springfield, turning promises into improvements for the people of Illinois?

And a question for Republicans: Rauner recently dismissed numerous top aides and replaced them with leaders of the Illinois Policy Institute, a free market think tank. Will Rauner's housecleaning lead to policy-driven progress in state government? Or does this signal deeper heel-digging for the 2018 election cycle?

Please show us the former, governor, because you'll need more than TV ads to get re-elected.

Just as Pritzker, Kennedy & Co. will need more than rehearsed attacks on Rauner in order to defeat him. Gentlemen, if you don't have policy specifics on how you would do the job better, spare us the negatrons. This state doesn't have time for great fogs of words from candidates whose best argument is, "I'm not that guy."

Illinois remains on precarious footing. Credit agencies held back on dropping the state to junk bond status. All three major agencies have emphasized that the state still faces "an extended fiscal hangover from the impasse, not least from its record level of unpaid bills, which will be a drain on its future resources." That was Standard & Poor's, but Moody's and Fitch have said much the same. Even with the tax hike, the state's alarming unfunded pension liabilities and debts will continue to grow. The hole Illinois pols have dug over the decades is too deep.

That's why it is imperative for lawmakers and Rauner to recognize they're still on the clock and expected to deliver results  solutions  even in an intense election season. They have a job to do and it isn't getting themselves re-elected. They work for us.

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Democrats, you jammed a tax hike through both chambers. You said you were committed to advancing pieces of Rauner's pro-growth agenda but you just needed more time. You have 16 months. Hurry up.

Join the discussion on Twitter @Trib_Ed_Board and on Facebook.

Related articles:

Bruce Rauner doesn't care

I moved out of Illinois just in time

Rauner lurches from crisis to crisis

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Will Illinois schools open this fall? Stop stalling, lawmakers

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Social Security is the oldest and most popular federal income support program, and after more than 80 years, it might seem as permanent as the pyramids. But the pharaohs did better long-range engineering than the architects of the New Deal did. A 2015 Gallup Poll found that 64 percent of millennials don't think the program will be able to pay benefits when they retire. The other 36 percent may not have been paying attention. The doubts are similar among those in the 30-to-49 age range.

The fearful ones have good reason to be concerned. Right now, the program provides retirement and survivors' benefits to some 50 million people. Every year since 2010, Social Security revenues, excluding interest earned, have been lower than payouts, and things promise to get worse. Last week, the system's board of trustees reported that it is still on track to insolvency.

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In the past year, the program's unfunded liabilities have grown from $11.4 trillion to $12.5 trillion. Given current trends, the Social Security retirement fund is expected to run out of money in 2034, a mere 17 years from now. The very modest good news is that's the same year it was expected to run out in last year's report. We're moving, but the cliff we're headed for is not.

Complacency is not in order. Someone who is 50 years old would reach normal retirement age (67 for those born after 1959) the year the fund is scheduled to run dry. People in the workforce and their employers would continue to contribute to the fund via payroll taxes. But barring action between now and then to reduce costs or increase revenue, retirees would face a reduction of "about $5,800 per year in today's dollars for a typical beneficiary reaching the full retirement age in 2033," according to the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

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The problem is simple. Our leaders have been piling up unfunded liabilities, a phrase familiar to every Illinoisan who knows about the state's debt-bedraggled pension system. In Washington as in Springfield, politicians have been far more eager to channel benefits to retirees and disabled people than to impose taxes to pay for them.

The Social Security payroll tax rate has not increased since 1990. But in the interim, the giant baby boom generation has begun its mass migration into retirement. Because of rising lifespans, these retirees will be collecting checks for many more years than their parents and grandparents did.

The trajectory of the workforce  the taxpayers who finance the benefits  is not matching this growth. Quite the opposite. In 1990, there were 3.4 workers per retiree. Today, there are 2.8. By 2035  barring, say, a flood of young immigrants  there will be about two. Forgive them if they think of themselves as indentured servants, doomed to pay for the irresponsibility of pols who let Social Security's finances deteriorate.

By failing to take timely steps to balance resources and obligations, members of Congress and presidents have made solutions steadily harder. When the retirement fund is depleted, the chief alternative to smaller retirement checks will be big tax increases. Each year, the choices get worse. "If policymakers wait until 2034 to make any changes, they will have to increase the payroll tax by 32 percent (to 16.4 percent) or cut benefits for all new and existing beneficiaries by 23 percent," says the CRFB.

The best time to address this looming crisis was long before now. The next best time: ASAP. The year 2034 is going to arrive whether Social Security is ready or not.

Join the discussion on Twitter @Trib_Ed_Board and on Facebook.

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Naperville police determined the officer who questioned a 16-year-old high school student about a potential sex video shortly before the boy killed himself followed proper procedures and did not threaten the teen during the interview, according to documents obtained by the Tribune.

A report from an internal investigation, which was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, offers the city's most detailed account of Officer Brett Heun's handling of the situation to date. Police Chief Robert Marshall repeatedly has called Corey Walgren's Jan. 11 suicide a tragedy but said Heun did nothing wrong and that the situation had been "mischaracterized" in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the Walgren family.

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The lawsuit alleges that school and police officials caused Walgren "extreme, intolerable and excessive emotional and psychological distress" during an interview at Naperville North High School less than two hours before the boy slipped out of the building and committed suicide by plummeting from the top of a municipal parking deck about a mile away.

Public records show Walgren, a junior at Naperville North, was summoned Jan. 11 to meet with Dean Stephen Madden and Heun, who is assigned to the campus. The two questioned Walgren in a school office about an allegation that he had a video on his phone of a recent consensual sexual encounter with a female classmate and that he had played the recording for friends.

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Heun, who attended the closed-door meeting at the request of school officials, did not intend to charge Walgren with a crime, according to the department's internal investigation. The teen was "fully cooperative" and never suggested that he did not want to speak to Heun. However, the U.S. Supreme Court has found teens may not appreciate their ability to walk out of such an interview.

The recording the officials sought ended up being a video file with no discernible images. Police described it as "very dark" and "more of only audio."

According to his own report, Heun asked the teen for permission to download the contents of his phone and remove the "illegal items." Walgren consented, records show.

"Conversation was short, not prolonged, and the tone of the conversation was agreeable," according to a heavily redacted internal investigation report released by the department. "Heun did not use forceful or aggressive tones or tactics nor did he threaten (Corey) with any of the same."

Corey Walgren, a 16-year-old Naperville North High School junior, committed suicide in January. (Family photo)

The Naperville Police Department began an internal investigation in the days after Corey's suicide and completed it in late January. It was done of the department's own volition, as no complaint had been filed against Heun. Heun remained at the high school throughout the review and will be assigned to the campus again next year, officials said.

"The investigation determined the school resource officer properly assisted the students' deans in responding to a request for help concerning a sensitive matter," the city said in a statement. "Considering the totality of the circumstances, this was not a matter involving police custody and it was handled appropriately."

An attorney for the Walgren family, however, dismissed the report's findings and suggested the internal investigation was not rigorous. Investigators, for example, never spoke with Walgren's mother, Maureen, even though she had been on a speakerphone with Heun, Madden and Corey shortly before her son killed himself.

The department relied almost entirely upon Heun's own reports and an account provided by Madden in making its determination, records show. Naperville District 203 officials have said Madden, who also is being sued by the Walgren family, followed the proper procedures when questioning the teen.

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"It's a police department investigating itself and it's worthless," said Walgren family attorney Terry Ekl. "They're trying to rationalize what happened so they can find an innocent explanation for everything."

The department's internal investigation appears to lay out its defense for a key issue raised in the Walgrens' lawsuit, specifically that Heun and Madden illegally questioned Corey because they failed to contact his parents first. Illinois law requires police to "immediately make a reasonable attempt to notify the parent" after a minor is taken into custody.

The investigation, which was conducted by Deputy Police Chief Jason Arres and approved by Chief Marshall, found the law was not applicable in this case because they determined Corey was never in police custody. Among other things, Heun never restrained Corey, requested backup or arranged for the teen to be transported to the Police Department, the internal review states.

When determining whether someone is considered to be in police custody, experts said, courts must look at two factors: the circumstances surrounding the interview and whether the person reasonably believed they could end the conversation and walk out at any time.

The courts, for example, would consider the interview's tone, whether the door was closed and Heun's actions during the meeting. It could weigh in the department's favor that Heun was not wearing a uniform, never handcuffed Corey and did not arrest him, experts said.

Heun also did not lead or initiate the interview, according to Arres' findings. The officer's own report, though, indicates he played an active role in the meeting, including discussing "illegal items" on Corey's phone and speaking with the teen's mother.

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The fact that the officer planned to resolve the issue with a station adjustment  a legally sanctioned way for authorities to reprimand minors without formally charging them  could indicate it was a police matter and not just a school-related dispute, experts said.

"That could weigh in favor of it being a custodial interview because they are talking about legal actions," said Carolyn Frazier, an attorney with Northwestern University School of Law's Children and Family Justice Center. "But it's a balancing test. There's no bright line that marks the difference between a conversation in a school office with a custodial interrogation."

The internal investigation also noted that the office door was unlocked, suggesting the teen  who had no criminal history and had never been in trouble at school  could have left the office and ended the interview with the dean and police officer at any point.

Legal experts, however, question whether a 16-year-old would understand his or her rights in such a situation. The belief is backed by a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the justices found it's "beyond dispute that children will often feel bound to submit to police questioning."

"I highly doubt the average student would think they could just walk out of the office if they're in a closed-door meeting with a dean and a police officer," said Michelle Mbekeani-Wiley, an attorney with the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law who has done extensive research on school resource officer-related issues in Illinois. "It would be reasonable for them to assume there would be consequences if they just stood up and left."

Heun and Madden spoke with Corey for 18 minutes, according to police reports, before calling his parents, Doug and Maureen Walgren. Once they reached Maureen Walgren, Heun talked to her on a speakerphone with Corey in the room. He told her that her son was being investigated for "child pornography" and could end up being placed on the sex offender registry, Maureen Walgren said.

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The officer then told Maureen Walgren he intended to download items from Corey's phone and needed her consent, according to the reports. Walgren, a nurse, said she would leave work immediately and be at the school within 50 minutes.

After the phone call, the officer and the dean walked Corey to an office waiting area and told him to sit down. The two went to speak with the school principal, leaving Corey alone to wait for his mother.

Corey walked out of the school a few minutes later and headed toward a downtown Naperville parking garage. He climbed to the fifth floor and then killed himself by plummeting 53 feet to the ground. His mother, who had arrived at the school to find Corey missing, was in her car just a few blocks away searching for her son when he fell.

The Walgren family has repeatedly said they do not blame the female classmate for reporting the matter and that they are concerned about her well-being. The classmate was welcomed at and attended Corey's wake.

sstclair@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @StacyStClair
News / National

by Staff reporter

Zanu-PF senator Angeline Masuku, whose suspension from the party was lifted recently, opened up this week, saying she has an impeccable history hence she could not easily be thrown out of the ruling party.The former Matabeleland South governor was a victim of the party's factionalism after she was suspended, along with 18 other members for attending a war veterans meeting addressed by Christopher Mutsvangwa and Jabulani Sibanda in March last year.She insisted that her suspension was null and void, adding she was still part of Zanu-PF and working tirelessly for the party."Let me correct one thing, I was not suspended," Masuku said."I have always been there . . . there is nobody who can build Zanu-PF except us. It is us who can correct whatever mistakes. We discuss these things and we correct ourselves."Masuku said despite the plot to destroy her political career by some nemesis in the party, she knew she would survive."I am feeling the same. I never changed or have a different feeling because I was innocent, I was innocent and I will remain innocent."Masuku reminded those allegedly behind her suspension that she was no minnow in the former revolutionary party."If you can recall in 1987 when unity between Zanu-PF and-PF Zapu by President Robert Mugabe and the late VP Joshua Nkomo, there was a high-powered committee to do the integration exercise from two parties. Five people from Zanu and five from Zapu and I am the survivor from those five people from Zapu."Remember I was with (Welshaman) Mabhena, Kotso Dube, Cyril Ndebele, George Marange and they are all late. And I am the only survivor among those who did the integration, which is the building of Zanu-PF."As a result, she questioned the "wisdom" of her nemesis."How on earth can someone wake up to say I am suspending you from the party? That is why I am saying I was not suspended . . .," she said." . . . somebody who was not even there when that house (Zanu-PF) was built and some of those were not even politically born at that time when we were building Zanu-PF"."I sympathise with those people who think they can destroy Zanu-PF where there are people who took their time, energy and everything to build Zanu-PF and they think that they can destroy it. Not when we are there, I am sorry," she said.While many expected her to respond to the allegations that led to her suspension, Masuku said "as a mature person I was quiet, I never said anything, I never retaliated, I knew that this will come to an end and there would be order".She said while infighting was common in the party, expelling each other was not the solution.Masuku, however, said she was confident that Zanu-PF was going to win the 2018 elections."The unity agreement was signed by two of our elders and we were just sent to go and build and . . . I was part of that. I am still privy to say that as one of those who are still surviving I still stand firm to say Zanu-PF is the only party in Zimbabwe that can take people's problems."
The Fox Valley Festival Chorus in the Basilica of St. Peter in Vatican City. ( Fox Valley Festival Chorus )

The Fox Valley Festival Chorus has come a long way in the past 19 years.

Beginning as the Aurora Festival Chorus in 1960, the community chorus membership had dwindled to fewer than 10 people by 1998. During that same year, Mary Beth McCarthy became the chorus' new director.

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Always believing in giving her students and ensembles new experiences, she led the chorus (which had grown to more than 60 voices) as they traveled to perform in Carnegie Hall in 2013 and at Lincoln Center in 2015.

But what could serve as an encore for a community chorus after performing at those famous venues in New York City?

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"I had always wanted to take my group to the Vatican, and started to explore the possibility of singing there and at other important sites," McCarthy said. "I had hopes of doing concerts of both sacred and Broadway music. But it's very ambitious to do two types of concerts in one tour."

The chorus travel committee began to float the idea of an international tour. Pat Carley, Karen Groszczyk, Sally McClellan, and Karen Christensen were committee people who helped to make the idea a reality. Chorus treasurer Linda Marquardt became "operations manager" for the trip, while McCarthy worked on lining up the venues.

After months of planning, the Fox Valley Festival Chorus became ambassadors for the Fox Valley by performing in Vatican City, Assisi, Florence, and Venice over a nine-day period in June.

"Where better to take the chorus on its first international journey than to Italy? It is one of the capitals of the music world," McCarthy said

The ensemble, which is non-denominational, sang at Masses in the Basilicas of St. Peter in Vatican City, St. Francis in Assisi, and St. Mark in Venice. It also performed separate concerts of sacred music and Broadway music in Florence.

Although some sacred music was performed in the traditional a cappella style, accompaniment by organ, piano, and a brass quartet enhanced the performances in each city. Brass players included Mark Running, Alex Bacchetti, Joy Inouye and Allan Loek. Running also arranged the brass transcriptions written specifically for the tour.

Members of the chorus, ranging in age from young adults to retired women and men, faced challenges in each of the Italian cities. Temperatures topped out in the mid-90s daily, and many streets were narrow and inaccessible by bus or taxi.

McCarthy was ecstatic while remembering conversations after some of the performances.

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"I was stunned when people came up to me outside of venues speaking in multiple languages trying to communicate their enthusiasm," she said. "Coming out of the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, people came up to me speaking German, Italian, and French thanking us for coming.

"At Santa Felicita in Florence, the church was packed and people leapt to their feet at the end and were extremely appreciative."

The chorus members were also able to relax at times and enjoy varied sights including the Tuscan wine country, the city of Sienna, and the canals and opera house in Venice.

But as a musical experience, most of them agreed that the tour was priceless. And it also helped to fulfill McCarthy's vision for her students and ensembles.

"The more experiences one has, the more one grows as a musician," she said. "I want people to go from being ordinary to extraordinary.

"I have a saying in some of my classrooms that 'fine isn't good enough.' We can be better than fine. I love making music and am extremely passionate about it, and I want to pass that passion on to others," she said.

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The Fox Valley Festival Chorus hopes to continue to grow as a result of the musical tour of Italy. Members come from all walks of life, and although there are auditions for solo performance, there are no auditions required for choral membership. Its website is www.foxvalleyfc.org.

After Labor Day, weekly rehearsals will again be at 7 p.m. Mondays at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Aurora.

"I'm really proud of our group," McCarthy said. "I look forward to Mondays because I get to direct the Fox Valley Festival Chorus."

Tom Strong is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News
Less than 24 hours after booking officers determined he was not a suicide risk, 19-year-old Devin Jaros was found hanging from a sheet in his LaSalle County jail room.

Tied around a TV mount affixed to a wall, Jaros was out of view of the motion-activated surveillance camera.

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His two cellmates said they were sleeping and didn't notice. When a corrections deputy conducting cell checks discovered the body, the commotion woke them up, they said.

The cellmates held Jaros while the officer cut him down.

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Months later, public records and interviews detail the last day of Jaros' life, from his arrest in Marseilles to his Sept. 17 hanging at the jail in Ottawa, showing how the troubled teen was able to slip though the cracks among staff trained to prevent suicide.

Experts caution that mental health screening in correctional settings needs to be a thorough and ongoing process. LaSalle jail officials said they followed protocol, state and national standards and could not have anticipated the suicide based on the information they had.

One deputy called to Jaros' cell that night told investigators in a recorded interview, "How he accomplished that without those other two inmates seeing it, hearing it, reporting it, that's the biggest thing that shocks me."

In a phone call the week after Jaros' death, his parents wondered whether authorities handled the situation properly.

"We are concerned," Jason Jaros said. "It doesn't seem to me like something that should happen in a jail, as not only are they charged to protect the public, but they are also charged with their (inmates') safety."

Citing pending litigation, Jason Jaros declined further interviews for this story but said he hoped for more awareness of tragedies such as his son's.

Born in Aurora, Devin Jaros had a history that wasn't reflected in intake documents, which stated he was not mentally ill or on suicide watch.

On a suicide prevention screening sheet, a corrections deputy drew a line down the "no" column to answer all 16 questions.

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"They ask them every single question in a row and if there's not a yes to any of them, they will just do one line," said jail superintendent Jason Edgcomb.

Was Jaros very worried about major problems other than his legal situation, such as fear of losing his job?

Did he express feelings of helplessness or hopelessness?

Did he have a psychiatric history?

Not according to the screening sheet, which also indicated no history of drug or alcohol abuse, though a postmortem toxicology report revealed marijuana and fentanyl in Jaros' urine; his prior convictions included marijuana possession; and, hours before, he had told a Marseilles police detective that his smoking habit made him a bad drug dealer.

It was just Jaros and the detective, sitting on opposite sides of a wooden table in a bleak room with gray walls. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, wearing a gray T-shirt and black sweatpants, Jaros slouched in his chair. It was just past midnight.

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"I made a mistake," Jaros told the detective during a videotaped interview at the police station. "After a while of being good I made a bad decision. It really (screwed) me over, and now I got to deal with the consequences."

Taking his grandmother's car without her permission had been one thing. When Marseilles police tried to stop Jaros for driving without lights on, he sped away and crashed. Police found a loaded 12-gauge semiautomatic shotgun in the trunk, and it wasn't his grandma's.

Considering his record, Jaros said, he had hoped he could get away.

"I didn't want to go to jail," he said, later adding: "I can't stand it there."

But police secured felony charges, including aggravated fleeing and eluding and unlawful use of a weapon. Driven from the police station, Jaros was booked in the jail about 2 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 17.

Pre-trial detainees attempt suicide at a rate about 7.5 times greater than the general male population, according to a 2007 World Health Organization report.

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While a federal report documented a dramatic decline in jail suicide between 1983 and 2002, when the rate per 100,000 inmates dropped from 129 to 47, more recent data show that trend has not continued.

Suicide, the leading cause of death in local jails nationwide, increased 13 percent between 2013 and 2014, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report published in December. In 2014, the most recent year covered in the report, the Bureau recorded 372 jail suicides  the most in any year since the Deaths in Custody Reporting Program began in 2000.

While levels have fluctuated over the years, Bureau data show the suicide rate is consistently highest in local jails, where the 2014 rate was 50 per 100,000 inmates, compared with 20 in state prisons, 14 in federal prisons and 13 among the general population.

Improved screening helped jail suicide rates plummet in the late 1980s, but it's hard to say why those rates started increasing again, said Judith Cox, a former prison psychologist. Smaller jails typically have higher suicide rates because of staffing, Cox said.

At the LaSalle County jail, where the average daily population is 175, staff for years have been noticing more inmates struggling with mental illness, Edgcomb said.

The World Health Organization calls jails and prisons "repositories" for vulnerable groups with high suicide risks, including young males; people with mental disorders; socially disenfranchised or isolated people; and substance abusers. Further, according to the organization, the psychological impact of arrest and incarceration may exceed the average prisoner's coping skills, as may drug withdrawal, and some jails may lack formal policies or procedures to identify and manage suicidal inmates.

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Questions on LaSalle County screening guidelines, which Edgcomb said they've been using since at least 2002, appear most similar to a suicide prevention model Cox helped develop for New York prisons in the 1980s. Cox described four essential components: identify, refer, keep safe, provide treatment.

In a 2007 report, researchers funded by the National Institute of Justice said two mental health screening tools they created and tested were likely to work in correctional settings.

Robert L. Trestman, who worked on one of the screens, said both focus on recognizing mental illnesses and there is no universal screen specifically for suicide risk in jails, though the New York model is frequently used.

But screening often relies on what inmates choose to self-report, and they commonly keep suicidal ideations secret. Staff will sometimes catch someone who has previously received mental health treatment at the jail lying during screening, Edgcomb said.

"Most are going to try very hard to hide that," he said.

Though Jaros had been to the jail before, no one involved in his booking on Sept. 17 had prior knowledge of his mental health history, Edgcomb said.

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Identification of suicide risk should start when a person enters and stop only when that person leaves the jail, Cox said. It should incorporate information from officers involved in the arrest and transport of the inmate along with lawyers or family who might see the inmate in jail or know of drug use, Cox and Trestman said.

Anyone screening inmates should be trained to notice panic, anxiety, loss of interest and other suicidal or strange behaviors, Cox said.

At one point, when Jaros was alone in the interview room, video shows him picking at his fingernails and putting something he'd picked off into his mouth.

Cox said that type of behavior demonstrates anxiety and, if observed, should lead to a referral for health care.

Professionals said Jaros had anger issues and hinted at depression, his dad said. He described past efforts to help his son "from a psychological standpoint," including a residential behavioral health facility, family counseling and court-ordered rehab facilities. At some point, Jaros was prescribed a mood stabilizer, his father said.

During his interview at the police station, Jaros reminded the detective of his "history with the Marseilles Police Department."

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Besides traffic citations, between 2012 and 2015, LaSalle County records show Jaros' prior convictions included possession of smoking materials, violating curfew, driving without a license, leaving the scene of a crash, fleeing police and marijuana possession.

The detective asked Jaros if Marseilles police had always treated him decently, and he said they had, but he was still afraid.

"I was scared that I was already going to jail," Jaros said, "especially since I had the gun in the back for protection and I obviously don't have a FOID card."

Jaros said he'd been stashing the shotgun in his grandmother's backyard in the weeks since he bought it for $160 from a stranger in Boulder Hill. He'd been robbed of money and marijuana during recent visits to Marseilles and didn't want to take his chances, he said.

"I do carry a lot of weed," Jaros said. "But I don't sell it because I end up smoking before I'm able to sell it so  my selling business isn't going that well."

He said he did have an actual job, tiling floors.

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"Had an actual job," he amended.

"Man, for a while there, I thought you were doing pretty good," the detective said.

Jaros was, he said. But on Sept. 16, a friend of a friend needed a ride from Oswego to Marseilles.

When the cop came up behind him, lights activated, Jaros got scared and sped off. As he turned a corner, he tried to brake but struck a white Chevy, he said. He jumped out of the car, panicking and anxious, ran down an alleyway and hid by some stairs until an officer saw him.

"You screwed up your grandma's car," the detective said. "Pretty badly."

"I know, I know," Jaros said.

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Both people in the Chevy were National Guard members, in the area for weekend drills, the detective said.

"Serving our country," he said, "and they get T-boned."

Again, Jaros said, he knew he messed up.

But was he already feeling suicidal?

The reasons people might lie about their mental health aren't much different in jail, Trestman said. They could be embarrassed, worried about incriminating themselves on substance abuse questions or fearful about how suicidal inmates are handled. Inmates may be uncomfortable sharing with someone who's not a health care professional, he said.

If it's a busy night, if other people are around or if the officer asking the question is antagonistic or clearly uninterested, they are less likely to get truthful answers, Trestman said.

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"If people feel they are in a safe environment and someone is genuinely concerned about their safety, they're more likely to give an honest answer," Trestman said.

Getting at the truth can be difficult, and picking up on more subtle cues requires "a culture of being concerned," Trestman said.

As an expert witness in suicide prevention cases, Cox said she has noticed poor assessments, done too quickly or in noisy areas.

"You can't rush a suicide assessment," Cox said.

Brought in on a slow night, Jaros was the only inmate in the booking room with two officers during his screening, Edgcomb said.

Experts, including Trestman and Cox, stress the importance of communication and collaboration in suicide prevention.

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When someone is repeatedly incarcerated, a correctional facility should know about previous mental health treatment in the community, Trestman said.

The goal in health care is to minimize the chance of mistakes  including in jails, which are often underfunded and understaffed, he said.

"It's a difficult job, but we have a constitutional obligation to do it," he said.

In these settings, an appropriate standard of care is rarely taken, Trestman said. "Occasionally it happens, and almost always in response to a tragic event," he said.

Best practices have medical, nursing or other specialized staff conducting initial screenings and involve heavy training when corrections officers are responsible, Trestman said. But without practice, supervision and ongoing feedback, training has been shown to do virtually nothing to reduce risk, he said.

Suicide prevention training should incorporate supervision by a mental health professional, Cox said. Ideally, resources permitting, at least the initial training would be done in a group environment, she said.

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In LaSalle County, Edgcomb said all corrections officers rotate booking duties and complete annual training for managing inmates' mental health, using a video-based program with no classroom instruction. Two lessons specifically relate to suicide prevention, according to materials provided to the Beacon-News.

Each new officer goes through eight weeks of field training during which training officers observe them performing mental health screens, Edgcomb said.

Jail policy outlines a collaborative, all-staff approach to suicide prevention using medical screening, suicide precaution protocol and "additional indicators."

An initial medical screening conducted by the booking officer is followed with an appraisal by qualified health care personnel within 14 days of intake. Jaros had only the initial screening, which includes questions along with observations of behavior, mental state and appearance. The first 12 hours of incarceration have the highest potential for suicidal acts, according to jail policy, which details several strong indicators of potential suicide and a long list of secondary indicators.

Classification records for each inmate are supposed to contain all available information about current offenses, past convictions and institutional records, including any history of medical or mental health conditions requiring special housing considerations. Ongoing therapy from community providers "will be disclosed and taken under advisement" when creating treatment plans for mentally ill inmates, jail policy states.

Jaros was in a pre-classification area, awaiting a morning bond hearing.

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Throughout efforts to revive him before medics arrived, a nurse never detected a pulse.

From a local hospital, Jaros was airlifted to St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria, where he was pronounced dead at 3:41 p.m. Sept. 19 from lack of oxygen to the brain due to hanging. The Peoria County coroner ruled it a suicide and determined he was not intoxicated by any drugs in his system.

The suicide affected everyone involved, Edgcomb said.

But he said he doesn't think it means the jail needs to change its policy, procedures or layout. Since 2010, one other inmate has died by suicide, he said.

In 2014, a 38-year-old man from Streator charged with dealing heroin hanged himself 11 days after he was booked. Two days before the hanging, Jason Watson was released from the jail's mental health care to its general population, a decision typically made by a psychiatrist or mental health nurse, Edgcomb said. No longer considered a suicide risk, Watson got a regular jail uniform and a cell to himself.

Though both Watson and Jaros were discovered hanging from bedsheets during cell checks and later pronounced dead at the same hospital, Edgcomb characterized their cases as "opposite," with one under the care of the medical department for more than a week and the other in custody less than a day.

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Reflecting on Jaros, Edgcomb said he didn't know if anyone, even an experienced mental health specialist, would have guessed he was having suicidal thoughts.

"It weighs on me anytime something like that happens," Edgcomb said. "Our job is to keep everyone safe, but our officers couldn't, and I don't think there is anything anyone else could have done to prevent that situation."

The wall mount from which Jaros was hanging has not been moved, he said.

hleone@tribpub.com

Twitter @hannahmleone
News / National

by Staff reporter

Former Vice President and National People's Party (NPP) leader Joice Mujuru laid into Morgan Tsvangirai yesterday, saying his July 31 deadline within which opposition parties must form a coalition was not feasible and that the MDC leader's underlings were being overexcited.Mujuru told the media after signing an alliance pact with Gilbert Dzikiti of the Democratic Assembly for Restoration and Empowerment (Dare) at her party's offices in Harare that although opposition parties were racing against time to consummate the coalition, there was need to be realistic with the deadlines.She said as far as her party was concerned, no such deadline exists."We do not have a deadline for the coalition yet. What I am saying is that July 31 is not a practical date. It should be stressed that it is not about the date, but finding trust with each other. Unfortunately, there are some people who have a big brother attitude. Let us work together and let us not attack each other in public," said the NPP leader."This mentality that only I can do this is wrong; let us self-introspect and agree on a leader who is acceptable to everyone. We know that there are some who are sending their underlings to set the agenda," she added.This comes as the MDC top brass has made it clear that it is either their leader, Tsvangirai, who should lead the envisaged grand coalition or no one else.Tsvangirai and his confidantes have gone further to give a July 31 deadline for all those interested in coming on board to do so or be left behind.On Sunday, MDC vice president Nelson Chamisa also told a rally in his Kuwadzana constituency that those who were not comfortable with Tsvangirai leading the coalition were free not to join the so-called big tent."On the issue of coalition, the president is having coalition talks until the end of July, after 31 July, we will close the (coalition) gates. Those who agree with us we will walk together, we want everyone to come. Vanhu vose vanoziva munhu anga achivhima nguva yose, iwe woona mhuka yakabatwa gumbo wotora banga wocheka musoro, ndeyako? (you don't reap what you did not sow). We walked a very long journey, we want democracy but for now it's not good to have many political parties; we must give president Tsvangirai a chance," said Chamisa.Mujuru's new found partner and Dare leader, Dzikiti, had no kind words as well for Tsvangirai and his party, which he accused of sponsoring fly-by-night political parties to strengthen his hand ahead of negotiations for the grand coalition that could take place this week."There is a proliferation of sponsored parties and the gathering of the so-called 10 parties that endorsed Tsvangirai over the weekend was one such thing. They are some civil society organisation that we know want to divide the opposition by sponsoring these parties," said Dzikiti.As she signed the alliance pact with Dzikiti, Mujuru claimed that the deal does not affect prior agreements she had with Tsvangirai or mean that the two will not be working together."Late last week, we signed an electoral alliance with Zimbabwe United for Democracy (Zunde) in the spirit of inclusivity; inclusivity being one of our core values as a party. It is in the same spirit and in keeping with the provisions of our MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) that today we are signing an electoral alliance agreement with Dare. It is equally in the same spirit that you may have heard that the MDC has signed other MoUs with more opposition parties and therefore should not be read to signal discord among coalition partners," said Mujuru.She said soon the principals involved in the coalition talks would be coming together with an official position on the grand coalition."The clarion call for a united coalition to guarantee change come 2018 has been heard and I can confirm our party commitment to the coming together of genuine opposition forces to deliver victory for the people of Zimbabwe," said Mujuru.Contacted for comment, MDC spokesperson Obert Gutu said the MDC was not behaving like a big brother and will not discuss about the coalition in the media."Our trajectory on coalitions has always been made abundantly clear. We will never, ever negotiate and/or discuss coalition issues in the media or the in the public domain."There is something that is called quiet diplomacy. Believe you me, when you are cutting coalition deals, quiet diplomacy is more effective than megaphone diplomacy. (President Morgan) Tsvangirai is personally handling all our coalition deliberations and, to date, we are perfectly happy with the progress that has been made," said Gutu.
News / Press Release

by MDC-T National Spokesperson

The MDC is deeply disturbed and concerned about the recent spate of thuggery and banditry taking place in and around the country, particularly in the capital city, Harare. Only last week, an Isuzu pick up truck belonging to the MDC Youth Assembly was torched at a car park in Kuwadzana by suspected Zanu PF thugs. As if this was not enough evidence of Zanu PF - inspired thuggery and violence, on Tuesday night, July 18, 2017, Vice President Elias Mudzuri's Dandaro bar in Harare was set alight by arsonists whom we strongly suspect to be Zanu PF thugs. On the same night, Councilor Janjazi's house in Kuwadzana was also attacked and torched by armed thugs and arsonists.No rocket science is needed to conclude that these savage and thuggish criminal activities are orchestrated by Zanu PF thugs and agents as the country approaches the make or break 2018 elections. The Zanu PF regime is cornered, deeply fractured, incorrigibly factionalised and crumbling. The regime is facing a crushing and humiliating defeat at next year's elections. In typical Zanu PF fashion, the regime has resorted to its default mode of violence, thuggery and banditry. The armed men and arsonists who attacked VP Mudzuri's bar and vandalised Cllr. Janjazi's house in Kuwadzana are, without a shadow of doubt, State agents. These thugs threatened residents at a nearby car park in Kuwadzana before proceeding to embark on their orgy of arson and bandtry. It is through the grace of God that no one was injured or killed as these ruthless thugs embarked on their senseless spree of State - sponsored savagery.The MDC is a peace - loving and law - abiding social democratic political party. In the face of immense provocation and wanton criminal attacks by Zanu PF hoodlums and thugs, our party has remained disciplined and focused. We have resolutely resisted the temptation to fight violence with violence, thuggery with thuggery. But then, the crumbling and faction - infested Zanu PF regime shouldn't take our discipline and focus as a sign of weakness. Far from it! There will come a time when peace - loving citizens of Zimbabwe shall be left with no other viable alternative but to defend themselves from the orgy of banditry and thuggery that is being perpetrated by Zanu PF thugs. After all, in the field of criminal law, there is a principle that is called the defence of self - defence.We call upon the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) and all other law enforcement agents, to thoroughly investigate the incidents of arson and banditry that have recently taken place in Harare. Perpetrators of these heinous acts of criminality should be promptly arrested and arraigned before the courts of justice. Zimbabweans deserve to participate in a free and fair election next year and the last thing that the nation wants at this stage is the complete breakdown of law and order.
What to expect next in the Frisch vs. Boebert CD-3 race

Final results in the race won't be known until Friday, Nov. 18, after clerks in all 27 counties upload final counts. So what happens between now and then?
News / Regional

by Stephen Jakes

Recent remarks by both Zimbabwe and South Africa point to the need for an independent Mthwakazi, former Mthwakazi Liberation Front Spokesperson David Magagula has said."I have always maintained that MLF is the leading force in the fight to liberate Mthwakazi and that MLF is just like the first rain that bring to life all sorts of creatures. These make marvelous and musical noise to the African Rural life. As if my preaching was a joke both Zimbabwean and South African Ministers have alluded to my assertion that Mthwakazi must be free and that will benefit the whole of Southern Africa," he said."The South African Deputy Minister of Police was quoted as having said a debate must be opened on why Foreigners have taken over Johannesburg, particularly Hibrow, Berea and Yoeville. I must tell the Minister that 99,99 of the inhabitants of the mentioned areas are Mthwakazian. On the other hand (President Robert) Mugabe's lick dogs and boot lickers in the form of Obedingwa Mnguni the deputy Minister of Home affairs and Abednigo Ncube-what ever he is a minister of, are accusing Stanley of demanding our(Mthwakazi)country and freedom."He said the Big Question Is: where do these people go? Lithi bayengaphi?"The so many Mthwakazi formations that have sprung up every where are a sign that Mthwakazi ought to be free and be free now. While Mthwakazi has a cultural and historic right to claim large parts of South Africa,they have chosen to fight for their Kingdom-the land between Limpopo and the Zambezi. May the two nations who owe them so dearly accept that they are a nation on their own right and let them decide their fate," said Magagula."The South African Deputy called for a debate and he shall get it gladly. The Zimbabwe bootlickers are quoting a constitution that they don't respect themselves to try and suppress the Mthwakazi issue. As a sibling of that (Mthwakazi)nation I know that when they(AbaThwakazi) want something,they do get it and as they are calling for their country/Kingdom, please give them before they forcefully take it."
Opinion / Columnist

Last week a discussion forum was held in Harare featuring prominent youth leaders under the theme, "Zimbabwe: The Task At Hand - A View from Young Professionals".Among the speakers were lawyer and political activist Fadzayi Mahere; businessman Shingi Munyeza; media personality Ruvheneko Parirenyatwa; politician and activist Jealousy Mawarire and Zanu-PF legislator Psychology Maziwisa.There was nothing, really, to write home about this particular discussion. Except, though, that the one big talking point is how Psychology Maziwisa has been excoriated, sniggered at and roiled over comments he made about how the ruling Zanu-PF party has fared in its 2013 election promises regarding the provision of 2,2 million jobs.The fallout has been sensational and social media platforms have been awash with comments regarding how Maziwisa made a less than decent job in presenting Zanu-PF's balance sheet.Here is what Maziwisa, a former deputy director of information in the ruling party, said:"Okay, can I run through this very quickly, 2,2 million jobs, yes we promised that. But you see what people tend to forget, and I want to say this on record and I hope it's the last time we are saying this as Zanu-PF, we did not say we were going to create 2,2 million formal jobs."We said we were going to create 2,2 million jobs and when you define what a job is, it includes casual jobs. So for example, you can use the word job in this way, 'I gave him a job to wash my clothes.'"And that sentence is grammatically correct. We have created millions of jobs in the informal sector. In fact, we have exceeded the 2,2 million jobs. We are now, at the last count, including the informal jobs at over three million jobs."Laughter. More laughter. Rolling laughter at poor Psychology Maziwisa!People poked fun at him, which the social media blowback has but just amplified.There is no doubt about it, Maziwisa was not convincing at all. In fact, he was complacent and did not do his homework properly, perhaps assuming that his audience would be of the intelligence ordinary among the old folk in his Highfield constituency who would be so beholden to him as to take anything at face value because of eternal gratitude for packets of rice and beans he beneficently extends to them.This audience did not owe him anything.In fact, the audience was hostile to a Zanu-PF representative, as is oft the case in these particular settings.Those familiar with the venue and dynamics at Ibbo Mandaza's Sapes Trust in Harare will quickly relate.And Maziwisa is not a Professor Jonathan Moyo, or a Nick Mangwana, the Zanu-PF UK chairman who lives in the belly of the beast and acquits himself admirably well.Which is to say that the criticism and sniggering that Maziwisa has endured is largely unfair not least because it is coming from well-known opposition quarters who do not want to hear about Zanu-PF policies.The youthful MP is also known to be quite a soft target for ridicule.For the record, two months ago Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa said Government had actually surpassed that target (We've created over 2,2 million jobs: Mnangagwa, NewsDay, May 22, 2017) and did not recieve such widespread ridicule.Said VP Mnangagwa: "We have surpassed that. Look at the jobs created across the industries and those created through Command Agriculture, they are more than two million jobs and we will be creating more."It will be noted though that the issue of 2,2 million jobs itself has been a political hot potato for the ruling party and not many of its officials have summoned enough intelligence and astuteness to confront it.But it shouldn't take much, really to put the figure in its proper con- text.First of all, and in reference both to the Zanu-PF election manifesto and Zim-Asset, this figure was never meant to be the number of white collar jobs that Government would create.Maziwisa's interlocutors at Sapes  and the rest of the young and probably miseducated youths that have been poking fun at Maziwisa  expected white collar jobs to give force to their unrequited academic qualifications.Which is a fallacy.Zim-Asset is anchored on production and manufacturing  and all the dirty jobs that come with such processes in agriculture, mining, manufacturing and so on; and more so in the small and medium-scale sectors that are largely informal.These are the jobs that run an economy like ours.White collar jobs don't.If one were to look at Zim-Asset itself it predicated main employment sectors as follows:ManufacturingFinanceAgricultureTourismHealthEducationTransport and CommunicationElectricity and WaterPublic ServicesConstruction; andOtherOf these agriculture was projected to be the biggest employer over a five- year period, employing 600 000 people; followed by tourism (300 000); manufacturing (250 000); "other" (200 000); finance and education (tied at 180 000 apiece); transport and communication, and construction (90 000 respectively) and health (85 000).These projections give us a total of 2 265 000 as the number of jobs that were supposed to be created by 2018.There has been visible growth in most of the sectors above with agriculture being ever the biggest employer and farmers from different parts of the country increasing each year and set to do so thanks to the Command Agriculture programme.Government has undertaken major construction projects such as the recently completed Tokwe-Mukosi Dam, Joshua Nkomo Airport in Victoria Falls; Plumtree-Mutare highway dualisation; Kariba South Hydropower stations; Hwange Thermal Power Station (5 and 6) as well as projects underway such as Mtshabezi Water Project and the dualisation of Beitbridge-Chirundu highway.According to the World Travel and Tourism Council's latest report, "Travel & Tourism Economic impact 2017 Zimbabwe": "In 2016 Travel & Tourism directly supported 159 500 jobs (2,1 percent of total employment). This is expected to rise by 2,2 percent in 2017 and rise by 2,1 percent pa to 200 000 jobs (2.0 percent of total employment) in 2027."This is all in sync with the projections of Zim-Asset and tourism is a rising star in terms of providing employment and contributing to the wealth of the country.Another specimen.Mining: According to the Zimbabwe Chamber of Mines' "Zimbabwe Mining Sector Growth 2011-2018" report: "The formal gold industry has created in excess of 11 000 direct jobs (25 percent) of total formal mining employment of around 40 000 and an additional 33 000 in indirect jobs."Further, the artisanal and small-scale sector is estimated to absorb in excess of 200 000 people."Still another specimen.Manufacturing: According to the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries the manufacturing sector is employing about 88 000 people at the moment and can easily reach "200 000 with the right support".Happily, SI 64, the Government's regulations limiting imports, has driven capacity utilisation from 34 percent in 2015 to a projected 65 percent by year end.These are all jobs.But they are dirty jobs that the youth in that room at Sapes do not think are jobs even when, ironically, they are the ones that drive an economy like ours.And it also is incumbent to point out that "Other" is a job sector itself and is employing lots of Zimbabweans in the informal sector.This is perhaps what Maziwisa, rather tragically, decided to elevate at the expense of more convincing specimens.Yet we should not make the mistake, because of our education, of looking down on this sector.Let us call it "Rese Rese".This Rese Rese sector is as legitimate an employer as any.In the final analysis, we must also heed the fact that the United Nations body, International Labour Organisation and the World Bank put Zimbabwe's unemployment rate at 5,1 percent.These statistics are scientific in their definition of employment and unemployment.They do not care about snobbish and ill-conceived notions held by misdirected so-called future leaders.
China introduced the biggest changes to its individual income tax (IIT) system since at least 2011 with the passing of a new IIT law in 2018. The new law...
Members of China's research team set up an ocean profiling float at a short-term data acquisition location near the icebreaker Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, in the Arctic Ocean, Aug 18, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

The Chinese icebreaker Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, will set sail on Thursday for a research mission to discover the extent of acidification in the Arctic Ocean.

It is internationally acknowledged that acidification -- mainly caused by carbon dioxide emissions into the sea -- is rising in the ocean and already covers a larger area, according to Xu Ren, deputy director of the Polar Research Institute of China.

"It may trigger environmental disasters and affect marine biodiversity," he said at a media briefing on Tuesday. "Ocean acidification is a major issue facing the international community, along with global warming and marine pollution.

"Although the situation in the Arctic Ocean is not as bad as other oceans, it will deteriorate with global warming and the decrease of sea ice in the Arctic," added Xu, who is team leader of this year's 83-day expedition.

China has pledged to conduct an annual Arctic expedition to make long-term and systematic scientific observations, and strengthen its position on the world stage regarding international governance of the Arctic region.
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"Belt and Road", "AlphaGo" and "emoji package" are among the most frequently used new words in Chinese media in 2016. [Photo/ Chinanews.com]

"Mobike," "AlphaGo" and "emoji package" were among the most frequently used new words in Chinese media in 2016, according to a report released Tuesday.

Other popular terms included "Long March spirit," "South China Sea" and "Tiangong-2," said the report released by China's Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission.

The annual report, which was the 12th of its kind, was compiled based on information from the language database of the National Language Resource Monitoring and Research Center.

According to the report, "rule," "small goal," "change" and "Belt and Road" were the most popular terms of the year.

Linguists noted that media frequently used the word "rule" to express the citizens' increasing awareness of abiding by regulations under changing circumstances.

The popularity of "small goal" was a demonstration that the Chinese people are positive and practical. "Change" and "Belt and Road" represented citizen's common aspirations for interconnectivity and win-win cooperation, said linguists.

Widely used terms in "bullet screens" and car stickers were also included in the report. Terms such as "baby onboard" reflected changing values and sentiments of the public, the report said.

Experts noted the emergence of low-brow terms in "bullet screens" and car stickers, calling for stronger guidance and supervision.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged officials to make "every possible effort" to solve public grievances.

He said officials must treat the handling of public petitions as important work to keeping abreast of public events, pooling people's wisdom, protecting the public interest and improving social solidarity.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, made the remarks in a written instruction conveyed to the eighth national conference on petition work, which was held in Beijing Tuesday to Wednesday.

He urged Party committees, government agencies and officials to handle people's legitimate appeals lawfully, in timely fashion and in the local areas, address the root causes of issues, and build a stronger grassroots system, Xi said.

The construction of the legal institutions and related system for addressing public petitions should be improved, Xi said, calling for efforts to make petition work more forward-looking, systematic and targeted.

Speaking highly of petition work in recent years, the president said those handling petitions have helped solve large numbers of problems concerning the immediate interests of the people and played an important role in safeguarding the country's reform, development and stability.

Xi ordered Party committees to enhance leadership over the work, show support and care for those handling petitions, and build a high-quality team that are loyal to the Party, dedicated to serving the people and good at working with the general public.

At the two-day event, model individuals and units were awarded for their contribution to the work and certificates of merit were granted to those who had handled petitions for more than 25 years.

China has established a system to handle appeals and petitions of the public, including citizens seeking government redress in cases ranging from illegal land acquisition, social security, education, to healthcare and environmental protection.
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German Social Democrat (SPD) and Left party (Linke) politicians criticized the Turkish government on Tuesday following the arrest of German human rights activist Peter Steudtner.

"What we are experiencing in Turkey at the moment breaks all boundaries," SPD leader Martin Schulz told German news magazine Spiegel.

A Turkish court placed Steudtner, along with six other activists, under custody on Tuesday. The 45-year-old from Berlin is the tenth German citizen to have been arrested in Turkey since the failed military coup on July 15, 2016, according to German media reports.

According to Schulz, "President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is on course to eliminate democracy and rule of law in Turkey. He is moving his country further and further away from Europe."

Speaking on the anniversary of the failed coup on Saturday, Erdogan vowed to aggressively pursue those who he saw as sympathizers of the attempt to overthrow his government.

The head of the SPD parliamentary faction, Thomas Opperman, said that Erdogan had inaugurated "new stage of escalation in German-Turkish relations".

Opperman added that "Merkel's strategy" to appease Erdogan had failed and said the time had come to tell the Turkish president that "things cannot go on as they are".

The Left party parliamentarian Sevim Dagdelen also joined in the SPD's sharp criticism of the Turkish government.

She warned that Germans were at risk of being taken hostage in Turkey and called on the German Foreign Office to issue a travel warning.

Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) were partially responsible for the fate of Steudtner and other Germans in Turkish custody, Dagdelen said.

Turkish-German relations have been severely strained since the failed military coup last year.

Ankara has rejected Berlin's criticisms that it engaged in an excessive crackdown on political opponents in response to the coup and is resentful towards its German NATO partner for allegedly granting asylum to Turkish revolutionaries.

Figures released on Friday by German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees suggest that the number of Turkish asylum seekers in Germany has risen dramatically since July 2016.

There is also a long-growing spat between Berlin and Ankara over attempts to prevent Turkish politicians from holding campaign rallies in Europe.

Hoping to win support amongst Turkish migrant communities for a controversial constitutional referendum which ultimately passed in April 2017, Erdogan and members of his AKP party ran up against heavy opposition in several European capitals.

Turkey retaliated by banning German lawmakers from visiting their country's armed forces stationed at the air-force base of Incirlik and most recently at the NATO base in Konya on July 16. In June, German lawmakers voted to transfer the troops in Incirlik to a new base in Jordan after several attempts to defuse the diplomatic crisis failed.
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A Turkish court ruled Tuesday six human rights activists including Amnesty's Turkey director remain in custody for aiding a terror group, local media reported.

Prosecutors accuse them of "committing a crime in the name of a terror organisation without being a member," it said.

Their detention sparked international alarm and amplified fears of declining freedom of expression under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The ruling came a day after the activists, who have not yet been put on trial or formally charged, gave statements to prosecutors for the first time since their detention.

Amnesty's Turkey director Idil Eser was detained on July 5 with seven activists and two foreign trainers during a digital security and information management workshop in an island south of Istanbul.

Eight of those detained were Turkish rights activists, including Ilknur Ustun of the Women's Coalition and Veli Acu of the Human Rights Agenda Association. Four of those have now been released, it added.

Two foreigners, a German and a Swede who were leading the digital information workshop, remain in pre-trial detention.

The activists were detained on a tip-off they were working against the government, comparing them to those involved in a failed putsch in July last year.
Opinion / Columnist

In a nation baffled by the laughable actions of the former Teflon Don of Manicaland, Didymus Mutasa, who believes Zimbabwe owes him a few luxury vehicles, a multimillion dollar mansion, a blank cheque, school fees and pocket money for his children - as a retirement package for the highly rewarding times he spent working in Parliament and government - let us step back and reflect on the roles of Members of Parliament. MPs have a responsibility to three main groups: Parliament, their constituents and political party. However, how well do MPs represent the aspirations of the people of Zimbabwe in Parliament?The World Bank has predicted that the economy will grow by just over 2% in 2017, primarily because of drought and macroeconomic imbalances. So, will MPs enact laws that can facilitate greater economic growth and safeguard public funds, particularly when 72% of the nation is stuck in poverty, and the bigger picture - high economic growth and lower levels of corruption and mismanagement of public capital - looks lost in the long running political brawl that has cast a long and dark shadow over Zimbabwe? In the aftermath of highly disputed polls in 2000, 2002, 2008 and 2013, countless MPs characteristically neglect the silent voices of millions who do not want to vote because they have zero faith in the institutions and processes run by Rita Makarau and Tobaiwa Mudede.The electoral process disregards the disenfranchised millions of citizens that live in South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana, Zambia, Britain and America, who are unwilling to expend valuable currency on traveling to Zimbabwe twice to register and vote for an aspiring MP, who may or may not do the right things once he or she is sworn into office. In 1990 the former Mayor of Harare, the late Tony Gara, notoriously described President Mugabe, as "God's other son". Last week the MP for Highfield West, Psychology Maziwisa, claimed Zanu-PF has created about 3 million casual jobs since elections in 2013. The abovementioned policymakers represent the standard of MPs people vote into office and look up to for economic and moral and social regeneration all too commonly. This explains why certain people remain hesitant to validate a flawed electoral and political process.Parliament is mandated to make laws and hold the Government to account for its policies, actions and spending. Nonetheless, how well have numerous parliamentary portfolio committees exercised oversight over public sector companies and stopped dishonest managers from bankrupting parastatals and causing massive unemployment and poverty? Let us see: debt-ridden Air Zimbabwe has retrenched half of its workforce. Net-One is burdened with legacy debts and remains highly unprofitable for now. The GMB is riddled with corruption and perplexing business practices. The NRZ is flat broke. Zimpapers is the unhealthiest possible scenario of sycophantic and unproductive journalism on earth; and the ZBC operates as an expensive loss-making propaganda machine. Nevertheless, the said highly remunerated honourable MPs are continually caught lacking and missing in action right when the nation is bulging at the seams with corporate malfeasance in the civil sector.When last did Zimbabwe witness an MP speak truth to power: last week, last month or last century? Dzikamayi Mavhaire famously said "Mugabe must go" in a parliamentary debate in 1998. Zanu-PF promptly suspended Mavhaire for his evaluation. Former finance minister Dr Simba Makoni went a step further and challenged President Mugabe for the presidency of Zanu-PF. But he got expelled for his democratic aspirations. Then, Zanu-PF spokesman Mr Nathan Shamuyarira, a close confidant of President Mugabe, told a news conference: "The rules are very clear that anyone who tries to challenge an elected candidate of the party stands expelled. In the case of Simba Makoni ... he stands expelled."Comparably, when last did a Zanu-PF Member of Parliament call for the resignation or prosecution of a powerful cabinet minister over allegations of corruption? When last did a Zanu-PF MP condemn police brutality and make calls for a thorough investigation into Commissioner Augustine Chihuri and the ZRP? And have you ever heard of an MP who quit his or her seat in Parliament in protest over the enactment of bad and unprincipled legislation? Life could be so different now had Parliament not passed laws that restrict the freedom of expression, the right to protest and the inalienable right to vote in Zimbabwe and the diaspora.Problematic laws like the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the Public Order and Security Act, and General Laws Amendment Act would not have passed if legislators had put the interests of Zimbabwe first and well ahead of very narrow interests. So while many people will castigate, dismiss and ridicule Advocate Mahere and accurately wonder what one woman will conceivably do in Parliament when weighed down by two colossal parties, do remember that the hundreds of MDC-T MPs who presently sit in Parliament normally speak in one voice all the time. So does the Zanu-PF Parliamentary Caucus.Should Advocate Mahere become the MP for Mount Pleasant she can use parliamentary structures and laws to apply powerful and strategic pressure wherever and whenever it is required. Should Advocate Mahere propose new legislation that will tackle corporate sleaze at parastatals: Zimbabwe will rally behind her. If Advocate Mahere can recommend the privatisation of state-owned companies like Air Zimbabwe, then she will make a big impact. If Advocate Mahere can promote clean governance through Parliament - her job will be half done. If Advocate Mahere can call for strict implementation of term limits for the police and army chiefs, the security sector can be revamped for the benefit of the entire nation.Without an egomaniacal party leader to please and a captured Chief Whip to answer to, Advocate Mahere can work diligently and make considerable progress. Parliament no longer has an MP in the mould of former Makokoba MP, the late Sydney Malunga - a left-wing firebrand who spoke his mind and called out corrupt leaders and civil incompetence in Parliament on a regular basis. Deplorably, dogmatic MPs simply toe the party line in meek manner all the time for fear that public dissent will lead to disciplinary actions and expulsions and losses in public standing and lucrative salaries and benefits. So Zimbabwe can plausibly do with a third and apolitical voice in Parliament - an option not bound to party-political goals. With all the problems Zimbabwe has at the moment whoever can bring fresh ideas and unearth renewed enthusiasm for the political process among young voters and act purposefully and unselfishly from beyond the boundaries of the two big parties - should certainly be appreciated, right? For everyone needs MPs who are bound to serve just one principal constituency: the people of Zimbabwe.
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The Syrian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday slammed the recent set of European sanctions on Syrian scientists and officials as "unjustified."

A day earlier, the European Union imposed sanctions on 16 Syrian scientists and military officials over allegations of their suspected involvement in a chemical attack in a northern Syrian town last April, which killed scores of civilians and was blamed on the government forces.

In its statement, the ministry said the sanctions were "unjustified and reflect the determination of the Western officials to keep supporting terrorism and misleading the public opinion."

The ministry reiterated that Syria had not used chemical weapons, further denying any possession of such substances.

"These sanctions indicate the lack of ethical standards of the West in dealing with the crisis in the world today," the ministry continued.

Syria has repeatedly denied Western allegations of chemical weapons use, with Damascus accusing the West of falsifying allegations to pressure the government to give up more concessions.
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Prague City Council on Tuesday approved a ban on lorries longer than 12 meters from exiting the Prague ring and entering the city.

The lorries are also banned from using some roads that replace the incomplete southeastern part of the Prague ring.

Prague city councillor for transport, Petr Dolinek, said the decision was made on strategic documents that demand lowering transit transport in the city due to environment pollution.

The relevant department of Prague Council was assigned on Tuesday to prepare implementation measures.

But the decision was opposed by the Czech Association of Road Transport Operators, which says the decision is outrageous populism and will result in a transport collapse.

Czech Transport Ministry says the ban will have a negative impact on the whole countries' road transport.

The project has yet to be submitted to the Road Administrative Authority for approval.
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Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said on Tuesday that Cairo employs all its capabilities to push forward the political process in Libya and reach a settlement in the conflict-torn neighboring country.

Shoukry's remarks came during a phone call with Fayez al-Sarraj, head of Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) run by the Presidential Council (PC), said the Egyptian Foreign Ministry in a statement.

"Shoukry made a phone call with PC chief Fayez al-Sarraj where they discussed the latest development in the Libyan affairs in the political and security arenas," Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid said in a statement.

The Egyptian foreign minister stressed the importance of joint work to boost the understandings reached between rival Libyan parties in their recent meetings in Cairo "in order to achieve accord over over the outstanding issues in the Libyan political agreement to move to the stage of construction."

For his part, Sarraj expressed his appreciation of the Egyptian efforts, voicing intention to make a soon visit to Cairo for further consultations on the next steps.

Six years after the 2011 uprising ended the 42-year rule of Muammar Gaddafi as well as his life, Libya is currently engaged in a civil war and run by two rival administrations, one in Tobruk and another in Tripoli.

Tobruk's parliament-backed government was internationally recognized before the PC was established in 2015 to run a unity government in Tripoli as per a UN-brokered peace deal between Libyan factions reached in Skhirat, Morocco.

Supported by self-proclaimed Libyan national army led by Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar, the parliament-backed government in Tobruk refuses to recognize the UN-backed, Tripoli-based, PC-run unity government known as GNA.

Egypt, which hosted several meetings of Libyan factions, refrains from recognizing the GNA, saying it is up to the Libyan people to determine their own government.

However, it repeatedly expressed support for the Tobruk-based government and for strongman Haftar's crackdown on militants in Libya, describing the man as "Libya's savior from terrorism."

In January, Cairo hosted top diplomats from Libya and its neighboring states, namely Egypt, Algeria, Sudan, Chad, Niger and Tunisia, as well as the Arab League chief and UN envoy, who issued a joint communique urging Libyan dialogue and reiterating rejection of any foreign military interference in the war-torn country.

In mid-February, Egypt managed to get Haftar and Sarraj to Cairo but failed to convince the two rivals to hold direct talks.
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Sudanese authorities on Tuesday released 1,636 prisoners on the occasion of annual Africa Prisons Day.

"This initiative comes on the occasion of Africa Prisons Day, where today we release 1,636 inmates," said Gen. Hatim Al-Nur, Director of Sudan's General Administration of Prisons, Reform and Rehabilitation, at a celebration event in Khartoum.

He explained that the number of inmates in Sudan is estimated at about 21,000, most of whom were sentenced to light terms.

He reiterated the improvement of prisons in Sudan, pointing to the government's serious endeavors to transform prisons into reformatory institutions and a productive sector contributing to the country's development.

Sudan on Tuesday celebrated the Africa Prisons Day for the first time based on recommendations of the conference of the Africa Correctional Services Association (ACSA), recently held in Kigali, Rwanda, with the participation of 23 African countries.

The ACSA approved an annual celebration for all prisons in the African countries on July 18, in memory of the late freedom fighter Nelson Mandela to promote prison conditions, raise awareness and highlight prison staff as performing a social service of particular importance.
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The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday that senior U.S. and Russian diplomats had held "tough" talks here on areas of mutual concern.

"Following the recent meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hamburg, Germany, and multiple bilateral senior-level engagements, Under Secretary Thomas A. Shannon Jr. met his Russian counterpart Sergei Ryabkov Monday to continue discussing areas of mutual concern," a State Department statement said.

According to the statement, the discussion was "tough, forthright, and deliberate, reflecting both parties' commitment to a resolution."

"The United States and Russia seek a long-term solution that would address areas of bilateral concern that have strained the relationship. The talks reflected a spirit of goodwill, but it is clear that more work needs to be done," the statement added.

Also on Tuesday, Moscow issued a more strongly worded statement, threatening to impose tit-for-tat measures if Washington does not return Russian diplomatic property the U.S. had seized.

"The Russian side stressed that if Washington does not remove this and other irritants, including continued obstacles to the work of our diplomatic institutions, we reserve the right to take retaliatory measures based on the principle of reciprocity," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

As part of U.S. response to alleged Russian meddling in the U.S. 2016 election, former U.S. President Barack Obama's administration expelled 35 Russian government officials from the United States and shuttered two Russian government-owned compounds.
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Three Republican senators said Tuesday they would oppose moving ahead on a new GOP plan only aiming to repeal Obamacare, leaving Republicans once again short of votes needed to carry on with their seven-year-old drive.

Lisa Murkowski, Shelley Moore Capito and Susan Collins indicated Tuesday that they would not vote to move forward a GOP repeal of the Affordable Care Act, known as the Obamacare, to the Senate floor without implementing an immediate replacement.

Their opposition came after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell conceded failure in efforts to repeal and immediately replace the Obamacare late Monday night as more Republican senators defected against the revised Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), a GOP bill designed to overhaul the Obamacare.

But McConnell said the Senate will vote to take up the House-passed bill in coming days while calling for a repeal vote on Obamacare with a two-year delay for substitute.

"I regret that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failures of Obamacare will not be successful," McConnell said on the Senate floor Tuesday. "That doesn't mean we should give up."

However, members of McConnell's caucus said a repeal-only bill would not have their support, shortly after he made those remarks.

"My position on this issue is driven by its impact on West Virginians," Senator Capito said in a statement.

"With that in mind, I cannot vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians," Capito said.

"To repeal there has to be a replacement," Senator Murkowski of Alaska told reporters. "There's enough chaos already, and this would just contribute to it."

Separately, Senator Collins of Maine said she was opposing the repeal and delay proposal as it is not constructive to repeal a law closely associated with the health care system but only plan to come up with a replacement over the next two years.

Republicans control a 52-48 majority in the 100-seat Senate. Under budget reconciliation rules, at least 50 votes are required to pass a plan, with Vice President Mike Pence to break a tie.

With Senator John McCain of Arizona recovering at home from surgery, two or more defections would stall any Republican proposal, were there a unanimous opposition from Democrats and independents.

The Senate's Obamacare replacement plan, the BCRA, collapsed Monday night when Collins and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky were joined by Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas in opposing the motion before McConnell shifted to advancing a repeal-only plan, stalled almost immediately the next day.

U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday he was "very disappointed" with the defeat in advancing the Republican health care plan, one of his major campaign promises during the 2016 presidential elelction.

"Let Obamacare fail," he said. "We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it."

The GOP effort to repeal and replace the Obamacare has stalled mutiple times in past weeks.

Republicans are divided amid unsolved concerns of rising costs and fewer insurers once the BCRA was enacted, while Democrats argue the GOP bill would cost tens of millions of people's coverage.
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At least 22 people were killed in battles between Yemeni government forces and Houthi rebels in Nehm front line, northeast of Houthi-controlled capital Sanaa on Tuesday, a military source said.

The battles erupted earlier Tuesday at al-Minsa mountain, which overlooks the regular road linking rebel-held Sanaa and government-held Marib province.

"The government forces, backed by a Saudi-led coalition warplanes, were trying to advance into sites near the capital, which was controlled by Houthis supported by forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah," the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

"Neither advance nor progress were made by any sides during the battles as the fighting is still ongoing," the source said.

He added that two soldiers were killed and four others wounded in the government forces, while Houthis lost nearly 20 militants in the battles.

Houthi media has not yet reported their casualties.

Battles in Nehm, about 90 km northeast of Sanaa, flared up regularly as the government forces have been trying to make advance into the capital, of which Houthis seized control in late 2014.

The war pits the Iranian-allied Shiite Houthi rebel movement against a Sunni Saudi-led military coalition after Houthis toppled Saudi-backed President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and his government more than two years ago.

The Saudi-led coalition forces backing Hadi started military intervention and sea-air-land siege in March 2015, trying to recapture territories, including Sanaa, and reinstate Hadi into power.

Hadi forces have managed to completely liberate six southern provinces out of the total 23 last year.

The war has since killed more than 10,000, mostly civilians, and displaced around 3 million as the all-out siege has caused severe shortage of imports of medicines and food.

The country has also been hit by a deadly cholera outbreak and is on the edge of famine.
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Iraqi security forces arrested 20 female foreigners, including five Germans, in Mosul city over charges of joining the Islamic State group, local media reported Tuesday.

According to an Iraqi officer, the 20 foreigners are from different countries, including Turkey, Canada and Chechnya.

One of the Germans does not speak Arabic, but she had joined Daesh and fought with its militants after finishing her studies, it said.

They were hiding in a hotel, where they were arrested with weapons and explosive belts in their possession.
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A separatist leader in the Ukrainian region of Donbas announced a plan on Tuesday to create a new state with Donetsk as capital.

"The new state formation will consist of 19 regions of the former Ukraine and will be called Malorossiya, taking Donetsk as its new capital. Kiev remains a historical and cultural center," Alexander Zakharchenko said in a statement.

Malorossiya will be "a federal state with broad powers of autonomy of the regions," in which regional languages are guaranteed to be retained, he said.

Most areas of today's Ukraine used to be called Malorossiya, when it was part of the Russian Empire before 1917.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who is currently visiting Georgia, said Ukraine was "hopeful for the reintegration of Donbas and Crimea, with the restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty over those territories."

The Kremlin has not reacted to the rebel proclamation so far, but Russia's envoy to the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, Boris Gryzlov, said it did not fit the Minsk process.

"I perceive this only as an invitation to a discussion. This statement has no constitutional consequences," Gryzlov was quoted as saying by RIA Novosti news agency.

War broke out in Donbas -- Donetsk and Lugansk -- between government troops and pro-Russian separatists following the February 2014 revolution that led to the fall of President Viktor Yanukovych. Violence has been plaguing the Donbas region since.

The two sides reached a peace agreement brokered by Russia, France and Germany in September 2014 in the Belarussian capital of Minsk, with a follow-up deal signed in February 2015.

The Minsk agreements envisage a cease-fire, a withdrawal of heavy weaponry from the contact line, a prisoner exchange and local elections in Donbas, among other measures.
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Liu Yunshan (R), a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, meets with Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka in Prague, the Czech Republic, July 18, 2017. (Xinhua/Rao Aimin)

China and the Czech Republic should push forward cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative, senior Communist Party of China (CPC) official Liu Yunshan said on Tuesday.

Liu, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, made the remarks while meeting with Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka. Liu is paying an official goodwill visit to the Czech Republic.

Noting the Czech Republic was one of the earliest countries recognizing and establishing diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, Liu hailed the two countries' increasingly closer high-level communication and strengthened political mutual trust.

Under the guidance of Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Czech counterpart Milos Zeman, China's relations with the Czech Republic are better than they have ever been, Liu said, adding that people from both sides have been deeply inspired.

He urged the two sides to seize the opportunities arising from the Belt and Road Initiative and "China-CEE 16+1 mechanism" to deepen mutually-beneficial cooperation and reap more achievements.

The China-CEE 16+1 mechanism is a platform created in April 2012 by China and 16 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries.

Both countries, with a long history and abundant culture, have made impressive contributions to mankind's development and progress, Liu said, stressing that China is willing to boost cooperation with the Czech Republic in fields such as culture, education, sports, tourism and Chinese medicine.

Sobotka, for his part, noted that his country's rapidly growing relations with China are guided by the two countries' leaders and driven by the Belt and Road Initiative.

Sobotka promised that his government would provide firm support for closer cooperation with China in trade, transportation, tourism, medical care and people-to-people exchanges, so as to continuously inject new vitality into bilateral ties.
Opinion / Columnist

Zimbabwe United for Democrats (ZUNDE) party led by Justice Benjamin Paradza has rubbished highly publicized claims by Dr. J Mujuru that ZUNDE had signed an MOU with National People's Party.In an open letter published today addressed to Dr. J Mujuru, ZUNDE Secretary General Mr. Moses Chamboko has refuted claims that his party had signed an MOU with Mai Mujuru's NPP Party. Mr. Chamboko pointed out that the ZUNDE president Justice B Paradza had not entered into any agreement with NPP as his party was only signatory to CODE and NERA."It has been reported in several media houses that National People's Party (NPP) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Zimbabweans United for Democracy (ZUNDE). This is incorrect. While ZUNDE is signatory to both CODE and NERA, we have not entered into any bilateral MoU with the NPP as incorrectly reported in the media or with any other party. We therefore totally repudiate any such document," stated Chamboko in the stinging letter.Mr. Moses Chamboko went on to rebuke Mr. Farai Mbira who has been reported to have "signed an MoU with NPP on behalf of ZUNDE"."Regrettably, Mr. Farai Mbira and his brothers have misrepresented themselves as official representatives of ZUNDE. Please be advised that Zunde's leader, Justice Benjamin Paradza, has not authorized anybody to sign any MoU."We recognize Mr. Mbira's right to participate in politics in his personal or any capacity other than representing himself as leader of ZUNDE which has been incorrectly or mischievously referred to as Zimbabwe Union of Democrats by some sections of media. We wonder if this is a genuine error or a forlorn attempt to mislead the public."We trust that you and your respective parties will take appropriate remedial action and ensure that this matter is put to rest once and for all."Faced with the demise and revolt within her own party, Mujuru has turned her focus on courting the smaller political parties in a venture to wrestle Coalition leadership through signing of MoUs with every political party that exists.Recently PDP led by Tendai Biti spurned her advances to sign an MoU confirming her dwindling popularity amongst other opposition parties dampening her spirited efforts to usurp coalition leadership role from her biggest contender Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai of MDCT.Professor Welshman Ncube of MDC has recently thrown his weight behind Tsvangirai and the probably leader of the coalition if it were to form.CODE partners have also expressed reservations with having Mujuru pen her name on the CODE list of parties. Flimsy excuses ranging from capacity of the venue to sighting of the venue and other "sticky issues" have been put in as a reason for the delay in NPP appending its signature on the CODE sheet.
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People are evacuated after a fire alarm went off at the United Nations headquarters in New York, on July 18, 2017. Around 2,000 people were evacuated on Tuesday from the United Nations headquarters complex in New York City after a fire alarm went off in one of the fan rooms in the second basement. UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters that "we have to evacuate as a precaution in case of a potential fire, but the alarm was checked and there was no fire." (Xinhua/Li Muzi)

Around 2,000 people were evacuated on Tuesday from the United Nations headquarters complex in New York City after a fire alarm went off in one of the fan rooms in the second basement.

UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters that "we have to evacuate as a precaution in case of a potential fire, but the alarm was checked and there was no fire."

"It was a problem potentially with the alarms," he noted in a briefing.

UN staff, diplomats, and visitors were allowed back into the buildings after the alarm was canceled within half an hour.

Haq said the Fire Department of New York came and helped find out that the rooms did not have fire conditions.

Meetings held at the UN headquarters were delayed, including a Security Council open meeting on the situation in Haiti.

Fire drills have been conducted regularly at the UN headquarters, though evacuation was rare in recent years.
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U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday nominated former Governor of Utah Jon Huntsman as new U.S. ambassador to Russia.

Huntsman, a Republican who served as ambassador to Singapore in early 1990s and to China from 2009 to 2011, currently serves as chairman of both the Atlantic Council, a U.S. think tank, and the Huntsman Cancer Foundation.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Huntsman would take on the diplomatic post of increasing importance to a country whose relationship with the United States has sunk to new lows in recent years after the Ukraine crisis and alleged Russian meddling in the U.S. election.

The nomination also came at a time when the U.S. Justice Department appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the probe into ties between Trump campaign and Russian officials.
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The White House confirmed on Tuesday that U.S. President Donald Trump had a second, previously undisclosed conversation with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin during the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

"There was a couples-only social dinner at the G20," U.S. National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton told ABC news. "Toward the end, the president spoke to Putin at the dinner."

Anton did not mention the length of the conversation, but multiple U.S. media, including the New York Times and CNN, on Tuesday cited a senior White House official as saying that the conversation lasted for nearly an hour.

In a series of tweets on Tuesday night, Trump blasted the news reports of his second conversation with Putin as "sick."

"Fake news story of secret dinner with Putin is 'sick.' All G20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!" Trump wrote.

Trump and Putin met face-to-face for the first time on July 7 on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.
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The eighth person who reportedly attended a controversial meeting with Donald Trump Jr., eldest son of U.S. President Donald Trump, and a Russian lawyer last year has been identified as a senior executive at a Russian real estate developer.

CNN said Tuesday it has learned that Ike Kaveladze was the previously unnamed eighth attendee at Trump Jr.'s meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya on June 9, 2016 in New York, an occasion where then campaign team to Trump reportedly anticipated damaging information on Democratic Presidential Candidate Hilary Clinton.

Kaveladze, a U.S. citizen, is a senior vice president of Crocus Group, a real estate development company run by Azerbaijan-Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.

Agalarov's son, Emin, is a businessman and pop star represented by British music publicist Rob Goldstone who proposed the meeting early June and then arranged it via emails with Trump Jr.

Those emails were disclosed by Trump Jr. last week with what he called total transparency after the meeting was uncovered by U.S. media, but he was accused of illegally soliciting a contribution from a foreign national during the presidential campaign.

The chain of emails indicated that attendees of the meeting were Goldstone, Trump Jr., Veselnitskaya, Trump's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, and his then-campaign manager Paul Manafort. It is revealed later Russian-born American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin working with Veselnitskaya, and an interpreter employed by her was also there before Kaveladze was identified.

Kaveladze attended the meeting as a representative for the Agalarovs, Scott Balber, an attorney for the family, was quoted by CNN as saying.

Balber said that Kaveladze who speaks fluent Russian has "never had any engagement with the Russian government in any capacity," a similar denial made by Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin.

According to Kaveladze's website, he studied at the Moscow Academy of Finance and received an MBA from the University of New Haven in Connecticut. Kaveladze has worked for the Crocus Group since 2004. He was implicated in a billion-U.S.-dollar money laundering scheme involving Russian brokers in 2000.

Other public records show Kaveladze, whose full name is Irakly Kaveladze, was born in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in 1965 and immigrated to the United States in 1991.

Balber said he received a call from investigators led by Robert Mueller, a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department to probe an alleged collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.

The attorney said they are "fully cooperating with prosecutors as a result of the investigation," but the Agalarovs, whom Balber also represents, have not been reached out by Mueller's investigators.

Kaveladze was told to act as an interpreter for the meeting because Veselnitskaya did not speak English but later he found the lawyer had already brought her own interpreter, Balber said.

The interpreter was a former State Department employee who refused to comment because of a non-disclosure agreement.

Balber quoted Kaveladze as saying the 30-minute talk surrounded a U.S. act that imposes sanctions on Russian individuals and a Russian retaliatory response that bans Russian children from being adopted by American citizens.

The U.S. intelligence community alleged that Russia meddled in the U.S. presidential race last year and there were connections between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Mueller and several congressional panels are investigating these allegations.
Opinion / Letters

Dear mai Mujuru and colleagues in the opposition,It has been reported in several media outlets that the National People's Party (NPP) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Zimbabweans United for Democracy (ZUNDE). This is incorrect. While ZUNDE is signatory to both CODE and NERA, we have not entered into any bilateral MoU with the NPP as incorrectly reported in the media or with any other party. We therefore, totally repudiate any such document.ZUNDE strongly believes in the formation of an inclusive, genuine and effective coalition based on values and a shared vision. We have always adhered to that position and we will continue to work towards realisation of this national goal.Regrettably, Mr Farai Mbira and his brothers have misrepresented themselves as official representatives of ZUNDE. Please be advised that ZUNDE's leader, Justice Benjamin Paradza, has not authorised anybody to sign any MoU.We recognise Mr Mbira's right to participate in politics in his personal or any capacity other than representing himself as leader of ZUNDE which has been incorrectly or mischievously referred to as Zimbabwe Union of Democrats by some sections of the media. We wonder if this is a genuine error or a forlorn attempt to mislead the public.We trust that you and your respective parties will take appropriate remedial action and ensure that this matter is put to rest once and for all.Moses ChambokoSecretary General (Interim)ZUNDE+61 420879118www.zunde.org ; info@zunde.org
There were a number of practical outcomes from the meeting between the US and Chinese presidents in Florida back in April. Among them are a 100-day economic plan for cooperation between the world's two largest economies and the restructuring of their wide-ranging high-level dialogues into four more focused dialogue mechanisms, including one on their economic ties.

As the first round of China-US Comprehensive Economic Dialogue commenced in Washington DC on Wednesday, it was encouraging to note that since the two countries initiated their discussions on the 100-day economic plan, they have made headway in narrowing some of the divergences between them. More important, the intensive engagement over the 100 days is said to have helped the respective economic teams build trust.

There are expectations, therefore, that the economic dialogue will make more progress in easing trade frictions and bridging the differences that exist between the two sides.

There are complaints from the US side that the talks progress too slowly. US companies are eager to gain greater access to the Chinese market, and Washington is urging China to open up more quickly and cut its trade surplus with the United States.

Yet to further reduce trade surplus, China needs to import more from the US, not only beef and beans, but also high technology products. This requires the US to take further steps to clear trade barriers in the form of outdated export controls, a byproduct of the Cold War, rather than unilaterally push China to open its market wider.

China's import of integrated circuits reached $227 billion last year, more than that of crude oil, iron ore and primary plastics combined. Yet only 4 percent of the IC import came from the US due to its export curbs, Vice-Premier Wang Yang said at a forum one day before the dialogue.

Also, if the US could liberalize its export barriers against China to the same level as those applicable to Brazil, US trade deficit with China would narrow by up to 24 percent, he added, citing an April article by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

According to the US-China Business Council, US exports of goods and services to China will double to $369 billion in the next decade. With this big picture in mind, political and business leaders from both sides should bear in mind they have a shared stake in putting aside their differences and working together for a brighter future for Sino-US economic exchanges.

But whatever the speed of progress in the nitty-gritty details of their to-and-fro, it is essential that the two sides continue to work together to move their cooperation forward in a constructive fashion.
A worker performs a soldering job at a factory in Qinhuangdao, Hebei province, which makes equipment for the HTGR reactor plant at Shidaowan in Shandong province. [Photo/Xinhua]

China National Nuclear Corp, one of the country's largest nuclear companies, is one step closer to exporting its high-temperature gas cooled reactor projects to countries including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with its HTGR fuel assembly line entering mass production.

The world's first production line for HTGR fuel elements started mass production on Monday at China North Nuclear Fuel, headquartered in Baotou in northern China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region, said the company.

The production of 200,000 spherical fuel elements shows that the fuel assembly line has transitioned from a pilot one into an industrial one, said Wang Shoujun, president of China National Nuclear Corporation, parent company of China North Nuclear Fuel.

"China is cementing its leading position as a manufacturer of HTGR fuel elements," said Wang.

"The HTGR reactors, best known for their inherent safety, versatility and modular construction, are a good fit for economies participating in the Belt and Road Initiative with small and medium-sized power grids."

CNNC has already signed memorandums of understanding with Saudi Arabia and the UAE in HTGR project cooperation, signaling that decades of research on the reactor have paid off, he said.

With government support for overseas expansion, including beneficial terms in getting financing from key financial institutions, many power companies are encouraged to acquire power assets or export their technology and expertise overseas, said Joseph Jacobelli, a senior analyst of Asian utilities and infrastructure at Bloomberg Intelligence.

The Institute for Nuclear and New Energy Technology at Tsinghua University has conducted research on HTGR fuel element technology over the past three decades, starting with a trial production line with an annual capacity of 100,000 spherical fuel elements.

Based on that technology, the production line will have an annual capacity of 300,000 spherical fuel elements, and the production line will provide fuel for the demonstration HTGR reactor plant at Shidaowan in Shandong province.

China has independent intellectual property rights for the production line, which was put into operation in 2016.

The company has vowed to continuously push forward the commercialization of the HTR reactors, striving for more nuclear power consumption in the coming decades, in order to achieve China's pledge to the international community to reduce carbon emissions and generate 20 percent of its electricity from clean energy sources by 2030.

The government has pledged that renewable energy will play a more significant role in green growth, with the share of nonfossil energy reaching 15 percent by 2020 and 20 percent by 2030.

Installed nuclear capacity, which more than doubled to 27.17 GW during the period of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15), is expected to double again by 2020 to 58 GW.
Workers install solar panels in Golmud, Qinghai province. [Photo/Xinhua]

The nation's next wave of growth will be fueled by new industries such as biotechnology, clean energy and advanced manufacturing, according to a government think thank.

The transformation is expected to generate massive job opportunities by upgrading the skills of workers across the country's business sectors.

"Strategic emerging industries will help the world's second largest economy bottom out from the economic downturn cycle," said Zhao Changwen, director of the Department of Industrial Economy at the Development Research Center. The department is a government think tank affiliated to the nation's top economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission.

Gross domestic product growth reached 6.9 percent in the first half of this year after decades of double-digit expansion.

In a move to plan for the future, the government has rolled out preferential policies to support the development of "strategic emerging industries" since 2009.

Key categories include biotechnology, advanced and high-end manufacturing, clean energy, information technology, digital industries, next generation IT and new energy projects, such as e-vehicles.

These sectors have been earmarked as strategic industries, the NDRC revealed earlier this year.

Boosting employment was a key component in the industrial shift, it said.

By the end of 2020, one million jobs are expected to be created by strategic emerging industries each year, according to the nation's 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20).

"It is hard to make a precise calculation of how many jobs will be created," Zhao said. "The government has been expanding the catalogue (of new industries).

"But creating one million jobs a year is not a difficult target to achieve," he added. "We might achieve more than that."

Zhao stressed that employees would be retrained and switched from traditional businesses to new advanced sectors, as the country weans itself off heavy industries.

New emerging industries, such as next generation IT and information technology sectors, are already popping up, and creating job opportunities through internet integration.

Last year, about 5.85 million people were working on platforms related to the "shared economy".

This was up by 850,000 compared to 2015, a report by China e-Business Research Center showed earlier this year.

Still, emerging industries have yet to solve problems such as job losses amid economic restructuring. Zhao, though, is confident that will eventually change as emerging industries expand in the next a few years.

By 2020, the added value output of strategic emerging industries is expected to account for 15 percent of the nation's total GDP, up from 8 percent last year, according to the 13th Five-Year Plan.

During the same period, China wants five new pillar industries to each generate output of 10 trillion yuan ($1.47 trillion). This would include information technology, biotechnology, and green and low-carbon industries.

Official data showed profits made from key emerging industries jumped by 13.3 percent year-on-year in the first five months of 2017. This was 1.8 percentage points higher than the same period last year.

"While progress has been made, supervision and supportive measures need to be improved," said Fei Zhirong, deputy secretary general of the NDRC.

Increased investment and protection of intellectual property rights are needed to help expand the emerging industries sector, Fei said. The government also needed to address imbalances in regional development.

"Many high-tech emerging industries prefer to invest and build factories in the eastern part of China," Fei said. "It might become a concern leading to imbalanced growth."
Technicians observe grass growth at a M-Grass' lab in Hohhot, North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Editor's Note:

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region. In a birthday tribute, China Daily takes a far-reaching look at the region's industries and how they have helped generate growth.

Under sweltering summer temperatures of 40 C, a highly-skilled team from M-Grass toil on ecology projects in the glitzy United Arab Emirates city of Dubai.

The Chinese environmental protection company was brought in to work on public parks, desert areas and villa developments because of its expertise.

Officially known as the M-Grass Ecology & Environment (Group) Co Ltd, the firm is affectionately called just M-Grass and has been a pathfinder for businesses in North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

"We have operated in more than a dozen provinces in China as well as in markets such as Dubai in the UAE," said Zheng Nan, an information officer at M-Grass. "We are also looking at opportunities in Singapore and Russia."

The group has a big reputation, and is the only listed company in China that specializes in ecological restoration, seed technology and state-of-the-art grass cultivation operation.

Founded in 2001, M-Grass is based in Hohhot, capital of Inner Mongolia, and its core business is described as "ecological environment engineering", in a company profile on Reuters.

With more than 1,500 employees, the group posted revenue of $422 million last year, an increase of 61.78 per cent compared to 2015.

In the first quarter of 2017, revenue was $45 million, a 160 per cent increase compared to the same period last year.

"In 2016, the company agreed a 10 billion yuan ($1.47 billion) cooperation agreement with Baotou, the largest industrial city in Inner Mongolia to reduce the environmental impact of buildings and improve the amount of green space available in the city," Xinhua reported. It is this core business that has made M-Grass a success story. For years, local governments had battled to find ways to counter desertification.

"China has vast grasslands along its border," said Yu Guangjun, director of the institute of economics at the Inner Mongolia Academy of Social Sciences. "These have been vital to curb the trend."

During the past decade, M-Grass' team has traveled across the regions to collect more than 8,000 different grass seeds and more than 11,000 soil samples.

"I always believed that the environment was smart enough to help us," said Wang Zhaoming, the group's chairman. "Native plants are the best and safest solutions for ecological rehabilitation.

"We will continue to do research on different types of grass," he added. "This will play a big role in environmental protection and help boost the economy."

By the end of last year, M-Grass had set up an intelligent search platform, integrating data on grass, soil, water, meteorology, livestock and microbial.

"In a matter of seconds, you can find all the information you need once you put in longitude and latitude figures," said Gao Jungang, chief executive officer of the group. "And we keep improving and updating the platform across the regions."

Research and development programs are crucial to M-Grass, as well as central government backing.

Since 2000, Beijing has invested 11.67 billion yuan in ecological projects in Inner Mongolia, Gao Xilin, forestry department director of Inner Mongolia, pointed out.

Public private partnerships, or PPP, have also helped channel funding into environmental protection programs.

Last year, M-Grass signed a 20 billion yuan contract with Hohhot's municipal government for major ecological restoration projects. This contributed to about 92 per cent of the group's revenue in 2016.

"M-Grass has been great for the region," said Li Jiheng, Party chief of CPC Inner Mongolia. "The ecological restoration market is very big. I just hope the company retains its competitiveness by providing excellent services."

Zou Yumeng contributed to this story.

Contact the writer at wuyong@chinadaily.com.cn
A worker processes scrap metal at a Dongbei Special Steel Group plant in Dalian, Liaoning province. [Photo by Liu Debin/China Daily]

China's iron ore demand is expected to see a continuous decline in the next few years, due to growing awareness of environmental protection and increased consumption of scrap steel, experts said.

In 2020, China's iron ore consumption is expected to reach 960 million metric tons, a decline of 150 million tons year-on-year, according to a research note from Industrial Securities.

"In the future, with more scrap being used by Chinese steel companies, iron ore demand will drop gradually," it said.

As a greener material in steelmaking, scrap helps to realize the aim of energy saving and emissions reduction in the iron and steel industry, by reducing the manufacturing processes required.

Since the beginning of this year, the scrap ratio has markedly increased in China's steelmaking industry.

Consumption of scrap steel in China was 25.3 million tons in the first quarter of this year, an increase of 29.7 percent year-on-year, with a scrap ratio of 12.58 percent, up from11.1 percent in 2016.

However, the average global scrap ratio was 51.6 percent, with the figure reaching 75.6 percent in the United States and 90 percent in Turkey.

Generally speaking, the proportion of scrap used in China's steel industry is around 2 to 3 percent.

Coke prices have increased at a rapid pace since last July, greatly increasing the cost of smelting steel with iron ore.

However, scrap prices are lower, and more companies are trying to increase the scrap ratio in steel production, said Gan Yong, president of the Central Iron & Steel Research Institute.

In 2015, the Iron and Steel Industry Adjustment Policy issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology pointed out that China's steelmaking scrap ratio should reach30 percent.

The China Association of Metal Scrap Utilization's 2016-20 plan, published last December, said that China's scrap steel ratio should reach 20 percent by 2020.

China's steel output and consumption have now both reached saturation point, and the period of rapid expansion is over, the research note said.

With the elimination of inferior steel, more scrap will enter the market, because 65 million tons of waste steel was used to make inferior steel, said Li Xinchuang, president of the China Metallurgical Industry Planning and Research Institute.

"The steel from electric furnaces is expected to increase significantly," Li said.

The CAMU predicted that China is expected to have 10 billion tons of steel by the end of 2020, with waste steel accounting for the production of around 200 million tons.
CAIRO  Egyptian President Sisi met a coalition of Chinese firms Tuesday over building a light rail transit around Cairo.

China's AVIC International and China Railway Group Limited are jointly in charge of carrying out the project.

"The meeting reached an initial agreement on the project yet it would need more time and further negotiations until a final deal is reached," the Economic and Commercial Counsellor's Office of the Chinese embassy in Cairo told Xinhua after the meeting.

Egyptian presidential spokesman Alaa Youssef said that the meeting, attended by Egyptian Transport Minister Hesham Arafat, discussed the latest developments of the negotiations on the light rail project.

"The project is part of the plan implemented by the Transport Ministry to develop the railway network and improve its services nationwide," said the Egyptian presidential spokesman.

The aspired light rail is a fast tram expected to cover a distance of 66 kilometers with 11 stops, connecting the new administrative capital city with distant districts of Greater Cairo including Al-Salam city, Ramadan 10 city, Obour city, Badr city and Shorouk city.

The Chinese group said it would assign Egyptian contractors with some civil and railway construction works that will provide thousands of job opportunities in the country.

Egypt and China enjoy strong bilateral relations that have been elevated to the level of comprehensive strategic partnership. The two countries marked in 2016 the 60th anniversary of the establishment of their diplomatic relations.

The volume of trade between Egypt and China has mounted to $11.3 billion in 2016, ranking Egypt as the third African trade partner with China.
COLOMBO  The Sri Lanka Economic Summit to be held later this month will discuss how Sri Lanka can tap opportunities out of the Belt and Road Initiative, the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce said in a statement on Tuesday.

Proposed by China in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, aiming at building a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along the ancient trade routes of Silk Road.

The session titled "Belt and Road Initiative - Transformative Opportunity for Sri Lanka" will talk on the potential investment opportunities for Sri Lanka from the Belt and Road Initiative.

The Sri Lanka Economic Summit 2017 will be held in the capital Colombo on July 25 and 26 with the sole aim of discussing ways to strengthen the island's economy.

The two-day annual summit, organized by the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, will have over 40 top resource persons, such as sectoral experts, industry practitioners, government officials and ministers taking part.
BEIJING  China's newly announced cabinet committee on financial stability and development plays a vital role in containing risks arising from the country's rapidly changing financial sector, a central bank official said Tuesday.

The committee will have its office based at the People's Bank of China (PBOC), the official told Xinhua while declining to be identified.

Its responsibilities include making plans for financial development and reforms, coordinating financial policies to create synergy in regulation, drafting rules to fill regulatory gaps, and holding officials accountable for inadequate regulation, the official said.

The committee is an upgrade of China's current financial regulatory framework for preventing risks and maintaining stability, according to the official.

A more powerful, effective and methodical regulatory framework is needed to contain financial risks, which have accumulated since the global financial crisis as new business types emerged and information technology developed rapidly, the official noted.

China announced that it will set up a committee under the State Council to oversee financial stability and development during a two-day National Financial Work Conference that ended Saturday.

The conference also stressed that the central bank will play a stronger role in macro prudential management and guarding against systemic risks.

"These (decisions) are aimed at coordinating all efforts like the moves in a chess game to safeguard the nation's financial stability, cope with possible financial risks both at home and abroad, and ensure smooth progress of the country's economic transition and development," the central bank official said.

The PBOC will firmly implement a prudent monetary policy and continue its macro prudential management, so that it can maintain "reasonable liquidity" to support the real economy while fulfilling the deleveraging task at the same time, according to the official.

Particularly, the central bank will attach importance to the regulation of systemically important financial institutions and prevent risk contagion across different industries and markets, the official noted.

The weekend conference highlighted three tasks in the financial field, namely making the financial sector better serve the real economy, containing financial risks and deepening financial reforms.

The conference has been held every five years since 1997 and is widely considered to set the tone for financial reforms.
By Zhang Yu and Yan Hui in Wuhai, Inner Mongolia | China Daily | Updated: 2017-07-19 07:41

Yu Haiming has moved his high-tech company into producing plastic bags that are less harmful to the environment.

The chairman of the Dongyuan Scien-Tech Co Ltd is on a mission to cut down on pollution by rolling out more eco-friendly models for busy shoppers.

"They will biodegrade within 90 days once they are thrown away," Yu said. "Only traces of carbon dioxide and water will be left."

Founded in 2008, Dongyuan Scien-Tech is based in Wuhai in North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region and employs about 3,000 people.

The group's key business is the chemical and plastics industry although the company has yet to disclose detailed financial figures.

Since 2012, it has invested 6.3 billion yuan ($899 million) into its operations and expects sales revenue to reach 43 billion yuan annually by 2022.

As the group expands, it aims to increase its production of PBS, or polybutylene succinate. This is a key component for making biodegradable plastic bags and mulching films, which suppress weeds and conserve water in crop production.

"We produce 20,000 to 40,000 metric tons of PBS per year," Yu said. "But we expect to reach 200,000 tons annually within three years.

"This will cut out 350 million tons of plastic waste a year," he added.

Still, there will be challenges ahead for the company.

Biodegradable plastic is more expensive, so the costs are naturally passed on to the customer.

Yu confirmed that sales of the new eco-friendly bags in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces had been disappointing because of the higher price.

"A regular size biodegradable bag from supermarkets will cost about 1 yuan, while the old ones will be 0.5 yuan," Yu said.

To stop this dip in sales, Dongyuan Scien-Tech hopes to trim costs by linking up with the Chengdu Institute of Organic Chemistry under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

With the help of the academy, Yu is confident his company can produce a highly-competitive new age shopping bag.

"The aim is to make the biodegradable plastic cheaper, so it's attractive to shoppers," he said.

"At the moment biodegradable bags make up less than 7 percent of the plastic bags used in China," Yu added.

In 2008, the government banned free plastic bags in supermarkets, stores and markets in a bid to curb pollution.

Nine years later, customers are still using them in vast numbers, Liu Junhai, a professor at the Law School of Renmin University of China, told China Youth Daily.

"The purpose of the ban was to contain the use of polluting plastic bags, but manufactures are still producing them, retailers are still selling them and consumers are still using them," Liu said.

Yu hopes to eventually change that mentality by making the new biodegradable bags cheaper and more appealing to customers.

He plans to roll out more cost-effective products later in the year.

"I'm not the one who developed the PBS technology, but I want to be the one who makes it possible for common people to afford it," Yu said.

Contact the writer at zhangyu1@chinadaily.com.cn
By Meng Fanbin in Beijing and Yuan Hui in Hohhot | China Daily | Updated: 2017-07-19 07:43

Two farmers on a tractor pass through a wind power farm in Inner Mongolia. [Photo by Su Weizhong/For China Daily]

Coal mining has become a way of life for Inner Mongolia but a new wave of green energy is about to change that.

Bu Xiaolin, chairman of North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region, talked with pride about the new wind farms that are dotted around the region as he outlined a vision of a sustainable future.

"The region is speeding up the development and construction of new energy industries," he said last month. "This will boost the area's power structure, and increase economic and social development."

Energy generated by wind power in the northern Chinese region exceeded a record 10 million kilowatts in May, according to the Inner Mongolia Power (Group) Co Ltd.

The electricity company also reported that the 154 wind farms in the area generated 16,036 megawatts or 25 percent of total installed capacity.

"Inner Mongolia will continue to expand its renewable energy program during the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20)," stated the new energy department, which is run by the Inner Mongolia Development and Reform Commission.

The region now has the largest integrated wind power grid in China as it pushes ahead to consign fossil fuels to history.

"We have a great deal of experience in operating and managing wind power farms and grids," the new energy department stated.

Last year, Inner Mongolia's wind power grid generated 25.56 million kw, a record for China.

Local government data showed that was 17 percent of the national total in the country last year.

During the same period, electricity production generated by wind farms was 46.6 billion kWh or 19.3 percent of the overall total in China.

Wind power has also reduced 4,170 metric tons of smoke dust, 21,800 tons of sulfur dioxide and 1,950 tons of nitrogen oxides by replacing fossil fuel alternatives, local government figures highlighted.

"Wind farms and photovoltaic (solar) power can effectively promote the development of renewable industries," said Bi Guochen, deputy mayor of Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia. "It is also an effective way to transform the economic development pattern."

Contact the writer at mengfanbin@chinadaily.com.cn
Morning News Brief For July 18, 2017

Morning Minute: Healthcare Is Dead, And So Is Ed Sheeran's Twitter Account

As you start your day, it can be overwhelming to try to make sense of everything you missed while you were getting on with your life. Morning Minute is here to bring you the news you need to know to start your day, all broken down into tidbits you can consume before you finish your morning constitution. Here are this morning's headlines.

Senate Healthcare Bill Is Dead (For Now)

Two more Republican senators, Mike Lee and Jerry Moran, announced last night that they would oppose the current iteration of the Senate bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. That leaves Republicans with just 48 votes, not enough to get it done. The President is mad.

We were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans. Most Republicans were loyal, terrific & worked really hard. We will return!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2017

As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan. Stay tuned!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2017

Everyone knows that "a few" means three, Don, not four. No one really knows for sure, but political analysts seem fairly certain that a bill to simply repeal without a replacement wouldn't go anywhere either. [Washington Post]

Ed Sheeran Is Not In Love With The Shape Of Twitter

After having a very stupid cameo in the premiere of Game of Thrones that no one found funny or charming, Ed Sheeran has deleted his twitter. Account. He said earlier in July that he didn't like logging on anyway because people were too mean. No really, that's it. [People]

Apple Devices Getting New Emojis

A bunch of new emojis, ranging from the diverse and inclusive to the whimsical, are no available on Apple devices. Woo hoo? [PCMag]

Walmart Apologizes for Product Listing With Racial Slur

So, here's a fun thing that was happening on Walmart's website:

The company apologized and promptly removed the product listing, but no one's sure how it happened. Walmart said they would investigate the vendor, but Jagazi (the manufacturer named in the listing) said they would never do such a thing either. [Fortune]

Elon Musk Fears Machines Could Rule The World From The Shadows

Elon Musk spoke at a conference for governors last week, and it was not a rosy pump-up speech. Mostly, he's afraid the AI will make humans obsolete a lot faster and more completely than anyone else thinks possible. He wants regulation on AI now, before it's too late. [Geek.com]

Former USC Medical Dean Led Sex, Drug-Fueled Double Life

It got buried with all the R. Kelly sex cult stuff yesterday, but the Los Angeles Times has a fascinating expose on Dr. Carmen A. Puliafito, former dean of USC's Keck Medical school. He apparently liked drugs and sex with younger women. Same. [L.A. Times]

Saudi Arabia Collectively Freaks Over Woman In A Skirt

Snapchat user Khulood is in hot water after she posted a video of herself wearing a skirt and crop top in one of Saudi Arabia's (already an incredibly conservative country) most conservative provinces. The country's religious police (because that's a thing that exists there) are looking into it, and many have called for her arrest. On the flip side, others point out that since Melania and Ivanka Trump visited the country dressed similarly without repercussions, the outrage is a bit hypocritical. [Washington Post]
By Wu Yong in Beijing and Yuan Hui in Hohhot | China Daily | Updated: 2017-07-19 07:45

A woman prepares food for Russian tourists in a folk village in Inner Mongolia. [Photo by Wang Zhuangfei/For China Daily]

Liu Jing admits July is a hot month in the border city of Manzhouli in North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

She also confessed it was the busiest time of the year for her as general manager of the Russian Dolls Playground theme park.

To illustrate the point, she came up with a few numbers. In just one day, Liu will serve more than 20,000 tourists. For the whole of July, she will deal with about 600,000 customers.

"This is just the beginning," Liu said with great understatement. "I am sure the numbers will double or even triple in the coming years."

The theme park showcases Russian culture, food and music, and is the jewel in the crown for Manzhouli Port International Travel Service Co Ltd.

Company Chairman Wang Zejun first arrived in Manzhouli back in 1992 when the State Council announced it was an open border city.

During the next 25 years, he established a business empire covering hotels, travel and international trade.

"We seized the golden chance of tourism development and made use of Manzhouli's unique geographical advantages," Wang said.

Inner Mongolia shares a border with Russia and this is boosting economic growth in the region.

Data from the Russian Federation Tourism Administration showed that cross-border visits reached 3.27 million last year.

Besides a booming tourism sector, new local government policies will change the business landscape by diversifying the economy.

"Inner Mongolia has relied too much on coal and cows, or farming," said Hang Shuanzhu, head of the Inner Mongolia Social Sciences Association. "We have to adjust this industrial structure and develop service industries in particular."

Tourism has now become a priority sector for the region, according to Li Jiheng, CPC regional chief of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

Local government statistics from Manzhouli city showed that overall tourism numbers hit 30 million with revenue topping 20.8 billion yuan ($3.06 billion) last year.

The Belt and Road Initiative has been a major driver in fueling those figures.

Proposed by President Xi Jinping in 2013, the initiative aims to build a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along the ancient Silk Road trade routes.

As one of the most important border cities between China and Russia, Manzhouli has attracted millions of tourists from home and abroad.

"In the center of the Russian Dolls Playground theme park is a huge doll with three faces of a Mongolia girl, a Chinese girl and a Russian girl," Liu, the general manager, said. "This represents peace and prosperity brought by cross-border tourism."

The attraction has certainly been a financial winner for Manzhouli Port International Travel Service.

Last year, the group's operating income reached 111 million yuan, an increase of 58 percent compared to the same period in 2015.

Net profit was 34 million yuan during the same time frame, an increase of 60 percent.

"We plan to invest another 300 million yuan to build an ice and snow park, and an international camping site in the next few years," Wang, the chairman, said.

Huang Wenshu contributed to the story.

Contact the writer at wuyong@chinadaily.com.cn
Large Chinese cities will be beneficiaries of increased foreign direct investment through new channels in the service sector, thanks to a fairer market environment and stricter laws to protect intellectual property, said experts on Tuesday.

Their comments came after the central government's call on Monday to ease the entry restrictions and share ratio limitations on foreign investment in areas such as nursery and elderly care, architecture, accounting, commerce and logistics, e-commerce and the traditional manufacturing and service sectors.

The central government urged megacities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen to take the lead in improving the business environment, calling for moves to reduce inspections and fines on companies, and ban the charging of illegal fees.

"Led by supply-side structural reform and an innovation-driven strategy, China's economy is increasingly dominated by the service sector, and more profound changes are occurring in relatively developed regions," said Gao Peiyong, director of the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

"The government's move shows that China is paying serious attention to innovation and has issued a number of promising policies," he said. "It also created a sound environment for China-foreign cooperation."

FDI inflows fell 0.1 percent year-on-year to 441.54 billion yuan ($65.33 billion) between January and June, but the decline narrowed from that in the first five months, as foreign investment in June rose 2.3 percent to 100 billion yuan, according to data from the Ministry of Commerce.

"There are five elements that are critical to FDIof course rapidly growing market consumption in China is the most important of all. Global companies also look at reasonable labor and logistics costs, mature industrial chains, and an improving business climate when they plan to expand," said Liu Shengjun, an economist at the Lujiazui Institute of International Finance.

Eager to enhance the country's earning ability, the Chinese government announced at the end of last month that more sectors are now open for foreign investment in China's 11 pilot free trade zones, ranging from helicopter manufacturing to financial services.

China will release the 2017 Catalog for the Guidance of Foreign Industries to offer more favorable policies and further improve the market environment for global companies by the end of this month.

Bai Ming, a researcher at the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, said industrial upgrading is vital to sustain economic growth and prevent the nation from falling into the middle income trap.

"The country must further open its doors in certain monopoly sectors such as banking and energy, and reduce the administrative fees on foreign business charged by government branches and various trade associations, as well as eliminate intellectual property infringement and counterfeiting in both manufacturing and cross-border e-commerce," said Bai.

Aside from attracting foreign capital, China also started a series of changes to the rules regarding permanent residence for foreigners in April. The reform plan serves the country's talent development strategy, which is to attract more innovative and entrepreneurial talent.

Foreign investment has played a significant role in China's economic development, promoting reasonable allocation of resources and driving market-oriented reform.

The manufacturing sector attracted 128.6 billion yuan of foreign investment in the first half, up 3 percent year-on-year, accounting for 29.1 percent of total FDI, while FDI in the service sector reached 309.99 billion yuan, making up 70.2 percent of the total.
KUNMING  Chinese budget airline Lucky Air on Tuesday launched a direct air route between Kunming, capital of Southwest China's Yunnan province, and Bandar Seri Begawan, capital of Brunei.

The flight departs from Kunming every Tuesday and Saturday at 11:15 am and arrives in Bandar Seri Begawan at 3:20 pm local time. The return flight leaves Bandar Seri Begawan at 4:20 pm local time and arrives in Kunming at 8:55 pm.

It is the first direct regular air route between Kunming and Bandar Seri Begawan, also the cultural center of Brunei.
HOUSTON  Sitting atop his horse on an overcast day, Texas cattle rancher Wayland Kelley surveyed the cows and calves that grazed on a 600-acre field his family leases in south of Houston, the United States.

Sales of cattle have been steady for Kelley and his uncles Rick Kelley and Leonard "Butch" Kelley, who began the family-owned Cow House Cattle Company in 2003 in Hitchcock, Texas.

With the market reopening of US beef exports to China, cattle sales are expected to go from good to better - not only for the Kelley family but for ranchers throughout the United States.

The United States has reached agreements with China on final details of a protocol to allow it to export beef to China, the US Department of Agriculture said on June 12.

In 2003, China shut its market to American beef after a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as Mad Cow Disease, was detected in the United States.

In Texas, beef producers say they plan to capitalize on the re-energized market of China.

"The reopening of trade will make it a lot better for the cattle industry as a whole," said Kelley, who raises cattle on leased grazing land in Galveston County. "I feel that it will give us smaller ranchers the opportunity to grow and to produce better beef."

Virtually every sector of the US beef industry -- from the ranchers to the feed lot owners that fatten the cattle for sale, and the slaughterhouses that process the meat -- are praising the news from China.

Craig Uden, president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA), said that U.S. beef is of high quality and meets all standards for consumer safety and consumption.

"Restoring US beef access to China has been a top priority for many years, and we are excited to have the opportunity to provide Chinese consumers with safe, tender, and delicious US beef once again," he said.

The appetite for American beef has skyrocketed in Asia in recent years, with Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong emerging as three of the world's top five importers of American-produced beef.

"China is the world's fastest-growing beef import market," said Joe Schuele, vice president of communications at the US Meat Export Federation. "It has grown tenfold in last five to six years, so the US industry doesn't want to be on the sidelines while our competitors capitalize on this market."

Until the ban in 2003, the United States was China's largest supplier of imported beef, providing 70 percent of the total intake, according to the Independent Cattlemen's Association (ICA) of Texas. China has 1.4 billion consumers who are potential customers for beef.

The US cattle inventory as of January 1, 2017, was 93.5 million head, according to ICA Texas. Texas led the way with 12.3 million head, followed by Nebraska and Kansas each with 6.4 million head of cattle, according to the association. The economic impact of the Texas cattle industry was $10.5 billion in 2014.

"The opening of the China market is great news for Texas ranchers that produce safe, high-quality beef each and every day," said Jason Bagley, senior manager of beef resources at the Texas Beef Council. "The market is constantly developing and we look forward to having the opportunity to provide Chinese consumers with a great beef eating experience in the future."

The renewal of beef trade is only part of bilateral deal between the United States and China, but it could be translated into positive signs for further deepening cooperation between the two countries.

The reopening of US beef market to China could lead to expanded overall trade between the two nations, said Professor Steven Lewis, China research fellow at the James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston. The trade deal also opens the market for expanded US exports of chicken and natural gas, he said.

"Everybody looks at this as a good for the beef, natural gas and poultry industries, but it's really just like an appetizer," he said.

Meanwhile, some people express that they hope international cooperation in economic area would help improve relations among nations.

Rich Anderson, whose family has raised and sold cattle at the Muleshoe Ranch in Gail, western Texas, for 141 years, said that reopening US-China beef exports will raise demand for Texas beef, a "win-win" for both countries.

"We've got to make friends with everybody" he said. "I feel this (trade deal) will help our relations. Nobody wants to fight. Everybody has got to be fair traders, and fair on each side."
CANBERRA  Stronger demand for premium Australian wine in China has contributed to a 10 percent increase in Australia's overall wine export value, according to Wine Australia's export report released on Wednesday.

China maintained its position as the No 1 export value destination for Australian wine in 2016-17, after export value to China grew by 44 percent to be worth A$607 million ($482 million).

The total value of exports grew by A$201 million ($159 million) to A$2.3 billion ($1.82 billion).

While China remained at the top of the export value tree, the value of wine exports to the United States also grew, but by just 3 percent to A$464 million ($368 million), while the value of exports to the UK fell by 7 percent.

While the export value of wine to the United Kingdom fell, the report said the UK remained the No 1 destination for Australian wine exports by volume, indicating that UK consumers prefer cheaper Australian wines, while Chinese tastes are a little more expensive.

According to Wine Australia CEO Andreas Clark, there was also strong growth in exports of carbonated wines as well as premium wines.

"Pleasingly, nearly all price points experienced growth and there were benefits for exporters in all segments of the market," he said in a statement accompanying the report on Wednesday.

"An interesting development from last year was the growth in the carbonated wine category, which includes varieties such as Moscato."

"Exports (of sparkling wine) more than doubled to A$30 million ($23.8 million). The United States was the destination for 35 percent of the carbonated wine exports, with mainland China (15 percent) and Japan (14 percent) the other major destinations."

Export director of Handpicked Wines James Hunt said the company's success in the Chinese market was on the back of hard work and recognizing that each market and its culture was unique.

"This is built on the back of tight brand guidelines, frequent market visits, engaged activity and communication with all levels of the distribution chain," he said in a statement.

"As the business grew we found the need to employ within the region to maintain the brand values and ensure the message was consistent across the region, particularly with local websites, trade material and social media accounts."

Meanwhile, the report also said that 24 percent of all wine imported into China is from Australia, second only to France, which has a 41 percent share of the Chinese import market.
WASHINGTON  Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang on Tuesday called on the United States to relax export barriers against China and allow the two sides to tap the huge market potential in bilateral trade.

"The Chinese and US economies do have a competitive dimension, but there is far greater complementarity than competition," he said at a business luncheon in Washington ahead of the first China-US Comprehensive Economic Dialogue, which is slated for Wednesday.

As the Chinese economy continues to grow at a medium-high speed and climb higher on the value chain, China's traditional industries are transformed and upgraded at a faster pace, and emerging industries flourish, he said.

Thanks to that, "there is huge market potential to tap in US export of advanced technologies, key equipment and critical parts to China," the vice premier pointed out.

"Unfortunately, American businesses have not had their fair share of the 'cake' due to outdated US regulations on export control," he said, noting that while US high-tech exports to China accounted for 16.7 percent of China's total imports of such products in 2001, the percentage dropped to 8.2 percent last year.

Taking integrated circuits (IC) as an example, he said China's IC imports amounted to a whopping $227 billion last year, more than the imports of crude oil, iron ore and primary plastics combined, but only 4 percent came from the United States.

Citing an op-ed by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace last April, Wang said that if the United States were to liberalize its export barriers against China to the same level as those applicable to Brazil or France, the US trade deficit with China would narrow by up to 24 percent and 34 percent respectively.

He also stressed that China now has 300 million people in the middle-income group and their demand for quality US goods and services is swelling by the day.

The US-China Business Council, he noted, predicts that American goods and services exports to China will double to $369 billion in the next decade and rise to $520 billion by 2050.

"There is no limit to the growth of the Chinese market, and China-US business cooperation holds out a promising future," he said.
WASHINGTON  Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang said here Tuesday that the recent fruitful cooperation between the world's largest two economies has proved that China-US economic cooperation is sailing on the right course.

Speaking at a business luncheon ahead of the first China-US Comprehensive Economic Dialogue, which is slated for Wednesday, Wang recalled that after the US presidential election last year, many fretted that China-US trade relations would "enter a stormy season of winter and even run the risk of a trade war."

At that critical juncture, Chinese President Xi Jinping's April trip to the US state of Florida and meeting with his US counterpart, Donald Trump, at Mar-a-Lago "set a constructive tone for China-US relations in a new era," Wang added.

He noted that the two sides then decided to set up four high-level dialogue mechanisms, including the Comprehensive Economic Dialogue, and launched a 100-day plan for bilateral economic cooperation, "which was most reassuring to the business communities in both countries."

"Thanks to the painstaking efforts of both sides, the 100-Day Plan has delivered major outcomes," Wang said, noting that the American beef has found its way back to the Chinese market after 14 years and the policy barriers for US liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to China have started to crumble.

"In the first five months of this year, China had already imported 400,000 metric tons of LNG from the United States, standing in sharp contrast to zero in the same period of last year," he added.

"More importantly, through 100 days of intensive engagement, our economic teams have built mutual trust, and managed to establish a way of communication featuring mutual respect and win-win cooperation," he said.

He thanked the two countries' business communities for their long-standing support and active participation, and reiterated that "China-US business cooperation is market behavior" and "the underlying drivers lie in the people and the business communities."

"Although there may still be twists and turns in our cooperation going forward, as long as you have confidence, the overall direction of China-US business cooperation will not change," he said. "Cooperation is the only right choice for our two countries."
BEIJING  Although it is the first time Laura Primiceri has visited China, the British woman has quickly adapted to cashless life in Beijing.

She was aware of the prevalence of China's mobile payment before her arrival in February and downloaded WeChat and Alipay, the two most popular mobile payment services in China.

"I use them here for payment quite frequently. It's much better than what we use in England," Primiceri said.

During five months studying in Beijing, the overseas student learned that the cashless trend was now taking hold in the country with mobile payment often a daily necessity.

Irresistible trend

"The cashless society is what we are moving toward," said Xiao Ligang, a cab driver in Beijing, "It is irresistible."

"Almost every taxi driver I know is using WeChat Pay," Xiao said.

Unlike paying with credit cards in western countries, China's cashless payment refers to mobile payment on smartphones.

In Beijing, even senior citizens buy vegetables at the community market with their smartphones; office workers pick up colorful shared bicycles after scanning their QR codes; and street artists provide QR codes for donations.

Whether it is making an appointment to see a doctor, ordering take-away from a restaurant, or buying a ticket at home for a film that is about to begin, Beijingers can do it on their smartphones.

"Mobile payment saves a lot of time for us and help us effectively avoid counterfeit money," said Ren Tingting, a cashier at Century Mart, a chain supermarket in Beijing.

Global leading coffee shop chain Starbucks has eyed the huge number of mobile payment users in China and partnered with Chinese internet giant Tencent to make WeChat mobile payment available in all its coffee shops in China.

More cashless cities

To expand its cashless service, Ant Financial, the financial affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba, plans to launch a cashless promotion week from Aug. 1 to 8, when China will be "1,698 days away from being a true cashless country," it claims.

Chen Liang, senior PR director of Ant Financial, said the company had signed with the governments of four other cities: Wuhan, Fuzhou, Tianjin and Guiyang, to promote city-wide cashless support solutions.

"The Cashless City Promotion means mobile payment can reach all the places where cash is needed," Chen said, adding that mobile phone users would no longer have to worry about whether they have cash on them.

By the end of 2016, Alipay's e-payment solutions had covered 357 Chinese cities, where people can use it for paying all kinds of bills ranging from car maintenance and medical bills, to bus fares, train tickets and even to buy pancakes for breakfast at the local market stall.

Going cashless has also become normal for Tibetans. Restaurants, souvenir shops and movie theaters in Tibet all provide online payment services. QR codes have become common on vendor booths selling Tibetan jewelry.

Similarly, Aug. 8 has been designated Cashless Day, an annual activity promoted by WeChat Pay, the e-payment arm of China Internet giant Tencent.

In addition to China, WeChat Pay covers more than 130,000 overseas businesses in 13 countries and regions, supporting settlements in 10 currencies, including the British pound, Hong Kong dollar, US dollar, Japanese yen and Canadian dollar.

Catherine Hou, president of the Chinese Cuisine and Hospitality Association of Canada, said she had been working to make WeChat Pay available at the upcoming Mississauga Mid-Summer Night Music and Food Festival set for July 29 and 30.

"Mobile payment can greatly benefit Chinese tourists coming to spend their summer holiday in Canada, as well as Chinese Canadians, who are active users of Chinese e-payment," Hou said.

Tourism Toronto announced plans in May to bring WeChat Pay to Toronto.

In addition to WeChat Pay, 450 merchants in Canada are getting access to e-payment solutions offered by Alipay, Souheil Badran, president of Alipay North America, announced in Toronto on June 5.

Globally, Alibaba's e-payment arm, Alipay, has entered more than 200 countries and regions supporting settlements in 18 varieties of currencies with more than 40 million overseas merchants using Alipay for settlement.

"With the mobile payment services in more countries, Chinese tourists tend to carry less cash abroad than before," said Zhao Kun, a tour guide at CITIC Travel.

Zhao said convenience was the main reason for using mobile payment.

Security concerns

However, the seeming panacea for payment transactions has also aroused security concerns.

Digital payment enables merchants to receive detailed information about consumers, including phone number and email addresses, compared with traditional credit and debit cards, which mainly involve purchases receipts.

"I use mobile payment a lot in China, but I am quite concerned about my privacy," said Li Xinyu, a student from the Republic of Korea at Tsinghua University. "I am afraid my personal information might be leaked."

Only a small amount of money, about 1,000 to 2,000 yuan ($147.74 to $295.48), is usually stored in my Alipay account, Li added.

"Maybe a credit card is safer. Alipay or WeChat is more convenient. I am more confident in the use of credit card because they barely go wrong. If the battery smartphone dies or there is no wifi, I cannot use Alipay or WeChat to pay," Primiceri said.

Although the mobile payment giants are seeking to expand their overseas service, tour guide Zhao Kun told Xinhua that some tourists, especially senior ones, have worries about the safety of paying via Alipay and WeChat when travelling abroad, despite the rising popularity of mobile payment in most North American and Southeast Asian countries.

The Chinese government is obliged to maintain a fair and square marketing environment and bring the mobile payment enterprises into full play, said Pan Helin, an economist at the Chinese Academy of Fiscal Sciences.
President Xi Jinping welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Xi received the highest Palestinian medal from Abbas. WU ZHIYI / CHINA DAILY

President voices support for a sovereign state based on borders dating to 1967

China will continue supporting the Palestinian people's pursuit of restoring their legitimate national rights, President Xi Jinping said on Tuesday as he received the highest Palestinian medal from visiting President Mahmoud Abbas.

China firmly supports the establishment of the State of Palestine, enjoying full sovereignty on the basis of 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital, Xi said while holding talks with Abbas at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Abbas is making a state visit to China through Thursday. It is his fourth state visit to China. Witnessed by the two presidents, China and Palestine signed four documents to enhance cooperation in diplomacy, economy, technology, human resources, culture and education.

It's important for all parties concerned to abide by the relevant UN resolutions, the principle of "land for peace" and the Arabic Peace Initiative, so as to achieve the comprehensive, just and durable settlement of the Palestinian issue through dialogue and negotiation, Xi said. China will continue to play its positive role to help resolve the Palestinian issue, he said.

The president called for earnest implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 calling for an immediate stop of all settlement activities in the occupied territories. China hopes that immediate measures will be taken to prevent violence against civilians, he said.

Xi said it is imperative to restart negotiations as soon as possible, speed up the political settlement of the Palestinian issue and achieve joint and durable security fundamentally. He also called for further international efforts to strengthen the synergy for peace.

China will hold a Palestinian-Israeli peace symposium this year to contribute ideas and solutions to the Palestinian issue, Xi said.

While promoting peace talks, it's also important to emphasize the issue of development, Xi said.

The friendship between China and Palestine has a long history, Xi said, adding that China is one of the first countries to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization and the State of Palestine.

"There is a Chinese saying: Ancient friendship is like true gold, the color of which will never fade despite being smelted hundreds of times," Xi told Abbas.

In the past half-century, the Chinese and Palestinian people have understood, trusted and supported each other, and they are truly good friends, partners and bothers, Xi said.

Calling Abbas "an old friend and good friend of the Chinese people", Xi spoke highly of his efforts toward Chinese-Palestinian cooperation.

Mentioning that he had sincere and friendly talks with Abbas during the Palestinian president's last visit to China in May 2013, Xi said the two sides reached important consensus at that time.

The high-level exchanges between China and Palestine have been strengthened in the past four years, Xi said, adding that both sides have enhanced political mutual trust and steadily developed cooperation in all areas.

After their talks, Abbas awarded Xi the top medal of Palestine to express gratitude for China's support of Palestine's pursuit of justice and to emphasize how highly the Chinese president is trusted and revered. Xi hosted a grand welcoming ceremony for Abbas before their talks.

Palestine congratulated China's great progresses in economic and social development, Abbas said, while calling for enhanced exchanges with China in all areas.

The Palestinian president expressed willingness to participate in the Belt and Road Initiative's construction and to expand cooperation with China in areas such as the economy, science, infrastructure, industrial parks and tourism.

Palestinian leaders speak highly of China's constructive proposals to press for a political resolution of the Palestinian issue, he said, adding that China is expected to play a bigger role in the Middle East peace process.
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Screenshots of a show in which Wang Jianlin made the "a small target of 100 million yuan" remark.

Xiaomubiao "small goal" in Englishwas one of the hottest phrases in China last year, according to a new set of lists released by the State Language Committee.

Netizens began widely using the term after Wang Jianlin, the chairman of Dalian Wanda Group, described making a fortune of 100 million yuan ($14.8 million) as a small goal in an interview in August.

Although he used it to mean something that is easily achieved, people on social media used it more ironically to express a goal that is well beyond their reach or even impossible.

For example, someone might write, "Let me set a small goal, such as losing 40 kilograms," or "Here's a small goal: Find a job that pays 1 million yuan a year."

Lists of popular words and phrases based on an annual assessment of characters used by Chinese-language media were released on Tuesday by the State Language Committee, the department under the State Council in charge of the nation's language reforms.

Some 12,000 characters were used almost 1 billion times in the Chinese media last year, Tian Lixin, director of the Ministry of Education's Department of Language Application and Administration, said at a news conference.

Words including afagou (AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence program that plays the ancient game go) and Mobai Danche (the Chinese name for bike-sharing company Mobike) were included in a list of the top 10 new words that appeared in the media.

Others like changzheng jingshen (the Long March spirit), Nanhai (the South China Sea), tuo'ou (Brexit) and meiguo daxuan (the US presidential elections) were among the top 10 popular expressions of 2016.

Tian added that 73 percent of China's citizens were able to communicate in Mandarin in 2015, up from only 53 percent in 2000.

China has more than 50 ethnic groups, some of which have their own spoken and written languages.

Last year the ministry set a goal of increasing the proportion to 80 percent by 2020.
Gong Xiaoming has a prescription for what ails China's health service: Set the doctors free.

The physician, who trained at the prestigious Peking Union College Hospital, has 15 years experience of working on the wards, and is highly regarded. In fact, the specialist in uterine fibroids once discovered that scalpers sold appointments for consultations with him for 3,000 yuan ($444), 400 times the official price.

"I should be proud," said the 45-year-old gynecologist.

However, in the winter of 2011, he was told a patient had waited overnight in temperatures of - 4 C to obtain a ticket for a consultation.

"I was shocked," Gong recalled. "How could patients suffer like that just to see a doctor?"

China's medical resources are extremely unbalanced: 80 percent of patients live in rural areas, but the best hospitals are concentrated in big cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai. Last year, an estimated 7 million patients from Hebei province alone visited hospitals in neighboring Beijing.

Gong admires his counterparts in the United States, whose patients have no difficulty accessing treatment. After visiting a clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, he said seeking treatment there was "almost enjoyable".

In 2013, Gong quit the public hospital system, where he worked as a contract doctor in hospitals in Shanghai and Shenzhen, Guangdong province. Last year, he went freelance and set up China's first gynecologist group, attracting more than 100 specialists as members.

Frustration

At school, Gong was shy and unsociable, but he was the top scorer in the national college entrance examination in his hometown in Zhejiang province. He followed his father's advice to study clinical medicine at university.

He began his career as a general practitioner, but was frustrated at dealing with so many patients with terminal illnesses. In response, he became a surgeon before moving into gynecology.

Gong earned his reputation by conducting a five-hour operation to save a young woman's uterus, removing 419 fibroid tumors individually. Other doctors had suggested a hysterectomy.

"I think about each patient's future," he said.

He now works in private hospitals where a consultation usually costs 420 yuan, about 60 times the official fee when he worked in public hospitals.

Some people have criticized Gong for "only working for the rich", but he countered by pointing out that doctors at private hospitals save patients hours of waiting, and more important, give more time to each consultation - at least 15 minutes.

"The doctors and the patients both benefit," he said.

Since 2009, government regulations have allowed doctors to register at more than one hospital or start their own clinics, but Gong has been a lonely pioneer.

By 2015, about 45,000 doctors had registered at more than one hospital, but only about 37 percent came from top public hospitals.

Those who hesitate to break away fear the loss of patients, because top public hospitals always have thousands more cases than private establishments.

"Chinese people prefer to judge doctors by the hospitals they work for," Gong said. "They trust public hospitals and trust the medical staff. So freelance doctors, who have been stereotyped as quacks in the past, have to compete in the market."

Internet medicine

Doctors must offer excellent services to please their patients, according to Gong, who established a website called China Obstetrics and Gynecology in 2000.

Initially, he used the site to share research and professional essays from overseas, but after he uploaded a video about a new method of treating postpartum bleeding, he received a message: "I saved a uterus today after learning about the treatment through your online video. Thank you very much."

That moment made Gong realize the huge power of the internet.

In 2012, he wrote an article in which he claimed that many women were diagnosed or even prescribed treatments for "cervical erosion", which is not a real condition in his opinion. He put the essay on Sina Weibo, where it was quickly reposted 33,000 times and garnered more than 4,000 comments.

He also has millions of followers on WeChat and other online clinics that share medical science and advice. He also offers two pregnancy apps.

Now, about 90 percent of his patients come to him through the internet.

The government is stepping up efforts to improve medical services. During the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), medical consultations via family doctors will be encouraged, and the government will pilot a hierarchical medical system in 85 percent of China's regions. Medical competence at the grassroots level will be improved and more resources will be allocated for lower-tier institutions.

Gong and his team have also begun working with public hospitals in second- and third-tier cities, seeing patients and conducting surgeries at hospitals in the provinces of Hebei and Zhejiang.

Gao Xia, vice-president of the Zhangjiakou Women and Children's Hospital, said Gong's service not only attracts more patients, but also helps to train local staff: "Patients do not need to go to Beijing to see good doctors."

Every month, Gong flies to two or three cities, and even though his life is busier, he feels freer.

"I will keep working hard to improve healthcare in China," he said.
Liang Qiyou reunites with his son in June in Shenzhen, Guangdong province. China Daily

On the day they were finally reunited, it had been 19 years since Ye Yong (not his real name) last saw his father.

The 25-year-old, who was abducted from his home in southwestern Guizhou province in 1998, stood watching the horizon, waiting for Liang Qiyou to appear.

Once Liang approached, the two hugged and wept.

"I have been missing you every minute and every second all these years," Liang said.

Ye now works at a restaurant in Shenzhen, southern Guangdong province.

He went to the city four years ago after being invited by the elder sister from his adoptive family, who runs the business.

He began the search for his biological parents in May by seeking help from a police station.

"Reuniting with my family has been my dream for years and when I learned that this is now a possibility because of DNA sequencing technology, I did not hesitate," he said.

Ye was lucky. Liang reported his son missing days after his disappearance and has repeatedly made attempts to find him, meaning his DNA was on file and easily accessible using the country's public security database system.

"If there was only DNA information for the son or the parent, the possibility of reuniting them would have been slim," said Lu Baolei, an official with Shenzhen's public security bureau, which carried out the search.

According to Lu, 23 abductees have been reunited with their families in Shenzhen this year.

Named Liang Jianshe at birth, Ye spent his early years in a village in Guizhou with his grandmother and younger sister, while his parents worked at a brick factory in distant Anhui province.

It was a rainy summer night in 1998 when Ye was snatched from his bed by three men as he slept beside his grandmother and younger sister, who was then only 1.
You'd think offering mothers of newborns more paid time off would be music to the ears of those planning to have a family one day, but not all women have welcomed moves by China's provinces to extend paid maternity leave.

Since 2012, Chinese women have been entitled to at least 98 days paid maternity leave. But since the introduction of the two-child policy at the start of last year, many provinces and regions keen to lift the birth rate now require employers to go above and beyond that, resulting in a patchwork of incentives for new parents across China.

The Tibet autonomous region is set to become the most generous in the country, granting mothers a whole year at home with their newborns. Fathers will also be able to access 30 days paid leave.

That overtakes Guangdong's 208 days, which was previously China's longest, and is up there with the best in the world.

Sweden is often mentioned as the model in this area, granting the primary carer 56 weeks of paid time off to be taken any time in the child's first eight years. The time can be shared between either parent.

At the other end of the scale, the United States is one of four countries that doesn't have paid maternity leave, with the idea dismissed as a job killer.

During last year's presidential campaign, Donald Trump floated six weeks of paid maternity leave that was typically light on detail. Surprise, surprise, there has been little talk of it since he stepped into the Oval Office.

In the middle is the United Kingdom, which guarantees mothers 39 weeks of paid leave, and Australia mandates 18 weeks.

While the benefits of supporting parents to spend more time with their child in the first months of their life are well-documented, governments mandating paid maternity leave tend to be more focused on economic matters. China is one of many countries grappling with an aging population and the worrying effect that will have on the workforce, healthcare costs and taxes. When the birth rate dropped to record lows in Australia a decade ago, a top official famously implored couples: "You should have one for the father, one for the mother and one for the country."

Inserting national duty into family planning only goes so far; easing the economic burden of another mouth to feed is more effective.

But rather than celebrating China's progress in this area, it appears some women are worried.

On social media, commenters expressed concern that it would put women at a disadvantage in the workforce. A 26-year-old woman commented that she was "often asked if I have a boyfriend and if I am planning to get married in the near future during interviews with employers".

Demographer He Yafu has suggested the government offer subsidies to enterprises that hire female workers to ease the burden caused when they have children. While that might work, governments shouldn't have to pay a company not to discriminate against women. Getting the best person for the job should be motivation enough and if not, governments should focus more on changing employers' attitudes and clamping down on gender discrimination.
Extreme weather will continue to challenge airline punctuality through August, after bad weather caused massive flight delays and cancellations in June, the civil aviation authority said on Tuesday.

"In June, most regions experienced extreme weather conditions such as storms and heavy rain," said Zhang Chunzhi of the Civil Aviation Administration of China.

"Five major airports, in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, which handle 40 percent of flights nationwide, had a combined 59 days of stormy weather and issued 92 massive flight delay and cancellation alerts."

Weather was still the chief obstacle for flight punctuality in June, accounting for 65.81 percent of delays, she said.

"There was more rain this June than in previous years. Extreme weather in some areas affected busy airports and flight routes. Take Beijing as an example, Beijing Capital International Airport had eight days of stormy weather in June, which caused 2,300 flight cancellations and more than 3,000 flight delays leaving Beijing."

She added that stormy weather also affected air routes in the Yangtze River Delta region and Pearl River Delta region, causing massive delays and some cancellations in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

Flight punctuality will face further challenges from bad weather in July and August, Zhang said.

The China Meteorological Administration predicted temperatures will remain high in July and August, she said. "Northern China will have heat waves and periodic storms. Storms and typhoons will hit coastal areas in southern and eastern China," she said.

The administration re--quires airlines, airports, the air traffic management bureau and regional civil aviation departments to take responsibility to improve the punctuality rate during the summer storm season.

Storms often cause massive delays and cancellations, in which passengers get stuck at airports, causing chaotic scenes. Arriving flights cannot land, so they circle Beijing Capital International Airport, and some even return or land at other airports. After storms, airlines must apply to have flights rescheduled. Delayed and newly arranged flights then cause new delays.

The CAAC's North China Regional Administration launched initiatives to cope with such weather challenges, reducing air traffic operational risks and improving efficiency.
The family of a 4-year-old boy who was able to pass through security and board a plane in Beijing without a ticket was released without charges, the civil aviation watchdog said on Tuesday.

The incident, which contributed to a five-hour delay for Juneyao Airlines flight HO1252 from the capital to Shanghai, happened at Beijing Capital International Airport on Sunday.

"A family of five-two parents and three children - had never taken a plane before, and the parents had misunderstood the airline's rules, believing a child under 1.2 meters tall did not need a ticket. So they did not buy one for their 4-year-old son," said Li Jicheng, deputy director of safety of the Civil Aviation Administration of China.

The error was discovered only when a flight attendant counted an extra passenger during a head count before departure.

The family was removed from the flight and taken to a police station at the airport. For safety reasons, all passengers were then asked to again go through a security check as an inspection of the aircraft was conducted.

Police were satisfied that the family did not attempt to sneak onto the flight without a ticket and they were released the same day, the CAAC said.

"The civil aviation department will examine loopholes after the incident. Passengers should learn civil aviation rules and requirements," Li said.

Flight HO1252 was scheduled to leave Beijing at 6:55 am on Sunday and finally took off at noon.

"The weather conditions also contributed to the delay. The child incident caused a delay of about an hour and a half," Li said.

Juneyao Airlines released a statement on Tuesday saying that compensation had been offered to the passengers.

The airline also reminded passengers that everyone needs a ticket to travel.

Jiang Chenglong contributed to this story.
A screen grab shows Gao Chengyong as he is escorted to court in Baiyin, Gansu province.

Hearing closed over 'cruel' way female victims died, official says

The trial of suspected serial killer Gao Chengyong got underway on Tuesday behind closed doors in Gansu province.

Baiyin Intermediate People's Court had not issued a statement on the case as of 6 pm, and it was unknown whether Gao, 52, has pleaded guilty to any of the charges he faces, including murder, rape, robbery and mutilation of a corpse.

Prosecutors said before the trial that the defendant had confessed to a number of crimes, including killing 10 women and an 8-year-old girl in Gansu and the Inner Mongolia autonomous region between May 1988 and February 2002.

Although the case was not open to the public, the court announced the prosecution on May 2 and disclosed the time and place of the hearing via Sina Weibo.

On Monday, it also held a news conference in Baiyin to respond to several much-discussed issues, such as why the hearing has come almost a year after the suspect was arrested.

"The case is complicated, as the killings took place from the 1980s to the 2000s, and the defendant is accused of multiple offenses ... which is why we have not heard about it until now," judicial official Teng Wenxiang said.

Under Chinese law governing case procedures, a basic principle for a hearing is transparency, except for cases relating to State secrets and privacy, he said.

"This case involves several female victims, and the way they were killed was cruel. Considering these factors, we decided not to hear it publicly," he said.

Teng estimated the hearing would last two and a half days because of its complexity and high profile, but said the timing would depend on whether Gao pleaded guilty.

"The judgment is expected at a later date," he added.

Under Chinese law, people who commit homicide, robbery and rape face a possible death sentence.

The cellphone of Zhu Aimin, Gao's lawyer, was powered off on Tuesday.

The case was thrust into the public eye last year when Baiyin police discovered evidence, including DNA, that identified Gao as a suspect in the killings. In preliminary interrogations, police said Gao confessed but gave no motive.

Details released by the police said the victims were all young women dressed in red, and Gao raped them and killed them by cutting their throats after following them home.

caoyin@chinadaily.com.cn
A bus was set on fire after it arrived at a station in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, around 2:25 pm on Tuesday. A man identified by the driver as the one who started the blaze died in the incident, local police said.

The westbound No 13 bus caught fire at the station at the intersection of Beijing West and Dinggong roads, the city's public security bureau said.

Firefighters extinguished the blaze at 2:40 pm. Except for the arsonist, all the passengers and the driver survived, the police said.

Passengers reported that the man boarded the bus with a container emitting an irritating odor, the police said. The driver told the bus company that it was this man who started the fire, which severely damaged the bus.

The identity of the dead man was being sought, local police said.

To prevent and better handle fires and other violent behavior on buses, security officers have been assigned to bus routes in many Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai.

cuijia@chinadaily.com.cn
BRICS countries will continue to strengthen multilateral exchanges and cooperation to promote science and innovation, according to a declaration signed during a ministerial meeting in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.

The five member nations - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - agreed that innovation is one of the major driving forces for sustainable economic development, Wan Gang, China's minister of science and technology, said at a news conference on Tuesday.

"Science, technology and innovation have played crucial roles in providing jobs, promoting structural reforms and market competition and tackling global challenges," he said. "BRICS nations have to strengthen the role of science and technology, facilitate multilateral science projects and people-to-people exchanges, and build frameworks for long-term projects and cooperation."

BRICS countries account for 42 percent of the world's population, 18 percent of the world's GDP, 17 percent of total research funding and 27 percent of all published science papers, Wan said.

"BRICS nations' strong role in global science development is becoming more evident," he said. "More multilateral cooperation and exchanges at all levels are beneficial in unlocking the scientific potential of each member nation."

BRICS nations will promote training and exchanges for young scientists, encourage young entrepreneurs to innovate and share their experiences, and support the role of female scientists in science and innovation.

China recently held the second BRICS Youth Scientists Forum in Hangzhou, and many great ideas emerged, Wan said. Some of the proposals from the forum will be incorporated into the BRICS summit scheduled for Sept 3 to 5 in Xiamen, Fujian province.

South Africa will host the next BRICS science and technology ministerial meeting.

Naledi Pandor, South Africa's science minister, said her country will build on the solid foundation of BRICS cooperation, and carry out the action plans agreed to at the Hangzhou meeting.

South Africa is now working with China to establish science parks, she said. "We would like to draw experience from China about building incubators because we believe this can lead to more innovation."

zhangzhihao@chinadaily.com.cn
5 ex-officials under investigation

China Daily | Updated: 2017-07-19 07:06

Su Shulin, former governor of Fujian province, has been put under investigation on suspicion of accepting bribes, the Supreme People's Procuratorate announced on Tuesday.

Su, also former deputy chief of the Communist Party of China Fujian Provincial Committee, was expelled from the CPC and dismissed from public office on July 4 for corruption and violating the Party's code of conduct.

The SPP also announced an investigation into four other officials suspected of taking bribes: Yang Chongyong, a former senior legislator in Hebei province; Wang Yincheng, former president of People's Insurance Company of China; Zhou Chunyu, former vice-governor of Anhui province; and Cai Xiyou, former general manager of State-owned chemical maker Sinochem Group.

The five have been placed under "coercive measures", which may include summons by force, bail, residential surveillance, detention or arrest.

Investigations into the cases are currently underway, according to the SPP.

Xinhua

(China Daily 07/19/2017 page5)
Seven people involved in a high-profile telecom fraud case that led to the death of a university candidate were sentenced to prison at a court in Shandong province on Wednesday.

The principal criminal, Chen Wenhui, was sentenced to life in prison on charges of fraud and illegally obtaining personal information at the Linyi Intermediate People's Court. The other six criminals were sentenced to prison between three to 15 years.

The seven people cheated people out of money by posing as officers of educational, financial and real estate institutions in telephone calls made between November 2015 and August 2016.

One of the victims, Xu Yuyu, an 18-year-old student from Linyi, was called on Aug 19. She had applied for financial aid from a local educational authority two days before she received the phone call.

During the call, Zheng Xiancong, one of the criminals, told Xu that he was an educational authority officer and would provide her with about 2,600 yuan ($385) in student aid. Zheng asked her to contact the local financial authority to find out how to receive the aid.

Xu was given a number to call that connected her to Chen. Chen asked Xu to transfer 9,900 yuan in tuition fees into a bank account, adding that the student aid would appear in her student account.

After discovering the money was stolen, Xu and her father reported the theft to local police on the same evening. On her way back home, she died of cardiac arrest. Forensic experts said Xu's death was linked to the great anxiety caused by the telecom fraud.

Chen Wenhui said he obtained more than 10,000 pieces of personal information, including that of Xu, through QQ, an instant messaging tool.
URUMQI -- A total of 3,300 students from northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region will attend vocational schools in inland cities as part of a program to increase the number of skilled workers in the region.

Of the students, 88.5 percent are from agricultural or pastoral areas in Xinjiang, according to the student enrollment office. This year, 15,658 students applied for the program, 1,085 more than last year.

Beginning 2011, students from Xinjiang have been able to apply to courses at 33 vocational schools located in nine municipalities and provinces in the central and eastern regions.

So far, the schools have enrolled more than 18,000 students, of whom more than 9,000 have graduated.
About 900 foreign students and teachers of Chinese origin visited the Memorial Hall for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre on Wednesday.

About 900 foreign students and teachers of Chinese origin visit the Memorial Hall for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre on Wednesday. [Photo by Cang Wei/chinadaily.com.cn]

The students, who come from 16 countries and regions, read historical material on the hall's walls, viewed the mass grave and presented flowers in memory of the victims.

Zheng Tingting, a young woman from Madrid, said she was astonished when she visited the massacre memorial hall.

"I knew nothing about the Nanjing Massacre when I was in Spain," she said. "I think it's quite meaningful to know the facts about the massacre."

The students and teachers will go to 11 cities in East China's Jiangsu province in the next seven days to visit places of interest and learn about local culture.

They are attending a summer camp organized by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council, the cultural department of Jiangsu province and the provincial Overseas Chinese Affairs Office.

Xu Jinrong, vice chairman of the provincial Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said that he hopes the students and teachers will learn more about Chinese culture after attending the summer camp and share that information with their friends when they go back home.
Autonomous region seizes new opportunities, strengthens ties to neighbors

The Inner Mongolia autonomous region wants to highlight its cooperation with countries related to the Belt and Road Initiative to boost its economic opening-up, according to the region's bureau of commerce.

Inner Mongolia has long been an important base for China's business cooperation with Mongolia and Russia to its north.

Since the Chinese government announced the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative in 2013, the autonomous region has regarded countries related to the initiative as major partners for its foreign trade and investment.

According to the Inner Mongolia Bureau of Commerce, the autonomous region's total foreign trade amounted to $11.7 billion in 2016, with trade with Belt and Road countries standing at $7.24 billion, accounting for about 62 percent.

Mongolia is the autonomous region's largest trade partner, with Russia coming in second.

Countries related to the initiative are also major partners for investment.

The commerce bureau's statistics show that businesses from Inner Mongolia had invested in 553 overseas projects by the end of 2016, with agreed investment totaling $10.95 billion. These include 404 projects in Belt and Road countries.

Mongolia and Russia again top the list of the autonomous region's outbound investment.

Businesses from Inner Mongolia funded 181 projects in Mongolia by the end of 2016, with agreed investment totaling $1.81 billion.

The autonomous region's companies invested in 177 projects in Russia, with agreed investment in combination amounting to $1.13 billion.

According to the bureau, Inner Mongolia's businesses mostly invested in operations related to international trade, resource utilization, services, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, transport and logistics, as well as cultural and creative industries in overseas regions.

The Belt and Road-related countries are also the major sources for inbound investment in the autonomous region.

The commerce bureau's statistics show that companies from these countries invested in 150 projects in Inner Mongolia by the end of 2016, with total pledged investment of $587.03 million.

Industries such as manufacturing, services, metallurgy and power generation are most favored by overseas investors, according to the bureau.

To enhance business ties with Belt and Road countries, the autonomous region has implemented a number of measures to facilitate international trade and investment.

According to the Inner Mongolia Bureau of Commerce, the region currently has 18 land ports for cross-border trade, with their throughput capacity leading the country.

The port in Manzhouli is the largest land port for Sino-Russian trade and the one in Erenhot is the largest land port for China's trade with Mongolia.

In 2016, cargo traded through these land ports totaled 78.87 million metric tons, growing 35.4 percent from the previous year. The number of passengers entering or exiting through the ports amounted to 5.32 million in the year, up 23.6 percent from 2015.

Inner Mongolia has a number of industrial zones and parks dedicated to trade and investment activities involving Belt and Road countries.

These include bonded areas in Chifeng, Manzhouli and Erdos, as well as border trade zones in Erenhot and Manzhouli.

The autonomous region's businesses have also built industrial parks in Russia and Mongolia.

The local government encourages the application of e-commerce in foreign trade business. There are already a number of e-commerce platforms for trade with Russia and Mongolia.

The government has also organized a number of trade and investment promotional events overseas and arranged local companies' attendance at international trade shows to facilitate business cooperation.

zhaoshijun@chinadaily.com.cn

The pastoral life on the vast Mongolian Plateau constitutes a major attraction for tourists in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region.Hasbagna / For China Daily

(China Daily 07/19/2017 page12)
Inner Mongolia, a multi-ethnic autonomous region located in North China, is welcoming the 70th anniversary of its establishment in 2017.

After an Inner Mongolia people's congress held in Wangyemiao - today's Ulanhot - in 1947, delegates agreed and decided to establish an autonomous region, which became the first autonomous region in China.

Spanning approximately 2,400 kilometers from east to west, Inner Mongolia is the third-largest provincial-level administrative region in China. It borders Russia and Mongolia, as well as the Ningxia Hui autonomous region and secven provinces - Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi and Gansu.

The main part of Inner Mongolia is made up of a plateau and the region's famous grasslands, where 55 ethnic groups live and have generated diverse branches of culture.

The autonomous region recorded a permanent population of 25.11 million in 2015. The population of the Mongolian ethnic group there reached 4.58 million, accounting for 18 percent of the whole region's total population.

Inner Mongolia has a long history and is one of the cradles of Chinese civilization. During the long convergence process of the grassland civilization and farming civilization, it formed well-known cultures such as Hongshan Culture and Dayao Culture - both prehistoric civilizations.

The vast grassland with undulating stretches also bred a unique grassland culture, where the native people live in yurt - a domed shelter - and treat their respected guests with lamb roast.

The economy in the region witnessed a giant rise in the past 70 years. The gross domestic product of Inner Mongolia in 2016 was 1.86 trillion yuan ($274.5 billion), 642 times as the GDP in 1947.

The gross profit of the service industry there increased from 87 million yuan in 1947 to 792.5 billion yuan in 2016, an increase of 1,855 times.

In 2016, per capita GDP in the region reached 74,069 yuan, ranking sixth among all the provincial-level regions in China after Tianjin, Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

liyou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 07/19/2017 page12)
Medical professionals are pushing for greater openness in the registration mechanism that can tie them to a single establishment for their entire career, as Yuan Quan reports for Xinhua China Features.

Editor's note: In the run-up to the 19th Communist Party of China National Congress, China Daily is reporting on a number of key projects of national importance that showcase the country's great improvements in crucial fields, such as recent reforms aimed at improving living standards and creating a moderately prosperous society by 2020. Today's report focuses on changes to China's medical system.

Despite appeals by his superiors, gynecologist Kang Kai was determined to resign from the hospital in which he had worked for nearly 20 years.
CANBERRA - The University of Adelaide has become Australia's first university to gain accreditation to offer a course in professional drone piloting, in what has been described as a major step forward for commercial drone use in Australia.

The university has announced it will offer an intensive, five-day course at a cost of A$3,500 ($2,660), which will allow professionals to use the drones with greater freedom, opening up greater opportunities in filmmaking among other key industries.

In an interview with Xinhua on July 11, Prof Lian Pin Koh from the University of Adelaide's Unmanned Research Aircraft Facility said while hobby drone pilots might not need a license to fly their machines, they are restricted in what they are allowed to do.
As Guizhou Aviation Industry Group has recently rolled out its first plane for export, the aircraft manufacturer is accelerating its overseas expansion.

The subsidiary of Beijing-headquartered Aviation Industry Corp of China has developed an export-oriented aircraft, a modified FTC-2000 Mountain Eagle, with some features more adaptable for combat scenarios, said Hu Jianxing, chief designer for Guizhou Aviation.

Wang Wenfei, the company's president, said the plane, which rolled out in early June, can be used to train fighter pilots in peacetime and be equipped with various types of missiles for use as a fighter in wartime.

AVIC Deputy General Manager Chen Yuanxian said at the launch ceremony that the rollout of the new Mountain Eagle is a first key step forward for exports, though he added that a number of assessments, including experiments and test flights, are still ahead.

The Mountain Eagle made its maiden flight in December 2003, after primary research on the Mountain Eagle began in the 1990s and development officially began in 2001.

Since then, the state-of-the-art trainer has been developed into navy and export series versions.

In 2006 and 2016, the proprietary model caught wide attention at the annual China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition in Zhuhai, Guangdong province, which is the only international aerospace trade show in China endorsed by the Chinese central government.

Senior officials from many countries' air forces have visited the company to explore cooperation probabilities, Chinese media reported.

Cost effectiveness and high performance partially explains the Mountain Eagle's popularity in the international market, chief designer Hu said.

Wang agreed, adding that "we will be riding high on our proprietary innovations, continuing research and development efforts and tapping into market opportunities in China and abroad."

Unmanned aerial vehicles are another trump card behind the company's ambitious sales goal.

Guizhou Aviation has also developed an unmanned aircraft series of the Mountain Eagle, and that plane has become the first of its kind in the country to fly 24 hours in a single flight and reach an altitude of 5,000 meters, according to the company.

Capable of working under a variety of geographical circumstances, including desert, lake, volcanic and glacial environments, the series can take high-resolution photos and capture images with infrared technology. It has completed aerial mapping in scores of cities, providing data for the country's environmental monitoring.

The unmanned planes developed by the company have provided emergency and disaster relief and environmental monitoring services in 10 regions across the country.

"Our next step may be to offer pilot training and provide flight simulator experiences," Wang said. "The national strategy of military-civil industrial integration provides Guizhou Aviation historic opportunities for new takeoffs of its development."

(China Daily 07/19/2017 page24)
Known for its waterfall, gorge and stone buildings, Anshun, a city in Southwest China's Guizhou province, is an ideal place for tourists to visit in summer, officials said at a recent promotion conference.

"The average temperature of Anshun is about 21 C in summer. It has fresh and wet air, always raining at night," said Gu Xinwei, director of the Anshun tourism development committee.

The city is home to three national scenic spots, two of which have been granted 5A attraction status.

One of the 5A-level attractions, Huangguoshu Waterfall, is among the largest waterfalls in East Asia.

Located on the Baishui River in Anshun, it is 77.8 meters high and 101 meters wide. Tourists can watch the waterfall from different angles at six of its observation decks, according to China's travel portal Ctrip.

The best season to visit it is from June to October, Ctrip said.

"The scene in the TV opera Journey to the West left me with a deep impression, said Doris Lee, a netizen on Ctrip. "That's when I first learned about Huangguoshu Waterfall."

Lee said she visited the Doupotang waterfall at the Huangguoshu scenic area, a shooting site for the TV series, adapted from an identically named ancient novel.

"You'd better wear a raincoat, otherwise you'll get showered all over," Lee said.

She also mentioned an underground karst cave inside the waterfall group; the cave contains many colorful stalagmites and stone forests under light.

Cao Pengcheng, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Tourism Development, said at the conference that the natural tourism resources of Anshun attracted many natives in search of a feast for the eyes, clean air for the lungs and a place to relax from the stress of a busy life.

Cao said the two cities are cooperating to develop more travel routes for Beijing residents.

Zeng Yongtao, Party chief of Anshun, said Beijing is an important market for developing its tourism. The first direct flight from Anshun to Beijing took off in early 2013, followed by a flight named after Huangguoshu Waterfall in 2015 flying to Anshun from the Nanyuan airport in Beijing.

Guizhou Fenghuang Travel Agency released preferential policies to target Beijing tourists, saying visitors from the capital can get a 50 percent discount for travels in Anshun.

After receiving approval to construct a national tourism demonstration area in 2016, Anshun is on the way to innovating different tourism products, including Huangguoshu Waterfall and Dragon Palace Cave, the underground cave system with lakes, waterfalls and stalactites, as well as the Getu River and stone buildings, Zeng said.

During this year's 2017 Guizhou Anshun Aviclub General Aviation Flight Carnival, which takes place from Friday through Sunday, the city will hold promotional events for air travel.

Anshun ranked No 2 in a list of the Top Attractions of this summer, released by China Tourism Academy in July, following only Kunming of Southwest China's Yunnan province.

Dai Bin, president of China Tourism Academy, said though temperature, humidity and rainfall played an important role in evaluation, the relaxing, fashionable atmosphere is also key elements attracting modern tourists.

Some 300 million Chinese people are expected to seek relief from summer's heat in Anshun and other domestic vacation spots.

chenmeiling@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 07/19/2017 page24)
Nezha [Photo/Mtime]

China Central Television (CCTV) has announced a deal with toy manufacturer Hasbro to produce an animation featuring the Transformers together with the Chinese mythological character, Nezha.

No details have been announced about the animation's plot, but a statement on CCTV's website confirmed that production standards had been agreed upon, as well as an air date and IP ownership.

The deal comes after a visit to Beijing by Hasbro president Stephen J. Davis.

Nezha is a popular figure in Chinese mythology, a deity who was born fully grown after his mother's three-year pregnancy.

In cartoons produced down the years, he is often seen battling his arch nemesis, the Dragon King of the East Sea.

The Transformers first appeared in the mid-80s as a line of toys before getting their own animated series in 1984.
The Chinese version of The Lion King. [Photo/VCG]

According to the Shanghai Disney Resort, the musical play The Lion King will end its tour in China on October 8. By then, there will be a total of 500 performances since the play was first staged on June 14 in 2016.

Premiering in New York in 2007, the two-hour musical has attracted 90 million viewers in the past 20 years.

The Chinese version is the play's ninth non-English edition, which debuted at the Shanghai Disney Resort.

Philippe Gas, general manager of the Shanghai Disney Resort, said the humor and romance in The Lion King echo many Chinese people's inner feelings.

"We saw the musical play made many milestones during its tour in China in the past one year. The success encourages us to make more wonderful shows and performances for Chinese tourists," Gas said.

The Chinese version is translated with a fusion of Chinese dialects. The mix of Peking Opera and pop music aroused more people's interests.

Shanghai Disney Resort said a new musical play will launch in 2018, and more details will be released soon.
A drone in Jilin city, Jilin province, in June. [Photo by Zhu Wanchang/For China Daily]

The University of Adelaide has become Australia's first university to gain accreditation to offer a course in professional drone piloting, in what has been described as a major step forward for commercial drone use in Australia.

The university has announced it will offer an intensive, five-day course at a cost of A$3,500 ($2,660), which will allow professionals to use the drones with greater freedom, opening up greater opportunities in filmmaking among other key industries.

In an interview with Xinhua on July 11, Prof Lian Pin Koh from the University of Adelaide's Unmanned Research Aircraft Facility said while hobby drone pilots might not need a license to fly their machines, they are restricted in what they are allowed to do.

"For most people who want to fly a drone for recreation, they can learn to fly the aircraft themselves without needing a license," Koh says, if they "abide by a set of standard operating conditions specified by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority", like, not flying above 122 meters.

"However, the situation is different if a person wants to fly a drone for work, for example, to take video shots of a property for a real estate company. In that case, this drone operator would need to be professionally trained by undertaking a course like ours, and be holding a Remote Pilot License before they are allowed to do so.

"Having a license also allows you seek permission or exemptions from CASA to perform more complicated or riskier tasks."

Koh says that he expects a wide range of people to undertake the training considering the benefits the course brings, saying that he has heard of interest from professional photographers and engineers, and amateur pilots who want to further their learning.

"We expect trainees from a diverse field, from high school students who aspire to be drone pilots, through professional photographers and videographers, to engineers in the oil and gas industry who want to use this technology in their work," Koh says.

The professor says gaining the accreditation is a major step forward for not only the university, but the Australian drone landscape. The courses are set to begin in August.

"When I first started on this path, colleagues at my former university thought I was wasting my time on toys and laughed," Koh says. He joined the university in 2014 and made it his mission operating drone as a research tool, and making students drone pilots.

With support from bosses and staff, he's happy "this dream is finally coming to fruition".
Coming-of-age ceremonies are infused with meanings to modern teens.

The atmosphere is solemn at the magnificent Mount Tai on a recent morning. Some 60 students from Taiwan's Kaohsiung St Paul's High School and Shandong province's Tai'an No 19 Middle School gathered to declare their adulthood witnessed by Mount Tai, the most renowned sacred mountain in China, and a world-renowned treasure house of history and culture.

The event was jointly organized by the Shandong Provincial Taiwan Affairs Office, Tai'an Municipal Taiwan Affairs Office and the Mount Tai management committee.

Middle school students from Taiwan and Shandong read poetry eulogizing the majestic and precipitous Mount Tai on July 7 in Tai'an, Shandong province. [Photo/ 1545ts.com]

"This is a very meaningful event and it offers an opportunity for the youth of Taiwan to experience Chinese mainland's social development as well as to enhance Shandong-Taiwan youth exchanges," said Cao Xiaowu, deputy director of the Shandong Provincial Taiwan Affairs Office.

"I'm very delightful to visit Mount Tai because it is my first time climbing the majestic mountain. What's more, it's very interesting to have communications with peers from Tai'an No 19 Middle School," said a student from Kaohsiung.

Another student from Taiwan shared her thoughts, "this time we have experienced a lot, we visited the Confucian Temple and climbed Mount Tai. I am delighted to make new friends from Shandong.

About 60 senior high students from Taiwan's Kaohsiung and Shandong's Tai'an attend the adulthood ceremony on July 7 at Mount Tai in Tai'an, Shandong province. [Photo/ 1545ts.com]
Shi Yu/China Daily

As the White House seeks to turn steel imports into a national security matter, the issue is alienating not only China but also the United States' NATO allies. "They're dumping steel and destroying our steel industry, they've been doing it for decades, and I'm stopping it. It'll stop," US President Donald Trump declared during a recent flight from the US to France. "There are two ways: quotas and tariffs. Maybe I'll do both," he added just days before his administration's first Sino-US Diplomatic and Security Dialogue.

Only days after China's ambassador to the US Cui Tiankai warned Washington on "troubling developments" that could derail the bilateral relationship, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said he would present Trump a range of options to restrict steel imports on national security grounds - even as Europe's NATO leaders were already lobbying against the White House's possible move.

After the meeting between President Xi Jinping and Trump in early April, China and the US announced a 100-Day Action Plan to improve strained trade ties and boost cooperation between the two countries. "This may be ambitious, but it's a big sea change in the pace of discussions," Ross said at the time.

Barely two weeks later, Trump issued a presidential memorandum directing Ross to investigate the effects of steel imports on national security on the basis of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. If Ross determines steel "is being imported into the US in such quantities or under such circumstances as to threaten to impair national security", Trump is authorized to take action "to adjust the imports of the article and its derivatives so that such imports will not threaten to impair national security".

It was such actions that Trump alluded to in his recent statement, including imposing import quotas, license fees on imported goods and negotiating more restrictive trade agreements.

Since 2000, the global steel market has changed dramatically. Some two decades ago, world crude steel production was still about 850 million metric tons a year. While North America, Europe and Japan (read the G7) accounted for more than half of the total, China's share was only 15 percent.

In the past, advanced economies were the key producers. Today, emerging economies spearheaded by China account for 70 percent of global steel production.

That's the real reason for increasing steel protectionism in the US and the European Union in the past few years. But Trump's latest effort is splitting even the transatlantic front.

With steel imports suddenly becoming an issue of "national security", US Defense Secretary James Mattis has been dragged into the debacle. By mid-June, Europe's NATO leaders joined in as well. They launched an extraordinary lobbying campaign against an anticipated US crackdown on steel imports, which, they argued, would hit US allies more than China. Consequently, Mattis - not Ross - has been hearing the cases of apprehensive German and Dutch NATO leaders and has passed on their concerns to the White House.

During George W. Bush's presidency, the transatlantic axis almost fell apart because of a deep divide in security policy. Now, the same axis is being strained to the hilt by deep divisions in economic, trade, climate and steel (read security) policies.

Washington's NATO allies do not buy the national security argument. In Brussels, the mood is growing for retaliation if the Trump administration were to walk the talk.

Ross seemed to be pushing for a trade war over steel in a closed-door meeting with Senate Finance Committee members, but he has not put a time frame on his review's release. Officially, he has 270 days to submit a report to Trump - which translates to anytime between soon and late fall.

What next?

If Ross finds that steel imports threaten to impair national security, Trump must determine within three months whether he concurs with the commerce secretary's findings, and what actions should be taken.

In practice, the White House's current goal is to ramp up "America First" pressure on the eve of Trump's first Sino-US dialogue. Theoretically, Ross and Trump can defer difficult decisions on steel only until early spring 2018.

However, a Pandora's box has now been opened and an adverse decision could not just derail Sino-US bilateral relations, but alienate Washington's NATO partners and undermine much of past economic progress worldwide.

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 Centre (Singapore).
The China-US Comprehensive Economic Dialogue takes place in Washington on Wednesday, the first meeting covering economic and trade issues since US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to transform the China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue at their Mar-a-Lago Summit in Florida in April.

The new format high-level official dialogue indicates both sides are willing to deal with their economic and trade relations in a more pragmatic way. And it is important that Chinese and US high-level officials sit down and have a decent discussion, given the current complicated situation.

The protectionist philosophy of the White House has not shown any sign of abating. The Trump administration's intention is to use unilateral means to maximize the United States' interests, which has provoked anger from other countries, and in Hamburg earlier this month. Trump was more isolated at a G20 summit than any US president before. On first sight, Trump's protectionism would seem to be of benefit to the US, but protectionism will exhaust the systemic bonuses and advantages the US has in the middle to long run.

The China-US Comprehensive Economic Dialogue can contribute to improving the current situation in four aspects.

First, China can elaborate on the dangers of protectionism, emphasize the importance of reciprocal and mutually advantageous trade and investment frameworks, persuade the Trump administration to keep the US market open and uphold the principle of non-discrimination, and urge the US to be cautious in using trade defense instruments. Especially, the Chinese side should ask the Trump administration to deliberate on the 232 investigations underway and send out clear signals that any actions to curb steel and aluminum imports could lead to retaliation, which would be disastrous for US agriculture in particular.

Second, the dialogue is an opportunity for the Chinese side to persuade the Trump administration to recognize the US' responsibility to the world and future generations in the fight against climate change, and they can remind the US of the potential rewards it stands to gain as a leader in the fight against climate change.

Third, both sides can set their watches. The Chinese side should clearly explain the progress and difficulties China faces in advancing its domestic reforms and economic transformation, and seek more concrete and workable cooperation areas for China and the US. The 100-Day Action Plan agreed at the Mar-a-Lago Summit was a good start. Both sides have reached consensus on 10 issues, including beef imports and the opening up of China's financial services market. But those are not enough to stabilize the economic relations between the two counties. Both sides, especially at the working level, need to find more areas of agreement. For instance, China and the US both have a problem of production overcapacity. This common problem could be a good area for cooperation.

Fourth, China should clarify that the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula is not part of the China and US trade and economic issues. It should not be included in the two sides' discussions on economic issues. The issue should be considered in diplomatic and regional security discussions, and should not influence the economic and trade relations between China and the US.

The author is director of the department of American economic studies at the Institute of American Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.


China has made remarkable progress in guaranteeing judicial protection of human rights. The rule of law in the country has been constantly improving and providing better protection to human rights since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in November 2012.

China has taken measures to optimize the allocation of judicial power, improve the judicial accountability and judicial information disclosure systems, deepen reforms in the criminal procedure by according greater importance to court trials, attach more importance to lawyers' role and public supervision, make the handling of petitions and complaints more systematic, abolish the labor education system and strengthen the State judicial assistance program.

The people's courts have replaced the case filing investigation system with registration of cases to ensure all cases are processed and all complaints heeded. The Criminal Procedural Law has been amended, so that an accused is assumed innocent until proven guilty and all illegal and doubtful evidence is rejected. The Civil Procedural Law has been revised, leading to the establishment of the public interest litigation system. The Administrative Procedural Law, too, has been amended to better protect citizens' legal rights and interests.

The first Anti-Domestic Violence Law came into effect on March 1 last year. And the judicial authorities are now paying special attention to ensure detainees' legal rights and interests are protected.

In 2015, the judicial and public security authorities issued regulations to protect lawyers' rights and interests, stressing that the lawyers had the right to know, meet their clients, access files and apply for reviewing evidence, as well as the right to correspondence.

Last year, the central authorities took measures to better protect the legal rights and interests of lawyers. By the end of March, 32 lawyers' associations had been founded in almost all provincial regions across the Chinese mainland. In April, the judicial and public security authorities and the All-China Lawyers Association required their local branches to take concrete and quick measures to protect lawyers' rights and interests, especially their right to practice law.

In 2013, the public security and judicial authorities vowed to improve the handling of criminal cases to avoid erroneous cases. And the Supreme People's Court has declared a defendant should be assumed innocent if the evidence against him or her is insufficient, and courts at various levels must base the trials on facts according to law, and take steps to correct the wrongs in a timely manner.

In 2010, the judicial and public security authorities issued a document defining the range of illegal evidence which should be rejected in trials. And the revised Criminal Procedural Law stipulates that the testimonies and statements obtained under duress from suspects, defendants and witnesses must be rejected. It also says physical and documentary evidence obtained illegally must be rejected. The exclusion of illegal evidence is critically important to ensure judicial justice and avoid wrong judgments.

Last month, the judicial and public security authorities further clarified the standards of illegal evidence and emphasized that illegally gathered evidence should by excluded from trials, saying courts must cross-check the legitimacy of the evidence before hearing a case.

In other words, China has made noticeable progress in advancing the rule of law in terms of governance, protecting lawyers' rights and interests, and providing judicial protection for human rights since President Xi Jinping assumed office.

Xi has said there is no best, only better, in human rights protection. Protecting human rights according to the law is an important task on the way to building a society where the socialist rule of law is supreme.

China will continue to improve judicial protection of human rights to ensure people's legal rights and interests are fully protected.

The author is an expert on human rights studies.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in attends a news conference in Berlin, Germany July 5, 2017. [Photo/Agencies]

It remains to be seen how Pyongyang will respond to Seoul's formal overture for dialogue. Serious talks, whether on easing animosities along their tense border or on resuming the reunions of families separated by the Korean War in the early 1950s, as Republic of Korea President Moon Jae-in proposed on Monday, are long overdue given the antagonism that has escalated and accumulated over the years.

The worsening state of affairs on the Korean Peninsula has brooded a mood of pessimism, so the new ROK leader's professed willingness to engage Pyongyang offers some cause for optimism, albeit slight, since none of similar past overtures for dialogue, even handshakes, produced any meaningful headway in relations.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea will be aware that Moon, while extending an olive branch, has never promised to adopt a carrot-only approach. On the contrary, he has openly stated Seoul will continue to apply pressure so that Pyongyang will rethink its pursuit of nuclear and missile capabilities.

Not to mention Tokyo and Washington, Seoul's close allies, are calling for harsher sanctions. Immediately after Moon's offer to talk, Tokyo argued "this is not a time for dialogue; it's a time for pressure".

Washington has also stated the conditions for dialogue are far from being satisfied, as White House spokesman Sean Spicer told a news briefing on Monday, "any type of conditions that would have to be met are clearly far away from where we are now."

This should come as no surprise, considering the July 6 joint statement the US, Japanese and ROK leaders signed on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg, which committed the three to applying "maximum pressure" on Pyongyang.

Pyongyang may be angry at what it sees as threatening saber-rattling by the United States, Japan and the ROK. But it should not take that as a reason for not responding or turning down the overture from the ROK. Especially since the window of goodwill may not last forever.

In making the offer, Moon defied pressure both from opponents at home as well as from Washington and Tokyo. An unanswered overture will not only dissuade Moon personally, but also reinforce the case of Washington and Tokyo that his policy of engagement is ill-advised. In that case, Pyongyang will find its room for maneuver has substantially shrunk.

While the vicious circle of escalating tensions has allowed Pyongyang to continue with its nuclear weapons program, the risks stemming from that endeavor have simultaneously grown.

Pyongyang's best course of action now would be to embrace Moon's offer, and get serious about his proposals, including that of cooperation on the 2018 Winter Olympics.


A 4-YEAR-OLD without a boarding pass was found on a Beijing-Shanghai flight before the plane took off on Sunday, causing a delay of nearly five hours. The child's parents did not buy her a ticket, because they "thought" teenagers shorter than 1.2 meters could travel for free. Beijing News commented on Tuesday:

The incident at Beijing Capital International Airport has again aroused concerns about misbehaving passengers and the potential security risks they represent.

Incidents such as this, and that of the 80-year-old passenger who recently threw a handful of coins at one of the engines for "good luck", highlight some people's lack of safety awareness, which could lead to costly consequences.

In the case of the child who was able to get on a plane without a boarding pass, the airport security checks should be blamed for failing to stop a ticket-less passenger. But her parents, who went to great lengths so their daughter could avoid the checks, need to pay the price for their misdeed.

Free-riders on buses and trains are nothing new, and some people might be tempted to try and get a free ride on an airplane if they thought they could get away with it.

Those violating security rules and many other public codes of conduct should be held accountable. That said, verbal warnings may not be enough to keep at bay such "troublemakers". They should receive penalties that deter others from disobeying the rules.

Airline companies are obligated to compensate other customers if a delay is caused by their fellow passengers, according to the Contract Law. Those passengers who cause delays through risky or absurd behavior should have to pay the costs as a reminder to others that the rules are there for a reason.
DESPITE LOANS ON CAMPUS BEING PROHIBITED, some online loan companies are disguising their loans to college students as installment repayment services for e-commerce purchases. Beijing Youth Daily comments:

The internet loan companies' "innovation" aims to bypass the authorities' ban on direct loans to students. They are reluctant to cease their campus business because of the exorbitant profits they can make.

The profit model of these companies is simple, yet crude. They encourage students to engage in excessive consumption then demand high interest after the students fail to repay their loans in time.

The central authorities banned online loan companies from extending loans to students in May. Although the ban slammed the break on the then rampant business, it stressed supervision of the companies without clarifying the punishments for those companies violating the ban, and failed to define what services were covered by the ban.

The authorities have underestimated the unscrupulousness of the online loan companies which have simply disguised their student loan business as an "installment repayment" service.

It is high time the authorities took immediate measures to rein in the online campus loans in whatever guise.

In the meantime, colleges and students' parents should urge students to refuse the lure of the loan companies' "fat offers". Students should also be given more financial education, so they are better able to manage their finances.

The student loans provided by State-owned banks and various kinds of subsidies and scholarships provided by the government are enough to help the students meet their normal needs for consumption on campus.

Students should learn to cultivate healthy consumption values and habits.
A political documentary on China's ongoing reform will remind the Chinese of the country's glorious national achievements, while sending a clear message about the enhanced reform that will happen after the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to be held later this year.

The ten-episode documentary, "Jiang Gaige Jinxing Daodi," which in English translates as "carrying the reform through to the end," summarizes the progress and achievements since the 18th National Congress of the CPC in 2012.

It features authoritative theoretical discussions on reform, with examples from the grassroots, covering a number of topics ranging from the Party's self-governance to social management.

"The documentary serves as an inspiration to Chinese people and is conducive to uniting all forces of society to carry forward the reform," said Liu Feng, professor of politics with the Chinese Academy of Governance. "It reminds us that the ultimate goal of reform is to bring benefits to the people."

About five years ago, against the backdrop of a global economic downturn and a complex international situation, China's new leadership pledged to make continued efforts to carry out reform and opening up and achieve the renewal of the Chinese nation.

Over the ensuing years, President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, and his team have developed various reform strategies.

In November 2013, the third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee raised the curtain for comprehensively deepening reforms and drew a blueprint for specific reform goals.

"Economic reform is key, and the core solution is the proper relationship between the government and the market, leaving the market to play the decisive role in allocation of resources," according to the meeting.

Despite a global economic slowdown, China's economy is stable and has seen growth as reform gains momentum. In the first half of 2017, China's economy continued steady expansion with GDP up 6.9 percent year on year to about 38.2 trillion yuan ($5.6 trillion dollars).

"Only by practicing comprehensively deepening reform, can our country become more prosperous, people live a happier life, and our great Chinese dream come true sooner," netizen Xiao Yang'er said on Mgtv.com, the official website of Hunan TV station.

Now, the country has embarked on a "new normal" economic development path, featuring higher quality, efficiency, equality and sustainability.

The CPC Central Committee with Xi at its core has attached great importance to reform. In December 2013, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee decided to set up the Central Leading Group for Deepening Overall Reform and appoint Xi as its head.

At a meeting of the leading group last June, Xi and group members said they believed that "reform will cause pain, but without reform the pain will be longer-lasting."

"Reform is a revolution that aims to rectify the system and challenge vested interests. There is no way to do it other than using real swords and spears," said a statement after the meeting.

Song Shiming, professor of politics with the Chinese Academy of Governance, said that the benefits of the people were always at the heart of President Xi's vision of reform.

Currently, as many countries stagnate in state governance amid growing regional conflicts and terrorism, the world wonders how and in what way China will sustain its economic growth.

The answer lies in reform.

The 19th National Congress of the CPC comes as China is striving to achieve its two centennial goals -- to build a moderately prosperous society by 2020, and building a modern socialist country by the middle of the 21st century.

"The documentary demonstrates the Party's confidence and determination to further deepen reform after the 19th National Congress of the CPC," said Sun Xiaoli, professor of politics at the academy.
Chinese visitors spent an estimated 3.52 billion Singapore dollars ($2.58 billion) in Singapore last year, increasing 39 percent or 1 billion Singapore dollars ($732 million) from 2015, the Straits Times reported on Wednesday.

This was the second year in a row for China to be Singapore's top-spending market, beating Indonesia, which has traditionally been the top spender.

Statistics from the Singapore Tourism Board show 2.86 million Chinese visitors arrived in Singapore last year, up 36 percent year on year.

It also shows the growth in Chinese tourists has been fuelled by a rise in tourists from secondary cities in China.

Online travel booking site Hotels.com released the result of a survey of over 3,000 Chinese travellers on Tuesday, which says the tide of Chinese tourists will not be ebbing soon.

It found that Singapore is the top city in the Asia-Pacific that Chinese travellers want to visit in the next 12 months.

This was followed by Sydney, while third place was shared by Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Australia's Gold Coast.
BERLIN  At least 547 members of a prestigious Catholic boys' choir in Germany were physically or sexually abused between 1945 and 1992, according to a report released Tuesday.

Allegations involving the Domspatzen choir in Regensburg were among a spate of revelations of abuse by Roman Catholic clergy in Germany that emerged in 2010. In 2015, lawyer Ulrich Weber was tasked with producing a report on what happened.

The report said that 547 boys at the Domspatzen's school "with a high degree of plausibility" were victims of physical or sexual abuse, or both. It counted 500 cases of physical violence and 67 of sexual violence, committed by a total of 49 perpetrators.

At the choir's pre-school, "violence, fear and helplessness dominated" and "violence was an everyday method," it said.

"The whole system of education was oriented toward top musical achievements and the choir's success," the report said. "Alongside individual motives, institutional motives  namely, breaking the will of the children with the aim of maximum discipline and dedication  formed the basis for violence."The choir was led from 1964 to 1994 by Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI's elder brother, the Rev. Georg Ratzinger.

Ratzinger has acknowledged slapping pupils after he took over the choir, though such punishments were commonplace in Germany at that time. He also said he was aware of allegations of physical abuse at the elementary school and did nothing about it, but he was not aware of sexual abuse.

The report faulted Ratzinger "in particular for 'looking away' or for failing to intervene."It also cited criticism by victims of the Regensburg diocese's initial efforts to investigate past abuse. It said that the bishop at the time the allegations surfaced, Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, bears "clear responsibility for the strategic, organizational and communicative weaknesses" of those efforts.

Cardinal Mueller became the head of the Vatican's doctrine office in 2012. Pope Francis recently removed him from that job.

Current Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer has already announced plans to offer victims compensation of between 5,000 and 20,000 euros ($5,730 and $22,930) each by the end of this year.

AP
WASHINGTON - The United States on Tuesday slapped sanctions on 18 Iranian entities and individuals linked to Iran's ballistic missile program and other non-nuclear activities.



The new round of sanctions came hours after US President Donald Trump's administration declared for the second time that Iran was complying with a 2015 nuclear deal but also called Iran "one of the most dangerous threats to US interests and to regional stability."



According to a statement by the US Treasury Department, 16 Iranian entities and individuals, including ones engaged in activities in support of Iran's military or the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, were designated for "engaging in support of illicit Iranian actors or transnational criminal activity."



Two other Iranian organizations involved in Iran's ballistic missile program were also targeted by the US State Department, according to the Treasury Department statement.



"This administration will continue to aggressively target Iran's malign activities, including their ongoing state support of terrorism, ballistic missile program, and human rights abuses," the statement quoted Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as saying.
Around 2,000 people were evacuated on Tuesday from the United Nations headquarters complex in New York City after a fire alarm went off in one of the fan rooms in the second basement. [Photo/Xinhua]

UNITED NATIONS - Around 2,000 people were evacuated on Tuesday from the United Nations headquarters complex in New York City after a fire alarm went off in one of the fan rooms in the second basement.

UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters that "we have to evacuate as a precaution in case of a potential fire, but the alarm was checked and there was no fire."

"It was a problem potentially with the alarms," he noted in a briefing.

UN staff, diplomats, and visitors were allowed back into the buildings after the alarm was canceled within half an hour.

Haq said the Fire Department of New York came and helped find out that the rooms did not have fire conditions.

Meetings held at the UN headquarters were delayed, including a Security Council open meeting on the situation in Haiti.

Fire drills have been conducted regularly at the UN headquarters, though evacuation was rare in recent years.
Jack Ma, executive chairman of Alibaba Group, chats with Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, during the US-China Business Leaders Summit on Tuesday at the US Commerce Department in Washington. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Eight prominent business leaders from China, led by Jack Ma, founder and executive chairman of the Alibaba Group, and 12 from the US, led by Stephen Schwarzman, chairman and CEO of The Blackstone Group, gathered in Washington for the inaugural US-China Business Leaders Summit on Tuesday.

Both sides agreed to establish an annual dialogue to offer both governments solutions to pressing challenges in the China-US economic relationship, according to a joint statement released after the summit.

The first meeting was marked by "constructive and positive" dialogue, it said.

The group discussed economic issues of mutual importance to both countries. Both sides agreed that as business leaders, they have critical interests in and a responsibility to promote a steady and positive economic relationship between China and the US.

"As entrepreneurs, we should utilize our wisdom and capacity to solve trade issues, rather than create trouble," Ma said.

"We're here to solve the problems of the future, not the problems of yesterday," Ma continued. "The economic dialogue between China and the US should have a good vision that helps to solve problems rather than fight with each other."

The summit was first proposed by Ma to US President Donald Trump in January, with the purpose of encouraging business leaders from China and the US to get involved more actively in the steady development of China-US economic relations.

Trump celebrated American-made products on Monday.

"We want to build, create and grow more products in our country using American labor, American goods and American grit," Trump said on Monday.

"China is the best market for commodities that are made in America," Ma said. "In the future, there will be less and less 'Made in China' or 'Made in America'. There will be 'Made in internet'. Everything in the world is all connected. We call it e-commerce today; we'll call it e-business in the future."

Ma said globalization could not be stopped. "The good thing is that I think President Trump listens. Initially, President Trump and I had different viewpoints. After I talked with him, he thinks what I said made sense. Then I found out he did change and follows a path that leads to a better way," Ma said.

The success of the meeting was rooted in the foundation established in President Xi Jinping's and Trump's meeting in April at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

"The first 100 day has been reached. But I think the past 100 days is just a start. We should create more 100 days for China and the US. And it requires the efforts of us entrepreneurs," Ma said.
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China and the United Kingdom will work even more closely together on research collaboration, with institutes from both nations linking up to develop satellite communications networks.

Xi'an-based China Academy of Space Technology Xi'an (known as CAST Xi'an) has signed a two-year research contract with the University of Surrey's Institute for Communications Systems (ICS) to develop High Throughput Satellite and 5G mobile satellite systems.

The announcement follows less formal but highly successful research visits between the organizations during the past two years.

The new collaboration includes support for ICS researchers, and research visits that will involve members of the Chinese team working with the ICS team that is led by professorial research fellow Barry Evans and Xiao Pei, a professor of wireless communications.

The University of Surrey has pioneered research into the integrated design of satellite and ground systems to optimize capacity.

Evans said the research will help China provide very high capacity satellite systems for future broadband and 5G coverage.

He said such an upgrade would "provide users with better quality and higher rate communications at a reduced cost".

CAST Xi'an vice-president Wang Wei and Rahim Tafazolli, director of Surrey's ICS and 5G innovation center, signed a memorandum of understanding that also calls for collaboration on a future joint laboratory at the university involving the two institutes, with researchers from both centers of excellence conducting regular exchanges.

Tafazolli said: "We welcome this research collaboration with CAST Xi'an, as it brings together experts from two strong organizations to work toward the next generation of satellite communications. The joint lab will cement our relationship with CAST and further long-term cooperation between China and the UK on the strategically important area of satellite communication networks."

Founded in 1965, CAST Xi'an is a subsidiary of the China Academy of Space Technology, within the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.

It is China's largest supplier of subsystems and equipment for spacecraft and, during the last five decades, has supplied products at both the systems level and the equipment level for more than 140 spacecraft for telecommunications, moon exploration, and the Chinese Shenzhou Spaceflight mission.
United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff - Appellee, v. DUPREE TURNER, Defendant - Appellant. No. 16-4162 Decided: July 11, 2017

Before WILKINSON, KING, and THACKER, Circuit Judges. Thomas P. McNamara, Federal Public Defender, Stephen C. Gordon, Assistant Federal Public Defender, Raleigh, North Carolina, for Appellant. John Stuart Bruce, United States Attorney, Jennifer P. May-Parker, First Assistant United States Attorney, Kristine L. Fritz, Assistant United States Attorney, Raleigh, North Carolina, for Appellee.

Dupree Turner pled guilty to distributing heroin, in violation of 21 U.S.C.  841(a)(1) (2012), being a felon in possession of a firearm, in violation of 18 U.S.C.  922(g)(1) (2012), and brandishing a firearm during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime, in violation of 18 U.S.C.  924(c)(1)(A) (2012). The district court sentenced Turner to an aggregate sentence of 130 months' imprisonment. On appeal, Turner argues that the district court erred in calculating his Sentencing Guidelines range. Finding no reversible error, we affirm.

The district court calculated Turner's base offense level under United States Sentencing Guidelines Manual  2K2.1(a)(4)(A) (2015), concluding that Turner had a previous conviction for a crime of violence. It is unclear from the record which offense the district court used as the predicate offense; however, the parties agree that the district court relied on either Turner's New Jersey conviction for possession of a sawed-off shotgun or his New Jersey conviction for robbery. We review de novo a district court's ruling that a prior conviction qualifies as a crime of violence. United States v. Flores-Granados, 783 F.3d 487, 490 (4th Cir. 2015).

In determining whether a prior conviction qualifies as a crime of violence, a court must apply the categorical approach or modified categorical approach, depending on the nature of the prior offense. United States v. Montes-Flores, 736 F.3d 357, 364 (4th Cir. 2013). Under the categorical approach, the sentencing court must look only to the statutory definitions of the prior offenses and may not look to the particular facts underlying those convictions. Flores-Granados, 783 F.3d at 491 (alteration and internal quotation marks omitted). Thus, we conclude that the district court erred in relying on the facts of Turner's prior conviction to conclude that he had committed a crime of violence.* Nevertheless, we may affirm the district court's judgment because both of Turner's prior offenses categorically qualify as crimes of violence. See id. at 49192 (recognizing district court erred in relying on facts of prior conviction but concluding that prior conviction qualified as crime of violence under properly applied categorical approach).

The Guidelines define a crime of violence as:

[A]ny offense under federal or state law, punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year, that

(1) has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person of another [ (the force clause) ], or

(2) is burglary of a dwelling, arson, or extortion, involves use of explosives [ (the enumerated offenses clause) ], or otherwise involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another [ (the residual clause) ].

USSG  4B1.2(a); see USSG  2K2.1 cmt. n.1. In Johnson v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 2551, 2563 (2015), the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutionally vague the identically worded residual clause found in the Armed Career Criminal Act, 18 U.S.C.  924(e) (2012). However, in Beckles v. United States, 137 S. Ct. 886, 892 (2017), the Court held that the advisory Guidelines are not subject to vagueness challenges. Thus, we must  apply  4B1.2(a) with all its relevant language, including the residual clause and any Guidelines Commentary that may explain it. United States v. Mack, 855 F.3d 581, 585 (4th Cir. 2017). Accordingly, we examine the fact of conviction and the statutory definition of the prior offense to determine whether the elements of the offense are of the type that would justify its inclusion within the residual clause, without inquiring into the specific conduct of this particular offender. United States v. Carthorne, 726 F.3d 503, 511 (4th Cir. 2013) (alterations and internal quotation marks omitted). To determine whether an offense presents a serious potential risk of injury, we consider [ ] whether the conduct encompassed by the elements of the offense, in the ordinary case, presents a serious potential risk of injury to another. Id. at 514.

The Guidelines commentary provide that [u]nlawfully possessing a firearm described in 26 U.S.C.  5845(a) [ (2012) ]  is a crime of violence. USSG  4B1.2 cmt. n.1 (internal quotation marks omitted). We previously concluded that the North Carolina offense of possession of a sawed-off shotgun qualified as a crime of violence under the residual clause by relying on this Guidelines commentary. United States v. Hood, 628 F.3d 669, 67273 (4th Cir. 2010). We likewise conclude that the New Jersey offense of possession of a sawed-off shotgun qualifies as a crime of violence because the elements of the New Jersey offense match those of the federal offense. N.J. Rev. Stat.  2C:39-1(o), 2C:39-3(b) (2013).

We also conclude that New Jersey robbery qualifies as a crime of violence under the residual clause. We previously concluded that the North Carolina offense of theft from the person qualified as a crime of violence under this clause. United States v. Jarmon, 596 F.3d 228, 232 (4th Cir. 2010). Although noting that larceny from the person entails less violence than robbery, we concluded that fact does not prove that larceny from the person is nonviolent. Id. Moreover, we recognized in Jarmon that because larceny from the person requires that the offender take the property from the protection or control of the victim, the victim's presence is assured, and the odds of a violent confrontation are even higher than in a generic burglary, where the victim is often absent. Id. at 23233.

The Supreme Court of New Jersey has defined the elements of robbery as

(1) theft or attempted theft; (2) intimidating or assaultive conduct consisting of (a) inflicting bodily injury upon another or (b) threatening another with or purposely putting him in fear of immediate bodily injury or (c) committing or threatening immediately to commit any crime of the first or second degree [or (d) using force upon another person]; (3) the intimidating or assaultive conduct must have occurred during the theft or attempted theft or in immediate flight after the theft or attempted theft; and (4) defendant must have acted purposely.

State v. Lopez, 900 A.2d 779, 784 (N.J. 2006). As in Jarmon, this requires that the crime occur in the presence of the victim, increasing the likelihood that the encounter will turn violent and injure the victim. See also United States v. Riley, 856 F.3d 326, 32829 (4th Cir. 2017) (concluding Maryland robbery with a dangerous weapon qualified as a crime of violence under residual clause).

Accordingly, we deny the Government's motion for summary affirmance but affirm the district court's judgment. We dispense with oral argument because the facts and legal contentions are adequately presented in the materials before this court and argument would not aid in the decisional process.

AFFIRMED

FOOTNOTES

. For this reason, we deny the Government's motion to summarily affirm the district court's judgment.

PER CURIAM:
The University of Manchester has started using a new Mandarin language app that was developed by a former student, which uses voice-recognition software.

Philip Zhang, who completed a law degree in 2007, began work on the app YiyaHanyu in 2015. Launched this year, it can analyze a user's spoken Mandarin and give a grade for the tone and pronunciation, which can be challenging aspects of the language for beginners.

Available for free download from the AppStore and Google Play, YiyaHanyu has grammar, reading, writing, speaking and listening features, as well as instructional and roleplaying videos that help with business and everyday Mandarin.

Zhang said most Mandarin apps available online tend to focus on one or two aspects of learning the language, such as teaching Chinese characters or pinyin, which is the system for writing Chinese words using the Roman alphabet.

"The Chinese government has encouraged people to innovate and begin start-up companies," said Zhang. "I became interested in new technologies in the language-learning market, like voice-recognition software. Our app is comprehensive and systematic, it covers most areas in depth, in one place."

Zhang, who left a job in the mining industry to start Yiya Hanyu, put up the initial investment to develop the app and build a team of 25 programmers and other staff in Beijing.

Mandarin students at the University of Manchester started using the app in June.

Karen Wang, deputy director of the university's Confucius Institute, said online tools are an essential part of classes.

"A lot of our students are professionals who can't attend more than a class a week, and that is not enough language exposure," she said. "After seven days, the majority of your memory is gone, so the app helps with learning between classes."

Wang said demand for Mandarin classes in Manchester has risen sharply in recent years. In 2014, there were 165 registered Mandarin learners at the university. Today, there are 245.

"We've seen a steady increase in the number of people wanting to learn Mandarin with us," she said. "Partly, it's because Manchester has been attracting a lot of Chinese investment, with Chinese companies setting up here or British companies trading with China."

Around 4,000 students sat a Mandarin GCSE last year, up from 2,500 in 2012. The Department for Education started the Mandarin excellence program in September, which aims to have 5,000 young people on track towards fluency by 2020.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel receives Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge and his wife Catherine, The Duchess of Cambridge, at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany July 19, 2017. The royal couple and their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, are on an official three-day-visit in Germany after making their first official visit to Poland. [Photo/Agencies]
With the hope to reach one more for the gospel, a church in Southern California has set out to train ministry leaders  both lay and pastoral  for more effective ministry.

Christ Central of Southern California aims to do so through a six-week summer program called LEAD (Leadership, Edification, and Development), featuring guest speakers who teach about various topics related to ministry, such as handling interpersonal conflict, or answering questions posed by millennials, among others. Leaders of churches outside of Christ Central have also been invited to and in attendance at the weekly seminars.

The most recent seminar, which took place on July 13, featured Reverend Owen Lee from Christ Central Presbyterian Church of Centreville, VA, and focused on helping ministers stay spiritually healthy.

Its possible for you to work very hard for Jesus, while walking very far from Jesus, said Lee. My hope is that you would want to walk with Jesus and enjoy Him personally.

There are multiple ways to fight for our faith, as Lee put it, such as corporate worship, personal worship, and other disciplines such as fasting or solitude. But in addition to those, Lee suggested two more ways to ensure spiritual health while doing ministry: preaching the gospel to yourself, and meeting in a safe community in which others can preach the gospel to you.

Preaching the gospel to oneself involves a method that Lee called the Gospel Waltz  a cycle which contains three steps.

It begins when a believer is convicted of sin, and she then comes to God and repents of that sin. But that repentance must be twofold: a repentance of the surface sin, and a repentance of the root sin that led to the surface sin.

For instance, Lee said, suppose a Christian lied. That would be the surface sin. But the Christian must probe deeper and uncover the idols that led to the lie.

Why did you lie? If you were worried about what people would think of you, maybe reputation is an idol for you, said Lee.

Then, she moves on to the second part of the Gospel Waltz: believing in the forgiveness and salvation that God freely gives. This is a step that many often carry out mechanically and move on from too quickly, Lee said.

You have to sit here for a while and let it marinate, he explained. This is where we wrestle with God, to be moved again by the beauty of the gospel.

To fight for your faith, it takes energy and time, added Lee.

Finally, she asks the Holy Spirit what God would have her do in that situation, and obey. The cycle begins again when the believer fails to obey, and sins once again.

Lee added that leaders need a community of safe people in which this can be done together  a community of confidantes to fight for our faith.

The more I confess by sins to you, the more protected I am from my sin, he said. It is better to be embarrassed in front of my friends, than to be enslaved by my sin trying to keep it to myself.

He encouraged those present to be vigilant in fighting for their faith.

What our churches need most from us as ministers, whether ordained ministers or lay ministers, is our personal holiness, he concluded. That were actually believing for ourselves what were telling them to believe  that were not just telling people how good Jesus is but were telling them because we have personally tasted his goodness for ourselves  that what we do is an accurate reflection of what is actually going on in our own lives.
Many people come here and take pictures, the elder told me as he leaned on his walking stick, his slender frame swathed in heavy cloth despite the heat. Then they go away and never help.

This is the moment that haunts me from my recent visit to Turkana, a region in northwestern Kenya crippled by drought and sliding inexorably into widespread hunger.

Id stepped out of a small plane into a sweltering landscape of dry riverbeds and desiccated animal bones jutting out of the eartha place so quiet without traffic and technology that a childs plaintive wail seemed to carry for miles. A month later, as I recall this sobering scene, the elders words play over it like a soundtrack, telegraphing doubt that my visit would mean anything more than a photo op.

Its not surprising that Westerners have a reputation here for capricious compassion. But it pains me that Christians would.

If anyone should be known for not just showing up to help but for following through with real hope for suffering people, it should be followers of Christ. We are the ones commissioned by Jesus to go into the hard places, the hostile places, the ragged edges of our world, not just to proclaim the good news but to be the good news of Gods love in action.

The hunger crisis spreading across East Africa, affecting more than 20 million people, is yet another opportunity to show who we are and whom we love.

American Christians are generous when confronted with dire need. But is our goal merely to pull people back from the brink of catastrophe?

Thats not enough. We should strive for nothing less than Gods vision for his people described in Isaiah 65: No more shall there be in it an ...

1
The City of Chattanooga announced the launch of the City Insider web application Tuesday, which is an open data tool from the Office of Performance Management and Open Data. "City Insider will empower citizens with data about their neighborhood and help improve the lives of Chattanoogans," officials said.



Open data has a tremendous ability to break down barriers and empower communities, which we can encourage by using a format that makes sense for neighborhoods -- in the case of City Insider, the data is presented in a searchable map, said Mayor Andy Berke.

City Insider is another valuable tool for citizens and neighborhoods as we work together to make Chattanooga a better place for everyone.The platform, located at cityinsider.chattanooga.gov , provides citizens with current, map-based info on recent incidents involving city agencies such as police or 311 requests. The platform is a first of its kind resource for neighborhoods, using public datasets through the Open Data Portal , along with geographic information systems (GIS) map layers, to provide insights into neighborhood-level activity. It features searchable map views, custom date ranges, and filters by neighborhood or council district.Every day Chattanooga is becoming more known as place for innovation, and in city government, we are looking for innovative ways to deliver services to our citizens, said City Council Chairman Jerry Mitchell. City Insider is an innovative tool that will help the mayor and council continue to provide citizens with the information they need, while making Chattanooga the best place it can be."New datasets will be added to the City Insider application in the future, and its just one of more citizen focused tools the City plans to create to empower Chattanoogans with data. The Citys open data program is dedicated to increasing the transparency, accountability and efficiency of Chattanoogas operations, while providing more responsive services to citizens," officials said.The City Insider will be an asset to individuals and neighborhood associations in Chattanooga who want info about crime, 311 reports, etc. Questions that are often asked at neighborhood association meetings can be answered quickly and accurately using this webpage. Being able to print this data is a plus, said Gwenda Gregory of the Lake Hills Neighborhood Association."By taking steps to make its data easily available through City Insider, Chattanooga joins the ranks of some of the worlds most innovative and forward thinking public sector organizations. The application is supported by Socrata, a leading global provider of open data and government performance management solutions," officials said.

"The Office of Performance Management and Open Data encourages citizens to use City Insider and share this tool within their communities. Chattanoogans can create a free account, allowing them to save searches, and opt in to receive daily, weekly, or monthly email updates about new incidents or activity in their area.



For more information visit http://connect.chattanooga.gov/opendata.






Oil was steady amid mixed signals on U.S. crude inventories, with industry data showing supplies increased last week while government statistics were expected to indicate a decline.

Futures were little changed in New York after adding 0.8 percent on Tuesday. U.S. inventories rose by 1.63 million barrels last week, according to people familiar with the American Petroleum Institute data. That contrasts with a Bloomberg survey before an Energy Information Administration report Wednesday that forecasts a 3.5 million-barrel decline, which would be the 13th drop in 15 weeks.

Oil has lingered below $50 a barrel despite an agreement by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies to curb output amid stubbornly high global supplies. Concern is growing that the deal may fray after OPEC member Ecuador said this week that it wont be able to maintain its pledged cuts.

Only continuous falls in total U.S. commercial and crude oil stocks will provide us with credible evidence that re-balancing is, in fact, happening, said Tamas Varga, an analyst at PVM Oil Associates Ltd. in London.

Brimming supply

West Texas Intermediate for August delivery, which expires Thursday, was at $46.55 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up 15 cents, at 12:58 p.m. in London. Total volume traded was about 2 percent below the 100-day average. Prices advanced 38 cents to settle at $46.40 Tuesday. The more-active September climbed 14 cents to $46.73.

Brent for September settlement rose 23 cents to $49.07 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. Prices gained 42 cents to end Tuesdays session at $48.84. The global benchmark crude traded at a premium of $2.33 to September WTI.

Ecuador Oil Minister Carlos Perez said late on Monday the nation will start raising oil production this month, arguing it needs the money. On Tuesday, after speaking with Saudi Arabias energy minister, Perez issued a statement saying his country and the Saudis remain committed to reducing inventories to a normal level as part of OPECs strategy to boost crude prices.

Crude stockpiles at Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for WTI and the biggest U.S. oil-storage hub, climbed by 608,000 barrels last week, the API was said to report. They probably declined by 1.5 million barrels, according to a forecast compiled by Bloomberg. Meanwhile U.S. gasoline inventories fell by 5.45 million barrels and distillates by 2.89 million, according to the API.

Oil-market news:
Update: Tickets appear to be sold out in Houston. But some might still be available for the Austin appearance.

Brene Brown just announced her book tour, which will start in Houston Sept. 7. And fans, you'd better act fast to claim your tickets.
With a state as big as Texas there are bound to be strange city names to fill out the map. Developments come and go, with towns flourishing into regional powers or devolving into ghost towns that exist only as historical markers, street names or an obscure entry in a history book.

The most Texas name on the list of Texas towns seems to be Oil City, located in the Panhandle. It's now a ghost town. Gun Barrell City, between Corsicana and Terrell, gives it a run for its money. Just south of Gun Barrell City is Tool, Texas.
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An Iowa mother is grieving for her 18-day-old baby, who died Tuesday morning.

Nicole and Shane Sifrit of Des Moines gave birth to their baby girl Mariana on July 1. One week later, the couple admitted their baby to the hospital after they noticed she was having trouble eating and waking up from naps.

Over the course of two weeks, Nicole Sifrit posted updates of her child's declining health on Facebook. Doctors said Mariana had contracted Meningitis HSV1, a common infection and cold sore virus that can often develop into oral herpes.

FIRING BACK: Grieving mother pushes back against anti-vaxxers in Facebook post

Story continues below...

"Keep your babies isolated," Sifrit told WHOtv a few days before her child died. "Don't let just anyone come visit them. Make sure they are constantly washing their hands. Don't let people kiss your baby and make sure they ask before they pick up your baby."

According to CNN, both Nicole and Shane tested negative for the virus, meaning the baby contracted the infection from someone else. Between 50 percent to 80 percent of U.S. adults have oral herpes, according to John Hopkins Medicine.

On Tuesday, Sifrit announced Mariana had passed away.

WANTED: Police release sketch of suspect wanted in shooting of baby near Meyerland

The New York State Department of Health advises parents with HSV to tell their doctor immediately, as a C-section delivery can avoid spreading the infection to a newborn.

Persons who touch newborns should wash their hands and avoid kissing the baby if they have cold sores on the mouth or lips.

Click through above to see the top children's doctors in Houston.
Marie D. De Jesus/Staff

J. Todd Culwell, an energy and infrastructure transactions lawyer, joined Reed Smith's office in Houston as a partner. He had previously been with Andrews Kurth.



Culwell, who focuses on international energy deals relating to oil and gas assets and project financing, is the fourth energy lawyer Reed Smith has added this year to its office in Houston. It also recently added a new energy lawyer in London, another in Paris and three to its energy regulatory team in Washington, D.C.
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A Dallas appellate court on Wednesday reversed a $535 million judgement against Enterprise Products Partners, which had been sued by Energy Transfer Partners over a 2011 pipeline deal.

The decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reverses a 2014 ruling that served as a potential legal precedent for when an agreement between two businesses becomes binding. The judgement, with interest, would have amounted to $620 million.

Houston-based Enterprise and Dallas-based Energy Transfer, two of the nation's largest oil and gas pipeline companies, planned in 2011 to partner on an oil pipeline project from Cushing, Okla. to the Houston area. But Enterprise nixed the deal because of a lack of customer support, and instead married up with Calgary-based Enbridge on a more profitable deal for a similar pipeline.

Energy Transfer Partners sued in 2012, alleging Enterprise violated a binding deal and won the district court ruling in 2014.

HoustonChronicle.com: Enterprise Products plans new export terminal in Houston

"When Enterprise could not persuade Energy Transfer to terminate the joint venture, Enterprise simply pretended that the joint venture never existed, claiming a purported unilateral right to terminate the joint venture at any time," Energy Transfer alleged in court documents.

Enterprise argued the agreement was never binding and that disclaimer agreements were signed ensuring nothing was definitive without board approvals or finalized project documents.

Enterprise lawyer David Keltner said Wednesday that if the 2014 decision had been upheld it would have been set of the worst legal precedents in Texas business history.

RELATED: Enterprise, Energy Transfer plan Cushing-to-Houston pipeline

"Sophisticated parties need the right to rely on written contracts," Keltner added in a prepared statement. "Partnership by ambush is a bad public policy and goes against the freedom to contract guaranteed by the Texas Constitution. The business world breathed a sigh of relief today when 'partnership by ambush' was ruled out of bounds in Texas."

The "partnership by ambush" phrase references Enterprise's contention that it only had preliminary plans with Energy Transfer and never entered into any formal partnership.

Energy Transfer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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Police were called to KPFT 90.1 FM's headquarters Tuesday as trouble at the radio station flared for the second time in a week.

Tuesday morning, three station employees were given letters of termination - firings they say aren't permitted by KPFT's bylaws.

More on the chaos at KPFT: Protest planned at KPFT

Houston police got a call from the station's Montrose headquarters in the early afternoon, when two opposing groups began fighting over which of them should be allowed to stay in the building.

Officers issued trespassing warnings to two of the fired employees and to a volunteer, said police spokesman John Cannon.

"We're here with at least seven police officers," said Greg Audel, one of the staffers who was fired Tuesday. "It's absolutely insane."

(Story continues below...)

The trouble at KPFT started Friday, when Obidike Kamau, the station's interim general manager, was fired after just three months on the job by Bill Crosier, the interim executive director of the California-based Pacifica Foundation, which owns KPFT.

Crosier fired Kamau for failing to develop a plan to get the beleaguered station out of debt.

KPFT THROUGH THE YEARS: KPFT was bombed (for the first time) in 1970

A number of station staffers, board members and supporters were incensed and staged a protest Friday night, demanding Kamau's title be restored. Since then, they've started a petition to save Kamau's job.

At a staff meeting Tuesday morning, Audel said, both Kamau and his appointed replacement, longtime KPFT deejay Larry Winters, showed up to lead the staff.

"We had dueling general managers" until Winters left the room, he said. During that meeting, Audel and two other staffers - all Kamau supporters - received letters of termination signed by Crosier that offered no reason for their firing.

HOUSTON RADIO: Houston music fans still begging for a true rock station

Those staffers and their supporters argue that Crosier, as the head of the parent foundation, doesn't have the authority to fire local station employees.

Crosier did not return a phone calls Tuesday. But Hank Lamb, a programmer for KPFT who recently resigned from the local station board, came to Crosier's defense.

"Bill's not a racist, and he's not a mean man," Lamb said.

Kamau is "a really good guy," he said, but he didn't get the fundraising support he needed from the board members who are now protesting his dismissal.

"We've got a hot mess of a board and always have," Lamb said.

Since Friday, KPFT supporters have been speaking out on social media about Kamau's firing:

"We are all heartbroken," Audel said. "None of us are here for the money. None of us are here for anything other than we believe in community radio."
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The Islamic Arts Society partnered with Octavia Fields Library to host Islamic Art: Henna and Calligraphy on Saturday, July 15, inviting the community to learn and practice how to apply henna.

No amount of rain could keep more than 80 people from gathering at the library to browse a collection of artwork that expressed the historical Arabic calligraphy based off the Arabic alphabet.

The event had two parts, the first being a henna presentation with a hands-on experience, and the second was more focused on the application of calligraphy and henna.

"We would like to thank Islamic Arts Society Zohra Siddiqui and Dr. Khawadja Azimuddin for this wonderful experience our community and library had a chance to enjoy today," said Janna Hoglund, library branch manager.

Siddiqui has been a member of the Islamic Arts Society for five years, but before joining she looked to henna to help with her post-partum depression.

The Islamic Arts Society of Houston is a non-profit organization that works to promote the heritage of art in Islam.

Each year the Islamic Arts Society hosts a festival in the fall that gathers over 5000 people each year for a day filled of learning about calligraphy, henna, glass, woodwork, ceramic and paintings

She launched her own company, Hooked on Henna, and for 12 years dedicated her time to honing her craft before also adding painting as another means to alleviate her stress levels.

"Its very relaxing for me. I have the patience to apply henna for days, but I don't have the patience to have someone apply it on me," Siddiqui said.

Siddiqui works at a long-term care nursing facility in North Houston to prevent, intervene and treat any skin condition.

She uses her henna to draw on her patients' bandages and said, through this simple gesture, she was able to bring a little joy into her patients' lives.

"I like to bring my two worlds together, even though they are two different realities; it just makes their day a little bit better," Siddiqui said.

Khawadja Azimuddin is a surgeon at the Houston Colon and Rectal Surgery.

Azimuddin became involved with calligraphy 15 years ago when he was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, after learning from friends who did calligraphy and patterns on ceramic tiles.

"I feel that outreach events like this helps people understand about our culture and way of life," Azimuddin said. "Art is a common language and helps build bridges between people of diverse background."

Azimuddin presented the visitors at the library with a complementary piece of their names written in Arabic calligraphy.

The Arabic alphabet consists of 29 letters written from right to left, like Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and any other languages from the same family. The art of calligraphy was born in the first Islamic century when formal scripts emerged from within the Arabian Peninsula, from the likely region in Medina, Saudi Arabia.

Arabic calligraphy, which can be related to cursive, is often reserved for special or formal occasions, while a swift more practical script is used for daily writing that is easily read.
Nonprofit regional blood center Blood Assurance announced that Southeast Lineman Training Center is its July #BAChampion community partner. A #BAChampion is a community partner who has committed to raising awareness within their community through various special events dedicated to education and blood collection.

As a #BAChampion, SLTCs staff and students can give back to the community and provide help nationwide with the life-saving gift of blood, said George Nelson, CEO for Southeast Lineman Training Center. Hosting annual blood drives teaches our students early in their career that they can make a huge impact. Knowing that they can make a difference in the community by donating is something we hope our students will take with them for the rest of their lives.

SLTC has partnered with Blood Assurance since 2007 and hosts three annual blood drives in support of the organization. SLTC hosts a blood drive for each graduating class, with three classes of about 230 students graduating each year. The center is forecasted to donate 400 units this year in addition to donations from Julys #BAChampion drive.

We are grateful for SLTCs consistent support of the blood supply through their three annual drives and its our honor to have them as our July #BAChampion, said Jay Baumgardner, executive director of marketing and community relations for Blood Assurance. Within their three days hosting a drive annually, SLTC will take care of one full day of the blood supply. We are excited to see SLTC and the community rise to the challenge of donating throughout the month of July.

SLTC, a Trenton-based company founded in 1999, trains more than 800 electrical linemen from all across the U.S. and other countries annually. In order to achieve standards for this industry, SLTC works with electrical co-ops to teach students the best practices. In 15 weeks, students are educated in around 80 out of 250 possible certifications to be a lineman. SLTC hosts job recruiters in Trenton to meet and interview these students so that they have job opportunities before they leave the center.

Through the #BAChampion initiative, Blood Assurance unites with businesses and organizations to further educate the community on the importance of blood donations. The #BAChampion title is given to an organization that is dedicated to raising awareness of the constant need for blood donations within their community.

To learn more about becoming a #BAChampion, please contact the Blood Assurance Marketing Department at 752-5926 or visit bloodassurance.org/bachampion-2017. For the latest Blood Assurance news and updates, follow @BloodAssurance on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

To be eligible to donate blood, participants must be at least 18 years old (16 and 17 years old with parental consent), weigh 110 pounds or more and be in good health. Donors are asked to drink plenty of fluids  avoiding caffeine  and eat a meal that is rich in iron prior to donating. To schedule an appointment at a donor center or blood drive near you, please visit www.bloodassurance.org, call 800-962-0628 or text BAGIVE  to 444999.
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Every Tuesday at 8 a.m., Houston ISD Trustee Manuel "Manny" Rodriguez, Jr., would roll his maroon mobility scooter up to his favorite table at the Tel-Wink Restaurant & Grill in Southeast Houston.

Rodriguez always left the seat across from him empty. Constituents and complete strangers knew those were his office hours  the hours he set aside to visit with community members with questions about the school district, parents worried about new policies or those who just wanted to get Rodriguez' opinion on the latest local news. If you were lucky, Rodriguez would buy your breakfast.

"That was like his little home away from home," said Carlos Calbillo, a Latino community activist who described Rodriguez as a "dear friend." "He did more work at that breakfast table than he did at his office or the HISD offices. He was a people person, just loved by everyone."

Rodriguez, an HISD trustee since 2003 and a voice for the city's Latino community for years before that, died Wednesday morning after suffering a massive heart attack, according to a statement released by the Houston ISD.

His unexpected death stunned the HISD community. Funeral arrangements had not been finalized as of Wednesday evening, and the district did not respond immediately to questions about the selection of a possible successor.

Trustee Anne Sung said Rodriguez's death was "tremendously sad."

"Manny has been such a long-standing servant on the HISD board," said Sung, elected last year to represent District VII. "He is extremely committed to his community and has been a great mentor to me as I've joined the HISD board. I'm very sorry to hear about this great loss."

Houston City Council Member Robert Gallegos announced Rodriguez' death at Wednesday's meeting. He, Mayor Sylvester Turner and other council members offered their condolences to Rodriguez' family.

Rodriguez had served in various roles including assistant secretary, second vice president, first vice president and president. He was the longest-serving member of the current school board.

As District III trustee, Rodriguez advocated dual-credit programs, credit recovery and instituting blended learning with laptop computers for high-school students. He helped establish the maritime academies at Austin and Yates high schools, as well as Liberty High School, an alternative school that caters to students who are recent immigrants. He also was a vocal proponent hiring Superintendent Richard Carranza, the district's second Hispanic leader.

"We are heartbroken by the passing of Trustee Rodriguez, who was a pillar in the HISD community," Carranza said in a statement Wednesday. "He was a true advocate for educating all children and a champion for change. He was wise man, a mentor, and a friend to us all. We will forever be indebted to him by his service to public education. His legacy will live on."

Rodriguez graduated from Stephen F. Austin High School in 1970 before earning an associate of arts degree in social sciences from Solano Community College and a bachelor's degree in organizational behavior management and marketing at the University of Houston.

His wife Virginia and four children all graduated from HISD schools. Family members could not be reached for comment.

Rodriguez served as a computer specialist in the U.S. Air Force from 1970 to 1977, in Lubbock, Texas, and at the Lindsey Air Station in Wiesbaden, Germany, before finishing his military career in Fairfield, Calif.

During the 1970s, Rodriguez became involved in local schools during Houston ISD's integration fight. Calbillo said Rodriguez and other Latino community advocates were furious over the district's attempts to better integrate schools  plans Calbillo said often came at the expense of Latino and black students.

Rodriguez continued to keep a keen interest in local schools, becoming a "go-to guy" for such issues, Calbillo said.

Trustee Jolanda Jones said she admired that Rodriguez was often willing to stand up for poor and minority students, even if it meant clashing with the HISD administration. But he never let the situation become too serious, she said, often bringing levity to tense school board discussions.

"He had the driest sense of humor. Sometimes I didn't know he was even telling a joke  he tickled his own self," Jones said. "He'll definitely be missed."

Rodriguez also served on the board of directors for the Texas Association of School Boards from 2008 to 2011. In 2010 he was elected president of the Mexican American School Board Members Association and was inducted into the National Hispanic Institute Hall of Fame in 2013.

"There is much to be proud of at HISD," Rodriguez said at the 2016 State of the Schools luncheon. "We continue to be recognized as one of the finest urban districts in the nation."

But his tenure was not without controversy. He angered many in the LGBT community in 2011 after he released a campaign ad that highlighted his opponent's sexuality and support of gay rights. In a flyer, Rodriguez's campaign noted that his challenger, Ramiro Fonseca, "spent years advocating for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender rights ... not kids." The Houston GLBT Political Caucus condemned Rodriguez's ad.

Rodriguez also had been a director since 1990 with the Harrisburg Information Center, a community guidance and clerical office serving the Hispanic community.

Although Houston ISD has not yet said how it will fill the District III seat, the board had to fill another vacancy recently. Trustee Greg Meyers abruptly resigned from the board in November, and the remaining board members appointed Holly Flynn Vilaseca to serve out the rest of Meyer's term.

Rodriguez was last reelected to the board in 2015.

Jacob Carpenter, Margaret Kadifa and Mike Morris contributed to this report.
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Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo betrayed little of the frustration he must have been feeling as he pleaded Wednesday for information to help close the case in the shocking killing last year of 11-year-old Josue Flores.

"People talk, criminals talk," Acevedo told a phalanx of reporters at Houston police headquarters. "There are people out there ... that have information on this case, that can help us further solidify this case.

"I'm speaking to you. Please come forward."

Until Tuesday, the investigation into the May 2016 fatal stabbing of the Marshall Middle School student appeared wrapped up.

CHARGES DROPPED: Second suspect set free

Investigators had pored through video. They'd talked to Northside residents and collected crime scene evidence.

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They ultimately arrested Andre Timothy Johnson, 29, a homeless veteran who was seen on surveillance video near the crime scene earlier in the day.

Then on Tuesday, the Harris County District Attorney's Office announced prosecutors were dropping charges for lack of of evidence. DNA and blood analysis were inconclusive and prosecutors were worried they didn't have enough to secure a conviction.

Acevedo said Wednesday his officers believe they arrested the right man, but that they are being hampered by a "CSI effect," a reference to a popular crime-scene investigation television show.

"If you talk to a prosecutor, talk to cops, the DNA effect is real," he said. "You have three witnesses or five witnesses, but a jury somewhere in the country will say, 'Hey, what about the DNA?'"

"It's a tough case, but it's a case we're not going to give up on," he said. "It's a case we're going to pursue, and I'm hopeful that at some point we'll have a charge and an arrest and a trial and a conviction."

REWARD: Crime Stoppers ups amount last year

Acevedo said the department had made the decision to ask the Texas Department of Public Safety to test the evidence because it has the most sophisticated machines and analysis available.

DPS has not yet explained why it took more than a year for the evidence to be examined.

"No DNA was found on our victim, and no DNA tying the suspect to that scene was found on items recovered from the suspect," Acevedo said, stressing that the analysis had not identified DNA from other possible suspects. "No DNA. ... That's a really important thing to note."

Josue was stabbed about 4:40 p.m. on May 17, 2016 as he walked home from school after staying late to attend a Science Club celebration.

The stabbing shocked the North Side community, where residents banded together to help students get home from school safely. Residents Tuesday sharply criticized the district attorney's office for dropping the charges, saying they felt blindsided by the decision.

...

St. John Barned-Smith covers public safety and major breaking news for the Houston Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Send tips to st.john.smith@chron.com.
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Hundreds of patrol vehicles could be facing safety checks in Houston and Harris County after officers in Austin and other parts of the country apparently became ill from exhaust leaks while on patrol in special-edition Ford Explorers.

Local law enforcement officials have received few complaints about odors in vehicles but are checking out the nearly 600 vehicles now on the streets.

Ford has issued maintenance warnings starting in 2012 about the "Police Interceptor Utility Vehicles," a Ford Explorer specially modified for use by law enforcement, but has not issued a recall.

Harris County, however, is installing carbon monoxide monitors in all of the 134 Interceptors used by the sheriff's department and county constables, and the Houston Police Department is doing spot-checks of its 434 Ford vehicles, most of which were purchased in 2016 and 2017.

"We're aware of what Austin is experiencing and the steps they've taken," said Kese Smith, an HPD spokesman.

Over the past two weeks, at least five Austin police officers were treated for possible carbon monoxide poisoning, according to a report Sunday from the Austin American-Statesman.

The department uses 'Police Interceptor Utility Vehicles," essentially a Ford Explorer designed for use by law enforcement officers.

That comes after an officer in March had to be hospitalized and treated for carbon monoxide poisoning after blacking out while driving and almost hitting a bus.

The Houston Police Department has received odor complaints from drivers of two unmarked Ford Explorers but could not confirm the smell stemmed from an exhaust leak, said Senior Officer Shawn Palin, a fleet officer.

"I want to protect my officers and cars as much as possible, but I don't know if we're having that issue," he said.

CHASE-READY: Ford reveals first hybrid police car

The Harris County Sheriff's Office has had one deputy complain of nausea but officials have been unable to confirm whether it was because of an exhaust leak, said Cedrick Collier, a department spokesman.

"Although inconclusive, we have ordered that all Ford Explorers be outfitted with the carbon monoxide detectors," he said. "In the meanwhile, temporary detectors will be installed for safety measures."

Harris County has about 130 Ford Explorers, including 56 in the sheriff's office. The vehicles are also used by the county's deputy constables and the district attorney's office, said Bruce High, chief of Harris County's Central Technology Services.

High said the county an order of carbon monoxide detectors is scheduled to arrive on Thursday.

"As soon as we get them ... we'll take them to the substations and get them installed," High said. "All the agencies are aware of the concerns and working with folks that drive them."

Story continues below ...

Organizations representing local rank-and-file said they are monitoring the situation.

"Obviously we're concerned whenever something like this comes out," said Houston Police Officers Union Vice President Joe Gamaldi. "However, after we notified the department, they have been pro-actively testing exhaust in all Ford Explorers and have yet to find any problems."

Harris County Deputies Organization President David Cuevas likewise said he had not received any complaints from his members.

"If there was an issue involving exhaust leaks with the vehicle and officer safety, our department would have notified us," he said.

HARD LIFE: Time and miles take toll on Houston police vehicles

In addition to the incidents in Austin, officers in agencies across the country have also blamed exhaust leaks for other dangerous incidents, with one California officer passing out while driving and crashing into a tree and an officer in Louisiana blacking out and flipping her vehicle.

Ford officials have downplayed any problems with the vehicles but records from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show Ford issued a "technical services bulletin" notifying users they were aware of a possible problem with the cars.

Ford officials said police modifications could have contributed to the exhaust problems and they do not believe the design of the vehicle is responsible.

At least 150 drivers of regular Ford Explorers have complained to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is investigating the issue, according to a letter the agency sent the Ford Motor Co. last July.

A report from CBS in February alleged that number had grown to more than 450 complaints.

"My wife ... complains of a lot of headaches and I am beginning to wonder if she is getting carbon monoxide poisoning from driving this vehicle daily," a Virginia man wrote in September in a complaint to regulators.

While settling a class-action lawsuit in Florida, Ford agreed to reimburse customers for the cost of repairs.

The Austin officer who became sick in March while driving his patrol car has also sued the company, and the Austin department recently finalized emergency contingency plans in case they have to pull their Interceptors from service.

The Austin department uses mostly Interceptors for its fleet; Houston varies its purchases among different models to keep too many vehicles from getting sidelined by possible recalls.

St. John Barned-Smith covers public safety and major breaking news for the Houston Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Send tips to st.john.smith@chron.com.
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The U.S. Coast Guard on Tuesday rescued a 44-year-old man from a fishing boat off Galveston .

Just before noon, a crewmember on the New Buccaneer reported a man on board having multiple seizures.

Shortly after 2 p.m, an MH-65 Dolphin helicopter aircrew arrived at the scene about 80 miles off the coast and hoisted the man to safety.

Story continues below ...

Around 3 p.m., the man was delivered to an ambulance waiting at Galveston's Scholar International Airport. He was last reported to be in stable condition.
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A Baytown tortilla chip-maker is wrapped up in a crispy claim after a Houston businessman filed a lawsuit alleging he had a stroke over bad bags of chips - including one nasty batch allegedly tainted with a dirty napkin.

Henry Riojas of Henry's Dream Distributors filed the claim Thursday in Harris County court, accusing chip manufacturer El Matador Foods of everything from gross negligence to deceptive trade to breach of contract.

The Baytown company started manufacturing chips for Riojas' business back in 2010. For six years, the chip-making continued with no crunchy complaints or salty side-effects.

But then in February 2016, during a demonstration at Sam's Club, a salt shaker rolled right out of a sealed bag of chips, court papers claim.

DONUT DON'Ts: Shipley Do-Nuts sprinkled with federal lawsuit

Afterward, Riojas "suffered emotional distress" because he could have lost his contracts to supply chips and salsa to Wal-Mart and Sam's Club.

"Several customers saw the salt shaker roll out of the bag and walked off from the demonstration," the suit says.

Five months later, Henry's Dream Distributors allegedly made a much grosser discovery when a dirty napkin reportedly fell out of a chip bag at a Harris Community College event. At the same event, Henry's handed out free chips and salsa - but the chips were "rancid," the distributor alleges.

Shortly afterward, Riojas had a stroke, which he contends was sparked by the "severe mental anguish" and "emotional distress." As he recovered, Riojas hired another manager to run the business - and soon switched to a different chip-maker.

Now, Riojas is asking the chip-maker to pay for his medical expenses, lost business opportunities, loss of earning capacities, loss of concentration and good health and "loss of use of chips."

NOT ON EVERY CORNER: Texas catering company launches taco truck lawsuit

The tortilla-maker at the center of the suit has been a longtime presence on the local chip-making scene. The company's founder, Eugene Ybarra, started making tortillas for restaurants back in 1960 and launched El Matador two decades later, according to the chip-maker's website.

Since then, the company has expanded to manufacture flavored wraps and ethnic flatbreads throughout Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and New Mexico.

Al Dean Allcorn, a Houston lawyer who represents El Matador, said he couldn't offer comment Tuesday, as he hadn't seen the suit and his client had yet to be served.

Click through our gallery to see some of the gross things people have found in their food around the country...
Residents gathered Saturday at Main Street America in Spring to take a dip in an ice-filled pool as part of a fundraiser for Special Olympics Texas.

The 2017 Polar Plunge supports nearly 9,900 Special Olympics athletes in the Greater Houston area. Awards were presented to the Top Fundraising Plunger, Top Fundraising Team and Best Costume.
The 4th Knox Asian Festival will be held Sunday, Aug 27, from 11 a.m.-6 p.m. at Market Square in Knoxville. For more information visit www.knoxasianfestival.com.

The event will include:

More Authentic Foods Vendors: (Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, India, Burma, Korea, China, Japan,Philippines, Vietnam)

Japanese Drum group from Disney World



Kids Asian World at Krutch Park

Country Street to learn Asian Country

Chinese Professional Musician

Thailand Traditional Dance, Indian Dance, Philippines Dance

Martial Arts demonstration

Lion/Dragon Dance, Tea Ceremony

K-Pop, J-Pop, Bonsai exhibition, Cosplay contest

Register to become a member at www.knoxasianfestival.com. One of the members will win a free airline ticket to Japan and more prizes.






Education should lead to employment, said Georgia Governor Nathan Deal at Georgia Northwestern Technical Colleges Whitfield Murray campus expansion groundbreaking Tuesday. We have accelerated the number of programs whose participants will have a job waiting for them. This is what education should encompass. Were preparing people for the careers that are already available right here at home.

And, after the ceremonial shovels moved the first mounds of dirt, the construction of what many believe will help fill the skills gap between Georgia businesses and the workforce of Northwest Georgia is now officially underway.

This has been a long time coming, said Joe Yarbrough, chair of the Technical College System of Georgia Board of Directors. For more than a decade, there has been a skills gap between what our companies here in Whitfield and Murray County need and what our workforce was able to provide. Now, Georgia Northwestern will have the facility in place to help bridge the gap. The people of our region can get the skill sets they need for the careers already out here waiting on them.

No one is more aware of this need than those who represent the taxpayers of Whitfield County. With the rumors of a possible expansion of the Georgia Northwestern campus beginning to circulate in 2016, the Whitfield County Board of Commissioners voted to put its full support behind the project. Gifts in-kind toward site development and a commitment of $1,054,000 were both approved by commissioners last year. We did this because we want to help our citizens obtain and retain higher paying jobs, said Lynn Laughter, chair of the Whitfield County Board of Commissioners.

This highly-anticipated expansion all started with a gift from the Whitfield County Board of Education three years ago. The donation of 21 acres of land from Whitfield Countys school system is the cornerstone of what will soon be an 80,000-square foot facility on the colleges Whitfield Murray Campus on Maddox Chapel Road in Dalton. The new facility expected to offer programs such as chemical technology, engineering technology, machine tool technology, computer information systems, industrial systems, and logistics will be leading the way in helping train the people of Murray and Whitfield counties to fill vacancies in the companies of Northwest Georgia.

Now, with Phase II of the Dalton-based campus set to open in either late 2018 or early 2019, the venture of bridging the workforce to the regions companies actually began when the campus first opened in 2010. Whitfield County Schools agreed to share space with the college at its Northwest Georgia College and Career Academy. After the college outgrew the space allotted them by Whitfield County Schools, it wouldnt be long before theyd move into their first new exclusive WMC building. And now, seven years later, the second phase of what will soon be one of the colleges larger campuses has begun.

With just one exclusive building in place at the WMC, the 2016-17 academic year saw the campus student body size swell to 1,000 students. With this expansion, the campus will be able to accommodate up to 4,000 students, said Pete McDonald, Georgia Northwestern Technical College president. Handling this growth in this amount of time takes cooperation from all parties. In politics, for whatever reason, it is hard to put partnerships together, said Governor Deal. This has been a partnership. Two months ago, Governor Deal signed legislation approving $18.7 million to pay for the expansion. The funding was part of the State of Georgias 2018 Fiscal Year Budget approved in Atlanta in May.

With the flooring industry among those really feeling the gap when it comes to finding skilled workers, Technical College System of Georgia Commissioner Gretchen Corbin feels the region has the right person leading the charge to change all of that. To make a project like this campus expansion happen, you have to have a champion. We have had a champion in Joe Yarbrough, said Ms. Corbin. Mr. Yarbrough, a resident of Dalton for more than 45 years, has served as a chairman, vice president, and president of some of the largest manufacturing names in Northwest Georgia.

Administrators and officials are also anticipating more growth among high school students as a result of this latest project. GNTC is among the best in the state of Georgia when it comes to enrolling and educating the areas teenagers by way of the Move On When Ready program. This is a state initiative which allows Georgias high school students to earn college credit at no cost to them or their families, while still attending their high school. Growing the GNTC site, a campus which currently sits next door to the Northwest Georgia College and Career Academy, will help expose more students to the program.

Georgia Northwestern Technical Colleges Whitfield Murray Campus is one of six campuses the college offers in Northwest Georgia. The others are located in Catoosa County, Floyd County, Gordon County, Polk County, and Walker County. Currently, GNTC offers more than 200 programs to nearly 6,000 students on-campus and online.
Man Charged With Stealing High-End Bikes In The South Loop

By Rachel Cromidas in News on Jul 18, 2017 9:51PM



Justin Milos via CPD. with stealing multiple high-end bicycles in the South Loop earlier this month.

The man, Justin Milos Mount Prospect, Illinois, was arrested in the 5600 block of North Sheridan Road in Edgewater on July 17 after police identified him as a man in surveillance footage showing three people stealing bikes around the South Loop. Police had issued a community alert on July 7 warning area residents about the rash of bike thefts.

"With community assistance coupled with surveillance video, Police were able to identify Milos and charge him with the above felony crimes," police wrote in a news release. Milos was charged with three felony counts of burglary.

A previous police alert showing pictures of the alleged burglars said there were at least seven bike thefts in the area reported between June 22 and July 1 that appeared related.
Plans Emerge For Ambitious Riverside Development In River West

By Stephen Gossett in News on Jul 19, 2017 8:30PM



Goettsch Partners / Photo via DNAinfo

Although the plan isn't yet finalized, we got a glimpse of how one of Chicago's next major riverfront developments could materializeand it's pretty ambitious.

A rendering and concept description popped up on the website for Riverside Investment & Development, who in partnership with Tribune Media, are developing the property at teh property at 700 W Chicago. The site is near the intersection of Chicago and Halsted, along the Chicago River, and includes a 115,000-square-foot building once used by the Tribune.

A since-deleted description on Riverside's website outlined the plans: a mixed-used development of towers that would include residential, commercial and retail spacetotaling at least 1.5 million square feet, plus 4.5 acres in park space.

According to Curbed, who first spotted the now-gone website update, Riverside (they also of the massive, new 150 N Riverside downtown tower and a huge proposed tower on Wacker Dr., between Randolph and Washington streets) has once again wrangled architecture firm Goettsch Partners for the design.

But as DNAinfo reported, the plan as is went back out of public view after the Curbed report appeared.

Tribune Media spokesperson Gary Weitman told Chicagoist via email:



"The plan for 700 West Chicago has not been finalized and is very much a work in progress. We continue working closely with the city planning department to secure the necessary input and approvals for the development of this area. This early version of a possible proposal for the area was placed on Riversides website by mistake and has since been removed."

The development, which lies in the southeast end of the North Branch Corridor, would still need to be rezoned.
Sheriff ID's Another Victim Of Infamous Serial Killer John Wayne Gacy

By Stephen Gossett in News on Jul 19, 2017 9:34PM



James Byron Haakenson / Cook County Sheriff

DNA analysis has confirmed the identity of a previously unnamed victim of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart announced on Wednesday.

The remainswhich were found in Gacy's crawl space back in December of 1978 alongside several other victimsare those of James Byron Haakenson, who was just 16 years old when he left his Minnesota home.

When Haakenson phoned his mother, on Aug. 5, 1976, and told her he was in Chicago, it was the last anyone had seen or heard from the teenager, according to the Cook County Sheriff.

Haakenson, who was known as Jimmie, was the second Gacy victim identified in the last six years. Sheriff Dart in 2011 reopened an investigation to identify each of the then-eight remaining unknown victims. Six now remain to be identified.

DNA from Haakenson's remains was compared with samples from Jimmie's siblings after a family member wondered if the teen may have been a victim of Gacy's, according to CBS News.

"It's not every day you heard this: A monster murdered your brother," Lorie Sisterman, James' sister told CBS. "It's just not an everyday, normal conversation that you have with a detective from a different state that tells you this awful news."

Jimmies's late mother tried in 1979 to determine if her son was killed by Gacy, but dental recordsthe main, pre-DNA method of identification"were not available," according to the Sheriff's Office.

Gacy tortured and killed at least 33 teenage boys and young men, in Norwood Park, between 1972 to 1978. Twenty-six of his victimswhom he typically luredwere buried in the crawl space of his home. Known to dress up as "Pogo the Clown" at kids' parties and events, Gacy became known as the "Killer Clown" once his murders were revealed. He was put to death in 1994.
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Fort Bend ISD trustees have taken aim at state leaders and lawmakers gathering for a special legislative session in Austin this week, adopting a series of resolutions imploring legislators to better fund public education.

The resolutions criticize vouchers as a way of taking money away from cash-strapped districts, lambaste a proposal to require districts to provide teacher raises without funding them and urge lawmakers to pass school finance reform in order to increase the amount that districts receive in state funding.

Kristin Tassin, the board's president, accused state leaders of taking money away from public schools to promote their political agendas.

"Our state leaders are claiming to support Texas teachers and students, but they are being disingenuous," Tassin said.

In Gov. Greg Abbott's call for a special session, he proposed giving a $1,000 pay raise to all teachers, offering vouchers for special education students, forming a committee to study school-finance reform and allowing districts to have more flexibility in teacher hiring.

Vouchers have long been a touchy subject in Texas and nationwide. Essentially, vouchers allow parents to take money that the state would have spent educating their child in a public school and use it to offset the cost of tuition at private schools. While proponents of vouchers argue that they're an innovative way to allow economically disadvantaged and special education students access to better educations, opponents say vouchers drain money from public schools and direct the funds to private schools that are not held to the same testing and accountability standards.

Both Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick -- conservative Republicans -- have been calling for vouchers or similar measures that would benefit special education students, but multiple efforts to create a school-choice program have died in the more moderate state House of Representatives.

If a student feels, a family feels they need a better opportunity, they should have that right, Patrick said. And especially, students with disabilities and autism, to be trapped in a school that cant help you get over a disability, is a sin. And were going to stand up for that community.

But Tassin said many districts, including Fort Bend ISD, have already voted to approve pay raises for the coming school year and argue that mandating unfunded raises will further strain the district's finances. Pay raises for teachers and employees have traditionally been considered a local matter.

"After a failed attempt to pass vouchers in the regular session and divert money away from public schools, our Lieutenant Governor is now proposing a pay raise for teachers in an effort to force his agenda," Tassin said. "While all of us are for higher salaries for our teachers, without state money to pay for the mandate, this is nothing more than big government control of our local funds."

Abbott said he hopes state lawmakers adopt rules that will give districts more flexibility in hiring and retaining teachers, which he said should help districts find more money for raises, though he did not specify how the flexibility would save district money.

"Texas doesn't need to spend more. We just need to spend smarter," Abbott said.

Fort Bend ISD trustees also adopted five resolutions ahead of the Texas Legislature's regular session, which began in January and ended in May. Those resolutions called for naming school finance reform a legislative priority, making testing less burdensome, streamlining the state's learning standards and opposing vouchers.
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In a searing 100-page rebuke of the Texas prison system, a federal judge Wednesday ordered state officials to provide air-conditioned living quarters for elderly, disabled and other heat-sensitive inmates at the Pack Unit northwest of Houston.

The judge's ruling  which chastises prison officials for "obstruction" and "deliberate indifference" to inmate suffering  gives the state 15 days to draft a plan to ensure that 475 vulnerable inmates have living units cooled to no more than 88 degrees and that 1,000 others have easy access to indoor respite areas. The prison must also develop a heat-wave policy to prevent further injuries and install insect-proof window screens.

PRISON SENTENCE: Sentencing set for parents who 'gifted' daughter to man

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Keith P. Ellison does not require prison officials to install air conditioning throughout the prison, but suggests staff could adjust housing assignments to make sure inmates with health problems sleep in cooled dormitories.

Breaking down heat deaths in Texas prisons Twenty-two people have died in Texas prisons from hyperthermia, or elevated body temperature, from heat exposure since 1998. Source: Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Created by Data Journalist Rachael Gleason | Houston Chronicle

Ellison  who spent five hours at the Pack Unit in the summer of 2014 to feel the heat for himself  cites Fyodor Dostoyevsky's writing on Siberian prison conditions in ordering the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to bring its prisons up to modern standards.

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons," Ellison wrote. "To deny modern technology to inmates today for the simple reason that it was not available to inmates in past generations is an argument that proves too much. No one suggests that inmates should be denied up-to-date medical and psychiatric care, or that they should be denied access to radio or television, or that construction of prison facilities should not use modern building materials. The treatment of prisoners must necessarily evolve as society evolves."

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Ellison concluded that the inmates are likely to win at trial, saying the conditions outlined in testimony and documents appear to violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The preliminary injunction will remain in place for 90 days, which should carry the order through the hottest months.

State officials vowed to appeal the decision to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Texas taxpayers shouldn't be on the hook for tens of millions of dollars to pay for expensive prison air conditioning systems, which are unnecessary and not constitutionally mandated," Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a news release. "We'll appeal the decision and are confident that TDCJ is already doing what is constitutionally required to adequately safeguard offenders from heat-related illnesses."

Jeff Edwards, whose Austin law firm argued the case for the inmates along with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said the judge relied on common decency preserved in the nation's founding documents.

"The true significance of Judge Ellison's opinion is to remind everyone that one of the beauties of living in the United States of America is that we're governed by a constitution that applies to everyone, not just the best and brightest among us," he said. "When you read this order what comes across is that the standards need to apply to everyone. It is simply wrong to display indifference to prisoners for the basic reason that they're human beings."

Attorney Wallis Nader, with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said the lawsuit aims to end "brutal heat conditions" in Texas prisons.

"All Texans, regardless of whether they are incarcerated, deserve dignity and respect," Nader said. "The inadequate cooling mechanisms provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in the past offered no real protection to the individuals inside  human beings have been baked inside Texas prisons."

Ellison's ruling follows a nine-day injunction hearing in June during which inmates testified about sleepless, sweat-soaked nights in the dormitories and daytime heat that caused fainting and vomiting.

One inmate told the judge he had such a bad headache that it felt like an ice pick had been jammed into his brain.

The inmates described the heat as "debilitating," "unbearable," and "miserable," yet they told the judge the prison discouraged them from spending time in cooled respite areas by asking them to remain silent, shuffling them from room to room, or requiring them to go to the infirmary for rectal thermometer readings of their core body temperature.

The lawsuit was brought by six inmates at the minimum-security Pack Unit built in 1983, which houses a disproportionate number of geriatric inmates and more than 500 inmates with medical needs. According to witnesses, dozens of inmates at the facility use wheelchairs, walkers and canes. Half the prisoners are older than 50, and about 200 are over 65. Another 200 inmates are young and healthy, shouldering the bulk of the workload.

State prison officials provided documentation that 22 Texas inmates have died of heat stroke since 1998 caused by the unregulated indoor climate inside prisons. None of the deaths has occurred at the Pack Unit, prison officials said.

In 2016, 100 inmates suffered heat-related injuries across Texas, according to court documents.

From HoustonChronicle.com: County offers 900 air-conditioned beds for inmates suing over heat

The judge noted, however, that heat deaths are vastly under-reported, since people who die from heat exposure can have other contributing causes of death.

The judge noted that 142 Pack Unit inmates have coronary artery disease, 728 have hypertension, 212 have diabetes, 113 have asthma, 111 are medically obese and 66 take medications that compromise their bodies' ability to regulate heat. Hundreds of prison employees have also suffered heat-related illnesses, the judge said.

Dr. Susi Vassallo, a national expert on heat illness, testified at a previous hearing last year on the case that the indoor heat at the Pack dormitories posed a substantial risk of serious injury to residents, particularly to those who are vulnerable due to age, medical conditions or medication.

State officials argued that managing indoor heat has been a top priority, and that they provide respite areas, wellness checks, cold showers, fans and abundant ice water.

Ellison - noting that the state abandoned daily efforts to measure the heat index inside the Pack Unit - concluded the state has not done enough.

"Despite a significant risk of harm faced by the men at the Pack Unit, [prison officials] have done the bare minimum," Ellison wrote. "The mitigation measures put in place by TDCJ are insufficient to combat the substantial risk of serious injury or death faced by the inmates at the Pack Unit during the summer months."

The state is expected to present a plan to Ellison on Aug. 8.
One person is in the hospital with multiple gunshot wounds after shots were fired at a south Houston gas station, blocks away from elementary and middle schools early Wednesday.

Officers were called just after midnight to a Fuel Depot in the 7100 block of Scott, following reports of a shooting, said Capt. Megan Howard with the Houston Police Department.
Two women ride Mobikes in Manchester in the United Kingdom. [Photo/Xinhua]

China has witnessed a bike-sharing boom in the past two years. Colorful shared bikes on the streets, linking users with the public transit networks, have contributed a lot to solving the "last mile" problem.

Given the massive growth in usage, Chinese bike-sharing operators represented by Mobike and ofo have now started to expand into the global markets. However, the smart two-wheelers so popular at home are enduring a less smooth ride overseas.

Mobike began its global expansion by rolling into Singapore last March. However, in the past four months, only a small number of the silver and orange bikes have been deployed, and many ended up being confiscated because of illegal parking.

A local resident explained, "Shared bikes are not popular here, because it's too hot, and people don't really want to ride bicycles. Besides, the public transport is very convenient, so there is no need for such an alternative."

In addition, it is reported that some local Singaporean companies criticized ofo for alleged unethical competition and evading public space permit fees.

Bluegogo, another Chinese bike-sharing company, also encountered difficulties during its expansion into San Francisco. In a letter to Li Gang, the CEO of Bluegogo, earlier this year, the directors of several municipal departments pointed out the company had violated local laws and exclusive agreements other companies had signed.

However, shared-bike startups are being welcomed in British cities such as Oxford and Manchester. Louise Upton, a councilor of Oxford City Council spoke highly of bike-sharing, hoping more people would use them as an environmentally-friendly means of getting around.

Hellobike has entered the Japanese market lately, reaching cooperative agreements with a number of universities. "I like riding shared bikes, because my workplace is far from bus stops, and it's sweaty to walk there," said a local resident.

According to Zhang Siding, a co-founder of ofo, faced with fierce competition, bike-sharing operators rushed to fill the streets with their smart bikes to show potential investors the promising prospects of the program.

However, the mixed experience shows that while pursuing overseas development, bike-sharing companies have to take into account local laws, regulations and urban development plans if they want to see their bikes rolling smoothly through the streets, said Zhang Lidong, the editor-in-chief of the China Civil Entrepreneur magazine.
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A cold case spanning nearly 30 years just north of Houston will be the focus on Oxygen's "Cold Justice" this Saturday.

The show will dig into the murder of Mary Jane LeFlore, who was last seen alive on July 19, 1991. Last month, her husband Larry LeFlore was arrested in her murder.

THE CASE: After nearly 30 years, an arrest is made in a Huntsville cold case

Houstonians who tune in will see a familiar face on the show as former Harris County prosecutor Kelly Siegler is a host.

"I think people will be pleased to see we had a lot of cooperation," Siegler told Chron.com about her experience in the LeFlore case. "It's kind of crazy a story like this would happen so close to home to such a nice lady."

Detective Sgt. Ken Foulch of the Huntsville Police Department told Chron.com last month that Larry LeFlore found his wife's car in the parking lot of the West Hill Mall the day she went missing. He claims he saw wife leaving the parking lot in a van with someone else.

Larry LeFlore said he pursued the van, following it onto Interstate 45 south, heading toward Houston. He told police he went back to the mall after he couldn't keep up. He was convinced his wife was having an affair.

MYSTERY SOLVED: Illinois sheriff IDs another victim of John Wayne Gacy

Police didn't get a new lead in the case until February 1993, when a perspective land buyer found human remains on a lot near FM 3179, off Highway 30. Police identified the remains as Mary Jane LeFlore through dental records and her jewelry that was left at the scene.

Siegler and Foulch didn't say what evidence eventually led to the arrest of Larry LeFlore. Foulch did say investigators with "Cold Justice" helped the case significantly, turning up new leads and getting more people to talk to the police.

To find out more information on how police came to arrest Larry LeFlore, tune into Oxygen on Saturday at 7 p.m.

Click through the slideshow above to learn more about Mary Jane LeFloreand other Texas cold cases.
Days after Gov. Greg Abbott launched his 2018 re-election bid, a new poll shows a steep drop in his net approval rating, but he is still maintaining a comfortable position among the most popular governors in America.

Independent research surveying site Morning Consult examined 50 governors across the nation, ranking them by their approval and disapproval ratings. Abbott landed at No. 11 with a 60 percent approval rating and 27 percent disapproval rating.
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Austin police recently arrested a 35-year-old woman accused of abandoning her 2-year-old son under a busy overpass.

According to an arrest affidavit for 35-year-old mother Felix Marie Jimenez, police received a report of an infant sitting on a couch under the roadway.

When authorities arrived they witnessed the toddler running around and being chased by two homeless people. They told police the child's mother asked them to watch the young boy while she went to the store.

FIRST-DEGREE FELONY: Texas mother charged with injury to a child after her 7-month-old suffered hot-water burns

Police said both transients were intoxicated and told authorities they did not know the child's full name. Authorities said one of the transients had an active robbery warrant detailing that he was armed and dangerous.

Police said Jimenez had been gone for at least an hour before they arrived.

When she returned, police discovered multiple syringes with heroin residue inside her bag. Jimenez admitted to authorities she used heroin that morning.

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When the Austin Police Department's Victim Services was called to the scene, police said they found the child to be dirty, "saturated in urine," and wearing fleece pajama pants in 100-degree weather.

Jimenez was charged with child abandonment and jailed. Her child is currently in foster care, according to KXAN.

Click through above to see which Texas counties have the most cases of child abuse.
With no heavy hitters in the Texas Republican hierarchy emerging to challenge U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz for the party's nomination in 2018, a Houston energy attorney is stepping forward.

Stefano de Stefano, who bills himself as a jilted voter and "free market Republican," represents a challenge from the center of the Republican firmament, a demographic that has felt increasingly left out of the state's GOP.

READ ALSO: Senators, we've got 4,000 people on the line

A long shot against Texas' tea party champion?

"I have every citizen's chance in a democracy, although it doesn't hurt than I'm running against one of the most ineffective legislators in the Senate," de Stefano said in a statement. "There are millions of jilted voters like me across Texas. I believe, like many of my friends and colleagues, that we'd be better off with a Senator with the experience of negotiating million dollar deals in Texas' energy industry over someone like Cruz."

De Stefano, who supported Cruz in his 2012 Senate run, is now taking aim at the former presidential candidate as a national show horse rather than a Texas work horse. He says he will offer a "reasonable method of leadership" over an "extreme one."

READ ALSO: A senator who hates Ted Cruz more than life itself

A Cruz spokeswoman declined to comment on de Stefano's run Wednesday.

De Stefano cites Cruz's role in the 2013 government shutdown over funding for the Affordable Care Act and what he calls a history of promoting his personal brand over Texas interests.

As a first-time candidate, de Stefano plans to run on his own business record brokering deals in the world of oil and gas as a corporate counsel for Diamond Offshore, a deepwater drilling contractor.

READ ALSO: Ted Cruz makes strange request of 'Late Show' host Stephen Colbert

Among others who have been mentioned as potential Cruz primary challengers are Texas U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul and political analyst Matthew Dowd, a former strategist for George W. Bush.

Both have bowed out.

De Stefano's surprise announcement rolls out officially on Thursday via his campaign's Facebook page. He aims to scramble the calculus of what is otherwise shaping up as a general election faceoff between Cruz and Democratic hopeful Beto O'Rourke, a congressman from El Paso.

READ ALSO: Why are Cruz and O'Rourke spending time in places they are likely to lose?

The 36-year-old de Stefano, married with a 4-year-old son and two rescue dogs, said he's putting his legal career on hold to make his first foray into politics.
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China has established a high-level think tank to advise on the design of Xiongan New Area, a new economic zone about 100 kilometers southwest of Beijing.

The institution is affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

Following the success of the country's two economic zones in the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta regions, Xiongan will promote high-level coordinated development of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei and accelerate the formation of a world-class city cluster, said CASS President Wang Weiguang.

Xiongan will serve as a new home for Beijing's "non-capital" functions, and drive the development of neighboring Hebei Province, said Xiao Jincheng, a researcher with National Development and Reform Commission.

The area needs a new mode of property development and will become a pilot zone for the housing system with Chinese characteristics, said Ni Pengfei with CASS.

China announced in April plans to establish the Xiongan New Area. It covers Hebei's Xiongxian, Rongcheng and Anxin counties. Authorities are seeking advices worldwide to develop the area.

A total of 183 global design teams will compete for the right to design Xiongan New Area, after northern China's Hebei Province invited international bids in late June.

Some 12 design teams will be selected to proceed to the next round of onsite consulting with local government officials and experts, before they submit a design plan on Aug. 20.
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Hundreds of low-income Houstonians will get holes in their roofs, cracks in their foundations and faulty electrical wires repaired following City Council's extension of what has become known as the "blue tarp" program.

The council unanimously agreed Wednesday to provide an additional $4 million to a program that already has spent $3.5 million to help more than 400 homeowners during Mayor Sylvester Turner's tenure.

The idea was to remove the blue tarps from the roofs of many homeowners, though other repairs, such as electrical or heating and cooling repairs, also are covered under the initiative.

Councilman Dwight Boykins said he was thrilled some of his constituents in south Houston could no longer see the stars through the holes in the roofs at night.

Explore where blue tarps are most prevalent in Houston Houstons housing department has identified roughly 550 single-family homes covered by a blue tarp as of September. Click on each zip code to see how many of its homes are covered by a blue tarp. Created by Rebecca Elliott | Source: Houston Housing and Community Development Department

"Thank you," Boykins said, addressing his comments to the mayor. "Since you've been mayor you have addressed this issue dealing with tarps. There's been a major impact in my district."

The city's Housing and Community Development Department figures show that 614 applicants have been approved for the program as of mid-July, with 400 receiving roof repairs and 33 receiving other critical home repairs.

Of the $4 million the council appropriated, $2.3 million came from housing bonds that the city's economic development zones issued between 2001 and 2004.

As reported Sunday in the Chronicle, city officials appeared to lose track of more than $3 million of those funds for years, accumulating millions in unnecessary interest costs.

Councilman Robert Gallegos supported the item but offered a word of caution. Data Gallegos had received on the distribution of city-funded home repairs in the years before Turner took office showed his District I constituents benefited from the program far less often than those in many other districts.

"Trust me, I can find home of seniors and people with disabilities who need help in getting their homes repaired," he said. "I'm hoping that this program will be a lot more fair."
The property tax reforms that died in the Texas Legislature nearly two months ago have officially been revived.

Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, officially filed a bill that would block cities and counties from raising the effective tax rates above 4 percent in any given year unless voters agree in a referendum - a move Senate leaders are convinced will slow the pace of Texas' skyrocketing property taxes.

In the previous bill Bettencourt was trying to get through the Legislature in May, he proposed capping local governments at 5 percent. Currently counties and cities can raise their effective tax rate 8 percent, if it goes higher, taxpayers can petition for an election to rollback the rate -- something that rarely happens in Texas. Bettencourt said a key to his plan is to make is easier for voters to have a say when local governments raise taxes.

But that measure has received a cool reception in the Texas House, where Ways and Means chairman Dennis Bonnen, R-Angleton, said he does not have the votes to get the measure passed. Bonnen said he supports the cap on local governments but has questioned its effectiveness in really giving taxpayers much relief. In most of the state's largest counties, only a handful raised their effective tax rates by more than 4 percent, yet tax bills still went up.

Bonnen has been aggressively pushing another plan that would require cities and counties to better show taxpayers in mailings and online tools who is actually raising their taxes, by how much, and where to fight it.

Taxpayers now have little chance of knowing who is really raising their taxes because of how confusing the state's tax notification system is, Bonnen said.

More important than caps, he added, is arming homeowners with better information so they can protest tax increases with the government agency that is responsible for the increases.

Showing how important the legislation is to the Senate, leaders there have made the property tax bill Senate Bill 1 (SB 1).

School districts - were the bulk of property taxes go to fund -- would not be affected by Bettencourt's legislation.

Gov. Greg Abbott has demanded property tax reform be one of at least 20 items he has ordered the Legislature back into a special session to address. The 30-day special session started Tuesday.
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Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (L) awards the highest Palestinian medal to Chinese President Xi Jinping after their talks in Beijing, capital of China, July 18, 2017. (Xinhua/Yao Dawei)

China supports a political settlement of the Palestinian issue on the basis of the two-state solution, President Xi Jinping said Tuesday.

China supports Palestine in building an independent, full sovereignty state along the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, Xi said in his talks with visiting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Xi said the UN Security Council Resolution 2334 should be effectively implemented, and all the settlement-building on the occupied territories of Palestine should be immediately stopped.

The resolution, adopted on Dec. 23, 2016, condemned Israel's settlements on occupied Palestinian territory as illegal, and urged it to halt building.

Xi said measures should be taken to prevent violence against civilians and peace talks should be resumed as soon as possible to accelerate the resolution of the Palestine issue.

China is one of the first countries to support the just cause of the Palestinian people and to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian state, Xi said, calling both countries "good friends, partners and brothers."

In 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, which recognized the need to establish a Jewish state and an Arab state in the former British Mandate territory of Palestine.

The 1967 Middle East war resulted in Israel's occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. The last round of peace talks between Israel and Palestine halted in 2014, mainly due to the continuing expansion of Jewish settlements on the occupied territories of Palestine.

China will host a symposium on peace between Palestine and Israel later this year to contribute wisdom to resolving the Palestinian issue, Xi said.

He said China is willing to participate in and support all efforts that are conducive to a political settlement of the Palestinian issue.

"China proposes to launch a tripartite dialogue mechanism with Palestine and Israel to advance major projects to assist the Palestinian side," Xi said.

Xi reiterated that China will, "as always," support the just cause of the Palestinian people to restore their legitimate national rights.

Xi said China appreciates Palestine's adherence to the one-China policy. He said China will work with Palestine to give political support to each other, maintain high-level exchanges and promote cooperation in various areas.

China regards both Palestine and Israel as important partners under the Belt and Road Initiative, he said.

"China will support capable and qualified companies in carrying out investment cooperation in Palestine for mutual benefits and win-win results," Xi said.

The Belt and Road Initiative, proposed by President Xi in 2013, refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. It aims to build a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa, along and beyond the ancient trade routes.

Xi said China will cooperate with Palestine in industrial park development, personnel training and solar power plant construction to help the country improve its self-development capacity.

Xi called on both sides to strengthen exchanges in culture, education, science and technology, among others.

Thanking China for its support for the just cause of Palestine, Abbas said Palestine will continue to support the one-China policy and China's reunification.

Palestine admires China's achievements in economic and social development and is willing to have closer high-level exchanges with China and participate in the Belt and Road Initiative, Abbas said.

Palestine spoke highly of China's constructive proposals on promoting a political solution to the Palestine issue and hopes to see China play a greater role in Middle East peace process, Abbas said.

After the talks, the two heads of state witnessed the signing of cooperation documents ranging from diplomacy, economy and personnel training to culture.

Abbas awarded the highest Palestinian medal to Xi for China's support to the just cause of Palestine and to pay homage to Xi himself.

Thanking Abbas for the medal, Xi said it represents the importance Palestine gives to bilateral ties with China and the acknowledgement of China's fair stance on the Palestine issue.

China will unswervingly push forward relations with Palestine and the Middle East peace process, Xi said.

Prior to the talks, Xi held a red-carpet welcome ceremony for Abbas at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Abbas is on a state visit to China from July 17 to 20 at the invitation of Xi.
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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All-Conference WEC teams The All-Conference teams for the War Eagle Conference have been announced with multiple MMCRU and South OBrien volleyball players making...

Crane signs off, for now I miss my ol' buddy, sportscaster Keith Crane on the sidelines. I miss his friendly smile, his dedication to his...
Missouri became the final state to create a prescription drug-monitoring program after Republican Gov. Eric Greitens signed an executive order Monday aimed at combating a scourge that killed more than 900 residents last year.

The monitoring program could be operating within a month, Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services director Randall Williams said. Greitens signed the order following a news conference at Express Scripts, the St. Louis-based online pharmacy benefits manager that will help provide data analytics as part of the effort.

For many years, Missouri has been the lone holdout without a statewide program that tracks prescription drug scripts as part of the effort to combat doctor shopping and prescription opioid addiction. State lawmakers have considered drug monitoring programs each year but legislation has failed, largely because of privacy concerns about keeping medical information in a database.

Greitens said the Missouri program will focus on analyzing prescriber and pharmacy prescription and dispensing data and will not use private medical information of patients. It will track when prescription painkillers are prescribed and dispensed in an effort to crackdown on doctors and dispensers who are fueling the opioid crisis. Greitens said penalties for doctors intentionally overprescribing opioids could range up to criminal charges or loss of a medical license.

We have to look at this problem straight in the eye, and the fact is opioids are a modern plague, the governor said.

Greitens introduced parents who lost a son to an overdose just a month ago, then paused several seconds before speaking. His voice breaking, he said he lost a cousin to an opioid overdose last year.

Towns are being hollowed out, Greitens said. Families are being ripped apart.

He said that since lawmakers for years have failed to approve a program, his office looked at statutes and determined an executive order was legal. He noted that some other state PDMPs also were established through executive order.

Reaction from Republican lawmakers who have opposed PDMPs largely over privacy concerns was mixed.

State Rep. Kurt Bahr of St. Charles said his initial reaction is to question whether or not he has the legal authority for such an executive order, as well as if hes not violating some sort of separation of powers because we did not appropriate any funds for the PDMP. So I dont know if he can legally spend money thats not appropriated.

State Sen. Will Kraus of Lees Summit said hell be closely watching implementation of the new program.

As long as its not tracking honest, law-abiding citizens, I probably will not have a problem with this, Kraus said. When it goes to the point where it says, somebody who hasnt done anything wrong is going to have their information in a database, thats where I have concerns.

Eight relatives who have lost loved ones to overdoses attended the news conference, including Gee Vigna of OFallon, Missouri, whose 20-year-old daughter, Nicky, died over overdose on Jan. 3, 2013. Vigna said Nickys addiction began with prescription drugs before she moved on to heroin, the drug that killed her. Heroin is typically far less expensive than prescription drugs.

Once the addiction takes hold, theres a viable alternative users turn to, which is heroin, Vigna said. With heroin, you have no idea what youre getting on the streets.

Williams and Greitens believe Missouris approach could potentially become a national model because of the analytic abilities of firms like Express Scripts. Williams said other private companies have also expressed interest in participating.

Greitens is making a series of announcements this week to address drug use and drug trafficking. He is scheduled to be back in St. Louis Tuesday to discuss preventing overdose deaths; speak Cape Girardeau Wednesday on battling trafficking; host a summit on opioid addiction in rural areas on Thursday in Springfield; and discuss the impact of drug courts in Kansas City on Friday.

(AP reporter Summer Ballentine in Jefferson City, Missouri, contributed to this report.)

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Today at noon, Congress will take a break from the nation's business to attend to matters, perhaps, even more American -- July 19 is National Hot Dog Day.

For decades, on this day, more than 1,000 of the nation's lawmakers, Capitol Hill staff and administration officials gather in a courtyard of the Capitol for one of the biggest celebrations for the humble frank ever held.

And what better place to highlight America's favorite food than on the grounds of our nation's capitol?

At the lunch, hot dog companies serve their franks from traditional hot dog carts, many offering special recipes, which reflect their home states and districts.

If you are planning to celebrate with your own backyard cookout, cleveland.com's "Best of" team - along with a panel of hot dog aficionados - taste-tested 18 brands of store-bought hot dogs this summer to find which tasted the best.

See the full rankings from No. 18 to No. 1 before you head to the store.

If you don't want to heat up the grill, some national chains are celebrating today's holiday with specials to help you keep pace with the average 50 hot dogs eaten per year by every American, according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council.

Here's a list of national chains, found locally, with deals on dogs today:

7-Eleven: You can get a Big Bite Quarter Pound dog for $1.

Circle K: You can get a hot dog for $1.

Burger King: Participating locations are offering grilled hot dogs for 79 cents until July 31.

Pilot Flying J: Show the linked coupon for a free hot dog at participating Pilot travel centers July 19-26.

Sonic Drive-In: Get an All-American Dog or Chili Cheese Coney for $1. Mention the offer when ordering.

And finally, in honor of the holiday, toast your favorite wiener with a signature cocktail.

Jim Beam Bourbon and Vienna Beef Franks joined forces to create an infusion of the Classic Chicago Dog recipe with bourbon. Here's the recipe:

Pour a 750 mL bottle of Jim Beam White into a large jar and add two Vienna Beef Hot Dogs sliced into long quarters

Combine with 8 small sport peppers, 1 tablespoon relish and 1 teaspoon of celery salt.

Let the infusion sit in the refrigerator for 4-5 days

Strain the bourbon liquid

To create the cocktail:

Combine two parts of the infused bourbon with .75 parts fresh lemon juice and .75 parts simple syrup.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Advocacy groups are challenging the federal Environmental Protection Agency's decision to accept Ohio's assertion that its portion of Lake Erie does not meet the definition of impaired waters.

The Ohio EPA did not include the state's open waters on a list of impaired waterways when it submitted the list to the U.S. EPA last fall.

The federal EPA approved the list May 17 and both the state and federal agencies' decisions were met with criticism from environmentalists who say the designation is necessary to curb the encroachment of harmful algal blooms.

The Environmental Law & Policy Center and Advocates for a Clean Lake Erie contends in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that the federal EPA's decision violates the Clean Water Act. More confounding is that the list of impaired waterways the state of Michigan submitted to the federal EPA included its portion of Lake Erie, and the agency approved Michigan's list, the suit says.

The lawsuit asks a judge to force the federal EPA to rescind its approval of Ohio's list and to classify Lake Erie as impaired.

(You can read the full lawsuit here or at the bottom of this story.)

The EPA said in a statement that it is not appropriate to comment on pending litigation.

Lake Erie's most significant pollutants comes from fertilizers running off into the lake, primarily by way of the Maumee River in Toledo.

That pollution tainted the area's supply of drinking water in the past. In 2014, 400,000 Toledo area residents were temporarily without drinking water after harmful toxins from algal blooms fouled the water supply.

Ohio EPA Director Craig Butler told cleveland.com in May that the impaired waters designation is "immaterial." He noted that portions of the lake close to the Ohio shore, and include water intakes that supply drinking water to Toledo and elsewhere, were deemed federally impaired.

He also said Ohio, Michigan and Ontario already have a collaborative agreement that calls for reducing harmful nutrient runoff into the lake by 40 percent by 2025. While the agreement doesn't call for penalties if the goal is not met, Butler said the agriculture community in Ohio has been put on notice that failure will likely result in more forceful action.

Environmentalists disagree. The lawsuit filed Tuesday says "listing waters as impaired is an important first step in addressing pollution," as it then forces officials to develop a plan to restore the body of water.

"Without the impairment designation, Ohio is likely to continue relying on unenforceable, voluntary measures to reduce phosphorus pollution that won't do enough to fix the problem," Madeline Fleisher, the Environmental Law & Policy Center's staff attorney, said in a news release.

The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Helmick in Toledo.

A May budget document from President Donald Trump proposed eliminating $300 million worth of federal programs to clean up the Great Lakes, arguing they've received "significant" federal money and oversight and that state and local groups are capable of managing their welfare.

The U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee restored the money for the 2018 budget, but the budget has a long way to go before it is passed.
ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Florida -- Police in Florida arrested three Columbus residents after they left a 6-year-old boy at a rest stop along Interstate 95, reports say.

Now James Morey, 62, Charlene Pitts, 56, and Andrea Yantone, 55, all of Columbus, are facing drug charges after police discovered two syringes loaded with heroin, pill bottles with unknown pills, and a breath mint box containing tar heroin, empty syringes and a burnt spoon, the Columbus Dispatch reports.

All three were still being held in jail on Tuesday.

A Jacksonville, Fla., resident tells WJXT Channel 4 that the boy approached her car at the rest stop, crying and distraught, saying he was lost and could not find his grandparents.

The woman searched with the boy for his grandparents, then called 911. The Dispatch reports the woman was with the boy for about an hour. Reports say it's believed the boy is the grandson of Yantone. It's not clear if he's related to the other two suspects.

A St. Johns County deputy responded and attempted to reach the boy's grandparents by phone were unsuccessful.

The Dispatch reports the three suspects were in a car accident, then returned to the rest stop. It was then police noticed they appeared to be under the influence and searched their vehicle.

"I guess your first words are, how does that happen?" Ohio Detective Nate Schiffel tells abc6onyourside.com. "If I was traveling myself from here to Florida, I guess I don't see how I would end up accidentally leaving my kid at the rest stop."

Yantone, Morey and Pitts all were arrested on charges of possessing heroin with intent to sell or deliver, possessing a controlled substance without a prescription, possessing drug equipment and contributing to the delinquency or dependency of a child.

The child was placed in state custody, reports say.

If you would like to comment on this story, please visit Tuesday's crime and courts comments page.
PAINESVILLE, Ohio - A Mentor-on-the-Lake man was sentenced Monday to life in prison for repeatedly raping three girls over a 17-year-period.

Howard D. Shannon, 40, was found guilty last month of nine counts of rape and four counts of gross sexual imposition related to incidents that happened from 1999 to 2006, according to court records.

The youngest of the three girls was 5 years old when Shannon began sexually abusing her, Lake County Prosecutor Charles Coulson said.

Judge Vincent A. Culotta, who sentenced Shannon in Lake County Common Pleas Court, said he will not be eligible for parole for 76 years.

"This person should never get out of jail," Coulson said.

Defense attorney Meredith A. O'Brien declined to comment on the case, but said Shannon is "extremely disappointed" and plans to appeal the verdict.

The youngest of the three girls reported the abuse last year to the Madison Township Police Department, Coulson said. Shannon was indicted May 23, 2016 and arrested days later, court records show.

Shannon's criminal history also includes convictions for corruption of a minor, domestic violence and receiving stolen property, Lake County court records show.

To comment on this story, visit Tuesday's crime and courts comments page.
A Chinese company with gold-plated political connections is buying into a Canadian mountain. And not just any mountain: Grouse Mountain, whose ski slopes famously look down on Vancouver.

A skier on Grouse Mountain, Vancouver, Canada. Lijuan Guo Photography | Getty Images

The Shanghai-based China Minsheng Investment Group (CMIG) isn't buying the entire mountain of course, but the sale of the ski operation by the Canadian McLaughlin family does include 500 hectares of privately owned land. CMIG's pending purchase was revealed by the Globe and Mail last week. More from the South China Morning Post:

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Reports on Tuesday said CMIG was a 40 per cent stakeholder in the newly formed buyer, GM Resorts Limited Partnership. The CBC quoted a CMIG spokesman as saying it would be a "silent investor". The total asking price was C$200 million (US$159 million)  well below the threshold for federal foreign investment review - but the symbolic significance is obvious. With its ski slopes floodlit at night, Grouse is like a north star when viewed from below, a literal guiding light that can be seen from just about anywhere in Vancouver. From up top, the ski slopes and hiking trails boast incredible views of the city and sea. Grouse Mountain isn't world-famous like nearby Whistler - but it is Vancouver's mountain. Whistler, too, recently ended up in foreign hands, when US-based Vail Resorts bought Whistler Blackcomb Holdings for C$1.4 billion last October. So is this just the way of the world? Is the sale of Grouse to simply a more-modest version of the Whistler-Vail deal? This way of thinking betrays a polite kind of Canadian naivete that verges on the quaint. I'm not suggesting outrage is justified. Nor is the purchase demonstrably nefarious. However, even a cursory examination of what CMIG is all about suggests the Grouse deal is quite a different proposition to Whistler's sale, regardless of the "silent investor" protestation.

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Yes, CMIG is a privately owned firm, but it exists and was created at the pleasure of the Chinese state: CMIG sprang from the brow of Premier Li Keqiang when he ordered it created in 2014. Fifty-nine big Chinese firms dutifully stumped up 50 billion yuan (US$7.4 billion) in starting capital and it was away. So China Minsheng Investment cannot be understood purely as a product of market forces, at least, not as Canadians generally understand them. It serves Chinese government policy, and its goals, explicitly stated on its corporate website, are those of the state. "As a representative of Chinese private capital, CMIG serves the national 'Belt and Road Initiative' and 'Going Global' strategy, bringing out financial wisdom and industrial strength, focusing the power of capital, building a globalised industrial platform," it says, namechecking various government policies. "By fully utilising the technology, brand, and resource advantages of developed countries, and the tremendous opportunities of 'Going Global and Bringing in' brought by the development potentials of countries along the 'Belt and Road Initiative' route, CMIG guides Chinese private capital to go abroad together, and promotes industrial upgrading and economic transformation." Look beyond the jargon and the purpose of CMIG is clear. It's not just about profit. It's a tool of Chinese national strategy and economic development. This isn't always incompatible with Canadian priorities, public and private. But China Minsheng is most certainly not analogous to some US ski company, or to western investment firms that are creatures of supply and demand. On its website, CMIG extols the Communist Party, explaining that it was "90 years ago, thanks to a group of advanced Chinese intellectuals who spread Marxism on Chinese soil with Prometheus-like courage, our nation became independent and prosperous". "In the next stage of our work, we must actively display the vanguard and exemplary spirits of the Chinese Communist Party, realise the core values of 'Five Concepts, Four Senses and Three Loves' advocated by Chairman Dong [Wenbiao], and contribute to the development of China Minsheng Investment, and to the implementation of national strategies. "With the dream faraway, we are on the way." The polit-speak isn't unusual for a big Chinese company, but there should be no illusions about the company's role. The part purchase of Grouse cannot be viewed simply as a private firm, like any other, getting into the ski business. It's part of a global acquisitions strategy endorsed and guided by the Chinese state. In this respect, CMIG is the yin to Anbang Insurance's yang. Both firms took to foreign acquisition like it was a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos. The main difference is that Anbang's foreign activities  including the purchase of a chain of BC retirement homes, and Vancouver's Bentall Centre for a record-setting C$1billion  were apparently not conducted with the happy endorsement of the Chinese state, and Anbang's chairman Wu Xiaohui now sits behind bars for reasons unclear.

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If a millennial eats a meal but didn't Instagram it first, did it really happen?

London restaurant Dirty Bones is betting on young people's love of social media, testing a new business and marketing strategy to capture millennials' influence online as well as their dining dollars.

The restaurant's newest location is designed to be showcased on Instagram, from the menu to the decor. It even provides a free Instagram kit to help diners take better shots, reports Today.com.

"We're all about helping people capture that perfect shot," Cokey Sulkin, founder and director of operations at Dirty Bones tells Mic. "The people that typically visit Dirty Bones tend to be very active on social media, and on Instagram in particular."

It seems like a good plan: Fifty-four percent of millennials eat out at least three times a week, according to June 2017 data by Bankrate, and 51 percent say they go to bars at least once per week.

And they're certainly posting about it.
Former Utah Governor and former U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman participates in a discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations January 29, 2015 in Washington, DC.

President Donald Trump will nominate Jon Huntsman, an envoy to China under former Democratic President Barack Obama, as U.S. ambassador to Russia in an announcement expected later on Tuesday, the White House said.

The job, all the more high-profile because of allegations that Russia intervened in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, requires confirmation by the U.S. Senate.

If confirmed, Huntsman, who has long been expected to be Trump's pick for the job, will head to Moscow as Congress and a special counsel investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and allegations that Trump's campaign had ties to Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied the interference, and Trump has said there was no collusion with Moscow.

Huntsman, a former Utah governor, was U.S. ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011. He has served in the administrations of five U.S. presidents and was a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Trump has said he wants to improve relations with Russia.

The Republican president held two meetings with Putin in Germany at the gathering of G20 leaders there and officials said he raised the issue of Russian meddling in the election before moving on to other issues such as the war in Syria.

Reports in March that Huntsman would get the Moscow envoy post were greeted with mixed reviews in Moscow, with one politician saying he was "not a dove" and the Kremlin saying it

would welcome anyone who was a "convinced proponent" of establishing a dialogue with Russia.
In 1994, Peter Loughrey sat in a hospital bed at the National Institutes of Health with tubes running in and out of his body. He was being treated for a rare form of lymphoma, and the odds of his survival weren't good. "I swore if I got out of this, if I beat this lymphoma, I'm going to be the best art dealer I can be," he said. More than 20 years later, Loughrey runs Los Angeles Modern Auctions, or LAMA. Last year he auctioned off $12 million in art, earning commissions of around $2 million. Loughrey went from Hollywood stunt man to homeless guy to cancer patient to successful art entrepreneur, and the story is even weirder than it sounds.

Jeniece Pettitt | CNBC

From death wish to stunt man

Loughrey says his eye for art came through "osmosis," as his parents dragged him and his brother to galleries and antique stores while growing up outside Baltimore. He had no interest in making art a career. "I came out to Los Angeles ostensibly to become a stunt man." He had been a daredevil as a kid, and his mother was so concerned about his "death wish," she sent him to a psychiatrist. "The psychiatrist told me about Mike Tyson," he said. The doctor explained how Tyson found the right people to guide his talent for fighting into something he could do for a living. "What does that have to do with me?" Loughrey asked. The doctor replied, "Well, you're crazy about driving cars and wrecking cars. Maybe you could be a stunt man." For Loughrey, "a lightbulb went off in my head," so he told his mother, "Mom, I didn't want to see this guy, but you're so right. I'm dropping out of school and going to L.A. to be a stunt man." His mother was not pleased.

From Hollywood to homeless

Like many before him, Loughrey learned it's difficult to succeed in Hollywood when you don't know anyone. He made a little money doing stunt work, but it was boring, and he was broke. He was living in a van in Marina del Rey, where he managed to get a key to a boathouse shower. He'd spend his days relaxing by the pool at a nearby apartment complex. Even though he was homeless, "I lived better than many millionaires," he said. He also had a lot of free time on his hands, and he started thinking about his knowledge of art. "I found that out here, a lot of people didn't know what antiques were and what a good antique was, and I started trusting my eye and buying things and flipping them." People in Beverly Hills would leave discarded furniture on the sidewalk once a month for a truck to pick up. "I would just get there before those trucks did," he said. "This was before 'Antiques Roadshow,' before eBay. It was before anybody really knew what to do with an old vintage piece." Loughrey's brother, Joe, was also in Los Angeles by then, so he would store pieces he found in Joe's garage (or his own van) until he could find a dealer to buy them. "You could find things by Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Eames," he said. "People were still throwing these things away."

Jeniece Pettitt | CNBC

Eventually, the two brothers opened their own gallery. When they built up too much inventory, Loughrey held his first auction when he was just 24 years old. "The first auction was standing room only," he said. "I had to place a porter out on the sidewalk to take bids and then yell them in the front door." Another light bulb went off. "I immediately knew, 'Wow, I don't want to do retail anymore. I want to be an auctioneer.'" But the gallery closed in 1993, when Joe died of AIDS. It was time to figure out the next act.

From health scare to happiness

What happened next included a strange detour when Loughrey became a marketing director for a medical device company in Philadelphia. "My father had invested in the company, and I was on a conference call because I gave him an idea," Loughrey said. The company was seeking FDA approval for a heart rate monitor, but approval was taking a long time, and the company needed to make some money. "I said, 'Well, can you use it on animals?'" Turned out the heart rate monitor didn't need FDA approval for animal use, and the product suddenly found a lucrative market from pets to racehorses. "They wound up selling a tremendous number of units." Then, 10 months after moving to Philadelphia to join the company, Loughrey was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma, which landed him at the National Institutes of Health. That is where he reconnected with a childhood friend who was working as a budget analyst there. They would soon fall in love. "When Peter was in the hospital, he had a poster on his wall," Shannon Loughrey remembers. It was a poster of a thousand chairs, and she recalls him explaining to her the characteristics of each one. "I would see the passion, and I would see his interest in modern design. ... I kept trying to encourage him, 'You should go back to do this.'" He did. With her. He beat cancer, and they got married.

From dismissed to respected

In 1995, he and Shannon came back to Los Angeles. She soon got a job to pay the bills while he spent $20,000 of their money to set up Los Angeles Modern Auctions. There was less competition for art auctions on the west coast, and he was optimistic. However, they couldn't make any money. The market did not yet appreciate the Mid-Century Modern era as much as Loughrey did. "I would be making somewhere between $25,000 and $60,000 (in commissions) on an auction, but that auction would cost me $80,000 to $100,000 to produce." More than once Shannon came home from work to find their couch missing. "Peter's like, 'Oh yeah, someone came over and I sold it. But look, we have this money!' And I'm like, 'But where's my couch?'" Then the internet happened. "All of a sudden, it wasn't just a couple hundred enthusiasts locally, it was thousands globally." By 1999, LAMA was turning a profit.

Jeniece Pettitt | CNBC

Over the past two decades, the Loughreys have auctioned off more than $100 million in art. About 10 years ago they moved into their current large warehouse in the San Fernando Valley, a building where Stan Winston used to build dinosaurs for "Jurassic Park" and created the Iron Man suit. "We've never had any debt, never taken any outside investment," Loughrey said. His reputation as an expert skyrocketed a few years ago when he proved a painting by New York pop artist Keith Haring was real. Art verification authorities didn't believe it. Then Loughrey discovered a thumbprint in wet paint on the back of the painting. Haring had been arrested several times in the '80s for putting up posters in New York subways, so Loughrey petitioned the NYPD for a copy of the artist's fingerprints. He succeeded, and a forensic expert pronounced the thumbprint a perfect match. "That was fun."

The next wave
Waiting, she says, will pay off in the long run.

"I know not everyone's going to agree on my advice on this," she says, "but here's the advice I give my own kids: If the salary is within 10 to 15 percent of what you had in your head, say, 'Yes, thank you. I'm excited. I can't wait.'"

The prevailing wisdom says you should negotiate, but according to bestselling management author and CNBC contributor Suzy Welch , the prevailing wisdom is wrong.

Do you accept the given number or negotiate for higher pay?

You've just landed a coveted job at a new company and the hiring manager presents the organization's offer for your starting salary.

Data shows women negotiate less often than men, and earn less money as a result. But Welch says that asking for a raise at the start could come across as greedy, and Harvard research underscores that women are particularly vulnerable to this scrutiny.

"You want to walk in as a team player and be the person who believes that pay comes with performance," Welch says.

Failing to do so can hurt your career. One woman who Welch describes as "talented" pushed for a 3 percent raise when starting at a new company. But she struggled to settle in and sensed that people were "cold to her in meetings."

"It wasn't worth it," Welch says. Waiting for a raise isn't just to avoid backlash. It's also strategic, and "positions you perfectly for asking and getting a significant raise after you've done great work."

Instead of asking for more money to begin with, Welch says you should set up a meeting with your boss six months into the new role. Be sure to emphasize your shared goals and how you've contributed to the team's success. Explain how you've not only succeeded but over-delivered. Then say, "I hope that will be recognized in my compensation."

Holding off several months gives you that extra time to show your boss that you recognize pay is performance-driven, as well as build your case for getting a raise. You'll be more likely to get a larger raise, too.

"Go in with good will, do a great job," she says, "and in the long run  and usually in the short run too  you'll see the real reward."

Suzy Welch is the co-founder of the Jack Welch Management Instituteand a noted business journalist, TV commentator and public speaker. If you have questions about your own career, email her at gettowork@cnbc.com.

Video by Mary Stevens.

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More from Suzy Welch:
Jia Yueting, founder and CEO of LeTV speaks on the releasing conference of LeTV October 27, 2015 in Beijing, China.

Embattled Chinese internet conglomerate LeEco has been branded a "Ponzi scheme" in an online comment made and endorsed by some of the country's leading lights in technology.

The debt-ridden group of technology companies founded by billionaire Jia Yueting declined to comment on the scathing critique posted by Tencent co-founder Zeng Liqing, and "liked" by the company's chairman Pony Ma Huating, and Xu Xiaoping, one of China's foremost angel investors.

"It [LeEco] is obviously a Ponzi scheme. You don't belong in the investment market or entrepreneurial world if you can't see that," wrote Zeng, co-founder and advisor emeritus at Tencent Holdings, one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

His damning appraisal was made at the weekend in a post on WeChat, Tencent's ubiquitous social media app. Ma and Xu later "liked" the post.

When contacted by the Post about Zeng's remark, Chen Xuanyi, a spokesman for LeEco, said the company had "no comment" to make.

The latest blow to LeEco  once a high-flying technology empire with a bright future  comes as it battles to stay afloat amid a mountain of debt, huge losses and court orders freezing its assets.

Its crisis has spilled into its Shenzhen-listed arm, Leshi Internet Information & Technology Corp, which said on Tuesday its shares will remain suspended for up to another three months.
In July, President Donald Trump walked out of a working session on Africa at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg.

In April, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson invited African Union chief Moussa Faki to Washington, and then backed out of the meeting at the last minute. And in March, the administration released a budget blueprint that one analyst says would "slash and burn" development programs in African nations.

In the battle for influence in Africa, policy experts say the United States is losing.

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The continent of 1.2 billion has never garnered enough attention from the U.S. and its Western allies, experts say, but Trump's administration seems especially indifferent. If the U.S. doesn't prioritize this rapidly growing bloc of countries soon, it will be too late  Africa will have moved on to other partners who will.

Trump's proposed 2018 budget would cut funding for humanitarian aid by about 30 percent, shifting the focus from assistance to national security in developing nations. While it is unlikely Congress will approve the cuts, policy experts say these actions send a strong message to one of the most aid-dependent regions in the world: You are not a priority.

It's a strong deviation from the last Republican president , George W. Bush, whose administration launched the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) that is credited with saving nearly 12 million lives. And while former President Barack Obama's Africa policies fell somewhat short of expectations, he did continue many of Bush's measures and added a few of his own, including the Power Africa initiative to increase electricity access in sub-Saharan Africa.

But former Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle said the Trump administration is "asleep at the wheel" in its dealings with Africa at a panel hosted last week by the progressive think tank Center for American Progress.

"The most disturbing thing is they are looking beyond us at this point," Reuben Brigety, former U.S. representative to the African Union, said at the panel. "As [African countries] are getting their act increasingly together They are no longer waiting for us to figure out what we may be doing."

With the Trump administration's proposed department restructuring, the Defense Department would absorb many of the civic duties of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which together provided more than $8 billion in assistance to Africa in 2015. By relying on a security posture, experts say the U.S.'s capacity to curb famine and conflict and promote development will be severely limited.

"You cannot have a foreign policy in the most diverse continent on earth that is entirely a security-driven policy," says Richard Downie, acting director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Africa Program. "If you do so, it will just become a reactive, expensive and ultimately pointless exercise where you're just firefighting from one crisis to another."

The massive continent should not be overlooked, experts say, because how this bloc of countries develops will shape global events in the future. Over the next 35 years, Africa will account for more than half of the world's population growth, and Nigeria will surpass the U.S. as the third most populous country in the world, according to United Nations estimates. More than 40 percent of sub-Saharan Africa still lives in poverty, presenting its own set of economic, humanitarian and security challenges for both Africa and global players such as the U.S.

The U.S.'s economic influence has been waning in Africa for years, driven by a decrease in crude oil exports from the continent that began in 2011. The African Growth and Opportunity Act, which was signed into law under former President Bill Clinton and promotes Africa's integration into the global economy, was renewed in 2015, yet sub-Saharan African exports to the U.S. decreased by about $8 billion that year, according to U.S. Census data .

Meanwhile, as China's economy has skyrocketed in recent decades, it has shored up its efforts in Africa. China has expanded trade and infrastructure projects, increased its commitment to peacekeeping missions and strengthened its military presence on the continent. Just last week, China sent two Navy warships to Djibouti to establish its first overseas naval base.

China is viewed more favorably in sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else, according to a global poll released last week by Pew Research Center. And while the U.S. is still largely considered the world's economic superpower, Africans have experienced some of the steepest drops in confidence in recent years about the U.S.'s global economic position.

Until the continent has further developed its economy, African nations will have to partner with whomever is available, experts say.

"If an African country can't get what it wants from the West, particularly I'm thinking in terms of arms, it can turn to China as an alternative supplier," says John Campbell, former ambassador to Nigeria and current fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "On a political level, it can also try to play the Chinese card, if Western partners are being, from their perspective, difficult."

Western countries have criticized China's controversial business practices in Africa, and say Beijing fails to promote democracy and human rights in repressive countries such as Sudan, Guinea and Zimbabwe while reaping the benefits of their economic partnerships. In 2009, for example, a private Chinese bank with government ties signed a $7 billion deal with Guinea about one month after military leader Moussa Dadis Camara seized power and backed the mass slaughter and rapes of unarmed protesters.

"Many African governments like to work with the Chinese because it's traditionally been a strictly business-to-business relationship," Downie says. "There's been less conditionality in types of support that the Chinese  especially the state-backed companies  [have] offered to governments."

China's noninterference approach has shifted in recent years as Beijing increases its security presence in Africa, but Brigety and others say it is still vitally important that the U.S. and its allies push their values of democracy and honest government on this bloc of developing nations.

"It doesn't matter what part of government you look at, it just makes sense to be engaged," Downie says, adding that he is not sure the Trump administration will push those values on foreign partners. "And with a continent of 54 countries, if the U.S. wants to advance its interest in the world  that's a lot of folks in the U.N., for example  working those diplomatic relationships is important. And that means being physically there, being engaged, trying to assert those values."

While Campbell says it will be several years before Africa's economic opportunities are fully realized, the U.S. is positioning itself poorly for the future by not fostering a strong relationship with the continent now.

Campbell and Brigety agree that the Trump administration will have to do a "complete 180 from where it is right now" in order to mend ties with Africa. If that does not happen, Brigety says, U.S. businesses, universities and non-governmental organizations will have to take the initiative to strengthen ties with Africa so that "when we get to a point where our government is ready to build those contacts again, we'll not be as far behind as we might otherwise be."
IBM 's stock is poised to fall 18 percent and the company's AI supercomputer, Watson, won't move the needle, Jefferies' James Kisner told CNBC on Wednesday.

The iconic technology company's stock fell Tuesday after it reported revenue was down year over year for the 21st-straight quarter, off by more than 4 percent. The stock was down about 3.5 percent premarket Wednesday, trading below $149 a share.

"The company missed some opportunities. If they had acquired Salesforce years ago, that might have been something they could do," Kisner said on "Squawk Box."

Kisner has an underperform rating on the stock and a 2018 price target of $125. That would be an 18 percent decline from Tuesday's closing price of $154 a share.

In response, an IBM spokesperson said: " Watson is the world's leading AI platform for business. No other company has the scope of enterprise AI engagements as IBM, from 50 hospital systems around the world deploying Watson for Oncology, to companies such as H&R Block, GM and Credit Mutuel leveraging Watson to transform their customer experience."

IBM has struggled over the past five years to grow revenues as it transitions from traditional business tools, like mainframes, to new fields like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and cloud.

On Tuesday, Martin Schroeter, IBM's senior vice president and chief financial officer, told CNBC the company is always looking for "profit pools" in enterprise technology.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett and others who like the stock have , Watson, as a valuable experiment.

But Kisner said the supercomputer won't "move the needle."

"The whole cognitive software market for artificial intelligence was $1.5 billion last year. As we spoke to a lot of industry contacts and customers, and competitors, they all had the same sort of comment: IBM is an expensive solution," he argued.

--CNBC's Anita Balakrishnan contributed to this report.
Apple has created a major new executive role in China and appointed the head of its wireless technologies unit to run it, reporting to CEO Tim Cook as the technology giant struggles with falling sales in the world's second-largest economy.

Isabel Ge Mahe will take up the new role of vice president and managing director of Greater China, Apple said in a statement late Tuesday. Ge Mahe is moving from her role as vice president of wireless technologies to take up the new job, which is based in Shanghai.

The executive will report to Cook and Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams.

Apple's move comes at a time when the world's second-largest smartphone maker by market share grapples with stricter regulation in China and struggling iPhone sales. In the quarter ended April 1, Greater China revenues fell 14 percent year on year, though iPhone sales were up 1 percent, pointing toward a slight recovery.

Local Chinese brands like Oppo, Vivo and Huawei have posed a big challenge to Apple in China, taking away market share. But Apple is hoping its upcoming device releases, especially the souped up iPhone 8 anniversary edition phone, will win back Chinese consumers.

Cook still sees China as a crucial market.

"We continue to be very enthusiastic about our opportunity in China," Cook said in Apple's fiscal second quarter earnings call.

Technology firms in China also have to grapple with ever-changing regulations, something that Apple has felt the effect of. Last year, for example, Apple's iBooks and iTunes Movies services were shut down.

But Apple has been making moves to appease regulators. Last week, Apple said it is setting up its first data center in China to comply with stricter cybersecurity laws that were introduced in June.

In Ge Mahe's role heading the wireless team, she focused on the development of cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, location, and other technologies for many of Apple's products. She has also overseen the engineering teams developing Apple Pay, HomeKit and CarPlay.

In China, she worked with Apple's research and development teams to develop features specifically made for that market.

In a statement released, Ge Mahe hinted that her role would include working with government, something that Apple increasingly needs to do.

"Everyone at Apple is proud of the contributions we make to the communities where we do business, and I am looking forward to deepening our team's connections with customers, government and businesses in China to advance innovation and sustainability," Ge Mahe said.

Ge Mahe, who is fluent in Mandarin, will begin the role later this summer.

"Apple is strongly committed to invest and grow in China, and we are thrilled that Isabel will be bringing her experience and leadership to our China team," Cook said in a statement.
Investors may worry about what is causing the stock market's monster rally, but Jim Cramer insists that it is all about boring stocks like financial technology player Equifax .

Shares of Equifax, one of the country's three biggest credit reporting agencies, have been on fire, rallying almost 20 percent in 2017 and far outpacing the index over the last five years.

How? Equifax makes money from the fees it collects from banks for checking customers' credit scores, selling software to help banks do that, providing workforce solutions for companies' human resources departments, and selling subscription-based credit monitoring and identity theft protection to individual consumers.

The company also uses data and analytics technologies to provide unique insights on over 820 million consumers and over 91 million businesses around the world.

"If all of this sounds really dull, that's because it is. If you want to put someone to sleep, start a conversation about credit scores," the "Mad Money" host said. "However, this market loves dull. Equifax is exactly the kind of boring, slow-and-steady company that's been embraced by Wall Street lately."

Founded over 100 years ago, Equifax's stock has caught fire lately thanks to the company's accelerating revenue growth and consistently rising operating income.

The growing importance of data has helped the agency sustain its growth levels, as consumer lending platforms like SoFi and LendingClub, which use computer algorithms to streamline lending, pop up across public and private markets.

"But these algorithms only work if they have huge piles of data, and the best data you can find here is the kind of consumer credit info that's Equifax's bread and butter. And it's not just the banks," Cramer said. "These days, everybody wants to see your credit score, from car deals to phone companies to advertising agencies who want to ... do more targeted marketing."

That is how Equifax, along with its competitors TransUnion and Experian, has had such a strong run. Add in Equifax's good management team, which has pursued growth at nearly every turn and made a series of small but smart acquisitions, and Cramer is a big fan of its story.

Equifax will issue its quarterly earnings report next Thursday. Last quarter, the stock pulled back slightly despite a strong report when management gave somewhat conservative guidance, so Cramer thinks earnings might provide an opportunity for investors to get into Equifax.

"Here's the bottom line: this rally is not just about the stocks of sexy, high-profile companies like FANG," the "Mad Money" host said, referring to his acronym for the red-hot stocks of Facebook , Amazon , Netflix and Google, now Alphabet . "It's about boring, slow and steady companies that just don't get enough appreciation from investors, or certainly from the media. Stocks like Equifax. I think there's more upside here. My recommendation is that you buy only a little at these levels just in case the stock pulls back after Equifax reports next Thursday, at which point I would be more aggressive if it came in.
In a market practically devoid of mergers, Jim Cramer was excited to see news of two deals emerge on Tuesday: a potential deal between Discovery and Scripps Networks Interactive and spice company McCormick buying Reckitt Benckiser's food division.

"While the potential Discovery-Scripps deal, at about $10 billion is more than twice the size of the $4.2 billion food transaction ... these are happening for similar reasons. Companies, afraid of losing their relevance and their clout, are merging with their peers or rivals in order to produce stronger entities with more appeal to their masters, meaning their distributors and their ultimate customers," the "Mad Money" host said.

To understand why these two deals are so similar, Cramer compared the companies' distribution methods. Just like you walk through aisles of a supermarket to find products, you scroll through cable offerings to find things to watch.

Cramer argued that the center of the supermarket, where slow-growth brands are often stored, is similar to the extra content in your cable bundle that comes with what you already like to watch.

"So along come some willing acquirers who have no choice but to try to break out of their not-so-hot areas and broaden distribution because, ultimately, their markets are challenged by new buyers," Cramer said. "Millennials just aren't interested in canned and bottled food or evergreen programming like their parents were."

Scripps, which owns HGTV and the Food Network, will likely rely on Discovery, the parent of TLC and Animal Planet, to broaden its distribution. However, shares of Scripps surged 16 percent on Tuesday when news broke that rival network Viacom was also considering a bid.

While McCormick's $4.2 billion purchase of Reckitt Benckiser's French's Mustard, Frank's Red Hot and Cattlemen's Barbecue Sauce brands seemed expensive to Cramer, he understood the move.

"As I see it, millennials like adding stuff to food that has spice but doesn't make you fat so you can still look your selfie best. Mustard and hot sauce have a lot fewer calories than, say, mayo or butter," he said. "[The brands] do fit with the company's understanding that these days, people want to stay home and cook using McCormick's spices and a whole slew of condiments."

And while millennials might have little use for HGTV since they are buying fewer homes, they do cook, and while cable is a difficult business, Cramer thinks Scripps and Discovery could just be each others' saving graces.

"So don't think of these deals as growth-makers," Cramer said. "They're defensive deals done to stay relevant in a difficult marketplace where every way that you used to get customers is now up in the air, while merchandise and channel loyalties are at an all-time low. And going forward, I bet we see a lot more mergers of this similar path."
Andrew Liveris, CEO of Dow Chemical speaking at the Innovation Summit in Brooklyn, New York on July 14th, 2017.

Even though President Donald Trump loudly withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, one of his advisors said the break may not be permanent.

"I do believe we will find a way back to [the Paris Agreement]," said Andrew Liveris, Dow Chemical CEO & chairman, addressing a small crowd at the New Lab in Brooklyn.

Liveris, head of Trump's manufacturing council, spoke Friday at the DS Virgin Innovation Summit in New York, an event to promote sustainable technology. The event was held a day before the start of the NYC ePrix  the city's first motorsport race in modern history  a fully electric single-seater race.

Liveris commented on what he sees as massive policy failures in both government and the investing community.

"[Businesses are] in a 90-day march to make profits," Liveris said. "If I talk about something that has a solution two or three years from now, no investor will be interested. The investment community in this area is minor and without a voice. The investment community of not investing for the future is loud and demanding of profits. We are doing this to ourselves."

In his view equity markets have been rewarding short-term results over forward-thinking initiatives.

He also said too many people have been left out of the conversation on the three biggest forces changing our world: globalization, digitalization and sustainability.

Sir Richard Branson, who also participated in the discussion, called the Trump administration's position on the Paris Agreement "incredibly bizarre" and said Trump may be regretting his decision to withdraw from it.

A day before Branson spoke in New York, Trump suggested during a visit to Paris that he may ease his opposition to the climate agreement.

"Something could happen with respect to the Paris accords, let's see what happens," Trump told a news conference. "If it happens, that will be wonderful, and if it doesn't, that'll be OK too."
Elon Musk says his plan to dig tunnels under Los Angeles is a "low stress activity" because "everyone expects it to fail."

Musk was at the International Space Station (ISS) Research & Development Conference in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, where he also said the knowledge they gain from tunneling under Los Angeles might be useful in developing digging technology for mining ice and minerals on Mars.

Musk hopes to send a SpaceX lander within the next few years to the Red planet. Though Earth and Mars are extremely different, there may be some lessons that can carry over.

As SpaceX has found clever ways of reducing the cost of launching rockets into space, the Boring Company will aim to reduce the currently prohibitive costs of tunneling.

Musk said money can be saved by reducing the diameter of the tunnels  they would only need to be large enough to fit cars and trucks  increasing the speed of the boring machine, and reducing machine downtime.

Despite skepticism, Musk said on Twitter in June that he had had a "promising" meeting with L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti about securing permits for his planned subterranean streets.

Musk

He later said the machine has begun working at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

Musk
While rival cryptocurrency has grabbed most of the attention, briefly tripling in value this year, ethereum 's value has run up a few thousand percent. The digital currency was officially launched on July 30, 2015, and some believe the ethereum network's ability to support applications could pave the way for a new, decentralized internet.

Ethereum's presence has grown rapidly in wealthy regions of the world in the two years since the full launch of the digital currency.

On Tuesday, Peter Szilagyi, head of an ethereum development team, tweeted Google Earth images showing the global spread of ethereum nodes, or computers participating in the ethereum network by executing and recording all transactions in what is known as the blockchain.

Szilagyi created the images by converting the computer Internet Protocol addresses from ethernodes.org into geographic locations and plotting them on Google Earth. He added that the ethernodes project may not include every single node, but the data is "the best we currently have."

So far, the images show ethereum nodes are more prevalent in the developed world.

"If you compare the wealthier regions like US and EU vs. the poorer regions like Asia and South America," Szilagyi said in an email to CNBC, "you'll see that node density seems to go hand in hand with connectivity, industrialization and wealth. My best bet as to why the discrepancy is that running a full Ethereum node is resource intensive."

Ethereum nodes in Europe

Source: Peter Szilagyi, Google Earth, ethernodes.org

Central Europe is by far the most packed for the nodes. That's not surprising since the Ethereum Foundation and many other digital currency firms are based in Switzerland.

"Central Europe does seem a bit more saturated than the U.S. for example (without looking at actual numbers)," Szilagyi said. "That might be because Ethereum's development team is mostly based in Europe, so we've had a bit more exposure to Ethereum before it began to spread globally."

Ethereum nodes in Asia

Source: Peter Szilagyi, Google Earth, ethernodes.org

In mid-June, digital currency enthusiasts speculated about a "flippening," a term used to describe the time when ethereum's market capitalization would surpass bitcoin's.

The two currencies came close to that event on June 13, when ethereum had roughly 33 percent of digital currency market capitalization, while bitcoin had about 40 percent.

However, ethereum dropped after some initial coin offerings clogged its network. Ethereum also briefly plunged from above $300 to 10 cents on one exchange in a flash crash on June 21.

As of Wednesday afternoon, ethereum had about 25 percent of digital currency market cap, while bitcoin had 45 percent.

That said, Szilagyi said comparing ethereum nodes to bitcoin nodes is like "apples vs. oranges."

"The underlying assumptions about them are different, people's expectations of them are different," he said.

Digital currency market cap, year to date

Source: CoinMarketCap
Ian Bremmer, president of the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, told CNBC on Wednesday he reported on a second, undisclosed G-20 meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin because "nobody else was going to break it."

Saying he's not in the business of breaking news, Bremmer told "Squawk on the Street" he decided to talk about it Monday evening with Bloomberg's Charlie Rose to have a longer conversation as opposed to just making headlines. After that, the story went national.

Trump-Putin had a 2nd private discussion at the G20...for an hour. Really? Really. I discuss with @charlierose.

In a note to Eurasia clients Monday morning, Bremmer first disclosed the G-20 dinner meeting between Trump and Putin, which took place on July 7, just hours after the two leaders held their formal, two-hour bilateral meeting at the summit in Germany.

The White House on Tuesday confirmed the second meeting, describing the encounter as "a brief conversation at the end of a dinner."

Bremmer took issue with that characterization, and indicated others knew about the meeting.

The dinner meeting "might have been 55 minutes," he told CNBC. "The people I talked to weren't timing. It wasn't five minutes. Brief implies it's five minutes or 10 minutes."

In details from the Eurasia note, Bremmer wrote about the sequence of events, according to his sources.

Halfway in [the dinner], Trump gets up from his seat, sits next to Putin, and spends roughly an hour talking privately and animatedly with the Russian president, joined only by Putin's own translator. ... Several notable pieces here. One, that Trump didn't bring in his own translator  a breach of national security protocol Trump likely wouldn't be aware of, but that significantly advantages the meeting towards Putin.

In a late Tuesday tweet, Trump angrily responded the story.

"Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!"

The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!

Bremmer told CNBC he didn't think the meeting was "sinister" either, but said it showed a lack of experience and indifference on the part of Trump.

"He's going to get played. He's going to get played. That's the concern," he said.

On Wednesday morning, Bremmer tweeted his conclusions.

Tweet: Bremmer

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Newly inaugurated French President Emmanuel Macron arrives on the Champs-Elysees after his handover ceremony on May 14, 2017, in Paris, France.

France's head of the armed forces resigned Wednesday citing cuts to the military's budget under new President Emmanuel Macron. The move is the culmination of a public spat between the two men.

In his resignation statement, translated by Reuters, General Pierre de Villiers said that: "In the current circumstances I see myself as no longer able to guarantee the robust defense force I believe is necessary to guarantee the protection of France and the French people." De Villiers' statement also detailed that Macron had accepted his resignation.

Last week, De Villiers used expletive language to express his dissatisfaction at the 850 million euro slash to France's defenses budget. "I may be stupid, but I know when I am being had," he said, according to sources unnamed by Reuters. His dissatisfaction came as France prepared to host U.S. President Donald Trump and display its military might on the national holiday of Bastille Day.

Macron responded with a firm hand, saying "I have made commitments, I am your boss," in a routine address to the French army Thursday. Though in a move that would mollify the military, he also announced that defense spending would rise from 2018.

Tension over Macron's proposed budget restructuring has been simmering in France in recent days. Earlier this week, leader of the Fifth Republic said that local authorities are expected to save 13 billion euros by 2022.

Macron's election campaign outlined his aim to shave 60 billion euros off French public spending in the five years that he would be in office. He also intends to rein in the country's fiscal deficit to below 3 percent of gross domestic product, in line with European Union rules. The euro zone's second largest economy is currently stuttering under high public debt and a swollen state.

Macron appointed General Francois Lecointre to be France's new military chief later Wednesday.

The French military is usually silent on political issues, and is known colloquially as "la grande muette," meaning "the great mute." De Villiers' noisy departure is rare.

Macron has in the past employed the symbolism of the French military to boost his profile as president, for example riding down the Champs-Elysees in a military vehicle at his inauguration.

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An employee works inside the cockpit of a C-17 Globemaster III military cargo jet being manufactured for the Indian Air Force.

Global defense exports could be set to slip for the first time in at least seven years, according to the latest findings from research firm IHS Markit.

"For the first time we are forecasting a decline in our expectations for the global defense export market," said Ben Moores, senior analyst at Jane's by IHS Markit, in a press release Wednesday.

"This is happening for a number of reasons including falling energy prices, increasing domestic production and the world simply pausing for breath after such a long run of increases."

The company says that weakening defense export order backlogs - orders placed but yet to be delivered - are suggesting that there could be a contraction in the market by 2018.
Ahead of Microsoft 's quarterly earnings report due out on Thursday after the market close, one macro strategist is marking the stock as a buy.

The legacy technology company has seen a strong long-term trend, said Boris Schlossberg, managing director of foreign exchange strategy at BK Asset Management. Even if Microsoft sees a short-term decline here, it's still going to present a good buying opportunity as a good "relative value bet," he said Wednesday.

"One of the key things to watch for is how successful Microsoft is going to be in the future in converting consumers to a subscription model. Generally, most of the analysts expect Microsoft to come in strong in this quarter, but we're going to be watching the numbers. And, the more important point here is that the longer-term trend for Microsoft is very positive," Schlossberg said Wednesday on CNBC's "Trading Nation," adding that the stock is quite cash-heavy and is still very undervalued relative to its peers.

Bolstering Schlossberg's bullish outlook is the company's ability to evolve in recent years from a software enterprise business to one reliant on subscription revenue and cloud services.

"Instead of trying to capture revenue all the way up front, they made a very astute business decision to try to capture revenue every single year by locking customers in to their Office 365 product," he said.

Persuading consumers to upgrade to a subscription model for Office 365 services has been a weak spot for the company, though, Schlossberg said, as Google's suite of office tools could present competition.

"Microsoft appears to be a very strong trade still for the next several years as this business change continues to develop," Schlossberg said.

The stock was trading modestly higher on Wednesday. Analysts are expecting earnings per share of $3.03, according to FactSet estimates.
Republicans failed to garner enough support to ensure passage of their most recent bill that would repeal and replace Obamacare. That prompted a GOP proposal to simply repeal Obamacare without a replacement, but it quickly lost support.

"If Obamacare fails, it's not going to die a natural death. This thing is going to be choked by Donald Trump and the Republicans, and there's going to be no way for them to deny that. They have the power to fix it. They have the power to destroy it," he said in an interview with " Closing Bell ."

Despite President Donald Trump's belief that Obamacare can just be left to "fail," if the law collapses it will be solely because of actions by the GOP, former Molina Healthcare CEO Mario Molina told CNBC on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Trump said, "Let Obamacare fail; it'll be a lot easier."

"We'll let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us, and they're going to say, 'How do we fix it? How do we fix it?' Or, 'How do we come up with a new plan?'" he told reporters.

However, on Wednesday the president called for renewed efforts to draft new legislation instead of letting Obamacare implode. He said senators should stay in Washington, D.C., to hammer it out before leaving for the August recess.

"We have no choice. We have to repeal and replace Obamacare. We can repeal it, but the best is repeal and replace," Trump said.

Following Trump's comments, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the Senate would proceed next week with a vote on a motion to move ahead with a repeal bill. While the proposal doesn't include a replacement plan, it could be amended, he said.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, repealing many Obamacare provisions would lead to 27 million uninsured people in 2020. That figure would climb to 32 million by 2026, the CBO said in its new report.

"That means 1 in 10 Americans will lose their insurance if this bill is repealed," Molina said.

He said stabilizing the Obamacare marketplace requires insurance subsidies to be funded. He said there should be a reinsurance pool so that health plans don't have an incentive to avoid costly patients. Plus, the mandate needs to be enforced, he said.

"You can't expect health insurance companies to insure people and have guaranteed access to insurance and not have people required to sign up. You can't expect them to only insure sick people," said Molina.



 CNBC's Christine Wang and Jacob Pramuk contributed to this report.
Verily  formerly Google Life Sciences  began releasing bacteria-infected male mosquitoes in Fresno, California.

The release marks the launch of Debug Fresno, a field study that aims to rid the central California county of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Also known as yellow fever mosquitoes, they first arrived in the area in 2013 and are known to spread the Zika virus, dengue, and chikungunya (although none of these viruses are currently spreading in Fresno).

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Verily is working with Fresno's Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District to release 1 million male mosquitoes every week for 20 weeks, starting now. These mosquitoes have been rendered essentially sterile by infection with a bacteria called Wolbachia pipientis, which naturally colonizes mosquitoes and other insects in the wild. In time, if the local females continue to mate with the sterile males, the population should drop. The effort will ramp up to the full 1 million mosquito capacity over the next week, Kathleen Parkes, a Verily spokesperson, told The Verge in an email.

The mosquitoes being released are not genetically modified; Wolbachia means they don't have to be. The bacteria naturally infects many mosquito populations, though not in Fresno. That's why this just might work: Wolbachia infections render the male mosquitoes released in Fresno sterile to any female that doesn't have a Wolbachia infection herself. And the males can't transmit the disease to females, which means that with a native population of uninfected females, a whole bunch of sterile males just came to the sexual marketplace. Also, the males don't bite  so residents shouldn't be pestered by the extra mosquitoes. (Verily developed its own technology to sort the females, which do bite, from the males.)

The way Wolbachia works is like a lock-and-key system for mosquito reproduction, explains entomologist Stephen Dobson at the University of Kentucky, whose spinoff company MosquitoMate provided Verily with their breeding stock of Wolbachia-infected females. Since uninfected females don't have the corresponding key to unlock the male's Wolbachia-modified genes, the eggs from these mismatched couplings never develop.

This isn't Fresno's first rodeo with Wolbachia mosquitoes. MosquitoMate worked with CMAD to release about 800,000 Wolbachia-infected males in 2016. The Environmental Protection Agency determined that this pilot experiment wasn't particularly risky to anyone who wasn't a mosquito bent on reproduction. So, in September 2016, the EPA renewed the permit to continue, and expand, the experiment.
The U.S.-led coalition's Reaper drones, armed with laser-guided precision weapons, were frequently used during the fight to retake Mosul, Iraq, and have figured prominently in anti-ISIS airstrikes in Syria's Raqqa, the quasi-capital of the caliphate.

"We're learning something  and it's in kind of the formative stage," he said. "We are trying to figure out a way of conducting protracted, high-intensity, counterinsurgency operations at a lower cost."

Similarly, Goure said "cheaper long-distance drones" that are less expensive to operate than the Reaper also have value on the battlefield. One example is AeroVironment's Puma drone, a hand-launched craft used for reconnaissance by the anti-ISIS coalition.

"What we've discovered is we're using very expensive stuff like B-1s, F-22s and even MQ-9 Reapers with things like Hellfire missiles, when you can do a lot of this with cheaper aircraft," said Daniel Goure, a defense analyst and vice president of the Lexington Institute, a nonprofit public policy research organization based in Arlington, Virginia.

There's also a growing realization that lower-cost technology solutions, whether in precision weapons or lighter attack aircraft, can provide advantages in an era of constrained budgets.

The fight against the Islamic State has become a learning opportunity for the U.S. military as it looks to a future taking on very adaptable and resourceful opponents.

U.S. Army soldier launches AeroVironment's Puma unmanned aerial vehicle during an Iraqi security forces' offensive on an ISIS position near the western edge of Mosul, Iraq, March 19, 2017.

One Reaper stopped a public execution of ISIS prisoners in May using precision-guided munitions or PGMs. Other recent missions have included taking out senior commanders of the militant group.

"The most feared assets are the UAVs and the PGMs," said James Andrew Lewis, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. "That's the one that always has them (ISIS fighters) looking over their shoulders."

Also, Lewis said the use of special forces and intelligence assets have been meaningful elements of the coalition's war-fighting strategy. That includes an early effort to counter the problem of improvised explosive devices or IEDs.

"DOD has been pretty good at developing new approaches to meet whatever the current tactical problem is," said Lewis, a former official of the departments of State and Commerce who also advised the U.S. Central Command for Operation Desert Shield.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, also has been working on lower-cost technologies to help the military better fight insurgents. One example is DARPA's Persistent Close Air Support program, a tablet-based targeting and communication system that gives ground forces the power to ensure more precision air strikes.

At the same time, experts say the U.S. coalition fighting the Islamic State has been dealing with an enemy that has proven to be surprisingly organized and resourceful in its ways. For one, the terror group managed to make its own armored vehicles and to create weaponized drones.

Yet ISIS has lacked the basic technology of some established militaries, such as modern air defenses. As a result, it hasn't mattered as much if aircraft go low and slow and lower-cost precision weapon systems have proven effective, too.

"If all I'm doing is shooting up truck convoys or machine gun positions that ISIS has, I can do it with cheap but precision weapon systems," said Goure, a former Pentagon strategist. "I don't have to use things like Hellfires."

The Hellfire missile, costing about $110,000 apiece, is designed to defeat armored vehicles but also has proven useful in destroying key ISIS buildings. However, the military has been running out of the Lockheed Martin -made Hellfires and had to ask for special funding to replenish the supply.

Indeed, the Pentagon has been ordering a roughly $30,000 rocket known as the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System from BAE Systems for use by coalition aircraft fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Last year, the Defense Department awarded BAE a contract worth more than $600 million for the laser-guided system, which is an upgrade from a 2.75-inch rocket system first used decades ago.

According to BAE's website, APKWS was "developed as a highly cost-effective solution that leverages the military's existing infrastructure and inventory  and inspired by real combat challenges." It also touts the precision weapon having "a better than 93 percent hit rate."

Defense experts say another reason for the smaller weapons is they can be more precise, offer more flexibility and there's less collateral damage.

Another example is the AeroVironment's Switchblade drone missile, which was first used by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and then against ISIS in Iraq. The drone missile is launched from a tube on the ground and has cameras to allow the operator to isolate targets with lethal accuracy.

"With Switchblade, AeroVironment's been able to put into the backpack of the front-line war fighter the ability to deal with those lethal threats, quickly, reliably and effectively  and to do so without incurring collateral damage to noncombatants," said Steve Gitlin, vice president of corporate strategy at California-based AeroVironment.

Then again, a report this week by the group Airwars charged coalition civilian casualties have doubled under President Donald Trump. A March 17 air strike in Mosul killed more than 100 civilians but a Pentagon report in May concluded ISIS had booby trapped the building and put snipers there.

"Avoiding civilian casualties has been a major focus of U.S. policy going after terrorists and has driven a lot of restraint," said Paul Scharre, director of the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank. An ex-Pentagon official, he's also former Army Ranger who served on special operations missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There's also been more interest from the U.S. military in countering explosive-laden drone threats from ISIS as the terror group gets more inventive using off-the-shelf technology. The Islamic State fighters also have been using drones for reconnaissance purposes.

Anti-drone countermeasures are a growing area both on the battlefront and in the homeland. One anti-drone system is known as DroneDefender, a rifle-looking device used to disrupt the signal between the flying craft and operator.

"Market interest continues to be very high as drones/UAVs become more proliferated across the world and modified for deleterious purposes," said Katy Delaney, a spokesperson for Battelle, maker of the DroneDefender. She said the company has sold a total of around 200 of the DroneDefender units, including customers such as the DOD and U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Competing anti-drone systems include the so-called DroneBuster weapon from Radio Hill Technologies and another product sold by the North American division of Israel's ELTA Systems.

On the aircraft front, there's now more interest in light-attack and armed observation planes with "off-the-shelf" technology as an option for missions where more expensive craft may not be necessary. Lower cost planes also would ease the burden on the Air Force's aging fleet of aircraft where readiness is often cited as a major problem due to maintenance issues.

"We're actually at the place right now where our F-18 fleet is severely overused and flown," said Scharre. "We're having to spend quite a bit of money to recapitalize that fleet."
The activist hedge fund who helped drive Whole Foods into Amazon's arms is cashing out.

On Wednesday, Jana Partners said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it was exiting its position of 26 million shares, or about an 8.2 percent stake in the grocery chain, making a profit of roughly $300 million.

Jana started selling its shares in Whole Foods on June 19, and then shed the remainder, 16 million shares, in a block trade at $41.66 apiece on Tuesday, the SEC filing shows.

Jana Partners in April first reported its ownership of Texas-based Whole Foods, bumping up shares of the supermarket company's stock. The hedge fund was, at the time, suggesting the struggling grocer should either accelerate its turnaround plans or consider putting itself up for sale.

In April, Jana said Whole Foods "shares are undervalued and represent an attractive investment opportunity." The investor group also pointed out it had "substantial experience" in the grocery and food sectors.

These purchases also made Jana Whole Foods' second-biggest shareholder.

The activist investor initially accumulated its stake in Whole Foods by buying stock priced between about $29 per share to about $32 per share, according to SEC filings. Considering where Whole Foods is trading today, Jana made a nice chunk of change, around $300 million, from its entire investment.

Jana's sales totaled more than $1 billion, and Jana originally paid about $794.5 million for its position in Whole Foods, the hedge fund disclosed.

A representative from Jana Partners didn't immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

Whole Foods' shares hardly moved Wednesday after the news broke. The grocery stock closed the day at $41.76 per share, hovering right around Amazon's $42 per share offer price.

In early June, prior to Amazon announcing its plans to acquire Whole Foods, Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey blatantly called out Jana Partners, tagging them "greedy bastards" who are only interested in making money from a forced sale of the struggling grocer.

"They're putting a bunch of propaganda out there, trying to destroy my reputation and the reputation of Whole Foods, because it's in their self-interest to do so," Mackey said in an interview with TexasMonthly.

Mackey's interview was published online days before the Amazon deal was announced.

Back when, Jana was frustrated that Whole Foods wasn't performing better in what was proving to be a competitive grocery market. Lately, more nontraditional players have swooped in and stolen market share; Lidl, a German grocer, just opened its first stores in the U.S. in June.

To be sure, Whole Foods' same-store sales have fallen for seven consecutive quarters. The company is scheduled to report earnings next Wednesday after market close.

Jana, meanwhile, has taken a similar tack in other investments it saw as underperforming. In 2013, the activist investor gained a 6 percent stake in Safeway, and then encouraged the grocer to exit certain markets and sell off non-core assets. In 2015, Jana acquired 7.2 percent of food packager ConAgra 's shares and pushed them to divest weak assets after criticizing "persistent underperformance."

 CNBC's Sarah Whitten and Jeff Daniels contributed to this report.
Sen. Heidi Heitkamp told CNBC on Wednesday that it's time for Republicans and Democrats to work together on health care.

"Let's bury the political hatchets, and let's start doing our job here," she said.

The moderate Democrat from North Dakota appeared on "Squawk Box," a day after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for an early next week vote on a motion to pave the way for action on a bill to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan. But with opposition from at least four Republican senators, approval of such a move appears unlikely.

The GOP only has a four-seat majority in the Senate.

Republican lawmakers working on health care should reach across the aisle, and they should seek input from both GOP and Democratic state governors who would ultimately play a major role in implementing any changes to health-care policy, Heitkamp said.

"Good policy is good politics," she argued, acknowledging the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, definitely needs some fixes.

Heitkamp, who won her seat in the 2012 election, was not in the Senate when the ACA was signed into law in 2010 by President Barack Obama. She previously served as North Dakota's attorney general and tax commissioner.

On tax reform, Heitkamp wants more details. "I used to be the tax commissioner so I know a little bit about it, but I say, 'Tell me what it is,'" she urged. "I'm going to evaluate whatever proposal comes my way based on what's good for my state, and what makes fiscally responsible sense in Washington, D.C., and for the country."

Looking ahead to 2018 midterm election and the 2020 presidential election, Heitkamp said Democrats need to do a better job of telling American voters what the party stands for and how it plans to improve their lives. Democrats hope to capitalize on President Donald Trump's legislative stumbles and unorthodox approach.

"[But] the overarching discussion for the Democratic Party is not there. Frequently, that role is filled by someone who is the presumptive [presidential] nominee. We don't have that," she added. "We're in this process of seeing opportunity for anyone to step up."
This isn't the first time China has piggybacked off an American saying  remember President Xi Jinping's "Chinese Dream" slogan? This time around, the tone is a bit sharper, with Chinese state media not backing down ahead of annual bilateral talks that have been rebranded this year as the U.S.-China Comprehensive Economic Dialogue.

"U.S. foreign policy is in total disarray, and world regard for the U.S. has plummeted. Indeed, America is making China 'great again,'" the op-ed said. "Once the world's model, the great American meltdown has turned the U.S. into some bizarre soap opera."

The op-ed published in the People's Daily said the U.S. was in political chaos and suffered from a broken system, which was why Washington couldn't get anything done. It also claimed the U.S. mess was giving China an opportunity to shine.

A Communist Party mouthpiece is crowing that malfunctioning U.S. leadership is making China "great again" on the eve of highly anticipated bilateral trade talks between the two countries.

Although both Beijing and Washington have indicated they understand the need to play nice, both sides are pushing their own agenda as expected.

The U.S. wants to reduce the more than $300 billion trade deficit with China and make good on a campaign promise from President Donald Trump to pressure China on a number of fronts, such as opening up its markets to more foreign participation and to bring jobs back to America.

China, on the other hand, has pushed back, saying Chinese investment has helped the U.S. But it's clear that as the U.S. continues to face political turmoil, China is enjoying its time in the spotlight. That is, Beijing is explicitly seeking to fill the void the U.S. left as it backed out of various multilateral talks and agreements from the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal to the Paris climate change agreement.

Regardless of the rhetoric leading up to the U.S.-China talks, experts are looking to see what agreements may have been reached at the end of the 100-day trade plan period struck by Trump and Xi earlier this year, which ended this past weekend.

The U.S. has been keen to push tangible, specific agreements, which government officials echoed again ahead of the talks. One recent success was the lifting of a 14-year ban on U.S. exports of beef to China.

"Though this is a good start, a lot of work remains," U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said. "There remain serious imbalances, which we must work to rectify. China's exports to the U.S. as we all know far exceed the exports of the U.S. to China, and the U.S. market has far fewer restrictions on Chinese investment than China has on U.S. investment."
A US Marine of 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade runs to safety moments after an IED blast in Garmsir district of Helmand Province in Afghanistan on July 13, 2009.

The global war on terror is fueling demand for robotic and other technology that can defeat or detect improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

The counter-IED market is forecast to reach $2.03 billion by 2022, up from an estimated $1.78 billion at present, according to Research and Markets, a European research company. That will put it at a compound annual growth rate of just under 3 percent during the five-year forecast.

One major area has been UAVs deployed by militaries in conflicts for surveillance of IEDs, while another is handheld technology or systems designed on armed vehicles to defeat the bombing devices. There's also been increasing use of bomb detection and disposal robots.

The IEDs used by the Islamic State terrorists have targeted both soldiers and civilians. Deadly bomb attacks by the terror group sympathizers also have rocked major cities in Western Europe.

Large U.S. defense firms active in the counter-IED space include Lockheed Martin , General Dynamics , Northrop Grumman and Raytheon . There also are foreign companies, including Israel's Elbit Systems and France's Thales.
"European markets are increasingly important to the cannabis sector. Each has a well-funded medical system, residents who seek natural and complementary therapies, and a government-supported mandate to stop the rising tide of opiate addiction related to chronic pain treatment."

These European markets are increasingly important to the cannabis sector. Each has a well-funded medical system, residents who seek natural and complementary therapies, and a government-supported mandate to stop the rising tide of opiate addiction related to chronic pain treatment.

Taken together, these and other European examples show that we're seeing traditionally conservative attitudes shift as medicinal cannabis is legalized.

That also means investors in cannabis who focus solely on North America are missing the huge potential found across the Atlantic.

Those investors restricting their cannabis investments to this side of the ocean  and in the United States in particular  are left navigating an array of legislation on a state-by-state basis, prohibitive out-of-state investment regulations, and a prohibitive tax code. These investors miss the boat as they churn through such choppy water.

In Germany, cannabis will be produced by licenced producers and distributed to pharmacies like any other medication, with each prescription eligible for full reimbursement from health insurance.

In their patient-driven markets, Germans, Italians and other Europeans are demanding the alternative of cannabis over opiates.

In our view, people who think opiates are the only answer to pain relief have a similar mis-perception as people who still think medicinal cannabis is nothing more than smoking up with their doctor's permission.

They are both wrong.

In short, medical cannabis is about personalized and effective medicine. It's not about getting high.

The Europeans know that, as we do in North America.

As Germany moves smartly down this path of medicinal cannabis, the rest of Europe will soon follow. And to ignore 500 million people in a stable economy is a mistake.

We're at the start of the global revolution. We all need to be looking to Europe next.

Commentary by Benjamin Ward, CEO of Maricann Group Inc., a vertically-integrated greenhouse producer and distributor of medical cannabis. Toronto, Canada-based Maricann is now building global teams in rapidly expanding European markets as well.

For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter.


Baidu driverless cars in test run during the 3rd World Internet Conference (WIC) on November 17, 2016 in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province of China.

Microsoft is throwing the weight of its Azure cloud infrastructure behind Baidu's open source autonomous driving project, Apollo, the companies announced Tuesday.

Baidu first revealed details about the initiative, named after the historic lunar landing program, in April: It is an open platform that provides cloud infrastructure, open software stack and other services that are able to support major features and functions of an autonomous car.

Companies using the Apollo platform for their self-driving vehicle projects can use Microsoft's Azure cloud services to securely scale outside China.

"Today's vehicles already have an impressive level of sophistication when it comes to their ability to capture data," Kevin Dallas, corporate vice president at Microsoft, said in a prepared statement.

He added, "By applying our global cloud AI, machine learning, and deep neural network capabilities to that data, we can accelerate the work already being done to make autonomous vehicles safer."

The autonomous vehicle space has been growing in recent years, with traditional automakers and prominent tech names working on various projects. Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google parent Alphabet, is considered one of the leading players in this space, ahead of names like Ford, Nissan and Tesla .

Last year, consulting firm McKinsey & Company said in a report that up to 15 percent of new cars sold in 2030 could potentially be fully autonomous.

Earlier this month, Baidu said more than 50 groups have signed on to build and improve the Apollo platform, including top Chinese car makers Chery Auto, Great Wall Motors and Changan Automobile. Other notable stakeholders include ride-sharing company Grab, global navigation and mapping service provider TomTom , suppliers Bosch and Continental as well as Ford and Intel .
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Chris Carosa thinks he has a solution for America's impending Social Security funding woes: child individual retirement accounts. If you've never heard of a Child IRA, that's because officially, it doesn't exist. While an adult can set up a custodial or guardian IRA under current law, the minor must have income that matches or exceeds the amount contributed to it, whether it's a Roth or traditional version. "We let parents and grandparents save for their kids' college expenses [in tax-advantaged 529 college savings plans] without requiring the child to have income," said Carosa, president of Carosa Stanton Asset Management, a Mendon, New York, firm that manages $30 million in assets. "Why don't we let them save the same way for their kids' retirement?"

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Carosa's data show that a $1,000 contribution to a newborn's account every year through their 19th birthday would grow to $2.2 million by the child's 70th birthday. This assumes an 8 percent average annual return over the seven decades. This compares with the roughly 11 percent median return for the Standard & Poor's 500 index over 19 separate 70-year stretches between 1928 and 2016. Based on data from the recent annual trustees report, Social Security will face shortfalls beginning in 2034. At that point, unless Congress has taken steps to shore up the program's solvency, it will be able to fund about 75 percent of benefits. By 2091, unfunded obligations would reach $12.5 trillion. "Social Security would fundamentally change in a disruptive way," Carosa said. "There's no avoiding that reality." He said if Congress continues delaying action, then some sort of inequitable bailout would occur. And that, he said, is when people who set up Child IRAs now would be in a better position to weather any cuts.

BSIP | UIG | Getty Images

Mark Mazur, director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said such an account would do little to benefit children whose families have no money to fund such an investment. "It's not a terrible idea if your goal is to assure kids of well-off parents have assets in retirement," Mazur said. Here's how Carosa envisions it: Any adult would be permitted to make tax-deductible contributions to any child's account, whether family, friend or stranger. Each minor would be able to receive a maximum $1,000 yearly, but contributors could spread a greater amount across multiple accounts. Carosa's idea also calls for the Child IRA converting to a traditional one at age 19, subject to current law. This means that additional contributions  2017's limit is $5,500 for people under age 50  would lead to even higher account balances in retirement.

Social Security would fundamentally change in a disruptive way. There's no avoiding that reality. Chris Carosa president of Carosa Stanton Asset Management
More than three years after the rollout of state and federally run insurance marketplaces, the program is finally stabilizing and insurers are seeing their profits grow, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation report last week.

A major reason for the improved health of Obamacare, the report said, was an increase in premiums approved this year to compensate for a larger-than-expected share of sicker patients.

But more recent data indicate that those premium increases were a one-time market correction, according to the analysis. Slow growth in claims for medical expenses also played a role in insurers' financial improvements, the report said.

To be sure, the future health of the Obamacare depends heavily on whether the Trump administration decides to try to sabotage the program by withholding critical federal funding.

Trump has suggested several times that he could eliminate the so-called cost-sharing reduction subsidies, which help pay for consumers' out-of-pocket health-care expenses. The administration could cut those subsidies as early as next month.

"When those payments stop, (Obamacare) stops immediately," Trump said Wednesday. "It doesn't take two years, three years, one year. It stops immediately."

Like much of the White House rhetoric, the pronouncement is unrealistically dire.

Insurers have already been bracing for an end to those payments, by proposed premium hikes of more than 20 percent for next year to make up for the possible lost funding.

On Tuesday, major insurers called on Congress to intervene and protect the cost-sharing payments with a formal appropriation.

"Our members and all Americans need the certainty and security of knowing coverage will be available and affordable for them," said Justine Handelman, senior vice president in the Office of Policy and Representation at the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, which represents insurers nationwide.

Even if those cost-sharing payments remain in place, the Trump administration has additional tools at its disposal to undermine the health insurance system.

Earlier this year, the administration backed off more strictly enforcing the so-called individual mandate, which is designed to lower the average premium cost by widening the pool of subscribers to include more younger, healthier people. The failed GOP reform plan would have allowed insurers to offer minimum coverage to those consumers, which would have further driven up costs for older people or patients with chronic conditions.
President Donald Trump (C) and Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (L) meet at the Oval Office of White House in Washington, D.C., on May 10, 2017.

"To understand the roots of the collusion, set aside Putin and follow the money."

That's what Seva Gunitsky, a politics professor at the University of Toronto and the author of Aftershocks, told me in a recent interview. I reached out to Gunitsky on Monday after he posted a short but incisive thread on Twitter about the financial roots of the Trump-Russia collusion case.

@SevaUT: One element of the Trump-Russia collusion story strikes me as really important and sort of under-discussed.

Gunitsky, who was raised in Russia, has followed the evolving relationship between Donald Trump and Russia for more than a decade. He says the prevailing narrative about Putin interfering in the American election in order to undermine democracy is wildly overstated.

More from Vox:

Why Rashida Jones wants America to have smarter conversations about pornography

Fear, loneliness, and duty  an American journalist on daily life in North Korea

9 questions with Courtney Maum

Putin is happy to sow confusion and distrust in America's system, of course, but to assume that's the basis of this operation is to overlook a much simpler motive: money.

The financial connections between Trump and various Russian banks and oligarchs (business elites with ties to the Kremlin) stretch back decades, which is likely a big reason why Trump won't release his tax returns. Trump's election, Gunitsky contends, presented Russian oligarchs with an opportunity to recoup losses and leverage Trump's debts for political gain.

I asked Gunitsky to lay it out for me as clearly as possible, and to explain the financial dealings between Trump and his Russian business partners.

Here's what he told me.

Sean Illing

This collusion story gets more convoluted by the day. But you seem to think it's pretty straightforward.

Seva Gunitsky

I think it's justifiable for you to say that it seems impossibly convoluted, but I would say it's still much simpler than this idea that there's a global conspiracy designed to bring down democracy. I'm not saying the political dimension is unimportant  surely it is. But if we're talking about the roots of the collusion, we have to look at where Trump's links with Russia begin. And it begins with money. [These roots] don't start with the election; they start with money, and namely Russian oligarch money.

Sean Illing

So walk me through the trail. Where does the money lead?

Seva Gunitsky

Again, this doesn't start with the election; it starts with Russian oligarch money pouring into Trump's real estate and casino businesses. Many of them Trump has been working with for years, well before he developed any serious political ambitions. And we're not talking about small change here; we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Possibly even enough to keep Trump out of another bankruptcy.

Sean Illing

And we know this how, exactly?

Seva Gunitsky

We know because they've told us. We can talk about specific cases in a minute, but Donald Trump Jr. has already admitted the importance of Russian money to their business ventures. He said publicly in 2008that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia." It doesn't get much clearer than that.

Sean Illing

And this is why you think Western media has overplayed the centrality of Putin in all of this? We have this notion of Putin as a kind of master strategist playing 10-dimensional chess with Trump. I think it's obvious that once Putin saw an opportunity he took it, but these financial ties go back a long way, long before the 2016 election.

Seva Gunitsky

I think that's right. Putin is often put up as this sort of central antagonist, but the Russian government is not this shadowy monolith. It's sometimes portrayed this way in the West, but in reality the Russian government is messy and disorganized and ad hoc.

It's possible that Putin was not even fully aware of efforts to court Trump up until last year, or a couple years ago. Putin, we often forget, has supporters to keep happy as well, people who desperately want to open up those channels of Russian finance.

Sean Illing

We know there are deep links between Russian money and Trump, but let's talk about how the interests intertwine. What did you make of the recent revelations about Trump Jr.'s meetingwith the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya?

Seva Gunitsky

So we have this infamous Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr. last year and apparently several other people, including a former Soviet counterintelligence officer. I think the tough question critics have been asking is where is the quid pro quo in that? The Magnitsky Act, ostensibly the purpose of the meeting, isn't going anywhere, so people are concluding that there wasn't a quid pro quo here. But we should be talking a lot more about the Prevezon case.

Sean Illing

Explain what that is and why it matters.

Seva Gunitsky

So Prevezon is a holding company with links to Russian elites that has been accused of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars through New York City real estate. It's also part of Hermitage Capital, an investment fund that was being investigated by Magnitsky (the Russian lawyer who was killed in a Moscow prison in 2009) more than 10 years ago.

Prevezon was part of this giant tax fraud scheme that Magnitsky uncovered in 2008, which led to his death and which led indirectly to the Magnitsky Act of 2012. The U.S. Attorney's Office was also preparing a massive case against Prevezon last year. Until it was abruptly dropped.

Sean Illing

We'll circle back to the case being dropped in a second, but let's stick to the role of the Russian lawyer that Trump Jr. met with.

Seva Gunitsky

Now, Prevezon's lawyer was Natalia Veselnitskaya, who of course met with Trump Jr. last year. She had been pushing for a long time to get something done about the Prevezon case. So it's very possible that she went into that meeting essentially asking for help, in return for which she would give the Trump campaign dirt on Hillary and the DNC.

It's impossible to know for sure what happened in that room, but these are extremely plausible interpretations. It's hard to say what the groups' motivations were. These motivations are all entangled  I want to stress that. I don't want to insist that this was allabout the money. I'm only saying that the financial motivations in all of this have been understated in relation to its importance.

Sean Illing

So what happened with the Prevezon case?

Seva Gunitsky

Several months after Trump takes office, the Prevezon case is dismissed. So what happened? The U.S. attorney was carefully preparing a case against Prevezon Holdings. They were all set to go forward, and then suddenly the case was settled. Prevezon's own lawyers were kind of shocked. We know they paid something like $6 million, which is a fraction of what the lawsuit was about. So they were extremely happy about it.

Congressional Democrats have openly expressed concerns about what happened here. They want to know why it was settled so quickly. Was pressure being applied from above? In any case, we can see the possible motivations of the people approaching Trump for favors. When I say the collusion starts with financial interests, this is what I mean.

It's not that obstructing democracy wasn't important; it's that it was potentially a happy byproduct of these financial relationships. And I think for Trump it was always about the money. It's just that now he's undergoing a level of scrutiny that he's never experienced before.

Sean Illing

Do we have any evidence that Trump was involved in any way with Prevezon?

Seva Gunitsky

We don't know that Trump was involved in any way with that. Obviously, it's kind of his wheelhouse, New York City real estate, so I am sure he at least heard about it. But we don't know if he has any direct connections.

But it's not even necessary for him to have any direct connections here. They're only asking for some relief in this case, in return for certain compromising documents. So the interesting thing for me is, was there pressure placed on the U.S. Attorney's Office by the administration, by the Department of Justice? What we know is that Preet Bharara, the attorney in charge of the case, was fired in early March, and shortly thereafter the Prevezon case was dropped.

Sean Illing

And we still have no explanation about this?

Seva Gunitsky

Not as a far as I know. They had been ready to prosecute, witnesses were flown in, it was all set to go, and it was settled rather unexpectedly. So I think this is a case that hasn't really entered the public consciousness yet. But I'm sure that [special counsel Robert] Mueller's team is looking at it.

[Author's note: Foreign Policy published a detailed report about Attorney General Jeff Sessions's possible role in dismissing the Prevezon case.]

Sean Illing

Do we know of any public reactions to the dismissal of the Prevezon case from the Russian lawyer or from anyone else associated with this?

Seva Gunitsky

Veselnitskaya was ecstatic about the Prevezon case on her social media. She said it was "settled on Russian terms"; that's a direct quote. She said it was the beginning of the end of the Cold War, and she said there'd be more to come. Again, like so much of the evidence here, this doesn't prove anything definitively. But there's an unbelievable amount of smoke, and a massive web of overlapping interests.

Sean Illing

As hard as it is to make sense of all this, it does help to explain Trump's unusual consistency on all things Russia. This is a guy without a fixed ideological core, but his bizarre pro-Russia posture is arguably the only issue on which he's been consistent.

Seva Gunitsky

I'd only slightly disagree here and say the thing about which he's been most consistent is the desire to make money. And if we take that, then his consistency on Russia becomes much more sensible.

I think you're absolutely right that he has no strong ideological commitments. We've seen that painfully over and over during the last few months. But if his financial interests are tied up with Russian oligarchs, who in turn are tied up with the Kremlin and thus have parallel interests, then Trump's "consistency" becomes much more explainable.

And if we emphasize this financial angle a bit more, it also makes a lot of sense that he would not want to release his tax returns. Because that would expose just how deeply embedded he is with Russian money.

Sean Illing

To be clear about what you're saying, you're not denying the political motivations of Putin or the Kremlin. In your mind, this is about understanding what catalyzed the alleged collusion process, right?

Seva Gunitsky

That's right. I think the idea of parallel interest is key here, that the Russian intelligence service, once they saw what Trump was doing, quickly latched on in order to push their own agenda, which was very similar to the Russian oligarchy agenda. And it's hard to even separate the two because, as you probably know, in Russia the distinction between political power and economic power is very fuzzy.

Sean Illing

Looking at the timeline here helps to clarify your broader argument. It's not like the Russians foresaw back in 1987, when they first started dealing with Trump, that he might become president in 2017. It seems clear enough that the financial ties were already there, and when the opportunity presented itself, the Kremlin took full advantage of it.

Seva Gunitsky

Absolutely. There's a tendency here, in part because of our Cold War inertia, to see Putin as this creature with his tentacles in every part of the country. And I think that may be overstating the case just a bit. He's been in power for 17 years, the people who support him are starting to itch a little bit, and he has to keep them happy. They're not happy about sanctions; they're not happy about restrictions on their financial dealings.

If they have financial leverage over Trump, and they clearly do, then why wouldn't they want him to become president of the United States?
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CNBC interviewed legendary entrepreneur Richard Branson following an earlier panel discussion at DS Virgin Racing's Innovation Summit in Brooklyn, New York. The Summit was held in advance of the inaugural New York City ePrix event, a fully electric, single-seater auto race. Branson spoke about start-ups, sustainability and some of his signature shenanigans. CNBC: You're very proud that you have three Brits participating in the [ePrix] race this weekend  from your vantage point across the pond what are the policy missteps you see taking place in America? Branson: I think there is a big difference between Americans and the Trump administration. America is full of brilliant people with brilliant minds who want to do the right thing. The sad thing is that some of the things coming out of the Trump administration seem to be anything but that. Since today we are talking about climate change, it was America first and our beautiful globe last  it is incredibly sad. Americans are stepping into the breach, cities are stepping into the breach, and businesses are stepping into the breach and are going to do everything they can to keep America on track to deliver on the climate change pledges that were made in Paris.

Sir Richard Branson speaking at the Innovation Summit in Brooklyn, New York on July 14, 2017. Adam Jeffery | CNBC

CNBC : You get asked a lot of questions, what's the one question no one ever asks you that you always ask yourself? Branson : I would love to invent a pill ... that would [bring us back] to 21 or 22. CNBC : The line between success and failure is very thin  what do entrepreneurs need to do to stay on the right side of that divided line? Branson: As long as you've come up with an entrepreneurial idea that is going to improve other people's lives, then obviously it would be great if it was successful, but if it fails you know you've done the right thing and you've done it for the right reasons. If it is going to dramatically improve other people's lives it is going to be successful, but if it happens to fail, pick yourself up and keep going until you're successful. Some of the greatest entrepreneurs have had slip-ups along the way  if you are going to create a lot of things in life not everything is going to be successful. CNBC: What is your biggest money mistake?

Richard Branson (L), chairman of Virgin, waves as he rides a tank into New York's Times Square to promote the United States launch of Virgin Cola, May 12. Virgin Cola was introduced in the United Kingdom in 1994, and is also available in several other European countries. Reuters
Samsung began rolling out its smart assistant Bixby  which is a rival to Apple's Siri  for Galaxy S8 and S8+ users in the U.S. on Wednesday, after a delay for the much-hyped feature.

The new software is for owners of Samsung's latest flagship devices in the U.S. and South Korea only, and they need to download an update to access the latest version of Bixby. The voice assistant is only available in Korean and U.S. English at the moment, with Samsung promising additional languages and devices in the "near future."

Bixby is the South Korean electronics giant's own version of the likes of Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, but it goes beyond voice. When Samsung launched the feature with the Galaxy S8 earlier this year, it talked up capabilities beyond just using voice commands. For example, it showed how a Galaxy S8's camera could be pointed at a monument, with Bibxy able to recognize it and provide detailed information.

But the service has so far only been available in Korean. A report in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year suggested that Bixby was struggling to understand English syntax and grammar.

Samsung then launched a beta test for U.S. users to help it improve Bixby.

"Bixby Voice benefits from time to further enhance natural language understanding, and we are currently growing our user testing in the U.S. to prepare for launch," a Samsung spokesperson told CNBC in May.

Now it is rolling Bixby out with some key features. Samsung said users can ask the smart assistant to carry out tasks like turning on the flashlight or taking a selfie. But consumers can also ask more complex questions such as: "Find photos I took in Spain and create an album called 'Vacation'.'"

Bixby can be activated by pressing a dedicated button on the side of the S8 and S8+ or by saying "Hi Bixby". Samsung said that Bixby will improve the more it is used.

"As the Bixby ecosystem grows, it will use its completeness, context awareness and cognitive tolerance to evolve from a smartphone interface to the interface for your life," Injong Rhee, head of research & development, software and services at Samsung Mobile, said in a press release.
John Colaneri, Anthony Carrino, Sunny Anderson, Kenneth W. Lowe, Katie Lee, Andrew Zimmern and guests of Scripps Networks Interactive ring the NASDAQ Opening Bell at NASDAQ on June 2, 2016 in New York City.

Shares of Scripps Network Interactive jumped 16 percent as both Discovery Communications and Viacom have reportedly expressed interest in acquiring the lifestyle broadcast company.

Interest from Discovery revives a potential deal the two companies scrapped in 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. And Reuters reported that Viacom also recently held talks to buy Scripps.

Discovery shares rose 3 percent, and Viacom shares rose 1 percent.

Wall Street remains skeptical of what a merger between Discovery and Scripps would achieve. Analysts said they are doubtful that a deal, which would create a $19 billion cable network, would solve either company's ongoing dilemmas.

"We don't think any of the current existential problems plaguing both companies and the sector in general would be addressed," Cowen Group analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a note.

Scripps is home to HGTV and Food Network, among others. Its stock market value is $9.9 billion, according to FactSet, while Discovery's market value is around $10 billion. Discovery focuses on its namesake channel and also has TLC and Animal Planet, among others.

Beyond fundamental flaws, Creutz says the merger's appeal of gaining international exposure isn't as beneficial for Discovery shareholders as it may seem.

"The attraction of having significant exposure outside of the U.S. would be diluted," Creutz said.

The deal could come with some mutual benefits, according to Jefferies analyst John Janedis.

"The combo would be a clear leader in the female demo," Janedis wrote in a note.

Yet Janedis maintains his skepticism that any comparative advantage gained is outweighed by the broadcast industry's continuing issues.

"The move would appear to be more defensive given history," Janedis said.

CNBC's Jim Cramer says a lack of appeal for the millennial demographic means a merger would not bear much fruit.

"I'm not necessarily interested in [HGTV], neither are millennials. They don't own homes. They rent," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street."

@CarlQuintanilla tweet.

Discovery and Scripps stocks are the second- and third-best performers of the S&P 500 group in midday trading Wednesday, outstripped only by Vertex Pharmaceuticals .

Terms of a potential deal, from either Discovery or Viacom, could not be learned, the WSJ and Reuters reported.
Martin Shkreli's securities trial came to a temporary halt early Wednesday afternoon after his lawyers objected heatedly to the prosecution's plans to show jurors documents they claim are evidence of fraud, without calling witnesses to back that up.

The documents detail payments that Shkreli's drug company made to investors he had allegedly previously defrauded at two hedge funds he ran, as well as supposedly bogus consulting agreements with some investors.

The trial's judge gave jurors the rest of Wednesday off, as well as Thursday, to allow both sides to file legal briefs on their arguments for and against requiring witnesses for the relevant documents.

Testimony is expected to resume Friday.

Shkreli's lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said that if he does not get a crack at cross-examining people about their relationship to documents that prosecutors want to use, Shkreli will be denied his constitutional rights to confront witnesses against him.

Brafman suggested that prosecutors were worried that his questioning of witnesses would undercut their claims that the documents in question really show fraud.

"This trial is not open and shut, your honor," Brafman told Judge Kiyo Matsumoto.

In fact, prosecutors have, as recently as Wednesday morning, had witnesses testify about receiving the same kinds of documents that they now want to introduce to jurors without witnesses.

And defense attorneys have subjected each of those witnesses to probing cross-examination.

Brafman said he "was stunned, quite frankly," to learn Tuesday night from his co-counsel in the case that prosecutors planned from now on to show jurors the documents without witnesses.

The documents included settlement agreements that Shkreli reached with investors at two of his hedge funds, as well as consulting agreements with some of those investors.

Prosecutors claim that Shkreli scammed multiple investors in his MSMB hedge funds by lying about the poor performance of those funds, and by refusing to give back the money they believed they had in the funds when they asked him to do so.

Prosecutors also charge that Shkreli defrauded the new drug company he founded, Retrophin , by looting that firm of stock and cash to pay back the ripped-off hedge fund investors.

Prosecutors additionally claim Shkreli used sham consulting agreements from Retrophin to facilitate a number of such payoffs to defrauded investors.

The settlement agreements in dispute Wednesday included the terms of what investors received from Retrophin in exchange for dropping any claims against Shkreli and his hedge funds.

Matsumoto indicated that she was sympathetic to the defense's argument that settlement and consulting agreements should only be shown to jurors if a person who received those agreements takes the witness stand.

"I do think the fundamental right to confront the witnesses and question the witnesses is important," Matsumoto said.

She also noted that "there is a fairly limited universe" of investors whom Shkreli allegedly defrauded, suggesting that it would not be onerous to prosecutors or jurors to have those people called as witnesses.

Brafman said he believed there were fewer than 10 people whom the government argued were defrauded by Shkreli.

Prosecutors told Matsumoto that they believed they had legal grounds for such an end-run around calling those witnesses.

The judge gave them until late Wednesday afternoon to file a brief arguing that view.

Shkreli's trial began in late June. If prosecutors are allowed to introduce the documents to jurors without calling related witnesses, they could rest their case soon.

But if Matsumoto bars that method, prosecutors could be forced to call multiple people to the witness stand, meaning they would be unlikely to rest their case until sometime next week.

The surprising delay in the normal pace of the trial came after Brafman wrapped up an extensive cross-examination of a witness, Lee Yaffe, whom prosecutors had called to detail his allegedly sham consulting agreement with Retrophin.

Yaffe had testified Tuesday that Shkreli proposed paying him off for a failed investment Yaffe's father made in Shkreli's earlier hedge fund, Elea Capital, in 2007. Yaffe said he agreed to accept $200,000 and 15,000 shares in Retrophin through a consulting deal with the company that purportedly had Yaffe doing "research on cluster headaches."

Yaffe testified that he neither intended to actually do that research, and that he was not qualified to do it, in any event.

Yaffe said that on April 1, 2015, which he called the "worst April Fool's day, two FBI agents visited his home in Florida and asked him about the Retrophin consulting agreements.

Yaffe testifed that he "panicked" and claimed the deal was legitimate, as he also did at a subsequent meeting with authorities. But he ended up recanting that claim, and admitted the agreement was a sham.

Authorities gave a non-prosecution agreement with Yaffe, which required him to testify truthtfully about Shkreli, and to pay back $355,000, which represents his cash payments under the consulting deal, the Retrophin shares he received and the investment returns on those shares.

Additional reporting by Rachel Pak and Matthew Zdun.
Independent business owners without a four-year degree now outnumber those with a bachelor's degree or higher, the SurveyMonkey small-business survey shows. A solid quarter of independent business owners had up to a high school diploma. Add in respondents with associate's degrees or with some college and the number shoots up to 56 percent  more than half of all respondents.

The billionaire Facebook co-founder and CEO meant getting a college degree, and it's a resume gap that Zuckerberg doesn't share just with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and other tech visionaries. A majority of small-business owners in the United States don't have a college degree, according to the recent CNBC/SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey . It's hidden fact not often talked about.

"Let's face it," said Mark Zuckerberg to an audience of newly minted Harvard grads during the 2017 Harvard commencement speech. "You accomplished something I never could."

What is the last grade of school you completed?

Entrepreneurs who did not attend or finish college outnumbered those with higher-education degrees across both genders and in every age group included in the CNBC/SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey, except for the 65-and-older category.

Business owners who skipped out on education all shared some common threads: self-reliance, a good idea and a willingness to take risks.

"If you want to get out of college and try to hustle, it still requires a great deal of capacity," said Chuck Runyon, co-founder of 24-hour gym chain Anytime Fitness. He left college after he saw a gap in the market for an always-open gym that focused only on equipment frequently used by members. "I want to make it clear: You have to work every bit as hard, if not harder."

These business owners don't uniformly express a dislike for higher education. In fact, even though less than half of business owners have received a college degree, the 44 percent that have puts them ahead of the general population, where 1 out of every 3 adults has a college degree or more education, according to Census data.

"I loved school and was very passionate about it," said Tanya Jun, owner of Motorcycle Works, an online shop selling custom motorcycle parts and accessories. She dropped out of the University of California, Irvine, when she saw the money was too good to pass up.

"I was a single mother, and the finances were just something I couldn't ignore," Jun said.

More from CNBC/SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey:

Winning the war for workplace talent now requires video

A common hiring fear that no longer makes much sense

Where the country's most confident business owners live

Skipping school can make it difficult to return to the traditional workforce, says Scott Dobroski, a community expert at the careers website Glassdoor. He said most high-demand jobs require a traditional four-year education. "To date we haven't seen conclusive evidence that shows dropouts have a competitive edge," Dobroski said.

Some entrepreneurs advocate for a college diploma despite their success without one. "Continue on, grind it out," said John Bornoty. He founded The Big Salad, a gourmet salad-and-sandwich chain with restaurants in Michigan and Texas. "Sometimes by not having [a four-year degree], I know I got passed over because I didn't have that credential. And whether we like it or not, society likes credentials."

Business owners say a college degree isn't just a symbolic credential; it can offer knowledge to a business founder that could have made their early days easier.

"It was a very hard road," said Amy Freeman, co-founder and CEO of The Spice and Tea Exchange. To create a franchise and secure financing for her company, she had to learn on her own about accounting, marketing and starting a business  and sometimes through painful lessons. If she had received a formal education in business, "I would've known how to build that structure. I would've had resources to tap into," Freeman said.

Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to continue work on Facebook, returning this year to give a commencement speech to new Harvard graduates. For entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg, it's not the means but the end that matters.

"An entrepreneurial culture thrives when it's easy to try lots of new ideas," Zuckerberg said. "The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail."

 By Mike Juang, special to CNBC.com
"We need to begin by acknowledging the fact that we have to rethink the relationship between human beings, work, and the economy."

Traditional economic theory says that the gains from technology will create as many or more jobs than the number destroyed, and statistically speaking, people like my father-in-law will be fine. The wonders of the free market and creative destruction will keep middle-aged dislocated salespeople from going hungry. That's what every economics textbook says.

But speaking statistically and speaking realistically are two different things.

Once his company transitions completely to online sales, what are the options for someone like my father-in-law?

Be a salesperson somewhere else? Every other company that could potentially hire my father-in-law is also trying to convert customers to online sales.

Get retrained for another job? Aid for retraining is restricted to employees who lose jobs because of trade, not technology. And, as research has shown, retraining is far from a foolproof solution.

Learn to be a coder? Though there isn't any data on this, the market for middle-aged, entry-level coders is probably weak.

In other words, the theory of creative destruction works when you're talking about specific companies or industries falling by the wayside because a better alternative has come along. The elimination of the typewriter wasn't an economic disaster, because typewriters gave way to a better alternative that created even more jobs. More people make their living from the production of computers than ever made their living from the production of typewriters.

However, the theory of creative destruction isn't as applicable when one of the things being destroyed is the very idea of human labor.

If economic theories like creative destruction do not provide an answer, maybe politics can.

I know I lost some of you right there.

"It's the free market," you say. "It will solve its own problems!" That's easy to say when the only way you've ever made a living hasn't disappeared. Just like there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are very few Ayn Rand followers in an unemployment line. And before you have any condescending ideas about the reading habits of people who end up in unemployment lines, it's worth remembering that bankers and CEOs also tend to misplace their copy of Atlas Shrugged whenever they need bailed out.

In fact, in the face of massive job loss, even the world's most powerful Ayn Rand fan, current Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, can stop caring about what the free market wants.

But both the left and the right offer about as many helpful ideas of how to deal with the changing nature of human labor as an economics textbook does.

A tax cut from the right or an increase in the minimum wage from the left does nothing for a middle-aged, middle-class worker whose skill set (and human touch) has been permanently replaced by yet another interaction with a screen. That's one reason why politics has gotten so awful. Neither the left nor the right has any new ideas for new problems, so all they do is turn up the volume on old ideas.

So, what can be done for someone like my father-in-law and the millions of other people who will be permanently displaced by technology?

We need to begin by acknowledging the fact that we have to rethink the relationship between human beings, work, and the economy. That doesn't mean we need to adopt socialism or communism. What it means is that we need to accept the idea that we need to find a new "ism" that works in a world that none of the thinkers who came up with the old "isms" could have imagined.

Developing a new "ism" should also not be viewed as a criticism of capitalism. The parts of the world that operated under some variation of capitalism have fared better, even if the gains weren't evenly distributed. People lived longer, healthier, and more educated lives. A big reason why all of that happened is because capitalism allows people to pursue their full potential through work. If technology has evolved to the point where there aren't enough avenues for people to do that, the way we organize our society needs to evolve, too.

Letting all we've achieved wither away because we can't think of a new idea would be a tragedy. It would be a little like allowing a family to fall apart just because the kids grew up.

Except rather than a lifetime of figuring out where to spend Thanksgiving, you get to experience the real life Hunger Games (where no one looks like Katniss or Galeor even Peeta).

It is possible to create a society that can adapt to the changes ahead.

But first we need to recognize that our old ideas aren't a solution, and that a middle-class, middle-aged, technologically displaced worker won't be helped by a tax cut or a higher minimum wage.

Or a few coding lessons.

Commentary by Dustin McKissen, the founder and CEO of McKissen + Company, a strategy, marketing, and public relations firm based in St. Charles, Missouri. The firm does consulting work analyzing how politics effects the business climate for clients in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. McKissen was named one of LinkedIn's "Top Voices" in 2015 and 2016. He holds a Bachelors degree in Public Policy, and a Masters degree in Public Administration and is currently pursuing a PhD in Organizational and Industrial Psychology. Follow him on Twitter @DMcKissen.

For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCOpinion on Twitter.


Matt Cardy | Getty Images | Getty Images News

The idea that big banks are facing an "existential crisis" from financial technology (fintech) challengers is "overblown", the digital chief of HSBC told CNBC. In response to the debate over challenger banks and other fintech players posing a serious threat to established financial services institutions, the bank's head of digital said that the trust of customers meant banks were "sufficiently primed." Some have referred to the debate as "David versus Goliath," referring to the potential for small digital start-ups to undermine the dominance of big banks. "I think the 'David-Goliath' (debate) or the existential crisis debate is overblown," Raman Bhatia, head of digital for HSBC in the U.K. and Europe, said in a phone interview on Tuesday. "There are many players that will co-exist and there could be many models that could build on top of the bank's model and co-exist with what banks have to offer."

ipopba | Getty Images

Several digital-only "challenger banks" such as Starling, Fidor and Monzo have gained momentum, particularly in the U.K., leading to questions over whether such digital alternatives could weaken the position of traditional banks. And regulations which would allow third-party companies the ability to provide payment services for and access the data of banking customers - something referred to in the fintech world as "open banking" - are also set to cause headaches for the banks, experts have said. Last week Daniel Doderlein, the CEO of Norwegian start-up Auka, which helps banks to comply with such regulations, warned that institutions which refuse to change their model to adapt to new developments like open banking would trail behind others in the market. He said at a fintech conference in London that there would be a difference between the banks that "continue to make incremental technology steps to just make their business more efficient," all the while operating "exactly the same," and banks that "strategically fight towards the force of fintechs."

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All airports are not created equal.

Confusing directions, jacked-up food prices and congested terminals may be the defining features of some airport experiences, but a new report from the Air Transport Research Society shows that not all airports deserve the same reputation.

By crunching data from 2015 on a handful of key factors, including productivity, efficiency and cost competitiveness, the ATRS report ranks 206 airports around the globe in 24 different airport groups. The ATRS has collected performance data from as early as 2002, and a single American airport has seized the top spot more than a dozen years in a row.

On the flip side, the report also confirms that travelers to New York aren't wrong to complain about the city's oft-maligned major airports. John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia International Airports were both ranked the lowest in their respective groups for cost competitiveness. And LaGuardia ranked second-worst in its size range  between 25 and 40 million annual passengers  in terms of productivity.

The airports in this list, however, all rank among the world's best.
Kwik Trip, which already dominates the convenience store market in suburban Dane County with its low prices and customer-friendly amenities like no-fee ATMs, is expanding its presence in Madison, announcing Wednesday that it is buying PDQ Stores.

This gives us a presence inside the Beltline and that fits perfectly with where we want to be, said David Niemi, a spokesman with La Crosse-based Kwik Trip, which signed an agreement to acquire the assets of Middleton-based PDQ, which includes 15 company-operated convenience stores in Madison, another eight in the area, 11 elsewhere in Wisconsin and one in California.

A purchase price was not announced because it was a private sale, according to Niemi. PDQ is employee-owned and has four major shareholders who approved the deal after conferring with the employees, Niemi said. Kwik Trip is owned by the Zietlow family.

A competitor offered a gloomy outlook at best for the other convenience stores in Madison because of Kwik Trips low prices for inside sales.

(Kwik Trip) is a huge company. We cant compete with them. Itll be tough for everybody else to do business in Madison, said Farooq Shahzad, president of Capitol Petroleum, which owns 17 Petro Marts in Madison  one more than Kwik Trip will own in the city after the PDQ sale is finalized.

Kwik Trip currently has 337 stores in Wisconsin. Its only presence in Madison is a store that doesnt sell gasoline on the UW-Madison campus, a full-service store at the American Center and a Tobacco Outlet, which is also part of the Kwik Trip organization, on Sherman Avenue. It has 19 other stores in the county.

It also has another 147 stores in Minnesota and 82 in Iowa. The stores are called Kwik Star in Iowa because a chief competitor in that state is called QuikTrip. The company, which does about $5 billion in gross sales annually, employs about 19,000 workers, Niemi said.

The acquisition of PDQ includes licenses to sell alcohol for each store, which was a key part of the deal, according to Niemi. Kwik Trips policy is to open stores only where the company can sell all of its many products, including alcoholic beverages. That had been difficult in Madison  as well as in Milwaukee  because of the policies of both cities to limit new licenses to sell alcohol, Niemi said.

About 1,000 new jobs will be created after the sale is finalized because the company will double and sometimes triple the amount of employees that PDQ employs at each of its stores, Niemi said. Most of those jobs  which include kitchen work, loading and unloading, and product demonstrations that arent part of the PDQ blueprint  will be part-time.

None of the current PDQ employees are assured of a job with Kwik Trip, but all are encouraged to apply for jobs with the company, Niemi said.

The company, which hopes to finalize the sale in October, also plans to spend $30 million to $35 million to re-image all of the PDQ stores into Kwik Trip stores, according to Niemi. The majority of PDQs stores will get an interior facelift that includes new shelving, while the smaller ones will be remodeled. The company plans to have the entire project finished by mid- to late October, he said.

A PDQ spokesman did not return calls asking for a comment on the sale.

PDQ has been around for 65 years, and Kwik Trip for 52 years, and they have enjoyed success as family-owned operations with similar business mindsets, according to Niemi. For instance, Kwik Trip and PDQ both like to build two stores across from each other on one street so customers dont have to make tough turns in traffic to get in and out.

Its a good fit for us, Niemi said.

Sam Jacobson opened the first PDQ  called Tri Dairy  in 1949, added a second one 13 years later and, following a suggestion by his wife, Mary, changed the name to PDQ, which was short for Pretty Darned Quick, a popular phrase from the World War I era, according to the company website. In 2009, Jeff Jacobsen sold PDQ to the employees.

The John Hansen family founded Kwik Trip in Eau Claire in 1965. It was co-owned by the Hansen and Zietlow families starting in 1972, and the Hansens sold their interest to the Zietlows in 2000.

Fast-growing Kwik Trip, which has opened 200 stores since 2013, has developed a strong reputation for luring customers inside with its fresh and hot food, coffee and beverages and a number of other products at prices that are usually the lowest in the area.

I choose between Kwik Trip, PDQ and Kelleys Market where I live because there isnt a grocery store nearby and Kwik Trips prices are more on the fair side, said Ryan Johnson, 43, who lives on the North Side near the town of Westport border.

Kwik Trip, which regularly rates high in consumer surveys, has the lowest prices because the companys campus in La Crosse includes a kitchen that makes soups, salads, pizzas and other hot food, as well as all the bread and buns under its labels, along with a warehouse where more than 6,000 different products flow through to its stores.

Many of Kwik Trips stores include large walk-in beer coolers, wood fixtures, tile floors and other amenities to give it an upscale look. They also include customer-friendly touches such as free and easy-to-use air compressors for inflating tires.

That is a business weapon that has no peers in this area and creates a gap in prices that will lure customers away from the citys other convenience stores, according to Capitol Petroleums Shahzad.

We have to pay a commission to a third party for the products we sell, and Kwik Trip avoids that. So they can undersell, theyve got the free ATM, they do things we cant afford to do. Hes going to kill the little guys, he said.

Shahzad said Capitol Petroleum turned down a very good offer from Kwik Trip to buy all the Petro Marts about a month ago.

They want to add 50 stores a year. Thats what they told me, Shahzad said. I think this time they offered PDQ too much money that couldnt be refused.
Tower operator Crown Castle International said it would buy privately held Lightower Fiber Networks for about $7.1 billion in cash to expand its fiber footprint in urban areas of the U.S. northeast.

Crown Castle, which has been looking to further diversify from its traditional tower business, said it was buying the company from a group of investors including Berkshire Partners and Pamlico Capital.

The deal doubles Crown Castle's fiber assets to about 60,000 route miles and gives it an opportunity to deploy small cell network in top northeastern metro markets, including Boston, New York and Philadelphia, the company said on Tuesday.

Small-cell towers are increasingly in demand by wireless carriers as they try to boost coverage and increase capacity, especially in urban areas.

Reuters reported last week that Crown Castle had made an offer for Lightower.

Crown Castle said it expects the deal to add about $465 million to $485 million to adjusted funds from operations before financing costs in the first full year of ownership and boost its annual dividend of $3.80 by 15 cents to 20 cents per share.

The company also said it expected Lightower to contribute $850 million to $870 million in site rental revenue.

Crown Castle said it has received financing commitments from Morgan Stanley Senior Funding Inc and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch of about $7.1 billion for new unsecured bridge facility.

Morgan Stanley was Crown Castle's financial adviser, while Cravath, Swaine & Moore provided legal counsel.

Evercore and Citigroup Inc were Lightower's financial advisers, with Ropes and Gray as its legal counsel.
Its been more than two years since Lisa M. Badciong, 46, of Chippewa Falls was charged with being unresponsive in a running vehicle in a Lake Hallie Burger King drive-through. According to a criminal complaint, she had two infants in the vehicles back seat and a half-bottle of vodka in the front passenger seat.

The case continued to drag on Wednesday in Chippewa County Court, a day originally set aside to take a plea from Badciong or her sentencing.

Instead retired Judge Roderick Cameron, filling in for Judge Steve Cray, ruled against a motion by defense attorney Michael Cohen.

Badciong faces charges of driving while intoxicated ninth offense, driving while intoxicated ninth offense with a minor child in the vehicle and second degree recklessly endangering safety from June 2, 2015 in Lake Hallie.

Cohen said he is in very significant talks with prosecutors to come up with a plea deal. He said Badciong should be charged with intoxicated driving eighth offense, while Assistant District Attorney Lawrence J. Broeren said it is a charge of ninth offense.

Cohen argued Badciong should not receive a mandated sentence in the case. A mandatory penalty may be undue punishment, he said.

Cameron replied the court can not tell the state Legislature that it can not impose a penalty the Legislature imposed. He also said that a mandatory sentence would not constitute unusual punishment as Cohen maintained.

I dont like mandatory penalties, Cameron said. But the Legislature has its own way of doing things.

Her criminal complaint said if she is convicted, the prison sentence Badciong could receive is not less than six years and not more than 20 years.

Judge Cray in January threw out a prospective plea deal, calling for Badciong to serve six months in jail and to be placed on up to nine years probation while performing 400 hours of community service.

A criminal complaint said she had a blood alcohol level of .32, four times the .08 intoxication standard the state has for first time drunken driving.

Cray said Badciong was so intoxicated she was going in and out of consciousness while having children ages 2 and 1  in the back seat of a red 2004 Pontiac Aztek.

According to the criminal complaint for the incident at 12:05 a.m. June 2, 2015:

Badciong had her foot on the vehicles brake while it was running in the restaurant drive through. A Chippewa Fire District member reached in and put the vehicle into park and shut off the ignition key.

Due to her high level of intoxication, she was unable to perform field sobriety tests as she could not speak nor stand. She was transported to the hospital where she had to stay to be medically cleared due to her high level of intoxication, a criminal complaint said.
An application for a non-commercial kennel license opposed by the police department was pulled before the Chippewa Falls City Council could consider it Tuesday.

Dorothea Panosh of 8 Madison St., wanted the license for her two dogs and three cats. But Police Chief Matt Kelm opposed granting the license, citing the findings of a police officer making an inspection of the Panosh residence on June 19.

Panosh withdrew the application before the council could vote on it. The council formally denied the application on a voice vote, even after its withdraw.

My concern was she said she was withdrawing (the application) because she is moving, Clerk Bridget Givens said. City Attorney Robert Ferg recommended the denial to support the police findings, which the council did.

According to Kelm, the police officer on his inspection found:

(A) distinct and foul odor of animal feces upon approach to the residence.

Two cats were loose in the yard and ran from the officer when he walked up. Panosh later stated she did not need an outdoor kennel enclosure because her cats were always indoors and her dogs were always on a leash when outside.

A distinct and four odor of cat urine emanating from the interior of the residence and overwhelming while inside the residence

Panosh advised the officer that she leaves food out specifically to feed feral cats in the neighborhood.

One neighbor said he or she didnt have a problem with Panosh. But another said cats are everywhere in the neighborhood because of Panosh and another neighbor feeding them.

Still another neighbor reported having major health issues and being unable to go outside their house because of what the officer said was an overwhelming cat urine and dog feces smell coming from Panoshs residence.

One neighbor advised there at 10-plus cats in their yard, near their house and under their deck every time they come home. The officer could also smell the overwhelming stench of cat urine coming from under the deck. This homeowner believes they will have to make major repairs to their deck/house prior to selling as a direct result of the cat urine smell, the officer reported.

Feeding feral cats and the condition of the Panosh residence is significantly having an impact on her neighbors, Kelm found.

Panoshs dogs include: Brownie, a Cocker Spaniel, Dom, a Blue Heeler mix. Her cats include Puff, a domestic longhair, Goldie the III, a domestic shorthair and Kelci, a domestic shorthair.

The council also ratified a labor agreement with the Chippewa Falls Professional Police Association on a 6-0 vote. The contract calls for a one percent wage increase in 2017, another percent raise on Jan. 1, 2018 and another percent increase on July 1, 2018.

Kelm said the increase helps and brings the city more in line with what other communities are paying police officers.

Council President Rob Keifer did not attend Tuesdays council session.
Good news this afternoon from Rhode Island, where Gov. Gina Raimondo has signed a bill providing automatic voter registration to qualified citizens doing business with state agencies.

The state becomes the ninth nationwide to adopt automatic registration, a voter reform which has boosted registration and voter turnout elsewhere. Common Cause Rhode Island was among the organizations that lobbied the state legislature in support of the legislation.

Governor Raimondo took an important step today to keep our elections modern, safe and secure in Rhode Island, said John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island. Having automatic voter registration will increase access to the ballot for eligible Rhode Islanders so that they can have their voice heard in the electoral process.

Having clean voter lists is critical to preserving the integrity of our elections, which is why I made enacting Automatic Voter Registration a priority, Rhode Island Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea said in a press release. Automatic Voter Registration will help reduce the bloat in our voter rolls resulting from unintentional, duplicate voter registrations and help increase voter participation.

Raimondos action came as President Trumps advisory panel on election integrity met for the first time in Washington. The White House has stocked the commission, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, with prominent advocates of laws and regulations designed to make voting more difficult.

###
Strap on your hip waders. This particular scare article should have you thinking yet again about the advisability of installing Windows updates as soon as theyre available. As youll see, Microsoft itself has flip-flopped on the resolution and those who subscribe to Windows Update have been taken along for the ride.

Buggy June patches to Windows, Internet Explorer and Edge left customers in the horns of a dilemma:

You can plug a security hole known as CVE-2017-8529, in which IE or Edge reveal the presence of a specific file on your computer when you simply surf to a compromised web site, OR

You can print content on web pages that are inside an HTML construct known as an iFrame, using IE 9, 10 or 11.

Microsofts up against a hard bug that makes this an either-or proposition: Until Microsoft figures out how to fix both problems at the same time, either you patch the security hole, or you can print inside iFrames with IE, but not both.

For most people, this isnt a big dealjust plug the security hole and use something other than IE to print web pages. But in many corporate environments, custom IE-based programs make that approach a non-starterand companies that have custom IE programs that rely on printing inside iFrames are really feeling the pinch. Its interesting to see how Microsoft has dealt with the problem, and cut the cards several times in the process.

[ To comment on this story, visit Computerworld's Facebook page. ]

And... surprise... if you have Automatic Update turned on, you can now print from iFrames in IE, but the security hole hasn't been plugged. Microsoft seems to prefer leaving IE intact, and let the security hole take the back seat.

There are a lot of patches involved. To see the train wreck in slow mo, look at the events chronologically:

June 13: Microsoft releases a slew of bad patches for IEJune Internet Explorer Cumulative Update 4021558, Monthly Rollups 4022719, 4022724, 4022726 (all fed through Automatic Update), and manually installed Security Updates 4022727, 4022714, 4022715, and 4022725.

June 21: Microsoft acknowledges the cant print from iFrame bug in all of those patches.

June 22: Microsoft releases a second patch, KB 4032782, which fixes the cant print from iFrame bug by disabling the part of the original patches that deal with CVE-2017-8529. Its an optional update, so IE users can choose to either (1) fix the CVE-2017-8529 security hole, or (2) enable printing from iFrames. Those using Automatic Update who dont touch anything will still have problems with printing from iFrames.

June 27: Microsoft releases another big bunch of IE-related patches. Again, the choices are (1) fix the security hole or (2) enable printing from iFrames. In this case, those using Automatic Update who dont install the Preview Rollup patches (which are not checked by default), will still have problems with printing from iFrames  EXCEPT for folks running Win10 Creators Update, 1703. The people running Creators Update are automatically updated with KB 4022716, which enables printing from iFrames, but disables the fix for the security hole.

As of June 27, if you were installing these patches as they came out the chute, your Win10 1703 machines can print in iFrames but dont have the security hole plugged. On the other hand, your Win10 1607 and 1511 machines have it the other way aroundIE cant print inside iFrames, but the security hole is plugged.

Complicated enough for you? Wait. It gets better.

Unfortunately, the automatically installed June 27 cumulative update for Win10 1703, KB 4022716, proved to be a disaster, with reported problems in IE, Chrome and Firefox, black screens, and a conflict with Comodo firewall. If you let Windows 10 install this cumulative update, IE and Edge would suddenly close when you visit particularly complexbut perfectly validwebsites. The same IE crash is documented for:

KB 4022168 Rollup Preview for Win7

KB 4022720 Rollup Preview for Win 8.1

KB 4032695 a manually installed update for Win10 1507

KB 4032693 a manually installed update for Win10 1511

KB 4022723 a manually installed update for Win10 1607

Heres the warning:

After you install this update, Internet Explorer 11 may close unexpectedly when you visit some websites. When the problem occurs, you may receive an error message that resembles the following: We were unable to return you to [previous URL] Internet Explorer has stopped trying to restore this website. It appears the website continues to have a problem. The problem may occur if the website is complex and uses certain web API's.

Thats how things stood until Patch Tuesday, July 11: Another bunch of patches came out the Auto Update chute that day, but this time the role seems to be reversed. You can sift through the details of the 35 patches that include IE and Edge updates  KB 4022724, 4021558, 4022715, 4022727, 4022714, 4022726, 4022725, 4022719, if I didnt miss anybut the meat of the changes appears in this Security TechCenter post:

Please note that the protection for CVE-2017-8529 is not yet available with the release of the July security updates, as we continue to work on a solution for the known issue customers may experience when printing from Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge after installing Internet Explorer Cumulative update 4021558. Customers who receive automatic updates will not be protected from this CVE.

If I read that correctly, Microsoft sent out a silver bullet in this months Patch Tuesday patches, which turns off the part of the bad June patches that plugs the CVE-2017-8529 security hole. That is, everybody who has Automatic Update turned on should now be able to print inside iFrames with IE, but will be exposed to the security hole.

I doubt that most customers, given the choice, would trade IE iFrame printing for security.

Its not at all clear why Microsoft changed horses in the middle of the botched-patch-updating stream, but it now appears as if were back to the pre-June update settings for the security hole and the iFrame printing issue.

Can you make heads from tails out of this? Hit me on the AskWoody Lounge.

Thanks to abbodi86, ch100, and MrBrian
We all know how it feels to be trapped in the bank. Maybe youre in line behind a kid depositing his summer lemonade stand money one quarter at a time. Or youre waiting behind a customer like me, who never has any of the family account numbers on him and has to ask the teller to look them up. Or youre stuck for three hours inside an ATM.

Last week a maintenance worker in Texas spent a good part of his Wednesday  he would no doubt call it a bad part of his Wednesday  trapped inside an ATM. He escaped by using an ability many of us perfected in junior high: Passing notes.

Heres the story, according to Americas leading authority on wokka-wokka wackiness, the New York Times: Just after 2 p.m., a person in Corpus Christi had just completed a transaction at a Bank of America ATM when a surprise slid through the receipt slot. Please help, read a handwritten note on a thin strip of paper. Im stuck in here, and I dont have my phone. Thats weird: When I get a surprise from the receipt slot, its a nastygram informing me the account is overdrawn.

The worker had been fixing a lock when a door shut behind him, trapping him inside the ATM. He noticed customers were using the machine, and tried passing notes through the receipt slot. Several ignored the notes, figuring it was a gag that would land them on Candid Camera. The guy might have had better luck if he had passed a $20 through the slot along with each note.

Finally one customer took the note seriously, spotted a police officer driving by  How about that? A cop when you need one!  and flagged him down. The officer suspected a prank, but heard a faint sound upon approaching the ATM. It was the workers muffled screams. The cop called the number the worker provided, confirmed he had been dispatched to the bank, and summoned help. Half an hour later, police kicked down the door and freed the worker.

So, how does a guy get trapped in an ATM? This one was attached to a bank that was under construction. A door led into a vault from which the worker could service the machine from the inside. He came to repair the locking mechanism, but when the door shut behind him, he was trapped.

No one involved  not the worker, the contracting company, the bank nor the customer who flagged down police  wanted to be interviewed. Thats a shame, because it would be interesting to find out how a man feels when he has access to all the cash he could ever want, but no ability to spend it. He was surrounded by $20s, but all he wanted was fresh air.

Fortunately he was resourceful enough to use a technique that probably is becoming a lost art. When I was in school, passing notes was a key mode of communication. Whats on the chemistry test this afternoon? Is it true that Bobby and Shannon broke up? Do these tight-rolled, acid-washed Guess jeans make my ankles look fat? Such questions wouldve gone unanswered without notes. Written on actual paper. With pens.

I imagine todays middle-schoolers Snapchat such questions and answers these days. They dont know about passing notes. And they have no idea what Candid Camera was.

These same youths probably never walk into a bank to conduct business. They use the drive-up window or the ATM. After all, theyd hate to get trapped at the bank behind some guy who cant remember his account number.

That being the case, kids today need to master the art of receiving a note. Whether youre executing a lightning-fast handoff with your best friend as you pass between classes or youre on the receiving end of a distress call coming from inside an ATM, knowing how to handle a note is critical. Someones life could depend on it.

Ben Bromley is a columnist for the Baraboo News-Republic. Contact him at bbromley@capitalnewspapers.com.
Jacob Rees-Mogg has told ConHome he is not running for the Conservative leadership. In this interview he declares that the growing campaign to make him leader, championed on this site by Anne Sutherland, is very flattering but Im not taking it seriously.

The MP for North-East Somerset wants Theresa May to carry on as Prime Minister for ever and ever. He adds that although the Conservatives got in a terrible flap over the general election, they should calm down over the summer and realise they have suffered a disappointment, not a catastrophe.

Rees-Mogg, whose sixth son, Sixtus, was born recently, points out that like Margaret Thatcher, whose prime ministership appeared in 1981 to be collapsing, but who stayed in office for another nine years, May could well remain much longer in Downing Street than people expect.

He rejects the idea that his own career has in any way been impeded by anti-Etonian prejudice. As a prominent Roman Catholic, he says that belonging to that Church is now no bar to being Prime Minister, or to any job in the United Kingdom other than ones within the Anglican Church.

Rees-Mogg says his real ambition, which is to go on Test Match Special, will be fulfilled at the end of August.

ConHome: What do you think of the campaign to make you leader?

Rees-Mogg [after a pause]: Well its very flattering. I cant help but be flattered. But Im not taking it seriously.

I dont think giving ones son an unusual name is a qualification for being Prime Minister. And Im glad to say there isnt a vacancy.

Im a backbench Tory MP, and cant be a serious candidate. But its very charming.

ConHome: Do you want to be leader?

Rees-Mogg: I dont think its wise to have ambitions above ones station. But I love being a Tory MP.

I love representing North-East Somerset, and my real ambition is going to be fulfilled at the end of August, when Im going to be interviewed by Jonathan Agnew for the View From The Boundary on Test Match Special.

What more can anybody want in life than to be a Member of Parliament for Somerset and to be interviewed by Test Match Special? Life is complete.

ConHome: Have you had any contact with these enthusiasts who have set up a website?

Rees-Mogg: Not directly. I do see some very nice things that they say.

ConHome: Why havent you been offered a frontbench job?

Rees-Mogg: Because there are many better people filling frontbench jobs at the moment, and theres no obvious need to offer me one.

ConHome: Is there an anti-Etonian prejudice stalking the land?

Rees-Mogg: I dont think so. It seems to me Old Etonians arent doing too badly, all things considered. I mean the great thing about Eton is not whether theres any prejudice in later life, but it gives people a fabulous education.

And what all Old Etonians should be thinking about who are in public life is how can Etons style of education be copied throughout the country. Because people from all over the world try to get their children into Eton.

It must therefore being doing something not only right, but it must be doing something very well, to a global standard. And the question we should ask is not, Is it an establishment that leads to people objecting to it later in life? but Can we be sure every child in the United Kingdom can get as good an education as is available at Eton?

And why not? Why arent we thinking about that? Its what the push should be for. And I think its where Michael Gove was such an inspired Secretary of State for Education, because I think thats basically what he was trying to do.

ConHome: But do you think theres a general anti-Etonian prejudice? The other thing about Eton is that its continually changing. People have some idea of it as a repository of hereditary blockheads or something.

Rees-Mogg: Well Im a sort of throw-back to that.

ConHome: Its actually quite a difficult school to get into.

Rees-Mogg: It is now very difficult to get into. It wasnt when I went. When I went it was very easy to get into. They frankly trawled the hedgerows of Somerset.

But no, I dont think there is [a prejudice]. The former Prime Minister was an Old Etonian. The Foreign Secretary is an Old Etonian. The Archbishop of Canterbury is an Old Etonian.

If this is what Old Etonians are doing against a great tsunami of prejudice it isnt a very effective tsunami. So no, I dont think its an issue for Old Etonians, and I also have no sympathy for Old Etonians who complain, because they have had the greatest advantage in the early stage of their life that they could possibly have, a fine education, in most cases with their parents making sacrifices to send them there, and the odd Old Etonian does moan, and I think this is entirely foolish really.

ConHome: Of course the proportion both in places like the City and in the Conservative Party of Old Etonians is considerably lower than it used to be.

Rees-Mogg: And thats a thoroughly good thing, because more people are coming into a variety of walks of life. And the City is so much bigger.

If you think of how much bigger the City is than it was prior to Big Bang, if it was still entirely staffed by Old Etonians there wouldnt be enough to go round.

But thats the success of the City of London, which is one of the great triumphs of the United Kingdom  something of which we should all be very proud. Indeed without the revenue the City of London generates the country would be considerably poorer.

ConHome: Leaving your own situation aside, is it conceivable now that we shall have a Roman Catholic Prime Minister  I dont think weve ever had one, Blair converted afterwards  is it conceivable that a Catholic whos opposed to same-sex marriage could become Leader of the Conservative Party and indeed Prime Minister?

Rees-Mogg: I dont think Catholicism, and accepting the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church, is any bar to any job in the United Kingdom other than ones within the Anglican Church, and being Sovereign. The Sovereign is Head of the Anglican Church.

Catholic Emancipation, 1829, only requires that Catholics do not interfere in appointments in the Church of England. And its quite interesting that Tony Blair followed that very carefully, because he liked appointing bishops, which would have been a felony under the Act of Emancipation, if he had been formally a Catholic.

Iain Duncan Smith was leader of the Conservative Party and nobody said he couldnt go on to become Prime Minister because he was a Catholic. And indeed I think it would be very strange if this country still discriminated on the grounds of religion in public office.

If you turn your question round and consider whether you would say that about any other major or even minority religion. Would you say that a Zoroastrian, for example

ConHome: Im rather pro-Zoroastrian.

Rees-Mogg: So am I. But you wouldnt even ask the question.

ConHome: No, no, no.

Rees-Mogg: And I dont notice in this country any anti-Catholic bias.

ConHome: I think its pretty much died out in most places.

Rees-Mogg: There was, 50 years ago, but I think theres very little now. My father [William Rees-Mogg, editor of The Times 1967-81] certainly came up against it sometimes in his life. I think in his generation there was still some.

ConHome: How long do you think the present Prime Minister should remain in office?

Rees-Mogg: For ever and ever, Amen, Amen, Alleluia, Alleluia, Amen.

ConHome: Yes.

Rees-Mogg: Weve all got in a terrible flap over the general election, and its quite unnecessary. It wasnt as good as wed hoped. But the Conservative Party is still the party of government. The Prime Minister is still the Prime Minister.

You know all shes done. She got more votes than anybody since 1983, and the Conservative share was more votes than Blair in 1997.

If expectations hadnt been so high this would have been seen as a good result. If David Cameron had got this in 2015 it would have looked triumphant.

So it was all really about expectations and not meeting inflated expectations, which you and I both had, because I heard you on Broadcasting House [confessing to expecting a huge Tory majority], which is one of my favourite programmes.

You were admitting to exactly what I was guilty of. And so that led to a sense of disappointment. But disappointment has been written up as a catastrophe.

Its not a catastrophe. Nobodys died. Were all still alive. I think a calmer evaluation of the election result is necessary.

I think the summer is the opportunity for people to think it through, and to realise that all parties need to be led. There is no obvious candidate to take over from Theresa May.

And actually as Paul Goodman was writing this morning, a candidate who did take over would have no greater majority in the House of Commons, no automatic bigger authority, but would be under pressure to have another general election.

I think Brenda in Bristol hit the nail on the head. People have had enough elections for the time being. They want Parliament to get on with the job of being Parliament, and the Government to get on with the job of being the Government.

So I think calm reflection over the summer will encourage people to think that we want Mrs May to stay.

And then you start speculating about how long that stay should be for, which is the favourite topic of conversation of almost everybody within the Palace of Westminster, journalists and politicians alike, about all Prime Ministers, always. And thats no change.

I think the interesting lesson of history on this is that Prime Ministers go when youre not expecting them to. If you think of David Cameron, in 2015 he looked as if he was set forever.

Tony Blair, even in 2005, looked as if he could be Prime Minister practically for life. And then events transpired that shortened the leasehold.

Other Prime Ministers who look as if everything is collapsing go on and recover and do amazingly strongly. Look at Margaret Thatcher in 1981, is perhaps the best example.

Look at the position Harold Macmillan was in after he took over from Eden, and what he was able to do with that. And so these things are not easily forecastable, and are never as bad as they seem, or as good as they seem.
MPs demand that self-confessed IRA bomber faces justice

According to the Daily Mail, Birmingham MPs are demanding that a man who has confessed to taking part in the 1974 pub bombings in the city.

Michael Christopher Hayes, who now lives in Dublin, told the BBC that he accepted collective responsibility for all the IRAs attacks (on the mainland) but played a particular role in the Birmingham atrocity, as well as planting the Brighton Bomb in 1974.

It will doubtless be awkward for Jeremy Corbyn that Jess Philips and Khalid Mahmood, two of his own MPs, are leading the call to have Hayes extradited and investigated. But on this subject his instincts are probably closer to Tony Blair than hed like to admit.

After all, the last time the IRAs mainland campaign was headline news was after Blairs secret comfort letters programme  essentially below-the-radar pardons to on-the-runs wanted in connection with republican terrorism  led to the collapse of the trial of John Downey, the Hyde Park bomber.

When finally forced to defend himself Blair stood by his scheme, and tried to warn the Coalition against interfering with it. By insisting that an IRA operative is brought to justice it is Phillips and Mahmood who have fallen out of step with recent Labour history.

SNP divided on strategy as Salmond plots return

The general election came as a very nasty shock to the SNP: they lost 21 seats, including such nationalist titans as Angus Robertson, their Westminster leader, and Alex Salmond. Those that remain have seen seemingly impregnable majorities cut to marginal status.

Now that their much-reduced caucus have had time to find their feet again in the new Parliament, the debate is opening up about where the Nationalists go from here.

This week held up two competing visions: Salmond confirmed his intention to stand again and press hard on independence as a driving issue; and Chris Stephens, a member of the SNP front bench, said that the party needed to tack left to tackle Corbyn.

Salmond, as a former oil economist for the Royal Bank of Scotland and long-serving MP for Scotlands right-leaning North East, represents the Tartan Tory aspect of the party, the one which rallied anti-Labour voters behind the SNPs to the black-and-yellow standard.

This tendency is strong amongst the Parliamentary group  Tommy Sheppard, an able but decidedly left-wing Nationalist MP, ended up withdrawing from the contest to replace Robertson due to a lack of support.

However, the former First Minister is a leading voice of the separatist true believers. Hes an old man in a hurry: if Scoxit doesnt happen soon, he may not be in the limelight (or even alive) by the time the stars align again. Before June this set him at odds with Nicola Sturgeon, but the election result may have shortened her political lifespan to the point where they are falling back in sync on this one.

Electorally, this is a problem: with Scottish politics currently highly polarised around the constitutional question, the Salmond wings previous ability to win over centre-right, anti-Labour voters is probably shot. The North East of Scotland is almost solidly Tory for the moment.

Yet Stephens plan of tacking left poses equally pressing challenges, not least of which is that a lot of the SNPs voters  and for that matter, members and especially legislators  arent socialists. Having already seen pro-Brexit nationalists jump ship to Ruth Davidsons Conservatives (a development foreseen on ConservativeHome), who are now a competitive second in a good clutch of the Nationalists remaining seats, alienating middle-class support to assuage Labour switchers may simply move the pain around.

It also conflicts with the Partys need to try and maintain as broad a coalition as possible, in order to be in a position to pursue a referendum when and if the opportunity arises during the Brexit process. Adherence to this principle has basically stopped the SNP doing much governing of any description; it certainly precludes adopting a detailed, radical agenda of the left.

After years of eerie, phalanx-like discipline, its healthy to see that defeat has opened the Nationalists up a little to internal debate. But they dont yet seem to have found a way out of the hole Sturgeon has led them into.

Cardiff Bay to insist that Assembly staff speak Welsh

An unhappy feature of Welsh nationalism, and one which makes it a closer cousin of its Quebecois than its Scottish counterpart, is its language fixation.

You can see it on display in this New Statesman piece from the usually excellent Roger Scully, in which he asserts that people who dont engage with Welsh are complicit in colonialism  an unfortunate state of Anglikaner impurity they share with a substantial chunk of the Welsh population.

But the Welsh Government, doubtless taking time out from trying to find solutions to its woeful track record on issues such as education and health, has stepped up: from 2018 all staff in the National Assembly will require basic Welsh.

On the face of it, the need to learn simple phrases is unobjectionable. But it fits uneasily into a pattern whereby local communities can be denied English-language schooling, and is simply the latest of example of the Welsh Government attempting to use the public sector to lend a patina of utility to its nationalist language projects.

It also fits a broader trend towards insularity: making Welsh-speakers artificially competitive for posts in Wales offsets the fact that the opportunity cost of learning Welsh (as opposed to a world language or other transferable skill) is being less competitive outside the country.

Other policies, such as a tuition fee subsidy that penalises studying elsewhere in the UK and a push for a separate Welsh law which would prevent Welsh-trained lawyers being automatically able to practice in England, are cast in a similar mould.

In his piece Scully talks of progressive hypocrisy on the Welsh language. It strikes me that the real double standard is that people who scorn UKIP for attempting to impose an archaic, pigeon-hole vision of nationhood on modern Britain should laud the same instincts in a Celtic context.

Irish Prime Minister opposes border poll

Leo Varadkar, the new Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, has told Time magazine that he is opposed to a referendum on Northern Irelands constitutional status, the Belfast Telegraph reports.

Varadkar, who leads the centre-right Fine Gael party and the current government, said that the nationalist side would lose any poll because unionist voters werent switching over.

This view contrasts with that of his predecessor, Enda Kenny, who professed the widespread view that Brexit would drive up support for separatism in the home nations.

Instead the Taoiseach argues that any referendum would whip up tensions and lead only to increased sectarianism and division  which, he adds, is precisely why Sinn Fein are pursuing one.

However, he does share Kennys great concern that Brexit, if it cant be stopped, should take a form which disguises as much as possible the true, international nature of the Northern Irish border.
Rebecca Lowe Coulson was Parliamentary Candidate for the City of Durham at the 2015 General Election.

Where would we be if Tony Blair werent trying to rule the world? His latest outfit is the unexpectedly vaingloriously named Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI)  though its Wikipedia entry doesnt stretch to more than a single small-screen page.

Recently, the TBI published The Centre in the United Kingdom, France and Germany. Some have been keen to emphasise its finding that 56 per cent of UK voters agree that Britain should leave the European Union, even if no deal or trade agreement has been struck with the EU. This is an attitude that Blair calls ambivalent in his accompanying essay, however: based on the results of another question, he claims a majority oppose Hard Brexit. With insufficient time  and, to be honest, interest, since Ive read many clearer reports  I was tempted to move on.

Then I noticed this:

And, specifically, that under ten per cent of French voters had answered: I want to see us remain in the EU as it is today, and only just over 10 per cent of Germans. Thats serious dissatisfaction, no? Wait, you counter, 70 per cent say they want to stay, nonetheless  and some of those who desire reform are calling for more EU, not less, anyway. I get that. But its still because theyre not happy as it is; otherwise, theyd have joined the lonely yet satisfied 10 per cent who went for option two.

Some people in Europe want more EU because they need it. Being stuck in a halfhearted economic link-up, over which you have no control, isnt great in times of trouble  particularly if youre coming from a weak position. The classic Piketty (et al) suggestion of mutualising EU debt and issuing Eurobonds, so the European Central Bank can support countries in extremis, is a reforming approach that would necessitate greater political union. As he points out in Chronicles on our troubled times,

to have a common debt, there has to be a strong and legitimate federal political authority. We cant create Eurobonds and then let each national government decide how many it wants to issue. And that federal authority cant be the European Council or the Eurogroup. We need to take a giant step forward towards political union and a United States of Europe; otherwise, sooner or later well be headed for a huge step backwards  that is a rejection of the euro.

Thats surely not the type of reform Germany wants, however. In Berlin Rules, Paul Lever contends that, whatever form a political union might take, it does not mean, for Germans, raising money in Germany for the benefit of others. He asks whether they really do want increased integration, or if political union, for them, is simply a slogan. His conclusion is that the extended union Germany wants is most likely one in which a closer eye can be kept on other countries, with the aim of persuading them to approach fiscal policy along the German lines of low debt, borrowing, and deficits.

This understanding of reform might seem less appealing than Pikettys to people in nearby Greece  or those struggling in France, where youth unemployment rests at over 20 per cent  but, again, it represents a call for change, based on unhappiness with the present situation. As Britons know, however  with the exception of Blair, who still believes things wouldve been different if hed stayed in charge  EU change hasnt always been easy to effect.

For many Eurosceptics who preferred the idea of substantial reform to a clear-cut exit, how to vote in last years referendum came down to whether the change they wanted seemed possible. What if the EU did x, I say to my remaining Remainer friends  or refused to do y? Would you still afford it unconditional love? At what point would you accept it would never be what you wanted? Unresolved questions about refugees, debt crises, security, and general financial instability will force these questions on more people, and not just Britons. And so will the Brexit negotiations.

Markus Krall claims that many Europeans are unimpressed by the EUs approach to the Brexit talks because the EU is taking a risk, here. It is treating [them] as an opportunity to show other EU member states what happens to those who dare to leave. Weve seen recently that campaigns based on threats dont always work. And are people in Europe proud of this bullyboy style?

What if Brexit turns out well, regardless? What if we forget our arguments, address the big policy problems we couldnt for 40 years, relish in the return of our law-setting powers, appreciate a fair migration system that doesnt prioritise Belgians and Germans over Canadians and Indians, and are glad to be able to help poorer countries by choosing to trade with them without punitive tariffs?

What if other Europeans recognise this? What if they spot that those bullyboy tactics may be predicated on such a recognition. The uber-Remainers praying for disaster dont understand that Britain doing well post-Brexit isnt in our self-interest, alone. They want so badly to be right, that they dont care if their nightmares bring us all down  Europe, too.

The obvious point, which, for me, has always been at the heart of all this is that you can love Europe and dislike the EU. You can dislike the EU for the very reason that you love Europe: in the interests of your neighbours, your allies, your friends.

When does that top option on the TBI question disappear? When is choosing reform no longer relevant? Either because people are satisfied with the reform that has already taken place  hard to envisage, not least because of the disparate nature of peoples desires, as partially catalogued above  or because theyve accepted its just not coming. Then what? What if the Brexit reforms turn out to reflect the changes  or at least the outcomes  that many Europeans actually want, if they knew they were possible?

Those like Blair are still painting this debate as the sensible versus the loons, the centre versus the extreme, Europe versus Britain. But its not. You can be as left, as right, as centrist as you want, and see that the EU isnt working for many people  and often, the least advantaged. (If Jeremy Corbyn were up front about his Euroscepticism, maybe this would be more obvious.)

Sure, people in other European countries are more invested in the EU than us. Sure, Im not really saying anything new. But Im certain its not only Britons who feel this way.
Robert Halfon is a former Apprenticeships and Skills Minister, is MP for Harlow, and is honorary President of Conservative Workers and Trade Unionists.

On Tuesday, David Cameron spoke about the continued need for modernisation of the Conservative party. He was right, especially in the sense that a modernisation that takes place at a certain period, cannot be preserved in aspic. The whole purpose of successful political parties is to continue to evolve in order to adapt to changing times.

Perhaps to use a more conservative way of describing this: we need to change what is necessary in order to conserve what is best.

However, the agreement that we need as a party to continually modernise, is much easier than to work out what form of modernisation that should take.

During the Cameron years  especially in opposition  modernisation appeared primarily focused on the middle classes and younger metropolitan professionals who had become disenchanted with a Tory party they saw as reactionary and too hard-nosed. So, this meant a boost for social liberalism, environmentalism, and, where possible avoiding the subject of Europe and immigration. To develop the compassionate side, the answer was increased overseas aid and the Big Society. Of all these, the Big Society was both an attempt to explain the little platoons philosophy of conservatism  emphasising that conservatism did have a compassionate heart and cared as much about social capital as economic capital.

Despite success in opposition, winning important by-elections like Crewe and Norwich North, significant numbers of councils, and gaining many Parliamentary seats at the 2010 election, the Conservatives still failed to get a clear majority and ended up in coalition with the Liberals.

It was at this time that the modernisation project came under question  with the argument being that the modernisation seesaw had tilted too far in favour of metropolitan types and not enough towards Blue Collar and White Van conservatives. In the early days, sometimes there was a mistaken belief that if you were not in favour of every part of The Project it just meant that you were against all forms of change and reform and were just from the reactionary right.

The seesaw tilted in the opposite direction as there came an understanding that the Conservative Party had to appeal as much to workers in Stevenage as young professionals in Battersea.

So, in came the fuel duty freeze, lower taxes for lower earners, the investment in millions of apprenticeships, and perhaps most important of all, the National Living Wage. The NLW was a powerful and counter-intuitive statement about our values  helping those on lower incomes, and showing all parts of the country that we were the party of workers. Alongside all this, came a pledge for an EU Referendum.

With the arrival of Theresa May as Prime Minister, her powerful speech on the steps of Downing Street about a Britain that works for everyone, inspired many. It firmly put the modernisation seesaw in favour of workers party Conservatism. The problem being of course was that, for one reason or another, much of this got lost in the post-manifesto election campaign. The modernisation seesaw was on neither one side or the other.

What is there to learn from all this?

First, that a back to the future to modernisation circa 2005 is not the answer to all our difficulties, but neither is a return to Keep the Pound circa 1997, primarily focusing on Brexit.

Second  and I say this as a huge proponent of Workers Conservatism  we wont win if we take the attitude that as long as we succeed in working class marginal seats, it does not matter if Conservatives do badly in London or the other great cities. The argument goes like this: the demographics are just not going our way. Not only is this wrong, it is defeatist  no area should be thought of as not natural Tory territory. Until we can straddle both, we will never get a healthy majority.

Third, Conservatives have to somehow create a fusion of policies that appeal both to workers conservatism and metropolitan types. I described the National Living Wage, apprenticeships and lower taxes as some examples above. Add strong support for the NHS and other essential public services. I am sure ConservativeHome readers can come up with some others.
The Government's motion seeking clarification of our order of June 26, 2017, is denied. The District Court order modifying the preliminary injunction with respect to refugees covered by a formal assurance is stayed pending resolution of the Government's appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.



Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, and Justice Gorsuch would have stayed the District Court order in its entirety.



On June 26, the U.S. Supreme Court granted in part the Government's request to stay the injunctions against enforcement of the travel ban for nationals of six countries. The court left the injunction in effect for, among others, persons with "a close familial relationship" with a person in the United States. How close is "close"? The Supreme Court did not say.The Government's interpretation was largely along the lines of family relationships that Congress has designated as close enough to file an application for a family-based immigration petition, which seemed sensible to me. The U.S. District Court did not think so and modified its injunction to include "grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins of persons in the United States." Sounds like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan The District Court also enjoined application of the Executive Order to two classes of refugees, those who "(i) have a formal assurance from an agency within the United States that the agency will provide, or ensure the provision of, reception and placement services to that refugee; or (ii) are in the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program through the Lautenberg Program."Acting swiftly in response to a petition by the Government, the Court issued this order Hmmm. The District Court's furthest stretch, to refugees who merely have an assurance from an agency but no other contact within the U.S., is stayed, but the rest remains in force. This is the Supreme Court that our Politically Correct academia keeps telling us is "conservative."
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ConvergeOne Fortifies Cisco, AWS Muscle With Purchase Of 155-Person Solution Provider

Michael Novinson

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Fast-growing solution provider ConvergeOne has bought a Cisco Gold Certified partner to boost its public cloud capabilities and gain a physical presence in the Northeast.

The Eagan, Minn.-based company said its acquisition Tuesday of Clifton Park, N.Y.-based Annese & Associates, No. 226 on the 2017 CRN Solution Provider 500, is part of a long-term strategy to broaden and deepen its capabilities through inorganic growth. Annese is the 12th acquisition ConvergeOne has made since 2005, according to the companies.

"As a Cisco Gold partner, the Annese team brings additional Cisco solutions and service capabilities in enterprise networking, security, collaboration and cloud, backed by four decades of experience and expertise," John McKenna, ConvergeOne's chairman and CEO, said in a statement. "This acquisition enables us to increase our presence in the northeastern United States."

[RELATED: Sources: ConvergeOne Acquires Sigmanet As Solution Provider Consolidation Continues]

Annese President and CEO Ray Apy will continue to lead 155-person Annese as a senior vice president in the combined company. He will report to Paul Maier, president and CEO of ConvergeOne's Solutions division.

"As part of a much larger company, this acquisition will provide our employees with unparalleled professional growth and development opportunities," Apy said. "Through ConvergeOne's broad reach and manufacturer portfolio, our customers will gain more flexibility coupled with the same great customer service approach they've come to expect from Annese."

Annese said in a note on its website that, after 47 years, the owners felt it was the right time to transition ownership and best position customers and employees for the next wave of technology. ConvergeOne's three Network Operating Centers and more than 1,280 employees will provide Annese with more resources to execute its strategic plan, the company said in a letter to customers.

Apy told vendors that the company will operate as a business unit within ConvergeOne's Cisco-based solutions division, with Annese's entire leadership team remaining in place. ConvergeOne also has an Enterprise division that draws its legacy and strength from the Avaya portfolio, Annese said in a blog post.

In addition, the deal will expand ConvergeOne's cloud capabilities beyond Cisco and Avaya's private cloud to include Amazon Web Services and Office 365, according to ConvergeOne Vice President of Marketing Scott Clark. Annese is currently going to market as "Annese, a ConvergeOne Company," according to the Annese blog post, and will fully transition to the ConvergeOne brand over time.

Converge One was founded in 1993, and enjoys tights bond with Avaya, Cisco, IBM, Interactive Intelligence and Microsoft, Apy said in the vendor letter. The company's core verticals include industrials, energy and power; technology, communications, and business services; and consumer products and services.

For ConvergeOne, the acquisition will unlock market share in the state, local and education (SLED) sector, as well as more capabilities around data center virtualization, mobility, security, cloud, managed and professional services, Annese said in the blog post.

ConvergeOne, meanwhile, can provide existing Annese customers with best-of-breed professional services covering everything from system design and installment to application development and infrastructure, according to Annese.

Over the next few months, the companies will work to integrate sales, service and operations functions so that Annese can effectively support the entire ConvergeOne portfolio, Annese said in the blog post. The companies expect to build a cross-functional team focusing on identifying best practices, business applications and collective synergies for the two firms.

Private equity firm Clearlake Capital Group purchased ConvergeOne in June 2014 from fellow private investment firm Genstar Capital, which had owned the solution provider since 2007.

Since becoming part of Clearlake, ConvergeOne purchased managed services and collaboration provider Spanlink in October 2014 and cloud computing and data analytics firm Sigmanet, No. 131 on the 2015 CRN SP 500, in December 2015.
Millions Missing: Where Did Everyone Go? Listen to Jan Markell now on OnePlace.com
The Segway Ninebot MiniPro may have 15 safety controls, including one that would prevent the hoverboards motor from shutting off while a rider is standing on it, but stopping an attacker hacking the Bluetooth connection and hijacking the hoverboard was not one of them.

Unless you or a loved one owns a Segway hands-free Ninebot MiniPro hoverboard, this may seem like the first of the silly hacks that will come out of the Black Hat security conference. However, if you ride a Ninebot, then there is nothing silly about the possibility of a remote attacker causing you to faceplant on the sidewalk.

IOActive researcher Thomas Kilbride discovered an attacker could bypass the Ninebot MiniPros safety system remotely. If an attacker were to exploit security vulnerabilities in the Segway hoverboard app, then she could disable the motor and bring the MiniPro to an abrupt stop while the rider is in motion, change settings and direction, and even lock users out.

An attacker needs just 20 seconds of Bluetooth connection to carry out an attack, Kilbride told Forbes, but it may be sped up using other means.

He used reverse engineering and protocol analysis to find the worrisome security threats. Kilbride gave this example: I determined that riders in the area were indexed using their smartphones GPS. Therefore, each riders location was publicly available, so the hoverboards could be found, tracked, hijacked and controlled without the riders knowledge.

The location aspect, according to the security advisory (pdf), makes weaponization of an exploit much easier for an attacker. In that same advisory, IOActive walks us through the nine steps of the proof-of-concept attack.

This video includes a demonstration of what Kilbride could remotely do to exploit security flaws in the Segway Ninebot MiniPro app.

Whether or not a rider set a PIN when first prompted by the app, the hoverboard doesnt change the default PIN. Kilbride said on the IOActive blog, This allowed me to connect over Bluetooth while bypassing the security controls. I could also document the communications between the app and the hoverboard, since they were not encrypted.

IOActive warned:

A malicious attacker could potentially perform one or more of the following behaviors: Malicious firmware updates

Remote code execution/control

Device tracking and theft of self-balancing vehicles with the potential to circumvent critical safety interlocks

The vulnerabilities were disclosed to Ninebot in December. In April, the company released an updated app that fixed some of IOActives findings. Users should keep the Ninebot app updated, but IOActive added, We also recommend that consumers avoid hoverboard models with Bluetooth and wireless capabilities."

FTC regulations do require scooters to meet certain mechanical and electrical specifications to help avoid battery fires and various mechanical failures, said Kilbride. However, there are currently no regulations centered on firmware integrity and validation, despite being integral to the safety of the system. As my research indicates, this lack of regulation could lead to a number of dangerous situations.

Kilbride will present his findings at Black Hat on July 26 from 1:50 p.m. to 2:40 p.m. PT in Palm B Room in Mandalay Bay.
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Clothing retailer American Eagle Outfitters recently broke barriers with the launch of a denim hijab.

AEO's hijab was available starting July 8 as an online only item for just under $20. It made headlines on social media and was out of stock in just over a week.

The head covering, which was part of its Fall '17 campaign, was in such high demand that it sold out, according to a company spokesperson.

American Eagle's fall ad featured Somali-American model Halima Aden wearing the hijab.

A DENIM hijab ?? @americaneagle #wearityourway #coolforthesummer #ICan A post shared by Halima Aden (@kinglimaa) on Jul 13, 2017 at 10:00pm PDT

"Handpicked for their ability to break stereotypes and credibility in their multi-hyphenated careers, the Fall 2017 campaign features a new cast of millennials from varied industries and backgrounds," American Eagle said in a release announcing the campaign launch.

The company has yet to say whether they plan to re-stock the product online, or introduce it in their stores. The retailer has area locations in Danbury, Milford, Trumbull and Stamford.

A report by Retail Dive writes, "Many apparel retailers are looking to the Middle East for overseas growth, where in many areas a young and growing middle class includes fashion-forward women interested in head coverings that allow them to conform to their traditions with style."

Nike is among the retailers working to add fashion-inclusive products. It recently announced plans to launch a Nike Pro hijab for Muslim women athletes in early 2018.

"The fact that Nike and American Eagle are getting into this category demonstrates how powerful a niche this could be," the Retail Dive report said.
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FAIRFIELD  Just three weeks after its June opening, Taj Indian Cuisine hosted a ribbon-cutting celebration that far exceeded its owners expectations.

We expected only 120 people, but close to 350 people came on that day, said owner Finto Antony, who is from Kerala, a state in southern India.

Antony, who moved to Fairfield five months ago, said he has been surprised by the support he and his team have received from town officials, neighboring businesses and customers. We love this place, he said.

Located in the former Tuscany Ristorante space, behind Billys Bakery, the restaurants entrance and parking are accessible from Katona Drive, although the address is 1879 Black Rock Turnpike. But visitors have had no problem finding the place, Antony said. Were getting really busy now, he said.

Antony and a group of friends, all natives of India he met while working at an Indian restaurant in Albany, N.Y., came to Connecticut earlier this year with a plan to open an establishment that offered a wide variety of Indian cuisine.

The group, which includes Antonys business partner, Bipin Joseph, chose Fairfield for their business because there werent a lot of Indian food options around, Antony said.

Because most of them, including the restaurants lead chef Justin Kurian Oommen, are from southern India, the cuisine has many dishes from that part of the country. But Antony said it was important to him to also include dishes from northern India and all over that region, including some meals inspired by Chinese and Bangladeshi cuisine.

The more popular menu items so far are the restaurants house specials, Antony said. These include the Taj snapper, which is cooked in a clay oven and topped with curried shrimp, and the fish pollichathu, a marinated fish wrapped in banana leaf. Those menu items are priced at $28.99 and served with vegetable biriyani, a rice dish and a salad.

The menu also features a lengthy list of both vegan and vegetarian dishes, priced at $14.99.

At lunchtime, customers also have the option of eating from a buffet with anywhere from 15 to 25 dishes, depending on whether its a weekday or the weekend. The weekday lunch buffet costs $11.99, while the expanded buffet is $14.99 on weekends.

The restaurant, which sits about 48 people inside and 16 in its patio, also offers catering and delivery services.

Beverly Balaz, president of the Fairfield Chamber of Commerce, said she had a chance to taste a sampling of menu items at last weeks celebration. Everything was delicious, she said. I enjoyed everything very much.

Antony said the customer experience is important to his team and customers can let their waiter know how spicy, or not, they want their meals. We are focused on customer satisfaction, said Oommen.

Balaz said the restaurant is a great addition to the Fairfield dining scene. I think with restaurants its nice to have a variety of different types and I think thats what Taj brings to this area, she said.

ktorres@hearstmediact.com; 203-330-6227
FAIRFIELD  Senior Helpers, an organization with more than 300 offices across the nation, has expanded its presence in Fairfield County.

Darien resident Katie Vanovitch opened the latest franchise location, the second in Connecticut, last month on the Post Road in Fairfield. The company also has a location in Stamford.

A former global risk manager at Morgan Stanley, Vanovitch had been a stay-at-home for three years when she and her husband, Joel, began looking into opportunities to own their own business. Vanovitch said they became interested in Senior Helpers after their familys experience with trying to care for aging parents while raising four young children.

We realized there was this need in the community, she said.

Vanovitch said they chose Senior Helpers because of its emphasis on providing a wealth of resources and materials for patients with Alzheimers and dementia. We offer the family quite a bit of services, as well, she said, including information on how best to help the client.

Through a program called Senior Gems, the organization also provides additional training for caregivers depending on the stage of dementia the client is in.

The Fairfield office currently has two staff members, including General Manager Lynn Lemay, who has 20 years of experience in the caregiver field. The location also employs 12 caregivers and is looking to hire additional people. Vanovitch said as its client base grows, so will its workforce.

Senior Helpers of Fairfield currently serves Fairfield, Stratford, Milford, West Haven, Weston, Easton, Trumbull, Shelton and Orange, although Vanovitch said they have received requests for caregivers from residents of towns like Monroe and Redding.

Vanovitch said she plans to be a hands-on owner. Im speaking to all the families, going out to meet them and putting together all the plans, she said.

She said Fairfield, with its growing senior population, has served as a good location for Senior Helpers expansion in the county.

Its ideal, said Mark Barnhart, Fairfields economic development director, of the new business. People are looking for this type of service. It gives folks another option. Were thrilled to have them join an already diverse and growing business community.

Senior Helpers can be reached at 203-659-0402.

ktorres@hearstmediact.com; 203-330-6227
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HARTFORD  Capital Preparatory Harbor Charter School will expand this fall to a full K-12 school despite the strong opposition of Bridgeport public school officials and teachers who claim it will deepen their fiscal woes.

The adult testimony before the state Board of Education on Wednesday was eclipsed by nearly a dozen blazer-clad charter school students from Bridgeport who pleaded one by one that their siblings and cousins get the same chance to experience an environment where failure is not an option.

They want to help these kids before they are broken, Navaughn Austin, a senior at the school, said of Capital Preps push to add grades K-5.

Austin, who said he went to Bullard-Havens and Central High before Capital Prep, told the board that the biggest difference at Capital Prep is its expectations. He said he was not allowed to slack off. Grades of C or D simply werent accepted.

They dont like average, Austin said.

A number of Bridgeport educators, including Ana Batista, a bilingual teacher at Batalla School, told the board the expansion would take vital resources away from the traditional public schools because it will divert some special education costs and potentially increase busing costs.

There is not enough resources now, Batista said.

Why not wait to see what the Legislature comes up with, said Rob Traber, a Bridgeport teacher and former president of the Bridgeport Education Association. I dont know how you can support this when we dont even know what we will get.

In the end, the board voted 6-2 in favor of expansion, although some members were troubled by questions raised about the two-year-old charter schools recruitment practices, how well its student body reflects the community at large and its treatment of special education students.

I am uncomfortable moving forward with this, William P. Davenport, one of two board members who voted not to expand. The other was Erin Benham who wanted more time to decide.

Commissioner of Education Dianna Wentzell assured the panel they were largely confirming a commitment already made three years ago when the board approved the Capital Prep charter.

They are growing into the size the board originally approved, Wentzell said.

The only difference is the school is moving faster to expand the grades its serves and is adding a second building. Students for the slots have already been chosen.

Board Chairman Allan Taylor dismissed the notion the enlarged charter school would deepen Bridgeports financial woes.

The money is separately funded, Taylor said. If we cut their enrollment, we would not be adding money to the Bridgeport Public School system.

In the absence of a 2017-18 state budget Kathy Dempsey, chief financial officer for the state Department of Education said the recommended charter school expansion was not brought to the board until an executive order was signed by the governor.

It extended funding not only for charter schools but the state technical high school system. Both rely on state funding. Charter schools get $11,000 per student for the year.

Dempsey said not all seats requested were granted. What was approved would allow six of the states 23 charter schools to add grades.

There would be 504 new seats in all, bringing the statewide total of charter school seats in the fall to 9,913. In addition to the 154-seat increase at Capital Prep, Great Oaks Charter School in Bridgeport would grow by 100 students and Stamford Charter School for Excellence will increase by 54 seats.

On Monday, the Bridgeport school board voted unanimously to oppose the Capital Prep expansion while not addressing the Great Oaks expansion into grade 9.

Schools Superintendent Aresta Johnson, who delivered the message to the state board, said the opposition was not anti-Capital Prep but rather pro-Bridgeport Public Schools.

It is an additional expense that cannot be absorbed, Johnson said of not only the grade expansion but the move into a second building across town. Give us the opportunity to serve all students.

A number of Capital Prep students said their experience with city schools was not great.

They were not helping me reach my expectations," Andre Woodson, said of Dunbar and Hallen Schools. "(At Capital Prep), there is a different mindset. They want you to be successful.

Steve Perry, founder of Capital Prep, told the state board his school is helping students succeed and is not taking any money from the city schools.

We arent here fighting for our jobs, we are here fighting for our children, Perry said, suggesting the district was attempting to shut down an opportunity for success that his school offers.

But Wanda Simmons, a Bridgeport parent, said she pulled her daughter out of the charter school after one year because her needs were not being met.

He does counsel out children with disabilities, Simmons said of Perry.

That troubled a number of state board members who asked Desi Nesmith, chief turnaround officer for the state, to report back to them on Capital Prep's handling of special education students and its efforts to recruit students learning English.
Connecticut will receive $638,477 from the federal government to improve food safety efforts in the state. The money is part of $30.9 million awarded to 43 states nationwide.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced the grants Wednesday. The money is part of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act to update and strengthen the FDAs risk-based approach to the oversight of food safety. According to the FDA, more than 3,000 Americans are estimated to die each year from foodborne illnesses and many more are hospitalized and sickened.
STRATFORD - A Bridgeport man was arrested after police said he raped a woman in a motel here.

Joseph Safilo, 21, of uncertain address, was charged Tuesday with first-degree sexual assault. He was being held in lieu of $150,000 bond.

Police said they responded to a call of an assault at the Stratford Motor Inn. When they got there a young woman to them she had been raped in her room, police said.

The woman said she had left her Bridgeport home and rented a room in the motel to be alone and watch television, police said. At some point Safilo, an acquaintance, had shown up uninvited.

Police said the woman told them she had let Safilo into the room and they began watching television together. But when she told him it was time to leave he had refused and instead pulled off her clothes and raped her, police said.

Police said the woman told them Safilo had apologized for raping her but said he could not control himself.

When police later confronted Safilo with the womans allegations they said he admitted being in the motel with her but denied having sex with her.

However, police said they later recovered Safilos DNA from a rape kit done on the woman.
During my first entrepreneurial venture with my partners -- opening an Italian-food manufacturing plant in San Diego in the late 1980s -- I experienced first-hand the importance of opening a business in an older, but emerging community.

Related: This Big City Will Soon Add Traffic Lights to Sidewalks for People Who Don't Look Up From Their Phones

When that manufacturing business faltered and closed in 1993, I again turned toward the notion of community: I leaned on my experience as the president of a business improvement district (BID) to form New City America, dedicated to creating, reinventing and fixing business districts throughout the nation based on the principles of place, financing and district management.

Since that time, my team has formed 78 community benefit districts (CBDs), which evolved out of the older business improvement district concept, though both are centered around creating sustainable financing to help businesses through assessments levied on property owners (who ultimately benefit). Our organization has also helped write local and state legislation to facilitate this growth.

So, why should a business owner, entrepreneur or property owner move into an area with a CBD when the latter requires a higher level of operating costs relative to a district without one? Here are six ways these districts can benefit your business:

1. Brand identity

Whether your business category is retail, restaurant, office, co-working, professional or something else, consumers identify with branded areas. In fact, a district's identity is key to creating demand for walking traffic and a dynamic critical mass that draws people. The Little Italy Association of San Diego, which New City America established and has managed for over 20 years in San Diego's Little Italy district, is one of the best examples of a comprehensive approach involving branding all assets in the district.

2. The creation of order

"Order" comes in many forms: clean sidewalks, trimmed trees, good landscaping, management of homeless encampments, elimination of odors, security and more. As municipal services nationwide are cut back due to the chronic financial crisis in our cities, CBDs fund the services that many cities have never provided yet are in need of more than ever.

Related: 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Endear Themselves to the Community

CBDs provide services from curb to property line, not just curb to curb -- thus ensuring that a district's public rights of way are clean and making small business fronts attractive for customers. One of the best examples of a turnaround district is the Downtown Glendale Association in Glendale, California. Its level of growth and strong attraction for businesses, as well as new residential development, over the past five years, makes it one of the true success stories in Los Angeles County.

3. New public spaces and place-making

Consumers are increasingly drawn to great, well-managed public spaces. The management of the "place" accentuates an area's history, the leaders who created it, plans for the future and mitigation of the impact of new developments.

The most valuable real estate in the country today, in fact, is found around beautiful well-managed public spaces. One of the best examples of this correlation between public spaces and higher-valued business districts is Bryant Park in New York City -- operated by the Bryant Park Corporation.

Post Office Square in Boston is another example; also worth citing is the array of piazzas in San Diego's Little Italy -- like Piazza Basilone. Placing well-managed and thoughtfully designed public seating areas throughout a district is key to encouraging the community to spend more time there.

New City America has made place-making and public-space management a core feature of its business model. We have led and activated at least 10 public space developments around the nation, including ones in Liberty Station, San Diego; Downtown San Leandro; and (the aforementioned) Downtown Glendale.

Placing well managed and thoughtfully designed public seating areas throughout the district is key to encouraging the community to spend more time in the area. The leaders in this field and the first international experts who understood the impact of implementing public spaces in a business district is Project for Public Spaces, which has been responsible for activating the core of San Diego's Balboa Park and New York's Bryant Park.
In this ongoing series, we are sharing advice, tips and insights from real entrepreneurs who are out there doing business battle on a daily basis. (Answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Who are you and whats your business?

My name is Luke Holden and I am CEO of Lukes Lobster. We are a vertically-integrated restaurant group that works directly with fisherman to bring the highest quality seafood direct from ocean to plate. We have 22 shacks in 7 states and are opening our second location in Philadelphia's Market East neighborhood this summer. We also have a food truck, the Nauti Mobile.

What's your company's philosophy?

We are anchored by a commitment to sustainably-sourced seafood. We take great pride in an absolute ability to trace our seafood's journey. We can do this as we have our own processing facility and know all of our fishermen.

Related: 22 Qualities That Make a Great Leader

What does the word entrepreneur mean to you?

To me it means going into business to support your stakeholders. I think the best entrepreneurs are able to create win-wins that lead to sustainable business growth and economics.

What was your toughest challenge and how did you overcome it?

It is hard to pick just one challenge, but I tackle them all the same. Huddle up with team, understand and unpack the challenge, divide and concur, come back as a team and see how we did. Sometimes it takes a few rounds.

Related: Entrepreneurs Are Artists of Life

What is your next big goal?

My next big goal is to tell the story of our seafood with a more focused lens. I dont think our guest understand the grit, determination, risk and skill that it requires to be a successful fisherman. I grew up in the lobster business, not the restaurant business, and one of the challenges I look forward to undertaking is bridging the information gap that exists between a guest simply enjoying their lobster roll, and a guest having access to the fisherman who caught their food and understanding how their dining decisions can impact a larger community.

What steps are you taking to achieve that?

We're telling the stories of our fishermen through social storytelling. For our opening in Market East next week we will showcase our fishermen not only on the walls of our shack, as with other locations, but are also bringing Jamie, a fisherman from Tenants Harbor, Maine, and a member of the Tenants Harbor Fisherman's Co-op, to meet with guests and talk about life as a fisherman.

What trait do you depend on most when making decisions?

I think the best decision makers are also the best leaders. The best leaders have the ability to ask the right questions and empower the team around them to gain as much good information as quickly as possible to make a well-informed decision.

Related: 5 Habits of the Wealthy That Helped Them Get Rich

How has your leadership style evolved?

I have just become more comfortable over time with building structure (organizational charts) and have learned when it is necessary vs. not necessary for me to get involved with challenges.

Is there a particular quote or saying that you use as personal motivation?

Not so much a quote, but I am big proponent of the Pareto Principle. I think a common observation of most the successful entrepreneurs is their ability to focus 80% of their time on the 20% of the business that drives 80% of the results.

Related:



Copyright 2017 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved



This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com


After studying environmental engineering in Australia, Peetachi (Neil) Dejkraisak returned to his homeland of Thailand in hopes of doing something that would change and better his country. Upon learning about the rice industry in the southeast Asian nation and how its farmers were among the poorest in the world -- earning just 40 cents per day -- the idea for Dejkraisak's company, Siam Organic, was born.

When I learned about that problem, it fascinated me how this was possible and how this is affecting 70 million people in Thailand, he shared with Entrepreneur.

Related: What It Means To Be A Social Entrepreneur

Siam Organic aims to help solve farmers poverty in Thailand by assisting small scale farmers with seed production, reducing costs and getting organic certification. The company also assists farmer cooperatives in the country with everything from production to exportation.

We actually help manage their entire value chain from seed to basically consumers' tables, Dejkraisak explains.

Asked why this cause is so important to him, Dejkraisak says, These farmers have become my family. I've gotten to know them, slept in their homes, ate their food. We've developed an amazing bond. So right now I'm just fighting for my family.

And lucky for this social entrepreneur -- hes one step closer to his achieving his dreams and changing the world. Dejkraisak is the winner of Chivas Venture, an annual social entrepreneur pitch competition launched by whiskey scotch brand Chivas Regal. With a panel of celebrity judges, the yearly competition seeks to find and support social startups that want to help build a better future for the world, with 30 entrepreneurs pitching and competing to win funding from Chivas Venture.

This year, Dejkraisaks Siam Organic won first place, receiving $400,000 from Chivas Venture. We caught up with Dejkraisak after his victory to hear some helpful tips for winning a competitive pitch competition as a social entrepreneur.

How did you make sure Siam Organic stood out from the rest of the competition?

The main thing for me was to share a story with the audience in a way that touched them, [and] in a way that inspired them.

Related: Avoid These 7 Mistakes When Pitching Your Business

My whole objective of pitching was to touch people's hearts, to share the farmer's story with them. Because sometimes when we talk about social business, we talk a lot about numbers, [and] we lose sight of the fact that these are real people and real lives. I make sure that, in my presentation, people get to really understand these people's lives. And I think that [was] obviously effective in terms of the competition.

What was your strategy for pitching?

We had more than 300 people in the live audience last night, and sometimes what I like to do is get a feel of the energy in the room. I don't like to be too scripted because that can be a little mechanical when you deliver [a] presentation.

I normally leave about 10 to 15 percent of room for some improvisation where I just look at the crowd, [or] look at somebody -- they may ask a question or I may ask them a question. I probably only practice about 80 to 85 percent of my presentation. The rest I leave a little room for some interaction with the audience.

Any advice for aspiring social entrepreneurs in the early stages of business?

One is you must have a very sustainable business model that can generate sustainable income and revenue to support your company because by nature, when we say social business the only thing that differentiates us from charity or NGO is our ability to earn revenue. It doesn't matter if you win or lose the pitch competition as long as your business works in real life.

The second is persistence -- hard work and persistence. As a social entrepreneur, a lot of people will not take you seriously because they think you're running a charity. You have to prove to them that you are willing to work harder than everyone else to make this work. And that's the only way you're going to be able to help people.

Related: The Secret to Pitching

As a social startup, do you think it's advantageous to be a part of a pitch competition, as opposed to traditionally pitching investors?

There are definitely pros and cons. I think when the company is in the early stages, you come to [a] competition to get advice. But once you have sufficient advice, you should spend at least one to two years working on the business. And I think in [those] one or two years you shouldn't pitch -- you should just focus on building the foundation of the company. Because even if you win some money, you will not be able to utilize it without the strong foundation.

So I would recommend [pitching] at the beginning to get ideas, to get advice and then spend the next one to two years working on it.

Related:

How Social Entrepreneurs Can Prove Themselves to Investors

Cause-Related Marketing: A Win-Win For Brands, Charities And The Consumer

Why I'm Leaving a VC Firm to Work for Free



Copyright 2017 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved



This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com


Most companies trust their gut when locking in their target market. After all, the larger the prospect pool, the bigger the sales growth, right?

Not so fast.

Its not as simple as selling your products and services to anyone who will throw you a few Benjamins. To truly grow your business and keep customers coming back, you need to intimately know who your radical buyer is.

Most businesses choose their target customer based on self-perception of their brand, and then the marketing team goes after them. Your own perception of your brand, however, doesnt always reflect whats actually happening in the marketplace, leaving your business vulnerable to missed opportunities and growth.

Harley-Davidsons typical target customer, for example, is almost a cliche: bandanna, sunglasses, maybe a beard and lots of leather -- not the type who cruises around Manhattan in January. So Asaf Jacobi wasnt surprised when winter sales at his New York Harley-Davidson dealership were low. He was selling only one or two bikes a week.

However, instead of chalking up the poor sales to timing and location demographics, Jacobi took a risk and implemented Albert, a marketing tool with an AI engine. Albert quickly found that the Harley customer base in New York City was much broader than the small niche normally associated with the brand. With marketing software churning to target this larger base with messaging, Jacobis dealership sold 15 motorcycles during Alberts debut weekend.

Though AI is becoming more prevalent, not every business has access to an AI engine. Through data analysis, exhaustive research and testing, our company, like Harley-Davidson, discovered a new customer base.

Rebranding requires a deep dive.

When we launched Hatchbuck, we cast a wide net targeting salespeople, marketers and business owners. Although all of our segments were buying, we felt like some customers were a better fit for our sales and marketing automation platform. We decided to peel back the layers to reveal our best customer.

To uncover the fabric of our radical buyer, we crunched data, captured survey responses and interviewed current and past customers by asking, Do you identify as an entrepreneur or a small business owner? and Does your business compete on price, quality or service? to drill down to their attitudes, behaviors and beliefs.We also asked about their buying intent and how well we were helping them overcome challenges.

Surprisingly, our biggest promoters werent who we thought they were. While our software had been built for smaller businesses from day one, wed been attracting larger companies looking for feature-rich software on a budget. These customers were also detractors, so we shifted focus to our promoters: Small business owners looking for an all-in-one sales and marketing platform thats simple to use.

Concentrating on creating the best experience for our best customers, we whittled down our mission statement to reflect our new target, overhauled our design -- from our logo and color palette to our website -- and launched a new version of our software to home in on the needs of this narrower base. These tweaks helped define our mission and zero in on exactly whom we should sell to.

Refining for your radical buyer.

Although revelations about our customer activity led to moderate changes in our business strategy, such customer insights can cause other companies to transform entirely.

Twitter, for example, was once a podcasting platform called Odeo. After several shifts in leadership, vision and product, Twitter has become a simple tool for thought leaders to promote content. In fact, 83 percent of the worlds leaders use it to communicate with their audience and promote their brands. Twitter might never have evolved into one of todays top social media channels if it hadnt searched for other audiences.

Related: 4 Ways a Data-Driven Approach Anticipates Buyer Behavior

Here are three ways to find out who your radical customer really is and use those findings to impact all aspects of your product development, sales and marketing.

1. Step outside your comfort zone and customer base.

Everyone wants more customers, but quantity doesnt always equal quality. A client signed today might drop off tomorrow. Sales and marketing teams waste a lot of time, money and energy chasing and even celebrating the wrong type of client.

To find the right clients, research is crucial. Although our survey of current clients found promoters and detractors, we also stepped outside our pool of customers. Leveraging sites such as SurveyMonkey and Google, we surveyed their audiences based on our desired parameters. On our own website, pop-up surveys collected feedback on pricing and positioning. With this carefully crafted net, we were able to find unexpectedly ideal clients and reel them in.

Companies that research to find their ideal customers have a huge leg up on the competition. A survey by DNN (formerly DotNetNuke) found that 72 percent of companies are unable to do so.

Related: 5 Must-Answer Questions to Succeed Targeting Your Customer Base

2. Break down the data -- and use it.

Collecting great data is important, but data alone is meaningless if you dont analyze and integrate it into your strategy.

After filtering our responses by role (marketing director or owner, for example), our promoters and detractors suddenly became glaringly obvious. This type of filtering and segmenting shows whos in love with your product or service and who isnt a great fit, providing valuable intel for your sales and marketing teams to use in the future.

Companies use different filters, depending on industry. When Netflix, for example, filtered for customers who enjoy films directed by David Fincher (who went on to direct House of Cards) and films starring Kevin Spacey, it found an overwhelming majority of its subscribers at the time fell into both categories.

Analysts saw it as a bold move to pick up a full season of House of Cards as its first original series. But decision makers at Netflix rested assured -- the customer data accurately predicted the (now award-winning) show would be a sure thing.

3. Make sure your brand messaging resonates.

Once you find your target, you need to hit it accurately. Thats where messaging comes in.

Our previous tagline -- Growing Your Business -- didnt resonate with our ideal client, who was more concerned with serving customers and catching sales opportunities before they slipped through the cracks. After we understood that, our new tagline was born: Seize the Opportunity.

Related: 3 Crucial Tips to Undergo a Brand Facelift and Make the Changes Stick

A report by the Rockefeller Corporation found 68 percent of customers spurn companies that dont appear to care about them; this shows just how critical a clear, carefully crafted message is. The right message shows how your aims align with your customers needs.

If youre not growing, youre dying, as the saying goes. Even novices in the business world know that change is inevitable and stasis impossible. Still, its human nature to want to maintain the status quo. Change is scary.

Think only the brave or crazy seek out new and different markets, clients and customers? While moving the target often means changing your company in a fundamental way, its sometimes the only path forward.
In secret, behind locked gates, our Nation's Oldest City dumped a landfill in a lake (Old City Reservoir), while emitting sewage in our rivers and salt marsh. Organized citizens exposed and defeated pollution, racism and cronyism. We elected a new Mayor. We're transforming our City -- advanced citizenship. Ask questions. Make disclosures. Demand answers. Be involved. Expect democracy. Report and expose corruption. Smile! Help enact a St. Augustine National Park and Seashore. We shall overcome!
Investments in railroad system continue in central Cuba

Submitted by: Juana

Local

Villaclara

Business and Economy

07 / 18 / 2017



The reopening of Marta Abreu railway terminal, after full repair, was one of the investments undergone by Centro Railway Company during the first half of this year.

From January to June they worked in the railway stations of the municipalities of Ranchuelo and Remedios, both in Villa Clara province, and the perimeter fence of Cienfuegos maritime terminal, actions that will conclude in the third quarter of 2017.

Ernesto Simono, director of investments of the company, told ACN that they are working in the Santa Clara Containers Loading and Unloading Center for the installation of equipment that increases the operation capacity.

He noted they are making changes in carpentry and painting the Placetas and Cascajal stations, in addition to build rail access to the future station of Candelaria, in Cienfuegos province.

Milagros Arenas, director of Rail Transportation Administration, reported that a 31-meter steel bridge is being repaired, and another two are scheduled to be executed this year, all in the province of Sancti Spiritus.
Swiss scientific vessel to arrive in Cuba

Submitted by: Juana

Europe

Havana

Science and Technology

07 / 18 / 2017



A Swiss scientific vessel called Race for Water Odyssey will arrive on Thursday at Sierra Maestra Cruise Terminal in the Bay of Havana.

Specialists from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment (CITMA by its Spanish acronym) announced that the official reception of the ship will be next Friday, and will include the president of the foundation of the same name.

They said that the stay of the ship's crew will be extended until August, and they will meet a program of scientific exchange activities, as well as guided visits to primary schools.

The Swiss foundation Race for Water Odyssey is dedicated to water conservation and aims to identify, enhance and implement solutions providing value to plastic at the end of its useful life.

It also intends to create new revenue streams for the people most affected by pollution, in coordination with UNESCO, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and others.

Its commitment covers the period 2017-2021 in a unique and self-sustaining vessel, aimed at science and energy transition to develop scientific studies for the conservation of the oceans.
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Pa. Dems could flip the House of Reps. Here's what that might mean
A mother-of-three from Christchurch who was recently diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer was donated the wedding of a lifetime by strangers.

Kiri Reyonolds, 49, was diagnosed with cancer only three months ago and was told she didn't have long to live.

'It's not in my family, it's not hereditary. Talking to the doctors they reckon I've had the cancer eight to 10 years and no symptoms,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

'Unfortunately there's no turning back for me now. It does happen but it doesn't often get as bad at this stage. They call it the silent killer because there are no symptoms.'

Kiri Reynolds (pictured left), 49, who was recently diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer was dinated the wedding of a lifetime two weeks ago

Kiri said her partner asked her to marry him three weeks after her cancer diagnosis, but she initially said no because she wanted them to spend the money making memories with the kids

Kiri and her now husband, Grant, have been together for 13 years and had never had time to organise a wedding.

'We've been engaged for about 11 years, it was always on the cards but then we bought the house, had two children and I have an older daughter as well.

'Then we bought a business and then it got put on the back burner. Time just goes so fast, we did mention it a couple of times saying we should do it but we just never got around to it,' she said.

'He [Grant] did ask me to marry him three weeks after I found out I had cancer and I said no.

'Not for any reason that I didn't want to it was just we talked about it, what money it cost to even have a cheap wedding we decided to spend it on the children on making a holiday and making memories instead of spending a few thousand dollars on a wedding.'

Kiri and her now husband, Grant (pictured right), have been together for 13 years and had never had time to organise a wedding

'We've been engaged for about 11 years, it was always on the cards but then we bought the house, had two children and I have an older daughter as well,' Kiri said

Kiri told her friend Tracey Gaskell about her situation which is what prompted Tracey to post in the Christchurch Brides and Grooms page asking people to donate their time and talents to help organise a wedding.

The post received an overwhelming response so Tracey approached Grant to see if this was something that they should do.

Originally they kept the planning hidden from Kiri but let her in on the secret once it became too big to hide.

One of the purposes of the wedding was to make it as much as a stress free experience for Kiri as possible, who looked spectacular on her special day.

One of the purposes of the wedding was to make it as much as a stress free experience for Kiri as possible, who looked spectacular on her special day

The white gold wedding rings for Kiri and Grant were donated by Michael Hill jeweller

'I didn't actually organise anything, it was all done for me. I was trying on wedding rings, the wedding gown. I was very busy with the wedding but I don't really know why, Tracey is the one who organised everything,' Kiri laughed.

Kiri didn't think that many people would respond to the post, but she was wrong.

The community managed to raise over $25,000 NZD for the ceremony, which took place two weeks ago and was planned over only eight weeks

'I wasn't expecting anything. I was just so overwhelmed by the generosity of the people, it was all just donated. They didn't want anything for it, it was just amazing,' Kiri gushed.

'I wasn't expecting anything. I was just so overwhelmed by the generosity of the people, it was all just donated,' Kiri gushed

She said that the wedding photograph package a photographer donated cost around the $3000 NZD mark.

They were provided food from multiple Christchurch establishments, a wedding planner, a celebrant and the venue - they didn't pay for a thing.

'They just wanted to help. It was incredible, people were just so willing to donate. You see the bad stuff on the news and you know there are bad people out there but this shows there are some incredibly generous people out there.'

The wedding photograph package a photographer donated cost around the $3000 NZD mark

A gentleman had donated his chapel and a venue for the reception for the day and Kiri's dress, shoes, veil and earrings were donated as well.

Local florists provided the flowers and Michael Hill donated two white gold wedding bands for the occasion, everything was accounted for.

'There were so many people involved, the ladies that were cooking was [sic] just two mums... the people that were waitressing that night were just people that had heard about the story.

'There was a limo, a DJ, photo booth, I had the bag pipes and a person videoing it all night. There was nothing provided that wasn't donated.'

A gentleman had donated his chapel and a venue for the reception for the day and Kiri's dress, shoes, veil and earrings were donated as well

An even more touching aspect of the day is the fact that her oldest daughter Savannah, 20, gave her away, her 10 year old son Kiarn was best man and her youngest daughter, Artesia who is eight, was the flower girl.

'I was totally overwhelmed, I couldn't believe it, I'm so thankful.

'I'm still on a high, it's incredible the amount of support and there was lots of love,' she explained.

Doctors are unsure as to how long Kiri has as they originally predicted 18 months but as she is responding well to the chemotherapy it could add a few more years.

'It was very emotional, both my parents passed away a couple of years ago and I am an only child but my parents would be absolutely ecstatic.'

'I'm still on a high, it's incredible the amount of support and there was lots of love,' she explained

They were provided food from multiple Christchurch establishments, a wedding planner, a celebrant and the venue - they didn't pay for a thing

It was a four day pain in her side that encouraged Kiri to ring the New Zealand health line to see what was wrong, who told her to go to the doctors.

'After a lot of tests they pulled me into a little room. I said "is it cancer?" and they said "yes" but I didn't have an inkling until they said it was bad news.

'"Am I going to die?" didn't even enter my head, even when I was having the tests.'

Kiri is currently undergoing chemotherapy treatment, she has had two lots of chemo infusions and takes pills every day.

It was a four day pain in her side that encouraged Kiri to ring the New Zealand health line to see what was wrong, who told her to go to the doctors

'The chemo infusion knock me around a lot so I'm not doing it at the moment but I'm staying on the chemo pills as they're fine at the moment.

'I had a scan not too long ago, the cancer has shrunk which has brought me a bit of time but how long that is they don't know... without the chemo I wouldn't be here, I would be gone.'

Kiri and Grant plan to take their children for a holiday in Australia to enjoy the sunshine as a family.

'The kids have never been out of New Zealand, we want to take them to Queensland, the Gold Coast and Movie World as they've never done that.

Kiri and Grant plan to take their children for a holiday in Australia to enjoy the sunshine as a family

'We want to give back to them and make some memories. The kids know its cancer and terminal but I don't think they know what that means, they don't know I'm dying,' she said.

Kiri explained that New Zealand doesn't currently screen for bowel cancer and a colonoscopy costs in the thousands, which she believes is a big deterrent as a lot of people can't afford to go to the doctors.

'A lot of the time there is no symptoms and 1200 people a year die from it [in New Zealand] and they don't screen for it like they do breast cancer... It's a simple stool test that can be done, just like a blood test.'

The celebrant surprised the family with Kiri's fingerprint imprinted on pendants for Grant and the three kids for her to give to them in the ceremony, something they will treasure forever

She added that there is a lack of publicly-funded testing for the disease in a country with one of the highest incidences of bowel cancer in the world.

The holiday will be a nice break for the family which they need, who also lost their home in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.

The couple's home was red-zoned and written off which sparked a lengthy battle with their insurers.

The holiday will be a nice break for the family which they need, who also lost their home in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake

'Kiri and Grant are just the sweetest couple and it has been a tremendous honour to uphold them as a couple and family unit throughout the planning process of their wedding and delivering a very heart centred, personalised wedding ceremony for them,' Tania Johnson-Scott, the marriage celebrant, told Daily Mail Australia.

'I will continue to uphold them and walk their journey with them as we now transition and focus on what may lie ahead for Kiri and her family.'
She urged the electorate to buy into her brand of 'strong and stable' leadership and ended up losing her majority in a shock swing to Labour at the general election.

But one thing that has remained constant throughout Theresa May's first year in office is her love of fashion, namely classic pieces from established brands teamed with quirky footwear and accessories to inject a sense of personality.

Political style blogger Laura Dunn has analysed the PM's despatch box outfits throughout her first 12 months in the job to discover her favourite brands, colours and accessories.

She discovered that Mrs May favours navy outfits, choosing the shade on 71 per cent of her appearances and Amanda Wakeley is her favourite designer worn 34 per cent of the time, while she prefers Russell & Bromley for footwear.

'May understands the power and complexities of a televised forum,' Laura explained.

'She selects tailored, timeless pieces that will look good on camera and present her as a strong and sophisticated leader. She picks items of clothing that give confidence and make her feel good, relying on trusted brands to help her get the job done.'

Mrs May's go to designer of the year is Amanda Wakeley, and this red suit by the British couturier has been one of her favourite outfits in the last 12 months as Prime Minister

The Prime Minister's go-to colour for sessions at the despatch box is navy, worn on 71 per cent of apperances in the past year

50 Shades of May: Other colours don't get much of a look in compared to Mrs May's favourite shade of dark blue

When it comes to designers, Escada is the runner up with the politician plumping for the German brand 31 per cent of the time.

Other designers that get a look in include MaxMara and Roland Mouret.

Mrs May is known for her love of a quirky shoe and the gold Twister block heel from Russell & Bromley is her firm favourite.

She also now favours heels over flats at the despatch box, possibly because of the confidence boost she gets from the added height.

The PM is known for her love of quirky footwear, and she's also embraced heels over flats in the past year

Russell & Bromley is her favourite brand for shoes and these gold Twister block heels are her most-worn pair

Russell & Bromley is the PM's favourite footwear brand with the gold Twister heel emerging as her go-to shoe

Theresa May has opted for a high heel on most occasions, appearing to enjoy an added confidence boost from wearing heels at the despatch box

'Theresa May selects suitably serious pieces for big events, choosing classic, no fuss pieces like a white shirt and a sharp navy suit for big announcements like the Budget and Brexit negotiations,' Laura added.

'And for solemn statements, like responses to the Westminster terror attack, May uses black to convey her sympathy and solidarity.

'But just as May chooses classic pieces, she does like to wear 'wildcard' items. In this very public arena oversized necklaces and statement bangles are two favourites, as is a sophisticated silk scarf.

Amanda Wakeley and German brand Escada are the Prime Minister's favourites

'Theresa May memorably used this public event to show her support of young designers, wearing an eye catching silk scarf by the talented Megan Ferris to a PMQ session for all the world to see.

'Genuine touches like these makes Theresa May a real champion of British fashion and provides us with an insight into just how much she loves to accessorise.

'As her political future remains uncertain, one thing does remain constant- Theresa May truly is the most fashionable MP we'll see at the despatch box.'
When planning their engagement portraits, a Cleveland couple took inspiration from Barack and Michelle Obama's romance and recreated their most iconic images.

Cassi Pittman and her fiance Adam's stunning re-enactments of photos featuring the former First Couple have turned them into online stars after they were shared by their photographer, Natasha Herbert, and wedding planner, Covesa Kelly, last week.

'I miss The Obama's SO much that when our Bride and Groom said "Can we try and duplicate one of their famous shots for our engagement pics?" I was like let's do an entire shoot- we can do this and this and THIS!' Kelly explained on Instagram.

Stunning: Cassi Pittman and her fiance Adam (right) recreated Barack and Michelle Obama's most iconic photos, including one of the couple taping a video for the 2015 World Expo (left)

Look of love: Cassi wore pearls (right) to re-enact the moment Barack hugged Michelle at the White House prior to the National Newspaper Publishers Association reception in 2009 (left)

When Herbert shared the images on her Instagram page, she shared a sentiment similar to Kelly's.

'Because we miss them so much.... Our couple Cassi & Adam were channeling Michelle and Barack Obama in this engagement shoot. It was great to team up with @covesakellyevents and bring her vision to life,' she wrote.

The first photo in the slideshow of images sees Cassi and Adam holding hands and facing each other, and they are so close, their heads are almost touching.

Fist pump: Photographer Natasha Herbert said it was great 'to have the couple channel the emotions of Barack and Michelle'. The Obamas are pictured at a campaign rally in 2008

Show of support: Cassi and Adam recreated the iconic fist pump for their engagement photos

Snuggle: Another image picked by the couple was this heartwarming black-and-white image shot by photographer Cass Bird for People Magazine

Intimate: The cute couple can be seen cozying up to one another as they recreate the photo

The image is a recreation of a photo of the Obama's that was featured inside the October 2016 issue of Essence, which they covered.

In another photo, Cassi is wearing a long strand of pearls to re-enact the moment Barack hugged his wife in the Red Room of the White House prior to the National Newspaper Publishers Association reception in 2009.

One particularly sweet shot sees Cassi cuddled up to Adam the same way Michelle snuggled against her husband during a video taping that was held in the Diplomatic Reception room in the White House for the 2015 World Expo.

A post shared by Natasha Herbert (@natashaherbert) on Jul 11, 2017 at 6:51am PDT

Taking the internet by storm: The stunning images have gone viral since Herbert and Kelly shared them on their individual Instagram pages last week

The Obamas are known for showing genuine affection for each other in public, and the photos of Cassi and Adam capture the same mutual adoration that is depicted in the images of the former president and first lady that they set out to replicate.

'It was great to pose and have the couple channel the emotions of Barack and Michelle in each picture,' Herbert told the Huffington Post.

'After all, the Obamas are definitely a couple who epitomize a love like no other.

Kelly agreed, telling the outlet: 'As African-Americans we admire their achievements and what they represent.

Family affair: Cassi and Adam also struck a pose with their dogs during their engagement shoot

Taking the internet by storm: The stunning images have gone viral since Herbert and Kelly shared them on their individual Instagram pages last week

Newlyweds-to-be: Cassi and Adam's upcoming wedding is going to be held in Willoughby, Ohio, this December

'They have a love that just shines, and we wanted to capture that love in our photos.'

Cassi and Adam's upcoming wedding is going to be held in Willoughby, Ohio, and if their engagement photos are any indication, it is undoubtedly going to be an unforgettable affair.

The stunning portraits have since gone viral, which may have been a surprise to the couple who was merely trying to emulate one of their favorite romantic pairs.

Cassi and Adam's upcoming wedding is going to be held in Willoughby, Ohio, this December and if their engagement photos are any indication, it is undoubtedly going to be an unforgettable affair.
You may not want to sip on your morning coffee in an avocado, but how about a waffle cone?

Italian restaurant Salt Meats Cheese is hoping that answer is yes, rolling out Coffee in a Cone in their Sydney and Surfers Paradise stores.

And a caffeine fix isn't the Coffee in a Cone's only perk. It also happens to be known as the most Instagrammable coffee in the world.

Italian restaurant Salt Meats Cheese is rolling out Coffee in a Cone in their Sydney and Surfers Paradise stores

Visitors can ask for drinks ranging from cappuccinos to espressos in the cone - as long as the drink is hot, it can be done

Coffee in a Cone is already available in places like London, Canada, South Africa, and Greece, but now the delectable dessert is ready to take Australia by storm.

The $6 treat is already a hit at Salt Meats Cheese's Surfers Paradise location, and the restaurant told Daily Mail Australia there are few rules when it comes to the cone.

Visitors can ask for drinks ranging from cappuccinos to espressos in the cone - as long as the drink is hot, it can be done.

And even kids can get in on the fun, as Salt Meats Cheese is also offering a hot chocolate cone.

Coffee in a Cone is already available in places like London, Canada, South Africa, and Greece, but now the delectable dessert is ready to take Australia by storm

The waffle cone is coated with a four layers of a leak-proof special chocolate, so there's no need to worry about spills

For those who like to drink their coffee slow, though, this may not be the safest treat.

The waffle cone is coated with a four layers of a leak-proof special chocolate, so there's no need to worry about spills.

But the chocolate will start to melt at around 10 to 15 minutes, so don't hold on to it for too long.

The cone was developed by South African cafe owner Dayne Levinrad, who wanted to bring some 'much needed innovation and excitement into the coffee industry'.

But the chocolate will start to melt at around 10 minutes, so don't hold on to it for too long

The cone was developed by South African cafe owner Dayne Levinrad, who wanted to bring some 'much needed innovation and excitement into the coffee industry'

Dayne developed his coffee talent while spending four years in Australia, and has also help coffee shops in both Brazil and the US develop new products.

In 2016 Dayne claimed that his #coffeeinacone concept has become the most 'liked' coffee-style shot on Instagram.

And he's not wrong, with millions of the unique coffee-laden creations being shared and liked on social media ever since.

The cone has been brought to Australia by Enright Foods, a distributor of exotic and international fine foods.
A 25-year-old man who was left unable to walk or talk after he suffered a severe brain hemorrhage has proposed to his girlfriend.

Sam Hensman, from Adelaide, asked the love of his life Tess Delony to marry him after she stayed by his bedside during his 10-month battle in hospital.

The man was diagnosed at the age of 23 with arteriovenous malformation (AVM) - a tangle of abnormal blood vessels connecting arteries to the brain.

And more than a year on, Mr Hensman and his girlfriend have proven their love can overcome any challenge after he pulled out a jewellery box with an amethyst ring - and she said yes.

Sam Hensman, from Adelaide, asked the love of his life Tess Delony to marry him on Saturday

The young woman (far left) has stood by his bedside during his 10-month battle in hospital

On Saturday, Mr Hensman proposed to his girlfriend by smiling at her after his mother helped him pick out the engagement ring.

'As I came over he pulled out the little black box with this big smile on his face,' Ms Delony told nine.com.au.

'I started to get a bit teary because he couldn't say, "Will you marry me?," but the amethyst meant everything. He pulled me in for a hug and I said, "Yes" - it was really special.'

The pair started dating for a couple of months before Mr Hensman was rushed to hospital after he began experiencing dizzy spells, vomiting and shaking.

The young man was previously told he would continue to suffer bleeding of the brain until he declines into a vegetable state or die.

Mr Hensman and his girlfriend have proven their love can overcome any challenge after he pulled out a jewellery box with an amethyst ring - and she said yes

Mr Hensman proposed to his girlfriend by smiling at her with a little jewellery box in his hands

The man, who was studying to become an electrician, was rushed to hospital after he fell ill

Sydney neurosurgeon Dr Nazih Assaad initially suggested they would try to slowly reduce the growth before removing it to avoid damaging the brain.

But just days before the surgery, Mr Hensman suffered stroke-life symptoms after he was struck down with a major haemorrhage.

The man, who was studying to become an electrician, was at his partner's home when he couldn't feel his right arm, shortly before suffering a seizure.

And after undergoing two rounds of life-changing surgeries, the AVM was removed.

However, when he woke, he couldn't move or speak.

But against all odds, Mr Hensman can now walk with aid after working to regain muscle and improve his strength.

And while he still can't speak, the man can communicate by using his arms to make hand signals.

The man was diagnosed at the age of 23 with arteriovenous malformation (AVM) - a tangle of abnormal blood vessels connecting arteries to the brain

But against all odds, Mr Hensman can now walk with aid after working to regain strength and communicate by using his arms to make hand signals

And despite his condition, Ms Delony said she has made a commitment to be with her fiance for the long haul as she revealed how she is now closer to his family.

'I would never wish this whole experience on anyone but it really does connect you in a way that not a lot of other people would get to experience - that's what makes it really special,' she said.

His sister Prue Cartledge who set up a GoFundMe page said her brother has miraculously fought through his battle.

'Sammy is a real trooper and is working so hard to learn to do everything again,' she wrote.

'He is learning to stand, pull himself up in his chair, walk with help, communicate with hand signals and even manages to joke around.

'He is desperately trying to communicate with sound and use of his iPad and is quick to acknowledge help and support with his beaming smile.'

And after undergoing two rounds of life-changing surgeries, the AVM was removed

His sister Prue Cartledge (pictured) set up a fundraising page to raise money for his expenses

But despite his improvements, the family have made an appeal to raise money for his medical expenses, as well as physiotherapy and speech therapy.

'While his therapists acknowledge his massive improvements, sadly the hospital are controlled by budgets and have decided his progress is not fast enough to warrant full time rehabilitation,' Ms Cartledge continued.

'Sam has fought so hard to live and is truly an inspiration to everyone that meets him.

'We believe that with help we will be able to keep him moving forward, so that he can eventually live an independent life and continue to grow as the amazing inspiration that he is.'

Family and friends have rallied behind the young man, with more than $15,000 already raised to help him with his rehabilitation.

To make a donation, please visit the GoFundMe page.
A 24-year-old businesswoman has appeared on Shark Tank after launching a kaftan business specifically for women to wear after they've just received a spray tan.

Jade Castle was working as a freelance spray tanner when she got the bright idea from confused clients, who were always asking what they should wear after a tan.

And others were coming in inappropriate clothes like leggings or jeans that were too tight, which can easily ruin a newly-applied spray tan and create lines.

Jade Castle (pictured) has appeared on Shark Tank after launching a kaftan business

The 24-year-old businesswoman was working as a freelance spray tanner when she got the bright idea from confused clients, who were always asking what they should wear after a tan

Jade decided she would create a kaftan dress that was comfortable, made with soft fabric and devoid of any tags (pictured the brand's Moss Kaftan)

It was then that the Brisbane native, who started her spray tanning business in high school, saw a new opportunity in the market.

Jade decided she would create a kaftan dress that was comfortable, made with soft fabric and devoid of any tags.

And so Kaf.Tanned, a clothing line that provides fashionable garments specially designed to help keep spray tans flawless, was born.

The site currently offers dozens of kaftans in a variety of colours and prints that range from cheetah to florals, as well as jumpsuits, robes, and kimonos.

Jade's designs are now in 350 spray tanning salons across Australia, and a few in the US and New Zealand, allowing for women to walk out with the perfect outfit.

'If a client comes in to get a spray tan and they have their work clothes on, it would ruin the tan,' Jade told Daily Mail Australia.

'So now the salon can offer a kaftan to wear so that they don't ruin their clothes - or their tan.'

Jade's company caught the attention of Steve Baxter, who offered her $50,000 for a 25 per cent stake as well as a $100,000 loan if it was later needed

The site currently offers dozens of kaftans in a variety of colours and prints that range from cheetah to florals, as well as jumpsuits (Jade wearing the Abbie Jumpsuit and her sister wearing the Long Jersey Knit Kaftan)

Jade designed and made the first kaftan herself before officially launched Kaf.Tanned in 2013.

She continues to design her products, which are made offshore and sell in salons and on the brand's website for $30 to $60.

Jade admits there have been hard days as she learns to run her first-ever business, but she is continuing to learn the ins and outs and taking all the advice she can get.

That includes those on Shark Tank, which Jade appeared on Tuesday night's episode to ask for a $150,000 investment for 10 per cent of her business.

Jade admits there have been hard days as she learns to run her first-ever business, but she is continuing to learn the ins and outs and taking all the advice she can get

Jade's company caught the attention of Steve Baxter, who offered her $50,000 for a 25 per cent stake as well as a $100,000 loan if it was later needed.

'I'm just a kaftan man,' Baxter joked before he shook hands with Jade.

Jade called the opportunity to appear on the show the 'biggest thing I ever had to do in my life'.

'It was a great experience both personally and business-wise,' she said. 'The amount of support we got and the response since has been phenomenal.'

Jade now hopes the experience will help expand Kaftan to salons across the globe for 'people who tan around the world'.

'It was an amazing feeling to have an idea,' she said, 'and turn it into something big.'
With swaying palms and balmy beaches, Ibiza is a tempting proposition at any time of the year...but most people don't decide to visit the Spanish party isle at a moment's notice.

A hilarious text exchange reveals how one very sheepish man had to explain to his girlfriend how a quiet night at his local pub in Porthcawl, Wales, had somehow turned into a spontaneous mini-break to Ibiza.

Gareth Kelly, 30, told girlfriend Hannah Williams, 20, over iMessage that he was enjoying a pint with friends at the Green Acre pub after helping his sister move furniture - but promised to be home soon.

Self-confessed 'partier' Gareth Kelly, 30, shocked his girlfriend Hannah Williams by texting her after a night at his local pub, the Green Acre in Porthcawl, to say he was hurtling towards Bristol Airport to catch a flight to Ibiza

'Are you trying to be single?' Gareth with his girlfriend Hannah, who didn't believe her boyfriend's claims at first. Right: To prove his whereabouts, Gareth then began Snapchatting from a bar on the White Isle

However, Hannah then began receiving a string of text messages at around midnight in which he declared he was actually on his way to Cardiff Airport to catch a flight to the clubbing hot-spot.

After realising her prankster partner was not joking, Hannah discovered that despite missing the last flight from Cardiff, Gareth was heading for Bristol Airport instead and wouldn't be home for five days.

The ventilation worker had even texted his boss at the same time to inform him he wouldn't be in work that week - despite being due in on Monday.

Support worker Hannah said: 'I didn't believe him, I FaceTimed him to see where he was and who he was with, he was just laughing at me in the back of the taxi and telling me he was going to Ibiza.

'Stupid decision': Girlfriend Hannah said she wasn't bothered by the news that her boyfriend would be away for five days... but her curt texts to him suggest otherwise

Definitely going: Gareth Snapchatted an image of his friends' passports - and a few drinks - with their flight boarding cards

'I genuinely thought he was taking the p***, he was just being a clown like he always is, he does normally go for a couple of drinks in the pub at the weekend but never ends up flying to Ibiza.'

Hannah admits that she did find her boyfriend's latest antics 'hilarious' and thought he might be back after the gang missed the flight from Cardiff.

She continues: '...but then he told me they had decided to get a taxi to Bristol airport and got a flight from there instead, I thought it was so funny, they landed at about 6.30am on Monday.

'I left him at about 1pm on Sunday, we had been at a wedding the night before and he went to help his sister to move some furniture in her house.

Plotting her revenge: Hannah says she'll definitely get her own back on her other half for his spontaneous trip...but isn't yet sure how

Two fingers up to work too! Gareth emailed his boss saying that he wouldn't be at work on Monday

'He had a pint with her at about six then she left him there with his mates. I have no idea what happened then but at about 11pm he went home, packed, got his passport then text me at 12.30am to say he was on the way to the airport.'

The couple are still in the 'honeymoon period' of their relationship but have been close childhood friends ever since Hannah can remember.

Hannah claims although Gareth has never boarded an unexpected flight while drunk, this is a typical thing that he would do.

He's ten years older than me - you'd think it would be me doing something like this, not a man who is meant to be a grown-up... Hannah Williams

Hannah said: 'He does some crazy stuff sometimes. He's a lunatic. He doesn't take much convincing to do things, he just goes along with stuff that people suggest to him.

'He is the only person that could get away with it, especially dropping work for five days, he just text his boss to say he'll be away and they were fine with it, he could get away with anything.

'He is older than me by ten years so you'd think that it would be me that would be doing something like this, not the one who is meant to be a grown up.'

By midnight, he was on his way: The drinking fan made the decision to enjoy a mini-break to Ibiza after Hannah left the pub in the early evening

Hannah admits that Gareth is a partier who 'rarely says no to a drink' and despite his girlfriend seeming fine with it she has a plan hatching for when he does finally make it home.

Hannah said: 'He is grovelling through texts now though, he keeps saying he'll take me away to make up for it.

'Then he's trying to make me jealous with Snapchats of him in the pool and in the sun but my revenge is coming.

'No one knows what it is yet but it's going to be a good one I'll get him back.'
Fiona and Germain Drouet have spoken about one of the last times they saw their daughter, who took her own life after suffering cruel mental torment at the hands of her boyfriend.

Emily Drouet, a law student at the University of Aberdeen, took her own life in 2015, just eight days after being choked by Angus Milligan in a jealous rage.

Speaking on ITV's This Morning, Emily's devastated parents revealed how they'd remarked on how their daughter had 'lost her sparkle' one of the last times they saw her.

The couple said they had put signs of Emily's distress down to 'students being tired and partying', and Fiona added: 'Hindsight is a great thing.'

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Emily was only 18 when she took her own life after she suffered domestic abuse

But the couple admitted there were warning signs they missed that hinted she was suffering.

'Hindsight is a great thing, looking back there were signs but we put it down to students being tired and partying,' Fiona said.

Emily avoided eye contact with her parents when she came home from university, which they say was down to Mulligan's emotional abuse.

The parents admitted that they'd spoken to Emily about the relationship one of the last times they had seen her.

Fiona and Germain Drouet appeared on This Morning today to talk about Emily's death

Angus Mulligan has been given a community order after he admitted to threatening Emily

A TIMELINE OF TRAGEDY September 2015: Fiona and Germain Drouet drop their daughter, Emily, off at her halls of residence at Aberdeen University where she had enrolled to begin a law degree.

Fiona and Germain Drouet drop their daughter, Emily, off at her halls of residence at Aberdeen University where she had enrolled to begin a law degree. October 2015: Emily begins dating Angus Milligan, who lives yards from her in halls.

Emily begins dating Angus Milligan, who lives yards from her in halls. December 2015: Milligan travels to the Drouets' home in Glasgow and stays overnight with the family. Mr Drouet later says that he 'felt quite uncomfortable around him'.

Milligan travels to the Drouets' home in Glasgow and stays overnight with the family. Mr Drouet later says that he 'felt quite uncomfortable around him'. March 2016: Miss Drouet texts a friend confessing to engaging in sexual acts with a family friend and member of Milligan's family, stressing she did not want him to find out.

Miss Drouet texts a friend confessing to engaging in sexual acts with a family friend and member of Milligan's family, stressing she did not want him to find out. March 10, 2016: Milligan arrives at Miss Drouet's apartment where he puts his hands around her neck and chokes her.

Milligan arrives at Miss Drouet's apartment where he puts his hands around her neck and chokes her. March 18, 2016: Miss Drouet is found dead in her apartment with a ligature around her neck. Police tell Mr and Mrs Drouet their daughter has killed herself.

Miss Drouet is found dead in her apartment with a ligature around her neck. Police tell Mr and Mrs Drouet their daughter has killed herself. May 23, 2017: Milligan appears at Aberdeen Sheriff Court and pleads guilty to three charges, including assault. Five other charges are dropped due to lack of evidence.

Milligan appears at Aberdeen Sheriff Court and pleads guilty to three charges, including assault. Five other charges are dropped due to lack of evidence. July 12, 2017: Milligan is sentenced to 12 months' supervision and ordered to carry out 180 hours of unpaid work. Advertisement

'She had everything mapped out and she saw that plan going wrong,' Germain said.

'He abused her so mentally that she thought she was a disgusting person.'

Milligan was sentenced to 12 months supervision and ordered to do 180 hours of unpaid community work at Aberdeen Sheriff Court last week.

Milligan pleaded guilty earlier this year to assaulting Emily, threatening and abusing her using abusive language, and sending offensive and obscene texts.

Emily (pictured) with an injury sustained from Mulligan

Five other charges were dropped, including one alleging he had attempted to choke her minutes before she killed herself.

Milligan, from Edinburgh, came from a distinguished family, with his late grandfather, Jim Milligan being regarded as one of Scotland's most respected judges.

Speaking to Ruth Langsford and Eamonn Holmes on Tuesday, Fiona and Germain pleaded with anyone else in the same situation as Emily to come forward.

'It's a big message we're trying to send out there, people who witness domestic violence on other people young or old, it's something we never saw coming,' Germain said.

Emily had only been at university for six months before she took her own life

'People would not see this coming.'

Fiona agreed, adding: 'Especially Emily. She was bubbly. She was the center of the room.

'She was the life and soul of party of every family party.'

Fiona said they are hoping to encourage victims of domestic abuse to seek help

For confidential support call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit a local Samaritans branch, see www.samaritans.org for details.
A Welsh teenager is believed to be one of the UK's first transgender Prom Queens after she was crowned by her fellow pupils.

Lori Beynon, 16, from Cardigan, said it was the 'best moment of her life' when she found out that her classmates had all voted for her to be Prom Queen, and she was presented with a crown and a sash.

The bubbly fashion lover was born Luis but started transitioning two years ago after telling her mother she was transgender by text.

Lori Beynon, 16, on her prom night just before she was crowned Prom Queen

Lori looked stunning in her above-the-knee black dress and matching heels, accessorised with a simple silver clutch and a sparkling choker, on her prom night

Glamorous Lori now wears a skirt to secondary school and is about to start hormone treatment.

But the teen had never worn a 'proper dress' until her end of school prom - so she was astonished when her classmates at Cardigan Secondary School voted her to be this year's Prom Queen at their end of school dance.

It is believed it's the first time a transgender person has been crowned prom king or queen in the UK.

Overwhelmed Lori said: 'I was really excited to be going to prom anyway. It was the first time I had really worn a proper dress.

Lori was crowned Prom Queen by her fellow classmates and was presented with a sash and a sparkling tiara

Lori always used to enjoy dressing up in her sister's clothes when she was little, before she transitioned

'I felt really nice I had fake tan on and I was really happy. I went with all my friends and I didn't know but they voted for me as Prom Queen.

'That was nice but I never thought other people would too. But when they called out my name it was amazing.

'It was quite scary walking up in front of everyone. It was probably the best moment of my life. Everyone was standing up and clapping.

'I didn't feel like I was a girl - I felt like I was a queen.'

Lori said she knew she was a girl from age three, and loved wearing big sister Chloe's clothes and playing with her Bratz dolls.

But when she started school she realised the 'outside didn't match the inside' and started researching online aged 10 to put a name to her feelings.

Lori was born Luis (left) but never felt comfortable as a boy and always believed she was a girl on the 'inside'. Now she wears make-up, dresses and skirts and is about to start hormone treatment

Lori (left) poses with a classmate after her fellow pupils voted her Prom Queen at their end-of-school dance

Lori explained: 'I've always wanted to dress like a girl and present myself as a girl.

'Being called "him" and "he" never really felt real to me. It always felt wrong. It was weird.

She added: 'I used to put a towel on my head to pretend it was long hair.

'I knew I was a girl. I didn't think or know I was any different. It was only when I got older that I started to realise that the outside didn't match the inside.

'When I was about 10, I searched on the internet for "I feel like I girl and I don't know what to do".

'I had no idea what it meant to be transgender then. I had no clue. I read lots of articles about it and watched a few documentaries.

'I knew that was me but I kept it inside for a really long time.'

Glamorous Lori (left) poses with a friend on her prom night before finding out she had been crowned Prom Queen

Lori before she transitioned. She says she started researching online aged just 10 after feeling like 'the outside didn't match the inside'

Lori before she transitioned when she was little. She was born Luis, but says her mother Sarah Young has supported her through her transition

Then just 13, brave Lori confessed she wanted to have gender reassignment treatment to supportive mum Sarah Young, 37, a health worker.

'I told her in a text because I was too scared to tell her to her face,' she said.

'Puberty was the worst time in my life. It was horrible. I would wake up and run over to the mirror and it was really hard to deal with.

'I would be there looking at my face and thinking "Do I have a beard?" It's horrible to feel like that.

She added: '[My mum] was really, really, really supportive. She said "I will support you all the way"'.

Lori's certificate confirming she has been crowned Prom Queen (left), and wearing her sash on the night (right)

Lori has grown her hair and has started to wear dresses and skirts. Her prom night was the first time she had worn a 'proper dress'

Newly-confident Lori started to grow her hair, try more girls' clothes, and started counselling at the Gender Identity Development Service at London's Tavistock Clinic

She changed her name to Lori in June 2015.

She attended her school prom earlier this month, and was excited to dress glamorously at the event for Year 11 pupils.

She said: 'I never thought at all that I would get prom queen. It was totally incredible.

'It felt like I was a celebrity. It was pretty weird. I just want to go as far as I can to feel authentic to myself and who I am. Being prom queen was one step closer.'

Mum Sarah added: 'I couldn't be more proud of Lori.

'I'm not sure there's been another transgender prom queen so I believe my daughter is the first.'
Canadian Governor-General David Johnston today momentarily broke protocol as he touched the Queen on the arm during a royal visit to Canada House.

The 76-year-old dignitary gently aided the 91-year-old monarch as she made her way down the red-carpeted steps of the historic building in Trafalgar Square.

Royal etiquette suggests the Queen shouldn't be touched by officials who meet her, although the protocol has been broken several times in recent memory, including by Michelle Obama in 2009.

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A break with protocol: Governor-General David Johnston momentarily swept aside royal etiquette as he helped the Queen down the stairs of Canada House this morning

The fleeting touch goes against guidelines for dignitaries meeting with the Queen...but was the 76-year-old merely being helpful in guiding the 91-year-old monarch down the stairs?

Socks away! Colourful Governor-General Johnston, pictured next to High Commissioner to the UK Janice Charette, shows off his red-and-white maple leaf socks to photographers

Governor-General Johnston keeps a more apt distance as he escorts the Queen through Canada House

Her own sporting colours! The Queen smiles as she peruses a Canadian national jacket with the royal crest on the back

The Queen, being escorted by UK High Commissioner Janice Charette, met with young Canadians during her tour of Canada House this morning

A smartly-suited Prince Philip, nearing the end of his official duties before retirement, looked on sparkling form as he laughed and chatted with guests at the function

The Queen and Prince Philip officially opened a commemorative walkway outside the building during their visit

The children of High Commission staff waved Canadian flags from the staircase of the building as the royal visitors were greeted by the Governor-General of Canada, David Johnston, and High Commissioner to the UK Janice Charette.

Canadian Mounties, dressed in full uniform, also saluted the royal couple.

Jovial Governor-General Johnston had earlier shown off his bright red maple leaf socks to the gathered media.

He was flanked by his wife Sharon; the pair were already on friendly terms with the Queen and Prince Philip after they visited Buckingham Palace yesterday to mark the official anniversary between the two countries.

The 150th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation celebrates the moment when Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia first united in 1867.

Wearing a royal blue hat by Rachel Trevor-Morgan - complete with extravagant black plume - with a cream Stewart Parvin white silk floral dress and diamond and platinum maple leaf brooch, the Queen looked happy as she made the short journey across the capital.

ROYAL PROTOCOL: WHY DO ETIQUETTE RULES STILL EXIST? For visiting dignitaries, royal protocol can be a disaster waiting to happen. A complicated system of rules that have evolved over hundreds of years, the basic premise is that a respectful distance should be kept between royals and their people. Touchy-feely: Michelle Obama caused a stir when she put her arm around the Queen - and it was reciprocated - on a US presidential visit to the UK in 2009 Try telling that to Michelle Obama though; the former First Lady embraced the Queen during a US presidential visit to the UK in 2009, swiftly creating the day's newspaper headlines. And the Australians have a terrible track record, with former Prime Minister Paul Keating dubbed 'the Lizard of Oz' when he put his arm around the Queen in 1992. The uninitiated could spend several weeks studying the rules of who can speak first, where to stand, what you may call them and even where your gaze can fall. If in doubt, play it safe. Advertisement

The Queen's brooch, first gifted from King George VI to his wife the Queen Mother to mark their visit to Canada in 1939, the first tour of the country by a reigning monarch.

By her side was the Duke of Edinburgh, who is currently winding down his royal duties at the age of 96.

The Queen and Philip were then shown around a small exhibition of Canadian artefacts from the Royal Collection, including a hockey puck she had dropped to start a match in Vancouver in 2002.

Rolling out the red carpet: Well-wishers line up to catch a glimpse of the Queen as she arrives at Canada House in Trafalgar Square this morning

With the Duke of Edinburgh, currently partaking in his last official royal duties before retiring, the Queen looked elegant in a cream suit and pearls with a striking blue hat with black plume detail

Stepping out: Hundreds of tourists gathered behind the royal couple as their car arrived in Trafalgar Square

Canada's Governor-General David Johnston and his wife Sharon welcome the couple with open arms as they make their way down the red carpet close to Trafalgar Square

All smiles! Mr Johnston, wearing his country's national colour on his tie, escorts the Queen into Canada House this morning

The Governor presented the Queen with a brooch on behalf of the Canadian people to mark her sapphire jubilee, celebrated earlier this year as she marked 65 years on the throne.

The Sapphire Jubilee Snowflake Brooch is adorned with 48 sapphires, which were part of the only sapphire deposit ever found in Canada in 2002.

In return, the royal couple gave Mr Johnston a leather-bound commemorative book marking his country's anniversary.

Brianna Price, a Canadian DJ known as B Traits, met the Queen at the event, and said the monarch smiled at the distinct smiley face tattoo she has on the palm of her hand.

'She saw my tattoo and I think she had a little giggle,' said the DJ.

Blue is the colour: High Commissioner Janice Charette curtsies as she's introduced to the Queen by David Johnston...as the Mounties salute in the background

Fully uniformed Canadian Mounties offers a salute as the Queen and Prince Philip arrive

A three-tier string of pearls, along with single pearl earrings completed the Queen's look. Right: the Queen also wore a platinum brooch set with diamonds to mark the anniversary

A DAZZLING DIAMOND BROOCH TO MARK CANADA'S FORMATION Last month, the Queen again wore brooch, as she perched on a golden throne to mark the 150th anniversary of Canada's formation. The picture of the monarch, herself wearing pale gold, showed Her Majesty wearing her platinum maple-leaf brooch on her left shoulder. In June, the Queen wore the maple leaf brooch - made of platinum and set with diamonds - to mark the 150th anniversary of Canada 's formation. Right: Wearing the iconic piece for her first visit to Canada in 1951 The diamond and platinum maple leaf is regularly worn by female royals to mark strong relations between the two countries Set with diamonds, it was given to her mother by her father George VI in 1939 on their trip to Canada  the first tour of the country by a reigning monarch. The Queen, then Princess Elizabeth, was then loaned the iconic piece for her first visit to Canada in 1951, and after she inherited it, lent the brooch to Camilla for her inaugural trip to the Commonwealth country in 2009, and to Kate for her first official Canada visit in July 2011 with William. The portrait of the Queen was taken by Toronto-based photographer Ian Leslie Macdonald and released in honour of Canada Day. The brooch marks the day in 1867 when the dominion of Canada was born as the British North America Act united the British colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick with the province of Canada to form a new nation. Advertisement

After telling the Queen she played electronic dance music on BBC Radio 1, the Queen asked what time the show was on.

'I said 1am and I was like "You should tune in!'''

The Queen also met Canadians Dean and Dan Caten, the identical twin fashion designers behind the brand Dsquared2, and Cambridge University engineer turned astronaut Jenni Sidey.

After both the British and Canadian national anthems were played, the High Commissioner credited the royals with having been 'integral to Canada's journey'.

As she left Canada House, the Queen opened a new jubilee walkway panel outside the building, to cheers from a crowd of tourists in Trafalgar Square.

In a tweet, Canada House, prior to the arrival of its regal visitors, wrote: 'This morning we are flying the Royal Standard of Canada over Canada House to mark the arrival of Her Majesty The Queen and Prince Philip.'
The Duchess of Cambridge has taken the 'magic' out of the Royal Family, according to a historian.

Sir Ferdinand Mount, 3rd baronet, said Kate has made the monarchy more domestic - but went on to argue that the fact the 35-year-old mother-of-two is so relatable will actually serve to strengthen the House of Windsor.

Speaking in Tuesday night's ITV3 documentary Kate: The Making of a Modern Queen, Sir Mount claimed William and Kate have made people believe they're just like them.

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Kate Middleton doesn't come from the aristocracy, which some claim has benefited the royals

'The idea that Kate will drift away from her family into an exclusively royal life seems to misunderstand what's happened, what's happened is a permanent removal of the old barriers and if you like a domestication of the idea of royalty and she will be able to bask happily among her family for the rest of her days,' he said in the programme.

'So to that extent we have moved into a much less magical era of monarchy, one in which they seem to be much more people like us leading lives like us, of course they don't lead lives exactly like us.

'I think this will be something that far from weakens the whole of the monarchy in the public imagination, I should have thought it would strengthen it.'

The historian said the monarchy still would have continued without Kate's influence, but added that Prince William's choice of bride did refresh the system.

Sir Mount says the public believe their lives are similar to the royals thanks to Kate and William

'As [the Queen's] reign has gone on the affection which she's held [in] gets deeper, and not less,' he explained.

'This suggests the monarchy has very deep roots and these periodic refreshments of young blood do it nothing but good, but it still goes on just the same.'

Sir Mount said it's too early to tell what kind of royal Kate will be when she eventually becomes queen consort.

The Baronet said Kate has refreshed the monarchy but it would have continued without her

'It's impossible to tell what sort of queen she'd be like we can only observe what we see and read but she seems to be a rather modest, cautious sort of person who's unlikely to endanger the monarchy,' he said.

'I should have thought she'd be a kind of [reassuring] presence, but who knows what the future will bring?'

The documentary also heard from royal biographer Sarah Bradford, Viscountess Bangor, who claimed Kate's middle-class background has benefited the royals.



Ferdinand Mount believes Kate

'Kate's background has been very helpful to the monarchy, that happy family, everybody getting along well, being supportive of each other - with the Middletons that's been a considerable help,' she said.

The writer also stated that the palace has given the Duke and Duchess space to be a normal family.

'I think the palace take a great deal of care over William and Kate, I dont think they make them do too much,' she said.

'They dont take them away from their children too much. I do think they have modern, sympathetic view.'
She's known for her love of high street bargains despite her royal credentials.

And Queen Letizia of Spain turned once again to an old favourite when she donned an old Hugo Boss number for an engagement in Cantabria today.

Letizia, 44, showed off her toned arms to perfection in the 220 sleeveless Lamma checked top as she joined husband King Felipe VI on a visit to the Monastery of Santo Toribio de Liebana.

She donned the same top last year, at the September 2016 Accion Magistral Awards in Madrid.

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Queen of thrift! Letizia, 44, showed off her toned arms to perfection in the 220 sleeveless Lamma checked top which she was first spotted in last year

Look familiar? Letizia donned the same top last year, at the September 2016 Accion Magistral Awards in Madrid (pictured)

Today, the stylish mother-of-two paired it with a pair of crisp white cigarette trousers and nude pumps with eye-catching mirrored block heels.

The couple are visiting the monastery in Camaleno today to mark the northern municpilatity's Lebaniego Jubilee Year, a religious tradition dating back to 1512.

They were given a rockstar welcome as hoards of well-wishers gathered outside the monastery, where of children were dressed in traditional clothing, and many royal fans begged for selfies.

One woman even thrust a baby into Letizia's arms - and the mother-of-two was only too happy to oblige, giving the infant a cuddle for the cameras.

Queen Letizia turned once again to an old favourite when she donned the old Hugo Boss top for an engagement in Cantabria today

One well-wisher held out their baby for the Spanish Queen to cuddle as they took a photo

Letizia was joining husband King Felipe VI on a visit to the Monastery of Santo Toribio de Liebana

The royal donned the same top last year, at the September 2016 Accion Magistral Awards in Madrid

The stylish mother-of-two paired her top with a pair of crisp white cigarette trousers and nude pumps with eye-catching mirrored block heels

The couple are visiting the monastery in Camaleno today to mark the northern municpilatity's Lebaniego Jubilee Year, a religious tradition dating back to 1512

Letizia and Felipe were accompanied today by Minister of Public Works, Inigo de la Serna, and Cantabrian President Miguel Angel Revilla.

The Spanish royals have just returned from a three-day state visit to the UK where they dined with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, had tea with Prince Charles at Clarence House and attended two glittering state banquets.

Letizia, who is mother to Princesses Leonor and Sofia, dazzled in a succession of show-stopping outfits including bespoke designer gowns - estimated to have cost upwards of 9,000 - but capped off her trip in a sartorial nod to the UK high street with an 80 Topshop skirt.

The couple were given a rockstar welcome as hoards of well-wishers gathered outside the monastery, where of children were dressed in traditional clothing, and many royal fans begged for selfies

One woman even thrust a baby into Letizia's arms (left) - and the mother-of-two was only too happy to oblige, giving the infant a cuddle for the cameras

Letizia and Felipe were accompanied today by Minister of Public Works, Inigo de la Serna, and Cantabrian President Miguel Angel Revilla

On her first engagement since returning to Spain, she was guest of honour at the National Fashion Awards 2017 at Madrid's Museo del Traje and looked sensational in a white dress by one of her go-to designers, Carolina Herrara, and 30 Magrit heels - another old favourite.

Queen Letizia herself is a staunch fan of the latest designers and trends. Indeed, the former TV journalist turned Queen of Spain has carved out a name for herself as a royal style icon.

The Spanish royals have just returned from a three-day state visit to the UK where they dined with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, had tea with Prince Charles at Clarence House and attended two glittering state banquets

On her first engagement since returning to Spain, she was guest of honour at the National Fashion Awards 2017 at Madrid's Museo del Traje

Queen Letizia herself is a staunch fan of the latest designers and trends. Indeed, the former TV journalist turned Queen of Spain has carved out a name for herself as a royal style icon

Letizia once favoured dowdy suits and frumpy jackets in her years as a news reader, but since joining the Spanish monarchy, Queen Letizia's wardrobe has had quite the makeover

With a penchant for homegrown labels, such as Mango, Zara and Uterque, Queen Letizia keeps her Spanish fashion fans happy

Style by day: Off duty, the mother-of-two has a penchant for relaxed tailored, billowing blouses and even the odd pair of jeans - but she still manages to look chic

She once favoured dowdy suits and frumpy jackets in her years as a news reader, but since joining the Spanish monarchy, Queen Letizia's wardrobe has had quite the makeover.

Her new wardrobe is packed with tailored sheath dresses, sky-scraping court shoes, Hugo Boss suits and eye-catching jewels.

With a penchant for homegrown labels, such as Mango, Zara and Uterque, she keeps her Spanish fashion fans happy.

Off duty, the mother-of-two has a penchant for relaxed tailored, billowing blouses and even the odd pair of jeans - but she still manages to look chic.
The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were given a royal welcome when they touched down in Porthleven to kick off their tour of Devon and Cornwall.

Charles and Camilla were greeted by hundreds of well-wishers - and an adorable black Labrador pup named Bella - as they arrived in the flood-stricken county on Wednesday.

The couple will meet food producers, charity workers, community volunteers, cancer patients and medical staff during their trip this week.

They began their annual summer tour of the two western-most counties on Wednesday and will undertake an exhausting 13 engagements in three days, including a tour of a custard factory.

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Charles is greeted by Bella, a black Labrador puppy owned by David and Alison Evans from Doncaster, during a walkabout during a visit to Porthleven, Helston on Wednesday

On Wednesday they will meet suppliers and food producers displaying their goods at Porthleven in Cornwall as part of a mini-exhibition showcasing a range of local produce on offer to London retailers.

It will also showcase catering establishments as part of a new partnership which provides a daily rail freight service from Penzance to Paddington.

They will then visit the Great Cornish Food Store in Truro to see the results of a collaboration between independent grocery store the Duchy of Cornwall and Waitrose before splitting up to carry out engagements separately.

Charles will visit the Cove Macmillan Support Centre at Royal Cornwall Hospital at Treliske later on Wednesday while Camilla will meet staff at disaster relief charity ShelterBox in Truro before touring Caterlink in Bodmin, which specialises in making ice-cream cones and toppings.

Bella wasn't the only four-legged friend eager to say hello to the royals as Camilla is greeted Sophie, a three-year-old Jack Russell Terrier owned by Peter Hichens, 69 (pictured)

When in Rome! The Duke of Cornwall - as he is known in the south-west of England - and his Duchess were baked this giant Cornish pasty in their honour

Rockstar welcome! Charles and Camilla were greeted by hundreds of well-wishers waving Union flags and begging for selfies as they arrived in flood-stricken Cornwall today

On Thursday, Charles and Camilla will meet stallholders at an indoor market in Barnstaple, north Devon, and chat to representatives from a number of local charities who will be showcasing their work in the area at the Victorian Pannier Market.

They will then tour the Ambrosia custard factory at Lifton to mark the creamerys centenary year before Charles visits the Devon Federation of Young Farmers Clubs new building in Cheriton Bishop.

The heir to the throne will also visit Okehampton Camp, located on the Ministry of Defences Dartmoor training area.

The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall are given a royal welcome as they touch down in Porthleven to kick off their tour of Devon and Cornwall

Busy week: The couple will meet food producers, charity workers, community volunteers, cancer patients and medical staff during their trip to Cornwall and Devon

No rest for the wicked! The couple began their annual summer tour of the two western-most counties on Wednesday and will undertake an exhausting 13 engagements in three days

Camilla, who recently celebrated her landmark 70th birthday, looked far younger than her years in a crisply-tailored coat dress in a flattering pale blue hue today

Just the beginning: Today, the couple will meet suppliers and food producers displaying their goods at Porthleven as part of a mini-exhibition showcasing a range of local produce

Charles meets Dale Reardon, 54, from Helston a retained firefighter who was in flood-hit Coverack last night and runs Hand Cut Cornish Fudge in Porthleven

There, he will hear how The Duchy of Cornwall is working with the MoD, the local community and other stakeholders on a variety of conservation projects on Dartmoor.

Meanwhile the Duchess will tour First Light, a sexual assault referral centre (SARC) which provides specialist support to victims of sexual violence and domestic abuse in Devon and Cornwall from its centre in Plymouth.

On Friday, Charles and Camilla will attend a service at St Protus and St Hyacinth Church in Blisland, Cornwall, which dates back to Norman times, to celebrate the Duchesss 70th birthday on Monday.

The couple cut lemon and Cornish elderflower sponge cakes, one modelled on Highgrove House and the other a five-tier creation representing the Duchess's wedding outfit

The cakes were made by husband and wife Phil and Christine Jenson (pictured) who run local cake makers Peboryonas

Camilla giggles as she greeted royal fans. Later, they will visit an exhibition showcasing catering establishments as part of a new partnership which provides a daily rail freight service from Penzance to Paddington

Later on in the week, the couple will hear how The Duchy of Cornwall is working with the MoD, the local community and other stakeholders on a variety of conservation projects on Dartmoor

Tomorrow, the couple are due to tour the Ambrosia custard factory at Lifton to mark the creamerys centenary year before Charles visits the Devon Federation of Young Farmers Clubs new building in Cheriton Bishop

Next, the couple will visit the Great Cornish Food Store in Truro to see the results of a collaboration between independent grocery store the Duchy of Cornwall and Waitrose

Non-stop: On Friday, Charles and Camilla will attend a service at St Protus and St Hyacinth Church in Blisland, Cornwall, which dates back to Norman times

The couple are beginning their annual summer tour of the two western-most counties on Wednesday and will undertake an exhausting 13 engagements in three days

They will then walk through the village to the local shop, post office and tearoom before visiting Tregunnel Hill.

During their visit, they will attend a street party on the village green and award prizes to the winners of a hanging basket competition.

Camilla, who recently celebrated her 70th birthday, will bring the summer tour to a close with a visit to the Cornwall Air Ambulance Trust, of which she is patron, to celebrate the Newquay-based charitys 30th anniversary.

Next the Duchess of Cornwall dropped in on Caterlink, in Bodmin, a Cornish business specialising in ice cream cones, toppings, decorations and accessories

The Duchess looked to be enjoying a scoop of ice cream as she chatted to technical demonstrator Anna Menini during her visit to Bodmin today
His brother and sister-in-law are currently on the charm offensive in Germany, with Prince George and Princess Charlotte in tow.

But it seems Prince Harry has been keeping busy back home - charming guests at the Vernon Monument Falklands Charity Dinner at Trinity House in London tonight.

The 32-year-old looked dapper in a tuxedo and bow tie as he arrived to meet veterans at the black tie event.

Harry is hosting a drinks reception ahead of the dinner, which marks the 35th anniversary of the 1982 Falklands War.

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Prince Harry looked dapper at the Vernon Monument Falklands Charity Dinner at Trinity House in London

Harry also met campaigners from Project Vernon, who are hoping to install a sculpture in honour of the HMS Vernon training base.

Funds raised at the silent auction will go towards the monument, with two thirds of the campaign's 325,000 target already raised.

Designed by Australian sculptor Les Johnson, the bronze statue will show a Navy diver placing an explosive on a mine.

It is hoped that the monument will be installed in Gunwharf Quays, Portsmouth, where the training site was once based.

The 32-year-old is hosting a drinks reception ahead of the Vernon Monument Falklands 35 charity dinner marking the 35th anniversary of the 1982 Falklands War

Harry looked in good spirits as he met guests at the reception, wearing his military medals proudly on his lapel

Harry also met campaigners from Project Vernon, who are hoping to install a sculpture in honour of the HMS Vernon training base. He was shown a model of the proposed monument at the reception (pictured)

The monument will be the first to commemorate HMS Vernons history and the work of its present and past personnel, of which 23 won the UKs second highest honour for gallantry, the George Cross.

The base was home to the mining and torpedo schools, preparing a force of minesweepers, minehunters and dive teams.

It remained in Portsmouth until 1996, when it was divided into different commands.

Harry is attending the charity event in his role as Royal Navy Commodore-in-Chief, Small Ships and Diving.

A silent auction will be held at the charity dinner, with a variety of lots on offer, including diving memorabilia and day at sea on board a major warship.

Harry was seen greeting Deputy Lieutenant Leslie Morgan as he arrived at the charity dinner

He later appeared to be in animated conversation with guests at the black-tie event
Colin and Janet Smith are sitting at opposite ends of the sofa, just as they were 27 years ago when they cradled their seven-year-old son as he died.

They both look into the space between them as they recall how little room Colin Jnr took up. So vivid is their account that it could have happened yesterday.

There was nothing to him, says his dad. No flesh left. He weighed less than a stone. We were just sitting with him. He was wrapped in sheepskin because we couldnt touch him - it hurt him too much. I kept talking to him, talking nonsense, really. He was still with us.

Wed never talked to him about the fact he was dying, but I think he knew. He had said to his brothers: You will miss me when Im gone. He was lying there and then suddenly he said, I cant see, Daddy, and not long after that he slipped away.

Colin Smith (pictured aged six in 1988) died aged seven in 1990 after contracting HIV from a contaminated dose of blood clotting protein Factor VIII

Janet nods. We must have sat there for an hour and a half after that, in the quiet. I couldnt bear to let them take him.

The contrast between their tenderness when they talk of their boy, and their rage over the manner of his death on January 13, 1990, as he developed full-blown Aids, is striking.

Colin Snr reaches under the sofa and pulls out a bag overflowing with papers. Medical notes. Jargon that they didnt understand then, but do now. He stabs at the pages, and three decades of frustration comes pouring out.

We wanted the word MURDERED on Colins gravestone, but the engravers said that wasnt allowed, he says.

But our boy was murdered - and it was State-sanctioned. They knew. We think he was infected with Aids in an NHS hospital very early, before his immune system even had a chance to develop much.

Their youngest, the child who defied the odds in even existing (He wasnt planned. Id had a vasectomy. When I got the final test to say it had worked, we discovered Janet was five months pregnant. He was our little bonus), had been ill for most of his short life.

His parents Colin Snr and Janet Smith, from Newport, South Wales, say they believe was infected with Aids in an NHS hospital very early in his life, before his immune system had a chance to develop much

As a baby, Colin, one of the couples four sons, had been diagnosed with haemophilia, a genetic disease where blood doesnt clot properly.

It should never have killed him, however, but he died in 1990 after contracting HIV and Hepatitis C from a contaminated dose of blood clotting protein Factor VIII, which had come from a U.S. prison.

At the time, the U.S. authorities had refused to use the blood, aware that it was unsafe. The Smiths - and more than 2,000 families like them - now know the British authorities had also been told the blood was contaminated.

For 27 years, the family have probed, campaigned and driven themselves nearly mad to discover the truth. The stress was near intolerable. Colin says they came close to parting because of it.

Its the anger that gets you. Its a fathers job to protect his son, isnt it? And I couldnt.

Colin (pictured left at 18 months old with brother Daniel) was diagnosed with haemophilia, a genetic disease where blood doesnt clot properly, as a baby

Janet would sit in her rocking chair and rock and Id go to Colins grave and shout at him. Why did he not fight more? We nearly split up over it.

Last week, there was a breakthrough when Prime Minister Theresa May unexpectedly announced an inquiry into the scandal, potentially one of the biggest in the NHS, which the Mail has been campaigning about for 30 years.

There is quiet satisfaction in this modest family home in Newport, South Wales, but no triumphalism. About bloody time, says Colin. Our son was given a death sentence. So were thousands of others.

The families have known about this for decades and the authorities have covered it up. For years theyve lied and stalled and tried to get us to go away.

Now he wants someone to pay - not necessarily in monetary terms. Im not interested in compensation, he says. This isnt about that. Id prefer someone to go to prison.

The youngster (pictured aged six in 1988) was given blood transfusions in order to treat his haemophilia. His parents explained how every time Colin had a bleed - even from the tiniest knock - they would have to go to hospital

For almost three decades this extraordinary couple have tried to do their best for their son in death, just as they did in life.

Colin was blond, cheeky, wise beyond his years. His face smiles down from every wall, his drawings have been framed, his toys are treasured in a special trunk.

He wasnt even supposed to be called Colin, laughs Colin Snr as he relates how they had agreed he should be called Matthew.

But I went to register the birth and decided he didnt look like a Matthew. So I gave him my name.

Janet throws him a look. And I went beserk, she confirms.

Eight weeks before Colin (pictured aged six with his mother Janet) was first treated, a letter went out to haemophilia centres recommending children should not be treated with Factor VIII

With hindsight, the signs that Colin had haemophilia - a condition from which a cousin also suffered - were there from the start.

He was always a mass of bruises, but they put this down to him being the baby in a family of boisterous boys. When he was a toddler, the family were actually reported to Social Services by a stranger who saw Colin in a park and drew the wrong conclusion.

Not long afterwards, he was diagnosed with the condition which would turn their local hospital into a second home as blood transfusions were the stock treatment for the condition.

Any time Colin had a bleed - even from the tiniest knock - they would have to attend hospital. Sometimes we were there twice a day, says Colin.

At the time, the plentiful supplies of blood were a godsend, thanks to a wonder treatment called Factor VIII. The NHS in England and Wales relied on it to help people who needed regular transfusions.

Colin's parents were told when he was two that he had been tested positive for HIV, but were not told until three years after his death that he had also contracted Hepatitis C. Colin is pictured here at his last Christmas day in 1989

It was made in huge vats, from the blood plasma of thousands of people. But there was a problem - if just one donation was infected with a virus, it could contaminate the whole batch. And it did.

They got blood from prisoners in America, drug addicts and the like, says Janet. Of course, we didnt know then about Aids. We were so ignorant.

But the authorities were not. We now know that in June 1983, eight weeks before Colin was first treated, a letter went out to haemophilia centres recommending children should not be treated with Factor VIII.

Had the guidelines been followed, Colin should still be alive today. They werent. He was given his initial dose shortly before his first birthday.

By the time Colin was two, his parents were being told he had tested positive for HIV. The questions just keep coming. Did they know it was inevitable hed get it? asks his father. They kept testing his blood, which we could never understand.

They said they were checking his white blood cells, now were convinced they were checking for HIV and Hep C. But what else did he have? CJD? Now we want to know who knew what, when.

Colin Snr (pictured with wife Janet) says authorities have 'covered up' the scandal, adding that 'for years theyve lied and stalled and tried to get us to go away'

The first warnings about this were made before our son was born. How dare they have played Russian roulette with his life?

The news that Colin had contracted the HIV virus, aged just two, was broken to his stunned parents brutally in the hospital corridor.

We came away not knowing what it meant. The consultant said something weird about the next five years being vital, and we didnt understand.

They realise now that the doctor meant Colin had five years left to live. Which was spot-on, actually, since he died when he was seven. But we had no help after that.

They pretty much said, Go home and enjoy him. I mean, they must have known what they were dealing with.

Whenever Colin had a bleed after that theyd never be concerned about him, but about Daniel, his brother, who shared his room. I remember them telling me burn the mattress. Not once did they say why.

Colin's mother Janet explained how they 'became known as the Aids family' at a time when the disease turned sufferers and their families into social pariahs

The family were not told - until three years after Colins death - that he had also contracted Hepatitis C, another potentially dangerous condition.

They put us all at risk, says Janet. That can be passed on with open wounds. I remember doing this when Colin had a little cut (she licks her finger and rubs it gently on her arm). We could have infected the whole family. They never told us.

What a lonely place this pair must have been in. To lose a child is always devastating, but to lose a child to Aids during the Eighties, when the disease turned sufferers and their families into social pariahs, was something else entirely.

It was the time of all the doom-laden adverts about the condition, says Janet. Everyone was scared. We got the brunt of it. We became known as the Aids family.

In the early hours one morning, they heard a noise and rose to discover someone had daubed Aids in giant letters across their home.

Colin's parents say their son (pictured in 1989) weighed less than a stone before his death and that they couldnt touch him because it hurt him too much

I was out at 2am painting over it, Colin recalls. The kids wanted to know what I was doing painting the house at 2am and I said: Oh, you know what your mother is like, she is always going on at me to spruce things up, so I might as well do it now. 

The family - struggling to cope with the round-the-clock demands of caring for the weakening Colin - were targeted in the cruellest of ways.

Wed get phone calls, usually in the small hours, from people calling us scum. Theyd say: Do your sons sleep together? Theyd call us disgusting. Mostly, the couple managed to protect their children from what was going on, but not always.

My son Patrick got a hard time of it once when all the kids at school surrounded him. They all gathered round and he was in the middle and they were chanting: Aids, Aids. You are gay.

We lost friends. People stopped coming round. They were afraid of Colin, afraid they would catch it. No matter how many times you explained, people still didnt get it.

Colin Snr and Janet say they aren't interested in compensation, but 'want someone to pay' for their son's death. Theresa May unexpectedly announced an inquiry into the scandal last week

Even relatives stayed away. If our own family couldnt deal with it, how could we expect the wider community to?

Is Colin Snr bitter? Of course he is. When he died we didnt have an open coffin because I couldnt bear all these people coming to see him when he was dead, when they wouldnt come near him when he was alive.

Salvation, for them, came in the form of contact with other families in the same position. They now have the support of a vast network of fellow sufferers.

The scale of this scandal is mind-blowing.

We know so many people who have died, says Colin. Wives whose husbands infected them. People who lost their homes. And cases are still coming to light.

The most pitiful part of the Smiths story is that they so obviously feel they have failed their son, when they did anything but. They gave him everything.

Ongoing: Survivors of tainted blood threated to boycott government inquiry by Ben Spencer, Medical Correspondent Victims of the contaminated blood scandal have threatened to boycott the Governments inquiry into the disaster. Families and survivors want control of the inquiry to be taken away from the Department of Health  and have refused to take part until the Prime Minister can assure them it will be truly independent. Theresa May last week announced an inquiry into the appalling tragedy that killed 2,400 people infected with hepatitis and HIV in the 1970s and 1980s after being given contaminated stocks of the clotting agent Factor VIII, used to treat patients with haemophilia. Minutes of papers disclosed by the Daily Mail suggest patients were given the deadly blood for at least five years after health officials became aware of the danger. Mrs May said victims, relatives and campaign groups would be consulted about the form they wished the inquiry to take. But campaigners say they will boycott the first consultation meeting  scheduled for today  unless control of the inquiry is transferred to a different Government department. A letter signed by the Tainted Blood campaign group and nine other organisations said health officials were implicated in the original scandal and could not possibly be trusted to run an independent inquiry. A Department of Health spokesman said: We are absolutely committed to a thorough and transparent inquiry. Advertisement

He got a bike for his last Christmas, even though he was too ill to get on it, says Janet. Whatever Colin wanted, Colin got. Near the end he decided he wanted to go to Blackpool to see the lights.

We took him in the car, in the middle of the night. It was November. Freezing! But we laid him on the back seat and he looked up through the sunroof.

He IS still very much a part of this family. Janet still buys Colin a birthday present every year, usually a toy car (I know hed be 34 now, but hell always be seven to me), their four grandchildren know all about Uncle Colin, and his parents still visit his grave twice a week.

Truth be told, Janet is now glad that they didnt have MURDERED emblazoned on that headstone.

Instead, they went for an inscription that says: Miss you always, sweetheart.

One can only hope, for their sakes, that the Smiths - and all families like them - get the answers they need soon. They have suffered enough.
Going into the family business is a tried-and-tested career path for many young people. When you grow up watching your mum and dad devote themselves to medicine it is hardly surprising you would want to follow in their footsteps.

And so it was for little Mayoni Gooneratne, reading the medical journals her father brought home when she was just seven years old. Saving lives is pretty much in the DNA, she says.

Her mother was a GP. Her father still is. At 76 years of age, Henry Gooneratne is the oldest practising family doctor in Croydon, South London, and received a letter from the Queen recently congratulating him on his services to the medical profession. Mayonis younger brother is an anaesthetist at one of Londons busiest hospitals.

For as long as she can remember, Mayoni has wanted to be an NHS doctor and by this point  she is 41  she fully expected to be continuing the family tradition. She started medical school in 1994 and in 2002 was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons.

From there the route to becoming a consultant  at the top of the medical tree  is long and gruelling, taking around ten years. She was on track, though.

Yet she was just one year away from becoming a consultant when she did the unthinkable  and quit the NHS, walking away from the career to which she had devoted her life.

Mayoni Gooneratne, 41, was just one year away from becoming a consultant when she did the unthinkable and quit her job at Lewisham Hospital in London, walking away from the career to which she had devoted her life

Now, she still uses her medical skills, but in a very different arena. She runs an aesthetic clinic, dispensing Botox and fillers, and organising manicures. A laudable business venture, but a far cry from saving lives on the front line. Shes the first to admit that this was very much an unwanted Plan B.

I wanted to save lives, she says. I was what you would have described as a hardcore surgical trainee. I was passionate about the job, passionate about the NHS. Its all I wanted to do. Leaving was the most devastating thing Ive ever done.

I had to have counselling because I was in such turmoil. I felt Id let everyone down  my parents, myself. I dreaded telling my father.

It was a terrible time. Im not by nature a quitter. I was in pieces. For an awfully long time afterwards I couldnt even talk about what I had done without getting emotional. It was a devastating loss, and one I never ever expected to have to go through.

It was perhaps a more devastating loss for the rest of us. It takes 15 to 20 years to train an NHS consultant, at huge expense. Its hard to put a figure on the cost, but when you consider that we are talking 610,000 per doctor for basic medical training, the sums are stratospheric.

To have that doctor quit at any stage is a slap in the face for the taxpayer. But to see them bow out, taking so much high-level experience with them is heartbreaking.

The thorny issue of why there are still so few women surgeons in the UK was recently highlighted in the Channel 4 series Confessions Of A Junior Doctor. 32-year-old Kayla (pictured) observed that she had been hurled into a world of egomaniac men

So why did Mayoni go? She says she reached the start of the end as she walked to work at Lewisham Hospital and found herself weeping openly before she reached the front doors.

Disillusion with the system was part of her anguish. Id already been brought down by the bureaucracy and the great sense of apathy in the NHS. Every day Id feel that I wasnt able to do the job Id trained to do.

But there was an added complication: her children.

Id had two children by this point, in quick succession, but Id always believed that women nowadays could have children and a rewarding medical career. But I was worn down.

The hours were punishing, and Id go home and find I had nothing left to give them. I was expending too much energy fire-fighting on the job to actually be a mum. It tore me apart.

When Id started to actually burst into tears on the way to work, I knew I had to get help. I went for counselling.

However, it wasnt the macho culture that forced Kayla to quit her training by the end of the programme, but her own family responsibilities. She had a three-year-old son, whom she hadnt seen for months because she had sent him to live with her parents in China

When my counsellor suggested I should see a medical careers service, to look at alternative careers, I was horrified. Give up this job that was everything to me? But eventually I had no choice. I had to put my children, my family and my own health first.

It was still the hardest thing Ive ever had to do.

Alas, Mayoni, who is married with three children now aged five, four and two, isnt the first woman to bow out of surgical training, citing it as incompatible with family life. And she wont be the last.

The thorny issue of why there are still so few women surgeons in the UK was recently highlighted in the brilliant Channel 4 series Confessions Of A Junior Doctor.

The first three episodes of the programme, which is filmed on the wards of Northampton General Hospital and traces the progress of junior medics, were filled with women  reflecting the fact that more women than men are accepted to medical school these days.

However, the fourth episode  which focused on the brutal surgical training programme  was startling. Where had all the women gone, and why did the place seem so awash with testosterone? Theres no denying that surgery is still male-dominated. Despite a 55 per cent female intake to medical school, only 33 per cent of surgical trainees are women.

Mayoni said she made the difficult decision when she found herself crying on the way to work one day. She says she had to put her three children and her own health first

The cameras in Northampton found only one female who wearily observed that she had been hurled into a world of egomaniac men.

Every day, every minute, you have to dress like a man, think like a man, talk like a man, said 32-year-old Kayla. It wasnt the macho culture that forced her to quit her training by the end of the programme, though, but her own family responsibilities.

She had a three-year-old son, whom she hadnt seen for months because she had sent him to live with her parents in China.

The plan had been that little Zak would join her in the UK, but the demands of the job made it impossible, and she was filmed chatting to him on Skype, racked with guilt and describing herself as a horrible mother.

It came as no surprise that she bowed out, devastated that she couldnt see a future where she could be a mum and a surgeon. I know I am not going to be a good surgeon if I have a son at home, said Kayla. You cant be a good mum and be a surgeon. You have to sacrifice one.

That thinking wasnt exactly challenged by Claire Brown, the lone female general surgeon at Northampton General, herself a single mum to a five-year-old.

While some doctors say the 'Alpha' image of surgeons also puts women off, orthopaedic consultant surgeon Scarlett McNally, from Sussex, says there are lots of surgeons in the profession who arent Alphas

Miss Brown has seen many talented women quit  some from near the top of the tree, others as soon as they have realised how difficult the lifestyle is.

There are no official drop-out figures, making it impossible to assess the scale of the problem, but, anecdotally, we seem to be facing a crisis.

There are fewer women at the top, says Miss Brown. Ive seen many female surgeons become disillusioned. Surgery involves unsociable hours and trying to find childcare for those unsociable hours is almost impossible.

I couldnt manage without a complete network of people who go out of their way to help me.

Interestingly, Mayoni agrees with the sentiments in the programme. I think its very different when you dont have children. Its a brutal environment but if you are able to act like a man  or the traditional image of the man  then you can do it. But a lot of women are conflicted when they have children.

You want, need, to be there for your kids. Personally, I dont think you can be a good surgeon and a good mother. Theres an old adage in surgery of knife, life, wife  meaning the order of importance surgeons attach to things. I still think it holds true. I thought I could fight it, and prove them all wrong. I couldnt.

Mrs McNally, who has four children, says she strongly believes that you can be a good mother and a good surgeon

A devastating portrayal of a profession, then, that was supposed to have embraced equality by now. And while something approaching a third of surgical trainees are now women, this is not yet translating into more surgical consultants. Across the UK, still only 12 per cent of consultants are female, reinforcing the idea that surgery is one of the last male bastions in the NHS.

There have been myriad attempts to overhaul the training. It is now possible to complete surgical training on a part-time basis, supposedly opening the doors to those women (and men) who have young families.

However, the Channel 4 programme reinforced the notion that you have to be a man  and a certain type of man, too  to reach the top.

Consider these comments from Peter Kang, one of Northampton Generals senior consultants.

Surgery is an art, as much as it is science, but there are very few Mozarts and Beethovens. Surgery is hard. It is not easy. Not every-one can be a surgeon. We are like Top Gun. Surgeons inherently are very competitive. In order to get ahead in surgery you have to be very domineering, to some extent. The fact is that surgeons tend to be Alphas.

The hours were punishing, and Id go home and find I had nothing left to give them. I was expending too much energy fire-fighting on the job to actually be a mum. It tore me apart

Its a view that has Sussex-based orthopaedic consultant surgeon Scarlett McNally  who has long campaigned to get more women to the top  putting her head in her hands.

The Alpha people are the ones who get noticed. They are the ones who talk. But there are lots of surgeons doing really good work who arent Alpha, Top Gun type of people.

Its that idea, though, that puts women off applying to be surgeons in the first place. The competition has always been fierce, but I did a paper in 2008 looking at the figures and it actually showed that the women who applied were statistically more likely to be accepted. The trouble was that fewer women were actually applying. Only the best women would put themselves forward.

There is no reason women should be under-represented. Its actually a wonderful career and more conducive to a family life than it was when I started out.

And so many of the assumptions are just wrong. You dont need to be tall to be a surgeon. You can stand on a step. I am 5ft and half an inch.

You dont have to be strong to be an orthopedic surgeon, for instance, as people seem to think. I am quite strong, but you dont have to be strong. There are tools. You dont have to do these things in a macho way.

Mrs McNally has four children, and strongly believes that you can be a good mother and a good surgeon.

Yet she admits her own career progression was made easier by the fact that her husband, a nurse, was a stay-at-home dad for at least one crucial period during her training. Had I been a single mother, it would have been an awful lot harder, she says.

But with women making up just 12 per cent of consultant surgeons in the NHS, the chances are many of us could go through our whole lives still thinking surgeons are always men. Its the bane of the female surgeons life.

Every woman surgeon has a story of being mistaken for a nurse, or a secretary.

Mrs McNally says she gets it on a daily basis. I go onto a ward with a handsome junior doctor and he is the one the patient assumes is the consultant. Or a patient will say to me, even after we have been speaking for a while: Oh, are you doing the surgery, too? They assume I am there in an administrative capacity.

The fact is that the NHS needs to push the female trainees through the ranks, not waving them off into the perceived easier branches of medicine, or seeing them leave the NHS entirely.

But wont the current exodus be seen as evidence that women cant hack it at the top?

Mayoni says nothing is further from the truth. The problem is that women like me just arent prepared to sacrifice everything for the job, and kill themselves in the process. And there is something wrong with a system that expects you to do it.
Having sleep apnoea raises the risk of dementia by nearly 30 per cent, experts have warned.

Scientists say they have found a clear link between obstructive sleep apnoea - which affects around 2.5 million Britons - and build-up of plaque in the brain which causes dementia.

They said screening patients and treating the condition could help cut dementia rates.

In sleep apnoea, the walls of the throat relax during sleep and stop breathing. Often it causes sufferers to unknowingly wake up from deeper sleep to take a breath, meaning their sleep patterns are interrupted.

Doctors said the link with dementia was likely to be caused by the brain being starved of oxygen during sleep, which can damage blood vessels and disrupt the balance of an enzyme which helps regulate the protein which causes plaque.

Scientists say they have found a clear link between obstructive sleep apnoea and build-up of plaque in the brain which causes dementia

Dr Yue Leng, of the University of California, San Francisco, said data from 14 studies showed people with sleep apnoea were 26 per cent more likely to develop dementia.

'Modifiable risk factor'

She said: 'Sleep apnoea may actually be a modifiable risk factor for dementia.

'It is a treatable condition while dementia is unfortunately an irreversible disease, so by treating sleep apnoea that could lead to a reduced risk of dementia.

'This means at the very least clinicians should really pay more attention to their patients' sleep.'

Other findings

Researchers from Wheaton College, Illinois, also presented a series of studies on sleep apnoea to the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in London.

In one set of studies, scientists examining a total of 1,314 scans found the brains of people with sleep apnoea contained more plaque.

THE RISE OF SLEEP APNOEA The number of tests to diagnose people with sleep disorders has doubled in the last ten years, statistics revealed last month. A total of 147,610 sleep disorder tests were carried out in England last year, while only 69,919 exams were carried out in 2007 to 2008. Sleep disorder tests are designed to diagnose sleep apnoea, a condition that causes sufferers to stop breathing in bed. Experts said the rise may be down to more awareness about the serious health risks of sleep apnoea, which include increased chances of heart disease and stroke. The condition affects around 1.5 million people in the UK, but doctors warn many more people have not been formally diagnosed. In the US, sleep apnoea affects 18 million people, or one in 15 Americans, according to the American Sleep Association. Advertisement

They also found sleep apnoea patients built up levels of plaque faster over the same time period as those without the condition.

The effect was the same whether people were otherwise healthy or had mild cognitive impairment  an early sign that someone could develop dementia.

Monitoring sleep

Amanda Shim, of Wheaton College, said: 'If we know there is an associated between sleep disordered breathing and Alzheimer's disease, then patients with sleep disordered breathing should be monitored for signs of cognitive impairment.

'Treating sleep disordered breathing could potentially delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease, or at least lessen its effects.'

Wide reaching impacts

Dr Carol Routledge, director of research at Alzheimer's Research UK, said of the study: 'Conditions such as sleep disordered breathing can get in the way of a restful night's sleep, and may have wider reaching health impacts.

'We know that Alzheimer's proteins can start to build-up over a decade before symptoms appear so it is often difficult to tease apart cause and effect in the relationship between sleep problems and dementia.

'Understanding how sleep disorders could affect our risk of dementia is of great importance, especially if managing these conditions could help to reduce the number of people developing dementia.'

Various associations

Dr Doug Brown, of the Alzheimer's Society, added: 'Researchers are increasingly finding associations between the early physical signs of Alzheimer's disease and poor quality sleep, but we don't know whether poor sleep directly increases your risk of Alzheimer's.

'As certain sleep disorders can be treatable, the next stage is to test some of these treatments in a controlled research setting to understand whether they could be effective in reducing the risk of dementia.

'It's important to talk to your GP if you have a sleep disorder and are concerned about your health.'
Insomnia is estimated to affect a quarter of the Western world.

Our 'open all hours' culture, increasing stress noise and lights and mobile devices are just a few of the modern lifestyle factors that are blamed.

But increasingly, research suggests that our 21st century 'sleep deprivation epidemic' is not linked to urbanisation as previously thought.

A new study has now found that living in a built-up area and the electrification of homes does not decrease the amount of sleep that people get.

Scientists have previously proposed that those who have electricity stay up later, but do not necessarily get up later to compensate. But this was not found to be the case.

Researchers found that people living in a town retired on average one hour later, but did not sleep less compared to people in a village without electricity, because they also rose an hour later in the morning.

A new study suggests that our 'sleep deprivation epidemic' is not linked to urbanisation (file)

Senior author, associate professor Laura Roden from the University of Cape Town, added: 'We will probably never know how our ancestors slept.

'But as urbanisation spreads across the globe, it is important to study how people's sleeping habits change. After they've changed, it will be too late'

Insomnia  classed as difficulty in getting to sleep or staying asleep for long enough to feel refreshed the next morning  may be related to the brain's sleep and wake cycle's going haywire.

And the cost of insomnia nights is more than just fatigue. Lack of regular sleep is linked to raised risk of depression, obesity, heart attack, stroke and diabetes  and it shortens your life expectancy.

How the research was carried out

A team led by the University of Surrey examined sleeping patterns of people from two neighbouring communities in Mozambique  the small electrified urban town Milange and the non-electrified rural community Tengua.

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, was performed by Dr Andrew Beale, who spent more than two years living in Milange.

He said: 'I noticed that the sleep-wake patterns of people around me were much earlier than I was used to from the UK.

'There is an intense debate going on right now on how our ancestors might have slept, and how this was changed by industrialisation.

'Looking at the effects of urbanisation on these communities is one way of helping us understand what happens.'

Another study author, professor Malcolm von Schantz, said: 'What these findings indicate is that the delay in sleep timing that comes with access to electricity does not directly cause people to sleep less.

'In other words, if indeed people do sleep less in industrialised countries, we can't just blame electrification.

'The step from delayed to shortened sleep seems to require more changes in behaviours.'

INSOMNIA IS IN YOUR GENES, NOT ALL IN YOUR HEAD A Dutch study has identified seven genes that put people at increased risk of developing sleeplessness. Their discovery, that a tendency to suffer sleep problems is biological, rather than psychological, offers a new understanding of the condition. The research, by scientists at Vrije University in Amsterdam, was carried out by mapping the DNA of more than 113,000 people from Britain and the Netherlands. Sleep specialist Professor Eus Van Someren said: 'Insomnia is all too often dismissed as being 'all in your head'. 'Our research brings a new perspective. Insomnia is also in the genes.' It means that targeted treatments could be developed, rather than the ten million prescriptions for sleeping tablets that are made each year. Advertisement

A global sleeplessness epidemic

But evidence is emerging it is not just a Western problem: researchers described a 'Global sleeplessness epidemic' in the journal Sleep in 2012.

They reported levels of sleep problems in the developing world are approaching those seen in developed nations, which they say is linked to an increase in problems like depression and anxiety.

A University of Warwick team suggest there is an estimated 150 million adults suffering from sleep-related problems across the developing world.

Bangladesh, South Africa and Vietnam had extremely high levels of sleep problems, in some cases surpassing Western sleeplessness rates.

'It seems that sleep problems are not linked to urbanisation as the people surveyed were mostly living in rural settings, said lead author Dr Saverio Stranges.

'We might expect even higher figures for people living in urban areas.'
A new test allows you to see how old you will be when exciting healthcare advances are expected to be made.

From implantable sensors to 3D printed organs, big changes are expected in just the next few years.

By 2019, 3D printing is expected to be a crucial tool in up to 35 per cent of surgeries.

In 2021, artificial intelligence (AI) is due to assist doctors in treating patients.

AI 'chatbots' are expected to outperform humans at some surgical procedures in 2030.

And in 2035, our senses will be able to be upgraded with implants that detect X-rays.

Dr David Allamby, a laser eye surgeon and founder of Focus Clinic, told MailOnline: 'There are 1.3 million NHS employees dealing with one million patients in the UK every 36 hours.

'There is no doubt that technological advances in the healthcare industry will help relieve the pressure on medical staff to ensure the patients needs are met quickly and efficiently.

'In the future, patients will still need specialists with expert knowledge but the difference is that advanced AI systems will assist healthcare practitioners by providing clinical and medical solutions; sometimes eliminating the need to see a doctor at all.

He said: 'One of the best factors is that the healthcare industry is already embracing these innovative technologies and health professionals have just a matter of years before even newer procedures will become readily available.

'The healthcare system is likely to change forever as technology becomes an integral part of delivering care to the nation.

'Were in for some big changes, and you can expect to see them in your lifetime.
Women who undergo the menopause early in life are at greater risk of developing type two diabetes, research suggests.

Those who start the menopause before the age of 40 are four times more likely to develop the condition than women who undergo the change after the age of 55, scientists discovered.

The research, led by Erasmus University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, suggests oestrogen hormones protect the body against diabetes.

Women who started the menopause before 40 were almost four times more likely to develop diabetes than those who started it after 55, researchers found

The menopause, which occurs on average at the age of 51, happens when the body stops naturally producing oestrogen and other sex hormones.

But about one in ten women in Britain start the menopause before the age of 45, one in 100 before they are 40, and one in 1,000 before they are 30.

The researchers tracked more than 3,600 postmenopausal women, examining them every three to five years for a decade.

During that period 348 women developed type two diabetes.

The researchers, whose results are published in the Diabetologia medical journal, found for every advancing year in age that a woman underwent the menopause, her chance of developing type two diabetes reduced by 4 per cent.

Compared with women who experienced a late menopause - at the age of 55 or later  those who started the menopause before the age of 40 were almost four times more likely to have developed diabetes.

Those who underwent the menopause between the ages of 40 and 44 years were 2.4 times more likely to develop diabetes, and those with menopause at 45 to 55 were 1.6 times more likely to get the condition.

Previous research by the same team found women who reach the menopause early are also at greater risk of heart disease.

They think this was because women who reach the menopause later are exposed to oestrogen for longer, and therefore have a more years of protection against heart disease.

They said this might also apply to diabetes.

Researchers say this could be because oestrogen, which is not produced naturally by the body after the menopause, helps to prevent against Type 2 diabetes

But there is a chance an early menopause might indicate a deeper problem - a defective DNA repair system - which might simply also lead to diabetes.

The authors wrote: Our findings might suggest that the risk of diabetes related to menopause is already there before menopause begins.

This could explain why other risk factors for diabetes do not explain the link between menopause and type two diabetes  early menopause is an independent marker for diabetes, indicating that something else is the driving force behind this observation, possibly defective DNA repair and maintenance.

Future studies should explore epigenetic marks related to menopause onset and whether epigenetic signatures can explain the association.

An estimated 1.9million women in Britain are going through the menopause at any one time.

Some 80 per cent of these women are thought to experience symptoms, which typically last for about four years, including depression, hot flushes, headaches and night sweats.

Women who never have children have double the risk of suffering early menopause.

Having an early menopause is known to increase the risk of other forms of poor health in later life, including strokes and osteoporosis.
A quick and affordable blood test to identify those at risk of dementia years before symptoms start has come a 'significant step' nearer.

Decades before the disease strikes and triggers memory loss, the brains of sufferers become dotted with sticky plaques.

Currently, the only way to detect the toxic substance, called amyloid beta, is through costly PET scanning or invasive spinal tap procedures.

But a new study suggests measuring for levels of the toxic protein in the blood has the potential to identify those at most risk with 89 per cent accuracy.

Senior author Professor Randall Bateman, of Washington University School of Medicine, described the findings as 'exciting'.

Measuring for levels of the toxic protein, which has long been touted as a cause of dementia, in the blood has the potential to identify those at most risk, experts say

'This is exciting'

He said: 'Our results demonstrate that this amyloid beta blood test can detect if amyloid has begun accumulating in the brain.

'This is exciting because it could be the basis for a rapid and inexpensive blood screening test to identify people at high risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.'

While the exact cause of Alzheimer's disease remains elusive, amyloid beta has long been touted as a potential trigger, alongside tau protein.

The researchers are currently developing a test for the latter toxic substance that mimics that of the amyloid one.

'A huge step forward'

Professor Bateman added: 'If we had a blood test for tau as well, we could combine them to get an even better idea of who is most at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.

'That would be a huge step forward in our ability to predict, and maybe even prevent, Alzheimer's disease.'

As the brain engages in daily tasks, it continually produces and clears away amyloid beta - which can stop brain cells functioning properly.

Some is washed into the blood, and some floats in the cerebrospinal fluid, which is why spinal taps are used.

Decades before the disease strikes and triggers memory loss, the brains of sufferers become dotted with sticky amyloid beta plaque

If the protein starts building up, it can collect into plaques that stick to neurons, triggering permanent damage.

Inconclusive trials

Previous trials of amyloid beta blood tests have been inconclusive, but the latest study provides the clearest evidence to date of them being successful.

VIKING DIET TO FIGHT OFF DEMENTIA Vikings may be best known for marauding and pillaging but there is one Nordic behaviour that is worth copying. Sticking to a traditional Nordic diet can support brain health in old age and could help fight off dementia, Swedish researchers claimed earlier this week. The diet is high in fish, non-root vegetables, fruit, rice and chicken, washed down with plenty of water and tea. In good news for drinkers, the diet also includes a light to moderate consumption of wine. People sticking to the so-called 'healthy Nordic diet' should avoid eating too many root vegetables, potatoes, refined grains, butter, sugar and fruit juice. Advertisement

Researchers analysed blood levels of three amyloid subtypes, amyloid beta 38, 40 and 42, in each of the 41 volunteers over the age of 60.

Each person had 20 samples taken over a 24-hour period to measure levels of the protein, production and clearance.

Deposited into the blood

They found that levels of amyloid beta 42 were consistently 10 to 15 per cent lower in those with amyloid plaques.

Professor Bateman said plaques are composed mainly of amyloid beta 42, meaning it is probably being deposited in the brain before moving into the blood.

He added: 'The differences are not big, but they are highly consistent.

'Our method is very sensitive, and particularly when you have many repeated samples as in this study - more than 500 samples overall - we can be highly confident that the difference is real.

'Even a single sample can distinguish who has amyloid plaques.'

How accurate was it?

By averaging the ratio of amyloid beta 42 to amyloid beta 40 over each person's 20 samples, the researchers could classify people accurately as amyloid-positive or -negative 89 per cent of the time.

On average, any single time point was also about 86 per cent accurate, according to the study published in Alzheimer's and Dementia.

Dr James Pickett, head of research at Alzheimer's Society said: 'This small study suggests a blood test for this purpose may not be that far away, but needs more validation.'

The findings were announced at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in London.
Senior doctors have called for a public inquiry into the use of vaginal mesh surgery in Britain, saying it could be akin to the thalidomide scandal.

It emerged earlier this year that the standard procedure to treat problems caused by childbirth has left hundreds of women in agony, with more than 800 suing the NHS and device manufacturers.

But experts say the true number of victims could be much higher than officially reported and that hospital readmission rates for one form of mesh surgery is as high as 19 per cent.

A meeting held at the Houses of Parliament was organised by Labour MP for Pontypridd Owen Smith, along with campaign group Sling the Mesh, which wants to see the procedure banned entirely.

Speaking at a meeting, Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford said: 'With thalidomide you could see the visual representation. [With mesh] you can't see it.

'We should have a public inquiry.'

Senior doctors have compared vaginal mesh surgery to the thalidomide scandal (file)

Certain implants have cut into women's vaginas, causing discomfort so severe that one sufferer was nearly driven to suicide.

Other patients have been left unable to walk, work or have sex.

The meshes are implanted to treat incontinence after childbirth and pelvic organ prolapse, which occurs when the bladder pushes against the vagina's walls.

Between April 2007 and March 2015, over 92,000 women had vaginal mesh implants fitted in England.

According to NHS data, around one in 11 have experienced problems.

Complications 'unacceptably high'

The vaginal mesh implants have 'eroded through' and 'destroyed' women's urethras

NHS TRIED TO DODGE MEDIA ATTENTION OVER VAGINA MESHES The NHS tried to dodge media attention over the vaginal mesh implants that left hundreds of women in agony. The procedure cut into their vaginas and left many in discomfort so severe they have been left unable to work, walk or have sex. It has now emerged the NHS actively sought to avoid courting headlines over the matter. Minutes from an NHS meeting back in October show an agreement to 'take the press element out of' a campaign for women experiencing complications from the devices. The meeting's minutes, seen by the Press Association, outline the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency's (MHRA) yellow card campaign, which targets under-reporting of mesh complications. Officials said they should 'look into taking the press element out of the mesh yellow card campaign' and 'investigate whether there can be a general yellow card campaign, of which mesh is one element, to avoid media attention on mesh'. Advertisement

However, professor Heneghan and Dr Sohier Elneil, a consultant urogynaecologist at University College Hospital, told the meeting that complication rates for some types of the surgery are 'unacceptably high'.

Their warning raises questions about whether the procedure is being performed appropriately.

Dr Elneil said that unpublished research by her team, based on the NHS's Hospital Episode Statistics, show that the surgery has a readmission rate of 8.9 per cent.

She added that the majority of these patients needed some form of subsequent procedure.

'These are not minor complications,' she said.

However, a report by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the government watchdog, suggested the rate of pain or 'erosion' for mesh procedures is just one to two per cent rate.

Professor Heneghan disagreed and cited a recent Lancet study, which showed that the readmission rate for one form of the surgery was 19 per cent.

An MHRA spokeswoman said: 'Patient safety is our highest priority and we are committed to help address the serious concerns raised by some patients.

'MHRA strongly encourages the reporting of issues related to all medical devices.

'When promoting reporting it is important to strike a balance between causing undue concern to patients who may benefit from a procedure and making sure they are aware of the potential complications.'
Taking common antibiotics during pregnancy may increase the chance of birth defects, major new research warns.

Although scientists claim the risk is only small, only three drugs studied were not associated with such links.

Experts suggested the findings were worrying, considering just how many expectant mothers get struck down with infections.

The Canadian team are urging doctors to consider prescribing other antibiotics when treating mothers-to-be with bugs.

Although scientists claim the risk is only small, only three antibiotics studied were not associated with birth defects

Infections should be treated

Senior author Dr Anick Berard, from Montreal University, said: 'Infections during pregnancy are frequent and should be treated.

'However, our study highlights safer options for treatment of infections, more specifically urinary tract infections or pulmonary infections, at least during the first trimester of pregnancy.'

What did they find?

Clindamycin, doxycycline, quinolones, macrolides, and phenoxymethylpenicillin were all linked to organ-specific malformations.

Amoxicillin, cephalosporins, and nitrofurantoin were all deemed safe, according to the study of nearly 140,000 live births in Canada.

Published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, the findings were based on data between 1998 and 2008.

Other worrying findings

The same team of researchers were behind a major study in May that established a link between common antibiotics and miscarriages.

ANOTHER REASON TO AVOID ANTIBIOTICS Pregnant women who take antibiotics could be putting their unborn children at risk, scientists warned in February. Drugs used to beat infections can interfere with a babys immune system long-term, Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Medical Center experts found. Friendly gut bacteria - which play a pivotal role in the development of a child - are frequently wiped out by the drugs, according to the research. In a study on mice this was found to leave them at higher risk of developing pneumonia - which can be deadly. Advertisement

While many types were also found to be safe, certain forms significantly increased the risk - some more than double.

Macrolides and quinolones were suggested triggers of miscarriages, backing up the new found evidence of their link to birth defects.

While nitrofurantoin, which is often used to treat urinary tract infections in pregnant women, was also found to be safe.

Prior to that study, research had consistently found that antibiotics could increase the risk of premature birth or low birth weight.

Dangerous to avoid antibiotics

Doctors have previously stressed that it is dangerous to leave infections untreated, especially in pregnant women who have a weakened immune system.

In Britain, some of the drugs such as tetracyclines and quinolones come with warnings they should not be taken during pregnancy.

But some carry no such warning, or warn only that they should be not taken at high doses.
When Amy Wright was 14 weeks pregnant with her third child Beau in 2004, a test revealed her child could have Down syndrome.

Their doctor tentatively warned them that many families terminate after receiving an alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) test with abnormal level of proteins, which can leave the baby vulnerable to heart defects, physical defects and developmental delays.

Nervous, Amy and her husband Ben decided to go ahead. Months later, Amy gave birth and doctors confirmed he had the disorder.

'Ben and I felt crushed,' Amy told Daily Mail Online. 'My mind instantly went to: will he get married, will he drive a car? Then it went to things like will he learn to walk? Will he talk?'

The couple knew nothing about Down syndrome and grieved for 'the son we thought we were going to have.'

Family journey: Amy and Ben Wright were stunned when their younger two children Bitty and Beau (center and second left) were born with Down syndrome. They were even more surprised when they struggled to find information on the disorder, which affect 6,000 Americans a year

Nearly 13 years later, Amy and Ben have not only gone through the ropes of learning to raise a child with the condition, but they also welcomed another child with Down syndrome named Bitty, now seven, into the family.

Despite their fears, their early years have been incredible, Amy said. The real challenge comes next.

As their children age, Amy and Ben began to worry about their future. People with intellectual and development disabilities  such as Down syndrome, autism, and fetal alcohol syndrome  have an unemployment rate of 85 percent in the US.

And so, last year, they decided to make the matter their passion project, by opening a cafe staffed exclusively by people with disabilities. Within months it has backing from TV personality Rachael Ray, and lines around the block.

'WE FELT ALONE': AMY AND BEN DESCRIBE SCRAMBLING TO FIND ANY INFORMATION ON DOWN SYNDROME - AND NOW THEY FEEL LIKE 'WE WON THE LOTTERY TWICE'

Down syndrome is a chromosomal disorder, which causes a child to be born with an extra chromosome in their cells. Chromosomes appear in almost every cell in the body and hold genetic code that determine traits like hair and eye color.

Typically the nucleus of each cell holds 23 pairs of chromosomes, half from each parent. People with Down syndrome have an extra half pair or extra full pair of chromosome 21, the smallest chromosome.

It is not wildly uncommon - it affects around 6,000 births in the US every year, and the Wright family is hardly the first affected.

Getting to know Down syndrome: Before Bitty and Beau (pictured together), Amy and Ben knew nothing about the disorder, and they were 'scared to death' of how to raise them

By the time Bitty came along in 2010 (pictured), Amy says she 'cried and cried' with joy at having another child with Down syndrome. 'We won the lottery twice', she said

Looking forward: As their children age, Amy and Ben began to worry about their future. People with intellectual and development disabilities  such as Down syndrome, autism, and fetal alcohol syndrome  have an unemployment rate of 85 percent in the US

Bitty (left with Amy) dances center stage for ballet and tap performances, while her older brother Beau (right with Amy) likes attending after-school acting and singing classes

But even so, they were shocked to find there were few resources to learn about the disorder, few schools that could cater for a Down syndrome child, they knew few families with Down, and when it came to life beyond education, there were little to no prospects.

'We felt a little bit alone We were scared to death, that's how little we knew about Down syndrome.'

By the time they heard that Bitty too had Down syndrome, Amy said she 'cried and cried because I was so happy.'

'We won the lottery twice,' she said. 'Once you know what Down syndrome is, once you have spent time with somebody that has it, you cannot help but want to be around more people that have Down syndrome.'

It was a journey to reach that point.

Online research taught them that Down syndrome manifests is various ways from delays in growth and motor skills to levels of intellectual disability.

Beau didn't walk until he was three years old and needed the aid of a walker and braces on his legs. Years later, (pictured) he showed three-year-old Bitty how to do the same

WHAT IS DOWN SYNDROME? Down syndrome is a chromosomal disorder, which causes a child to be born with an extra chromosome in their cells. Chromosomes appear in almost every cell in the body and hold genetic code that determine traits like hair and eye color. Typically the nucleus of each cell holds 23 pairs of chromosomes, half from each parent. People with Down syndrome have an extra half pair or extra full pair of chromosome 21, the smallest chromosome. It affects around 6,000 births in the US every year. In 1983, it had a life expectancy of 25. Now people with the condition are expected to live to 60 years old. SYMPTOMS: Physically: upward slanting eyes

low muscle tone

smaller body frame Intellectually: delayed speech

mild to moderate cognitive disability Advertisement

Physically it can result in upward slanting eyes, low muscle tone, and smaller body frames.

It was only through the internet that Ben realized the clouds in nine-week-old Beau's eyes were a red flag of something more serious. Data show that 1.4 percent of children with Down syndrome are born with cataracts. Ben took him the eye doctor, and indeed he needed cataract surgery.

Beau didn't walk until he was three years old and needed the aid of a walker and braces on his legs.

Intellectually it can manifest itself through delayed speech and mild to moderate cognitive disability. But that doesn't stop individuals with Down syndrome from attending school and having careers.

Today, weeks after Beau's 13th birthday, he can run and jump, read books cover to cover, and feels like a normal kid. He likes attending after-school acting and singing classes, while his younger sister dances center stage for ballet and tap performances.

'It takes Beau and Bitty a little bit longer to learn things but they are fully capable of learning these things,' Amy said. 'It just takes a little bit more patience from parents and teachers to help them master some skills.'

OPENING THE STORE: HOW THEIR FEAR FOR THEIR CHILDREN TURNED INTO A BUSINESS PLAN THAT WON CELEBRITY SUPPORT

In January 2016, they opened a 500-square-feet coffee shop in Wilmington, North Carolina, that hired a staff of all intellectually and developmentally disabled employees. The shop was named after her son Beau.

The Wrights were surprised to find a line around the block on opening day, a frenzy of social media success and a sponsorship by TV personality Rachael Ray.

The business quickly expanded to a ten-times bigger location, 40 staff members with disabilities, and a new name: Bitty & Beau's.

Employees range between 18 and 50 years old and have different forms of disability. For much of the staff, this is their first job.

In January 2016, the Wright family opened a 500-square-feet coffee shop in Wilmington, North Carolina, that hired a staff of all intellectually and developmentally disabled employees

The business, named after the younger Wright children, has the backing of Rachael Ray

Amy said she knows why companies sideline disabled populations from the workplace. Today, more than ever, there is an emphasis on speed. There is also the lingering misconception that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are not capable of meeting that fast demand.

But without offering opportunities to build those skills, Amy warns, we are restricting thousands of people from the workplace.

Matt Dean, 27, is the Director of First Impressions at Bitty & Beau's and is autistic. He has had jobs before, but was never allowed to work with customers - something he and the Beau & Bitty owners consider to be his best skill.

Dean said that in previous jobs 'I had no one my age to work with and no one to chat with and no customer service experience. Here I have all that and a bag of chips I wouldn't change it for the world.'

Despite the cafe's culture of inclusion and acceptance, there are still testing moments when customers underestimate the workers' abilities.

Amy recalls a time where an employee was counting change at the register and a presumptive customer asked if she needed help. The employee responded 'it's okay, I got it.'

Today, more than ever, there is an emphasis on speed. There is also the lingering misconception that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are not capable of meeting that fast demand. But Amy says her staff are proving that is not the case

'You just see moments of doubt and our employees, in the most gracious way, rises to the occasion and shows they know exactly what they are doing,' Amy said.

Bitty & Beau's business is booming and has plans to expand to a second location in Charleston, South Carolina in the fall, creating more employment opportunities for disabled workers.

'The people who work here are celebrities,' Amy said. 'The staff has a sense of respect they've never had in their lives.'
Teenage boys will continue to be denied the anti-cancer HPV jab because it costs too much, a Government advisory body has announced.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which advises on the cost-effectiveness of vaccinations, said the NHS should carry on giving it only to girls.

Campaigners have slammed the decision, accusing the independent committee of putting more than 400,000 lives at risk with the virus known to lead to oral, penile and anal cancers in later life.

And charities have said the decision by the JCVI, which did acknowledge evidence that boys would benefit, may breach equality law.

'Both sexes deserve equal protection' against HPV, campaigners argue (file)

HPV Action campaign director Peter Baker said: 'It is astonishing that the committee has ignored advice from patient organisations, doctors treating men with HPV-related cancers, public health experts and those whose lives have been devastated by HPV.

'The decision not to vaccinate boys is about saving money not public health or equity.

'HPV Action will continue to make the case for a national vaccination programme that protects men and women equally and will be calling on ministers to make the right decision if the JCVI continues along its current path.

'There may also be grounds for a legal challenge on the grounds that the a decision to leave boys and men at risk breaches equality law.'

It is estimated that each year in the UK there are 2,000 new cases of HPV-related cancer in men and 48,000 cases of genital warts.

The vaccination protects against nine HPV types including those responsible for 90 per cent of HPV-related anal and cervical cancers and 90 per cent of genital warts.

'Herd protection'

The NHS began offering the HPV vaccine to 12 to 13 year old girls to protect themselves against cervical cancer nine years ago.

Only girls were vaccinated on the grounds that men who only have sex with women would logically also be protected from transmission through herd immunity.

The JCVI has said that today's decision  which is as an 'interim' one  is grounded in the same reasoning and because uptake in adolescent girls is 'consistently high' at over 85 per cent.

In 2016, the jab was made available for gay men and bisexual men in England up until the age of 26 as part of a pilot scheme.

The committee decided to recommend this move because the 'herd immunity' concept is said to not apply to gay men.

Its statement said: 'The evidence considered clearly indicates that HPV is associated with a number of cancers which affect both sexes.

'While there are some additional population level health benefits to both males and females by extending the programme to boys, impact and cost-effectiveness modelling indicates that adding boys is highly unlikely to be cost-effective in the UK.'

But experts point out a weakness in the JCVI's herd protection argument.

Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at the University of Nottingham, said: 'It all comes down to cost and how much benefit will be gained from vaccinating boys.

'As increasing numbers of girls take up the vaccine then risk of heterosexual transmission decreases and the benefit of vaccinating boys diminishes.

'But of course, this reliance on herd immunity doesnt provide optimal benefit for boys who go onto have sex with other men in adulthood.'

The body said its final decision would be made after further consultations.

WHAT IS HPV? The human papilloma virus (HPV) is the name given to a family of viruses. There are over 100 different types of HPV, with around 40 types that affect the genital area. Different types of HPV are classed as either high risk or low risk, depending on the conditions they can cause. For instance, some types of HPV can cause warts or verrucas. Other types are associated with cervical cancer. In 99 per cent of cases, cervical cancer occurs as a result of a history of infection with high-risk types of HPV. Often, infection with the HPV causes no symptoms. Infection with some high-risk types of HPV can cause abnormal tissue growth as well as other cell changes that can lead to cervical cancer. Infection with other types of HPV may cause genital warts, skin warts and verrucas, vaginal cancer or vulval cancer (although these types of cancer are rare), anal cancer or cancer of the penis, some cancers of the head and neck and laryngeal papillomas (warts on the voice box or vocal cords). Studies have already shown that the vaccine protects against HPV infection for around 10 years, although experts expect protection to be for much longer. Advertisement

Listen to the doctors urge campaigners

A recent survey carried out by HPV Action of over 1,500 British GPs and dentists revealed that 95 per cent believe the national HPV vaccination programme should cover both boys and girls.

The British Dental Association has also called on the JCVI to back vaccination of boys and argues vaccination is cost effective for the NHS.

TV presenter Dr Christian Jessen backs the calls and said it is important to give the jab to boys when they are 12 or 13  before they are sexually active.

'The vaccine will not work effectively if a person has already been infected by HPV,' he previously told MailOnline.

Call for parents to fight

Pressure groups points out that 11 countries, including Australia, Austria, Italy and Norway, are already vaccinating boys and the UK is lagging behind.

Tristan Almada, co-founder of the HPV & Anal Cancer Foundation, has urged parents to help pile the pressure on the Government.

He said: 'The JCVI's disappointing announcement today puts over 400,000 boys a year at unnecessary risk for contracting HPV, a ubiquitous virus that causes five per cent of all cancers.

'Although the public is familiar with the HPV vaccine as the 'cervical cancer jab,' HPV is responsible for the fastest increasing cancers in UK men today.

'Eleven countries are now vaccinating their boys. UK boys deserve the same.

'I hope that parents in the UK will join us in fighting for their boys' right to have access to this life-saving vaccine.'

In April, pharmacy chain Boots UK launched a new private HPV vaccination service for both males and females aged 12 to 44.

For 12 to 14-year-olds it costs 300 for a course of two vaccinations. For those over 15, three vaccinations is required which costs 450.
A Chinese soldier stands guard on the Chinese side of the ancient Nathu La border crossing between India and China

The current stand-off at Doklam - with the muscle- flexing from China's military - comes at a very significant time for the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

All the PLA's departments are currently in the throes of preparing for its 90th anniversary, on August 1.

Details of festivities are closely guarded. The only clues are vapour trails that now appear every weekend across the Beijing skies, and slickly produced propaganda videos that are being circulated around Chinese social media showing the military's strength.

The message is that China's army today is vastly different from its humble origins - and that it can stand up to protect Beijing's 'sovereignty'.

No surprise then that the Doklam stand-off has been universally portrayed in China not as a dispute involving Bhutan's land, which has been whitewashed out of official reports, but of India 'violating' China's sovereignty.

To be sure, China's shrill rhetoric is largely because it sees the stand-off as a China-Bhutan affair, and was perhaps taken off guard by India stepping in and stopping the road construction on disputed land, which would alter the status quo in the trijunction.

Yet, the timing, a month before the PLA's biggest anniversary in years, has perhaps heightened the rhetoric. Hence the muscle-flexing.

The PLA was founded on August 1, 1927, when the Communist Party organised an uprising against the Kuomintang in southern Jiangxi.

Song Zhongping, a Beijing-based military expert and former Second Artillery Corps officer, told the Global Times that the 90th anniversary comes 'in the midst of China's fundamental military reform and strategic transformation, so apart from commemorating its history, it's also a new start for the PLA.'

Last year, President Xi Jinping announced the demobilising of three lakh soldiers of the 2.3 million strong force.

The message is that China's army today is vastly different from its humble origins - and that it can stand up to protect Beijing's 'sovereignty' (pictured - Chinese Foreign Ministry, Lu Kang)

That number will be cut by another one million, bringing the PLA's strength under a million for the first time.

The re-organisation of departments is equally significant. The focus is on winning a high-tech, short war and integrating the different services.

The Second Artillery Corps has been elevated as the PLA Rocket Force, while a Strategic Support Force has been created.

The PLA Navy's resources have been increased, just as China opens its first overseas base in Djibouti near the Gulf of Aden, and inducts its second aircraft-carrier  and first home-grown one  into its rapidly expanding navy.

In the past, the army was the absolute main body of the PLA, but since China's national interests are expanding quickly overseas and there are more requests from other countries for China to share more of the global security burden, China has many more new missions that are beyond the army's capability,' Xu Guangyu of the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, told the Global Times.

For some in the PLA, the Doklam stand-off has perhaps come at an opportune time. They have seized on it to whip up nationalism and support for the PLA, and to showcase its credentials ahead of August 1.

Still 'Hand in Hand'? An Indian Army soldier stands in front of a group of People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China soldiers as they line up after participating in an anti-terror drill

One former PLA general in a widely circulated post on social media hit out at domestic critics of the army and the party, and called on them to rally behind the PLA amid the Doklam stand-off.

This past month, military outlets have showcased no less than two major drills on the Tibetan plateau.

The first, announced on July 3, showed battle tanks being tested. Then, this past weekend, state media showed videos of a major PLA exercise in Tibet involving livefire drills and anti-aircraft guns.

And the expectation is there is only likely to be more muscle-flexing in the lead up to August 1.
Actor Rajinikanth, who recently returned to Chennai after a routine medical check-up in the US, is likely to resume Kaala in August.

While the Kabali actor has completed the shooting of his sci-fi thriller 2.0, reports now suggest that Rajinikanth will shoot a special song sequence with Amy Jackson.

According to an online report, Amy Jackson was quoted as saying, 'We have completed the shoot for 2.0. Only a song is left. Rajini and I are going to shoot for a 12-day song schedule next month.

Amy Jackson is a British actress, who appears in Tamil, Hindi, Telugu and Kannada films

'We are not travelling for the song, it will be indoors. There will be a huge set erected for the same, much like Shankar's style.'

A R Rahman is composing the song which will have a lot of dancing and romance. It has a bit of both, but it's going to be a dance track.'

It must be noted that Rajinikanth has already completed dubbing for 2.0, which is slated to release on January 25, 2018. 2.0 is his most anticipated Indian film for several reasons.

Actor Rajinikanth, who recently returned to Chennai after a routine medical check-up in the US, is likely to resume Kaala in August

Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar has been cast to play the prime antagonist, while Amy Jackson, Sudhanshu Pandey and Adil Hussain will be seen in important roles.

Made on a whopping budget of sS 400 crore, the satellite rights of the film was sold for a massive price of Rs 110 crore. Directed by Shankar, the film has music by AR Rahman.

Hollywood costume designer Ror Rodriguez, who has designed costumes on Supergirl and Daredevil, has reportedly been brought in for this film.
With cow slaughter and the subsequent attacks on Muslims and Dalits high on the national agenda, ordinary tourists and genuine animal lovers have also come under attack and face regular death threats from the so-called 'meat mafia' in India.

Cases of genuine animal lovers being intimidated or attacked are very rarely reported these days as the outrage is primarily directed against gau rakshaks (cow vigilantes) who have lynched and killed innocent cattle transporters merely on the strength of a rumour.

However, although the lynchings of Akhlaq in Uttar Pradesh's Dadri and Pehlu Khan in Rajasthan's Alwar are shameful, they are not the only victims.

AWBI officer Thimaraju was thrashed by illegal meat traders in June before policemen in Karnatakas Hassan district

Cows are revered in the Hindu scriptures as the 'mother' of civilisation and many worshippers equate the slaughter of cows or eating beef as blasphemy

Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI) officers, tourists, genuine gau rakshaks and ordinary people merely concerned when seeing the cruel treatment of animals, have all been targeted. However, so far law-enforcement agencies have provided little support.

Recent attacks

On July 14, software engineer Ajay (name changed) and his friends were attacked while his wife was molested by a mob of armed 'meat mafia' goons on Friday evening.

Thrashed: Cases of genuine animal lovers being intimidated or attacked are on the rise

On July 14, software engineer Ajay (name changed) and his friends were attacked while his wife was molested by a mob of armed 'meat mafia' goons on Friday evening

'It was about 4 pm when all four of us were on a sightseeing trip in Khedapoda village in Chandili in Odisha's Rayadaga district when we saw some men armed with sticks and knives, thrashing cattle.

'With the police not responding promptly, we tried to reason with the goons ourselves.

'Little did we know that they would attack us with the same sticks and axes with which they were beating animals.

'I was attacked while my wife was molested by these barbarians. They snatched and smashed my phone which had all the recordings. It is a miracle we are still alive,' Ajay said.

Bollywood actress Shabana Azmi, right, joins other to protest against a spate of violent attacks across the country targeting the country's Muslim minority, in Mumbai, India

While Ajay is undergoing medical treatment, no arrest has been made for the assault. And no cattle have been seized.

Superintendent Rahul did not accept India Today's invitation to meet and speak. An FIR has been registered with the Bissam Cuttack police station in Odisha.

Armed and dangerous

On July 10, 'meat mafia' goons opened fire on police officials in Khol in Haryana's Rewari district.

The so-called 'mafia' were carrying 16 animals, including cows, bulls and calves, which were all cruelly stuffed into a van.

Four out of these 16 animals were believed to already be dead. The criminals broke through a police checkpost in Rewari. When the cops chased them, they opened fire on the police.

In pain: AWBI officer Kavita Jain with injuries inflicted by the so-called 'meat mafia'

A case has been booked under IPC 1860, Haryana Gau Samwardhan Act and the ARMS Act with the Khol police station, Rewari in Haryana.

On July 09, animal lovers Teertho and Niranjan were attacked with stones and beaten with sticks by 'meat mafia' goons for visiting and taking photographs at an animal fair in Kaalapatthar in Odisha's Begunia.

Niranjan suffered head injuries while Teertho was severely attacked and his wallet, phone and passport stolen.

A case has been registered with the Beguniya police station in Khorda district in Odisha.

AWBI officers Joshine Anthony (pictured) and Kavita Jain and active volunteers of the Gau Gyan Foundation have been attacked several time

On June 24, AWBI officer Thimaraju was thrashed last month in the presence of police officials for bringing to light how an illegal slaughterhouse was running in Channarayapatna in Hassan district.

'I visited the illegal slaughterhouse with police officials where we found hoards of calves locked inside a small room.

'After getting the animals released while we were returning towards the PCR van, I heard a group of butchers chasing me.

'Surprisingly, no police officer was around to protect me. I was hit on the head and thrashed in front of the Police PCR van. The police had conveniently vanished for those few minutes.'

A case was registered under charges of attempt to murder (226/2017) and cow slaughter (225/2017) under the Channarayapatna police station in Hassan district in Karnataka.

Attacks on women and activists

AWBI officers Joshine Anthony and Kavita Jain and active volunteers of the Gau Gyan Foundation have been attacked several times. On some occasions the activists claim that they were thrashed in front of police officials as they raised their concern over illegal activities.

They were pelted with stones by miscreants in Kanakpura market under Ramnagar District in Karnataka for informing the police about illegal cattle traders.

An FIR was filed with Kanakpura police station.

A statue of a cow is seen during a protest and fast by Indian Hindu devotees against the slaughter of a cow in the southern state of Kerala on June 1, 2017

They were also attacked by alleged cattle smuggler Ali Madat on separate occasions.

Firstly, on spotting a vehicle stuffed with cattle being taken for slaughter, the women informed the police but police were late in reaching the spot. The women were attacked in the interim. An FIR was lodged with the Kunigal police station.

Secondly, outside JC Nagar police station limits in Bengaluru, Kavita Jain's car was attacked by goons as she was informing the police about an illegal cattle smuggling taking place.

A case was lodged with the JC Nagar police station.
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The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) on Thursday asked a strange question - has the BJP become 'Beef Joy Party'.

The outrage came following Union minister and current Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar claiming that he would not let there be a beef shortage in Goa while speaking in the state legislative assembly on Tuesday.

The RSS-affiliate demanded that Parrikar resign from his post and urged the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to sack him from the membership of the organisation with immediate effect.

The outrage came following Union minister and current Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar (left) claiming that he would not let there be a beef shortage in Goa while speaking in the state legislative assembly on Tuesday

A statue of a cow is seen during a protest and fast by Indian Hindu devotees against the slaughter of a cow in the southern state of Kerala on June 1, 2017

The RSS-affiliate demanded that Parrikar resign from his post and urged the BJP to sack him

'If he is ready to hurt the sentiments of Hindus, the person has no right to continue in the Constitutional position of the chief minister.

'He should apologise for what he said and for hurting the people and must resign immediately. We believe that the image of the BJP is being tarnished by such people in the fold.

'BJP is a party of cow-protectors and this government is that of gaubhakts (cow worshippers).

'The party must, therefore, initiate immediate action against Parrikar and turn him out of the party,' VHP's international joint general secretary Surendra Jain told Mail Today in an exclusive conversation.

Parrikar said in the Legislative Assembly on Tuesday that there will be no shortage of beef in Goa and that if needed it could take help from neighbouring state Karnataka.

Jain asked if the CM was unaware about the law prohibiting the slaughtering of cows in Karnataka and Goa.

Parrikar added that production of 2,000 kilograms of beef is done every day from Goa Meat Complex, the only legal abattoir in state.

Cows are revered in the Hindu scriptures as the 'mother' of civilisation and many worshippers equate the slaughter of cows or eating beef as blasphemy

Meanwhile, the VHP has also pressed for a major push to its cow-protection agenda in the north-eastern states that 'have so far been maligned as beef-eaters'.

Jain also told Mail Today that he was on a tour to the north-eastern states where he had been witnessing 'a huge groundswell in support for gau-raksha (cow protection).

'I hosted a meeting of intellectuals yesterday at Guwahati and today special Bajrang Dal camp concluded at Nalbari,' said Jain.

Jain said that while there was 'an undercurrent of Hindutva earlier', now there was a 'huge wave'.

'Earlier, Hindu girls were lifted with impunity and cows were culled openly, but no one dares to do it now. There used to be beef parties, but now no one dares. Assam has unduly been stigmatised for cow slaughter, but this was a conspiracy by some people.'

'Assam, on the other hand, is way more protective of cows than others in India. Bihu, the festival, starts with goru bihu which is a ceremony of worshipping the cow and then starting the festival.

'Also, cow herders in Assamese language are called gorakhia or those who protect cows, gau-rakshaks.

When the government changed, the undercurrent has come to the surface.'
In the clear? German prosecutors look set to drop charges against Carsten Kengeter

Prosecutors in Germany look set to drop insider-trading charges against Deutsche Boerse chief executive Carsten Kengeter.

Investigators had been looking into whether the 50-year-old had bought shares in the marketplace organiser despite knowing the firm was in talks to buy the London Stock Exchange.

But Frankfurts public prosecutor has offered to drop an investigation into Kengeter if the firm accepts two fines totalling 9.3million.

Deutsche Boerse  whose planned merger with the LSE was abandoned earlier this year  said it was reviewing the matter and continues to believe the allegations made are unfounded in all respects.

Kengeters reputation has been damaged by his failed attempt to land the LSE. The deal fell apart when it was blocked by European regulators  much to the relief of critics in the UK worried about a key part of the Citys infrastructure falling into German hands.
Consumer goods maker Reckitt Benckiser has agreed to sell the food arm which makes Frenchs mustard to the US food company McCormick in a deal worth $4.2billion (3.2billion).

The American company behind Schwartz spices beat off rival bidders for the business, which also makes Franks hot sauce, Cattlemen's bbq sauce and nutrition brand Tiger's Milk.

The rivals were said to have included Marmite maker Unilever and US giant Hormel, which owns brands including Spam.

Sold: US group McCormick has bought Reckitt Benckiser's food arm which makes Frenchs

The deal, which is set to be completed in the third quarter, comes a year after McCormicks failed attempt to buy Mr Kiplings cake firm Premier Foods and is expected to create a combined group with annual sales of around $5billion (3.8billion).

Shares in Reckitt were 1.3 per cent, or 101p higher at 7,913p in morning trading.

Reckitts food arm, which is headquartered in Chester, New Jersey, in the US, had sales of 416milion last year, but Reckitt is increasingly focused on consumer health. It employs 450 people, including 360 staff at a manufacturing site in Springfield, Missouri.

In February, Reckitt, whose brands include Lysol cleaning products and Durex condoms, agreed to buy US baby food firm Mead Johnson for 13billion.

Rakesh Kapoor, chief executive of Reckitt, said the sale of its food business is in line with its aims to refocus the group on its consumer health and cleaning products.

He said: This transaction marks another step towards transforming Reckitt Benckiser into a global leader in consumer health and hygiene, ensuring we continue to deliver for shareholders and give people innovative solutions for healthier lives and happier homes.

McCormick boss Lawrence Kurzius said Reckitt's food arm was a perfect match for the group and added: The addition of Frank's RedHot hot sauce, the clear consumer favourite in an attractive and high-growth category, French's Mustard and the other beloved products enables McCormick to become a one-stop shop for condiment, spice and seasoning needs.

Frank's RedHot sauce is the number one brand in its market in the US and Canada, as is French's Mustard.

McCormick has said it wants to strip out around 50 million US dollars (38million) in costs after the takeover.

Experts in the City said Reckitt had secured a better-than-expected price for its food business.

Darren Shirley, an analyst at Shore Capital, said: Reckitt is achieving a very attractive valuation for a North American food business, in our view.
Cathryn Ross, chief exec of water regulator Ofwat has joined BT

A top regulator has been recruited by BT as boss Gavin Patterson fights back over criticism of his handling of its Italian fraud scandal.

Cathryn Ross, the chief executive of water regulator Ofwat, is understood to be taking charge of the telecom company's regulatory affairs division  a key role which will oversee the way the firm behaves.

Her appointment comes after a bruising year for BT.

The legal separation of its network and cables arm, Openreach, has begun but is being closely scrutinised by telecoms watchdog Ofcom.

Meanwhile, Patterson is also juggling a massive cost-cutting drive, the fallout of a 530million Italian accounting scandal and a 14billion pensions deficit.

In January, BT was forced to write down the value of its Italian business by 530million after years of 'inappropriate behaviour' in a major embarrassment for the company and Patterson.

BT found evidence of improper accounting practices that had resulted in 'the overstatement of earnings in our Italian business over a number of years'.

The head of BT Europe, Corrado Sciolla, and BT Italy chief executive Gianluca Cimini lost their jobs over the scandal.

BROADBAND PRICE WAR TalkTalk is mounting a television and broadband price war as it seeks to rebuild its business after 2015s hack attack. The telecoms firm yesterday revealed it had brought in 20,000 customers in the three months to June 30, continuing a surge in growth earlier this year. It came as it announced a broadband and TV bundle, including Sky Sports, that it claimed was the lowest-priced in Britain. The growth was in stark contrast to the 9,000 customers it lost over the same period last year, when it was still reeling from the hack that saw it lose the personal data of about 157,000 people.

But Patterson is also under huge pressure to prove that he is capable of putting the company back on track.

Ross's appointment will beef up the boardroom before new chairman Jan du Plessis takes over from Sir Michael Rake in November.

A spokesman for BT last night confirmed that chief strategy officer Sean Williams, who currently handles regulatory affairs, was leaving but would not confirm Ross's appointment.

Ofwat chairman Jonson Cox said only that Ross was leaving for a private sector role, adding: 'We are sorry to see her go and wish her every success in her new role.'

Ross was yesterday called a 'transformational leader' after pushing for major changes in the water industry, going into battle with companies over pricing and introducing competition from smaller firms.

Her experience at the regulator will be valuable to BT as it prepares to lock horns with Ofcom in the coming year.

BT caved to pressure from the watchdog in March to separate Openreach from the rest of its business, but is due to retain ownership of the new company and will still set its overall budgets  stopping short of giving it full independence.

The arrangement sets the stage for further clashes about the future roll-out of broadband.

Openreach is consulting with BT's rivals  such as Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone  after long-standing criticism that it has favoured BT and relied too heavily on its slower network of copper wires rather than investing in cutting-edge fibre cables.

It was handed a record 42million fine earlier this year for a 'serious breach' of industry rules after it cut compensation payouts to providers for delays in installing high-speed lines.

Alongside its boardroom shake-up, BT has responded to the accounting scandal at BT Italia by vowing to replace PwC as auditors and bringing in KPMG to lead an investigation.
He looks set to overtake Bill Gates as the world's richest man - but Amazon chief Jeff Bezos looks like he's also had an image overhaul.

As the online giant unveiled its new app service, Bezos, 53, caused a stir with his macho new look - particularly as it is in such contrast to his previous nerdy appearance when Amazon started out in the mid-90s.

Back then Bezos ran the business from a garage at a house he had rented in Seattle, USA.

Amazon boss and father-of-four Jeff Bezos in 1999, left and today, right, after his dramatic makeover

Social media sites went into a frenzy as they compared Bezos  who is worth around 75billion  with his previous image.

Many remarked how the father of four looked younger and notably more muscular at a tech conference in Idaho. It is thought Bezos has become a health nut and regularly works out.

'Congratulations Jeff Bezos on your change in personal brand from 'business ascetic' to 'prefers killing with his bare hands,' one commented.

Amazon has just launched Spark in the US, a social network that identifies products that appear in pictures and lets users click through to buy them.

Users of the service are asked to pick subjects they like, such as books, technology or food, and will then be shown pictures others have shared of them.

Economist Albert Ruiz added: 'Jeff Bezos looks like he just stepped off the set of Fast And The Furious.'

Bezos famously wrote the business plan for Amazon while driving from New York to Seattle.

He originally listed 20 things he wanted to sell  but chose just books. In 1999 he patented the idea of buying items with just one click  a decade before it was possible.
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An Ethiopian dubbed 'Hyena Man' keeps his city safe from the wild animals by feeding the big dogs every night directly from his own mouth.

Hyenas have roamed the streets of the ancient walled city of Harar in eastern Ethiopia for decades, seeking scraps of meat to drag into nearby caves.

But residents are not afraid, thanks to 23-year-old Abbas Yusef and his family, who have spent more than 50 years keeping the neighborhood safe.

Abbas Yusuf, known as Hyena Man, learned to feed the hyenas from his father, Yusuf Mume Salleh, who fed them for 45 years before passing the job to his son 13 years ago.

Abbas Yusuf, 23, known as Hyena Man, feeds a hyena directly from his mouth on the outskirts of the walled city of Harar in in eastern Ethiopia

Hyenas have roamed the streets of the ancient walled city of Harar in eastern Ethiopia for decades, seeking scraps of meat to drag into nearby caves

Abbas Yusuf, known as Hyena Man, learned to feed the hyenas from his father, Yusuf Mume Salleh, who fed them for 45 years before passing the job to his son 13 years ago

But residents are not afraid, thanks to 23-year-old Abbas Yusef and his family, who have spent more than 50 years keeping the neighborhood safe

The family was chosen by the town to feed the animals and have since come accustomed to the task, despite the dangers that are associated with coming into close quarters with such wild animals.

'Hyenas have never attacked the people of Harar after my father started feeding them, unless you harm their babies,' Abbas Yusuf told Reuters.

'My father is always thankful that I continued the good work he started and I will pass it onto my children when I grow old.'

His work is now an attraction, drawing in tourists who came to see the city's ancient mosques nestled within its old stone walls.

'I am privileged by God to be a good friend to those misunderstood animals,' he said.

Abbas's family was chosen by the town to feed the animals and have since come accustomed to the task, despite the dangers that are associated with coming into close quarters with such wild animals

Abbas's work is now an attraction, drawing in tourists who came to see the city's ancient mosques nestled within its old stone walls

Abbas has given the hyenas names according to their behaviour and appearance. Among them are 'Dabbassoo' or 'Hairy', 'Tuqan Dilii' or 'Lazy', and 'Qallaa', meaning 'skinny'

Abbas even keeps a baby hyena in his bedroom, and says he's not afraid of hit attacking him during his sleep. Pictured above, one of the many hyenas that Abbas feeds

'I have a baby hyena in my house and keep it in my bedroom (and I'm) not worried it will bite me when I sleep.'

Abbas has given the hyenas names according to their behaviour and appearance. Among them are 'Dabbassoo' or 'Hairy', 'Tuqan Dilii' or 'Lazy', and 'Qallaa', meaning 'skinny'.

To encourage visitors to trust the hyenas, Abbas feeds them directly from his mouth.

The hyenas live in caves outside the city and roam the rubbish dumps, also outside the walls. Some hyenas give birth in the ditches in the middle of the city.

'The hyenas are a gift of nature to clean up the city we mess during the day time. Without them the city will be much dirtier,' Anisa Mohammed, a 32-year old bread vendor, said.

Yusuf Mume salleh, 70, known as the first Hyena Man, taught Abbas how to feed the hyenas. He's pictured above sitting near his house within the walled city of Harar, Ethiopia

Harar, with a population of 240,000 people, started to expand out of its original wall after 1882 and is now surrounded by modern buildings. Pictured above, a tuk-tuk drives outside of the walled city of Harar, Ethiopia

The city has been a centre of Islamic culture since it was founded in the 7th Century. Pictured above, a man feeds birds in front of a meat market within the walled city of Harar

In the 16th Century Emir Nur Ibn Mujahid built a four-metre-high protective wall around the city, pierced by five gates. Pictured above, people drive tuk-tuks outside of the walled city of Harar

Every year since the 16th century, to mark the birth of Prophet Mohammed, the city's residents offer the hyenas porridge mixed with butter and goat meat on the 'Hakim Mountain'. The landmark, located outside the city, is believed to be a holy site because the ancient Muslim leaders of the city are buried there. Pictured above, people sit outside the walled city of Harar

If the hyenas refuse the sacrifice, people believe the country will have bad luck. Pictured above, Muslim faithful take part in Friday (Jumaa) prayers within the walled city of Harar

Harar, with a population of 240,000 people, started to expand out of its original wall after 1882 and is now surrounded by modern buildings.

It has been a centre of Islamic culture since it was founded in the 7th Century. In the 16th Century Emir Nur Ibn Mujahid built a four-metre-high protective wall around the city, pierced by five gates.

Every year since the 16th century, to mark the birth of Prophet Mohammed, the city's residents offer the hyenas porridge mixed with butter and goat meat on the 'Hakim Mountain'.

The landmark, located outside the city, is believed to be a holy site because the ancient Muslim leaders of the city are buried there.

If the hyenas refuse the sacrifice, people believe the country will have bad luck.
The conventional wisdom that whisky gets better with age may have been turned on its head by an Australian distillery taking the world by storm.

Starward scooped the latest of its international accolades at the 2017 World Whisky Awards, taking out Best Australian Single Malt for the second year running.

Aged just three years, the distillery's Wine Cask Edition is sure to raise scepticism among whisky purists, most who will argue it takes at least a decade to produce the perfect drop.

But Starward founder David Vitale says there are logical reasons he is able to create a world-beating product in such a short period from his Port Melbourne distillery.

Starward scooped the latest of its international accolades at the 2017 World Whisky Awards. Pictured, the company's founder, David Vitale

The conventional wisdom that whisky gets better with age may have been turned on its head by the Melbourne distillery

Aged just three years, the distillery's Wine Cask Edition is sure to raise scepticism among whisky purists

'Often in Scotland, whisky is considered to be resting over the maturation period,' Mr Vitale told Daily Mail Australia.

'Our barrels are working. In fact I think we have the hardest working barrels in the world.'

Moreover, Mr Vitale said, Starward uses Melbourne's unpredictable weather to gain an edge over its international and domestic competitors.

'Melbourne's climate is perfectly suited to maturation in shorter time frames,' he said.

'Our famed four seasons in a day enable us to use the elements to create world beating whisky in just three years.'

The 43-year-old entrepreneur is tapping into a fast growing market, with studies showing consumption rates of local whisky have doubled in the past five years.

Mr Vitale said the younger generation of Australian drinkers taking a fresh interest in whisky

Mr Vitale said, Starward uses Melbourne's unpredictable weather to gain an edge over its international and domestic competitors

Mr Vitale said it is the younger generation of Australian drinkers taking a fresh interest in whisky.

'A lot of whisky's growth is driven by this younger demographic as perceptions of whisky as ''an old man's drink'' are changing,' he said.

Mr Vitale said his brand aims to change the conventional methods of whisky drinking.

'We're about putting flavour first - creative cocktail recipes, non-intimidating tasting notes and signature serves that let the whisky shine are all ways to break down barriers,' he said.

Stewards Wine Cask Edition also won Best Craft Distiller Whisky at the San Francisco Global Spirits Competition last year

Mr Vitale (pictured) said his brand aims to change the conventional methods of whisky drinking

He hopes to 'let people be a bit more experimental with something that's previously been locked away for specific occasions.'

Stewards Wine Cask Edition also won Best Craft Distiller Whisky at the San Francisco Global Spirits Competition last year.

At the same awards, it received a Double Gold medal, meaning it was given the highest possible marks from each judge in its category.
A man accused of shooting his girlfriend in the chest and dumping her in a wheelchair outside a hospital has been charged with her murder.

Albertus Lewis, 23, from Columbia, South Carolina was initially charged with obstruction of justice following the death of 20-year-old Mayra Sanchez.

Richland County Sheriff's Office said Sanchez was left outside the Palmetto Health Richland Hospital in Columbia on July 5, where she was pronounced dead by doctors.

Albertus Lewis, right, is accused of murdering his girlfriend Mayra Sanchez, left, by shooting her in the upper chest and dumping her outside a hospital in a wheelchair on July 5

Sanchez was pronounced dead at Palmetto Health Richland hospital in Columbia, pictured

Deputies claimed Lewis put Sanchez in the wheelchair before fleeing the scene.

Sanchez's mother Guadalupe Sanchez told WLTX that her family had a restraining order out against Lewis at the time of the murder.

They had warned him against attending the house in future

Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said Lewis has been charged with murder and obstruction of justice.

He is being held in the Alvin S Glenn Detention Center.

Members of Sanchez's family have opened a GoFundMe page to pay for her funeral. So far the page has raised almost $2,000.
The gap between rich and poor across the UK is lower now than a decade ago despite claims that the Tories have worsened inequality, a major report reveals today.

The research also found that inequality in London in particular has fallen dramatically since the late 2000s, in part because of a jobs boom.

The report undermines Labour claims that the poorest have been hit hardest because of government policies including spending cuts. The figures are starkly at odds with the Left-wing argument that Britain is one of the most economically divided nations in the world.

According to the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), income inequality across Britain fell sharply after the Great Recession at the end of the 2000s, and has barely changed since.

The research also found that inequality in London in particular has fallen dramatically since the late 2000s, in part because of a jobs boom

Instead, researchers found evidence the top one per cent of earners had done worse in recent years than those on middle incomes.

The incomes of the top one per cent are around ten per cent below their pre-recession levels - compared to a five per cent fall among the average earner.

The IFS measured income as the amount that people had to spend after deducting income tax, National Insurance and council tax. It includes the income that some get from state benefits and tax credits.

According to the IFS, the sharpest reductions in the gap between rich and poor were in London. Since the end of the last decade, the incomes of the poorest ten per cent of earners in the capital have risen by more than ten per cent. By contrast, the incomes of the top ten per cent of households have fallen by more than ten per cent.

The IFS pointed to strong growth in employment in the capital  up five per cent since 2007  and falls in overall earnings to explain the shift.

Household incomes have also been supported by Conservative tax cuts, including increases in the personal allowance. In 2010 single earners started paying income tax after earning 6,475 but that figure now stands at 11,500.

Across the country, incomes of the bottom ten per cent have grown by nearly eight per cent and average earnings by four per cent since 2007. The incomes of the top ten per cent fell slightly.

Jeremy Corbyn has called for a maximum wage law to reduce inequality in the UK

Analysis of regional differences showed average incomes in the South East of England are 25 per cent higher than in the West Midlands, the poorest region by this measure.

London remains the most unequal part of the country, inequality in the capital has seen a dramatic decline over the last decade.

Robert Joyce, an Associate Director at IFS and another author of the report, said: Although the post-recession years have seen modest income growth, with little change in poverty rates and inequality, many people have seen large changes in their incomes.

Fluctuating incomes mean that many fewer people are classed as persistently poor than have a low income at any point in time.

It follows a report by the World Bank which found wealth is shared more fairly in Britain than most other Western nations.

Income inequality in the UK is less marked than in nations including France, Australia and Italy, it found. Britain was 39th out of 157 countries surveyed.

Jeremy Corbyn has called for a maximum wage law to reduce inequality in the UK.

In January, the Labour leader said: We have the worst levels of income disparity of most of the OECD countries. It is getting worse.

And corporate taxation is a part of it. If we want to live in a more egalitarian society and fund our public services, we cannot go on creating worse levels of inequality.
Eric Scott Ruska, 37, kidnapped and raped his 28-year-old victim on July 8

The FBI said it arrested a 37-year-old convicted sex offender after he kidnapped and raped a woman for a week near his Michigan home.

Eric Scott Ruska was taken into custody as he was pulling into a Shell gas station in Munising on July 14.

The victim, 28, was found 'rachet strapped' to the front passenger seat of Ruska's car during the time of the arrest, local media citing FBI testimony reported.

Ruska allegedly admitted to sexually assaulting his female victim multiple times across several counties in northern Michigan.

He is facing federal charges because the alleged crimes happened on federal land located on Michigan's upper peninsula in Alger, Delta and Marquette counties.

No bond was set for his bail.

In 2004, Ruska was convicted of kidnapping and third-degree sexual assault, spending 11-years in jail before being released in December 2015.

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Federal authorities arrested Ruska during an undercover sting operation at a Shell gas station on July 14

Courtesy WLUC

The victim later told authorities that she and Ruska were acquainted with one another.

The woman said on July 8 Ruska asked her to go fishing at Chicago Lake in Delta County.

Once isolated on the water, she told FBI investigators, his alleged scheme unfolded, telling the 28-year-old the real reason behind their meeting.

'Ruska then informed (the woman) that he was going to sexually assault her and that he would kill (her) and her family if she refused,' FBI special agent Richard Grout said in a complaint filed in US District Court.

Ruska was convicted of similar charges in 2004, sentenced to 11 years in prison before being released in December 2015

Ruska then punched her in the chest, slapped her in the face and proceeded to sexually assault her on the boat.

Three days after the two went missing, state police found Ruska's boat trailer at Hugoboom Lake, about 10 miles from the other lake.

A tactical team tasked with tracking down the convicted felon later saw him pulling his 2006 Chevrolet Colorado pick-up truck into the 24-hour Shell station.

Police were conducting surveillance after learning that Ruska had been making late-night stops for food and drinks.

Undercover police were able to arrest Ruska at the scene without incident. The woman was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.

Ruska allegedly admitted to the kidnapping and sexual assault claims made by federal authorities, and went with investigators to point out the places he sexually assaulted the woman.
Henriette Karra, 17, was found dead in her family's home in Ramle, Israel, with several stab wounds to the neck on June 13

A Christian father has been accused of murdering his teenage daughter by stabbing her repeatedly in the neck in a row over her Muslim boyfriend.

Henriette Karra, 17, was found dead in her family's home in Ramle, Israel, with several stab wounds to the neck on June 13.

Her father 58-year-old Sami, uncle and her mother Aliham were all arrested for plotting her murder which came after weeks of fighting over her romance.

The teenager was in a relationship with a Muslim man who was in prison. She planned to convert to Islam upon his release.

In the weeks before her death, she fled home in fear of her life after being threatened and beaten by her father, according to The Jeruselum Post.

Henriette sent panicked text messages to friends telling them that her family was going to kill her.

One read: 'You wont believe what they did to me They are sending people to kill me.

'They are searching for me in every possible place. You dont understand what fear this is. I dont believe I have the strength to stand on my feet and run away.'

She went to stay with her boyfriend's mother but her own family tracked her down and she was forced to return to them.

Police were watching the family and had placed recording devices inside the home.

According to local reports, the girl's father was previously suspected of drug dealing.

It is not clear if the family was being monitored for those allegations or if the surveillance was ordered as a result of complaints made by Henriette.

On the night before her death, her father was heard telling her mother: 'Forget about her, let her go to hell.

'Its not worth another shekel to even chase after her, shes garbage. We need to whip her, throw her away like a dog and see how she does Shes already gone, Im sick of her and you.'

Her mother later told police that her husband believed she had affronted the family's honor.

The girl's father denies the killing and is on trial in Israel.
Rip-off card fees imposed by airlines, shops and town halls are to be outlawed.

Customers are thought to fork out half a billion pounds a year for the stealth charges.

Airlines can add up to 3 per cent for credit card bookings while local councils often impose a levy of 2.5 per cent.

But the Government will announce today that all such fees will be banned from January.

Rip-off charges have no place in a modern Britain and thats why card charging is about to come to an end, said Stephen Barclay, economic secretary to the Treasury.

This is about fairness and transparency, and so from next year there will be no more nasty surprises for people at the check-out just for using a card.

These small charges can really add up and this change will mean shoppers across the country have that bit of extra cash to spend on the things that matter to them.

The ban will be policed by trading standards units and the Competition and Markets Authority. The clampdown stems from Brussels, with governments across Europe forced to implement the EU Payment Services 2 directive.

The Treasury says it has gone further by applying it to American Express, Apple Pay and Paypal.

Although Monarch and Virgin Atlantic have ditched their card fees, others continue to levy hefty charges. They include Flybe which charges 3 per cent, Ryanair which charges 2 per cent, and Swinton Insurance which charges 2.5 per cent

James Daley of the consumer website Fairer Finance, which has campaigned for a crackdown on rip-off card fees, said: It is a bit cheeky of the Treasury to take credit for implementing a European directive.

Firms have exploited customers for years by charging them way over the odds. The big question now is whether the authorities will enforce this, as they have failed to enforce previous legislation.

Guy Anker of MoneySavingExpert.com said: Scrapping card surcharges is good news for the millions of consumers who would otherwise have been milked by companies who whack on unexpected charges at the end of the process  something that has been happening for years.

But he warned: While it will make it easier for consumers to compare prices we expect some companies will raise prices for all to compensate for the loss, which could hit those who currently pay in cash or by debit card.

Rip-off charges have no place in a modern Britain and thats why card charging is about to come to an end, said Stephen Barclay, economic secretary to the Treasury

The Treasury said firms caught breaking the law would be forced to reimburse customers and face fines. The fee ban will also apply to local authorities and agencies such as the DVLA.

Town halls rake in millions with card fees on council tax and parking permit payments. The DVLA charges a 2.50 flat fee to motorists using a credit card.

Figures from HM Revenue & Customs showed the card fees generated an estimated 473million back in 2010.

New laws were introduced in 2013 making it illegal for firms to profit from card charges.

Now they are allowed only to pass on interchange fees they are charged by their bank.

But consumer campaigners say this has been openly flouted.

A 0.3 per cent cap on interchange fees has also had a limited impact since it was introduced back in December 2015.

Although Monarch and Virgin Atlantic have ditched their card fees, others continue to levy hefty charges. They include Flybe which charges 3 per cent, Ryanair which charges 2 per cent, and Swinton Insurance which charges 2.5 per cent.

British Airways still charges 1 per cent on credit card purchases, having dropped a flat fee of 5 per booking last year.

Experts say large companies should incur costs of no more than 0.6 per cent on a credit card purchase. Although some firms could increase their prices as a result of the ban, the Treasury hopes they will take the hit in order to remain competitive.

Officials said that an outright ban would be easier to police than a series of caps and other failed measures.
Drivers using the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Tunnel face tolls going in both directions for the first time under a government plan to pay for a new $14 billion city link.

Sydney commuters will be slugged $8 to use the new multi-billion dollar tunnels linking the inner west to the northern beaches, according to proposals to the New South Wales cabinet.

The plans call for a $3 toll for cars on northbound trips on the bridge and the Harbour Tunnel from 2022 for the first time.

Drivers using the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Tunnel face tolls going in both directions for the first time under a government plan to pay for a new $14 billion city link

The money will go towards the $14 billion cost of the proposed Western Harbour Tunnel and Beaches Link, from Rozelle in the inner west to Balgowlah in the city's northeast.

Drivers will have to pay $8 for a full one-way trip on the 14km road, including $3 for the new harbour tunnel.

There will also be a $5 toll for commuters using the Beaches Link between the Warringah Freeway and Balgowlah, Fairfax reported on Wednesday.

Trucks will pay three times as much as cars.

The plans call for a $3 toll for cars on northbound trips on the bridge and the Harbour Tunnel from 2022 for the first time

The money will go towards the $14 billion cost of the proposed Western Harbour Tunnel and Beaches Link, from Rozelle in the inner west to Balgowlah in the city's northeast

The Sydney Harbour Bridge was officially opened on March 19, 1932 following eight years of construction.

About 1400 people worked on the Bridge's construction, which cost 10 million Australian pounds.

Sixteen workers were killed during the construction period.

Spectacular footage of the 1932 opening was released this year for the bridge's 85th birthday.

Cars, trams and commuters on-foot were pictured celebrating the opening of the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge was officially opened on March 19, 1932 following eight years of construction

Spectacular footage of the 1932 opening was released this year for the bridge's 85th birthday
It was a trap, executed imperfectly but with bloody results.

Prosecutors said in a recent court filing that four young men found slaughtered in a Long Island park last April were lured to the site by two female associates of the MS-13 street gang, which was hunting for rivals and perceived enemies.

Once there, the youths - some still in high school - were surrounded by more than a dozen gang members who attacked them with machetes, knives and wooden clubs 'in a horrific frenzy of violence,' according to the court papers obtained by Newsday.

A fifth young man who had accompanied the victims to the park ran for his life and escaped, the court memorandum said.

Names of the dead: Michael Banegas (left) and his cousin Jefferson Villalobos (right), both aged 18, were identified by relatives as victims of a quadruple murder in Long Island Read

Jorge Tigre (left), 18, and Justin Llivicura (right), 16, were said to be among the friends discovered slaughtered in Central Islip Park

Prosecutors last week quietly charged four people in the killings but have revealed scant details about the case. Three of the defendants were named in court papers unsealed Monday as Alexis Hernandez, Santis Leonel Ortiz-Flores and Omar Antonio Villalta. A fourth defendant's identity was blacked out. The U.S. Attorney's office would not say whether that person was in custody or still at large.

The April massacre in Central Islip was part of a string of Long Island killings blamed on MS-13, a deadly gang with origins in Central America. The deaths have attracted international attention and led to Congressional hearings, tweets from the White House and a visit to Long Island from the U.S. attorney general.

In a letter to the court, obtained by Newsday, federal prosecutors said the four victims found dead in April, plus the person who escaped, 'were marked for death merely because they were suspected of disrespecting the MS-13 and being rival gang members.'

The two female gang associates had been instructed to get the victims to a community park, prosecutors wrote.

Emergency personnel walk near the crime scene where the four bodies were found in Central Islip, New York in April

There was a large police presence at the park as authorities investigated the murder

The victims had suffered 'significant trauma'. Police were seen working in a wooded area of the park (above)

WHO ARE MS-13? The ultra-violent street gang MS-13 was the first to be designated as an international criminal group. With as many as 20,000 members in 46 states, the gang has expanded far beyond its initial roots. Members are accused of major crimes including murder, kidnapping, prostitution, drug smuggling and human trafficking. Major roundups of MS-13 members have taken place across the country since the early 2000s. In Charlotte, N.C., 53 gang members were arrested as part of Operation Fed Up, which targeted MS-13 members. In 2016, 58 members of MS-13 were rounded up as part of 'Operation Mean Streets'. Previously, two of their most notable killings include stabbing to death a federal witness in 2004 and chopping the hands off of a 16-year-old boy in 2005. Advertisement

'When the females got to the park, they led the five individuals to a wooded area ... and sent a text message of their location to several of the MS-13 members,' the memorandum said.

The victims killed in the ensuing attack included Justin Llivicura, 16, of East Patchogue; Jorge Tigre, 18, of Bellport; Michael Lopez Banegas, 20, of Brentwood; and Jefferson Villalobos, 18, of Pompano Beach, Florida, who was on Long Island visiting his cousin Banegas at the time.

The victims' families have denied that any of the men were in a gang.

Justin's mother told the New York Times that her son's body was so mutilated that the police wouldn't let her or her husband view it.

At Jefferson's memorial service, there was an open casket and make-up could only cover up some of his facial injuries. A cotton ball filled the hole where his right eye used to be.

The Times also revealed that Justin's girlfriend received a video the morning after the slaughter, showing the four victims lying dead in the woods.

'Were in possession of the video, and we know its origins,' was all Commissioner Sini would tell the Times about the video.

The three suspects identified in the killings were charged with racketeering, conspiracy to murder rival gang members and four counts of murder. Attorneys for Ortiz-Flores and Hernandez declined to comment; the name of Villalta's attorney was not immediately available.

MS-13, also called Mara Salvatrucha, is believed to have been founded as a neighborhood street gang in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s by immigrants fleeing a civil war in El Salvador. The gang is now a major international criminal enterprise, with tens of thousands of members in several Central American countries and many U.S. states.
Bosses should consider allowing workers to use e-cigarettes at their desks to cut smoking rates, according to Government plans.

Health chiefs yesterday pledged to slash smoking rates from 15.5 per cent to 12 per cent in five years.

They said vaping was key, helping 22,000 smokers quit a year, and employers should be reminded that e-cigarette use was not illegal in offices.

Health chiefs said vaping helps 22,000 smokers quit a year, and employers should be reminded that e-cigarette use was not illegal in offices

This is despite scientists' concerns over the potential health risk of the devices  particularly the chemicals used to flavour vapour.

In a push for a 'smoke-free generation', the Tobacco Control Plan saids: 'E-cigarette use is not covered by smoke-free legislation and should not routinely be included in the requirements of an organisation's smoke-free policy.'

Public Health England advice for employers about e-cigarettes, which have been used by 3million Britons in the decade they have been on the market, says bosses are free to decide whether to allow vaping by staff but should not 'routinely' ban it  although they must take into account the fact that vapour may be a nuisance and also affect asthmatics.

ARE E-CIGARETTES A HEALTH RISK? Experts agree e-cigarettes  which turn a liquid form of nicotine into vapour to be inhaled  are far safer than tobacco, but many scientists still have concerns. Studies have raised fears some flavourings increase the risk of 'popcorn lung', a condition that may leave sufferers needing a lung transplant. Research suggests chemicals that flavour the nicotine can impair the body's healing process, leading to lingering wounds. And a paper presented at the European Society of Cardiology congress last year said vaping results in significant damage to key blood vessels, raising the risk of heart attacks. Dr Juliane Kokott, advocate general to the European Court of Justice, warned in 2015 that vaping may also provide a 'gateway' for teenagers to start smoking tobacco. But Public Health England says the devices are '95 per cent safe'. Advertisement

Its guidance says: 'International peer-reviewed evidence indicates that the risk to the health of bystanders from exposure to e-cigarette vapour is extremely low.

'The evidence of harm from second-hand exposure to vapour is not sufficient to justify the prohibition of e-cigarettes. Reasons other than the health risk to bystanders may exist for prohibiting e-cigarette use in all or part of a public place or workplace, such as commercial considerations and professional etiquette.'

E-cigarettes heat a liquid form of nicotine into vapour to be inhaled, avoiding the harm of tobacco smoke. Experts agree the devices are far safer than tobacco.

But many are worried about unresolved safety concerns, while others say they are a 'gateway' for teenagers to smoke tobacco.

Launching the strategy yesterday, public-health minister Steve Brine said: 'Britain is a world-leader in tobacco control, and our tough action in the past decade has seen smoking rates in England fall to an all-time low of 15.5 per cent. But our vision is to create a smoke-free generation.

'Smoking continues to kill hundreds of people a day in England, and we know the harms fall hardest on some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society. That's why we are targeting prevention and local action to address the variation in smoking rates in our society, educate people about the risks and support them to quit for good.'

E-cigarettes heat a liquid form of nicotine into vapour to be inhaled, avoiding the harm of tobacco smoke. Experts agree the devices are far safer than tobacco

The plan also aims to cut smoking among 15-year-olds from 8 per cent to 3 per cent by 2022, and among pregnant women from 10.7 per cent to 6 per cent.

Duncan Selbie, of Public Health England, said: 'We are at a pivotal point where an end is in sight and a smoke-free generation a reality.

'But the final push, reaching the most vulnerable and disadvantaged, will undoubtedly be the hardest. Only by everyone pulling together can we hope to end the loss of life and suffering smoking has wreaked for far too long. Public Health England will do everything possible to make this happen.'

But Deborah Arnott, of Action on Smoking and Health, stressed that no new money had been put towards reaching the targets. She said: 'Funding must be found if the Government is to achieve its vision of a 'smoke-free generation'. The tobacco industry should be made to pay through a licence fee on the 'polluter pays' principle.'
The creators of Blackadder wanted to make a politically incorrect fifth series of the comedy about the origins of man  called Homo Blackadder.

But John Lloyd, who produced the hugely popular BBC show, said they felt the finale of the fourth series, set in the First World War, could not be topped.

The last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth sees the cast going over the top of a trench and running to their death into enemy fire.

John Lloyd, who produced the hugely popular BBC show, said they felt the finale of the fourth series, set in the First World War, could not be topped

The scene, which fades to reveal a field of poppies, is one of the most memorable moments of British TV.

Mr Lloyd disclosed there were a number of ideas for the never-made fifth series, of which his favourite was a story about Blackadder as a caveman.

Speaking at the Latitude Festival in Suffolk, he said: There were so many ideas in the pipeline. My favourite idea, perhaps not very politically correct, was the original Blackadder set in the dawn of time, called Homo Blackadder.

Baldrick is king of the monkeys and out of the forest comes Homo Blackadder, the first true man, and says Baldrick, Ill take it from here.

Mr Lloyd disclosed there were a number of ideas for the never-made fifth series, of which his favourite was a story about Blackadder as a caveman

He added that writer Richard Curtis suggested a series set in the 1960s about an ageing rock group, to be called Blackadder Five, with a drummer was called Bald Rick.

Mr Lloyd, who also produced QI, Spitting Image and Not the Nine Oclock News, said the shows creators were initially criticised for setting a sitcom in the trenches of the First World War.

Mr Lloyd said the Blackadder series was a 'great way of getting children interested' in history

He said: [Writer] Ben Eltons uncle, who was a historian called G R Elton, wrote to him and said, Im not going to ever speak to you again, its the most disgraceful thing.

Rowan [Atkinson, who played Blackadder] got all these letters saying, youve appear to have gone mad.

Mr Lloyd also hit back at former education secretary Michael Gove over his criticism of Blackadder for allegedly promulgating left-wing myths about the First World War.

Mr Gove complained in 2014 that the series belittled Britain and cleared Germany of blame.

But Mr Lloyd, 65, said that the series was intended to be entertaining and as a result was taught in every school in the country.

Remember Michael Gove saying Blackadder shouldnt be shown to teach history in schools? he said.

He seems to be under the impression it was a documentary. Its not true, you know. We didnt set out to do Blackadder to teach people history.

We set out to entertain them and as a result its taught in every school in the country, I can guarantee you because its a great way of getting children interested. You want to teach the Tudors, show Queenie.

Queenie was the version of Queen Elizabeth I played by Miranda Richardson in the second series of Blackadder who had the mannerisms of a spoilt schoolgirl but happened to have total autocratic power.

Mr Lloyd also criticised modern day TV managers who are too frightened to make decisions on creative programmes.

Theres a problem in television, which is managers of all kinds want certainty. They say, prove it will work. Creative people arent sure of anything, he said.

We used to be judged on whether ideas were good and people would go, thats a brilliant idea, or I hate that, get out of my office. Now they say, yeah OK, well ask some people.
A policeman has urged people to 'put down those iphones' and check on their neighbours after an elderly couple were found dead inside their Sydney home.

Superintendent Dave Darcy made the touching plea after the bodies of the couple, both in their 80s, were found at a Palm Beach house in the city's north on Tuesday.

'I reckon [they] should get off their Facebook for 20 minutes and spend a bit of time with some older people and get to understand what they're about,' he told the ABC.

'Our elderly, particularly in that 70s to 80s group, are completely left behind in terms of social media and a friend to them isn't a click of a button.

Superintendent Dave Darcy has urged people to 'put down those iphones' and check on their neighbours after an elderly couple were found dead inside their Sydney home

The bodies of the couple, both in their 80s, were found at a Palm Beach house in the city's north on Tuesday

'A friend to them is someone who exchanges eye contact and genuinely cares about them.'

The husband was the carer for his life-long partner, who was blind and had other disabilities, police said.

It is believed the pair had been dead for two or three weeks before they were found inside their home.

'Although yet to be confirmed by autopsies, we believe the husband has passed away naturally, unfortunately leaving the wife with no means of support,' police said in a Facebook post.

'She has subsequently died due to a lack of care.'

In the online post, which has gone viral since it was shared on Tuesday, the couple were described as 'fiercely independent'.

The husband was the carer for his life-long partner, who was blind and had other disabilities, police said

It is believed the pair had been dead for two or three weeks before they were found inside their home

In an online post, which has gone viral since it was shared on Tuesday, the couple were described as 'fiercely independent'

'If you are concerned about a neighbour... knock on their door or give us a ring. We are more than happy to check on the welfare of the elderly,' the post read.

'So just for twenty minutes, time to put down those iphones and ipads, and hold back the selfies and making friends with people you don't know.

'Have a real conversation with your elderly neighbour who is living a simple life devoid of all electronic gadgets that contribute little to real community cohesion.'

Neighbours said the couple kept to themselves, although they had been seen walking in the streets in previous years.

Police do not believe the deaths are suspicious but a crime scene has been established and will be examined by forensic officers.
Simon Alessandro Pearson (pictured) was killed after attempting to rescue his daughter off the Italian coast

A British company director was killed after attempting to rescue his daughter when she got into difficulty in the sea off the Italian coast.

Simon Alessandro Pearson and a beach worker both died after rushing to the girl's aid at the Bosco Verde beach in Ostuni, in the Puglia region of southern Italy.

The father-of-two, 47, who had been at the beach with his family, was taken by strong currents in the sea after trying to reach his daughter, 10.

It is believed Martino Maggi, 49, managed to bring the girl back to dry land but died after going back into the water to rescue her father.

Mr Pearson's wife Emma Jane revealed how her husband 'did everything' he could to try and rescue their daughter.

The 43-year-old told The Times: 'They were swimming in the shallows at the beach but the tide pulled them into deeper water.

'Simon held on to my daughter's hand to keep her afloat but he became unconcious. I have two young children who have lost their dad. We are all traumatised.

'My husband worked hard all his life to provide for his family and he has now given his life to save our daughter.'

Mr Pearson, from Montgomery, Powys, and Mr Maggi were eventually brought to shore and resuscitation attempts were made but both were declared dead.

Simon Alessandro Pearson and a beach worker both died after rushing to the girl's aid at the Bosco Verde beach (pictured) in Ostuni, in the Puglia region of southern Italy

The coastguard rescued others who were in difficulty and said the conditions were caused by strong winds.

Mr Pearson was managing director of Jemsonite, a specialist building materials company based in Bishop's Castle, Shropshire.

A Foreign Office spokesman: We are supporting the family of a British man following his death in Puglia. Our staff are in contact with Italian authorities.

High winds are common in the area where the tragedy took place. Reports said the wind speeds were between 10 and 15 knots when the tragedy unfolded.

On July 14, four lifeguards rescued three Russian tourists and an Italian who were unable to return to the shore on a nearby beach.
The father and Irish national who fell seven floors on a construction site has shown signs of life despite remaining in critical condition.

Dave Conway, a 37-year-old carpenter from Ireland, fell seven floors when working on the Varsity Lakes construction site, on Queensland's Gold Coast, last Monday and suffered multiple fractures and has significant internal injuries.

His brother, Stephen Conway, said the father was originally placed in a coma and required multiple surgeries after falling 20 metres from the scaffolding.

But Stephen did say Dave's condition was slowly improving.

Dave Conway (pictured with his daughter) is an Irish born carpenter who fell up to seven floors from scaffolding on the Gold Coast

Dave (pictured) suffered internal injuries and multiple fractures. He is pictured here in his hospital bed

'David fell 20 metres from scaffolding and has suffered horrific injuries,' Stephen Conway wrote on a fundraising page.

'David is in a coma and in a critical condition. He needs many operations and procedures but day by day he grows a little stronger and we are so grateful that he is still with us, but he needs our help.'

The carpenter fell on his daughter's seventh birthday.

Dave's family had flown in from Ireland to be by his side and Dave's wife was finding it hard, an emotional Stephen Conway told 7News.

Brother Stephen Conway (pictured) said Dave's wife was taking the tragedy the toughest

Dave's family have flown over from Ireland to support him

'He's had operations on his legs, his ruptured heart, his lungs,' Stephen said.

'His wife is finding it the toughest. She's strong, she loves him to bits.

'It an absolute miracle he is here. One million per cent.'

Dave's condition has improved and he is no longer in an induced coma, but remains in a critical condition.

To donate to Dave Conway's fundraising page, visit YouCaring.

The sub-contractor fell from the Aura Varsity Lakes Apartments on Lakefront Cres at 7am on Monday morning.

The father was treated by paramedics at the scene before he was rushed to hospital.

The construction worker was rushed to Gold Coast University Hospital in a critical condition with multiple fractures in the legs, ribs and had a swollen chest and feet.

Dave, a sub-contractor, fell from the seventh floor of the Aura Varsity Lakes Apartments

The 37-year-old father is in critical condition after being placed in an induced coma

A statement from the developer Alder Construction said an investigation is underway.

'Our priority is the people involved and our thoughts are with his family and workers on-site,' the statement read.

'(Counselling group) Mates in Construction have provided counselling for these workers and ongoing support is available.

'Alder Constructions takes safety seriously and an investigation is underway. We are working with the relevant authorities to determine the cause.'
A mother and father have claimed they were booted off a JetBlue flight from Fort Lauderdale to New York while travelling with their three daughters without reason.

Videos show Tamir and Mandy Raanan in a heated confrontation with an airline employee after they were removed from the packed plane after a fellow flier got angry with their one-year-old daughter.

The married couple said they were 'stranded' with their girls and blacklisted by the airline 'without reason'.

They were told to get off the plane after their one-year-old daughter kicked the seat in front of her and agitated the passenger on the July 2 flight.

The family claims the situation was quickly resolved, while other fliers on the video can be heard saying the confrontation was over.

But they were still booted from the cabin. Video taken from the jet bridge just moments later shows JetBlue manager Armando Gonzalez saying they were ejected because they refused to cooperate.

JetBlue have refuted the family's version of events and said they were compelled to remove them because of their violent and threatening behavior.

In a statement to DailyMail.com, they said: 'After a verbal altercation that included physical threats and profanities against a nearby customer, the aircraft door was reopened and our airports team politely asked the customers to step off to discuss the situation.'

The Raanan family was traveling with their three little girls, the youngest Eden (middle) had kicked the seat in front of her, according to her mom Mandy and some words were exchanged

Mandy and her husband Ifrah Raanan (middle at their wedding) say they were kicked off the plane without being given a reason after a brief disagreement with another passenger

JetBlue's Armando Gonzalez (pictured) would not give the family a reason for their removal

The statement continues: 'The customers refused repeated requests from our crew members to deplane the entire aircraft. Law enforcement escorted them out of the gate area and we provided a refund.'

'We are investigating whether the customers behavior warrants restrictions on JetBlue travel and we thank our crew members for their professional handling of this unfortunate incident.'

The mom, Mandy however says that after the passenger in front of them told her to tie her baby daughter's feet together to stop her from kicking her seat.

She said the passenger accepted her apologies a short time later, but the attendants didn't see it that way.

Gonzalez in the video tells the couple: 'We can discuss this outside the plane. What I need you to do is come with me outside the plane.'

Mandy responds and says 'Did something happen?' with her fellow passengers chiming in saying, 'No nothing happened'.

Later, someone else on the video can be heard saying: 'I saw the whole thing nothing happened'.

Another fellow flyer added: 'This is terrible'.

Mandy tells Gonzalez: 'I need to get my kids to New York, I need to get back home.'

Tamir, the father, asks about the other passenger, saying: 'What about them, are they gonna get off?'

Gonzalez says 'No.'

You can hear the distraught mother saying: 'She tells me to tie my kids feet because she's kicking my chair.'

Then, realizing she is going to have to leave the plane she says: 'I never in my life heard of such a thing.'

The video begins again at the gate with the couple asking the manager repeatedly why the family was removed, Gonzalez responds: 'You were removed from the airplane because you were not cooperating with me, at this point if you want more information about the incident you'll have to call 1-800-jet blue.'

The distraught mother, Mandy holding daughter Eden, wiped away tears as she's told she's not going home on JetBlue tonight

The Broward County Sheriff's arrive and explain to the family nothing can be done to change the fact that they aren't getting on a JetBlue flight tonight

Mandy is in tears as Broward County Police officers are seen surrounding the family.

The cops say there is nothing they can do about their flight plans changing.

Ifrah says JetBlue told them they could take a flight with the airline the following day but that they needed to find their own overnight accommodations.

To make matters worse, the family's luggage was not removed leaving them stranded an extra night in Florida without their baby supplies or clothes.

Upon arriving at the airport the next morning the family was told they were banned from all future flights with JetBlue while the airline investigates.

They were flown home on another airline.

Their luggage with JetBlue never made it to New York, and it was mailed to them a week later.

A lawyer for the family, David Templer, says what happened to the Raanan family is illegal, and that the statement JetBlue provided saying there was cursing and physical threats shows as much.

'It is convenient misinformation. If the incident had occurred the way JetBlue now claims, then it would have been a violation of laws and regulations to not immediately report it to Federal or State law enforcement, which did not occur,' Templer says.

'JetBlue's conduct was unprofessional and reckless, if not malicious. It's staff is poorly trained. It unnecessarily humiliated and then abandoned an entire family, including infants and toddlers,' Temple adds.
With his chiselled jaw and muscular physique, 27-year-old investment manager 'Carl' was sure to receive plenty of attention on Twitter.

So too was Charlie, whose profile picture showed him lounging on a wicker sofa, drink in hand and shirt unbuttoned.

The only problem was the photos showed the same person  Matt Peacock, a married male model whose good looks saw him used as an innocent dupe in a sinister phenomenon known as 'catfishing'.

Matt Peacock, pictured, is leading a campaign against catfishing after his identity was stolen to create 40 fake profiles on dating websites to con women into dates

Astonishingly, more than 40 fake profiles are thought to have been set up on dating sites and social media by people stealing his image alone in order to attract women.

Some succumbed to pressure to send explicit photographs of themselves, with one woman left feeling ashamed and devastated after realising she had been betrayed.

Now campaigners  backed by Mr Peacock  want a change in the law to make it illegal to use a fake profile to lure people into sexual relationships.

'I am a fashion model by trade so there are a lot of pictures of me out there,' the 34-year-old from Stockport, Greater Manchester said yesterday.

'I started getting messages from girls I had never seen before saying they had been talking to someone pretending to be me.

'There were 43 different profiles that used my picture, and it wasn't just one person doing it.'

Some even lifted pictures of his nieces and nephews to bolster claims that their fake persona was a 'caring dad'.

'It affected me and my whole family,' he added.

Working with private detective Rebecca Jane, he confronted one of the alleged catfishes  a man calling himself Carl Chambers and who claimed to be a wealthy property developer.

He had exchanged messages with a young single mother, Kirsty Wiffen, 31, from Portsmouth, who agreed to send him explicit images of herself, unaware that the photographs on his profile in fact showed Mr Peacock.

Pictures of Mr Peacock, a married model, were used on Tinder, left, and Facebook, to entice women

Faced with the evidence, the catfish  whose real name a Sunday newspaper reported is Chris Bachelor, 26, from the South East  was filmed apologising, claiming: 'I was in a place in my life where I needed comfort. I just was not thinking straight.'

Miss Wiffen told the paper she felt 'utterly betrayed, violated'.

'I'm not sure I'll ever trust a man properly again,' she added. 'He has videos and pictures of me that he could send to anyone.

'It's so humiliating to know none of it was real.'

The 'catfish' was reported to police, who said no crime had been committed against Mr Peacock as he hadn't been harassed or contacted in any way by the 'catfish'.

Now he and the detective have teamed up with Stockport MP Ann Coffey who yesterday ((TUES)) secured a Westminster debate on what can be done to crack down on the problem.

She is calling for a specific law against stealing another person's identity to lure people into sexual relationships.

The Labour MP will also urge social media companies, such as Facebook, and dating sites to be more proactive in monitoring and warning users against the dangers of catfishing.

'Catfishing is a modern day menace affecting the lives of many innocent people,' she said.

His picture was used on profiles asking for casual relationships and 'friends with benefits' and Mr Peacock said it had a devastating effect on both his wife and the female victims

'It can cause years of heartache. We must do something to deter this and a change in the law is the most effective deterrent.

'Without a specific offence, 'catfish' who cause so much distress to individuals and their families will continue to exploit and harm other people.'

Backing her call, Mr Peacock added: 'I am going to be a dad next year, and I don't want my children to come into a world where this goes on.

'Something needs to be done and if people knew pretending to be someone else online was an offence then they might be put off.'

Miss Jane added: 'Online dating is currently not a safe place, but it could be.

'I want people to put themselves in Matt's position and ask how they would feel? Our reputations are all we have, and his reputation is entirely out of his control.'

Catfishing is the act of inventing or stealing an alternative online identity on social networks or dating apps for nefarious purposes.

The term has spread worldwide following a 2010 American documentary called Catfish about a woman who invents identities through fake accounts to build a relationship with a man she meets online.

Facebook alone has previously estimated that up to ten per cent of its users' profiles are fake or duplicate  as many as 80million pages.
One of Donald Trump's fiercest critics refused to call him her president during a panel discussion on CNN.

CNN political commentator Angela Rye repeatedly referred to Trump as 'your president' during her appearance on host John Berman's show Monday.

The pair was discussing Russian meddling and potential collusion during the 2016 presidential campaign with former Republican Rep Jack Kingston, when Rye refused to call Trump her president.

CNN political commentator Angela Rye repeatedly referred to Trump as 'your president' during her appearance on host John Berman's show on Monday

Rye (right) and Berman (center) were discussing Russian meddling and potential collusion during the 2016 presidential campaign with former Republican Rep Jack Kingston (left), when Rye refused to call Trump her president

'Do you really think they would have had five people in a meeting if this was about collusion with Russia?' Kingston said as he defended Donald Trump Jr.

Kingston, who is a former senior adviser to the Trump campaign, was referring to Trump Jr's June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya.

'It just defies logic,' Kingston added before Rye fired back.

Rye said: 'He [Trump Jr] went into a press conference during the summer [of 2016] asking Russia to find the other 30,000 emails.'

She was referring to the 33,000 emails Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton deleted from the private email server she used as secretary of State.

'There are a lot of things that your president has done to defy logic. Let's at least acknowledge that,' she said.

Rye (left) told Kingston that 'there are a lot of things that your president has done to defy logic - let's at least acknowledge that', before he fired back with 'your president too, Angela. Your president, too'

Shortly after her CNN appearance Rye took to Twitter and posted a video clip of her discussion with Berman and Kingston. Rye tweeted: 'Another day of #RussiaGate. #AlternativeFactChecker! #NotMyPresident'

'Your president too, Angela. Your president, too,' Kingston quipped.

'Well, he's your president,' Rye said defiantly.

CNN host Berman ended the segment with Trump is 'the president of the United States'.

Shortly after her CNN appearance Rye took to Twitter and posted a video clip of her discussion with Berman and Kingston.

Rye tweeted: 'Another day of #RussiaGate. #AlternativeFactChecker! #NotMyPresident.'
The Royal Navy escorted a flotilla of Chinese warships through English waters as it prepared to carry out drills with Vladimir Putin's forces.

HMS Richmond was scrambled to the English Channel to shadow three Chinese ships as they made their way for the Baltic Sea.

The destroyers passed through the Strait of Dover over the weekend having carried out training exercises in the Mediterranean.

On Monday, the warships were also escorted by the Dutch Navy sailing through the North Sea ahead of drills with the Russian fleet.

The destroyers passed through the Strait of Dover over the weekend having carried out training exercises in the Mediterranean (pictured in the North Sea)

The warships (one of which is pictured) were escorted by the Dutch Navy sailing through the North Sea ahead of drills with the Russian fleet

The Royal Navy escorted a flotilla of Chinese warships (pictured) through English waters as it prepared to carry out drills with Vladimir Putin's forces

HMS Richmond, a Type 23 Duke Class frigate, was scrambled to escort the Chinese. The ship is pictured observing aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov in October

The episode of reminiscent of similar show of strength in October, when a fleet of Russian warships sailed along the British coast on its way to Syria.

Russia's flagship Admiral Kuznetsov and seven additional vessels passed the UK on their voyage to bomb rebel forces in Aleppo and were escorted by the Royal Navy.

The fleet also out practice bombing north of Scotland before sailing down the English Channel - a mile off the coast of Britain.

It comes amid rapidly escalating tensions between the west and Russia, as the Kremlin looks to give a show of strength right on the doorstep of the UK.

At the time, Russian spokesman Igor Konashenkov said: '[Sir Michael Fallon's] statements and shows of escorting our warships are geared to divert attention of British taxpayers from the real state of the Royal Navy.'

Upon its return UK Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon responded: 'We will keep a close eye on the Admiral Kuznetsov as it skulks back to Russia; a ship of shame whose mission has only extended the suffering of the Syrian people.'

The Chinese boats are pictured as they make their way through the North Sea under the watchful eye of the Dutch
Charlie Gard is being given legal and permanent residence in the US by Congress in order to allow him to fly to America for treatment.

Jeff Fortenberry, Republican U.S. Representative for Nebraska, tweeted: 'We just passed amendment that grants permanent resident status to #CharlieGard and family so Charlie can get the medical treatment he needs.'

It is the latest move by US lawmakers who are determined to keep up the pressure on Great Ormond Street doctors in the on-going international political row over the 11-month-old's medical care.

Jeff Fortenberry (pictured in 2013), Republican U.S. Representative for Nebraska announced that Charlie Gard is being given legal and permanent residence in the US by Congress

He tweeted: 'We just passed amendment that grants permanent resident status to #CharlieGard and family so Charlie can get the medical treatment he needs'

Eyes open: Charlie's parents provided the Daily Mail with this photograph in response to Great Ormond Street Hospital's claims that he was blind

But legal sources said Charlie is the subject of a High Court order and it made no difference what passport he held.

And last Friday, the judge made it clear it would be illegal for Charlie to travel to America without his permission.

The parents' barrister Grant Armstrong said the parents were of the view that legally it was up to the hospital to change its mind and allow Charlie to be transferred.

But Mr Justice Francis said the effect of the various rulings meant the court's permission was required.

Charlie Gard's father Chris Gard was photophraphed outside great Ormand Street Hospital today after the announcement by US Congress that Charlie has been given US citizanship

Q&A: What is the current legal position for Charlie's parents? How can doctors end Charlie's life against his parents' wishes? Great Ormond Street (GOSH) took Charlie's case to the High Court and a judge agreed to allow them to end Charlie's treatment because it was not in his 'best interests' after he agreed it will cause him pain and will not improve his condition. The Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights all rejected appeals by his parents Chris Gard and Connie Yates, who believe they should have the final say on their son's treatment. In Britain the rights of the patient override the wishes of the parents if doctors disagree. For example there are several cases where Jehovah's Witnesses are given a blood transfusion by doctors despite religious objections from parents. Can the doctors change their mind and not turn off his life support? Yes. Great Ormond Street could go back to the High Court to stop the order they fought for this year. The process of gaining a Consent Order could be done on an urgent basis and completed in less than two hours. Experts have told MailOnline this is the only way Charlie could travel to America or Rome for treatment because his parents' appeals appear to have been exhausted. Can the hospital stop his parents taking him to America without permission? Yes. If doctors believe that any parent will cause suffering to their child, police can be called in to arrest them using Powers of Protection legislation. Why won't the hospital let Charlie die at home? Connie Yates and Chris Gard say doctors have denied their 'final wish' to take Charlie home to die. Travelling to a hospice was also denied. While judges ruled that his treatment should end, there is nothing in the judgments that says the little boy cannot be outside the hospital. Great Ormond Street refused to tell MailOnline on what basis that decision was taken. If parents still refuse to accept treatment should be withdrawn, can the hospital end it anyway? Yes. Police could be called in to facilitate treatment being ended if parents were violently preventing it - although it is highly unlikely this would happen. Doctors are more likely to try to 'persuade' parents to let it happen. If the parties remain at loggerheads for a long period the hospital could go back to court for an injunction and ask a judge to set a deadline for treatment to be withdrawn. A less stringent deadline for Charlie's life support machine to be shut off was at Midnight last Wednesday, but this has lapsed to allow his parents and loved-ones to say goodbye. Advertisement

He said: 'It would be entirely wrong for him to be transferred without my being involved.'

He added that if the hospital did change its mind to allow the baby to go, he would be 'bound to agree'.

MailOnline previously reported how the hospital could prevent Charlie's parents from taking him to the US.

If doctors believe that a parent will cause suffering to their child, police can be called in to arrest them using Powers of Protection legislation.

In the case of young cancer sufferer Ashya King his parents faced a European Arrest Warrant after absconding with their son who was in hospital.

Charlie's parents recently released a new photograph of their little boy where he appears to be looking at a toy to debunk his doctors' claims he is blind.

Connie Yates and Chris Gard say the poignant image, taken last Friday, is proof that Great Ormond Street Hospital is wrong to write off their 11-month-old son.

His doctors say he is blind, deaf, unable to move and badly brain-damaged and believe it is 'cruel' to let him live any longer.

The Mail can reveal that his British clinicians emerged from a crucial summit about his fate yesterday still convinced he should be allowed to die.

They apparently failed to be persuaded by American neuroscientist Dr Michio Hirano, who flew back to New York last night.

Dr Hirano and an expert from the Pope's hospital in Rome spent five and a half hours trying to talk round Charlie's doctors.

Last night his mother Connie Yates revealed Charlie was set to undergo more tests.

They could decide if he is fit to undergo experimental treatment on his brain condition.

She added: 'Our gorgeous baby boy is still stable. We are at his bedside and feel satisfied he is not suffering or in any pain.

'As Charlie's loving parents, we are doing the right thing for our son in exploring all treatment options.'

Dr Hirano, from the Columbia University Medical Center, is offering to try the experimental therapy.

It has never been tested on any human or animal.

The expert is at the forefront of researching Charlie's rare form of mitochondrial disease, and told the High Court last week there was a 'small but significant' chance of improvement.

But that was before two brain scans that the 11-month-old had on Sunday, his first since April.

He had an MRI scan and an electroencephalogram (EEG) to monitor brain activity for more than 30 minutes.

Neither the results, nor Dr Hirano's view of them, have been made public, but were central to yesterday's meeting of experts at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) in London.

Dr Hirano, the Rome doctor and Miss Yates were all hoping to convince GOSH doctors to let them try the treatment.

Charlie's parent said an electroencephalogram (EEG) should be carried out for no longer than 30 minutes.

Charlie's parents have waged a four-month legal battle to prevent GOSH removing his ventilator

But specialists said a scan would have to be carried out for at least four hours in order to generate useful data.

Mr Justice Francis has ruled in favour of Ormond Street doctors. He said the scan should 'be of such duration' as treating clinicians 'may advise'.

How does 'legal permanent residence' differ from 'citizenship'? Becoming a legal permanent resident is also known as getting your green card. You are not a US citizen but you have the right to live and work in the US permanently. In addition permanent resident status would guarantee a quick clearance through passport control and immigration, without the need for any formalities Advertisement

The dispute about the scan arose at the weekend, prior to the expert gathering.

Today Mr Justice Francis released the order he made after analysing emailed arguments from rival legal teams on Saturday.

The order gives an outline of the dispute and his decision.

But they faced a GOSH team including Charlie's consultant paediatric intensivist, consultant paediatric neurologist, and an expert in mitochondrial disease.

A GOSH spokesman said its position had not changed since last week, when it said Charlie had 'no quality of life and no real prospect of any quality of life'.

Last night Miss Yates said she and Charlie's father Chris Gard were 'so grateful to Dr Hirano and the other clinicians for coming to see Charlie'.

She added: 'Charlie will be having some more tests shortly.'

Miss Yates was allowed to attend the summit after convincing the High Court judge she should be there. It started at 7.30am and lasted until 1pm.

Mr Justice Francis is due to read a transcript of the meeting before the next hearing, likely to be this Friday.

Dr Michio Hirano is offering to try the experimental therapy

Charlie's parents have waged a four-month legal battle to prevent GOSH removing his ventilator. His condition means his lungs are too weak to function by themselves.

His parents say his condition is not this bad and provided the Daily Mail with a photo of him with his eyes open taken last Friday.

The High Court has said it would be kindest to let him 'slip away'. The Court of Appeal, Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights agreed.

Charlie has survived three decisions to withdraw his ventilator, but was saved each time by appeals by his parents and interventions from Pope Francis and Donald Trump. Then Dr Hirano and six fellow experts wrote to GOSH offering 'new evidence', and the High Court reconvened.

Mr Justice Francis will give his verdict next Monday or Tuesday.
Sir Nick Weller, pictured, the chief executive of Dixons Academies in Bradford, said legislation is needed to stop communities segregating themselves at school level

A leading headmaster has called for a new law to stop state schools in diverse areas being taken over by one faith or community.

Sir Nick Weller, the chief executive of Dixons Academies in Bradford, said legislation is needed to stop communities segregating themselves at school level.

He warned of the unhealthy situation in Bradford, where the Muslim and the white communities live separate lives and send their children to different schools.

His comments come more than 30 years after another headmaster, Ray Honeyford, was branded racist for raising concerns about community cohesion in the multicultural city.

He later lost his job  but many said he was at least partially vindicated when a government-commissioned report into the 2001 Bradford riots blamed shockingly divided communities.

Sir Nick, who runs eight academies in the city, told Radio 4s Today programme yesterday that diversity in schools is vital to helping communities interact.

He said: I think its unhealthy in a city like Bradford for two communities to live separate lives, which by and large they do. You could say Bradford is almost two communities  the Muslim community and the white community.

Families will ignore the school that is nearest them because it is predominantly of one  the wrong  ethnic group and they will send them a little bit further down the road to a school where they feel more comfortable.

He said there was a tipping point and that once a school has 70 to 80 per cent of pupils from one community, other families are put off sending their child there.

Sir Nick, who runs eight academies in the city, including Dixons Trinity Academy, pictured, said legislation is needed to stop communities segregating themselves at school level

Asked if the Government should legislate for the proportion from one community in any one school to be no more than 70 per cent, he said: I think that is the only answer myself, but the legal implications of that are quite high.

Currently, all new faith schools must recruit 50 per cent of pupils who do not belong to their religion  although the Government has consulted on scrapping this requirement.

Sir Nicks proposal goes further, suggesting existing faith and non-faith schools should also be made to recruit a diverse mix of pupils.

Yesterday Professor Ted Cantle, who produced the report into the Bradford riots in 2001, said: I do think it is a good idea.

Segregation is a disaster. We know that people who live in very excluded communities are more likely to fall prey to extremist points of view.

Oliver Lee, chief executive of integration charity The Challenge, said: It is hard to see how the Government could legislate on this, however local authorities and schools could do more to ensure their admissions policies encourage better school and community integration.

Bradford Councils executive member for education, Councillor Imran Khan, said: Bradford has led the way in helping to bring together children of different faiths and cultural backgrounds through the Schools Linking Project which links schools to allow pupils from different parts of the district to learn side by side.

Our schools also take part in a variety of work which promotes the importance of tolerance.

Echo of Honeyford row

Ray Honeyford was branded racist in 1984 after raising concerns about a lack of integration among migrant communities.

As head of Drummond Middle School in Bradford, where 90 per cent of pupils were non-white, he warned of a growing number of Asians whose aim is to preserve as intact as possible the values and attitudes of the Indian sub-continent within a framework of British social and political privilege, ie to produce Asian ghettoes.

He also criticised the linguistic confusion ... in which British-born Asian children begin their mastery of English by being taught in Urdu.

After a national outcry, Mr Honeyford retired early in 1985.
Labour refused last night to support a ban on people registering to vote in two constituencies as the row over electoral fraud grew.

Tory MPs called for a change in the law, which some students may have exploited to vote twice for Jeremy Corbyn.

Downing Street also intervened yesterday, with Theresa May saying that anyone who illegally voted twice should be reported to police. Her spokesman said it was vital the principles of democracy were upheld.

Tory MPs have called for a change in the law, which some students may have exploited to vote twice for Jeremy Corbyn

Election fraud: A Corbyn supporter took to Twitter to boast about voting twice

Despite this, police in Canterbury and Lincoln  two of the university towns where double voting is said to have taken place  revealed they were not investigating the issue.

It came amid claims that students were able to vote up to six times after taking polling cards of friends who did not intend to vote and pretending to be them.

An unnamed MP told the Daily Telegraph that they had heard students bragging that they had been able to vote for Mr Corbyn several times.

The row has led to calls for an outright ban on people registering to vote in more than one constituency  students can register at both their university residence and their home address.

Conservative MP Peter Bone vowed to introduce a Commons Bill on the issue.

Ex-Tory minister Sir Henry Bellingham also called for a ban, demanding students be prevented from registering in the seat where they live while at university.

But Cat Smith, Labour spokesman for voter engagement, refused to endorse the calls and claimed the Government should be cautious about any change that might deter people from voting.

Mr Bone accused Labour of a cynical attempt to get more votes. He said: Nobody doubts now that this happened so why wouldnt they want to take a very simple measure to stop it. Are they so undemocratic that they dont believe in one person, one vote?

Theresa May said that anyone who illegally voted twice should be reported to police. The row has led to calls for an outright ban on people registering to vote in more than one constituency

It is illegal to vote twice  the fine can be 5,000  but it is not illegal to register in more than one constituency

Yesterday, the Daily Mail revealed that thousands of students may have voted twice to try to put Mr Corbyn into Downing Street. It came after the Electoral Commission said it was investigating troubling evidence of illegality on polling day.

It is not against the law to register to vote in two or more constituencies, provided you vote in only one.

The electoral watchdog warned that a change in the law could be need to prevent the practice, which carries a minimum fine of 5,000. It has received more than 1,000 complaints from the public and 38 complaints from MPs. Mr Bone said thousands of students were suspected of voting twice.

They were targeted by Labour, who pledged to scrap tuition fees. It said a ban on registering in more than one constituency would be undemocratic and insisted the party had encouraged young people to vote.

Double voting is a serious crime and it is vital that the police have the resources they need to bring about prosecution, Miss Smith said. However, we urge caution when looking at measures to tackle this issue  a blanket ban on being registered at two addresses would exclude those who for reasons of work or study need to be registered in two places.

This cannot be an attempt to make it harder for young people to register.

Asked whether Mrs May believed anyone caught voting twice should be prosecuted, her official spokesman said: Yes. One person, one vote is a core principle of the democratic process in this country. If anyone has evidence of an individual voting twice, they should report it to the local returning officer and police.

An increase in the number of younger voters is thought to have fuelled the surge in support for Labour.

Nearly two million applied to vote after Mrs May called the snap election.
Kim Jong-un's firing squad carries out public executions in school yards as punishment for theft, prostitution and watching South Korean television, defectors have revealed.

Witnesses claim North Korean guards sometimes beat their victims to death because 'some crimes were considered not worth wasting bullets on'.

Executions also take place in marketplaces and on riverbanks for crimes as petty as stealing rice and copper, according to The Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG) based in Seoul.

Kim Jong-un's firing squad carries out public executions in school yards as punishment for theft, prostitution and watching South Korean television, defectors have revealed

Executions also take place in marketplaces and on riverbanks for crimes as petty as stealing rice and copper, according to The Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG) based in Seoul. A map produced by the group shows alleged killing sites and detention centres

The report, by the non-government group, said the often extra-judicial decisions for public executions are frequently influenced by 'bad' family background or a government campaign to discourage certain behaviour.

TJWG said its report was based on interviews with 375 North Korean defectors from the isolated state over a period of two years.

The group is made up of human rights activists and researchers and is led by Lee Younghwan, who has worked as an advocate for human rights in North Korea.

It receives most of its funding from the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy, which in turn is funded by the U.S. Congress.

The TJWG report aims to document the locations of public killings and mass burials, which it says had not been done previously, to support an international push to hold to account those who commit what it describes as crimes against humanity.

Sarah Son, research director of Transitional Justice Working Group, holds a graphic showing suspected killing sites in North Korea in a report compiled by the group

'The maps and the accompanying testimonies create a picture of the scale of the abuses that have taken place over decades,' the group said.

North Korea rejects charges of human rights abuses, saying its citizens enjoy protection under the constitution and accuses the United States of being the world's worst rights violator.

However, the North has faced an unprecedented push to hold the regime and its leader, Kim Jong Un, accountable for a wide range of rights abuses since a landmark 2014 report by a United Nations commission.

U.N. member countries urged the Security Council in 2014 to consider referring North Korea and its leader to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity, as alleged in a Commission of Inquiry report.

The commission detailed abuses including large prison camps, systematic torture, starvation and executions comparable to Nazi-era atrocities, and linked the activities to the North's leadership.

North Korea has rejected that inquiry's findings and the push to bring the North to a tribunal remains stalled due in part to objections by China and Russia, which hold veto powers at the U.N. Security Council.

The TJWG report aims to document the locations of public killings and mass burials, which it says had not been done previously. Officials in Pyongyang (pictured) deny charges of human rights abuses

TJWG said its project to map the locations of mass graves and executions has the potential to contribute to documentation that could back the push for accountability and future efforts to bring the North to justice.

It said executions are carried out in prison camps to incite fear and intimidation among potential escapees, and public executions are carried out for seemingly minor crimes, including the theft of farm produce such as corn and rice.

Stealing electric cables and other commodities from factories to sell them and distribution of South Korean-produced media are also subject to executions, which are most commonly administered by shooting, it said.

Testimonies also showed people can be beaten to death, with one interviewee saying: 'Some crimes were considered not worth wasting bullets on.'

Government officials were executed on corruption and espionage charges, and bureaucrats from other regions would be made to watch 'as a deterrence tactic', the report said.

Defectors from the North have previously testified to having witnessed public executions and rights abuses at detention facilities.
A funeral was held on Tuesday for a five-year-old Southern California boy whose father is charged with killing him after a trip to Disneyland.

Dozens of police officers lined the steps as pallbearers carried the small white coffin of Aramazd Andressian Jr into the Holy Family Roman Catholic Church in the Los Angeles suburb of South Pasadena.

The boy's mother, Ana Estevez, wept as she carried the boy's hat into church, where it was placed on the casket.

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Aramazd Andressian Jr's mother, Ana Estevez, holds her son's had as she walks into the five-year-old's funeral at Holy Family Catholic Church, in South Pasadena, California

Ahead of the start of the funeral on Tuesday, Estevez placed her young son's had on his casket at the front of the church

Pallbearers head to the hearse after Aramazd Andressian, Jr's funeral at Holy Family Roman Catholic Church

Los Angeles County sheriff's investigators have said they think Aramazd was killed early April 21 after a trip to Disneyland with his father. His body was found on June 30 near Lake Cachuma in Santa Barbara County

She read a statement praising her son as vibrant, sweet and kind.

'Your sensitive nature melted many hearts, your analytical and curious mind amazed many, your imagination took us both away on new adventures, your kindness and generosity was unparalleled to any child, and your ability to love unconditionally proved that you truly are God's child,' she said.

'I can't think of anything that is more tragic than an event like this,' South Pasadena police Sgt Matthew Ronnie told KABC-TV outside church before the service.

'This has touched everybody in our police department,' he added. 'There's not one person who's unaffected by this.'

The boy's father, Aramazd Andressian Sr, 35, has pleaded not guilty to murder.

The boy's father, Aramazd Andressian Sr, 35, has pleaded not guilty to murder. The boy's body was found in a lake on June 30, two months after his disappearance

During the funeral, Estevez spoke of her young son, praising the five-year-old as vibrant, sweet and kind

South Pasadena Police Chief Art Miller comforts Ana Estevez as they watch her son's coffin leave Holy Family Roman Catholic Church

Dozens of police officials attended young Aramazd's funeral on Tuesday, including Police Chief Art Miller and Los Angeles Sheriff Jim McDonnell

Investigators believe Andressian killed his son sometime after he was seen leaving Disneyland the morning of April 21

When Andressian Sr (left) appeared in court earlier this month, his defense attorney Ambrosio Rodriguez said that a blue smock his client wore during the arraignment was a suicide-prevention garment. Before finding the remains of the boy (right with his mom), authorities had twice previously searched the lake unsuccessfully, using dogs and a dive team

He was brought back to Los Angeles early this month from Las Vegas, where he had been living for more than a month.

Los Angeles County sheriff's investigators have said they think the boy was killed early April 21 after a family trip to Disneyland. His body was found on June 30 near Lake Cachuma in Santa Barbara County.

Prosecutors contend that the boy's father killed him to get back at his estranged wife.

Andressian Sr was found passed out in a South Pasadena park on April 22.

He had taken prescription pills and was found in a car doused in gasoline in an apparent suicide attempt, sheriff's officials said.

Andressian told authorities that he drove that day about 145 miles (233 kilometers) to Lake Cachuma.

Msgr Clement J Connolly, left, comforts mother Ana Estevez, middle, as she watches her son's small white casket being carried into Holy Family Catholic Church

Authorities haven't disclosed how the boy was killed or what evidence links the boy's father to his death.

An unidentified woman touches Aramazd Andressian Jr's coffin after his funeral at Holy Family Church in South Pasadena

Dozens of people dressed primarily in white, blue and black at young Aramazd's funeral on Tuesday

Before finding the remains of the boy, authorities had twice previously searched the lake unsuccessfully, using dogs and a dive team.

Authorities haven't disclosed how the boy was killed or what evidence links the boy's father to his death.

When Andressian Sr appeared in court earlier this month, his defense attorney Ambrosio Rodriguez said that a blue smock his client wore during the arraignment was a suicide-prevention garment and that he was being evaluated by a jail psychiatrist.

Andressian is 'in a state of shock', said the attorney at the time, who declined to answer questions about the case.

Detectives believe Andressian killed his son in an attempt to get back at his estranged wife for their 'tumultuous' relationship.

The boy's mother was scheduled to have a video chat with her son on April 20, but that never happened, said South Pasadena Police Chief Art Miller

Police began investigating after Andressian failed to drop the boy off with his mother that weekend

Andressian Sr was found passed out in a South Pasadena park on April 22. He had taken prescription pills and was found in a car doused in gasoline in an apparent suicide attempt, sheriff's officials said

Detectives believe Andressian killed his son in an attempt to get back at his estranged wife for their 'tumultuous' relationship

The couple were separated and had been sharing custody.

The boy was last seen by his mother who had a video chat with him on April 18 as he visited with his father.

The boy's mother was scheduled to have a video chat with her son on April 20, but that never happened, said South Pasadena Police Chief Art Miller.

Police began investigating after Andressian failed to drop the boy off with his mother that weekend.

'My heart is shattered and I will miss my son immensely each and every second of every day for the rest of my life,' the boy's mother, Ana Estevez, said in a statement released by the sheriff's department in June.

If convicted on the charges levied against him, Andressian Sr faces 25 years to life in prison.
A disabled five-year-old girl who depends on her $10,000 wheelchair to get around is stranded and homebound after heartless thieves stole it.

Her mother Margaret Mutambara woke up on Sunday morning to find her car, parked in the driveway of her Perth home, trashed and the wheelchair gone.

Mia Runakorwashe has Lobar Holoprosencephaly, a rare neurological condition which causes severe global development delay, along with diabetes insipidus and a cleft lip and palate.

Disabled five-year-old girl Mia Runakorwashe, who depends on her $10,000 wheelchair (pictured) to get around, is stranded and homebound after heartless thieves stole it

Her mother Margaret Mutambara woke up on Sunday morning to find her car, parked in the driveway of her Perth home, trashed and the wheelchair gone

The little girl can't even sit up unsupported and needs ankle-foot orthoses moulded around her legs and feet to walk even a few paces or stand up.

The single mother, originally from Zimbabwe, said losing the wheelchair made it very difficult for Mia to attend doctor and physiotherapy appointments and go to school.

'I am really shattered and appalled that someone would steal a wheelchair for a five-year-old, how can people be so selfish and cruel?' she told Daily Mail Australia.

'Only God knows why someone would do something like this.'

Mia has Lobar Holoprosencephaly, a rare neurological condition which causes severe global development delay, along with diabetes insipidus and a cleft lip and palate

Mia, who weighs just 15 kilograms, is regularly in hospital, needed to surgeries for broken hips in the past year, and endures frequent painful physiotherapy.

Her mother said losing the wheelchair made it very difficult for Mia to attend doctor and physiotherapy appointments and go to school

Ms Mutambara begged the thieves to bring back the vital mobility aid, and as a devout Christian said she would forgive them.

'You've taken away my Mia's ability to experience the world, please please bring back our wheelchair,' she said.

She believed the thieves struck at 4am when neighbours heard people rummaging through their mailboxes.

Ms Mutambara was not sure whether her car insurer or Australian disability funding would cover the $10,000 cost of a replacement wheelchair

Mia is regularly in Princess Margaret Hospital in Perth for treatment of her rare condition

A new wheelchair could take up to six months to arrive and she would have to hire one in the meantime

The Carlisle resident said she was not sure whether her car insurer or Australian disability funding would cover the $10,000 cost of a replacement wheelchair.

Even if it did, the chair would take up to six months to arrive and she would have to hire one in the meantime.

Ms Mutambara's single income is already stretched to breaking point with the high cost of therapies, equipment, medical expenses and medicines.

Mia with Sam Whitcomb of the Perth Lynx Women's National Basketball League team

Ms Mutambara begged the thieves to bring back the vital mobility aid, and as a devout Christian said she would forgive them

The little girl can't even sit up unsupported and needs ankle-foot orthoses moulded around her legs and feet (pictured) to walk even a few paces or stand up

Lobar Holoprosencephaly involves the brain failing to separate into two hemispheres and also comes with facial defects and causes seizures.

Mia, who weighs just 15 kilograms, is regularly in hospital, needed to surgeries for broken hips in the past year, and endures frequent painful physiotherapy.

Fortunately, friends and strangers have stumped up almost $5,000 in two days for a new stroller and hiring one in the meantime, through a GoFundMe page.

Ms Mutambara's single income is already stretched to breaking point with the high cost of therapies, equipment, medical expenses and medicines
Navy sailor has been shot dead by cops after she crashed her car into his and shot him outside a naval base.

India Nichole Nelson, 25, was killed outside a gate to Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia around 7pm on Monday, after she was in a car wreck with another vehicle driven by her husband and shot him.

The husband, who has not been publicly identified, was treated and released at a hospital.

Both he and his deceased wife are Navy sailors assigned to units based out of Naval Station Norfolk, military officials confirmed.

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Investigators are seen at the scene of a fatal police shooting in Virginia on Monday evening

Naval personnel helped secure the scene immediately outside of Naval Station Norfolk

Nelson, who was originally from New York and enlisted in 2015, was a nuclear technician assigned to the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Aircraft Carrier, whose home port is Norfolk, Navy spokesman Matthew Allen said.

The circumstances leading to the altercation and shooting are unclear, but police are calling the incident a domestic dispute.

The Norfolk Police Department said that when officers arrived to investigate the car crash Nelson fired on her husband with a gun and officers engaged her and returned fire, killing her.

Witnesses said that they saw a car spun out in the median and two people laying on the ground.

'There was someone else laying on the opposite side of the vehicle, also face down, that individual was also face down. They were both motionless,' one witness told WAVY.

The incident took place directly outside a gate of Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval station in world and home port to five US aircraft carrier strike groups.

Nelson, who was originally from New York and enlisted in 2015, was a nuclear technician assigned to the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Aircraft Carrier, which is seen in this file photo

Nelson's aunt, Carlyne Cardichon, told the Virginian-Pilot that she was an 'extremely brilliant' nuclear technician.

She said Nelson and her husband had been married for about two years.

The officers involved in the shooting have been placed on administrative duty per department policy.

Virginia State Police are investigating. Officials haven't released the names of the officers involved.

Norfolk police spokeswoman Jo Ann Hughes said the department doesn't release the races of officers or victims.
A convicted teenager who became a household name after shocking images emerged of him being placed in a spithood in a Darwin detention centre, has announced he will run in his upcoming council election.

Dylan Voller, 19, endured horrific abuse at the hands of guards at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre after he went on a 24-hour crime spree while high on ice in 2014.

Footage aired by Four Corners showed Voller shackled to a mechanical restraint chair by his hands, feet and neck in 2015.

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Dylan Voller is pictured in a spithood, restrained to a mechanical chair while in custody at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Darwin in 2015

Voller announced this week he would run in the 2017 Alice Springs Town Council elections to give more power to the youths of Central Australia

Voller announced this week he would run in the 2017 Alice Springs Town Council elections to give more power to the youths of Central Australia.

'I'm running for the election so I can get the voices of young people, who don't have much of a voice, out there' he told the NT News.

'I wouldn't be doing this for myself, I'd be doing it for everyone else in the community who doesn't have a voice.'

Footage aired by Four Corners showed Voller shackled to a mechanical restraint chair by his hands, feet and neck in 2015

Voller, who was in and out of detention from the age of 11, was also stripped naked on two occasions, thrown into his cell by his neck and kicked to the ground by a guard after refusing to end a phone call

Voller's ordeal at the youth detention centre prompted the Prime Minister to order a Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory

Voller, who was in and out of detention from the age of 11, was also stripped naked on two occasions, thrown into his cell by his neck and kicked to the ground by a guard after refusing to end a phone call.

His ordeal forced the Prime Minister to order a Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory.

Alice Springs Mayor Damien Ryan refused to comment on specific candidates but said the council would benefit from fresh, young members.

'There's a few young tradesmen who are going to stand for council  their life experience would be pretty damn good,' he told the NT News.

Former teen inmate Dylan Voller (centre) speaks outside the Northern Territory juvenile justice royal commission, Darwin, Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Voller (left and right) said he wanted to run for a position on the council to speak for those without a voice
A 16-year-old girl allegedly sexually assaulted as she walked home from a party was so traumatised from the horrific attack she didn't report it until a year later.

Victoria Police are calling for help to identify a man for questioning after a male allegedly pulled the young girl into the bush on Mount Eliza, on the Mornington Peninsula, and sexually assaulted her, while another man kept watch.

Detective Sen-Constable Laura Colley said the victim was so traumatised by the alleged attack she was unable to report the incident.

'The victim was really traumatised with the event so it took her over 12 month to report to the police. We have been working with the local community, but have come today to get the image out there,' Detective Sen Constable Colley said.

Police released computer-generated image (pictured) of the man they would like to question

The 16-year-old girl was walking down Old Mornington Road on the night

Police released a computer-generated image of a man they would like to question.

The victim was walking along Old Mornington Road between 11.30pm on May 7, 2016, to the early hours of May 8, when two males approached the 16-year-old.

After one of the males grabbed her by the arm, the young girl crossed the road, before one of the males allegedly pulled her into the bushes between Ti-Tree Lane and Williams Road.

The young girl was allegedly sexually assaulted by the male, while the other one stood by as a lookout.

Crime Stoppers Victoria General Manager Cathy Rhodes said the pain of the incident has traumatised the young woman.

'He has inflicted tremendous pain and suffering on an innocent young woman who should have been free to go about normally,' she said.

Victoria Police are calling for help to identify the alleged offenders (Stock Image)

Police are calling for anyone with information to come forward.

The male that allegedly assaulted her is described as being Caucasian, 18-19 years of age, he was wearing a black jacket or hoodie and a grey T-shirt underneath. He was wearing khaki shorts and black socks and black runners.

The other male is also Caucasian, with possibly darker skin tone, with a black hooded jacket or jumper with black runners.

Anyone with information please call Crime Stoppers via 1800 333 000 or crimestoppersvic.com.au
Jessica Rowe was slammed by her Studio 10 co-hosts after voicing her support for Senator Larissa Waters, who sensationally resigned on Tuesday over her dual Canadian citizenship.

The fiery exchange came as Rowe, who revealed she is a Greens supporter, said the party's former co-deputy leader simply 'made a mistake' and has done 'a lot of good'.

'What's she done apart from breastfeed her baby in the Senate?' guest panellist Steve Price interjected.

Rowe attempted to explain her position before Joe Hildebrand asked: 'But what has she done though?'

Jessica Rowe (right) was slammed by her Studio 10 co-hosts after voicing her support for Senator Larissa Waters, who sensationally resigned on Tuesday over her dual Canadian citizenship. 'What's she done apart from breastfeed her baby in the Senate?' Steve Price (left) asked

As tensions began to flare, Rowe said: 'Joe, don't be a smart a***,' to the gasps of the live studio audience.

'All we're asking is what has she done? You said she's done a lot,' a clearly agitated Hildebrand continued.

'Just tell us what she's done instead of attacking the question.'

Rowe responded: 'Sometimes it's very difficult to respond to a question when you sound like you're an expert on everything.

As tensions began to flare, Rowe said: 'Joe, don't be a smart a***,' to the gasps of the live studio audience

'Just tell us what she's done instead of attacking the question,' Hildebrand (pictured) said

'There's a whole lot of different views and sure, people believe in what you say, but then there are other views and sometimes it can be difficult to be a different voice.'

Senator Waters announced her resignation on Tuesday afternoon after 'discovering' she was still a Canadian citizen.

Fighting back tears, she apologised to her party and vowed to 'hold her head up high' amid the 'embarrassing revelation'.

'I left Canada as a baby and I had no idea I was a Canadian citizen... it was an honest mistake and I am deeply apologetic,' she said.

Hildebrand (pictured) was visibly agitated during the fiery exchange on Wednesday morning

Senator Larissa Waters became the first person to breastfeed a baby in parliament last month

She has never returned to Canada but she remains a citizen, ruling her ineligible to stand for election under section 44 of the constitution.

In a statement she released after making the announcement, Senator Waters said she had strived to 'speak for Queenslanders who want a fairer and cleaner world.'

'From being the first woman to breastfeed in federal parliament, to being part of stopping the dumping of dredge spoil on the Great Barrier Reef, overturning cuts to domestic violence services and keeping key environmental decision making powers in federal hands, I have relished every moment to make positive change as a Greens Senator,' she said.
A young man has admitted killing two much-loved mothers in a crash in Melbourne's north when he sped through a red light in an unregistered car at more than 130km/h, slamming into a vehicle containing the women.

Mohamad Hassan, 21, faced the Victorian County Court on Wednesday where he pleaded guilty to two counts of culpable driving causing the deaths of Bozica Nikolic, 57, and Subha Deumic, 62, in the crash at Attwood in June 2016.

Five daughters of Ms Nikolic and Ms Deumic delivered heart-wrenching victim impact statements in court, including one account from a woman who witnessed the collision from a following car.

Mohamad Hassan has admitted killing two much-loved mothers Subha Deumic (right) and Bozica Nikolic (left) in Attwood, north-west Melbourne last year

Hassan faced the Victorian County Court on Wednesday where he pleaded guilty to two counts of culpable driving causing the deaths of the women at Attwood in June 2016 (pictured)

Ms Deumic's daughters were driving in the car behind and watched on in horror as their mother's red Toyota sedan was flung across the road after being t-boned by Mr Hassan's black 1999 Mercedes Benz.

Ms Nikolic and Ms Deumic had been best friends for 30 years and were returning home after catching up over dinner.

Hassan, a Lebanese national, was said to have been driving the Mercedes with number plates from his uncle's Nissan Triton at the time of the crash.

Five daughters of Ms Nikolic (pictured) and Ms Deumic delivered heart-wrenching victim impact statements in court, including one account from a woman who witnessed the collision from a following car

Ms Deumic is pictured with her son Ermin, 32, before her tragic death

Detective Senior Constable Alexander Osmelak said dashcam footage showed the Mercedes speeding past another car before the crash, and afterwards the speedometer in the Mercedes was frozen at 130km/h.

Last year, Ms Nikolic's daughter Marina told 7 News of her heartache.

'Now I've lost my mum. She's not going to be there for when I get married, she's not going to be there to watch my sister grow up.

'[I'm] just not going to have a mum and that's going to be really hard.'
Aldi has withdrawn a line of cleaning wipes claiming to be 'flushable' after backlash from customers and the ACCC.

The German retailer stocks a range of Green Action flushable bathroom cleaning wipes its website and packaging said could be flushed after use.

Aldi Australia customers are kicking up a stink over the supermarket's claims that its cleaning wipes (pictured) can be flushed down the toilet

They were due to hit shelves on Wednesday but were withdrawn when the regulator raised concerns after Daily Mail Australia reported shoppers were outraged.

'We welcome ALDIs swift action in addressing our concerns,' ACCC Chairman Rod Sims said on Wednesday.

'The ACCC is also speaking with other industry players regarding similar products sold in Australia which make a "flushable" claim.'

Aldi said it was working with the regulator about its concerns with the wipes.

'While there is currently no Australian standard for flushability, this product has been tested to the EDINA and INDA International guidelines, passing flushability and biodegradability tests,' it said.

'While our discussions with the ACCC continue, we have decided not to sell this product. We apologise for any inconvenience caused to our customers. We hope to have clarity on the ACCCs position shortly.'

The ACCC launched court action in December against Kimberly-Clark Australia and Pental for making false or misleading claims by saying their products disintegrate as well as toilet paper.

Customers and water authorities say wipes like the ones Aldi is selling don't break up in water like toilet paper and clog up drains

In Sydney alone, 1,000 tonnes of wet wipes had to be removed from the wastewater system in the past two years

'The impression given by the representations which Kimberly-Clark and Pental each made about these products was that they were suitable to be flushed down household toilets in Australia, when this was not the case,' it said at the time.

Aldi's products made the same claim, despite water authorities saying the wipes did not break down and clogged drains which had to be expensively cleaned.

The supermarket's customers said the wipes promotion was misleading advertising and the products should not be sold on its shelves.

'Aldi - I love you most of the time but really... Green Action (ahem) 'Flushable' wipes on sale next week?!' one customer posted to Aldi's Facebook page.

'When will everyone realise that these things ARE NOT FLUSHABLE! Please don't help in harming the environment and our waste systems... get with the program!'

The German retailer stocks a range of Green Action flushable bathroom cleaning wipes its website and packaging said could be flushed, one at a time, after use

A few days later another social media user complained advertising the wipes as flushable was 'wrong'.

'They must not be flushed. It is misleading advertising. Sydney Water are constantly trying to stop the sale of flushable wipes and now you are making things worse!'

A survey found customers were easily influenced by the advertising as 73 per cent of consumers believed wet wipes wouldn't block drains.

A further 67 per cent thought it would break up like toilet paper, and according to Sydney Water a quarter of people flush wet wipes.

In Sydney alone, 1,000 tonnes of wet wipes had to be removed from the wastewater system in the past two years and they are blamed for about 75 per cent of all sewer blockages.

'Just because something is flushable doesn't mean it breaks down,' Sydney Water spokesman Peter Hadfield said.

'Technically my phone is flushable, but that doesn't mean it should go down the toilet.'

Wet wipes are are blamed for about 75 per cent of all sewer blockages

The ACCC launched court action against Kimberly-Clark Australia and Pental for making false or misleading claims by saying their products (pictured) disintegrate as well as toilet paper

Queensland Urban Utilities said fixing blockages cost it about $2.5 million a year, with wet wipes largely to blame.

Consumers themselves felt it too, with blocked and burst pipes costing up to $16,000 to fix - which plumbers like Darren Clancy vouched for.

'To call these flushable is insane... they're not breaking down and in some cases not even moving out of the pipes,' he told Choice.

'I've been doing this job for 30 years and wipes are now causing the worst blockages I've ever seen.'

Consumers themselves felt it too, with blocked and burst pipes costing up to $16,000 to fix - which plumbers like Darren Clancy vouched for

A survey found customers were easily influenced by the advertising as 73 per cent of consumers believed wet wipes wouldn't block drains

Choice tested 11 wet wipes claiming to be flushable for six hours in an agitator system that mimicked the environment of a waterway system.

Toilet paper broke up within minutes but the wet wipes remained intact apart from some tears.

Aldi's products were not among those tested and the supermarket insisted the new wipes met the INDA /EDANA Flushable Assessment (GD3 ) (FG501-FG507 ) and were biodegradable.

Consumers themselves felt it too, with blocked and burst pipes costing up to $16,000 to fix

Choice tested 11 wet wipes claiming to be flushable for six hours in an agitator system that mimicked the environment of a waterway system - and found wet wipes barely broke up

Its website also claimed they were eco-friendly and not harmful to the environment.

'Without compromising on performance and quality, we have restricted the use of harmful chemicals to limit our impact on the ecosystem,' it stated.

'More of the Green Action packaging is recyclable, reusable and made from sustainable materials to conserve natural resources.

'This offers peace of mind knowing you are using products that are less harmful to the environment.'
A severed pig's head in a bag emblazoned with a swastika was left outside of the Islamic College of Brisbane on Wednesday morning.

The bag, adorned with a swastika, was dropped at the front gates of the Brisbane school by a number of men, acting college chairman Ali Kadri told ABC radio.

He said footage of the incident, which happened just before 9am on Wednesday, also captured the number plate of the car they were driving, making him 'confident' police will catch the perpetrators.

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A pigs head in a bag emblazoned with a swastika was left outside of an Islamic College on Wednesday morning

Police confirmed they were investigating the incident after footage of people allegedly dropping the bag out of a car was viewed

The Chairman of the Islamic College of Brisbane posted on Facebook claiming the school was safe after police were investigating the incident.

'Someone left a pigs head in a backpack with a swastika at Islamic College of Brisbane this morning,' he wrote.

'Police is at it and we have a good footage of the car and the perpetrators. Queensland police's response to this hate crime is phenomenal and we don't believe there is any threat to safety of staff and kids.

'Right wing extremists including some politicians and shock jock who demonise Islamic schools are responsible for this.'

Islamic College of Brisbane (pictured) found a pig's head with a swastika on the bag outside

Police confirmed they were investigating the incident.

The school's chairman has blamed people like Pauline Hanson for the attack, saying they were 'demonising Muslims', according to AAP.

'The shock jocks and politicians are mainstream demonising Muslims and Islam,' he said on Wednesday.

'If ISIS is going to do propaganda and target Muslims to make them do stupid actions, I think people like ... Pauline Hanson are doing the same thing.

'They're the same kind of hate crimes. They have to take responsibility for what they say.'
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This is the secretive world of Japan's elite sumo wrestling where wrestlers eat 8,000 calories-a-day and wear oxygen masks while they nap.

Incredible photos have emerged from inside the Tomozuna sumo 'stable' in Nagoya, Japan, where 11 gigantic wrestlers wear only loincloths and take turns throwing each other out of a ring of sand.

The wrestlers, or 'rikishi', spend more than three hours each morning practising holds in Japan's 15-century-old national sport, with defeat facing the first to fall or be forced out of the ring.

Incredible photos have emerged from inside the Tomozuna sumo 'stable' in Nagoya, Japan, where 11 gigantic wrestlers wear only loincloths and take turns throwing each other out of a ring of sand

The wrestlers, or 'rikishi', spend more than three hours each morning practising holds in Japan's 15-century-old national sport

When they end practice at 10.30am, they sign autographs and pose for photos before the first of their two daily meals.

Lunch, prepared by the junior wrestlers, is a spread of pig's feet, grilled and deep-fried sardines, steamed rice, and 'chanko nabe' - a signature hot-pot dish associated with sumo wrestlers, who consume 8,000 calories a day.

The wrestlers nap for several hours immediately after eating, wearing oxygen masks to aid breathing.

Reuters documented the daily life of the wrestlers at their Buddhist temple base for the Nagoya Grand Sumo Tournament that began last week.

Reuters documented the daily life of the wrestlers at their Buddhist temple base for the Nagoya Grand Sumo Tournament that began last week

Mongolian-born Tomozuna Oyakata, or master of the Tomozuna stable (L), attends his wrestlers' training session at Ganjoji Yakushido temple in Nagoya, Japan

When they end practice at 10.30am, they sign autographs and pose for photos before the first of their two daily meals

Mongolian-born Tomozuna Oyakata, or master of the Tomozuna stable, attends his wrestlers' training session at Ganjoji Yakushido temple in Nagoya

Lunch, prepared by the junior wrestlers, is a spread of pig's feet, grilled and deep-fried sardines, steamed rice, and 'chanko nabe' - a signature hot-pot dish associated with sumo wrestlers, who consume 8,000 calories a day

Entering the world of sumo is to eat, live, and breathe Japanese - from the samurai-style topknots to the rigid hierarchy.

But the tough training and tradition-bound ways have put off many Japanese youth, leaving sumo to be dominated by foreign - mostly Mongolian - wrestlers, who face a gruelling path to assimilation.

'Language was the biggest source of stress,' said Tomozuna Oyakata, better known by his fighting name Kyokutenho, the first Mongolian-born wrestler to lead a sumo stable.

'I couldn't understand anything when I was being scolded, or even when I was being praised,' said the master, one of the first six Mongolians to be inducted into the sport in 1992.

Entering the world of sumo is to eat, live, and breathe Japanese - from the samurai-style topknots to the rigid hierarchy

razilian-born sumo wrestler Kaisei (L), and Mongolian-born sumo wrestler Kyokushuho tape up during training session at Ganjoji Yakushido temple

Sumo wrestler Kaiho stands on a sumo ring as he prepares for a training session at Ganjoji Yakushido temple in Nagoya, Japan

Mongolian-born Tomozuna Oyakata (3rd L), or master of the Tomozuna stable, and his wrestlers eat a meal inside the main hall of Ganjoji Yakushido temple

Today, the one-time champion, who was born Nyamjavyn Tsevegnyam, speaks near-flawless Japanese, has a Japanese wife, and has given up his Mongolian nationality to become Japanese - a requirement to become a sumo master, or 'oyakata'.

Full assimilation into Japanese culture means that foreign wrestlers face no ill-will.

'We wear our topknots, kimonos and sandals, and live by Japanese rules, and the rules of sumo,' said Tomozuna Oyakata.

'It's only by chance that we were born a different nationality.'

Sumo wrestler Kainishiki returns to training at Ganjoji Yakushido temple in Nagoya, Japan

Sumo wrestler Kyokutaisei poses for a photograph with a baby after their training session at Ganjoji Yakushido temple in Nagoya

Sumo wrestler Kainoryu (R) plays with kindergarten children at the temple in Nagoya, Japan where the tournament began last week

Mongolian-born Tomozuna Oyakata, or master of the Tomozuna stable, signs autographs for fans after a training session at Ganjoji
Since his father's surprising victory over Hillary Clinton last year, Donald Trump Jr has had a hard time adapting to life after the election, according to his close friends.

A friend of the Trump brothers told People that they hate their role as First Sons. The insider told the magazine: 'Eric and Don, they never wanted this.'

Another source in the family's circle echoed similar sentiments. 'Don can't do any deals, because he'll be overly scrutinized. He just goes to work every day and is miserable.'

'You can't bite the hand that feeds you, but he [Don Jr] can't wait for these four years to be over,' the source added.

Since his father's surprising victory over Hillary Clinton last year, Donald Trump Jr has had a hard time adapting to life after the election, according to his close friends

A source in the family's circle said: 'He just goes to work every day and is miserable.' Another source added that Trump Jr 'can't wait for these four years to be over'. Trump Jr is pictured with his father in October 2016

Trump Jr has now hired a crisis PR firm and it issued a statement accusing people of 'fake news'.

'Yet another sad example of "fake news",' a spokesman for Don Jr said.

'Anyone who actually knows Don knows that the claims made in this article by their unnamed sources are simply false.'

According to People, Trump Jr escapes the political world and the work of running the family business in New York by using his weekends to hunt and fish when the time permits.

Oftentimes he will travel to a cabin upstate with his wife, Vanessa, and their five children.

He is also a regular at the Riverside Cafe in Roscoe, New York. The manager of the cafe told People that Trump Jr is 'good people,' who doesn't seek attention.

And it's probably about time for one of those escapes seeing as Trump Jr has come under fire within the past two weeks over a 2016 meeting where he was promised dirt on Clinton.

Trump Jr admitted to meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya on June 9, 2016, at his father's building in Manhattan.

The meeting was also attended by then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump's son-in-law and trusted adviser Jared Kushner, former Soviet counterintelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshi, and others, according to reports.

Trump Jr was told in an email ahead of the meeting that Veselnitskaya could provide him with information that would damage Clinton's campaign, and that the Russian government was in some way involved in the alleged 'dirt'.

On July 11, Trump Jr dramatically published the email which shows how a shadowy PR got him to meet a Russian lawyer with the offer of 'incriminating' foreign government information about Hillary Clinton.

The claims of juicy information by way of Moscow appeared to enthrall the president's eldest son, according to the email.

'If it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer,' Trump Jr responded, referencing the high-impact portion of the campaign when voters tend to focus on the election.

News of Trump Jr not adapting well to life after the election comes as it was revealed he had a meeting where he was promised dirt on Clinton in 2016 with with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya

In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, also on July 11, Trump Jr even said: 'In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently.'

That statement alone caused his friends to pay closer attention to the president's eldest son.

'Those are not words normally heard from a Trump,' a source told People.

Despite the president standing up for his son, sources said he 'doesn't like failure and mistakes, and he doesn't accept them'.

And whatever his personal and legal predicament, Trump Jr will remain loyal to his father, his friends told People.

'The loyalty within this family is insane,' said a family friend close to Trump Jr and Eric. 'They would never speak against their dad.'
The stepdaughter of a doctor recently charged in the overdose deaths of seven patients has been found murdered floating in a lake.

Mikayla M. Mitchell, 17, was found dead in a Dallas park on Sunday, less than a week after her step-dad Howard Gregg Diamond, 56, was arrested on federal charges in a prescription drug fraud case.

Diamond's lawyer, Peter Schulte, said in a statement that 'there is no connection' between his client's charges and the girl's death, calling the media 'ruthless' for seeking any links.

Mikayla was found dead near William Blair Jr. Park at around 11.40am on Sunday and was the victim of homicidal violence, police said without releasing any further details.

But a family friend, Sunshine Grigg, told Fox4 News that investigators had informed the family that Mikayla's body was found dismembered with signs of torture.

Mikayla M. Mitchell (left) was found dead in a Dallas park on Sunday, less than a week after her step-dad Howard Gregg Diamond (right) was arrested in a prescription drug fraud case

A family friend said that Mikayla (pictured) had recently fallen in with some 'bad news' boys

Mikayla's body was found in this small lake. A family friend said her body had been dismembered and showed signs of gruesome torture

Mikayla is seen in Facebook photos. Police have not identified any suspects in the case, however, and are seeking information from the public

Grigg said the teen girl had been hanging out with some 'bad news' boys she met through Facebook and recently ran away from home to stay with them in Abilene, which is over 180 miles from Dallas.

Police have not identified any suspects in the case, however, and are seeking information from the public.

The girl's gruesome death comes just days after her step-father was charged on June 11 on a number of counts including conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and health care fraud.

Prosecutors contend that Diamond began issuing prescriptions in 2010 that had no legitimate medical purpose. The prescriptions were for drugs such as fentanyl, hydrocodone and morphine, according to the indictment.

Authorities say the overdose deaths occurred in the Texas cities of Abilene, McKinney and Sulphur Springs, and in the Oklahoma cities of Ardmore, Hugo, Idabel and Yukon.

Diamond's lawyer says there is absolutely no connection between his client's charges and Mikayla' gruesome murder. Police have no suspects in the homicide yet

In each case, the seven people died within a month of filling the prescription provided by Diamond, the indictment states. One person filled a prescription for methadone in May 2013 and was dead two days later.

In another instance, a woman only identified in the indictment by the initials T.H. filled a prescription in July 2014 for alprazolam, morphine, oxycodone and zolpidem. She died 10 days after receiving the drugs.

Diamond, who is based in Sherman, about 60 miles (97 kilometers) north of Dallas, pleaded not guilty to the charges

Diamond also is accused of defrauding Medicare of tens of thousands of dollars by filing false claims and through other means.

He is currently in federal custody.

A $5,000 reward is offered for information leading to an arrest in Mikayla's murder. Anyone with information is urged to contact CrimeStoppers anonymously at 214-373-8477.
A Melbourne man handed himself in to police after allegedly drowning his partner while they were both in the bath.

Murat Davsanoglu, 42, faced Melbourne Magistrates' Court on Wednesday, charged with the murder of young mother Ozlem Karakoc, 34.

A solicitor contacted homicide detectives on Monday night to say Davsanoglu wanted to hand himself in after police had issued a missing persons alert for the pair earlier that day, court documents said.

Melbourne mother Ozlem Karakoc was found dead in a home in the city's north on Tuesday

The woman's partner Murat Davsanoglu appeared in court on Tuesday charged with murder

Davsanoglu told investigators the two had a suicide pact, and he attended Ms Karakoc's home at Dandenong on Friday night, where the two got into the bath together.

It is alleged Davsanoglu used his full body weight to drown Ms Karakoc as she struggled against him at that home in Melbourne's south-east.

After her death, Davsanoglu put Ms Karakoc's body in the boot of his Ford Falcon and drove toward regional Mildura, where he planned to dump her body, it is further alleged.

However, he instead returned to Melbourne and is accused of placing her, wrapped in a blanket, in an empty garage at a home in suburban Lalor, in Melbourne's north.

Davsanoglu appeared briefly in court on Tuesday night and again on Wednesday morning, when he did not apply for bail.

He was remanded in custody to reappear before the court on November 29.

Ozlem Karakoc's relatives posted fond memories of her on social media as her partner faced court charged with her murder.

Her body was found in at Lalor, in Melbourne's north, early on Tuesday morning.

Ozlem Karakoc was remembered as a caring mother and a shoulder to cry on by her cousin

The deceased woman's cousin Seren Ozerkan posted a Facebook tribute to her loved one

The dead woman's cousin Seren Ozerkan has promised to look after her daughter.

'Words can't explain how much I miss you, you always left your shoulder for me to cry on whenever I had problems,' she wrote on Facebook.

'I promise I'll always be by your beautiful daughter's side. I will always stand up and support her just like you. I feel so lost, I feel so speechless.'

Another cousin, Sinem Ozerkan, said she would look after Ms Karakoc's young daughter.

'You left us too soon, you left your little angel Sevim. Don't worry... we will take care of your daughter, we will look after her.. I promise.. Fly high my angel,' she wrote.

Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467.
The younger brother of accused Bourke St rampage attacker Dimitrious Gargasoulas has faced court on fresh allegations he assaulted a woman while armed with a knife.

Angelo Gargasoulas trespassed at an address in Carlton, Melbourne, and assaulted a woman who is known to him with a knife on Saturday, police documents allege.

The 26-year-old was charged with eight offences including possession of a weapon, possessing drug ice, unlawful assault with a knife, trespass and property damage.

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Angelo Gargasoulas (pictured) trespassed at an address in Carlton, Melbourne, and assaulted a woman who is known to him with a knife on Saturday, police documents allege

Angelo is the younger brother of accused Bourke St rampage attacker Dimitrious Gargasoulas (pictured) who mowed down dozens of people in Melbourne's CBD last year in a maroon sedan

He allegedly sped through the city ramming pedestrians as he went, leaving six dead and at least thirty injured

Gargasoulas' last appeared in court in February this year sporting injuries he suffered after allegedly being stabbed by his brother on the morning of the Bourke St attack.

Dimitrious 'Jimmy' Gargasoulas allegedly mowed down pedestrians through the mall in Melbourne's CBD on January 20, 2017.

Driving a maroon sedan, he allegedly sped through the city ramming pedestrians as he went, leaving six dead and at least thirty injured.

Angelo was charged after allegedly damaging a $500 glass door and a $100 mobile phone, on the same day as the weekend's alleged assault .

He made no application for bail during a brief hearing in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court on Wednesday.

Angelo was remanded into custody, with his case to be mentioned again in October.

Angelo made no application for bail during his brief hearing on Wednesday in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court and was remanded into custody to be mentioned again in October

Mourners left thousands of bunches of flowers in Bourke St mall in the days after the attack

Earlier this year he fronted court with a large bandage on his arm, just days after he was released from hospital.

He faced several charges unrelated charges including property damage and assault.

The damaged property charge relates to an incident on December 18 when it is alleged broke some plates valued at $100.
A mother put her bruised eight-week-old daughter to bed, having decided to take her to a hospital in the morning, but within hours she was limp, discoloured and struggling to breathe.

'My baby's not breathing,' the mother was heard saying in a triple zero call played at the NSW Supreme Court in Darlinghurst on Wednesday.

Despite attempts to revive the newborn, she was pronounced dead in hospital on August 12, 2014.

Her father, who can't be named for legal reasons, has pleaded not guilty to murdering the newborn at a Regents Park home, in Sydney's west.

A mother put her bruised eight-week-old daughter to bed, having decided to take her to a hospital in the morning, but within hours she was limp, discoloured and struggling to breathe (stock image)

The baby's grandmother said she came home on the afternoon of August 11 and saw 'a little bit of bruise' on the newborn's head.

'I asked what's wrong with her,' she said.

'My daughter said to me 'I don't really know but I think (a sibling) hurt her.'

The baby was breathing normally so the mother resolved to take her to hospital in the morning.

But before 5am the grandmother was woken up by her daughter who said, 'mum, baby's not breathing properly.'

In a seven-minute-long phone call to triple zero, the mother can be heard repeatedly giving the newborn CPR until paramedics arrive.

The man, who can't be named for legal reasons, has pleaded not guilty to murdering the premature newborn (Supreme Court Sydney pictured)

'She's going blue,' the mother says.

'Don't stop, okay, don't stop,' a man giving CPR instructions says.

At Westmead Children's Hospital, where the baby was pronounced dead, police officers noticed bruising on her face and head.

Detective Senior Constable Scott Ford asked the mother what had happened.

'She said (the baby) had gone to sleep but through the night she noticed (her) breathing was difficult and (she) was limp when picked up,' he said.

She told him the baby had also become discoloured.

The court earlier heard the baby's father had told the mother that their toddler gave the newborn a black eye when he hit her with a hairbrush.

But in his opening address on Tuesday, the man's lawyer Hugh White said the man told police 'he accidentally dropped (the baby) on the floor which he now believes caused the fatal blow to her head.'

The trial continues.
The plastic core of the cladding used on Grenfell Tower burned as quickly as petrol and was 14 times above the Government's combustibility limit, it was revealed today.

The energy from the burning building would have been equal to burning 51 tonnes of pinewood, a top fire safety expert has said.

Dr Roth Phylaktou, an expert in fire investigation at the University of Leeds, said the aluminium panels combined with insulation was 'optimum for vertical fire spread'.

His conclusion appears to be the most damning evidence yet that the tinder box cladding surrounding Grenfell Tower turned it into a deathtrap.

Grenfell Tower's cladding would have ignoted like petrol, it emerged today, and the tragedy has led to widespread fears over the state of Britain's tower blocks

Dr Phylaktou told the BBC: 'If you set that on fire near the bottom you can imagine what would happen and how fast the fire will grow.'

Before the blaze Grenfell Tower had been recently refurbished with Reynobond PE cladding, consisting of Reynolux-coated aluminium sheets over a Reynobond polyethylene core.

Dr Phylaktou said: 'The polyethylene in the cladding would have burnt as quickly as petrol.'

The BBC said it had seen information released by French authorities which indicates the burning cladding would have released 14 times more heat than a European standard of 'limited combustibility'.

All buildings over 18 metres which have submitted cladding samples have failed combustibility tests rolled out after the fire, the Department for Communities and Local Government said yesterday.

Around 80 people died last month after a raging fire spread through the tower block in North Kensington, West London.

Attention has been focused on the flammable cladding panels on the high-rise block which caught light and spread the flames rapidly. Similar panels are being taken down from tower blocks across the country after failing fire safety tests.

Cladding strapped to the outside of the building helped the fire spread and would have been equal to burning 51 tonnes of pinewood

Materials have since been removed from blocks around the UK after hundreds failed test after test

An investigation by Channel 4 News has also raised questions about recent refurbishment work on the Grenfell building.

Evidence has emerged that smoke and fire may have spread via an air gap between newly installed windows and the buildings original walls.

Channel 4 said detailed planning drawings showed an air gap that may have enhanced the spread of fire. One resident photographed smoke coming through the side of the windows, which he said was very scary.

In his proposed class-action Mr Brave is seeking to recoup significant losses caused by the drop in Arconics share price in the wake of the tragedy.

The price fell by 21 per cent between June 14  the day of the fire  and June 27, although it has since recovered slightly.

This drop reduced Pennsylvania-based Arconics market value by around 1.9billion. Mr Brave also named chief financial officer Kenneth Giacobbe and former chief executive Klaus Kleinfeld as defendants.

Other shareholders may now join the action to sue as a group. Mr Brave said shareholders were deceived by Arconics inadequate disclosures about the cladding panels, and that their use significantly increased the risk of property damage, injury or death in buildings containing them.

He said Arconics public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times. Arconic has stopped selling the Reynobond PE cladding for use in high rise buildings anywhere in the world.

An earlier company statement said: Current regulations within the US, Europe and the UK permit the use of aluminum composite material in various architectural applications, including in high-rise buildings depending on the cladding system and overall building design.

Our product is one component in the overall cladding system; we dont control the overall system or its compliance.
Two children have been pricked by a syringe needle which was hidden under a rail at a Melbourne supermarket.

Victoria Police are investigating after two children were pricked by the needle in separate incidents at the deli section of Coles at Broadmeadows, in Melbourne's north on Monday.

The first child discovered the syringe at 1.30pm hidden under a rail at the supermarket.

Two children have been pricked by a syringe needle which was hidden under a rail at a Melbourne supermarket

When the second child was pierced about an hour later, their mother discovered the syringe and alerted the authorities.

Police could not release the ages of the children due to an ongoing investigation.

The police described the syringe as 'malicious', suggesting it might have been hidden with intent to cause harm.

In a statement released on Wednesday Coles said it was 'working with police to investigate' the incident.

Victoria Police are investigating after two children were pricked by the needle in the deli section of Coles at Broadmeadows, in Melbourne's north on Monday

In a statement released on Wednesday Coles said it was 'working with police to investigate' the incident

'Our thoughts are with the customers affected by this event and their families,' it said.

'Out of respect for the privacy of the customers involved, we cannot comment further at this time.'

Victoria Police have appealed to anyone who might have seen suspicious activity in the vicinity of the deli section of the Pascoe Vale Road supermarket on Monday to phone Crime Stoppers.
Two males and one female have been arrested in connection with the murder of a young mother who was found dead on the side of a road.

Jennifer Raven Nevin, 23, was found dead around noon on Monday in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, spurring investigators to swiftly arrest and charge the three suspects, including one teen, in the murder.

Charged with murder are Koran Rashad Lewis, 23, Vida Milagros Confetti Duena, 20, and Kendrick Ky'Andre Marshall, 16, who can be charged as an adult under Alabama law.

Killed: Jennifer Raven Nevin, 23, was found dead on Monday in Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Charged: (left to right) Koran Rashad Lewis, 23, Vida Milagros Confetti Duena, 20, and Kendrick Ky'Andre Marshall, 16 are charged with murder

Nevin had her own home and ran a residential cleaning service, her brother said

Jennifer Nevin was the mother of a five-year-old boy, and was last seen on Friday when her mother picked the child up

The three suspects were arrested swiftly and are seen being perp-walked before the press

A natural gas worker checking on a well head found Nevin dead off the side of the road at Watermelon Road and Phelps Road, police said.

That's about 20 miles from where Nevin lived near Shelton State Community College, her brother told AL.com.

Brother Will Nevin said his sister ran her own residential cleaning service and noted that she had suffered from mental health and drug abuse issues.

Marshall can be charged with murder as an adult under Alabama law, although he is 16

Vida Milagros Confetti Duena is seen in custody. Investigators have yet to reveal how they linked the three suspects to the crime, but the arrests came within hours of finding Nevin

Koran Rashad Lewis, 23, is the oldest of the three suspects arrested in Nevin's murder

'On her good days, she was beautiful and creative. She had a thousand questions about everything. She was smart,' her brother said. 'But she had her not good days, and this weekend was a string of them.'

Jennifer Nevin was the mother of a five-year-old boy, and was last seen on Friday when she picked him up.

Investigators have not announced a cause of death, but said that it did not appear that Nevin had been dead for long when her body was discovered uncovered by a worker checking a gas well nearby.

Lewis and Marshall are being held pending $150,000 bail, and Confetti's bail has been set at $100,00.
A staffer for former Greens senator Larissa Waters denied she was a dual Canadian citizen 14 months before she quit parliament in dramatic circumstances, it has been claimed.

The Australian Greens lost their second $200,000-a-year senator in less than a week on Tuesday afternoon when Ms Waters announced she had just discovered she was still officially Canadian.

A staffer for the former lawyer, who turned 40 in February, denied she was a dual citizen when Queensland blogger Tony Magrathea contacted her office in May 2016, he claims.

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Greened: Larissa Waters fought back tears as she announced her resignation from the Senate

A staffer to Larissa Waters told blogger Tony Magrathea in May 2016 her boss wasn't Canadian, according to this message

Larissa Waters' office (pictured with her staff in Canberra) maintained she only had Australian citizenship

The senator's staff member, Catherine Garner, is believed to have tweeted back to him: 'Hi Tony, Senator Waters was born in Canada but has never been a Canadian citizen.'

Tshung Chang, a ratings analyst who ran as a One Nation candidate in Western Australia earlier this year, has looked into renouncing his dual Malaysian citizenship so he can run as a federal candidate.

The 44-year-old Perth businessman said Ms Waters could simply have visited a Canadian consulate office in Australia to renounce her dual citizenship.

'She would only have taken about five minutes to ring the Canadian consul to check that she's still on the register and she could have done that back then when members of the public were alerting her to it,' he told Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday.

Malaysian-born former One Nation candidate Tshung Chang says Larissa Waters could have visited a Canadian consulate and waited five minutes for an answer

Perth ratings analyst Tshung Chang called on Larissa Waters to declare her citizenship days before she resigned from parliament for having an official allegiance to Canada

'You can go to any consulate, it's just for Commonwealth countries.

'If you think you could be a citizen, especially if you have a birth certificate, you go in there and ask them, 'Look, am I still a citizen?' and they can tell you if you are still on the books.'

Mr Chang challenged Ms Waters to come clean on her Canadian citizenship on Saturday, three days before she resigned from parliament, where she had illegitimately been a Greens senator for Queensland since July 2011 on an annual $200,000 salary.

When he received no reply on Twitter, he appealed on Monday for immigration lawyers to look into her citizenship. She resigned the next day, becoming the second Greens senator and co-deputy leader to quit parliament in less than a week.

One Nation learnt a painful lesson after the 1998 federal election when Heather Hill, a dual British citizen, was elected as a senator for Queensland only to be declared invalid by the High Court in June 1999.

The party has since required every federal candidate to declare they aren't a dual citizen.

Eighteen years later, Ms Waters has resigned as a senator for Queensland for also breaching Section 44 of the Constitution, only days after her Greens Senate colleague Scott Ludlam quit for being a dual New Zealand citizen.

Ms Waters had moved from Canada to Australia when she was 11 months old.

'It's with great sadness I have discovered I am a dual citizen and I will be forced to stand down,' she told reporters in her home city of Brisbane on Tuesday.

Fighting back tears, she apologised to her party and vowed to 'hold her head up high' amid the 'embarrassing revelation'.

The Greens co-deputy leader is seen arriving with her partner Jeremy Gates and their daughter Alia Joy to make the shock announcement

She arrives with her partner and their daughter, flanked by Greens Brisbane City Councillor Jonathan Sri

'I left Canada as a baby and I had no idea I was a Canadian citizen... it was an honest mistake and I am deeply apologetic,' she said.

She has never returned to Canada but she remained a citizen.

Senator Waters said her parents told her she had until the age of 21 to actively seek Canadian citizenship.

'At 21, I chose not to seek dual citizenship, and I have never even visited Canada since leaving at 11 months old,' she said in a statement.

'However, after Scott [Ludlam's] shock discovery, I immediately sought legal advice, and was devastated to learn that because of 70-year-old Canadian laws I had been a dual citizen from birth, and that Canadian law changed a week after I was born and required me to have actively renounce Canadian citizenship.'

'I left Canada as a baby and I had no idea I was a Canadian citizen... it was an honest mistake and I am deeply apologetic,' she said

Senator Waters said her parents told her she had until the age of 21 to actively seek Canadian citizenship

'It's with great sadness I have discovered I am a dual citizen and I will be forced to stand down,' she said, with Greens Councillor Jonathan Sri by her side

Senator Waters said she had not renounced her citizenship because she was unaware she was a dual citizen.

'This is something that I should have sought advice on when I first nominated for the Senate in 2007, and I take full responsibility for this grave mistake and oversight,' she said.

'I am deeply sorry for the impact that it will have.'

Greens leader Richard Di Natale was 'gutted' by the announcement, reiterating it was an innocent mistake.

'Larissa acted quickly, as soon as she knew about it, and she has paid a high price for this,' he said.

Senator Waters would be welcomed back to parliament with open arms if she decided to stand for re-election, Senator Di Natale said.

In the meantime, he confirmed the party's co-convenors will conduct a thorough 'root and branch' review to make sure it never happens again.

'It was a stuff-up,' he said.

Senator Waters said the party will now review its processes but stressed the Greens weren't to blame.

Senator Larissa Waters' partner Jeremy Gates and their daughter Alia Joy watch her as she announces her resignation

Senator Waters had not renounced her citizenship because she was unaware she was a dual citizen

Senator Waters said the party will now review its processes but stressed the Greens weren't to blame

The matter will be referred to the High Court, sitting as the Court of Disputed Returns, which will likely order a recount of the 2016 election ballot papers.

Former senator and Democrats leader Andrew Bartlett is set to take her place in the Senate, having been second on the Greens' ticket in last year's double-dissolution election.

Mr Bartlett sat in parliament from 1997 to 2008.

He quit as Democrats leader in 2003 after female Liberal senator Jeannie Ferris claimed he had injured her arm during an altercation at Parliament House over an allegation he had stolen wine from a Liberal Party Christmas function.

'[Mr Bartlett is] a dear friend of mine, a wonderful human being and an excellent politician,' Senator Waters said.

The party's co-deputy leader, who is from Queensland but was born in Canada, made the shock announcement on Tuesday afternoon

Fighting back tears, she apologised to her party and vowed to 'hold her head up high' amid the 'embarrassing revelation'. Pictured, she kisses her daughter in the Senate Chamber at Parliament House

Australian Greens senator Scott Ludlam announced his resignation over his dual citizenship with New Zealand last week

'I apologise unreservedly for this mistake,' Scott Ludlam (pictured) said in a statement last week

The announcement follows the resignation of West Australian Greens senator Scott Ludlam last week when it was discovered he held dual citizenship with New Zealand.

Senator Ludlam labelled it a 'ridiculous oversight'.

'I apologise unreservedly for this mistake,' he said in a statement last week.

'This was my error, something I should have checked when I first nominated for preselection in 2006.'

Senator Ludlam was born in Palmerston North in New Zealand and left the country with his family when he was three.

DISAPPEARING SENATORS OF THE 45TH PARLIAMENT Larissa Waters (Qld, Greens): Born in Canada and resigned in July 2017 after revealing she still had dual citizenship - in breach of the constitution. Elected to the Senate in 2010. Scott Ludlam (WA, Greens): Born in New Zealand and resigned in July 2017 after discovering he was still a dual citizen, ruling him ineligible to stand for election. The party's co-deputy leader was naturalised as a teenager in Australia, and had been in the Senate since 2007. Rod Culleton (WA, One Nation turned independent): Booted from the Senate in January 2017 after the High Court ruled he wasn't validly elected because he had been convicted of a larceny charge at the time of voting - even though it was later quashed. The Federal Court also declared him a bankrupt, which would also have disqualified him from sitting in parliament. Elected July 2016. Bob Day (SA, Family First): Resigned in November 2016 before the High Court determined he had been improperly elected. It found the South Australian indirectly benefited from a government lease arrangement on his Adelaide electorate office, in breach of the constitution. Advertisement

Greens leader Richard Di Natale (centre) was 'gutted' by the announcement, saying parliament and the nation were worse off. Senator Ludlam (right) and Senator Waters (left) have both been forced to resign

'Larissa has unfinished business and I know she won't back away from it, be it inside or outside the parliament,' Senator Di Natale tweeted

Senator Larissa Waters is pictured during a vote on GST on tampons in the Senate chamber at Parliament House in Canberra last month

Senator Waters made international headlines last month after becoming the first mother to breastfeed a baby in parliament

He settled in Australia not long before his ninth birthday, before being naturalised when he was in his mid-teens.

'(I) assumed that was the end of my New Zealand citizenship,' he said.

'It is entirely my responsibility - it wasn't the way I was hoping to go out.'

Two other Greens senators, Peter Whish-Wilson and Nick McKim, were also born overseas - in Singapore and the UK respectively.

Senator Di Natale has been assured they are both eligible to sit in parliament.

Senator Waters made international headlines last month after becoming the first mother to breastfeed a baby in parliament.
A Melbourne local council will be stripped of its right to hold citizenship ceremonies if it moves them from Australia Day.

Darebin Council, in Melbourne's northern suburbs, is considering moving the ceremonies from January 26 out of respect for Aboriginals.

The council sent a survey to its advisory committee asking if the date should be changed and an event acknowledging indigenous Australian suffering held instead.

Australia Day could be moved from the traditional date of January 26, after councils across the country called for it to be changed because of it marks the arrival of the first fleet from England

A national meeting of 560 local councils saw a plan formed to lobby the government to switch Australia Day

But Assistant Immigration Minister Alex Hawke sent the council a strongly worded written warning ordering it to dump the idea.

He said Darebin would be in breach of the Australian Citizenship Ceremonies Code, which requires ceremonies to be apolitical and bipartisan.

'You must not use your ability to preside over citizenship ceremonies or the dates they are held to delegitimise Australia Day,' he wrote in the letter seen by the Preston Leader.

'If you were to continue to use a citizenship ceremony, or your ability to preside over one, as a promotional tool for an anti-national day event, I will consider this a serious breach.'

Mr Hawke said he would revoke authorisation from anyone in Darebin who could receive the pledge at citizenship ceremonies.

The minister then told the newspaper research showed Australia Day was the most popular day to become a citizen and it was the most appropriate day for them.

On Tuesday, a meeting of the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA) voted 64-62 to lobby the government for a date change

'[The government will] not allow a small number of Greens controlled councils to continue a campaign to undermine Australia Day using Australian citizenship ceremonies,' he said.

Similar ultimatums were sent to Fremantle and Hobart Councils when they planned to move their ceremonies.

Fremantle folded and kept the ceremonies on January 26 but moved its fireworks and other celebrations to January 28.

Indigenous protesters march through central Brisbane to protest what they call 'Invasion Day' on Australia Day earlier this year

Celebrities including Aboriginal AFL star Lance Franklin (right) his wife Jesinta (left) were among a host of big names to call for the date of Australia Day to be changed

Another Melbourne council, Moreland, two weeks ago voted against a proposal to move its citizenship ceremonies.

Councils were emboldened after the Australian Local Government Association voted 64-62 to lobby the government to change the date at a meeting last month.

'The ALGA board noted the level of debate and the closeness of the result of the debate and will take these matters into consideration when determining a course of action,' the association said.

Protests and violent clashes marred celebrations in 2017, while Aboriginal flags flew en masse in the streets and celebrities posted support to 'change the date' online.

Many indigenous people call Australia Day 'Invasion Day' as they view it as the beginning of a violent colonisation.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that while everyone is entitled to debate the date of Australia Day, the government does not support a change.
An outspoken Muslim sheikh has called for extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir to be banned in Australia after Indonesian authorities revoked the group's legal status.

The Indonesian government declared the hardline Islamic group went against the 'spirit' of the country and posed a threat to national unity.

Muslim sheikh Imam Mohammad Tawhidi, from Adelaide, took to Twitter on Tuesday to 'demand' Australian authorities ban the group.

Muslim sheikh Imam Mohammad Tawhidi, from Adelaide, (pictured) took to Twitter on Tuesday to 'demand' Australian authorities ban the group

'I demand that our respected authorities ban Hizb ut-Tahrir from operating in Australia as it preaches a terrorist ideology,' he wrote

'I demand that our respected authorities ban Hizb ut-Tahrir from operating in Australia as it preaches a terrorist ideology,' he wrote.

Australia is now one of the few countries yet to ban the group, which wants to establish a global caliphate and condones domestic violence against women.

The ban has sparked calls for Australia to follow in Indonesia's footsteps and crackdown on the group, who earlier this year called on Muslims to be executed if they leave the religion.

The director-general at the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights Freddy Haris said the group's legal status had been revoked to protect national unity.

The group stirred up political tensions when it told Muslims not to vote for a non-Muslim in the recent Jakarta elections, which saw mass protests and resulted in the Christian governor losing his post and later jailed for blasphemy.

The future of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the world's largest Muslim-majority country now hangs in the balance.

Police try to stop Bangladeshi Muslims members of the 'Hizb ut-Tahrir' Islamic group from heading towards the Danish embassy in 2006

Just days after announcing a presidential decree that would allow the banning of 'mass organisations' spreading ideology against the country's constitution and 'Pancasila', Director General of Law Administration Freddy Harris said they were revoking Hizb ut-Tahrir Indonesia legal status.

The organisation might say it respects Pancasila but its mission, which includes seeking to establish a caliphate operating under Sharia Law in Indonesia, is a clear contradiction, he said.

'HTI activities are against Pancasila and the spirit of Indonesia,' he told reporters in Jakarta on Wednesay.

It has been operating in the country for decades, despite only becoming a legal entity in the last days of the Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono government and in the midst of President Joko Widodo winning the election in July 2014.

Bangladeshi Muslims members of the 'Hizb ut-Tahrir' burn flags of the U.S. and Israel during a protest against Israeli attacks on Palestine and Lebanon, in Dhaka in 2006

Associate Professor of Indonesian Politics at The Australian National University, Greg Fealy questioned whether such a ban would be effective.

'Hizb ut-Tahrir also has experience, both in Indonesia and abroad, of operating underground,' he wrote in Lowy Institute's publication The Interpreter this week.

'HTI activists could simply create new labels for their activities or have no organisation affiliation at all, while secretly working through informal networks to pursue HTI's mission.'

On Tuesday, HTI lodged a constitutional court challenge against the presidential decree which paved the way for their legal status to be revoked.

Their lawyer Yusril Ihza Mahendra told AAP they had been unfairly targeted and that the decree could be used for a president's own political ends.

HTI refused to comment on how many members it has in Indonesia.
Matthew Waring and Carly Hale (pictured in Cape Verde) had just landed at Gatwick and discovered their car was missing

Holidaymakers were outraged after landing at Gatwick Airport to learn their cars were missing after a parking company went bust while they were away.

Gatwick First Parking, which has been in business for 10 years keeping cars in a CCTV-covered secure compound, ceased trading and its website has been suspended.

Police said that around 120 vehicles were found to be parked at various sites in Sussex and Surrey.

But they added 30 sets of keys have been discovered for vehicles yet to be found as travellers desperately hope to be reunited with their cars.

One passenger, Matthew Waring, 28, had just landed in the UK after spending a week in Cape Verde with his girlfriend Carly Hale, 27.

They had paid 60 to leave their Honda Civic with the company - but were devastated to discover their car was missing.

The couple, from Gloucester, were forced to spend 14 hours at the airport in West Sussex before finally getting their car back.

Mr Waring, a father-of-two, touched down at Gatwick at 10pm and said it was 'depressing' to find out the firm had folded and he feared the car had been stolen.

He told MailOnline: 'We went to the car park where the 'meeting point' was but nobody was there.

'We were told by someone that they had heard the company had gone bust and both Carly and I were extremely worried at this point.

'I phoned the police but they said they were not dealing with it as it was a matter for trading standards.

'We had to wait at the airport for 14 hours. It was depressing, we were tired, fed up and miserable.

'We did not know if we were ever going to get our car back. I did not know if it had been stolen or where it was.'

After waiting at the airport for 14 hours, the couple, from Gloucester, were eventually reunited with their Honda Civic (pictured)

And the boss of the firm, Umar Irshad, 'vanished' overnight and quietly gutted his office without telling his landlord or customers.

Mr Irshad, 31, ran the company from an office near Gatwick Airport but suddenly closed down while people were still away.

He is believed to have packed his stuff and left the office in Horley, Surrey, on Friday night.

Landlord Dedman Properties Ltd said they were shocked by the sudden disappearance.

Owner Grahame Dedman said: 'We didn't have any notice they were leaving so we were surprised.

There was no sign of the owner at Gatwick First Parking today and the landlord claimed they had 'vanished' overnight

'The first we heard of it was when police arrived at the offices on Saturday night because people thought their cars had been stolen while they were away on holiday.

'We were shocked. I feel really sorry for the families who couldn't find their cars.

'They hire the office space from us to do administrative things for the business but we don't know where they keep the cars or anything like that.

'They've done a complete runner and we can't get hold of them and last we heard neither could the police.'

Mr Waring, a roofer, added that police eventually phoned him to let him know that his vehicle was left at an industrial estate a few miles away from the airport.

He said: 'We eventually found the car parked on an industrial estate. We thought it was going to be left in a secure car park but it was just parked by a kerb.

'I paid 60 for the parking and I looked like a legitimate site. But we now know that Gatwick Airport has approved parking firms so I will use them from now on.'

Meanwhile, a married couple returned from a relaxing family holiday in Portugal with their disabled baby to find their black Audi Q7 had disappeared.

Kyle and Libby Augustin, from Tenterden, Kent, landed at Gatwick with their one-year-old twins, including daughter Izola - who has cerebral palsy - and immediately called Gatwick First Parking.

After calling police themselves, the Augustins were initially told that it was a matter for trading standards and they were forced to return home by taxi and shell out 130.

A row of cars parked close to Gatwick Airport were given parking tickets on Wednesday. It is unclear whether these cars belong to people who were Gatwick First Parking customers

Passengers who had landed at Gatwick Airport (pictured) were unable to find their cars after a parking company stopped trading

Mrs Augustin said: 'We had collected our bags and were all tired but we couldn't get hold of the firm so we went to where we'd dropped off the car but couldn't see it and that's when we bumped into another couple who were on the phone to Sussex Police about their missing car.'

Two days later, Libby said Sussex Police told her to return to Gatwick before 3pm and she would be reunited with their car.

Her husband Kyle was at work so Libby, a New Zealander, who has no family nearby, had to take the twins with her in a taxi.

When Libby arrived at Gatwick no one was aware of an arrangement with Sussex Police, so she flagged down a police officer, who made enquiries, and then informed Libby that it was a trading standards issue.

Libby had no choice but to return home to Tenterden and says she feels let down by police.

The 30-year-old added: 'I had been on a four-hour journey and had to pay around 200 but I still had no car.

'Izola's cerebral palsy means that her limbs stiffen up easily and she gets aching muscles so she must have been in discomfort but can't tell me.

'Our car also has her support seat in it that I use when I'm feeding her so I need that back.'

After landing at Gatwick (stock photo) shocked passengers were unable to find their vehicles

Izola has treatment at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford and Libby said: 'I don't live in town and without the car it is difficult to get around. I've had to cancel three physiotherapy appointments for Izola.'

The Augustins were finally reunited with their car at around 5.30pm on Monday.

Sussex Police added they helped return more than 100 abandoned vehicles to their owners who had used the non Gatwick-approved parking service before flying.

It comes as millions of Britons prepare for the start of the summer getaway as schools break up.

Ben Murphy posted on Facebook: 'Hi All - warning don't park your car with Gatwick First Parking meet and greet - as someone I know has just returned to find their car gone and police are saying it's a big scam as loads have gone missing.'

Sergeant Darren Taylor, of the Gatwick Policing Team, said: 'It's essential that Gatwick Airport passengers use official on-airport parking, or companies registered with Gatwick's off-airport approved parking operators scheme only, to avoid this sort of thing from happening.

'We're carrying out further enquiries to locate the outstanding vehicles, and the owners of those vehicles will be contacted and kept up to date. Our priority is to find and return their vehicles to them as soon as we possibly can.

'We're also extremely grateful to everyone who has assisted us in contacting passengers to reunite them with their vehicles. Without their support, we would have had a far harder task.'

A Gatwick Airport spokesman said: 'Whilst we recognise the distress and inconvenience caused, and sympathise with any of our passengers that have been affected, Gatwick Airport has no relationship with Gatwick First Parking as it is not an officially approved off-airport parking operator.

'Any passengers affected by the company's closure should contact Trading Standards who are investigating the matter.

'Gatwick Airport strongly recommends that passengers use official on-airport parking or companies registered with Gatwick's off-airport approved parking operators' scheme. More information about the scheme can be found at www.gatwickairport.com/parking/other-parking-options/operator-scheme/.'
A shocking video has been released of the moment a thieving man and woman used a baby as a distraction to rob an elderly man of his wallet in a New Orleans elevator.

The man, wearing a yellow t-shirt and a cap, pretended to fall ill before leaning on the 73-year-old victim and pinching his wallet, according to police.

Police say the man later returned the wallet to the French Quarter hotel's front desk, but with $400 in cash missing.

New Orleans cops are now searching for the pair for simple robbery and cruelty to a juvenile.

In the CCTV video, the male thief can be seen holding a 10-month-old baby in his arms.

His female accomplice, wearing a dark-colored dress, used her body to block the man from leaving the elevator.

The man holding the baby then fell onto the victim and reportedly stole his wallet.

A shocking video has been released of the moment a thieving man and woman used a baby as a distraction to rob an elderly man of his wallet in a New Orleans elevator

The man, wearing a yellow t-shirt and a cap, pretended to fall ill before leaning on the elderly victim and pinching his wallet, according to police

When the elevator door finally reopened, the elderly victim left seemingly unaware that he had been robbed.

The pair could then be seen frantically pressing the elevator's buttons as they made their escape.

A New Orleans police spokesman said: 'Above is a video footage of two suspects of interest sought by NOPD for a simple robbery and cruelty to a juvenile.

Police say the man later returned the wallet to the French Quarter hotel's front desk, but with $400 in cash missing

New Orleans cops are now searching for the pair for simple robbery and cruelty to a juvenile

'The incident occurred on 7/12/17 at or about 2:00 pm. The male subject places a toddler between an elderly man as he robs him.

'The female is seen blocking the victim's wife from the elevator.

'Anyone with information regarding the identity of the two subjects is ask to contact Crimestoppers at 504-822-1111 or Detective Steve Nolan at 504-658-6733.'
A German judge has told a Syrian woman she has to remove her Islamic headscarf in court during a divorce hearing warning she would not be able to legally separate if she left it on.

The warning was issued in writing to lawyer Najat Abokal, who is representing the Syrian woman, with the judge warning there was no place for religious symbols in the courtroom.

Civil servants and police officers have already been banned from wearing the niqab, burka or hijab or any religious symbol, but this has not previously extended to members of the public.

The Muslim woman, who arrived in Germany from the Middle East as a refugee, wants to split from her husband and has filed papers at the Luckenwalde court in Brandenburg.

A woman in an Islamic headscarf, similar to the one the woman filing for divorce has been banned from wearing (file photo)

The judge, who has not been named, issued the threat in writing which read: 'Religiously motivated statements such as headscarves are not allowed in the courtroom and during a hearing,' according to Tagesspiegel.

A trial was set for July 27 and the head of the bench said if the woman did not comply with his demands the divorce procedure would not be able to proceed and could even face legal charges, Andolu Agency reports.

Abokal, the claimant's lawyer, believes the the procedure is unconstitutional, and told the German daily he had already appealed the decision which has delayed the hearing.

An unidentified woman wearing a niqab

Although the judge has not made a comment, the magistrate's office in German said the judge 'has to take care of order in the courtroom, where religious symbols have no place'.

A draft law to ban German civil servants, judges and soldiers from wearing full-face burkas at work was agreed earlier this year by the country's parliament.

The move came after Chancellor Angela Merkel called in December for a ban on full-face Muslim veils 'wherever legally possible'.

She told Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland in August: 'From my point of view, a completely covered woman has almost no chance of integrating herself in Germany.

In February, it was reavealed nearly 70 per cent of Germans want to see the Burka banned - while the same view is held by half of Britons, a study claims.

More than 7,000 Germans were asked in December about their views on burkas and 69% said they should be a law against wearing them - a seven point increase since the same question was asked months earlier.

And with the German federal elections just around the corner on September 24, politicians will be aiming to gain popularity among voters.

Teachers and civil servants are already barred from wearing the Islamic headscarves at work and the judiciary and police are not allowed to carry any visible religious or ideological symbols while carrying out their duties.
Hans-Olaf Henkel said the EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier was among those seeking to make an example of the UK

Brussels wants to 'punish' Britain for Brexit and is determined to make our departure a 'catastrophe', a top German politician warned today.

Hans-Olaf Henkel said the EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier was among those seeking to make an example of the UK.

Senior Eurocrats are focused on making sure that no other country follows Britain's example by leaving the bloc, according to the MEP.

Mr Henkel, a former chief executive of IBM and president of the Federation of German Industries, delivered the warning as he ridiculed the idea that Britain should be denied favourable access to EU markets and institutions.

He said he viewed Brexit as a 'disaster', reflecting the German view that the UK has been a positive influence on the organisation over the past four decades.

Mr Henkel said the European parliament's Brexit negotiator, Guy Verhofstadt, an outspoken federalist, was responsible in 'no small part' for the UK quitting.

'Mr Verhofstadt now wants to punish the British, full stop,' Mr Henkel wrote in an article for the Times.

'He says he doesn't want to, but I'm afraid he does. My impression is that Mr Barnier wants to do the same.

'The reason is simple. They would seek to make sure that Brexit is such a catastrophe that no country dares to take the step of leaving the EU again.'

Mr Henkel, who is deputy chair of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group, which includes Conservative MEPs, said he still hoped Britain might reconsider.

But he insisted that if Brexit went ahead it must be possible to forge close relations with EU-wide institutions such as nuclear safety body Euratom.

'My position is that the EU must accommodate the British. That will mean some give and take on both sides,' he said.

The comments come as Brussels takes a hard line on demands for an 85billion 'divorce' settlement from Britain.

Mr Barnier has insisted that the UK must provide an initial framework in the autumn as to how much money it is willing to pay before talks about a trade deal can begin.

Michel Barnier, pictured with Brexit Secretary David Davis in Brussels on Monday, has insisted that the UK must provide an initial framework in the autumn as to how much money it is willing to pay before talks about a trade deal can begin

Mr Henkel said the European parliament's Brexit negotiator, Guy Verhofstadt (pictured), an outspoken federalist, was responsible in 'no small part' for the UK quitting the EU

He has repeatedly threatened that the complex negotiations will not proceed unless he determines there is 'sufficient progress' on the size of the UK bill.

But Downing Street is prepared to infuriate EU leaders by offering only a vague agreement in October and refusing to produce a concrete figure.

British negotiators have insisted the size of the payment can be determined only when it becomes clear whether the EU is willing to offer a wide-ranging trade deal.

Insiders have dismissed the EU's 85 billion demand as 'preposterous' while Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson recently said the bloc could 'go whistle' for such a sum.

Brexit Secretary David Davis has described even a settlement of half that as a 'lot of money', while Tory Brexiteers insist nothing should be paid.

Talks on the so-called 'substantive' issues such as the bill and the Northern Irish border began on Monday amid claims jibes from Brussels that British officials have been underprepared.
An American Airlines flight attendant was stopped flying from Japan to the US carrying 30 bullets in his hand luggage after he forgot they were in his bag.

Police at Tokyo's Narita International Airport stopped the man as he was due to board a flight back to the United States.

The flight attendant, who is described as a US national in his 50s, claimed he was unaware he was carrying the rounds in two magazines.

A member of American Airlines cabin crew was found carrying 30 bullets loaded into two magazines in his hand luggage moments before he was set to board his aircraft to the US

The man was stopped by security at Narita Airport in Tokyo, file photo. The man, who is in his 50s said he forgot he was carrying the bullets in his bag all the way from the United States

The cabin crew member returned to the United States on board an American Airlines plane

Worryingly, he had carried the ammunition in his hand luggage on the outbound journey.

Security officials in the American airport, which has not yet been identified, failed to intercept the loaded magazines.

Airport police official Masatoshi Ito said the man forgot he was carrying the bullets, even though having live rounds in your hand luggage is against US law.

Police released the man later Saturday as he posed no danger of destroying evidence, Ito said.

The man and the airline also promised to cooperate in any future investigation. Police are still investigating how the bullets were undetected when he arrived at Narita and went through customs.

American Airlines said in a statement that the crewmember headed to Dallas after his release, but refused to disclose details of his flight out of the US The airline also declined to comment how a crewmember might have walked through US security checks.

US airports are stepping up baggage checks of passengers flying in from overseas.

Police are also considering a possible violation of the Japanese gun and sword control law, but the flight attendant was not charged with any crime.
A baby has died after a teenager working at a Mexican restaurant gave birth in the toilet and 'shoved it in a trash bag.'

Authorities say the woman, 19 and her mother, 41, were arrested in South Carolina after a worker taking out the trash at the restaurant where they worked saw a newborn baby fall out of a hole in the bag.

Greenville Police spokesman Johnathan Bragg said Estela Ruiz-Gomez gave birth in the restaurant's bathroom on July 12 and her mother, Lorenza Gomez Rodriguez, knew about it.

A baby has died after teenager Estela Ruiz-Gomez (pictured), who was working at a Mexican restaurant, gave birth in the toilet and 'shoved it in a trash bag'

Bragg says an employee taking the trash out later that day noticed the bag was heavier than usual and dragged it across the parking lot.

Bragg said in a news release the bag tore and the newborn baby fell out. The baby died at the hospital.

Both women are charged with homicide by child abuse.

The medical examiner performed an autopsy on July 13 and could find no medical reason why the child died after birth.

Homeland Security is investigating both individuals due to their immigration status.

A police spokesman said: 'Officers responded to La Parilla, located at 1 Market Point Drive, in regards to a newborn in cardiac arrest. Upon arrival, the baby's mother and grandmother, the mother's boyfriend and at least two employees advised that the mother had just given birth in the bathroom.

Greenville Police spokesman Johnathan Bragg said Estela Ruiz-Gomez gave birth in the restaurant's bathroom on July 12 and her mother, Lorenza Gomez Rodriguez (picured), knew about it

'Greenville County EMS arrived on the scene, advised that the baby had a heartbeat and rushed him to the hospital, where he was pronounced deceased a short time later.'

The spokesman added: 'When Deputy Coroners Dill and Edmonds returned to the restaurant for further investigation, other employees told them a different version of events than the original one provided the day of the incident.

'The manager informed them that Estela Ruiz-Gomez, the baby's mother, busses tables at the restaurant and Lorenza Gomez Rodriguez, the baby's grandmother, is a dishwasher.

'According to the employees, Estela went to the bathroom during her break because her stomach was hurting. When the manager went to get Estela out of the bathroom at the end of her break, she stated that her stomach still hurt and the manager went to get Lorenza to check on her.

A police spokesman said: 'Officers responded to La Parilla (pictured), located at 1 Market Point Drive, in regards to a newborn in cardiac arrest'

'A short time later, Lorenza exited the bathroom and explained that Estela needed to go to the hospital.

'Shortly after they came out of the bathroom, a female employee emptied the trash in the men's and women's restrooms.

'Because she was having difficulty lifting the trash bag, she dragged the bag across the parking lot, causing it to tear, and a newborn baby fell out of the bag onto the pavement.'

The statement went on: 'Estela's boyfriend (the baby's father), who was present when the baby fell out of the trash bag, retrieved the baby from the ground and took him back inside the restaurant. It was at this point that EMS was called to the scene.'
Two men were pinned down and had they eyes gouged out before being stoned to death in South Africa by a gang who sell body parts to witch doctors.

Horrified residents in the township of Siqalo in Cape Town, heard the men screaming in agony but were too terrified to come out of their homes until the morning.

They found two victims covered in blood on Monday morning with their eyes missing and surrounded by large stones.

It comes just weeks after a young girl and a young mother also had their eyes gouged out. Locals fear the eyes of the four victims may have been taken to be sold to witch doctors who use them to create potions for customers.

Two men were pinned down and had they eyes gouged out before being stoned to death in a township in Cape Town (pictured), South Africa by a gang who sell body parts to witch doctors

Residents who called the police on Monday vowed to find the killers and murder them in the same way and quickly tracked down five heavily blood-stained men and interrogated them.

The gang allegedly confessed and were attacked with one beaten to death and four escaping.

The homes that the alleged killers lived in were torn down by the mob and angry locals vowed to kill them if the police don't catch them first and gouge their eyes out in revenge.

A resident told The Daily Sun: 'We are sick and tired of cops who don't do their jobs. When we found the suspects and beat one to death they were quick then to rush to the scene.

'But where were they when it was dark and they were called to help the men being attacked?'

Western Cape police spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Andre Traut said the murders of the two men were being investigated along with the death of a 29-year-old male suspect.

Police said the murders of the two men were being investigated along with the death of a 29-year-old male suspect (file picture)

In early June a local girl Minentle Lekhakha, aged five, was found dead under a bridge in Cape Town after vanishing while playing in the street with both her eyes gouged out.

Minentle's mother Tandisiwe Lekhakha, 23, was distraught when the news was broken to her and the girl's father had the distressing job of trying to identify his daughter.

The family fear she was raped before her eyes were gouged out and taken by her attacker.

Just days before the body of mother-of-two Unathi Madotyeni, 33, was found in Nyanga, Cape Town. She had been raped and beaten to death and her eyes gouged out.

She had travelled to Cape Town to further her studies and vanished after leaving a local bar.

Many locals believe body parts are sold to traditional healers known as sangomas to make their traditional medicines known as muti which the superstitious are in total awe of.

The sagomas believe that for there to be harmony between the living and the dead, vital for a trouble free life, that the ancestors must be show respect through ritual and animal sacrifice.

The sangomas are called on to heal and it is believed that through them the ancestors from the spirit world can give instruction and advice to heal illness or social disharmony,

Gogo Kheswa, a sangoma from Nyanga, Cape Town, said she makes her muti using herbs,

She told The Daily Sun: 'South African sangomas do not use body parts. This is a new thing. It derives from foreign nationals who promise business people they can make them rich.

'They say they use body part to make them rich and it is is making it harder for us local sangomas because people do not trust and they think we are all the same' she said.
Theresa May today warned her Cabinet there was 'no such thing as an unsackable minister' after a bout of ugly briefing wars.

The Prime Minister has demanded her top team draw a line under an extraordinary round of infighting and laid down the law at yesterday's Cabinet meeting.

She insisted today her top team was 'together' but made clear she still had the power to fire trouble makers.

In what appeared to be a coordinated assault on Chancellor Philip Hammond, damaging quotes about his attitude to women and public sector pay were leaked to newspapers.

And an unnamed minister was quoted by The Times as saying she should sack testosterone-fuelled 'donkeys' behind the series of hostile leaks.

Theresa May today warned her Cabinet there was 'no such as an un-sackable minister' after a bout of ugly briefing wars

In a radio interview today with LBC's Iain Dale Mrs May said this was 'sadly' not the only instance of Cabinet discussions being leaked

In a radio interview today with LBC's Iain Dale Mrs May said this was 'sadly' not the only instance of Cabinet discussions being leaked.

And she warned: 'It should not happen. It is important we accept collective responsibility - it is not for ourselves it is because we have a job to do.

'There is no such thing as an unsackable minister but at the moment the team is together and we are getting on with the job of delivering what we believe the British people want us to do.

'Brexit is a key part of that but there is a lot else we need to deal with too.'

The Prime Minister said: 'Things that are said at those Cabinet meetings should not be reported publicly in that way and people should accept collective responsibility.

'When decisions are taken, they're government decisions.'

She added: 'We've got a job to do.'

Sir Michael Fallon earlier warned that Cabinet must show 'military discipline' to stop 'Red'Jeremy Corbyn from getting into Downing Street.

The Defence Secretary delivered the stern rebuke to his colleagues after a wave of poisonous public infighting at the top of government.

The Defence Secretary (pictured in Downing Street yesterday) delivered the stern rebuke to his colleagues after a wave of poisonous public infighting at the top of government

Mrs May's Cabinet gathered for its traditional annual photo in the Pillared Room of Downing Street yesterday. They are (back row left to right) Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood, Chief Whip Gavin Williamson, Attorney General Jeremy Wright, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Sir Patrick McLoughlin, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Elizabeth Truss, Leader of the House of Commons Andrea Leadsom, Immigration Minister Brandon Lewis, (middle row left to right) Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Karen Bradley, Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire, Welsh Secretary Alun Cairns, Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, Works and Pensions Secretary David Gauke, Business Secretary Greg Clark, Communities Secretary Sajid Javid, Leader of the House of Lords Baroness Evans of Bowes, Scottish Secretary David Mundell, Environment Secretary Michael Gove, International Development Secretary Priti Patel, (front row left to right) International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, Justice Secretary David Lidington, Defence Secretary Sir Michel Fallon, Home Secretary Amber Rudd, First Secretary of State Damian Green, Mrs May, Chancellor Philip Hammond, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Education Secretary Justine Greening, Brexit Secretary David Davis and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt

At a reception at the Policy Exchange think-tank last night, Sir Michael underlined th message as he called on colleagues to defend the Conservative approach to the public purse.

'In this summer of warm prosecco I think we in the Cabinet would also do well to reflect on those military virtues: loyalty, discipline, cohesion, that might better enable us first to concentrate our fire on a dangerous enemy in reach of Downing Street - somebody who would lower our defences, scrap our deterrent, weaken our response to terrorism,' he said.

'And second, to better articulate again the moral case for lower taxation, for honest public financing, for wider opportunity, enterprise and ownership - the Conservative case.'

The PM told a gathering of her top team yesterday that some of them were acting 'irresponsibly', after a wave of damaging leaks threatened to throw the government into chaos.

Mrs May has been powerless to prevent the infighting in the wake of the disastrous election that robbed the Tories of their overall majority.

But Mrs May was cheered to the rafters at a reception for MPs on Monday night when she warned that the public rowing was merely increasing the chances of Jeremy Corbyn taking control of Downing Street.

An unnamed Cabinet minister was quoted branding the leakers 'donkeys' and 'indulgent safe seat kids' who were creating the mood for a tough reshuffle. Allies of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove have been widely blamed for much of the briefing, although they deny any involvement.

Mrs May (pictured in No10 today) has been powerless to prevent the infighting in the wake of the disastrous election that robbed the Tories of their overall majority

Home Secretary Mrs Rudd (pictured arriving for Cabinet yesterday) pointedly said this morning that 'most' of her colleagues were focused on their jobs. Mr Johnson has flatly denied being behind the briefing

According to her official spokesman, the PM told the Cabinet today that she had championed more 'genuine and collective discussion' in the top level meetings.

Mrs May warned it was 'vital that discussions in Cabinet must remain private', addding that 'briefings and counter briefings have been a case of colleagues not taking their responsibilities seriously'.

She there was a need to show 'strength and unity' and that 'starts around the Cabinet table'.

The intervention at the start of the Cabinet meeting was said to have been met with 'widespread' agreement.

Home Secretary Mrs Rudd pointedly said earlier this morning that 'most' of her colleagues were focused on their jobs, insisting people should be 'honoured' to serve in government.

'I know that they should be getting on, as I know most of them do want to, and delivering what they have been asked to do,' she told Sky News.
A family in China have come up with an inventive birthday surprise in the form of a cake that distributes money.

The woman from Qingdao in China's Shandong province said the cake was a birthday gift for her mother-in-law.

Footage of the cake has been widely shared on social media with many people praising the cake creator's imaginative side.

Impressive: In the footage, a person presses the button and money is dispensed

The video also showed the process used to make the impressive dessert

In the footage shared to Pear Video, the cake can be seen on a table surrounded by other objects.

When the button on the cake is pressed, 100 yuan (11.37) notes are dispensed from the cake.

The creator of the cake Ms Ren told reporters that she made the cake for her mother-in-law's birthday.

The creator of the cake Ms Ren told reporters that she made the cake for her mother

When the button on the cake is pressed, 100 yuan (11.37) notes are dispensed from the cake

Ms Ren said she wanted to get her mother-in-law something different

She said she wanted to get her mother-in-law something different as people usually just give clothes or money.

Ms Ren said it was the first she had made.

The video has been widely shared on social media.

One user wrote: 'Oh I will try this'

While another commented: 'I envy the relationship between this mother and daughter.'

And one user said: 'This cake shop is going to be trending.'
A Queensland Uber driver has been charged for the second time in one month with raping a young woman while they were in his ride-sharing car.

The man had appeared in a Brisbane court just weeks ago for similar offences.

Queensland police said on Wednesday the 47-year-old man had been charged with the rape and deprivation of liberty of a teenage girl in Ipswich, west of Brisbane, on September 4, 2015.

A Queensland Uber driver has been charged for the second time in one month with raping a young woman while they were in his ride-sharing car (file picture)

He appeared in court earlier this month accused of raping a different young passenger three times.

Last week, another Uber driver, a 37-year-old man, appeared in Brisbane Magistrates Court charged with the rape of a 16-year-old in Brisbane's south on July 7.

The 47-year-old man will appear in court on July 31.

Police believe there could be other victims and have urged people who may have been assaulted to come forward.
Scores of suspected ISIS fighters are being held in a cramped jail in Mosul amid claims Iraqi troops committed human rights abuses retaking the city.

Pictures show men huddled together on the floor in 45C heat in a prison with no electricity or ventilation to the south of the war-ravaged city, which was recently free from the terror group's control.

The images, showing young and old suspected jihadists, emerged as an Iraqi lieutenant revealed the thirst for revenge among army ranks and insisted ISIS militants 'are not human beings.

He also revealed how he interrogated one suspect before 'sending him to hell' and insisted ISIS jihadists who brought terror to the country deserved to die.

Scores of suspected ISIS fighters are being held in a cramped jail in Mosul amid claims Iraqi troops committed human rights abuses retaking the city

Pictures show men huddled together on the floor in stifling conditions in a make-shift prison to the south of the war-ravaged city, recently liberated from the terror group

The Iraqi officer who oversees the make-shift jail facility said it currently holds some 370 prisoners.

He says authorities were overwhelmed with detainees as Iraqi forces cleared the last neighborhoods of the city earlier this month at the end of a grueling nine-month campaign.

'Prisoners are infected with diseases, lots of health and skin problems, because they're not exposed to the sun,' he said. 'The majority can't walk. Their legs are swollen because they can't move.' He said a provincial health team checks on the prisoners 'occasionally.'

More than 1,150 detainees have passed through the prison over the past three months, with 540 sent to Baghdad for further investigation, the officer said.

Another 2,800 prisoners are being held in the Qayara air base south of Mosul, and hundreds more in a few smaller facilities. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to brief reporters.

Prisoners who were discreetly interviewed by the AP insisted they were innocent. They spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals.

'You won't find 10 real (ISIS members) among these guys. And all of them have spent more than six months here,' one prisoner said out of earshot of the guards. 'Since I got here eight months ago, I've only seen the sun once.'

He said he was a civil servant and had traveled between Baghdad and Mosul on several previous occasions before being detained.

The Iraqi officer who oversees the make-shift jail (pictured) said it currently holds some 370 prisoners

The images, showing young and old suspected jihadists, emerged as an Iraqi lieutenant revealed the thirst for revenge among army ranks and insisted ISIS militants 'are not human beings

'They said my name was in their database. I haven't seen any court or judge. I don't even know what I'm accused of. A lot of names are the same,' he said.

He said two prisoners had died in the packed holding cell. Some prisoners 'have pus coming out of their wounds. Once they go to the hospital, they come back with amputated legs or arms.'

'We really want to die,' another prisoner said. 'None of us have received any visitors, relatives, family members. They don't even know where we are.'

The country's prime minister Haider al-Abadi has acknowledged Iraqi forces committed human rights violations, but insisted that these were 'individual acts' for which the perpetrators would be punished.

They said my name was in their database. I haven't seen any court or judge - I don't even know what I'm accused of

ISIS militants were notorious for atrocities, both against civilians and Iraqi security forces, often hunting down anyone connected with the police or military after they overran territory.

And for some Iraqi soldiers, the fight against ISIS in Mosul has been a slow, methodical quest for revenge. For three years, one lieutenant has hunted for two ISIS militants from his village who he believes killed his father.

Along the way, he has shot to death detained militants after interrogating them, he acknowledges unapologetically.

And if he catches either of the men he is searching for, the lieutenant vows he will inflict on him 'a slow death' and hang his body from a post in the village after forcing him to reveal where his father's body is buried.

That sort of thirst for vengeance in the wake of military victories is fueling extrajudicial killings of suspected ISIS members at the hands of Iraqi security forces in and around Mosul.

Videos that emerged last week showed troops in Mosul taking captured ISIS suspects and throwing them one by one off a high wall next to the Tigris River, then shooting their bodies below.

The Iraqi officer who oversees the make-shift jail facility said it currently holds some 370 prisoners

More than 1,150 detainees have passed through the prison over the past three months, with 540 sent to Baghdad for further investigation, the officer said

Speaking to The Associated Press, four Iraqi officers from three different branches of the military and security forces openly admitted that their troops killed unarmed and captured ISIS suspects, and they defended the practice.

They, like the lieutenant, spoke on condition of anonymity because they acknowledged such practices were against international law, but all those interviewed by AP said they believed the fight against ISIS should be exempt from such rules of war because militant rule in Iraq was so cruel.

However, the killings risk tipping Iraq back into the cycles of violence that have plagued the country for over a decade, according to Belkis Wille, Iraq researcher with Human Rights Watch.

ISIS was able to attract recruits in the past because of people's anger over abuses, including arbitrary detentions, torture and extrajudicial killings, she said.

If abuses continue, 'all you're going to see is (that) young Sunni Arab men are going to want to join whatever the next extremist group looks like,' she said. Despite the military's vows not to tolerate it, she said no soldier or commander has been held accountable for any killings.

The bloodshed reflects the deeply personal nature of the fight against ISIS.

When the militants overran Mosul and large parts of northern and western Iraq in 2014, they specifically targeted members of the military and security forces and their families for brutal atrocities.

Video has emerged of a man in an Iraqi Army uniform moments before he shoots an unarmed man in Mosul, Iraq. Vengeance is reportedly fueling a string of extrajudicial killings of suspected ISIS militants

The video shows a man kneeling before he is gunned down by a man in an Iraqi military outfit

Near Tirkrit, ISIS massacred some 1,700 captured military recruits and buried them in mass graves that have been uncovered since.

Hundreds of policemen and soldiers in Mosul are believed to have been killed after the takeover. Militants made no attempt to hide atrocities.

Defense Ministry's spokesman, Brigadier General Tahseen Ibrahim, said that authorities 'have not registered any incident of revenge killing, whether carried out by security forces or residents. The situation is under full control and we will not allow such incidents to happen because this issue is very sensitive and leads to violent reactions.'

When you're facing a man who has killed your friends, your family, yes, sometimes the men get rough

But a senior Iraqi officer said his troops regularly killed men who were said to be ISIS among civilians fleeing the city at screening centers in and around Mosul.

He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the possibility it could prompt legal repercussions.

'When an entire group of civilians tells us, "This man is Daesh," yes, we shoot him,' he said, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.

'When you're facing a man who has killed your friends, your family, yes, sometimes the men get rough,' he added. 'But for us, this is personal.'

The lieutenant said the two men who killed his father were well known in his hometown, a small village south of Mosul. He agreed to share his story with the AP because he wanted to show how personal the fight is for Iraqi troops.

Two of his colleagues confirmed his version of events. The AP is not revealing the names of the men he is pursuing because there is no way to confirm independently they belonged to ISIS.

Pictured left: A man is beaten by troops in what appear to be Iraqi army uniforms. Right: He panics and pleads as the soldiers prepare to drag him off towards a wall before throwing him to his death

The lieutenant said his father was an officer in the security forces who fought al-Qaeda, the predecessor to ISIS, in 2007, at the height of Iraq's sectarian violence.

After ISIS seized the village in 2014, the tribes that were once kicked out for al-Qaeda ties moved back in, and ISIS installed them in security and administrative positions.

According to the lieutenant, two men grabbed the lieutenant's father outside his home. The two were among those previously expelled for al-Qaeda ties, he said.

I'm not selfish with my revenge - what I'm doing is for all Iraqis

The lieutenant was away, and his neighbors told him his father had been killed and who did it. He said he was told the men boasted about it in public. ISIS fighters also killed the lieutenant's uncle and more than a dozen other friends and relatives.

The lieutenant keeps an old picture of the two men on his phone. He said a handful of other troops know about his hunt and have helped him interrogate and kill ISIS suspects.

As Iraqi forces advanced toward the lieutenant's village last year in the lead-up to Mosul, he began interrogating captured ISIS suspects.

'Most of them I just asked questions,' he said, 'but for those who I knew had blood on their hands, I killed them on the spot.'

He said he has killed more than 40 militants, whether in combat or in interrogations on the sidelines of the battle. He acknowledged most were not directly responsible for his relatives' deaths.

Pictured left: The man is dragged up a short path to the top of the precipice. Right: The group of soldiers forcing the ISIS fighter to the edge can be seen gathering around him

Pictured left: Blood can be seen covering the man's shirt as the troops drag him to the cliff edge. Pictured right: The man - who it is claimed is an ISIS fighter - is brought to the precipice moments before he is executed

'I'm not selfish with my revenge, what I'm doing is for all Iraqis,' he said.

Early on in the Mosul operation, he said he learned that one of the two men was in Tal Afar, a town west of Mosul that remains in ISIS hands, or had fled to Syria.

In early July, as Iraqi forces pushed into Mosul's Old City, he received a tip on the location of the second man. He said a colleague, an intelligence officer, called and said he was holding an ISIS suspect from the lieutenant's home town.

'I told him don't do anything, keep him there. I'm on my way,' the lieutenant said.

The detainee was the uncle of the lieutenant's second target. The man was left alone with the lieutenant in a bare concrete room without a table or chair.

'I didn't torture him. I cut the plastic handcuffs from his wrists and gave him water,' the lieutenant said. The man was elderly, with a grey beard and hair.

'He begged me not to kill him as I questioned him,' he said, smiling. 'He could barely walk (he was so scared).'

Eventually, the man told the lieutenant that his second target was alive and in Mosul's Old City.

Pictured left: The lifeless body of another man can be seen on the ground, suggesting multiple executions. Pictured right: The man is thrown from the cliff edge and, moments later, shot with a rifle several times

'After I questioned him I sent him to hell,' the lieutenant said flatly. He said he shot the man with his side arm and left his body on the floor.

The first reports of revenge killings appeared within weeks of the launch of the Mosul operation last year and continued throughout. But the government and rights groups do not have an exact number.

In June, Human Rights Watch said at least 26 bodies of blindfolded and handcuffed men had been found dumped in government-held areas in and around Mosul. A month later, HRW said it had further reports of extrajudicial killings. Wille of Human Rights Watch said it was taking place 'basically everywhere that is touched by this conflict' and by every armed force involved in the fight.

The military says troops have orders to hand any captured ISIS over for interrogation ahead of future trial.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on Tuesday acknowledged that rights violations took place during the Iraqi forces' battle in Mosul but described them as 'individual acts' by persons who were either 'ignorant' of the consequences or who had struck a deal with Daesh with the intent 'to defame us and the security forces.'

He pledged the government would punish the perpetrators.

The lieutenant dismissed the idea of going to the courts, saying they are corrupt and suspects could bribe their way to freedom.

'I know some people believe that this kind of killing is wrong, but Daesh, they are not human beings,' he said. 'I am the one who still has my humanity.'

When al-Abadi declared 'total victory' in Mosul last week, the lieutenant said he believed his target is still in one of the last ISIS pockets in the Old City.

'I hope I find him alive,' he said, 'because I want to make sure he dies a slow death, not quick. I want him to tell me where my father's body is buried, and then I want to take his body and hang it from a post in my village.'
This is the shocking moment an angry woman smashes her ex-husband's car with a hammer while her terrified children are inside the vehicle.

The disturbing video shows her going around the car and striking blows to every window, starting from one on the side.

As the woman hits the window by the front seat where her former flame is sitting, glistening pieces of glass can be seen scattering into the car and onto his arm.

An angry woman smashes her ex-husband's car with a hammer while her terrified children are inside the vehicle

The father filmed the whole attack from inside the car and caught the terrified reaction of his children in the back

Throughout the ordeal two children, a boy and a girl sat in the back seats, scream.

The man can he heard telling the woman to be careful of the 'babies' but she pays no attention and continues her assault.

Then the mother picks them up and takes them to another car, drawing the attack to a close.

A spot of blood can be seen trickling down the young girl's elbow as she is taken from the destroyed vehicle by her mother.

The video was shot by the ex-husband from inside the car that was parked in a seemingly leafy residential area of New Jersey.

A caption with the clip, that was uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday, says the family are of Dominican descent and that the unnamed woman was in a fit of jealous rage.

She was expected to hand herself over to the authorities yesterday, but did not show, making her a fugitive, according to the caption.

The mother walks off her with son and daughter, with a cut on her arm, and the hammer in hand

Relatives told Univision the driver is the woman's ex-husband and the two children, 3 and 5, are their children.

'This is very sad, right?' the woman's cousin, who chose not be identified, told Univision in Spanish. 'This is not right. I don't know why this happened.'

'You're going to rot in prison, you heard?' the man said to her during the violent ordeal.
A British man has successfully cycled 3,403 miles through China to Vietnam on a unicycle but only after passing the whole of Europe and Central Asia on route.

Ed Pratt, 21, set off from his Somerset home in March 2014 hoping to become the first man to traverse the globe on a one wheeled bike.

After making his way through Europe and crossing the whole breadth of Turkey he reached the largely unexplored climbs of Kazakhstan.

Ed Pratt passes a desolate area in China on his unicycle. After six months in the 'Middle Kingdom' he made it to Vietnam

The route taken by the young explorer who has been on the road for over two years

He entered China through its fabled Silk Road in the country's northwest and onto the city of Urumqi, which lies closer to some cities in the Middle East than capital Beijing.

The youngster then set off on a six month voyage through China's mountainous interior taking in the cities of Lanzhou, Chongqing, Kunming and Nanning before crossing over into Vietnam.

Along the treacherous 3403 mile route Mr Pratt kept a number of videoblogs which he posted on his YouTube channel.

In one, the adventurer claims that police tried to kick him out of a 'military city' for being a foreigner so he went incognito, dressing in a balaclava, sunglasses and cap to disguise himself.

Mr Pratt, who has cycled alone for much of his route, also recorded the shocking moment he came across a lorry turned on its side in a brutal accident.

He even pitched a tent in the hollows of a bridge deep in rural China during one pit stop.

Along the treacherous 3403 mile route Mr Pratt kept a number of videoblogs

Mind the side wind! Mr Pratt passes a wind farm on route to Vietnam

After taking in the beautiful scenery surrounding the city of Kunming, and eating a cockerel's testicle for dinner, he entered Vietnam and was clearly overjoyed to be arriving at yet another country on his route.

'So that's it. In this one I reach the Vietnam border and finally complete my 3403 miles, 6 month crossing of China,' the youngster wrote.

'I really hope that you enjoyed watching these videos. They took a ridiculously long time to edit and release, but if they help inspire you to head out into the world and explore then I feel that my hard work, on the unicycle AND in front of my computer, was well worth it!'

Despite already navigating thousands of miles Mr Pratt is continuing his journey across the world.

Since he left China in June he has made his way through the inclines of Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.

He is currently making his way across the rim of southern Australia, starting in Perth, braving the cool winter chill.
Kelly Green, 32, (left with her husband Shane Green) moved from Eastbourne, East Sussex, in the UK to Tristan da Cunha (pictured), one of a remote group of volcanic islands in the South Atlantic Ocean, in July 2013. The whole island descends from just seven families and has a population of just 138 inhabitants. It is only accessible by boat from Cape Town, South Africa, and the journey can take anywhere from a week to 15 days - depending on the weather. After going through a tough break up, Kelly travelled to the island to visit her parents in 2010 as her dad was a diplomat posted there. Kelly said she 'fell in love' with the island and it was there that she met her now husband Shane Green, 33. Shane, a carpenter who has lived on the island for his entire life, had helped Kelly carry her luggage off the raft and they soon became besotted with each other. Kelly made the move to Tristan da Cunha permanently in July 2013 and the couple now have two children together - Savannah, eight, and Seren, who is 16-months-old.
This is the heartbreaking moment a herd of elephants try in vain to save an injured calf struck down by a speeding car.

Footage from the Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe shows the baby elephant lying lifelessly on the floor while two adult beasts - who appear to be his parents - try desperately to get it to its feet.

Despite showing signs it might be able to get up and walk away, it sadly died on the side of the road.

Scroll down for video

Two adult elephants around the baby elephant as it sits back on its hind legs after being hit by a car

The desperate herd surround the baby elephant who lies injured in the road after the accident

The video was shot by 66-year-old Heidi Haas who was trying to find the best spots for safaris.

She told LatestSightings.com: 'I was in complete and utter shock when I saw that this baby elephant had been knocked down by a speeding vehicle.

'With tearful eyes, I had to watch how the entire elephant family tried to help this little one without actually being able to do a thing.

'There was literally no more that could be done as the elephant had broken its leg and its back.'

Local rangers were called in to help, but they spent most of the time trying to keep other elephants in the herd at bay as they were in danger of being trampled.

'The elephant family didnt want them being anywhere near the herd,' Ms Haas said,

'There was little other they could do than put this young elephant out of its misery.

'It was emotionally draining to watch and I never want to have to experience such a moment again.

'My last words to everyone who visits these magnificent Parks all over the world, please take care and dont over speed as the loss of such a beautiful life as in this case is absolutely unnecessary.'

Three adult elephants get the baby to its feet and drag it across to the other side of the road

A group of adults elephants come together to hoist the injured baby to its feet in an attempt to save it

The baby threatens to stand up independently, getting onto all four feet, but it is short lived

Appearing to cry in desperation, the baby's parents are forced to abandon their little one

The video starts with the elephant on the left hand side of the street with a herd of around a dozen surrounding it, appearing to cry out in desperation.

They manage to get it to its feet and drag it across the road before it collapses.

It threatens to get up, at one stage managing to stand on all four legs, but as soon as the adult elephant stops propping it up, it collapses in a heap.
Jeremy Corbyn last night lashed out at 'homophobic' Donald Trump and warned the US President not to encourage 'discrimination and violence'.

The angry broadside risks being a diplomatic headache for the Government as Mr Trump stalls over when to take up his invite for a state visit.

Mr Corbyn would be expected to meet the US President if and when he does visit Britain.

He made the incendiary intervention at the PinkNews reception to mark 50 years since the decriminalisation of homosexuality last night.

Jeremy Corbyn (pictured at the PinkNews event last night) had lashed out at 'homophobic' Donald Trump and warned the US President not to encourage 'discrimination and violence'

The angry broadside risks being a diplomatic headache for the Government as Mr Trump (pictured at the White House on Monday) stalls over when to take up his invite for a state visit

Mr Corbyn said: 'I am disturbed by a lot of what was said and went on during the US Presidential election.

'I would hope that President Trump and Vice President Pence will reflect on what was said during that campaign, and recognise that they must represent all Americans, whatever their sexuality and orientation, and not encourage more discrimination against them, or indeed violence against them.

'There has been an increase in homophobic hate crime, and as a culture we must celebrate diversity and accept our differences.'

The event was hosted by John Bercow in the lavish Speakers' House suite in Parliament.

Mr Bercow - whose role requires him to be politically neutral - risked his own controversy as he voiced his passion for LGBT rights at a reception to mark 50 years since homosexuality was legalised.

The event was hosted by John Bercow in the lavish Speakers' House suite in Parliament (pictured)

'We are marking 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality,' he told guests.

'There's always a balance to be struck - we don't want to behave as though it's all over, that everything has been done, nothing remains - because that isn't true

'I still feel that we can only really have equal marriage when you can bloody well get married in a church if you want to do so.'

Education Secretary Justine Greening, who came out last year, told the event: 'Britain now is genuinely a much more inclusive country than we've ever been, but we've got a long way to go, and there are too many pockets in our country where LGBT rights are something that are a mistake.

'They think things have gone too far, and should go back to where they were. We need to keep on pushing, and there are lots of steps I want to see us as a government take going forward.'
Conman Craig Brown (pictured) has been jailed after persuading two women to give him more than 670,000

A love-rat conman who duped two women he met on a dating website into selling their homes before giving him 670,000 was told by a court to pay back just 1.

Craig Brown, 47, started talking to the women - who had no idea about one another - online and persuaded them both to sell their homes.

Both women, who lived 50 miles from each other in Coventry and Derby, believed he was working away for their future while he was actually with the other woman.

Brown, of Nuneaton, Warwickshire, was jailed for five-and-a-half years after admitting four charges of fraud and two of assault at Warwick Crown Court.

At that time a confiscation hearing under the Proceeds of Crime Act was adjourned for an investigation into his finances.

And at the resumed hearing prosecutor Justin Jarmola said police financial investigators had established Brown had a benefit of 674,495 from his dishonesty.

But he had told the court he had nothing left after gambling it all away.

So Judge Richard Bond made a confiscation order under the Proceeds of Crime Act for a nominal 1 - to be paid within three months, with one day in prison in default.

Explaining the need for an order in such a small amount, Mr Jarmola said: 'The reason the order is made is that, should any funds or assets be discovered in the future, or Mr Brown come into any money, this order can be revisited.'

During the original hearing it was said Brown met his first victim, who lived in Derby and owned her own home, through a dating website in June 2010.

Within four months Brown, who claimed to own a business called Jade Security, had moved into her home and proposed to her - but having gained her trust, he set about defrauding her.

As they began house-hunting, he persuaded her he needed 3,000 to set up a mortgage - and she also paid for 'legal fees' over their proposed purchase of various houses which fell through.

Brown encouraged her to give up her job, claiming he could support her, but the relationship then became volatile, and he assaulted her by stamping on her foot, breaking a bone in it, and later grabbed her by the hair, pulling out a chunk.

He claimed his company had a lucrative contract, but that they needed to put up 50,000 to secure it, of which he said his partner was providing 40,000 and he needed to find the rest.

Brown showed her a bank slip purporting to show his non-existent company had a balance of 800,000 which he claimed had been temporarily frozen by the Inland Revenue, so she took out a 5,000 loan to help out.

Brown, of Nuneaton, Warwickshire, was jailed for five-and-a-half years after admitting four charges of fraud and two of assault at Warwick Crown Court (pictured)

In March 2015 she sold her home, still believing they were looking for another place, and Brown cruelly persuaded her to put the 44,000 proceeds into his account on the basis that it earned higher interest than hers.

They ended up living in a caravan home on which she was again paying the mortgage, said prosecutor Stuart Clarkson.

His deception finally came to light in September last year when she believed they were going on holiday to Florida with members of his family.

When the airport taxi turned up without him, his sister and the woman contacted the holiday company - only to find nothing had been booked.

Mr Clarkson said: 'She was left with no savings and no home, estranged from her own family,and living with the fact that the previous six years of her life had been a lie.'

Brown had also been living a lie during those six years with a Coventry woman he had met through the same dating site.

Claiming he had a kitchen-fitting business, he persuaded her to part with 3,300 to help with a supposed problem with his tax, and then to invest 47,000 in a non-existent garage business.

After their return from a holiday in Turkey, he convinced her he had arranged to have a house built for them there - and to help fund the fictitious project she gave him her 55,000 savings and cashed an endowment policy for a further 11,000.

Brown later claimed funds had run out for the project, and persuaded her to sell her home and to hand over the 120,000 proceeds to finance its completion.

And as more and more money was needed, her father was also taken in by the lies and transferred large sums of money to her to then transfer to Brown - even taking out loans against his own home to help them.

Nick Devine, defending, said: 'The money he obtained went exclusively to fund his run-away gambling habit. He hoped the big win would come in, but of course it didn't.'
An Australian woman is missing and feared dead after her sunglasses were found near a waterfall infamous for fatalities.

Sophie Dowsley, 34, and her boyfriend Greg Tiffin, 44, have not been since since July 8 on a hiking trip west of Vancouver.

The pair had taken a day trip near Harrison Hot Springs where Statlu Falls is located, an area a Canadian official described as 'a waterfall with a history of fatalities.'

Friends of Mr Tiffin have posted tributes to the 44-year-old on Facebook, describing him as 'a beloved son, brother, uncle and friend.'

An Australian woman, Sophie Dowsley (left) is missing and feared dead after her sunglasses were found near a waterfall infamous for fatalities. She was on a hiking trip west of Vancouver with her Canadian boyfriend, Greg Tiffin (right) but haven't been seen since July 8. Friends of Mr Tiffin have posted tributes to the man on Facebook describing him as 'a beloved son, brother, uncle and friend'

The pair had taken a day trip near Harrison Hot Springs where Statlu Falls is located, an area a Canadian official described as 'a waterfall with a history of fatalities'

Ms Dowsley posted an image of the area to Instagram a day after she was last seen

Ms Dowsley's family have flown from Sydney to Canada to help emergency services search for her body.

'It's the worst possible nightmare that you could imagine. I couldn't dream of anything worse,' Ms Dowsley's father Peter told CTV News.

'They've gone to a very dangerous place and they haven't come out. The terrain is just absolutely stunningly beautiful and rugged and unforgiving,' he said.

The only people that can be in there are trained professionals.'

The couple's SUV has been found near the area and several pieces of Ms Dowsley's belongings were discovered at the base of the waterfall.

Ms Dowsley's family have flown from Sydney to Canada to help emergency services search for her body

The couple's SUV has been found near the area and several pieces of Ms Dowsley's belongings were discovered at the base of the waterfall

Friends of Mr Tiffin have posted tributes to the 44-year-old on Facebook, describing him as 'a beloved son, brother, uncle and friend'

'It's the worst possible nightmare that you could imagine. I couldn't dream of anything worse,' Ms Dowsley's father Peter told CTV News

Neil Brewer, a member of the Kent Harrison Search and Rescue team, said the area is infamous for fatalities.

'20 years ago we went there three times, three consecutive years, for exactly the same scenario and a fatality each time,' he said.

A spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs say they are in regular communication with the family to give them any support necessary.

'The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is providing consular assistance to the family of an Australian woman reported missing in Canada, in accordance with the Consular Services Charter. Owing to our privacy obligations, we will not provide further comment.'
An ill teenager who missed her prom after she was bullied at school will have her own celebration after her friends stepped up, organising their own party instead.

Shannon Purcifer, 16, shunned her prom after 18 months of alleged intimidation from classmates who left her in tears due to name-calling as she battled bowel disease ulcerative colitis.

Her mother, Claire Carstens, posted an emotion picture of her daughter in her white prom dress the night she was meant to join in the end of year celebrations.

Shannon Purcifer, 16, says she was so badly bullied she stayed home from her prom, so her friends have rallied to organise her an alternative party

Friends and strangers decided to rally round the teenager, and have organised her an alternative prom, which 100 people are expected to attend in Gosport, Hampshire, on Saturday night.

A fleet of scooters will escort Shannon, in her 470 dress, to the venue, and guests will include Shannon's stepdad Kevin Carstens, a 37-year-old engineer, her brothers Alex, 18, and Brandon, 12, and four-year-old sister Freya, as well as 'true friends' and family.

Brave coeliac Shannon, who was also diagnosed with arthritis earlier this year, said she would often be given a room of her own at break times to stop bullies from picking on her.

Shannon, getting ready for an MRI scan this year. She has been in hospital frequently for various health problems

Her mother Claire, a 38-year-old retail worker, said: 'She wants to show the bullies that they won't win.

'The night she was supposed to go to her prom she just did nothing. She tried the dress on but it was heart-breaking for her to choose not to go.

'She had been looking forward to it for months and we bought the dress as far back as February but the bullying got so bad she knew she wouldn't enjoy it if she went.

'She agonised over it for a while but we knew maybe two months beforehand that her heart wasn't in it. She'd had enough.

'With all the things she's been going through with her health and trying to study for GCSEs, the bullying has just taken its toll.

'It started about halfway through year 10 and continued into year 11. It's mainly been name-calling and intimidation but there has been physical bullying too.

'When she's been poorly, the bullies have jumped on that too and it's got to the point where she feels sick every day.

'Having to put up with all of that has been too much for her.'

Shannon, whose dad Daniel Purcifer, a Royal Navy Petty Officer, died in Germany in 2007 aged 28, was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis two years ago.

Left, Shannon with Prince William in May this year, and right, Shannon with superbike star Shane Byrne

The condition, which causes inflammation and ulcers to develop in the inner lining of the colon, left Shannon seriously ill in hospital for two weeks when she was 14.

Shannon, who is due to start college in the autumn, has to take up to five tablets a day for this condition and her arthritis, which was spotted by doctors last year.

According to Shannon, when the bullies found out about her illnesses, the taunting only got worse.

Shannon said: 'It was really difficult to cope with. They used to call me the most terrible names. I couldn't even repeat any of them.

Guests will include Shannon's stepdad Kevin Carstens, a 37-year-old engineer, her brothers Alex, 18, and Brandon, 12, and four-year-old sister Freya. Brandon, Freya, and Claire, above

What is ulcerative colitis? Ulcerative colitis causes inflammation and ulceration of the inner lining of the large bowel. Tiny ulcers appear, and can bleed and create pus. It's a life-long condition and sufferers can have good periods of health or relapses, with poor health. Symptoms include diarrheoa, cramping in the abdomen, tiredness and fatigue, loss of appetite and anaemia. The disease affects one in 420 people in the UK, usually appearing between the ages of 15 and 25. Although the cause isn't known, genes have an impact, and there is often a trigger, such as a dietary impact or stress. It can be managed with medication and surgery is sometimes necessary. Source: Crohns and Colitis Advertisement

'It was really bad stuff, then it spread to text messages and social media. I had to change my number but somehow they still found me.

'I just know that if I had gone to the prom they would have completely taken the mick out of me. They're like a gang: girls and boys.

'The worst pain I have is the arthritis. It's in every joint. Some people didn't believe I had it and said I was faking.

'On the night of the prom I didn't really do anything. I was too upset. I saw my boyfriend, Lee, but I knew I couldn't face it.

'It was difficult because I'd been looking forward to it for ages, but now I'm excited for this one. I'm really touched by all the effort people have put in to it.'

Shannon, who recently had her waist-length hair cut to a bob to raise funds for Cancer Research UK, will be collected by a mystery car on Saturday afternoon after Claire's friend Kerri Kimber put out an appeal on social media.

In Claire's original touching Facebook post, accompanied by two black-and-white pictures of Shannon wearing the floor-length white dress, she wrote: 'If Shannon had gone to prom tonight she would have worn this beautiful dress.

Shannon being treated aged 14 in hospital. The Gosport teenager had ulcerative colitis, is a coeliac and has arthritis

Shannon with her mum Claire and her grandmother, Denise. Claire shared the photo of the dress the night of the prom, and her friends have rallied around

'Thanks to nasty vile bullies Shannon decided she didn't want to go and mix with scum that made her so miserable.

'For a girl that has had so much to deal with in life - coeliac disease, ulcerative colitis and rheumatoid arthritis - she is one strong young lady with an even stronger mind. Love you girl.'

Speaking about the plans for Saturday, Claire said: 'It's going to be a full prom. Some very kind people have offered to do her hair, we've got decorations, everything.

The 16-year-old has had a tough few years with her health, but still did her bit for charity, choosing to have her long hair cut off for a wig

'She's a beautiful young girl and I'm so proud of her for sticking two fingers up at the bullies. She wanted to join the Navy like her dad but can't because of her health so she's looking into a career in law or engineering.'

The headteacher of Shannon's Hampshire school said: 'Although we cannot comment on individual pupil matters, as a school we work hard with all pupils who experience bullying to help resolve the issues they are experiencing. The school prom was, as always, a safe and happy event.

'The alternative prom is a lovely idea. It is a great example of the positive power of social media, and we hope it is a great success.'
A man who stabbed his stepdaughter to death in front of her mother insisted he 'never touched her' in a chilling police interview before blaming the murder on his wife.

Raymond John Mead was convicted of murdering 24-year-old Sherelle Locke, a mother to a one-year-old girl, when she visited her family in Brisbane in 2014.

He was sentenced to life in prison in November last year.

But in his police interview, he denied being involved, instead pinning the blame on his wife and Sherelle's mother, Marlene Locke, who was in the room as Mead killed her daughter.

He told officers that Ms Locke pulled a knife on her daughter and he had been enjoying a glass of champagne outside when he heard screaming.

And despite being behind bars now, he is continuing to maintain his innocence and tormenting Ms Locke, A Current Affair reports.

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Raymond Mead (centre) stabbed his stepdaughter to death in front of her mother, then insisted he 'never touched her' in a chilling police interview

Raymond John Mead was sentenced to life in prison for murdering 24-year-old Sherelle Locke (pictured)

When asked by officers if he attacked Sherelle at any time in his police interview, Mead replies: 'Never touched her.

'I've never touched Sherelle or her in the eight years we been together. I've not put one finger on her at all.'

Mead is seen telling detectives that Sherelle and her mother had pulled knives on each other hundreds of times.

'It's just ridiculous,' he says. 'I just can't believe what she's done.'

Audio recordings from the night of the murder reveal Mead told his wife: 'You done it, you done it.'

Marlene Locke (pictured) said her husband blamed her for the murder and torments her from behind bars

She is heard screaming back at him: 'Don't you dare put this back on me. You liar!'

In an interview with ACA, Ms Locke said: 'He hasn't changed. He'll always be the way he is.'

She says Mead was drinking heavily all day  including beer, pink champagne, red wine, Scotch  before he approached her daughter, grabbed her by the throat and stabbed her in the chest.

Ms Locke said her daughter had begged for help with Mead still clutching her throat after stabbing her.

But her two-year-old son had been woken up by the commotion and started crying so she went to pick him up before helping her daughter.

'You're f****** next, put our son down,' she says Mead, still holding the knife, told her before throwing her against a wall.

Mead and Marlene Locke are pictured on their wedding day, with Sherelle (second from right)

When Ms Locke begged Mead to let her go to her dying daughter's aid, she says he told her: 'I don't care. She f****** deserved it. I'm f****** sick of her.'

He added: 'Now put our son down cause you're next.'

When she was eventually able to go to her daughter, it was too late.

Then Marlene called Triple-0.

'And he's standing beside me with a knife, just walking around in a circle going, 'she f****** deserved it.' That's all he kept saying,' Ms Locke adds.

During his murder trial, the jury heard that Mead hated his stepdaughter and blamed her for problems in his marriage.

Since then, he has written letters to Ms Locke tormenting her and urging her to take the blame for the murder.

'I was there, I saw what happened and I have to live with that for the rest of my life and he just denies it,' Ms Locke said.

'I would never, ever wish anything like this on any mother  to witness their own child being murdered by their husband.'

Mead's appeal will be heard in October.
Prison officers were today banned for life by a High Court judge from taking industrial action.

The Ministry of Justice mounted the legal case after moves by the prison officers union to get their members to refuse to undertake certain voluntary tasks.

The MoJ claimed the POA - the Professional Trades Union for Prison, Correctional and Secure Psychiatric Workers - was calling on its members to to take action short of a strike.

The POA was slapped with an interim injunction to withdraw a circular instructing members to refuse to undertake certain voluntary tasks.

And in a milestone ruling today, High Court judge Mr Justice Jay agreed to make the injunction permanent.

A High Court judge today banned prison officers for life form taking industrial action

Daniel Stilitz QC, representing the MoJ, said earlier this month that the case was brought 'to ensure that POA does not seek to breach the law again'.

The POA's barrister John Hendy QC claimed that as the tasks referred to in the circular were voluntary there was no evidence that any of their members had been asked to do anything unlawful.

He said steps were taken to make sure all officers complied with the injunction and the circular was never implemented.

But Mr Stilitz said: 'Any inducement which leads prison officers to cease to provide services which they otherwise would have done is unlawful.'

He added that there had been a history of 'unlawful' industrial action with the POA using 'inflammatory rhetoric.'

The Government wanted to ensure there will be no calls for unlawful industrial action in future.

The prison officers union had told its members to refuse to undertake voluntary tasks but an injunction stopping them form carrying out the action was today made permanent (file photo)

He added: 'It is therefore critical to safeguarding the proper and safe functioning of the prison service that the scope of the statutory prohibition is confirmed.'

In granting the permanent ban the judge said the prison service was under 'considerable pressure' due to squeezed budgets and prison officer numbers which he said were down to about 18,400.

Meanwhile, assaults and violence in prisons have been soaring with growing numbers inmates resorting to self harm and suicide.

He said: 'Inevitably, this has increased the pressure on prison officers whose job always has been difficult and stressful.

'Thus whilst the physical dangers and rigours of the job have increased, prison officers have felt conmensurately undervalued and diminished.'

But nevertheless he added: 'The POA has lost not just on the facts - the wording of the circular, and the finding that the circular was likely to generate a risk to the safety of prisoners and staff - but also on the important point of principle.'




A New Hampshire lobsterman has joined an elite club after catching a rare blue lobster.

Greg Ward initially thought he had snagged an albino lobster when he examined his catch off the coast Monday where New Hampshire borders Maine.

The Rye lobsterman who has been fishing for 32 years quickly realized his hard-shell lobster was a unique blue and cream color.

A rare blue lobster caught by local lobsterman, Greg Ward, is on display at the Seacoast Science Center in Rye, New Hampshire

Scientists say just one lobster in three million is blue - the result of a genetic defect that causes them to produce an excessive amount of protein

Excessive levels of a protein combines with a red caratenoid molecule known as astaxanthin, forming a blue complex known as crustacyanin. It is this that makes the lobster turn blue

'This one was not all the way white and not all the way blue,' Ward said. 'I've never seen anything like it.

'Usually, the stronger lobsters are usually the reddish brown color but this one still had a hard shell,' he told The Portsmouth Herald.

The oft-cited odds of catching a blue lobster are one in three million. But no one knows for sure.

The blue lobster is no different from the regular lobster- its only the mutation which influences the lobsters outer shell color

Prior to being cooked and turning red, most lobsters are found in browns and dark greens, as seen in this file photo of them removed from a cage at sea

ROYAL BLUE LOBSTER Scientists say just one lobster in three million is blue - the result of a genetic defect that causes them to produce an excessive amount of protein. The blue lobster is no different from the regular lobster- its only the mutation which influences the lobsters outer shell color. They can be found any place where regular lobsters are found. A research study conducted by Professor Ronald Christensen, at the University of Connecticut, USA, found that excessive levels of a protein combines with a red caratenoid molecule known as astaxanthin, forming a blue complex known as crustacyanin. It is this that makes the lobster blue. And just like all lobsters, blue lobsters turn bright red when they are cooked. In 2006 lobsterman David Percy caught a yellow lobster near Whaleback Island in the US at the mouth of the Kennebec River. The odds of finding a yellow lobster are approximately 1 in 30 million. It is estimated that only about one in 100 million lobsters are albino - lacking in colored pigments. They are known as 'white' or 'crystal' lobsters. Advertisement

Ward says the lobster is unlike anything he's ever seen.

'Blue lobsters are still pretty uncommon,' Royer said. 'We'll get about five or six calls every summer. Every time we get a call about an albino lobster, I get a little skeptical just because they are so rare.'

He gave the rare crustacean to the Seacoast Science Center in Rye to study and put on display.

Center aquarist Rob Royer says Ward's blue lobster will go on display in the 'exotic' lobster tank once it acclimates to the water.

The tank already holds a bright orange lobster and a calico covered lobster.

He said it currently has another blue lobster on display, a bright orange lobster and a calico covered lobster.

The Gulf of Maine, which includes the coast on New Hampshire, has one species of lobster, Homarus americanus, the American lobster.

Normally appearing brown or dark green in nature prior to boiling, scientists say just one lobster in three million is blue - the result of a genetic defect that causes them to produce an excessive amount of protein.

The blue lobster is no different to a regular lobster - it is only the mutation which influences the lobster's outer shell color.

Rarest: A calico lobster at the New England Aquarium is pictured which are found in one-out-of 30million

Yellow: This yellow lobster, like the calico, has a one-in-30million chance of being found, as seen at Massachusetts' New England Aquarium
A five-year-old boy and his two-year-old brother took their mother's car for a three-mile ride before crashing it.

The boys took the car from their mother's house Monday in West Virginia without her even realizing.

One child steered the vehicle while the other child pushed the gas and brake pedals as they rode along a curvy, winding road.

The ride only ended when the car crashed into a ditch. The pair escaped unharmed.

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Putnam County Sheriff Steve Deweese, pictured, says his team are trying to work out how the children were able to drive the car given that they were so small

The boys managed to drive the car for three miles before they ended up crashing into a ditch

Investigators are still trying to figure out how it all happened, saying there are many more questions than answers.

Putnam County Sheriff Steve Deweese said officials think the brothers worked together to steer the vehicle, but aren't sure because they haven't confessed details about their Monday ride.

Luckily, they didn't pass anybody because they would've probably had a wreck before then,' Deweese said Wednesday.

The boys made some good progress toward their grandfather's farm before crashing, navigating two or three turns and even a complete right turn, Deweese said.

One child steered the vehicle while the other child pushed the gas and brake pedals

'They were heading in the right direction,' he said, but crashed about 5 miles short of their destination.

The brothers were checked out at a hospital but had no injuries.

'To be their age, I know my kids couldn't get in the car and make it that far,' said Sharlene Wiseman to WSAZ, who owns the Bronco Junction Apartments where the boys live.

Sheriff Deweese says deputies did not find the children's mother until nearly an hour later.

Sharlene Wiseman who is the mother's landlady has told her she is no longer welcome

The two children's mother said that she believed her children were outside playing in the yard

She claimed that thought the boys were playing in the front yard.

Wiseman told the boy's mother that she was no longer welcome to live there as a tenant.

'We didn't want to take that chance that something might happen again,' she said.

The children were taken to the hospital to be checked out but had no injuries.

No charges have been filed against the mother, but Deweese says authorities are working with the prosecutor's office and Child Protective Services.
A fast food worker saved his colleague who started choking while having a break in the Colorado restaurant.

Chick-fil-A worker Andrew Myrant used the Heimlich maneuver which he learned at high school to save his co-worker.

Myrant said he noticed his colleague signalling that he had a piece of food stuck in his throat and was having difficulty breathing.

This is the dramatic moment an un-identified fast food worker starts struggling for breath while having a break in the Chick-fil-A restaurant in Highlands Ranch, Colorado

Fortunately for the worker, his colleague Andrew Myrant knew the Heimlich maneuver

Myrant learned the lifesaving technique in high school according to staff at the restaurant

According to a video shot of the dramatic incident, Myrant stood behind his colleague, clasped his hands on the man's abdomen and thrusted upwards dislodging the stuck piece of food.

According to ABC News, Myrant, who works at the branch in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, denied he did anything spectacular.

He said: 'I mean, it makes me feel pretty awkward because I don't feel like it, but they say "hero" a lot, and one of my managers bought me a sandwich for the other day, so that was nice.'

The video of the incident showed that Myrant sat down after saving his colleague so he could finish his own lunch.

Luckily the co-worker was also able to continue with his shift having not suffered any injury following the scare.
A notorious British gangster has married his glamorous moll who shared pictures of their lavish wedding ceremony at a luxury hotel.

Cocaine kingpin David Hough, 36, tied the knot with Hayley McGarry at the exclusive Mar Hall in Renfrewshire in Scotland.

Popstars Robbie Williams and Ed Sheeran have stayed at the exclusive hotel and the happy couple partied the night away with friends and family who drank champagne.

The tattooed bride posted photographs to her 3,500 followers on Instagram which showed her holding flowers wearing a silver coloured bikini before the big day.

Hayley McGarry has married notorious gangster David Hough (pictured) in a lavish ceremony in Scotland

Hayley McGarry uploaded this photograph of her in her wedding dress to her 3,500 Instagram followers

Another photograph showed two men holding her wedding dress before putting it into her mother's car.

One picture uploaded yesterday showed her wearing her wedding ring on her finger, with the caption: 'I didn't dream it.'

She also posted another photograph of her wearing her extravagant wedding dress with the caption: 'MrsH.'

Her husband, Hough, was jailed for four-and-a-half years after being caught by police with 146,000 of cocaine in 2004 following a high-speed chase.

In 2015, he escaped a prison term after headbutting a bouncer during an incident in a nightclub.

He also threatened to shoot former Celtic defender Darren O'Dea after accusing him of trying to chat up his girlfriend in a nightclub, reports the Daily Record.

The newspaper reports that the event was attended by former Miss Scotland Nicola Mimnagh.

She showed off her wedding ring and posted 'I didn't dream it' after the pair tied the knot
Nearly 220,000 gallons of sewage has been spilled into the ocean as beach goers are warned to stay out of the water along the Central California coast.

A spill of 219,000 gallons of sewage from the city of Oxnard has shut down two beaches.

Ventura County's Environmental Health Division says it was notified on Sunday that a power outage at a water treatment plant resulted in the discharge from a line a mile out into the ocean.

Nearly 220,000 gallons of sewage has been spilled into the ocean as beach goers are warned to stay out of the water along the California coast

The city has posted warning signs along Ormond Beach and Port Hueneme Beach Park.

The Environmental Health Division advises people to avoid contact with the water in posted areas and to not eat any shellfish from those areas.

All shellfish that has been recreationally harvested from the Ventura County coastline is under quarantine.

Ventura County's Environmental Health Division says it was notified on Sunday that a power outage at a water treatment plant (pictured) resulted in the discharge

The warning signs will be posted at Ormond Beach until Wednesday, or until lab test results 'meet ocean water quality standards,' health officials said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Port Hueneme officials told residents that Hueneme Beach Park will be closed for 72 hours due to the spill.

Scott Shoemaker, a 59-year-old lifeguard at Hueneme Beach who went into the ocean Monday morning not knowing about Sunday's spill, told the Ventura County Star: 'It's not the worst thing that could happen. If I tasted or smelled anything funny, I'd get out.'
This Royal fanatic who camps out day and night for special events has been dubbed 'Union Jack Man' by the Queen and claims to have met her more than 100 times.

Devoted Terry Hutt, 82, has spent decades travelling to Buckingham Palace and other royal residences to wait outside and meet the Windsors.

Such is his dedication, Kate and William even sent him a cake on his 80th birthday - which coincided with Prince George turning two.

Terry Hutt, 82, pictured in his "royal room" at his house in Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset

Mr Hutt giving flowers to the Queen, who he says he has met more than 100 times

On his 80th birthday - which coincided with George's festivities - William and Kate sent him a cake

Terry Hutt camping outside, Westminster Abbey in London today, for Kate and William's wedding (left) and on the Queen Mother's 101st birthday (right)

Mr Hutt meeting the Queen Mother, who he had first encountered when he was four, starting his royal obsession

His obsession was sparked when he was four after he met the Queen Mother, when went on a walkabout during the Blitz.

Terry has since written hundreds of letters and cards to old and young heirs to discuss royal affairs, say get well soon or congratulate them on weddings and births.

He regularly sends gifts to the Royals, including a toy dog wearing a Union Jack for Prince George.

Terry stands outside Buck House in all weathers and is known to the Queen as 'Union Jack Man' because of his red, white and blue suit.

He's always at the front of the queues outside the Queen's house and she always makes a point of saying hello when she talks to the crowd.

Terry could claim to have met HRH more times than any other member of the public - and hopes to one day pour her a cuppa.

Mr Hutt camped on a bench outside Windsor Castle in 2002 as he waited to pay his final respects to the Queen Mother

Outside of the Lindo Wing at St Marys Hospital, London before the birth of Princess Charlotte

His framed picture of him and the Queen is one of his most treasured possesions

The grandfather first camped on the street in 1978 and is preparing to do so once more for the anniversary of Princess Diana's death next month.

His home in Weston-Super-Mare in Somerset is crammed full of Royal memorabilia including pictures, newspapers cuttings and flags.

Retired carpenter Terry said: 'I've never been to the tea party they throw for pensioners, but I'd like to be there and pour the Queen a cup of tea.

'Kate Middleton poured me a cuppa once. The Queen calls me Union Jack Man.

She usually gets out of her car and makes a point of speaking to me.'

Heart surgery forced Terry into early retirement and he found himself wanting to learn more about the royal family.

He said: 'I had more spare time than before, so I decided to go and have a look.

'I met the Queen for the first time when I was 58. I'd just retired and I decided I wanted to see what was going on, so I went to Clarence House.'

Terry says Diana was his favourite member of the Royal Family and after her death he spent a week camped outside Buckingham Palace helping to clear away bouquets.

Climbing the gates outside Buckingham Palace(left) and sat outside the same venue on a different occasion (right)

Terry says Diana was his favourite member of the Royal Family and after her death he spent a week camped outside Buckingham Palace helping to clear away bouquets

He proudly recalls how his late father took Diana around London in a horse-drawn cart pulled by his pony, Snowball.

Terry's fascination with the Royal Family was sparked aged four, when he met the Queen Mother on a walkabout to reassure bombed-out Londoners.

Years later he met her once more and was delighted when she took an interest in his memories of the first time they met, during the Blitz.

Terry has an entire room dedicated to his obsession, with placards he made and photographs of the Royals on the walls

Terry said: 'I was dressed up in one of these outfits and I told her we'd met before when I was four years old.

'She wanted to know where it was and when it was, then she invited me to come to her birthday party next year.When she was alive I went to her birthday parties.'

He said: 'A few days before anyRoyal event I go and do my homework.

'Royalists from all over the world keep in contact and they want to know where I'm going to be, so we work it so that we try and keep together.

'I make sure I know where I'm going to stand and I take supplies for the week: a groundsheet, tent and food.'

When the Queen Mother broke her collar bone, Terry sent her a pink rose to cheer her up.

Born in North London, Terry will only buy his distinctive Union Jack hats in Camden Market and always haggles traders down from a tenner.

When camping on the streets, he uses his oldest hat as a night cap to keep his head warm. And he always takes a flask of tea and some sandwiches.

Terry has an entire room dedicated to his obsession, with placards he made and photographs of the Royals on the walls.

A pair of Union Jack glasses, a small model of the Queen and a mug of Kate and William can be seen here

This right, white and blue hat has various badges of the Union Jack and members of the Royal family pinned on it

Mr Hutt when he was four years old (left) and in more recent times before Prince George's birth (right)

It had to be stored in a caravan when he moved house, due to the quantity of letters, newspaper cuttings, framed photographs and souvenirs.

Every year he visits the Diana Memorial to pay his respects, and has already written to Kensington Palace to camp outside with other Royalists.

This year they have clubbed together to buy a floral garland to be placed at the gates.

Terry has amassed friends from around the world through his hobby, and as well as his suit, a gift from Holland, he was given an umbrella hat by a Canadian fan.

Tourists always want to snap photos with him and Terry cheerfully obliges.

He is counting down to August 31 when he will dress up in his outfit and pay tribute to Diana.

He said: 'Prince Harry's wedding could be the next big event, or it could be another baby.'

When Diana married Prince Charles in 1981, Terry took his wife Joy, and children David and Tracey, watch the ceremony.

He said: 'I want to get to 100 so I get a birthday card from the palace. You have got to think positively.'
Theresa May vowed to be 'fair' to public sector workers on pay today - but slammed Jeremy Corbyn for pretending no-one would have to foot the bill for rises.

The Prime Minister and the Labour leader traded blows over the future of the 1 per cent cap on salary increases in the last PMQs session before parliament's summer break.

Mrs May said she recognised the 'sacrifice' being made by state employees, but again refused to confirm that the limit would be eased, despite pressure from Tory MPs and inside the Cabinet.

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The Prime Minister and the Labour leader traded blows over the future of the public sector pay cap today in the last PMQs session before parliament's summer break

Mr Corbyn was slammed for pretending no-one would have to foot the bill for rises, but he insisted too many people were in poverty

She insisted the UK had to 'live within its means' and delivered an impassioned defence of the Conservatives' record in government.

'He seems to think it's possible to go around promising more money and promise nobody is ever going to have to pay for it,' Mrs May told MPs.

But Mr Corbyn shot back that the PM had managed to find 1billion over two years to secure support from the DUP.

The veteran left-winger kicked off the clashes by highlighting reports that Chancellor Philip Hammond told a Cabinet meeting that public sector workers were 'overpaid' compared to the private sector when their pensions are taken into account.

He jokingly asked Mrs May if she believed Mr Hammond was referring to her own ministers, before telling MPs: 'The Conservatives have been in office for 84 months - 52 of those months have seen a real fall in wages and income in our country.'

But Mrs May retorted that Labour had been responsible for 'crashing' the economy and the Tories needed to make tough choices to put it back together.

'I'll tell you when you can't have a strong economy, it's when you adopt Labour Party policies of half-a-trillion pounds extra borrowing which will mean more spending, more borrowing, higher prices, higher taxes and fewer jobs,' she said.

Mrs May said Labour had been responsible for 'crashing' the economy and the Tories needed to make tough choices to put it back together

Parliament is about to break up for the summer break after a tumultuous few months

'The Labour government crashed the economy, the Conservative Government has come in - more people in work, more people in jobs, more investment.'

Mrs May said she was determined to 'balance being fair to public sector workers, protecting jobs and being fair to those who pay for them'.

'He and I both value public sector workers... the difference is on this side of the House we know you have to pay for them,' she added.

Mr Corbyn said: 'The PM doesn't seem to have any problem finding money to pay for the DUP's support!'

.'
Drone footage has captured incredible footage of a shark feeding frenzy off an iconic Sydney beach.

Up to a dozen grey nurse sharks have been captured feasting on a large school of bait fish at Bondi Beach on Wednesday.

A local photographer captured the images with a drone, as two daredevil swimmers and a lifeguard went in for a closer look.

Drone footage has captured incredible footage of a shark feeding frenzy off an iconic Sydney beach

Up to a dozen grey nurse sharks have been captured feasting on a large school of bait fish at Bondi Beach on Wednesday

The grey nurse sharks, which are not a dangerous species, can be seen hunting through the fish as they move closer to shore

The grey nurse sharks, which are not a dangerous species, can be seen hunting through the fish as they move closer to shore.

Lifeguards signalled the beach's shark alarm, alerting swimmers and surfers to exit the water.

The beach was closed for an hour before the school moved on.

To the shock of Craig Smith, who filmed the stunning footage, a man and woman entered the water and swum directly to the fish.

A local photographer captured the images with a drone, as two daredevil swimmers and a lifeguard went in for a closer look

Up to a dozen grey nurse sharks have been captured feasting on a large school of bait fish at Bondi Beach on Wednesday

I've never seen anything like that before, and so close to the beach. They were only 100 metres off the beach'

He attempted to signal to the swimmers there were sharks below, but said 'it was pretty obvious they were there to see the sharks,' he told Nine News.

I've never seen anything like that before, and so close to the beach. They were only 100 metres off the beach.'

Swimmers are being advised to be on the lookout as large numbers of fish travel up Australia's east coast.

Swimmers are being advised to be on the lookout as large numbers of fish travel up Australia's east coast
French officials have been left baffled after hundreds of thousands of bizarre sponge-like balls likened to yellow mousse washed up on a coastline.

The mystery objects have been found in huge numbers on the beaches of France's northern Pas-de-Calais department.

Experts say they are still trying to work out where the balls come from - but officials insist that 'to their knowledge' they do not pose a risk to the public.

French officials have been left baffled after hundreds of thousands of bizarre sponge-like balls likened to yellow mousse washed up on a coastline

The mystery objects have been found in huge numbers on the beaches of France's northern Pas-de-Calais department

Experts say they are still trying to work out where the balls come from - but officials insist that 'to their knowledge' they do not pose a risk to the public

The area affected stretches from Boulogne-sur-Mer to the nearby town of Le Touquet - about 19 miles.

They have been found on beaches called La Slack, Wimereux, Le Portel, Equihen-Plage, Hardelot, Le Touquet, Stella and Berck, according to La Voix du Nord.

Authorities have indicated that the influx is not a danger to 'public health, animals or plants'.

The area affected stretches from Boulogne-sur-Mer to the nearby town of Le Touquet - about 19 miles

Authorities have indicated that the influx is not a danger to 'public health, animals or plants'

But their appearance has sparked confusion among residents and tourists in the area.

The sponge balls are being analysed in the hope of unravelling the mystery.

Jonathan Henicart, president of the Sea-mer conservation group told French TV news channel BFMTV he suspected it was from an 'oil product'.

He added: 'It could come from a polyurethane product commonly used for building. And it smells very, very lightly of paraffin.'
A police officer is in hospital after he was attacked with a Samurai sword.

The incident occurred at a house in Parkin Street in Rockingham, southwest of Perth, at around 5.30pm on Wednesday, according to the ABC.

The officer, who is thought to be in his mid-50s, sustained a deep cut to his head.

He was taken to Royal Perth Hospital.

Police took a man into custody and seized the sword as evidence.
A Brigham Young University professor was fired from her job after she refused to take down a Facebook post detailing her support for the LGBT community.

Ruthie Robertson, 22, wrote the status to her social media page on June 5 in honor of Pride Month.

In the post, she also expressed her opposition to the strict religious practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where she is currently a member.

The Facebook post was set to private mode, meaning none of Robertson's students could read it - only Robertson's friends could view it.

However, one of her followers came across the post and reported it to her employer at some point that same day.

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Ruthie Robertson (above), 22, was fired from her job at Brigham Young University-Idaho for posting a status to her Facebook page supporting LGBT rights.

In the post, she also expressed her distaste for the strict and segregated practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where she is currently a member

RUTHIE ROBERTSON'S FACEBOOK POST 'In honor of LGBT Pride Month, I thought I would reveal some things in the name of authenticity. 'This organization has openly and forcefully opposed same-sex relationships and legalized same-sex marriage. They pushed members in California to fight against Prop 8, and had a policy claiming that same-sex relationships were a sin and discouraged individuals from participating in them,' the post read. 'In November 2015, they took their stance further by labeling same-sex couples in the Church as apostates, meaning those found in these relationships would have a disciplinary hearing to determine their membership status; they can either end their engagements in this sinful life, or be excommunicated. 'The policy also prevents their children from joining the Church until they are 18, with the condition that they disavow their parents life style. 'For an organization that places so much importance on the family unit, this policy sure seems to be attacking a form of that unit.' Advertisement

The very next day, Robertson was summoned to meet with administrators where it was strongly implied that if she did not take down the offending post she would be fired.

Robertson refused and claims that school officials ordered her to pray on her decision, according to the Washington Post.

The young professor says one week later, after she had still not deleted the post she was called in and told that she would not be returning to teach in the fall.

When asked, the university said that it 'has a long-standing policy of not commenting on personal matters,'

Robertson was employed as an adjunct instructor of political science at Brigham Young University-Idaho, a private university closely affiliated to the LDS Church, according to the school's official website.

She admitted to feeling out of 'place' as a member of the church for several years.

'I kind of felt like the rug was pulled out from under me,' she said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Robertson said after the school became aware of her post, they cancelled her fall and winter semesters. Above: Students walk around Brigham Young University-Idaho campus

Robertson said she would not apologize for the comments posted

Robertson told KUTV the university has officially cancelled her fall and winter semesters, while she was able to complete the remainder of summer courses.

Robertson said she would not choose to sacrifice her personal beliefs for the sake of her job, adding she would continue to support her gay friends just as she would her straight.

'I could not take it back,' she said.

'I will never support the phrase 'love the sinner, hate the sin because that 'sin' is part of who that person is. Homosexuality and transgenderism are not sins; if God made us, and those are part of who we are.. then God created that as well,' she added.

'I realize that my views counter the current day policies of the LDS Church, but I hope that over time the Church will come to see the harm these policies have,' Robertson wrote.

'I will always and forever stand up for the equality of the LGBT community. Sexuality and gender are not binary, they are on a spectrum and that's how we were made.'
Sergei Paylian was only 14 years old when he was horrified by the death of his young, attractive neighbor in Tbilisi, Georgia. As was the local Soviet custom at the time, her open coffin was carried through the street to the sound of music as a shocked teenage Sergei looked on, confronted for the first time with the issue of his own mortality.

It sparked a lifelong obsession with aging  and how to reverse it.

Now, standing in his neat Florida laboratory that looks more like a dentists office, the 66-year-old scientist is explaining how a lifetime of research has culminated in a purified extract he calls bioquantines, 'combinatorial biologics' incorporating other species such as frogs and, in the future, sharks that he believes is the key to curing diseases  and even death.

When injected into humans, he claims, the bioquantines find their way to diseased or damaged cells and help restore them to a healthier state.

The company Dr Paylian founded, Bioquark, is part of a broader project called ReAnima  which is exploring the potential of cutting edge biomedical technology for human neuro-regeneration and neuro-reanimation.

He is on the international advisory board of ReAnima, which is already preparing to conduct experimental treatments in Latin America of living cadavers, patients who have experienced complete and irreversible loss of brain function, or brain death. The procedure involves harvesting stem cells from the patients own blood and injecting them back into their body; injecting bioquantines into the patients spinal cord; and performing 15 days of laser and median nerve stimulation, monitoring the patients using MRI scans.

The initial goal is to re-start the bodys ability to, unaided, pump the heart and breathe; no one is expecting the treatment to immediately reanimate the patients so that theyre jumping off the bed - but the project aims to lay the groundwork for future, further developments that can enhance levels of consciousness and recovery.

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Dr Sergei Paylian, who lives in Tampa with his wife and children, has spent decades researching ways to reverse the aging process and treat diseases

Dr Sergei and his Russian wife, Tatyana, work to produce biological extract 'bioquantines' in the 600 sq ft laboratory of their company Bioquark, which he founded in 2007

The Bioquark lab includes three rooms for research, extract production and storage, as well as a reception area and bathroom

Planned trials in India were derailed last year by the Indian Council of Medical Research, and the project is still awaiting approval in Latin America - though Bioquark and ReAnima CEO Ira Pastor says many families have come forward to offer their relatives as subjects. He says the company has made five applications that 'go directly to the supreme court of the country where we are applying to use the protocol and are given for single cases - hence why we are applying for five of them at the same time, in anticipation of short-term patient flow.'

Their specific ideas of brain death regeneration tend to be laughed off by much of mainstream science; Dr Paylians face falls when he acknowledges that he has sent out articles hundreds of times but has been rarely published, and no one has congratulated what he considers to be a massive discovery that could change the way we view and treat disease.

Regenerative medicine and research based on other species is nothing new; Cody Smith, assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Notre Dame, explains how the scientific community for years has been studying other organisms to see if humans can learn to replicate their regenerative properties.

The idea is, if you can find what they do differently than the humans, then you can be able to somehow activate it or deactivate it in a human  and get it to regenerate like it does in the amphibian and other organisms.

Smith, for example, works with zebra fish  as does Dr Paylian  in studying possibilities for peripheral nerve regeneration. He did not comment specifically on the Bioquark plans, given his unfamiliarity with the specifics of their science  and other universities contacted were reluctant to put forward anyone to speak directly about the ReAnima effort.

Another expert, however, has previously cast doubt on the project; Dr Charles Cox of the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, told science site Statnews.com last month that its not the craziest thing Ive ever heard, but I think the probability of that working is next to zero.

It's not the craziest thing I've ever heard, but I think the probability of that working is next to zero - Dr Charles Cox, University of Texas

He added that their plan to reverse brain death would technically be a miracle.

I think the pope would technically call that a miracle, he said.

Dr Paylian, however, is hoping for a miracle, and says that reversing the effects of aging, disease and even death was always his ultimate dream ever since the neighbors funeral that left such a mark on him.

I was so shocked, he says in heavily accented English as his smiling Russian wife  and lab assistant  nods along. I said, Jesus Christ, the time will come when everything will disappear. How come we have such a unique ability to think and simultaneously we have to die, somehow, in the future? Then I was scared, as a kid.

This is when I started to collect all this information about aging, because everybody dies  mosquito, human beings. It looks like some program is working, and the program is different between human beings, dogs, cockroaches, they all have different programs.

I was fascinated with this power of aging, I would say, because everything, all biological species, they eventually die  and especially its not fair to human beings. We have such a wide ability to think and create both in the arts and science and even, by the end of your life, then you are about 80 years old, you are still able to think clearly and do a lot of other beneficial work  but unfortunately aging takes its toll. So this was pretty much the big challenge.

He adds: I thought there should be some kind of mechanism which will allow us to somehow modify the aging process and somehow make it even reversible.

While bioquantines are researched and made at this Florida facility in an office park just off a major highway, the trials on 'living cadavers' are set to take place in Latin America

Dr Paylian says his major goal is to help people and reverse ageing and disease since for thousands of years we have been 'a very sick civilization'

Dr Paylian poses with a shark used for his research; he says the 450 million-year-old species 'are masters of regeneration'

Bioquark CEO Ira Pastor came from a pharmaceutical background and went into business with Dr Paylian after reading his proposals online

He went on to study biophysics and molecular biology in the Soviet Union and found work at the Institute of Experimental Morphology in Tbilisi and the Institute of Gerontology in Kiev  but more mainstream science, he says, did not offer the answers he sought.

At some point, I split from everything, he says. I remember one day, I came home, I just cleaned up the table; I just said, No more  because I have to work in that more  I dont want to call it dark field of science, but a field of science which nobodys stepping in.

He says: I was in search of the trigger who can convert, normalize cancer cells. I am against the use of strong drugs to kill cancer cells; I am against radiation, radiotherapy, even against surgery  because we dont give the patient opportunities to understand what is going on with growing of cancer.

says he prefers working with cancerous cells to try to get them to go back to their pre-cancerous state without any medicine, without anything.

We discovered that cells, they have a memory of the past, memories of a healthy state  because the past is usually associated with the health, future with sickness and disease.

Similarly to immunotherapy, he says: I believe that reprogramming is the future of medical therapy  adding that there is an ancient trigger which should be identifiable and able to revert cells to a normal, past state before sickness.

Controversial plan to carry out experimental treatments on 'living cadavers' Bioquark was founded in 2007 by Dr Sergei Paylian, who remains its chief scientific officer. Working from a lab in Tampa, Florida, he produces a purified extract called Bioquantine, which aims to incorporate biological material from other, regenerative species to treat human ailments and reverse the aging process. The peptide extract forms part of a project called ReAnima, which is exploring the potential of cutting edge biomedical technology for human neuro-regeneration and neuro-reanimation. ReAnima is already preparing to conduct experimental treatments in Latin America of living cadavers, patients who have experienced complete and irreversible loss of brain function, or brain death. The procedure involves harvesting stem cells from the patients own blood and injecting them back into their body; injecting bioquantines into the patients spinal cord; and performing 15 days of laser and median nerve stimulation, monitoring the patients using MRI scans. The initial goal is to re-start the bodys ability to, unaided, pump the heart and breathe; no one is expecting the treatment to immediately reanimate the patients so that theyre jumping off the bed - but the project aims to lay the groundwork for future, further developments that can enhance levels of consciousness and recovery. Advertisement

He continued his studies and work in Eastern Europe before immigrating to the US in 1990 because he wanted more freedom of choice.

From the very beginning, I was always depressed with the political situation in the Soviet Union, he says. A human being could not express freely his thoughts, both in arts and in science, even.

He worked in science in the US but became disheartened with the lack of enthusiasm and funding for his projects, eventually working on translating documents, instead.

I left science, says Dr Paylian, who has three children with wife Tatyana, while they also each have one child from previous relationships. He and his wife built a cabin in wooded, rural Wisconsin and enjoyed temporarily enjoyed a quiet life in nature.

I was translating interesting topics to deliver to Russian readers, plus it was a very nice place. We were collecting mushrooms in the woods. Then we drained all our savings. This was when it was very important I publish my ideas, [thinking] Maybe this will work.

He posted his ideas about reprogramming therapy on a scientific website, looking for funding, but spent months fielding annoying phone calls from brokers who wanted money upfront to connect him with investors. He was cutting the lawn when he rudely answered what he thought was just another one of these opportunists  but turned out to be pharmaceutical entrepreneur Ira Pastor, now Bioquarks CEO, who came on board.

Dr Paylian began conducting more research with better resources and currently works in a 600-square-foot lab in Tampa, just a few miles from his family home. Its a nondescript space in a row of one-storey offices just off a major highway, neatly decorated and sparkling clean. Tanya sits behind the reception desk, where stickers advertise what credit cards the company accepts. In addition to using bioquantines for therapy practices, theyve also incorporated them into cosmetic and dermatologic products which they sell.

There are no animals in the lab today, but its common for the space to host frogs, fish, even sharks  studying and utilizing their regenerative qualities  and mice on whom the bioquantines are tested. The lab encompasses three rooms of scientific equipment, as well as the waiting area and bathroom. It doesnt look like the birthplace of Frankenstein-esque technology, and Dr Paylian  endearingly nervous about speaking on camera, as he fidgets with printouts of his research  laments the fact that his work has not been taken more seriously by the scientific community.

It is here where he researches and manufactures the allegedly rejuvenating bioquantines. They encompass purified, extracted biologic material from other species whose biology allows regeneration, with cells being returned through electrical stimulation to primordial conditions, though Dr Paylian coyly wont elaborate on his methods for achieving these. The research began with the South African species of Xenopus laevis frogs and expanded.

The zebra fish has amazing opportunity to rejuvenate even neural tissue; you cut a part of the brain, it regenerates; you cut a part of the heart, it regenerates, he says. And then we also added sharks  they are masters of regeneration.

Sharks are a 450million-year-old species, one of the oldest species on this planet  and they remember things the way species dont remember. This is why we took the shark material, especially as a blood component.

Of utilizing other species to reprogram human cells, he says: I understood that I stumbled on something unusual and magic and interesting, which attracted me immediately  and that I may hold the keys to the successful therapy. This was a major feeling I had, because if you hold in your hands a mechanism who may reverse pathological cells into the normal cells, this is something which tells you, if we can do with the cell, it means that we can do it with tissue, because tissue consists of cells.

We can do it with organs; if we can do it with organs, convert them in younger stages, we can actually rejuvenate human beings.

He says injecting bioquantines has helped patients with everything from cerebral palsy to thyroid problems to kidney disease  though the reasons for their efficacy remain a mystery.

How bioquantine works, nobody knows, including us, he says. We dont know what is going on, how it works, how it modifies.

Bioquantines are trialed on mice - at much higher levels than human doses - in the Bioquark lab, where Dr Paylian also works with regenerative animals such as frogs and zebra fish

Dr Paylian says that, if science can reverse diseased cells to healthy cells, it can be done with tissue, which means the same can then be done with organs

Each tissue releases some kind of warning signals, saying that, Hey, I dont feel good, come here and help me. Bioquantines read those signals, apparently  so bioquantine goes towards this area and interacts with certain molecules there, micromolecules, and this is the beginning of the process of the healing, we believe. But all this can be chased down in more, wider studies, which of course needs more funds to conduct them.

All patient experiments have been conducted abroad, since the use of bioquantines on humans is not FDA-approved  and Dr Paylian says they dont have enough funds to conduct the required research to get that approval.

We are more focused on production  which can help millions of people, including kids, he says. Because our major goal is to help people right now, not to collect molecular biology data, results. Enough waiting, I would say, we deserve good health. Already many centuries we suffer, thousands of years human beings are suffering from many diseases. As of today, we have around 6,500 different types of diseases. We are a very sick civilization. This makes us sad, because we deserve much better health  and I think  reprogram-based bioquantine therapy can step in and activate and help people to be more healthy.

When it comes to applying the reprogramming bioquantines to brain dead patients, he says: At some point, I was very much engulfed in the ageing studies; I was thinking that, ok, if you end up with an already dead person  can you rewire him?

As of today, we know a person pronounced dead, then the brain is not responding. This is intermediate condition of the human that is between real death, and all the metabolism stops in your body, and real life, then you are in normal condition.

So this is some kind of sensitive threshold that you can still bring him back, trying to apply the bioquantines, stem cells.

CEO Ira Pastor says that elements of the ReAnima project have taken on a life of their own  without meaning to make a pun  detracting from the therapeutic reprogramming uses for the bioquantines. But he stands by the unorthodox project that he, Dr Paylian and their team are pursuing.

It is obviously something thats never been done, yet I think we are on the right path, he says. Thats not to say everyone loves us; they dont.

If we can get you breathing independently and then your heart will be beating independently, you are alive. You are not awake, but you are in a coma now, and you are not in an irreversible coma  and that would be a major step.

Some people say, Thats no good  its a poor quality of life. And I say, well, number one, I can argue that being dead is probably a worse quality of life than being alive. But at the same point, the concept that we would stop now at this point is ludicrous. The goal is, theres a continuum of consciousness. Theres brain death, or irreversible coma; one step after that is coma, and there are many stages of this; above coma is persistent vegetative state, and above that is your minimally conscious state  and above that, you are awake.

So our goal is to progress up that chain, but we have to do this stepwise. This is not magic, and no ones going to jump up tomorrow, but this is a progression that normally happens in nature  and we have only one path to follow to move you up at that at this point.
A young woman was fired by a real estate firm just one day before her six-month probation was up 'because she was pregnant'.

Burgess Rawson, who hired Tiffany Mahajan as an administrative assistant, said she was sacked because she was 'unreliable', the Melbourne Federal Circuit Court heard.

But Judge Heather Riley said this was a 'preposterous' excuse, noting Ms Mahajan's pregnancy as the reason for her dismissal.

Tiffany Mahajan was fired by a real estate firm just one day before her six-month probation was up 'because she was pregnant' (Ms Mahajan is pictured pregnant)

Judge Riley found it hard to believe Ms Mahajan was considered unreliable because she was slightly late to work on a small number of occasions.

The judge found she was dismissed unfairly because she was pregnant, took her entitled annual leave and was temporarily away from work because she was sick.

At Ms Mahajan's three-month probation meeting she told her employer she was pregnant and intended to take maternity leave in the future, the court heard.

Ms Mahajan was 'five to ten minutes' late for work a small number of times because of public transport delays, she told the court.

She took seven days of sick leave ad four days of annual leave due to medical appointments.

The real estate firm's Principal Tim Perrin used this as a reason Ms Mahajan, the court heard.

Burgess Rawson, who hired Tiffany Mahajan as an administrative assistant, said she was sacked because she was 'unreliable', the Federal Circuit Court heard (court pictured)

'It beggars belief that Mr Perrin would have said that the applicant's employment had become unreliable on the basis that she was a little late for work on six or seven occasions in a three month period in combination with some formatting issues that he had not previously raised with her in a formal manner,' the judge said in her final statement.

'I consider that a significant and substantial reason for the respondent dismissing the applicant was her pregnancy.'
Queensland MPs have slammed Deputy Premier Jackie Trad after jarring remarks she made during Senate estimates on Wednesday.

It is alleged Ms Trad 'fat shamed' Liberal National MP Andrew Powell during a bitter exchange regarding Queensland Rail drivers.

Mr Powell was questioning the re-employment of a 'union-heavy' man when Ms Trad was heard saying 'not as heavy as you' under her breath.

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Queensland Deputy Premier Jackie Trad has come under fire after opposing MPs accused her of 'fat shaming' another MP during Senate estimates

Andrew Powell was questioning Ms Trad about the re-employment of a 'union heavy' man

It is not known what she meant by the remark, but some politicians took to Twitter to vent their disgust.

Ms Trad also serves as the Minister for Transport and the Minister for Infrastructure and Planning.

Shadow Health Minister John-Paul Langbroek said the Deputy Premier's comments would have blown up more if she were a man speaking to a woman.

'Imagine the outrage nowadays if a male MP made a public comment about a female MP's weight,' he wrote.

'Jackie Trad shows what she's really like - nasty.'

Mr Powell was left stunned as Ms Trad responded under her breath when she said 'not as heavy as you'

Ms Trad was slammed by Liberal National Party MP's, who called her 'nasty' and a 'hypocrite'

Shadow Small Business Minister Scott Emerson echoed Mr Langbroek's sentiments, and labelled Ms Trad 'nasty and hypocritical'.

LNP MP Mark Robinson asked if Ms Trad had apologised.

Ms Trad's comment stopped Mr Powell in his tracks, and a clip showed the MP looking stunned and staring straight at her.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Jackie Trad for comment.
The mayor of a French town has been forced to apologise after a prankster flew a plane over a packed beach with a banner saying: 'Go home f****** tourists.'

In the video comedian Remi Gaillard can be seen preparing his banner before taking off in a small aircraft.

The 42-year-old then parades the sign in front of hundreds of sunbathing tourists on Carnon beach near Montpellier in southern France.

The mayor of a French town has been forced to apologise after a prankster flew a plane over a packed beach with a banner saying: 'Go home f****** tourists'

He successfully flew the banner translated in English and Spanish but was stopped by police before he was able to parade his sign in French.

The mayor of the city of Mauguio Carnon, Yvon Bourrel, has taken to Twitter to apologise and denounce the stunt as 'upsetting,' according to The Local.

Mr Bourrel went on the assure tourists they would be welcome to visit the town.

The video has been viewed more than one million times on YouTube since being uploaded on Monday.

The mayor of the city of Mauguio Carnon, Yvon Bourrel, has taken to Twitter to apologise and denounce the stunt as 'upsetting'

Mr Gaillard defended the prank as an act of humour and said: 'What is pitiful to me is the rescue stations closing at 6.30pm when the beaches are still packed.'

This is not the first time the prankster's antics have raised eyebrows.

The French comedian was previously accused of glorifying sex attacks after posting a video online in which he appears to be simulating sex with unsuspecting women.

Mr Gaillard (left) defended the prank as an act of humour while Mayor Bourrel (right) was critical

Gaillard provoked criticism for the 'air sex' video in which he used careful camera angles to make it appear he is miming intercourse with women without their knowledge.

The online comedian however has defended the film, insisting all of the women involved gave their consent for the footage to be published and pointing out how the media is 'feasting' on the video.
Busted: James Dameron, 26, was arrested in Florida on charges stemming from a 2015 crash that killed a family of three

Authorities in Florida have apprehended a driver who they say is responsible for causing a fiery crash in 2015 that killed a young family of three, including a one-year-old baby.

James Dameron, 26, was taken into custody by Florida Highway Patrol troopers on Tuesday afternoon after leading them on a chase along the Florida Turnpike in Palm Beach County.

Dameron had an active warrant out for his arrest stemming from the deadly September 6, 2015, collision that took the lives of Thomas Garza, 23, his fiancee Lillian Luna, 20, and the couple's daughter, Brianna.

The crash happened at around 4.20am at mile marker 286, a mile from the Leesburg South exit at State Road 19 and US-27.

Dameron, then aged 24, was behind the wheel of a white Mercedes SUV and allegedly rear-ended Garza's Nissan Maxima with such force that both vehicles burst into flames.

Garza and Luna, from Georgia, died at the scene. Their one-year-old daughter was ejected from the car and died from her injuries at the hospital a short time later.

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Family wiped out: The September 6, 2015, collision took the lives of Thomas Garza, 23 (left), his fiancee Lillian Luna, 20, and the couple's daughter, Brianna (pictured right)

Deadly inferno: Dameron driving a Mercedes SUV (pictured) allegedly rear-ended Garza's Nissan Maxima with such force that both vehicles burst into flames

The family were on their way to Walt Disney World in Orlando to celebrate Brianna's first birthday at the time of the crash.

Investigators said that Dameron, who has an extensive criminal record involving drug possession charges and a history of speeding violations, was driving on a suspended license at the time of the accident.

ClickOrlando reported that court records from Orange County alone show that Dameron has been ticketed 13 times since 2013.

Dameron walked away from the wreck with minor injuries and spent the next two years on the lam. He was being sought on three counts of vehicular homicide and driving while his license was suspect, in a case involving death.

Garza (left) and Luna, from Georgia, died at the scene. Their one-year-old daughter (left and right) was ejected from the car and died from her injuries at the hospital

Tragic detail: The family were on their way to Walt Disney World in Orlando to celebrate Brianna's first birthday

Dameron walked away from the devastating wreck with a few minor injuries

Shortly before 5pm on Tuesday, Dameron was driving south on the Florida Turnpike with his half-brother in the car when troopers acting on a tip intercepted him, according to Orlando Sentinel.

Dameron tried to get away by taking an exit, but he got stuck in traffic and was ultimately detained by the authorities, who had been actively looking for him for nearly two years.

At the time of his arrest, Dameron had copper and tinfoil wrapped around a monitoring device strapped to his ankle.

A search of his Mercedes also yielded illegal narcotics. Dameron was booked into the Palm Beach County Jail on charges on fleeing police at a high speed, driving with a suspended license, tampering with electronic monitoring device, possession of methamphetamine with intent to sell and possession of drug equipment.

He was being held Wednesday on bonds totaling $19,500 pending his initial court appearance scheduled for later in the day.
A man accused of beating his father to death and leaving the body in a freezer has been indicted by a grand jury.

Kenneth Alleman Midgley Jr., 28, is charged with first-degree murder in the death of his father Kenneth Midgley Sr., 50, whose body was found inside their Plano, Texas, home in April.

The 28-year-old, who told his mother, 'You can't talk to dad because he's not alive' fled to Mexico before he was arrested two weeks after his sister called the police.

Kenneth Alleman Midgley Jr., 28, (left) has been indicted by a grand jury on a first-degree murder charge in the death of his father Kenneth Midgley Sr. (right), who was found in a freezer

Midgley Jr. is still being held at the Collin County Jail on $500,000 bond, with his first court appearance scheduled for August 10.

The suspect's sister called the police on April 15, reporting she hadn't heard from her father in a few days, according to an arrest warrant affidavit cited by FOX4 .

According to her, the 28-year-old told their mother: 'You cant talk to dad because hes not alive.'

Police arrived at the home in the 4700 block of Nocona Drive and found a note signed by 'Kenny' saying something bad had happened.

It also said the 50-year-old had been hit by a steel rod, and included the line: 'It's in the freezer'.

After Midgley Jr.'s sister called the police, authorities found a note signed by 'Kenny' saying something bad had happened. It included the line 'It's in the freezer'

Just as the note indicated, Kenneth Midgley Sr.'s body was found inside the freezer, wrapped up in a blue tarp.

There were signs of a struggle, and the bloody rod was found inside the home, according to an affidavit. Police said Midgley Sr. died from blunt-force trauma.

Midgley Jr. was seen crossing the border into Mexico before he was taken into custody at the Dallas Forth Worth International Airport on April 25. It remains unclear where he was flying in from.
The man who desecrated up to 70 graves, including those of children and babies, has escaped jail time despite showing no remorse.

Nassem Raad was charged with recklessly destroying the gravestones at Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney's west in 2015.

A court heard the 23-year-old showed no remorse for his actions and received a nine-month suspended sentence and fined more than $60,000.

Raad was sacked from his full-time job as a stonemason after his employers learnt of the horrific crime.

Nassem Raad (centre) was charged with recklessly destroying the gravestones at Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney's west in 2015

Mr Raad desecrated up to 70 graves, including those of children and babies, has escaped jail time despite showing no remorse

Horrific images taken of the cemetery following the attack showed turned over and smashed gravestones, flowers scattered across footpaths and candles turned upside-down

Mr Raad destroyed headstones and smashed crosses and candles while on his needless path of destruction at the sprawling necropolis

Magistrate Eve Wynhausen told the court Mr Raad had shown 'no remorse' and continues to deny causing any of the damage

Horrific images taken of the cemetery following the attack showed turned over and smashed gravestones, flowers scattered across footpaths and candles turned upside-down.

Teddy bears, trucks and other children's toys were damaged and littered across the facility, with even religious icons such as cross smashed into pieces.

The attack seemed to be targeted, with many of the destroyed resting places belonging to people and children of Greek and Ukrainian backgrounds.

Magistrate Eve Wynhausen told the court Mr Raad had shown 'no remorse' and continues to deny causing any of the damage.

Despite being found guilty, Raad told reporters waiting outside court last week that he 'didn't do anything', flanked by friends who aggressively pushed cameramen out of the way as they walked to their car.

Mr Raad will have to pay $63,450 in damages on top of his suspended sentence.

At a previous court appearance, his co-accused - who pleaded not guilty at the time - was confronted by Russian Orthodox men dressed as soldiers.



Raad's co-accused is pictured at a previous court appearance. He was confronted by men dressed as Russian soldiers during his previous appearance
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has stood down minister Mark Bailey after the state's corruption watchdog found he may have engaged in corrupt conduct.

The Crime and Corruption Commission investigated Mr Bailey's use of a private email account and found while it was not corrupt, there was 'sufficient evidence to raise a reasonable suspicion of corrupt conduct' because he deleted his email account.

Labor's left-faction energy and main roads minister allegedly used his personal account to conduct secret negotiations with an Electrical Trades Union official.

The former ETU member's sacking from the cabinet makes him the third minister to be fired in less than a year from the first-term, minority Labor government.

Mark Bailey deleted his private email account earlier this year, but reactivated it when media reports alleged he had used it for ministerial business

Mr Bailey deleted his private email account earlier this year, but reactivated it when media reports alleged he had used it for ministerial business.

'I met with Mark Bailey tonight and I have asked him to stand aside as Minister pending the outcome of the State Archivist investigation into his deactivation of his personal email account,' Ms Palaszczuk said in a statement.

She also said her office has been directed by the commission to develop 'further explicit and formal advice to Ministers regarding the requirement that they use their ministerial email address for all ministerial businesses'.

Mr Bailey is the third minister to be sacked since last year, with fellow left-faction MP Leanne Donaldson fired in November from the agriculture portfolio for unpaid council rates and Stirling Hinchliffe forced out as transport minister in February over Queensland Rail bungles.
Andronicos Sideras, 55, pictured, was allegedly part of a ring of dodgy dealers who conspired to sell the contaminated products between January and November 2012

A sausage and salami supplier accused of flogging horsemeat as beef after equine ID chips were found in his food has today denied any knowledge of the scam.

Andronicos Sideras, 55, was allegedly part of a ring of dodgy dealers who conspired to sell the contaminated meat concoction between January and November 2012.

Environmental health officers uncovered the scandal when they found microchips belonging to two horses inside equine-flesh-infused meat sold by Sideras.

The finding was made during a spot-check by environmental health at a cold-store in Northern Ireland in October 2012.

Sideras, owner of Dinos and Sons, is accused of plotting with supplier Ulkrik Nielsen, 58, and his right hand man Alex Beech, 44, to pass of the meat as beef to boost profits.

Nielson was the boss of meat wholesaler FlexiFoods.

Giving evidence Sideras admitted storing pallets of horsemeat at his cold store, but insisted he has no idea how it had ended up in the products he sold.

He told Inner London Crown Court: I have never purchased, used or sold horsemeat.

Michael Levy, for Sideras, asked: Have you ever stored meat for people?

He replied: We stored horsemeat for FlexiFoods on occasions when he asked us.

He told jurors his company produced a range of specialist sausages, salamis and hams.

Dinos had been pulled up in the past for mislabelling of meat products.

Sideras said he had just repackaged products using Dinos branding when the previous packaging had been damaged in transit.

Mr Levy said: Its been suggested that your relabelling was a dishonest thing and was part of this conspiracy to deceive or disguise.

A small tracking device can be seen inside some of the meat sold by Sideras' company (pictured)

Sideras replied: I dont accept that.

He continued: We have a long-standing relationship with FlexiFoods.

Mr Levy said: We know that some horsemeat came through Dinos.

Sideras said: Two pallets of horsemeat that came to us and that was sent on by us for FlexiFoods.

When the lorry arrived we thought it could be a load for us or a load for him (Nielsen)- we didnt realise until unloading that the truck was horsemeat.

An invoice was marked 10 pallets of horse trimming he said.

We hadnt expected a load to come in that day so I unloaded it and telephone Mr Nielsen, he said.

He arranged for it to be collected and moved on.

He continued: The boxes were labelled and stamped with an EC stamp. It was just another meat.

The tiny chips - which are barely a centimetre long - were shown to the court in photos

Dino's and Sons 'completely messed up' some of the orders they were managing exposing their 'dodgy deal', said prosecutor Jonathan Polnay. Pictured is one of the microchips which was found

It was just brown boxes shrink wrapped on red pallets.

When asked why he hadnt charged FlexiFoods for the storage he replied: We didnt touch it. We didnt change it. We didnt do anything to it. We only had it for a couple of days.

He said that he hadnt charged for storing the meat because of the special relationship he had with FlexiFoods.

I wasnt asked to sign any documents in relation to it so I didnt, he said.

The court heard Dinos was making an annual turnover of more than 2 million when the horsemeat was discovered, with a gross profit of 640,000.

Images of various cuts of meat were shown to the jury, including the slices which contained the microchips.

One of the Dinos & Sons food factory premises at the Millmead Industrial Estate in Tottenham, north east London that is under investigation

Sideras, pictured, denies any involvement in the scam and insists he had no idea how horsemeat could have ended up in the consignments he sold

Barely a centimetre long, the tiny chips were shown in photos in the palm of a purple-gloved hand next to a coin to show how small they were.

Dinos and Sons completely messed up some of the orders they were managing, exposing their dodgy deal, said prosecutor Jonathan Polnay.

Approximately one third of the pallets analysed were found to contain horsemeat.

Sideras was investigated after he mixed up two different delivery loads, accidentally sending horsebeef to Irelands top wholesale meat supplier Rangelands instead of meat factory Silvercrest.

The prosecution say three consignments of horsemeat were sent to Dinos and Sons for processing in June and October 2012.

Police first interviewed Sideras in 2013 after evidence of the fraud was found at Dinos and Sons, including blank documents used for forging labels to disguise the origin of meat.

Sideras, pictured left and right, admitted deleting emails he had exchanged with Nielsen, but said he only did it to avoid being implicated in anything illegal that FlexiFoods might be involved in

The businessman admitted deleting emails he had exchanged with Nielsen, but said he only did it to avoid being implicated in anything illegal that FlexiFoods might be involved in.

Sideras, of Friars Walk, Southgate, north London, denies one count of conspiracy to defraud.

Nielsen, of Gentofte, Denmark, and Alex Beech, from Hull, have each admitted conspiracy to defraud.

The trial continues.
Jared Kushner's undisclosed Russia contacts have now put his wife Ivanka Trump in the position of having to revise her own government security disclosure form  although the couple's legal team is staying mum on the subject.

'We dont have any comment on it. Were just not commenting, period, on this,' a spokesman for the law firm WilmerHale, the firm of Kushner and high-powered Trump attorney Jamie Gorelick, told MailOnline.com.

A White House official was similarly tight-lipped. 'The White House has a longstanding policy of not commenting on security clearances or other personnel security matters,' the official told MailOnline.com.

The president's daughter, a White House advisor to President Trump, got into the crosshairs of House Democrats, who are demanding a probe of her own government disclosures.

LETS BE CLEAR: A group of 22 House Democrats have written the acting head of the FBI to ask whether the president's daughter disclosed all of her husband's and siblings' foreign contacts as required on her government disclosure form

Government forms leave little room for interpretation about the requirement that federal officials seeking a security clearance must disclose foreign contacts not only of their own but of their spouse or close family members.

While her firm wouldn't comment on the status of Ivanka Trump's forms, Gorelick did make an on-record statement in the case of Kushner, whose omissions on his own security form required 'updates'  which themselves would trigger the need for updates on his wife's form.

'As we have previously stated, Mr. Kushners SF-86 was prematurely submitted and, among other errors, did not list any contacts with foreign government officials,' she said earlier this month, after revelations he attended a meeting with a Russian lawyer that weren't initially disclosed.

'He has since submitted this information, including that during the campaign and transition, he had over 100 calls or meetings with representatives of more than 20 countries, most of which were during transition,' she continued. 'Mr. Kushner has submitted additional updates and included, out of an abundance of caution, this meeting with a Russian person, which he briefly attended at the request of his brother-in-law, Donald Trump Jr.

A group of 22 House Democrats have written the acting head of the FBI to ask whether the president's daughter disclosed all of her husband's and siblings' foreign contacts as required under a sworn government disclosure form she filled out when she joined her father's White House.

Kushner is under fire for failing to disclose 100 foreign contacts on his government disclosure form  including contacts with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak, a Kremlin linked lawyer, the head of a Kremlin-linked bank, and a lobbyist with a Soviet Army past.

'We are concerned that Ivanka Trump may have engaged in similar deception,' the letter said,' wrote the Democrats. The letter was signed by Virginia Rep. Don Beyer and signed by 21 colleagues. Beyer also has called for the revocation of Kushner's clearance.

'For example, did she disclose her husband's meetings with Kislyak and [state-owned Vnesheconombank bank chair Sergei] Gorkov? Did she disclose her brother's and husband's meeting with [Kremlin-linked lawyer] Veselnitskaya? Did she accurately disclose her own foreign contacts in her initial filing, which reports suggest may be numerous?' the lawmakers wrote.

Representatives for Ivanka Trump did not respond to repeated requests for information about whether she would be making changes to her disclosure form.

They addressed their letter to acting director Andrew McCabe, who is President Trump's nominee to run the FBI after the president fired FBI Director James Comey in a move Comey believes was linked to the bureau's Russia investigation.

The president's daughter will difficulty pleading ignorance high-level diplomacy. She temporarily filled her father's seat during the recent G20 summit, was pictured with multiple world leaders at Trump Tower during the transition, and was conspicuously seated next to German Chancellor Angela Merkel during her White House visit.

The letter references Section 19 of the standard form 86, which asks whether 'you or any member of your immediate family in the past seven years had any contact with a foreign government, its establishment (such as embassy, consulate, agency, military service, intelligence or security service, etc.) or its representatives, either inside or outside the U.S.?

Officials getting a security clearance are required to disclose foreign contacts by close family members. Donald Trump, Jr., and Ivanka Trump arrive for the Presidential Inauguration of their father Donald Trump at the US Capitol on January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC

House Democrats wrote acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe about Ivanka Trump's clearance

She is a top confidant of her father's, and even took the lead on a World Bank program to provide support to women entrepreneurs. She was a top advisor to her father's business before relinquishing the role and stepping away from operation of her own brand, which she still owns.

'Between them, the couple have been assigned expansive policy portfolios, even as they maintain a business empire that relies on foreign financing and manufacturing,' the letter said, referencing a Washington Post story that tracked the overwhelmingly foreign points of origin for Iranka Trump branded clothing.

'The juxtaposition of their public and private roles may be murky and confused, but their obligation to disclose her families' and her foreign contacts is not.'

The letter references Section 19 of the standard form 86, which asks whether 'you or any member of your immediate family in the past seven years had any contact with a foreign government, its establishment (such as embassy, consulate, agency, military service, intelligence or security service, etc.) or its representatives, either inside or outside the U.S.?'

IN THE ROOM: Pope Francis meets United States President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner at the Apostolic Palace on May 24, 2017 in Vatican City, Vatican

HPresident Donald Trump (R) holds his daughter Ivanka Trump (C) at a panel discussion titled 'Launch Event Women's Entrepreneur Finance Initiative' on the second day of the G20 summit on July 8, 2017 in Hamburg, Germany

MOSCOW, RUSSIA - NOVEMBER 08: Lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya during the interview on November 8, 2016 in Moscow, Russia

Donald Trump Jr met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya last June, after being promised by an intermediary dirt on Hillary Clinton. If sister Ivanka Trump knew about the contact, a federal form required her to disclose it

It states that knowingly or falsely concealing information on the form is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

The focus on the president's daughter comes after her brother, Donald Trump Jr., has been under fire for a June 2016 meeting he attended at Trump Tower along with Russians after getting an email promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Attending were Kushner, former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, along with Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, Ike Kaveladze, a vice president in a real estate firm owned by Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov, publicist Rob Goldstone and Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin.

Trump Jr. has said nothing useful came of the meeting, and President Trump has defended it by saying anyone would have gone to it.
A blind man has been found guilty of raping a blind widow on several occasions over a five-month period on the pretext of marriage.

Saurabh Kapoor, 33, of Mayur Vihar, Delhi, was convicted on Tuesday after the 32-year-old mother-of-one identified him by his voice during the trial.

The unidentified woman, also from Delhi, told the court how she had tried to find a lawyer following her husband's death from a suspected suicide in 2014 and had been introduced to Kapoor via a friend as someone who could help her.

Saurabh Kapoor, 33, of Mayur Vihar, Delhi, was convicted of rape on Tuesday after the 32-year-old mother-of-one identified him by his voice during the trial. (File photo)

In May 2015, bank worker Kapoor accompanied her to Gurgaon, southwest of New Delhi, to supposedly meet a lawyer but instead took the woman to a guesthouse, where he raped her.

When I started crying, he asked me to be quiet and said that he would marry me Unidentified woman after she was raped

'When I started crying, he asked me to be quiet and said that he would marry me.

'Over the next five months, he sexually exploited me on the pretext of marriage.

'He also took money from me on a number of occasions. After some time, he said he did not want to continue the relationship,' she alleged, according to the Times Of India.

Kapoor, who was arrested in December that year, was convicted based on the call details of both the accused and the woman, as well as medical evidence, forensic report and the woman's statement.

Kapoor is due to be sentenced on July 24.
Britain has reportedly warned the EU that it could send radioactive waste black to the bloc if Brexit talks turn sour.

UK officials have got tough with their counterparts in Brussels by telling them that nuclear material could be shipped back to Germany, Italy and other EU countries.

Britain has the world's largest stockpile of civilian plutonium at Sellafield nuclear plant, with 126 tonnes of the stuff - and nearly a fifth of this originally comes from overseas.

A nuclear expert who has advised the British government told the Financial Times: 'It might just be a reminder that a boatload of plutonium could end up at a harbour in Antwerp unless an arrangement is made.'

Brexit Secretary David Davis met with EU negotiator Michel Barnier on Monday to kick off the latest round of Brexit talks. The UK has reportedly told Brussels it could radioactive waste back to its shores if the talks on leaving the European Union break down without agreement

Britain has imported used nuclear fuel from Europe since the 1970s and reprocessed it at the Sellafield.

The process produced reusable uranium and plutonium, but also stockpiles of radioactive waste which officials are now threatening to send back unless a deal is struck.

EU diplomats hit back at the threat by telling the paper they would have 'the coastguard ready'.

The warning come as Theresa May has faced a growing threat of revolt from her backbenchers over Britain's relationship with the EU on nuclear issues after Brexit.

She has come under mounting pressure to commit to keeping Britain in Euratom - the European nuclear agency which develops and shares nuclear energy - after we leave the bloc.

But Mrs May has insisted the UK must leave the agency on Brexit because so we can free ourselves from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

Theresa May, pictured leaving No.10 for PMQs today, has insisted that the UK must leave Euratom - the EU nuclear agency - when we Brexit so we can leave the jurisdiction of EU judges

Meanwhile, a government paper setting out Britain's stance in the Brexit negotiation fired off the same warning stressing that the UK has the right 'to return radioactive waste . . . to its country of origin'.

And it said EU countries have responsibility for some 'special fissile materials' - the most dangerous and tightly-regulated types of nuclear substances - derived from imported spent fuel.

Britain has the world's largest stockpile of civilian plutonium at Sellafield, but a plant built at the site to recycle the plutonium into new nuclear fuel was closed in 2011 because of technological flaws.

The plutonium is currently stored as powder in flasks while under heavy guard.

A new plant would have to be built to either recycle the material or process it so oit can be returned safely as waste.

The UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said negotiations would focus on the 'legal ownership not physical location' of nuclear materials.

What happens to materials once ownership has been settled 'will be a matter for the owner and the UK to agree on commercial terms,' it added.
A millionaire landlord suspected of child sex abuse who was arrested but never charged can finally be named after losing a five-year legal battle to keep his identity a secret.

The High Court and Court of Appeal both rejected former magistrate Tariq Khuja's bid to use privacy laws to stop the press and media naming him after his identity was revealed in open court proceedings.

Described as 'a prominent figure in the Oxford area', his identity remained secret while he took his fight to the Supreme Court, the highest court in Britain.

The High Court and Court of Appeal both rejected former magistrate Tariq Khuja's bid to use privacy laws to stop the press and media naming him after his identity was revealed in open court proceedings. He is pictured outside his property letting agency in 2013

By a 5-2 majority, the Supreme Court justices ruled today that he had no 'reasonable expectation of privacy' under human rights laws and revoked an anonymity order.

Lawyers for the press and media had argued that if he had won his case, coverage of criminal trials would have been handicapped.

The ruling was a victory for journalists Andrew Norfolk and Ben Wilkinson, who challenged Mr Khuja's right to anonymity after he was named in the sex grooming trial.

Supreme Court president Lord Neuberger agreed with Lady Hale, Lord Clarke, Lord Sumption and Lord Reed that Mr Khuja had no right to prevent publication of matters, including his identity, being discussed at a public trial.

Lord Kerr and Lord Wilson disagreed.

Gavin Millar QC, appearing for the media, had told the court it was being asked to create an exception to the open justice principle, which allows the reporting of evidence heard in open court, by granting anonymity to the man because to identify him as a suspect in a child sex case would potentially subject him to public vilification.

Mr Khuja was described as 'a prominent figure in the Oxford area' and his identity remained secret while he took his fight to the Supreme Court, the highest court in Britain

The case involved a clash between the rights of the press and public, under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to freedom of expression and the rights of Mr Khuja and his family under Article 8 to private and family life.

Lord Sumption said in the lead judgment that for some years media organisations had investigated allegations that the police and child protection authorities had failed adequately 'to confront a pattern of crime involving the sexual exploitation of vulnerable young teenage girls by older men'.

It had become a subject of serious public concern and given rise to a number of government-ordered national inquiries.

It had also led to a review of standards of protection in children's homes, and substantial changes in the procedures of the police and prosecuting authorities for handling such cases.

The case of Mr Khuja arose from the trial of nine men 'on exceptionally serious charges' involving organised child sex grooming and child prostitution in the Oxford area over a period of eight years.

The men were arrested in March 2012 by Thames Valley Police after a long-running investigation known as Operation Bullfinch and tried before Judge Rook QC at the Old Bailey between January 7 and May 14 2013.

Seven were convicted of rape and conspiracy to rape children, trafficking and child prostitution.

Lord Sumption said evidence was given at the trial of the exploitation of six girls aged 11-15 and it attracted considerable publicity in the national and local press and in the broadcast media.

'Public interest in it was accentuated and prolonged by the perception that the victims of the men convicted had not originally been taken seriously by the police or Oxfordshire social services, and had not received the protection to which they were entitled.'

Mr Khuja was a prominent figure in the Oxford area, who was arrested at about the same time as the nine and was released on bail on terms including that he surrender his passport, said the judge.

He was arrested because one of the six girls told the police she had been abused by a man with the same, very common, first name.

But she failed to pick Mr Khuja out at an identity parade and he was released without charge but told that the case would be kept under review.

Lord Sumption said: 'That remains the position. Police investigations are continuing, but PNM has never been charged with any offence, and there is no present reason to believe that he ever will be.'

The judge ruled: 'PNM's application is to prohibit the reporting, however fair or accurate, of certain matters which were discussed at a public trial.

'These are not matters in respect of which PNM can have had any reasonable expectation of privacy.'

The judge said the impact on PNM's family life 'of what was said about him at the trial is no different in kind from the impact of many disagreeable statements which may be made about individuals at a high profile criminal trial.'

That impact was 'part of the price to be paid for open justice and the freedom of the press to report fairly and accurately on judicial proceedings held in public'.

He said: 'The sexual abuse of children, especially on an organised basis, is a subject of great public concern.

'The processes by which such cases are investigated and brought to trial are matters of legitimate public interest.

'The criticisms made of the police and social services inevitably reinforce the public interest in this particular case.

'PNM's identity is not a peripheral or irrelevant feature of this particular story.'

In their dissenting judgment, Lord Kerr and Lord Wilson said they took the view that 'the scales have descended heavily in favour of PNM's rights under Article 8'.

They said there was 'increasing concern, judicial and extra-judicial, about the effect upon an innocent person's reputation of publication of the fact of his arrest', and Mr Khuja was likely have been able to establish his right to an injunction against identification if the matter had gone to a full trial.

They said there was no basis for the presumption articulated by Lord Rodger in a press freedom case involving the Guardian that people understood 'that persons charged with an offence - and even more obviously persons not or not yet charged with an offence but simply arrested on suspicion of it - are innocent until their guilt has been established'.
Rugby league star Trent Hodkinson took a 15-year-old girl with terminal cancer to her high school formal.

The Newcastle Knights playmaker escorted Hannah, who is a massive fan of the team, to the event at Kurri Kurri High School on Wednesday night.

The school moved the formal to July because Hannah, who has Ewing sarcoma, may not make it to the end of the year.

And Hodkinson, who has met Hannah before, held the teenager's hand as they walked into the party and the pair also cut a cake in front of her classmates.

Rugby league star Trent Hodkinson took 15-year-old Hannah, who has terminal cancer, to her high school formal

Hodkinson, who is an ambassador for Give Me 5 for Kids, which raises funds for children's hospital wards across Australia, shared a selfie taken on the way to the formal on his Instagram story.

But he was lauded for his actions after a Facebook post about the night went viral.

Luke Morrison, from Newcastle, wrote that seeing the former halfback taking Hannah to her formal made his day.

'She may look perfectly happy in this photo but this poor little girl has Ewing sarcoma terminal cancer,' he wrote.

Hodkinson shard a selfie with the teenager, taken on the way to the formal, on his Instagram

The Newcastle Knights playmaker and Hannah cut a cake in front of her classmates at the event on Wednesday night

'Meaning at this very time she has a very high dosage of morphine just to keep all her pain away.

'It's a credit to this strong, determined and obviously very powerful young woman to put a smile on her face and get on with day to day life.

'I admire Hannah for this and I hope she has the most wonderful night.'

Hodkinson shared a picture with Hannah on his Instagram after meeting her in March last year

Hodkinson received praise for his actions after a post by Luke Morrison went viral on Facebook

Mr Morrison added that Hodkinson donating his time said a lot about his character.

'Trent's in a position to make a difference and make this poor little girl's night unforgettable and take away the pain and suffering for her and her family,' he wrote.

'What a legend.'
Saudi police have released without charge a model who was filmed in a miniskirt at a historic site in the ultraconservative kingdom, the government said on Wednesday.

The ministry of information said police released the woman, named only as 'Khulood', on Tuesday night and the prosecutor had closed the case.

Police said they were questioning the woman after she appeared in a series of videos, initially posted to messaging app Snapchat, wearing a crop top and a high-waisted miniskirt.

She had been filmed walking through the historic fort of Ushaiqer, north of Riyadh, and playing with sand in the dunes.

Saudi police have released without charge a model who was filmed in a miniskirt at a historic site in the ultraconservative kingdom, the government said on Wednesday

The videos were uploaded over the weekend to the 'Model Khulood' Snapchat account.

An arrest warrant issued by Riyadh police and shared by several Twitter users shows that the woman had been arrested on Monday for 'disrespecting and violating the teachings of Islam'.

Saudi state TV later reported that a woman had been arrested by authorities for dressing 'indecently'.

The ministry said in a statement that the woman had confessed to walking through the site in a skirt with her hair uncovered but that the footage had been uploaded without her knowledge.

Foreign and local women in Saudi Arabia are expected to wear 'conservative' loose-fitting cloaks known as abayas.

Most also cover their hair and face with a black veil, though exceptions are made for visiting dignitaries.

The ministry of information said police released the woman, named only as 'Khulood', on Tuesday night and the prosecutor had closed the case

Saudi authorities earlier issued an order for the model's arrest after her Snapchat video when viral on social media, according to the Okaz newspaper.

The video shows the Saudi woman walking around an empty historic fort in Ushaiager, a village north of the capital, Riyadh, in the desert region of Najd, where many of Saudi Arabia's most conservative tribes and families are from.

An arrest warrant that circulated online said that the woman was taking photos in 'indecent clothing'.

The woman's outfit sparked outrage among social media users, some of whom called for her to be arrested.

One person tweeted: 'People who don't respect the kingdom's rules, don't deserve to live in it.'

Another said: 'What she did doesn't fall under 'personal freedom'. It's clear that she wanted to provoke people and go against the country's social rules and norms. She must be punished for this.'

Women in Saudi Arabia are required to wear long black abaya robes and cover their hair in public (File photo)

Ibrahim al-Munayif, a Saudi writer with more than 41,000 followers on Twitter, wrote on his official account that allowing people to disobey the law leads to chaos.

'Just like we call on people to respect the laws of countries they travel to, people must also respect the laws of this country,' he wrote.

Others defended her by posting images from President Donald Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia in May, in which First Lady Melania Trump and his daughter Ivanka, though modestly dressed in higher necklines and longer sleeves, shunned wearing a head cover or the abaya.

One twitter user wrote of the model's video: 'She's freely walking around Ashaiqer, regardless of all the backlash, it's still a beautiful idea.'

Another said: 'Why all this fuss? You turned your eyes away from all the catastrophes in the world and the only thing that outraged you is a woman not wearing an abaya?'

Another tweeted: 'She didn't force anyone to follow her on Snapchat. Her account is also only directed at women. What's the problem? Why call for an arrest warrant against her?'
Michael Denon-Ross, a Briton who travelled to Australia last month, is missing in Alice Springs

A Briton who travelled to Australia last month is still missing in Alice Springs.

Northern Territory Police said they are concerned for the welfare of Michael Denon-Ross from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, after he failed to return to his hotel.

The 57-year-old flew to Perth from London last month on a three-month tourist visa and checked into an Alice Springs hotel on July 8 but has not been seen or heard from since.

He was due to check out of his accommodation on July 15 but did not return to the establishment despite leaving his luggage and possessions in the room.

Mr Denon-Ross is believed to have previously gone missing in 2013 after Gloucestershire Police appealed for information regarding his whereabouts.



He is described as Caucasian with very short dark hair and brown eyes and of a medium build.

Senior Sergeant Alex Brennan, from Northern Territory Police, said: 'Michael, who is on holidays from the UK, was last seen at his hotel in Alice Springs on 8 July.

'He has not been seen or heard from since. We ask anyone who sights Michael or who has any information to contact police.'
The acting head of President Donald Trump's voter fraud commission says it's probably not possible to determine whether Hillary Clinton won the popular vote because of fraud.

'You know, we may never know the answer to that,' Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach told MSNBC's Katy Tur today. 'We will probably never know the answer to that question because even if you could prove that a certain number votes were cast by ineligible voters, for example, you wouldn't know how they voted.'

Kobach is the vice chair of Trump's panel, which had its first in-person meeting on Wednesday. He technically reports to the vice president but has taken a forward-facing role in the commission's operational tasks.

The acting head of President Donald Trump's voter fraud commission says it's probably not possible to determine whether Hillary Clinton won the popular vote because of fraud

'The reason the commission exists, it's not to justify, to validate or invalidate what the president said in December or January of the 2016 election,' he said, referring to Trump's comments that he'd have won the popular vote instead of Clinton had it not been for 3 to 5 million illegally cast ballots

A Republican running for governor of Kansas, a state that employs voter ID laws. Kobach is perhaps best known for his work on the immigration law in Arizona that permitted law enforcement officers to ask suspected non-US citizens about their immigration status.

Kobach told a skeptical Tur on Wednesday after the commission's meeting on the White House grounds that the panel would 'look at the facts as they are and go where the facts lead us on voter fraud.'

'The reason the commission exists, it's not to justify, to validate or invalidate what the president said in December or January of the 2016 election,' he said, referring to Trump's comments that he'd have won the popular vote had it not been for 3 to 5 million illegally cast ballots.

Even if the panel finds evidence of mass fraud, Kobach said, 'You still won't know if those people who are ineligible voted for Trump, or for Clinton or for somebody else.

'So it's impossible to ever know exactly, if you took out all the ineligible votes, what the tally would be in that election,' he posited.

President Trump pledged this morning that the 'full truth will be known' about America's election systems 'and 'exposed if necessary in the light of day.'

Trump said in a surprise appearance before the commission that he authorized a national review of the nation's ballot boxes in response to allegations of fraud, 'sometimes having to do with very large numbers of people in certain states,' that supporters came to him with during his Oval Office campaign.

The president sent mixed messages as he told members of the commission moments later: 'You will approach this important task with a very open mind and with no conclusions already drawn. You will fairly and objectively follow the facts wherever they may lead.'

The president said that more than 30 states have agreed to turn over their voter data to the commission, as requested.

'If any state does not want to share this information, one has to wonder what they're worried about. And I asked the vice president, and I asked the commission, what are they worried about? There's something. There always is,' Trump stated.

President Donald Trump pledged that the 'full truth will be known' about the last election 'and exposed if necessary in the light of day' at a meeting of his voter fraud commission on Wednesday

Trump formed the commission in May to pursue his charge that millions of people voted illegally in the last election.

Using the power of the executive, he put his vice president, Mike Pence, in charge of a voter integrity commission that will document vulnerabilities in US election systems and report back to him.

The panel will conduct a review this year of state and local systems and present its findings to the president. It has a two-year charge, but the commission hopes to finish its work ahead of the federal elections that will take place next November.

In his remarks Wednesday, Trump said he would make the panel's final report available to the public as soon as possible 'so the full truth will be known and exposed if necessary in the light of day.'

'Every time voter fraud occurs, it cancels out the vote of a lawful citizen and undermines democracy,' Trump said. 'We cant let that happen. Any form of fraudulent voting, whether by non-citizens or the deceased, and any form of voter suppression or intimidation, must be stopped.'

Pence meanwhile asserted that the goal of the commission is to bolster the American peoples' confidence in the integrity of the ballot box.

'This commission, let me be clear, this commission had no preconceived notions or preordained results,' he emphasized. 'Were fact-finders.'

'If any state does not want to share this information, one has to wonder what they're worried about. And I asked the vice president, and I asked the commission, what are they worried about? There's something. There always is,' Trump said to the VP and the commission's vice chair, Kris Kobach (left)

Kobach turned heads earlier this month when he requested the sensitive personal information of registered voters from all 50 states.

Dozens of states initially said they would not comply with the demand that included a disclaimer that the information would be made public.

Critics of the request said it was tantamount to the creation of a federal database. Conservatives have rejected federal gun registries on the grounds that they're an invasion of privacy.

Trump's commission asked states to turn over 'publicly-available' data, including birth dates, political affiliations and the last four digits of voters' Social Security numbers.

'We call on every state to give its full support and total cooperation in this effort,' Trump said Wednesday. 'Most of them have really done brilliantly and we appreciate it. And the rest, all of that information will be forthcoming.'

Amid the uproar the vice president's office has stressed that the commission was only asking for information that states are already providing to political parties and other entities and is allowable under their laws.

'That's all they are seeking,' said Marc Lotter, a spokesman for Mike Pence, in response to claims from Democrats that the commission is asking states to break their own codes and trample on the Constitution.

Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes has said the move screams 'danger stranger' and wreaks of 'horse manure' in a round of TV appearances after the request.

President Donald Trump, accompanied by Vice President Mike Pence, center right, and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, center left, speaks during the first meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex

The American Civil Liberties Union is otherwise suing the commission for failing to comply with a federal law requiring commissions to be transparent about their activities.

After ACLU filed its lawsuit on July 10 the commission created a website, where it posted an introductory email and agenda from a meeting it conducted by phone.

It also posted public comments in full - including contact information of private citizens who had written the commission to protest the request for their personal information.

The listings generated an all new firestorm from privacy advocates.
Flooding has battered several counties in China following a spate of torrential rain.

Video footage shows floodwaters rushing down the streets of Yangcheng County in China's Shanxi province on July 18 .

No casualties have been reported.

People can be seen trying to grab hold of their vehicles as they are swept away by floodwaters

At one point a white minivan can be seen being swept away by fast-moving waters

Footage shows the streets left completely flooded with raging waters.

The water can be seen moving incredibly fast.

Motorbikes and automobiles can be seen moving quickly.

At one point a white minivan can be seen dragged along by the fast currents.

Since late June, heavy rain has struck certain areas in China damaging provinces

Cars can be seen piling up at the bottom of a road in the Chinese province of Shanxi

After some time the vehicles can be seen piled up at the bottom of a street.

According to CGTN, the local meteorological department issued a blue alert for flooding, the lowest level in China's four tier warning system.

Since late June, heavy rain has struck certain areas in China damaging provinces including Shanxi and Guangxi.

Earlier this month students were trapped in their campus building in Guangxi province and had to be evacuated using trucks and loaders.


With ISIS on the brink of being flushed out of Iraq and Syria, experts suggest militants returning to the West may want to be sent to prison where they can set up what is being described as jihadi universities to spark a new movement.

It is also predicted Islamic State could then re-emerge from the ashes under a new name and with a fresh army of brainwashed jihadis once the group is effectively destroyed in the Middle East.

After 51 jihadist attacks in Europe and the US in the last three years, two separate studies have reported three quarters of the terrorists were homegrown.

Both pointed to a shift in the Islamic State movement, with less of an emphasis on the foreign fighter and more concern brewing over extremists attacking their own countries.

A man suspected of being an Islamic State militant is detained by the Iraqi Army in the Old City district on July 10, 2017 in Mosul, Iraq. The Iraqi government and armed forces have declared victory but fighting continues

A picture taken on July 9, 2017, shows a general view of the destruction in Mosul's Old City.Iraq will announce imminently a final victory in the nearly nine-month offensive to retake Mosul from jihadists, a US general said Saturday, as celebrations broke out among police forces in the city

In a security policy brief published by the Royal Institute for International Relations, Thomas Renard claims the modern jihadi in Eutope is homegrown, leaderless and virtual.

Renard said: 'Returnees are likely to play a key role in the recruiting and training of the next jihadi wave.

'It is therefore imperative to monitor them very closely, and seek to limit their influence as much as possible.

'That work starts imperatively in prison, where a number of them are already detained or heading in that direction

Prisons have always been an incubator for radicalisation and violence, but there are many indications that the problem is growing out of proportion.

Khuram Butt, 27, a British citizen who slaughtered innocent people in London

'Some recruiters seem to see jail as jihadi universities, while programmes focusing on counter-radicalisation, deradicalisation or disengagement remain underdeveloped in prison.'

He said the terror group's constant weakening position in former strongholds such as Mosul and Raqqa, there is a growing number of militants looking to turn their backs on ISIS.

Renard found some fighters would now be looking for redemption and reintegration into the society in their homelands, but he predicted many would fall back into violent extremism years later.

He claims that brings with it a rising threat - the homegrown jihadi.

Fighting in Syria has lost its appeal with a massive number of senior ISIS figures killed by allied forces and the terror group losing its grip on territories.

Instead, militants are turning their attention to the West.

And with Europe tightening its border controls, it has turned the continent into forbidden fruit for some extremists hell bent on wreaking havoc.

Those who do manage to get into mainland Europe, either forcibly or voluntarily, could be hoping they get sent to jail.

Final moments: Khuram Butt died on his back with armed officers training their weapons on him - across the road his jihadi friends also lie dead

Police in control: All three men are left dead on the ground outside Borough Market after being hit by a hail of 50 bullets

Greater Manchester Police released this image of a CCTV still of Salman Abedi (circled), the bomber in the Manchester Arena terror attack

Renard said: 'Since 2012, Western intelligence services had feared that young Europeans travelling to Syria and Iraq would return home and pose a security threat.

'Now, security officials confess that what worries them most is unidentified homegrown radicals, initiating a killing spree with an everyday weapon, such as a knife or a car  or even homemade explosives, such as in Brussels recently.'

The same could be said of all three Islamic terror attacks in the UK this year.

On March 22, Khalid Masood killed five people when he ploughed a hire car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge before launching a knife attack in the capital.

Just over two months later on June 3, a copycat attack on London Bridge claimed the lives of eight victims when Khuram Butt, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba used a van and knives to slaughter people in Borough Market.

It came days after Salman Abedi blew himself at Manchester Arena using a homemade bomb killing 22 Ariana Grande fans who were piling out of the venue on May 22.

Hundreds more were injured and all attackers apart from Zaghba were British citizens.

It mirrors the global picture, with 73 percent of Islamic terrorists attacking the country in which they are citizens in attacks on the West since June 2014.

Salman Abedi, the Manchester Arena attacker

Another 14 percent were either legal residents or legitimate visitors from neighboring countries, according to a report published in part by The Hague and 5 percent were refugees or asylum seekers at the time of attack.

Just six percent were residing in the country illegally at the time of the attack.

Of the 51 attacks, 17 were in France, 16 in the US, four in the UK, three in Belgium and Canada and one each in Denmark and Sweden.

The death toll stands at 395 in total with 1,549 injuries meaning the average fatalities per attack is 7.7 and the average age for an attacker is 27.3.

A huge proportion of those killed were in France - 239 - mainly due to the 130 who died in the horrendous Paris attacks in November 2015.

What has become a recent trend is authorities admitting retrospectively that attackers were on their radar.

At least 57 percent had a prior criminal record and 17 percent of attackers were converts to Islam.

Another common theme with the terror attacks it for ISIS to come out and claim responsibility for the atrocities.

Jihadist groups, almost always ISIS, claimed 38 percent of the attacks, but 42 percent of attackers had a clear operational connection to an established jihadist group, again in most cases the Islamic State, according to the study Fear Thy Neighbour: Radicalisation and Jihadist Attacks in the West.

The report was published jointly by George Washington Universitys Program on Extremism, the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI) and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism  The Hague (ICCT).

It also found that 63 percent of attackers pledged allegiance to a jihadist group, almost always the Islamic State, during or before the attack.

US scholar Brian Jenkins said until just recently, youngsters wanted to be part of a jihadi group which ordered them to kill.

But now, they seek to kill in order to be part of the jihad, even if it means they kill themselves.
A 20-year-old California woman died after she plunged about 150 feet off a cliff, which crumbled underneath her as her friends looked on in horror, police said.

Jennifer Diaz-Ocampo was standing about a foot away from the edge of the cliff trying to access Davenport Beach with her friends on Monday when the rock gave way, according to Sgt. Chris Clark of the Santa Cruz County Sheriffs Office.

Diaz-Ocampo plummeted onto a remote beach 150 feet below and was airlifted by a helicopter before she died on the way to the hospital, CBS reported.

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Jennifer Diaz-Ocampo (pictured above) died on Monday after she plunged about 150 feet off a cliff in Davenport, California

Diaz-Ocampo was with her friends overlooking the cliff trying to find out how to access the beaches below when the ground underneath her crumbled away

Diaz-Ocampo was with a group of friends when they were looking off the cliff trying to find out where they could access the beach.

'This young lady got to about a foot of the cliffs edge. She was looking over when the ground gave way beneath her. She fell about 150 feet,' according to Sgt. Chris Clark of the Santa Cruz County Sheriffs Office.

When the ground underneath her crumbled away, Diaz-Ocampo fell onto a remote beach that was only accessible by air or water.

Raymond Oyos told CBS he was near the cliffs when a man approached, screaming 'She fell! She fell!'

He rushed over and said her friends were frantically thinking of how to reach Diaz-Ocampo, with some stripping down in hopes of swimming to her. Others managed to scale down the cliff and ended up covered in cuts, Oyos said.

Diaz-Ocampo fell onto a remote beach that was only accessible by air or water as her friends tried to reach her

Diaz-Ocampo was still responsive when lifeguards swam to her, but she died while she was being airlifted to the hospital

Diaz-Ocampo was still speaking and waving her arms when lifeguards swam to her, but she died en route to the hospita, Clark said.

On Facebook, friends shared their shock and mourned the loss of the 20-year-old.

Minerva Razo wrote: 'As most of you already know, Jennie was one of the sweetest and happiest person around. It's heartbreaking that's she's gone. I can't imagine what she went through but at least she's resting in peace.'

Louisa Story-Garcia shared: 'She was always so bubbly, outgoing, just so happy all of the time! Never was there a dull moment.. I didn't expect a couple of days ago to be the last day I'd see you...I'm in shock....You have your wings now baby girl! I'll miss you!'
Members of British Airways cabin crew will strike for a further 14 days in a dispute over pay, the Unite union has announced.

Staff members will continue their strike for an additional two weeks from August 2 after a current 14-day walkout - which started today - ends.

The additional industrial action means that British Airways 'mixed fleet' cabin crew will be on strike for the next four weeks.

It comes as the company and union have have been unable to settle a long-running dispute over pay for mixed fleet employees - who serve both short and long-haul routes.

British Airways cabin crew will strike for a further 14 days from August 2 in a dispute over pay

Workers have already taken 46 days of strike action in what is becoming one of the longest-running disputes in the aviation industry.

The newly announced action will run from August 2 to August 15. The mixed fleet has been on strike on several occasions already this year, including a 16-day walkout at the beginning of July.

British Airways has said during previous action that all customers would reach their destinations, with a small number of flights being merged.

Unite claimed that cabin crew who are covering for striking workers would be getting 'perilously close' to their legal number of flying hours.

National officer Oliver Richardson said: 'Attempts by British Airways to bribe cabin crew into not striking with a 250 bung represent a crude attempt to sow division and will ultimately fail.

'Such actions by British Airways will only serve to deepen the resolve of our members and the support they are receiving from the public and politicians.

The additional industrial action means that British Airways 'mixed fleet' cabin crew will effectively be on strike for the next four weeks

'Covering cabin crew are perilously close to their legal flying times and could ultimately be pushed over the number of hours they are allowed to fly in the next 28 days.

'Rather than spending money on crude bribes and millions on 'wet' leasing aircraft to defend its low pay and bullying behaviour, it's time British Airways started talking about resolving this dispute, which will further tarnish its brand.'

Unite has launched legal action against the Government's decision to give the go-ahead to the 'wet lease' of nine Airbus aircraft from Qatar Airways during the strike.
Despite Tuesday's news that he lacks enough support from Senate Republicans to pass an Obamacare repeal bill, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will force a vote next week.

Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska announced Tuesday that they would refuse to support legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act with a two-year delay for a replacement to be devised.

With only 52 seats in the 100-member Senate, McConnell could afford only two defections.

But he said defiantly on the Senate floor on Wednesday that he will call their bluff.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will force a vote next week on an Obamacare repeal bill, daring three Republican defectors to stand and be counted

President Trump embraced a 'simultaneous' repeal-and-replace strategy early on, but more recently called for Obamacare to be smashed even if there was no immediate replacement plan on the table

'As I announced last evening, after consulting with both the White House and our members, we have decided to hold the vote to open debate on Obamacare repeal early next week,' McConnell announced.

'This is the same legislation that a majority of the Senate voted to send to the president in 2015,' he added. 'Now, we thankfully have a president in office who will sign it. So we should send it to him.'

Capito and Murkowski were among the 'yes' votes on that earlier vote, which was seen as a symbolic gesture in the face of a certain veto from President Barack Obama.

Now, however, it would have real-world consequences.

An unnamed Republican political operative told the Washington Examiner that senators like Capito, Collins and Murkowski 'have to be held accountable.'

'They have been hiding behind [McConnell]  and hiding behind process arguments  for months now," this operative added.

Republican senators Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia (left) and Susan Collins of Maine (right) quickly said they would vote against a repeal-first package, which Capito supported less than two years ago

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Maine, another senator who voted to pass the December 2015 bill, made her own flip-flopping announcement, guaranteeing a defeat

President Donald Trump is hosting all 52 GOP senators for a White House lunch on Wednesday, hoping to twist the last remaining arms and laying out the political consequences for those who abandon him.

None of the three naysayers will face a 2018 re-election fight, however, giving them relatively safe space to maneuver.

McConnell showed his frustration on Tuesday, telling reporters during his weekly press conference that 'this has been a very, very challenging experience for all of us.'

'It's pretty obvious that we don't have 50 members who can agree on a replacement.'

Trump reached a fit of pique on Tuesday after McConnell's best laid plan appeared to run off the rails, fuming that he was willing to let the flailing Obamacare insurance scheme die on the vine in order to force Congress to craft a replacement package.

'I've been saying for a very long time, "Let Obamacare fail and then everybody is going to have to come together and fix it, and come up with a new plan, and a plan that is really good for the people with much lower premiums, much lower costs, much better protection",' he told reporters.

'I think we're probably in that position where we'll let Obamacare fail,' Trump added. 'We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it.'

But cooler heads prevailed hours later, with the White House announcing Wednesday's strategy lunch  all but daring the three recalcitrant senators to cross the president publicly.
On Capitol Hill, it's Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who's receiving the brunt of the blame for Republicans' efforts to get rid of Obamacare being just out of sight.

Both his Senate peers, and pundits  including some of the conservative side  are pointing a finger at McConnell, suggesting that he lied to members, played too much hard ball and crafted health care legislation in secret, making it just too hard of a sell.

CNN's Amanda Carpenter, a former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, mocked the Senate's No. 1 Republican, who's considered a 'legislative mastermind,' chiding him for accomplishing 'nothing at all.'

Speaking to a local newspaper, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said McConnell had made conflicting statements about Medicaid to different members of the caucus, which to him signified a 'significant breach of trust,' according to Roll Call.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., (center) attends a lunch at the White House Wednesday where President Trump tried to rally GOP senators one more time to repeal and replace Obamacare

While Sen. Mitch McConnell is on the receiving end of much of the blame for the Republicans' latest Obamacare repeal mess, many in Washington are wondering why the president didn't do more to sell the bill

McConnell reportedly told some senators that Medicaid reform wouldn't actually go into effect, if the bill was passed.

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., whose 'no' vote, alongside Sen. Mike Lee's, R-Utah, decision to also vote 'nay,' derailed the Obamacare repeal-and-replace legislation Monday night, said he came to the decision, in part, because of the 'closed-door' process in which the Better Care Reconciliation Act came to be.

'We should not put our stamp of approval on bad policy,' Moran also urged.

Democrats, too, who are not supporting any of the Republican health care bills, have called for a more transparent process.

McConnell's hard ball attempts to herd conservative and moderates together has backfired, with pundits like Erick Erickson saying the majority leader was too cozy with 'liberals' and calling for his head.

'McConnell, again and again, stacks the deck against conservatives, setting them up to be the fall guy for his own failures,' Erickson wrote, arguing that McConnell should be led out to pasture so he can't hinder anymore of President Trump's agenda.

On Wednesday, however, McConnell was poised to embarrass the trio of moderate, female senators, who refused to vote for a straight Obamacare repeal bill.

A defiant McConnell said he would call a vote next week on just an Obamacare repeal, which three senators from within his caucus  Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.V. and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska  have already said they won't support.

A majority of Republicans did, however, support the bill back in 2015 when President Obama was still president, and thus would veto the effort.

Capito and Murkowski were among the yeas.

Now, with President Trump behind the Resolute desk, pen-in-hand waiting, the trio of senators are refusing to vote for the bill.

'As I announced last evening, after consulting with both the White House and our members, we have decided to hold the vote to open debate on Obamacare repeal early next week,' McConnell announced from the Senate floor.

'This is the same legislation that a majority of the Senate voted to send to the president in 2015,' McConnell continued. 'Now, we thankfully have a president in office who will sign it. So we should send it to him.'

Trump, of course, is absorbing blame for the bill's failure too.

From the left, Vox's Ezra Klein noted that 'policy leadership' in this modern political era, tends to come from the White House, not the leaders of Congress, and Trump's absence helped kill the bill.

The president's message was often muddled, hinging between advocating for Republicans to do nothing, so Obamacare simply failed, to asking them to bring a bill to his desk.

Klein argued that Trump was especially handicapped in this endeavor because he never studied up on the Obamacare repeal and replacement plans.

'The core problem is Trump has no idea what hes talking about on health care and never bothered to learn,' Klein wrote.

Trump famously uttered that 'nobody knew health care could be so complicated,' and later said 'that's OK,' if Republicans couldn't pass a bill  statements that made McConnell's wrangling of Republican votes harder.

On Wednesday, as he convened Republican senators at the White House, Trump called for a full repeal-and-replace bill yet again.

'I think the people of this country need more than a repeal,' the president said. 'They need a repeal and a replace.'

Trump suggested that the Republicans were struggling to sell the bill because they had a weak PR campaign, not because Americans objected to the contents of the bill.

'If we're weak on anything it's letting people know how good it is,' Trump said.

He also openly threatened those members of his own party who didn't get in line.

'Any senator who votes against starting debate is really telling America that you're fine with Obamacare, but being fine with Obamacare isn't fine for another reason, because it's gone, it's failed, it's not going to be around,' Trump said.

He also said he was surprised when Sens. Lee and Moran, joined Collins and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., in saying they wouldn't vote for the Senate's repeal-and-replacement bill.

'The other night I was very surprised that a couple of my friends  they really were, and are  they might not be for very much longer,' Trump pivoted. 'But that's OK.'

All the no votes for various Republican plans  Lee, Moran, Collins, Paul, Murkowski and Capito  were in the meeting with Trump on Wednesday, according to the White House.

McConnell doubled down after the White House meeting, saying again, that next week the Senate would vote on a motion to proceed.

He pointed out that whatever bill comes to the floor would be 'fully amendable,' and that senators have two options, a replacement bill or a repeal bill, with the latter on a 'two year delay.'

'So the takeaway from what I'm telling you is, no harm is done by getting on the bill,' McConnell huffed.
Lee Richardson has been jailed for three years after admitting fraud

A BBC manager has been jailed for three years after fraudulently paying himself 155,000 for non-existent works.

Lee Richardson was a Frameworks Contracts Manager, responsible for awarding work to firms tasked with the upkeep of the broadcaster's huge property portfolio.

However, the 52-year-old, from Surbiton, south-west London, founded Sentinal Services and paid twelve separate invoices for repairs that never happened.

The married father-of-three, who is also a school governor and served with Ofsted, pleaded guilty to one count of fraud by abuse of position between October 6, 2009 and February 22, 2011.

Kingston-upon-Thames Crown Court heard an audit after Richardson had left the BBC exposed the fraud.

'He was responsible for work to be carried out to the BBC estate and it was his job to select these tendered contracts,' said prosecutor Mr. Stephen Apted.

Sentinal was registered on September 9, 2009 and almost immediately Richardson was paying the company for work never carried out.

'That company was set up and registered for the sole purpose of committing these frauds.'

Richardson was Sentinal's director and his wife Debra the company secretary and he twice refused to answer police questions after his arrest on November 15, 2015.

He has now fully repaid the BBC and after paying tax originally is now 25,000 down on the fraud.

'He has taken full responsibility. He felt aggrieved, overlooked, overworked and undervalued and saw gaps in the system and took advantage,' said his lawyer Anna McKenzie.

'He fully accepts what he did was wrong and bitterly regrets what he has done.'

Richardson has a construction and engineering background. 'He has ruined his personal and professional reputation and is deeply ashamed of what he has done.'

Judge Sarah Plaschkes QC told bearded Richardson, whose wife and mother were in court: 'You were employed by the BBC, a public body.

The 52-year-old was responsible for awarding work to firms tasked with the upkeep of the broadcaster's huge property portfolio (pictured: BBC Scotland Studios, Glasgow)

'You were promoted and were required to be independent and impartial, but these invoices were bogus.

'No work has been carried out and that company was created at the same time you were promoted.

'This was a sophisticated fraud in setting-up the company and using it to produce and submit invoices, it required planning.

'This was a calculated, sustained and sophisticated fraud, abusing your position to defraud a public institution.'
A white nationalist and a counter-protester have been charged following clashes during neo-Nazi rally which saw 14 people stabbed outside the California state Capitol building in 2016.

The Californian Highway Patrol recommended charging 101 people following the violent scenes from June 2016 when 300 counter-protesters confronted around 30 members of the white-nationalist Traditional Worker Party.

The Sacramento County District Attorney's Office said other arrests are expected, but prosecutors rejected numerous other charges the highway patrol sought after its eight-month investigation.

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Two people suffered critical injuries after they were stabbed during the demonstration outside the California state Capitol building in Sacramento during a protest by neo-Nazis

14 people were stabbed during clashes between neo-Nazis and counter protesters last year

Around 30 members of the white-nationalist Traditional Worker Party held a demonstration in Sacramento outside the California state Capitol building on June 2016

California prosecutors want to extradict William Scott Planer, right, from Colorado

Planer, pictured, was arrested in Colorado on suspicion of defacing a Jewish center

The two arrests were on charges of assault with a deadly weapon or using force likely to cause great bodily harm and participating in a riot.

William Planer, who prosecutors say was supporting the Traditionalist Worker Party, was arrested in Colorado and is awaiting extradition to California. Prosecutors did not know if Planer had retained an attorney.

Porfirio Paz was arrested in Southern California and is set to be arraigned July 24. Prosecutors believe Paz, who is from Long Beach, was a counter-protester.

His attorney, Mark Reichel, said Paz has no criminal record and plans to plead not guilty.

'I don't know why they charged him but he will beat the charges,' Reichel said

Planer, right, was allegedly in Sacramento attending the Traditionalist Worker Party rally

The neo-Nazi group were confronted by a group of around 300 counter-protesters

The California Highway Patrol recommended charging 101 people following the disturbances

Investigators could not learn the identities of those committing the most violent offenses, Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Grippi said in a statement, and the district attorney's office is not pursuing many of the more minor recommended charges.

A KCRA-TV reporter and his cameraman were confronted by protesters who shouted 'no cameras' as they grabbed at their equipment.

The stabbings and the assault on the TV crew were clearly felonies, but no charges can be filed because investigators never learned who was responsible, Grippi said.

Representatives from both sides did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Police in Colorado Springs, Colorado, are holding a William Scott Planer, 34, for extradition to California, department spokesman Lt. Howard Black said.

Planer was arrested July 12 on suspicion of committing bias-motivated crimes alleging that he pasted black stickers reading 'Fight Terror, Nuke Israel' on the front door of a Colorado Springs Jewish center, Black said.

The doors were defaced about 1:30 a.m. June 10, and detectives identified Planer from a surveillance tape, he said.

Prosecutors claimed it was impossible to identify those suspected for the most serious crimes

The highway patrol had recommended 68 felony charges and 514 misdemeanors. But prosecutors rejected dozens of lower-level crimes, including 85 counts of unlawful assembly, 55 counts of conspiracy to unlawfully assemble and 32 counts related to the possession of illegal signs and banners.

It took prosecutors five months to review the agency's 2,000-page report and hours of related video.

Videos posted on social media showed participants throwing stones toward a man who was holding a stick as he was protected by police officers wearing riot gear. Other videos showed officers on horseback dispersing protesters, some with their faces covered.

The highway patrol said its investigation was made more difficult because many of the counter-demonstrators were masked. Many participants were difficult to locate or refused to cooperate, the agency said.

The Traditionalist Worker Party was formed in 2015 as the political wing of the white nationalist Traditionalist Youth Network, according to The Southern Poverty Law Center, which studies extremist groups across the nation.

'We are unapologetically nationalists, fighting to secure the existence of our people and a future for White children,' the party says on its website.

The group had a permit for the Capitol rally, while counter-protesters did not have a permit and were there to prevent the white nationalists' rally, the highway patrol said.

Several uninvolved observers criticized police for being too slow to break up the fighting.
Police in Oregon arrested a man after the remains of a his dead mother were discovered in a backyard fire pit outside her home in Beaverton.

Matthew Gutierrez, 24, was charged with first-degree abuse of a corpse after he admitted to investigators to burning the body of Katherine McDowell, 57, in a furious rage.

Police have yet to determine the official cause of McDowell's death.

Beaverton police spokesman Bryan Dalton said the department was initially tipped off about a suspicious matter Monday afternoon when they received a phone call from McDowell's daughter requesting a welfare check on McDowell after she failed to get in contact with her for some time.

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Matthew Gutierrez, 24, (left) was charged with first-degree abuse of a corpse after he admitted to investigators to burning the body of Katherine McDowell, 57, (right)

Police were not initially aware of the whereabouts of McDowell when they arrived to the home until Gutierrez revealed the disturbing details

When they arrived to the home, investigators were not initially aware of the whereabouts of McDowell until Gutierrez willingly revealed later the disturbing details on what he had executed.

Police confirmed Gutierrez holds two domestic violence incidents on his record, which stem back to January 2016 and March 2017.

Family members of the late McDowell expressed their devastation and regret regarding the domestic homicide, insisting they were not made aware of the recent disorder surrounding the home.

McDowell's brother, Rex McDowell, told the The Oregonian he believed his nephew cared greatly for his mom.

'I thought Matthew loved his mother and I never saw otherwise,' he said.

Residents who lived in the vicinity of McDowell said they noticed the stench of a fire burning in the neighborhood at the time.

'We definitely smelled a fire burning,' Shanie Geattle revealed to Fox 12 Oregon, while reflecting on her times crossing paths with her.

'You just remember seeing her just weeks ago and you just can't believe it happened to her, that she's not here anymore,' she added.

It is unknown whether or not Gutierrez has been formally diagnosed with mental health issues.

Gutierrez is currently detained in the Washington County Jail on $250,000 bond.

Further investigation is expected to ensue over the course of the next several months.
A majority of Americans say Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with Russians was inappropriate, despite President Trump's pitch that the sit-down was 'just politics.'

Asked about Trump Jr.'s meeting with a 'Russian government attorney,' 52 per cent of Americans said it was inappropriate. Just 23 per cent called it appropriate. Twenty-five per cent had no opinion.

An overwhelming 73 per cent majority said it was inappropriate for political campaigns to meet with an 'enemy' regime in order to get information in order to help their candidate get elected.

The number dropped to 69 per cent with an 'unfriendly' regime and 46 per cent with a 'friendly' regime, according to the Politico / Morning Consult poll.

Asked about Trump Jr.'s meeting with a 'Russian government attorney,' 52 per cent of Americans said it was inappropriate

The overall number didn't change much when told the meeting was to get information that would incriminate Democrat Hillary Clinton. Fifty three per cent called it inappropriate in that case, compared to 28 per cent who called it appropriate.

Republicans were more sanguine about the idea, calling the meeting appropriate by a breakdown of 44 per cent to 24 per cent.

President Trump has defended the meeting by arguing that 'most people would have taken that meeting,' tweeting: '''That's politics!'

Ike Kaveladze has been identified as the eighth person known to have attended a meeting with Donald Trump Jr.

Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks ABC's 'Good Morning America' about meeting with Donald Trump Jr. in footage aired Wednesday

PR executive Rob Goldstone emailed Donald Trump Jr to set the controversial meeting up. He confirmed to the Associated Press that he participated in the gathering. Next to be revealed to be there was interpreter Anatoli Samochornov (right)

Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin (background in glasses) was working with Natalia Veselnitskaya on an effort to kill the Global Magnitsky Act around the same time as the Trump Tower meet-up. He confirmed to the AP he attended the controversial get-together

Republicans tend to agree, wth 57 per cent saying most campaigns would take the meeting, compared to 65 per cent of Democrats who wouldn't go.

Asked whether President Trump had been very or somewhat truthful about alleged coordination, compared to 46 per cent who said he had been not too truthful or not at all truthful.

'President Trump and his surrogates have been making the case that Donald Jr.'s meeting was politics as usual, and Republican voters appear to agree,' Morning Consult Chief Research Officer Kyle Dropp said. 'Fifty-seven percent of GOP voters say that most campaigns would accept a meeting with a Russian government attorney offering incriminating information about an opponent.'

Trump Jr. has been under fire for attending a June 2016 meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin linked lawyer after being promised information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton. Also attending were Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, and Ike Kaveladze, a vice president in a real estate firm owned by Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.
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Palestinians clashed with Israeli police outside an entrance to Jerusalem as tensions rose today over metal detector security checks installed by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office.

Netanyahu consulted with officials about security arrangements outside a major Jerusalem shrine that angered Muslim leaders, who have urged worshippers to gather there in two days' time and to pray outside if the devices are still in place.

Israel installed the detectors this week after Arab Israeli gunmen killed two police officers at the site, holy to both Muslims and Jews.

Many worshippers have since prayed on nearby streets, refusing to undergo security checks and clashing with police.

Palestinians see the installation of metal detectors as expanding Israeli control over the site, which is at the heart of the Middle East conflict.

An Arabic statement from Netanyahu's office downplayed reports that the talks were about removing metal detectors.

Israeli police officers detained Palestinians outside the Lion's Gate, following an appeal from clerics to pray in the streets instead of the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, in Jerusalem's Old City, as protest against the security checks.

Unrest: A Palestinian (pictured) clashed with Israeli police outside an entrance to Jerusalem as tensions rose today over metal detector security checks installed by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office

Trouble: Israeli police officers detain a Palestinian man outside the Lion's Gate, following an appeal from clerics to pray in the streets instead of the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, in Jerusalem's Old City

Tight security: Following Friday's terror attack the holy site of Al Aqsa mosque was partly closed. Now only individuals can enter through metal detectors which has sparked outrage in the Muslim community (pictured)

Tension: Israel installed the detectors this week after Arab Israeli gunmen killed two police officers at the site, holy to both Muslims and Jews. Many worshippers (pictured) have since prayed on nearby streets, refusing to undergo security checks

Held down: Palestinians see the installation of metal detectors as expanding Israeli control over the site, which is at the heart of the Middle East conflict

Downplaying: An Arabic statement from Netanyahu's office downplayed reports that talks were about removing detectors

Violence: Palestinian Muslims clash outside the entrance to the old city of Jerusalem as it is partially blocked by Israeli Police in Jerusalem, Israel

Terror: The unrest (above) comes after Arab assailants struck at ground zero of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last Friday, opening fire from inside a major Jerusalem shrine and killing two Israeli policemen before being shot dead

Attack: The shooting spree from within the sacred site, revered by both Muslims and Jews, raised new concerns about an escalation of violence. The attackers were Arab citizens of Israel, also a rarity since Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers that erupted about two years ago, in part over tensions at the holy site. Pictured: A Palestinian man is detained

Wounded: A Palestinian man, hurt during clashes with Israeli security forces after a demonstration, walks next to Lions Gate, a main entrance to the holy site, in Jerusalem's Old City on July 18, 2017. Israel reopened the ultra-sensitive holy site after it was closed following an attack by Arab Israeli men in which two Israeli policemen were killed

Protest: Yesterday, Palestinians staged a protest (pictured) after performing evening prayer as they refused to enter because of the detectors installed by Israel outside of the main entrances to the Al-Aqsa mosque that re-opened for the first time on Sunday since a two-day closure following a deadly shootout in Jerusalem

Emergency: Medics carry a wounded Palestinian man, during clashes with Israeli security forces following a demonstration after Palestinian Muslim worshipper refused to enter the Al-Aqsa mosque compound
This is the moment a teenager got knocked out cold by an elevator after looking through the door to see when it was coming down.

Mohit Kumar, 14, peeped through a wooden door with an open window as he waited for the elevator in Patna, India, at 8.40am on Saturday.

But moments later the lift came down and smashed into his head - leaving him in a crumpled heap on the floor.

Mohit Kumar, 14, was waiting for an elevator in Patna, India, when he poked his head through a broken window in the elevator doors to see if it was coming

Mohit was rushed to hospital after the accident at the Shail Villa apartments and is in a serious condition.

Apartment manager Hira Ratna Mahato said he found Mohit laying motionless on the ground and rushed him to the Patna Medical College and Hospital.

He said: 'A few men had been stranded in the lift recently when its door had failed to open.

'They had broken the glass pane on the door while attempting to get out. This normally stops people from looking through.

Moments later the elevator car arrived and hit the teenager over the head, knocking him out instantly and leaving him in a crumpled heap

Mohit was rushed to hospital after the accident where he remains in a serious condition. The building owner is helping to pay for treatment

'The society was planning to replace the glass pane when the tragedy struck.

'We have given the boy's father money for his son's treatment. More money will be given if needed.'

Mohit's father, Pramod Kumar, said he is a security guard at the building and had brought his son to work on the day of the accident.

Pramod, from a village in Islampur, said his son was running errands and helping to cook while while he covered an extra shift for an absent colleague.
Another victim of notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy was identified Wednesday as a teen who ran away from home in 1976.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said in a news release that the remains of a person whose body was found under the crawl space of Gacy's Chicago area home in 1978 were those of 16-year-old James 'Jimmie' Byron Haakenson.

The teenager had left his Minnesota home in 1976 and was last heard from in August of that year when he called his mother and told her he was in Chicago.

Gacy was convicted of killing 33 young men and was executed in 1994.

Haakenson was one of eight of Gacy's victims who were buried without being identified.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said that the remains of a person whose body was found under the crawl space of serial killer John Wayne Gacy's (left in 1978) Chicago area home in 1978 were those of 16-year-old James 'Jimmie' Byron Haakenson (right)

Gacy (above in 1992) was convicted of killing 33 young men and was executed in 1994. Haakenson was one of eight of Gacy's victims who were buried without being identified

Haakenson had left his Minnesota home in 1976 and was last heard from in August of that year when he called his mother and told her he was in Chicago. His victim's bodies were found under the crawl space of Gacy's Chicago area home (above in the 1970s)

Dart's office exhumed the remains of all eight in 2011 in an effort to identify them using DNA testing.

At the time, Dart asked that relatives of young men who vanished between 1970 and Gacy's 1978 arrest submit saliva samples so that their DNA could be compared with the DNA of the remains.

He said he hoped advances in scientific technology would allow investigators to figure out who the eight victims were.

Two siblings of the teen were among the scores of relatives who submitted saliva samples.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart (above) made the announcement regarding the decades old case on Wednesday in Chicago

Dart (above left) explained that Haakenson's remains were identified thanks to DNA samples provided by two siblings of the teen. Before he was identified, Haakenson was known as 'Victim #24'

Dart said that there was a 'strong genetic association' between the siblings and the teen's remains.

Haakenson is the second of the eight victims to be identified.

Months after Dart had the bodies exhumed, his office announced that it had identified one of the victims as William George Bundy, a 19-year-old construction worker.

The investigation has also solved four cold cases that were not related to Gacy, locating five missing persons who were still alive and two who had died elsewhere in the U.S.

Gacy (left in 1978 and right as a clown) is remembered as one of history's most bizarre killers, largely because of his work as an amateur clown named 'Pogo the Clown'. He stated that acting as a clown allowed him to 'regress into childhood'

For example, in 2013, Dart announced that thanks to the DNA collection in the Gacy case, investigators were able to identify remains found in a wooded area in New Jersey as a teenager who ran away from a nearby orphanage in 1972.

Gacy is remembered as one of history's most bizarre killers, largely because of his work as an amateur clown.

Gacy, a Chicago-area building contractor, lured young men to his home by impersonating a police officer or promising them construction work.

There, he stabbed one and strangled the others before he buried most of them in the crawl space or dumped the others in a river.
A man, 59, who took five generic Viagra pills and got behind the wheel has been arrested for a DUI.

A witness had called police at around 10pm on Sunday after they saw the driver, who has not named, drive over a highway median, hitting a wall and crashing into a Seattle parking garage.

When cops arrived they found the man, of Mercer Island, Washington, identified as the driver by his son and the witness, stumbling and was acting 'off' according to his son.

A man, 59, who took five generic Viagra pills and got behind the wheel has been arrested for a DUI (stock image)

Officers say they could not smell alcohol on the man but suspected he could be under the influence of prescription drugs, according to an incident report, seen by Kiro7.

When they asked him what he had taken, the 59-year-old 'made statements to officers about taking a generic version of 'Viagra,' according to a police incident report, and 'told officers that he took five pills when the bottle said to only take one.'

He added that the pill bottle did not state he couldn't drive after taking Viagra.

A witness had called police at around 10pm on Sunday after they saw the driver, who has not named, drive over a highway median, hitting a wall and crashing into a Seattle parking garage at the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Union Street

Viagra does contain a warning saying that it can cause rare side effects such as sudden vision loss, a rapid drop in blood pressure, and an erection lasting more than four hours.

Police took a blood sample and are still waiting for the results to determine what was in his system.

In the meantime, the man pleaded not guilty to driving under the influence. He is due back in court on August 21.
An illegal immigrant with an 'abysmal' criminal record has won 40,000 compensation from the Home Office after he was locked up for too long.

The High Court payout is the second time that Moroccan national Khalid Belfken, 27, has been awarded substantial damages for unlawful detention.

Belfken was only 15 when he arrived in Britain in 2005 and almost immediately embarked on a life of crime.

In the 12 years since, drug addict Belfken has committed over 40 offences, including possessing offensive weapons and twice attacking police officers.

The High Court payout is the second time that Moroccan national Khalid Belfken, 27, has been awarded substantial damages for unlawful detention

He has been locked up four times by British judges but swiftly went back to his criminal ways every time he was released.

His High Court claim centred on his fourth period of detention under immigration powers - he has previously won damages over an earlier unlawful period in 2013.

The Home Secretary conceded that part of the most recent detention was unlawful because throughout the period from September 7, 2016 to May 3, 2017 there was no realistic prospect of his removal from the UK within a reasonable period.

His latest spate of crimes involved an armed Belfken creeping into people's homes and making off with their treasured possessions.

He sneaked into one victim's bedroom as he slept in the early hours and was caught rifling through his wardrobe.

The judge earlier revealed that Belfken had previously been awarded 'substantial damages' for a period of unlawful detention in 2013.

A deportation order was issued against Belfken as a foreign criminal as long ago as 2008, London's High Court heard.

But, despite six attempts by the Home Office, the Moroccan authorities refused to provide travel documents or take him back.

And now, in the ultimate slap in the face for the Home Office, Judge Karen Steyn QC has ruled Belfken was unlawfully detained for almost a year.

Given the Moroccan authorities' stance, there was at the time no realistic prospect of him being deported, she ruled.

Home Office lawyers described the now 27-year-old's criminal record as 'atrocious' and said his habit of carrying weapons made him a serious danger to the public.

He had committed his first crime after absconding from local authority care within months of his clandestine arrival in the UK.

Given his history of revolving-door prison sentences, the chances of him returning to crime were 'extremely high'.

As well as a long list of thefts, burglaries and other crimes, he had been convicted of breaching court orders or failing to answer bail no less than 13 times.

Judge Steyn said: 'He has no lawful right to remain in the UK and he should leave.

'As he has not left voluntarily, it is strongly in the public interest that the Secretary of State should deport him, if possible.'

'He has an abysmal offending history...there can be no doubt that the risks of him re-offending and absconding, on release, were extremely high.

'He was rightly assessed, in July 2016, as presenting a high risk of harm to the public'.

But the judge added: 'Nevertheless, the right to liberty is of fundamental importance'.

The failure to deport him was in part due to Belfken's 'uncooperative and obstructive' failure to reveal details about his childhood in Morocco.

But as he was so young when he left, his fingerprints were not on the Moroccan database and officials there had refused to accept him as one of their own.

The Home Office had six times asked the Moroccan government to sanction his return there, but so far without success.

The judge said the Home Office was only entitled to detain Belfken for so long as there was a realistic prospect of him being deported.

And she ruled that, given the impasse with the Moroccan authorities, there was no such prospect between July 2016 and May this year.

The judge concluded: 'It would not be fair, in my view, to deprive Belfken of substantial damages.

'The appropriate compensatory award in this case should be 40,000.'
An Illinois police officer has been cleared of any wrongdoing in connection to a 16-year-old boy's suicide earlier this year, which is now the subject of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.

An internal affairs investigation conducted by the Naperville Police Department has concluded that officer Brett Heun followed proper protocol while questioning Corey Walgren about a possible sex video involving a female classmate in January.

Walgren took his own life by jumping from the roof of a parking garage just hours after his interview with Heun at Naperville North High School in suburban Chicago.

An internal affairs investigation into he suicide death of 16-year-old Corey Walgren (pictured) has cleared a Naperville, Illinois, police officer who had interviewed him of any wrongdoing

In May, Corey's parents, Maureen and Doug Walgren (pictured), filed a $5million wrongful death lawsuit against the local school district and the police department

Corey's parents, Maureen and Doug Walgren, in May filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Naperville Police Department and School District 203 seeking $5million.

Mrs Walgren previously claimed that Heun had frightened her son to death by accusing the honor roll student of possibly being in possession of child pornography and suggesting that he could be classified as a sex offender.

But a report from the internal affairs investigation, which was obtained by the Chicago Tribune through the Freedom of Information Act, found that the officer did not threaten the teenager and violated no policies.

On January 11, Corey was called into the office at Naperville North High School after a female classmate told a school dean that he had a recording of a sexual encounter they had before Christmas.

The teenage boy allegedly had audio on his phone of the consensual sexual encounter with the 16-year-old classmate that police claimed he had possibly played to friends.

During the interrogation, the deans, James Konrad and Stephen Madden, as well as Officer Heun, questioned him about possessing and sharing child pornography.

They also checked his phone and found audio of the sexual encounter with his classmate, but did not find any evidence of child pornography.

While officers did not intend to press charges, police allegedly wanted Corey to know the seriousness of his actions.

Corey's parents say the school district broke a crucial state law, which demands that parents be notified during an interrogation of a minor

The newly released investigation report has concluded that officer Heun and Corey Walgren had a brief conversation, and its tone was 'agreeable'.

Throughout the interview, the report stated, Corey was 'fully cooperative and never signaled that he did not wish to speak to Heun.

Heun did not use forceful or aggressive tones or tactics nor did he threaten [Corey] with any of the same, the report said.

The City of Naperville backed the police departments version of events, saying in a statement that the case, which did not involve police custody, was 'handled properly.'

An attorney representing the Walgren family, however, dismissed the finding of the internal affairs probe as 'worthless.' He also noted that no one from the department has reached out to Maureen Walgren while reviewing Officer Heun's conduct, even though she had been on the phone with him and the school deans during a portion of her son's interview.

The Walgren family's lawsuit stated that after confronting Corey and threatening to register him as a sex offender, the deans and police officer called his mother at work on a loudspeaker in front of the teen, and informed her that her son was being investigated for child pornography.

Heun had explained the case could be dealt with via a 'station adjustment', which meant Corey could be disciplined reprimanded without being formally charged with a crime, according to Mrs Walgren.

She said the officer intended to download the contents of Corey's phone, but needed a parent's consent to do so.

The lawsuit also accused the deans and Heun of violating a crucial state law, which demands that parents be notified if a minor is taken into custody.

Corey had been called into the office at Naperville North High School after a female classmate told a school dean that he had a recording of a sexual encounter they had before Christmas

The investigation, however, found that law did not apply in this case because Corey was never in police custody, as evidenced by the fact that Heun never restrained Corey, called for backup or had him transported to the police station.

Additionally, the office door was unlocked, meaning that Corey could have walked out at any time.

Corey was eventually taken to a nearby area in the school's office and told to wait for his mother.

His mother arrived at the school a short time later, but Corey had already left and staff didn't know where he had gone.

Mrs Walgren, a nurse, immediately went out looking for her son and asked the school to contact police to help with the search.

A short time later, Corey jumped from the fifth story of a municipal parking garage a mile away from school and died from his injuries while in hospital.

If anyone is seeking help please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by calling 1 800 273 8255 or visiting the website.
Laptops and tablets on US-bound flights from Mexico are now subjected to heightened carry-on security measures.

Mexican officials announced the change, which was implemented from Wednesday, was made at the request of the Department of Homeland Security.

Any electronic device 'larger than a cellphone' will have the new measures applied to it, Mexico's Transportation Department said in the statement.

After announcing the policy tweak, the department recommended passengers travel with as few of those devices as possible in carry-on bags.

Laptops and tablets on US-bound flights from Mexico are now subjected to heightened carry-on security measures. Pictured is a TSA officer checking a laptop at a Washington airport

It did not give details on the checks other to say they will take place separately from baggage, without cases or covers.

The news comes after the TSA announced earlier this week it was lifting a ban on passengers on Saudi Arabian Airlines carrying large electronics like laptops onboard US-bound flights.

Restrictions were imposed in March this year on passengers carrying laptops and other large electronic gear in cabins on nine airlines, most of which were Middle Eastern carriers, to address the potential threat of hidden explosives.

Last month, American officials announced new security requirements for all airlines rather than an expansion of the laptop ban and have been dropping the restrictions from airlines as they boosted security.

Mexican officials announced the change, which was implemented from Wednesday, was made at the request of the Department of Homeland Security. Pictured is a Mexican agent checking backs at Toluca Airport

Details on what the checks will be are unknown, other than that they will take place separately from baggage, without cases or covers. Pictured is a passenger taking his laptop out of a bag at Salt Lake City Airport

A TSA spokesman said the government had lifted the restrictions at Saudi Arabian Airlines' main hub in Jeddah at King Abdulaziz International Airport on Monday.

A spokesman also said US officials will visit Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport this week to: 'confirm compliance there as well'.

The DHS issued a revised directive to airlines around the world in response to requests that it clarify aviation security measures scheduled to begin taking effect later this week.

An airline official briefed on the matter said the directive gave airlines more flexibility and additional time to obtain explosive trace detection equipment. The official was not authorized to discuss sensitive security issues with the media and requested anonymity.

The directive includes technical adjustments, agency officials said, declining to release the text. European airlines have been pushing for changes to meet the new requirements.

Any electronic device 'larger than a cellphone' will have the new measures applied to it, Mexico's Transportation Department said

The change for passengers flying from Mexico comes after the TSA announced earlier this week it was lifting a ban on passengers on Saudi Arabian Airlines carrying large electronics like laptops onboard US-bound flights. Pictured is a man with his laptop at Kuwait airport

DHS has said that it could impose new restrictions on laptops if airlines do not make security upgrades.

European and U.S. officials told Reuters that airlines have until July 19, to put in place increased explosive trace detection screening and other measures and 120 days to comply with other security measures, including enhanced screening of airline passengers.

The new requirements include enhanced passenger screening at foreign airports, increased security protocols around aircraft and in passenger areas and expanded canine screening. They affect 325,000 airline passengers on about 2,000 commercial flights arriving daily in the United States, on 180 airlines from 280 airports in 105 countries.

A group of airline groups, including the International Air Transport Association, criticized the new requirements in a July 14 letter to American officials saying it is a 'fundamental shift away from the risk-based approach' and said it would be 'extremely difficult' to 'meet the deadlines because of the lack of availability of screening equipment technology and resources.'
Donald Trump told Republican senators on Wednesday  three times  that they should cancel their planned August recess if they haven't passed a bill repealing the Obamacare law. But Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wasn't making any commitments.

'We have to stay here. We shouldn't leave town and we should hammer this out and get it done,' the president said at the beginning of a lunch at the White House.

'Frankly I don't think we should leave town unless we have a health insurance plan, unless we can give our people great health care,' he added later.

And in a flourish at the end of his remarks, Trump repeated his demand: 'We shouldn't leave town until this is complete, until this bill is on my desk, and until we all go over to the Oval Office. I'll sign it, and we can celebrate for the American people.'

After the lunch, McConnell dodged a question about whether he would cancel the Senate's annual vacation.

'Will you be here all of August? Will you cancel all of August recess?' DailyMail.com asked him.

'We're going to have a vote on the motion to proceed to the bill next week,' McConnell replied, refusing to forecast beyond that.

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President Donald Trump told Republican senators to scrap their vacation plans until they move an Obamacare repeal bill through the legislative process

'We have to stay here. We shouldn't leave town and we should hammer this out and get it done,' he said at the beginning of a lunch at the White House

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke to reporters at the White House but wouldn't answer a question about whether senators' vacations would be put on hold

The White House would not commit the president to staying in Washington himself until the bill passes and clarified later in an off-camera briefing that he expects senators to travel home on the weekends like they normally would.

That allowed his aides to wiggle out of questions about Trump's weekend travel to his golf courses.

'I think the president will be traveling, but I would imagine that members will be traveling to, so I don't know that that's a fair comparison. But he will be here working on it as long as they are,' Marc Short, the president's legislative affairs director said.

Pressed to explain the fairness argument, Short said, 'Members will be traveling home on weekends, too, so it's not a matter of being here, it's a matter of whether you recess the Senate.'

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders echoed Short from the podium when it was her turn to brief.

'As Mark said, the president's committed to being here and working on a health care bill,' she told DailyMail.com

Asked about it again, she said: 'We plan to be here while the Senate is in session to get the health care bill completed.'

Trump typically departs the White House on Friday and does not return until Sunday. He frequented his Palm Beach, Florida, resort in his off time until it closed for the season. Now he goes to his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club.

Sometimes he visits another, closer, golf course he owns in Sterling, Virginia, not too far from the White House.

This weekend he's commissioning the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier in Norfolk, Virginia. Trump has a rally scheduled next week on Tuesday in Youngstown, Ohio.

That event is being managed by his presidential campaign, not the White House.

Trump is unlikely to discard the opportunity to use the bully pulpit to raise awareness about the GOP's health care reform bill.

Forty-nine of the GOP's 52 senators came to the White House on Wednesday for a talk with Trump -a quorum too small to pass anything. John McCain of Arizona was still recovering from blood clot surgery.

Richard Burr of North Carolina and Johnny Isakson of Georgia stayed away, but they are both considered to be reliable 'yes' votes.

Isakson is reportedly ill. And Burr has pledged not to visit the White House while the Senate Intelligence Committee, which he chairs, is investigating alleged links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Marc Short, the White House's legislative affairs director, told reporters in a mid-afternoon briefing that 'we are confident that we will get this bill passed.'

Short, the White House's legislative affairs director, told reporters in a mid-afternoon briefing that 'we are confident that we will get this bill passed.'

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday morning that he would force a vote next week on a motion that would open debate on a repeal bill.

That puts a spotlight on a handful of reluctant GOPers, all of whom were present.

Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska all said Tuesday that they would vote 'no.'

Rob Portman of Ohio said Tuesday night that he had misgivings about the plan. And Dean Heller of Nevada let it be known last week that the plan then on the table, a more ambitious repeal-and-replace measure, wasn't to his liking.

Gesturing to Heller with a knowing grin, Trump told the room: 'He wants to remain a senator, doesn't he?'

White House aides had mulled last week the idea of assisting Republican primary challengers who might unseat Heller when he runs for re-election next year.

The brushback pitch did little to persuade him to back last week's bill, but he hasn't raised public objections about the repeal-only plan, which would give lawmakers a two-year grace period to replace the Obama-era system.

'Any senator who votes against starting debate is really telling America that you're fine with Obamacare,' Trump said Wednesday, another hint at political consequences.

But Short insisted a few hours later that 'there's not a sense of a veiled threat.'

'The president's been pretty direct in his words, and he's right now saying, "This is what you promised. I will live up to my promise, I'm ready to sign the bill, get me the bill so we can get this done for the American people and we can also move on to tax reform and other items that are part of our agenda," ' Short said.

Trump took a shot at Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada (left), saying he should vote to repeal Obamacare if 'he wants to remain a senator'

US Senator Ted Cruz (R), Republican of Texas, and US Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska, listen as US President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Republican Senators to discuss the health care bill in the State Dining Room of the White House

He denied, in a follow-up, that Trump had promised to campaign for Heller next year in exchange for his vote. 'There was not a quid pro quo.'

The president claimed that the Senate GOP caucus is 'so close' to reaching a deal, and pledged to put his signature on the result.

'I'm ready to act. I have pen in hand, believe me. I'm sitting in that office, I've got pen in hand,' he said. 'You've never had that before.'

'For seven years you promised the American people that you would repeal Obamacare.'

Trump reminded senators that the main selling points of the Obamacare system turned out to be empty promises, putting them on notice that full-throated opposition was the only acceptable course.

'Obamacare was a big lie. "You can keep your doctor"? Lie. "You can keep your plan"? Lie. It was a lie directly from the president,' he said.

'"You can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan." Twenty-eight times he said [it]. Twenty-eight times. It was a lie and he knew it was. And now it's hurting this country irreparably.'

McConnell said Wednesday that he will force a vote next week on an Obamacare repeal bill, daring Republican defectors to stand and be counted

Collins, Capito and Murkowski announced Tuesday that they would refuse to support legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act with a two-year delay for a replacement to be devised.

With only 52 seats in the 100-member Senate, McConnell could afford only two defections.

But he said defiantly on the Senate floor on Wednesday that he will call their bluff.

Trump reached a fit of pique on Tuesday after McConnell's best laid plan appeared to run off the rails, fuming that he was willing to let the flailing Obamacare insurance scheme die on the vine in order to force Congress to craft a replacement package.

'I've been saying for a very long time, "Let Obamacare fail and then everybody is going to have to come together and fix it, and come up with a new plan, and a plan that is really good for the people with much lower premiums, much lower costs, much better protection",' he told reporters.

'I think we're probably in that position where we'll let Obamacare fail,' Trump added. 'We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it.'

'As I announced last evening, after consulting with both the White House and our members, we have decided to hold the vote to open debate on Obamacare repeal early next week,' McConnell announced.

'This is the same legislation that a majority of the Senate voted to send to the president in 2015,' he added. 'Now, we thankfully have a president in office who will sign it. So we should send it to him.'
The Republican senator overseeing a probe of Trump campaign Russia contacts is steering clear of the White House as the investigation heats up.

North Carolina GOP Sen. Richard Burr avoided a White House meeting meant to try to revive a failed health care bill that drew 49 of 52 GOP senators Wednesday.

His objection wasn't ideological, but was rooted in his investigatory role.

'I'll make it a habit while this investigation is going on that I don't go down [to the White House],' Burr said, the Hill newspaper reported.

Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr said he is steering clear of the White House as the investigation into Trump campaign Russia contacts heats up

In doing so, Burr hopes to avoid the fate of GOP Rep. Devin Nunues, who had to step back from his chamber's Russia probe after his own trips to the White House drew scrutiny.

Burr has himself been accused of being too close to the White House during the investigation, including during the publicly slow pace of the early days of the inquiry. He has worked closely with panel vice chair Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia.

Burr indicated Tuesday he is interested in getting to the bottom of a June 2016 meeting involving the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., a Kremlin-linked lawyer, and other figures.

'Any intelligence out there that suggests somebody is of interest to us, we have to pursue it. ... You've now got an email chain that makes this a very important aspect to get into,' he said, referencing the emails Trump Jr. posted that showed him accepting a meeting when potentially incriminating information on Hillary Clinton was offered.

POWER LUNCH: President Donald Trump delivers remarks on health care and Republicans' inability thus far to replace or repeal the Affordable Care Act, during a lunch with members of Congress in the State Dining Room of the White House on July 19, 2017 in Washington, DC. Burr was one of the few senators to miss the luncheon

'MASS HYSTERIA': In this July 11, 2017, photo, Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks to journalists in Moscow, Russia. The Russian lawyer at the center of the June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr. is known for her work trying to roll back U.S. sanctions on Russia. She told Russian state media she wants to testify in the Senate

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, Burr's counterpart, said the panel's witness list was 'still being worked out' how Trump Jr. and campaign chair Paul Manafort should testify.

The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, told Russian state media: 'I am ready to clarify the situation behind the mass hysteria, but only through lawyers or testifying in the Senate.'

In another development, Senate Judiciary Committee chair Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said he wants Don Jr. and Manafort to testify before his panel before the upcoming August recess.

The Senate Judiciary Committee wants former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to testify

Grassley said he "didn't get any pushback" from Trump Jr'.s lawyer when he first suggested testimony as early as this week, but then called an early date 'kind of rushy.'

Trump Jr. has been under fire for attending a June 2016 meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin linked lawyer after being promised information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton.

Also attending were Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, and Ike Kaveladze, a vice president in a real estate firm owned by Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.

Manafort and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner also attended.
Hillary Clinton and a firm with ties to the Democratic party setup President Donald Trump and his family in an attempt to destroy the billionaire businessman and politician according to the National Enquirer.

The tabloid magazine, which has made no secret of its pro-Trump agenda, came to this conclusion after what they describe as an 'exhaustive investigation' into the matter.

These attempts by 'evil' Hillary to bring down her rival included luring Donald Jr. into meeting with shadowy Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskyaya claims the tabloid.

And the firm in the middle of all this is Fusion GPS according to the tabloid, the same group that allegedly compiled Christopher Steele's scandalous dossier of claims about President Trump that was published in January.

Fusion GPS previously denied these claims, stating: 'Fusion GPS learned about this meeting from news reports and had no prior knowledge of it. Any claim that Fusion GPS arranged or facilitated this meeting in any way is absolutely false.'

Axis of evil: The National Enquirer claims that Hillary Clinton (above in June) and her supporters are trying to bring down the Trump family by making it seem that they colluded with Russians

Consolidating power: This was allegedly done with help from the group Fusion GPS according to the tabloid, who claims the Democratic party hired the company to get Trump dirt (Ivanka, Donald and Don Jr above in January)

'To put it in spy terms it was like a honey trap, Only they weren't selling sex to Donald Jr. They were selling fictitious dirt of Hillary,' said former CIA officer Larry C. Johnson.

'And once they bit on the meeting, they had him right where they wanted him!'

As for why this firm, Fusion GPS, would want to aid in this setup, a congressional source told the tabloid: 'These guys had a vested personal interest and ideological interest in smearing Trump and boosting Hillary's chances of winning the White House.'

The Enquirer claims that the Democratic party hired Fusion GPS on 2012 'to smear presidential candidate Mitt Romney,' and that in September 2015 a Republican donor did the same, but to smear President Trump.

When that donor left, the Democratic party allegedly stepped in and hired the firm to continue digging on the soon-to-be Republican nominee according to the tabloid.

Those claims were all made in a Vanity Fair story that was published earlier this year, and at no point in either piece is Hillary said to have had any direct contact with Fusion about getting any dirt on President Trump.

The Enquirer claims that Fusion previously worked with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskyaya

There is no direct proof that Fusion coordinated with Veselnitskyaya to frame Don Jr. other than a claim that the Russian lawyer had previously worked with the firm back in 2012 'to undermine a 2012 American law called the Magnitsky Act.'

Fusion has denied any knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting.

There are also claims that a Hillary agent has Fusion do 'opposition research' prior to starting the firm, along with a claim that Fusion has 'stonewalled' Senate investigators who requested their communications with the FBI and Justice Department.

Johnson believes the 'Trump Tower meeting' is the real Fusoion syaroy, saying: 'If you're trying to build a case the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, then you crate a situation where there is indeed a Russian for them to collude with - and that's exactly what Veselnitskyaya.'

The 'Enquirer' was not able to explain how some of the other individuals ended up at the meeting.

It also remains unclear why if Hillary and her supporters were behind this meeting in some way they would not release the details of it before the election.

Buddy system: The Enquirer is owned by Trump friend David Pecker, who voiced his love for the President in a story earlier this month

The tabloid went to print before an eighth person was reveled to be at the meeting, who they failed to locate or identify despite their own 'exhaustive research.'

In addition to the National Enquirer readily admitting their pro-Trump stance in a recent New Yorker story, there have also been suggestions that President Trump himself brags about the pull he has over the tabloid.

Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough of 'Morning Joe' claimed that President Trump used the magazine as a form of blackmail.

He told the morning hosts through a third party that he would get a story about their relationship killed from the Enquirer if they woudl apologize to him They have been vocal critics of him on their show.
A rookie police officer from New Jersey who was busted for drunk driving was caught on a camera trying to use her badge to get out of the arrest.

Stephanie Roggina, a Scotch Plains Police Department officer, led police on a short pursuit in Flemington in August last year.

The 26-year-old was caught on a Readington police officer's dashcam swerving across the road and almost hitting a guardrail before she eventually pulled over.

'I'm a cop. I work in Scotch Plains. My number is 140,' she told the officer in the footage obtained by The Trentonian.

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Stephanie Roggina, a 26-year-old Scotch Plains Police Department officer, was arrested after leading police on a short pursuit in Flemington, New Jersey in August last year

The arresting officer could be heard telling her: 'Well then, you should know better, right?'

Roggina was charged with DUI last year but the dashcam footage of the night she was arrested has only just been released.

It was published by The Trentonian on Wednesday after they filed a lawsuit to obtain a copy.

She was charged with third-degree eluding and driving while intoxicated.

Prior to the chase, the dashcam from the arresting officer's vehicle captured Roggina sitting in her car at a stop sign for 90 seconds despite there being no other cars.

Roggina, a police recruit, was charged with DUI last year but the dashcam footage of the night she was arrested has only just been released

The 26-year-old was caught on a Readington police officer's dashcam swerving across the road before she eventually pulled over and placed in handcuffs

The officer turned on his sirens when Roggina eventually started moving.

She quickly accelerated and the chase broke out.

When she eventually pulled over, the officer could be heard screaming: 'Let me see your hands' and 'Get out of the car.'

Roggina was handcuffed and could be heard slurring as she was put in the back of the squad car. She repeatedly asked 'Are you serious?' as she was arrested.

She was immediately suspended without pay following her arrest and the department has not confirmed her current status with the force.
A man from Louisiana ended up missing out on the birth of his daughter after he got arrested as he sped down the highway as he desperately tried to get his wife to a hospital.

Bridget Evans ended up going into labor on Monday evening, almost two months before her due date.

She and her husband, Zak, jumped into the car and floored it as they headed for the nearest emergency room doing 108mph in a 55mph zone.

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Bridget Evans went into labor seven weeks early on Monday but her husband was unable to be by her side because he was arrested

Husband, Zak, was determined to get Bridget to hospital to give birth and sped down the road

But it wasn't long before they attracted some unwanted attention and were spotted by a Creola police officer.

'He got behind him, cut his lights and siren on. The vehicle then started passing people on the right and left shoulder,' police chief Heath Landry told WISTV.

An officer eventually pulled the car over and the couple attempted to explain what was happening.

'My husband immediately started screaming, "My wife is in labor!" And I started screaming, "I am in premature labor!"' Bridget said.

The cops were not interested and told the couple to both get out of the car.

Bridget gave birth to baby Letty Evans, was born at 4lbs 4oz

Police chief Heath Landry said that Zak Evans was going so fast down the highway that he had no choice but to slap cuffs on him and take him straight to jail

Officers clocked Zak speeding along at 108mph in a 55mph zone

Zak believes officers were in the wrong and he got extremely irate with the police

However, once the situation was explained, instead of providing the couple with an escort to hospital, Zak was handcuffed and taken straight to jail, while an ambulance was summoned for Bridget to take her to Cabrini Hospital.

'I didn't have time to sit down and look at my speedometer... I was worried about her, about the blood going down and about my baby dying,' Zak said to WISTV.

The arresting officer said that Zak was extremely irate at being pulled over and he has admitted he was under pressure because he was worried about his wife and baby.

'It was the most horrific experience that any mother, especially a first-time mother, not knowing what's going on,' said Bridget.

'I literally had to experience bringing my baby into this world without her father,' she cried.



Officers wrote Zak a ticket for speeding, flight from an officer and careless operation of a motor car.

After a call from the hospital urging officers to let Zak go, police ended up dropping him off in the hospital parking lot.

Although he was too late for the birth of his baby, Letty, who came in at 4lbs 4oz, he didn't miss much - and the family are now all together again.

The hospital made a call to the police telling them to release Zak so that he could be present at his wife's side and meet his daughter for the very first time
A Pennsylvania judge has sentenced a married couple to up to seven years in prison after they 'gifted' their oldest daughter to a cult-like figure who sexually assaulted the girl and her five sisters.

Daniel and Savilla Stoltzfus were sentenced Wednesday by Judge Jeffrey L. Finley to serve a minimum of three and a half years up to 7 years in prison on child endangerment charges.

Daniel, 44, pleaded no contest to the charges in April, but his 43-year-old wife had entered a guilty plea. The couple gave their children to 52-year-old Lee Donald Kaplan because he helped them out of financial trouble when they broke with their Amish faith.

Two of the Stoltzfus's daughters attended their sentencing on Wednesday along with an older brother who led a delegation of 26 Amish adults and two infants into the courtroom, Philly.com reported.

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Daniel (left), 44, and Savilla Stoltzfus (center), 43, were sentenced to prison Wednesday on child endangerment charges after they gave away their 14-year-old daughter to cult-like figure Lee Kaplan (right)

Prior to their sentencing, one of the couple's daughters reportedly asked Finley to consider the childrens' love for their parents.

But the judge slammed the couple saying that he allowed his daughter to become 'sex slaves' and exposed them to trauma.

'You continued letting your children crawl into the bed of that man when you knew what was going on,' Finley told Savilla.

Daniel said, 'I regret having to put my children through what they've been through this past year and wish to reunite with my children.'

Savilla told the judge that she felt 'very very lost' when they met Kaplan.

'Forgive me for the fact that I put my children at risk,' she said.

During court Wednesday, Daniel (above left in 2016) said: 'I regret having to put my children through what they've been through this past year and wish to reunite with my children.' Kaplan is pictured above right

Savilla (above in 2016) said in court that she knew about the sexual activity between Kaplan and her daughters but believed 'it could be a good thing.'

The girls' mother has said she knew about the sexual activity between the man and her daughters but believed 'it could be a good thing.'

Kaplan twice impregnated one of the girls. He has been convicted of several child rape charges in the case and will be sentenced to prison in September.

His victims range in age from 9 to 19. The youngest victim said she was 7 the first time Kaplan had sex with her.

Police found the family, including the couple's nine daughters and two grandchildren, living with Kaplan when a neighbor's tip led them to search his Philadelphia-area home in June 2016.

Neighbors have described the couple as caring and hard-working until a 14-month-old son was killed in a farm accident in 2001.

The couple later broke from their Amish church as they became closer with Kaplan, who appeared to have a cult-like influence over them, they said.

The break led to financial problems when an Amish bank revoked the family's $300,000 business loan, they said.
President Donald Trump is ending a covert CIA program that delivered arms to Syrian rebels - a program that was mocked as illegal by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The program sought to identify a moderate opposition, delivering arms as a way to put pressure on Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

It was begun in 2013 during the Obama administration.

The president decided to end it a month ago following a meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security advisor H.R. McMaster, the Washington Post reported.

President Donald Trump speaks at a luncheon with GOP leadership, Wednesday, July 19, 2017, in the State Dinning Room of the White House in Washington. He is ending a covert CIA program to arm Syrian rebels

In doing so, the Trump administration was yielding to a key demand of Moscow, which dispatched troops in 2015 to pro up the Assad regime, which fought back against rebels with a ruthless campaign of attacks using its helicopters and other means.

'If true  and I hope its not  it would be a complete capitulation to Assad, Russia, and Iran,' wrote South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham on Twitter.

Officials said the pull-back was part of Trump's effort to seek improved ties with Moscow, and and acknowledgement that it was unlikely to succeed now that Assad has consolidated power, aided by support from Russia's air force.

Putin blasted the U.S. program in 2015 as illegal in advance of a meeting with Obama.

'In my view, providing military aid to illegitimate organizations contravenes the principles of international law and the U.N. Charter,' Putin said. 'We back only legal government entities.' He said the only legitimate army was that controlled by Assad.

Putin blasted the U.S. program in 2015 as illegal in advance of a meeting with President Obama, who authorized it in 2013

Smoke rises from buildings after Assad Regime's forces hit de-conflict zone of opposition controlled Ein Terma region in Damascus, Syria on July 18, 2017. (Photo by Qusay Nour/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Smoke rises from the Syrian town of Kobani, seen from near the Mursitpinar border crossing on the Turkish-Syrian border in the southeastern town of Suruc in Sanliurfa province on October 12, 2014 in Sanliurfa, Turkey. Kurdish forces defending Kobani urged a U.S.-led coalition to escalate air strikes on Islamic State fighters who tightened their grip on the Syrian town at the border with Turkey

People are silhouetted on the top of a hill close to the border line between Turkey and Syria near Mursitpinar bordergate as they watch the U.S led airstrikes over ther Syrian town of Kobani on October 19, 2014. Kurdish fighters in Syrian city of Kobani pushed back Islamic State militants in a number of locations as U.S. air strikes on ISIS positions continue in and around the city

The covert program was intended to weaken Syrian President Bashar al-Assad

The decision was made last month after an Oval Office meeting that included CIA Director Mike Pompeo, the Washington Post reported

Trump has repeatedly pushed for negotiations and improved relations with Russia. Following a bilateral meeting between the two presidents in Hamburg, Trump touted a recent cease fire over part of Syria that has held for several days.

On Tuesday night, the White House confirmed that Trump and Putin held a second, previously undisclosed meeting during a G20 dinner.

The New York Times reported that the meeting lasted an hour, but the White House said it was brief.
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A controversial hunting festival has been held today in Peterborough, where protesters have rallied against the sport.

The Peterborough Royal Foxhound Show is the largest gathering of hounds in the country, and rival hunts took part in relays.

It attracted an estimated 6,000 enthusiasts.

But anti-hunt campaigners have branded the event, which is in its 129th year, as 'nothing more than a celebration of illegal hunting', and claimed the issue was key to Theresa May losing her majority in this year's General Election.

In a letter to the Peterborough Telegraph, the North Cambs Hunt Saboteurs wrote: 'We strongly believe that this is nothing more than a celebration of illegal hunting.

'Theresa Mays pledge to hold a free vote on the repeal of the Hunting Act is widely seen as one of the reasons for the Conservatives loss of their majority at the General Election.

'Hunting is deeply unpopular (there are believed to be 70 Tory MPs who also oppose a repeal). We believe that the act actually needs strengthening.'

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Stewards watch on during judging at the foxhound enclosure at the Festival of Hunting today in Peterborough. The event, in its 129th year, attracted an estimated 6,000 enthusiasts

Foxhounds are pictured in their kennels ahead of the judging at the Festival of Hunting, a controversial event in its 129th year

A whipper-in carries an Old English hound into the presentation ring at today's festival, where protests were held by anti-hunt campaigners

A Bassett hound glares through a fence at today's event, which is the largest gathering of hounds in the country and has been held for 129 years

A man wears his winning rosettes outside one of the competition rings at the Festival of Hunting today. The show featured the Peterborough Royal Foxhound Show, inter-hunt relays and a variety of stalls and merchandise for all things relating to hunting and country sports

Old English hounds are held outside the competition ring by a man wearing a distinctive red jacket and riding gear at the celebration of hunting today

Anti-hunt campaigners have branded the event, which is in its 129th year, as 'nothing more than a celebration of illegal hunting'

Blood hounds are seen in one of the competition rings at the Festival of Hunting, with the annual festival attracting thousands of enthusiasts, as well as anti-hunt protests

A stuffed fox is seen as customers browse clothing shelves at a stall at the festival in Peterborough today, which attracted thousands from across the country

A man wears a selection of hunting pins on his hat at the Festival of Hunting, where members of rival hunts took part in relays today

A woman attaches a winning rosette to the sleeve of a man at today's festival, where members of rival hunts competed against each other

A judge observes some of the Harrier hounds during the competition today, with the show now in its 29th year

A man wears his winning rosettes outside one of the competition rings during the controversial event today
Roger Ailes shared stories about his final days at Fox News and relationship with News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch with close friend Michael Wolff in the months before his death.

Wolff is now sharing some of those stories in an article for The Hollywood Reporter, including a shocking admission about how Murdoch wanted to see coverage of the presidential race play out on the network.

'Murdoch instructed Ailes to tilt to anyone but Trump, Ailes confided to me before he was fired, even Hillary,' reveals Wolff.

There was no real need to worry about that however, as Ailes learned he was out at the network on the same day that Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president.

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What the HIL!: Rupert Murdoch asked Roger Ailes to 'tilt to anyone but Trump,' including Hillary Clinton, before he was fired from Fox News (Murdoch and Ailes above in 2007)

Showdown: Ailes learned he was out at the network on the same day that Trump accepted the Republican nomination (Trump and Clinton above in October)

Wolff writes that he began speaking with Ailes soon after he left Fox News, with the men meeting in person initially at his home in New Jersey and later speaking by phone when Ailes and his wife Elizabeth moved down to Palm Beach, where they purchased a $36 million mansion.

'This was, of course, a window into the fleetingness of power,' writes Wolff.

'The single most influential person in conservative politics one day, and the next, waiting for the phone to ring.'

Wolff also confirms the much widely-held belief that in the end it was a battle between Ailes and Murdoch's two sons, Lachlan and James.

Ailes had the upper-hand in their dealings for years according to Wolff, and once said of the Murdoch's two heirs: 'I make the money; they spend it.'

That all changed however after Gretchen Carlson filed her sexual harassment lawsuit against Ailes and the network.

Murdoch came from his honeymoon with Hall and, when Lachlan and James voiced their belief that Ailes had to go, he 'had to side with his sons.'

This later caused a bit of difficulty however for Murdoch when Trump did win the race, and he had to quickly make amends with the man he had been less than kind about during the campaign.

'After the election, a confounded Murdoch had to call on his ex-wife Wendi's friends, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, to broker a rapprochement with the disreputable Donald,' writes Wolff.

He then adds: 'Now, to Trump's great satisfaction, a humbled Murdoch is a constant caller.'

Prior to his termination, Ailes dismissed Murdoch's demands and criticisms according to Wolff, who wrote:' Ailes, for his part, characterized Murdoch's periodic efforts at interference as similar to Nixon's instructions to bomb this or that country  best ignored.'

Burn: Ailes also had a tumultuous relationship with Murdoch's sons Lachlan and James, saying of the heirs: 'I make the money; they spend it' (Ailes and James above in 2010)

Ailes was preparing to head back to New York City and speak about a return to media industry when he fell and struck his head in May, dying within a week.

Wolff recalls their final conversation one day before that fall to close out his piece.

'It's strange to be at home with nothing to do but just to see how right you were. The liberals really have had no idea what was going on,' said Ailes.

Wolff's story appears in The Hollywood Reporter

'But the lesson is, you probably don't want to be as right as I've been. That's not going to make you a lot of friends.'

Ailes' silence after his firing meanwhile was attributed to his payout according to Wolff, which was a 'slow-drip' so that the Murdochs 'were able to enforce his silence as they pursued their plan to erase his place in their corporate history.'

Ailes began working with Trump after stepping down as CEO of Fox News over the summer, but that was short lived and Ailes left just before the election.

Trump defended Ailes after multiple women came forward accusing him of sexual harassment at the time, saying: 'Hes such a great guy. Roger is, I mean, what hes done on television, is in the history of television, hes got to be placed in the top three, or four or five.

'And that includes the founding of the major networks. So, its too bad.'

Trump then added about the alleged harassment: 'Im sure it was friendly.'
Winston Churchill tried to conceal documents which revealed that the 'disloyal' Duke of Windsor supported the Nazis, newly-declassified files reveal.

Hitler had planned to install the former monarch as the puppet king in Britain if the Germans had won the war.

And files released by The National Archives at Kew, West London, now show Churchill feared these revelations could have brought down the House of Windsor.

Revealed: Churchill tried to conceal files which revealed the Duke of Windsor supported the Nazis. Hitler (right) had planned to install the former monarch (pictured centre, next to his wife the Duchess of Windsor) as the puppet king in Britain if the Germans had won the war

The wartime prime minister attempted to have the papers blocked for 20 years thinking that the truth would scandalise the nation with the suggestion that the Duke was colluding with the Nazis.

But American academics fought for the files to be published, which they were in 1957 after 12 years of delay by the British.

Conversations revealed that the Duke (pictured) was angered at being forced to abdicate the throne in 1936 so he could marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson

The intercepted telegrams highlighted the former King Edward VIII's Nazi leanings and his willingness to deal with the Hitler regime to win back the throne.

They documented the wartime activities of the Duke and his wife, the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, and the couple's links to the German dictator.

The latest declassified files now reveal Churchill's attempts to block the first set of documents.

The Duke and Mrs Simpson had been living in Paris, but after the fall of France in 1940, the couple moved briefly to Spain and Portugal.

While there, their unguarded comments were recorded by Nazi sympathisers, who sent the material to Berlin, where Hitler pored over them.

The conversations revealed that the Duke was angered at being forced to abdicate the throne in 1936 so he could marry Mrs Simpson.

He believed only the continued heavy bombing of British cities would bring the United Kingdom to the negotiating table.

Hitler and his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, became convinced that Edward was willing to be installed as the puppet king of Britain.

Officials had to quash claim jailed Hess was 'lookalike' The capture of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess after he parachuted into Scotland remains one of the strangest episodes of the Second World War. Hess flew to Britain in a secret attempt to broker a peace deal in May 1941 but had to bail out when his Messerschmitt plane ran low on fuel. He was captured and sentenced to life in Spandau prison in West Berlin in 1947. Newly-released files show Foreign Office officials were engaged in a behind-the-scenes bid to quash claims made by a former British Army surgeon that the man who was jailed was an imposter and lookalike. Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess (pictured) flew to Britain in a secret attempt to broker a peace deal in May 1941 but had to bail out when his Messerschmitt plane ran low on fuel By 1979 Dr Hugh Thomas, who had seen Hess in jail, claimed it could not be the old Nazi because he did not have scarring left by a bullet that was known to have penetrated Hess's lung during the First World War. A doctor accused the British government of a cover-up and alleged Hess's plane had been shot down on the orders of his rival, SS chief Heinrich Himmler (pictured) Dr Thomas accused the British government of a cover-up and alleged Hess's plane had been shot down on the orders of his rival, SS chief Heinrich Himmler. He claimed Himmler sent someone else on the mission instead. To stop the allegations being revived in future, officials quietly commissioned a series of reports. One used evidence from another British physician who said the man in prison had a scar that did correspond to Hess's war wound. The Foreign Office then published a response stating: 'On the basis of these studies, we have no doubt the prisoner in Spandau is Rudolf Hess.' In 1987 Hess, 93, was found dead in Spandau having apparently hanged himself. Advertisement

They contrived an elaborate plot  codenamed Operation Willi  to tempt the couple to Spain to wait for the Germans to invade the UK before putting the Duke back on the throne.

Within days of the Duke and Mrs Simpson's arrival in Madrid, German diplomats were working with their Spanish allies to try to convince the former king to remain in Spain.

The couple were offered a small fortune and a palace in Ronda in southern Spain to sit out the war.

Victory: Documents show Churchill (above) tried to delay the dossier's publication for up to 20 years in case they damaged the Duke's reputation and raised doubts about his loyalty

The Duke notified Churchill, who ordered that he be moved to neighbouring Portugal.

How Cambridge spy No5 beat the courts The fifth Cambridge spy was spared prosecution because his brother was the governments chief economic adviser, the files reveal. John Cairncross is believed to have passed atomic secrets to his Russian handlers during the Cold War. But officials feared they did not have enough evidence to prosecute and also that damaging headlines would embarrass his brother Alec. In a note to prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, cabinet secretary Burke Trend wrote: Apart from the distress and embarrassment this would inflict on an individual whose integrity we have no reason to question, we have to ask ourselves what would be the probable result if it became known the government were employing, as their chief economic adviser, a man who is the brother of a self-confessed Communist spy. John Cairncross was one of the notorious Cambridge spies recruited by Soviet intelligence while at university in the 1930s. He was the last of the group to be identified. The others were Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. Cairncross held a series of sensitive government posts, including working at the Bletchley Park codebreaking centre, and is thought to have been the first to alert the Soviets to Britains plans to develop an atomic bomb. Advertisement

According to German diplomats, the Duke was seen as 'the only Englishman with whom Hitler would negotiate any peace terms, the logical director of England's destiny after the war'.

Hitler ordered his spy chief, Walter Schellenberg, to travel to Lisbon to entice  or if necessary kidnap  the Windsors.

The Germans recorded their every word and noted their movements and gestures, the files reveal.

According to their notes, the Duke considered his younger brother, King George VI, 'utterly stupid', the Queen an intriguer and Churchill a warmonger.

The Nazis at one point even tried to convince the couple that Churchill would order their assassination in the Bahamas.

Hitler's plot came to nothing, but when he was shown the dossier after the war, Churchill immediately insisted that it should be destroyed as he feared it would damage the monarchy.

The documents just released show Churchill tried to delay the dossier's publication for up to 20 years in case they damaged the Duke's reputation and raised doubts about his loyalty.

In 1953 he even wrote to US President Dwight Eisenhower, appealing to his sense of 'justice and chivalry' to prohibit their release for another ten or 20 years.

'If they were to be included in an official publication they might leave the impression that the Duke was in close touch with German agents and was listening to suggestions that were disloyal,' he wrote.
The fifth Cambridge spy was spared prosecution because his brother was the Government's chief economic adviser, newly-declassified files reveal.

John Cairncross is believed to have passed atomic secrets to his Russian handlers during the Cold War, causing immense damage.

Files reveal that British officials decided not to pursue a prosecution against the Communist spy after he secretly confessed.

They feared they did not have enough evidence, but they also worried damaging headlines would embarrass his brother.

Revealed: John Cairncross is believed to have passed atomic secrets to his Russian handlers during the Cold War, causing immense damage. Files show that British officials decided not to pursue a prosecution against the Communist spy (pictured) after he secretly confessed

The Government's chief economic adviser at the time was Alec Cairncross who had never come under official suspicion.

Yet officials feared that his reputation would be damaged if revelations his brother was a spy became public.

In a note to prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, cabinet secretary Sir Burke Trend wrote: 'Quite apart from the distress and embarrassment which this would inflict on an individual whose integrity we have no reason to question, we have to ask ourselves what would be the probable result, in terms of public policy in the widest sense, if it became known that the government were employing, as their chief economic adviser, a man who is the brother of a self-confessed Communist spy.

'This is a harsh and crude way of putting it; but that is how, I fear, it could, and probably would, be represented.'

John Cairncross was one of the notorious Cambridge Spies recruited by Soviet intelligence while at university in the 1930s.

He was the last of his fellow spies to be identified. They included Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt.

Cairncross went on to hold a series of sensitive government posts and is thought to have been the first agent to alert the Soviets to Britain's programme to develop an atomic bomb.

The revelation prompted Stalin to launch his own nuclear programme, escalating the Cold War.

John Cairncross was the last of his fellow spies to be identified. They included Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean (pictured in the 1950s with his wife Melinda Marling and his two sons Ronald and Fergus)

Caincross began his civil service career in the Foreign Office, before moving to the Cabinet Office and then codebreaking headquarters Bletchley Park.

In 1951 he was forced to leave government service over suspicions that he had been spying and in 1964, made a partial confession to MI5.

The files contain correspondence on whether or not he could be extradited from the US where he was working as a professor.

Officials concluded that he could not be extradited and that there was no realistic prospect of prosecution.

Fear of embarrassment was also a factor and it was concluded he should be allowed to remain in the US, a prospect his host country was happy to accept.

The file is one of the first in a cache of previously-secret files known as the cabinet secretary's miscellaneous papers - or files that are 'too hot to handle'.

The papers document the most controversial episodes in British political life over the last 60 years, including spy scandals and the Profumo affair.

They include Sir Norman Brook's notes on the 1960s scandal when Conservative secretary of state for war John Profumo was forced to resign after it emerged he shared a mistress with a Russian naval attache.

As the rumours spread of Mr Profumo's affair with showgirl Christine Keeler, the papers record Sir Norman's alarm at the extent of the contacts within the Establishment of Stephen Ward, the 'society osteopath' and sketch artist who brought them together.

MI5 director general Sir Roger Hollis said Mr Ward seemed to be 'very much at home' at a party at the Russian embassy.

'He knew, or believed, that his patients included at least 40 people who were ministers or Members of Parliament,' Sir Norman noted. 'I agreed with Hollis that this information should be followed up.'
The capture of Hitler's deputy after he parachuted into Scotland during the Second World War remains one of the strangest episodes of the war.

The Nazi leader's right-hand man Rudolf Hess flew to Britain in a secret attempt to broker a peace deal in May 1941 but was forced to bail out of his plane.

He was captured and jailed as a prisoner of war and put on trial when the war ended, before being sentenced to life in Spandau prison in Germany in 1947.

Now newly-released files have revealed that officials were engaged in a behind-the-scenes battle against claims the man who was jailed was actually an imposter.

Newly-released files from west London's National Archives revealed officials were engaged in a behind-the-scenes battle against claims the man who was jailed was not Hess (pictured) but an imposter

By 1979 Hitler's deputy had been behind bars for almost four decades after flying to Britain in 1941 on a bizarre one-man peace mission to end the Second World War.

However a former British Army surgeon who examined him in Spandau Prison claimed the man was an imposter and accused the British government of a cover-up.

Dr Hugh Thomas said Hess's plane had been shot down on take-off from Germany on the orders of his rival, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, and that someone else was in the plane.

Although the theory did not gain traction, secret National Archives files show that Foreign Office officials fought to counter the claims.

'We are at present under no pressure to comment on the allegations and there is obviously a danger that any attempt by HMG to refute them will only focus attention on them and lead to a public debate between Dr Thomas and HMG,' they wrote.

'On the other hand, if no refutation is published, the allegations could conceivably be revived in future, perhaps after the death of Hess.'

Behind the scenes officials quietly commissioned a series of reports countering claims in the book.

Behind the scenes: Dr Hugh Thomas said Hess's plane had been shot down on take-off from Germany on the orders of his rival, SS chief Heinrich Himmler (pictured), and that someone else was in the plane. Although the theory did not gain traction, secret National Archives files show that Foreign Office officials fought to counter the claims

One was testimony from a British physician at Spandau who testified that the man in prison had scars that corresponded to wounds Hess was known to have suffered in the First World War.

Two further reports were prepared to prove his plane could not have made the long flight from Germany to Scotland.

The Foreign Office then published a response stating: 'On the basis of these studies, we have no doubt the prisoner in Spandau is Rudolf Hess.'

Britain and its Western allies pressed for his release on humanitarian grounds from the 1950s onwards, but the Russians refused.

In 1987, the 93-year-old Hess was finally found hanging at the prison. The official verdict of suicide was rejected by Hess's son, who claimed he was murdered.
British holidaymakers were injured evacuating a Thomas Cook plane in Egypt after smoke started coming from under a passenger's seat.

Flight MT519, which was due to take off from the Red Sea resort town of Hurghada to London Gatwick at 1.40am local time, was evacuated shortly before takeoff.

Thomas Cook said all 251 passengers and nine crew made it off the plane in what it called a 'controlled evacuation', though several travellers disagreed.

Thomas Cook Flight MT519 from Hurghada, Egypt, to London Gatwick was evacuated shortly before its scheduled departure time of 1.40am last night (pictured, plane sits on the runway with emergency slides deployed)

Passengers took to Twitter to broadcast the evacuation - complaining of several people being injured and blasting Thomas Cook for providing little information.

One user, Wendy Derek, wrote: 'This was not a controlled evacuation, it was an emergency one with people getting injured.

'They then left people standing by the plane.'

Claire McIlroy added: 'Sister's family stuck, brother-in-law injured during evacuation! More information on twitter than your rep is telling them!'

Airport sources said panic spread through the aircraft after smoke started coming from underneath a passenger's seat prior to takeoff.

That prompted the crew to order an emergency evacuation of the plane, causing a stampede for the exits.

A number of injuries were caused in the crush, with one passenger reportedly receiving a fracture, and others minor injuries, mainly bruises.

The cause of the smoke was identified to be a technical malfunction, the aircraft was examined and returned to service.

Passengers were injured in a scramble to get off the jet after smoke started coming from beneath on person's seat, airport sources said

However, the airline decided to dispatch a replacement aircraft from Frankfurt, rather than get passengers back on board the previous jet.

The flight was delayed until 6pm on Thursday while passengers waited for the plane to arrive.

A Thomas Cook spokesman said: 'Flight MT519 to London Gatwick carried out a controlled evacuation before take-off at Hurghada airport after the crew reported a smell of burning and smoke at the rear of the cabin.

'All 251 passengers and 9 crew members evacuated the aircraft using the emergency slides and were transported back to the terminal building.

'Our customers safety is always our top priority and we are very sorry for the delay.'

The scare comes almost exactly a week after a knifeman launched a fatal attack on bathers at a hotel in Hurghada in what is believed to have been a terrorist attack.

Abdel Rahman Shaban Abokorah, 28, swam from a neighbouring beach to Hurghada and spoke to his German victims in their native language before attacking them.

Four others, believed to have been from eastern Europe, were injured.

Thomas Cook said the smoke on board the plane was caused by a mechanical issue, and was not terror-related.
A woman accused of throwing her newborn baby in a trash bag was ordered to leave the U.S. last year, according to an immigration official.

Estela Ruiz-Gomez, 19, complained of a stomachache and gave birth while she was working at the restaurant La Parilla in Greenville, South Carolina, on July 12.

Shortly after she emerged from the bathroom with her mother Lorenza Gomez Rodriguez, 41, who also works at the restaurant, a co-worker took out the trash and found a newborn baby had fallen out when the bag ripped, police said.

After the baby suffered a cardiac arrest and died in the hospital, Ruiz-Gomez was charged with homicide by child abuse, while her mother was charged with aiding and abetting homicide by child abuse.

Estela Ruiz-Gomez (left), who gave birth in a restaurant bathroom where she worked, is accused of throwing the baby in a trash bag. Her mother Lorenza Gomez Rodriguez (right), is charged with aiding and abetting

Both Ruiz-Gomez and her mother are still being held in Greenville without bond.

Bryan Cox, a spokesperson for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, confirmed to Dailymail.com that Ruiz-Gomez been ordered to leave the country in 2016.

A detainer has also been issued for her arrest, although he said it 'in no way impedes criminal prosecution', since it takes effect once the individual is released from custody.

He could not comment on her immigration status given Ruiz-Gomez is not in the custody of ICE, and Greenville Police spokesman Johnathan Bragg said he didn't know where she was from or how long she had been in the U.S.

Shortly after, an employee at La Parilla (general view) taking out the trash dragged it across the parking lot before it ripped and a newborn baby fell out, police said

Ruiz-Gomez complained of a stomachache while she was bussing tables at La Parilla on July 12, and her mother checked on her before emerging from the bathroom, saying the 19-year-old needed to go to the hospital.

Shortly after, an employee taking out the trash noticed the bag was heavier than usual and dragged it across the parking lot, according to Bragg.

As a result, the bag ripped and the newborn baby fell out, Bragg said.

'Estela's boyfriend (the baby's father), who was present when the baby fell out of the trash bag, retrieved the baby from the ground and took him back inside the restaurant. It was at this point that EMS was called to the scene,' according to a statement issued by the police.

The baby, who still had a heartbeat when emergency responders arrived, died in the hospital.

The medical examiner performed an autopsy on July 13 and could find no medical reason why the child died after birth, although the death was ruled a homicide by the Greenville County Coroner.

The arrest warrant states that Ruiz-Gomez 'failed to provide adequate and sufficient medical attention to the child at the time, putting the child at unreasonable risk of harm, affecting the child's life, physical or mental health and safety.'
Things suddenly turned sour for one Canadian family who were enjoying some time away with one another this weekend after they found a catheter inside a tub of ice cream.

Three people were already licking away at the delicious chocolate and caramel Coaticook ice cream when one of the guests felt something hard in his mouth.

After spitting it out, it became clear the unwanted ingredient was in fact part of a catheter that had somehow made its way inside the container.

The family tell CBC that there was something dark on the tip and in a particularly stomach-churning moment, the family could not tell if it was caramel or blood.

A family found a catheter inside their tub of ice cream. They say they were unable to determine whether a dark spot was caramel or blood

Ice cream company Coaticook said it will conduct an internal investigation into what happened and stresses that this is the first time they have received such a complaint

'He put it in his mouth and found the tip of syringe,' Carole-Anne Christofferson told Radio-Canada as she told of the moment the grandfather of the family made the gruesome discovery.

'He's the worst off, the most affected. He's not even able to speak about it.'

The ice cream had been bought at a grocery store in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec.

The family had to go to a hospital for HIV tests as well as for Hepatitis A, B and C. They will also need blood tests for the next six months.

Christofferson has complained to the ice cream maker and is considering taking legal action.

The ice cream company Coaticook has said it will be conducting an internal investigation into what happened and stresses that this is the first time they have received such a complaint.

'We have so many internal controls here and in food production in general that having something like that show up in a food item, it's not normal,' said Jean Provencher, the owner of Coaticook.

Inspectors from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency are now looking into how the slip-up happened at the factory itself.
A street fight involving two men - one armed with a trash can and the other with a machete - was caught on camera in New York City on Wednesday morning.

The brawl broke out near Broadway and West 94th Street on the Upper West Side at 6.50am.

It began when a driver, later named by police as 40-year-old Louis Roman, allegedly shouted at the pedestrian for not paying attention as he crossed the road.

The pedestrian - who has not been named - told them Roman threatened him by flashing a gun clip at the window.

The pedestrian, dressed in red, retaliated by throwing a trash can at the man's car, prompting him to pull over.

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This is the moment a driver and wielding a machete and a pedestrian holding a trash can fought in the street in New York City during the morning rush hour

Both the driver and the woman in the passenger seat, who appeared to be dressed for work, hopped out of the car.

Roman then grabbed a machete out of the trunk of the vehicle. This is when witness Paul Tena, who was on his way home from the gym, started filming.

'The guy in the white shirt already had blood on him when I started filming,' Tena, an office worker who lives nearby, told DailyMail.com on Wednesday night.

He described how the man and woman were about to drive away when the pedestrian threw another trash can at the vehicle.

The men stopped traffic on Broadway as one dragged a second trash can from across the street after throwing a first can at the car. The driver is seen trying to pick up his machete after dropping it on the sidewalk. The female passenger in the car also got out as the fight unfolded

The driver hurled his machete down towards the man and struck the trash can. The weapon fel out of his hands as he did so and bounced on to the road, shattering in to two

Without his weapon, the driver retreated to the car as the pedestrian held the trash can up

He and his female passenger attempted to get in to drive away but the pedestrian continued shouting

The pedestrian then opened the passenger door, where the woman was sitting, prompting the driver to run around again to fight

'Then the guy got out again and pulled out a machete, because everyone has one of those in the back of their car!' Tena said.

The men danced around the vehicle, lunging at one another until the machete dropped on the ground and broke into two pieces.

When the driver got back in to the car to drive away, the pedestrian opened the passenger side door where a woman was sitting, reigniting the fight.

Both the driver and the passenger got back in to the car again but the pedestrian walked round to the other side to coax the man back out

The two men then began fist fighting in the middle of the busy street as onlookers filmed

The fight played out in the middle of Broadway minutes before 7am

He later tried to get in to the driver's side. They result was a fist fight in the middle of Broadway.

Eventually, the driver hopped back in to his car and drove off around the corner but stopped as police arrived at the scene.

He was arrested for assault, criminal mischief, menacing and criminal possession of a weapon. The pedestrian walked away a free man.
Travis L. Tingler, 32, was arrested in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, on Sunday evening for allegedly standing in the street with no clothes on and threatening people

This is the moment a naked man suffered minor burns after a taser hit his cigarette lighter during a struggle with police.

Travis L. Tingler, 32, was arrested in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, on Sunday evening for allegedly standing in the street with no clothes on and threatening people.

Cops found him on the 1100 block of South 25th Street near Hamilton Street, where he was reportedly threatening to kill the occupants of a house with a knife.

But when questioned by police, Tingler told police he had done nothing wrong, USA Today reported.

Police later found a pocket knife and the man's pants on the porch of a nearby home where a woman he was dating was living.

There, a girl told police that Tingler had started drinking three hours earlier and had been making strange comments.

He then smashed a glass on the street and removed his clothes, she said.

'I told him he couldn't be out in the middle of the street with no clothes on,' an officer at the Manitowoc Police Department wrote in a report, according to the website. 'I asked him about his condition. I noticed he had a dazed appearance, blank stare and he sweated profusely.'

When officers tried to escort him into a police car, he resisted, and was tasered. During the struggle, Tingler is thought to have picked up a lighter.

This is the moment a naked man suffered minor burns after a taser hit his cigarette lighter during a struggle with police

When officers tried to escort him into a police car, he resisted, and was tasered (pictured)

During the struggle, Tingler is thought to have picked up a lighter. When the stun gun hit the lighter it exploded, causing a small burns

When the stun gun hit the lighter it exploded, causing a small burns.

'The second Taser hit him in the hand that was holding the lighter,' said Manitowoc assistant police chief Scott Luchterhand.

But Tingler continued to struggle with police, punching one officer in the face.

Police used a stun gun again to subdue him, causing him to fall to the ground and hit his head.

Officers were eventually able to get pants on him and took him to hospital where he tested positive for marijuana and was found to have a blood alcohol level of 0.177.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein suggested former FBI Director James Comey was wrong in leaking his memos, through a friend, to the press.

Rosenstein sat down with Fox News Channel's Martha MacCallum for an exclusive interview and tsk-tsked Comey using legal speak.

'We take confidentiality seriously, so when we have memoranda about our ongoing matters, we have an obligation to keep that confidential,' Rosenstein said.

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Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein sat down with Fox News Channel's Martha MacCallum for an exclusive interview

Martha MacCallum asked Rod Rosenstein if it would ever be 'proper' for a government official to leak memos of conversations they had with the president to the press

MacCallum had asked Rosenstein if leaking notes about conversations with the president would ever be 'proper.'

'So, I would take that you would not approve of any releasing of memorandum written in an interviewer discussion with the president to the press?' she asked.

Rosenstein said the answer to this question was 'quite clear.'

'It's what we were taught, all of us as prosecutors and agents,' he added.

In the days following his firing, Comey handed over memos he made about his conversations with President Trump to a Columbia University law university friend, who then passed them along to reporters.

Comey wanted his side of the story to air out publicly, he later said during congressional testimony, in part to get a special counsel selected.

'My judgment was that I needed to get that into the public square,' he said, adding, 'because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.

Rod Rosenstein admonished former FBI Director James Comey, who gave memos he wrote about concerning conversations he had with President Trump to a friend, who passed them to the press

The ex-FBI chief told lawmakers that he feared President Trump was trying to meddle with the agency's probe into Russia's role in the 2016 presidential election, as investigators sniffed around the Trump campaign to see if there were any hints of collusion.

'There's no doubt ... that I was fired because of the Russia investigation,' Comey said during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June.

Comey's revelations indeed prompted Rosenstein to tap former FBI Director Robert Mueller to serve as a special counsel, taking over the FBI's Russia investigation.

MacCullum asked if it was problematic that Mueller and Comey are close.

'I've got to explain that I made the decision to appoint Director Mueller based upon his reputation. He had an excellent reputation. Really bipartisan support for his integrity,' Rosenstein answered. 'That's why I made that decision.'

Rosenstein also assured the Fox News host that the Department of Justice would take care of it if any conflicts of interest arose.

MacCullum then asked if Rosenstein was concerned about some of Mueller's hires being supporters of Democrat Hillary Clinton, the president's political foe.

'The Department of Justice, we judge by results and so my view about that is, we'll see if they do the right thing,' Rosenstein answered.
Tony and Cherie Blair are adding a 5million London office to their property empire.

They have taken out a mortgage with the Queens bank Coutts to buy the four-storey Victorian building.

It is their first commercial property, having purchased 38 homes since leaving Downing Street ten years ago.

Mrs Blair will use the office with staff from her organisations including Omnia Strategy and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women.

Tony and Cherie Blair (right) have taken out a mortgage with the Queens bank Coutts to buy the four-storey Victorian building (left)

A spokesman said: Cherie Blairs current offices are being re-developed so they have been forced to seek new office space.

'The most cost-effective way over the long term was to buy this building. There will be no other tenants.

The former prime minister, 64, and his wife have applied for planning permission to fit glass partitions and make other improvements to the 4,492 sq ft suite of offices.

The Blairs are doing the work via their new company, Harcourt Ventures Ltd, set up in March to engage in letting and operating properties, according to Companies House records.

The block of 14 apartments in Stockport, Greater Manchester, on the site of a former scrapyard owned by the Blairs

The former Prime Minister's family bought three 75,000 one-beds in Stockport, Greater Manchester. They are now worth a combined 250,000

This cute terrace in one of west London's most expensive cul-de-sacs was bought by Cherie Blair

The couple are joint owners of the firm, which lodged three mortgage applications this month with Coutts  one for the office, and the other two relating to unspecified stocks, shares and bonds.

The buildings previous owner, a company based in the British Virgin Islands, bought it in May 2015 for 4.1million.

The Blair family already owns 38 homes worth an estimated 33million  meaning the total value of their property portfolio is now about 38million.

They have a series of flats in the North West which Mrs Blair, 62, and eldest son Euan, 33, are renting out via their existing company, Oldbury Residential Ltd.

Companies House documents show Oldbury held property investments worth 2.4million in the year ending April 2016.

Since early disastrous attempts to play the property market, the Blairs have banked at least 1.7million in profits from nine properties bought and sold.

The combined rise in value in the 38 homes they currently own is about 14million.
President Trump's son and son-in-law will get grilled in public and private by Senate investigators next week about their explosive meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer at Trump Tower.

Son-in-law Jared Kushner is appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is probing Russia contacts with the Trump campaign, on Monday, his attorney confirmed.

'As Mr. Kushner has been saying since March, he has been and is prepared to voluntarily cooperate and provide whatever information he has on the investigations to Congress,' Kushner Lawyer Abbe Lowell said in a statement.

Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner is set to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed session

He said Kushner would appear July 24, and 'appreciates the opportunity to assist in putting this matter to rest.' The session is set to be held in a closed fashion for Kushner, whose presence in White House photos is constant but who rarely speaks in public.

However Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is invited to appear in public at a Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday.

So is Paul Manafort, who chaired Trump's campaign for several months. The trio were all present at the meeting, which included Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

It got set up after a music publicist Robert Goldstone came to Trump Jr. with an offer of incriminating information on Hillary Clinton.

Senate Judiciary Committee chair Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said Wednesday morning that he wants Don Jr. and Manafort to testify before his panel before the upcoming August recess.

Donald Trump Jr met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya last June, after being promised by an intermediary dirt on Hillary Clinton

The Senate Judiciary Committee listed former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort as a witness for Wednesday

Grassley said he 'didn't get any pushback' from Trump Jr'.s lawyer when he first suggested testimony as early as this week, but then called an early date 'kind of rushy.' Hours later, the hearing got announced.

The letters inviting Trump Jr. and Manafort to testify only went out on Wednesday, raising the possibility their appearance might not happen.

According to Politico, the requests also included 'a broad request for documents from players such as recent Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.'

They will speak at a hearing titled 'Oversight of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and Attempts to Influence U.S. Elections: Lessons Learned from Current and Prior Administrations.'

The hearings are certain to provoke yet another all-Russia frenzy on Capitol Hill. The hearings, if they happen, would put two of the president's family members and close advisors under oath describing Russia contacts that were not initially disclosed.

Trump Jr. has said he got nothing useful out of the June Trump Tower meeting, but acknowledged he would do things differently.

President Trump has publicly defended his son, saying others would take the meeting and brushing it off with a tweet: 'That's politics!'

YOU'RE INVITED! A Senate Judiciary notice lists Donald Trump Jr. and Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort as witnesses for a Wednesday hearing

Trump Jr. has been under fire for attending a June 2016 meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin linked lawyer after being promised information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton.

Also attending were Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, and Ike Kaveladze, a vice president in a real estate firm owned by Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.

Manafort and Trump son-in-law Kushner also attended the meeting, as did music publicist Robert Goldstone, who set it up with an email appeal to Don Jr. offering incriminating material about Hillary Clinton.

Kushner didn't disclose the contacts on a federal form used to get his security clearance, something some Democrats want revoked.

Even with out the star witnesses, the Judiciary session was already expected to bring Russia intrigue, with testimony by Glenn Simpson of political intelligence firm Fusion GPS, which reportedly subcontracted the partially discredited 'dirty dossier' of material on Donald Trump.

Fusion GPS was reportedly hired by a Republican opponent to dig up dirt on Donald Trump during the primaries. It later did work on behalf of Democratic funding sources, subcontracting to retired British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who produced the infamous dossier.

Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, the shadowy firm behind the dirty dossier of unverified information about Donald Trump, is listed as a witness for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing next week

Also listed is William Browder of Hermitage Capital, who says has battled efforts to oppose the Magnitsky Act, and who knows the Russian lawyer who got a meeting with Donald Trump Jr.

'MASS HYSTERIA': In this July 11, 2017, photo, Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks to journalists in Moscow, Russia. The Russian lawyer at the center of the June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr. is known for her work trying to roll back U.S. sanctions on Russia. She told Russian state media she wants to testify in the Senate

The dossier contained salacious and unproven material about Trump, including a discredited claim that he was involved with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. It also contained detailed unverified claims of Russian efforts to gain compromising information about him.

Also scheduled to appear is William Browder of Hermitage Capital Management. He knows the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, and has fought to expose people who lobbied against the sanctions in the Magnitsky Act without proper disclosure.

Browder's firm filed a 2016 complaint with the Justice Department charging that Simpson lobbied against the Magnitsky Act without registering as a lobbyist.

A portion of the unverified dirty dossier compiled by a retired British intelligence officer

The complaint also signals out Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya as having lobbied against the Magnitsky Act on behalf of her client, Prevezon, which is owned by Denis Katsyv.

The Republican senator overseeing a probe of Trump campaign Russia contacts is steering clear of the White House as the investigation heats up.

North Carolina GOP Sen. Richard Burr avoided a White House meeting meant to try to revive a failed health care bill that drew 49 of 52 GOP senators Wednesday.

Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr said he is steering clear of the White House as the investigation into Trump campaign Russia contacts heats up

His objection wasn't ideological, but was rooted in his investigatory role.

'I'll make it a habit while this investigation is going on that I don't go down [to the White House],' Burr said, the Hill newspaper reported.

In doing so, Burr hopes to avoid the fate of GOP Rep. Devin Nunues, who had to step back from his chamber's Russia probe after his own trips to the White House drew scrutiny.

Burr has himself been accused of being too close to the White House during the investigation, including during the publicly slow pace of the early days of the inquiry. He has worked closely with panel vice chair Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia.

Burr indicated Tuesday he is interested in getting to the bottom of a June 2016 meeting involving the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., a Kremlin-linked lawyer, and other figures.

'Any intelligence out there that suggests somebody is of interest to us, we have to pursue it. ... You've now got an email chain that makes this a very important aspect to get into,' he said, referencing the emails Trump Jr. posted that showed him accepting a meeting when potentially incriminating information on Hillary Clinton was offered.

POWER LUNCH: President Donald Trump delivers remarks on health care and Republicans' inability thus far to replace or repeal the Affordable Care Act, during a lunch with members of Congress in the State Dining Room of the White House on July 19, 2017 in Washington, DC. Burr was one of the few senators to miss the luncheon

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, Burr's counterpart, said the Intelligence panel's witness list was 'still being worked out' and raised the issue of having Trump Jr. and campaign chair Paul Manafort testify there.

The Kremlin-linked lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, told Russian state media Wednesday: 'I am ready to clarify the situation behind the mass hysteria, but only through lawyers or testifying in the Senate.' But she was not listed on any witness list Wednesday evening.
Under Sajid Javids plans, authorities would be told to take the affordability of local homes into account when deciding how many new houses are needed in their area

A drive to bring down property prices in wealthy areas could see councils forced to approve the building of thousands of new homes.

The Communities Secretary is understood to want local authorities to face tough new building targets if prices in their areas are too high.

Under Sajid Javids plans, they would be told to take the affordability of local homes into account when deciding how many new houses are needed in their area.

Every authority would have to calculate how easy it is for young people to get on the housing ladder by working out the local salary-to-house-price ratio.

Those with a ratio deemed too high would then be told to build thousands more homes. Mr Javid hopes that market forces would then see the greater supply of homes bringing down prices.

The average property price in Britain is now 212,000, which is 7.8 times the typical salary.

In some areas of the South East, the ratio is more than 12 times average wages.

The plan  which was not denied yesterday by Downing Street  could be controversial among Conservative backbenchers.

It risks a backlash in solid Tory areas as owners panic about their own homes losing value.

But a senior source called it a transparent test to increase supply. The insider told The Sun: For once, councils wont be able to fudge it  and that is key.

Ministers are said to want up to 300,000 homes a year to be built to keep up with soaring population levels and Mr Javid has blasted councils for not doing enough.

Three weeks ago, he branded the refusal by councils to increase building targets as not good enough and declared that the era of tolerating such poor, patchy performance is over.

Mr Javid has warned colleagues that if wealthy areas refuse to build extra homes, they will drive more young voters who cannot afford to buy into the arms of Jeremy Corbyn (pictured)

The Minister has warned colleagues that if wealthy areas  such as Theresa Mays constituency of Maidenhead in Berkshire  refuse to build extra homes, they will drive more young voters who cannot afford to buy into the arms of Jeremy Corbyn.

Government officials said at the weekend that Mr Javid will target councils accused of lying about the scale of housing needs in their area in a bid to avoid having to build new homes.

One official told The Mail on Sunday: From now on, these council leaders, who include many Conservatives who should know better, are going to have to start telling the truth.

We are not prepared for them to lie about the housing crisis to protect Nimbys [Not In My Backyard] who have had too much sway for too long.

They are going to have to adjust to the idea that everyone has a right to a roof over their head in this green and pleasant land, not just a privileged few.

Owning your own home is a fundamental part of being a Conservative. If a whole generation of young people cannot afford to do that, we cant complain if they vote Labour.

Last night a spokesman for No 10 said: We are committed to fixing the dysfunctional housing market and have acknowledged the need to build more decent affordable housing.

Steps to fix it include making more land available and helping local areas plan for the right homes in the right places.

We will launch a consultation soon seeking the views of local authorities on that.
Tony Abbott has labelled Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's counter terror overhaul a 'massive bureaucratic change', claiming he was advised against such a move when in office.

A bitter Mr Abbott has continued his attacks on the prime minister, challenging him to reveal what advice he was given to support Australia's new 'super agency'.

Under the plan, set to come into force from next year, the Australian Federal Police, Australian Border Force and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation will merge.

But Mr Abbott has questioned the move to incorporate aspects of security measures from the UK and US into Australia, telling Sydney radio station 2GB he was advised a similar move wasn't needed when he was prime minister.

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Tony Abbott (pictured) has labelled Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's counter terror overhaul a 'massive bureaucratic change', claiming he was advised against such a move when in office

Under Mr Turnbull's (pictured) plan, to come into force from next year, the Australian Federal Police, Australian Border Force and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation will merge

'The advice back then was that we didn't need the kind of massive bureaucratic change which it seems the prime minister has in mind,' Mr Abbott said.

'I can only assume the advice has changed.'

Mr Abbott instead appointed Greg Moriarty as commonwealth counter-terrorism coordinator within the prime minister's department.

Mr Moriarty has since been appointed chief of staff to Mr Turnbull.

The new home affairs portfolio will be headed by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, a fierce supporter of Abbott when he was in office.

Mr Turnbull, who has described the move as the biggest change in national security in 40 years, defended his move on The Project on Wednesday night.

He admitted it was an idea considered by several prime ministers but not proceeded with because of what he called 'bureaucratic inertia'.

But Mr Abbott has questioned the move to incorporate aspects of security measures from the UK and US, saying he was advised a similar move wasn't needed when he was prime minister

Mr Turnbull (pictured), who has described the move as the biggest change in national security in 40 years, has defended his move: 'My approach every day... is to try to do my job better.'

'You can say, "Oh, well, if it ain't broke don't fix it" - that's laziness and complacency,' the prime minister said.

'You can wait until there is a disaster or a crisis and that wakes you up and prompts you into action.

'My approach every day of my life is to try to do my job better.'

Mr Dutton has also doubled down in his defence of the plan, insisting it was the best way to deal with the increasing terror threat.

'I think we can improve. I'm not going to wait for a terrorist incident to take place,' he told Sky News.
COLUMBUS  A 36-year-old Columbus man accused of felony child abuse for allegedly beating his 15-year-old son during a dispute was released on bond Monday after spending two nights in the county jail.

Zachary Gray posted a $10,000 personal recognizance bond Monday morning, shortly after a brief Platte County Court bond hearing appearance via video link from the Platte County Detention Facility.

Judge Frank Skorupa scheduled Gray, a divorced father of two sons, for an Aug. 3 felony status hearing in connection with the June 19 incident at a Columbus residence.

The judge ordered Gray to have no contact with the juvenile victim.

The child abuse charge is a Class 3A felony, punishable by up to three years in prison, 18 months of post-release supervision and a $10,000 fine.

According to court documents, a Columbus Police investigation got underway with a report of an assault of the teen at a residence in north-central Columbus.

The juvenile reported the assault began with the teens refusal to help Gray move out of his girlfriends residence, Investigator Gregory Sealock wrote in his probable cause arrest statement.

The teen stated that during the assault his father tackled him twice, dragged him across the floor of the home, choked him across the front of his neck with his forearm and punched him several times in the stomach and once in the head, the investigator wrote.

The boy resides with his biological mother.

Sealock reported he made numerous attempts to contact Gray from the time of the June 19 assault report. Gray did not follow through with a scheduled interview and his phone service was disconnected before his arrest Saturday morning in Columbus on an outstanding warrant, Sealock wrote.

Skorupa told Gray the abuse charge could affect his status on adult diversion stemming from a February case in which he was charged with leaving the scene of an accident, careless driving and no operators license. The judge scheduled Gray for an Aug. 1 diversion status hearing on that case.
Nearly three out of four voters want Republicans in Congress to embrace an unlikely solution to the health care crisis if they can't agree with the White House on a fix for the Obamacare crisis: Sit down with Democrats.

That's the course favored by 74 per cent of the voters surveyed for a new Fox News poll.

Just 22 per cent said that if GOP lawmakers can't make a deal with President Donald Trump, they should scrap their plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, and go back to the drawing board.

The poll, which sampled opinions from Sunday to Tuesday, found support slipping for the replacement package Senate Republicans offered last week as a substitute for the Affordable Care Act.

President Donald Trump (left) and Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell (right), are battling over an Obamacare repeal, and most voters want McConnell to ask Democrats for help if his members can't strike a deal with the White House

If there's an impasse among Republicans, 74 per cent of voters surveyed for a Fox News poll said they wanted a bipartisan attempt next instead of a back-to-the-drawing-board approach

Only 25 percent said they favor the latest draft  which was shelved last week amid a raft of defections inside the Republican Party. Fifty-five percent gave it a thumbs-down.

The bill the House of Representatives passed in May by a narrow margin had attracted 40 per cent support.

Even Republican voters aren't overwhelmingly behind Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: Just 52 percent of them back his latest proposal.

Overall, the nation has become more comfortable with the expenses and restrictions related to the Obamacare system, with a majority now believing that it should be fixed, not junked.

Only 33 per cent agreed that Congress 'should throw it out and start over,' compared with 60 per cent who said they 'should keep it and make it better.'

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (left) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (right) would presumably love to be involved in creating Trumpcare, so they could salvage as much of Obamacare as possible

Only one-quarter of voters told Fox's pollsters that they like the current repeal-and-replace plan being considered in the Senate

Another 4 per cent said 'we should leave it alone.'

Trump has adopted a sense of urgency about fulfilling his campaign pledge to see Obamacare repealed and replaced.

'I'm ready to act. People are hurting,' he told GOp senators Wednesday at the White House.

'Inaction is not an option, and frankly I dont think we should leave town unless we have a health insurance plan, unless we can give people great health care.'

Citing cost spirals and the number of insurers who have exited marketplaces in more than 1,300 U.S. counties, he declared: 'We have no choice. We have to repeal and replace Obamacare.'

But a large majority of Americans appear willing to see Uncle Sam ponying up to guarantee insurance coverage for more people.

Sixty-three percent told Fox's pollsters that they wanted Congress to change the medical insurance system 'so that more people would have health insurance, even if it costs the government more money.'

Republicans can expect to be widely blamed if their obituaries for Obamacare prove to be premature and chaos ensues

Only 27 per cent preferred making changes 'to reduce government spending, even if it means fewer people would have health insurance.'

The Congressional Budget Office said late Wednesday that the Senate's latest Obamacare replacement bill would result in 32 million fewer Americans having medical insurance by the year 2026.

It's unclear how many millions of those people would be uninsured by choice, following the end of the 'individual mandate' that requires adults to buy insurance or pay a fine.

But it is clear that Americans expect to see Obamacare's demise  and that Republicans will catch most of the criticism if they fall short.

If the Affordable Care Act remains the law of the land, according to 47 per cent, GOPers in Congress would deserve 'all' or 'most' of the blame.

Two-thirds of voters who said they oppose the Senate bill did so because it 'gets rid of Obamacare'  the same percentage of repeal supporters who cited that reason.
Beavers can help restore wetlands and boost biodiversity, new research has found.

Researchers looks at the effects a small group of beavers had on a wetland originally drained for farming.

Over a period of 12 years local plant richness rose by 46% and the total number of different plants recorded more than doubled.

Species which normally grow in areas with high nitrogen levels decreased, indicating a return to more natural soil conditions.

Professor Nigel Willby, of Stirling University, which conducted the study, said: 'Wetlands are tremendously important environments for biodiversity. They also serve to store water and improve its quality - they are the "kidneys of the landscape".

'However, the world's wetlands are disappearing at an alarming rate. The latest estimates suggest that almost two-thirds have been lost since 1900.

'Beavers are renowned for their engineering skills, like dam building, and are now being considered as tools for restoring wetlands.

Researchers looks at the effects a small group of beavers had on a wetland originally drained for farming. Over a period of 12 years local plant richness rose by 46% and the total number of different plants recorded more than doubled (stock photo)

'They have been reintroduced widely, including in Scotland, partly for this purpose and our findings demonstrate the surprisingly large benefits they can bring to biodiversity.'

The study, partly-funded by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) and published in the international journal Science of the Total Environment, is said to be the first to fully measure these environmental benefits over time.

Between 2003 and 2015, the beavers constructed 195 metres of dams, 500 metres of canals and an acre of ponds, surrounded by a mosaic of vegetation which increased in complexity by 71%.

Four hundred years after being hunted to extinction in the UK, beavers were readmitted to Scotland last year, based on experience from trial re-introductions.

Stirling co-author Dr. Alan Law said: 'We know lots about the benefits of beavers in natural settings but until now we did not know the full extent of what they can achieve in present-day landscapes where restoration is most needed.

'Wetland restoration normally involves raising water levels, for example by ditch blocking, plus mowing or grazing to maintain diversity.

'Beavers offer an innovative, more hands-off, solution to the problem of wetland loss - provided their populations are suitably managed and protected.

'Seeing what beavers can do for our wetlands and countryside highlights the diverse landscape we have been missing for the last 400 years.'

SNH will use the findings of the study to inform discussions about how the animal can be integrated within the Scottish countryside.

The report states: 'Our study illustrates that a well-known ecosystem engineer, the beaver, can with time transform agricultural land into a comparatively species-rich and heterogeneous wetland environment, thus meeting common restoration objectives.'

There is also a colony of beavers on the River Otter in Devon in south west England.

The latest findings follows the team's earlier research which demonstrated how beaver dams can stabilise water flows, reducing downstream flood risk and water pollution.
The whereabouts of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 remains one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries.

The plane vanished en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board in March 2014

Now, detailed sea-floor maps made during the search for the missing plane are revealing new details about rich fisheries and the prehistoric movement of the Earth's southern continents.

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An undated supplied image from Geoscience Australia shows a computer generated three-dimensional view of the sea floor obtained from mapping data collected during the first phase of the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370

THE MH370 FLIGHT The Boeing 777, believed to be carrying 239 passengers and crew, vanished three years ago. It was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing The flight departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 00:41 on 8 March 2014 (16:41 GMT, 7 March) and was due to arrive in Beijing at 06:30 (22:30 GMT). According to Malaysia Airlines the plane lost contact one hour after take-off. It did not send any distress signals beforehand. The last words spoken by the pilot or co-pilot were 'Good night Malaysian three seven zero'. Just minutes later the plane's transponder was shut down. The whereabouts of the plane remains one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries. Advertisement

The Indian Ocean search ended in January after covering a lonely stretch of open water where under-sea mountains larger than Mount Everest rise and a rift valley dotted with subsea volcanoes runs hundreds of miles long.

However, information gathered during painstaking surveys of some 120,000 sq km (46,000 sq miles) of the remote waters west of Australia should provide fishermen, oceanographers and geologists insight into the region in unprecedented detail, said Charitha Pattiaratchi, professor of coastal oceanography at the University of Western Australia.

'There are the locations of seamounts which will attract a lot of international deep sea fishermen to the area,' Dr Pattiaratchi told Reuters by phone.

High-priced fish such as tuna, toothfish, orange roughy, alfonsino and trevally are known to gather near the seamounts, where plankton swirl in the currents in the inhospitable waters.

The search was completed in two phases.

The first was the bathymetric survey which involved making a detailed map of the sea floor topography.

By measuring the strength of the sonar researchers could distinguish between hard and soft sediment.

They could also identify anomalies on the sea floor that needed to be looked at in more detail.

Phase two was an underwater sea floor search using sonar equipment mounted on underwater vehicles to collect high-quality sonar images.

The search was carried out in a remote part of the Indian Ocean around 2000km (1242miles) from Perth. Boats took six days to reach the search area.

Information gathered during painstaking surveys of some 120,000 sq km (46,000 sq miles) of the remote waters west of Australia should provide fishermen, oceanographers and geologists insight into the region in unprecedented detail

The data indicated the aircraft crashed somewhere along a narrow arc (pictured) in the Indian Ocean. The search was carried out in a remote part of the Indian Ocean around 2000km (1242 miles) from Perth. Boats took six days to reach the search area

WHAT DID THEY FIND? One of the major new features is the Broken Ridge which is 1200 km (745 miles) long and was created more than 40 million years ago. This is the oldest sea floor in the search area. It has 300 metres (984 feet) of sediment on top of it and has extensive sea floor landslides - some of which can go on for several kilometres. The Gulden Draak Seamount and the Batavai Seamount are found in this search area. The sea floor of the Diamantina Escarpment is the youngest geologically and was formed by 'sea floor spreading'. It is home to complex geological features including ridges, volcanoes and valleys. The Geelvinck Fracture Zone was formed by similar tectonic motions to the Broken Ridge. It is 900 metres (2900 feet) deep and 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) wide. Investigations also found a number of shipwrecks in the area. Advertisement

It was one of the largest marine surveys ever conducted, according to the Australian government and provided maps that were at least 15 times better quality than what was previously available.

They found a variety of new features, including seamounts 1500 metres (4920 feet) high and sediment landslides that go on for several kilometres.

One of the major new features is the Broken Ridge which is 1200 km (745 miles) long and was created more than 40 million years ago.

This is the oldest sea floor in the search area.

It has 300 metres (984 feet) of sediment on top of it and has extensive sea floor landslides - some of which can go on for several miles.

The Gulden Draak Seamount and the Batavai Seamount are found in this search area.

The sea floor of the Diamantina Escarpment is the youngest geologically and was formed by 'sea floor spreading'.

It is home to complex geological features including ridges, volcanoes and valleys.

The Geelvinck Fracture Zone was formed by similar tectonic motions to the Broken Ridge. It is 900 metres (2900 feet) deep and 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) wide.

One of the major new features is the Broken Ridge which is 1200 km (745 miles) long and was created more than 40 million years ago

The Geelvinck Fracture Zone was formed by similar tectonic motions to the Broken Ridge. It is 900 metres (2900 feet) deep and 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) wide

Investigations also found a number of shipwrecks in the area.

They also found whale bones and cable from a vessel.

Dr Pattiaratchi said the location of seamounts would also help model the impact of tsunamis in the region.

Undersea mountains help dissipate their destructive energy, and potentially change our understanding of the break-up of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana.

The Gulden Draak Seamount is found in the Broken Ridge search area. It has 300 metres (984 feet) of sediment on top of it and has extensive sea floor landslides - some of which can go on for several kilometres

The Batavai Seamount is also part of the Broken Ridge area. This is the oldest sea floor in the search area. Investigations also found a number of shipwrecks in the area

The data was published online by Geoscience Australia on Wednesday, with a further tranche due to be published next year.

'It is estimated that only 10 to 15 per cent of the world's oceans have been surveyed with the kind of technology used in the search for MH370, making this remote part of the Indian Ocean among the most thoroughly mapped regions of the deep ocean on the planet,' said Stuart Minchin, chief of Geoscience Australia's environmental geoscience division.

Australia has not ruled out resuming the search for the Boeing 777 airliner.

However, it has said that would depend on finding 'credible new evidence' about the plane's whereabouts.

Pictured is a Boeing 777 aircraft Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 leaving Schiphol Airport in Schiphol, the Netherlands, which was similar to the one that disappeared. The whereabouts of the plane remains one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries

'No new information has been discovered to determine the specific location of the aircraft and the underwater search remains suspended,' Australian Transport Minister Darren Chester said in a statement on Wednesday.

The flight departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 00:41 on 8 March 2014 (16:41 GMT, 7 March) and was due to arrive in Beijing at 06:30 (22:30 GMT).

According to Malaysia Airlines the plane lost contact one hour after take-off.

It did not send any distress signals beforehand.

The last words spoken by the pilot or co-pilot were 'Good night Malaysian three seven zero'.

Just minutes later the plane's transponder was shut down.
The world's first emoji may have been carved in Turkey in 1700 BC.

Archaeologists have discovered a 3,700-year-old pitcher engraved with what appears to be a smiley face in the ancient city of Karkams.

Researchers dug up the marked sherbet pitcher during excavations of the city's extensive set of ruins, and say the pot was deliberately marked.

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The world's first emoji may have been carved in Turkey in 1700 BC. Archaeologists have discovered a 3,700-year-old pitcher engraved with a smiley face in the ancient city of Karkams

EMOJI FACTS The first true emoji was created in 1999 by a team working on Japanese mobile phone provider i-mode's messaging features. Originally meaning 'pictograph', the word emoji literally means 'picture' (e) and 'character' (moji). There are 722 different emoji characters currently available in the standard Unicode set shared by most platforms. The word 'emoji' was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013. In April last year, Andy Murray posted a wedding day tweet which described the day in emoji. Advertisement

The vase-like, off-white coloured pot features a small handle, and has a prominent smiley face drawn on its front.

It was discovered as part of a seven-year long excavation in the Karkamis district along the Syrian border under the guidance of Professor Nicolo Marchetti, an archaeologist at the University of Bologna, Italy.

'We have found a variety of cubes and urns,' Professor Marchetti told Anadolu Agency.

'The most interesting of them is a pot from 1700 BC that features an image of a "smile" on it.

'The pot was used for drinking sherbet.

'Most probably, [this depicts] the oldest smile in the world,' he added.

Professor Marchetti said much of the pottery found at the site depicts the era of the Hittites, an ancient civilisation and empire that is believed to have existed in the north-central Anatolian region.

The 'smiley' pot will now be put on display at the nearby Gaziantep Archaeology Museum.

Officially created in the 1980's as a form of expressing digital emotion, about six billion emojis are sent around the world every day.

The Turkish smiley face carving is not the first to be declared the 'world's oldest emoji' this year.

The vase-like, off-white coloured pot (right) features a small handle, and has a prominent smiley face (left) drawn on its front

In February, a group of Slovakian researchers also made the claim - this one a 382-year-old smiley face.

It was discovered as part of a seven-year long excavation led by archaeologist Professor Nicolo Marchetti (pictured)

The evidence suggests the inventor of the iconic smiley face is a lawyer by the name of Jan Ladislaides.

Head of the archive in Trencin Peter Brindza said: 'We found a smiley face, which dates from the 17th century - from 1635 - by notary Jan Ladislaides next to his signature.'

The hand-drawn smiley face emoji appears after a passage where Ladislaides had checked several municipal accounts.

He states that he had no objections or problems, and the smiley face indicates he was happy with the documents.

There also appears to be a clown's finger with a hashtag drawn on it, though the context is unclear.

Mr Brindza said hive was hugely surprised by his exceptional find and said: 'In contemporary writings, of course, it is not a common thing.

'I do not know if it's the oldest Slovakian smiley or the world's oldest, but it is certainly one of the oldest in the Trencin region.'

The pitcher was discovered as part of excavation in the ancient city of Karkams along the Syrian border with Turkey

In February, a group of Slovakian researchers also claimed to have found the 'world's first emoji' - this one a 382-year-old smiley face. The face, signed off by a lawyer, is thought to have shown he was pleased with the documents
Mesmerising timelapse footage shows a spider spinning a huge silver orb web.

Initially Mark Gildner, from North Carolina, set up his camera to film a timelapse of storm clouds rolling in.

But he was surprised to find he had caught the construction of a massive orb spider web instead.

SPOTTED ORBWEAVER Generally noctural, the spotted orbweaving spider is found across much of North America, particularly in late summer and early autumn. Females grow to around 9.519 millimeters (0.370.75 in) long, while males are considerably smaller. The orb-shaped web is very large and is often constructed on buildings and other man-made structures, especially near outdoor lights. The orb part of the web may be nearly 2 feet (0.61 m) in diameter, and is used to capture small insects. Orbweaver spiders eat their webs at the end of the night and re-digest the proteins so they can spin a new one the next day. Advertisement

The impressive structure, which took 40-45 minutes in real time, was spun by a spotted orbweaver (Neoscona crucifera).

Once completed, it spanned 76 centimetres (30 inches) across Mr Gildner's balcony.

As the footage progresses, small insects are captured by the web before the spider devours them for dinner.

Mr Gildner said: 'As I watched the first video back I wasn't expecting to see the spider, so it was a nice surprise and I was actually really excited when I saw the final outcome.

'After the first night of seeing the spider I anticipated that it might return the next evening, she must have been happy with the location, because she began construction of the web the same time as the previous evening.

'I frequently see frogs and lizards on my balcony, but this spider was a pleasant surprise.

'Sadly the web was gone when I woke up.'

Initially Mark Gildner, from North Carolina, set up a camera to film a time lapse of storm clouds rolling in. But he was surprised to find he had actually caught the construction of a web (pictured) on camera instead

The impressive structure, which took 40-45 minutes in real time, was spun by a spotted orbweaver (Neoscona crucifera)

Orbweaver spiders eat their webs at the end of the night and re-digest the proteins so they can spin a new one the next day.

'I would guess this is why the spider doesn't try to repair the damages caused by capturing its prey,' Mr Gildner said.

'Orbweavers aren't an aggressive species to humans, but I was still glad she didn't decide to use my camera as an anchor point for her web; I wouldn't have wanted to disturb her.'

Generally noctural, the spotted orbweaving spider is found across much of North America, particularly in late summer and early autumn.

Once completed, the huge structure spanned 76 centimetres (30 inches) across Mr Gildner's balcony. Orb spider webs are very large and are often constructed on buildings and other man-made structures, especially near outdoor lights

As the footage progresses, small insects are captured by the web before the spider devours them for its dinner

Females grow to around 9.519 millimeters (0.370.75 in) long, while males are considerably smaller.

The orb-shaped web is very large and is often constructed on buildings and other man-made structures, especially near outdoor lights.

The orb part of the web may be nearly 2 feet (0.61 m) in diameter, and is used to capture small insects.

The building of a web is an engineering feat, begun when the spider floats a line on the wind to another surface.

The spider secures the line and then drops another line from the centre, making a 'Y' shape.

The rest of the web's scaffolding follows with many lines of nonsticky silk being constructed before a final spiral of sticky capture silk.

Mr Gildner said: 'As I watched the first video back I wasn't expecting to see the spider, so it was a nice surprise and I was actually really excited when I saw the final outcome'

Orbweaver spiders eat their webs at the end of the night and re-digest the proteins so they can spin a new one the next day

The building of a web is an engineering feat, begun when the spider floats a line on the wind to another surface

The spider secures the first line of the web and then drops another line from the centre, making a 'Y' shape. The rest of the web's scaffolding follows with many lines of nonsticky silk being constructed before a final spiral of sticky capture silk
The story of humanity's journey out of Africa and into the wider world may need to be rewritten thanks to new geological evidence.

Experts studying ancient artefacts in Australia say we must push back the date from which humans arrived by almost 20,000 years to 65,000 years ago.

The discovery means that they would have lived alongside Australia's unique megafuana for tens of thousands of years.

The researchers involved in the study say it adds to evidence that humans did not wipe out the country's megafauna - but not everyone is convinced.

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A new study has found that humans arrived in Australia around 65,000 years ago, around 18,000 years earlier than one estimate. This graphic shows the movement of our ancestors based on the latest research

WHAT KINDS OF MEGAFAUNA WERE THERE? Huge 'megafauna' species once roamed around Australia. But around 85 per cent of these megafauna went extinct. Some of these animals included: 1,000 pound kangaroos.

2-ton wombats.

25-foot-long lizards.

400-pound flightless birds.

300-pound marsupial lion.

Volkswagen-sized tortoises. Advertisement

Around 45,000 years ago, huge 1,000 pound kangaroos, 2-ton wombats and 25-foot long lizards roamed around Australia.

But within the space of 2,000, 85 per cent of the country's large wildlife had been wiped out.

Whether humans were to blame or climate change has long been debated, and the latest study has reignited that debate.

An international team of researchers examined artefacts found at Madjedbebe, a rock shelter in Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory of Australia, which was home to early aboriginals when they arrived in Australia

Over 10,000 stone tools, ochre 'crayons', plant remains and bones have been unearthed at the site since 1973.

A University of Queensland-led research team evaluated artefacts found in various layers of sediment, using advanced dating techniques.

Their analysis found that humans arrived in Australia far earlier than had been thought.

This would mean that early settlers lived alongside the continent's unique megaufauna, which included giant kangaroos, wombats and tortoises.

But one of the researchers involved in the study argues that the new evidence suggests this is not the case.

Professor Ben Marwick, an anthropologist at the University of Washington, said: 'Previously it was thought that humans arrived and hunted them out or disturbed their habits, leading to extinction.

Experts have used cutting edge technology to push back the date from which Australia was settled by over 20,000 years by some estimates. Researchers examined artefacts found at Madjedbebe (pictured) in the Northern Territory of Australia

The story of humanity's journey out of Africa and into the wider world may need to be rewritten thanks to new geological evidence. Pictured is the team excavating the lowest reaches of the pit

'But these dates confirm that people arrived so far before that they wouldn't be the central cause of the death of megafauna.

'It shifts the idea of humans charging into the landscape and killing off the megafauna.

'It moves toward a vision of humans moving in and coexisting, which is quite a different view of human evolution.'

Not everyone in the scientific community will agree, however.

Writing in an opinion piece in the journal Nature, in which the full findings were published today, Curtis W Marean from Arizona State University said: 'The outcomes of scientific debates on the extinctions of large animals remain highly contentious, particularly in relation to Australia.

Experts have used cutting edge technology to analyse found artefacts, pushing back the date from which Australia was settled. Excavation leader Chris Clarkson examines a stone tool in this image

'A paper published in 2016 showed that early Australians had penetrated the harsh arid interior of Australia by around 49,000 years ago, and those researchers found the earliest definitive evidence for megafaunal fossils in association with tool-like artefacts in Australia.

'Taking this work together with the findings of Clarkson and colleagues now provides compelling evidence that humans were in Australia early enough to cause many of the megafaunal extinctions.'

RESEARCH METHODS A University of Queensland-led research team evaluated artefacts found in various layers of sediment, using advanced dating techniques. This included radiocarbon dating, which requires a certain level of carbon in a substance.

Traditional radiocarbon dating techniques have suggested that occupation of Australia by their ancient ancestors occurred no earlier than around 45,000 years. But radiocarbon dating is only able to provide accurate dates to a maximum of around 50,000 years ago. A technique called optical stimulated luminescence (OSL) can be used on minerals to date, for example, the last time a sand grain was exposed to sunlight. A University of Queensland-led research team evaluated artefacts found in various layers of sediment, using advanced dating techniques. An edge-ground hatchet head can be seen being excavated in this image This is helpful in determining when an artefact was buried, up to 100,000 years ago or more. The researchers used this process to measure thousands of sand grains individually so as to establish a more precise age for the artefacts. Students at Washington University's campus in Seattle also tested sediment samples Professor Marwick helped excavate at Madjedbebe. Using a scanning electron microscope they studied the properties of hundreds of dirt samples and microscopic plant matter to try to picture the time in which the ancient Australian humans lived. Advertisement

The new research involved extensive cooperation with the local Aboriginal community, the Mirarr people.

Traditional radiocarbon dating techniques have suggested that occupation of Australia by their ancient ancestors occurred no earlier than around 45,000 years.

The findings would mean that early humans lived alongside the continent's unique megaufauna. Pictured (left to right) is team leader Chris Clarkson with Richard Fullagar and Elspeth Hayes examining a rare grindstone from the lowest layers of the excavation

The new research involved extensive cooperation with the local Aboriginal community, the Mirarr people. In this image, excavation leader Chris Clarkson stands in front of the 2015 excavation area with local Djurrubu Aboriginal Rangers

This image shows three axes from different layers of the site and a rectangular sharpening stone from the 65,000-year level. Over 10,000 stone tools, ochre 'crayons', plant remains and bones have been unearthed at the site since 1973

But radiocarbon dating is only able to provide accurate dates to a maximum of around 50,000 years ago.

Other theories place humans on the continent anywhere between 47,000 and 60,000 years ago.

A technique called optical stimulated luminescence (OSL) can be used on minerals to date, for example, the last time a sand grain was exposed to sunlight.

This is helpful in determining when an artefact was buried, up to 100,000 years ago or more.

Traditional radiocarbon dating techniques have suggested that occupation of Australia by the aborigine's ancient ancestors occurred no earlier than around 45,000 years. Site custodian May Nango (right) and excavation leader Chris Clarkson (left) in the pit are pictured

The researchers used this process to measure thousands of sand grains individually so as to establish a more precise age for the artefacts.

Students at Washington University's campus in Seattle tested sediment samples Professor Marwick helped excavate at Madjedbebe.

Using a scanning electron microscope they studied the properties of hundreds of dirt samples and microscopic plant matter to try to picture the time in which the ancient Australian humans lived.

This and other tests built up a picture of the environment and showed that when the first humans arrived, northern Australia was wetter and colder than it is today.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, support the theory that our species Homo sapiens evolved in Africa before dispersing to other continents, Dr Marwick said.

Other theories place humans on the continent anywhere between 47,000 and 60,000 years ago. Pictured (left to right) is Elspeth Hayes with Mark Djandjomerr and traditional owner May Nango extracting comparative samples at a cave adjacent to Madjedbebe
A top military official has warned lawmakers not to equip the military with autonomous weapons that could go rogue.

The US's second highest-ranking general said he believed humans must always be the ones to pull the trigger when it came to killing people.

General Paul Selva advocated keeping the 'ethical rules of war' - even if the US's enemies didn't.

In June the Pentagon awarded an $11 million (8.4 million) contract to build a combined-arms squad of human and robotic capabilities.

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The US's second highest-ranking general warned that he does not 'think it's reasonable to put robots in charge of whether we take a human life' (stock image)

KILLER ROBOTS In June the Pentagon awarded an $11 million (8.4 million) contract to build a combined-arms squad of human and robotic capabilities. From unmanned trucks and aircraft, to ghost fleets of underwater drones, the military has in many ways turned its sights on autonomous technology to improve capabilities. And, a similar shift can be seen all around the world. Russia, for example, has also been working on ways to integrate combat robots into battle, including armed sentry drones. Intelligent robotic weapons  theyre a reality, and they will be much more of a reality by 2030, said John Bassett, a former British intelligence officer. At some point around 2025 or thereabouts, the US Army will actually have more combat robots than it will have human soldiers. Advertisement

Responding to questions from Senator Gary Peters at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday Selva warned against 'unleash[ing] on humanity a set of robots that we don't know how to control'.

'I don't think it's reasonable for us to put robots in charge of whether or not we take a human life,' Selva told the committee.

Senator Peters warned America's enemies would not hesitate in using such technologies, The Hill writes.

'Our adversaries often do not to consider the same moral and ethical issues that we consider each and every day,' Peters said.

However, Selva said America should always 'take our values to war' and said it was too dangerous to fit military hardware with autonomous weaponry.

'There will be a raucous debate in the department about whether or not we take humans out of the decision to take lethal action,' he said.

It 'doesn't mean that we don't have to address the development of those kinds of technologies and potentially find their vulnerabilities and exploit those vulnerabilities,' he said.

From unmanned trucks and aircraft, to ghost fleets of underwater drones, the military has in many ways turned its sights on autonomous technology to improve capabilities.

And, a similar shift can be seen all around the world.

Responding to questions from Senator Gary Peters at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday Selva (pictured) warned against 'unleash[ing] on humanity a set of robots that we don't know how to control'

Russia, for example, has also been working on ways to integrate combat robots into battle, including armed sentry drones.

Experts predict robots are the future of warfare  and it may come sooner than many expect.

Intelligent robotic weapons  theyre a reality, and they will be much more of a reality by 2030, said John Bassett, a former British intelligence officer.

From unmanned trucks and aircraft, to ghost fleets of underwater drones, the military has in many ways turned its sights on autonomous technology to improve capabilities (stock image)

At some point around 2025 or thereabouts, the US Army will actually have more combat robots than it will have human soldiers.

In July 2016, Professor Hawking and Tesla founder Elon Musk led 1,000 robotics experts in an open letter warning that 'Autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow'.

'The probable life span of human civilization is much greater if we're a multi-planet species as opposed to a single-planet species,' Elon Musk said last year.

'If we're a single planet species, then eventually there will be some extinction event,' he said.
A mysterious group of mutilated whale corpses has been found half-buried in the sand on a Russian beach.

The mammals' decomposing bodies were discovered jutting from the sand with their bones and flesh brutally exposed.

Experts have no idea what killed the animals or how they ended up in their bizarre positions.

Some of the whale bones have clearly been gnawed on, and initial reports suggest the animals were half-eaten by bears, though this has not been confirmed.

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The decomposing bodies of several whales have been found seemingly half buried (left) on a Russian beach with their bones and flesh brutally exposed (right)

LIVER-LESS SHARKS WASH UP IN SOUTH AFRICA The Russian whales are not the first bizarre animal corpses to wash ashore this year. In South Africa, four great white sharks have washed up on a popular tourist beach since May with just their livers removed. Scientists say all four great whites had their livers removed with 'surgical precision' prompting claims that pods of orcas in the Gansbaai area, south of Cape Town, are to blame. Experts believe orcas are purely removing and feasting on the organ which is rich in a compound called squalene. Advertisement

A video of the corpses shows a number of the dead animals stranded on the shore of Sakhalin Island's Chayvo Bay, off the coast of southeast Russia.

The clip was taken by local resident Egor Rybalko, who uploaded it online.

The amateur cameraman records three corpses jutting from the sand, each spaced just a few metres from one another.

Large footprint tracks can be seen in the sand around the corpses, which may have been left by scavenging bears.

Experts are still investigating how the mammals met their deaths.

The whales are not the first bizarre animal corpses to wash ashore this year.

In South Africa, four great white sharks have washed up on a popular tourist beach since May with just their livers removed.

Scientists say all four great whites had their livers removed with 'surgical precision' prompting claims that pods of orcas in the Gansbaai area, south of Cape Town, are to blame.

Experts believe orcas are purely removing and feasting on the organ which is rich in a compound called squalene.

South Africa's Department of Environmental Affairs ordered dissections in May and confirmed orcas were to blame for the attacks.

Pods of killer whales were spotted around Gansbaai at the time three of the great whites were killed in May, and around Dangerpoint where a fourth great white was killed in June.

Biologist Alison Towner confirmed on Twitter at the time that the fourth death was that of a 12 foot (3.6m) male great white shark with its liver neatly removed and nothing else eaten.

In another tweet local wildlife group Marine Dynamics stated an elusive orca pair had been spotted close to Dangerpoint on Saturday morning near the time of the latest attack.

Some of the whale bones have clearly been gnawed on, and initial reports suggest the animals were half-eaten by bears, though this has not been confirmed

A number of the dead animals were stranded on the shore of Sakhalin Island's Chayvo Bay, off the coast of southeast Russia

Towner said: 'Obviously this is a very sad time for us. Nature can be so cruel but the dexterity with which these killer whales are capable of is mind blowing  almost surgical precision.

'That is the way in which they have removed the squalene-rich livers and dumped the shark carcass. We have never seen anything like this before in great white deaths.

'In the attacks there is left a large gaping hole between her pectoral fins where they were torn apart to reveal her body cavity and that their large livers were completely missing.

'This information, combined with the recent sightings of orca and disappearance of white sharks in the area,provides convincing evidence that the orcas are responsible,' she said.

The Russian whales are not the first bizarre animal corpses to wash ashore this year. In South Africa, four great white sharks have washed up on a popular tourist beach since May with just their livers removed. Pictured is one of the mutilated carcasses
Aardvarks may face massive population declines as the planet heats up due to global warming.

Aardvarks survive by hiding from sub-Saharan heat inside burrows they dig and eating ants and termites at night.

During a particularly severe drought in the Kalahari desert, five out of six aardvarks monitored died of starvation because the ants and termites they eat need a certain amount of water in the soil to survive.

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During a particularly severe drought in the Kalahari desert, five out of six aardvarks monitored died of starvation because the ants and termites they eat need a certain amount of water in the soil to survive

Aardvarks have floppy ears, a tubular snout and a body similar to that of an armadillo.

WHAT ARE AARDVARKS? Aardvarks (Orycteropus afer) are medium-sized, burrowing, nocturnal mammals native to sub-Saharan Africa. They have floppy ears, a tubular snout and a body similar to that of an armadillo. They hide from the heat in burrows and eat during the night. Researchers consider them to be a keystone species because other animals also use the burrows they build as nests, sleeping shelter or a place to hide from predators and desert heat. Advertisement

They hide from the heat in burrows and eat during the night.

Researchers consider them to be a keystone species because other animals also use the burrows they build as nests, sleeping shelter or a place to hide from predators and desert heat.

But researchers at the University of Whitwatersrand in South Africa have discovered that rising temperatures due to climate change may endanger the existence of aardvarks.

To conduct their study, published in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers implanted temperature and motion-sensitive biologgers and tracking transmitters into six free-living adult aardvarks under anesthesia.

After the surgery, the animals were released at their capture site at Tswalu Kalahari Reserve in South Africa in 2012.

'Only one of the six aardvarks survived the summer of 2013,' the authors of the study wrote.

They recovered the temperature and activity loggers from the carcasses, and removed the sensors from the one survivor.

Aardvarks (Orycteropus afer) are medium-sized, burrowing, nocturnal mammals native to sub-Saharan Africa. They have floppy ears, a tubular snout and a body similar to that of an armadillo

According to the study, air temperatures in the summer of 2013 were the hottest since records began in 1980, and wind speeds were 32 per cent higher than that averaged of 35 years - a combination of conditions which led to a severe drought.

When the researchers analyzed the data from the sensors, they found that the animals had swapped their usual routines, going out of their burrows during the day to eat, rather than at night.

They also found that the body temperatures of the aardvarks had declines, which is a sign of malnourishment, and this was backed up by the fact that the aardvarks had low body weight.

The researchers concluded that the aardvarks that died had starved to death, as had several other aardvarks they observed in areas around the test site. This indicates that aardvark populations are likely going to plummet as their habitats grow hotter and drier

The researchers suggest that the aardvarks struggled to find food because ants and termites need a certain amount of water in the soil to survive.

The researchers concluded that the aardvarks that died had starved to death, as had several other aardvarks they observed in areas around the test site.

This indicates that aardvark populations are likely going to plummet as their habitats grow hotter and drier.
It is the heart warming moment that a half brother and sister break off from wresting each other for a hug.

The two young western lowland gorillas, named Avatar and Jingles, were halfway through a play session in Mbeli Bai, a forest clearing in the Republic of Congos Nouabale Ndoki National Park.

Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society, which help manage the park, took the video as they observed the animals.

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The two western lowland gorillas, named Avatar and Jingles, were halfway through a play session in Mbeli Bai, a forest clearing in the Republic of Congos Nouabale Ndoki National Park.

Researchers from WCSs Congo Program released touching footage of two sibling western lowland gorillas in a tender embrace.

The 11-second video was taken from an observation platform in Mbeli Bai, a forest clearing in the Republic of Congos Nouabale Ndoki National Park, which WCS helps manage.

The WCS researchers said it was part of a play session.

However, the gorillas play is a little rougher than the average human sibling fight.

'Gorillas are quite physical in their play behavior; they wrestle, hit, bite, but also touch, sniff, kiss and hug,' the team say.

'Hugging, like grooming, could also be a form of confirming social bonds.'

WCS works in the protected area to safeguard gorillas, forest elephants, and other wildlife from poaching.

The large (12.8 ha) natural forest clearing is located in the south-west of the Nouabale-Ndoki national park in Northern Congo.

AVATAR AND JINGLES Jingles (left) is the youngest member of the group, born seven months before Avatar (right) Jingles was born on 13 Oct. 2014, and is the youngest member of the group. Researchers are still unsure of Jingles sex. Conan, the pair's father Avatar, the second youngest member of the group, was born on 4 Mar. 2014 and still fully dependent on his mother. The pair same the same father - Conan, a large bodied silverback with distinctive pair of veins under both eyes. Researchers named him after his cone shaped head. Advertisement

Due to the mineral rich soils and aquatic vegetation, Mbeli Bai is an attractive resource for numerous elusive mammal species including the western lowland gorilla and the African forest elephant.

A kiss from mum: The pair took breaks from their play session to interact with other grillas nearby

In 1995 researchers set up a study there to study the lowland gorilla populations because of the unique terrain that allows unobscured observation of animals that are otherwise hard to study in their dense forest habitat.

'In Mbeli bai we can individually recognize and monitor a large number of animals and therefore gain useful information on key life history traits and population dynamics to help inform conservation strategies,' the researchers say.

Since 1995, the MBS has identified over 460 gorilla individuals.

The gorillas were also seen playing with (and on) the other gorillas in the group

At current, the MBS is following 25 groups of gorillas and 13 solitary silverback males, totalling a little over 200 individuals. So far in 2017, 125 gorilla individuals visited the bai, 2 new gorilla babies were born and one new female immigrated in to the population.

Aside from gorillas, approximately 536 elephants have been identified at Mbeli, since January 17, 3 new infants were added to the population as well as 3 young adult males.

Researchers are also at the forefront of technology, and, gorilla behaviour, proximity, social interactions and health indicators will be recorded through the Animal Observer app (Dian Fossey Fund International).

At one point one of the pair even seemed to take a bit of a nap on an older female's back

The study has also entered a partnership with Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to develop an automated individual gorilla recognition software which will potentially have many applications in camera trap studies, for example to assess abundance and density of gorillas in the wild.
Apple's eagerly anticipated new iPhone will go on sale in September - but in very limited quantities, the latest forecast for the firm has claimed.

J.P. Morgan Apple analyst Rod Hall believes the new handset will be called the 'iPhone Pro', and will sell for $1100, according to 9to5Mac.

However, the report warns that supply will be extremely limited at launch and for its first few months on sale.

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J.P. Morgan Apple analyst Rod Hall believes the new handset will be called the 'iPhone Pro', and will sell for $1100 - but will only be available in limited quantities when it is announced in September.

IPHONE 8 RUMOURS Several rumors have been circulating about the iPhone 8, and suggest the next device may have: - Dual-lens 3D camera - Augmented reality capabilities - Curved glass casing - Wireless charging - 5 inch (12.7 centimeter) and 5.8 inch (14.7 centimeter) model, will have a wraparound OLED screen - Aluminum back will be replaced with two reinforced glass panes and a metal frame in the middle - Facial recognition - 128GB will cost $999 - 256GB will cost $1,099 Advertisement

Multiple claims say the new OLED 5.8-inch iPhone, which is expected to have a bezel-less screen, may not be available until November.

However, Hall believes there will instead be 'a slower production start for the flagship OLED phone.'

J.P. Morgan is adjusting its forecast for the device from 9m units for September to ~2m units for September.

It notes, however, that it will also increase its Y18 unit forecasts 'by about the same amount to reflect time-shifted demand.'

The firm has also increasing its expectation for the average selling price by $100 to $1,100, noting that it believes 'production costs are slightly higher than we had originally anticipated.'

It also thinks the higher average selling price will be a 'critical demand control variable for a new tier of iPhone' and that 'Apple's pricing strategy is likely to be aimed at spreading this replacement cycle over two years given totally new product categories like AR are likely still a few years out.'

The most recent claims say Apple has yet to start mass production of any of the three expected models.

Economic Daily News is reporting that all three new iPhones, overhauled iPhone 8 and the '7s' iterative updates to the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are yet to start mass production.

The report says that the new 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch phones are expected to ramp up in August, a month behind the normal new iPhone production timelines.

It also claims the OLED 5.8-inch iPhone, which is expected to have a bezel-less screen, may not be available until November.

Economic Daily News says that Foxconn has secured the vast majority of orders for the upcoming OLED phone, which will feature almost no bezel enabling Apple to pack in a 5.8-inch screen into the same physical size as the current 4.7-inch iPhone 7.

'While there were previous reports indicating that volume production for new iPhone devices has commenced, yield rates at the two main ODMs, Foxconn Electronics and Pegatron, have not yet reached levels that warrant mass production', the report claims.

New claims suggest that Apple is working 'feverishly' to fix software problems with its wireless charging and 3D face recognition systems. Pictured is an idea of what the iPhone 8 may look like

It is believed Pegatron will assemble most of the 4.7-inch iPhone 7s devices and a small number of the 'iPhone 8s, while a third manufacturer, Wistron, will mainly focus on making the 5.5-inch 7s model.

In another warning last week, Bank of America Merrill Lynch lowered its estimates for Apple's iPhone shipments by 11 million for the year, and suggest it could be delayed by a month.

'Our conversations with the Supply Chain suggest that the iPhone 8 will ship 3-4 weeks delayed given technological issues which Apple and its suppliers are working through,' analysts Wamsi Mohan and Stefano Pascale said in a report Wednesday, citing a recent trip to Asia, according to CNBC.

The analysts said problems with finger print and 3-D sensors were to blame for the delay.

The BofAML analysts cut their expectations for September quarter shipments of iPhones by 11 million and the December quarter by 6 million.

For fiscal year 2017, the analysts expect 11 million fewer shipments for 2017, down to 208.1 million.

Recent reports say Apple is working 'feverishly' to fix software problems with its wireless charging and 3D face recognition systems.

If these issues aren't resolved, the flagship iPhone could even launch with these major features disabled, according to some sources.

A report by Fast Company explains that a 'a source with knowledge of the situation' has claimed that engineers and designers at Apple are working with a 'sense of panic in the air.'

The report states: 'The company has been working feverishly to fix software problems in its hotly anticipated 10th-anniversary iPhone that could ultimately cause production and delivery delays, the source says.

The latest social media leak comes from the Chinese social media website Weibo, which shows a photo claiming to show the glass panel back of the iPhone 8 - with no evidence of a cutout for a Touch ID sensor on the back, as rumors in April suggested

'If the software problems aren't resolved quickly, the new flagship iPhone could even launch with major features disabled.'

In particular, Apple is said to be facing problems developing its wireless charging system and the report suggests that the iPhone 8 could even ship without this feature enabled.

Apple is also having issues with its front-facing 3D facial recognition system, according to the report.

The issues in both systems are said to not be hardware related, but instead lie with the software pairing with iOS.

This suggests that the features could be added after launch via a software update.

Several reports have speculated about the iPhone 8's Touch ID system, and where this will be located.

THE TOUCH ID FINGERPRINT SENSOR Rumors have circulated in recent weeks that Apple was struggling to decide where to put the sensor - under the front screen with an 'invisible' sensor, or even on the rear. There were also rumors earlier this month that Apple plans to replace its Touch ID sensor with a facial recognition system. Now it appears a third option may be on the table - abandoning an ID senor entirely. Advertisement

The Fast Company report suggests that it is 'plausible' that Apple is still deciding where to put the Touch ID, but that 'in all likelihood' will be embedded under the OLED display.

And yesterday, MacRumors claimed that Apple is hoping to place the Touch ID sensor underneath the glass screen, but that it is struggling to do so.

Apple has until August to either place orders for chips for Touch ID sensors, abandon the sensor all together, or significantly delay the release of the iPhone 8, according to the reports.

The Touch ID fingerprint sensor on the current iPhone 7 model allows users to unlock their phone by placing their finger on the home button.

But rumours have circulated in recent weeks that Apple was struggling to decide where to put this sensor on the new iPhone 8 - under the front screen with an 'invisible' sensor, or even on the rear.

The new rumor comes days after an analyst suggested that Apple could abandon its Touch ID fingerprint recognition system entirely in favour of a new facial recognition system. Pictured is an image of what the iPhone 8 could look like

There were also rumors earlier this month that Apple plans to replace its Touch ID sensor with a facial recognition system.

Now it appears a third option may be on the table - abandoning an ID sensor entirely.

According to a report published by the investment publication Barron's, Apple has 'just a couple of weeks' to solve the matter of placing a fingerprint sensor under the glass of the next iPhone - or its earnings estimates are at risk.

The report reads: 'We believe it would typically take 12 weeks from placement of fingerprint IC orders to full volume production of iPhones.

'Consequently, if Apple is able to solve its fingerprint problems and place orders for fingerprint ICs before August, it would likely be able to reach volume production in late October or early November.

Pictured is an alleged iPhone 8 leak from the Chinese social media website Weibo, which claims to show photos of the iPhone 8's front and back panel

'We believe this remains Apple's preferred path, and expect it would be acceptable to both consumers and investors.

'It is entirely unclear if Apple will be able to fix the problem in this time frame.'

According to Andy Hargreaves, a KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst who co-authored the report, it's likely that Apple may incorporate a facial recognition system instead, but this 'would not be good, as it might effectively shut out the new phone from things like Apple Pay.'

'We believe Apple's facial recognition solution should work from many angles and in low-light environments', wrote Hargreaves.

'However, it would not work without clear line of sight to the user's face.

'Even if this encompassed just five per cent of login scenarios, it would mean that several times a day the new iPhone would perform worse at an elemental feature than older iPhones, which would risk pushback from consumers.'

Pictured is an alleged iPhone 8 leak from the Chinese social media website Weibo, which claims to show photos of the iPhone 8's front and back panels

In addition, leaks of what the iPhone 8 may look like continue to be shared on social media.

The latest social media leak comes from the Chinese social media website Weibo, which shows a photo claiming to show the glass panel back of the iPhone 8 - with no evidence of a cutout for a Touch ID sensor on the back, as rumors in April suggested.

'Further, we do not believe facial recognition would be initially qualified as an acceptable verification method for Apple Pay.

'While Apple could achieve this over time, the likelihood for an initial lack of Apple Pay could adversely affect demand.'

It's expected that Apple may unveil three iPhone models in September: Two LCD phones with standard 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch screens, with the front face resembling the current iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, and the third being an OLED version.

However, the launch date of the OLED version may trail that of LCD models.
A series of colourful maps has revealed a breathtaking look at the vein-like network of river systems around the world, plotting the countless waterways that stretch across nearly every continent, from North America to Australia.

The maps, created by geographer and GIS analyst Robert Szucs, visualize permanent and temporary rivers and streams, using a rainbow of colours to differentiate the intricate branches.

Using a system known as Strahler Stream Order Classification, Szucs highlights the staggering breadth of Earths watersheds, with the individual flows involved in each particular basin shown as lines of varying thickness.

The creator uses the open-source QGIS software to visualize the networks based on scientific data.

By the Strahler Stream Order, branches of higher stream orders are indicated as thicker lines.
Couples who live together share a kitchen, living room and maybe a bathroom - and they also share each other's microbiomes.

Researchers analyzed the skin of cohabitating couples influence the microbial communities living on each other's skin.

The similarities between couples' skin microbiomes were so strong that a computer algorithm could identify couples with 86 per cent accuracy, based on analyzing their skin microbiomes alone.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada found that share similarities in the microbial communities on their skin. In particular, the area with the strongest similarities are partners' feet

WHERE THEY TESTED To conduct the study, reseachers at the University of Waterloo in Canada analyzed 330 skin swabs collected from 17 sites on the participants' bodies. All the couples were heterosexual and lived in the Waterloo region of Canada. The participants swabbed themselves on sites which included the upper eyelids, outer nostrils, inner nostrils, armpits, torso, back, navel and the palm of the hands. The researchers say this is the first study to identify areas of the skin with the most similar microbiomes between cohabitating partners, finding the strongest similarities on partners' feet. Advertisement

The study, published in the open-access journal mSystems, reported that cohabitation is likely less influential on a person's microbial profile than other factors like biological sex and what part of the body is being studied.

The researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada also found that the microbial profile from a person's body usually looks more like their own microbiome than that of their partner.

'You look like yourself more than you look like your partner,' says Ashley Ross, who led the study while a graduate student in the lab of Dr Josh Neufeld.

'Can we link couples back together? The answer is yes, but not a very loud yes,' says senior author Dr Neufeld, whose lab focuses on microbial communities and their interactions.

To conduct the study, Ross and Dr Neufeld, along with assistant professor Dr Andrew Doxey, analyzed 330 skin swabs collected from 17 sites on the participants' bodies.

All the couples were heterosexual and lived in the Waterloo region of Canada.

The participants swabbed themselves on sites which included the upper eyelids, outer nostrils, inner nostrils, armpits, torso, back, navel and the palm of the hands.

Dr Neufeld says that this is the first study to identify areas of the skin with the most similar microbiomes between cohabitating partners, finding the strongest similarities on partners' feet.

'In hindsight, it makes sense,' says Dr Neufeld.

'You shower and walk on the same floor barefoot.

'This process likely serves as a form of microbial exchange with your partner, and also with your home itself.'

And as a result, partners end up with a similar mix.

To conduct the study, researcher at the University of Waterloo analyzed 330 skin swabs collected from 17 sites on the participants' bodies. All the couples were heterosexual and lived in the Waterloo region of Canada, and they swabbed themselves

The researchers also found other patterns, for example, microbial communities on the inner thigh are most similar among people of the same sex rather than between cohabitating partners.

Dr Neufeld told the DailyMail.com: 'The inner thighs of men were dominated by common skin bacteria, like Corynebacterium, whereas women's thighs were dominated by bacteria presumably from the nearby vaginal microbiome, such as Lactobacillus.'

Computer algorithms could differentiate between men and women with 100 per cent accuracy by analyzing inner thigh microbial samples alone - suggesting that a person's biological sex can be determined by analyzing the microbes in this area but not others.

They researchers also found that the microbial communities on areas of a person's left side of the body strongly resemble the right side, and of all the swabs, the least microbial diversity was found on either side of the outer nose.

Depiction of the human body and bacteria that are most prevalent in different regions. There are both tremendous similarities and differences among the bacterial species found at different sites

Ross says that while other studies have already shown that microbial communities vary from region to region, she wanted to know how other factors, such as living with another person, can help shape the microbiome.

Staphylococcus epidermidis bacteria (magnified under bright field microscopy 1000 times) is part of the skin flora

In a previous project, Ross and Dr Neufeld analyzed samples collected from door handles at the University of Waterloo to determine whether buildings could be identified based on their door-handle microbiomes.

In the future, Ross says she says she hopes to see similar analyses of same-sex couples, or couples with different ethnic backgrounds.

Dr Neufeld says the study is part of a larger focus aimed at understanding how skin microbiomes adapt and change with their host - not only people, but other mammals too.

'Ultimately what we're trying to learn is whether skin microorganisms have co-evolved with their hosts over time,' he says.
Elon Musk has warned that the first passengers on SpaceX's megarocket designed to bring private citizens into space will need to be 'brave'.

He admitted that there is a 'good chance' that its unmanned maiden flight will end in disaster.

The SpaceX Falcon Heavy, a rocket with 27 engines that have to fire up simultaneously, has been difficult to test on the ground, Musk said yesterday.

Speaking at the International Space Station (ISS) Research & Development Conference in Washington, he joked that people should watch the firm's first test of its Falcon Heavy rocket as it was 'guaranteed to be exciting'.

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SpaceX founder Elon Musk speaks during the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. On Wednesday, July 19, 2017, Musk said the first launch of its big new rocket, the Falcon Heavy, is risky and stands 'a real good chance' of failure

MUSK ON MARS TRIPS Musk also addressed the risks of a trip to the red planet. 'Going to Mars is not for the faint of heart,' said Musk. 'It's risky, dangerous, uncomfortable, and you might die. Now, do you wont to go? For some the answer will be: Hell no. For some, it will be: Hell yes.' 'I don't think you'll get irradiated to death,' said Musk. 'With some moderate shielding we can cut down on a large percent of incremental radiation, so the marginal risk of cancer isn't something that's going to be a show stopper.' 'If safety is your top goal, I wouldn't go to Mars.' Advertisement

Musk's SpaceX is gearing up to fire its giant rocket later this year.

The Falcon Heavy will have three boosters instead of one, and 27 engines instead of nine, all of which must ignite simultaneously.

No one will be aboard the initial flights.

But the first passengers will need to be courageous, Musk warned, saying, 'no question, whoever's on the first flight, brave.'

When asked whether the risks would make potential customers think twice before signing up for a flight, he said: 'I want to make sure we set expectations accordingly.'

Speaking for over an hour at the Washington conference, Musk encouraged people to go to Cape Canaveral for the Falcon Heavy launch later this year.

'It's guaranteed to be exciting,' he promised, getting a big laugh.

'There's a lot of risk associated with Falcon Heavy, real good chance that that vehicle does not make it to orbit,' he said.

'Major pucker factor, really, is like the only way to describe it.'

SpaceX has previously said it plans to fly two paying customers to the moon in 2018, using a Falcon Heavy.

Musk also called for a human outpost to be built on the moon to boost public interest and 'continue the dream' of the Apollo missions.

'If we want to get the public real fired up, we've got to have a base on the moon - that would be pretty cool,' he said.

'Having some permanent presence on another heavenly body, that's the continuance of the dream of Apollo.'

He also lamented that many people seem to be unaware of the International Space Station, or do not seem to fully understand 'how cool the ISS is.'

While the moon may not be in Musk's personal travel plans, he said in response to a question that he'd like to ride one of his smaller Falcon rockets to the International Space Station in maybe three or four years.

SpaceX plans to start ferrying NASA astronauts to the orbiting outpost, using Falcon 9 rockets and enhanced Dragon capsules, by the middle of next year. SpaceX now uses the Dragon capsule to deliver supplies to the space station.

'All right, we'll put you on the manifest,' said NASA's space station program manager Kirk Shireman.

Building the Falcon Heavy has proven harder than SpaceX envisioned, according to Musk.

But it will be capable of lifting more than double the amount of payload into orbit than the current Falcon 9, and also hoisting a SpaceX Dragon capsule into a loop around the moon.

SpaceX has previously revealed how their Falcon Heavy rocket will work. A video shows it lifting off (shown) from a launch pad in Florida. Its side boosters and core then land themselves back at the pad. SpaceX say reusability is key to keeping launch costs down. The Falcon Heavy will be used to take astronauts to the moon and Mars

As for Mars, Musk said he favored friendly competition for getting astronauts to the red planet.

NASA for years has supported an international effort.

Musk said it would be better to have at least two or three-country coalitions striving to get there first and making the most progress.

He praised the model used by NASA in the commercial crew program, in which both SpaceX and Boeing are developing capsules for flying space station astronauts.

Americans have not launched from home soil since the last shuttle flight in 2011, instead forced to use Russian rockets.

The crew Dragons will parachute into the ocean just like the cargo Dragons; land landings were scrapped because of the work needed to make everything safe.

Musk also said he's updated his long-term plan for colonizing Mars to make it more economically feasible.

The vehicles will be smaller, although still big.

He promised to share his evolving ideas at a September conference in Australia.

Musk also said that using satellites to provide low-cost internet to rural customers, and doing Earth observation for crops, climate, and natural disasters, are just two examples of the potential business opportunities created from such a venture.

He also discussed his plan to dig tunnels beneath Los Angeles, through the venture he named 'The Boring Company.'

Musk said that project is a 'low stress activity' because 'everyone expects it to fail.'

However, he said the project could one day be used to design digging machines that can mine Mars for ice and minerals.

'I do think getting good at digging tunnels could be really helpful for Mars,' said Musk.

'It would be a different optimization for a Mars boring machine versus an Earth boring machine.

'For sure there's going to be a lot of icing mining on Mars, and mining in general to get raw materials.'

Musk has said that any plan to colonize Mars would have to make as much use of Martian materials for building and general survival as possible.

MUSK'S PRIVATE MOON MISSION Elon Musk's SpaceX will launch a crewed mission beyond the moon for two private paying customers using the Dragon Heavy, it has been revealed. It will be the first time in 45 years humans have been in deep space, said the company, promising its mission will go 'faster and further' than any humans before them. The week-long mission was originally due to take place some time in late 2018 and will 'skim the surface of the moon' then venture into deep space before returning to Earth, Musk revealed. The identity of the customers and how much they paid has been kept secret. When completed, the Falcon Heavy will be equipped with three cores, making for a total of 27 Merlin engines to generate 5.13 million pounds of thrust at lift-off. SpaceX expects the mission to take place some time in late 2018, after it sends a crewed NASA Dragon craft to the International Space Station. 'We have been approached by private individuals,' said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, after announcing the mission by tweeting 'fly me to the moon... ok'. 'This is a private mission with paying customers, who have placed significant deposits,' Musk said, but added that they have so far not authorized the company to reveal their names. Musk said the individuals know each other and are 'very serious' about the flight 'This is a really exciting thing that's happened,' Musk told reporters. Advertisement

'And then, along the way, building underground habitats where you could get radiation shielding you could build an entire city underground if you wanted to,' said Musk.

'People are still going to want to go to the surface from time to time, but you can build a tremendous amount underground with the right boring technology on Mars. So I think there is some overlap in that technology development arena.'

Earlier this month Elon Musk announced the Boring Company's Godot machine has begun its digging operation in the car park of the SpaceX building in LA.

'Just installed steel skeleton of the car/pod elevator. Should be operating next week', the SpaceX founder tweeted today, with a five second video of the site.

This marks a major step in Musk's plans to build a transport network beneath the city.

The announcement comes just weeks after Musk claimed he and the mayor of LA had 'promising talks' about his plans to build an underground bus network.

As well as the news that it would be operating next week, Musk tweeted another video of the site and commented 'Across the road and below the ground'.

He also revealed the location of the tunnel with a tweet that included a picture of the SpaceX headquarters and the comment 'perspective'.

'Just installed steel skeleton of the car/pod elevator. Should be operating next week', the SpaceX founder tweeted today, with a five second video of the site

The Tesla founder said his 'Godot' machine had 'begun boring and just completed the first segment of tunnel in LA', while at the same time making bizarre declarations about his love of floors and tunnels.

Musk's mention of 'Godot' appears to reference Samuel Beckett's 1949 play, Waiting for Godot, where two melancholy men old men sit on mounds of Earth waiting for 'Godot' to arrive.

Seemingly excited by the progress of his plans to dig under the city, the billionaire then went on to post a number of other tweets about his love of floors.

On the subject of floors, Musk posted: 'They will never let you down.

'They are so underappreciated.

'Just try one. It's way better than you think.'

He added: 'I love floors. Not as much as tunnels though.'

He also revealed the location of the tunnel with a tweet that included a picture of the SpaceX headquarters and the comment 'perspective'

His posts come weeks after Musk claimed that he had 'promising conversations' with the Mayor of LA about creating a network of tunnels beneath the city.

The Tesla founder tweeted a video of Eric Garcetti saying that the Boring Company's tunnel could provide a 'quick and direct route from LAX to Union station.'

While this suggests that the Mayor is on board with the tunnelling plans, Musk added that getting permits would be harder than creating the technology itself.

Mr Garcetti spoke about the Boring Company's tunnel during an interview on ABC 7.

And Elon Musk tweeted a link to this video, saying: 'Promising conversations with @MayorOfLA regarding tunnel network that would carry cars, bikes and pedestrians. Permits harder than technology.'

Critics have slammed the plan as completely unrealistic as it would require a mass of permits and huge disruption as hundreds of tunnels and access 'lifts' are dug. Pictured is the first image released of the Boring Company's tunnelling machine

'Secondly, increase the speed of the Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM).

'TBMs are super slow.

'A snail is effectively 14 times faster than a soft-soil TBM.

'Our goal is to defeat the snail in a race.'

Musk envisions a new breed of smaller, more powerful TBMs with triple the power of current machines that can tunnel continuously.
The Russian artificial star Mayak has successfully made it to orbit, putting it on path to become one of the brightest objects in the night sky.

The satellite launched from Baikonur spaceport on July 14 aboard a Soyuz 2.1a rocket, and unfolded its sun reflector upon arrival to orbit.

Once the team has obtained its ID number, sky-gazers will be able to track its location using an app for iOS and Android.

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Astronomers have slammed the Mayak satellite (pictured), which is no larger than a rugby ball, calling it a 'nonsense' project that could 'ruin' dark skies for everyone

CROWDFUNDING SPACE PROJECTS Crowdfunding has become a popular way of raising money for space exploration projects in the last few years. In 2013, the asteroid-mining company Planetary Resources raised more than $1.5 million (1m) via the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to help develop its public-use Arkyd space telescope. The company's first space craft was successfully deployed from the International Space Station (ISS) last year. Another Kickstarter campaign by a group called Lunar Mission One, aiming to send a robotic spacecraft to drill deep into the rocks near the moon's south pole, received more than $1 million (716,000) in pledges in 2014. Advertisement

According to the Mayak team, the satellite reached orbit at 12:10 p.m., following the 9:36 a.m. launch.

'After the launch and orbiting Mayak unfolded sun reflector,' the firm's site claims.

However, the firm is yet to launch its iOS app to track the device, and amateur astronomers have not yet been able to spot it.

'At this point, it isn't clear yet whether Mayak has successfully deployed its reflector,' said Sky and Telescope.

'Your best bet is simply to go out and look for it.'

Leading up to the event, Russian scientists working on the Mayak CubeSat crowd-funded around $20,000 (15,400), allowing them to build and test the satellite.

Its designers say it could be used to combat space junk by using a parachute-like structure to lower the orbits of debris so they can burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

However, some astronomers have slammed the creation, which is no larger than a rugby ball, calling it a 'nonsense' project that could 'ruin' dark skies for everyone.

Called the 'Mayak' or 'Beacon', the satellite is set to outshine everything in the sky, apart from the sun, thanks to a giant reflective sheet of material.

Its the work of engineers from the University of Mechanical Engineering in Moscow.

'We fight so hard for dark skies in and around our planet,' Nick Howes, an astronomer and former deputy director of the Kielder Observatory in Northumberland, told IFLScience.

'To see this being potentially ruined by some ridiculous crowdfunded nonsense makes my heart simply despair.'

Mayak was taken up in a Soyuz 2 rocket, with help from Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.

'Russian cubestat 'Mayak' to launch Jul 14 will deploy a reflector that may be as bright as mag minus 10. Astronomers likely to be annoyed', tweeted Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Dr McDowell also noted that with telescopes scanning much of the sky each night it 'could cause problems'

Facebook user Paulonius Woodham, who says he is a teacher and student in Perth, wrote on his Facebook; 'Brightest star in our night sky? No just a useless piece of junk that they will send up to join all teh other useless junk polluting orbit'

The team is planning to place the spacecraft in a sun-synchronous orbit 370 miles (600km) above the ground.

This means it will always be in the path of sunlight, so will always be shining at different locations on Earth as it rotates.

The small spacecraft will launch a giant pyramid-shaped solar reflector in orbit.

'Russian cubestat 'Mayak' to launch Jul 14 will deploy a reflector that may be as bright as mag minus 10. Astronomers likely to be annoyed', tweeted Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

He also noted that with telescopes scanning much of the sky each night it 'could cause problems'.

The controversial satellite, which is set to be the brightest 'star' in the night sky, is due to be launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan

Facebook user Paulonius Woodham, who says he is a teacher and student in Perth, wrote on his Facebook; 'Brightest star in our night sky? No just a useless piece of junk that they will send up to join all teh other useless junk polluting orbit'.

The reflector is 170 square feet (16 square metres) in size and made of a thin polymer film 20 times thinner than human hair.

Each edge will be 2.7 meters (9ft) long, with a total surface area of 6 square meters (65 square feet).

Its designers say it could also be used to combat space junk by using a parachute-like structure to lower the orbits of debris so they can burn up in Earth's atmosphere

The Cubesat will used also a braking system to open a parachute that will catch space debris.

But the aim of the project is to promote space research in the country, and to make science and engineering more appealing to young Russians.

A previous proposal, which involved attaching a reflective panel of plastic to a cargo ship heading to the Mir space station, was designed to see if orbiting mirrors could illuminate cities or other parts of Earth by reflecting sunlight.

The launch of Mayak scheduled for 14 July and is expected to be taken up in a Soyuz 2 rocket, with help from Roscosmos, the Russian space agency

The idea was that the mirrors could extend daylight hours for farmers, for example, reports Ars Technica.

'We are sending a spacecraft into orbit that will be the brightest star in the sky, visible from any point on our planet,' project leader Alexander Shaenko, head of the modern cosmonautics course at Moscow State University of Mechanical Engineering.

'We want to show that space exploration is something exciting and interesting, but most importantly that today it is accessible to everybody who is interested.'

Students from the university are also taking part in the crowdfunded project to launch the orbital spacecraft.

The team is planning to place the spacecraft in a sun-synchronous orbit 370 miles (600km) above the ground. This means it will always be in the path of sunlight, so will always be shining at different locations on Earth as it rotates

A previous proposal, which involved attaching a reflective panel of plastic to a cargo ship heading to the Mir space station, was designed to see if orbiting mirrors could illuminate cities or other parts of Earth by reflecting sunlight. Pictured is the Myak team
Kind-hearted plane passengers chipped in to help a struggling mum who faced being thrown off an aircraft with her two children over a hand luggage row.

The mother-of-two, identified as Laura Medina, was already on board the Viva Colombia flight from Medellin to Bogota when she was told her that her hand luggage was too big and she would have to pay 25.

At first, the airline refused to take the cash as the woman had not 'raised it herself' but after shouts and protests from other passengers, they allowed it and the flight went on its way.

It is reported that the Ms Medina desperately told staff she had no money and was told she would have to exit the plane with her children.

But as revealed in footage taken from the cabin, other passengers took pity on her and made donations to cover the cost of the bag.

The flight was delayed after police intervened at one point to try and calm the situation as the mum pleaded for mercy from staff.

The captain of the plane told passengers at the time: 'The flight is going to be delayed due to a passenger who got into the plane without following the rules of the company.

This passenger (left) started collecting money from others in his hat, which the mother-of-two (right) was then able to pay the 25 fee with

The flight was delayed after police intervened at one point to try and calm the situation as the mum pleaded for mercy from staff

'If the woman does not get out of the plane or follow the rules paying the amount for the luggage she has taken abroad the plane, we cannot start the trip. I ask the woman for her co-operation so that we can continue with the flight'.

After the warning, one kindhearted passenger shouted, 'Let's do a "vaca",' which means a kind of collection.

One young man started to collect the donations by taking off his cap and within no time at all the 25 (100,000 COP) was raised.

Viva Colombia released a statement saying that the passenger was 'informed twice her luggage did not follow the rules'.

But Ms Medina hit back with a tweet saying: 'The conditions were changed three times. How can Viva Colombia give this reason when 160 other people supported us on the plane?'
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Britain's most expensive beach hut has hit the market for a whopping 280,000 despite having no mains electricity or even its own toilet.

The wooden cabin, Hut 78, is on the exclusive Mudeford Spit in Christchurch, Dorset, home to the most costly beach huts in the country.

Owners have to share communal bathroom facilities and can only sleep in the huts between March and October, but can visit any time of year.

Pricey: Britain's most expensive beach hut (pictured) has gone on the market for a whopping 280,000 despite having no running water, mains electricity or toilet

For 280,000 you could buy a four-bedroom detached house in Huddersfield or two three-bed cottages with an acre of land in the village of Maerdy, South Wales.

The sandbank can only be accessed by a 20 minute walk, a ride on a novelty land train or by ferry but its isolated position is what gives it its exclusivity and value.

The price tag for Hut 78 beats the previous highest sum for a cabin on the sandy peninsula which sold for 275,000 earlier this year.

Hut 78 is in a handy location close to the ferry jetty and the communal facilities, and looks out Christchurch Harbour.

The timber home measures 16ft 7in by 10ft 2in and comfortably sleeps four, with a double bed in a mezzanine level.

It has a living area which doubles up as a sleeping space for two, as well as a modern kitchen.

Seasonal: Beach hut owners have to share communal bathroom facilities and can only sleep in the huts between March and October

Location: The wooden cabin, Hut 78, is on the exclusive Mudeford Spit in Christchurch, Dorset, home to the most costly beach huts in the country

Kitchen: Solar panels on the roof power the fridge and lights, the cooker runs on bottled gas and there is a water tank that feeds into the kitchen sink

It has a living area, which doubles as sleeping space for two and modern kitchen.

Solar panels on the roof power the fridge and lights, the cooker runs on bottled gas and there is a water tank that feeds into the kitchen sink.

The current owners have carried out improvements in the last two years which include fitting double-glazed windows and bi-fold doors which open the hut up to a decking area and sandy beach.

As well as the eye-watering purchase price, the new owners will also have to pay annual rates to Christchurch Borough Council of about 500 and a licence fee of about 4,500 a year.

Andy Denison, from Denisons estate agents, who are handling the sale, said: 'This beach hut has gone on the market at 280,000, which means it is probably the most expensive one in the UK.'

Cosy: The timber home measures 16ft 7in by 10ft 2in and comfortably sleeps four, with a double bed in a mezzanine level

Good view: The current owners have carried out improvements in the last two years which include fitting double-glazed windows and bi-fold doors which open the hut up to a decking area and sandy beach

Ouch: As well as the eye-watering purchase price, the new owners will also have to pay annual rates to Christchurch Borough Council of about 500 and a licence fee of about 4,500 a year

The sandbank can only be accessed by a 20 minute walk, a ride on a novelty land train or by ferry but its isolated position is what gives it its exclusivity and value.

Mr Denison added: 'We are pitching it at this level because it's quite unique - it's on the front line with harbour views, which is very sought after, and it's got lovely extras put in, such as bi-fold doors.

'The owners have only had it a few years but their circumstances have changed. The hut was upgraded by the previous owner and the current owners have done quite a lot inside and all new windows and doors put in.

'The hut has a westerly aspect so the sunsets are amazing and it's just a short walk from the wash facilities and the ferry landing, which is very convenient.

'It's got quite a lot going for it and it's in a good position on the 'golden mile' where a lot of the bigger huts are.

'The Mudeford beach huts are very much in demand. We put this on the market yesterday and had people coming in wanting to go down there immediately to see it.

'People love it because it's such a tranquil way of life away from the fast-paced world we live in. Even if you only go for a weekend, you feel refreshed for the working week.

'The demand is there and the prices have crept up over the last few years. Each time one comes on the market it seems to set a new level. I don't think anybody can predict where this market is going.'
If you were given the chance to have one more night with your ex, how would you spend those hours? And what would your final words to your former beau be?

These were the questions posed to celebrities in a new video for Bravo as they arrived at The Fat Jewish's 'Pink Party' on Saturday. And their responses ranged from the sweetly sentimental to the furiously bitter.

The Bachelor's Olivia Caridi had one of the strongest reactions to the prospect of 24 hours with her ex-boyfriend, who she broke up with as she was 'sick of his BS.'

No regrets: The Bachelor's Olivia Caridi said that if she had the opportunity to spend one more night with her ex she would tell him that she did not miss him

'It was harder to leave his dog than to leave him,' she tells DailyMail.com. 'Good riddance to him.'

And when asked if she had any final words for her former love, she responds: '[Your] Instagram looks great, good for you. I don't miss you though.'

Kim Kardashian's best friend Jonathan Cheban also seems to have no regrets about calling it quits with his ex.

Pondering his final words to his former beau, he says: 'I would probably tell her not to get married to the guy she did and have a baby.

Missing out: Kim Kardashian's best friend Jonathan Cheban insists that his ex had made a mistake by not being with him

Looking back: The Real Housewives of New York's Dorinda Medley (left) and Dolores Catania from The Real Housewives of New Jersey (right) have very different reactions when asked to reflect on their past relationships

'Look what you're missing!' the reality star and 'FoodGod' adds. 'I'm on a boat ride in the middle of the city and you're stuck at home with a new baby.'

Instagram personality The Fat Jewish seems a little reluctant to spend one more night with his ex, revealing that they had tried to be friends, but 'it's absolutely not happening.'

In contrast, The Real Housewives of New York's Dorinda Medley only has nice things to say about her ex, who she first met when he was 'playing a saxophone in his dorm room.'

'I would be so happy to see him,' she insists. 'I would just want to catch up and reminisce. I don't really have any hard feelings about my ex. It was a great experience.'

Better apart: Instagram personality The Fat Jewish seems a little reluctant to spend one more night with his ex, revealing that they had tried to be friends, but 'it's absolutely not happening'

Happy memories: Nickelodeon's Jack Griffo has nothing negative to say about his ex, describing their relationship as 'kind of perfect'

But Dolores Catania from the Real Housewives of New Jersey is not so forgiving about her failed relationship with her ex-husband, which ended explosively.

'No man can cheat on me and get away with it,' she insists. 'That ship has sailed... just no.'

At the other end of the spectrum, Nickelodeon's Jack Griffo seems to have nothing negative to say about his former love, describing their relationship as 'kind of perfect.'

He adds: 'My last words would be: Peace!'

How would YOU spend one final night with your ex? See how this situation plays out in reality when former lovers are given the opportunity to spend 24 hours together on A Night With My Ex premiering Tuesday July 18 @10/9c, only on Bravo.
It's no surprise that Amy Adams couldn't stop smiling.

On Tuesday, the actress was honored with the Giffoni Experience Award while attending day five of the 2017 Giffoni Film Festival in Italy.

The guest of honor looked adorable in her floral-patterned blue, sleeveless dress.

Beauty in blue: Amy Adams donned a sleeveless, gradient dress with a floral pattern to attend day five of the 2017 Giffoni Film Festival

The colorful garment featured a black, floral pattern over a blue, gradient color scheme that got darker from top to bottom.

The sleeveless frock flaunted the 42-year-old's toned arms, while the knee-length hem provided a good glimpse of her lean legs.

Her slender stems were further accentuated by the black, strappy stilettos on her feet.

Adorable actress: The 42-year-old was all smiles when she arrived at the Italian film festival

Amy could hardly contain her excitement as she arrived at the event in Giffoni Valle Piana.

The red-head wore her long locks off to one side, letting her big, beautiful curls flow past her right shoulder.

The Arrival alum kept her accessories to a minimum, and didn't over-do her makeup.

Precious pictures: The actress posed for photos with the fans eagerly waiting to see her

Faithful to followers: The red-head signed autographs and portraits outside the event

Around her eyes, the Oscar nominee donned only a tiny bit of eyeliner and mascara, as well as a pale, pink pout.

During her arrival, the beauty couldn't help but stop and pose for sweet selfies with fans.

She also took the time to sign portraits of herself for her faithful followers.

Total sweetheart: The Arrival alum won over the jurors after tearing up while talking about how the people of Italy made her feel 'at home'

Excited honoree: Amy was honored with the Giffoni Experience Award

At the event, Amy was honored with the Giffoni Experience Award at the 2017 festival.

The star enchanted the jurors while tearing up and gushing about the European nation.

'I beg your pardon, but my daughter is sitting in the front row and has been trying to make me laugh in every possible way. To be honest, I called her Aviana after your amazing country, the place where I was born and I still feel at home,' she emotionally explained.

'People open the doors of their houses here, they invite you for dinner even if you dont know them very well, but you dont feel uncomfortable when accepting. This is the reason why I had been looking forward to coming to Giffoni and I cant wait to be back soon,' she continued.
As Richie Cunningham he was not above the occasion bout of teasing.

And it seems old habits die hard for Ron Howard after he sneakily shared the first snap of Donald Glover as a young Lando Calrissian on the set of the Han Solo spinoff film via social media on Tuesday.

The director, who has been tasked with saving the disastrous production, uploaded to Instagram a snap of himself working on the set of the latest movie from Disney's Star Wars factory production line.

Look here bucko: Cheeky Ron Howard nonchalantly teased the first snap of Donald Glover as young Lando on the set of the Han Solo spinoff movie on Tuesday

Playing the innocent, the 63-year-old Happy Days legend said: 'Lining up a shot today from my director's monitor.'

But on closer inspection the picture on the monitor clearly shows young Donald, 33, sitting with his head bowed in full Lando Calrissian regalia.

And it seems he may have had a falling out with his best friend Han, as he looks rather despondent in the image.

It is the latest in a series of teasing snaps from the filmmaker, as he has also shared a picture of Chewbacca and of Lando's wardrobe.

Lookalikes? Despondent Donald looks far from the dashing Lando portrayed by Billy Dee Williams in the Star Wars saga

Leaving them hanging by a thread: He previously shared a teasing glimpse of Lando's outfits

Cloaked in flamboyance: Billy Dee was something of an intergalactic dandy in the films

Ron took over the reins of the film after the original directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord were unceremoniously booted from the high-profile job after falling out with producer Kathleen Kennedy, the incumbent president of Lucasfilm.

The not-so-dynamic duo, the brains behind comedy films The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street, are said to have been trying to inject more humour into proceedings.

In a move which is said to have infuriated writer and producer Lawrence Kasdan, who also penned The Empire Strikes Back, they were supposedly encouraging improvisation on the set.

Putting a positive spin on things, they said in a statement following their sacking: 'Unfortunately, our vision and process werent aligned with our partners on this project.

He's at it again: And Chewbacca was loitering in the background in one of his other snaps

Going Solo: Han and Lando's younger incarnations will feature in the latest in Disney's Star Wars factory production line

'We normally arent fans of the phrase "creative differences" but for once this cliche is true.

'We are really proud of the amazing and world-class work of our cast and crew.'

For their part, the crew are said to have cheered with joy when they learned Oscar-winner Ron was taking over.

He has a string of well-received hits on his resume, including his Oscar-winning work A Beautiful Mind.

However his most recent films - including The Dilemma, In The Heart Of The Sea and Inferno have been critically panned.

Fired: Christopher Miller and Phil Lord were given the sack mid-way through production
She announced her engagement to policeman Sean Ogilvy in April.

And The Footy Show's Erin Molan, 33, couldn't hide her affection for her man when she took to Instagram with a snap of him on Tuesday night as they enjoyed a pub date in Toowoomba, Queensland.

Sharing a photo of Sean sitting at a bistro table, Erin gushed: 'My handsome man', before adding the sly aside: '(cue all his mates and colleagues to screen shot and send to him with derogatory commentary).'

'Cue the derogatory commentary!' Footy Show's Erin Molan takes a jab at policeman fiance Sean Ogilvy's friends as she enjoyed a pub date with her man on Tuesday night

The pair are certainly not shy when it comes to showcasing their affection.

Erin also shared a tribute to her husband-to-be in her Instagram Story on Tuesday night, posting a snap of the pair posing in an intimate embrace.

Sean was seen beaming in the black-and-white photo, wrapping one arm protectively around his partner.

She's smitten! Erin also packed on the PDA with Sean in her latest Instagram story

That's cheeky! Last week, the soon-to-be married couple could not keep their hands off each other, with Sean touching Erin's derriere, in a snap shared to Instagram

Just last week, the soon-to-be married couple could not keep their hands off each other, in a snap shared to Instagram.

Perched on Sean's lap, the blonde beauty placed an arm around her betrothed's neck as she smiled for the camera.

Sean affectionately placed one hand on Erin's knee, affectionately touching her derriere with the other.

Engaged: Sean proposed to Erin in April with a diamond sparkler reportedly worth $100,000

Sean proposed in April with a personalised House of K'dor ring worth $100,000.

The stunning piece of jewellery certainly doesn't lack any sparkle, consisting of a 'rare 2.2carat oval cut' centre stone surrounded by three carats of smaller diamonds set upon a white gold band.

Erin spoke of the 'very blingy' piece of jewellery just days later on radio show WSFM101.7 Jonesy & Amanda.

'He's done so well. I seriously can't stop looking at it,' she told co-hosts Brendan 'Jonesy' Jones and Amanda Keller.

Prized bling: Erin spoke of the 'very blingy' piece of jewellery just days later on radio show WSFM101.7 Jonesy & Amanda: 'He's done so well. I seriously can't stop looking at it,' she told co-hosts Brendan 'Jonesy' Jones and Amanda Keller

The Canberra-born journalist also revealed her husband-to-be added a very personal touch by inscribing his initials on the inside.

'There's little S's on the inside for Sean, so it means if it doesn't work out between us, I can't use it for anyone else,' Erin joked.

The Channel Nine star has previously spoke about plans to have children, telling TV WEEK recently: 'I definitely want kids. I have beautiful nieces and nephews.'
They welcomed their second child in March.

But Benedict Cumberbatch, 40, and Sophie Hunter, 39, were enjoying some time away from their brood as they headed on a date night in London on Tuesday.

Cuddled up close to each other, the pair looked smitten as they stepped out hand in hand on their first outing since welcoming the child.

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Cute couple: Benedict Cumberbatch, 40, and Sophie Hunter, 39, were enjoying some time away from their brood as they headed on a date night in London on Tuesday

Highlighting her stunning post-baby physique, the theatre director donned a little black dress which clung to her svelte figure.

Boosting her modelesque frame, Sophie donned a par of lace up heels and clutched a gold jacket in her arms.

Benedict looked dapper for the outing, teaming a striped grey shirt with skinny navy jeans and a plain white top.

Perfect pair: Cuddled up close to each other, the pair looked smitten as they stepped out hand in hand on their first outing since welcoming the child

Benedict and Sophie welcomed their second child, baby Hal, four months ago. The pair are also parents to sons, Christopher, two.

The pair have kept a low-profile since the birth, amid claims they chose to name their newborn after a Shakespearean hero.

Hal was the nickname Henry V had before he became the hero of Agincourt.

Legs eleven: Highlighting her stunning post-baby physique, the theatre director donned a little black dress which clung to her svelte figure

But in choosing the name, Benedict could also be acknowledging his affection for fellow screen star Tom Hiddleston.

The pair starred together in 2012 in The Hollow Crown, an amalgamation of Shakespeares history plays in which Benedict played Richard III and Tom took the role of Hal.

They have been close pals ever since meeting on the set of Steven Spielbergs film War Horse in 2010.
It's the business reality show that sees everyday people pitch what they deem investment-worthy ideas.

But the Shark Tank panel were left speechless, after a bizarre concept by Kim Macrae on Tuesday night's episode.

'That felt really awkward....I was really disturbed by that,' entrepreneur Steve Baxter shared on-camera.

'That was awkward and disturbing': Shark Tank's Steve Baxter (pictured) was left speechless over a BIZARRE pitch on Tuesday night's program, involving a children's learning program and orange sticks

'That felt really awkward. It felt confining, it felt uncomfortable, and I was really disturbed by that,' Steve told Kim, after his bizarre pitch.

Kim, the creator and director of iKiFit, put forward his idea of a Wiggles-style learning program for children, involving song and dance, that he hopes to deliver to classrooms nationwide.

In order to convince the judging panel, Kim brought along a group of children for a live demonstration.

Pitch: Kim Macrae (pictured), the creator and director of iKiFit, put forward his idea of a Wiggles-style learning program for children, involving song and dance, that he hopes to deliver to classrooms nationwide

In action: In order to convince the judging panel, Kim brought along a group of children for a live demonstration

When asked what problem he was trying to fix, the contestant responded while moving the stick around: '(to) do all those movements our ancestors did - chopping, rowing, kayaking, surfing.'

He then added rather oddly: 'for a long long time, education institutions haven't had clear rules or processes to manage behaviour.'

Steve and the other members of the panel were left dumbfounded, especially with Kim's extravagant asking price of $250,000 for just a 10 per cent stake of the company.

Reasoning: When asked what problem he was trying to fix, the contestant responded while moving the stick around: '(to) do all those movements our ancestors did - chopping, rowing, kayaking, surfing'

Kim then added rather oddly: 'for a long long time, education institutions haven't had clear rules or processes to manage behaviour'

'I'm glad you're happy, because that's an amazing amount of money for something that's got no traction and probably no prospect of traction,' Steve offered.

Boost Juice founder Janine Allis also stated: 'Honestly, if he's invested $800,000 and he's made $50,000 back, I hope he gives up TODAY.'

Social media users were quick to comment on Twitter over Kim's bizarre proposal.

Not sold: The judges were confused and far from impressed after hearing Kim's pitch

Vocal: Boost Juice founder Janine Allis (pictured) stated: 'Honestly, if he's invested $800,000 and he's made $50,000 back, I hope he gives up TODAY'

Online: Social media users were quick to comment on Twitter over Kim's bizarre proposal, with one Tweeting: 'One does not need an orange stick to have an iKiFit experience'

'One does not need an orange stick to have an iKiFit experience,' wrote one, while another posted: 'For a business dependent upon training and presentation this pitch is very poor'.

While Studio 10 co-host Joe Hildebrand also had his say, Tweeting: 'As far as I can tell this guy wants $250,000 for 10 per cent of a stick'.

The reality series, aired on Network Ten, sees the 'Sharks', worth more than $1 billion collectively, use their skills to take inventions presented to them, and turn them into unique products and services.

The sharks, including Steve, Janine, Dr. Glen Richards, Andrew Banks and Naomi Simson, are not shy of debating over what they feel will generate the most revenue, and what will not.

Another posted: 'For a business dependent upon training and presentation this pitch is very poor'

Household name: While Studio 10 co-host Joe Hildebrand also had his say, Tweeting: 'As far as I can tell this guy wants $250,000 for 10 per cent of a stick'
She was rumoured to have enjoyed a series of romantic dates with Prince Harry last summer.

And Sarah Ann Macklin ensured she stayed in the limelight on Tuesday night, as she attended Quaglino's Q Legends launch party at Quaglino's in London.

The 27-year-old model showcased her tanned legs in a showstopping orange gown with a feathered bodice at the bash.

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Looking good: Sarah Ann Macklin ensured she stayed in the limelight on Tuesday night, as she attended Quaglino's Q Legends launch party at Quaglino's in London

The brunette beauty added height to her statuesque frame with a pair of black cross-strap heels.

She styled her raven tresses in glossy waves and framed her dark eyes with lashings of mascara and smokey shadow.

Sarah, who is still studying for a BSc in Human Nutrition, is best known for her modelling work with British brand Burberry.

Looking good: The 27-year-old model showcased her tanned legs in a showstopping orange gown with a feathered bodice at the bash

Chic: The brunette beauty added height to her statuesque frame with a pair of black cross-strap heels

Preened to perfection: She styled her raven tresses in glossy waves and framed her dark eyes with lashings of mascara and smokey shadow

Double trouble: She posed alongside friend Rosanna Falconer at the bash

Prince Harry was rumoured to have enjoyed a series of dates with Burberry model Sarah Ann in June and July last year.

Friends of Miss Macklin  who looks uncannily like the American actress  revealed that Harry, 32, met the model at a private party.

He reportedly took her number and bombarded her with texts after their meeting.

Taking centre-stage: Laura Hamilton looked chic in a white Bardot top and red midi skirt

Legs for days: Olivia Inge (L) and Kat Shoob both opted for thigh-grazing dresses on the night

Sarah previously dated Marks and Spencer underwear model David Gandy, who has shared high profile relationships with The Saturdays' Mollie King and stage and screen actress Samantha Barks.

Sources claimed that Harrys interest in Sarah brought on a jealous reaction from her chiselled ex David.

A source close to the model said: Their fling is an open secret among her friends.

David knew that Harry was pursuing her and tried to get her back.

'At one point she had the countrys most famous male model and a prince vying for her affection, and the novelty was not lost on her.'
She's known for her turn as girl next door Sally Fletcher.

But Kate Ritchie is shedding her Home And Away persona, trading her Summer Bay bikini for slinky underwear.

The 38-year-old mother of one has stripped down for a sizzling lingerie shoot for underwear brand Jockey.

That's one hot mama! Former Home and Away star Kate Ritchie, 38, sizzles in lingerie shoot for underwear brand Jockey

Photos from the Australian brand's latest campaign show the actress turned radio host flaunting her curves in a feminine camisole and matching knickers.

In one shot Kate lies across a couch, while another still shows the Logie winner kneeling on a bed.

Other photos show the soap star in a patterned slip and pajamas as she lounges around a sun-drenched home.

Beach babe: Photos from the Australian brand's latest campaign show the actress turned radio host flaunting her curves in a feminine camisole and matching knickers

Lazy morning? Another photo show the soap star in a patterned slip as she lazes in a sun-drenched home

Kate has been named ambassador of the SS17 Jockey Weekender range of loungewear and underwear.

In a statement, the Nova radio host said wearing the range made her 'look good and feel good'.

'The concept behind the Weekender range really reflects my lifestyle. My weekdays are full and busy and see me heading into the studio for our radio show each afternoon,' Kate added.

New gig: Kate has been named ambassador of the SS17 Jockey Weekender range of loungewear and underwear

'I dont think Im alone when I say I look forward to the weekends so when they arrive I most enjoy spending time with my family and friends at home, entertaining my daughter and catching up on life.'

In 2010 Kate married former NRL player player Stuart Webb, the couple welcoming daughter Mae in 2014.

After starring as Sally Fletcher on Home and Away from 1988 to 2008, Kate has since carved out a successful career for herself as a drive time radio host on Nova.
Roxy Jacenko has sparked a debate among her Instagram followers after revealing intravenous vitamin infusions are part of her 'monthly health plan'.

On Tuesday, the 37-year-old PR queen shared a photo of herself with her arm hooked up to an IV drip at Cosmos Clinic in Double Bay, Sydney.

While many of Roxy's fans were supportive of the health treatment, or curious about its possible benefits, others claimed 'vitamins should come from food'.

Debate: Roxy Jacenko has sparked a debate among her Instagram followers after revealing intravenous vitamin infusions are part of her 'monthly health plan'

A follower wrote, 'Be careful promoting something you aren't qualified to!' before posting a link to a news article criticising vitamin drips.

Roxy swiftly responded: 'What I am doing is part of my monthly health plan - not a promotion.'

Other critical comments included, 'Eat some fruit instead' and, 'Sends the wrong message. Vitamins should come from food'.

Critic: A fan wrote, 'Be careful promoting something you aren't qualified to!' before posting a link to a news article criticising vitamin drips. Pictured: Roxy and husband Oliver Curtis

Later, Roxy wrote a comment agreeing with a follower's claim that vitamin infusions 'may benefit after a cancer diagnosis'.

The Sweaty Betty PR founder was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, just weeks after her husband Oliver Curtis was jailed for insider trading.

Roxy told Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday: 'I have the infusions monthly with Dr Joseph Ajaka at Cosmos Clinic post my radiation treatment for breast cancer this time last year.

'This works for me': Roxy told Daily Mail Australia, 'I have the infusions monthly with Dr Joseph Ajaka at Cosmos Clinic post my radiation treatment for breast cancer this time last year'

'It is very common amongst people who have or have had cancer  perhaps not talked about!'

She continued: 'Treatment is up to the individual and one must do what is right for them, this works for me as an active mother-of-two, running three companies.'

Vitamin infusions are said to help combat the effects of fatigue, which is associated with cancer and chemotherapy treatment, and to boost the immune system.

Good times! It has been a busy few weeks for Roxy, after her husband Oliver Curtis 'proposed' for a second time on Friday with a diamond ring estimated to cost up to $450,000

It has been a busy few weeks for Roxy, after her husband Oliver 'proposed' for a second time on Friday with a diamond ring estimated to cost up to $450,000.

The former investment banker was released from Cooma Correctional Centre last month on a good behaviour bond after serving a year behind bars.

While there were rumours the married couple had split last year, it appears their relationship is now back on track.
The KIIS FM radio host has been revisiting her romantic encounters with photographer husband Lee Henderson by reading her diary on air.

And on Wednesday, Jackie 'O' Henderson revealed how their first dinner date unfolded at Sydney's Chicane bar.

Detailing a night out in 2000, the entry read: 'Wow, he certainly stood out in the crowd, he was the most gorgeous looking man I'd ever seen.'

'He certainly stood out in the crowd!' KIIS FM's Jackie 'O' Henderson details first date with husband Lee Henderson on air on Wednesday, as co-host Kyle Sandilands reads from a diary entry she wrote at 24

Jackie, who was 24 at the time, claimed she initially worried she's been 'stood up', but was pleasantly surprised when Lee appeared 'out of thin air' to meet her.

'He was taller than I remembered, his skin was tanned and perfectly smooth and glowing. He wore a simple black shirt with a couple of buttons popped, he had the most beautiful smelling aftershave that i'd ever ever smelt,' co-host Kyle Sandilands, 46, read the entry.

Jackie chimed in to confirm the diary was accurate: 'He definitely stood out! He was the best looking man in the room.'

'He's a lot smarter than me, which was unusual': Shock jock Kyle Sandilands mocked Jackie's dramatic retelling in her diary entry

The pair sat down and discussed their travels over a glass of wine, to which Jackie was thoroughly impressed by Lee's adventurous overseas trips.

'I was amazed at how intelligent he was, he's a lot smarter than me, which was unusual,' Kyle laughed as he continued

'He then kissed me, he's such a beautiful kisser, so gentle, soft and slow, unlike so many other men,' Kyle said, before teasing the rest of the story for Thursday's show.

'He's such a beautiful kisser, so gentle, soft and slow...' Kyle recalled their kiss on their first date, before Kyle teasing the rest of the story for Thursday's show

Kyle previously read Jackie's diary, revealing she likened Lee to a 'hot Hugh Grant' when they first met.

Her first encounter with husband Lee was at a club, while Jackie was out with 'Tash and Vanessa Amorosi' in Sydney.

'I kept seeing Lee (at a club) and we got to talking. We got on really well,' the shock jock read.

'We talked all night and there were some really honest moments with each other. He was a real gentleman,' she said.

It came weeks after Jackie confessed to making Lee wait nearly a month to have sex when they first started dating.

The pair now share daughter Catalina Mae, who is six years old.

Family life: The pair now share daughter Catalina Mae, who is six years old
She intricately documents her life on social media.

And Scarlett Moffatt's enthusiasm for hitting the keyboard sparked outrage on Tuesday evening as she took to Twitter to reveal she was in a hotel with a resounding fire alarm blaring yet opted to stay in bed.

The 26-year-old Gogglebox star sparked huge concern among her 550,000 followers as users flocked the microblogging site to urge her to depart the building although she soon insisted she was in fact safe.

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Terror: Scarlett Moffatt's enthusiasm for hitting the keyboard sparked outrage on Tuesday evening as she took to Twitter to reveal she was in a hotel with a resounding fire alarm blaring yet opted to stay in bed

Scarlett soared to fame on MTV's now-defunct reality show Beauty School Cop Outs in which she joined a legion of aspiring beauty therapists, including Jeremy McConnell, in learning the ropes of the cosmetics industry.

Following her appearance on the short-lived show she later scooped a role on Gogglebox before being crowned Queen of the Jungle in the 2016 series of I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here and later releasing a fitness DVD.

With her masses of adoring followers, it is plain to see how Scarlett could spark concern with any note as illustrated when she revealed she was remaining in bed while a fire alarm sounded in her hotel.

She penned a tweet reading: 'When the fire alarm in your hotels been going off for half hour and is still going and you've got to be up early.'

Worries: The 26-year-old Gogglebox star sparked huge concern among her 550,000 followers as users flocked the microblogging site to urge her to depart the building although she soon insisted she was in fact safe

Scarlett was soon met with concern, as her fans wrote: 'Ehhh leave the building... Have you checked... That means run.... You sure it's not a warning honey xx'

Quick to calm down her followers, she quickly wrote: 'By the way I've obviously checked if we need to evacuate, we've been told it's all fine. I'm just super tired'.

Scarlett's fire drama comes after she made her first public appearance with ex Luke Crodden, 28, since getting back together four months after they initially parted ways.

Sharing the candid moment on Instagram, the reality star grinned from ear-to-ear as she posed for a number of snaps with her former hairdresser flame - who she split with in February.

Back together? Scarlett's fire drama comes after she made her first public appearance with ex Luke Crodden, 28, since getting back together four months after they initially parted ways

Clad in a chic grey piece suit, she teamed her sensational look with a black vest top while she carried her godson on her hip.

She let her ombre locks cascade down her shoulders in a soft curl while beaming alongside her suit-wearing ex.

In jovial spirits, she captioned the loved-up collage on her social media: 'Memories were made this weekend #christening #godson #love'.

Their defiant display comes after it was reported that they had rekindled their romance just four months after they initially parted ways.

Hotting up! Their defiant display comes after it was reported that they had rekindled their romance just four months after they initially parted ways

At the time, the I'm A Celebrity winner was said to be 'sad' about the break up, having only moved in together in North London weeks beforehand.

Yet, according to The Sun in June, the reality-star-turned-presenter and her hairdresser beau are giving their relationship another go with Luke moving into her new abode.

A source said: 'Scarlett and Luke are giving it another go. Her life was manic after the jungle and she wanted to focus on her work. The following months were critical for her career, which is why she needed space from Luke.

Adding: 'Now that Scarlett is more settled, she and Luke have been seeing a lot more of each other and have decided to make it official.'

Having moved to Camden from Newcastle before Christmas, the couple looked to be in a good place with Scarlett taking Luke to the National Television Awards where she was working as a backstage presenter in January.

'Giving it another go': Yet, according to The Sun, the reality-star-turned-presenter and her hairdresser beau are giving their relationship another go with Luke moving into her new abode

Although it was reported at the time that the Gogglebox star had been so busy following her return from the jungle, that she and Luke have been struggling to spend time together and now needed to focus on her career.

The TV star had signed up to be a co-presenter alongside Ant & Dec for their show Saturday Night Takeaway and was also set host a reboot of Channel Four dating show Streetmate.

An insider told the paper: 'At the moment she needs to concentrate on her career. After all, shes got plenty of time to settle down in the future'.

The split will come as a surprise to fans of the reality star, with Scarlett previously making no secret of the fact she felt ready to make a long term commitment to her beau.

In happier times: The I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! winner revealed she and Luke had made plans for the future, and even discussed rings

Together: Scarlett and Luke, pictured together in December, recently moved out of her native Newcastle and to London

Insta-official: Scarlett regularly posted images of she and her beau on social media

'My friend works at a jewellers and he invited me over. I said, "While Im here, I might as well try some rings on"', she told The Mirror last November before heading to the Australian jungle for I'm A Celeb.

'I pointed out which one I liked and what my ring size is, just so Luke knows which one to get in the future. If that isnt a hint, I dont know what is.'

The couple even confided to OK! magazine in December that they had discussed names for their future children.

'Weve had a baby name chat,' she told the publication, with Luke revealing she wanted to call their daughter Aurora.
Diane Kruger was spotted Facetiming boyfriend Norman Reedus on Tuesday as the two work on projects thousands of miles apart.

The blonde beauty, 41, is in Winnipeg, Canada, filming JT Leroy, while her actor beau, 48, is currently on the set of The Walking Dead in Atlanta, Georgia.

Kruger smiled as she chatted away happily with Reedus.

Catching up: Diane Kruger was spotted Facetiming boyfriend Norman Reedus on Tuesday as the two work on projects thousands of miles apart

The German-born actress was dressed in a stripy short-sleeved top and distressed jeans tucked into brown lace-up boots.

Her bobbed blonde hair was styled in a tousled look and tucked back behind one ear.

The animated conversation continued for some time with Kruger propping herself up on a tall traffic bollard as she enjoyed the video hook up.

Long distance romance: The blonde beauty, 41, is in Winnipeg, Canada, filming JT Leroy, while her actor beau, 48, is currently on the set of The Walking Dead in Atlanta, Georgia

Online: The German-born actress was dressed in a stripy short-sleeved top and distressed jeans tucked into brown lace-up boots. Her bobbed blonde hair was styled in a tousled look

The couple went public with their romance back in March as they enjoyed a boozy night out together in New York.

It came eight months after Kruger split from lover of a decade Joshua Jackson.

The pair met while filming the 2015 film, Sky, which also starred Jackson.

Reedus shares a son Mingus, 16, with former flame supermodel Helena Christensen.
He's Roxy Jacenko's adorable three-year-old son.

And Hunter Curtis looked to have enjoyed quality time with his elder sister Pixie, five, in Sydney's exclusive suburb of Rose Bay on Tuesday.

A snap of Pixie sipping a hot beverage was captioned to Instagram: 'Coffee date with my sister'.

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Family time: Roxy Jacenko's adorable son Hunter Curtis (pictured), three, enjoyed a coffee date with sister Pixie, five, in Sydney on Tuesday, according to a snap shared to Instagram

Tagging the location as Sonoma Bakery in Rose Bay, the pic caption read: 'Coffee date with my sister today,' alongside a love heart emoji.

The photo saw Pixie beaming at the camera, as she enjoyed a hot beverage, while seated in the popular eatery.

Hunter's outing looked to be a fun affair, with pencils and colouring-in templates splayed across the table.

Precious: Tagging the location as Sonoma Bakery in Rose Bay, the photo of Pixie (pictured) was captioned: 'Coffee date with my sister today,' alongside a love heart emoji

He's the boss! The post came shortly after Hunter showed off his rather cute business attire, sporting a suit, tie, mini briefcase and a giant inflatable phone

The post came shortly after Hunter showed off his rather cute business attire.

A photo shared to Roxy's Instagram account on Tuesday saw the youngster sporting a suit and tie, matched with a mini briefcase and a giant inflatable phone.

Roxy, 37, captioned the post: 'Kid works hard for the money,' adding a money bag emoji, while spruiking the release of Boss Baby film on DVD and Blu Ray.

Fans of the fashionable kid commented on the post, complimenting his sleek ensemble.

Too cute! His mother PR queen Roxy Jacenko, 37, took to Instagram to share several snaps of Hunter in his powerful look

Lifestyle: Fans of the fashionable kid commented on his post, complimenting his sleek ensemble, with one wring: 'That is way too cute!'

One wrote: 'That is way too cute!' while another added: 'Handsome little boss'.

This isn't the first time Hunter has appeared to take on a boss role, with Roxy sharing a video of the tot in a 'board meeting' with Pixie.

Hunter, dressed in a red puffer jacket, sat in front of his sister and offered the camera a huge grin.

Meanwhile Pixie, dressed in a white top and pink bow headband, was just as giggly.

Baby whisperer: Hunter was recently pictured cradling a newborn, with Roxy jokingly offering her son's services with the caption: 'Babysitting services now available'
Indonesia Table of Contents The Japanese occupied the archipelago in order, like their Portuguese and Dutch predecessors, to secure its rich natural resources. Japan's invasion of North China, which had begun in July 1937, by the end of the decade had become bogged down in the face of stubborn Chinese resistance. To feed Japan's war machine, large amounts of petroleum, scrap iron, and other raw materials had to be imported from foreign sources. Most oil--about 55 percent--came from the United States, but Indonesia supplied a critical 25 percent. From Tokyo's perspective, the increasingly critical attitude of the "ABCD powers" (America, Britain, China, and the Dutch) toward Japan's invasion of China reflected their desire to throttle its legitimate aspirations in Asia. German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940 led to Japan's demand that the Netherlands Indies government supply it with fixed quantities of vital natural resources, especially oil. Further demands were made for some form of economic and financial integration of the Indies with Japan. Negotiations continued through mid-1941. The Indies government, realizing its extremely weak position, played for time. But in summer 1941, it followed the United States in freezing Japanese assets and imposing an embargo on oil and other exports. Because Japan could not continue its China war without these resources, the military-dominated government in Tokyo gave assent to an "advance south" policy. French Indochina was already effectively under Japanese control. A nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in April 1941 freed Japan to wage war against the United States and the European colonial powers. The Japanese experienced spectacular early victories in the Southeast Asian war. Singapore, Britain's fortress in the east, fell on February 15, 1941, despite British numerical superiority and the strength of its seaward defenses. The Battle of the Java Sea resulted in the Japanese defeat of a combined British, Dutch, Australian, and United States fleet. On March 9, 1942, the Netherlands Indies government surrendered without offering resistance on land. Although their motives were largely acquisitive, the Japanese justified their occupation in terms of Japan's role as, in the words of a 1942 slogan, "The leader of Asia, the protector of Asia, the light of Asia." Tokyo's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, encompassing both Northeast and Southeast Asia, with Japan as the focal point, was to be a nonexploitative economic and cultural community of Asians. Given Indonesian resentment of Dutch rule, this approach was appealing and harmonized remarkably well with local legends that a two-century-long non-Javanese rule would be followed by era of peace and prosperity. The Japanese divided the Indies into three jurisdictions: Java and Madura were placed under the control of the Sixteenth Army; Sumatra, for a time, joined with Malaya under the Twenty-fifth Army; and the eastern archipelago was placed under naval command. In Sumatra and the east, the overriding concern of the occupiers was maintenance of law and order and extraction of needed resources. Java's economic value with respect to the war effort lay in its huge labor force and relatively developed infrastructure. The Sixteenth Army was tolerant, within limits, of political activities carried out by nationalists and Muslims. This tolerance grew as the momentum of Japanese expansion was halted in mid-1942 and the Allies began counteroffensives. In the closing months of the war, Japanese commanders promoted the independence movement as a means of frustrating an Allied reoccupation. The occupation was not gentle. Japanese troops often acted harshly against local populations. The Japanese military police were especially feared. Food and other vital necessities were confiscated by the occupiers, causing widespread misery and starvation by the end of the war. The worst abuse, however, was the forced mobilization of some 4 million--although some estimates are as high as 10 million--romusha (manual laborers), most of whom were put to work on economic development and defense construction projects in Java. About 270,000 romusha were sent to the Outer Islands and Japanese-held territories in Southeast Asia, where they joined other Asians in performing wartime construction projects. At the end of the war, only 52,000 were repatriated to Java. The Japanese occupation was a watershed in Indonesian history. It shattered the myth of Dutch superiority, as Batavia gave up its empire without a fight. There was little resistance as Japanese forces fanned out through the islands to occupy former centers of Dutch power. The relatively tolerant policies of the Sixteenth Army on Java also confirmed the island's leading role in Indonesian national life after 1945: Java was far more developed politically and militarily than the other islands. In addition, there were profound cultural implications from the Japanese invasion of Java. In administration, business, and cultural life, the Dutch language was discarded in favor of Malay and Japanese. Committees were organized to standardize Bahasa Indonesia and make it a truly national language. Modern Indonesian literature, which got its start with language unification efforts in 1928 and underwent considerable development before the war, received further impetus under Japanese auspices. Revolutionary (or traditional) Indonesian themes were employed in drama, films, and art, and hated symbols of Dutch imperial control were swept away. For example, the Japanese allowed a huge rally in Batavia (renamed Jakarta) to celebrate by tearing down a statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the seventeenthcentury governor general. Although the occupiers propagated the message of Japanese leadership of Asia, they did not attempt, as they did in their Korean colony, to coercively promote Japanese culture on a large scale. According to historian Anthony Reid, the occupiers believed that Indonesians, as fellow Asians, were essentially like themselves but had been corrupted by three centuries of Western colonialism. What was needed was a dose of Japanese-style seishin (spirit; semangat in Indonesian). Many members of the elite responded positively to an inculcation of samurai values. The most significant legacy of the occupation, however, was the opportunities it gave for Javanese and other Indonesians to participate in politics, administration, and the military. Soon after the Dutch surrender, European officials, businessmen, military personnel, and others, totaling around 170,000, were interned (the harsh conditions of their confinement caused a high death rate, at least in camps for male military prisoners, which embittered Dutch-Japanese relations even in the early 1990s). While Japanese military officers occupied the highest posts, the personnel vacuum on the lower levels was filled with Indonesians. Like the Dutch, however, the Japanese relied on local indigenous elites, such as the priyayi on Java and the Acehnese uleebalang, to administer the countryside. Because of the harshly exploitative Japanese policies in the closing years of the war, after the Japanese surrender collaborators in some areas were killed in a wave of local resentment. Sukarno and Hatta agreed in 1942 to cooperate with the Japanese, as this seemed to be the best opportunity to secure independence. The occupiers were particularly impressed by Sukarno's mass following, and he became increasingly valuable to them as the need to mobilize the population for the war effort grew between 1943 and 1945. His reputation, however, was tarnished by his role in recruiting romusha. Japanese attempts to coopt Muslims met with limited success. Muslim leaders opposed the practice of bowing toward the emperor (a divine ruler in Japanese official mythology) in Tokyo as a form of idolatry and refused to declare Japan's war against the Allies a "holy war" because both sides were nonbelievers. In October 1943, however, the Japanese organized the Consultative Council of Indonesian Muslims (Masyumi), designed to create a united front of orthodox and modernist believers. Nahdatul Ulama was given a prominent role in Masyumi, as were a large number of kyai (religious leaders), whom the Dutch had largely ignored, who were brought to Jakarta for training and indoctrination. As the fortunes of war turned, the occupiers began organizing Indonesians into military and paramilitary units whose numbers were added by the Japanese to romusha statistics. These included the heiho (auxiliaries), paramilitary units recruited by the Japanese in mid-1943, and the Defenders of the Fatherland (Peta) in 1943. Peta was a military force designed to assist the Japanese forces by forestalling the initial Allied invasion. By the end of the war, it had 37,000 men in Java and 20,000 in Sumatra (where it was commonly known by the Japanese name Giyugun). In December 1944, a Muslim armed force, the Army of God, or Barisan Hizbullah, was attached to Masyumi. Custom Search Source: U.S. Library of Congress
She plays a seductive temptress in The Philanthropist, a West End comedy about the university bubble in the Seventies.

And Lily Cole couldn't help stealing the limelight offstage on Tuesday night, as she left the Trafalgar Studios in London.

The 29-year-old model and actress flaunted her coltish legs in a pair of minuscule pinstripe shorts and a cheeky motif T-shirt.

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Looking good: Lily Cole stole the limelight offstage too, as she left the Trafalgar Studios in London on Tuesday night

The red-haired beauty lent a dose of sports-luxe to her look with a pair of glittery trainers and black socks.

She wore her trademark auburn-hued tresses in a sleek middle-parting and plumped her pout with a slick of scarlet lipstick.

Her new show The Philanthropist tells the story of academics living in a university bubble while the world is in trouble.

Legs for days: The 29-year-old model and actress flaunted her coltish legs in a pair of minuscule pinstripe shorts and a cheeky slogan T-shirt.

Killer footwear: The red-haired beauty lent a dose of sports-luxe to her look with a pair of glittery trainers and black socks

Speaking on Lorraine earlier this month, the flame-haired beauty described her experience on set with co-star Simon Bird as a 'very special experience'.

Describing her experience on set, she told Lorraine Kelly: 'It's a very special experience.

'I feel like I'm in Simon Callows' acting hall. It's so fun to do a comedy.'

Simon, however, revealed it had been a daunting experience for him.

Glam look: She wore her trademark auburn-hued tresses in a sleek middle-parting and plumped her pout with a slick of scarlet lipstick

The pair are joined on stage by Matt Berry, Tom Rosenthal and Charlotte Ritchie.

As for romance, Lily is swept up in her whirlwind love affair with long-term partner Kwame Ferreira.

The lovebirds welcomed their first child Wylde together in September 2015.

Lily juggles being a mum with her high-flying career as a model and an actress.
Meryl Streep emerged from a seventies-era taxi cab outside The Plaza Hotel on the Manhattan set of Steven Spielberg's The Papers on Tuesday.

The 68-year-old acting legend was wearing a teased-up wig to better resemble Washington Post publisher Katharine 'Kay' Graham, who died from a 2001 head injury.

The biopic - based on Kay's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 memoir Personal History - centers on her two-decade stewardship of her father's newspaper (Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and pressmen's strike).

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Action! Meryl Streep emerged from a seventies-era taxi cab outside The Plaza Hotel on the Manhattan set of Steven Spielberg's The Papers on Tuesday

Double take: The 68-year-old acting legend was wearing a teased-up wig to better resemble Washington Post publisher Katharine 'Kay' Graham, who died from a 2001 head injury

Pictured in 1980: The biopic - based on Kay's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 memoir Personal History - centers on her two-decade stewardship of her father's newspaper

The three-time Oscar winner suited up in a blue blazer, matching pencil skirt, buckled pumps, patterned blouse, and pearls selected by costume designer Ann Roth.

Joining Meryl (born Mary Louise) was Fargo's Carrie Coon, who plays Kay's real-life closest confidante - Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer Meg Greenfield.

The political drama, pitting journalist against government, also featured numerous extras as outraged Vietnam War protesters for the scene.

Production on The Papers began as early as June 22 when lucky Instagram user Ashley Mikoletic Cheng scored an elevator selfie with Streep and her castmate Tom Hanks.

Boss lady: The three-time Oscar winner suited up in a blue blazer, matching pencil skirt, buckled pumps, patterned blouse, and pearls selected by costume designer Ann Roth

Reenacting history: Joining Meryl (born Mary Louise) was Fargo's Carrie Coon (L), who plays Kay's real-life closest confidante - Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer Meg Greenfield

'Stop the war!' The political drama, pitting journalist against government, also featured numerous extras as outraged Vietnam War protesters for the scene

The 61-year-old Oscar winner portrays The Washington Post's executive editor Ben Bradlee, who challenged the government over the rights to publish the Pentagon Papers.

On July 9, The Circle star shared a silly behind-the-scenes snap with his 23.6M social media followers captioned: 'I got a new car!'

It's hard to believe that the talented twosome have never previously shared the screen several decades into their respective successful careers.

By contrast, The Papers marks Tom and Spielberg's fifth collaboration following Saving Private Ryan (1998), Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Terminal (2004), and Bridge of Spies (2015).

Starstruck! Production on The Papers began as early as June 22 when lucky Instagram user Ashley Mikoletic Cheng scored an elevator selfie with Streep and her castmate Tom Hanks

'I got a new car!' The 61-year-old Oscar winner portrays The Washington Post's executive editor Ben Bradlee, who challenged the government over the rights to publish the Pentagon Papers

Reunited: The Papers marks Tom and Spielberg's fifth collaboration following Saving Private Ryan (1998), Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Terminal (2004), and Bridge of Spies (2015)

The 70-year-old filmmaker enlisted his favorite composer John Williams and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski for the flick, which hits US theaters December 22 and UK theaters January 26.

The Papers' ensemble also includes Alison Brie, Bradley Whitford, Sarah Paulson, and Jesse Plemons, as well as Mr. Show alums Bob Odenkirk and David Cross.

Other backstage glimpses from the bustling set have been provided by eagle-eyed New Yorkers like Lauren Uppink, who shared a snap of extras in seventies business attire.

Coming soon! The 70-year-old filmmaker enlisted his favorite composer John Williams and DP Janusz Kaminski for the flick, which hits US theaters December 22 and UK theaters January 26

Quiet on the set! The Papers' ensemble also includes Alison Brie, Bradley Whitford, Sarah Paulson, and Jesse Plemons, as well as Mr. Show alums Bob Odenkirk and David Cross
She's never shied away from flaunting her ample curves in skimpy bikinis and scantily-clad ensembles on Instagram.

And on Sunday, Skye Wheatley flashed the flesh in a busty bralette crop while on Seadeck Brisbane.

The 23-year-old socialite drew attention to her large surgically-enhanced breasts in the summery outfit as she cruised the Brisbane River.

Busty babe! Skye Wheatley flaunts taut stomach and surgically-enhanced assets in skimpy crop top on Seadeck Brisbane on Sunday

The former Big Brother babe, who has reinvented herself as a racy Instagram model and Gold Coast makeup artist, struggled to contain her assets in the tiny top.

Skye chose to layer gold necklaces that fell between her bosoms, while she added large gold hoop earrings to accessorize.

Covering up for the winter outing, the Instagram sensation wore white trousers and a denim jacket.

She's NOT shy! The 23-year-old socialite drew attention to her large surgically-enhanced breasts in the summery outfit as she draped multiple necklaces between her ample assets

Her taut stomach was on display in the orange patterned bralette, as she posed with friends for photos.

She shared snaps to Instagram on Monday, writing: 'Had the best time yesterday with all my hunnie bunnies @seadeck_brisbane thanks for having us for my bois birthday @louiedolman.'

Skye's signature plump pout was also on show, as she wore a light pink lipstick with a darker lip liner.

Birthday celebrations! Skye claimed she was on the cruise to celebrate her friend's birthday, giving him a kiss with her signature plump pout

Keeping the party going? Skye was also tagged in peoples photos at South Bank's The Fox Hotel and The Stock Exchange bar in the CBD as the night progressed

She slicked back her lightly curled hair in a low ponytail as she enjoyed drinks on board the party boat.

Skye was also tagged in peoples photos at South Bank's The Fox Hotel and The Stock Exchange bar in the CBD as the night progressed.

The ex-reality star bombshell now boasts more than 50,000 YouTube subscribers and 315k Instagram followers.

Rise to fame: The ex-reality star bombshell now boasts more than 50,000 YouTube subscribers and 315k Instagram followers since her 2014 stint on Big Brother




She's the Seven Year Switch star and a proud mother to three children.

And on Tuesday, Cass Thistleton took to Instagram, voicing her frustration over a typed letter from a neighbour, found in her letterbox.

After discovering that the note was a complaint over the apparent loud noise her children make, the 34-year-old shared to the social media site: 'Seriously, what is this world coming to?'

'Seriously, what is this world coming to?' Seven Year Switch's Cass Thistleton, 34, vented her frustration to Instagram on Tuesday, after receiving a typed letter from a neighbour complaining of loud noise

Uploading a screenshot of the typed letter, Cass began her post: 'TEMP POST - Had to share! It's hard to be a positive person in a world where people thrive on negativity and have nothing better to do with their lives than try to bring others down!

'THIS letter was left in my letter box today! Funnily enough my children haven't been home for 5 nights! Apparently I need to bound and gag my children from enjoying themselves in my back yard.

'Seriously, what is the world coming to? My kids are not outside before 9am and are well and truly back inside by 5pm and are lucky to play in our concrete back yard once a week!!'

Vocal: Uploading a screenshot of the typed letter, the reality star wrote: 'TEMP POST - Had to share! It's hard to be a positive person in a world where people thrive on negativity and have nothing better to do with their lives than try to bring others down!'

Friendly approach: Cass went on to say that she approached her neighbours for an adult conversation, but that the culprit is still unknown

Cass went on to say that she approached her neighbours for an adult conversation, but that the culprit is still unknown.

The lengthy post was featured alongside a screenshot of the typed letter that voiced their concerns of the apparent loud noise her three children make.

'I am writing to you to complain about the really loud noise that your children make,'t the letter began.

Support: Fans of Cass were quick to offer their support for the star, writing in the comments section: 'Omg how ridiculous' and 'This makes my blood boil'

'The constant screaming from your kids is ridiculous. Everyone in the neighbourhood hears every noise you make when you are outside.

'I have told the people who own your house and so have other neighbours 'cause they haven't told you to be quiet,' the text continued.

Fans of Cass were quick to offer their support for the star, writing in the comments section: 'Omg how ridiculous' and 'This makes my blood boil'.

Notoriety: Cass and former partner Ryan (pictured) appeared on the Network Seven reality show, Seven Year Switch, last year, and rekindled their broken marriage

Cass and former partner Ryan appeared on the Network Seven reality show, Seven Year Switch, last year, and rekindled their broken marriage.

After the show aired, the couple went on to have another daughter, 12-month-old Mena Lee, but split soon after.

Since their separation, the pair have remained close friends and share custody of their other children, daughter Emmerson Lee, two, and Cass' 10-year-old daughter Ramani, from a previous relationship.

Brood: After the show aired, the couple went on to have another daughter, 12-month-old Mena Lee, but split soon after
Sydney PR queen Roxy Jacenko is known for flaunting her designer wears and luxury accessories in her signature elevator selfies.

And on Wednesday, the publicist proudly flashed her pricey six-carat diamond ring from jailbird husband Oliver Curtis' 'second proposal' last Friday.

The 37-year-old took to Instagram in front of the lift mirror, displaying the massive sparkler on her engagement ring finger.

Rock-ing it! PR queen Roxy Jacenko flaunts '$450,000 engagement ring' in glam lift selfie with husband Oliver Curtis after announcing their second engagement

'Marry me? Again': Husband Oliver, who was convicted of insider trading in June 2016 and spent 12 months in prison, surprised Roxy with the romantic gesture at Sydney's Four Seasons hotel on Friday night

The disgraced former investment banker proposed to Roxy for a second time on Friday, shortly after they returned from a luxury family holiday in Bali.

Oliver, who was convicted of insider trading in June 2016 and spent 12 months in prison, surprised her with the gesture at Sydney's Four Seasons hotel.

Roxy, who over the past few months has been spotted without her wedding ring, happily sported the 'upgraded' diamond engagement ring.

The Nicholas Haywood ring Roxy is believed to be valued at up to $450,000 by a respected member of the National Council of Jewellery Valuers, which is more than double the $200,000 jewel she received when Oliver first proposed in 2010.

'Wow, lucky Roxy!' gemologist Karen Lindley of Diamonds by Design told Daily Mail Australia on Sunday, suggesting a likely value of 'between $400,000 and $450,000.'

Loved-up! Roxy, who over the past few months has been spotted without her wedding ring, happily sported the 'upgraded' diamond engagement ring

'This sharing a lift isn't working for my #liftselfie game': Roxy, who is known for her signature elevator selfies, joked that Oliver was cramping her style in the snap

Wearing a bright-red sweatshirt and tight black trousers, she pouted to the camera as she took the photo.

Oliver, wearing a blue collared shirt for work, could be seen laughing in the background of the snap.

Roxy captioned it: 'This sharing a lift isn't working for my #liftselfie game.'

Family life: Roxy and Oliver share two young children, five-year-old Pixie and three-tear-old Hunter

Roxy and Oliver share two young children, five-year-old Pixie and three-tear-old Hunter.

Friday's proposal came a month after he was released from Cooma Correctional Centre on June 23, following a one-year sentence for insider trading.

Before Oliver's release, it was rumoured the couple had decided to quietly end their marriage.
Kirsten Dunst showed off her impeccable summer style as she stepped out in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles on Tuesday.

The actress, 35, stayed cool in a short-sleeved patterned dress that had buttons down the front.

She left the top button undone to show off a little cleavage and left lower buttons undone allowing her to flash some leg as she walked.

Staying cool: Kirsten Dunst showed off her summer style as she stepped out in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles on Tuesday in a short-sleeved patterned dress

The Beguiled star was bare-legged in dark sandal wedges.

She left her blonde hair loose and sported large black-framed sunglasses.

She also carried a wicker purse on a long leather strap.

Summer style: The Beguiled star left her blonde hair loose and sported large black-framed sunglasses. She also carried a wicker purse on a long leather strap

Dared to bare: The actress, 35, left the top button of her frock undone to show off a little cleavage and left lower buttons undone allowing her to flash some leg as she walked

Dunst, who's engaged to her Fargo co-star Jesse Plemons, 29, told People last month that their show business schedules often complement their relationship.

'With our job you can work three months intensely and then you have a lot of time to do whatever you want to do,' she said, noting that 'the best part is having time off.'

The Hidden Figures actress said they're 'not in any rush' to start getting into nitty-gritty wedding details just yet.

'Im very relaxed when it comes to those kinds of things,' Dunst told the publication, adding that her engagement to Plemons has been 'amazing.'
Things appear to be going swimmingly for Fifi Box and her new boyfriend, Damien Richardson.

In new pictures from their idyllic trip to Bali earlier this month, the pair were spotted taking a dip together in their hotel pool, with Fifi's daughter.

At one point, the 40-year-old radio and TV star gazed affectionately at her man, 47, while she relaxed in a bikini and kaftan.

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The look of love! Fifi Box gazes affectionately at boyfriend Damien Richardson as they swim with her daughter in Bali

Holiday bliss: Fifi relaxed in a bikini and kaftan

Fifi's sheer and patterned kaftan featured a V-neck and finished just above her knees.

She covered her blonde locks with a black and white beach hat, and covered her eyes with a pair of sunglasses.

Fifi appeared to be makeup free and had her hair swept up into a low bun.

With her mini-me: The personality doted on her little girl, Trixie Belle, five, who was swimming with the help of a inflatable ring

Poolside-chic! Fifi's sheer and patterned kaftan featured a V-neck and finished just above her knees

No fuss: Fifi appeared to be makeup free and had her hair swept up into a low bun

While away, Fifi took to Instagram to say how she loved skipping the makeup while on holiday.

'My favourite part of being on holiday is NO makeup, two full weeks with not a scrap of foundation, eye shadow, lipstick, mascara or contouring just my pale imperfect skin and a set of fabulous lash extensions,' she said.

The personality doted on her little girl while swimming, with Trixie Belle, five, swimming with the help of a inflatable ring.

Fifi and Damien chatted as they swam in the pool, and appeared to enjoy a laugh.

The pair - who have since returned from their holiday - enjoyed Bali with their daughters, Trixie Belle, who Fifi shares with Grant Kenny, and Damien's daughter Maisie, who he shares with ex partner Nicole.

Just the four of us! The pair enjoyed Bali with their daughters, Trixie Belle, who Fifi shares with Grant Kenny, and Damien's daughter Maisie, who he shares with ex partner Nicole

Rumours: According to Woman's Day , the pair were spotted scouting for possible wedding ceremony locations in Seminyak

Speculation: The publication reports the 'head over heels' couple were spotted looking over wedding packages at the Intercontinental Hotel

Taking it all in: Fifi was seen sitting at the edge of the pool as she watched her daughter and their group

At one point, the Fifi and Damien enjoyed soaking up the sun as they lounged by the pool.

According to Woman's Day, the pair were spotted scouting for possible wedding ceremony locations in Seminyak.

The publication reports the 'head over heels' couple were spotted looking over wedding packages at the Intercontinental Hotel.

'No-one would be surprised if they got married sooner rather than later,' a source told the publication.

They also added that Bali would be a venue of choice for the actress as she can 'drop out of the spotlight' there.

The Neighbours co-stars fell in love shortly after Damien separated from his wife Nicole Riches.

Wedding bells? 'No-one would be surprised if they got married sooner rather than later,' a source told Woman's Day

Claims: They also added that Bali would be a venue of choice for the actress as she can 'drop out of the spotlight' there

New love: The Neighbours co-stars fell in love shortly after Damien separated from his wife Nicole Riches

Happy: Fifi 'confirmed' her relationship with Damien live on her Fox FM radio show, Fifi, Dave, Fev and Byron, in May

Sweet: While she was careful not to mention Damien by name - only referring to him as 'Steven' - she declared her love for him

Doting: Fifi picked up all the pool toys as they got out

Fifi 'confirmed' her relationship with Damien live on her Fox FM radio show, Fifi, Dave, Fev and Byron, in May.

While she was careful not to mention Damien by name - only referring to him as 'Steven' - she declared her love for him.

This is the first romantic getaway Fifi has enjoyed since she holidayed with former boyfriend Grant Kenny, 53, in Fiji in 2016.

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to comment to Fifi on the magazine's claims.

Break: This is the first romantic getaway Fifi has enjoyed since she holidayed with former boyfriend Grant Kenny, 53, in Fiji in 2016

Back to business: Fifi was back on The Project this week, having returned from the trip
She's the glamorous PR queen who balances family life with running several high-profile businesses.

So it's hardly surprising Roxy Jacenko doesn't have time to waste on a busy Wednesday morning.

The Sweaty Betty PR founder, 37, appeared a little impatient while waiting for a ride outside her Paddington offices.

You shouldn't keep a lady waiting! Leather-clad Roxy Jacenko looked a little impatient while waiting for a ride outside her Paddington offices on Wednesday

Roxy looked glamorous as always in head-to-toe designer clothes and stiletto heels as she stood outside the swanky Elizabeth Street premises.

She flaunted her slender figure in leather trousers and a bright red jumper and clutched a Hermes Birkin handbag worth over $84,000.

Her other accessories included a flashy watch, dark sunglasses, and what appeared to be her new engagement ring from husband Oliver Curtis.

Style icon: Roxy, 37, looked glamorous as always in head-to-toe designer clothes and stiletto heels as she stood outside the swanky Elizabeth Street premises

The diamond sparkler, which has an estimated value of $450,000, was gifted by Oliver, 31, in a surprise 'second proposal' on Friday.

The platinum blonde publicist was also seen looking at her personalised iPhone, featuring the names of her children - Pixie, five and Hunter, three.

After a short time waiting on the sidewalk, Roxy was eventually picked up by a white car and driven away.

Bling alert! Roxy's accessories included a flashy watch, dark sunglasses, and what appeared to be her new engagement ring from husband Oliver Curtis

Expensive taste! She flaunted her slender figure in leather trousers and a bright red jumper and clutched a Hermes Birkin handbag worth over $84,000

Hurry up! The platinum blonde publicist was also seen looking at her personalised iPhone, featuring the names of her children - Pixie, five and Hunter, three

It was an altogether different scene for Roxy's ex-boyfriend Nabil Gazal, who was also pictured in Sydney that same day having what appeared to be a moment of quiet reflection.

Nabil enjoyed a solitary stroll in his local park, perhaps dwelling on recent headlines that Roxy and Oliver's marriage is back on track following the former investment banker's release from prison last month.

In late April, the former lovers were pictured kissing during a late-night soiree at Nabil's Sydney apartment while Oliver was still serving his sentence for insider trading at Cooma Correctional Centre.

But since Roxy and Oliver returned from a family holiday in Bali, Indonesia earlier this month, the couple seem to be focused on enjoying married life together.

Busy lady! The PR queen balances family life with running several high-profile businesses

It's about time! After a short time waiting on the sidewalk, Roxy was eventually picked up by a white car and driven away

Solitude: It was an altogether different scene for Roxy's ex-boyfriend Nabil Gazal, who was also pictured in Sydney that same day having what appeared to be a moment of quiet reflection
Shawn Ashmore welcomed his first child, a boy, over the weekend.

The X-Men actor, 37, shared the news on Instagram with an adorable photos of his newborn baby's hand around his dad's finger.

The Canadian actor captioned the photo: 'Couldn't be more in love with my new baby boy and my incredible wife.'

It's a boy! Shawn Ashmore welcomed his first child, a boy, with wife Dana over the weekend.

Proud dad! The X-Men star, 37, shared the news on Instagram with an adorable photos of his newborn baby's hand around his dad's finger

Wife Dana, 33, who Shawn married in 2012, also posted a couple photos of her new little boy, including one of his precious feet.

She captioned her sweet snap with the words 'so in love' along with a heart emoji.

Dana also shared a video of her newborn still in the hospital kicking his legs ever so slightly alongside the caption: 'We did it guys!!!'

Memories: Wife Dana, 33, who Shawn married in 2012, also posted a couple photos of her new little boy, including one of his precious feet

Dana also shared a video of her newborn still in the hospital kicking his legs ever so slightly alongside the caption: 'We did it guys!!!'

Shawn is known for his work as Bobby Drake/Iceman in the X-Men series and has also starred in the TV series The Following on Fox.

The couple met on the set of the thriller Frozen in 2010 and tied the knot two years later in Los Angeles.

'I just got down on my knee on the couch in our living room and just proposed and she was shocked and she obviously said yes and it was amazing,' Ashmore told PEOPLE at the time.
She shared an encouraging update on her mother's cancer battle on Monday.

And Chloe Lattanzi took to Instagram again on Tuesday, dishing out medical advice to her followers as she proceeded to undergo a pap smear exam.

The 32-year-old, who found out in May her mother Olivia Newton-John's breast cancer had returned after 25 years, delivered her message in various cartoon filters.

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Guidance counselor? Chloe Lattanzi took to Instagram on Tuesday, dishing out medical advice to her followers in the hopes they take precautions with their own health

'My beautiful fellow beings. Having so many people around me be afflicted by cancer it's important to get yourself checked regularly,' she wrote in the video's caption.

'I know us women hate the "lady exam" but I encourage you to make an appointment to keep yourself safe and informed,' she said, in reference to a pap smear procedure.

'I avoided this check up for years and that's a big mistake. Get your lady parts checked regularly and look for any signs of inflammation in your blood tests,' she instructed her almost 50,000 social media supporters.

'My beautiful fellow beings. Having so many people around me be afflicted by cancer it's important to get yourself checked regularly,' she wrote in the video's caption

'I know us women hate the "lady exam" but I encourage you to make an appointment to keep yourself safe and informed,' she said, in reference to her pap smear procedure

'This can be a sign of cancer. I love and care for you all. And don't want you to go through what my family is going through,' she offered.

'Make the appointment. I love you and just wanted to be a reminder of how vulnerable we all are,' she finished her statement.

The marijuana farmer signed off her public service announcement 'with all my heart, Chloe Rose'.

'I avoided this check up for years and that's a big mistake. Get your lady parts checked regularly and look for any signs of inflammation in your blood tests,' she instructed

'Make the appointment. I love you and just wanted to be a reminder of how vulnerable we all are,' she finished her statement

Chloe's mother Olivia was first treated for breast cancer in 1992, at the age of 43 and underwent a partial mastectomy, chemotherapy and breast reconstruction.

Afterwards, she championed breast cancer awareness and in 2008 built the Olivia Newton-John Cancer and Wellness Centre in Melbourne, Australia.

'I'm totally confident that my new journey will have a positive success story to inspire others!' she said in a statement recently released to People magazine.
He reportedly dumped his girlfriend Georgia Hayden just two hours before going into the Love Island villa.

But Jamie Jewitt's mother, nail technican Jenny, has slammed the claims, saying she dumped HIM, not the other way around - and insisted his relationship with Camilla Thurlow, 27, IS the real deal.

She told MailOnline: 'The facts were, Jamie and Georgia both went into a relationship agreeing neither wanted anything serious and were seeing each other for a number of weeks.

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'Georgia broke up with HIM': Jamie Jewitt's mother Jenny has slammed claims he 'dumped girlfriend hours before going on Love Island' as she insists relationship with Camilla (pictured) IS the real deal

She's not having it: Nail technican Jenny, (right) told MailOnline: 'The facts were, they both went into a relationship agreeing neither wanted anything serious and were seeing each other for a number of weeks'

'Georgia actually broke it off about two weeks before Love Island, as she wanted a commitment from Jamie, then called a week later to ask if they could carry on.

'Jamie said no and that they should leave it as it is on friendly terms. On July 1, he had to fly to Ireland for a job, but Georgia still had his passport in her bag from a week or so before.

'I took him to pick it up from her at work before dropping him off at Stansted airport, which is when he got the call asking him to go on Love Island.'

Dispute: Georgia Hayden claims Jamie dumped her two hours before going on Love Island and she was left heartbroken when he bedded Camilla Thurlow

Not happy: Jamie's father Ricky hit back at Georgia's claims with this tweet and Jenny retweeted it

She said: 'He called them back on the Monday to say he would do it. Out of courtesy, he called Georgia to let her know, so that she wouldn't just see him on the show.

'She accused him of knowing for ages and hung up on him, even though she had finished with him two weeks previously.'

Jenny continued: 'Watching Jamie on the show, I can tell he genuinely really likes Camilla. He may have gone in late not really thinking he'd find someone but I actually think he has.'

On top of this, Jamie's father, Ricky, also took to Twitter to defend his son, with Jenny retweeting his words.

He wrote: 'I know someone I would like to get on the lie detector, Georgia come on girl, utter rubbish. Just to get your face in the paper.'

The Sun previously claimed that Jamie broke up with Georgia just two hours before jetting off to Spain to appear on the show.

Talking to the publication, a friend of the 22-year-old beauty queen said: 'He's a total scumbag. He's broken her heart.

Beauty queen: Georgia is a shop worker who is currently Miss Chelmsford International 2017 and Jenny Jewitt claims SHE broke up with Jamie and NOT the other way around

'One night they were sat watching Love Island together, slagging off all the girls. Five days later he was in the villa trying to bed them. It made her feel worthless.

'To make sure he got the part she thinks Jamie let producers believe he was not in a relationship.'

It has been claimed that Jamie and Georgia had been dating for three months, with Jamie professing his love for her.

Conflict: Her friend claims that Jamie and Georgia had been dating for three months, with Jamie professing his love for her

But she reportedly was upset when he made a move on Camilla, after arriving at the villa, and has since bedded her.

Georgia is a shop worker who is currently Miss Chelmsford International 2017.

On Tuesday night's episode of Love Island, Camilla had to explain to Jamie why a lie detector test revealed she didn't think she was compatible with the Calvin Klein model.

What a guy! The post comes amid Jamie's romance with Camilla in which he has won the nation over with his romantic personality

Breaking down in tears in the Beach Hut, Camilla confessed: 'I know why I don't believe Jamie and I are compatible. I don't think I'm good enough for him. It's the thing I've been fighting against.

'I know we're compatible. But I watch how he is, and how amazing he is and part of me is constantly thinking I cant keep up.

'It's so annoying that that little voice overrides everything else and makes me feel like I'm just not good enough for him, he's never done anything to make me think that. I'm just frustrated with myself for being so pathetic.'

Saucy: A clip from Monday night's episode aired on After Sun revealed to viewers that Camilla and Jamie had done the deed - after they were seen getting steamy under the sheets

Camilla told Jamie: 'I've been trying very hard not to say the things I'm about to say because it's not attractive, it's horrible'

Later, having a chat outside, Camilla told Jamie: 'I've been trying very hard not to say the things I'm about to say because it's not attractive, it's horrible.

'It's very difficult for me not to give into those thoughts where I think "I'm not good enough".'

Jamie did his best to console the Scot, who has reportedly been cheated on by an ex in the past, gushing: 'This is ludicrous, you're absolutely amazing in so many different ways.

'You have traits about you that I haven't seen anywhere. I understand that you have these confidence issues, but everyone knows how incredible you are.'

Wrapping an arm around a crying Camilla, he reassured: 'You're absolutely stunning. I hate saying all this cheesy stuff, but honestly don't go there. It won't affect us.'

Hot and heavy: Camilla and Jamie were seen getting steamy on Sunday's episode - and the beauty was seen confirming the romp in a preview clip aired on spin-off show After Sun
She isn't afraid to experiment when it comes to fashion.

And Suki Waterhouse reiterated her kooky sense of style as she hit the streets of New York City in an offbeat dress on Tuesday.

Showcasing her fashion prowess, the 25-year-old model opted for a pink, silky frock as she pounded the pavements of the Big Apple.

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Silky Waterhouse! Suki reiterated her kooky sense of style as she hit the streets of New York City in an offbeat dress on Tuesday

Suki's outlandish number comprised of a plunging neckline, which highlighted her svelte waist thanks to a shirred panel around her hips.

The design also allowed for a glimpse of her slender calves from beneath its asymmetric hemline.

Putting an edgy spin on her otherwise feminine frock, Suki paired the number with suede, tan trainers and styled her blonde tresses into dishevelled waves,

Pretty in pink: Showcasing her fashion prowess, the 25-year-old model opted for a pink, silky frock as she pounded the pavements of the Big Apple

Suki is hot off her Salvatore Ferragamo shoot in Florence where she channelled Audrey Hepburn in a Breakfast at Tiffany's style dress.

The London native, who previously dated Bradley Cooper, shot to fame when she became the face of Burberry.

She graced the cover of British Vogue for their April 2015 issue alongside Cara Delevigne and Georgia May Jagger.

Taking the plunge! Suki's outlandish number comprised of a low-cut neckline, which highlighted her svelte waist thanks to a shirred panel around her hips

Rough it up: Putting an edgy spin on her otherwise feminine frock, Suki paired the number with suede, tan trainers and styled her blonde tresses into dishevelled waves

She is also cultivating a career as an actress, appearing in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Love, Rosie and Insurgent.

More recently the British star has been filming on the set of new thriller Assassination Nation.

Suki has been romantically linked with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story actor Diego since January, after the pair were spotted looking close during a trip to Mexico in January.

The young starlet was reportedly dating Game of Thrones actor Richard Madden, however her recent appearances with Diego suggested she's already moved on.
There have been rumours circulating about Harry Styles and his supposed four nipples for quite some time now.

And the Dunkirk actor has finally put fans' minds to rest after he confirmed to Chelsea Handler that the claims are in fact true during a recent interview.

Despite speaking to the American TV host - who is famed for her dry, no-nonsense humour - to promote his latest flick, it seemed the 42-year-old had more pressing questions to ask the star.

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Bit nippy? Harry Styles confirmed he has four nipples while enjoying a rather flirty interview with American TV host Chelsea Handler earlier this week

'There is a rumour on the internet that you have four nipples,' she blunty asked. 'Have you heard?'

'Correct,' he retorted, without hesitation, before proceeding to show where all four of his nipples were located.

'Oh, I hooked up with a guy who had that once. I didn't know it was a thing,' she quipped.

Body talk: Harry's nipples have frequently been a talking point among his legions of fans

'It's a thing,' Harry responded dryly, before proceeding to burst into laughter.

But that wasn't the only moment the interview took an awkward turn, as the pair also discussed the unconventional names of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's children.

'Why do different people have different accents? I'm from New Jersey and you're from, what part of London are you from?' the comedian pryed.

'Manchester,' the Sign of the Times hitmaker replied, a city that is actually in the North West of England.

Have a look! Harry even pointed out where all four of his nipples were located during the cheeky chat

Shocker: Chelsea was clearly taken aback by Harry's body revelation, before revealing that she 'once slept with a guy' who had the same thing

'Right, Manchester. So, that's North England,' Chelsea hit back, before Harry corrected her.

'It's North West? Are you talking about Kanye's baby? They have two babies. One is named North and one is named West,' the talk show host teased.

But when Harry asked if North West was actually the name of one of their children, she jibed: 'I have no idea. That's a good question.'

Chelsea has famously had her fair share of feuds with the Kardashians over the years, with Kim recently calling the star a 'b***h' during a recent episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

Here he is: Known for his interest in fashion, the former One Direction member cut a typically cool figure as he arrived at the LA premiere of his new movie Dunkirk on Tuesday night

Dashing: Harry kicked back on Wednesday's Today Show, where he was seen wearing an incredibly trendy Stella McCartney shirt adorned with swallows

Quirky: Harry jazzed up his look with his suit trousers - which were embroidered with a red swirl on the ankle

Chelsea has spoken out about the Kardashians over the years; in January, she told Variety she thinks the famous family could be the reason why Donald Trump won the election.

The comedian told the publication that the media covers Trump so much so that he's being treated like an 'entertainer.'

Chelsea explained: 'We've turned into a reality show. I blame the Kardashians, personally; the beginning of the end was the Kardashians. The way there people have blown up and don't go away - it's surreal.'

Showing his stripes: Meanwhile his co-star Cillian Murphy enjoyed a much-needed day off after their busy string of promotional events in New York

Casual cool: Cillian opted for a classically cool striped T-shirt and skinny jeans as he enjoyed the sunshine

Relaxed: The Peaky Blinders star added retro rounded sunglasses
Elliott Wright has heaped praise on close friend and former The Only Way Is Essex co-star James Arg Argent after watching him embrace a healthy new lifestyle.

Argent, 29, travelled to South East Asia in February  two years after entering The Priory Clinic for alleged drink and drug abuse  after opting to seek professional help away from the media spotlight.

And speaking to MailOnline from his Costa del Sol restaurant Olivia's La Cala, Wright, 36, admits he is stunned by the results of his 10-weeks stay at a remote Thai retreat.

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Pleased: Elliott Wright has heaped praise on close friend and former The Only Way Is Essex co-star James Arg Argent after watching him embrace a healthy new lifestyle

'Im very proud of him,' he said. 'The first time he came out I dont think he really accepted his situation, but you can clearly see now that he does.

Before, hed come out and hed eat me out of house, home and restaurant. Now he comes out and he eats clean, no carbs and hes running every day.

Im proud of him and its a pleasure to be around him. If anything hes a pain in the a**e because hes up at the crack of dawn every day. I know his mum and dad and from their point of view, they must be so proud of him.'

Close friendship: The reality star has known Argent for more than ten years

The reality star was reflecting on Argent's progress as he prepares for dramatic changes in his own life; namely his imminent wedding to fiancee Sadie Stuart, set to be documented in a forthcoming ITVBe show.

A follow-up to the well received Playa In Marbella, it will follow the couple as they prepare for their big day, concluding with exclusive, fly-on-the wall access to what he admits will be a huge wedding.

'Trying to find a venue has been extremely difficult because were at 258 guests so trying to accommodate for everyone is a nightmare,' he said.

Coming soon: The reality star was reflecting on Argent's progress as he prepares for dramatic changes in his own life; namely his imminent wedding to fiancee Sadie Stuart, set to be documented in a forthcoming ITVBe show

'I wouldve liked to do the wedding in Olivias if Im being honest but it wasnt feasible, so were looking at other places. Its a bit of a liberty. Im trying to be all over it while trying to let Sadie flow and enjoy her moment.'

He added: 'Sadies a traditional girl so its going to be a nice wedding in that respect. I want it to be a warm wedding. Im not a stuffy person, I dont want a stuffy wedding, but Sadie is traditional.'

While close friend Arg can almost certainly expect a seat when he finally does find a venue, he freely admits the new show will feature none of his his former co-stars.

There will however be space for cousin Mark Wright and his wife of two-years, Michelle Keegan.

'Hes coming out in August so it will be nice to meet up then,' he said. 'Id be devastated if he wasnt there.

'Id find a role for Mark, I would imagine Mark would be there as an usher something like that, he means a lot to me.'

Big plans: A follow-up to the well received Playa In Marbella, it will follow the couple as they prepare for the big day before concluding with exclusive, fly on the wall access to what he admits will be a huge wedding

The new show follows a dramatic end to Playa in Marbella, during which he got down on one knee and proposed to Sadie following a whirlwind 10-month romance.

And he admits her strong relationship with his two children from a previous marriage to Joanne McGuinness left him in no doubt that he was doing the right thing.

'I knew really early on that she was the one,' he explained. 'Ive been married, Ive got two kids and Ive got my own business since I was 20 years old.

'Ive had a level head since an early age, and when I met Sadie she ticked so many boxes. I couldnt ask for a better step-mum  shes an incredible woman; thats a massive factor for me, for my kids to accept someone.'

He added: 'Shell openly say "I want six kids; I want four more because Ive already got two." As a single dads you couldnt ask for more.

'Shes an incredible person inside and an incredibly beautiful person out  I fell on my seat, if Im being honesty with you.'

Elliott Wrights new ITVBe show will air Autumn 2017, sharing the planning and preparation of his upcoming wedding to fiancee Sadie Stuart.
He has been publicly parading his new romance, despite having split from wife of eight years Melissa Meeks just weeks ago.

But Jeremy Meeks appeared upbeat as he was spotted enjoying a cigarette on the balcony of a luxury hotel in LA on Tuesday.

The 33-year-old model's appearance came as new girlfriend Chloe Green, 26, made her return to Instagram- albeit with her account set to private.

Living the good life: Jeremy Meeks appeared upbeat as he was spotted enjoying a cigarette on the balcony of a luxury hotel in LA on Tuesday

Dressed in an all-khaki ensemble, Jeremy cut a striking figure as he stood on the balcony speaking on the phone.

Meanwhile Chloe marked her return to social media- after being trolled off the site by angry followers accusing her of breaking up Jeremy's marriage, with a loved-up snap of the duo.

Apparently oblivious to any carnage caused, the billionaire's daughter, whose resume consists of a fleeting stint on reality show Made In Chelsea, snuggled up to Jeremy as they held two parrots.

And proving her besotted status, defiant Chloe set her profile picture as one of her cosying up to Jeremy- the snap that caused her to be trolled off Instagram.

Defiant: The 33-year-old model's appearance came as new girlfriend Chloe Green, 26, made her return to Instagram- albeit with her account set to private

Jeremy sent shock waves across the internet when pictures emerged of him kissing Chloe Green on a yacht in Turkey last month.

And following the news that Jeremy has filed for legal separation from his wife of eight years Melissa Meeks, he was spotted spotted sneaking into a hotel with British heiress Chloe Green last Friday.

The American father was seen canoodling with the British Topshop heiress as they enjoyed a PDA-filled paddle in an LA hotel pool- the same day heart-broken wife Melissa was celebrating her birthday.

Appearing equally besotted, the pair floated around the pool in a passionate embrace, staring lovingly into each other's eyes.

Looking deep in conversation, the duo giggled together, before letting his manager Jim Jordan take a loved-up picture of the duo.

And just days later, billionaire Chloe took Jeremy jewellery shopping in Beverly Hills, before the duo enjoyed numerous public outings.

And as the duo appeared to celebrate their new union, Jeremy's wife Melissa took to Instagram to share defiant pictures as she celebrated her birthday.

Sharing a selfie as she pouted at the camera, she bravely captioned the snap: 'Birthday wishes', adding a middle finger emoji in defiance.

She then uploaded an emotional meme, with the words: 'Better to be slapped with the truth then kissed with a lie'.

Controversial: The married father sent shock waves across the internet when pictures emerged of him kissing Chloe Green on a yacht in Turkey last month

On Thursday Jeremy filed for legal separation from mother-of-three Melissa, who he shares her youngest son with.

He was married to the 38-year-old nurse, who stayed with him throughout his stint in prison, for eight years.

The move came after she filed for divorce, after confronting him outside their Stockton home when he arrived back from his break in Turkey, where the controversial pictures of him cavorting on the $145,000-a-week yacht emerged.

The couple's legal separation documents say they will share custody of their children.

A legal separation is different from a divorce in a number of ways: The former couple can still claim some tax benefits and share healthcare. The former couple will still have to separate their assets.

Family first: Melissa celebrated her birthday in the company of her mother and sister, who have been helping her through the tough time

In documents filed on Tuesday, Meeks said that he has not yet 'determined the full nature and extent of his separate property assets and/or liabilities'.

He added, however, that earnings and acquisitions made after the separation began would be considered separate property.

She later told the Mail of her devastation, admitting that her husband had been seduced by the glamour of his newfound modelling career.

I know it takes two to tango but she knew he was married. To me, thats unforgivable. My whole world has been torn apart by this. What do I tell our children? My heart is broken.

What sort of woman would do something like this to another woman? My marriage wasnt perfect but I thought it could be saved, until this happened.

'Better to be slapped with the truth then kissed with a lie': As the duo appeared to celebrate their new union, Jeremy's wife Melissa took to Instagram to share defiant pictures as she celebrated her birthday last week

Defiant: She shared a kissing face selfie along with a middle finger emoji as her ex canoodled with Chloe in the pool

Of course Im angry at her. What she did is unforgivable. And Im angry at him too. What they did destroyed my entire world.

Did either of them think about the children and how this will affect them? Theyre the innocent victims in this. And so am I.

Describing the moment she learned about her husband's affair, she added: Some random person I dont know sent a direct message with the photograph of my husband kissing that woman.

I went into shock. I felt nauseated. It was like a bomb had gone off and my whole world had been blown apart.

Id never heard of Chloe Green. I thought Jeremy was working.

Did either of them think about the children and how this will affect them? Theyre the innocent victims in this. And so am I. Melissa recently broke her silence over the furore, in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail

Following the furore, Jeremy returned to California to be reunited with his family.

Melissa says the first contact she had with her husband was when he landed in Los Angeles last Monday.

However he didn't appear too welcome, with wife Melissa retreating to her sister's residence for Fourth Of July celebrations.

And Melissa revealed he had texted her from the airport to ask if he could pick up their two sons, his biological child Jeremy Jr, seven, and Robert, 11, Melissas son from a previous relationship. She also has a daughter, 16-year-old Ellie, and says both stepchildren consider Meeks a father figure.

Chloe was last seen cutting a low profile as she enjoyed another sunny break with her billionaire father Sir Phillip Green, 65, in St Tropez, France on Saturday.

First contact after the snaps: Melissa revealed he had texted her from the airport to ask if he could pick up their two sons, his biological child Jeremy Jr, seven, and Robert, 11, Melissas son from a previous relationship. She also has a daughter, 16-year-old Ellie, and says both stepchildren consider Meeks a father figure

Chloe has been staying out of the spotlight ever since she was forced to delete her Instagram account after enraged social media fans slammed her over pictures showing her kissing married Jeremy.

And Chloe isn't the only one who has been in the spotlight of late.

Controversial British retail tycoon Sir Philip Green, who owns Topshop and is worth an estimated $5.1 billion, has been hitting headlines frequently over the last year.

BHS went bust last spring and her father got the blame for the 571 million hole in the firms pensions pot.

However, Sir Philip agreed to pay 363 million into the pension fund in February this year.

At the beginning of July Jeremy sent the internet into overdrive when he was pictured kissing Topshop heiress Chloe Green on a luxury yacht in Turkey.

The father-of-one model faced furious backlash from fans, who accused him of disrespecting his eight-year-relationship with wife and mother-of-three Melissa Meeks, who he shares her youngest son with.

Life of luxury: Meeks continued to send tongues wagging after pictures emerged of him kissing British Topshop heiress Chloe Green on a yacht in Turkey at the beginning of the month

Meeks and Chloe, who is heir to her father Sir Philip's billions, were pictured sharing an intimate kiss over the weekend and snuggling up together as they waited to be taken back to their 112,000-a-week yacht in Bodrum, Turkey.

Their tender embrace was watched over by an entourage which had joined them on their luxury charter for a week of fun in the sun.

It came as Melissa broke her social media silence and as his legions of fans turned on him for dumping her.

On Monday, two days after the pictures emerged, Meeks's manager posted a photo of him and his client, who has 1.2million Instagram followers in Dusseldorf, Germany.

Holding him hostage? Chloe took to Instagram at the beginning of the month, sharing a a photo with Meeks and his manager, before deleting her account due to the backlash

But fans turned on them with one user writing: 'Shame on you,' in apparent reference to the photos.

Meeks' wife, Melissa, a mother of three who has a son with the convict, appeared to respond to her husband's alleged infidelity with a sultry Instagram post of her own on Sunday.

She added: 'It's just me against the world baby,' with the hashtag 'Still I rise'.

Ignoring the revelation that her husband was cheating on her, Melissa made a point of not mentioning his adultery and instead opted to caption the picture with two hashtags - Queens are Born in July and It's My Birthday Month.

Chloe has since deleted her Instagram account shortly after posting a picture of her and Meeks together with the caption: 'Just the beginning...We appreciate all the love and the hate.'

F

Meeks too has edited his account, deleting all photographs of him and Melissa, which has not gone down with the fans who fell in love with his good looks after his California mugshot went viral in 2014.

Meanwhile Chloe's father Sir Philip said he is 'not getting involved' in his daughter's holiday romance.

The tycoon refused to be drawn when asked about it, telling the Telegraph: 'With respect, I am not getting involved in it.'

Chloe is thought to have met Jeremy when he attended at an array of star-studded events during the Cannes Film Festival last month.

Modelling for Phillip Plein, Jeremy was seen mingling with the likes of Paris Hilton and Nicki Minaj during the glitzy fest.

From in the can to in Cannes! Jeremy mingled with heiress Paris Hilton during the Cannes Film Festival in May

Rubbing shoulders with the A listers: He as spotted enjoying dinner with rapper Nicki Minaj

Meeks, whose looks have earned him a huge fan base, made his first official modelling appearance at New York fashion week this year, and has certainly turned his life around in an impressive way since his release from prison.

However his journey to stardom hasn't been all smooth-sailing, after he was recently barred from entry to the UK after arriving at London's Heathrow airport from New York.

The California native shot to fame in 2014 when the Stockton Police Department posted his mugshot on their website, following his arrest for gang activity and a misdemeanour charge of resisting/obstructing justice.

The photo promptly went viral, with internet users dubbing him 'the hottest convict ever'.
She's the yummy mummy who just became the face of Jockey underwear.

But luckily for Kate Ritchie, 38, she's not required to wear the company uniform on promo trips.

Instead, the former Home and Away star looked ready for business, seen stepping out in a stylish floral dress in Sydney on Wednesday.

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Stepping out in style! Kate Ritchie looked ready for business on her Jockey Underwear promotional rounds on Wednesday, seen stepping out in style in a floral dress

The actress was spotted in a breezy navy dress with flowery prints, understood to be leaving one of the stops on her promotional tour.

The beauty matched a red leather handbag with similarly coloured heels, balancing a purple jacket over her arm.

Kate also flaunted an ability to multi-task, clutching her morning coffee while en-route to her destination.

She is currently doing the rounds in support of new campaign for underwear brand Jockey.

It's a match! The 38-year-old former Home and Away matched a red leather handbag with similarly coloured heels, balancing a purple jacket over her arm

Sizzling! She is currently doing the rounds in support of new campaign for underwear brand Jockey

Last week, images from the stars sizzling lingerie shoot surfaced online.

Just as the mother turned back the clock in that shoot, she was feeling similarly nostalgic earlier this week.

On Wednesday, Kate had her say on what it was like when she locked lips with Gold Logie winner Samuel Johnson back when she was a teenager on Home and Away.

'It was mortifying!' Just as the mother turned back the clock in that shoot, she was feeling similarly nostalgic earlier this week

The actress told Today Extra that it was very awkward for the pair and she was worried that 'he felt he'd drawn the short straw.'

'In the early years, any kind of kissing scene was mortifying!' she told hosts Sonia Kruger and David Campbell.

Kate, who played girl-next-door Sally Fletcher on the long-running soap, also shared that she didn't realise her onscreen kiss with Samuel was the first time he'd ever kissed anyone.

Kiss and tell? On Wednesday, Kate had her say on what it was like when she locked lips with Gold Logie winner Samuel Johnson back when she was a teenager on Home and Away

At the start of July, Samuel said that he was so embarrassed about the kiss that he would hide from Kate on set, something that didn't go unnoticed by the actress.

'He was beside himself and proceeded to avoid me,' Kate said.

Samuel played bad boy Gus Bishop on the soap, who was a fleeting love interest for Kate's character Sally.
She's been mixing business with leisure during a well-deserved breakaway to breath-taking Italy.

And Lily Collins, 28, made sure to soak-up the sun in between promoting her new Netflix drama To The Bone at the Ischia Film Festival on Monday alongside Jason Vahn.

According to Just Jared, the two have known each other for a long time and attended high school at Harvard Westlake in Los Angeles together.

Abs-olutely: Lily Collins, 28, made sure to soak-up the sun inbetween promoting her new Netflix drama To The Bone at the Ischia Film Festival on Monday

Lily was seen getting close to her investment analyst beau on a dock outside their hotel, although neither have confirmed the relationship.

They both graduated together in 2007 and Jared went on to attend the University of Pennsylvania before getting into investment banking at Canyon Capital Advisors.

The British-born actress looked sensational as exited the idyllic sea in her mixed print bikini.

The alabaster-skinned beauty put her best fashion foot forward as she worked a multi-coloured two-piece that featured eye-catching cutaway detailing in the midst of her bust.

Striking: The British-born actress looked sensational as exited the idyllic sea in her mixed print bikini

Her halterneck bikini top was sure to make a statement while her handsome mystery man followed swiftly behind as they walked up a wooden ramp to their sun loungers.

The Golden Globe nominated star's slinky bikini bottoms highlighted her petite frame while she navigated her way back to her sun spot barefoot.

Lily - who is the daughter of Phil Collins - appeared in jovial spirits as she chatted away to her attractive pal while her wet brown locks were slicked back off her face.

Towering over the stunning LA-based actress, Jason who lives in Los Angeles, showcased his muscular physique in a pair of striped white swimshorts.

Seas the days: The alabaster-skinned beauty put her best fashion foot forward as she worked a multi-coloured two-piece that featured eye-catching cutaway detailing in the midst of her bust

Later, the pair were spotted enjoying some refreshments as they soaked up the final rays of the day before leaving together in complementing ensembles.

Her swimwear-clad appearance comes after she attracted attention with her role as a 20-year-old anorexic sufferer Ellen in her latest movie.

Her appearance comes after she gave her first full interview about the film and her own off-screen struggle with eating disorders to the Daily Mail.

The starlet blamed her famous father Phil Collins' 17million divorce as the trigger for her anorexia and bulimia.

She explained how her severe eating disorder stopped her menstrual cycle for two years and could have affected her chances of having children.

Lily revealed she gorged on junk food, then forced herself to throw up, causing her hair to fall out and her nails to become brittle.

My periods stopped for two years,' she bravely confessed. 'And my life was out of control. I was terrified I had ruined my chances of ever having kids.'

Of her relationship with her father, she said: There was a terrible disconnect that grew between us. Many of my deepest insecurities stem from my issues with my dad.

Very naut-y: Her halterneck bikini top was sure to make a statement while her handsome mystery man followed swiftly behind as they walked up a wooden ramp to their sun loungers

Sun-soaked: The Golden Globe nominated star's slinky bikini bottoms highlighted her petite frame while she navigated her way back to her sun spot barefoot

Lily, who went to school in Los Angeles, lived with mother Jill Tavelman (Phil's second wife) after their separation.

When she heard that his marriage to third wife Orianne Cevey was also in trouble, along with the stress of her school life, she became anorexic and bulimic in 2008.

For To The Bone, the actress has insisted that she lost weight in a 'healthy' fashion, with regular check-ups from doctors.

Relaxed: Lily - who is the daughter of Phil Collins - appeared in jovial spirits as she chatted away to her attractive pal while she lay strewn across a sun lounger

Regardless, her mother sobbed when she saw her daughter looking gaunt in the film, no doubt bringing back the harrowing memories of Lily's teenage years.

Speaking about her mum's reaction, Lily told the EDIT: 'The first time mum saw the film she was a bit in shock.

'The second time I looked over at the end and she was sobbing; it really hit her hard. I never wanted her to feel responsible; she's like my best friend.'

In her autobiography Unfiltered, Lily touches on her eating disorder that plagued her teenage years.
She regularly spends the start of her days indoors as she co-hosts Channel Seven breakfast show Sunrise.

And as she holidays in Greece, Samantha Armytage's mornings are looking a little brighter.

Taking to Instagram on Wednesday, the 40-year-old posted a Story which featured an image of herself enjoying time at the beach.

Life's a beach! Sunrise host (pictured) took to her Instagram Story to share a selfie as she enjoyed a sun-soaked holiday in Greece

Over the selfie the blonde beauty scribbled what appeared to be 'Now this is sunrise!' and added an image of an eye as well as a Greek flag.

Donning sunglasses, Samantha went makeup-free and appeared to be wearing a black swimsuit in the snap.

The image also featured a Greek beach landscape in the background.



From one Sunrise to another! The 40-year-old appeared to enjoy a relaxing morning at the beach in the Greek Island of Spetses

'Cheers to a pair of slippers at 26,000 feet': Sam also shared a snap of herself chilling out in slippers and holiday a glass of wine on the plane

On the same day, the TV personality seemed to be enjoying a sunrise on a beach on the Greek island of Spetses.

Kicking back, Sam shared a photo of the sun rising along the coast with one of her feet in view.

'I think I'm the only morning person in Greece,' Samantha captioned the photo.

Her Channel Seven colleague Kylie Gillies, who co-hosts The Morning Show noticed the image and joked in the comments section: 'You may need a thong. Of the foot variety!'

'I think I'm the only morning person in Greece': Samantha co-hosts Sunrise and it appears her early starts continued while on holiday

Samantha has been sharing regular updates of her trip to Europe all week, beginning on Tuesday with a photo taken on her flight that referenced her dog Banjo.

'Here's cheers to a pair of slippers at 26,000 feet that Banjo can't chew,' Sam captioned an image featuring herself kicking back and relaxing in comfortable footwear and a glass of wine on an aeroplane.

Leaving no doubt that the trip was for pleasure and not business, Sam added the hashtag '#holidays'.

Taking time out! The glam TV personality has been sharing updates of her vacation all week




She's a dedicated mother to her daughter Sophia, previously confessing she has only ever let her out of her sight for six minutes.

And Tamara Ecclestone brought three-year-old along to work on Wednesday, stopping off at her SHOW Dry blow dry salon in Westbourne Grove, London to check that things were running smoothly.

The 33-year-old Formula One heiress was looking her best in a black bodycon dress, offsetting the slinky number with a distressed denim jacket.

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Stepping out: Tamara Ecclestone was bringing the three-year-old along to work on Wednesday, stopping off at her SHOW Dry blow dry salon in Westbourne Grove, London

Tamara pulled her look together with a cute pair of Perspex heels featuring pretty silver detailing.

She upped the glamour with her hair and beauty regime, matching her glossy blow dry with a liberal amount of bronzer and heavy eye make-up.

The star carried little Sophia on one hip, with the youngster coming over a little shy for once.

Looking good: The 33-year-old Formula One heiress was looking her best in a black bodycon dress, offsetting the slinky number with a distressed denim jacket

Sheer delight: Tamara pulled her look together with a cute pair of Perspex heels featuring pretty silver detailing

Tamara dressed the adorable kid in a simple sundress layered over a white T-shirt.

The pair went hand-in-hand as they left the salon, looking the picture of happiness.

The glamorous star has been showing her support for younger sister Petra Stunt since details of her bitter divorce battle from husband James came to light.

Petra is divorcing the father of her three children, six years after their lavish 12million wedding ceremony which took place in an Italian castle.

Chic: She upped the glamour with her hair and beauty regime, matching her glossy blow dry with a liberal amount of bronzer and heavy eye make-up

Toddler style: Tamara dressed cute Sophia in a simple sundress layered over a white T-shirt

She is embroiled in a bitter battle with her estranged husband over their 5.5billion fortune.

The pair have hired some of the countrys most high profile divorce lawyers to represent them in High Court hearings, which are expected to start next month.

Their 158million mansion in Los Angeles and a Grade II-listed pile in the fashionable west London district  worth up to 100million  are expected to be just some of the assets fought over.

F1 boss Bernie told MailOnline: 'She has suffered an awful lot and I couldn't bear for her to suffer any more'.

He added: 'I don't like to see marriages broken up unnecessarily, she tolerated it for quite a long time. He has caused enough aggravation for Petra'.

Supportive: The glamorous star has been showing her support for younger sister Petra Stunt since details of her bitter divorce battle from husband James came to light
She previously revealed that her break-up with DIY:SOS presenter Nick Knowles put her off dating.

Yet, Gemma Oaten, 33, appeared to have her love life back on track as she enjoyed a spot of retail therapy with her new beau film producer Scott Walker in Chelsea, London.

The former Emmerdale star was as ease as she stepped out clad in a pair of navy linen shorts which accentuated her bronzed skin.

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Retail therapy: Gemma Oaten, 33, appeared to have her love life back on track as she enjoyed a spot of retail therapy with her new beau film producer Scott Walker in Chelsea

The blonde beauty teamed her pin-flaunting look with a polka dot print blouse which complemented her shorts while she sauntered behind her new love.

Keeping to a navy palette, she wrapped a matching cardigan around her frame while she carried her burgundy tote over her forearm.

She added inches to her petite frame with a pair of cork wedge sandals as accessorised her casual ensemble with a drop necklace and silver watch.

Bronzed beauty: The Emmerdale star was as ease as she stepped out clad in a pair of navy linen shorts which accentuated her bronzed skin

Gemma's new man followed her causal memo as he sported a pair of denim jeans and loose-fitting tee while carrying a number of purchases in his hands.

The day time display comes after she openly discussed their new relationship last month in OK! Magazine.

Having met Scott four months ago, not only are the couple having more success than Gemma and Nick ever did, they have already decided to live together.

'Scott makes me realise Ive actually never been in love before,' Gemma told the publication. 'Hes made me realise what unconditional love is, and I dont think Id ever understood what that is.

New romance: The day time display comes after she openly discussed their new relationship last month in OK! Magazine

'The difference with Scott to anybody Ive been with in the past is that he loves me for me and sticks by his word.'

The pair have rapidly moved in with each other, after just a few weeks.

I got the place [in London], and Gemma was looking for a new place anyway, so it made sense,' Scott explained.

Happy: Having met Scott four months ago, not only are the couple having more success than Gemma and Nick ever did, they have already decided to live together

The couple's relationship comes after Gemma embarked on a short lived romance with Nick, who she met at the TV Choice Awards in September.

Nick immediately whisked her off for a romantic dinner after the glitzy award ceremony and they began dating, eight months after Nick's separation from wife Jessica Knowles.

But when pictures emerged of the pair enjoying a romantic getaway in Edinburgh, the 54-year-old star abruptly broke up with Gemma.

In the past: Nick immediately whisked her off for a romantic dinner after the glitzy award ceremony and they began dating, eight months after Nick's separation from wife Jessica

When the pair broke up Gemma was left heartbroken, telling the Daily Star : 'It was weird. It was very eggy and it did put me off dating. I've been a little bit burned and now is the time for me to be a little bit selfish and look after me.'

Nick returned to Jessica, 28, and supported her as she battled cervical cancer.

By January they decided to separate but remained on good terms for the sake of their son, Eddie.
He's been inseparable from girlfriend Alejandra Silva, 34, since their first date in 2015.

And Richard Gere, 67, was naturally joined by the glamorous blonde during his family holiday in Italy, enjoying a day at the beach in the company of his young son Homer, 17, on Tuesday.

The veteran actor was spotted larking about with the youngster - whose mother is Richard's second wife, model and actress Carey Lowell - as they took a dip in the sea.

Family fun: Richard Gere, 67, was enjoying a day at the beach in Italy in the company of his young son Homer, 17, on Tuesday

Silver fox Richard opted for a pair of blue board shorts to take a swim, while Homer donned turtle print trunks.

Alejandra kept her beach attire simple, sporting a white sundress and straw fedora.

She was laden down with towels as the group set up camp on the pebbled beach, spending the afternoon in the sunshine together.

Glamorous: Alejandra kept her beach attire simple, sporting a white sundress and straw fedora

Father and son time: Silver fox Richard opted for a pair of blue board shorts to take a swim, while Homer donned turtle print trunks

Alejandra, a publicist, joined her partner in the sea as they larked about, trying a spot of snorkeling.

Gere still appears in films despite his previous claims that Hollywood will not hire him due to his support of Tibet and criticism of China.

'I recently had an episode where someone said they could not finance a film with me because it would upset the Chinese,' he told the Hollywood Reporter.

Time off: The Hollywood veteran was taking some time out from his filming schedule

Making a splash: Alejandra, a publicist, joined her partner in the sea as they larked about, trying a spot of snorkeling

His latest role was in Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, in which takes the titular role as Norman Oppenheimer, an affable hustler with connections to Israeli Prime Minister Micha Eshel, who he befriended three years previously, while down on his luck.

But after Eshel rises from young politician to the top tier of Israeli politics, Norman soon finds himself in the midst of a political scandal.

He can next be seen in dramas The Dinner and Three Christs.
Rob Kardashian posted revenge porn of Blac Chyna on July 5 and accused of her sleeping with eight men in one month.

On Wednesday the 29-year-old reality star told People how she now feels after taking out a restraining order on the 30-year-old Keeping Up With The Kardashians star with whom she has daughter Dream, eight months old.

'I'm glad to be relieved of Rob, but damn why did I have to get relief in this way?' said the reality TV diva.

Done: Blac Chyna told People on Tuesday she's glad she's done with Rob Kardashian; seen on Sunday in Atlanta

Sad end: 'I'm glad to be relieved of Rob, but damn why did I have to get relief in this way?' said the reality TV diva

Chyna added she felt tremendous pain when she learned he had released nude photos of her.

'Words are words. But once you start posting actual pictures, that's just not right,' she began. 'What he did is not right, it's actually against he law.'

'I just want to voice my story  voice whats real  because at the end of the day, the person next to me could possibly be going through the same thing. For people to actually look up to me really means a lot. These types of things, they happen every day. A lot of women, they dont address it. See it, recognize it  but dont be tainted by it. Just be strong and positive.'

She then added: 'I feel like God does certain things - not to hurt you but to show you true strength. I feel like if I can come out of this I can come out of anything.'

Her side: Chyna added she felt tremendous pain when she learned he had released nude photos of her. 'Words are words. But once you start posting actual pictures, that's just not right,' she began

Wise words: 'What he did is not right, it's actually against he law... I feel like God does certain things - not to hurt you but to show you true strength'

He kept the car: 'I bought him a Range Rover,' she admitted. He still has it, according to Chyna, whose real name is Angela White. Range Rovers average about $100,000

Since the scandal made headlines, she has been seen heading to events (she hosted a strip club in LA and another club in Atlanta) and shopping.

'I'm not going to sit here and hide in my house because of somebody else being hurt or jealous or insecure,' she said.

Also in the interview, the looker made it clear she never used Rob for his money.

He did not buy her this Ferrari: 'I also read that he took the cars back. No he did not. Those cars were leased, and I was going to have to give them back anyway,' explained the star

She would not address her relationship with Ferrari

'I make my own money. I've been making my own money for a very, very long time. My first job was at McDonald's when I was 15.

'Years later, right after I had King, I wanted to do something that expressed myself, so I started Lashed Cosmetics.

'The lipsticks, the full skin care line, the beauty bar and 88F in clothing trickled down from that. Nobody supports me at all. If anything, I've gotten people more money. I'll leave it at that.'

And she said she gave Rob back his jewelry - including that diamond engagement ring worth almost $1 - because she 'can't be bought.'

She added: 'I'm not going to let him hang something over my head any more.

'I also read that he took the cars back. No he did not. Those cars were leased, and I was going to have to give them back anyway.'

Chyna said even after she gave him back the cars and jewelry, he did not give her anything back.

Her little one: The makeup mogul has daughter Dream, eight months, with Rob

'I bought him a Range Rover,' she admitted. He still has it, according to Chyna, whose real name is Angela White. Range Rovers average about $100,000.

As far as living together, she revealed he did live at her LA house for two months in the beginning of her pregnancy, but that it was too hard on her.

'He stressed me out every day,' she said.

She also detailed how after she had Dream she moved in with Rob to Kylie Jenner's old house, putting her pride aside (Kylie at the time was dating Chyna's ex Tyga with whom she has King Cairo, aged four).

Still working: She hosted a club in Atlanta and says she has been making her own money since she was 15

But she moved out after a week because she felt 'disrespected.'

She did not address the relationship she had with a man named Ferrari and simply said she wanted to be 'happy' so that Dream and King could be happy too.

'Im going to make myself happy because once Im happy, then Dream can be happy and then King can be happy and then everybody else around me can be happy,' she said.

Mother of two: The beauty also has son King Cairo, aged four, with ex Tyga

As far as Dream, the former model said she will 'co-parent' with Rob and hopes they can 'communicate' and build respect.

She also said the child has three teeth and can say 'Bye bye.' Chyna added: 'Dream's always dancing and smiling. She's a really happy baby.'

The star also said she moved into a new six-bedroom home in May because she wanted 'a fresh start.'

She split with Rob in December, she maintains. Their show Rob & Chyna is not on the E! schedule for a second season.
Next year will see them celebrate their fifteenth year of marriage.

But, despite their many years of happiness, Ola and James Jordan proved a lot of effort is still required from both parties to help keep their union a blissful one during their appearance on Loose Women on Wednesday.

The former Strictly Come Dancing stars shed some dark truths about their life together after Ola, 34, underwent a lie detector test on the ITV daytime show.

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Time for some home truths! Ola and James Jordan gave a very candid insight into married life as the beauty underwent a lie detector test during their appearance on Loose Women on Wednesday

Two months after James, 39, took part in a a polygraph test on the programme, his Polish dancer spouse has done the same - and she had some tough questions to answer.

Not afraid to put the bigger questions to his spouse, the Loose Women asked on James' behalf: 'Do you get jealous when you see James looking at other women?'

Unsurprisingly, Ola revealed that she does indeed get insecure when she sees her husband eyeing up other girls.

Bag of nerves! Ola admitted she was feeling nervous ahead of the polygraph test

No hiding! The former Strictly Come Dancing stars shed some dark truths about their life together after Ola, 34, underwent a lie detector test on the ITV daytime show

Quick to explain himself, James said: 'In the past, I've held her hand and said, 'Oh my God, look at her!' Seventeen years she's been with me.'

Demonstrating her fiery side, Ola quipped: 'It's expensive to get divorced!'

'Does it bother you that James is losing his hair?' the panel went on to pry.

Insisting he hadn't chosen that question to be asked, the dance pro confessed that his receding hairline did bother him.

Your turn! Two months after James, 39, took part in a a polygraph test on the programme, his Polish dancer spouse has done the same - and she had some tough questions to answer

'It bothers me': James admitted that he was also feeling insecure about his receding hairline

Surprise, surprise! Ola revealed that she does indeed get insecure when she sees her husband eyeing up other girls

Fortunately, the same couldn't be said for Ola, who answered no and was telling the truth.

But, later asked if she had scratched the expensive alloys on their car, the beauty came unstuck and was forced to reveal she had marked them.

'Oh! We've been arguing about it for ages. I started to think I did do it,' James hit back.

Elsewhere in the episode, James was forced to wear an uncomfortable PVC romper as payback for the time he made his wife do the same on the show.

Oh dear! Ola was also forced to confess that she had scratched the expensive alloys on the couples' car
When it comes to fashion, she can do no wrong.

And Natalie Portman once again showcased her style prowess as she dazzled at the Dior for Love event in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday.

Just a day after she wowed in a plunging black gown, the 36-year-old actress was ravishing in red as she posed for snaps at a photocall for the brand's latest fragrance.

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Miss Dior: Natalie Portman once again showcased her style prowess as she dazzled at the Dior for Love event in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday

The Black Swan star commanded eyes in an off-the-shoulder dress that flattered her svelte silhouette.

Giving the beauty the illusion of a more hourglass shape, the boho-inspired frock boasted a white panel that cinched her waist.

White crochet cuffs and an insert comprised of the same fabric just above the hem broke up the otherwise all red number.

Lady in red: Just a day after she wowed in a plunging black gown, the 36-year-old actress was ravishing in red as she posed for snaps at a photocall for the brand's latest fragrance

Pairing the garment with a statement shoe, Natalie slipped her feet into pointed black stilettos that had elaborate white ribbons at either side.

She has long been affiliated with designer Christian Dior and has enjoyed a five year relationship with the fashion house, fronting many of its beauty campaigns and becoming the face for its Miss Dior perfume.

Speaking about her work with Dior, Natalie told British Vogue last year that she feels 'very lucky' to be associated with the brand.

Fashionista: The Black Swan star commanded eyes in an off-the-shoulder dress that flattered her svelte silhouette

She said: 'I've been working with Dior for so long and they have been so incredibly supportive of me and my career.

'I have also been lucky enough to travel to some pretty incredibly places with them, giving me time in foreign countries I may not otherwise get to experience.'

'I feel very lucky to have them in my life,' she insisted.

Curves: Giving the beauty the illusion of a more hourglass shape, the boho-inspired frock boasted a white panel that cinched her waist
Ben Affleck revealed the hilarious moment his eldest child threw serious shade at him.

The American actor, 44, was collecting his humanitarian award at the Starkey Hearing Foundation Gala in St Paul, Minnesota, on Sunday - when he told audiences that daughter Violet - who he shares with ex Jennifer Garner, wasn't too impressed.

The Oscar winner initially choked up while making a serious speech about helping people in the Congo, before he light-heartedly revealed: 'When I told my oldest daughter that I was getting this award, she said, "Yeah, Dad. Mom already has that one."'

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Roasted! Ben Affleck, 44, revealed the hilarious moment his eldest child Violet, 11, threw serious shade at him as was collecting his humanitarian award at the Starkey Hearing Foundation Gala

No big deal: The American actor revealed during the ceremony that his daughter wasn't too impressed with the honour

Ben looked every inch the hunk as he told audiences how his family reacted to the impressive news - especially his daughter Violet.

The sweet youngster cheekily mentioned the honour was no big deal, as her mum and his ex had already bagged the award.

Ben and Jennifer split in 2015 and only filed for divorce this spring and together they have Violet, 11, Seraphina, eight, and Samuel, five.

And the ex-beau of Jennifer Lopez and Gwyneth Paltrow said he was in 'good company' after his soon-to-be ex-wife took home the same award.

The Oscar winner light-heartedly revealed: 'When I told my oldest daughter that I was getting this award, she said, "Yeah, Dad. Mom already has that one."'

Jen did it first: The sweet youngster cheekily mentioned the honour was no big deal, as her mum and his ex, Jennifer Garner, had already bagged the award - Pictured together in 2014

Starting off emotional: Meanwhile, according to UsWeekly , Ben 'choked up at the beginning of his speech after a touching introduction from his business partner Whitney Williams, who was also visibly emotional at the annual event'

Affleck, who is now dating SNL producer Lindsay Shookus, appeared to be date-free at the event.

According to UsWeekly, Ben 'choked up at the beginning of his speech after a touching introduction from his business partner Whitney Williams, who was also visibly emotional at the annual event.'

The gala raises millions of dollars to provide hearing aids to people in need around the world.

Posing with a pretty lady: The Argo director looked every inch the hunke as he posed with Tani Austin

And now another pal: Here Ben beams in his dark suit as Bill Austin poses with him

A new Ben: The Good Will Hunting vet seemed to be in great spirits at the Minnesota gala

Affleck 'was honored for his longtime humanitarian work with the nonprofit organization Eastern Congo Initiative, which he established with Williams in 2010,' added the site.

Ben was last in the Congo in June. It was his 10th trip to the region.

'Every time I visit, I leave even more inspired there will be a brighter and more peaceful future for the Congolese,' he wrote in a caption posted to Instagram last month.

He does more than make movies (and headlines): Affleck 'was honored for his longtime humanitarian work with the nonprofit organization Eastern Congo Initiative, which he established with Williams in 2010,' added UsWeekly

Another bro: Ben with Steven Sawalich at the 2017 Starkey Hearing Foundation So the World May Hear Awards Gala at the Saint Paul RiverCentre

Trio: Meanwhile, Jennifer was seen with daughter Violet and son Samuel at Jessica Biel's restaurant Au Fudge in LA on Friday. She was dressed down in a black T-shirt, jeans and sandals

'The challenges are real, and the road is long, but the Congolese are the hardest working and most hopeful people I know. We often speak of heroes  I count these among the many. It's the honor of a lifetime to support Congo. My heart will forever be there with them.'

Also at the event was Kris Jenner's ex Caitlyn Jenner and her daughter Kim Kardashian's ex-husband Kris Humphries.

Meanwhile, Jennifer was seen with daughter Violet and son Samuel at Jessica Biel's restaurant Au Fudge in LA on Friday. She was dressed down in a black T-shirt, jeans and sandals.

Ben and Jen seem to be amicable even though he has a new love in his life and on July 4 they were seen at a parade with their kids.

No smiles here: Also at the event was Kris Jenner's ex Caitlyn Jenner
She filed divorce papers earlier this month.

And Joanna Krupa says that splitting from husband Romain Zago left her 'heartbroken.'

The 38-year-old reality television star told In Touch on Wednesday that she was caught off guard by the nightclub owner requesting a divorce last December.

Hard times: Joanna Krupa says that splitting from husband Romain Zago left her 'heartbroken'

The Real Housewives of Miami alum told them: 'I spent many nights crying. It was the worst Christmas imaginable.

'I felt like my life had been turned upside down, and I couldnt see the light at the end of the tunnel. I cried. I couldnt eat. I probably lost about 7 pounds.'

The beauty - who was married to Romain for four years - explained that their marriage went wrong because of their differing priorities.

Surprise: The 38-year-old reality television star told In Touch on Wednesday that she was caught off guard by the nightclub owner requesting a divorce last December

She told them: 'I was heartbroken. He had wanted a family, but I was always traveling and made work my priority.

'As time has gone on, Ive realized we were both unhappy.'

The Polish-born beauty has put on a brave face on social media, regularly posting nude, or nearly nude pictures, perhaps to show her ex what he's missing.

She told the publication that seven-months after their split she feels ready to reclaim her happiness.

'I feel alive again. I finally woke up one day thinking, "Ive got to get myself together." I had been dead inside. I realized Im healthy, Im successful, I have an amazing family and friends, what am I crying about? Life is too short,' she told them.

Big reveal: Joanna is mostly known for posting naked shots of herself to her Instagram

How will she fit it in? The reality star split from her husband of four years last December, after she was working too hard and has now promised herself a hard-earned vacation

The couple - who were seen frolicking on the beach together just a day after she filed divorce papers - are apparently on 'great terms' according to Joanna.

She told In Touch that they speak daily, explaining: 'We were together 10 years, and I want to respect that. We were both at fault, we both neglected the relationship, but weve found forgiveness.

'Im finally enjoying life again. Im going out to dinners with friends and planning a vacation.'
She's heading to LA - her tenth holiday destination of the year - and Made In Chelsea star Louise Thompson shared a picture of herself wearing a red bikini ahead of the trip.

The 27-year-old showed off flawless abs in the snap and a golden tan in the two-piece which had sexy gold embellishments.

She captioned the image with the words: 'Hi LA, can't wait to hang out. Swim: @bahimibeachwear.'

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Getting some more stamps for the passport: Louise Thompson shows off her toned abs in very tiny red string bikini as she heads to her TENTH holiday destination of the year

Louise accessorized with diamond hoop earrings and a matching bracelet for the photo opportunity.

She, and her boyfriend Ryan Libbey have travelled to a variety of destinations already this year.

They have ticked The Maldives, Sri Lanka, Dubai, Paris, Halkidiki, Mexico, Mykonos, Ibiza, Florida and LA off their list now.

Earlier this month, Louise shared pictures of herself with her man in Ibiza.

The London beauty put her peachy derriere on full display in skimpy patterned bikini bottoms which showed off her bronze tan as she cosied up to Ryan.

Cosy! Louise showed off her pert derriere in tiny bikini bottoms as she cosied up to Ryan Libbey in Ibiza in a post her beau shared from Ibiza earlier this month

Letting her glossy tumble down her back, the fitness guru kept her look casual as she teamed the beachwear with a fitted white tee.

Ryan also showed he was ready to hit the beach with his baggy stripy T-shirt and skimpy brief bottoms.

Madly in love, the E4 reality show's power couple proved their romance is stronger than ever as they couldn't take their eyes off of each other.

Abs-olutely ripped! The personal trainer showed off his incredible body when he went shirtless on their sunny holiday on a yacht

They showed they complemented each other when they posed in the same mirrored sexy shades for the snap.



Ryan captioned the shot, 'my fave.'

The couple have been sharing a string of sun-soaked photographs from their holiday abroad.

The personal trainer had previously showed off his incredible body when he went shirtless on their sunny holiday.

Meanwhile, his Made in Chelsea girlfriend went topless in a raunchy snap, posing in the very same bikini bottoms while picking lemons in Ibiza.

Jeez, Louise! Louise flashed her perky behind as she posed in nothing but a pair of tiny bikini bottoms while picking lemons in Ibiza

The reality star turned fitness enthusiast reiterated her body confidence as she flashed her perky behind in patterned monochromatic bikini bottoms - and nothing else.

Using nature to her advantage, Louise smouldered as her brunette tresses, which have been noticeably lightened by the sun, blew away from her face.

The ex Jump contestant then turned and flashed a coy smile for the camera.

Copping a feel: Louise's boyfriend Ryan Libbey couldn't resist grabbing the Made in Chelsea star's as they posed in the sun-soaked location

Smitten kittens: The couple - who have been dating since last summer - have shared a series of loved-up snaps on the social networking site

'Picking lemons in our juicy orchard (dodging the sprinkler system: ugly black cable),' she captioned the raunchy snap.

The saucy shot came mere hours after Louise shared an image of boyfriend Ryan copping a feel of her peachy behind.

This time concealing her torso beneath a white T-shirt, the TV personality smiles for the camera while leaning against the muscle-bound trainer's chest.

'A whole lotta luv (& tan),' she wrote alongside the loved-up post.

While they are regulars on the London party scene as cast members of Made In Chelsea, it seems the couple are keen to be anywhere but the capital this year.

Cheeky: Louise looks to be having the time of her life during her seemingly never-ending holiday run

Breakfast in bed! The reality star posted a cheeky bedroom photo last week, holding up a pair of doughnuts to hide her bare chest

Louise has been dating personal trainer Ryan since last summer, and recently revealed he was part of the reason she decided to embark on her fitness journey.

Admitting to Women's Health she has ditched alcohol since finding love, she said: Getting in shape has been a combination of being with Ryan, the timing and changing my outlook.

'Im done drinking. Before, I would go wild once a week. But I mean wild.

'Then I realised that I dont actually enjoy drinking and its taken me the past few months to see how much better my life is without it.'
She reportedly began dating Nicolas Hoult this year and is the ex-girlfriend of Brody Jenner.

And it isn't difficult to see why Bryana Holly is such a hot commodity, as she sizzled in the new campaign for Honey Birdette Lingerie.

The Playboy model, 24, oozes sex appeal in the saucy snaps which sees her flashing her busty assets, toned tummy and pert derriere.

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Sizzling: Playboy model Brayan Holly, 24, oozed sex appeal as she flaunted her busty assets and toned stomach for the new campaign for Honey Birdette Lingerie

In one snap, the blonde bombshell flashed the camera a smouldering glance as she exhibits her ample assets in the halterneck bikini top - which boasts a keyhole neckline.

Bryana sexily places one hand on her toned stomach while her matching bottoms features a sexy, teasing slash.

Her locks are styled in glamorous blonde curls and she dons a pristine coat of old school Hollywood inspired make-up - including bold red lips and mascara.

In another peachy snap, she shows off her derriere as she sexily looks over her shoulder.

Smokin' hot! In another peachy snap, the sizzling model shows off her derriere in barely-there caged thongs as she sexily looks over her shoulder

The bottoms prove to be a barely-there fit and put prominence on her perky derriere as she delivers her best sultry pose.

Nicholas Hoult, 27, was spotted 'looking really loved-up' with the bikini model - who is said to be a 'tease' by fellow Playmates - earlier this year.

'Nicholas and Bryana have been getting close for months now,' a source told The Sun.

The insider continued: 'At first they spent a lot of time in Los Angeles together and even took a trip away to go hiking up the mountains.

'Bryana has also started flying over to London a lot so she can see Nicholas.

'They have been getting close for months now': Bryana is reportedly dating Nicholas Hoult, 27, after they were spotted 'looking really loved-up'

It's a hectic year for the Mad Max: Fury Road actor, who has five new films set for release.

'He is very busy with work so its hard to get their schedules to match - but when they can see each other they do and they are having a great time together.'

The source added: 'Theyve been spotted looking really loved-up, going to gigs and movies together and relaxing at Soho House.

'Bryana used to flaunt her relationships, always sharing selfies with Ashton [Irwin] and appearing on Brodys reality shows with him.

'But shes happy to be more low-key for Nick, which is a great sign.'

The Orange County, California stunner, who dated Kim Kardashian's step brother, was frequently featured on their E! reality show.

An insider revealed: 'At first they spent a lot of time in Los Angeles together and even took a trip away to go hiking up the mountains'

The couple dated for several months in 2013 before a dramatic falling out at the annual Playboy Mansion Halloween party in October.

A source told DailyMail.com: 'Brody and Bryana both partied at the Playboy Mansion to celebrate Halloween, something Bryana was really looking forward to, but the night ended really badly.

'Straight away the next day both deleted each other off Instagram.

'Bryana even went as far as deleting all the photographs with Brody, including their special trip to Hawaii.'

Nicholas previously dated Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence for five years before they split in 2014.
In November 2016, Jesinta Campbell secretly wed Lance 'Buddy' Franklin in a lavish ceremony in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales.

And on Tuesday, the 25-year-old model discussed her fairy tale nuptials in a chat with Vogue Australia.

In the revealing interview, Jesinta shared details about her big day, including her favourite moment and how she managed to score a custom-made Vera Wang wedding dress for it.

'I remember that vividly': On Tuesday, Jesinta Franklin (left) revealed heartwarming new details about her intimate wedding to Buddy (right) to Vogue Australia

The former Miss Universe Australia gushed about her first dance with her AFL star partner, explaining that it was the moment she cherished most from that day.

'I remember that vividly. The song that played meant a lot to Bud and me and it felt like it was just us in the room. We didn't have dance lessons; we literally just held each other and swayed,' Jesinta told the publication.

She added that the moment the couple were officially married was also extremely memorable.

'We personalised the ceremony and an Indigenous elder sung his song. It was really moving and I'll never forget that feeling. There was nothing contrived, it was all relaxed,' the David Jones ambassador said.

'It felt like it was just us in the room': The 25-year-old gushed about her first dance with her AFL star husband

'This is something out of a movie': The former Miss Universe Australia explained that Vera Wang's people reached out to her ten minutes after she announced Buddy had proposed

To tie the knot, Jesinta donned a couture Vera Wang gown for the ceremony, she opted for shoes by the designer too as well as a custom-made outfit for dinner and dancing.

The star explained that a chance meeting with Priya Shukla, who looks after marketing and PR for Vera Wang, resulted in an offer for the well-known designer to make Jesinta's dress coming in as soon as Buddy proposed.

'Within 10 minutes of me posting the photo, she wrote to me and said: "Vera would love to make a wedding dress." I thought: "This is something out of a movie; it's just not real."' she said.

Jesinta also revealed that she loved the frock so much that if she has a daughter, she can pass it onto her to wear on her own wedding day.

Well-kept secret! Buddy and Jesinta's nuptials were an intimate affair, with only 24 guests

Beautiful! Jesinta wore a couture Vera Wang gown for her wedding ceremony

For the genetically blessed couple, the occasion was a well-kept secret and with only 24 guests, it was an intimate affair too.

Guests drank Moet, VB, Peroni and espresso martinis and dined on a buffet of salmon, paella, roast potatoes and fresh salads.

Red and purple flowers were scattered along the tables, while the bride opted for several single-stem peonies instead of a bouquet.

Jesinta and Buddy made the surprise announcement that they had gotten hitched by posting a matching photo from their big day to their respective Instagram accounts.

Cheers! Guests sipped on Moet, VB, Peroni and espresso martinis
She plays an undercover MI6 agent in her latest movie.

But there was no chance of Charlize Theron flying below radar on Wednesday, as she flashed her bra in New York City.

The 41-year-old actress gave fans a thrill as she wore a sheer vest top which gave more than a glimpse of her lacy underwear, as she arrived at Howard Stern's show.

Sheer delight! Charlize Theron she flashed her bra in New York City on Wednesday

Her plunging tank was teamed with a simple black mini, which revealed her finely toned legs.

Her foot tattoo was on show as the South African-born beauty added a pair of classic lacy black stilettos.

The blonde beauty kept her tresses in waves with a side parting, as she stepped out on the promotional trail for action flick Atomic Blonde.

Sexy: The 41-year-old actress gave fans a thrill as she wore a sheer vest top which gave more than a glimpse of her lacy underwear, as she arrived at Howard Stern's show

Her eyes were covered by giant sunglasses, as she flaunted her flawless complexion and striking good looks.

Later, she covered her shoulders with a black blazer jacket as she arrived to chat at Sirius XM radio.

The star revealed that she enjoys filming love scenes with both men and women.

She shares a steamy moment with co-star Sofia Boutella, who plays a French spy, and told Extra that they found the scene easy to choreograph.

Simple style: Her plunging tank was teamed with a short black mini, which revealed her finely toned legs

Stunning: Her eyes were covered by giant sunglasses, as she flaunted her flawless complexion and striking good looks

Charlize told them: 'With Sofia, it was easy just because were both dancers and you have to choreograph those scenes quite a bit. Otherwise, they just become silly. There is a technical aspect to it, so with her it was really easy because she thinks like me because we're dancers.

'We shot that scene in, like, 45 minutes and with the guys, they're not dancers, so, it takes a bit more work. I enjoy both -- yes!

'Doing a love scene with guys is different, but I enjoy both.'

Demure: Later, she covered her shoulders with a black blazer jacket as she arrived to chat at Sirius XM radio

Comfortable: The star had revealed to Extra that she enjoys filming love scenes with both men and women

Blonde ambition: The beauty kept her tresses in waves with a side parting, as she stepped out on the promotional trail for action flick Atomic Blonde

The Mad Max star has been tipped by Chris Hemsworth as a future James Bond.

He told W Magazine: 'She's smart as hell. She's physically able,' adding, 'I just think why not? It's time.'

The 41-year-old Oscar-winning actress revealed to Extra that she was proud with how far she pushed herself for the action scenes of Atomic Blonde.

'We always wanted to raise the bar a little, but with the action, we wanted it to still feel that a woman could do all of that stuff - that was important for me as a woman, I wanted it to feel authentic, so no one can say a woman can't do that,' she told them.

'I'm going to be 42 in August, very proud to say, ladies.,' she added.

However, Charlize admitted the scenes took their toll on her body and she managed to chip two of her teeth during fight training.

'I went through the first two surgeries before we started the film, and then I wrapped the movie and had another two surgeries and I still have one more,' she revealed.

The mother-of-two said her two harshest critics are her two children, Jackson, six, and 23-month-old August.

She told Extra: 'They don't think I'm cool at all! I was singing in the car the other day and Jackson was like, "Mom, can you not sing, please? Stop doing that."'

Cold War era film Atomic Blonde is directed by David Leitch, and sees Charlize play undercover MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton as she investigates the murder of an agent in Berlin.

The movie also stars Sofia Boutella and John Goodman, and is scheduled for release on July 28.
He's a favorite of Bachelor Nation, having appeared on the series four different times.

And Nick Viall looked like he might have been dreaming about a return to Paradise, while spotted lunching with BIP castmate Ashley Iaconetti Wednesday in sunny LA.

Though the lunch date was purely platonic, the reality star's fiance Vanessa Grimaldi was no where to be seen as the Milwaukee, Wisconsin native chatted with contestant/journalist Ashley over bites at Joan's On Third in West Hollywood.

Let's do lunch! Bachelor alum Nick Viall was spotted lunching with Bachelor In Paradise castmate Ashley Iaconetti Wednesday in West Hollywood

Nick, 36, looked handsome in a grey tee and jeans, donning loosely laced boots and a rugged stubble across his chin while carrying a to-go coffee in hand.

Ashley - who appeared on season 19 of the Bachelor in addition to two stints in Paradise - looked sweet in a flirty wrap and cami which revealed her tan arms and perky chest, pairing the top with distressed jeans and nude heels.

The Access Hollywood reporter added a splash of color with a bright red pout, covering her eyes with dark shades.

Just friends: Though the lunch was purely platonic, the reality star was without fiance Vanessa Grimaldi as he chatted with his Paradise season two castmate over bites at Joan's On Third

That's a wrap! Ashley donned a flirty wrap and cami pared with jeans and nude heels

Though Nick and Ashley both appeared on season three of the dating romp, they never had a romantic spark.

But it looked like the pair could have been exchanging post-Bachelor business tips, seen rubbernecking at each other's phones.

Since finishing his season Nick appeared on ABC's Dancing With The Stars, where he stepped into 6th placed, while he and fiance Vanessa Grimaldi have been settling into life together.

Good cause! Monday the lovebirds hosted a fundraiser for Vanessa's No Better You foundation. The pair looked smitten, despite reports they've been on the rocks since the show's finale

Ashley's - who has a master's degree from Syracuse University - smoothly transitioned from the reality screen to the sidelines, now reporting for Access Hollywood, writing for Cosmopolitan, and hosting two podcasts.

On Monday the reality lovebirds were in Vanessa's hometown of Montreal, Canada where they hosted the very first fundraiser for the special educator's No Better You foundation.

Together the duo raised over $30k for the fledgling foundation, calling the event a 'great success' on Instagram.

Their grinning photo is at odds with rumors of tumult that have followed them since the finale of Nick's seasons.

Rough waters? Despite falling in love in front of a national audience, rumors of tumult have followed Nick and Vanessa since their season finale

Not a pretty picture: According to an US Weekly source, the couple looked 'miserable' on a flight home from Bachelor In Paradise's Evan Bass and Carly Waddell's Mexico wedding in May

According to an US Weekly report late June, eyewitnesses said the couple looked 'miserable' on a flight home from Puerto Vallarta, where they attended the wedding of Bachelor In Paradise's Evan Bass and Carly Waddell.

'They didnt exchange five words the entire flight. They were angled completely away from each other,' a witness told the publication, adding 'Nick grabbed his bag and ran ahead of Vanessa. They really dont seem to like each other.'

It was also noted that Vanessa recently stepped out in LA without her 3.5 carat Neil Diamond ring, given to her during the finale episode in March.
She's been treating her fans to an array of sultry snapshots of late.

And Elizabeth Hurley continued with her sizzling streak as she posed topless in an Instagram snap on Wednesday, hinting at her sensational figure.

Clad in just a skimpy white thong, the 52-year-old actress left little to the imagination as she smouldered down the lens in another of her head-turning snapshots.

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Cheeky: d Elizabeth Hurley continued with her sizzling streak as she posed topless in an Instagram snap on Wednesday, hinting at her sensational figure

Displaying her enviably pert posterior and lean legs, the mother-of-one oozed glamour in the saucy shot, which she quipped was to show off the fur throw she was lying on.

'Lounging on the best presents ever from @patrickcox_lathbridge', she captioned the snap.

Yet it wasn't the bedding that caught the eye as she posed coquettishly for the camera.

Cheeky! Elizabeth went for one of her sexiest looks to date on Monday as she went topless in a sexy clip in which she wore just bikini bottoms while reclining on a sunlounger

Elizabeth went for one of her sexiest looks to date on Monday as she went topless in a sexy clip in which she wore just bikini bottoms while reclining on a sunlounger and learning her lines for The Royals.

The actress once again showed off age-defying figure as she flashed a generous glimpse of side-boob in the cheeky clip while also displaying her endless legs and perky posterior in her coquettish pose.

Elizabeth is known for her age-defying features and physique, which make her look like a woman half her age, a fact she is often keen to flaunt among her 632,000 followers - with Monday being no exception.

Oh my! The 52-year-old actress once again showed off age-defying figure as she flashed a generous glimpse of side-boob in the cheeky clip while also displaying her endless legs and perky posterior in her coquettish pose

As she enjoyed the summer sunshine, the stunning star beamed into the camera while ensuring she was tanline free by whipping off her top while lying in the blissful setting where she revealed she was learning lines.

Taken in Herefordshire, she added a caption on the shot reading: 'Learning my lines Herefordshire style', as she beamed giddily into the camera.

The stunning star plays Queen Helena in E! hit The Royals, where she first scooped the role in 2015 before becoming a fan favourite in the US.

Legs for days: Just days before in yet another sexy social media snap, she put on a leggy display in a black lace mini dress, to expose her toned and tanned pins as she leisurely reclined on a pleather chair

Just days before in yet another sexy social media snap, she put on a leggy display in a black lace mini dress, to expose her toned and tanned pins as she leisurely reclined on a pleather chair.

The racy garment hugged Elizabeth's sensationally slender figure and pert bust as she struck a relaxed pose in the photo captioned 'Good morning Trailer, good morning Pleather Chair, good morning #theroyals'

Her caramel flecked tresses were styled into soft curls and parted on the side. The Austin Powers actress opted for soft smoky eye make-up, which enhanced her sparkling peepers and a slick of frosted pink lipgloss on her pump pout.

Earlier in the week she displayed an impressive yoga move in a striking snap, which showed her clad in a skimpy hot pink bikini while arching her back all the way down to the ground.

Envy-inducing figure: Earlier in the week she displayed an impressive yoga move in a striking snap, which showed her clad in a skimpy hot pink bikini while arching her back all the way down to the ground

Elizabeth executed the crab yoga move to perfection for the spectacular snap which saw her sizzle in the barely-there two-piece.

With a pink printed mat rolled on the grass underneath her, the British beauty balanced on her toes, which allowed her enviably toned pins to take prominence.

The pair of string bikini bottoms rested low on her hips and showed off her impossibly toned stomach.

With her luscious locks cascading beneath her, Elizabeth sported a thrilled expression as she practised her yoga skills.

Saucy: The actress left fans hot under the collar as she posed for a VERY sultry selfie that drew attention to her plentiful bust the day before on Tuesday

'Day 2 of s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g,' the striking star captioned the snap while also crediting the bikini from her Elizabeth Hurley beach swimwear line.

The day before, Elizabeth showcased her phenomenal figure and flawless complexion once more, as she shared a sultry photo of herself to Instagram.

She posed in nothing but a bath robe that left little to the imagination, while shrugged sexily off of her shoulders.

Clearly tied together loosely, Elizabeth's robe made for a perilously low neckline, allowing her social media followers to steal a glimpse at her plentiful assets.

Coming over all nonchalant when it came to her racy display, The Royals star simply penned alongside her post: 'Getting ready for my close up.'

'Sexy as hell': The stunning snap found the mother-of-one inundated with compliments, with many feeling obliged to comment on her bust-enhancing attire

She was pictured sitting down on set while being preened and pampered to perfection.

Elizabeth boasted a glam make-up look that came complete with heavily kohl-lined eyes and spell-binding long lashes, as well as a nude pink lip and her lightened tresses in soft curls.

The stunning snap found the mother-of-one inundated with compliments, with many feeling obliged to comment on her bust-enhancing attire.

One follower penned: 'That is the most fantastic robe I have ever seen,' while another remarked: 'Sporting that 29yr old cleave still...'

A third fan added: 'OMG you have been my ultimate crush since as long as i was old enough,' prompting another fan to write: 'Sexy as hell.'

Back onscreen: Elizabeth has been enjoying television success once more with E! comedy sitcom The Royals in which she plays the role of Queen Helena - her son Damian, 15, has starred alongside her on the show

It's not the first time the movie star has set pulses racing on the photo-sharing site, as she recently posed in plunging purple swimsuit.

Seen fooling around at her English country manor, Elizabeth appeared green-fingered with a hose in hand, all the while showing off her jaw-dropping body.

Proving she has the whole package, she looked sensational in her skimpy all-in-one, that again drew attention to her bust, along with her enviable frame.

Elizabeth joked alongside her snap: 'Someone's gotta do it.'

She has been enjoying television success once more with E! comedy sitcom The Royals in which she plays the role of Queen Helena.

Mark Wright has previously made a cameo in the show as a talk show host, and Elizabeth's very own son, Damian Hurley, 15, had also starred.

She has previously admitted to purposely taking a long break from the spotlight in order to focus on her parenting duties and bring up Damian.

Reflecting on her eight years away from the industry, Elizabeth revealed in an interview with Closer magazine: 'Looking after my son became my No. 1 task, and it was a joy to have someone else on whom to focus.

'I was 36 and had been worrying about myself for quite long enough. I stopped doing movies and TV for the first eight years of his life, and I don't regret it for a moment. I always put him first.'
They have been two of the favourite islanders over the last week, despite being the newest couple to the show.

But on Wednesday night, Love Island fans voted Sam and Georgia to be the next couple dumped from the villa.

While they had encountered a few hiccups during the lie detector test on Tuesday night, the pair hinted romance could be on the cards as they made their exit, with Georgia gushing: 'I didn't expect to come out with someone I like.'

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Farewell: On Wednesday night, Love Island fans voted Sam and Georgia to be the next couple dumped from the villa

Sealed with a kiss! They have been two of the favourite islanders over the last week, despite being the newest couple to the show

As the islanders gathered around the fire pit, favourites Gabby and Marcel were shockingly announced as the first couple at risk.

The second couple named were Sam and Georgia, who were followed by Alex and Montana - resulting in the brunette flashing a small smirk as she was named, after the episode's drama with Gabby.

Olivia then announced that the two new arrivals were the next to leave the villa, with both Montana and Gabby - who clashed during the episode - breathing a sigh of relief.

Gracious: Georgia held her head high as she was voted off, telling the islanders: 'Don't be upset, we ain't been together as long as you guys. We did well to make it as long as we did!'

Love is in the air? The fun-loving couple themselves even teased that romance could be on the cards when they returned to the UK

Hugging their fellow islanders goodbye, Georgia admitted she had been expecting to be voted off, telling her friends: 'It was always going to be us guys.

'Don't be upset, we ain't been together as long as you guys. We did well to make it as long as we did!'

The fun-loving couple themselves even teased that romance could be on the cards when they returned to the UK - after a troublesome few days in the villa, which saw Georgia accused of lying by the detector test when she said she could see herself in a relationship with Sam.

Excited: She said of the Middlesborough native (above): 'I didn't expect to come out with someone that i like, so it is definitely more sweet than bitter, 100%'

Practical joker: While Sam laughed with the islanders one last time in the villa, after admitting he did not want to leave

She said as she made her way out: 'I didn't expect to come out with someone that I like, so it is definitely more sweet than bitter, 100%.'

It appears the fun-loving couple were a hit with the islanders too - with all singing their praises as they made a sad departure.

Georgia told the islanders by the fire pit: 'You were all so accepting when I came in, I feel you're such good people and I've really bonded with all of you.

Big fans: It appears the fun-loving couple were a hit with the islanders too - with all singing their praises as they made a sad departure

Farewell: Kem said in the Beach Hut: 'Georgia and Sam really are the perfect couple, as they're the boy and girl version of each other. I am really excited for them'

To which Olivia replied: 'You b***sed it up when you came in but then you still made friends with us all! You did so well.'

Before Kem added in the Beach Hut: 'Georgia and Sam really are the perfect couple, as they're the boy and girl version of each other. I am really excited for them.'

Things had become incredibly complicated for the islanders on Wednesday, after they were faced with playing Mum and Dad in the villa - a challenge Georgia and Sam had actually failed.

The contestants are tasked with looking after baby simulators and were tested on whether they could be hands-on parents, from feeding to changing and everything in between.

New arrivals: Things got incredibly complicated for the islanders on Wednesday - after they were faced with playing Mum and Dad in the villa

Chris instantly took to his role as a new father like a duck to water, and seemed worryingly attached to the fake infant.

At one point he was seen introducing the child to the swimming pool, and even started ranting that his fellow islanders were exhibiting 'shocking parenting' by not dressing their dolls in a sun hat.

He later was seen wetting the fake baby's head beside the pool in order to cool the tot down, melting the hearts of viewers.

'I think this morning he has already brought out an emotional side in me,' he said of his 'son'. 'With Olivia, we have stopped the mishaps weve had together and weve got to focus on the baby now, because ultimately he is our main responsibility.'

Adorable: Chris took to his role as a new father like a duck to water, and seemed worryingly attached to the fake infant

After squabbling over the name, the pair decide to call their tot Cash.

In the Beach Hut, they explained: 'We named him after our favourite thing,' before they joke that the baby is thus called: 'Cash Hughes', alike to the sound of the nut.

In the smoking area, Chris then became overwhelmed by the emotions of becoming a new father - and even developed a tear in his eye because he cared so much about their baby.

Looking adoringly at Cash, Chris was heard saying: 'Hes got his dads eyes like a husky and hes got his mothers temperament.'

Doting dad: Chris was every inch the loving father, telling the doll: 'Hes got his dads eyes like a husky and hes got his mothers temperament'

Later, Sam was sunbathing with his baby by the pool, but Chris and Amber call him out for not dressing him with a sun hat or in factor 50 sun cream.

However Sam soon received karma for his complacency, as his doll, who had been quiet for the duration of the morning, finally began to cry.

Yet, some of the others were not quite as suited to parenthood - with Kem and Amber becoming openly disgruntled they were unable to stop the baby crying.

Kem later expressed his annoyance at people telling him off for being loud around the babies - admitting the claim was 'banter', as the children are not real.

Baby Cash: Olivia and Chris name their baby Cash, joking: 'We named him after our favourite thing'

Future power couple? Montana and Alex agreed to call their baby Harper

However his brunette partner was a much more hands-on mum - happily hugging the doll and even snapping a few photos of him in the sunshine.

Also not finding the challenge a breeze was Gabby, who admitted in the Beach Hut: 'Theres probably a reason why my friends dont let me babysit, because they dont know if I would be able to cope.'

Jamie and Camilla meanwhile name their daughter, Jamie Jr, who Camilla declares will be 'a strong, independent woman.'

Broody: Camilla admitted: 'I definitely did feel a little ovary twinge today, much more to do with the guys, they are just so cute with the babies'

Proud mama: 'She is going to be a strong, independent woman,' Camilla said of their daughter

The Scottish beauty later admitted the challenge had a real effect on her, revealing in the Beach Hut: 'I definitely did feel a little ovary twinge today, much more to do with the guys, they are just so cute with the babies.'

Amber later asked asks the girls if the babies have made any of them broody - with Olivia adamant that she's not, as is Gabby.

However Georgia said she cant wait to start a family, exclaiming: 'Yes, not this year but I cannot wait to have babies. Im so excited.'

Before Montana added: 'I was broody before we got that fake baby and now Im like, I want 10. Its weird seeing the person youre coupled up with, with a baby because how they are with that baby can make you think, "Youre my baby daddy".'
The couple called it quits in 2015, but only filed for divorce this spring.

But Ben Affleck has already moved on from his marriage of over a decade to Jennifer Garner.

And while the hunky actor was spotted in New York on Wednesday with new lady Lindsay Shookus, the mother of his three kids, Violet, 11, Seraphina, eight, and Samuel, five, was seen running family errands in Los Angeles.

Jennifer seemed to be shrugging off the new romance as she smiled during her outing.

Out and about: Ben Affleck and new girlfriend Lindsay Shookus were spotted during a coffee run in New York City on Wednesday

Shrugging it off: Jennifer Garner grinned from ear-to-ear while out in Los Angeles on Wednesday

Meanwhile, her 44-year-old ex was joined by Lindsay during a coffee run inNew York City on Wednesday.

Ben and the Saturday Night Live producer certainly looked to be enjoying their bonding time as they sipped their iced coffees from Starbucks while heading back to their lodging place at the Ritz-Carlton.

The Good Will Hunting star looked comfortable in a shirt from Parc National des Virunga in the Congo along with baggy jeans and navy blue sneakers.

His short salt and pepper hair was disheveled as he sported grizzled scruff and a pair of aviator shades.

Lindsay looked cute in a blue Southwest-patterned mini dress along with white low-top shoes.

Her blonde locks were worn down into waves flowing over her shoulders as she also wore aviators over her make-up free face.

Casual cool" She rocked a white long-sleeved top and blue boyfriend jeans

Chill mode: Ben and the Saturday Night Live producer sipped their iced coffees from Starbucks while heading back to their lodging place at the Ritz-Carlton

The outing comes just hours after it was reported that Ben is dropping out of Netflix project Triple Frontier to focus on 'his wellness and his family', according to Deadline.

The thriller, helmed by A Most Violent Year director JC Chandor, will move forward without him and find its final cast quickly.

Ben hasn't made any official statements about his decision.

Personal affairs: The outing came just after a Deadline report that the actor has dropped out of an upcoming Netflix thriller to focus on his wellbeing and family

He is still scheduled to be at San Diego Comic Con later this week to promote the upcoming Justice League, which hits theaters in November.

Back in March, Ben revealed that he had completed rehab 'to be the best father I can be.'

He issued a personal statement on Facebook sharing why he decided to get help for alcohol addiction.

Batman! He is still scheduled to be at San Diego Comic Con later this week to promote the upcoming Justice League, which hits theaters in November

'I have completed treatment for alcohol addiction; something I've dealt with in the past and will continue to confront,' he began in the statement.

He continued: 'I want to live life to the fullest and be the best father I can be. I want my kids to know there is no shame in getting help when you need it, and to be a source of strength for anyone out there who needs help but is afraid to take the first step.'

Ben has had a rough few years in his personal life as he split from wife of 12 years, Jennifer Garner.

No official word: Ben hasn't made any official statements about his decision

The couple called it quits in 2015, but only filed for divorce this spring.

Together they have Violet, 11, Seraphina, eight, and Samuel, five.

Since officially divorcing Jennifer earlier this year, the actor has been spotted with his new girlfriend, Lindsay. The two have been snapped together on several dates.

'It is early on in the relationship but they are very happy together,' a source close to Affleck told ET. Another source added, 'Ben and Lindsay's relationship is new and they are taking it slow.'

The two reportedly first got together in 2015 before Ben and Jennifer officially separated.

Trying times: Ben has had a rough few years in his personal life as he split from wife of 12 years, Jennifer Garner

Still there for the kids: The couple have remained friendly as they raise their three children Violet, 11, Seraphina, eight, and Samuel, five, together

Jennifer has apparently known about the affair for quite some time and even spoke to Lindsay's ex about it on another trip to New York City after Lindsay and her husband had already split up.

The insider told Us that Ben and Lindsay 'were not casually dating' but have been 'having a full-blown affair' since 2015.

However, a source close to Ben claimed they pair have only been dating for three months and tried to make it clear that 'Lindsay was not what led to the end of [Affleck and Garner's] marriage,' adding 'They had a ton of other problems.'

Serious? The actor has been spotted with his new girlfriend, Lindsay Shookus and the two have been snapped together on several dates
Former Doctor Who favourite Kris Marshall is being tipped to play the Doctor's assistant following the reveal of Jodie Whittaker as the Time Lord.

An insider told The Sun: 'Kris is a big fan of the show and the BBC are a big fan of his', as fans await the announcement following the groundbreaking reveal of the first ever female doctor earlier in the week.

The 44-year-old Death In Paradise star was previously in the lead for the role before viewers were delighted to hear of the arrival of the first ever female lead.

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Could it be? Former Doctor Who favourite Kris Marshall is being tipped to play the Doctor's assistant following the reveal of Jodie Whittaker as the Time Lord

MailOnline has contacted representatives for Kris and BBC for comment.

Talk long-circulated about Kris scooping the role as doctor, with sources previously revealing: 'Kris Marshall has already joined the cast and will regenerate at the end of this series, not in the Christmas special'.

Atop the misleading claims regarding his recruitment, insiders totally dismissed the idea of a woman scooping the role - just two months before Jodie's announcement: 'They wont risk a woman Doctor. They want a David Tennant type.'

News of Kris' possible casting comes just days after Jodie was confirmed as the first female Time Lord on Sunday, after the Wimbledon Men's Singles Final.

Popular: Jodie's unveiling as the new Doctor Who has gone down a storm with fans - with the clip being viewed a whopping 16 million times online

And it seems Jodie's unveiling as the new Doctor Who has gone down a storm with fans - with the clip being viewed a whopping 16 million times online.

The clip, aired on BBC One, revealed the Broadchurch actress, 35, as both the 13th individual and first ever female to play the iconic role.

On the BBC's Facebook page it has been watched almost 10m times, and it has been since a whopping 2.5 million views on Twitter - with the clip itself has been retweeted by 73,000 people.

The impressive figures make it the most successful Doctor Who tweet of all time, and Jodie's entrancement as the role perhaps the most explosive.

No doubt overwhelmed by the reception, controller of BBC Drama Piers Wenger said: 'To see the overwhelmingly positive response to the news that Jodie Whittaker will star as the Thirteenth Doctor, and know that the reveal has had over 16 million views online so far, is just phenomenal.

Taking over: The actress replaces The Thick Of It star Peter Capaldi, who will hang up his shows as the part during this year's Christmas Special

'It's exhilarating to see Doctor Who engaging with people on so many different levels and I cannot wait for the audience to see her in action on BBC One this Christmas.'

The actress replaces The Thick Of It star Peter Capaldi, who will hang up his shows as the part during this year's Christmas Special.

In the announcement clip, a hooded Whittaker was seen walking towards the Tardis in the middle of a forest before revealing herself to the camera.

Doing it justice: Last week, Jodie (above) told fans 'don't be scared of my gender', after she was announced as the first woman to play the role

However last week, Jodie has told fans 'don't be scared of my gender', after she was announced as the first woman to play the role.

The decision to cast a female actress in the role, which has previously been played by men, divided fans.

She said: 'It feels completely overwhelming, as a feminist, as a woman, as an actor, as a human, as someone who wants to continually push themselves and challenge themselves, and not be boxed in by what you're told you can and can't be.

I can do this: She said: 'It feels completely overwhelming, as a feminist, as a woman, as an actor, as a human, as someone who wants to continually push themselves'

Before adding excitedly: 'It feels incredible.'

She then reassured fans to not be afraid of the change - affirming that the show itself will not alter in any way despite being fronted by a female.

'Because this is a really exciting time, and Doctor Who represents everything that's exciting about change,' she said, adding: 'The fans have lived through so many changes, and this is only a new, different one, not a fearful one.'

While many praised the BBC and the show's writers for choosing a female actress, others slammed the decision as 'political correctness gone mad'.

Moving on: Jodie took on the role after a recently successful stint in ITV's Broadchurch

Twitter user David Stephens said: 'Sorry this is so called equality, women's rights, political correctness gone mad-Dr Who was written/created as a man! End of.'

Clive Walton agreed, writing on his Twitter page: 'No the character is a man not a woman! As usual the BBC have to muddy the waters through political correctness that's what they do!'

Responding to the BBC's announcement, former fan Tony Moretta said on the social networking site: 'Well you're one viewer down already.'

Whittaker, 35, revealed she had told 'a lot of lies' in order to keep the announcement secret and had used the codename Clooney when discussing the role with her husband and agent.

She said: 'I'm beyond excited to begin this epic journey - with Chris and with every Whovian on this planet. It's more than an honour to play the Doctor'. Right, she is pictured with her husband Christian Contreras

Mixed: Many praised the BBC and the show's writers for choosing a female actress, but others slammed the decision as 'political correctness gone mad'

It will see the actress team up with Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall on the hit sci-fi series as he takes over from Steven Moffat as executive producer.

Explaining how she won the part, she said: 'We had a strange chat earlier this year where he tricked me into thinking we were talking about Broadchurch.

'And I started to quiz him about his new job in Wales, and asked him if I could be a baddie. And he quickly diverted the conversation to suggest I should consider auditioning to be the 13th Clooney.

'It was the most incredible chat because I asked every question under the sun, and I said I'd take a few weeks to decide whether I was going to audition.

'He got a phone call within 24 hours. He would've got a phone call sooner, but my husband was away and there was a time difference.'

Tony Moretta said on the social networking site: 'Well you're one viewer down already.'

Another user, who tweets under the name of Sick of Tolerance, wrote: 'I trust her companion will be a disabled, transgender, asexual, Muslim Afro Caribbean gay all rolled into one to keep the PC BBC happy'

Georgina Hewitson tweeted: 'I must say I'm pleased we might get a generation of little girls running around with sonic screwdrivers and lightsabers'

She added the freedom the role enjoys was why she wanted to become an actress in the first place.

Asked if she had been given any advice from previous actors who had played the role, Whittaker said: 'Well they can't because they haven't known until now, but I'm certainly expecting a couple of calls - I've got a couple of mates in there.

'I'm mates with a companion (Arthur Darvill), I'm mates with a trio of Doctors.

'I know Matt Smith, Chris Eccleston and obviously David Tennant. Oh! And let's throw in David Bradley! Four Doctors! So I'm hoping I get some calls of advice.'

Many fans of the show have expressed their delight over the decision to cast the actress.

The teaser begins with a mysterious, cloaked figure making their way through a wood

The suspenseful clip initially gives no clues as to the identity of the new Doctor

The figure stops and holds out an empty hand only for the key to the Tardis to materialise out of thin air

Georgina Hewitson tweeted: 'I must say I'm pleased we might get a generation of little girls running around with sonic screwdrivers and lightsabers.'

Amy Downes wrote: 'So pleased about #doctor13 - a fantastic actor and brave and exciting move from @BBCOne. Thank you Beeb - it's going [to] be amazing.'

One person, who tweets under the name Kagekabuki, reminded people of the television show's previous decisions to feature women in other prominent roles in the show.

They said: 'Friendly reminder that the TARDIS [the name of the spaceship the Doctor travels in] is female and The Corsair [another Time Lord] had male and female reincarnations.'

Divided: Fans took to Twitter to express their mixed opinions on the choice

The camera pans to reveal a woman is the mysterious wandered trudging through the wood

What we've all been waiting for: Broadchurch star Jodie Whittaker removes her hood to reveal she is the first ever female Doctor Who

In a testament to the acclaimed actress, ex-Doctor Peter Capaldi said: 'She has above all the huge heart to play this most special part. She's going to be a fantastic Doctor'

'Making history is what Doctor Who is all about', said Charlotte Moore, Director of BBC Content

New head writer and executive producer Chris Chibnall, who takes over from Steven Moffat on the next series, made the decision to cast the first ever woman in the iconic role.

He said: 'I always knew I wanted the Thirteenth Doctor to be a woman and we're thrilled to have secured our number one choice.

'Her audition for The Doctor simply blew us all away. Jodie is an in-demand, funny, inspiring, super-smart force of nature and will bring loads of wit, strength and warmth to the role. The Thirteenth Doctor is on her way.'

Mr Capaldi announced plans to step down from the alien role in January, which prompted some fans and critics to call for Mr Moffat to change the Doctor's gender.

Ms Whittaker as Beth and Andrew Buchan as Mark in the ITV hit Broadchurch, which told the story of how their son was murdered

She is pictured with Viggo Mortensen in the 2008 movie Good, the story of John Halder

Speaking about her new role, Jodie said: 'I'm beyond excited to begin this epic journey - with Chris and with every Whovian on this planet. It's more than an honour to play the Doctor.

'It means remembering everyone I used to be, while stepping forward to embrace everything the Doctor stands for: hope. I can't wait.'

Capaldi praised the decision to choose Ms Whittaker and said: 'Anyone who has seen Jodie Whittaker's work will know that she is a wonderful actress of great individuality and charm.

'She has above all the huge heart to play this most special part. She's going to be a fantastic Doctor.'

Charlotte Moore, Director of BBC Content said: 'Making history is what Doctor Who is all about and Chris Chibnall's bold new take on the next Time Lord is exactly that.

'The nation is going to fall in love with Jodie Whittaker - and have lots of fun too!'
All good things must come to an end.

On Tuesday, Jessica Chastain and her new husband, Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo, touched down in Los Angeles after celebrating their honeymoon.

The longtime loves tied the knot in Italy back in June.

Honeymoon's over: Jessica Chastain and new husband Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo landed in Los Angeles following their Italian wedding last month

Pajama party: While at LAX, the 40-year-old rocked patterned pajamas that she paired with glittery, gold shoes

After landing at LAX, the 40-year-old made her way through the airport sporting a patterned pajama set.

Rocking the comfy clothing made for a super casual outfit, except the shoes on her feet were anything but.

The actress strutted through the terminal in some sparkly gold footwear that dressed up the laid-back look.

Opposites attract: Gian Luca dressed a bit more elegantly than the actress, sporting a striped button-down and a pocket square in his blue suit jacket

The California girl hid her face behind a massive pair of sunglasses, but proudly put her wedding band on display.

Meanwhile, her Italian husband, 34, was a bit more dressed up, donning a red, striped button-down shirt beneath a blue jacket, complete with coordinating pocket square.

He finished off his upscale ensemble with crisp, white pants and dark loafers.

Both husband and wife were a bit preoccupied at the airport, consumed by looking at their phones.

On June 10, the cute couple got married at the Passi de Preposulo family estate, Villa Tiepolo Passi, in the Italian city of Trevice, which is near Venice.

The red-head made a breathtaking bride, wearing a strapless gown that boasted a fitted bodice, a drop waistline, and intricate, lace detailing.

Her fiery locks were pulled back off her stunning face, and tucked neatly beneath her veil.

The groom sported a handsome blue suit, that he partnered with a white shirt, matching boutonniere, and a grey tie.

A source dished details about the ceremony to E! News, saying: 'Italy was a place where they always wanted to get married.'

'The wedding was stunning. Jessicas dress was perfect and you could tell she was very nervous walking down the aisle. The food was delicious,' the insider added.

Their European nuptials were a star-studded event, as Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt both attended, arriving arm-in-arm.

And while she couldn't attend, the celeb's The Help co-star, Octavia Spencer, shared a sweet snap from the ceremony on Instagram, offering her congratulations in the caption.

'Congrats @jessicachastain @preposulo I hate that I missed your big day, but know I couldn't be more thrilled for you!!!!' she wrote.

Low-key love: While the precious pair has been together since 2012, the Julliard alum doesn't talk about her beau very often

Sweet sentiments: However, she did give her longtime love a shoutout on Instagram for Valentine's Day

The acclaimed actress doesn't discuss her relationship with her longtime love very often.

But on Valentine's Day, Jessica did post a tender tribute to their relationship on Instagram, writing in the caption: 'Some things are worth the wait @preposulo #happyvalentinesday.'

And in 2015, she also told W Magazine that she was 'very, very happy' with her beau.

'He's a gentleman. And that's very important to me. He's from an old-school Italian family. No one in his family has ever been divorced!'

The longtime loves have been together since 2012.

Gian Luca comes from one of Italy's most noble families, and works in high-fashion for the French brand Moncler.
Vicky Pattison's grandparents have revealed the newly-engaged star is set to wed John Noble on the day of their 65th wedding anniversary next year.

Mavis and David Birdsey, the parents of Vicky's mum Caroll, announced her plans just hours after she revealed her news with a stunning shoot for OK! magazine.

The 29-year-old former Geordie Shore star, who began her relationship with John late last year after first dating nearly 10 years ago, could not contain her glee at the news, while her mum explained she was 'so excited' for the wedding.

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Happy days: Vicky Pattison's grandparents have revealed the newly-engaged star is set to wed on the day of their 65th wedding anniversary next year

Vicky has always been candid about her love of her tightknit family, with her first ever scene in Geordie Shore seeing her telling the camera: 'To me my family is everything', before Caroll revealed: 'It's always easier if she gets her own way'.

Naturally the family are brimming with excitement of John's proposal, leading to Mavis and David, both 87, reflecting on their own relationship which all began when they were just 16 and met at one of the former's friend's birthday party.

Mavis, who is now a carer to Alzheimer's sufferer David, said of their lengthy marriage: 'I can't believe we've been married for 65 years already. We're also so excited for Vicky's wedding. It's just lovely.'

The adoring pensioner went on: 'We both retired at 60 and that meant we were finally free. We've always loved our holidays but we were limited with work. We've now been to America five times and all over Europe, we just love it.

Happy days! Mavis and David Birdsey, the parents of Vicky's mum Caroll, announced her plans just hours after she revealed her news with a stunning shoot for OK! magazine

Prouder than ever! The 29-year-old former Geordie Shore star, who began her relationship with John late last year after first dating nearly 10 years ago, could not contain her glee at the news, while her mum explained she was 'so excited' for the wedding

'We went on a family holiday to Spain for our 80th birthdays but that was the last trip abroad as I can't travel anymore with my back problems.'

Speaking of how life changed since she began caring for David, Mavis recalled: 'For better or worse. It's about give and take. There's never been a boss between us. We always tend to agree on everything but if we don't, we talk through it'.

She advised Vicky: 'I don't believe anyone who has been married for 65 years who says they've never had a row. I say they're either a liar or not normal. My advice to Vicky would be not to squabble over the little silly things. Life is just too short.'

Vicky's mum Caroll added: 'The family are delighted that they've reached this milestone because they are such a lovely couple. They are totally devoted to each other. Their life has been each other and their family. They've been fabulous parents.

In their day: Speaking of how life changed since she began caring for David, Mavis recalled: 'For better or worse. It's about give and take. There's never been a boss between us. We always tend to agree on everything but if we don't, we talk through it'

'I'm so excited (for Vicky). He's a lovely lad and they're so happy together.'

On Monday, Vicky revealed her engagement to John after a 'difficult few weeks,' which saw her crying down the phone to her pals, as she was convinced he was going to break up with her.

She told the publication that the tailor presented her with a 3.6-carat marquise-cut diamond ring while they were at his countryside home on the outskirts of Newcastle.

She told OK!: 'I was spending a few days at Johns house, which is just outside Newcastle and surrounded by lovely countryside. One morning he suggested we take his dog Roxie out for a walk.

'I was playing with Roxie when she shook her head and got slobber all over my face. When I wiped it away, John was in front of me on one knee.

'I couldnt believe it, I burst into tears. I said yes and then I looked at the ring and I was blown away, it was amazing.'

She said: 'John was in front of me on one knee. 'I couldnt believe it, I burst into tears. I said yes and then I looked at the ring and I was blown away, it was amazing'

However, Vicky admits she was completely taken aback by the proposal as she had been feeling like John was going to break up with her.

She said: 'Wed had a difficult few weeks because I had been really busy with work and couldnt make it to see him.'

Vicky said the timing was weird as the day before he proposed (in June) she had been talking about getting engaged during an interview with Lorraine.

She said at the time: 'For years I have struggled with my personal life and finding someone who was supportive of my career and essentially successful in their own right as well. And finally I have that with John. Hes lovely and caring and strong.'

Loved up: The beauty flaunted her love for her boyfriend John, as they packed on the PDA at Wimbledon on Saturday - Vicky's ring finger was artfully tucked out of sight

Playful Lorraine said that John may well pop the question soon. And looking into the camera, Vicky said: 'You heard it from Lorraine, John!' Just days before John popped the question, Vicky revealed that she had been dropping major hints to her man.

'I've made it a bit obvious, no?' she cheekily revealed when speaking about the future of her romance to Heat magazine.

'When I'm drunk, I'll say things like "will you marry us when I'm grown up?" I reckon he'll go the whole nine yards. I want to feel like a princess,' Vicky continued.

However, she was quick to note at the time: 'There's nothing on the horizon and I would never rush him. I know everyone thinks I'm a little keen, but I'm just happy to shout from the rooftops how much I love John.'

Also talking about her pals becoming pregnant, including Ferne McCann, Vicky revealed that it 'wasn't for her just yet' but she was 'enjoying the practise.'

Vicky already has the big day all planned out, as she told Closer that she will enjoy a ceremony inspired by the show Big Fat Gypsy Weddings.

Taking her time: Also talking about her pals becoming pregnant, including Ferne McCann, Vicky revealed that it 'wasn't for her just yet' but she was 'enjoying the practise'

'John's got a traveller heritage, so I'm going the full nine yards. I want butterflies and LEDs on my dress,' she revealed.

Showing her dedication to the theme, Vicky continued: 'I've already been in touch with Themla Madine (Big Fat Gypsy Weddings' dressmaker). She's buzzing!'

Since starting her romance with John late last year, Vicky has made no secret of her admiration for him.

The star previously admitted to The Sun's Fabulous magazine that she would say yes in a heartbeat if he asked for her hand in marriage as he was the 'first man who has stimulated my mind and body.'

The loved-up pair were first pictured together in the X Factor audience last October. The northern lass already dated John nearly 10 years ago, when she was 20.

Pleased with herself? Vicky smugly showed off her beach body in a tiny black bikini as she bragged about how good she looks while on holiday

The couple rekindled their old flame, and were pictured together for the first time in Australia's Gold Coast in November 2016 after posting a sentimental Instagram photo with the caption 'What's meant to be will always find a way...'

He currently resides in Newcastle, and has his own clothing line, Little & Large - which only stocks two sizes - 'Little' and 'Large'.

Vicky soared to fame in Geordie Shore's 2011 inauguration, yet left the show in 2014's series eight after many dramas played out before she was hurtled into yet more reality stardom including a victorious stint on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here.

She has also dated model Alex Bowen, Spencer Matthews and was previously engaged to her Geordie Shore co-star Ricci Guarnacci.
Israeli soldiers stand next to the body of a Palestinian who was shot dead after reportedly carrying out a car-ramming attack near Beit Einun village, north east of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on July 18, 2017

A Palestinian carried out a car-ramming attack near the city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, lightly wounding two Israeli soldiers before being shot dead, officials said.

Israel's army said the attack took place at the entrance to the town of Beit Einun, leaving the two soldiers wounded, and that the attacker had been shot by security forces.

The Palestinian health ministry confirmed that the Palestinian had died. No further information was immediately available on the attacker's identity.

Israeli-Palestinian tensions have risen in recent days following an attack near an ultra-sensitive Jerusalem holy site on Friday that killed two Israeli policemen.

However, there was no immediate sign of a link between the two incidents.

On Friday, three Arab Israelis opened fire on police before fleeing to the nearby Haram al-Sharif compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, where security forces shot them dead.

Israel closed the site, which includes the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, for two days following the attack, angering Muslims and Jordan, the site's custodian.

Israel said the closure was necessary to carry out security checks.

The site reopened on Sunday, but with metal detectors at entrances.

Muslims have been refusing to enter because of the metal detectors, with Palestinians viewing the move as Israel asserting further control over the site.

A wave of unrest that broke out in October 2015 has claimed the lives of at least 283 Palestinians or Arab Israelis, 44 Israelis, two Americans, two Jordanians, an Eritrean, a Sudanese and a Briton, according to an AFP toll.

Israeli authorities say most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks.

Others were shot dead in protests and clashes, while some were killed in Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip.

The violence had greatly subsided in recent months.
Pope Francis leads a mass during a visit to the Roman Parish of San Pier Damiani, on May 21, 2017 in Rome

Pope Francis is unlikely to visit India and Bangladesh this year as widely expected, a senior church official said Tuesday, with the high-profile visit postponed due to schedule clashes with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Pope had announced last year that he would "almost certainly" travel to South Asia in 2017 but no dates were officially confirmed.

A senior Indian church official told AFP the delay came about because the government in New Delhi had been unable to provide the Vatican with dates suitable for the papal visit.

"It takes a year to prepare for Pope's visit and we don't have enough time left. There was no clarity on the schedule," the official said on condition of anonymity.

"It's unlikely he will visit this year."

India's foreign ministry spokesman Gopal Bagley said he was unaware of the matter.

Another church official said the visit had been postponed to the early months of 2018.

India's Cardinal Oswald Gracias told the US-based National Catholic Reporter that discussions with the Modi government about a papal visit had taken longer than expected.

Finding a time that aligned with Modi's schedule hosting world leaders had proven "a little bit of a difficult situation".

"We have to find a good spot where we can give the Holy Father his due importance and respect," the cardinal said.

It would be the second papal visit postponed this year, after the Vatican announced in late May it was delaying a trip to South Sudan for security reasons.

There are roughly 28 million Christians in India, the third-largest religion in the nation of 1.3 billion behind Islam and Hinduism.

Pope John Paul II was the last pontiff to visit India, and he made the journey twice. The late Pope first visited India in February 1986, followed by a return journey in 1999.
Israeli Moshe Farchi, the founder and head of the Stress, Trauma and Resilience Studies at Tel-Hai College, has developed an unorthodox model for treating mental trauma and preventing post-traumatic stress disorder.

An Israeli who developed an unorthodox model for treating mental trauma and preventing post-traumatic stress disorder during his years in the military is now sharing it with first responders in other countries.

Moshe Farchi says Israel's decades of conflict have afforded it "lots of experience" in dealing with trauma, leading to effective and science-based models of work.

"We made many mistakes and are learning from them," the head of stress, trauma and resilience studies at Israel's Tel-Hai College told AFP.

Farchi's model was developed during his years in the Israeli army, where he served as a mental health officer.

He saw shortcomings in such treatment because it "failed to reduce the element of anxiety and perception of the event as traumatic."

Farchi, a clinical social worker by training, also utilised his experience as a volunteer first responder in emergency medical organisations.

His principles are simple, easily applicable and, to the layman, possibly counterintuitive.

They are employed in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event such as an attack, serving as mental first-aid.

"One thinks that a person in distress should be contained, held," he told AFP.

But providing emotional support activates the recipient's emotional part of the brain at the expense of the area responsible for the ability to think and make decisions, he said.

- 'Resetting' the brain -

Thinking and making decisions are what the person needs to do in order to be freed of a "sense of helplessness."

"The given is that we can't stop the threat -- the rocket has hit, the event has taken place," he said. "What we can do is stop the helplessness."

"The opposite of helplessness is effective action. That's why first of all we need to activate the person, to diminish the helplessness," Farchi said.

Activating the person includes asking concrete and factual questions, giving him or her the ability to make decisions -- initially easy ones, such as if they want to drink a glass of water or take a break.

The idea of "resetting" a person who underwent a traumatic event using Farchi's method can have both immediate and long-term positive effects, according to the psychiatrist who currently heads the clinical branch in the Israeli army's mental health department.

"The two main goals are to quickly return a person to being functional in a way that would reduce the risk of getting killed, and reducing the risk for more serious disorders" in the future, such as PTSD, said Lieutenant Colonel Dr Ariel Ben Yehuda.

People in life-threatening situations tend to feel confused, lonely, frozen or disoriented, said Ben Yehuda, and "Farchi's method addresses these issues."

"This isn't psychiatric treatment, rather something very focused. You can do it in two minutes, but the idea is to 'reset' the person," Ben Yehuda noted.

The system is currently being implemented as part of soldiers' medical training, and takes just a few hours to teach.

- 'Not left alone' -

One place where Farchi has taken his method is the British city of Manchester where a suicide bombing killed 22 and wounded more than 100 on May 22.

The attack came as Dov Benyaacov-Kurtzman, a Scotland-born social worker who had lived in Israel for years, was working in Manchester on establishing a centre to provide emergency response for stress and trauma.

Benyaacov-Kurtzman had planned to launch his organisation, called Heads Up, in six months.

But the Manchester attack galvanised him into starting work and reaching out to Farchi to help with training the group's professionals and volunteers.

"At that moment they called and said 'come'," Farchi said recently in Tel Aviv before flying to Manchester.

Farchi has already trained local professionals who can carry out a "cultural translation" of the method in countries such as Germany, the Philippines and Argentina.

He was also set to travel for training in London.

A key aspect of Farchi's method is that it should not be reserved for professionals, but spread to as many people as possible.

The 2014 conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip was an opportunity to examine Farchi's method.

Residents in Ofakim, an Israeli town that was subject to heavy rocket fire from Gaza, underwent Farchi's intervention, showing no occurrence of PTSD in the months following the war, Farchi said.

"The chance that a person (experiencing trauma) will be next to a professional is very small, but that a layman will be next to him is very high," Farchi said.
US President Donald Trump is fuming over the collapse of Republican efforts to dismantle Barack Obama's landmark health care law

An angry President Donald Trump railed Tuesday against dissenters in his party who dashed his months-long effort to dismantle his predecessor's landmark health care law, as moderates balked at Republican plans to scrap Obamacare without a replacement.

With several efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) now squashed, the Senate's top Republican said he would forge ahead with what could be a last-gasp vote -- on a new plan to kill off most of the 2010 reforms of Trump's predecessor with no replacement at the ready.

A vote to proceed to the bill will be held "early next week," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told colleagues, even though the effort appeared doomed, with three Republicans declaring their opposition to the plan.

The previous day, four Republicans had lined up against McConnell's earlier health overhaul, flat lining it in the chamber, where the party can afford only two defectors in order to get the measure passed.

And with Senator John McCain home in Arizona through this week and perhaps longer as he recovers from surgery to remove a blood clot, the room for maneuver is even narrower.

McConnell nonetheless prepared to force a vote to see where his members stood on his latest ploy, the repeal-only measure.

The dramatic implosion effectively means that Trump, who marks his first half-year in office Thursday, has no major legislative victory in hand, squandering months of political capital.

Trump fired off a morning tweet storm complaining about how he was "let down" by Democrats "and a few Republicans" opposed to the repeal.

He had campaigned relentlessly on a pledge to abolish most of the ACA, proclaiming at an October campaign rally that it would be "so easy" to immediately repeal and replace the law.

But he has run into the uncompromising reality of American politics: even with a president's party enjoying a majority in both chambers, crafting and passing landmark legislation can be perilous in the US Congress.

The White House insisted that success remained within reach, with deputy spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying "we are not done with the health care battle."

But Trump could not hide that he was "disappointed," and repeatedly offered that now it would be easier to just "let Obamacare fail."

He also stressed he wanted nothing to do with the blame for the collapse.

"We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it," he said.

"We'll let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us" to collaborate on a solution.

- 'Time to start over' -

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is prepping to force a vote as early as this week to see where his members stand on a measure that would only repeal Barack Obama's signature health care reform law

McConnell's new bid would repeal much of Obamacare outright, but with a two-year delay of implementation, in order to allow Congress time to craft a replacement.

A straight repeal bill passed Congress in 2015. That was during Obama's presidency, and Republicans knew they would pay no political price for their votes, as Obama vetoed the measure.

It is no longer a dress rehearsal, and some Republicans are clearly concerned they would be on the hook for any ensuing disruption to the health care system.

Two years ago, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warned that simply repealing Obamacare would essentially kick 18 million people off health care in the first year compared to current law, a figure that would balloon to 32 million by 2026.

That is far worse than the 22 million that the CBO forecast would lose coverage under the latest repeal-and-replace legislation.

With a number of Senate Republican moderates voicing concern about how the latest bill could adversely impact millions of people insured through Medicaid, the health coverage program for the poor and the disabled, McConnell's bid floundered.

"I cannot vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians," Senator Shelley Moore Capito said in a statement.

Her state has significant numbers of residents on Medicaid.

Another Republican opposed to the new plan, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, acknowledged that McConnell had the nearly impossible task of corralling enough votes from his caucus's rival conservative and moderate factions.

"The majority leader is trying to keep all the frogs in the wheelbarrow, and it's a tough job," Murkowski said. "But he's doing a good job."

While Democrats celebrated, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer extended an olive branch to his Republican rivals and encouraged them to work with Democrats to improve Obamacare.

"It's time to move on. It's time to start over" on health care, he said.

Meanwhile a bipartisan group of 11 governors urged the Senate to "immediately reject" the repeal-only effort and work with state executives on bettering the current system.

"The best next step is for both parties to come together and do what we can all agree on: fix our unstable insurance markets," said the governors, including Ohio Republican John Kasich and Democrat Terry McAuliffe of Virginia.
Rwanda last year exported around 14 tonnes of essential oils -- geranium, moringa, patchouli and tagetes -- bringing in $473,000, according to the National Agricultural Export Development Board.

Inside a metal shed in southeastern Rwanda, Nicholas Hitimana brandished a plastic container holding a green liquid: geranium essential oil, freshly distilled and ready for export at more than $200 (175 euros) a kilo.

The pioneer of essential oils in Rwanda, Hitimana said he understood over a decade ago "the need to develop high-value crops" in his hilly nation of just 2.6 million hectares (6.4 million acres).

Agriculture accounts for nearly a third of GDP and employs four-fifths of the population and, as a result, there is "little arable land" remaining.

"On a hectare, if we grow beans, we earn about $2,000 a year, whereas on the same land, if we grow geranium, the income can reach $6,000 or even $8,000," Hitimana says.

The trained agronomist embodies Rwanda's ambition of diversifying its agriculture and increasing the value of exports by getting into the lucrative global market for essential oils. To this end, Hitimana has been importing geraniums from South Africa since 2004.

At the time the flower was virtually unknown in Rwanda, but Hitimana was convinced of the "great potential" of the essential oil sector.

- Four crops a year -

Agronomist Nicholas Hitimana has been at the forefront of Rwanda's ambition to diversify its agriculture and increase exports by getting into the lucrative global market for essential oils.

"In South Africa there can only be two harvests a year, but here, as there is no winter, it is possible to get up to four crops a year," says Hitimana, whose company Ikirezi Natural Products has since grown and diversified.

With 25 hectares of plantations, it produces 1,000 kilogrammes of essential oils derived from patchouli, lemon grass and eucalyptus as well as geraniums. The oils are exported to Canada, South Africa, the US and elsewhere for use in the perfume industry.

The company employs 70 farmers. "At first, it was not easy to convince them to abandon subsistence for commercial agriculture," he says, adding the work is more precise than growing beans.

"We need to plant on time, manure on time, hoe, turn the soil, irrigate and harvest on time", or risk a "drastically" reduced yield, Hitimana says, noting that it takes between 600-1,000 kilos of geraniums to produce a single kilo of oil.

A few years on, and the employees seem convinced. "Since I've been working here, I've been able to build a house with a tin roof, I can pay for my son's schooling and buy everything I need," says 55-year-old Stephanie Mukamana, busily weeding around a geranium plant.

Last year, Rwanda exported around 14 tonnes of essential oils -- geranium, moringa, patchouli and tagetes -- bringing in $473,000, according to the National Agricultural Export Development Board.

Rwanda is also cultivating pyrethrum, used in natural insecticides.

- Growth market -

According to the India-based firm Market Research Future (MRFR), essential oils are increasingly in demand in richer countries for use in cosmetics, food and pharmaceuticals. The world market is forecast to grow by seven percent between 2017 and 2022, says MRFR.

To get its share of the cake, Rwanda opened an essential oil laboratory three years ago, the first of its kind in the region, allowing quality control.

"One of the main challenges facing Rwanda is a growing trade deficit and a limited number of competitive companies that can meet regional and international export standards," says Patience Mutesi, Rwanda director for TradeMark East Africa, which promotes regional trade and helped fund the lab project.

The laboratory will "enable Rwandan companies to access new and lucrative markets... by strengthening consumer confidence in the quality of Rwandan products," she says.

Sitting in front of a brand new chromatogram in the Kigali laboratory, Antoine Mukunzi, a Rwanda Standards Authority official, is satisfied with his small country's progress: "We cannot compete in terms of exported volumes, but we can in terms of quality."
A boy walks along a damaged street in west Mosul on July 13, 2017, a few days after the government's announcement of the "liberation" of the city from the Islamic State group

The battle over, it's now time to start rebuilding Iraq's second city, parts of which were literally flattened during the offensive against holed up jihadists of the Islamic State group.

But before this can happen, the chaotic mess caused by the conflict that devastated Mosul must be cleared away.

Standing outside his damaged house in the west of the city, Manaf Yunes looked on as a worker removed rubble from a balcony.

"I don't have any money because I haven't been paid for three years. I had to borrow to be able to begin renovating," the 57-year-old former official said.

On July 10, the authorities announced they had defeated IS in Mosul after a nine-month campaign that unleashed destruction of almost unimaginable dimensions on the ancient city.

According to a preliminary assessment, it will cost more than $1 billion just to restore basic services such as running water, electricity, schooling and medical care to all of Mosul, said Lise Grande of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Iraq.

The western sector was the hardest hit.

"The levels of destruction we are seeing are the worst in Iraq. Western Mosul represents one of the largest and most complex stabilisation challenges the UN has faced," Grande told AFP.

West Mosul has been eviscerated, its buildings half collapsed or shattered, craters in the road sprouting tangles of misshapen and broken water pipes.

- Restoring basic services -

According to Abdel Sattar Habbo of the local municipality, more than 90 percent of west Mosul's infrastructure and public services was destroyed.

The UN says almost one-third of housing has been destroyed in Mosul's old town, seen here on July 9, 2017

And the figure for private property is nearly as high, at 70 percent.

He put the cost of the damage at several billion dollars, and said between three and four months would be needed just to "stabilise" the west of the city.

By that he meant bringing back on line -- even partly -- necessities including water, power and public services to enable "a return to life".

"Based on preliminary assessments, we estimate that $470 million is needed to help restore the main electricity, water and sewage grids and rehabilitate key public facilities including hospitals, schools and houses in the most heavily damaged neighbourhoods in western Mosul," said the UNDP's Grande.

In the old town, where the jihadists battled to the last in the final hours of the most ferocious clashes, "almost one-third of the housing stock is most likely severely damaged or completely destroyed", the UN wrote in a recent report.

Erfan Ali, head of the UN Human Settlements Programme in Iraq, told AFP that despite the destruction, the medical sector was already on the mend.

"Some major hospitals... have been almost completely destroyed," he said, while others were "completely looted and burned" when Mosul was under IS occupation.

"However, the health sector is gradually recovering, and almost half of the hospitals are currently working, which means in most cases that some floors have been rehabilitated," he said.

- Laying new pipes -

A bulldozer cleans a street on July 13, 2017 as part of efforts to bring west Mosul back to life

In the east of the city a semblance of normal life has resumed, with crowded streets and shops and restaurants again open for business.

And in west Mosul, despite the widespread destruction, hesitant steps are already being taken to bring the area back to life.

As rubble is removed, workmen from the municipality lay new pipes in trenches dug in roadways to repair the sewerage system.

While they await the beginning of major reconstruction projects, residents of battered Mosul must do what they can to cope.

For electricity they rely on neighbourhood generators, and water is supplied by tank trucks or NGOs.

Aid groups have given out "construction kits" of wooden planking, plywood panels and tarpaulins to nearly 12,700 families, said Melany Markham, spokesperson in Iraq for the Norwegian Refugee Council.

Outside Manaf Yunes's house in the west of the city, there are now bags of cement and stacks of breeze blocks.

The front of his home bears the scars of war. A booby-trapped vehicle exploded outside the building, blowing in its windows and destroying part of the balcony.

A wooden board now covers a large hole in his bathroom wall.

"We built this house bit by bit," he said, gloomily, and now work must begin again.
People stand next to the bullet-riddled vehicle where some members of the Presidential Security Group were ambushed by gunmen in Aracan town, on the southern island of Mindanao

The Philippine government's peace talks with communist rebels teetered near collapse Wednesday as President Rodrigo Duterte threatened to end negotiations after suspected guerrillas shot and wounded five of his bodyguards in an ambush.

Aides said Duterte was not in the convoy when gunmen opened fire on two Presidential Security Group vehicles on the southern island of Mindanao, where troops have also been battling Islamic State group-inspired gunmen for nearly two months.

"The president directed the government panel... not to resume formal peace talks unless the reds (rebels) agree to stop their attacks against government troops in Mindanao," said a statement issued by the presidential palace.

The rebels have been in off-and-on peace talks with the government since Duterte, a self-described socialist, was elected last year. Both sides have since declared unilateral ceasefires, but these did not last.

Duterte suspended formal peace talks in May after both sides failed to resolve a dispute over a rebel order for fighters to step up attacks.

On Tuesday Duterte separately ordered negotiators to informally meet communist counterparts in Europe in the coming days and raise the issue, Dureza told ABS-CBN television a day later.

But Duterte's peace adviser Jesus Dureza later announced that the government was also cancelling the planned informal talks with the rebels due to Wednesday's attacks by the communists' 4,000-member armed wing the New People's Army.

The communist party, which is waging Asia's longest-running insurgency, called on its guerrillas on Tuesday to launch offensives in response to Duterte's plan to put Mindanao under martial law until the end of the year.

Mindanao is already under a 60-day martial rule as the security forces battle Islamist militants in Marawi city, but on Tuesday the Duterte government said it needed more time to accomplish the mission.

"The situation on the ground necessary to provide the desired enabling environment for the conduct of peace negotiations are still not present up to this time," Dureza said in a statement.

The communist insurgency began in 1968 and the military says it is now mostly waged in Mindanao. The rebellion has claimed an estimated 30,000 lives.

Wednesday's ambush appeared to dash hopes for an early political settlement to the insurgency.
Rescue workers and forensic officials dig out skeletons in May 2015 from shallow graves at the site of an abandoned jungle camp used by human traffickers in southern Thailand

A Thai general, police officers and local politicians were among dozens jailed for human trafficking on Wednesday, many handed decades-long sentences, at a mass trial exposing official complicity in the grim trade in Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants.

The junta launched a crackdown in May 2015 on a network of corrupt officials and gangmasters who made millions funnelling desperate migrants through southern Thailand and onto Malaysia, holding some for ransom in jungle camps.

It unspooled a crisis across Southeast Asia as traffickers abandoned their human cargo in the camps where hundreds died from starvation and malaria, and at sea in overcrowded boats which were then "ping ponged" between Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian waters.

The most senior government figure among the 62 people convicted on Wednesday was Lieutenant-General Manas Kongpan, who received 27 years for multiple human trafficking charges and other offences.

A judge at Bangkok Criminal Court said he was also guilty of complicity in a "transnational organised crime" network and "worked with others to facilitate human trafficking".

It is extremely rare for senior military figures in Thailand to see the inside of a courtroom, let alone a jail.

Others received even more severe punishments. One Myanmar national who helped run the jungle camps got 94 years in jail, at least 17 others got terms more than seven decades long. Under Thai law, however, the maximum sentence a prisoner serves is 50 years.

Manas was a top figure in the security apparatus covering Thailand's south -- a key transit zone in a trafficking trail that stretched from Myanmar to Malaysia.

The court heard he received bank transfers from trafficking agents worth 14.8 million baht ($440,000).

But the police investigation found he also used his position to guide trafficking gangs around checkpoints after their arrival on remote beaches as they headed to the jungle camps.

In 2013 he was promoted to head the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) for the entire south. Current junta leader Prayut Chan-O-Cha was army chief at the time.

Before the crackdown rights groups had long accused officials of ignoring -- and even conducting -- the trade in humans through Thailand's southern provinces.

The trial revealed a lattice of military, police, local political and mafia figures acting as traffickers, agents and logistics men, all soaking up cash from some of Asia's poorest migrants.

- Soldiers and kingpins -

The human trafficking crisis emerged after Thai officials uncovered dozens of shallow graves in hidden camps dotting the steep hills along the Thai and Malaysian border area

Some reporting restrictions were placed by judges citing national security and Manas was allowed to give evidence behind closed doors.

Another well-connected kingpin convicted on Wednesday was Pajjuban Aungkachotephan, better known as Ko Tong or 'Big Brother Tong'.

Police accused him of using private Andaman Sea islands, close to tourist spots such as Koh Lipe, to shift boatloads of migrants to the mainland, where they were packed into lorries and taken to the fetid camps straddling the Malaysia border.

He was found guilty of human trafficking and links to organised crime with judges giving him 75 years.

Throughout the marathon sentencing hearing dozens of people, including two police officers, were convicted of various offences, ranging from guarding the squalid migrant camps to trafficking and negligence.

Some 40 defendants were acquitted including an army captain and a senior police officer while one died awaiting trial.

- 'Big business, big money' -

Thailand's role as a key trafficking route spilled into full view after officials found dozens of shallow graves in the hidden camps dotting the steep, forested hills of the Thai-Malaysian border in May 2015.

They revealed the horrors endured by some of the migrants, who were starved and held in bamboo pens by traffickers who demanded over $1,000 for their release.

The verdict is being closely-watched inside and outside Thailand. The government is desperate to dispel the kingdom's notorious reputation for human trafficking.

Earlier on Wednesday Junta chief Prayut angrily denied the case reflected systemic corruption within the security services.

"Manas alone will not make the entire military collapse," he told reporters.

Critics say the case was prematurely concluded and describe a trial marred by witness intimidation, secret evidence hearings and restrictions on media reporting.

"We expect there are many more perpetrators out there," Amy Smith, from Fortify Rights, told AFP.

"This is a big business with big money."

The senior policeman who initially headed the investigation, Major General Paween Pongsirin, fled Thailand under threats to his life.

Days before he left, he told AFP the case had been ordered closed before he could delve any further into the complicity of officials.
Navy ships and fishing boats battled strong monsoon swells in the following days to pull scores of bodies from the waves, most of them the wives and children of servicemen

Bad weather caused a Myanmar military plane to crash last month with 122 people on board, state media reported on Wednesday, in one of the deadliest aviation accidents in the country's history.

The Chinese-made Shaanxi Y8 military aircraft plunged into the Andaman Sea during a routine flight from the southern city of Myeik to the commercial hub, Yangon.

Navy ships and fishing boats battled strong monsoon swells in the following days to pull scores of bodies from the waves, most of them the wives and children of servicemen.

Recordings from the black box showed the plane went into a nose dive after icing built up on the wings and a sudden increase in crosswinds caused the engine to stall, state media said.

The plane lost contact with air traffic control roughly half an hour after takeoff from Myeik while flying at over 18,000 feet (5,486 metres), according to previous military statements.

"The accident occurred due to loss of control after experiencing adverse weather that caused the plane to stall... resulting in a nose dive," state media said.

Investigators concluded the crash was "not from any act of sabotage, explosion or engine failure," it added.

It is monsoon season in Myanmar but there were no reports of major stormy weather in the area at the time.

Gerry Soejatman, an independent aviation expert based in Jakarta, said storms high up in the atmosphere that are not visible from the ground can cause ice to form on wings or in engine intakes.

But he added that normally pilots would use a weather radar to avoid such clouds.

"If it is storm clouds, this begs the question, why did they fly into it?" he told AFP.

The black box data were analysed by the investigators from Myanmar and Australia, which has steered the hunt for wreckage from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Its last known location before it went missing in March 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board was several hundred miles north of where the Myanmar military plane crashed.

The accident is the latest long line of crashes among the military's fleet.

A five-strong crew died when an air force plane burst into flames soon after taking off from the capital Naypyidaw in February last year.

Three army officers were also killed in June when their Mi-2 helicopter crashed into a hillside and burst into flames in south-central Bago.
Muslim student activists take part in an anti-government rally in Jakarta on July 12, 2017, after President Joko Widodo signed a new law to disband Hizb ut-Tahrir Indonesia

Indonesia's government on Wednesday banned the local branch of Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, rejecting criticism from rights groups that the move was undemocratic.

The government said it revoked the licence of Hizb ut-Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) because the group conducted activities that were against the state ideology.

Hizb ut-Tahrir, which calls for Islamic law and wants to unify all Muslims into a caliphate, has been operating for decades in Indonesia and has tens of thousands of foillowers.

"With HTI's legal status revoked, the group is therefore disbanded," the justice ministry said in a statement.

HTI said it would challenge the decision.

"This is a true form of abuse by the government against its own citizens," HTI spokesman Ismail Yusanto told AFP.

The move came after President Joko Widodo issued a decree last week that strengthened the government's power to outlaw any groups which it deemed were opposed to the state ideology, or which spread hatred against other races or religions.

The ideology, known as pancasila, officially encourages moderation and tolerance between different faiths.

Widodo, a pluralist, has been under pressure to manage the growing influence of hardliners in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country.

Rights activists said the decree could stifle a broad range of democratic institutions.

Legal expert Refly Harun said it was the first time in the reform era that the government had disbanded an organisation without due process of law.

"The presidential decree is a blank cheque for the government to disband any group without due process of law," he told AFP.

Indonesia was under dictator Suharto for more than three decades until the iron-fisted ruler was toppled in 1998 and democracy began to flourish in the country.
Five years have passed since Hla Hla Sein was forced into a displacement camp in western Myanmar for Rohingya Muslims, where disease and deprivation are rife and armed guards patrol a barbed-wire perimeter.

But after a crackdown on the international smuggling routes that once offered a dangerous - but viable - escape route, she now sees no way out.

'We have no idea how many years we will have to live like this,' the 40-year-old widow told AFP inside the tiny bamboo hut she shares with her son, tugging nervously at her purple headscarf.

Children play in Da Paing displacement camp in western Myanmar for Rohingya Muslims, where disease and deprivation are rife

'Our lives are worse than animals... we are human only in name.'

Deadly sectarian riots in 2012 drove more than 120,000 Rohingya into the camps in Rakhine State, where they live in ramshackle homes and are deprived of adequate food, schools and doctors.

For years human traffickers cashed in on the group's desperation, ferrying thousands of Rohingya across the Andaman Sea to countries like Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Muslim girls carry water in Da Paing IDP camp in Rakhine state, western Myanmar

The journeys were defined by danger: from rickety boats on high seas to abuse and even death at the hands of the gangs, who held many victims for ransom in jungle camps on the Thai-Malaysia border.

That route was shuttered by Thailand's junta in 2015 and few boats have left the camps since, according to residents, aid workers and migration experts.

The move may have spared Hla Hla Sein death at sea or abuse at the hands of smugglers, but it also cut off a way out of a painful limbo.

While a Bangkok court rules Wednesday on the fate of more than 100 people arrested for running the trafficking network, she will spend another day distributing food rations in the camp.

'Ready to die'

Hla Hla Sein and her son had tried to escape to Malaysia before the crackdown, but their boat was so overcrowded it started to sink a few hours into the journey, forcing the captain to turn back.

It was only after they returned to shore that she found out the smugglers had planned to sell them as slaves at their destination.

'I was ready to die at sea as we have nothing in this country,' she said. 'Our children cannot get education, even I cannot work. I thought dying would be better.'

Buddhist-majority Myanmar has long been chastised for its treatment of the Rohingya, a group of more than a million Muslims whose rights and freedoms have been successively stripped away since the early 1980s.

Over the past five years almost 170,000 have fled the country, according to the UN's refugee agency, leaving many families split across borders.

'It's impossible to go to Malaysia by boat nowadays,' said a Rohingya camp leader, asking not to be named. 'We do not want people to die at sea.'

Recently, a new outburst of violence in northern Rakhine pushed more than 70,000 Rohingyas across Myanmar's northwestern border to Bangladesh.

But Bangladesh plays an unwilling host to the minority and traffickers there are believed to now be smuggling Rohingya by road and air as far afield as Saudi Arabia, India, Nepal and Pakistan.

For those left behind in Myanmar's camps, escape is no longer an option.

'We are suffering,' said Hla Hla Sein. 'We are not supposed to stay like this forever.'

Cornered by poverty, stalked by violence: The bloodiest chapter of Buddhist-majority Myanmar's persecution of Rohingya Muslims looks set to continue

by AFP

Hemmed in by Myanmar security forces and menaced by abductions and killings, Rohingya Muslims in a conflict-scarred corner of Rakhine State say fear is one of the few constants in their lives.

Last week foreign media were given partial access to the isolated wedge of the northwestern state for the first time since security forces launched a months-long operation to root out militants who attacked border police posts.

The UN wants to establish if that campaign amounted to ethnic cleansing after accounts of mass rape, killing and arson emerged from Rohingya who fled to neighbouring Bangladesh.

The Rohingya minority are widely reviled as illegal migrants from Bangladesh, although many say their ancestors have lived in the area for generations

For those left behind in the rattan-walled frontier villages the violence and insecurity is unrelenting, locals told reporters, under the watch of Myanmar border forces who steered the visit.

'Our husbands are on the run. They left us because they are afraid of border guard police,' one Rohingya woman told AFP, requesting anonymity for safety reasons.

'They burned our house. We have no home and nothing to eat. Our husbands are hiding somewhere.'

The large-scale military operation has abated but the area remains in lockdown, with sporadic killings by military patrols still intent on rooting out 'terrorists'.

The UN believes hundreds may have died in what may be the bloodiest chapter of Buddhist-majority Myanmar's years-long persecution of the Rohingya Muslims.

Rohingya villagers say they are trapped between an oppressive state and vengeful militants

The minority are widely reviled as illegal migrants from Bangladesh, although many Rohingya families say their ancestors have lived in the area for generations.

Now a new peril has emerged: scores of local men have been abducted and murdered by unknown gangs of knife-wielding men, with state media reporting they are dressed in black and often wearing masks.

Authorities say the assassins are targeting leaders from the Muslim minority and anyone perceived to be a state collaborator. They blame Rohingya militants for the murders.

International Crisis Group analyst Richard Horsey says some 60 people may have been targeted in a 'systematic' campaign 'to take out Muslims who are in some way connected to, or perceived to be connected to, authorities'.

The UN believes hundreds may have died in Myanmar's years-long persecution of the Rohingya Muslims

Mysterious killings

In an area stained by mistrust and rumour it is unclear who is behind the attacks - and the fear is intensifying in the face of almost daily reports of killings.

Earlier this month unidentified men dragged father-of-six Atthu Suwan from the bed he was sharing with his wife in Maung Hnama village.

They stabbed the 44-year-old, who occasionally worked as a translator for local officials, and carried his body into the darkness, his family and friends told reporters on the government-run press trip.

'I haven't even been able to eat since they took my son,' his elderly mother Moeyeyan Khatu said, her face etched with sadness.

On Monday state media reported his body had been found abandoned in a nearby creek.

'We are fearful it (the killings) will happen again,' his neighbour, 67-year-old Hanumyar, told AFP.

The government blames the attacks on the self-styled Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a newly formed Rohingya militant group.

The group denies any involvment, instead accusing the military in statements issued through an unverified Twitter account.

Myanmar's stateless Rohingya Muslim minority

They do however claim the raids on police border posts last October.

The raids sparked the months-long 'clearance operation' by the military which sent more than 70,000 fleeing into Bangladesh.

Rohingya escapees shared harrowing accounts of security officers slaughtering babies, burning people alive and gang-raping women - abuses UN investigators said may amount to crimes against humanity.

The army denies the claims and says its response was proportionate in the face of terrorist interlopers.

But the crackdown sparked global opprobrium and the UN has commissioned a fact-finding mission to probe the violence.

Rohingya escapees have harrowing accounts of security officers slaughtering babies, burning people alive and gang-raping women

Rock and a hard place

Myanmar has refused to cooperate with the probe, denying the investigators visas.

Unable to leave because of travel restrictions and abject poverty, Rohingya villagers say they are trapped between an oppressive state and vengeful militants.

Adding to the climate of fear, death threats and fatwas (Islamic religious rulings) have circulated on social media aimed at anyone who dares to stand against the militants, according to several analysts and Rohingya sources.

On the media visit, officials sought to play down the military's campaign - and the murders.

Police Brigadier General San Lwin, chief of Rakhine's state police, said some of the killings might relate to 'personal grudges' and not militancy.

But locals say they are now frightened to take official posts in case they too become targets.

A 35-year-old Muslim man, recently appointed as a household head in Tinmay village, said his predecessor was killed in April after talking to local reporters.

'I do not sleep at home,' he added, requesting anonymity. 'I sleep at a police outpost with security.'
Baltimore-based spicemaker McCormick's top US brands include McCormick, Grill Mates and McCormick Gourmet

British consumer health giant Reckitt Benckiser has agreed to offload its sauces division to US spicemaker McCormick for $4.2 billion (3.6 billion euros), the groups said Wednesday.

"Reckitt Benckiser Group plc is pleased to announce that it has entered into an agreement to sell its food business, including the French's, Frank's RedHot and Cattlemen's brands, to McCormick & Company Inc.," Reckitt said in a statement after a strategic review.

The price tag reflects "the quality of this highly profitable, growth business".

The deal will hand McCormick a leading position in the condiments sector in the United States. It is currently the tenth biggest player.

The Maryland-based group's top US brands include McCormick, Grill Mates and McCormick Gourmet. It also sells Schwartz seasoning in Britain and Ducros in France.

RB Food brands include French's mustard and Frank's RedHot sauce, which will now become McCormick's second and third biggest sellers respectively.

RB Food was "a strong complementary fit that we expect will strengthen McCormick's business opportunities as we expand our presence in condiments, a core category for the company in the US and internationally," said McCormick boss Lawrence E. Kurzius in a separate statement.

The divestment follows Reckitt's purchase of US infant and child nutrition specialist Mead Johnson in February for $16.6 billion.

That deal took Reckitt, whose brands include Durex condoms and Nurofen painkillers, into the baby-food market for the first time -- and targeted rapid expansion in fast-growing Asian markets like China.

"Following the acquisition of Mead Johnson Nutrition, this transaction marks another step towards transforming RB into a global leader in consumer health and hygiene," said Reckitt chief executive Rakesh Kapoor.

The deal will create a combined group with annual sales of around $5 billion dollars (3.8 billion).
South Korea's ousted leader Park Geun-Hye arrives in court in May for her own trial

South Korea's disgraced former president Park Geun-Hye on Wednesday again refused to testify in the corruption trial of the heir to the Samsung business empire, citing poor health.

For the second time in a fortnight Park rejected a court order to give evidence in the case of Lee Jae-Yong, the vice-chairman of Samsung Electronics.

Lee is accused of bribery, corruption, perjury and other offences stemming from a wide-ranging scandal that saw Park herself impeached and arrested. Four other Samsung executives have also been charged.

Park, now in the Seoul detention centre and on trial separately, has been complaining of exhaustion and a toe injury that has left her limping slightly.

Defence lawyers say her hectic trial schedule -- which forces her to appear in court four days per week for up to 10 hours -- coupled with confinement during sultry weather, have taken a toll on her health.

"We visited the accused in the Seoul detention centre this morning to have her testify in court but she, again citing health reasons, refused to comply with the summons," a prosecutor was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency.

Senior Judge Kim Jin-Dong said Tuesday he planned to finish Lee's trial next month. He denies the charges.

Prosecutors will make their sentence demand on August 4 and a verdict is likely two weeks after that, a court spokesman told AFP.

The corruption scandal centres on Choi Soon-Sil, a former close confidante of Park who is accused of using her close presidential ties to force local firms to "donate" nearly $70 million to two dubious foundations.

Choi, who allegedly used some of the funds for personal gain, was jailed for three years last month for obstruction of business in connection with her daughter's illicit admission to a Seoul university. She also faces other cases.

Samsung, the world's biggest smartphone maker and South Korea's largest business group with revenues equivalent to about a fifth of the country's GDP, was the single biggest donor to the foundations.

It is also accused of separately giving millions of euros to Choi to bankroll her daughter's equestrian training in Germany.

On Wednesday Lee, wearing a dark suit with no tie, watched quietly as prosecutors and defence lawyers questioned a former presidential Blue House official who handed prosecutors the notebooks of a former top presidential aide.

Prosecutors argue that the notebooks, in which aide Ahn Jong-Beom jotted down Park's instructions, constituted incriminating evidence against Park, Choi and Lee.

Ahn has been arrested on charges of abuse of power and attempted coercion in helping Choi set up the foundations.

Lee's arrest sent shockwaves through the group and triggered the announcement of a major reform of its top-down management style.

The scandal has cast renewed light on the cosy ties traditionally enjoyed by the government and the family-controlled conglomerates known as "chaebols" that dominate the country's economy.

The groups have faced increasing criticism over their management practices, including rapid promotions for family members -- some of whom have damaged the corporate image with their conduct.
Chinese labour activist Hua Haifeng worked undercover in factories that made shoes for Ivanka Trump's brand

Labour activist Hua Haifeng had avoided legal trouble in his 14 years investigating companies in China, but that changed after he looked into a factory that made shoes for Ivanka Trump's brand.

Hua and two colleagues had worked undercover in factories that manufactured shoes for the brand of US President Donald Trump's daughter and other foreign firms when they were detained in May.

The 36-year-old activist and the two other men, who work for New York-based non-profit China Labor Watch (CLW), were accused of using "spying and other monitoring equipment".

The government has intensified a crackdown on human rights activists and lawyers in recent years.

But Hua told AFP he believes the factory's link to the Ivanka Trump brand may have been a "factor that attracted police interest", though he cannot confirm it.

"As for Ms. Ivanka and her family, I want to say that business activities should abide by business regulations, and not use a family's political resources for personal commercial gain," said Hua.

Hua, who was released on bail in June along with his colleagues, said he was interrogated on 16 occasions for up to three hours at a time. He was kept in a shared cell where he slept beside a urine bucket.

For the first week he was not given access to a lawyer, but the father of two said his conditions gradually improved as his wife paid the authorities to give him better food.

Li Qiang, CLW's founding director, said the case marks the first time activists have faced police trouble in the non-profit's 17-year history.

"But this is the first time we've investigated Ivanka Trump (suppliers), so it may very well be related to the brand," Li said.

- 'Respect the law' -

The activists had been probing two plants owned by major footwear producer Huajian Group -- one in the city of Dongguan in southern Guangdong province, the other in southern Jiangxi province's Ganzhou.

A CLW statement alleged that factory employees worked 15-hour days with minimal breaks and no overtime pay, among other labour abuses.

Collectively, the investigators worked undercover at the factories for several weeks between March and May.

Huajian Group did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but it has previously denied the allegations.

Labour activists allege that employees working at Chinese footwear producer Huajian Group worked 15-hour days and received no overtime pay

For her part, Ivanka Trump company president Abigail Klem said in a statement: "After discussions with our licensee, we have determined that Ivanka Trump brand products have not been produced at the factory in question since March."

But CLW said they found the Ivanka Trump company listed on Huajian's production schedules for May and June, along with several other prominent overseas fashion brands.

The investigators' arrest put a fresh spotlight on Chinese business activities linked to the US presidential family.

Ivanka Trump, who is a White House advisor, has taken a formal leave of absence from her fashion brand, announcing in January that she is no longer involved with the company's management or day-to-day operations.

Her husband, Jared Kushner, is also a top aide to the US president and his own family business has come under scrutiny over its financial dealings in China.

"I don't know much about (Ivanka Trump's) women's fashion brand, but any company or brand should respect the law and fulfil their responsibility towards society," Hua said.

The activist said the police in their questioning had been focused on a watch equipped with a camera, which was in a suitcase but had never been used.

He said he only took cellphone photos of the public areas surrounding Dongguan.

Hua worked in one factory for a day and was detained before he could go to another one.

- World's factory -

Hua and his fellow investigators have not been officially charged, nor has a trial date been set.

Authorities said the case was still being investigated and declined to provide additional information.

Hua, back home in central Hubei province, vowed to never stop doing labour rights work.

"China is the world's factory; our workers work for the entire world," he said. "In the decades since economic reform and opening up, the labour community has paid too much."
Pyongyang city skyline: the national tourism agency is wooing visitors

North Korea's tourism agency has launched a website offering holiday options ranging from surfing to rice planting, despite strong US warnings to avoid travel to a nation where several trips have ended in jail.

Sixteen Americans have been detained in the past decade in North Korea, including 22-year-old student Otto Warmbier who was given a long prison term for stealing a hotel propaganda banner. He was sent home in a coma in June but died several days later.

The "DPR Korea Tour" website, run by the North's National Tourism Administration, depicts the country -- which is subject to stiff sanctions over its weapons programmes -- as just another tourist destination.

It introduces package trips to various parts of the country including the capital Pyongyang, and offers various "theme tours" for travellers seeking something more unusual.

Visitors are invited to check out beaches on the east coast, including the Majon Bathing Beach, where "surfing has come into vogue among tourists" for its favourable conditions and clean water.

The website also provides basic travel information like air and train routes and ways to get around Pyongyang using public transport such as cabs and buses.

However, it does not allow users to book tours directly and does not list the handful of foreign agencies that arrange trips to the isolated state.

The site is available in Korean, English, Chinese, Russian and Japanese and can be found at tourismdprk.gov.kp. The country's official name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The US State Department strongly warns Americans against travelling to North Korea, citing "serious risk of arrest and long-term detention".

Canada, Australia and New Zealand are among other nations giving similar warnings.
A Chinese soldier stands guard on the Chinese side of the ancient Nathu La border crossing between India and China

A top Indian diplomat has claimed that China is being unusually aggressive over the month-old border dispute with India at the Doklam plateau.

The stand-off shows no sign of easing according to media reports in both countries.

Beijing has made virtually daily warnings to its neighbour over the deadlock on a remote Himalayan plateau, where Indian and Chinese troops have been locked in a tense face off.

Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar told lawmakers in a closed briefing on the dispute that India wanted a diplomatic settlement, the reports said.

'Jaishankar told us that China's aggression and rhetoric on the recent standoff is unusual,' a member of the parliamentary panel at Tuesday's briefing told Indian media.

'We will continue to engage with them through diplomatic channels,' the foreign ministry number two was quoted as saying by Press Trust of India news agency.

The dispute concerns land near where the boundaries of China, India and Bhutan meet. China has alleged that Indian troops are on its territory. Bhutan and India say the area - known as the Doklam plateau in India and Donglang to China - is Bhutanese.

Still friends? An Indian Army soldier stands in front of a group of People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China soldiers as they line up after participating in an anti-terror drill

Bhutan has no diplomatic relations with China and is closely allied to India, which says its troops approached a Chinese army unit that entered the zone on June 16 to build a road.

China has said it will hold talks with India only after Indian troops are withdrawn from the disputed territory.

China and India have a number of border disputes, although the section currently in question is generally regarded as stable.

The two fought a border war in 1962 in Arunachal Pradesh.

In 2014, hundreds of Indian and Chinese troops faced off on the de facto border known as the Line of Actual Control that runs along the northwest Indian region of Ladakh.

On Tuesday, an Indian junior home minister Kiren Rijiju told parliament that 73 new roads with 'operational significance' were being constructed by India along the border, with 30 completed so far.

Beijing has made virtually daily warnings to its neighbour over the deadlock on a remote Himalayan plateau, where Indian and Chinese troops have been in a tense face off (file pic)

The latest dispute has triggered international concern, with the visiting Australian foreign minister urging the neighbours to resolve the row amicably.

'We don't want to see any escalation of tensions that could lead to miscalculation and misjudgement,' Julie Bishop said Wednesday.

The US State Department has flagged concern while calling on the two nations to come up with 'some sort of arrangement' for peace.
A Sahrawi man holds up a Polisario Front flag near Moroccan soldiers guarding the security barrier in contested Western Sahara

A Moroccan court on Wednesday sentenced 23 Sahrawis to prison terms ranging from two years to life over the killing of 11 members of the Moroccan security forces in contested Western Sahara.

The verdict in the case, which has been closely followed by human rights campaigners, was delivered at dawn by the Court of Appeals in Sale near Rabat, the official news agency MAP reported.

Morocco and the Algeria-backed Polisario Front independence movement have accused each other of provoking deadly clashes between police and Sahrawi protesters at a camp for displaced people in Gdeim Izik in November 2010.

In 2013 a military court sentenced the defendants to jail terms ranging from 20 years to life imprisonment.

International rights groups condemned that trial as "unfair" and in July the Court of Cassation ordered a civilian court to examine the case.

The court issued its verdict after 14 hours of deliberations, issuing sentences against 19 defendants ranging from 20 years to life.

Four others were given lighter sentences but were not detained as they have already served their time.

The defence has 10 days to appeal the ruling, along with a decision to dismiss claims for damages.

The killings took place on November 8, 2010 as Moroccan forces moved to dismantle the Gdim Izik camp where thousands of Sahrawis were living.

Eleven security personnel and two Sahrawi civilians were killed in the clashes that followed, which spread to the nearby city of Laayoune where businesses and public buildings were looted and torched.

Disarmed, some victims had their throats cut or their dead bodies desecrated, according to videos shot by the security forces.

Morocco says Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony mostly controlled by Rabat, is an integral part of the kingdom.

The Polisario Front demands a referendum on self-determination for the territory.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch this week issued a joint plea for the Moroccan authorities to ensure the verdict in the trial was not based on confessions or statements "obtained under torture or other ill-treatment during police interrogations".

The Moroccan authorities have underlined what they called the "transparency" and "fairness" of the civil trial, which was open to the press and international observers.

In May the defendants and their lawyers announced they would no longer attend what they said was a "mock trial".

The defendants have not appeared in the court since, and their case was taken up by lawyers appointed by the court.

The NGO Action by Christians for the Abolition of Torture has criticised what it called an "unfair trial" that took into account "confessions signed under torture".

Amnesty International criticised the ruling.

"The failure of judicial authorities, over more than six years, to adequately investigate torture allegations in this case is a stain on today's verdict," the human rights watchdog said.
A Saudi-led coalition has been carrying out air strikes in Yemen since March 2015, including in the capital Sanaa, shown here in January 2017

An air strike on a group of displaced Yemenis has killed at least 20 civilians, mostly from the same family, a UN statement and witnesses said Wednesday.

The attack on Tuesday afternoon hit a group of civilians in the Mawza district of the southwestern province of Taez, a statement by the UN refugee agency said.

Residents said the attack was carried out by a warplane from the Saudi-led coalition fighting Shiite rebels in support of Yemen's internationally recognised government.

The UNHCR said it was "deeply shocked and saddened at reports of the deaths and injuries of a number of internally displaced persons in an aerial attack" on the area.

The statement said the civilians had fled fighting in the nearby Mokha district, on the Red Sea coast.

Coalition-backed forces loyal to President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi recaptured the port of Mokha in February as part of a major ongoing offensive to drive rebels from Yemen's lengthy coastline.

"This latest incident once again demonstrates the extreme dangers facing civilians in Yemen, particularly those attempting to flee violence, as they disproportionately bear the brunt of conflict," the statement said.

The coalition launched a military operation against the rebels in March 2015 as insurgents closed in on Hadi in his southern refuge in Aden forcing him to flee to Riyadh.

The World Health Organization estimates that more than 8,000 people have been killed in Yemen's conflict, most of them civilians, since March 2015.
Philippine troops in Marawi: Singapore has offered training

Singapore said Wednesday it has offered surveillance drones and urban warfare training to Philippine troops battling Islamist fighters, to prevent the militants becoming entrenched and threatening the rest of Southeast Asia.

Philippine troops have been battling to dislodge militants loyal to the Islamic State group who seized parts of the southern city of Marawi on May 23 in a bid to establish a base in the Mindanao region, which shares sea borders with Malaysia and Indonesia.

IS has said it plans to establish a caliphate in Southeast Asia as it did in parts of Iraq and Syria.

More than 550 people, including 413 militants and 98 government forces, have been killed in the Marawi fighting, which enters its third month this weekend.

Singapore's defence ministry said its offer includes the use by Filipino troops of its urban warfare training facilities and a detachment of drones.

It also offered a C-130 transport plane to deliver humanitarian supplies to evacuees from Marawi, the ministry said in a statement issued after a visit to Manila by Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Ng on Tuesday met his counterpart Delfin Lorenzana, who "expressed his appreciation and in-principle acceptance of the offer from Singapore", the statement said.

Philippine troops, long used to fighting in the jungle against communist and Muslim insurgents, have struggled against the militants in bloody street-to-street combat.

Singapore's offer is the first from a fellow member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) apart from joint maritime patrols involving the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Australia and the United States provided spy planes, and China sent some guns and ammunition to help troops in Marawi.

Singapore's defence ministry said Philippine forces were confident of liberating Marawi, but "further concerted efforts are required to ensure that other terrorist cells do not entrench themselves in the southern Philippines as this would cause instability to the rest of ASEAN".

IS could use bases like Marawi to "launch further attacks against other cities within the Philippines and ASEAN, and urge their cells to attack targets in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore", added defence chief Ng in a Facebook post.
Shiite Huthi rebels seized control of large parts of Yemen including the capital Sanaa in late 2014 and early 2015

An air raid in Yemen has killed at least 20 people mostly from the same family, the UN and witnesses said Wednesday, the latest in a series of suspected strikes on civilians by a Saudi-led coalition.

The attack on Tuesday afternoon hit a group of civilians in the Mawza district of the southwestern province of Taez, a statement by the UN refugee agency said.

Residents said the attack was carried out by a warplane from the Saudi-led coalition fighting Shiite rebels in support of Yemen's internationally recognised government.

At least seven women and four children were among those killed, they said.

The UNHCR said it was "deeply shocked and saddened at reports of the deaths and injuries of a number of internally displaced persons in an aerial attack" on the area.

The statement said the civilians had fled fighting in the nearby Mokha district, on the Red Sea coast.

Coalition-backed forces loyal to President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi recaptured the port of Mokha in February as part of a major ongoing offensive to drive rebels from Yemen's lengthy coastline.

Conflict in Yemen

The UNHCR statement said more than half a million civilians, 27 percent of Yemen's internally displaced people (IDPs), originate from the governorate of Taez.

- 'Extreme dangers' -

"This latest incident once again demonstrates the extreme dangers facing civilians in Yemen, particularly those attempting to flee violence, as they disproportionately bear the brunt of conflict," the statement said.

The coalition launched a military operation against the rebels in March 2015 as insurgents closed in on Hadi in his southern refuge in Aden forcing him to flee to Riyadh.

The World Health Organization estimates that more than 8,000 people have been killed in Yemen's conflict, most of them civilians, since the intervention.

The Saudi-led coalition has faced repeated criticism over civilian casualties in Yemen. It accuses the rebels of using civilians as human shields.

Last month, an air raid on a market in rebel-controlled Saada province, in north Yemen, killed 24 civilians. Another suspected coalition raid in Taez province in May was reported to have killed more than 20 civilians.

The coalition has admitted responsibility for some strikes that killed civilians, including a raid on the rebel-held capital Sanaa in October 2016 that killed more than 140 people at a funeral ceremony.

The UNHCR statement said appealed for parties to the conflict to do "their utmost in the protection of civilians and the mitigation of suffering."

"A peaceful political solution to resolve the conflict in Yemen is urgently needed to end civilian suffering," it said.

A Saudi-led coalition has been carrying out air strikes in Yemen since March 2015, including in the capital Sanaa, shown here in January 2017

Repeated attempts to bring about a political solution to the conflict, including a series of UN-mediated peace talks, have failed.

The Shiite Huthi rebels, who Saudi Arabia says are supported by its regional arch-rival Iran, seized control of large parts of the country including Sanaa in late 2014 and early 2015.

Campaigners in the West have urged countries including the United States and Britain to suspend arms exports to Saudi Arabia over civilian casualties in the conflict.
A passenger is seen placing a laptop in his checked baggage after US authorities banned carry-on personal electronics on US bound flights from airports in the Middle East and North Africa

Saudi Arabia's national carrier said a US ban on laptops and tablets in the cabins of its US-bound planes had been lifted on Wednesday.

The kingdom's civil aviation authorities informed Saudia that the ban had been lifted after a US team inspected security measures at airports in Riyadh and Jeddah, the airline's spokesman Abdulrahman al-Taieb said.

Washington in March barred all electronic devices larger than a mobile phone in the cabins of direct flights to the United States from 10 airports in Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, only allowing them in hold luggage.

The ban was brought in after intelligence officials learned of efforts by jihadists from the Islamic State group to produce a bomb that could be hidden inside such devices.

Washington said it would abolish the ban for companies that implemented new safety measures.

Saudia, also known as Saudi Arabian Airlines, was the last carrier to have its ban lifted.
Yazidi fighter Heza prepares her rifle in an abandoned home used as a base on the eastern outskirts of Raqa on July 18, 2017

She was trafficked into Raqa as a sex slave by the Islamic State group but managed to escape. Now Yazidi fighter Heza is back to avenge the horrors she and thousands of others suffered.

Her hair tucked under a tightly wrapped forest green shawl embroidered with flowers, Heza says battling IS in its Syrian bastion has helped relieve some of her trauma.

"When I started fighting, I lifted some of the worries from my heart," she says, surrounded by fellow Yazidi militia women in Raqa's eastern Al-Meshleb district.

"But it will be full of revenge until all the women are freed."

She and her two sisters were among thousands of women and girls from the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority taken hostage by IS as it swept into Iraq's Sinjar region in August 2014.

The women were sold and traded across the jihadists' self-proclaimed "caliphate" in Syria and Iraq. Around 3,000 are believed to remain in captivity, including one of Heza's sisters.

"When the Yazidi genocide happened, Daesh snatched up the women and girls. I was one of them," Heza recounts, using the Arabic acronym for IS.

Smoke billows following an airstrike on the western frontline of Raqa on July 15, 2017, during an offensive by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, to retake the city from Islamic State (IS) group fighters

The United Nations has qualified the massacres IS carried out against the Yazidis during the Sinjar attack as genocide.

IS separated Yazidi females from the men in Sinjar, bringing the women and girls into Raqa.

"They took us like sheep. They chased us and humiliated us in these very streets," Heza tells AFP, gesturing to a row of heavily damaged homes in Al-Meshleb.

The eastern district was the first neighbourhood captured from IS by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-Arab alliance, in their months-long offensive to seize the jihadist bastion.

SDF officials told AFP that their forces had already rescued several female Yazidi captives, including a 10-year-old girl, since they entered Raqa city in June.

- 'Despite pain, I felt joy' -

Over the course of her 10-month captivity in Raqa, Heza was bought by five different IS fighters.

Yazidi fighter Heza prepares her rifle in an abandoned home used as a base on the eastern outskirts of Raqa on July 18, 2017

Her voice strained but her brown eyes still sharp, the young fighter says she prefers not to detail the abuses she suffered.

But in an indication of the extent of her trauma, Heza -- whose name means "strength" in Kurdish -- says she tried to commit suicide several times.

Finally, in May 2015, she escaped from the home where she was being held to a nearby market, and she found a Syrian Kurdish family who smuggled her out of the city.

She travelled around 400 kilometres (250 miles) across war-ravaged northeast Syria back into Iraq to join the Shengal Women's Units (YPS).

The YPS -- named after the Kurdish word for Sinjar -- is a part of the US-backed SDF.

Heza underwent intensive weapons training, and when the SDF announced its fight for Raqa in November 2016, she and other YPS fighters were ready.

"When the Raqa offensive began, I wanted to take part in it for all the Yazidi girls who were sold here in these streets," she says.

"My goal is to free them, to avenge them."

The SDF spent months tightening the noose around Raqa before breaking into the city in June, and the YPS took up their first positions in Al-Meshleb several weeks later.

It was the first time Heza was back in the northern Syrian city since her escape.

"When I entered Raqa, I had a strange, indescribable feeling. Despite the enormous pain that I carry, I felt joy," the fighter says.

- 'Revenge will be proportional' -

A member of the Shengal Women's Units rests in an abandoned home used as a base on the eastern outskirts of Raqa on July 18, 2017

Rifles are lined up in neat rows inside the abandoned home used by the YPS as their base in Al-Meshleb.

Yazidi women in brand-new uniforms gather around a crackling walkie-talkie for news from the front.

Some of them, like 20-year-old Merkan, have travelled far to join the fight against IS.

Her family is originally Yazidi Turkish, but Merkan and her 24-year-old sister Arin were raised in Germany.

When they heard about IS's infamous sweep into Sinjar in 2014, they were outraged.

"I could never have imagined a world like this. I didn't expect things like this could happen," Merkan says.

"I was in so much pain," says the tall militiawoman.

Her older sister decided to travel to Sinjar in late 2014 to join the YPS, and Merkan followed in early 2015.

"I only had one goal in front of me: liberating the Yazidi women, and all women who were still in Daesh's clutches."

She had scribbled a similar pledge in Kurdish on a wall behind her.

"Through strength and struggle, we Yazidi women fighters came to Raqa to take revenge for the August 3 massacre," the graffiti says, referring to when IS entered Sinjar.

"We are avenging Yazidi girls," it adds.

"Yesterday there was Al-Qaeda and today there's Daesh. We don't know who will come next. I want to go anywhere there is injustice," Merkan said.

Fellow fighter Basih is sitting quietly in a neighbouring room, chain-smoking cigarettes in the muggy July afternoon.

"We suffered the ugliest forms of injustice. Our revenge will be proportional to it," she said
Madeleine Albright says "rule of law" issues could hamper investment in the Philippines

Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright warned Wednesday that "rule-of-law" issues could harm investments in the Philippines after her nation and rights groups criticised President Rodrigo Duterte's deadly war on drugs.

The United States -- along with the United Nations, the European Union and international watchdogs -- has expressed concern about alleged extrajudicial killings and rights violations in the campaign.

Albright, who served under then-president Bill Clinton, was asked at a forum in Manila organised by ABS-CBN network about her advice to investors.

"One of the things that I think people need to understand in the Philippines (is) that investors do not want to go into a place where the rule of law is under question," said Albright, 80, who runs an eponymous private investment firm.

"Therefore government institutions and the rule of law are very important because despite the fact that investing in its nature is risky, it is better for countries themselves to make it less risky as possible," she said, without directly commenting on Duterte's policies.

Duterte, 72, won elections last year on a promise to kill tens of thousands of criminals to prevent the Philippines from becoming a narco-state.

Since then police have said at least 3,200 people were killed during their anti-drug operations.

Thousands more people, some of them described by the authorities as drug users, have been killed by unknown attackers.

Rights groups have warned that Duterte and the police may be overseeing a crime against humanity.

A defiant Duterte insists his pronouncements to kill criminals and his security forces' actions are within the law and meant to save generations of Filipinos from the drug menace.

Duterte has been prickly about US criticism, calling then-president Barack Obama a "son of a whore" and the previous US ambassador to Manila "gay".

Duterte also verbally abused the State Department.

However on Tuesday, new US ambassador Sung Kim said ties between the two nations have become "much more positive".

In a separate development, four members of the European Parliament met a jailed senator and leading critic of Duterte on Wednesday in a show of support, reiterating calls for her release.

The legislators visited Senator Leila de Lima in her cell at national police headquarters where she has been held since February on alleged drug charges.

The European Parliament in March urged the Philippines to release de Lima. Critics say the real reason for her detention is her criticism of the bloody war on drugs.

"The delegations purpose of the visit is to express our concerns as parliamentarians in Europe about the case of de Lima," the head of the delegation, Soraya Post, said after the meeting.
More than 2,000 trees were planted between the Exel warehouse and the Nottingham and Valley Meadows developments on the west end of Carlisle this spring to provide screening for the residents of those neighborhoods.

Now, residents are telling the borough council that too many trees have been planted, and theyve been planted in the wrong places.

MALCO Landscape Inc. had been awarded a $207,997 contract for the project.

Renee Rhan, president of the Nottingham Valley Meadows Association, addressed the borough council at its meeting last Thursday. The association represents those in the neighborhoods affected by the development of warehouses on the old Royer farm.

Rhan told the council that too many trees have been planted in areas that are already well-screened while there are still gaps among the trees on and at the ends of a berm that had previously been built as a screen.

Other trees have been planted close to the walking trail that, when mature, will create a dark, canopy effect that could be a safety concern, Rhan said.

Rhan suggested the borough work with the contractor to put the trees in more appropriate places.

We will be going out there this summer, probably in the next month or so, to identify the gaps and come up with the next planting. We can certainly meet with you, Borough Manager Matt Candland said.

Candland said the trees were planted so densely because, as a reforestation project, the idea is to have the trees grow straighter and faster.

There will be a mortality rate, and thats by design. But the trees will grow the fastest when we do it that way, Candland said.

Joseph Nunez, a resident of Wellington Court and vice-president of the NVMA, took issue with that explanation, citing arborists he has had visit the site.

They have flatly disagreed that this would work, and that the trees are in trouble. Many of them are dead or dying, and its not restricted to one variety, said Nunez.

Some of the trees that would provide the best screening are among those that are dying due to poor planting stock that was used, Nunez said.

The citizens, the residents, of Nottingham and Valley Meadows have been economically disadvantaged, Nunez said. If somebody is going to sell their home today, and they live near that berm, they are going to take a hit, a very big hit.

Nunez offered the example of a home near the berm that was listed at $479,900, and sold 20 months later for $355,000.

Stormwater

A water diversion project related to the warehouse construction also raised questions. Rhan said stormwater pipes from the warehouse site empty into a pre-existing swale near her home that had been constructed for the Nottingham development. The swale has come close to overflowing during heavy rains.

The warehouse owners have agreed to cap and close the pipes, and have the water diverted to newly constructed swales in Valley Meadows Park.

Rhan questioned the council about the budget for the project being raised again. Rhan said $50,000 initially was to come out of a fund created from the proceeds of a settlement between the homeowners and Exel, owners of the warehouse, to provide for reforestation and other improvements.

The $50,000 from the fund was to be combined with an $80,000 grant for a project cost of $130,000. Now, Rhan said, the budget for the project has been increased without having consulted the residents.

Candland said the initial budget was a rough estimate. Now that additional information has been gathered, the borough believes the project will cost about $150,000, but that the project was budgeted at $190,000 as a cushion.

The borough hopes to have the work done within a year, Candland said.

Candland acknowledged that the Rhans live next to a stormwater outfall that could be a problem in the event of a heavy storm.

This has taken longer than it should, Candland said. Youve been far more patient than a reasonable person can be expected to be, given the circumstances.

Above all these concerns, Rhan said residents need to be better informed of decisions concerning the work being done around their properties.

We really just want to work with them, she said.

Candland suggested setting up regular periodic meetings or phone calls to keep residents current on information concerning the project.

Nunez recommended that a group be established with representation from the borough staff, borough council and members of NVMA, similar to the group that met during the settlement process that resulted in the acquisition of funding from Exel to fund the reforestation and storm swale construction.

Thats an effective working group, and thats the only way we are going to get things done in my estimation, he said.
Old Fangak hospital in South Sudan has expanded from a single tent into several treatment rooms lined with white metal beds and warm blankets

Thouk Reath, 19, was recovering from a leg amputation after being shot in fighting in northeastern South Sudan when the clinic he was in had to be evacuated because of approaching gunfire.

Patients and doctors at the clinic in the town of Maiwut risked being caught up in an army offensive closing in on the nearby opposition-stronghold Pagak.

The United Nations said last week that about 5,000 people had fled into neighbouring Ethiopia to escape the fighting, and rebel spokesman Lam Paul Gabriel told AFP another 25,000 had fled over the weekend.

"I was shot and my leg was amputated in Maiwut Hospital where I was recovering until we were told to evacuate," said Thouk, lying under a blue sheet.

"It was a difficult journey. We were first driven to Pagak, then flown to Old Fangak and taken to the hospital across the river by boat."

Old Fangak is a small, spread-out town of mud huts on both banks of the White Nile, about 300 kilometres (190 miles) from Maiwut. With no access to the swampy area by main roads, the fastest way to get patients to a field hospital in the town is by boat.

Thouk was in Maiwut, about 25 kilometres from Pagak after being displaced a first time more than a year ago when his village came under attack. He has not seen his parents since and believes they may be dead.

- Stopped mid-surgery -

Thouk Reath, a South Sudanese whose leg was amputated because of a gunshot wound, has not seen his parents since his village came under attack more than a year ago

The arrival of Thouk and about 20 other patients has seen the Old Fangak hospital extended from a single tent into several treatment rooms lined with white metal beds and warm blankets, all covered with rainproof tarpaulins.

Operating theatre nurse Robbie Gray, working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), recalls being told to "stop mid-surgery" to evacuate the Maiwut clinic.

"I was assisting an operation when we suddenly heard about gunshots outside Maiwut. We were told to immediately evacuate," he told AFP.

Now in Old Fangak, Gray, with a team of nine other ICRC doctors and medical staff, continues to treat patients who fled Maiwut, most of them suffering gunshot wounds.

In another part of the treatment facility lies five-year-old Nyachan Makuach with a gunshot wound to her abdomen. Lying in woollen blankets, she floats in and out of consciousness. Her eyes are swollen and sweat drips from her small forehead.

According to hospital staff she is traumatised by the memory of seeing her father being killed.

"She remembers everything," said the ICRC's surgical team leader Louise Humphreys.

Makuach's uncle, who came with her to Old Fangak, is losing weeks' worth of work as a farmer in the field.

"But we are glad to receive treatment here," he said.

- 'Fighting will continue' -

South Sudan's civil war erupted in December 2013 when President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy, Riek Machar, of plotting a coup.

Fighting between government and opposition forces in South Sudan has forced thousands from their homes

Tens of thousands have been killed and millions forced from their homes in the years since as a series of peace deals have been abandoned. The latest UN figures say half the population -- roughly six million people -- will need emergency food aid this month.

With fighting ongoing around Pagak, the Old Fangak clinic has scaled-up its staff numbers, flying in additional doctors and nurses from South Sudans capital Juba.

"The last weeks have seen tens of thousands of people being displaced," the rebel spokesman Lam told AFP.

"If the army advances, the fighting will continue."

The loss of Pagak would be a major defeat to the already weakened opposition.

David Shearer, head of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), said last week he was "gravely concerned" by the situation and called for both parties to stop the fighting.
Netanyahu urged Europe to reassess its relationship with Israel

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday denounced Brussels' repeated criticism of Israel as an "anomaly" and called on Europe to reassess its relationship with the Jewish state.

The EU has repeatedly condemned Israel's building of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and crackdown on civil society groups critical of the government.

"There is an anomaly, we are often criticised by western Europe, often more than any other place in the world. Israel is a bastion of European and western values in the heart of a very dark place," the premier said in Budapest on the second of a three-day visit to Hungary.

"It's time to have a re-assessment in Europe about the relationship with Israel."

Netanyahu made the remarks after holding talks with leaders from the so-called Visegrad Four group -- Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic -- whose nationalist anti-immigration stances have also put them increasingly at odds with Brussels.

The Israeli premier praised the Visegrad nations for supporting Israel "on several occasions" at European Union meetings.

Observers say Israel is seeking closer ties to nations that can help defend its interests in international forums.

"With their backing, it will be harder for the EU to pass resolutions critical of Israel," Middle East expert Peter Lintl told Austrian newspaper Kurier.

Netanyahu is the first Israeli leader to visit Budapest since the fall of communism in 1989.

His Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orban, a virulent opponent of Muslim immigration, has hailed Netanyahu as a "patriot".

"We share Israel's notion of protecting external borders," said Orban whose government has erected fences on its southern EU frontiers to keep out illegal asylum-seekers.

"If Europe does not cooperate with Israel, it is punishing itself," he added.

Both men are right-wingers enamoured of US President Donald Trump and with a disdain for the left-leaning liberal global order bankrolled, as they see it, by the likes of US Jewish billionaire George Soros.

Netanyahu's trip comes at a sensitive time for Orban, who is under fire at home over his running battle against Hungarian-born Soros and praise of a Hungarian Nazi-allied wartime leader.

Many in Hungary's 100,000-strong Jewish population -- one Europe's largest -- have accused Orban, in power since 2010, of turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism or even encouraging it to stave off growing support for the far-right.

However Netanyahu defended Orban on Tuesday, insisting that Hungary, as the birthplace of modern political Zionism founder Theodor Herzl, was "at the forefront" of countries fighting anti-Zionism.
Violent crime has been on the rise in China in recent decades

A man admitted killing 19 people, including his parents and three children, when he went on trial in southwest China on Wednesday, the court said.

After returning to his home village in Yunnan province on September 28 last year, Yang Qingpei murdered his parents when they refused to give him money, the Qujing City Intermediate People's Court said on its official microblog account.

Fearing he would be discovered, Yang then killed 17 of his neighbours and fled to Yunnan's provincial capital Kunming, it said, adding that the murder weapon was a pickaxe.

Yang, who was born in 1989, pleaded guilty to all charges and apologised to the relatives of the dead, it added.

The court adjourned Wednesday afternoon for sentencing.

While mass killings are rare, violent crime has been on the rise in China in recent decades as the economy has boomed and the gap between rich and poor has expanded rapidly.

Studies have also described a rise in the prevalence of mental disorders, some of them linked to stress as the pace of life becomes faster and support systems wither.
According to UN figures 2,251 Palestinians, including 551 children, were killed in fighting between Israel and Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas and other factions

Palestinian lawyers and civil society groups Wednesday urged the International Criminal Court to speed up inquiries and open a full investigation into alleged war crimes in Gaza, east Jerusalem and the West Bank.

"Since two years Palestine is under preliminary examination," said lawyer Gilles Devers, adding "in Gaza, we think two years is too long."

The Palestinian Authority has formally asked the ICC to investigate Israel, which is not a party to the Rome Statute that governs the court, for alleged war crimes.

It has presented the court with a dossier alleging abuses during the 2014 summer Gaza war, and for the Israeli occupation and settlement of Palestinian territories.

In January 2015, the tribunal opened a preliminary examination into alleged abuses by all sides in the conflict. And an ICC delegation visited Israel and the West Bank in late 2016.

But Palestinian activists told reporters Wednesday the investigation has stalled, calling for both the ICC and the Palestinian Authority to speed up efforts.

Lawyers representing 448 named victims, and more than 50 Palestinian trade unions and organisations, were handing over Wednesday a thick dossier to the ICC prosecutor's office which they said showed "clearly that crimes within the jurisdiction of the court have been committed."

The Gaza conflict, in which according to UN figures 2,251 Palestinians, including 551 children, were killed in fighting between Israel and Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas and other factions, was clearly "a war crime" and the "ICC was competent" to handle it, said Devers, speaking in English.

Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda had "an obligation" to move beyond a preliminary examination to a full investigation, he told reporters before meeting with representatives from her office.

The dossier has been drafted by more than 30 lawyers in the Palestinian territories, and it is the first time that Palestinian civil groups, including doctors, farmers, fishermen and teachers, have appealed directly to the ICC.

The group said it has taken the action because of "the lack of political will on behalf of the Palestinian Authority" which it said had not made an official complaint as a state member of the ICC.

Devers said the group was also hoping to persuade the ICC to open a full investigation "as a matter of urgency" into the situation in east Jerusalem.

Protests and scuffles between demonstrators and Israeli police have erupted in recent days outside the Haram al-Sharif compound, which includes the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque.

The site is venerated by Muslims as the third holiest site in Islam, and by Jews as the most sacred site in Judaism.

But Israel closed the ultra-sensitive compound on Friday and Saturday, after an attack by an Arab Israeli on Friday left two Israeli police dead, as has triggered Palestinian fury by installing metal detectors at its entrances.
A picture taken on July 19, 2017 shows Israeli army vehicles driving along the road parallel to the border fence separating the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights and Syria

Israel plans a new field hospital along the demarcation line with Syria to treat patients from the war-hit country, the military said Wednesday, while reporting an uptick in aid missions there.

The new field hospital would be located on the Syrian side of the fence but on the Israeli side of the demarcation line in the Golan Heights, which it occupied in 1967, Lieutenant Colonel Tomer Koler said.

The fence does not always follow the line precisely.

In addition, Israel's military said it had been involved in operations to deliver humanitarian aid across the line, including hundreds of tonnes of food and clothing, as well as fuel and equipment such as generators.

There have been more than 110 such missions since August 2016, when a new push began.

The military has worked with aid groups on such missions, Koler said.

Israel has long treated war wounded from Syria as a gesture it hopes will soften attitudes toward the Jewish state on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.

With the help of contacts with doctors in Syria, it recently expanded it to include those who are sick but unable to access proper treatment due to conditions in the country, Koler told journalists in a phone conference.

Israel has treated more than 3,000 war wounded from Syria since 2013, saying it does not ask questions about whether they are fighters or civilians, providing treatment only as it is needed.

About one-third of those treated have been women and children, according to Koler.

The new field hospital can treat some 50 people per day and will be operated by an international NGO, he said. He said he could not name the NGO nor say exactly where the field hospital will be located.

Koler said he hoped it would be operational in the next month.

Israel formerly had a field hospital in the area but closed it in 2016.

Koler said that because of the humanitarian efforts, he hopes "that they will see that we are good people on the other side."

Asked if they were providing help to rebels, he stressed Israel's military was not taking "any side in the war" and did not provide assistance to any specific organisation.

Israel has sought to avoid being dragged into the six-year conflict in neighbouring Syria, but has carried out air strikes to stop what it says were advanced arms deliveries to its enemy Hezbollah.

The Lebanese Shiite movement, with which Israel fought a war in 2006, is supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the conflict.

It has also carried out strikes in retaliation for spillover in fighting in the Golan when rockets or other projectiles have landed over the demarcation line.
Trucks snaking across the Mexico-California border, carrying goods for the US market under the North American Free Trade Agreement that US President Donald Trump wants to renegotiate

Negotiations on reworking North America's landmark free trade pact will begin next month in Washington, US officials announced Wednesday.

The announcement comes after American officials this week laid out a bargaining position with a heavy emphasis on reducing bilateral trade deficits with Mexico and Canada while pressing Ottawa and Mexico City for other important trade concessions.

Analysts say the position is workable but certain US demands -- such as toughening rules on sourcing duty-free goods and weakening dispute resolution procedures -- risk dragging out the process, which faces a narrow window created by the Mexican and American political calendars.

The first round of the talks will be held from August 16 to 20 and John Melle, the assistant US Trade Representative for the Western Hemisphere, will lead the US delegation to the talks, the Trade Representative's office said in a statement.

Melle is a 30-year veteran of USTR, having held positions covering Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean and Central America.

That puts the start of the talks 90 days after the opening of a consultation period with Congress, allowing them to begin at the earliest possible opportunity allowed by US law.

In a statement on Wednesday, the Mexican economic ministry said the Mexican government had completed consultations with industry representatives to develop its own negotiating objectives.

"The Mexican government reiterates its willingness to work together with its NAFTA partners to increase our regional competitiveness and continue to generate trade and investment opportunities in North America," the secretariat said in a statement.

On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump attacked the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, calling it the "worst" trade pact ever signed by the United States.

But he has stopped short of exiting the agreement and his administration is now focused on comparatively minor tweaks, with substantial proposed changes drawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- a 12-nation treaty negotiated by the former Obama administration which the White House scrapped earlier this year.

"These objectives could lead to a successful negotiation but one that will be difficult and where not all the objectives can be achieved," Jeffrey Schott, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told AFP.

"This does open the possibility for improving NAFTA from its current form and I think it's a basis for negotiations."
Netanyahu urged Europe to reassess its relationship with Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday denounced the EU's political demands on Israel as "absolutely crazy", in remarks leaked from a closed-door meeting with eastern and central European leaders in Budapest.

"The European Union is the only association of countries in the world that conditions the relations with Israel... in every area on political conditions," he said in a recording heard by AFP.

"It's crazy, it's absolutely crazy," he added.

Brussels has repeatedly condemned Israel's building of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and its crackdown on civil society groups critical of the government.

Netanyahu cited China, Russia and India as countries who do business with "innovation giant Israel" and "don't care about political issues."

"Europe has to decide whether it wants to live and thrive or if it wants to shrivel and disappear," he told the prime ministers of the so-called Visegrad group -- Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

"Don't undermine that one Western country that defends European values and European interests and prevents another mass migration to Europe."

Netanyahu toned down his rhetoric in official comments after the meeting, describing the EU's criticism of Israel as an "anomaly".

He made the remarks on the second of a three-day visit to Budapest, the first such trip by an Israeli leader since the fall of communism in 1989.

Observers say Israel is seeking closer ties with EU nations that can help defend its interests in international forums.

"With their backing, it will be harder for the EU to pass resolutions critical of Israel," Middle East expert Peter Lintl said.

- 'Patriot' pair -

At the news conference, Netanyahu praised the Visegrad group -- whose nationalist stances are also a growing thorn in Brussels' side -- for supporting Israel "on several occasions" at EU meetings.

The Israeli premier has found a particularly willing ally in his Hungarian counterpart Victor Orban.

Both men are right-wingers enamoured of US President Donald Trump and with a disdain for the left-leaning liberal global order bankrolled, as they see it, by the likes of Jewish US billionaire George Soros.

They also both insist on their countries' right to defend themselves against perceived outside threats.

Israel has blocked off its border to Syria, where regime forces fight a US-led alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters.

Netanyahu said Israel had repeatedly carried out strikes against Iranian convoys transporting weapons in Syria destined for the Jewish state's arch-enemy Hezbollah.

"When we see them doing this, we take military action against them. We've been doing this dozens and dozens of times," he said.

Orban, a virulent opponent of Muslim immigration who has been in power since 2010, hailed Netanyahu as a "patriot".

"We share Israel's notion of protecting external borders," said the populist strongman who has erected fences on Hungary's southern EU frontiers as part of hardline measures against asylum-seekers.

"If Europe does not cooperate with Israel, it is punishing itself," Orban added.

Netanyahu's trip comes at a sensitive time for Orban, who is under fire at home over his running battle against Budapest-born Soros.

Many in Hungary's 100,000-strong Jewish population -- one Europe's largest -- have accused Orban of encouraging anti-Semitism to stave off growing support for the far-right.

They decried as "poisonous" a recent government poster campaign attacking Soros over his alleged support for mass immigration.

Some of the posters were daubed in anti-Semitic graffiti.

Orban has stressed that the campaign was about Soros's political views and that Hungary has " zero tolerance" toward anti-Semitism.

"It is possible to argue over the aims of the campaign, but for me, it became unacceptable because of one thing: the Jews in Hungary have started to be afraid," Andras Heisel, who heads Hungary's largest Jewish organisation, said at an event attended by Netanyahu and Orban at Budapest's Great Synagogue on Wednesday evening.

Netanyahu however earlier defended Orban, saying that Hungary was "at the forefront" of countries fighting anti-Zionism.
Former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo, pictured in 2016, and his former militia leader Charles Ble Goude, 45, have pleaded not guilty to four charges arising out of the post-election violence in 2010 to 2011

Appeal judges Wednesday struck down a decision denying former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo interim release during his trial for crimes against humanity, and ordered the court to review his situation.

Gbagbo, the first ex-head of state to be tried by the International Criminal Court, has appealed a March decision that he must stay behind bars in a UN detention centre until the end of his trial.

Gbagbo and his former militia leader Charles Ble Goude, 45, have pleaded not guilty to four charges arising out of the post-election violence which wracked the Ivory Coast in 2010 to 2011.

About 3,000 people died in the turmoil that swept Abidjan -- once one of Africa's most cosmopolitan cities -- in the aftermath of the November 2010 presidential polls when Gbagbo refused to accept defeat to bitter rival Alassane Ouattara.

In a small initial victory for the former Ivory Coast strongman, five appeals judges agreed the judges in his trial had "erred" on several key points when they refused to release him for the duration of his trial.

The trial opened in January 2016 and could last three to four years.

Greying and balding, Gbagbo listened intently in court to the ruling, with a large beige scarf wrapped around his neck and wearing a casual blue shirt with a red print.

The trial judges had failed to take into account both Gbagbo's advanced age -- he is now 72 -- and his health as well as the fact that he has been in detention since he was handed to the ICC in November 2011, the appeals court ruled.

"The trial chamber should have considered the duration of time Mr Gbagbo has spent in detention ... and whether Mr. Gbagbo's detention continues to be reasonable," said judge Piotr Hofmanski, reading a summary of the ruling.

Therefore the appeals chamber "directs the trial chamber to carry out a new review as to whether Mr Gbagbo should continue to be detained or should be released with or without conditions."

However Gbagbo must remain behind bars until the review is complete, and Hofmanski stressed the appeals court was "not suggesting what the outcome of the trial chambers review should be."
Australia will provide AUS$500,000 (US$400,000) to fund the World Health Organization's dengue prevention and control measures in Sri Lanka, where the virus has claimed 250 lives and infected nearly 100,000 people this year

Australia will join Sri Lanka in its war on dengue fever, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Wednesday, as the virus has claimed a record 250 lives and infected nearly 100,000 people in the South Asian country this year.

Sri Lanka has deployed hundreds of troops to destroy mosquito breeding grounds as it battles to control the spread of the mosquito-borne virus, which has been unprecedented and caught authorities off guard.

Humid monsoon weather, stagnant water from recent flooding, as well as mounting piles of rotting garbage accumulating in the capital, have combined to create abundant areas for mosquitoes to multiply.

Official figures show about 250 deaths so far this year compared to 78 for the whole of last year, when only about 55,000 infections were reported.

Bishop said Canberra would provide AUS$500,000 (US$400,000) to fund the World Health Organization's dengue prevention and control measures in Sri Lanka.

It would also fund a AUS$1 million research partnership between Australia's Monash University and Sri Lanka's health ministry.

She said Sri Lanka could benefit from Monash University's groundbreaking research to trial the introduction of naturally occurring Wolbachia bacteria to Sri Lanka's mosquito populations.

"It prevents the dengue virus from being transmitted between people," she said. "It also has the ability to block other mosquito-borne diseases such as zika and chikumgunya."

Bishop made the announcement after talks with her Sri Lankan counterpart Ravi Karunanayake.

Authorities have blamed a garbage disposal crisis in Colombo for the unusually large infections.

The country's main rubbish tip collapsed in April, crushing dozens of homes and killing 32 people.

Stagnant water left behind after last month's flooding was also seen as contributing to the spread of dengue.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, seen here at a session in June of the UN Human Rights Council, is criticizing African states for backing a bid by the Democratic Republic of Congo to gain a seat on the Geneva-based body

The United States on Wednesday berated African countries for backing a bid by the Democratic Republic of Congo to win a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, saying the move would fuel the conflict in the African country.

The Geneva-based rights council is investigating atrocities allegedly committed by the DRCongo's forces and militias in the Kasai region, where more than 80 mass graves have been uncovered.

US Ambassador Nikki Haley said the decision to put forward the DRCongo as a candidate was "an inexcusable failure" to promote human rights by African countries.

"When the nations of the Africa Group put forward a country like the Democratic Republic of Congo to be a member of the Human Rights Council, it does more than just weaken that body -- it adds to the conflict that is causing so much suffering on that continent," Haley told a debate at the UN Security Council.

The UN's main human rights body can be an asset for the continent if African states put forward "credible candidates with strong human rights records," said Haley.

The General Assembly is expected to hold elections in October to fill seats at the 47-nation council, which monitors and investigates rights violations worldwide.

African countries have agreed to put forward four countries to fill the four seats reserved for the region at the council -- Angola, Nigeria, Senegal along with the DRCongo.

The United States has criticized the "clean slate" practice for choosing members of the rights council and has pushed for competitive elections to challenge countries with questionable human rights records.

During last year's vote, Russia failed to win re-election to the council, losing out to Croatia, but China and Saudi Arabia won their seats by running unopposed.

Human rights groups have also raised concerns about giving the DR Congo a seat at the council, citing the violence in Kasai, the murder of two UN experts who were investigating mass graves there, and the arrests of scores of opposition demonstrators.

"A seat for the Congolese government will be a huge blow to the council's credibility," said Akshaya Kumar, Human Rights Watch's deputy UN director.

The rights council decided last month to send a team of investigators to the DR Congo to look into allegations of killings, torture, rape and the use of child soldiers in the Kasai.
The Department of the Army has scheduled Tuesday, Aug. 8, as the start date to disinter the remains of three Northern Arapaho boys who died in the early 1880s while attending the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

The notice of intended disinterment from the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery was published in the June 21 edition of the Federal Register. The Army National Military Cemeteries is honoring the requests of three families.

The remains of students Little Plume (a.k.a. Hayes Vanderbilt Friday), Little Chief (a.k.a. Dickens Nor) and Horse (a.k.a. Horace Washington) will be removed from the cemetery along Claremont Road.

ANMC will disinter, transfer custody, transport and reinter the remains in private cemeteries in Fremont County, Wyoming. Living relatives have until this Friday to object to the disinterment.

Dickinson College has an ongoing project where Carlisle Indian School student records stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., are scanned into a digital resource center at carlisleindian.dickinson.edu.

All three boys arrived at the Carlisle Indian School on March 11, 1881, according to their student information cards. They were full-blooded American Indians from the Shoshone-Bannock tribes whose fathers and mothers were both living.

Hayes Vanderbilt Friday was the son of Bill Friday, a butcher. He was 9 years old when he arrived at the school. His date of death was listed as April 15, 1882.

Almost three months later, Horace Washington died on June 12, 1882. He was 11 years old when he arrived at the school. The words Washington (Chief of Police) are written in the space for home address on his information card.

Lastly, Dickens Nor, 14, was the son of Sharp Nose, who was identified as the 2nd Chief on the information card. This boy died on Jan. 22, 1883.

There is an effort underway to repatriate the remains of students who died while attending the Carlisle Indian School. The school was founded by Army officer Richard Henry Pratt to assimilate Native American children into the white mans culture.

The school operated between 1879 and 1918 and saw more than 10,000 children, who upon arrival were required to have their braids cut off and dress in military-style uniforms. Students were punished for speaking their native language and had to go by a European name.
Morgan Stanley is moving its European operations to Frankfurt from London to prepare for Brexit

Morgan Stanley has picked Frankfurt as a new temporary hub to operate in the European Union when Brexit takes effect, a person familiar with the situation said Wednesday.

The New York investment bank will double staff in the German city from 200 to 400 in order to be ready to continue to operate in Europe by the March 2019 deadline for Brexit to take effect, the person said.

"It's a short-term solution," the person said, adding that Morgan Stanley executives continued to consider other cities for its long-term headquarters.

Morgan Stanley currently employs about 5,000 people in London, but will relocate some traders as well as marketing and administrative staff to Frankfurt.

The bank also plans to shift a smaller number of banking and trader jobs to Paris, Dublin, Madrid and Milan, the person said.

Morgan Stanley plans to later take a decision on the permanent headquarters for the EU operations. French President Emmanuel Macron, among other European leaders, has been actively trying to lure bankers to Paris for the post-Brexit era.

Frankfurt has already been picked as the EU headquarters by Standard Chartered and Nomura.

JPMorgan Chase has transferred hundreds of jobs to Dublin, but has not announced plans for a permanent headquarters for the EU.
Ebtisam al-Saegh was detained after retweeting a series of posts on July 3 critical of Bahrain's king and National Security Agency's treatment of women

Bahrain has slapped terrorism charges on an activist who tweeted criticism of the government's treatment of women, Amnesty International said Wednesday.

Ebtisam al-Saegh was accused of "using human rights work as a cover" to communicate with the Geneva-based Al Karama foundation, and of undermining Bahrain's "status abroad", Amnesty reported.

She was detained after retweeting a series of posts on July 3 critical of the king and National Security Agency.

Representatives of Bahrain's justice ministry were not immediately reachable for comment.

A statement carried on the state-run BNA news agency said four people were facing "terrorism charges", without naming them.

A group of UN special rapporteurs on Tuesday warned Saegh may be subjected to "acts of torture" in detention.

The activist had previously been arrested and released in May and has accused Bahraini security services of torture and assault during her detention.

"Saegh is a prisoner of conscience who must be immediately and unconditionally released," said Amnesty's Samah Hadid.

"By charging her with terrorism for her work on human rights, the Bahraini government is itself attempting to intimidate and silence civil society in Bahrain."

Sunni-ruled Bahrain has been gripped by unrest since 2011, when a wave of protests erupted in the Shiite-majority kingdom to demand an elected government.

Authorities have since cracked down on all dissent, jailing hundreds of protestors and stripping clerics and high-profile activists of citizenship.

The government has accused neighbouring Tehran of provoking unrest in the tiny kingdom, which lies across the Gulf from Shiite Iran.

Bahrain, an ally of the United States and home to its Fifth Fleet, has come under frequent criticism from international human rights groups for its crackdown on protestors.
Critics say the massive biometric database, now compulsory for basic procedures such as opening a bank account, violates people's right to privacy

India's Supreme Court began hearing submissions Wednesday to determine whether Indians have a constitutional right to privacy in a challenge to the government's massive biometric database, which critics argue violates that right.

A group of plaintiffs brought the case to protest against the government's Aadhaar programme, which has recorded the fingerprints and iris scans of more than one billion Indians.

They argue that although the right to privacy is not explicitly set out in India's constitution, it nevertheless guarantees it implicitly.

"Our constitution gives us liberty to live life," Gopal Subramanium, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, argued before the court.

"Liberty existed even before the constitution was drafted and it includes privacy," he added.

"There cannot be a question of diminution but expansion of a right. Right to liberty includes freedom from encroachment on his or her privacy."

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has rejected suggestions that the programme, set up in 2009, poses a threat to civil liberties.

The Aadhaar database was originally presented as a purely voluntary programme that offered to provide every Indian with an identity card.

In recent years however, it has become compulsory for a growing number of services, such as the opening of bank accounts, the payment of taxes and any payment of public money.

Its critics say that its use for what are effectively essential services means that Indians' right to privacy is being increasingly violated.

"If you have the same number in every single database, travel, phone, banking, then anyone sitting in the Home Ministry or intelligence bureaux will be able to pull out information on me," argued Reetika Khera, an economics professor at Delhi's Indian Institute of Technology.

"It will be a landmark case and it will be law for many many years to come. I think it is significative because privacy (is) at the root of every good democracy," she added.

The government will present its arguments on Thursday and the court's ruling could be handed down in the coming months.
US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis faces tensions with NATO ally Turkey over Washington's support for Kurdish fighters in Syria

The United States reacted angrily Wednesday after Turkey's state news agency disclosed the locations of American military posts in northern Syria, a move the Pentagon warned could put lives at risk.

The Anadolu Agency (AA) published a report Monday detailing the 10 US military facilities' whereabouts and, in some instances, the number of special operations forces working there.

Pentagon spokesman Major Adrian Rankine-Galloway said the release of sensitive military information exposes coalition forces to "unnecessary risk."

"While we cannot independently verify the sources that contributed to this story, we would be very concerned if officials from a NATO ally would purposefully endanger our forces by releasing sensitive information," Rankine-Galloway said.

"We have conveyed these concerns to the government of Turkey," he added, noting that the Pentagon would not comment on whether the locations listed by AA were accurate.

AA said the bases -- two airfields and eight military outposts -- are being used to support the Kurdish Democratic Party (PYD) and its armed wing, the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which Ankara views as an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

Turkey views the PKK as a terrorist organization and the group has waged an insurgency since 1984 that has killed more than 40,000 people in Turkey.

Despite being NATO allies, the United States and Turkey have a fraught relationship over the current US-led coalition effort to defeat the Islamic State group in northern Syria.

America is relying heavily on YPG and other Kurdish elements to conduct the fighting on the ground. And it has shipped weapons to the Kurds in a move that infuriated Turkey, which worries the guns will end up in the hands of the PKK.

AA said one post in the town of Ayn Issah in northern Raqa governorate housed around 200 US soldiers and 75 French special forces troops.

Rankine-Galloway urged all factions to remain focused on the fight against IS.
Mustafa Sanalla, Chairman of the National Oil Corporation of Libya, pictured in April 2017, said the company is aiming for 1.25 million barrels per day by the end of 2017

The head of Libya's National Oil Company announced on Wednesday that oil production is expected to reach 1.25 million barrels per day by the end of 21017.

NOC president Mustafa Sanalla said, however, that "despite a surge of more than one million bpd" oil production would fluctuate "in the absence of a budgetary law".

Sanalla, who was in the eastern city of Benghazi for talks with oil company chiefs on reuniting the sector, which like other institutions has been hard hit by divisions in Libya.

With estimated oil reserves of 48 billion barrels, Libya used to produce 1.6 million bpd before the armed uprising that toppled and killed dictator Moamer Kadhafi in 2011.

By the end of 2014, the conflict forced the majority of oil fields and terminals to close as warring parties battled for control of Africa's largest crude reserves.

No oil was exported from Libya's main ports until September 2016 with the reopening of the Ras Lanuf terminal in the country's so-called oil crescent.

The recovery of oil production and exports is needed to restore Libya's moribund economy.

"We are aiming for 1.25 million barrels per day by the end of 2017 and 1.5 million by the end of 2018," said Sanalla, the NOC president said, hoping that Libya's oil production could topo two million bpd in four years.

Sanalla is to head a Libyan delegation at a meeting of OPEC and non-cartel members in the Russian city of Saint Petersburg on Saturday.

He said that he wants his country to stand united, speak with one voice and "show that we are working together for the national interest".
Donald Trump meets with Republicans as Democrats in Congress express their frustration with a motion of no confidence in the US president

Two dozen congressional Democrats Wednesday launched a no-confidence motion against Donald Trump, an effort that will have no practical effect but highlights the rancor aroused by the US president.

"This is an attempt at a political intervention," Representative Steve Cohen told reporters as he unveiled the resolution questioning Trump's fitness to serve as commander in chief.

Congress cannot remove a president except by impeachment, so a no-confidence motion would be non-binding.

But Democrats are hoping to send a message of frustration with a leader who has refused to release his taxes, launched verbal attacks on women and the press, pulled the United States out of a pivotal climate pact and cast doubt on the usefulness of traditional alliances.

If Cohen were to use procedural tactics to bring the resolution to the House floor, even for a simple request for a vote, it could serve as a strong if symbolic rebuke.

Cohen said the resolution details "misdeeds and actions that give people lack of confidence in him and the direction he is taking our country."

They include accusations that Trump accepted payments from foreign powers including from officials staying at his hotels, and fired the FBI director because of the ongoing investigation into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia.

The resolution urged the president to release his tax returns; "unequivocally acknowledge" that Russia interfered in the 2016 election; and refrain from using Twitter inappropriately.

Cohen said he discussed his motion with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and that she did not object.

"We have a president who actively undermines the very principles of our government, and a Republican Congress that makes excuses for him as though his behavior were normal," said congresswoman and co-sponsor Judy Chu.

"It is not normal. Trump's behavior is cruel, unethical and it is driving people's faith in government to dangerously low levels."

US resolutions of congressional censure are rare.

In 2007, the Senate considered a no-confidence motion against Bush-era attorney general Alberto Gonzalez, but it failed to advance.

Earlier this month a Democratic congressman formally filed the first article of impeachment against Trump, but the effort has been ignored by Republican leadership.
Israeli actress Gal Gadot poses for photos at the premiere "Wonder Woman" on May 25, 2017 in Hollywood, California

A Tunisian court has banned the US film "Wonder Woman" which stars an Israeli actress, more than a month after it had been scheduled to open at cinemas in the Arab state, a legal source said Wednesday.

Lebanon has also banned Wonder Woman, on the grounds of a long-standing boycott of Israel.

The film was to have been screened at two venues in Tunis in early June but the showings were "suspended" following a complaint from the nationalist Al-Chaab party.

The court finally decided to impose the ban last Friday, prosecution spokesman Sofiene Sliti said, although the verdict was only disclosed to the media this week without a reason given for the judgement.

Al-Chaab demanded the film be banned because its leading actress, Gal Gadot, had defended Israel's 2014 war on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza on Facebook.

The case sparked controversy in Tunisia, with supporters of the ban calling for "no normalisation" of ties with the Jewish state and others criticising censorship.
A study commissioned by the Motor Equipment Manufacturers Association found that manufacturers and suppliers would not respond to a border tax or tariffs by bringing jobs back to the US

Imposing new tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico could raise the price of new cars in the US by an average of $1,100 and eliminate as many as 50,000 US jobs, according to a new study Wednesday.

The Motor Equipment Manufacturers Association (MEMA) said the study shows the dangers of changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement, including steps such as a border adjustment tax or new duties.

And MEMA president Steve Handschuh warned that such steps would not return jobs to the United States.

"Tax and trade policies that force companies to re-shore jobs will not work," Handschuh said during a press briefing. "The economics of re-shoring a significant number of jobs is currently not possible."

Xavier Mosquet, a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group and lead author of the study conducted for MEMA, said the motor vehicle sector depends on an integrated supply chain with plants in Canada, Mexico and the United States.

"Vitality in the motor vehicle sector hinges on a globally integrated supply chain," Mosquet said.

"Introducing new tariffs, a border tax and a retreat from NAFTA would greatly impede the industry's relatively smooth and cost-effective flow of goods across borders in North America and around the world," he warned.

The study found that US tariffs of 20 to 35 percent would add $16 billion to $27 billion to automotive costs in the US market.

Manufacturers most reliant on imports would see its per-vehicle costs rise by an average of $1,100.

The study also found that manufacturers and suppliers would not respond to a border tax or tariffs by bringing jobs back to the US.

Mosquet estimated it takes nine years to recover the cost of building a new plant, and manufacturers and suppliers indicated they would continue to operate existing factories rather than building new US facilities.

As manufacturing costs go up under the weight of a border tax or NAFTA tariff, companies likely would respond by reducing the content on the vehicles they sell, which would impact suppliers who provide the sophisticated safety equipment found on modern vehicles, Mosquet said.

If US cars sales remained stable at around 16.8 million units annually, the reduction in the use of sophisticated technology and higher prices could lead to the elimination of 25,000 to 50,000 jobs at US factories, the study showed.
One complicating factor has been Russia's contention that the July 4 launch was not an intercontinental ballistic missile, despite North Korea's claim that it had achieved that milestone in its military program

Despite a push to quickly slap new UN sanctions on North Korea, the United States is bogged down in "slow-going" negotiations with China on a response to Pyongyang's first ICBM launch, diplomats said Wednesday.

US Ambassador Nikki Haley told the Security Council two weeks ago that she would present "in the coming days" a draft sanctions resolution to confront what she described as a "clear and sharp military escalation."

The United States promptly opened negotiations with China, North Korea's main ally and fellow permanent council member, to agree on possible new measures such as cutting off oil supplies, banning North Korean guest workers or imposing new air and maritime restrictions.

Those talks are "still going on," a Security Council diplomat said. "There has not been any breakthrough despite a push by the United States in particular to do it more quickly than usual."

"It's fairly slow-going," said the diplomat, who asked not to be named. Four other UN diplomats confirmed that the negotiations were moving at a slow pace.

Asked whether there was progress in negotiations, China's Ambassador Liu Jieyi told AFP "not yet" and said he did not expect agreement on a draft resolution any time soon. "It's a complicated issue," he added.

One complicating factor has been Russia's contention that the July 4 launch was not an intercontinental ballistic missile, despite North Korea's claim that it had achieved that milestone in its military program.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un described the launch as a "gift" to Americans as they prepared to celebrate Independence Day and hailed a breakthrough in Pyongyang's decades-long drive to develop the capability to threaten the US mainland with a nuclear strike.

Russia maintains that its defense ministry had determined, based on its tracking systems, that the missile was in fact of medium range.

Russia's arguments challenge the US view that the stronger sanctions are necessary to confront the more dangerous threat posed by North Korea's newly-acquired ICBM capacity.

- US shows evidence of ICBM launch -

On Monday, Haley invited all council ambassadors along with South Korea to a meeting at which US evidence was shared about the launch, refuting Russia's claims that it was an ICBM, diplomats said.

The missile launched by North Korea "was almost certainly an ICBM, capable of achieving a range in excess of 5,500 kilometers. We have high confidence in this assessment," said a spokesperson for the British mission.

Ukrainian Ambassador Volodymyr Yelchenko, who attended the briefing, said Russia's envoy was not convinced by the US evidence and that the Chinese ambassador "did not say a word."

While Russia contends that the launch was not an ICBM, China is "slipping behind that as a way of not definitively saying that now is the right time for a resolution," said a Security Council diplomat.

A spokesman at the US mission declined to give details of the evidence presented at the meeting. "The United States continues to work toward a resolution that will address the escalation" from the ICBM launch, he said.

At an emergency council meeting following the launch, Russia argued that sanctions were not the answer to rein in North Korea, and that talks, as advocated by Beijing, were needed.

It remains unclear if the United States will become impatient and put forward a sanctions resolution that could be vetoed by either China or Russia.

Such a move would clear the way for US unilateral sanctions against Chinese and Russian firms that continue to trade with North Korea.

In all, six sets of UN sanctions have been imposed on North Korea since it first tested an atomic device in 2006, but two resolutions adopted last year significantly toughened the sanctions regime.
The US' UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, pictured on July 5, 2017, urged Lebanon to take action against Hezbollah, a paramilitary organization that Haley accused of amassing weapons

US Ambassador Nikki Haley on Wednesday accused Lebanon's Hezbollah of amassing weapons and said the world must turn its attention to the actions of the powerful paramilitary organization.

Haley met with UN envoy for Lebanon Sigrid Kaag ahead of a Security Council meeting Thursday focussing on the UN peacekeeping force deployed in southern Lebanon.

"Ambassador Haley expressed alarm over the build-up of weapons by Hezbollah, a situation that demands the international community's attention to prevent the further escalation of regional tensions," said a statement by the US mission.

She stressed that the international community must "apply more pressure on Hezbollah to disarm and cease its destabilizing behavior, especially toward Israel."

Haley has been a strong supporter of Israel, which fought a month-long war against Hezbollah in 2006. The fighting killed more than 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

There has been speculation about the possibility of a new war between Israel and Hezbollah, a powerful Lebanese paramilitary organization, more than a decade after their last direct confrontation.

There have been periodic skirmishes along the UN-monitored demarcation line between Israel and Lebanon, longtime adversaries which are technically still at war with each other.

Haley said the UNIFIL mission must be "fully engaged in addressing the threat posed by Hezbollah."
YWCA Carlisle will host Womens Health: A Community Conversation at 6 p.m. Wednesday.

Dr. Chavone Momon-Nelson, with Carlisle Obstetrics and Gynecology, will facilitate the discussion at the YWCA building at 301 G St. in Carlisle.

Residents are invited to attend the free event and share their thoughts, feelings, concerns and opinions about the status of womens health care in the state. Preventive care, maternity coverage and contraceptive care are the primary themes of the evening, co-hosted by YWCA Carlisle, Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Advocates, AAUW Chapter of Carlisle and Cumberland Valley Rising.

The Community Conversations are an initiative of the Pennsylvania Campaign for Womens Health. Founded in 2013, the Pennsylvania Campaign for Health is a collaboration of more than 55 local, state and national organizations calling for evidence-based policies to support and protect equal access to affordable reproductive health care including abortion, personal safety and workplace equality.

To learn more about the Pennsylvania Campaign for Womens Health, go to its Facebook page or www.pa4womenshealth.org.
The Trump administration has been besieged by allegations that the president's closest advisors colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election

The White House and Kremlin on Wednesday played down the significance of an additional, previously undisclosed meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin during this month's G20 summit.

The two powers united in their condemnation of reports questioning why the meeting was not disclosed.

"Once again, the Russia fever has caught up with the media and everybody ran out and tried to create a story that simply didn't exist," said White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.

That message was echoed by her Kremlin counterpart Dmitry Peskov.

"The use of the terms 'secret' or 'confidential' for this meeting provokes absolute surprise and incomprehension."

The meeting had been "officially accepted" by diplomatic channels, he added in comments reported by the Russia's TASS news agency.

"There was no secret and confidential meeting," he said. "To say so is absolutely absurd."

After a brief greeting at the start of the two-day summit and a two-hour bilateral meeting with their foreign ministers on July 7, Trump and Putin also chatted over dinner on the final night of the summit, a US official said Tuesday.

The White House confirmed the political sensitive sit-down only after it was leaked.

That raised questions about what the pair talked about, who was present and why the meeting was not previously mentioned.

The Trump administration has been besieged by allegations that the president's closest advisors colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.

Trump's eldest son Donald Jr recently released emails showing he held a meeting during the campaign with Kremlin-connected figures, hoping to get dirt on his father's rival for the White House, Hillary Clinton.

Trump took to Twitter to blast the suggestion that there was anything improper about his dinner chat with Putin.

"Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is 'sick.' All G20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!" he declared.

"The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!"

At the dinner in Hamburg, Trump was seated between the wife of the prime Minister of Japan the wife of the president of Argentina.

US First Lady Melania Trump was seated next to President Putin."

According to a US official "during the course of the dinner, all the leaders circulated throughout the room and spoke with one another freely."

"President Trump spoke with many leaders during the course of the evening. As the dinner was concluding, President Trump went over to Mrs. Trump, where he spoke briefly with President Putin."

Sanders denied reports that the sit-down lasted an hour, describing it as "brief."

"We weren't following him around with a stopwatch," but "certainly not an hour," she said.

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Donald Trump Jr is seen in December 2016 as he walks around Trump Tower in New York

President Donald Trump's eldest son and a former campaign manager will testify before Congress next week as part of US investigations into the Trump team's alleged contacts with Russia, a Senate panel announced Wednesday.

Donald Trump Jr and Paul Manafort are scheduled to testify in an open hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday at 10 am (1400 GMT).

Both men attended a controversial meeting with a Russian lawyer last year in which they were expecting to receive dirt from Moscow on Donald Trump's 2016 election rival Hillary Clinton.

Adding to the political drama in Washington next week, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner will testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday, albeit in a closed-door session, CNN reported, citing Kushner's lawyer.

Kushner, who is married to Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump, also attended the June 2016 meeting with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Trump Jr sent shockwaves through Washington when he confirmed the meeting by releasing a series of emails in which the now-president's son was told the campaign could get "very high level and sensitive information" that was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump."

It put Trump's son and son-in-law at the center of a burgeoning scandal involving multiple US investigations into whether Trump associates colluded with Moscow in its efforts to tilt the 2016 election in the Republican's favor.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and top Democrat Dianne Feinstein warned in letters to those testifying next week that they need to "preserve all relevant documents in your possession... related to Russian interference in the 2016 election, including documents related to your or the Trump campaign's contacts with Russian government officials, associates or representatives."

The senators said they would issue subpoenas if the witnesses did not produce the required documents.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - California lawmakers voted Monday to extend a climate change initiative that Gov. Jerry Brown holds up as a model for states and nations looking to lower carbon emissions.

Brown's signature will add another decade of life to the state's cap-and-trade program, bolstering the Democratic governor's quest to portray California as a leader in the fight against climate change at a time when President Donald Trump is pulling back.

"Tonight, California stood tall and once again, boldly confronted the existential threat of our time," Brown said in a statement after the vote. "Republicans and Democrats set aside their differences, came together and took courageous action. That's what good government looks like."

Catherine Garoupa joins others critical of Gov. Jerry Brown's cap-and-trade program, calling for defeat of the bill at a news conference, Monday, July 17, 2017, in Sacramento, Calif. California lawmakers are expected to vote Monday on AB398, Monday, which critics say is too friendly to the oil industry. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Brown portrays the initiative, which would have ended in 2020, as essential for the survival of civilization. Extending it has been one of his highest priorities as he nears the end of his fourth term, but critics say it fails to aggressively combat pollution.

The legislation was fiercely opposed by some environmentalists who say it's too timid for progressive California, especially those who work to clean up the notoriously smoggy air in parts of Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and the agricultural Central Valley. Conservatives also fought the measure, saying it will raise costs in an already expensive state.

But Brown and Democratic leaders were able to cobble together the two-thirds support needed in both chambers to extend the law through 2030.

Cap and trade puts a limit on carbon emissions and requires polluters to obtain permits to release greenhouse gases. Some permits, known as allowances, are given away while others are auctioned, generating billions of dollars in revenue for the state.

The extension was part of a three-bill package, which passed. One measure aims to improve local air quality, and helped bring some Democrats on board with the cap-and-trade deal. Republicans, however, favored a third bill that may give them more of a say in how to spend the money collected through cap and trade.

Brown sounded an apocalyptic tone in a rare personal appeal before a Senate committee last week, telling lawmakers that failing to pass the extension would lead to fires, disease and mass migration, not to mention higher costs for food and gasoline.

Republicans likened the bill to a tax that will hit Californians at the gas pump and the grocery store. The nonpartisan legislative analyst said last year that the existing cap and trade program accounted for an 11-cent-per-gallon increase in gasoline prices. The office has not analyzed the extension proposal.

"We could shut down the entire state of California and it would have absolutely no effect on the global climate," said Sen. Andy Vidak, a Republican from Hanford in the agricultural Central Valley. "But what is measureable is the effect this tax will have on the poorest of the poor in my district and across California."

The bill was supported by national environmental groups and business interests, which echo Brown's refrain that cap and trade is the most affordable way for California to meet its ambitious climate goals.

State law requires California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2030 - among the most aggressive mandates for carbon reduction in the world. Without cap and trade, state regulators will be forced to enact restrictive mandates on polluters that would be burdensome for businesses and significantly more expensive for consumers, Brown said.

The fight over the legislation showed the divisions between environmentalists who work nationally, focusing on reducing global carbon emissions and creating a policy that can be replicated elsewhere, and environmental justice advocates who work locally.

The latter group said cap and trade allows polluters to keep fouling the air around major sources of pollution like oil refineries and objected to concessions Brown made to the oil industry and other polluters in a bid to win support from Republicans and moderate Democrats.

Brown's urgency to extend a program that doesn't expire for another 2 years drew questions from some lawmakers. The governor says the move would give businesses the certainty they need to plan.

A quick extension also would bolster Brown's global advocacy for climate action. He made a high-profile trip to China last month, plans to attend a climate summit in Germany in November and will host a climate conference next year in San Francisco.

FILE - In this July 13, 2017 file photo, Calif., Gov. Jerry Brown, left, testifies in support of a pair of climate change bills as Senate President Pro Yem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, looks on during a hearing of the Senate Environmental Quality Committee, in Sacramento, Calif. California lawmakers are nearing a high-stakes decision that will decide the fate of a climate initiative that Brown holds up as a model to be replicated around the world to confront rising global temperatures. A vote is set for Monday on whether to give another decade of life to California's cap-and-trade program. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli,file)

Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, left, talks with Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-Azusa, Monday, July 17, 2017, in Sacramento, Calif. California lawmakers are expected to vote Monday on a pair of climate change bills supported by Gov. Jerry Brown. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

State Sen. Minority Leader Pat Bates, R-Laguna Niguel, left, talks with Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara, during the Senate session, Monday, July 17, 2017, in Sacramento, Calif. California lawmakers are expected to vote Monday on a pair of climate change bills supported by Gov. Jerry Brown. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Democratic state Senators Jerry Hill, of San Mateo, left, and Bill Monning, of Carmel, walk into the Senate Chambers, Monday, July 17, 2017, in Sacramento, Calif. California lawmakers are expected to vote Monday on a pair of climate change bills supported by Gov. Jerry Brown. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
SEATTLE (AP) - Eight of the world's biggest aid groups are joining together in a new campaign to get more attention in the U.S. for what the United Nations calls the world's largest humanitarian crisis in more than 70 years.

More than 20 million people are at risk of famine in nine African nations and Yemen, according to the United Nations. But Richard Stearns, president of Federal Way, Washington-based World Vision, says the situation has been overshadowed amid the controversies surrounding President Donald Trump's administration.

"We have seen that America is very distracted, and I think you have another phenomena - that some Americans are just so fed up with the news," Stearns told The Seattle Times .

FILE - In this April 13, 2017, file photo, Yemenis present documents in order to receive food rations provided by a local charity, in Sanaa, Yemen. Eight of the largest U.S.-based aid groups are joining together in a new campaign to address what the United Nations calls the world's largest humanitarian crisis in more than 70 years. More than 20 million people are at risk of famine in nine African nations and Yemen, but Richard Stearns, president of Federal Way, Washington-based World Vision, says it has been overshadowed amid the controversies surrounding President Donald Trump's administration. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed, File)

Instead of competing for donations, the organizations - U.S.-based groups or the U.S. arms of international charities - are banding together in a fundraising appeal launching this week. The Global Emergency Response Coalition 's effort is backed by $1 million in matching donations each from the PepsiCo Foundation and the investment firm BlackRock, with additional corporate sponsors that include Twitter and Google.

Actor George Clooney narrated a video pitch for the campaign.

Conflicts have disrupted farming and driven millions of people from their homes in some of the affected countries, while drought is a factor elsewhere. The hardest hit countries are Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria and South Sudan.

Cattle carcasses littered the land and children were dying of hunger when Stearns visited nomadic herders in northern Kenya last month. A World Vision nutrition center had only two nurses trying to offer supplemental feeding to hundreds of malnourished children.

"I don't often feel helpless as a World Visions president, but I am feeling kind of helpless right now," Stearns said in a video report, choking back tears.

Early this month, the United States, the world's largest donor of humanitarian assistance, announced it would send $630 million in aid to the four hardest-hit countries. That brought the total U.S. assistance to the four countries to more than $1.8 billion this fiscal year, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

But hunger-relief advocates noted that the newly announced aid had been approved by Congress months ago before being held up by the Trump administration. Trump's proposed deep cuts to foreign aid - more than 30 percent - have caused widespread concern.

Deepmala Mahla, the South Sudan country director for Oregon-based Mercy Corps, said she plans to call for increasing the aid when she testifies before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday.

"My message will be, "People are dying, this is not the time to talk about aid cuts,'" Mahla said.

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Information from: The Seattle Times, http://www.seattletimes.com

FILE - In this March 11, 2017, file photo, acutely malnourished child Sacdiyo Mohamed, 9 months old, is treated at the Banadir Hospital after her mother Halima Hassan Mohamed fled the drought in southern Somalia and traveled by car to the capital Mogadishu, in Somalia. Eight of the largest U.S.-based aid groups are joining together in a new campaign to address what the United Nations calls the world's largest humanitarian crisis in more than 70 years. More than 20 million people are at risk of famine in nine African nations and Yemen. (AP Photo/Mohamed Sheikh Nor, File)

FILE - In this April 19, 2017, file photo, a South Sudanese woman carries food donated by Saudi Arabia Government through the Islamic Council of South Sudan, in Juba, South Sudan. Eight of the largest U.S.-based aid groups are joining together in a new campaign to address what the United Nations calls the world's largest humanitarian crisis in more than 70 years. More than 20 million people are at risk of famine in nine African nations and Yemen, but Richard Stearns, president of Federal Way, Washington-based World Vision, says it has been overshadowed amid the controversies surrounding President Donald Trump's administration. (AP Photo/Samir Bol, File)

FILE - In this file photo taken April 5, 2017, Abuk Garang holds her 7-month-old son William Deng as she and others walk to a food distribution site in Malualkuel in the Northern Bahr el Ghazal region of South Sudan. Eight of the largest U.S.-based aid groups are joining together in a new campaign to address what the United Nations calls the world's largest humanitarian crisis in more than 70 years. More than 20 million people are at risk of famine in nine African nations and Yemen, but Richard Stearns, president of Federal Way, Washington-based World Vision, says it has been overshadowed amid the controversies surrounding President Donald Trump's administration. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 12, 2016, file photo, actors George Clooney, left, and Don Cheadle listen during a news conference to discuss an investigation about corruption in South Sudan at the National Press Club in Washington. Eight of the largest U.S.-based aid groups are joining together in a new campaign to address what the United Nations calls the world's largest humanitarian crisis in more than 70 years. The Global Emergency Response Coalition counts Twitter and Google among its sponsors. Clooney narrated a video pitch for the campaign. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 12, 2016, file photo, actors George Clooney, right, and Don Cheadle, left, arrive for a news conference to discuss an investigation about corruption in South Sudan at the National Press Club in Washington. Eight of the largest U.S.-based aid groups are joining together in a new campaign to address what the United Nations calls the world's largest humanitarian crisis in more than 70 years. The Global Emergency Response Coalition counts Twitter and Google among its sponsors. Clooney narrated a video pitch for the campaign. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

FILE - This May 14, 2017 file photo, shows the United Nations' protected camp in Wau, South Sudan, which since clashes in April is now the most congested internally displaced camp in the country, with almost 40,000 inhabitants. Eight of the largest U.S.-based aid groups are joining together in a new campaign to address what the United Nations calls the world's largest humanitarian crisis in more than 70 years. Eight of the largest U.S.-based aid groups are joining together in a new campaign to address what the United Nations calls the world's largest humanitarian crisis in more than 70 years. More than 20 million people are at risk of famine in nine African nations and Yemen. (AP Photo, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. last year had drawn attention from U.S. government officials even before that now-famous encounter for her work fighting U.S. sanctions that had angered the Kremlin.

At one point, officials tried to seize emails from the attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and deny her entry into the U.S., according to government and legal documents.

The scrutiny focused on Veselnitskaya's ties to Prevezon Holdings Ltd. and its owner, who is the son of a former Russian government official and a fierce advocate for rolling back some of the U.S. sanctions.

In this July 11, 2017, photo, Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks to journalists in Moscow, Russia. The Russian lawyer at the center of the June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr. is known for her work trying to roll back U.S. sanctions on Russia. But Veselnitskaya was on the radar of American officials long before revelations about the meeting emerged. Government and legal documents show officials have tried to seize her emails and at times denied her entry into the U.S.(AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

Her work underscores the blurry lines in Russia between the government and businesses, deepening the questions about her and the June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump associates.

At the time of the meeting in Trump Tower, Veselnitskaya was helping defend Prevezon against charges it had engaged in money laundering from a $230 million Russian tax fraud scheme.

The fraud was exposed by Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer whose death in jail in 2009 prompted U.S. lawmakers to enact a law named for him that imposed travel and financial sanctions against Russians believed to be involved in his death. The sanctions angered President Vladimir Putin because they targeted not only rank-and-file investigators and judges but eventually affected close allies like Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Russian Investigative Committee.

Veselnitskaya also was working with a group of lobbyists trying to weaken the Magnitsky Act. The $300,000 campaign partly financed by Denis Katsyv, Prevezon's owner and a client of Veselnitskaya's.

Trump Jr. has said Veselnitskaya spent much of their meeting discussing the Magnitsky Act and one of its repercussions - Russia blocking U.S. adoptions - despite the fact the session was billed as an opportunity to discuss potentially incriminating information about Democrat Hillary Clinton. According to emails released by Trump Jr., he was told by an associate that the promised information was part of the Russian government's efforts to help his father win the White House.

Veselnitskaya's work history could become fodder for federal and congressional investigators probing whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to meddle in the election. Veselnitskaya has denied having ties to the Kremlin, and President Donald Trump has denied any coordination with Moscow.

Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet military official, described Veselnitskaya to The Associated Press as a "very emotional person and a great patriot of Russia." He said he saw no evidence of any direct ties between her and the Russian government.

"She's a hard-working person, very loyal to her clients," said Akhmetshin, who confirmed to AP on Friday that he also attended the Trump Tower meeting.

Despite Russian denials about her working for the government, Veselnitskaya's efforts against the Magnitsky Act would have been beneficial to the Kremlin, given how the law affected its judges, investigators and associates of Putin.

Akhmetshin said Veselnitskaya coordinated frequently with him and others last year in lobbying against the sanctions law. U.S. proponents of the law said the lobbying campaign was also directed at weakening or defeating a proposed expansion of the original measure that authorized the president to sanction individuals, companies or governments complicit in human rights violations and corruption.

That bill passed in December and was signed by President Barack Obama.

As Veselnitskaya was both defending Prevezon and working for its owner's anti-sanctions campaign, U.S. officials began scrutinizing her actions and communications.

Preet Bharara, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, questioned Veselnitskaya for billing the government $2,000 for a two-day stay at New York's lavish Plaza Hotel during depositions of several Prevezon defendants, including Katsyv.

"Ms. Veselnitskaya appears to have stayed at a less expensive hotel during the depositions, but moved to the Plaza after the depositions concluded, and only after the Court orally stated that the government would be responsible for reimbursing defendants' expenses," Bharara said in a letter to the trial judge. Bharara was ousted by the new administration in March.

Prosecutors also tried to use a grand jury subpoena to learn more about Veselnitskaya's communications with another Russian lawyer for Prevezon. Prosecutors said that lawyer, Andrey Pavlov, filed sham lawsuits against investors in Russian companies and associates with members of a Russian organized crime group described as "a shadowy criminal syndicate - identified only as 'the Organization.'"

The documents do not explain why prosecutors sought Veselnitskaya's communications with Pavlov or detail whether any correspondence was turned over to federal authorities. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, which prosecuted the case, declined comment.

In a declaration she filed in the case in January 2016, Veselnitskaya complained she had "been harassed by the (U.S.) government" despite being given temporary permission to work in New York on the Prevezon case. She said she was detained at London's Heathrow Airport on a return trip from the U.S. and "unjustifiably" subjected to a strip search.

A federal prosecutor explained in a hearing that U.S. immigration officials had repeatedly denied her entry, but did not explain the reasons. The Justice Department finally allowed Veselnitskaya to temporarily perform legal work in the U.S. under "immigration parole," a special visa requiring approval from the U.S. attorney general.

Trump used that visa clearance to defend his son's meeting with Veselnitskaya, saying then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had approved her entry to the U.S. Lynch has said she has no knowledge of Veselnitskaya's travel.

Veselnitskaya has cast her work in the U.S. last year as a success. In May, the Justice Department settled its case, with Prevezon paying $6 million in fines but admitting no guilt.
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - A fire in New York's capital city heavily damaged five 19th century buildings and forced more than a dozen people from their homes, officials said Tuesday.

Albany fire officials said the blaze started around 9 p.m. Monday in a block of clapboard row houses. It quickly tore through the two- and three-story buildings on the edge of the city's Center Square neighborhood. Crews from Watervliet and Troy helped bring the fire under control.

No injuries were reported.

The popular downtown neighborhood, located a few blocks from the state Capitol, is a mix of brownstones, art galleries, shops, restaurants and nightclubs.

"There was lots of screaming, and shouting, pounding on doors. When I went outside to look, you could see flames just shooting out of the roof," said Paula Lemire, who lives across the street. "It just spread very, very quickly."

Dana Longley, who lived in one of the damaged Victorian-era homes, said she was outside when the fire started in the home next door.

"I just smelled something funny and walked out back and fire was pouring out of this place here," she said, pointing to the neighboring duplex. "Then the firefighters were banging on the door."

Mayor Kathy Sheehan said more than a dozen people were displaced and the city was working with the Red Cross to find accommodations for those not staying with friends or family. The buildings, while still standing, are unstable. Sheehan said that has made it difficult for investigators trying to determine the cause of the fire.

It was unclear whether any of the homes will be demolished.

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This story has been corrected to show the number of buildings damaged was five, not more than a dozen, and to reflect the name of the neighborhood is Center Square, not Central Square.
LONDON (AP) - British Prime Minister Theresa May tried to discipline her fractious Cabinet Tuesday after last month's election setback undermined her leadership.

Recent days have seen a string of disparaging media stories about various members of the government, as ministers hoping to replace May jostle for position. They have included alleged leaks of Cabinet discussions, which are supposed to remain private.

"There is a need to show strength and unity as a country, and that starts around the Cabinet table," May said.

FILE In this Friday, June 9, 2017 file photo, Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May listens as the declaration at her constituency is made for in the general election in Maidenhead, England. May is trying to discipline her fractious Cabinet after last month's election setback undermined her leadership. Recent days have seen a string of disparaging media stories about various members of the government, as ministers hoping to replace May jostle for position. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)

May called a snap election in the hope of increasing her majority in Parliament and strengthening her hand in exit talks with the European Union. Instead, voters wiped out the Conservative majority and left May weakened at a time when her party - and the country - is divided on the best way to negotiate Britain's exit from the EU.

May has warned Conservative lawmakers that toppling her could lead to an election that would end in a victory for Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd defended May, saying she had not lost her authority and saying lawmakers would settle down after Parliament's summer break.

"I'm hopeful that after a holiday ... we can all calm down and get on with the job in hand," she told broadcaster ITV.

But former Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine, a prominent pro-EU Conservative, said the situation would worsen because the government remains deeply divided over Brexit.

"It is going to get worse," Heseltine told Sky News. "There is an irreconcilable division within the Cabinet, within the party and within the country."
BEIJING (AP) - Users of WhatsApp in China and security researchers have reported widespread service disruptions amid fears that the popular messaging service may be at least partially blocked by authorities in the world's most populous country.

WhatsApp users in China reported Tuesday on other social media platforms that the app was partly inaccessible unless virtual private network software was used to circumvent China's censorship apparatus, known colloquially as The Great Firewall.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook and offers end-to-end encryption, has a relatively small but loyal following among users seeking a greater degree of privacy from government snooping than afforded by popular domestic app WeChat, which is ubiquitous but closely monitored and filtered.

FILE - In this March 10, 2017, file photo, WhatsApp appears on a smartphone in New York. Users of WhatsApp in China and security researchers reported Tuesday, July 18, 2017, widespread service disruptions amid fears that the popular messaging service may be at least partially blocked by authorities in the world's most populous country. The app was partly inaccessible unless virtual private network software was used to circumvent China's censorship apparatus, known colloquially as The Great Firewall. (AP Photo/Patrick Sison, File)

Questions over WhatsApp's status come at a politically fraught time in China. The government is in the midst of preparing for a sensitive party congress while Chinese censors this week revved up a sprawling effort to scrub all mention of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died Thursday in government custody.

A report this week by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab detailed how Chinese censors were able to intercept, in real time, images commemorating Liu in private one-on-one chats on WeChat, a feat that hinted at the government's image recognition capabilities.

It appeared that pictures were also the focus of the move to censor WhatsApp. Late Tuesday, users in China could send texts over WhatsApp without the use of VPNs, but not images.

Nadim Kobeissi, a cryptography researcher based in Paris who has been investigating the WhatsApp disruption, said he believed The Great Firewall was only blocking access to WhatsApp servers that route media between users, while leaving servers that handle text messages untouched. He said voice messages also appeared to be blocked.

But there was no evidence to suggest that Chinese authorities were decrypting WhatsApp messages, Kobeissi added.

A Chinese censorship researcher known by his pseudonym Charlie Smith said authorities appeared to be blocking non-text WhatsApp messages wholesale precisely because they have not been able to selectively block content on the platform like they have with WeChat, which is produced by Shenzhen-based internet giant Tencent and legally bound to cooperate with Chinese security agencies.

Because WhatsApp content is encrypted, "they have moved to brute censor all non-text content," Smith said in an email. "It would not be surprising to find that everything on WhatsApp gets blocked, forcing users in China to use unencrypted, monitored and censored services like WeChat."

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said he had no information on the issue when asked by reporters on Tuesday.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment. WhatsApp is one of the world's most widely used messaging services, with over 1.2 billion users.

Signal, another encrypted messaging service, appeared to also have patchy service with significant delays.

China has long blocked Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, with officials arguing that foreign social media services operating beyond their control pose a threat to national security. But authorities in China, as with other governments, are paying increasing attention to encrypted messaging apps.

After Beijing waged its largest-ever crackdown on human rights lawyers and activists in 2015, the People's Daily newspaper, the ruling Communist Party's official mouthpiece, singled out Telegram as the platform where lawyers the coordinated their activities. And in closely orchestrated and televised trials, the arrested lawyers read scripted confessions explaining how they used the apps to communicate freely with collaborators overseas.

Telegram has since been blocked, with many Chinese dissidents switching in recent months to WhatsApp.

The progressive tightening of messaging apps forces Chinese users to resort to domestic apps such as WeChat "to simply function and have day-to-day communications," said Kobeissi, the security researcher. "Then they can be monitored en masse."

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Follow Gerry Shih on Twitter at twitter.com/gerryshih
"The Fallen" (Putnam), by Ace Atkins

Ace Atkins' novels about Quinn Colson, a former Army Ranger turned sheriff, takes place in Mississippi's rural Tibbehah County, where the largest town is the small Jericho. But Edgar finalist Atkins uses this as a microcosm of the world in "The Fallen."

Corruption, politics, crime, dirty deals and people trying to lead honest lives all converge here as Atkins succinctly shows in his seventh superb novel about Quinn.

This cover image released by G.P. Putnam's Sons shows "The Fallen," a novel by Ace Atkins. (G.P. Putnam's Sons via AP)

"The Fallen" also looks at the effects of war on veterans returning home, a situation Quinn knows all too well. Atkins delivers stronger tales about Quinn with each outing, and "The Fallen" continues those high standards.

Quinn's responsibilities as sheriff are fraught with crisis. His region of Mississippi is being invaded by a series of bank robberies in which the criminals wear Donald Trump masks. The masks aren't political to the robbers, only a way to get attention. Their methods and efficiency indicate to Quinn that they may be former military. So far, no one has been killed during the robberies, but Quinn believes the violence will soon escalate.

Corruption also is seeping through the county through Vienna's Place, the strip bar on the highway run by the ruthless Fannie Hathcock, who may be responsible for the disappearance of two teenage girls. No one cares about those girls except Quinn's sister Caddy, who runs an outreach program for abused women.

Atkins skillfully pulls together several plotlines into the cohesive, action-packed "The Fallen," a story about a community strengthened by its believability and character studies. Atkins continues to show new aspects of Quinn, Caddy and Deputy Lillie Virgil. Mississippi is home to these characters and they will do whatever is necessary to protect it. Atkins even delves into the multilayers of the villains of "The Fallen," especially Fannie, who despite being rotten to the core, has a soupcon of humanity.

Atkins, who also is continuing the late Robert B. Parker's Spenser series, delivers another engrossing thriller with "The Fallen."
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) - Former Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley is giving himself stellar marks three months after pleading guilty to criminal charges and resigning.

Bentley tells WVTM-TV in an interview that he was "by far" the best governor ever of Alabama.

Bentley says he accomplished more in seven years than the state's five previous governors. That would include Gov. Jim Folsom Jr., who is widely credited with launching the state's automotive industry by helping lure Mercedes-Benz to Alabama.

Bentley is a doctor, and he has returned to practicing dermatology in Tuscaloosa since quitting in April. He was replaced by Kay Ivey, who has dismantled some advisory panels created by her fellow Republican.

Bentley pleaded guilty to misdemeanor campaign finance charges following a sex-tinged scandal with a female adviser.
A former research technologist at Penn State Hershey Medical Center pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to false statements charges in connection with his performance of flawed genetic diagnostic tests for 124 cancer patients, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

Floyd Benko, 62, of Palmyra, entered the guilty plea in federal court.

According to U.S. Attorney Bruce Brandler, Benko performed gene mutation tests for 124 advanced stage cancer patients at Hershey in 2013 and 2014. The tests help physicians diagnose a patients particular type of cancer so that specifically tailored treatments can be administered, according to the office.

Brandler said Benko failed to perform the tests up to Hersheys standard operating procedures, and subsequent re-testing found that 60 patients had different results than the ones obtained by two outside laboratories.

Benko admitted to making a false statement to Hershey administrators on April 11, 2014, about how he performed the tests, and the attorneys office said Benko admitted he lied and concealed the fact that he did not follow standard procedure.

The medical center incurred out-of-pocket expenses totaling $69,906 for outside laboratory re-testing of all of the affected patients, the attorneys office said. Benko agreed to make full restitution to the medical center.
DENVER (AP) - The Latest on a man who pleaded guilty to trying to bomb a Colorado police department (all times local):

11:15 a.m.

A man harboring a decades-old grudge against authorities pleaded guilty Tuesday to planting a backpack bomb outside the police station in a Colorado mountain town.

FILE - This Oct. 13, 2016, file photo shows the exterior of the police station in the town of Nederland, Colo. A man accused of leaving a bomb outside the police station in the small mountain town to avenge the killing of a fellow member of a hippie group in the 1970s is expected to plead guilty. David Michael Ansberry is expected to acknowledge Tuesday, July 18, 201, that he left a powerful bomb containing arsenic outside the Nederland Police Department on Oct. 11. (AP Photo/Sadie Gurman, File)

David Michael Ansberry acknowledged his motive stemmed from the 1971 killing of his friend and fellow hippie by the town marshal.

Ansberry, 65, said he changed his plea because of a preexisting health condition, which he did not specify.

According to court documents, Ansberry attempted to set off a bomb last October in front of the police department in Nederland, about 15 miles southwest of Boulder. Nobody was injured because the device failed to detonate.

Ansberry was arrested a few days later in Chicago on a layover between Denver and Baltimore.

He is to be sentenced Nov. 30 and faces 30 years to life in prison.

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2:30 a.m.

A man accused of leaving a bomb outside a police station in a small Colorado mountain town to avenge the killing of a fellow member of a hippie group in the 1970s is expected to plead guilty.

David Michael Ansberry is expected to acknowledge Tuesday that he left a powerful bomb containing arsenic outside the Nederland Police Department on Oct. 11.

Surveillance video captured him buying cellphones to trigger the explosive. He was easily recognizable because he is 3-foot-6, 100 pounds and uses crutches.

The device did not detonate.

Investigators say he was trying to avenge the 1971 killing of his friend Guy Goughnor at the hands of Renner Forbes, who was a town marshal at the time. Forbes was convicted of the killing in 1998.
CULLMAN, Ala. (AP) - Authorities in Alabama say a lawyer was fatally shot at his home by an assailant who was killed in turn by someone else in the residence.

Cullman County coroner Jeremy Kilpatrick said on Tuesday that 73-year-old Stephen K. Griffith was shot to death at home Monday afternoon.

The coroner identified the dead suspect as 45-year-old Patrick O. Walker.

The Cullman Times reports that Sheriff Matt Gentry would not identify the person who killed the suspect or say how Walker died, citing the ongoing investigation.

Kilpatrick says Griffith was an attorney with the Griffith, Lowry & Meherg law firm.

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Information from: The Cullman Times, http://www.cullmantimes.com
AL-JAFR, Jordan (AP) - Hundreds of people in southern Jordan have protested the conviction of a local soldier in the shooting deaths of three U.S. military trainers.

The U.S. troops were killed in November at the gate to the al-Jafr air base when their convoy came under fire. A Jordanian military court sentenced 1st Sgt. Marik al-Tuwayha to life in prison on Monday.

On Tuesday, protesters blocked roads to the town of al-Jafr with burning tires and staged a sit-in.

Protesters in the southern Jordanian town of al-Jafr stage a sit-in Tuesday, July 18, 2017, following the conviction of a local soldier a day earlier in the shooting deaths of three U.S. military trainers. One banner reads: "We will continue the civil disobedience until justice is brought to the hero. The U.S. troops were killed in November at the gate to the al-Jafr air base when their convoy came under fire. (AP Photo/Reem Saad)

Members of the soldier's tribe claimed, without presenting evidence, that he was a scapegoat, and that there had been a deadly clash between U.S. troops and Syrian rebels they were training.

The defendant testified that he opened fire because he believed he had heard a pistol shot and feared the base was being attacked.
"The Library of Light and Shadow" (Atria), by M.J. Rose

M.J. Rose takes readers on a journey to 1925, where a post-war environment invoked a sense of heightened passion and new opportunities in "The Library of Light and Shadow."

Delphine Duplessi has left Paris and the man she loves due to a vision she cannot shake. She spends time doing parlor tricks for people, but her ability is actually quite powerful and frighteningly real. She can blindfold herself and sketch someone, but what she draws is also that person's deepest hidden secret. Duplessi can see these scandalous visions easily, and she knows that her family history has given her this gift of insight.

This cover image released by Atria shows "The Library of Light and Shadow," a novel by M.J. Rose. (Atria via AP)

One evening Duplessi draws a woman at a party and the finished piece has her subject in a sexual encounter with a man who is not her husband. It's actually her brother-in-law. The chaos that occurs after the finished art is seen results in the death of a man, and she vows to never use her talents of drawing these "shadow portraits" again.

Duplessi soon watches her fiance leave her, and with nothing left in New York City, she reluctantly agrees to go back to Paris with her brother. Soon she will confront a past she had been hoping to avoid, and the man she loved whom she can never see again.

Rose's writing conveys both passion and emotional artistry in this story. She transports the reader into the past better than a time machine could accomplish. A simple brushstroke or color invokes so many emotions that it is as if one is admiring a painting rather than devouring prose.

The history mixed with the multilayers of the narrative will captivate readers.
Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about Wednesday:

1. WHO TRUMP HELD AN UNDICSCLOSED MEETING WITH

President Donald Trump had another, previously undisclosed conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit in Germany this month.

Russian President Vladimir Putin watches an aerobatics team performance at the opening ceremony of the MAKS-2017 (the International Aviation and Space Show) in Zhukovsky, outside Moscow, Russia, Russia, Tuesday, July 18, 2017. (Alexei Nikolsky, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

2. RUSSIAN DEVELOPER'S STAFFER ALSO AT TRUMP TOWER MEETING

Revelations that a Russian developer's representative was the eighth attendee at a Trump Tower campaign meeting arranged by President Trump's eldest son brought word that the special counsel investigating possible Trump campaign ties to Russia wants more information about the sit-down.

3. TRUMP NAMES NEW RUSSIA AMBASSADOR

President Donald Trump announced he intends to nominate former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman to be U.S. ambassador to Russia, a high-profile post amid ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

4. WHAT TRUMP SAYS NOW THAT OBAMACARE REPEAL COLLAPSED

President Trump declares it's time to "let Obamacare fail" after the latest GOP health care plan crashed and burned in the Senate, a stunning failure for the president and Republicans.

5. HOW SENATORS USED TWITTER TO TORPEDO GOP BILL

Sens. Mike Lee and Jerry Moran decided chose President Donald Trump's favorite medium to announce they were sinking the legislation, and gave no heads up to the White House or Senate leaders before pressing send.

6. TRUMP ADMINISTRATION RESTORING ASSET SEIZURES WITH SAFEGUARDS

The U.S. Justice Department will soon restore the ability of police to seize suspects' money and property with federal help, but The Associated Press has learned the policy will come with a series of new provisions aimed at preventing the types of abuse that led the Obama Justice Department to severely curtail the practice.

7. OFFICIALS SAY AUSTRALIAN WOMAN SHOT AFTER COPS HEARD LOUD SOUND

The woman who called 911 to report a possible assault was shot and killed by a Minneapolis police officer after the officers heard a loud sound near their squad car, according to information released by Minnesota investigators.

8. TURKISH COURT JAILS SIX HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS

Amnesty International's Turkey director and five other human rights activists were jailed pending trial for allegedly aiding an armed terror group - making them the latest suspects in a massive government crackdown initially launched against alleged supporters of last year's failed coup but has since broadened to include government opponents.

9. POWERFUL OPIOID SUSPECTED IN MIAMI BOY'S DEATH

A 10-year-old boy from a drug-ridden Miami neighborhood apparently died of a fentanyl overdose last month, becoming one of Florida's littlest victims of the opioid crisis, authorities say. How he came into contact with the powerful painkiller is a mystery.

10. WHAT THE ARCTIC NOW LOOKS LIKE

An AP team reporting team is sailing through the Arctic Circle's Northwest Passage on an icebreaker to document the changes global warming has wrought in one of the world's most fragile enviornments.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., center, joined by, from left, Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, July 18, 2017. President Donald Trump blasted congressional Democrats and "a few Republicans" over the collapse of the GOP effort to rewrite the Obama health care law. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
STAMFORD, Conn. (AP) - A Connecticut teenager who fatally stabbed a man outside a fast-food restaurant during a dispute over spilled coffee has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The Stamford Advocate reports 17-year-old Marquest Hall was sentenced Tuesday by a judge who called the March 2015 killing of 52-year-old Antonio Muralles "brutal, senseless and totally unnecessary."

Hall pleaded guilty in March to first-degree manslaughter. He's eligible for parole in 12 years.

Marquest Hall, right, 17, is sentenced to 20 years in prison for the stabbing death of 52-year-old Antonio Muralles outside of Stamford's downtown McDonalds in March 2015, during a sentencing hearing in Stamford Superior Court in Stamford, Conn., Tuesday, July 18, 2017. Prosecutors say Muralles had just left a Stamford McDonald's with a coffee when he inadvertently bumped into Hall and a friend and spilled some coffee on them. (Michael Cummo/Hearst Connecticut Media via AP)

Prosecutors say Muralles had just left a Stamford McDonald's with a coffee when he inadvertently bumped into Hall and a friend and spilled some coffee on them.

Hall was 15 at the time but was charged as an adult. The proceedings were held in open court.

Hall did not speak at sentencing. But his lawyer says he's remorseful.

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Information from: The Advocate, http://www.stamfordadvocate.com
MANILA, Philippines (AP) - The leader of the Philippines' largest Muslim rebel group says Islamic State-linked militants wanted his group to broker their possible withdrawal from Marawi city during the major military offensive against them but he refused to intervene.

Al Haj Murad Ebrahim of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front told The Associated Press in an interview late Tuesday that intervening would have been difficult because President Rodrigo Duterte has declared his government would not negotiate with terrorists.

The nearly two months of insurrection in Marawi is the worst he has seen in his more than four decades as a rebel in the country's south, Murad said, adding the attackers are now wracked by infighting and have expressed through religious emissaries they are ready to fight to the death.

Chair of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) Al Haj Murad Ebrahim talks to The Associated Press in Makati city east of Manila, Philippines, late Tuesday, July 18, 2017. Murad said the Islamic State-linked militants wanted his group to broker their possible withdrawal from Marawi city during the major military offensive against them but he refused to intervene. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

The violence underscores the urgency for the government and the Moro rebel group to implement a 2014 Muslim autonomy deal to help stop the rising tide of extremism, he said.

More than 550 people, including 413 militants, have been killed in Marawi since May 23, when hundreds of gunmen, waving Islamic State group-style black flags, stormed into the city center, occupied commercial buildings and villages and took hostages. Duterte ordered troops to crush the attackers and declared martial law in the south for 60 days, which he now wants to extend up to the end of the year to deal with the worst crisis he has faced in his yearlong presidency.

Amid the intense fighting that has forced nearly 400,000 people to flee from their homes, Murad said his group met with the president and offered to help rescue hundreds of residents, who have been trapped and starving in their homes in the battle zones. Duterte welcomed the offer, he said, and the government and the rebels worked to establish "peace corridors" through which trapped residents were extricated to safety.

A group of Muslim ulamas, or religious scholars, managed to enter the conflict zone in past weeks and urged some of the militant leaders to end the siege and withdraw from the beleaguered city.

"After a series of dialogue, they came up with a proposal, they said, 'we will leave but the MILF should intervene," Murad said of the militants' demand that was relayed by the ulamas to his rebel group.

"I said it'll be hard for us to intervene because the president is very clear in his statements that he will not negotiate with the terrorists," Murad told AP, adding he asked the religious leaders to convince the gunmen "to just withdraw so this will stop" without any mediation.

The gunmen chose to fight it out, he said. "What they said, if nobody will intervene, then we will die here," Murad said.

After weeks of battle setbacks, the militants have grown desperate, he said. One of the leaders, Abdullah Maute, had a deadly rift with another militant. "What happened was, he was able to kill their member and he was wounded," Murad said, citing information his rebels received.

Maute's brother, Omarkhayyam, had also been wounded in battle and is no longer seen on the ground, he said.

Murad's remarks echo earlier military statements that Omarkhayyam Maute has been wounded early in the fighting and that the militants have been beset by infighting as the siege dragged on.

A militant leader, Isnilon Hapilon, "is no longer being seen but his whereabout has not been confirmed," he said. Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana has said in recent weeks that Hapilon, among the most-wanted terror suspects by the United States, may still be in Marawi, hiding in a mosque.

Murad's rebel group has a vast encampment in Butig town, near Marawi, and hundreds of its fighters have been ordered to stay in a designated zone to prevent them from being entangled in the ongoing clashes. Ceasefire monitors from the government, the rebel group and foreign peacekeepers have been stationed in Butig to prevent any problem, he said.

Murad traveled to Manila to witness government and rebel representatives submitting to Duterte a new draft legislation that aims to establish a more powerful Muslim autonomous region in the south of the predominantly Roman Catholic nation.

The autonomy deal would have been a major legacy of Duterte's predecessor, Benigno Aquino III, but the legislation stalled in Congress in 2015 after some rebels from the 11,000-strong Moro Islamic Liberation Front became entangled in fighting that killed 44 police commandos during an anti-terrorism raid in the south. The massive police deaths sparked public outrage and prompted lawmakers to stall passage of the bill.

Wearing a business suit, the 69-year-old Murad, who says he met late al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden when he was sent as a young insurgent for combat training in Afghanistan decades ago, underscored that, if the autonomy deal was set in place, the more moderate rebels in his group can provide crucial help in dealing with the smaller but radical groups that have emerged in the south.

The deal aims to create a regional police force, which may enlist qualified insurgents, who fought and grew up in the battlefields in the south that may now be transformed into prosperous communities.

"The revolutionaries are very, very, very knowledgeable of the terrain," Murad said.
MOSUL, Iraq (AP) - For one Iraqi lieutenant, the fight against the Islamic State group in Mosul has been a slow, methodical quest for revenge. For three years, he has hunted for two IS militants from his village who he believes killed his father. Along the way, he has shot to death detained militants after interrogating them, he acknowledges unapologetically.

And if he catches either of the men he is searching for, the lieutenant vows he will inflict on him "a slow death" and hang his body from a post in the village after forcing him to reveal where his father's body is buried.

That sort of thirst for vengeance in the wake of military victories is fueling extrajudicial killings of suspected IS members at the hands of Iraqi security forces in and around Mosul. Videos that emerged last week showed troops in Mosul taking captured IS suspects and throwing them one by one off a high wall next to the Tigris River, then shooting their bodies below.

FILE - This file photo made from undated video posted online in July, 2017 shows a man in an Iraqi Army uniform moments before shooting an unarmed man in Mosul, Iraq. Vengeance is fueling a string of extrajudicial killings of Islamic State group militants amid the fall of Mosul. One Iraqi lieutenant says he has been hunting the past three years for the two IS members he believes killed his father, and he describes interrogating one man and then shooting him. A video shows troops throwing IS suspects to their deaths. Rights groups warn that such killings will only fuel recruitment for the next-generation militant group.(AP Photo, File)

Speaking to The Associated Press, four Iraqi officers from three different branches of the military and security forces openly admitted that their troops killed unarmed and captured Islamic State suspects, and they defended the practice. They, like the lieutenant, spoke on condition of anonymity because they acknowledged such practices were against international law, but all those interviewed by AP said they believed the fight against IS should be exempt from such rules of war because militant rule in Iraq was so cruel.

However, the killings risk tipping Iraq back into the cycles of violence that have plagued the country for over a decade, according to Belkis Wille, Iraq researcher with Human Rights Watch. The Islamic State group was able to attract recruits in the past because of people's anger over abuses, including arbitrary detentions, torture and extrajudicial killings, she said.

If abuses continue, "all you're going to see is (that) young Sunni Arab men are going to want to join whatever the next extremist group looks like," she said. Despite the military's vows not to tolerate it, she said no soldier or commander has been held accountable for any killings.

The bloodshed reflects the deeply personal nature of the fight against IS. When the militants overran Mosul and large parts of northern and western Iraq in 2014, they specifically targeted members of the military and security forces and their families for brutal atrocities. Near Tirkrit, IS massacred some 1,700 captured military recruits and buried them in mass graves that have been uncovered since. Hundreds of policemen and soldiers in Mosul are believed to have been killed after the takeover. Militants made no attempt to hide atrocities.

Defense Ministry's spokesman, Brig. Gen. Tahseen Ibrahim, said that authorities "have not registered any incident of revenge killing, whether carried out by security forces or residents. The situation is under full control and we will not allow such incidents to happen because this issue is very sensitive and leads to violent reactions."

But a senior Iraqi officer said his troops regularly killed men who were said to be IS among civilians fleeing the city at screening centers in and around Mosul. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the possibility it could prompt legal repercussions.

"When an entire group of civilians tells us, 'This man is Daesh,' yes, we shoot him," he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.

"When you're facing a man who has killed your friends, your family, yes, sometimes the men get rough," he added. "But for us, this is personal."

The lieutenant said the two men who killed his father were well known in his hometown, a small village south of Mosul. He agreed to share his story with the AP because he wanted to show how personal the fight is for Iraqi troops. Two of his colleagues confirmed his version of events. The AP is not revealing the names of the men he is pursuing because there is no way to confirm independently they belonged to IS.

The lieutenant said his father was an officer in the security forces who fought al-Qaida, the predecessor to IS, in 2007, at the height of Iraq's sectarian violence. After the Islamic State group seized the village in 2014, the tribes that were once kicked out for al-Qaida ties moved back in, and IS installed them in security and administrative positions.

According to the lieutenant, two men grabbed the lieutenant's father outside his home. The two were among those previously expelled for al-Qaida ties, he said.

The lieutenant was away, and his neighbors told him his father had been killed and who did it. He said he was told the men boasted about it in public. IS fighters also killed the lieutenant's uncle and more than a dozen other friends and relatives.

The lieutenant keeps an old picture of the two men on his phone. He said a handful of other troops know about his hunt and have helped him interrogate and kill IS suspects.

As Iraqi forces advanced toward the lieutenant's village last year in the lead-up to Mosul, he began interrogating captured IS suspects.

"Most of them I just asked questions," he said, "but for those who I knew had blood on their hands, I killed them on the spot."

He said he has killed more than 40 militants, whether in combat or in interrogations on the sidelines of the battle. He acknowledged most were not directly responsible for his relatives' deaths.

"I'm not selfish with my revenge, what I'm doing is for all Iraqis," he said.

Early on in the Mosul operation, he said he learned that one of the two men was in Tal Afar, a town west of Mosul that remains in IS hands, or had fled to Syria.

In early July, as Iraqi forces pushed into Mosul's Old City, he received a tip on the location of the second man. He said a colleague, an intelligence officer, called and said he was holding an IS suspect from the lieutenant's home town.

"I told him don't do anything, keep him there. I'm on my way," the lieutenant said.

The detainee was the uncle of the lieutenant's second target. The man was left alone with the lieutenant in a bare concrete room without a table or chair.

"I didn't torture him. I cut the plastic handcuffs from his wrists and gave him water," the lieutenant said. The man was elderly, with a grey beard and hair.

"He begged me not to kill him as I questioned him," he said, smiling. "He could barely walk (he was so scared)."

Eventually, the man told the lieutenant that his second target was alive and in Mosul's Old City.

"After I questioned him I sent him to hell," the lieutenant said flatly. He said he shot the man with his side arm and left his body on the floor.

The first reports of revenge killings appeared within weeks of the launch of the Mosul operation last year and continued throughout. But the government and rights groups do not have an exact number.

In June, Human Rights Watch said at least 26 bodies of blindfolded and handcuffed men had been found dumped in government-held areas in and around Mosul. A month later, HRW said it had further reports of extrajudicial killings. Wille of Human Rights Watch said it was taking place "basically everywhere that is touched by this conflict" and by every armed force involved in the fight.

The military says troops have orders to hand any captured IS over for interrogation ahead of future trial.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on Tuesday acknowledged that rights violations took place during the Iraqi forces' battle in Mosul but described them as "individual acts" by persons who were either "ignorant" of the consequences or who had struck a deal with Daesh with the intent "to defame us and the security forces."

He pledged the government would punish the perpetrators.

The lieutenant dismissed the idea of going to the courts, saying they are corrupt and suspects could bribe their way to freedom.

"I know some people believe that this kind of killing is wrong, but Daesh, they are not human beings," he said. "I am the one who still has my humanity."

When al-Abadi declared "total victory" in Mosul last week, the lieutenant said he believed his target is still in one of the last IS pockets in the Old City.

"I hope I find him alive," he said, "because I want to make sure he dies a slow death, not quick. I want him to tell me where my father's body is buried, and then I want to take his body and hang it from a post in my village."

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Associated Press writer Sinan Salaheddin in Baghdad contributed to this report.
MIAMI (AP) - Authorities believe a 10-year-old Miami boy died of a fentanyl overdose after visiting a local pool last month, becoming one of Florida's littlest victims of the opioid crisis.

But it's unclear how fifth-grader Alton Banks came in contact with the drug. Exposure to just tiny amounts can be devastating.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said during a news conference Tuesday afternoon that investigators don't believe Alton got the dangerous opioid at his home. She says the boy could have simply touched the substance, explaining that it could have been on a towel at the pool.

Police patrol a side street next to an apartment building where a 10-year-old boy that died of a fentanyl overdose last month lived, in Miami, Fla. (AP Photo/Mario Houben)

Investigators said Alton may been exposed to the drug on his walk home in the poor, high-crime neighborhood where Assistant Miami Fire Chief Pete Gomez said he has seen a spike in overdoses in the past year and where needles sometimes litter the streets.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle gives a news conference on the opioid-related death of 10-year-old Alton Banks in Miami, Fla. The fifth grader from a drug-ridden Miami neighborhood apparently died of a fentanyl overdose in June, becoming one of Florida's younges victims of the opioid crisis, authorities said Tuesday. But how he came into contact with the powerful painkiller is a mystery. (AP Photo/Mario Houben)

Assistant Miami Fire Chief Pete Gomez points to a location in front of the department during an interview on Tuesday, July 18, 2017. Gomez said he has seen a spike in overdoses in Overtown, a poor, high-crime neighborhood, in the past year and where needles sometimes litter the streets. (AP Photo/Mario Houben)

Jessie Davis, who lives in an apartment next to the building in the Overtown area of Miami where 10-year-old Alton Banks had lived, speaks during an interview. Davis said her grandchildren, ages 8, 9 and 10, regularly make the same walk he did to the nearby park with a swimming pool. She said she initially thought the pool water made Alton sick and was shocked by news reports that he had been exposed to fentanyl. "Where would a 10-year-old baby get something like that?" Davis said. (AP Photo/Mario Houben)

This Tuesday, July 17, 2017 photo shows the Overtown area of Miami where fifth grader Alton Banks died of a fentanyl overdose in June, becoming one of Florida's youngest victims of the opioid crisis, authorities said Tuesday. But how he came into contact with the powerful painkiller is a mystery. (AP Photo/Mario Houben)

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle gives a news conference on the opioid-related death of 10-year-old Alton Banks in Miami, Tuesday, July 18, 2017. The fifth grader from a drug-ridden Miami neighborhood apparently died of a fentanyl overdose in June, becoming one of Florida's youngest victims of the opioid crisis, authorities said Tuesday. But how he came into contact with the powerful painkiller is a mystery. (AP Photo/Mario Houben)

Assistant Miami Fire Chief Pete Gomez speaks to reporters Tuesday, July 18, 2017, in Miami. A 10-year-old boy from a drug-ridden Miami neighborhood apparently died of a fentanyl overdose last month, becoming one of Florida's littlest victims of the opioid crisis, authorities said Tuesday. But how he came into contact with the powerful painkiller is a mystery. Investigators said Alton Banks may been exposed to the drug on his walk home in Overtown, a poor, high-crime neighborhood where Gomez said he has seen a spike in overdoses in the past year and where needles sometimes litter the streets. (AP Photo/Mario Houben)

Cars sit parked in front of an apartment building where a 10-year-old boy, that died of a fentanyl overdose last month, lived in Miami, Fla. (AP Photo/Mario Houben)

People stand in front of an apartment building where a 10-year-old boy that died of a fentanyl overdose last month lived, in Miami, Fla., Tuesday, July 18, 2017. (AP Photo/Mario Houben)
WASHINGTON (AP) - An international robotics competition in Washington attracted teams of teenagers from more than 150 nations. The team that drew the most attention at the FIRST Global Challenge, which ended Tuesday, was a squad of girls from Afghanistan who were twice rejected for U.S. visas before President Donald Trump intervened. But there were even more stories than there were teams. Here are a few:

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RESULTS:

Team Afghanistan, from second from left, Kawsar Rashan, Lida Azizi, Somayeh Faruqi, and Rodaba Noori, next to a member of Team Australia, left, hug before their final round of competition at the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge, Tuesday, July 18, 2017, in Washington. The challenge is an international robotics event with teams from over 100 countries. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Teams left with gold, silver and bronze medals in a variety of categories.

The Europe team won a gold award for getting the most cumulative points over the course of the competition. Poland got silver and Armenia bronze. Finland won a gold award for winning the best win-loss record. Silver went to Singapore and bronze to India.

There were also awards for engineering design, innovation and international unity, among others. The Afghanistan team won a silver medal for "courageous achievement." The award recognized teams that exhibited a "can-do" attitude even under difficult circumstances or when things didn't go as planned. The gold medal in that category went to the South Sudan team and bronze to the Oman team, whose students are deaf.

The 2018 competition will be held in Mexico City.

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GIRL POWER:

Sixty percent of the teams participating in the competition were founded, led or organized by women. Of the 830 teens participating, 209 were girls. And there were six all-girl teams, including not only the Afghan squad but also teams from the United States, Ghana, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. Vanuatu's nickname: the "SMART Sistas."

Samira Bader, 16, on the Jordanian team, says "it's very difficult for us because everyone thinks" building robots is "only for boys." She said her team wants to prove that "girls can do it."

The three-girl U.S. team included sisters Colleen and Katie Johnson of Everett, Washington, and Sanjna Ravichandar of Plainsboro, New Jersey. Colleen Johnson, 16, said her team looks forward "to a day when an all-girls team is going to be no more special than an all-boys team or a co-ed team, just when that's completely normal and accepted."

The team competing from Brunei was also all female, though a male member previously worked on the project.

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WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS:

The team from Iran got some help building their robot from American students. It turns out that the competition's kit of robot parts including wheels, brackets, sprockets, gears, pulleys and belts was not approved for shipment to Iran due to sanctions involving technology exports to the country. So the competition recruited a robotics team at George C. Marshall high school in Falls Church, Virginia, to help. Iran's team designed the robot, and about five Marshall students built it in the United States.

The team explained on its competition webpage that "our friends in Washington made our ideas as a robot."

Because of the time difference between the countries, the three-member team and its mentor were sometimes up at midnight or 3 a.m. in Iran to talk to their collaborators.

Amin Dadkhah, 15, called working with the American students "a good and exciting experience for both of us." Kirianna Baker, one of the U.S. students who built the robot, agreed. "Having a team across the world with a fresh set of eyes is very valuable," she said.

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TEAM HOPE:

A group of three refugees from Syria competed as team "Refugee," also known as team "Hope." All three fled Syria to Lebanon three years ago because of violence in their country.

Mohamad Nabih Alkhateeb, Amar Kabour and Maher Alisawui named their robot "Robogee," a combination of the words "robot" and "refugee."

Alkhateeb, 17, and Kabour, 16, say they want to be robotics engineers, and Alisawui wants to be a computer engineer. Kabour said it's important to the team to win, to "tell the world" refugees are "here and they can do it."

Alkhateeb also said living as a refugee has been difficult, but he hopes to someday return home.

"I will go back after I have finished my education so I can rebuild Syria again," he said.

Some 11 million people - half of the Syrian population - have been forced from their homes.

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Follow Jessica Gresko on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jessicagresko .

Lida Azizi, center, picks up a teammate with Team Afghanistan in the air as they celebrate after competing in the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge, Tuesday, July 18, 2017, in Washington. The challenge is an international robotics event with teams from over 100 countries. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Amar Naser Kabour, center, and Mohammad Mahir Ghssan Alisawaui, right, who are both Syrian refugees living in Lebanon, are helped with their robot by their mentor, Osama Shadeh, who is also a Syrian refugee, during the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge, Tuesday, July 18, 2017, in Washington. Their team is known both as Team Refugee and as Team Hope. The challenge is an international robotics event with teams from over 100 countries. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Rodaba Noori, left, Somayeh Faruqi, Kawsar Rashan, and Lida Azizi, with Team Afghanistan, encourage their robot during their final round of competition, at the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge, Tuesday, July 18, 2017, in Washington. The challenge is an international robotics event with teams from over 100 countries. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Students from across the world, from Peru, to Russia, to Slovenia, and from across the African continent, meet during the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge, Tuesday, July 18, 2017, in Washington. The challenge is an international robotics event with teams from over 100 countries. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
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PODGORICA, Montenegro (AP) - The high-profile trial in Montenegro of two Russians and 12 other people charged with plotting a coup to scuttle the country's NATO bid was postponed on Wednesday over a defense motion to replace the prosecutor.

Judge Suzana Mugosa delayed the hearing until the top state prosecutor rules on the defense demand against the prosecutor and his team.

The 14 defendants - among them the Russians and two top opposition leaders - are charged with "creating a criminal organization." The Russians are additionally charged with terrorism.

The indictment alleges they planned to take over parliament, assassinate then-prime minister Milo Djukanovic and install a pro-Russian leadership to prevent Montenegro from joining NATO.

The Russians, identified as Eduard Shishmakov and Vladimir Popov, allegedly coordinated the operation from neighboring Serbia. The two remain at large and will be tried in absentia.

One of the defendants, opposition leader Andrija Mandic, said Wednesday that the trial was a "staged political process." Defense lawyers alleged special prosecutor Milivoje Katnic and his team were "biased" and have "contaminated" the case.

Russia has denied involvement in the alleged plot. Montenegro joined NATO in June despite strong opposition from Moscow, which considers the small Adriatic country a historic, Slavic ally.

The trial is being broadcast live on Montenegrin state TV.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin (all times EDT):

4:15 p.m.

The spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin is disputing the characterization of a previously undisclosed conversation between Putin and President Donald Trump as secret.

In this July 7, 2017 photo Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Melania Trump, wife of US-President Donald Trump, talk with a translator between them as they have dinner in the 'Kleiner Saal' (lit. 'small hall') at the Elbphilharmonie during the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. (Kay Nietfeld/pool photo via AP)

The White House confirmed Tuesday that Trump and Putin spoke to each other at dinner connected with the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, this month. The conversation came after Putin and Trump held formal talks of more than two hours.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says, "The use of such definitions as a 'secret' or 'undisclosed' meeting raises eyebrows and causes confusion." Peskov was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying the Trump-Putin discussions "were neither secret nor undisclosed meetings. It is absurd to claim this."

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3:25 p.m.

U.S. officials say President Donald Trump's embrace of Russia is sparking concern among members of his national security and foreign policy team. They are said to be concerned about his previously undisclosed dinner conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 meetings in Germany last month.

The White House confirms the conversation took place. Officially, Washington and Moscow are downplaying the reports. A spokesman for the National Security Council says it was a casual chat between the two leaders that shouldn't be described as a "meeting." A Russian lawmaker describes it as "a secret conversation that didn't happen."

The chat between the two leaders is said to have involved Russia's translator but not one from the U.S. U.S. officials say they are concerned about the president's tendency to shun the usual protocols for such meetings. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the meeting on the record.

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10:30 a.m.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman says the point of a dinner at the Group of 20 summit was to facilitate informal contacts, and the German leader wasn't "surprised or confused" by anything that happened.

The White House confirmed Tuesday that President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin had a second, previously undisclosed conversation at the summit in Hamburg on July 7, this one at an evening dinner following a concert.

A foreign affairs columnist who says he spoke with two people who were there said attendees described the meeting as startling.

Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert wouldn't comment Wednesday on specific conversations but said the dinner "did, exactly as hoped, produce a lively exchange" between many participants. He said "the chancellor, in any case, was not surprised or confused by anything."

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4:20 a.m.

A senior Russian lawmaker is dismissing media reports of an undisclosed conversation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump as sensationalist.

The White House spokesman Sean Spicer confirmed on Wednesday that Trump and Putin spoke at a dinner for world leaders and their spouses at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. Trump defended the dinner in a pair of angry tweets late Tuesday, saying it had been on his public schedule.

Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the information policy at the upper house of Russian parliament, on Wednesday lashed out at U.S. media for seeking details of "a secret conversation that didn't happen."

"They're sick," Pushkov said.

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3:50 a.m.

President Donald Trump had another, previously undisclosed conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit in Germany this month.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer and National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton confirmed that Trump and Putin spoke at a dinner for world leaders and their spouses at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

The conversation came hours after Trump and Putin's first official face-to-face meeting on July 7, which was originally scheduled to last just half an hour but stretched on for more than two. The two world leaders were also captured on video shaking hands and exchanging a few words after they arrived at the G-20 summit of industrialized and developing nations earlier that day.

Anton would not specify the duration of the conversation. But he said the discussion was casual and should not be characterized as a "meeting" or even a less formal, but official, "pull-aside."

FILE - In this July 7, 2017 photo U.S. President Donald Trump, bottom left, talks to delegates from Saudi Arabia as his wife Melania talks to Russian Prseident Vladimir Putin with the help of a Russian translator, top right, as the heads of government of the G-20 states and their partners have dinner after a concert in the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, Germany (Kay Nietfeld/Pool Photo via AP)

President Donald Trump speaks while having lunch with services members in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, July 18, 2017. Trump had a second, previously undisclosed conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit it Germany. White House spokesman Sean Spicer says that Trump and Putin spoke during a world leaders' dinner at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg earlier this month.(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

FILE - In this July 7, 2017, file photo, President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany. Trump had a second, previously undisclosed conversation with Putin at the summit it Germany. White House spokesman Sean Spicer says that Trump and Putin spoke during a world leaders' dinner at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg earlier this month.(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
WASHINGTON (AP) - A key House panel on Wednesday approved a Republican fiscal plan that probably won't deliver on its promises to balance the budget, but would begin to clear a path for a GOP effort to overhaul the tax code this fall.

The Budget Committee approved the measure by a party-line 22-14 vote. The plan proposes deep cuts to safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps and reprises a controversial Medicare plan strongly opposed by President Donald Trump - though Republicans only want to deliver on a small fraction of the cuts.

Instead, to most Republicans on Capitol Hill, the most important element of the plan is the procedural pathway it would clear to allow Republicans to pass their top priority - an overhaul of the tax code - later this year without fear of a blockade by Senate Democrats. Passing a budget through Congress is the only way to get a GOP-only tax plan enacted this year.

FILE - In this March 10, 2017 file photo, House Budget Committee Chair Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn. speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. House Republicans on Tuesday, July 18, 2017, unveiled a budget that makes deep cuts in food stamps and other social safety net programs while boosting military spending by billions, a blueprint that pleases neither conservatives nor moderates. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Republicans argue that growing deficits and debt are part of the reason for slow economic growth and that big benefit plans like Medicare and Medicaid need changes now to keep them from going broke for future generations.

"Both parties in Washington have failed to abide by a simple principle that all American families and small businesses do - that we must live within our means," said Budget Chairman Diane Black, R-Tenn. "Balancing the budget requires us to make tough choices, but the consequences of inaction far outweigh any political risks we may face."

But like the GOP's health care repeal-and-replace efforts and its moribund hopes to boost infrastructure, the GOP budget outline faces opposition from both wings of the party. Republican conservatives want more of its proposed cuts to actually take effect in follow-up legislation, while moderates want to focus on tax reform instead of cuts to food stamps or federal employee pensions.

GOP leaders generally fear that adding spending cuts to tax reform would only make the tax code rewrite more difficult to pass.

The nonbinding GOP plan promises to cut more than $5 trillion from the budget over the coming decade, though Republicans only appear serious about enacting a relatively modest 10-year, $203 billion deficit cut over the same period through filibuster-proof follow-up legislation. Conservatives are pressing for larger cuts, including strict work requirements for food stamps, for instance.

But Democrats blasted the sweeping cuts in the plan. It revives a provocative proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher-like program for future retirees. Experts say that change would likely increase costs for beneficiaries and deny them the coverage guarantees of Medicare.

"The list of upside-down priorities and irresponsible policies in this document is lengthy," said top panel Democrat John Yarmuth of Kentucky. "Democrats support investments in education, health care, national security, job training, innovation and infrastructure. We support programs that help individuals with nowhere left to turn, and a tax code that helps families get ahead."

Republicans easily rejected Democratic attempts to protect the Obama health law, restore Medicaid, and increase spending for domestic programs renewed by Congress each year.

The panel is stocked with hard-core conservatives, some of whom said the measure is too loose on spending. Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., faulted it for a $28 billion increase above Trump's budget for defense and for rejecting most of Trump's proposed $54 billion cut to domestic programs for next year. Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., was denied a chance to offer a late amendment designed to block a so-call border adjustment tax and voted for the plan anyway - but wouldn't guarantee he'll support it in a floor vote.

While exempting Social Security, veterans and defense, the plan proposes cuts across the rest of the budget to turn this year's projected $700 billion-or-so deficit into a tiny $9 billion surplus by 2027. It would do so by slashing $5.4 trillion over the coming decade, including almost $500 billion from Medicare and $1.5 trillion from Medicaid and the Obama-era health law.

The GOP plan also proposes a 10-year, $150 billion cut to food stamps, though the Agriculture Committee would be directed to come up with no more than $10 billion.

It also contains its share of gimmicks, including $1.8 trillion in deficit cuts over the coming decade from rosy projections of economic growth averaging 2.6 percent over 10 years. Another $700 billion in savings would come from a crackdown on "improper payments" such as tax credits and Social Security and Medicare benefits going to people who don't qualify for them. Many of its cuts are unspecified.

But in the immediate future, the GOP measure is a budget buster. It would add almost $30 billion to Trump's $668 billion request for national defense next year and rejects most of Trump's proposed cuts to domestic agencies - only to promise deeper, nonbinding cuts in the future.
MADRID (AP) - Spain's Civil Guard said Wednesday that a former chairman of one of the country's largest banks has been found dead with a gunshot to the chest in a private hunting estate in southern Spain.

A spokeswoman with the police force said initial inquiries into the death of the 69 year-old Miguel Blesa had ruled out a homicide.

The former head of the now defunct Caja Madrid savings bank was awaiting the result of an appeal to a six-year prison sentence for misusing corporate credit cards issued by Bankia SA, another defunct bank.

In this photo taken on Friday, Dec. 19, 2008, former President of Caja Madrid bank Miguel Blesa attends a news conference at the regional government building in Madrid. Spain's Civil Guard said Wednesday, July 19, 2017, that a former chairman of one of the country's largest banks has been found dead with a gunshot to the chest in a private hunting estate in southern Spain. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

Witnesses who were with Blesa in the private property near the southern city of Cordoba told police that the former banker left the group early Wednesday morning saying he was going to take his car.

They described hearing one gunshot moments later, the Civil Guard spokeswoman said, speaking anonymously in line with the police force's protocol. She said an autopsy would be required to determine the exact cause of the death.

Blesa chaired Caja Madrid, one of the country's top saving banks, between 1996 and 2010. In 2011, the bank was merged with seven other domestic savings institutions to form Bankia, which later had to be nationalized and bailed out for 18 billion euros ($24 billion.)

Both Blesa and former International Monetary Fund chief Rodrigo Rato, who chaired Bankia between 2010 and 2012, appealed a March ruling by Spain's National Court that condemned them to 6 and 4  years in prison respectively for misusing the saving bank's corporate credit cards.

Blesa received the highest punishment among 65 defendants found guilty of hiding irregular and undeclared expenses with the cards. The two former bankers were released on bail while the appeal is resolved.

The former banker was also in the midst of a lawsuit involving irregular bonuses during his time at Caja Madrid. In 2013, he was briefly jailed for irregularities in the purchase of shares in the City National Bank of Florida, but a court later acquitted him.

Blesa also appeared in leaked documents of the Mossack Fonseca law firm, which was investigated for managing offshore accounts globally. According to media reports at the time, he used the Panamanian firm in 1989 to create a company in the British Virgin Islands in order to invest in Spain-based companies.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) - When President Donald Trump left his chair at this month's G20 summit while Africa was discussed and had daughter Ivanka sit in for him, critics blasted it as a breach of diplomatic protocol. But it also drew attention to the growing concern that when it comes to the continent of 1.2 billion people, the U.S. leader has been notably absent.

Six months into office, the Trump administration's policy toward Africa has been left to drift, observers say. They cite vacant diplomatic posts and a lack of strategic thinking on multiple issues, including extremist threats in East and West Africa and civil war in South Sudan.

It's always been a struggle to get Washington's attention on Africa, but "with this administration, I don't get the sense that it's even on the map . We're looking at blank page here," said Richard Downie, acting director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

FILE - In this Saturday, July 8, 2017 file photo, Ivanka Trump, daughter of U.S. President Donald Trump, left, attends a working session at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, northern Germany. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump left his chair at the G20 summit while Africa was discussed, having his daughter Ivanka sit in for him instead. Critics blasted the move as a breach of diplomatic protocol, but it also drew attention to the growing concern that when it comes to Africa, Trump has been notably absent. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn, File)

A chief concern is that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has yet to appoint an assistant secretary in charge of African affairs, the top post in charge of Africa policy.

That has "stymied" State Department operations, said Steve McDonald, global fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington. "Ongoing, day-to-day things don't get decided on."

In addition, there is still no permanent Africa director at the National Security Council. It is the only region without one.

This month the Trump administration delayed a decision on whether to lift sanctions on Sudan, prompting Sudan's president to order that all negotiations with the U.S. be frozen until mid-October.

Other White House moves suggest that Trump's "America First" foreign policy is increasing focus on security and counter-terrorism efforts in Africa over the humanitarian and development agenda supported by previous administrations.

Several African nations face threats from extremist groups like Boko Haram and the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab. At the same time, millions of people are at risk of starvation in Somalia, South Sudan and northeastern Nigeria, and potentially violent elections are approaching in regional powers Kenya and Congo.

While the U.S. this month pledged nearly $640 million in humanitarian assistance to alleviate hunger in South Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen, critics said the aid had been approved months earlier by Congress but delayed by the Trump administration.

Trump moved relatively quickly on security. In March, he approved a Pentagon proposal to "conduct lethal action" in Somalia against al-Shabab. Less than a month later, Defense Secretary James Mattis visited Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the only permanent U.S. military base in Africa.

Tillerson has yet to visit Africa, according to the State Department's online log of his travels.

The White House's 2018 proposed budget reflects the shift toward security and away from aid. It includes a $52 billion increase on defense spending, made possible by proposed cuts to the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development by roughly a third.

The proposed budget would reduce funding from $30 million to $8 million to carry out the closure of the United States African Development Foundation, which supports local enterprises in 30 countries. It also would reduce funding by about $1 billion to the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which supports anti-retroviral therapy for over 11 million people, many in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Trump administration also wants downsizing of United Nations peacekeeping missions, many operating in Africa's most volatile areas. In June, the U.N. reduced its annual peacekeeping budget by more than half a billion dollars.

Current and former U.S. military leaders have warned that deep cuts to diplomacy and aid could jeopardize long-term U.S. interests overseas, and some lawmakers have pledged not to pass the budget as it stands.

"This budget, if fully implemented, would require us to retreat from the world diplomatically or put people at risk," Sen. Lindsey Graham told reporters in May. "You'd have lot of Benghazis in the making if this thing became law."

In Somalia, development programs meant to counter the lure of extremism could disappear under the proposed budget. USADF grants have reached nearly 6,000 direct beneficiaries there since 2012, said Abdinasir Ahmed Osman, project coordinator for the Somali Consultants Association, which monitors the work.

In the capital, Mogadishu, USADF-funded programs target youth between 18 and 35 - the same demographic that extremist recruiters go after, Osman said.

"We are giving them skills. We are giving them opportunity," he said. "They can compare which is better: being in battle, dying without a future, or getting skills and working?"

It's wrong to say that U.S. diplomatic efforts in Africa are not moving forward, said Brian Neubert, director of the State Department's Africa Regional Media Hub in Johannesburg.

He said several development and trade initiatives such as Power Africa and the African Growth and Opportunity Act continue and diplomats are going about their work. But South Africa, one of the continent's top economies, remains without a U.S. ambassador.

"It's pretty routine at this period, given the other challenges in the world," Neubert said.

Others disagree, saying that without a president visibly engaged in Africa - especially after President Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan - U.S. diplomatic efforts could flounder.

"What you have is a policy vacuum when it comes to basic, critical issues in Africa," said Steven Feldstein, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.

"Diplomacy will follow where the president signals his interest."

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Associated Press writer Vivian Salama in Washington contributed.

FILE - In this Aug. 5, 2011 file photo, newly arrived Somali refugees wait outside a UNHCR processing center at the Ifo refugee camp outside Dadaab, eastern Kenya, 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the Somali border. Six months into office, the Trump administration's policy toward Africa, a continent home to 1.2 billion people, has been left to drift, observers say. They cite key diplomatic posts that remain vacant and a lack of strategic thinking on multiple crises, including extremist threats in Somalia and Nigeria and civil war in South Sudan. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)
PANMUNJOM, Korea (AP) - Some call it one of the scariest places on Earth; others view it more as a tourist spot.

On a visit to the Korean border village of Panmunjom on Wednesday, the tension was palpable as North and South Korean troops glared at each other across the military demarcation line that divides their countries.

Five things that AP journalists saw on a media tour of Panmunjom, where the Koreas may sit down as early as Friday for their first face-to-face talks since late 2015.

A North Korean army soldier walks at the border villages of Panmunjom in Paju, South Korea, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. Panmunjom is located inside the heavily mined Demilitarized Zone that serves as a border between the Koreas, and the main road to the zone is lined with barb-wired fences and security watchtowers for kilometers (miles). (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

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NO-MAN'S LAND

Panmunjom sits inside the heavily mined Demilitarized Zone that serves as the de facto border between the Koreas, and the main road to the zone is lined with barbed-wire fences and security watchtowers.

Journalists gathered near Camp Bonifas just south of the DMZ, a base named after Capt. Arthur Bonifas, one of two American officers killed by axe-wielding North Korean soldiers in a 1976 clash.

A military bus then took the journalists into the 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) -wide DMZ. Razor-wire fences and leafy hills dotted the narrow path to Panmunjom.

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TRUCE VILLAGE

The armistice that halted the 1950-53 Korean War was signed in Panmunjom, a former farming village. Later, North Korean and U.S. military officers used the site, now a bleak cluster of blue huts, for meetings to oversee the often-shaky truce.

On Wednesday, a handful of tall South Korean soldiers - chosen to intimidate nearby North Korean troops - stood rigidly, gazing toward the North through darkened sunglasses. A lone North Korean soldier stood at attention in front of a North Korean building and another used binoculars to peer from a window into the South.

South Korea has proposed two sets of talks in Panmunjom, one on Friday on easing cross-border tensions and another on Aug. 1 to discuss temporary reunions of families separated by the Korean War.

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GIANT NORTH KOREAN FLAG

From a nearby military checkpoint, North Korea's frontline Kijong-dong village is visible across the border, with a giant North Korean flag fluttering from a 528-foot (160-meter) flagpole. A person rode a bicycle along a road through agricultural fields, while another walked on a trail in the woods.

Visible behind shabby tile-roofed houses was a modern building at a now-shuttered joint Korean factory park in the North Korean city of Kaesong, once a sign of detente but now a victim of rising tensions between the two Koreas.

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PROPAGANDA MONUMENT

A monument near the flagpole glorifies the Kim family that has ruled North Korea for nearly 70 years.

"Great comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il will be with us forever," it reads, referring to current leader Kim Jong Un's grandfather and father, who governed the county before him.

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BRIDGE OF NO RETURN

Visible also is the Bridge of No Return, where North Korea and the American-led U.N. Command exchanged prisoners of war at the end of the Korean War. Nearby is the site of the 1976 North Korean attack that killed Capt. Bonifas and another officer, Mark Barrett. An empty checkpoint stands at the end of the bridge.

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Associated Press writer Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.

A foreign journalist takes a picture of a South Korean army soldier at the Military Armistice Committee meeting room at the border villages of Panmunjom in Paju, South Korea, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. Some call it one of the scariest places on the planet; others view it more as a tourist spot. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

A South Korea army soldier gestures at the border villages of Panmunjom in Paju, South Korea, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. Some call it one of the scariest places on the planet; others view it more as a tourist spot. Several uniformed soldiers were at the village, which has a bleak cluster of blue huts where North Korean and U.S. military officers used to meet to oversee an armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

A giant North Korean flag flutters from a 528-foot pole in the propaganda village of Kijong-dong near the border villages of Panmunjom in Paju, South Korea, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

A giant North Korean flag flutters from a 528-foot pole in the propaganda village of Kijong-dong as a South Korean army soldier stands guard at the border villages of Panmunjom in Paju, South Korea, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Army soldiers of North Korea, top, and South Korea stand guard at the border villages of Panmunjom in Paju, South Korea, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. Panmunjom is located inside the heavily mined Demilitarized Zone that serves as a border between the Koreas, and the main road to the zone is lined with barb-wired fences and security watchtowers for kilometers (miles). (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

A North Korean monument with a propaganda message, left, is seen in Kijong-dong village near the border villages of Panmunjom in Paju, South Korea, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. The message is aimed at glorifying the Kim family that has ruled North Korea for nearly 70 years. The message reads: "Great comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il will be with us forever." (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was caught Wednesday by a live microphone railing against the European Union's "crazy" insistence on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a precondition for closer ties.

Netanyahu was meeting with leaders of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia at a regional summit. Netanyahu was discussing Iran, Syria, the Islamic State group, and EU-Israel relations when some of his comments - and those of other leaders at the meeting closed to the media - were accidentally broadcast to journalists in another room.

Netanyahu also made a rare public admission that Israel has struck Iranian arms convoys in Syria bound for Hezbollah "dozens and dozens of times."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, listens to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban during a press conference held after the talks of Netanyahu with heads of government of the Visegrad Group or V4 countries in the Pesti Vigado building in Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, July19, 2017. Netanyahu is staying on a four-day official visit in Hungary. (Balazs Mohai/MTI via AP)

The Israeli premier was overheard blasting the EU's approach to Israel, saying "it's crazy. I think it's actually crazy" that the 28-nation bloc maintains that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must come before closer trade ties.

"There is no logic here. Europe is undermining its security by undermining Israel. Europe is undermining its progress by undermining the connection with Israeli innovation because of a crazy attempt to create conditions (for peace with the Palestinians)," said Netanyahu.

European ties with Israel would determine whether the 28-member union would "live and thrive or shrivel and disappear," he added.

EU-Israel relations have been tense for years, with Jerusalem feeling that Brussels is targeting its policies far too much while being too soft on the Palestinians. While the EU is the main trading partner for Israel, frictions have persisted. Relations took a dive in November 2015 after Israel derided a decision by the bloc to label products made in Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The EU doesn't recognize Israeli sovereignty over territories it captured in the 1967 Mideast war, including the West Bank and east Jerusalem, where the Palestinians hope to establish a state. It has been a vocal critic of Israel's settlement construction and has adopted measures mandating the labeling of goods produced in West Bank settlements.

"The European Union is the only association of countries in the world that conditions the relations with Israel - that produces technology in every area - on political conditions. The only ones. Nobody does it," Netanyahu said, citing Russia, China and India's willingness to do business with Israel despite politics.

Netanyahu has pushed for closer trade ties with India and China in recent years. Earlier this month, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid a state visit to Israel, during which the two countries signed a number of trade agreements cementing increasingly warm relations.

During statements to the media after their meeting, Orban shared Netanyahu's view on the EU's relations with Israel, calling for a more rational approach with "significantly better ties" and less criticism of Israel.

"The EU should value the efforts made by the state of Israel for stability in the region," Orban said. "This is of interest not only for Israel but for Europe, too, as it protects us from more and more migrant invasions."

"The EU's relations with Israel are not rational enough and need to be repaired," Orban added. "Instead of criticizing Israel, we should open the door to cooperation with Israel."

Orban's comments on Israel were in line with his similar views on countries like Turkey, Russia and China, where he also has chosen to emphasize improving ties and economic relations without delving, for example, into human rights issues.

Orban said the four Central European countries in the so-called Visegrad Group had accepted Netanyahu's invitation to hold an upcoming meeting in Israel.

Near the end of his visit to Hungary, Netanyahu gave a speech to representatives of the Jewish community and paid his respects at a Holocaust memorial behind the Dohany Street Synagogue, Europe's largest.

Andras Heisler, the head of the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, reiterated his criticism of the anti-Semitic overtones of a campaign by the Hungarian government against Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros and Israel's decision to water down a statement by its ambassador to Hungary condemning the billboards and posters.

Neither Orban nor Netanyahu mentioned the Soros campaign and did not react to Heisler's criticism.

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Ilan Ben Zion reported from Jerusalem.

Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Bohuslav Sobotka, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico and Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, left to right, attend a press conference held after the talks of Netanyahu with heads of government of the Visegrad Group or V4 countries in the Pesti Vigado building in Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. Netanyahu is staying on a four-day official visit in Hungary. (Balazs Mohai/MTI via AP)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban speaks during a press conference held after the talks of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with heads of government of the Visegrad Group or V4 countries in the Pesti Vigado building in Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, July19, 2017. Netanyahu is staying on a four-day official visit in Hungary. (Balazs Mohai/MTI via AP)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, left to right, attend a press conference held after the talks of Netanjahu with heads of government of the Visegrad Group or V4 countries in the Pesti Vigado building in Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. Netanyahu is staying on a four-day official visit in Hungary. (Balazs Mohai/MTI via AP)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, right, listens to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a press conference held after the talks of Netanjahu with heads of government of the Visegrad Group or V4 countries in the Pesti Vigado building in Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, july 19, 2017. Netanyahu is staying on a four-day official visit in Hungary. (Balazs Mohai/MTI via AP)

Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Bohuslav Sobotka, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, left to right, shake hands during the meeting of Netanyahu and the Visegrad Group's (V4) Prime Ministers in the Pesti Vigado building in Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. Netanyahu is staying on a four-day official visit in Hungary. (Balazs Mohai/MTI via AP)

Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Bohuslav Sobotka, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, left to right, pose for a group photo during the meeting of Netanyahu and the Visegrad Group's (V4) Prime Ministers in the Pesti Vigado building in Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. Netanyahu is staying on a four-day official visit in Hungary. (Balazs Mohai/MTI via AP)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Tree of Life memorial in the garden of Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (Zoltan Mathe/MTI via AP)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and his wife Sarah in the garden of Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. In the center is Hungarian Prime minister Viktor Orban. (Zoltan Mathe/MTI via AP)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, his wife Sarah, second right, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, third left and his wife Aniko Levai, second left in the garden of Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (Zoltan Mathe/MTI via AP)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, second, left, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, second right, Chief Rabbi of Hungary Robert Froelich, left, and President of the Federation of Jewish Religious Communities of Hungary (Mazsihisz) Andras Heisler in the Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (Bea Kallos/MTI via AP)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers his speech in the Goldmark Room of the Federation of Jewish Religious Communities of Hungary (Mazsihisz) Office in Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (Balazs Mohai/MTI via AP)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers his speech in the Goldmark Room of the Federation of Jewish Religious Communities of Hungary (Mazsihisz) Office in Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (Balazs Mohai/MTI via AP)
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - A Bahraini rights group says a female activist has been charged under an anti-terrorism law amid a crackdown on dissent in the U.S.-allied Gulf island nation.

The London-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy said Wednesday that Ebtisam al-Sayegh was one of four people accused of using human rights work as a cover for terrorism-related activities.

The official Bahrain News Agency announced the charges but did not name the suspects. Bahraini officials did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Al-Sayegh was taken into custody two weeks ago in a late-night raid. Amnesty International has raised concerns, saying al-Sayegh alleges she was tortured and sexually assaulted during an earlier detention in May. Bahrain has said it opposes any mistreatment of detainees.
NEW YORK (AP) - Investment bank Morgan Stanley said its second-quarter profit rose 11 percent from a year ago, and the bank's trading desks were able to outmaneuver its rivals in a quiet market.

After the bank's major competitors - Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America - all reported declines in trading during the period, many expected the same from Morgan Stanley. But while Morgan Stanley did report a modest decline in trading revenue, it was nowhere close to those seen by its rivals.

Morgan Stanley said Wednesday it earned $1.76 billion in the three months that ended June 30, or 87 cents per share, compared with $1.58 billion, or 75 cents per share, in the same period a year earlier. That handily beat analysts' expectations of 76 cents per share.

In this Monday, July 17, 2017, photo, the Morgan Stanley logo appears above a trading post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. On Wednesday, July 19, 2017, Morgan Stanley reports financial results. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

The bank had bond trading revenue of $1.2 billion, down just slightly from $1.3 billion a year earlier. The division at Goldman Sachs that trades similar securities reported a drop of 40 percent. Bank of America had a decline of 14 percent and JPMorgan was down 19 percent.

Stock trading, a market that historically is Morgan Stanley's strongest, had a modest increase in revenue.

The strong quarter in trading comes as Morgan Stanley is moving away from relying on stock trading to focusing on more stable businesses, like asset and wealth management.

Morgan's better-than-expected quarter was also reflected in its return-on-equity ratio, a measure of an investment bank's profitability, which improved to 9.1 percent from 8.3 percent a year earlier. That's still below the long-term goal of Morgan's management for a return-on-equity of above 10 percent, however.

"Our second-quarter results demonstrated the resilience of our franchise in a subdued trading environment," James Gorman, chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley, said in a statement.

Morgan Stanley's wealth management division also had a relatively strong quarter, reporting a profit of $1.1 billion compared with $859 million a year earlier. Assets under management also increased.

Overall, Morgan Stanley had revenue of $9.50 billion, up from $8.91 billion a year earlier.

Morgan Stanley shares rose 2 percent to $46.07 in afternoon trading.
BERLIN (AP) - The German government summoned Turkey's ambassador on Wednesday to demand the release of a jailed trainer of human rights activists, and said the foreign minister was interrupting his vacation for consultations on relations with Ankara.

The jailing of Peter Steudtner, who along with Amnesty International's Turkey director and four other activists is accused of aiding an armed terror group, marks a new low point in German-Turkish relations. They have been weighed down by a widening range of issues for months.

Ambassador Ali Kemal Aydin was "told very clearly that the arrest of Peter Steudtner and other human rights activists is neither understandable nor acceptable," Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer told reporters in Berlin. The German government demanded Steudtner's immediate release and unhindered consular access, he added.

The accusations of terrorist activity are "clearly far-fetched," Schaefer said.

Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel will hold consultations in Berlin Thursday on "what should now be done in view of the dramatic escalation of Turkey's actions," he added.

A massive Turkish government crackdown was initially launched against alleged supporters of last year's failed coup but has since broadened to include government opponents. Nine German citizens are currently in custody.

The activists were detained in a July 5 police raid on a hotel on the island of Buyukada, off Istanbul, where they were attending a digital security workshop. A court jailed the six on Tuesday.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, described the terror accusations as "a transparent attempt to discredit and criminalize dissenters."

Earlier Wednesday, a newspaper publisher said it has filed an appeal to Turkey's highest court against the incarceration for the past five months of a German-Turkish reporter.

Deniz Yucel, who works for the daily Die Welt, was arrested Feb. 14 in Istanbul. Turkish authorities accuse him of disseminating terrorist propaganda and inciting hatred, as well as espionage and ties to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK- allegations Yucel denies. He hasn't been formally charged.

Die Welt's publisher, WeltN24 GmbH, said it filed a complaint Tuesday to the Constitutional Court in Ankara against Yucel's continued imprisonment and violation of its press freedom in the case.

WeltN24 director Stephanie Caspar said the company "will exhaust all legal means available to us to defend the freedom to report of our correspondent and the publisher."
PODGORICA, Montenegro (AP) - A plane from Ukraine has joined firefighting efforts in Montenegro after the country asked for international help to battle wildfires raging along the Adriatic coast.

Authorities say help also will arrive from Switzerland and Bulgaria. Emergency official Zoran Barbic says "the situation is much better now."

Wildfires reaching close to fishing villages and tourist resorts at Lustica peninsula have forced at least 100 people to evacuate the area. Montenegro sought NATO and EU help to fight the blaze.

Smoke rises from trees burned by wildfire on a mountain near Montenegro capital Podgorica, Monday, July 17, 2017. At least 100 tourists have been forced to evacuate from a coastal area in Montenegro that has been the hardest hit by the blaze. Fueled by strong winds and dry weather, the fire on the Lustica peninsula in southern Montenegro has spread near to homes and camping zones. (AP Photo/Risto Bozovic)

In neighboring Croatia, authorities fear new fires could erupt with a heat wave that is expected to hit the region in the coming days. They say thousands of acres of pine forests and low shrubbery have been destroyed in the massive fire this week that also threatened the key port of Split.

A smoke rises over Montenegro capital Podgorica, Montenegro, Monday, July 17, 2017. At least 100 tourists have been forced to evacuate from a coastal area in Montenegro that has been the hardest hit by the blaze. Fueled by strong winds and dry weather, the fire on the Lustica peninsula in southern Montenegro has spread near to homes and camping zones. (AP Photo/Risto Bozovic)
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Discovery Channel wants Shark Week viewers to be donors as well.

The channel's annual celebration of all things shark will include requests to support Oceana, an advocacy group focused on ocean conservation.

Viewers can use their smartphones to donate and also to receive Shark Week program information, said technology company Pledgeling, which is working with Discovery on the Oceana fundraising.

This undated image released by Discovery Channel shows a great white shark. The channel's annual Shark Week will include requests to support Oceana, an advocacy group focused on ocean conservation. Shark Week's opening lineup Sunday includes "Phelps vs. Shark: Great Gold vs. Great White," with Olympian Michael Phelps testing his speed against that of a great white shark. (Discovery Channel via AP)

By texting the word "SHARK" to 707070, participants will get a return message that includes a Pledgeling link for Oceana donations that can be made by Apple Pay or by credit card.

"We've streamlined the entire experience to capture that moment in time when somebody feels compelled to donate" and it's made it easy for them, Pledgeling CEO James Citron said. The company also is working with Discovery on Project CAT, an initiative to support the World Wildlife Fund's effort to increase the tiger population in the wild by conserving protected land.

Shark Week's opening lineup Sunday includes "Phelps vs. Shark: Great Gold vs. Great White" (8 p.m. EDT), in which Olympian Michael Phelps tests his speed against that of a great white shark.

The week includes "Return to the Isle of Jaws" on Monday and back-to-back episodes Tuesday of "Sharks and the City," one set off the coast of Los Angeles and the other off New York.

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Online:

https://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/shark-week/

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Corrects spelling to Pledgeling from Pledgling throughout.
MOSCOW (AP) - Ukraine's leader says Ukraine and Georgia will coordinate their efforts to reclaim areas captured by pro-Russian separatists.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was speaking Wednesday during his visit to Georgia, which fought a brief war with Russia in 2008. Two Georgian regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, declared independence after the war and have since enjoyed Russia's broad political and financial support.

Poroshenko and his Georgian counterpart Giorgi Margvelashvili visited a village that is fenced off with barbed wire from the neighboring area, which is controlled by self-proclaimed South Ossetia.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, right, speaks to locals at Georgia's de-facto border with its breakaway region of South Ossetia in the village of Odzisi, Georgia, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. Poroshenko was interested in the humanitarian situation of the local population, the Georgian presidential press service said. (AP Photo/Mykhailo Markiv, Presidential Press Service Pool Photo via AP)

Poroshenko called Russia "our common aggressor" and urged the international community to express its solidarity with Ukraine and Georgia, which have lost territories to Russia-backed separatists.

Parts of eastern Ukraine have been under the separatists' control since 2014.
SAMSON, Ala. (AP) - Hogs aren't unusual in rural south Alabama, but Wade Seago said he'd never seen anything like the 820-pound (372-kilogram) animal he shot and killed in his front yard.

Seago told al.com that he and his daughter spotted the massive hog in their yard in Samson last week after the family's pet schnauzer Cruiser started barking.

"Cruiser had this huge hog confused with all of the barking and movement," Wade said. "It was not a good situation."

In this Tuesday, July, 11, 2017, photo provided by Wade Seago, the taxidermist stands next to a dead hog in Samson, Ala. Seago shot and killed the 820-pound animal with his .38-caliber handgun and plans to mount the head and shoulders. (Courtesy of Wade Seago via AP)

So the man got his .38-caliber handgun and took aim. It took three shots to drop the hog, Seago said, and he later weighed it on scales at a peanut company.

Seago told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he plans to display the hog's stuffed head and shoulders at his taxidermy shop. He said the rest of the remains were discarded on a friend's property.

"It's so humid down here, it had to hang all night. I wouldn't trust the meat," he said.

Seago didn't have any regrets about killing the hog, which had tusklike teeth that were 6 inches (15 centimeters) long. Feral hogs cause millions of dollars in damage annually, and hunters on private land can kill as many of them as they want under Alabama law.

"I didn't think twice about taking down this hog," Seago said. "I'd do it again tomorrow."
CAIRO (AP) - Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi overruled a powerful branch of the judiciary by appointing its new leader on Wednesday, risking a backlash from the judges, who had nominated another candidate.

El-Sissi named Ahmed Abul-Azm as head of the State Council, which rules on disputes between the government and citizens. The appointment ignores the choice of council judges who, in violation of a widely disputed law, voted overwhelmingly in May to nominate Yahya Dakroury, their most senior justice, for the job.

Dakroury gained nationwide fame last year when he ruled to annul an April 2016 agreement to surrender two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia. El-Sissi's government insists the islands have always been Saudi, but were placed under Egypt's protection amid rising Arab-Israeli tensions in the early 1950s.

El-Sissi has argued in support of the islands' Saudi ownership, a stand that many Egyptians find vexing given that one of the two islands, Tiran, has a strong strategic value. It controls a narrow shipping lane leading north to the port cities of Eilat and Aqaba, in Israel and Jordan respectively.

Parliament hurriedly debated and approved the agreement last month in a series of charged and chaotic sessions, and el-Sissi ratified it, slamming shut an issue that sparked the largest anti-government protests since he took office in June 2014.

Critics say the surrender of the islands amounts to a pay-off to the Saudis, who have provided billions of dollars in aid to help prop up Egypt's economy.

A new law enacted in April allows the president to select the leader of each branch of the judiciary from three names submitted by its members. Previously, each branch had nominated its most senior member, and presidential approval was mainly a formality.

The State Council, signaling its opposition to the law, only nominated Dakroury.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - The Latest on London-based British American Tobacco's purchase of Reynolds American Inc., the second-largest U.S. cigarette company (all times local):

12:10 p.m.

Shareholders of British American Tobacco and Reynolds American Inc. support merging into the world's largest publicly traded tobacco company.

Shareholders of both companies on Wednesday approved London-headquartered BAT buying the nearly 60 percent of Reynolds it doesn't already own. The purchase is expected to become effective next week.

British American Tobacco sells Dunhill, Rothmans and Lucky Strike cigarettes. Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based Reynolds owns the Camel, Newport and Pall Mall brands.

BAT projects saving at least $400 million a year through cost-cutting of corporate operations, increased purchasing power, and other efficiencies.

Each Reynolds share will convert to $29.44 in cash and about half a share in BAT. The British company says the price is nearly 40 percent above the value of Reynolds' shares before its earlier, unsuccessful purchase offer in October.

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3:40 a.m.

Shareholders of British American Tobacco and Reynolds American Inc. were scheduled to decide Wednesday whether to approve a merger that would create the world's largest publicly traded tobacco company.

If approved during separate shareholder votes, the deal is expected to become effective next week.

London-headquartered BAT will buy the 57.8 percent of Reynolds it does not already own. Reynolds shareholders will receive for each share $29.44 in cash and 0.5260 BAT shares.

The $49 billion cash-and-stock offer announced in January valued each Reynolds share at $59.64, up from $56.50 offered in October.

BAT sells Dunhill, Rothmans and Lucky Strike cigarettes. The company said its cigarettes reach about 12 percent of the world's one billion smokers.

Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based Reynolds owns brands like Newport, Camel and Pall Mall.

Reynolds traces its roots to 1875, when Richard Joshua Reynolds started a chewing tobacco company in the city that has been its headquarters since. The takeover marks an end for what became R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, which stamped its home state of North Carolina as a center during a bygone era of smoking's popularity through its Winston and Salem brands.

The company's links with British American Tobacco date to 2004, when R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. merged with BAT's Brown & Williamson unit, creating Reynolds American. The two companies already have a technology-sharing agreement in the development of electronic cigarettes.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on investigations into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia (all times EDT):

11:30 p.m.

The Senate intelligence committee has scheduled perhaps the most high-profile testimony involving the Russian meddling probes since former FBI Director James Comey appeared in June.

In this July 11, 2017, photo, Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks to journalists in Moscow, Russia. The Russian lawyer at the center of the June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr. is known for her work trying to roll back U.S. sanctions on Russia. But Veselnitskaya was on the radar of American officials long before revelations about the meeting emerged. Government and legal documents show officials have tried to seize her emails and at times denied her entry into the U.S.(AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

A lawyer for Trump's powerful son-in-law and adviser says Jared Kushner will speak to the Senate intelligence committee Monday. Attorney Abbe Lowell says Kushner has been prepared to "voluntarily cooperate" for months and "appreciates the opportunity to assist in putting this matter to rest."

The session with Kushner will apparently take place behind closed doors.

Donald Trump Jr. is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next Wednesday along with former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

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6:10 p.m.

Members of the Trump campaign's inner circle are being scheduled to talk to Senate committees next week.

President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will speak with the Senate intelligence committee on Monday. That's according to his lawyer, Abbe Lowell. He says Kushner is voluntarily cooperating with congressional probes. That interview will likely take place behind closed doors.

Donald Trump Jr. and former campaign manager Paul Manafort are scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next Wednesday. They are among witnesses the panel has announced for a hearing on foreign influence in elections.

All three men are almost certain to be asked about recent revelations they attended a June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer and others in the expectation of receiving incriminating information about Hillary Clinton.

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1 p.m.

The House Intelligence Committee's top Democrat says the panel is reaching out to participants in a 2016 meeting between top Trump officials and people linked to Russia.

California Rep. Adam Schiff says the committee is asking them for "testimony and documents."

He says he wants to hear from everyone in the meeting, including Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. Veselnitskaya told a Kremlin-funded RT television outlet Wednesday that she is ready to testify before the Senate. Both the House and Senate intelligence panels are investigating Russian meddling in the U.S. election.

President Donald Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort all attended the meeting.

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12:50 p.m.

The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee says he wants President Donald Trump's son and his former campaign chairman to testify before senators leave for August recess.

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley said Wednesday that he's been talking to Donald Trump Jr.'s lawyer and "I didn't get any pushback" when he suggested he testify this week. But he said "it's kind of rushy" to call him in so quickly and Democrats wanted to review documents they'd requested first.

The hearing will review a law that oversees the registration of foreign agents. Trump Jr. and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort attended a campaign meeting last year with a Russian-American lobbyist who has been under investigation by the panel.

The Judiciary panel is also investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

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12:15 p.m.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr says he is not going to the White House while his panel is investigating Russian election meddling and ties to the Trump campaign.

Other Republican senators were heading to the White House for lunch Wednesday at the invitation of President Trump. But Burr was spotted buying lunch in the small cafeteria in the basement of the Capitol.

The North Carolina lawmaker told a small group of reporters that he was steering clear of the White House altogether while his investigation is underway. He said he does not want to risk being seen shaking hands with someone. Burr did not say who he was referring to.

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11:45 a.m.

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee says President Donald Trump's eldest son should testify publicly.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner says "it's still being worked out" if some of the committee's more high-profile witnesses, including Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, should testify publicly or privately. The committee is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible links to the Trump campaign.

Warner says that for Trump Jr., "he's got no security clearances that I am aware of, so he should be able to testify in public."

Trump Jr. and Manafort could testify in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The top Democrat on that panel, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, said this week that special counsel Robert Mueller has cleared them for public testimony.

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8:40 a.m.

The Russian lawyer who met with President Donald Trump's eldest son during the 2016 election campaign says she's ready to testify before the U.S. Senate.

Natalia Veselnitskaya says in an interview with Kremlin-funded RT television broadcast Wednesday that she's "ready to clarify the situation behind the mass hysteria, but only through lawyers or testifying in the Senate."

Donald Trump Jr. agreed to meet with Veselnitskaya in June 2016 after being told that she could provide incriminating information about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The meeting had been billed as part of a Russian government effort to help the Republican's White House campaign.

Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort also took part in the meeting at Trump Tower.
WASHINGTON (AP) - A woman with a record of trying to illegally enter the White House grounds has pleaded guilty to a similar offense.

Alicia Keppler of Spartanburg, South Carolina, pleaded guilty Tuesday to entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds. The incident occurred July 4.

A court document says in the latest incident she jumped over a bike rack security fence. The document says the 32-year-old previously jumped over a bicycle rack security fence in March 2016 and then twice violated a court order by returning, once to try to get into the White House Easter Egg Roll.

Sentencing is set for Sept. 19. She faces a maximum of a year in prison and a fine.

Keppler's attorney didn't immediately respond to a telephone call requesting comment Wednesday.
The Florida sinkhole that swallowed two homes last week isn't getting any deeper, but it's getting wider, officials said Wednesday.

It's now about 235 feet wide, about 10 feet wider than it was several days ago. It remains 50 feet deep, Pasco County officials said during a news conference.

Because of the sinkhole's growth, residents of two additional homes in the neighborhood have been warned they may need to evacuate.

They were told to gather their possessions in preparation of leaving, said Kevin Guthrie, Pasco County's assistant administrator for public safety.

Five homes near the sinkhole already had been evacuated.

'This is not a time for panic. We have somebody out here monitoring this sinkhole, monitoring the expansion. We will let people know in plenty of time that they need to get their stuff together and be ready to go,' Guthrie said.

Scroll down for video

The Florida sinkhole (above on Friday) that swallowed two homes last week isn't getting any deeper, but it's getting wider, officials said Wednesday. It's now about 235 feet wide, about 10 feet wider than it was several days ago. It remains 50 feet deep, Pasco County officials said

Because of the sinkhole's growth, residents of two additional homes in the neighborhood have been warned they may need to evacuate

They were told to gather their possessions in preparation of leaving, said Kevin Guthrie, Pasco County's assistant administrator for public safety. Above officials operate a ground penetrating radar at the sinkhole site Wednesday

Five homes near the sinkhole already had been evacuated. An edge of the sinkhole is pictured on Wednesday

The edges of the sinkhole (above on Wednesday) are caving in because there's no support for the sandy soil as it dries out, officials said. As the water in the sinkhole recedes, the sand on the right-angled banks can't support the weight of the ground and it's giving away

'When we say, 'Now is the time to leave.' It's time to leave. It's not time to pack things up.'

The edges of the sinkhole are caving in because there's no support for the sandy soil as it dries out, officials said.

As the water in the sinkhole recedes, the sand on the right-angled banks can't support the weight of the ground and it's giving away.

Engineers believe the solution lies in quickly getting dirt into the area to create a sloping bank that can keep the edges of the sinkhole from falling in, Guthrie said.

'We're working to that end right now,' Guthrie said.

Engineers hope to start bringing in dirt and removing debris over the weekend, or early next week.

None of 20 water wells tested came back positive for E. coli, but water samples from 17 of the wells will be re-tested for any signs of contamination.

Engineers believe the solution lies in quickly getting dirt into the area to create a sloping bank that can keep the edges of the sinkhole from falling in. Damage is pictured above Friday

None of 20 water wells tested came back positive for E. coli, but water samples from 17 of the wells will be re-tested for any signs of contamination. Damage is pictured above Friday

Pasco County's risk manager has told officials that the response to the sinkhole could cost at least $1.5 million but it will be likely much more. Debris in the sinkhole pictured above Friday

Greg Crumpton, a local health official, said elements found in water from those wells may be the result of improper maintenance by homeowners, but health officials want to make sure it's not from the sinkhole.

Pasco County's risk manager has told officials that the response to the sinkhole could cost at least $1.5 million but it will be likely much more, Guthrie said.

Despite the threat, those who live in the Land O'Lakes neighborhood where the huge hole has already swallowed two homes, a nearby resident is vowing to stay unless the hole consumes her house.

'I'm apprehensive, a little nervous,' said Patty Camunas, 57, whose family lives near the sinkhole.

But she added, 'Where are you going to go? There are sinkholes all over Florida. Unless something happens that the sinkhole takes my house, I don't plan on going anywhere anytime soon.'

Florida is highly prone to naturally occurring sinkholes because there are caverns below ground of limestone, a porous rock that easily dissolves in water. Debris in the sinkhole pictured above Friday

Pictured above is one of the homes that was swallowed by the sinkhole last week

Camunas was at work Friday morning when the sinkhole swallowed one house about 200 feet behind hers.

Her husband and daughter were home when officials told them to evacuate.

They were allowed to return Saturday but decided to give it an additional 24 hours. On Sunday, they returned.

'The only thing we lost is the food from the power being shut off,' she said.

Now, she said, the main commotion on her cul-de-sac is from curious people driving to the neighborhood to take selfies with the sinkhole in the background.

For Camunas, a lifelong Florida resident who built her home in Pasco in 1982, sinkholes are part of life.

She'd heard about a sinkhole in years past in another part of her subdivision.

Florida is highly prone to naturally occurring sinkholes because there are caverns below ground of limestone, a porous rock that easily dissolves in water.

Acidic rain can, over time, eat away the limestone and natural caverns that lie under much of the state, causing sinkholes.

Both extremely dry weather and very wet weather can trigger sinkholes. State geologists generally consider March-September 'sinkhole season' because that's when the state receives most of its rainfall.

In 2013 in Florida, a 37-year-old man was killed when a hole opened up underneath his bedroom.

That sinkhole, which garnered international headlines, opened in Hillsborough County, about an hour south of the sinkhole that swallowed two homes this month.

Engineering experts said it was too dangerous to retrieve the man's body, so they demolished the home and filled the hole with gravel.
BRIANCON, France (AP) - One series of giant Tour de France mountains out of the way. One more to come. And one less rival for race leader Chris Froome to watch quite so closely.

By sticking like fly-paper to the enterprising Romain Bardet, despite the French rider's efforts to distance him on the race's highest peak, Froome took a big step Wednesday toward a fourth Tour victory this weekend in Paris.

Italian Fabio Aru, on the other hand, fell behind on the barren slopes of scree and patchy grass in the thinning air of the mighty Col du Galibier, one of the Tour's most fearsome Alpine climbs.

Slovenia's Primoz Roglic crosses the finish line to win the seventeenth stage of the Tour de France cycling race over 183 kilometers (113.7 miles) with start in La Mure and finish in Serre-Chevalier, France, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

Like a yo-yo, the Italian repeatedly worked his way back to Froome's group of top contenders. But a last burst of speed from Bardet toward the top of the mountain pass, which rises 2,642 meters (8,668 feet) in altitude, proved decisive. Froome stayed with the French rider who stood next to him on the Paris podium last year, in second place. Aru did not.

On the long and hairy high-speed descent from there to the finish, they pedaled furiously to prevent Aru from catching them, whisking through the bends with no safety barriers and no margin for error. At their quickest, the riders descended at 75 kph (45 mph).

Rigoberto Uran, the Colombian who is making a habit at this Tour of being in the right place at the right time, always in Froome's shadow, zoomed down in that group, too.

The bill, at the end, was costly for Aru.

Having started Stage 17 in second place overall, just 18 seconds behind Froome, the Astana team rider slipped back to fourth - 53 seconds behind the race leader, who is getting stronger in the last week of the three-week cycling marathon.

Uran leapfrogged from fourth to second overall. Bardet is still third. That podium could stick all the way to Paris on Sunday, as they both trail Froome by 27 seconds.

"At this stage of the race, everyone's on their hands and knees, let's see what happens," Froome said. "It's still all to race for."

Beating everyone to the top of the Galibier - a feat that earned him a bonus of 5,000 euros ($5,750) from race organizers - was Tour rookie Primoz Roglic. Showing nerves of steel on the 28-kilometer (17-mile) descent to the finish at the Serre-Chevalier ski station, the former ski jumper became the first Slovenian to win a stage in the 114-year history of the Tour.

"It's unbelievable," Roglic said. "A really crazy stage."

Froome's group of Uran, Bardet and French rider Warren Barguil rolled over the line 1 minute and 13 seconds after the 27-year-old Team Lotto rider, who moved to cycling in his early twenties.

Determined not to give any ground, Froome outsprinted Bardet to the finish line, securing four bonus seconds for placing third on the stage. Uran was quicker still, beating Froome to get six bonus seconds for second place.

"It was a big day of climbing," Froome said. "My legs certainly felt a lot better than a week ago in the Pyrenees, which is a good sign."

The Team Sky leader was greeted at the finish by French President Emmanuel Macron, who followed the stage in a car with the race director.

If he wants to catch up with the main contenders, Aru will have to strike back on Thursday in the last Alpine stage, with a mountain-top finish at the Col d'Izoard - another storied 2,000-meter (6,500-feet) pass.

After that, the last big opportunity to make up places is the race-against-the-clock time trial in Marseille on Saturday. But that discipline isn't Aru's forte - unlike Froome.

"I fought until the very last meters, I gave my all to minimize losses," Aru said. "Anyway, I don't see a big drama in today's stage. The race ends in Paris."

While Bardet's repeated bursts of acceleration on the Galibier eventually cracked Aru, they couldn't shake off Froome. To hold onto the race leader's yellow jersey all the way to Paris, the three-time champion can ride defensively, keeping tabs on Uran and Bardet and, now to a lesser extent, on Aru.

"I did my utmost," Bardet said. "I raced to take the jersey and I came close to dropping them at the top of the Galibier. I attacked. That's the way I love to race. I have no regrets. I tried everything."

One of the most active riders on Wednesday was two-time champion Alberto Contador. Riding with the panache of his glory days, the 35-year-old Spaniard sped away from Froome's group on the second and longest climb, the 24-kilometer (15-mile) ascent to the Col de la Croix-de-Fer. But Contador faded in the Galibier and could not stay with Roglic.

"I want people to remember me as a rider who tried things, who was courageous," Contador said.

The Tour lost Marcel Kittel, the winner of five stages this year, after he crashed. The German had been leading the Tour's green jersey competition, awarded for points collected in sprints during and at the end of stages. With his departure, Australian Michael Matthews inherits the jersey.

Britain's Chris Froome, wearing the overall leader's yellow jersey, and Italy's Fabio Aru, in tricolor jersey, follow Team Sky riders Poland's Michal Kwiatkowski, front, and Spain's Mikel Nieve, in second position, as they set the pace for Froome when climbing Croix de Fer pass during the seventeenth stage of the Tour de France cycling race over 183 kilometers (113.7 miles) with start in La Mure and finish in Serre-Chevalier, France, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Britain's Chris Froome, wearing the overall leader's yellow jersey, and Italy's Fabio Aru, in tricolor jersey, follow Team Sky riders during the seventeenth stage of the Tour de France cycling race over 183 kilometers (113.7 miles) with start in La Mure and finish in Serre-Chevalier, France, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Britain's Chris Froome, wearing the overall leader's yellow jersey, France's Romain Bardet, center, and Colombia's Rigoberto Uran, right, sprint towards the finish line of the seventeenth stage of the Tour de France cycling race over 183 kilometers (113.7 miles) with start in La Mure and finish in Serre-Chevalier, France, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

Britain's Chris Froome, wearing the overall leader's yellow jersey, passes a the Union Jack and a French flag as he speeds downhill during the seventeenth stage of the Tour de France cycling race over 183 kilometers (113.7 miles) with start in La Mure and finish in Serre-Chevalier, France, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

France's Warren Barguil, wearing the best climber's dotted jersey, climbs Croix de Fer pass during the seventeenth stage of the Tour de France cycling race over 183 kilometers (113.7 miles) with start in La Mure and finish in Serre-Chevalier, France, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)
The Park Hills-Leadington Chamber of Commerce met for its regular investor meeting on Thursday at Cafe Redux in Park Hills.

The meeting featured an appearance from Rep. Mike Henderson R-Bonne Terre, who spoke about his efforts in Jefferson City on behalf of constituents and the importance of Gov. Eric Greitens newly announced Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP).

He said that he had only just been made aware of Greitens announced PDMP plan, and took a moment to explain how the situation had progressed to necessitate executive action on the governors part.

We failed, Henderson said. Im going to tell you that up front. We failed as a legislature tremendously. We passed it in the House (of Representatives), and I actually co-sponsored the bill. We fought hard for probably a month and a half or two months to get that through.

Henderson said the bill was laid low by a "poison pill" amendment that was added to the proposed legislation by Missouri Senator Rob Schaaf.

Henderson said a poison pill is an amendment added to a bill to make it virtually impossible to support by those who originally wrote the legislation. In this case, Henderson said Schaafs amendment would have made the process of writing or filling prescriptions an arduous and time-consuming thing.

All of a sudden I get a call from the state pharmacy association, Henderson said. And they said, Were out. Were not in it anymore because it would make our jobs untenable. We cant do it. So consequently, his poison pill made everybody get out, and nothing happened.

Henderson then received word of Greitens pursuing an executive order through the Missouri Health Department.

Henderson explained the executive action would accomplish what Sen. Schaaf had opposed in the Senate, effectively giving the state health department an opportunity to track the opioid prescription drugs prescribed in Missouri to halt doctor shopping.

And I want to brag on your (county) health department over here, Henderson said. Theyd already applied for the grant. And your county commissioners had already agreed to do our own county PDMP.

So if you see people from the health department or the commissioners, please say something to them. Because they stepped up when we failed to get it through up there. We should have, but we didnt.

Maybe the PDMP will be a first step as we start trying to work toward this drug addiction problem that we have, he added. We have to do something.

Henderson began his time with the chamber by speaking about things hed learned about how things work in Jefferson City, such as party affiliation, lobbying and regulations.

Theres three groups, Henderson said. Everybody thinks of Democrats and Republicans, but theres really three groups. Theres the liberals on the left, and Ive got a lot of good friends over there. Then weve got mainly the Republicans that are over on the right.

And then like myself, Im a moderate conservative, more in the middle. Luckily, we have more in the middle than we do on either end right now. In my opinion, thats a good thing.

Henderson told the chamber members that their small businesses are what drives the State of Missouri, not the big companies.

And what our job is up there  I feel its not to create jobs, he said. Government does not create jobs. All it does is create waste most of the time when it tries. Our job is to pass policies to get out of your way so you all can create jobs.

Henderson said hes found that lobbyists arent necessarily the slimy creatures that theyre often portrayed to be, but just people whose job it is to represent their particular industries. He also briefly spoke about Missouri becoming the last state to join the REAL I.D. Act of 2005, which requires new licenses be issued for boarding planes and entering federal courthouses.

Henderson also discussed creating an environment conducive to job creation in the state, with a major emphasis on reducing regulation and training a viable workforce.

Workforce Development is the one area in Missouri that weve got to do better at, Henderson said. Finding workers that are already trained to do the jobs you want them to do. Were working on that pretty hard right now.

Henderson said Missouri had recently been upgraded from 31st to 22nd place among business friendly states, momentum that he hopes to capitalize on to bring more business to the state.

In other chamber business, President Brad Dush said the August 15 investor meeting will serve as a time to discuss the upcoming Battle of the Badges shooting competition which is scheduled for Sep. 9.
The Supreme Court is granting the Trump administration's request to more strictly enforce its ban on refugees, at least until a federal appeals court weighs in.

But the justices are leaving in place a lower court order that makes it easier for travelers from six mostly Muslim countries to enter the United States.

The administration had appealed last week's ruling by U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson that required the government to allow in refugees formally working with a resettlement agency in the United States. Watson also vastly expanded the family relations that refugees and visitors can use to get into the country.

The high court on Wednesday blocked Watson's order as it applies to refugees, but not the expanded list of relatives. The justices said the federal appeals court in San Francisco should now consider the appeal. It's not clear how quickly that will happen.

Supreme Court boost: Trump was having lunch with Republican senators as the Supreme Court announced it would uphold one part of his travel ban but not another

Final ruling later: The Supreme Court will consider the travel ban in its entirety after a lengthy series of rulings in lower courts and by the justices themselves

In the meantime, though, up to 24,000 refugees who already have been assigned to a charity or religious organization in the U.S. will not be able to use that connection to get into the country.

The Supreme Court also denied the administration's request to clarify its ruling last month that allowed the administration to partially reinstate a 90-day ban on visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and a 120-day ban on refugees from anywhere in the world.

The court's ruling exempted a large swath of refugees and travelers with a 'bona fide relationship' with a person or an entity in the U.S.

The justices did not define those relationships but said they could include a close relative, a job offer or admission to a college or university.

Watson's order added grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins to a list that already included a parent, spouse, fiance, son, daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law or sibling already in the U.S.

The expanded list of relatives remains in effect.

Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas would have blocked Watson's order in its entirety.

Those same three justices said last month they would have allowed the Trump travel ban to take full effect.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - The Latest on the fatal shooting of an Australian woman by police in Minneapolis (all times local):

3:55 p.m.

Some legal experts say the Minneapolis police officer who shot and killed an Australian woman after she called 911 to report a possible rape is smart not to talk to investigators.

In this May 2016 image provided by the City of Minneapolis, police officer Mohamed Noor poses for a photo at a community event welcoming him to the Minneapolis police force. Noor, a Somali-American, has been identified by his attorney as the officer who fatally shot Justine Damond, of Australia, late Saturday, July 15, 2017, after she called 911 to report what she believed to be an active sexual assault. (City of Minneapolis via AP)

Mohamed Noor has yet to talk with agents investigating Sunday night's shooting, and his attorney has given no indication he will.

Defense attorneys and legal scholars say police have the same constitutional right against self-incrimination as everyone else.

They say the department's internal affairs unit can compel Noor to give a statement, and fire him if he refuses, but that statement cannot be used against him in any criminal investigation.

In contrast, St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez voluntarily spoke with agents after shooting Philando Castile last summer. Prosecutors used his statement during his manslaughter trial, but the jury acquitted him.

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12:20 p.m.

An Australian woman who was shot to death by a Minneapolis police officer that night called 911 twice to report a possible sexual assault in the alley behind her home.

City officials on Wednesday released transcripts of the 911 calls that Justine Damond made Saturday night. Damond was killed by a responding officer after she approached their squad car when it finally arrived.

Damond made her first call at 11:27 p.m., when she said she heard a possible sexual assault. Damond told the dispatcher she wasn't sure but thought a woman was in distress. She called back eight minutes later when no officers had arrived and told the dispatcher she was worried they had the gone to the wrong address.

Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is investigating the shooting.

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11:45 a.m.

The attorney for a Minneapolis police officer whose partner fatally shot an Australian woman says it was reasonable for the officers to have believed that they might be targets of an ambush.

Officer Matthew Harrity told investigators he heard a loud sound before Officer Mohamed Noor shot 40-year-old Justine Damond.

According to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Harrity told investigators he and Noor were in a squad car Saturday when the sound startled Harrity. Damond appeared at the driver's side door and Noor shot her from the passenger seat.

Harrity's attorney, Fred Bruno, tells the Star Tribune "it's certainly reasonable" to assume any officer would be concerned about an ambush. He referenced the recent death of a New York City officer killed in her squad car.

Bruno declined to provide specifics about the case.

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12:15 a.m.

The partner of a Minneapolis police officer who shot and killed an Australian woman who had called 911 told investigators he was startled by a loud sound near their squad car seconds before his partner fired his weapon.

Officer Matthew Harrity's account was released Tuesday by state investigators.

It's the first to emerge about the moments leading up to the death of 40-year-old Justine Damond. It's also the only account, since the officer who fired the shot has refused to be interviewed.

Investigators say they cannot compel Officer Mohamed Noor to give an interview.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension says Damond approached the driver's side window of the squad car immediately after Harrity had been startled by the sound. Noor, in the passenger seat, shot Damond through the open driver's side window.

This undated photo provided by Stephen Govel/www.stephengovel.com shows Justine Damond, of Sydney, Australia, who was fatally shot by police in Minneapolis on Saturday, July 15, 2017. Authorities say that officers were responding to a 911 call about a possible assault when the woman was shot. (Stephen Govel/www.stephengovel.com via AP)

In this May 2016 photo provided by the City of Minneapolis, police Officer Mohamed Noor, right, is greeted by a well-wisher at a community event welcoming him to the Minneapolis police force. Noor, a Somali-American, has been identified as the officer who fatally shot Justine Damond, of Sydney, Australia, late Saturday, July 15, 2017. Authorities have released no details about what led to the shooting of Damond, a meditation teacher and bride-to-be, who was killed after calling 911 to report what she believed to be an active sexual assault. (City of Minneapolis via AP)

A makeshift memorial is left at the scene where a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed Justine Damond, Monday, July 17, 2017 in Minneapolis, Minn. The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension released a statement Sunday saying two Minneapolis officers responded to a 911 call for a potential assault late Saturday. Exact details weren't released, but officials said an officer fired a gun, killing Diamond. (Elizabeth Flores/Star Tribune via AP)

Friends and strangers leave flowers at a makeshift memorial at the scene where a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed Justine Damond, of Australia, Monday, July 17, 2017 in Minneapolis. The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension released a statement Sunday saying two Minneapolis officers responded to a 911 call for a potential assault late Saturday. Exact details weren't released, but officials said an officer fired a gun, killing Damond. (Elizabeth Flores/Star Tribune via AP)

ADDS NAME OF WOMAN KILLED - A crowd gathers to remember Justine Damond, from Sydney, Australia, who was shot and killed late Saturday by police, Sunday evening, July 16, 2017 in Minneapolis. The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension released a statement Sunday saying two Minneapolis officers responded to a 911 call for a potential assault late Saturday. Exact details weren't released, but officials said an officer fired a gun, killing the woman. (Jeff Wheeler/Star Tribune via AP)

Family and friends gather on Sydney's Freshwater Beach, Wednesday, July 19, 2017, following a candlelight vigil, where they threw hundreds of pink flowers into the ocean for Justine Damond who was shot by a Minneapolis last weekend. Damond, a 40-year-old spiritual healer and bride-to-be, was shot Saturday night by one of the two officers responding to her 911 call. Damond had called police about what she thought was a sexual assault in the alley behind her home. (Dean Lewins/AAP Image via AP)

Assistant Police Chief Medaria Arradondo and Mayor Betsy Hodges address the latest developments in the death of Justine Damond, Tuesday, July 18, 2017, in Minneapolis, Minn. Damond, of Australia, was shot and killed on Saturday, July 15 by a Minneapolis police officer after she called 911 to report what she believed to be a possible assault. (Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Star Tribune via AP)

Mayor Betsy Hodges and Assistant Police Chief Medaria Arradondo address the latest developments in the death of Justine Damond, Tuesday, July 18, 2017, in Minneapolis, Minn. Damond, of Australia, was shot and killed on Saturday, July 15 by a Minneapolis police officer after she called 911 to report what she believed to be a possible assault. (Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Star Tribune via AP)
LONDON (AP) - Egyptian authorities transferred scores of detained students from China's Uighur community to a massive prison complex in Cairo on Wednesday for interrogation alongside Chinese officials, students and activists from the ethnic minority said.

Egypt appears to be assisting China in a crackdown on the group as Cairo looks to Beijing as a key ally and source of much-needed investment, including in mega-projects like the construction of a new capital and an expansion of the Suez Canal.

Egyptian authorities in coordination with Beijing have detained some 120 students this month, with at least 80 still held, activist Abduweli Ayup said from Turkey. Others put the total figure near 200.

Chinese authorities have been waging a wide-scale security crackdown in Xinjiang, in China's far west, which officials say is necessary to curb Islamic extremism. Beijing is also reportedly seeking the immediate return of Uighurs studying abroad.

Overseas Uighurs and human rights groups say the measures have turned Xinjiang into a police state, with widespread arbitrary detentions and invasive surveillance.

The detentions in Egypt underline Beijing's determination to extend its reach abroad to a popular destination for religious study among China's Muslims, many of whom attend the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islam.

Uighur students who have gone underground in Egypt say friends inside the notorious Tora prison told them that police are collecting students who were detained elsewhere and bringing them there for possible deportation at Beijing's request.

"The Egyptian Interior Ministry is gathering all the detained Turkistani students in Egypt from different police stations and airports and is transporting them all to Tora prison, and is starting to interrogate the students before Chinese investigators," they said in an Arabic-language statement. Turkistan refers to an area in central Asia that includes the Uighurs' native Xinjiang province, and that separatists have sought as a state for decades.

The broad sweep in Cairo included raids at restaurants, apartments and a supermarket. On July 1, a masked SWAT team stormed a Uighur restaurant and arrested nearly 40 Uighurs inside, according to witnesses and activists.

Neither the Egyptian Interior Ministry nor the Chinese Embassy responded to requests for comment, although a Foreign Ministry spokesman in Beijing had previously acknowledged the detentions by saying the individuals would receive consular visits. He gave no further details.

A message in the Uighur language circulated by activists on social media and signed by a woman who identified herself only as "the wife of Qari" said that she had been allowed to see her detained husband and that his and the students' condition was dire.

"The police from China are forcing them to accept their 'crime' and they are not getting enough food to eat," she said, adding that some 10 students were being held in Cairo's Ain Shams detention center. Students have also reported fellow Uighurs being held in other police stations across the sprawling Egyptian capital.

Videos shared on social media earlier this month purportedly showed more than 70 Uighurs sitting on a floor in a government building and others being driven in a truck in handcuffs. Egyptian officials denied Uighurs were being held at Cairo's international airport for deportation at the time but declined to comment further.

It was not possible to independently verify the videos or the woman's statement.

Lucia Parrucci, a spokeswoman for the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, a Brussels-based advocacy group, said that some 150 students are at immediate risk for deportation to China, where they face immediate imprisonment, and where some of their families have been detained to encourage their return.

"We have learned that many of the students have been arrested directly at the airport upon their return and sent to re-education camps," she said. "None of them have been able to see family members and no information was provided to their families about their whereabouts."

Egypt has itself faced widespread allegations of human rights violations since the military overthrew an elected Islamist president in 2013. Egyptian police have arrested thousands of dissidents, holding many without charge. Egypt is also battling an increasingly powerful Islamic State-led insurgency in the northern Sinai Peninsula.

Egypt has held up Al-Azhar as a bastion of moderate Islam, but that reputation could be undermined by its raids against the Uighurs under the banner of Chinese-branded anti-terrorism efforts, as most Uighurs study there.

The predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking people - ethnically distinct from China's Han majority - have chafed for decades under Beijing's heavy-handed rule.

Uighur separatists belonging to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a militant group based in the rugged tribal areas of nearby Afghanistan and Pakistan and allied with al-Qaeda, have been blamed for attacks in Chinese cities. The militants often use crude but effective weapons such as knives, Molotov cocktails and speeding vehicles. Uighurs have also surfaced in Syria fighting for the Islamic State group.

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Follow Brian Rohan on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/brian_rohan
MARIPOSA, Calif. (AP) - The Latest on wildfires burning in the west (all times local):

4:10 p.m.

California fire officials say they expect Yosemite National Park will escape a growing wildfire to the west of the park.

Flames from a backfire burn as CalFire crews battle the Ditwiler Fire near Mariposa, Calif., on Tuesday, July 18, 2017. Record rain and snowfall in the mountains this winter was celebrated for bringing California's five-year drought to its knees, but it has turned into a challenge for firefighters battling flames feeding on dense vegetation, officials said. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

More than 2,200 firefighters on Wednesday were fighting the wildfire, which is about 35 miles west of Yosemite at the closest. The fire has nearly doubled in size in a day, to more than 70 square miles (180 square kilometers).

Authorities have closed one of several roads into Yosemite. Park spokesman Scott Gediman says Yosemite is warning visitors with breathing problems to be aware of smoky haze wafting into Yosemite Valley from the fire.

California fire spokesman Jordan Motta says the wildfire is currently moving south, away from Yosemite. The evacuated Gold Rush-era town of Mariposa is almost empty of all but emergency crews, as fire spreads on ridges near that community.

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10:55 a.m.

A Yosemite National Park official says Highway 140 into Yosemite Valley from Mariposa is closed as a stubborn wildfire rages several dozen miles from the park.

All other entrances to the park are open.

Park spokesman Scott Gediman says the fire is about 35 miles from Yosemite boundaries at the closest. Gediman says power was out for a while Tuesday night because of the fire, but is back on, and internet and some cellphone coverage is out Wednesday.

Gediman says the park has visitors Wednesday and no big problems because of the fire. The park is recommending that visitors with breathing difficulties consider there may be extra smoke and ash in the air

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8:15 a.m.

A stubborn wildfire burning in the rugged mountains outside Yosemite National Park has placed nearly 1,500 structures under threat Wednesday.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection says that the fire nearly doubled in size overnight and has now scorched roughly 71 square miles (183 square kilometers).

Roughly 5,000 people are under evacuation orders as the fire burns in steep terrain with dense vegetation.

No injuries have been reported, but the fire has destroyed eight structures.

The fire is also threatening powerlines that provide electricity to the park.

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This story has been corrected to put the number of structures threatened to 1,500 and to correct the time to 8:15 a.m.

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4:30 a.m.

As wildfires rage throughout the western U.S., one California blaze in the rugged mountains outside of Yosemite National Park destroyed eight structures and forced thousands of nearby residents to flee their homes.

As of Tuesday evening, the fire had scorched 39 square miles (101 square kilometers), according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The blaze burning since Sunday was making its way to the hills on the edge of Mariposa, a town of about 2,000 people under a mandatory evacuation order.

The Northern California blaze is threatening at least 1,500 homes as well as powerlines that provide electricity to the park, officials said. The park remained open Tuesday but several roads frequented by tourists were closed.

A firefighter sprays water on a back fire while battling the Ditwiler Fire near Mariposa, Calif., on Tuesday, July 18, 2017. Record rain and snowfall in the mountains this winter was celebrated for bringing California's five-year drought to its knees, but it has turned into a challenge for firefighters battling flames feeding on dense vegetation, officials said. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Flames from a backfire burn above fire trucks as CalFire crews battle the Ditwiler Fire near Mariposa, Calif., on Tuesday, July 18, 2017. Record rain and snowfall in the mountains this winter was celebrated for bringing California's five-year drought to its knees, but it has turned into a challenge for firefighters battling flames feeding on dense vegetation, officials said. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Merced and Mariposa County Sheriff's Office members attend a briefing during a wildfire in Mariposa County, Calif., Tuesday, July 18, 2017. Tall grass from a deluge of winter rains is fueling wildfires throughout the Western U.S., damaging more than a dozen homes in Nevada and threatening hundreds more structures in California. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection on Tuesday ordered evacuations for some residents living southwest of Yosemite National Park. (Merced County Sheriff's Office via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump's push this week to get Americans to buy goods "made in America" is harder than it might seem.

Even for Trump.

The gold-plated pens the president uses to sign laws are assembled in Rhode Island but lacquered and engraved in China. The Boeing jet he posed with to showcase America's industrial might is 30 percent foreign-made. The firetruck the administration parked at the White House this week to promote U.S.-made goods gets about 10 percent of its parts from abroad.

FILE - In this Friday, Feb. 17, 2017, file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in front of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner while visiting the Boeing South Carolina facility in North Charleston, S.C. Trump's push to get Americans to embrace goods "Made in USA" is harder than it looks. Few products are American-made only. Trump himself signs laws with gold-plated pens assembled in Rhode Island but lacquered and engraved in China. He praises U.S. industrial might in front of a Boeing jet whose parts are 30 percent foreign-made. And there's a good reason why this is the case: U.S. manufacturers rely on global supply chains and Americans buy foreign goods because they prefer lower prices. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

Fact is, in a 21st century global economy, few products are exclusively American-made. U.S. manufacturers rely on global supply chains and many people buy foreign goods for the simple reason that they value lower prices.

Even for people who prefer to buy America-only, it is increasingly hard to identify which products qualify as such.

Promoting American-made products is "catnip" to politicians, notes Dan Ikenson, a trade analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute. But it comes at a price:

"When people feel compelled to buy local, buy American, they generally spend more money, which means they have less to spend on other things or to save," Ikenson says.

In his celebration this week of American-made products this week, Trump has yet to acknowledge such nuances. He has argued instead that buying exclusively American will create more national wealth.

"When we purchase products made in the USA," Trump said Monday, "the profits stay here, the revenue stays here, and the jobs - maybe most importantly of all - they stay right here in the USA.'

Trump went beyond saying he would protect the U.S. manufacturing sector. He also pledged a crackdown on "the predatory online sales of foreign goods" that he said are "absolutely killing" U.S. retail stores.

The challenge for Trump is that most Americans put a high premium on saving money, which makes them more likely to choose less expensive goods from abroad.

Last year, an Associated Press-GfK poll found that Americans said they preferred to buy foreign-made goods over identical American-made goods if the foreign products were cheaper. Asked to choose between $50 pants made in another country and an identical $85 pair made in the United States 67 percent say they'd buy the cheaper pair from abroad.

The survey found that household income made little difference in such preferences. Americans in households earning more than $100,000 a year were no less likely than lower-income people to say they'd go for the lower-priced good from abroad.

Research by Amit Khandelwal, an economist at Columbia University, found that inexpensive imports disproportionately benefit poorer Americans who can struggle to afford daily expenses. Lower-paid households devote a greater portion of their earnings to such basic goods as food and clothing, whose prices often reflect inexpensive supplies from overseas, Khandelwal found. By contrast, more affluent households tend to spend more on services insulated from foreign trade, from gym memberships to child care.

If Trump were to raise tariffs on some imports, as he has proposed to do to encourage U.S.-made goods, lower-income households would struggle with higher prices, Khandelwal said.

"It's going to hurt the poor more than it hurts the rich," he said.

Companies, under intense competitive pressure to keep prices low, often turn to factories and suppliers in such countries as China and Bangladesh, where wages are much lower and benefits often nonexistent. The famed American outdoors retailer L.L. Bean, which has been endorsed by Trump himself, estimates that it imports about 75 percent of its products, though its signature boots are still American-made.

Companies that have tried to move more of their production back to the United States from abroad have often had to shoulder higher costs. The Bollman Hat. Co., which makes the kangaroo-logo Kangol caps worn by celebrities like Samuel L. Jackson and Brad Pitt, moved into a Pennsylvania factory last year from China. It has since struggled to turn a profit.

The cost per hat is twice as high as it was in China - though the gap is narrowing - partly because the Pennsylvania workers don't yet work as fast as the experienced workers at a now-closed plant in southern China.

More broadly, the globalization of manufacturing has complicated efforts to identify which products truly are Made-in-America.

Consider cars. American University's Kogod School of Business and the website Cars.com conduct separate annual efforts to single out which cars are the most American-made. They sometimes produce conflicting results. This year, the Chevrolet Traverse, Buick Enclave and GMC Acadia stand atop the American University list. Cars.com singles out the Jeep Wrangler, Jeep Cherokee and Ford Taurus.

When Cars.com unveiled its list 11 years ago, more than 60 vehicles earned the American-made label. Because of globalization, the number qualifying under the original criteria fell to eight last year.

This year? Just three.

So the website has changed its rules. Now, more than 30 cars meet the standard.
DALLAS (AP) - Shares of United Airlines' parent tumbled Wednesday on the company's weak forecast about revenue trends for the rest of the summer.

United said that a revenue measure that often mirrors average fares would be flat in the third quarter after rising 2.1 percent from April through June. Rival Delta Air Lines gave a much more bullish prediction last week.

On a conference call Wednesday, United executives blamed other factors including rising competition in key markets such as China.

FILE - This Tuesday, July 11, 2017, file photo, shows a United Airlines jet on a runway at San Francisco International Airport, in San Francisco. Shares of United Airlines' parent tumbled Wednesday, July 19, 2017, on the company's weak forecast about revenue trends for the rest of the summer. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

In afternoon trading, United Continental Holdings Inc. shares were down $4.75, or 6 percent, to $74.15. Other U.S. airline stocks were little changed.

The revenue forecast put a damper on United's report after the market closed Tuesday that second-quarter profit rose to $818 million, beating Wall Street expectations.

It was United's first report since the widely seen video from April in which a passenger was dragged off an overbooked flight. The publicity led United to make changes, including raising the amounts that employees can offer passengers to give up their seats.

CEO Oscar Munoz said the changes have reduced bumping passengers by 85 percent.

Executives said United will test technology that lets the airline offer customers on full flights a travel voucher to give up their seat, which United would try to resell at a higher price. In the test, United will send out offers several days before the flight rather than waiting until passengers are at the gate or even - as in the April incident - seated on the plane.

Andrew Nocella, United's chief commercial officer, said the airline would start testing the idea with about 50 customers in the next few weeks.

"We think it's a great idea, and if it works and our customers appreciate it, a lot more to come," he said.

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David Koenig can be reached at http://twitter.com/airlinewriter
LONDON (AP) - Chelsea is set to strengthen its attacking options for its Premier League title defense by signing Alvaro Morata from Real Madrid.

The London club says it has agreed terms with Madrid to sign the 24-year-old striker.

The transfer will be completed after Morata's personal terms are finalized and a medical examination is passed.

Morata will be leaving Madrid for a second time. The Spain international was only bought back a year ago after two seasons at Juventus.

Although Morata won the Champions League final for a second time in June, he was only a late substitute in the victory over Juventus.
MARIPOSA, Calif. (AP) - A surging wildfire raced through California mountains and foothills west of Yosemite National Park on Wednesday, forcing thousands to flee tiny, Gold Rush-era towns, destroying 29 structures and wafting a smoky haze over the park's landmark Half Dome rock face.

The 4-day-old blaze nearly doubled in size overnight to 75 square miles (194 square kilometers), the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said.

At its closest, the blaze was still about 35 miles from the boundary of Yosemite, where campgrounds are open, park spokesman Scott Gediman said. The fire closed one of several roads into the park during its busy summer season, and rangers warned visitors with respiratory problems to be mindful of the haze, Gediman said.

An air tanker drops retardant while battling a wildfire near Mariposa, Calif., Wednesday, July 19, 2017. The fire has forced thousands of people from homes in and around a half-dozen small communities, officials said. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Among park visitors Gediman talked to, "people understand fire is a naturally occurring thing," he said. "Nobody was upset about it."

Yosemite does not appear at risk from the fire, which was moving south Wednesday, away from the park, California fire spokesman Jordan Motta said.

The fire has forced almost 5,000 people from homes in and around a half-dozen small communities, officials said.

Heavy smoke hung in the air over Mariposa, a town of 2,000 with century-old wooden buildings, including what's touted as the oldest active courthouse west of the Rocky Mountains.

The fire was threatening about 1,500 homes and other buildings, after already destroying 29 structures. It's not clear what type of buildings burned. The flames are near Highway 49, a historical route winding its way up California foothills of the western Sierra Nevada dotted with little towns that sprouted along the gold Mother Lode that drew miners to California in the 1800s.

The fire got within a half mile of Mariposa but crews have been able to keep it out of the town, said Cal Fire spokeswoman Katherine Garver.

Tony Munoz, 63, and his wife, Edna Munoz, 59, were ordered out of their home outside Mariposa on Tuesday. They grabbed clothes, medicine and their three dogs and a cat before fleeing.

Driving out on narrow roads clogged by others getting out, "you couldn't even see the sun" in the ash-filled sky, said Tony Munoz, a school custodian.

Downtown Mariposa was empty except for firefighters and other emergency workers. Fierce flames were visible on slopes about a mile away.

Record rain and snowfall in the mountains this winter abruptly ended California's five-year drought. But that has increased the challenge for crews battling flames feeding on dense vegetation.

"There's ample fuel and steep terrain," Cal Fire spokeswoman DeeDee Garcia said. "It makes firefighting difficult."

Statewide, about 6,000 firefighters were battling 17 large wildfires, including about 2,200 at the fire near Yosemite.

Gov. Jerry Brown has declared an emergency, bolstering the state's resources to battle the fire that he said has forced thousands of residents to flee and is expected to continue burning.

In Nevada, firefighters got a handle on a wind-driven wildfire that destroyed four homes and damaged several more. Bureau of Land Management spokesman Greg Deimel said Wednesday that no one was hurt in the fire that broke out in extremely windy conditions just east of Elko.

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Kristin Bender in San Francisco contributed to this report.

Flames from a backfire burn as CalFire crews battle a wildfire near Mariposa, Calif., Tuesday, July 18, 2017. Record rain and snowfall in the mountains this winter was celebrated for bringing California's five-year drought to its knees, but it has turned into a challenge for firefighters battling flames feeding on dense vegetation, officials said. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

These Tuesday, July 18, 2017, webcam photos provided by the Yosemite Conservancy show the monolith known as Half Dome as smoke from the Ditwiler fire swirls into Yosemite Valley, from late morning to early afternoon, in Yosemite National Park, Calif. The Northern California blaze is also threatening powerlines that provide electricity to the park, officials said. The park remained open Wednesday but several roads frequented by tourists were closed. (Webcam by Yosemite Conservancy at yosemiteconservancy.org via AP)

A chimney stands at a burned residence on Yaqui Gulch Road as a wildfire burns near Mariposa, Calif., on Wednesday, July 19, 2017. The fire has forced more than 4,000 people from homes in and around a half-dozen small communities, officials said (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

A scorched car rests next to a residence leveled by the Detwiler fire near Mariposa, Calif., on Wednesday, July 19, 2017. A surging wildfire raced through California mountains and foothills west of Yosemite National Park on Wednesday, forcing thousands to flee tiny, Gold Rush-era towns. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

An air tanker drops retardant while battling a wildfire fire near Mariposa, Calif., on Wednesday, July 19, 2017. According to fire officials, the blaze has scorched more than thousands of acres and destroyed multiple structures. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

An air tanker drops retardant while battling a wildfire near Mariposa, Calif., on Wednesday, July 19, 2017. The fire has forced thousands of people from homes in and around a half-dozen small communities, officials said. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

A burned structure stands atop a hill on Yaqui Gulch Road as a wildfire burns near Mariposa, Calif., on Wednesday, July 19, 2017. According to fire officials, the blaze has scorched thousands of acres and destroyed multiple structures. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

A chimney stands at a burned residence on Yaqui Gulch Road as a wildfire burns near Mariposa, Calif., on Wednesday, July 19, 2017. The fire has forced thousands of people from homes in and around a half-dozen small communities, officials said. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Melted lawn chairs rest outside a residence leveled by the Detwiler fire near Mariposa, Calif., on Wednesday, July 19, 2017. A surging wildfire raced through California mountains and foothills west of Yosemite National Park on Wednesday, forcing thousands to flee tiny, Gold Rush-era towns. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Evacuees Don and Jodi Roark, who are unsure if their Bear Valley house is still standing, rest outside a Red Cross center for Detwiler fire evacuees in Oakhurst, Calif., on Wednesday, July 19, 2017. A surging wildfire raced through California mountains and foothills west of Yosemite National Park on Wednesday, forcing thousands to flee tiny, Gold Rush-era towns. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

A chimney stands at a burned residence as the Detwiler fire burns near Mariposa, Calif., Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

A trellis rests in front of a Hummingbird Lane residence leveled by the Detwiler fire near Mariposa, Calif., on Wednesday, July 19, 2017. A surging wildfire raced through California mountains and foothills west of Yosemite National Park on Wednesday, forcing thousands to flee tiny, Gold Rush-era towns and wafting smoky haze over the park's landmark Half Dome rock face. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Flames rise behind a vacant house as a firefighter works to halt the Detwiler wildfire near Mariposa, Calif., on Wednesday, July 19, 2017. As wildfires rage throughout the western U.S., one California blaze in the rugged mountains outside of Yosemite National Park forced thousands of nearby residents to flee their homes. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Flames rise behind a vacant house as a firefighter works to halt the Detwiler fire near Mariposa, Calif., on Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Flames rise behind a vacant house as firefighters work to halt the Detwiler fire near Mariposa, Calif., Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Flames from a backfire burn above fire trucks as CalFire crews battle the Ditwiler Fire near Mariposa, Calif., on Tuesday, July 18, 2017. Record rain and snowfall in the mountains this winter was celebrated for bringing California's five-year drought to its knees, but it has turned into a challenge for firefighters battling flames feeding on dense vegetation, officials said. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
RACINE, Wis. (AP) - A father has been charged in the fatal shooting of his 3-year-old son in Racine, Wisconsin.

Police were called to the apartment July 12 where they found Jere'Miah Pitt dead of a single gunshot wound to the chest. A criminal complaint says his 30-year-old father, Jeffrey Pitt Jr., told police he drank five shots of alcohol, put in a movie for his son then passed out. He said he found his son dead the next morning.

The complaint says police found a gun hidden under Pitt's dresser. The Journal Times (http://bit.ly/2vCYxno ) reports prosecutors charged Pitt Wednesday with first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree recklessly endangering safety and illegally possessing a gun. Court records don't list an attorney to speak on behalf of Pitt.

Racine is 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of Milwaukee.

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Information from: The Journal Times, http://www.journaltimes.com
SALEM, Mass. (AP) - The Latest on the dedication of a memorial to the 19 people hanged during the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts 325 years ago (all times local):

4 p.m.

Descendants of some of the 19 people who were hanged during the Salem witch trials have attended the dedication of a memorial at the site of the executions.

Five women who were hanged as witches 325 years ago at Proctor's Ledge during the Salem witch trials are being remembered in a noon ceremony at the site of their death, pictured here, Wednesday, July 19, 2017, in Salem, Mass. Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Wildes were hanged as witches on July 19, 1692. It was the first of three mass executions at the site on Proctor's Ledge. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)

One of the descendants, Jeffrey Stark, said Wednesday the memorial "brings justice to the fact that they were wrongly accused."

The ceremony came 325 years to the day when Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Wildes were hanged at a site known as Proctor's Ledge. It was the first of three mass hangings at the spot.

The semi-circular stone wall memorial is inscribed with the names of the people hanged at the site.

Mayor Kim Driscoll says the shadows from the tragic episode in U.S. history "extend across our city in ways we cannot see with our eyes."

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2:30 p.m.

A memorial in honor of the 19 people hanged during the Salem witch trials has been dedicated 325 years after five women were killed at the exact spot.

Salem Mayor Kim Driscoll said Wednesday that the shadows from the tragic episode in U.S. history "extend across our city in ways we cannot see with our eyes."

The ceremony came 325 years to the day when Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Wildes were hanged at a site known as Proctor's Ledge. It was the first of three mass hangings at the spot.

The semi-circular stone wall memorial is inscribed with the names of the people hanged at the site.

Salem State University history professor Emerson Baker was part of the team that confirmed the site of the hangings last year. He says a memorial is the right thing to do.

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11:20 a.m.

Five women hanged during the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts are being remembered on the 325th anniversary of their deaths.

Salem and Danvers are holding ceremonies Wednesday.

Salem is scheduled to hold a ceremony at Proctor's Ledge where Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Wildes were hanged as witches July 19, 1692. Proctor's Ledge was the site of the hangings. A memorial also will be dedicated.

The Salem News reports that a descendant of Nurse is scheduled to speak.

Nurse also will be honored at a ceremony at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers. Danvers used to be part of Salem known as Salem Village.

Twenty people in all were killed during the 17th century witch hunt.

Rebecca Nurse was one of five women hanged as witches 325 years ago at Proctor's Ledge during the Salem witch trials who are being remembered in a noon ceremony at the site of their death, pictured here, Wednesday, July 19, 2017, in Salem, Mass. Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Nurse and Sarah Wildes were hanged as witches on July 19, 1692. It was the first of three mass executions at the site on Proctor's Ledge. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)

Area residents attend a memorial dedication, where five women were hanged as witches 325 years ago at Proctor's Ledge during the Salem witch trials are being remembered in a ceremony at the site of their death Wednesday, July 19, 2017, in Salem, Mass. Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Wildes were hanged as witches on July 19, 1692. It was the first of three mass executions at the site. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)

Karla Hailer, a fifth grade teacher from Situate, Mass., makes a video of the Proctor's Ledge Memorial before the noon dedication of the site Wednesday, July 19, 2017, at the site where five women were hanged as witches 325 years ago today during the Salem witch trials in Salem., Mass. Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Wildes were hanged as witches on July 19, 1692. It was the first of three mass executions at the site. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)
A group of West County Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA) students made a name for themselves on a national level earlier this month when they placed third in the organizations LifeSmarts Knowledge Bowl at the 2017 National Leadership Conference in Nashville.

According to its website, FCCLAs mission is, To promote personal growth and leadership development through Family and Consumer Sciences education. Focusing on the multiple roles of family member, wage earner and community leader, members develop skills for life through: character development, creative and critical thinking, interpersonal communication, practical knowledge, and career preparation.

FCCLA offers a variety of nationwide competitions each year and past West County students have qualified at the national level in the past, but never before in the LifeSmarts Knowledge Bowl, which focuses on knowledge in key areas related to FCCLA.

FCCLA has several conferences each year, from the state level all the way up to the national. Below the nation level are cluster conferences which break the country into two groups, with a conference in the east and the west. Late last year, the West County FCCLA students attended a cluster conference in Orlando.

Jacob Briley was one of the students who attended the conference, and was also recently elected the President of the Missouri FCCLA. He said West County has had its sights set on the LifeSmarts Knowledge Bowl since last fall.

It started last October when we registered to compete in the LifeSmarts Knowledge Bowl, Briley said. We had to do an online test that would place us with the other teams that would be competing at the cluster meeting. We went through the online test and we were ranked first at the cluster.

After competing at the cluster conference in Orlando, the West County team came out on top and qualified to compete at the National Leadership Conference earlier this month. Briley said the Knowledge Bowl is a team event, with different team members focusing on one of five different content areas, plus general FCCLA knowledge.

They test you on five different categories, Briley said. Personal Finance, Consumer Rights and Responsibilities, Technology, Health and Safety and Environment.

The way the matches are set up, for the first half of the match, its all one-on-one questions, Briley said. So the person for Consumer Rights on each team would be asked a question and only they could answer. So thats where the categories come into play. Then the second half of the match is the whole team. Anyone can buzz in and answer.

Syr Lyons, a recent graduate from West County, also competed with the FCCLA team. He said the team lost only one game at the national level, falling to the team that would go on to take first place. The questions ranged widely within the content areas, from what Lyons said could be considered common sense to lesser known information.

Some of the questions were common sense things, Lyons said. But some of them were things that are just helpful to know in life. Like one I missed in Orlando was, You read in the newspaper that ABC Company is reorganizing  what does that mean? And I thought it was a change in management or something. But it means theyre filing bankruptcy.

In addition to the Knowledge Bowl and other competitive events, the National Leadership Conference offers a chance for FCCLA members to take advantage of seminars and workshops on specific subjects.

One of the primary aspects of national conferences like this is that theyll have workshops, Lyons said. Theyll have people who are experienced in specific aspects come in and speak about what theyve learned. For example, I just graduated and they had a workshop for graduating seniors. They had three FCCLA alumni who had just graduated college who were basically speaking about how to stay involved with FCCLA after high school and tips for how to stay successful in college.

Briley said the workshops he took part in were slightly different, as hes the president of the Missouri FCCLA Conference.

The workshops I went to were a little different because I was elected as a state officer for Missouri FCCLA this year, Briley said. I went to the State Officer Boot Camp, and they pretty much just went over the best ways to lead your state and how to set goals and accomplish them.

Briley said he was elected to the state position by peers at the Missouri State FCCLA Conference after being nominated in the local region.

Its an elected position, so first you have to fill out an application to say youre running, Briley said. And then you run within your region, which Missouri has 14 of. Each region elects one state officer candidate.

Brileys election required speeches be given in front of a panel of FCCLA officials and the entire state conference before each schools voting delegates cast ballots for officers.

Brileys responsibilities include organizing the state conferences and activities for the coming year, which hell be attending a planning meeting for in two weeks time. At the National Leadership Conference, Briley carried Missouris flag across the stage alongside the other states presidents.

When the students werent competing or attending workshops, they had the opportunity to get out and enjoy Nashville in a variety of ways. Some went to "escape rooms" while some attended a private Dan + Shay concert for FCCLA students only. Briley even caught a glimpse of Duck Dynastys Willie Robertson out and about in town.

West County FACS teacher and FCCLA sponsor Tiffany Miller said the organization provides students a chance to really mature and grow as people and leaders.

FCCLA is a great organization, Miller said. They have a lot of opportunities for students to grow. What Ive seen in the six years Ive been doing it, is students that are shy and bashful really tend to grow out of their shell.

Miller added that at the sub-national Knowledge Bowl competition in Orlando, West County wasnt the only Parkland team to succeed.

When we were in Orlando, West County and North County took first and second to advance to nationals, she said. We were first and they were secondboth of us coming from St. Francois County, Missouri.

Miller said while this was the first year she had students who were involved with the LifeSmart Knowledge Bowl, they finished strong and look to do even better in the future.

Were getting our feet wet, Miller said. And we got third this first time, so it was pretty awesome. But now our standards are high. Weve got two spots to work our way up.
CHICAGO (AP) - The Latest on a yearslong effort to identify victims of John Wayne Gacy (all times local):

3:25 p.m.

A Minnesota woman says she's glad to finally know where her brother is after Illinois authorities identified him as a victim of serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

Sixty-one-year-old Lorie Sisterman of North St. Paul said Wednesday that detectives came to her home and let her family know that "victim No. 24 is our brother." He was identified through DNA.

Sixteen-year-old James Byron Haakenson of St. Paul disappeared in 1976. Sisterman said he called their mother to let them know he was in Chicago. She says her family filed a missing person's report. And when bodies were found in a crawl space of Gacy's Chicago-area home in 1978, the family told authorities Haakenson might be a victim.

Sisterman says the family plans to go to Chicago to put Haakenson's name and dates of birth and death on his grave.

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2 p.m.

An Illinois sheriff says the mother of a Minnesota teen identified as a victim of John Wayne Gacy had suspected her son was a victim of the serial killer and came to Chicago to talk to investigators in 1979.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said at a Wednesday news conference that at the time the only way to identify bodies was with dental records, which 16-year-old James Byron Haakenson's mother didn't have.

Dart says the dead teen's nephew always wondered what had happened. Earlier this year he saw a news clip of Dart talking about his effort to identify the victims. Dart says the nephew persuaded his father and his aunt to submit saliva samples for testing. The sheriff says investigators "got an immediate hit" when they ran tests this spring.

The teen's mother is dead.

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11:45 a.m.

A Chicago-area sheriff has identified another victim of serial killer John Wayne Gacy as a 16-year-old boy from Minnesota.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart issued a news release on Wednesday identifying the victim as James Byron Haakenson. Haakenson ran away from Minnesota and is believed to have been killed in August 1976.

The teen's remains were among those of more than two dozen young men found in the crawl space of Gacy's Chicago-area home in 1978. He's one of eight who were buried without being identified. Remains of the eight victims were exhumed in 2011 in an effort to identify them through DNA testing. Dart's office asked that relatives of young men who disappeared between 1970 and Gacy's 1978 arrest submit to DNA testing in hopes of finding matches.

Haakenson is the second of the eight to be identified.

Gacy was executed in 1994.

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10:40 a.m.

An Illinois sheriff plans to provide an update on a yearslong effort to identify victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

The Cook County Sheriff's Department announced in a news release that Sheriff Tom Dart on Wednesday will discuss the investigation that he launched in 2011. His office exhumed the skeletal remains of eight of at least 33 young men Gacy stabbed or strangled in the 1970s. Dart also asked that relatives of young men who disappeared between 1970 and Gacy's 1978 arrest submit to DNA testing in hopes of finding a match.

Months after the exhumations, Dart announced that one of the eight victims had been identified as 19-year-old William George Bundy.

The Sheriff's Department hasn't said whether another body has been identified.

Gacy was executed in 1994.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) - Australia is contributing funds to help Sri Lanka combat its worst outbreak of dengue fever, which has claimed 250 lives and infected nearly 100,000 people so far this year in the Indian Ocean island nation.

Visiting Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Wednesday night that Australia is giving 475,000 Australian dollars (US $377,000) to the World Health Organization to implement immediate dengue prevention, management and eradication programs in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka's hospitals are overcrowded with patients, and the government has deployed soldiers, police and health officials to inspect houses and clear rotting garbage, stagnant water pools and other potential mosquito-breeding grounds across the country. Health officials blamed the public for their failure to clear puddles and piles of trash after last month's heavy monsoon rains.

FILE - In this July 4, 2017 file photo, a Sri Lankan municipal worker fumigates during Dengue fever irradiation work in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Australia is contributing funds to help Sri Lanka combat its worst outbreak of dengue fever, which has claimed 250 lives and infected nearly 100,000 people so far this year in the Indian Ocean island nation. Visiting Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Wednesday night, July 19, 2017, that Australia is giving 475,000 Australian dollars (US $377,000) to the World Health Organization to implement immediate dengue prevention, management and eradication programs in Sri Lanka. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena, File)

The number of infections nationwide is already 38 percent higher than last year, when 55,150 people were diagnosed with dengue and 97 died, according to the Health Ministry. Cases were concentrated around the main city of Colombo, though they were occurring across the tropical island nation.

Bishop is on a two-day visit and will meet Thursday with government leaders

She said Australia is offering an additional 1 million dollars (US $795,000) for a research partnership between Australia's Monash University and Sri Lanka's Health Ministry to test the introduction of naturally occurring Wolbachia bacteria to eradicate dengue fever from Sri Lanka.

She said the bacteria "prevent transmission of dengue virus between humans" and that it has shown success during the last six years in countries such as Brazil, Columbia, Australia, India, Vietnam and Indonesia where it was piloted.

The bacteria have the ability to block other mosquito-borne diseases such as Zika and Chikungunya, the Australian embassy said in a statement.
FREEHOLD, N.J. (AP) - A New Jersey police officer who skipped out on his trial on charges he helped gang members in investigations has returned to court to hear from a woman who says he harassed her after she turned down his advances.

Dorothy Howard Brown and her sister testified against 49-year-old Asbury Park patrolman Keith German Wednesday.

The women told of seeing fliers around Asbury Park and on social media claiming that Brown had HIV.

Prosecutors say German had gang members initiate the smear campaign in exchange for tipping them off about police investigations.

Another woman testified that German gave her Brown's Instagram account and asked her to post the information.

Brown responded by posting on Instagram test results showing she didn't have the condition.

German was arrested in North Carolina last month after fleeing.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Travelers flying to the U.S. from nearly 300 international airports, including those in Mexico and Canada, are now subject to stepped-up security measures that include stricter screening for electronic devices larger than cellphones.

The regulations could include asking passengers to present larger electronic devices for inspection and prove that they can be powered on.

The Homeland Security Department demanded last month that airlines around the world step up security measures for international flights bound for the United States or face the possibility of a total electronics ban for planes. The deadline for some of those changes to take affect was Wednesday.

FILE - In this March 22, 2017, file photo, an Emirates plane taxis to a gate at Dubai International Airport at Dubai International Airport in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Travelers flying to the U.S. from nearly 300 international airports, including those in Mexico and Canada, are now subject to stepped-up security measures that include stricter screening for electronic devices larger than cell phones. The new measures may include asking passengers to present larger electronic devices for inspection and prove they can be powered on.(AP Photo/Adam Schreck, File)

Airlines and aviation authorities responded by warning passengers to expect longer security screenings at airports.

"Enhanced screening measures are in effect," read an alert on the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority's website. It said that passengers flagged randomly for additional screening will be asked to remove electronic devices from protective cases for inspection, and possibly show they can be powered on.

Mexico's aviation authority advised passengers on flights bound for the U.S. to arrive at the airport three hours early to comply with the new screening measures.

Toronto-based Porter Airlines, which operates numerous flights a day between the U.S. and Canada, informed frequent travelers of the new security measures in an email Wednesday.

"As of July 19, if you're travelling to the U.S., the U.S. Department of Homeland Security requires you to take your personal electronic devices larger than a smartphone, such as your laptop and/or tablet, out of their protective cases and to turn it on, if asked," they advised, adding that devices that failed to comply would not be allows onboard.

The new rules apply to roughly 180 foreign and U.S.-based airlines flying from 280 airports in 105 countries. The Department of Homeland Security says more than 2,000 international flights land in the United States each day.
David Davis has spent up to an hour in Brexit talks with European Commission chief negotiator Michel Barnier before officials got on with the serious business of detailed negotiations, a Government source said.

The Brexit Secretarys meeting during a flying visit to Brussels included 10-15 minutes alone and away from officials with his opposite number Mr Barnier, in discussions described as very friendly and positive.

Shortly after declaring it was time to get down to work in a media event alongside Mr Barnier, Mr Davis returned to London.

Watch David Davis as he arrived in Brussels today to reiterate that the UK and EU should work together to get the best outcome pic.twitter.com/7vHruZadK7  Department for Exiting the EU (@DExEUgov) July 17, 2017

The source dismissed suggestions Mr Davis had to leave talks early to get back to the House of Commons in time to vote against a Labour motion to vastly increase the amount of debating time for backbenchers legislation.

But the speculation came with the minority Government mired in difficulties, with Theresa May set to order senior ministers to keep Cabinet discussions private after a series of leaks targeting Chancellor Philip Hammond.

Labour said Mr Daviss exit from Brussels after a few hours, amid the storm of leaks at home, showed the Government is in disarray, while the Liberal Democrats mocked the Brexit Secretary for skulking back to the UK after just half a day.

Brexit Secretary David Davis met with EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier last week

Mr Davis had also spent time speaking to some of the 98 UK officials carrying out the detailed talks, and a Government source insisted: He didnt go back for anything specific, just that the timetable for today was always set out this way, that he would go back this morning, they had already agreed that.

During their meeting, Mr Davis and Mr Barnier talked about tasking their teams for talks, and said they were looking forward to getting into the substance of the issues, the source said.

Mr Davis is expected to return for further talks with Mr Barnier on Thursday and a potential press conference to wrap up the second formal round of negotiations.

learnt in Brussels today: there are 98 UK staff here, "the 98", around double number on EU Brexit taskforce. Talks in English and French  Arj Singh (@singharj) July 17, 2017

The four day talks got under way with a plenary session followed by working groups on the issues of citizens rights, borders, the UKs financial settlement and separation issues, including the UKs position in relation to the European civil nuclear regulator, Euratom, the source of Tory disquiet at home.

The mood among the 98 British officials in Brussels was said to be determined and a source said they covered quite a lot of ground in the talks, conducted in English and French.

A spokesman for the Department for Exiting the European Union said: As the Secretary of State has said, its time to get down to business.

Both sides have today got round the table and started the serious business of working through our positions in a number of areas.

We recognise that this will be a complicated and technical process and we look forward to coming back tomorrow to make progress on the work we have begun today.
Jeremy Corbyn has set out plans for a summer campaign in about 100 target seats along with a social media blitz as Labour seeks to keep up its momentum from the General Election.

The Labour leader told the partys MPs and peers about a campaign to target the 95 most marginal Tory-held seats, including 20 in Scotland.

At the final meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party before Westminsters summer recess, Mr Corbyn gave details of the largest campaign the party has mounted outside an election.

Jeremy Corbyn

Great to be in Southampton Itchen, where the Tories held on by just 31 votes, and where we are aiming to win at the next General Election. pic.twitter.com/MDeAKeuq41  Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) July 15, 2017

Mr Corbyn hopes to visit around 40 of the seats over the summer and a Labour source said the plans received an enthusiastic reception,

Generally everyone was up for it. We are all just keen to get involved and keep the campaign going, the source said.

The aim of the summer offensive is to demonstrate that Labour has the campaigning momentum to take the party into Government.

State of the Parties (chg vs MOS online 11/06) Lab 41% (-4); CON 39% (NC); LD 8% (+1); UKIP 6%* (+2); Others 6% (+1) pic.twitter.com/TNVOxO4eEc  Survation. (@Survation) July 15, 2017

The campaign will also promote the message of hope to transform Britain for the many not the few, particularly in marginal constituencies, a spokesman said.

There will also be a focus on encouraging Labour members to get involved in campaigning, particularly in target seats.
Tottenham defender Kieran Trippier has signed a new five-year contract, the club has announced.

Trippier, who joined Spurs from Burnley in June 2015, has put pen to paper on a deal that will expire in 2022.

The 26-year-old is expected to line up as Mauricio Pochettinos first-choice right back next season following the sale of Kyle Walker to Manchester City.

We are delighted to announce that @trippier2 has signed a new contract with the Club, which will run until 2022. #COYS pic.twitter.com/s3Yf9V8VZx  Tottenham Hotspur (@SpursOfficial) July 18, 2017

Trippier told the clubs official website: Im delighted with the new deal, its a great achievement for myself. Im delighted to get it signed.

I learned a lot in the Europa League and Champions League, playing with the players I have here and the manager also.

Its been a great experience and a learning experience. Ive progressed a lot and I thank my team-mates and manager for that.

 @trippier2: "I always believed that I can play at the top level."



 Watch the full interview - https://t.co/ZIv7CLUOnF #COYS pic.twitter.com/MoZIYfLKAQ  Tottenham Hotspur (@SpursOfficial) July 18, 2017

Trippier had been used largely as a back-up in his debut season under Pochettino but became a regular starter after Walker fell out of favour earlier this year.

He was picked ahead of Walker for Tottenhams FA Cup semi-final defeat to Chelsea in April and then preferred for their final match against Arsenal at White Hart Lane a week later.

Trippier earned a call-up to the England squad in May and made his first senior international start in a friendly against France.

Trippier made his international debut in England's defeat in France

At the back end of last season I was really enjoying it, I didnt want it to end really because I was getting a lot of game time, Trippier said.

When I first came the manager demands a lot in training and on the field. Hes helped me a lot with my defensive and attacking work.

As an all-round player I think Ive changed since Ive been here.
Sadio Mane will join Liverpools pre-season trip to Germany after being cleared to resume full training next week.

The Senegal forward underwent surgery in April having damaged the meniscus in his left knee, and was excluded from the squad which on Sunday travelled to Hong Kong.

Liverpool are scheduled to face Hertha Berlin in a friendly on July 29 before participating in the Audi Cup, which also includes Bayern Munich, and boss Jurgen Klopp expects to have the 25-year-old available.

Sadio Mane cleared to join Liverpool's trip to Germany following knee injury

 Follow our live blog for exclusive behind-the-scenes coverage from day two of #LFC's trip to Hong Kong: https://t.co/8OFnnWRQYY pic.twitter.com/7PF3ZaleC6  Liverpool FC (@LFC) July 18, 2017

Sadio is on the way back, Klopp told the clubs official website. The plan is he will come with us to Germany.

The plan is he trains completely normally with us when we are back in England.

We have been waiting long enough for him now. He is around (Melwood) all of the time and is in pretty good shape.

Unfortunately he was not ready to train, but he looked good, (the injury) looks good and so now he should be fine when we get back.
William and Kate started the second day of the Polish leg of their European tour poignantly at a Nazi concentration camp in Stutthof without their children George and Charlotte.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

There, they met with British survivors Manfred Goldberg and Zigi Shipper, who made a special trip to meet the Royal couple. They were back at the camp for the first time.

(Bruce Adams/Daily Mail)

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with Holocaust survivors

Throughout the day the couples car had been flanked by four security men, who walked alongside each corner as it came to a stop. Later, they visited Gdansk where they were greeted by thousands of flag-waving Poles.

teh Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

(Jane Barlow/PA)

(Jane Barlow/PA)

William and Kate were welcomed to Arthurs Court in the heart of Gdansk and they wandered through the Long Market with Neptunes Fountain, a symbol of Gdansk, nearby. The crowds, ten deep, were held back behind steel barriers as the couple sampled local produce.

the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

At a stall the Cambridges downed a Gdansk liqueur called Goldwasser  Golden Water  a strong root and herbal liqueur which has been produced since at least 1598.

(Arthur Edwards/The Sun)

It is very good, very sweet, William said after he downed the shot in one.

And very strong Kate added as she recovered from downing the 40% proof liqueur.

They also met former Poland president Lech Walesa, whose Solidarity trade union helped bring down Communist rule in the bloc, and later observed a minutes silence before laying down roses in memory of the fallen shipyard workers of 1970.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with former Polish president Lech Walesa (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

The Duke and Duchess with former President Waesa walk through the historic shipyard gates on their way to the monument to the fallen. pic.twitter.com/f8RxPNU97o  The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) July 18, 2017

(Dominic Lipinski/PA)

They added messages to the wall of solidarity during a visit to the European Solidarity Movement museum.

Dominic Lipinski/PA

Afterwards, the Royal couple attended a reception at the Gdansk Shakespeare Theatre, before watching a performance.

(Chris Jackson/PA)

(Chris Jackson/PA)

The Royal couple then chatted with the cast.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visit the Gdansk Shakespeare Theatre on the second day of their three-day tour of Poland.

(Chris Jackson/PA)

Many thanks to the people of Gdansk for such an interesting and enjoyable day in your city! #RoyalVisitPoland pic.twitter.com/qNHPcmUxlD  The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) July 18, 2017
Princess Charlotte stole the the show during the latest leg of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridges European tour  scampering up the planes steps and receiving her first official bouquet.

Princess Charlotte arriving at Berlin Airport in Germany

When William and Kate said goodbye to Poland, the two-year-old scaled the private jets steep steps using her hands and feet.

Princess Charlotte crawls up the plane steps

Kate watched carefully as her daughter made her way up to the cabin of the Embraer Legacy 600 jet, following her brother, Prince George, who had been eager to board the flight to Berlin.

Princess Charlotte crawls up the plane steps, watched by the Duchess of Cambridge

The Duke and Duchess were leaving Warsaw after a two-day visit that saw them celebrate the nations history, culture and ties with the UK.

Hallo Berlin! The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince George and Princess Charlotte arrive for #RoyalVisitGermany pic.twitter.com/MbQcALPsqt  The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) July 19, 2017

When the family arrived in the Polish capital, Warsaw, on Monday, George, who will turn four on Saturday, looked shy and reluctant to take part in the official welcome staged by the European nation.

However for the official departure he strode confidently across the airport runway, holding hands with his mother and father.

Prince George tugs at William's hand

He even tugged at Williams hand as he was saying goodbye to waiting dignitaries, appearing eager to board the plane. He then went ahead of his father and carefully climbed the steps of the jet, which seats 13 people.

When the plane touched down in Berlin, where a small group of officials were waiting to greet the royal visitors, Charlotte was spotted peering out of a window.

Princess Charlotte looks out of the plane window

After clambering up the plane steps in Warsaw, the journey down them in Berlin was slower, with the young princess holding on to a rail with one hand while clasping Kates fingers with the other.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with Prince George and Princess Charlotte arrive at Berlin Airport in Germany

Till Knorn, the German governments head of protocol, presented the Duchess and her daughter with a posy each.

The Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte arrive at Berlin Airport

Charlottes floral gift was a miniature version of her mothers and, as she smelt her bouquet, George, who was holding Williams hand, reached out for Kates posy and she lifted it out of his way.

Prince George arriving at Berlin Airport in Germany

The three-year-old prince appeared a little bored with the formalities of the official welcome and at one point buried his face in his arm as William chatted to Sir Sebastian Wood, Britains ambassador to Germany.

As William and Kate made their way along the line of dignitaries on the runway, Brigadier Rob Rider, the British embassys defence attache, shook hands with the two-year-old princess.

Kate, who was wearing a Catherine Walker dress, walked off the red carpet with her daughter, husband and son to start their three-day tour of Germany.

Hallo Berlin! The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince George and Princess Charlotte arrive for #RoyalVisitGermany pic.twitter.com/MbQcALPsqt  The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) July 19, 2017

Later the Duke and Duchess had extended discussions with Chancellor Angela Merkel, meeting her at the German Chancellery.

Flanked by security the beaming royal couple shook hands with Mrs Merkel as a European flag fluttered in the background.

The Duke and Duchess are formally welcomed to Germany by Chancellor Merkel #RoyalVisitGermany pic.twitter.com/ivDuzlR0ZW  The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) July 19, 2017

Kate and William  both wearing blue which is seen as representative of unity and solidarity in the EU  have been dubbed Brexit ambassadors, helping to maintain ties with Europe as Britain leaves the EU.

Welcoming Kate, Mrs Merkel asked if she spoke German to which a smiling Kate replied: No, no. Sorry.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with German Chancellor Angela Merkel

The trio then stood for pictures on a red carpet before Kate ushered William to stand between herself and Mrs Merkel for a final pose. They then headed inside the building for a private lunch.
Pep Guardiola still wants to make as many as four more summer signings, with the Manchester City manager confirming interest in Real Madrid right-back Danilo.

An outstanding start to life in the Premier League last season soon tapered off as the Spaniards first campaign at the Etihad Stadium ended trophyless.

Guardiola has overseen major surgery ahead of the 2017-18 season, with a number of players heading for the City exit in a summer that has seen Bernardo Silva, Ederson Moraes and Kyle Walker arrive.

Danilo

The boss on potential incomings and the importance of pre-season...#cityontour  https://t.co/F4OdaQCehB  Manchester City (@ManCity) July 19, 2017

City are not done there, though.

Guardiola refused to rule out moves for Arsenals Alexis Sanchez or Monaco full-back Benjamin Mendy, but confirmed an interest in Brazil international Danilo.

We have many options for people, players coming, but until the deal is done out of respect for the other clubs I cannot say absolutely anything, the City boss said.

Everything you need to see and more during #cityontour in one place!  https://t.co/FlwXNxij5X  Manchester City (@ManCity) July 17, 2017

But (Danilo) is one option we have.

I said hes a player from Real Madrid, so we are talking with not too much players but three or four players to try, if possible, to join us for not only the next season but the next three, four, five years because all of them are so, so young players.

We need that, refresh with the spirit of the new players. It is good for them, for the old players like Vincent (Kompany) and the other ones here in the club.

It is going to help us to rebuild a little bit more the club and well see.
Chelsea have agreed terms with Real Madrid for the transfer of Spain striker Alvaro Morata, the Premier League club have announced.

The 24-year-old, who helped Real to the Champions League title last season, is still to agree personal terms and pass a medical before the move is officially confirmed.

The Blues stepped up their bid for Morata after another potential transfer target, Romelu Lukaku, opted instead to join Jose Mourinho at Manchester United.

We have agreed terms with Real Madrid for the transfer of Alvaro Morata...https://t.co/uuenBgcPH2  Chelsea FC (@ChelseaFC) July 19, 2017

United had originally been favourites to land Morata, but turned to Lukaku after failing to come close enough to Reals reported 75million asking price.

That left the way clear for Chelsea to step up their bid for the Spanish star, who played under Blues boss Antonio Conte at Juventus.

Despite making no secret of his desire to leave Real, Morata jetted out for the clubs pre-season tour to the US, from which he is now expected to return.

Alvaro Morata

He scored 15 league goals for the club last season but grew increasingly frustrated at his limited opportunities behind Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale.

The deal will also be a timely boost for Conte who had endured frustration after failing to land either Lukaku or another potential signing, Borussia Dortmunds Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.
Everton have been dealt a double injury blow after Ross Barkley and Ramiro Funes Mori underwent surgery, with the latter expected to miss a minimum of six to nine months.

Argentina international Funes Mori, 26, suffered a torn meniscus while on international duty in March and has now gone under the knife again in Barcelona, meaning he will miss most of the 2017-18 season.

Barkleys future has been the source of much debate following manager Ronald Koemans insistence he must sign a new contract or face being sold this summer, but the midfielder is now facing four weeks out with a groin problem.

 | Ross Barkley underwent surgery on his groin earlier today.



More  https://t.co/lYxuslX5KQ pic.twitter.com/GPGizdOUz2  Everton (@Everton) July 19, 2017

The Toffees are currently in Koemans native Holland as part of their pre-season preparations and neither Barkley or Funes Mori have made the trip.

A statement on the clubs official website read: Ross Barkley underwent surgery today (Wednesday) on his groin, with the injury having prevented him from travelling with the Everton team last week to Tanzania and this week to Holland. The surgery has been a success and he is expected to be able to return to play in approximately four weeks.

Ramiro Funes Mori has had a problem within his knee and has undergone further surgery in Barcelona which will require prolonged rehabilitation of a minimum of six to nine months. The defender tore his meniscus while on international duty with Argentina in March.

Evertons season begins at Goodison Park next week with a Europa League qualifier against either Slovakian side Ruzomberok or Norwegian club Brann.

Ross Barkley, whose contract expires at the end of the season, is out for four weeks after undergoing groin surgery (Daniel Hambury/Empics)

Funes Mori signed for the club in 2015 and started 16 Premier League games last season and his absence leaves new signing Michael Keane, Phil Jagielka and Ashley Williams as Koemans only senior centre-back options.

Barkleys injury lay-off means his future may not be resolved imminently, with Koeman stating last week the situation regarding the England international was no clearer.

The 23-year-olds deal is up next summer and Koeman has repeatedly stated he would need to make a decision on his Everton career one way or another during this summers window.
Celtic booked their place in the Champions League third qualifying round as expected with a 4-0 trouncing of Linfield at Parkhead to go through 6-0 on aggregate.

The Hoops led 2-0 from the first-leg against the Northern Irish part-timers at Windsor Park on Friday night and the return encounter was even more one-sided with Scott Sinclairs fourth-minute goal no reflection on the first 45 minutes.

The goals came more readily after the break as midfielder Tom Rogic, who like Sinclair had scored in Belfast, added a second two minutes after the restart before Sinclair grabbed his second.

FULL-TIME: #CelticFC 4-0 Linfield FC



A trip to  awaits the Celts in the #UCL Third Qualifying Round! pic.twitter.com/lqAidNiXDx  Celtic Football Club (@CelticFC) July 19, 2017

Substitute Stuart Armstrong added a fourth in added time to send Brendan Rodgers side comfortably into the next round, where they will play Norwegian side Rosenborg with the first game at Celtic Park next week.

The Scottish champions are sure to be given a stiffer test against the Eliteserien league leaders, who overcame Dundalk after extra-time.
By Julia Love

MEXICO CITY, July 17 (Reuters) - Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's telecoms company America Movil said on Monday it was auditing its Guatemalan unit, which has become embroiled in a probe into suspected money laundering and illicit election financing by a former government minister.

Guatemalan police on Friday arrested 17 people on suspicion of involvement in a corruption racket allegedly directed by the country's former communications minister Alejandro Sinibaldi, who has been on the run since June 2016.

During the probe by a U.N.-backed anti-corruption body in Guatemala known as the CICIG, investigators found evidence of payments from Telecomunicaciones de Guatemala S.A. (Telgua), a subsidiary of America Movil, in Sinibaldi's account.

"Guatemalan law permits these contributions," a spokesman for America Movil said over the phone. "What we are trying to find out is why these contributions were made without observing the norms and requirements that Guatemalan law establishes."

Interviews with a former Telgua executive revealed that the payments were intended to secure the company favorable treatment in a dispute with a Tigo, a local rival, CICIG said.

The former Telgua executive took responsibility for the payments, and the company did not benefit from them, the America Movil spokesman said. "The commercial dispute between Telgua and Tigo was resolved through a private agreement ... without any intervention from the Guatemalan government."

A spokeswoman for Tigo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sinibaldi served under former President Otto Perez, who fell from power in 2015 following a CICIG-led investigation into his alleged involvement in a lucrative corruption racket.

Sinibaldi created a series of shell companies to launder money he collected in bribes to authorized state building companies, and some of that money also was intended to finance Perez Molina's right-wing Patriot Party, the CICIG said. (Reporting by Julia Love; Editing by Richard Chang)
By Andrew Osborn and Natalia Zinets

MOSCOW/KIEV, July 18 (Reuters) - The pro-Russian rebel leader of a breakaway region in eastern Ukraine announced proposals to abolish Ukraine and create a new state in its place on Tuesday, comments that could further undermine a 2015 peace deal that is already faltering.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko dismissed the idea, describing Alexander Zakharchenko, leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), as part of "a puppet show", with Russia pulling his strings in order to relay a message.

Ukrainian officials said Russia wanted to show the world, and the United States especially, it could keep the crisis in a suspended state and deepen it if need be. A new U.S. envoy for the Ukraine crisis was appointed this month and Moscow and Washington are likely to start regularly engaging on the issue.

Zakharchenko, who scarcely would have expected anything other than outright rejection from Kiev, said in a declaration that he and his allies were proposing a new state called Malorossiya (Little Russia) be set up with its capital in rebel-held Donetsk.

Malorossiya was the term used to describe swaths of modern-day Ukraine when they were part of the Russian Empire and is one which many Ukrainians today regard as offensive.

"We are proposing to residents of Ukraine a peaceful way out of a difficult situation without war. It's our last proposal," Zakharchenko said in a statement. The new state would be federal, with regions enjoying a large degree of autonomy.

He said the move was backed by delegates from different Ukrainian regions, though a statement from the neighbouring rebel territory of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic said it had been unaware of the initiative.

"SICK FANTASIES"

His declaration cast a shadow over the faltering Minsk peace agreement between the rebels and the Ukrainian government which has failed to quell fighting between the two sides and has only been partially implemented since a pro-Russian uprising broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Russia denies accusations it has delivered arms and provided troops backing rebels in the industrial, largely Russian-speaking east.

Yevhen Marchuk, Ukraine's representative in talks on implementing the peace deal, told Ukrainian TV channel 112.ua that Zakharchenko's declaration would complicate negotiations and looked like a Russian attempt to sabotage the process.

France, which along with Germany has been closely involved in trying to resolve the Ukraine crisis, condemned the idea and demanded Russia do more to prevent a further escalation.

A German government spokeswoman also criticised the move, calling it "totally unacceptable."

Ukraine's top military commander, Viktor Muzhenko, said on social media that the Ukrainian people would "bury" Malorossiya, calling the plan one of the rebels' "sick fantasies".

The Kremlin, which denies allegations it controls the rebels, was expected to comment on the matter later on Tuesday.

Three former rebel leaders told Reuters in May that a top aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin decides how the pro-Moscow administration of eastern Ukraine is run and who gets what jobs there, challenging Kremlin denials that it calls the shots in the region. (Additional reporting by Margarita Antidze in Tbilisi and John Irish in Paris and Andreas Rinke in Berlin; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Ralph Boulton)
By Andrew Osborn and Natalia Zinets

MOSCOW/KIEV, July 18 (Reuters) - The pro-Russian rebel leader of a breakaway region in eastern Ukraine proposed on Tuesday replacing Ukraine with a new federal state, in comments that could further undermine a 2015 peace deal that is already faltering.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko rejected the idea, describing Alexander Zakharchenko, leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), as part of "a puppet show", with Russia pulling his strings in order to relay a message.

France and Germany, which are involved in diplomatic efforts to end the Ukraine crisis, also condemned the proposal.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian agencies that Zakharchenko's statement was Zakharchenko's own initiative and that the Kremlin had learned about it from media reports.

Ukrainian officials contend that Russia wants to show the world, and the United States especially, that it can keep the crisis in a suspended state and deepen it if need be. A new U.S. envoy for the Ukraine crisis was appointed this month and Moscow and Washington are likely to start regularly engaging on the issue.

Zakharchenko, who would scarcely have expected anything other than outright rejection from Kiev, said in a declaration that he and his allies were proposing a new state called Malorossiya (Little Russia) be set up with its capital in rebel-held Donetsk.

Malorossiya was the term used to describe swaths of modern-day Ukraine when they were part of the Russian Empire in tsarist times and is one many Ukrainians today regard as offensive.

Ukraine, a country of about 42.5 million people, declared independence from Moscow in 1991.

"We are proposing to residents of Ukraine a peaceful way out of a difficult situation without war. It's our last proposal," Zakharchenko said in a statement. The new state would be federal, with regions enjoying a large degree of autonomy.

He said the move was backed by delegates from various Ukrainian regions, but a statement from the neighbouring rebel territory of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic said it had been unaware of the initiative and did not support it.

"SICK FANTASIES"

His declaration cast a shadow over the faltering Minsk peace agreement between the rebels and the Ukrainian government, which has failed to quell fighting between the two sides and has only been partially implemented since a pro-Russian uprising erupted in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Russia denies accusations it has delivered arms and provided troops backing rebels in the industrial, largely Russian-speaking east. On Tuesday the Kremlin said it remained committed to the Minsk peace deal.

Yevhen Marchuk, Ukraine's representative in the talks on implementing the peace deal, told Ukrainian TV channel 112.ua that Zakharchenko's declaration would complicate negotiations and looked like a Russian attempt to sabotage the process.

France condemned the idea and demanded Russia do more to prevent a further escalation. A German government spokeswoman also criticised the move, calling it "totally unacceptable".

Ukraine's top military commander, Viktor Muzhenko, said on social media that the Ukrainian people would "bury" Malorossiya, calling the plan one of the rebels' "sick fantasies".

Three former rebel leaders told Reuters in May that a top aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin decides how the pro-Moscow administration of eastern Ukraine is run and who gets what jobs there, challenging Kremlin denials that it calls the shots in the region. (Additional reporting by Polina Devitt in Moscow, Margarita Antidze in Tbilisi, John Irish in Paris and Andreas Rinke in Berlin; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Gareth Jones and Richard Balmforth)
By Guillermo Parra-Bernal and Bruno Federowski

BOGOTA/SAO PAULO, July 18 (Reuters) - Grupo Carrefour Brasil SA on Tuesday priced Brazil's largest initial public offering in four years at 15 reais per share, the bottom of a suggested price range, according to a securities filing late on Tuesday.

Reuters had reported the pricing earlier in the day citing sources familiar with the matter.

Carrefour Brasil, a unit of France's Carrefour SA and Brazil's largest supermarket chain, and shareholders secured 5.12 billion reais ($1.6 billion) with the transaction.

Carrefour Brasil sold 91.2 million shares in so-called secondary offering, in which current shareholders sell part of their stakes, and 205.8 million shares in primary offering, in which the proceeds go to the company's coffers.

At 15 reais per shares, Carrefour Brasil will trade at a discount against rival GPA SA in terms of enterprise value over earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, a metric known as EV/EBITDA. Other multiples, such as sales over EBITDA, yield a premium for Carrefour Brazil.

Investors were reluctant to bid at the top half of the 15-19 reais suggested range for a company that lacks a substantial competitive advantage, fund managers said.

Still, the IPO should help Carrefour Brasil add muscle to take on GPA, whose food division has recovered amid slowing appliance sales. Carrefour recently surpassed GPA as Brazil's No. 1 diversified retailer in sales.

The transaction seals the first phase of an alliance between Carrefour and Brazilian retail tycoon Abilio Diniz, which started in 2014. Diniz, whose family founded GPA, is Carrefour's third-largest shareholder and has a seat on its board.

Carrefour Brasil's IPO is the first of two such offerings this week, making it the busiest for share offerings since mid-February.

The separate offering of Brazilian depositary receipts (BDRs) in Colombia-based pharmaceutical firm Grupo Biotoscana SA has investors willing to place three times the amount of shares on offer at the mid-point of a 24.50-28.50 reais price range, two people with knowledge of the deal said.

Pricing of the offering, originally scheduled for Tuesday, was delayed to Friday after Biotoscana revised its financial statements in response to a regulatory inquiry over the accounting of its 2015 purchase of Laboratorio LKM.

Investors are wary of Brazilian IPOs after new issues failed to deliver promised returns over the past decade.

Less than one-third of the 115 IPOs priced since the start of 2007 yielded returns above Brazil's interbank lending rate, Thomson Reuters data shows.

($1 = 3.1580 reais) ($1 = 3.1542 reais) (Reporting by Guillermo Parra-Bernal and Bruno Federowski; Additional reporting by Dominique Vidalon in Paris and Tatiana Bautzer in Sao Paulo; Writing by Guillermo Parra-Bernal and Bruno Federowski; Editing by Tom Brown and Sandra Maler)
July 19 (Reuters) - Defenders Team New Zealand and challenger of record Luna Rossa are considering the possibility of the 36th America's Cup being staged in Auckland in 2021 and will release the protocol in September, the teams' governing bodies have said.

Team New Zealand beat Oracle Team USA 7-1 in Bermuda last month and can now dictate the location, dates and type of boat to be used in their Cup defence.

"The Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron and Circolo della Vela Sicilia ... are pleased to announce that the Protocol establishing the parameters for the 36th America's Cup will be released in September 2017," they said in a statement.

"The Defender and the Challenger of Record are considering the possibility of the 36th America's Cup Match and the preceding Challenger Selection Series being conducted in Auckland in early 2021 during the New Zealand summer."

The protocol will include a "constructed in country" requirement for all competing yachts and will also have a nationality requirement for the crew members. (Reporting by Aditi Prakash in Bengaluru; Editing by Peter Rutherford; )
By Fathin Ungku

SINGAPORE, July 19 (Reuters) - Singapore has offered a military transport airplane, drone surveillance aircraft and use of combat training facilities to support the Philippines' fight against the rising threat of Islamist militancy, the defence ministry said on Wednesday.

The offer stemmed from talks in Manila earlier this week between Singapore Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen and his Philippines counterpart Delfin Lorenzana.

Surrounded by Muslim majority countries and with a Muslim minority of its own, Singapore is worried by the small but dangerous number of people in the region who have been radicalised by Islamic State.

Ministers describe the terror threat against the wealthy city-state as the highest in recent years and alarm was heightened in May when a militant group linked to Islamic State seized Marawi City on the southern Philippines island of Mindanao.

Security forces are still battling to regain control of the town and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte this week asked Congress to extend martial law until the end of the year on Mindanao, the only Muslim majority island in the largely Catholic Philippines.

During the past two months Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines launched joint maritime and air patrols over their shared boundaries in the Sulu Sea, to guard against the movement of militants between Borneo Island and Mindanao.

Supporting the regional effort, Singapore's Defence Ministry said that it had offered a C-130 transport plane to deliver humanitarian supplies, drone surveillance aircraft, and use of training facilities for the Philippines military.

"While the AFP is confident that Marawi will be secured from terrorists soon, further concerted efforts are required to ensure that other terrorist cells do not entrench themselves in the southern Philippines, as this would cause instability to the rest of ASEAN," the ministry said in a statement.

Fearful that Islamic State could build a base in Southeast Asia, governments in the region announced last month that they plan share intelligence, using spy planes and drones to stem the movement of militants across their porous borders.
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By Amy Sawitta Lefevre and Patpicha Tanakasempipat

BANGKOK, July 19 (Reuters) - Dissent has been muted by Thailand's ruling generals since a 2014 coup. But there is one area where critical voices still have some space: humour.

With political activity banned, internet censorship in force and activists and dissidents detained or summoned for "attitude adjustment", public discontent is being manifested in widely shared cartoons, internet memes, and parody music videos.

"Thais are becoming more open to what critics and humorists are saying about the junta and the military government," political satirist Winyu "John" Wongsurawat told Reuters.

Winyu is the co-host of YouTube show "Shallow News in Depth", which uses humour to comment on politics.

Last week, Thai pop band Tattoo Colour released a video for their single "Dictator Girl", which opens with a book titled "44 Rules" - a reference to Article 44, a measure that gives junta chief Prayuth Chan-ocha absolute power in the name of national security.

"Dictator Girl" includes lyrics such as: "I must accept everything" and "there are no equal rights", not-so-subtle references to the ruling National Council for Peace and Order, which has broadly cowed opponents into silence.

"We're happy that people get it and try to interpret what we meant," Nittakarn Kaewpiyasawad, who directed the video, told Reuters.

Also at the forefront of the trend is Facebook page, Kai Maew. Known for comic strips featuring prominent political figures, it has more than 350,000 followers.

It is produced anonymously.

In one of its most popular strips, Prayuth is depicted in a tank - a nod to the junta's recent military spending - past a farmer struggling with falling commodity prices and a civilian who can't afford health care.

Another Facebook page uses memes from the 2004 movie "Mean Girls" to tackle topics including a general election that has been pushed back several times.

"There is more talk, especially about the hypocrisy of the military government. There is laughter, but there is also an impact on people's feelings," said Winyu.

Government spokesman Weerachon Sukhontapatipak warned against poking fun at the military government online because it could breach defamation and cyber crime laws.

"Before you do anything, please consider existing laws and regulations first," he said.

In March, Veera Somkwamkid, an activist and vocal coup critic, was charged over a mock poll that parodied the junta's theme song, "Returning Happiness to Thailand".

There is also one area where comedy is always off limits.

Thailand's monarchy is protected by one of the world's harshest laws against royal insult which says anyone who defames it can be punished with up to 15 years in prison for each offence.

Police have said they will target even those who look at online content critical of the royal family. (Editing by Matthew Tostevin, Robert Birsel)
MOSCOW, July 19 (Reuters) - The following are some stories in Russia's newspapers on Wednesday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

VEDOMOSTI

www.vedomosti.ru

- Russian gas giant Gazprom has started laying undersea pipes for the second line of its new TurkStream gas pipeline in the Black Sea, the daily reported, citing an unnamed counterparty of a contractor and an unnamed government official.

Experts believe that the risk of new U.S. economic sanctions has prompted Gazprom to speed up construction.

- The newspaper says BNS Group, a Russian company, has obtained the exclusive rights to develop the Karl Lagerfeld brand in Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus. The first such women's clothing store in Russia is expected to be opened in 2018.

KOMMERSANT

www.kommersant.ru

- Russian agroholding Miratorg is set to acquire about 32,000 hectares of agricultural land in the Tula and Bryansk regions from the National Land Company which is owned by tycoon Alexander Lebedev, the newspaper writes, citing sources.

- Russia's United Shipbuilding Corporation has begun to stop using the services of external design bureaux for civilian ships and started relying on its own in-house expertise instead, the newspaper writes, citing sources.

KRASNAYA ZVEZDA

www.redstar.ru

- A joint Russian-Chinese naval drill will be held from July 21 to 28 in the Baltic Sea area, the newspaper reports, saying it will involve about 10 vessels of various classes and more than 10 aircraft and helicopters.

($1 = 59.3705 rub) (Reporting by Margarita Popova; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
ANKARA, July 19 (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan is meeting Prime Minister Binali Yildirim at the presidential palace on Wednesday, and a cabinet reshuffle could be on the cards, three sources with knowledge of the matter said.

Erdogan's office announced the unscheduled meeting earlier on Wednesday, and the three sources said a reshuffle could be in the works, declining to be identified because the information is not yet public.

"There is a strong likelihood that there could be a decision on a cabinet reshuffle after the meeting," said one of the sources, who is close to the presidency.

A cabinet reshuffle has been widely expected since May, when Erdogan resumed his leadership of the ruling AK Party following an April 16 constitutional referendum giving him sweeping new powers. (Reporting by Orhan Coskun and Ercan Gurses; Writing by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by David Dolan)
DUBAI, July 19 (Reuters) - President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday new U.S. economic sanctions imposed against Iran contravened the country's nuclear accord with world powers and he vowed that Tehran would "resist" them, state television reported.

The Trump administration slapped the new sanctions on Iran on Tuesday over its ballistic missile program and said Tehran's "malign activities" in the Middle East undercut any "positive contributions" coming from the 2015 Iran nuclear accord.

"Some of the actions of the Americans are against the spirit and even the letter of the (nuclear accord). We shall resist these plans and actions," Iranian state television quoted Rouhani as saying.

"One of the plots of the Americans is to act in such a way that would make Iran say that it is not following its commitments... I think the Americans will fail as we will always respect our international commitments," Rouhani said.

Iran's parliament agreed on Tuesday to discuss measures, including increased funding for the missile programme, as retaliation for the new U.S. sanctions, state media reported.

The U.S. measures signal that the administration of President Donald Trump is seeking to put more pressure on Iran while keeping in place the agreement between Tehran and six world powers to curb its nuclear program in return for lifting international oil and financial sanctions.

The U.S. government said it was targeting 18 entities and people for supporting what it said was "illicit Iranian actors or transnational criminal activity." (Reporting by Dubai newsroom; Editing by Gareth Jones)
By Thomas Escritt

BERLIN, July 19 (Reuters) - Germany raised the possibility on Wednesday of suspending European Union aid payments to Turkey after summoning Ankara's ambassador to Berlin to protest over the arrest of six human rights activists including a German citizen.

The moves mark a further escalation of tensions between NATO allies Germany and Turkey, who are at loggerheads over a wide range of issues.

This month, Turkey arrested rights activists including Amnesty International's Turkey head Idil Eser and German citizen Peter Steudtner on terrorism charges, which Berlin has labelled "absurd".

"Unfortunately we have constant cause to talk to Turkey about civil and press freedoms," government spokesman Steffen Seibert told a news conference. "We think it is important to review aid in light of the latest developments."

Seibert was referring to a package of assistance totalling three billion euros that the EU has promised to Turkey to help stem flows of migrants, mostly from conflict zones in the Middle East, into Europe.

The deal has helped to sharply reduce the number of arrivals and has been especially welcomed by Germany, the preferred destination for the migrants, and Chancellor Angela Merkel.

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel cut short his holiday to deal with the latest rise in tensions with Turkey, whose ability to rekindle Europe's refugee crisis could harm Merkel's prospects in a national election due in September.

The six rights activists are among tens of thousands of Turks swept up in a crackdown that followed last year's failed coup against Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. Many have accused Erdogan of using the dragnet as an excuse to purge opponents.

"Claims of terrorist links are absurd," the German foreign ministry said in a statement demanding consular access to its citizen and the release of all the activists. "It is appalling to accuse Amnesty and other rights organisations of terrorism."

Ankara is seeking the extradition of army officers whom it accuses of involvement in the coup attempt and has urged other countries to crack down on people with links to the "terrorist organisation" it blames for the coup. Berlin has declined to return the men, who have sought asylum in Germany.

On Wednesday the newspaper Die Zeit reported that Turkish authorities had several weeks ago handed Berlin a list of 68 German companies they accused of having links to U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen. Turkey accuses Gulen of masterminding the coup attempt, a charge he denies.

The list included chemicals giant BASF, which confirmed it was on a list that had been passed to it by German police, but declined to comment on the allegations.

Daimler was also on the list, alongside much smaller businesses including a night shop and a kebab stall based in north-west Germany.

"We do not know this list and so cannot express a view," a Daimler spokeswoman said. (Additional reporting by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Gareth Jones)
By Ece Toksabay and Gulsen Solaker

ANKARA, July 19 (Reuters) - Turkey's jailed pro-Kurdish opposition leader said no judge could stand up to Tayyip Erdogan, expressing doubts he could ever have a fair trial after the president publicly labelled him a terrorist.

In a rare interview from prison, Selahattin Demirtas also told Reuters he believed he accepted some blame for failing to halt the collapse of peace talks between the government and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

The former human rights lawyer is one of more than a dozen lawmakers from the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) arrested in a crackdown that followed last year's attempted coup. They are mostly accused of links to the PKK, considered a terrorist group by the United States, Turkey and Europe. All deny the charges.

"The decision to arrest me and my colleagues is political. Currently, Turkey's judiciary is under the complete control and pressure of the AK Party," Demirtas said, referring to the ruling party founded by Erdogan.

"No one has the chance of a fair trial," he said in written response to questions submitted by Reuters to his lawyers.

Erdogan faces broader domestic and European Union criticism that he has subverted the judiciary in the course of a post-coup crackdown that has seen more than 4,000 judges and prosecutors dismissed from their posts.

"Unfortunately, no judges in Turkey can object to Erdogan's unlawful and transgressive remarks. Judges are facing the threat of being removed, sacked or jailed. We will certainly hold Erdogan and judges who abide by him accountable."

Erdogan, still by far the most popular political leader in Turkey after 15 years in power, made his feelings about Demirtas clear when asked about him this month by a reporter.

"Turkey is a state of law...The person you mentioned is a terrorist. We don't have the authority to release terrorists from jail."

Demirtas has turned the HDP into the third-largest party in parliament, drawing support from beyond its Kurdish core to include some pro-Western liberals. Its emergence has at times threatened to hinder an overall AK Party majority.

TATTERED PEACE PROCESS

Some 150,000 people have been sacked or suspended and roughly 50,000 people have been detained since the failed coup. Rights groups and some Western allies say Erdogan is using the putsch as a pretext to quash dissent. The HDP says as many as 5,000 of its members have been detained.

Erdogan says such measures are necessary after the coup that killed more than 240 people and revealed, according to government accounts, a conspiracy embracing sectors of society from the judiciary to police, the arts to academia.

Prosecutors are seeking jail sentences of 142 years for Demirtas and 83 years for former HDP co-head Figen Yusekdag on charges of propaganda in support of a terrorist group.

Demirtas, who was jailed in November and is being held at a prison in the northwestern province of Edirne, refused to attend a court hearing two weeks ago because police told him he would have to be handcuffed.

The HDP occasionally shares his artwork from prison, including short stories and two paintings - one of a horse and the other of a small child staring out from a half-open door.

The HDP denies direct ties to the PKK, which since 1984 has carried out an armed insurgency in Turkey's largely Kurdish southeast that has left more than 40,000 dead.

In July 2015 a 2-1/2-year ceasefire and a historic peace process between the PKK and the state collapsed, plunging the southeast into some of the worst violence in decades. Demirtas said the HDP could have done more to save the peace talks.

"President Erdogan and his AK Party thought that the peace process was costing them votes, and decided to terminate it. The PKK didn't do enough to revive the process, and to frustrate the AK Party's policies of war and violence," he said. (Writing by Ece Toksabay; Editing by David Dolan and Ralph Boulton)
By Blythe Nebeker and Jack Schofield

GHENT, Belgium, July 19 (Reuters) - Despite of a wave of militant attacks in Belgium and elsewhere in Europe in recent years, the city of Ghent continues to host one of Europe's most popular urban music and culture festivals.

Known locally as the Gentse Feesten, the Belgian city will see over a hundred thousand people gather on the biggest nights of the festival's 10-day run, filling the city's squares and streets until late in the evening.

In total, the festival is expected to draw over a million people from Belgium and around the world to Ghent, which also boasts splendid renaissance architecture, canals and medieval churches.

With a range of music venues and bars, the city goes through a daily routine of partying into the night followed by a big clean-up, before it all kicks off again the next day.

"Good music, great atmosphere, really lovely people. It is perfect," said Daan Uytterlinde, 23, a student from Antwerp who visited for three days with a group of friends.

Despite fears that tourists would be put off visiting countries that have suffered Islamic State inspired attacks, figures from local transport company De Lijn point to an increase in visitor numbers to Ghent this year.

"On every stage you can listen to different kinds of music. You can choose between jazz, pop, rock, Latin music...so I think it's awesome," said Maria-Julia Lopez, a 21 year-old Italian and Spanish Literature student from Spain.

The festival period includes Belgium's national holiday on July 21 and ends on the evening of July 23. (Editing by Toby Chopra)
By Anastasia Moloney

BOGOTA, July 19 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Rampant sexual violence in Haiti against women and children, including some toddlers, should be treated as a public health issue and more care made available for survivors, the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said.

Most of the 1,300 survivors of sexual violence who had been treated at one clinic run by MSF in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince since it opened in May 2015 are younger than 25, and more than half are children, according to a MSF report this month.

Four in every five people who sought free medical and psychological care at the MSF Pran Men'm clinic had been raped.

"We would like sexual violence to be recognised as a public health problem because there is not a lot of health services and care available for patients," said Carl Frederic Casimir, deputy medical coordinator at the clinic.

The 24-hour clinic receives an average of 80 survivors of sexual violence a month, providing emergency contraception and antiretroviral drugs to prevent the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS.

Casimir said he has seen children as young as two years old treated for sexual assault at the clinic.

"This is the most shocking part of it, the minors. Most of the time with the children, it's people (the attackers) they know," Casimir told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Just under half of all child victims of sexual assault who came to the clinic were referred by the police, a sign authorities are playing an important role in helping girls and women get emergency care, MSF said.

"Their collaboration has been instrumental for ensuring timely medical and psychological care for young survivors," the MSF report said.

"It could also suggest that some of these young women were confident enough to go to the police after sexual abuse."

Rape survivors are often traumatized and having access to mental health care, including counselling, is crucial for them to recover and to avoid developing depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, Casimir said.

Haiti's ministry for women has said addressing the country's high levels of sexual violence and improving access to justice for victims is a priority.

Yet there are no official figures to show the scale of violence against women and girls in Haiti, in a country where rape has only been a crime since 2005.

Cases of sexual violence are under-reported due to stigma and shame, as well as fear of reprisal from attackers or the community, MSF's report said.

Rights groups and the United Nations say sexual assaults and rape escalated after the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti.

Made homeless by the disaster, hundreds of thousands of Haitians were forced to live in overcrowded camps with little privacy, police presence and poor lighting, putting women and girls at risk of sexual violence.

A 2010 decision by the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights requested the Haitian government to take urgent measures to tackle rising levels of sexual violence and address impunity surrounding such cases.

Years on, about 45,000 Haitians made homeless by the quake still live in tents and make-shift shelters. (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)
SANTIAGO, July 19 (Reuters) - Chile's senate narrowly passed a bill on Wednesday to legalize abortion in certain cases, in a win for President Michelle Bachelet's center-left coalition and for rights groups that have campaigned for years against the country's strict ban.

After a long and sometimes fractious overnight debate, the senate voted to legalize abortion when a woman's life is in danger, when a fetus is unviable, and when a pregnancy results from rape.

Chile is one of only a handful of countries worldwide where abortion is illegal without exception. The ban was put in place during the closing days of Augusto Pinochet's 1973-1990 dictatorship, and Bachelet pledged reform when she took office for the second time in 2014.

The bill will now be returned to Chile's lower house to be reconciled with a version passed there. That is expected to happen within the week, allowing it to become law.

Senate approval had been seen as the biggest hurdle for the measure, given opposition from some Christian Democrats within Bachelet's own coalition, as well as lawmakers from the right-wing Chile Vamos bloc.

"It's a historic morning," Bachelet said in front of the presidential palace after the bill passed. "The senate approved depenalizing abortion in three cases, which means we can be a country where women can make the best decision possible when faced with such situations."

Although Chile is seen as one of Latin America's more socially conservative countries and the Roman Catholic Church retains significant influence, polls show around 70 percent of Chileans favor the easing the abortion ban.

However, the conservative opposition has pledged to challenge the measure in the courts.

"It has been a sad day for Chile," said Jacqueline van Rysselberghe, a senator for the far-right UDI party. "We are going to take it to the constitutional tribunal (to try to block it)." (Reporting by Antonio de la Jara; Writing by Gram Slattery and Rosalba O'Brien; Editing by Frances Kerry)
July 19 (Reuters) - Global banks have said they could move thousands of jobs out of Britain to prepare for Brexit, the country's planned exit from the European Union.

Financial services firms need a regulated subsidiary in an EU country to offer products across the bloc which could prompt some to move jobs out of Britain if it loses access to the European single market.

Following are related stories about top banks (in alphabetical order):

ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN BANKS IN GERMANY

The association expects 3,000 to 5,000 new jobs in Frankfurt over the next two years as a result of Brexit, its head Stefan Winter of UBS told German newspaper Welt am Sonntag in June. He said he expected 12 to 14 major banks to significantly expand their Frankfurt sites or build new ones.

BANK OF AMERICA CORP

Bank of America Corp said in August its businesses and results could be adversely affected and it may have to incur additional costs if Brexit limited the ability of its UK entities to conduct business in the EU.

Dublin is Bank of America's default option for a new base within the EU, but other centres are on the table and no decision has yet been made, an executive said in Germany on March 14.

BARCLAYS

Barclays is talking with Irish regulators about extending its activities in Dublin in preparation for when Britain leaves the European Union, the British bank said.

The firm already has a licenced bank in the Irish capital and is looking to expand that so it can act as its EU subsidiary.

Banks in Britain will start shifting some operations to continental Europe reasonably soon to avoid disrupting links with customers after Brexit, Barclays Chief Executive Jes Staley said.

He added that obtaining a licence to trade on the continent and changing financial contracts to another jurisdiction took a year to 18 months.

Staley previously told BBC Radio that Barclays would keep the bulk of its activities in Britain after Brexit and any changes to how the bank operates would be small and manageable.

BNP PARIBAS

BNP Paribas may move up to 300 London investment bank staff due to Brexit, depending on how clients adapt and on the French bank's efforts to win new UK business, a source said.

The firm had 3,123 staff in its corporate and institutional bank in Britain at end-2016, down from 3,294 a year earlier, internal documents seen by Reuters showed.

CITIGROUP

U.S. bank Citigroup is expected to announce Frankfurt will be its new European Union base this week as it prepares for when Britain leaves the bloc, two sources told Reuters on Monday.

Citi, which has a large banking unit in Dublin, had earlier said it would choose Frankfurt to become its hub for sales and trading in the EU and move "a couple of hundred" jobs outside of London after Brexit.

Separately, the bank's European chief said the U.S. bank would make a decision on its Brexit contingency plans in the first half of the year and choose from a number of potential EU countries to relocate some investment banking business.

CREDIT AGRICOLE

Credit Agricole, France's third-biggest listed bank, could relocate about 100 employees from its London hub to France out of 1,000 based there in the case of a "hard" Brexit, its chief executive said.

CREDIT SUISSE

Credit Suisse's Chief Executive Tidjane Thiam said in September his bank was relatively well placed to deal with the impact of Brexit and that only around 15-20 percent of volumes in the investment bank would be impacted.

DAIWA SECURITIES GROUP

Japan's No. 2 brokerage Daiwa Securities Group said it will set up a subsidiary in Frankfurt, making it one of the first banks to publicly chose Germany to keep a foothold in the European Union after Britain leaves the bloc.

The group has said it would still keep staff in London even after Brexit. It has 450 staff working in the EU now, mostly in the British capital.

The German city is Daiwa's favoured destination, as London-based staff can easily be transferred to its investment banking branch in Frankfurt, Chief Executive Seiji Nakata had previously said.

DEUTSCHE BANK

Deutsche Bank warned on April 26 up to 4,000 UK jobs could be moved to Frankfurt and other locations in the EU as a result of Brexit - the highest potential move of any bank.

European supervisors want Deutsche Bank to prepare a fallback plan, laying out how it could shift the clearing of trades from London, one person with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

EUROCLEAR

Settlement bank Euroclear is looking at the option of setting up a branch or subsidiary to provide a route between its UK and Irish markets following Brexit, the head of its UK and Irish operation said.

GOLDMAN SACHS

U.S. bank Goldman Sachs is considering moving up to 1,000 staff from London to Frankfurt because of concerns over Brexit, Germany's Handelsblatt newspaper reported in January, citing financial sources.

Goldman Sachs will begin moving hundreds of people out of London before any Brexit deal is struck as part of its contingency plans, the Wall Street firm's Europe CEO said in March.

Three people familiar with the matter told Reuters in November that Goldman Sachs was considering shifting some of its assets and operations from London to Frankfurt.

HSBC

HSBC sees the chances of a hard Brexit receding after Britain's shock election result, which could result in fewer jobs moving out of London, its investment bank chief said.

Stuart Gulliver, CEO of HSBC, Europe's biggest bank, had said previously the firm would relocate staff responsible for generating around a fifth of its UK-based trading revenue, or around 1,000 people, to Paris.

Chairman Douglas Flint has told lawmakers that banks without operations elsewhere in the EU will likely trigger migration plans immediately after EU divorce talks begin, estimating "tens of thousands" of jobs are linked to EU "passporting" rights.

INVESTEC

Investec is considering converting its London bank's Dublin branch into a subsidiary to ensure it has continued access to the European single market after Britain leaves the EU, Chief Executive Stephen Koseff told British newspaper The Telegraph on May 18.

However, the Anglo-South African lender and asset manager was in no rush to secure the licence needed for such a subsidiary and would see only a small part of its business affected by Brexit, the paper quoted Koseff as saying. (http://bit.ly/2qywZzY)

JPMORGAN

JPMorgan Chase said in July that the bank would probably use Frankfurt as the legal domicile of its European operations after Brexit, though jobs could be put elsewhere as well.

The U.S. bank has also 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 government began a major campaign to attract firms after Brexit.

However, 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 United Kingdom.

Daniel Pinto, head of investment banking at the Wall Street firm, had told Bloomberg on May 3 that the firm planned to move hundreds of London-based bankers to expanded offices in Dublin, Frankfurt and Luxembourg.

CEO Jamie Dimon had previously said the bank was not planning to move many jobs out of Britain in the next two years.

Before the vote, Dimon said the bank would be forced to move 4,000 of its 16,000 staff currently based in Britain if the country loses access to the single market.

JULIUS BAER

Britain's planned departure from the European Union opens the door for a UK-Swiss deal covering financial services, said Boris Collardi, chief executive at Julius Baer, Switzerland's third-biggest private bank.

LLOYDS BANKING GROUP

Lloyds Banking Group, Britain's largest mortgage lender and the only major British retail bank without a subsidiary in another EU country, is close to selecting Berlin as a European base to secure market access to the EU after Britain withdraws.

MORGAN STANLEY

Morgan Stanley has chosen Frankfurt to be a new base for its European Union operations as Britain prepares to leave the bloc, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Morgan Stanley is planning to use its Frankfurt subsidiary as the centre for its EU trading operations. "That means 200 new people will be coming to Frankfurt," the source said.

Morgan Stanley has identified many of the roles that will need to be moved from Britain after Brexit, sources involved in the processes had previously told Reuters.

The U.S. bank, which bases the bulk of its European staff in Britain, will have to move up to 1,000 jobs in sales and trading, risk management, legal and compliance, as well as slimming the back office in favour of locations overseas, one source told Reuters.

Morgan Stanley may initially shift 300 staff from Britain following its EU exit, and is scouting for office space in Frankfurt and Dublin, Bloomberg News reported in February.

The bank plans to double the number of bankers it has in Frankfurt to 400, German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported in June.

NOMURA

Nomura Holdings Inc is applying for a licence to operate a new entity in Frankfurt, as Japan's largest brokerage gears up for Britain's planned exit from the European Union in 2019.

NORTHERN TRUST

Asset management company Northern Trust will set up a European Union banking base in Luxembourg following Britain's decision to leave the bloc, LuxembourgforFinance, the body promoting the Grand Duchy as a financial centre, said.

SOCIETE GENERALE

Societe Generale could move 400 corporate and investment banking jobs from London as part of its Brexit plans, with most of them going to Paris, Chief Executive Frederic Oudea said in July.

Oudea said the possible move of jobs after Brexit would affect 300-400 investment banking jobs out of 2,000 it has overall for that business in London.

STANDARD CHARTERED

Standard Chartered is in talks with regulators about making Frankfurt its European base to secure market access to the European Union when Britain leaves the bloc.

SUMITOMO MITSUI FINANCIAL

Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc said its core banking unit, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp (SMBC), has decided to set up a subsidiary in Frankfurt as it prepares for Britain's exit from the European Union in 2019.

UBS

UBS is weighing up whether to move banking jobs in London to Frankfurt, Madrid or Amsterdam to cope with Britain's planned departure from the European Union, Chief Executive Sergio Ermotti said in an interview with CNBC in July.

The bank has estimated that it would need to "move 1,500 people" from London to the EU in order to retain full passporting rights, according to chairman Axel Weber. That would be more than a quarter of its current 5,500 staff in London.

The world's biggest wealth manager has also set up a bank in Frankfurt to consolidate most of its European wealth management operations, after the Brexit vote dashed London's chances of being the host city.

(Compiled by Noor Zainab Hussain and Esha Vaish in Bengaluru; Editing by Rachel Armstrong)
DPA, 18th JULY, 2017- President Mahmoud Abbas Fatah party has called for a Day of Rage as 50 Palestinians were wounded in overnight clashes with Israeli police near a Jerusalem site holy to Jews and Muslims, the Red Crescent reported on Tuesday.



Fifteen of the injured had been hit by rubber bullets, the Red Crescent said.



The Day of Rage is set to take place on Wednesday over new security measures introduced at the weekend by the Israelis after police were attacked at the site, known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount.



The Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements have also called for protests in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over the new security measures, which include metal detectors and turnstiles at the entrance to the site.



Jerusalem Grand Mufti Mohammed Ahmed Hussein criticized the new measures as altering the status quo, which gives Muslims religious control over the site and permits Jews to visit but not pray there.

The Palestinians fear Israel is trying to retake control of the site by stealth. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed on Friday that he did not want to alter the status quo.



The site is sacred to both religions, as it houses the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock shrine, Islams third holiest site after Mecca and Medina, but also the ruins of the Biblical Jewish Temple. Questions about control of the site frequently lead to outbursts of fighting.



On Friday, two Israeli police officers were killed and another injured after three men opened fire on security officers working at the site. The attackers, believed to be Israeli Arabs, were also killed. Israel then closed off the area, preventing Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa Mosque.
Yahapalanayas 18-member dissident group had planned a night-time tryst in the VIP lounge of a high-end hotel in Rajagiriya area the other day.



In the afternoon of the day of the planned powwow one group member from Gampaha who was rearing to attend it had rung up a certain TB of the group from a government office to double-check the exact venue of the proposed secret meeting. It had so happened that at the time he was making the call, there had been a shrewd deputy from the same district in this office within hearing distance. The deputy who quietly sloped away with the vital information had conveyed it to the high-ups in yahapalanaya.



Some members who turned up at the Rajagiriya hotel in the night had sensed that an intelligence net had already been cast on the place and they had beaten a hasty retreat warning others whom they met that the jig was up.



However, some bold ones who had stayed back had got bolder still after a drink or two and proceeded to take several far-reaching decisions about their political future, they say.
The Sri Lanka- Singapore Free Trade Agreement is to be finalized by the end of the year, Minister of Foreign Affairs Ravi Karunanayake said yesterday.

Both visiting Singaporean Foreign Minister Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan and Karunanayake addressing the media in Colombo yesterday said they were working towards completing the FTA which would be modern, comprehensive, ambitious and demonstrate that both countries were open for business.

Welcoming Karunanyake to the club of Foreign Ministers, Dr. Balakrishnan spoke of a better connectivity between the countries which would ensure they would become the gateway to business in each others respective regions.

The bigger the pipeline we build the greater the opportunities for our respective countries. We believe that with the FTA Sri Lanka would be the gateway to South Asia as we would be the gateway for Sri Lanka to South East Asia, he said.

Dr. Balakrishnan is scheduled to visit Jaffna today, where he would take part in an event to hand over books donated from the Singapore National Library Board to the Jaffna Public Library and visit the Orthopedic Ward of the Teaching Hospital where he would plant a tree at the premises.

The Minister will also visit the University of Jaffna to take part in the launch of the Lee Foundation-SingHealth Orthopaedic Development Programme at the Medical Faculty. During his stay in Jaffna he would also call on the Governor of the Northern Province Reginald Cooray and Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran and have an interaction with Businessmen of the Chamber of Commerce of Jaffna. (Nabeela Hussain)

- Pix by Waruna Wanniarachchi
Animal Rights groups yesterday said they would file a petition at the Supreme Court over the alleged sedation of dogs and cats that led to the animals' death at the Moratuwa University.

Speaking to the Daily Mirror, Animal Rights Activist, Attorney Lalani Perera said the petition preventing such inhumane acts in the future will be filed with the support of animal rights organizations and will be backed by students of the Moratuwa University.

After a shocking video of at least 23 dogs and some cats being stunned with toxic substance went viral, animal rights activist had collected evidence and witness statements which would be submitted to Court, Mrs. Perera said.

Meanwhile, another animal rights activist Ms. Hasini Silva said their main focus now was to save the remaining animals at the university premises by seeking legal assistance. The activists hoped to request measures be taken for the safety of the animals when the petition was filed, she said.

There arent many laws for Animal Welfare, but we are trying to bring those responsible before the law. We believe the Court would do justice and prevent these barbaric acts in the future, she said.

Ms. Silva also said the biggest struggle was to ensure the Animal Welfare Bill and the Dog Registration Bill was passed in parliament soon.(Thilanka Kanakarathna)
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe yesterday handed over 25 tractor bowsers to five district secretariats affected by the drought.

Speaking at the event, the Premier said Sri Lanka was affected by changing weather patterns, for which the government would have to make several important decisions in the coming months. Pix by Pradeep Pathirana
Mrs. Shashi Kandambi Jassim, Senior Deputy General Manager  Corporate Banking, Sampath Bank PLC receiving the award from Hon. Minister of Foreign Employment, Mrs. Thalatha Atukorale

Sampath Bank announced that Mrs.Shashi Kandambi Jassim, Senior Deputy General Manager  Corporate Banking, has received theGold award in the Banking and Finance category at the Top 50 Professional and Career Women Awards held recently.

Mrs.Kandambi Jassim received this award in recognition of her outstanding achievements and exemplary leadershipduringher long banking career.

Congratulating Mrs. Shashi Kandambi Jassim on being honoured at this forum on behalf of the Bank, I am proud to note that she represents the innumerable women across Sampath Bank and the country who continue to excel and contribute to our growth and success, said Mr.Nanda Fernando, Managing Director, Sampath Bank PLC.Right from our inception, we have focused on ensuring that all members of the Sampath Bank family are treated equally, without any bias based on gender or otherwise. We believe that this has helped us nurture greater diversity within the Bank which in turn allows us to better relate to the varied needs of our customers and respond more empathetically.

Organized by Women in Management (WIM) in partnership with IFC (a member of the World Bank group), the Top 50 Professional and Career Women Awards highlight and honor women in the national and regional economy and celebrate their achievements, experience and creativity in leading institutions, professions and businesses in an efficient and effective manner. 50 leading ladies from a diverse mix of industries were recognized across the Career, Professional, Business and Organizational categories at the seventh annual awards ceremony this year.

Im honoured to be recognized by WIM and IFC at the Top 50 Professional and Career Women Awards. This achievement wouldnt have been possible without Sampath Banks commitment to being an employer which practices true meritocracy. The opportunities afforded to me by my bank and the knowledge and experience gained over the years have brought me to this position today. The diversity within the team and in the mix of industries that our clients represent has allowed me to acquire a vast wealth of knowledge. And I have had the fortune of sharing this knowledge with clients, colleagues and society at large, playing at least a small role in their success stories, said Mrs. Kandambi Jassim.

Having joined Sampath Bank in 1989, Mrs.Kandambi Jassim has over 28 years of varied and extensive experience in the Banking sector, all at Sampath Bank.She holds a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Sri Jayewardenepuras Postgraduate Institute of Management. She has also received leadership training at the Harvard School of Business. She is the immediate Past President of the Association of Professional Bankers Sri Lanka, a role in which she initiated several programs to nurture young talent entering the banking sector and shape them into able banking professionals.
Meanwhile, Wickramaratne said the Central Bank of Sri Lanka should refrain from playing dual roles and must pay greater emphasis on its responsibilities of being only a regulator.

Referring to the ownership of LankaClear, which is Sri Lankas largest payment infrastructure provider, of which the Central Bank holds a stake, the state minister said the ownership must be transferred over to the government.

The Central Bank is a regulator and the regulator should not own anything. They cannot play the role of the regulator when owning a stake. Its a conflict.

The stake of LankaClear held must ideally be owned by the government, said Wickramaratne.

However, he acknowledged that LankaClears model of a public-private partnership (PPP) has worked well over the years.



Currently the Central Bank and the two state banks, Bank of Ceylon and Peoples Bank, own 47 percent of the agency, while other commercial banks hold 57 percent of the ownership.
Using tobacco and arecanut in betel quids apart from smokeless Tobacco Products and mixtures that contain tobacco would be banned from today, Centre for Research in oral cancer Director Prof W.M. Tilakaratne said yesterday.

While addressing media at the Government Information Centre yesterday Prof. Tilakaratne said a gazette notification had been issued on September 1, 2016 in this regard and according to its update manufacturing all smokeless tobacco products, selling, keeping in possession and import would totally be prohibited.

This law will be implemented further to banning tobacco products such as Babul, Pampara, Bita and etc in the country.

It was reported that the incidence of oral cancer among tobacco and arecanut chewers is five-fold compared to non-users of them. They are the major causes of oral disease, other systemic conditions, disability and death, according to reports.

Arecanuts had been certified as the main cause to oral cancer by the reports prepared by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Therefore a Bill was passed in Parliament under which, the gazette notifications have been issued, Prof Tilakaratne said.

The Health Minister has also issued regulations prohibiting the manufacture, importation, and sale of e-cigarettes containing tobacco, and cigarettes that are flavoured, coloured, or sweetened under this law, the National Authority on Tobacco and Alcohol Act, in 2016. (Chaturanga Pradeep)
The South-Asian Institute for Technology and Medicine (SAITM) today said that as per the Cabinet Memorandum approved by the Cabinet, the mortgage rights of the Dr. Neville Fernando Teaching Hospital (NFTH) will remain with the Bank of Ceylon (BoC) until such time all loans are repaid by SAITM within the next 10 years, after which all titles of ownership will be vested with the Government of Sri Lanka.

Issuing a statement, the SAITM also stated that This arrangement was materialized under the advocacy of attorneys of BoC, the government and SAITM in the best interest of all stakeholders. Furthermore, SAITM would like to clarify that the Sri Lankan Government has not made any form of payment to SAITM as compensation or lease, under the said agreement.

Contrary to the statements issued by parties with vested interests, the Dr. Neville Fernando Teaching Hospital (NFTH) hospital valued at Rs.3.55 billion was ceremonially handed over to the Government to augment the free health care provided by the Government to Sri Lankan citizens.

The land which is owned by the Urban Development Authority (UDA) will be sub-leased to the Ministry of Health for a nominal rent of Rs.1,000 per annum.

The NFTH was ceremonially handed over to the government of Sri Lanka on July 17 in the presence of President Maithripala Sirisena, Health, Nutrition and Indigenous Medicine Minister Dr. Rajitha Senaratne and Higher Education and Highways Minister Lakshman Kiriella.

Accordingly, a tri-party agreement will be signed by the Chairman of SAITM, Secretary to the Ministry of Health and the General Manager of Bank of Ceylon, formally handing over the Dr. Neville Fernando Teaching Hospital, which will function as a government hospital offering free healthcare, effective August 1, 2017.

The Management of SAITM aspires to work alongside the government, as it has done in the past, to uplift the healthcare sector in Sri Lanka, and to thereby enable all citizens, access to efficient and quality health services from qualified professionals, the statement added.
Emirates iconic A380 aircraft will make a one-off landing at Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA), Katunayake, on Monday, August 14, as the global airline joins the local authorities in the celebration of the airports resurfaced runway.



The special flight, operating as EK654 from Dubai, will be the first A380 aircraft to disembark passengers in Sri Lanka after completing a commercial service.



The one-off A380 aircraft will arrive at 16:10 hours and be on ground for more than six hours before it returns to Dubai as flight EK655 departing at 22:10 hours, enabling airport executives, VIPs, trade partners and media to enjoy a guided static tour of the double-decker aircraft.



Colombo has welcomed us from the day Emirates commenced daily flights from Dubai in 1986, just a year after the airline launched its operations. We are honoured to work alongside the city, airport and the Sri Lankan Civil Aviation authorities, to bring our flagship A380 to this vibrant destination.

For BIA and for aviation enthusiasts in Sri Lanka, this will certainly be a special day and we look forward to showcasing our unique on board products in this market, said Emirates Senior Vice President West Asia and Indian Ocean Ahmed Khoory.



Customers in Sri Lanka can experience Emirates double-decker aircraft by connecting through the airlines Dubai hub to more than 45 A380 destinations. With its quiet cabins, on-board lounge and shower spas in premium cabins, Emirates A380 products and services are unparalleled in the industry, giving all our passengers on board an unsurpassed travel experience.



As the first and only airline in the world to operate a fleet of all Airbus A380 and Boeing 777 aircraft for its passenger flights, Emirates operating fleet remains modern and efficient while offering customers a high level of comfort. Since 2008, Emirates has flown over 80 million passengers on its A380 fleet.

Emirates commenced operations to Sri Lanka in April 1986 and operates a total of 34 flights a week from Colombo -- 27 flights westward to Male and Dubai and seven eastward to Singapore connecting onwards to Melbourne, Australia. The airline has deployed ultra-modern Boeing 777-300 ER aircraft on scheduled flights serving Sri Lanka.
Women in Management (WIM) in partnership with IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, has presented Fiona Juriansz Munasinghe the Gold award in the Marketing category at the 2017 Top 50 Professional and Career Women Awards presented in Colombo recently.

Now in its seventh edition, the Top 50 Professional and Career Women Awards celebrates the achievements of remarkable women who inspire those around them through their astounding achievements in their careers, businesses and everyday lives.

The awards presentation held at the Taj Samudra Hotel was graced by the Opposition Leader, Ministers, Members of Parliament, Diplomats, professionals in businesses and the public service, women leaders from various industries and the Inspector General of Police. The awards were presented in several categories including Public Sector, Private Sector, Enterpreneurship, Media, Advertising, HR, Marketing, Finance and CSR.

Currently Hemas Consumer Brands Marketing General Manager, Munasinghe was nominated by her employer for the award. She heads a team of Brand Custodians overlooking three of the largest and most competitive categories in which Hemas operates as well as one of the companys future growth categories.

Fiona Munasinghe being handed the award

It is a great honour to be named one of the top 50 professional career women in Sri Lanka, Munasinghe said, commenting on the prestigious WIM award she received. As a passionate marketer and brand builder, it is pleasing to be acknowledged as a leader in my chosen profession and humbling to be recognized at the same forum as the amazing women who were recognized for their contributions in their respective fields. I would like to thank WIM for the amazing work they are doing and my husband Hasrath, family, workplace Hemas and my team at work who encourage and inspire me every day. I encourage women to reach for the stars and families and workplaces to acknowledge the numerous roles women play and the amazing value that they can bring to the table.
Gas World (Pvt.) Ltd, an associate company of Industrial Gases (Pvt.) Ltd (IGL) which marked its 25th anniversary of operations in Sri Lanka, made its presence known with its latest technology standards set by the company.



To commemorate this landmark, Gas World launched its new dedicated medical gas filling facility with a cylinder traceability system. Located in Sapugaskanda, this key milestone reaffirms Gas Worlds position as a long-term investor in the country and as a leading medical gases supplier.



With this new automated filling facility, which is the largest in the country, Gas World expands its medical oxygen, breathing air, nitrogen and nitrous oxide supply to hospitals to assist patients when they are at their most vulnerable.



Gas World is one of the key medical oxygen manufacturing companies, supplying from its own state-of-the-art cryogenic air separation plant, which generates liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen, which conforms to the international pharmacopoeia standards. Commitment to purity and quality has further helped the company to maintain a strong market presence and find a strong foothold in the industry. The new manifold system allows for expansion of capacity to meet the future needs of the entire market.



The new filling centre is geared to deliver cost competitive options to customers with advanced cylinder filling using world-class technologies and innovative solutions, while encapsulating industry-leading safety features and environment-friendly best good manufacturing practices.



Speaking at the official opening, Gas World Chairman Sumith Guruge, who has a background of 30 years in the service industry stated, Gas World continues to see growth opportunities in the country with our firm presence in the industry. We have established a track record of continued investments and of bringing the latest technology to Sri Lanka. I am pleased to note that in the past five years alone, Gas World has increased its sales growth by five times. We hope to further strengthen our leadership in the medical gas industry and support our customers in helping them reduce their costs, while delivering sustainable and profitable growth for our stakeholders.



He added, Technology, innovation and an inventive spirit has and always will be at the heart of Gas World for the years to come.



Sharing his thoughts at the launch, Kandy Teaching Hospital Pharmacist stated that Gas World had broken the monopoly in the gas industry, by meeting all the requirements in State tender procedures successfully. Gas World had fulfilled all aspects of qualifying criteria such as: High purity and quality standards and capacity to supply on a continuous basis and cost. With the commencement of Gas World supplying medical gases to the Kandy Hospital, costs incurred in purchasing medical gases by the hospital had come down by about 50 percent. He also stated that the hospital has had a successful partnership with Gas World with well sustained service and quality of the product

throughout supply.
Highlighting the fact that Sri Lanka was being affected by changes in global weather patterns, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said today the government would have to take important decisions to face this situation.

He told those who had gathered at a ceremony at Temple Trees where bowsers were distributed to drought-stricken districts that Sri Lankas economy would have to be adjusted to face such changes.

The prevailing drought is not confined to Sri Lanka alone. It is being experienced in India, Bangladesh and in several other countries. Many experts including those from the UN had said global weather patterns are changing. It is a new phenomenon which Sri Lanka will also have to face. This is why President Sirisena signed the Paris agreement on behalf of the country. We would have to determine how we could adjust our economy to face these changes. The government has focused on this issue and will take important decisions in the coming months to face these changes. It is essential to think of the future generations and preserve the environment, the Prime Minister said.

He said several districts were hit by the prolonged drought. We have faced droughts before but we will have to think whether this one is different to those we have experienced before, the Prime Minister said. (Yohan Perera)

Video by Buddhi
The government, which is unhappy with the outcome of the visit to Sri Lanka and the report released by UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism, Ben Emerson, will introduce a new procedure for officials visiting Sri Lanka, the Cabinet spokesman said.

Minister Rajitha Senaratne said the Foreign Affairs Ministry had permitted him to meet LTTE detainees, but from now on the Foreign Ministry will consult the Defense Ministry and Prison Commissioner General before permitting a foreign official to engage in such missions.

The ministers are concerned about Mr. Emersons behaviour and the report that included controversial information which we cannot agree with. It was revealed that the Foreign Affairs Ministry without the knowledge of the defence ministry had permitted him to interview the LTTE suspects. The President has instructed the authorities to formulate a new procedure to regulate and monitor the visits of foreign officials to Sri Lanka," Minister Senaratne said.

He said such issues would have to be handled carefully to avoid tarnishing the image of Sri Lanka among the global community and confirmed that the government was committed to respect various international conventions and treaties it had signed and ratified.

The minister said allegations of murder, abductions and torture have been levelled against the armed forces personnel and it was the governments responsibility to inquire into them, based on the law of the land and International Humanitarian Law (IHL) which Sri Lanka was a signatory to.

The government cannot abdicate this responsibility to probe these allegations. It is our responsibility to do justice to the victims, which is why the government released the Mahanama Report on the killing at Katunayaka during police firing, he said.

The minister said the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime did not release the Mahanama Report despite repeated requests from the parents of Roshen Chanaka who was killed during police firing in 2011. Roshen was killed when the security forces attempted to quell the peaceful protest against the move to introduce a pension scheme for the private sector using funds from the EPF. The parents had obtained the Mahanama Report on an application under the Right to Information Act.

Having learnt a lesson from this atrocious incident, the yahapalana government has decided not to deploy armed forces to quell riots by civilians, he said.

The minister said he had obtained first hand information from about 50 parents of victims of abductions and killings in the North. They were summoned to Temple Trees, when he was appointed by President Rajapaksa as the Chairman of a cabinet sub-committee to probe the allegations. (Sandun A. Jayasekera)

Pix by Nisal Baduge
New Delhi, (Hindustan Times, Hindustan Times), New Delhi - Angry over being ticked off for using cellphone on duty, an army jawan posted in Jammu and Kashmirs Uri sector on Tuesday pumped five bullets into a major, killing him on the spot.



Major Shikhar Thapa belonged to 71 Armoured Regiment but was attached to 8 Rashtriya Rifles, the armys elite counter-insurgency unit deployed in Uri, close to the Line of Control, an army spokesperson said, confirming the fratricidal killing.



Hindustan Times has learnt that Thapa pulled up the jawan, whose identity is not known, and told him he would be reported to the commanding officer for using mobile phone while on duty in a sensitive area.



The phone was damaged while being confiscated, which led to an argument after which the jawan shot the officer with his AK-47 rifle at around 12.15am.



The army and police were investigating the incident, the spokesperson said.
London, (Daily Mail0, 18 July 2017 - Londons Mayor Sadiq Khan has warned Donald Trump that there will be no red carpet should he visit the United Kingdom.



The Mayor of London renewed his war of words with the U.S. President ahead of a proposed state visit to the capital.



Theresa May had officially invited Trump to the UK in January but the trip was left out of the Queens Speech last month, ending hopes it would happen this year.



Despite an invite from the UK government, both sides have failed to arrange a date amid reports that Mr Trump has been put off by the threat of large-scale protests.Among the Presidents main opponents in the UK has been Mr Khan, who opposed Trumps travel ban which targeted people from mainly Muslim countries.



Speaking to CNN about the mooted state visit, Mr Khan said he was ready to play my role when it came to challenging peoples opinions.
Sri Lankas renowned and frontline private hospital, Pannipitiya Private Hospital has added more modern treatment and medical text services among its already available prolific portfolio of services.

The specialty of Pannipitiya Private Hospital is that all these new medical treatment and tests could be obtained for a very reasonable fee in comparison to other private hospitals in

the island.



Under this newest initiative latest blood dialysis treatment has been introduced to patients suffering from kidney disease and the hospital is also equipped with state of the art modern equipment and amenities for the treatment of kidney patients.



Furthermore, Pannipitiya Private Hospital now carries out bone density scanner tests which could recognize osteoporosis beforehand. Another unique service introduced by Pannipitiya Private Hospital is the treatment for obesity which is carried out by specialist doctors with full responsibility. The hospital has also commenced treatment for scars and patches with a panel of specialist doctors being assigned for the task.



Pannipitiya Private Hospital which celebrated its 25th anniversary recently is in the process of further improving its services to patients. Accordingly more modern treatment methods and medical tests and more state-of-the-art equipment have

been introduced.



Pannipitiya Private Hospital has been able to offer additional benefits to its patients from the cost saved by cutting off unwanted expenses and provide services for a relatively cheaper reasonable price to its patients. As a result all the medical tests could be obtained for an affordable fee, said Pannipitiya Private Hospital Chairman and Managing Director Dr. Ananda Kuruppuarachchi.



Pannipitiya Private Hospital has also added a state-of-the-art 5D ultrasound scanner test facility to its portfolio. This modern equipment provides the opportunity to observe the real nature of the fetus in the womb on the screen real time live with the 5D Ultrasound technology. The hospital receives the honour of being the very first to introduce this 5D ultrasound scanner test facility to

the country.
Richmond College, Galle, a premier educational institution in Sri Lanka with an unparalleled history, completes 203 years of incessant existence on 25th July 2017. Beginning as the Galle School in 1814, it took a little more than six decades before it was renamed Richmond. During her 203-year long journey, she passed several milestones.



The native monarchy ended with the British subjugating the entire country in 1815. The first missionaries from England were the Baptists and from the Church of Ireland and with the presence of the Anglican Chaplains they all began to actively propagate their brands of Christianity. In 1813 six of the Missionaries of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, led by the Rev Dr Thomas Coke, set sail to Ceylon accompanied by William Ault, James Lynch, George Erskine, William Martin Harvard, and Thomas Hall Squance, Benjamin Clough and, John Mckenny, destined for Cape of Good Hope. Rev Dr Coke died at sea on the 2nd of May and was committed to the deep the next day. The other missionaries arrived in Bombay and five of them came to the Galle Harbour on 29th June 1814. The governor, General Sir Brownrigg of the country had prior knowledge of their arrival and sent his Brother-in-law the Rev Bisset, the senior Chaplain, to meet and confer with the Missionaries and to learn about their future plans and report to him. General Brownrigg on hearing of their plans suggested that they start schools to teach English to the natives while engaging in preaching and was promised pecuniary assistance of fifty Rix dollars (the legal currency at the time) for each school they established. The Governor made this suggestion with foresight. He foresaw the need of an educated native workforce if the country was to be developed and progressed.

A large Dutch built house in Galle was initially taken on rent, but later purchased by Erskine on behalf of the Methodist Mission, and the school was moved to Galle Fort. That building is at present the main hall of Southlands Girls School



The Missionaries held a meeting- the first Wesleyan Methodist Conference- on 4th July 1814 at the Queens House Galle, heralding the beginning of the Methodist Mission in the country. And by ballot they decided the stations for the six missionaries. William Ault was selected to labour in Batticaloa, James Lynch and Thomas Hall Squance to occupy Jaffna, George Erskine to Matara, and Benjamin Clough to remain in Galle, and William Martin Harvard, to occupy Colombo upon his arrival.



Benjamin Clough was visited by the Maha Mudaliyar of Galle, Don Abraham Dias Abeysinghe Amarasekera on 25th July 1814, on hearing that Clough was to start a school soon. He offered his deceased brother Balthazars vacant house for this purpose. The house was built in 1712 by the Dutch, in upper Dickson Road, Galle, and was known as Doornberg.

The Missionaries held a meeting- the first Wesleyan Methodist Conference- on 4th July 1814 at the Queens House Galle, heralding the beginning of the Methodist Mission in the country



Mission documents record, Mr. Clough, after acknowledging the liberal offer of the Mudaliyar, went to view the premises, which are about a mile from the Fort, and only a stones-throw from the house of the generous proprietor. They are situated in a very retired and romantic spot; and appeared in most respects to be so eligible, that Mr. Clough did not hesitate to accept of the liberal proposal. He immediately had his luggage removed; and was thus, without any expense to the Mission Fund, placed at once in a situation of comfort and respectability; and in circumstances of all others the best; calculated to promote his improvement in the language, and his usefulness among the natives. His school was soon commenced, and attended by some of the most intelligent boys on the island. The date is recorded in the Rev Cloughs journal archived in the library of the School of African-Asian Studies (SOAS), as 25th July 2014.

Colebrooke observed that the English missionary societies have formed extensive establishments in various parts of Ceylon



The school became very popular with more and more natives seeking to study under the Rev Clough. In 1815 Rev William Harvard joined his brethren in Galle. The Rev Erskine had returned to Galle by this time abandoning his school in Matara due to disinterest by the natives though it was opened with much enthusiasm. The Rev Harvard was to soon move to Colombo as planned earlier.



The Rev Erskine took over from Clough when he left for Colombo with Rev Harvard. A large Dutch built house in Galle was initially taken on rent, but later purchased by Erskine on behalf of the Methodist Mission, and the school was moved to Galle Fort. That building is at present the main hall of Southlands Girls School. Although no reason is adduced for the relocation in mission records it could be argued that it was due to societal reasons prevailing at the time. The Mission continued to use Doornberg for many more years and billeted the unmarried missionaries who started arriving in the country. It also served as a temporary abode for missionaries of several other denominations who arrived in Ceylon during the second decade of the nineteenth century.



In 1816, the Rev John Mckenny too arrived in Galle failing to secure permission from the Governor to establish a mission in South Africa and joined Erskine. In 1817, the Rev Mckenny established the first Wesleyan Methodist Vernacular.

The educational system took another decisive turn in 1865 with the discontinuance of The Central School Commission. The government changed its policy of giving the grant to schools based on their performance, deviating from the earlier policy of allowing grants on predetermined criteria like student population and the number of tutors



The school in Bone vista, Unawatuna, Galle, which was later abandoned, was taken over by the Anglican Church. It was called the Bone vista School. He then established the second English School of the Galle School in Ja Kotuwa, Magalla together with a female department (in later years it went on to become the Rippon Girls School). It was a vernacular school and a caste based one, made at the request of the natives belonging to that caste living around Magalla. He also established the first Anglo-vernacular school in Minuwangoda, Galle and several other schools in the suburbs. All these schools, although on different foundations, was the same Galle School.



The Methodist Mission opened more small (Limited capacity) schools in Galle, but the parent School was the Galle School in Fort. The Superintending missionary of Galle supervised the school with locally recruited teachers. Its said that the all scholars sat together and took instructions, irrespective of caste, creed, ethnicity, religion or social standing. Richmond can take credit for being the pioneer school to eliminate caste, creed, and ethnic rivalries in schools.



In 1829, Lieutenant-Colonel William MacBean George Colebrooke and Charles Hay Cameron, in 1830, two Royal Commissioners, came to Ceylon to study and report on administrative, financial, economic, and judicial reforms. They submitted five reports between December 1831 and May 1832, and they became the reports of the Commission of Eastern Enquiry. Colebrooke proposed drastic changes to the Civil Service and recommended that the public service should be freely open to all classes of persons according to their qualifications. He also recommended that the government implemented the proposals in 1833. He proposed that the government actively takes part in the role of education. He also proposed the establishment of a School commission to make policy decisions, on education, and supervise all schools in the country to ensure a uniform system of education.



Colebrooke observed that the English missionary societies have formed extensive establishments in various parts of Ceylon, and it would be unnecessary to retain the government schools in situations where English instructions may already be afforded. He also proposed to disallow teaching of scripture during school hours and suggested it be taught either before or after the time spent inside the classroom. The School Commission was established in 1834, but soon encountered problems due to inter-denominational rivalries on the teaching of the scripture. The School Commission was discontinued and a new Central School Commission was established in 1841. The first Methodist female School was established by the Rev William Bridgnell in 1842, which is at present known as Southlands Girls School. Colebrooke wanted the vernacular schools abolished, but the Methodist Mission didnt agree to the proposition. It was after the Central School Commission in 1841 that vernacular education was encouraged again.



The Central School Commission offered a grant to all schools willing to be supervised and conducted according to the commissions proposals. The commission formed a list of all schools who agreed to the proposition. The Galle Boys and the Girls School, giving its consent to get the grant, too was included in the list which was incorrectly interpreted by many as a government takeover. In the history of education in Sri Lanka, the government took over schools only in 1962, and not in any other year. Those schools that became eligible to the grant continued to be supervised by the respective sponsoring societies.



The Rev Joseph Rippon, who became the superintending Missionary in 1851, purchased an abandoned mountainous property in Galle known as Mount Seymour or the Sillerys Hill in 1857. He sought permission to start a High school, an industrial school, an academic institute for females with a farm. His proposal wasnt sanctioned, but he was asked to move several native schools, the Anglovernacular school operating in Minuwangoda and the female school in Magalle to the hill, to save the rent paid to private properties in conducting the schools. The School in the Hill was then called the Richmond Hill School and the female branch, the Richmond Hill Girls Boarding School.

The educational system took another decisive turn in 1865 with the discontinuance of The Central School Commission. The government changed its policy of giving the grant to schools based on their performance, deviating from the earlier policy of allowing grants on predetermined criteria like student population and the number of tutors. The schools were subject to government inspection and the grant had to be earned based on performance and the progress made. Schools had to be upgraded from their present status if they were to earn an enhanced grant. Thus, many vernacular schools were upgraded to Anglo-vernacular schools and the Anglo-vernacular schools were converted to high schools.



With his health failing, Rev Rippon returned home in 1861. Rev Nicholson came after him and pursued Rev Rippons dream of establishing a high school. In 1863 the Society sanctioned to upgrade the Anglo-vernacular school in the hill to a high school and renamed it as Wesley College. Unfortunately due to pressure from the Colombo elite, it was moved out from Richmond Hill, and the Dam Street School was elevated to a high school. This is the present Wesley College.



The Rev George Baugh, who was serving in Kandy, returned home in 1873 with his sick wife, who didnt survive the voyage and died at sea. He remained in England for some time and having remarried, returned in 1874. He too pursued Rev Rippons dream of a high School in the hill. With Rev Baughs perseverance and commitment it was sanctioned in 1875. The Anglovernacular school in the hill was converted to a collegiate School by connecting the Magalla English School. The institute was renamed as Galle High School with the Rev Samuel Langdon at the helm. Six years later, Rev Samuel Hill suggested the institute be renamed Richmond College.



Under Langdon the school became popular and made rapid progress. One year after the school was converted to a collegiate school, several Scholars gained entrance to the newly formed Ceylon Medical School in 1877, while several others were successful in sitting for the Calcutta University examination. Langdon served for three years and was transferred to Kandy.



From the beginning of Richmond as the Galle School in 1814 until it was converted to a collegiate School in 1876, the Superintending Missionary of Galle administered the school and he served as Principal.



Beginning with Rev Benjamin Clough in 1814, as many as 21 Missionaries Superintended the School until it was converted to a collegiate institution in 1876. Rev Samuel Langdon became the first Missionary Principal of the school. The school was vested in the Government in 1962 until which time the school was under the Wesleyan Methodist Mission. During this period there were seventeen Methodist Missionary and three Ceylonese Methodist Principals. The first Buddhist Principal D G Welikala was appointed in 1962. Since then the school has had ten Principals up to the present times. Of all the Principals Richmond had, seven were old boys. Claude Ivor de Silva, who took care of the school until it was taken over, is the oldest living principal now aged 94 years.



For a school to exist uninterrupted for 203 years is a great achievement. Being the oldest Wesleyan Methodist School in Sri Lanka and Asia is also a great prestige.



Several Richmond Missionary Principals left an indelible mark in the College History. Rev Samuel Langdon is credited with introducing science to schools in Sri Lanka. The Rev James Hone Darrell Memorial Hall of the college, built in 1898 by the Rev Darrell, is an engineering marvel. It has no pillars to support a high tiled roof and has withstood the test of time for more than a century. Rev W J T Small is credited with for being in the forefront with the Buddhists in the Temperance movement.

In 1876 Rev George Baughs unremitting efforts to convert the school in to a high school paid off. It became a High School. For many years, the misinterpretation of the transformation of the Anglo-vernacular school in Richmond Hill to a High school or a collegiate institute was taken as the beginning of the school. The Methodist Church of Sri Lanka recently made a proclamation rectifying the error.
Polonnaruwa District UPFA MP Roshan Ranasinghe today said he would withdraw from political activities of the Joint Opposition.

He said all future meetings and programmes of the Joint Opposition organised by him would be postponed indefinitely.

In a statement, he said his political policies will remain unchanged and added that he had to take the decision as some JO leaders were interfering in political activities in the district without his knowledge. (K.G. Karunaratne)
By Kithmina Hewage

Since the conclusion of a nearly three-decade-long conflict in 2009, Sri Lankas prominence in the Indian Ocean politics has grown significantly. Whereas during the conflict its outlook was predominantly security-oriented, the island nation has now become prominent in economic and political matters in the region. However, despite its role as a pioneer of South Asian regionalism through the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), Sri Lanka is increasingly turning towards broader engagement with East Asia. In doing so, the country is recognizing its pivotal position as a strategic asset to both India and China. The island nations move towards engagement beyond South Asia has placed Sri Lanka in the midst of Indo-China politics, which, if balanced astutely, could largely benefit its economy and political standing in the region.



Pivot to East Asia



Sri Lankas shift away from a South Asian focus was initiated under former President Mahinda Rajapaksa in the immediate aftermath of the civil war. This was prompted mostly by political necessity. Sri Lanka was facing growing political pressures from the international community regarding the alleged war crimes and China offered the much-needed cover at the United Nations and other international forums.



Moreover, China was willing to provide unconditional economic support to finance large-scale infrastructure development, albeit through loans at market-rate interest. Indias reticence to fully embrace the Rajapaksa administration provided China with the opportunity to embrace Sri Lanka as an ally with vital geostrategic importance. In return, Sri Lanka shifted away from its carefully curated non-aligned foreign policy in the Indian Ocean and started engaging in activities that demonstrated its new allegiance with China.



Over the past five or so years, China has provided the island nation with financial support to develop an international seaport and airport, while also investing heavily in the Colombo Port City project. Each of these investments and actions has consequently raised concerns with India and its allies.

Sri Lankas current look to establish closer politico-economic ties with countries beyond South Asia is driven by economic necessity as much as political expediency. As a small island economy with a population of 21 million, Sri Lanka depends heavily on foreign direct investment (FDI) and its export sector to catalyze economic growth.



However, Sri Lankas post-conflict economic progress has been underwhelming, especially in its export sector. Domestic protectionist policies hinder the competitiveness of Sri Lankan firms and the country is in dire need of diversifying its export basket and expanding exports beyond its traditional markets in the United States and United Kingdom.



The inadequacy of regional value chains within South Asia has further heightened the need for Sri Lanka to look elsewhere for profitable economic linkages. Unlike those in East Asia, Latin America and Europe, production and trade networks in South Asia are almost non-existent. Intra-regional trade in South Asia stands at a meagre 5 percent and that too is heavily influenced by bilateral trade with India.



Cognizant of its weak position on the global economic platform and the failures of regional trade agreements such as the South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA), Sri Lanka is currently negotiating a trifecta of bilateral trade and investment agreements with India, China and Singapore. These agreements are expected to act as the platform upon which Sri Lankas economic pivot across the Indian Ocean takes place.

Recalibrating Indo-China politics

The most critical consequence of Sri Lankas new regionalism is an acute awareness of its need to balance the interests of India and China. Immediately following the January 2015 presidential election, the new Sri Lankan government halted the Colombo Port City project in an attempt to appease India by signalling independence from Chinese influence. The government has since recognized that Sri Lankas economic dependence on China for investment and debt relief makes close cooperation imperative.

Yet, Sri Lanka has taken considerable measures over the past two years to demonstrate its willingness to balance both Indian and Chinese interests. This effort was evident when the Sri Lankan prime minister welcomed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Colombo, then visited China immediately afterward to attend a summit on the Belt and Road initiative.



The Sri Lankan government is also currently negotiating a debt-to-equity swap with China by granting it access to an industrial park and management of the Hambantota Deep Sea Port and Mattala International Airport, while at the same time agreeing to work with India to develop a war-era oil tank farm in Trincomalee, a strategic port on the east coast of the island.



While India initially seemed concerned by the Sri Lankan shift towards China, it now views the countrys amended Indian Ocean focus more favourably. This is especially important as India itself moves towards broader regional engagement. Along with its growing relationship with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), India is also a critical stakeholder in negotiating the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).



Thus, Sri Lankas expanding relations align well with Indias priorities. Sri Lanka is beginning to establish itself as a logistical hub for Indian manufacturing and trade, while also positioning itself as an increasingly reliable political ally. In fact, India appears to be facilitating Sri Lankas broader Indian Ocean focus by providing greater credence to the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) as a potential alternative to the SAARC.



At the same time, even though China undoubtedly prefers to be Sri Lankas prominent partner, China also appears to support Sri Lankan balanced regionalism. For example, China has been willing to compromise on issues of land ownership and investment conditions while providing the Sri Lankan government adequate policy space to engage with India. China will support this balance so long as it is allowed to pursue its strategic investments in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.



In fact, if Sri Lankas free trade agreements with India, China and Singapore proceed as expected, the island nation could be positioned as a conduit for further economic engagement between the regional superpowers, which would be in all three nations interests. For instance, the Chinese investors could invest in industrial zones in Sri Lanka to export to both China and India under an improved free trade agreement between Sri Lanka and India.

Conclusion

Sri Lankas shift towards East Asia is somewhat inevitable, given the decades-long stagnation of the SAARC and the necessity for the country to reduce its dependence on American and European markets. Additionally, an increasingly inward-looking American foreign and economic policy and the consequent shift in global economic power towards the East increases opportunities for Sri Lanka to position itself as a regional economic hub.

The change in focus, however, could pose potential challenges in terms of balancing Indian and Chinese interests. Both nations consider Sri Lanka a strategic asset, while also recognizing the concerns of their counterpart. Therefore, to balance Indian and Chinese interests to its advantage, Sri Lanka will need to pursue a form of strategic promiscuity that will enable it to leverage the benefits of both regional superpowers.

(A version of this article originally appeared on South Asian Voices, an online platform for strategic analysis and debate hosted by the Stimson Centre)





(Kithmina Hewage is a Research Officer at the Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka (IPS). To view this article online and to share your comments, visit the IPS Blog Talking Economics - http://www.ips.lk/talkingeconomics/)
Sri Lankas diversified conglomerate Sunshine Holdings, celebrating its 50th year of responsible entrepreneurship, for the third consecutive year will support the countrys premier economic forum, the Sri Lanka Economic Summit 2017.



Hosted annually by Ceylon Chamber of Commerce (CCC), to be held on the 25th and 26th of this month, the summit will promote dialogue on the circumstances shaping the current business landscape of Sri Lanka.



As the platinum sponsor, brand Sunshine will be part of Sri Lankas growth story by promoting deliberation and discussion on how innovation across diverse sectors can be harnessed to create a positive impact. The Economic Summit brings thought leaders in many spheres  including top economists, foreign and local private sector celebrities, professionals and leading public sector figures onto one platform, to deliberate on and explore solutions on key economic issues of the country. Group Managing Director, Vish Govindasamy speaking of the sponsorship, said As we at Sunshine celebrate our 50th anniversary and 50 years of responsible entrepreneurship, it is our privilege to be powering a forum that serves as a vital platform in bringing together policy makers, corporates, entrepreneurs, local and foreign academics to shed light on things that matter, with a view to strengthening business opportunities and driving a new wave of responsible economic growth.

It is for these reasons that Sunshine extends its fullest support to the Sri Lanka Economic Summit and we look forward to this years event with great anticipation.



Contributing towards the intellectual discourse, Sunshine Holdings Group Managing Director, Vish Govindasamy will be part of a panel discussion on the Transformative Opportunity for Sri Lanka.

Sunshine Holdings PLC is a diversified conglomerate with interests in Healthcare, Plantations, FMCG, Packaging and Renewable Energy. The Group with revenue exceeding US $120 million is listed on the Colombo Stock Exchange. Beginning with the healthcare business in 1967, the group has built strong businesses over the last five decades, including partnering with the Tata Group in 1992 to form a joint venture in Plantations. Group companies include Sunshine Healthcare Lanka, Watawala Plantations PLC, Watawala Tea Ceylon Ltd and Sunshine Energy.
The current standoff at Doklam  with the muscle-flexing from China's military  comes at a very significant time for the People's Liberation Army (PLA). All the PLA's departments are currently in the throes of preparing for its 90th anniversary, on August 1.

Details of festivities are closely guarded. The only clues are vapour trails that now appear every weekend across the Beijing skies, and slickly produced propaganda videos that are being circulated around Chinese social media showing the military's strength.

The message is that China's army today is vastly different from its humble origins  and that it can stand up to protect Beijing's "sovereignty". No surprise then that the Doklam standoff has been universally portrayed in China not as a dispute involving Bhutan's land, which has been whitewashed out of official reports, but of India "violating" China's sovereignty.

To be sure, China's shrill rhetoric is largely because it sees the standoff as a China-Bhutan affair, and was perhaps taken off guard by India stepping in and stopping the road construction on disputed land, which would alter the status quo in the tri-junction. Yet, the timing, a month before the PLA's biggest anniversary in years, has perhaps heightened the rhetoric.

Hence the muscle-flexing. The PLA was founded on August 1, 1927, when the Communist Party organised an uprising against the Kuomintang in southern Jiangxi. Song Zhongping, a Beijing-based military expert, and former Second Artillery Corps officer told the Global Times that the 90th anniversary comes "in the midst of China's fundamental military reform and strategic transformation, so apart from commemorating its history, it's also a new start for the PLA."

Last year, President Xi Jinping announced the demobilising of three lakh soldiers of the 2.3 million strong force. That number will be cut by another one million, bringing the PLA's strength under a million for the first time. The re-organisation of departments is equally significant. The focus is on winning a high-tech, short war and integrating the different services.

The Second Artillery Corps has been elevated as the PLA Rocket Force, while a Strategic Support Force has been created. The PLA Navy's resources have been increased, just as China opens its first overseas base in Djibouti near the Gulf of Aden, and inducts its second aircraft-carrier - and first home-grown one - into its rapidly expanding navy.

In the past, the army was the absolute main body of the PLA, but since China's national interests are expanding quickly overseas and there are more requests from other countries for China to share more of the global security burden, China has many more new missions that are beyond the army's capability," Xu Guangyu of the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, told the Global Times.

For some in the PLA, the Doklam standoff has perhaps come at an opportune time. They have seized on it to whip up nationalism and support for the PLA, and to showcase its credentials ahead of August 1. One former PLA general in a widely circulated post on social media hit out at domestic critics of the army and the party and called on them to rally behind the PLA amid the Doklam standoff.

This past month, military outlets have showcased no less than two major drills on the Tibetan plateau. The first announced on July 3, showed battle tanks being tested. Then, this past weekend, state media showed videos of a major PLA exercise in Tibet involving livefire drills and anti-aircraft guns. And the expectation is there is only likely to be more muscle-flexing in the lead up to August 1.
The ongoing India-China standoff in Doklam on the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet trijunction, now into its second month, is arguably the worst crisis between the two Asian giants ever since they fought a war in 1962. Both sides are sticking to their respectively stated "maximalist" position and asking each other to back off, but neither side is ready to budge.

Perhaps forgotten in this melee of diplomatic and military chain of events is one major Chinese project which India has baulked at and rejected outright, which can prove to be a magic wand to not only resolve the current situation but may also bring about a thaw in the now frigid India-China bilateral relations  the One Belt, One Road (OBOR), also known as Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

India boycotted the BRI International Forum Summit hosted by China on May 14-15  a move that riled China more than any other recent bilaterally contentious issues, including the Dalai Lamas fairly long visit to Arunachal Pradesh, Beijing's opposition to New Delhi's aspirations for full membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) or China not being on the same page as India on the issue of the United Nations blacklisting Pakistan-backed terrorists such as Masood Azhar.

India has rejected the OBOR because the CPEC or China Pakistan Economic Corridor, which passes through Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK), is an integral part of the OBOR.

China isnt prepared to scrap the CPEC for obvious reasons in view of its very close strategic ties with Pakistan, its all-weather friend and ally.

Diplomacy is all about trying to square the circles. Such a situation is staring in the face of the Indian and Chinese establishments today.

The question is whether India is prepared to give some kind of concession to Beijing to ease the Doklam crisis and persuade the Chinese to restore status quo ante as prevailed before June 16 when the eyeball-to-eyeball standoff situation between the Indian and Chinese troops erupted? The same question can be asked with respect to the Chinese too.

It's a pity that the two sides have tied themselves in knots in such a complicated manner that nothing seems to be working out. There is no bilateral dispute on which the two sides can expect a breakthrough  be it the NSG or Masood Azhar or the Dalai Lama or even the CPEC.

What does China want the most today?

It is the OBOR, the most ambitious project ever undertaken in the history of Peoples Republic of China, which is being personally driven by Chinese President Xi Jinping. Indias outright rejection of the OBOR has upset China to no end.

Perhaps in hindsight, New Delhi ought to have handled this issue more deftly than it has. Perhaps, India should not have boycotted the BRI Forum Summit and sent a representative to China even at a junior level.

After all, even the US attended the summit and that too at a fairly senior level. Matthew Pottinger, special assistant to President Donald Trump and National Security Council (NSC) senior director for East Asia, attended the event.

After all, Indias rivalry with China cant be greater than the US-China rivalry despite a recent thaw in the Washington-Beijing ties. India should have taken a cue from the Trump administration's last-minute decision to attend the BRI summit and sent a representative for the event, albeit at a junior level.

By completely boycotting it, India took a categorical and maximalist position which doesnt leave any elbow room for Indias China diplomacy. And lo, the Doklam crisis erupted full bloom exactly a month after the BRI summit.

It may not be a mere coincidence. Indias stand on OBOR may well be the real trigger for the Chinese action in Doklam. Perhaps the most important thing to be kept in mind is that the Doklam crisis is not about India-China border dispute  as technically it is essentially a China-Bhutan boundary dispute. India has stepped into the frame because it is treaty-bound to ensure Bhutan's security and protect the tiny country from all external threats.

India cannot deal with China in the same manner as it deals with Pakistan. India has had inimical relations with Pakistan for decades and yet it does not cause a ripple. The same template cannot be applied to China, the worlds number two economy and a near-superpower.

While India can expand and intensify relations with far-abroad, it cannot ignore its near abroad, particularly a contiguous neighbour like China with which it has over a 4,000-km-long long border.

Under the current complicated geopolitical web, only an out-of-the box strategy may ease the India-China tensions. The OBOR card may well fit the bill. And of course, India doesnt have to sign on the dotted line as per China's wishes.

All that India may consider to do is to convey to China that despite its valid concerns on OBOR, it is willing to "discuss" the issue with the Chinese with an open mind.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Israel on July 4, 2017, is, of course, historic. He becomes the first Indian premier to visit the country since its creation in 1948. For decades, even as the relationship strengthened, there was a curious hesitation in New Delhi to publicly acknowledge its significance.

India vacillated for more than two long years before it recognised the Israeli state, and it was only in 1992 that the Narasimha Rao regime established full diplomatic ties. Indeed, India's policy towards Israel has long been hostage to its fear of annoying the "Muslim world" - in particular, Arab nations who were openly committed to Israel's annihilation.

Meanwhile, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation stood as a phalanx behind Pakistan and its export of terrorism into India, and did New Delhi no favours. Arab monies have flowed generously into the funding of Islamist extremism and radicalisation across South Asia, and have done India grievous harm.

All this is changing quite rapidly. For one thing, the "Muslim world" is fragmenting as never before, and several constituent states have established friendly ties and, as terrorism and sectarian warfare increasingly threaten their own stability, even engaged in security cooperation with Israel.

Illustration by Anirban Ghosh.

The Palestinian cause has discredited itself through decades of terrorism, even as Palestinian terrorism has been marginalised by movements far more lethal and widespread.

Crucially, Israeli cooperation and support have given strength to India's counter-terrorism capabilities and efforts, and there have been several instances of successful operational cooperation. Several special force units, both from the Centre and from various states, have undergone specialised training in Israel.

The country's capacities against cyber-terrorism are, moreover, exceptional, and this is another sphere in which cooperation is emerging, and will be crucial for India in the future.

Counter-terrorism and defence are, of course, the lynchpins of Indo-Israeli relations. Israel, despite its minuscule size, has established itself as India's third largest source of defence and security equipment.

Crucially, Israel has shown itself to be willing to provide equipment and technologies that other "friends" deny us. This includes a range of missile systems, armed drones, laser-guided bombs, airborne warning and control systems (AWACs) and border surveillance equipment.

This relationship, however, goes far beyond common concerns on terrorism and security. Modi has rightly described Israel as a "technological powerhouse" and non-defence technology imports cut across a wide range of industries and, crucially, agriculture - in which sphere Israel's contributions are revolutionary. Bilateral trade has burgeoned over the years to a current estimate of over $5 billion, excluding defence.

There is also, in the present regime in New Delhi and its wider Hindutva constituency, an "ideological" dimension to the relationship. India's right-wing has long seen Israel as a model to emulate - as a realpolitik-based nation-state that emphasises military strength and a hard-headed retaliatory response to aggression, bound together by a single religion and a homogenised national culture.

The revival of Hebrew as Israel's official language is seen as a model for the resurrection of Sanskrit as national cultural unifier.

Here, however, we are in the realm of fantasy. Israeli militarism and machismo are not an ideological choice; they are survival imperatives in a relentlessly hostile environment. If Israel were to let its guard down for even a day, it would be wiped off the map.

This is not an eventuality that confronts India, despite grave threats in the neighbourhood and within the country. Crucially, moreover, a country of 8.2 million cannot be a model for a nation of 1.3 billion, particularly one that embraces the diversity of India's populations.

There is, nevertheless, much that we can learn from Israel - the commitment to national goals, the sheer dedication of purpose, a high sense of duty, the determination to secure "peace through strength" and the veneration of intellect.

Israel will prove a reliable partner for India; its fundamentals are sound and its perspectives enduring. Regrettably, this is not something that can be said about India.
According to a non-binding resolution passed by the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2016, access to internet is a basic human right. What does that mean in India? Nothing.

An ongoing study conducted by the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), which provides pro bono legal representation and related services to not-for-profit developers of free software/open source software, found that India has seen 29 instances of internet shutdown in the first seven months of 2017  all in the name of preserving law and order.

That is just two less than the total number of internet shutdowns in India in 2016. Yes. At the slightest sign of civil unrest, authorities suspended mobile internet and broadband services this year.

Photo: Internetshutdowns.in

How bad is it?

According to the study, 49 of the 73 instances  the number has risen to 88 at the time of writing  targeted mobile internet services, while 10 targeted both mobile and fixed-line services. The study also states that no shutdown targeted fixed-line internet services alone, and the targets of 14 shutdowns are unknown.

27 of the 73 recorded shutdowns lasted for less than a day, 17 lasted between one and three days, and 16 lasted for more than three days. No information is available on the duration of 13 shutdowns. Of the 73 shutdowns recorded since 2012, 37 were imposed in anticipation of law and order problems, while 36 instances were imposed in response to an ongoing law and order problem.

"Indian authorities' concerns over the misuse of the internet and social media should not be the default option to prevent social unrest," said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch.

"The lack of transparency and failure to explain these shutdowns only further the perception that they are meant to suppress nonviolent reporting and criticism of the government."

Areas affected

Leading the list in terms of internet shutdowns is Kashmir Valley, a region that has been regularly on the receiving end of human rights violations.

In 2017, there have so far been 10 cases of internet suspensions (and a total of 40 internet shutdowns since 2011) in the conflict-torn region due to various incidents; most recently due to the terrorist attack on Amarnath pilgrims. In 2016, internet services in the Valley were suspended for around 17 days at a stretch after the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.

In May 2017, David Kaye, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, and Michel Forst, the special rapporteur on human rights defenders, condemned the restrictions on the internet and social media services in Jammu and Kashmir, stressing that the scope of the restrictions undermined "the Government's stated aim of preventing dissemination of information that could lead to violence.

Photo: Reuters

"The internet and telecommunications bans have the character of collective punishment [and] fail to meet the standards required under international human rights law to limit freedom of expression," Kaye added.

The other states where internet services have been clamped down are Haryana (five instances), Madhya Pradesh (one instance), Rajasthan (three instances), Uttar Pradesh (two instances), West Bengal (three instances), Nagaland (two instances), Maharashtra (one instance) and Odisha (two instances).

Legality

While the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution on July 1, 2016 condemning network disruptions and measures adopted by states to curb online access and/or dissemination of information, Victorian-era laws still followed by India are a big hurdle in the UNHRCs goal. Section 5(2) of the Telegraph Act of 1885 allows the central or state governments to restrict or interfere with the transmission of messages.

Section 69A of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act of 2008 allows the government to block specific websites and pages in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State.

Other consequences

Internet is a key enabler of fundamental rights like freedom of speech and expression. Frequent disruptions through internet clampdown threaten the democratic fabric of our nation. However, what the government fails to see  besides the fact that actions like these are unconstitutional  is that this is stalling India's economic growth.

In 2015-2016, internet shutdowns cost India Rs 6,485 crore in lost business opportunities. A Brookings Institution study of 19 countries suggests that the maximum loss was incurred by India ($968 million), followed by Saudi Arabia ($465 million) and Morocco ($320 million).

Additionally a PWC report commissioned by Facebook states that Indias GDP would rise by Rs 67 lakh crore by 2020, if 100 per cent Indians had access to the internet. The report cautions: As the digital economy expands, it will become even more expensive for nations to shut down the internet... Without coordinated action by the international community, this damage is likely to accelerate in the future and further weaken global economic development.

"A modern India that wants technology for development cannot at the same time be haphazardly invoking national security to deny people access to essential information and services," said Meenakshi Ganguly. Yet, clampdowns continue ever so often. How long will it take the government to realise that its Digital India dreams have to go hand in hand with the civil liberties of citizens?
Last week gave heritage lovers reason to rejoice. Ahmedabad became the first Indian city to be declared a World Heritage Site (WHS) chosen along with the cities of Asmara in Eritrea (Africa) and Yazd in Iran.

UNESCO in its 41st session of the World Heritage Committee, held in the beautiful city of Krakow in Poland, inscribed 21 new sites on their WHS register.

Ahmedabad, a well-deserved selection, beat Delhi and Varanasi to the finishing line. It now stands among the prestigious heritage cities of Edinburgh, Dubrovnik, Luxembourg, Bath, Berne, Vatican and the like.

Chandigarh, the only other city from India in the UNESCO list, is part of the architectural work of Le Corbusier, as the Compelxe du Capitole, a 17 site transnational serial property including Le Corbusiers works from as far as Japan and Argentina.

While celebrations are mandatory, we must also reaffirm that the UNESCO tag does not come with a lifetime guarantee. It comes with riders, it in fact adds more responsibility to preserve and protect the heritage.

A reason why a number of countries refrain from putting certain heritage on the UNESCO list or some others like the Dresden Elbe Valley in Germany that pulled out due to compulsions of development.

As Germany stood steadfast on its decision to build a four-lane bridge in the heart of the Valley, UNESCO delisted the site. A similar decision that it took when Oman decided to substantially reduce the protected area of the Arabian Oryx Sanctuary, which was home to the rare antelope.

From time to time, UNESCO puts certain listed properties on the Danger list when it sees a threat to them from development or natural disasters. The only site that came close enough in India was Hampi when two bridges were to be built across the Tungabhadara River.

So while getting the site listed is an extremely difficult and laborious task, what is more important and difficult is to maintain these sites as well. A city as large as Ahmedabad would therefore need to work even harder to ensure that the properties are maintained and preserved being a mix of government, institutional and private properties. The people would have to be made to feel as much a part of the heritage, to own it and save it.

Recent events in the North East have raised the relevance of such heritage properties for common people. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railways (DHR), which was listed as a WHS in 1999, was vandalised by agitators as part of the ongoing agitation for Gorkhaland in West Bengal.

DHR, opened in 1881, is an outstanding example of a hill passenger railway built by the British and operational till date, thanks to the Indian Railways. Photo: Mail Today

DHR, opened in 1881, is an outstanding example of a hill passenger railway built by the British and operational till date, thanks to the Indian Railways. Subsequently, with the addition of the Nilgiri Mountain Railway in 2005 and the Kalka-Shimla Railway in 2008, the listing came to be known as the Mountain Railways of India.

The recent agitations saw the burning down of DHR railway stations and this is not the first time that agitators have vandalised the heritage site. Agitators, whom we presume are local people who should be proud of their heritage, targeted their own property. If we are so proud of these mountain railways then why did the agitators burn the station of this heritage site? Do the locals not see it as their heritage?

We know of the dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban as they did not see it as their culture, we know of the destruction of the Mostar Bridge by the Croats as they saw it as a symbol of Bosnian identity. But how come locals from West Bengal are burning their own heritage? Did they not see it as their identity?

To get an administration or government to pay heed to your demands is one thing; but for that do you burn your own house? Agitators usually burn and ransack other peoples property or public property, as they dont see it as theirs.

If that is the case, then perhaps the agitators saw the heritage property as somebody elses and not their own. They perhaps do not see it as a symbol of their identity or part of their heritage.

This is also observed when locals go to tourist sites and either they don't hesitate to dirty the place or leave ugly graffiti behind. Its because they see the heritage property as something that belongs to the government and not as part of their own heritage.

Have we then failed to evoke a sense of pride and a sense of belonging in people? What the government proposes as places of value for Indian heritage and culture are perhaps being seen as government buildings under protection. There is possibly no sense of community heritage in these sites for the locals.

If people of one state valued the trees and stood embracing them as part of the Chipko movement because they valued it, why wont people stand up against vandalisation of heritage? Is it because we dont identify with it or share its heritage value? Do we still view it as fragmented heritage, or that belonging to certain kings or rulers and not of the common man?

If in 70 years of our independence we have not managed to evoke a sense of value among people, then will we be able to protect the other heritage, which we so proudly keep listing on international registers?

What guarantee do we have that UNESCO will not want to review the DHR and put it on the danger list? What guarantee do we have that locals wont go about vandalising heritage cities? What guarantee do we have that these listings will instill a sense of history and heritage among the local community?

Should we then not be investing energy to understand what people value as their heritage and what they would want listed and preserved? Should we not have a dialogue to share why these heritage properties belong to the people and tell a history about them to the world?
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Two people are dead after a wrong-way driver caused a fatal crash on the Interstate 64 in Albemarle County early Sunday morning, according to police.

Virginia State Police were alerted to a green pickup truck driving recklessly in the westbound lanes of the interstate just after 6 a.m. The driver  identified by police as Winston J. Smith II, 32, of Staunton  then crossed the median, into the eastbound lanes, and drove the wrong way.

Smiths Isuzu pickup truck struck a Hyundai sedan driving eastbound near mile marker 114. The head-on collision caused both vehicles to strike a Ford F-150 pickup truck, according to a statement from police.

Smith and the driver of the Hyundai sedan, Bethany M. Franklin, 30, of Troutville, both died at the scene. Both were wearing seatbelts.

The driver of the Ford F-150, identified only as an adult male, was transported to the University of Virginia Medical Center for minor injuries.

Police are still investigating the crash.

Bedford County Fire Marshal Jeff Pauley said Sunday by phone that Franklin was hired in July 2009 as a full-time firefighter and paramedic for Bedford County Fire & Rescue.

She was a great employee, Pauley said. She was one of our earlier hires when we first started hiring career staff.

Franklin continued to work part time for the county when she went back to school more than a year ago, Pauley said. She was stationed at the Moneta Volunteer Fire Department for a number of years, he said.

In a Facebook post Sunday, the Moneta department sent condolences to Franklins family and said Franklin will be missed by many. She also helped with department fundraisers, the post said.

Pauley described Franklin as extremely professional and would not hesitate to get in and get her hands dirty when it came to emergency services.

She was awesome, he said. She was a wonderful person. Its certainly a shock to everyone in our system.

The deaths are the second and third in the area under investigation by police in two days. On Saturday, a woman was found dead on U.S. 250 near the Old Ivy Road bridge. Police have not identified her publicly.

On July 11, police said Rodney D. Burnett, 46, of Indiana, stabbed his ex-girlfriend with a folding knife while she was driving on I-64 near mile marker 101 in Albemarle County. The 46-year-old Fishersville woman was taken to the UVa Medical Center in critical condition, having suffered stab wounds to her neck and abdomen, according to a search warrant. Burnett currently is being held at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail on a charge of malicious wounding.
The White House has confirmed that President Donald Trump held a previously undisclosed meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 in Hamburg, Germany, earlier this month."There was a couples-only social dinner at the G-20," Michael Anton, a senior national security official in the Trump administration, told a small group of reporters today, a White House official told ABC News. "Toward the end, the president spoke to Putin at the dinner."Anton did not reveal the length or content of the meeting, according to the White House official. Anton did not immediately return ABC News' request for comment.A White House official disputed the characterization of the meeting as hidden in reports as false, malicious and absurd. And despite reports saying it lasted an hour, the official said that Trump and Putin only spoke briefly. The official confirmed that Putin's translator was used during the exchange.Trump, Putin shake hands ahead of high-stakes meeting at G-20Trump 'pressed' Putin on election meddling but he denied it, Rex Tillerson says"During the course of the dinner, all the leaders circulated throughout the room and spoke with one another freely," the official said in part in an extensive statement. "President Trump spoke with many leaders during the course of the evening. As the dinner was concluding, President Trump went over to Mrs. [Melania] Trump, where he spoke briefly with President Putin."The statement continued: "It is not merely perfectly normal, it is part of a president's duties, to interact with world leaders. Throughout the G-20 and in all his other foreign engagements, President Trump has demonstrated American leadership by representing our interests and values on the world stage."Ian Bremmer, an American political scientist and president of the Eurasia Group, previously reported the dinner encounter between Trump and Putin on "Charlie Rose" Monday night, but the White House had not confirmed the encounter until this evening.Bremmer spoke to ABC News on Tuesday night, saying he stands by the account provided to him by his sources in the room. He said the sources told him Trump got up halfway through the dinner and then went to sit with Putin and the two talked for about an hour.The conversation was said to be very animated, and jovial in nature, Bremmer said. He added that people in the room were distressed by what they saw, and said that it was unusual seeing that type of rapport between an American and Russian president in a talk that lasted as long as it did with just a Russian translator in between them.Trump and Putin held a high-profile meeting at the G-20 on July 7 that lasted over two hours, in which they discussed in part Russian interference in the U.S. election -- which the Putin denied.Before the sit-down, the two leaders also had a casual run-in in the morning, where they exchanged a handshake.
Peter Schiff Warns Of "Calm Before The Storm"by Tyler DurdenOct 20, 2017But interest rates are now at just 1.25%. If the stock market were again to drop in such a manner, the Fed has far less fire power to bring to bear. It could cut rates to zero and then re-launch another round of QE bond buying to flood the financial sector with liquidity. But that may not be nearly as effective as it was in 2008. Given that the big problem at that point was bad mortgage debt, the QE programs purchase of mortgage bonds was a fairly effective solution (although we believe a misguided one). But propping up overvalued stocks, many of which have nothing to do with the financial sector, is a far more difficult challenge. The Fed may have to buy stocks on the open market, a tactic that has been used by the Bank of Japan.It should be clear to anyone that since the 1990s the Fed has inflated three stock market bubbles. As each of the prior two popped, the Fed inflated larger ones to mitigate the damage. The tendency to cushion the downside and to then provide enough extra liquidity to send stock prices back to new highs seems to have emboldened investors to downplay the risks and focus on the potential gains. This has been particularly true given that the Feds low interest rate policies have caused traditionally conservative bond investors to seek higher returns in stocks. Without the Feds safety net, many of these investors perhaps would not be willing to walk this high wire.But investors may be over-estimating the Fed's ability to blow up another bubble if the current one pops. Since this one is so large, the amount of stimulus required to inflate a larger one may produce the monetary equivalent of an overdose. It may be impossible to revive the markets without killing the dollar in the process. The currency crisis the Fed might unleash might prove more destructive to the economy than the repeat financial crisis it's hoping to avoid.--------------
Ex-FBI agent: Trump got elected, thanks to RussiaDavid Knowles,Yahoo News August 1, 2018Yes. I think just alone the hacking, particularly of the DNC and the time to release by WikiLeaks and DCLeaks and others of hacked materials offset the media narrative, Watts, who has been an outspoken critic of the current president, told Bots & Ballots host Grant Burningham.For many agents in the FBI, Watts said it became clear that the biggest goal for active measures was advancing Trumps presidential bid, in part by utilizing vulnerable social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.By the time 2016 came around, it was very clear that they had four campaign messages that they wanted to push. The first one was very anti-Hillary Clinton, and that was from the beginning. The second one was very pro-Trump, Watts said. The third one was when the hacking kicked in, which was that Bernie Sanders got a raw deal from the DNC, and you can see that in these hacked emails. Thats really when we started to see that hacking was starting to power influence. And the last one, which was very minor, was that you still need to show up for Jill Stein. So, the equation was quite clear, it was how do we elevate Trump to the top spot and sort of suppress Clinton turnout and people wanting to support her.In Messing With the Enemy, his new book on modern cyberwarfare campaigns, Watts said that the election results in traditionally Democratic states like Michigan and Wisconsin prove just how effective the Russian campaign was. Still, Watts notes that because of incomplete social media data and notoriously inaccurate polling, that its almost impossible to prove one way or another whether Russia won the election for Trump. What is clear is that Trumps election was itself a victory for Moscow.
Turkey is negotiating a mega deal worth billions of dollars in a Turkish Bazar style, where the European Eurosam consortium faces a competing offer from the Russians, through their largest missile exporter Rostec, as Ankara opens its missile defense program to foreign bidders.

Until 2013 Turkey, a major NATO ally considered only the weapon systems produced by its allies. However, in 2013 Ankara broke this tradition favoring the Chinese FD-2000 air defense system over costlier US and European competitors that restricted Turkish work sharing in the development of the system, something the Chinese were happy to offer for the US$3.4 billion they asked for.

Turkey eventually backed off from its plan to buy the Chinese system, but Ankara continued interest in air and missile defense. The tightened relations with Moscow, that following the failed coup in July 2016, brought Ankara to negotiate on the procurement of the most sophisticated Russian air and missile defense system  the S-400 that Ankara could see in the past two years, deployed in Latakia in Syria. Turkey reportedly agreed to pay $2.5 billion for the Russian system, significantly less than the Chinese one. While the technical aspects are cleared, the deal is yet to be finalized, its completion will have significant consequences for Turkey-NATO ties.

Turkey maintains its air defense under the NATO umbrella, with allies nations deploying Patriot and SAMP/T surface-to-air missile batteries, air defense radars, and airborne early warning aircraft on a regular basis since 2013. This plan continued successfully as long as the neighborhood was predictable, with friendlies on one side and hostiles on the other. The situation got much more complex as Russia entered the fight in Syria. Russian forces are positioned and operating in Syria, where NATO-backed coalition air forces support Kurdish militias that are associated with Turkish Kurdish PKK rebel groups designated as terrorists by Ankara. NATO also operates from bases in Turkey, but some of these bases were under siege during the coup, as some of their occupants were suspected of supporting the rebels.

Apparently, Ankara is seeking more sovereignty over its military force. Buying the missiles from Russia will achieve such result. While Ankara maintains it can link the Russian system to the NATO air defense network by integrating a NATO compliant Interrogation Friend / Foe (IFF) system into the Russian radar and battle management system, it is likely the Turkish S-400 units will remain isolated, or act as an ultra expensive opposition force (OPFOR) during the annual Anatolian Eagle war games, just as the Greek S-300 system is operated by in Crete.

On the other hand, Turkey is still dependent on its alliance with NATO and will benefit greatly from continued cooperation. Choosing a European air and missile defense solution will achieve this goal.

The Turkish move closer to Russia brought the heads of European air defense missile consortium Eurosam to Turkey, where they were more lenient to invite Turkish companies to cooperate and get a more significant share of the development and production of Aster/SAMP/T missiles. The Heads of Agreement between Michel Vigneras, the head of Eurosam, Faik Eken of Aselsan and Selcuk Yasar of Rocketsan, was signed last week in Ankara under the aegis of the Turkish Undersecretariat for Defence Industries (SSM). The HoA sets the work sharing agreements for a definition study with the SSM on a long-range air and missile defense system to be launched in the coming months.

According to the joint announcement, the future Turkish air and missile system will be based on the technologies and experience that Eurosam has built in the ground and naval systems, using the Aster missile over 25 years and EUR11 billion of collective investment. The Aster systems have been delivered to the naval and air forces of France and Italy. Most of the systems are naval-based, deployed with French, Italian, British Royal Navy and Saudi Navy, as well as the Singapore, Moroccan, Algerian, Egyptian, and Qatari navies. An Italian SAMP/T unit is currently deployed near the town of Gaziantep in Southern Turkey, as part NATOs augmentation of the Turkish air defense. SAMP/T is able to defeat the most challenging of air threats, whether air breathing or ballistic. The future program will be managed in synergy with future evolutions of the Eurosam systems in France and Italy. The future evolution of the system, known as Aster 30 Block 1NT, that will be better capable of engaging short and intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBM).

At the occasion of the HoA signature, Eurosam CEO Michel Vigneras said: The Italian Army has deployed two Eurosam-built SAMP/T firing units since June 2016 as part of NATOs contribution to the defense of Turkey and its people against potential missile threats from beyond NATOs southeastern flank. Todays agreement is a clear demonstration of the willingness and readiness of our 3 companies to build further on the strong defense cooperation commitments already in place and to work together as equal partners, towards a common goal and sharing full and entire responsibility vis-a-vis the Turkish authorities. I am confident that today, we have laid the foundation of a long term cooperation between Eurosam and the Turkish defense industry.

Can Ankara do both? Possibly yes. More likely is that it will get the missiles they want much cheaper though.
Let us take a look at what we expect out the 2017 Hyundai Verna.

While Hyundai has already launched the third-generation Verna in Russia, North America and China, their Indian arm has been teasing it for our market for quite some time now. The new Verna is likely to be launched in August and some dealers have even started accepting bookings unofficially. Heres what you can expect from the third-generation Verna.

The all-new Verna will pick up from where the outgoing model left a long time ago in a segment that has been dominated by the Honda City and Maruti Suzuki Ciaz. Only time will tell whether or not the new-gen model will be able to take the lead like the previous model did when it was introduced. Meanwhile, let us take a look at what we expect out the 2017 Hyundai Verna.

Design

It is pretty clear that the upcoming Vernas design is heavily inspired by the current Elantra.

In fact, Hyundai wants to create a uniform look among its sedans since with the facelift; the Xcent has also tried to be in line with the two.

The new Verna gets Hyundais latest signature cascading grille which is flanked by swept-back projector headlamps featuring sideways J-shaped LED daytime running lights much like the Elantra. There are projector fog lamps as well.

The coupe-like design element, which was the vital selling point of the outgoing model, has been further emphasised in the silhouette of the new-gen model. At the rear, compared to the previous model, it gets split wraparound tail lamps (probably LEDs this time around). Theres also a dual-tone bumper with reflectors.

On the inside, the dashboard layout is much like the Elite i20. The infotainment screen takes centre stage and is flanked by the vertical AC vents. The climate control unit looks identical to the one in the hatch, and so does the steering wheel.

Features

Range-topping version might get bi-xenon headlamps as higher variants of the Honda City offers LED units

Daytime running LEDs and projector fog lamps

Possible LED light guides in its tail lamps like the Elantra

16-inch diamond-cut alloy wheels (expected)

Hyundais latest 7-inch infotainment system with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto

Will carry over equipment list from the outgoing model with features such as passive keyless entry with engine push button start-stop, shark-fin antenna, climate control, six-airbags among others.

Engine and Transmission

The 2017 Vernas mill is likely to remain unchanged and will carry forward the same set of engines  petrol (1.4-litre and 1.6-litre) and diesel (1.4-litre and 1.6-litre)  in their current state of tune. While a 6-speed manual is expected to be standard, the 2017 Verna is likely to borrow the 6-speed automatic from the Creta for both of its 1.6-litre petrol and diesel motors. The new 6AT will replace the current and ancient 4-speed auto.

Source: CarDekho.com
New Delhi: National carrier Air India recorded the maximum cases of safety violations in the last three years, followed by Jet Airways and SpiceJet, Union Minister Jayant Sinha said in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday.

Air India, along with its subsidiaries Air India Express and Alliance Air, registered 185 cases of violations where punitive measures were taken against the crew in 2014, 2015 and 2016.

These measures included warning to personnel, derostering, corrective training and suspension of licences, he said in response to a question.

During the same period, Jet Airways recorded 154 instances where penalties were imposed on their crew and SpiceJet saw such 142 cases. Market leader IndiGo recorded three cases during this period.

But over the years there has been a decline in such instances, the government said. "There is a reducing trend in cases of safety violations in the last three year," Minister of State for Civil Aviation Sinha said.

In the case of Air India, safety violations dropped by 80 per cent - from 103 cases in 2014 to 22 in 2016. Jet Airways saw a drop of such cases from 54 in 2014 to 34 in 2016. However, SpiceJet was an exception where instances of safety breach rose from 48 in 2014 to 69 in 2016.
A fire broke out Tuesday evening and burned through four units at the 148-unit Copper Canyon Storage complex in the 1100 block of Airway Road in Lebanon.

The call came in shortly after 7:30 p.m. The fire was mostly out by 8 p.m., with Lebanon Fire District checking units for hot spots. According to the LFD, no injuries were reported, although medics treated a man for smoke inhalation at the scene.

Airway Road between Oak Street and Airport Road were blocked during the incident.

It remains unknown how the fire started or whether the units' damaged contents were insured. The Copper Canyon complex opened two and a half months ago, according to Lebanon Fire Department battalion chief Ken Savage.

The Lebanon Fire Department was assisted at the scene by the Lebanon Police Department and Tangent Rural Fire District. The Albany Fire Department played a standby role during the incident.
New Delhi: IndiGo's parent InterGlobe Aviation today said its board would consider dilution of promoters' stake to meet the minimum 25 per cent public shareholding requirement. The board will discuss the matter at its meeting to be held on July 31.

IndiGo, which is the largest domestic carrier in terms of market share, is working on ambitious expansion plans and has expressed interest in acquiring the international operations of debt-laden, state-owned carrier Air India.

In a filing to BSE, InterGlobe said its board will consider the means of achieving the minimum public shareholding in the company in accordance with the applicable laws during the meeting on July 31.

It will also consider a follow-on public offer, "institutional placement programme which may comprise of a fresh issue and/or an offer for sale and recommend the same for the approval of shareholders of the company, if required", as per the filing.

As per Sebi regulations, a company should have a minimum public shareholding of 25 per cent within three years of listing. InterGlobe got listed on November 10, 2015.

Besides, the board would consider and approve unaudited financial results for the quarter ended June 30 subject to a limited review by the statutory auditors. In late afternoon trade, shares of InterGlobe were trading at Rs 1,257, down 1 per cent, on BSE.
Government had decided to settle the PF/EPF, gratuity of retiring on the day of retirement itself.

New Delhi: Retirement fund body Employees 'Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has issued directions to its field offices to settle pension benefits to employees on the day of retirement itself, Parliament was informed today.

"Directions have been issued by EPFO to all its field offices to make the payment of provident fund and pension to members of Employees' Provident Funds (EPF) Scheme, 1952 and Employees' Pension Scheme (EPS), 1995 on the date of retirement itself," Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha.

He was responding to a question if the government had decided to settle the PF/EPF, gratuity of retiring on the day of retirement itself.

"As regards settlement of gratuity, as per Payment of Gratuity Act, 1972, the employer shall arrange to pay the amount of gratuity within 30 days from the date it becomes payable to the person to whom the gratuity is payable," the minister added.

In June 2014, the government had decided to give pension payment order to an employee on the day of retirement itself with the aim to ensure a life of dignity for pensioners.

There are about 48.85 lakh central government employees and 55.51 lakh pensioners in the country.
New Delhi: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today described the Goods and Services Tax (GST) as a "win-win" deal for all as it will expand the tax net, end

"inspector raj" and bring down prices of goods.

Pitching the GST as a measure beneficial for the country at a meeting of the BJP parliamentary party attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, senior leaders and party MPs, Jaitley said prices of goods has come down between four to eight per cent since its roll-out on July 1.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar briefed reporters about the meeting in which External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj also informed parliamentarians about Modi's recent foreign visits, especially to the US and Israel.

The GST was in the interest of people and states as well as the latter will get 80 per cent of the revenue leading to more development, Jaitley said. There was no longer tax on tax and the transport of goods across the country was going unhindered now, he said.

More than one crore firms will be migrating to the new tax regime against around 80 lakh companies earlier, he said, Kumar quoted him as saying.

"Tax net has expanded. The country's market has been integrated. Inspector raj is over. The tax burden on the masses has gone down. It is a win-win situation for all," the finance minister said.

BJP MPs were also asked to attend the Houses regularly.
Mumbai: Amidst escalating border tensions between India and China, 16 nations are working on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in Hyderabad that will seek solutions to critical trade issues.

This mega Asia pact includes big economies like China and Japan but does not involve the US, said a Bloomberg report. RCEP aims at liberalising norms for trade in goods and services and boost investment among 16-member countries.

China, which is currently facing a standoff with India over the Dokalam issue, has been pushing the member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), along with India, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan to hurry the process. Qian Keming, China's vice minister of commerce, said at a briefing in Beijing last week that China, in cooperation with Southeast Asian Nations would like to wrap up the talks by the end 2017. However, India seems to have slowed the pace ever since it refused to budge from its demand for greater market access.

India putting its foot down on this issue indicates that it will not make any hasty conclusions and will rally its efforts for greater mobility for its highly-skilled professionals. According to the Bloomberg report, other Asean counties may be viewing Indias demand as a threat to their economies.

India is expected to engage with other nations, including China to insist on concessions regarding the service sector, sources familiar with the matter said. While it is willing to offer broader tariff cuts on goods to the RCEP member countries, it expects similar concessions on services.

The service sector accounts for over 50 per cent of Indias GDP. This trade pact must therefore uphold the welfare of this sector.

"We have certain reservations in terms of how it needs to be taken forward, like seeing more progress on the services track," said Ashok Kantha, the Indian ambassador to China until 2016 and now director of the New Delhi-based Institute of Chinese Studies. He added that Indias USD 51 billion trade deficit with China is a strong concern as it seeks a more balanced opening that will cover goods and services.

"The challenge for RCEP is that China would want a quick end to the deal so that it can establish itself as a leader of world trade," said Amitendu Palit, a senior research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. "Japan, New Zealand won't be in favor of concluding early as they would want a high quality agreement. However RCEP is a low-quality agreement as it is not going beyond tariff cuts and investment," he added.

Experts familiar with this trade deal suggest that other countries will have to play a neutral, balanced role in this atmosphere of tension between India and China. While India must be firm on its demand, it should not risk polarization with other Asean countries, they said.
Old Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes were banned on November 8 last year.

New Delhi: The parliamentary panel on finance is likely to finalise its report on demonetisation of high value currency notes tomorrow, sources said.

The Standing Committee on Finance, headed by former senior Congress leader M Veerappa Moily, is planning to submit its report to Parliament during the ongoing Monsoon Session.

In its final meeting on demonetisation tomorrow, the panel has called representatives of IT industry body Nasscom for a presentation on digital payments and government's think tank Niti Aayog on policy related issues, sources said.

Earlier this month, Moily had said that the panel would submit its report on demonetisation during the Monsoon Session of Parliament that started on July 17. The session is scheduled to conclude on August 11.

Sources also added that the panel has finalised its report on bad loans and challenges in the banking sector for presentation to Parliament.

The Committee had already taken views of RBI Governor Urjit Patel and senior officials of the finance ministry on the government's decision to scrap old Rs 500/1000 notes from November 9 last year.

The move had lead to immediate shortage of currency in the system leading to long queues at banks and ATMs all over the country. However, the situation improved after the RBI pumped in new Rs 500 and also Rs 2,000 notes into the system.
New Delhi: India's proposal at the World Trade Organization to negotiate a trade facilitation pact in services has received a mixed response from member countries, Parliament was informed on Wednesday.

In February, India had circulated the draft legal text on the Trade Facilitation in Services Agreement (TFS) at the WTO. Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the proposal has been discussed at the relevant services bodies of the WTO.

The proposal provides a framework to address various impediments to trade in services in a comprehensive and holistic manner, she said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha. "India's proposal received a mixed response from the WTO members. Some members appreciated India's proposal as being comprehensive in scope and well balanced. However, several developed and developing country members expressed concern on the scope and content of the draft agreement," she said.

However, she added that the proposal has imparted the much needed momentum to the discussion on services and India has urged members to engage constructively on this initiative.

Replying to a separate question, Sitharaman said an association of pharmaceutical manufacturers of America has asked US Trade Representative to continue to keep India on its Priority Watch List in the Special 301 Report. The Special 301 Report issued by the US is a "unilateral measure" to create pressure on countries to enhance IPR (intellectual property rights) protection beyond the WTO rules.

Under the WTO regime, any dispute between two countries needs to be referred to the dispute settlement body and unilateral actions are not tenable under this regime, she added.

"Special 301 is an extra territorial application of the domestic law of a country, which is inconsistent with the established norms of the WTO," the minister said.
Mumbai: Alia Bhatt and Vicky Kaushals upcoming movie, 'Raazi,' is set to be directed by Meghna Gulzar. Based on Harinder Sikka's best-selling novel, Calling Sehmat, the film revolves around a Kashmiri spy (Alia Bhatt) who gets married to a Pakistani Army Officer (Vicky Kaushal).

And taking the plot in mind, Kashmir forms an integral part of the narrative. However, before the project can go on floors, it has run into its first hurdle  the makers have been unable to get the necessary permissions to shoot in the Valley, given the state of unrest there.

A unit member informs, "The original plan was to start the shoot in the Valley. However, Kashmir has been knocked off in the first schedule. Rumours are rife that Ansarul Khilafah Jammu Kashmir (the Indian facet of the IS) is threatening the local police with violence and, in such a situation, it's in everyone's best interest to not shoot the film in the state."

Considering Kashmir is an important element in the film, the makers have now decided to recreate Kashmir in studios of Mumbai itself. To make sure that the audience gets the impact of the movie, each and every aspect of Kashmir is being recreated. A large set will be erected in Film City where most of the indoor sequences will be shot. "A few local Kashmiri workers are building the set. Since the decor of the homes has to be authentic, local Kashmiri artworks and curios will be flown down by the producers. The set will take a few weeks to be complete. "From workshops to creating the perfect environment, the team of Raazi has been laying all its efforts and thus it will be interesting for the audience to watch the outcome of the movie.

Meanwhile, the makers will kick-start the film's shoot in Punjab. Alia and Kaushal will begin shooting by the end of this month. After their schedules in Punjab and Mumbai, the team will head to Delhi for another leg of shoot.
Not long ago, Ajay Devgn issued a statement saying, There is an exchange of bullets happening, and you are talking about exchange of culture? We cannot isolate ourselves from the nation.

It was around the same time when arch rival Karan Johar had cast Fawad Khan in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil and was battling the right wing political parties. Karan was facing a lot of flak for his love for Pakistani actors even as India and Pakistan were not on good terms.

But now, Ajays forthcoming film Baadshaho directed by Milan Luthria, is a fictional story during the Emergency is in trouble after using Raahat Fateh Ali Khans voice in the song Mere Rashke Qamar.

The excuse that the makers are giving is that the song was originally sung by the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan around 30 years ago and hence it was only fair to get his successor and nephew Raahat to sing the song in the film.

Ajays departure from his earlier statement is rather contradictory considering he used patriotism as a tool earlier, but now he features in a song sung by a Pakistani artist. In the song, Ajay is seen walking across a ground, unmindful of the running horses during a polo match being played at the Jodhpur polo ground as he woos Ileana DCruz. At the time of going to press, the makers had not responded to our query on why Raahats voice was used in the film.


Mumbai: Well, with the reprise version of Samjhawan from Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania, the talented actress Alia Bhatt revealed to the world her inner talent of singing. The song was loved and applauded by everyone. However, recently, when she was asked if she would take a step further and release her own music album? This is what the Udta Punjab actress replied.

Talking about the same to a leading daily, she said, "Cutting an album will be something that I may do for fun, but that wont be the main focus in my career. Even if I do it, it will be out of my passion or love for singing and nothing else. It wont be a career move. I want to concentrate mainly on acting."

Alia understand the craft very well and is aware that singing live is a tough task. Speaking about it she asserted, "I dont have the talent to sing live. I think its very difficult. Also, I have an issue. I cannot sing with music behind me, I can only sing without music because I get confused with music playing around me. So, I dont know about singing live. But again, I believe, Never say never. Someday, I may end up doing that."

Thats right! Never say never.

Recently, the actress was performing live at an award show and unable to contain her excitement, she started crooning the song, which received her a lot of flaks on the social media.

Alia recently swept back home the IIFA (International Indian Film Academy Awards) 2017 Best Actress award for her stunning performance as Mary Jane in Udta Punjab with Shahid Kapoor, who also bagged the Best Actor Award for Udta Punjab as Tommy Singh. She is currently working on Meghna Gulzars Raazi' with Vicky Kaushal, where she plays a Kashmiri spy and marries a Pakistani official (Vicky).
Star-kid Arjun Kapoor speaks about the existing nepotism debate in Bollywood, triggered by Kangana Ranaut.

Mumbai: The much- hyped debate on nepotism was triggered by Kangana Ranaut on the popular chat show of Karan Johar.

The actress accused the filmmaker on his show of being a flag-bearer of nepotism and ever since, the debate has had too many repercussions. Several celebrities from the fraternity spoke about the issue and gave their views on it.

However, the most recent star-kid to give his opinion on the nepotism debate is Arjun Kapoor, son of producer Boney Kapoor.

Arjun, who debuted from Yash Raj Films Ishaqzaade reportedly feels that nepotism exists in every field.

As per the actor, there are no degrees in the industry and everyone gets just one chance to prove themselves.

He further stated that he got an opportunity because of his dad, but post that, it was only between the audience and him. He also added that no one buys a ticket or offers work because of one's surname.

According to the 'Mubarakan' star, talent is the biggest qualification.
LEBANON  Paul Aziz is throwing a party next weekend for every mayor in the state, and the rest of the mid-valley is invited, too.

The Lebanon mayor, currently in his third term, has been attending the annual Oregon Mayors Conference ever since his election. His favorite part of each convention has been visiting a new city and learning about its community and the type of amenities it offers. Two years ago, he began the process to bring the conference to Lebanon for the first time.

"I thought it would be great to have Lebanon the showcase because we're doing so much positive stuff in our town," he said.

The conference will run Thursday, July 27, through Saturday, July 29, including a community "Mayors Night" from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. Friday, July 28, in the downtown area.

Lebanon applied to the Oregon Mayors Association, which is run by the League of Oregon Cities, to hold the conference. Aziz said the application involved essentially putting together a promotional package, talking about all the things Lebanon could feature.

He focused on the city's 2040 plan, its Best Western Boulder Falls hotel conference availability, the College of Osteopathic Medicine and several new businesses. He also proposed ideas for things to do, including the Friday night "Mayors on Main Street" community event with a free concert, car show, Art and Wine walk and various special offerings.

"All that just came together and they accepted it," he said.

Aziz said he's expecting some 80 mayors from around the state to visit Lebanon for the conference. Costs are being covered by tourism dollars and sponsorships, particularly from Linn-Co Federal Credit Union and from Republic Services.

Friday's concert and car show take place on Main Street between Vine and Oak streets. They are free and open to the public, although vendors and Wine Walk merchants may charge for their offerings, Aziz said. He suggested bringing chairs for the concert, which will start at 6 p.m.

Aziz has attended mayoral conferences in Lincoln City, Cottage Grove, Pendleton and Corvallis and said he's very excited to play host this year.

"It's an honor, really, to be able to show off what our community has done," he said.
The Tamil remake of Malayalam movie Bhaskar The Rascal, is officially on cards now. Titled Bhaskar Oru Rascal, Amala Paul will be seen essaying Nayantharas role as Swamys pair.

The films release has been confirmed for September. Siddhique, who did the original will direct the Tamil remake and this is his fourth flick in Tamil after Friends, Engal Anna and Kaavalan. Both Arvind Swamy and Amala Paul portray single parents in the family drama. While Master Raghav will play Swamys son, actress Meenas daughter Baby Nainika who rose to fame with Theri will play Amalas daughter.
Kochi: Fearing his arrest in abduction-cum-assault case of a south Indian actress here, an aide of Malayalam actor Dileep too moved the Kerala High Court for the anticipatory bail, a relief which the court denied today to a lawyer suspected to have destroyed some evidence in the case.

In his anticipatory bail plea, Dileep's aide Sunilraj A S alias Appunni told the court that there have been "fanciful reports" about his role in the case and repeated assertions by the media that he would be arrested and arrayed as an accused.

He said he had received telephone calls from one Vishnu, allegedly on behalf of 'Pulsar' Suni, the prime accused.

The petitioner said he had been repeatedly interrogated by the Special Investigation Team probing the case but no incriminating evidence was found against him.

The petitioner also said he apprehended that he would be intimidated and tortured if taken into police custody.

He said he also believed that 'Pulsar' Suni was trying to blackmail Dileep, arrested in the case. Sunilraj's anticipatory bail plea is expected to be heard tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the high court is slated to consider tomorrow Dileep's bail plea.

The actor was denied bail by an Angamaly magisterial court near here. In a related development, the high court today disposed of the anticipatory bail plea of lawyer Pradeesh Chacko, observing that the offences alleged against him are bailable.

Granting Chacko time till 11 AM tomorrow to appear before the police team investigating the case, the court said police can proceed as per law, if its further probe finds he is involved in a non-bailable offence in connection with the case.

The police suspect the lawyer's role in destruction of evidence of the crime allegedly committed by Suni and his men, in the case.

They also suspect that Suni had handed over evidence, the mobile phone he had used to record the offending video, to Chacko at his office in Ernakulam.
Miami: A 10-year-old boy from a drug-ridden Miami neighborhood apparently died of a fentanyl overdose in June, becoming one of Florida's littlest victims of the opioid crisis, authorities say. But how he came into contact with the powerful painkiller is a mystery.

Fifth-grader Alton Banks died June 23 after a visit to the pool in the city's Overtown section. He began vomiting at home, was found unconscious that evening and was pronounced dead at a hospital. Preliminary toxicology tests showed he had fentanyl in his system, authorities said. "We don't believe he got it at his home," Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said Tuesday. "It could be as simple as touching it. It could have been a towel at the pool." She added: "We just don't know."

The case has underscored how frighteningly prevalent fentanyl has become - and how potent it is. Exposure to just tiny amounts can be devastating. Investigators said Alton may have been exposed to the drug on his walk home in Overtown, a poor, high-crime neighborhood where Assistant Miami Fire Chief Pete Gomez said he has seen a spike in overdoses in the past year and where needles sometimes litter the streets.

"There is an epidemic," Gomez said. "Overtown seems to have the highest percentage of where these incidents are occurring." The three-block walk between the pool and Alton's home took him down streets that appeared relatively clean Tuesday, but on the block in the other direction from his home, trash littered the pavement and empty lots. Homeless people slept in the shade of an Interstate 95 overpass.

Detectives are still trying to piece together the boy's final day. Rundle appealed to the public for information. "This is of such great importance. We need to solve this case," she said. "I believe this may be the youngest victim of this scourge in our community."

The boy's mother, Shantell Banks, was informed of the preliminary findings last week. A distraught Banks told The Miami Herald that her son was a "fun kid" who wanted to become an engineer and loved the NFL's Carolina Panthers, especially Cam Newton. Jessie Davis, who lives in an apartment house next to the building where Alton lived, said her grandchildren, ages 8, 9 and 10, regularly make the same walk to the nearby park with a swimming pool. She said she initially thought the pool water made Alton sick and was shocked by news reports that he had been exposed to fentanyl.

"Where would a 10-year-old baby get something like that?" Davis said. Thinking about her own grandchildren going to the pool, Davis said, "I'm going to tell them, 'Don't touch nothing.' I don't know whether they think it's candy, but somebody needs to tell these kids something."

The Florida Department of Children and Families said it is conducting its own investigation, in addition to that of the police. Fentanyl is a synthetic painkiller that has been used for decades to treat cancer patients and others in severe pain. But recently it has been front-and-center in the U.S. opioid abuse crisis. Perhaps best known as the drug that killed pop star Prince, it is many times stronger than heroin. Dealers often mix it with heroin, a combination that has often proved lethal.

Fentanyl is so powerful that some police departments have warned officers not to even touch it. In 2016, three police dogs in Broward County got sick after sniffing the drug during a federal raid, officials said. Gomez said his crews wear long sleeves, coveralls, gloves and masks while handling fentanyl. And "you never want to start reaching into people's pockets," he said, explaining that crews often cut people's pockets open for fear of pricking themselves with needles.

The Florida Legislature addressed the epidemic, passing a law that imposes stiff mandatory sentences on dealers caught with 4 grams (0.14 ounces) or more of fentanyl or its variants. The law also makes it possible to charge dealers with murder if they provide a fatal dose of fentanyl or drugs mixed with fentanyl. The law goes into effect Oct. 1. Nearly 300 overdose deaths in Miami-Dade County last year involved variants of fentanyl, according to the medical examiner's office. Statewide, fentanyl and its variants killed 853 people in the first half of 2016. Of those, only nine were younger than 18.
Hyderabad: The Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) has advised young couples getting married in the same caste to go for genetic horoscopes instead of astrological horoscopes.

CCMB director Dr Rakesh Misra said the genetic testing before marriage tells the mutations they are likely to have in order to prevent the disease causing genes carry forward to the next generation.

Researchers said that the stronger founder event in the groups having high Identity-By-Descent (IBD) are a major of source of risk of recessive diseases and it is very different from that due to marriages among close relatives (consanguineous marriages).

Dr Rakesh Mishra said, The future direction for the research is to sequence the population with high IBD score and identify the mutations. Then perform diagnosis and provide counselling to have a health future generation. Currently it costs around Rs 1 lakh each for genetic testing. There is a 25 per cent change of offspring to get the recessive disease from each pair of parents in the high IBD group of a particular population. CCMB scientists quoted Dor Yeshorim: A community genetic testing program among Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews where matchmakers query the database whether the potential couple is incompatible in the sense of both being carriers or recessive mutation at the same genet.

Ashkenazi Jews have high prevalence of autosomal recessive diseases like Bloom syndrome, breast or ovarian cancer, congenital deafness, cystic fibrosis, haemophilia G, Gaucher disease, parkinsons disease and several other syndromes.

Researchers said the strategy has reduced the rate of many recessive diseases to near-zero among the Orthodox Ashkenazi jews who use the service and a similar strategy could be effective in South Asians. The Finnish populations too have certain high prevalence of these diseases.
Fharzana Siraj is a name to be reckoned with in the wellness scene in the country. Also, undoubtedly her name is on speed dial of many celebs. A therapeutic yoga consultant and an advocate of alternate medicine from Chennai, she has changed the way Indian millennials are living. The 48-year-old is renowned around town for her affable nature and is an inspiration to youngsters in the fitness scene.

The lady, who lives the motto eat, breathe, and live yoga, started practising yoga when she was 13, while she was in Kolkata with her parents. Later, her marriage and shift to Chennai opened up new avenues. The yogini points out, Its wonderful to realise that yoga is the only science that balances ones physical, spiritual, psychological, mental and emotional parameters. If one can achieve the harmony, wellness cannot escape.

Rather than hopping from one from clinic to the other in search of fitness options, Fharzana decided to bring all forms of alternative medicines under one roof. And she has a brilliant reason as well  The future is integrated medicine and I decided to go the CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) way. I dont believe that yoga therapy is the answer to all problems. Where yoga gets limited, I introduce something else. For example, when someone comes to me with acute pain, I cannot introduce them to yoga therapy, but can use acupuncture instead, asserts that mother of two.

Fharzana says that people in the West have already adopted holistic lifestyles, and its high time we follow suit, explaining, We are forgetting the fact that India is the mother of alternative medicine, and we ourselves are not confident about our own science. Its a pity.

Unlike earlier, youngsters are now open to various forms of medicine and are knowledgeable too. I do a lot of corporate seminars and have found that youngsters have succumbed to neck pain, back pain, insomnia and depression. And the reasons are the same  sedentary lifestyle, erratic eating habits, and too much use of cell phone and computers! Sadly, we have converted the boon into a bane, Fharzana avers.

Though her clinic and wellness workshops keep her busy, she finds time to travel with her two daughters. Both my daughters are working in Mumbai and I am free from all domestic responsibilities. Recently, I went to Bali with one of my daughters and I had an amazing time. Despite hectic schedules, it is important that one makes time for family, says the doting mother.

Currently, Fharzana is part of a research team formed by the Indian government to probe on whether school children want to take up yoga as a career option. Trust me, most of the responses are in the affirmative. And thats the kind of recognition and respect yoga is getting now. I am glad that todays generation is aware of the wellness factor, she adds. On a concluding note, she says that a person needs to have a four-pillar approach towards health. If a person can control these four  ahar (food), vihar (relaxation), achar (discipline) and vichar (thought)  he or she will never fall sick, she sums up.
Ullipittadorli (Kumarambheem Asifabad): Adivasis living around the Dorli-I and Dorli-II open cast coal mines in Kumarambheem Asifabad district are having to drink water poisoned by the coal dust, thanks to the Singareni Collieries Company Limiteds (SCCL) practice of disposing of the excavated coal dust, called overburden in industry jargon, in the open around the mines. The overburden also pollutes the air around the mines.

The SCCL removes the coal dust or soil while mining coal and dumps it in the open. The piled up coal dust flows into the water bodies and seeps into the ground water as well during rains. The local people and cattle are falling prey to many health problems, including skin diseases, and cattle have even died.

The SCCL had promised to set up drinking water tanks as part of efforts to rehabilitate the Adivasi communities, but that hasnt helped much.

Mr Kotnaka Bapurao of Bapuraoguda in Asifabad mandal said the coal dust has polluted the ground water and drinking water bodies and has caused health problems to these populations. The coal dust is also flowing into the Vattivagu irrigation project and killing the fish and cattle. All the local rivulets and streams have been polluted, he added.

Ms Atram Surekha of Vullipittadorli said it was unfortunate that Singareni has failed to supply potable drinking water as it had promised. The water tanks and drinking water supply promised have not been fulfilled. Residents of SC Guda and Kolamguda of Vullipittadorli in Tirynai mandal and Vattivagu colonies and Dorli colony (rehabilitation colony) in Asifabad mandal are the biggest sufferers as a big coal ash hillock has come up close to the village. Villagers have also complained of snakes from the Vattivagu project area entering into their villages.
The study pointed out that this wasn't same in case of women (Photo: AFP)

Porn is a highly controversial topic in the digital age due to its effects on sexual health, relationships and even psyche of children due to easy access. Among several voices of criticism, the most assertive opposition comes from people of religious conservative backgrounds.

But are religious men really as opposed to pornographic content as they appear from their behaviour? Research shows that despite their stand against porn in public life, a section of such individuals do consume porn in private. The basis for the tension between porn and religion has for long been its association with extramarital sex.

Researchers say that the notion that peoples professed beliefs and moral judgments are in line with their behaviour is a common misconception. A study said that conservative Christians in the US were more likely to reject porn but were not less likely to report watching it.

A study found that greater prayer frequency and religious service attendance was found in men saying that pornography is morally wrong while having watched it the previous year, which was not the case for women.

The study also showed that people without religious affiliations who considered porn immoral were less likely to watch it anyway in comparison to people associated with religious groups.
The hijab emoji was the most requested. (Photo: Apple)

On World Emoji Day recently tech giant Apple unveiled some of the new emojis it will be adding to its devices.

The company's CEO Tim Cook also took to Twitter to give the world a preview of the new additions. Among them are a bearded person and a woman who is breastfeeding.

 Happy #WorldEmojiDay!  Weve got some  new ones to show you, coming later this year!  https://t.co/xBR9ZJ7l4g pic.twitter.com/fhDrr4J5KG  Tim Cook (@tim_cook) July 17, 2017

It also included the most-requested pictogram - a woman with headscarf. In 2016, a 15-year-old girl from Saudi Arabia named Rayouf Alhumedhi had petitioned to have a hijab emoji as she argued 550 million Muslim women proudly wear it around the world and should be represented in this digital way.

Thousands were ecstatic with the inclusion.

THERES GONNA BE A HIJAB EMOJI YAYYY pic.twitter.com/L6fmBqwDSI  RAEESA (@raenb0w) July 17, 2017

However, some cruelly posted harsh comments on social media. One Twitter user called the hijab "a symbol of oppression". Another called for it to be banned.

Take a look at some of the tweets about the emoji:

Headscaffs? Lol now that's funny. I guess we shall be seeing explosive vests as back packs next!  Richard (@1RTFULDODGER) July 17, 2017

Any beheading Emoji?  Jose Roberto (@jrwwagner) July 17, 2017

these emojis should be banned!  Dr. Moe  (@mohammad_karima) July 18, 2017

I'm sick of diversity for its own sake. Hijabs are an element of female oppression. Stop treating it like it's something sacred coz it's not  Jeffrey (@boredjeffrey) July 17, 2017

@Apple REALLY apple?? A hijab emoji?? Japan is disgusted with you. America is disgusted too. Take this sexist garbage off my phone!!!  MadamAsuka (@MadamAsuka) July 18, 2017

There should be an emoji to show what happens when the Muslim woman takes off the hijab. #WorldEmojiiDay  Richard Elder (@rickthe_elder) July 17, 2017

the hijab is a symbol of oppression. by including it as an emoji you are showing your support for the oppression of women.  Joeymp (@joeymp123) July 17, 2017
Pune: Rohit Tilak, 38, the national coordinator of Youth Congress and the great-grandson of freedom fighter Bal Gangadhar Tilak has been booked by the Pune police for allegedly subjecting a 41-year-old woman to rape, unnatural sex and intimidation.

The FIR was registered on a complaint by the woman who alleged she knows Mr Tilak since March 2015 and was raped by him multiple times, at multiple places, on assurances that he loved her and intended to marry her, the police said.

Mr Tilak is a resident of Kesariwada, Pune. The FIR lodged at Vishrambag police station says Tilak raped, had unnatural sex with the woman on the pretext of marriage and when the complainant asked about marriage, he physically abused her. Despite repeated attempts, Mr Tilaks mobile was switched off.

Sources said, Mr Tilak and the woman met in March 2015 and later Mr Tilak sent her a friend request on social media. Since then they had met each other several times.
Hyderabad: The Hyderabad police busted a major drug racket by arresting nine persons including two African nationals and seized high-end narcotics like cocaine, LSD and MDMA from their possession in two separate cases.

Task Force deputy commissioner of police B. Limba Reddy said 300 grams cocaine, 42 grams of MDMA, 27 LSD blots, a car and an airgun had been seized from them.

In the first case, six persons including the foreign nationals were apprehended from Banjara Hills, Mr Limba Reddy said.

These included the Nigerian identified as Chika Ohycowusi, who has a cloth business in Goa and South African national Lucky Bongani, a student, who resides in Manikonda here. Others arrested were identified as N. Raghu, Abhinav Mahender, V. Mallikarjun Rao of Hyderabad and Christopher H.H. Gidd-ens, who is into real estate in Bengaluru, he said.

They visited different pubs and hotels in Goa, Mumbai and Hyderabad where they befriended customers and sold cocaine to them at higher price, the DCP said.

Police said that the main accused Raghu Vamsh-idhar had met other drug peddlers in Gokarna, Karnataka. Giddens introduced him to some persons to buy LSD stamps and charas from. He brought those drugs to Hyderabad, the DCP said.

In another case, three persons  P. Revanth, Irf-an Najeeb Khan and Zain Khan  were nabbed from Masab Tank on the cha-rges of possession and selling narcotics.The Task Force handed over the accused and the seized material to local police stations for further formalities.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday decided to set up a nine-judge bench to decide whether right to privacy can be declared as a fundamental right under the Indian Constitution. (Photo: File | PTI)

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday decided to set up a nine-judge bench to decide whether right to privacy can be declared as a fundamental right under the Indian Constitution.

A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar said the larger bench would examine the correctness of the two judgements delivered in the cases of Kharak Singh and M P Sharma in which it was held that right to privacy was not a fundamental right.

While the Kharak Singh judgement was delivered by a six- judge bench in 1960, the M P Sharma verdict was reported in 1950 and was delivered by an eight-judge Constitution bench.

The five-judge bench, also comprising Justices J Chelameswar, S A Bobde, D Y Chandrachud and S Abdul Nazeer, said that the nine-judge bench would commence hearing on Wednesday and decide the issue as to whether the fundamental rights, described under Part III of the Constitution, also include the right to privacy.

The order came on a batch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar scheme.

It has also been alleged that the Aadhaar scheme infringes the 'fundamental right to privacy'.

The petitions were referred to a larger bench in 2015 when then attorney general Mukul Rohatgi had referred to the inconsistencies in the past apex court verdicts and said that the issue whether right to privacy was a fundamental right or not, needed to be settled first.
Former defence minister Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday claimed that China was ready to attack India in collaboration with Pakistan. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: Samajwadi Party leader and former defence minister Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday claimed that China was ready to attack India in collaboration with Pakistan and asked the government to reverse its stand on the Tibet issue and support its independence.

Raising the matter in the Lok Sabha against the backdrop of tension between India and China, he asked the government to inform Parliament what it has done to meet any likely challenge from the neighbouring country.

"India is today facing a big danger from China. I have been cautioning the central government for years. China has joined hands with Pakistan. It has made full preparation to attack India. China is India's biggest opponent. What has the government done? In Kashmir, the Chinese army has allied with the Pak army," Yadav, known for his tough stand on China, said during the Zero Hour.

He also claimed that China had buried nuclear weapons in Pakistan to target India, adding that Indian intelligence agencies "would know better".

Yadav said India's stand on Tibet, a reference to its acceptance that the region was part of China, was a "mistake" and the time has come to support its independence as it had been a traditional buffer between the two big nations.

"China is our enemy, not Pakistan. Pakistan can do us no damage," he said.

It was India's responsibility to protect Bhutan and China was eyeing Nepal, he said.

He also spoke against massive amounts of Chinese goods finding a market in India.
Indian Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar maintained that New Delhi is engaged with Beijing in defusing the tension through diplomatic channels. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: India on Tuesday briefed top diplomats of a few foreign missions individually in New Delhi about the current Sino-Indian military standoff in the Doklam area of Bhutan, and foreign secretary S Jaishankar reportedly told a parliamentary panel that Chinas stand in the Sikkim sector has been unusually aggressive and articulate.

Jaishankar, while briefing the panel on external affairs, maintained that New Delhi is engaged with Beijing in defusing the tension through diplomatic channels.

Some TV channels reported that Jaishankar had advocated a deep breath, stop and engage policy as a way of resolving the matter, indicating that both countries would have to talk it out and solve the matter.

New Delhi briefed top diplomats of a few foreign countries in New Delhi after China had carried out a similar exercise of briefing foreign diplomats in Beijing about the standoff last week.

It is learnt that foreign missions in New Delhi, worried about the standoff, requested that they be updated. New Delhi is keeping the diplomats of United States, Russia, Britain, France, Japan and Germany in the loop about developments on the border.

There were also TV reports that Congress vice-president and Lok Sabha member Rahul Gandhi had asked about Chinese intentions and Indo-Bhutanese special relationship at the meeting of the panel of which he is also a member.

The Chinese foreign ministry in Beijing said on Tuesday that India should not use trespass into the Doklam area as a policy tool to achieve its political targets, and asked New Delhi to immediately withdraw its troops to avoid any escalation.

Jaishankar told us that Chinas aggression and rhetoric on the recent standoff is unusual but it is not that complicated as it is being projected in some quarters. We will continue to engage with them through diplomatic channels, one of the MPs in the panel was quoted by news agency PTI as saying.

The foreign secretary told the panel that India has clearly outlined its position on the border and Chinese have their own position, but they are misinterpreting it and so India was trying to clarify it. He said that India has been maintaining the same position since 1895 as per an Anglo-Chinese agreement.

Words like war-like situation or conflict were not used by the foreign secretary, and he stuck to the word standoff to describe the current situation in Doklam, another member said. Both members spoke on condition of anonymity because of the confidential nature of the meeting.

Chinese and Indian soldiers have been locked in a face-off for over a month after Indian troops stopped the Chinese Army from building a road in the Doklam area of Bhutan which China claims as its territory.

Since the illegal trespass by Indian border personnel, many foreign diplomats in China felt shocked about this and (wanted) to confirm whether it was true, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in Beijing when asked about the reported briefing by China there last week to foreign missions. The Chinese side maintains close communication with the foreign diplomatic missions on the issues they are interested, Lu told reporters
The song is sung by Malishka and is titled 'Mumbai Tula BMC var Bharosa nai ka', which means, 'Mumbai, don't you have faith on BMC?' (Photo: Screengrab)

Mumbai: The Shiv Sena corporators have demanded that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) file a defamation suit against a popular radio jockey and a local FM channel for allegedly making fun of the civic body in a video over the bad condition of city roads.

The BMC has also issued a notice to RJ Malishka, working with a private FM channel in Mumbai, after mosquitoes were found breeding at her house in suburban Bandra.

Yuva Sena members and corporators Sadanand Sarvankar and Amey Ghole, in a joint letter to the BMC Commissioner Ajoy Mehta on Tuesday, demanded that a Rs 500 crore defamation suit be filed against the channel.

"The radio channel and its RJ Malishka have knowingly targeted the BMC to tarnish its image for problems that are not under its jurisdiction," Sarvankar said.

"Everyone knows that the maintenance and supervision of the big roads like Eastern Express Highway and Western Express Highway is the responsibility of the state government agencies. But the RJ, in her video, has portrayed that the BMC is responsible for all the potholes (on the city's roads)," he said.

He alleged that the video has not only maligned the image of Mumbai and the BMC, but has also shaken the confidence of thousands of BMC employees who work hard to keep the city free from water-logging during the rains.

Another corporator, Amey Ghole, said the BMC chief has assured them of appropriate steps over the issue.

"We hope that the BMC's legal department will swing into action," Ghole said.

RJ Malishka was featured in a 1.23-minute-long video footage, titled 'Mumbai tula BMC var bharosa nai ka' (Mumbai, don't you have faith in BMC) in Marathi and uploaded on YouTube. In the footage, she purportedly poked fun at the bad

state of roads filled with potholes in the city as well as the delays in suburban train schedules.

She is purportedly seen taking a dig at the BMC and other authorities over the issues related to the problems of traffic jams during the rains.

The BMC, meanwhile, has served a notice to the RJ alleging that mosquitoes were found to be breeding at her flat in Pali Hill area of Bandra.

"We have served a notice to RJ Malishka under section 381-B of the Mumbai Municipal Corporation (MMC) Act for the mosquito breeding at her house on the 6th floor of a building at Pali Naka in Bandra," a BMC official said.

"During a routine inspection, our team found Aedes mosquitoes breeding in a clay bowl kept under a pot as well as indoor breeding in the pots of plants," he said.

The notice has been served to the RJ's mother. The RJ could not be reached for her comments on the issue.

Mumbai BJP president Ashish Shelar, however, termed the civic body's action to serve notice to the RJ as "unfair."

"Completely unfair that authorities turn up at @mymalishka's house and find faults. Spoke to BMC Commissioner & ward officers to bring peace," Shelar tweeted.

Completely unfair that Authorities turn up at @mymalishka's house and find faults. Spoke to BMC Commissioner & ward officers to bring peace.  ashish shelar (@ShelarAshish) July 19, 2017

Congress MLA Nitesh Rane said he stands behind the RJ, who is like a sister to him.
Bengaluru: The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has issued notices to two top Karnataka prison officials taking cognisance of a complaint about alleged torture and transfer of 32 convicts serving terms in the Central Prison.

An NHRC release said the complaint alleged the prisoners were beaten black-and-blue and shifted overnight (on July 16) in an injured condition to various other prisons at Mysore, Ballari, Belagavi and Davanagere.

According to the complaint, lodged on Monday by BJP MP Shobha Karandlaje, the family members of these prisoners were not being allowed to meet them.

The complaint was filed a day after the prisoners, in a sudden move, were shifted at around 1 am to jails in Ballari and Belagavi for allegedly trying to voice their grievances.

The commission observed that the allegations of physical torture of the prisoners and their overnight transfer to other jails in an injured condition, if true, raised a serious issue of violation of their right to life and dignity.

It issued notices to Karnataka Director General of Police (DGP) and Inspector General (IG), Prisons, asking them to file within four weeks a detailed report on the allegations, along with a note on the current location and health condition of the "injured and shifted" prisoners.

"It need not be restated that a prisoner is not a slave of the State and is not denude of his fundamental rights while in judicial custody," the release said.

Allegedly, the prisoners were meted out this "inhuman" treatment because of their bid to stage a dharna inside the jail premises as they were not allowed to speak to (then) DIG (Prisons) D Roopa, who had visited the jail, it added.

DIG Roopa had recently flagged certain "grave irregularities" inside the Central Jail, including providing a sophisticated kitchen to one of the prisoners, (AIADMK Amma chief) V Sasikala, and VIP treatment to another prisoner, Abdul Karim Lala Telgi, the release said.

The issue of alleged preferential treatment to Sasikala, serving a four-year term in a disproportionate assets case, came to the fore after Roopa submitted a report to her superior, DGP (Prisons) H N Sathyanarayana Rao.

Both DIG Roopa and DGP Rao were transferred after they sparred over the report in public.

The government has also ordered a probe by a retired official into the allegations.

The release said that according to the complaint, the 32 prisoners were allegedly shifted in a hasty manner in order to avoid any disclosure to the inquiry officer.
Kacharakanahalli lake, once spread out across 53-acres, bears few traces of its former glory. Now almost completely parched, the lake-bed contains packs of feral dogs, swarms with mosquitoes and is frequented by anti-social elements, with nearby residents bearing the brunt. And it isnt the only problem area in Bengaluru. The 100-odd lakes and tanks that remain are choked with sewage, encroachments and transformed into mini landfills. There is little clarity on maintaining these water bodies, with the responsibility shared by the BDA, BBMP and KLCDA. Banning untreated sewage and allowing rainwater to enter these lakes is the only solution and could be the answer to Bengalurus water needs, report Rohan Ramesh and Aksheev Thakur

The Kacharakanahalli Lake, once a sylvan spread of water, is now a waste land. The 53-acre lake located between Lingarajapuram and HBR Layout, has dried up, has turned into a dump yard that appears to be beyond any sort of revival and considering its location, is being eyed by developers.

The lake is now used to dump garbage, throwaway construction material, and even as a vegetable market on Sundays! On one side, there is the Kariyanapalya residential locality that is also known as St Thomas Town and the Chandrika Soap Factory. On one side, the lake is bounded by the Hennur Main Road. On the other are two temples and a goshala run by Isckon. A slum has come up on the lake bed. Lorries that transport construction material are parked at night. There is also pre-school in the area.

At night, the area presents an eerie sight, with feral dogs scavenging for refuse, fighting turf wars, and growling menacingly at passersby.

The once-pristine water body, called Silver Lake by the locals, is a mini Mandur, right in the heart of the city. The lake bed is being encroached, on one side by two temples. Back in 1986, the lake, already dead, was identified for an abattoir by the government, which gave up the idea in the face of fierce resistance by the residents nearby. There are plans to develop the 53 acres into a playground, parks and colleges, but all that is in the future.

According to Narayan B.S., a lake conservationist intent on developing the remaining area, A temple has encroached the lake bed area. The case is in the court, therefore we have to wait before taking steps to recover what is left of the lake bed. Only about 15 or 20 acres remain right now.

Right now, it is a waste dump, with a storm water drain filled with refuse running on two sides, swarms of mosquitoes, and dogs that pose a danger to the residents. There is a path from the Hennur road inside the lake, which residents actively seek to avoid after sundown, when canine attacks and mugging pose a significant threat.

Local resident Satya Murthy says that roving packs of dogs in the lake bed are pose a danger to passerbys. Packs of feral dogs roam the area threatening residents. This is due to people dumping garbage in the lake area.

Another resident, Mr. Davidson says there are atleast 40-50 stray dogs that have made the lake bed their home. These strays roam the area, attracted by the smell of garbage being dumped by unconcerned citizens. Also, flies are a big problem.

There have been instances of muggings and robberies in the area. The place is a haven for criminals hiding from police. 10 days ago, there was a shootout between police and a couple of rowdies. Police, who received information that two rowdies, Santosh and Shyam who killed their rival Ranjith, were hiding in the lakebed, confronted them.

If the government does not take steps to develop the area, there are chances of it being encroached upon by land sharks.

Right now, the area is a waste land by the day and Bad Lands by night. The residents are still waiting for redemption.

Fact-file

Kaggadasapura Lake covers an area of 47 acres. According to Koliwad Committee report, over three acres and 34 guntas have been encroached.

Out of 124 acres 25 guntas, nearly 18 acres 30.75 guntas of Hulimavu Lake have been encroached

The local residents near Sarakki Lake complain of lorries dumping garbage near the lakebed late at night.

Even though the NGT ordered that a penalty of Rs 500,000 would be imposed on those found dumping waste in the lake, the order is rarely implemented.

BWSSB should treat sewage before it enters water bodies: Lake official

The extent of encroachment on the lake beds across the city, which quickly turn into dumping grounds has citizens up in arms, more determined than ever to reclaim the glory of the lakes.

However, the Karnataka Lake Conservation and Development Authority (KLCDA) claims it has custody of only four lakes but accepts that the solution to reviving the lakes is to have decentralised Sewage Treatment Plants (STP).

The lakes are in the custody of BBMP, BDA and KLCDA which has only four lakes under its custody. The treatment of sewage must be ensured by the BWSSB, says Seema Garg, CEO, KLCDA.

Citizens protest against the apathy shown towards Bellandur Lake

On being asked how the implementation to have STPs in apartment complexes and IT parks can be enforced, she adds, Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) has to check if various establishments have STPs or not. The decentralised STP can solve the problems.

Commenting on the burning issue of saving lakes, Sandeep Anirudhan, volunteer with citizen group Whitefield Rising says, The lake authority constituted by the BBMP should be empowered. Encroachments are rampant and there is no action from the government. The moment lakes are restored, the Cauvery project becomes redundant and it will be a huge loss to those who are looking to make money.

Speaking further on the issue of rampant encroachment, Mr N Suresh, Convener United Bengaluru says, The committees are formed only to confuse people and to buy time. The catchment areas of lakes are encroached. Without the support of the courts, we would have become a lake less city.

The Vibhutipura Lake is completely dried up and water expert Mr S. Vishwanath remarks, The storm water drain bypasses the lake and stops rainwater from entering it. We must ensure treated sewage flows into the lake and for this, we must have decentralised STPs so that we can fill up the lake.

Expert: Unhappy with public attitude towards RWH

Subbu Hegde, President, Federation of Villa Community Associations of Bangalore

Water expert V. Balasubramanians 2011 report showed thousands of lakes (or tanks) existing in and around Bengaluru city even a few decades ago. Today, the number has dwindled to under a 100. The misery caused to citizens by this rapid decline in our water bodies was exemplified in July 2016, when the flood caused by heavy rains entered homes in many parts of the city.

On the other hand, large parts of the city depend on private tankers for water, as Cauvery supply is nowhere near adequate. The reason for this sorry state of affairs is clear: The encroachment of raja kaluves and lakes by real estate mafia, an apathetic political class and officials willing to cover up discrepancies.

This trend needs to stop at once. If not, we will all live to see the last of Bengalurus lakes and tanks edge into extinction.

The tanks or lakes around Bengaluru were created a few hundred years ago by rulers by constructing dams across streams for irrigation and to augment water supply to Bengaluru. According to experts, if all the 1000-odd tanks are rejuvenated and the raja kaluves cleared of encroachments, 80% of Bengalurus drinking water needs can be met.

The fire and froth in Bellandur and Varthur lakes attracted worldwide attention from the media and gave rise to a wave of awareness that swept across the city. The clarion call by spirited leaders like H.S. Doreswamy to reclaim and save lakes indicates the seriousness of the situation before us. The time has come for citizens to take an active part in the campaign to save our lakes.
New Delhi: Opposition members in Rajya Sabha on Wednesday strongly raised the issue of agrarian crisis in the country, saying farmers were being forced to do distress sale of crops in the face of cheaper zero-duty imports.

Several members gave notices under rule 267 that allows adjournment of the proceedings to take up a discussion on an issue.

Deputy Chairman P J Kurien said a discussion on the matter has been accepted and the members can raise their points during the debate.

Raising the issue, Janta Dal (United) MP Sharad Yadav claimed that 15-20 farmers were committing suicide every day.

He said pulses production has been raised by 33 per cent but the government has lowered the import duty on it to zero, resulting in cheaper shipments into the country.

Farmers, he said, are being forced to make distress sale.

Congress MP Digvijaya Singh said the farmers were getting "bullets instead of price".

Kurien said besides Yadav, Congress MP Pramod Tiwari, Samajwadi Party MPs Naresh Agarwal, Ram Gopal Yadav, Congress MP Kapil Sibal and CPI(M) MP Sitaram Yechury had given notice under 267 on the issue.

A discussion on the subject has been admitted and the members can raise their points then, he said.

JD(U) MP Ali Anwar Ansari through a Zero Hour mention raised the issue of manual scavenging saying this practice was continuing even after the government has declared it illegal.

Four workers, he said, died in the national capital due to toxic gases while cleaning a septic tank.

"All four are dalits," he said, adding over 2,500 dalits have lost their lives in last two-and-half-years due to this practice but no cases have been registered or compensation paid.

While the government on the one hand talks of going to Mars, on the other it provides no equipment or apparatus for such cleaning activities, he said. "Our sensitivities are dead," he said.
Pune: Police on Tuesday launched a probe after booking Congress leader Rohit Tilak, who is the great-grandson of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, for allegedly raping a woman and forcing her into "unnatural" sex, police said.

The case was registered at the Vishrambaug Police Station late Monday night.

Tilak is the grandson of late Jayantrao Tilak who was a senior Congress leader and Member of Parliament.

The police said the 41-year-old complainant and Tilak met each other at an event in 2015 and later connected on a social media site.

"The complainant alleged that Tilak repeatedly raped her on the pretext of marrying her on multiple occasions," said a police officer.

He said that the complainant claimed that she was not aware about his marital status when they met for the first time.

She alleged that she later became pregnant and he forced her to abort, said the police officer.

He added that in the complaint, the woman also stated that when she insisted on marriage, he allegedly abused and thrashed her, threatening her of dire consequences.

"So far no arrest has been made and we are investigating the case," said the officer.

The police have slapped charges of rape, unnatural offences, voluntarily causing hurt, insult with an intent to provoke breach of peace and criminal intimidation under the Indian Penal Code.

The complainant while speaking to media today claimed that she was under great pressure as she received "death threats" from Tilak's family.

In her complaint, the complainant, who is a lawyer, said that Tilak took Rs 10 lakh from her during their "relationship", the officer added.

Tilak had unsuccessfully contested the 2014 Maharashtra Assembly polls from the Kasba Peth seat in Pune against the BJP's Girish Bapat.
New Delhi: A nine-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court on Wednesday began hearing arguments to determine whether the right to privacy is a fundamental right under the Constitution.

Senior advocate Gopal Subramanium initiated the hearing before the bench headed by Chief Justice JS Khehar saying that the rights to life and liberty are pre-existing natural rights.

The Supreme Court had on Tuesday set up a nine-judge bench to decide if the contentious issue of right to privacy is a fundamental right under the Constitution.

The nine-judge Constitution bench comprise Justices J Chelameswar, S A Bobde, R K Agrawal, Rohinton Fali Nariman, Abhay Manohar Sapre, D Y Chandrachud, Sanjay Kishan Kaul and S Abdul Nazeer.

A five-judge Constitution bench headed by the CJI, which was to deal with pleas challenging the validity of the Aadhaar scheme and the right to privacy attached to it, was faced with the two past verdicts, delivered in 1950 and 1962 by larger benches, holding that the privacy right was not a fundamental right.

The apex court had on Tuesday said the nine-judge bench would deal with the limited issue of right to privacy and the correctness of the two judgements. The matter challenging the Aadhaar scheme would be then referred back to a smaller bench, it said.

"During the course of the hearing today, it seems that it has become essential for us to determine whether there is any fundamental right of privacy under the Indian Constitution," the bench, also comprising Justices J Chelameswar, SA Bobde, D Y Chandrachud and S Abdul Nazeer, said.

"The determination of this question will essentially entail whether the decision recorded by this court in M P Sharma and Ors vs. Satish Chandra, District Magistrate, Delhi and Ors. (of 1950) by an eight-judge Constitution bench, and also, in Kharak Singh vs. the State of UP and Ors. (of 1962) by a six-judge Constitution bench, that there is no such fundamental right, is the correct expression of the constitutional position," it said in its order.

The court asked Attorney General KK Venugopal, representing the Centre, and other senior advocates, including Arvind Datar, Shyam Divan, Gopal Subramanium and Anand Grover, who appeared for petitioners opposed to the Aadhaar scheme, to submit their written briefs in the meantime.

At the outset, Venugopal reiterated the arguments of his predecessor Mukul Rohatgi that there have been inconsistent views so far as judicial pronouncements on right to privacy was concerned.

He said the apex court in M P Sharma and Kharak Singh cases have held that right to privacy was not a fundamental right and later, the smaller benches have said that it was a fundamental right.

Venugopal also said that the right to privacy is not a fundamental right and rather it is common law right which is not recognised by the Constitution.

One of the counsel for petitioners termed as "regressive" the stand of the Centre that the right to privacy was common law right and not a part of fundamental right under the Constitution.

The apex court, initially, referred to the 1978 judgement in the Maneka Gandhi case and said that there was no need to revisit the judgements in Kharak Singh and M P Sharma cases on right to privacy.

A three-judge bench had in 2015 referred to a larger bench a batch of pleas, including the one filed by Justice (retd) K S Puttaswamy, challenging the validity of the Aadhaar scheme and the aspect of right to privacy attached to it.

The apex court had agreed to set up a bench on July 12 to deal with the Aadhaar-related matters after the attorney general and senior advocate Shyam Divan, appearing for petitioners, had jointly mentioned the matter.

The petitioners had claimed that collection and sharing of biometric information, as required under the scheme, was a breach of the "fundamental" right to privacy. Allowing the Centre's plea, the court had framed various questions, including as to whether right to privacy was a fundamental right, to be decided by a Constitution bench.

"If yes, then what would be contours of right to privacy," the bench had said while referring the matter to the then CJI for setting up a larger bench.

At an earlier hearing, then AG Rohatgi, while backing the Aadhaar card scheme, had contended that right to privacy was not a fundamental right.

"No judgment explicitly cites right to privacy as a fundamental right. It is not there under the letters of Article 21 either. If this court feels that there must be clarity on this subject, only a Constitution bench can decide," Rohatgi had said.

He had cited the two judgements, pronounced by six and eight-judge benches, which had held that right to privacy was not a fundamental right.

Subsequently, smaller benches had held a contrary view and, hence the matter needed to be decided by a larger bench, he had said.

"Whether right to privacy is a fundamental right guaranteed under Part III of the Constitution of India, in the light of express ratio to the contrary by an eight-judge bench in M P Sharma case and also by a six-judge bench of this court in Kharak Singh's case has to be decided," Rohtagi had said.
Rainwater being baled out by sanitation staff in the first floor of the AP Temporary Secretariat at Velagapudi of AP capital region on Tuesday. (Photo: DC)

GUNTUR: Rainwater leaked into the chambers of AP minister for human resources, Ganta Srinivasa Rao and AP minister for water resources, D. Uma-maheswara Rao on Tuesday.

The rainwater that leaked from the false ceiling troubled the employees and the officials pressed workers into service to remove the leaked water that dripped into Block 4 of the Secretariat.

Earlier, a similar incident of rainwater leakage happened on June 6 in the chamber of YSR Congress president and opposition leader Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy. The government, suspecting a conspiracy behind the leakage, ordered an inquiry. The Secretariat staff and public were worried over the leakage in the world-class Secretariat.

Besides the rainwater seepage into the ministers chambers, the false ceiling of revenue and stamps and registration department had fallen due to rainwater seepage.

Rainwater soaks AP Secretariat files

The employees faced a lot of inconvenience due to flowing of the rainwater onto the floor. The files and other documents in the office of the Water Resources secretary Sasibhushan reportedly got drenched in the rainwater. The officials of the various departments including APCRDA rushed to Block 4 and directed the contractors to repair the leakages instantly. The rainwater further started leaking from the panes of the windows. The staff immediately plunged into action and removed the water in buckets.

YSR Congress MLA Alla Ramakrishna Reddy, suspecting package deals behind the poor quality of the construction of the Secretariat, has demanded a CBI inquiry. He alleged that the government paid Rs 10,000 per square feet against the normal rate of Rs 3,500. The public wants to know the causes, conspiracies and illegalities in the Secretariat contract.

Recalling the CID inquiry into the water leakage in Mr Jagan Mohan Reddys chamber, he said that there was no progress by the CID despite the passing of a month.

APCRDA vice-chairman and minister for municipal administration P. Narayana rushed to the Secretariat and inspected the leakages. He ruled out any illegalities in the Secretariats construction and claimed that rainwater had leaked into the chambers due to the duck sheet on the roof.

He said that orders had been issued to remove the duck sheet and said that the contractors would be looking after Secretariat for a period of two years. He said that there would be some small problems in big building constructions and that people also face similar difficulties and he felt no need for treating the leak as a big issue. He appealed to everybody not to inflate simple leaks into big faults or a failure.
On Tuesday, Mayawati had got angry and stormed out of the House after being told to conclude after three minutes her speech on violence in Saharanpur in UP some time back. (Photo: File)

New Delhi: The Rajya Sabha wants Mayawati to withdraw her resignation, Deputy Chairman PJ Kurien said on Wednesday, a day after the BSP chief quit as a member of the House, saying she was not allowed to speak on Dalit issue.

Kurien, with whom Mayawati had got angry when he asked her to conclude her speech after the prescribed three minutes, said the episode was a result of a "misunderstanding" and that he has "utmost respect" for the BSP leader.

"None of us are happy about her resigning. I have utmost respect for her. It was just a misunderstanding. We all have a lot of respect for her and regard her as a senior leader. The House will ask her to reconsider her decision," Kurien said.

"... It is the decision of the House that she (Mayawati) should take back her resignation," Kurien said. He sought to set the record straight about Tuesday's developments, saying he had "nothing against anybody".

The Deputy Chairman said there was no notice by Mayawati (about raising any issue).

He said when he came to the House, he had a list of 8-9 speakers under Rule 267 and Mayawati's name was not there.

"...I want to set the record straight... When I came, I saw her standing and gave her three minutes (to speak)... I bypassed the Leader of Opposition and allowed her to speak," he said.

Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad joined Kurien and said, "we should request her to reconsider her resignation".

The Deputy Chairman then asked Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi about government's view on this.

Naqvi indicated that the government had no objection if all the parties wanted so.

On Tuesday, Mayawati had got angry and stormed out of the House after being told to conclude after three minutes her speech on violence in Saharanpur in UP some time back.

Mayawati, whose term in the Upper House was till April next year, had said she would resign as there was no point to be a member when she was not allowed to speak.

Satish Chandra Misra of the BSP said on Wednesday that the entire Treasury bench had been instructed to stand when Mayawati stood up to speak.

"They did not allow her to speak. She spoke for 2 minutes and nine seconds in breaks and would have even finished in 3 minutes," Misra said.
The issue of killings in the name of cow protection reverberated in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday with the opposition creating noisy scenes. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: The issue of killings in the name of cow protection reverberated in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday with the opposition creating noisy scenes after government said the states have all the powers to deal with such incidents and there was no need to change the existing law.

Samajwadi Party members came into the Well and raised slogans expressing dissatisfaction over the government's reply to questions regarding the steps taken by the Centre to stop such lynchings.

This led to brief adjournment of the House for 10 minutes during Question Hour, after Chairman Hamid Ansari urged members to allow other members to raise their questions.

Minister of State for Home affairs Hansraj Gangaram Ahir said the states have the power to act against those behind such incidents while outrightly rejecting charges by SP member Naresh Agrawal that BJP men were behind such lynchings.

The Minister said the Union Home Ministry has already issued an advisory to all states for immediately registering FIRs in such cases and asked them to take action and arrest the culprits involved in such violent incidents.

He also said the Prime Minister has already spoken against such killings in the name of cow protection which will not be tolerated.

"I don't think there is a need to bring changes in the law," he said when asked by Congress member Digvijaya Singh if the government intended to bring changes in the existing law to curb such violence.

Ahir said 24 states and five union territories in the country have banned cow slaughter and only states of Arunachal Pradesh, Kerala, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland, besides UT of Lakshwadeep have not imposed any such ban.

The Minister informed that the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) does not maintain separate data on cases of lynchings as only cases related to communal and religious tensions are recorded.

"For the first time, NCRB has started recording lynching incidents since 2014. In 2014, more such cases happened in states like Kerala, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, while in 2015 there were more incidents in

states of Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

"In 2016, more such incidents took place in states of Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Kerala, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. Except a state or two which are BJP-ruled, other states are non-BJP ruled," he said.

"It is not correct that BJP people are involved in this," he said, as he rejected the opposition charge.

Ahir also said all states have acted against the culprits behind such killings and have sent complete information to the Centre, except West Bengal, on the action taken and added that the Centre is not going away from its duty.

"In Haryana, four people have been arrested, while three have been held in West Bengal, 30 persons in Jharkhand and four have been held in Maharashtra," he said, adding all states have acted and no culprits are roaming free.

"If anyone is not arrested, we will ask the states to take action...The Centre is not running away from fulfilling its duty and have asked states to send complete reports," Ahir said.

Raising the issue, Agrawal asked whether the Centre was aware of the killings that have taken place in the country in the name of cow vigilantism and sought the details of such incidents.

"'Police' and 'Public order' are state subjects under the Seventh Schedule to the Constitution of India. The responsibilities to maintain law and order, protection of life and property rests primarily with the respective state governments.

"The state governments are competent to deal with such offences under the provisions of law. NCRB does not maintain data on lynching in the name of cow vigilantism," he said in a written reply.

Agrawal, however, said it was a matter of privilege as the Minister had provided wrong information that the NCRB does not maintain data on lynchings in name of cow vigilantism.

Majid Memon (NCP) said India's image internationally was being affected and said people abroad think that India is a country without the rule of law and because of communal disharmony and religious hatred is created.

He asked what the government was doing to stop these incidents as the Prime Minister's words have not stopped them and mere registration of FIR was not enough.

TMC member Sukhendu Shekhar Roy asked why was the NCRB not maintaining separate data on lynchings in name of cow protection.

As members expressed dissatisfaction over the Minister's reply, the SP members entered the Well saying they have not received an answer to their question and protested raising slogans like "killings in the name of cow protectionism will not be allowed".
SP leader Naresh Agrawal made the comment while participating in a short duration debate on 'rising incidents of lynching and atrocities on minorities and dalits across the country'. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: A controversial remark by a Samajwadi Party (SP) leader against Hindu gods on Wednesday triggered uproar in the Rajya Sabha, forcing its two adjournments before he expressed regret.

SP leader Naresh Agrawal made the comment while participating in a short duration debate on 'rising incidents of lynching and atrocities on minorities and dalits across the country'.

The comment triggered an uproar as the ruling party members said he had hurt religious feelings of the majority of people and this also was "lynching". They insisted that he should apologise.

"He has linked each of the Hindu Gods with a brand of alcohol. If he would have made this statement outside Parliament, he would've been booked. Do you have the audacity of repeating this in relation to any other religious denomination? Would you do this?" said Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, demanding an apology.

After two adjournments, when the House re-assembled, Agrawal said he did not intend to hurt sentiments of anyone.

"If someone has been been hurt, I express my regret," the SP member said.

Later, Deputy Chairman PJ Kurien ruled that part of Agrawal's remarks had been expunged and asked the media to guard against using these.

Earlier, while taking strong objection to the usage of words by Agrawal, Leader of the House and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said: "He (Agrawal) has linked up each of the Hindu Gods with brands of alcohol. If he had said this outside, he would have been liable to prosecution.You have not realised the gravity of what you have said. Do you have the audacity to say about other gods?"

Seeking apology, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said, "He cannot hurt the sentiments of the majority people who are Hindus. He cannot hold the House to ransom."

BJP member Bhupender Yadav said, "In this House, no member should hurt the feelings of others. This is also lynching."

The ruling party members were on their feet demanding apology and shouted slogans 'Bhagwan ka apman nahi chalega (disrespect to Gods will not be tolerated).

Kurien, who missed the remark as he was busy speaking to a member, said he will check the records and expunge the comment.

"I have called for records. I will check and expunge the comment if any derogatory remarks are made," he said.

Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi requested the Chair to adjourn the House till the records were checked. The House was then adjourned for 10 minutes.

As soon as the House re-assembled at 1521 hours, both the Treasury and the Opposition members were on their feet and trading barbs. Trying to bring the House to order, the Deputy Chairman said, "I have gone through the records. It is per se derogatory and hurting the sentiments of majority community...I have expunged these remarks...He should not have made the remarks..."

However, the uproar continued with Agrawal reiterating that cowsheds are run by Agrawal community and "if my statement has hurt members, I withdraw it."

But the BJP members continued to demand apology from him. The Deputy Chairman intervened, saying he had already "disapproved" of and "condemned" the remark and urged the members to not to fight on the issue.

The remarks were "hurting" members sentiments and "it is not on record", Kurien said.

He urged Agrawal to express regret and react to the situation to bring the House to order.

Agrawal said, "Lynching is a major issue..." To this, Kurien insisted that he should express regret.

CPI-M leader Sitaram Yechury tried to intervene, saying the matter should be allowed to rest.

"Naresh Agrawal has said something offensive. you (Chair) have gone on record condemning that. It is my appeal that let the House function," Yechury said.

However, the ruling party members were adamant on Agrawal tendering apology. Ananth Kumar said, "He has not insulted a single person. He has insulted a community."

Amid slogans like "Bhagwan ka apman nahi chalega (insult to the God will not be allowed)", "Sri Ram ka apman nahi chalega (insult to the God will not be allowed)" and "Apne devo ka apman nahi sahega Hindustan (India will not tolerate insult to its deities)."

Ram Gopal Yadav, another party leader of the SP, said Agrawal will not tender apology even if the entire session has to function like this. Naresh Gujral (SAD) suggested sending the issue to the Privileges Committee of the Rajya Sabha for a decision on it.

Anand Sharma (Cong) said the Gods belong to all and not only to the ruling party members. He said the ruling party should not become the "custodians of God".

He said last year, during the JNU agitation, a Cabient Minister had made certain "derogatory" remarks against Goddess Durga and refused to apologise.

He said the issue pertained to faith of all and urged for a solution to it. However, the ruling party members continued to raise slogans and the Chair adjourned the House till 4 pm.

When house re-convened, Ananth Kumar again condemned Agrawal's remarks and said he should apologise.

He said the government wants the House to function and the SP member should not make it a prestige issue.

Ram Gopal Yadav then referred to Anand Sharma's comment about a Cabinet minister making "derogatory" remarks against Goddess Durga last year.

Yadav said if the Cabinet minister has apologised, then Agrawal will also apologise. "There cannot be double standards," he added.

Agrawal then expressed regret and said in his entire political career, he has never hurt sentiments of any caste and religion.

The SP leader said he has never made any personal allegations as well.

Earlier, IT and Law Minister Ravi Shanker Prasad said that Agrawal's commenets were not correct and the SP leader should regret.

After Kurien's ruling about expunging the remarks, Congress leader Anand Sharma said it should be ensured that these comments do not surface on the social media and passions are not inflamed.

Prasad said he would convey this to the authorities concerned.

At the same time, he said the character of social media has changed and "we will have to collectively ensure that this does not spread" on the social media.
Terming it 'discrimination' towards Tamil Nadu NEET students (AIADMK) MP alleged that tough questions were given to students from the southern states and easy ones to those from the north. (Representational Image)

New Delhi: All parties from Tamil Nadu on Wednesday joined hands in the Rajya Sabha to demand complete exemption of the state's students from the combined medical entrance test NEET, alleging bias against them in the examination, with the Centre saying the matter was sub-judice.

The government responded saying it has given its views on the legislation passed by the state government for exempting Tamil Nadu from NEET (National Eligibility and Entrance Test) and it was now up to the President to take a view on it.

AIADMK and DMK members also trooped in the Well of the House for a brief while and shouted slogans seeking exemption for Tamil Nadu.

Raising the issue through a zero hour mention, AK Selvaraj (AIADMK) said the state assembly had passed a legislation for exempting Tamil Nadu students from NEET but the President has so far not given his assent to it.

He claimed that 98 per cent of the students studied the state syllabus, but the examination was based on the CBSE syllabus.

Kanimozhi (DMK) said it was not correct to state that Tamil Nadu wanted one-year exemption. "All parties (in Tamil Nadu) want permanent exemption (from NEET)," she said, adding that the state government had invested in medical college infrastructure.

A Navaneethakrishan (AIADMK) alleged that tough questions were given to students from the southern states and easy ones to those from the north. "This is discrimination," he said.

CPI(M) MP, TK Rangarajan said half of the questions in the NEET examination were out of syllabus taught to students in Tamil Nadu.

"Is this the way of cooperative federalism? State assembly passes a resolution, the Central Government is not accepting it," he asked.

Congress MP Anand Sharma wanted the Centre to make its stand clear on the state legislation.

CPI MP, D Raja demanded that Tamil Nadu be given exemption from the entrance examination.

HRD Minister Prakash Javedekar said the government has "taken note of every body's pleas" and the issue was discussed with everyone.

"The matter is in advanced stage and sub-judice," he said, adding "We have taken note of everybody's plea."

Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda said the common entrance examination for all medical colleges in the country was supported by the Supreme Court and all political parties.

Last year, exemption was given but this year the NEET examination has already taken place, he said.

"We have given our views (on the legislation passed by Tamil Nadu) and also replied" to the grounds given by the state government for seeking exemption, he said, adding it was now up to the President to take a view on granting assent to the Bill.

The government is in dialogue over the issue through the Ministry of Home Affairs, Nadda added.
Governor of Nagaland has invited the leader of the rebel faction and former chief minister TR Zeliang for swearing in at Raj Bhavan on Wednesday. (Photo: File)

Guwahati: Nagaland Governor PB Acharya on Wednesday dismissed the government headed by chief minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu and invited former chief minister TR Zeliang to form new government in the state.

The Governor Acharya in his order said, According to report received from Nagaland Legislative Assembly chief minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu did not attend the emergent assembly session convened on July 19 at 9.30 am for the purpose of testing majority of the cabinet led by him. 48 MLAs including speaker attended the session. Therefore, it is obvious that Shurhozelie Liezietsu has failed to obtain vote of confidence despite the repeated opportunity given to him.

The Governor in his order further said, By virtue of powers vested in my by Clause (1) of Article 164 of the Constitution of India, I, PB Acharya, Governor of Nagaland hereby, withdraw my pleasure from chief minister of Nagaland and the council of ministers headed by Shurhozelie Liezietsu is hereby, dismissed with immediate effect.

Earlier, Shurhozelie Liezietsu and his supporters on Wednesday failed to turn up in the Assembly to face the floor test following which the House was adjourned sine die.

Governor PB Acharya had on Tuesday directed the Speaker Imtiwapang Aieyer to summon an emergent special session of the assembly at 9.30 am for the chief minister, who is facing a rebellion from MLAs of his party Nagaland Peoples Front (NPF), to seek confidence vote.

Former chief minister TR Zeliang, leader of the rebel NPF MLAs, was present in the House along with his followers.

The motion to prove the majority of the chief minister could not be taken up as he was not present and the House was adjourned sine die, Speaker Imtiwapang informed the Governor.

Meanwhile, Governor of Nagaland has invited the leader of the rebel faction and former chief minister TR Zeliang for swearing in at Raj Bhavan, sources in Kohima said.
Bengaluru: Muddying the waters further on the raging issue of cash for perks at Parappana Agrahara jail for the incarcerated AIADMK leader V. Sasikala, a little known section of leaders belonging to AIADMK's (OPS) camp led by Anbukumar on Tuesday came down heavily on KPCC president, Dr G. Parameshwar accusing that the latter of facilitating Saisikala Natarajan's luxurious stay at Bengaluru prison. This was strongly denied by the former home minister, who dismissed it as a "pack of lies." Speaking to reporters here, Mr R. Anbuvel, AIADMK Karnataka Youth Wing secretary, charged that Dr Parameshwar was hand in glove with prison officials in providing better facilities to Sasikala Natarajan. "There is prima-facie evidence for this charge is that AIADMK Karnataka unit secretary V. Pugazhenthi is always seen with former home minister, Dr G. Parameshwar.

About Mr Pugazhenthi it is said that if he is not found at his home, he will be very much be with Dr Parameshwar, that is the closeness he shares with former Home minister. We suspect that Mr Pugazhenthi's closeness to Dr Parameshwar helped Sasikala to get what she wanted in prison," he charged. However, reacting sharply to these allegations, KPCC chief, Dr Parameshwar said, "These are baseless allegations. As long as I was Home Minister of this state, Prison officials have acted based on the prison manual. I neither interfered in their work nor influenced in manner. In any case, a detailed probe is ordered by Chief Minister Siddarmaiah on the entire episode, I hope that finally truth and justice will prevail upon everything else."
Hassan: People of the state who were anxious over the rains playing truant this season, finally got a reprieve after the Western Ghats where prominent rivers take birth, received copious rainfall while reservoirs saw a steady increase in inflow.

Rainfall recordings at Bhagamandala in Madikeri district have sprung a surprise for officials of India Meteorological Department (IMD) as the region which usually records 8-9 cm rain saw 20 cm rain on Wednesday. Heavy rain in Bhagamandala and other parts of Madikeri have increased inflow into the KRS reservoir across river Cauvery in Mandya and the inflow was recorded at 2,121 cusecs. Another prominent reservoir in Cauvery basin, Hemavathy reservoir in Hassan across river Hemavathy had 8.46 tmc feet with an inflow of 5,441 cusecs of water, said an official adding that there are heavy rains in the catchment areas of the reservoir.

With the rains lashing the region, rivers such as Tunga and Bhadra which originate in Chikkamagaluru have been flowing to capacity. An official said, about 12,000 cusecs inflow has been recorded in Tunga River, while Lakkavali reservoir across river Bhadra had water storage of 20 tmc feet.

Like, Bhagamandala, most parts of Western Ghats have recorded copious rains particularly Agumbe, considered the Cherapunji of the state which has recorded rain of 153 mm. Kotigehara has recorded 145.6 mm rains Kalasa rain of 104.2 mm, Kammaradi 120mm, Napoklu records 183.6 mm, Linganamakki-124mm, Siddapura-118 mm, Kolluru-114.8 mm and Gerusoppa in Uttara Kannada district-122.4 mm, disclosed director of IMD, Ramesh Babu.
Kollam: Environmental organisations, NGOs and even political parties consider it revolutionary when a river is revived from its imminent death in the times of global warming and climate change. Such a revolution is pioneered by the students of a village primary school where they bring a river, abandoned by the people over time, back to life. Pallikkalaar, the river originating at Chooralvayal in Palamel panchayat in Alappuzha, flows around 42 kilometers to reach the Vattakkayal in Karunagappally. Of the 44 rivers in the State, Pallikkalaar is the only river that is fed by over 60 rivulets unlike the ones which originate in a hill. The river, which bears memories of Sooranad revolt which marked the Communist rising over the feudal stranglehold in Kollam and serves as the lifeline of nearly 25 villages in Pathanamthitta and Kollam districts, had stagnated owing to encroachment, pollution and garbage piles over the last decade. The river has now got new lease life with efforts and enthusiasm of students of the Thengamom LP School in Pathanamthitta district.

It all started when the students of standard IV of the school visited river as part of their extra-curricular activities in April this year. The rivulets of Pallikkalar flow close to our school, P. Athul, a student who was in the forefront of the team, told DC. During our study we found abandoned bottles and garbage piled in sacks preventing the flow of the river. We wanted to save it. The river went into stagnation for two reasons: encroachment which narrowed its path and disposal of waste which stopped its flow. Several places including the 12-kilometer stretch from Nellimukal to Moozhi in Adoor are under the grip of encroachers, said Shyni Jose, Adoor municipality chairperson. Several spots that were 20 meters wide are hardly three meters now, thanks to encroachments. The river had virtually become the drainage canal for townships like Adoor.

The level of coliform bacteria in the water even posed threat to drinking water distribution from the river. The ever-spreading water weed cabomba aquatic ensured that the river had no chance to come back to life. The rivulets that recharged the river were also blocked with human intervention. The students who returned from seeing the stagnated river prepared a detailed report on its preset state with the help of their teachers. They wanted the river saved, PTA president Jayan B. Thengamam told DC. The PTA backed the idea and helped the formation of an action council to coordinate the rejuvenation works with the help of state government agencies. The students then met Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan with a detailed report they had prepared. Finance Minister Dr Thomas Isaac, who came to know about the project, visited the river and offered help. He in fact declared a package for the rescue of the river on International Labour Day on May 1. The Kerala State Planning Board also chipped in, giving directions to various departments to sanction sufficient funds for the rejuvenation process.

The action council then went ahead with the formation of peoples' committees at ward level. The committees included Kudumbashree members, peoples representatives and MGNREGA workers. Awareness campaigns were taken up among the people residing on the banks of the river on the need of its conservation. The first phase of the project was to prepare documents after conducting surveys on either sides of the river. Once that done, then the Kerala State Suchitwa Mission came forward with a plan to address the garbage disposal issues while the cleaning up of the river was taken up by the MGNREGA workers after it was listed as a project they could work on. The sides of the river were then protected with coir geo-textiles which stopped soil erosion. The next move was to plant ethnic varieties such as vetiver, bamboo and screwpine. By the time it has almost become a mass movement. The three-months effort, which were meticulopulsy planned and executed, has resulted the free flow of the river now. The river is gaining its might, making the dream of the children who visted it once come true.

The river that fed reds

Pallikkalaar has a history of its own, and is part of the history of Oanattukara, the region in central Travancore. The river is also known for its association with the revolt of Sooranadu of 1949, led by the early communist movement in the state. The early Communist leaders who had fought against the feudal order used to seek refuge in the banks of the river which had plenty of betel leaves and banana plantations. The fields near to Pallikkal check dam was a meeting place of the young comrades who were ousted from their homes by the order of Thennala landlords.

The action council for the revolt of 1949 December 31 was also formed in the banks of Pallikkal. The river played a role in the economic and social development of the people. A number of industries including coir in Kannetti areas, mat production using pandanus leaves, mining of white clay for Travancore Cements and the famous baked bricks of Pavumba came up on its banks. The region is also known for its sugar cane cultivation, fed by the river. It also backed the agrarian culture of Onattukara at large.
The 64-yr-old from Kannur who has shot to the limelight after AIBs controversial tweet, broke his silence and asked a legitimate question  Why would someone do this to him? (Photo: Twitter)

Mumbai: People might not know who MP Ramachandran is, but they know how he looks, thanks to his uncanny resemblance to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The 64-yr-old from Kannur who has shot to the limelight after AIBs controversial tweet, broke his silence and asked a legitimate question  Why would someone do this to him?

According to a report in Mid-day, Ramchandran has also slammed All India Bakchod (AIB) for making fun of the prime minister. "Prime Minister Narendra Modi is an international figure, and my role model too. It's not right to make fun of someone who is doing what he is for the country," he said.

The meme in question used a picture of Ramchandran along with a Snapchat dog filter superimposed on Modi's face. Following public outrage both online and offline, a case was registered against AIB for making fun of Modi.

The post with the meme went viral on social media platforms and brought Ramchandran unwanted attention. So much that he was even contemplating shaving off his beard, stating that his identity is being used to defame Modi.

"Nobody has the right to morph photographs to make fun for monetary gain. I am neither a politician, nor a social activist. I am a common man with no enemies," Ramchandran said.

He also told the tabloid about the story behind the picture that has gone viral. The picture was taken by a commuter on July 10 at Payyanur station, he said, adding that it was common for him to get request for pictures or selfies from passersby, when they realise Ramchandrans resemblance to Modi.

Ramchandran was employed by a Mumbai-based private firm as a stenographer for about 30 years. He then moved to Saudi Arabia, where he worked for another 10 years. Later, he shifted to Kuwait, but returned to Kerala in 2013.
Murder, fraud, loneliness, abuse and financial pressures - the going is tough for senior citizens in India, as helplines are inundated with distress calls. About 7% of Karnatakas population comprises senior citizens, with the number likely to triple by 2050. Shunned or ill-treated by their families, battling rising healthcare costs and crippled by the absence of compassion and support from the government, senior citizens from middle and lower income groups suffer most of all. Why arent the elderly allowed the life of dignity they deserve, ask Joyeeta Chakravorty and Mujahid Deputy.

Recently, Bengaluru awoke to the grisly murder of 69-year-old Shanthakumar, who was found stuffed inside a cupboard at a rented house in Gandhinagar. Police investigations revealed that Shantakumari had been killed by her own daughter and grandson over a trivial matter.

The burgeoning city of Bengaluru has a number of things to flaunt, attracting people from across the country. However, the well-being of the elderly has always been a matter of concern, with crimes against them increasing every day. A number of police initiatives seek to help senior citizens stay safe, through intensified patrolling and interactive programmes, besides assisting them on the phone. Despite this, assaults by family members are becoming an alarming trend.

While cheating remains the number one crime which the elderly people are being subjected to, the police data shows that attacks on the elderly who live alone have drastically reduced. Further scrutiny of the trend reveals that attacks on those who live alone are markedly less common than instances of domestic violence, which is on the rise and has proven fatal in several cases, explained a senior police officer.

Senior citizens, especially those who live without their children, are vulnerable to crimes and are a soft target. Theyre easy prey, also because they are less able to fight against injustice. Many of these crimes involve cheating and fraud, which arise more within the family than from outsiders, points out DCP Crime - 2, Jinendra Khanagavi. He, however, said that the police force has intensified patrolling and awareness programmes to prevent crimes against the elderly, under its new beat system. Khanagavi added that servants have had a major role to play in crimes against senior citizens who live alone, usually tipping off burglars about the situation.

Police have deployed constables to areas that have larger numbers of elderly people residing alone and remain in constant touch with them. All residents are given their respective area-in-charges number to be contacted if in distress.

To bring a sense safety among elderly people in the city, the police are planning for frequent personal visits besides conducting interactive programmes to increase their participation.

2007, the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act

Any person who is responsible for the protection and care of a senior citizen and intentionally abandons the senior citizen completely is liable to pay a fine of Rs 5,000 or be imprisoned for 3 months or both. Senior citizens can also file an application before the Maintenance Tribunal to declare the transfer of property void, in keeping with certain conditions.

Responsibility of the State Government:

The State Government must ensure that all government hospitals and hospitals partly or fully funded by the government arrange separate queues for senior citizens and provide beds for all senior citizens. Additionally, every district hospital must have special facilities for senior citizens. Every district must have at least one old age home for senior citizens who are poor and needy. These old age homes must be able to accommodate at least 150 poor and needy senior citizens

Elder demands

A Universal and Non Contributory Old Age Pension System to be established immediately by the government with a minimum dignified amount of monthly pension not less than 50% of minimum wage or Rs 2000/- per month, whichever is higher.

The pension should be an individual entitlement for all eligible citizens of India. The monthly pension amount be revised every two to three years. Individual who are 55 older are eligible for the old age pension. For women, eligibility age for pensions should be 50 years.

For highly vulnerable groups (such as the Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, Transgender, Women Compelled to become Sex Workers, PWDs), the eligibility age should be 45 years.

No one should be forced to compulsorily retire from work on attaining the age of eligibility for universal old age pension. A single window system for Old Age Pensions and a separate ministry for issues of the Elderly.

The right to employment and the right to pensions together represent the most important survival and livelihood demands of the unorganized sector (both rural and urban).

The demand is that these issues are taken into account in the coming years budget, and are given due consideration by the government.

The payment of pension should not be used to deny any other social security / welfare benefit such as benefit under the Public Distribution System

Demand for old age homes, legal protection against family on the rise

The helpline at the government-run Department for the Empowerment of Differently Abled and Senior Citizens never stops buzzing. The department receives upto 1500 calls a month regarding a range of problems, from legal advice to tales of senior citizens seeking information on old age homes, having been shunned by their families. While the more affluent can afford better facilities or caregivers at home, the process is far more difficult among the middle-income groups, for whom life in a Tier 1 city is simply out of their means. A recent report on Elder Abuse in India released by HelpAge India puts Bangalore at the top on issues of elder abuse among the Tier 1 cities.

Senior citizens comprise around 7.7% of Karnatakas population, an unfortunate demographic that battles waning health, rising prices and abuse in all forms. Our helpline centres are spread out across 28 centres across the state and we have noticed a marked increase in these calls, said Vasantha Prema DP, Joint Director, Directorate of Welfare of Disabled and Senior Citizens. The Department has received over 4 lakh calls in all, out of which 37,969 complaints proved genuine. 27,712 cases have been solved so far. These are usually people from the lower economic strata and this is the tip of the iceberg, she added.

Dr Radha S Murthy, Managing Trustee, Nightingales Medical Trust also points out that out of the 10 lakh or so senior citizens living in Bengaluru, around three lakh face some form of abuse, either physical, emotional or financial. "There has been an increase in the number of people seeking admission to old age homes and also seeking day care facilities. Sadly, the budget for senior citizens is not adequate and we have to make do with what we have," laments Vasantha, who adds that the State has begun a need-based survey for distribution of some 20,000 Aids and appliances for senior citizens who fall under the BPL category.

Nightingales Medical Trust, which runs a care centre for senior citizens with Alzheimers or Dementia, receives several calls inquiring after long term stays for the elderly. "A lot of calls come from elderly people who are alone and find it difficult to manage on their own, said Swati, from NMT, who adds that they receive some 1500 calls a month, of which around 40 are serious complaints.

Middle-income groups are finding it hard to manage the financial burden that comes with living in a tier 1 city. "The cost of medicines is huge and hospital visits are increasing everyday. Reputed private centres in the city charge around Rs 30,000 a month for care-giving facilities at home, which most of us cannot afford. We do not run businesses and are dependent on our savings," added Dhanya Rajesh, who employs a nurse to help care for her 80-year-old mother-in-law.

Focussed research and bigger databases on the plight of senior citizens will go a long way, said Poonam Muttreja, Executive Director, The Population Foundation of India. "The Government should start thinking along those lines, atleast for the future generations. Middle-income groups require attention because their savings arent enough to meet growing healthcare costs.

India will have 300 million senior citizens by 2050: Poonam Muttreja, Executive Director, The Population Foundation of India

I think India will soon face the problem of an ageing population in a big way, with the second largest demographic after China. In 2010, the growth rate, which hovered between five and seven percent, will rise by 20 percent by 2050, which means that there will be 300 million senior citizens in India. Sadly, despite such enormous growth projections, not much is being done in terms of social welfare, providing economic security, emotional support or proper care-giving services. The majority of these people will also belong to the poor and middle classes, with each one of them requiring social security.

The Government should start thinking along those lines, conduct research and collect data so that better implementation can happen for the benefit of future generations. Financial security for the old is under increasing strain throughout India.

The need now is to understand that there is a lack of policy and security for the elderly. There is the need for a national policy that prevents crime against the elderly and also aims at providing helplines for the old. We should start looking at universal health insurance for the elderly and it should not be restricted to just BPL patients and should extend to the middle-class population as well. We need helplines, the establishment of a national trust for the aged and also establish a national commission for senior citizens. Sadly, as a society, we do not care for our elderly and the senior citizens, which might explain the absence of will.
New Delhi: The Congress has decided to speed-up the procedures for Rahul Gandhis take over as the party president. The organisation elections, which were scheduled between September 15 and October 15 this year, will now begin in August.

According to a report in NDTV, Congress Vice-President will take over as the party president, replacing his mother Sonia Gandhi, in September.

The move to hand over the partys leadership to Rahul has not been much appreciated by opposition leaders like Mamata Banerjee and Mayawati.

Sonia will, however, retain a key role as the chief of the Congress Parliamentary Party, NDTV quoted its sources as saying. Moreover, the communications strategy team, comprising P Chidambaram, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, Jairam Ramesh and Mani Shankar Aiyar, that Sonia set up recently will oversee partys key policies.

As mandated by the Election Commission of India, in April this year the Congress agreed to complete its internal elections and re-constituted the central election committee.

Following the president's election, there will be another round to appoint CWC members. The CWC has 25 members, of whom at least 12 are elected by All India Congress Committee (AICC) members. There has been no need to conduct elections to the CWC since 1997.
Chennai: The Assembly witnessed heated exchanges between ministers and Opposition members on Tuesday when DMK working president M.K. Stalin demanded resignation of health minister C.Vijayabaskar for failing to exempt Tamil Nadu students from Neet.

The DMK, Congress and IUML members walked out the Assembly when Speaker P. Dhanapal did not allow Stalin to counter school education minister K.A. Sengottaiyan charge that the DMK was in power at the Centre when Neet was introduced.

Raising the issue. Stalin said the ruling AIADMK should use the Vice-President elections to push for getting President's approval for Tamil Nadu's Neet exemption bill.

Blaming the state government for the present chaos, he charged the state government with not exerting pressure on the Centre. Though, Presidential elections have been completed, Vice-President polls would come be held soon.

The state government should utilize the Vice-President elections to exert pressure on the Centre, he said.

Health minister C. Vijayabaskar, who intervened, said the state government had been taking all measures to protect students' welfare. A government order was issued to provide 85 per cent reservation for state-board students. A single judge of Madras high court had cancelled the reservation and the state had appealed against the single judge verdict, he said and accused the opposition of politicising the issue. He also said he would visit New Delhi to exert pressure on the Centre.

Stalin, who continued, referred to the minister's charges that opposition parties are politicising the issue and said Neet was introduced in AIADMK regime and not in DMK rule. Deputy leader of Opposition, Duraimurugan, who joined Stalin wanted the minister to get exemption for Neet or resign and added there is no other option.

Vijayabaskar asserted that the state government is continuing its fight on the issue. He said the Opposition parties are trying to use the problem for protests.

This comments triggered strong protests from the DMK members, leading to noisy scenes in the House for some time. Speaker P. Dhanapal said the DMK members would not stall the House if they had alternate suggestions.

To this, Stalin said it is the duty of the Opposition to raise the issue and it is the minister's responsibility to give an answer. How can the minister say the opposition parties are looking out for agitations?, he asked.

At this juncture, school education minister K.A. Sengottaiyan asked The Neet was introduced by the Centre when DMK was in power. Did the DMK resign against it?

When Stalin began answering the minister, the Speaker stopped him. Protesting against the Speaker's refusal to permit Stalin to speak on the subject, the Opposition members walked out of the Assembly.
Bengaluru: Jolted by Goa water resources minister Vinod Palyekar's tweet against an out of court settlement on sharing water of the river Mahadayi, the state government appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to intervene and settle the dispute with Goa.

Speaking to 'Deccan Chronicle', water resources minister M.B. Patil, said "we are not playing dirty tricks as tweeted by Mr. Vinod Palyekar. His statement is completely wrong and foolish in nature. Why should Karnataka plays dirty tricks with regard to Mahadayi water dispute?. Our Chief Minister has initiated talks with Goa and Maharashtra following a suggestion by Mahadayi Water Disputes Tribunal. The tribunal has suggested to the three riparian states to settle the dispute through an out of court settlement, so where is the question of Karnataka playing dirty tricks? It is inappropriate on the part of Goa to state that Karnataka is playing dirty politics over Mahadayi water dispute."

Infact, then Goa Advocate General Atmaram Nadkarni, presently holding the post of Additional Solicitor General of India, gave an undertaking to the Tribunal about a negotiated settlement. How could the Goa government renege on its stand before the Tribunal, Mr. Patil queried.

Lambasting leaders of Opposition BJP who often demanded the Congress government to initiate talks with Goa on Mahadayi dispute while assuring to convince BJP government and its leaders in Goa, Mr. Patil asked whether these leaders were asleep now.

Meanwhile, Opposition leader in the Assembly Jagadish Shettar criticized the state government for not making an all-out effort to resolve the crisis. Mr Shettar told Deccan Chronicle the tribunal has already commenced the hearing but the state government has not taken serious interest about proceedings in the Tribunal.
Chennai: The Masscom PG student detained under the Goondas Act has been long linked to the banned Maoist movement and was even involved in recruiting sympathisers from the campuses in the western belt, police said.

We would think a hundred times, a thousand times, before considering action against a student. And in this case, it's detention under the Goondas Act. And in this case, it's a woman student. We wouldn't have done this if we were not forced by evidence and witnesses to get convinced that she is a threat to society, a senior officer, closely involved in long-time monitoring of extremists in the state, said while explaining the case of M.Valarmathi. She was detained under the Goondas Act on Monday after being arrested on July 12 for agitating against the Kathiramangalam hydrocarbon project.

Top police sources said the 23-year-old MA student in Mass Communication and Journalism at the Periyar University in Salem had close links with Maoist activists and was in fact recruiting sympathisers from the campuses to join the movement.

She had taken a student named Santosh from Angalankurichi in Salem to the tri-junction (the Maoist hub in the forest area in the TN-Karnataka-Kerala border) last year. While she and her companion Parthiban returned after three months, Santosh stayed back, said a senior police officer.

Another officer said Valarmathi was with activist Solomon when he threw a chappal at Pon Radhakrishnan when the Union minister visited Salem on March 16 to condole the family of Dalit JNU student Muthukrishnan who had committed suicide in Delhi. While Solomon is out on bail after arrest, Parthiban is under watch, he said.

Valarmathi is the first woman activist to be detained under the Goondas Act in Tamil Nadu. The Act prohibits her release from jail for one year unless the detention itself is quashed by a competent court.

Predictably, almost all opposition parties have come down strongly against Valarmathi's detention  that too just for distributing pamphlets that protest against the hydrocarbon project. Salem police commissioner had on Monday invoked the Goondas Act against her citing six pending cases against her. Valarmathi was arrested along with her friends in April this year in Karur from a train when they headed to Neduvasal, a village in Pudukottai district, where local people were protesting against the hydrocarbon project. They had spent about a month in Tiruchy jail.

We condemn the fascist action of the Tamil Nadu government through the detention of Valarmathi under the Goondas Act. This is the first time a social activist is being detained under the draconian law in the political history of Tamil Nadu," Mugilan, coordinator of Tamil Nadu Environment Protection Movement said, pointing out that the Committee for Protection of Nature, of which she was a member, was not a banned organisation.

"Valarmathi had only distributed pamphlets and campaigned among the people. Constitution permits such democratic forms of protest, yet she has been detained under the Goondas Act," he said.

Political leaders condemn detention

Leaders of various political parties have condemned the police action of invoking the Goondas Act on 23-year-old Salem student M. Valarmathi arrested for distributing pamphlets to youngsters urging them to support the Neduvasal protests. They demanded the state government to withdraw the case and set her free. They sought the release of all those arrested for staging protests in a democratic manner.

Condemning her detention under the Goondas Act, DMK working president M. K. Stalin said Valarmathi, Thirumurugan Gandhi and Prof. Jayaraman and others had only staged the protests in a democratic manner and argued that they should be released immediately. He also flayed the government for its dual stand, especially claiming that it would not allow the hydrocarbon project inside the Assembly while outside it had allowed the police to take action against the protesters.

MDMK general secretary Vaiko urged the state government to release her immediately. Arresting those who raise voice against the government under Goondas Act strangles democracy, he said and added that the action against the woman student was strongly condemnable and she should immediately be released.

CPI state secretary R. Mutharasan, who also demanded her release, said that the detention of Valarmathi went against the Constitution guaranteed right to propagate and freedom of expression. Tamizhar Vazhvurimai Katchi president Velmurugan said that in a never before manner, Tamil Nadu has become a hub of protests as people are agitating against projects that would harm them.
Police and military officials said the attack did not appear to be targeted as the unit were traveling in civilian clothes in unmarked vehicles. (Photo: Representational/AFP)

Manila: Four members of the Philippine presidential guard were wounded in a firefight with dozens of Maoist rebels disguised as soldiers at a checkpoint on the southern island of Mindanao, the military said on Wednesday.

The attack on the elite Presidential Security Group (PSG) in North Cotabato province will be a another blow to a stuttering peace process between the government and National Democratic Front, the political arm of the communist rebels. President Rodrigo Duterte was not in the region.

"Four of our troops in two vehicles were slightly wounded in the firefight," PSG commander Brigadier-General Louie Dagoy said, adding that the rebels fled.

Dagoy said the New People's Army (NPA) guerillas opened fire on the presidential guards and were wearing soldiers' uniforms.

The peace process has been fraught with breakdowns and allegations of breaches of unilateral ceasefires by the military and the NPA.

Informal talks in the Netherlands are due to take place at the weekend to restart stalled negotiations to end the nearly 50 years of conflict, which has killed more than 40,000 people.

The encounter at the checkpoint came a day after Duterte requested both houses of Congress to extend martial law in Mindanao until the end of the year as security forces needed more time to deal with Islamist militants.

Duterte on Tuesday met his peace negotiators and instructed them not to agree to any bilateral ceasefire until the NPA ceased attacks on government troops and called on the Maoists' political leaders to keep their fighters under control.

The latest incident highlights the challenge facing a military stretched on multiple fronts in Mindanao, an island of 22 million people with a long history of rebellion.

Government forces are battling to defeat Islamic State-allied rebels who have occupied the heart of Marawi City for 58 days, while operations continue on islands in the west of Mindanao against heavily armed Abu Sayyaf bandits behind kidnappings and piracy.

The presidential guard unit is usually deployed ahead of activities by the president to secure areas in advance. Dagoy said the PSG was carrying out other work and not preparing for a visit by Duterte.

Police and military officials said the attack did not appear to be targeted as the unit were traveling in civilian clothes in unmarked vehicles.
The foreign ministry said the Sikkim section of the India-China boundary is mutually recognised by the two sides.

Beijing: India should not use "trespass" into the Doklam area in the Sikkim sector as a "policy tool" to achieve its "political targets", China said on Tuesday, asking New Delhi to immediately withdraw its troops to avoid any escalation.

The foreign ministry also said it was in "close communication" with foreign missions in Beijing on the standoff with India, but refused to confirm whether it held a special briefing for them on the issue.

"Since the illegal trespass by Indian border personnel, many foreign diplomats in China felt shocked about this and (wanted) to confirm whether it was true," the ministry's spokesman Lu Kang said when asked about the reported briefing.

"The Chinese side maintains close communication with the foreign diplomatic missions on the issues they are interested," Kang told reporters.

China reportedly held a "closed-door briefing" last week and conveyed their side of the story on the standoff near the Bhutan tri-junction.

The standoff between tow neighbours have continued for a month over the construction of a road by China near the tri-junction.

India has expressed concern over the road construction near the tri-junction, fearing it may allow Chinese troops to cut India's access to its northeastern states. It has conveyed to China that the road construction would represent a significant change of status quo with serious security implications for India.

Asked if China stated in the reported meeting that its patience was withering, Lu said Beijing stressed that the "facts are very clear in this incident".

He said the Sikkim section of the India-China boundary is mutually recognised by the two sides. "This time Indian border personnel illegally trespassed the boundary into the Chinese territory," he said.

"We stress that the Indian side should not take the trespass as a policy tool to reach or realise their political targets," he said.

To another question whether Beijing has stated that patience was running out over the issue, he said: "We have reiterated our position on the illegal trespass by the Indian side."

"You must be very clear about it. We hope the Indian side can get clear understanding of the current situation and take immediate measures to withdraw the personnel who have illegally crossed the boundary so as to avoid the escalation," he said.

Earlier an Op-ed in a Chinese state-run daily said that if India "stirs up conflicts in several spots, it must face the consequence of an all-out confrontation with China along the entire LAC (Line of Actual Control)."

"China doesn't advocate and tries hard to avoid a military clash with India, but China doesn't fear going to war to safeguard sovereignty either, and will make itself ready for a long-term confrontation, said The Global Times.
Chinese media stated the standoff as a competition of military strength, as well as a competition of overall economic strength (Photo: PTI) (Representational image)

Beijing: As the standoff between India and China over Doklam region in continues, Chinese media has said that New Delhi has poisoned the atmosphere for negotiations and this is likely to trigger all-out confrontation along Line of Actual Control (LAC).

China doesn't fear going to war to safeguard its sovereignty and will make itself ready for a long-term confrontation, a Chinese state-run daily Global Times said in an editorial.

The Chinese daily further claimed that India triggered the Sikkim standoff as it was worried about Chinas growth. One important reason that prompted India triggering the border dispute this time is its worry over China's development in recent years, it said.

New Delhi is deeply concerned with China's rapid rise and the provocation at the border reflects India's worry and attempt to sound out China, it added.

In the editorial, the daily also warned India to be ready to face the consequence of an all-out confrontation with China along the entire LAC if it stirs up conflicts in several spots.

It also urged China to take further countermeasures along the 3,500-kilometer border and said.

Responding to the Indian media reports of India deploying its troops at the border area with logistical support, Chinese daily said that China must continue strengthening border construction by deploying more troops in the Doklam area.

On Monday, state-run China Central Television reported that Chinese troops held advance military exercise near border area near Arunachal Pradesh. Anti-tank missiles, artilleries and tank were deployed during the 11-hour long drill.

Chinese media stated the standoff as a competition of military strength, as well as a competition of overall economic strength and called India's action this time is a blatant infringement on China's sovereignty.
Beijing: China renewed a call for India to immediately withdraw its troops from disputed territory high in the Himalayan mountains, following a report that Chinese forces recently held live firing drills in the region.

Foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said that Indian forces had to leave the area to avoid an "escalation of the situation."

"We have stated many times that we hope the Indian side will get a clear understanding of the situation (and) immediately take measures to withdraw the troops that illegally crossed the border back to the Indian side of the border," Lu said at a regular news briefing Tuesday.

Beijing and New Delhi have engaged in more than a month of saber-rattling as officials from both sides talk of a potential clash even bloodier than their 1962 war that left thousands dead.

Lu's comments came after Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported late last week that an army brigade equipped with rocket launchers, heavy machine guns and mortars recently practiced a simulated live-firing assault on an enemy position in Tibet. The drills also involved tracking and targeting enemy aircraft, the report said.

The current standoff is in the southernmost part of Tibet in an area also claimed by Indian ally Bhutan, although the report did not say exactly when or where the drills took place.

The slow-motion crisis is expected to be discussed when Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval visits Beijing on July 27-28 to take part in a security forum under the BRICS group of large developing nations that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

However, with nationalist sentiments among the public running high in both nations, neither side is expected to back down before the bitter Himalayan winter arrives in a few months, according to experts.

China insists Indian troops withdraw before talks can take place to settle what has become the longest protracted standoff in recent years between nuclear-armed neighbors who share a 3,500-kilometer (2,174-mile) border, much of it contested.

The most recent dispute flared in June after Chinese teams began building a road onto the Doklam, or Donglang in Chinese, Plateau that is claimed by both China and Bhutan, which cooperates closely with India on security matters.

Although China and Bhutan have been negotiating the precise border for decades without serious incident, the tiny Himalayan kingdom turned this time to help from New Delhi, which sent troops across the border from the northeastern state of Sikkim.

China retaliated by closing a nearby mountain pass that Indian pilgrims use to reach Mount Kailash, a sacred Hindu and Buddhist site in Tibet. China's foreign ministry has also presented to reporters historical documents that it says prove China's claims to the plateau.

Although the Doklam Plateau is not part of Indian territory, New Delhi has been particularly sensitive to Chinese building activity in a region with strategic significance.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif could have taken immunity, but he chose not to, adding that he presented himself for fair accountability by offering full cooperation with the JIT. (Photo: PTI)

Islamabad: Lower and higher courts in Pakistan came to a standstill today as lawyers across the country held protests demanding Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's resignation after a probe recommended filing a graft case against him and his family.

The protests were called by Pakistan's top lawyers' associations, including the Pakistan Bar Council (PBC) and the Supreme Court Bar Association.

The courts, where protests were organised, did not hear any case. The Supreme Court, however, continued with its proceedings, including hearing the Panama Papers leaks case.

The Lahore High Court was also paralysed by a partial strike by the lawyers.

The organisations have urged Sharif to "honourably" resign as he has "lost the moral and legal authority" to continue in his office after a joint investigation team (JIT) report accused him and his family of evading tax by setting up offshore companies to purchase high-end properties in London.

Bar council Vice Chairman Ahsan Bhoon said the lawyer community has expressed solidarity with the Supreme Court and asked Sharif to step down.

"We haverequested the Supreme Court to take the Panama Papers case to its logical end and disqualify the prime minister and other public office-holders declared guilty of corruption in the JIT report."

He said the bar councils have also sought the resignation of Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and the prime minister's son-in-law Muhammad Safdar.

"The JIT report has proved that the prime minster and his family members have been involved in corruption," he said, adding that the apex court should refer the case to the National Accountability Bureau for a reference against the Sharif family as recommended by the JIT.

He claimed the evidence collected by the JIT was enough to disqualify Sharif.

Sharif has dismissed the JIT report as a "bundle of baseless allegations" and refused to quit. "The people of Pakistan have elected me and only they can remove me from this post."

The scandal, nonetheless, threatens Sharif's position. If the Supreme Court finds him guilty of corruption he will have to resign, throwing the country into turmoil.
Karnataka on Tuesday criticised the Cauvery Water Dispute Tribunals decision for releasing water to Tamil Nadu every month, saying it is like God sending rain to the state.



Calling the Tribunal's direction of 2007 as arbitrary for ignoring the needs of Karnataka, senior advocate F S Nariman, appearing for Karnataka, submitted before a three-judge bench presided over by Justice Dipak Misra that it was perverse for the Tribunal to have fixed monthly water releases to Tamil Nadu without any regard to the availability of water. How can the Tribunal fix the quantity of water to be released? he questioned. Nariman, made the intervention, during the arguments being advanced by advocate Mohan Katarki.



The state contended that the Tribunal did not consider the due need of two-thirds of Bengaluru, holding that the city fell outside the basin and was not entitled to supply water from Cauvery. The Tribunal granted only 1.85 tmcft to Karnataka and 2.73 tmfct to Tamil Nadu for consumptive use.



Katarki, submitted before the bench, also comprising Justices Amitava Roy and A M Khanwilkar, that the Tribunal went on to consider the population of each state to allocate water.



The population in Tamil Nadu far exceeded the population in Karnataka, which enabled the Tribunal to allocate to Tamil Nadu 25.7 tmcft unconnected to any projects. This 25.7 tmcft water was neither claimed nor pleaded by Tamil Nadu, yet it was allocated the share, he said.



Katarki said the Tribunals order to Karnataka to supply 192 tmcft annually at the inter-state border of Billigundlu was fixed without any regard to 30 tmcft groundwater available in Tamil Nadu.






The Mysuru city police have arrested seven persons and seized three machines, which were used to erase the international mobile equipment identity (IMEI) number from mobile phones.



The police have decided to communicate the matter to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) as the tampered mobile phones could be used for anti-national activities.



Addressing reporters here on Tuesday, Commissioner of Police Dr A Subramanyeshwara Rao said, the tampering of IMEI number of mobile phones is a threat to national security and seven persons have been arrested in connection with the crime. The suspects used to erase IMEI number and give a new IMEI number to stolen mobile phones. Raids would be conducted on all mobile service and repair shops in the city to check for such anti-national activities, he added.



The machines seem to have been manufactured in China. They can change the IMEI number of even high-end smartphones, including i-Phones, in just five minutes. It is suspected that such stolen and tampered phones are used in anti-social activities, Dr Rao said.



Referring to the attachment of properties worth Rs 5.30 crore, amassed by murder convict and rowdy-sheeter C Madesha and his brother Manju, by the Enforcement Directorate recently, Dr Rao said this was first such case in the city.



The EDs action followed the request by the city police to unearth the ill-gotten wealth of the convict. Hereafter, assets of all rowdy-sheeters will come under scrutiny. If it is found that the moveable and immovable properties are bought with ill-gotten money, they will be confiscated, the top cop said.






RJD president Lalu Prasad came out in support of BSP leader Mayawati who resigned from the Rajya Sabha, and offered to send her to the upper house from Bihar.



"Today would be remembered as a black day in the history when a highly respected Dalit leader was not allowed to raise the voice of poor in the Rajya Sabha," Lalu said reacting to Mayawati's resignation.



The BSP chief today tendered her resignation accusing the BJP and the Chair of not allowing her to raise the issue of anti-Dalit violence in Uttar Pradesh.



"If Mayawati wishes, we will send her to Rajya Sabha from Bihar," the RJD president whose party has 80 MLAs in 243-member Bihar Legislative Assembly said.



"We are with her," Prasad said.



Mayawati's current term would have ended in April next year and her party, with just 18 MLAs in the UP Assembly, is not in a position to send her to Rajya Sabha.



"Chanakya had said that an assembly (of people) where a person is not allowed to speak through the force of brute majority is no assembly," he said.



Lalu Prasad's support to Mayawati is being seen as a part of his efforts to bring her and Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav together. He has invited the two leaders to his party's August 27 rally here.
The Sensex today bounced by over 244 to close at 31,955 following buying lift from metal, healthcare and FMCG stocks on the back of better-than-expected corporate earnings so far. Foreign fund inflows continued amid positive global cues.



The market opened positive on overnight earning numbers of FMCG major Hindustan Unilever coupled with a firming trend at other Asian markets, tracking another record close at Wall Street.



The Sensex after a gap up opening advanced to hit a high of 31,978.89, before settling at 31,955.35, a gain of 244.36 points, or 0.77 per cent.



The gauge had retreated from record by plunging 363.79 points in the previous session.

The 50-share NSE Nifty stayed in the positive zone and retook the 9,900-mark to hit a high of 9,905.05 as buying activity gathered momentum towards the fag end. It settled higher by 72.45 points, or 0.74 per cent, at 9,899.60.



Bharti Airtel stole the show by climbing 3.21 per cent while Dr Reddy's surged 2.01 per cent.


Embattled Nagaland Chief Minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu and his supporters today failed to turn up in the Assembly to face the floor test following which the House was adjourned sine die.



Governor P B Acharya had yesterday directed Speaker Imtiwapang to summon an emergent special session of the assembly at 9.30 am for the chief minister, who is facing a rebellion from MLAs of his party Nagaland Peoples Front (NPF), to seek confidence vote.



Former chief minister T R Zeliang, leader of the rebel NPF MLAs, was present in the House along with his followers.



The motion to prove the majority of the chief minister could not be taken up as he was not present and the House was adjourned sine die, Speaker Imtiwapang said.



The speaker said, he will report the proceedings of the House to the Governor.



Efforts to contact legislators of the Liezietsu camp turned futile as they did not take calls.



Acharya had asked the speaker to convene the special session after the Kohima bench of the Gauhati High Court yesterday dismissed the chief minister's plea to stay the governor's directive to him to seek a trust vote by July 15.



Liezietsu had filed the petition on July 14 and the court had issued an interim order staying the governor's directive till July 17.



Acharya had on July 11 and July 13 directed Liezietsu, who is facing rebellion by 43 ruling NPF MLAs led by Zeliang demanding change of leadership in the present House of 59, to seek vote of confidence on or before July 15.



Zeliang, who was forced out of office in February following large-scale protests over holding of urban local bodies election with 33 per cent reservation for women, had staked claim to form the government saying he had majority support in the House.



Four BJP legislators and Nagaland BJP president Visasolie Lhoungu yesterday called on the governor and submitted a letter supporting Zeliang.



BJP is a pre-poll alliance partner of the NPF and a constituent of the Democratic Alliance of Nagaland (DAN) government in the state.




A 60-year-old pilgrim from Madhya Pradesh died on his way back from the Amarnath shrine, taking the death toll in the ongoing annual yatra to 48, officials said today.



Romeshwar Patidar died at Pissu Top, on his way back from the cave to Nunwan base camp in Pahalgam last evening, a police official said.



He said the cause of Patidar's death is being ascertained.



With this, the death toll of pilgrims due to natural causes this year has risen to 20.

While eight pilgrims were killed in the militant attack on a bus of yatris on 10 July, 20 other pilgrims have died in various road accidents.



Governor N N Vohra, who is also chairman of the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board (SASB), yesterday reviewed the issues relating to pilgrims injured or killed since the beginning of the yatra on 29 June.



The CEO of SASB Umang Narula informed the chairman that 19 pilgrims had died due to medical reasons and 20 pilgrims had been killed in accidents.



Narula said in view of the circumstances leading to the killing of pilgrims in the militant attack, a conscious decision had been taken to enhance the scale of ex-gratia relief paid to the next of their kin.



He said, as per the chairman's directions, the SASB has borne all costs for sending the mortal remains by air to the home towns of the pilgrims, in whatever circumstances they had died.



"In 37 cases, the board had also borne the cost of providing an escort and attendant to deliver the coffin to the deceased pilgrim's home town. Till date, the board had incurred Rs 14.66 lakh on account of transportation costs and Rs 1.34 crore towards payment of ex-gratia relief," he said.






A united opposition today forced the adjournment of the Lok Sabha proceedings for nearly an hour by storming the Well and raising slogans slamming the government for allegedly ignoring the well-being of farmers.



As soon as the question hour was taken up, opposition members raised the issue of farmers.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar reminded the opposition that a discussion on the issue of farmers is listed in today's agenda. He said the government was ready for a debate and would answer all the questions raised by members. "Do not interrupt the House. Let us debate," he said.



But the opposition members, including those from the Left and the RJD, continued raising the issue from the Well.



Most of the Congress members, who were also in the Well, raised slogans such as "Mann ki Baat band karo, karzamaafishurukaro (stop talking on radio programme, implement loan waiver)" and "stop shooting farmers".



Prime Minister Narendra Modi was present in the House.



An apparently peeved Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said the opposition was not interested in the proceedings to run and adjourned the House for 50 minutes till noon.
Violating the ceasefire again, Pakistan today targeted several villages and Indian posts with mortar bombs in the Poonch-Rajouri belt of Jammu and Kashmir leaving a civilian injured.



The Indian Army retaliated effectively.



"Pakistan Army initiated unprovoked firing on Indian Army posts in Naushera sector in Bhimbher Gali sector at around 0845 hours. The Indian Army retaliated strongly and effectively," a defence spokesman said.



Pakistan Army also shelled areas in Balakote, Dhar, Lambibari, Rajdhani, Mankote, Sandote in Rajouri and Poonch districts since early morning.



A civilian identified as Raza has been injured in the shelling in Sandote hamlet along the LoC and has been hospitalised, police officials said.



Yesterday, two jawans were killed and six persons injured as Pakistan violated the ceasefire five times and pounded several villages and forward posts with mortar bombs.



The Pakistani shelling endangered lives of hundreds of school students in Rajouri district.

Over 8000 people including 3000 in Naushera and 5000 in Manjakote-Rajdhani-Panjgrain-Naika have been affected by the Pakistan shelling in the past two days.



Amidst the Pakistani shelling, authorities rescued 217 students and 15 teachers from various government schools along the LoC in Rajouri district.The students were ferried in bullet-proof vehicles.
The Pentagon has been pulled up by a powerful US Senate panel for not appointing its point person for America's "key security partner" India to coordinate and expedite bilateral defence cooperation.



The Senate Armed Services Committee, in its report running into more than 600 pages, has voiced concern over the growing gap between the overarching goals of the Indo-US defence ties.



The panel, which passed the annual National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) 2018, pulled up the Pentagon for not appointing the point person for India in the Department of Defence to coordinate and expedite bilateral defence cooperation.



Appointing such an individual would bring a refined approach to prioritising defence cooperation and aligning it with missions like maritime awareness and anti-submarine warfare and eventually joint naval patrol of the Indian Ocean, the report said.



"As a rising economic power and key security partner, it is the committee's judgement that India deserves a seat at the table as the US works with our other key allies and partners to increase resiliency, strengthen deterrence and secure superiority in both operating domains.



"Looking ahead to the future of the US' Major Defence Partnership with India, the committee encourages the Department to work closely with India in the cyber and space operating domains at appropriate strategic, operational and tactical levels," the report said.



The report, keeping in mind that key defence cooperation agreements -- Communications Capability and Security Agreement and the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for Geospatial Intelligence -- have not been completed, said the Department of Defence has approached negotiation of these agreements with consistency and good faith, as evidenced in the successful signing of the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement with India earlier this year.



The report commended both the Department and the Ministry of Defence for this progress, and hoped to see similar agreement with the two outstanding documents as well.



Over the last one decade, the defence trade between India and the US has increased from being almost non-existent to more than USD 14 billion. This is expected to increase manifold as India embarks on a major defence modernisation drive.



During Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the US last month, both the countries pledged to deepen their defence and security cooperation. The US and India look forward to working together on advanced defence equipment and technology at a level commensurate with that of America's closest allies and partners, said a joint statement issued after the India-US Summit at the White House.



US President Donald Trump had said that the security partnership between the US and India is incredibly important.

According to the White House, the United States remains a reliable provider of advanced defence articles in support of India's military modernisation efforts.
India's meat export increased to 13.53 lakh tonnes in 2016-17 from 13.36 lakh tonnes in the previous fiscal, Parliament was informed today.



In value terms, however, the export declined to Rs 27,184 crore in the last fiscal, from Rs 27,528 crore in 2015-16.



Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, said no complaint was received at her ministry with regard to prevention in production of meat and leather.

However, she said, as per data, export of buffalo meat has declined.



During April-May 2016-17, the buffalo export stood at USD 554 million whereas for the same period in the current year, it came in at USD 530 million.



She also said the export of leather products and footwear declined during 2015-16 and 2016-17 in value terms due to various factors, including some external ones like recession in European market, instability in the Middle-East countries.



In a separate reply, she said the government has received some representations for ban or restriction on meat exports.



"Some of the representations were received from GauVansh Vikas Prakoshth, Shree Bharat Vashiya Digamber Jain Mahasabha Charitable Trust, Akhil Bharat Krishi Go Seva Sangh and Govanshi Hatya Evam Niryat Nidhi Parishad," she added.



In another reply on e-commerce, the minister said the government has received communications from All India Online Vendors Association and others raising issues relating to e- commerce, including payment settlement.



"The issues raised by the associations regarding payment settlement emanated from disputes arising out of business operations of the entities involved," she said.



She added that the government takes action under suitable laws or statutes in such issues routed through appropriate authorities.
The government today said it is "pro-actively" considering the matter of having two separate time zones in the country.



The issue was raised in the Lok Sabha by BJD member B Mahtab who highlighted that there was a gap of nearly two hours in sunrise timings between the eastern and the western parts of the country.

"Sun rises at 4 am in Arunachal Pradesh while offices open at 10 AM. The Ministry of Science and Technology has also done a study on this in the past," Mahtab said.



He said some 2.7 billion units of electricity could be saved if there are two separate time zones and added that only the Centre can take a call on office timings.



Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said the government has taken Mahtab's suggestion very "seriously".



"He has raised a very important and sensitive matter. The government is pro-actively considering the issue," he said.



As the Lok Sabha was earlier adjourned after the opposition alleged that the government was ignoring the well- being of farmers, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan expressed happiness over the matter being discussed, saying "some constructive work" is happening in the House.
Shocking details have emerged in the case of brutalisation of two young lovers and video recording of the incident in Uttar Pradesh's Maharajganj district, about 250 kilometres from here.



According to the sources, the girl was allegedly ''forced'' to strip and ''pose'' for video recording. The video was later uploaded on the social networking sites.



Two persons, who were residents of Banarsinha village in the district, were arrested in this connection, police sources said in Maharajganj. A hunt was on to nab the other culprits.



The girl, who was a minor, has alleged that she was forced to strip and pose indecently with her lover by the miscreants, who also recorded everything.



Sources said that the incident had occurred about nine days back. The girl had told her parents about her brutal torture after which they approached the cops for lodging a case against the accused persons.



The police allegedly exerted pressure on the victim's parents to compromise in exchange for Rs. 37 thousand, sources said adding that the police told the girl's parents that they would face social humiliation if the matter became public.



The cops swung into action only after senior police officials took cognizance of the video, which had gone viral on the social networking sites.



The video footage, which showed the two lovers being repeatedly kicked and beaten with sticks by a group of people in a forested area, triggered a massive outrage with the opposition parties once again cornering the Yogi Adityanath government on what they alleged its failure on the law and order front.



''Women are not safe in this regime,'' said Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Rajendra Chaudhary here on Wednesday.



Barely a few days back a video showing molestation of a young girl by a group of youths in Rampur district had gone viral. The incident had triggered nationwide outrage. Around a dozen youths were arrested in this connection.
The BJP today slammed the Karnataka government over the transfer of DIG (Prisons) D Roopa after she brought to light the alleged special treatment meted out to AIADMK (Amma) leader V K Sasikala in the central jail here.



The party's state unit staged a protest here against the transfer and accused the state government of favouring corrupt officials.



BJP's state unit chief B S Yeddyurappa accused the government of siding with corrupt jail officials by shunting out an "honest and upright" officer who had exposed alleged irregularities at the Parapana Agrahara central jail here.



"By transferring an honest and upright police official (Roopa)... the Siddaramaiah government has sided with corrupt jail officials. It is clear, and people should understand it," Yeddyurappa told reporters.



He demanded that Roopa should be reinstated with immediate effect.

The government had on Monday transferred Roopa and asked DGP (Prisons) H N Sathyanarayana Rao to go on compulsory leave after they sparred over a report on the allegations in public.



In her report, Roopa had alleged that Rs 2 crore had exchanged hands to provide special facilities to Sasikala and dragged Rao into the bribery charge, saying there was a "talk" that he was also a beneficiary.



The report and her transfer have raised a political storm in the state.

Yeddyurappa said there was no room for honest officers like Roopa in Siddaramaiah's government. He urged the government to take action against guilty police officials involved in jail irregularities.



Addressing BJP protesters earlier, he highlighted the government's "failure" to arrest killers of RSS activist Sharath Madiwala in Dakshina Kannada district.



Former Deputy Chief Minister R Ashok demanded protection for honest officers.
The sudden resignation by BSP supremo Mayawati, who is fighting for her survival in Uttar Pradesh, from the Rajya Sabha may be a ''political ploy'' to regain the support of the dalits in the state, according to the political observers and her rivals.



The observers said that Mayawati was wary of the emergence of dalit organisations like Bheem Army and some others in different parts of the state and needed to show that she was the ''lone messiah' of the community and that she was ready to ''make any sacrifice'' to protect their interests.



''Mayawati feels that her resignation may help her in rallying dalits behind her once again,'' says Prof. Dinesh Kumar, a former faculty at Lucknow University.



Kumar said that dalit outfits like Bheem Army could well spoil Mayawati's attempts to win back support of dalits in the state. BSP leaders here also feel the same way. ''Mayawati has always fought for the dalits....by resigning she has once again proved that she could make any sacrifice for them,'' said a senior BSP leader here while speaking to Deccan Herald on Wednesday.



The BSP leaders said that atrocities on dalits were on the rise in UP since the BJP government assumed charge. There had been several incidents of attacks on dalits in the state in the past few months.



Her rivals, however, do not think so and for them, the resignation was only a ''nautanki'' (drama). ''Mayawati is indulging in nautanki...it will not help her in getting dalit support of dalits...she has always used the dalits for her political gains,'' said BJP leader Vijay Bahadur Pathak here.



Dalits in large numbers had held demonstrations in Saharanpur district to protest the arrest of Chandrashekhar, the chief of Bheem Army, who was the prime accused in Saharanpur violence in which three persons were killed in May this year.



BSP could win only 19 seats in the 2017 assembly polls in UP. Mayawati's social engineering (bringing dalit and brahmin together) came a cropper in the assembly elections.
The Karnataka cabinet today approved free laptops to about 1.5 lakh students who have got admitted to government or aided medical, engineering and first grade colleges in the academic year 2017-18.



The initiative is expected to cost Rs 300 crore to the state government."Government has approved free distribution of laptops to students who have obtained admission in government and aided medical, engineering, first grade and polytechnic colleges for the academic year 2017-18," Jayachandra told reporters here after a cabinet meeting.



He said "the estimated cost is Rs 300 crore... government aims to cover 1.5 lakh students and the criteria is their family annual income should be below Rs 2.5 lakh."



The government's intention to this effect was earlier announced by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah in his budget speech to encourage higher education.



The other decisions taken by the cabinet today included approval for new Karnataka Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics Policy 2011-2022.



Jayachandra said the new policy intends to bring in more investments into the sector and create employment to about 20,000 people.



The new policy gives thrust on skill development in the sector and to project Karnataka, especially Bengaluru as the hub in animation, visual effects and gaming globally, the minister added.



The cabinet also gave administrative approval for promoting Karnataka tourism in BMRCL Metro stations at a total expenditure of Rs 37.38 crore and applicable tax for next 5 years and to entering into agreement with BMRCL.


He said the right to privacy has been internationally recognised as fundamental human right under Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Right, 1966, Article 8 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedom (European Union),1950, Charter of Fundamental Rights of EU, 2012, among others. The United Nation General Assembly also passed a resolution appointing a special rapporteur on the right to privacy in 2015.



In the absence of any domestic law to the contrary, India's obligations must be enforced, Divan said. In his submission, Subramanium said the concept of privacy was embedded in liberty as well as honour of a person.









The Supreme Court was on Wednesday told that all other fundamental rights of citizens would be denuded of its vigour and vitality if there is no right to privacy.A group of petitioners represented by senior advocates Gopal Subramanium, Soli J Sorabjee, Shyam Divan and Arvind P Datar submitted before a nine-judge bench presided over by Chief Justice J S Khehar that the ratio decidendi (the rationale for the decision) of the judgements in M P Sharma (1954) and Kharag Singh (1962) is not that the right to privacy is not part of fundamental rights as it was not the question before the court then.Already compromisedDuring the day-long hearing, the apex court at once observed that the citizens have already surrendered their right to privacy by putting their personal details in public realm with the use of technology.However, the counsel submitted the Supreme Court over the last four decades has consistently recognised the right to privacy. Divan also cited 11-judge bench decision in cases relating to R C Cooper, Maneka Gandhi and I R Coelho to buttress his arguments that the right to privacy was an inalienable fundamental right.Divan questioned Attorney General K K Venugopal's submission that the right to privacy was not a fundamental right and could at best be called as common law right, saying it would be illusory since it may not provide the citizens' right to approach constitutional courts for remedy against its violation.
The CBI has issued a fresh summons to former Finance Minister P Chidambaram's son Karti Chidambaram in connection with investigations into a media house getting government clearance to receive foreign funds.



Sources said he has been asked to appear before the investigation officer on July 21 in connection with the investigations into the clearance given by Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) to INX Media for receiving funds from Mauritius when Chidambaram was the finance minister.



He was earlier issued a summons to appear between June 27 and 29 but he had skipped it and sought more time to appear before the agency. On May 15, the CBI registered a case against Karti, his company Chess Management Services, INX Media, Advantage Strategic Consulting Services, its director Padma Vishwanathan and INX Media's Peter Mukerjea and his wife Indrani Mukerjea, who are currently in jail on charges of murdering their daughter.





According to the CBI, INX Media stated in its records that an amount of Rs 10 lakh was given to Advantage Strategic Consulting (P) Limited, a firm the CBI said was "indirectly" owned by Karti, for management consultancy charges towards an FIPB notification and clarification.



The FIR also alleged that invoices of approximately Rs 3.5 crore were raised in favour of INX Media in the name of other companies in which Karti had substantial interests "directly or indirectly". In response to the FIR, Chidambaram had earlier said that the government was using the CBI and other agencies to target his son.
NDA candidate M Venkaiah Naidu so far enjoys committed support of 485 of the 788 members of the electoral college that will choose the next vice president on August 5, election managers of the former Union minister said.



With more than 60 per cent of the votes likely go in his favour, Naidu is set for an impressive win over joint opposition nominee Gopal Krishna Gandhi.



Sources in the BJP said they are confident about getting more support as the polling day approaches.



Though the electoral college's strength is 790, two members-- Vinod Khanna and Anil Madhav Dave--both of the BJP, passed away recently.



The members of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha constitute the electoral college that elects the vice president.



The NDA's strength in the 544-member Lok Sabha (reduced by one following the demise of Vinod Khanna) is 337, while it has 77 MPs out of the total 244 in the Upper House.



Three non-NDA parties- the AIADMK, TRS and YSR Congress- have also announced their support to Naidu, taking the number of lawmakers backing him up by 54 in the Lok Sabha and 17 in Rajya Sabha.



In the NDA, the BJP's current strength is 281 in the Lower House followed by 18, 16, six and four of the Shiv Sena, TDP, LJP and SAD.



In the Rajya Sabha, the saffron party's strength is 56 followed by six of TDP, and three each of Shiv Sena and SAD.
Bengaluru-based actor Meghana Raj has made a name for herself in Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam industries.



She began her career as a child artiste on stage and made her entry into films much later.

Her performances in Kannada films like Raja Huli, Bahuparak, Bhujanga, Noorondu Nenapu, Jinda and Aatagara have been noteworthy.



In Telugu, she has acted in Bendu Appa Rao, while in Malayalam, her films are Yakshiyum Njanum, Beautiful and Memories among others.



She has more projects coming up in Sandalwood.



Inspiration

Pramila Joshai

My mother Pramila Joshai has been my biggest inspiration. I admire the way she has constructed her life. She has overcome challenges and Ive never seen her run away from any problem. She faces it head on and tries to solve any problem in the best possible way. She has always taught me that it is not necessary to win in whatever you attempt but it is important to attempt everything and learn from it.

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Musician

Shreya Ghoshal

I like listening to filmi music and that can be in any language. I love listening to Shreya Ghoshal and Sunidhi Chauhan. They both have a very different voice texture. Sunidhi is someone who can sing in any genre and Shreya modulates her voice very well. I am also a big fan of Backstreet Boys. Infact, they ruled the 90s. Unfortunately they are not together anymore. After them, I have not been able to connect to any other band.

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Author

Dan Brown

My favourite author is Dan Brown. I like the way he mixes fiction and fantasy to create an exceptional piece of work. I also like his views about religion. He asks a lot of pertinent questions about religion and God. Ive read most of his works. I also like the books written by Sophie Kinsella. The many chick lit books that she has written make for some interesting reading. I like the way she describes a plot and carries it forward.

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Food

Rice and chicken

I like the combination of mosaranna, rice and chicken. I can eat this three times a day and I will still not get bored. The only vegetable that I eat is ladys finger. I eat the other vegetables but I can ladys finger in any form. Chicken biryani is favourite. I also relish chaats with paani puri being my favourite. Whenever I am travelling, I look forward to trying out the dishes that are specific to that region.

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Travel

Glasgow

I hold very fond memories of my visit to Glasgow with my friend Lasya. She and I took off on a holiday a few years ago and explored almost all the places in Glasgow. We didnt go through a travel agent but chalked out the itinerary ourselves. We shopped a lot and ate some good food. We also tried some of dishes that are specific to the region. I also cherish my travel to Bhutan. Ive heard so much about New Zealand that I cant wait to explore that place soon.

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The Rajya Sabha wants Mayawati to withdraw her resignation, Deputy Chairman P J Kurien said today, a day after the BSP chief quit as a member of the House, saying she was not allowed to speak on dalit issue.



Kurien, with whom Mayawati had got angry when he asked her to conclude her speech after the prescribed three minutes, said the episode was a result of a "misunderstanding" and that he has "utmost respect" for the BSP leader.



"None of us are happy about her resigning. I have utmost respect for her. It was just a misunderstanding. We all have a lot of respect for her and regard her as a senior leader. The House will ask her to reconsider her decision," Kurien said.



"... It is the decision of the House that she (Mayawati) should take back her resignation," Kurien said.



He sought to set the record straight about yesterday's developments, saying he had "nothing against anybody".



The Deputy Chairman said there was no notice by Mayawati (about raising any issue).

He said when he came to the House, he had a list of 8-9 speakers under Rule 267 and Mayawati's name was not there.



"...I want to set the record straight... When I came, I saw her standing and gave her three minutes (to speak)... I bypassed the Leader of Opposition and allowed her to speak," he said.



Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad joined Kurien and said, "we should request her to reconsider her resignation".



The Deputy Chairman then asked Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi about government's view on this.



Naqvi indicated that the government had no objection if all the parties wanted so.

Yesterday, Mayawati had got angry and stormed out of the House after being told to conclude after three minutes her speech on violence in Saharanpur in UP some time back.



Mayawati, whose term in the Upper House was till April next year, had said that she would resign as there was no point to be a member when she was not allowed to speak.



Satish Chandra Misra of the BSP said today that the entire Treasury bench had been instructed to stand when Mayawati stood up to speak.



"They did not allow her to speak. She spoke for 2 minutes and nine seconds in breaks and would have even finished in 3 minutes," Misra said
The US today listed Pakistan among the nations and regions providing "safe havens" to terrorists, saying terror groups like the LeT and JeM continue to operate, train, organise and fundraise inside the country in 2016.



In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the State Department said that Pakistani military and security forces undertook operations against groups that conducted attacks within Pakistan such as Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan.



"Pakistan did not take substantial action against the Afghan Taliban or Haqqani, or substantially limit their ability to threaten US interests in Afghanistan, although Pakistan supported efforts to bring both groups into an Afghan-led peace process," the State Department said.



"Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in 2016, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan," the report said. India, it said continued to experience attacks, "including by Maoist insurgents and Pakistan-based terrorists".



Indian authorities continued to blame Pakistan for cross-border attacks in Jammu and Kashmir, it said. "In January, India experienced a terrorist attack against an Indian military facility in Pathankot, Punjab, which was blamed by authorities on JeM. Over the course of 2016, the Government of India sought to deepen counterterrorism cooperation and information sharing with the United States," the State Department said.



The Indian government continued to closely monitor the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), which made threats against India in their terrorist propaganda. A number of individuals were arrested for ISIS-affiliated recruitment and attack plotting within India, the report said. In a separate chapter, the State Department listed Pakistan as one of the safe havens of terrorism.



The State Department said that numerous terrorist groups, including the Haqqani Network (HQN), the LeT and JeM continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2016. "Although LeT is banned in Pakistan, LeT's wings Jamaat- ud-Dawa (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FiF) were able to openly engage in fundraising, including in the capital," it said.



"LeT's chief Hafiz Saeed (a UN-designated terrorist) continued to address large rallies, although, in February 2017, Pakistan proscribed him under relevant provisions of Schedule Four of the Anti-Terrorism Act, thus severely restricting his freedom of movement," it noted.

The 2015 ban on media coverage of Saeed, JuD, and FiF continued and was generally followed by broadcast and print media, it said.



According to the State Department, the Pakistani government did not publicly reverse its December 2015 declaration that neither JuD nor FiF is banned in Pakistan, despite their listing under UN sanctions regimes, although in January 2017, Pakistan placed both organisations "under observation" pursuant to Schedule Two of the Anti-Terrorism Act.



While not a ban, keeping the outfits under observation allows the government to closely scrutinise the activities of both organisations. On November 11, Pakistan's National Counterterrorism Authority published its own list of banned organisations that placed JuD in a separate section for groups that are "under observation" but not banned.



Pakistan continued military operations to eradicate terrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, although their impact on all terrorist groups was uneven, it said.



In its report to the Congress, the State Department said in 2016, India and the United States pledged to strengthen cooperation against terrorist threats from groups including al-Qaeda, the ISIS, JeM, LeT and D-Company (Dawood Ibrahim's group), including through greater collaboration on designations at the UN.



Indian and US leaders directed officials to identify new areas of collaboration through the July US-India Counterterrorism Joint Working Group, applauded finalisation of a bilateral arrangement to facilitate the sharing of terrorism screening information, and called upon Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of terrorist attacks against India to justice, the report said.



The United States and India worked together to designate JeM leader Maulana Masood Azhar, although the listing was blocked in the UN 1267 Committee, the State Department said. Other areas mentioned in the report as safe havens are Afghanistan, Somalia, the Trans-Sahara, Sulu/Sulawesi Seas Littoral, Southern Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Columbia and Venezuela.
Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said on Wednesday that IAS officers serving in the state must learn Kannada and must conduct business only in Kannada.



He was speaking at a function organised by the Kannada Development Authority to felicitate candidates from the state who had obtained good ranks in the civil services exam of 2016, conducted by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC).



No matter which state they are posted in, IAS officers should always conduct business in the language of that state. Officers from other states who come to Karnataka should learn Kannada, at least on a par with the SSLC level. There can be no compromise on this, he said.



He said that an Assamese IAS officer had to be sent back to the central services as he did not learn Kannada even after two years in the state. Siddaramaiah reprimanded IAS officers from Karnataka who continue to use English in files and documents.



Topper K R Nandini and six selected candidates who had written their examination in Kannada were awarded Rs 1 lakh each by the KDA.



The authority also awarded Rs 50,000 each to 15 candidates who had chosen Kannada literature as their optional subject.



Visually impaired candidate Kempahonnaiah from Tumakuru, who spoke at the event, said: I grew up in a village, herding cows and sheep. I lost my vision when I was nine and my mother put me in a school for the blind.



I got education because of the government and now I will get a chance to serve the government. He thanked his wife Anchita for her support.




Sanjjanaa Galrani, featured in a nude video, said on Wednesday that only the face was hers and the body had been morphed. She told DH that the controversial scene, from the Kannada film Dandupalya 2, had computer-generated shots, which she described as obscene.

Sanjjanaa said the original scene was filmed with her draped in a towel. The film is a sequel to Dandupalya, and fictionalises the chilling story of a criminal gang.

The scene leaked on the Net shows her character being physically abused by the jail authorities. Sanjjanaa said the way the scene was shot was bold and justified from a story perspective, but how it turned out was something else.

Someone has intentionally done it, she said, referring to the leak. She said the director and producer were trying to find out who was responsible for the leak.

Earlier, people on whom the movie is purportedly based had opposed the way they were portrayed. They had protested against the release of the film and gone on a fast.

Directed by Srinivasa Raju, Dandupalya 2 hit screens on July 14. Its Telugu version is due for release later this week.




The Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL) has floated tenders for rejuvenation and overall development of Kengeri lake as part of its corporate social responsibility initiative. The 25-acre lake was earlier developed in 2005 with a fence around its periphery. Even an islet and walking paths were built to make it a centre for leisure activities. However, lack of maintenance left the lake in ruins within the next few months. At present, the lake bed is covered in weeds and shrubs.



In 2012, Bangalore Development Authority handed over the lake to the BMRCL which included the responsibility of its development and maintenance.



The BMRCL now plans to rejuvenate the lake and also put in place a system where its water supports aquatic life. It has prepared a Rs 8.75-crore development plan that includes building walking paths, boating, childrens play area, recreation zone, islet and other facilities. The tender called on June 30 sets a 12-month deadline. The Karnataka Lake Conservation and Development Authority has given its approval for the development of the lake.



The rejuvenated Kengeri lake will not only improve the water table but will also have a positive impact on the people in the surrounding areas. A lake also plays a major role in pollution control, a BMRCL official said.





Kengeri lake, which was on deathbed a few years ago, will soon get a fresh lease of life. The lake will emerge as a popular breathing space with recreational activities in a year.
Sri Rama Sene president Pramod Muthalik, on Wednesday, appeared before the investigating officer of High Grounds police station after a suomotu case was registered against him last week for his derogatory and inflammatory speech against the minority community and promoting enmity at a protest in Bengaluru.



Muthalik had obtained bail from a court and presented himself at the police station. The police inspector completed the arrest formalities and released him. We are yet to record his statements on the incident, said a senior police officer.



Muthalik and his supporters had staged a protest before the Gandhi statue near Anand Rao Circle against Pejawar Mutt seer Vishwesha Theertha Swami of Udupi for hosting an iftar party inside the Mutt during Ramzan. Muthalik said that he and his supporters would spill blood if an iftar party or namaz was organised in any temple. The police had registered a case under IPC Section 153 and had booked him.




Members of the Congress and the BJP engaged in a verbal duel in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday over the transfer of IPS officer D Roopa, who had made startling claims about the facilities enjoyed by the AIADMK (Amma) leader V K Sasikala in Bengaluru Central Prison at Parappana Agrahara.



BJP member Pralhad Joshi raised the issue of Roopas transfer and accused the government of punishing senior police officers who raised their voice against the illegal and immoral acts of the government.



As Joshi made these remarks during the Zero Hour, Congress members Mallikarjun Kharge, K C Venugopal, Gaurav Gogoi and D K Suresh lodged a strong protest over raising issues related to the state in Parliament.



One lady officer, a DIG, raised her voice against providing excellent facilities like that of a five-star hotel to VIP jail-mates.  instead of transferring the jailor, the DIG was transferred first and then the jailor was transferred, Joshi said.



He said a woman IAS officer, who was the Deputy Commissioner of Mysuru, was transferred after she filed a police complaint against a person close to the chief minister for threatening her. Another officer was transferred because she did not receive the phone call of a minister as she was in a meeting.



Congress members were on their feet protesting Joshis remarks. Is this the Karnataka Assembly? Why is he raising state subjects in Parliament? Venugopal said. Kharge said members should not be allowed to raise subjects that fall in the domain of the state government, in Parliament.
Nearly a week after the state government ordered an enquiry into the irregularities in the Central Prison, a three-member team headed by retired IAS officer Vinay Kumar visited the Bengaluru jail at Parappana Agrahara on Wednesday.



Kumar was accompanied by two senior police officers of the rank of Inspector General of Police and Deputy Inspector General of Police, who inspected the prison premises. The team not only enquired with prison staff, but also interacted with inmates to understand the ground realities and ascertain why they had staged protests.



Later, Kumar told reporters that the enquiry has been initiated and they would visit the prison again shortly. We have gathered some information which we are verifying. We cannot disclose whatever we saw or discussed there. Two senior police officers have been assigned to assist me in the whole enquiry process," Kumar said.



Meanwhile, Additional Director General Police (Prisons) N S Megharikh said that he would visit the prison after the enquiry team finished its job. My visit would be as an administrator and the probe teams visit is for the enquiry. My visit to prisons now would be a clash of interest and I cannot let that happen.



Sources said the prison administration work has been stepped up since Tuesday. The staff have been strictly directed to follow the jail manual and provide equal treatment to all inmates. The staff have intensified checks on visitations and their duration along with flow of food items into the jail, in accordance with the prison manual.



Prison staff have been instructed to discuss and raise the issues with their higher-ups instead of going to the media. The chief jail superintendent in-charge has been instructed to take up measures to ensure law and order in the prison, including maintaining records of visitors and scanning of baggage of visitors.




The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) restructuring committee, which had proposed five smaller corporations in its previous report submitted in 2015, has started the delimitation process of 400 wards it had recommended.



The committee, headed by former chief secretary B S Patil, was of the view that the city needs to be governed by a borough like system, as in London, and hence had proposed five smaller corporations which will be headed by a bigger body of Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA).



All the civic agencies will function under the proposed authority, the committee had recommended. Sources in the government said that two weeks ago, the committee submitted its proposal to the Bengaluru Development Minister K J George and the proposal will soon be handed over to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah.



The committee had recommended doing away with the 198 wards as they have been formed in an unscientific manner. Citing an example, the sources said there are certain wards spread across just two to three sq km whereas some are as big as an Assembly constituency. Such unequal distribution causes stress on administration in bigger wards.



The committee is also working on a Greater Bengaluru Authority Act to govern the municipal administration in the city. The committee believes that the archaic Karnataka Municipal Corporation Act cannot remain a guidebook for Bengaluru, and hence started its exercise to bring a separate Act to govern the city. It has taken help of a private law university and a reputed law firm.



The committee has proposed a separate recruitment process exclusively for the GBA. It will bring in 100% professionalism in the functioning of Bengaluru municipal administration, said a source.



In its previous reports

submitted to the government, the committee had recommended that the mayor should be directly elected by the people unlike the present procedure where an electoral college comprising elected representatives, elects the mayor. The committee recommended participatory democracy by giving space to citizens in policy making decisions.




The High Court of Karnataka on Wednesday told the BBMP that it cannot withhold the occupancy certificate by citing the National Green Tribunals order.



The court was hearing a petition filed by Sri Nakoda Constructions Ltd, which had sought directions to the BBMP to allot it the occupancy certificate since it had completed the construction according to the sanctioned plan.



Justice Vineet Kothari told BBMP that the plan was sanctioned much before the NGT order on buffer zones came up and the NGT has not sought the demolition of any buildings in its order.



The NGT, in its judgement on May 4, 2016, had imposed new buffer zones of 75 metres for lakes and wetlands which will be a no-construction zone, as opposed to 30 metres earlier, in Bengaluru. Under-construction buildings will have to be demolished. However, if the construction is already completed, the order is not applicable.



The BBMP counsel sought time to place the order of the NGT before the court as it had denied the occupancy certificate based on this order.



The judge directed the BBMP to also place the status of the case pending before the NGT and adjourned the next hearing to August 2.




A Nepalese labourer, accused of raping of a minor girl in Kothai, was killed reportedly by another accused at the Kotkhai police station in Shimla district late on Tuesday night.



Following the death, the staff of the police station was shifted out, and a recommendation for a judicial inquiry has been made.



Additional police force was rushed to Kotkhai to tackle the law and order situation, as it is feared that incident might add fuel to the public outrage over the rape incident.



On July 4, a Class X student was raped and murdered after she took a lift in a vehicle driven by Rajender, the man who reportedly killed Suraj, the labourer.



The body of the victim was recovered from the nearby Halila forest two days later. Six people were arrested in connection with the case.



According to the police, Rajender alias Raju had heated exchanges with Suraj in the lockup and a scuffle ensued.



Rajender banged Surajs head against a wall, which led to his death, police said. Z H Zaidi, IG (Southern range) said Suraj had narrated the entire sequence leading to the rape and named Rajender as the main accused.



Police face criticism

The police are already facing criticism for tardy investigation, and protests are continuing in Kotkhai, Shimla and other places demanding justice for the minor girl.




Liquor baron Vijay Mallya can be brought back from London, if it can be established that the offences he committed in India are also punishable by the UK laws.



As per international norms, dual criminality is an essential component for extradition of a fugitive, M J Akbar, Minister of State for External Affairs, informed the Lok Sabha in a written reply to a question by Balasubramaniam Senguttuvan, an MP of the All India Anna Dravida Munnethra Kazhagam.



In the present case, establishment of dual criminality is a legal requirement according to India-UK Extradition Treaty, Akbar said.



Mallya is wanted for his now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines default on loans worth nearly Rs 9,000 crore. New Delhi has asked London to extradite him in accordance with the India-UK extradition treaty.



Mallya left India for the UK on March 2, 2016  the day a consortium of 13 banks, which had given the loan to his company, moved the Debt Recovery Tribunal to step up pressure on him to return the money. He was arrested in London on April 18 and was presented before the Westminster Magistrates Court on the same day. He was, however, granted bail. The Westminster court will determine whether he should be extradited or not.
ELKO -- US Senate hopeful Jesse Sbaih held a Town Hall meeting for local Democrats at Duncan Little Creek Gallery on Tuesday.

We need to step up and bring back the middle class, Sbaih said. My priority is immediate jobs brought to Nevada. I've talked all around the state, and people need jobs.

Nevada has an abundance of sunshine and wind, and renewable energy is not only good for the environment, it's good for jobs," he said. "We can put people to work immediately with high-paying jobs, and sell a lot of that power while still taking care of Nevada.

Sbaih described learning the American Dream after immigrating here as a child from Amman, Jordan, where his father was an attorney and his mother was a teacher.

When I was 5, my father told me about a better life that could only happen in a country called America, he said.

Growing up in Chesapeake, Virginia, Sbaih started washing dishes at 12 before getting a scholarship to University of Miami, where he double-majored in economics and political science.

The more America gave me, the more I wanted to give back, he said.

After putting a down-payment on their Chesapeake home, Sbaih's father had a stroke and was released from the hospital with a $100,000 bill.

I don't want to see another mother with fear in her eyes over losing their house, he said.

Sbaih views health care as a human right for Americans, and supports a single-payer system.

A healthy society is a productive society, Sbaih said. I don't understand how Senator Heller can support putting 210,000 Nevadans out of health care. He was saved when that bill imploded, but he was for it at first.

Sbaih faces three other Democratic opponents in next June's Primary, competing for Heller's U.S. Senate seat. Sbaih said what differentiates him from the other candidates is his support of single-payer health care; of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour; getting rid of dark money in politics; and supporting tuition-free universities.

Nobody should be denied training in a trade based on what their parents can afford, Sbaih said, responding to a question about Nevada's educational ranking of 49th or 50th in the U.S. Kids should be getting the best education so they can compete in the world. Tuition-free college is an investment that will pay off over many years.

When a company like Tesla comes along, Nevadans should be offered the first jobs, Sbaih said, while also promising protecting of American jobs in foreign trade deals. I'm all for free trade, but not for losing American jobs.

For companies expatriating their headquarters overseas to find tax shelters, Sbaih said, They should lose the benefits of this country's bankruptcy laws if they leave.

When asked about industrial hemp benefiting American farmers, Sbaih said, We used to use that a lot decades ago, for paper and other raw material. Now that marijuana is legal in Nevada for recreational and medicinal use, that's something to look at carefully, and start utilizing for various purposes.

Far too many are being jailed, Sbaih said, having their rights taken away, and getting criminal records for employment. It about time to decriminalize marijuana in the United States.

Sbaih said he has worked as a civil trial attorney in Las Vegas for 16 years fighting greedy corporations, and spoke against privatization. Eighty percent of Nevada is public land, which ultimately belongs to the people of the United States. I'm not in favor of transferring any land to the states; Nevada can't afford it.

They talk about privatizing the VA, Social Security, and for-profit prisons, Sbaih said. Any time there are profits, people get greedy, put more people in jail, and stiff veterans. My veteran friends are terrified Trump will privatize the VA.

Sbaih said he also opposes Radical Trumpism for promoting hatred, bigotry and racism. This country isn't for white folks, or for black folks, or for brown folks; it's for the Unites States of America. We need to stop talking and start demanding equal rights for everybody in this country. If not now, when? If not us, who?

The atmosphere in D.C. is toxic, Sbaih said. too many people go there and forget they represent The People. This guy's in the pocket of Big Pharma, this one in Aetna's, enriching billionaires and corporations, always looking out for rich buddies and campaign contributors.

Maybe we can get 'dark money' and corporate money out of politics, Sbaih said, Probably not overnight, since it's been so wrong so long in D.C. We should stand up and fight -- enough is enough -- and take our country back.

While this was Sbaih's first time in Elko, he was impressed by its scenery and wild west history, and said he looks forward to returning.
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The senior police officer leading the investigation into more than 100 claims of abuse at a former mental hospital says staff members who worked there at the time have been interviewed as part of the inquiry.

One hundred and five people claim they were abused at Aston Hall Hospital in the 1960s and 70s. Dr Kenneth Milner is accused of tying children down and pumping them with drugs to correct "deviant" behaviour. Others claim he sexually abused them.

A Derby Telegraph investigation revealed the allegations in February 2016. Since then our probe has revealed 105 people have told police they were abused at the hospital and 58 crimes have been recorded.

Detective Chief Inspector Paul Tatlow, from Derbyshire police, said his team is putting together a file of evidence from the complex investigation.

He said: We are now looking to talk to as many people who worked there as possible and I would encourage any former staff members to please get in touch with us and give their accounts. We are struggling to track down all of them.

We can then rule out who we need to speak to and who we dont so we can get the full picture. We have spoken to some already and they have all been on a witness basis.

DCI Tatlow said once all the evidence was gathered it would be submitted for a report.

He added: I fully appreciate any frustration about the time that this case has taken. Its been very difficult and complex. Weve had to spend a lot of time having to find evidence and documents which would have been written and put together a long time ago.

Its been a time-consuming investigation. But we are getting there and making progress. When we have gathered everything we need we will compile a report.

The Aston Hall probe forms one of ten major child sexual abuse investigations being carried out by Derbyshire police's Public Protection Major Investigation Team.

Dr Milner died in 1976. Numerous alleged victims are claiming compensation from the Department for Health.

An obituary in the British Medical Journal on January 31, 1976, stated Dr Milner was born on June 26, 1909, and educated at Wakefield Grammar School and Leeds University, graduating with honours in 1933. He gained his medical doctorate there in 1939.

Derbyshire police have issued helpline numbers for anyone in need. They said, for immediate help and support, people should call the Samaritans on 116 123.

Within office hours, people can call Andrew Rayner or Liz Holmes on 01332 623700, ext 31537 and for support for their mental health at other times people can contact their out-of-hours health service.
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Arsenal's Jon Torral is on Derby County's radar and the Rams have contacted the Gunners about the 22-year-old attacking midfielder.

The Spaniard, who had a loan spell at Rangers last season, spent 2015-16 playing on loan under Rams boss Gary Rowett when he was manager at Birmingham City.

Toral made 38 appearances for Birmingham and scored eight goals.

Derby also remain interested in Leicester City forward Tom Lawrence.

He is currently with Leicester at the Asia Trophy in Hong Kong and started in their first match against West Bromwich Albion.

Lawrence was on loan at Ipswich Town last season.

Rowett has completed three signings so far this season - Curtis Davies, Andre Wisdom and Tom Huddlestone - but made inquiries about 10 players.
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Police are searching for a Derbyshire man who has gone missing in France.

David John Henson, 76, has been living on his boat on waterways in the south of France but his family have not heard from him since May.

They have become increasing concerned for his safety and have contacted Derbyshire police for help.

A spokesman for the force said: "David, who is originally from Unstone, near Dronfield, has been travelling around the Camargue area of France and is usually in regular contact with his family in the UK.

We are liaising with authorities in France and are asking people to share this appeal on social media, particularly if they live in southern France or know people that do.

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"David is white, 6ft 1in tall, of medium build and has shoulder length grey hair, which he wears in a ponytail.Anyone with information as to his whereabouts should call us on 101, or 0345 123 3333 if calling from outside of Derbyshire."
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Passengers flying from East Midlands Airport will soon be able to jet off to Iceland to witness the spectacular Northern Lights.

Travel company Super Break has started selling tickets for chartered flights to the northern Icelandic city of Akureyri from the Castle Donington airport.

And as well as enjoying the delights of Icelands second city, as part of the package, visitors will able to take part in a number of memorable activities including visiting a volcano to embark on a lava walk, visiting a beer spa as well as witnessing the beauty of the Northern Lights.

According to Super Break, East Midlands is among the first airports in the country that will offer direct flights to Akureyri.

The first flight will not take place until February next year - but tickets have gone on sale now here. Tickets for the three-night trip start from 699 per person and this includes flights, accommodation and tours.

A variety of different tours are being offer by Super Break. All of its trips include a Lake Myvatn Adventure  Land of Fire and Ice Tour, which includes the chance to see the regions many magical terrains, the Goddafoss Waterfall, the boiling mud pools of Namafjall and a stop at Vogafjos working farm.

There is also the opportunity to visit Myvatn Nature Baths or take part in a snowmobiling experience.

Other activities offered include whale watching, horse riding and a visit to the Lofthellir Ice Cave - a unique lava cave filled with ice formations, stalagmites and sculptures.

Super Break spokeswoman Katherine Scott said: Weve pulled out all the stops to deliver our customers with the first ever flights to Icelands Arctic North, chartering our first Super Break aircraft to provide British bookers with direct access to this incredible destination.

From lava walks to some of the best chances of seeing the Northern Lights, adventure really does await those heading to Akureyri.

Inga Hlin Palsdottir, director of Visit Iceland, said: We are very excited about the introduction of these direct flights to Akureyri.

Iceland and its different regions are exiting to explore, especially during the wintertime.

The north of Iceland has everything from breathtaking nature, rich cultural life and fantastic restaurants and accommodation options so holiday-makers can look forward to an epic experience, whatever their interests.

Howard Ebison, commercial director at East Midlands Airport, said: The Northern lights phenomena is really taking off so its great to be able to offer our passengers this opportunity.

Were working closely with Super Break to look at longer-term possibilities of expanding the programme already.
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Firefighters have rescued a man from a midnight house fire which started in his kitchen.

A neighbour who was woken by a smoke alarm made an emergency call to the fire service at 12.20am this morning.

Three fire engines were sent to the Belper house and crews managed to rescue a man from the flames, which the fire service think could have been started by a kitchen appliance.

A Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service spokesman said: "Firefighters rescued the male using a short-extension ladder. The fire was in the ground floor kitchen.

"One male casualty was left in the care of the ambulance service. The neighbour who called said the gentleman could stay with them while the house was sorted out."

Crews from the Belper, Duffield and Alfreton fire stations attended the incident in Bargate Road (circled in red) with East Midlands Ambulance Service.
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Hundreds of people paid their respects to a "one in a million" Derby businessman and father today.

There were emotional scenes at the Guru Arjun Dev Gurdwara temple and Markeaton Crematorium this morning where huge numbers consisting of his family and friends celebrated the life of Gurmukh Singh Sohal who passed away aged 65 earlier this month.

Mr Sohal founded Derby food company Sohal Foods and was well known and worked with dozens of restaurants and other businesses over the years.

While working for British Rail as a conductor, Mr Sohal opened his first corner shop on Porter Road in 1982, Sohal Food Store, where Mrs Sohal worked in the day and Mr Sohal worked in the evenings.

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This shop was one of the first in Derby stocking the specialist Asian foods and spices than can now be seen in many other stores.

His store then moved to Dale Road - just yards away where he was remembered today at the Guru Arjun Dev Gurdwara temple - and Sandown Business Park.

In what was an emotional day for hundreds of people, Mr Sohal's body was released inside the Dale Road temple for people to pay their final respects to him.

His body and coffin were then taken to Markeaton Crematorium where hundreds packed the room to attend a funeral service dedicated to his life.

A poem was read out by his daughter Narinda before a heartfelt speech was made by his son Bhupinder Sohal who said his dad was a man who would be sorely missed by many.

"Hard working, humble, honest, generous, dependable, understanding - these are some of the words to describe my father," he said.

"He never had a bad word to say about anybody. He was never able to say no to anyone and would always offer help.

"He accepted everyone for who they were. He was truly one-in-a-million. What a man he was - he was so special in many ways."

The funeral concluded with Mr Sohal's family and friends releasing gold and blue balloons into the sky as a mark of respect. Visitors to the funeral then went back to the temple for final prayers.

In 2006, Mr Sohal was featured in the book 50 Years of Punjabis In Derby which was published to celebrate the achievements of some of the most influential Punjabi citizens of Derby.

Two years later he began his mission to make improvements in his home village Sangal Sohal in India by creating a fund to modernise the drainage and sewerage system in the village, install street lighting, construct roads, create a park area and plant trees.

Tributes poured in for the Derby businessman when his death was announced by his family last week.

Mahmood Akhtar and staff at Shalimar Gold restaurant said: "Mr Sohal was my supplier for 30 years. When I heard he had died, I felt really shocked.

"He was such a nice person, not just to me, but to the whole community. He was very helpful when a person opened their business. I really feel sorry for his family."

Mr Sohal, who was originally from India and moved to Derby as a teenager in 1966, leaves behind his two sons, Bhupinder Sohal, 34, and Narinderpal Sohal, 43, daughter Narinder Baraclough, 44, his wife Debo Kaur Sohal, 63, and his mother Chanan Kaur, who is 100 years old.
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Police have named a woman who died after she was hit by a vehicle on the A38 - and revealed she was originally from Lithuania.

Veronika Pugaciova, 33, was taken to hospital by air ambulance after the A38 collision near Branston on July 6.

Johnathon Allison, 39, from Hull was arrested on suspicion of murder in connection with the incident and remains under police investigation.

Allison, of Coltman Street in Hull, also appeared in court charged with breaching a restraining order. He was remanded in custody and will appear at Stafford Crown Court on August 11.

A Staffordshire police spokeswoman said that Ms Pugaciova was taken to hospital by air ambulance after the collision but died.

The southbound side of the A38 was closed for a short time to allow the air ambulance to land. However, the A38 northbound stayed closed overnight and only partially reopened at about 9am the following morning.
By James Gallagher

11 July 2017(BBC News)  Thirty-five people have died in the past year from measles outbreaks across Europe, the World Health Organization has warned.It described the deaths  which can be prevented with vaccination  as an unacceptable tragedy.A six-year-old boy in Italy was the latest to die from the infection. More than 3,300 measles cases have been recorded in the country.The most fatalities  31  have been in Romania.But there have also been deaths in Germany and Portugal since June 2016.Dr Zsuzsanna Jakab, the WHO regional director for Europe, said: Every death or disability caused by this vaccine-preventable disease is an unacceptable tragedy.We are very concerned that although a safe, effective and affordable vaccine is available, measles remains a leading cause of death among children worldwide, and unfortunately Europe is not spared.I urge all endemic countries to take urgent measures to stop transmission of measles within their borders, and all countries that have already achieved this to keep up their guard and sustain high immunisation coverage. []Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni blamed a decrease in vaccinations in part on a spread of anti-scientific theories.A lingering false belief that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) jab causes autism is largely to blame, despite the claims being disproven and the doctor who made them being struck off. [more]

Measles tragedy kills 35 across Europe

(CNN)  Thirty-five people have died of measles across Europe in the past 12 months, the World Health Organization said Tuesday, warning that vaccination remains crucial to stopping the spread.

In the most recent case, a 6-year-old died in Italy on June 22. The boys doctor confirmed that he had not been vaccinated against measles and died of the disease.Another measles death and over 3,300 cases of measles have been reported in Italy alone since June 2016.The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reported that cases of measles in Europe have jumped by 50% in just the first five months of 2017, compared with the total number of measles cases during all of 2016.There has been a particularly large increase in measles cases in Italy: 3,232 cases from January through June this year, compared with 478 in the same time period last year.Italy has had suboptimal (vaccine) coverage for many years now, said Dr. Rob Butler, program manager of the Vaccine-Preventable Diseases and Immunization Program of the WHO Regional Office for Europe. He added that vaccine coverage for measles in Italy has fallen every year since 2012.Butler said this is in part due to the rise of anti-vaccine movements across Europe and a sense of complacency among parents.The disease is not confined to Italy. In the past 12 months, Romania has reported 31 measles deaths, the most in Europe. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reports that from June 2016 to May 2017, Romania had 3,922 measles cases, making up 42% of all European cases.Last week, the Romanian Ministry of Health said that the measles outbreak is under control and that there is enough vaccine to cover the population. Romania has also implemented broad vaccination campaigns, though much of the population lives in areas that are hard to reach. [more]

Measles still spreading in Europe, WHO warns, with 35 deaths over past year

Copenhagen, 11 July 2017 (World Health Organization)  Ongoing measles outbreaks in the WHO European Region have caused 35 deaths in the past 12 months. The most recent fatality was a 6-year-old boy in Italy, where over 3300 measles cases and 2 deaths have occurred since June 2016. Several other countries have also reported outbreaks; according to national public health authorities, these have caused 31 deaths in Romania, 1 death in Germany and another in Portugal.

Every death or disability caused by this vaccine-preventable disease is an unacceptable tragedy, says Dr Zsuzsanna Jakab, WHO Regional Director for Europe. We are very concerned that although a safe, effective and affordable vaccine is available, measles remains a leading cause of death among children worldwide, and unfortunately Europe is not spared. Working closely with health authorities in all European affected countries is our priority to control the outbreaks and maintain high vaccination coverage for all sections of the population.

The Region has been progressing towards measles elimination. A total of 37 countries have interrupted endemic transmission, according to the assessment of the Regional Verification Commission for Measles and Rubella Elimination based on 2015 reporting. However, remaining pockets of low immunization coverage allow the highly contagious virus to spread among those who choose not to vaccinate, do not have equitable access to vaccines or cannot be protected through vaccination due to underlying health conditions.

In response, several countries are adopting measures, such as school-entry checks, to increase coverage rates for routine vaccinations against measles and other diseases. WHO recommends that every eligible child receive 2 doses of measles-containing vaccine. It also encourages adults who are not fully immunized, or who are not sure of their immunity status, to get vaccinated.

In line with the Regional Directors call for intensified efforts, Romania conducted a nationwide campaign of enhanced routine immunization activities. Italy implemented outbreak control measures including notifying suspected cases, tracing contacts and offering post-exposure prophylaxis and vaccination.

On 21 June 2017 in Rome, Italy, experts from the WHO Regional Office for Europe contributed to a consultation with regional public health officials, representatives of the Italian Institute of Health (ISS), and measles and rubella laboratory officials. Together they decided on further strategies to improve vaccination coverage among adolescents, adults, vulnerable population groups and health-care workers. The range of identified activities includes strengthening disease surveillance and communication practices.

Measles continues to spread and take lives in Europe
WASHINGTON  The Russia scandal has entered a new phase and theres no going back.

For six months, the White House claimed that this scandal was nothing more than innuendo about Trump campaign collusion with Russia in meddling in the 2016 election. Innuendo for which no concrete evidence had been produced.

Yes, there were several meetings with Russian officials, some only belatedly disclosed. But that is circumstantial evidence at best. Meetings tell you nothing unless you know what happened in them. We didnt. Some of these were casual encounters in large groups like the famous July 2016 Kislyak-Sessions exchange of pleasantries at the Republican National Convention. Big deal.

I was puzzled. Lots of cover-up, but where was the crime? Not even a third-rate burglary. For six months, smoke without fire. Yes, President Trump himself was acting very defensively, as if he were hiding something. But no one ever produced the something.

My view was: Collusion? I just dont see it. But Im open to empirical evidence. Show me.

The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an email chain released by Donald Trump Jr. himself. A British go-between writes that theres a Russian government effort to help Trump Sr. win the election, and as part of that effort he proposes a meeting with a Russian government attorney possessing damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Moreover, the Kremlin is willing to share troves of incriminating documents from the Crown Prosecutor. (Error: Britain has a Crown Prosecutor. Russia has a State Prosecutor.)

Donald Jr. emails back. I love it. Fatal words.

Once youve said Im in, it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were copied on the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended.

It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame, Donald Jr. told Sean Hannity. A shame? On the contrary, a stroke of luck. Had the lawyer real stuff to deliver, Donald Jr. and the others would be in far deeper legal trouble. It turned out to be incompetent collusion, amateur collusion, comically failed collusion. That does not erase the fact that three top Trump campaign officials were ready to play.

It may turn out that they did later collaborate more fruitfully. We dont know. But even if nothing else is found, the evidence is damning.

Its rather pathetic to hear Trump apologists protesting that its no big deal because we Americans are always intervening in other peoples elections, and they in ours. You dont have to go back to the 40s and 50s when the CIA intervened in France and Italy to keep the communists from coming to power. What about the Obama administrations blatant interference to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in the latest Israeli election? One might even add the work of groups supported by the U.S. during Russian parliamentary elections  the very origin of Vladimir Putins deep animus toward Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, whom he accuses of having orchestrated the opposition.

This defense is pathetic for two reasons. First, have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it.

Whats left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?

Second, no, not everyone does it. Its one thing to be open to opposition research dug up in Indiana. But not dirt from Russia, a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbors (Georgia, Crimea, Eastern Ukraine), that buzzes our planes and ships in international waters, that opposes our every move and objective around the globe. Just last week the Kremlin killed additional U.N. sanctions we were looking to impose on North Korea for its ICBM test.

There is no statute against helping a foreign hostile power meddle in an American election. What Donald Jr.  and Kushner and Manafort  did may not be criminal. But it is not merely stupid. It is also deeply wrong, a fundamental violation of any code of civic honor.

I leave it to the lawyers to adjudicate the legalities of unconsummated collusion. But you dont need a lawyer to see that the Trump defense  collusion as a desperate Democratic fiction designed to explain away a lost election  is now officially dead.
Skeletal remains found in

Idaho hundreds of years old

BOISE, Idaho (AP)  Authorities say human bones found protruding from a badger hole in southwestern Idaho are hundreds of years old and not connected to a crime.

The remains were discovered in April in high desert sagebrush steppe by state fish and game workers who stumbled across the bones while out on a routine patrol. Initially authorities treated the discovery as a possible recent homicide, but Elmore County Sheriff Mike Hollinshead said Tuesday carbon dating showed the remains were from between 1436 and 1632.

The Idaho Statesman reports that testing estimated one body was of a 20-year-old while the other was between 10 and 15. The sexes were undetermined.

The remains have been turned over to the Bureau of Land Management. Lara Douglas, the agencys regional manager, says BLM will work with Indian tribes claiming the bones to determine what the next appropriate steps would be.

Woman serving life terms

dead after prison fight

LAS VEGAS (AP)  Prison officials in Nevada say a 51-year-old woman who was serving four consecutive sentences of life in prison with the possibility of parole has died after a fight with another inmate.

The Nevada Department of Corrections said Monday that Marnie M. Peot was pronounced dead Friday in a cell at the Florence McClure Womens Correctional Center in Las Vegas.

A statement says Peot had been checked by medical staff after the fight and was believed to have had minor injuries.

The other inmate wasnt identified.

An autopsy was planned to determine Peots cause of death.

She was convicted in Clark County and sentenced in August 1995 for the killings of Scott Rehn and Jimmy Sorenson in Las Vegas in 1994.

Retrial begins in standoff case

LAS VEGAS (AP)  Armed assault and lawful protest were the opposing scenarios presented to a federal jury in Las Vegas as the retrial began for four men who bore assault-style weapons during a standoff that stopped government agents from rounding up rancher Cliven Bundys cattle in April 2014.

Acting U.S. Attorney Steven Myhre told jurors during openings on Monday that evidence will show the gunmen used what he called the working end of a rifle barrel to bend the law to their will.

Myhre says jurors should focus on conspiracy, assault on a federal agent, weapon and other charges.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that defense attorney Richard Tanasi cast the men as individuals who stood for what they believe against the U.S. government.

Trial is expected to take several weeks.
The Unique Identification Authority of India has taken note of the leak and is regularly monitoring the status to get the Aadhaar data removed from the websites

About 210 websites of the Central and State government departments were displaying personal details and Aadhaar numbers of beneficiaries. The Parliament was informed of the same on Wednesday. Minister of State for Electronics and IT, PP Chaudhary said in a written reply in the Lok Sabha, UIDAI (The Unique Identification Authority of India) has taken note of the same and is regularly monitoring the status to get the Aadhaar data removed from the said websites. It was found that around 210 websites of Central Government, State Government Departments including educational institutes were displaying the list of beneficiaries along with their name, address and other details and Aadhaar numbers for information of general public.

He also goes on to say that there has been no leakage of Aadhaar data from the UIDAI. According to PTI, Chaudhary said that private players have not acquired any Aadhaar data including biometrics from the UIDAI, and sharing of Aadhaar information is done only with authorised agencies through secure applications after following well-established procedures and protocols.

This isnt the first-time information such as Aadhaar has leaked. A database of user information of Reliance Jio users recently leaked online. The leak included personal user information like email addresses, Aadhaar numbers and more. Information pertaining to 120 million Reliance Jio users leaked online. However, Aadhaar number of all the users wasnt leaked during this breach.

More than a billion people today have Aadhaar numbers. The breach or leak of Aadhaar details can be catastrophic in the right hands. Right to privacy is being debated in the Supreme Court as we speak of this leak. The petitioners say data like iris scans and fingerprints taken by the state violates citizens' privacy. An eight-judge bench in 1954 and six-judge bench in 1962 had both ruled that there is no right to privacy. But in those days, sensitive data like Iris scans and fingerprints was not being collected by the government. Whether such information being collected by the government is a breach of privacy will be determined on the basis of the verdict which decides whether privacy is a fundamental right or not. This Aadhar leak will definitely not help the government's case.

With Aadhaar being linked to users PAN cards, bank accounts and more, its easy for a hacker who gets his hands on all this data to exploit it. The question isnt what will happen when this data is leaked. The question is, when will this data leak. Well, that time has come.
The device is listed as running Android Nougat v7.1.2 and is expected to be announced at the IFA 2017 event scheduled to be held in September

LGs second flagship device for the year, the V30 has been spotted on benchmarking website Geekbench. As per the listing, the phone may be powered by Qualcomms flagship platform, Snapdragon 835 with 4GB of RAM. While the devices predecessor, LG V20 was the first to come with Android Nougat out of the box, it seems like the same privilege may not be extended to the LG V30. The device is listed as running Android Nougat v7.1.2 not Android O. In the single core test, the phone scored 1899, while it scored 6350 in the multi core test.

The LG V30 is tipped to launch at IFA 2017, which is scheduled to be held between September 1 and September 6. Back at I/O 2017, Google inadvertently confirmed that the phone would feature an OLED display. While talking about its VR platform, Daydream, Google noted that an upcoming LG smartphone would be compatible with it. The requirements for Daydream are almost certainly adhered by OLED panels only and not LCD. All Daydream compatible phones such as the Pixel, Galaxy S8 and the newly launched ZenFone AR come with AMOLED displays.

The combination of the Snapdragon 835 platform with 4GB of RAM is quite popular with flagship devices and is used by other manufacturers like the Samsung Galaxy S8 (US variant) and the HTC U11. However, other manufacturers have upped the RAM offered by their phones. The Xiaomi Mi 6 offers 6GB of RAM, while the OnePlus 5 offers up to 8GB of RAM on their phones. Even Samsung offers a 6GB RAM variant of the Galaxy S8+.
The standard Galaxy S8 is tipped to sport a 5.77-inch display, while the larger Galaxy S9+ is expected to feature a 6.22-inch display. However, the 2018 flagship is tipped to sport an under display fingerprint sensor

The Galaxy Note 8 is yet to be revealed, but leaks about Samsung's 2018 flagship have already started coming in. As per a report by The Investor, the Galaxy S9 lineup may have the same display sizes as the current Galaxy S8 series of smartphones. The report notes that the company has informed its its display manufacturing division, Samsung Display the specifications of the upcoming device. The standard Galaxy S9 is tipped to have a 5.77-inch display, while the larger Galaxy S9+ is expected to feature a 6.22-inch display.

Both these devices are also expected to come with the Infinity design that Samsung introduced this year, with dual-curved sides and minimal bezels on the top and bottom. The big difference in the 2018 flagship is expected to be the inclusion of an under display fingerprint sensor. While the Galaxy S8 does come with an under display home button, the fingerprint sensor is located on the rear panel, next to the camera module. Previous reports have suggested that Samsung has already started to work on the Galaxy S9 and S9+ under the codenames Star and Star 2. The two devices are expected to come with Qualcomms next generation of flagship processors, which may feature the 7nm fabrication process.

The report by The Investor also notes that Samsung have have tentatively decided to use a 6.32-inch display on the Galaxy Note 9 smartphone. The Galaxy Note 8, which is expected to be launched on August 23, is tipped to sport a 6.3-inch display and its possible that the two display might end up being the same. The phone is also expected to be the first device by Samsung to feature a dual-rear camera setup. However, it might not be the only device by the company to sport such a setup this year as the Galaxy C10 may sport a dual-rear camera setup as well.
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Reliance Jio has sought an end to interconnection user charges (IUC), or call termination charges, even as established airlines have demanded doubling of the fee, opening a new front in the ongoing war with the newcomer and entrenched interests. At a workshop held by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Tuesday, Reliance Jio officials have proposed scrapping of the interconnection user charges (IUC), while Bharti Airtel Ltd, Idea Cellular Ltd and Vodafone India Ltd sought to double these. This is because, bigger networks like Airtel, Vodafone and Idea with more users earn more from interconnection charges on a net basis while newcomers like Reliance Jio with smaller customer base end up paying more. For every mobile phone call, the telecom firm that originates the call pays 14 paise to the one which receives the call, called interconnection user charges. This rakes in more revenues to established telcos as customers prefer to make calls from zero tariff Jio to other networks rather than the other way round, increasing the burden on Jio. It's double loss for Jio as on a net basis it ends up paying to established operators for the free calls it offer to customers. Reliance Jio has now proposed zero IUC charges. Other smaller operators also maintained that Trai should not change IUC charges. On the other hand, the three telecom majors wanted the charges to be more than raised to 30 paise. They also are reported to have presented their cost structures to press for a hike in IUC to at least 30 paise, reports quoting sources present at the meeting said. Jio said its cost of servicing a call is next to zero and hence it proposed a so-called ''bill and keep'' model, in which companies only keep a record of incoming calls on their network but don't raise any demand from other operators. The top three telecom firms are of the view that interconnection capacities provided by one telecom firm to another involve costs, for which a company should be fairly compensated. Reducing IUC will dent their revenues, but will also bring down call charges. ''Some operators said reduce the charges, some said increase them, some also requested to maintain it at current levels,'' Trai chairman RS Sharma said in an interview. He did not reveal any more details. Trai will hold an open house discussion on the issue on Thursday, before examining the companies' cost structures to arrive at a decision.








Statement by the Spokesperson on the conflict resolution and reconciliation efforts

Foreign Minister of Armenia to participate in the Fifth Paris Peace Forum

Armenia: EU and Armenia Hold annual Dialogue on Human Rights

Todays Shushi, Occupied and Cleared of Armenians, is a Real Example of Turkish-Azerbaijani Policy of Ethnic Cleansing of Artsakh

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Ookla, the the global leader in internet testing and analysis has awarded Ucom

Sweden will hold the Presidency of the Council of the European Union

Ameriabank: At the Vanguard of Armenia's Banking Sector

STATEMENT OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF THE REPUBLIC OF ARTSAKH

SUBSCRIBERS OF UCOMS ALL TIME BEST OFFER TO ENJOY ADDITIONAL BENEFITS

Armenia-Azerbaijan: EU sets up monitoring capacity along the international borders

PACE co-rapporteurs on Armenia concerned by reports of alleged war crimes or inhuman treatment perpetrated by Azerbaijans armed forces

There is still 35% gender pay gap: Sona Ghazaryan

Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia

Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans provided 136 million AMD support for the overhaul of the Myasnikyan statue, which was in unsafe state of disrepair

Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan

I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General

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I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox

UCOMS SPECIAL OFFER OF THE UNLIMITED INTERNET IS NOW TERMLESS

There is no place for the death penalty in a State that respects human rights: PACE General Rapporteur

EU and CoE call on two Member States that have not yet acceded to this Protocol  Armenia and Azerbaijan  to do so without delay

An urgent debate requested on "The military hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan".

UCOM AND PES-PES CONTINUE COOPERATION WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF EDUCATIONAL PROJECT

The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022

Largest Corporate Bond Program at the Securities Market of Armenia Completed Successfully

The statement of the Defender on the video of the execution of Armenian PoWs by the Azerbaijani armed forces

LEVEL UP ONLY FOR STUDENTS: UCOM OFFERS X2 AND X3 MORE INTERNET

STATEMENT BY SECRETARY ANTONY J. BLINKEN

This criminal act is another proof that the Armenophobia policy. Tatoyan

Nikol Pashinyan, Nancy Pelosi discuss a number of issues related to the Armenian-American agenda and regional developments
A longer-than-expected renovation will force some middle school students in Dale County to attend a different school temporarily.

According to a release from Dale County Schools Superintendent Ben Baker, the renovation of South Dale Middle School in Pinkcard will extend beyond the first day of school next month on Aug. 4. Baker said the current plan calls for students in the fifth and sixth grades to attend other campuses.

Baker indicated enough classrooms would be ready for seventh- and eighth-grade students to attend South Dale Middle School as planned.

The release from Baker indicated a combination of factors led to renovations taking longer than expected.

"Once the construction began on the nearly 70 year old structure, the contractors and school officials found unforeseen obstacles that have put the construction behind schedule. The weather has also contributed to delays in construction," Baker said in the release.

A parent's meeting is scheduled Thursday at the Newton Elementary School lunchroom. Parents of seventh- and eighth-graders will meet at 6 p.m., while parents of fifth- and sixth-graders will meet at 7 p.m.

"We appreciate everyones patience as we focus on the end result  a safe, modern, beautiful school for the students, teachers, parents, and community of South Dale Middle School," Baker said in the release.
For the past 30 years, Southeast Alabama Medical Center has assisted the Houston County Coroner with access to the hospitals morgue for body storage. However, that could change as of August 1.

According to Houston County Coroner Robert Byrd, the shortage of space has turned into a problem.

The cooler in the morgue at the Southeast Alabama Medical Center has four drawers, Byrd said. Those drawers are used not only by me when the need arises, but the hospital as well. With the population increasing, unfortunately the death rate increases as well and that has caused a problem with the cooler space.

Byrd utilizes the coolers at the hospital under certain situations. It is used as a holding area until a body can be transported to Montgomery for an autopsy, when identification of the deceased is not immediately available, or if law enforcement needs additional evidence from the body.

The hospital has informed me I have until August 1 to find a new location to serve as a holding area, Byrd said. "We are hoping both the city and county can work together to find a solution to this matter.

Houston County Commission Chairman Mark Culver stated he hopes to have a solution soon.

We have got to get something in place, Culver said. We are still discussing this issue with the Medical Center and we are speaking with the city. We are trying to establish a temporary solution until a permanent solution can be put into place. We have got to have something available for the coroner. The bodies have to have somewhere to go while the coroner is waiting for the body to be transported for an autopsy or while the body is waiting to be identified.
Gov. Kay Ivey marked her 100th day in office at a groundbreaking for a new tire distribution center in Dothan.

Gateway Tire and Service is investing $11 million to build the 200,000 sq. ft. distribution center on Technology Drive in Dothan. The business is expected to initially employ 30 people.

Ivey thanked state and local government and business organizations for working together to attract Gateway to Dothan.

Its a team effort and we have to keep it up because it produces good results, she said.

Ivey said her administration is dedicated to attracting highly-skilled, good-paying jobs to Alabama. Ivey noted that more Alabamians are currently employed than at any time in the past 10 years.

We want our population to be able to be qualified to make as much as they can in work they will enjoy, she said.

Dothan Mayor Mike Schmitz thanked the city commission for quick action on items necessary to draw Gateway to Dothan. Houston County Commission Chairman Mark Culver also praised the cooperation of local governments in attracting businesses like Gateway to the area.

Dennis King, vice president of corporate operations, said the center will employ warehouse workers, truck drivers, forklift operators, clerical staff and salespeople.

King said construction on the distribution center will begin in August and finish in early spring. The center will open shortly thereafter. Hiring for the new center will begin about a month before it opens.

Gateway Tire and Service is a wholesale and retail tire dealer. The companys retail stores sell tires, custom wheels, batteries and accessories, as well as repair services. Gateways parent company, Dunlap & Kyle Company, Inc. was founded in 1929 and is headquartered in Batesville, Mississippi.
Alabama is hosting its 12th annual Back-to-School Sales Tax Holiday beginning at 12:01 a.m. Friday, and ending at midnight on Sunday, July 23.

We are hosting this event earlier this year, so this will allow extra shoppers to take advantage of this years event," said Alabama Retail Association Community Manager Melissa Warnke.

Local boutiques, retail shops, shoe stores and technology businesses join forces with national retail chains in the Wiregrass for the tax-free holiday this weekend. The four-percent state tax is deducted from any qualifying local taxes from items such as clothing, books, computers, electronics and other school supplies.

The Alabama Retail Association currently has 4,200 retail members.

Warnke said July is usually a slow month for retailers and the sales tax holiday could boost business.

Our Back-to-School Sales Tax Holiday weekend is our second busiest shopping time of the year (with) the busiest being the Christmas shopping season," Warnke said.

According to the guidelines through the State of Alabama all clothing, shoes under $100 and school supplies $50 and under will be sales tax exempt.

This event allows parents a chance to save a little extra money, and at this time of year thats great, said Eagle Eye Outfitters Assistant Store Manager Christina Ross. "This holiday brings in a lot of traffic for our store and all retailers in the area. Actually, we have extended our hours Friday and Saturday night until 9 p.m. to better serve our customers. Our customers can also shop online to participate in the sales tax-free holiday

The tax-free holiday coincides with Eagle Eye Outfitters' Backpack Trade-in Event, which allows customers to donate gently used backpacks in exchange for a $10 coupon that can be used toward the purchase of a new backpack worth $50 or more at Eagle Eye. Ross said the donated backpacks are then given to non-profits who will distribute to students in need.
The man behind such huge early 2000s hits like Danger! High Voltage and Gay Bar - Dick Valentine of Electric Six fame - is set to grace the stage at the Spirit Store Dundalk this August.

Valentine will play the Dundalk venue on Sunday August 27th.

"Experience a seven-or-eight-times-in-a-lifetime chance to be up close and personal with an American music icon. Its a low pressure, good time affair as the Electric Six frontman strips down all your favorite songs from the Electric Six catalog, plays original solo material and swims in a sea of requested good-time covers.

"This tour will be your chance to reach directly into Dick Valentines bag and be one of the first to buy a copy of his latest solo work Robocalls. Robocalls is Valentines fourth solo album and there can be no doubting it will go down as his magnum opus.

"Imagine Mac DeMarco being spliced with Gordon Lightfootand youve got two Canadians being fused into one. In the background during the splicing procedure, you might hear a trace of Robocalls emanating from the anesthesiologists iPod.

"So you know the drill.drop everything and come see Dick Valentine behaving as a cornered animal as he comes face to face with you, the fans. An night of merriment and frivolity awaits! Come see the American troubadour Dick Valentine take the stage in your town for one unforgettable evening. You will not see Electric Six in 2017 so this is the next best thing!"

TICKETS AVAILABLE FROM SPIRIT STORE
Many SMB owners think that that debt management is frustrating, repetitive and even awkward, but it doesnt have to be. When approached with professionalism and a clear plan of attack, the right debt strategy could save weeks worth of work per year, while also doubling or tripling working capital.

So, why isnt everyone doing a debt detox? Business owners often blame cash flow problems on sales, inventory, pricing, competitors, the economy, without realising that the real issue lies in credit control and debt management.

Does your business need a debt detox?

Your business takes too long to collect its account receivables and days sales outstanding is growing

Your staff spend too much time chasing unpaid invoices

The stress of overdue debt is keeping you up at night

Your customer relationships are strained by late payment problems

You dont know where to begin to fix your overdue debt problem

Dealing with debtors can seem overwhelming, but a deep clean of your debtor management problem isnt as hard as you may think. If your business has any of the above symptoms, use the new financial year to evaluate and restructure your debt processes.

Here are 10 steps you can start today:

Recognise the problem: Reducing overdue debt and improving average collections by even a week can inject much-needed operating capital into a business. Increasing sales is great, but until you get paid, nothing improves. Flush out your biggest debtors: Map your accounts receivables so you get a clear picture of the percentage of invoices that are overdue, by how long, and how much is owing to your business. Identify your largest and longest overdue accounts, they are your starting point. Appoint a debt collection agency: A debt collection agency is not just an endpoint. Start by sending through your largest and most overdue debts; having experts deal with these will help your business recover its most significant returns efficiently. Set accounts receivables goals: There is a lot of measurable data you can mine from your balance sheet and profit and loss statement alone. Ask your accountant to do some modelling on basic data like your Days Sales Outstanding and Accounts Receivable Turnover Ratio. Find out the impact on cash flow if these improve and set some measurable goals. Update your customer details: Chasing a payment is almost impossible if you dont know who to contact. Start with your oldest debtors, as the longer a debt ages, the less chance there is of collection. While youre updating your records, note the last known action taken to chase payment (e.g. phone call to MD with promise to pay mid-February). Refresh your credit policy: Your credit policy may no longer reflect the needs of your business or how you want to allocate credit to customers and manage debtors. Update your policy to make sure it achieves the aims of (1) getting paid promptly and (2) maintaining a great relationship with your customers. Send a bulk email to overdue credit customers: Use the opportunity of the new financial year to genuinely reach out to your customers and wish them success. Let them know of any updates to your credit policy and any follow-up action they should expect e.g. Sam from accounts will be in touch to discuss your payments plan. Emails like this serve as reminders and often prompt action. Enact a predetermined communications plan: Every credit customer should have a customised communications plan that is triggered on day 1 of an invoice being overdue. Now that you have updated your customer contact details, choose the channels you will use for reminders (e.g. email, SMS, call) and document the escalating plan of action. Install an online payment gateway: Your reminders are going out as per your communications plannow make it easy for debtors to pay you. If your customer cant easily transact with you online, expect more delays. Tighten your controls on credit customers: Youve put the time and effort in to clean up your overdue debts, now dont let them get out of control again. Risk management strategies such as getting credit reports before offering trade terms to new customers and monitoring your customers credit activities are long-term investments in protecting your cash flow and peace of mind.

About the author

Arjun (AJ) Singh is the co-founder and managing director of ezyCollect, a Sydney-based startup that provides accounts receivable software to small- and medium-sized businesses. ezyCollect is currently being used by more than 500 businesses in 24 countries.
Last year, one of my colleagues built two semi-detached houses, wanting to sell one. His question to me was: How do I sell it to a Chinese buyer? Theres an implied understanding in that question that Chinese buyers will pay a premium to acquire a property.

Besides possible higher premiums, the other reason to target Chinese consumers is that it can help your business expand to a larger market (i.e. selling a larger quantity at the same price). One excellent example of this is baby formula. By targeting the Chinese, Australian diary companies have achieved great international success. Based on a 2011 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Australian dairy industry, Chinese import growth has been significant; milk imports increased from 600,000 tonnes in 2006 to 1,000,000 tonnes in 2010. This figure has drastically risen again in the past few years due to the FTA between China and Australia signed in 2015, along with the 2016 milestone change from the one-child policy to two-child policy in China. (Prior to the Australian FTA, New Zealand was the biggest exporter to China for dairy products).

Think about the nature of the product or service you offer  will you be able to sell it to the Chinese for a higher premium? Or will you be able to sell it into the large Chinese market? If you think there is an opportunity for your product or service, heres 3 things to consider before you do:

Tip 1  Ask a real Chinese

Theres no universal approach in marketing. You should do some research first to understand why the Chinese consumer might be interested in the product or service you offer. The first step then is to identify the right group of Chinese to ask.

You might have a best mate from high school by the name of Lau whose parents were originally from China. Lau might speak some simple Cantonese, but he most likely cant read written Chinese. He probably doesnt know much more about the Chinese consumer than you do. So, although hes your best mate, dont rely on him for the best advice on Chinese consumers.

The Chinese consumers everyone is trying to target today are mostly Mandarin speakers from mainland China. They use simplified Chinese (whereas Hong Kong and Taiwan instead use Traditional Chinese). Mainland Chinese have had quite unique experiences growing up. To get a valid opinion on how to promote your product service to the Chinese consumer, you need to ask someone who is from that cultural background. And its easy to find one in Australia today, especially in Sydney and Melbourne.

Tip 2  Dont rely on Google Translate

I cant remember how many times I have seen advertisements in Chinese, designed to target a Chinese consumer that actually drive them away instead. My guess was that the material was translated to Chinese using Google Translate and was never proofread by a Chinese speaker. Its ridiculous how things like that can happen when we have hundreds of thousands of native Chinese speakers living in Australia.

And its not just the small business sector (who might not have the budget for professional translators) that Im talking about. A major private health fund recently had a Chinese poster with a message about why Chinese people should choose them. Even though I think it was created by a professional, I struggled to understand the message. As someone with higher education both in Australia and China, its fairly safe to say that that if I dont get it, most Chinese consumers in Australia wont get it either.

Decent doesnt mean expensive or fancy. Your material just needs to be clearly written in simplified Chinese so your target audience can understand it without confusion.

Tip 3  Find your Chinese strategic partner

When I came to study in Australia, I applied to three universities in Sydney through an education agent. I then received offers from all three of them. My agent had highly recommended one of them to me, saying it was the best university in Australia. It was years later when I found out from a friend working in the education agent industry that that university pays the highest commission to agents for student recruitment. And not surprisingly this university has done very well acquiring international students from China over the last decade. This is an example of how the Australian higher education industry benefits from the right strategic partner for the Chinese market.

You can always find someone to partner with to penetrate the Chinese market. This is of particular importance if you wish to sell your product inside China because the regulatory framework is quite different there. Unlike in Australia where you can register a company and get ready for trading in 3 days, it takes 29 days to set up a company in China (which is a big improvement from the 48 days in 2003 per a Worldbank report). Then, depending on the industry, it might be a massive investment to get all the permits to start selling. Partnering with a local Chinese company can save you plenty of administration trouble.

For smaller businesses with easy-to-ship products, your best shot is to get the Chinese shopping agents (called daigou) to recommend them on Weibo (Chinese version of Twitter) or WeChat (Chinese combination of Facebook + Whatsapp). Give them a reasonable profit margin and they will look after everything for you including logistics and customer service. Unlike traditional supermarkets and resellers, they take stock at their own cost and risk. Their recommendations to their family and friends in China are word of mouth advertisements, which are more cost effective than any paid advertising in China.

About the author

Barry Li is the author of The New Chinese: How they are changing Australia (Wiley $29.95), which provides a guide on the history, culture, and mindset of Chinese migrants in Australia, and of the new China. For more information visit www.theNewChinese.com
I believe that retirement is not the end of your life but the beginning of your new one. It was just that it was seen negatively as it is associated with old age. We all could retire at any age as long as we have secure financial capabilities like living on passive income or savings. []
Federal and state officials have confirmed that cyberattacks against state voting systems during the 2016 election were more widespread than previously disclosed to the public, but they said the heightened activity did not impact final vote tallies.

The confirmations follow Tuesdays Bloomberg report, citing three unnamed sources, that attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election were much greater than previously disclosed to the public. Still, officials pushed back on the revelation that 39 states were hit by Russian attackers.

Unusual or suspicious activity was detected in several states during the months leading up to the November election, a DHS official who asked not to be identified told the E-Commerce Times. However, that activity was not necessarily considered an attack. Nor was it necessarily attributed to Russia.

The majority of the activity involved scanning and attempting to steal data from voter registration databases. However, voter tallies were not impacted by the hackers.

Our past election demonstrated that cybercriminals are aggressively targeting our governments critical infrastructure to gain access to sensitive information and cause widespread damage, said Ryan Kalember, senior vice president of cyber security strategy at Proofpoint.

Cybercriminals have been trying to take advantage of the United States vulnerable, decentralized structure to gain access to as much information as possible, he told the E-Commerce Times.

Although their motivation is not clear, and theres no certainty about what cyberthieves have learned, it is likely they could use the information gleaned to mount future attacks, Kalember warned.

High Alert

Illinois and Arizona are the only two states that the FBI and DHS have identified as victims of intrusion by Russian cyberattackers during the 2016 elections, according to a report released earlier this year by the National Association of Secretaries of State, which regulates elections in 40 states.

However, numerous other state systems were scanned or probed by the Russians, based on U.S. intelligence data, but were not breached, according to the report.

Everybodys alertness level is at an even higher pitch than it was before, said Ken Menzel, general counsel of Illinois State Board of Elections.

Post-election investigations of other states systems turned up signatures that were similar to those of the hackers who breached the Illinois voter databases, he told the E-Commerce Times, but he did not know which states were involved.

Attempts to breach state voter databases is not a new phenomenon, according to Menzel, who said attempts have been made on a pretty regular basis for years.

The Arizona Secretary of States office has learned nothing new since last year, said spokesperson Matt Roberts.

Since the election, Arizona has added two-factor authentication for officials accessing the system, he told the E-Commerce Times.

Phishing in Florida

Bloomberg reported that 39 states were hit by cyberattackers, but officials told the E-Commerce Times that what the publication meant by the word hit was unclear.

The Bloomberg report followed a controversial story published by The Intercept, reporting that Russian hackers executed a cyberattack on a local software vendor in the U.S. and sent spearphishing emails to at least 100 local election officials around the country. The Intercept based its reporting on a leaked top secret NSA document.

Bloombergs report references VR Systems, a firm that specializes in voting system technology. The company earlier this month warned its customers not to click on links in suspicious email messages, after receiving an alert from a customer about a fraudulent email claiming to be from the company. However, VR Systems said at the time that it had no information regarding any customers who may have clicked on any suspicious links, and it had no indication that any data was compromised.

The company last week reported that it was aware of a phishing scam sent to multiple election officials right before the 2016 election, and that it was aware of officials opening the email.

Russian hackers used the phishing attack to try to break into systems of five Florida counties, the Miami Herald reported last week.

A VR Systems official was not immediately available to comment for this story.

Floridas online elections databases and voting systems remained secure in 2016. We have multiple safeguards in place to protect against elections fraud and prevent any possible hacking attempts from being successful, the Florida Department of State said in a statement provided to the E-Commerce Times by spokesperson Sarah Revell.

The department participated in an informational call with the FBI related to elections security at the end of September 2016, where they alerted officials for the need to maintain security measures, but there was no indication of a Florida-specific issue, the statement says.

Full Disclosure

The Bloomberg report highlights the need for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to release its full report, said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center

EPIC requested the full report in a Freedom of Information Act filing earlier this year, he told the E-Commerce Times.

EPIC is seeking information that goes beyond the disclosures in the declassified report previously released to the public, arguing that the full report might reveal a broader scope of attacks on U.S. political organizations, including state voter databases.

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which works with state and local officials to make sure election systems are secure, declined to comment on the Bloomberg report until it had more time to review it, said spokesperson Mark Listes.

State officials have been working to better secure their systems and protect against ongoing threats, he told the E-Commerce Times.

The FBI declined to comment for this story.
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When I talk with teachers, I often find them flummoxed by my descriptions of unexpected schools. Thats the term I use to describe high-performing and rapidly improving schools with large populations of children of color and children living in poverty. These schools dont fit the well-worn pattern of academic achievement tightly correlating with family income and ethnicity, a connection first documented by James S. Coleman in his eponymous 1966 report.

When I tell them that professional development in unexpected schools is linked to both the needs of teachers and school goals and informed by classroom observations by principals and other leaders, they say something to the effect of, The only time I see my principal is when he is doing a walk-through.

Similarly, I sometimes describe how teachers in unexpected schools unpack standards, map out the curriculum, and develop lessons and common assessments together. The conversation stopper: We dont have common planning times.

Through such conversations, I have realized that educators in unexpected schools change the fundamental way schools have traditionally been organized.

Back in 2000, Harvard researcher Richard Elmore argued that because teaching has primarily been an isolated, autonomous, and idiosyncratic practice, school improvement is nearly impossible. Privacy of practice produces isolation; isolation is the enemy of improvement, he wrote. A few years later, I was hired by the Education Trust, a national education advocacy organization, to help identify and learn from successful schools serving large populations of students living in poverty and students of color.

After spending more than a decade visiting, writing about, and learning from dozens of unexpected schools across the country, I have seen what happens when school leaders take Elmores analysis to heart and make improvement a shared task rather than a solitary one.

For example, at Malverne Senior High School in Long Island, N.Y., 93 percent of the schools seniors graduated in 2016, and 54 percent earned advanced diplomas (reflecting a full college-preparatory study). These numbers would be unremarkable in white, upper-middle-class high schools in New York City, but are unusual in schools with Malvernes demographic makeup. Most of Malvernes students are students of color58 percent African-American and 23 percent Hispanicand 51 percent are considered economically disadvantaged.

The school has achieved its results by systematically building caring relationships and tackling problems together. Failures are our problem, Principal Vincent Romano told me. Its leaders do not leave teachers to work in isolation, but make instructionfrom lesson plans to assessmentsa shared activity. Every year, seven full-period classroom observations by teachers, department heads, and administrators help teachers reflect on their practice and build a culture where they work together to better engage their students in challenging material. And by continually looking at grades, test scores, and attendance and discipline data, teachers and administrators monitor how students are doing so that they can adjust instruction accordingly.

Unexpected schools like Malverne demonstrate the power schools hold to overcome barriers of poverty and discriminationsomething traditionally organized schools seem to find insuperableby breaking down long-standing structures of autonomous practice.

Traditional school structures keep schools highly dependent on the social capital students bring to their classrooms."

As Elmore wrote, traditional school structures keep schools highly dependent on the social capital students bring to their classrooms, allowing schools that serve a majority of middle-class and upper-middle-class families to appear reasonably successful. But if they begin enrolling low-income students or new immigrants, they are often exposed as schools that were not good in and of themselves. Rather, they had relied on the strength of their wealthier students vocabulary and background knowledge, and parents ability to provide extra help. Unfortunately, the common assessment is that low-income students and students of color cause schools to go downhill.

I saw how this worked in the high school my children attended. The once predominantly white, middle-class school had experienced a large increase in low-income students and students of color whose families had been drawn to the area, partly by the good reputation of the schools.

Many teachers blamed the ensuing drop in academic achievement on the new students, while continuing their decades-long march through outdated textbooks and poorly thought-through worksheets. Their instructionisolated, autonomous, and idiosyncraticwent unchallenged by the schools traditional structure. That is to say, the school had no systems to make sure teachers knew what state standards required students to know, no systems to identify students who had not mastered standards, and no systems to hone teachers individual expertise and collaborate with other teachers to improve instruction. On average, students who didnt have the vocabulary, background knowledge, or organizational wherewithal to compensate for the weak school structures did not fare well. Conscientious teachers helped individual students, but could not by themselves change the schools academic trajectory.

In contrast, unexpected schools have system after system to marshal the power of schoolssystems as prosaic as master schedules that permit uninterrupted instruction and teacher collaborationto help teachers work together and focus on the best ways to teach what students need to know. Most important, they have systems of information that let the adults in the school know what is working and what isnt so they can continually adjust their practice.

These systems dont require enormous amounts of money. What they do require is thoughtful professionalism on the part of educators and school staff who are given the time, knowledge, and resources to work together in a quest to ensure that every student is successful. That should be within the grasp of every school in the country.
If you want to engage students and get them excited about what they are learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics classes, ask them to tackle a real-world problem. Then watch their amazement as they realize what they are learning in class actually has real-world applications.

Working on solutions to real-world problems is the heart of any STEM investigation. These solutions may include devices and designs that improve our lives, fulfill our needs or wants, and make our world better. From designing a better pen to figuring out how to assist areas lacking access to clean drinking water, the opportunity to search for solutions to real-world problems fuels students curiosity and sparks their investigative interests.

Perhaps the most important consequence of students working on real problems is that they begin to develop empathya sense that there is something worth dedicating their efforts to outside of themselves. We need to grow a savvy, ethical workforce to solve looming issues such as air pollution, fresh-water shortages, and crumbling infrastructure.

Criteria for Selecting Real-World Problems

Designing real-world engineering challenges for K-12 students can be tough. In my experience as a STEM teacher, identifying authentic problems that students can work on is one of the most challenging parts of lesson planning.

Here are some of the criteria I consider when selecting real-world problems:

The problem must be real. It must involve an authentic engineering challenge grounded in compelling societal, economic, and environmental issues that affect peoples lives and communities. Mythical insects, space aliens, and theoretical life forms are not real-world problemsat least not yet.

Students must be able to relate to the problem. If students dont care about the problem, their buy-in will be limited. This needs to be a significant challenge students care about. It might be a problem in their own life or community. Alternatively, you might build a context to help them connect with an unfamiliar problem by using videos, speakers, or field trips.

The problem should be doable. For a STEM project to be successful, students should have access to the resources, knowledge, and skills they need to solve the problemand the scope of the problem should be manageable. Engineering solutions for a problem involving clean energy, such as wind turbines or solar cells, might be realistic. However, tackling a problem involving interplanetary space travelnot so much.

The problem must allow for multiple acceptable approaches and solutions. Dont even consider a problem with a single, predetermined approach and right or wrong answer. In your STEM class, each team of students might choose a different approach for solving the problem, and several different solutions may work.

Students should use an engineering design process drawing on science, mathematics, and technology skills and conceptsto solve the problem. However, each subject doesnt need to be used to the same extent. Some solutions may rely more heavily on science and others on mathematics, but all must require students to use an engineering design process.

The problem should align with grade-level standards for science and mathematics. In a packed school day, neither teachers nor students have time for much extra curriculum content. Teachers can more readily buy into teaching STEM if students are able to use skills they are learning anyway to address the selected problem.

Problem Possibilities

Now for the most challenging part: selecting a real-world problem that meets the above criteria. When my students and I draw a blank, these are some of the tactics I use:

Encourage students to come up with the problem. This approach typically generates the most enthusiasm and buy-in from students. Give them as much autonomy as possible to identify problems they want to solve, within the constraints dictated by the curriculum. You might start by asking students to be on the alert for problems in their home, school, or community. For example, students might notice erosion in the schoolyard, or determine that kids need a digital tool to manage their homework assignments. If students get stuck, ask them what needs to happen to make life better for the citizens in their area. Are some people in their community hungry? Is pollution a problem? Just remember to direct students toward problems that are appropriate for their grade level and content knowledge.

Do an online search. Simply typing real-world problems in a search engine brings up a host of possible sites that you can sift through for ideas. But be forewarned: Everything labeled real-world problem is not necessarily a STEM real-world problem with an engineering approach.

Online Resources

So how do you focus your online research to target problems that students can approach with a STEM lens? Some of my go-to search options include:

If you need a jumping-off point, take a look at the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges . These challenges are divided into four major themes: sustainability, health, security, and joy of living. Some of the challenges that might inspire middle-school students revolve around solar energy, clean water, health care (including food shortage, disease, and accessibility), and urban infrastructure (including transportation systems and municipal structures).

Take a stop at the Boston Museum of Science for comprehensive and well-designed engineering curriculum targeting all age groups. The museums Engineering Everywhere Curriculum Units offer free STEM lessons that focus on unique and interesting real-world challenges. For additional ideas, check out these 20 hands-on Engineering is Elementary Curriculum Units .

You can find a wide variety of STEM lessons and activities geared to specific grade levels at eGIF Dream Up the Future .

Another one of my favorite sites is PBSs Design Squad . You can find intriguing problem-solving ideas in the activities and lesson plans sections.

The Teach Engineering site also offers a number of STEM/engineering lessonsbe sure to browse these Maker Challenges .

For high-school teachers, an excellent resource is Rutgers Today , which describes more advanced real-world problems. High school students in upper-level math or science courses might be able to design and implement solutions for these types of problems.

These are just a few of many resources that can help identify real-world problems with STEM solutions. In the comments section, share your own go-to websites or other resources for STEM instruction. By sharing your insights and experiences, you can help all STEM teachersand studentslearn.
Castletown-based insurance firm sold for 340m

A Castletown-based insurance company has been sold for around 340m.

Friends Provident International has been acquired by RL360 from the Aviva Group, subject to approval by industry regulators.

Friends Provident International also has offices in Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai, but around 150 of their 500 employees are based at the Castletown office.

So far it's not been announced whether the sale will have any impact on jobs.
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A charitable five-year-old is planning to have his hair cut off so it can be transformed into a wig for a child currently undergoing treatment for cancer.

Finley Barber, from Billericay , has spent the past two-and-a-half years growing his long blonde locks so they can be donated to the Little Princess Trust, an organisation which provides free of charge real hair wigs to boys and girls across the UK and Ireland.

His hair will go towards making a wig that will change someone's life for the better, giving them self-confidence that so many cancer sufferers loose as a result of hair loss.

Finley, who attends Buttsbury Infant School , in Perry Street, Billericay, is no stranger to performing good deeds, having already baked cakes to be donated to the homeless when he was just three years old.

His mum, Charlotte Pattison, said: "When he was about three-and-a-half he wanted to grow his hair for the children that didn't have any.

"I have absolutely no clue where the idea came from, he just came out with it.

"He has always been very aware since a young age that children get ill.

"He's also been very aware of people not having things that he does have."

Finley caught the charity bug two years ago when decided he wanted to help homeless people by giving out all of his Easter eggs.

Not only did the youngster give away all his chocolate but he spent time baking 36 nest cakes to be handed out too.

A year later he undertook a 5km run and raised 300 for East Anglia's Children's Hospices (EACH).

Mum Charlotte, 29, said: "I'm so proud of him.

"His hair now goes past his shoulders down his back.

"It needs to be at least 17cm for a wig but it's already past that."

Finley's hair has now reached 30cm in length and is so long that on a number of occasions he has been mistaken for a girl.

But according to his mum, he always politely sets confused passersby straight and even introduces himself to new people by saying: "Hello, I am Finley. You may think I am a girl, but I am actually a boy."

Tonight (July 19), mum and son will go to Frosts, in Moulsham Street, Chelmsford , for the big trim.

Charlotte has created a Just Giving page, with a target of 350, for anyone who wishes to donate towards Finley's efforts.

You can donate to Finley's page here.
Estonia, who is currently holding the EUs rotating presidency, said that the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany would have many negative consequences for the continents energy security. Estonian foreign minister Sven Mikser urged the EU that it must not allow suppliers to use energy as a tool for political pressure and added that before the project goes any further, we have to analyze the consequences very closely. Mr. Mikser also stressed that if this analysis shows that Nord Stream 2 puts Russian suppliers in a position where they can exert pressure on any country in Europe, for example, Ukraine, then we have to take this very seriously.

Estonian leadership thinks that the European Commission should negotiate directly with Russia. The Commission has previously raised its concerns and asked for a mandate to negotiate on behalf of the EU on the legal underpinnings of the project. It is still not clear whether the EU executive will be given the mandate by the member states. Mr. Mikser, however, said that his country would try its best to reach the necessary consensus on the issue.

The Nord Stream 2 pipeline is meant to transport natural gas into the EU to enhance security of supply, support climate goals and boost the internal energy market. Germany is a strong supporter of the project, which will bring gas from Russia through the Baltic Sea, just like the already operational Nord Stream pipeline. One of the strongest supporters of the pipeline within the German government is German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel who, together with Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern, criticized a decision by the White House on toughening sanction against Russia.

Mr. Mikser urged the EU member states to unify their position when talking to the Kremlin by saying that we have shown consensus when it comes to sanctions and we should continue to do so. However, he also warned against a piecemeal dismantling of the sanctions so long as Russia violates the fundamental principles of international law and does not respect its obligations.
Both the European Union and the United Kingdom are planning to announce their plans for the reform of the terms of the World Trade Organization (WTO) membership in fall this year. The two sides are also talking about sharing liabilities from trade disputes including the 13-year-old battle between the EU and the United States over billions of dollars in state subsidies to Airbus Group SE and Boeing Co.

The joint approach would specifically address aspects of the blocs WTO membership terms  known as WTO schedules  that are not easily split between Great Britain and the other 27 EU member states such as commitment on services trade, agricultural subsidies, and agricultural tariff quotas. The plan is that both Brussels and London would explain together how they would see the disentanglement of the United Kingdom from the EU commitment and schedules. This joint endeavor would also deal with Britains wish to join the WTOs Government Procurement Agreement, which liberalizes access to procurement markets among the members of the agreement. While the EU is a signatory, Britain is not.

Britains Brexit minister, David Davis, kicked off the first round of the talks in Brussels on Monday (17 July) amidst internal disputes within the British government over the Brexit terms. Moreover, the UK faces a hefty bill as it leaves the bloc to cover its ongoing commitments. One of such costs might be a provision to cover damages of the EU-US dispute over allegedly illegal subsidies to plane companies.
Bill Farren-Price, a long-term OPEC follower and consultant at Petroleum Policy Intelligence, citing his sources said in a note to clients that Saudi Arabia was planning to cut exports by 1-million barrel per day.

First, Saudi Arabia is considering cutting its exports unilaterally by up to a further 1m b/d, which would offset the rise in Libyan and Nigerian supplies, Mr. Farren-Price wrote. No final decision has been made, reported the Financial Times.

Another measure being considered by OPEC is to cap the production supply of Nigeria and Libya.

"The increment of crude oil supply from Nigeria and Libya in June vs. October 2016 reference production levels comes to 450,000 barrels per day on average. This is almost 40 percent of the 1.25 million barrels per day cut by the OPEC 10 members engaged in supply restraint," French bank BNP Paribas said.

The third option being considered is to force the existing members to adhere to their respective production quotas. A few of the members have been producing above their designated quotas.

Nevertheless, the other OPEC members who have cut their production have also not reduced their exports, which has kept the market well supplied, delaying the rebalancing of the crude market.

The US crude stockpiles rise again

American Petroleum Institute said that the US crude oil inventory increased 1.6 million barrels in the week ended July 14, while analysts were expecting a fall of 3.2 million barrels.

However, gasoline stocks fell 5.4 million barrels exceeding analysts expectations of a 665,000-barrel decline.

"We're stuck in a range that ... will be tough to break out of without some kind of political factor coming into play," said Matt Stanley, fuel broker at Freight Investor Services, reports Reuters.

Meanwhile, the US shale oil production is expected to rise for the eighth straight month in August and reach 5.585 million barrels a day, the U.S. Energy Department said in a report on Monday

"With little sign of the OPEC-shale tug of war drawing to an end, the scene is now set for a period of range-bound trading as market players await the next price catalyst," said Stephen Brennock at London brokerage PVM Oil Associates.


A pilot scheme in Canada aimed at attracting international graduates and skilled professionals to move to the Atlantic Provinces is gaining interest.A growing number of employers are looking to the Atlantic Immigration Pilot to find workers which is part of an innovative partnership between the Government of Canada and the Atlantic Provinces.Since it launched on 27 January 2017, more than 600 Atlantic employers have expressed an interest in becoming designated and about 400 have already received a designation by an Atlantic provincial government.Once an employer receives a designation, they can recruit immigrants and recent international graduates under the Atlantic Intermediate Skilled Programme, the Atlantic High Skilled Programme and the Atlantic International Graduate Programme to fill job vacancies.These programs give employers significant flexibility in finding the right candidates to meet their specific workforce needs from forestry software designers under the Atlantic High Skilled Programme, to long haul truckers and hospitality workers under the Atlantic Intermediate skilled Programme, to recent graduates in medicine, nursing and architecture under the Atlantic International Graduate Programme.Skilled immigrants and Atlantic international graduates can apply for permanent residence once they receive a job offer from a designated employer, develop a settlement plan with a designated Atlantic service provider organisation, and are endorsed by an Atlantic provincial government.Immigration Refugee and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) began accepting permanent resident applications for under the pilot on 06 March 2017 and to date, more than 250 skilled immigrants and Atlantic international graduates have been recruited and applied for provincial endorsement. Of these applicants, more than 180 have been endorsed and can apply for permanent residence.An IRCC spokesman said that it is committed to processing the majority of permanent residence applications within six months. As part of the process, applicants will need to complete an application form, including providing proof of language proficiency, education, and previous relevant work experience, if appropriate.After consulting Atlantic employers and provincial partners that have been using the Pilot, IRCC has launched a dedicated service channel. This assists designated employers whose candidates have received, or are in the process of receiving a provincial endorsement and are ready to apply for permanent residence.During this phase, a candidate has to gather a number of documents to support their application. The dedicated service channel provides additional support and information to employers to enable their recruits to complete the remaining steps, the spokesman explained.This will be particularly helpful to employers that are not familiar with the steps involved in the immigration process. In addition, IRCC is now expediting processing of temporary work permits for candidates so that they can start working in Canada while their application for permanent residence is being processed, he added.The Atlantic Immigration Pilot is a key initiative under the Skilled Workforce/Immigration pillar of the Atlantic Growth Strategy. The pilot tests innovative approaches to permanent immigration to attract and retain skilled immigrants and Atlantic international graduates to meet the varied labour market needs in the region.
The citys Zoning Commission cleared the way Tuesday for a massive new development that could spread growth from The Pearl east across Broadway.

A second 3.3-acre project that was also approved could renovate land to the west of the River Walk.

The commission unanimously approved a request by downtown developer GrayStreet Partners to rezone 23 acres of land across Broadway from The Pearl where it wants to build apartments, a hotel, offices, retail space and parks. The project, a few acres larger than the current footprint of the Pearl, holds the promise of transforming Government Hill, a historic neighborhood that is marred by run-down homes, deteriorating streets and drainage problems.

Flasher Equipment, a manufacturer of traffic signs, also won approval from the commission to rezone 3.3 acres of the property it is vacating on the other side of The Pearl from commercial and industrial to infill development, allowing for offices, multifamily housing and retail shops across River Walk. The company is in the process of moving to a new facility on the West Side and is in talks with developers who are interested in the land.

Both requests are subject to City Council approval. The GrayStreet project will go before council on Aug. 17, said Peter French, the firms director of development.

Three residents of Government Hill spoke in favor of the Gray Street project, but said they were concerned whether it would help disadvantaged residents of the neighborhood. The median household income there was $25,116 in 2015, less than half of the median annual earnings for all of Bexar County, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Government Hill Alliance Neighborhood Association has been talking with GrayStreet about whether the firm could help fix up some of the areas run-down homes, residents said.

We are committed to work with the Government Hill Alliance Neighborhood Association and single-family owners to make investments in those homes, said Daniel Ortiz, an attorney representing GrayStreet at the meeting. This is a 10-year development, and GrayStreet is a long-term owner. It is in their interest to also see the single-family develop.

The project will include an office building on Broadway, several buildings of multifamily, a boutique hotel and numerous retail buildings stretching along a pedestrian corridor that would act as an extension of Pearl Parkway, according to a map presented at the meeting. It could include about 100,000 square feet of retail and up to 300,000 square feet of office space, GrayStreets managing partner, Kevin Covey, said in an interview last month.

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Its buildings could be as high as eight stories along Broadway but will shrink to around two stories as they get closer to the residential core of Government Hill, French said. With underground parking garages, the project will include 4,100 parking spaces.

GrayStreet already owns 8 acres of land along Broadway and has most of the projects remaining footprint under contract, including 14 acres that the San Antonio Independent School District put up for sale last year. The development would stretch from Broadway to as far east as Oleander Street, and from Grayson Street to as far south as Casa Blanca Street.

Everybody is in conjunction that there are a couple things we need to work out but at this point the Government Hill Alliance Neighborhood Association  does support the project, its president, Rose Hill, said. Residents are excited that something great is coming to our neighborhood.

rwebner@express-news.net

@rwebner
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San Antonio-based pipeline company Howard Energy Partners is making its first foray into the Port of Corpus Christi with a $150 million storage facility that will serve as an entry point to the Mexico and overseas export markets.

One of the big focuses is diversifying the company both geographically and across the hydrocarbons and that just means everything from gas to oil, Brad Bynum, Howard Energys president and co-founder, said in a phone interview.

Howard Energy, which does most of its business in natural gas pipelines, storage and processing, owns and operates more than 500 miles of pipelines and 220,000 barrels of liquid storage capacity in Brownsville. The company is building the Corpus facility through subsidiary Maverick Terminals Corpus. This will be the companys biggest project to date and its first foray into Corpus Christi. It will also allow the company to export more crude oil and refined product.

Bynum said the new facility will break ground in August and the first phase, which will consist of 480,000 barrels of gasoline and diesel storage, should be complete by the end of 2018. Howard Energy will spend up to $150 million over the next five years to build out the facility, which Bynum said they hope will have an additional 1.6 million barrels of crude oil storage.

The Port of Corpus Christi will spend up to $50 million to build a new dock that will have a loading capacity of 30,000 to 50,000 barrels of oil an hour. Port Chief Operating Officer Sean Strawbridge said the dock will also be able to handle Suezmax-class oil tankers, which can hold up to 1 million barrels of crude oil.

Theyre an emerging leader in the midstream energy space, particularly with how it relates to Mexico, Strawbridge said of Howard Energy.

The only other dock that will be of similar scale will be a dock the Port is building for San Antonio-based NuStar Energy.

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Howard Energys Dos Aguilas pipeline, which will have a capacity of at least 90,000 barrels a day and will ship refined products into northern Mexico, will eventually connect with the storage facility, Bynum said. Exports will initially be transported by train, he said.

(Corpus Christis) access to supply and relative positioning to the Mexico market makes it a great place to originate product, gasoline and diesel to go to the Mexico market, Bynum said.

Howard Energy was founded in 2011, and started with natural gas pipelines and operates assets in South Texas Eagle Ford Shale field and Pennsylvanias Marcellus natural gas shale field.

rdruzin@express-news.net

@druz_journo
A former manager of a local Wells Fargo Bank branch accused the lender of forcing her out after she refused to go along with the illegal sales practices that cost the bank $185 million in regulatory fines last year, according to a new lawsuit.

Rachael DeBoy of Cibolo seeks as much as $1 million in damages from the San Francisco-based institution, saying she resigned in 2013 to avoid termination because of her inability to reach the banks fraudulent sales goals.

DeBoy said she refused to go along with unethical company practices reinforced by a manager who was filling in for her while she was on maternity leave.

DeBoy, 35, is at least the second former manager of a local Wells Fargo branch to sue over the scandal that upended the institution, sparked consumer lawsuits and triggered investigations by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Justice Department, and Securities and Exchange Commission, among others.

In December, Alex Leal sued the bank, alleging he was discriminated against and ultimately terminated in 2015 for resisting the banks unethical and illegal sales practices while working at a West Side branch. Wells Fargo countered in a January court filing that it had legitimate, non-discriminatory, and non-pretextual reason for the employment action it took against Leal.

San Antonio lawyer Richard Espey filed DeBoys suit Friday in Bexar County district court. He said since DeBoy was essentially run out of Wells Fargo, she has not been able to get another job in the financial industry.

When you get fired or forced out by one financial institution, you have a big black mark on you, Espey said.

Wells Fargo spokesman Michael King said in an email he could not comment on ongoing litigation, but added we take allegations like these seriously and the company has measures in place to protect team members from retaliation if they report a concern.

Wells Fargo has been reeling ever since the scandal erupted in September. About 2 million or so fake bank and credit cards accounts were opened by Wells Fargo employees without customer authorization, all part of an effort to achieve lofty sales goals. The practice dates back to at least 2002, according to an April report prepared by the banks independent directors.

The bank was fined $185 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, among others, in September. Earlier this year, the bank agreed to pay $142 million to settle one class-action lawsuit in California, though at least 10 other class-action cases are pending.

Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf was forced out without severance pay in October. Its board clawed back about $69 million in compensation from Stumpf and $67 million from former Community Bank head Carrie Tolstedt, the bank disclosed in a May filing with the SEC.

The bank is the process of closing about 480 branches nationwide, part of $2 billion in cost-cutting initiatives, the Los Angeles Times reported in May. Last month, Wells Fargo closed its Olmos Park branch at 4014 McCullough Ave.

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Wells Fargo plans on implementing changes at its branches to improve customer and employee relationships. Those changes include efforts to reduce wait times and educate consumers about new digital capabilities.

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In her lawsuit, DeBoy said she started at Wells Fargo as a personal banker in 2004 and rose to branch manager in 2008. In 2011, her superiors began to employ more and more stringent sales quotas for the branches in San Antonio.

The new sales targets were based on fraudulent sales figures throughout the company, the suit said.

DeBoy said she reported unethical behavior at her branch when she returned from maternity leave and was given a negative performance review as a result. Her temporary replacement, on the other hand, received a raise and a promotion, the suit added.

DeBoy reported her concerns to multiple levels within humans resources and to the banks ethics line, the lawsuit said. She was told she was in jeopardy of being fired for failing to meet the fraudulent sales goals, the suit alleged. Ultimately, she was forced to resign to avoid termination, the suit added. She has sued the bank for fraud, breach of contract and wrongful termination.

Espey said DeBoys lawsuit is the first he has filed on behalf of a former bank employee, but he anticipates filing more.

pdanner@express-news.net

Twitter: @AlamoPD

News researcher Misty Harris contributed to this report.
Staff file photo

The Symphony Society of San Antonio, founded in 1939 by first conductor Max Reiter, will cease to operate the San Antonio Symphony as of Sept. 1.

The Symphony Society will be replaced by a new nonprofit to be called Symphonic Music for San Antonio, which is being organized by some of the symphonys biggest funders, Tobin Endowment Chairman J. Bruce Bugg told the Express-News in an editorial meeting at the newspaper Wednesday.
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Oscar Health and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas said they plan  at least for now to remain in the local Affordable Care Act exchange next year despite turmoil surrounding federal health care policy.

Oscar Health, which announced in June that it would extend from Bexar to nearby counties, said it has no plans to change its decision to offer individual plans on the ACA exchanges in 2018.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas said that, at this time, it doesnt plan to make changes for next year.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas continues to focus on our priority  serving our members across state, the company said in a statement. We remain committed to working with lawmakers, regulators, providers and the entire healthcare system to ultimately achieve a sustainable and stable individual market that helps make healthcare coverage more affordable and fosters choice and competition.

Humana, which currently offers plans on the ACA exchange in Bexar County, announced in February it would not offer such plans in 2018. Ambetter, the only other insurer serving Bexar County, did not respond to requests for comment.

Companies still have a couple of months to sort out their 2018 coverage plans.

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In many parts of the country, options for next year on the exchanges are growing thin. The exchanges are the only place where people can buy insurance with help from income-based tax credits. Several insurers have said they are retreating from this market, some after losing more than $100 million.

The government has been giving insurers money to help customers with modest incomes cover out-of-pocket expenses, such as co-payments and deductibles. But the future of those payments, which are separate from the income-based tax credits that help people buy coverage, is in political limbo. President Donald Trump has talked about stopping the payments, and insurers want a guarantee they will last through next year.

An attempt to replace the ACA legislation, also known as Obamacare, failed Monday night after two Republican senators  Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas  came out against the Better Care Reconciliation Act, effectively killing the bill.

Allison De Paoli, media chair for the San Antonio Association of Health Underwriters, said the uncertainty of federal policy makes it difficult for insurers and employers who provide health care to plan for the future.

Everybodys watching for now, De Paoli said, adding that it was imperative for employers to continue to follow the reporting requirements in the ACA.

The ACA is in force until they vote to repeal it and succeed, De Paoli said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he would push for a repeal and delay of the Affordable Care Act, similar to a measure that passed the Senate in 2015 but was vetoed by President Barack Obama.

I believe we must continue to push forward now. I regret that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failures of Obamacare will not be successful, McConnell said in a statement. That doesnt mean we should give up. We will now try a different way to bring the American people relief from Obamacare  I think we owe them at least that much.

McConnells effort to repeal-and-delay quickly met resistance as three Republican senators  Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Susan Collins of Maine  said Tuesday they were opposed to the measure. That would leave the bill three votes short of the support needed to pass.

I did not come to Washington to hurt people, Capito said in a statement.

Dr. Arthur Garson, director of the Texas Medical Center Health Policy Institute in Houston, said he fears Republicans will now abandon health care and move on to other issues, such as tax reform.

My biggest concern is they quit dealing with it, Garson said.

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McConnell said he plans to reintroduce a 2015 bill that would repeal some of the ACAs coverage mandates, subsidies and Medicaid expansion but not the regulations, such as the requirement that insurers cover people with pre-existing conditions. The repeal of mandates would take place immediately, while the repeals of the subsidies and Medicaid extension would be delayed for two years.

This would cause 18 million people to lose insurance and result in premium increases of 20 to 25 percent in the first year insurers could account for the lack of mandates, according to a January report issued by the Congressional Budget Office.

More than 1 million Texans received health insurance through the exchange as of 2015, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

De Paoli said the fact that repealing the subsidies is on the table is a cause for concern as it would make premiums unaffordable for a lot of people.

I think that makes people pretty nervous, De Paoli said.

Eleven governors, including Republican John Kasich of Ohio, released a joint statement Tuesday arguing against repeal.

Garson said both parties need to work together to make the insurance industry operate in a way that is affordable to consumers.

The idea of well, lets just let Obamacare implode isnt helpful either, Garson said. Weve got to attack this because there are issues.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

jpound@express-news.net

Twitter: @jesserpound
A bipartisan group of lawmakers is appealing directly to President Donald Trump to continue a cost-sharing program for cotton farmers that was meant to be a short-term fix for low commodity prices and subsidized competition abroad.

We cant continue ignoring the economic turmoil of U.S. cotton farmers, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway, R-Texas, said of the letter sent Tuesday. It was also signed by ranking member Collin Peterson, D-Minnesota, and more than 100 others. Cotton producers cant wait until the next farm bill  they need help now.

Former U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in June 2016 announced a $300 million shot in the arm for cotton growers who have been struggling for years as high foreign supplies and a low U.S. dollar drove cotton prices south. While prices for almost all commodities have been low, cotton farmers also lost a bulk of their federal subsidies under the 2014 farm bill. The cuts were made to settle a trade dispute with Brazil  which accused the U.S. of undercutting the global market  but it was negotiated at a time when commodity prices were soaring.

Growers contend they are up against foreign governments subsidizing their own cotton growers and keeping prices artificially low.

As a consequence, Americas cotton farming families are struggling to compete on a lopsided global playing field heavily weighted to our competitors in countries like China and India, the letter reads.

Cotton farmers who are now pushing for the continued aid thought they would be able to get cotton redesignated as an oilseed during negotiations for the $1 trillion-plus omnibus spending bill, which passed in May. The designation would have restored cotton as a program crop eligible for price support programs, something Vilsack said he was not qualified to do administratively. But their proposal failed in the Senate.

So we were really just kind of back to square one after that, said Steve Verett, executive president of the Lubbock-based Plains Cotton Growers. We really had nothing left but to ask for the secretary to once again put in place the gin cost share assistance, since we had a precedence for that program.

The cotton ginning cost sharing program paid 40 percent of ginning costs in a one-time payment based on farmers 2015 acreage. Verett said the intentions of Tuesdays letter is to have the program continued until implementation of the next five-year farm bill.

Texas is the nations leading producer of cotton. While current USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue comes from Georgia, another cotton producing state, Verett said growers felt it necessary that their request to reach the president directly.

The secretary is certainly aware of the issue, but this letter from Congress is basically attempting to appeal to the president, to get him involved through his administration and through the (Office of Management and Budget), Verett said. Everythings about money and you know the secretary only has a certain amount of monetary authority to be able to do anything on his or her own.

Cotton growers have, meanwhile, had a roller coaster of a year. At the beginning of the year, future prices were around 74 cents a pound. Thats nowhere near the highs of more than $2 a pound in 2011, but still worth planting considering the soils promised abundant yields. But prices since then have fallen, with December futures now trading at around 68 cents.

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Cotton produces both lint and seed, and up until recently cottonseed was selling so high it offset low prices for the fiber. But cottonseed has plunged to less than $150 a ton in recent months. In February it was valued at $203 a ton.

Thats below the break-even cost for ginning, so in addition to cotton prices not being that great now producers  unless something happens to cottonseed prices  theyre going to be paying to get their cotton ginned above and beyond the value of the cottonseed, Verett said.

According to the letter to Trump, planted U.S. cotton acreage is at a 30-year low, which affects a not only farms but also a $21 billion revenue sector that includes gins, warehouses, processors and manufacturers across a 17-state Cotton Belt.

lbrezosky@express-news.net
If not for the fact that the installations by Jenelle Esparza and Rafael Gutierrez are in different rooms of Sala Diaz, it would be difficult to tell where the work of one artist ends and the other begins.

In Under the Gun, an exhibit curated by Michele Monseau as a pop-up of Three Walls Gallery, both artists use the layered meanings of words in minimalist, text-based works to subtly comment on political and social issues.

Invited to fill a slot in the Southtown spaces programming schedule, Monseau tapped Esparza and Gutierrez, she said, because everything thats going on right now in the world should be commented on. Thats what I wanted to do in a nutshell.

Monseau has run Three Walls as a roving pop-up since the gallery lost its space at the Blue Star Arts Complex in 2012.

In 2017, to be under great pressure  or direct threat  is the norm, which is having a profound effect on the global population, Monseau said in a curatorial statement for the show, citing climate change, government corruption, police brutality, the legislation of womens bodies and species extinction as contributing factors.

Washed Power of False Profits, the installation by Gutierrez, occupies the first room at Sala Diaz, which occupies half of a duplex. One wall, painted black, bears four words: male, power, privilege, list. The wall opposite, painted white, also bears four words: people, lie, washed, out.

I kind of wanted to play with the idea of If these walls could talk, what would they say, he said.

The color of each wall serves as a key, he explained. Place black and white in front of the set of words or each individual word on the corresponding wall, and the meaning begins to emerge. Read in succession, the two lists become contemplative poems reflecting on color and race in America. The area between the black and white walls is gray space where a conversation between the two sets of words  and viewers  can take place.

Originally from Augusta, Georgia, Gutierrez, 32, has lived in San Antonio for about seven years. He served in the Air Force for more than four years before enrolling at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he earned a bachelors of fine arts degree with a concentration in new media. Gutierrez has exhibited throughout Texas, merging installation, painting and performance in his work.

Recently Ive been really interested in words, text and the syntax of words, like the meaning and where did it come from, and also color, Gutierrez said. Im interested in color because I feel like people either ignore color or they acknowledge it. And so, I juxtapose those two things.

Gutierrez is biracial but identifies as black. Growing up in a city he describes as very segregated, he said he was always aware of race at a very young age, and the history of what that meant and how that could affect my future. The words on the black wall allude to Gutierrezs experience.

Just thinking about myself and thinking about a lot of things that are happening, being a black male, being black empowered, kind of feeling like youre privileged as a black person can also put you on this black list, he said.

The words on the white wall address the idea of white privilege.

Some people get the benefit of not actually having color associated with them, he said. I grew up realizing that white people are just people. Theyre not white people. Only black people are black people.

So for me, Ive always noticed that white people have the privilege to wash things over.

Gutierrez shaped each letter from clay epoxy so the words stand out in relief from the walls.

You can paint straight on the wall, but you lose the artist being there, he said. But here you can see the many hours that I had to put in of mixing, of blending the clay and touching it. So I encourage people to touch it and kind of feel the history and feel my fingerprints or the indentations that I made on the wall, he said.

In the second gallery, Esparzas installation Weeds features words  single or in phrases  plucked from articles and news reports printed by letterpress sans ink on sheets of watercolor paper, among them privilege, pre-exist, culture control and bootstrap blues.

I wanted it to be it to be a little obscured just like the meanings are kind of obscured depending on whos reading it, Esparza said. Its real intimate. Theyre small scale, and youve got to get real close to read it. And then, once you read it, it makes you kind of want to concentrate on Well, what does that mean? and start asking the questions that start the thought process.

Originally from Corpus Christi, Esparza, 30, received her bachelors of fine arts degree in photography from UTSA in 2010. Her work recently was featured in a solo exhibition at Provenance Gallery and is now on view in A Womans Place Is ..., an all-Latina group show at Centro de Artes curated by Kathy Vargas.

On the floor of the gallery, Esparza arranged casts of hands, or rather fists, raised in protest. Unpainted, the ghostly white appendages look as if they have pushed through the wooden boards. Each hand is different, with one making a peace sign and another giving the finger. The piece was inspired by the current political climate.

Theres so many people involved in protests and neighborhood community meetings and organizing themselves as citizens, Esparza said. I felt like that hadnt been present prior to this election.

The first fist Esparza made was a cast of her grandmothers hand. The artist was experimenting with the material. Unbidden, her grandmother made a fist. Esparza was taken with the gesture, so it just kind of spurred the whole thing of like, Oh, yeah. I should make a bunch of these protest fists up in the air, she said. Thats what I think of when I think of protests and people getting together in solidarity  that one hand in the air; people holding hands; the community or people lifting each other up.

The cast of Esparzas grandmothers hand is on display on a shelf in a narrow hallway along with etched mirror works by Esparza from an earlier series and another piece by Gutierrez.

The title of Esparzas installation was inspired by a definition she read of the word weed that said it doesnt have a botanical significance.

It just basically means a plant in the wrong place, she said. A plant thats in one context could be perfectly accepted and in another context its considered a weed and you should get rid of it. And so I felt like that was the same idea with words. My opinion in (Sen.) Mitch McConnells house would be kind of like a weed. Its just in the wrong place. Its just not accepted there. And vice versa. And so these hands were kind of left in protest, and theyre kind of like weeds growing out of the floor.

Under the Gun continues through July 29, Sala Diaz, 517 Stieren, 972-900-0047, saladiazart.org.

lsilva@express-news.net
Jaston Williams has been fighting a cough of late, though it doesnt bother him when hes onstage.

Its just regular life where I start hacking and coughing, said Williams, who is probably best known as the co-creator and longtime co-star of Greater Tuna and other comedies set in tiny Tuna, Texas. I carry an inhaler on stage, and I just stop and spray. Ill offer it to people if they need it.

San Antonians will get an opportunity to perhaps avail themselves of that offer when Williams brings his solo show Clear to Partly Crazy to the Classic Theatre.

Its the third show hes brought to the space. The last one, A Wolverine Walks into a Bar, sold so well that he did it there twice.

Kelly Hilliard Roush, the companys executive director, has long been taken by how Williams talks about true things, things that are real, and pulls back the curtain on them. Its always astounding to me how he is so present and so funny and so honest.

Clear to Partly Crazy has a bizarre origin story, Williams said. He was slated to do an evening of music and storytelling with musician Gary P. Nunn in Galveston several months ago. When Nunn had to pull out, Williams opted to keep the date himself, telling the theater management that hed come up with something by showtime. He looked through his writing and found three short pieces  one about cheerleaders, one about tornadoes and one about mental illness  that just seemed to go together.

The mental illness piece, which is based on his cousins battles, is set in San Antonio in the Jefferson neighborhood, not too far from the Classic. His cousin had a series of nervous breakdowns late in life that required hospitalization, and Williams would often visit her. Once, he made the mistake of bringing his mother along, who couldnt understand why handing out cigarettes to the patients  who, understandably, did not have access to anything with which to light them  was a bad idea.

She said, Theyll go nuts if they have cigarettes and they dont have matches, he recalled. Finally I told my cousin, Were going to have to go or were going to have to get a room.

The other two pieces are rooted in his childhood in the Panhandle. In one, he talks about cheerleading, recalling the impact on his hometown when five cheerleaders died in an accident.

They didnt replace any of them, he said. They left an empty space for them, and there was a memorial.

It stayed with me. Its a very humorous piece, but it deals with how something as immaterial as cheerleading can become an icon and a symbol, and turn it into something else. The thing about cheerleading is, its just like Congress. It doesnt require any skill. Congress and the British monarchy  the qualified need not apply, because it doesnt matter.

The tornado piece is about how his family  specifically, his mother  responded when twisters were spotted in the area.

We did not have a cellar or basement at our house in this little town near Lubbock, and the tornadoes were everywhere, he said. People would issue you invitations  Come to our house if theres another tornado. Mother accepted every invitation, but you couldnt go to the same cellar twice, no matter how dire the situation was.

In the piece, he remembers his parents arguing over where they would go as a storm drew closer: She was saying, I dont know why I married you; he was saying, If youre trying to become a widow, youre making quite an effort! I finally screamed, Were all gonna die! And that got everybody focused.

Clear to Partly Crazy Opens July 27. 8 p.m. July 27- 29 and 3 p.m. July 29-30, Classic Theatre, 1924 Fredericksburg Road. $20 at classictheatre.org or by calling 210-589-8450.

dlmartin@express-news.net

Twitter: @DeborahMartinEN
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When playwright William R. Razavi first started playing with the idea of a Shakespeare mashup, he planned to combine two of the comedies.

It started off as kind of a joke, Razavi said. The initial joke was we wanted to do some sort of Shakespeare-lite kind of comedy.

Cue the 180.

Instead of blending a couple of comedies, he ended up mixing elements of King Lear into Macbeth.

The result  titled William M. Razavis Macbeth  begins a two weekend run Friday at Northwest Vista College. The show is being produced by the Southwest Association of Literary and Dramatic Artists, which Razavi serves as artistic director.

The inspiration for the play came from a comment that Razavi ran across from playwright Tom Stoppard, in which he mentioned that his original idea for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was to place the two minor characters from Hamlet in the court of King Lear.

That struck Razavi as something hed like to see. Rather than running with Stoppards idea, he started working on a Lear/Macbeth hybrid.

More Information Shakespeare around town The next year or so is going to be very good for San Antonio fans of the Bard's work. In addition to "William M. Razavi's Macbeth," there are a number of productions in the works, as well as a series of readings and an exhibit. Here's a look: "Shakespeare in Prague: Imagining the Bard in the Heart of Europe," through Sept. 29, University of the Incarnate Word: The exhibit, which is split between the Semmes and Student galleries in the Kelso Art Center, includes maquettes, costumes and design concepts for productions in the 20th and 21st centuries. Curator Joe Brandesky Jr. will give a talk about the show at 5 p.m. Sept. 8 in room 121 of the Ingrid Seddon Recital Hall/Luella Bennack Music Center. Info: uiw.edu. "Macbeth," Sept. 8 and 10, Tobin Center for the Performing Arts: Opera San Antonio presents Verdi's take on the treacherous tale, with sets from New York's Glimmerglass Festival. Bass-baritone Greer Grimsley will sing the title role opposite soprano Nadja Michael as Lady Macbeth. Info: operasa.org. Standup Shakespeare, Overtime Theater: William M. Razavi is also artistic director for the Overtime, and he is planning to launch a series of readings of all of the Bard's works sometime in September. He is still figuring out the format, and the title for the series is tentative, as well. "We're going to try to cycle through the entire canon, good, bad and ugly, and frankly, with kind of an emphasis on some of the obscure ones." Info: theovertimetheater.org. Shakespeare in the Park, Nov. 16-18, Arneson River Theatre: Magik Theatre will once again bring back Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre for a string of performances. The play hasn't been finalized yet, but "The Taming of the Shrew" is a possibility, said Frances Limoncelli, managing artistic director for Magik. Info: magiktheatre.org. "Hamlet," Feb. 10-March 4, Sheldon Vexler Theatre: Vex head honcho Ken Frazier is slated to direct the blood-soaked story of the melancholy Dane. He plans to take a steampunk approach to the show's look. Info: vexler.org. See More Collapse

Initially, he envisioned bringing a slew of Lear denizens into Macbeths universe.

I realized that what I was doing there was writing a European art theater 10-hour play, he said. When it went from being an abstraction to a thing that we ended up producing, it got scaled back.

That doesnt mean it plays like a sketch edition of the Bards work.

I was very specifically and consciously trying to give it the same weight of an actual Shakespeare tragedy, Razavi said. Its not highlights from Macbeth. It does feel like youve sat through a tragedy.

This is the second San Antonio production of the play. He directed and appeared in a 2000 production of it in the Attic Theater at Trinity University and has long wanted to revisit it. Hes reworked some things since then, first for a published edition of the script released in 2012 and then for this staging.

The play is not a cut-and-paste of Shakespeares text. Razavi has modernized the language and also has played around with the characters and the connections between them with an eye toward shoring up what he sees as weaknesses in the original plays. That includes the misogyny in the original conception of Lady Macbeth.

In Shakespeares play, Razavi said, Lady Macbeth is steely about the plan for her husband to murder his way to the throne until the deed happens and then, suddenly, she is overcome with feminine guilt, and its just hogwash. Its early Renaissance BS.

The idea of creating a character out of Lady Macbeth who isnt a representation of a male idea of what a woman should be and to give her an actual emotional core and a much more real reason to be ridden by guilt became sort of one of the central things about trying to  and I will say it  improve upon Shakespeare.

He also blended the title character in Lear and Duncan from Macbeth into a single man  King Duncan Lear (played by Jay Overton)  so that the king whos being killed off is a more interesting character instead of just a prop to be murdered, he said.

The king is attended by a Fool (Mellissa Marlowe), another Lear character. And Lears daughters appear, as well. They are played by Caroline Arroyo, Jessica Roberts and Yleana Wooten, who also play the witches whose eerie prophecy of Macbeths future on the throne help place him on the path to regicide.

The play has a contemporary setting. There are cell phones, and the dress is modern. The overall look is fairly stripped-down.

Were really not capable of creating real spectacle, said director Emily Fitzgerald. We play into that, use it as a strength. We have strong ability with lights and we have good sound. So we can use those elements.

Fitzgerald, who also is a playwright, said the play has struck her emotionally. Some moments in rehearsal, particularly of scenes involving the king and his daughter Cordelia (Wooten), have left her in tears.

Ive killed a lot of people onstage, she said. And I never feel it. In this one, Im actually feeling it, particularly Jay and Yleana. I think a lot of these (moments) are going to effect people.

William M. Razavis Macbeth can be seen at 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays through July 29 in the black box theater at the Palmetto Center for the Arts at Northwest Vista College, 3535 N. Ellison Drive. Admission is pay-what-you-will; $10 is suggested. No reservations required. Info, swalda.org.

dlmartin@express-news.net
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The Alamo Colleges board approved a $354.1 million operating budget Tuesday for the coming fiscal year that calls for $4.9 million in spending cuts districtwide.

The board unanimously approved the plan, with trustee Anna Bustamante absent.

Were relatively flat on revenues and we were able to still fund our strategic priorities and fund our budget, said Diane Snyder, vice chancellor for finance and administration.

It included a $5.1 million expenditure decrease compared to last year, when the community college district used $5 million from its fund balance, or reserves, for salary adjustments and student success initiatives. Those expenses are included in next years budget but will need to be funded without another transfer from the fund balance, Snyder said.

The district also had to budget for an additional $4.1 million in employee raises that will take effect in January.

Funding from the state this year was essentially unchanged. Tuition revenue decreased, due to flat enrollment, a faster-completion initiative that results in students taking fewer overall credit hours and an increase in tuition exemptions such as a summer incentive program for students who take more than 18 credits per year.

The district is taking advantage of increases in property value assessments in Bexar County, which will rake in an additional $8.8 million without changing its tax rate, and in benefits paid for by the state, expected to bring an additional $2.8 million.

District administrative offices and the five community colleges will cut their travel, catering and temporary staffing budgets, Snyder and college presidents said.

To save money, Palo Alto College also is closing its aviation program to new students and will end it after those already in it complete their studies, President Mike Flores said.

Offering an aviation program in our current environment and, unfortunately, dealing with the Veterans Administration, is similar to being a health insurance company in the current milieu, Flores said. We didnt want to continue to put the students in compromising positions with all of that unpredictability.

San Antonio College is cutting operational costs, including technology, and is not backfilling positions, President Robert Vela said.

St. Philips College is cutting part-time temporary staff, including workers at the colleges call center and some tutors in academic labs, said Lacy Hampton, vice president of college services. Full-time faculty will be shouldering more of the tutoring.

It will be an adjustment, but its a challenging year for all of us, Hampton said. As long as we all collaborate, well continue to provide the services we need to support students.

Northeast Lakeview Colleges cuts include delaying some new hires and maintaining class sizes to reduce adjunct faculty costs, President Veronica Garcia said.

Northwest Vista College is not making cuts because of its fast enrollment growth in recent years, President Ric Baser said. The college is not projecting any growth for next year, although it expects more tuition-exempt dual-credit students, Baser said.

amalik@express-news.net
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President Donald Trump promised a big, beautiful wall on the U.S. border with Mexico, but the revelation that Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge would be marooned south of the wall has broadsided some Rio Grande Valley officials.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been preparing for segments of the wall in several places across the border. Last week, engineers used a drilling rig to gather soil samples from the levee where a 3-mile stretch of concrete wall and fence would cut through the popular refuge.

The news we were given today was bad news, said Luciano Ozuna Jr., city manger of nearby Alamo. The effect Im sure will be enormous, because I dont know if people will want to go to the south of the wall.

The Trump administration wants to build 28 miles of new levee wall and 32 new miles of border wall in the Rio Grande Valley. There have been preliminary meetings to install dozens of border gates under the 2017 fiscal year budget, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection has requested funding for numerous projects, including more miles of wall, under the 2018 fiscal year budget.

Manuel Padilla Jr., who became Border Patrol sector chief in the Rio Grande Valley in 2015, has kept local stakeholders apprised of fast-moving border wall developments, a change from a decade ago when cities were largely kept in the dark as 54 miles of wall and fence were stitched across the Valley.

But news that a treasured stretch of ecologically sensitive refuge land is at stake leaked to the media before Padilla had the chance to meet with area mayors and other city officials. On Tuesday, Padilla sought to assuage concerns, though some remain unconvinced.

Once you paint the picture of what crosses the refuge and why its a priority I think people understand, Padilla said. All of these projects are in the planning stages and subject to change, but I want to be transparent with them and keep them involved.

Considered the jewel of the National Wildlife Refuge System, the 2,088-acre refuge was established in 1943, positioned along the Rio Grande and two routes for migratory birds, where at least 400 bird species can be found at different times of the year.

Environment groups warn that a structure would cause far greater damage to vulnerable fauna, like the endangered ocelot, by impeding their movements. If the refuge is witness to another flood like 2010s many terrestrial animals would be unable to escape the rising waters.

Exotic green jays, chachalacas and Altamira orioles draw more than 165,000 visitors each year, infusing $463 million into the local economy, according to a 2011 Texas A&M University study.

The refuge lands bring a lot of money into the community from the outside, said Scott Nichol, co-chair of the Sierra Club borderlands team. If those people start seeing pictures online of a border wall, and hearing you have to get through a border wall to get to the refuge, I think a lot of them are going to stay away.

But CBP officials say smugglers exploit the lack of infrastructure to traffic drugs and immigrants into the country. The refuge is situated between a roughly 10-mile gap in sections of existing border fence.

When were talking about refuge property  unfortunately those lands are exploited by smugglers, Padilla said. Santa Ana falls under Border Patrols Weslaco station, the second-busiest for drug interdiction in the Valley, Padilla added.

In 2008, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security waived environmental laws to expedite building sections of border fence. The waivers were made possible by the Real ID Act of 2005, which gave broad authority to then-Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff to sidestep environmental reviews.

Vast swaths of the Texas-Mexico border are privately owned and require that federal officials condemn properties and negotiate compensation, a costly exercise that could drive up the cost of building a wall far higher than the Department of Homeland Security estimate of $21.6 billion.

Going through the refuge is the path of least resistance for Trump to get some form of new border wall built, said Brian Segee, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit organization that works to protect endangered animals and plants. They really should have been doing environmental analysis. Instead theyre spending their time trying to draft a secret deal that will destroy the refuge.

Speaking aboard Air Force One last week, Trump downsized his expectations for his wall, saying you don't need 2,000 miles of wall because you have a lot of natural barriers  but youll need anywhere from 700 to 900 miles.

Congress has not yet approved construction funding for levee walls in the Rio Grande Valley, but the House Appropriations Committee last week released a bill allocating $1.6 billion for a physical barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border and House Republicans are moving to approve the funding next week.

Edinburg Mayor Richard Garcia, who attended the stakeholder meeting with CBP officials Tuesday, said several in attendance expressed concern over the impact of a wall on wildlife that roam through Santa Ana and on tourism once the area is perceived as a dangerous no-mans land

Will they want to go there? Garcia asked. I would think probably not.

anelsen@express-news.net

Twitter: @amnelsen
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AUSTIN  Attorney General Ken Paxton raked in more than $1 million during the first half of the year, bringing the indicted Republicans political war chest to more than $5.2 million, according to state records.

Details of Paxtons political fundraising, filed Monday with the Texas Ethics Commission, shows that the attorney general who is facing felony charges of securities fraud still enjoys political and financial support from big donors as he nears his trial and his first re-election bid as the states top lawyer.

Even prior to his public service, he was a GOP activist working in the political trenches at the local level, said Matt Welch, Paxtons campaign spokesman. The fact that more people are supporting Attorney General Paxtons campaign to a greater extent than before is a testament to his track record of success and outstanding leadership on issues important to all Texans.

Most of Paxtons support comes from big donors who cut five-figure checks to his campaign. Eighty-five percent of his take this year came from contributions of at least $10,000, and nearly all came from within the state.

The bulk of his contributions in the six-month reporting period spanning January through June came from corporate CEOs and presidents, including those from oil and gas companies and investment firms.

Officeholders are barred from fundraising directly before, after and during a legislative session. That left 12 days for Paxton to accept donations, during which he collected more than $1 million.

More than half of the $1,056,356 collection was made in checks for more than $20,000. Paxtons largest contribution came from the Republican Attorney General Association, which gave him $100,000.

The largest check from an individual came from Dan Wilks, who gave $51,000. Wilks brother, Farris, nearly matched the contribution with a $50,000 check.

The two West Texas fracking billionaires are listed as CEOs of Wilks Brothers LLC and spent at least $15 million to support Sen. Ted Cruzs presidential bid. The Wilks family has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Texas tea party groups and conservative causes, including those pushing efforts to unseat House Speaker Joe Straus, a moderate Republican from San Antonio.

Paxton received a third $50,000 check from Kenny Troutt, chairman and CEO of Mount Vernon Investments, headquartered in Dallas. Troutt, the former director of Excel Telecommunications Inc., has a net worth valued at $1.41 billion, according to Forbes.

The attorney general also received a $25,000 check from James Webb of Frisco, CEO of Preferred Imaging. Paxton has received contributions in the past from Webb, although Webbs company was under investigation by the attorney generals office for Medicaid fraud.

Paxtons office and the U.S. Justice Department signed off on a $3.5 million settlement on a whistleblower lawsuit against the company. Paxtons spokesman said at the time the attorney general was not involved in the case.

In the first six months of the year, Paxton spent $298,249 from his campaign account. His total cash on hand totals $5,270,565, although no one has announced plans to run against him in the primary or general election.

Paxton, a tea party Republican from Collin County, has spent much of his tenure in the attorney generals office fighting allegations he committed securities fraud by failing to tell friends and colleagues he would make a commission off their investment in Servergy, a North Texas tech company. He is also charged with failing to register with the state as an investment adviser. He faces two first-degree felony charges and one lesser, third-degree charge.

He maintains his innocence and contends he is the victim of a political witch hunt. A federal judge this year tossed similar charges brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He raised nearly $218,000 in 2016 in gifts from friends and relatives to support his legal defense fund.

Paxton, who faces 99 years in jail and thousands of dollars in fines if found guilty, is due in Houston for a criminal court hearing July 27.
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The American Red Cross issued a call for volunteers in San Antonio to install smoke alarms and educate the public on fire safety at an outreach event this fall.

The local goal of the nationwide Sound The Alarm event, set for Oct.14, is to install 1,000 smoke alarms in homes that dont already have them, said Henry Van De Putte III, the executive director of the local Red Cross chapter. In a video posted on Facebook, he said the Red Cross wants to reduce the number of deaths and injuries from home fires, which make up the bulk of the disasters the chapter responds to.

Nationwide, the goal is 100,000 new smoke alarms this year, which would bring the total to 1 million installed since the Red Cross began the program.

Our biggest disaster in the area is specifically home fires, Van De Putte said. We need help. This is a community-wide effort. We really want to reduce home fires and home fire deaths by 25 percent..

He said the local chapter is in dire need of Spanish speaking volunteers.

We work with the San Antonio Fire Department, said Tracy Beach, the chapters disaster program manager. They put together a map for us with structural and home fires which, combined with Red Cross response records, point to neighborhoods where more than 8,000 homes might need smoke alarms.

On the day of the event, teams of volunteers  one to install, another to educate and a third to document which homes had alarms tested, replaced or installed  will go door-to-door. Installers need to be comfortable with a ladder and drill and must be over 18. Even for households that already have alarms, the educator can talk to people about escape plans and what to do in case of a fire.

All you have to do to become an everyday hero is to join this movement, Van De Putte said. We want to make our community more resilient  we want to make it safer.

Registration can be done online at redcross.org/soundthealarmsa or by phone at 210-224-5151.

The Red Cross shelters, feeds and provides emotional support to victims of disasters, holds blood drives and teaches the public life-saving skills.

jpolcyn@express-news.net
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A rural Texas county has offered up a novel remedy for the states problems with overheated prisons.

As Texas inmates await a federal judges ruling  expected any day  on whether to grant emergency relief from dangerous indoor temperatures at prison units that dont have air conditioning, Newton County Judge Paul Price penned an unsolicited letter to U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison.

Newton County, near the Louisiana border, has a 900-bed, air-conditioned facility thats vacant and available for use should Ellison see fit to consider it, Price wrote.

Its a private prison facility on 72 acres for minimum-, medium- and maximum-security prisoners that has been shuttered since 2012. Price said it once housed overflow inmates from Newton, nearby Jasper County and other Texas counties, and has taken inmates from Arizona and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

It might take a little work to get the vacant compound operational again, but Price said hed be glad to help facilitate the process.

At one time, it was a state-of-the-art prison, said Newton County Sheriff Billy Rowles, who runs the local jail and is currently paying $400 a day for overflow elsewhere. Id give my eye teeth to get that thing up and going.

Rowles said the private prison provided jobs in Newton County for about 200 people who now are scrounging for work.

Some are working at Walmart, some working (at the county jail) and some of them aint working, he said. The economys just really bad over here. That would do us a great job.

A prospective buyer for the facility opted out in January, Rowles said.

The facility has been operated by several different private operators over the years, said Russell Rau, a corrections industry consultant who has worked for many years with Newton County. Rau said the building is owned by the Newton County Public Facility Corporation, a quasi-governmental entity that generates bonds to operate the facility.

A spokesman at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice declined to comment about the impromptu offer.

But Jeff Edwards, one of the attorneys in the federal lawsuit against TDCJ, said he was pleased about the possibility.

Its nice that someone is trying to solve an obvious problem. Its regrettable that its a county official in Newton County, he said.

Edwards said it concerns him that Texas prison officials have not examined the possibility of using under-capacity county jails  which are air-conditioned by law  even though a significant portion of prison inmates are at risk during the summer months.

Their job is protecting human beings in custody who are in their care, and theyre just not doing that, Edwards said.

Breaking down heat deaths in Texas prisons Twenty-two people have died in Texas prisons from hyperthermia, or elevated body temperature, from heat exposure since 1998. Source: Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Created by Data Journalist Rachael Gleason | Houston Chronicle

The federal lawsuit filed on behalf of inmates at the Pack Unit in Grimes County says the Texas prison administrators are deliberately indifferent in exposing inmates to serious harm during summer heat waves.

The suit, filed by a team from Edwards Law in Austin and the Texas Civil Rights Project, was filed initially by six inmates at the geriatric facility, which houses many elderly and medically compromised inmates. The Pack Unit does not provide cooled air for its housing units.

The lawsuit cites the deaths of 22 Texas inmates since 1998 from exposure to indoor heat in the summertime.

There are currently 18,732 vacant beds in Texas jails, according to the Texas Commission on Jail Standards population report from June. These beds would have access to air conditioning under Texas law.
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AUSTIN  Republicans ran over Democrats in the Senate on Tuesday to fast-track a special session agenda thats under fire from big-city mayors, transgender advocates, educators and abortion-rights activists, among others.

Its frustrating, but were not going to take anything lying down. Were going to do everything we can to represent our community, Sen. Jose Menendez, D-San Antonio, said after Democratic efforts to slow down the process were shut down by the Republican majority.

Hundreds of protesters came to the Texas Capitol on the first day of the special session called by Gov. Greg Abbott, taking aim at key elements of his agenda. Organized by One Texas Resistance, a coalition of progressive groups across the state, they said special session priorities that include a contentious bathroom bill are all wrong.

Children in Texas have a damn hard time getting access to health care. Thats a tragedy. Access to education for all too many students is not there. Thats a tragedy. You have too many people working a full-time job and living in poverty. We have too many adults without health care, said Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez. Thats what you should be talking about.

Nick Morrow, press secretary for Southern states at the Human Rights Campaigns Project One America effort, said the rally was organized by a range of diverse groups concerned that the agenda being pushed by state Republicans would make Texas the most discriminatory state in the nation.

All of us realized that our fights are really interconnected, Morrow said.

Besides the items on the special session agenda, protesters continued their outcry over a so-called sanctuary cities law approved this year that they fear will lead to racial profiling as officers ask about peoples immigration status. Democrats including Menendez are pushing a beyond-longshot repeal of the measure.

Eighteen mayors from across Texas, including San Antonios Ron Nirenberg, separately voiced objections to the special session agenda. They sent a letter to Abbott asking to meet with him, citing harmful proposals such as revenue and spending caps, limiting annexation authority, and other measures preempting local development ordinances.

The proposals, the mayors said, directly harm our ability to plan for future growth and continue to serve as the economic engines of Texas.

An Abbott spokesman didnt immediately respond to a request for comment on the requested meeting.

Meanwhile, the Legislature kept its focus on the agenda before it.

The Senate moved quickly to have a committee hearing on must-pass measures to keep several state agencies in business, including the Texas Medical Board, overriding a Democratic effort to delay consideration. Democrats said the move gave the public virtually no notice of the bills, which the full Senate could take up Wednesday.

I think if were doing the peoples work, we should let the people have a say, Sen. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, said to cheers at the rally when she recounted the goings-on. It is wrong, it is un-Texan, to do the peoples work without peoples input.

Democrats didnt object to the sunset legislation itself, which is acknowledged as necessary and got unanimous, bipartisan backing in Tuesdays Senate committee hearing.

These are noncontroversial bills, said Sen. Van Taylor, a Plano Republican who authored them. I dont expect anybody to vote against them.

But Democrats are worried about what comes next. After the Senate approves the sunset legislation, Abbott said he would allow lawmakers to consider a slew of other measures that are opposed by a wide swath of groups and championed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. The lieutenant governor forced the special session by stalling the sunset legislation in the regular session, giving him another chance at passing some of his priorities.

Taylor said he expected there will be full-blown hearings for other items on the special-session agenda and added, It is very normal to suspend different rules to expedite parts of the process.

Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, pointed out that the lieutenant governor had kept Democrats and Republicans informed about how quickly he wanted to move the legislation. He said the public is aware of the critical need to keep the Texas Medical Board going so it can license doctors.

This is why were here. The public knows that.  It has to be passed, Bettencourt said. He said contentions that Republicans are overplaying a partisan role dont hold water, adding, I knew it was going to be a party-line vote day when I heard not only was Wendy Davis here but the chairman of the (Democratic) National Committee.

Davis is a Democratic former state senator who lost the 2014 governors race to Abbott. Like Perez, she joined Tuesdays protesters.

The other special session items would restrict which public restrooms transgender people can use; allow for state support for private school tuition for special-needs students; affect abortion, including health plan coverage; and restrict local officials authority in areas ranging from taxes to rules on cellphones to permitting.

The bathroom bill, in particular, has highlighted a chasm in the states Republican leadership. Abbott and Patrick say its necessary for privacy and safety; House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, opposes it as harmful to the state economy and vulnerable Texans.

Straus nevertheless has said his chamber will give due consideration to Abbotts agenda. Like the Senate, the House is moving forward on the sunset legislation, with a hearing set for Wednesday.

There have been rumors that Democrats, outnumbered in the House as they are in the Senate, might opt against showing up and deny Republicans a quorum. But such a move would be extraordinary and high-risk, since Republicans could paint them as not doing their jobs, and the Democrats couldnt stay away forever.

Rep. Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington, has filed a resolution to provide for penalties if members were to break quorum. He expressed concern Tuesday at the prospect that his measure would be referred to the Rules and Resolutions Committee, which is headed by a Democrat, Rep. Eddie Lucio III of Brownsville.

As lawmakers came together for the session, both chambers began with a prayer that included a plea for wisdom.

Save our leaders from themselves, prayed Capt. Brett Anderson, chaplain of the 1st Squadron, 124th Cavalry Regiment of the Texas Army National Guard, based in Waco. Save them from their friends and their enemies, too.

pfikac@express-news.net

Twitter: @pfikac
Local experts are alarmed over a recent decision by the Trump administration to prematurely end funding for teen pregnancy prevention programs based in San Antonio and around the nation, a move that could erode ongoing declines in Texas and Bexar Countys notoriously high teen pregnancy rate, they said.

Dr. Jan Realini, associate vice president of Healthy Futures of Texas, said she and other program grantees received a letter from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that stated the original five-year grants were being reduced to three years, with the flow of funding stopping June 30, 2018, instead of that day in 2020.

We were not given any sort of explanation for the funding reduction, she said. Were very concerned about this.

The unexpected cutoff in funds would affect a scientific trial of a Healthy Futures curriculum that is being studied in three school districts along the Texas border, she said. Begun in 2015, the Big Decisions study teaches students  most of whom are low-income  about both abstinence and contraception and includes education for parents as well.

Its been very well received by both students and parents, Realini said. Losing approximately $1.7 million in funds from what was originally a $4.3 million grant means data and other information will go uncollected.

It means our work for three years is unlikely to give us the answers the funding was designed to develop, said Realini, whose organization also conducts numerous teen pregnancy prevention programs in San Antonio. Well be serving less than half the number of youth we were planning to serve, which reduces the power of the study to tell us the difference between (students) who receive the (curriculum) and students who dont.

Also affected by the reduction is UT Teen Health, a teen pregnancy prevention program based at UT Health San Antonio that delivers evidence-based teen sex education to some 17,000 students in Bexar County annually, Realini said. That $2 million-a-year program will lose $4 million in funding, she said.

When we start a program we always do so with an eye toward sustainability, said Dr. Kristen Plastino, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UT Health San Antonio. We had always intended to seek additional sources of funding to continue these programs with our stakeholders once the grant funding had been completed. This provides an opportunity for us to begin this process now.

Following national trends, the teen birth rate in Texas and Bexar County has declined significantly in recent years, a drop experts attribute to better education and greater access to contraception.

In Bexar County, the rate of births to teens ages 15 to 19 declined from 50.9 births out of 1,000 in 2010, to 37.4 out of 1,000 in 2014, the most recent data available.

But while the teen birth rate continues to drop in the county, the rate of births among teens who were already parents has stayed constant. Of the 2,412 teen births in 2014, 539 were to teens who were already mothers  more than 22 percent of all teen births, a rate that remained largely unchanged since 2010, according to data from the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District.

Were going in the right direction, but we have so much we can do to close the gap, Realini said.

More than 80 programs across the nation received the letter. The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program was created under the Obama administration, with a goal of finding new ways to attack the problem. Some theorize the funding cut reflects President Trumps ongoing desire to dismantle the legacy of his predecessor, as well as to respond to social conservatives objection to contraception.

Congressmen Joaquin Castro and Lloyd Doggett, both Democrats from San Antonio, sent a letter last week to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Thomas Price demanding an explanation for the cuts.

Terminating an effective program is another short-sighted decision, done by fiat behind closed doors, Doggett wrote. These programs bring life-changing education to our youth, helping those in our community avoid unplanned pregnancies and make healthy decisions.

mstoeltje@express-news.net
Gov. Greg Abbott is so well acquainted with freedom, he even knows what it smells like.

Once you cross the Travis County line, it starts smelling different, he said last month. And you know what that fragrance is? Freedom. Its the smell of freedom that does not exist in Austin, Texas.

Im not sure what Abbott was smelling  horse manure, maybe?  but since he made that observation, it has become clear that the governors idea of freedom is more akin to slavery. To Abbott, freedom means to obey, whether youre a local elected official or a fellow Republican.

More evidence of this came on Monday, when Abbott vowed to publish a daily list of lawmakers who support or oppose his list of priorities in the special legislative session.

No one gets to hide, Abbott said at a forum hosted by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation.

In a state that prizes a maverick, the governors demand for blanket conformity should disturb every Texan, regardless of political affiliation.

It should surprise no one, though. Its merely an extension of the governors unprecedented assault on local control.

To Abbott, a city that shapes its own destiny is like a lawmaker who thinks for himself: something that must be brought to heel. Hence his demands to eliminate local tree preservation ordinances, roll back city and county property tax revenues and limit a citys ability to annex land.

Citing these and other attempts to pre-empt local governments, the liberal watchdog group Texans for Public Justice suggested in a report that Abbott himself is merely obeying the whims of special interests.

Seeking re-election, the governor is flush with cash: $40.8 million. Since he announced his gubernatorial bid in 2013, real estate, development and construction interests have given him a quarter of that windfall: $10.7 million, according to TPJ.

Local tree preservation ordinances certainly vex these industries. San Antonios law, for instance, applies to undeveloped land but does not prohibit the removal of trees from developed properties.

Freedom to Abbott, then, must mean bowing to political benefactors.

And the governor says freedom a lot.

My campaign is building the largest grass-roots army ever assembled in the Lone Star State, with the goal of keeping Texas the brightest beacon of freedom in the country, he said in announcing his re-election bid.

Abbotts ham-fisted way of wielding power has made his calls for freedom ring hollow. Unsurprisingly, some fellow Republicans are bridling at his order to obey.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman John Zerwas, R-Richmond, told San Antonio Express-News Austin bureau chief Peggy Fikac that the threat bothered him.

I find it a little problematic that  he is going to try to use his influence and public presence out there in order to corner people into taking a position when they perhaps havent had a chance to really consider the pros and cons of a bill and what the ultimate consequences of it might be, Zerwas said.

In other words, Zerwas would prefer to think for himself.

So would the 18 mayors from across Texas who have requested to meet with Abbott to discuss his harmful proposals that would hinder their ability to plan for future growth.

Mayor Ron Nirenberg is among them.

Theres not a whole lot of hope in the special session for local communities, Nirenberg told me Wednesday. The absurdity of it all is that we have residents calling and complaining about the fact that swaths of land next to their neighborhoods are being moonscaped and that is the result of the limits that our current tree ordinance has.

He added, Up is still down, right is still left and big government is still, for some reason, local control in the world of Austin politics.

Also, freedom is slavery.

bchasnoff@express-news.net
Pete Gallego didnt attend last weeks redistricting trial in San Antonio and says he didnt pay close attention to the proceedings.

Thats a little hard to believe, given that one of the prime topics of testimony last week was U.S. District 23, the sprawling piece of political real estate that the Alpine-based Democrat represented for two years, before losing his seat in 2014 to Will Hurd, R-Helotes.

Gallego sounds like hes gearing up for his fourth straight congressional run and while many of us have believed that his decision (to run or not to run) hinged on what changes the courts make to the District 23 map, he insists that redistricting is not the determining factor for him.

That begs the following question: If not for a change in the district map, what makes Gallego think 2018 would produce a different outcome than 2014 or 2016?

Gallego insists that he came away from last Novembers election defeat ready to give up politics and concentrate on his family, his law practice and his teaching at Sul Ross State University. But the former congressman says he has been disturbed by the early months of Donald Trumps presidency and energized by the progressive resistance movement that has formed against Trump.

Energized enough, in fact, to believe that District 23 is ripe for a Democratic victory.

Im one of those people who would have told you that the energy on the Democratic side was pretty amazing after the election, Gallego said Monday. But whats been even more amazing is that the energy hasnt dissipated.

As a result, the environment in Texas 23 is much different today than it was even six or eight months ago. The attitudes of people, the enthusiasm of people.

District 23  which stretches from South San Antonio to El Paso  is the states lone congressional swing district and it flipped back and forth from the Democratic to the Republican column for three straight election cycles, until Hurd won re-election over Gallego in 2016.

Democrats argue that the 2011 GOP-led redistricting process violated the Voting Rights Acts in District 23 by pulling out high-performing Latino precincts in San Antonio and replacing them with low-performing rural precincts. They also argue that a temporary federal-court remedy, which the Legislature approved in 2013, did not fix the problem.

San Antonio Democrats privately talk about experiencing Gallego Fatigue and are ambivalent about gambling their fate on someone who has lost twice in a row to the same opponent. Gallego could offer a good case that in 2014 he simply got swept up by a GOP wave election. But its hard to find excuses for his disappointing performance last November.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton carried the district, but Gallego was unable to take advantage of her coattails. He ran about five points behind Clinton in the district and was buried by Hurd in the North Side of San Antonio.

Even with the kind of energized Democratic base that Gallego talks about, its hard to see him turning things around in a midterm election, unless the courts carve some North Side votes out of the district.

If Gallego was a no-show at last weeks trial, one intriguing attendee was Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Hulings, who sat near the back of the courtroom on Saturday when Hurd delivered his testimony.

Hulings is the wild card in District 23, a Harvard Law School graduate who lives on the North Side and was recruited a few months ago by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as a possible candidate. Hulings recently handled the high-profile public corruption cases against former Crystal City officials James Jonas and Ricardo Lopez.

Hulings would have to give up a coveted job to run for Congress, so the unpredictability of the District 23 map has to be a particularly acute concern for him.

Currently, Bexar County constitutes about 40 percent of District 23s registered voter base and El Paso County makes up about 15 percent. If the courts shift the balance toward El Paso County, that would play to the strengths of Gallego, who is widely admired in West Texas. And it would create a near-impossible scenario for Hulings.

For his part, Gallego says he welcomes the possibility of a contested Democratic primary.

The more the merrier, Gallego said. Ive run unopposed and Ive run opposed. While unopposed sometimes is easier, its not good for the system.

ggarcia@express-news.net

Twitter: @gilgamesh470
(Scroll down to see a slideshow of before and after Discovery Center pictures during construction last fall, and during FFA camp in June, 2017)

CARROLLTON, Ohio  While it is impossible to prevent all disasters, it is possible to rebuild something even better than what was destroyed.

Six years after Ohio FFA Camp Muskingum, located in Carroll County, lost its old nature center to a fire, it has finished building a new $2.3 million Discovery Center in the middle of the camp.

Nature center

According to Todd Davis, executive director of Camp Muskingum, the camp hosts three FFA camps, up to 40 schools for the Natures Classroom environmental education program and about 163 outside groups every year.

The new Discovery Center will help the camp host these groups because of the added space and organization and the convenience of the location. The new building is closer to the rest of the main facilities and fulfilled the camps goal of having an assembly area that can seat 300 people comfortably and includes a stage.

The old nature center was in a corner of the camp, away from other main buildings, the main offices and the cafeteria. The new center is in the middle of the camp, next to the lake, which makes it more convenient for campers.

On the top floor of the Discovery Center, there are four classrooms that will be used for FFA camps and Natures Classroom. Davis said one of the classrooms will be used when the program has students doing dissections. In the past, they used the porch of the old center, but this new classroom has counters and sinks that will make it a good place for dissections.

Another classroom has space for an aquarium behind a wall, with windows that look in on the animals. On the opposite side of the room, there are carpeted stairs for students to sit and watch presentations about the animals. Camp Muskingum currently has a python, turtles and a chinchilla. There is also a lobby on the top floor, where Davis hopes to put an aquaponics unit.

The first floor includes a welcome center, where Davis plans to put four to six kiosks focused on energy, including one on ethanol and one on fracking. There is also a warming kitchen.

Davis said he anticipates being able to host weddings when there are no other events or groups scheduled to use the camp, and the warming kitchen will contribute to the needs of wedding parties and other groups who choose to bring in some of their own food.

We thought not only about our needs, but our customers needs, Davis said.

Lastly, the first floor has a large meeting room, with a stage and a projector and screen, that will be able to seat at least 300 people in chairs.

Davis said because the old meeting area was smaller, students would often have to sit on the floor for events, including outside speakers and camp talent shows. This new space will allow the camp to be able to comfortably put everyone in chairs.

Funding

Davis said funding the project took a while since they had never asked anyone for money. Camp Muskingum had always taken care of its own funding in other areas.

It takes a while for people to understand who you are before they are willing to donate, said Davis. Over time, the FFA camp was able to raise $1.8 million. The entire project cost $2.3 million, so they are still seeking donors to help cover the last half million to pay for the building.

Donors so far have included individuals, the Timken Foundation in Canton, the Hoover foundation, the FFA foundation and other organizations.

Makeshift center

In 2012, Camp Muskingum used the insurance money to build its FFA pavilion, which served as a makeshift nature center. While the building was adequate for a while, it was only about half the size of the space that burned down and the space in the new Discovery Center.

The animals are still in the makeshift building, but will be moved to the new space in late July and early August. When they are, Davis plans to use the makeshift building as a bird observation area, since it is in a corner of the camp closer to the woods. He plans to put up signs with information on what birds to look for and information about different species.

Off-season use

The new building will help not only with FFA camps and Natures Classroom, but with hosting outside groups. Davis said outside groups are the bread and butter of the camp. Many outside groups will pay to use the facilities at the camp, including meeting areas, dorms and the cafeteria.

Groups that Camp Muskingum has hosted in the past include Faith Family Church, drug and alcohol prevention programs, drug rehabilitation programs and local bands for band camps. The added space will allow Camp Muskingum to double book with smaller groups, maximizing their space.

Plans

Davis said they started construction on the Discovery Center in April 2016, and held a grand opening in May 2017.

The landscaping was just finished the week of June 26, and the rest of the nature center will be fully ready, with animals moved into place and classrooms furnished, in late August, when the first school comes to Camp Muskingum for Natures Classroom.

Inside Muskingum Discovery Center The construction crew is building a stage in the multipurpose room capable of seating 350 people. < > < > 1 View Inside Muskingum Discovery Center The construction crew is building a stage in the multipurpose room capable of seating 350 people. 2 View Muskingum Discovery Center The pictured posts will soon be supporting a deck on the front of the new building overlooking Leesville Lake. 3 View Discovery center backofbuilding 4 View The front of the new Discovery Center Six years after losing its old nature center to a fire, Ohio FFA Camp Muskingum built its new Discovery Center in the middle of the camp. The Discovery Center includes a nature center, classrooms and a meeting area with a stage, a projector and a screen. It improves on the location, space and organization of the old nature center. (Farm and Dairy/Sarah Donkin photo) 5 View FFA camp workshop from stage FFA state officers Emma Sterwerf, Evan Calicoat and Marley Kerr (not pictured) ran a leadership workshop for FFA campers in the new discovery center June 28. (Farm and Dairy/Sarah Donkin photo) 6 View The back of the Discovery Center from outside Camp Muskingum's new Discovery Center is in the middle of the camp near the other main facilities, making it much more convenient for campers. (Farm and Dairy/Sarah Donkin photo)
Cow poses no risk to food supply or human health in the United States

WASHINGTON  The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) found an atypical case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), a neurologic disease of cattle, in an eleven-year old beef cow in Alabama.

This animal never entered slaughter channels and at no time presented a risk to the food supply, or to human health in the United States.

USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services (APHIS) National Veterinary Services Laboratories have determined that this cow was positive for atypical (L-type) BSE.

The animal was showing clinical signs and was found through routine surveillance at an Alabama livestock market. Following delivery to the livestock market the cow later died at that location. Routine tissue samples were taken and sent to diagnostic laboratories in Colorado and Iowa for testing and confirmation.

The results were confirmed for atypical BSE at the USDA laboratory in Ames, Iowa.

Types of BSE

BSE is not contagious and exists in two types  classical and atypical. Classical BSE is the form that occurred primarily in the United Kingdom, beginning in the late 1980s, and has been linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in people.

The primary source of infection for classical BSE is feed contaminated with the infectious prion agent, such as meat-and-bone meal containing protein derived from rendered infected cattle.

Regulations from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have prohibited the inclusion of mammalian protein in feed for cattle and other ruminants since 1997 and have also prohibited high risk tissue materials in all animal feed since 2009.

Atypical BSE is different, and it generally occurs in older cattle, usually 8 years of age or older. It seems to arise rarely and spontaneously in all cattle populations.

Fifth U.S. case

This is the nations fifth detection of BSE. Of the four previous U.S. cases, the first was a case of classical BSE that was imported from Canada; the rest have been atypical (H- or L-type) BSE.

The World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) has recognized the United States as negligible risk for BSE. As noted in the OIE guidelines for determining this status, atypical BSE cases do not impact official BSE risk status recognition as this form of the disease is believed to occur spontaneously in all cattle populations at a very low rate.

Therefore, this finding of an atypical case will not change the negligible risk status of the United States, and should not lead to any trade issues.
In a statement released Monday, Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) says it is currently reviewing the U.S. starting positions for the re-negotiation of NAFTA.

The U.S. is seeking to eliminate non-tariff barriers to its agricultural exports.

DFC says "that the U.S. objectives remain fairly broad, and there isn't anything new."

It adds that dairy wasnt part of the first NAFTA agreement, and there is no valid new evidence to support that dairy should be discussed in this round of talks.

DFC further commented, "The U.S. has a positive and growing dairy trade balance with Canada. Canadas dairy policies respect international trade laws. The United States is only looking to Canadas market because they have overproduced. When too much milk is produced, prices crash, and the end result is job loss, loss of income for farmers, and in some cases, farmers having to shut down their farms."

Source : Steinbachonline
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I have long advocated that Grand Corruption should be considered a crime against humanity, under Article 7(1)(k) of the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court.

Given my prior interest and area of professional expertise, the recent announcement that the UKs National Crime Agency (NCA) will be heading up and hosting a team of specialist investigators to target Grand Corruption from countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore and the USA grabbed my attention.

The initiative will be called the International Anti-Corruption Coordination Centre.

Grand Corruption is one of the greatest scourges the world faces, and it is showing few signs of abating. The Cambridge Dictionary defines kleptocracy as ..a society whose leaders make themselves rich and powerful by stealing from the rest of the people. This captures the essence of Grand Corruption as a crime perfectly.

The people worst affected by Grand Corruption are the ordinary people in the country concerned: the same people who have no voice, or whose voice goes unheard. Grand Corruption is extremely difficult to investigate and to deal with. In many instances it is those in the higher echelons of government perpetrating the crime. Invariably the corrupt network will have tentacles reaching into the police, courts and judiciary.

This fact renders those who would investigate the crime from within almost impotent. International sanctions may put pressure on the rulers, but again it will be the poorest who are worst affected. Add to this that sanction busting is itself a growing business, and the problematic nature of addressing this insidious crime becomes even more apparent.

The NCA is effectively the UKs equivalent of the FBI. Its reputation with other UK law enforcement agencies is, at best, mixed as is its track record.

The NCA oversees asset recovery in the UK on behalf of law enforcement agencies, empowered by the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA). In effect, a hard working police force whose investigators recover significant assets from a drug trafficker will see their figures swallowed up by the NCA, which then effectively publishes as its own.

The National Audit Offices most recent figures indicate that the NCA oversaw 155 million ($202 million) collected by law enforcement agencies between 2014-2015. This figure includes confiscations in respect of all acquisitive and POCA-qualifying crime. The NCA itself states that drug trafficking alone cost the UK 10.7 billion ($14 billion) in 2015.

This puts into perspective the 155 million collected, especially when the NAO also indicates law enforcement has secured 1.61 billion ($2 billion) in confiscation orders in terms of value, all of which is outstanding and hasnt been collected. Presumably this money remains with the criminals. Could this be construed as being a successful confiscation regime?

If we put this into the context of the new International Anti-Corruption Coordination Centre (IACCC), who will it be pursuing and what will be its objectives? Having read the NCA press release, the founding members all make admirable statements of intent and of bringing the corrupt elites to justice.

So why have I mentioned the NCA in the context of POCA and its questionable results in the area of confiscation?

Well, when you read the IACCC press release there is a glaring omission in terms of its ambition and those extolled by its partners. Each organizations spokesperson talks in soundbites. How they are going to bring culprits to justice in the context of a corrupt state where they have no jurisdiction is debatable. This brings me to the case in point.

Nowhere is it mentioned that there is any plan in place to recover the value in terms of assets lost to the people of the corrupt state. How can you launch an initiative such as this and not mention asset recovery? What is the point of point of setting up a flagship initiative directed at the problem of Grand Corruption, with no apparent remit or ambition to recover the assets stolen in the crime?

Historically such failings have seen the culprits incarcerated, but their families allowed to live the high life, living off illicit proceeds. And, when the convicted are eventually released from jail, their luxury houses, cars and fat bank balances are still in situ awaiting their return. Meanwhile, the poor have all gotten poorer.

Confiscation, forfeiture, call it what you will, is vital to ensuring that the shysters do not get to enjoy the fructus corruptio (the fruits of corruption). When criminals are subjected to confiscation, others see them stripped of their ill-gotten wealth. It serves as a warning to those who may consider following in the crooks footsteps. In effect, you remove the incentive to commit crime by removing the assets  and thereby the negative role model.

The UKs anti-money laundering armory will soon include the Criminal Finances Bill, due to be enacted in September this year. This legislation will enable easier information sharing in respect of money laundering, and require suspects to justify their financial means and lifestyle via Unexplained Wealth Orders. In addition, it will enable the authorities to seize money via forfeiture held in bank accounts suspected of having its derivation in serious crime and terrorism.

Again, there is not one mention of this forthcoming legislation by the National Crime Agency. This could be a groundbreaking law and it will be at the disposal of the new team. One clearly compliments the other.

I have no doubt that the International Anti-Corruption Coordination Centre will look at the issue of asset recovery when the time comes, because a lowly investigator will see to it that it does, and wholeheartedly welcome its arrival. But until then, the National Crime Agency and its partners in the IACCC have done themselves no favors in trumpeting their initiative and missing out any reference to asset recovery.

_____

Martin Kenney, pictured above, is Managing Partner of Martin Kenney & Co., Solicitors, a specialist investigative and asset recovery practice based in the BVI and focused on multi-jurisdictional fraud and grand corruption cases www.martinkenney.com |@MKSolicitors. He was recently selected as one of the Top 40 Thought Leaders of the Legal Profession in 2017 by Whos Who Legal International.
As one of the most talked-about upcoming films of next year, Darkest Hour arrives in cinemas across the globe in January 2018, starring Gary Oldman in the leading role of Winston Churchill. You can now check out the first official trailer for the film below:

Also starring the likes of Scott Thomas, Lily James, Stephen Dillane, Ronald Pickup and Ben Medelsohn, the movie comes from director Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride & Prejudice), based on a screenplay by Anthony McCarten and produced by Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Anthony McCarten, Lisa Bruce and Douglas Urbanski.

Beginning on the eve of World War II, the film will explore how Churchill must face one of his biggest challenges within just a few days of becoming Prime Minister; deciding whether to commit to a negotiated peace treaty with Nazi Germany, or fight firmly for the ideals, liberty and freedom of the nation.

As Nazi threats roll through Western Europe, an invasion feels imminent in Britain, but with a public that are unprepared and a King sceptical about the future, Churchill faces party in-fighting and must withstand his darkest hour if hes to rally a nation and change the course of world history.

Check out a first look image from the film as well as a brand new poster below:

Darkest Hour officially hits cinemas across the UK on January 12, 2018.

by Daniel Falconer for www.femalefirst.co.uk

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Coats, a leading industrial thread manufacturer and a major player in the Americas textile crafts market, has entered into a strategic alliance with Permess, a supplier of high quality interlinings, to provide a comprehensive co-branded range of interlinings to all segments of the garment industry. Interlinings form a key part of apparel manufacturing.Interlinings are used to enhance, reinforce, and shape the structure of the garment and are generally held in place by sewing or fusing.

Coats, a leading industrial thread manufacturer and a major player in the Americas textile crafts market, has entered into a strategic alliance with Permess, a supplier of high quality interlinings, to provide a comprehensive co-branded range of interlinings to all segments of the garment industry. Interlinings form a key part of apparel manufacturing.#

The announcement follows an informal partnership, of over one year, which has made progress in South and South East Asian markets and will now start to be expanded to other regions of the world. The sales, distribution, and technical service capability, which Coats has in markets across the world combined with the interlinings manufacturing spread, expertise, and technology of Permess, creates a fast sampling and delivery service with swift responses and local market presence.To help cater for the dynamic sampling and technical service requirements of customers, Coats has opened design studios for Coats Permess interlinings in India and Vietnam. Further studios in other markets will open soon. Coats Permess design studios are fully equipped with state of the art sewing, fusing, washing and testing facilities to provide all the required technical and backend support for garment manufacturers and brands. With the brand new facilities and trained people in place, Coats will be able to provide quick sampling and technical support to customers.Evert Jan Berenpas, managing director, Permess International said, Permess has invested heavily in new products, production technology, capacity and logistics both in Europe and Asia. Now we are ready to expand our global service network and improve the availability of our high quality interlinings. The global network of Coats with professional teams of dedicated managers is a perfect fit for our growth ambitions.Rajiv Sharma, group chief executive, Coats said, The alliance with Permess is a step forward in our journey to be a value added partner to the apparel industry. Coats Permess interlinings becomes part of Coats global trims offer that complements our comprehensive range of high quality threads, yarns and zips, providing a convenient and reputable source for all component needs. (GK)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Textile markets in Surat, Ahmedabad, Rajkot and other places have opened after textile traders called off their strike against the imposition of five per cent Goods and Services Tax (GST) on fabrics. The strike was called off after Union finance minister assured Surat and Ahmedabad textile market representatives of looking into their demands.

During the meeting, Jaitley assured us that the issue of the GST on fabric will be taken up in the next GST Council meeting to be held on August 5. Thus, we have decided to call off the strike till that date, said Manoj Agrawal, a textile trader.

If no favourable decision comes in that GST council meeting, we will think of going on strike again to raise our demand for abolishing the five per cent GST, he said, according to an agency report.

Textile markets in Surat, Ahmedabad, Rajkot and other places have opened after textile traders called off their strike against the imposition of five per cent Goods and Services Tax (GST) on fabrics. The strike was called off after Union finance minister assured Surat and Ahmedabad textile market representatives of looking into their demands.#

During their meeting with the finance minister, textile traders asked for time of around 18 months for implementing GST. They also demanded making the entire GST procedure simple and relaxation of filing returns from three times a month at present to once in every quarter.

The representatives also suggested that the GST rate on yarn be increased while keeping the remaining chain free from the GST.

Jaitley said that the GST could not be removed, but their other demands would be discussed in the upcoming GST Council meeting on August 5 in New Delhi. (RKS)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Global cotton production remains concentrated among a handful of countries, and the top five cotton-producing nations are forecast to account for more than 76 per cent of total production, similar to last season but slightly below the 2013-14-2015-16 average. India, China, the United States, Pakistan and Brazil are top cotton producing countries.

Indiathe largest cotton produceraccounts for 25 per cent of the 2017-18 global crop estimate, while China and the US are expected to contribute 21 per cent and 16.5 per cent, respectively, according to the latest Cotton and Wool Outlook report released by the Economic Research Service of the US department of agriculture.

In 2017-18, India is projected to produce 29.0 million bales of cotton, 7 per cent above 2016-17. Although the yield is forecast lower (near the 5-year average), an area rebound of 14 per cent is expected to push the 2017-18 crop to its highest in 3 years.

Global cotton production remains concentrated among a handful of countries, and the top five cotton-producing nations are forecast to account for more than 76 per cent of total production, similar to last season but slightly below the 2013-14-2015-16 average. India, China, the United States, Pakistan and Brazil are top cotton producing countries.#

For China, cotton production is projected to rise 5.5 per cent (1.25 million bales) in 2017-18 to 24.0 million bales. Area devoted to cotton is forecast to return to the 2015-16 level of approximately 3.1 million hectares. Meanwhile, the China national yield is projected at a record 1,713 kilograms per hectare, as area is heavily concentrated in the high-yielding Xinjiang region.

Due to each of the major producing countries expecting larger crops, 2017-18 global cotton production is forecast at its highest level in 3 years at 115.4 million bales, 8 per cent (8.8 million bales) above 2016-17 and 19 per cent above 2015-16s 12-year low, the report said.

With alternative crops less favourable for the 2017-18 season, global cotton harvested area is projected to jump 10 per cent from 2016-17s 30-year low to 32.4 million hectares (80.1 million acres). The world cotton yield is estimated at 775 kilograms per hectare (691 pounds per acre) in 2017-18, 2 per cent below a year earlier. (RKS)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / July 18, 2017 / Pomerantz LLP announces that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation ("Booz Allen" or the "Company") (NYSE: BAH and certain of its officers. The class action, filed in United States District Court, Eastern District of Virginia, is on behalf of a class consisting of investors who purchased or otherwise acquired Booz Allen's securities, seeking to recover compensable damages caused by defendants' violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

If you are a shareholder who purchased Booz Allen securities between May 19, 2016 and June 15, 2017, both dates inclusive, you have until August 18, 2017 to ask the Court to appoint you as Lead Plaintiff for the class. A copy of the Complaint can be obtained at www.pomerantzlaw.com. To discuss this action, contact Robert S. Willoughby at rswilloughby@pomlaw.com or 888.476.6529 (or 888.4-POMLAW), toll free, ext. 9980. Those who inquire by e-mail are encouraged to include their mailing address, telephone number, and number of shares purchased.

[Click here to join this class action]

Booz Allen is an American management consulting firm. The Company purports to provide management and technology consulting, engineering, analytics, digital, mission operations, and cyber solutions to governments, corporations, and not-for-profit organizations in the United States and internationally. At all relevant times, Booz Allen has derived substantially all of its revenues from services provided to the U.S. government.

The Complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and misleading statements regarding the Company's business, operational and compliance policies. Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) Booz Allen engaged in improper accounting practices in its contracts with the U.S. government; (ii) consequently, the Company's revenues derived from services provided to the U.S. government were inflated and unsustainable; (iii) discovery of the foregoing conduct would subject the Company to heightened regulatory scrutiny, potential criminal sanctions, and jeopardize its business relationship with the U.S. government; and (iv) as a result of the foregoing, Booz Allen's public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.

On June 15, 2017, post-market, Booz Allen disclosed that on June 7, 2017, the Company's subsidiary Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. "was informed that the U.S. Department of Justice is conducting a civil and criminal investigation relating to certain elements of [its] cost accounting and indirect cost charging practices with the U.S. government."

On this news, Booz Allen's share price fell $7.43, or 18.89%, to close at $31.90 on June 16, 2017.

The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Florida, and Los Angeles, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com

SOURCE: Pomerantz LLP
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/18/17 -- Sabina Gold & Silver Corp (TSX: SBB), ("Sabina" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has received a copy of the Second Final Hearing Report (the "Report") from the Nunavut Impact Review Board (the "NIRB"). In the report, the NIRB has recommended to the Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada ("INAC") that development of the Company's 100%-owned Back River Gold Project ("Back River" or the "Project") in Nunavut, Canada, should proceed to the licensing phase.

This positive recommendation by NIRB concludes a five year comprehensive NIRB review and public hearing processes involving Inuit, the Kitikmeot Inuit Association ("KIA"), Federal and Territorial governments, and community and other Northern representatives. This recommendation follows a direction of the Minister to the NIRB in January 2017 to reconsider the project after an initial negative recommendation from the NIRB in July 2016. In February this year, a Final Environmental Impact Statement Addendum was submitted to the NIRB focusing on the areas that were identified as outstanding concerns in the First Final Hearing Report. The review of this addendum by all parties culminated in a second final technical and public hearing that took place in Cambridge Bay during May 27th to June 3, 2017.

"After a multi-year environmental assessment, we are extremely pleased with the NIRB giving Back River the green light to move ahead to the licensing phase," stated Bruce McLeod, President and CEO. "NIRB's recommendation is a 400 page document that also includes recommended terms and conditions for the project which we are currently reviewing. We are moving ever closer to our goal of becoming a mid-tier gold producer in one of the world's best mining jurisdictions. We would like to thank the community participants from the Kitikmeot region, the KIA, and the numerous regulatory agencies for their ongoing contribution to the review and their support to advance the Project. In particular, we would like to thank the NIRB for a very well run, rigorous yet collaborative process that enabled valuable discussion and idea sharing between all parties. Back River is aiming to be one of the next gold mines in Nunavut providing much desired jobs, training, infrastructure and opportunities to the Inuit of the Kitikmeot Region."

Next Steps

The positive NIRB recommendation and associated Report is now before the Minister of INAC in accordance with Article 12 of the Nunavut Agreement. The Minister's responsibility now is to accept or reject the NIRB's recommendation. Should the Minister accept the NIRB's recommendation, a Project Certificate could be issued in Q4, 2017.

With the positive recommendation in hand, Sabina will commence the submission of applications for the various authorizations required for full-scale construction and operation. Sabina intends to submit Type A and Type B Water License Applications to the Nunavut Water Board within the next 60 days.

Sabina Gold & Silver Corp

Sabina Gold & Silver Corp. is a well-financed, emerging precious metals company with district scale, world class undeveloped assets in one of the world's newest, politically stable mining jurisdictions: Nunavut, Canada.

In September, 2015, Sabina released a Feasibility Study on its 100% owned Back River Gold Project which presents a project that has been designed on a fit-for purpose basis, with the potential to produce approx. 200,000 ounces a year for approx. 11 years with a rapid payback of 2.9 years. At a US$1,150 gold price and a 0.80 exchange rate, the Study delivers a potential after tax internal rate of return of approximately 24.2% with an initial CAPEX of $415 million.

The Project is advancing through the environmental assessment process with final public hearings with the Nunavut Impact Review Board completed during May 31 - June 3, 2017 in Cambridge Bay.

In addition to Back River, Sabina also owns a significant silver royalty on Glencore's Hackett River Project. The silver royalty on Hackett River's silver production is comprised of 22.5% of the first 190 million ounces produced and 12.5% of all the silver produced thereafter.

The Company had cash and equivalents of C$43m at March 31, 2017.

Forward Looking Information

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws (the "forward-looking statements"), including our belief as to the extent, results of permitting and environmental assessment outcomes, and access to project funding. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, as there can be no assurance that the future circumstances, outcomes or results anticipated in or implied by such forward-looking statements will occur or that plans, intentions or expectations upon which the forward-looking statements are based will occur. While we have based these forward-looking statements on our expectations about future events as at the date that such statements were prepared, the statements are not a guarantee that such future events will occur and are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors which could cause events or outcomes to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors and assumptions include, among others, the effects of general economic conditions, commodity prices, changing foreign exchange rates and actions by government and regulatory authorities and misjudgments in the course of preparing forward-looking statements. In addition, there are known and unknown risk factors which could cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Known risk factors include risks associated with exploration and project development; the need for additional financing; the calculation of mineral resources and reserves; operational risks associated with mining and mineral processing; fluctuations in metal prices; title matters; government regulation; obtaining and renewing necessary licenses and permits; environmental liability and insurance; reliance on key personnel; the potential for conflicts of interest among certain of our officers or directors; the absence of dividends; currency fluctuations; labour disputes; competition; dilution; the volatility of the our common share price and volume; future sales of shares by existing shareholders; and other risks and uncertainties, including those relating to the Back River Project and general risks associated with the mineral exploration and development industry described in our Annual Information Form, financial statements and MD&A for the fiscal period ended December 31, 2016 filed with the Canadian Securities Administrators and available at www.sedar.com.

Although we have attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. We are under no obligation to update or alter any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable securities laws. This news release is authorized by the undersigned on behalf of Sabina Gold & Silver Corp.

Contacts:

Sabina Gold & Silver Corp

Nicole Hoeller

Vice-President, Communications

1 888 648-4218

nhoeller@sabinagoldsilver.com




BUENOS AIRES (dpa-AFX) - Argentina's Ministry of Finance reached an agreement with France's oil company Total to pay a US$ 210 million debt with a bond emission. Total's claim stemmed from regulatory changes imposed in the country during the 2001 financial crisis, that resulted in a sharp devaluation of the local currency and cessation of sovereign debt payments. Total obtained a definitive ruling in its favor on February 1, 2016, with an updated interest amount of US$ 312 million. The agreements contemplate settling the amount agreed through a US$ 210 million bond maturing in 2024, resulting in a nominal reduction of 36%. 'This agreement puts an end to the claim of Total and contributes to reestablish direct investments particularly from companies from France in the energy sector,' the Ministry said in a statement. 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.
IPO to be priced at R$15 per common share, valuing Grupo Carrefour Brasil at R$29.7bn (8.1 bn1

Regulatory News:

Carrefour (Paris:CA) announces that Atacadao S.A. ("Grupo Carrefour Brasil"), the parent company of all Groupe Carrefour's activities in Brazil, has set a price of R$15 per common share for its Initial Public Offering (IPO), determined after completion of the bookbuilding process. Based on this price, the gross proceeds of the primary component of the IPO, will reach R$3.1billion (0.8billion), resulting in an equity value, post-money, of Grupo Carrefour Brasil at IPO of R$29.7billion (8.1billion).

The Brazilian Final Prospectus related to the IPO will be filed today with the Brazilian Securities Commission (CVM).

The IPO consists of (i) a primary offering of 205,882,353 common shares issued by Grupo Carrefour Brasil and (ii) a secondary offering of 34,461,489 and 56,800,000 common shares of Grupo Carrefour Brasil sold by Carrefour and Peninsula Participacoes, respectively.

Furthermore, Carrefour has granted an option to the Brazilian underwriters in connection with this offering to place up to 44,571,576 additional common shares held by Carrefour to cover over-allotments, if any, exercisable up to 30 days after the starting date of trading of Grupo Carrefour Brasil's common shares on the Sao Paulo stock exchange ("Secondary Greenshoe").

Grupo Carrefour Brasil's common shares are expected to begin trading on July 20th, 2017 on the Sao Paulo stock exchange under the ticker symbol "CRFB3." The offering is expected to settle on July 24th, 2017, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Information regarding the IPO of Grupo Carrefour Brasil, including the Brazilian Final Prospectus, will be available in Portuguese on the websites of Grupo Carrefour Brasil (at http://www.grupocarrefourbrasil.com.br), the Brazilian underwriters, the CVM and the Sao Paulo stock exchange.

Grupo Carrefour Brasil shareholding structure after completion of the IPO

With the completion of the IPO and after the completion of Peninsula's call option to acquire from Carrefour 71,003,063 Grupo Carrefour Brasil common shares, Carrefour will hold 73.53% of Grupo Carrefour Brasil, Peninsula will hold 11.47% and Grupo Carrefour Brasil's free float will be 15.00%. If the Secondary Greenshoe is fully exercised, and after the transfer of the common shares subject to Peninsula's call option, Carrefour would hold 71.28% of Grupo Carrefour Brasil, Peninsula would hold 11.47% and Grupo Carrefour Brasil's free float would be 17.25%.

The common shares of Grupo Carrefour Brasil held by Carrefour and Peninsula will be subject to customary lock-up restrictions pursuant to Novo Mercado regulations and market practices.

This press release does not constitute an offer of securities for sale in Brazil. Grupo Carrefour Brasil's IPO shall take place by means of the offering documents to be released after IPO registration with the CVM in compliance with the Brazilian securities regulation, including Portuguese language Final Prospectus. Investors must carefully read the Portuguese language Final Prospectus to be publicly available upon disclosure of the announcement of commencement of the IPO, especially the "Risk Factors" section of Grupo Carrefour Brasil's Final Prospectus and Reference Form, prior to making any investment in Grupo Carrefour Brasil's shares.

This press release is not intended for publication or distribution, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States. This press release does not constitute an offer of securities for sale in the United States. The securities mentioned in this press release have not been, and will not be, registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the Securities Act), or any state securities laws, and they may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements of the Securities Act.

1 Reference exchange rate EUR/BRL: 3.6502; Equity value post-money of Grupo Carrefour Brasil at IPO.

Not for distribution directly or indirectly in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170718006484/en/

Contacts:

Investor relations (Groupe Carrefour):

Mathilde Rodie, Anne-Sophie Lanaute, Louis Igonet, Tel France: +33 (0)1 41 04 28 83

or

Shareholder relations: Tel France: +33 (0)805 902 902 (n vert)

or

Group press relations: Tel France: +33 (0)1 41 04 26 17
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / July 18, 2017 / Pomerantz LLP announces that a class action lawsuit has been filed against General Motor Company ("GM" or the "Company") (NYSE: GM) and certain of its officers. The class action, filed in United States District Court, Eastern District of Michigan, and docketed under 17-cv-12185, is on behalf of a class consisting of investors who purchased or otherwise acquired GM securities, seeking to recover compensable damages caused by defendants' violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

If you are a shareholder who purchased GM securities between February 27, 2012 and May 24, 2017, both dates inclusive, you have until July 26, 2017 to ask the Court to appoint you as Lead Plaintiff for the class. A copy of the Complaint can be obtained at www.pomerantzlaw.com. To discuss this action, contact Robert S. Willoughby at rswilloughby@pomlaw.com or 888.476.6529 (or 888.4-POMLAW), toll free, ext. 9980. Those who inquire by e-mail are encouraged to include their mailing address, telephone number, and number of shares purchased.

[Click here to join this class action]

General Motors Company designs, builds, and sells cars, trucks, crossovers, and automobile parts. The Company offers vehicle protection, parts, accessories, maintenance, satellite radio, and automotive financing. General Motors provides its vehicles and services worldwide.

Complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and misleading statements regarding the Company's business, operational and compliance policies. Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) the Company installed at least three distinct defeat devices in over 700,000 trucks with Duramax diesel engines from 2011 to 2016 in order to cheat emissions tests in the U.S.; (ii) consequently, the GM trucks at issue emit up to five times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide pollutants; and (iii) as a result of the foregoing, GM's public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.

On May 25, 2017, Bloomberg reported that a consumer lawsuit had been filed against GM for installing multiple defeat devices in two models of heavy-duty trucks with the Duramax diesel engine from 2011-2016. The lawsuit alleges that GM's unlawful, unfair, deceptive, and otherwise defective emission controls affect model year 2011-2016 GM Sierra 2500HD and 3500 HD trucks and GM Silverado 2500 HD and 3500 HD trucks. According to the lawsuit, extensive testing of a 2013 Silverado 2500 diesel-a vehicle representative of the class of Duramax diesel engines present in both the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra model years 2011 to 2016-indicated as follows: (1) the vehicle produces emissions above the certification tests at temperatures above the certification range (86F); (2) the vehicle produces higher emissions when temperatures are below the certification test range (68F); and (3) the vehicle produces higher emissions occur after the vehicle has been run for 200-500 seconds of steady speed operation on average by a factor of 4.5 in all temperature windows. These test results confirmed the presence of three distinct defeat devices, which enable the vehicle to meet emissions standards in the test temperature range, while allowing two to five times the legal amount of nitrogen-oxide pollutants to be emitted at all other times.

On this news, GM's share price fell $0.60, or 1.81%, to close at $32.60 on May 25, 2017.

The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Florida, and Los Angeles, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com

SOURCE: Pomerantz LLP
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / July 18, 2017 / Pomerantz LLP announces that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Eco Science Solutions, Inc. ('Eco Science' or the 'Company') (OTC PINK: ESSI) and certain of its officers. The class action, filed in United States District Court, District of New Jersey, and docketed under 17-cv-03760, is on behalf of a class consisting of investors who purchased or otherwise acquired Eco Science securities, seeking to recover compensable damages caused by defendants' violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

If you are a shareholder who purchased Eco Science securities between May 1, 2017 and May 19, 2017, both dates inclusive, you have until July 24, 2017 to ask the Court to appoint you as Lead Plaintiff for the class. A copy of the Complaint can be obtained at www.pomerantzlaw.com. To discuss this action, contact Robert S. Willoughby at rswilloughby@pomlaw.com or 888.476.6529 (or 888.4-POMLAW), toll free, ext. 9980. Those who inquire by e-mail are encouraged to include their mailing address, telephone number, and number of shares purchased.

[Click here to join this class action]

Eco Science Solutions, Inc. is a technology-focused company that provides solutions for the health and wellness industry. The Company provides enterprise software solutions and services including consumer apps, localized communication platforms between consumers and businesses, educational content, e-commerce platforms, and social networking services.

The Complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and misleading statements regarding the Company's business, operational and compliance policies. Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) the Company's plan for strategic acquisitions lacked veracity; and (ii) as a result, Defendants' statements about the Company's business, operations and prospects were materially false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable bases at all relevant times.

On May 19, 2017, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued an order of suspension of trading, halting trading of the Company's securities. To date, trading the Company's securities remains halted, rending the Company's securities illiquid and virtually worthless, thereby damaging investors.

The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Florida, and Los Angeles, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com

SOURCE: Pomerantz LLP


MELBOURNE (dpa-AFX) - Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton plc (BHP.AX, BLT.L, BBL, BHP) reported that its total iron ore production for the fourth-quarter was 60.14 million tonnes, up 8 percent from 55.63 million tonnes in the previous year.



BHP expects to record exceptional items of US$546 million in the second half of the 2017 financial year. These items relate to idle capacity and other strike-related costs incurred as a result of the Escondida industrial action in the March 2017 quarter and Chilean withholding tax on a one-off dividend paid while a concessional tax rate was available.



Total iron ore production for the 2017 financial year increased by four per cent to 231 Mt, or 268 Mt on a 100 per cent basis. Western Australia Iron Ore or WAIO production is expected to increase to between 239 and 243 Mt, or between 275 and 280 Mt on a 100 per cent basis, in the 2018 financial year. BHP will continue to work with the relevant authorities to obtain the necessary approvals to increase system capacity to 290 Mtpa (100 per cent basis).



Record annual production of 268 Mt (100 per cent basis) at WAIO reflects strong productivity improvements across the supply chain as well as the commissioning of a new primary crusher and additional conveying capacity at Jimblebar. Following recovery from the wet season, WAIO produced at a record annualised rate of 280 Mt (100 per cent basis) in the June 2017 quarter. The rail renewal and maintenance program was completed in May 2017.



Metallurgical coal production for the 2017 financial year decreased by six per cent to 40 Mt. Production is expected to increase to between 44 and 46 Mt in the 2018 financial year.



Total copper production for the 2017 financial year decreased by 16 percent to 1.3 Mt. Total copper production is forecast to increase to between 1,655 and 1,790 kt in the 2018 financial year.



Total petroleum production for the 2017 financial year decreased by 13 per cent to 208 Mmboe.



Petroleum production is forecast to decrease to between 180 and 190 MMboe in the 2018 financial year.



Energy coal production for the 2017 financial year increased by seven per cent to 29 Mt. Production is expected to remain broadly unchanged at approximately 29 to 30 Mt in the 2018 financial year.



Nickel West production for the 2017 financial year increased by five per cent to 85.1 kt. Debottlenecking activities at the Kwinana refinery have resulted in record refined metal production. Nickel production for the 2018 financial year is expected to remain broadly unchanged from the 2017 financial year.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
DALLAS, TX / ACCESSWIRE / July 18, 2017 / Dr. Karl Jawhari, D.C., started the Dallas Spine and Disc Center, a medically-integrated clinic helping clients with chronic back pain, and has committed his career to developing effective treatments for bulging and herniated spinal discs. Often described as being similar to a jelly donut - consisting of a firm outer layer of tough cartilage surrounding a softer layer composed of cartilage fibers suspended in a mucoprotein gel - the purpose of intervertebral discs is to cushion and act as a shock absorber between adjacent vertebrae, as well as to serve as connecting ligaments holding spinal vertebrae together. While tough enough to typically absorb a lifetime of shock and impact, the effects of poor posture, spinal injury, repetitive strain and the normal wear and tear of aging can lead to a bulging disc or a herniated disc and associated pain.

'Intervertebral discs are an amazing bit of engineering,' says Dr. Karl Jawhari. 'The twenty-three discs help keep the spine in alignment and prevent the vertebra from contacting each other, while also staying soft and pliable. But it is not a flawless system, and bulging discs or herniated discs may occur.'

A bulging disc is medically described as 'contained,' meaning there is no tear or rupture is present within the outer layer of the disc, although it is pushing outward and into the spinal canal. The degree of pain depends on whether the disc impinges a nerve root. It may not be painful at all, or it may produce mild symptoms ranging from numbness, tingling and weakness up to severe pain. Coughing, sneezing, sitting, driving and bending forward can make the pain worse due to additional pressure put on the nerve by these various activities.

Herniated discs are the second condition that commonly account for chronic back pains and are described as 'non-contained,' meaning a tear or rupture is present. They often begin as a bulging disc, until long-term extended pressure on the outer wall leads to a herniation. The pain from a herniated disc is frequently much greater than with a bulging disc, as it is caused by both compression of the nerve, in combination with painful inflammation of the nerve root caused by the gel-like nucleus pulposus leaking into the spinal canal.

Dr. Karl Jawhari, D.C., is the founder of Dallas Spine and Disc, an innovative healthcare center with a focus on back pain. He is a nationally recognized speaker for the Health Awareness Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes health and wellness in local companies by educating employees and creating a healthier environment through workshops. Dr. Jawhari has consulted with over 120 doctors in the U.S. on the application of non-surgical healing techniques such as New Life Laser, lumbar decompression, litecure laser and cervical decompression. He and his talented staff have treated hundreds of patients who previously had little expectation of relief from chronic pain.

Dr. Karl Jawhari, D.C. - Founder of Dallas Spine and Disc Center: http://www.DrKarlJawhariNews.com

Dr. Karl Jawhari - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-karl-jawhari-1b84b516

Karl Jawhari (@DrKarlJawhari) - Twitter: https://twitter.com/drkarljawhari

Contact Information:

DrKarlJawhariNews.com

http://drkarljawharinews.com

contact@drkarljawharinews.com

SOURCE: Dr. Karl Jawhari
Entrance system utilizing facial recognition technology



NEC Seiichiro Toda s-toda@cj.jp.nec.com +81-3-3798-6511

TOKYO, July 19, 2017 - (JCN Newswire) - NEC Corporation (TSE: 6701) and NEC Telecommunication and Information Technology, Ltd. announced today that the Turkish Ministry of Youth and Sports, organizer of the 23rd Summer Deaflympics in Samsun, Turkey, selected NEC's leading face recognition technology to ensure the security and quality of experience for this year's Deaflympic participants.This is the first time that face recognition technology has been used as a key security measure for the Summer Deaflympics. NEC's face recognition technology is being implemented among kiosks and security access control systems, enabling rapid identification, and ensuring that participants and audiences enjoy a safe and secure experience.http://www.acnnewswire.com/topimg/Low_NECFaceRecognition71917.jpgEntrance system utilizing facial recognition technologySamsun, a scenic province in the north of Turkey, will host the 2017 Summer Deaflympics from 18-30 July, featuring more than 5,000 participants from 109 countries across 21 categories.The secure access control solution was designed, developed, implemented and tested jointly by NEC Telecommunication Information Technology and its local partner MIA. The solution includes 30 NEC face recognition checkpoints that verify the identities of participants and ticket holders, by referencing a database of photos that are provided in advance of the events. The solution features immediate response time and the world's highest matching accuracy(1)."NEC's security and access control solutions have been successfully implemented for law enforcement agencies and large-scale facilities throughout the world, including major airports and stadiums," said Tomoki Naka, Managing Director, NEC Telecommunication and Information Technology."Implementing NEC's face recognition, recognized as the world's most accurate, at user-friendly security access control points has allowed us to provide this event with the fastest and most reliable ID and verification system of its kind," said Ali Gokhan Belekin, General Manager, MIA Technology.For more information about NEC's face recognition technology, please visit:http://www.nec.com/en/global/About NEC CorporationNEC Corporation is a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies that benefit businesses and people around the world. By providing a combination of products and solutions that cross utilize the company's experience and global resources, NEC's advanced technologies meet the complex and ever-changing needs of its customers. NEC brings more than 100 years of expertise in technological innovation to empower people, businesses and society. For more information, visit NEC at http://www.nec.com.Based on its Mid-term Management Plan 2015, the NEC Group globally provides "Solutions for Society" that promote the safety, security, efficiency and equality of society. Under the company's corporate message of "Orchestrating a brighter world," NEC aims to help solve a wide range of challenging issues and to create new social value for the changing world of tomorrow. For more information, please visit http://www.nec.com/en/global/about/solutionsforsociety/message.html.Source: NEC CorporationContact:Copyright 2017 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved.
UnionPay QR Code payments will be deployed across all AsiaMalls malls

SINGAPORE, Nov. 27, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- UnionPay International announced today to have cooperated with Bank of China Singapore Branch (BOCSG) in launching the BOCSG e-wallet app within this year, enabling UnionPay cardholders to make QR Code payments after adding UnionPay credit cards to the app. UnionPay International and BOCSG also collaborate with Lianhe Zaobao in launching the BOC Zaobao Card and the BOC Zaobao Debit Card, bringing greater savings and convenience to the local customers. UnionPay International also partners with AsiaMalls Management to launch UnionPay QR Code payments across all six malls of the latter.

"UnionPay QR Code payments have already been launched in Hong Kong and Macau. This time, we made another major breakthrough in Singapore, which not only demonstrates that UnionPay is accelerating the rollout of our QR Code payments worldwide, but also shows that innovation has become a significant impetus for the localized development of Chinese financial institutions that have gone abroad," said CEO of UnionPay International, Cai Jianbo. "We choose to promote UnionPay QR Code payments first in everyday spend merchants to meet the diverse payment demands of Chinese individual tourists while laying a foundation for the localization of our business in Singapore. We also collaborate with issuers in various and flexible ways to make UnionPay QR Code payments available to more customers outside mainland China.

UnionPay accelerates the localization of its business in Singapore

Singapore is one of the first Southeast Asian countries that UnionPay has made a presence. Now, UnionPay is accepted at almost all ATMs and 90% of POS terminals there. As it is increasingly convenient to use UnionPay cards in Singapore, four local banks have issued multiple UnionPay card products, and an increasing numberoflocal customersis signing up for and using UnionPay cards.

BOCSG is the No.1 issuer of UnionPay credit cards in Singapore. UnionPay International and BOCSG further partner with Lianhe Zaobao, the Chinese flagship newspaper of Singapore Press Holdings, to launch the BOC Zaobao Card and the BOC Zaobao Debit Card. The BOC Zaobao Credit Card is the first diamond credit card equipped with UnionPay's QuickPass contactless feature that has been issued in Singapore. Cardholders can make contactless payments seamlessly with a simple tap-and-go move at more than 10 million merchants worldwide, while enjoying discounts on Lianhe Zaobao and other SPH subscriptions, and a variety of cash rebates on petrol and dining.

The BOC Zaobao Credit Card will also be compatible with the BOCSG e-wallet app, jointly developed by UnionPay and BOCSG, enabling cardholders to make QR code for payments.

UnionPay QR Code payments expands globally

UnionPay QR Code payment is interoperable globally for it is compliant with the industry standard of the EMVCo QR Code Specification, and is safer by adopting the Token technology. The launch of the BOCSG e-wallet app means that the overseas roll-out of UnionPay QR Code payments has evolved from serving Chinese tourists to serving the local customers.

Singapore customers will be able to make QR Code payments at the local BreadTalk, Lady M and Itacho Sushi, as well as over 3 million merchants in the Chinese Mainland, Colourmix in Hong Kong and more than 100 restaurants in Macau. Since next year, six malls of AsiaMalls Management, namely Hougang Mall, Liang Court, TiongBahru Plaza, Tampines 1, White Sands and Century Square, will support UnionPay QR Code payments.

"We are able to establish the acceptance of UnionPay QR Code on a sizeable scale in Singapore for cross-border payment by leveraging on AsiaMalls' strong footprint in the local retail industry, offering the same seamless mobile payment experience to Chinese tourists both in Singapore and in China. It also facilitates the launch of e-wallet products by BOCSG and other local issuers while accelerating building more local application scenarios and promoting platforms," said Cai Jianbo. In the future, the QR Code for payment will also have the function of discount code, with which customerswill beable to make payments and enjoy discounts with just one scan of the QR Code.
Fujitsu Limited Public and Investor Relations Tel: +81-3-6252-2176 URL: www.fujitsu.com/global/news/contacts/

TOKYO, July 19, 2017 - (JCN Newswire) - Fujitsu has demonstrated its ability to link and achieve mutual compatibility between its in-house-developed cyber threat intelligence (CTI)(1) utilization system and the US Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) system for sharing CTI provided through its Automated Indicator Sharing (AIS) program which rapidly shares cyber threat indicators between government and private companies.By linking these systems, Fujitsu will be able to analyze both the CTI it already possesses as well as the CTI from AIS. In so doing, when a cyberattack occurs, threat indicators about attacks with the same or similar elements, as well as intelligence about countermeasures can be rapidly supplied from AIS and used to respond. In addition, by setting the link so that the latest CTI is uploaded onto AIS and automatically reflected to Fujitsu's security products and services that protect customer systems, Fujitsu can automate tasks such as the addition of rules to respond to new cyberattacks, which previously had to be done manually. This shortens the work time required of those responsible for cybersecurity and reduces the chance for mistakes.Fujitsu is positioning this CTI utilization system as a linchpin in building a proactive defense against an expanding number of cyberattacks. Going forward, Fujitsu will link this system with its security products and services for malware detection and other tasks in response to the latest cyberattacks.BackgroundAs the threat of cyberattacks has increased in recent years, demand has been growing for enhanced security countermeasures to protect the critical infrastructure that supports society. In addition, there have been issues with a lack of analysts with advanced skills that can respond to ingenious and difficult-to-detect cyberattacks, making it increasingly important to utilize CTI on a global scale.The DHS is promoting its AIS program, which is an effort to rapidly share massive amounts of CTI around the world between participating organizations and corporations. Fujitsu has been connected to the framework since June 2017.In order to more efficiently use CTI from AIS, Fujitsu has now connected the CTI utilization system it developed with AIS's CTI sharing system, enabling its use in rapid responses to cyberattacks.The AIS programThe AIS program consists of the US government and government institutions and private companies, both inside and outside the US, rapidly sharing CTI through a system operated by the DHS. As of the end of June 2017, 147 organizations are now connected. CTI shared through AIS uses the STIX(2) format and TAXII(3) protocol standardized by the OASIS CTI Technical Committee(4) for the sharing of CTI.AIS offers the following features.1. Rapid sharing of CTIThe CTI provided by participating government institutions and private corporations can be shared with a simple process so that this program facilitates the rapid sharing of CTI among participating organizations.2. Anonymization of CTI providerThe name of the organization or company that provided CTI can be anonymized as necessary, enabling the provision of CTI without revealing the source to the end user.3. Participating organizations can utilize CTI safely and securelyTo participate in AIS, an organization is required to submit application documents to DHS for approval. Participating organizations are therefore able to mutually utilize CTI safely and securely.About Fujitsu's CTI Utilization SystemIn order to efficiently share CTI between various organizations and companies, and rapidly build effective countermeasures, Fujitsu developed a CTI utilization system that incorporates functionality to safely and easily generate and use advanced CTI, and has been operating this system internally since August 2016.1. Functionality safely and easily shares CTI between organizations and companiesThis system incorporates functions to accept CTI in standard formats established by the OASIS CTI Technical Committee, as well as a function that enables users to choose who shares what information from within the CTI. With these capabilities, CTI can be collected from a variety of providers, combined, and utilized. This system's ability to link with FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence(5) has already been confirmed.2. Advanced CTI analysis and editing functionalityThis system incorporates functionality providing visibility into the relationships between the constituent elements of a cyberattack recorded in each piece of CTI, including basic information such as the attacker, the time, the target, the machines attacked, and intrusion pathways and methods, as well as countermeasures. This enables users to extract cyberattacks with identical or similar elements to another cyberattack, visually checking the relationship between them, and simplifying discovery of new commonalities between cyberattacks, including information about attackers that could not have been discovered previously.Linking Fujitsu's CTI Utilization System with CTI from AISFujitsu has confirmed it successfully linked its CTI utilization system with AIS. Through this, Fujitsu expects the following results.- Because it is possible to rapidly collect cyber threat indicators from around the world and immediately build concrete countermeasures, this connection is capable of preemptively preventing risks such as information leaks.- By connecting CTI from AIS with Fujitsu's security products and services, and setting the system to automatically update with new CTI, even existing security products and services become capable of immediately responding to new cyberattacks. This will shorten the time spent by those responsible for security on operations, and reduce the number of mistakes.Future PlansFujitsu is beginning to link its CTI utilization system, now linked with CTI from AIS, with a variety of security products and services, implementing them internally under the Fujitsu Advanced Artifact Analysis Laboratory(6), an advanced security analysis organization. Going forward, Fujitsu aims to provide security products and services that can respond to the very latest cyberattacks by reflecting the results of this implementation in its security products and services.(1) Cyber Threat IntelligenceThe kinds of information yielded by a sophisticated analysis of a cyberattack (such as the attacker, timing, objective, target of the attack, and route and method of the intrusion), as well as information on ways of dealing with the attack, all in a format that can be used by a computer.(2) STIX (Structured Threat Information eXpression)A structured language for describing cyber threat information so it can be shared, stored, and analyzed in a consistent manner.(3) TAXII (Trusted Automated eXchange of Indicator Information)An application layer protocol for the communication of cyber threat information in a simple and scalable manner.(4) OASIS CTI Technical CommitteeThe OASIS Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) TC was chartered to define a set of information representations and protocols to address the need to model, analyze, and share cyber threat intelligence.(5) FireEye iSIGHT IntelligenceThe cyber threat intelligence service provided by FireEye, Inc. https://www.fireeye.com/products/isight-cyber-threat-intelligence-subscriptions.html(6) Fujitsu Advanced Artifact Analysis LaboratoryJointly established by Fujitsu Limited and PFU Limited in Tokyo and Yokohama on November 18, 2015, this organization brings together and analyzes security information on a global scale.About Fujitsu LtdFujitsu is the leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company, offering a full range of technology products, solutions, and services. Approximately 155,000 Fujitsu people support customers in more than 100 countries. We use our experience and the power of ICT to shape the future of society with our customers. Fujitsu Limited (TSE: 6702) reported consolidated revenues of 4.5 trillion yen (US$40 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2017. For more information, please see http://www.fujitsu.com.* Please see this press release, with images, at:http://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-releases/Source: Fujitsu LtdContact:Copyright 2017 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved.
Regulatory News:

Gecina (Paris:GFC) has sold 2,193,081 PSRs (ISIN code FR0013270014) detached from its treasury shares by way of an accelerated bookbuilding to institutional investors (the "Placing") at a price of 2.58 by PSR. The PSRs sold represent the entirety of PSRs detached from Gecina's treasury shares and give right to the subscription of 313,297 new Gecina shares, i.e. approximately 3.5% of the share capital increase.

The Placing was executed in coordination with the concomitant sale of 12,597,643 PSRs by Ivanhoe Cambridge via the Trade Confirmation System (TCS) of Euronext. Ivanhoe Cambridge sold its PSRs to participate in the capital increase on a "cash-neutral basis".

The total PSRs placed, including Ivanhoe Cambridge's PSRs, represent a total of 2,112,960 potential new shares issued if all the PSRs sold are exercised, i.e. approximately 23% of the share capital increase.

The sale of the PSRs alongside the rights offering will help increase Gecina's free float by close to 10% and enhance the liquidity profile of its shares1

As a reminder, Gecina and Ivanhoe Cambridge have each agreed to a lock-up period starting on the date of the AMF visa on the French-language prospectus in respect of the rights issue and ending 90 calendar days following the settlement and delivery of the rights issue, subject to certain exceptions.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell PSRs and the Placing of PSRs by Gecina does not constitute an offer to the public.

Disclaimer

This press release and the information contained herein do not constitute an offer to sell or purchase, or the solicitation of an offer to sell or purchase, PSRs.

No communication or information relating to the contemplated Placing of PSRs or the rights issue may be distributed to the public in any jurisdiction in which registration or approval is required. No action has been (or will be) undertaken in any jurisdiction where such steps would be required. The subscription for or purchase of securities of Gecina or the purchase of PSRs may be subject to legal or statutory restrictions in certain jurisdictions. Gecina assumes no responsibility for any violation of such restrictions by any person. The distribution of this press release in certain jurisdictions may be restricted by law.

This press release does not constitute a prospectus within the meaning of Directive 2003/71/EC of the European Parliament and Council dated 4 November 2003, as amended, in particular by Directive 2010/73/UE in the case where such directive was implemented into law in the member States of the European Economic Area (the "Prospectus Directive

The Placing of PSRs does not constitute an offer to the public in any jurisdiction.

With respect to each member State of the European Economic Area (the "Member State") having implemented the Prospectus Directive into law, no action has been undertaken or will be undertaken to make an offer to the public of securities requiring a publication of a prospectus in any such Member State. As a result, the PSRs may only be offered in the Member States (a) to qualified investors, as defined by the Prospectus Directive; or (b) in any other circumstances, not requiring Gecina to publish a prospectus as provided under Article 3(2) of the Prospectus Directive.

For the purposes of this paragraph, "securities offered to the public" in a given Member State means any communication, in any form and by any means, of sufficient information about the terms and conditions of the offer and the securities so as to enable an investor to make a decision to buy or subscribe for the securities, as the same may be varied in that Member State.

The above selling restrictions are in addition to any other selling restrictions which may be applicable in the Member States.

The distribution of this press release is directed only at (i) persons outside the United Kingdom, subject to applicable laws, or (ii) persons having professional experience in matters relating to investments who fall within the definition of "investment professionals" in Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 as amended (the "Order") or (iii) high net worth bodies corporate, unincorporated associations and partnerships and trustees of high value trusts as described in Article 49(2) (a) to (d) of the Order (all such persons together being referred to as "relevant persons"). The Placing of PSRs is only available to, and any invitation, offer or agreement to subscribe, purchase or otherwise acquire such rights will be engaged in only with, relevant persons. Any person who is not a relevant person should not act or rely on, this press release or any information contained herein.

This press release does not constitute an offer or invitation to sell or purchase, or a solicitation of any offer to purchase or subscribe for, any securities of Gecina or the PSRs in the United States of America. Securities may not be offered, subscribed or sold in the United States of America absent registration under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), except pursuant to an exemption from, or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements thereof. The securities of Gecina and the PSRs have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act and Gecina does not intend to make a public offer of its securities or the PSRs in the United States of America.

The diffusion of this press release in certain countries may be prohibited under applicable law.

This press release does not constitute an offer of securities, in the United-States (including in the territories and dependencies and in any State of the United States), in Canada, in Australia, or in Japan.

1 Float increased from 51% to approximately 55% following the capital increase with preferential subscription rights and the tenders for the securities offer of the mandatory public offer

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170718006515/en/

Contacts:

Gecina
STOCKHOLM, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --During the second quarter Electrolux improved its operating income by close to 25%, achieving an operating margin of 6.2%. Profitability increased in most of our business areas. This was driven by continued focus on improving product mix through active portfolio management, and increased cost efficiency within our operations. Cash flow continued to be strong, further strengthening our balance sheet.

In EMEA, our premium brands continued to gain market share driven by the built-in kitchen segment. The launch of the new AEG products is ongoing, with strong market impact. We are very pleased that operating margins continue at a high sustained level, reaching 6.2% in the quarter.

The European appliance market remains solid, with demand growth in several markets in Western and Eastern Europe, while the UK and the Middle East and Africa continue to be weak. We expect the total European market to be positive and confirm our outlook of around 1% growth in 2017.

In our operations in North America, we continued the strong operational performance, improving the mix by focusing on our most competitive products and increasing productivity and cost efficiency. This contributed to achieving an operating margin of 8.4% despite continued price pressure and lower sales volumes under private labels.

With a good trend during the first half of the year, the market for appliances in North America remains strong and we see the favorable macro environment continuing to support demand. We therefore increase our outlook for the North American market and now expect the market to grow by 3-4% in 2017.

The operations in Latin America faced another quarter with tough market conditions although there were signs of a slow recovery. Market volumes in Brazil, Argentina and Chile improved slightly but the macro and political uncertainty in Brazil remains. Actions to improve the profitability of our business are progressing according to plan. The operations in Asia Pacific, Home Care & SDA and Professional Products all showed strong improvement in earnings compared to the second quarter 2016.

We expect the organic sales contribution from volume, price and mix for the full year to be slightly positive, as a result of the supportive market environment, strong mix performance and successful product launches, offsetting continued price pressure. Our efforts to drive cost efficiency continue and we now expect to deliver a net cost efficiency of SEK 2.3bn for the full year of 2017. Price developments in the commodity markets have been neutral on balance, and we confirm our expected negative impact from raw-material costs of SEK 1.4bn for the full year.

In early July we announced the agreement to acquire Best, a European manufacturer of innovative and well-designed kitchen hoods. The acquisition enables Electrolux to further drive long-term profitable growth in the built-in-kitchen segment in EMEA. The deal is expected to close within the next quarter and will be our fourth this year, highlighting our ambition to broaden Electrolux product offering and expand in new profitable markets and segments.

During the quarter we have also updated our strategic framework, connecting our business model and path to profitable growth to a clear and revised company Purpose - Shape living for the better. We will achieve this by reinventing taste, care and wellbeing experiences for more enjoyable and sustainable living around the world. This will set the direction for Electrolux for years to come.

For further information, contact Daniel Frykholm, Electrolux Press Hotline, +46-8-657-65-07 or Merton Kaplan, Investor Relations, +46-8-738-70-06.

This information is information that AB Electrolux is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation and the Securities Markets Act. The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact person set out above, at 0800 CET on July 19, 2017.

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

http://news.cision.com/electrolux/r/electrolux-president-and-ceo-jonas-samuelson-s-comments-on-the-results-for-the-second-quarter-2017,c2313411

The following files are available for download:
STOCKHOLM, Aug 2, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --ASSA ABLOY has acquired SMI (Shree Mahavir Metalcraft), a leading OEM manufacturer of architectural hardware in India.

"I am very pleased to welcome SMI into the ASSA ABLOY Group. The acquisition of SMI delivers on our strategy to grow our presence in emerging markets", says Johan Molin, President and CEO of ASSA ABLOY.

"SMI is an attractive addition to the Asia Pacific division and reinforces our position in the India market. The acquisition offers the potential to develop market specific competitive products and complements our existing Indian business", says Magnus Kagevik, Executive Vice President of ASSA ABLOY and Head of Division Asia Pacific.

SMI was established in 1984. It is headquartered in Jamnagar, West coast of India and has some 960 employees.

Sales for 2017 are expected to reach INR 1,080 million (approx. SEK 140 million) and the acquisition will be accretive to EPS from start.

For more information, please contact:

Johan Molin, President and CEO, tel.no:+46-8-506-485-42

Carolina Dybeck Happe, CFO and Executive Vice President, tel.no:+46-8-506-485-72

About ASSA ABLOY

ASSA ABLOY is the global leader in door opening solutions, dedicated to satisfying end user needs for security, safety and convenience. Since its formation in 1994, ASSA ABLOY has grown from a regional company into an international group with about 47,000 employees, operations in more than 70 countries and sales of SEK 71 billion. In the fast-growing electromechanical security segment, the Group has a leading position in areas such as access control, identification technology, entrance automation and hotel security.

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

http://news.cision.com/assa-abloy/r/assa-abloy-acquires-smi-in-india,c2320983

The following files are available for download:
Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) hat den Global Excellence Award von der European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) erhalten und ist damit die erste Organisation auerhalb Europas, die diesen prestigetrachtigen Preis erhalt, und die erste in der Geschichte des Preises, die ihn beim ersten Antrag erhalt. DEWA erzielte zwischen 750 und 800 Punkte und rangiert damit in der Platin-Kategorie, zu der fuhrende Unternehmen und Institutionen gehoren, die nachhaltige Exzellenz fordern.

Diese Pressemitteilung enthalt multimediale Inhalte. Die vollstandige Mitteilung hier ansehen: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171105005116/de/

DEWA Is the First Organisation outside Europe to Win EFQM Global Excellence Award in the Platinum Category (Photo: AETOSWire)

"Bei DEWA arbeiten wir im Einklang mit der Vision von Seiner Hoheit Scheich Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vizeprasident und Premierminister der VAE und Herrscher von Dubai, der die grundlegenden Funktionen und den proaktiven Ansatz fur kunftige Regierungen benannt hat. Dies basiert auf dem Erreichen der besten Errungenschaften in verschiedenen Sektoren der Regierung, um die Dienstleistungen zugunsten der Burger und Mitglieder der Gesellschaft anzuerkennen. Der Exzellenzprozess im Rahmen des Dubai Government Excellence Program hat dazu beigetragen, eine Kultur der institutionellen Exzellenz zu fordern, was die Grundlagen nachhaltiger Exzellenz konsolidiert. DEWA bietet eine positive Arbeitsumgebung, die die Effizienz von Individuen und Organisationen beitragt und die eine Kultur der Exzellenz institutionalisiert, gema den hochsten Standards von totalem Qualitatsmanagement und nachhaltiger Exzellenz. Bei DEWA ist Exzellenz ein tagliches Arbeitsprogramm, das nach spezifischen und durchdachten Strategien und Planen implementiert wird, die durch alle Mitarbeiter durchgefuhrt werden, um die Zufriedenheit der Kunden und der Gesellschaft als Ganzes zu erreichen", sagte Seine Hoheit Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD und CEO von DEWA.

Ein Team von 7 Gutachtern von EFQM besuchte DEWA, um seine Verfahren und Praktiken betreffend Innovation, Exzellenz, stetige Entwicklung und Richtlinien zur Aufrechterhaltung seiner Errungenschaften zu begutachten. Das Team lobte DEWAs Anstrengungen, die dazu beitragen, seine Vision zu verwirklichen, ein nachhaltiger innovativer Weltklasseversorger zu werden, und preiste seine Errungenschaften in den letzten Jahren.

Die VAE, reprasentiert von der DEWA, lagen laut dem Report "Doing Business 2018" der Weltbank auf dem ersten Platz hinsichtlich des Bezugs von Strom. In dem ausfuhrlichen Bericht werden mehrere Kriterien angewandt, um zu bemessen, wie gut man in 190 Landern auf der ganzen Welt Geschafte machen kann.

*Quelle: AETOSWire

Die Ausgangssprache, in der der Originaltext veroffentlicht wird, ist die offizielle und autorisierte Version. Ubersetzungen werden zur besseren Verstandigung mitgeliefert. Nur die Sprachversion, die im Original veroffentlicht wurde, ist rechtsgultig. Gleichen Sie deshalb Ubersetzungen mit der originalen Sprachversion der Veroffentlichung ab.

Originalversion auf businesswire.com ansehen: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171105005116/de/

Contacts:

Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA)

Ribal Dayekh, +97143072006

ribal.dayekh@dewa.gov.ae

oder

Iman Saeed, +97145150512

iman.saeed@dewa.gov.ae
Russia's MSK-IX to Deploy Coriant Groove G30 to Enhance High-Speed Connectivity Services with Best-in-Class Density, Flexibility, and Efficiency

Coriant, a leading supplier of packet optical, IP, and SDN solutions to Tier 1 global service providers and web-scale Internet operators, today announced that MSK-IX, a leading Russian Internet Exchange (IX) provider, has selected the Coriant Groove G30 Network Disaggregation Platform to cost-efficiently scale its peering infrastructure and enhance the performance of its high-speed communications services, including 100G. MSK-IX selected the Coriant Groove G30 solution based on the proven performance of its industry-leading features including ultra-high density, low power consumption, configuration flexibility, and pay-as-you-grow scalability.

One of the world's largest IXPs with headquarters in Moscow, MSK-IX provides neutral connectivity services to over 500 organizations, including international companies operating in Russia. With a secure, resilient, and flexible peering platform connecting 10 cities, MSK-IX serves a broad range of end-user customers, including ISPs, search engines, cloud providers, cable operators, enterprises, and education organizations. The Coriant Groove G30 will be deployed in the MSK-IX backbone network to easily scale service capacity and deliver more flexible customer offerings in response to growing demand for domestic and international data traffic exchange services, including Data Center Interconnect (DCI).

"We selected Coriant as our technology partner for this project following rigorous testing and evaluation of competitive solutions," said Alexander Ilin, Technical Director, MSK-IX. "The Coriant Groove G30 platform met our stringent criteria for high-performance, efficient, and scalable transport, while demonstrating exceptional levels flexibility with its highly modular and pluggable system design optimized for today's dynamic interconnect environment."

"We are very excited to bring best-in-class optical transport to one of the world's premier IXPs and help MSK-IX enhance and accelerate application and content delivery for their customers," said Shaygan Kheradpir, CEO of Coriant. "The Groove G30 offers game-changing innovation that reduces the total cost of ownership while enhancing the end-user quality of experience proven value that will only grow in importance as Russia hosts the 2018 World Cup next year and demand for high-quality, real time Internet content distribution reaches unprecedented levels."

The award-winning Coriant Groove G30 Network Disaggregation Platform is an innovative 1RU modular open transport solution designed to deliver programmable, high speed, and secure bandwidth optimized for the growing capacity demands of mobile, video, IoT, and cloud applications. Widely deployed in the world's leading IXP, service provider, web-scale Internet operator, and cable MSO networks, the Groove G30 can be equipped as a muxponder terminal solution and as an Open Line System (OLS) optical layer solution. Open APIs ensure rapid introduction and easy integration within any IXP, data center, or telecom operating environment.

About Coriant

Coriant delivers innovative and dynamic networking solutions for a fast-changing and cloud-centric business world. The Coriant portfolio of SDN-enabled, edge-to-core packet optical networking and DCI solutions enables network operators to cost-efficiently scale network capacity, reduce operational complexity, and create the resilient foundation for a new generation of mobile, video, and cloud services. Coriant serves leading network operators around the world, including mobile and fixed line service providers, cloud and data center operators, Web 2.0 content providers, cable MSOs, government agencies, and large enterprises. With a distinguished heritage of technology innovation and service excellence, Coriant is helping its global customers maximize the value of their network infrastructure as demand for bandwidth explodes and the communications needs of businesses and consumers continue to evolve. Learn more at www.coriant.com and follow us on Twitter for the latest @Coriant news and information.

About MSK-IX

MSK-IX accelerates communications between Internet companies by providing neutral Internet eXchange for IP peering and global distributed network of DNS servers for top-level domains.

More than 500 organizations use MSK-IX services on a daily basis to enhance network connectivity in 10 cities. MSK-IX participants include ISPs, social networks, search engines, cloud providers, corporate and educational networks.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180123005592/en/

Contacts:

Coriant

Scott Larson, +1.978.250.3433

scott.larson@coriant.com

or

MSK-IX

Alex Kostin, +7.965.205.77.00

a.kostin@msk-ix.ru
To: Company Announcements

Date: 21 November 2017

Company: Standard Life Investments Property Income Trust Limited

LEI: 549300HHFBWZRKC7RW84



Subject: SLIPIT Purchase - 1 Station Square, Bracknell

Standard Life Investments Property Income Trust (SLIPIT) has completed the purchase of a multi let office, 1 Station Square, in Bracknell for 12m, reflecting a yield of 6.9% on the topped up rent. The office has had a substantial refurbishment, and is located adjacent to Bracknell train station, and very close to the newly opened town centre retail scheme. The building also benefits from an excellent car parking ratio. The top floor is vacant, and was subject to a rent guarantee.

Jason Baggaley, Fund Manager of SLIPIT commented "We are excited by this purchase as it provides a good quality building next to the train station and amenities, which has been refurbished to provide grade A accommodation. The top floor is vacant, but has interest from prospective tenants, and we believe that after a difficult few years Bracknell will provide scope for rental growth now the town centre has undergone major redevelopment."





All enquiries to:

Jason Baggaley

Fund Manager

Real Estate Investments

Standard Life Investments

1 George Street, Edinburgh, EH2 2LL

Tel: +44 (0)131 245 2833

jason_baggaley@standardlife.com





The Company Secretary

Northern Trust International Fund Administration Services (Guernsey) Limited

PO Box 255

Trafalgar Court

Les Banques

St Peter Port

Guernsey

GY1 3QL



Sharon Ann Williams

Tel: 01481 745436

Fax: 01481 745085


LONDON, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Sanders School children taking part in a London schools astronomy initiative have discovered three new stars, which have now been named after the young astronomers that identified them.

Their discovery formed part of the scientific initiative 'Discovery in a Week' designed by Noosphere, Yelena Baturina's educational foundation, in association with the Mayor's Fund for London. More than 20 London schools have already been involved into the project, also supported by international think-tank BE OPEN.

The newly identified stars are in the southern constellation of Compass (Pyxis) and were first spotted on the images from the 20-inch T31 telescope in Australia. The first variable star was found by Sanders School pupil Hannah Cornwell, the second by Patrick Hynes-Hamilton, with the third discovered jointly by Emily Wilkins and Alicia Farrant. All three are eclipsing binary stars of the W UMa (EW) type. The discovered stars are now officially registered in the International Variable Star Index AAVSO VSX.

By producing real scientific results 'Discovery in a Week' gives children a rewarding educational experience that broadens their intellectual horizons, while fostering a keen interest in scientific research to last for years to come. 'Discovery in a Week' encourages children from different countries to exchange their astronomical experience and ideas during regular conferences.

Yelena Baturina, Founder of Noosphere said: "I'd like to congratulate the children at Sanders School that took part and hope they will continue their voyage of discovery. The sky belongs to everyone, and by creating an international network of enthusiastic young observers we hope to promote open exchange of ideas, bring them together and improve understanding for their better future."

'Discovery in a Week' is designed to introduce young people from across London to the fascinating world of astronomy. The project brings together PHD astronomy students from the UCL's Physics and Astronomy department to mentor secondary school pupils.

The programme was made possible thanks to the Russian philanthropic foundation Noosphere in partnership with the Mayor's Fund for London, and with support from the BE OPEN foundation.Since 2008, Noosphere has conducted its educational projects across schools in India, Israel, Bulgaria, Romania and Austria.
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.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - October 6, 2017) - Secova Metals Corp. (TSXV: SEK) (FSE: N4UN) (OTC: SEKZF) ("Secova" or the "Company") is pleased to announce it has received and filed a technical report ("or Report") prepared to the standards of Canadian National Instrument ("NI") 43-101 describing the Duvay/Chenier gold project (the "Property"), located between 7 and 20 kms from Amos, Quebec. Secova holds an option to earn up to a 90% interest in the Property.

"This initial report provides the Company, its consultants and its shareholders an extensive amount of historical information that is necessary to evaluate the opportunity and pertinent to further developing the Duvay/Chenier project. After going over this Report we have a better understanding of the project and many other mineralized zones have come to light. Our current Phase 1 drilling program has already been adapted due to the information that the Report has provided us. Like the Windfall Lake project when my former company Eagle River got ahold of it, it was once a mineral project that was not fully understood yet had great potential. Through methodical approaches and utilizing advanced geophysical methods that project is now developing into one of the greatest gold camps in Canada. Our plan is to do that with the Duvay/Chenier project," comments Secova's Chairman & CEO, Brad Kitchen.

Highlights of the Initial NI 43-101 on the Duvay/Chenier Project

There are numerous historical mineralized showings reported from the Quebec government within the Property, these are titled the Duvay Zone Principal, Duvay Zone de la Fosse, Bacola, Grenadier Oeste, Grenadier, Cresus-Silverny, Villeneuve, Villeneuve VD-10, Norval, Cossette-Monpas Shear, Peter Brown, East Mac (N), and the East Mac (SE).

Over 500 historical drill holes were reported on the entire project; mostly concentrated in the Duvay Zone Principal.

Multiple bulk samples have been reported from the Duvay Zone Principal, including the three largest between 1000 and 1200 tonnes apiece, completed in 1986 by a previous property holder. These three largest bulk samples were reportedly processed to try and achieve representative sub-samples. Nine such sub-samples were analyzed by fire assay, yielding an average of 5.68 grams per tonne gold, according to reports filed with the Quebec government in 1988. The reported range of fire assay results was between 0.60 and 30.00 g/t gold. Secova cannot verify these historical results beyond what is reported in the contemporaneous assessment reports filed with the Quebec government, except to note that large pits consistent with the reported bulk samples exist on site today.

In 1990, A 40,000 tonne bulk sample was extracted from the Duvay Zone de la Fosse and processed by heap leach methods, as reported in the Northern Miner of that year. The Northern Miner (1990) reported that Sphinx poured its first dore bar containing 300 oz gold and 200 oz silver from the heap leach project and a second pour was anticipated soon when their staff visited the site in early September 1990. Further information is not available, and Secova cannot verify the results.

A copy of the report can be found on Secova's website at www.secovametals.com/duvaychenier

NI 43-101 Disclosure

Harrison Cookenboo, Ph.D., P. Geo., a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, supervised the preparation of the technical information in this news release.

About Secova Metals Corp.

Secova Metals Corp. is a Canadian gold exploration company focused on building a strong asset base through exploration of undervalued gold projects in Canada. Management has demonstrated expertise in advancing gold exploration projects into acquisition targets, most notably in the province of Quebec. Secova has the exclusive right and option to acquire from Tres-Or Resources Inc. ("Tres-Or"), an undivided 65% right, title and interest in the contiguous Duvay/Chenier Gold Projects. Secova can earn up to 90% of the property (an additional 25% ownership) by funding a pre-feasibility study after the initial exploration expenditures to bring the property towards production. The Company has a total contiguous land package of 176 claims covering over 7,766 hectares (19,193 acres) of land. Duvay/Chenier is located in the Abitibi gold belt, one of Quebec's premier mining jurisdictions. The Company has plans to advance the development of Duvay/Chenier as well as seek other avenues of growth through acquisition and mergers. The Company also has 100% ownership of the Eagle River project which is adjacent to and on-trend to several gold projects in the Windfall Lake district of Urban Barry in Quebec.

For more information on Secova Metals Corp. please contact info@secovametals.com, Tel: +1 604-558-5397 or visit the website at www.secovametals.com for past news releases, media interviews and opinion-editorial pieces by CEO and Chairman Brad Kitchen.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors,

SECOVA METALS CORP.

"Brad Kitchen"

Brad Kitchen

Chairman, CEO and Director

Tel: +1 604-558-5397

info@secovametals.com

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This press release contains "forward-looking information" that is based on the Company's current expectations, estimates, forecasts, and projections. This forward-looking information includes, among other things, statements with respect to the Company's exploration and development plans. The words "will", "anticipated", "plans" or other similar words and phrases are intended to identify forward-looking information. Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the Company's actual results, level of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information.


BRUSSELS/FRANKFURT/PARIS (dpa-AFX) - After three successive days of gains, the U.K.'s benchmark stock index FTSE 100 is slightly lower on Thursday, with a rather disappointing update from Centrica PLC, the British Gas parent, hurting sentiment.



The lowering of growth forecasts for the U.K. economy by the Chancellor of the Exchequer when he presented the budget on Wednesday appears to be outweighing some positive data on third quarter GDP growth.



The FTSE 100 index is down 3.40 points or 0.05% at 7,415.62, coming off an early low of 7,373.31.



Shares of Centrica PLC plunged more than 17% as investors pressed sales at the counter, reacting to the company's warning that its energy supply businesses have had a disappointing second half and the earning outlook that fell short of market expectations.



SSE is down 2.6 percent and Vodafone Group is declining 1.2 percent.



Meanwhile, Ashtead Group and EasyJet are advancing higher, gaining 1.3 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively.



In economic news, The UK economy expanded at a faster pace in the third quarter, driven by private consumption, second estimate from the Office for National Statistics showed Thursday. Gross domestic product grew 0.4 percent sequentially, slightly faster than the 0.3 percent expansion posted in the second quarter.



On a yearly basis, GDP growth held steady at 1.5 percent in the third quarter and in line with preliminary estimate. The service sector remained the strongest contributor to GDP growth, with output rising by unrevised 0.4 percent.



Overall production climbed by revised 1.1 percent, within which manufacturing also grew 1.1 percent. Farm output gained marginally by 0.2 percent, while construction contracted 0.9 percent.



Household spending advanced 0.6 percent and government expenditure climbed 0.3 percent, data showed. Meanwhile, gross fixed capital formation grew 0.2 percent sequentially. Total trade exports dropped 0.7 percent, while total imports increased 1.1 percent.



Unveiling the budget on Wednesday, the UK government set aside an additional GBP 3 billion over the next two years to aid the process of the country's exit from the European Union and slashed the growth forecasts for the next few years mainly due to a significant downward revision to potential productivity growth.



Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond presented fresh forecasts for the UK economy during his speech that showed sharp downward revisions to the growth outlook and said the government would commit more sums if and when needed.



The outlook for next year was slashed to 1.4 percent from 1.6 percent and the projection for 2019 was trimmed to 1.3 percent from 1.7 percent. The forecast for 2020 was slashed 1.3 percent from 1.9 percent.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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Named one of Central Florida's Top Public Companies

ORLANDO, FL / ACCESSWIRE / July 19, 2017 / Lifestyle Medical Network, Inc. (OTC PINK: LMNK) was named by Orlando Business Journal's Top Public Companies in Central Florida on June 17th, 2017. This recognition confirms managements desire to continue its growth in the medical space.

Chris Smith, CEO stated "We are honored to be named to this list and be alongside some of the largest companies around. Additionally, it is a testament to our continued drive and focus to grow our business even more into the future"

About Lifestyle Medical Network (LMNK):

Patient centric, forward thinking Managed Services and Solutions for the Healthcare Industry. Lifestyle Medical Network's services allow Healthcare Professionals to truly focus on their patient's well-being without many of the distractions of day-to-day operations. With customized solutions based on each Providers specific needs, wants and goals, Lifestyle Medical Network helps healthcare providers streamline their businesses, potentially creating better patient outcomes.

Lifestyle Medical Network

121 S. Orange Ave. Ste 1500

Orlando, FL 32801

Phone: (407) 377-6336

Web: www.lifestylemedicalnetwork.com

Contact:

Ryan Bumgardner

SVP, Marketing & Communications

Office: (407) 377-6336

Direct: (407) 421-4255

This press release contains statements, which may constitute 'forward-looking statements' within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. 'Forward-looking statements' are based upon expectations, estimates and projections at the time the statements are made that involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated. Such factors include; our ability to create, sustain, manage or forecast our growth; our ability to attract and retain key personnel; changes in our business strategy or development plans; competition; business disruptions; adverse publicity; and international, national and local general economic and market conditions.

SOURCE: Lifestyle Medical Network
TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/17 -- (All amounts are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise stated)

Teranga Gold Corporation ("Teranga" or the "Company") (TSX: TGZ)(ASX: TGZ) is pleased to announce that as at June 30, 2017 the Company's proven and probable reserves ("P&P reserves") at its Sabodala gold operation in Senegal increased to 2.7 million ounces of gold representing an increase of more than 400,000 ounces over the previous mineral reserves estimate.

Highlights of the Mid-Year 2017 Sabodala Update

-- Increases open pit reserves by over 400,000 ounces, more than replacing reserves depleted from production since the December 31, 2015 Sabodala update -- Significantly improves mine plan with gold production expected to exceed 1 million ounces in total over the next five years, or a minimum of 200,000 ounces per year through 2022(1) -- Continuing multi-year drilling program intended to further define near surface resources and reserves on the prospective Niakafiri trend -- Defers underground production until at least 2023

"The majority of the new reserves come from Niakafiri, which is located less than five kilometres from the Sabodala process plant. Niakafiri remains a highly prospective area on our mine license and we have a multi-year drill program designed to continue identifying resources and reserves," stated Richard Young, President and Chief Executive Officer. "This organic growth improves our five-year production and cash flow profile as we re-sequence the Sabodala mine plan to bring forward the development of the Niakafiri open pit deposit and defer underground development."

Added Mr. Young, "With annual gold production of at least 200,000 ounces per year through 2022, our flagship Sabodala operation is expected to provide significant cash flow to fund our long-term growth plans."

Senegal Exploration Program

The Company plans to continue drilling at both Niakafiri and Goumbati West over the next several years with the objective to further increase resources and reserves. Based on the positive exploration results to date, the Sabodala village relocation will move forward in the mine plan. The ongoing drill program is expected to run concurrently with the village relocation. Assuming continued success of this multi-year drill program, the goal is to maintain production of at least 200,000 ounces per year at Sabodala for the next ten years(2). This could result in a further deferral of underground production and associated capital expenditures of $50 million beyond 2023, if beneficial to the annual cash flows in the life of mine plan.

Open Pit and Underground Mineral Resources Summary

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Measured Indicated ----------------------------------------------- Deposit Domain Tonnes Grade Au Tonnes Grade Au ----------------------------------------------- (g/t (g/t ('000s) Au) ('000s) ('000s) Au) ('000s) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sabodala Open Pit 11,725 1.17 442 6,488 1.59 332 Underground 1,631 3.65 191 Combined 11,725 1.17 442 8,119 2.01 524 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Masato Open Pit 4,163 0.68 92 22,212 1.16 829 Underground 1,163 2.75 103 Combined 4,163 0.68 92 23,375 1.24 932 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gora Open Pit 439 2.47 35 471 8.67 131 Underground 315 5.14 52 Combined 439 2.47 35 786 7.26 183 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Golouma Open Pit 40 1.38 2 5,857 2.85 536 Underground 2,134 4.09 280 Combined 40 1.38 2 7,991 3.18 816 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kerekounda Open Pit 30 3.30 3 1,153 4.45 165 Underground 499 4.88 78 Combined 30 3.30 3 1,653 4.58 243 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Niakafiri East Open Pit 4,776 1.37 210 14,140 1.14 516 Underground 224 2.72 20 Combined 4,776 1.37 210 14,364 1.16 536 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Niakafiri West Open Pit 3,061 1.02 100 Underground 74 2.67 6 Combined 3,135 1.06 107 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Maki Medina Open Pit 2,112 1.22 83 Underground 109 2.71 10 Combined 2,221 1.30 93 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Goumbati West - Open Pit Kobokoto 2,678 1.35 116 Underground 131 3.25 14 Combined 2,809 1.44 130 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Golouma North Open Pit 170 1.32 7 Underground 14 2.64 1 Combined 184 1.42 8 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Diadiako Open Pit Underground Combined ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kinemba Open Pit 24 1.06 1 Underground Combined 24 1.06 1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Koulouqwinde Open Pit Underground Combined ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kourouloulou Open Pit 96 11.51 36 Underground 59 9.15 18 Combined 156 10.61 53 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kouroundi Open Pit 67 0.93 2 Underground Combined 67 0.93 2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Koutouniokolla Open Pit Underground ------------------------------------------------------------ Combined ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mamasato Open Pit 560 1.45 26 Underground Combined 560 1.45 26 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marougou Open Pit ------------------------------------------------------------ Underground Combined ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sekoto Open Pit Underground Combined ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Soukhoto Open Pit Underground Combined ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total Open Pit 21,174 1.15 783 59,091 1.52 2,882 Underground 6,354 3.78 773 Combined 21,174 1.15 783 65,444 1.74 3,655 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Measured and Indicated Inferred ----------------------------------------------- Deposit Domain Tonnes Grade Au Tonnes Grade Au ----------------------------------------------- (g/t (g/t ('000s) Au) ('000s) ('000s) Au) ('000s) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sabodala Open Pit 18,213 1.32 774 2,525 1.23 100 Underground 1,631 3.65 191 460 3.60 53 Combined 19,844 1.51 965 2,985 1.60 153 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Masato Open Pit 26,375 1.09 921 Underground 1,163 2.75 103 1,984 2.85 182 Combined 27,537 1.16 1,024 1,984 2.85 182 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gora Open Pit 911 5.68 166 35 5.60 6 Underground 315 5.14 52 59 4.83 9 Combined 1,226 5.54 218 95 5.12 16 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Golouma Open Pit 5,897 2.84 538 84 2.49 7 Underground 2,134 4.09 280 854 3.66 100 Combined 8,031 3.17 818 939 3.55 107 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kerekounda Open Pit 1,184 4.42 168 5 1.12 0 Underground 499 4.88 78 235 5.70 43 Combined 1,683 4.56 247 239 5.61 43 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Niakafiri East Open Pit 18,916 1.19 726 4,515 0.93 135 Underground 224 2.72 20 514 2.70 45 Combined 19,140 1.21 746 5,030 1.11 180 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Niakafiri West Open Pit 3,061 1.02 100 673 0.86 19 Underground 74 2.67 6 71 2.84 6 Combined 3,135 1.06 107 744 1.05 25 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Maki Medina Open Pit 2,112 1.22 83 114 0.81 3 Underground 109 2.71 10 85 2.54 7 Combined 2,221 1.30 93 199 1.55 10 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Goumbati West - Open Pit Kobokoto 2,678 1.35 116 498 0.81 13 Underground 131 3.25 14 79 2.90 7 Combined 2,809 1.44 130 577 1.09 20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Golouma North Open Pit 170 1.32 7 295 1.42 14 Underground 14 2.64 1 19 2.93 2 Combined 184 1.42 8 314 1.51 15 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Diadiako Open Pit 178 1.27 7 Underground 663 2.89 61 Combined 841 2.54 69 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kinemba Open Pit 24 1.06 1 91 0.95 3 Underground 56 2.52 5 Combined 24 1.06 1 147 1.55 7 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Koulouqwinde Open Pit 230 1.42 11 Underground 60 2.67 5 Combined 290 1.68 16 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kourouloulou Open Pit 96 11.51 36 22 6.71 5 Underground 59 9.15 18 86 13.58 38 Combined 156 10.61 53 108 12.18 42 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kouroundi Open Pit 67 0.93 2 42 0.74 1 Underground Combined 67 0.93 2 42 0.74 1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Koutouniokolla Open Pit 85 1.58 4 Underground 22 2.54 2 ------------------------------------------------------------ Combined 108 1.78 6 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mamasato Open Pit 560 1.45 26 305 1.25 12 Underground 42 2.32 3 Combined 560 1.45 26 347 1.38 15 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marougou Open Pit 1,198 1.41 54 ------------------------------------------------------------ Underground Combined 1,198 1.41 54 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sekoto Open Pit 485 0.89 14 Underground 25 2.11 2 Combined 510 0.95 16 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Soukhoto Open Pit 550 1.46 26 Underground Combined 550 1.46 26 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total Open Pit 80,264 1.42 3,665 11,933 1.13 434 Underground 6,354 3.78 773 5,315 3.34 570 Combined 86,618 1.59 4,438 17,247 1.81 1,004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Notes for Mineral Resources Estimates

1. CIM definitions were followed for Mineral Resources. 2. Open pit oxide Mineral Resources are estimated at a cut-off grade of 0.35 g/t Au, except for Gora and Marougou at 0.48 g/t Au. 3. Open pit transition and fresh rock Mineral Resources are estimated at a cut-off grade of 0.40 g/t Au, except for Gora and Marougou at 0.55 g/t Au. 4. Underground Mineral Resources are estimated at a cut-off grade of 2.00 g/t Au. 5. Measured Resources at Sabodala include stockpiles which total 7.2 Mt at 0.75 g/t Au for 174,000 oz. 6. Measured Resources at Masato include stockpiles which total 4.2 Mt at 0.68 g/t Au for 92,000 oz. 7. Measured Resources at Gora include stockpiles which total 0.4 Mt at 1.28 g/t Au for 15,000 oz. 8. Measured Resources at Golouma include stockpiles which total 0.04 Mt at 1.38 g/t Au for 2,000 oz. 9. Measured Resources at Kerekounda include stockpiles which total 0.03 Mt at 3.30 g/t Au for 3,000 oz. 10. High grade assays were capped at grades ranging from 1.5 g/t Au to 110 g/t Au. 11. The figures above are "Total" Mineral Resources and include Mineral Reserves. 12. Open pit shells were used to constrain open pit resources. 13. Mineral Resources are estimated using a gold price of US$1,450 per ounce. 14. Sum of individual amounts may not equal due to rounding.

Open Pit and Underground Mineral Reserves Summary

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Deposits Proven Probable ------------------------------------------------------ Tonnes Grade Au Tonnes Grade Au (Mt) (g/t) (Moz) (Mt) (g/t) (Moz) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Masato 18.62 1.10 0.66 Niakafiri East 4.61 1.32 0.20 9.92 1.10 0.35 Golouma West 4.11 1.91 0.25 Sabodala 2.04 1.56 0.10 3.18 1.33 0.14 Gora 0.82 5.25 0.14 Kerekounda 0.53 4.71 0.08 Goumbati West and Kobokoto 1.42 1.31 0.06 Maki Medina 0.98 1.12 0.04 Niakafiri West 1.20 1.06 0.04 Golouma South 0.24 3.23 0.02 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subtotal Open Pit 6.65 1.39 0.30 41.02 1.35 1.78 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stockpiles 11.80 0.75 0.28 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total Open Pit with Stockpiles (OP) 18.45 0.98 0.58 41.02 1.35 1.78 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Golouma West 1 0.62 6.07 0.12 Kerekounda 0.61 4.95 0.10 Golouma West 2 0.45 4.39 0.06 Golouma South 0.47 4.28 0.06 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subtotal Underground (UG) 2.15 5.01 0.35 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- TOTAL OPEN PIT & UNDERGROUND 18.45 0.98 0.58 43.17 1.53 2.12 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- Deposits Proven and Probable --------------------------- Tonnes Grade Au (Mt) (g/t) (Moz) ------------------------------------------------- Masato 18.62 1.10 0.66 Niakafiri East 14.53 1.17 0.55 Golouma West 4.11 1.91 0.25 Sabodala 5.22 1.42 0.24 Gora 0.82 5.25 0.14 Kerekounda 0.53 4.71 0.08 Goumbati West and Kobokoto 1.42 1.31 0.06 Maki Medina 0.98 1.12 0.04 Niakafiri West 1.20 1.06 0.04 Golouma South 0.24 3.23 0.02 ------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- Subtotal Open Pit 47.66 1.35 2.07 ------------------------------------------------- Stockpiles 11.80 0.75 0.28 ------------------------------------------------- Total Open Pit with Stockpiles (OP) 59.47 1.23 2.36 ------------------------------------------------- Golouma West 1 0.62 6.07 0.12 Kerekounda 0.61 4.95 0.10 Golouma West 2 0.45 4.39 0.06 Golouma South 0.47 4.28 0.06 ------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- Subtotal Underground (UG) 2.15 5.01 0.35 ------------------------------------------------- TOTAL OPEN PIT & UNDERGROUND 61.62 1.37 2.70 -------------------------------------------------

Notes for Mineral Reserves Estimates

1. CIM definitions were followed for Mineral Reserves. 2. Mineral Reserve cut-off grades range from 0.38 g/t to 0.57 g/t Au for oxide and 0.44 g/t to 0.63 g/t Au for fresh rock based on a $1,200/oz gold price. 3. Underground Mineral Reserve cut-off grades range from 2.3 g/t to 2.6 g/t Au based on a $1,200/oz gold price. 4. Mineral Reserves account for mining dilution and mining ore loss. 5. Proven Mineral Reserves are based on Measured Mineral Resources only. 6. Probable Mineral Reserves are based on Indicated Mineral Resources only. 7. Sum of individual amounts may not equal due to rounding. 8. The Niakafiri East and West deposits are adjacent to the Sabodala village and relocation of at least some portion of the village will be required which will necessitate a negotiated resettlement program with the affected community members.

Competent Persons Statements

The technical information contained in this document relating to the open pit mineral reserve estimates is based on, and fairly represents, information compiled by Mr. Stephen Ling, P. Eng who is a member of the Professional Engineers Ontario, which is currently included as a "Recognized Overseas Professional Organization" in a list promulgated by the ASX from time to time. Mr. Ling is a full time employee of Teranga and is not "independent" within the meaning of National Instrument 43-101. However, he is a "Qualified Person" as defined in NI 43-101. Mr. Ling has sufficient experience which is relevant to the style of mineralisation and type of deposit under consideration and to the activity which he is undertaking 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 (the "JORC Code"). Mr. Ling is a "Qualified Person" under National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. Mr. Ling has consented to the inclusion in this document of the matters based on his compiled information in the form and context in which it appears in this document.

The technical information contained in this document relating to mineral resource estimates for Niakafiri is based on, and fairly represents, information compiled by Ms. Patti Nakai-Lajoie. Ms. Nakai-Lajoie, P. Geo., is a Member of the Association of Professional Geoscientists of Ontario, which is currently included as a "Recognized Overseas Professional Organization" in a list promulgated by the ASX from time to time. Ms. Nakai-Lajoie is a full time employee of Teranga and is not "independent" within the meaning of National Instrument 43-101. Ms. Nakai-Lajoie has sufficient experience which is relevant to the style of mineralisation and type of deposit under consideration and to the activity which she is undertaking to qualify as a Competent Person as defined in the 2012 Edition of the JORC Code. Ms. Nakai-Lajoie is a "Qualified Person" under National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. Ms. Nakai-Lajoie has consented to the inclusion in this document of the matters based on her compiled information in the form and context in which it appears in this document.

The technical information contained in this document relating to the underground ore reserves estimates is based on, and fairly represents, information compiled by Jeff Sepp, P. Eng who is a member of the Professional Engineers Ontario, which is currently included as a "Recognized Overseas Professional Organization" in a list promulgated by the ASX from time to time. Mr. Sepp is independent of Teranga and is a "Qualified Person" as defined in NI 43-101 and a "competent person" as defined in the 2012 Edition of the JORC Code. Mr. Sepp has sufficient experience relevant to the style of mineralization and type of deposit under consideration and to the activity he is undertaking to qualify as a Competent Person as defined in the 2012 Edition of the JORC Code. Mr. Sepp has consented to the inclusion in this document of the matters based on his compiled information in the form and context in which it appears in this document.

Teranga's exploration programs are being managed by Peter Mann, FAusIMM. Mr. Mann is a full time employee of Teranga and is not "independent" within the meaning of National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Mann has sufficient experience which is relevant to the style of mineralisation and type of deposit under consideration and to the activity which he is undertaking to qualify as a Competent Person as defined in the 2012 Edition of the JORC Code. Mr. Mann is a "Qualified Person" under National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. The technical information contained in this news release relating exploration results are based on, and fairly represents, information compiled by Mr. Mann. Mr. Mann has verified and approved the data disclosed in this release, including the sampling, analytical and test data underlying the information. The RC samples are prepared at site and assayed in the SGS laboratory located at the site. Analysis for diamond drilling is sent for fire assay analysis at ALS Johannesburg, South Africa. Mr. Mann has consented to the inclusion in this news release of the matters based on his compiled information in the form and context in which it appears herein.

Teranga's disclosure of mineral reserve and mineral resource information is governed by NI 43-101 under the guidelines set out in the Canadian Institute of Mining, 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 by the CIM ("CIM Standards"). CIM definitions of the terms "mineral reserve", "proven mineral reserve", "probable mineral reserve", "mineral resource", "measured mineral resource", "indicated mineral resource" and "inferred mineral resource", are substantially similar to the JORC Code corresponding definitions of the terms "ore reserve", "proved ore reserve", "probable ore reserve", "mineral resource", "measured mineral resource", "indicated mineral resource" and "inferred mineral resource", respectively. Estimates of mineral resources and mineral reserves prepared in accordance with the JORC Code would not be materially different if prepared in accordance with the CIM definitions applicable under NI 43-101. There can be no assurance that those portions of mineral resources that are not mineral reserves will ultimately be converted into mineral reserves. See the Appendix for the JORC Code explanations relating to the results in this press release.

Endnotes

1. This production target is based on proven and probable reserves only from the Sabodala project. The estimated ore reserves underpinning this production target have been prepared by a competent person or persons (see Competent Persons Statements above). 2. This production target of 200,000 ounces per year for an additional 5- year period beyond 2022, is based on proven and probable ore reserves of 2.7 million ounces and the anticipated conversion of approximately 500,000 ounces of measured and indicated resources at an average grade of approximately 1.5 grams per tonne.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain statements that constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws ("forward-looking statements"), which reflects management's expectations regarding Teranga's future growth, results of operations (including, without limitation, future production and capital expenditures), performance (both operational and financial) and business prospects (including the timing and development of new deposits and the success of exploration activities) and opportunities. Wherever possible, words such as "objective to", "likely", "intend to", "potential", "belief", "believe", "expects", "estimates", "plans", "anticipated", "ability" and similar expressions or statements that certain actions, events or results "should", or "will" have been used to identify such forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements include, without limitation, all disclosure regarding possible events, conditions or results of operations, future economic conditions and anticipated courses of action. Although the forward-looking statements contained in this press release reflect management's current beliefs based upon information currently available to management and based upon what management believes to be reasonable assumptions, Teranga cannot be certain that actual results will be consistent with such forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are based upon assumptions, opinions and analysis made by management in light of its experience, current conditions and its expectations of future developments that management believe to be reasonable and relevant but that may prove to be incorrect. These assumptions include, among other things, the ability to obtain any requisite governmental approvals, the accuracy of mineral reserve and mineral resource estimates, gold price, exchange rates, fuel and energy costs, future economic conditions, the ability to resettle the community within anticipated timeline, anticipated future estimates of free cash flow, and courses of action. Teranga cautions you not to place undue reliance upon any such forward-looking statements.

The risks and uncertainties that may affect forward-looking statements include, among others: the inherent risks involved in exploration and development of mineral properties, including government approvals and permitting, changes in economic conditions, changes in the worldwide price of gold and other key inputs, changes in mine plans and other factors, such as project execution delays, many of which are beyond the control of Teranga, as well as other risks and uncertainties which are more fully described in Teranga's Annual Information Form dated March 30, 2017, and in other filings of Teranga with securities and regulatory authorities which are available at www.sedar.com. Teranga does not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements should assumptions related to these plans, estimates, projections, beliefs and opinions change. Nothing in this document should be construed as either an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy or sell Teranga securities. All references to Teranga include its subsidiaries unless the context requires otherwise.

About Teranga

Teranga is a multi-jurisdictional West African gold company focused on production and development as well as the exploration of more than 5,000km2 of land located on prospective gold belts. Since its initial public offering in 2010, Teranga has produced more than 1.2 million ounces of gold from its operations in Senegal. Focused on diversification and growth, the Company is advancing its Banfora development project and conducting extensive exploration programs in three countries. Teranga has a strong balance sheet and the financial flexibility to continue to grow its business.

Steadfast in its commitment to set the benchmark for responsible mining, Teranga operates in accordance with the highest international standards and aims to act as a catalyst for sustainable economic, environmental, and community development as it strives to create value for all of its stakeholders. Teranga is a member of the United Nations Global Compact and a leading member of the multi-stakeholder group responsible for the submission of the first Senegalese Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative revenue report. The Company's responsibility report, is available at www.terangagold.com/responsibilityreport and is prepared in accordance with its commitments under the United Nations Global Compact and in alignment with the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines.

Contacts:

Teranga Gold Corporation

Richard Young

President & CEO

+1 416-594-0000

ryoung@terangagold.com



Teranga Gold Corporation

Trish Moran

Head of Investor Relations

+1 416-564-4290

tmoran@terangagold.com

www.terangagold.com




Research Desk Line-up: Northern Technologies Intl. Post Earnings Coverage

LONDON, UK / ACCESSWIRE / July 21, 2017 / Pro-Trader Daily takes a look at the latest corporate events and news making the headlines for Axalta Coating Systems Ltd (NYSE: AXTA), following which we have published a free report that can be viewed by signing up at http://protraderdaily.com/optin/'symbol=AXTA. The Philadelphia based Company, which is a leading global supplier of liquid and powder coatings, announced on July 19, 2017, that it has made a binding offer to acquire the European and Chinese operations of IVA from its parent company Superior Essex. IVA is one of the leading wire enamel manufacturers of the world. For immediate access to our complimentary reports, including today's coverage, register for free now at:

http://protraderdaily.com/register/

Discover more of our free reports coverage from other companies within the Specialty Chemicals industry. Pro-TD has currently selected Northern Technologies International Corporation (NASDAQ: NTIC) for due-diligence and potential coverage as the Company reported on July 13, 2017, its financial results for Q3 FY17. Tune into our site to register for a free membership, and be among the early birds that get our report on Northern Technologies Intl. when we publish it.

At Pro-TD, we make it our mission to bring you news that matter about the stock you follow. Today, our research desk covers a blog story on AXTA; also brushing on NTIC. Go directly to your stock of interest and access today's free coverage at:

http://protraderdaily.com/optin/'symbol=AXTA

http://protraderdaily.com/optin/'symbol=NTIC

About IVA

IVA has been in operation since the late 1930's. The Company develops and produces the latest innovations in wire enamels used to insulate electrical equipment and components. IVA is well known for its broad portfolio of high performance, high-quality wire enamels including top coats and self-bonding products.

Offering Customers Enhanced Insulating Enamel Solutions

Michael Glomp, Axalta's Global Vice President of Energy Solutions, stated:

"We look forward to welcoming IVA into Axalta. IVA's single-minded focus on continuous innovation, quality, and customer fulfillment is well aligned with Axalta's values, and we look forward to offering our customers enhanced insulating enamel solutions at the cutting edge of magnet and electrical wiring technology."

Commenting on the development, Brian Kim, Chief Executive Officer of Superior Essex, commented:

"The sale of IVA France and IVA China will allow Superior Essex to focus on its core competencies, while creating an opportunity for IVA to further enhance its enamel solutions and offerings in partnership with Axalta. We are excited to see all that this partnership will bring to the marketplace."

Approvals from Concerned Authorities

The transaction is expected to be completed at the end of 2017 or early 2018 and is subject to approval by certain regulatory authorities, IVA's French employee works council and other customary closing conditions. Financial terms of the transaction remain undisclosed.

IVA's manufacturing sites in Meyzieu, France and Changzhou, China, which is operated through a joint venture with a local minority partner, will be a part of the transaction.

Other Acquisitions in 2017

On June 01, 2017, Axalta announced the acquisition of The Valspar Corporation (VAL)'s North American Industrial Wood Coatings business, one of the leading providers of coatings for OEMs and distributors engaged in industrial wood markets, for $420 million. Following the acquisition, the brands of VAL, including Zenith, UltraguardTM, LifeshieldTM, and Color Choice, have become a part of Axalta's portfolio of Performance Coatings products and services.

Axalta acquired UK-based Spencer Coatings, a leading manufacturer of high-performance industrial coatings for heavy-duty equipment, general industrial, oil and gas, and glass coatings segments, on June 06, 2017. Spencer's line of industrial products joined Axalta's portfolio of Performance Coatings for industrial customers, enabling Axalta to serve existing customers in the UK and expand into new geographies.

About Axalta Coating Systems

Founded in 1866, Axalta Coating Systems is a leading global company focused solely on coatings and providing customers with innovative, colorful, beautiful, and sustainable solutions. The Company has two business segments: performance coatings and transportation coatings. Axalta serves more than 100,000 customers in 130 countries every day with the finest coatings, application systems, and technology.

Last Close Stock Review

At the closing bell, on Thursday, July 20, 2017, Axalta Coating Systems' stock dropped 1.61%, ending the trading session at $33.00. A total volume of 1.50 million shares have exchanged hands. The Company's stock price surged 4.17% in the last three months, 15.38% in the past six months, and 16.86% in the previous twelve months. Moreover, the stock rallied 21.32% since the start of the year. The stock is trading at a PE ratio of 107.14 and currently, has a market cap of $7.92 billion.

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Regulatory News:

International Flavors Fragrances Inc. (NYSE:IFF) (Euronext Paris: IFF), a leading innovator of sensory experiences that move the world, announced that it will release its second quarter 2017 earnings results following the market close on Tuesday, August 8, 2017. The management team will host a live webcast on Wednesday, August 9, 2017 at 10:00 a.m. EDT to discuss results and outlook with the investor community.

Investors may access the live webcast and accompanying slide presentation on the Company's website at ir.iff.com. For those unable to listen to the live webcast, a recorded version will be made available for replay.

Meet IFF

International Flavors Fragrances Inc. (NYSE:IFF) (Euronext Paris: IFF) is a leading innovator of sensorial experiences that move the world. At the heart of our company, we are fueled by a sense of discovery, constantly asking "what if?". That passion for exploration drives us to co-create unique products that consumers taste, smell, or feel in beloved foods and beverages, iconic fine fragrances and household goods, as well as indispensable personal and skincare products. Our 7,400 team members globally take advantage of leading consumer insights, research and development, creative expertise, and customer intimacy to develop differentiated offerings for consumer products. Learn more at www.iff.com, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170724006173/en/

Contacts:

International Flavors Fragrances Inc.

Michael DeVeau, 212-708-7164

VP, Global Corporate Communications and Investor Relations

Michael.DeVeau@iff.com
SEOUL (dpa-AFX) - Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (SMSN.L, SSNNF.OB, SSNLF.OB) launched Bixby voice capabilities for U.S. English in the United States and Korea. Bixby's added functionality will let users seamlessly navigate their phones and easily switch between voice commands, touch, vision and text. Bixby is an intelligent interface available on the Galaxy S8 and S8+ that makes interacting with your device, services and apps more instinctive and seamless. With full voice capabilities for U.S. English, Bixby can help users get more out of their connected lives. With voice capabilities, Galaxy S8 and S8+ users can easily activate voice commands to get more done in their day - simply and efficiently. The company noted that users can ask Bixby to complete simple tasks, like turning on the flashlight or taking a selfie, or complex tasks, like 'remind me to pick up milk at the grocery store,' or 'find photos I took in Spain and create an album called 'Vacation.' At launch, Bixby will be fully integrated across core Samsung apps, so almost anything you could do with touch or typing, users can now do with their voice, including multi-step, and cross-app requests. The company noted that Voice capabilities for Bixby can be activated by pushing the dedicated Bixby hardware button located on the side of the Galaxy S8 and S8+, or by simply saying 'Hi Bixby.' Bixby understands natural language, so users can complete tasks by using everyday speech, rather than pre-set and inflexible commands. Through iterative deep learning technology, Bixby can improve over time to recognize the user's different preferences and ways of speaking. Galaxy S8 and S8+ users in the U.S. can start using Bixby's voice service immediately by updating the application to the latest software version. Bixby's voice capabilities are currently available in Korean and U.S. English in South Korea and the United States on the Galaxy S8 and S8+. Samsung noted that it will continuously expand this service with additional languages and devices in the near future. 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.
TOKYO (dpa-AFX) - The Japanese government maintained its economic view on Wednesday, reiterating that the economy is on a moderate recovery. The government retained its view on private consumption, business investment, exports, industrial production and corporate profits. Assessment of employment and consumer prices were also kept unchanged. In June, the cabinet office had upgraded its overall assessment for the first time in six months. In the short term, the government said the economy is expected to recover, supported by the effects of the policies, while employment and income situation is improving. However, attention should be given to the uncertainty in overseas economies and the effects of fluctuations in the financial and capital markets, the government said. 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.
WASHINGTON, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Venture Global LNG announces the hiring of Tom Earl as the company's Chief Commercial Officer. Prior to joining the company, Tom served as Vice President of Development for Total S.A., focusing on developing its global LNG business.

Tom represented Total in its recent and highly regarded expansion into new LNG markets, including international LNG terminal projects and new downstream asset transactions. Previously at Total, Tom represented the company in its US LNG liquefaction transactions from 2012 to 2015. Before that, he was Head of Electricity Trading at Total where he led a significant expansion into newly opened power markets across Europe. He joined Total in 1998.

Mike Sabel co-CEO of Venture Global LNG remarked, "Tom is an excellent addition to the leadership of Venture Global LNG. He is one of the most recognized figures in LNG markets and will be an important addition to our team." Bob Pender, co-CEO added, "Tom understands the global LNG market from the vantage point of one of the world's largest IOCs and sees the value that Venture Global LNG brings to a changing global gas market."

Tom Earl added, "I am excited about the future at Venture Global LNG as an important low-cost supplier for a growing global LNG market."

Mr. Earl will serve as the Chief Commercial Officer of VG LNG, Marketing LLC. from London, U.K.

About Venture Global LNG

Venture Global LNG plans to be a long-term, low-cost producer of LNG, capitalizing on low-cost natural gas production in the U.S. Venture Global is developing LNG export terminals at both Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines, totaling 30 MTPA of anticipated nameplate capacity. More can be found atwww.venturegloballng.com.
OTTAWA, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/17 -- Tetra Bio-Pharma Inc. ("Tetra" or the "Company") (CSE: TBP)(CSE: TBP.CN)(CNSX: TBP)(OTCQB: TBPMF), announced today it has signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) with Constance Therapeutics, Inc. of San Francisco, California, USA, for the clinical development and commercialization in Canada of its signature standardized, patent-pending, medicinal cannabis extract products.

The AgroTek Health subsidiary of Tetra will work with Constance Therapeutics to bring these products to the Canadian medical marijuana market under a commercial license agreement. "Over the coming months, the corporation will be focusing its energy on generating revenues while becoming an important player in the medical marijuana market," commented Mr. Andre Rancourt, CEO of Tetra. "The products developed by Constance Therapeutics are exactly what the corporation is looking for in terms of novel cannabis products developed for patients. The approach used by Constance Therapeutics is exactly the type of business model that Tetra is implementing to bring medical marijuana products to patients."

"Constance Therapeutics works in conjunction with physicians and medical professionals to provide integrative medicinal options to those suffering from serious conditions, such as cancer, lyme, auto-immune, chronic pain, neurodegenerative diseases, and other out-of-option patients," commented Constance Finley, Founder and CEO of Constance Therapeutics, Inc. She added, "over the years, research demonstrates that cannabinoids including specific terpenes, reduce and inhibit tumor growth in various animal models. Early clinical studies suggest cannabinoids enhance the effects of traditional cancer treatments with radiation therapy and help reduce the size of brain cancers, such as Glioma, compared to controls."

Tetra will enter into a licensing agreement with Constance Therapeutics to perform clinical research on the novel cannabis extract products initially focusing on their use in treating patients with brain cancer. Tetra will work closely with oncologists to evaluate the therapeutic benefit of these products according to pharmaceutical standards.

These products are currently available to patients living in California, USA and are consumed sublingually and through vaporization. As part of its mission to bring effective cannabinoid-based products to cancer patients, Tetra will be working in partnership with Constance Therapeutics to investigate the potential efficacy in a clinical trial.

About Constance Therapeutics:

Constance Therapeutics, Inc. is a manufacturer and licensor of cannabis products designed to enable medical professionals offer their patients a broader array of treatment options. The products fill the gap between traditional pharmaceuticals and commonplace cannabis products through manufacturing protocols using highly controlled, quantitatively-defined and patented processes. The products are third-party tested in the industry's most respected laboratories. Since 2008, the company has employed stringent, science-based processes and standards to ensure the highest quality and consistency. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Constance Therapeutics' products have historically been accessed exclusively for therapeutic use and could only be purchased by registered California patients, in keeping with Proposition 215, and California Senate Bill 420. For further information, visit: www.constancetherapeutics.com.

About Tetra Bio-Pharma:

Tetra Bio-Pharma is a multi subsidiary publicly traded company (CSE: TBP)(CSE: TBP.CN)(CNSX: TBP)(OTCQB: TBPMF) engaged in the development of Bio Pharmaceuticals and Natural Health Products containing Cannabis and other medicinal plant based elements.

Tetra Bio-Pharma is focused on combining the traditional methods of medicinal cannabis use with the supporting scientific validation and safety data required for inclusion into the existing bio pharma industry by regulators physicians and insurance companies. More information is available about the company at: www.tetrabiopharma.com.

Source: Tetra Bio-Pharma

The Canadian Securities Exchange ("CSE") has not reviewed this news release and does not accept responsibility for its adequacy or accuracy.

Forward-looking statements

Some statements in this release may contain forward-looking information. All statements, other than of historical fact, that address activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future (including, without limitation, statements regarding potential acquisitions and financings) are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are generally identifiable by use of the words "may", "will", "should", "continue", "expect", "anticipate", "estimate", "believe", "intend", "plan" or "project" or the negative of these words or other variations on these words or comparable terminology. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company's ability to control or predict, that may cause the actual results of the Company to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, without limitation, the inability of the Company, through its wholly-owned subsidiary, GrowPros MMP Inc., to obtain a licence for the production of medical marijuana; failure to obtain sufficient financing to execute the Company's business plan; competition; regulation and anticipated and unanticipated costs and delays, and other risks disclosed in the Company's public disclosure record on file with the relevant securities regulatory authorities. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause results or events not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements included in this news release are made as of the date of this news release and the Company does not undertake an obligation to publicly update such forward-looking statements to reflect new information, subsequent events or otherwise unless required by applicable securities legislation.

Contacts:

Tetra Bio-Pharma Inc.

Edward Miller

Vice President, IR & Corporate Communications

(514) 360-8040 Ext. 203

edward@tetrabiopharma.com




MISSISSAUGA, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/17 -- goeasy Ltd. (TSX: GSY), ("goeasy" or the "Company"), a leading full-service provider of goods and alternative financial services that improve the lives of everyday Canadians, will hold a conference call with shareholders, analysts, and portfolio managers on Wednesday, August 2, 2017. A Press Release will be issued after the market closes on Tuesday, August 1, 2017.

Date: Wednesday, August 2, 2017 Time: 11:00am EST Dial-in (toll-free): 1-866-219-5269 Passcode: 51457785 please dial in the passcode, followed by # to enter the call Webcast: http://investors.goeasy.com/

Media are invited to listen to the call by telephone or through the webcast. For questions, media may contact David Ingram, President and CEO or Steve Goertz, CFO at 905-272-2788.

After the conference call, a recording will be available until August 16, 2017 by calling 1-855-859-2056 and entering passcode number 51457785.

goeasy Ltd. is a leading full-service provider of goods and alternative financial services that improve the lives of everyday Canadians. Today, goeasy Ltd. serves its customers through two key operating divisions, easyfinancial and easyhome. easyfinancial is a non-prime consumer lender that bridges the gap between traditional financial institutions and costly payday lenders. It is supported by a strong central credit adjudication process and industry leading risk analytics. easyfinancial also operates an indirect lending channel, offering loan products to consumers at the point-of-sale of third party merchants. easyhome is Canada's largest lease-to-own company, offering brand-name household furniture, appliances and electronics to consumers under weekly or monthly leasing agreements through both corporate and franchise stores. Both operating divisions of goeasy Ltd. offer the highest level of customer service and enable customers to transact through a national store and branch network of over 200 easyfinancial and 170 easyhome locations across Canada and through its online and mobile eCommerce enabled platforms.

goeasy Ltd. is listed on the TSX under the symbol 'GSY'. For more information, visit www.goeasy.com.

Contacts:

goeasy Ltd.

David Ingram

President and Chief Executive Officer

(905) 272-2788



goeasy Ltd.

Steve Goertz

Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

(905) 272-2788




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/17 -- Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. (TSX: IVN)(OTCQX: IVPAF) -

An initial story published by Bloomberg News on July 18, 2017, misleads readers with its headline, erroneous reporting and the omission of critical contextual facts that were known to the news organization.

A second story, also published on July 18, contains a false allegation by Bloomberg that Ivanhoe Mines had corrected as part of a detailed statement of facts delivered to Bloomberg seven weeks ago.

On May 26, 2017, Ivanhoe Mines provided a letter to Bloomberg reporter Thomas Wilson that set out critical information related to a planned story that subsequently was published by Bloomberg early on July 18. It became apparent after the story was published that much of Ivanhoe's factual information had been excluded, which Bloomberg indicated was due to "the limitations of the length of the story." Of course, this deliberate withholding of critical details was not revealed to Bloomberg's readers, according to Ivanhoe Mines.

A review of the facts shows that Bloomberg's omission of information makes the initial story misleading and one-sided. Basic journalistic principles of truth, accuracy and balance never should be compromised, particularly just to satisfy a predetermined limit on a story's length, according to Ivanhoe Mines.

This public statement by Ivanhoe Mines is intended to provide readers with relevant information ignored by Bloomberg's reportorial short-cuts that sacrificed facts and completeness in an apparent determination to sensationalize. Bloomberg's tactics succeeded in misrepresenting Ivanhoe Mines and its business successes in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in a prejudiced and harmful manner.

The truth, also not acknowledged by Bloomberg, is that Ivanhoe's significant successes in the DRC have been founded on a 14-year commitment to international standards of professional exploration along the Central African Copperbelt. The facts prove that Ivanhoe's first discovery in 2008, and subsequent discoveries, had nothing to do with relatively recent business transactions, as alleged by Bloomberg.

The full text of the Ivanhoe Mines statement is available on the Ivanhoe Mines website and may be accessed through the following link: https://www.ivanhoemines.com/news/2017/ivanhoe-mines-says-bloomberg-stories-on-ivanhoes-success-in-the-democratic-republic-of-congo-are-flawed-by-a-deceptive-headline/

Contacts:

Investors

Bill Trenaman

+1.604.331.9834



Media

North America: Bob Williamson

+1.604.512.4856



Media

South Africa: Jeremy Michaels

+27.82.939.4812

www.ivanhoemines.com






CAMDEN (dpa-AFX) - Campbell Soup Company (CPB) said that it reaffirmed its previous full-year guidance for fiscal 2017. For the year, Campbell continues to expect net sales to change by -1 to 0 percent; adjusted Earnings Before Interest and Taxes or EBIT to increase by 2 to 4 percent; and adjusted Earnings Per Share to increase by 3 to 5 percent, or $3.04 to $3.09 per share. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect the company to report earnings of $3.05 per share for fiscal year 2017. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items.



Campbell plans to provide fiscal 2018 guidance for net sales, adjusted EBIT and adjusted EPS when it reports fourth-quarter fiscal 2017 results on August 31, 2017.



Campbell expects to reach approximately $310 million in annual cost savings by the end of fiscal 2017. The company also continues to expect its current cost savings initiatives to deliver $450 million, or approximately 6 percent of sales, in annual savings by the end of fiscal 2020. This cost savings goal is incremental to the company's ongoing supply chain productivity program. Campbell expects an adjusted gross margin of approximately 38 percent for fiscal 2017, and expects to generate approximately $1.25 billion in cash flow from operations in fiscal 2017.



Campbell reiterated its long-term targets for organic sales and earnings. The company targets long-term organic sales growth of 1 to 3 percent. Excluding currency translation, the company is targeting adjusted EBIT growth of 4 to 6 percent and adjusted EPS growth of 5 to 7 percent.



Campbell Soup Company, led by President and Chief Executive Officer Denise Morrison, will meet with investors today to discuss Campbell's strategic imperatives.



Management will provide an overview of Campbell's plans for its three divisions for the upcoming fiscal year, as well as review the company's cost savings initiatives and plans to reinvest in the business.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/17 -- Dividend Select 15 Corp. (The "Company") declares its monthly distribution of $0.06983 per Equity share. The distribution is payable August 10, 2017 to shareholders on record as of July 31, 2017.

Under the distribution policy announced in September 2014, the monthly dividend payable on the Equity shares is determined by applying a 10.00% annualized rate on the volume weighted average market price (VWAP) of the Equity shares over the last 3 trading days of the preceding month. As a result, Equity shareholders of record on July 31, 2017 will receive a dividend of $0.06983 per share based on the VWAP of $8.38 payable on August 10, 2017. The yield will remain stable at 10.00% (based on the VWAP) under this distribution policy.

Since inception, Equity shareholders have received a total of $5.25 per share inclusive of this distribution.

The Company invests in a portfolio of 15 Canadian companies selected from the following 20 company universe which are among the highest Canadian dividend yielding stocks.

Bank of Montreal Great West Lifeco inc. TELUS Corporation BCE Inc. Husky Energy Inc. The Bank of Nova Scotia CIBC National Bank of Canada The Toronto-Dominion Bank CI Financial Corp. Power Corporation of Canada Thomson Reuters Corporation Enbridge Inc. Royal Bank of Canada TMX Group Inc. EnCana Coproration Loblaw Companies Limited TransAlta Corporation Sun Life Financial Inc. TransCanada Corporation -------------------------------------------------------- Distribution Details Equity Share (DS) $0.06983 Ex-Dividend Date: July 27, 2017 Record Date: July 31,2017 Payable Date: August 10,2017 --------------------------------------------------------

Contacts:

Investor Relations:

1-877-478-2372

Local: 416-304-4443

www.dividendselect15.com

info@quadravest.com




Manufacturers of Consumer and Industrial Products gain Increased Replenishment Efficiency



CINCINNATI, 2017-07-19 15:00 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Datalliance's latest update to its cloud-based Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) platform makes it easier for manufacturers of consumer or industrial products to manage inventory replenishment for retailers and distributors. These enhancements - driven by feedback from its global user base and Datalliance's vision for the future of VMI - focus on making the user-experience even more flexible and intuitive.



Because the Datalliance VMI platform is cloud-based, these upgrades are available for immediate use by Datalliance customers and their trading partners. Datalliance releases all platform-wide updates at no cost, and there's never a need to install or download software updates. This is the second of three major releases Datalliance plans for the year. Since Datalliance's founding, more than 50 releases have been delivered.



Highlights of enhancements in this release include:



-- Order Workbench: New generation order worksheet with layout and content refinements as well as personalization capabilities such as filtering, column pinning, dynamic sort, user-selected grid data, tabs and other ease-of-use enhancements that improve user productivity in this primary VMI planner interface. -- Product Activity Handling: New generation user interface, process flow and resolution options for handling system-identified errors in trading partner activity reporting. Again, improving planner speed and productivity for daily tasks. -- Event Management: Enhanced event details gives users access to more information, and personalized user-views enable even more productive "one-stop" promotion event management. -- Master Item Management: Extended capabilities and enhanced user-interface enable more efficient management of product family rotations and transitions across multiple replenishment locations.



As with every release, a number of general technical and performance enhancements have been included to support overall system scalability, reliability and availability.



At its recent annual forum, Datalliance customers who had beta-tested some of the enhancements gave rave reviews. One user stated: "Datalliance is always doing things to further improve user productivity with process automation and user interface refinements. We always appreciate that, but they really took some big steps with this release - especially in the order worksheet where we do most of our daily work. Not only does it enable us to work faster, but it will also enable us to train new planners more quickly."



About Datalliance



Datalliance is the world's largest provider of technology and services to support collaborative replenishment programs such as Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) and related approaches. Delivered as a cloud-based platform backed by extensive customer care, Datalliance makes it easy for trading partners to establish inventory management relationships that increase sales and profits by fully aligning business objectives, increasing on-shelf availability, optimizing turns, and reducing supply chain costs. Datalliance manages billions of dollars in orders, millions of SKUs, and tens of thousands of locations worldwide for leading companies in consumer and industrial markets. For more information about Datalliance, visit www.datalliance.com.



Contact: Brian Lindner, Datalliance 513-791-7272

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DETROIT, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Stratview Research announces the launch of a new research report onGlobal Automotive Composite Suspension Components Market by Component Type (Leaf Spring, Coil Spring, Suspension Arm, Stabilizer Bar, and Others), by Vehicle Type (Passenger Car, Light Commercial Vehicle, Medium & Heavy Duty Commercial Vehicle, and Others), by Manufacturing Process Type (Compression Molding, HP-RTM, Prepreg Layup, and Others), and by Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World), Trend, Forecast, Competitive Analysis, and Growth Opportunity: 2017-2022.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160831/402975LOGO )

This market report, from Stratview Research, studies the composite suspension components market in the global automotiveindustry over the period 2011 to 2022. The report provides detailed insights on the market dynamics to enable informed business decision making and growth strategy formulation based on the opportunities present in the market.

Composite Suspension Components Market in the Global AutomotiveIndustry: Highlights

As per Stratview Research, the global composite suspension components market offers an impressive during the forecast period of 2017 to 2022 and reach US$ 83.7 million in 2022, which offers an opportunity to the automotive and composites industry players to align themselves with the market growth.

There are several factors bolstering the growth of composite suspension components in the global automotive industry. The author of the report cited organic growth of automobile production, growing preference for composite components in passenger and light commercial vehicles, development of new composite suspension applications, an advancement in the composites technology, and stringent government regulations regarding fuel efficiency and carbon emission reductions as the major growth drivers of the market.

Composite leaf springs are expected to remain the largest segment in the global automotive suspension components market during the forecast period. Composite leaf springs are mainly used in passenger cars and light commercial vehicles.Pickup, Van, and SUVs are the major vehicle types that are using composite leaf springs on either transversal or longitudinal position depending on requirements, vehicle design, etc.

LCV, currently, dominates the global automotive composite suspension components market because of higher usage of composite leaf springs in LCVs. However, passenger car segment is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period, driven by an increasing usage of leaf springs and coil springs.

Register Here for a Free Sample of the Report

In terms of region, Europe is expected to remain the largest market for composite suspension components in the automotive industry over the next five years, driven by higher usage of composite leaf springs in LCVs. Asia-Pacific is a relatively small market but is expected to experience the highest growth during the same period.

As per the study, the global automotive composite suspension components market is highly consolidated with the presence of less than a dozen global players. The key composite component manufacturers for suspension system are Liteflex LLC, IFC Composite GmbH, Benteler-SGL, and Sogefi Group. New product development, capacity expansion, and process optimization are the key strategies adopted by the majorplayers to gain a competitive edge in the market.

Report Features

This report provides market intelligence in the most comprehensive way. The report structure has been kept such that it offers maximum business value. It provides critical insights on the market dynamics and will enable strategic decision making for the existing market players as well as those willing to enter the market. The following are the key features of the report:

Market structure: Overview, industry life cycle analysis, supply chain analysis.

Market environment analysis: Growth drivers and constraints, Porter's five forces analysis, SWOT analysis.

Market trend and forecast analysis.

Market segment trend and forecast.

Competitive landscape and dynamics: Market share, product portfolio, product launches, etc.

Attractive market segments and associated growth opportunities.

Emerging trends.

Strategic growth opportunities for the existing and new players.

Key success factors.

This report studies the global automotive composite suspension components market and has segmented the market in four ways, keeping in mind the interest of all the stakeholders across the value chain. The following are the four ways in which the market is segmented:

Global Automotive Composite Suspension Components Market by Component Type:

Coil Springs (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and Rest of the World)

Leaf Springs (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and Rest of the World)

Stabilizer Bar (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and Rest of the World)

Suspension Arm (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and Rest of the World)

Others(Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and Rest of the World)

Global Automotive Composite Suspension Components Market by Vehicle Type:

Passenger Car (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and Rest of the World)

Light Commercial Vehicle (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and Rest of the World)

Medium & Heavy Duty Commercial Vehicle (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and Rest of the World)

Others(Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and Rest of the World)

Global Automotive Composite Suspension Components Market by Manufacturing Process Type:

Compression Molding Process (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and Rest of the World)

HP-RTM Process (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and Rest of the World)

Prepreg Layup Process (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and Rest of the World)

Other Processes(Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and Rest of the World)

Global Automotive Composite Suspension Components Market by Region:

North America (Country Analysis: USA , Canada , and Mexico )

Europe (Country Analysis: Germany , Sweden , Italy , Russia , and Rest of Europe )

Asia-Pacific (Country Analysis: China , South Korea , India , and Rest of Asia-Pacific )

Rest of the World(Country Analysis: Brazil and Others)

Stratview Research has several high value market reports in the automotive industry. Please refer to the following link to browse through our reports:

Click Here for Other Reports from Stratview Research in the Automotive Industry

Related premium market reports in the automotive industry are:

Global Composite Leaf Springs Market by Vehicle Type (Passenger Car, Light Commercial Vehicle, Medium & Heavy Duty Commercial Vehicle, and Others), by Installation Type (Transversal and Longitudinal), by Location Type (Front and Rear), by Manufacturing Process (Compression Molding, Prepreg Layup, and Others), and by Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World), Trend, Forecast, Competitive Analysis, and Growth Opportunity: 2016 - 2021

Global Automotive Suspension Market by Vehicle Type (Passenger Car, Light Commercial Vehicle, and Medium & Heavy Duty Commercial Vehicle), by System Type (Passive, Semi-Active, Active, and Air Suspension), by Architecture Type (Dependent and Semi-Independent / Independent), by Damping Type (Hydraulic / Pneumatic and Electromagnetic), by Component Type (Coil Spring, Leaf Spring, Air Spring, Shock Absorber, Strut, Control Arm, Ball Joint, and Others), and by Region (NA, Europe, APAC, ROW), Trend, Forecast, Competitive Analysis, and Growth Opportunity: 2016 - 2021

About Stratview Research

Stratview Research is a global market intelligence firm providing wide range of services including syndicated market reports, custom research and sourcing intelligence across industries, such as Advanced Materials, Aerospace & Defense, Automotive & Mass Transportation, Consumer Goods, Construction & Equipment, Electronics and Semiconductors, Energy & Utility, Healthcare & Life Sciences, and Oil & Gas.

We have a strong team of industry veterans and analysts with an extensive experience in executing custom research projects for mid-sized to Fortune 500 companies, in the areas of Market Assessment, Opportunity Screening, Competitive Intelligence, Due Diligence, Target Screening, Market Entry Strategy, Go to Market Strategy, and Voice of Customer studies.

Stratview Research is a trusted brand globally, providing high quality research and strategic insights that help companies worldwide in effective decision making.

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SILVER SPRING, MD -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/17 -- BTCS Inc. (OTC: BTCS) ("BTCS" or the "Company"), a blockchain technology focused company, announced today the appointment of Jonathon R. Read to the Company's Board of Directors.

"Jonathon brings a wealth of public company expertise to our board," commented Charles Allen, CEO of BTCS. "As we move forward on our plans to build a vertically-integrated operation in the burgeoning blockchain space, Jonathon's experience should add tremendous value."

Mr. Read has held numerous executive positions with domestic and international companies over a career that spans in excess of 35 years. Most recently, from 2013 to present, he has served as Managing Partner of Quadratam1 LLC, a Scottsdale, Arizona based firm specializing in providing financial and organizational consulting services for growth-stage companies in the US and China. Prior to that, he served as Chief Executive Officer or President of Timefire VR, Inc., formerly known as EnergyTek Corp., and during the course of his tenure repositioned, re-financed, and merged the company into an entity focused on the virtual reality sector. Beginning in 2005 and continuing through 2012, he founded and served as Chief Executive Officer and a director of ECOtality, Inc., a San Francisco-based entity in the field of electric vehicle charging and battery technology.

About BTCS:

www.btcs.com

Forward-Looking Statements:

Certain statements in this press release, including those related to an anticipated merger, constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Words such as "may," "might," "will," "should," "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "estimate," "continue," "predict," "forecast," "project," "plan," "intend" or similar expressions, or statements regarding intent, belief, or current expectations, are forward-looking statements. While the Company believes these forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on any such forward-looking statements, which are based on information available to us on the date of this release. These forward-looking statements are based upon current estimates and assumptions and are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including without limitation those set forth in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, not limited to Risk Factors relating to its digital currency business contained therein. Thus, actual results could be materially different. The Company expressly disclaims any obligation to update or alter statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

BTCS Investor Relations:

Michal Handerhan

BTCS Inc.

(202) 430-6576

IR@btcs.com




NASHVILLE, TN -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/17 -- Waller, a leading provider of legal services to the healthcare, financial services, retail and hospitality industries, has been named a "Top Ranked" firm for healthcare, an honor given to only 14 firms nationwide by Chambers-Associate, a reliable source for law firm and individual practice and partner rankings and a division of the Chambers & Partners brand.

"We have an established reputation as a go-to law firm for healthcare matters and being named as a top ranked firm nationally by Chambers-Associate is a tremendous honor for us," said Waller chairman Matt Burnstein. "With offices in Nashville, Memphis, Birmingham, and Austin, our healthcare practice is committed to delivering exceptional service to every segment of the healthcare industry day in and day out."

Chambers-Associate also surveyed associates at law firms, and Waller was the only law firm in Tennessee recognized for outstanding practices and leadership in the healthcare market. In addition, Waller was named a top-ranking firm for Most Satisfied Associates, and noted as a leading firm in the 2017 Compensation, Benefits and Lifestyle Survey and 2017 Law Firm Diversity survey.

"Employee satisfaction drives any firm's success, and we are dedicated to providing our attorneys with the best possible environment for them to thrive," continues Burnstein. "We are proud to receive such high praise and to be listed among these large, national and international firms."

For more information on Chambers-Associates and to view the lists of recognized firms and attorneys, visit www.chambers-associate.com.

About Waller

With more than 230 attorneys in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., Birmingham, Ala., and Austin, Tex., Waller assists clients in complex transactional, regulatory and litigation matters. The firm has built a national reputation for its work in healthcare, financial services, retail and hospitality, and has extensive experience in manufacturing, real estate, technology and other industries. For more information, please visit www.wallerlaw.com.

Media contact:

Sarah Brawner

DVL Seigenthaler

Sarah.brawner@dvlseigenthaler.com

615-610-0323




Abu Dhabi strategic investment fund to make equity investment and explore opportunities.

Nexen Tire to accelerate business expansion with new strategic partnership.

SEOUL, South Korea, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Nexen Tire, a leading global tire manufacturer and Mubadala Investment Company (Mubadala), the Abu Dhabi strategic investment fund, today signed a Memorandum of Understanding to explore strategic partnership opportunities. Mubadala has made a direct investment into Nexen as part of the agreement.

Nexen Tire is one of the fastest growing companies in the automotive industry, with a compounded annual growth rate of 15% over the past ten years. The company sells 40 million tires to more than 140 countries annually, with more than 4 million tires sold throughout the Middle East.

Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, Managing Director and Group CEO of Mubadala, and Travis Kang, CEO of Nexen Tire, signed the MOU in Abu Dhabi on July 19th.

Waleed Al Mokarrab Al Muhairi, Deputy Group CEO & Chief Executive Officer, Alternative Investments and Infrastructure, Mubadala said: "As a high performing business with significant global growth potential, Nexen Tire represents an interesting investment opportunity for Mubadala Investment Company. Our investment approach prioritizes partnership with best-in-class global organizations as a key driver of creating lasting value for our shareholder. We look forward to exploring opportunities with Nexen Tire."

Travis Kang, CEO of Nexen Tire, added: "This strategic partnership with Mubadala Investment Company is a significant milestone for Nexen Tire in our journey to becoming a global top 10 tire company by 2025. This collaboration will accelerate Nexen Tire's growth in international markets."

In addition to the equity investment, Mubadala and Nexen will explore a broader range of business initiatives, including potential further investment as well as wider cooperation in Nexen Tire's overseas expansion. The parties will also cooperate in other areas such as future automotive technology linked to the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

About Mubadala Investment Company

Mubadala is a pioneering global investor, deploying capital with integrity and ingenuity to accelerate economic growth for the long-term benefit of Abu Dhabi. As Abu Dhabi's leading strategic investment company, Mubadala is active in 13 sectors and more than 30 countries around the world, creating lasting value for our shareholder, the Government of Abu Dhabi.

Our work includes the development of global industrial champions in sectors such as aerospace, ICT, semiconductors, metals & mining and renewable energy, utilities, and the management of diverse financial holdings. We build on legacy expertise in oil and gas to invest across the hydrocarbon spectrum, and enhance the UAE's growth potential through investments in healthcare, real estate and defense services. Our investment approach prioritizes partnership with best-in-class organizations and a commitment to the highest standards of governance.

About Nexen Tire

Nexen Tire, established in 1942, is a global tire manufacturer headquartered in Yangsan, South Gyeongsang Province, and in Seoul, South Korea. Nexen Tire, one of the world's fastest growing tire manufacturers, works with 491 dealers based in 141 countries around the world (as of July 2015) and owns three manufacturing plants - two in Korea (Yangsan and Changnyeong) and one in Qingdao, China. Another plant in Zatec, Czech Republic will be operational by 2018. Nexen Tire produces tires for passenger cars, SUVs, and light trucks with advanced technology and excellence in design. The company also focuses on producing UHP tires, which are based on advanced technologies. Nexen Tire supplies OE tires to global car makers in various countries around the world. In 2014, the company achieved a grand slam of the world's top 4 design awards for the first time amongst the various tire makers in the world. For more information, please visit http://www.nexentire.com.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/537234/Nexen_Tire_Investment.jpg
Solar Pioneer Gigawatt Global Expands its Green Energy Offerings in Africa



BUJUMBURA, Burundi, 2017-07-19 16:03 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- -- "By expanding our investments from commercial scale projects to include off-grid additionally, we are positively impacting the lives of millions of people in Burundi and throughout Africa" - Yosef I. Abramowitz, CEO, Gigawatt Global



Downtown Bujumbura just got a little brighter, thanks to an innovative partnership between Mayor Freddy MBONIMPA and Gigawatt Global (http://GigawattGlobal.com), a founding member of United States Power Africa's Beyond the Grid program.



[Access multimedia content here: http://APO.af/ePScuQ/ http://APO.af/xxruhc/ http://APO.af/gdfypU/ http://APO.af/Xpw3uh]



This week solar-powered 'light islands' began appearing in the heavily-trafficked central bus station and nearby marketplace, extending commercial hours and personal safety.



"The city of Bujumbura is very pleased to be working with Gigawatt Global on this important solar street lighting project," said Mayor Freddy MBONIMPA. "This project will enhance security as well as provide opportunities for economic development to the citizens of Bujumbura. It is the hope and wish of all involved that this project can spread throughout the city, as well as expand to other cities in Burundi within the near future."



Gigawatt Global is now in discussions to scale the solar-powered 'light islands' program throughout the city and in other major Burundian towns. "We are grateful and pleased to work with the city of Bujumbura, and the Honorable Mayor Freddy MBONIMPA to realise this important first step of the solar street lighting project," said Michael Fichtenberg, Managing Director of Gigawatt Global Burundi. "We intend to expand throughout the capital and to other locations as part of our larger program of green electrification in Burundi, with 40 'light islands' planned in the first phase of the program," Fichtenberg continued. "Every country in which we develop commercial scale solar fields will receive additional benefits like these 'light islands' and rural electrification with mini-grids."



Gigawatt Global, which provides 100% financing for its projects, pioneered commercial scale solar power plants in sub-Sahara Africa, launching the first one in Rwanda in 2014, which is currently supplying 6% of the country's generation capacity. Gigawatt Global will complete a 7.5 Mw solar field in the Gitega region of Burundi in the next six months, which will supply 15% of the East African country's generation capacity. Similar projects are currently being developed in 10 African countries, including Liberia and South Sudan, among many others.



"Over 95% of Burundi's 11 million people lack access to electricity. Gigawatt Global is honoured to play a role in advancing economic and social development through green power in the country," says Josef Abramowitz, CEO of Gigawatt Global. "By expanding our investments from commercial scale projects to include off-grid installations, we are positively impacting the lives of millions of people in Burundi and throughout Africa, and are becoming a leading force in green energy projects across the continent."



The 'light islands' project in Bujumbura is produced by a team that includes local members Patrick NZINTUNGA, Gigawatt Global Regional Coordinator, and Deo HUGERE, Gigawatt Global Engineer. The engineering, procurement, and construction components of this project are being carried out by Asantys System. The pilot program is supported by the Energy & Environmental Partnership (EEP), an initiative of the governments of the United Kingdom, Austria and Finland, and with an impact investment from entrepreneur Alex Goldberg.



"God bless the people of Burundi," says Goldberg. "In Bujumbura, we found a place ripe for innovation and open to economic development."



As part of Gigawatt Global's commitment to additional Corporate Social Responsibility, one of its investors, Mark Gelfand, funded and built the STEM Centre (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) at the Universite Polytechnique de Gitega.



Distributed by APO on behalf of Gigawatt Global.



Starting in Rwanda and Burundi, Gigawatt Global is a solar and social development enterprise, concerned with empowering Africans.



About Gigawatt Global: Gigawatt Global is a multinational renewable energy company bringing new sources of green power and social development to Africa. Led by a team of seasoned project developers, financiers, impact investors and solar energy experts, the American-owned Dutch company develops, finances, owns and operates renewable energy installations (solar, wind and hydro) across the African continent.



About Power Africa's Beyond the Grid: The USAID Power Africa Initiative's goal is to enable electricity access by adding 60 million new electricity connections and 30,000 MW of new and cleaner power generation. Power Africa works to bring together technical and legal experts, the private sectors, and governments from around the world to work in partnership to increase the number of people with access to power.



Media contact: Michael Fichtenberg Gigawatt Global +972 54 976 0092

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ATLANTA, GA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/17 -- Luvu Brands, Inc. (OTCQB: LUVU), the manufacturer of Liberator Bedroom Adventure Gear, along with its factory showroom, were featured in a recent episode of VH1's cable television series Love & Hip Hop Atlanta. The Liberator factory showroom is located in Atlanta which served as a backdrop for the hit cable series.

During the segment, the stars of Love & Hip Hop Atlanta, Momma Dee and Ernest decide to explore the Liberator erotic boutique and discuss intimacy with a local sex therapist to save their marriage. Momma Dee can be seen draped across the best-selling Wedge/Ramp Combo while surrounded by a variety of Liberator products.

Liberator products are no stranger to being featured on popular television shows. The company and its products were recently highlighted on Playboy's popular travel series Toyride and Aziz Ansari's Netflix series Master of None.

"Love & Hip Hop Atlanta is one of the highest rated shows on primetime cable television and we are honored to take part in their latest episode," said Angela Lieben, Marketing Manager for Luvu Brands. "We were incredibly flattered when the series producers contacted us. Over the past couples of years, Liberator products have been successful in earning top placement on network and cable programming and we are excited about this most recent feature."

The Liberator segment can be viewed on VH1's Love & Hip Hop Atlanta, season 6, episode 16 which originally aired on July 3, 2017.

About Luvu Brands

Luvu Brands, Inc. designs, manufactures and markets a portfolio of lifestyle products in the categories of intimacy enhancement, top-of-bed relaxation and fashion beanbags, loungers and sofas. The Company is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia in a 140,000 square foot vertically-integrated manufacturing facility that employs over 150 people. Bringing sewn products manufacturing back to the USA and creating innovative consumer brands are core to the Company's operating principles. As the majority of the Company's products are constructed of polyurethane foam, sustainable manufacturing practices are used including re-purposing of foam trim and vacuum compression to reduce our overall carbon footprint. Luvu Brands promotes its products globally in a variety of distribution channels including mass market web retailers, catalogers and specialty retail stores. The Company's brand sites include: liberator.com, jaxxliving.com, avancomfort.com plus other global e-commerce sites. For more information about Luvu Brands, please visit luvubrands.com.

Company Contact:

Luvu Brands, Inc.

Ronald Scott

Chief Financial Officer

770-246-6426

ron@LuvuBrands.com




PALM BEACH, Florida, September 21, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Legal Cannabis, Hemp and Marijuana markets are expanding and growing a rapid pace whereas industry professionals are reporting that sales growth potentials are reaching new highs every day. The Hemp Business Journal estimates the total retail value of all hemp products sold in the U.S. alone to be at least $688 million for 2016 as well as The Marijuana Business Daily's newest report, "Marijuana Business Factbook 2017," is forecasting that legal U.S. cannabis sales could soar by approximately 300% to around $17 billion annually by 2021. Active companies in the market today includes: Future Farm Technologies Inc. (OTC: FFRMF) (CSE: FFT), Isodiol International Inc. (OTC: ISOLF) (CSE: ISOL), Radient Technologies Inc. (TSX-V: RTI), SugarMade, Inc. (OTC: SGMD), Amfil Technologies Inc. (OTC: AMFE).



Future Farm Technologies Inc.(OTCQB: FFRMF) (CSE: FFT.CN) is pleased to announce a new joint venture with Cannatech LLC, a Massachusetts cannabis consulting company. This joint venture will grow, research, develop, and sell premium hemp extracts that contain a broad range of cannabinoids and natural hemp derivatives. Cannatech has done pioneering work with hemp by growing high CBD strains, which have tested in the 15-26% range, while staying compliant with state and federal laws.

Hemp is a smaller, but fast growing, closely related business to the cannabis business. According to Hemp Business Journal, total retail value of hemp products sold in the U.S. in 2016 was $688 million, and sales of hemp CBD products boosted the industry to a five year 22% CAGR. The same group estimates the hemp industry will grow to $1.8 billion by 2020 in the USA.Read this and more news for Future Farm at:http://www.marketnewsupdates.com/news/ffrmf.html



As part of this joint venture agreement, Cannatech will provide Future Farm with multiple compliant hemp strains that test in the 'high' CBD percentile. It will also provide hemp strain lineage and breeding options to better develop hemp strains that thrive in the southeastern United States. The joint venture plans to grow in the state of Florida, where Future Farm already owns 15-acres of land and is working towards closing on another 10-acres.



Florida is the latest state to pass legislation allowing for the growing of hemp. Earlier this month, Gov. Rick Scott signed the Industrial Hemp Pilot Projects bill (Senate Bill 1726) into law. The bill gives Florida A&M University (FAMU) and the University of Florida permission to conduct research pilot projects on growing and selling hemp."This joint venture continues Future Farm's goal to position itself as a leader in the two most valuable and fastest growing crops in the world: cannabis and hemp," comments William Gildea, CEO of Future Farm. "We will leverage the same oil extraction equipment and techniques in Florida as we have learned in California, where we have already started processing hemp into CBD oil and cannabis into THC oils."



This week's top performers and additional developments in the industry:



Isodiol International Inc. (OTC: ISOLF) (CSE: ISOL.CN) closed up over 37% on the CSE Canadian Exchange on Wednesday at $0.33 trading over 2.3 Million shares by the market close as well as up over 29% at $0.2559 on the OTC Markets. Isodiol International, a global cannabinoid innovator specializing in the development of pharmaceutical and consumer products announced earlier this month that it is proud to be launching a new Phytoceutical Division that will focus on cannabinoids and terpenes derived from non-cannabis sources. Proprietary extraction methods ensure that the cannabinoids and terpenes will not be denatured during extraction and this process will provide another superior product in the Isodiol offerings.



Radient Technologies Inc. (TSX-V: RTI.V) closed up over 9% on the TSX Venture Exchange on Wednesday at $0.57 trading over 2.8 Million shares by the market close as well as close up over 14% at $0.467 on the OTC Markets. Radient extracts natural compounds from a range of biological materials using its proprietary MAP' natural product extraction technology platform which provides superior customer outcomes in terms of ingredient purity, yield, and cost. From its initial 20,000 square foot manufacturing plant in Edmonton, Alberta, Radient serves leaders in industries that include the pharmaceutical, food, beverage, natural health, personal care and cannabis markets.



SugarMade, Inc. (OTCQB: SGMD) closed up over 10% on Wednesday trading over 5.6 Million shares by the market close. Sugarmade, Inc. and Plantation Corp., announced yesterday important breakthroughs in long-term cannabis storage. Laboratory research has produced an optimum proprietary packaging atmosphere that will allow long-term storage of cannabis in the new BudLife containers. The management teams of both companies consider this research breakthrough to be highly significant to the emerging cannabis industry.



Amfil Technologies, Inc. (OTC: AMFE) closed up over 8% on Wednesday at $0.1739 trading over 2.1 Million shares by the market close. Amfil Technologies announced this week the commencement date for Snakes & Lattes Game Nights at the Rec Room Toronto Roundhouse, beginning October 16th, 2017. The series of events, managed by Snakes & Lattes, will bring weekly board game nights to the Rec Room Toronto Roundhouse. On Mondays, from 7 PM - 11 PM EST, Rec Room guests are invited to take part in board gaming from a select library of titles curated and overseen by Snakes & Lattes Game Gurus.



DISCLAIMER: MarketNewsUpdates.com (MNU) is a third party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. MNU is NOT affiliated in any manner with any company mentioned herein. MNU and its affiliated companies are a news dissemination solutions provider and are NOT a registered broker/dealer/analyst/adviser, holds no investment licenses and may NOT sell, offer to sell or offer to buy any security. MNU's market updates, news alerts and corporate profiles are NOT a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell or hold securities. The material in this release is intended to be strictly informational and is NEVER to be construed or interpreted as research material. All readers are strongly urged to perform research and due diligence on their own and consult a licensed financial professional before considering any level of investing in stocks. All material included herein is republished content and details which were previously disseminated by the companies mentioned in this release. MNU is not liable for any investment decisions by its readers or subscribers. Investors are cautioned that they may lose all or a portion of their investment when investing in stocks. For current services performed MNU has been compensated twenty-four hundred dollars for news coverage of the current press release issued by Future Farm Technologies Inc by a non-affiliated third party. MNU HOLDS NO SHARES OF ANY COMPANY NAMED IN THIS RELEASE.

This release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended and such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. "Forward-looking statements" describe future expectations, plans, results, or strategies and are generally preceded by words such as "may", "future", "plan" or "planned", "will" or "should", "expected," "anticipates", "draft", "eventually" or "projected". You are cautioned that such statements are subject to a multitude of risks and uncertainties that could cause future circumstances, events, or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements, including the risks that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, and other risks identified in a company's annual report on Form 10-K or 10-KSB and other filings made by such company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should consider these factors in evaluating the forward-looking statements included herein, and not place undue reliance on such statements. The forward-looking statements in this release are made as of the date hereof and MNU undertakes no obligation to update such statements.



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WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Almost the entire board of vegan food start-up Hampton Creek resigned last month. The company's Co-Founder and Chief Executive Josh Tetrick is now the only remaining board member.



The San Francisco-based company did not provide any reasons for the mass resignation. However, Bloomberg reported that several board members at the company gave up their seats amid deep discord with Tetrick.



The four board members who resigned last month are Khosla Ventures partner Samir Kaul, Bon Appetit Management Co-Founder and CEO Fedele Bauccio, former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman.



A joint statement by the four board members, released by Hampton Creek, said, 'We continue to fully support Hampton Creek and its CEO, Josh, in their exciting and important mission to change the food industry for the better of all people. We will advise Josh and the team on strategies across all areas of its business moving forward.'



Two other people - Bart Swanson of investment firm Horizon Ventures and Lynne Benioff, the wife of salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff - stepped down from the Hampton Creek board last year.



Hampton Creek was founded in December 2011 by Josh Balk and CEO Tetrick. With around 110 employees, the company's products include mixes, dressings, cookies, mayo and cookie dough. The company began working on its Just Mayo eggless mayonnaise spread product in 2011.



The company has raised more than $220 million since its founding after attracting strong support from venture capitalists, but its investor support began to erode after several controversies surfaced in the last year.



Bloomberg reported in August 2016 that Hampton Creek bought back its own products from supermarkets, with the move suspected to be aimed at boosting the company's sales figures.



However, the company said the policy was for quality control purposes and that federal inquiries concluded without finding wrongdoing, according to the report.



In June 2017, Target removed all Hampton Creek products, including its Just Mayo egg-free spread, from its stores. The retailer said it received allegations regarding food safety concerns, including unconfirmed allegations that the products had tested positive for salmonella and listeria.



Target also claimed that Hampton Creek was accused of mislabeling some of its products by incorrectly saying the items are non-GMO.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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CANBERA (dpa-AFX) - The Canadian dollar climbed against its most major counterparts in early New York deals on Wednesday, as oil prices rose following an industry data showing a draw in gasoline stockpiles last week and investors await official data on crude supplies due shortly.



Crude for September delivery rose $0.10 to $46.69 per barrel.



Data from American Petroleum Institute showed a drop of 5.4 million barrels in gasoline supplies for the week ending July 14, far higher than analysts' expectations for a fall by 500,000 barrels.



Distillate inventories fell by 2.9 million barrels, compared to expectations for a 700,000-barrel draw.



However, U.S. crude stockpiles rose by 1.628 million barrels last week, defying forecasts for a draw of 3 million barrels.



The Energy Information releases oil inventory data at 10:30 am ET, with analysts expecting a drop in crude stocks by 3.2 million barrels.



A joint meeting between OPEC and non-OPEC producers, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, is scheduled in Russia next week, at which the delegates will discuss compliance with production cuts and the current situation in the oil market.



In economic news, Canada's manufacturing sales increased for the third consecutive month, up 1.1% to $54.6 billion in May. The gain was mainly attributable to higher sales in the transportation equipment and chemical manufacturing industries.



The loonie has been trading higher against its major rivals in the European session, with the exception of the yen.



The loonie recovered to 0.9993 against the aussie, off its early low of 1.0035. If the loonie rises further, 0.98 is likely seen as its next resistance level.



The latest survey from Westpac Bank showed that a leading index for the Australian economy continued to show pessimism in June, and at a sharper rate.



The index was down 0.14 percent after easing an upwardly revised 0.01 percent in May.



The loonie reversed from an early low of 1.2652 against the greenback, advancing to over a 1-year high 1.2579. Continuation of the loonie's uptrend may see it challenging resistance around the 1.23 region.



The loonie hit a 2-day high of 1.4505 against the euro, from a low of 1.4593 hit at 6:00 pm ET. On the upside, 1.43 is possibly seen as the next resistance level for the loonie.



Data from Eurostat showed that Eurozone construction output declined in May after recovering in April.



Construction output fell 0.7 percent in May from April, when it rose 0.3 percent. Civil engineering slid 0.9 percent and building construction dropped 0.6 percent in May.



On the flip side, the loonie fell to 88.51 against the yen, from an early high of 88.89. The next possible support for the loonie is seen around the 86.00 mark.



The Japanese government maintained its economic view, reiterating that the economy is on a moderate recovery.



The government retained its view on private consumption, business investment, exports, industrial production and corporate profits. Assessment of employment and consumer prices were also kept unchanged.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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Novolyze, a company specializing in food microbiology, announced receiving the 2017 Food Safety Innovation Award from the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP). This award is presented to an organization for creating a new idea, practice, or product that has had a positive impact on food safety, thus improving public health, and the quality of life. The award sponsored by Walmart was delivered to Novolyze at the IAFP Annual Meeting in Tampa (FL) early July, rewarding the company for its innovative solution to validate the efficacy of food processing technologies.

Novolyze has developed a range of dried surrogate bacteria (SurroNov) which are harmless microorganisms that mimic the resistance of foodborne pathogens. Due to their proven safety (non-pathogenicity), Novolyze's dried surrogate bacteria are used directly in food facilities to evaluate the efficacy of processes to kill pathogens. With its SurroNov range of harmless bacteria, Novolyze offers the food industry with a turnkey and safe solution to perform process validation studies, a cornerstone of many food safety regulations, such as FSMA Final Rule for Preventive Controls in the US.

Karim-Franck Khinouche, founder of Novolyze:  We are very proud to have received this year's IAFP Food Safety Innovation Award. It is for us the recognition of more than 5 years of R&D since Novolyze was founded in 2012. Novolyze now has offices both in France, where our head office is located, as well as in the US (Cambridge, MA). This award encourages us to pursue our continuous efforts to bring innovative solutions to today and tomorrow's challenges of the food industry. 

For more information about the IAFP Food Safety Innovation Award, click here.

For more information about Novolyze, click here.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170719005063/en/

Contacts:

Novolyze

Jena Roberts

VP Business Development

contact@novolyze.com
Multi-million-dollar project will bring U.S.-accredited degrees to refugees at home and abroad

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) has launched a major initiative to bring university degrees to refugees in the U.S. and around the world. Over the last decade, the refugee crisis has dramatically accelerated with 65.3 million displaced worldwide, and globally, less than one percent of refugees have access to higher education. This will be the first large scale initiative to bring American accredited university degrees to the most marginalized population in the world with a goal of educating 50,000 refugees in 20 locations by 2022.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/537273/SNHU_Graduating_Class.jpg

Phase one of the initiative, a $10-million-dollar effort to bring SNHU's online, competency-based bachelor's and associate degrees to refugees and others affected by displacement, was made possible by a group of anonymous donors.



"The refugee crisis will require concerted social, legal, and political action, but education holds the key to an alternative future of possibility," said Paul LeBlanc, president, SNHU. "At SNHU, we believe education is a fundamental human right, that's why we want to bring our degrees to some of the most underserved populations in the world."



SNHU has piloted its work with refugees in Rwanda, nearly 7,000 miles away from its Manchester, New Hampshire, campus. The program is offered at two sites in Rwanda, one in the Kiziba Refugee Camp where all students are refugee learners, and one in the capital city Kigali, where a substantial number of students are refugees. Collectively, the campuses enroll more than 500 students. This summer the first cohort of refugee students graduated with associate degrees from the Kiziba campus. All of the graduates are engaged in internships outside of the camp and are now working on their bachelor's degrees.



"We're giving refugees hope for the future, the tools to rebuild their lives, and a transformational opportunity," said Chrystina Russell, who leads the refugee learning initiative at SNHU. "Over the next five years, we will scale our work to many other locations, many of which are ready and eager to begin tomorrow."

In Rwanda, SNHU partners with Kepler, a nonprofit organization, to deliver competency-based degrees through a blended learning delivery model that offers in-person instruction and academic and employment support. The University will form similar partnerships with other organizations as it looks to expand into other countries. Phase one of the project will include sites in East Africa and the Middle East. SNHU will partner with the UN High Commission on Refugees, the Connected Learning in Crisis Consortium, SOLVE at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the American University of Beirut.

The initiative will also be guided by an advisory board with diverse backgrounds and experiences, including former U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan; Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Deborah Berke; and Director of Refugee Studies at the University of Oxford, Alexander Betts.

"Education remains the greatest source of hope and opportunity for people on the far margins of society," said Arne Duncan, advisory board member of the SNHU refugee initiative, and former U.S. Secretary of Education. "SNHU's work in the camps brings education to some of the most desperate and poorly served people in the world today."



Over the next two years, SNHU will begin programming at four new sites around the world. SNHU is also exploring ways to support the refugee population in Manchester, and is partnering with the YWCA NH to expand services locally.


WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - A majority of voters think it was inappropriate for Donald Trump Jr. to meet with an attorney linked to the Russian government, according to the results of a new Politico/Morning Consult poll.



The poll found that 52 percent of voters think Trump Jr.'s meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya was inappropriate, while just 23 percent said the meeting was appropriate.



Eighty percent of Democrats and 50 percent of independents said the meeting was inappropriate, although only 24 percent of Republicans agreed.



When told the meeting was set up because the attorney was purportedly offering incriminating evidence about Hillary Clinton, the percentage of GOP voters saying the meeting was appropriate rose to 52 percent from 44 percent.



The poll also found that 53 percent of voters think the meeting should be included in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of alleged collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.



Seventy-six percent of Democrats and 51 percent of independents said the meeting should be included in the investigation, while 48 percent of Republicans disagreed.



The Politico/Morning Consult survey of 1,994 registered voters was conducted July 13th through 15th and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.



(Photo: Gage Skidmore)



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / July 19, 2017 / Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC is investigating potential claims of whether the board members of Monogram Residential Trust, Inc. ("Monogram" or the "Company") (NYSE: MORE) breached their fiduciary duties in connection with the proposed sale of the Company to Greystar Growth and Income Fund, LP ("Greystar"). Such investors are encouraged to obtain additional information and assist the investigation by visiting the firm's site: www.bgandg.com/more.

On July 4, 2017, Monogram announced that it agreed to be bought by Greystar and that deal, expected to close in the second half of 2017 has been unanimously approved by the REIT's board of directors. Included in the terms of the agreement, Monogram shareholders will receive $12.00 in cash for each share of Monogram stock they own.

The investigation focuses on whether the Monogram board members failed to fulfill their duties to the shareholders and whether Greystar is underpaying for Monogram.

If you are a shareholder of Monogram and believe the proposed buyout price is too low, you can learn more about this investigation by visiting the firm's site: www.bgandg.com/more. You can also contact Peretz Bronstein or his Investor Relations Analyst, Yael Hurwitz of Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC: 212-697-6484.

Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC is a corporate litigation boutique. Our primary expertise is the aggressive pursuit of litigation claims on behalf of our clients. In addition to representing institutions and other investor plaintiffs in class action security litigation, the firm's expertise includes general corporate and commercial litigation, as well as securities arbitration. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

Contact:

Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC

Peretz Bronstein or Yael Hurwitz

212-697-6484 | info@bgandg.com

SOURCE: Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC
BRIDGEWATER, NOVA SCOTIA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/17 -- Silver Spruce Resources Inc. ("Silver Spruce" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE: SSE)(FRANKFURT: S6Q) is pleased to announce it has closed the Purchase Agreement with Cedar Forest LLC (the "Vendor") for 100%, free of any royalty, of the Kay Mine parcel of 70.84 acres of patented claims near Black Canyon City, Arizona, USA.

Terms of Purchase

The original asking price for the 70.84 acre parcel of patented ground was U$977,000 in cash. Upon execution of the Purchase Agreement to acquire 100% interest in the patented claims, free of any royalties, Silver Spruce paid a non-refundable deposit of US $50,000 to the Vendor and completed its due diligence process which included a site visit, an appraisal of the fee simple surface land value, a fee simple surface title opinion, an extensive mining title search, an analysis of the mining rights held with the patented claims titles and a legal opinion of the mineral title rights, conducted by a prominent mining attorney in Arizona.

Subsequently, the Company secured a U$450,000 debenture, and the Vendor agreed to accept shares in the Company in lieu of U$500,000 cash.

The Company has received Exchange approval for the acquisition.

The Company has now paid the remaining US $450,000 cash and issued 8,649,142 shares to the Vendor at a deemed price of CAD $0.075 per common share, which completed the terms of purchase, and closed escrow.

"Silver Spruce is excited to complete our purchase of 100% of the Kay Mine parcel of patented ground, royalty free. The Company has successfully staked an additional 400 acres of unpatented claims and now controls all of the known areas of mineralization at the project that have been identified over the last 120+ years by companies such as the Kay Copper Company, Exxon Minerals, Rayrock (acquired by Glamis) and American Copper and Nickel (a subsidiary of INCO, now Vale)," stated Dr. Brian Penney, Chairman of Silver Spruce Resources Inc.

"The Company looks forward to initiating its work programs at the Kay Mine project," said Karl J. Boltz, President & CEO. "We are eager to produce a maiden NI 43-101 on the project and to assimilate the available data into a GIS database, conduct modern geophysical studies, geologic mapping and geochemical sampling, the twinning of select Exxon drill holes and downhole geophysics, with the goal of qualifying the substantial historical resource stated in the Exxon Minerals' internal reports from the 1970's and 80's."

The Kay Mine Project

The Kay Copper Company and others produced Au-Ag-Cu-Pb-Zn ore on the property intermittently from 1916 until 1956. Exploration conducted from 1972 to 1982 by Exxon Minerals Company, a subsidiary of Exxon Petroleum, indicates that substantial additional mineralization exists down dip and potentially along strike from the past-producing mineral deposits. A two-page Executive Summary of the Kay Mine Project is available here: http://www.silverspruceresources.com/s/KayMine.asp

Known mineralization occurs in two zones of massive sulfide, the North and South Zones, extending from the surface to at least 2100 feet in depth that was developed in several thousand feet of workings on eleven levels. A November 1982 internal Exxon Minerals Company report by M. L. Fellows stated that the deposit contains a resource of "Proven and Probable Ore" with a tonnage of 6.4 million short tons grading an estimated 2.2% copper, 3.03% zinc, 1.6 ounces per ton (50 g/t) silver and 0.082 ounces per ton (2.55 g/t) gold. The estimate was made using assay data from historic mine level plan maps and Exxon drill hole intercepts. Exxon also reported the deposits to be open down dip, with significant additional potential for the discovery of new deposits at the project.

Exxon's use of the word "ore" is not to be construed in the strict sense. After examining mine assay level plans and Exxon drill hole data, Silver Spruce has concluded that "Indicated Mineral Resource" is the appropriate term for Exxon's historical estimate. Additional drilling is needed to verify this estimate. The Qualified Person for Silver Spruce has not conducted sufficient work to definitively classify Exxon's resource estimate to be compliant with NI-43-101 resource definitions. The issuer is not treating the historical estimate as current mineral resources or mineral reserves.

Qualified Person

Mr. Leonard J. Karr, professional geologist and the Company's independent Qualified Person is responsible for the technical content of this press release within the meaning of National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101"), under TSX guidelines.

About Silver Spruce Resources Inc.

Silver Spruce Resources Inc. is a well-positioned Canadian junior exploration company pursuing exploration and development of the past producing Kay Mine volcanogenic massive sulfide ("VMS") project in Arizona, USA, and the exploration of the Pino De Plata and the Encino De Oro epithermal silver/ base metal/ gold projects located in the prolific Sierra Madre Occidental region of western Chihuahua State in Mexico.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. The company seeks Safe Harbour.

Contacts:

Silver Spruce Resources Inc.

Karl Boltz

President & CEO, Director

Toll Free: (866) 641-3397

info@silverspruceresources.com

www.silverspruceresources.com




BRUSSELS/FRANKFURT/PARIS (dpa-AFX) - Nauto, a self-driving start up company, got an additional series B funding of $159 million. Greylock Partners, SoftBank were leading the funding. Nauto uses artificial intelligence, various sensors and cameras, as well as global positioning system to develop systems leading to self driving cars. Major automakers such as General Motors, Toyota are some companies which have agreed to test Nauto's devices in their vehicles. Apart from an outward camera, it uses an inward facing camera to capture the eye movements of the driver. By analyzing the eye movement, chest movements as well as head movements, the computer can determine if the driver is distracted. The system will automatically provide alerts to avoid accidents. Nauto intends to help operate an efficient and secure fleet. Nauto stated that 68 percent of collisions are caused by distracted driving. One in four collisions are due to driver impairment from cell phone use. The cost of collisions annually to fleets is around $4-$5K. Nauto's bidirectional camera are expected to improve safety, reduce collisions by 37 percent, and improve efficiency by 20 percent. An outward camera in a vehicle can alert other vehicles in a fleet to available parking spots. The second generation device gives an idea of the road conditions. It can also give alert to the red lights ahead, crossing of pedestrians, or a garbage truck ahead. 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.
BEVERLY HILLS, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/17 -- Reign Sapphire Corp. (OTCQB: RGNP) ("Reign" or the "Company"), a direct-to-consumer, branded and custom jewelry company, today announced its latest international partnership to market, sell and distribute its products in Europe and the United Kingdom.

Following the success of its local partnerships in United Arab Emirates and Qatar, the Company has teamed with the original founder of its brand Coordinates Collection, Owen de Vries to run the new effort.

According to ReportLinker and McKinsey & Co., "Sales of jewellery are going up. Annual global sales... expected to grow at a healthy 4 to 6 percent every year, reaching EUR 250 billion by 2020."

According to Euromonitor, in the Netherlands, jewelry registered a sustained increase in 2017 driven mainly by higher levels of Dutch consumer spending.

The Company intends to replicate the success achieved in the Middle East where its flagship store in the Dubai Mall and regionalised direct-to-consumer website contributes almost 10% of the Company's annual revenue.

The Netherlands based operation will proliferate Reign points of sale (POS) adapted for local language, digital marketing and customer service.

"Europe and United Kingdom is our largest international revenue contributor after the Middle East," commented Reign CEO Joseph Segelman. "Our experience has shown localised marketing, promotion and social media drives direct-to-consumer sales and can assist the company reaching its growth targets."

The company is actively pursuing similar distribution partnerships in the Asia Pacific region.

About Reign Sapphire Corporation:

Reign Sapphire (OTCQB: RGNP) is a Beverly Hills-based, Direct-to-Consumer (D2C), branded and custom jewelry company with three niche brands: Reign Sapphires: ethically produced, millennial targeted sapphire jewelry, Coordinates Collection: custom jewelry, inscribed with location coordinates commemorating life's special moments, and Le Bloc: classic customized jewelry. http://www.reignsc.com.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the U.S. federal securities laws, which statements may include information regarding the plans, intentions, expectations, future financial performance, or future operating performance of Reign Sapphire Corporation ("Reign" or the "Company"). Forward-looking statements are based on the expectations, estimates, or projections of the Company's management as of the date of this press release. Although Reign's management believes these expectations, estimates, or projections to be reasonable as of the date of this presentation, forward-looking statements are inherently subject to significant business risks, economic and competitive uncertainties, or other contingencies, which could cause the Company's actual results or performance to differ materially from what may be expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause Reign's actual results or performance to differ materially from the forward-looking statements include those set forth in the "Risk Factors" sections in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the risks set forth in the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016, which is available for viewing on the SEC's EDGAR website. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this press release and, except as required by law, Reign specifically disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

Reign Sapphire Corporation

Investor and Media Inquiries:

info@reignsc.com

+1 (213) 457-3772




Brings Spirits Industry Knowledge and 25+ Years of Experience as a Finance Professional

PORTLAND, OR / ACCESSWIRE / July 28, 2017 / Eastside Distilling, Inc. (OTCQB: ESDI) ("Eastside" or the "Company"), a producer of award-winning craft spirits, today announced the appointment of Shelly A. Saunders to its Board of Directors. Saunders brings more than 25 years of finance experience to the board, having served as VP Finance/CFO of Campari Canada and VP Finance/FP&A for Campari America/SKYY Spirits. With experience in SEC reporting, Saunders will become an independent member of the board and serve on the Company's audit committee.

Grover Wickersham, Chairman of the Board of Directors, commented, "We welcome Shelly to the Eastside Board. In addition to having been a finance professional with one of the largest global spirits companies in the industry, Shelly has excellent knowledge of, and contacts within the industry. I look forward to Shelly's guidance and expertise as a member of the Eastside board."

Since March 2015, Ms. Saunders is a consultant for Resources Global Professionals, a consulting firm serving global corporations. From June 2013 to January 2015, Ms. Saunders served as Vice President Finance and Country CFO for Campari Canada, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Davide Campari-Milano. From July 2009 to May 2013, Ms. Saunders served as Vice President Finance for Campari America/SKYY Spirits, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Davide Campari-Milano. Prior to joining Campari America, Ms. Saunders was a consultant for Resources Global Professionals, a Director Finance for Mervyns, and a Vice President Finance and Treasurer for Organic, Inc., among other positions. Ms. Saunders received a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University and an MBA from University of California, Berkeley.

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 lineup 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 symbol OTCQB: ESDI. For more information visit: www.eastsidedistilling.com or follow the company on Twitter and Facebook.

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; acceptance of the Company's products in the market; the Company's success in obtaining new customers; 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 ("SEC"), including the financial statements and related information contained in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K and interim Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Examples of forward-looking statements in this release may include statements related to our strategic focus, product verticals, anticipated revenue, and profitability. The Company assumes no obligation to update the cautionary information in this release.

Company Contact:

Eastside Distilling

inquiries@eastsidedistilling.com

Investors:

Robert Blum, Joe Diaz or Joe Dorame

Lytham Partners, LLC

(602) 889-9700

esdi@lythampartners.com

SOURCE: Eastside Distilling, Inc.
According to the latest market study released by Technavio, the global residential smoke detector marketis projected to grow at a CAGR of more than 5% over the forecast period.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170719005503/en/

Technavio has published a new report on the global residential smoke detector market from 2017-2021. (Graphic: Business Wire)

This research report titled 'Global Residential Smoke Detector Market 2017-2021' provides an in-depth analysis of the market in terms of revenue and emerging market trends. This market research report also includes up to date analysis and forecasts for various market segments and all geographical regions.

The rising adoption of connected devices, tablets, wearable devices, and smartphones among consumers and enterprises will favor the growth of the global residential smoke detectors market. The growing adoption of smart homes in various countries is also boosting the demand for residential smart smoke detectors. Builders in developing countries are also installing these detectors on residential buildings due to safety and security concerns.

This report is available at a USD 1,000 discount for a limited time only: View market snapshot before purchasing

Buy 1 Technavio report and get the second for 50% off. Buy 2 Technavio reports and get the third for free

Based on the sensor type, the report categorizes the global residential smoke detector market into the following segments:

Photoelectric residential smoke detector

Dual-sensor residential smoke detector

Ionization residential smoke detector

Other sensor residential smoke detector

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 revenue-generating sensor segments in the global residential smoke detector market are discussed below:

Photoelectric residential smoke detector

Photoelectric residential smoke detectors occupied a majority 56% of the global market and will continue to grow at a moderate pace over the forecast period. The key factor contributing to the growth of the segment is the decreasing application of ionization smoke detectors due to their ineffectiveness in detecting life threatening fires. The swift response of these smoke detectors in detecting smoldering fires is a major reason for their high adoption.

"Globally, there is an increase in demand for photoelectric smoke detectors because they are being installed in new residences in compliance with regulations by authorities such as the NFPA and the Residential Tenancies Authority. Also, these smoke detectors do not contain any radioactive materials, and hence are easy to dispose ofsays Poonam Saini, a lead analyst at Technavio for retail goods and services research.

Dual-sensor residential smoke detector

The global dual-sensor residential smoke detector market is expected to be the fastest-growing segment, with an estimated CAGR of nearly 6% during the forecast period. The acceptance and adoption rate of dual-sensor residential smoke detectors is attributed to their high efficiency in detecting different types of fires, whether smoldering or fast-flaming.

Dual-sensor smoke detectors combine the features of both ionization and photoelectric smoke detectors. Authorities such as the North-Eastern Ohio Fire Prevention Association (NEOFPA) and the Australian Fire Authorities Council (AFAC) also recommend the use of dual-sensor smoke detectors, which will propel the growth of this segment during the forecast period. Technological advances in dual-sensor smoke detectors will support the growth of the segment during the forecast period.

Ionization residential smoke detector

"The ionization residential smoke detectors dominated the global residential smoke detector market until as recently as 2011 with more than 90% of the household using these smoke detectorssays Poonam.

However, the market has experienced a significant and drastic shift in terms of the demand for technology used in smoke detectors. The use of ionization smoke detectors is currently decreasing because of the high number of false alarms they give. These devices also contain radioactive materials like Americium-241, which is also leading to the declining popularity of these products.

The top vendors highlighted by Technavio's research analysts in this report are:

BRK Brands

Hochiki America

Honeywell International

Kidde

Siemens

Browse Related Reports:

Global Breastfeeding Supplies Market 2017-2021

Global Curling Equipment Market 2017-2021

Ready to Assemble (RTA) Furniture Market in Europe 2017-2021

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions.

With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 10,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

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/20170719005503/en/

Contacts:

Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media Marketing Executive

US: +1 630 333 9501

UK: +44 208 123 1770

www.technavio.com
REGINA, SASKATCHEWAN -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/17 -- Viterra Inc. ("Viterra") today hosted an official grand opening event at its new grain terminal at Grand Forks, North Dakota. Viterra customers, employees and local government officials came together to celebrate the company's latest investment in its asset network.

"Our mission is to connect more customers to more places, and we feel that this location is an ideal place to help us continue delivering on that mission," said Kyle Jeworski, Viterra's President and CEO for North America. "The US is an important market for our continued growth, and we look forward to working together with local farmers to market and move their crops to end users in more than fifty countries."

The facility has a storage capacity of approximately 140,000 metric tonnes. It has the ability to load up to 110 railcars serviced by BNSF Railway, and is equipped with two truck receiving pits and a grain dryer. Further, in keeping with its ongoing commitment to operational excellence Viterra will be making a number of immediate capital upgrades at the site.

"In addition to our quality assets, what makes us an industry leader is the high level of service we offer our customers," said Jeworski. "The expertise of our people, our contracting and risk management tools, and the major investments we continue to make in our technology are part of a complete service offering that we deliver to our customers to help them be successful."

The company acquired the facility in May. In addition to this location, Viterra's presence in North Dakota includes special crops facilities in Ray and Minot, as well as a joint venture terminal at Northgate.

About Viterra

Viterra is Canada's grain industry leader, supported by the expertise of its people, a superior network of assets, and unrivalled connections to world markets. Headquartered in Regina, Saskatchewan, our commitment to agriculture goes back over 100 years, partnering with farmers to market and move their crops to areas of need around the world. Our continued focus on operational excellence throughout North America allows us to efficiently handle, process, distribute and transport grains and oilseeds. We provide further value to our partners through a wide variety of contracting and risk management tools to help them realize the full potential of their crops. For more information on Viterra in North America, please visit www.viterra.com. Viterra is part of Glencore Agriculture, a global market leader in originating, handling, processing and marketing agricultural commodities.

Contacts:

Peter Flengeris

Viterra Inc.

(306) 569-4810

peter.flengeris@viterra.com




HOUSTON, TX and MEDFORD, MA / ACCESSWIRE / July 19, 2017 / INVO Bioscience, Inc. (OTC PINK: IVOB), a medical device company who was granted FDA clearance for the first Intravaginal Culture System, INVOcell, today announced that the INVOcell device and procedure is now being offered at Houston Fertility Center in Houston, Texas under the direction of Dr. Sonja Kristiansen. This is the first clinic in Houston to offer the new, revolutionary, and affordable treatment option to families.

Houston Fertility Center aims to assist the millions of women struggling with tough decisions about timing their family-building. Due to economic necessity or other life circumstances, many find that pregnancy must be put on hold, while others may try to conceive earlier in life only to find their dreams of getting pregnant not coming true. By now offering the INVOcell solution, families can know that Dr. Kristiansen and her team are on the leading edge of fertility treatment, offering a solution that is affordable and effective.



Dr. Sonja Kristiansen, Houston Fertility Center



Dr. Sonja Kristiansen, founder and Medical Director at Houston Fertility Center, commented, "Our team of experts at Houston Fertility Center utilize advanced technology and science available to create treatment programs specifically tailored to meet the needs of individuals and couples. INVOcell is a novel solution that will help our clients experience the life-changing moments of parenthood in an effective and affordable way, thereby increasing access to treatment for clients who may otherwise have been unable to utilize an assisted reproductive technique."

"I am excited that Dr. K and her team at the Houston Fertility Center will be the first center in Houston to be offering the groundbreaking INVOcell technology to patients in the area," commented Katie Karloff, Chair and Chief Executive Officer of INVO Bioscience. "INVOcell has proven to be equally as effective as traditional IVF, at a fraction of the overall cost. By utilizing the women's own vaginal cavity as an incubator, patients require fewer office visits, less medication, and a more personal overall experience. We believe INVOcell could be a game-changer in the $2 billion assisted reproductive technology market, and are excited to be working with the Houston Fertility Center to reach more and more patients that are having difficulties in becoming pregnant."

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, CEO

INVO Bioscience, Inc.

978-878-9505 ext. 504

kkarloff@invobio.com

SOURCE: INVO Bioscience, Inc.
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), which is the largest public pension fund in the U.S., is considering to make direct investments in private companies. CalPers, which has current investments are worth $327.77 billion, currently has $25.9 billion invested in private equity, through funds based across the globe. It would be for the first time that such a fund has committed to run its own direct investment strategy, which seems to be a logical step as it would help fund to stop paying the fees to private equity fund managers for both management and performance. CalPERS Chief Investment Officer Ted Eliopoulos said although he would recommend the fund to 'explore setting up a separate vehicle' for direct investments it would take as long as 20 years. Eliopoulos also said that CalPERS should focus on opportunities that do not compete with its current private equity investments, such as owning companies for longer than 10 years and investing in technology and life science companies. 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.
WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwired - July 19, 2017) - Bill Golden of Golden Shoes in downtown Traverse City is one of an elite group of five finalists for America's Retail Champion of the Year, an honor bestowed annually by the National Retail Federation (NRF).

The announcement came Tuesday at NRF's Retail Advocates Summit, as small retailers from across the country were honored for their advocacy on behalf of the industry. Retailers, including Golden, are in Washington this week to meet with members of Congress on a variety of public policy issues.

Trudy Trombley, owner of Truly Trudy's Boutique in Stowe, Vt., was named America's Retail Champion of the Year. She was selected from 75 nominees and the group of five finalists who included Golden. The program honors retailers who make their mark on public policy debates.

"Going out and advocating for other retailers is satisfying," Golden said. "To get the recognition is nice and it's good to know there's a voice out there for me and my fellow retailers. We're all champions."

Golden was nominated by Michigan Retailers Association (MRA) and serves as a director on the board of Michigan Retailers Services, an MRA subsidiary. Golden Shoes was honored as Michigan Retailer of the Year in 2005 in the small retail category.

"Bill Golden bleeds retail, and he's a longtime advocate for the independent retailer," said Jim Hallan, President and CEO of MRA. "It's good to see him recognized for his many contributions."

Golden Shoes, a fixture on Traverse City's Front Street, is well known to residents and tourists alike. Bill is co-president with his brother Craig of the family-owned business, which succeeded a shoe store dating back to 1883.

A Traverse City native, Golden began working in the store at age 14. He is chair of the Traverse City Downtown Development Authority, a member on the Traverse City Area Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors and active with the Northern Michigan Chamber Alliance.

He has advocated on many state issues, including Main Street Fairness and support for Downtown Development Authorities. He is a proponent for MRA's Buy Nearby program, which urges residents to keep their shopping dollars in Michigan and celebrates I Buy Nearby Weekend on Oct. 7-8.

"NRF is proud to host hardworking small business owners in Washington this week to recognize our industry's most engaged retail advocates," NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay said.

Participants will meet with members of the House and Senate on Capitol Hill today to discuss the retail industry's public policy agenda and priorities.

NRF is the world's largest retail trade association, with members in more than 45 countries. Retail is the nation's largest private sector employer, supporting one in four U.S. jobs -- 42 million working Americans. Contributing $2.6 trillion to annual GDP, retail is a daily barometer for the nation's economy.

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Contact:

Meegan Holland

517.721.9009

Email contact


Technavio analysts forecast the global solar PV systems marketto grow at a CAGR of close to 21% over the projected period, according to their latest report.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170719005526/en/

Technavio has published a new report on the global solar PV systems market from 2017-2021. (Graphic: Business Wire)

The research study by Technavio on the global solar PV systems market for 2017-2021 provides a detailed industry analysis based on the end-users (utility, C&I, and residential) and geography (APAC, EMEA, and the Americas).

Growing environmental concerns and depleting energy reserves are compelling countries all over the world to rethink their energy policies. The use of renewable energy not only solves today's environmental problems but also enables global energy demands to be met. Therefore, solar PV systems provide an effective technology for sustainable renewable energy-based power generation.

This report is available at a USD 1,000 discount for a limited time only: View market snapshot before purchasing

Buy 1 Technavio report and get the second for 50% off. Buy 2 Technavio reports and get the third for free

Technavio analysts highlight the following three factors that are contributing to the growth of the global solar PV systems market

Declining cost of solar energy

Need for rural electrification

Supportive governmental regulations

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.

Declining cost of solar energy

In the past, the high cost and intermittent nature of renewables were the major hurdles to their adoption. One solution to the problem of intermittency is energy storage, which not only bridges the gap but is also used to increase the renewable energy penetration in hybrid systems.

"The solar power industry has witnessed a price decline of more than 40% in the past decade. With the reduction in solar power price, PV adoption has gained traction, leading to the growth in the number of installations over the yearssays Thanikachalam Chandrasekaran, a lead analyst at Technavio for power research.

Need for rural electrification

Most people in developing countries, especially those living in rural areas, lack access to grid power, which indirectly impacts the economic growth of the country. In remote and rural areas, the cost of connection to the main grid is considered high and depends on various factors, such as the distance of the community from the existing main grid, population density, topography, demand pattern, and quality of power.

The high cost involved in grid extension has led various governments and communities to use stand-alone energy systems for decentralized power. The need to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels has given rise to the adoption of renewable sources, such as solar energy and wind energy. This will increase the installation of solar PV systems in the coming years.

Supportive governmental regulations

"Governments worldwide support the adoption of solar PV systems by providing incentives, subsidies, and tax benefits to producers and consumers. In the US, the solar ITC is an important federal policy mechanism, developed to support the deployment of solar energy in the countrysays Thanikachalam.

The enforcement and continuation of current policies will encourage manufacturing companies to invest in R&D activities to develop cheaper and more reliable technology to bring down the cost of solar PV systems. Many end-users have embraced alternative forms of energy and are slowly discarding power generation using fossil fuels. This is expected to have a positive impact on the global solar PV systems market during the forecast period.

Browse Related Reports:

Global Greenhouse Horticulture Market 2017-2021

Global Safety Light Curtains Market 2017-2021

Global Safety Shoes Market 2017-2021

About Technavio

Technaviois a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions.

With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 10,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com.

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Contacts:

Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media Marketing Executive

US: +1 630 333 9501

UK: +44 208 123 1770

www.technavio.com
Trial Led by Alzheimer's Association and American College of Radiology Evaluating Impact of Brain Amyloid PET Imaging on Patient Management and Health Outcomes

LONDON, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Piramal Imaging joins its industry partners in applauding interim results from the ongoing "Imaging Dementia - Evidence for Amyloid Scanning" (IDEAS) clinical trial, in which pre-defined patients are undergoing positron emission tomography (PET) scanning of beta-amyloid deposits in their brains, a core feature of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Piramal Imaging's FDA-approved diagnostic radiotracer for brain beta-amyloid detection, NeuraceqTM (florbetaben F18 injection), is one of three radiotracers used in the IDEAS trial. The company is also providing funding and support for the study, which is evaluating the impact of brain amyloid PET imaging on medical management and health outcomes in enrolled patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or atypical dementia.

In a presentation at the 2017 Alzheimer's Association International Conference (AAIC 2017), the Principal Investigator Gil Rabinovici, MD, of the Memory and Aging Center, University of California, San Francisco, reported findings from the first 3,979 IDEAS trial participants for whom case report forms were completed both before and 90 days after PET scanning. The investigators observed changes in medical management in 67.8% of patients with MCI, of whom 47.8% experienced changes in their AD drug regimens, 36.0% had other drugs changed, and 23.9% underwent changes in counseling.

"The interim results from the IDEAS Study suggest we are well on track to see beneficial results at the level we originally envisioned, and perhaps even greater, regarding changes in medical management based on having a brain amyloid PET scan," commented James Hendrix, PhD, Alzheimer's Association Director of Global Science Initiatives. "We look forward to working with the study scientists to report the final results."

Launched in 2016, the IDEAS trial is being led by the Alzheimer's Association, and managed by the American College of Radiology (ACR) and American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ACRIN). The trial is being conducted at roughly 200 sites throughout the United States, and will enroll more than 18,000 Medicare beneficiaries age 65 years or older with MCI or atypical dementia who meet published Appropriate Use Criteria (AUC) for clinical amyloid PET scanning.

"We salute the IDEAS investigators and the participating patients for providing such a strong indication of the value of beta-amyloid imaging, particularly in terms of influencing patient management," said Andrew Stephens, M.D., Ph.D., Chief Medical Officer of Piramal Imaging. "The early results validate our ongoing support of the IDEAS trial, which reflects our commitment to enhancing understanding of the role of beta-amyloid imaging in individuals with cognitive impairment or dementia. We look forward to receiving full results from the IDEAS trial, which we hope will lead to improved health outcomes in the management of Alzheimer's disease and related disorders."

AD is typically diagnosed after a person with a cognitive impairment undergoes an extensive clinical examination, which typically includes family and medical history, physical neurological and psychiatric examinations, laboratory tests, and imaging procedures such as computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. However, today many patients with dementia symptoms can be misdiagnosed and a typical patient experiences symptoms for two years and visits an average of two to three doctors before receiving a clinical diagnosis. A definitive diagnosis of AD can only be made after death, based on autopsy findings of beta-amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in the brain. Today the combination of clinical diagnosis and a beta-amyloid biomarker assessment improves the diagnostic accuracy while the patient is still alive.

About NeuraceqTM (florbetaben F18 injection)

Indication

This medicinal product is for diagnostic use only.

Neuraceq is a radiopharmaceutical indicated for Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging of beta-amyloid neuritic plaque density in the brains of adult patients with cognitive impairment who are being evaluated for Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other causes of cognitive impairment. Neuraceq should be used in conjunction with a clinical evaluation. A negative scan indicates sparse or no neuritic plaques, which is not consistent with a diagnosis of AD. For the limitations in the interpretation of a positive scan, please refer to the US package insert.

Important Safety Information

Neuraceq cannot be used to diagnose Alzheimer's disease and it cannot predict a patient's predisposition for beta-amyloid neuritic plaque development in the future. Neuraceq images should only be interpreted by readers trained in the interpretation of PET images with florbetaben (18F injection). Following training, image-reading errors (including false positive or false negative interpretation of Neuraceq images) may still occur. Additional interpretation errors may occur due to image noise, brain atrophy with a thinned cortical ribbon, or image blurs.

Administration of Neuraceq, as with other radiopharmaceuticals, results in a low amount of ionizing radiation exposure. Safety precautions should be taken to ensure healthcare providers and patients do not receive unintentional radiation exposure from Neuraceq.

Most Common Adverse Events

The most common side effects observed in clinical trials were injection site reaction and injection site pain.

About Piramal Imaging

Piramal Imaging, a division of Piramal Enterprises, Ltd., was formed in 2012 with the acquisition of the molecular imaging research and development portfolio of Bayer Pharma AG. By developing novel PET tracers for molecular imaging, Piramal Imaging is focusing on a key field of modern medicine. Piramal Imaging strives to be a leader in the Molecular Imaging field by developing innovative products that improve early detection and characterization of chronic and life-threatening diseases, leading to better therapeutic outcomes and improved quality of life. For more information please go to www.piramal.com/imaging.
CHICAGO, IL -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/17 -- Gold Eagle Co. is pleased to announce that it has promoted Tyler Rossdeutcher to National Sales Manager overseeing strategic national & regional retail accounts as well as cultivation and maintenance of relationships with key customers. Rossdeutcher will work closely with the Digital Team as well as the Senior Director of Retail Sales in preparing sales goals, forecasting of existing and new products, and business plan development.

"Tyler is an important member of the Gold Eagle family and during his time with the company we have seen him grow and excel in his roles," said Marc Blackman, CEO of Gold Eagle Co. "He is a valuable part of our team and his rise to National Sales Manager is well deserved."

Rossdeutcher began his career with Gold Eagle as Sales Intern in 2011, working closely with Gold Eagle's product managers as well as assisting in the Customer Service Department. After graduating from Southern Illinois University in 2012 with a degree in marketing, Rossdeutcher returned to Gold Eagle and has filled several roles at the company, including a Consumer Contact Associate, a Customer Development Field Representative, a Fuel Performance Specialist and Regional Sales Manager.

To learn more about Gold Eagle and its brands, please visit www.goldeagle.com.

About Gold Eagle Co.

Founded in 1932, Gold Eagle Co. is a family owned and operated company that is an industry pioneer in the production and distribution of performance chemicals and surface treatments. Gold Eagle is driven to produce innovative products that protect and preserve the things we love and its award winning line up of products, includes STA-BIL, 303 Products, TriNova. HEET Gas-Line Antifreeze, Start Your Engines!, NO LEAK Treatments, ALUMASEAL, 104+ Octane Boost, Start Your Engines! and DieselPower! Diesel Additives.

For more information please visit www.goldeagle.com.

All trademarks, service marks and trade names, including STA-BIL, TriNova, HEET, Start Your Engines!, NO LEAK, ALUMASEAL, Gold Eagle, DieselPower!, Golden Touch, 104+, Cool Rides Online and 303 Products used herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Gold Eagle Co. The aforesaid families of related marks, images and symbols are the exclusive properties and trademarks of Gold Eagle Co. Any other product or company names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

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DUBLIN, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

The "Global Data Analytics Outsourcing Market 2017-2021" report has been added to Research and Markets' offering.

The global data analytics outsourcing market to grow at a CAGR of 30.25% during the period 2017-2021.

The report, Global Data Analytics Outsourcing Market 2017-2021, 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.

One trend in the market is emergence of BPaaS. Cloud technology has revolutionized outsourcing business processes. BPO solutions are hosted on remote infrastructure, managed by cloud providers, and categorized as BPaaS. Cloud-based BPO provides advantages like cost reduction, reliability, scalability, and agility.



According to the report, one driver in the market is data analytics services lead to cost reduction and efficiency. Globalization has resulted in labor arbitrage which refers to the outsourcing of business processes to locations with cheap labor. Labor arbitrage is an outcome of business process outsourcing (BPO) and knowledge process outsourcing (KPO). Outsourcing of services reduces investment by the company and enables the utilization of available resources. Outsourcing of data analytics processes provides skilled talent and advanced analytical technologies in an offshore location.

Further, the report states that one challenge in the market is changing customer requirements adversely affect market. Several industries lack policies or frameworks for data storage, which severely affect the performance of analytics. Inefficient data analytics services adversely affect demand. Outsourcing service providers must continuously develop and offer innovative solutions according to the changing customer requirements. Understanding consumer behavior is a complex and costly process. It involves high degrees of uncertainty and any failure in understanding customer behavior can lead to a potential loss of time and money.

Key vendors



Accenture

Capgemini

Fractal Analytics

TCS

Wipro

ZS (ZS Associates)



Other prominent vendors



Cognizant

Evalueserve

EXL Service (EXL)

Genpact

Gramener

HPE

IBM

Infosys

Latentview



WNS Global



Key Topics Covered:



PART 01: Executive summary



PART 02: Scope of the report



PART 03: Research Methodology



PART 04: Introduction



PART 05: Market landscape



PART 06: Market segmentation by end-user



PART 07: Geographical segmentation



PART 08: Decision framework



PART 09: Drivers and challenges



PART 10: Market trends



PART 11: Vendor landscape



PART 12: Key vendor profile



PART 13: Appendix



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/663flf/global_data

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com



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Scalable, centrally-managed fabric of Network Recorders gives NOC and SOC teams quick access to network history, and accelerates network security and performance investigations

SAN JOSE, California, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --Endace, a world leader in high-speed network recording and network history playback, today announced the release of EndaceFabric', a centrally-managed, network-wide packet capture and recording fabric. EndaceFabric gives network security and network operations teams (NetOps and SecOps) the definitive, packet-level evidence they need to rapidly investigate, and respond with certainty to, cybersecurity threats and network or application performance issues.

EndaceFabric seamlessly connects multiple EndaceProbe' Network Recorders into a recording fabric that can be centrally managed using EndaceCMS' Central Management Server.

It includes powerful investigation tools that enable analysts to quickly find and retrieve the network history they need for investigations:

EndaceConsole ' is a one click data-mining application that lets analysts quickly search the network history stored across the EndaceFabric and download or archive packet capture files to SAN or NAS storage.

is a one click data-mining application that lets analysts quickly search the network history stored across the EndaceFabric and download or archive packet capture files to SAN or NAS storage. EndaceVision ' and EndacePackets ' are built-in, browser-based tools that let analysts search, visualize and analyze network history on multiple EndaceProbes simultaneously.

"Managing accurate recording of petabytes of network history and making it searchable across the network is a big technical challenge. It becomes even more difficult as network speeds increase and networks become more distributed," says Cary Wright, VP Product Management at Endace. "With the release of OSm 6.3, the operating system that powers all Endace systems, EndaceFabric addresses that challenge by providing a distributed, centrally-managed recording infrastructure that can be deployed across the entire network at scale."

EndaceFabric's one-click search lets analysts quickly locate, retrieve and analyze packets of interest from petabytes of recorded network history distributed across the EndaceProbes in the fabric. This streamlines investigation workflows, and eases the burden on NOC and SOC teams which are under pressure to investigate and resolve the exponentially increasing number of critical alerts they receive each day.

API integration provides tight integration of EndaceFabric's Network History with security and performance monitoring tools from Endace partners such as Cisco, Dynatrace, Splunk and Plixer. Analysts can click on alerts in these tools and jump straight to the related packet-level history to see exactly what's happened.

Endace will be launching the new EndaceFabric, and demonstrating how network history can be integrated with partner analytics solutions, at booth #466 at Black Hat in Las Vegas next week.

About Endace

Endace's 100% accurate, Network History Recording and Playback provides definitive, packet-level evidence for investigating cybersecurity threats, quantifying data breaches and troubleshooting network or application performance problems. Playback integrates with commercial, open-source or custom analytics applications to streamline and automate issue investigation. Network History can be played back through hosted or external analytics solutions for automated, back-in-time investigations. Global customers include banks, hospitals, telcos, broadcasters, retailers, web giants, governments and military.

www.endace.com

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TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/17 -- North American Palladium Ltd. ("NAP" or the "Company") (TSX: PDL)(OTC PINK: PALDF) will announce its second quarter 2017 financial results for the three months ended June 30th, 2017 on Tuesday August 1st, 2017.

Following the release of the second quarter results, the Company will host a conference call on Wednesday, August 2nd, 2017 at 8:00 a.m. EDT. To participate in the conference call, please dial toll-free 1-800-319-4610 for North America and 1-604-638-5340 for International access.

Jim Gallagher, Chief Executive Officer and Timothy Hill, Chief Financial Officer will present the Company's operating and financial results followed by a question and answer session.

A recording of the conference call will be available within 24 hours following the call at the Company's website.

As well, an audio replay of the call will be available until September 2nd, 2017 by dialing 1-855-669-9658 and entering pass code 1595 on your telephone keypad.

About North American Palladium

North American Palladium Ltd. (NAP) is a Canadian company and is currently the only pure play palladium producer in the world. Operating its Lac des Iles mine northwest of Thunder Bay Ontario for more than 20 years, NAP features a unique world class ore body with modern infrastructure, including both an underground mine and an open pit mine. The Company's shares trade on the TSX under the symbol "PDL" and on the OTC Pink under the symbol "PALDF".

Contacts:

North American Palladium Ltd.

Investor Relations

416-360-7374

IR@nap.com

www.nap.com




TORONTO, ONTARIO and SPOKANE, WASHINGTON -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/17 -- Highlights:

-- Establishes one of North America's largest regulated utilities with over C$32.2 billion (US$25.4 billion) in assets and a leader in electricity transmission and distribution as well as natural gas local distribution businesses -- Expands into complementary and diversified regulated assets, inclusive of natural gas local distribution -- The transaction will be accretive to earnings per share in the mid- single digits in the first full year of operation -- Provides Hydro One with a significant and stable increase to earnings and cash flow underpinned by fully regulated utility operations jurisdictions with constructive regulatory mechanisms -- A long-term intention of continuing Hydro One's dividend payout of 70-80 per cent of earnings -- Avista shareholders receive US$53 in cash per common share, a 24% premium as of market close on July 18, 2017 -- Both Hydro One and Avista to maintain healthy balance sheets as well as strong investment-grade credit ratings -- Hydro One's acquisition financing strategy involves the issuance of C$1.4 billion of Hydro One common equity and US$2.6 billion of Hydro One debt -- Hydro One has concurrently executed a bought deal of C$1.4 billion of contingent convertible debentures represented by instalment receipts to satisfy the equity component of the acquisition financing strategy -- Hydro One and Avista customer rates will not be impacted by any of the costs associated with the transaction -- Efficiencies through enhanced scale, innovation, shared IT systems and increased purchasing power provides cost savings for customers and better customer service, complementing both organization's commitment to excellence -- Avista preserves corporate identity including its headquarters; customers, employees, communities and shareholders all benefit from new partnership -- No workforce reductions are anticipated as a result of this transaction for either Hydro One or Avista

Hydro One Limited ("Hydro One") (TSX: H) and Avista Corporation ("Avista") (NYSE: AVA) today jointly announced a definitive merger agreement ("Agreement") under which Hydro One will acquire Avista for C$67 (US$53) per share in a C$6.7 billion (US$5.3 billion) all-cash transaction. Together, Hydro One and Avista will create a North American leader in regulated electricity and natural gas business with over C$32.2 billion (US$25.4 billion) in combined assets. The transaction brings together two industry-leading regulated utilities with over 230 years of collective operational experience as well as shared corporate cultures and values. The combined entity will safely and reliably serve more than two million retail and industrial customers and hold assets throughout North America including Ontario, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.

"This marks a proud moment for Canadian champions as we grow our business into a North American leader," said Mayo Schmidt, President and CEO, Hydro One Limited. "This transaction demonstrates the power and value of the transition into an investor-owned utility, by allowing for healthy expansion into new lines of regulated utility business and new jurisdictions, such as the U.S. Pacific Northwest which is experiencing customer and economic growth."

"With a focus on operational excellence and building our earnings streams, we are positioned for long-term, sustainable growth," said Schmidt. "We are further accomplishing this goal by bringing together two companies with shared cultures and industry expertise to create a North American regulated utility leader. This combination means greater scale, diversity and financial flexibility."

Hydro One has a uniquely strong track record consolidating electricity utilities. Since the IPO, Hydro One has also delivered on cost savings and efficiencies for shareholders and customers. Through the company's energy conservation programs, Hydro One has helped customers and municipalities save 700 GWh year-to-date.

"Since our initial public offering, we have significantly enhanced our current operations while exploring opportunities that extend and diversify our regulated assets," said Schmidt. "We constantly seek to deliver exceptional value to shareholders, customers, and the communities we serve through stable, increasing regulated returns, exceptional service, and community engagement."

This strategic combination demonstrates the value of consolidation by bringing together two highly complementary platforms to create one of North America's largest regulated utilities, meaningfully enhancing both shareholder and customer value. In addition, over time, non-headcount efficiencies will be realized through collaboration and sharing of best practices on IT, innovation and supply chain purchasing, all of which will further enhance cost savings. No workforce reductions are anticipated as a result of this transaction for either Avista or Hydro One.

Avista Corporation Chairman, President and CEO Scott Morris said, "For Avista, the decision to team up with Hydro One at a time of strength and growth represents a win for our customers, employees, shareholders and the communities we serve. Through this agreement, we have a unique opportunity to secure a partnership that allows us to continue to define and control, to a significant degree, future operations and opportunities in a consolidating industry landscape for the benefit of our customers. In Hydro One, we believe we've found a partner that allows us to preserve our identity and our proud legacy, while also preparing us for the future. We look forward to joining forces with Hydro One and its dynamic team."

Following completion of the transaction, Avista will maintain its existing corporate headquarters in Spokane and will continue to operate as a standalone utility in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. Its management team and employees will remain in place and it will operate with its own Board of Directors representing the interests of the Pacific Northwest and the communities it serves. The combined company's headquarters will be based in Toronto.

Avista employees and retirees will see a continuation of the company essentially as it is today. Customers of both companies will continue to be provided with safe, reliable and high quality energy. Hydro One and Avista customer rates will not be impacted by any of the costs associated with the transaction. The communities Avista serves will continue to benefit from the important philanthropy and economic development that Avista provides.

"In fact," Morris said, "Hydro One is committed to doing even more - nearly doubling Avista's current levels of community support."

"This is the coming together of two highly respected and reputable companies steeped in history and shared commitment to the communities they serve. Both teams also share a common vision and a dedication to serving customers safely and reliably every day," said Schmidt.

"The strength of the combined company enables the accelerated deployment of innovation programs and infrastructure upgrades for the benefit of customers while continuing to deliver on shareholder expectations for consistent, healthy, financial performance. Together, we will deliver even more possibilities for the shareholders, customers, employees, and communities we have the privilege of serving," said Schmidt.

The transaction was unanimously approved by the Boards of Directors of both companies and is expected to close in the second half of 2018, subject to Avista common shareholder approval and certain regulatory and government approvals and clearances, including approval by the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, the Public Utility Commission of Oregon, the Idaho Public Utilities Commission, the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, the Public Service Commission of the State of Montana, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, clearance by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and compliance with applicable requirements under the U.S. Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended, and the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Advisors

Moelis & Company LLC is acting as exclusive financial advisor to Hydro One. BofA Merrill Lynch is acting as exclusive financial advisor to Avista. Bracewell LLP is acting as legal advisor to Hydro One. Kirkland & Ellis is acting as legal advisor to Avista.

Investment Community Teleconference and Webcast to Discuss Transaction

Hydro One and Avista management teams will host a teleconference with the investment community on July 19, 2017 at 4:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, a webcast of which will be available at www.HydroOne.com/Investors. Members of the financial community wishing to ask questions during the call should dial 1-855-716-2690 prior to the scheduled start time and request access to Hydro One acquisition of Avista teleconference, conference ID 57965580 (international callers may dial 1-440-996-5689). Media and other interested parties are welcome to participate on a listen-only basis. A webcast of the teleconference will be available at the same link following the call.

Press Conference

Hydro One and Avista will host a joint media availability on July 19, 2017 at 5:30pm Eastern Time at 483 Bay St, Toronto, ON. Members of the media not able to attend should dial (855) 716-2690 (toll-free) or (440) 996-5689 (international) 10 minutes prior to the scheduled start time and request access to the Hydro One acquisition of Avista teleconference, conference ID 58264301. Helpful keypad commands include (i)0 for operator assistance and (i)6 to self-mute/unmute. Please note that video footage of the availability will be available following the news conference for interested media.

Note: Please see attached backgrounder for additional details on the terms of the transaction and the combined companies.

About Hydro One Limited

We are Ontario's largest electricity transmission and distribution provider with more than 1.3 million valued customers, C$25 billion in assets and annual revenues of over C$6.5 billion. Our team of 5,500 skilled and dedicated employees proudly and safely serves suburban, rural and remote communities across Ontario through our 30,000 circuit km high-voltage transmission and 123,000 circuit km primary distribution networks. Hydro One is committed to the communities we serve, and has been rated as the top utility in Canada for its corporate citizenship, sustainability, and diversity initiatives. We are one of only four utility companies in Canada to achieve the Sustainable Energy Company designation from the Canadian Electrical Association. We also provide advanced broadband telecommunications services on a wholesale basis utilizing our extensive fibre optic network. Hydro One Limited's common shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: H). For more information about everything Hydro One, please visit www.HydroOne.com.

About Avista Corporation

Avista Corporation is an energy company involved in the production, transmission and distribution of energy as well as other energy-related businesses. Avista Utilities is our operating division that provides electric service to 379,000 customers and natural gas to 342,000 customers. Its service territory covers 30,000 square miles in eastern Washington, northern Idaho and parts of southern and eastern Oregon, with a population of 1.6 million. Alaska Energy and Resources Company is an Avista subsidiary that provides retail electric service in the city and borough of Juneau, Alaska, through its subsidiary Alaska Electric Light and Power Company. Avista stock is traded under the ticker symbol "AVA." For more information about Avista, please visit www.myAvista.com.

Forward-Looking Information

This communication contains "forward-looking statements" and "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws of the U.S. and Canada, respectively. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements about beliefs, expectations, estimates, projections, goals, forecasts, assumptions, risks and uncertainties, are forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information are often characterized by the use of words such as "believes," "estimates," "expects," "projects," "may," "intends," "plans," "anticipates," "pro forma," "predicts," "seeks," "could," "would," "will," "can," "continue" or "potential" and the negative of these terms or other comparable or similar terminology or expressions. The forward-looking statements and forward-looking information in this communication include, without limitation, statements relating to Hydro One's proposed merger transaction with Avista and expectations regarding timing and benefits thereof, earnings per share accretion, increases in regulated assets and earnings, financing intentions, strength of credit metrics, scale and diversification, capital expenditures, rate base growth, industry and geographic trends and forecasts, financing plans, stakeholder commitments, stockholder and regulatory approvals, and the completion of the proposed merger transaction. These statements reflect Hydro One and Avista's management's current beliefs and are based on information currently available to the management teams. Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information involve significant risk, uncertainties and assumptions. Certain factors or assumptions have been applied in drawing the conclusions contained in the forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. Hydro One and Avista caution readers that a number of factors could cause actual results, performance or achievement to differ materially from the results discussed or implied in the forward-looking statements and forward-looking information.Important factors that could cause actual results, performance and results to differ materially from those indicated by any such forward-looking statements and forward-looking information include risks and uncertainties relating to the following: (i) the risk that Avista may be unable to obtain shareholder approval for the proposed merger transaction or that Hydro One or Avista may be unable to obtain governmental and regulatory approvals required for the proposed merger transaction, or may be unable to obtain those approvals on favorable terms; (ii) the risk that the required shareholder, governmental or regulatory approvals may delay the proposed merger transaction; (iii) the risk that a condition to the closing of the proposed merger transaction may not be satisfied or the merger agreement may be terminated prior to closing; (iv) the timing to consummate the proposed transaction; (v) disruption from the proposed merger transaction making it more difficult to maintain relationships with customers, employees, regulators or suppliers; (vi) risks associated with the loss and ongoing replacement of key personnel; (vii) the diversion of management time and attention on the transaction; (viii) general worldwide economic conditions and related uncertainties; (ix) the effect and timing of changes in laws or in governmental regulations (including environmental and tax laws and regulations); (x) the risk that financing necessary to fund the proposed merger transaction may not be obtained or may be more difficult and costly to obtain than anticipated; (xi) the impact of acquisition-related expenses; (xii) the ability to maintain an investment grade credit rating; (xiii) the ability to maintain dividend payout ratios; and (xiv) other factors discussed or referred to in the "Risk Factors" section of Hydro One's most recent annual management's discussion and analysis of financial results filed with securities regulators in Canada and available under Hydro One's profile at www.sedar.com.The foregoing list is not exhaustive and other unknown or unpredictable factors could also have a material adverse effect on the performance or results of Hydro One or Avista. Additional risks and uncertainties will be discussed in the proxy statement and other materials that Avista will file with the SEC in connection with the proposed merger transaction, or in material Hydro One will file with securities regulatory authorities in Canada. There can be no assurance that the proposed merger transaction will be completed, or if it is completed, that it will close within the anticipated time period or that the expected benefits of the proposed merger transaction will be realized. These factors should be considered carefully and undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, and actual outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expressed, implied or forecasted in these forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. For additional information with respect to certain of the risks or factors, reference should be made to Hydro One's continuous disclosure materials filed from time to time with Canadian securities regulatory authorities, available at www.sedar.com and Avista's filings with the SEC available at www.sec.gov. Except as required by law, each of Hydro One and Avista disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Backgrounder

Strong Value Proposition

-- Strong fundamentals: Hydro One maintains a healthy balance sheet as well as a strong investment-grade credit rating. This provides an attractive dividend yield and earnings accretion, as well as significant and stable increases in earnings and cash flow underpinned by fully regulated utility operations with constructive regulatory mechanisms. The acquisition provides additional support to Hydro One's growing dividend, and its 70-80 per cent targeted dividend payout ratio will remain unchanged upon completion of the transaction. -- Expansion to new markets: The transaction enables expansion into new jurisdictions for Hydro One outside of Ontario, including Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho and Alaska, which are experiencing customer growth. Operations in regulatory jurisdictions with constructive regulatory mechanisms and higher allowed returns on equity and more favourable capital structures than provided by Hydro One's current regulatory jurisdiction will complement existing business operations. Benefits include a stable commercial structure, including a growing revenue base and stable, strong, forward-looking returns on equity in a regulated business. -- Focused on diversification and innovation: The combined company will have a growing low-risk natural gas LDC network, and exposure to renewable energy, including biomass and wind. There is a deep-rooted innovation culture with a strong record of technology incubation and successful investments. -- Strategic growth platforms: This extends Hydro One's core transmission and distribution business and introduces a diverse asset mix of power generation coupled with new commercial capabilities in low-risk gas distribution. Efficiencies through enhanced scale, innovation, shared IT systems and increased purchasing power provides cost savings and better customer service complementing both organizations' commitment to excellence. -- Community investment and shared values: Hydro One and Avista have a shared culture and values, as well as a strong dedication to their respective communities, which will enable a seamless integration. Both companies take their responsibility to be good corporate citizens and community partners very seriously, and this transaction will preserve and increase the philanthropy and economic development in the communities they serve. -- Similar business models: Both companies have a similar approach to operations. The companies share a strong commitment to safety, respect for the environment, and the importance of engaging stakeholders in operations.

A Leading North American Power Utility

The acquisition of Avista by Hydro One will create a leader in the North American power transmission and distribution utility sector with exposure to a mix of regulated power generation. Both companies are principally regulated utilities with complementary assets together with uniquely common cultures and values, including commitments to safety, customer service, innovation and investment in communities served.

The combined company will have over C$32.2 billion of assets while transmitting and distributing electricity and gas power safely and reliably to more than two million customers across portions of Ontario, Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska -- a service territory with a geography larger than the country of France. Following closing of the Acquisition, Hydro One will have approximately C$32.2 billion in assets and a consolidated regulatory rate base of C$22.6 billion, strengthening its position as one of the top 20 North American regulated utilities. The combination will further reinforce Hydro One as one of the top 20 investor owned regulated utilities in North America.

The Acquisition creates geographic, economic and regulatory diversity while enhancing Hydro One's asset base with the addition of complementary regulated natural gas distribution.

The enhanced scale resulting from the Acquisition will enable Hydro One to accelerate transformation of the combined power systems through more efficient investments in grid modernization, distributed generation, electrification of transportation and adoption of emerging technologies. The combination of two pure play regulated power transmission and distribution utilities with exposure to a mix of regulated generation also enables sharing of leading practices to drive enhancements to productivity and efficiency, while sharing R&D costs, leveraging innovation investments and the joint deployment of emerging technologies, all of which are expected to benefit ratepayers and shareholders.

Leadership, Governance and Market Listings

Upon closing of the transaction, which is expected to occur in the second half of 2018, Avista's successful management team will remain in place and it will operate with its own Board of Directors.

Avista will have a Board of nine directors consisting of five members designated by Hydro One, including Mayo Schmidt, and four members designated by Avista, including Scott Morris, the CEO of Avista. Scott Morris will be the Chair of the Board of Avista post-merger.

On closing, Avista's common stock will be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) while Hydro One's common shares will continue to be listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). The combined company will be operated from Ontario.

Financing and Additional Transaction Details

Hydro One financing plan is designed to maintain a strong investment grade balance sheet following completion of the Acquisition, and its pure play regulated utility profile will remain intact with approximately 99 per cent in regulated earnings.

Hydro One will finance the transaction through a combination of medium and long-term borrowings amounting to approximately C$3.4 billion together with C$1.4 billion contingent convertible debentures represented by instalment receipts, which will form the permanent equity component of the financing plan upon conversion at closing of the transaction.

Terms of the Transaction

Under the terms of the all-cash transaction, which has been unanimously approved by the Board of Directors of both companies, Avista shareholders will receive US$53 per common share, representing a 24 per cent premium to Avista's share price on July 18, 2017. Closing of the acquisition is expected by second half of 2018 subject to required approvals as discussed below.

The transaction will be accretive to earnings per share in the mid-single digits in the first full year of operation. Further, the Acquisition provides additional support to Hydro One's growing dividend, and its 70-80 per cent targeted dividend payout ratio will remain unchanged upon completion of the transaction.

The Acquisition enhances Hydro One position as a leading North American pure-play regulated power utility principally involved in electricity transmission and distribution with a legacy of having successfully consolidated approximately 90 separate electricity utilities with sensitivity and respect for the customers and communities it serves and strong partnerships with the numerous employees which have joined its team.

The closing of the Acquisition, which is expected to occur by the second half of 2018, is subject to Avista common shareholder approval and certain regulatory and government approvals, including approval by the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, the Public Utility Commission of Oregon, the Idaho Public Utilities Commission, the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, the Public Service Commission of the State of Montana, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, clearance by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and compliance with applicable requirements under the U.S. Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended, and the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Additional information About the Acquisition and Where to Find it

This communication may be deemed to be solicitation material in respect of the proposed merger transaction. (Avista Corporation ("Avista")) intends to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") and mail to its shareholders a proxy statement in connection with the proposed merger transaction and this communication is not a substitute for the proxy statement or any other document that Avista may send to its shareholders in connection with the proposed merger transaction. THE INVESTORS AND SECURITY HOLDERS OF AVISTA ARE URGED TO READ THE PROXY STATEMENT AND OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE, BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION about Avista, Hydro One and the proposed merger transaction. Investors and security holders will be able to obtain these materials (when they are available) and other documents filed with the SEC free of charge at the SEC's website, www.sec.gov. In addition, a copy of Avista's proxy statement (when it becomes available) may be obtained free of charge upon request by contacting Avista Corporation, 1411 East Mission Avenue, PO Box 3727, Spokane WA. 99220-3727. Avista's filings with the SEC are also available on Avista's website at: www.myavista.com. Investors and security holders may also read and copy any reports, statements and other information filed by Avista with the SEC, at the SEC public reference room at 100 F Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20549. Please call the SEC at 1-800-SEC-0330 or visit the SEC's website for further information on its public reference room.

Participants in the Solicitation of Proxies

This communication is not a solicitation of proxies in connection with the proposed merger transaction. However, Avista, Hydro One and certain of their respective directors, executive officers and other persons may be deemed under SEC rules to be participants in the solicitation of Avista shareholder proxies in respect of the proposed merger transaction. Information about Hydro One directors and executive officers is available in Hydro One's management information circular, filed with Canadian securities regulators on March 23, 2017, in connection with its 2017 annual meeting of shareholders and is available on its website at www.HydroOne.com and also under its profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Information regarding Avista's directors and executive officers is available in Avista's proxy statement filed with the SEC on March 31, 2017 in connection with its 2017 annual meeting of shareholders, and its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2016 filed with the SEC on February 22, 2017, each of which may be obtained from the sources indicated in Additional Information and Where to Find It. Other information regarding persons who may be deemed participants in the proxy solicitation and a description of their direct and indirect interests (which may be different than those of Avista's investors and security holders), by security holdings or otherwise, will be contained in the proxy statement and other relevant materials filed or to be filed with the SEC when they become available.

Timing and Approvals

The closing of the Acquisition, which is expected to occur in the second half of 2018, is subject to Avista common shareholder approval and certain regulatory and government approvals and clearances, including approval by the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, the Public Utility Commission of Oregon, the Idaho Public Utilities Commission, the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, the Public Service Commission of the State of Montana, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, clearance by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and compliance with applicable requirements under the U.S. Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended, and the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Hydro One intends to work diligently with Avista to productively engage with state and federal regulators and file and process the required regulatory applications in order to close the proposed merger transaction as promptly as possible. Hydro One and Avista both have histories of successfully executing regulated utility acquisitions and working constructively through the associated regulatory processes to achieve fair, balanced and timely approvals.

Contacts:

Media: Hydro One Limited

Natalie Poole-Moffatt

Corporate Communications

416-345-6868

media.relations@hydroone.com



Investors: Hydro One Limited

Bruce Mann

Investor Relations

416-345-5722

bruce.mann@hydroone.com



Media: Avista Corporation

Dana Anderson

External Communications

509-495-4174

dana.anderson@avistacorp.com



Investors: Avista Corporation

Jason Lang

Investor Relations

509-495-2930

jason.lang@avistacorp.com




CALGARY, Alberta, 2017-07-19 23:00 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Serinus Energy Inc. ("Serinus", "SEN" or the "Company") (TSX:SEN) (WARSAW:SEN) provides an update on its operations in Tunisia. The Company's production at its Sabria and Chouech Es Saida fields in Tunisia continues to be temporarily shut-in due to continued social and labour unrest in the southern part of the country. The Sabria field has been shut-in since May 22nd and the Chouech Es Saida field further south has been shut-in since February 28th, 2017.



The continued protests in the southern region, over jobs and development, have blocked all oil field activities in the southern oilfields of Tunisia, and have shut down the major south-north oil export pipeline. There are two primary hot spots of protest affecting the Tunisian oil and gas industry: the Tataouine Governorate and the Kebili Governorate.



In the Tatouine region, where the Chouech Es Saida field is located, a large group of protestors started a sit-in on April 22nd at the El Kamour military check point. This check point provides access to the southern desert region, including the southern oilfields. The protestors illegally blocked any movement of supplies or people by road into the southern oil facilities, thereby preventing oil companies from carrying out oil and gas activity. On May 20th, the protestors attacked and disabled the SP4 valve station on the primary north-south oil export pipeline. This action resulted in all production (OMV, ENI, SODEPS & MEDCO) in the region being shut-in by June 5th, due to storage capacity limitations being reached. On June 16th, the El Kamour sit-in was lifted following an agreement between the sit-in committee and the government, with the commitment of the Union Generale Tunisienne du Travail ("UGTT") that this agreement for the Tataouine region would be implemented by June 18th. On this date, oil & gas production was resumed by OMV, ENI, SODEPS & MEDCO. However, the production stoppage resulted in damage to at least 9 oil wells, which will require significant capital investments to re-start production in the future. On June 27th, a group of illegal protestors from the town of Douz again closed a valve on the major north-south oil export pipeline at Bou Lahbal (100 km south of Douz). Despite the agreement being in place, on July 5th protestors from Tataouine again blocked the road leading to the southern desert region and seized a number of corporate four-wheel drive vehicles. On July 7th, OMV and SODEPS production from the southern Tataouine desert region was shut-in again and ENI shut-in production on July 10th, due to the pipeline closure. In a statement to the press, the Minister said that the oil companies must recruit 100 new hires during the month of July, 150 new hires in September, and 150 new hires in October. He added that there are plans to create 1,000 jobs in 2017 and a further 500 jobs in 2018. This is despite the fact that the total current workforce of the Tunisian oil companies is estimated to be 1,700 and that there is no ability among the oil companies to take on additional employment obligations under the current economic conditions.



In addition to the protests in the Tataouine region, parallel protests began in the Kebili region, where the Company's Sabria field is located. On April 4th, as a result of the protests in Tataouine, a social campaign named "where is the oil?" began in Kebili. Throughout the month of April, the protests increased in size and by May 7th the Kebili protestors started a sit-in at the Perenco facilities in Douz. These actions quickly escalated to a stoppage of production and abandonment of the facilities by Perenco staff. Serinus continued to truck Sabria crude oil at this time, but by May 19th the protests in the El Faouar region stopped all crude oil trucks from operating. At this time, a general strike in El Faouar was held requesting that the government promise to hold a dedicated ministerial meeting on the economic situation in the region. On May 22nd, given no response by the government, the El Faouar protestors arrived at the Serinus Sabria facilities and demanded that the Company stop production and evacuate all personnel from the field. The government attempted to de-escalate the situation with a ministerial meeting on May 25th. However, this meeting ended with no solution as the protestors rejected the 29 government initiatives offered as not being sufficient. The final demands of the protestors in El Faouar (Governorate of Kebili) are uncertain. However, the general framework is the strengthening of development and employment in the region, including the creation of public projects, increased employment by the oil companies and strengthening the social and economic actions of oil companies, by increasing funding allocated for this purpose and the creation of subsidiaries in the governorate.



The Governor of Kebili has taken the initiative to help consolidate all the protestors demands into one manageable framework. On July 6th, a meeting was held at the Perenco El Franig facility between the protestors, the union and the government deputies. The outcome of this meeting was that the protestors accepted the Governor's proposal to unify the demands and to have just one coordinating committee for all the sit-ins from the different delegations, all under the supervision of UGTT.



The process is still ongoing and a meeting with the UGTT, concerning the Governor's proposal to unify the demands and to have just one coordinating committee for all the sit-ins from the different delegations, was held on Saturday, July 15th, 2017. At this meeting a committee was formed of all key representatives of the local associations, members of the assembly, protest groups and UGTT. A consolidated list of demands was written and will be submitted to the government.



As a result of the continued road blockages in the Kebili Governorate, the Company has been unable to restart oil production at Sabria. The Company has implemented cost-saving measures to reduce expenditures to the minimum level while still meeting its legal contractual commitments.



The Company continues to hold discussions with the government and other oil producers to closely monitor the situation. Over the past four months, the government has held numerous meetings with the protestors to seek a solution to the situation. Unfortunately, these protest actions and the shut-in of production in southern Tunisia have the unintended consequences of inflicting significant harm to the Tunisian economy, and self-defeating the goals of the protestors seeking employment growth and opportunities in southern Tunisia.



It is the Company's hope that a solution to the social unrest between the protestors and the government can be achieved as soon as possible and the oil production in the region can resume to the benefit of the country of Tunisia and all its citizens.



About Serinus



Serinus is an international upstream oil and gas exploration and production company that owns and operates projects in Tunisia and Romania.



For further information, please refer to the Serinus website (www.serinusenergy.com) or contact the following:



Serinus Energy Inc. Serinus Energy Inc. Calvin Brackman Jeffrey Auld Director, External Relations Chief Executive Officer Tel.: +1-403-264-8877 Tel.: +1-403-264-8877 cbrackman@serinusenergy.com jauld@serinusenergy.com



Translation: This news release has been translated into Polish from the English original.



Forward-looking Statements This release may contain forward-looking statements made as of the date of this announcement with respect to future activities that either are not or may not be historical facts. Although the Company believes that its expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable as of the date hereof, any potential results suggested by such statements involve risk and uncertainties and no assurance can be given that actual results will be consistent with these forward-looking statements. Various factors that could impair or prevent the Company from completing the expected activities on its projects include that the Company's projects experience technical and mechanical problems, there are changes in product prices, failure to obtain regulatory approvals, the state of the national or international monetary, oil and gas, financial, political and economic markets in the jurisdictions where the Company operates and other risks not anticipated by the Company or disclosed in the Company's published material. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature, they involve inherent risks and uncertainties and actual results may vary materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statement. The Company undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements in this announcement to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this announcement, unless required by law.

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Regulatory News:

In connection with AP Alternative Assets, L.P.'s ("AAA"; Euronext Amsterdam: AAA) equity investment in Athene Holding Ltd. ("Athene"), AAA, the largest shareholder of Athene, informs its investors that Athene has today filed with the Securities Exchange Commission ("SEC") a registration statement on Form S-8 relating to Athene's employee stock purchase plan. The registration statement is available for free on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov.

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of any offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

About AP Alternative Assets, L.P.

AP Alternative Assets, L.P. was established by Apollo Global Management, LLC and its subsidiaries ("Apollo") and is a closed-end limited partnership established under the laws of Guernsey. Apollo is a leading global alternative investment manager with 27 years of experience investing across the capital structure of leveraged companies. AAA is managed by Apollo Alternative Assets, L.P. For more information about AAA, please visit www.apolloalternativeassets.com.

This announcement does not constitute or form part of an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to purchase or subscribe for securities in the United States or in any other jurisdiction.

This press release contains forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties because they relate to future events and circumstances. Such statements are based on currently available operating, financial and competitive information and are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from the historical experience and expressed or implied expectations of AAA. Undue reliance should not be placed on such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which they are made and AAA does not undertake to update its forward-looking statements unless required by law.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170719006362/en/

Contacts:

AP Alternative Assets, L.P.

Gary Stein (New York), +1-212-822-0467
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / July 19, 2017 / The following statement is being issued by Levi & Korsinsky, LLP:

To: All persons or entities who purchased or otherwise acquired securities of Eco Science Solutions, Inc. ("Eco Science Solutions") (OTC PINK: ESSI) between December 2, 2016 and May 19, 2017 . You are hereby notified that a securities class action lawsuit has been commenced in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey. To get more information, go to: http://www.zlk.com/pslra-sb/eco-science-solutions-inc?wire=1, or contact Joseph E. Levi, Esq. either via email at jlevi@levikorsinsky.com or by telephone at (212) 363-7500, toll-free: (877) 363-5972. There is no cost or obligation to you.

The complaint alleges that, throughout the class period, Defendants issued materially false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) the Company's plan for strategic acquisitions lacked veracity; and (ii) as a result, Defendants' statements about the Company's business, operations, and prospects were materially false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis at all relevant times. On May 19, 2017, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued an order of suspension of trading, halting trading of the Company's securities.

If you suffered a loss in Eco Science Solutions, you have until July 24, 2017 to request that the Court appoint you as lead plaintiff. Your ability to share in any recovery doesn't require that you serve as a lead plaintiff.

Levi & Korsinsky is a national firm with offices in New York, California, Connecticut, and Washington D.C. The firm's attorneys have extensive expertise and experience representing investors in securities litigation, and have recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for aggrieved shareholders. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

CONTACT:

Levi & Korsinsky, LLP

Joseph E. Levi, Esq.

30 Broad Street - 24th Floor

New York, NY 10004

Tel: (212) 363-7500

Toll Free: (877) 363-5972

Fax: (212) 363-7171

www.zlk.com

SOURCE: Levi & Korsinsky, LLP
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - People's United Bank, a subsidiary of People's United Financial, Inc. (PBCT), announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire LEAF Commercial Capital, Inc. Based in Philadelphia, PA, LEAF is one of the largest, independent commercial equipment finance companies in the U.S., with approximately $500 million of annual originations. People's United will acquire approximately $730 million of net investment in leases and loans and retain approximately $250 million of securitizations. Remaining LEAF borrowings are expected to be repaid at close and the acquisition will be immediately accretive to People's United earnings. The transaction is expected to close during the third quarter of 2017. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / July 19, 2017 / The following statement is being issued by Levi & Korsinsky, LLP:

To: All persons or entities who purchased or otherwise acquired securities of Axiom Holdings, Inc. ("Axiom Holdings") (OTC PINK: AIOM) between October 14, 2016 and June 19, 2017 . You are hereby notified that a securities class action lawsuit has been commenced in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. To get more information, go to: http://www.zlk.com/pslra-sba/axiom-holdings-inc?wire=1, or contact Joseph E. Levi, Esq. either via email at jlevi@levikorsinsky.com or by telephone at (212) 363-7500, toll-free: (877) 363-5972. There is no cost or obligation to you.

The complaint alleges that, throughout the class period, Defendants issued materially false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) Axiom lacked control over the merger process sufficient to ensure that the Agreement with CJC would be completed; (ii) accordingly, the Agreement with CJC Holdings, Ltd. ("CJC") was never completed; (iii) the Company's issuance of shares to the CJC Shareholders was thus improper; and (iv) as a result of the foregoing, Axiom's public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.

On June 19, 2017, Axiom issued a press release revealing that it identified discrepancies related to prior news announcements in response to a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The following day, the Company issued another press release, advising investors that 'it now appears the merger was never completed' and advising investors that it would rescind the shares that were issued to CJC Shareholders in connection with the merger.

If you suffered a loss in Axiom Holdings, you have until August 21, 2017 to request that the Court appoint you as lead plaintiff. Your ability to share in any recovery doesn't require that you serve as a lead plaintiff.

Levi & Korsinsky is a national firm with offices in New York, California, Connecticut, and Washington D.C. The firm's attorneys have extensive expertise and experience representing investors in securities litigation, and have recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for aggrieved shareholders. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

CONTACT:

Levi & Korsinsky, LLP

Joseph E. Levi, Esq.

30 Broad Street - 24th Floor

New York, NY 10004

Tel: (212) 363-7500

Toll Free: (877) 363-5972

Fax: (212) 363-7171

www.zlk.com

SOURCE: Levi & Korsinsky LLP
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / July 19, 2017 / Roughrider Exploration Limited (TSX-V: REL) ("Roughrider" or the "Company") - Further to its News Release dated June 22, 2017, announcing that it had signed an option to acquire the Iron Butte oxide gold-silver project located along the western margin of the Battle Mountain-Eureka Gold Trend in Lander County (the "Iron Butte Project"), the Company is pleased to announce that it has received TSX Venture Exchange approval for, and acquired, an option (the "Option") to acquire a 100% interest in the Iron Butte Project, subject to certain royalty interests, from an arm's length private vendor.

In connection with the acquisition of the Option, the Company issued 75,000 common shares (the "Shares") and paid aggregate cash payments totaling USD $25,000. The Shares are subject to a hold period expiring November 14, 2017. The terms of the Option agreement are fully disclosed in the Company's June 22, 2017 news release.

About Roughrider Exploration Limited

Roughrider's focus is exploring the 131,412 hectare (324,728 acre) Genesis uranium project located in the Wollaston-Mudjatik geological trend extending northeast from Saskatchewan's Athabasca Basin. Roughrider has the option to earn an 85% interest in Genesis from Kivalliq Energy Corporation. Roughrider has recently signed an option agreement to acquire a 100% interest in the Iron Butte oxide gold-silver project located along the western margin of the Battle Mountain-Eureka Gold Trend in Lander County, Nevada.

For further information, please contact:

Scott Gibson

Chief Executive Officer

604-697-0028

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION

Certain information contained or incorporated by reference in this press release, including any information as to our strategy, projects, plans or future financial or operating performance, constitutes "forward-looking statements." All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are to be considered forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based on a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by the company, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, geological and competitive uncertainties and contingencies. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance. Known and unknown factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Such factors include but are not limited to: fluctuations in market prices, exploration and exploitation successes, continued availability of capital and financing, changes in national and local government legislation, taxation, controls, regulations, expropriation or nationalization of property and general political, economic, market or business conditions. Many of these uncertainties and contingencies can affect our actual results and could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements made by, or on behalf of, us. Readers are cautioned that forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and, therefore, readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of such uncertainties. All of the forward-looking statements made in this press release, or incorporated by reference, are qualified by these cautionary statements. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

UNITED STATES ADVISORY

The securities referred to herein have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), have been offered and sold outside the United States to eligible investors pursuant to Regulation S promulgated under the U.S. Securities Act, and may not be offered, sold, or resold in the United States or to, or for the account of or benefit of, a U.S. Person (as such term is defined in Regulation S under the United States Securities Act) unless the securities are registered under the U.S. Securities Act, or an exemption from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act is available. Hedging transactions involving the securities must not be conducted unless in accordance with the U.S. Securities Act. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in the state in the United States in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.

SOURCE: Roughrider Exploration Limited
FreshBooks, a Toronto, CA-based cloud accounting software for self-employed professionals and their teams, raised USD$43m (CDN$57M) in Series B funding.

The round was led by existing investor Georgian Partners with participation from previous investors Accomplice and Oak Investment Partners. In conjunction with the funding, Simon Chong, managing partner and co-founder at Georgian Partners, joined FreshBooks board of directors.

The company plans to use the funds to invest in accelerating its growth in North America, and continuing platform innovation for billing, reporting, accounting, and partner integrations.

Led by Mike McDerment, co-founder and CEO, FreshBooks provides service-based small business owners and independent professionals with a cloud based accounting software platform with invoicing, time tracking, and expense management features and used by more than 10 million people across 160 countries to date. The company had previously raised USD$30M (CDN$40M) in institutional funding (in July 2014).

FinSMEs

19/07/2017
Neurovalens, a San Diego, CA- and Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK-based healthtech startup that specializes in combining neuroscience and technology to solve health issues, secured 1.1m in funding.

Backers included both the Angel CoFund (backed by the British Business Bank) and Beltrae Partners, which joined early investor TechStart NI.

The company, which has raised 1.4M in total funding to date, will use the funds to launch its Modius device.

Co-founded in 2015 by British neuroscientists Dr. Jason McKeown and Dr. Paul McGeoch, who retain the majority shareholding, Neurovalens is launching its first product, Modius, a headset that stimulates the hypothalamus, an area of the brain associated with hunger and metabolism, simultaneously to UK and US consumers via crowd-funding website Indiegogo.

The launch is scheduled for 8th August.

FinSMEs

19/08/2017
Workato, a Cupertino, Calif.-based enterprise integration platform, completed a $10m Series A financing.

The round was led by Storm Ventures with participation from Salesforce Ventures and Workday Ventures.

The company intends to use the funds to continue to develop the platform and expand its business reach.

Led by Vijay Tella, CEO, Workato provides an enterprise integration platform that integrates and automates tasks across on-premise, cloud apps and databases. It enables enterprise integration, process automation, and a citizen experience, enabling business users and IT to collaborate in order to build, operate and rollout automations without compromising security and governance.

The companys solution, used by more than 21,000 organizations, including top brands, processes more than 4 billion integration events per year.

FinSMEs

18/07/2017
New Delhi: Air India is drawing up a proposal to offer voluntary buyouts to just over a third of its 40,000 employees, two government officials said, in what would be one of the largest such offers in India's state sector, as the airline slashes costs ahead of a 2018 sale.

The state-owned airline has also put fleet expansion on hold, scrapping a proposal to lease eight Boeing 787 wide-body aircraft, said one of the officials, a senior Air India employee who requested anonymity as the plans are not public. Air India's board approved that proposal in April but nothing further had been done.

"Nothing has been finalised but our aim is to make the strategic sale as simple as we can," the company official said, adding that any fresh investment would also be put on hold.

Air India spokesman Dhananjay Kumar said the company had not offered employees voluntary buyouts.

India's flag carrier is on the block after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's cabinet last month approved plans to privatize the loss-making airline by selling part or all of the company and ending decades of state support.

Founded in the 1930s and known to generations of Indians for its Maharajah mascot, Air India has a complex fleet, too many staff relative to rivals and $8.5 billion in debt. Since 2012, New Delhi has injected $3.6 billion to keep it afloat.

An official in Modi's office said the prime minister, under pressure to cut spending and boost basic infrastructure such as ports and roads, was in "no mood" to provide fresh monetary assistance to any loss-making public sector company.

The two government sources, who are familiar with Air India's plans, said top officials in the civil aviation ministry and at Air India had been asked to present a report on how a Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS) could be offered to some 15,000 of Air India's 40,000 staff, including contractors.

Many of the contractors, including office staff and ground handlers, have worked for the airline for years, and would need to be given buyout offers to prevent protests from them, said the senior company official, who is involved in the airline's daily operations.

Previous attempts to offload the airline have failed mainly because of the scale and complexity of Air India's problems, as well as its influential unions.

If Modi can pull the privatization off it will buttress his credentials as a reformer brave enough to wade into some of the country's most intractable problems.

Separately on Tuesday, Air India Chairman Ashwani Lohani sent a letter to employees assuring them the government and the airline management "would like to safeguard your genuine and valid interests", according to a copy of the letter seen by Reuters. Kumar, the company spokesman, confirmed the letter.

United front

In its heyday, Air India boasted a talent pool that newly founded airlines dipped into.

The government will need to convince seven trade unions to accept the plan to make the airline attractive to potential buyers, including buyouts and other efforts to slash costs. Their initial response was not positive.

"The government will propose a VRS scheme and we will throw their proposal in the dustbin," said J B Kadian, leader of a union that represents 8,000 non-technical Air India staff.

Kadian said a joint forum of unions representing Air India employees would launch an "agitation" in August if the government pursues its privatization plans.

On Tuesday, dozens of members of the Air Corporations Employees' Union gathered near Delhi airport holding placards and shouting slogans opposing the privatization and demanding the airline's debt be written off, marking the first protest against the government's plan.

A committee of five senior federal ministers, led by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, is expected to meet this month and begin ironing out the finer details of the privatization plan.

In the meantime, Civil Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju said he wanted Air India to begin cutting at all levels.

Earlier this month, the airline decided to stop serving non-vegetarian meals in economy class on domestic flights in a bid to save up to 100 million rupees ($1.6 million) over 10 months.

The action provoked uproar on social media and was belittled by aviation experts, who argue that Air India's management needs a massive structural overhaul, tackling thornier issues such as its fleet and staff, rather than meals.

The airline is also working to reduce the time its planes spend on the ground and launching direct flights to new international destinations.

In July, Air India started a direct flight to Washington and will start flying to Stockholm, Copenhagen and Los Angeles later this year.

"Keeping planes in the hangar makes no sense when Air India is trying to find new sources of income. We should optimize the use of all possible resources," Raju said. "The idea is to present a robust company to potential buyers."
The privatisation of Air India is set to bring about a major change in the work life of its employees, many of whom have been with the public sector unit (PSU) for a considerable period of time. Chairman Ashwani Lohani reportedly wrote a letter to the staff detailing how the move could result in a work culture change in a bid to prepare them for the likely sale.

"Ownership changes that we expect at Air India would also lead to a change in the working environment and the work culture. The complexities of working in a PSU (public sector unit) environment would get replaced by a corporate culture, a culture in which merit would get a better deal," Lohani wrote in the letter, according to a report in the Mint.

Working for a PSU is largely perceived to be cushy. Job security is guaranteed and one cannot be sacked unless one commits a fraud or treason. You also have more ways to hide your incompetence, than in the private sector, to hold on to your job or even get promotions. Once privatised, all this will likely change for Air India employees.

So what should an Air India employee be now prepared for? The PSU culture is seen as work done for the good of society and at a broader level for nation building, point out analysts. It is this perspective that has to change, they say.

Amit Nandkeolyar, assistant professor of organisational behaviour at the Indian School of Business says unlike PSUs, the focus of the private sector is to maximise profits. There is no diffused ownership here like seen in PSUs. He feels that Air India employees should be given some training about work culture in the private sector so that they are better prepared when the behemoth gets privatised.

In the private sector, it is your performance that matters and it becomes more pronounced as you are accountable and responsible for the work given to you, says Nandkeolyar.

Some employees in Air India might find the new job responsibility when it get privatised a tough call. No longer will the bhatija-mama-chacha (nephew, maternal uncle, paternal uncle) connection with the Minister or the Member of Parliament open the doors or help you when you are truant at the workplace, says KVJ Rao, General Secretary, All India Cabin Crew Association, adding that has been the bane of the airline.

A retired senior airline official recounts innumerable occasions when out-of-line promotions and plum positions were offered just by the dint of being related to a mantri or knowing someone in power.

Another peculiarity of the PSU sector is not to get into trouble, says a sector analyst. That means that one will play it safe and delay work as much as possible to play it safe. Just as the individual who works beyond what is required of him/her is not rewarded in the PSU, similarly no one is blamed for a delay. This is a lesson that will have to be unlearnt when employees enter the private sector from a PSU, she points out.

The cultural aspect will impact employees at all levels, especially in the front office and service levels, says Ajay Shah, head of recruitment services at Teamlease, a manpower firm. Privatisation is not about compliance but about aggression at all levels -- service levels have to go up from the laid-back attitude as seen now. There has to be continuous innovation and enriching of customer experience. The oft-pronounced comfort factor that Air India has been talking of will not work. Low-frills airlines like Go Air and even a new entrant like Vistara is fulfilling that promise and delivering much more.

The airline industry has become increasingly more competent and is running on two factors  timeliness and comfort. While Air India has been promising only comfort for five years, says Shah.

Employees who will be worried would be the babus and those who owe their existence to babudom, says Rao. There is no culture shock for the 85 percent of employees who come to work for a living and do their job well. It is only the 15 percent who are here because of their political connections and the few who are lazy and laid back will find privatisation a culture shock, he says.

Is the distinction that public sector units are large, unwieldy setups compared to a tightly knit performance-oriented organisation that threatens to stir and shakeup the PSU employees? That is not the issue at all, believes Debashis Chatterjee, Director General, International Management Institute (IMI), Delhi, and two other campuses in Kolkata and Bhubaneswar. In the private sector, based on your performance, incentives will come your way. The culture will be to work hard to get those incentives. If people are not habituated to efficiency, then this can become a hurdle, Chatterjee points out.

For those who are used to a culture of freebies, the road ahead will not be smooth. That will not only be a cultural change but also mind-set change, points out a sector analyst.

Way out

One way to make the transition smooth would be to have manpower skilling and training so that people know what is expected of them in the new landscape. Re-skilling people and getting them to work in a time-bound manner is one way to make them prepared for the transition, says Shah of Teamlease.

At the end of the day, culture is dictated by what an organisation does and expects its employees to do. None of us are born into this culture but adapt to what is being done. When some employees get away with something that is not right, a few are tempted to follow suit, said Rao of All India Cabin Crew Association. He says that it is not that the private airlines dont go to the civil aviation ministry to get their work done. But they are not going to pamper a minister, MP or MLA all the time which is what Air India does. I agree with the prime minister who says that the government should not be in the business of business, he says.

Would the transition be painful for employees? Not really, if they are not forced into a change in culture overnight. More importantly, if employees can view this change in a positive manner as a new learning and a new perspective to doing things better, there should not be an issue at all, says Ronesh Puri, MD, Executive Access, an executive search firm. No organisation can sustain with losses for a long time and that tap has to run dry, he said.

The days of running to a minister or to Delhi to get things done will be over when Air India gets privatised and that could be a culture shock which Chairman Ashwani Lohani must be hinting at, said the retired airline official. The question that begs an answer is how did Air India go from being a debt-free organisation to one that is now weighed down with Rs 52,000 crore debt. That is a shock on all counts  not just cultural, the retired official says.
New Delhi: The number of digital transactions, which grew significantly in the aftermath of demonetisation last year, has started showing a declining trend since March 2017, according to official data.

The number of digital transactions has come down from 119.07 crore in March 2017 to 118.01 crore in April and further to 111.45 crore in May, P P Chaudhary, Minister of State for Electronics and IT, said in a written reply in the Lok Sabha.

The number of digital transactions was only at 71.27 crore in October 2016. It went up to 83.48 crore in November 2016 and shot up to 123.46 crore in December 2016.

The increase in digital transactions was witnessed after demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes on 8 November, 2016.

These transactions numbered 114.96 crore in January 2017, and about 101.18 crore in February 2017.

To another query whether commission is charged on cash transactions under digital economy, Chaudhary said scheduled commercial banks have the freedom to levy charges for various services, as per a Reserve Bank of India circular dated July, 2014.
A week after nearly 2,000 publishers in the US formed the News Media Alliance to get an anti-trust exemption from the Congress to negotiate over advertising revenue with digital platforms, a top Facebook executive has confirmed the company would soon launch a news subscription product.

Campbell Brown, the head of the company's news partnerships, said Facebook will launch a subscription-based news product with initial tests beginning in October, The Street reported late on Tuesday.

"One of the things we heard in our initial meetings from many newspapers and digital publishers is that we want a subscription product -- we want to be able to see a paywall in Facebook," Brown said at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit in New York City.

"And that is something we're doing now. We are launching a subscription product," he told the gathering.

According to Brown, the paywall idea is based on premium and metered plans and has been in the works for a while.

"Facebook plans to erect a paywall which would require readers to become subscribers of the platform after they'd accessed 10 articles," Brown was quoted as saying.

Media reports said Facebook options would seem to accommodate metered publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, which make a certain selection of articles free and put the rest behind a paywall.

Facebook will also give access to publications to all subscriber data through which they can understand their audience better.

The move is to let the people subscribe to publications through Facebook's 'Instant Articles' feature and support major publications with metered paywalls and "freemium" models.

The News Media Alliance that represents roughly 2,000 US' national and local newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, has started reaching out to Capitol Hill to sound out the chances for an exemption.

"We are not looking to break up Google and Facebook by saying they have a duopoly here, what we are saying is there has got to be a way to improve the business model," Paul Boyle, senior vice-president (public policy) News Media Alliance, was quoted as saying.

According to Boyle, newspapers had thought allowing their articles to be shared on social media would earn them a piece of the digital ad market.

"But Facebook doesn't always allow the reader to click through to the publisher's website, denying the news website ad revenue from that reader," he stated.

It is unclear, however, how payments will be handled and if Facebook would take a cut of subscription sales.

According to media reports, Google and Facebook control nearly two-third of the digital advertising industry, and newspaper revenue from advertisements declined to $16 billion in 2016, down from about $50 billion 10 years earlier.
Infosys executive vice-president Ritika Suri, who was focused on getting large deals, has resigned from the company, media reports said citing sources, bringing the focus back on high-level exits at the software major.

Suri, who led the acquisition of Israeli automation technology firm Panaya for Infosys, was based out of the US. A former executive at SAP, Suri was brought into Infosys by CEO Vishal Sikka in September 2014. She was later elevated as the EVP (Corporate Development and Ventures).

She also helped Infosys set up a $500 million Infosys Innovation Fund to invest in startups, and especially those working on areas like artificial intelligence and automation.

Sources said Suri put in her papers last week and is serving her notice period. They did not wish to be identified as they are not authorised to speak on the matter.

The reason for Suris exit could not be ascertained.

When contacted, Infosys said, We do not comment on speculations related to appointments or exits of executives other than key management personnel.

Sikka had told PTI in January that of the venture fund corpus a little over $62 million had been invested. The fund was set up in 2013 with a corpus of $100 million for startups and other innovative businesses outside the company. The size of the fund was expanded to $500 million in January 2015.

The startups that the company invested included Stellaris Venture Partners, Unsilo, Trifacta, Cloudyn and TidalScale. These investments are expected to play a major role in helping Infosys reach its aspirational goal of $20 billion revenues by 2020.

In the June quarter, Infosys had written down its entire carrying value of the investment in its associate DWA Nova LLC, an Infosys Innovation Fund investment.

"The impact of write down on Q1 net profit is USD 11 million," the company had said.

Suri was earlier engaged in a mergers and acquisitions role and led the contentious acquisition of Israeli automation technology firm, Panaya.

However, two anonymous letters in February 2017 alleged wrongdoing in some of Infosys' acquisitions, including Panaya, improper contracting and CEO compensation as well as expenditures.

In February 2015, Infosys had announced buying the Israeli automation technology company for $200 million or Rs 1,250 crore in cash.

After the allegations, the company had instituted an independent forensic investigation by US law firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. The results of the probe that came out last month, gave a clean chit to Suri on the deal.

On the acquisition, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher had said it did not find any evidence of "inappropriate contracting" or that the mergers and acquisitions team failed to obtain appropriate approvals.

Company observers are surprised at the sudden development. Even if the company and chief executive Sikka received a clean chit from US law firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher on allegations over Panaya deal, Suris resignation within a month after the investigation report appears surprising, a former Infosys executive is quoted as saying in a report in the Business Standard.

It is also to be noted that the exit comes at a time when the company is looking to acquire large deals in its markets.

In the first quarter of the current financial year, the company had added eight clients in $100 million category.

The exit of the senior executive also comes on the heels of the departure of Infosys' Americas Head Sandeep Dadlani, who was responsible for about one-third of the company's annual business.

Ever since Sikka became the CEO, the company has seen 10 high-level exits, according to the BS report.

Suri's exit shows the painful transition of the company continues to pose challenge for Sikka.
Ahmedabad: The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) on Tuesday allowed Essar Steel to file objections to petitions moved by the State Bank of India (SBI) and the Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) to initiate insolvency proceedings against it.

The Ahmedabad bench of the tribunal of judicial member Bikki Raveendra Babu granted time to Essar Steel till 22 July to file objections to the petitions moved by the two lenders against the company after the Gujarat High Court dismissed its petition yesterday. The tribunal posted the hearing in the matter for 24 July.

The Gujarat High Court had on Monday dismissed the steel major's plea against the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) directive to the banks to initiate insolvency proceedings against it, saying it is not proper for it to interfere in the matter.

A bench of Justice S G Shah had said in its order that with the firm owing a debt of a whopping Rs 45,000 crore, the lenders should be allowed to exercise discretion to take legal steps to recover the amount.

The State Bank of India (SBI), which leads the joint lenders forum, and the Standard Chartered Bank have sought initiating insolvency proceedings against Essar Steel under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC).

The RBI had on 13 June allowed the banks to initiate proceedings against a dozen companies, including Essar Steel, under the IBC to recover outstanding loans.

The high court had in its order said that the company can raise its objections against the banks before the NCLT. Based on the order, the company sought time from the NCLT to file its objections.
New Delhi: Finance minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday described the Goods and Services Tax (GST) as a "win- win" deal for all as it will expand the tax net, end "inspector raj" and bring down prices of goods.

Pitching the GST as a measure beneficial for the country at a meeting of the BJP parliamentary party attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, senior leaders and party MPs, Jaitley said prices of goods has come down between four to eight percent since its roll-out on 1 July.

Parliamentary affairs minister Ananth Kumar briefed reporters about the meeting in which external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj also informed parliamentarians about Modi's recent foreign visits, especially to the US and Israel.

The GST was in the interest of people and states as well as the latter will get 80 per cent of the revenue leading to more development, Jaitley said.

There was no longer tax on tax and the transport of goods across the country was going unhindered now, he said.

More than one crore firms will be migrating to the new tax regime against around 80 lakh companies earlier, he said, Kumar quoted him as saying.

"Tax net has expanded. The country's market has been integrated. Inspector raj is over. The tax burden on the masses has gone down. It is a win-win situation for all," the finance minister said. BJP MPs were also asked to attend the Houses regularly.
New Delhi: India has participated in the global joint task force meet to discuss with countries information exchange as it looks to pursue work on the Panama Papers, the finance ministry said on Tuesday.

The Joint International Taskforce on Shared Intelligence and Collaboration (JITSIC) meeting was reconvened in Paris in the last week of June 2017 to pursue the work on the Panama Papers.

"Based on legal instruments under the OECD and Council of Europe Multilateral Convention and tax treaties, a number of countries shared information in confidential Competent Authorities sessions, on structures that facilitate, enable and promote tax avoidance/evasion. India also shared its experience in this regard," the statement said.

Demonstrating the value and strength of JITSIC, 30 project participant countries have continued to exchange, analyse and act on information about taxpayers and intermediaries connected to Mossack.

In the past six months, more than 570 requests for information have been sent to 32 countries. India has also sent several requests for information to various jurisdictions in the Panama Paper cases since the last meeting in January 2017.

"JITSIC members have established the capability to allow for fast, effective and coordinated multilateral responses to any future data leaks and are sharing the same. JITSIC will continue to identify more arrangements as countries continue their investigations and share intelligence and new data comes to light," the statement said.

Collaboration with JITSIC has been useful for India in its fight against offshore tax evasion, it added.

The Panama papers refer to 11.5 million leaked documents published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with details of offshore entities set up by the law firm Mossack Fonseca over 40 years.

Some of the entities set up by the law firm were shell corporations used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion and evading international sanctions.

The papers also included details of entities set up by over 500 Indian nationals.
While there has been an intellectual uproar over the cuts ordered by the Central Board Of Film Certification (CBFC) in Suman Ghosh's documentary The Argumentative Indian, the CBFC chairperson, Pahlaj Nihalani, speaking on the cuts argues that the mere deletion or beeping of six words is no reason to feel creatively smothered when those words indicate a clear contempt for Indian culture and democracy.

"I've been flooded with calls from print and television channels asking why we've beeped six words in the documentary. For the first and last time, here's the reason why. Because we felt a documentary on an Indian Nobel laureate referring so insensitively to our politics and religion could result in a serious breach in the peace and harmony of the country. At one point, Prof. Sen talks of Indian democracy and refers to Gujarat's 'criminalities'. We've asked for 'Gujarat' to be removed," said Nihalani.

"At another point in the documentary there is a reference to the enemy in India being religious leadership. We've asked for 'India' to be removed here. The third word we've ordered cut is when Prof. Sen speaks of India being interpreted as 'Hindu'. We've asked for Hindu to be removed. The fourth cut is that of the word cow' where Professor Sen, while speaking of religious integration, makes a frivolous reference to the cow'.

"The fifth, and according to us minor change, is in Professor Sen's line about the Vedas being used in a sectarian way these days. We've asked for the words 'used' and 'these days' to be removed. And finally, Professor Sen refers to the Hindutva view of India as "banal". We asked for the offensive adjective to be removed," he added.

Nihalani says the removal of six words in the documentary is wrongly being seen as pro-government 'chamchagiri'.

"We are not asking for the removal of the words under pressure from the Government. We seriously feel the removal of the words causes no injury to Professor Amartya Sen's thought processes in the documentary.

"On the other hand, referring to a cow in a flippant manner or calling Hindutva "banal" could seriously breach the communal harmony of the country. When filmmakers talk about freedom of expression, they should know that such freedom comes with a responsibility. You may be a Nobel laureate but if you speak disparagingly about things held sacred by the population you are vulnerable to attacks," he said.

Nihalani wants the documentary's director Suman Ghosh to calm down.

"Simply reacting because six words are beeped out when they in no way affect your artistic freedom is just a knee-jerk reaction. Please look at the larger picture," he said.

The censor chief also points out a serious legal breach on the part of the documentary's makers.

He said, "They have been screening the film without a censor certificate in various public places of India. That's illegal. Freedom of expression is fine. What about breaking the law?"
RJ Malishka, popular for her radio show on 93.5 Red FM, is in legal trouble.

She has come under the scanner of Yuva Sena who have alleged that she is defaming Mumbai and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) for shortcomings in an area that does not fall under their jurisdiction.

Now, the BMC has slapped a notice on her but for a completely different reason.

She has been charged under relevant sections of the Mumbai Municipal Corporation Act for allowing collection of standing or flowing water in her residence in which mosquitoes are breeding or are likely to breed.

Free Press Journal reports that Malishka had featured in a video named Mumbai Tula BMC Var Bharso Naye Ka in Marathi, which has got viral on YouTube. This song takes a dig at the ill maintenance of highways, apart from a range of commuting issues, in Mumbai which have resulted in inconvenience to residents.

But Hindustan Times reports that Yuva Sena has defended itself by claiming that the two highways, traffic and railways do not fall under the BMC's jurisdiction.

The report quotes Samadhan Sarvankar, Sena legislator Sada Sarvankars son, as saying, "The song did not name the Shiv Sena directly, but it hurts us that Mumbais and the BMCs image is unnecessarily taking a hit. The two main highways of Mumbai dont come under the BMC and it is not responsible for Mumbais traffic or the functioning of its railways.

Yuva Sena has also requested the legal department of the BMC to file a Rs 500 crore defamation piece against Malishka.

The same report quotes Amey Ghole, a BMC corporator, as saying, "The BMCs legal department will decide what action is best suited in this case. The song has hurt the citys efforts at attracting foreign investment and global talent. The civic body can either file a defamation suit or issue a warning.
Priyanka Chopra's ominous absence from the IIFA 2017 awards that were held in New York this year did not go unnoticed by the Bollywood fraternity.

It is now being reported that it was a conscious decision on the actor's part to withdraw herself from this year's IIFA awards due to the remuneration that Chopra was receiving for the show, according to a report by the Mumbai Mirror.

The report states that Chopra's team had been in talks with the IIFA organisers since January, however the actor was allegedly not satisfied with the remuneration that she was being offered  a sum that was reportedly much lesser than the money being offered to a male counterpart for just attending the same event.

The actor was seen jetting off to the Maldives to celebrate her 35th birthday instead, with mother Madhu Chopra, brother Siddharth Chopra and friend Tamannah in tow. The actor has been sharing photographs from her lavish vacation via various social media sites.

Priyanka Chopra had a loud presence at the IIFA awards in 2016 bagging the Best Actor in a Supporting Role and the Woman of the Year award. She also gave an energetic performance on a medley of songs that was very well received by the audience.

Chopra recently finished shooting for her third feature film in Hollywood. Her last successful venture was Baywatch opposite Zac Efron and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson.

IIFA 2017 has been in the news for more than one reason lately, the most popular one being Karan Johar, Saif Ali Khan and Varun Dhawan's dig at Kangana Ranaut over her nepotism comment that was aimed at most of the Bollywood bigwigs.
After raising objection to words like 'cow', 'Hindutva' in a documentary on Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) has asked the directors of a Bengali feature film to mute the word 'Radha' in a song sequence in the entertainer.

The film Dekh Kemon Lage was finally given U/A certification after the directors deleted the entire line of the song instead of muting the word 'Radha' from it as sought by CBFC.

"During the screening few days back, the CBFC has asked for muting the word 'Radha' in a song," Sudeshna Roy, one of the two directors of the film, told PTI today.

"Instead of muting one word which will have no meaning, we have deleted the entire first line and re-recorded the song minus these words," Abhijit Guha, the other director, said.

"With the film slated for release on July 22, we did not wish to court further trouble and went by what they asked for and the film was granted a U/A cerficate," Guha said.

"The song in the romantic comedy was inspired by a very popular folk number and we had only replaced some parts of the song without understanding that it will meet Censor hurdle," Roy said.

A top CBFC, Regional office source told PTI, "We routinely ask film makers-producers to make cuts or mute certain words as per the guidelines. It is a regular issue."

The film, a home production of Bengali suprstar Prosenjit Chatterjee, casts Subhasree Ganguly and Soham Chakraborty.

Last week Anik Dutta's film Meghnad Badh Rahasyo was given U/A certification by CBFC, Regional office after the makers of the film agreed to mute the two words including 'Ramrajya'.

The CBFC had recently asked Suman Ghosh, the director of The Argumentative Indian, a documentary on Nobel laureate Amartya Sen to mute words like 'Gujarat', 'Cow', 'Hindutva view of India' and 'Hindu India'. Ghosh had refused to mute those words.

Recently we have seen a song titled 'Radha', with the word forming the crux of the chorus in Imtiaz Ali's next  Jab Harry Met Sejal  starring Shah Rukh Khan and Anushka Sharma. Although the movie in itself has had multiple run-ins with the CBFC over words like 'intercourse' in its mini-trailers ; the song 'Radha' was passed by the board without a single snip or controversy surrounding it, showing us how context, intent and usage has a lot to do with what is like to be flagged by the censorship authorities.

With inputs from PTI
Kochi: Kerala Police on 19 July voiced confidence it has enough evidence to nail superstar Dileep in the alleged abduction and molestation of a popular actress in February this year.

AV George, Superintendent of Police and one of the key officials behind the probe, refused to give out much about the probe, but said they would not have arrested the actor without evidence.

He appeared confident that he has all the evidence against Dileep.

However, the actor's manager Appunny, who is currently on the run, in his anticipatory bail plea filed on 19 July said that police has no evidence against Dileep. He alleged that police is trying to put pressure on actor-turned-director Nadir Shah and himself to turn approver in the case.

Dileep is presently housed at the Angamaly sub-jail near his home town Aluva as a remand prisoner.

On 20 July, a single bench of the Kerala High Court is to take up his bail application. Last week, the trial court denied bail to the actor.

In a related development, revenue officials have found that the theatre complex owned by Dileep near here has been built on encroached land. They have started to initiate legal proceedings against the actor.

Giving the developments a political colour, state Congress president MM Hassan blamed Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan over the actor usurping government land in two places.

"The closeness the actor shared with Vijayan and the CPI-M is well known. It is the CPI-M which helped Dileep usurp government land. The revenue department is now looking into this," Hassan told reporters in Kasargode.

The superstar was arrested on 10 June and the next day he was remanded to 14 days judicial custody for conspiring in the abduction and molestation of a popular actress in February in Kochi.

The police had earlier arrested the prime accused Pulsar Suni and his accomplices a week after the incident.
Mumbai: Babumoshai Bandookbaaz casting director Sanjay Chouhan today said that he never made the 'fair and handsome' remark about actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui, that has led to a controversy.

Chouhan, in an interview to a daily, had apparently said that after Chitrangada Singh quit the film they had to find an actress who could look good opposite the actor as they "can't cast fair and handsome people with Nawaz. It would look so weird."

Siddiqui responded to Chouhan's interview with this cryptic tweet, "Thank you for making me realise that I cannot be paired along with the fair and handsome because I'm dark and not good looking, but I never focus on that."

However, the casting director today clarified that his comments have been misconstrued.

"I was completely misquoted. All I said was the film needed actors as good as Nawazuddin. You need actors who could match his stature. I don't know from where the 'fair and handsome' bit came but I never said the words," Chouhan told PTI.

"I would never want to hurt Nawaz sir or the film by giving such statements. I haven't spoken to him yet, but I am deeply saddened by how the comments, which I never made in the first place, have turned out," he added.
It was an act that was uncalled for. It was an act that IIFA 2017, also (laughably) promoted as the Oscars of India, could have easily done away with.

Three respected figures of the Indian film industry dug up a grave and brought alive something that is potent enough to divide the industry into camps: Nepotism. The collateral damage was the reputation of an actress who was brave enough to call a spade a spade.

Yes, the unexpected happened at the IIFA 2017 award ceremony when Karan Johar, his protege Varun Dhawan, and Saif Ali Khan took to the stage and poked fun at nepotism prevalent in the industry and at the actress who dared to speak about it on national television.

The latest in this episode is that Varun has apoligised on Twitter for his remarks. Ditto for Saif Ali Khan. In an exclusive interview to Firstpost, the actor admitted that he was quite disturbed after the show and the joke was not funny.

Karan too, has now apologised for his remark. But we can't help but wonder if this is a case of the boy who cried wolf.

To be honest, Karans attitude to this whole situation with Kangana, even after an apology, seems like a jilted lover's.

After verbal volleys were exchanged in his show  the content of which 'should not to be taken seriously as admitted by the filmmaker himself  he hit it hard from shores afar. Johar countered Kanganas nepotism charges few weeks later at a London School of Economics event. All this while Kangana maintained a dignified silence.

His Town Hall chat with Barkha Dutt in the month of April clearly stated that the spat was now a closed chapter, however again in New York he took a u-turn. Its apparent that this not yet a closed chapter for the filmmaker.

But this is the deal: it amazes me how a 40 plus old director simply refuses to grow and forget the past. It only reinforces the age-old fact that truth is a bitter pill and Karan learnt it the hard way in his own show when Kangana took him by the horns.

Karan should not forget that he was able to rope in Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan for his debut film only because of his proximity to the movers and shakers of the industry. It was Karan Johars father Yash Johars proximity to Yash Chopra, which helped Karan assist Aditya Chopra for his debut film, which in turn paved his way for approaching Shah Rukh Khan.

Had Karan been an outsider he would have surely learnt this the hard way.

If the nepotism word infuriates Johar so much, then what was the case with Nikhil Advani, who got his big break with Kal Ho Naa Ho? Nikhil had assisted Karan during the making of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, and is also related to NN Sippy, Ekta and Tusshar Kapoor. Ayan Mukherji, who directed Wake Up Sid, hails from the Mukherji family, is Kajols first cousin and Ranis second cousin. Sidharth P Malhotra directed We Are Family for Karans Dharma production. Legendary Prem Nath is Sidharths grandpa. Karan also gave breaks to Alia Bhatt, Varun Dhawan and their pedigree is well known.

The bitter truth is that had there been no Yash Johar, Karan would have taken years to make his debut film. Chances are he would still be struggling and carrying his portfolio from one office to another.

Karans repeated jibes at Kangana only looks poor in taste and surely looks far from the refined man image he has built for himself. The trio cracked a poor joke at the cost of someone who has risen the ranks in the film industry by sheer dint of her talent and hard work, and never believed in the concept of Godfather.

There is a lot to learn from the journey that Kangana has taken in her career. The journey from a small town in Himachal Pradesh to joining the Elite Modeling Agency to now a Bollywood star.

Karan should be thankful to his stars (pun not intended) that he has been part of a privileged background that allows him the freedom to write scripts at his own pace and time, and more or less, the freedom to direct/produce films he likes. Not everyone has that privilege.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday said privacy is an amorphous term which is not absolute and cannot prevent the State from making laws imposing reasonable restrictions on citizens.

According to a report in The Hindu, the court said that in order to recognise privacy as a right, it would first have to define it. But this would be a near impossible task as an element of privacy pervaded all fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution.

Senior counsel Gopal Subramanium told the Supreme Court on Wednesday that the right to privacy is a pre-existing natural right which is inherent in the Constitution, even though it is not explicitly mentioned.

Subramanium is leading the argument on behalf of the petitioners who have challenged the Aadhaar scheme on the grounds that it violates the right to privacy.

Subramanium said, "The right to privacy is recognised as a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution. The concept of privacy is embedded in liberty as well as a person's honour."

His arguments came as the apex court on Wednesday began hearing arguments whether privacy was a fundamental right.

A nine-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar is examining the nature of privacy as a right in context of two judgments the first in 1954, the other in 1962  which held that privacy was not a fundamental right.

The other judges hearing the case are: Justice J Chelameswar, Justice SA Bobde, Justice RK Agrawal, Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman, Justice Abhay Manohar Sapre, Justice DY Chandrachud, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice S Abdul Nazeer.

Senior counsel Shyam Divan told the bench that even Union finance minister Arun Jaitley, during a debate on the Aadhaar Bill in the Rajya Sabha, asserted that privacy was a fundamental right linked to liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution.

Responding to a question during debate in the Rajya Sabha on 16 March, 2016, finance minister Jaitley had said that the top court was considering the conflicting judgments on privacy and whether it was a fundamental right or not.

Having said that Jaitley told the Rajya Sabha that "The present bill (Aadhaar) pre-supposes and is based on a premise that it is too late in the day to contend that privacy is not a fundamental right. So I do accept that probably privacy is a fundamental right."

Jaitley had told the Rajya Sabha that "It is now accepted that privacy is a part of individual liberty" and referring to Article 21 he said "Let us assume that privacy is a part of liberty and no person shall be deprived of privacy without due process of law".

Having quoted the Union finance minister in support of his contention that privacy was a fundamental right, Divan said that in the past 40 years since the mid-1970s different benches of the top court have consistently held that privacy was a fundamental right.

He urged the bench to reaffirm this right.

With inputs from IANS
Chandigarh: Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh on Wednesday announced Rs 10 lakh financial assistance to the family and a government job to the younger brother of Sepoy Jaspreet Singh who was killed in shelling by Pakistani forces on Tuesday.

The 24-year-old jawan, who was belonged to 8 Sikh Light Infantry regiment, was attached with Rashtriya Rifles at the time of his death in Naushera sector in Rajouri district.

The chief minister has sanctioned Rs 5 lakh as battle casualty compensation and another Rs 5 lakh as general compensation to the family of the martyred soldier, along with a job for his younger brother in the police department, an official spokesperson said on Wednesday.

Singh, a native of Moga, is survived by his parents and four siblings.

The spokesperson said that Rs 25,000 has also been given to the family for cremation related expenses.

"The job for Jaspreet's younger brother is being provided under the honour and gratitude scheme of the Punjab Government," he said.
Jammu: A Junior Commissioned Officer (JCO) injured in Pakistani firing died on Wednesday while a civilian was wounded in fresh ceasefire violations along the LoC in the Poonch-Rajouri belt of Jammu and Kashmir.

"Pakistan Army initiated unprovoked and indiscriminate firing by small arms, automatics and mortars from 11:45 hours in Poonch sector along the Line of Control (LoC)," a defence spokesman said.

The Army is retaliating strongly and effectively, the spokesman said.

"JCO Subedar Shashi Kumar, who was grievously injured during the unprovoked ceasefire violation by Pakistan in Naushera yesterday and was being administered treatment at Command Hospital Udhampur, succumbed to his injuries," a defence spokesman said.

He said the nation will always remain indebted to Subedar Shashi Kumar for his supreme sacrifice.

The soldier was a native of Galon village in Hamirpur district of Himachal Pradesh. He is survived by his wife Santosh Sharma and children.

"His mortal remains are being sent to his native village," the spokesman added.

Earlier in the day, the Pakistan army resorted to unprovoked firing on the Indian posts in Naushera sector in Bhimbher Gali around 08:45 hours.

Reports suggested Pakistan has resorted to heavy shelling in Balakote, Dhar, Lambibari, Rajdhani, Mankote, Sandote, Shahpur, Rawalakote, Gulpur in Rajouri and Poonch districts from this morning.

A civilian, named Raza, has been injured in the shelling in Sandote hamlet along the LoC and is hospitalised, police said.

During the past 24 hours, Pakistan violated ceasefire eight times  in Balakote, Poonch, Naushera, Bhimbher Gali, Nowgam sectors.

Nine people, including seven soldiers, have been killed and 18 people injured in over a dozen of ceasefire violations by Pakistan this month.

On Wednesday, Pakistan violated ceasefire five times pounding villages and forward posts with mortar bombs along the LoC. Two jawans were killed and six people, including three civilians, were injured.

Over 8,000 people, including 3,000 in Naushera and 5,000 in Manjakote-Rajdhani-Panjgrain-Naika, have been affected in Pakistan shelling in the past two days.
New Delhi: Assam chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal on Wednesday urged the Centre for a "liberal" financial help to the north-eastern state in the wake of a massive flood, which had hit 25 lakh people in 29 districts.

At a meeting with Union finance minister Arun Jaitley, Sonowal sought his intervention in the release of funds under the Flood Management Programme (FMP), Rural Infrastructure Development Fund (RIDF), oil royalty arrears and incentives to the industries.

He requested Jaitley to help Assam by all possible means to tackle the "unprecedented" and an unusually long wave of floods this year, an official release said.

In this context, Sonowal sought the release of the central share of Rs 1,138 crore under the FMP during the 11th and 12th five-year plans.

The state has already released its share against 141 schemes under the FMP, the release added.

Sonowal also urged the Union finance minister not to restrict the refund of CGST/IGST incentives to industries to 58 percent, but to continue with the earlier policy of 100 percent duties and taxes during the last three years of the 14th Finance Commission award and under the North East Industrial and Investment Promotion Policy (NEIIPP), 2007.

"We are in the third year of the 14th Finance Commission award and a 100-percent refund has been given in the last three years. Thus, restricting the refund to the industries to 58 percent is not appropriate," Sonowal was quoted as saying in the release.
Editor's note: The flood situation in Assam has worsened, with at least 99 people dying and 22.5 lakh being affected in 21 districts. The Indian Army has been called out for rescue operations in the state. This article on Assam's lack of infrastructural and administrative response to flooding is part of a series and originally appeared on 19 July, 2017. It is being republished in view of the current situation.

***

In the first of the three-part series on recurring Assam floods, we read about what ails the state's fight against this annual phenomenon. The second part took a close look at the existential crisis of the vulnerable Majuli island. The third part will seek to find out if dredging the river Brahmaputra is the panacea that the state is looking for all these years.

Another wave of floods. Another cycle of death and destruction. Floods and Assam have become synonymous with each other, with people across the state accepting the monsoon deluge as a disaster from which they will never get any respite.

Trail of destruction

Of the 33 districts of the state, 29 were hit by floods this year, affecting nearly 18 lakh people. As of 11 July, the situation was so bad in Lakhimpur district that 3,09,464 people were affected in areas like Nowboicha (34,255), Narayanpur (22,965), Subansiri (4,023), Bihpuria (85,559), North Lakhimpur (1,46,399), Kadam (12,985) and Dhakuakhana (3,278), according to data released by the Assam State Disaster Management Authority. Sixty people have lost their lives, while 1,86,998.68 hectare of total crop area is affected.

The Kaziranga National Park, a world heritage site, is under water, quite literally, with 80 percent of its area inundated at one point. By Friday, this had come down to 62 percent, although 111 anti-poaching camps under Bokakhat, Agaratoli, Kohora, Bagori, Burapahar and Biswanathghat ranges were still under water. The number of deaths of wild animals due to drowning and running over by speeding vehicles on National Highway 37, which passes through an animal corridor on the Kaziranga stretch, is also quite high.

Government apathy

There are a number of reasons why floods in Assam have become so dangerous  both natural and man-made. And it's not that nothing was done to mitigate the crisis; it's just that no measure has proven to be successful. After 15 years of Congress rule, it was felt that things under the BJP regime would get better, especially since the party had made tall promises on flood control before the 2016 Assembly election. But it was not to be.

Apart from a phone call to Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal a few days ago, and expressing sadness on Twitter, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has only sent junior home minister Kiren Rijiju to take stock of the situation. Perhaps, the prime minister did not feel that the situation was grave enough to warrant a visit by a Cabinet minister or by himself.

What's more, the problem will not be resolved even after the water level recedes. There will remain the daunting task of fighting epidemics like Japanese Encephalitis, while rehabilitating people who are forced to stay on highlands, embankments, highways or in relief camps will also be a tough task. Among these would be many who have failed to secure their cattle, crop and houses. The administration needs to start from scratch, before the next wave sets in.

Till date, the country has no comprehensive plan on how to tackle this recurring problem. Repeated pleas by various organisations to have the Assam floods declared a national disaster have fallen on deaf ears.

"The Brahmaputra, being a large river, covers different climate zones, landscapes and bio-geographic regions. Geomorphologically, the Brahmaputra basin is very unstable, is located in a high seismic zone, and comprises alluvial soil," said Ananda Hazarika, head of the Department of Geography at Majuli College.

Natural or man-made disaster?

Leaving aside natural causes like excessive rainfall, there are also man-made reasons that compound the misery. This includes the release of water from the Ranganadi Hydroelectric Project at Yazali in Arunachal Pradesh without prior warning, which caused untold havoc downstream in Assam.

"'North Eastern Electric Power Corporation Limited (NEEPCO) had prior knowledge that the water holding capacity of the dam of the 405 MW Ranganadi Hydroelectric Project would soon reach its maximum mark. They had meteorological input about the rains and also how much water the river is pumping in. But they still did not open the shutters, probably to produce more power,"

"They had enough reasons to raise the shutters, but since they did not do it on time, they had to open all six gates simultaneously, and the shutters had to be raised even more to protect the dam," said Uma Baruah, former additional chief engineer, water resource department. He informed that each gate measures 10 metres by 12 metres in size.

In 2008, Lakhimpur had witnessed similar scenes of destruction, again for similar reasons.

"In 2008, gates were opened at a height of 5,200 millimetres, which caused huge devastation. This time, they were raised at 10,500 millimetres, overloading the silt-laden river with an additional discharge of 1,500 cumec (cubic metre per second). The capacity of the river is 1,291 cumec. The release at this rate went on for eight hours (from 2 pm to 10 pm on 9 July, 2017). Later on, the release was stepped down to 100 mm per hour. The quantity of release at its peak was a massive 4,32,00,000 cubic metres. The dynamics of the river had changed, resulting in a breach in the embankment system at Bogolijan, which was acting as protection to Lakhimpur town," the former engineer said.

The world's largest inhabited river island Majuli also bore the brunt, since Ranganadi is a tributary of the Brahmaputra.

Floods cannot be prevented but can be better managed, especially if infrastructure like roads and bridges are properly planned. Had some thought gone into developing National Highway 15 on the northern bank of the Brahmaputra, huge swathes of the area would not have been affected in this manner.

"Almost all north bank rivers are silted up to the bank level. The rivers do not have the required cross-sectional area to accommodate normal floods, as those in the south bank like Dikhow, Desang and Jhanji do. Moreover, openings on National Highway 15 and on the railway line are too small for flood water to pass. Beds of these openings (bridges or culverts) are also silted, worsening the problem,"

"The rushing flood water coming from the nearby hilly slopes of Arunachal Pradesh devastates the plains of Assam, upstream of railway and national highway bridges. The latest example is the flooding of the Satrong river near Gohpur. Such occurrences are regular in cases of rivers like Gainadi, Jiadhal, Kumotia, Ranganadi, Dikrong, Brahmajan and Jia Bharali," he said.

Desiltation of north bank rivers

Until the river is in a position to carry its water freely, flooding is unavoidable, particularly on the north bank rivers in Assam. "All north bank rivers, jacketed by two embankments on both banks, need desiltation to provide required waterways. River beds are rising progressively, causing breaches in the embankment system every year, which indicates that by closing the breaches without providing a required course to flow is a wasteful, expensive and endless measure," Baruah said.

Time to take river training seriously

It is obvious that flood challenges can be tackled neither by focussing on cosmetic rescue and rehabilitation efforts nor by shoddy repairing of embankment and dykes. It has to be in a scientific and sustainable manner.

"As a permanent and sustainable measure for solving floods and erosion, the braided river is to be trained while keeping the width not more than five kilometres across. The river is flowing in a width of 1.5 kilometres at Saraighat bridge in Guwahati. Similarly, the spans of the Naranarayana Setu, Kolia Bhumura and Bogibeel bridges are all 4-4.5 kilometres across. The river is so wide that at one point, it separates Dibrugarh on the south bank and Jonai on the north bank by a massive 21 kilometres. However, with the upcoming bridge at Bogibil towards the west of that particular spot, it's made to flow in a width of 4.5 kilometres between the guide banks made of boulders. The river, constituting braided channels, can be trained by constructing hard nodal points with guide banks and spurs or groynes," the former engineer added.

He said that the floods in upper Assam can be largely controlled through river training. "In the stretch between Dibrugarh and Neamatighat, in addition to the Bogibeel Bridge, two more bridges are coming up  one at Kamalabari-Neamatighat and another at Disangmukh-Tekeliphuta. The proposed guide banks for these two bridges will cover 40 kilometres (two by 20 kilometres on either bank). By providing boulder-armoured spurs with synchronised encroachment into the river at designed spacing points on both banks in the remaining 60-kilometre stretch, the river can be trained,"

"The spacing of spurs is to be ascertained by a physical model test. The trained mono channel of the river will have a lowered bed level since the depth will increase by scouring. The space between two spurs will get silted up, and in due course, a strip of land measuring five kilometres on both banks will be reclaimed," Baruah said.

Dredging the impossible

Among the ideas that are being propagated to tame the Brahmaputra is river dredging. However, strong differences have cropped up on the feasibility and sustainability of the whole exercise. "The Centre is talking about dredging the Brahmaputra. This is largely to keep the public hopeful that something would be done. Because it is practically impossible to dredge the 916-km long river  even developed countries would think twice before doing it. The cost would be astronomical and won't be sustainable. And even if the dredging is done, there would be complete siltation within a year. Costs for its operation and maintenance would be huge," Baruah said.

Bharat Saikia, secretary of the Majuli Island Protection and Development Council, was surprised that such advice was even given to the chief minister. "Someone is advising Sonowal to dredge the entire length of the river in a width span of 250 metres for navigation. Compared to the behaviour of other rivers, Brahmaputra is quite different. Before taking any such decision, the geographical position and geological conditions have to be ascertained," Saikia said.

"Siltation is increasing fast due to environmental damage. The condition of Brahmaputra and Barak is worsening beyond control," he said.

Question mark over technologies

Damaged geo-bags or wrecked porcupines often dominate TV footage and newspaper pages when floods ravage the state, as though they present evidence showing the incompetence of the water resources department. But perhaps the new technologies are not as ineffective as they are projected to be.

"Geo-mattresses and geo-tubes were very successfully used in the Rs 141 crore Matmara Geo Dyke project in Lakhimpur. At Rahmaria in Dibrugarh, we placed geo-bags for 2.6 kilometres and porcupines for 6.4 kilometres to create a channel for the river. Rahmaria was once grabbing headlines almost on a daily basis due to severe erosion. But the problem has now been taken care of," Baruah said.

What concerns people is that the next wave is always lurking in wait, given nature's fury and the impassivity of those who should at least try and bring down this cycle of death and destruction.

This is the concluding part of the series.

Part one: Graft, fund crunch, lack of political will won't stop the rampage of rivers

Part two: For Majuli island, Subansiri dam in Arunachal Pradesh is an apocalypse in the making
The Siddaramaiah-led Congress government in Karnataka constituted a nine-member committee on Tuesday to design a state flag and look into the legalities of it. While the issue is being debated by all political parties and has sparked a row over the legality of the demand, it should be noted that there is no provision in the Indian Constitution which bars states from having their own flags.

Former advocate-general of Karnataka, Ravivarma Kumar, told The Hindu that in SR Bommai vs Union of India case, the Supreme Court had declared that federalism is a basic feature of the Constitution and States are supreme in their sphere.

"This being the constitutional position, there is no prohibition in the Constitution for the State to have its own flag. However, the manner in which the state flag is hoisted should not dishonour the national flag. It has to be always below the national flag," the Supreme Court had said.

Senior Supreme Court lawyer and constitutional expert Pavani Parameswara Rao told Kaumudi Online, "A state can have its own flag. I don't see any provision anywhere, if they want to have state flag, there is nothing wrong in it."

Although there is no bar in the Constitution, experts feel that the head of the state should think about its impact on the unity and integrity of the country. "The head of the state should strengthen relations between states and the Centre. We say India is known for unity in diversity. At the same time, we give scope for issues like a separate flag that will affect the integrity," The New Indian Express quoted a former Supreme Court judge as saying.

However, former Advocate General Ashok Haranahalli said that the state should frame a flag code without giving scope for it to affect the unity and integrity of the country if it wants to have a separate flag.

If the state government does have its way, Karnataka will become the second state after Jammu and Kashmir to have its own flag. While political parties like the BJP and the Shiv Sena are accusing the Karnataka government of whipping up divisive emotions ahead of Assembly election, Siddaramaiah was quoted by The Indian Express as asking, "Is there any provision in the Constitution that prohibits a state from having a flag?"

Karnataka has had an unofficial flag since the mid 1960s. The red and yellow flag was created by Kannada writer and activist Ma Ramamurthy for a pro-Kannada political party called the Kannada Paksha. The unofficial flag is a common sight in Karnataka and the pro-Kannada activists have virtually adopted the flag as a symbol of state pride, The Indian Express reported. During agitations and protests in the state, the unofficial flag serves as a protection against mob attacks.

The red and yellow flag was once accorded official status by the BJP government through a notification. DV Sadananda Gowda said in his 2012 budget speech that it would be compulsory to hoist the state flag on government buildings, schools and colleges. However, the notification was withdrawn later when activists started misusing the flag.

While the Constitution is silent on the issue of states having their own flags, Jammu and Kashmir is the only state in the Indian Union to have a separate flag and Constitution. On 13 July, 1931, 22 Kashmiri protesters were gunned down by the army of the Dogra ruler after the people rose against the Maharajas rule, according to Deccan Herald. The blood tainted shirt of one of the victims was hoisted as the new flag of Kashmir by the crowd.

Later National Conference leader Sheikh Abdullah got the central government to accept the states constitution and flag through the 1952 Delhi Agreement. The separate constitution of the state makes it mandatory to hoist the state flag along with the national flag. The Constitution of the state works under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution.

There were also reports of Nagaland getting its own official flag as part of the final accord which was expected to be signed by the Union government and the National Socialist Council of Nagalim in 2016. The issue of giving the northeastern state its own flag is almost decided, sources told Hindustan Times in this 2016 report.

However, when it comes to other states, the Constitution is largely silent on the issue. While it does not bar states from having their own flags, it also does not condone having a separate state flag. The silence is open to interpretation and has therefore, triggered a row over Karnataka asking for its own flag.
New Delhi: Samajwadi Party leader and former Defence Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday claimed that China was ready to attack India in collaboration with Pakistan and asked the government to reverse its stand on the Tibet issue and support its independence.

Raising the matter in the Lok Sabha against the backdrop of tension between India and China, he asked the government to inform Parliament what it has done to meet any likely challenge from the neighbouring country.

"India is today facing a big danger from China. I have been cautioning the central government for years. China has joined hands with Pakistan. It has made full preparation to attack India."

"China is India's biggest opponent. What has the government done? In Kashmir, the Chinese army has allied with the Pakistan army," Yadav, known for his tough stand on China, said during the Zero Hour.

He also claimed that China had buried nuclear weapons in Pakistan to target India, adding that Indian intelligence agencies "would know better".

Yadav said India's stand on Tibet, a reference to its acceptance that the region was part of China, was a "mistake" and the time has come to support its independence as it had been a traditional buffer between the two big nations.

"China is our enemy, not Pakistan. Pakistan can do us no damage," he said.

It was India's responsibility to protect Bhutan and China was eyeing Nepal, he said.

He also spoke against massive amounts of Chinese goods finding a market in India.
Srinagar: Followers of Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama have once again pledged their support to the cause to "free" Tibet from "Chinese occupation". Dalai Lama who has been on over a month long visit to the Leh area of Jammu and Kashmir received support from the people at a religious gathering in the state.

Even though Dalai Lama has been visiting Leh for many years now, during the current visit, which began on 28 June, a series of discussions were held on Buddhism in the Nobra Valley of the region, where people pledged support to "free" Tibet from Chinese "occupation".

Dalai Lama has repeatedly emerged as a sour topic in the India-China relations. Earlier, Dalai Lama's visit to Arunachal Pradesh had triggered a controversy with China stating that this could vitiate the relations with India. China even described Dalai Lama as "disgraceful".

Miffed with India's support to Dalai Lama, China recently offered a mediation on Kashmir as Indian and Pakistani troops pounded each others position along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir, resulting in heavy loss of civilian lives and armed forces personnel, and damage to private and public property.

The visit has come at a time when India and China are locked in a stand-off over Doka La area in Sikkim, and in the backdrop of repeated incursions by Chinese troops in Ladakh.

Dalai Lama's visit is also significant because Chinese incursions along Demchok in Leh have halted several developmental works in the region. However, this is not the first instance as incursions by the Chinese troops have taken place in the past as well along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) whose demarcation has not been agreed to by the two sides.

Though political leaders from Congress vowed to support the cause of freedom for Tibet and reiterated that China was committing excesses on Tibetans, Member Parliament of Tibetan Parliament in Exile, Dhondup Tashi, said that the stated position of Dalai Lama has been that a "middle ground could be reached" through dialogue on the Tibetan issue.

Tashi also stated that the Chinese accusation against Dalai Lama were false as he had visited Arunachal Pradesh on the invitation of the Buddhist devotees in the state. His visit was consented to by the Indian government.

"Dalai Lama is the spiritual head of Buddhists and visits different parts of the world on the invitation of the Tibetans," he said, adding further that "the position of the Tibetan parliament in Exile has been that the Tibet was occupied by China and there has to be a settlement of the issue".

Tashi, however, accused China of having a belligerent approach on Tibet stating that China is not ready to talk to Dalai Lama.

Congress MLA from Nubra, Deldan Namgayal, in whose constituency the Buddhist conference was held, said that the people have pledged support for the Tibetan cause. "China is committing atrocities on people in Tibet. Dalai Lama is our religious spiritual head and he was here for religious preaching. He visits every year and it was a programme of religious ceremonies," he said.

Namgayal, however, said that there is a recurring dispute over grazing pastures along some areas in Leh as the nomads from India and Chinese side remain settled in Demchok and are protected by the Indian and Chinese troops respectively. "From the Indian side, the nomads come from the Changathan Valley which shares border with China and they move to Demchok in summer months due to thick pastures."

The Congress MLA also alleged that China has gone to the extent of murdering the Tibetan population. "Tibetans have their own government in exile and they are demanding freedom of Tibet. Many people have been brutally murdered by the Chinese," he said.

Dorjay Motup, executive councilor, works, Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (LAHDC), said that due to the hostilities along the LAC in Demchok, many of the developmental works have taken a hit. "The work over a medical sub centre has been stopped midway. Work also couldnt be started on the irrigation bridges," said Motup.

Tashi said that though the Sikkim issue was not linked to the overall Tibetan cause, but Tibetans in Exile consider Sikkim to be part of India. "Tibetan political issue has nothing to do with Sikkim, but the way we look at it, Sikkim is one of the parts and soils of India. Sikkim is India and India is Sikkim. China is raising every issue every day," he said adding that Dalai Lama had visited the Indian soil and not the Chinese soil and there should have been no problem for China on his visit to Arunachal Pradesh.

Dalai Lama's visit to Leh will culminate on 2 August.
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Vietnam Red Cross officials (Source: VNA)



PM Phuc affirmed that humanitarian relief, especially for those in remote areas and victims of natural disasters, is crucial.

However, there remain several spontaneous activities, he noted, asking the VRC to cooperate with local authorities to ensure humanitarian activities are organised at right venues, and for right people.

The Government leader suggested the association intensify international collaboration to attract more assistance from the international community, and actively participate in disaster relief in the world.

The Government will create all favourable conditions for the VRCs activities, he added.

Founded by President Ho Chi Minh 71 years ago, the VRC now has over 8 million members working in nearly 17,000 grassroots chapters nationwide.

Over the past 10 years, the VRC has mobilised VND527.8 billion (USD26 million), assisting more than 22.2 million people affected by natural disasters.

It cooperated with the Health Ministry to collect 4.7 million blood units during 2013-2016.

Several movements and campaigns launched by the association, such as Tet for poor people and Agent Orange/dioxin victims programme, and Cow Bank project, have produced positive results./.
Darjeeling, West Bengal: Their domicile certificate might say they belong to West Bengal but ask any Gorkha and they will tell you they don't really feel like they belong to the state.

"Racial slur is a common phenomenon in West Bengal. Sometimes, we are called 'Chinki', sometimes 'Khukri terrorist' and 'outsider' too," Bipin Lama, a Gorkha youth studying in a reputed college in Kolkata told Firstpost. He said many Bengalis live in Darjeeling but he has never heard of them facing racial discrimination. "But for the Gorkhas, it's a regular feature. They think what we can do in life is only to [sic] sell milk."

In October last year, two law students from the Gorkha community, Akshay K Pradhan and Manik Sethi, had filed a petition in the Supreme Court regarding racial profiling of the Gorkhas. Their petition read: "Nepalis or Gorkhas are projected as witless and brainless people who are fit to stand only on others' doorsteps. Such actions grossly violate the basic right of the Nepalis to live with self-respect and dignity. Racism and stereotyping against the Gorkha community wouldnt stop without the intervention of the highest court in the nation."

Prakash Gurung, president of the youth wing of Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM), which is spearheading the agitation for a separate state for their community, told Firstpost they often get branded as outsiders, foreigners and terrorists in West Bengal. He said the fact of the matter was that it was the Gorkhas who had inhabited Darjeeling in the 17th century when there was no boundary demarcation.

A historical perspective

In early 18th century, the Gorkhas ruled the then kingdom of Sikkim for 35 years and conquered Darjeeling and Siliguri, among other territories. History has it that between 1775 and 1815, about 1.8 lakh Nepalis migrated to the region and settled there. When the British arrived in the sub-continent to colonise it, they took control of Darjeeling and surrounding areas. Since then, authorities in Kolkata looked after their administration.

The demand for Gorkhaland is more than a century old. In 1907, the Hillmens Association of Darjeeling urged the Minto-Morley Reforms Committee to provide a separate administrative set-up for the hills. Ten years later, the association submitted a memorandum in this regard again, this time to the secretary of the state of India Edwin Montague. The memorandum said: "Historically, culturally, ethnically, socially, religiously, and linguistically, there was no affinity whatsoever between Bengal and Darjeeling."

In 1929, Hillmen's Association made this demand to the Simon Commission as well. Till the 80s, Gorkhas demand for a separate administration/autonomy was raised many a time. It was in 1986 that under the leadership of Subhash Ghisingh, Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) launched a violent agitation for the separate state of Gorkhaland. The 28-month-long movement claimed the lives of 1,200 people.

To placate the protesters, the West Bengal government formed a semi-autonomous administrative unit for Darjeeling and Kalimpong hills in 1988. It was named Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council. In 2007, Bimal Gurung-led GJM launched fresh agitations for the creation of Gorkhaland. After three years of protests, the West Bengal government agreed to establish a new semi-autonomous body that would have administrative, executive and financial authority  but no legislative power  to administer Darjeeling and Kuresong districts. Thus, Gorkhaland Territorial Administration was formed in 2011 and replaced the Council.

Stirring up the hornet's nest

This May, the West Bengal government announced that students of all the schools in the state will compulsorily have to learn Bangla till class 10. The Gorkhas felt slighted at the state's bid to impose its language on them and took to the streets to protest the decision, which, they felt, undermined their language. While a fortnight later the government exempted Darjeeling schools from the mandate, its initial decision had already touched a raw nerve and sparked an agitation. Since then, the hills are on the boil.

Tshiring Dahal, who had joined the GNLF as a student during the first Gorkhaland protests in 1986 and is now with the GJM, explained why the Gorkhas are adamant about a separate state. She said neither Bengalis recognise them as one of their own nor are they able to relate to Bengal despite 70 years of living there. She blamed it all on the state government's "eternal disinterest in understanding or recognising our distinction."

The leader of the current agitation and founder-president of the GJM Bimal Gurung said via SMS that the struggle for Gorkhaland is for the political identity of the Gorkhas. On the run following a non-bailable arrest warrant issued in his name, he said the community is living under a colonial domination and wants liberation from West Bengal.

M Yasin, retired professor of political science at North Bengal University, said the time has come to acknowledge the Gorkhas' demand of their identity. "They deserve it. For over a century, they have been feeling deprived and exploited. It has only set in deeper into their minds," he said.

He explained that for the Gorkhas, their identity is not a mere notion but a feeling so intrinsic that it has become the driving force of their movement. "They may be powerless in front of the higher-ups in politics but the fact that 'I am a Gorkha' has let them sustain their efforts," Yasin said.

The author is a Guwahati based freelance writer and a member of 101Reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters.
New Delhi: The National Green Tribunal on Wednesday slammed the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) for terming cigarette butts as 'biodegradable' and directed it to clarify its stand on the issue.

A bench headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Swatanter Kumar asked the MoEF to take clear instructions within a week regarding its stand on declaring cigarette and bidi butts "toxic waste". "Butts of cigarette and bidi are hazardous in nature. How can you call them 'biodegradable'? You take clear instructions and inform us," the bench said.

The observation came after an advocate representing MoEF told the green panel that cigarette butts are 'biodegradable'. When the bench enquired as to how they have come to this conclusion, he said that the main counsel was busy before a Constitution bench in the Supreme Court and sought adjournment. The bench, however, said, "Constitution bench or no Constitution bench, ask him (the lawyer) to be present before us."

The matter is fixed for next hearing on 27 July.

The tribunal had earlier issued notices to the MoEF, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and Central Pollution Control Board on a plea filed by by a doctors body seeking prohibition on consumption of tobacco in all public places and proper disposal of related waste.

Doctors for You, an NGO working towards cancer care, had moved the NGT praying that the Centre be directed to declare cigarette and bidi butts "toxic waste". It had claimed that tobacco was causing major health problems and its "cultivation, processing, production and disposal was harming the ecology badly".

The plea had sought directions to prohibit consumption of tobacco in any form in all public places and ban the use of plastics for packing tobacco used in cigarettes.

"People should be allowed to smoke and chew (and spit) in only designated areas where norms for disposal of cigarette/bidi butts and toxic saliva should be made. Such designated areas should be licensed and monitored jointly by the Ministry for Environment and Ministry of Health," it had said.

According to the plea, cigarette butts are concentrated toxic waste dumps and their improper disposal causes environmental problems. "Discarded cigarette/bidi butts are a form of non-biodegradable litter.... While India is working towards Swachh Bharat, nearly 100 billion non-biodegradable cigarette butts and one trillion bidi butts are getting disposed of into environment every year.

"Cigarette butts leach out toxic chemicals. The leachate (liquid that drains from a landfill) from cigarette butts is acutely toxic to representative marine and freshwater fish species," the plea had said.
India and China have shared political, economic and cultural relations for thousands of years and are not natural enemies. Yet, in recent times, the hostility is rife and the aggression obvious.

Similarly, Hindus and Muslims have historically lived together and worked together. Even during the Mughal empire, Muslim rulers had Hindu advisors. Birbal was Akbar's confidante and Chandra Bran Brahman was a poet in the courts of Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb.

Throughout history, the northern and southern parts of India were an entity and rulers of both hemispheres lived in harmony. Christians were not only tolerated but held in esteem and the affluent in Hindu and Muslim societies opted to send their children to schools run by Jesuit and Patrician orders. Girls went to convents managed by nuns. Even after the British left, a convent education was coveted. But the recent past seems to discredit this harmony.

All this makes one wonder, what has gone wrong? Writing a brilliantly incisive piece on the marketing of violence, Ian Buruma, a professor of democracy and human rights, said:

"What is astonishing, however, and deeply disturbing, is how quickly extreme violence can erupt among people who have lived peacefully together for a long time. German Jews went unmolested by their gentile neighbours until Nazi leaders stirred up the mobs after 1933. Christians and Muslims coexisted for centuries in Sarajevo, until Serb agitators, backed by armed forces, called for violent expulsions and murder,"

"Hindus and Muslims, who had left one another alone, or even had friendly relations, suddenly went for one another's throats when the largely Muslim north broke away from predominantly Hindu India in 1947. Muslims lived peacefully in Burma until Buddhists, egged on recently by fanatical monks, started burning down their houses and beating them to death."

A recent video that went viral on social platforms, showing United States president Donald Trump punching the face of a man with a CNN logo on his head, he says, is evidence of a new marketeer in this business. After Trump, come his fans, ready to do the same: attack the media. And there have been several incidents on record of his fans flattering Trump through imitation. So much for the watchdogs of society.

The man with power using it to whip sentiment is our new mascot. When leaders pick up the banner and espouse division we, the herd, follow. The lemming effect is further exacerbated by the dubious distinction that 'blood sport' is in our genes. So, if people from Assam or Meghalaya or Sikkim come to the hinterland, we mock them where once we admired them. In the cosmopolitan commercial city of Mumbai, the Mumbaikar frowns on outsiders.

Again, it is political leaders who spread the doctrine of hatred. It gives them control. They have identified the enemy.

Take our caste system as an example. Contrary to the belief that lower rungs of this totem pole were always mistreated and the manner in which that defence has become an armour for mounting flagrant acts of violence, the fear factor today is massive. When political entities tacitly or openly seek confrontation, they send a message to their followers that it is not just alright to rape and pillage but that there will be a rescue at the end of the orgy.

After Indira Gandhi was shot, legend tells us that even as Rajiv Gandhi was ushered in to replace her with what could only be called fawning servility in its unholy haste, he made an untoward remark about getting the community responsible. In minutes, centuries of affection, love and admiration for the 'warrior Sikh' melted down like a candle in the sun as a killing spree tore the capital apart.

If this was to occur today, what with tweets and WhatsApps and the mass and instant distribution of a message, there would be mayhem. A nation like ours sits on several time bombs. Irresponsible and venal political leaders have stopped caring to even put up a pretence. Violence is now a political gambit.

Do we turn to our leaders and tell them to stop. Explain to them that silence or deliberately delayed responses are even more harmful and dangerous and that we have to stop following them like lemmings off the cliff.

Prejudices have now come to the fore. The erudite Shashi Tharoor, speaking on the looting of India by the British, explains the cordiality of the relationship between the north and the south to the interviewer Shoma Choudhary. And she says, "Oh but you are an aberration, you are too fair, Shashi to be an asur (demon)."

I rest my case.
Ahmedabad: Amid a protest march taken out in Gujarat by members of the Dalit community over allocation of land and other demands, four Dalit families in Lavara village of Dhanera district were given back their agricultural land from illegal occupants almost after four decades.

The district administration of Banaskantha gave back the tracts of lands, which were actually owned by the Dalit families, but were allegedly forcibly being used by some villagers.

Dalit leader and convener of Rashtriya Dalit Adhikar Manch, Jignesh Mevani, whose 'Azadi Kooch' (Freedom March) ended at Dhanera town on Tuesday, reached nearby Lavara village with other Dalit activists and celebrated the "victory" by putting a blue flag on one of the allocated pieces of land, a statement said.

"While four Dalit families in Lavara got possession of around nine acres of land yesterday, three such families from this village would get around 2.5 acres of land each in the next few days," Banaskantha Collector Dilip Rana said.

When asked Rana, however, claimed that the land allocation had nothing to do with the Dalit protest march.

"On paper, these families are the actual owners. They were given this land by the government in the 1980s. We have no idea who was using it or how they were not able to use it. We gave them possession as soon as we received their representation," he said.

Rana declined to comment about the charges of illegal possession of land by some persons for these many years.

The 'Freedom March' led by Mevani that had begun in Mehsana town on 12 July, ended at Dhanera on Tuesday. The march was planned to mark the first anniversary of the Una Dalit thrashing incident, which had rocked the state.

The key agenda of the march was to mount pressure on Gujarat government to allocate agricultural land to Dalits, so that they can give up their ancestral work of cattle skinning or sewage cleaning and start a new life with dignity.

Meanwhile, Kantibhai Solanki, one of those who got back his land on Monday, approached Dhanera police on Tuesday with the help of Dalit activists and lodged a complaint against four men, who he alleged had been using the land for the last 35 years.

In the complaint, Solanki alleged that the agricultural lands had been allocated by the government to his father around 35 years back.

He claimed that some people of Lavara village had grabbed the land until the Collector gave its possession back to him on Monday.

After receiving the complaint, Dhanera police lodged an FIR of criminal intimidation as well as under various sections of Prevention of Atrocities Act, said Dhanera police inspector, GJ Chavda.

"Solanki alleged that when he was putting up a fence around the land, four persons of a particular community, who allegedly grabbed that land, had threatened him of dire consequences. We have not only taken the complaint, but also provided police protection to him," he officer said.
The India Meteorological Department's (IMD) has sounded an alert for extremely heavy to heavy rainfall in Maharashtra and the Konkan-Goa region, media reports said, as rains continued to lash the Mumbai metropolitan region for the fourth consecutive day on Tuesday.

Heavy rain is also expected in Odisha and neighbouring areas, raising the possibility of floods, as a depression was set to hit the state on Tuesday night, The Times of India reported.

IMDs warning bulletin showed the Konkan and Goa region in red for 18 July and central Maharashtra in orange for 18 and 19 July, according to the report, indicating the intensity of predicted rainfall.

IMD Santacruz and Colaba stations recording a three digit rainfall in last 24-hours. "The Santacruz station of Mumbai IMD recorded 163 mm of rainfall, while Colaba registered 107 mm of showers in last 24-hours," IMD-Mumbai, director, Sunil Kamble told PTI.

IMD-Pune has warned of heavy rainfall at isolated places in Konkan, Marathwada, central Maharashtra and Vidarbha.

"The rainfall is of good intensity in last four days compared to that since 1 June. The coastal Konkan region is having more showers in last four days as well. Compared to it, the rainfall in central parts of Maharashtra is still on lower side," Kamble said. The Konkan and Goa region includes Alibaug, Bhira, Dahanu, Goa (Panjim), Harnai, Mumbai and Ratnagiri.

The neighbouring areas of Mumbai such as Alibaug received 173 mm of rainfall, followed by Bhira getting 169 mm. The other parts such as Mahabaleshwar in Satara received 149 mm rains, while Ratnagiri received 130 mm rainfall in the last 24 hours.

Madhavan Rajeevan, secretary of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, tweeted about the "chance of floods". He said, "Widespread rains with heavy spells are expected in next 8-10 days over central and northwest India."

Monsoon in active phase. Wide spread rains with heavy spells expected next 8-10 days over central and NW India, chance of floods. pic.twitter.com/t98gBaZmPC  Madhavan Rajeevan (@rajeevan61) July 18, 2017

The forecast issued by the IMD on Monday afternoon said the rainfall would be "fairly widespread to widespread" over central Maharashtra  the food-grain cultivating area till Wednesday. Marathwada region will have widespread rainfall till Wednesday, while Konkan region will have heavy to very heavy rainfall at isolated places, it said.

According to data released by IMD, New Delhi the rainfall received across Maharashtra from 1 June to 17 July is "normal", though actual precipitation is 381.1 mm as against the normal of 387.2 mm.

With inputs from agencies
Bhopal: Over 15,000 "farmers and people associated with farming" have committed suicide in Madhya Pradesh in the last thirteen years ending 2016, the Legislative Assembly was informed on Wednesday.

"As many as 15,129 farmers and the people associated with farming have killed themselves in the last 13 years ending December, 2016," Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Bhupendra Singh said in response to a question raised by Leader of Opposition Ajay Singh, who had sought to know the exact number of suicides by farmers during 2004 to 2016.

Singh said his reply was based on the figures available with the State Crime Record Bureau (SCRB).

The BJP has been ruling Madhya Pradesh since December, 2003.

Citing the data, the minister said the disturbing trend has been on a decline since 2005 when 1,248 such suicides had occurred.

While 1,638 such cases were recorded in 2004, the figures for subsequent years are:

Year Suicides in farming industry 2005 1,248 2006 1375 2007 1263 2008 1379 2009 1395 2010 1237 2011 1326 2012 1172 2013 1090 2014 826 2015 581 2016 599

Madhya Pradesh was on the boil last month after cultivators in various parts of the state held protests for their demands including a complete loan waiver and a better remuneration for agri produce.

The state government yesterday clarified that six persons were killed and as many were injured in the police action during the farmers' stir in Mandsaur district on June 6, which had triggered a political firestorm in the BJP-ruled state. PTI LAL ADU NSK IKA 07192201 NNNN
Moscow: The first stage of negotiations between India and Russia on developing a fifth generation fighter jet (FGFA) together is over, an official has said.

Sergey Chemezov, CEO of Rostec Corporation, said this on Tuesday, adding that a final decision may be made in the "near future".

Asked about the negotiations on the sidelines of 13th International Aerospace Show MAKS, Chemezov also said the progress was slow as the project and its negotiations are very "complicated".

"As for the fifth generation, the work is underway. Stage one of negotiations is over. Now, we are discussing the second stage," Chemezov said.

"I think that in the near future, all decisions will be made. And the contract documents will be signed," he said.

India and Russia had inked an inter-governmental pact for the FGFA project in 2007.

In December 2010, India had agreed to pay $295 million towards the preliminary design of the fighter, also referred to as the "Perspective Multi-role Fighter" (PMF). However, negotiations faced various hurdles in the subsequent years.

The two sides hope to sign a detailed agreement on the design and development soon, though a deadline was not given.

While the slow pace of progress has been a concern, progress in discussions off late are going in a positive direction as per officials on both sides.

"The only country for India which without any restrictions transfers all technologies is Russia," Chemezov added.

Asked about other ongoing projects between India and Russia, he said: "We have an enterprise that has been working for a long time producing cruise missiles Brahmos. They are already completely localised today... This is one of the first projects that we implemented in India, as well as the T 90, Su-30MKI. That is a fairly large number of projects -- some have already been implemented, some are being implemented."
Jammu: The Army on Tuesday bid farewell to its braveheart soldier Naik Mudassar Ahmed, hailing from Kashmir's militancy-hit Pulwama, in a solemn ceremony in Jammu.

He was injured on Monday when mortar shells fired by the Pakistani Army landed on his bunker along the Line of Control (LoC) in Poonch district. He later succumbed to his injuries.

"The Indian Army on Tuesday paid last tributes to Naik Mudassar Ahmed who was martyred on the LoC in BG sector while responding valiantly to unprovoked firing by Pakistan," a defence spokesman said.

Wreaths were laid on behalf of the GOC-in-C Northern Command, GOC 16 Corps and all ranks by GOC 25 Division at a ceremony in Rajouri.

The mortal remains were then sent to his native village for last rites. Ahmed was a native of Duchoo village in Tral Tehsil and is survived by his wife and two children.

"Ahmed was a brave and sincere soldier. He loved his job to the core," the spokesman said, adding that the nation will always remain indebted to him for the supreme sacrifice and devotion to duty.

Deputy Chief Minister Nirmal Singh and Speaker Kavinder Gupta paid floral tributes to the soldier by laying wreaths. They praised the bravery and valour of the Army personnel guarding the borders against the aggression of the enemy.

Top civil, Army and police officers were present there, including DIG Jammu Ashkoor Wani, Deputy Commissioner Jammu, Kumar Rajeev Ranjan.
The CBI on Wednesday issued summons to Karti Chidambaram, the son of former Finance Minister P Chidambaram, in its ongoing probe against him in a corruption case, an official said.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), in its third notice to Karti, asked him to appear at its headquarters in south Delhi's Lodhi Road on Friday.

The agency wants to examine Karti in a case related to Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance given to INX Media for allegedly receiving funds from Mauritius when his father was the Union finance minister.

The agency had issued summons to Karti and four others for questioning on 27 June and 29 June, but they did not turn up. Karti, through his lawyer, had then informed the CBI that he needed more time to appear.

The CBI on 15 May registered an FIR against Karti on charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating, accepting gratification by corrupt or illegal means, influencing public servants, and criminal misconduct.

Karti is alleged to have received Rs 3.5 crore from Mumbai-based INX media, now 9X Media, for helping it in getting FIPB clearance when it was run by Peter and Indrani Mukerjea, both accused in the Sheena Bora murder case.

The FIR does not mention the name of Chidambaram senior, though it says he cleared the FIPB approval for Rs 4.62 crore foreign direct investment (FDI) in the FIPB meeting on 18 May, 2007.

Karti left for London two days after the CBI registered a case against him.

In May, the agency had conducted raids at the premises of Karti, Peter, and Indrani at 14 locations in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Delhi National Capital Region in connection with the case.
Different states in the United States have their own flags. Besides, the US has flags to represent an array of federal departments, agencies, state governors, counties and even cities. There are more flags there than the colours of the rainbow can support.

Few Americans, however, question this polychromatic extravaganza. Not everybody is happy about how the flags of the seven southern states are designed. Thats because each of these has something or the other that is a sad reminder of the civil war. The most controversial of all US flags is the one that Mississippi state flies because, for some, it denotes white superiority, racism and slavery.

But, by and large, the Americans look at the sundry flags in their midst with Socratesian aplomb. Even Mississippi lawyer Greg Stewart, a die-hard supporter of his states contentious flag, once said: A flag is just a piece of cloth that flies on a stick.

In fact, countless countries across the world including the United Kingdom  where Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland swear by the Union Jack but on occasions fly their own  have national as well as regional flags.

Vinasha kale, viprita buddhi (Reason abandons man in times of adversity)

You might ask whats wrong if the Congress-ruled Karnataka wants a separate flag for itself. Everything, in fact. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has appointed a grandiose committee to consider the legality of a flag for Karnataka and even design one, under the belief that posterity will hail his move as epoch-making feat. If, and when, Karnataka gets its own official flag, it will be the second state to have this distinction after Jammu and Kashmir, but that state enjoys a special status under the Constitution.

Instead, it has landed him in a raging controversy over the motives of his decision. Its no longer a question of whether Karnataka must have its own flag. Its a question of why Siddaramaiah wants it.

Its difficult to imagine that he and his government have overnight fallen, head over heels, in love with Kannada language, culture and identity. Its much easier to see his action as a sign of what the ancient Sanskrit proverb warned: Vinash kale, viprita buddhi. It means that when one nears ones doom, one gets fanciful and bizarre ideas.

The question upfront now is whether the Congress fears doom for itself in the May 2018 Assembly election and is coming up with desperate ideas to win by stoking the fires of regionalism and language.

Faced with allegations of non-performance, the government is trying to fill its report card with dubious actions like holding a caste census to prove that Dalits are the largest community, setting up Indira canteens to offer cheap food and celebrating the birth anniversary of Bengalurus founder Kempegowda. The greatest tribute to Kempegowda would have been to fill the citys million potholes.

How about the existing flag?

As for the move for a Karnataka flag, the ridiculousness of it is evident from the fact that the state has indeed had a flag for more than five decades, designed by Kannada writer M Ramamurthy. Comprising two horizontal yellow and red strips to represent turmeric and vermillion, it has enjoyed a demi-official status since then, despite the absence of a government order to promote it. It even figures on the Karnataka governments website.

No doubt, Siddaramaiah is dishing out old wine in a new bottle, after the BJP tried and failed to make political capital out of it. In 2009, BJPs chief minister BS Yeddyurappa rejected a demand to make the hoisting of Kannada flag compulsory on every Rajyotsava Day (state formation day) on 1 November. But his successor of the same party, DV Sadananda Gowda, made an about-turn and promised in 2012 to give the flag official status.

Just months later in 2012, Gowda did another volte face by withdrawing that decision, when cornered by the Karnataka High Court. While hearing a public interest litigation petition which accused some Kannada activists of misusing the existing flag, the court had raised some pointed questions about the legality of a state having a flag other than the national tricolour.

Use and misuse of the flag

As Kannada journalist and writer Prathibha Nandakumar points out: ... (Kannada) activism has come a long way and also sometimes moved away from the original intention of fighting for the Kannada cause. The advent of TV channels gave rise to the rat race to make more news and the Kannada flag indeed is misused sometimes.

After all this, its clear that the Siddaramaiah government is flogging a dead horse. And by raising needless controversies over his motives, he is once again finding himself in an abyss from which he is trying hard to get out.

Even as the Congress in Karnataka is licking its self-inflicted wounds over the issue, the indications from Delhi are that the central leadership has taken a dim view of the whole thing. The Congress high command, or whatever is left of it, evidently fears that the gains that the local unit hopes to make by raising the temperatures on language may be more than offset by the BJPs campaign to paint the party as anti-national.

But still, as writer Nandakumar points out, While one must condemn the misuse of Kannada flag by individuals and whatever be the stand of the government with regard to this, the fact remains that the flag has come to be identified with the Kannada movement and the history of its evolvement cannot be erased so easily.

The flag as it exists now serves the purpose of symbolism and indeed makes many Kannadigas proud. But Kannada language, culture and art, suffering from neglect for long and crying for a big boost, need much more than what the Mississippi lawyer calls a piece of cloth that flies on a stick.

Author tweets @sprasadindia.
Secretary Xuan Anh addresses the ceremony. (Photo: VGP)

So confirmed Nguyen Xuan Anh, Secretary of the Da Nang city Party Committee, during a ceremony held on July 18to mark the 55th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Vietnam and Laos and 40 years since the signing of the Vietnam-Laos Treaty of Amity and Cooperation.

Addressing the ceremony, Secretary Anh said the city recognized that developing comprehensive cooperation with Laos plays a very important role in national protection and construction.

So far, Da Nang city has signed 30 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Laos in different areas, including increasing exchanges, making conditions for businesses to cooperate in production, and cooperating in planning and agricultural development, healthcare, education, culture and society.

As of late October 2016, Da Nang city signed MoUs for the 2018-2023 period with Savannakhet, Champasak, Sekong, Salavane and Attapu localities, with assistance capital of up to VND94 billion, focusing on education and training, agriculture and planning. In March 2012, the Pakse-Savannakhet-Da Nang direct flight debuted.

Da Nang city has assisted nearly 750 Lao students.

Speaking at the ceremony, Mr. Phommaseng Khamsene, Lao Consul General to Da Nang city, said that over the past years, Da Nang city has always provided great assistance to Laos in general and to Lao localities in particular.

He expressed his happiness with the citys cooperation, adding he believed that the relationship between the city and Lao localities in particular, and between Vietnam and Laos in general, will witness great progress in the future./.
Bengaluru: The Karnataka government, which is under fire for considering a flag for the state, on Wednesday said the issue of whether a state could have its own flag was a "grey area" as there was no mention of it in any of the Acts in the country.

Law Minister TB Jayachandra said the existing Acts referred only to the national flag.

"But whether the state should have a flag or not is a grey area," he told reporters after a cabinet meeting.

The Karnataka government has formed a nine-member committee to submit a report on designing a flag for the state and "providing a legal standing for it", an official said on Tuesday.

The issue has kicked up a storm, with the state government coming under fire from various political parties and organisations. Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut had called it "anti-constitutional" and demanded the imposition of president's rule in Karnataka.

Jayachandra said the committee would weigh the pros and cons of having such a flag, but stressed the state wanted to be in the "mainstream" and did not want any "controversy".

Referring to the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971; Emblems and Names (Prevention of Improper Use) Act, 1950 and Flag Code of India, the law minister said these Acts were for the national flag.

"A committee has already been constituted, it will also deliberate on this issue," he said.

The minister clarified that the issue did not come up for discussion at Wednesday's cabinet meeting.

Defending the move, Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah had on Tuesday asked if there was any provision in the Constitution which prohibited states from having their own flags.

A Union home ministry official said in New Delhi on Tuesday there was no legal bar on a state having a separate flag but it would represent the people and not the government and said India as a nation had only one flag.

Stating that the committee would look into all aspects, Jayachandra said, "We want to be in the mainstream; we don't want to get involved in controversy."

Asked if there was anything in the constitution that barred a state from having a flag, Jayachandra said there was no mention about states in the three Acts.

"Whether it (flag) is needed or not is a policy matter, the pros and cons will be looked into by the committee before giving its report to the government," he said.

To a question on whether the pros and cons had not considered before the committee was set up, Jayachandra said discussions had happened at the departmental level and he would go through them in detail.

If Karnataka eventually decides to have a separate flag, it would be the only state to do so after Jammu and Kashmir, which enjoys a special status under Article 370 of the Constitution.

The committee, headed by the principal secretary, Department of Kannada and Culture, was set up last month following a representation from noted Kannada writer and journalist Patil Puttappa and social worker Bheemappa Gundappa Gadada.

Puttappa and Gadada in their representation had requested the government to design a separate flag for 'Kannada Naadu' and accord its legal standing.

The Siddaramaiah government's move to form a committee is being considered as a departure from the stand taken by the earlier BJP government.

The Sadananda Gowda-led BJP government had in 2012 informed the Karnataka High Court that it had not accepted suggestions to declare the bicolour 'Kannada flag' as the state's official flag, as having a separate flag would be "against the unity and integrity of the country".

The unofficial but widely seen red and yellow 'Kannada flag', hoisted across the state on 1 November every year to commemorate the state's formation day and used as a scarf by Kannada activists, was designed in the 1960s by Veera Senani (brave soldier) Ma Ramamurthy, who championed the cause of Kannada.
The angst of the farmer seems to have become the new national agenda for political parties, particularly those in the Opposition. However, as the developments in Delhi's Jantar Mantar over the last two days suggest, the issues of farmers and farm distress have assumed a distinct political overtone.

While the Members of Parliament (MPs) raised issues related to farmers' distress in the Parliament on Wednesday, the farmers continued their agitation at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi for the second day.

"After the MPs announced that they would raise farmers' issue inside Parliament, we decided to continue with the rally for the second day at Jantar Mantar. In the evening, the working committee of the umbrella organisation of farmers'  the All India Kalindi Samaj Central Committee (AIKSCC)  will review the developments inside Parliament and at the rally. Based on the review, our future course of action will be chalked out," Swaraj Abhiyan spokesperson, Ashutosh, told Firstpost.

Meanwhile, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi will hold a farmers' rally in Rajasthans Banswara district on Wednesday. At the Kisan Aakrosh rally, Rahul is expected to talk on the current agrarian crisis including the issue of farm loan waivers.

Earlier on Tuesday, the farmers' rally at Jantar Mantar was hijacked by political leaders of various hues, who used it as a platform to air their grievances against the Narendra Modi government at the Centre  on unfulfilled promises made by the prime minister to farmers in the lead up the 2014 General Elections.

The rally had started from Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh on 6 July. Ostensibly a farmers' protest, it has now become more about a conglomeration of Opposition parties minus the Congress taking on the BJP government at the Centre. Farmers' organisations that started from Mandsaur had travelled across five states to reach Delhi, to knock at the doors of the Parliament in an attempt to register their grievances.

Amidst the high-decibel pro-farmer sloganeering, countless selfies, and a cacophony befitting a mandi  where heated bargaining settles the price of farm produce  various political parties pledged to take up the cause of the peasants in Parliament while urging them to continue their movement at the ground level. The debilitating heat and humidity of Delhi didn't seem to be a deterrent to the enthusiasm of the farmers and the political parties alike.

"During India's freedom movement, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw a bomb at the Central Legislative Assembly. The aim was to draw the attention of the British and air their grievances. Now, we have to make our government listen to us in the Parliament on farmers' distress," CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury said.

Farmers from Tamil Nadu, who have been protesting at Jantar Mantar for 100 days now, made a dramatic pitch for their demands by wearing skulls and bones. They chained their hands in an obvious reference to the problem of farmers' suicides, that has plagued the country in recent years.

"Today, we tried to raise the issue of farmers' distress twice in the Lok Sabha, but the House got adjourned. On one hand, the government has failed to put an end to farmers' suicide, on the other, it's killing farmers  like what happened in Mandsaur. While corporate NPAs are rising, the government is not ready to waive the loans of poor farmers. If we fail to save our farmers, we won't be able to save our nation. This movement will continue both inside the Parliament and on the ground," CPM Member of Parliament Mohammed Salim told Firstpost.

The rally, dubbed the Kisan Mukti Yatra, came up with its observations on farmers' distress after covering five states.

"The state governments have failed to redress farmers' grievances. They are not getting the right price for their produce and are compelled to sell at prices much lower than the minimum support price (MSP). The condition of farmers is really bad. It is not the farmers who are under debt but the whole country is under the debt of farmers. We are not asking for a debt waiver but freedom from debt. It is not the farmer that is indebted to this country but the country that is indebted to the farmer," said Yogendra Yadav, president, Swaraj India.

The rally witnessed the presence of MPs and leaders from JD(U), CPM, BJD, Karnataka Janatha Paksha, Aam Aadmi Party, Swaraj India, etc.

A meeting was organised by the leaders of Opposition parties to decide a future roadmap. It was decided that issues related to farmers' distress would be raised in Parliament on 19 July.

JD(U) Rajya Sabha MP, Sharad Yadav, said: "Today, we had a meeting and decided to raise farmers' issues in the Parliament on Wednesday. The BJP government got 31 percent vote share and came to power. Now the remaining 69 percent have to make the government listen."

Major issues driving farmers' protest:

- A collapse in prices of farm produce.

- Demand for better prices of their produce  as they are not getting the minimum support price (MSP).

- The absence of an effective buying mechanism has compelled farmers to go for a distress sale. At grain mandis,the traders are buying at a reduced price.

- Before coming to power, BJP had promised to implement the recommendations of the Swaminathan Commission report, especially related to MSP, but it has not been done.

- Post-demonetisation, the traders at mandishave been exploiting farmers by delaying their payments against the sale of crops on a pretext of delayed payments by cheques.A rise in farmer suicides in various states, especially by marginal farmers have irked the community.

- The demand for waiving of farmers' loans is central to their protest.

"I campaigned for Narendra Modi and I supported him, only because he promised to waive off loans of farmers and implement Swaminathan Commissions recommendation on MSP. But later, his government gave an affidavit in the Supreme Court claiming that it was not possible," Raju Shetti, MP from Maharashtra and founder-leader of Swabhimani Sethkari Sanghthana, told Firstpost.

"If it was not possible, why did Modi make this promise in his election manifesto. The government has to take responsibility for buying produce from farmers to redress their grievances, or else the angst will only escalate. The agitation we saw in Mandsaur will spread to other states," he added.
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Life as we know is something more than ones mere survival and existence; therefore, the right to privacy is an inherent right to every citizen of the country. As things stand today, where the Government of India is taking a stand that the right to privacy is not a fundamental right and at the same time the government is promoting digitalisation, enacting policies and regulations permitting surveillance in cyberspace, telephones, email, personal messages etc through multiple agencies under the grab of national security, implementing national programmes like Unique Identification Number etc, it is imperative for India to enact stringent privacy laws.

"It will impact my right to my body, to what I do at home, my communications, and everything else."  Reuters

"If the court rules for the government, then it's going to impact all kinds of footprints of citizens, both professionally, and in their private lives," Guruswamy said.

"This goes far beyond Aadhaar. The ruling will decide the manner in which constitutional democracy will endure."

Right to privacy hearing will impact much more than Aadhaar

Justices J Chelameswar says degree of protection higher if it refers to a Constitution Part 3 right. He also further referenced the corresponding acts in American and European law, and its evolution from a common law to a human right.

The Privacy Act, 1974, is meant to protect individuals from unauthorised use of their records by a federal agency. It makes agencies accountable for the records they maintain and requires them to protect the accuracy of records. Agencies must also reveal the purpose for which are collecting information.

Europe generally is governed by the Data Protection Directive, which restricts how information can be processed and used. It requires that member states "implement technical and organisational measures to protect personal data against accidental or unlawful destruction or accidental loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure or access and to establish judicial remedies for breaches. It also mandates the establishment of a public authority to monitor adherence to the directive.

Justice J Chandrachud asked senior advocate Arvind Datar, representing the petitioners, on what privacy entails. Every right to make a decision may not be a part of the right to privacy, the judge said.

Shivam Divan, representing the petitioners in the court, on why Right to Privacy is important

Chamleshwar adds whether there is an issue of privacy when the State induges in data collection.

Povaya: Declaring privacy as a fundamental right is the first step towards ensuring accountability for coordinate branches of government.

In case you missed it: Right to privacy not absolute, says Supreme Court during Aadhaar hearing

The declaration that privacy is a fundamental right itself is the first step towards fulfilling that obligation of oversight on executive

MA: The right to privacy can be drawn from Articles 17, 24, and 25 of the Constitution.

With Meenakshi Arora's statement, petitioners have completed their statement in their hearing on Thursday. Meenakshi Arora, the last petitioner, ends by saying, "History teaches us that without privacy, the consequences are unimaginable."

Meenakshi Arora, the last counsel for petitioners, takes the Court through the judgement in District Registrar v Canara Bank. She concludes with the privacy of personal information and personal choice.

any way and let it develop case by case.

Four non-BJP ruled states, including Karnataka and West Bengal moved the Supreme Court seeking to intervene in the ongoing Right to Privacy hearing

Thread on the Union of India's arguments in the right to privacy case in the morning session. https://t.co/ZykjIUkhiV

Article 21 i.e. protections of life and personal liberty, AK Gopalan 's case and feasibility of the right to privacy being considered a fundamental right discussed.

Union of India's arguments in the right to privacy case in the morning session, so far

Right to privacy cannot be an absolute right and the State may have some power to put reasonable restriction, the Supreme Court said today while examining the issue whether it can be declared as a fundamental right under the Constitution.

A nine-judge Constitution bench, headed by Chief Justice JS Khehar, also asked the Centre and others to assist it about the "contours" and ambit of test on which the width and scope of right to privacy and its infringement, if any, by the State would be tested.

The bench then referred to the apex court judgement, criminalising gay sex and said if right to privacy was construed in its widest sense, then the verdict in the Naz Foundation case "would become vulnerable".

The NGO, Naz Foundation, has been fighting a legal battle for decriminalising consensual unnatural sex including lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders.

During the day-long hearing, the bench, also comprising Justices J Chelameswar, SA Bobde, RK Agrawal, Rohinton Fali Nariman, Abhay Manohar Sapre, DY Chandrachud, Sanjay Kishan Kaul and S Abdul Nazeer, said, "Right to privacy is an amorphous right and not absolute. It is only a small sub-sect of liberty."

It then gave illustrations including that giving birth to offsprings might fall under right to privacy and the parents could not say that the government did not have the power to direct sending every child to schools.

It also referred to issue of data protection and said that its ambit was "much wider" than right to privacy and "cataloguing the contents of privacy" has the danger of limiting the right itself.

"We live in an age of big data and the state is entitled to regulate the data whether it is for the purpose of regulating crime, taxation or other activities... Right to privacy cannot be so absolute that it prevents the State from legislating or regulating it," the bench said.

If a bank has sought personal details for disbursing loans then it could not be said to be an infringement of right to privacy, it said, adding that the issues like one's sexual orientation and the bedroom details were covered under right to privacy.

Senior advocate Gopal Subramanium, appearing for one of the petitioners, initiated the arguments and said right to privacy was an "inalienable" and "inherent" to the most important fundamental right which the right to liberty.

He said the right to liberty, which also included right to privacy, was a pre-existing "natural right" which the Constitution acknowledged and guaranteed to the citizens in case of infringements by the State.

"Liberty is the fundamental value of our Constitution. Life and liberty are natural existing rights which our Constitution acknowledges and guarantees. How can liberty be at all experienced without privacy?," he asked.

Subramanium, at the outset, referred to apex court verdicts to highlight the process of interpretation of fundamental rights by it and assailed the two judgements delivered in M P Sharma and Kharak Singh cases by an eight-judge and six judge benches in 1954 and 1963 respectively in which it was held that right to privacy was not a fundamental right.

The issue of right to privacy as a fundamental right was deliberated upon by the court in the two cases.

"It is submitted that the decision in the 1954 and 1963 cases, to the extent they interpret fundamental rights on a distinctive basis (as recognised in the A K Gopalan case of 1950) are no longer good law.

"In view of the fact that the A K Gopalan case stands overruled in the R C Cooper case (of 1970), it follows a fortiori (from a stronger argument) that neither of the above decisions are effective."

He assailed the M P Sharma verdict which had held that right to privacy was not a fundamental right, saying that the MP Sharma case was not "an authority for the proposition that there is no fundamental right to privacy in the Constitution".

He argued that right to privacy is inherent to the right to liberty and the Constitution "mediates" between the citizens and the State and the concept of privacy is "embedded in liberty as well as honour of a person".

He then referred to the Preamble and Article 14 (equality before law), 19 (freedom of speech and expression) and 21 (protection of life and liberty) of the Constitution to contend that right to privacy was intrinsic to these "inalienable" fundamental rights also.

The counsel assailed the contention of Attorney General KK Venugopal that right to privacy was a "common law right" and not the fundamental one and said it "went much beyond the common law" as it was inherently attached to the basic rights of life and liberty.

"Right to privacy invariably means the inviolability of the person. The expression 'person' includes the body as well as the inviolate personality and the privacy really is intended to indicate the realm of inviolable sanctuary that most of us sense in our beings.

"It refers to spatial sanctity, freedom in decisional autonomy, informational privacy as well as the ability to freely develop one's personality and exercise discretion and judgement," he said.

Former Attorney General Soli Sorabjee, appearing in support of privacy right, went much beyond and said even if the Constitution did not "explicitly" provide this right, it could be deduced as had been done in the case of freedom of press.

He referred to Article 19 and said it dealt with the freedom of speech and expression and the apex court deduced the media right from it.

Another senior advocate Shyam Divan also said privacy right was a fundamental right according to the "golden triangle" rule that comprised Article 14, 19 and 21.

"As recognised by an unbroken line of decisions of this court since 1975, right to privacy is protected under Part III of the Constitution. This court has recognised several unenumerated rights as facets of Article 21.

"Similarly, right to privacy has also been recognised as flowing from Article 21," he said.

He said that right to privacy extends to several aspects, including body integrity, personal autonomy, right to be left alone, informational self-determination and protection from State surveillance.

The bench, at one point, stopped Divan from raising issues relating to Aadhaar that that government could not force citizens to give biometric details and asked him to focus on the privacy issue alone.

When the bench asked whether privacy right could be absolute and the government could put some restriction or not, he said that the aspect of privacy might be determined on a case-to-case basis.

"In a technologically dynamic society it is imperative to keep dimensions of right to privacy flexible to adapt and adjust with the new scenarios," he said, adding many of the fundamental rights "cannot be enjoyed to the fullest in the absence of right to privacy".

He further referred to the fact that India is a signatory to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and now to say that right to privacy is a common law right only will be a "regressive" step.

He said the recognition of "fundamental right to privacy" is consistent with international norms and has been recognised internationally as a human right and is protected in almost all liberal democracies.

Another senior advocate Arvind Dutta also submitted that right to privacy should be treated as a fundamental right.

The argument will continue tomorrow and that attorney general is likely to put the government's view across.

With inputs from PTI
Bhopal: The Madhya Pradesh government on Monday told the state legislative assembly that it would come out with a "clear-cut" compensation policy for the victims, who lose their lives in the incidents of serious nature.

Home minister Bhupendra Singh made this announcement while replying to a question raised by Congress member Mukesh Nayak over the financial aid provided to those who died during the farmers' agitation last month, especially the Mandsaur police firing incident of 6 June, in which five farmers were killed.

"We are going to come out with a clear-cut compensation policy for the victims (including the deceased) of incidents of serious nature," Singh said.

Currently, the compensation is given as per the Revenue Book Circular (RBC), he said adding, "However, in case of incidents of serious nature, succour is also provided from the Chief Minister's Discretionary Fund."

Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had personally handed over the cheques of Rs 1 crore each as compensation to the kin of the five farmers killed in Mandsaur police firing.

Besides the loss of life, properties of several people had been destroyed in arson, stone pelting during the farmers' stir in Mandsaur.

The opposition Congress had later organised a bandh in Balaghat district and demanded Rs 1 crore each for the over 25 people killed on 7 June in a fire cracker factory inferno.
Bengaluru: The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has issued notices to two top Karnataka prison officials taking cognisance of a complaint about alleged torture and transfer of 32 convicts serving terms in the Central Prison in Bengaluru.

An NHRC release said the complaint alleged the prisoners were beaten black-and-blue and shifted overnight on 16 July in an injured condition to various other prisons at Mysore, Ballari, Belagavi and Davanagere.

According to the complaint, which was lodged on Tuesday by Bharatiya Janata Party MP Shobha Karandlaje, the family members of these prisoners were not being allowed to meet them.

The complaint was filed a day after the prisoners, in a sudden move, were shifted at around 1 am to jails in Ballari and Belagavi for allegedly trying to voice their grievances.

The commission observed that the allegations of physical torture of the prisoners and their overnight transfer to other jails in an injured condition, if true, raised a serious issue of violation of their right to life and dignity.

It issued notices to Karnataka Director General of Police (DGP) and Inspector General (IG), Prisons, asking them to file a detailed report on the allegations within four weeks, along with a note on the current location and health condition of the "injured and shifted" prisoners.

"It need not be restated that a prisoner is not a slave of the State and is not denude of his fundamental rights while in judicial custody," the release said.

Allegedly, the prisoners were meted out this "inhuman" treatment because of their bid to stage a dharna inside the jail premises as they were not allowed to speak to (then) DIG D Roopa, who had visited the jail, it added.

Roopa had recently flagged certain "grave irregularities" inside the Central Jail, including providing a sophisticated kitchen to one of the prisoners, (AIADMK Amma chief) V Sasikala, and VIP treatment to another prisoner, Abdul Karim Lala Telgi, the release said.

The issue of alleged preferential treatment to Sasikala, serving a four-year term in a disproportionate assets case, came to the fore after Roopa submitted a report to her superior, DGP (Prisons) HN Sathyanarayana Rao.

Both Roopa and Rao were transferred after they sparred over the report in public.

The government has also ordered a probe by a retired official into the allegations.

The release said that according to the complaint, the 32 prisoners were allegedly shifted in a hasty manner in order to avoid any disclosure to the inquiry officer.
Around 2,000 farmers protested in Delhi on Tuesday to condemn the "anti-farmer" policies of the BJP government and the killing of six farmers in Madhya Pradesh in June.

However, the ensuing protests took a political colour as a stormy Monsoon Session is underway, with the agrarian crisis being one of the issues the Opposition wants to use to corner the government.

The protesting farmers pressed for adequate remuneration for their produce and demanded a complete farm loan waiver. The Kisan Mukti Yatra, flagged off on 6 July at Mandsaur in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Madhya Pradesh, reached Jantar Mantar around 12 pm on Tuesday.

The 'Kisan Yatra' passed through Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana before reaching the national capital. It was led by Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana leader and MP Raju Shetti and Swaraj Abhiyan founder Yogendra Yadav.

Shetty and Yadav reiterated their demands of loan waiver and remunerative prices saying the farmers were in distress.

"The government did not give Madhya Pradesh farmers a good price for their produce but instead fired bullets at them. Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants farmers to just produce food grains. He thinks they are animals. Farmers will have to take revenge," Shetty said.

The protesting farmers were predominantly from Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.

Meanwhile, separate farmers' protests were also held in Punjab and Rajasthan, where the protesters echoed similar sentiments and demanded loan waiver. Scores of Tamil Nadu farmers, who had grabbed eyeballs with their unique protest earlier this year, also resumed their agitation for loan waiver and drought-relief package in the capital.

The farmers demanded that the Modi government fulfill its electoral promise of 50 percent profit above the production cost and implementation of recommendations by the MS Swaminathan Committee.

Among the protesters were about 40 children of Maharashtra farmers who committed suicide in recent years. They made an appeal to the farmers to not commit suicide as it would only further add to their families' woes.

Social activist Medha Patkar, civil activist Prashant Bhushan, CPM leader Sitaram Yechury and Shiv Sena MP Arvind Sawant, among others, sought farmers' unity to force the government to bring a legislation to ensure remunerative prices.

Yechury said he will raise issues of loan waiver and remunerative prices in the ongoing session of Parliament.

"We will talk about the loan waiver in Parliament. It is a right of farmers to get adequate price. The government will have to bring in a law," Yechury said.

Sawant said the Shiv Sena had always been supporting farmers and that it would raise their issues in Parliament.

Leaders from the Janata Dal-United and the Biju Janata Dal also joined the protesters.

Notably, the Rashtriya Kisan Mahasangh, an umbrella body of 62 farmers' organisations, stayed away from the yatra, calling it "politically motivated".

The Centre, meanwhile, asked states to chalk out relevant plans to achieve the goal of doubling farmers' income by 2022, Parliament was informed on Tuesday.

The average monthly income per agricultural household from various sources is estimated to be Rs 6,426, according to the survey done by the National Sample Survey Office in 2013.

Replying to queries raised on farmers' income, minister of state for agriculture Parshottam Rupala said a road map has been outlined by the NITI Aayog for farm sector reforms and doubling farmers' income by 2022.

With inputs from agencies
Srinagar: Over 8,000 pilgrims from Jammu and Kashmir would join Muslim devotees from across the globe in Saudi Arabia for the annual Haj pilgrimage this year with the first batch of pilgrims leaving for the kingdom from Srinagar next week, the state government said on Wednesday.

Two flights carrying 420 pilgrims each would fly directly to Saudi Arabia from Srinagar on 25 July, marking the beginning

of the pilgrimage from the state, an official spokesman said after a meeting here chaired by Minister of State for Haj and

Auqaf Farooq Ahmad Andrabi.

He said a total of 8,050 pilgrims from the state are performing the Haj this year.

Both the flights would operate from Srinagar International Airport and the process of taking the pilgrims to Saudi Arabia is expected to be completed by 4 August, the spokesman said, adding, the first return flight, carrying the pilgrims back home, would arrive here on 7 September.

Jammu and Kashmir has received over 35,000 applications for the pilgrimage this year and the selection of pilgrims was done mostly through draw of lots, though hundreds of pilgrims were allotted seats directly under various categories.

All the pilgrims would be intimated about the flight date at least two weeks before the date of departure, the spokesman said.

He said the State Hajj Committee has introduced jackets and flags for 'Khuddam-ul-Hujaj' (Haj attendants) so that they could easily be identified by the pilgrims and each attendant would lead a group of 200 pilgrims each.

The spokesman said high-end vehicles with sophisticated technology would be made available for the pilgrims to carry them from Haj House to the airport.

Besides the committee has also published brochures which contain Haj-related information, he said.

He said the committee has installed three foreign exchange counters and an accidental insurance policy has been made for every pilgrim.

Besides, personal identification cards will be given to pilgrims that contain their identification information and Hajj Commission helpline numbers, so they can have a hassle-free journey, the spokesman said.
Islamabad: Pakistan on Wednesday summoned Indian Deputy High Commissioner JP Singh after two civilians were killed and six others injured in alleged ceasefire violations along the Line of Control by Indian troops.

Foreign ministry spokesman Nafees Zakaria said Indian security forces resorted to firing in Baroh and Tandar sectors on Tuesday.

Director General (SA and SAARC) Mohammad Faisal summoned Singh and "condemned the unprovoked ceasefire violations" by Indian security forces.

"The deliberate targeting of civilians is indeed deplorable and contrary to human dignity and international human rights and humanitarian laws", Faisal said.

He urged India to respect the 2003 Ceasefire arrangement and investigate the incidents of ceasefire violations along the LoC.

The Pakistani foreign ministry previously summoned the Indian envoy for two consecutive days on 8-9 July, over the same issue, claiming that more civilians were killed in firing by Indian troops.
Jammu/Srinagar: Two army jawans were killed and six people, including three civilians, were injured as Pakistani troops pounded several villages and forward areas with mortar bombs along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir on Wednesday, officials said.

Terrorists also made a bid to infiltrate into Kashmir from Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK) via the Gurez sector which was foiled by the Indian troops who killed one of the infiltrators, the officials said.

Over 8,000 people have been affected by Pakistani shelling during the last two days and 3,361 border migrants have been housed in camps.

Nine people, including six soldiers, were killed and 18 injured in over a dozen ceasefire violations by the Pakistani army along the LoC this month.

The Pakistani troops targeted several areas of Rajouri, Poonch and Kupwara districts of along the LoC, they said, adding that the Indian troops retaliated.

The Pakistani shelling put lives of hundreds of school children at risk in Rajouri district.

The authorities rescued over 250 people. Among them were 217 students, who were trapped in three schools in Kadali and Seha areas of Rajouri near the LoC for six hours. They were evacuated in bulletproof vehicles, according to Deputy Commissioner of Rajouri Shahid Iqbal Choudhary.

"Pakistani troops initiated unprovoked firing on Indian Army posts in Naushera sector in Rajouri at around 1350 hours today. The Indian Army retaliated strongly and effectively," the defence spokesman said.

An army sepoy Jaspreet Singh was killed in the Pakistani shelling in Naushera sector in Rajouri district, a defence spokesman said.

The 24-year-old jawan hailed from Talwandi in Moga district of Punjab. He is survived by his parents, he added.

"The nation will always remain indebted to him for the supreme sacrifice and devotion to duty," he said.

Three civilians were injured in Pakistani shelling along the LoC in Naushera sector, the DC said, adding that they have been hospitalised.

The reports said that three army jawans also suffered injuries in exchanges of the firing and shelling along LoC. They were hospitalised.

Another army jawan was killed in Pakistani firing in the Nowgam sector of Kashmir Valley, an army official said.

Over 8,000 people, including 3,000 in Naushera and 5,000 in Manjakote-Rajdhani-Panjgrain-Naika, have been affected by Pakistani shelling during the last two days.

"3,361 border migrants have been given shelter in camps set up by the government in safer areas along the LoC in Rajouri district," the DC said.

"Earlier in the day, the Pakistan Army in unprovoked and indiscriminate firing, used small arms, automatics and mortars from 0645 hours in Bhimbher Gali (Rajouri) and Poonch sectors along the LoC," the spokesman said.

According to reports, one jawan suffered minor splinter injuries in the exchange of the fire in the Bhimbher Gali sector.

The Pakistani army also targeted civilian areas and Indian Army posts along the LoC in Bhimbher Gali and Balakote sectors of Rajouri district as well as the Poonch sector triggering fear among residents.

On Tuesday, the Pakistan Army had fired on Indian Army posts in Rajouri, Poonch and Baramulla districts, officials said.

Naik Muddasar Ahmed was killed when mortar shells landed on his bunker. Ahmed, who hailed from Duchoo village, is survived by his wife and two children. Pakistan had shelled mortars on civilian areas on Tuesday in which nine-year-old Sajada Kouser was killed at Baroti, officials said, adding that two other civilians and a jawan were also injured in Rajouri.
New Delhi: The BJP on Wednesday accused the Congress of conspiring to disrupt Parliament during the monsoon session by giving issues a "communal colour".

Waving an alleged leaked document of the Congress on the issues to be raised by the party in this session, BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said, "This is a dossier of disruption".

"Rather than focusing on the more relevant issue of national security, the Congress has given priority on raising incidents of lynching by the mob and cow vigilantism, by giving them communal colour," he told reporters.

Stressing that debate and discussions were always welcomed, he said but there should be a way to do that.

"In this leaked document, they have mentioned about Junaid and Akhlaq but why there is no mention of the lynching of police officer Ayub Pandith in Srinagar," he alleged.

Intelligence reports have made it clear that Junaid died due to a fight over a seat in the train and not over beef as claimed, Patra said.

"Not once or twice but thrice, prime minister Narendra Modi has criticised the incidents of cow vigilantism and asked for stringent action against such people," he added.

The BJP spokesperson said that according to this leaked plan of the Congress, the issue of national security was not the priority.

It is expected as their leaders prefer to have a laugh with extremists, he said, in an apparent reference to Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar's meeting with Hurriyat leaders in Kashmir.

He further said that on one side Modi was "sweating out" for the development of the country but the Congress is keen to stall the nation's progress.

The leaked Congress' strategy for the monsoon session, titled 'Key issues to raise in Parliament', was being reported by some news channels.
Vietnamese Ambassador to Cambodia Thach Du (Photo: VNA)



The Ambassador noted that the visit, the second of the Party chief to Cambodia after the first one on December 6th-8th, 2011, is taking place on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Vietnam-Cambodia diplomatic ties, which shows that Vietnam always attaches great importance to the neighbourliness and friendship between the two countries.

The visit also aims to affirm Vietnams adherence to the motto of good neighbourliness, traditional friendship, comprehensive, sustainable and long-term cooperation with Cambodia, which was agreed by the two sides in 2005, he added.

The ambassador stressed that the upcoming visit of Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong follows a series of visits by President Tran Dai Quang, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, and National Assembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan.

He also noted that in recent years, King Norodom Sihamoni of Cambodia has paid several official visits to Vietnam. This year saw Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen and President of the Cambodian National Assembly Samdech Heng Samrin visit Vietnam to celebrate the 50th founding anniversary of the bilateral diplomatic ties.

During the visits, leaders of the two countries have reiterated their strong determination to nurture the bilateral friendship, solidarity and cooperation for the interests of the two peoples.

Highlighting achievements in Vietnam-Cambodia cooperation, the Ambassador said the bilateral rapports have continuously grown through historical ups and downs.

Trade and investment cooperation has expanded rapidly, with Vietnam having become one of the leading economic partners of Cambodia. Two-way trade reached nearly USD3 billion in 2016 and around 190 projects of Vietnam worth nearly USD2.9 billion have been licensed in Cambodia.

However, the diplomat said there is still room for further developing the bilateral cooperation, urging the two sides to pay more attention to boosting affiliation in education, training, healthcare, and culture, while strengthening collaboration in security and defense.

He stressed that both nations continue to commit themselves to the policy of not allowing any hostile forces to use their territory to threaten the security of the other country.

On the basis of agreements and treaties reached by top leaders, the two countries have been actively coordinating to implement the land border demarcation and border marker planting. According to the ambassador, Vietnam and Cambodia have completed over 84 percent of the work and strive to complete it as soon as possible in order to build a border line of peace, friendship, cooperation and sustainable development.

On the prospects of bilateral ties, the Ambassador said in order to maintain the good relations, Vietnam and Cambodia should continue to exchange delegations between their Parties, States, National Assemblies and Governments as well as ministries and localities to reinforce the bilateral trust.

At the same time, it is necessary to enhance partnership across the fields, especially economics, trade, investment, culture-society, tourism, security and defense, to make them match the sound political relations, he said.

He noted the need for both countries to expand and diversify international relations to overcome common difficulties and challenges, with priority given to close coordination at forums such as the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam (CLV) Development Triangle, Cambodia-Laos-Myanmar-Vietnam (CLMV) Cooperation, Ayaoadi-Chaophaya-Mekong Economic Cooperation Strategy (ACMECS), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), and United Nations (UN), in order to increase Vietnam and Cambodias position and prestige in the region and beyond.

The ambassador also called attention to the education of young generations on the good neighbourliness, traditional friendship and comprehensive cooperation between the two countries, which is important to bilateral sustainable cooperation in the long run./.
The Monsoon Session of Parliament had a stormy start, with the Opposition forcing a washout on Tuesday by creating pandemonium over various issues and an angry BSP chief Mayawati declaring that she would resign from the Rajya Sabha for not being allowed to speak on the Dalit issue. Members from parties like the Congress, the Trinamool Congress, the Left parties and the RJD created uproar in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha as soon as the Houses met for the day.

Due to the ruckus, the Lok Sabha was adjourned for the day minutes after noon following one adjournment earlier while the Rajya Sabha was adjourned repeatedly till 3 pm and then for the day, without transacting any business. Though the Monsoon Session began on Monday, Tuesday was the first working day as Monday, both the Houses were adjourned, without transacting any business, after obituary references to the departed MPs.

On Tuesday, the opposition members wanted to raise issues like "atrocities" against dalits, violent incidents involving cow vigilantes and the plight of farmers.

In the Rajya Sabha, as soon as the House assembled for the day, Mayawati raised the issue of violence against Dalits against the backdrop of riots in Saharanpur district of Uttar Pradesh sometime back.

While she was speaking, Deputy Chairman PJ Kurien asked her to wrap up as she had exceeded the three-minute duration set for each member during the Zero Hour.

At this, Mayawati got angry and asked how she could be prevented from raising the issue about her 'samaj' (community) and the Dalits. "I have not finished. You cannot do this," she said. In anger, she went on to add, "I will resign from Rajya Sabha today... I have no moral right to be in the House if I am not allowed to put across my views on atrocities being committed against Dalits."

By the evening, the BSP chief sent in her resignation to the Rajya Sabha Chairman. Mayawati's term in the Upper House was till April next year.

Kurien asked her not to make a full-fledged speech and she can seek a discussion after giving a notice under Rule 267 that seeks adjournment of proceedings to take up an issue.

A discussion can begin only after the Chair, on the advise of the government, accepts the notice and agrees for a discussion.

Kurien rose from his seat in an attempt to calm her down but Mayawati refused to agree saying she has no right to be in the House if she cannot protect the rights of her community. "I am going to resign from the house," she said and walked out of the House in a huff.

Her party colleagues led by Satish Mishra followed her but were back in the House soon to raise slogans against the alleged anti-Dalit policies of the government. Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said Mayawati was challenging the Chair. "She should apologise. She has threatened the Chair," he said.

BSP members immediately rushed into the Well, shouting slogans against the government. Leader of the Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad briefly prevailed over them to allow him to make his submission. Azad said the government, at an all-party meeting before the start of the Monsoon Session, had agreed to discuss any issue that the opposition wants to raise in the house.

"Promise was made to us in the presence of the Prime Minister. You are going against that," he said. He said the Opposition led by Congress has given notices

to discuss crisis facing farmers, anti-Dalit violence and lynching of minorities.

Responding to the barbs of the treasury benches to respect the people's mandate, Azad said the government has got a mandate to protect the Dalits and minorities and for development.

"You didn't get a mandate to massacre minorities and Dalits," he said, before leading a walkout by the Congress. Soon thereafter, BSP members were back in the Well, shouting anti-government slogans. Sitaram Yechury (CPM) said the government policies were pushing farmers to suicide.

Naqvi said the government was ready for discussion on any issue and the opposition should give a notice. Kurien said the government was agreeing to having a

discussion, so the opposition members should return to their seats and start it.

"Shouting slogan is no soluition. We can discuss. The Chair is ready to allow discussion on all subjects. Let us start," he said. But the opposition members remained unrelenting, forcing him to adjourn the proceedings till 1200 hours.

Earlier, Mayawati while elaborating on the incidents in Saharanpur, said the Dalits had agreed to the district administration's order not to take out any procession or install a statue of Bhim Rao Ambedkar on 14 April. But the followers of Maharana Pratap, however, took out a procession on 5 May, she said.

Before she could complete, Kurien asked her to sit and called the next speaker, saying "you cannot monopolise", angering Mayawati.

No sooner that the House reassembled at noon, slogan shouting Congress members trooped into the Well. They were followed by the members of Trinamool Congress and others. Amid slogan shouting by members of Congress and other parties, Chairman Hamid Ansari called for taking up the Question Hour.

TMC member Derek O'Brien tried to speak but could not be heard amidst the noisy scenes. Some members of the AIADMK too rushed into the Well as other opposition party members were on their feet.

The continued sloganeering forced the Chairman to adjourn the House till 2.00 pm. Similar scenes were witnessed when the House re-assembled at 2.00 pm, leading to its adjournment till 3.00 pm. As the protests continued, Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar challenged the opposition members to a discussion, asking why they were running away from it.

However, as the uproar continued, the House was adjourned till Wednesday.

In the Lok Sabha, the Opposition wanted to raise cow vigilantism, the plight of farmers and various other issues. Being disallowed, members from the Congress, RJD, TMC and the Left, among others, then trooped into Well. Many were shouting slogans and also displaying placards. The House was first adjourned after 15 minutes into Question Hour till noon as the bedlam continued. As the House re-assembled after the adjournment during Question Hour, the opposition members again trooped into the Well raising anti-government slogans.

In the din, as many as three bills, including the Indian Institute of Petroleum and Energy Bill, were introduced. Besides, reports of various parliamentary committees were tabled before Speaker Sumitra Mahajan adjourned the proceedings for the day.

One of the opposition placards read, "Gau mata toh bahana hai, karz maafi se dhyan hatana hai (Cow protection is a tool to divert attention from farm loan waiver)". "Vijay Mallya ko bhagaya, kisano ko rulaya (Vijay Mallya was allowed to leave, while farmers were made to cry)," read another placard.

BJP members from Karnataka were also seen holding placards and standing at their benches asking the state government to protect honest officers. They were referring to the recent transfer of DIG (Prisons) D Roopa, who had reportedly exposed that AIADMK leader Sasikala Natrajan was provided special facilities and services inside prison.

With inputs from agencies
New Delhi: The government has no information to suggest that terror groups al-Qaeda and Islamic State(IS) are engaged in a turf war in India, the Rajya Sabha was informed on Wednesday.

"There are no inputs available to suggest a turf war between al-Qaeda and Daesh (ISIS) in India," Minister of State for Home Hansraj Ahir said in reply to a written question.

However, the minister said, in order to counter terror activities, there exists close and effective coordination between intelligence and security agencies at the Centre and the states.

"The cyber space is being closely monitored to keep a close watch on the activities of terrorist groups. The central intelligence and security agencies are regularly alerting the state police for taking precautionary and proactive measures to counter any terrorist act," he said.
New Delhi: The government is not mulling a separate law to tackle mob lynching incidents, Minister of State for Home Affairs Hansraj Gangaram Ahir said on Wednesday.

Replying to a question in the Rajya Sabha during Question Hour, Ahir said that whether a lynching is done by a single person or by several persons, the existing laws can deal with it.

"The state governments can take action against person or persons involved in such incidents under existing laws. I don't think there is a need for a separate law," Ahir said.

The minister was responding to a supplementary question by Congress leader Digvijay Singh, who asked if the central government was planning to modify the CrPC and IPC to deal with mob lynching in the name of cow protection which he said was "emerging as a trend now".

The minister said the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) does not maintain a separate data of killings in the name of cow protection.

Stressing that law and order was a state subject, Ahir said Home Minister Rajnath Singh had already issued an advisory to all the states to take prompt action in cases of cow vigilantism and nab the culprits.

Samajwadi Party leader Naresh Agrawal, who had asked the primary question on cow vigilantism, accused "BJP people" of involvement in such incidents. Ahir objected to the reference to BJP cadres in this connection.

Not satisfied with the minister's reply, Samajwadi Party MPs walked up to the Chairman's podium and shouted slogans.

"Gau raksha ke naam pe hatya, nahi chalegi (Killings in the name of cow protection won't be accepted)," they shouted in a chorus as other opposition members stood up at their desks.

Chairman Hamid Ansari adjourned the House for 10 minutes amidst sloganeering.
Srinagar: The NC on Tuesday expressed concern over the Centre's decision not to file a written response to a PIL in the Supreme Court, challenging Article 35A of the Constitution, saying it was tantamount to "supporting" an assault on the special status of Jammu and Kashmir".

"The Centre's decision to remain ambiguous on the very sensitive issue indicated a political intention to support and patronise those forces that want to use the judicial route to launch an assault on Article 35A and Article 370 of the Constitution," the National Conference said in a statement.

The Centre had on Monday refused to commit itself in the Supreme Court on continuing with the special status accorded to Jammu and Kashmir by the Constitution, saying being purely a legal issue, it should be decided by a larger bench of the apex court.

Attorney-General KK Venugopal told a bench of Chief Justice JS Khehar and Justice DY Chandrachud that the matter raised in a PIL in 2014 by Delhi-based NGO 'We the Citizens', against the continuance of the special status, was a legal issue and therefore, the Centre was not filing any reply to the notice issued in 2014.

"The decision of the Attorney General not to file a written counter-response to the PIL, before it was referred to a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, has raised many red flags and yet again points towards the fact that the powers that be in New Delhi are patronising and supporting such moves to question Jammu and Kashmir's special status and state subject laws," read the statement.

It claimed that it was evident that the Centre wanted to "abstain from taking a clear position" on the issue, a "dangerous" approach, which could lead to an "irreparable damage" to the state's special status.

Article 35A of the Constitution empowers the legislature of Jammu and Kashmir to define the "Permanent Residents" of the state and subsequently, empowers it to provide special rights and privileges to those permanent residents.

"It is the responsibility of the Centre and the Attorney General to respond to such PILs in a transparent, unambiguous and unequivocal manner and that has clearly not happened," said the opposition party in Jammu and Kashmir.

Referring to the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in the state, the NC alleged that the extension of the new tax regime to the state through a Presidential Order "robbed" it of its fiscal autonomy.

It described the move as the "most recent instance of the PDP-BJP state government and the Centre collaborating to inflict an irreparable harm on the state's autonomy and special status".

"The wound inflicted on the state's autonomy through the extension of GST is still fresh as another new machination has been launched to question the validity of Article 35A now," the statement read.

It added that while senior PDP leaders and the current state finance minister initially opposed the extension of GST to Jammu and Kashmir, the ruling party eventually "surrendered and then actively collaborated with the Centre to decimate the state's fiscal autonomy".

"The PDP seems to have teamed up with the powers that be yet again to facilitate an assault on Article 35A," the NC alleged.

It said it was in the process of getting the details of the PIL to consult legal and constitutional experts.

"The National Conference has and will continue to fight for the state's special status and the restoration of its autonomy and no power on earth can suppress the state and its people in safeguarding their constitutionally validated political rights," the statement added.
Chandigarh: The Punjab government is mulling making inquest proceedings mandatory in farmer suicide cases for the payment of ex-gratia in order to prevent any "fraudulent" claims, an official said.

Inquest proceeding, under Section 174 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, is aimed to ascertain whether a death is suicidal.

"There is a proposal to make inquest proceedings mandatory in case of farmer suicide. This proposal came in a cabinet sub-committee meeting," said a senior official of Punjab revenue department on Wednesday.

The idea behind this proposal is to prevent any fraudulent claims for ex-gratia, the officer said.

The official however said that nothing has been finalised yet by the government in this regard.

"It is at a discussion stage," he clarified.

The Congress led government had last month announced raising the ex-gratia for suicide affected families to Rs 5 lakh from the earlier Rs 3 lakh.

At present, inquest proceedings are not mandatory in suicide cases, the official pointed out.

An ex-gratia is given to the families of farmers who commit suicide on the basis of the post-mortem report, FIR copy after a district level committee recommends such cases to the state government.
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday lashed out at the BJP government at the Centre for not paying attention to the plight of farmers across the country. He said the Congress would put pressure on the government to waive farmer loans, the way it did in Uttar Pradesh. He was addressing a farmers' rally in Banswara, Rajasthan.

"Congress waived the farmers' loans in Punjab and Karnataka while the BJP did the same in Uttar Pradesh because of our pressure on them," he said.

#WATCH: Congress VP Rahul Gandhi addresses a rally in Rajasthan's Banswara. https://t.co/rYeWUJphTosays  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

The Kisan Aakrosh rally was part of Rahul's visit to all the states that are slated to go to polls next year.

A report from India Today said that the Rajasthan rally will mark the beginning of protests throughout the country by Congress on the current agrarian crisis. Other states are also expected to hold rallies and kisan mahapanchayats to highlight the plight of the farmers.

According to a tweet by the Congress, 61 farmers had committed suicide in Rajasthan in the last two years and 40 lakh farmers were burdened with loans in India.

Rising farmer suicides continue to plague Rajasthan while BJP's anti-farmer policies worsen the situation.#KisaanAakrosh# pic.twitter.com/q8jRUCLXrM  INC India (@INCIndia) July 19, 2017

Rajasthan Pradesh Congress Committee chief Sachin Pilot had also blamed the government for staying silent on the issue on Tuesday.

10 farmers hv committed suicide in Raj in 6weeks.Shameful silence from govt. @OfficeOfRG will address farmers issues at tom's Banswara rally  Sachin Pilot (@SachinPilot) July 18, 2017

The Kisan Aakrosh rally coincides with the 'Kisan Mukti Rally' going on at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi since the last two days. On Tuesday, the rally was used by various political leaders as a platform to air their grievances against the Narendra Modi government.

Senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar also joined Tamil Nadu farmers in demanding farm loan waivers and a drought relief package, reported The Indian Express. In the report, he was quoted as saying, "These poor people are wandering between Delhi and Chennai (since April) but not getting any decent answer, so they have again come.

Criticism on GST

In Wednesday's rally, Rahul also criticised the faulty implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) supporting the ongoing protest against the tax in New Delhi.

He said that while issues related to the GST were being discussed in Parliament, farmers' issues were getting sidelined.

#GST ke liye raat 12 baje Parliament khola jaata hai, lekin kisaano ke liye ek min baat nahi karne dete: Rahul Gandhi in Banswara(Rajasthan)  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

He blamed the government for rolling out the GST in a hurry without considering the impact on small traders.

We had suggested to the Govt to not pass GST in a hurry but they did not listen: Rahul Gandhi pic.twitter.com/bPjMqco7iq  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

Big traders have no issues with this GST, they can employ 10 accountants and fill as many forms. Small traders suffer:Rahul Gandhi pic.twitter.com/YmwTdhkmP5  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

He added that the government did not care if the poor live or die and said only small traders will have suffer because of the GST.
New Delhi: People can soon buy generic drugs at cheaper prices from railway stations, the government informed Parliament on Wednesday.

The ministry of railways has decided to allow its premises to be used for opening Janaushadhi outlets across the country under the Pradhan Mantri Bhartiya Janaushadhi Pariyojana.

The campaign has been launched by the Department of Pharmaceuticals, Ministry of Chemical and Fertilizers, to provide quality medicines at affordable prices to the masses through special outlets

"Ministry of Chemical and Fertilizers has, in view of Railways' pan-India reach, approached ministry of railways for the proliferation of such kendras over railway network. The two ministries have, in principle, agreed to set up such kendras at railway premises. Deliberations to work out the modalities between the two ministries are going on," said Minister of State for Railways Rajen Gohain in a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha.

At present, 22 exclusive chemist stalls and 15 chemist corners are operational on the Indian Railways network.

Besides, medicines for common ailments and painkillers, which do not normally require doctors' prescription, are also being sold through existing 339 miscellaneous article stalls at various railway stations.
New Delhi: The Rajya Sabha wants Mayawati to withdraw her resignation, Deputy Chairman PJ Kurien said on Wednesday, a day after the BSP chief quit as a member of the House, saying she was not allowed to speak on Dalit issue.

Kurien, with whom Mayawati had got angry when he asked her to conclude her speech after the prescribed three minutes, said the episode was a result of a "misunderstanding" and that he has "utmost respect" for the BSP leader.

"None of us are happy about her resigning. I have utmost respect for her. It was just a misunderstanding. We all have a lot of respect for her and regard her as a senior leader. The House will ask her to reconsider her decision," Kurien said.

"... It is the decision of the house that she (Mayawati) should take back her resignation," Kurien said.

He sought to set the record straight about yesterday's developments, saying he had "nothing against anybody".

The deputy chairman said there was no notice by Mayawati (about raising any issue).

He said when he came to the House, he had a list of eight or nine speakers under Rule 267 and Mayawati's name was not included.

"...I want to set the record straight... When I came, I saw her standing and gave her three minutes (to speak)... I bypassed the Leader of Opposition and allowed her to speak," he said.

Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad joined Kurien and said, "we should request her to reconsider her resignation".

The Deputy Chairman then asked Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi about government's view on this.

Naqvi indicated that the government had no objection if all the parties wanted so.

On Wednesday, Mayawati had got angry and stormed out of the House after being told to conclude after three minutes her speech on violence in Saharanpur in UP some time back.

Mayawati, whose term in the Upper House was till April next year, had said that she would resign as there was no point to be a member when she was not allowed to speak.

Satish Chandra Misra of the BSP said today that the entire Treasury bench had been instructed to stand when Mayawati stood up to speak.

"They did not allow her to speak. She spoke for two minutes and nine seconds in breaks and would have even finished in three minutes," Misra said.
Islamabad: The Kashmir issue remains the core dispute between India and Pakistan, and its resolution is imperative for bringing peace in the region, Pakistan's top diplomat said on Wednesday.

Sartaj Aziz, the Prime Minister's advisor on foreign affairs, made the remarks during his meeting with a 9-member delegation of All Parties Hurriyat Conference (Pakistan Chapter) in Islamabad, the foreign office said in a statement.

"The Adviser noted that Jammu and Kashmir remains the core dispute between India and Pakistan, and its resolution is imperative for bringing peace to South Asia," it said.

"Pakistan continues to pursue its principled position on Jammu and Kashmir and extends its steadfast support to the Kashmiris in their just struggle, as Kashmir cause remains close to the hearts of every Pakistani," he added.
Bengaluru: The BJP on Wednesday slammed the Karnataka government over the transfer of DIG (Prisons) D Roopa after she brought to light the alleged special treatment meted out to AIADMK (Amma) leader VK Sasikala in the central jail.

The party's state unit staged a protest against the transfer and accused the state government of favouring corrupt officials.

BJP's state unit chief BS Yeddyurappa accused the government of siding with corrupt jail officials by shunting out an "honest and upright" officer who had exposed alleged irregularities at the Parapana Agrahara central jail.

"By transferring an honest and upright police official (Roopa)... the Siddaramaiah government has sided with corrupt jail officials. It is clear, and people should understand it," Yeddyurappa told reporters.

He demanded that Roopa should be reinstated with immediate effect.

The government had on Monday transferred Roopa and asked DGP (Prisons), HN Sathyanarayana Rao, to go on compulsory leave after they sparred over a report on the allegations in public.

In her report, Roopa had alleged that Rs 2 crore had exchanged hands to provide special facilities to Sasikala and dragged Rao into the bribery charge, saying there was a "talk" that he was also a beneficiary.

The report and her transfer have raised a political storm in the state.

Yeddyurappa said there was no room for honest officers like Roopa in Siddaramaiah's government. He urged the government to take action against guilty police officials involved in jail irregularities.

Addressing BJP protesters earlier, he highlighted the government's "failure" to arrest killers of RSS activist Sharath Madiwala in Dakshina Kannada district. Former deputy chief minister R Ashok demanded protection for honest officers.
Beijing has been issuing war threats against India over the tense standoff at the Doka La tri-junction, but not a single bullet has thankfully been fired yet. But 21st century battles are not fought via bullets or missiles alone; propaganda also forms a key part of modern warfare. And whether India accepts it or not, that war is already afoot.

The focus has already turned to India's actions. But it was China that violated several agreements (1988 and 1998 bilateral pacts with Bhutan, and a tripartite deal involving India in 2012), and altered status quo by trying to extend the dirt track at Dolam plateau towards Mount Gymochen near the Bhutan Army camp at Zornpelri. However, the central point of the debate has come to settle on whether or not India will withdraw its troops to avoid escalation.

Beijing already appears to be successful in masking its land-grab in Bhutan as a sovereignty issue, turning China's neocolonial aggression on its head into a victimhood narrative. While it appeared nimble in bending the information highway to suit its narrative, India has so far seemed reluctant in playing ball, preferring to hold its silence.

There is nothing wrong with India's approach  and to a certain extent it's a sensible one, since our focus has been on deescalation of crisis leading to a diplomatic solution  but it does allow China a wide berth to propagate its version of events. Given China's mastery of 'Goebbelsian' tactics, it won't be long before the victimhood narrative becomes the "established truth".

We are familiar with the steps of this foxtrot. South China Sea offers an immediate template where China first built capacities in disputed islands and then touted these as "facts on the ground" to claim maritime and territorial rights.

There are several strands in China's propaganda warfare. Apart from daily media briefings and foreign office statements (each more confrontational than the other), routine incendiary rhetoric from state-controlled media and military muscle flexing at the border regions, it is also probing India's domestic faultlines and seeking to build international pressure.

Confusion and obfuscation are tools of China's propaganda war. On Monday, reports emerged that Beijing has briefed foreign envoys about the standoff and conveyed to them that Chinese patience cannot be taken for granted. On Tuesday, its foreign ministry confirmed the news but also heightened the confusion. It is unclear which countries were briefed.

A report in The Indian Express quoted one P5 diplomat as saying that "our colleagues in Beijing attended the briefing and were given the impression that the Chinese side will not be waiting for an indefinite period". Another report in The Times of India says US, Britain and France were not among among the countries to have attended the meeting.

The whole point of the exercise seems to be to claim that India is becoming diplomatically isolated. China's foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang claimed the envoys were "shocked" and advised New Delhi not to "take the trespass as a policy tool to reach or realise their political targets", as The Times of India article notes.

While China is ramping up diplomatic pressure, careful leaks are emerging in its media about light battle tanks being tested on Tibetan plateau, 11-hour live fire drills being conducted by its mountain brigade near Arunachal Pradesh, and huge amounts of militaty equipment being moved into Tibet.

The last bit of news is particularly interesting. Quoting the PLA Daily (official mouthpiece of the Chinese military), Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported that "tens of thousands of tonnes of military vehicles and equipment" were "transported to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command  which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India".

There is a clear indication that India's twin approach  of staying firm on the ground while looking for a diplomatic solution  is frustrating China, which is looking to break the impasse before the onset of winter that will make the terrain too harsh for even military standoff. Additionally, Xi Jinping would like to reinforce his strongman image ahead of the crucial 19th Party Congress, where he is expected to retain power.

For now at least, Chinese efforts seem to be pointed towards piling pressure on India to test its submission threshold. In line with this tactic, China also seems to be intent on tapping India's domestic faultlines. Reports in Indian media indicate that China's ambassador to India, Luo Zhaohui, has been meeting Opposition leaders and even a district magistrate in Darjeeling, where agitation for a separate Gorkhaland state by carving out West Bengal has been raging for over a month.

According to The Indian Express, after the Sikkim standoff broke out, Zhaohui went to meet Rahul Gandhi, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, former Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi, his son Gaurav, former national security advisor Shivshankar Menon, and even the Darjeeling district magistrate. There was also a trip to Bhutan undertaken by the envoy's wife, who called on the Queen Mother.

Meeting Opposition leaders is of course a routine affair undertaken by all diplomats and there is ostensibly nothing wrong in the exercise. The timing of the meetings, however, and the reaction of some political leaders, raise some curiosity.

Which brings us to the core of the problem: How to counter China's high-stakes propaganda war? Compounding India's problem is the irresponsible attitude of some political parties for whom no issue is sacrosanct enough to be kept outside the purview of myopic politicking.

The Centre has so far shown maturity and responsibility in handling the conflict. It is trying to address some gaps in communication, and external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj's discussion of Doka La with visiting Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop was an important step.

The government has also been trying to take the Opposition along, and foreign secretary S Jaishankar's briefing to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs on Tuesday was another crucial move. It emerged from reports that Opposition leaders, who apparently posed many questions, were satisfied with the briefing and the direction taken by the government.

The Indian Express quoted Congress's Shashi Tharoor, the panel chairman, as saying that the discussion was "very thorough and enriching We were 20 members and 11 of them asked questions Members from a cross-section of parties were satisfied"

This stance sits at odds with Congress' brinkmanship over media reports questioning Rahul Gandhi's meeting with the Chinese envoy. The party could very well have ignored the noise but chose to engage in a game of oneupmanship.

Will the same TV channels have the guts to ask BJP Govt as to why were 3 Union Ministers in China in the midst of border standoff? pic.twitter.com/DgjHcfthRE  Randeep S Surjewala (@rssurjewala) July 18, 2017

This follows a major goof-up by the Congress party, when it initially denied that Rahul Gandhi had met the Chinese envoy, dismissed the reports as fake news, but later confirmed it, while the Gandhi scion went on to post a series of amateurish tweets. He created unnecessary controversy over a courtesy call and then drew false equivalences to make the goof-up more apparent.

The issue wasn't the meeting but the curious flip-flop by the Congress, triggered by Chinese embassy flashing the news on its website.

An article written by Arati R Jerath in The Statesman posits that "for some unknown reason, he (Rahul Gandhi) decided to keep it a secret."

On the other end is Mamata Banerjee who chose an inopportune time and an inopportune subject to hit out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, claiming that his government is harming her state by "spoiling relations" with neighbouring countries. "Bengal that has borders with Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, and is bearing the brunt of deteriorating relations with all neighbouring countries. If Sikkim goes under the control of China, Darjeeling will pay the price. What was the necessity of spoiling relations with all bordering nations," she was quoted as saying.

On Wednesday, Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav, a former defence minister, claimed in Lok Sabha that China was ready to attack India in collaboration with Pakistan and has even "buried nuclear weapons in Pakistan".

This is exactly the kind of posturing the country doesn't need at this time. The political immaturity on display is not only undermining India's position against China, but also creating fault lines for the Chinese to exploit.
The government's idea of Aadhaar, as a mandatory factor to live as a law-abiding citizen, hinges upon what the Supreme Court's constitutional bench is about to rule on right to privacy issue. The question is whether privacy is a fundamental right of the citizen or simply a right offered by common law. And the Supreme Court's answer will be historic as it will set the precedent for many more litigations that are yet to come on Aadhaar.

Most importantly, it will spell out whether the government can pursue its current course  making Aadhaar mandatory for almost everything Indians do, ranging from availing benefits of government schemes to ruling tax returns.

So far, the government has gone ahead with its plan to make Aadhaar number mandatory for more number of activities even when the privacy confusion persisted. These include filing tax returns, operating bank accounts, vehicle registrations (in certain states) and, of course, avail government schemes. Of these, the original idea was only to use Aadhaar to facilitate transfer of government schemes but later the government widened its ambit even when there is a case pending in the apex court.

Till now, there is no clarity as far as the law that governs the privacy of citizens. There are two earlier judgments on this  one by six-judge bench and other by an eight-judge bench, wherein it was held that right to privacy was not a fundamental right of the citizen. But, since then, smaller benches have been maintained that privacy is indeed a fundamental right. This led to more legal battles between various groups and the government, even as Aadhaar was made mandatory for more and more services.

The government received a minor setback last month, when a regular bench of the Supreme Court ordered a partial stay on Section 139 AA of the Income tax Act pending the pleas that Aadhaar infringes right to privacy before the constitutional bench of apex court. The ruling simply meant:

Those who have an Aadhaar number already will still have to seed it with PAN when filing the IT returns, but the government cannot force those who don't have an Aadhaar card as yet, to get one to file their tax returns if they have a PAN. But, on a closer look, the order is neither a victory nor a defeat for the Modi government. It only said wait a little for our answer till the constitution bench make up its mind. That time has come now.

Why is privacy such a big debate, especially in context of Aadhaar? Since the time of enrolling, a citizen offers his biometric data, address and a brief personal profile to the government. The fear, as highlighted by the privacy rights activists, is that the deep state will misuse this data to hunt down people they don't like. That explains a number of pleas in the court to restrict the use of Aaadhar as a voluntary option and have stronger framework to protect the citizens from privacy invasions by the deep state.

Going by the contours of the Aadhaar Act, even the Unique Identification Authority of India cannot share the personal information available under Aadhaar records with any agency unless there is an order from a district judge. On issues of national security, only a joint secretary level officer can authorise access of personal data, that too after getting an order from the central government.

But, that's in theory. There have been reports of Aadhaar data leakage. But, as this article pointed out, this shouldn't be the primary subject of the Aadhaar debate, for the simple reason that much of the personal information of every citizen is already accessible to the government (and even various private service providers) through various means.

In reality, the government doesn't really need an Aadhaar number to dig out someone's personal information. The idea is not to say that Aadhaar holder doesn't require a right by law to keep his information secret from the government/public access. But, let's remember that most of us willingly give away personal information to mobile phone service providers, e-commerce firms and online shopping portals that are often shared with other entities for business purposes.

If Supreme Court's Constitution bench rules that right to privacy is indeed a fundamental right of the citizen, it will mean a major setback to the government plan, which wants to make Aadhaar mandatory for every citizen. Such a ruling will have a bearing on all other litigations, with respect to Aadhaar, in all courts in the country. The government will automatically be on backfoot and it cannot force the unique number on the citizen for every aspect of governance. In other words, Aadhaar, as the government envisages today, will eventually see a natural death. It will be limited to what it was originally made for-transfer of government benefits.

No doubt, the Aaadhar is a revolutionary step India has taken that is fundamental to the Director Benefit Transfer (DBT) programme conceptualised and executed by two successive governments. Certainly, it has helped to plug subsidy leakages to a significant extent. Much work and investment have gone into the institution of Aadhaar-mechanism. Already 115 crore Aadhaar cards have been issued so far.

The point here is it is the government's task to convince the apex court and the general public that every concerns on privacy issues are addressed to take the Aadhaar programme ahead. The Aadhaar scheme is critical for the new economic structure which is on the lines of certain number of developed nations with a similar unique identity structure for their citizens. For this, the government needs to make legislations that addresses concerns on data privacy laws, something even Nandan Nilekani, the architect of Aadhaar, had mooted earlier.

More than what country's top court says on this issue, right to privacy and individual freedom are democracy's basic commitments to its stakeholders and it's the job of the elected government of the day to fulfill that promise. The lawmakers must do what they are supposed to do at this juncture  make data privacy laws and thus help Aadhaar emerge as a winner in the new economic structure.
Editor's Note: The Supreme Court set up a a nine-judge bench which will decide today whether right to privacy can be declared as a fundamental right under the Indian Constitution. The SC order came over a bunch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar scheme. It has also been alleged that the Aadhaar scheme infringes the 'fundamental right to privacy'. This article, originally published on 19 May, 2017 as part of a Firstpost series, is being republished in view of the judgment that is expected this week.

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

- Benjamin Franklin

Aadhaar, Indias biometric identification system, which is the largest such project in the world, is in the eye of a storm lately. Though Aadhaar has become the focal point of debate on right of privacy, threats to data security and citizens rights to privacy go far beyond it.

The Constitution of India does not provide privacy the status of a fundamental right, however, the same comes into existence upon widening the horizons of Article 21 of the Constitution ie right to liberty which states that No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law. Since the Constitution of India does not specifically guarantee right to privacy, the determination of privacy as a right completely rests upon the interpretation of the judiciary, and has been subject to restrictions under various provisions and judgments of the Supreme Court of India. The recognition of privacy as a right first came up in the case of Kharak Singh versus State of Uttar Pradesh, wherein the Supreme Court interpreted that right to privacy is not guaranteed under the Constitution yet the said right is an essential ingredient of personal liberty which is implicit in Article 21 of the Constitution.

Life as we know is something more than ones mere survival and existence; therefore, the right to privacy is an inherent right to every citizen of the country. As things stand today, where the Government of India is taking a stand that the right to privacy is not a fundamental right and at the same time the government is promoting digitalisation, enacting policies and regulations permitting surveillance in cyberspace, telephones, email, personal messages etc through multiple agencies under the grab of national security, implementing national programmes like Unique Identification Number etc, it is imperative for India to enact stringent privacy laws.

Evidentially, there has been a rampant use of technology by the masses on daily basis and as a result, the internet giants like Google, Apple, Facebook, WhatsApp and Microsoft have vast information about us, through malware, covert eavesdropping, and the unwarranted permissions we voluntarily grant social media sites and apps. There is an immediate need for a data protection law which emphasise a persons rights to her personal data; require her informed consent to collect, process, remove or alter such data; oblige those who deal with data to keep it secure; and have a grievance mechanism to punish violations with hefty fines and imprisonment.

Growing challenges of privacy



The current laws on privacy are not at par with the growing developments in technology in India. The Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act) and the rules made thereunder, do entail certain provisions pertaining to data protection, however as privacy is not a right per se under any law in force, these provisions appear inadequate in addressing issues relating to sharing of, disclosure and retention of data and leave room for potential abuse.

The Privacy Bill, 2010 was introduced by the Department of Personnel and Training, however though the objective of the Privacy Bill was to protect individuals fundamental right to privacy, the Privacy Bill primarily focused on provisions pertaining protection against the use of electronic/digital recording devices in public spaces without consent and for the purpose of blackmail or commercial use. Incidentally, the National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010, which aimed at establishing a National Identification Authority for issuance unique identification number (called Aadhaar) to every resident of India, which would be linked to a residents demographic and biometric information, was also introduced. Neither the Privacy Bill, 2010 nor the National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010, were enacted.

With a view to conquer growing privacy challenges in the country and in order to effectively address the privacy issues, the erstwhile Planning Commission of India had directed the constitution of a Group of Experts to identify the privacy issues and prepare a report on the same to facilitate authoring of privacy bill for India. The Expert Committee, which submitted its report in 2012, analysed various international privacy principles and the existing privacy legislations in India. According to the recommendation of the Committee, the Privacy Act should put into place a regulatory framework for both public and private sector organisations and further aim to harmonise all statutory legislations with respect to privacy laws in India.

The report recommended fundamental privacy principles in line with global standards including the EU, OECD, and APEC, which included the principle of notice, choice and consent, collection and purpose limitation, disclosure of information, security and accountability. Further, the Expert Committee also recommended the establishment of privacy commissioners, self-regulating organisations and co-regulation, to ensure implementation and enforcement of policies. The draft privacy bill of 2011, was modified based on the recommendations made by the Expert Committee, however, no definite timeline has been provided by the government in relation to the introduction of legislation to protect privacy of individuals.

While the enactment of much needed privacy laws seems to be not a priority, the government is uncontrollably enacting policies and regulations for surveillance through systems like the Centralised Monitoring System, NITRA, NATGRID (for collecting data from across databases) in the interest of National Security and linking citizens and databases across the unique identity number in Aadhaar. If we look at the steps being taken by the government in relation to the implementation of these programs and the powers being granted to various governmental authorities under these legislations to monitor data over the telecommunications networks including interception of calls, tracking of IP addresses etc. it becomes evident that a specific privacy legislation is imperative and urgently required in order to safe guard the privacy of individuals.

Monitoring and surveillance

If we look at the establishment of the Central Monitoring System (CMS), which is a centralised telephone interception provisioning system installed by the Centre for Development of Telematics to automate the process of lawful interception; monitoring of telecommunications, there is a lack of clarity on the scope, functions, and technical architecture of the CMS.

It is worrying that there is no specific law which mandates or regulates the CMS. Surveillance in India is primarily governed by the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 (Telegraph Act) and the IT Act. Section 5(2) of the Indian Telegraph Act which empowers the Indian government to intercept communications on the occurrence of any public emergency or in the interest of public safety, when it is deemed necessary or expedient to do so in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign states, public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of an offence.

On the other hand Section 69 of the IT Act (as amended in 2008) grants the government with the power to intercept, monitor or decrypt or cause to be intercepted or monitored or decrypted any information transmitted received or stored through any computer resource if it is satisfied that it is necessary or expedient to do in the interest of the sovereignty or integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognisable offence relating to above or for investigation of any offence.

It is relevant to note that prerequisites of public emergency and public safety which were earlier nearly the same in the IT Act, and the Telegraph Act, have now been removed from IT Act with which the power of the government has become more extensive in relation to interception and monitoring of telecommunications.

In addition to the implementation of the CMS, the government had also setup the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID), which is an integrated intelligence grid connecting databases of core security agencies of the Government of India. NATGRID would provide intelligence agencies real-time access to 21 databanks, including banking, credit card, income tax, election identity card, call records, PAN card and driving licence details. Again, there is no specific law which mandates or regulates the NATGRID.

Internationally, the USA, the EU and the UK provide for specific laws in relation to lawful interception and surveillance. However, globally mass surveillance activities are being challenged by Human Right activists as being violative of privacy rights of citizens. The EU had also introduced the Data Protection Directive in 2006, which mandates the retention of metadata of internet and telephone usage, which was struck down by the European Court of Justice in 2014 on the grounds of infringement of privacy.

Similarly, the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016 (Aadhaar Act), was passed in the Lok Sabha, despite being opposed on numerous grounds including the concerns regarding privacy and protection of biometric information and demographic data of citizens collected by the enrolling agency for issuance of the Aadhaar number. Though the objective of the Aadhaar Act is to provide for efficient, transparent, and targeted delivery of subsidies, benefits and services to individuals residing in India through assigning of unique identity numbers to such individuals, the Aadhaar Act creates a single database, a Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR), holding bio-metric as well as demographic information on every Indian, along with name, address, and phone number. Even though the Aadhaar Act was introduced post submission of the recommendations of the Shah Committee Report, the Aadhaar Act does not address some of the key principles enumerated under the Shah Committee Report.

While the question whether there is any right to privacy guaranteed under our Constitution is still pending before the Constitutional Bench of the Supreme Court, the government is proposing to make Aadhaar mandatory for obtaining a permanent account number, filing your income tax returns etc. All this while, the Supreme Court, had previously stated that Aadhaar cannot be made mandatory and the production of an Aadhaar card will not be condition for obtaining any benefits otherwise due to a citizen. However, with the Finance Act, 2017, it seems the order of the Apex Court has consciously been disregarded which has negated an individuals freedom of voluntary enrolment.

There is no doubt that people are evading taxes by maintaining multiple PAN. One estimate is that there are 19 million income taxpayers in India, whereas 250 million PAN cards are issued and Aadhaar can be an effective way to de-duplicate the PAN.

Further, though the Aadhaar Act prohibits usage of bio-metric information for any other purpose other than generation of Aadhaar number and authentication, under the Aadhaar Act, Section 33(1) permits the disclosure of information including identity information or authentication records, pursuant to a judicial order by a Court not inferior to that of a District Judge. Further, Section 33(2) permits disclosure of information including identity information or authentication records (including bio-metric data) in the interest of national security if so directed by an officer not below the rank of a joint secretary to the Government of India specifically authorised in this behalf.

The Section further provides that every such direction shall be reviewed by an oversight committee consisting of the Cabinet Secretary and the Secretaries to the Government of India in the Department of Legal Affairs and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, before it takes effect. The Aadhaar Act permits disclosure of information for national security purposes but there is no clarity in relation to what extent the surveillance can be exercised by the government under the guise of national security.

The Aadhaar Act, has similarities to the Identity Cards Act, 2006 of United Kingdom, under which national identity cards which were a personal identification document and European Union travel document, linked to a database known as the National Identity Register, were proposed to be issued. As in the case of the Aadhaar Act, when the UK Identity Card Bill was introduced, independent studies in relation to the proposed bill strongly recommended against the centralising storage of information due to privacy concerns. The Identity Card Act, 2006 has been repealed and the National Identity Register has been destroyed, due to privacy and cost concerns.

What about Big Data?

With the launch of governments digital India, which aims to transform India into a digitally empowered society and the widespread increase in the number of internet users in India, which has led to a rampant growth in the amount of data and information about an individual that is available in the hands of private enterprises and the government, the concern about privacy and security in relation to big data analytics is discernible.

Big data refers to substantial and complex amount of data generated primarily by through internet access and usage. The significance of such data lies in the availability of such data in such volume through various sources such as Facebook posts, tweets, clickstream, online transactions, email, uploaded images, cookies, applications, smart phones etc. Such data is not merely restricted to ones internet usage pattern but also encompasses data collected in real time, and pertaining to highly personal, sensitive behavioural patterns such as habits, likes, and dislikes, as well as travel, movements, health statistics, among others. As per recent data available in the public domain, Government of India ranks second (the first being the US) requesting Facebook to share user data from India.

Irrespective of different states having different laws on privacy, privacy has been recognised as a fundamental human right in the UN Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and in many other international treaties. The UDHR and the ICCPR are binding upon India, as India is a signatory to both of these conventions, however no consequent and explicit legislation has been passed by India in this regard. Countries across the globe have formulated privacy laws and laid down principles in accordance with the privacy requirements that their country raises.

With right to privacy being a fundamental right being questioned, the substantial growth and development in the technology sector, widespread growth of Internet users, the digital India program, implementation of CMS, NATGRID, Aadhaar and other government initiatives, a comprehensive legal framework that governs both the private companies and the government agencies needs to be implemented in line with the global data protection policies and the international human rights standards.

The lack of any comprehensive legislation in relation to privacy, surveillance, power and authorities of the government agencies to request for data and surveillance, protection and destruction of such data collected endangers the privacy of individuals as the limited provisions under the existing laws are not enough to deal with the development of the information technology sector and the government initiatives to collect, intercept, decrypt and store data in the interest of national security. Further, there is a need to amend the current regime to provide for greater transparency, accountability and clarity on the scope, functions, and technical architecture in relation to India's surveillance framework. Evidentially, the right to privacy is a right to be negotiated and more to be seen on the government initiatives as we move along.

Read the original article here
A nine-judge bench on Wednesday will hear several petitions challenging the government's rule of making Aadhaar mandatory for all citizens. The Supreme Court decided to set up a nine-judge bench who will determine whether right to privacy can be declared as a fundamental right under the Indian Constitution. The move comes after the new Attorney-General KK Venugopal and senior advocate Shyam Divan asked the Supreme Court to constitute a Constitutional bench to decide on the case.

"We are of the view that it should be referred to a nine-judge bench. At this stage, it is essential for us to define if the right to privacy is a fundamental right under the Constitution or not," Livemint quoted a five-member bench led by Justice JS Khehar as saying on Tuesday.

While the hearing of the cases will start at around 9.30 am on Wednesday, the final judgment on the petitions is only expected later this week or next week. The apex court is also likely to put to rest the legal challenges involved in the the government's push to universalise the Aadhaar plan.

While the case was supposed to be heard by a five-member bench, the Chief Justice of India decided to refer it to a larger nine-member bench on Wednesday.

While the Aadhar issue is the centre of the storm in the apex court, the larger bench will also examine two previous cases where the issue of privacy were raised.

MP Sharma case (1955)

In the MP Sharma case (1955), a eight-judge bench headed by the then Chief Justice MC Mahajan had held:

"A power of search and seizure is, in any system of jurisprudence, an overriding power of the State for the protection of social security and that power is necessarily regulated by law. When the Constitution makers have thought fit not to subject such regulation to constitutional limitations by recognition of the fundamental right to privacy, analogous to the American Fourth Amendment, there is no justification for importing into it, a totally different fundamental right by some process of strained construction."

Kharak Singh case (1962)

Seven years later, in the Kharak Singh verus Uttar Pradesh case (1962), a six-judge bench headed by then chief justice BP Sinha had observed that the right to privacy was not a guaranteed right under the Indian Constitution, adding that surveillance of a person was not an infringement of a person's fundamental right.

However, in the Gobind versus the State of Madhya Pradesh case (1975), the Supreme Court had ruled in favour of right to privacy. Delivery the judgement, Justice K Matthew had observed:

Individuals need a place of sanctuary where they can be free from societal control. The importance of such a sanctuary is that individuals can drop the mask, desist for a while from projecting on the world the image they want to be accepted as themselves, an image that may reflect the values of their peers rather than the realities of their natures. Rights and freedoms of citizens are set forth in the Constitution in order to guarantee that the individual, his personality and those things stamped with his personality shall be free from official interference except where a reasonable basis for intrusion exists.

However, the spectre of privacy came back to haunt the UPA and the NDA government over the Aadhaar scheme. A bunch of petitions challenged the constitutional validity of the scheme, alleging that it infringes upon their 'fundamental right to privacy'.

While privacy rights activists argued that the scheme compromised the personal data of the citizens, the UPA as well as the NDA government maintained that the right to privacy is not a fundamental right.

It was in August 2015 that the Supreme Court (SC) referred to a Constitution Bench a batch of petitions challenging the Centre's ambitious scheme to provide Aadhaar card to all citizens and decide whether right to privacy is a fundamental right. The apex court had said that the constitutionality of the Aadhaar plan depended on the nature and status of the right to privacy.

Former Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for the Centre, had said that the matter requires elaborate debate and an authoritative pronouncement in view of the fact that there have been inconsistent decisions as to whether right to privacy is a fundamental right.

However, smaller benches had held contrary view and, hence the matter is now before the larger bench, the attorney general had said.

With inputs from PTI
New Delhi: External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj on Wednesday briefed the BJP parliamentary party on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the US and Israel while finance minister Arun Jaitley briefed them on the GST and said that prices of goods have come down four to eight percent since the roll-out.

Sushma Swaraj briefed the MPs about the reception accorded to Modi by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"The reception given to the prime minister in US and Israel was unprecedented. No Indian prime minister was given such warm welcome," a BJP leader quoted Sushma Swaraj as saying during her address at the BJP parliamentary party meeting attended by prime minister Modi.

Speaking on GST, Jaitley said that implementation of the pan-India indirect tax regime was a win-win situation for all.

"With roll-out of GST the country's market has been integrated. Inspector Raj is over. The tax burden on the masses has gone down," he said.

Parliamentary affairs minister Ananth Kumar said Jaitley told the BJP MPs that more than one crore firms would be migrating to the new tax regime against 80 lakh companies earlier.

Sources said that Kumar also urged the party MPs to remain in Delhi on 5 August, the day the Vice President's election is being held.

5 August is a Saturday and most MPs return to their Parliamentary constituencies during the weekend.

Ananth Kumar later requested the Opposition parties to let Parliament function, saying the government is ready for positive discussion on every issue in both the Houses.

"We hope that both the Houses of Parliament function properly," Kumar said after the Bharatiya Jananta Party's Parliamentary party meeting.

"I request the Opposition parties to have positive discussion in both the Houses, and the government is ready to debate and discuss all the issues," the BJP leader said.

The Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha were adjourned on Tuesday after the Opposition leaders created a ruckus on several issues, including mob lynching, atrocities on Dalits and farmers suicides.

Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati had on Tuesday resigned from the Rajya Sabha alleging that she was not allowed to speak on the atrocities on Dalits in Uttar Pradesh's Shahranpur district.
At a time when Tamil Nadu is facing an agrarian crisis, the Tamil Nadu Assembly on Wednesday decided to give the state legislators an almost 100 percent pay hike, News18 reported.

According to the report, the monthly salaries of the 234 MLAs in the state Assembly was doubled from Rs 55,000 to Rs 1,05,000. The monthly pensions of the legislators were hiked to Rs 20,000.

Tamil Nadu MLAs' salary doubled - MLAs to get a salary of 1.05 L now; Pension increased to 20K, Constituency fund increased to 2.6 crores pic.twitter.com/YGeIrOKFyy  News18 (@CNNnews18) July 19, 2017

Times Now reported that the the Assembly also increased the phone bill allowance from Rs 5,000 to Rs 7,000. The report added that there was a Rs 50 lakh addition to the MLA constituency fund, which now stood at Rs Rs 2.5 crores. The latest development came at a time when Tamil Nadu farmers resumed their protest for a loan waiver at Jantar Mantar on Wednesday. Reacting to the pay hike, Ayyakannu, the leader of the protesting Tamil farmers, told CNN-News18, "We are abandoned by our leaders. We demand at least decent prices for our produce." The Tamil Nadu BJP slammed the ruling E Palaniswamy government for the salary hike, pointing out the poor finances of the state treasury.

No industrial growth, state of revenue is very bad; This salary hike is disgusting: Narayanan Thirupathy, Spokesperson BJP TN to CNN-News18  News18 (@CNNnews18) July 19, 2017

DMK should oppose this salary hike; There is no need for people to get this kind of salary hike in Tamil Nadu: Narayanan Thirupathy, BJP TN  News18 (@CNNnews18) July 19, 2017

"There is no industrial growth, while the state of revenue is very bad. This salary hike is disgusting," Narayanan Thirupathy, spokesperson of the state BJP, told CNN-News18. The saffron party also demanded that the principal Opposition party DMK oppose the pay hike.

Meanwhile, similar demand was made by Samajwadi Party MP Naresh Agarwal in Rajya Sabha, who claimed that parliamentarians were paid less than their secretaries.
Agartala: A 12-hour shutdown called by the opposition Congress against a tribal party's indefinite road and rail blockade demanding a separate state crippled life in Tripura on Wednesday.

The Congress also accused the central government and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for "conspiring in Tripura, like in Manipur, to get political and electoral mileage before the early next year's assembly elections".

The party also blamed the ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) for its "failure to govern the state properly".

Police said around 300 activists of Congress were arrested for picketing in front of government offices in different parts of the state.

Most government and private offices, educational institutions, shops and business establishments were closed due to the strike. Banks and financial institutions were also closed in view of the shutdown, which was also opposed by the CPM and BJP.

All vehicles, except those of security forces, went off the roads. The dawn-to-dusk bandh did not affect flights in and out of Agartala.

"The shutdown is peaceful," Deputy Inspector General of Police Arindam Nath told IANS. "The strike was total, successful and spontaneous," Tripura Pradesh Congress president Birajit Sinha said.

"The BJP, like in Manipur and other non-NDA ruled states, is also conspiring to disturb peace and political stability in Tripura. The BJP, as in other states, is funding the conspirators and parties involved in the political turmoil to gain political mileage," Sinha told the media.

He also charged the Left government with "failure to deal with the Indigenous People's Front of Tripura's (IPFT) illegitimate demand for a separate state and blocking the vital national highway and lone railway line".

"BJP-led central government remained completely inactive while a tribal party stopped plying of vehicles through a crucial national highway and obstructed solitary railway line. Both the highway and the railway line are under the control of central government," the Congress leader pointed out.

The BJP vice-president Subal Bhowmik strongly denied the Congress' allegations and said the people would suffer due to the shutdown.

The IPFT has been blocking National Highway-8, the lifeline of Tripura, and the lone railway line since July 10, leading to shortage of essential commodities, fuel, food grain and other goods of basic necessity.

A senior Tripura home department official said on the request of Chief Minister Manik Sarkar, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh had asked his deputy Kiren Rijiju on Monday to talk to the IPFT leaders.

Rijiju, however, did not talk to the IPFT leaders on Tuesday, instead through his officials, asked the tribal leaders to talk to the Tripura governor Tathagata Roy about their demand.

IPFT general secretary Mevar Kumar Jamatia and front's youth wing president Dhananjoy Tripura have been camping in New Delhi since Thursday.

The IPFT has been agitating since 2009 for a separate state, to be carved out, by upgrading the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (TTAADC), which has jurisdiction over two-thirds of Tripura's 10,491 sq km area, home to over 12,16,000 people, mostly tribals, of the state's 37-lakh population.

Most political parties, including the ruling CPM and the Congress, the BJP, and the Indigenous Nationalist Party of Tripura have rejected the IPFT demand, saying it was not practical to divide the already small state.

The IPFT leaders have has also met the Governor Tathagata Roy twice on Tuesday night and demanded tripartite meeting between them, central government and the state government to resolve their issue.

The tribal party's president Narendra Debbarma told IANS that they would hold a meeting on Wednesday and then they would decide about the withdrawal of the 10-day long National Highway and lone railway line blockades.
New Delhi: CPM chief Sitaram Yechury on Wednesday attacked the Narendra Modi government over growing incidents of lynchings in the country and demanded that cow vigilante groups must be banned.

"Today when I speak, my head hangs in shame. What has our Republic come to?" Yechury said while participating in a debate in Rajya Sabha on mob lynching in the name of cow protection.

He said that India is the only country with universal suffrage, or right to vote for all, from the very beginning "which was a revolutionary step at that point of time".

"Seventy years earlier we felt pride in saying that no other western democracy could have the courage to say that from day one we gave universal suffrage to everybody in our country irrespective of their religion, caste, gender," he added.

Noting that the basis of recognition at the time was equality, Yechury said, "It is that equality today that is being questioned and being severely trampled upon by these instances of lynching."

He questioned the level of intolerance these days in the country.

"You have people who question who eats beef and who doesn't to identify Hindus and non-Hindus today. Is this what my country is coming to?," he asked.

And these private armies are roaming around freely, he said.

"The prime minister said that it is a state subject as it is a law and order issue. These private armies that are taking law and order in their hand need to be banned by a central order. They cannot be banned by the state governments," he said.

He stressed that this was the only way to stop the mobs, adding that such incidents were on a rise because a certain ideology was at work.

Lashing out at such fringe groups, Yechury asked why is it that one is only patriotic when they say "Bharat Mata Ki Jai" as if saying "Jai Hind" is anti-national.

"Bhagat Singh raised the slogan of Inquilab Zindabad. Was it anti-national?" he asked.

The CPM leader said it is Indian nationalism that needs to be inculcated, not Hindu nationalism.

Meanwhile, Trinamool Congress member Derek O'Brien said that the central government was "lighting a fire" in states.

He said the important thing to discuss today is the cases of the poor and marginalised being lynched and killed across the country and asserted that opposition parties will not cow down against the "political terrorism" of the ruling party.
A dossier prepared by the research department of the All-India Congress Committee, which lists burning issues to attack the government with in Parliament, has become a point of slugfest between the ruling BJP and the Opposition. While the BJP has stated that the dossier is an attempt by the Congress to disrupt proceedings in Parliament, the Grand Old Party has hit back saying that the dossier is a routine document. It has accused the ruling dispensation of contorting facts.

The controversy broke on Wednesday morning when the dossier, prepared by the research department headed by Congress MP Rajiv Gowda, came into circulation. It lists several issues to corner the government during the ongoing Monsoon Session. The 'key issues to raise in Parliament' section puts 'mob violence and lynching - from Akhlaq to Junaid' top-most on the agenda. Its followed by Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath's role in fanning communalism and cow vigilantism in the state. Economic issues and terrorism rank much lower in the priority order.

As the day progressed in Parliament on Wednesday, the events that played out seemed to be in accordance with the dossier. The leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad, raised the issue of lynching. While listing recent lynching incidents, Azad said: "Instances of lynching took place earlier as well. But nowadays, members of the ruling party or Sangh Parivar are involved in these."

A threadbare analysis of the contents of the dossier points to one vital fact: With the public mood on issues such as the GST not against the government  as the Opposition may have anticipated  lynching by cow vigilantes is the strongest issue available to the Congress. Another issue of import is the farmers' agitation in Mandsaur, which all political parties are anyway trying to make their own. A look at other issues reveals that playing the constructive role that the Opposition can play in a democracy is not on the party's agenda. Disrupting the government's functioning and staging walkouts seem to be its main intention.

What is interesting is that other national issues such as GST, or the country's escalating border crisis with China, have been pushed to the bottom of the list. The dossier also mentions the upcoming Madhur Bhandarkar film Indu Sarkar  which tells the story of Indira Gandhi and the Emergency.

"Economic and development issues rank lower in order in the Congress dossier because it will expose the UPA regime  when development was poor and marred with corruption and scams," BJP MP Subramanian Swamy reportedly told a news channel.

Mosquito-borne diseases and the Zika virus also featured on the Congress dossier.

The issue of cow vigilantes has already become a point of embarrassment for the government, with Modi categorically condemning violence spread in the name of cow protection. Even the farmers' distress that is brewing in Madhya Pradesh and a few other states is a definitive handle to hem in the government.

Several top leaders of the Opposition have either publicly supported demonetisation (like Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar) and GST has been accepted by the general public.

Similarly, the India-China standoff on the border could have been a heavy-duty issue to corner the government, but the 'secret' meeting between Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi and the Chinese envoy to India has forced the Congress on the back foot. Any question by the Congress on concerns with China is most likely to be met with counter-questions about this meeting.

"Congress won't be comfortable with the China issue because Rahul secretly met the Chinese envoy," Swamy told a news channel. Moreover, the Modi government has already 'checkmated' the Opposition in an astute move by calling an all-party meeting on the issue.

Reacting sharply to BJP's allegations on Wednesday, AICC spokesperson and Congress leader Randeep Surjewala said: "BJP is trying to circulate false news in the media by contorting the facts. AICC Research Department lists important issues before every Parliament session. The Congress, as a responsible Opposition, raises these important and burning issues in Parliament,"

"For this session, our research department has listed farmers' distress, Dalit atrocities, GST issues, MNREGA wages, failure in the education sector, etc. We challenge the NDA government and Modi to come forward and discuss these issues. Congress is a 130-year old party and its members are responsible for their statements. We dont want to disrupt the workings of the Parliament but well take up all the burning issues and ensure that the government should be made accountable for all its mistakes. We won't allow the BJP government to take an escape route," Surjewala said.
Patna: Senior BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi on Wednesday asked Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who held a closed-door meeting with Deputy Chief Minister Tejaswi Yadav, to answer if he was standing firm on his policy of zero tolerance against corruption or had compromised with it for the "sake of chair".

"Has the chief minister given up will to sack Deputy Chief Minister Tejaswi Yadav who even after 12 days of CBI raids and an FIR against him has not given point-by-point reply to accusations?" Modi wondred in a statement.

Modi, who has been highlighting accumulation of benami properties by RJD President Lalu Prasad and his family, said the way Tejaswi Yadav led a "julus" (procession) of RJD ministers to the cabinet meeting on Tuesday reflected as if he was "issuing a threat to the chief minister that the entire party is with him and nothing can be done against him."

Making a scathing attack against the Congress which is trying to play peacemaker to break the running feud between JD(U) and RJD, Modi said Congress could never create pressure on issue of corruption as their leader like Himachal Pradesh chief minister Virbhadra Singh is "sticking to chair" notwithstanding CBI raids and registration of case by

Enforcement Directorate.

On RJD President Lalu Prasad backing BSP chief Mayawati and offering her to send her to Rajya Sabha from his party, the senior BJP leader alleged, "He is shedding crocodile tears in the name of Dalits".

He also poked fun at Lalu Prasad for failing to file a defamation case against him even 10 days after issuing a threat in this regard to him in the wake of his allegation of tranfer of land by former RJD minister Brij Bihari Singh to Tej Pratap Yadav as a "gift" in 2004.

Lalu Prasad had dismissed the allegation by making public a cancelled deed of over 13 acres of land "gifted" by Brij Bihari Prasad to his son without his consent and threatened to file a defamation case against Sushil Modi.
Bengaluru: The BJP unit of Karnataka on Wednesday said it was not opposed to a separate state flag but flayed Chief Minister Siddaramaiah's 'unilateral decision' to form a panel on the issue without consulting the Opposition leaders. "Our party is not opposed to Karnataka having a separate flag. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has taken a unilateral decision without consulting Opposition leaders," state BJP president BS Yeddyurappa told reporters.

He, however, also toed the "one nation, one flag" stand of the BJP's central leadership.

There is no provision in the Constitution for any state to have its separate flag. We are one nation, one flag," he added.

Asked if Siddaramaiah is politicising the issue ahead of 2018 Assembly elections, Yeddyurappa said, "That is for everyone to see. I need not tell."

Siddaramaiah had brushed aside the criticism on Tuesday by saying that the elections were scheduled next year, not in immediate future, and hence it was a baseless allegation and a ploy to politicise the issue.

He had also dared BJP to make a statement opposing the separate state flag.

"Did the BJP say they do not want flag for Karnataka state? Let them make a statement that they do not want a flag for Karnataka. The BJP people always level such false allegations," he had said.

The Congress government has set up a nine-member panel to examine the legality of a separate state flag and designing it. The move has sparked a row.

If Karnataka eventually decides to have a separate flag for it, it would be the second state to have its official flag after Jammu and Kashmir, which enjoys a special status under Article 370 of the Constitution.

A Union home ministry official had Tuesday said in New Delhi there was no legal bar on a state having a separate flag but it represents people and not the government and insisted India as a nation has only one flag.

Earlier, Yeddyurappa led a protest by the party workers against the transfer of D Roopa as DIG (Prisons) after she brought to light the alleged irregularities, including 'preferential' treatment to AIADMK (Amma) chief VK Sasikala, serving her sentence in the Parapana Agrahara prison.

In a four-page report submitted on 12 July to erstwhile DGP (Prisons) HN Sathyanarayana Rao, Roopa had said a special kitchen was functioning in the central prison for Sasikala in violation of the rules.

She had said in the report to Rao that there was "a talk" that Rs 2 crore had exchanged hands and that there were allegations against him (Rao) as well.

Both the officials have been shunted out of their respective posts by the state government, which has already ordered a probe into the charges, after they were locked in a bitter public spat.
Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati on Tuesday tendered her resignation as a Rajya Sabha member, hours after the Chair asked her to restrict her impromptu speech on anti-Dalit violence in Saharanpur of Uttar Pradesh.

Mayawati met Rajya Sabha chairman Hamid Ansari on Tuesday evening and handed over her resignation letter.

However, India Today reported that the Chairman is likely to reject the BSP supremo's resignation as her resignation letter also provided an explanation for her resignation, which is in contravention of the rules of the House.

Members quitting the House need to submit their resignation in a simple format without any conditions, India Today reported.

In her resignation letter, she wrote:"When I got up to speak, the government side did not allow me to complete. Their members stood up and interfered... Instead of asking them not to interfere, the deputy chairman asked me to end as the allocated three minutes were over. Which rule says a member cannot speak for more than three minutes. It is not good."

According to the Rajya Sabha's rules, the resignation letter has to be limited to one line which clearly states the intention to resign. If a member wants to resign or quit from the Rajya Sabha, a member who intends to resign his seat must write a letter to the Chairman, stating his or her intention to resign the seat. If the member hands over the letter in person and conveys to the Chairman that the resignation is voluntary and genuine, the Chairman may accept the resignation immediately.

According to this Firstpost report, if the Chairman receives the letter by any other means, he or she may make inquiries to determine through himself, the Rajya Sabha Secretariat or any other agency  that the resignation is voluntary and genuine  if he determines otherwise, he may reject the resignation. A member may withdraw his resignation at any time before it is accepted, according to the rules of procedures.

The Chairman shall also inform the council that the member has resigned and that he has accepted the resignation. After the resignation, the secretary-general shall publish the information in the Bulletin and the Gazette and send a copy of the notification to the Election Commission for filling the vacancy, according to the Firstpost report.

Why did Mayawati threaten to resign?

Mayawati was told to introduce a motion in the Upper House, when the leader instead started speaking about the rising atrocities against minorities and Dalits in the country. Mayawati said that the BJP-ruled states have failed to reign in the atrocities against minorities and Dalits.

Claiming that the atrocities in Uttar Pradesh are on the rise, Mayawati said that the government is not even allowing her party to help the people. Rajya Sabha deputy chairman PJ Kurien was quick to remind the BSP chief that she only has three minutes in Zero Hour to discuss an issue. Rajya Sabha immediately erupted over Kurien's comments and soon saw several MLAs storm the Well.

Speaking on developments inside Rajya Sabha, Mayawati said that she is well aware that there is a limit of 3 minutes in Zero Hour, but she was not speaking under the Zero Hour. She said that when she tried to keep her point, the Treasury Benches stood up and disrupted her speech.

"If I am not allowed to speak right now, I will resign right away. I will come and give my resignation right now, if I am not allowed to speak right now," the BSP chief said after being asked to wrap up her impromptu speech on Saharanpur anti-Dalit violence.

"When I tried speaking about the weaker sections today in the Rajya Sabha, I was not allowed to speak. Why?" asked Mayawati at a press conference after the Upper House was adjourned.

"Laanat hai. Agar mai apne weaker sections ki baat sadan mein nahi rakh sakti to mujhe House mein rehne ka adhikaar nahi hai (It's shameful. If I am not allowed to speak out for the weaker sections in Parliament, then I have no right being inside either of the Houses). This is the reason I have decided to quit Rajya Sabha, I am not being heard, not allowed to speak," Mayawati said.

Mayawati also invoked BR Ambedkar and said that a similar incident had occurred with the Dalit leader who resigned and then later spoke to media over his reasons to quit Parliament.

Visuals of Mayawati getting frustrated with the House's way of functioning went viral. Visuals showed Mayawati slapping her desk, mumbling a few words and leaving the Rajya Sabha in a huff. Mayawati is the lone BSP MP in Rajya Sabha and her term ends in a year.

After a solemn first day of Monsoon Session of Parliament on Monday, Tuesday was slated to be an active day with Opposition all geared up to corner the Narendra Modi government over issues ranging from cow vigilantes, farmer crisis and GST bill.

With inputs from agencies
With the Opposition creating a ruckus in both Houses on Tuesday, Wednesday's proceedings will likely see another stormy start as Parliament meets at 11 am for the third day of the Monsoon Session.

On Tuesday, members from the Congress, the Trinamool Congress, the left parties and the RJD created uproar in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha as soon as the Houses met. Due to the ruckus, the Lok Sabha was adjourned for the day minutes after noon while the Rajya Sabha was adjourned repeatedly till 3 pm and then dismissed for the day without conducting any business.

Wednesday will likely to see the aftershocks of of Tuesday's chaos in both Houses, with Opposition parties alleging that the government is throttling alternative voices after Mayawati resigned from the Upper House. Moreover, the state of agriculture and farmers' protests, one of the key issues in Opposition's cache of weapons with which it plans to corner the Centre, is slated for discussion under Rule 193.

Meanwhile, 2,000 farmers have rallied at Jantar Mantar to condemn the "anti-farmer" policies of the BJP government and the killing of six farmers in Madhya Pradesh in June. The farmers are also pressing the government for adequate remuneration for their produce, while seeking a complete farm loan waiver.

Besides this, two new bills: Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education 2017 and The Indian Institutes of Information Technology (Public-Private Partnership) Bill, 2017 will be tabled in the Parliament for debate and passage.

Three bills were introduced in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday too, despite the brouhaha. However, no discussions could be held owing to the chaos and repeated sloganeering in the House.

The Opposition wanted to raise cow vigilantism, the plight of farmers and various other issues. Being disallowed, members from the Congress, RJD, TMC and the Left, among others, then stormed the Well. Many were also holding placards.

One of the opposition placards read: Gau mata toh bahana hai, karz maafi se dhyan hatana hai (Cow protection is a tool to divert attention from farm loan waiver). Another read: Vijay Mallya ko bhagaya, kisano ko rulaya (Vijay Mallya was allowed to leave, while farmers were made to cry).

BJP members from Karnataka were also seen holding placards and standing at their benches, asking the state government to protect honest officers. They were referring to the recent transfer of DIG (Prisons) D Roopa, who reportedly exposed that AIADMK leader VK Sasikala was provided special services inside prison.
New Delhi: Union minister Ananth Kumar on Wednesday requested the opposition parties to let Parliament function, saying the government is ready for positive discussions on every issues in the both the Houses.

"We hope that both the Houses of Parliament functions properly," Kumar said after the Bharatiya Jananta Party's parliamentary party meeting, which was also attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"I request the opposition parties to have positive discussion in both the Houses and the government is ready to debate and discuss all the issues," the BJP leader said.

The Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha were adjourned on Tuesday after the opposition leaders created a ruckus on several issues including mob lynching, atrocities on Dalits, farmers suicides etc.

Rajya Sabha member and Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati on Tuesday resigned from the House alleging that she was not allowed to speak on the atrocities on Dalits in Uttar Pradesh's Shahranpur district.

Sharing the details of the parliamentary party meeting, the Union Minister of Chemicals, Fertilizers and Parliamentary Affairs said that Finance Minister Arun Jaitley briefed the party MPs over the smooth implementation of Goods and Services Tax across the country.
Proceedings in both Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha were disrupted multiple times on Wednesday, after MPs protested the agrarian crisis, cow vigilantism and Samajwadi Party leader Naresh Agarwal's comments linking Hindu gods with brands of alcohol.

A slugfest also emerged between BJP and Congress over a dossier prepared by the research department of the All-India Congress Committee. It was leaked on Wednesday morning and lists several issues to corner the government during the ongoing Monsoon Session. The 'key issues to raise in Parliament' section puts "mob violence and lynching  from Akhlaq to Junaid" top-most on the agenda. The Congress did raise the lynching issue extensively on Wednesday. However, proceedings began with the agrarian distress.

Farmers' crisis

Lok Sabha was adjourned almost immediately after beginning the day, after the Opposition created a ruckus over the farmers' crisis. Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi later said in Rajasthan that they wanted to speak in the Lok Sabha about problems that farmers in the country are facing but were not allowed.

Today in Lok Sabha we wanted to speak on farmers issues,even PM was present, but we were not allowed to speak: Rahul Gandhi pic.twitter.com/7BDm2unGHy  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

In the Upper House, JDU leader Sharad Pawar raised the farmers issue and said that the government has failed to get farmers the right price for their produce. While Congress' Digvijay Singh said farmers were getting "bullets instead of price", most of his party members in the Well kept chanting, "Mann ki baat band karo, karza maafi shuru karo (stop talking on radio programme, implement loan waiver)."

Cow vigilantism

Another major issue that reverbearted in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday was the issue of killings in the name of cow protection. The Opposition created a lot of noise after government said the states have all the powers to deal with such incidents and there was no need to change the existing law.

Samajwadi Party members came into the Well and raised slogans expressing dissatisfaction over the government's reply to questions regarding the steps taken by the Centre to stop such lynchings. This led to brief adjournment of the House.

Minister of State for Home Affairs Hansraj Gangaram Ahir said 24 states and five Union territories in the country have banned cow slaughter, with only Arunachal Pradesh, Kerala, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland, and the Union Territory of Lakshwadeep still to impose such a ban.

The minister said the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) does not maintain separate data for cases of lynchings, as only cases related to communal and religious tensions are recorded.

"For the first time, NCRB has started recording lynching incidents since 2014. In 2014, more such cases happened in states like Kerala, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, while in 2015 there were more incidents in states of Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad alleged in the Rajya Sabha that those attacking Dalits and minorities were getting protection from the ruling BJP. "The cases of mob lynching in the name of protecting cows have gone up across the country in the last three years. Those involved in lynchings are getting protection from the ruling party people," Azad said.

The BJP in turn accused the Congress of conspiring to disrupt Parliament during the Monsoon Session by giving issues a "communal colour". "Rather than focusing on the more relevant issue of national security, the Congress has given priority on raising incidents of lynching by the mob and cow vigilantism, by giving them communal colour," BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said.

Naresh Agarwal's statement

Soon after Agarwal stood up to speak on the issue of lynching in the Upper House, the House members started protesting against his controversial remark linking Hindu gods to brands of alcohol. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley demanded an apology from Agarwal for saying names of some Hindu deities linked to some types of alcohol were written on the wall of the school.

Pointing towards the treasury bench, Agarwal said these lines were written by "your people". Deputy chairman PJ Kurien said Agarwal should not have made these remarks which "per se are derogatory" and should withdraw them. Agarwal agreed and withdrew his statement. However, BJP members in the Rajya Sabha refused to budge and started sloganeering. The House was adjourned following the disruption.

Meanwhile, in the Lok Sabha, Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav raised the Sikkim border row and said that China is preparing to attack India. He said the Chinese government is conspiring with Pakistan to attack New Delhi. He also asked the government to inform Parliament what it has done to meet any likely challenge from the neighbouring country. "India is facing a big danger from China. I have been cautioning the central government for years. China has joined hands with Pakistan. It has made full preparation to attack India," he said.
Kohima: Nagaland chief minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu and his supporters failed to turn up in the Assembly to face the floor test on Wednesday following which the House was adjourned sine die.

On Tuesday, Governor PB Acharya had directed Speaker Imtiwapang to summon an emergent special session of the assembly at 9.30 am for the chief minister, who is facing a rebellion from MLAs of his party Nagaland Peoples Front (NPF), to seek confidence vote.

Former chief minister TR Zeliang, leader of the rebel NPF MLAs, was present in the House along with his followers. The motion to prove the majority of the chief minister could not be taken up as he was not present and the House was adjourned sine die, Speaker Imtiwapang said. The speaker said, he will report the proceedings of the House to the Governor.

Efforts to contact legislators of the Liezietsu camp turned futile as they did not take calls.

Acharya had asked the speaker to convene the special session after the Kohima bench of the Gauhati High Court on Tuesday dismissed the chief minister's plea to stay the governor's directive to him to seek a trust vote by 15 July.

Liezietsu had filed the petition on 14 July and the court had issued an interim order staying the governor's directive till 17 July.

Acharya had on 11 and 13 July directed Liezietsu, who is facing rebellion by 43 ruling NPF MLAs led by Zeliang demanding change of leadership in the present House of 59, to seek vote of confidence on or before 15 July.

Zeliang, who was forced out of office in February following large-scale protests over holding of urban local bodies election with 33 percent reservation for women, had staked claim to form the government saying he had majority support in the House.

Four BJP legislators and Nagaland BJP president Visasolie Lhoungu yesterday called on the governor and submitted a letter supporting Zeliang.

BJP is a pre-poll alliance partner of the NPF and a constituent of the Democratic Alliance of Nagaland (DAN) government in the state.
Embattled Nagaland chief minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu will face a floor test at a special session of the state assembly on Wednesday, after the Gauhati High Court dismissed his plea to stay the Governor's directive to him to seek a trust vote.

Governor PB Acharya directed Speaker Imtiwapang to summon an emergent special session of the state assembly at 9.30 am for the chief minister, who is facing a rebellion from his party MLAs, to seek the confidence vote.

Justice LM Jamir, judge of Kohima Bench of Gauhati High Court, had dismissed earlier in the day a writ petition filed by Liezietsu, pleading for a stay on the governor's directive to him to seek a vote of confidence in the assembly by 15 July.

The court while stating there was no merit in the petition vacated its interim order staying the directive and left the matter to the discretion of the governor.

This court is of the considered opinion that the governor had taken the right decision to ask the petitioner (Liezietsu) to seek a vote of confidence in the floor of the House to see which out of the two contesting claimants of chief ministership has a majority in the House, the court observed.

The court also maintained that it has no reasons to interfere with the governors letter to the chief minister on the matter.

Dismissing the petition, the court said, "The matter is left to the wisdom of the governor to take a decision on the same after proper application of mind."

The chief minister had filed the petition on 14 July and the court had issued an interim order staying the governor's directive till yesterday so that the matter could be taken up for hearing.

Acharya had on 11 and 13 July directed Liezietsu, who is facing rebellion by 43 ruling Naga Peoples Front MLAs led by former chief minister TR Zeliang demanding change of leadership in the present house of 59, to seek vote of confidence on or before 15 July.

Zeliang, who was forced out of office in February following large scale protests over holding of urban local bodies election with 33 percent reservation for women, had staked claim to form the government saying he had majority support in the House.

NPF slams Acharya

In a NPF emergency meeting, Lieziestsu questioned the neutrality of the governor, who "misused, abused and tarnished Raj Bhawan" to favour rebellion within the NPF to enhance the BJP's political fortunes in the state. The NPF also resolved to appeal to Aier to act with propriety and impartiality.

Government spokesperson Yitachu also told IANS that they would appeal in the Supreme Court, as it is "an internal matter within the NPF party and the matter should be resolved outside the floor of the House".

Asked if the chief minister would step down to pave way for his predecessor Zeliang to return to power, he ruled it out, asserting: "We will not allow these unconstitutional activities to take place in Nagaland."

BJP backs Zeliang

Meanwhile, Zeliang called for Liezietsu's "minority government" to step down honourably.

"I am prepared to get to the government through the democratic means of a floor test, so that the unity within the rank and file of the party is firmly secured," he said.

Meanwhile, four BJP legislators and Nagaland BJP president Visasolie Lhoungu on Tuesday called on the governor and submitted a letter supporting Zeliang. BJP is a pre-poll alliance partner of the Naga People's Front and a constituent of the Democratic Aalliance of Nagaland (DAN) government in the state.

The legislators in their letter to the governor said, "BJP has been a constituent of the DAN and continues to remain a part of the arrangement till date." However, they said that in the present political crisis in the state government, the BJP has decided to be with the DAN group led by Zeliang.

The four BJP legislators are Minister for Transport and Civil Aviation, Paiwang Konyak, Advisor for Treasury and Accounts, Labour and Employment T M Lotha, Advisor for Cooperation Imtilemba Sangtam and MLA and Chief Whip of BJP Mmhonlumo Kikon.

With inputs from agencies
In an abrupt turn of events in the recent political crisis in Nagaland, the ruling Naga Peoples Front on Wednesday expelled TR Zeliang from the party as he was taking oath as the chief minister after nearly two weeks of political crisis.

He replaces Shurhozelie Liezietsu as chief minister.

In the expulsion order signed by the partys working president duo Huskha Yepthomi and Apong Pongener it is stated, "Shri TR Zeliang, MLA is expelled from the party with effect from 19th July 2017, for a period of six years."

The expulsion order, stating the reasons for his expulsion alleged, "He tried to destabilise and instigate the leadership of NPF-led DAN government, demanding the resignation of the party Chief Minister and its party president."

It said, "Whereas inspite of an order served to him for restoration of his primary and active membership of NPF on 13th July 2017, he was adamant and has already planned to dismantle the NPF party."

Zeliang despite the expulsion order took oath as the chief minister of Nagaland, but his swearing in is unlikely to end the ongoing political crisis in the state as legal hindrance might arise in front of the NPF MLAs who have been supporting Zeliang.

Yitachu a leader and an NPF MLA told Firstpost, "After Zeliang is being expelled from the party, no party MLA should support his chief ministership anymore. They will risk their membership to the party and thus to the Nagaland Assembly if they do."

He also said that continuance of support to Zeliang by any NPF MLA now on will be seen as an anti-party activity on his part.

Dissidence against Nagaland former chief minister Liezietsu cropped up after he appointed his son Khriehu Liezietsu as his advisor with cabinet rank and pay.

Following that 35 dissident NPF MLAs under the leadership of Zeliang demanded his resignation levelling charges of nepotism and dictatorial rule against him.

On 13 July Governor PB Acharya asked the chief minister to prove his majority on the floor after Zeliang claimed of having the support of more than 42 MLAs in his favour.

Liezietsu approached the Gauhati High Court on Tuesday but the court dismissed his appeal and the governor directed Speaker Imtiwapang to summon a special session of the Assembly at 9.30 am for the chief minister, who is facing a rebellion from MLAs of his party Nagaland Peoples Front (NPF), to seek a confidence vote.

But the chief minister failed to show up in the Assembly to prove his majority and Zeliang was chosen for oath taking.

But after Zeliangs expulsion, the crisis in Nagaland is likely to continue.
Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik, who supported NDA's candidate Ram Nath Kovind in the presidential election held on Monday, has done a surprising volte-face, opting to side with the joint Opposition candidate Gopalkrishna Gandhi for the vice-presidential election, due for 5 August.

"The Biju Janata Dal will support Sri Gopalkrishna Gandhi," is all the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) chief would reveal to the media on Wednesday when asked to elaborate on his choice.

Patnaik had in 2012 said Gandhi was an "old and valued friend. We were friends even when I was not in politics".

Considering the presidential and vice-presidential polls were both through a system of secret ballot and parties cannot be found issuing whips to their MPs and MLAs, it does raise two key questions  why did Patnaik announce his choice, and more importantly, why did he support candidates of rival camps for the two elections?

BJD parliamentary party spokesman Kalikesh Singhdeo appeared to be answering this question, when he said, "Patnaik has proved that the BJD has been maintaining equal distance from the Congress and the BJP."

Indeed, it does appear that Patnaik is trying to walk a tightrope, without appearing to be too close to either the NDA camp or to the Opposition. Considering the long strides the BJP has made in Odisha in recent times and the saffron camp's rising profile appearing attractive to voters, it may be a calculated move on Patnaik's part to remain close to both sets of political leaders and parties.

According to a report in The Times of India, the BJD's parliamentary group was told at the last minute, barely half an hour before NDA's Venkaiah Naidu was to file his nomination papers. The report did appear to confirm the theory that BJD was picking rival candidates to ensure it wasn't seen as being too close to one camp, which may hurt the party's prospects in the state. The party had supported the NDA government in Parliament on several issues and legislations.

However, BJD sources insisted the cases were different.

Kovind quit his party membership before becoming Bihar governor and conducted himself in an exemplary manner thereafter. He also hails from the weaker sections and has worked his way up from the grassroots. On the other hand, BJD leaders said, Naidu was a party man and a member of the cabinet till his nomination was announced by BJP. It was also felt Gandhi would be seen as a more non-partisan choice for the constitutional position, the copy said.

The announcement has made a lot of people within his BJD camp very happy, especially since party leaders were said to be feeling "uncomfortable" with Patnaik over his increasing bonhomie with the saffron alliance.

BJD's Dhenkanal MP Tathagat Satpathy tweeted in favour of the choice

BJD parliamentary party spokesman Kalikesh Singhdeo said, "Patnaik has proved that the BJD has been maintaining equal distance from the Congress and the BJP."

Very happy & totally support my leader Sri @Naveen_Odisha on his decision of @bjd_odisha supporting Sri Gopal Gandhi as VP.

-TS  Office of T Satpathy (@SatpathyLive) July 18, 2017

This not only enhances the image of the party but also proves we walk the talk of being equidistant from the 2 national blocs.

-TS  Office of T Satpathy (@SatpathyLive) July 18, 2017

The BJP, which was actively courting BJD's support for the vice-presidential elections after having seen the party's backing for the presidential election, was in for a disappointment. It later accused the party of having a "tacit deal" with Congress.

"Patnaik has supported Gopalkrishna Gandhi, who signed the mercy plea of terror convict Yakub Memon. The support of BJD to a Congress candidate shows a tacit deal between them," said state BJP president Basanta Panda.

With inputs from agencies
Chennai: Tamil Nadu chief minister K Palaniswamy on Wednesday said that holding protests is a civil right but warned of stringent action those who attempt to destabilise law and order in the state by instigating people.

Intervening Opposition leader MK Stalin during a debate in the Assembly over slapping of the stringent Goondas Act on a woman activist, he informed that the said legal section is not invoked on someone at the very outset.

"There is a right in democracy to stage protests. But the Goondas Act will be slapped if attempts are made to destabilise law and order by instigating people," the chief minister said.

He was responding to Stalin's poser on why a woman activist protesting against the hydrocarbon project in Puthukottai and ONGC operations in Kathiramangalam had been detained under the stringent Goondas Act.

The woman, Valarmathi, was involved in many protests and had allegedly instigated students of a university against its fee structure among others, Palaniswamy said.

Stalin said various sections of the society like farmers and fishermen, besides locals in Neduvasal (Puthukottai) and Kathiramangalam (Thanjavur) were staging protests. People of Neduvasal and Kathiramangalam were opposed to the respective hydrocarbon projects there, he said.

To this, the chief minister shot back saying it was the DMK government which had allowed the project in Neduvasal in 1989 and if it had anticipated the problems then and denied permission, the present day issues would not have come up.

Further, it was the DMK government in 2006-11 which had okayed the methane extraction project in Cauvery delta, he added.
Q: Which organisation in India has given the best salary hike this appraisal season?

A: Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly

At a time when job losses are hitting the headlines and increments have been poor, it pays to be an MLA in Tamil Nadu.

Monthly salaries have been increased from Rs 55,000 to Rs 1.05 lakh. Even ex-MLAs benefited, their pension was hiked from Rs 12,000 to Rs 20,000 per month. The MLA Local Area Development Fund, that is spent at the discretion of the lawmaker, has increased from Rs 2 crore to Rs 2.5 crore.

Cut to New Delhi, where Tamil Nadu farmers have gone on protest once again, disappointed that the promises made by Chief Minister Edappadi Palaniswamy were not kept. In May, after a 41-day protest at Jantar Mantar, EPS had requested farmers to call off the protest, promising he will take care. Little did they know he meant he will take care of the political class. They have been asking for a loan waiver and a resolution to the Cauvery dispute. This after 270 farmers have reportedly killed themselves since October 2016.

The pay hike is obscene at various levels. This comes on the back of revelations that MLAs of the ruling AIADMK were paid huge sums of money, running into crores, to vote for the Sasikala faction in the trust vote in February. During the RK Nagar bypoll that was eventually rescinded by the Election Commission in April, the Sasikala faction showed how loaded it is. Its plan to distribute Rs 89 crore at the rate of Rs 4,000 per vote was exposed after an income tax raid at the residence of the health minister, C Vijayabaskar.

What is criminal about the decision to give such a hefty increment is that this is public money. And Tamil Nadu's financial position is in a mess, reeling under a debt of over Rs 2.35 lakh crore. When Jayalalithaa returned to power in May 2016, her first five decisions including free electricity for domestic consumers, free gold for women getting married, waiver of farm loans, set the exchequer back by Rs 8,000 crore. Add to that the closure of another 1,000 liquor shops in the last one year, the main source of revenue for the state, and you realise Tamil Nadu is living a hand to mouth existence. This kind of abysmal financial mismanagement is certain to lead the state into bankruptcy.

Thanks to the political fragility, the state has struggled to attract big ticket industrial investment, losing prestigious projects to neighbouring states in South India. That begs the question  what kind of an impressive performance have the lawmakers put in that they have given themselves such a handsome increment.

The decision without a doubt, is political. This is Palaniswamy's way of keeping everyone happy, even if it comes at the cost of the exchequer. Would the 89 MLAs of the Opposition DMK oppose the hike and refuse to accept the increased emoluments? Because this hike is an indirect way to keep the Opposition happy so that the fight with the treasury benches, at best, is a friendly duel.

But then Tamil Nadu is not the odd one out when it comes to greed shown by the political class. In fact, the Tamil Nadu MLA may be unhappy to know that he/she will still be drawing a salary less than his counterparts in Telangana, Delhi and Himachal Pradesh.

Last year, Telangana MLAs became the country's highest-paid state lawmakers when the Assembly approved a bill that hiked their gross monthly salary by a whopping 163 percent to Rs 2.5 lakh. Chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao's salary went up from Rs 2.44 lakh to Rs 4.21 lakh, a hike of 72 percent. Ministers in Telangana get Rs 4 lakh as salary. KCR's argument was this will help the state remain free of corruption.

The Telangana decision in March 2016 was as insensitive because according to data from National Crime Records Bureau, 1,358 farmers had killed themselves in the new state in 2015, the second highest in the country after Maharashtra. The KCR regime too, like the EPS government now, thought nothing of the vulgarity in splurging on itself.

In fact, when the insensitivity of the move was pointed out to a senior Telangana Rashtra Samiti leader, she said it is not necessary for every decision to be contrasted with the plight of farmers. Empathy committed suicide that very moment.
New Delhi: A united Opposition on Wednesday forced the adjournment of the Lok Sabha proceedings for nearly an hour by storming the Well and raising slogans slamming the government for allegedly ignoring the well-being of farmers.

As soon as the question hour was taken up, Opposition members raised the issue of farmers.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar reminded the Opposition that a discussion on the issue of farmers is listed in Wednesday's agenda. He said the government was ready for a debate and would answer all the questions raised by members. "Do not interrupt the House. Let us debate," he said.

But the Opposition members, including those from the Left and the RJD, continued raising the issue from the Well.

Most of the Congress members, who were also in the Well, raised slogans such as "Mann ki baat band karo, karza maafi shuru karo (stop talking on radio programme, implement loan waiver)" and "stop shooting farmers".

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was present in the House.

An apparently peeved Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said the Opposition was not interested in the proceedings to run and adjourned the House for 50 minutes till noon.
Mumbai: The Shiv Sena on Wednesday expressed concern over recent incidents of violence in the name of gau raksha and asked where were these self-appointed 'cow saviours' when terrorists targeted Amarnath pilgrims in Kashmir recently.

Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi is facing the heat over the issue of cow vigilantism, an editorial in Sena mouthpiece Saamana said. The ruling alliance partner also said that Pakistan wanted the nation to get divided in the name of cow protection.

The statements come in the wake of recent incidents of violence in different parts of the country in the name of cow protection.

Seeking to blunt the opposition attack over cow vigilantism, the prime minister had on Sunday sought to put the onus for checking such "hooliganism" on state governments, insisting that they take "stringent action" against such elements.

"Even the prime minister had to face criticism over the ruckus created by cow vigilantes across the nation. They have not stopped even after the PM criticised them and said this has become more of a business now," the editorial said. "The Muslims across the country are being attacked and killed over suspicion of carrying beef," it said.

At a time when tensions mount on the borders, internal squabbles would be disastrous for the integrity of the nation, the Sena said.

"Even in Prime Minister Modi's home state Gujarat, the gau rakshaks have mercilessly killed people in the name of cow protection. Where were these cow vigilantes when the Amarnath pilgrims from the state were killed by terrorists?

"They should not have any problems in taking weapons and going to Kashmir to take revenge," the Sena quipped. The saffron ally said that the cow vigilantes should show courage and machoism at all levels. "If cows are being saved in the name of religion, protecting the nation is also important in the name of religion," it said.

"The gau rakshaks are laying thorns in the path of Modi. It seems that the prime minister has given up on them as their activities have not stopped even after his warning," the editorial said.

"It is unfortunate that law is a mute spectator when 40-50 people gang up to beat an individual," it said. In a jibe, the Sena said despite the life of animals

being more important in the country than that of humans, the export of beef has increased in the last three years due to which a considerable amount has been received in the Indian coffers.

"Do the cow vigilantes believe that this money should not be used for developmental purposes? They should remember that many Muslim police personnel have been martyred in terrorist attacks in Kashmir and it was a Muslim who saved the Amarnath pilgrims," it said.
TR Zeliang was appointed the new chief minister of Nagaland by Governor PB Acharya after Chief Minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu and his supporters failed to turn up in the Assembly for the floor test on Wednesday. Following this, the House was adjourned sine die.

Zeliang will be sworn in as the chief minister at 3 pm on Wednesday, Raj Bhavan sources said.

Nagaland Guv PB Acharya invites former CM TR Zeliang to be sworn-in as CM today at 3:00 pm, asks him to prove majority on or before 22 July.  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

Nagaland Guv PB Acharya invites former CM TR Zeliang to be sworn-in as CM today at 3:00 pm, asks him to prove majority on or before 22 July.  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

Nagaland governor has asked Zeliang to prove his majority on the floor of the House on or before 22 July.

On Tuesday, Acharya had directed Speaker Imtiwapang to summon an emergent special session of the Assembly at 9.30 am for the chief minister, who is facing a rebellion from MLAs of his party Nagaland Peoples Front (NPF), to seek confidence vote.

Speaker Imtiwapang Aier, who adjourned the House sine die, said the motion to prove the majority of the chief minister could not be taken up as he was not present. "I have already submitted a report to the governor on the development in the House," Aier told IANS.

Zeliang, leader of the rebel NPF MLAs, was present in the House along with his followers. The motion to prove the majority of the chief minister could not be taken up as he was not present and the House was adjourned sine die, Speaker Imtiwapang said.

The speaker said, he will report the proceedings of the House to the governor.

Efforts to contact legislators of the Liezietsu camp turned futile as they did not take calls.

Zeliang, who was forced out of office in February following large-scale protests over holding of urban local bodies election with 33 percent reservation for women, had staked claim to form the government saying he had majority support in the House.



With inputs from agencies
Rebel National Peoples Front leader TR Zeliang was sworn in as the chief minister of Nagaland in the presence of Governor PB Acharya at 3 pm on Wednesday. However, according to sources soon after the swearing-in ceremony Zelian was expelled from the party.

"He was adamant and has already planned to dismantle the NPF party," NPF working presidents Huska Yepthomi and Apong Pongener said.

Zeliang, however, was unfazed saying he would continue to remain the NPF leader in the House.

"The expulsion from the party does not affect the membership inside the House," he said.

Zeliang was appointed the new chief minister after former chief minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu and his supporters failed to turn up at the Assembly for the floor test on Wednesday.

TR Zeliang sworn in as the new Chief Minister of #Nagaland at Darbar Hall, Raj Bhavan in Kohima. pic.twitter.com/ldyLVqmwUB  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

Meanwhile, Nagaland governor has asked Zeliang to prove his majority on the floor of the House on or before 21 July.

According to PTI, Acharya had on Tuesday directed Speaker Imtiwapang Aier to summon an emergent special session of the Assembly at 9.30 am for Liezietsu, who is facing a rebellion from MLAs of NPF, to seek a confidence vote.

Aier, who adjourned the House sine die on Wednesday, said the motion to prove the majority of Liezietsu could not be taken up as he was not present in the Assembly. "I have already submitted a report to the governor on the development in the House," Aier told IANS.

Zeliang, leader of the rebel NPF MLAs, was present in the House along with his followers.

According to IANS, Liezietsu, who was a non-elected member in the 60-member House, claimed to have the support of 10 members of the ruling NPF legislators and one Independent member. Efforts to contact legislators of the Liezietsu camp turned futile as they did not take calls.

In Nagaland Assembly one seat is vacant. The ruling Democratic Alliance of Nagaland coalition has 47 NPF legislators, four BJP members, and eight Independents.

The rebellion within the ruling coalition erupted when a section of the NPF accused Liezietsu of indulging in "nepotism" by appointing his son Khriehu Liezietsu as his advisor with cabinet status and pay.

Liezietsu, who is also NPF president, was sworn in as chief minister on 22 February after Zeliang resigned following a violent protest by tribal groups who were opposed to his move to hold civic polls with 33 percent reservation for women.

With inputs from agencies
Muppavarapu Venkaiah Naidu, who turned 68 on 1 July, could be the last of the breed of troubleshooters who followed the Kamaraj model in South Indian politics. Many describe his nomination as NDA candidate for vice-president as a birthday gift for a person who has been in the rungs of power for over three decades and participated in successful NDA governments of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and now Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Journalists in Hyderabad and Delhi look forward to Venkaiah's arrival for a taste of his dinner politics. He hosted meetings over dinner in Delhi and lunch in Hyderabad with spicy delicacies from Nellore such as Ulava Charu and Gongura Pachadi.

When it comes to spicy vegetarian food, none can beat the flavor of Nellore, my native place, Venkaiah would proudly say.

Venkaiah is known for rhyming political rhetoric, be it at press conferences, public meetings or even while addressing an Assembly or Parliament. When he was filing his nomination papers in Delhi he said: I started as Usha pati (Usha's husband), now I will be up-Rashtrapati (vice-president), eventually Sabha pati (Rajya Sabha chairman), but not sabka pati (everyone's husband).

But Venkaiahs candidature has surprised many in the realm of South Indian politics. Venkaiah has been seen as a successful troubleshooter in Tamil Nadu affairs during Jayalalithaa's reign. As a four-time Rajya Sabha MP, he was a prominent member in the corridors of power in the BJP and NDA for nearly three decades. He could have been a major asset to the party outside rather than in the post of vice-president, said senior political analyst Pasam Jagannadha Naidu Vijayawada.

Many contend that Venkaiah was a successful speed-breaker for Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu, who often did not share Venkaiahs optimism on many issues. The decision to remove Venkaiah from the active political space perhaps came after BJP president Amit Shah visited Telangana and Andhra Pradesh a month ago.

Since then, Venkaiah had been sidelined in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana affairs. In Karnataka, where Venkaiah was successful in installing the first BJP government in the south, he has been made a spectator to the fight between BS Yeddyurappa with others. Venkaiah was the southern face of BJP, while Modi represented the north. If at all there could have been a BJP government in Andhra Pradesh, he would have been the only man to lead it, says Hari Babu, BJP MP from Visakhapatnam and president of BJP's Andhra Pradesh unit.

However, inside the Andhra Pradesh political circles, some BJP leaders contend that Venkaiah was removed as BJP high command saw it fit to give more opportunities to those that had defected from the Congress such as Daggubati Purandeswari, K Lakshmi Narayana and KS Rao. Though Venkaiah isn't active within the Andhra Pradesh political scene, he will provide guidance and monitor developments from Delhi," says a senior BJP leader and Venkaiah loyalist.

But sources tell Firstpost that the Andhra Pradesh unit of the BJP is happy at the turn of events. Venkaiah always favoured an alliance with the Telugu Desam Party led by Chandrababu Naidu, who had stripped them of power. Whenever we raised a voice, Chandrababu would call Venkaiah who would tell us to lie low."

The Telanganas BJP unit openly opposed Venkaiahs intervention in 2014 when he inked the electoral alliance with the TDP. Then Andhra Pradesh BJP president G Kishan Reddy often went on record to state that but for the alliance with the TDP, the BJP would have bagged more than five Assembly seats in the 2014 polls. Even the 7 of the 18 seats the TDP won were due to BJP votes, Kishan Reddy told the BJP high command.

If we can contest on our own, BJP will undoubtedly win over 20 seats in 2019, says BJP spokesperson Krishna Saagar Rao. But many feel that they are shackled to the TDP, thanks to Venkaiah Naidu who need the alliance at the national level.

Other regional parties in the south, particularly the Left, are heaving a sigh of relief. There is no other BJP leader of the stature of Venkaiah Naidu in either of the Telugu states or in Kerala, Karnataka or Tamil Nadu. He is also the fifth in line among the top BJP national leadership after Modi, Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley. BJP's growth in the south at the cost of the Left is a clear indication that it is caste-driven, says a senior Telangana Left leader.

The BJP also sees a clear advantage in Venkaiah being the custodian in Rajya Sabha, the House where the NDA government lacks support and where both Left and Congress gang up against Modi. It appears Venkaiahs agenda as vice-president is crystal clear: To tame the Congress and Left in the elder House, said senior Rajya Sabha MP and TDP leader TG Venkatesh.

The TDP though will miss a troubleshooter who had their ear. Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu is said to have lamented at a TDP parliamentary party meet on Sunday that Venkaiah being out of active political life would be a loss. Many TDP leaders said Venkaiah was a bridge between TDP and the Centre. Whenever there was a problem, either about grants to Amaravati or special status to Andhra Pradesh we sought his help at Delhi. His elevation to the post of vice-president will not be good for the TDP and Andhra Pradesh, says deputy chief minister KE Krishna Murthy.

Venkaiah will be the second candidate from Nellore to step into the gubernatorial post. Dr S Radhakrishnan, who was president, also hailed from the remote village of Sarvepalli in Nellore district.

Hailing from a modest agricultural family, Venkaiah is an arts graduate and has a degree in law from the Andhra University, Visakhapatnam.

After having a stint as a student leader and participating in the agitation for statehood for coastal Andhra, which rocked the state during 1972-73, Venkaiah served as president of Andhra University Colleges Students Union from 1973-74. Attracted by the JP movement, he formed the Loknayak Jai Prakash Chhatra Sangharsha Samithi in Andhra Pradesh in 1974. Venkaiah also was imprisoned under Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) during the Emergency.

He joined the BJP in 1980 and was among the three MLAs of the erstwhile Janata Party who broke away to form BJP and was re-elected to the state Assembly in 1983. He was the floor leader of the three-member BJP group in the state Assembly from 1980-85.

His contemporaries in the Assembly included S Jaipal Reddy (who was then in the Janata Party), Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi (Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen), Rajeshwar Rao (former CPI floor leader and later TDP), and the late Puchalapalli Sundarayya (late CPM patriarch).

He came into prominence during August-September 1984 as one of the key leaders of the 'Save Democracy' movement launched by TDP founder NT Rama Rao after being toppled as chief minister. He was instrumental in getting NTR to travel in a wheelchair to Rashtrapati Bhavan. Along with Chandrababu Naidu and P Upendra, Venkaiah masterminded the campaign against Congress that finally led to the reinstallation of NTR as chief minister of Andhra Pradesh after a gap of 30 days in 1985.

Though a slick talker with a propensity to dish out tongue lashings, Venkaiah served in Assembly for only two terms: From 1978-1985 from Udayagiri segment in Nellore. That perhaps sealed his electoral fate. He gave up after running for office and being defeated from Bapatla in 1991 and Hyderabad in 1996.

Though he is a BJP leader, Venkaiah had a sound rapport with leadership of all Opposition parties.

He was the longest serving president of the BJP's Andhra Pradesh unit. During the period the TDP was in power, he succeeded in getting a land grant for the BJP office, right opposite Gandhi Bhavan, which quartered the Congress.

I am what I am today because of the BJP, Venkaiah declared, while contributing 25 percent of the cost of the Syama Prasad Mukherjee building, housing the BJP headquarters at Nampally, Hyderabad.
The Congress has dug up a six-year-old Supreme Court verdict invalidating land allocation to a BJP trust to shovel dirt on NDA vice-presidential candidate M Venkaiah Naidu. Is the Congress counter charge any stickier than Shiv Senas Yakub Memon slur on UPA candidate Gopal Krishna Gandhi?

On 6 April, 2011 the apex court had quashed the BJP governments decision to allot land to Kushabhau Thakre Trust in September 2004. Naidu, as president of the BJP headed the trust. The other trustees were: former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kailash Joshi, LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and RSS representatives Balwant P Apte and Sanjay Joshi.

The Supreme Court had indicted the government for its act of favouritism and for gross violation of Article 14 of the Constitution. The court also voided the changes in the land use of the plot and instructed the town planning authorities to take back the possession of the 20-acre land. The case caused a storm as the government sought to gratify the party from chief ministers discretionary quota. The extent of Naidus involvement in the deal is debatable but as BJP president he was a party to the wrongdoing. Regardless of Naidus prospects in the poll, a recount of the saga of allocating the land would show how the party almost succeeded in grabbing 20 acres of premium land through manipulations.

On 18 June, 2004, Kailash Joshi, as convenor of the Thakre Memorial Trust, applied for reservation of 30 acres land in Bhopals prospering Bawadiya Kalan area to establish an All India Training Institute.

Babu Lal Gaur, then housing minister, ordered an immediate action simultaneously asking Town and Country Planning (T&CP) commissioner and collector to report on the matter. The T&CP commissioner objected saying the land was reserved for residential and plantation purposes and part of it did not belong to the government. The principal secretary then rejected the trusts application.

The trust was also not registered when it applied for the land. Joshi applied for registration of the trust mentioning Naidu as its first president. The registration cleared in October and was formalised on 24 December, 2004, six months after the land was sought.

The collector pointed out that the land use could not be changed after being notified through state gazette. The government steamrolled all objections and reserved 30 acres of the land for the trust in anticipation of approval by the land reservation committee that was duly granted.

The collector, however, reminded the government that the land could not be allotted below a minimum price. The cost was quoted at Rs 7,84,80000 of which 10 percent needed to be deposited before allotment. The Trust didnt deposit the amount.

Joshi promised to pay soon after the allotment. About eight months later Joshi wrote to the collector saying the institute would need only 20 acres. The government then sought Rs 5,22,72,000 as premium and asked for Rs 52,27,200 as earnest money. The trust deposited only Rs 25,00,000 and kept haggling for another seven months by when Babu Lal Gaur became the chief minister. The revenue secretary suggested that in view of the financial crunch, the government should auction the land. The cabinet rejected his call and decided to allot 20 acres of the land to the trust at Rs 40 lakhs per hectare.

Now the Trust was told to pay Rs 55,94,000. However, Joshi sought a waiver of the premium as the institute was being established "in public interest". The government readily obliged. It settled for a premium of Rs 25,00,000 and now the Trust needed to pay a lease rent of Re 1 per year for 30 years.

Before notifying a change in the land use, the government invited objections from public and promptly got them from the realtors. After the government overruled their objections, the final notification was issued on 5 September, 2008.

The Akhil Bharatiya Upabhokta Congress moved high court against the allotment. The high court summarily rejected the petition saying the land belongs to the government and it is for the government to decide to whom it should be allotted as per its policy and no case of violation of any legal or constitutional right has been made out by the petitioner.

The petitioner then moved Supreme Court which set aside the high court order saying: "Unfortunately, the division bench of the high court overlooked that the entire process of reservation of land and allotment thereof was fraught with grave illegality and was nothing but a blatant act of favouritism on the part of functionaries of the State."
Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati on Tuesday tendered her resignation as a Rajya Sabha member, hours after the Chair asked her to restrict her impromptu speech on anti-Dalit violence in Saharanpur of Uttar Pradesh.

Mayawati met Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari on Tuesday evening and handed over her resignation letter.

BSP Chief Mayawati resigns from Rajya Sabha (file pic) pic.twitter.com/40DVYK17Vw  ANI (@ANI_news) July 18, 2017

"I met the chairman to hand over my resignation letter. It is not good that I cannot speak in the House on issues close to me... When I got up to speak, the government did not allow me to complete. Their members stood up and interfered. It is not good," she said after resigning.

In her resignation letter, she said, "When I got up to speak, the government side did not allow me to complete. Their

members stood up and interfered... Instead of asking them not to interfere, the Deputy Chairman asked me to end as the allocated three minutes were over. Which rule says a member cannot speak for more than three minutes. It is not good," she said.

The move is seen as an attempt by Mayawati to consolidate her core Dalit support base and re-establish herself as the sole leader of the community after facing a massive defeat in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections earlier this year. Her party could win only 18 seats while the BJP came to power by winning more than 300 of the 403 seats

Jab satta paksh mujhe apni baat rakhne ka bhi samay nahi de raha hai toh mera isteefa dena hi theek hai: Mayawati pic.twitter.com/gHiJcOuqNs  ANI (@ANI_news) July 18, 2017

Sources in the Rajya Sabha Secretariat told PTI the decision on accepting Mayawati's resignation lies with the chairman. Also, the format states that the resignation letter should be brief and should not mention the reasons. Her letter is three-page long.

There is a rule for both the houses of the Parliament which says that resignation by the members has to be unconditional. Mayawati's resignation is hence likely to be rejected, India Today reported.

On the second day of Monsoon Session, an angry Mayawati had in the Rajya Sabha threatened to quit the Upper House.

While elaborating the incidents in Saharanpur, Mayawati had said the Dalits had agreed to the district administration's order not to take out any procession or install a statue of BR Ambedkar on 14 April. But the followers of Maharana Pratap however took out a procession on 5 May, she said.

Mayawati, whose term in the Upper House is till April 2018, argued with Kurien asking how she could be prevented from raising the issue about her 'samaj' (community) and the Dalits. "I have not finished. You cannot do this," she said.

Before she could complete, Kurien asked her to sit and called the next speaker, saying "you cannot monopolise", which the BSP president found unacceptable.

"I have no moral right to be in the House if I am not allowed to put across my views on atrocities being committed against Dalits," she said.

Asking her to not make a speech, Kurien told Mayawati to seek a discussion after giving a notice under rule 267 that seeks adjournment of proceedings to take up an issue.

Refusing to budge, Mayawati said she had no right to be in the House if she cannot protect the rights of her community. "I am going to resign from the House," she said and walked out in a huff.

Her party colleagues led by Satish Mishra followed her but were back in the House soon to raise slogans against the alleged anti-Dalit policies of the government.

They also rushed into the Well to shout, "Dalit virodhi yeh sarkar nahi chalegi, nahi chalegi" (anti-Dalit government will not be tolerated), thereby disrupting Tuesday's proceedings.

With inputs from PTI
Information and broadcasting minister M Venkaiah Naidu has been selected as the NDA candidate for the post of vice-president, BJP president Amit Shah announced at a press conference on Monday evening.

Shah went on to say why Naidu deserves candidature of this post. "Naidu started as a student leader and rose through the ranks and all NDA allies support his candidature,"Shah said adding across the country and party lines, Naidu is respected as a minister.

Venkaiah ji has a lot of experience, all NDA allies have welcomed this decision: BJP President Amit Shah at a press conference in Delhi pic.twitter.com/TM5thMiQmj  ANI (@ANI_news) July 17, 2017

BREAKING -- NDA picks @MVenkaiahNaidu as their Vice-Presidential candidate. pic.twitter.com/3JfCsPic6N

Naidu will file his nomination on Tuesday at 11 am.

M Venkaiah Naidu is a fitting candidate for the office of vice-president, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Monday soon after the senior BJP leader was chosen as the ruling NDA's candidate. Modi described 68-year-old Naidu as a farmer's son who "brings years of experience in public life and is admired across the political spectrum".

He said he has always admired the hard work and tenacity of Naidu, currently a minister in his Cabinet holding the portfolios of Information and Broadcasting and Urban Development.

"I know @MVenkaiahNaidu Garu for years. Have always admired his hard work & tenacity. A fitting candidate for the office of Vice President," the prime minister tweeted, soon after the announcement of the decision of BJP's Parliamentary Board, the highest decision-making body of the party.

"The years of Parliamentary experience @MVenkaiahNaidu Garu has will help him discharge the important role of Rajya Sabha chairperson," Modi added. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Parliamentary Board met on Monday evening, sources told IANS. Prime Minister Narendra Modi reportedly attended the meeting.

Naidu, 68 and a former BJP president, met Modi and spoke with BJP president Amit Shah, the sources said.

Earlier, Naidu had stated categorically that there was no chance of him contesting the vice-presidential election.

"Never am I going to participate in vice-president election even if anyone compels me," Naidu said.

"Happiness for me is to meet people, be among them and serve them. I cannot stay away from people by taking up any ceremonial position," the minister added.

He had declared he would neither want to become the rashtrapati (president) nor uparashtrapati (vice president) but was happy being Usha's pati (his spouse).

"I wish to speak without any barriers and say what I feel, travel to different places, meet people and eat their food," he added.

Naidu has been pitted against Gopalkrishna Gandhi whose name was endorsed by all 18 Opposition parties, including the JD(U), which is backing the NDA's candidate in the presidential poll. The former West Bengal Governor will file his nomination tomorrow too.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, is an acclaimed civil servant, diplomat and governor, who is a strong votary of secular ethos, and has clear and independent views.

Gandhi, 72, had a distinguished career in the civil service before he became a diplomat and governor. Later, he turned an academic, author and columnist.

Gandhi's term as West Bengal governor between 2004-09 coincided with the violent land struggles in Singur and Nandigram that contributed to the Left losing its dominance in the state and Trinamool Congress replacing it in power in the state.

The term of Vice-President Hamid Ansari, who is also ex-officio chairman of the Rajya Sabha, ends on 10 August.

With inputs from agencies
Canberra: Australia on Wednesday released the first series of data and maps of the Indian Ocean seabed that the search teams scoured to locate the MH370, a Malaysia Airlines aircraft that disappeared in 2014 with 239 people on board.

Australia, which coordinated the search operation, along with China and Malaysia had focused on a lonely stretch of the Indian Ocean where experts believed the plane might have crashed, Efe news reported.

Geoscience Australia (GA), a government agency that carries out geoscientific research, drew the maps with the help of bathymetric data or topography of the selected marine area, and an underwater search was subsequently carried out over an area of 1,20,000 square kilometres.

Data from the second phase of the search will be released in mid-2018, GA said in a statement.

Between 10 and 15 percent of the seabed was analysed with this technology, said Stuart Minchin, Chief of Geoscience Australia's environmental geoscience division. He said the data is unique owing to the remote location of the area examined.

Data from the first phase show in great detail high crests, underwater volcanoes, enormous ridges and deep fault valleys across the remote ocean.

The data can contribute to a greater understanding of the geology of the seabed and throw light on the complexity of the processes that occur there, Minchin added.

MH370 disappeared from the radars on 8 March 2014, around 40 minutes after taking off from Kuala Lumpur and enroute to Beijing, when someone turned off the communication systems and changed the plane's route, according to the official investigation.

Malaysia, Australia and China called off the unsuccessful search, that cost an estimated $135 million, in January this year.

So far, parts of the plane have been recovered from beaches in the French island of Reunion, Mozambique, Mauritius, South Africa and the Pemba Island (Zanzibar).
Budapest, Hungary: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was caught Wednesday by a live microphone railing against the European Union's "crazy" insistence on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a precondition for closer ties.

Netanyahu was meeting with leaders of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia at a regional summit. Netanyahu was discussing Iran, Syria, the Islamic State group, and EU-Israel relations when some of his comments  and those of other leaders at the meeting closed to the media  were accidentally broadcast to journalists in another room covering the conference.

Netanyahu also made a rare public admission that Israel has struck Iranian arms convoys in Syria bound for Hezbollah "dozens and dozens of times." The Israeli premier was overheard blasting the EU's approach to Israel, saying "it's crazy. I think it's actually crazy" that the 28-nation bloc maintains that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must come before closer trade ties.

"There is no logic here. Europe is undermining its security by undermining Israel. Europe is undermining its progress by undermining the connection with Israeli innovation because of a crazy attempt to create conditions (for peace with the Palestinians)," said Netanyahu. European ties with Israel would determine whether the 28-member union would "live and thrive or shrivel and disappear," he added.

EU-Israel relations have been tense for years, with Jerusalem feeling that Brussels is targeting its policies far too much while being too soft on the Palestinians. While the EU is the main trading partner for Israel, frictions have persisted. Relations took a dive in November 2015 after Israel derided a decision by the bloc to label products made in Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The EU doesn't recognise Israeli sovereignty over territories it captured in the 1967 West Asia war, including the West Bank and east Jerusalem, where the Palestinians hope to establish a state. It has been a vocal critic of Israel's settlement construction and has adopted measures mandating the labeling of goods produced in West Bank settlements.

"The European Union is the only association of countries in the world that conditions the relations with Israel  that produces technology in every area  on political conditions. The only ones. Nobody does it," Netanyahu said, citing Russia, China and India's willingness to do business with Israel despite politics.

Netanyahu has pushed for closer trade ties with India and China in recent years. Earlier this month, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi paid a state visit to Israel, during which the two countries signed a number of trade agreements cementing increasingly warm relations.

During statements to the media after their meeting, Orban shared Netanyahu's view on the EU's relations with Israel, calling for a more rational approach with "significantly better ties" and less criticism of Israel. "The EU should value the efforts made by the state of Israel for stability in the region," Orban said. "This is of interest not only for Israel but for Europe, too, as it protects us from more and more migrant invasions."

"The EU's relations with Israel are not rational enough and need to be repaired," Orban added. "We'd like relations between the EU and Israel to be characterised by rationality. Instead of criticizing Israel, we should open the door to cooperation with Israel."

"If Europe fails to cooperate with Israel, it is punishing itself," Orban concluded. "This makes no sense." Orban's comments on Israel were in line with his similar views on countries like Turkey, Russia and China, where he also has chosen to emphasize improving ties and economic relations without delving, for example, into human rights issues.

Orban said the four Central European countries in the so-called Visegrad Group had accepted Netanyahu's invitation to hold an upcoming meeting in Israel. Hungary holds the rotating presidency of the Visegrad Group until June 2018.
Beijing: In a controversial move, China's ruling Communist Party has directed its nearly 90 million members to shun religion for maintaining party unity, warning that religious belief is a "redline" for the cadres and those who resist would be punished. The head of China's top religious affairs regulator said that party members should not seek value and faith in religion and those who have religious beliefs should be persuaded to give them up.

Experts said the direction is meant to maintain party unity, the official media reported today. "Party members should not have religious beliefs, which is a redline for all members...Party members should be firm Marxist atheists, obey party rules and stick to the party's faith...they are not allowed to seek value and belief in religion," Wang Zuoan, director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) wrote in an article released in the Qiushi Journal on Saturday, the flagship magazine of the CPC Central Committee.

Officials who have religious faith should be persuaded to give it up, and those who resist would be punished by the party organisation, Wang wrote. The order came as the CPC, which has about 88.76 million members, geared up to hold its 19th Congress expected to be in October this year in which President Xi Jinping who heads the party and the military is likely to get elected for another five-year term.

Wang said the party members are also forbidden from supporting or getting involved in religious affairs in the name of developing the economy or diversifying culture. Elaborating on the new order by the party, Zhu Weiqun, chairman of the Ethnic and Religious Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said "It is important that Wang constantly reminds Party members not to have religious beliefs. Some people who claim to be scholars support religious beliefs in the party, which has undermined the party's values based on dialectical materialism."

"Once the party's values are damaged, party unity as well as the party's basic policy to regulate religions would be sabotaged," Zhu told state-run Global Times. Wang also stressed the need for a firm political direction in managing religious affairs.

"We should guide religious groups and individuals with socialist core values and excellent traditional Chinese culture to dig into their doctrines to find parts that are beneficial to social harmony and development," Wang said.

Apparently referring to the fast-spreading Christianity in China, which Beijing apprehends posed a major threat as it could emerge as a force like in previously socialist countries like Poland to overthrow Communist Party rule, Wang said foreign forces are "infiltrating" into China in the name of religion.

China also has over 20 million Muslims. Xinjiang where the Turkik speaking Uygur Muslims are a majority is in turmoil as Uygurs were restive about the increasing settlements of majority Hans from other provinces.

Next to Buddhism, Christianity is regarded as the fastest growing religion in Communist China. Unofficial estimates say China has over 65 million Christians including Catholics, Protestants as well as other church groups.

The ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) has tenuous ties with Rome apprehending political impact of the rapid growth of Christianity as it could become a movement in later years challenging the CPCs power base. According to reports, a number of Chinese Christians were involved in preaching Christianity in Muslim countries.

Two Chinese nationals, accused of being involved in preaching in Pakistan, were killed allegedly by Islamic State militants in the restive Baluchistan province.

Recent reports spoke of backchannel contacts between Beijing and Vatican to establish diplomatic ties which broke off in 1951, two years after CPC came to power.

"Some foreign forces have used religion to infiltrate China, and extremism and illegal religious activities are spreading in some places, which have threatened national security and social stability," Wang added.

"Guiding religions to suit to China's development is a core policy to solve China's religious problems. The moves evolve with traditional Chinese values over years and meet the demand of socialist development," said Su Wei, a professor at the Party School of the CPC Chongqing Committee.

Some foreign forces have used religions, including Christianity and Islam, two non-local religions, to deliberately spread their political views in China, Su said, adding that some religious doctrines shall be adjusted to match Chinese ethics and customs.

Su also noted that the regulation banning party members from having religious beliefs would be permanent, but may involve more work in Northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Gansu Province as well as Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region.
They say Nero fiddled as Rome burned to the ground.

As Donald Trump's health care bill collapsed under the strain of its own contradictions, the man who would be the leader of the free world was playing with a fire truck and wearing a cowboy hat, much to the consternation of senior Republican leaders.

Politico reported that the president was reportedly clueless about the fate of his biggest legislative push as two conservative senators performed Trumpcare's last rites, even as he wined and dined senior members of his party at the oval office.

Trump reportedly pleaded with the Republican senators, saying they needed to repeal and replace the legislation passed and stated that if they failed, the Republicans would be in big trouble and look terrible, Politico reported.

After the bill was declared dead, the US president refused to take responsibility for the failure.

Indeed, it was a far cry from "The buck stops here."

Dealt a stinging defeat with the failure of the Republican healthcare bill in the Senate, Trump flipped the script from Harry Truman's famous declaration of presidential responsibility and declared Tuesday, "I am not going to own it."

He tweeted:

We were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans. Most Republicans were loyal, terrific & worked really hard. We will return!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2017

Repeal and replace crumbles

This is the same president who thundered night after night on the campaign trail that it would be "so easy" to repeal and replace the Obama health care law on Day One of his administration.

Try and tweet as he might, Trump can't now avoid a share of the blame for the stall-out of that repeal effort.

It's a president's burden to shoulder the nation's problems whether they are inherited or created in real time. Barack Obama took office with the American economy facing its worst crisis since the Great Depression. John F Kennedy accepted responsibility for the failure of the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, ordered on his own watch.

"That's the nature of being elected president: You own the policies, the economy and the government," said presidential historian Julian Zelizer, a professor at Princeton University. "You own the positives and negatives of the job whether you think it's your fault or not. You live in the White House: You can't disassociate yourself from what happens if you don't like it."

A shaky start

Trump took office armed with Republican control of both Houses of Congress and an ambitious agenda that would begin with the repeal and replacement of Obamacare. Six months later, the collapse of the GOP plan was a sharp rebuke for the president, who was unable to cajole or threaten Republicans to stay in line and who exerted little of his diminished political capital to see through a promise that had been at the core of his party since Obamacare became law seven years ago.

The president's disjointed support for the health care plan did little to persuade Republicans to support it, and the fact that his approval ratings had dropped below 40 percent didn't help either.

Trump never held a news conference or delivered a major speech to sell the bill to the public. He never leveraged his popularity among rank-and-file Republican voters by barnstorming the districts of wavering GOP senators. And he never spearheaded a coherent communications strategy  beyond random tweets  to push for the plan.

"The best way to motivate members is talk to their constituents and at no point did he try to talk to Americans about health care reform in any sort of serious way," said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who worked on Florida Senator Marco Rubio's 2016 presidential campaign. "His attention seems to drift with whatever is on cable news on any given moment as opposed to what is on the Senate floor any given week."

Sounding almost like a bystander during his brief Oval Office remarks Tuesday, Trump six times expressed "disappointment" that the Republican effort had failed. And he insisted the fault rested with Democrats and suggested Obamacare should be left to fail on its own.

"I'm not going to own it," Trump insisted. "I can tell you that Republicans are not going to own it."

Democrats blasted Trump's blame game, with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer saying his refusal to accept responsibility demonstrated "such a lack of leadership."

"That is such a small and petty response," Schumer said. "Because the president, he's in charge. And to hurt millions of people because he's angry he didn't get his way is not being a leader."

How the bill failed

Despite Trump's efforts to shift blame across the aisle, the White House made little effort to court Democrats.

Instead of initially pursuing an infrastructure plan  which would have likely received support from unions and blue-collar workers, making it hard for Democrats to oppose  Trump opted to tackle the far more polarising issue of health care first. He outsourced most of the work to House speaker Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.

It became a strictly Republican effort which, due to the party's slight advantages in the House and Senate, had little margin for error. And it was conservatives from Trump's own wing of the Republican party who thwarted him.

The conservative House Freedom Caucus defied him and ignored his Twitter threats. The two senators who withdrew their support Monday night, effectively killing the bill, didn't even give the White House a heads-up before announcing their decisions.

And even though Trump allies have threatened to aid primary challengers to a pair of on-the-fence senators  Jeff Flake of Arizona and Dean Heller of Nevada  the Republicans did not cave, potentially setting a worrisome precedent for the White House as it tries to move ahead with the rest of its stalled agenda.

Former speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump adviser, believes that both Congress and the White House share blame after seemingly forgetting that "Opposition parties pass press releases that get vetoed, while governing parties pass bills in which every paragraph gets scrutinised."

"I hope the president learns that do something really, really big, you need to be disciplined and focused and sort out your communications program," said Gingrich. "So far, they are clearly not capable of doing that."

With inputs from AP
United Nations: Four Arab nations that cut ties with Qatar have urged the tiny Gulf nation to commit to six principles on combatting extremism and terrorism and negotiate a plan with specific measures to implement them a step that could pave the way for an early resolution of the crisis.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain broke diplomatic relations with Qatar in early June largely over their allegations that it supports terrorist and extremist groups a charge Qatar rejects. They initially made 13 demands, which Qatar also dismissed.

Saudi Arabia's UN Ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi told a briefing for a group of UN correspondents that the four nations are now committed to the six principles agreed to by their foreign ministers at a meeting in Cairo on 5 July, and hope Qatar will support them as well.

The principles include commitments to combat extremism and terrorism, prevent financing and safe havens for such groups, and suspend all acts of provocation and speeches inciting hatred or violence.

Al-Mouallimi said the four-nation quartet thinks it "should be easy for the Qataris to accept" the six principles.

He stressed that implementation and monitoring must be "essential components," and "there will be no compromise when it comes to principles."

But he said both sides can talk about details of "the tactics" and "the tools" to implement them "and that's where we can have discussion and compromise."

The Saudi ambassador explained that the initial 13 points included some principles and some tools to achieve compliance.

Mixed in the 13 points were what Western nations might see as fair demands, such as cracking down on support for extremists and curbing ties with Iran, and tougher-to-swallow calls to shut down the Al-Jazeera television network one of Qatar's best-known brands and kick out troops from NATO member Turkey, which has a base in Qatar.

Al-Mouallimi stressed that stopping incitement to violence is essential, but he said closing Al-Jazeera might not be necessary.

"If the only way to achieve that is by closing down Al-Jazeera, fine," he said. "If we can achieve that without closing down Al-Jazeera, that's also fine. The important thing is the objective and the principle involved."

UAE Minister of State for International Cooperation Reem Al Hashimy said all the countries involved have strong relations with the United States "and we believe that the Americans have a very constructive and a very important role to play in hopefully creating a peaceful resolution to this current crisis."

President Donald Trump has sided strongly with Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the dispute, publicly backing their contention that Qatar is a supporter of Islamic militant groups and a destabilizing force in the Middle East.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently concluded several days of shuttle diplomacy and sealed a deal to intensify Qatar's counterterrorism efforts.

The memorandum of understanding signed by the US and Qatar lays out steps Qatar can take to bolster its fight against terrorism and address shortfalls in policing terrorism funding.

Al Hashimy called the MOU "an excellent step."

"We'd like to see more of that," she said. "We'd like to see stronger measures taken and stronger commitment made to address that."

Al Hashimy said "at this stage the ball is in Qatar's court."

"We're looking for a serious change in behavior, serious measures," she said. "No more talk."

Qatar has further escalated the situation by encouraging Turkey's military presence, Al Hashimy said.

"We do not want to see a military escalation of any kind," she said. "We hope to be able to resolve this internally and among ourselves with the assistance of strong mediation, whether it's from the US or the Kuwaitis."

Al-Mouallimi stressed that Qatar's future lies with its neighbors not with "faraway places," a clear reference to Turkey and Iran which are supporting Doha.

"Our Turkish brothers need to recognize that the era of covert and to some extent unwanted intervention in the Arab world has long gone," he said. "If Turkey wants to play a constructive role they are welcome to do so, but trying to find the role through military bases or military intervention would not be productive, and would not fare well for Turkey's reputation in the Arab world."

Diplomats from the four countries who attended the briefing said there have been discussions about possible next steps.

UAE Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh said that "if Qatar is unwilling to accept core principles around what defines terrorism or extremism in our region, it will be very difficult" for it to remain in the Gulf Cooperation Council with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain.

"So it may be a parting of ways for a little while in order to work things out," she said.

Al-Mouallimi said the quartet briefed the 10 elected Security Council members on Tuesday and hopes to meet the permanent members as well.

There are no plans to take the dispute to the UN's most powerful body, he said, but "if we develop the conviction that that is a necessary move forward, then we will do so."
Tehran: Iran's president said on Wednesday that his country will stand up to the United States and reciprocate for any new sanctions that America imposes on the Islamic Republic.

Hassan Rouhani's remarks came a day after the Trump administration announced new, non-nuclear sanctions on Iranians while at the same time warning Tehran that it would face consequences for breaching "the spirit" of the nuclear deal with world powers.

The new sanctions, perceived as the latest attempt to clamp down on Iran's military financing, target 18 Iranian individuals and groups, ranging from an Iranian-based company accused of aiding the country's drone program to a Turkey-based provider of naval equipment and a China-based network that helped secure electronics for Tehran.

If Washington, under any pretext, imposes new sanctions against Iran, "we will stand up to the United States," Rouhani said, adding that the "great nation of Iran will have an appropriate answer" and that the Iranian parliament will also act.

He did not elaborate. His speech, at a weekly cabinet meeting, was broadcast on state TV.

Rouhani, a 68-year-old cleric and political moderate who secured a resounding re-election over a hard-line opponent in May, has been increasingly outspoken against the US, calling relations with Washington "a curvy road" even as he touted the 2015 nuclear accord Iran secured with world powers.

The Trump administration on Monday confirmed that Iran had met its obligations under the 2015 nuclear deal but warned the country it would face consequences for breaching "the spirit" of the accord  a reference to Iran's continued pursued of a ballistic missile program.

Rouhani speculated that such statements seek to dissuade Iran from continuing to comply with the nuclear deal. The International Atomic Energy Agency already verified that Iran has lived up to its nuclear commitments.

"This plot will never succeed.We will always remain loyal to our international commitments," he added.

Iran's foreign ministry in a statement Tuesday condemned the latest US sanctions, calling them "mean and pointless" and said it will in return impose sanctions on more Americans.

Iran in April and May imposed reciprocal sanctions on dozens of American companies and individuals, alleging they support terrorism and repression against people in the region such as the Palestinians.
Washington: The United States has expressed concern over the Indo-China border stand-off in the Sikkim Sector and urged both countries to work together to try to come up with some sort of arrangement for peace.

"I know that the United States is concerned about the ongoing situation there," state department spokesperson Heather Nauert told reporters at her daily news conference.

She was responding to questions on India China border row in Sikkim which has carried on for more than a month now.

"We believe that both parties, both sides should work together to try to come up with some better sort of arrangement for peace," Nauert said.

China and India have been engaged in a standoff in the Dokalam area in the Sikkim sector, where Indian troops stopped road construction by Chinese soldiers on 16 June.

Doka La is the Indian name for the region which Bhutan recognises as Dokalam, while China claims it as part of its Donglang region.

Of the 3,488-km-long India-China border from Jammu and Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, a 220-km section falls in Sikkim.
Jakarta: The Indonesian government on Wednesday banned Hizbut Tahrir, an organisation that wants to establish a global caliphate, under a new presidential decree criticised as draconian by rights groups.

Hizbut's legal status had been revoked to protect national unity, said Freddy Haris, a director-general at the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights.

The decree signed last week by president Joko "Jokowi" Widodo gives the government almost unfettered power to ban organisations deemed against the constitution and the official state ideology known as Pancasila, which enshrines democracy and social justice.

Rights groups say the decree undermines the right to freedom of association and governments could easily abuse its power. But mainstream Muslim groups have supported it.

Haris said Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia listed Pancasila as an ideology of the organisation in its articles of association "but in fact on the ground their activities were against Pancasila and the soul of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia".

The measures follow months of sectarian tensions in the world's most populous Muslim nation that shook the government and undermined Indonesia's reputation for practising a moderate form of Islam.

Hizbut Tahrir, along with groups such as the violent Islamic Defenders Front, was behind a series of massive protests against the Jakarta governor, a minority Christian and Jokowi ally who was accused of blaspheming Islam.

He subsequently lost a bid for re-election to a Muslim candidate and was imprisoned for two years for blasphemy despite prosecutors downgrading the charge to a lesser offence.

Hizbut, already banned or circumscribed in some countries, is estimated to have tens of thousands of members in Indonesia.

About 2,000 people from Islamic groups protested against the decree in Jakarta yesterday, denouncing the government as repressive and tyrannical, and another protest is planned for today.

Jokowi's top security minister announced in May that the government planned to ban Hizbut but facing the prospect of a lengthy legal battle, Jokowi opted to sidestep courts with the controversial decree.

Separately, Rizieq Shihab, the leader of the Islamic Defenders Front, which gained a national platform for its hard-line views during the Jakarta protests, has fled Indonesia during a police investigation into alleged violations of Indonesia's anti-pornography law, which his supporters say are trumped up charges.
Al-Alam, a state-run Iranian news agency, has accused hackers from Saudi Arabia of posting a fabricated news story on their Twitter account, CNN has reported.

A tweet from Al-Alam's account claimed that Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani had asked Iranian president Hassan Rouhani to establish an Iranian military base in Qatar. The tweet did not link to any story on the Al-Alam website. According to CNN, the tweet could give further rise to tensions in the region where Qatar has been facing a blockade by Saudi Arabia and its allies.

Al-Alam posted a statement on its website which explained the situation. They also insisted that "Saudi news agencies and websites, though fully aware of the fact that Al-Alam's Twitter account has been hacked, publish these false news stories immediately, designating their collusion with the hackers."

They have also said their account has not been reinstated by Twitter despite numerous legal investigations.

This incident comes in the light of other reports of cyber-attacks in the region. A report in The Washington Post had said that the United Arab Emirates orchestrated the hacking of a Qatari government news site in May, planting a false story that was used as a pretext for the current crisis between Qatar and several Arab countries.

The Emirati embassy in Washington released a statement in response calling the report "false" and insisting that the UAE "had no role whatsoever" in the alleged hacking.

The report quotes unnamed US intelligence officials as saying that senior members of the Emirati government discussed the plan on 23 May. On the following day, a story appeared on the Qatari news agency's website quoting a speech by Qatar's emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, in which he allegedly praised Iran and said Qatar has a good relationship with Israel.

Similarly incendiary statements appeared on the news agency's Twitter feed.

The agency quickly claimed it was hacked and removed the article. But Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt all blocked Qatari media and later severed diplomatic ties.

Qatar called the reported involvement of the United Arab Emirates in hacking its government news site in May "unfortunate" and a breach of agreements among the Gulf countries.

In May, Qatar-based broadcaster Al-Jazeera had said that it was under a wide scale cyber attack which had targeted "all systems".

"Al Jazeera Media Network under cyber attack on all systems, websites & social media platforms," it said on Twitter. The attack was also confirmed by a source at Al Jazeera, who said the broadcaster was attempting to repel the hack. "An attempt has been made, and we are trying to battle it," said the source.

With inputs from agencies
Quetta: Pakistani police says gunmen riding on a motorcycle opened fire, killing four members of a Shia family and their driver in the country's southwest.

Local police chief Mohammad Ishaq says the drive-by shooting took place in the town of Mastung, about 75 kilometers south of the city of Quetta, Baluchistan's provincial capital.

He says a woman was among the four family members killed and that the family's driver was Sunni.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack but outlawed Sunni extremist groups have claimed similar attacks in the past. Sunni extremists view Shias as apostates deserving of death.

Baluchistan has also been the scene of a low-level insurgency by separatists demanding more autonomy and a greater share in the region's natural resources such as gas and oil.
Embattled Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday contested the graft charges against him and his family in the Supreme Court, saying the Panama probe panel did not produce any document to prove that he was the owner of the posh London flats which are at the centre of the high-profile case.

The apex court had started hearing the scandal on Monday after the JIT submitted its final report on 10 July, recommending that a corruption case be filed against Sharif and his family for alleged money laundering in the 1990s, when he twice served as prime minister, to purchase assets in London.

Sharif's lawyer Khawaja Harris stressed that the JIT "did not level any specific charge of corruption against Sharif."

He also said that the JIT has not produced any document to prove that Sharif, 67, was the owner of the London flats.

Harris's arguments were directed at the six-member JIT, two of whom were from the Inter-Services Intelligence and the Military Intelligence.

He said the JIT had overstepped its mandate given to it by the court and had based its findings on the documents, which were of no evidentiary value as per the Pakistani laws. If Sharif loses the case in the Supreme Court, it could cost him his premiership, throwing Pakistan into a turmoil.

Sharif has refused to quit, calling the JIT report a compilation of "allegations and assumptions". His decision to stay in power was endorsed by the federal cabinet last week.However, the three-member apex bench observed that Sharif has not provided the details of all assets and source of income in the form of his tax returns

However, the three-member apex bench observed that Sharif has not provided the details of all assets and source of income in the form of his tax returns.

Justice Ijazul Ahsan said the Sharif family has not produced any document to prove that the prime minister's son Hussain Nawaz was the original owner of the London flats. He said JIT has found that Sharif's daughter Maryam was the real owner of those apartments.

Justice Ejaz Afzal told Sharif's counsel that the Sharif family has not provided the money trail to establish that the London flats were legally purchased.

"We have been waiting for them since day one to come forward and provide the money trail," he said, but added that the court would decide the case on the basis of evidence and it was not bound by the findings of the JIT.

Justice Azmat Saeed Sheikh raised questions about the sources of funds used to set up the Hill Metal steel company in Saudi Arabia, which is allegedly owned by the Sharifs.

The judges appeared quite aggressive and grilled Sharif's counsel about the source of money used to establish businesses in Gulf and the UK by the Sharif family.

"The real question is where did the money for (family) properties in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and London come from? We have not yet received an answer to this fundamental question," Justice Ijazul Ahsan said.

The bench also asked Sharif's counsel whether the court should decide the case by its opinion over the concealment of facts or refer the case to an accountability court for trial.

The counsel urged the court to decide it on merit and stressed that the JIT was biased and his client had done nothing illegal.

Later, finance minister Ishaq Dar's counsel began his arguments but the court adjourned the case until Thursday.

The scandal surfaced when the Panama Papers leaks last year revealed that Sharif's sons - Hassan and Hussain - and his daughter Maryam owned offshore companies which managed their family's properties. The assets in question include four expensive flats in Park Lane, London.

Opposition parties allege that the London flats were purchased through illegal money which Sharif and his family have rejected.
Successful healthcare reform should base on the introduction of mandatory medical insurance and the setting of the clear percentage of GDP for healthcare expenses in Ukrainian legislation, Head of the parliamentary healthcare committee Olha Bohomolets has said.

"What another way do we have? This is the setting of percentage of GDP and the introduction of mandatory medical insurance," she said at a meeting of the committee leaders with representatives of the healthcare commission of regional and district councils.

Bohomolets said that mandatory medical insurance envisages a tool for creating a new pool of funds, which are not enough today. They are to enter the healthcare system.

She said that the bill proposed by the Health Ministry on government financial guarantees for the provision of healthcare services and medicines (No. 6327) foresees guaranteed financing which would allow covering only minimum needs. It does not take into account the necessity of financing secondary and specialized medical care.

She believes that the implementation of the ministry's initiatives would not allow financing specialized medical care, while today up to 80% of the healthcare budget is spent on it.

She said that bill No. 6327 does not offer the ways for looking for new sources of financing.

Bohomolets said that the profile committee has drawn up a legislative base for healthcare reform with bills on mandatory medical insurance, on the principles of the state healthcare policy and on the organization of the provision of healthcare services.
Islamabad: A day after Pakistan's Supreme Court inquired about Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's money trail, his counsel said details of all his assets had been presented to the Joint Investigation Team (JIT).

Sharif had provided details of all assets and sources of income in the form of tax returns that was mandated to probe allegations of money laundering against the Sharif family, Dawn quoted senior counsel Khawaja Harris as telling the three-member apex bench.

On the court's observation that Sharif had remained evasive in answering the JIT's questions, Harris said the team had not inquired about any other properties, maintaining that his client had not concealed any assets, nor did he own any benami properties.

Harris argued that according to the laws of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), "an individual cannot be held accountable for the properties and assets that are in the name of his wife and children".

He maintained that the prime minister's relatives had also not concealed any assets.

During Tuesday's hearing, the court had asked about Sharif's money trail, saying: "We've been waiting for it since day one."

The prime minister and his family members had remained evasive in answering the questions put forward by the JIT, it added.

The apex bench had also asked counsel whether the judges should form their own opinion on the concealment of facts or refer the matter to an accountability court.

Harris had argued that the JIT had exceeded its mandate by recommending the Supreme Court to reopen 15 cases against Sharif. He also questioned authenticity of the documents obtained from Britain and the UAE that were included in the JIT's report.

The bench had resumed the Panamagate case on Monday, nearly three months after ordering the formation of a JIT to investigate the allegations of money laundering against the Sharif family.
Manila: Four of Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte's bodyguards were shot and wounded on Wednesday by suspected Communist rebels a day after the insurgents warned of attacks, authorities said.

Duterte was not in the convoy when gunmen opened fire on two Presidential Security Group vehicles along a highway on the main southern island of Mindanao, they added.

A military official blamed the New People's Army  the 4,000-member armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines  for the ambush.

"This is part of their nationwide call for armed groups to oppose martial law by launching intensified offensives against government forces," Brigadier General Gilberto Gapay, a senior Mindanao military official, told radio station DZBB in Manila.

The ambush came a day after Duterte asked Congress for authorisation to place Mindanao under martial law until December to defeat Islamic State group-styled militants fighting security forces in the city of Marawi.

A 60-day martial rule is already in place over the island after the militants attacked Marawi on 23 May, but Duterte conceded Tuesday he needed more time to defeat the Islamic State-styled gunmen.

The communist party, which has been waging Asia's longest insurgency, called on its armed wing on Tuesday to launch offensives in response to Duterte's extended martial law plan.

The wounded soldiers were on their way to another Mindanao city when they ran into a checkpoint manned by guerrillas, their commander Louie Dagoy told reporters.

"Our troops were able to fire back and they called for help from a nearby militia base," a regional military spokesman, Major Ezra Balagtey, told AFP.

The communist insurgency that began in 1968 has claimed an estimated 30,000 lives, according to the military.

The rebels have been in on-and-off peace talks with the government since Duterte, a self-described socialist, was elected in 2016.

They were set to resume formal negotiations in August.

On Tuesday, Duterte denounced the rebels for their alleged treachery in killing soldiers.

Saying the rebels were targeting soldiers who are not allowed to carry their assault rifles when they went off-duty, Duterte announced he was providing all of them with pistols for self-defence.

"The majority of the people have repudiated communism with all its brutality, and (they have) nothing really to offer to the country. It's almost bankrupt," Duterte added.
The reports of 'fake news' cyber attack on Qatari news agencies and the vehement denial by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), brings to mind one of PG Wodehouses iconic characters. When caught red handed at some underhanded deal by his aristocratic sister, the trembling Lord Emsworth was advised to stick to the policy of "stout denial" and admit nothing. The policy worked well for the embattled peer, but probably wont for the royals who head the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Somebody has spilt the beans.

It may be recalled that late in the night of 21 May, 2017 hackers planted a story on Qatar state television which showed the Emir of Qatar addressing a military graduation ceremony. While the audio was suppressed, an online ticker alleged that the Emir had expressed support for Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Israel, and worse, prophesied a short tenure for the Trump presidency.

The Qatar News Agencys Twitter account was also briefly hacked, where remarks were attributed to the foreign minister calling for removal of ambassadors from various Gulf countries. Qatar immediately denied that any such remarks were made, but the story was picked up by Arab news channels, leading to a virtual storm of criticism. Worse, Saudi Arabia and UAE then blacked out all Qatari TV news channels  including Al Jazeera  ensuring that the denials by the Qatari government of any such remarks quite literally fell on deaf ears. If the intention was to create a crisis, it succeeded. About two weeks later, the Saudi-led alliance announced what was in effect, a modern day blockade on Qatar.

It is now reported that the whole sorry tale did start from the UAE, as Qatar had alleged all the while. The Washington Post reported that US intelligence agencies were able to home in on a 23 May meeting meeting of senior UAE officials, where the plan to hack into Qatars national Television was probably made. While the jury is still out on whether the UAE was directly responsible  or instigated it  what is notable is the use of cyberspace to create conditions necessary to pressure a country and create near-war conditions.

To most of us, the threat of cyber war seems faintly incredible. While the jargon of the cyberage like bots, worms, blackhats and whitehats are now part of our conversation, the fact that it could actually be part of war making, still seems part of Hollywood popcorn. But cyber warfare is already out there, and has been, for some time. The Stuxnet virus that was induced into the Iranian nuclear program was detected way back in 2010, after it had attacked at least 15 Iranian facilities including the Bushehr unit, which reportedly damaged 984 centrifuges. The attack virtually put paid to Iranian nuclear ambitions for several years.

The source of the attack was never traced, though Edward Snowden was quoted as saying that it had been a joint US-Israeli effort. As analysts studied the virus, it was realised that it had infected several hundred thousand computers through a Windows OS programme, but did not cause damage elsewhere, because that was not what it was designed to do. So thats the two worst things of a cyber attack. Finding its source is a hundred times difficult than the proverbial needle in the haystack. At least, the haystack is a physical, and a given entity. Notice that the CIA did not "trace" the source of the hacking on Qatar to UAE. What it did apparently find, however, was evidence of a meeting of officials.

More recently, another cyber attack was waged in a near war-like situation. In 2014, the situation in Ukraine began to climb into violence as the pro-Russian president was removed following the Euromaidan protests. Soon after, Russian special forces were said to have infiltrated into Crimea, and later effectively annexed it. As Russian speaking populations in other parts of Ukraine also began to rebel and the situation worsened, a severe cyber attack hit the power grid leaving around 700,000 homes in the area of Ivano-Frankvisk without electricity. The date was 23 December, the height of winter when the temperature drops to minus four. Researchers linked it to a malware called Black Energy that was designed to prevent computers from rebooting. This was the first attack on a countrys energy system, and it was the first known systematic attack on a country as part of a war effort.

A year later, it emerged that the good guys were also engaged in cyber warfare against the most violent group of this century, the Islamic State. In 2016, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced what was the first wartime assignment of the countrys Cyber Command. While no details were released, experts note that this could be waged on two fronts.

First is a world wide, relatively open US-led effort to counter the extremely sophisticated messaging that the Islamic State uses to recruit young Muslims to fight for an Islamic Caliphate. That effort is mostly tied to counter-messaging, where the weaknesses and the failures of the Islamic State are highlighted, and sometimes invented.

While experts claim that terrorist recruitment dropped from 2,000 a month to barely 500, it must be kept in mind that the reverse would have been the case if Islamic State had continued its victorious grabbing of territory. The crux of this effort is therefore still tied to military success on the battlefield, where the Islamic State is credibly seen as failing in its tall claims.

A second cyber effort may have directly led to crippling of the Islamic State war machine. Attacks have been launched on the Islamic State computer network that purportedly included false messages to and from commanders, thus leading Islamic State forces into a trap, where they were killed from the air or by 'allies' on the ground. The other hints that were dropped were about cyber attacks against financial networks and the entire communications effort of the group. Whether or not such efforts worked is unclear. But discreet publicity would well have worked its way into the Islamic State command system and its "trust" factor. On the US side, it meant more money for large corporations like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and others who had all jumped on the "cyber" gravy train.

There is clearly a downside to the use of this new arm of warfare. In June this year, a huge cyber attack, originating from Ukraine spread across much of the world. In Kiev, technicians had to shift to manual overdrive to monitor radiation at the damaged Chernobyl nuclear site while shipping companies like Maersk and drug companies in the US scrambled to respond. It emerged that the attack used the same hacking tools used earlier (May 2017) in the Wanna Cry attack, which was derived from hacking tools originating from the National Security Agency of the United States. It seemed that the worm had quite literally turned. As with the nuclear genie, which slipped out from US shores, it is now open season for cyber criminals and warriors.

As technology moves forward, it is tempting to see cyber war as the new form of war that will swiftly replace tanks, aircraft and artillery guns that still form the nucleus of a countrys battle readiness. As indicated above, this is far from the truth. To win, you still need to hold ground, or allow your ally to do so. Cyber warfare can help you get there, but as of now, it is just another medium through which war can be fought for a larger objective.

So, what is the objective of what analysts call the "new age warfare" of the present? It is certainly true that technology has changed the way we fight. The skill of the charioteer has given way to the brain of the supercomputer, but it still hasnt changed the basics of war. A war has been and will always be a duel between two or more sides, where one side will seek to compel the other to accede to its demands. At all times in history, this compellence has involved using all available weapons including espionage, psychological warfare, and quite simply the strategic use of deceit. Cyber warfare allows one to do all the above, faster and in a far greater area. The trouble is, as with all new technologies, that it has got out of hand. When the Vedic warrior found that his brand new arrows made from the finest of bamboo and iron heads had been rudely replicated by the opposing side, his generals would have hastened to invest the best possible shields for the defense of their king. This is exactly the present state of the cyber realm. The only difference is that the arrows are raining in from all directions with the shield being pierced even before it is invented. So, it is not war that has changed. The challenge is detecting that you are at war, long before a bullet has even been loaded by either side.
New Delhi: Australian foreign minister Julia Bishop on Tuesday called for a peaceful resolution of the standoff between Chinese and Indian troops at Dokalam in Sikkim sector, an issue which she discussed during her meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and senior cabinet ministers.

"My understanding is this it is long-standing dispute...It was a subject of discussion today. Australia's position is that border disputes, territorial disputes should be resolved peacefully between the claimant countries...We don't want to see any escalation of tensions which could lead to a miscalculation or misjudgement," Bishop told reporters.

The visiting minister also said, "In the case of maritime disputes we said it should be subjected to arbitration under the UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea), if necessary. Land disputes should be resolved peacefully between the competing claimants and urge the countries to do that."

Earlier, during a meeting with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, Bishop had condemned the Amarnath terror attack and conveyed her country's resolve to fight all terrorism. The Australian minister also held talks with Defence Minister Arun Jaitley.

Bishop talked about cooperation between India and Australia in key areas of trade, energy and defence during the media interaction.

"First shipment is on its way," she said when asked about the status of supply of uranium to India.

She also noted that all the necessary parliamentary clearances to activate the bilateral civil nuclear supply agreement had been accomplished.

On India not allowing Australia to join the Malabar naval exercises, Bishop said she had not asked for an explanation from the Indian leadership.

"It's not upsetting, it is a question of priorities for each country...Australia conducts many exercises that India is not a part of. We said Australia would like to be part of Malabar exercises in the future. We are all working together to maintain relative peace and security and stability in our region," she said.

India recently completed the Malabar exercises with the United States and Japan.
New Delhi: Britain's Chief of the Defence Staff, air chief marshal Stuart Peach, is visiting India this week and will meet Indian ministers and military officers to further reinforce the bilateral defence and security partnership.

Under the umbrella of the 2015 Defence and International Security Partnership, Stuart will meet Indian ministers and officers, a British high commission statement said.

His meetings will cover the growing strategic defence relationship through the recently established Capability Partnerships, the threat of terrorism and extremism faced globally, multinational cooperation, upcoming exercises and UN Peacekeeping, the statement said.

Stuart, the most senior military officer in the UK Defence Forces, last visited India in April 2015 as Britain's Vice Chief of the Defence Staff.

Ahead of his visit, Stuart said: "I very much look forward to visiting India again. It is not only our shared history and democratic values that bind us together; but increasingly it is the threats and challenges to these values, that we face in an ever changing global environment, that bring us closer together, making the UK and India truly strategic defence partners.

"Whether standing shoulder to shoulder in countering terrorism and violent extremism, undertaking UN Peacekeeping operations, or forging ahead on developing advanced equipment programmes, the UK-India partnership is an enviable one internationally.

"I intend to ensure that my visit demonstrates further that the UK's commitment to India and our relationship is undisputed, now and for the future."

Stuart will visit New Delhi and Kolkata over four days. In addition to official calls and engagements, he will pay his respects to the 74,000 Indians who served and died in the World War I by laying a wreath at India Gate.

UK's Secretary of State for Defence Michael Fallon visited New Delhi in April 2017.

Stuart will also touch upon the defence industry and the UK's support to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Make in India' campaign.
Washington: The US on Wednesday listed Pakistan among the nations and regions providing "safe havens" to terrorists, saying terror groups like the LeT and JeM continue to operate, train, organise and fundraise inside the country in 2016.

In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the state department said that Pakistani military and security forces undertook operations against groups that conducted attacks within Pakistan such as Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan.

"Pakistan did not take substantial action against the Afghan Taliban or Haqqani, or substantially limit their ability to threaten US interests in Afghanistan, although Pakistan supported efforts to bring both groups into an Afghan-led peace process," the state department said.

"Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in 2016, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan," the report said.

India, it said continued to experience attacks, "including by Maoist insurgents and Pakistan-based terrorists".

Indian authorities continued to blame Pakistan for cross-border attacks in Jammu and Kashmir, it said.

"In January, India experienced a terrorist attack against an Indian military facility in Pathankot, Punjab, which was blamed by authorities on JeM. Over the course of 2016, the Government of India sought to deepen counterterrorism cooperation and information sharing with the United States," the state department said.

The Indian government continued to closely monitor the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like Islamic State and Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), which made threats against India in their terrorist propaganda. A number of individuals were arrested for Islamic State-affiliated recruitment and attack plotting within India, the report said.

In a separate chapter, the state department listed Pakistan as one of the safe havens of terrorism.

The state department said that numerous terrorist groups, including the Haqqani Network (HQN), the LeT and JeM continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2016.

"Although LeT is banned in Pakistan, LeT's wings Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FiF) were able to openly engage in fundraising, including in the capital," it said.

"LeT's chief Hafiz Saeed (a UN-designated terrorist) continued to address large rallies, although, in February 2017, Pakistan prescribed him under relevant provisions of schedule four of the Anti-Terrorism Act, thus severely restricting his freedom of movement," it noted.

The 2015 ban on media coverage of Saeed, JuD, and FiF continued and was generally followed by broadcast and print media, it said.

According to the state department, the Pakistani government did not publicly reverse its December 2015 declaration that neither JuD nor FiF is banned in Pakistan, despite their listing under UN sanctions regimes, although in January 2017, Pakistan placed both organisations "under observation" pursuant to schedule two of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

While not a ban, keeping the outfits under observation allows the government to closely scrutinise the activities of both organisations.

On 11 November, Pakistan's National Counterterrorism Authority published its own list of banned organisations that placed JuD in a separate section for groups that are "under observation" but not banned.

Pakistan continued military operations to eradicate terrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, although their impact on all terrorist groups was uneven, it said.

In its report to the Congress, the State Department said in 2016, India and the United States pledged to strengthen cooperation against terrorist threats from groups including Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, JeM, LeT and D-Company (Dawood Ibrahim's group), including through greater collaboration on designations at the UN.

Indian and US leaders directed officials to identify new areas of collaboration through the July US-India Counterterrorism Joint Working Group, applauded finalisation of a bilateral arrangement to facilitate the sharing of terrorism screening information, and called upon Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of terrorist attacks against India to justice, the report said.

The United States and India worked together to designate JeM leader Maulana Masood Azhar, although the listing was blocked in the UN 1267 Committee, the state department said.

Other areas mentioned in the report as safe havens are Afghanistan, Somalia, the Trans-Sahara, Sulu/Sulawesi Seas Littoral, Southern Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Columbia and Venezuela.
Washington: The US on Tuesday announced fresh sanctions against Iran, targeting 18 individuals or entities for supporting the country's ballistic missile programme or militant groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad that threaten Israel and stability in West Asia.

The move came a day after the Trump administration told the Congress that Iran is complying with the nuclear deal signed two years ago with the US and other world powers, and as such would continue to be exempted from American sanctions.

However, the state department today said "Iran's other malign activities are serving to undercut whatever positive contributions to regional and international peace and security were intended to emerge" from the nuclear deal.

"In response to these continued Iranian threats, the Administration today announces that it has designated 18 entities and individuals supporting Iran's ballistic missile programme and for supporting Irans military procurement or Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as well as an Iran-based transnational criminal organisation and associated persons," State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert said.

Nauert also accused Iran of supporting militant groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad "that threaten Israel and stability in the Middle East."

Iran continues to test and develop ballistic missiles in direct defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, the spokesperson said.

On Monday, the State Department notified the Congress that the US continues to waive sanctions as required to continue implementing sanctions-lifting commitments in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

"The US will continue to use sanctions to target those who lend support to Irans destabilising behavior and above all, the US will never allow the regime in Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon," the spokesperson said.

Nauert said the US remains deeply concerned about "Irans malign activities" across the Middle East which undermine regional stability, security, and prosperity.

Alleging that Iran has maintained its steadfast support for the Assad regime, despite Assads atrocities against his own people, the State Department said Tehran also continues to provide the Houthi rebels in Yemen with advanced weaponry that threatens freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, has been used to attack Saudi Arabia, and is prolonging the Yemen conflict.

In its report, the Trump administration told the Congress that Iran remains one of the most dangerous threats to US interests and to regional stability.

It also highlighted the range of malign activities by Iran that extend well beyond the nuclear realm.

"The president and the Secretary of State judge that these Iranian activities merely undermine the intent of the JCPOA, which was to contribute to regional and international peace and security.

"And as a result, the President, the Secretary of State, and the entire administration judge that Iran is unquestionably in default of the spirit of the JCPOA," said a senior administration official on anonymity.

"There have been a number of years of concessions to the Iranian regime, and the administration does not intend to overlook those any further. In previous years, US policy pertaining to Iran made the JCPOA the centerpiece of the US approach. And that narrow approach led us to overlook some of the broader, malign behaviors that the Iranian regime conducted, particularly in its region," the official said.

Moving forward, the administration intends to employ a strategy that will address the totality of Iran's malign behavior and not narrowly focus just on the Iranian nuclear agreement, the official added.

It has been a longstanding complaint that the previous administration allowed the nuclear deal to be the "tail that wags the Iran policy dog", the official said, adding that the Trump administration is determined to not repeat that mistake.

In the past, the official alleged, Iran had taken advantage of the previous administration's permissive view of the number of centrifuges that Iran is allowed to operate as part of its research and development plan.

"In concert with our European allies, we have determined that we need to approach those things more stringently," the official added.
Washington: The US on Wednesday said Iran continues to be the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism along with Sudan and Syria.

All the three countries have been on this list of the US for the past several decades.

Iran was designated as state sponsor of terrorism in 1984 and Sudan in 1993. Syria was designated as state sponsor of terrorism way back in 1979.

In its annual report to the Congress, the State Department alleged that the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad continued its political and military support to a variety of terrorist groups affecting the stability of the region as the Syrian conflict entered its sixth year.

The regime continued to provide political and weapons support to Hezbollah and continued to allow Iran to rearm the terrorist organisation, it said.

The Assad regimes relationship with Hezbollah and Iran grew stronger in 2016 as the regime became more reliant on external actors to militarily fight the Syrian opposition, it said.

Iran, the report alleged, continued its terrorist-related activity in 2016, including support for Hezbollah, Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza, and various groups in Syria, Iraq, and throughout West Asia.

Iran used the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) to implement foreign policy goals, provide cover for intelligence operations, and create instability in West Asia, it alleged.

According to the State Department, in 2016, Iran supported various Iraqi Shia terrorist groups, including Kataib Hizballah, as part of an effort to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and bolster the Assad regime in Syria.

Iran has historically provided weapons, training, and funding to Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, including Palestine Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, the report alleged.

The report indicated that Sudan, which was designated as a state sponsor of terrorism in 1993 due to concerns about support to international terrorist groups, including the Abu Nidal Organization, Palestine Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Hezbollah, could be taken off the list.

"Notwithstanding this history, countering terrorism is today a national security priority for Sudan, and Sudan is a cooperative partner of the United States on counter-terrorism, despite its continued presence on the State Sponsors of Terrorism List," the State Department said.

"Sudan takes seriously the threat posed by Islamic State, and in September 2016, the US government acknowledged the Government of Sudans significant efforts to counter the Islamic State and other terrorist groups and to prevent their movement into and through Sudan. Earlier, in June 2016, a senior US official praised Sudan for its counter-terrorism efforts as well, the report said.

To designate a country as a state sponsor of terrorism, the secretary of state must determine that the government of that country has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism.

Once a country is designated, it remains a state sponsor of terrorism until the designation is rescinded in accordance with statutory criteria.

A wide range of sanctions are imposed as a result of a state sponsor of terrorism designation, including a ban on arms-related exports and sales; controls over exports of dual-use items, prohibitions on economic assistance; and imposition of miscellaneous financial and other restrictions.
After six months in office, Donald Trump's approval rating is the lowest of any American President since polling began.

Trump's popularity continues to decrease as the scandal over his team's possible collusion with Russia in an alleged bid to influence last year's election continues to grow. The federal investigation has now engulfed both his son, Donald Jr, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. During all this, Trump hit back to critics on Twitter, and called the probe a witch hunt, while saying that he wants to remain focused on fulfilling his policy platform, like his campaign promise to reform the healthcare system. But his healthcare policies are also slowing down. Internal party divisions among the Republicans in Congress is hampering progress. A proposed, then twice revised, bill failed to get the votes needed to pass the Senate.

In his six months, the president has however signed a slew of executive orders, one of them his much touted Muslim travel ban. Both versions of this order were struck down by the courts. But the ban eventually came into partial effect, a decision taken by the Supreme Court, until it hears the full case in October. Across the country, this ban drew mass protests, and globally, was denounced by numerous world leaders.

Another controversial decision of Trump's was to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. It was another decision that received the criticism of world leaders and people alike. The US head of state has also slashed the budget for the Environmental Protection Agency, and rolled back regulation aimed at curbing pollution and emissions.

In the arena of diplomacy, Trump has ramped up tensions with China, following North Korea's missile tests. He has put himself at odds with Russia over Syria, going against his own advice to Barack Obama and launching a military strike.

The President has stood firm by his pledge to put America First in international meetings and multinational deals, notably by announcing the US would renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

And yet, despite the controversy that has dogged his nearly every move, continuing economic growth and job creation means support from his base remains undiminished.
The number of electronic public services would grow by the end of 2017, while the Cabinet of Ministers would launch the updated online portal, Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman has said.

"First we have introduced six electronic services. By the end of this year there will be more of them and the main thing that these are pilot projects where we have own experience. I would like that each Ukrainian citizen could have a chance of receiving any public service without speaking to an official when visiting the portal of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine which would be updated in the near term," the prime minister said at a government meeting on Wednesday.

Groysman said that 1,000 families used a chance of registering newborn babies on the electronic portal. The commissioning of facilities after construction completion is started online.
The Mobile ID electronic identification technology could be introduced by mobile operators by the end of 2017, Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman has said.

"I think that this year we would expand the possibilities of Mobile ID. We are working on the issue. I think that this year we would make the relevant decisions," he said at a government meeting on Wednesday.

Earlier Groysman called on all mobile operators to create the identical system that would be clear for users. He said that the government is ready to support the idea in the legal field  to form a package of legislative initiatives for the implementation of mobile identification.

Using Mobile ID mobile communications users would be able to sign documents in the electronic form, pay for services and receive access to protected e-documents using their mobile phones.

Mobile ID provides for the creation of an infrastructure for interaction between mobile operators' networks, key certification centers and various electronic interaction portals with citizens, providing mobile phone owners with special SIM cards with built-in identification algorithms. Since 2000, similar services have been introduced in most EU countries, as well as in Moldova, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Kazakhstan.
Using its patented nanotechnology, Capsoil Food Tech has developed a unique, water-soluble vitamin D powder which is touted as unlike anything else on the... Read More
Govt approves Naftogaz's financial plan for 2017 with net profit of UAH 21.8 bln

The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine at a meeting on Wednesday approved a financial plan of national joint-stock company Naftogaz Ukrainy as a separate legal entity for 2017 with expected net profit of UAH 21.781 billion, which is 17.9% less than in 2016 (UAH 26.529 billion).

According to the draft document, net revenue of Naftogaz could grow by 29.5% compared to 2016, to UAH 208.944 billion. UAH 147.034 billion could be received from wholesale trade with fuel (UAH 99.591 billion in 2016) and UAH 61.402 billion  from transit and internal transportation of gas (UAH 61.385 billion in 2016).

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economic Development and Trade Stepan Kubiv proposed to review the revenue figures in the financial plan for 2017, taking into account the prices as of April 1, 2017.

Gross profit would fall by 7.6%, to UAH 41.664 billion.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) in 2017 are approved at UAH 14.211 billion, which is 60% less than in 2016 (UAH 34.874 billion).

Operating profitability is expected at 10% compared to 16% in 2016.

Capital investment is approved at UAH 1.11 billion compared with UAH 36.011 million in 2016.

According to the explanatory note to the document, Naftogaz could import 8.5 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas in 2017, sell 25.5 bcm of gas and have transit of 74 bcm of gas.

Average price of imported gas, taking into account the cost of entering the Ukrainian gas transport system, is $245 per 1,000 cubic meters at the exchange rate of $27.60.
This blog covers software patent news and issues with a particular focus on wireless, mobile devices (smartphones, tablet computers, connected cars) as well as select antitrust matters surrounding those devices.
Cake and conversation, it seems, can go only so far to mend longstanding economic rifts between the United States and China.

Three months after President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, shared chocolate cake at an amiable summit in Florida, tensions between the world's two biggest economies are flaring again.

Just as officials of the two nations prepare to meet Wednesday in Washington, the Trump administration is considering slapping tariffs on steel imports, a step that risks igniting a trade war. For the United States, it's a perilous option to address a problem caused largely by China's overproduction of steel.

And Trump is criticizing China again for failing to use its economic leverage to rein in its neighbor and ally, the nuclear rogue state North Korea.

Could this week's U.S.-China Comprehensive Dialogue produce a meaningful breakthrough in economic relations?

Most China watchers are skeptical.

"I'm not looking for anything worthwhile," says Derek Scissors, a China specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

For one thing, the points of difference between the two countries run deep. For another, Xi faces political pressures at home and won't want to cause a stir in Beijing.

For all the tensions between the two nations, Trump's words about Xi himself have remained warm. He has suggested that the personal bond he formed with Xi when the two met April 6-7 at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort can overcome fundamental differences on trade and national security. Last week, the president called his Chinese counterpart a "friend of mine," ''a terrific guy" and "a very special person."

At a White House event Monday, Trump suggested that the relationship is so strong that he asked during the Florida summit to start exporting U.S. beef to China and that the request was quickly granted. Trump said that the beef industry was so pleased to return to China after a 14-year ban that one executive from Nebraska "hugged me, he wanted to kiss me so badly."

"We welcome this opportunity," Kenny Graner, a North Dakota cattle farmer who is president of the U.S. Cattlemen's Association, says of the China market. "They have a middle class that's growing in income. It's big, a lot of people."

After the meeting, the president softened his accusations of abusive Chinese practices, dropped his threat to label China a currency manipulator and expressed optimism that China would pressure North Korea to scale back its nuclear program.

Still, the Trump-Xi relationship has yet to deliver the substantive changes that Trump the candidate had promised voters  a core piece of his mantra to put "America first." The economic irritants are likely to vex U.S. and Chinese officials this week.

Trump had campaigned on a promise to shrink America's trade deficits, which he blames for wiping out American factories and manufacturing jobs. The United States last year ran a trade deficit in goods with China of $347 billion, the amount by which imports exceeded exports. It's by far the widest gap that U.S. has with any country. Trump says China unfairly subsidizes exports.

Take steel. From 2000 to 2016, China accelerated steel production, raising its share of the world market from 15 percent to nearly 50 percent. As Chinese steel poured into the market, global prices fell, hurting American steelmakers. Scissors notes that China has long promised to stop subsidizing steel and to slow production but hasn't delivered.

The Trump administration responded by invoking a little-used weapon in American trade law that lets the president tax or restrict imports  if a U.S. Commerce Department investigation finds that they imperil national security. (The result of Commerce's investigation of steel imports is expected soon.) The rationale was that the American military relies on steel for airplanes, ships and other equipment. Steel also goes into roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

The problem is that the United States already blocks most Chinese steel imports. So any tariffs or limits on imports would instead hurt other countries, including such staunch allies as Canada and South Korea.

Scissors says the United States could try to coordinate sanctions against China by countries that do import Chinese steel.

David Dollar, a former World Bank and U.S. Treasury official who is now at the Brookings Institution, thinks Xi isn't likely to make a bold move to cut Chinese steelmaking capacity  or enact other economic reforms  in advance of the Chinese communist party's National Congress this fall. At the meeting, Xi will want to further tighten his grip on the party.

What's more, the European Union and others are likely to lash back if the U.S. imposes sanctions on foreign steel, thereby running the risk of a broader trade war.

Then there's North Korea. As a presidential candidate, Trump attacked China for refusing to pressure Pyongyang to back off from developing nuclear weapons. After the Mar-a-Lago summit, though, Trump praised Beijing for agreeing to help deal with North Korea. As a reward, he abandoned his vow to accuse China of manipulating its currency to benefit Chinese exporters.

This month, North Korea defiantly proceeded with its first launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Trump tweeted his complaint:

"Trade between China and North Korea grew almost 40% in the first quarter. So much for China working with us  but we had to give it a try!"

Brookings' Dollar says the administration will likely continue to be disappointed.

"China is not going to do anything dramatic" to pressure North Korea, he says. "They don't want that regime to collapse" and thereby destabilize the Korean peninsula and likely send North Korean refugees into China.

Overall, Dollar expects more turbulence between Washington and Beijing. The Obama administration, he notes, had kept the relationship stable despite economic differences by working with China on such issues as the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. But Trump has pulled out of the Paris deal and denounced the Iran pact.

"We're going to see more volatility in the U.S.-China relationship than we've seen in years," Dollar says.
After Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) reported second-quarter earnings on Tuesday, its executives held a conference call with analysts to walk through the results. The call covered a lot of ground, but here are five things I found particularly noteworthy about what Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan had to say.

1. Responsible growth

Bank of America's mantra over the past few years has been all about responsible growth.

Moynihan introduced the term in his 2014 shareholder letter. He then dedicated his letter the following year to digging into the four pillars of responsible growth:

Growing and winning in the market.

Growing with a customer-focused strategy.

Growing within the bank's risk framework.

Growing in a sustainable manner.

This remains Bank of America's focus today, as Moynihan made clear on the bank's second-quarter conference call:

2. Capital return

One of Moynihan's objectives since becoming CEO in 2010 has been to "get back most of the [7 billion] shares we issued in the crisis, that caused all the dilution," as he told Fortune's Shawn Tully in 2011.

Moynihan doubled down on this goal in his latest shareholder letter, saying in relation to the financial crisis that "now that our company is stronger, we are focused on reducing the dilution and increasing the dividend."

Bank of America made good on its promise following this year's stress tests. Thanks to its performance on the tests, the North Carolina-based bank was given the green light from regulators to increase its dividend and repurchase $12 billion worth of stock between now and the end of the second quarter of next year.

As Moynihan noted on the call:

3. Digital banking

Bank of America has consistently been on the leading edge of digital banking, with its mobile-banking app in particular becoming especially popular.

On Tuesday's call, Moynihan shared a number of metrics that show just how significant its progress on this front has been:

4. Regulations

Most conference calls with bank executives nowadays include some conversation about the likelihood that regulations in the bank industry will be eased, as Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail. Bank of America's latest call was no exception.

In response to an analyst's question about changes that would be most helpful to Bank of America, Moynihan largely dodged the question:

For the record, at an industry conference last year, Moynihan intimated that his top priority on the regulatory front was regaining discretion over capital distributions, which all big banks lost as a part of the stress testing process. As Moynihan noted at the time:

5. Branches

Last but not least, Moynihan spent a fair amount of time talking about Bank of America's branch network. Given the growing popularity of digital banking, combined with the fact that large branch networks are expensive to operate, there's a need to balance consumers' desire to have access to branches against economic realities.

Here was Moynihan's take on this:

Despite these investments, Moynihan told analysts that they should expect the bank to close roughly 100 branches a year.

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Chipotle Mexican Grill (NYSE:CMG) will reopen one of its Virginia locations Wednesday, following its closure for a suspected norovirus outbreak that is believed to have caused several customers to become ill.

Chipotle said Wednesday that multiple teams performed complete sanitizations of all surfaces.

The store outside Washington, D.C. closed Monday after Chipotle became aware of reports of illnesses. The chain said the reported symptoms were consistent with norovirus, which can cause vomiting and diarrhea. Norovirus is a leading cause of outbreaks from contaminated food, and infected employees are a frequent source of the outbreaks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Chipotle said norovirus doesn't come from its food supply, but company shares fell more than 4 percent Tuesday, underscoring its vulnerability following its food scares in 2015. They were down again about 1.2 percent on Wednesday.

The company said Wednesday that its procedures are designed to provide quick detection in the rare cases where such events occur. It outlined a number of steps it has taken since an E. coli outbreak, such as the creation of a food safety council and the implementation of additional food handling and preparation procedures.

"We continually strive to find new and innovative ways to ensure that our restaurants are safe," CEO Steve Ells said in a statement.

Chipotle had previously said the store would reopen Tuesday. David Goodfriend, director of the Loudoun County Health Department in Virginia, said his office recommended keeping the store closed an extra day as a precaution. Goodfriend said that would reduce risk if there were any employees who were infectious, and give time for extra cleaning.

Goodfriend says a stool sample was collected and sent to a state lab in Richmond for testing of norovirus.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Spain's Civil Guard said Wednesday that a former chairman of one of the country's largest banks has been found dead with a gunshot to the chest in a private hunting estate in southern Spain.

A spokeswoman with the police force said initial inquiries into the death of the 69 year-old Miguel Blesa had ruled out a homicide.

The former head of the now defunct Caja Madrid savings bank was awaiting the result of an appeal to a six-year prison sentence for misusing corporate credit cards issued by Bankia SA, another defunct bank.

Witnesses who were with Blesa in the private property near the southern city of Cordoba told police that the former banker left the group early Wednesday morning saying he was going to take his car.

They described hearing one gunshot moments later, the Civil Guard spokeswoman said, speaking anonymously in line with the police force's protocol. She said an autopsy would be required to determine the exact cause of the death.

Blesa chaired Caja Madrid, one of the country's top saving banks, between 1996 and 2010. In 2011, the bank was merged with seven other domestic savings institutions to form Bankia, which later had to be nationalized and bailed out for 18 billion euros ($24 billion.)

Both Blesa and former International Monetary Fund chief Rodrigo Rato, who chaired Bankia between 2010 and 2012, appealed a March ruling by Spain's National Court that condemned them to 6 and 4  years in prison respectively for misusing the saving bank's corporate credit cards.

Blesa received the highest punishment among 65 defendants found guilty of hiding irregular and undeclared expenses with the cards. The two former bankers were released on bail while the appeal is resolved.

The former banker was also in the midst of a lawsuit involving irregular bonuses during his time at Caja Madrid. In 2013, he was briefly jailed for irregularities in the purchase of shares in the City National Bank of Florida, but a court later acquitted him.

Blesa also appeared in leaked documents of the Mossack Fonseca law firm, which was investigated for managing offshore accounts globally. According to media reports at the time, he used the Panamanian firm in 1989 to create a company in the British Virgin Islands in order to invest in Spain-based companies.
Ukraine is interested in developing trade relations with Georgia, and goods turnover between the two countries would increase from $526 million to $1 billion, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said at the Ukrainian-Georgian business forum, the press service of the head of state has reported.

"Some $526 million in 2016. We believe that this does not reflect the potential Ukraine and Georgia have. We set a goal to bring goods turnover between our countries to $1 billion in several years," Poroshenko said.

He said that in the first quarter of 2017 growth of 16.5% was recorded.

"Figures are encouraging," he said.

The head of state said that the intensification of contacts at the high level was discussed at meetings in Tbilisi on Tuesday. This autumn a Georgian governmental delegation headed by the Georgian prime minister is to visit Ukraine.

"Ukraine is a reliable trade partner of Georgia. Traditionally Ukrainian agricultural goods find their consumers all over the world, and Georgia is an important market for us," Poroshenko said.

He said that 21% of agricultural imports in Georgia are of Ukrainian origin.

The Ukrainian president called on creating new forms of relations between the two countries on the basis of international specialization and production cooperation, including joint production.

"This also contributes to the appropriateness of boosting mutual direct investment in Ukraine and Georgia," he said, adding that the countries' authorities and business representatives are working on the issue.

According to the report, now there are more than 50 companies with Ukrainian capital in Georgia. The accumulated amount of Ukrainian investment in the Georgian economy, as of late first quarter, is $42 million. The volume of Georgian investment in Ukraine is lower - $4.6 million.

"Friends, I want to invite you to Ukraine, I'm here to convince you that the reforms that the Ukrainian government, the president, the government and the parliament are carrying out, are irreversible," the head of the Ukrainian state said.

In turn, Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili, who also participated in the forum, said that Georgia is ready to deepen relations.

"Despite the fact that Ukraine and Georgia are facing great challenges due to the occupation by Russia, the continuation of the reforms remains our priority," he said.

The prime minister said that Ukraine is an important trading partner for Georgia and it is one of the five countries with which Georgia has the largest commodity turnover. He also invited Ukrainian businessmen to invest in Georgia.
The United States announced Wednesday that the first round of NAFTA renegotiation talks between the U.S., Canada and Mexico will take place August 16  August 20. Last month, the United States and Mexico cleared an important trade obstacle between the two countries when they struck a deal on sugar prices.

While President Donald Trump called the agreement a very good one for both countries, companies that rely on sugar to make candy, cakes and other goods have said it will lead to a rise in U.S. consumer prices.

The split perspectives underscore how U.S. policies have long put sugar producers at odds with the rest of the food industry. Food makers say federal policies already inflate U.S. sugar prices, and the new agreement will make things worse. The sugar industry, meanwhile, says food companies are trying to drive down prices to sweeten their own profits, not to make treats more affordable.

TRADE RULES

U.S. policies on sugar support higher prices in a couple ways.

Limits on sugar imports help shield domestic producers from competition. The government also effectively guarantees U.S. producers a minimum price for their sugar if the market price falls below that level.

The latest deal with Mexico traces back to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which opened the U.S. market to Mexican sugar imports in 2008. But a few years after that, U.S. sugar producers said Mexico produced too much and got rid of it by dumping it in the U.S. for lower prices than in Mexico, which was a violation of trade laws.

That triggered an agreement in 2014 that limited the amount of sugar Mexico could send to the United States, among other things. Trump's deal this month tightens the terms of that temporary agreement.

THE PRICES

It's difficult to pinpoint how much more Americans pay for sugar as a result of U.S. policies, given the complexity of factors that influence prices at home and globally. Much of the sugar people eat also comes from foods where the cost of sugar is just one factor in the price.

That's why a government agency in 2000 cited a range of $600 million to $1.9 billion in estimating the potential benefit to American consumers if federal sugar policies weren't around. The agency noted that it wasn't clear how much of any potential savings food makers might immediately pass on to consumers.

Still, a food industry lobbying group in 2011 estimated that federal sugar policies cost Americans as much as an extra $4 billion a year. The Sweetener Users Association, which represents food makers that use sugar, says its calculation is based on the difference in the average price for U.S. refined sugar and the average world price, multiplied by the amount of sugar Americans consume. The estimate would vary depending on the gap between U.S. and world prices.

Rick Pasco, the group's president, says people might not notice the extra cost because it it's spread out across the population, amounting to about $9 to $11 a year per person.

THE DEAL

The deal with Mexico tightens the 2014 agreement. It says more of the sugar imported from Mexico will be raw, meaning more work for U.S. refiners. It also raises the minimum price for sugar from Mexico. The U.S. government will review whether it should be extended in late 2019.

According to the Sweetener Users Association, the new terms could mean an additional $1 billion in costs to consumers. Other critics say federal policies only enrich domestic sugar producers. And while other commodities enjoy federal protections, sugar is among the most protected, says Gary Hufbauer at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which favors free trade.

Either way, shoppers may not detect any price hikes directly because of the Mexico deal, in part because manufacturers and retailers consider so many other factors before adjusting the price of that chocolate bar.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
McCormick & Co. (NYSE:MKC) said Wednesday it will buy Reckitt Benckiser's food business for $4.2 billion, adding well-known brands such as Frenchs mustard and Franks RedHot to its portfolio of spices and herbs.

Sparks, Maryland-based McCormick fought off rival bidders to secure the deal, which will create a combined group with annual sales of around $5 billion. The deal will catapult McCormick, the 10th-largest condiments maker in the U.S., to a leading position in the category. French's and Frank RedHot brands will become McCormick's second- and third-most popular brands, respectively.

In addition to its stable of namesake condiments, McCormick owns Old Bay seafood seasoning, Stubbs barbeque sauce and Zatarains New Orleans-style foods. U.K.-based Reckitt Benckiser is also known for Cattlemens barbeque sauce.

"RB Foods' focus on creating products with simple, high-quality ingredients makes it a perfect match for McCormick as we continue to capitalize on the growing consumer interest in healthy, flavorful eating," said Lawrence E. Kurzius, McCormick's CEO.

The deal is part of RB's strategy to re-focus on consumer health and hygiene products after it bought U.S. baby formula maker Mead Johnson. The company's non-food brands include Nurofen, Woolite and Clearasil.

"This transaction marks another step towards transforming RB into a global leader in consumer health and hygiene," said Rakesh Kapoor, CEO of RB.

Reckitt's food business is headquartered in Chester, New Jersey. The company employs 450, including some 360 in Springfield, Missouri.

McCormick has said it wants to strip out around $50 million in cost synergies after the takeover, the majority of which would be achieved by 2020. The company said it will fold RB Foods into its consumer and industrial segments.

Shore Capital analyst Darren Shirley says Reckitt "is achieving a very attractive valuation for a North American food business, in our view."

Shares of McCormick fell 4.5% to $92.75 in pre-market trading. Reckitt Benckiser shares in London rose 1.5%.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has told employees at a Portland-area factory that production of the Surface Hub will move to China, according to a report from the Oregonian.

The Wilsonville, Oregon, plant is responsible for making the $22,000 Surface Hub, a large $22,000 touchscreen computer used in offices and other commercial applications. Microsoft announced last week that the small factory would close and 124 employees would be laid off. The Redmond, Washington-based software giant will eliminate 61 jobs there by Sept. 8, according to a letter sent to state officials.

Those manufacturing jobs are heading to China, the Oregonian reported. Although Microsoft executives didnt disclose the location, employees were told that Surface Hub production would be consolidated with the rest of the companys Surface lineup. Microsofts other tablets are made in China.

Microsoft didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move highlights the challenges that manufacturers face in the U.S. The report noted that Oregon has lost more than a quarter of its electronics manufacturing jobs since 2001, including defections by Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPE) and Tektronix.
The RadioShack brand will live on after a family office already owed $23 million by the bankrupt U.S. electronics chain agreed to assume ownership of it, as no other buyers submitted better bids this week, people familiar with the matter said.

An affiliate of Kensington Capital Holdings, a family office based in the suburbs of Boston, will acquire RadioShack's intellectual property after it submitted a $15 million bid, the people said on Wednesday.

Kensington had made a $23 million loan to RadioShack after it exited its first bankruptcy two years ago, and had secured a deal with U.S. wireless carrier Sprint Corp to co-brand 1,400 stores.

The deadline for other bidders to make offers was Tuesday, but no better proposals were received, the people said.

Kensington plans to license the 96-year-old brand back to General Wireless, the bankrupt company that does business as RadioShack, the people said. That company is currently working out its bankruptcy plan in court.

RadioShack and Kensington did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

RadioShack now has 425 independent dealer stores, an e-commerce business and fewer than 100 brick-and-mortar stores, the people said. It filed its second bankruptcy in March due in part to a challenging retail environment with more than 1,400 stores.

Kensington's other investments include locally oriented eatery Dig Inn and music program Boinc.

(Reporting by Jessica DiNapoli in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Retailers in the United Kingdom will soon be banned from charging customers an additional fee for using credit cards on purchases, British government officials said Wednesday.

The new guidelines are set to take effect in January 2018. Under the previous system, companies could add charges of up to 20% of purchases made with credit cards. Stephen Barclay, the U.K.s economic secretary of the Treasury, said credit card surcharges have no place in modern Britain.

These small charges can really add up and this change will mean shoppers across the country have that bit of extra cash to spend on the things that matter to them, Barclay added.

The elimination of surcharges is part of a broader bid to help British families cover the cost of living. Credit card fees cost shoppers 473 million, or roughly $616 million, in 2010, according to the U.K. Treasurys estimates.

In the United States, at least 11 states, including New York and California, have laws forbidding retailers from using credit card surcharges, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. There is no national ban against the practice.

According to an Intuit survey, more than half of U.S. small businesses (about 55%) do not accept credit cards.
Canadian and Mexican officials will meet on Wednesday to discuss how to handle negotiations on NAFTA, two well-placed sources said on Tuesday, as a top Canadian diplomat hinted at a potential clash with Washington.

The working-level talks are scheduled to take place in Ottawa, said the sources, who asked to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of the situation.

"The two sides will be looking for areas where they can work together," said one of the sources.

The meeting was scheduled before the United States on Monday released its goals for negotiations to update the North American Free Trade (NAFTA), which came into force in 1994.

Washington's wish list contains potentially contentious items such as cutting the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico and Canada, boosting enforcement of labor standards and eliminating a trade dispute mechanism -- all of which will be discussed by the Canadian and Mexican delegations, said one source.

Earlier on Tuesday, Canada's ambassador to Washington said it was critical for NAFTA to have a dispute resolution mechanism.

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump wants to ditch the Chapter 19 mechanism that has hindered the United States from pursuing anti-dumping and anti-subsidy cases against Mexican and Canadian firms.

"There are many things they raised where we take quite a different position. We think it's critical to have some kind of a dispute resolution mechanism incorporated -- it was in 1994 and it continues to be," said envoy David MacNaughton.

"Whether or not ... (it) can be improved or modernized, I think we're up for discussion on that," he said in televised remarks to reporters in Edmonton, Alberta.

Under Chapter 19, which Canada insisted be in NAFTA, binational panels hear complaints about illegal subsidies and dumping and then issue binding decisions. The United States has frequently lost such cases.

MacNaughton said he was not particularly surprised by the U.S. demands, many of which had been flagged ahead of time.

Both Mexico and the United States face important elections in 2018 which could complicate the negotiations.

Mexico says it would make sense to wrap up the talks by the end of this year, a goal Canadian officials say privately is impossible if the agreement is to be properly updated.

"If we could get a clarification of the trading relationship sooner rather than later it would be better, but ... we're not going to rush into a bad deal," said MacNaughton.

(Reporting by David Ljunggren; editing by Andrew Hay and Sandra Maler)
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross participated in a reception Tuesday for the Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang before the start of bilateral economic talks in Washington.

The business lunch attended by U.S. and Chinese business leaders comes as the U.S. considers new tariffs on Chinese steel and new calls for the Chinese government to put pressure on North Korea over its nuclear program.

Gordon Chang, author of Nuclear Showdown,' told FOX Business Nicole Petallides the Chinese have not been helpful on North Korea and could hamper trade talks with the U.S.

You know they say these [trade] talks have been sputtering and now they could come right at the end in the last few hours, but I dont really thinks so, he said.

The U.S.-China Comprehensive Economic Dialogue, or CED, is expected to draw businesses leaders from the U.S. and China that includes JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon, General Motors (NYSE:GM) CEO Mary Barra, executives from Walmart (NYSE:WMT), ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP), Caterpillar (NYSE:CAT), the Bank of China Chairman and one of the state owned oil companies.

Chang said China is using the CED as an opportunity to gain more access to the U.S. market.

This is a very difficult conversation because we want more market access which is the reason why all these companies are there, but the Chinese dont want to grant it to them, he said.

Chang said he expects a historic shift in American policies toward China because President Trump has made North Korea the primary policy goal of the administration.

The Chinese, if they are not helpful on North Korea are not going to get a good trade deal, he said.
Deputy Assistant to President Trump, Sebastian Gorka says the U.S. should be concerned over North Korea capability to launch a nuclear missile and its threats is a continuing trend escalated by the communist country.

[North Korea] is constantly breaching all of the international norms and requirements, the resolutions incumbent upon them, whether it has to do with ballistic missile testing, weapons of mass destruction or others, Gorka told FOX Business Stuart Varney on Wednesday.

Gorka said North Koreas threats only escalates tensions in the Korean peninsula and threatens the United States and its allies.

[North Korea] is escalating the situation and it is a threat to the United States and our partners and our allies, he said.

The U.S. has recently called on China to sever its economic ties with the Hermit Kingdom amid it's latest ballistic missile tests.
Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze has said that NATO has already provided Ukraine with more than EUR 1 million in assistance in the field of cyber security under the relevant trust fund and intends to begin the second stage of cooperation.

"I can name the total amount that was accumulated in the trust fund  EUR 1.05 million. These funds have been spent, but they also include payment for the services of experts who conducted the required analysis," Klympush-Tsintsadze said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

The deputy prime minister said the funds were provided for the trust fund for Ukraine, which is overseen by Romania, in order to cover the country's needs in the field of cyber security.

"We've approached the end of the first stage of the fund's work. During the meeting of the Ukraine-NATO commission on July 10, the Allies expressed their readiness to move to the second stage of the fund's operation," she said.

According to Klympush-Tsintsadze, at the moment Ukraine, namely the Security Service of Ukraine as the agency responsible for cooperation with this fund, should assess the country's needs in the field of cyber security.

"And then the country responsible for this fund (Romania) will coordinate with other countries the implementation of the tasks identified by the parties," Klympush-Tsintsadze said.

She added that in the past earlier this whole process took a year, but now, given the available experience, this should go faster.

The deputy prime minister said Ukraine and NATO are actively cooperating in the field of cyber security: "The NATO headquarters invited our experts in this field to visit it to learn more about the cyber defense system and exchange experience."
Pork barrel spending in Congress on special projects cost taxpayers $6.8 billion in fiscal 2017, according to the latest edition of Citizens Against Government Wastes Pig Book unveiled Wednesday.

This years Pig Book identifies 163 earmarks, or additions to appropriations bills to fund local projects in a legislators home territory. That total marks a 32.5% increase from fiscal 2016. The $6.8 billion price tag attached to the pet projects jumped 33.3% compared to the same period.

The 2017 Congressional Pig Book reveals the sullied underbelly of the Washington swamp, CAGW President Tom Schatz said in a statement. Even worse, some members of Congress are trying to return the wasteful and corrupt system to prominence even after taxpayers delivered a drain the swamp message to DC less than one year ago. The only way to clean up Washington is to do the opposite: adopt a permanent ban on pork-barrel earmarks.

CAGW notes that pork-barrel spending increased despite Congress decision in 2011 to enact a moratorium on earmarks in appropriations bills. The organization has published a Pig Book detailing excess government spending since 1991. Over that span, total approved spending on earmarks has surpassed $329 billion.

The Pig Book identifies several specific instances of earmark spending in 2017, including $9 million on an aquatic plant control program and $5.9 million toward an East-West Center in Hawaii to promote improved relations between Pacific and Asian nations.

Several sitting congressmen, including Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), were set to attend the unveiling of the Pig Book in Washington D.C.
Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice and others are set to give closed-door testimony over allegedly unmasking Trump officials in Russian collusion probes the 2016 election. Judge Napolitano joined FOX Business to discuss the fallout.

I have been fuming for several days now that we have the right to know, he said. The American public has the right to know what Susan Rice did, what the Congress knows about her and what the Congress will do.

Making the testimony private will allow members of Congress to leak information, in his opinion.

We are going to hear [a] leakedDemocrat version which will make her look good [and] a Republican version which will make her look bad, he said, adding that in his opinion former FBI Director James Comeys testimony allowed Americans to make their own judgment.

Also expected to testify: Former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power.

[Samantha Power] is the chief diplomat. She has nothing to do with national security. She doesnt have the right to do any of the unmasking. We would like to know what she did from our own eyes and ears, not from the opinion of a member of Congress who will be leaking it, he said.
While the United States on Wednesday set a final date to begin NAFTA renegotiation discussions next month, ongoing trade talks with China have been presenting some more immediate economic obstacles.

As officials from both sides began meeting Wednesday, Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang warned that "confrontation will immediately damage the interests of both."

Certainly, obstacles to cooperation loom. The Trump administration is considering slapping tariffs on steel imports, a step that risks igniting a trade war. For the United States, it's a perilous option to address a problem caused largely by China's overproduction of steel.

And Trump is criticizing China again for failing to use its economic leverage to rein in its neighbor and ally, the nuclear rogue state North Korea.

For one thing, the points of difference between the two countries run deep. For another, Xi faces political pressures at home and won't want to cause a stir in Beijing.

Both countries canceled scheduled news conferences Wednesday without saying why.

For all the tensions between the two nations, Trump's words about Xi himself have remained warm. He has suggested that the personal bond he formed with Xi when the two met April 6-7 at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort can overcome fundamental differences on trade and national security. Last week, the president called his Chinese counterpart a "friend of mine," ''a terrific guy" and "a very special person."

At a White House event Monday, Trump suggested that the relationship is so strong that he asked during the Florida summit to start exporting U.S. beef to China and that the request was quickly granted. Trump said that the beef industry was so pleased to return to China after a 14-year ban that one executive from Nebraska "hugged me, he wanted to kiss me so badly."

"We welcome this opportunity," Kenny Graner, a North Dakota cattle farmer who is president of the U.S. Cattlemen's Association, says of the China market. "They have a middle class that's growing in income. It's big, a lot of people."

After the meeting, the president softened his accusations of abusive Chinese practices, dropped his threat to label China a currency manipulator and expressed optimism that China would pressure North Korea to scale back its nuclear program.

Still, the Trump-Xi relationship has yet to deliver the substantive changes that Trump the candidate had promised voters  a core piece of his mantra to put "America first." The economic irritants are likely to vex U.S. and Chinese officials this week.

Trump had campaigned on a promise to shrink America's trade deficits, which he blames for wiping out American factories and manufacturing jobs. The United States last year ran a trade deficit in goods with China of $347 billion, the amount by which imports exceeded exports. It's by far the widest gap that U.S. has with any country.

"If (the gap) was just the product of free-market forces, we could understand," Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said at the opening of the dialogue Wednesday. "But it's not." The Trump administration argues that China unfairly subsidizes its exports.

Take steel. In 2016 China produced more than 808 million metric tons of steel, nearly 50% of the worlds total output, according to the World Steel Association. By contrast, the United States produced less than 79 million metric tons, or 4.8% of global output. As Chinese steel poured into the market, global prices fell, hurting American steelmakers.

The Trump administration responded by invoking a little-used weapon in American trade law that lets the president tax or restrict imports  if a U.S. Commerce Department investigation finds that they imperil national security. The rationale was that the American military relies on steel for airplanes, ships and other equipment. Steel also goes into roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

The problem is that the United States already blocks most Chinese steel imports. So any tariffs or limits on imports would instead hurt other countries, including such staunch allies as Canada and South Korea.

Then there's North Korea. As a presidential candidate, Trump attacked China for refusing to pressure Pyongyang to back off from developing nuclear weapons. After the Mar-a-Lago summit, though, Trump praised Beijing for agreeing to help deal with North Korea. As a reward, he abandoned his vow to accuse China of manipulating its currency to benefit Chinese exporters.

This month, North Korea defiantly proceeded with its first launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Trump tweeted his complaint:

"Trade between China and North Korea grew almost 40% in the first quarter. So much for China working with us  but we had to give it a try!"

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Amanda Seyfried admitted she took Lexapro, a medication used to treat depression and anxiety, while pregnant with her first child.

The 31-year-old actress and her husband, fellow actor Thomas Sadoski, welcomed a baby girl in March 2017.

I didnt get off my antidepressant. Its really for anti-anxiety for me, said Seyfried during a recent appearance on Dr. Berlins Informed Pregnancy podcast. Ive been taking Lexapro for years and years and years, and I didnt get off of it. I was on an extremely low dose. A healthy parent is a healthy kid.

The "Mean Girls" star was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder when she was 19.

It would take me a really long time to put my clothes away in the drawers, she explained. And its all about organization and if it doesnt feel right you have to keep moving until it feels right, keep moving things around until they feel right. I have a thing with numbers, which is really common.

And while Seyfried has kept quiet about her daughter, she did reveal the birth was smooth sailing for her.

It was just perfect, she said. It was quiet and beautiful, and it was the best moment of my life for sure. And I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Captain Sig Hansen's chest pains forced the once heart attack survivor to seek medical evaluation on Saint Paul Island, Alaska on Tuesday night's episode of "Deadliest Catch."

As the situation became graver, clinic doctors recommended that the captain of the Northwestern take a Medevac plane off the Island in order to get better medical care elsewhere.

The drama began to unfold on last week's episode of the Discovery Channel show, when Hansen swallowed a "nitro pill" for chest pain and complained of symptoms to his wife over the phone.

Hansen had reason to worry because he'd nearly lost his life due to a heart attack in 2016.

The skipper grew more anxious while fishing during an Arctic storm and on Tuesday's episode, he had a disagreement with his brother Norm on how to solve the problem of a frozen anchor.

Hansen went ballistic on Norm, but admitted he was wrong when his brother's solution worked.

The veteran skipper told his other brother, Edgar, "I can't stress out."

Pointing to his chest, Hansen told Edgar "it hurts right here."

Hansen dropped anchor on Saint Paul Island to wait out the storm, adding to an already stressful situation..

Lighting up a cigarette in his wheelhouse, Hansen said, "I don't know why my side's burning.

"I feel that pain right now, on and off again. I don't know what it is," he said.

Hansen's crew man Nick admitted all the guys were constantly worried about his health and added, "We're watching him. He's struggling."

Cameras next showed Hansen driving to a medical clinic on Saint Paul Island talking about how the chest pain on his left hand side needed to be checked.

"It's got me freaked out," Hansen told the cameras. "I feel like I'm a mental basket case right now, and that's not how I should be feeling."

Back on the dock, Edgar worried about his brother and got a call from a crewman who had news about Hansen's health: "They don't want to take any chances. Sig needs to medevac now."

Edgar bid Hansen goodbye as the medevac plane prepared to fly the captain away for treatment.

"You can't take any chances after what you went through," Edgar told him as Hansen climbed on the plane.

Also on the episode, Jake Anderson, who had fired his crewman Dean Gribble last week for insubordination, was planning to drop him off at the next docking point but not before getting a visit from him in the wheelhouse.

Gribble wanted to start working again but Anderson ordered him back to his cabin.

Anderson then had a crisis when his ship the Saga was suddenly moving and the men discovered the anchor wasn't holding it in place.

The captain erupted in expletives as they'd lost the anchor!

Anderson was forced to spend his whole night in the wheelhouse keeping the boat in place. The next day, he turned to disgraced Gribble to help the less experienced hands hoist up the anchor from the sea floor.

"It will be fine," Gribble said, and headed to the deck.

With Gribble's help, the men got the anchor back and Anderson admitted he had been invaluable.

Anderson told Gribble that he was still going to let him go, even though, "Today you saved us big time."

Once they were docked on Saint Paul Island, Gribble trudged away with his bags in the snow.
On Tuesday, Marvel Comics mastermind Stan Lee had his legend cemented  literally  in Los Angeles, when he joined the great icons of Hollywood who have pressed their hands and feet into wet cement in front of the TCL Chinese Theatre.

All I can say is thank you from the bottom of my heart, Lee told the crowd that turned out for the ceremony. I've always wondered: Why is the bottom of your heart more important than the top of your heart? I thank you from my whole heart, and you've made this day certainly totally unforgettable, almost unbelievable.

But it was a bittersweet honor for Lee, whose wife, Joan, died on July 3, bringing their nearly 70-year marriage to an end.

I've been the luckiest man because I have had friends, and to have the right friends is everything, Lee said. People you can depend on, people who tell you the truth.... I have been lucky. I've been lucky to have a wonderful wife.

After placing his hands and white sneakers in the cement, Lee told Fox News it was an honor he never could have imagined.

It's hard to put it into words, he said. I never expected something like this when I was creating the characters or writing them. I was just hoping the books would sell so I would keep my job and be able to pay the rent.

All of the sudden, to realize that the characters have meant so much to people and that they would actually go to the trouble of having me sign my name in whatever the hell that is I signed it ... it's hard to believe. It's all like a dream.

Its far from the first major honor the 94-year-old has received.

At 71 he received a comic book creators greatest honor: induction into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame. And at 85, the creator of Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Thor, Black Panther, the X-Men and the Avengers was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Just last weekend, he was honored as a Disney Legend at the D23 Expo in Anaheim, Calif. This weekend, he is expected to be honored at Comic-Con in San Diego.
A family in Florida is completely baffled by the airdropped sausages they received in the middle of the night.

The Adair family, of Deerfield Beach, woke to the sound of several packages of frozen Italian sausage slamming into their roof on Saturday morning, and they're still not quite sure where it came from.

It was like thunder, and it awakened me out of a sleep, Travis Adair told ABC 10.

GWYNETH PALTROW WON'T EAT AN OCTOPUS BECAUSE IT'S 'TOO SMART TO BE FOOD'

Upon hearing the noise, a few members of the Adair family went outside to investigate, soon finding a few packages of sausages in their yard.

In total, the family found several packages of frozen Italian sausage  weighing a total of 15 pounds  on the roof and scattered around their home.

We got up, found two packages of sausage on our side yard, and then we were like, Ok, well, we got to go on the roof and check and see if we find more of this stuff, Austin Adair explained.

The packages were labeled with William Land Service, which is the name of a land-clearing company in Alabama, reports ABC 10.

Austin later called the company to try to learn what happened, but "the guy had no idea what I was talking about and probably thought I was crazy, he said. He even sent them a photo of the packages, although he hasn't heard back.

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"I would love to know what really happened, because it's just so, so odd," said matriarch Jennie Adair.
A yet-to-be-opened restaurant in Iowa, which was to be called Me So Hungry, has officially changed its name to Eggs & Jam in the wake of backlash from the online community.

"We have officially renamed our new restaurant to Eggs & Jam. We apologize for offending anyone with our previously announced restaurant name. Our intent was to create buzz and interest tied to a popular 90s song. However, it is clear we did not understand how it would be perceived, and how it could offend people in our community," the restaurateurs wrote in a statement obtained by Fox News.

The eatery, which will boast a 90s hip-hop theme and a Southern-inspired menu, isnt scheduled to open until August, but critics had already claimed that the Caucasian couple behind the new dining spot were appropriating black culture to turn a profit, Huffington Post reports.

BUTCHER PUTS NUDE WOMAN IN DISPLAY CASE FOR 'SOCIAL EXPERIMENT'

The restaurateurs have also taken flak for the original name of their eatery, which was presumed to be a play on a line spoken by the a Vietnamese prostitute in Full Metal Jacket, as well as a play on the name of a 2 Live Crew rap song, which sampled that same line of dialogue.

On Tuesday, the owners of a Vietnamese restaurant located in nearby Des Moines had also released a statement regarding the controversy, imploring the owners of Me So Hungry to reconsider the name of their establishment, as it only serves as a potent reminder of each and every single time a member of our community was belittled for being Asian.

In a statement they provided to Huffington Post earlier this week, the duo behind Me So Hungry  Sarah Cattoor and Ryan Greening  claimed that their intentions were genuine, and seemed to have no plans to change their establishments theme or name.

We have been fans of hip-hop music along with other genres for all of our lives and look forward to opening Me So Hungry, the two stated. We welcome all varying views, and in fact you will likely find our views run very counter to many of the [racist] views we are being claimed to have."

We encourage people to join us for breakfast and open up a productive dialogue about any issue.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

Me So Hungry is still slated to open sometime in August, according to the latest statement from the restaurateurs.

"We look forward to opening in August and providing people with a fun eating environment built around the music of the 1990s."

Photos and a full menu were recently available on the restaurants Facebook page, though the page has since been removed.
Tabasco's Original Red Sauce isn't generally considered to be a mouth-burning, tear-jerking hot sauce; it adds just a dash of heat on everything from scrambled eggs and soups to burgers and wings.

Well, the game is about to change.

WORLD'S HOTTEST PEPPER MAY KILL YOU, ISN'T MEANT TO BE EATEN

The McIlhenny Company, the makers of Tabasco sauce, are ready to release their hottest sauce yet, which they're simply calling Scorpion Sauce.

The new hot sauce will only be available for a limited time, but it's designed to leave a lasting impression. Scorpion Sauce blends scorpion peppers with guava, pineapple, and Tabasco's Original Red Sauce to create "a tangy sauce with untamed heat and a touch of Caribbean sweetness," per a press release obtained by Bon appetit.

Tabasco's Scorpion Sauce will be available starting Wednesday, July 19, but only online or at the company's headquarters in Avery Island, La.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

In addition to Scorpion Sauce, the McIlhenny Company currently offers a Green Jalapeno Sauce, a Chipotle Sauce, a Buffalo-Style Sauce, a Habanero Pepper Sauce, Garlic Pepper Sauce, Sweet & Spicy Sauce and Sriracha Sauce.
When members of the Wildwood, N.J., community heard that Ethan Kranig, a sick 9-year-old boy from Wisconsin who always wanted to be a police officer was planning on visiting their beach town, locals pulled out all the stops.

Kranig, who was diagnosed with the rare disease ectrodactyly ectodermal dysplasia, was officially sworn-in Monday as an honorary police officer with the Wildwood Police Department.

Police Chief Robert Regalbuto gave Kranig the oath of office and was touched by the emotional event.

Regalbuto said hes seen nothing like this before... and Ive been with the department for 28 years.

A Wildwood resident, Christine Six Brown, helped to coordinate Kranig's trip, but it was John Lynch  a local who works with the citys tourism department and is known for giving back to the community  who spearheaded the event.

GIRL SCOUT WHO SAVED GRANDMOTHER FROM CHOKING ON POTATO HONORED WITH AWARD

When he heard that Kranig, who planned to be in the area for follow-up treatments at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, wanted to be a police officer, he called up the Wildwood Police Department to see how they could help.

In addition to becoming a police officer, Kranigs one wish was to visit the ocean for the first time.

The nearby Middle Police Department also wanted to help, so they gave Kranig and his family a police escort straight to the beach, which made Kranig ecstatic, according to Lynch.

And when other local residents heard what was going on, they, too, wanted to help. A sightseeing helicopter business called up looking to give the Kranigs a free ride. The boardwalks iconic Sightseers Tramcars offered Kranigs family free tram rides.

FATHER AND SON KAYAK DOWN MISSISSIPPI RIVER TO RAISE AWARENESS FOR VETERANS

When we as a community can do that, can do something so special, its incredible, Lynch said of the city coming together for Kranig. With so much discord going on  this is what America is all about.

The Wildwood Police Department concluded the ceremony by including Kranig in the force's yearly staff photograph.

Ethan Kranig is collecting police department patches. Departments interested in sending him a police patch to add to his collection can visit LunchWithLynch.com.
On Tuesday, militants shelled the positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) zone 23 times, killing two Ukrainian servicemen and injuring four, the ATO press center headquarters reported.

"The situation in the ATO zone has seriously worsened late on Tuesday. During daytime the enemy reduced the number of attacks on Ukrainian positions, then after 18:00 the situation radically changed... All in all, in the past twenty-four hours, militants breached the truce 23 times. Two servicemen were killed and four were wounded. The ATO forces opened fire 14 times, using mostly small arms and heavy machine guns," the headquarters said on its official Facebook page.

In the Donetsk sector, militants shelled the ATO positions near Avdiyivka from 120 mm and 82 mm mortars, grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and small arms, near Krasnohorivka - from tanks, near Zaitseve and Nevelske - from mortars and grenade launchers. In addition, as a result of the shelling of residential areas of Avdiyivka from 82 mm caliber mortars, two local residents were wounded.

In the Luhansk sector, militants fired using small arms at the Ukrainian army positions near Donets and Stanytsia Luhanska.
Teen Vogue is defending its decision to publish a graphic tutorial to anal sex for children and teenagers  calling critics homophobic.

This is anal 101, for teens, beginners and all inquisitive folk, author Gigi Engle wrote in A Guide to Anal Sex.

Click here for a free subscription to Todds newsletter: a must-read for Conservatives!

Anal sex and anal stimulation can be awesome, and if you want to give it a go, you do that, wrote Engle, a self-described sex educator. More power to you.

The original article did not include any references to practicing safe sex  but was later amended to include a line about condoms being non-negotiable.

Here is the lowdown on everything you need to know about butt stuff, the writer declared.

Parents across the nation became enraged upon learning that Teen Vogue wanted to turn their children in sexual deviants.

I was truly flabbergasted, Elizabeth Johnston told me on my radio show, "The Todd Starnes Show."

They should not be teaching sodomy to our children.

Johnston, known as The Activist Mommy, launched a national campaign to urge local stores and public libraries to pull Teen Vogue from bookshelves -- #PULLTEENVOGUE.

This is not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue. This is not a conservative issue or liberal issue. This is a parent issue, she told me.

More than 10 million people have viewed a video of Johnston burning a copy of Teen Vogue in her backyard.

Phillip Picardi, the magazines digital editorial director, fired back in a flurry of tweets  culminating with a photo of him embracing another man while holding up his middle finger.

He said they had been inundated with hate mail saying we promote sodomy and want teens to get AIDS.

How can you expect young women to not get pregnant without access to reproductive health care, he tweeted.

Picardi then accused his Catholic school of being guilty of endangering all of us by sheer omission of FACTS. EDUCATION doesnt equal ENCOURAGEMENT.

Well, I think we can all agree that Hell would freeze over before a Catholic school would teach children about anal sex.

Picardi then played the phobic-card  a favorite among liberals.

The backlash to this article is rooted in homophobia, he wrote. Its also laced in arcane delusion about what it means to be a young person today.

This has nothing to do with homophobia, Ms. Johnston told me. This is about parents protecting their children from perversion.

Teen Vogue would have you believe its offensive for parents to be offended by the smut they are peddling.

And in their perverse world, the magazines editors would have you believe that a bunch of teens and tweens are frolicking across the fruited plain having anal sex with Lord-knows-what.

Remember the good old days when kids just used to play spin the bottle?
UPDATE: Facebook has unblocked more than 20 Catholic-interest pages  blaming the issue on a technical glitch.

"All Pages have now been restored, a Facebook spokesperson said. This incident was triggered accidentally by a spam detection tool. We sincerely apologize for the issue this has caused."

As many as two dozen Catholic Facebook pages have been blocked - impacting millions of followers, according to several Catholic news organizations.

Click here for a free subscription to Todd's newsletter - a must-read for Conservatives!

Most of the blocked pages are based in Brazil and four are English-language pages with followers in the millions, Catholic News Agency reports.

One of the blocked pages is "Jesus and Mary" with 1.7 million followers. The page administrator said he was notified by Facebook that he had violated some sort of Facebook policy.

Other pages that were blocked include "Father Rocky," "Holy Mary Mother of God," and a Portuguese-language Pope Francis page that had 3.8 million likes.

"It is extremely heartbreaking," Kenneth Alimba told ChurchPOP. "It's too horrible."

To continue reading Todd Starnes' column, click here.
We need to sell more rhino horns, quickly.

That may be the only way to save rhinos from extinction. Today, rhinos vanish because poachers kill them for their horns. Businesses turn their horns into ornaments or quack health potions.

Some horns sell for $300,000. No wonder poachers risk their lives for one. How do you fight an incentive that strong?

Flood the market!

That's a solution suggested by Matthew Markus.

Markus's biotech company can make artificial rhino horn in a laboratory that's virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.

Put enough of that lab-grown horn on the market and supply and demand will bring the price way down.

Then poachers won't risk getting killed trying to steal real rhino horn.

"One way to devalue something is to create a lot of it," said Markus. "When things are abundant, people don't kill."

South Africa tried a mild version of this solution once. For 20 years, they made it legal to own rhinos and sell their horns.

Poaching dropped because legal rhino farming took away the poachers' incentive. Rhino farmers bred rhinos and protected them. Once in a while, they'd put rhinos to sleep with tranquilizer darts and saw off their horns. The horns grow back. The rhino population quadrupled.

Win-win.

But animal welfare activists are never happy with any solution that involves profiting from nature. South Africa banned sales of rhino horn again. Poaching rose 9,000 percent from 2007 to 2014, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Now South Africa is considering legalization again, but they will have to fight the NGOs.

Some, like Humane Society International, even oppose sale of that artificial horn. They asked the U.S. government to block a shipment of a sample of rhino DNA that might have created better artificial horn.

I confronted the Humane Society's spokeswoman about that. Our interview will be one of the first videos for my new project: "Stossel on Reason." I will post videos weekly on Facebook, Twitter and Reason TV. We start this week.

In this first story, the Humane Society's Masha Kalinina passionately argues against re-legalizing rhino farming and the sale of artificial horn.

"This is dangerous! Absolutely dangerous for rhinos and their survival," she says. "This is greenwashing an illegal activity. ... The problem is that people still see animals as commodities, natural resources for their use!"

Yes. And why is that a problem? I eat eggs and chicken, and I drink milk. More chickens and cows are alive because people like me pay for them or what they produce.

Kalinina replied: "Are we really going to farm every single animal on this planet so we can continue endlessly supplying this bloodlust and thirst of people to consume wildlife products?"

Give me a break. Farming isn't "bloodlust."

South African farmer John Hume says each of his 1,500 rhinos has 12 acres of land in which to run around. Every two years he trims their horns. That procedure is painless enough that even environmental groups perform it on wild rhinos to discourage poachers.

The Humane Society claims legalization won't stop poaching. Kalinina points out that elephant ivory trading was once made partly legal, and it "started up a new carving industry in China." Demand increased when supply increased, she said.

But that was hardly real legalization. Just a few one-off sales were allowed. To really bring down the price, you'd need a consistent supply of cheap horns. Artificial horn could provide that.

The Humane Society rejects that solution. Instead, they run ads that say rhino horn is not good medicine.

It's fine to try to educate people, but legal rhino farming and artificial horn are much better ideas. People respond faster to price signals than lectures from the Humane Society or regulations that impoverished African nations barely enforce.

The NGOs' solution has failed. Hunting bans don't stop poaching. In fact, bans create more crime, just as government's attempts to prohibit alcohol sales did. Poachers have killed a thousand park rangers.

If we stick to the Humane Society and other NGOs' ways of doing things, the rhino and other endangered animals will disappear.

Market-hating environmentalists will love endangered animals to death.
Susan Rice will testify secretly this week before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence which is investigating whether Russian intelligence attempted to influence the 2016 presidential election and whether she and others in the Obama administration used the NSA and any other domestic or any foreign intelligence assets to spy on President Trump before he was president. She has admitted to her knowledge of the surveillance of President-elect Trump.

Just to be clear, there are two kinds of unmasking. In the ordinary course of intelligence work, the White House may request a transcript of a surveilled conversation or some communication between an American and a foreign agent. And it might be necessary for the White House fully to appreciate the content of the communication to know the identity of American; so that American is then unmasked. That is a lawful unmasking.

But if the unmasking was done for political reasons or to embarrass the American or to embarrass a person of affiliated with the American, like the president-elect of the United States, that's a felony.

Susan Rice is a known public liar. She lied about the cause of the attacks at Benghazi on all five network Sunday morning talk shows in September 2012, and she lied about spying and unmasking before she admitted she did it.

Hoekstra on Samantha Power: How Much Raw Intel Does a UN Ambassador Need?

Since our government is legally permitted to lie to us -- though we can be prosecuted for lying to it -- her lies are not criminal.

Yet she will soon have a very difficult time at the hands of members of Congress wherein she can be prosecuted for both lying to Congress and for misleading it.

One can give a truthful answer to Congress, but if it is incomplete or misleading, one can still be prosecuted for misleading.

As President Obamas National Security Adviser, Rice had the highest security clearance. As such, she could order transcripts of the telephone conversations, emails, and text messages of any person she wanted as well as the names of participants.

Unmasking for national security purposes -- to help her understand the gravity of the communication by learning the identity of the participants -- is lawful and part of her then-job.

Unmasking for political purposes or revealing that which was unmasked to a person who lacked a security clearance is a felony. The use of raw intelligence data for political or personal purposes is a grave threat to personal liberty in a free society.

In an attempt to humiliate the incoming Trump administration, the Obama folks made a last-minute change in the rules -- where everybody in the intelligence community was permitted to share raw data with everyone else.

Here are three important questions: Was this done in order to frustrate the new president? Was it done in order to paint a false picture of him? Is there any criminal activity there which is akin to hacking?

I'm angry that Rices testimony will be in secret because the American public is entitled to know what Susan Rice and the Obama people did, and the American public is entitled to know what the Congress knows and what the Congress will do about it.

When the government operates in secret like this, Democracy dies. Does the government work for us or do we work for the government?
President Donald Trump intends to formally nominate former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, Jr. as ambassador to Russia, the White House announced on Tuesday.

Huntsman, who ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, previously served as U.S. ambassador to China and to Singapore.

He is currently serving as the chairman of both the Atlantic Council, a foreign policy think tank, and the Huntsman Cancer Foundation.

HUNTSMAN TO BE RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR

Huntsman was elected governor of Utah in 2004 and re-elected four years later. He resigned seven months into his second term to become ambassador to China under the Obama administration.

He resigned to launch his 2012 presidential campaign but wound up dropping out of the race after finishing third in the New Hampshire primary.

Huntsman had already accepted Trump's offer earlier this year. Now the nomination needs to be confirmed by the Senate.
President Trump lashed out at reports that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin had a second, previously undisclosed talk during the G-20 summit in Germany earlier this month.

The president said the dinner at which the encounter took place was known to members of the media who were covering the event.

In a follow-up tweet, Trump decried the media for, as he put it, "becoming more and more dishonest!"

"Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister," the president wrote.

A White House spokesman confirmed the conversation between the American and Russian leaders to Fox News earlier Tuesday.

An administration official said Trump and Putin briefly spoke during a dinner the night of the G-20 summit.

First lady Melania Trump was seated next to Putin, and the president approached Putin at the end of the night, the official said. They spoke through a Russian translator.

The administration official pushed back against the interaction being characterized as a meeting.

There was no second meeting between President Trump and President Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner, the official said. The insinuation that the White House has tried to hide a second meeting is false, malicious and absurd.

The official added: It is not merely perfectly normal, it is part of a president's duties, to interact with world leaders.

Details about what transpired during the conversation were unclear.

Their first G-20 encounter, on July 7, lasted more than two hours. Trump later said he pressed the Russian president during that meeting about whether his government attempted to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.

Meanwhile, the White House on Tuesday night officially announced the presidents appointment of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman to serve as ambassador to Russia. Huntsman is a former ambassador to China and Singapore who unsuccessfully ran for president as a Republican in 2012.

Fox News Serafin Gomez and The Associated Press contributed to this report.




Donald Trump Jr. has been called to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee about Russias attempted meddling in the presidential race, according to an advisory from the committee.

The presidents son has been in the news over his June 2016 meeting with a Russian attorney over possible damaging information on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Democrats have pointed to the meeting to argue collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The Trump campaign has denied the accusation.

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who attended the meeting with Trump Jr., is also invited to testify before the committee, according to the advisory.

A news release from the committee said it expects that all witnesses will "comply voluntarily with invitations to testify but that it will issue subpoenas, if necessary, to Trump Jr. and Manafort.

The July 26 hearing will be about oversight of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and attempts to influence U.S. elections, the advisory said.

Fox News is told Manafort received the letter inviting him to testify from Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the committees chairman, and is looking it over.

Jared Kushner, the presidents son-in-law who now works as a White House adviser, is also expected to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee next week. Kushner also attended the meeting with Trump Jr. and Manafort.

Working with and being responsive to the schedules of the committees, we have arranged Mr. Kushner's interview with the Senate for July 24, Kushners attorney, Abbe Lowell, said Wednesday. He will continue to cooperate and appreciates the opportunity to assist in putting this matter to rest.

Fox News John Roberts contributed to this report.


Another Senate Republican has spoken out against Majority Leader Mitch McConnells plan to repeal ObamaCare without a replacement, dampening GOP efforts to move forward.

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, told reporters in a conference call Tuesday that the strategy was not appropriate, but neglected to say whether he would vote against taking up the House health care bill, the Hill reported.

I have said consistently that I support repeal and replace, and Im not giving up on doing both of those things, Portman said. I dont think its appropriate just to repeal, weve also got to put a replacement in place.

Portman is the fourth Republican to push back on the plan by McConnell, R-Ky. Previously, West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Maine Sen. Susan Collins signaled they also oppose legislation that would repeal ObamaCare without offering a replacement.

"As I stated earlier this year, I cannot vote to proceed to repeal the ACA [Affordable Care Act] without reform that allows people the choice they want, the affordability they need and the quality of care they deserve, Murkowski said.

McConnell said Tuesday that the Senate will hold a procedural vote to repeal ObamaCare early next week, but with four Republicans already announcing their opposition, debate on a bill doesnt seem likely.

Republicans have 52 seats in the Senate. McConnell can afford to lose only two Republican votes, with Vice President Mike Pence as a tiebreaker, if all Democrats vote against the effort.

Fox News Chad Pergram contributed to this report.
OSCE Chairperson-in-Office and Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said he is concerned about the statements on the creation of Malorossiya, adding that the conflict parties in Donbas should avoid actions that jeopardize the implementation of the Minsk agreements.

"Concerned about developments in #Ukraine - "declaration" on "Malorossiya"; must avoid acts jeopardizing implementation of Minsk agreements," Kurz said on Twitter, commenting on the statement by DPR leader Alexander Zakharchenko on the creation of the state of Malorossiya.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, in an exclusive interview with Fox News Martha MacCallum, made clear he would not approve leaks like ex-FBI Director James Comeys release of personal notes on discussions with President Trump.

Rosenstein discussed the Comey controversy and the overall Russia probe led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller during the extensive interview, set to air Wednesday evening on Fox News The Story.

WATCH ROD ROSENSTEIN ON FOX NEWS THE STORY AT 7 P.M. WEDNESDAY

And he had tough words when asked about Comeys recent admission that he used a friend at Columbia University to get a memo he penned on a discussion with Trump leaked to The New York Times.

As a general proposition, you have to understand the Department of Justice. We take confidentiality seriously, so when we have memoranda about our ongoing matters, we have an obligation to keep that confidential, Rosenstein said.

Asked if he would prohibit releasing memos on a discussion with the president, he said, As a general position, I think it is quite clear. It's what we were taught, all of us as prosecutors and agents.

COMEY MEMOS REPORTEDLY HAD CLASSIFIED INFO

Rosenstein has faced his fair share of criticism over his role in the Comey controversy. His memo laying out the rationale for Comeys ouster was initially cited as a key factor by the Trump administration, though Trump and his aides have since given varying explanations as to how much of a role the deputy AGs recommendation played.

Rosenstein later appointed Mueller as special counsel to oversee the probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign and possible coordination with Trump associates.

In his first national interview, Rosenstein stood by his decision to appoint Mueller despite his close relationship with Comey.

He had an excellent reputation. Really bipartisan support for his integrity. That's why I made that decision, he said.  The Department of Justice, we judge by results and so my view about that is, we'll see if they do the right thing.

Rosenstein also defended a newly announced Justice Department decision to expand whats known as civil asset forfeiture  allowing police to seize property of suspects without proving guilt. The move has spurred some criticism from Republican lawmakers.

In order to seize property, police need probable cause, the same standards that police need to make an arrest, Rosenstein said. And when a decision is made to forfeit property federally, we conduct an independent review of the facts and circumstances.
A leader of President Trumps controversial voter fraud commission on Wednesday blasted what he described as baffling calls for his resignation, saying Democrats charge that the investigation could lead to voter suppression doesnt even make sense.

How in the world can a commission in Washington, D.C.  studying a problem cause someone in some far-flung state like California not to go to the polls? Kris Kobach said on Fox & Friends.

He spoke as Vice President Pence later Wednesday morning was set to chair the first meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

Kobach, who serves as vice chairman, sparked controversy several weeks ago when he sent letters to state officials seeking extensive voter information  which dozens of states resisted turning over, claiming the request was too broad.

Kobach, the secretary of state in Kansas, defended the requests Wednesday and also responded to a new demand by congressional Democrats that Pence seek his resignation.

I think they want me removed because Ive been fighting voter fraud in my state of Kansas for over six years now and Ive been very specific about what we need to do and what other states have been doing, he said. I guess they just dont want someone heading the commission as vice chair who knows this issue and knows how to get at the problem.

The call for his ouster was made in a letter to Pence sent by Reps. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.; John Conyers, Jr., D-Mich.; Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.; and Robert Brady, D-Pa. They also alleged Kobach is using the commission to help himself politically.

Mr. Kobach has repeatedly claimed, falsely, that widespread voter fraud exists and advertises his work on the Commission to promote his own campaign for governor of Kansas, they wrote. These actions undermine the integrity of the Commission and raise significant concerns that the Commission will be used as a tool for voter suppression.
A lawsuit filed in federal court on Monday alleges the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) violated the gun rights of foster parents.

Caseworkers from MDHHS and a county judge told William Johnson of Ontonagon, Mich., that he had to choose between his Second Amendment rights and fostering his grandson, according to a complaint filed with the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan. The 54-year-old Johnson is a retired, disabled Marine with a Michigan Concealed Pistol License. He and his wife were asked by the state of Michigan to foster their grandson. According to Johnson's suit, however, the issues began as soon as he arrived at MDHHS to pick up the child.

Johnson said he was searched for a firearm and, although he was not carrying a gun, officials demanded to see his concealed carry license. He was then told he would need to give MDHHS the serial numbers of all of his firearms, including rifles and shotguns, and register them with the agency. After questioning why he would have to register his firearms in order to foster his grandson, Johnson said he was told by one caseworker, "if you want to care for your grandson you will have to give up some of your constitutional rights." When he objected, he was told there would not be a "power struggle" and MDHHS "would just take his grandson and place him in a foster home" if he didn't comply with their requests.

Two weeks later, during a hearing on placement of the child, Johnson said a Gogebic County Court judge similarly told him, "if you want to care for your grandson you will have to give up some of your constitutional rights."

Michigan requires that anyone who wants to be a foster parent must register his handguns with the state as well as keep the guns unloaded and locked in a safe separate from the ammunition. Foster parents in states like Nevada and Oklahoma have challenged similar laws in recent years after being denied foster children over their legally owned firearms. The case against MDHHS also features plaintiffs Brian and Naomi Mason, who said the gun regulations keep them from becoming foster parents.

Click for more from The Washington Free Beacon.
A psychiatric evaluation has been ordered for a Nebraska man accused of threatening Republican U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Helen Adams on Tuesday ordered the transfer of 64-year-old Robert Simet from Pottawattamie County Jail in Council Bluffs, Iowa, to the Douglas County Jail in Omaha, where he'll be held while undergoing an evaluation.

An arrest affidavit says employees of a motorcycle shop in Pacific Junction, Iowa, told an FBI agent that Simet had been there July 5. During that visit, Simet made several statements about Ernst, including that he believes she is a member of the Islamic State group and that he "could kill" her during a July 10 event at the motorcycle shop.

NEBRASKA MAN ACCUSED OF THREATENING US SEN. JONI ERNST

Simet, of Omaha, is charged with threatening a U.S. official.
Pork-barrel spending is surging despite a roughly five-year-old moratorium on so-called earmarks, according to the annual "Pig Book" report released Wednesday.

The report calls out special projects that receive billions of dollars thanks to Capitol Hill lawmakers who tuck the funding -- which critics call "pork" -- into appropriations bills.

The latest report calls out projects ranging from the often criticized F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to the East-West Center in Hawaii. The latter originally was proposed decades ago as a way to promote better relations with Pacific nations and was slated to get nearly $6 million despite long-standing opposition from the State Department, according to the report.

We all need to work on wasteful spending, Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst said at the Capitol Hill event announcing the release of the report by watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste. We know Washington has some big-time spenders.

The senator pointed to a recent inspector general's report that concluded the Defense Department overspent as much as $29 million for uniforms for the Afghan National Army, which had a forest camouflage pattern despite much of the country having a desert landscape.

Ernst said the total cost of the uniforms was $93 million and called them overpriced and under-vetted as well as useless.

The 15-page Pig Book shows the number of appropriations earmarks increased from fiscal 2016 to 2017 -- as well as the cost, from $5.1 billion to $6.8 billion.

The report acknowledged the recent totals are lower than during the earmark heyday -- fiscal 2006, when a record $29 billion was inserted to appropriations bills.

However, it also pointed out that totals have steadily increased since the $3.3 billion recorded in 2012, the first year after Congress agreed to an earmark moratorium.

Were no longer finding indoor rain forests or teapot museums, but there are some concerning findings, group President Thomas Schatz said.

Among them in fiscal 2017 was $10.3 million to support 49 National Heritage Areas under the National Park Service.

Earmarks can be inserted into a bill to help win the support of a member of Congress. Or they could be inserted by a member trying to quietly steer millions to a home-state project -- like the ill-fated, roughly $238 million Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska, which was intended to link the mainland to an island that contained an international airport and just 50 residents.

The release of the book also comes amid uncertainty inside the GOP-led House about whether the chamber will continue the ban, as the Republican-led Senate recently did.

A group of House Republicans including Reps. John Culberson of Texas, Mike Rogers of Alabama and Tom Rooney of Florida tried days after President Trumps Drain the Swamp presidential win to modify the moratorium, according the report.

Weve got to keep the ban in place, Arizona GOP Sen. Jeff Flake said Wednesday. Wed like to see a permanent ban.  We owe it to the taxpayers.

Retired Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, a Pig Book champion, once called earmarks the gateway drug to Washingtons spending addiction.

Congressional lawmakers also attending the event Wednesday included Reps. Mark Walker of North Carolina and Jim Banks of Indiana.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday ordered the expansion of the governments ability to seize suspects' property  a move that puts him at odds with members of his own party who have slammed the practice for years as ripe for abuse and a violation of civil rights.

Sessions touted the use of asset forfeiture as a key tool for law enforcement and said it weakens criminal organizations and the cartel.

Sessions hinted he would issue the new directive during a speech Monday at the National District Attorneys Association.

We hope to issue this week a new directive on asset forfeiture  especially for drug traffickers, he said. With care and professionalism, we plan to develop policies to increase forfeitures. No criminal should be allowed to keep the proceeds of their crime. Adoptive forfeitures are appropriate as is sharing with our partners."

As he loosened the rules for what's known as civil asset forfeiture, Sessions also announced he will reverse an Obama administration order that barred local authorities from using the federal system to circumvent state law  prompting his predecessor Eric Holder to label Sessions step as another extremist action.

Sessions' announcement drew quick condemnation from both Democrats and Republicans.

This is a step in the wrong direction and I urge the Department of Justice to reconsider, Wisconsin Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner said in a statement. Expanding forfeiture without increasing protections is, in my view, unconstitutional and wrong.

"This is a step in the wrong direction and I urge the Department of Justice to reconsider."  Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he opposes the government overstepping its boundaries by assuming a suspects guilt and seizing their property before they even have their day in court.

Civil forfeiture is when police and prosecutors seize property, cars or cash from someone they suspect of wrongdoing. It differs from criminal forfeiture cases, where prosecutors typically must prove a person is guilty or reach a settlement before freezing funds or selling property.

In civil forfeiture, authorities dont have to prove guilt, file charges or obtain a conviction before seizing private property.

Asset forfeiture is used at the state level to fund police departments. Sessions has argued it will help the DOJ go after drug offenders. But because the government doesnt need to file criminal charges to take a persons money or property, some warn authorities could use it to choke off, for instance, the sale of marijuana in states where it's legal.

Sessions argues that increased civil forfeiture powers gives law enforcement officials an effective tool to go after lawbreakers. The ability to freeze funds and seize assets allows authorities to hit alleged criminals where it hurts the most  their wallets.

SESSIONS SIGNALS MORE POLICE PROPERTY SEIZURES COMING

But Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who sponsored legislation earlier this year to regulate asset forfeiture, said Sessions agenda is a troubling step backward that would bring back a loophole thats become one of the most flagrantly abused provisions of this policy.

He added, Criminals shouldnt be able to keep the proceeds of their crime, but innocent Americans shouldnt lose their right to due process, or their private property rights, in order to make that happen.

There have been multiple cases where the authorities have stepped on the paper-thin protections people have against asset forfeiture.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas also has gone on the record about asset forfeiture reform in the past.

In a March 6 filing, the conservative justice wrote that asset forfeiture has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses, and added that the practice frequently targets groups that are unable to financially defend themselves in drawn-out forfeiture proceedings.

A March report from the Department of Justices inspector general also found multiple issues with the asset forfeiture program including poor data collection as well as inadequate training of state and local officers. Under the DOJs adoptive forfeiture program, up to 80 percent of the proceeds from a seizure can be shared with local agencies.
Just one day after the collapse of Senate Republicans latest health care bill, President Trump invited every GOP senator to a luncheon Wednesday at the White House to discuss ObamaCare, Reuters reported.

It is unclear what exactly the senators will discuss, but one unnamed official told the news agency that they are meeting because theres a movement on health care.

The inability to pass the health law, which was a major talking point during Trumps presidential campaign, was the latest setback for the Trump administrations effort to undo President Obamas legacy.

The Los Angeles Times wrote, Rarely has a president taken office so focused on undoing his predecessors works as Donald Trump. Six months in, he has little to show.

The question on health care is now: What next?

Both Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have said they hope to outright repeal the law and then work on a replacement at a later date. But on Tuesday, Trump appeared to wash his hands of the matter.

I think we're probably in that position where we'll just let ObamaCare fail, Trump told reporters at the White House. We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We'll let ObamaCare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us."

The Trump administration attempted to place blame on Democrats, but if Republicans fully supported the bill, it could have passed without them. Some Republicans want an outright repeal, while others in more moderate states do not want to strip coverage from their constituents.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who was in opposition of the bill, said, To just say repeal and trust us, were going to fix it in a couple of years, thats not going to provide comfort to the anxiety a lot of Alaskan families are feeling right now.

The Associated Press contributed to this report
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the latest version of President Trump's controversial travel ban that affects residents of some majority-Muslim countries.

The ban applies to people from Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. It also placed limits on people from North Korea and Venezuela.

Since the president signed an executive order in January 2017 establishing a ban on travel of people from Muslim-majority nations, it has been a point of contention and challenged in court. Heres a look at the bans journey through the legal system.

June 26  Supreme Court upholds ban

In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court issued its first substantive ruling on a Trump administration policy on June 26, upholding the travel ban. The court said the president has substantial power to regulate immigration.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by his four conservative colleagues.

The sole prerequisite set forth in [federal law] is that the President find that the entry of the covered aliens would be detrimental to the interests of the United States. The President has undoubtedly fulfilled that requirement here, Roberts wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who dissented, said "a reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus."

April 25  Supreme Court hears oral arguments

In the last case the justices will hear until October, oral arguments on the travel ban will be delivered before the Supreme Court on April 25. This is the first time the justices are considering whether it violates immigration law or the Constitution.

People waited for a seat inside the courtroom for days ahead of the hearing.

A decision is expected by June.

April 10  Chad removed from travel ban

The Trump administration removed Chad from the travel ban because the African country had improved its identity-management and information sharing practices enough, press secretary Sarah Sanders said.

It had been included on the list because of an office supply glitch that prevented it from supplying homeland security officials with recent samples of its passports. It was also unable to adequately share public safety and terror-related information with U.S. officials who screen foreigners seeking to enter the country, officials said.

March 30  More than a dozen states back lawsuit against ban

Washington, D.C. and 16 states backed Hawaiis lawsuit against the travel ban with an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court.

President Trumps discriminatory ban both hurts the families caught up in the chaos of his draconian policies, and undermines our states residents, institutions, businesses and economies, New York Attorney Gen. Eric Schneiderman said in a statement.

Jan. 19  Supreme Court announces it will rule on the travel ban

The Supreme Court announced on Jan. 19 that it will rule on Trump's controversial travel ban. The justices plan to hear arguments in April and issue a final ruling by late June.

Dec. 4  Supreme Court OKs full enforcement of Trump travel ban

Handing the White House a huge judicial victory, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Trumps travel ban affecting residents of six majority-Muslim countries.

Lower courts had said people from those countries with a "bona fide" relationship with someone in the United States could not be prevented from entry.

Grandparents and cousins were among the relatives courts said could not be excluded.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have left the lower court orders in place.

Oct. 17  Federal judge temporarily blocks travel ban

U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson granted a request from Hawaii to temporarily block a version of Trump's travel ban, which was supposed to take effect at midnight ET on Oct. 18.

Hawaii argued that the revised ban  which included citizens from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, and some Venezuelan government officials and their families  was a continuation of Trump's "promise to exclude Muslims from the United States."

"Todays dangerously flawed district court order undercuts the Presidents efforts to keep the American people safe and enforce minimum security standards for entry into the United States," the White House said in a statement. "The Department of Justice will vigorously defend the Presidents lawful action."

Oct. 10  Supreme Court dismisses one case

The Supreme Court didnt take action on a case that originated in Hawaii pertaining to Trumps travel ban and a ban on refugees.

However, it did dismiss another case that originated in Maryland. That case involved a ban that has since expired and been replaced with a new one by the administration.

Oct. 5  Justice Department asks Supreme Court to drop travel ban case

The Department of Justice asked the nations highest court to dismiss the case challenging the administrations travel ban. The administration argued the case should be dismissed because it was regarding a previous travel ban that is now moot.

Sept. 24  Trump signs new travel ban

As Trumps original ban was set to expire, the president unveiled new restrictions on travel to the U.S. from certain countries citizens.

The revised ban included citizens from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. It also included some government officials from Venezuela.

Sept. 12  Supreme Court lifts restrictions

The Supreme Court blocked a lower courts decision that would have allowed refugees to enter the country under certain conditions, blocking a ruling that said a resettlement agency counts as a bona fide relationship.

Sept. 7  Appeals court limits travel ban

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that would allow for more refugees to enter the country despite the ban. The federal court ruled that refugees working with a resettlement agency would be considered to have established an approved bona fide relationship with a contact in the U.S.

WHO DOES TRUMPS TRAVEL BAN BLOCK FROM ENTERING THE US?

It also expanded the scope of a bona fide relationship to include other family members, such as grandparents and other relatives.

July 19  Supreme Court allows for strict enforcement of refugee ban

The Supreme Court, temporarily, allowed for the administrations travel ban to keep a strict enforcement on its ban of refugees. It did, however, leave in place the court order that made it easier for travelers from the six Muslim-majority countries to enter the U.S. and allowed a previous expansion of bona fide relationships to stay.

July 13  Federal judge expands scope of travel ban

U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson, in Hawaii, ruled that a bona fide relationship certain travelers need before entering the U.S. could be expanded to include grandparents and other relatives.

The Justice Department filed an emergency request with the Supreme Court for clarification.

June 29  Travel ban goes into effect

After the Supreme Courts ruling, the Trump administration issued guidance on who would be allowed into the country and who would be barred.

June 26  Supreme Court allows for travel ban to continue

The Supreme Court announced it would allow Trump to forge ahead with a limited version of his travel ban. Trump hailed the decision as a victory for national security.

HAWAII GETS CHANCE TO MAKE CASE FOR FIGHTING 3RD TRAVEL BAN

The court said it would hear arguments in October, but until then, the ban on travelers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen could be enforced if the visitors lacked a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.

May 25  Travel ban blocked by federal court

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia blocked the travel ban from being implemented. It had begun to hear the case earlier in May.

We remain unconvinced [the ban] has more to do with national security than it does with effectuating the Presidents promised Muslim ban," the court said at the time.

March 30  Trump administration appeals ruling

The Department of Justice filed an appeal with the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to challenge the ruling against the travel ban.

March 29  Federal judge continues to block travel ban

U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson granted a request to continue to halt the travel ban.

March 16  Another federal judge temporarily blocks the order

Sitting in Maryland, U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang temporarily halted the executive order. The injunction was not as comprehensive as the one issued earlier in Hawaii, but it did contend that the ban was discriminatory toward Muslims.

The order did not change the previous injunction in Hawaii, but rather just reinforced it.

March 15  Federal judge blocks travel ban

U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson prevented the travel ban from being implemented just before it was set to take effect. Watson granted the state of Hawaiis request for a temporary restraining order.

Trump called the decision an unprecedented judicial overreach.

March 8  Hawaii sues to block the travel ban

The state of Hawaii sued in an attempt to halt the Trump administrations travel ban from going into effect. Lawyers said the new executive order is resulting in the establishment of religion in the State of Hawaii contrary to its state Constitution.

Lawyers also argued that the ban would damage Hawaiis economy, educational institutions and tourism industry; and it is subjecting a portion of the states citizens to second-class treatment and discrimination, while denying all Hawaii residents the benefits of an inclusive and pluralistic society.

March 6  Trump unveils new travel ban

Trump signed a new executive order which barred travel from six predominantly Muslim countries for 90 days  removing Iraq from the new ban.

The new order also exempted permanent residents and current visa holders from the travel ban. Syrian refugees were still included in the new order but only for 120 instead of indefinitely.

Feb. 15  Trumps travel ban gets a defender

Texas Attorney Ken Paxton split with other states and defended the travel ban as he filed documents with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit asking to reconsider a decision blocking the ban.

Paxton argued that the order is a legal exercise of presidential authority.

Feb. 13  Federal judge grants injunction against ban

A federal judge in Virginia granted an injunction to prevent the administration from implementing the ban.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said the ban was unconstitutional as it had a religious bias.

Feb. 9  Travel ban is again blocked

The travel bans suspension was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in a unanimous decision.

MUSLIM ADVOCATES, LEGAL ORG FILES SUITS OVER TRAVEL BAN

Those judges were Michelle Friedland, appointed by former President Barack Obama; Richard Clifton, appointed by former President George W. Bush; and William Canby, appointed by former President Jimmy Carter.

The court began to hear arguments from the Justice Department and lawyers from the states of Washington and Maryland  in opposition to the ban  on Feb. 7.

Feb. 6  Justice Department asks federal court to intervene

The Justice Department filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit asking it to intervene and reverse a previous judges decision to halt the travel ban.

Sixteen attorneys general filed an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit against the travel ban. Those included: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Feb. 3  Judge declines to extend injunction against travel ban

U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton did not extend a temporary injunction against the administrations travel ban.

But U.S. District Judge James Robart in Seattle did issue a temporary block of the ban on the same day.

The state has met its burden in demonstrating immediate and irreparable injury, Robart said as he ruled in favor of lawyers from the states of Washington and Minnesota.

Feb. 1  Administration tweaks travel ban

The Trump administration tweaked its travel ban to exempt legal permanent residents of the U.S.

AFGHAN GIRLS ROBOTICS TEAM ARRIVES IN US JUST IN TIME

They no longer need a waiver because if they are a legal permanent resident, they wont need it anymore, then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer said of green card holders.

Jan. 30  Senate Republicans save travel ban from Democrats

Senate Republicans squashed an effort by Democrats to overturn the executive order. When Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. sought a vote on legislation to reverse the ban, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., objected.

Trump also fired acting Attorney Gen. Sally Yates on this day when she refused to defend the travel ban.

Jan. 29  Temporary stay issued on travel ban

A Boston federal court temporarily put Trumps travel ban on hold for one week.

The ruling stipulated that previously approved refugees, valid visa holders and lawful permanent residents or travelers from the seven countries included in Trumps order could not be detained or removed from the U.S. because of the executive order.

Jan. 28  Federal judge issues emergency injunction against ban

A federal judge in New York issued an emergency order blocking, in part, the executive order. U.S. District Judge Ann Donnellys ruling temporarily barred the U.S. from deporting people who arrived with a valid visa or who had already completed a refugee application.

As dozens of people were detained after their planes landed in the U.S., massive protests erupted at airports nationwide.

Jan. 27  Trump signs executive order barring travel from seven Muslim-majority nations

Trump signed an executive order which immediately barred entry into the U.S. for the citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

The order, dubbed Protection the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, also halted the U.S. refugee program for 120 days, but indefinitely barred all Syrian refugees from entering the country.

Fox News' Barnini Chakraborty, Bill Mears and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
President Trump dismantled his controversial voter fraud commission as the group faced lawsuits, oppositions from states and fighting among its members.

On social media, Trump accused Democrat States of refusing to turn over information requested by the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity  tasked with investigating alleged voter fraud in the 2016 election  because they know that many people are voting illegally.

System is rigged, Trump said, calling for more stringent voter ID laws.

A June 2017 letter addressed to states from the commission asked for publicly available voter roll data. However, the letter also requested a lot of specific details, including: parts of Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses and information regarding felony convictions or military status.

Officials plan to erase the information already collected by the commission, White House Director of Technology Charles Herndon said in a declaration submitted to federal court.

The commission was also hit with a bevy of legal obstacles by organizations and state lawmakers regarding its practices.

What was the commission?

Trump created the commission through an executive order in May. It was expected to investigate instances of alleged voter fraud in the 2016 election.

Vice President Mike Pence chaired the commission with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach serving as its vice chair.

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, a Democrat on the commission, sued the group in federal court. He alleged, in part, that it violated federal law by refusing to provide him documents made available to other members.

Dunlap also blamed Kobach and his allies for stonewalling progress on the commission.

Why did Trump create it in the first place?

In the days following his inauguration, Trump called for a major investigation into alleged voter fraud in the U.S.

Trump has claimed multiple times that between 3 and 5 million illegals voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, thus costing him the popular vote. These claims have not been verified.

However, critics have said the commission was part of a campaign to make it more difficult for lower-income and minority voters to access a ballot box. Others said it was an effort by the Trump administration to distract from the ongoing investigation into Russian collusion in the 2016 election.

Why did Trump decide to disband it?

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the commission rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense.

She said the Department of Homeland Security has been asked to review the groups initial findings and determine [the] next course of action.

In his declaration, Herndon said state voter data will not be transferred to or accessed or utilized by DHS, Politico noted.

Kobach called the disbanding of the commission a tactical change and said DHS can still pursue its own probe into election fraud in a quicker manner.

"The Democrats, both on and off the commission, made very clear that they were not interested in determining the scope and extent of voter fraud and, indeed, they were trying to stop the commission in its tracks," Kobach said. "The Democrats lost their opportunity, lost their seat at the table, by stonewalling."

Several secretaries of state, Republican and Democrat, bucked a request for sensitive data by the commission or said they would only provide limited data.

Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, suggested the commission go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.

Even Kobach said his state would only provide some of the data requested by his commission.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Opposition Bloc MP Mykhailo Dobkin has said that his fellow faction member Vadym Novynsky on Tuesday contributed UAH 30 million to pay part of his UAH 50 million bail, the remaining UAH 20 million will be provided by co-chairman of the Opposition Bloc party Borys Kolesnikov.

"Yes, I talked to Vadym Vladyslavovich by phone and he confirmed that today he provided the first part of the bail, which amounts to UAH 30 million, and I have the information that the second part will be provided by Borys Kolesnikov," he said on 112.ua TV channel.

Dobkin recalls the deadline for posting the bail is Thursday. "I will not pay the bail on my own, I do not have the money. My friends have the financial means and they have this money declared, because any amount that is posted as bail is checked by financial monitoring and the origin of the money, its legality is probed," he said.

Later, a former lawmaker of the Party of Regions, Olena Bondarenko, wrote on her Facebook page: "Vadym Novynsky (UAH 30 million) and Borys Kolesnikov (UAH 20 million) contributed to Misha Dobkin's [bail]."

As reported, on July 15, Pechersky District Court of Kyiv ruled to take MP Dobkin into custody for 60 days, setting bail at UAH 50 million bail.
President Trump forged ahead Wednesday with his voter fraud commission, kicking off its first meeting and repeatedly declaring voter information will be forthcoming from the roughly 20 states that have yet to comply with the groups request.

Trump in May announced the formation of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The commission sparked controversy several weeks ago by asking states to provide voter information including names, voting history and party affiliation.

Nearly 20 states reportedly have yet to comply with the request.

More than 30 states have already shared this information. And the others states, that information will be forthcoming, Trump said. So the full truth will be known and exposed if necessary in the light of day.

The 12-member, bipartisan group will looking into such matters as voter suppression, registration, the voting processes, polices and rules during federal elections.

KOBACH BLASTS 'BAFFLING' CALLS FOR RESIGNATION

Trump suggested in his winning 2016 White House campaign the possibility of voter fraud, particularly in large Democratic strongholds like Philadelphia.

Officials have said the presidential commission will also examine ways to protect voting systems from foreign interference, amid high-level probes into Russia meddling in last years White House race.

The commission is being led by Vice President Pence, who at the White House meeting called the right to vote the crown jewel of American liberty.

By establishing this commission, President Trump is taking action to ensure that the ballot box remains inviolate and that the crown jewel shines brighter than ever before, he also said.

The commissions vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, said Wednesday before the meeting that calls from congressional Democrats for his resignation are baffling."

He sent the letters several weeks ago asking state officials for the extensive voter information, prompting the pushback from state capitals as well as Democrats on Capitol Hill. Several Democrats recently penned a letter to Pence asking him to seek Kobach's resignation.

I think they want me removed because Ive been fighting voter fraud in my state of Kansas for over six years now. And Ive been very specific about what we need to do and what other states have been doing, he told Fox News Fox & Friends.

Trump during the meeting also struck an ominous tone about the states that have so far withheld the voter information arguing the request was too broad.

Any form of illegal or fraudulent voting  and any form of voter suppression or intimidation must be stopped, he said.

If any state doesnt want to share this information, one has to wonder what they are worried about? he said. And I ask the vice president and I ask the commission, What are they worried about? Theres something. There always is.
The United States Postal Service violated federal law by letting employees do union-funded work for Hillary Clinton's campaign and other Democratic candidates while on leave from the agency, according to an Office of Special Counsel report obtained by Fox News.

The OSC determined the USPS "engaged in systemic violations" of the Hatch Act, a federal law that limits certain political activities of federal employees. While employees are allowed to do some political work on leave, the report said the Postal Service showed a "bias" favoring the union's 2016 campaign operation.

The investigation was launched months ago after Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., brought constituent complaints to the OSC in October. The constituent, identified as a USPS employee, was concerned the Postal Service incurred unnecessary overtime costs and improperly coordinated with the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) when it released members for several weeks of union official leave without pay to participate in campaign work.

The Labor 2016 program sought to elect Hillary Clinton and pro-worker candidates across the country, the report said, citing campaign work like door-to-door canvassing, phone banks and other get-out-the-vote efforts.

HILLARY CLINTON SIDED WITH RUSSIA AS BILL MADE $$ IN MOSCOW

According to the report, roughly 97 NALC members requested the leave without pay to participate. The NALC, which endorsed Clinton last June, compensated those USPS workers using the Letter Carrier Political Fund, the unions PAC.

According to the report, 82 percent of the work took place in 2016 battleground states: Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Officials at multiple levels apparently were involved.

According to OSC Acting Special Counsel Adam Miles, the NALC provided lists of letter carriers to participate in campaign activity to a senior headquarters USPS labor relations official, who then emailed the lists to other USPS officials across the country. According to Miles, the local officials interpreted the communications as directives from USPS headquarters to release the carriers on union official leave without pay.

According to the report, local supervisors raised concerns about the impact this would have on postal operations and initially objected to releasing them, but USPS managers instructed local supervisors to let the workers participate.

We concluded that the USPS practice of facilitating and directing carrier releases for the unions political activity resulted in an institutional bias in favor of NALCs endorsed political candidates, which the Hatch Act prohibits, Miles said in prepared testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which is set to hold a hearing Wednesday on the matter.

But USPS Postmaster General Megan Brennan said that senior postal leadership did not in any way guide union leadership in selecting the candidates for whom NALC employees could campaign and that USPS did not approve or choose candidates for the unions to support or ask the union to advocate for political candidates on behalf of the Postal Service.

I also note that our postal unions do not speak for the Postal Service, and the Postal Service does not speak for our unions, Brennan wrote in her prepared testimony, insisting USPS did not seek to assist the NALCs favored candidates. This especially applies in a political context, but it is inherent in any collective bargaining relationship.

Brennan said that the practice to grant leave without pay for NALC political activity has been in place for approximately 20 years, but that all violations of the Hatch Act were unintentional.

We will change our practice in consultation with the OSC and based upon OSCs guidance. This will ensure that we do not put our people in harm's way and they do not unintentionally run afoul of the Hatch Act, Brennan said. As we have previously communicated to both this committee and to the OSC, and as the OSC has acknowledged, the Postal Service has always been ready, willing and able to end or modify our practice as appropriate, consistent with OSCs recommendation.

HATCH ACT EXPLAINED: WHAT IS THE FEDERAL LAW?

The Hatch Act is a federal law that limits certain political activities of federal employees. The laws purpose is to ensure federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion, to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace, and to ensure that federal employees are advanced based on merit and not based on political affiliation, according to the OSC. The office is an independent federal agency that monitors compliance with that law and others.

Miles, in his prepared remarks, said the OSC investigation revealed the NALC-USPS practice is long-standing, going back many election cycles, and perhaps started in the 1990s.

As a federal entity, the USPS must remain politically neutral, Miles' testimony said. In many localities, the Postal Service is a citizens primary point of contact with the federal government, reinforcing the need for strict adherence to the letter and the spirit of the Hatch Act.

OSC recommended in the report that, going forward, USPS management should not require, direct or suggest local supervisors release union members to engage in political activity.

Miles added: OSC has communicated these recommendations to USPS, and agency representatives appear ready to take the steps necessary to comply with the Hatch Act.
The United States Postal Service took heat during a congressional hearing Wednesday for allegedly violating federal law by favoring a union doing pro-Clinton campaign work.

According to a report released Wednesday morning by the Office of Special Counsel, USPS engaged in systemic violations of the Hatch Act, a federal law that limits certain political activities of federal employees.

While employees are allowed to do some political work on leave, the report said the Postal Service showed a bias in favor of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) campaign operation, letting employees take leave without pay to participate in pro-Clinton campaign efforts.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee heard testimony from OSC and USPS officials on Wednesday, along with the USPS mail carrier who shared complaints with Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., in October 2016.

USPS BROKE LAW IN ALLOWING WORKERS TO BOOST CLINTON CAMPAIGN, WATCHDOG SAYS

Postal Service leadership took official actions with the intent of enabling the campaign activity of its union, and with a clear understanding of what that activity involved, Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said in his prepared opening statement, citing the OSC report.

Based on these findings, it is legitimate to wonder why no one will be held accountable, how Postal Service leadership allowed this systemic violation of the Hatch Act to go on for twenty years, and is this occurring in other federal agencies?

Johnson was first notified of the violations in October 2016 by Tim Kopp, a letter carrier for the USPS and member of the NALC. Kopp thought the actions were illegal and was concerned the Postal Service incurred unnecessary overtime costs and improperly coordinated with NALC when it released several members for weeks of union official leave without pay to participate in partisan campaign work.

I want things done fairly and I dont want things done on a partisan issuethe union is always involved in highly political activities and I didnt want this to be a partisan thingI wanted this to be a thing where the general public does not lose trust in the postal service, Kopp told the Senate panel Wednesday. There are a lot of good employees, but the way this was doneit was a nightmare.

According to the OSC report, roughly 97 NALC members requested the leave without pay to participate in get-out-the vote efforts in primarily 2016 battleground states: Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The NALC, which endorsed Clinton last June, compensated those USPS workers using the Letter Carrier Political Fund, the unions PAC.

Officials at multiple levels apparently were involved.

According to OSC Acting Special Counsel Adam Miles, the NALC provided lists of letter carriers to participate in campaign activity to a senior headquarters USPS labor relations official, who then emailed the lists to other USPS officials across the country. According to Miles, the local officials interpreted the communications as directives from USPS headquarters to release the carriers on union official leave without pay.

The practice also put non-union employees, or union employees who supported other candidates, at a disadvantage, Johnson said. If those employees sought unpaid leave for several weeks for campaign activity, they would not have received the same treatment.

The OSC found an institutional bias in favor of union-endorsed candidates, all of which were Democrats.

USPS, through its longstanding practice of honoring these kinds of requests, failed to administer its programs in a politically neutral manner in violation of the Hatch Act, The OSC report said.

HATCH ACT EXPLAINED: WHAT IS THE FEDERAL LAW?

Committee Ranking Member Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said that the USPS is emblematic of a systemic problem not limited to one individual or one election cycle.

USPS has failed to implement sufficient controls to ensure compliance with the Hatch Act, McCaskill said.

But USPS Postmaster General Megan Brennan told lawmakers that senior postal leadership did not in any way guide union leadership in selecting the candidates for whom NALC employees could campaign and that USPS did not approve or choose candidates for the unions to support or ask the union to advocate for political candidates on behalf of the Postal Service.

I also note that our postal unions do not speak for the Postal Service, and the Postal Service does not speak for our unions, Brennan wrote in her prepared testimony, insisting USPS did not seek to assist the NALCs favored candidates.

Brennan said the practice to grant leave without pay for NALC political activity had been in place for approximately 20 years, but that all violations of the Hatch Act were unintentional.

We will change our practice in consultation with the OSC and based upon OSCs guidance. This will ensure that we do not put our people in harms way and they do not unintentionally run afoul of the Hatch Act, Brennan said.

As we have previously communicated to both this committee and to the OSC, and as the OSC has acknowledged, the Postal Service has always been ready, willing and able to end or modify our practice as appropriate, consistent with OSCs recommendation.
The former head of the Democratic Party who lost her post in the fallout from a massive email breach is expected to start cooperating with federal investigators in a separate cybersecurity case, after months of apparent stonewalling.

Fox News has learned that Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz plans to allow federal investigators to scan a laptop belonging to her as part of a complex probe into allegations of computer theft, over-billing and possible email hacking.

U.S. Capitol Police have had the laptop for months and until now had been unable to get access. It's unclear why the Florida lawmaker and ousted Democratic National Committee chairwoman had been battling law enforcement over the computer; however, her counsel began negotiating this week with Capitol Police in connection with the probe.

At least five IT contractors who worked for dozens of House Democrats including Wasserman Schultz purportedly took hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment and potentially hacked into the lawmakers email accounts.

The contractors, all members of a Pakistani-Muslim family, also are being investigated for a possible procurement scam in which they allegedly bought computer equipment, then overcharged the House administrative office.

TRUMP HITS PODESTA OVER DNC SERVER; EX-CLINTON CHAIR FIRES BACK

In addition, sources say the contractors had unauthorized access to the House computer system.

House Democrats have stood by the contractors, privately and publicly suggesting their heritage prompted the probe and is contributing to fear-mongering.

There is no indication that Wasserman Schultz has been accused of wrongdoing. The USCP has declined to comment on the case, a standard response in ongoing investigations. But the agency recently told Fox News the probe focuses on the actions of House IT support staff.

Wasserman Schultzs office declined to comment Tuesday on the situation or the congresswomans apparent shift.

However, the south Florida lawmaker, who has a primary challenger next year, has publicly resisted USCP efforts to look at the contents of her computer -- even suggesting consequences for the agency if the computer was not promptly returned.

In a Capitol Hill hearing in late May, Wasserman Schultz asked Capitol Police Chief Matthew R. Verderosa whether members property found on the Hill complex is promptly returned.

Verderosa replied: Its generally turned back over to the owner of a property. If its part of an ongoing case, then there are other things that have to occur for that to happen.

The chief gave a similar response to Wasserman Schultzs repeated questions on issue before she finally said: I dont understand how that is possible. Members equipment is members equipment. My understanding is the Capitol Police is not able to confiscate members equipment when the member is not under investigation.

It is their equipment, and it is supposed to be returned  I think youre violating the rules when you conduct your business that way. And you should expect that there will be consequences.

The Daily Caller New Foundation reported, based on information from an unnamed federal employee with knowledge of the situation, that investigators found a laptop used by lead contractor Imran Awan as officials were closing in on him and his brothers.

The story stated the laptop was found stashed in the Rayburn House Office Building and seized as part of the probe. But whether the seized computer is the one that belongs to Wasserman Schultz remains unclear.

Imran Awan did IT contract work for House Democrats from at least 2005. News of the investigation broke in February. However, Wasserman Schultz kept Imran Awan on her payroll for at least about a month, though he also had been denied access to the House computer network.

Investigators appeared to be blocked from accessing data on the congresswomans laptop without her consent based on the Constitutions Speech and Debate clause.

The clause in part bars law enforcement from interfering in lawmakers' official congressional business. The clause was designed to keep law enforcement from targeting lawmakers for their political views or legislative work.

There was speculation when news of the investigation broke that the alleged cybersecurity breach was linked to the hacking and publication of Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 White House race, which led to Wasserman Schultzs resignation late last summer. Fox News is told that no longer appears to be part of the probe.

The DNC also was accused of denying law enforcement access to their servers during that cyber-crisis last year.

House staffers continue to be concerned about whether their emails were hacked by the contractors.

Official documents and multiple sources say at least five contractors -- including brothers Imran, Jamal and Abid Awan -- are the focus of the probe but that as many as six people could be involved.

The equipment they allegedly removed from offices includes computers and servers.

Other troubling allegations have surfaced.

In one instance, police in January were called to the northern Virginia home of a woman identified in the incident report as the stepmother of the Awan brothers. The woman alleged the brothers were keeping her away from her dying husband. Abid Awan told police her bedside visits were causing their father additional stress and claimed he had full power of attorney over him.

According to LegiStorm.com, which tracks congressional pay, the contractors Capitol Hill work started in 2004 with at least two making six-figure salaries, including Abid Awan last year earning $166,944.

But Awan also had money troubles, contributing to concerns about the contractors' access to sensitive emails and how that could be used. Awan declared bankruptcy in 2012 with more than $1.1 million in debt.

Court documents show the debt included roughly $51,150 to the Congressional Credit Union, for two cars and a credit line. And Virginia court records show he has had 19 violations since 2009, mostly traffic-related offenses.

Fox News' Chad Pergram contributed to this report.
A tomb that may have belonged to the wife of King Tutankhamun has been discovered in Egypts Valley of the Kings, according to archaeologists.

Archaeologist Zahi Hawass told LiveScience that the tomb is located near the tomb of the Pharaoh Ay. Hawass and his team plan to excavate the newly-discovered tomb.

"We are sure there is a tomb there, but we do not know for sure to whom it belongs," Hawass told LiveScience, via email.

KING TUT TOMB MYSTERY: EXPERTS TAP TECH IN NEW HUNT FOR SECRET CHAMBERS

Hawass, the former head of Egypts Supreme Council of Antiquities, says that the tomb may belong to Ankhesenamun, half-sister and wife of Tutankhamun. Ankhesenamun, who lived in the 14th century B.C., married Ay after Tutankhamuns death so her tomb may be located near the Pharaohs, according to Hawass.

The discovery was reported by National Geographic Italia earlier this month, according to LiveScience.

Hawass cited the discovery of four foundation deposits as evidence of the tomb. Foundation deposits, he told LiveScience, are holes filled with votive objects such as pottery vessels and food remains.

STUDY CONFIRMS KING TUTS DAGGER WAS MADE WITH IRON FROM A METEORITE

King Tutankhamun continues to be a source of fascination for historians. The possibility that the boy king's tomb contains hidden chambers, for example, has prompted searches for the secret rooms, but remains a contentious topic for archaeologists.

In 2015, British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves put forward the theory that Tutankhamuns tomb contains two hidden doorways. The ghosts of the hitherto unrecognized doorways could lead to an unexplored western storage chamber and Queen Nefertitis final resting place behind the chambers northern wall, he said.

Mystery surrounds the remains of the famous Queen Nefertiti, who was one of the wives of Tutankhamuns father, the Pharaoh Akhenaten.

YALE ARCHAEOLOGISTS MAKE AMAZING ANCIENT EGYPTIAN 'BILLBOARD' DISCOVERY

Scans conducted in 2015 suggested Tutankhamuns tomb contains two open spaces, although a radar scan organized by National Geographic last year failed to replicate the results.

Some archaeologists also believe the mummy of Nefertiti, fabled for her beauty, has already been found in a different tomb.

Hawass has rejected the theory that undiscovered chambers lie behind the tomb and likely contain the tomb of Queen Nefertiti.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.
On Sept. 15, 2017, at 8:08 a.m. EDT (1208 GMT), controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, expect to receive the last signal from the $3 billion Cassini-Huygens mission. When the signal stops, humans on Earth will know that the spacecraft has met its end as a streak of debris across Saturn's sky.

Cassini will be intentionally deorbited into Saturn's atmosphere. The probe  a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency  will sacrifice itself to prevent an accidental crash that could contaminate one of the Saturnian moons where native life may exist, or may someday evolve. Cassini discovered a liquid-water ocean under the icy surface of the moon Enceladus and, perhaps a victim of its own success, must die to prevent any chance that its warm electric generators might melt their way down into those life-friendly waters. But the judgment to condemn the spacecraft was not made lightly. [Latest Saturn Photos by Cassini]

Deciding Cassini's fate

In 2009, with the primary mission complete and a completely healthy spacecraft well into a 27-month extended mission, Cassini managers looked at a variety of "what next?" options. Trajectory modeling showed that Cassini could have been sent on to survey the "ice giant" planets, not visited by a spacecraft since Voyager 2's quick flybys of Uranus in the winter of 1986 and Neptune in the summer of 1989.

Alternatively, Cassini could have been directed back inward, to explore giant Jupiter and its many moons, rounding out science started on NASA's Galileo mission in 1995. Galileo's large high-gain antenna had never unfolded properly, dramatically lowering the sum of data the spacecraft could send home. Galileo was purposely deorbited into Jupiter's atmosphere in September 2003, to prevent accidental contamination of the wet moon Europa, a precursor of Cassini's end at Saturn. (NASA's Juno mission is now gathering data during repeated close flybys of Jupiter's cloud tops.)

Or, Cassini could have been dispatched outward to investigate a few of the Centaurs. These are large, comet-core-like bodies inhabiting the region between the orbits of Jupiter and Uranus. Centaurs are likely similar to Kuiper Belt objects, such as the dwarf planet Pluto and its very large moon Charon, considered residents of the so-called Third Realm of the solar system.

But Saturn's unresolved scientific mysteries kept Cassini's handlers enthralled. So, in 2010, the mission team developed an innovative, intricate orbital campaign to extract as much science as possible from the Saturn system. [Cassini's 'Grand Finale' at Saturn: NASA's Plan in Pictures]

This clever blossom of gravity and inertia  termed the solstice mission  let researchers investigate the changes of Saturn's seasons, ultimately watching the planet change through half of its year. (A full year on Saturn is nearly 29.5 "Earth years" long.) By watching both of the planet's hemispheres, the science community witnessed all four seasons in only half of Saturn's solar orbit.

Death spiral for science

That extended stay at Saturn meant Cassini would someday run out of rocket propellant and drift out of control. To maneuver, Cassini carefully places monomethyl hydrazine in contact with nitrogen tetroxide, which spontaneously oxidizes (burns) it. There's only one way out: through the rocket nozzle. This produces vectored thrust.

Looking ahead to the day the onboard stores of these "hypergolic" chemicals would be nearly depleted, mission managers decided upon a final "death spiral" set of orbits. This looping "Grand Finale" would let Cassini sail between Saturn's cloud tops and its innermost rings  unknown territory considered too risky to explore earlier in the mission. The plan is for Cassini to execute 22 of these daring dives through the gap. (As of July 17, Cassini had completed 13 such plunges.)

Us or them?

Planetary protection works both ways: The probability of infecting another world with microbes from Earth cannot ever be zero. Likewise, the possibility of bringing a non-native "bug" home to Earth on a returning spacecraft cannot be eliminated. Some scientists argue that material has jumped from planet to planet since the beginning of the solar system and so there's no need to worry. Others are deeply concerned about unintended consequences.

The Cassini-Huygens mission launched 20 Earth years ago. In those two decades, there has been a shift in the planetary science community's attitude toward greater caution where the possibility of cross-contamination exists. This view is not based primarily on the altruistic goal of allowing possible alien biology to develop along its own course (although some scientists do subscribe to that idea). The broader rationale affirms that it's vital to know if any extraterrestrial life  which may be discovered on a moon or a planet or a comet someday  arose from an independent origin.

It does not matter whether it's a complex critter or simple microbe: If an alien does not use the same class of biomolecules that Earth life does (DNA, for example), its evolution was almost surely separate from that of Earth  a true "second genesis." But if it shares a similar genetic makeup, then either we had a common origin (likely somewhere else in space), or our spacecraft have contaminated the sample, and we'll never know for sure. This latter case is the nightmare scenario for astrobiologists.

Cassini carried and dispatched the Huygens probe, which landed softly on the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in January 2005. When Cassini and Huygens were designed and built in the 1990s, there was little suspicion that the Saturnian moons could have life-supporting environments. There was little concern that the Huygens probe could contaminate Titan's methane-rich surface. No water oceans were known in the Saturn system at that time. [Landing on Titan: Pictures from Huygens Probe on Saturn Moon]

Cassini itself later found that Titan might encompass such an ocean under its surface. And the tiny "snow globe" moon Enceladus almost certainly encloses one. Well, almost encloses: Enceladus sprays geysers of water ice out into space, some of which settles back down to the moon's surface in the form of snow, making it the most reflective planetary object in the solar system.

With Cassini's findings  and discoveries by the Phoenix Mars lander, the Mars Global Surveyor and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which spotted signs of transient liquid water on the present-day Red Planet  a more rigorous set of guidelines governing planetary protection was issued by the international Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) in 2009. COSPAR is empowered by Article IX of the United Nations Outer Space Treaty. These rules placed Enceladus , along with Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa, squarely on the list of bodies upon which biologic contamination should not be allowed. Each of those worlds was deemed to be a place where "contamination carried by a spacecraft could jeopardize future exploration." Each had natural processes by which "bugs" arriving on landers  or crashers  could find their way to habitats where microbes could survive and reproduce.

As if to seal the case, in early 2017, Cassini discovered silica grains and hydrogen gas in the ice plumes above Enceladus, indicating there must be hydrothermal vents on the floor of the subsurface ocean. Such vents on Earth have proved to be oases for life, dispensing heat, nutrient chemicals and mixing currents. These "black smokers" and "white smokers" support rich communities of organisms, almost completely isolated from others by many miles of barren ocean.

The warm way down

Certain parts of Cassini's internal plumbing and other systems are purposely kept warm; hitchhiking bacteria could have remained protected from extremely low temperatures. There is strong evidence that some bacteria can survive strong ultraviolet light from the sun and other space radiation. (A well-known claim, dating from the 1969 Apollo 12 mission, that Earth bacteria could return to life after more than two and a half years on the harsh moon turns out to be almost impossible to replicate due to the laboratory practices the scientists employed at the time.)

Cassini gets its electrical power from three radioisotope thermal electric generators (RTGs), which translate the heat of decaying plutonium dioxide. These RTGs are hot and heavy. RTGs can't be cooled except by their own radioactive decay; plutonium-238 has a half-life of nearly 88 years. If the craft were to crash on the surface of a cold moon like Enceladus, the RTGs could easily thaw a path through tens of kilometers of ice, and plop down into the liquid water ocean beneath, though this might take a long time.

Best of intentions

Space agencies hire microbiologists to keep records and samples of bacteria that can survive in clean rooms where spacecraft are assembled. The idea is to carefully limit  and specifically list  the species that could sneak aboard. If life is found in space, it must be checked against this gang of usual suspects before it can be declared as extraterrestrial.

There is also the chance that stringent spacecraft sterilization could actually be encouraging the evolution of microbes that are hardier and more resistant to the hard vacuum, wide temperature swings and harsh radiation conditions of space. It is remotely possible that, in the name of planetary protection, we are making the effects of cross-contamination worse.

For a deeper look into all that Cassini found in its 13 years in the Saturn system, watch " Kingdom of Saturn  Cassini's Epic Quest," a 73-minute documentary available on Amazon Xive-TV.

The author, @DavidSkyBrody, is the writer and director of " Kingdom of Saturn  Cassini's Epic Quest ," a documentary that look back at the mission available at Amazon Xive-TV. Brody was formerly executive producer at Purch, the parent company of Space.com and LiveScience.com.

Follow this author @DavidSkyBrody . Follow us @Spacedotcom , Facebook and Google+ . Originally published on Space.com .
The Afghan girls who originally were denied entry into the United States for a robotics contest made it to the competition in time -- and received an award for courageous achievement Tuesday.

The six teenage girls, who were denied U.S. visas twice, finished in 99th place but outshined 67 other countries  including the United States  in the FIRST Global Challenge in Washington, D.C.

President Donald Trump allowed the girls, between ages 14 and 16, to enter the U.S. on July 13 after their visa rejections sparked an international backlash.

AFGHAN GIRLS REFLECT ON COMPETING IN U.S. ROBOTICS OLYMPIAD

It is unclear why their visas were denied, but the State Department previously responded by saying all applications are adjudicated on a case-by-case basis in accordance with U.S. law.

The girls had little time to prepare -- their robot kits didn't arrive until 2 weeks before the deadline.

"When I was younger I was watching TV and saw this robot walking and wondered how such a robot could walk and talk. Now I build my own robots. It makes me feel proud," 14-year-old Fatemah Qaderyan said through a translator.

The first annual robotics competition, which aims to inspire young people to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), drew 163 teams from around the globe. Poland won the competition, while the United States ranked 155th.

Ivanka Trump attended the competition to meet the girls and cheer on the six all-girls robotics teams, including the team from the U.S.

Teams from South Sudan and Oman also received the courageous achievement award.

Fox News Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.
Last August, a 55-year-old Wal-Mart WMT +0.00% employee found out her job would now be done by a robot. Her task was to count cash and track the accuracy of the stores books from a desk in a windowless back room. She earned $13 an hour.

Instead, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. started using a hulking gray machine that counts eight bills per second and 3,000 coins a minute. The Cash360 machine digitally deposits money at the bank, earning interest for Wal-Mart faster than sending an armored car. And it uses software to predict how much cash is needed on a given day to reduce excess.

They think it will be a more efficient way to process the money, said the employee, who has worked with Wal-Mart for a decade.

Now almost all of Wal-Marts 4,700 U.S. stores have a Cash360 machine, turning thousands of positions obsolete. Most of the employees in those positions moved into store jobs to improve service, said a Wal-Mart spokesman. More than 500 have left the company. The store accountant is now a greeter at the front door, where she still earns $13 an hour.

The role of service and customer-facing associates will always be there, said Judith McKenna, Wal-Marts U.S. chief operating officer, in an interview. But there are interesting developments in technology that mean those roles shift and change over time.

Shopping is moving online, hourly wages are rising and retail profits are shrinkinga formula that pressures retailers from Wal-Mart to Tiffany & Co. to find technology that can do the rote labor of retail workers or replace them altogether.

Click here for more from The Wall Street Journal.
The USS Gerald R. Ford is set to go into active duty on July 22, after concerns about its technology and costs have caused politicians to criticize the aircraft carrier's new technology.

The 1,100-foot ship, which incorporates the U.S. Navy's first new aircraft carrier design in 40 years, uses advanced technology and operational systems to let aircraft take off and land quicker than previously done. It will have a total of 2,600 sailors, approximately 600 less than a Nimitz-class flattop, according to the carrier's commissioning website.

But the technology, which includes electromagnetic catapults, the ability to launch a third more aircraft than older carriers and additional arresting gear, has caused some concerns in Washington.

DARPA TRYING TO LAUNCH SMALLSAT EXPERIMENT ON AN INDIAN ROCKET

President Donald Trump told Time magazine earlier this year that the Navy should go back to using steam catapults to launch fighter jets because the new system "costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it's no good."

The ship is also two years behind schedule. Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, previously said the delays were "unacceptable" and "entirely avoidable."

Despite his criticism of some of the ship's technology, President Trump will preside over the commissioning of the nation's newest aircraft carrier at its base in Norfolk, Virginia.

NEW KING STALLION HELICOPTER BOOSTS MARINES' AERIAL POWER

The Navy officially accepted delivery of the carrier in Newport News, Virginia, May 31 after successful trials.

"Congratulations to everyone who has helped bring CVN 78 to this historic milestone," said Rear Adm. Brian Antonio, program executive officer for aircraft carriers in a June 1 statement. "Over the last several years, thousands of people have had a hand in delivering Ford to the Navy -- designing, building and testing the Navy's newest, most capable, most advanced warship... It is because of them that Ford performed so well during acceptance trials, as noted by the Navy's Board of Inspection and Survey."

In addition to the Ford, there are two other carriers in its class, with the three ships costing approximately $42 billion.

The USS John F. Kennedy is scheduled to launch in 2020 and the USS Enterprise is set to begin construction next year.

The USS Ford will undergo a number of tests prior to becoming operational in the next few years.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who is on a visit to Georgia, and Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili visited the village of Odzisi located on the South Ossetian border on Wednesday.

In Odzisi, the two presidents looked through the binoculars at the Russian border guard base, which was built several years ago. It is located several hundred meters from the wire fences put along the border line.

Poroshenko was interested in the humanitarian situation of the local population, the Georgian presidential press service said.

"President Poroshenko drew a parallel between the situation in the occupied region of Georgia and the situation in Donbas," the report said.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin, who accompanied Poroshenko, told reporters no compromises with Russia on the 'occupied territories' are possible.

"We continue the struggle because it is a struggle nut only for our territories, but also for our citizens," he said.
This is a rush transcript from "Your World," July 19, 2017. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

So Donald Trump had a second meeting with Vladimir Putin and we are upsetwhy?

Because we in the media didn't know about it prior?

Or because we just want to pile on about it now?

For the life of me, Im really at a loss on this one and why this is even an issue.

I mean, these guys weren't holed up alone at some secret location.

They were at a group of 20 Summit of world leaders in Germany.

This was at a dinner for those leaders.

All the leaders knew about it. They were all there.

Not a one wearing a disguise.

They talked. They mingled. They moved around. You know, the sort of thing world leaders do at a meeting of world leaders!

It's what they do. At these G-20 events, actually, it's all they do. Schmooze. They get up and schmooze.

Whether it's for a minute or an hour, do we really care?

If President Trump joins president Putin further down the table and uses his translator, because he spoke English and not his own, because he didn't speak Russian, does it really matter?

Each leader could bring only one translator. The president was seated next to the Japanese prime minister's wife, so his translator spoke Japanese.

Somehow everyone in that room got around and got around these boundaries. In at least a dozen different languages, Im also told a good time was had by all, even though its safe to say all the folks in that room didnt flip over the elephant in that room, talking to the other elephant in that room.

They sound catty, but that doesnt make for a conspiracy.

Like when I heard Connecticut Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, who ominously wondered about a conversation he will never know.

Yet if memory serves me right, didn't say boo about another president's conversation he very much did know.

Barack Obamas incredible exchange with then Russian president Medvedev caught off mic about waiting for a certain presidential election.

I don't recall Mr. Blumenthal steamed over that.

Some media coverage of that. Nothing approaching this.

Another news network even expressing feigned horror at the site of Melania Trump sitting next to Vladimir Putin.

No historical reference to a certain other first lady once seated next to a fellow named Nikita Krushchev.

We'd later learn John Kennedy was sending secret notes to the Russians through his brother Robert Kennedy to solve the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Not a word about this president talking to his Russian counterpart to maybe prevent a future crisis.

No, Kennedy was brilliant and working a connection.

Trump's a boob and proving a collusion.

And the media calls this holding truth to power?

Please. Save the sanctimonious outrage for someone who cares.

If this was a super-secret pow-wow, news flash: the whole world was in on it.

And every major world leader was playing a part in it. Including their spouses.

Talk about clever by half, those G-20 guys icing us media guys in full view of the world.

None other than host Angela Merkel in on the whole thing, inviting the whole bunch.

What is German for "faked you out, fake news!!"

How dare they meet and talk. Better they should sit and not say a word, at all.

And how dare the American news media not be given a heads-up,

Especially when it seems every other country's media knew exactly what was going down.

This is kind of like that time then President-elect Trump went out for a steak dinner in New York City and never told anyone.

Oh, the outrage. Oh, the questions that were never answered. What kind of a steak was it? Did he have a baked potato with it? Butter or sour cream? Both? And what did Melania have? The ribeye or petite filet?

Oh, did the media have a T-bone to pick with Trump then, but that's nothing like the beef it has now.

The same media famous for saying leaders should talk, just not this one.

And break bread not war, just not this one.

And work together on solving crises, not making new ones, just not this one.

Stop. Just stop. You're trying very hard to mask a hate that's now too over the top.

Go after the president on things that matter, not silly things that don't.

It's fair game to say the president might have dropped the ball on healthcare.

But to say he did the same dropping in on a world leader at the same table?

For now, focus less on what he's eating, and maybe more on what's eating you.

It only makes you look childish.

Worse, vindictive.

Isn't that the kind of stuff you say you hate about the president?

Just because you missed a dinner doesn't entitle you to some childish just desserts.

Food for thought.

Content and Programming Copyright 2017 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2017 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of CQ-Roll Call. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.
Delayed flights. Mishandled bags. Poor service. For many people, flying can seem like a hellish ordeal. However, what do the numbers actually show about air travel?

Figures for May 2017 were published last week in the Department of Transportations Air Travel Consumer Report. Fox News took a look at the information, compared to figures for May 2016.

On-time percentage

79.1 percent of arrivals were on-time in May 2017 for 12 carriers at all U.S. airports, the report said. The carriers included Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, ExpressJet Airlines, Frontier Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways, SkyWest Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Spirit Airlines, United Airlines and Virgin America.

However, your idea of on-time may be different from that of the airlines.

A flight is counted as 'on time' if it operated less than 15 minutes after the scheduled time shown in the carriers' Computerized Reservations Systems, according to the report.

In May 2016, 83.4 percent of arrivals for the 12 carriers at all U.S. airports were on-time.

BUMPED FROM A FLIGHT? KNOW YOUR RIGHTS BEFORE YOU FLY

What about cancellations, delays, and diverted flights?

"In May, the carriers filing on-time performance data reported that 20.89 percent of their flights were delayed," according to the DOT's website, which said that 0.19 percent of flights got diverted and 0.83 percent canceled.

The agency said in July 2016 that in May of that year, 16.56 percent of flights were reported delayed, 0.28 percent diverted, and 0.52 percent canceled.

7 INSANE AIRLINE INCIDENTS CAUGHT ON CAMERA

What do I need to know about mishandled baggage?

The mishandled baggage rate was slightly slower in May 2017 -- 2.32 reports per 1,000 people -- than it was in May 2016, when the figure was 2.40 reports per 1,000 people, the DOT report indicated.

What about the rate of being bumped?"

Customers may fear being bumped from flights, after an April incident involving United passenger Dr. David Dao, who was dragged off a flight after he refused to give up his seat to make room for crew members. Dao suffered numerous injuries, his attorney said, and settled with the airline later that month.

For the 12 airlines, the rate of bumping someone involuntarily stayed at 0.62 per 10,000 passengers for the first quarter (January to March) of both 2016 and 2017, the DOT report showed.

How many complaints were there in May 2016 and May 2017?

The DOT said it received more complaints (1,779) in May 2017 than in did in May 2016 (1,135). It said that most complaints for both time periods were about flight problems, which included cancellation, delay, and misconnection.

From a consumer perspective, air travel has become generally worse over the years, airline industry consultant Dr. Brent D. Bowen told Fox News. Bowen is a co-author of the Airline Quality Rating report, an annual study that ranks U.S. airline performance.

Bowen said the rise in number of complaints in May 2017 could be attributed to the Dao incident, which "sensitized the public" and "sensitized the media." He argued that media coverage of the story prompted heightened "psychology" of reporting.
A family of five said they were removed from a JetBlue flight on July 2 without reason following a confrontation with an airline employee.

Tamir and Mandy Raanan were allegedly asked to leave a flight from Fort Lauderdale to New York while traveling with their three young daughters after another passenger complained that the youngest daughter was kicking her seat, the Daily Mail reported.

Mandy said that after her apology was accepted by the woman, she and her family were still asked to leave the plane.

In a video taken on the plane, JetBlue manager Armando Gonzalez is heard telling the family we can discuss outside the plane. What I need you to do is come with me outside the plane.

When asking if something happened?. Mandy was answered by fellow passengers: no, nothing happened.

The couple repeatedly asked at the gate why they were removed; Gonzalez responded that they were removed from the airplane because you were not cooperating with me, at this point if you want more information about the incident youll have to call 1-800-jetblue.

The Raanans luggage was not removed from the plane, leaving the family an extra night in Florida without their belongings, and they were later told at the airport the following morning that they were banned from all future flights with JetBlue while the airline investigates, the Daily Mail reported.

JetBlue, however, has refuted the familys version of the incident.

In a statement to the Daily Mail, JetBlue said After a verbal altercation that included physical threats and profanities against a nearby customer, the aircraft door was reopened and our airports team politely asked the customers to step off to discuss the situation.

The statement went on to say that they will continue to investigate whether the customers behavior warrants restrictions on JetBlue travel and thanked their crew members for their professional handling of the incident.
From a lawyer who claims United Airlines gave her seat away to a Democratic congresswoman, to a singer allegedly barred from an airline lounge over her footwear, airline controversies are neither few nor far between.

The rising prominence of social media, and a near-monopoly of the airline industry, are contributing to the growing news of airline customers being unduly inconvenienced as they travel, attorney Arthur Alan Wolk, who specializes in aviation law, told Fox News.

These incidents are happening more because airlines feel that theyre empowered to abuse their passengers more and feel that there are no consequences, Wolk said.

Wolk says that chances of the airline industry improving for customers is bleak, even nil.

Read on for a look at some recent airline controversies.

Canine companion

A dog in a TSA-compliant pet carrier died after a flight attendant forced its owner to store the animal and its carrier in an overhead bin for the duration of the four-hour March 12 United flight from Houston to New York City.

First reported by travel blogger The Points Guy, United has since claimed full responsibility for the tragic accident.

According to passenger Maggie Gremminger, she and others heard the black French bulldog barking initially during the four-hour flight, and were horrified to learn the animal had passed away later in the trip, she told People.

A stranger offered to hold her newborn while she sat on the floor, there in the airplane aisle. She was holding her dog and rocking back and forth. Her daughter was also crying, Gremminger told the publication of the scene following the discovery.

Gremminger told People once the dog was found dead, the flight attendant became "frazzled" and insisted she did not know there was a live animal in the carrier.

I want to help this woman and her daughter. They lost their dog because of an @united flight attendant. My heart is broken, Gremminger wrote on Twitter, sharing a photo of the family who allegedly lost their dog.

A pet traveling in cabin must be carried in an approved hard-sided or soft-sided kennel, United's pet policy says. The kennel must fit completely under the seat in front of the customer and remain there at all times.

United Airlines spokesperson Maggie Schmerin returned Fox News request for comment with the following statement: This was a tragic accident that should never have occurred, as pets should never be placed in the overhead bin. We assume full responsibility for this tragedy and express our deepest condolences to the family and are committed to supporting them, she said.

Schmerin added, We are thoroughly investigating what occurred to prevent this from ever happening again."

Family matters

A woman upset about sitting next to an 8-month-old boy and his mother was booted from a Delta-operated flight on Feb. 6, the Daily Mail reports.

Mother Marissa Rundell Rundell shared a 45-second video clip of the incident to Facebook on Feb. 6. In it, a woman identified by Spectrum News as Susan Peirez  a program director at the New York State Council of the Arts  can be heard telling a flight attendant that she works for the governor before complaining about being seated next to a crying baby. Peirez then threatened to have the flight attendant fired when she learned she couldnt be moved to a new seat.

Rundell also told the Daily Mail that Peirez told her to shut the f--- up and shove it just prior to the start of the footage, after Rundell asked Peirez to watch her language around the baby.

Peirez could also be seen attempting to apologize to the flight attendant, but was ultimately booted after the staff member accused Peirez of having just "screamed at [Rundell] and her baby."

Ronni Reich, a director of public information for the New York State Council of the Arts, later confirmed to Spectrum News that Peirez had been placed on leave.

State employees are and must be held to the highest standard both professionally and personally, said Reich. We were notified of this situation and have commenced an investigation.

Rundell, however, has said she did not post her video to Facebook with the intention of getting Peirez suspended from her position.

"I don't [often] post really anything," Rundell told Inc. "This was a one-time thing and it happened  I totally was caught off guard with everyone who has been watching it. I didn't even realize that many people could see what I was posting."

Political privilege?

United passenger Jean-Marie Simon says the airline gave her first-class seat on a December 2018 flight to Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat. United, Simon claims, threatened to yank her from the flight after she complained and took a photo of the politician, the Houston Chronicle reports.

A gate attendant at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston told Simon during boarding that her ticket wasnt in the system, the newspaper reported. Told her seat was taken, Simon was reportedly put in Economy Plus and received a $500 voucher.

We were concerned by this issue and took immediate steps to fully understand what happened. After thoroughly examining our electronic records, we found that upon receiving a notification that Flight 788 was delayed due to weather, the customer appears to have canceled her flight from Houston to Washington, D.C., within the United mobile app, United told Fox News in a statement. As part of the normal preboarding process, gate agents began clearing standby and upgrade customers, including the first customer on the waitlist for an upgrade.

Simon disputed Uniteds claim that she canceled her ticket.

Since this was not any fault of mine, the way the individual continued to act appeared to be, upon reflection, because I was an African-American woman, seemingly an easy target along with the African-American flight attendant who was very, very nice, Jackson-Lee said in a staatement. This saddens me, especially at this time of year given all of the things we have to work on to help people. But in the spirit of this season and out of the sincerity of my heart, if it is perceived that I had anything to do with this, I am kind enough to simply say sorry.

Simon told the Houston Chronicle that the congresswomans remarks were accusing her of racism.

I had no idea who was in my seat when I complained at the gate that my seat had been given to someone else; there is no way you can see who is in a seat from inside the terminal, Simon told the newspaper.

Footwear fail

English singer Joanne Catherall, a vocalist for The Human League, made international headlines after she said that she was denied entry to a business-class Qantas lounge in Melbourne, Australia.

Denied access @Qantas business class lounge in @MelairMelbourne Airport apparently Ugg (Australia) Boots are deemed sleepwear by the lady working there although no problem in any of the other lounges so far, she tweeted. Helpfully she suggested I go to one of the shops & purchase some shoes.

Hi Joanne, we endeavour to remain consistent and uphold our Lounge's dress guidelines to all our guests, the airline tweeted, including a link to its domestic-lounge dress guidelines, which considers Uggs sleepwear.

Why would an @UGG boot I wear outdoors in all weathers be classed as sleepwear in @Qantas lounge but nowhere else that I have ever been on this earth ? Catherall asked.

Hi Joanne, we don't accept them in our lounges as you can see on the dress-guidelines, another airline tweet said.

Strange I had no problem in either the Perth or Adelaide @Qantas lounges wearing my Uggs even though they are apparently on the no go list in those 2 airports as well, Catherall tweeted.

The airline's reply here? Understood Joanne, bear in mind each lounge is subject to the discretion of the team. We'll pass your feedback on so we can improve our services.

We completely understand that no one likes being declined at the door but we've always had smart casual dress standards for our lounges, which are similar for those in place for most clubs and restaurants, a Qantas spokesperson told The Independent. "Over the past couple of years, we have had clear feedback from lounge members that they wanted these existing guidelines to be applied more rigorously."

Lewd comments

Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's sister, claimed that a fellow passenger on her Alaska Airlines flight to Mexico made "lewd sexual remarks" toward her.

Zuckerberg claims that the staff on the flight stood by and let it happen, with one flight attendant reportedly telling her, Dont take it personally, this guy just doesnt have a filter.

Shortly after her flight, on Nov. 29, Zuckerberg penned a letter to Alaska Airlines detailing the incident.

He started talking to me about touching himself, kept asking me if I fantasized about the female business colleague I was traveling with, rated and commented on the womens bodies boarding the aircraft as they walked by us, and many more equally horrifying and offensive comments, she said in the letter, as seen in her Twitter post.

Alaska Airlines began an investigation into the incident, the airline said in a tweet.

The passenger who allegedly made the comments was temporarily suspended from the airline, Zuckerberg wrote in a later tweet.

Mother's concern

Harvard Law student Briana Williams claims she and her daughter were booted from an American Airlines flight over the summer after she requested the 4-year-old's stroller while the plane was delayed, the New York Daily News reported.

Williams, 24, told the newspaper their Aug. 21. New York City-bound flight was delayed for several hours. The plane reportedly went back to the gate and passengers were told to get off.

Williams asked the airline staff for the stroller, which had been checked, while she was exiting, the paper recounted. The staff declined.

I told a crew member that I was not going to be leaving the aircraft without my stroller, Williams said. She later spoke to the "very disgruntled and aggressive" pilot, and says he contacted police to boot her from the flight.

Williams and her daughter were put on a flight in the morning, the report said.

The pilot put me in a potentially dangerous situation with law enforcement as a young, black woman, saying that I was a threat, Williams, who intends to pursue legal action, told the paper. "This type of rhetoric paralyzes the African-American community, and I want to ensure that policies are put in place that regulate the pilots discretionary abilities.

She says she turned down American's offer of 25,000 miles.

The airline told Fox News putting her on a different flight was in "the best interest of everyone involved," and said it offered her the miles. The carrier also said it "does not tolerate discrimination of any kind."

MOM CLAIMS AMERICAN AIRLINES REMOVED HER FROM FLIGHT OVER STROLLER

Patriotic display

In October, a Georgia woman said she was prohibited from singing the national anthem with fellow passengers aboard a Delta flight which was also carrying one of the four U.S. troops killed that same month during an attack in Niger.

Pamela Dee Gaudry, who is married to a Vietnam War veteran, enlisted the support of other passengers and planned to sing the anthem to honor the fallen soldier and his family. But in a now-viral Facebook video, Gaudry said she was prevented from singing by the chief flight attendant, who informed her the song was against Deltas policies.

She also said in her video that she was humiliated by what she saw as her lack of courage for following orders and not singing.

Since her video, Gaudry said she has been offered an apology from Delta, and the airline also confirmed that the national anthem is not against its policies.

Seat change without explanation

In a series of tweets, right-wing commentator Ann Coulter slammed Delta for giving away her seat to another woman on a flight from New York to West Palm Beach, Florida, on July 15, 2017.

Coulter later told Fox News that as she was boarding, a ticket agent snatched the ticket" and informed her that her seat had changed due to an emergency.

DELTA PAYS WOMAN $4,000 TO GIVE UP HER SEAT

She said that she sat in the original seat anyway until she was told to move by a stewardess who was not able to give an explanation for the seat change.

[The other passenger] was not an elderly person, was not a sickly person, a very tall person, Coulter said.

Party of five

A family of five said they were unfairly kicked off a JetBlue flight on July 2, 2017, after a confrontation with an airline employee.

Tamir and Mandy Raanan said they were traveling from Fort Lauderdale to New York with their three young daughters  one of whom kicked the back of another passengers seat.

Mandy said she apologized to the other passenger, but the family were still asked to leave the plane.

JetBlue said in a statement that the incident was not as innocent as described. After a verbal altercation that included physical threats and profanities against a nearby customer, the aircraft door was reopened and our airports team politely asked the customers to step off to discuss the situation, JetBlue said.

The airline thanked its employees for their professional handling of the situation and said it would investigate whether the customers behavior warrants restrictions on JetBlue travel in the future.

Quite the erreur

Lucie Bahetoukilae, who only speaks French, handed her ticket to an airline employee and boarded a plane in Newark, New Jersey, thinking the next stop would be Paris. When she got to her seat and found another woman in it, a flight attendant sat her in an empty seat.

Nearly 3,000 miles later, Bahetoukilae touched down in San Francisco.

In what United Airlines deemed a horrible failure in May, Bahetoukilae boarded the wrong plane after her flights gate switched at the last minute. She said the announcement wasnt made in French, and she didnt receive an email notifying her of the gate change.

CHELSEA HANDLER TO BOYCOTT DELTA OVER MISTAKEN PRICE HIKE

Once in San Francisco, Bahetoukilae had to wait 11 hours before United was able to get her on a flight to France.

Diane Miantsoko, the womans niece, told WABC-TV that she was worried about Uniteds security protocol.

"She could have been a terrorist and killed people on that flight and they didn't know they didn't catch it."  Diane Miantsoko

"With everything going on in this country, people have to be more careful," Miantsoko said. "They didn't pay attention. My aunt could have been anyone. She could have been a terrorist and killed people on that flight and they didn't know they didn't catch it."

United apologized for the mistake in a statement and said it is working with our team in Newark to prevent this from happening again.

Whose seat is it, anyway?

Delta apologized after a California couple and their two children were booted from an overbooked plane when the parents refused to give up an extra seat they had purchased.

Brian Schear said he, his wife and two children boarded a flight from Maui, Hawaii, to Los Angeles on April 23, 2017, and were asked to give up an additional seat they had purchased for their older son -- he had ended up taking a different flight. Since the son wasnt present, Schear said the family planned to use his seat for one of the younger children.

AIRLINE COMPLAINTS DOWN LAST YEAR DESPITE MORE CASES OF BUMPING

But the flight was overbooked, and Schear was asked to give up the seat. When the family refused, they were made to leave the plane. The family booked new tickets home on another airline.

We are sorry for the unfortunate experience our customers had with Delta, and weve reached out to them to refund their travel and provide additional compensation, the airline said.

Id rather go to jail

Dr. David Dao was seated on a United fight in Chicago bound for Louisville, Kentucky, on April 9, 2017, when he was asked to give up his seat on an overbooked flight to make room for crew members.

Dao refused, explaining that he was a doctor who needed to be at work early the next morning.

Im not going, Dao repeatedly said. Id rather go to jail.

Disturbing cellphone footage showing Dao being dragged off the plane, seemingly unconscious, by security officials went viral. During the altercation, Dao suffered a concussion, lost two of his teeth and broke his nose, his attorney said.

Dao and United reached an amicable settlement later in April.

We look forward to implementing the improvements we have announced, which will put our customers at the center of everything we do, United said in a statement at the time of the settlement.

Fox News' Janine Puhak, Alexandra Deabler, Michael Bartiromo, Kaitlyn Schallhorn and Madeline Farber contributed to this report.
If you think this womans holiday snaps on Instagram look too good to be true, you may be right.

Travel, fashion and beauty blogger Amelia Liana has been called out for photoshopping Instagram images of herself at stunning locations around the world, including New York City and the Taj Mahal.

Eagle-eyed followers noticed something was up when in May Liana uploaded a stunning photograph of herself at the top of Rockefeller Center, gazing out at a view of the New York City skyline, with the caption: What a welcome to NYC #TopOfTheRock."

The problem, as commenters pointed out, was that One World Trade Center (formerly called Freedom Tower)  which was completed in 2013  was notably missing from the citys skyline.

Cute! Thats pre-World Trade Center (the new one) though  the skyline is very, very different now, one person wrote, according to the Mail Online (the image has since been removed from Lianas feed).

Another said: Why is this skyline completely photoshopped? The buildings are different now.

Picture experts at The Times pointed out the image of Liana appeared to have been superimposed over an old image of New York City.

And that wasnt the only suspicious image on Lianas feed.

The Times also noticed an altered image of the Brooklyn Bridge, and one of Liana somehow laying in bed with the London skyline right behind her.

In another too-good-to-be-true photo, Liana poses outside the Taj Mahal in India. But the massive crowds of tourists normally seen outside the famous building are missing from her photo, as well as the scaffolding that was around the tower at the time the photo was supposedly taken.

Blogger Ellie Dickinson told The Times light editing was considered acceptable, but bloggers shouldnt go too far.

Its considered normal to change things like brightness levels but moving buildings and people and adding sunsets is something else, she said.

The problem with fake photos comes down to the premise of blogging. Its supposed to be accessible and authentic, not a glossy magazine. People want to see a lifestyle thats amazing, but attainable.

In a post published on her blog after The Times article ran, Liana denied she was cheating her followers.

I feel a great bond with you, my followers, and I would never wish to deceive you, the 26-year-old said, adding she was striving for authenticity as well as giving you imagery that is stylish, progressive and inspiring."

Outlining what she called her image principles," Liana said all her imagery was shot at the time in the location specified, that she tried to present images that have been shot using natural light and in real conditions." and that she may use all available techniques to enhance, sharpen or smarten my images."

This may include improving the light, tidying the background and other enrichments, but always in a way that is representative to the true setting and always in a way that reflects my aesthetic, she said.

This is not the first time travel bloggers have been called out for appearing to deceive fans with unrealistic photography.

Earlier this month, news.com.au reported on an Instagram blog called You Did Not Sleep Here, which calls shenanigans on pretentious posers flooding the platform with glamorous shots of illogical campsites that are more than likely fake.

This article originally appeared on News.com.au.
Police in Oregon found bones believed to be a local womans a day after her son was arrested for abuse of a corpse.

Officers responded to a welfare check request of 57-year-old Katherine McDowell at her Beaverton home Monday, Fox 12 Oregon reported.

Beaverton Police Department officers spoke with McDowells daughter, who requested the welfare check, and McDowells son, Matthew Gutierrez.

MAN WHO KILLED, SLEPT WITH STEPDAUGHTER'S CORPSE IS CHALLENGING DIVORCE TERMS

Gutierrez, 24, was arrested during the investigation on the charge of abuse of a corpse. Gutierrez reportedly told police that he burned his mothers body in a fire pit in their backyard.

Authorities searched the property Tuesday and found confirmed human remains. Police believe the remains are McDowells.

Police told Fox 12 that Gutierrez, who is currently being held in a county jail, has been arrested twice since January 2016 on allegations of domestic harassment involving his family, including an arrest in March involving his mother.

Click here for more from Fox 12 Oregon.
The Somali-born Minnesota police officer alleged to have shot and killed an unarmed Australian woman on Saturday had been lauded by Minneapolis mayor and feted by the local community when he joined the force in 2015.

I want to take a moment to recognize Officer Mohamed Noor, the newest Somali officer in the Minneapolis Police Department, Mayor Betsy Hodges wrote in a Facebook post when Noor began serving the city. Officer Noor has been assigned to the 5th Precinct, where his arrival has been highly celebrated, particularly by the Somali community in and around Karmel Mall.

In fact, The Washington Post reported that community threw a party for Noor  the first Somali-American officer to serve in the precinct. Minneapolis is home to one of the nation's largest Somali communities.

He came to the United States at a young age and is thankful to have had so many opportunities, Thomas Plunkett, Noors attorney, said Monday. For him, being a police officer is a calling.

Abdikadir Hassan, a local community leader, told The Minneapolis Star Tribune that Noor was a role model.

He is inspiring to young people in the community, Hassan said. He is very supportive and good with the kids. He is such a lovely guy.

Noor, 31, attended Augsburg College in Minneapolis and earned a degree in business administration, management and economics, The Star Tribune reported.

But despite reportedly viewing the police force as his calling, Noor took a winding road to the departments door. He first had jobs in residential property management and as the general manager of a hotel, according to The Star Tribune.

In his short time with the Minneapolis Police, Noor has had three complaints filed against him  two that are still open. The other was closed and Noor wasnt disciplined.

On May 25, a woman accused Noor of assault and battery because he grabbed her right wrist and upper arm and inflamed a pre-existing shoulder injury while officers were forcibly removing her from her home and bringing her to a hospital.

Noor, who spoke Somali at home, divorced his wife in December, but documents obtained by The Star Tribune also suggest he was a workaholic.

An evaluator was reportedly sent to observe Noor and his son together for an unspecified reason and concluded Noor had an even keel and calm demeanor.

But questions continue to surround Noors alleged actions on Saturday night.

Justine Damond called police to report a possible crime occurring near her house. Officers arrived, and Noor, at some point, and for an as yet unknown reason, allegedly fired his gun, striking Damond in the abdomen and ultimately killing her.

When she was shot, Damond was standing, in her pajamas, talking to an officer on the driver's side of the squad car. Noor, in the passenger's seat, allegedly fired, shooting Damond through the driver's side door, three sources with knowledge of the incident told The Star Tribune.

Noor did not activate his body camera  as required by the department in all use-of-force scenarios  and his patrol cars dashcam did not capture the pivotal moments, either.
Army sergeant serving in Afghanistan wrote a public plea on Tuesday looking for his beloved blue pickup truck that was stolen while it was parked at a Colorado home.

Sgt. James Neily, who was deployed to Afghanistan in December, found out someone stole his truck when his wife called him on FaceTime Tuesday morning. The truck was parked in Arvada at his parents' home.

"It does make me mad. I was really mad," Neily's wife Kayleigh told KDVR. "I had to calm down about it because I can't do anything about it right now."

NOTORIOUS 'GRANNY GEM THIEF' ARRESTED FOR SHOPLIFTING AT WALMART

Kayleigh Neily said the family was devastated to find the truck gone.

"It's our family truck. [My son] loves the truck. He was [just] playing in it," she added.

The Army sergeant posted a message on Facebook asking friends and family to help find his truck.

"I am currently deployed and someone thought they needed it more than me. I disagree so please help me find it. Thanks," James Neily wrote in the post.

ARMED MEN CAUGHT ON VIDEO STEALING GUNS FROM UNLOCKED CARS IN ALABAMA

Kayleigh Neily told the news station she has received messages of support from the community since. The family hopes to find the truck by Halloween when Sgt. James Neily is expected to return from Afghanistan.

Click here for more from KDVR.
Justine Damond, the Australian woman living in Minneapolis who was shot and killed by a police officer, spent her final moments trying to help stop what she believed was a sexual assault happening nearby, according to her newly released 911 call.

At 11:27 p.m. Saturday night, Damond called police to report that a woman was screaming, a transcript of the call obtained by the Minneapolis Star Tribune showed.

AUSTRALIAN WOMAN SHOT AFTER MINNESOTA COPS HEARD LOUD SOUND, OFFICIALS SAY

Im not sure if shes having sex or being raped, Damond told the 911 operator. I think she just yelled out help, but its difficult, the sound has been going on for a while, but I think, I dont think shes enjoying it.

OK, the operator reportedly said. Ive already got an officer on the way.

Eight minutes later, Damond called the emergency line again, to confirm her location and to make sure an officer was on the way.

The operator said officers were on the way to the scene.

MYSTERY BICYCLIST SOUGHT BY POLICE AS WITNESS IN MINNESOTA SHOOTING INCIDENT

One of the responding officers, Mohamed Noor, shot Damond when he arrived. His partner, Matthew Harrity, told investigators that he heard a loud sound right before Damond approached Harrity on the driver's side of the car.

A lawyer for Harrity told the Tribune that "it's certainly reasonable" the officers thought they were being ambushed.

Its certainly reasonable to assume that any police officer would be concerned about a possible ambush under these circumstances, the lawyer, Fred Bruno, said. It was only a few weeks ago when a female NYPD cop and mother of twins was executed in her car in a very similar scenario.

Miosotis Familia, an officer with the New York City Police Department, was shot in the line of duty earlier this month.

Minneapolis police are now searching for a mystery bicyclist, who may be the only witness to Damonds shooting.
Innovations Council under Cabinet to be established by end of summer

Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Groysman counts on launching the work of the Innovation Council under the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine by the end of the summer.

"We have developed a concept for the formation of the Innovation Council, and I think that by the end of the summer it will be launched as an institution under the government that will develop innovations," Groysman said at a government meeting on Wednesday.

The prime minister stressed that the government's task is to channel the potential of innovations into the development of the national economy.
Activists in Baltimore are attempting to promote a murder-free weekend by urging criminals to ditch their guns -- despite the failure of previous community ceasefires to curb violence.

Activist Erricka Bridgeford has been pushing her campaign for a violence-free weekend since May, and the idea has garnered support on social media. She and other activists are calling for a 72-hour ceasefire from Aug. 4 to Aug. 6.

"This is a city-wide call, asking Baltimore residents to celebrate life during the ceasefire," the event's website stated.

"This ceasefire is the product of Baltimore residents not only being exhausted by homicides, but believing that Baltimore can have a murder-free weekend if everyone takes responsibility."

Baltimore has been marred by violence for years. The city has seen 188 murders already this year, more than what was reported by July 2016, The Baltimore Sun reported. The number of homicides in 2017 is already on track to surpass the previous year -- which would make 2017 the deadliest year in the city's history.

But Bridgeford is hoping that doesn't happen. More than 1,600 people have followed the event's Facebook page. Activists even created T-shirts and flyers with their message: "Nobody kill anybody."

Community ceasefires, however, have historically proven to have little impact on reducing crime in cities, The Baltimore Sun reported.

For instance, Mothers of Murdered Sons, an advocate group for women who have lost children due to gun violence, attempted to stage a ceasefire during Mother's Day weekend. But the ceasefire didn't hold: two people were shot and killed and two others were injured by gunfire.

Bridgeford and her associates are even prepping for "in case someone gets killed during this ceasefire weekend" by promoting a fundraiser to support families of shooting victims.
A stubborn wildfire burning in the rugged mountains outside Yosemite National Park destroyed at least eight structures Wednesday, and forced thousands to flee their homes.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said the blaze, known as the Detwiler Fire, nearly doubled in size overnight in Mariposa County and has now scorched roughly 71 square miles.

The blaze is only seven percent contained, fire officials said.

The fire is burning near Highway 49, a historical route winding its way up the California foothills of the western Sierra Nevada and dotted with communities and landmarks that sprouted up during the state's Gold Rush. Yosemite National Park remains open, but several roads frequented by tourists were closed.

More than 2,000 people in the town of Mariposa, located outside the park boundaries, are under evacuation orders as the fire burns in steep terrain with dense vegetation.

"I've been here since 1974 and I've never seen Mariposa evacuated," resident Rocky Shaver told FOX 26 News.

Reinforcements are being called in to help get the fire under control, bringing the number of firefighters working to more than 2,200, according to FOX 26 News.

The fire is also threatening powerlines that provide electricity to the park.

"The safety of our customers and fire fighters responding to the Detwiler fire is our top priority," a Pacific Gas and Electric Company spokesperson said in a statement. "To assist with firefighting efforts we have de-energized several power lines in the fire area at the request of Cal Fire, many power lines have been de-energized to make it safer for Firefighters, Law Enforcement, and residents."

Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday declared an emergency, bolstering the state's resources to battle the fire that he said has forced thousands of residents to flee -- and is expected to continue burning.

The cause of the blaze remained under investigation, as smoke from the fire drifted more than 150 miles away to Reno.

Read more from FOX 26 News.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A runaway teen who disappeared in the late 1970s has been identified as a victim of notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Chicago authorities revealed Wednesday.

The Cook County Sheriffs Department said in a news release that the victim was James Jimmie Byron Haakenson, a 16-year-old runaway from Minnesota. The teen was reported missing in 1976 after he ran away from his home and was last heard from in August of that year when he called his mother and told her he was in Chicago.

Another victim of serial killer John Wayne Gacy identified. James Byron Haakenson, a teen runaway from Minnesota. https://t.co/yCZvGZlJNc pic.twitter.com/wmJjJNYVSW  CBS Chicago (@cbschicago) July 19, 2017

Haakensons remains were found in the crawl space of Gacys Chicago-area home in 1978 and one of eight who were buried without being identified.

POLICE TRYING TO STEM CHICAGO VIOLENCE FACE CUTS DUE TO SODA TAX PLAN

Gacy was convicted of killing 33 young men and executed in 1994. His famous last words were: Kiss my a--.

Years later in 2011, Sheriff Tom Dart of Cook County, Ill. ordered that the bodies be exhumed and asked the relatives of the young men who vanished between 1970 and Gacys 1978 arrest to submit saliva samples to compare their DNA with that of the victims. Dart hoped the advances in scientific technology would help investigators identify the eight victims.

Lorie Sisterman, one of the siblings of the teen, was among the scores of relatives who submitted saliva samples. Dart said that there was a strong genetic association between the siblings and the teens remains.

We (her and a County Cook Sheriffs detective) talked. And then he says, I regret to inform you that yes a couple of people burst out crying, Sisterman told CBS. And all I could say was: Wow.

Haakenson is the second of the eight victims to be identified. Months after Dart had the bodies exhumed, his office announced that it had identified one of the victims as William George Bundy, a 19-year-old construction worker.

CHICAGO OFFICIALS USED CITY EMAIL FOR RACIST JOKES, INSPECTOR GENERAL SAYS

Gacy is regarded as one of historys most unconventional killers, largely because of his work as an amateur clown. Gacy was also considered an active citizen of the community and well-liked by the towns citizens.

Gacy was convicted in 1968 to sexually assaulting two teenagers. It is believed that Gacy killed his first victim, teenager Timothy McCoy, in 1972.

Gacy, a Chicago-area building contractor, lured young men to his home by impersonating a police officer or promising them construction work. There, he stabbed one and strangled the others before he buried most of them in the crawl space or dumped the others in a river.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
An Idaho fisherman earned bragging rights after he reeled in a record-setting trout in Utah.

Sidney Cellan, of Soda Springs, Idaho, caught the 48-inch trout at Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Utah on July 3, Fox 13 reported. He went fishing with a guide from Creative Fishing Adventures.

"It weighed 57 pounds. It took about 30 minutes to bring in," Cellan told Fox 13.

Cellan posed in a few pictures with the trout before tossing it back in the lake.

He released it "so somebody else can catch it."

"You know if I kill all the fish that I catch then means there's going to be less fish for other people to catch," the fisherman said.

'MONSTER' CATFISH REELED IN BY CALIFORNIA FISHERMAN

The massive trout made it onto Utah's "catch and release" record. Utah Division of Wildlife Resources posted a photo of Cellan with the catch on its Facebook page on Monday.

"Record fish alert! On July 3, Sidney Cellan of Soda Springs, Idaho, set a new Utah catch-and-release fishing record at Flaming Gorge with this massive 48-inch lake trout," the Facebook caption read.

"Way to go, Sidney!"

Click here for more from Fox 13.
Another Senate Republican has spoken out against Majority Leader Mitch McConnells plan to repeal ObamaCare without a replacement, dampening GOP efforts to move forward.

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, told reporters in a conference call Tuesday that the strategy was not appropriate, but neglected to say whether he would vote against taking up the House health care bill, The Hill reported.

DON'T MISS: Attorney General Jeff Sessions, at 11:30 AM ET. announces a policy shift reversing the Obama era relaxation on the policy surrounding civil asset seizures. Watch live on FoxNews.com and Fox News Channel.

MISSILES HAVE RANGE, NOT ACCURACY

The second highest-ranking U.S. military official said on Tuesday that despite North Koreas intercontinental ballistic missiles range, Pyongyang does not have the ability to hit the U.S. with any degree of accuracy, Reuters reported.

North Korea is believed to possess hundreds of missiles capable of striking South Korea and Japan. Its recent test of an ICBM put it one step closer to its goal of developing nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching anywhere in the United States.

PEOPLE OUGHT TO KEEP THEIR PROMISE

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., slammed Republican senators who have said they would vote against a bill to repeal ObamaCare, telling Fox News Tuesday night that "they've got some serious explaining to do when they go home."

"People ought to keep their promise," Paul told "The Story" host Martha MacCallum. "If people are no longer for repeal, theyre going to need to go home and explain to their voters why they said they were for repeal and now theyre no longer for repeal."

MINISKIRT ARREST

The woman seen in a viral video walking in a miniskirt and crop top in Saudi Arabia was arrested Tuesday and was turned over to the public prosecutors office, The New York Times reported, citing state-run TV.

The woman was identified only as Khulood. She told authorities that she was in public with her legal guardiana male relativeand the clip was put online without her knowledge.

COMING UP ON FOX BUSINESS

7 AM ET: Rep. Peter Roskam will be on Mornings with Maria

8:20 AM ET: James Hoffa, International Brotherhood Teamsters president, will appear on Mornings with Maria

8:30 AM ET: Sen. David Perdue will be a guest on Mornings with Maria

9 AM ET: Sen. John Kennedy will appear on Varney & Company

9:15 AM ET: Bill Simon, former Walmart U.S. CEO & president, will be on Varney & Company

1 PM ET: Sen. Richard Shelby will be on Cavuto: Coast to Coast
Minnesota cops are desperately searching for a mystery bicyclist who was seen moments before a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed an unarmed woman Saturday night and who may be the lone independent witness to the controversial killing.

The bicyclist, estimated to be between 18 and 25 years old, was seen in the area shortly before the fatal shot was fired and allegedly stuck around to watch officers Mohamed Noor and Matthew Harrity try in vain to resuscitate Justine Damond, investigators said Tuesday night.

As the search for answers continues into how Damond, who called police after hearing screams nearby, was killed, the bicyclist may be an essential witness. Noor, who reportedly shot Damond, isnt talking to investigators.

Harrity was interviewed by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and provided a detailed rundown of the night, including that both officers heard a loud noise near their squad car shortly before Damond, a native Australian, approached the drivers side of the police cruiser. In the ensuing moments, and for an as-yet unidentified reason, Noor, seated on the passengers side, fired his weapon through the open drivers side window, striking Damond.

Neither officer activated his body camera during the incident  an apparent violation of department policy. The squad cars dash camera also wasnt recording.

In the absence of definitive footage, BCA agents have asked the bicyclist seen in the area  and anyone else who may have seen the shooting  to come forward.
New Jersey authorities arrested an internist for allegedly writing fraudulent prescriptions for tens of thousands of painkillers and anxiety pills as part of a drug dealing ring, the state attorney general said Wednesday.

Dr. Craig Gialanella, who has a medical practice in Belleville, N.J., was arrested Monday and charged with second-degree distribution of narcotics, New Jersey Attorney General Christopher Porrino said Wednesday in Newark at a news conference.

In addition to the 53-year-old doctor, 16 alleged leaders and members of a drug ring in Atlantic County were arrested and charged in the case, Porrino said. The attorney general added that the drug ring members distributed high-dose oxycodone pain pills they were able to get because of the prescriptions Gialanella provided to them in exchange for cash. The suspects also allegedly distributed the anti-anxiety drug alprazolam, sold under the brand name Xanax.

Doctors who act like drug dealers and illegally dole out prescriptions for these highly addictive painkillers are nothing more than drug pushers in white coats, Porrino said. And they are even more dangerous than a street dealer, because we trust that our doctors will protect our health and not hurt or kill us. Rather than preserving health and protecting life, this doctor allegedly profited by prescribing addiction and death in one of the counties hardest hit by the epidemic of opiate addiction in New Jersey.

The arrests arose from an investigation into drug trafficking in Atlantic County, which authorities described as one of the areas in the state hardest hit by the opioid epidemic.

Porrino's office said that from Jan. 1, 2016, to Dec. 7, 2016, Gialanella issued 413 prescriptions for approximately 50,000 oxycodone 30-milligram tablets in the names of 30 individuals from the Atlantic County area, including prescriptions for the alleged leaders and members of the drug ring. Frequently the prescriptions were issued in the same name but with varying birth dates.

Second-degree crimes, such as Gialanella is charged with, carry a sentence of five to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $150,000, while third-degree crimes carry a sentence of three to five years in prison and a fine of up to $15,000.

Gialanella is the sixth doctor New Jersey authorities have charged in the least two years in connection with the illegal distribution of painkillers.

Authorities were alerted to Gialanella by an Altantic County pharmacist who grew suspicious over the numerous prescriptions for high-dosage painkillers being written by a doctor some 100 miles away, Porrino said.

The pharmacist noticed that names often were altered to elude detection, as well as other factors that created a red flag.

"That pharmacist no doubt saved lives," the attorney general said.

He added that the investigation into Gialanella continues, noting that the doctor was found to have issued prescriptions for more than 350,000 oxycodone 30 milligram tablets.

"If all those pills were sold on the street for $20 each, they would command more than $7 million," Porrino said.

New Jersey has among the nations toughest regulations for painkillers, calling for initial prescriptions to be for only five days, and establishing strict guidelines for doctors to prescribe more. The measure also requires state-regulated health insurers to cover at least six months of substance abuse treatment.

Authorities have ensured that people who have terminal illnesses or suffer from chronic and acute pain will continue to be able to obtain prescription painkillers.

New Jersey is also taking a hard line against doctors who do not exercise caution in prescribing opioids, since data shows that many people who overdose develop an addiction after getting prescription painkillers.

Accidental drug overdoses claimed about 1,600 lives in New Jersey in 2015, the last year for which data is available. Thats four times the number who died from homicide and three times the number killed in automobile accidents.

A majority of those fatal drug overdoses involved prescription painkillers. State officials say that number is certain to be higher for 2016, and perhaps this year, as well.

Authorities described Gialanella as a doctor located over 100 miles away who allegedly callously cashed in on the epidemic.

New Jersey has taken action against more than 30 doctors in in the past 12 months, saying they overprescribed painkillers and other narcotics.

New Jersey has pursued criminal charges against some, and imposed sanctions including suspension and taking away the license to practice. The crackdown on unscrupulous doctors is part of a concerted effort in New Jersey to fight the opioid epidemic on multiple fronts  law enforcement, medical and a preventive educational campaign.

Nationwide, 52,404 people died from a drug overdose in 2015, up from 47,055 in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control. A majority, 63 percent, of the deaths involved opioids.
A worldwide audience was watching in breathless suspense when a Los Angeles jury found American icon O.J. Simpson not guilty of murder in the Trial of the Century in 1995.

The verdict was just one of many moments in the Simpson saga that over the decades has become a cultural touchstone, captivating millions who have seen him on the gridiron, in the movies and TV commercials, in a low-speed police chase through Los Angeles and a lengthy reality-TV courtroom spectacle.

Now a new act is about to unfold as Simpson awaits a parole hearing in Las Vegas Thursday that could free him from prison.

Before that happens, here is a quiz to test your O.J. knowledge.

What does O.J. stand for?

Where did O.J. play college football?

Who did Hertz Rental Cars pair O.J. with in several TV commercials in the 1980s?

What was the name of the person O.J. was accused of killing in addition to his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson?

Who found the bodies?

To which city did O.J. fly just hours after the murders?

Who was O.J.s chauffer during the low-speed police chase in the white Ford Bronco?

Who was the judge who presided over the O.J. trial?

Name the government witness who was O.J.s houseguest

Prosecutors said a bloody footprint found at the murder scene came from what brand of shoe?

The trial was on TV for how many days?

Whats O.J.s connection to the Kardashians?

Who was the LAPD detective O.J.s lawyers sought to discredit as a racist?

Who did the defense blame for the murders?

On one trial day the jury staged a protest by doing what?

Who was the O.J. attorney parodied on "Seinfeld"?

The defense closing included a line that became instantly famous. What was it?

O.J. was ordered to pay how much in a wrongful death lawsuit related to the murders?

What is the title of O.J.s book on the murders?

What prison sentence is O.J. currently serving?

CLICK HERE FOR ANSWERS TO THE OJ QUIZ


Two Pennsylvania parents who gave their oldest daughter to a cult-like figure who sexually assaulted her and her five sisters have each been sentenced to up to seven years in prison.

Bucks County Judge Jeffrey L. Finley said the actions of Daniel and Savilla Stoltzfus were unimaginable as he sentenced them following their convictions on child endangerment charges.

MAN ACCUSED OF ABUSING 'GIFTED' GIRL GETS MENTAL EVALUATION

Investigators said the parents gifted their oldest daughter, a teen, to Lee Donald Kaplan, 52, after he helped them out of financial trouble when they broke with their Amish faith.

Kaplan fathered two children with the girl, the first when she was 14. She is now in her late teens.

Jurors convicted Kaplan on all 17 counts of rape of a child, statutory sexual assault and other offenses last month, a year after a neighbor's tip prompted authorities to search Kaplan's Feasterville home.

During the trial, seven girls testified that they considered Kaplan to be their husband. Prosecutors argued Kaplan brainwashed the family, casting himself as a prophet, and created a world in which child rape was the norm.

MAN ACCUSED OF ABUSING 6 GIRLS IN SAME FAMILY WAIVES HEARING

The girls mother has said she knew about the sexual activity between her daughters and Kaplan, but believed it could be a good thing.

The girls father pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 3 1/2 to seven years, while the mother pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three to seven years.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
One of the most violent counties in the nation tied a plan to hire more than 100 policing recruits to a soda tax -- but the plan fell flat when a lawsuit succeeded in keeping the tax from taking effect, forcing the Illinois county to lay off the vital emergency responders.

The Cook County Sheriffs Office, which helps serve the county seat of Chicago, said 66 incoming recruits who were expected to start training next week were notified their incoming class had been suspended and 47 trainees who began last month were laid off, the Chicago Tribune reported on Tuesday.

The layoffs were part of countywide job cuts to make up for the loss of anticipated revenue from a proposed tax on soda that was recently put on hold.

CHICAGO OFFICIALS USED CITY EMAIL FOR RACIST JOKES, INSPECTOR GENERAL SAYS

These are very difficult times for everyone, said Cara Smith, chief policy officer for the sheriffs office. Were going to do everything we can to keep our staff safe and keep the public safe.

Smith said she is hopeful the budget crisis passes soon and training class can resume.

In addition to the recruits, 12 other employees -- including eight people who work at county courthouses -- were laid off. These layoffs were in addition to more than 300 county job cuts announced last week, the Tribune reported.

The layoffs in the sheriffs office come during a critical period for Chicago, which is in the midst of an epidemic of gun and gang violence.

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

In January, the nations third largest city revealed more than 760 homicides had been recorded in 2016  an average of two murders per day. The increase in 2016 homicides compared to 2015, when 485 were reported, was the largest spike in 60 years.

CHICAGO RECORDS 762 HOMICIDES IN 2016, UP 57 PERCENT FROM PREVIOUS YEAR

According to the Tribune, the county projected to collect about $67.5 million in revenue from the tax on soda this year and more than $200 million for fiscal year 2018.

But a Cook County judge issued a temporary restraining order June 30 on the soda tax after the Illinois Retail Merchants Association and several grocers filed a lawsuit against the county seeking to block the tax. They called it unconstitutional and too vague.

Soon after Circuit Judge Dabiel Kubasiak issued the order, 10 percent across-the-board cuts were ordered by the Cook County Board. The countys states attorneys office said last week that 17 prosecutors and 22 other employees would be laid off.

The Public Defenders office cut 69 employees, most of them lawyers.
Belarus is categorically in favor of restoring peace in Ukraine and is facilitating this process as much as it can, Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei said.

"We are categorically in favor of restoring peace in the region and settling the Ukrainian conflict as soon as possible," Makei told journalists in reply to a relevant question in Minsk on Wednesday.

"Our position consists in facilitating the soonest peaceful settlement process as much as we can and helping normalize relations between Ukraine and Russia," he said.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko regularly discusses ways to settle the Ukraine conflict with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the matter will be addressed during the Belarusian leader's upcoming visit to Ukraine, he said.

"We presume that both Russia and Ukraine are our closest countries among all former Soviet republics because these are our neighbors and because these are our main trade and economic partners. And, certainly, we categorically cannot accept the situation existing today, this triangle between Belarus, Russia and Ukraine," he said.

The conflict in Ukraine negatively affects Belarus, Makei said.

"Belarus is suffering from this conflict, from the fact that there are certain reciprocal sanctions between Russia and the EU, which is having a negative effect on trade and economic relations," he said.

There is also the danger that illegal weapons could be smuggled to Belarus due to the conflict, he said.

"On the whole, the existing situation affects not only trade-economic relations but also relations between people," Makei said.
Its been a busy few weeks for road rage incidents on Interstate 95, which the Federal Highway Administration says is the nations busiest highway.

On June 20 in Florida, a motorist was fatally stabbed after a sideswipe crash in Palm Beach Country involving a sedan and a van. After the crash, the drivers of the two vehicles began fighting and one stabbed the other to death with a knife. It was the countys third road rage incident on I-95 since February, according to the Palm Beach Post.

On July 6, police arrested an Episcopalian priest after he allegedly pointed a gun at a mother and son in Florida and cursed at them. The priest, William Rian Adams, 35, of Fletcher, N.C., was driving with his wife when he was pulled over in a red Corvette.

Police reportedly found a Glock handgun in the Corvette and arrested Adams on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

On July 9, Maryland police arrested a man and woman who allegedly pointed a gun at another motorist in a road rage incident. Police recovered two loaded handguns and a 2-year-old child in the vehicle. The child was turned over to family members.

Part of the reason for what may be an increase in road rage incidents on I-95 may be the sheer volume of travel on U.S. highways. Last year Americans drove 3.2 trillion miles, and I-95 travel accounted for 53.3 billion of those miles, a number that is expected to rise this year.

Americans are driving more for a variety of reasons, FHA spokesman Doug Hecox said to Fox News.

It may be because the economy is doing better. It may be gasoline being more affordable or maybe because Americans are ordering more online and so that could be increasing commercial freight traffic.
A woman who allegedly dumped her newborn in the trash at a South Carolina restaurant earlier this month had been ordered to leave the United States in 2016, officials said Tuesday.

Estela Ruiz-Gomez, 19, gave birth to a baby in the bathroom of her workplace, La Parilla restaurant in Greenville, S.C., on July 12 and subsequently disposed of the baby in the trash, authorities said. The babys grandmother, Lorenza Gomez Rodriguez, 41, who also worked at the restaurant, allegedly knew about the birth. Both women were arrested Tuesday and are facing charges in connection with the incident.

SOUTH CAROLINA POLICE BELIEVE MISSING COUPLE IS DEAD; TWO HAVE BEEN CHARGED IN CONNECTION

Homeland Security is investigating both women and their immigration status but confirmed that Ruiz-Gomez had been ordered to leave the U.S. in 2016, but did not comply, Fox Carolina reported.

Police said Ruiz-Gomez took a break during her shift at the restaurant citing a stomachache. Rodriguez went to the bathroom to see if the woman was okay and told her co-workers that Ruiz-Gomez needed to be transported to the hospital.

VIRGINIA MIDDLE SCHOOL PRINCIPAL CHARGED WITH ASSAULTING STUDENT AFTER BACKSIDE SMACK

Later, one of the restaurants employees was taking out the trash and noticed the bag was heavier than normal. The employee was dragging the bag through the parking lot when it ripped open and the infant fell out.

Emergency officials were called to the scene and rushed the baby to the hospital where the child was pronounced dead.

Ruiz-Gomez was charged with homicide by child neglect while Rodriguez faces aiding and abetting homicide by child abuse. The two women are being held at Greenville County Detention Center.
Two women were arrested in South Carolina after a newborn baby fell out of a hole in a trashbag at a Mexican restaurant and later died, authorities said.

Estela Ruiz-Gomez, 19, gave birth in the bathroom of La Parrilla restaurant on July 12, and the baby's grandmother, Lorenza Gomez Rodriguez, 41, knew about it, officials from the Greenville Police Department said.

An employee taking the trash out later that day noticed the bag was heavier than usual and dragged it across the parking lot.

Authorities responded to an emergency call from the restaurant reporting that a newborn was in cardiac arrest.

Officers said they answered a call at La Parrilla for a newborn in cardiac arrest. Polce said the mother gave birth to the baby in the bathroom, according to Fox Carolina.

The newborn was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. Hospital officials said they could not determine the cause of the child's death but said dirt and gravel were found on the baby's body.

Coroners returned to the restaurant for further investigation. Employees there told them that both Ruiz-Gomez and Rodriguez work at the restaurant.

Ruiz-Gomez took a break during her shift bussing tables, complaining of a stomach ache. When Rodriguez went to check on her, she returned from the bathroom saying the Ruiz-Gomez needed to go to the hospital.

After they left the bathroom, an employee emptied the trash in the restrooms and, as she was dragging the bag across the parking lot, it tore open and the newborn fell out onto the pavement, police told Fox Carolina.

The baby's father, who was at the restaurant, retrieved the newborn and brought him inside where EMS was called to the scene. The newborns death has been ruled a homicide by local authorities.

Click here for more from Fox Carolina
The second highest-ranking U.S. military official said on Tuesday that despite North Koreas intercontinental ballistic missiles range, Pyongyang does not have the ability to hit the U.S. with any degree of accuracy, Reuters reported.

North Korea is believed to possess hundreds of missiles capable of striking South Korea and Japan. Its recent test of an ICBM put it one step closer to its goal of developing nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching anywhere in the United States.

What the experts tell me is that the North Koreans have yet to demonstrate the capacity to do the guidance and control that would be required, Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

South Korea on Monday offered talks with North Korea to ease animosities along their tense border and resume reunions of families separated by their war in the 1950s.

It was unclear how North Korea will react since it remains suspicious of new South Korean President Moon Jae-in's outreach to it. But Moon's overture, the first formal offer of talks since his inauguration in May, indicates he wants to use dialogue to defuse the international standoff over North Korea's weapons programs, despite having condemned the North's first intercontinental ballistic missile test on July 4 and vowed a firm response.

After the ICBM launch, Kim said he would never negotiate over his weapons programs as long as U.S. hostility and nuclear threats persist.

The two Koreas have been divided since the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. About 28,500 American troops are stationed in South Korea.

Selva was asked about the U.S.s next move in the region and said a preemptive military operation is something that should be considered.

The Associated Press contributed to this report
ALEXANDRIA, Va.  A former middle-school principal has been charged with misdemeanor assault after police say he smacked a defiant student on the backside earlier this year.

Fifty-three-year-old Terrence Yarborough of Woodbridge had been principal of Carl Sandburg Middle School in Alexandria until he was placed on leave and then resigned after the April 4 incident.

Fairfax County Police said Tuesday that Yarborough asked a 12-year-old girl in the cafeteria to pick something up off the floor. Police say Yarborough then hit the girl on her buttocks after she twice said no.

At the time, Fairfax County Public Schools declined to discuss why Yarborough had been placed on leave.

Police charged Yarborough with misdemeanor assault earlier this month.

A message seeking comment from Yarborough was not immediately returned Tuesday.
The German government summoned Turkey's ambassador on Wednesday to demand the release of a jailed trainer of human rights activists, and said the foreign minister was interrupting his vacation for consultations on relations with Ankara.

The jailing of Peter Steudtner, who along with Amnesty International's Turkey director and four other activists is accused of aiding an armed terror group, marks a new low point in German-Turkish relations. They have been weighed down by a widening range of issues for months.

Ambassador Ali Kemal Aydin was "told very clearly that the arrest of Peter Steudtner and other human rights activists is neither understandable nor acceptable," Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer told reporters in Berlin. The German government demanded Steudtner's immediate release and unhindered consular access, he added.

The accusations of terrorist activity are "clearly far-fetched," Schaefer said.

Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel will hold consultations in Berlin Thursday on "what should now be done in view of the dramatic escalation of Turkey's actions," he added.

A massive Turkish government crackdown was initially launched against alleged supporters of last year's failed coup but has since broadened to include government opponents. Nine German citizens are currently in custody.

The activists were detained in a July 5 police raid on a hotel on the island of Buyukada, off Istanbul, where they were attending a digital security workshop. A court jailed the six on Tuesday.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, described the terror accusations as "a transparent attempt to discredit and criminalize dissenters."

Earlier Wednesday, a newspaper publisher said it has filed an appeal to Turkey's highest court against the incarceration for the past five months of a German-Turkish reporter.

Deniz Yucel, who works for the daily Die Welt, was arrested Feb. 14 in Istanbul. Turkish authorities accuse him of disseminating terrorist propaganda and inciting hatred, as well as espionage and ties to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK allegations Yucel denies. He hasn't been formally charged.

Die Welt's publisher, WeltN24 GmbH, said it filed a complaint Tuesday to the Constitutional Court in Ankara against Yucel's continued imprisonment and violation of its press freedom in the case.

WeltN24 director Stephanie Caspar said the company "will exhaust all legal means available to us to defend the freedom to report of our correspondent and the publisher."
Now North Korea has yet another new way to send a belligerent message: it has produced two anti-American stamps to observe the 85th anniversary of the Korean Peoples Army.

Scott English, executive director of the American Philatelic Society, told Fox News the imagery on the stamps is quite provocative.

In addition to the stamp of Nixon being stabbed with a pen, North Koreas image of a missile being aimed at the U.S. takes the cake, he said. It shows their willingness to escalate the tensions between them and the United States.

English, who worked on Capitol Hill throughout the 90s with a brief stint in 2015 working for Republican South Carolina congressman Mark Sanford, believes the stamps are a hard-hitting way for the North Koreans to get people talking and rattle the swords.

Its a good way to rally support by having their people buy the stamps to show their loyalty, and good propaganda for internal politics, English added.

Aside from the rah-rah effect, do these stamps add up to a hill of beans?

No. Not among U.S. stamp collectors because they are so hard to get, English said.

As Martin Frankevicz, New Issues Editor for Scott Postage catalogue explained, Stamps from North Korea are not easily accessible because they are embargoed, much like Cuba and Iran. And quite frankly, these are not particularly different than the other anti-American ones they issue.

But isnt scarcity a good thing when it comes to value?

Frankevicz says smaller quantities dont have much market value. What matter more is what is on the stamp. One of the scarcest stamps in the U.S. is the Inverted Jenny stamp," he said. "Only 100 were printed and one stamp sold for $450,000. In 1918, it had a 24 cent face value. This printing error by the post office is one of historys most famous and expensive mistakes.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was caught on a hot mic Wednesday railing against the European Union's treatment of Israel.



Netanyahu was meeting with leaders at a regional summit, where a conversation with his Czech and Hungarian counterparts discussing Iran, Syria, ISIS, and EU-Israel relations was accidentally broadcast to journalists covering the conference.

Netanyahu went off on the EU's "crazy" insistence on resolving the

Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a precondition for closer ties with the 28-state bloc, and trumpeted Israel as essential to Europe's prosperity and survival.

EUROPEAN UNION TAKES LEGAL ACTION AGAINST HUNGARY ON NGO LAW

"It's crazy. I think it's actually crazy, Netanyahu said. "There is no logic here. Europe is undermining its security by undermining Israel. Europe is undermining its progress by undermining the connection with Israeli innovation because of a crazy attempt to create conditions (for peace with the Palestinians)."

European ties with Israel would determine whether the 28-member union would "live and thrive or shrivel and disappear," he added.

POLAND'S LAWMAKERS CONTINUE BATTLE OVER CHANGES IN JUDICIARY

The EU doesn't recognize Israeli sovereignty over the land it won in the 1967 Mideast war.

"The European Union is the only association of countries in the world that conditions the relations with Israel - that produces technology in every area - on political conditions. The only ones. Nobody does it," Netanyahu said, citing Russia, China and India's willingness to do business with Israel despite differences in politics.

Netanyahu has pushed for closer trade ties with India and China in recent years. Earlier this month, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Netanyahu signed a number of trade agreements.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Justine Damond had a mortal fear of guns and expressed reservations about US gun laws to friends before moving to America to start a new life.

Kat Kinnie, who says she became close to Ms Damond while the pair participated in Soul Sessions workshops in Sydney, said she was just so excited to be joining her fiance Don Damond and future stepson Zach but worried about the prevalence of guns in her new home.

(Ms Damonds fear of guns) was her biggest reservation about moving to the (United) States, Ms Kinnie told the Triple M Grill Team this morning.

Like, there was no question about how much she loved Don  he was her beloved, he was her wish come true. She was just so excited to be starting her life with him and to be engaged with him and become part of his family and become a mother to Zach but she was worried about moving to the States and worried about how different things are in comparision to Australia and with the gun laws ... its a real shame that she has left us in that way.

Ms Kinnie described her friend in the same glowing terms as so many others have since the 40-year-old was inexplicably gunned down by a US police officer outside her Minneapolis home on Monday.

She was one of the most beautiful people I have ever met, she said.

She was a model human being and if someone could have been designed with the biggest heart and the most love and kindness and compassion that Ive ever met, that was Justine.

CLICK TO READ MORE AT NEWS.COM.AU
Secretary General of Amnesty International Salil Shetty has called on the Ukrainian authorities to investigate the murder of journalist Pavel Sheremet.

"#Ukraine: one year after journalist Pavel Sheremet was killed by a bomb in his car and still no justice. Investigate #WhoKilledSheremet!" Shetty wrote on Twitter.

Amnesty International noted that the investigators failed to identify Sheremet's killers, and did not provide evidence on any of the lines of inquiry.

"Despite a large number of investigative actions and an array of processed video materials, to date, an operative investigation team led by the head of the National Police of Ukraine could not identify the perpetrators of the murder. The investigation also did not provide any convincing evidence on any of the official lines of inquiry," reads a statement posted on the organization's website.

Human rights activists also recalled that in a letter dated May 19, 2017, the Interior Ministry of Ukraine reported that the pre-trial investigation into the murder of Sheremet "is supervised by the leadership of the National Police of Ukraine."

The organization plans to hold a rally dubbed 'A Year without Pavlo' in memory of the deceased journalist on July 20, 2017.

As reported, a car belonging to Olena Prytula, the head of the Ukrayinska Pravda online publication, was blown up while Sheremet was driving it in central Kyiv at 7:45 a.m. on July 20, 2016. The journalist died on the spot soon after the explosion. Investigators said they believed that Sheremet was killed due to his journalistic activity in Ukraine and other countries.

In recent days, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has held a meeting with the Sheremet family and CPJ representatives. The law enforcement agencies should deliver a public report on the findings of the investigation shortly, he said.
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When President Donald Trump left his chair at this month's G20 summit while Africa was discussed and had daughter Ivanka sit in for him, critics blasted it as a breach of diplomatic protocol. But it also drew attention to the growing concern that when it comes to the continent of 1.2 billion people, the U.S. leader has been notably absent.

Six months into office, the Trump administration's policy toward Africa has been left to drift, observers say. They cite vacant diplomatic posts and a lack of strategic thinking on multiple issues, including extremist threats in East and West Africa and civil war in South Sudan.

It's always been a struggle to get Washington's attention on Africa, but "with this administration, I don't get the sense that it's even on the map . We're looking at blank page here," said Richard Downie, acting director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

A chief concern is that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has yet to appoint an assistant secretary in charge of African affairs, the top post in charge of Africa policy.

That has "stymied" State Department operations, said Steve McDonald, global fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington. "Ongoing, day-to-day things don't get decided on."

In addition, there is still no permanent Africa director at the National Security Council. It is the only region without one.

This month the Trump administration delayed a decision on whether to lift sanctions on Sudan, prompting Sudan's president to order that all negotiations with the U.S. be frozen until mid-October.

Other White House moves suggest that Trump's "America First" foreign policy is increasing focus on security and counter-terrorism efforts in Africa over the humanitarian and development agenda supported by previous administrations.

Several African nations face threats from extremist groups like Boko Haram and the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab. At the same time, millions of people are at risk of starvation in Somalia, South Sudan and northeastern Nigeria, and potentially violent elections are approaching in regional powers Kenya and Congo.

While the U.S. this month pledged nearly $640 million in humanitarian assistance to alleviate hunger in South Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen, critics said the aid had been approved months earlier by Congress but delayed by the Trump administration.

Trump moved relatively quickly on security. In March, he approved a Pentagon proposal to "conduct lethal action" in Somalia against al-Shabab. Less than a month later, Defense Secretary James Mattis visited Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the only permanent U.S. military base in Africa.

Tillerson has yet to visit Africa, according to the State Department's online log of his travels.

The White House's 2018 proposed budget reflects the shift toward security and away from aid. It includes a $52 billion increase on defense spending, made possible by proposed cuts to the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development by roughly a third.

The proposed budget would reduce funding from $30 million to $8 million to carry out the closure of the United States African Development Foundation, which supports local enterprises in 30 countries. It also would reduce funding by about $1 billion to the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which supports anti-retroviral therapy for over 11 million people, many in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Trump administration also wants downsizing of United Nations peacekeeping missions, many operating in Africa's most volatile areas. In June, the U.N. reduced its annual peacekeeping budget by more than half a billion dollars.

Current and former U.S. military leaders have warned that deep cuts to diplomacy and aid could jeopardize long-term U.S. interests overseas, and some lawmakers have pledged not to pass the budget as it stands.

"This budget, if fully implemented, would require us to retreat from the world diplomatically or put people at risk," Sen. Lindsey Graham told reporters in May. "You'd have lot of Benghazis in the making if this thing became law."

In Somalia, development programs meant to counter the lure of extremism could disappear under the proposed budget. USADF grants have reached nearly 6,000 direct beneficiaries there since 2012, said Abdinasir Ahmed Osman, project coordinator for the Somali Consultants Association, which monitors the work.

In the capital, Mogadishu, USADF-funded programs target youth between 18 and 35 - the same demographic that extremist recruiters go after, Osman said.

"We are giving them skills. We are giving them opportunity," he said. "They can compare which is better: being in battle, dying without a future, or getting skills and working?"

It's wrong to say that U.S. diplomatic efforts in Africa are not moving forward, said Brian Neubert, director of the State Department's Africa Regional Media Hub in Johannesburg.

He said several development and trade initiatives such as Power Africa and the African Growth and Opportunity Act continue and diplomats are going about their work. But South Africa, one of the continent's top economies, remains without a U.S. ambassador.

"It's pretty routine at this period, given the other challenges in the world," Neubert said.

Others disagree, saying that without a president visibly engaged in Africa  especially after President Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan  U.S. diplomatic efforts could flounder.

"What you have is a policy vacuum when it comes to basic, critical issues in Africa," said Steven Feldstein, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.

"Diplomacy will follow where the president signals his interest."

___

Associated Press writer Vivian Salama in Washington contributed.
New U.K. Treasury chief Jeremy Hunt has reversed most of an economic package announced by the government just weeks ago, including a planned cut in income taxes. Hunt said Monday he was scrapping almost all the tax cuts announced last month by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Liz Truss, and also signaled that public spending cuts are on the way. It was a bid to soothe turbulent financial markets spooked by fears of excessive government borrowing. The move raises questions about how long the beleaguered prime minister can stay in office, though Truss insisted she has no plans to quit. She vowed to lead the Conservatives into the next general election, but many in the party want her gone.
There is no good drinking water in Donbas and there is a risk of water shortages in Mariupol, Donetsk region, Ukraine's Minister of Temporarily Occupied Territories and Internally Displaced Persons Vadym Chernysh said.

He said in an interview with Interfax that there is problem with the high level of water mineralization in Donbas and the cleansing system was built back under he Soviets and is now old.

"The level of admixtures in the water is very high and there is no good drinking water in the region in general," Chernysh said.

The part of the southern Donbas water service line, which supplies water from the Severskyy Donets to Mariupol, runs through territory uncontrolled by Kyiv, where it has been damaged.

"Water supply has declined, apparently there is damage, but we cannot assess it, let alone repair it. The result is an inefficient water supply system: there are water and power losses, water quality is declining," the minister said.

The supply of water to Mariupol has dropped to a very low level and the city may experience a need for drinking water as the water supplied is low quality, he said.

The minister said the reduction of supply and the shortage of water does not mean that the people of the city will be left without water altogether.

Chernysh also said he believes the local authorities have resources to resolve water supply issues.
A man who had an estimated $80,000 worth of illegal drugs in his car when he crashed after fleeing from a state trooper in Spotsylvania County last year was ordered Tuesday to serve 10 years in prison.

Jesus J. Isaguirre, 23, of Green Acres, Fla., had previously pleaded guilty in Spotsylvania Circuit Court to three counts of possessing illegal drugs with the intent to distribute, felony eluding and possessing a firearm as a felon. Judge Ricardo Rigual sentenced him to a total of 28 years with 18 years suspended.

According to the evidence presented by prosecutor Ryan Mehaffey, Isaguirre and two other Florida men were on their way from Miami to New York on June 30, 2016, when state trooper Quintin Kelly attempted to stop their white Mercedes for speeding in the northbound lanes of Interstate 95 in Spotsylvania.

Instead of stopping, Isaguirre left the interstate and soon got onto southbound U.S. 1 doing more than 100 mph with police in pursuit. A short time later, the Mercedes went out of control, crossed the northbound lanes, ran off the road and overturned in Caroline County.

Troopers found a badly injured Isaguirre hiding in the woods a short distance away. The front seat passenger, 24-year-old Fleurisson Lebrun, was picked up while walking away from the scene. Noel Mendoza, 22, was pinned in the back seat.

Mehaffey said numerous drugs were found in or near the car, including more than an ounce of cocaine, more than two ounces of heroin, one and a half pounds of marijuana and nearly 1,000 Xanax pills.

Rigual said his "inevitable conclusion" is that Isaquirre is a "professional drug dealer."

Lebrun and Mendoza have already been convicted for their roles in the aborted drug run. Lebrun pleaded guilty to two counts of possession with the intent to distribute and possessing a firearm while in possession of drugs; he was ordered to serve a year and nine months in prison.

Mendoza pleaded guilty to possessing cocaine and was ordered to serve nine months in prison. Neither Lebrun nor Mendoza had prior criminal records.
A local judge who was barred from presiding in his home district after complaints surfaced that he sexually harassed courtroom clerks and made crude remarks has been reinstated to the 11th Judicial District but will not be allowed to sit on the bench in the district.

After being assigned to preside in a number of other districts across the state during his 14-month exile from the 11th District, Judge Robert B. Beasley Jr., who has apologized for his behavior, officially returned July 5 on instructions from the office of Chief Justice Donald W. Lemons of the Virginia Supreme Court.

But 11th District Chief Judge Mayo Gravatt, after meeting with Beasley, has limited Beasleys duties to presiding over mental commitment hearings at three hospitals within the district. He will not sit on the bench  at least for now  in general district courts in Petersburg or the counties of Powhatan, Dinwiddie, Amelia and Nottoway, which make up the 11th District.

In an interview this week, Gravatt said Beasleys services are not needed on the bench because the current caseload in those localities can be handled sufficiently and expeditiously by the two existing judges  himself and Judge Ray P. Lupold.

We didnt need another judge, Gravatt said, adding that a third judge in the district would leave us underutilized.

Instead, Gravatt has assigned Beasley to preside over mental commitment hearings  also known as temporary detention order hearings, which are for people who may require involuntary hospitalization for psychiatric treatment  at Central State Hospital, Southside Regional Medical Center and Poplar Springs Hospital in the Tri-Cities area.

That has always been a district court function as well, (and) its a fairly busy job with three institutions in the 11th, Gravatt said. Mental commitment cases typically have been handled by special justices  local attorneys who are appointed by the court and authorized to hear certain mental health commitment matters.

In addition to hearing mental commitment cases three days a week, Beasley has been assigned to hear civil and criminal matters two days a week in Suffolk General District Court in Virginias 5th Judicial District, Gravatt said. Beasley will sit in the 5th District at least through Oct. 30, according to a July 10 order signed by Lemons.

In ordering Beasley back to the 11th District, the Virginia Supreme Court did not specify what duties he should be assigned. That was left to the discretion of Gravatt as the 11th Districts chief judge.

Beasleys return has left a number of 11th District courtroom clerks who said the judge had harassed them feeling uneasy and fearful of reprisals if he eventually is reinstated to the bench in their localities. Gravatt acknowledged that its possible that Beasley could return to the bench at some future point.

Gravatt said Beasleys current assignment continues for the time being  until conditions change or something (else) changes.

At least one of the clerks said she recently hired an attorney as a precaution.

Beasley has declined to comment in the past, and he did not respond Tuesday to several messages seeking comment by email or through his former attorney.

Beasley came under intense scrutiny last year after it was disclosed that he had been suspended for 10 weeks in late 2015 and early 2016 for allegations of inappropriate conduct.

He was eventually reinstated on Feb. 2, 2016, after writing letters of apology the previous month to clerks in Amelia, Powhatan and Dinwiddie, where he began sitting as a judge on Dec. 1, 2014. In the letters, Beasley apologized for my offensive conduct and statements over the past year, which he described as inexcusable.

My actions towards you were inappropriate on both a personal and professional level and for that I am truly sorry, Beasley wrote. It will not happen again.

The complaints against the judge include his telling crude sexual jokes and making sexual remarks inside and outside the courtroom. He was also accused of emailing images to employees and posting pictures in clerks offices that convey sexual innuendos, sources have previously said.

Beasley is also alleged to have made repeated statements about court employees jobs, suggesting they would be terminated if he were elevated to the position of chief judge.

The clerks have said that Beasleys conduct and statements created a hostile work environment that made them uncomfortable and concerned about their continued employment. The affected employees felt uneasy in the judges presence and do not want him to return.

In early March 2016, the Virginia Supreme Courts chief justice ordered Beasley to begin serving outside his home district, and through a series of subsequent orders Beasley was assigned to various judicial districts in Virginia that were shorthanded or needed temporary assistance.

It is my understanding that he had done well in these districts that he had been sent to, Gravatt said. I did not go to monitor (Beasley), but there may have been some monitoring that Im not directly privy to.

The complaints against Beasley were reviewed in December 2015 by Virginias Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission, which investigates allegations of judicial misconduct, but the body apparently took no official action against the judge. All commission matters are confidential unless the panel files a formal complaint against a judge in the Supreme Court of Virginia or, pursuant to law, reports information to the General Assembly when the judge is being considered for re-election by the legislature.

In the spring of 2016, two of the most powerful members of the Virginia Senate threatened to initiate impeachment proceedings against Beasley, but House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, quashed the move. He said that although Beasleys behavior was unbecoming and inappropriate, it did not substantiate an impeachment charge.

Beasley has roughly three years and four months remaining on his six-year term, which ends in December 2020. He was elected by the General Assembly in September 2014 and began work that December. Beasley filled the 11th Districts third general district court position, created in 2014.

Gravatt will retire in January 2020 after reaching 73, the mandatory retirement age for state judges. That could create an opening for Beasley if the General Assembly doesnt elect someone to specifically fill Gravatts vacancy.

Then-House of Delegates Courts Chairman David B. Albo, R-Fairfax, suggested to the Richmond Times-Dispatch last year that Beasley would have a heck of a time getting reappointed when his term expires.
Members of Spotsylvania American Legion Auxiliary Unit 320 will host a continental breakfast for all prospective members on Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to noon. Veterans or those who have a grandparent, parent, sibling or spouse who is a veteran and are interested in becoming a member of the Auxiliary are welcome.

American Legion Auxiliary Unit 320 members support veterans from every conflict, active military personnel and their families, and the community. Join Auxiliary members on Saturday for camaraderie and learn more about the work they do. The breakfast will be held at 8456 Brock Road, Spotsylvania.

To RSVP for the breakfast or for information on the Auxiliary or Legion, contact Janet Skerry, Auxiliary President, at 540/548-8069 or Janet.AmLAux320@gmail.com; email SpotsyUnit320@gmail.com; or visit spotsylvaniapost320.org or facebook.com/AmLAuxiliaryUnit320.
The cyber police of Ukraine have received 194 pieces of special equipment for protecting against cyber threats under an program administered by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Interior Minister Arsen Avakov has said.

"We today herald the next stage of our cooperation [with the OSCE] and announce the transfer of special equipment for the cyber police," Avakov said during a ceremony on Wednesday in Kyiv marking the event.

British Ambassador to Ukraine Judith Gough, who attended the ceremony, said her government was happy to cooperate.

"Official handover of equipment to #Ukraine Cyber Police. UK provided training to 184 officers. Working together to tackle #cyber crime," Gough said on her Twitter page following the event.

The head of Ukraine's cyber police unit Serhiy Dmediuk, in turn, said the software and specialized programs, as well as equipment and accessories, would help to study and analyze cyber threats.

"The equipment is one of the tools, which help qualified police conduct their work," he said. "I think the use of more modern equipment, of course, will make it easier to react more quickly."
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said Ukraine and Georgia will fight to the end to restore their territorial integrity.

"Ukraine will do its utmost to ensure Georgia's sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity. There is no line of contact here, it's not even the line of occupation, it's a gap between the past and the future... and this is the result of Russia's policy... What we see [behind the barbed wire] is tears in people's eyes, humanitarian catastrophe. We see a situation where people do not have elementary social rights, and most importantly, they have absolutely no hope," the Ukrainian president told reporters during his visit to Odzisi village located on the border with South Ossetia (the broadcast was conducted by the 112.ua TV channel.

At the same time, Poroshenko stressed that the way for de-occupation of the territory is political and diplomatic.

"We need unity and solidarity with Georgia, I believe that today the world is united, Russia remains isolated, Russia should take steps to de-occupation of Ukrainian and Georgian territory," he said.
Democrat Ralph Northam and Republican Ed Gillespie both raised nearly $2 million in June as they won their gubernatorial primaries, but Gillespie has almost twice as much cash as Northam after spending less money to survive his surprisingly close nomination contest.

Gillespie had nearly $3.29 million on hand between his campaign and PAC as of June 30, compared with $1.76 million for Northam, according to campaign finance reports due at midnight Monday. Northam, the current lieutenant governor, finished slightly ahead of Gillespie, a Northern Virginia-based political consultant and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, in fundraising for the month, bringing in $1.96 million to Gillespies $1.82 million. Both received a $1 million post-primary contribution from their parties respective governors associations.

At the end of the reporting period, Gillespies campaign had spent $3.47 million for the entire election cycle. Northams campaign had spent $6.65 million, much of it going toward advertising in his Democratic primary battle with former congressman Tom Perriello.

The NorthamPerriello matchup was widely thought to be the more competitive race of the June 13 primaries. Instead, Northam, a pediatric neurologist and former state senator from Norfolk, cruised to a nearly 12-point victory as Gillespie eked out a close win over Corey Stewart, the chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, who is now trying to translate his near miss into a 2018 run against U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, DVa.

Looking for a silver lining, the Gillespie campaign has stressed frugality as a strong point heading into the general election phase.

We had three goals in the primary: 1. Win; 2. Dont change as Ralph Northam did; and 3. Stockpile our cash so we can bring Eds positive vision to the voters of our commonwealth right out of the gate in the general election, Gillespie campaign Chairman Pete Snyder said in a prepared statement.

After coming off of a strong primary victory, Dr. Northam continues to generate new enthusiasm across Virginia as we work together to create economic opportunity for everyone no matter where they live, said Northam campaign manager Brad Komar.

Among Northams top donations for the period were $50,000 from the Mid-Atlantic Laborers Political Education Fund and $30,000 from Baltimore Washington Construction & Public Employees.

Libertarian Cliff Hyra raised $2,979 in the period, finishing with $3,492 on hand.

Northam and Gillespie are scheduled to debate for the first time Saturday during the Virginia Bar Associations summer meeting at The Omni Homestead Resort in Hot Springs.

One of Gillespies largest donations was $50,000 from William B. Holtzman, head of Holtzman Oil Corp. and father of Republican lieutenant governor nominee Jill Vogel. A state senator from Fauquier County, Vogels campaign reported raising $147,499, with $86,591 on hand. Holtzman forgave an earlier $100,000 loan to Vogels campaign and gave an additional $35,000 in late June.

Justin Fairfax, a former federal prosecutor who won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor, reported raising $187,523, led by a $25,000 donation from Gov. Terry McAuliffes Common Good VA PAC. Fairfax had $71,449 on hand as of June 30, according to reports compiled by the Virginia Public Access Project.

In the attorney generals race, Democratic incumbent Mark R. Herring outraised Republican John Adams, bringing in $503,125 compared with $234,326 for his challenger. Herring had $2.47 million on hand. Adams had $683,969.
WHEN author Henry James said the two most beautiful words in the English language were summer afternoon, he surely wasnt thinking about a heat index over 100 degrees.

But not everybody can be like my neighbors who bought a house on a cove in Maine to escape Northern Virginias swampy summers.

See you in late September! they sang out happily as they drove away in May.

Nor should we hunker down with our news feeds. Many of us stuck in town need to remember that endlessly reading tweets by the Donaldsfather and sonjust makes us hotter under the collar.

Fall may not be in the air, but it is yapping at our consciousness. Ive spotted two Kaine 2018 bumper stickers in two days, a sure sign autumn and yet another election are coming. Back-to-school sales are in full swing, and Redskins training camp kicks off July 26.

So sit back, sip a cool drink and banish the vexing news from the nations capital. Just for a while.

Here are three ways to seize the (summer) day.

No. 1: Hit the roadand go slow.

Forget fighting traffic on interstates. Take the back roads, and head to the mountains. The U.S. Department of the Interior named Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park one of the eight best drives in all of America.

The 105-mile road through the Blue Ridge Mountains has some of the most sublime views in the nation, the Interior Department says. The 35 mph speed limit is the perfect speed to roll down the windows and let the wind whip through your hair.

And, boomers 62 and older, now is the time to buy a lifetime Senior Pass for admission to national parks. The cost is just $10 until Aug. 28, when it rises to $80. Buy the Senior Pass at the park entrance to save time.

You could order online but demand is so heavy it takes nine weeks to get the passes, Interior warns.

No. 2: Go part way on the Great American Total Solar Eclipse.

This sounds harsh as the astronomical mega-event Aug. 21 will be the first coast-to-coast total eclipse since 1918. Unless youve already made arrangements, though, settle for the partial eclipse, which we should see in Virginia, weather permitting.

People in the know booked motels and campsites years ago in the so-called Path of Totality, including Nashville, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Columbia, S.C.

Plus, more than 200 million people live within a days drive of the path. Do you really want to risk viewing the eclipse bumper to bumper?

If you plan to watch the eclipse, get your viewing glasses ahead of time and dont bother with your camera. The event will be over before you know it. The moon will cover the sun for no more than 160 seconds in prime locations.

And plan ahead. The next total solar eclipse in North America is just seven years away, April 8, 2024. It will swing from Mexico through Texas to Maine and into Canada. Youve got this.

No. 3: Eat a peach.

Dire news reports last spring warned that a late March freeze had ruined the peach crop for 2017. Not to worry. It didand it didnt.

Peaches are far less plentiful in the peachiest states, Georgia and South Carolina, but orchards farther north suffered no lasting deleterious effects of the cold snap.

Virginia, Delaware and Pennsylvania are enjoying an excellent crop, so buy local. Virginias more than 200 peach farms expect an abundant peach supply through early September.

Add peach pie or ice cream to your menuand tuck into a taste of summer.

And rememberPresident Ronald Reagan declared July 1984 National Ice Cream Month and the third Sunday of July National Ice Cream Day.

Ice cream is a nutritious and wholesome food, enjoyed by over 90 percent of the people in the United States. It enjoys a reputation as the perfect dessert and snack food, Reagan said in his proclamation. Not a word about sugar, fat or calories.

I call upon the people of the United States to observe these events with appropriate ceremonies and activities, he wrote.

Now thats an executive order everybody can get behind. Happy summer!

Marsha Mercer writes from Washington. You may contact her at marsha.mercer@yahoo.com.
We're not about to judge or speculate about what happened with Generations of Women, the local OB-GYN medical practice operated by Dr. Barbara Mercado that is shutting down after 15 years of operation.

We do, however, want to sympathize with the mothers-to-be who will need to seek out new providers to continue their care and deliver their babies. Women develop strong, personal relationships with their OB-GYNs, especially while they are pregnant and giving birth.

Given the circumstances, theyll have no choice but to put their trust in someone else and hope theyre happy with the decisions they make. Every woman is different, but there is no minimizing a pregnant womans need to have confidence in and be satisfied with her prenatal care, whether its her first baby or her fourth.

Many of these women will no doubt seek out recommendations from friends, or do their own research. Perhaps doctors with other local practices will reach out to inform women that their services are available. Perhaps departing staff members at Generations can recommend doctors who might make good fits for these women.

Pregnancy is an exciting time, but also an anxious one. Issues can surface at any time from beginning to end, or, as one woman interviewed for our story last week divulged, for a pregnancys duration.

We wish all those mothers-to-be out there, no matter who their doctor is or will be, a joyful outcome to what is certainly a life-changing experience.
An ex-Richland County councilwoman accused of paying for vacations and other personal expenses with taxpayers' money has been temporarily barred from practicing law. Read moreSC high court suspends law license of ex-Richland County official charged with corruption
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Ukraine ready to accept lethal weapons from U.S. as soon as there is relevant decision

Ukrainian Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak has said that Ukraine is ready to accept lethal weapons from the U.S. as soon as Washington approves this decision.

"It was repeatedly stated that the U.S. Congress has expressed its readiness to transfer lethal weapons to Ukraine, but in order for this decision to be final, the president's approval is needed," the minister told journalists before the meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, commenting on the report about the U.S. Congress' decision to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine.

He stressed that Ukraine is ready to accept such weapons.
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko intends to speak with the Georgian authorities on the action plan for NATO membership, press secretary of the Ukrainian president Sviatoslav Tseholko has said.

"We will talk with Georgia on the NATO Membership Action Plan," Tseholko quoted the president of Ukraine as saying on Twitter on Wednesday.

As reported, Poroshenko during his state visit to Georgia on Wednesday takes part in the work of the investment "round table" in Batumi.
The Trilateral Contact Group (TCG) for the settlement of the situation in Donbas in Minsk on Wednesday, while discussing the statement previously announced by the self-proclaimed leader of the DPR Alexander Zakharchenko on the formation of Malorossiya, called for refraining from any confrontational statements that contradict the Minsk agreements.

"The statements about the so-called Malorossiya do not meet the fundamentals of the Minsk process and do not contribute to the settlement of the situation in Donbas. The attempt to divide Ukraine is not new and it failed in 2014. Instead of talking about the reintegration the Minsk process is aimed at, the representatives of the ORDO say about some separate ideas that are contrary to their obligations. The TCG called for refraining from any confrontational statements that contradict the Minsk agreements," Darka Olifer, a spokesperson for Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine's second president and representative in the Trilateral Contact Group, wrote on Facebook.

At the same time, she said that representatives of Ukraine during the meeting of the TCG urged the Russian Federation to condemn this statement of Zakharchenko.

"In this context, we call on the Russian Federation at all levels to condemn this unacceptable step of the ORDO, which is a total violation of the Minsk agreements," Olifer wrote.
The supermarket watchdog is making significant progress tackling unfair trading in the grocery supply chain, but more must be done to tackle the climate of fear that stops suppliers speaking out.

That is the conclusion of the governments statutory review of the Grocery Code Adjudicator (GCA), which also said the GCA had led to a positive cultural shift among supermarkets in the way they treat their suppliers.

There is, however, more to be done, said minister for small business, consumers and corporate responsibility, Margot James.

See also: Supermarket treatment of suppliers  the good, bad and ugly

Too many direct suppliers are still facing issues with potential breaches of the code, and I am concerned by evidence that some suppliers are reluctant to raise issues with the adjudicator for fear of the commercial consequences.

This was despite findings that the GCA had been effective in maintaining anonymity of suppliers, such as during its complex Tesco investigation. Although it also noted that the waving of anonymity for arbitrations was an issue.

The review said the government viewed actions taken by retailers against suppliers who speak out against unfair trading practices, as totally unacceptable and that it would be making this clear to supermarkets.

According to YouGov polls commissioned by the GCA, the proportion of suppliers who said they would raise an issue with the adjudicator has risen slightly from 47% in 2015 to 52% in 2017.

Fear of retribution

Of the 48% who said they would not or were unsure about raising an issue in this years survey, 47% said this was due to fear of retribution from the retailer.

Christine Tacon, the sitting adjudicator, has been vocal about asking suppliers to come forward with evidence since she took up the position in 2014, and the review noted that she is well aware of the issue about suppliers being afraid.

A spokesperson for the GCA said Ms Tacon has repeatedly asked trade bodies to do more to collect evidence as this would add a further layer of anonymity for suppliers and she continued to offer one-to-one sessions with suppliers.

But more will be done to tackle this issue, stated the review, with the GCA and ministers working together on a plan, with its effectiveness reviewed in 2019.

As a result of the review, the GCA will remain in existence with its current set of powers and resources. Christine Tacon, the sitting adjudicator, has been reappointed for another term.
Powers over farming should return direct to the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland  rather than being temporarily retained in Westminster, say peers.

The recommendation is made in a report by the House of Lords EU committee which says Brexit poses a fundamental challenge to the future of the UK.

Responsibility for implementing the EU CAP in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is currently devolved to those countries administrations at Holyrood, Cardiff and Stormont.

See also: EU farm rules to be retained post Brexit

The UK government wants any powers returned from Brussels after Brexit retained in Westminster rather than going straight back to the devolved administrations.

It argues that replicating the framework provided by EU rules at a UK level would provide the greatest level of legal and administrative certainty post Brexit.

Instability

But the House of Lords report says any attempt to use Brexit to re-reserve powers previously devolved could add to instability within the UK.

This is not the time to embark on controversial amendments to the devolution settlements, says the committees report, published on Wednesday (19 July).

We therefore believe that the existing statutory balance of competences between the UK parliament and the devolved legislatures should as far as possible be unchanged.

Brexit makes it more important than ever that any further reform of the devolution settlements should be underpinned by a clear and agreed framework, says the report.

And it calls on the UK government and the devolved governments to work constructively together to deliver a Brexit that protects the interests of all parts of the UK.
The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission's (SMM) First Deputy Chief Monitor Alexander Hug and observers were able to drive along the M03 road of international importance to the city of Debaltseve owing to mine clearance conducted by the conflicting parties in Donbas.

"Hug and other OSCE monitors traveled along MO3 road to Debaltseve. Mines and obstacles cleared on both sides [of the contact line]. [Owing to] joint efforts by JCCC and deminers," the OSCE SMM said on Twitter.

The conflicting parties can conduct mine clearance when they want to do it, the OSCE SMM said. "More mine clearance is needed throughout Donbas. Civilian logic should prevail," the mission said.

As reported, on July 17, Hug and OSCE SMM observers were unable to drive along the MO3 to Svitlodarsk due to mines. The Joint Control and Coordination Center for the ceasefire on the contact line (JCCC) failed to coordinate the mine clearance process, the OSCE SMM said then.
Aug. 5, 1939  June 30, 2017

Elizabeth C. Elder, 77, died unexpectedly but peacefully while traveling in Japan on June 30, 2017.

Elizabeth was born in Puno, Peru, the daughter of Magdalena Rios Caceres and Domingo Cueva. She attended elementary school, high school, and teachers training school in Puno, and received teaching credentials at universities in Cuzco and Lima, Peru.

After her education, she worked as an elementary and college teacher in Puno. She also volunteered in a Community Development Program with Native Peruvian Women, and with the Catholic charity CARITAS.

On December 9, 1967, in Puno, Elizabeth married John F. Elder (Jack), who had been a Peace Corps Volunteer. They moved to the United States, and worked in Peace Corps training centers in California until Jack enrolled in graduate school at the University of California at Davis.

Their two daughters were born while they were living in Davis.

Jacks work led to family moves to Riverside, Richmond, and Palo Alto, California, and Tallahassee, Florida.

In 1981 and 1983, Elizabeth received Bachelors and Masters degrees from Florida State University and became double-certified in counseling and Spanish teaching.

In 1986, the family moved to Madison, Wisconsin. Elizabeth worked there for 18 years as a middle-school counselor and Spanish teacher. She retired in 2004, and in 2005 she and Jack moved to Corvallis.

Following the move to Corvallis, Elizabeth has been a devoted and active member of the Saint Marys Parish Community. Her participation included Stone Soup, Food Pantry, welcoming committee, resurrection choir, preparation of high-school students for confirmation, preparation of Hispanic parents for first communion of their children, volunteering in the church library, ministry of prayer, and Eucharistic adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.

Elizabeth is survived by her husband Jack; daughters Katherine and Sonya; sons-in-law Ben and Jonathan; and grandchildren Julian, Naomi, and Leland. Surviving family members in Peru include brothers Jose and Felix; cousin Maria; and loving nieces and nephews.

She was preceded in death by her parents, her sister Adelaida, and her nephew Jose.

In lieu of flowers, Elizabeths family has suggested that memorial donations be made to any of the following organizations: Catholic Relief Services, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Mid-Valley Health Care Advocates.

Natural burial took place July 13 at Riverview Cemetery in Portland.

Services will be held at 11 a.m. July 21 at St Marys Catholic Church, Corvallis; and at 3 p.m. July 23 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Corvallis.
On Thursday, July 20, at 12.00, the Interfax-Ukraine News Agency's press center will host a press conference entitled "New Deaths of Botulism Result of Systemic Phenomena." The participants will include Chair of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Health MP Olha Bohomolets; chief non-staff expert at the Health Ministry of Ukraine specializing in contagious diseases M.D. Olha Holubovska; and Chairman of the State Service of Ukraine for Food Safety and Quality Volodymyr Lapa (8/5a Reitarska Street). Registration requires press accreditation. More information by phone: (067) 504 5908.
100 Years Ago

1917

WEDDING: Miss Ella Fink, deputy county school superintendent of Benton County, will be married Sunday to John Alden. Both reside in Philomath. The ceremony will be performed at the home of the bride. (Published July 22, 1917, in the Oregon Daily Journal, Portland).

75 Years Ago

1942

COUNCIL: At the meeting of the city council last Monday night. H.C. Gardner was elected to fill the unexpired term of Hubert Hathaway, who resigned to join the firefighting forces in the Army. Mr. Gardner has served on the council before and is well acquainted with the work. (Published July 18, 1942, in the Corvallis Gazette-Times).

BUSINESS: Miss Margaret Davis has sold her beauty shop to Miss Billie Vosberg and has gone to her home in Marshfield for a much-needed rest. Miss Vosberg is a Philomath girl and has just completed a beauty course and state examination. She is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Greer Vosberg. (Published July 20, 1942, in the Corvallis Gazette-Times).

OFFICERS: New officers of the Odd Fellows Lodge, installed for the present term are Lee Hodges, noble grand; Melvin Ayers, vice grand; Harry Arbuckle, recording secretary; Clarence Gibbs, financial secretary; Jesse Stevens, treasurer; Gus Larsen, RSNG; Calvin Tatum, RSVG; H.C. Tatum, LSVG; H.C. Lutz, warden; Ed Strouts, chaplain; Bert Newhouse, inside guardian; Guy Bagled, outside guardian. Other officers will be installed later. (Published July 20, 1942, in the Corvallis Gazette-Times).

60 Years Ago

1957

WATER: Corvallis and Philomath are closer to a meeting of the minds on the sale of the Corvallis water system in Philomath to that city, John Porter, Corvallis city manager, said today. Corvallis has previously agreed to sell the system to Philomath for $1. The point of difference has been over the charge for water and the amount of water to be provided to Philomath. Corvallis has asked for a rate of about 10 cents per 100 cubic feet of water, and Philomath offered to pay three and three-quarters cents. Corvallis also seeks to put a limit on the amount of water that would be sold to Philomath on the grounds that the Rock Creek source is limited and ultimately could be consumed entirely by Philomath, leaving only the Willamette River source to Corvallis. (Published July 17, 1957, in the Corvallis Gazette-Times).

POOL: A public meeting to discuss the possibilities of raising funds for a swimming pool at the Philomath High School has been called for 8 p.m. Monday. Mrs. Robert Muir said a group of mothers at Philomath had instigated the meeting to determine what support a swimming pool would have and to discuss means of raising money for the proposed project. (Published July 20, 1957, in the Corvallis Gazette-Times).

10 Years Ago

2007

ILOX: The Philomath School District has invited Ilox, Philomath Police Department's drug-sniffing dog, to do searches at its facilities. Chief Ken Elwer said he doesn't want to boost stats, and instead will leave discretion to the district on how to handle problems, such as drugs found within a locker. The school district has had a policy regarding dog searches for several years, said Superintendent Pete Tuana.

Ilox (pronounced e-locks), joined the department in 2006. The German shepherd and handler Officer Dave Gurski met with the Philomath School Board in May, and the board reaffirmed the idea of having the dog walk through the halls with that mighty nose. Residents raised $54,000 to purchase him and a specially outfitted vehicle. (Published July 19, 2007, in the Corvallis Gazette-Times).
Siegburg train station : Fire department called to ICE train

Siegburg Smoke developed on board an ICE train en route to Munich, causing the conductor to make an unscheduled stop in Siegburg and alarm the fire department.

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The fire department was called to Siegburg train station on Tuesday afternoon, July 18 in response to a technical defect aboard an ICE train. A spokesperson for the fire department said they were called out at 4:10pm. Apparently, there was a release of heat which resulted in smoke in the end car.

Because of the problem, the conductor of the train, which had been on its way from Dortmund to Munich, made the decision to stop in Siegburg. Passengers had to leave the ICE train and board other trains to their destinations.

The fire department examined the train but did not find any fire. German Rail employees sent the train on to a workshop for repairs.
Weather in Bonn and the region : Severe weather disrupts railways

Bonn The week started out with summer-like temperatures and lots of sun. But thunderstorms have been rolling into the region since Wednesday afternoon - with consequences.

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The German Weather Service (DWD) warns against severe thunderstorms in Bonn and the Rhine-Sieg district. Localized hail and strong winds up to 115 kmh are possible. This is strong enough to uproot trees and damage roofs. Since Wednesday afternoon, the storms have been spreading over Bonn and the region.

In the areas of Troisdorf and Niederkassel, the fire departments have already been called out many times due to overturned trees. There are also disturbances on the railway tracks around Bonn. As Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) reported, the stretches between Bruhl and Sechtem as well as the entire route between Bonn and Koblenz have experienced disruptions. Beginning already this morning, there were considerable disruptions of rail traffic throughout NRW due to power supply problems.
Deutsche Telekom management : Van Damme leaves position as Head of Deutsche Telekom Germany

Bonn A surprising change on the board of management at Deutsche Telekom: Niek van Damme, the head of Telekoms German business will leave the company at the end of the year.

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His successor, Dirk Wossner will take over on January 1, 2018. Wossner is well-known at Deutsche Telekom as he served in management positions there from 2002 until 2015.

The announcement was made in a board meeting on Tuesday evening. Supervisory Board chair Ulrich Lehner said there was a window of opportunity for Dirk Wossner to make a change at this time, otherwise he may have been committed for a longer period of time.

Telekom CEO Tim Hottges expressed his gratitude to van Damme, saying he had contributed a great deal to Deutsche Telekom, especially merging the fixed-network and mobile business into a single entity. The list is long, Hottges said in referring to van Dammes accomplishments.

Van Damme has served on the management board since 2009. From the Netherlands, he speaks fluent German. His exit comes a little earlier than planned, but its a good fit with my personal life planning and the best way to ensure a seamless transition  similar to the situation with Rene Obermann and Tim Hottges four years ago, he said on Tuesday. He thanked his colleagues and wished the firm the best of luck, saying he was convinced it would continue down a successful path.

Wossner has been at Rogers Communications in Canada since 2015, responsible for consumer business. At the time when Wossner left Deutsche Telekom, CEO Hottges had said there was always a door open if Wossner wanted to return. He knows this company better than nearly anyone else, said Hottges and he has gathered valuable experience in the last years which he can bring back to Telekom.
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.
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.
U.S. Army Reserve military police adapt to the changing environment of modern warfare

By Master Sgt. Michel Sauret July 18, 2017

FORT HUNTER LIGGETT, Calif. -- The ground was so hard that the U.S. Army Reserve Soldiers broke five mallets while pounding tent pegs into the dirt. The heat climbed above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and even though it was a dry heat, it caused the dust to fly around and settle on the Soldiers from their eyebrows down to their bootstraps.

Undeterred, the Soldiers of the 384th Military Police Battalion pushed ahead with their Warrior Exercise, also known as WAREX, during their training in California this month. But the difficult terrain and the heat were not the only obstacles facing the troops.

WAREX, which stands for Warrior Exercise, is a cyclical training event designed to evaluate U.S. Army Reserve brigades, battalions and companies in their specific functional areas.

When the battalion traveled from Indiana to California for the WAREX -- a cyclical training event designed to evaluate U.S. Army Reserve units in their specific functional areas -- the Soldiers thought they knew the strict parameters of their mission. They had been planning for months to rehearse their battalion's typical function: detention operations for enemy prisoners of war.

Except, without warning, the mission changed when they arrived at the WAREX. Instead of guarding hundreds of prisoners, the Soldiers of the 384th were now tasked with feeding and housing thousands of displaced civilians.

"We're equipped to in-process 550 people a day. But on one day, busloads of 800 people showed up as an 'inject.' We had to move into accelerated in-processing," said Lt. Col. Joseph Adamson, the 384th Military Police Battalion commander.

Thankfully, those numbers were "notional," but for the battalion staff it didn't make much of a difference. They still had to react and execute planning as if 800 human beings had just showed up on their installation. This tested the battalion's battle staff procedures, decision-making, communication and logistics -- all while being required to pack up and move their tactical operational spaces in the middle of their exercise.

"We didn't have a playbook for this kind of mission, so we're building one on the fly," said Adamson.

It is fortuitous timing that the playbook is being written now, before the team enters a real theater of war. A "prisoner operation" versus a "life support" mission are significantly different tasks, but both are very real possibilities in a war zone.

In the last 15 years of fighting, U.S. troops have fought mainly in counter-insurgency operations, often known as "asymmetric warfare." Now, the Army wants to maintain that knowledge and awareness, but also return to its roots of fighting "near-peer" enemies, such as organized military forces.

"We've been dealing with insurgent type activity (for so long). When you start thinking about linear battlefield and uniformed enemy, it's totally different," said Maj. Travis Gilbert, officer in charge of operations for the 384th Military Police Battalion.

"Our focus has always been, 'Eyes in. Guns in,' while watching detainees, to now the mission changes with displaced civilians: 'Eyes out. Guns out. Provide security.' Just a huge mindset change," said Gilbert.

In such a scenario, when a war first breaks out, there will be thousands of civilians whose homes, schools, hospitals and infrastructure are destroyed. They will need shelter, food, medical aid and care.

"Someone has to take care of them. That's a huge partnership we have with civil affairs, to provide life support and meet their physical needs," said Adamson.

The battalion also trained in logistical operations, setting up their own sleeping structures and operation centers, to mimic the type of rapid logistical work they would have to do in a real-time operation.

Despite the 180-degree shift in their training mission and mindset, the Soldiers of the 384th Military Police Battalion responded with the physical and mental acuity and flawless teamwork that not only will help them complete the training exercise, but will also serve them well in a real-life combat situation.

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MTACS-38 deploys a light-weight, amphibious aviation command post during exercise HYDRA 1-17

US Marine Corps News

By Cpl. Harley Robinson | July 18, 2017

Marine Tactical Air Command Squadron (MTACS) 38 conducted exercise HYDRA 1-17 to simulate ship-to-shore employment of a Tactical Air Direction Center (TADC) and integrate it with a simulated Navy tactical air control center (NTACC), at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California, June 5-8.

A TADC is a task-organized facility that can perform all or most of the Marine tactical air command center (Marine TACC) tasks, such as coordinating the delivery of supplies, people or ordnance and synchronizing the actions of all Marine aviation assets in the area of operations, but is employed in a subordinate role.

During HYDRA 1-17, MTACS Headquarters acted as the NTACC that was afloat, and sequentially employed two TADCs, each with different sizes and capabilities, to East Miramar training area.

This evolution is not a new concept: Marine TADCs were employed during the Vietnam conflict, but have not employed ship-to-shore in combat since the 1950 Inchon invasion during the Korean War.

The first time MTACS-38 employed a TADC was during Weapons and Tactics Instructor Training 1-17, in October 2016.

Exercise HYDRA 1-17 proved the concept that an MTACS can perform the capabilities of a fully functional but smaller TADC, capable of being embarked on and lifted from an L-class ship while maintaining all required capabilities to support a Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB) or Amphibious Ready Group Marine Expeditionary Unit.

"A smaller expeditionary TADC capability, one that ties in all the agencies of the Marine Air Command and Control System and/or host nation partner, and effectively integrates with the NTACC or a Marine TACC afloat, has the potential to significantly increase the effectiveness, information sharing, safety, and commander's ability to influence a situation during amphibious operations," said Capt. Tywan Turner, MTACS-38, weapons and tactics training program officer.

A small TADC can be employed early in an amphibious operation. It can move to a new location as the situation develops and it can later scale up into a larger and more capable TADC or even a TACC with additional assets. The scalability of it gives the Marine Air Ground Task Force (MAGTF) aviation command element (ACE) commander multiple flexible options to choose from to facilitate his/her command and control requirements, according to Lt. Col. James K. McBride, commanding officer of MTACS-38.

"The shortfall this TADC capability addresses is that, while today's MACCS provides effective ACE control for all-sized MAGTFs, it does not currently offer an effective command capability for MEB ACEs afloat," McBride added. "The TADC, working with the NTACC and ACE Marines afloat, provides a robust and flexible command ability for the MEB ACE commander."

After being employed ashore, the TADC can gradually build up capability via equipment and personnel to take on the TACC role from the NTACC, and airspace management functions can be officially passed from the Navy afloat to the Marines ashore.

"The size of the TADC is not dependent on the size of the MAGTF it supports," said Turner. "Size is based on the capabilities that it provides and the number of sorties it is required to manage or generate. The capabilities determine what equipment, personnel, external support and number of coordinators are needed for the mission, whether a Marine Expeditionary Unit, MEB or MEF is employed in theater."

The second phase of HYDRA 1-17 involved the Marines tearing down the first site and echeloning to a second objective area and building a larger TADC to support bigger and more persistent operations.

As control phased from the ship to the first TADC, the NTACC delegated a limited set of command and control authorities which enabled the TADC to command humanitarian assistance and tactical recovery missions ashore. As Marines conducted tear-down and echeloned to the second location, all authorities temporarily went back to the ship during the move.

After the larger TADC was built and became operational, the Marines were faced with obstacles from the notional White Cell consisting of 'bug pilots,' which are Marines with radios simulating higher, adjacent and subordinate agencies. The replication is to help simulate commanding those agencies in an actual combat zone.

The Marines conducted training in how to respond to enemy attacks, aircraft mishaps, coordinating the recovery of injured personnel, processing immediate requests, and keeping communication open between the simulated air and ground units.

The lessons learned from HYDRA 1-17 will be applied during future training.

A medium-sized configuration of a TACC at MCAS Yuma, Arizona, will be established, while they will simultaneously execute an actual ship-to-shore movement and set up a lighter, more expeditionary configuration of a subordinate TADC in the vicinity of Camp Pendleton.

"The next step is to produce detailed documentation of everything we've learned so far to codify, discuss and refine our concepts," Turner added. "As a MTACS community, it's imperative that we build sustainable inter-service training opportunities to integrate Marine and Navy aviation command and control."

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Chinese media rejects fake news report of Indian soldiers' death in Chinese attack

People's Daily Online

(People's Daily Online) 13:11, July 18, 2017

Chinese mainstream media outlets on Tuesday denounced Pakistani media's "groundless" report, which claims that over 150 Indian soldiers were killed in Sikkim due to a Chinese rocket attack.

According to Dunya News, a 24-hours Urdu language news service in Pakistan, at least 158 Indian soldiers died and several others injured on Monday due to a Chinese rocket attack across the border.

The news was rejected by India. The Hindustan Times on Monday quoted Gopal Baglay, spokesperson for India's Ministry of External Affairs, as saying that the reports are "utterly baseless, malicious, and mischievous."

Meanwhile, Chinese media outlets have carried out a series of investigations, claiming that the fake news should not be taken seriously.

According to an investigative report released by the People's Daily on Tuesday, the Chinese embassy in India had noticed the report and has denounced its authenticity. Some Pakistani media outlets claim that the fake news is based on unverified information from social media and the Internet.

The Global Times also published a report on Tuesday, calling the Pakistani media report "groundless and fake."

Chinese authorities have yet to responded to the incident, while the fake news article is still posted on Dunya News' website.

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Saudi warplanes kill 19 displaced Yemenis in Ta'izz

Iran Press TV

Tue Jul 18, 2017 3:30PM

Saudi warplanes have targeted three displaced families in Yemen's southwestern province of Ta'izz, killing 19 Yemenis.

The Saudi jets targeted the displaced families near Khalid camp in Mawza' District, Yemeni al-Masirah television network reported on Tuesday.

Saudi airstrikes also killed a Yemeni civilian and injured two others in an area between Ta'izz and Al Hudaydah provinces.

On Monday, Yemeni forces repelled Saudi-led attacks west of Mawza' District, killing and injuring 40 of the mercenaries. Six vehicles of the Saudi-led forces were also destroyed during the operation.

Saudi Arabia has been leading a destructive military campaign against Yemen since March 2015 to reinstate former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and crush the Houthi movement.

The campaign has seriously damaged the country's infrastructure. Local Yemeni sources have put the death toll from the Saudi war at over 12,000, including many women and children.

The UN has warned that suspected cholera cases across Yemen has surpassed 320,000 while at least 1,740 had lost their lives after being infected.

On July 12, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs Stephen O'Brien blamed Yemen's cholera crisis on the perpetrators and their foreign supporters of the ongoing war against the impoverished country.

The US and the UK have been the main purveyors of weapons, training and intelligence to Saudis during the course of the unprovoked war, which began in March 2015.

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Egypt to deny Qataris visa-free entry

Iran Press TV

Tue Jul 18, 2017 8:1AM

Egypt, which has joined a Saudi-led bloc of states in boycotting Qatar, says it will end a visa-free regime with the country and will continue to require that Doha meet the 13 demands the bloc has given it.

"It does not make sense to keep making exceptions for Qatar and giving it privileges in light of its current positions," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid, referring to the visa-free regime that has been in place.

Though a new visa regime will accord exceptions to Qatari nationals with Egyptian mothers, those married to Egyptians, and Qataris studying in Egypt, it will mark the latest measure by the bloc to pile up pressure on Doha.

The bloc, consisting of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, severed diplomatic ties and cut all land, sea, and air routes with Qatar on June 5, accusing it of supporting terrorism -- allegations denied by Doha.

They later issued the 13-point list of demands for Doha to meet in order for the relations to be restored. Among them was that Qatar end its support for Egypt's biggest banned opposition party Muslim Brotherhood, close a Turkish military base on its soil, limit its ties with Iran, and "compensate" the sanctioning countries for unspecified harm.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry also told his Kuwaiti counterpart during a meeting in Cairo on Monday that Egypt was standing by the list of demands and would keep the sanctions against Doha in place. Kuwait has been leading mediation efforts between Qatar and the quartet.

"The Foreign Minister affirmed to his Kuwaiti counterpart Egypt's commitment to the list of demands presented to the state of Qatar and the continuation of sanctions taken against it," Abu Zeid said in a statement.

The insistence comes "in light of what the quartet states see as Qatar's stalling and procrastination, and lack of concern for the concerns of the four states," he said.

Doha has refused to meet any of the demands.

Doha stands ground

Meanwhile, Qatar's Defense Minister Khalid bin Mohammad al-Attiyah, in an exclusive interview with Turkey's TRT World network, reaffirmed Doha's rejection of the four countries' accusations and offered some clarification concerning the diplomatic crisis.

All the accusations leveled against Qatar were false, he said.

He also referred to the demand to close down the Turkish base in Qatar and said no one could ask Doha to carry out such a task. "This is considered relation between two sovereign countries," al-Attiyah said.

The Qatari defense minister also hinted that Qatar could refer to the International Court of Justice to get compensation for the damages it faced because of the siege.

Asked about Qatar's relations with the US, he said that the ties were strong, historic, and strategic.

The US, Turkey, and Iran have all urged that the Arab states resort to dialog to resolve their differences.

Concerning the demand that Doha limit its ties with Tehran, al-Attiyah said, "When it comes to the relation between us and Iran, if we look around us, the neighbors, who boycotted us, who besieged Qatar, they have way farther relation with Iran than Qatar does. If you come to the trade, they have billions of billions of dollars [of trade] with Iran."

"So, the matter at the end of the day is not having relation with Iran or not because they [themselves] have better relations with Iran," he added.

"But in this crisis, Iran did reach out for us, especially concerning food supplies, and this is the only way we have," he said. The Islamic Republic has been shipping foodstuffs to Qatar following the introduction of the blockade based on humanitarian grounds.

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Haiti has chance to solidify stability before UN mission's drawdown, Security Council told

18 July 2017  With three months left before the current United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti transitions to a smaller one, a UN envoy stressed today that the Caribbean country faces the "window of opportunity" to solidify stability, following recent elections.

"Haiti has remained on the path of stabilization and democratic consolidation," the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Sandra Honore, told the UN Security Council today.

"Looking ahead, for the country to make full use of the window of opportunity that emerged following the electoral process, additional measures will be needed to consolidate the security and stabilization gains of the past few years, create greater social and political cohesion and truly reinforce State institutions so that they can meet the needs of the Haitian people," the Special Representative added.

Ms. Honore noted that political space has opened up for the new Government to start addressing the many challenges facing the country, using this unique opportunity to tackle the root causes of instability, poverty, exclusion and impunity.

"Since then, initial steps aimed at overcoming longstanding problems in the areas of governance, rule of law and socio-economic development have been taken," she said.

Those steps include a flagship development programme, the "caravan of change" in five of Haiti's 10 departments, and the launch of legislative review to improve the investment climate, reinforce governance structures and restore State institutions.

However, it is "troubling" that the third branch of power  the judiciary  has not been brought to full functioning, she said, urging that key positions must be filled without further delay.

The senior UN official also repeated her calls to modernize the penal system: "Without a properly functioning justice system, the Haitian National Police cannot effectively deliver security for all Haitian citizens and the domestic and international investments in the national police force will not develop to their full potential."

She underscored the vital importance of inclusive national dialogue to forge a common vision for progress and articulate an institutional reform agenda.

"Ultimately, Haiti's security, political, social and development agenda can only be shaped by the national authorities and the Haitian people themselves; and the responsibility for the further consolidation of the stabilization gains rests with the Haitian people," Ms. Honore said, adding that donor support can complement Haitian-led efforts where needed.

In April, the Council decided in resolution 2350 (2017) that the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) would close on 15 October, transitioning to a smaller follow-up peacekeeping mission known by its acronym MINUJUSTH.

The new mission back Government efforts to strengthen rule-of-law institutions, further develop and support the Haitian National Police and engage in human rights monitoring, reporting and analysis.

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China's Air Force conducts high-seas training

People's Daily Online

By Yan Li (CNTV) 10:46, July 18, 2017

The Air Force of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has conducted a number of high-seas training exercises this week. Formations of H-6K bombers and other fighters flew over the Bashi Strait and the Miyako Strait, putting to test the Air Force's maritime combat capability, said its spokesman Shen Jinke in Beijing on Saturday.

Shen said the training is part of the routine yearly training plan of the PLA Air Force, which conforms to relevant international laws and practice without aiming at any particular country, region or target.

In recent years, the PLA Air Force has worked to enhance its real combat capacity through high-seas training in order to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as protect national airspace and development interests.

In accordance with international law and practice, the Air Force will continue to undertake regular systematic high-seas training to further improve its maritime combat ability.

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Pressures on Iran's missile power aimed at weakening Islamic Republic

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Tehran, July 18, IRNA -- Pressures and sanctions against Iran's missile power is aimed at weakening the Islamic establishment, Commander of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh said.

Hajizadeh made the remarks during the visit of the members of Majlis (parliament) National Security and Foreign Policy Commission to the IRGC Aerospace Force Headquarters.

The achievement made by the IRGC aerospace forces in various fields proves that people can overcome problems by relying on domestic capabilities, Hajizadeh added.

Elaborating on the details of IRGC missile attack on terrorists' headquarters in Syria, he said that after receiving permission of the Supreme Leader of Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, 60 goals were recognized to be targeted.

The Leader had underlined preventing damage to civilian people during the attacks and in order to follow the Leader's command, three of the 60 targets were hit by missiles, he noted.

The commander said pictures of the targets were made available by unmanned aerial vehicles before, during and after the operation.

Daesh headquarters and the groups' underground tunnels were damaged in the missile attack, he said.

Hajizadeh referred to the US hostility towards Iranian nation and cautioned officials against underestimating the enemy threats.

The US plans to weaken the Islamic establishment by the use of sanctions and pressures, he added.

9191**1420

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Majlis Speaker: Iran to resist US actions

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Tehran, July 18, IRNA -- Iran's Majlis (parliament) has approved the urgency of a bill on counteracting "US adventurous and terrorist actions" in the region.

Iranian Members of Parliament approved on Tuesday the single urgency of the bill with 211 affirmative votes.

"The US should understand the message of the overwhelming majority vote against its adventurous and terrorist actions in the region", Speaker of Majlis Ali Larijani sad.

Despite different political tastes and ideas, the MPs are unanimous against US actions and Majlis will stand against such actions as firmly as it can, Larijani added.

The bill was presented as a counteraction against US Senate bill 'Countering Iran's Destabilizing Activities Act' passed on May 15.

9417**2044

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Zarif: If US violates JCPOA, Iran has right to withdraw

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Tehran, July 18, IRNA -- Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Monday that if the US violates the landmark nuclear agreement then "Iran has another options including withdrawing from the deal."

Zarif, currently in New York to attend the United Nations High Ranking Political Assembly made the remarks in an interview with the National Interest, an American bimonthly international affairs magazine published by the Center for the National Interest.

"If it comes to a major violation, or what in the terms of the nuclear deal is called significant nonperformance, then Iran has other options available, including withdrawing from the deal," Zarif told Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of the National Interest.

"Iran has taken a route that has been prescribed within the nuclear deal, taken it to the joint commission, and we will discuss that in the joint commission to make sure that the shortcomings by the United States are remedied.

"This has been the subject of an ongoing debate within the joint commission, not only during the Trump administration but also during the previous Obama administration, when it took the United States, for instance, several months to clear the purchase of airplanes.

"It took the US longer to clear the purchase of Airbus airplanes than it took for the purchase of Boeing airplanes. But nevertheless for Airbus it took about nine months and for Boeing it took about four months. Which in our view was too long, so we took the issue to the joint commission. And some parts of it were remedied, some parts of it were not, and this is the avenue that is open to us now," he said.

8072**1394

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Iran self-sufficient in producing missiles, drones, smart bombs: IRGC commander

Iran Press TV

Tue Jul 18, 2017 1:51PM

A senior commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Division says Iran is self-sufficient in producing various types of surface-to-surface missiles, drones and smart bombs.

"[Iran's] self-sufficiency in manufacturing advanced surface-to-surface missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, smart bombs, radar and air defense systems, electronic warfare [devices] and other issues correctly proves that we can overcome all problems by relying on domestic capabilities," Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh said in a meeting with a group of Iranian lawmakers on Tuesday.

Iran has recently made major breakthroughs in its defense sector and attained self-sufficiency in producing important military equipment and hardware. The Islamic Republic says its military power poses no threat to other countries and is merely based on the doctrine of deterrence.

Referring to a recent missile attack on terrorists' positions in Syria's eastern province of Dayr al-Zawr, the commander said the IRGC's Qods Force had initially given the list of 60 targets to the Aerospace Division, but eventually six missiles were fired at three main targets.

Hajizadeh added that all the missiles hit the targets and completely destroyed the Daesh Takfiri terrorists' underground bases and tunnels, noting that some pictures of the destroyed tunnels have already been released.

On June 18, the IRGC fired six medium-range surface-to-surface ballistic missiles at Daesh bases in Syria's Dayr al-Zawr, which killed more than 170 Takfiri terrorists, including a number of commanders and senior elements, and inflicted heavy damage on their equipment and systems.

The missile attack came after gunmen mounted almost simultaneous assaults on Iran's parliament and the Mausoleum of the late Founder of the Islamic Republic Imam Khomeini on June 7. The Daesh Takfiri terrorist group claimed responsibility for the assaults, which killed 17 people and injured over 50 others.

Hajizadeh also pointed to the US role in the creation of the ongoing challenges in the Middle East, saying that Iran was currently engaged in a war in multiple fronts.

The US tries to project the picture it wants of reality rather than the reality itself for the world's public opinion, the IRGC commander said, adding that such an image was sometimes intimidating and sometimes very deceitful just like a mirage.

He emphasized that Iran's hands should not be tied in the face of the enemy's sanctions and pressure, emphasizing that the IRGC's suggestion is that the country should take retaliatory measures to counteract US pressure and bans.

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US must alter its policy of issuing sanctions against other nations: Zarif

Iran Press TV

Tue Jul 18, 2017 1:52AM

Washington has to reassess its approach of issuing sanctions against other countries as they are a liability for the US, says Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

During a press conference held in New York with President of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass on Monday, Zarif noted that the US will become the prisoner of its own sanctions if it does not alter is current policies.

Zarif went on to stress that imposing sanctions on others countries usually does not yield a positive outcome.

Last month, US Senate voted for a bill to impose new sanctions on Iran over its ballistic missile program, alleged support for terrorism, and human rights violations.

Iran's top diplomat went on to criticize the US and its allies over their refusal to take part in a UN organized summit aimed at banning the use of nuclear weapons.

Earlier in the month, the United States, along with Britain and France, announced that they would never become party to a global treaty that was endorsed by 122 countries at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Zarif went on to note that Iran would always remain dedicated to its vow over never producing nuclear weapons.

"We believe that nuclear weapons do not augment anybody's security. Our objection to nuclear weapons does not recognize friend or foe. We simply believe that nuclear weapons are unacceptable and -- in our view -- illegal because of their consequences," he said.

The Iranian foreign minister also noted that despite differences between Iran and Saudi Arabia over the conflicts in Yemen and Syria, he hoped that Tehran and Riyadh could work together towards resolving the issues.

"If we don't agree with each other about the situation in Yemen or about the situation in Syria, we can still work with each other in order to bring those situations to an end. We believe nobody is gaining from the continuation of the conflict in Yemen," he added.

Saudi Arabia has been leading a destructive military campaign against Yemen since March 2015 to reinstate former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and crush the Houthi movement.

The campaign has seriously damaged the country's infrastructure. Local Yemeni sources have put the death toll from the Saudi war at over 12,000, including many women and children.

He warned that a plan by Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region to hold an independence referendum would have negative consequences for the country.

"We believe that the referendum is not the right choice. We believe that it would bring about centrifugal tendencies in Iraq that would be disastrous for the country, and it would not be limited to the Kurdish population," Zarif said.

The president of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, Masoud Barzani, announced on Twitter in June that the northern territory would hold an independence referendum on September 25 not only in the three provinces that make up the Kurdish region, but also in the areas that were bone of contention between the Iraqi Kurdistan Region and the central government in Baghdad.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on June 13 that the Kurdish minority's decision to hold an independence referendum was untimely.

"I believe the impact on Iraqi security would be disastrous, and the impact on regional security would be disastrous. So, we have advised our friends in Iraqi Kurdistan -- and all of them are our friends, from Mr. Barzani to others in Iraq. We have advised all of them that this is the wrong choice and they should not make this choice," Zarif added.

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Oops! Israeli Defense Forces Accidentally Admit to Existence of Secret Airbase

Sputnik News

18:12 18.07.2017(updated 18:14 18.07.2017)

The Israeli army accidentally revealed the existence of a previously unacknowledged airbase through its official website, hastily removing all references when the exposure was pounced upon by the media. The incident highlights the secrecy at the core of Israel's military strategy.

Officially, the Israel Air Force operates 10 major airbases under the ultimate leadership of Commander Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel  notable examples include Ramat David in the north, and the Uvda airbase near Eilat.

However, military documents released in early July via the IDF's official website in accordance with Israel's Freedom of Information Law acknowledged the existence of another for the very first time.

The document describes the structure of the air force corps and its divisions, listing the names of all the bases and their respective commanders' names.

The mysterious eleventh base  commanded by a "Colonel Binyamin"  is called Sdot Ha'ela. The IAF's official website map of all the force's airbases doesn't acknowledge the existence of the base, let alone where it is located.

In a sense, that Israel  a regional superpower in military terms, a major arms exporter and one of the world's key military innovation hubs  should maintain a covert airbase isn't so surprising. All the world's major military spenders have a panoply of army installations on their own soil and elsewhere, some top secret, some not so secret.

However, Israel's military is perhaps more shrouded in secrecy than that of any other country.

Ironically, Israel's biggest military secret is perhaps the world's worst kept  since the 1970s, if not before, Israel has informally possessed a nuclear deterrent.

While its existence isn't remotely doubtful  and, bizarrely, ongoing debates over whether to publicly acknowledge its existence are openly conducted in mainstream Israeli discourse  the country has a policy of failing to confirm, and even occasionally denying, it maintains nuclear weapons.

Israel's failure to acknowledge its possession of nuclear weapons stems from their illegality  and indeed the legal obligations many of the country's key allies have to respond to illegally-held nuclear arsenals via diplomatic, political and even military means, that stem from various nuclear treaties.

What is known is Israel started research into nuclear weapons in the late 1940s. At the time, many analysts expected the wide proliferation of nuclear weapons technology across the world, and as a state under effective siege a nuclear deterrent was viewed as a potentially permanent lifeline. The development was assisted by France, the UK and US.

Israel probably constructed its first nuclear device in 1966, with an arsenal of usable weapons available a few years later. The first delivery systems were fighter-bombers, supplemented before long by ballistic missiles.

Information on the program was leaked to the world's media by Mordechai Vanunu, who worked on the project.

Vanunu suffered greatly for his whistleblowing  after selling his story to mainstream publications, he was lured to Rome by Mossad agent Cheryl Bentov in a honey trap operation, overpowered and drugged by three waiting Mossad agents, before being dispatched to Israel.

There, he was convicted in a secret trial of treason and espionage, and sentenced to eighteen years of imprisonment. 

Vanunu served most of his sentence in solitary confinement, and was released April 2004. He remains subject to a number of prohibitions, including not contacting foreigners, owning a mobile phone or ever leaving Israel. He has been imprisoned on several occasions subsequent for breaching these conditions.

However, information has also flowed from more contemporary sources.

The 2017 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) report on trends in nuclear warfare estimates Tel Aviv has access to around 80 warheads, of which around 30 are gravity bombs for delivery by aircraft, and 50 weapons are made for delivery by Jericho II medium-range ballistic missiles, believed to be located along with mobile launchers in caves at a military base east of Jerusalem.

Moreover, Germany is known to have supplied a sextet of Dolphin class diesel-electric submarines to Israel in 2016, which can be equipped with nuclear missiles.

 Sputnik

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Russian MoD Wants to Get Hypersonic 'Aviation Means of Destruction'

Sputnik News

20:15 18.07.2017

Russia intends to obtain in 2020-2022 several hypersonic "aviation means of destruction," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Borisov said Tuesday.

ZHUKOVSKY (Sputnik)  Earlier this year, the Russian deputy defense minister said that Russia will consider the development of hypersonic weapons and supplying the country's Armed Forces with them as one of the high-priority spheres in the country's 2018-2025 state armaments program.

"We intend to obtain in  2020-2022 a range of devices and aviation means of destruction which will work on hypersonic speeds," Borisov told reporters.

Russian scientists have surpassed their colleagues from the United States on hypersonic speed advances, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Siberian Branch Vasily Fomin said earlier.

On April 20, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the country was developing hypersonic weapons on par with the United States.

 Sputnik

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Fresh US-led airstrikes kill several Syrian civilians in Dayr al-Zawr

Iran Press TV

Tue Jul 18, 2017 1:32PM

Several civilians have lost their lives when the US-led coalition purportedly fighting the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group carried out a number of aerial attacks in Syria's troubled eastern province of Dayr al-Zawr.

Informed sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the airstrikes targeted Kashkieh village on Tuesday, Syria's official news agency SANA reported.

Nearly a dozen civilians were killed on July 13, when US-led military aircraft targeted al-Diriyah neighborhood of the militant-held northern city of Raqqah. Seven of the victims were members of one family.

The US-led coalition has been conducting airstrikes against what are said to be Daesh targets inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from the Damascus government or a UN mandate.

The Western military alliance has repeatedly been accused of targeting and killing civilians. It has also been largely incapable of fulfilling its declared aim of destroying Daesh.

The city of Raqqah, which lies on the northern bank of the Euphrates River, was overrun by Daesh terrorists in March 2013, and was proclaimed the center for most of the Takfiris' administrative and control tasks the next year.

Syria has been fighting different foreign-sponsored militant and terrorist groups since March 2011. UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura estimated last August that more than 400,000 people had been killed in the crisis until then.

Bomber kills four in Kurdish-held northeast Syria

A so-called monitoring group says at least four people have lost their lives when a car bomb explosion ripped through a checkpoint at a Kurdish-controlled area in Syria's northeastern province of Hasakah.

The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said on Tuesday that blast hit a checkpoint manned by Kurdish Asayesh security forces in al-Manajir village, located 20 kilometers south of Ra's al-Ayn city on the border with Turkey, overnight and killed four people.

The Britain-based group said there were two Asayesh members among the victims, noting that the identities of the other two have yet to be found out.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Tuesday's deadly attack, but such assaults bear the hallmarks of those carried out by members of the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group.

11 killed as militants clash with Kurdish militiamen

Separately, nearly a dozen foreign-sponsored Takfiri militants were killed when they engaged in clashes with militants from the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of mostly Kurdish and Arab militia forces, in the northwestern Syrian province of Aleppo.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights four SDF militants were wounded during the fighting around the village of Ain Daqna on Monday.

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F-35B Lightning II Fighters: UK MoD Faces Hundreds of Millions in Extra Costs

Sputnik News

14:50 18.07.2017(updated 14:47 18.07.2017)

UK defense chiefs are facing a bill of hundreds of millions due to the hidden costs of the F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, due to be added to the Royal Air Force's arsenal before the end of 2017. Billions are to be spent on the fleet  a fleet which may not even work properly due to defense cuts.

The F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter  hailed as "hugely impressive" by Defense Secretary Michael Fallon  produced by US defense giant Lockheed Martin, is the most expensive weapons system in military history.

The "fifth generation" jet fighter has stealth capabilities, advanced networked electronics for situational awareness and low-probability intercept radar, among other gadgetry. It can fly at a maximum altitude of 15 kilometers, and reach speeds of Mach 1.6.

Prices range between US$100 million (77million) and US$130 million (100 million) per plane.

The UK has pledged to spend over US$15 billion (12 billion) on the jets and aircraft carriers by 2021  in all, it will buy 138 F-35s. The first squadron will arrive at RAF Marham in Norfolk next year.

However, around US$200 million extra could be spent due to hidden costs, such as spare parts and the price of upgrading software, despite the fighter plane supposedly being the most sophisticated of its kind.

The reasons are manifold. For one, sweeping defense cuts pursued by the ruling Conservative government mean other machinery in the UK military arsenal is ill-equipped to receive data from the "world's technologically advanced plane"  meaning they must be improved, lest the stealth jet's communications are intercepted by enemy forces.

The financial feasibility of an upgrade is highly questionable, given the military department responsible for computer networks essential to the aircraft's operation needs to make savings of over US$500 million in 2017.

Moreover, the collapse in the value of sterling against the US dollar since the June 23, 2016 Brexit referendum is also likely to greatly bloat the UK's final bill in any event.

However, despite the plane's alleged technological primacy, some fear the F-35B's software system could be susceptible to cyberattack from foreign powers. The first tranche of 48 F-35Bs to be purchased will be the same sort the US was forced to ground in June due to software glitches.

In a statement, the Ministry of Defense said the F-35B Lightning II aircraft purchase program was "on time and within costs." The Ministry added all the issues raised by critics were reported in the past and were under "active management"  and claimed it did not recognise the mooted extra expenditure figures.

The UK is not the only country that has taken an interest in the F-35B  Australia, the Netherlands and Norway are all testing the plane as of July 2017.

If critics' claims are accurate, it delivers another blow to the UK's Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier ambitions. Plans for the carriers  the HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales  date back to 1997, when Tony Blair's Labour government published a report highlighting the urgent need for Britain to regain its aircraft carrier capabilities, lacking since 1966.

However, it took until 2007 for a contract for the vessels to be announced, and another year for it to be awarded (to BVT Surface Fleet, a merger of BAE Systems Surface Fleet Solutions and VT Group's VT Shipbuilding). Once complete, they will be the largest warships ever built in the UK.

Nonetheless, uncertainty surrounded the project for almost a decade subsequently, with serious concerns over spiralling costs and operability leading some analysts to suggest the project may never be completed.

In 2013, then-Defense Secretary Philip Hammond announced the vessels would cost over US$8 billion (6.2 billion) to complete. With the ships scheduled to be finally launched onto the seas before the end of 2017, it may be the UK government is willing to overlook budgetary and technological issues to ensure the pair are seafaring by the stated deadline.

 Sputnik

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To the editor:

The press is fake according to President Trump because its doing its job in uncovering the many untruths that he tells, and now it seems his oldest son Donald Jr. is a chip off the old block and doing the same thing.

If it wasnt for the press, we wouldnt have found out about Watergate and Richard Nixon would have gotten away scot free. Ironic that Nixon called the press fake, also. If you lie the press will let us know. Thats our only link to the truth with Trump as president. Which is sad.

Trumps base believes anything he says. If Kellyanne Conway said the sun was shining when the moon was out, they would believe it. Trump should say the wall has already been built, and they would believe that, too. Look at all the money that would be saved!

Many Americans have become accustomed to his lies. Thats Trump being Trump, but this great country should not allow itself to become numb to them. Many Americans are sick of it with his approval level at 36 percent, the lowest of any president in 70 years. But of course Republicans still approve of him and the question is why? I was actually embarrassed for him and this country when he told the French presidents wife she had a good figure. Is this presidential? I think not, but he didnt act presidential during the campaign and was still elected.

I truly think people wanted a change with someone not associated with Barack Obama. Trumps political rise was built on a lie about Obamas birthplace. His lack of truthfulness has become central to the Russia investigation with former FBI Director James Comey testifying under oath about Trumps lies plain and simple. There is no precedent for an American president to spend so much time telling untruths and instructing his people to do the same thing. He is trying to create an atmosphere in which realty is irrelevant.

Trump Jr. said his meeting with a Russian lawyer was over adoption, but emails tell a different story. A story why he was there along with Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort to get supposed dirt on Hillary Clinton, not about adoption like he said. I truly think they would have met with the devil if they could have received some dirt. Meeting with people is no crime, but meeting with a foreign country, especially one that has tried to destroy us, is. Other people where there with this lawyer whom Trump Jr. neglected to mention when asked. Why lie about it if it was a nothing burger? He came up with a different story for days. Drip. Drip.

For all that Trump has not achieved, he has taught us to live in a state of chaos and crisis that he says has been caused by fake news and Democrats who making a big deal over nothing and are poor losers after the election. Wrong. Most Americans, except his base, know that this not true. When 17 intelligence agencies claim Russia was involved in our election, this is very serious and has to stop. But Trump has done nothing about it. Not to upset his buddy Vladimir Putin. What does this president owe Russia anyway? I do know that Trump couldnt borrow any money from American banks and had to borrow from Russia and China.

To the many who voted for this man, you should have known what to expect. His actions during the campaign and the way he treated people should have told you that, but if the truth comes out that he has ties with Russia, this will be the end of this fake president for sure if Republicans dont try to overlook it.

One way or another, this nightmare has to stop and this country needs to move on and help the middle class and the poor. Our only hope is Special Counsel Robert Mueller doing his job.

ROBERT HAYDEN

Blairs
The Danville Registrars Office will have a little more room in a few months as the department plans to move across the street to the First Citizens Bank building at 530 Main St.

This will be a much better space, said Danville Registrar Peggy Petty.

Petty said the building lease will be effective on Aug. 1, and the moving process will begin shortly afterward. However, she said the office didnt have a firm opening date yet. The registrars office is currently located across the road at 515 Main St.

It will give us additional room after purchasing the paper ballot system, Petty said. The city recently started using the new system after state laws phased out the old electronic machines.

The current space is 1,400 square feet, and the new space is 2,425 square feet.

Petty said the facility also would include more counter space and a larger lobby area for voters. Since the building will still house First Citizens Bank, voters will enter through a side entrance.

The city of Danville issued a building permit for the space on June 7 for renovations totaling around $136,000. According to Danville Budget Director Cynthia Thomasson, the building owner will pay for the renovations, and then defer some of that cost to the rent agreement with the city.

We will be paying the rent, which includes the utilities, Thomasson said.

The 530 Main St. property is one of seven in the River District owned by Durham, North Carolina-based Watershed Ventures. The group currently leases space downstairs to the bank and other tenants on the upper floors, project manager Jordan Jones said.

The city space will be on the first floor as well, Jones said.

Jones said the group was excited to continue working with the city of Danville. The voting office is the first project between the two groups, he said.

The company is partnering with the Danville Regional Foundation to acquire properties and prepare for development.

We have a very strong relationship with the city, Jones said. We look forward to continuing to do some projects together.

Danville owns the current property for the voting office, and will lease the new space for a yearly rent of $44,256.24.

Danville City Council approved the renovations on May 16, and City Manager Ken Larking signed the agreement on May 19. Renovations began in the second week of June, Petty said.

Petty said the space, which is on the first floor of the building, has been vacant for at least several months. First Citizens Bank owned the entire building before relocating to near Danville Mall.

Petty said her office employs two full-time positions and two more part-time spots during election cycles.
VANCOUVER, BC--(Marketwired - July 19, 2017) - Sarama Resources Ltd. ("Sarama" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE: SWA) is pleased to advise that the Ministry of Mines and Quarries in Burkina Faso has issued, and Sarama has paid, the invoice for the transfer of the Djarkadougou Exploration Permit ("Djarkadougou"), which hosts the Bondi Gold Deposit ("Bondi Deposit"). This was acquired from Orezone Gold Corp. ("Orezone"), pursuant to the sale agreement between Sarama and Orezone (the "Agreement") (refer Sarama news release May 24, 2016).

This is the final step of the approval process before the official transfer becomes effective upon the Ministry of Mines delivering the new Djarkadougou Order (the "ArrAtA") in Sarama's name, at which point common shares and warrants issued by Sarama to Orezone as part of the Agreement will be released from escrow. The issuance of the ArrAtA is a matter of process and it is anticipated that this will occur during Q3 2017.

With Orezone's consent, Sarama commenced exploration activity on the property in Q2 2017 and has made progress in identifying and drill testing new exploration targets, the results of which will be provided in future news releases.

The Djarkadougou Property forms part of Sarama's 100%-owned(1) ThreeBee Project(2) (refer Sarama news release May 16, 2017) and will play an important role in any future development plans.

Sarama's President and CEO, Andrew Dinning, commented:

"Sarama is pleased to have received this government approval and we look forward to progressing and extracting further value from the Bondi Project.

We view this acquisition as an important step in the consolidation of the highly prospective southern HoundA Belt which is an area where Sarama has had significant exploration success and controls a large land position with significant interests in three advanced gold exploration projects."

ABOUT SARAMA RESOURCES LTD

Sarama Resources Ltd. (TSX VENTURE: SWA) is a West African focused gold explorer with substantial landholdings in Burkina Faso. Sarama is focused on consolidating under-explored landholdings in Burkina Faso and other established mining jurisdictions.

Sarama's flagship properties are situated within the Company's South HoundA Project area in south-west Burkina Faso. Located within the prolific HoundA Greenstone Belt, Sarama's exploration programs have built on significant early success to deliver an inferred mineral resource estimate of 2.1 Moz gold(4). Acacia Mining plc is earning up to a 70% interest in the South HoundA Project by satisfying certain conditions, including funding earn-in expenditures of up to US$14 million, over a 4-year earn-in period and may acquire an additional 5% interest, for an aggregate 75% interest in the Project, upon declaration of a minimum mineral reserve of 1.6 million ounces of gold. Acacia has satisfied certain milestones and currently holds a 50% interest in the South HoundA Project and is continuing to sole fund exploration activities.

Sarama holds a 31% participating interest in the Karankasso Project Joint Venture ("JV") which is situated adjacent to the Company's South HoundA Project in Burkina Faso and is a JV between Sarama and Savary Gold Corp. ("Savary"). Savary is the operator of the JV and in October 2015, declared a maiden inferred mineral resource estimate of 671,000 ounces of contained gold(5) at the Karankasso Project JV.

Sarama has also agreed to acquire(1) a 100% interest in the Bondi Deposit from Orezone Gold Corp. (refer news release May 24, 2016). Bondi has a historical estimate of mineral resources of 0.3Moz Au (measured and indicated) and 0.1Moz Au (inferred)(3).

Together, the South HoundA Project, Bondi Deposit and the Karankasso Project form a cluster of advanced gold deposits, within trucking distance of one another, which potentially offers a development option for a multi-source fed central processing facility in the southern HoundA Belt region of Burkina Faso.

Incorporated in 2010, the Company's Board and management team have a proven track record in Africa and a strong history in the discovery and development of large-scale gold deposits. Sarama is well positioned to build on its current success with a sound exploration strategy across its property portfolio.

FOOTNOTES

(1) Upon closing of the respective purchase agreements, Sarama will hold a 100% interest in the Botoro Property and the Djarkadougou Property, which hosts the Bondi Deposit. (2) The ThreeBee Project comprises the Djarkadougou, Botoro, Bamako and Bouni Properties. (3) Bondi Deposit - 4.1Mt @ 2.1g/t Au for 282,000 oz Au (measured and indicated) and 2.5Mt @ 1.8g/t Au for 149,700 oz Au (inferred), reported at a 0.5 g/t Au cut-off. i. The historical estimate of the Bondi Deposit reflects a mineral resource estimate compiled by Orezone Gold Corp. ("Orezone") which has an effective date of February 20, 2009. The historical estimate is contained in a technical report titled "Technical Report on the Mineral Resource of the Bondigui Gold Project", dated date of February 20, 2009 (the "Bondi Technical Report") and is available under the profile of Orezone on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. ii. Sarama believes that the historical estimate is relevant to investors' understanding of the property, as it reflects the most recent technical work undertaken in respect of the Bondi Deposit. iii. The historical estimate was informed by 886 drillholes, assayed for gold by cyanidation methods, were used to interpret mineralised envelopes and geological zones over the area of the historical estimate. Gold grade interpolation was undertaken using ID  methodology based on input parameters derived from geostatistical and geological analyses assessments. Field measurements and geological logging of drillholes were used to determine weathering boundaries and bulk densities for modelled blocks. iv. The historical estimate uses the mineral resource reporting categories required under National Instrument 43-101. v. No more recent estimates of the mineral resource or other data are available. vi. Sarama is currently undertaking the necessary verification work in the field and on the desktop that may support the future reclassification of the historical estimate to a mineral resource. vii. A qualified person engaged by Sarama has not undertaken sufficient work to verify the historical estimate as a current mineral resource and Sarama is therefore not treating the historical estimate as a current mineral resource. (4) South HoundA Project - 43.0 Mt @ 1.5 g/t Au (reported above cut-off grades ranging 0.3-2.2 g/t Au, reflecting the mining methods and processing flowsheets assumed to assess the likelihood of the inferred mineral resources having reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction). The effective date of the Company's inferred mineral resource estimate is February 4, 2016. For further information regarding the mineral resource estimate please refer to the technical report titled "NI 43-101 Independent Technical Report South HoundA Project Update, Bougouriba and Ioba Provinces, Burkina Faso", dated March 31, 2016. The technical report is available under Sarama Resources Ltd.'s profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. (5) Karankasso Project - 9.2 Mt @ 2.3 g/t Au (at a 0.5 g/t Au cut-off). The effective date of the Karankasso Project JV mineral resource estimate is October 7, 2015. For further information regarding the mineral resource estimate please refer to the technical report titled "Technical Report and Resource Estimate on the Karankasso Project, Burkina Faso", dated October 7, 2015. The technical report is available under Savary Gold Corp.'s profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Sarama has not independently verified Savary's mineral resource estimate and takes no responsibility for its accuracy. Savary is the operator of the Karankasso Project JV and Sarama is relying on their Qualified Persons' assurance of the validity of the mineral resource estimate.

CAUTION REGARDING FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

Information in this news release that is not a statement of historical fact constitutes forward-looking information. Such forward-looking information includes statements regarding the transfer of the Djarkadougou ArrAtA, Company's plans for exploration at the Djarkadougou Property and the potential for the Djarkadougou Property and ThreeBee Project to host gold mineralization of significance, drilling and geochemical and geophysical surveys at the South HoundA Project, the Earn-In Agreement with Acacia, including the amounts that may be spent on exploration and interests in the South HoundA Project that may be earned by Acacia upon making certain expenditures and estimating a minimum reserve, the potential to expand the present oxide component of the Company's existing estimated mineral resources, and future exploration plans.

Actual results, performance or achievements of the Company may vary from the results suggested by such forward-looking statements due to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors. Such factors include, among others, that the business of exploration for gold and other precious minerals involves a high degree of risk and is highly speculative in nature; Mineral Resources are not Mineral Reserves, they do not have demonstrated economic viability, and there is no certainty that they can be upgraded to Mineral Reserves through continued exploration; few properties that are explored are ultimately developed into producing mines; geological factors; the actual results of current and future exploration; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be evaluated, as well as those factors disclosed in the Company's publicly filed documents. There can be no assurance that any mineralisation that is discovered will be proven to be economic, or that future required regulatory licensing or approvals will be obtained. However, the Company believes that the assumptions and expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable. Assumptions have been made regarding, among other things, Acacia's continued funding of exploration activities, the Company's ability to carry on its exploration activities, the sufficiency of funding, the timely receipt of required approvals, the price of gold and other precious metals, that the Company will not be affected by adverse political events, the ability of the Company to operate in a safe, efficient and effective manner and the ability of the Company to obtain further financing as and when required and on reasonable terms. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information.

Sarama does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except as required by applicable laws.

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.

QUALIFIED PERSONS' STATEMENT

Scientific or technical information in this news release that relates to the preparation of the South HoundA Project mineral resource estimate is based on information compiled or approved by Adrian Shepherd. Adrian Shepherd is an employee of Cube Consulting Pty Ltd and is considered to be independent of Sarama Resources Ltd. Adrian Shepherd is a Chartered Professional Member in good standing of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy and has sufficient experience which is relevant to the commodity, style of mineralisation under consideration and activity which he is undertaking to qualify as a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101. Adrian Shepherd consents to the inclusion in this news release of the information, in the form and context in which it appears.

Scientific or technical information in this news release, in respect of the Bondi Deposit relating to mineral resource and exploration information drawn from the Technical Report prepared for Orezone on that deposit has been approved by Guy Scherrer. Guy Scherrer is an employee of Sarama Resources Ltd. and is a member in good standing of the Ordre des GAologues du QuAbec and has sufficient experience which is relevant to the commodity, style of mineralisation under consideration and activity which he is undertaking to qualify as a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101. Guy Scherrer consents to the inclusion in this report of the information, in the form and context in which it appears.

Scientific or technical information in this news release that relates to the preparation of the Karankasso Project's mineral resource estimate is based on information compiled or approved by Eugene Puritch and Antoine Yassa. Eugene Puritch and Antoine Yassa are employees of P&E Mining Consultants Inc. and are considered to be independent of Savary Gold Corp. and Sarama Resources Ltd. Antoine Yassa is a member in good standing of the Ordre des GAologues du QuAbec and Eugene Puritch is a member in good standing of Professional Engineers Ontario. Eugene Puritch and Antoine Yassa have sufficient experience which is relevant to the commodity, style of mineralisation under consideration and activity which they are undertaking to qualify as a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101. Eugene Puritch and Antoine Yassa consent to the inclusion in this news release of the information, in the form and context in which it appears. Sarama has not independently verified Savary's mineral resource estimate and takes no responsibility for its accuracy.
Credit rating agency Standard & Poor's lowered Alaska's credit rating on Tuesday and said the state's reliance on financial reserves to fund its budget cannot continue.S&P Global Ratings dropped Alaska's general obligation debt rating from AA+ to AA, with a negative outlook. This is just the latest in bad credit rating news for Alaska. Its rating has been sliding since last year.Another top rating agency, Moody's Investors Service, also downgraded Alaska less than a week ago.S&P warned Alaska a month ago that a downgrade was coming if lawmakers didn't adopt fiscal reforms to fix the state budget, which relies largely on oil revenue."The rating actions reflect continued lack of agreement on fiscal reforms to return the state to structural balance," said S&P analyst Timothy Little, "and while we recognize the state's sizable reserve position is intended to offset volatile economic cycles, continued reliance on reserves, coupled with the state's economic contraction since 2012 and the fallout of oil prices in mid-2015, have reached an (unsustainable) level."The Legislature passed an operating budget last month, and last week passed a last-minute oil tax deal to end cash payments to oil companies. But there's still no deficit reduction package to close the state budget's $2.5 billion shortfall."The continued reliance on budgetary reserves that have significantly diminished over the years places the state in a more vulnerable position," S&P said in its statement. "Deteriorated reserves and continued dependence on revenues from natural resources will only exacerbate budgetary pressures as the state's economy is likely to continue to contract."S&P also said that if lawmakers fail to enact "significant fiscal reforms," the state's trend of downward ratings "will likely persist, possibly by multiple notches as its structural imbalance becomes more protracted."This is the second downgrade from S&P in as many years for Alaska. In January 2016, the agency lowered the state's top-shelf AAA rating to AA+.
The Idaho Supreme Court, in a 4-1 ruling Tuesday afternoon, upheld Gov. Butch Otter's veto of legislation removing the state's 6 percent sales tax on groceries.But the high court also overturned a 39-year-old precedent and ruled that the Idaho Constitution actually requires the Legislature to present all bills to the governor before they adjourn for the year -- a ruling that will significantly change how the Idaho Legislature operates at the end of its annual session each year.The case pitted Idaho's legislative branch against its executive branch in a struggle for power; in recent years in Idaho, the balance of powers between those branches has been shifting toward the legislative branch. But that wasn't the result in this case.In an opinion written by Justice Daniel Eismann, the court overturned its 1978 Cenarrusa v. Andrus ruling -- as requested by 30 state lawmakers who sued Idaho Secretary of State Lawerence Denney in their bid to overturn the veto. But the justices found that all sides in the case were "misconstruing Article IV, section 10, of the Idaho Constitution."Justice Warren Jones dissented, writing that he favored a "strict constructionist approach to the Constitution." But Justices Roger Burdick, Joel Horton and Robyn Brody all concurred in Eismann's opinion.The high court held that its ruling applies prospectively only -- not retrospectively. That means the new rule for when bills must be presented to the governor -- for his signature or veto -- takes effect now, not for past actions. It's a win for Denney and Gov. Butch Otter; the court ordered the lawmakers who sued to pay the court costs on appeal.In Cenarrusa v. Andrus, the court held that once lawmakers have adjourned their session for the year, the governor has 10 days from the time he receives any particular bill to either sign it, veto it, or have it become law without his signature. The 3-2 ruling had gone unchallenged for nearly four decades, but last year, in a different case, two of the current justices -- Eismann and Jones -- signed a concurring opinion strongly suggesting they thought the Cenarrusa decision was wrong.The lawmakers who sued contended that the exact wording of the state constitution only gave the governor 10 days from their session's adjournment -- not from when he received the bill. Under their approach, Otter's veto of the grocery tax bill came too late, and the bill became law without his signature. Under Cenarrusa v. Andrus, the veto was valid.Otter argued that going with the lawmakers' interpretation would allow the legislative branch to stymie the governor's ability to veto bills -- by simply delaying them until it's too late and the deadline's passed."When a bill is presented to the governor and when the legislature adjourns sine die are both within the sole control of the legislature," Eismann wrote. "Sine die" means without a day -- it signifies that the Legislature's annual session is done for the year."If the legislature could present a bill to the governor after adjournment, it could infringe upon the governor's right to veto the bill by presenting it to him more than 10 days after adjournment," Eismann wrote. "In summary, Article IV, section 10, of the Constitution clearly and necessarily prohibits the legislature from presenting bills to the governor after the legislature has adjourned sine die."Instead, he found, "It requires that bills must be presented to the governor while the legislature is still in session. That is the only logical interpretation of the section."The final sentence of Article IV, Section 10 of the Idaho Constitution starts off talking about the governor having five days to return a bill as vetoed "after it shall have been presented to him," or it becomes law without his signature. But at the end of the lengthy sentence, it says that if "the legislature shall, by adjournment, prevent its return" the bill would have to be vetoed "within 10 days after such adjournment (Sundays excepted) or become law."During the oral arguments in the case last month, Justice Joel Horton told David Hensley, attorney for Otter, "I'm having a great deal of trouble finding ambiguity within the phrase '10 days after adjournment.'"Hensley responded, "I would caution the court not to look just at the 10-day language. I would point the court's attention to the entire sentence, because it says 'unless the legislature by adjournment shall prevent its return.'" The Cenarrusa case found that all those words have meaning, he said, and suggest the final part of the sentence assumes the governor has a bill in his possession that he's considering vetoing."Otherwise ... how can he return that which he does not have?" Hensley asked.In their decision, the justices found that the constitution does, in fact, imply that the governor would already have been presented with the bill -- and that that's because the Legislature can't present bills after it adjourns for the year.Jones, in his dissent, wrote, "Article IV, section 10 is a complex and inartfully drafted provision that is capable of more than one construction depending on which theory of constitutional interpretation is applied. My approach differs from both the majority's and the Cenarrusa Court's approach because my approach is not an interpretation at all; rather, it is simply a reading of the specific language of Article IV, section 10."But Eismann, in the majority opinion, countered, "The dissent argues that the only prohibitions on legislative actions that can be in a constitution are those that are expressly stated. That argument is contrary to a principle of constitutional interpretation that was well established when the Idaho Constitution was drafted and adopted. ... The understanding that a constitution could include express and necessarily implied prohibitions on actions of the legislature was well established prior to the drafting and adoption of our Constitution."The end result is that Otter's veto stands, and Idahoans will continue paying the 6 percent sales tax on groceries -- at least for now. But there's nothing stopping the Legislature from passing the same bill again next year, and this time, getting it to the governor in enough time that lawmakers, if they still have two-thirds support, could override his veto.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock said Tuesday he is forming a federal political action committee to allow him to travel and be a larger part of the national political conversation.On Monday evening, the New York Times published a story saying the state's Democratic governor is taking "the first steps" toward a run for president in 2020, citing the PAC and statements made by Bullock at the National Governors Association gathering in Rhode Island last week."I believe the time is right to lend my voice, the voice of someone that after getting elected has been able to govern in what's viewed as a red state," Bullock told the Times. "Some of the things that I've been able to do in Montana can also translate beyond just the state's border."Tuesday afternoon, Bullock said the PAC will allow him to "share Montana's story.""Montana has a story that I'm asked more and more often about as far as how we treat one another with respect, we actually work together to get some things done, from health care to campaign finance transparency and other things," he told reporters. "The ability to be part of that conversation, I think lending our voice is significant (and) there is no mechanism under state law to do so, so we formed that (federal) PAC both to help out some people and to help travel, (that) allows me to be part of that."When asked if he would consider a run for president, Bullock said "2020 is a long, long way away. I have no idea what I'll be doing at that point."Bullock is termed out from running for governor again after his current stint ends in 2020.Bullock has gained attention as a more moderate Democrat in a state that voted for Republican President Donald Trump by 20 points. He narrowly won re-election against now-U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte last November. He came into the governorship following popular Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who had previously been named as a possible presidential candidate.Democrats nationally have been trying to find ways to connect to rural voters, where they did poorly in the last presidential election. Some pundits worry the party spends too much time on social issues that play well on the East and West coasts but not in middle America.Montana's plain-spoken Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, a farmer from Big Sandy expected to face a tough re-election battle next year, has been held up as an example of the type of Democrat that can connect to rural areas."I think nationally Democrats need to be showing up in places beyond just the coasts or the bright blue areas," Bullock said Tuesday, sitting in his office in jeans with backpacking gear piled by the side of his chair."I think at times national Democrats write off a lot of the country. And even if you could win a nationally doing so, that's not an effective tool for governing," he said. "So from that perspective I'm hopeful as part of the conversation (to be) really saying every ZIP code matters. And it does, not just for winning elections but for governing afterwards."Carroll College political science associate professor Jeremy Johnson said Democrats see a chance to take back the presidency in 2020 and he expects a crowded primary. He called Bullock an interesting possibly said but it's too early to judge how well he'd perform."It's interesting because it's not clear exactly who is the ideal candidate for the Democratic Party. Bullock's strength is he got elected in a state where in presidential elections it's quite red. It's also a Western state where Democrats traditionally have more problems winning elections."Bullock's interview with the Times took a jab at U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who lost his party's nomination in the presidential primary a year ago and is far more liberal than Bullock."We can talk free college for all all we want, but there's a whole lot of people that can get a darn good job, like in Montana, out of an apprenticeship," Bullock told the Times. Free college was one of Sanders' key issues.The governor also said he wants a bigger voice on the national stage to show the country civility in politics is still possible. Though the state has seen some of the most expensive and biting campaign attacks recently, including Bullock's run for governor last fall, the negative discourse here never rose to anything near the national level.During the last legislative session, which wrapped up in April, several lawmakers in leadership positions congratulated the body on upholding decorum even as key infrastructure billa failed. The four months lawmakers were in town was not void of conflict, however, with Democrats and Republicans on the House Judiciary committee clashing regularly toward the end of the term."By and large we have a model of civility and much more so than what we see at the national level," Bullock said.After championing campaign finance reform in Montana, Bullock said PACs are necessary vehicles and allow for a degree of transparency in who is giving him money."To be a part of that conversation needs some money and both the state and the federal PACs aren't 501(c)4s, the dark money political efforts I fought so hard against, and it affords that opportunity for people to see who contributes."Bullock is also forming a statewide PAC to work to elect people with he says have the values and priorities of Montanans and who are willing to work with the governor to advance policy. Having lawmakers in the next legislative session, which is in the early months of 2019, will be critical to continuing Medicaid expansion in Montana, another of the governor's hallmark efforts.In 2015, state lawmakers passed a bill carried by a Republican that expanded Medicaid to cover the working poor in the state, but built in a clause that requires a vote to renew it in 2019. Both the federal House and Senate's versions of attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, which provided extra federal money to expansion states, would have pulled back funding enough to end the programs here.Though both federal bills are dead for now, they served to create a level of uncertainty about expansion funding in Montana and have some concerned the 2019 Legislature will end the program, which has covered nearly 80,000 statewide."I'm hopeful that in 2019 the Legislature will be folks that want to come together and solve problems and continue to move this state forward and make it better for the next generation," Bullock said. "That's one of the reasons I'm also forming the Montanans Working Together PAC."
Attorney General Jeff Sessions signed an order on Wednesday reversing the Obama administration's limits on civil asset forfeiture, a widely criticized practice in which law enforcement officers seize cash and property from citizens who have not been charged with crimes.The policy change comes as a number of states -- both red and blue -- have clamped down on civil forfeiture abuses, and it will allow local police departments to circumvent state laws that restrict the practice."Civil asset forfeiture is a key tool that helps law enforcement defund organized crime, take back ill-gotten gains, and prevent new crimes from being committed, and it weakens the criminals and the cartels," said Sessions when he announced the order to a group of law enforcement officials. "In departments across this country, funds that were once used to take lives are now being used to save lives."In most states and cities, police departments get to keep most or all of the money and property they seize, which has led some departments to depend on forfeitures as a critical source of funding.Civil forfeiture has critics on both the right and the left , largely because of the low burden of proof required to seize a persons property.The law doesnt require you to be charged, much less convicted, of any crime [to have your possessions taken], says Darpana Sheth, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm that represents civil forfeiture clients. And because its a civil proceeding, people are not afforded the right to counsel like they would be in a criminal proceeding.That means people have to pay for an attorney to represent them while they try to regain their possessions -- an expense that often exceeds the value of the confiscated goods in the first place.If [the police] take $500 from you during a traffic stop, the legal fees and everything turn out to be more than what you already lost, says Louis Rulli, a clinical law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading forfeiture expert.Over the last decade, shocking stories of individual and systemic abuse have made national headlines.In 2016, Oklahoma police stopped a Christian band manager for a broken tail light and ended up seizing $53,000 in concert revenue and charity donations to an orphanage.reported a lengthy expose on police taking hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists never charged with crimes. In Tenaha, Texas, authorities systematically confiscated motorists' property and threatened them with criminal charges unless they signed waivers giving up their possessions (the department later used the money to buy, among other things, a popcorn machine).The potential for abuse has led several states to rein in police power to seize property.In the last three years, 24 states have comprehensively reformed their forfeiture laws, according to Sheth. As of July 10, when Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy signed H.B. 8146 , 14 states require a criminal conviction before seized assets can be legally forfeited to authorities (if no conviction results, the assets must be returned to their owner).Several states have other types of restrictions -- some ban the use of forfeited assets for law enforcement services and reroute the money to other public services, thereby eliminating the profit motive some say leads to abuse of the practice. (For a specific list of individual state policies, visit the Institute of Justices interactive map .)But Sessions' order gives officers a way to bypass state restrictions.It revives a program called Equitable Sharing or adoptive forfeiture, which allows local law enforcement to process forfeiture cases under federal statute and share the assets with federal authorities. In practice, the federal government sends up to 80 percent of the assets right back to local departments, effectively allowing them to get around stricter state laws, says Rulli. Eric Holder, Obama's attorney general, eliminated adoptive forfeiture except in rare cases.Sessions is calling [adoptive forfeiture] a partnership between the federal government and states, says Rulli, but in fact, its an attack on federalism and the ability of states to decide for themselves how they should handle this [issue].Rulli and Sheth agree that Sessions is moving against a growing tide of politicians and public officials on both sides of the aisle who believe civil forfeiture is a blatant abuse of power.Earlier this year, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas -- one of the most conservative members of the court -- attacked the practice, writing that it has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses. Several bipartisan bills have been introduced in Congress to reform federal civil forfeiture laws, at least one of which would eliminate adoptive forfeitures.[Sessions] new directive shows the incredible importance of Congress taking immediate action and passing comprehensive bills to reform forfeiture and prevent local departments from circumventing state laws, says Sheth.In the meantime, Sheth suggests states should prohibit law enforcement officers in their state from participating in the Equitable Sharing Program.This new directive bucks the trend of where states have been going, she says. It appears that everyone but the Justice Department understands the need for reform.
Description

GIS - 19 July 2017:

The first edition of Next Generation Computing Applications (NextComp2017) International Conference, aimed at presenting innovative ideas with a view to shaping the research, innovation and technology landscape, opened this morning at Le Meridien Hotel in Pointe-aux-Piments.

NextComp 2017, a three-day event, is organised by the Faculty of Information, Communication and Digital Technologies of the University of Mauritius. Participants include local and foreign researchers and practitioners from academia and the IT industry.

In his address the representative of the Ministry of Education and Human Resources, Tertiary Education and Scientific Research, the Director (E-Education and Scholarships), Mr R. Auckbur, pointed out that institutions have to gear up to adapt their realities to emerging computing and ICT tools and a close nexus of research in ICT within the industry is required to achieve this. Events such as NextComp 2017 help to define new pathways, develop new ICT partnerships and ensure that the community and businesses benefit from discussions, he said.

The Ministry is embarking in reforms in which ICT plays an important part and thus connecting and digitising education systems at all levels, said Mr Auckbur adding that the reform process has to be accompanied by high-level discussions and research. It is also important to accompany the new trajectory of Mauritius into the ICT and computing needs of tomorrow, he said.

For his part, the Chief Technical Officer of the Ministry of Technology, Communication and Innovation, Mr R. Hawabhay, outlined that research and development are critical for innovation as they will be called upon to play a leading role for the future of Mauritius as well as in making the country an inclusive high-income economy. In the coming years our researchers will have to find ways to engage in eco-friendly and sustainable agriculture to ensure food security and factories will have to adopt high-tech manufacturing processes. This means that investments will be required in novel tools and techniques to create innovative products, he said.

According to Mr Hawabhay, the ICT sector need to explore novel ways to address the major issues of skills mismatch and skills gap in an ever-changing world faced with emerging technologies.

The Conference

NextComp 2017 is focusing on the main theme Next Generation Computing Applications. Discussions will cover the following areas: Communication and Computer Networks; Security and Forensics; Intelligent Systems; ICT for Development; Data Analytics; Information Management and Enterprise Systems; Bioinformatics and Healthcare Information Systems and Software Engineering Principles; and, Practices and Applications.

The conference is also featuring a comprehensive programme comprising of keynote presentations by experts and oral presentations of peer reviewed papers.
The GoMentum Station in Concord, Calif., is expanding its reach and forging new partnerships across international borders.This month, the Contra Costa Transportation Authority (CCTA), which oversees and operates GoMentum Station, entered into a collaborative agreement with Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) Japan and signed a letter of intent to partner with The Netherlands' Coast-to-Coast Smart E-mobility program.Innovation knows no boundaries, said CCTA Executive Director Randy Iwasaki in a news release. While GoMentum already has working partnerships with international brands including Honda and the France-based EasyMile, CCTA is beginning to work directly with foreign quasi-government agencies.The Coast-to-Coast initiative is a public-private partnership (P3) among the Dutch and U.S. governments, universities, and private companies set on furthering innovative mobility solutions that utilize electric vehicles. The groups have agreed to share information; launch Amber , a Holland-based autonomous car-sharing startup, in California; and look for opportunities for GoMentum to launch projects in the Netherlands.ITS Japan, another P3 based in Tokyo, brings together representatives from next-gen transportation-related organizations, industries and academia. ITS Japan is committed to investing in research and deployment, and acting as a liaison among ITS-related public and private organizations and academia.This partnership will facilitate sharing autonomous vehicle knowledge between California and Japan as well as accelerate research and development of Connected Vehicles/Autonomous Vehicles through GoMentum Stations partnerships, Iwasaki said in the release.GoMentum allows for companies and interested parties to test self-driving vehicles and vehicle-to-vehicle technology out of the public eye, free from most public data disclosure regulations. In January, the testing facility was named one of 10 Proving Ground Stations by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
An Agency on Its Own



Cleaning House and Improving from Within



Much Ado About Workforce

Whats Next for Alabama?



Jim Purcell wasnt expecting a call from Alabamas new governor, Kay Ivey, and he certainly wasnt expecting her to ask him to head up the Office of Information Technology (OIT)  but thats exactly what happened last week Following a rocky patch in Alabama politics, which included a personal scandal terminating with former Gov. Robert Bentley's resignation, Ivey  Bentleys former lieutenant  stepped in to stabilize the executive branch and make a few administrative changes. Among those changes was the appointment of Purcell as the OIT acting secretary. Purcell accepted, picking up where former Secretary Joanne Hale left off.But the job isnt just a promotion; there is some very real work to be done to make the agency future-ready. Purcell, a man who will happily tell you he is up to the challenge, is contending with not only the restructuring of his agency, but with all the other things CIOs normally must deal with as well.In May, Ivey signed Senate Bill 219 into law, clearing the way for OIT to officially separate from the states Department of Finance. What may seem simple at first glance is much more complicated, Purcell explained, and will require reconciling assets, staff and contracts. He calls it a big, hairy monster.Its a pretty complicated minutiae problem. I am fully on board with that continuing, and the sooner we can identify it the better, and the finance director is still very much on board, he said. Its kind of like merging two companies, where one acquires the other one, its a lot of work that goes on under the covers.Though both agencies and their respective leaders were on board with the change, and had set it into motion with an interagency agreement, it took the governors signature to seal the deal in May.With other portions of the act set to go live in October 2017, the final sign-off on the separation has no deadline because state officials want the gargantuan task done correctly, not necessarily quickly.Even a brief conversation with Purcell is enough to show that his sights are set on moving the agency forward and preparing it for the future, not just maintaining the status quo. As an agency insider, who formerly served in the chief operations officer (COO) role, he said the governor choosing the new secretary from within the OIT was a welcome choice for an agency with a plan.Like Hale before him, Purcell hopes to cement OITs internal operations and ingrain what he calls cultural core throughout the service-based agencys ranks.Trying to get the mass of long-term employees to think more customer service and service-based is a huge cultural undertaking, and we can draw it on paper and we can put procedures out there, but until it is in our very fiber, its yet to be seen if I can be successful or not, he said.A step in the right direction is improving the tools that state agencies have at their fingertips  like the phones they use, for example. And Purcell is not a technology for technologys sake kind of guy; he means it when he says the states phone system is out of date and costing big money.Under a large-scale VoIP project, about to be kicked off with industry partner Cisco, the state stands to save millions of dollars a year over the analog systems it currently operates on. Were really within weeks of kicking that project off, and very conservatively, were looking at probably a 50 percent savings  a $12 million range over current state, he said. Its a have-to-do and its a big win for the agency.New phones aside, the federated model of Alabama IT does create some private-sector competition for OIT in the other aspects of the technology environment, but Purcell, a former private-sector man himself, sees it as an opportunity for his agency to up the ante and try harder to incent prospective agency customers.Were competing with outside providers, but really with a goal of being not only the best choice from a price point, but also the best choice from a service point of view in that federated model, he said. How do you incent people to do better if they have to? Wed much rather use the carrot approach than the stick approach.By his count, nearly three-quarters of his staff could retire at any given moment. Anecdotes about state IT staffing fly around all the time, but this isnt a figure Purcell uses flippantly  he means it, and is audibly nervous about what the loss of valuable staff could mean for state IT.Whats more, he said, is that very little has been done to prepare for recruiting their replacements.I would guess that 70 percent of my staff could drop their retirement papers any day they wanted to  nothing has been done to prime the pump and to go recruit young people and bring in diversity or talent and diversity of thought, he said.To beat the stereotype of the state government hiring debacle, the acting CIO said he knows its not something that OIT can do alone; its going to take partnerships with higher education, scholarships and incentivizing millennials to give government work a try.But part of the problem is, well, governments glacial pace when it comes to changing. The state IT agency has been stuck in the mainframe era with regard to how it thinks about the roles of its personnel, data processing clerks, etc. To fix it, OIT is having to realign these roles and responsibilities, not just to make sense of what staff is up to, but also to where it comes to pay.The first swipe at this is align the people we have and fix the pay scale to, as best we can, where it aligns with industry, he said. That will help retain talent, but does nothing really to fix the huge problem we have in recruiting.When asked about the future, Purcell has no delusions about his timetable. Iveys term ends in 16 months, and a lot of other political factors could determine his immediate future, but even so, he remains focused on the tasks at hand.As he tells it, the next few months will be spent not only shoring up the states cybersecurity and internal processes, but also in building better relationships with the customer agencies that OIT serves. When asked whether leadership fully understands the evolving role of IT in government, he answered in the affirmative, but said there is work to be done when it comes to some of the agency heads.Rather than blaming a cost-conscious agency for not immediately accepting the potential of new technology, Purcell said its up to OIT to prove the value of what it supplies.They dont necessarily understand how technology can help them over hiring more doctors or social workers, more feet on the ground doing their stuff," he said. "So, weve got to do a better job in showing them the value and how we can multiply peoples efforts through automation and technology.
(TNS) -- PROVIDENCE  More than 20 organizations , including the Rhode Island Medical Society, have launched a public campaign to persuade Gov. Gina Raimondo to veto legislation to allow warrantless searches of otherwise confidential information on the state's electronic prescription database.Raimondo has not stated publicly what she intends to do with the legislation, which was introduced in the House by Rep. Joseph McNamara, D-Warwick; and in the Senate by Sen. William Conley, D-East Providence. The governor has until Wednesday to sign, veto or allow the legislation to become law without her signature.The proposed law would give state and federal investigators access to the state's Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP), which contains information on every prescription for a controlled substance dispensed by Rhode Island pharmacies  from highly addictive prescription opioids such as Vicodin and OxyContin, to stimulants such as Adderall, anti-anxiety drugs, common painkillers and cough suppressants with codeine.The database allows health officials to track prescribing patterns as a way to identify possible over-prescribing and abuse."We are concerned that these bills, if signed into law, may drive patients 'underground' and away from the care that they need and have the unintended effect of increasing the number of overdoses,'' Rhode Island Medical Society President Sarah J. Fessler wrote the governor. "Our Department of Health already has the data and the authority to detect potential prescription drug diversion," Fessler said. "Judicial review should remain the standard by which police gain access to such sensitive information."Echoed Steven Brown, executive director of the ACLU of Rhode Island: "This bill strikes at the heart of doctor-patient confidentiality and undermines the public's faith in our state Department of Health to be a protector of the deeply private information kept in its care."If police wanted to search the medicine cabinet in your home, they would need a warrant. The fact that the medicine cabinet is stored electronically shouldn't change that equation. In fact, it's worse. Unlike the PDMP, your actual medicine cabinet contains only the medicines you are using now, not an entire history of your prescription use. We urge the governor to veto this dangerous bill."The legislation was championed in the General Assembly by Attorney General Peter Kilmartin.On Monday afternoon, Kilmartin responded to the criticism of the legislation"The bill does not, as the Rhode Island Medical Society, ACLU and others would like you to believe, give law enforcement unfettered access to the PDMP," Kilmartin said in a statement issued by his office. "The bill does not and would not allow law enforcement to 'rummage through these records' as the medical society and other has falsely claimed. Police are not going to rummage through your medicine cabinet. Police are not going to have access to your medical records."The scare tactics by the medical society and others are disingenuous and are outright lies. Maybe the question we should be asking is, 'What are the doctors trying to hide?' Doctors helped to create the opioid problem; now they need to be part of the solution and support this bill."My office worked for months with the Department of Health, our federal partners, and the governor's own legislative staff to draft a bill that would restrict access to the PDMP while giving law enforcement a meaningful tool to help fight this crisis."The bill would allow certain law enforcement officials to request information in the database from a state health department employee, rather than directly accessing the database. The official would have to present credentials and a case number of the investigation.The access would apply to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and the Medicaid Fraud and Patient Abuse Unit in the state attorney general's office.Thirty states, including Massachusetts and Connecticut, have similar laws to give law enforcement access to their state prescription databases for criminal investigations without a search warrant, according to Kilmartin's office.
Recently, some state and local governments, often at the urging of the hotel industry , have passed laws aimed directly at short-term rental sites like Airbnb. Most notably, New York passed a law last year to fine apartment owners between $1,000 and $7,500 for advertising their homes on sites like Airbnb for durations of less than 30 days (the law allows long-term rentals of entire homes and rentals of any duration of spare bedrooms), even though these rentals generate hundreds of millions of dollars in economic impact annually. The impact of these laws is substantial: At the time Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the bill into law, more than half of the listings in New York City violated the new rules.But while laws affecting the supply side of the short-term rental market have received quite a bit of attention, the policies impacting demand for these rentals often goes unnoticed. However, many state and local governments have rules limiting public employees from using these options  even though doing so means they end up paying more for lodging or staying in a less convenient location. Sometimes these limitations are explicit prohibitions on using these types of services, while at other times government agencies make the process to do so too cumbersome or the rules so vague that their employees simply give up.In Georgia, for example, the state government bans services like Airbnb indirectly by not allowing its workers to stay in private residences. The travel policy for government employees states, All lodging claims must be documented with receipts and must be at a business that offers lodging to the general public, such as a hotel or motel, and not a private residence.In North Carolina, the state discourages, but does not prohibit, government workers from obtaining short-term rentals. The policy reads , Note that under this section of the State Travel Policy, obtaining lodging through Airbnb, VRBO.com or other home-sharing services requires prior approval by the State Office of Budget and Management. Therefore, these home-sharing services are discouraged. So basically, the state creates just enough red tape to dissuade all but the most determined users.Illinois has one of the most explicit state bans. Its policy states : The State of Illinois requires employees who are traveling on official State of Illinois business travel to contact hotels listed in the Preferred Hotel listing first when seeking overnight accommodations. While the online marketing site Airbnb may at times offer lodging within or lower than the maximum lodging rate in certain areas, the State of Illinois will not reimburse employees who choose to obtain lodging through Airbnb while traveling on State of Illinois business. There is a certain tragic irony that the policy itself acknowledges that this restriction is costing the state money.Finally, California offers both an example of how states get these policies wrong, as well as how to fix them. In 2014, the University of Californias Office of Risk Services issued a memo stating that it was banning all employees from using Airbnb for official travel. But the state eventually recognized the folly of this policy. Last year the state reversed itself when Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation p rohibiting state agencies from banning its nearly quarter of a million employees from using short-term rentals.Unfortunately, government agencies often move at a glacial pace when it comes to adopting new technologies. Until recently, the federal government had rules on the books to allow employees to submit expenses for feeding and stabling horses while traveling on official business, but nothing permitting them to use ride-hailing services such as Uber or Lyft. While the Obama administration finally issued guidance permitting federal employees to use these services last summer, this slow rate of change shows the type of hurdles innovative services often face when breaking into a new market.State and local governments often throw up similar roadblocks. But they should consider the impact these types of restrictions have on their internal culture. Past research has shown that organizational culture can support or hinder innovation, and government agencies that limit their workers from using the latest digital tools and technologies will surely fall behind the curve. States, especially those that want to be digital trailblazers, should eliminate these types of policies and back up their ostensibly pro-innovation rhetoric with meaningful action to ensure their staff are not restricted from participating in the sharing economy.
According to the rumour grapevine, Williams has banned its 1997 champion Jacques Villeneuve from the team's motor home at grands prix.

French Canadian Villeneuve is now a television pundit for Italy's Sky, but the Williams ban apparently followed the 46-year-old recently telling a newspaper that Lance Stroll is the "worst rookie" in F1 history.

"With regard to Jacques, he's obviously been pretty vocal in the media," said deputy team boss Claire Williams.

"I don't want to go into a huge amount of detail about it. The way that Lance describes it, he just wants to get on and let his track performance do the talking.

"I think that's what we should do, because that's when the critics will stop -- when Lance proves he deserves to be in formula one, which we all at Williams believe anyway," she insisted.

Indeed, Claire Williams told Italy's Corriere dello Sport that 18-year-old Stroll's recent podium in Baku showed he is in fact a "superstar of the future".

"He has shown to have a strong character and personality, even under pressure," she said.

"He has been interrogated more than most rookies are but always remained focused and has constantly improved.

"After the first six races he was criticised a lot, but I always responded by recalling the debuts of Vettel, Ricciardo and Raikkonen," Williams explained.

"Honestly I didn't expect him to get on the podium this year, but now that it's happened, we can say that we have a superstar of the future with us."

(GMM)
South Korea's farm goods exports slowed due to weak demand from China, a government report showed Wednesday.

Exports of farm goods and food to China reached 435.7 million U.S. dollars in the January-June period, down 11.4 percent from the same period of last year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

The agricultural product exports to China kept a monthly downward trend, after growing 7.4 percent in March.

The falling exports to China pulled down South Korea's overall farm goods exports. The growth rate of South Korea's exports of food and agricultural products fell from 11.3 percent in March to 6.5 percent in June.

The ministry said the South Korean government needed to continue investment in China, which is the world's largest food market.

It drew up a set of measures to expand food exports to China, including efforts to produce food tailored to Chinese consumers.
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Sogou Maps, a popular Chinese mapping service application developed by Beijing Sogou Technology Development Co., Ltd, on Tuesday launched an "intelligent co-driver" system, allowing voice interaction during car journeys and liberating drivers' eyes and hands.

"Data shows that the accident rate of drunk driving is 12 times of normal driving, with drug driving 21 times. However, the rate goes to 23 times when drivers are watching their mobile phones," said Kong Xiang, general manager of Sogou Maps, highlighting the value of integrating voice technology into mapping products for a better and safer driving process.

The new system embedded in Sogou Maps is able to support conversations in various scenarios inside the vehicle, including searching for a destination, starting navigation, setting intermediate stops, and inquiring about road conditions -- all by voice commands.

For instance, when the user instructs "I am going to the Olympic Forest Park," the system will ask: "Are you going to the north campus of the park or the south?" Once the destination is determined, it will map out a proper route with the distance and estimated arrival time.

Sogou Maps has made a breakthrough in the mapping industry by realizing multi-round voice interaction during the entire journey, said Kong, thanks to the company's comprehensive technical capacities, including voice recognition, semantic interpretation, intelligent error-correction, intelligent search and intention analysis.

The daily volume of voice requests has reached an average of 240 million times, which helps the company accumulate a mass of speech corpus data, especially in noisy environments and with differing accents.

So far, Sogou Maps has reached 97 percent accuracy in voice recognition. The new system also provides cloud services and customized voice-assistant services for vehicle manufacturers.

Sogou Maps is cooperating with several automobile enterprises, and new models powered by navigation products of Sogou Maps will soon be on market.
Cashion, a Democrat, received the award after ending her term as president of the North Carolina State Capitol Foundation.

The order, one of North Carolinas highest civilian honors, is given by the governor to those with a record of outstanding service to the state.
DuraFiber Technologies filed Monday with the N.C. Commerce Department temporary plans to eliminate 373 jobs at its Salisbury production plant and 89 at its Grover plant if it cannot find a buyer for the facilities by Sept. 11.

DuraFiber issued a warning July 13 that it has taken steps to close the Salisbury and Grover plant, as well as one in Winnsboro, S.C.

It has 800 employees combined at the three plants, and 1,800 employees overall. In a WARN Act notice with the N.C. Commerce Department, it said it would require 14 days to eliminate the Salisbury workforce if required.

The company is a global supplier of high-tenacity polyester fibers, engineered fabrics, sewing threads and advanced materials.

"Today's actions follow a series of initiatives to lower production costs in response to increased competition in the textile industry, as well as a thorough review of strategic alternatives, including potential asset sales," the company said in a statement.

The company said its plants in France, Germany and Mexico are unaffected by the announcement.
WENTWORTH  Sobbing. Shrieking. Shouting.

You can hear the terror and despair in the voice of Whitley French (now Whitley French Alvarez) as she called police for help in the early hours of Feb. 4, 2012. Her parents lay bleeding after being shot.

Are they almost here? she asks a dispatcher. Im really scared.

It would take 20 minutes for the first responder to reach the familys house in rural Rockingham County  time that seems like an eternity during Alvarezs 911 call.

It was a call that had been sealed by a judge for more than a year in a story that has played out like a TV movie, with its cast of characters, controversy and conspiracy theories as the case grew cold over time. It transfixed Rockingham County and ultimately drew national attention.

But now that Jose Silvano Alvarez Jr.  Whitleys brother-in-law  has been found guilty in the killings of Douglas Troy and LaDonna Moseley French, a judge has allowed the release of that call to the public at the request of the News & Record.

Its the latest chapter in the saga. And what a chilling chapter it is.

My mom ... shes not making any noises. Shes laying near the door and I dont want to go over there, the 19-year-old Alvarez says, her voice trembling.

On July 12, 2017  more than a year after Alvarezs conviction  Superior Court Judge Jerry Cash Martin signed an order releasing the recorded call to the public. Martin did so after learning from Rockingham County District Attorney Tom Keith that he and Alvarezs attorney, Vincent Rabil, agreed that there was no reason to withhold the recording anymore.

The state objected to their release for fear of prejudicial pretrial publicity, Keith wrote in his motion. The state no longer has any reason for the tapes to remain sealed since the defendant has been found guilty and there is no appeal pending.

Oddly enough, the News & Record obtained a copy of the call just hours after the shooting.

But the recording was inadvertently destroyed during a change in computer systems.

And the Rockingham County District Attorneys Office refused to provide another one.

Later, in early 2016, Superior Court Judge Stan Allen ordered the tape sealed at the request of then-Rockingham County District Attorney Craig Blitzer. At the time, Blitzer argued that the release of the 911 call could taint the jury pool.

The case never went to trial because Alvarez pleaded guilty and is now serving two life sentences at Central Prison in Raleigh.

He admitted to his attorney that he liked the smell of the French house, particularly the scent of the dryer, and would break in while they slept. Alvarez told Rabil he found Troy Frenchs 9 mm handgun one evening and took it.

He used that gun to kill his sister-in-laws parents.

The night of the shooting, Whitley Alvarez woke up to a man climbing on top of her but didnt recognize the intruder. She screamed for help, sending her parents running towards her upstairs bedroom.

On the way up, they were met by Jose Alvarez, who shot them both.

The 911 tape reveals the tense moments before sheriffs deputies reached the familys house. Throughout the call, a hysteric Alvarez struggles to keep her father alive as she tries to explain to investigators how her parents were shot.

Hes not breathing anymore, she says. His eyes are closed. He doesnt have a pulse. ... Im giving him CPR.

Near the end of the call, a law enforcement officer can be heard taking the phone away from Alvarez and telling the dispatcher to save the recording because it would be important.

The case grew cold over the years until 2014 when investigators sent blood found on the familys stairs to Parabon Nanolabs in Reston, Va. The company uses a new technology called Snapshot DNA Phenotyping that creates an image of a person based on their genetic makeup.

Investigators received an image that looked strikingly similar to John Alvarez, Whitleys husband.

But other lab reports had already cleared him of being a suspect, as well as his immediate family members.

After viewing the rendering in 2015, investigators decided to collect DNA from both John Alvarezs oldest brother and father.

What investigators and family didnt know until those DNA tests was that Jose Alvarez was not who people believed him to be. He was John Alvarezs maternal half-brother and a match to the DNA found at the crime scene.
Police in Winston-Salem found a man dead Tuesday inside an apartment at 133 Columbine Drive. They are treating the investigation as a homicide.

Officers were responding to a call about unknown trouble when they found the body of Jack Eugene Atkins, 66.

Investigators say he appears to have sustained stab wounds and blunt-force trauma.

Atkins lived in the apartment, No. 124, within the Reynolda Square Apartments in the citys northwestern section.

Michael Smith, Atkins neighbor, said Wednesday that Atkins was a friendly person.

He was a happy, bright man, Smith said of Atkins. He was a real cool guy.

Smith said he feels safe living in the apartment complex despite Atkins death.

He was probably killed by someone he knew, Smith said.

Police said no arrests had been made of as Wednesday night.

Anyone with information regarding Atkins death can call Winston-Salem police at 336-773-7700, Crime Stoppers at 336-727-2800 or, en Espanol or Spanish line at 336-728-3904.

This is the 12th homicide to occur in Winston-Salem this year compared to 15 homicides for the same period of time in 2016.
GREENSBORO  Eight plaintiffs who won their federal lawsuit over City Council redistricting are requesting that Guilford County pay for legal fees totaling more than $600,000, according to court documents.

The 33-page document, filed Friday in U.S. District Court, asks the county to foot the bill for $562,252 in attorney fees, $35,016.64 in expert fees, and $5,040.85 in non-taxable litigation expenses for eight of the nine plaintiffs.

The city of Greensboro, the ninth plaintiff, isnt asking the county reimburse it.

Neither the General Assembly nor legislators were named as defendants in the lawsuit, which instead named the Guilford County Board of Elections. Guilford County Attorney Mark Payne declined to defend his clients in court, telling the judge the board carries out fair and impartial elections but has no control over district lines or legislation.

The motion to pay attorney and other fees, filed by Anita S. Earls of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, argues that the plaintiffs are entitled to reimbursement under the Civil Rights Attorneys Fees Awards Act.

The federal law allows courts to award reasonable attorneys fees to prevailing parties in civil rights cases  unless special circumstances would render such an award unjust.

Payne said Tuesday that using taxpayer money to pay legal fees for a lawsuit fundamentally unrelated to the county most likely meets that definition.

Making innocent taxpayers pay for the error of the General Assembly seems to me to be manifestly unjust, he said.

Guilford County has until Aug. 7 to file a response with the court.

The redistricting lawsuit was filed in July 2015 after the General Assembly passed a bill changing the Greensboro City Council from five districts and three at-large seats to eight newly drawn districts.

The legislation, introduced by state Sen. Trudy Wade (R-Greensboro), also limited the mayor to a vote only in the event of a tie.

In April, Judge Catherine Eagles of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina found the redistricting unconstitutional and ruled that all future elections would be held with the previous district map, unless a public referendum changed it.
North Carolina Republicans appeared to fall just short in Tuesdays General Assembly elections of gaining large enough majorities to override Gov. Roy Coopers vetoes on their own. But their seat gains eroded further the Democrats ability to block bills on abortion and other highly contested legislation. The Senate GOP increased their seats to the number needed to have a veto-proof majority. But Speaker Tim Moore said that House Republicans were one seat shy of a similar threshold. Moore said Wednesday he's confident House Republicans can get help from Democrats in an override. But that could be more difficult on abortion restrictions, which Cooper and other Democrats campaigned against.
GREENSBORO  UNC-Greensboros nursing students wont start fall semester classes for another month, but a handful of their professors Wednesday got a glimpse of the nursing schools newest teaching tool.

What they saw was a full-body childbirth simulator known as SimMom, a high-tech mannequin that will let UNCG nursing students get realistic experience with labor and delivery.

The molded plastic female mannequin comes with a simulated 6-pound newborn, the placenta and an umbilical cord. SimMom can simulate routine vaginal births as well as births with complications  such as an inverted uterus, a prolapsed cord (when the umbilical cord precedes the baby) or a breech birth (when the baby comes out bottom first instead of head first).

This enables us to get everybody through several kinds of scenarios that UNCG nursing school graduates might see professionally, said Robin Remsburg, the dean of the School of Nursing.

UNCGs nursing students have used an older simulation model for the past several years. Last month, the nursing school took delivery of a $45,000 upgrade made by Laerdal, a Norwegian medical equipment maker famous for its CPR Annie doll used to train people to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. UNCG, in fact, bought the first new-and-improved birthing model to come off the companys assembly line.

This new version has more features than previous models. Its also wireless.

Company rep Sarah Sue Miller, a registered nurse who leads Laerdals maternal and newborn division, says the lack of wires means SimMom can be used in a variety of different teaching exercises.

If faculty members want to simulate a birth in which the mother has complications that require surgery, she said, nursing students can wheel SimMom from the birthing room to an operating room without having to wrangle cords that connect the mannequin to its computer.

The mannequin is designed to act as realistically as possible. It accepts medications, an IV and a catheter, and a patient monitor shows its vital signs. Faculty members use a laptop computer to control SimMom, which responds with numerous cues  it can breathe, bleed and talk, among other things  that teach nursing students how to respond to different childbirth scenarios.

There are all sorts of things we can do with her, Miller said.
Updated at 3:50 p.m.

WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court says the Trump administration can strictly enforce its ban on refugees, but is leaving in place a weakened travel ban that includes grandparents among relatives who can help visitors from six mostly Muslim countries get into the U.S.

The justices acted Wednesday on the administration's appeal of a federal judge's ruling last week. U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson ordered the government to allow in refugees formally working with a resettlement agency in the United States. Watson also vastly expanded the family relations that refugees and visitors can use to get into the country.

The high court blocked Watson's order as it applies to refugees for now, but not the expanded list of relatives. The justices said the federal appeals court in San Francisco should now consider the appeal. It's not clear how quickly that will happen.

In the meantime, though, up to 24,000 refugees who already have been assigned to a charity or religious organization in the U.S. will not be able to use that connection to get into the country.

"This ruling jeopardizes the safety of thousands of people across the world including vulnerable families fleeing war and violence," said Naureen Shah, Amnesty International USA's senior director of campaigns.

That part of the court's ruling was a victory for President Donald Trump, who rolled out a first ban on travelers and refugees after just a week in office, prompting a legal fight that has raged ever since.

But the Supreme Court also denied the administration's request to clarify its ruling last month that allowed the administration to partially reinstate a 90-day ban on visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and a 120-day ban on refugees from anywhere in the world.

The court's ruling exempted a large swath of refugees and travelers with a "bona fide relationship" with a person or an entity in the U.S. The justices did not define those relationships but said they could include a close relative, a job offer or admission to a college or university.

Watson's order added grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins to a list that already included a parent, spouse, fiance, son, daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law or sibling in the U.S. The expanded list of relatives remains in effect, and the State Department already has instructed diplomats to use the broader list when considering visa applicants from the six countries.

Hawaii Attorney General Doug Chin said the court's order Wednesday "confirms we were right to say that the Trump administration over-reached in trying to unilaterally keep families apart from each other."

Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas would have blocked Watson's order in its entirety. Those same three justices said last month they would have allowed the Trump travel ban to take full effect.

The travel ban already is on the court's calendar for October, though the 90-day pause will have expired by then.

___

Associated Press writer Jennifer Sinco Kelleher contributed to this report from Honolulu, Hawaii.

WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court is granting the Trump administration's request to more strictly enforce its ban on refugees, at least until a federal appeals court weighs in.

But the justices are leaving in place a lower court order that makes it easier for travelers from six mostly Muslim countries to enter the United States.

The high court acted Wednesday on the administration's appeal of last week's ruling by U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson that required the government to allow in refugees formally working with a resettlement agency in the United States. Watson also vastly expanded the family relations that refugees and visitors can use to get into the country.

The justices said the federal appeals court in San Francisco should now consider the appeal.
Its been more than a week since America first learned of the existence of an email that seemed to clearly demonstrate the willingness of some in the Trump campaign to accept the assistance of the Russian government in their effort to win the 2016 presidential race. In black and white, Donald Trump Jr. is offered the opportunity to meet with a lawyer connected to the Russian government who can provide documents and information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton. That information, Trump Jr. is told, is part of Russia and its governments support for Mr. Trump.

If its what you say (it is)  I love it, Trump Jr. replies.

If opponents of President Trump were hoping that this was a smoking gun that would tilt support away from him, though, a new Post-ABC News poll released on Sunday will quickly disabuse them of that idea.

By a more than 2-to-1 margin, Americans told our pollsters that they viewed the meeting as inappropriate.

As you likely expected, theres a big split by party. Democrats view the meeting as inappropriate by a 76-point margin. Independents are also much more likely to consider the meeting inappropriate. On net, Republicans say that it was appropriate, but by a fairly narrow margin.

Responses to the question correlate strongly to how people feel Trump is doing as president. More than 6 in 10 of those who strongly approve of Trumps job performance also think the Trump Jr. meeting was appropriate. Among those who strongly disapprove of Trump, 90 percent think the meeting was inappropriate. Interestingly, those who only somewhat approve of Trumps job approval are also 20 points more likely to believe that the meeting was inappropriate than appropriate.

Its hard to say precisely how much support for Trump colors views of his sons meeting, but its clear that, at the very least, theres a strong connection.

Which brings us back to the question of collusion  that is, whether Trumps campaign actively and successfully worked with the Russians to submarine Clinton. The email is clear evidence of a willingness to work with the Russians by at least one member of the campaign. But did the effort go beyond that?

Most Americans think that the Russians did try to influence the campaign. About 4 in 10 Americans think Trumps campaign aided them in that effort.

Here, too, theres a correlation between views of Trump and views of Russian meddling. A majority of those who approve of Trumps job performance feel as though Russia didnt try to influence the election.

Whats remarkable, though, is that we asked the same question about Russia in April. The figures have barely budged (considering margins of error).

Its hard to delineate all of the things that have changed since that poll: The firing of James Comey, the appointment of the special prosecutor, reports about Trump hoping to intervene for Michael Flynn, the revelation of classified information in a meeting with the Russians  not to mention the Trump Jr. emails. But only a small change in the percentage of people who believe Trumps campaign colluded with the Russians.

That holds regardless of views of Trumps job performance. In April, people who approved of Trump didnt really think Russia tried to meddle; now, the same is true. There are fewer people who now approve of Trumps job performance  6 percentage points fewer  which could be in part a function of belief that his campaign worked with the Russians. Other than that, though, how you felt about Trump and Russia in April is pretty much how you feel about it now.

It does raise the tacit question with which we began, though: Would any new evidence convince Trump supporters of collusion?

Were in the weird position, more than one week after the release of the Trump Jr. email, of already seeing that shockingly unexpected document as part of the background fabric of our political discussion. Weve learned repeatedly over the last two years that once something makes its way there, we see only a very familiar tapestry.
"Jon Huntsman called to see me. I said no, he gave away our country to China!"

That was a Donald Trump tweet in 2012. He obviously didn't think highly of Huntsman's work as U.S. ambassador to China.

Yesterday, Trump nominated Huntsman to be the U.S. ambassador to Russia, leading to hoots that he wants Huntsman to give away our country again.

At the same time, reports surfaced about Trump's hour-long private conversation with Vladimir Putin at a G20 dinner. The only other person privy to the discussion was Putin's translator.

This episode wasn't disclosed by the White House, and it's worrisome.

No, I don't think Trump was up to anything sinister, but Putin had a big advantage in that setting. He's been running Russia for 17 years; Trump is new in his job and not very savvy. What information did he give away? What promises did he make? No one knows. The reportedly chummy tete-a-tete was likely also unnerving to other leaders who would wonder why Trump's best international relationship is with Putin.

No wonder Emmanuel Macron worked so hard to woo Trump in Paris last week.

Still more concerning is the June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort with an ever-expanding cast of Russian operatives. Reports were confirmed yesterday that Ike Kaveladze was also present. He's handled some suspicious financial transactions in this country for Russian interests. It seems that Robert Mueller's investigators want to talk with him, which comes as no surprise. This was a very well-connected team of Russian players. What were they plotting?

Yet, this really doesn't shake support for Trump among his base. A survey released yesterday by Public Policy Polling found that 32 percent of 2016 Trump voters don't even believe this meeting took place  even though it was confirmed by the president himself, the White House and Don Jr. Seventy-two percent think the whole Russia-Trump story is fake news.

Impossible. You just can't make this stuff up.
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A Greenwich office building sold for $33.8 million last week, according to documents filed at Greenwich Town Hall, with plans in place to convert some of the space for medical use.

The three-story structure at 75 Holly Hill Lane includes more than 100,000 square feet and was built in 1979.

Following the recession, the building underwent foreclosure and New York City-based ClearRock Properties working with Artemis Real Estate bought it from the lender for $19.3 million in 2012. Last week, New York City-based Benedict Realty Group inked a nearly $34 million deal for the office building.

Neither ClearRock nor BRG responded to requests for comment.

At the time ClearRock Properties took over the building, it was about 20 percent leased, according to its website. ClearRock managing principal Doug Winshall told Hearst Connecticut Media in 2012 he foresaw the offices eventually housing financial services companies, law firms and accounting companies.

Over the last few years, plans have arisen to convert some of the office building for medical use with Stamford Health Medical Group expanding onto its second floor. Stamford Health has had a limited presence at 75 Holly Hill Lane since 2013, according to hospital spokesman Craig Andrews, when a private practice operating there joined its physician network.

Last year, Greenwichs Planning and Zoning Commission approved plans to renovate portions of the building and parking areas to accommodate dramatic growth in Stamford Healths footprint there. Construction is underway to turn the second floor into more medical offices and exam rooms.

In total, roughly 33,000 square feet of the building will eventually be occupied by the medical group, which will offer primary care physicians along with specialists in cardiology, endocrinology, neurology, gastroenterology, orthopedics, rheumatology, gynecology and neurosurgery, Andrews said. Patients will also be able to visit the location for personalized health and preventive care services, X-ray, ultrasound, bone density testing, screening mammography and cardiology testing. The medical expansion is expected to be completed by this fall, according to Andrews.

Stamford Health adds to the increasing variety of medical options positioned nearby, which include Greenwich Hospital and WestMed Medical Group. The buildings pivot to increased medical uses came after ClearRock marketed it to office tenants for several years without as much success, according to discussions during planning and zoning meetings last year.

Its a market there that really doesnt exist currently except for medical uses, ClearRocks attorney John Tesei told planning and zoning last February.

Mixing a building between offices and medical uses can be a tricky situation, said Christian Bangert of Rhys, a Stamford-based commercial real estate company. There are things that come with medical that dont always mesh with offices, such as heavier traffic flow, additional wear and tear on the building and potentially sick visitors sharing space with office tenants, he said.

I know some tenants in the building who will probably not be happy with Stamford Hospital moving in, Bangert said.

But the medical tenant is likely what helped attract last weeks buyer, Bangert added, as another of BRGs recent acquisitions includes a $60 million portfolio of medical office buildings in Rhode Island. BRG will continue to expand its medical office portfolio along the East Coast in the upcoming years, BRG principal Daniel Benedict said in a statement about the deal. We will be purchasing on-campus medical office buildings, as well as medical buildings located in strategic locations close to hospitals and attractive target customer bases.

The western side of Greenwich will likely continue to see more medical offerings moving in due to the areas more palatable rental rates and larger parking availability, Bangert said. This side of Greenwich will continue to be a medical outpost, he said.

Contact the writer at mbennett@greenwichtime.com; Twitter @Macaela_
The owners of Beach House Cafe in Greenwich are expanding the concept to South Norwalk, with plans to open shortly at the locale of Mamas Boy Southern Table & Refuge which they bought in 2015 while melding elements of both menus.

The 19 N. Water St. address that will bear the Beach House Cafe SoNo sign is among the plum locations in southwestern Connecticut, nearly opposite the entrance to the regions biggest tourist attraction in the Maritime Aquarium in the same building that houses the aquariums parking garage.
GREENWICH  Greenwich Emergency Medical Services claim that it should not be held to the same open records standards as a government agency has been dealt a blow.

Because town funding and oversight of GEMS are substantial, GEMS is the functional equivalent of a public agency despite not officially being part of town government, according to a finding by Freedom of Information Commissioner Matthew Streeter.

The medical service is seeking to overturn a 1988 ruling by the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission that held it subject to the state FOI Act.

GEMS has made the argument as part of its defense against a claim brought by former managing director of operations Joe Soto, who was terminated in April 2016. Soto is seeking documented proof that his appeal of his termination was duly considered by GEMS Board of Directors, in accordance with agency policy.

GEMS leadership has maintained that the appeal was considered and denied at a meeting of the board. Soto insists the meeting never took place, and formally requested records through the FOI Commission. GEMS has insisted that because it is not a town department and is a non-profit that operates independently, it should not be subject to the FOI Act.

If they have not already done so (GEMS) forthwith shall provide (Soto) with the records he requested, free of charge, Streeter, the FOI commissioner who is serving as hearing officer in the case, wrote.

While GEMS operates independently, it receives funding from the town to cover operating expenses: $4.65 million in the current budget. Streeter determined GEMS also is subsidized by the town in other ways, such as use of the 911 system.

In 1988, the FOI Commission ruled in a case brought by Greenwich Time and its then editor Joe Pisani that, because GEMS was created by town government and is funded to a significant extent by it, the agency is subject to the same FOI regulations as town departments such as the police and fire departments.

In his report, Streeter stated that the commissions determination in the 1988 case was correct. Streeter also cited several other cases involving ambulance services in which it was determined they should be considered public agencies.

Streeter determined Sotos requests are for public records and that GEMS violated statutes by failing to provide him with what he has asked for.

The finding by the hearing officer is not the final decision in the case as the entire commission must rule. But hearing officer reports have influence and Soto said he was pleased with the finding.

Once the Freedom of Information Commission votes and accepts that decision, GEMS will be required to provide me a copy of the documents requested in a timely manner, he said. GEMS spent thousands of dollars to prevent access to information that they are required to provide employees upon request. Those funds could have been spent on other, more important, life-saving projects.

On Tuesday, GEMS announced a change in its leadership with John Raben ending his term as chairman of the board of directors and Jennifer Baldock, who had been vice chairman, succeeding him. Both insisted Soto had been provided with everything he had asked for and his termination was handled properly.

Raben stressed the decision was just from one hearing officer and not the full commission.

We disagree with any finding that we are a government agency, Raben said. We specifically are not.

GEMS has requested pushing back the date the hearing on the case will be held by the full commission. Baldock said the request is due to a timing issue during the summer months. A date has not been set.

We remain committed to full transparency with the town and people seeking information on behalf of the town, Baldock said.

She said GEMS has sought to overturn the 1988 ruling to try to save the town money. Freedom of Information requests are expensive to comply with because documents have to be redacted to comply with medical privacy regulations, she said, and to protect employee personnel files.

Baldock said the only requests being made of GEMS through the FOI Act are from disgruntled former employees and people working on their behalf.

kborsuk@greenwichtime.com
The Gawadar Port (File Photo)

Pakistan has reaffirmed its commitment to provide security to the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the Chinese workers in the country.

Pakistan army and law enforcement agencies are vigilant and are determined to providing foolproof security to the CPEC and Chinese workers, Chief of Pakistan Army General Qamar Bajwa said while addressing a seminar in Islamabad.

He was addressing a seminar organized by National Logistic Cell (NLC) about implementation and advantages of CPEC.

The Pakistan army chief said that the countrys civil government and law enforcement agencies have accepted the challenge and all effort would be carried out to make CPEC a success.

CPEC is also affirmation of our efforts for a peaceful and prosperous region. Unlike some countries of South Asia, we believe in focusing our energies on peace and inclusiveness, rather than divisive competition, General Bajwa added.

The army chief affirmed that government of Pakistan and law enforcement agencies are focusing on providing security to the projects being carries out under CPEC and to the Chinese engineers and workers currently working in the country.

Military was up to the job of providing security, General Bajwa said: We are making steady but sure-footed progress in making Pakistan a terrorism and extremism-free country.

The army chief said that CPEC is an important opportunity for Pakistan to boost its economy and get the financial benefits as China is doing massive investment in the country.

General Bajwa said that all the institutions in Pakistan should play their role for gaining benefits from the opportunity provided by the CPEC. We as a nation can only benefit from this historic opportunity if we prepare ourselves to embrace it. All national institutions will have to make a deliberate effort to ensure success of the CPEC, he noted in his speech.

It is pertinent to mention that Pakistan has established a Special Security Division (SSD) to provide security to the Chinese people working on the projects of CPEC. Provincial governments in Pakistan have also made extraordinary security arrangement for the CPEC projects. The estimated value of the CPECs projects is $55 billion.

During an investment road show in Beijing in April this year, Pervez Khattak, Chief Minister of Khyber Pakhtunkha Province of Pakistan, assured Chinese investors that his government would also provide them security besides other incentives for business. He also announced that his provincial government would establish a special force for security of the Chinese workers in the province.

Currently around 20 thousands Chinese workers are working in Pakistan on the projects under CPEC including Gawadar Port, roads and railways network and power plants. Pakistans government is providing foolproof security to the Chinese workers.

Raza Khan is a reporter of the Dawn News, and currently an intern with the People's Daily Online.
GREENWICH  The town of Greenwich turned up in the number one spot on a list of the safest communities to raise a child as ranked by a security-consulting organization.

According to SafeWise, an online trade organization that promotes home security and bills itself as The authority on safety and home security news, Greenwich consistently ranked as one of the best places to live in America.
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As a self-employed entrepreneur, you dont get the luxury of company benefits such as healthcare, matching IRA contributions, and discounted services. Instead, you need to take care of these benefits yourself, which can be a hefty financial burden. Since most of these expenses are essential in the modern world, you will need to figure out how to pay for these benefits without doing too much damage to your income.

The key is to place the money in smart vehicles that make money for you. Theres nothing smart about dumping these funds into a regular savings account. By moving your money into smart accounts you lower your taxable income, thereby minimizing your tax burden. If youre a freelance entrepreneur looking for ways to maximize your income, then consider these three profit hacks.

Take advantage of the most tax-friendly account in America.

If youre paying a lot of money out-of-pocket for health-care services during the year (or anticipate doing so in the future), it makes a ton of sense to open a Health Savings Account, or HSA. This type of account allows you to set aside money, pre-tax, that you can use at any time for qualified health-care costs.

You can open an HSA in 2017 if you have a so-called High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP), which means your deductible is at least $1,300 for single coverage or $2,600 for family coverage. Additionally, your annual out-of-pocket expenses (deductibles, co-payments and other amounts, but not premiums) cannot exceed $6,450 for self-only coverage or $12,900 for family coverage.

We spoke with Barbara Weltman, small-business tax expert and author of multiple books including J.K. Lassers Small Business Taxes (more than 250,000 copies sold) about what finance hacks freelancers and small business owners can use to increase their bottom line. Her number one strategy? Health Savings Accounts.

Im a big proponent of HSAs. Theyre a triple tax breaktheres nothing like it in the tax code, Weltman says. HSA contributions are tax-deductible, tax-deferred, and tax-free. What this means for entrepreneurs is you can put money into an HSAup to $3,400/$6,750 per year depending on if youre single/marriedand deduct the contribution on your tax return. Interest earned is also tax-free, as well as any withdrawals you make to pay for qualified healthcare costs.

Another great benefit? Portability, Weltman says. Your HSA belongs to you, not your employer. This is especially advantageous if you started an HSA with your employer but leave to take another job or go self-employed full-time. In todays economy, the freedom to keep your benefits is a huge plus.

Weltman also notes that the health-care trends in both Washington and with private insurers strongly favor HSAs. As insurers offer more high deductible plans to combat rising healthcare costs, Health Savings Accounts are becoming an increasingly attractive option to safeguard your money while slashing tax bills.

Avoid irking the IRS.

Having the IRS hit you with unexpected penalties or fees for underpaying taxes or paying late is probably the least-desirable thing you want as an entrepreneur. These are obvious costs that can gouge your profit (IRS penalties are not tax-deductible!), but there are hidden costs as wellbeing the subject of an audit or having to amend your tax return takes a huge amount of time, which means less time running your business and generating revenue.

We spoke to small-business expert Barry Moltz, who also counts Microsoft, American Express, Capital One, and GE as clients. He had has these tips: Pay estimated personal taxes quarterly, so there isn't a big surprise at the end of the year. Have separate credit cards for the company and for personal use, so it is easy to track all applicable businesses expenses for a maximum tax deduction.

As a small-business owner or freelancer, its important to make sure youre on top of your tax payments, since no taxes are automatically withheld from your earnings like a regular job. The IRS requires self-employed taxpayers to make quarterly payments if they meet the minimum threshold, so file on-time if this rule applies to you to avoid late fees and penalties. Regardless, its a smart way to budget your tax expense throughout the year rather than paying out a big chunk all at once.

Second, Moltzs recommendation to open a dedicated account for your business earnings and expenses is a simple but shockingly underused one. This is perhaps the easiest way to identify profit-increasing business expenses youre already incurring that are tax-deductible.

Plus, an exclusively business account will save you countless hours of headache should the IRS or your accountant request additional support for a write-off. If you dont already have separate accounts as an entrepreneur, take 15 minutes right now and open one.

Dont pay double.

Gail Gardner, a small-business expert and founder of GrowMap.com, clued us in on a little-known issue that caused some freelancers and business owners to end up paying double on their tax return.

As more and more small business owners rely on payment platforms like Square, Stripe, Paypal, and Shopify to get paid for goods and services, it has caused some confusion as to whos responsible for providing the required tax documents at the end of the year.

These documents are referred to by the IRS as 1099s. They list the official total payment made to contractors during the year. Traditionally its the responsibility of the party paying for the services to fill out and send accurate 1099syour client. However, because payment platforms like Square and Paypal technically are the entities paying you, its actually their responsibility to furnish these forms.

Whats the issue, then, you ask? At the end of the year you might receive two 1099s for the same set of services performedone from your client and the other from the payment platform. Freelancers and small businesses who dont have degrees in accounting and taxation may list both on their tax returna mistake less rare than you may think, says Gardner.

The income will be over-reported, Gardner states, which is a big problem for your bottom line because it means the IRS wants double the tax payment.

Dont make the rookie mistake of listing all your 1099 amounts as income if you fit this profile. Be sure to only report the income youve earnedand if you primarily get paid through platforms such as Square and Stripe, the tax documentation should come from them, not your clients. Being savvy about this will help avoid paying double in taxes.

Disclosure: This is brought to you by the Entrepreneur Partner Studio. Our goal is to feature products and services that we think you'll find interesting and useful. If you purchase them, we may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our commerce partners.

Related:

3 Profit Hacks From Top Tax Experts

Dear GST! Here are #7 Softwares to Simplify You

5 Tips for Finding the Tax Advisor Who Will Save You Millions



Copyright 2017 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved



This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com


Since early 2017, one of the issues revolving around legalized marijuana was generated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

An adamant opponent of legal marijuana, Sessions said in February that legalizing marijuana ends up creating violent crime. He said had this information from experts. To this point, he has not furnished that data, but it has raised the question:

Does legalized marijuana lead to higher crime?

So far, studies show that is not the case. A recent study in California actually showed just the opposite.

Related: Women Cannabis Entrepreneurs Gather In L.A. for Empowerment Summit

No Dispensary, Higher Crime

The study by researchers from the University of Southern California and published in the Journal of Urban Economics, compared crime data in Los Angeles neighborhoods where dispensaries were closed by the city with areas where dispensaries remained open. The researchers wrote, Contrary to popular wisdom, we find an immediate increase in crime around dispensaries ordered to close relative to those allowed to remain open."

They found that many of the crimes committed were the sort that the presence of bystanders would have stopped, such as property crimes and auto theft. They found a similar pattern in areas where restaurants were forced to close because of health violations.

Related: Oakland Strives to Rejuvenate Economically by Becoming California's Cannabis Capital

Sacramento Study

A similar study published in the Journal of Study in Alcohol and Drugs found that the presence of medical marijuana dispensaries had no discernable effect on the crime rate.

Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, examined the association of marijuana dispensaries and crime in 95 Sacramento census tracts. They found that violent crime and property crime varied depending on the number of commercially zoned areas, one-person households and the local unemployment rate but medical marijuana dispensaries were not a factor.

The report states that dispensaries may actually help reduce crime because many use video surveillance or hire doormen, two factors that contribute to fewer crimes in the nearby area.

Related: Getting Healthy, Not High: Using Cannabis to Fight Cancer

Denver crime increase.

Its possible Sessions was referring to the crime increase in Denver. The number of crimes has risen 44 percent since adult-use marijuana became legal in 2012. However, local law enforcement does not believe marijuana is the issue. Denver police spokesman Sonny Jackson told the Denver Post that crime is up, but added,I dont know if you can relate it to marijuana.

Denver has tracked marijuana-related crime since 2012, and found that such crimes constitute less than 1 percent of all crimes in the city, the Post reported. The city report found 183 crimes related to the legalized medical and adult-use marijuana industries in 2015.

Follow dispensaries.com on Instagram to stay up to date on the latest cannabis news.

Related:

Somebody Needs to Tell Jeff Sessions That Legalized Marijuana Does Not Cause More Crime

Women Cannabis Entrepreneurs Gather In L.A. for Empowerment Summit

Oakland Strives to Rejuvenate Economically by Becoming California's Cannabis Capital



Copyright 2017 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved



This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com


In a press release, a Crown Heights bar advertised what it claims are bullet holes. Photo: Courtesy of Summerhill

No one but the very rich can outrun gentrification in New York, but certain communities have been more affected than others. A majority black and Afro-Caribbean neighborhood, Crown Heights is one of those neighborhoods. Its stretch of Franklin Avenue was a candidate for the new Williamsburg at the beginning of this decade. In 2016, a report published by NYUs Furman Center found that from 2010 to 2014 northern Crown Heights rents rose 29.9 percent and southern Crown Heights rents rose 18.1 percent. (In Bed-Stuy, that figure was 36 percent.) From 2011 to 2015, DNAInfo found, the greatest increase in high-income renters occurred in the 11216 Zip Code  which includes parts of Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy. And while business ownership has grown in New Yorks 15 gentrifying neighborhoods, a report from city comptroller Scott Stringer found that the number of black-owned businesses declined from 2007 to 2012.

Its in this context that a new Brooklyn bar called Summerhill opened this summer  and has been met with a severe backlash by local residents, media outlets, and others. Summerhill is not your average bar in a gentrifying neighborhood, which is why the groans have given way to exasperated outrage. As Gothamist details, the bar opened in June but didnt attract much attention until a press release sent out on Monday advertised an unsavory and unsubstantiated story about a bullet-hole-ridden wall. In this way, owner Becca Brennan has tried spinning the neighborhoods difficult past into a marketing gimmick. (She also plans to sell those 40-ounce bottles of rose that are, at best, culturally tactless.)

Earlier today, Eater reported signs plastered on Summerhills street describing the bar as racist, gentrifier, and colonialist. On Twitter, political commentator Joy Reid  who moderated a panel about the neighborhoods future last night  called the Gothamist post a reminder of why we need to talk 

The one person that the controversy didnt seem to particularly bother is Brennan. Yesterday, on her now-private Instagram, she posted a screenshot of Eaters first story that focused in on a line mentioning she is white and captioned it, @eater failed to notice the really great tan I have going on right now. The Summerhill account responded by writing, thanks for the all internet love, you guys! Today, Brennans tone changed as she issued an apology via Gothamist. In it, she wrote that she was excited about the bullet holes in the bathroom wall, seeing it as a shout out to previous businesses, but now knows my intention was misinterpreted and Im sorry for that.

Whether she wants to keep talking or not, though, the conversation is happening. Residents now plan on having an open forum outside the bar at 2:30 p.m. this Saturday. On its Facebook event page, the organizers say Brennan aims to profit by perpetuating violent and ridiculous stereotypes and that anyone from the community is welcome to speak at the event.
Mexican carrier America Movil and Samsung Electronics are planning to develop 4.5G networks in Mexico and other Latin American countries. The initiative will also bring smart products and solutions to allow customers to get into the Internet of Things.

The partnership consists of supporting the testing of 4.5G technologies on the latest flagships - Galaxy S8 and the Galaxy S8+ along with the Galaxy S7 edge. America Movil wants to test the availability of VoLTE, VoWiFi 4x4 MIMO, and other communications technologies.

America Movil plans to test its newly developed 4.5G infrastructure, before launching it officially. The carrier operates in 17 Latin-American countries and eight more in Europe. It also has pre-paid wireless network with over 26M subscribers in the US.

Source
After an Early Access Program that Samsung launched last month, the public roll out of Bixby Voice has now begun in the United States. Effectively, that means Bixby now offers full voice capabilities for US English.

That's definitely good news for Galaxy S8/S8+ users in the country, who can now start using Bixbys voice service immediately - all you have to do is to make sure that the application is updated to the latest software version.

"At launch, Bixby will be fully integrated across core Samsung apps, so almost anything you could do with touch or typing, you can now do with your voice, including multi-step, and cross-app requests," the company says in a press release.

"Support for additional native and third-party apps will be available via Bixby Labs, which includes select applications that are offering preliminary integration with Bixby."

Samsung says Bixby Voice currently offers US English support both in the US as well as South Korea (where it also understands Korean). The tech giant also shared the following Bixby-related videos through the press release:

Source | Via
Honor 9 with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage to be available in Europe as Honor 9 Premium

When the Huawei Honor 9 was made official last month, it was revealed that the device will come in both 4GB and 6GB RAM options as well as 64GB and 128GB storage options.

Now, it has come to light that the 6GB/128GB variant will be available in Europe as the Honor 9 Premium. Reportedly, the model is exclusive to 3 in Italy, and will be available for purchase soon. It's also available to pre-order in Switzerland.

The listing shown above reveals that sales for the variant will begin August 28 onwards. As for pricing, the Honor 9 Premium carries a tag of CHF 499 (around $520 or 450) in Switzerland, which is CHF 50 higher than the standard Honor 9.

While there's no official confirmation, we expect the Premium variant to also land in other European markets very soon.

Via 1 2 | Source
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A Chinese military expert says China should develop counter technologies after the U.S. and Australia jointly tested at least one flight for their Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation (HiFIRE) programme.

As a major power, China should carry out research on hypersonic technology and invest sufficient capital and energy in the development of counter technologies, the expert explained.

According to the website, Nextbigfuture, the programme had at least one successful hypersonic flight at Woomera testing range in South Australia last week. The experiments were concluded on July 12, confirmed Australian Defense Minister, Marise Payne.

The report described HiFIRE 4 as a free-flying hypersonic glider designed to travel at Mach 8.

BAE Systems Australia, one of the researchers of the programme, claimed in a statement that the successful flight trial [was] the most complex of all HIFiRE flights conducted to date.

The $54m joint initiative involves the US Air Force, Boeing, the Australian Department of Defences Defence Science and Technology Group, BAE Systems Australia, and the University of Queensland.

As a matter of fact, the flight is just a small part of the whole HiFIRE programme. The University of Queensland is involved in three flights in the programme. These tests will be known as HyShot, V, VI and VII.

HiFIRE is just the tip of the iceberg of the huge hypersonic research work by the U.S., said the military expert. The U.S. has conducted many experiments on hypersonic vehicles including unmanned research scramjet aircraft X-51, Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW) and the crewless experimental hypersonic glide vehicle rocket glider, Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2.

These projects almost cover all theories, forms and technologies of current hypersonic vehicles. With a high engineering degree, their design parameters are leaders in the world.

Though foreign media described the vehicle as hypersonic missile, the expert explained that HiFIRE 4 is not a missile, and the HiFIRE programme is not conducted for weapons research. However, the expert pointed out that the data acquired in the programme will help the U.S. to develop hypersonic weapons.

The expert told Global Times that hypersonic technology is a strategic-level technique crucial for national security, and also one important for the development of aerospace. Thanks to their unpredictable flight routes and low trajectory, hypersonic weapons are very difficult to intercept, thus posing huge challenges for early warning systems.

As a result, the expert suggested that China develop its own counter hypersonic technology and invest sufficient capital and energy into it.
Have you ever found yourself saying, someday I am going to do something. Eventually that changes to, I always wanted to do that. Maybe its time to act on some of these things, before you just cant. In the mid...
Published on 2017/07/19 | Source

Added episode 5 captures for the Korean drama "Bride of the Water God 2017" (2017)

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Directed by Kim Byeong-soo

Written by Jeong Yoon-jeong

With Nam Joo-hyuk, Shin Se-kyung, Lim Ju-hwan, Jung Soo-jung, Gong Myung, Lee Kyung-young,...

16 episodes - Mon, Tue 10:50

Synopsis

"Bride of the Water God 2017" is a spin off version of the comic "Bride of the Water God". 'Spin off' means a deviated version from the original, so the classic fantasy and characters will be modernized and moved by time and location to Seoul today.

Broadcast starting date in Korea : 2017/07/03

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To tackle the issue of random parking, Beijing plans to operate over 400 virtual fences as parking lots for shared bikes in Tongzhou and Chaoyang districts.

The e-fences with special marks both on the ground and in mobile app maps are located near residential communities, schools, subway stations, bus stops and commercial blocks, for the convenience of bike renters.

A user receives a text message if he or she fails to park a bike at a designated spot and those who park properly will be awarded two credit points, an official with the Tongzhou district government said.

The shared bicycles will be equipped with dual positioning systems, Beidou and GPS, so that they can be tracked if not properly parked.

The core equipment for e-fences in Chaoyang District is a Bluetooth sensor that has a detectable area of 50 meters. The sensor delivers data to shared bicycle companies who inform users where and how to park.

The first batch of 20 e-fences in Chaoyang District will undergo trials in August. There are over 100 million registered shared bicycles users nationwide.
The Ministry of the Interior has drafted a bill that would grant border officers the same powers as police officers under normal circumstances to uphold order and security at border-crossing points, their immediate vicinity, and other areas and facilities controlled by the Finnish Border Guard.

The Finnish Border Guard is set to receive expanded powers to combat hybrid threats both independently and in collaboration with other security authorities.

Border officers would, for example, be allowed to use both technical and forcible measures to disable unmanned aerial vehicles flown in the vicinity of border-crossing points as well as locate the operators of such vehicles. They would also be able request assistance from military personnel in conducting traffic control and security checks under special circumstances.

The powers have been designed to effectively allow border officers to respond to serious disturbances in border regions and bring the situation under control until the arrival of law enforcement authorities.

This means [that the officers would have] the right to carry out clandestine information gathering operations in, for example, hostage situations. The police currently have to lead the response in such situations, Pekka Koivisto, the head of the legal division at the Finnish Border Guard, commented to Helsingin Sanomat in June.

The newspaper also wrote that the number of border officers is to be stepped up considerably on the eastern border of Finland. The Border Guard has almost doubled the number of applicants to be admitted to its one-year training programme in January and June of 2018  from 62 to 120.

The government decided in its mid-term review session in April that surveillance along the eastern border will be stepped up, and now we need more border guards to perform the duties, Paivi Nerg, the permanent state secretary at the Ministry of the Interior, said to Helsingin Sanomat.

She also reminded that the number of border officers will effectively be restored to its previous levels.

The Ministry of the Interior in its press release defines hybrid threats as any operations designed to exert pressure, inflict damage or cause insecurity or instability. Such operations  which include information campaigns, covert military operations and operations to disturb data networks and other critical infrastructure  may be carried out by unmarked agents who cannot be reliably identified as foreign military personnel.

The unmarked, so-called green men first took control of border crossing points in Crimea. They had no country patches, but they were very well equipped, Koivisto said to YLE on Tuesday.

Koivisto was a member of the task force assigned to draft the bill, which is currently being circulated for comments. The Finnish Parliament is expected to discuss the bill this autumn, while the new legislation is to be enacted next spring.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Photo: Handout  Finnish Defence Forces
Seamus Sheridan (52) and his son Nathan (22) rushed to the aid of the youngster

A hero dad who came to the aid of a toddler who fell from a third-storey apartment balcony has spoken of the horrifying moments after the shocking incident unfolded.

The three-year-old boy suffered serious injuries after falling from an apartment block in Longford town at around 10.30am yesterday.

Seamus Sheridan (52) and his son Nathan (22) rushed to the aid of the youngster and his mother after the fall at the Cuirt An Oir apartments.

Last night Seamus said he did his best to console the child's heartbroken mother.

The boy was taken to the Midland Regional Hospital, in Mullingar, before being transferred to Temple Street Children's Hospital in Dublin.

"Myself and my son came to their aid," Mr Sheridan told the Herald. He said his son was in the sitting room/kitchen area of his apartment at around 10.30am yesterday when he heard a bang, which he described as "not loud".

"There was a lot of screaming and shouting and banging on doors.

"I could hear them crying and everything so I opened my door," he said.

Devastated

"She said her son had fallen down from the balcony. I'm still devastated," he said.

Mr Sheridan said he let the mother, and another woman accompanying her, through his door and on to the back patio.

"I looked in and I saw the baby face down. I said to myself 'he's dead'."

"I rang the gardai straight away and my son got on the phone to the ambulance," he said.

Mr Sheridan said the ambulance crew arrived after 15 minutes.

At this stage the young mother had brought her son to the front of the apartment block.

He described how he tried to console the distraught mother.

"He was opening and closing his eyes, he had his little fingers inside his mouth.

"I was just testing to see if he was breathing," he said.

"It was terrible to see," he added. "The girl had the little baby in her arms. I was trying to comfort her as much as I could.

"I tried to keep her as calm as possible.

''I said 'relax, stay calm, your baby is going to be OK, there's help on the way'."

"She kept saying 'is my baby going to be ok? Is my baby going to be ok? Please wake up, please wake up'.

"And I said please, stay calm, your baby is going to be fine," he said.

Accident

Investigating officers visited the scene yesterday, but it's understood they are treating the incident as a tragic accident.

Emergency services attended the scene and the boy was rushed to Mullingar's Midland Regional Hospital.

He remained in a serious condition in hospital in Dublin last night.
Journalist Paul Williams vehemently denied suggestions that he was too close to Garda Headquarters

Maurice McCabe and his wife Lorraine arrive at the tribunal. Photo: Gareth Chaney/Collins Dublin

The journalist who interviewed the young woman who made a sexual assault allegation against Sgt Maurice McCabe has rejected suggestions he was given a garda file on the case.

Irish Independent correspondent Paul Williams said he was aware of the suggestion but described it as being "completely baseless and false".

Appearing at the Disclosures Tribunal, Mr Williams also vehemently denied suggestions he was "too close" to Garda Headquarters.

He said he was never briefed by Garda Commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan, former commissioner Martin Callinan or former Garda press officer David Taylor in relation to rumours which circulated about Sgt McCabe.

Mr Williams said he was contacted directly by Ms D's father and told she wished to speak to him.

Rumours

While he had been aware of "vague rumours" circulating about Sgt McCabe, he did not know what Ms D had alleged against him until he interviewed her in March 2014.

Mr Williams said he did not know where the rumours had come from.

Two articles were published in the Irish Independent the following month referring to an unnamed woman who believed her complaint of sexual assault against an unnamed garda had not been properly investigated.

The tribunal has previously heard how, as a teenager, Ms D complained to gardai in 2006 that she had been molested by Sgt McCabe when she was aged six or seven during a game of hide and seek.

The complaint was investigated but no prosecution was directed by the DPP.

The tribunal is investigating whether there was a conspiracy against Sgt McCabe and if the allegation was used by senior gardai to smear him.

Mr Williams said Ms D was "upset" as media reports of Sgt McCabe's whistleblowing activity had "brought it all up again".

Under questioning from tribunal counsel Diarmaid McGuinness, Mr Williams said he did not consult with any senior gardai before going to Ms D's family home.

Mr McGuinness said a suggestion might be made Mr Williams in some way acted as "a puppet of the guards in participating, willingly or otherwise, in a smear campaign relating to Sgt McCabe".

Mr Williams said: "I have read that extensively and that is absolutely false."

He added that, about a week after the interview, he contacted Supt Taylor by phone with a series of questions.

He wanted to know had an investigation taken place, what was the decision of the DPP, was there an arrest and was the investigation logged on the Garda Pulse system.

The journalist said Supt Taylor went away to do some research and later came back to him to confirm an investigation took place, a file had been sent to the DPP and no charges were directed.

Mr Williams said there were a number of contacts with the superintendent in relation to his queries.

However, John Ferry, counsel for Supt Taylor, said his client would be disputing this account of events.

He said Supt Taylor would say Mr Williams phoned him on the day he interviewed Ms D and told him he was at Ms D's house.

The barrister said his client would claim Mr Williams "did not ask Supt Taylor to confirm anything specific or to confirm or deny any facts in that call".

Mr Williams said he never called Supt Taylor that day and what the officer was alleging was "totally untrue".

Flabbergasted

The tribunal also heard from a garda superintendent who rejected a claim that he alleged Sgt McCabe watched girls coming out of a secondary school.

The claim emerged in the notes of a Garda Ombudsman investigator who interviewed Ms D.

According to the note, Ms D alleged Det Supt John O'Reilly told her father, also a garda, that "M McC would go to the local secondary school and watch the young ones coming out of the school".

Det Supt O'Reilly said he was "absolutely flabbergasted" by the claim.

"I never said it, nor have I any knowledge about it," he said.

"As far as I am concerned that is not true."

Earlier this week, the tribunal heard evidence from Ms D's father that he discussed his daughter's wish to give an interview to a journalist with Det Supt O'Reilly.

Ms D's father testified that Det Supt O'Reilly, who was a friend, suggested Paul Williams, as he had dealings with him in past.

However, this account was disputed by Det Supt O'Reilly.
The mother of a teenager who died after falling through a roof described her son as a boy who was "loved by everyone."

Craig Hanlon McKeon (19) died after he fell through the roof of a former steelworks factory in St James's Street in Dublin. The young man, who loved climbing, was walking along the roof with a friend when it partially collapsed on January 4, 2016.

The fishmonger, from Basin Street flats in Dublin 8, died in hospital the following day.

Speaking after an inquest into his death at Dublin Coroner's Court, his mother Fiona and relatives paid tribute to Craig, describing him as "a character" who loved sport and was loved by his community.

"He was loving and giving. He loved his job, he loved sport and was really into his fitness. Everyone loved him. We are heartbroken," Fiona McKeon said.

"He was one of the nicest, kindest young men you could meet. He was really good to his mother," his aunt Susan McKeon said.

The inquest heard evidence from the young man's friend, Conor Fitzgerald, who said the pair "just loved climbing".

Climbing

They had gone "on a ramble" after meeting earlier that afternoon, he said.

"We were bored. We decided to climb up on the roof. We both liked climbing and we wanted to see what was up there," he added.

They had climbed on to the roof of the steelworks two or three times previously, gaining access through an apartment block nearby. Mr Fitzgerald was about two feet behind when his friend fell, the court heard.

"I heard a crack and a breaking noise and I looked back and Craig was gone," he said.

"I don't know what he stood on. I don't think he tripped. He just fell straight down."

Mr Fitzgerald raised the alarm and gardai arrived at 4.40pm. Dublin Fire Brigade arrived two minutes later. The victim was rushed to St James's Hospital where he was pronounced dead on January 5.

"The doctors said they had done all they could for him," the young man's father, Stephen Hanlon, said.

Dublin Coroner's Court heard that the former steelworks yard was used as a car park for staff working at St James's Hospital.

Occupational therapist Riona Nolan was returning to her car when she heard a crash. She said she had previously heard parts of the roof flapping.

Coroner Dr Myra Cullinane said there was no one with responsibility for the car park present in court. She adjourned the case, saying "a little more information was required in order to complete the inquest".
Pressure continued to mount on the Kinahan cartel last night, after it emerged that officers had obtained fingerprint and DNA evidence from a house where 4m of drugs and firearms were seized.

Cannabis and heroin, along with drug paraphernalia, a vacuum-packing machine and a cash-counting machine, were found during the raid at a property in Ballyfermot Parade on Monday morning.

Pistol

Weapons were also found at the scene, including stun guns, a sawn-off shotgun and a semi-automatic pistol.

Three suspects - aged between 39 and 46 and from Crumlin and the south inner city - were still being questioned at Clondalkin and Ballyfermot garda stations last night.

It can be now revealed that specialist officers plan more arrests in relation to the massive bust in the coming weeks.

"A full forensic examination of the Ballyfermot property was carried out and this means that DNA and fingerprint evidence has been obtained," a senior source said last night.

"This means that gardai may be able to determine who had been using that property before it was raided. This in turn could lead to more arrests later, it is a very significant haul indeed."

The three men who were still in custody last night are considered "trusted" members of the deadly organisation and the bust is considered "highly significant".

An international crime organisation, the Kinahan cartel has been responsible for 10 of the 12 murders in its deadly feud with the Hutch faction.

Last night, sources said that gardai were "unaware" if the major seizure was linked to an alliance between the cartel and the so-called 'Family' gang, which is the main drug operator in the Ballyfermot area of the capital.

While a 46-year-old arrested man from Crumlin and a 39-year-old from the south inner city were detained in the operation, sources say that the most important arrest was that of a 44-year-old criminal who lives in the Kinahan cartel's heartland.

He is an older relative of one of the cartel's key players and has previously served jail time for violent offences linked to a drug addiction almost two decades ago.

However, sources say that the 44-year-old has now progressed into a "key position" within the organisation.

Priority

"Out of the three arrested individuals, this is a guy who would be the top priority for gardai, not least because of the position his 32-year-old male relative has in the gang," a source said.

The bust happened just days after reports emerged that cartel boss Daniel Kinahan (40) had married his long-term lover in Dubai at the weekend.

Last night, senior sources said that gardai could still not confirm the rumour, which is believed to be true by many in underworld circles.

It is understood that many of Daniel's closest associates, pals and business partners are currently with the cartel kingpin in Dubai.
Owing to climate change and human activities, Urumqi Glacier No.1 in Xinjiang, northwest China, a river source located in the Tianshan Mountains, is melting at fast rate after the peak in 1993. It is estimated that Urumqi Glacier No.1 will disappear in 50 years and more than 60 per cent of smaller glaciers around will also vanish.

There are many reasons for the melting of glaciers, of which climate warming accounts for 70 per cent. 2016 was the warmest year on record when average global surface temperature was 1.1 degrees above pre-industrial level and 0.83 degree higher than average from 1961 to 1990, according to a statement by WMO on the State of the Global Climate in 2016.

The melting of Glacier No.1 is attributed to rise in global and regional temperatures. If temperature rise can be brought down to 2 degrees or 1.5 degrees, Glacier No.1 can last as long as 90 years, Li Zhongqin, the head of Tianshan Glaciological Station of Chinese Academy of Sciences, told thepaper.com.

Moreover, dust from nearby pasture, mines, coal plants, electric power enterprises and rubbish from visitors, add a layer of grey to the glaciers, thereby accelerating melting speed, Thepaper.cn reported.

Glaciers are important headwaters for rivers and major sources of water supply in extreme drought areas. Their disappearance therefore poses threats to local water supply and even the sustenance of ecological balance.

In the long term, the melting of glaciers is irresistible, but human beings can take prompt measures to slow down the rate, Li said.

Government took a series of measures including calling for limits on glacier tourism, closing surrounding mines and factories and building glacier conservation areas, the expert added. The impact of these measures has been noticeable in the past 10 t0 20 years. Still, experts hope that the protection of glaciers will be stepped up.
BRISTOL, Va. - The Virginia Supreme Court has set an Aug. 1 deadline for Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court Judge Kurt Pomrenke to respond to an ethics complaint.

The complaint was filed earlier this year by the Virginia Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission, a court document shows. The Supreme Court issued a July 11 order setting out a series of deadlines for all parties to respond.

Pomrenke was embroiled in controversy in February during the trial of his wife Stacey Pomrenke in U.S. District Court. Prosecutors alleged Kurt Pomrenke attempted to tamper with two prospective witnesses in his wife's trial, calling and leaving a voice message with a woman who worked for his wife and sending a note to BVU President Don Bowman.
A Chilhowie, Virginia, woman arraigned on a first-degree murder charge in the shooting death of her husband last week confessed to killing her husband in his sleep, according to an investigator.

Teresa Barlow, 56, appeared in Smyth County Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court for arraignment. The judge appointed Mark Haugh as Barlows attorney and reset the case for Oct. 3 at 1 p.m.

On July 13, at 1:21 p.m., the Smyth County Sheriffs Office received a call of a possible gunshot victim at a residence in the 300 block of Mill Creek Road in Chilhowie, according to a criminal complaint signed by Investigator W.G. Eller.

Deputies found Charles Ricky Barlow, 59, lying on a couch with a gunshot wound to his head. His wife, Teresa Barlow, was at the home and said she had found him lying on the couch and called 911, the complaint states.

Deputies processed the scene and developed Teresa Barlow as a suspect.

Mrs. Barlow confessed to shooting her husband while he was asleep, Eller wrote in the criminal complaint. Mrs. Barlow said she had used a firearm that was usually stored in the basement, but she had recently moved it upstairs to a dresser in her bedroom.

The investigation continues as several pieces of evidence were collected and submitted to the states Department of Forensic Science for examination, Sheriff Chip Shuler said. The mans body was sent to the Medical Examiners office in Roanoke for an autopsy, the sheriff added.

Teresa Barlow is being held without bail at the Southwest Virginia Regional Jail in Abingdon.
BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn.  More than a dozen people voiced varied opinions Tuesday during what was likely Tennessees final public hearing on the proposed merger of the regions primary health care systems.

Tennessee Commissioner of Health John Dreyzehner and members of his staff listened intently as a clear majority of regional officials and residents expressed support for the Certificate of Public Advantage being sought by Mountain States Health Alliance and Wellmont Health System. Four people spoke against the merger, including a representative of the Federal Trade Commission staff, which has consistently opposed it.

The two health systems are seeking similar approvals in both Tennessee and Virginia, with a decision expected in September.

I think everybody recognizes this is a very big decision, Dreyzehner said. Its a precedent-setting decision, and its been a very challenging decision. We appreciate people understanding the thoroughness with which we are trying to understand all the various elements of this proposal.

The health systems began formally working together about three years ago to review the feasibility of merging and then securing needed approvals. The process stopped temporarily in both states back in the winter to allow the applicants to answer questions and submit additional information. Three supplemental studies have been submitted from hospital consultants.

Dreyzehner said the series of public hearings have been important to his departments work.

This is one part of the way were assessing the COPA and its ability to provide a clear and convincing benefit for the region, Dreyzehner said. What people that live, work and play in this region think about it is important. Its also important what other stakeholders think about the proposal.

Alexis Gilman, assistant director of the FTCs mergers IV division from Washington, D.C., reiterated its opposition.

We still have concerns with the merger, Gilman said. We think it would lead to higher prices, lower quality, less access to care and lowered incentives to invest.

The FTC recently responded to the trio of consultants reports filed on behalf of the applicants.

We dont believe those reports added anything meaningful to justify the merger. We dont believe it shows the benefits of the merger outweigh the likely harm from the merger, he said, adding that the applicants need to submit a lot more detail about goals and objectives and how they intend to accomplish those goals.

Dreyzehner said he appreciates the input from the FTC staff.

There are strong opinions in this room, and it is our job to discern what would be best for Tennessee and Tennessee citizens. Their [FTC] opinion is an important perspective, but that is one opinion and one group of experts, the commissioner said.

Among the other speakers, business leader Bill Greene renewed his call for approval, citing its potential impact on regional economic growth.

Were [region] trying to grow up. Were trying to become who we can become and who we should become, Greene said. Were trying to do what the rest of Tennessee has done so we can become a major part of Tennessee.

Greene said a merged health system could be the most powerful economic engine the region will ever have.

Todd Norris, Wellmonts senior vice president for system advancement, said the health systems appreciate the communitys support.

I think we saw once again from the community very overwhelming support from leaders and businesses for what we want to accomplish  which has been consistent all through the process, Norris said.

Asked about the FTCs continued opposition, Norris said those involved in the merger effort understand but disagree.

We believe under the situation were pursuing, a certificate of public advantage under state action immunity, that there is clear rationale to move forward with this merger with active state supervision and that federal law certainly allows for that, Norris said. We understand their [FTC] position but believe the state action immunity laws will ultimately allow this to happen.

Dreyzehner said many of his staff members plus outside consultants and the state attorney generals office continue reviewing the application. His staff has also spoken multiple times with their counterparts in Virginia, who are reviewing and must decide on a separate proposed cooperative agreement since both systems operate in both states.

With the Tennessee deadline exactly two months away, the commissioner said he still hasnt made a decision.

Sept. 19 is the deadline for a decision, and we will certainly make it by then if not before, Dreyzehner said.
BRISTOL, Tenn.  Ben and Brenda Sue Yates said Tuesday theyve been talking to God a lot since their son was fatally shot in Sullivan County on July 8.

The couple was at the Sullivan County Courthouse for an appearance by Johnny F. Royston Jr., the Bristol, Tennessee, man charged in the death of the their son, Rowdy Yates. Rowdy Yates, 44, was found with a gunshot wound to the head, lying beside a camper in the woods, according to court documents.

Its been rough, Brenda Sue Yates told the Bristol Herald Courier. Very rough."

During his appearance in General Sessions Court, Royston told Judge J. Klyne Lauderback that he hasn't been employed since 2008 and has no source of income. He asked for a court-appointed attorney and was assigned to Ilya Berenshteyn.

His preliminary hearing is scheduled for Aug. 25 at 10 a.m.

He faces charges of second-degree murder, drug possession, evading arrest, driving on a suspended license, due care, driving left of center, stop sign violation and reckless endangerment.

Outside the courtroom prior to Roystons appearance, the Yateses said while it was tough for them to be there, they want justice.

We just need to see justice for our son and his children, Ben Yates said.

They described their son as a man who deeply loved his family. His mother said she misses her sons smile.

At his funeral last week, his parents said they could see the love that Rowdy Yates left in the world: The chapel was overflowing.

Just after midnight on July 8, the Sullivan County Sheriffs Office responded to a property in the 500 block of Eaton Private Drive, off Bethel Drive, just outside of the Bristol city limits, where officers found Yates.

Law enforcement began searching for Royston in connection with Yates' death. Ultimately, he led police on a 70-hour manhunt across the region. He was chased in multiple cars and on foot, before he was captured along Emmett Way near U.S. Highway 421 on the night of July 10.

As of Tuesday, Royston was being held on $300,000 bail in the Sullivan County jail.
At an Abingdon Town Council meeting, Councilwoman Cindy Patterson revealed three members had written a letter to Judge Deanis Simmons about her dangerous and unstable behavior. To dig into her personal life while she is currently in divorce negotiations with unsubstantiated charges being made is a move of desperation. The three members of the Town Council did not cite one example at the meeting of their dismay in her job performance. All one has to do is watch the meeting videos to see that Ms. Patterson conducts herself with persistent dignity and politeness. She has faced accusations from the very beginning when she presents an opinion contrary to what three of the council members want. She has been asked to recuse herself on multiple occasions, accused of grandstanding when she voices contrary views and now is having her private life exposed to the public.

Why did City Attorney Deborah Icenhour send this accusatory letter to a Marion judge instead of an Abingdon judge in the first place? Despite the insistence, it was sent to ask for guidance, it was sent to gain support for removal from office. They committed a violation of the open meeting laws in order to silence any further opposition to their policies, and they were insistent enough to delve into her private life since they didnt have any other evidence. Mayor Cathy Lowe stated at the meeting, I have tried to stay above the fray. She said that she has been under investigation for a year, as if this were without cause, as if this were justification for her inquiry into Ms. Patterson. The incubator was just last week found in violation of the Virginia Retirement Laws. There are also major conflict of interest questions that need to be answered. To the Town Council of Abingdon: Lay off peoples private lives.
Yet again, Bristol, Virginia, is sending a city official off with what we might call a silver parachute.

After former Bristol Virginia City Manager Tabitha Crowder was ousted by City Council on July 3, the terms of her employment contract from 2014 entitled her to a severance package  a seemingly generous $100,000 package.

We absolutely agree with the majority of our polltakers on the subject, whose votes also appear on this page: Her severance pay seems extravagant for a cash-strapped city. Just a month ago, City Council still debated over, coincidentally, $100,000 for the Birthplace of Country Music Museum. They ultimately decided to nix the funding. Now it seems we are simply passing that cash-filled sack from our local museum to an individual to, as one answer in our poll stated, go away.

Upon further review, however, that severance pay amount is actually pretty common: Because city managers perform at the will of the city council they serve, abundant severance packages tend to offer a method of protection. Factor also that city managers can be (and have been) subject to a high turnover because of the quick-changing political landscape, where politicians re-evaluate their teams efficacy and make changes without much notice  much like this case.

But our citys contracts with its employees should reflect its financial limitations and status. If the city managers employment contract was crafted with more care and selectivity and its language reviewed on an annual basis, precautionary measures could be included to protect a fragile city like ours.

For one, lets curb the six-month severance pay to four months. Cities can equate severance packages for city managers to as high as a years salary or as low as three months. Even with a lower package in writing, though, City Council may still choose to offer a larger severance  as was the case with Crowders predecessor, Dewey Cashwell (Cashwell, indeed). But including that provision in the contract gives the city added applicable security and, at the least, a more modest baseline should they choose to stuff that package like a holiday turkey.

Expanding the definition of the term cause also offers the city some leverage in cases of termination. Typically, termination with cause involves criminal activity. Revising our city managers contract to include failure to perform the duties of city manager or something similar would allow City Council a broad cover to dismiss a city manager. That would not have covered the reason for Crowders release  simply a different direction, as mentioned by Mayor Kevin Mumpower  but it covers termination for poor performance, qualifies as termination with cause and therefore nullifies dispensing severance pay.

Abiding to an explicit contractual time limit might also decrease the financial impact on the city. The initial contract extended to Crowder expressed a one-year term but does not appear to have had an official renewal contract. Instead, City Council voted for her retainment every July and simply reapplied the terms of her initial contract.

Each year would have been a prime opportunity to revisit the contract and amend as necessary for the citys welfare.

In Bristols recent case, Crowders contract would not have been renewed, and the terms (including a severance package) would have no longer applied  a riskier deal for a would-be city manager but an understood risk if signatures are obtained.

We could argue for the invalidity of the current contracts terms because weve surpassed the expiration noted within it. We could even argue for basing the contracts expiration on the terms of the sitting board  that is, the terms apply only inasmuch as City Council members serving during those negotiations are still members. Still, we understand that, to attract high-quality talent, compensation needs to be competitive. Were saying that also needs to be a relatively smart allocation.
After Parrott's lead disappears, Trone takes 6th District race

Republican state Del. Neil Parrott conceded on Friday after close race. Trone to return as congressman for 6th District.
As the emergence of new media brings both challenges and opportunities, China and Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) should make the best of new channels to promote dissemination of information and influence, spokespersons said at the first China-CEEC Spokespersons dialogue.

The dialogue was held by China in Beijing on July 17, at which Chinese spokesmen and spokeswomen exchanged views with representatives from 13 CEEC countries on the role new media plays in the joint construction of Belt and Road and global communication.

Jiang Jianguo, director of the State Council Information Office, said about 5,000 news conferences held in China last year, adding that government releases timely and accurate news via all kinds of new media.

Albanias Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, Glevin Dervishi, pointed out that such dialogue not only strengthened communication between spokespersons, but provided participants with a good opportunity to know Chinas development situation as well as its reform and opening-up process.

Taking the WeChat official account of Shanghai as example, it was discovered that its influence topped the list of all new media outlets of Chinese government agencies dedicated to the coverage of government affairs with 3.25 million users. The account integrates many service functions, including information on weather, individual income tax and medical insurance, all packaged into one, Xu Wei, spokesperson of the Information Office of Shanghai Municipal Peoples Government noted.
Photos and evidence of a Chinese online celebrity being a pedophile went viral over the weekend, indicating the countrys underperformance and lax public awareness in child protection.

Xu Haojie, a 27-year-old entrepreneur, has been reported by many Internet users for his alleged pedophiliac actions. Having over half a million followers on Sina Weibo, Xu is dubbed Chinas Startup God, as his successful business ideas have inspired a lot of netizens. The Shanghai-based entrepreneur reportedly followed many accounts with obscene content and pictures of underage boys and reposted some sexually suggestive comments.

Xu was also identified by some media outlets as the possible owner of a website featuring images and video clips of young boys. The website has since been shut down, but screenshot images show it once had a large number of active users who left many vulgar comments on the website.

According to the Chinas Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's website, the website, named shotacon, was created by a person with the same name as Xu, but it is unclear if it is the same person. Shotacon is Japanese slang used to describe an attraction to young boys in a suggestive or erotic manner.

Xus possible crime has ignited public wrath. The hashtag XuHaoJiePedophile on Sina Weibo has garnered over 14 million page views since it was posted on July 17. Many netizens criticized Xu as despicable and pathetic and have reported photos and evidence to local police.

In response to the controversy, Xu posted a 14-second video clip to defend himself. He said he is being defamed, adding that he has already retained a lawyer.

As of press time, many of Xu's controversial posts cannot be found on Weibo. Police in Shanghai noted that they are aware of the incident, without making further comment.

Chinas Criminal Procedure Law stipulates that nobody shall be declared guilty without being judged as such by a court accordingly, thus more evidence is needed to press charges against Xu. If all the evidence circulating online is true, then the case should be dealt with seriously, as sexual crimes against children are prohibited in any civilized country, said Dong Hanlin, a Beijing-based lawyer.

Rampant crimes

Xus incident has once again drawn public attention to a heavy yet unignorable social issue in China: the rampant sexual crimes against underage children.

According to a 2016 report released by the China Foundation of Art and Culture for Children, a total of 968 cases of sexual crimes against children were reported by Chinese media from 2013 to 2015. Over 1,790 victims have suffered sexual assaults or even rape, while the statistics shows a growing trend of such crimes.

Wang Dawei, a professor at the Peoples Public Security University of China, told media that when it comes to sexual crimes against elementary or middle school students, only one out of seven cases will be revealed to the public, while many other victims may keep silent due to social pressure and feelings of embarrassment.

Though Chinese authorities hold a firm stance against such crimes, many perpetrators use advanced technologies such as the dark web to hide their crimes, while some criminals have even started an industry, selling videos and photos to foreign buyers.

In 2016, Beijing police arrested eight people for selling such videos and photos abroad. According to media reports, the criminals posted over a hundred videos of underage Chinese girls being raped or sexually harassed on hidden websites, involving over 30 victims, who were usually enticed by sweets and toys.

Meanwhile, China has yet to issue law targeting such pornography. According to Chinas Criminal Law, obscene content is defined as the explicit description of sexual behavior. Yao Jianlong, a professor at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, told Thepaper.cn that it is hard to determine if erotic content regarding children is obscene due to the lack of legal support.

In order to protect children, the law should define obscene content, including all erotic content involving children, while more serious punishment should be imposed on the perpetrators, said Yao.

Lax awareness

Compared to their foreign counterparts, the Chinese public has a relatively low awareness of pedophilia. The lack of sexual education has led to many tragedies, said Dong.

Some TV programs in China even features so-called romance scenes between adults and children as a stunt to draw public attention. In 2016, the famous reality show, Dad! Where Are We Going? was bombarded with criticism from the public after it showed a 23-year-old Olympic athlete and a 4-year-old girl who plays his daughter act too intimate.

Many viewers called the relationship pure and cute, but it was awful. The show would be banned in Western countries for showing that much intimacy with a little girl, who even exposed her bare shoulders in the public, a netizen wrote on Sina Weibo.

The societys intolerance to the victims has also caused trauma for the children. According to the Hunan newspaper Xiangxiang Morning Post, a 13-year-old girl, who was raped and harassed by at least 18 elderly men in 2013, was criticized by locals, who said the girl should feel guilty for seducing the elderly men and getting them sent to prison.

The authorities should raise public awareness of such despicable crimes, educating both children and their parents. More public organizations or facilities should also be established to help young deal with the pain, said Dong.
Yaounde Conference Centre, which overlooks Cameroon's capital city from Nkol-Nyada Hill was built by the Chinese and commissioned on May 12, 1982

After two years of intensive work, a Chinese firm, Anhui Construction Engineering Group, recently completed the rehabilitation of the Yaounde conference centre, Cameroons biggest international event venue. The building, which sits on Nkol-Nyada Hill overlooking the capital city, was built by China and commissioned on May 12, 1982 after seven years of work.

Chinese gift

The recent refurbishment was effected from June 12, 2015 to May 11, 2017, thanks to a gift of almost $19.2 million by the Chinese government. The signing of papers for the formal handover of the renovated facility held on June 27, 2017 in the presence of the visiting Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Zhang Ming and several Cameroonian cabinet ministers.

Cameroonian and Chinese officials on June 27 after signing papers marking the end of refurbishment of Yaounde Conference Centre

The wholesome renovation of what is probably the biggest building in Cameroon included the roof, floor tiles, marble, plumbing, electricity, sound speaking system, air conditioning, replacement of rugs, installation of about 60 surveillance cameras, water supply, amongst others. Meanwhile, three new powerful transformers were installed to ensure stable power supply.

We are gathered here today to sign a new deal for the Yaounde conference centre, which signifies dynamism and a new takeoff, said Christophe Mien Zok, the facilitys General Manager on June 27. After more than 30 years of use, China decided to completely rehabilitate the Yaounde Conference Centre. It is now better equipped and offers more efficient services, Vice Minister Zhang Ming said. Relations between Yaounde and Beijing have never been any better because they are based on win-win partnership, Christophe Mien Zok noted.

Showcasing renovated facilities

Not long after the completion of rehabilitation and handover of the Yaounde conference centre, the General Manager, Christophe Mien Zok launched the facilitys Week of Activities running from July 5 to 21. The aim is to enable the public discover the new look of the Yaounde conference centre whose grounds cover about 18 hectares. The launch ceremony included a guided tour of facilities and new equipment such as multi-purpose meeting halls, restrooms, VIP salon, main entrance, adjoining building, kitchen, artificial springs, etc.

One of the renovated halls of the Yaounde Conference Centre

Some 100 Chinese and 250 Cameroonian workers were mobilized to carry out the work. The quality and lifespan of the renovated facilities make us eye the future with greater optimism. The main challenge will be maintenance in order to make the building last long, Christophe Mien Zok said. Meanwhile, engineers of Anhui Construction Engineering Group will work with their Yaounde conference centre colleagues for a year to maintain the facility.

Placed under the Ministry of Arts and Culture, the Yaounde conference centre hires out halls for the organization of seminars, exhibitions and other big and international events as part of efforts to promote Cameroons tourism and cultural potentials. The special week includes activities such as open-door days, photo and video exhibitions, artistic and cultural events

Djoel Nguiebe, a senator, expressed the wish to see the facility carry out services like money transfer and for the public to keep it clean.

Centre of international repute

Jean-Marcel Kouotou, a businessman, expressed delight at the quality of work carried out, saying it made Cameroon proud to have such a conference centre of high international standards. Ekinde George, a worker with the Yaounde conference centre, expressed joy at the completion of the refurbishment, saying things will never be the same.

The centre has in the past served as office space for the ruling Cameroon Peoples Democratic Movement, CPDM party, the Senate, the National Anti-corruption Commission, the CPDM newspaper, LAction, as well held countless international summits and conferences. It is the biggest conference centre not only in Cameroon, but in the whole of central Africa. With its large expanse of gentle slopes, the facility also hosts the Yaounde International Exhibition for SMEs and Partnerships, PROMOTE, which holds every two years, organized by German entrepreneur, Pierre Zumbach.

Side view of Yaounde Conference Centre

Facilities, services on offer

The Yaounde conference centre boasts high-speed internet connection, personalized microphones and interpretation headsets, proper indoor and outdoor lighting systems, more comfortable chairs and air conditioning systems. Also, the centre now has uninterrupted power supply, modern furniture, better water and drainage systems, security surveillance cameras, amongst others.

We have completely changed the outer look of the building from the rooftop to the walls, widows and window panes. Inside, we have very comfortable furniture, better sound system, air conditioners, security cameras and multiple-colour shiny bulbs. In fact, we are putting in place a new look conference centre at the disposal of all, Mien Zok said.

Kimeng Hilton Ndukong is Sub-Editor for World News with Cameroon Tribune bilingual daily newspaper in Cameroon. He is currently on media attachment with Peoples Daily Online in English.
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Grand Prize Winner: Donna Rickey Blog Winners: A Song for her Enemies by Sherri Stewart: Mary Ann Hake Spies & Sweethearts by Linda Shenton Matchett: Connie Ruggles Sword of Trust by DebbieLynn Costello: Brenda Walters Justice for Julia by Donna Schlachter: Natalya Lakhno Party Prize winners: Sherri Stewarts Winners A Song for her Enemies: Angie Pool Bottle of Dutch Syrup: Carol Koch Alscheff Corrie ten Boom book: Deb Gramie Burgess Linda Shenton Matchetts winners: $5.00 gift card to online retailer or choice (Kobo, B&N, AppleBooks, Amazon): Karen Hadley A Bride for Seamus: Carol Osterhouse Wotring DebbieLynn Costellos winners: Sword of the Matchmaker: Melissa Planas Sword of Forgiveness: Paty Hinojosa Gomez Shattered Memories: Charlene Zall Capodice Sword of the Perfect Bride: Licha Haney Donna Schlachters winner: Leather Journal: Lisa Turley

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Expert says cooperation is way out for greater China-U.S. trade ties

The first round of the Comprehensive Economic Dialogue (CED) begins on July 19 in Washington. It is one of four major dialogue mechanisms the two sides established in April. An expert stressed before the meeting that cooperation was the only right choice for better China-U.S. trade relations.

Reuters pointed out in its reports that bilateral meetings to reduce U.S. trade deficit with China have reached preliminary agreements.

For instance, American beef has found its way back to the Chinese market after 14 years and the policy barriers for U.S. liquefied natural gas exports to China have started to crumble.

However, some people are mounting pressure on China before senior officials from both countries meet on economic and trade issues, with many hard nuts still left to be cracked such as trade friction. The U.S. has taken a hard stance on Chinese imports, especially steel and aluminum.

"It is an excellent momentum-builder, but much more needs to be done for U.S.-China commercial negotiations to be considered successful," said Jacob Parker, vice president of China operations at the U.S.-China Business Council in Beijing.

Generally speaking, cooperation is the only choice to improve China-U.S. trade relations, said Song Guoyou, director of the Center for Economic Diplomacy, Fudan University.

In the U.S., there are long-standing and even blown-up discussions that China-U.S. trade divergence exists and that the U.S. should mount pressure on China, Song disclosed.

However, the need for cooperation still has the upper hand because economic and trade matter a lot to both sides and the scope of cooperation is expanding, Song said.

Some U.S. groups insist that their interests are impaired as a result of trade with China. Some U.S. political elite on the other hand mount pressure on China over economic and trade issues with the aim of putting the U.S. in a vantage position.

Song suggests that China and the U.S. jointly take measures to respond to the negative voices, for instance, by exploring how to keep trade balance at macro level.

It's easy to find a solution to such issues and the point is never to be kidnapped by negative voices, Song noted.

The 100-day action plan, which was announced during the Mar-a-Lago meeting in April between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump, has proven successful, said Tu Xinquan, director of the China Institute for WTO Studies at the University of International Business and Economics.

Tu forecasts that trade imbalance will be tackled eventually, but that does not necessarily mean China will accept all U.S. demands.
NEWTON  During the last six years, portions of Charles Wishons historic farm off N.C. Highway 10 have turned into what he says is an expanding swamp.

The farm, known as Oakwood Farm, has a long history in the area going back to the time Robert Lee Shuford Sr. established the farm in 1880, Wishon said.

Wishons family history with the farm goes back nearly that long, with his grandfather moving onto the land in 1885.

Four generations of Wishons family have lived and worked on the farm.

Wishon said he has researched the farms history and takes pride in its history and his familys connection to it.

R.J. Reynolds would come here in the summer and spend Saturdays and stay all night with the Shufords and eat ice cream at the factory and stuff, so it has a huge amount of history, Wishon said.

Several years ago, Wishon said he went in with Robert L. Shuford III to purchase the farm before Shuford III died in 2011.

The 38-acre swamp on the Target property was constructed around 2008, Wishon said.

Water from the wetland has been backing up onto the property since before 2011, according to a letter Wishon wrote to Target CEO Brian Cornell

A wet area began to form in an area used for grazing cows in 2012, Wishon said.

Another wetland area had formed in a section used for growing hay.

Since 2015, the wetland in the hayfield has grown to around three times its original size, Wishon said.

The loss of hay itself has not been that severe, with the worst being the aggravation that comes with working around it.

The wetland has prevented Wishon from fertilizing the soil for fear of how the nutrients would affect the wetland area.

As the wetland has expanded, workers have had difficulty mowing around it, with some workers sometimes nearly getting stuck, Wishon said.

Cows also would often get stuck in the wetland in the grazing area.

Wishon sold his cows earlier this year, though the decision was motivated more by market forces than the effects of the water infiltration.

Starting around 2012, Wishon said he spent a few years reaching out to the Charlotte-based environmental group Catawba Lands Conservancy, which has easements on both sides of the property line, but was told by the group the dispute would need to be handled by the two landowners.

Wishon then began what has now turned into a multi-year effort to resolve the problem with Target, starting with personnel at the warehouse.

Four representatives from the Target warehouse came to the farm in 2014 and 2015, but there was nothing any of those representatives were able to do, Wishon said.

Wishon wrote a letter to Target CEO Brian Cornell in August 2015, explaining the situation up to that point and asked for Cornells assistance.

In December 2015, Wishon said he received a number of calls from the Target corporate offices in Minnesota as a result of Cornell passing on the letter.

An insurance adjuster from Sedgwick, the company that handles claims and liabilities for Target, also came out to look at the farm and take photos.

Since then, Wishon has been in regular contact with Targets guest relations and Sedgwick.

The company seems to not know how to deal with the problem, Wishon said. Dealing with Target guest relations has often been frustrating, he added.

Theyve turned my claim over to a division that handles, like, bad microwaves, Wishon said. And they just dont get it and theyre still the ones thats trying to help me, 19 months later.

Some of the conversations he has had with guest relations give him the impression they havent been spending much time on the problem since they often asked the same questions repeatedly, Wishon said.

William Elliot, an official with the Army Corps of Engineers who helped design the Target wetland, came out to the farm in June 2016, Wishon said.

Wishon said he was told by Elliott regulations would prevent Target from draining its wetland, but Wishon would be able to take action on his own land because of the age of the farm and the fact he was upland from the wetland.

That same month, Wishon submitted a three-part proposal to Sedgwick.

Wishon asked Target to pay for the construction of a ditch by the largest wetland on the farm so the water could be diverted and the land could dry.

In addition, Wishon requested Target purchase the smaller wetland where he used to graze cattle and gift him a narrow strip of land currently owned by Target to compensate for the lost land and the maintenance costs Wishon will incur maintaining the ditch.

The cost estimate Wishon provided for all three proposals is $51,955.

"That was my proposal, but they didn't care about it," Wishon said.

The Record reached out to Target for comment, and received an email response from Target Public Relations Manager Erika Winkels.

During the construction of the distribution center, Target worked with a number of public and private organizations, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the Catawba Lands Conservancy, to understand and mitigate the environmental impact of the building, according to the statement.

A five-year monitoring process was in place following the opening of the distribution center, and the company continues to work with Catawba Lands Conservancy to see that guidelines are followed, according to the statement.

We are aware of Mr. Wishons claims, are awaiting some additional details from him and then will discuss next steps directly with Mr. Wishon, according to the response.

Wishon said he cannot afford legal action at this point, but has no intention of ceasing his efforts at reaching a resolution with Target.

Wishon wrote a second letter to Cornell in January.

I think theyre hoping Ill give up, but Im just going to keep writing Brian Cornell until he gets tired of me, Wishon said.
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US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin held a second, previously undisclosed meeting at the G20 summit earlier this month in Hamburg, Germany, according to the Washington Post.

The one-hour meeting took place at a dinner for G20 leaders, according to the report. Halfway through the meal, Trump reportedly left his own seat to occupy a chair next to Putin. The talks were joined only by a Russian translator.

However, a White House official described this interaction as a "brief conversation" instead of a "second meeting."

The two men used Putin's Russian translator for their chat because the American translator did not speak Russian, the official said.

The official did not say when exactly the second meeting took place, how long it lasted, or what the two leaders discussed.

On the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg, the two leaders held a two-hour formal meeting, which was previously disclosed as their only one-on-one talks.

In the meeting that ran longer than either side had planned, the two leaders discussed a series of issues, including the alleged Russian meddling in the US election.
When she made her film debut in 2015, Bhumi Pednekar was the antithesis of the Bollywood heroine  playing an overweight bride whose husband refuses to accept her and her body type. In her second film, Pednekar plays another newly-wed, but this time she is a feisty woman who leaves her husband after discovering he doesnt have a toilet in the house.

Bhumi Pednekar during a jewellery exhibition in Mumbai onJuly 15. (IANS)

Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, which releases August 11, focuses on a serious problem that plagues millions of Indians. A World Bank report said more than half of Indian households dont have toilets, which poses countless health and safety hazards. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, acknowledging the seriousness of the issue, launched the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, or Clean India Mission after he came to power in 2014 to modernise sanitation in the country.

Pednekar spoke to Reuters about the film and how it opened her eyes to the issue of open defecation.

Did you find it hard to relate to the issue in Toilet: Ek Prem Katha?

When they (filmmakers) first told me about it, I said, This is not an urban problem. But the truth of the matter is, all my life I have seen people squatting beside the railway tracks and doing their business. I remember when the July 26 floods happened in 2005. I was walking back from college and I had shit floating all around me. It is definitely an urban problem. But yes, it is definitely a bigger rural problem. Through the film, we are commenting on the Indian mindset. There is a line in the film where a character says, Jis ghar mein tulsi hai us ghar mein shauch kaise bana sakte hain? (How can you build a toilet in your house when you have a tulsi plant - which Hindus consider holy).

All these years, I thought this was an issue because the government doesnt provide enough infrastructure or there is poverty. But the bigger problem is that people dont believe in using the toilet. They dont believe that it is a necessity and a right. In 2017, the women of your house need to go and defecate in the open? That is sad.

Bhumi Pednekar during a jewellery exhibition in Mumbai onJuly 15. (IANS)

And it is mostly women who bear the brunt

The men too, but this is harder on women. This film opened my eyes to a lot of things. Fifty-four percent of our country does not have access to bathrooms. Whatever toilets the government has provided, people have turned them into shops or godowns. Fifty percent of rape cases in India happen when women defecate in the open.

Not only is it a health scare, because for 12-14 hours, youve controlled yourself, you are not going and relieving yourself from a process that is as natural as breathing you are working, taking care of the children, sweeping the floor, cooking food, working in farms. And then when you do get a chance to relieve yourself, you dont have any peace of mind because you dont know when youll be attacked or molested. You dont know when someone will come take a video or take a picture. And this is such a private act. Even if we have a friend sitting outside the bathroom door, we are uncomfortable. Imagine sharing it with 20 other women. Shooting those scenes were the toughest for me  I just couldnt get to it, even though I was acting. If it was tough for me, imagine how much we are hurting the self-respect and dignity of women who are actually going through this every day.

Do you think a film like this can help spread awareness about the issue?

Definitely. Films are the largest and most impactful medium. In todays times, it needs to be entertaining, yes, but if you have a chance of giving a message or changing a mindset, why not? People worship stars, so why not use that to the benefit of our society? Primarily, this is a beautiful love story between Keshav and Jaya. They are simple, straightforward characters, and the villain in their love story is a toilet.

Did you meet the woman on whom this story is based?

This film is not based on a particular story. We have been inspired by all these women and I have read about them in-depth. When you start reading about them, you understand their mindset. It is so difficult for them  it is a violation of their privacy, their health and security. Even otherwise, Indian women are perpetually scared. On the days I dont have my car and I am coming by cab at 2 am, my mum is up because she is worried. You can belong to any strata of society

In both your films, you play a woman who is willing to stand up to her family and in-laws, which is very atypical. Is that a conscious decision?

I have been very lucky to get these roles. And these are not women that come from money. They are girls whose fathers probably mortgaged their houses to get them married. And the next day, they have the balls to leave their husband. In that social economic strata, the story of spirit is so high. They are real feminists, they just have not had the chance to act upon what they believe in. Hypothetically, if I am in an unhappy marriage, my parents will not say, drop it and come back. For them, it is not easy.

Did you learn anything about the men in these womens lives?

I already have an opinion about men  not men that belong to this socio-economic strata, but Indian men in general. Most of them are MCPs (male chauvinist pigs), and the people that need to blamed are those mothers and fathers who are inculcating these dated, old-school teachings to their sons. How is it OK for you to eve-tease a girl or touch her inappropriately? Today, because of social media, a lot of these cases are coming out and you understand the hypocrisy of the average Indian male.

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After Varun Dhawans apology, Karan Johar has also expressed regret at his nepotism rocks chant at the 18th India International Film Awards (IIFA) in New York on Saturday. The director said he took full responsibility for the joke which was entirely his idea.

In an interview to NDTV, Karan said he obviously doesnt think that nepotism rocks. Of course I dont believe that nepotism rocks. Of course, I believe that only talent rocks. If anything that rocks, its your talent, hard work and conviction. Its the energy you bring to your job. What we said was meant to be a joke, which I think has been misplaced, misunderstood and I think it went wrong. I regret it, he said.

The idea of that joke was entirely mine, so I take onus of the idea of what we said. And I think we went a bit too far with the Kangana mention, he added.

Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan (R) and director/producer Karan Johar perform on stage during the IIFA Awards of the 18th International Indian Film Academy. (AFP)

He also addressed his issues with Kangana in the interview: No matter what I say or feel about my issues with what Kangana said on my talk show Koffee With Karan, I think I was raised to be a dignified, a chivalrous, and a decent person. Thats the upbringing that I was given and I feel that I failed on those accounts. I felt that no matter what my thoughts or personal issues on this, I should not have repeatedly brought that up. For that, Im deeply regretful.

Karan said that he wants the matter now closed with the interview and assured Kangana and his fans that he will no longer talk about nepotism or bring up Kanganas name. I want to once and for all say and close this chapter after this and subsequently I will not speak about nepotism nor Kangana because it would be distrustful for her and it would be ungraceful at my end, which Ive already been. Nepotism is easy access, nobody can deny that, but what you do with that access is what moulds you into a professional.

Karan and Saif Ali Khan, who were hosting the gala, revisited the much-talked about nepotism issue that started in Bollywood when actor Kangana Ranaut branded Karan as a flagbearer of nepotism on his chat show Koffee With Karan.

Kangana Ranaut during her appearance on Koffee With Karan.

When Varun joined the two actors on stage at the Metlife Stadium to receive the Best Performance in a Comic Role for Dishoom, Saif joked that the actor had made it big in the industry because of his father. You are here because of your papa, Saif quipped. Varun said: And youre here because of your mummy (veteran actor Sharmila Tagore).

Karan then promptly added: I am here because of my papa (late filmmaker Yash Johar). They then said in unison: Nepotism rocks. The trio then broke into Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham song, Bole Churiyan, Bole Kangana, to which Karan said Kangana na hi bole toh accha hai (Its better if Kangana doesnt speak).

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Bollywood actors Alia Bhatt and Vicky Kaushal are coming together for the first time in Meghan Gulzars Raazi. While the makers had other plans initially, they will now recreate Kashmir in Mumbai.

Based on Harinder Sikkas best-selling novel, Calling Sehmat, the film revolves around a Kashmiri spy (Alia Bhatt) who gets married to a Pakistani Army Officer (Vicky Kaushal).

Kashmir forms an integral part of the narrative and the original plan was to shoot the film in the valley. Unfortunately, the filmmakers couldnt get the necessary permissions because of unrest in Kashmir.

Sources from the crew told Hindustan Times that the films first schedule is not going to be shot in Kashmir.

Considering Kashmir is an important element in the film, the makers have now decided to recreate Kashmir in studios of Mumbai. To make sure that the audience gets the impact of the movie, each and every aspect of Kashmir is being recreated. A large set will be erected in Film City where most of the indoor sequences will be shot.

A few local Kashmiri workers are building the set. Since the decor of the homes has to be authentic, local Kashmiri artworks and curios will be flown down by the producers. The set will take a few weeks to be complete, said the source.

Meanwhile, the makers will kick-start the films shoot in Punjab with Alia and Vicky by the end of July. After their schedules in Punjab and Mumbai, the team will head to Delhi for another schedule.

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Having worked with actor Amitabh Bachchan in Pink (2016) and Akshay Kumar in this years Naam Shabana, actor Taapsee Pannu is definitely not new to starry vibes. However, the Delhi girl was in for a pleasant surprise when she got to meet Salman Khan while wrapping up the shooting for her upcoming film Judwaa 2. Salman joined the cast of the film for a cameo shoot and Varun Dhawan, who is reprising Khans role from the 2000 hit film Judwaa, took to Instagram to share a picture too.

Asked how it was to meet Salman, Taapsee says, I had seen and heard so much of him that for a second, I was just taken aback and remained in awe of him. I just kept looking and couldnt take my eyes off him. It was that crazy star-struck moment for me. I was just trying to fathom the fact that he was standing there, right next to me and in the same frame.

#judwaa2 just got bigger. Shot with my childhood hero @beingsalmankhan. I've grown old but he's definitely the same. Can't wait SEPT 29th A post shared by Varun Dhawan (@varundvn) on Jul 8, 2017 at 9:09am PDT

Interestingly, Taapsee was the only one from the cast and crew of Judwaa 2who had never met Salman before. Varun knows Salman since his childhood days, and Jacuqueline Fernandez has worked with the actor in Kick. I was meeting him [Salman] for the first time and it was too brief a meeting, so it was more like an introduction, greeting each other, couple of minutes of chatting with the entire team together and then just got a picture clicked together, shares Taapsee, adding that, Whenever I meet him next time, maybe, I would talk to him with ease.

And it happened! Done with my talkie portion for #Judwaa2 #SuperTeam A post shared by Taapsee Pannu (@taapsee) on Jul 8, 2017 at 8:52am PDT

Whether there were any words of appreciation for her past films or performances, Taapsee adds, We didnt really have all those conversations. The only time we talked, there was a bunch of us from the entire cast and crew in the room, chatting together and sharing some funny anecdotes from the past experiences of shooting for Judwaa.

So what were these fun conversations?He was basically talking about how he has memories with David [Dhawan] and Sajid [Nadiadwala] sir, since their equation dates back to so many years. He was giggling while talking about some off the set experiences and funny situations that they have had two decades ago while shooting for Judwaa, she says.

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Filmmaker Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, who has earlier won accolades for Nil Battey Sannata, was inspired by a French book to make her next film Bareilly ki Barfi.

Filmmakers Nitesh Tiwari, Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari and actor Ayushmann Khurrana during the trailer launch of Bareilly Ki Barfi. (IANS)

When Ashwiny was returning to Mumbai from the final schedule of Nil Battey Sannata, she picked up an English translation of a French book, titled Ingredients of Love from a bookstore at Delhis international airport.

She was totally captivated by the story and once she completed the book, she also ensured that her husband, writer-filmmaker Nitesh Tiwari read it.

Talking about the book, Ashwiny said in a statement, I was tired, but I couldnt put the book down. I even made Nitesh read it and he agreed that the basic story could become the theme for a film.

I was so excited, I even told my producers, Abhay Chopra and Juno Chopra (late filmmaker BR Chopras grandsons) about the story immediately . They put in a lot of effort to contact the publishers in France and procure the rights to the book, she added.

Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari ans actor Ayushmann Khurrana during the trailer launch. (IANS)

Bareilly Ki Barfi, which has Ayushmann Khurrana, Kriti Sanon and Rajkummar Rao in the lead roles, will have Ashwiny and her husband team up as director and writer for the second time after Nil Battey Sannata.

Nitesh, who adapted the book into the script, has changed the setting of the story from France to Uttar Pradesh. The film has been co-written by Shreyas Jain.

Nitesh Tiwari said,Its difficult to adapt any book into a film. The French settings are alien to us, so weve only retained the basic theme and infused our own colours, quirks and characters into the story . The parents, friends and lovers, their professions and their basic habits have all been adapted to our culture. I got time to work on the script because Ashwiny was caught up with the post-production of her first film. I just hope that the audience likes my first tryst with breezy cinema.

When asked if both of them were under pressure to deliver, as both their films were praised, Ashwiny admits, Id be lying if I said no. I dont want people to say , `Yeh kyun kiya! Though Nitesh is a harsh critic and has not been too critical in his views so far, Im still anxious about what the audience would think. I hope I have done justice to his writing. The team was excited at the very thought that Nitesh was writing it.

Junglee Pictures, in association with BR Studios, is going to release Bareilly Ki Barfi on August 18.

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Bankruptcy proceedings against Monnet Ispat and Energy Ltd and Alok Industries Ltd were approved by different benches of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) on Tuesday.

They become the second and third among the big 12 firms identified for early bankruptcy proceedings by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) where the process has gone into the second stage. Jyoti Structures was the first.

Separately, the Ahmedabad bench of the NCLT gave Essar Steel time till 22 July to file its objections to the insolvency proceedings initiated against it by its creditors, including State Bank of India (SBI) and Standard Chartered Bank.

The 12 firms were chosen by RBI for immediate bankruptcy proceedings based on one criterion: the total banking exposure of the company should be at least Rs5,000 crore and 60% of this exposure should have turned non-performing by March 2016.

In Alok Industries case, the firm had already admitted its default, but the tribunal had to hear a petition filed by the Industrial and Commerce Bank of China (ICBC) that sought dismissal or deferment of SBIs petition against the firm. The Chinese bank has lent close to $55 million to Alok Industries and said there was an ongoing case before the Bombay high court seeking the liquidation of Alok.

The judge dismissed ICBCs petition invoking Section 14 (1) (a) of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), which gives the NCLT power to impose a moratorium on any other pending suit against the defaulter in any other court. Alok Industries owes close to Rs8,000 crore to SBI, of which Rs3,700 crore has turned non-performing. The firms overall outstanding debt stands at about Rs20,000 crore.

Separately, a Mumbai bench of the NCLT admitted bankruptcy proceedings against Monnet Ispat after the lead bank clarified the default amount.

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Air fares are expected to rise sharply in the week leading to August 15. Fares are expected to remain at elevated levels even after the long weekend as a slowdown in the pace of capacity addition gives airlines enough pricing power, executives at online ticketing firms and analysts said.

This year, Independence Day falls on a Tuesday. While its not out of ordinary for fares to go up during long weekends, the quantum of jump this time is expected to be higher as compared to earlier holidays due to a combination of factors, including a strong passenger load factor and long gap between two holidays.

The lowest fare from Delhi to Goa on August 5, for instance, is Rs 3,246, as compared to Rs 5,800 on August 12. The yields for the airlines during this period, are expected to go up by 30-40%, said Sharat Dhall, chief operating officer of B2C Business at Yatra Online, Inc.

Read more: GSt rates: Flight tickets for economy class to be cheaper from July 1

While the jump could be as much as 10-15% across all the sectors, it could be as high as 80% for tourist destinations, said Himanshu Periwal, vice-president, growth, at Ixigo.com, a travel search marketplace. One has always seen a 40-50% jump in fares during holidays and long weekends, this time around, it will be higher, he said.

Amid intense competition and lower jet fuel prics, air fares, in a majority of the sectors for most part of the year, have either remained muted or lower, driven by promotions and flash sales by the airlines. Airlines slashed fares across most routes to fill planes ahead of the lean season that started in June end.

Indias domestic aviation market expanded 21.8% in 2016-17the second straight year air traffic growth exceeded 20%. The research arm of rating agency ICRA expects it to moderate to 13-15% in the current fiscal year.

Read more: UDAN will make air travel affordable for many, but not the poor

Meanwhile, besides seasonal factors and one-offs, fares are also likely to go up as the capacity addition in the airline industry has slowed as compared to a year ago, said an analyst at a domestic brokerage. He declined to be identified. When the capacity addition is less, theres no urge to fill up the seats as there are fewer of them to be filled up and that may not come up at a discount, he said.

ASKM (average seat kilometre), an indicator of capacity addition, has tapered off to around 15% in the June quarter this year as compared to 20% last year, said the analyst cited earlier.

Capacity addition, he said, has slowed owing to engine-related issues that market leader InterGlobe Aviation, which operates Indigo Airlines, is facing. Indias biggest airline grounded at least seven Airbus SE jetliners as it awaits fixes for Pratt & Whitney engines, joining several carriers around the world that have pulled the planes from service, Bloomberg reported on July 14.

Uncertainties regarding taxes on import of an aircraft have also impacted induction of newer planes. On an average, an operator will have to pay additional 10-12 crore per aircraft in additional levies, including the 5% duty on plane imports, said AirAsia India managing director and chief executive Amar Abrol at a press meet on July 4.
Flipkart has undertaken a pilot programme in Bengaluru, aiming to foray into grocery segment and may expand it to other places across the country, a senior official said here today.

The homegrown e-commerce player plans to launch the grocery service shortly, Anil Goteti head of marketplace, Flipkart told reporters without giving any timeframe for the launch.

We will be opening up groceries very very innovatively when we launch...The pilot is going on in Bengaluru. We will be launching it (groceries) in few months time.

We will be doing more pilots (on grocery) across different cities. We will be coming out with very innovative and unique propositions that India does not have today, Goteti said.

He said the e-commerce player which currently has a base of over 100 million users is working towards bringing 500 million customers on its platform in the coming few years.

Replying to a query, he said the recently introduced Goods and Services Tax (GST) has not impacted sales and almost all of Flipkart vendors migrated to the new tax regime from July 1.

Goteti said the online marketplace recently has set up a new warehouse for large appliances here. It already has a 2.2 lakh sq ft automated fulfillment centre in Gundapochampally on the outskirts of the city.

With over 28 lakh unique customers, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana together form one of the biggest and fastest growing markets in Southern India for Flipkart. While Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada, Nellore, Guntur and Tirupati are the top performing cities for the e-commerce company, he added.

The official however, did not reply when asked if the company has plans to open any new fulfillment centres in the near future.

Marking the tenth year celebrations of Flipkarts Big 10 campaign which is a year-long celebration to commemorate all aspects of the companys business and growth since it launched in 2007, through a plethora of activities involving all its stakeholders across the length and breadth of the country, he explained.
With an eye on 2G mobile users, Reliance Industries is working on a strategy to sell 200 million 4G feature phones  likely to be priced Rs 1,000-1,500  in two years, industry sources told PTI.

The company is planning to launch it in the second half of August. However, it could not be ascertained if the handsets will be sold by Reliance Retail or Jio.

Reliance has not yet finalised actual unit price of the feature phones, but it is likely to be in the range of Rs 1,000-1,500 a unit. It will be smart feature phone with pre- loaded apps of Reliance Jio like Jio TV, Jio Money etc, one of the sources who did not wish to be named said.

He said the phone will not have touchscreen facility like smartphones, but will have rest of facilities like Wi-Fi connectivity and browsing and come with a cable that can connect the handset with television sets to watch Jio TV content.

The company is eyeing 2G users who cannot afford expensive smartphones and are paying high call rates. Jios voice calls will be free which will encourage them to buy these handsets, the source said.

Reliance Jio has started the process of importing handsets and is in discussion with Foxconn and Intex to make them in India.

Around 10 million units are being planned for initial sales and the company has plans to increase inventory to 100 million in the first year and another 100 million next year. Discussions have started with Foxconn and Intex to make these phones in India, the source said.

Mobile industry body Indian Cellular Association in a submission to the government has said the total size of Indian mobile phone market was estimated to be around 280 million units in 2016 and is expected to grow to 320 million by 2018.

A source privy to discussions said Intex had approached RIL for bundling Jio service for a state government tender.

Intex will bid for a state government tender which has huge requirement of low-cost mobile phone, but it wants bidder to come with a service provider. The economy of scale is enough to bring down the cost of phone. The discussion with RIL started for this tender and is now moving in direction for low-cost 4G feature phones, the source said.

He said Jio will use Qualcomm chipsets in 4G feature phones.

When contacted, Reliance Jio declined to comment. Intex said: ...we are exploring various business opportunities, including those with Reliance Jio, and would keep you updated about the details as they materialise. We also keep participating in various state governments tenders and are always keen to work with them.
The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) has arrested a Delhi-based businessman with foreign currency worth Rs 1 crore from the Delhi airport. A DRI official said it is suspected that the man planned to bring gold from Dubai and had travelled for the same reason on three-four occasions earlier too.

Based on a specific intelligence, we arrested a passenger from Delhi airport last week. Interrogation revealed that he has travelled in each of the past four months. He used to bring gold and then sell it in local markets, a DRI official said.

The arrested passenger had kept the currency, mostly euros and dirham, separately to avoid detection during screening.

Smuggling of foreign currency has increased and the customs department has started analysing data of frequent travellers. In little over a month, foreign currency worth over Rs 4 crore has been seized at the Delhi airport and customs officials said security at the departure terminal has been stepped up considering the increase in smuggling.

Customs sources said that after demonetisation, there had been no cases of cash smuggling till April. However, there has been a spike since then. On June 3, two passengers were caught with $60,000 hidden in power banks, mobile chargers and biscuit packets.

Few days before that, customs made the biggest haul of recent times by seizing Rs 2.52 crore worth foreign currency from an Afghan national. According to Customs, the passenger, who was going to Mumbai, was intercepted at the departure hall.

He was carrying $2,15,000 and $7,00,000 Saudi Riyals, equivalent to Rs 2.52 crore. The currency was concealed in a piece of corrugated box, wrapped with English newspaper and kept inside his hand baggage. Some of the currency was also concealed in the false cavity at the bottom of the bag, said a customs official.

Investigation revealed that the passenger had to handover the bag to another passenger, who was going to Dubai by Air India flight AI995.
DEHRADUN: Former chief minister Harish Rawat has been trolled on the social media for posting pictures from his village using a Twitter campaign that was launched by his successor Trivendra Singh Rawat.

On May 31, Trivendra Singh had launched the Twitter campaign exhorting the people to visit their villages and share pictures using the hashtag to help bring out different aspects of Uttarakhand for the world to see. The Twitter campaign was a brain child of the chief minister who seeks to stop mass exodus from the hills and to promote reverse migration.

The Congress veteran had posted pictures of Harela (a hill festival) celebrations from his village Mohanari in the Kumaon regions Almora district using #SelfieFromMyVillage tag. Maine mukhyamantri sri @tsrawatbjp ki appeal sweekar kar apne gaon mohanari, almora mein jakar harela mein bhagidari ki hai #SelfieFromMyVillage (I accepted CM TS Rawats appeal and celebrated Harela festival at my village), Rawat wrote on his Twitter handle.

Though some praised the Congress veteran, Rawat soon found himself being trolled by Twitter users. Neta hai ya naatakbaaz, Vipin Kala commented, wondering whether he was a politician or one expert at gimmicks. Aaj tak kahan the ab gaon ki yaad aa rahi hai aapko (where were you till now, why care for you village now), wrote another user Bhawnish Bisht, questioning Rawats visit to his village only after he was ousted from power.

The Uttarakhand Congress bagged only 11 of the 70 seats in the assembly polls earlier this year. Rawat himself faced a crushing defeat on both the seats he contested the assembly election.

Gaon mein itna achcha ghar hai toh aap palayan kar Dehradun kyun aa gaye, posted Gourav Relhan, questioning why Rawat chose to migrate to the plains from his village.

But Rawats spokesperson Surendra Kumar asserted that the former chief minister had launched the state-level celebrations of the Harela festival in Uttarakhand and that his motive was to send out a positive message through his post. The only message was that the people should stay connected with their roots, no matter where they live. Moreover, Rawat ji keeps visiting his village...anyway, the people are free to express their opinion and we welcome their comments, Kumar told Hindustan Times.

Rawat is active on the social media, which he uses to post his comments especially on the BJP governments functioning and decisions. He had released a self-made list of 110 mistakes committed by the BJP government on his social media account and also got into a Twitter spat with finance minister Prakash Pant for presenting fudged up revenue and growth figures presented by in the state budget.

The Congress leader recently held Mango and Kaafal parties to promote Uttarakhands native produces as well as to draw the BJP governments attention to the welfare of hill farmers.

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Deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia on Wednesday said that government agencies cannot micro monitor breeding of mosquito across the city. Speaking at a function held by Urja, the apex body of all Resident Welfare Associations in Delhi, the Deputy chief minister sought support from people and urged residents to keep a watch on accumulation of water in their area.

Government and civic bodies cant micro monitor dengue mosquitoes in the city. It is not possible. They are most active in August and September  the monsoon months. We need support and cooperation from citizens of Delhi, he said.

At least 225 cases of malaria and 150 dengue cases have been reported from across the city. Also 120 cases of chikungunya were reported this year. MCD officials said the peak season for dengue, mosquito and chikungunya mosquito breeding is at the peak between July and September.

MCD officials said that this year, cases of vector borne diseases are being reported earlier in comparisons to previous years. This year, hospitals started recording cases from April onwards.

An MCD official said that WhatsApp groups have been started across all the three civic agencies, where MCD officials have to share reports of the places they visited to check for breeding centres and prevent out break of the disease.

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Two girls, aged six and eight, were allegedly raped and then strangled by a 21-year-old man in outer Delhis Bawana on Friday.

Pankaj Kumar, a factory worker and neighbour, left the girls in the park presuming that they were dead. The girls, police said pretended to be dead to save their lives.

Kumar was arrested soon after the incident on Saturday. The girls, who are now in post-operative care are said to be critical.

According to the police, the girls who are neighbours, were playing outside their house when the man approached them and gave them money to fetch a medicine. Kumar reportedly lured the girls promising them a candy if they fetched him the medicine. The girls went to the store but could not find the medicine. Kumar allegedly then asked the girls to accompany him to another shop but instead took them to the park.

Police said that the sister of one of the girls tried to accompany them but the man asked her to leave. He even have her some money and asked her to get some candies for herself. He then allegedly took the two girls to the park where he raped them.

We have arrested Pankaj Kumar. A case of rape has been registered against him and he has been sent to 14-day judicial custody, DCP (Rohini district) Rishi Pal said.

After raping the girls, the man allegedly strangled both of them. As they cried asking for help, the man first smothered them and then strangled them. As the girls stopped crying to save themselves, the man thought they were dead. He left the girls inside a pit and fled, a senior police officer said.

Meanwhile, since the girls did not return home till late at night, their parents started searching for them. They first looked in the neighborhood and then made a PCR call. The locals then made teams to search for the girls.

The father of one of the girls went to the park searching for his daughter and found clothes scattered. When he called out her name, the girls who were hiding in a pit, came out and narrated their ordeal. The man then informed the police and a case was registered, a police officer said.

The police then took the girls to the hospital where they have been admitted for treatment.

The girls told the police that they had seen the man visiting the grocery store and also gave his description. Based on the information the police identified and then traced Kumar.
The 29-year-old doctor, who was found 12 days after his abduction, was drugged using injections, terrorised and kept tied to a chair in an under-construction building in Meerut by the eight kidnappers.

He seemed shocked when he was rescued. As if he had lost all hope. He is traumatised to the extent that he is not saying anything against the abductors, a police source said.

Srikanth Goud, hailing from Gadwal in Telangana, was allegedly abducted from east Delhis Preet Vihar on July 6, by an organised crime syndicate, including an Ola cab driver, from Western UP.

Goud, who works in Metro hospital in east Delhis Preet Vihar, had booked the Ola cab to go to South Delhi, after he missed a Metro. The driver drove him to Dadri instead.

The driver took him to Dadri where other gang members joined him. The driver then switched off the navigation and drove Goud to Meerut where he was confined in an under-construction building, a police officer said.

Goud, sources said, was tied up and as he resisted the bid, he was thrashed and threatened. He was also given injections to make his reflexes slow.

After taking him to Meerut, the abductors first called the Ola call center demanding a ransom of Rs 5 crore to release the passenger. The abductors told the cab aggregators that the incident will tarnish the image of the company forever, and they should pay the ransom if they wanted the matter to be under wraps. The cab company immediately called Preet Vihar police station and shared all the details of the driver along with the registration number of the car.

The cab company informed us about the incident around 4 am on July 7, following which we put our teams to trace the car and track the drivers number. We also put the number that was used to make the ransom call on surveillance, a police officer said. Meanwhile, the police also contacted Gours hospital and got details of his family. They then contacted his family back in Telangana.

The family said that even they received calls for ransom from random numbers. The abductors shot videos of Goud in a terrible state asking for water and sent them to his family members and the cab company, a police source said.

The police made a list of numbers that the abductors used to make those calls and also traced the location from where the videos were sent. The investigators took the dump data of the area from where the calls were made and traced the location to Meerut.

With the help of technical surveillance, we found that the men were in Western UP. Their location was constantly changing as they were using different numbers and handsets to make the calls. Their earlier location was in Haridwar but by the time our teams got there, they had escaped. They were finally nabbed near Muzaffarnagar after a shootout. While four have been arrested, four others managed to escape, a police officer said.

Police said that while it appears that Goud was fed, they are not certain if he was kept in harsh conditions. He appeared weak and under a state of shock when he was rescued. He has now been asked to take rest and will also be given counselling. It appears that he was thrashed and terrorised because of which he has gone quiet. We suspect that he was drugged, a police officer said.

Goud completed his medical degree from Jiujiang University in China and got registered with the AP Medical Council in 2013. Having secured Medical Council of Indias clearance, he settled down in Delhi two years ago.
Police rescued on Wednesday a Delhi doctor who was kidnapped by an Ola cab driver and held hostage by a gang for nearly two weeks in Meerut.

Srikanth Goud, who works at the Metro Hospital in east Delhis Preet Vihar, was rescued from an under-construction building where he was being held, and four members of the gang that kidnapped him were arrested from Uttar Pradeshs Muzaffarnagar after a gunfight with the police, according to joint commissioner of police, Eastern Range, Ravindra Yadav.

Goud took an Ola cab from the hospital on the night July 6 to go to south Delhi, but the driver took him to Dadri, where other suspects joined them.

It was not immediately clear how the driver took Goud that far by himself.

After abducting Goud, the abductors called the cab providers and asked for Rs 5 crore as ransom to release him. They used different numbers and SIM cards to make the calls so that they are not traced. They even shot some of his videos and sent them to his family members in Hyderabad and the company, a police officer said. The abduction was reported to police by Ola.

Ola did not respond to requests for a comment till this article went to press.

The driver, police said, enrolled with Ola using a fake license and forged documents.

He drove the car for a few months, before planning an abduction to make quick money.

The driver and three other suspects are on the run.

Police said they camped in Meerut for days before finding the hideout. The operation was carried out by a team of Delhi Police, UP police and special staff.Goud was being brought back to Delhi after his rescue.
The police on Wednesday arrested a 41-year-old man for allegedly posing as a Delhi Police sub inspector and threatening to shoot Shabnam Hashmi, a social activist.

The caller threatened to kill Hashmi, who runs an NGO named Pehchan, in an encounter for not possessing a valid Aadhar card.

According to the police, accused Harender Malik, used to get drunk and make random calls to women. He first tried engaging them in a conversation and even approached them for friendship but when the women used to turn down the offer, he used to get angry and hurl abuses at them threatening to kill them in an encounter.

In many cases when the women threatened to report him to the police, he used to tell them that he was a Delhi Police personnel with good contacts.

The matter came to fore on July 14, when Hashmi lodged a police complaint alleging that the man called her colleague Mubina and told her that under a new law  Ghero and Maaro  the government of India has directed the Delhi Police to identify people who do not possess a valid Aadhar card and shoot them on sight. Scared, Mubina shared the instance with Hashmi who then called the man to confront him.

When Hashmi called him, the man used inappropriate language and abused her. He used filthy words to address her colleague as well. He told Hashmi that he was a sub inspector posted in Lajpat Nagar who has been given orders to shoot the people who do not have a valid Aadhar card. He also threatened to kill Hashmi. She also alleged that the man was drunk at that time, DCP southeast Romil Baaniya said. He added, Following Hashmis complaint, a case was registered and the phone number through which the calls were received was put on surveillance.

The police put three different teams to trace the man and he was finally apprehended from his residence at Ghaziabad in UP. His phone along with the SIM card that he used to make those calls was also seized.

Police said that he had been making such calls since January. During questioning, he confessed to have made such calls to women. He is unmarried and is suffering from polio. He worked as a mechanic of Japanese fitting machines at a company. He said he was randomly called women with an intention to make a conversation but used to get angry when they turned down his offer, a senior police officer said.

The SIM card that he used to make those calls was also found to be issued in his employers name.
The road cave-in at C-Hexagon at India Gate on Wednesday was due to an old communication line, which had loosened the soil and resulted in the incident, officials said.

But why do these incidents take place?

One possible reason behind portions of roads caving in is damage to water or sewer lines beneath roads.

In April 2016, a large stretch of the Kasturba Gandhi Marg caved in as heavy leakage from an underground pipeline had caused water to accumulate under the road, leading to the mishap.

When water seeps in, the lower sub layer becomes soft. After some time, it cant bear the load and the section collapses. These are caused due to sewage and water pipe leakage or burst of an old pipe. For this particular case at India Gate, there might be some other reasons, too, which need to be investigated upon, K Sitaramanjaneyulu, a scientist at Central Road Research Institute, said.

Most roads have been laid on water pipelines. Before a road is built, the water or sewerage pipeline should either be shifted underneath a footpath or to the side. The pipeline should be covered in concrete so that leakages dont take place. In most cases, the concrete cover is missing.

Officials also blame depletion of the groundwater table for making the soil beneath roads hollow. During the rainy season, the water table rises. The pressure of water pushes away the soil underneath and this layer gets eroded, making the road vulnerable, a council official said.

In August last year, a portion of road from India Gate towards Ashoka Road caved in following incessant rains, disrupting traffic on the route.

Past cases March 2016: A major cave-in created a 20-feet deep crater near gate no. 1 of the Pragati Maidan Metro station at Bhairon Marg, which connects both east and south Delhi with the central part of the city. A damaged sewer line caused the collapse, which took nearly three weeks to be fixed April 2016: A large stretch of the Kasturba Gandhi Marg caved in as heavy leakage from an underground pipeline had caused water to accumulate under the road August 2016: A portion of road from India Gate towards Ashoka Road caved in following incessant rains December 2015: A sizeable portion of a busy road  the intersection between KG Marg and Feroz Shah Road  caved in because of a leaking water pipe

Another issue might be bad road laying techniques. According to SM Sarin, former CRRI director, one of the reasons why these incidents take place is that the road layers are not properly consolidated during the construction process.

They are soft, not properly rolled and the lower layers havent been compacted properly. As soon as water gets in or any sort of overload happens, the portion caves in. Lack of quality control, at the time of construction, leads to these gaps. The engineers need to monitor quality, he said.

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Heavy traffic around India Gate and slow metro movement gave office-goers a tough time during the peak hours on Wednesday.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic was reported from India Gates C-Hexagon after a part of the road caved in affecting vehicular movement. The police imposed traffic restrictions, which resulted in a ripple effect as other arterial roads like Tilak Marg and Ashoka road too saw major jams.

Irritated over the situation, motorists took to Twitter to get the traffic jam cleared.  @DelhiTrafficPol are you guys sleeping at work today? Massive traffic jams at and around India Gate, wrote Pulkit.

The traffic police also alerted people using the same medium and wrote, Traffic is heavy in the carriageway from C-Hexagon towards Akbar Road due to potholes near C-Hexagon.

Things were no better for those who chose the metro over driving to work. The busy Blue Line of the metro that connects Noida and Ghaziabad with Dwarka had trains running making unscheduled stops. Although an official statement from the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) is awaited, people complained of trains running later than schedule.

I travel from Vaishali to Barakhamba station every day. While usually it takes 25 minutes, today the same metro ride took me 50 minutes, said Devesh Tripathy, a daily commuter.

Another commuter said the metro waited at Yamuna Bank for over 15 minutes and even after that moved slowly.

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Long live the revolution

We want to correct injustices. We are against crimes in society. We want peace against oppression. If war is the solution then so be it.

This is the note left by a group whose members claim to be the saviours of society and promise to make it crime free. The note was found at a spot where a 32-year- old businessman, identified as Vikas, was gunned down on Monday night in Dwarkas sector 22.

According to reports, the string of events that led to Vikas murder began on July 14 when a 23-year-old youth named Hemant Kumar was shot at by the gang. Hemant allegedly was in a relationship with the sister of one of the gang members and they did not approve of it. It is suspected that Vikas was targeted because he supported the couple.

In the note left after Vikas murder, the group claimed that Hemant had been taught a lesson for molesting a girl and said they will not spare rapists.

The group have been allegedly involved in seven to eight murder cases and the car they use for committing crimes is also said to be a stolen one.

The group struck again on Tuesday afternoon. They are suspected to have murdered a 21-year-old man, Pradeep, who had brushed his bike against their car in Kanjhawala, a day after the Dwarka incident.

Pradeep was on his bike with his brother Pawan when it accidentally brushed against a Verna car. After an argument the men in the car allegedly whipped out a pistol and shot Pradeep dead. Pawan, his brother later identified the accused, who is also a suspect in the Dwarka murder case.

The group claim to be fighting against corrupt doctors, molesters,rapists, gamblers, anti-nationals and those with black money. The note signs off with Jai Hind, Jai Bharat, however, the police suspect that this may be a way of misleading the investigators.

Dismissing the gangs claims of wiping out criminals, the police said the two murders were a result of gang rivalry that took place in Gurgaon, Jhajjar and Chhawla in May. They claimed the killers may have been hired to eliminate rivals.

The one-page note also mentions the names of the group members. The group members claim that the idea behind the killings was to bring peace to the nation and that they would gun down all offenders across Delhi using high tech weapons.

The group claimed to have killed three gangsters, including Papu Gurjar and Puneet Kharkhari . They also claimed to have shot one Hemant, who had allegedly molested a girl.

The police said they have sent the note for forensic examination. They are also tracking the members who have mentioned their names in the note.

It seems like a case of gang rivalry. We have registered the cases and have begun the investigation, DCP southwest, Surendra Kumar said.

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CGTN photo

China notified the World Trade Organization (WTO) on Tuesday it will ban the import of 24 different types of solid waste shipments as part of a campaign to curb environmental pollution.

The import ban, which will go into effect at the end of 2017, includes plastics, slag from steelmaking, unsorted scrap paper and discarded textile materials. According to China's WTO filing, the list has been adjusted to protect the country's environment and people's health.

China has been importing large amounts of plastic waste as raw materials for industrial production. In 2016, China imported 7.3 million tonnes of plastic waste worth 3.7 billion US dollars, accounting for over half of worldwide imports.
Preeti Singh, a wheelchair-bound working woman in Delhi, took to Facebook to vent her anger after the driver of an Uber cab she hired left her humiliated on Monday.

Her complaint was that cars as well as drivers provided by the cab aggregator are not disabled-friendly.

During my trip back home, I really felt humiliated and insulted when the driver kept saying my cars gonna get ruined. Im a very positive person but I did loose it a little. As I reached my destination I called my brother to clean his car with a cloth just so he never says that again to anyone, Preeti said in the Facebook post on Tuesday.

It is, however, not the first time that she has experienced such rude behaviour of the cab drivers, Preeti mentioned.

Uber drivers are not alone who have behaved rudely with me. I have faced same issue with Ola cab drivers too. At least, with Uber, the drivers accept to give me the ride, no matter how reluctantly. I remember an Ola driver saying no upfront because I have a wheelchair, Preeti said when contacted by Hindustan Times.

She, however, feels that the drivers working with Uber India or any other cab service providers cannot be entirely blamed since they are not given proper training.

Uber drivers are very good in general. It is the reason people use it, right? But there are times when they create a lot of fuss about it. I agree that they might have an issue with a wheelchair because sometimes they are not the owners of the car. If something happens to the car, the will be charged, she said.

But the cab-hailing app is such that there is also no way of informing the drivers beforehand that the customer has a wheelchair until the driver calls, she added.

The cab aggregators should send cars which can at least accommodate wheelchairs, which can happen only if I can inform them while booking, Preeti said. She also sent a list of suggestions to Uber via e-mail.

It was, however, after 14 hours that Uber India responded to her complaint, Preeti said.

Im sorry to hear about what happened yesterday. As discussed over the phone, Ive taken your feedback into strong consideration in order for us to make the improvements you look forward to. While I wouldnt be able to provide an ETA, I can certainly assure you that we will take a closer look into this, the company replied to Preeti in an e-email, which she shared with Hindustan Times.

It added, Considering that youve made a special request of not taking severe action against any driver partner, we will work towards improving our driver standards instead of imposing any action against the drivers in question.

Preeti said she was hoping Uber India would to take her suggestions seriously. I am ready to give Uber another chance.

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The politics of symbolism has its limitations.

By resigning from the Rajya Sabha on the burning issue of Dalit atrocities in Uttar Pradesh, BSP national president Mayawati can, at best, score a political point. But she cannot be sure how far it will help in the resurrection of the 33-year-old Bahujan Samaj Party that touched its lowest ebb in 2017; just like the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) may not make any major gains from the election of a Dalit President.

The politics of symbolism and populism fails when it is not padded with concrete plans to fulfil the aspirations of the masses.Mayawati has failed on this count. Her slogan of swabhimaan (self-dignity) started losing appeal when her politics moved from the bahujan samaj to sarvjan samaj before the 2007 UP assembly elections. She formed a majority government albeit at the cost of alienating Dalits, who could not accept the BSPs new slogan  Haathi nahi Ganesh hai, Brahma Vishnu Mahesh hai replacing Tilak tarazu aur talwar, inko maaro joote chaar  as they continued to suffer appalling forms of discrimination.

The BSP met its first electoral setback in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections as Mayawati, despite being the first Dalit woman chief minister of the state, could only raise the partys tally from 19 to 21 seats.

It was the first wake-up call that she failed to respond to. From there on, the BSP kept losing election after election  assembly polls in 2012 and 2017; and Lok Sabha elections in 2014 . After all, political arithmetic depends on base votes, not borrowed ones.

Thus, while the country was weighing the pros and cons of her resignation, seen as a countermove to the BJP naming a Dalit for the post of president, her voters and supporters were watching the return of a pre-2007 firebrand Mayawati who never minced words in attacking her opponents.

It is a well-known fact that Dalits prefer fighters as their leaders. Mayawati must have first sensed it while driving down to Saharanpur  the centre of caste clashes. As she diluted her social agenda, the restless Dalit youth had started moving towards little known leaders like Chandrashekhar of the Bheem Sena. In fact, between 2007 and 2017, hundreds of Dalit organisations have emerged in the country trying to fill the vacuum caused by a weakened BSP as it drifted from its Bahujan mission.

The BSP still remains their first choice as reflected in the election results. She lost seats but her vote share of about 20% has remained intact. Mere resignation will, however, not be enough.

Mayawati will now have to hit the streets as her mentor and founder president of the BSP Kanshi Ram did, irrespective of political gains and losses. He often used to say: We contest first election to lose, second to defeat and the third to win. As Mayawati rebuilds the party from the scratch, she will have to adopt Kanshi Rams style and social agenda to survive in UP politics.

Mayawati says she is working on a strategy. Dalits may ask for what? Its mission or power? In this renewed political war, her membership of the Rajya Sabha is far too trivial an issue for her constituency.
A liberal education aims at the making of men, said Sir Raymond West, vice-chancellor of the University of Bombay, speaking in the convocation address in July 1882. It [education] is not to be diverted into a process of manufacturing human tools wonderfully adroit in the exercise of some technical industry, but good for nothing else, added West.

His words are interesting to revisit as the University of Mumbai (MU) turns 160 this month.

The former VC would probably have had some things to say about how the university has conducted exams and admissions in recent times. It has also messed up schedules and delayed results. Last year, the Mumbai University ranked 68 among 421 institutions among BRICS nations according to rankings agency Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). Amongst 724 institutes nationally, it ranks between 151 and 200, in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) released by Indias human resources development ministry in April.

Think of a prominent Mumbaiite, and chances are she or he studied here.

Nuclear physicist Homi Bhabha; reformer Lokmanya Tilak; Morarji Desai, the fifth prime minister of India; Dadasaheb Phalke, the father of Indian cinema, passed through these gates. More recently, so did industrialist Adi Godrej; Wipro founder Azim Premji; jurist Nani Palkhivala and ICICI Bank CMD Chanda Kochhar.



The MU is one of the three oldest in the country, says Naresh Chandra, former pro-vice chancellor of the university who now serves as principal of Birla College, Kalyan. The largest number of NAAC-accredited A-grade colleges fall under MU. These include St Xaviers, Ruia, Ruparel colleges and more.

Established in 1857 and initially spread over a single 243 acre campus in south Mumbai, MU now operates across campuses in Kalina, Thane, Ratnagiri and Kalyan. It is the administrative body for 777 colleges and more than 7 lakh students, says Leeladhar Bansod, the universitys deputy registrar. At the undergraduate level, courses are offered in subjects ranging from management studies to law, architecture, aviation and physical education. It also runs 58 post-graduate programmes ranging from applied psychology to nanotechnology.

BACK AND FORTH

Changing times need a change of pace and approach. One of the key issues for students of the 21st century is student engagement, says Rajan Welukar, former vice-chancellor of MU. The moment you engage them, learning happens automatically in the classroom and outside it. For this net-savvy generation, what is needed is creating the experience around such easily accessible content. MA Khan, registrar of the MU says, The current administration has initiatives to increase transparency and automation. 

Indu Shahani, educationist and former principal of HR College, says that much of the universitys good standing comes from the staff and students. Eighty to ninety percent of students in MU travel from the suburbs for higher education. They are very self-motivated, she says. They make things happen no matter what.

Today, a generation lasts not 20 years, but 5. Newer courses when added, must be centered around the learner,  says Snehlata Deshmukh, former vice-chancellor of MU.

Shahani adds that the university has been able to meet the needs of its students well. Its B.Com courses have offered specialisations such as Banking and Insurance, and Accounting and Finance. It also introduced Bachelor of Mass Media and Management Studies courses in the early 2000s.

But much more needs to be done. When exam reforms are added, the process has to be set in motion at least two years in advance, says Snehlata Deshmukh, former vice-chancellor of MU.

Quick decisions have resulted in delays in results and mix-ups during exams.

Deshmukh also says that the curriculum be revised more frequently. Today, a generation lasts not 20 years, but 5, she says. Newer courses when they are added, they must be centered around the learner.

Despite Wests view, the curriculum needs to help students face a changing workplace. The jobs of the future will be in fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, design thinking, virtual reality, and data analytics, says Shahani.

Data is going to be the next generations oil. Its time the institution started planning for tomorrow.
The 15 Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs), established through public-private partnership, have been declared institutions of national importance. The Lok Sabha on Wednesday passed the bill that will now allow them to grant degrees.

Union minister for human resource development, Prakash Javadekar, said the fees for the poor students will not be increased and that reservation law will be applicable to these institutes.

Education is not an issue for party politics. It is an issue of national policy, said Javadekar in his reply to the debate over the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (Public-Private Partnership) Bill, 2017. He said the fees is not the only source of revenue for the institutions as there are other sources like research grant and projects and new researches which make up for the expenses.

There might be a slight increase for those who have the capacity to bear. But for the poor (students), scholarships will be available, the minister said.

As the students of existing Indian Institutes of Information Technology are completing their graduation by July and August, 2017, there is an urgent need to confer statutory status upon the institutes. The bill will allow these institutes to use the nomenclature of BTech, MTech or PhD degree as issued by university or an Institution of national importance. The formal degree would help the students fare better in job markets and the institutes will attract quality students.

The cost of each IIIT is Rs 128 crore and is contributed by the Centre, state government and the industry in the ratio of 50:35:15, sustainable within 5 years of commencement.

During the debate, Deepinder Hooda of the Congress criticised Javadekar for not mentioning contribution of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in bringing policy initiative in the IT sector.

We should not indulge in politics in such important issues. It was Rajiv Gandhi who was pioneer in beginning IT education in the country, Hooda said.

He also attacked the NDA government for removing names of Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi from various government schemes. The Congress MP also asked Javadekar to explain why works on the proposed IIITs in Amethi and Sonepat have been stopped.

Referring to difficulties being faced by Indias IT firms due to changes made by the Donald Trump administration in granting H1B visas meant for highly skilled workers on short duration, Hooda said Prime Minister Narendra Modi must tell the country whether he had raised the issue with the US during his recent visit there.
One in every two students applying for medical and dental seats in Maharashtra is not from the state. Angry with the states decision to relax norms and allow non-domicile students to apply for medical seats, medical aspirants and their parents from Maharashtra filed a petition in the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Directorate of Medical Education and Research (DMER) figures show that the number of registrations of students who have cleared both class 10 and 12 from the state is 49,768, whereas those who have only cleared Class 12 is 48,977.

Explaining why the Class 12 numbers were high, a parent said Many students come to Mumbai to prepare for medical entrance exams and appear for Class 12 exams in Maharashtra after sitting Class 10 exams in their respective states. He was of the opinion that they should not be given the advantage meant for children with state domicile.

On July 7, the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay High Court relaxed domicile norms for medical and dental aspirants in the state. Originally, those who had cleared class 10 and 12 from the state or had a domicile certificate - a document showing that the student had lived in the state for the required number of years - were eligible for state quota seats. Now the rule making Class 10 compulsory has been dropped. Those who have cleared Class 12I from Maharashtra, even without Class 10 from the state, will be eligible for state quota seats from now, said Dr Pravin Shingare, director of DMER.

Commenting on the move another parent said Earlier this year SC was very clear that no more cases on medical and dental admissions should be entertained by High Courts till admissions are over. How can the Aurangabad bench allow such changes to the admission process while the registrations are on?

DMERs decision to announce a revised provisional state merit list before the first seat allocation list for state quota seats has brought some relief to the parents and students. We hope the SC will support our stand before the first seat allotment list is released, one of them said.

While the petition is up for hearing in SC this week, the first seat allotment list for admissions to state quota seats in government-run and private medical and dental institutes in the state will be released on July 25.

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New Delhi All parties from Tamil Nadu on Wednesday joined hands in the Rajya Sabha to demand complete exemption of the states students from the examination to medical and dental colleges, National Eligibility cum Entrance (NEET), alleging bias against them in the examination. The Centre said the matter was sub-judice.

The government responded to the charges saying it had given its views on the legislation passed by the state government for exempting Tamil Nadu from NEET and it was now up to the President to take a view on it.

AIADMK and DMK members also trooped in the Well of the House for a brief while and shouted slogans seeking exemption for Tamil Nadu.

Raising the issue through a zero hour mention, A K Selvaraj (AIADMK) said the state assembly had passed a legislation for exempting Tamil Nadu students from NEET but the President had so far not given his assent to it.

He claimed that 98% of the students studied the state syllabus, but the examination was based on the CBSE syllabus.

Kanimozhi (DMK) said it was not correct to state that Tamil Nadu wanted one-year exemption. All parties (in Tamil Nadu) want permanent exemption (from NEET), she said, adding that the state government had invested in medical college infrastructure.

A Navaneethakrishan (AIADMK) alleged that tough questions were given to students from the southern states and easy ones to those from the north. This is discrimination, he said.

T K Rangarajan (CPI-M) said half of the questions in the NEET examination were out of the syllabus for Tamil Nadu students

Is this the way of cooperative federalism? State assembly passes a resolution, the Central government is not accepting it, he asked.

Anand Sharma (Cong) wanted the Centre to make its stand clear on the state legislation.

D Raja (CPI) demanded that Tamil Nadu be given exemption from the entrance examination.

HRD minister Prakash Javedekar said the government has taken note of every bodys pleas and the issue was discussed with everyone.

The matter is in advanced stage and sub-judice, he said, adding We have taken note of everybodys plea.

Health minister Jagat Prakash Nadda said the common entrance examination for all medical colleges in the country was supported by the Supreme Court and all political parties.

Last year, exemption was given but this year the NEET examination has already taken place, he said.

We have given our views (on the legislation passed by Tamil Nadu) and also replied to the grounds given by the state government for seeking exemption, he said. It was now up to the president to take a view on granting assent to the Bill, he said.

The government is holding talks on the matter through the ministry of home affairs, Nadda added.
The Staff Selection Commission (SSC) on Tuesday issued a notification for recruitment of Scientific Assistant In India Meteorological Department. The commission will fill 1,102 (tentative vacancy) posts through this process. The examination (computer based) will be held from November 20 to November 27, 2017.

The last date for receipt of application August 4.

Scheme of examination:

The examination would comprise 200 questions carrying 200 marks for two hours duration. The question paper would have two parts, Part - I and Part - II.

Part 1 will be divided into four parts carrying 25 marks each. The four parts are: General Intelligence and Reasoning, Quantitative Aptitude, English Language and Comprehension, General Awareness.

Part II will carry 100 marks for 100 questions from Physics, Computer Science and Information Technology, Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering.



There will be negative marking of 0.25 marks for each wrong answer in both the Parts.

The Commission will prepare the category-wise merit list and hand it over to India Meteorological Department, which would declare the final result.

Candidates applying for the exam must not be of more than 30 years as on August 4, 2017. The application must be submitted through online mode only.

Note: Candidates can check eligibility, application process, examination centres list and other details on the official website of SSC.

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Washington  The Department of Homeland Security is enlisting American college students in its efforts to stop the radicalisation and recruitment of young people, mostly immigrants, by foreign terrorist groups.

Under a programme called Peer to Peer: Challenging Extremism, students at dozens of universities are given a budget of up to $2,000 each semester to develop social media campaigns and other tools to counter the online recruiting efforts of terrorist groups like the Islamic State.

George Selim, director of the office for community partnerships at Homeland Security, said about 50 to 75 universities voluntarily participated in the programme each year. Students enter a competition judged by Homeland Security and other national security officials, and the winning school is given $5,000.

On Tuesday, the department awarded students at the University of Maryland first place in the competition for developing a project that helps friends and neighbours recognise signs of radicalisation in young people. It is built around a video game and a social media campaign.

Who better to push back against the prejudice, bigotry and hate online than students? said Tony Sgro, the president of EdVenture Partners, the company that created the programme.

Countering violent extremism online has become a focus of the United States government in recent years as groups like the Islamic State and Nigerias Boko Haram have successfully used the internet to market themselves and gain recruits. Dozens of young people from the United States have joined groups like the Islamic State.

But the government has long struggled to counter the groups use of social media.

So officials at Homeland Security and other federal agencies have turned to the very people whom terrorist groups are trying to attract: young people.

The programme addresses two fundamental things, Selim said. It brings real-world national security problems to the classroom, and it gives young people a chance to have their voices heard.

Although most of the programme seems to focus on countering foreign terrorist groups, Selim said students were also encouraged to develop campaigns to counter the violent messaging of domestic hate groups. The University of Maryland project targets white supremacist groups as well as gangs like MS-13.

Government programmes to counter violent extremism have been criticised by some civil liberties groups, which say that ideology is not a clear predictor of terrorism. Some Islamic organisations worry that the programmes are a way for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to gather information that can be used to arrest Muslims.
Schoolchildren in Telangana will no longer have to carry loads of textbooks and notebooks following a government order on Tuesday capping the weight of school bags for students from primary school to Class X.

The order, which came into effect from Wednesday, made it mandatory for all the school managements to ensure that the students do not carry more than the prescribed weight of school bags.

According to the order, the maximum weight of a school bag with textbooks and notebooks should not exceed 1.5 kg for Class 1 and II; 2-3 kg for Classes III to V; 4 kg for Classes VI and VII; 4.50 kg for Classes VIII and IX and 5 kg for Class X students.

Until now, school children were carrying bags weighing from 6 kg to 12 kg at primary level and up to 17 kg at high school level, the government noted.

This has a severe, adverse physical effect on the growing children which can cause damage to their vertebral column, knees and can also causes anxiety disorders in students, the order said.

The order said the heavy load was caused by the fact that the children bring textbooks, guides, homework notebooks, rough work notebooks etc., to the classroom every day. Therefore, clear guidelines of what to bring to the schools is required, it said.

The school managements should inform students well in advance about the textbooks and notebooks to be brought to the school on a particular day. The department asked the schools to sensitise parents and students about appropriate kind of school bags to be used.

The order also said that there should be no homework for primary school students and all work pertaining to exercises given at the end of each unit or lesson in textbooks should be done during school hours under supervision of teachers. The school should plan for homework to classes VI to X by allocating particular days for homework for specific subjects, the order said.

The order also asks schools to provide safe drinking water so as to avoid children getting water bottles from home, which add to their load.

The Andhra Pradesh Child Rights Association has welcomed the move and said the government should ensure strict implementation of the order.

The officials should take action against the school managements which insist on workbooks and other material, thereby overloading the students, association president P Achyuta Rao said.

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Australia became the 35th country on Wednesday to join the International Solar Alliance, an initiative launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in November 2015 in Paris. It is co-led by India and France.

The platform brings together countries that are keen to massively ramp up their solar power production.

The sun is the source of all energy. The world must turn to solar, the power of our future, Modi said at the launch during the 21st Conference of Parties (COP 21) where the Paris climate treaty was also signed.

The aim was to support developing countries to boost their solar production capacity. When it was announced over 100 countries extended their support.

The solar alliance, whose head office is in India, has grown stronger in the past two years with more countries joining the group and signing the agreement.

Till May this year, 6 countries had ratified the agreement, once 15 countries ratify it, the agreement will become a legal entity.

The alliance means not just cooperation on the technology front but also much-needed finances for solar projects. The French Development Agency has pledged 300 million euros to fund initial projects.

India on its part through the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA) and Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) is contributing $1 million to the ISA fund.

The larger aim is to mobilise over $ 1000 billion by 2030 towards promoting solar power on all fronts, generation and storage.

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CGTN photo

Chen Wenhui, one of seven suspects involved in a telecom fraud case that led to the death of a student last year, was sentenced to life in jail by a court in Linyi, east China's Shandong Province on Wednesday.

Xu Yuyu, a high school graduate from Linyi, died of a heart attack last August after 9,900 yuan (1,450 US dollars) of her university tuition were swindled.

The case sparked national outcry last year.

All seven suspects involved in the case were arrested in August 2016.

Local prosecutors said the criminal gang gained more than 560,000 yuan (58,196 US dollars) by cheating people through phone calls made between November 2015 and August 2016.
Cassi Pittman and her fiance Adam are huge fans of former US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle. So much so that they decided to recreate iconic images of the former presidential couple for their engagement shoot.

The Cleveland couples wedding planner, Covesa Kelly, revealed on Instagram that they had asked for just one photo. But she had other plans.

A post shared by Covesa Kelly Events (@covesakellyevents) on Jul 11, 2017 at 6:17am PDT

I miss The Obamas SO much that when our Bride and Groom said Can we try and duplicate one of their famous shots for our engagement pics? I was like lets do an entire shoot- we can do this and this and THIS! she wrote on Instagram.

Everything from the Obamas poses for a photoshoot for African American womens lifestyle magazine Essence was replicated. The settings, Cassis hair, Adams outfits and accessories - their photographer Natasha Herbert made sure that each frame was shot just like the original.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Cassi says, As African-Americans, we admire their achievements and what they represent. They have a love that just shines, and we wanted to capture that love in our photos.
A team of the deputy excise and taxation commissioner (DETC), along with the subdivisional magistrate(SDM), remeasured distance of the liquor vend in DLF Phase 4 from a school in the area on Wednesday after the intervention of the Gurgaon deputy commissioner.

The parent body of the school as well as residents of the area had complained to the district administration against the newly opened liquor vend saying that the outlet  was a bad influence on children.

The parents alleged that the liquor vend is where they park their cars and children have easy access to the outlet.

The excise officials met the school administration and the parent body on Wednesday and discussed the issue. According to the excise policy, no liquor vend should be operational within 150 metres of an educational institution. The excise department on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, measured the distance from all entry and exit points of the vend to the school and found it to be beyond the 150-metre limit.

Excise officials claimed that the vend was allotted keeping in mind the distance from schools in the locality. In all, four measurements were taken by the team and all of them found the vend to be a safe distance from the school.

Officials said they will take all matters into consideration and take a decision which will be in favour of parents and residents.

We had visited the spot along with the SDM, school administration and parents. The distance from the vend to the school was measured as 164 metres. But we will still consider the issue and will try to resolve it in a manner that does not affect parents and children. The deputy commissioner had asked us to look into the issue as parents were concerned for their wards, said Sneh Lata Yadav, DETC East.

After the measurement on Tuesday found the vend to be in the safe zone, parents had requested the deputy commissioner Vinay Pratap Singh to shift the vend.

The residents also demanded a measurement to assess the distance of the vend from the residential complex as the entry for the school and the complex is the same.

There were four measurements taken. The vend was found to be 130 metres from Hamilton Gate, 30 metres from the complex gate, 80 metres from the boundary wall and 164 from the exit gate. We have met the deputy commissioner and he has promised us that the shop will be shut, Sudhir Sachdeva, a parent and resident of Sushant Lok 1.

Singh said, The DETC and SDM had remeasured the location on Wednesday. I have received the report and it clearly mentions that the shop is beyond the 150 metre mark . But keeping in mind the sentiments of the people, we have asked the licensee to shift the shop from the present location and not to run the shop in the meanwhile. The issue is resolved.

On Tuesday the excise officials also measured the distance of other liquor vends in Sector 14, Manesar and Bilaspur and found them to be operational in safe zones.

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Assamese actress Bidisha Bezbaruah, who committed suicide at her Sushant Lok apartment on Monday, had asked her father to arrange for divorce a day earlier.

Twenty-eight-year-old Bidisha, who had a love marriage with Nisheeth Jha, was reportedly distressed by the fact that he had not come to Gurgaon from Mumbai for the last 12 days on one pretext or the other, her father Aswini Bezbaruah said.

The couple had taken transfer from Mumbai in June and had rented a house in Gurgaons Sushant Apartment.

Bidisha, who had recently acted in Jagga Jasoos, was found hanging from her apartment on Monday evening. Police have arrested her husband Nisheeth Jha on charges of abetment to suicide. Jha was produced in court on Wednesday. He has been remanded to one day police custody, said Ravinder Kumar, Gurgaon Police, public relations officer.

On Sunday, Bidisha had sent me a message on WhatsApp that I should arrange for a divorce as she had reached a dead end in her marriage. I tried to convince her that she should try to rebuild the relationship but she told me that she had lost all faith and trust because of Nisheeth, said the father, who is a writer and former banker.

The parents of the deceased stay in Guwahati, and her brother works as an engineer in Pune.

Bezbaruah alleged that the immediate reason for Bidisha to take the extreme step was that Nisheeth, who had gone to Mumbai just for two to three days had not returned even after 12 days.

On the fateful day, I spoke to Nisheeth after Bidisha told me to arrange for divorce. I asked him to catch the first flight to Gurgaon and meet Bidisha but he did not go asking for more time and the result was her suicide, Bezbaruah told HT.

Bezbaruah also alleged that his daughter had found out that Nisheeth had an affair with his colleague in Mumbai. He knew her even prior to knowing Bidisha and continued the relationship. Bidisha came to know about it in January. Despite his promise that he would stop all this, Nisheeth continued in the affair, he said.

Everything was fine till January, when Bidisha came to know about the alleged affair and their relationship took a nosedive after that, and ultimately resulted in the suicide, said the father.

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Over two hundred and fifty students from Delhi NCR on Wednesday interacted with Australias foreign minister Julie Bishop, who was in Gurgaon as part of an initiative aimed at developing student and teacher exchange programmes between the two countries. The programmes have been commissioned under the Australia-India BRIDGE School Partnerships Project.

Bishop, during her visit to Shiv Nadar school, participated in a live interaction with the BRIDGE students in Australia and India on the theme STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education.

She also shared her insight and thoughts on the theme Careers of the Future in a bid to inspire the budding leaders of tomorrow.

Established in 2015, building relationships through Intercultural Dialogue & Growing Engagement (BRIDGE) is an international programme that fosters and encourages partnerships between teachers, students and school communities. BRIDGE maximizes the use of (Information and Communication Technologies) ICT in classrooms and encourages students to collaborate on projects, practice language skills and develop life-long friendships with students at their partner school.

Read I Gurgaon: Girl students block Pataudi Road as 88 of 100 fail class 10 exams

Shiv Nadar School is one of the participating schools in the Australia-India BRIDGE School Partnership Project.

Addressing students and teachers,Bishop said that students should keep their eyes and ears open and should enquire about their career options. She said they should be curious about their careers and should look to be the leaders in their family, friends circle and at school. She advised them to be confident as they are the ones who will be the pioneers of future technologies. She said the students should be curious and have the ability to communicate.

Educational exchange programmes have come to acquire a lot of importance these days as the students get a chance to explore new campuses, meet people and make friends for life. They also increase their appetite for learning.

This is the time for unprecedented change and we see technological advancements changing the way we live, the way we communicate and the way we work. We can see that the jobs of the future, the careers of the future are very different. Australia is the second-most popular destination in the world for international students and last year there were 70,000 enrolments from India for students to study in our universities and institutions. We have some of the best educational institutes in the world, Bishop said.

Col. (Retd) Gopal Karunakaran, CEO, Shiv Nadar School, said, BRIDGE is an important initiative that builds global competence through student engagement between Australia and Asia and we see both our students and teachers benefitting immensely from this programme. Initiatives such as these greatly encourage schools to build the spirit of internationalism and recognise diversity in a globalised world.

The students performed a fusion of contemporary and traditional Indian dance in the ministers honour.

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Deepika Padukone is one of the newest members the Academy of Motion Picture of Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) and the actor says she feels honoured to be included in the Class of 2017.

The 31-year-old actor, who made her Hollywood debut with Vin Diesels xXx: Return of Xander Cage, took to Twitter to share her excitement.

Honoured to be a new #Academymemeber. @TheAcademy # Classof2017, Deepika tweeted.

Following two years of sharp criticism and back-to-back ceremonies with an all-white slate of acting nominees, AMPAS last month invited a record 774 new members from 57 countries around the world to join the organisations ranks.

Apart from Deepika, Priyanka Chopra has also joined the Academy Class of 2017.

Other Indian stars who have been invited to join the Academy and vote in the Oscars include the likes of, Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Salman Khan and Irrfan Khan and filmmakers Goutam Ghose and Buddhadeb Dasgupta.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
As many as 95 terrorists were eliminated in Jammu and Kashmir between January and July 9, while this figure was 150 for 2016, the Rajya Sabha was informed on Wednesday.

As many as 38 security personnel and 12 civilians were also killed during this period in the Valley that witnessed 172 terror incidents, Union minister of state for home Hansraj Gangaram Ahir said in a written reply.

Ahir said 150 terrorists  the highest since 2011  were neutralised in 2016 in Jammu and Kashmir which faced 322 terror incidents in which 82 security men and 15 civilians were killed.

In 2015, 108 terrorists were killed during clashes with security forces at different places, while 39 security personnel and 17 civilians also lost their lives in 208 terror incidents.

In 2014, 110 terrorists were killed in different shootouts in the Valley, which witnessed 222 incidents of terrorist violence and killing of 47 security personnel and 28 civilians.

In 2013, 67 terrorists were neutralised while 53 security personnel and 15 civilians were killed in 170 terror-related incidents.

Read | Amarnath yatra attack: 164% rise in terror-related civilian deaths in Kashmir over a year

In 2012, 72 terrorists were killed, apart from 15 security personnel and a similar number of civilians in 220 violent attacks.

In 2011, 100 terrorists were killed, apart from 33 security personnel and 31 civilians in 340 terror incidents.

Citing the report, the minister said that from July 2014 to June 2017, there was a reduction in Maoist violence in the country by 22.25 per cent (3,999 to 3,109) compared with the preceding three years (July 2011 to June 2014) and an increase of 78 per cent (228 to 406) in killing of Maoists compared with the preceding three years.
Even as public outrage in the Kotkhai rape and murder case refuses to die down, one of the six arrested in the crime, identified as Surat Singh, died in police custody in Kotkhai on Wednesday morning.

On July 13, police had claimed a breakthrough in the rape and murder of a minor school girl whose naked body was found in isolated woods in Kotkhai tehsils Halaila village. The six accused were identified as Ashish Chauhan (29), Rajinder Singh (32) of Sharaal village, Subash Singh Bisht (42) of Pauri Garhwal, Surat Singh (29) of Nepal, Lok Jan (19) of Nepal and Deepak (38) of Garhwal. Bisht is a priest in a temple at Pauri Garhwal. They were produced before a court in Theog and sent to seven-day police remand.

All the six arrested were kept in police custody in Kotkhai. The police is tight-lipped over the matter but sources have confirmed to Hindustan Times that Singh, a Nepalese national, died due to strangulation. His body is being brought to IGMC, Shimla, for postmortem.

Surat Singh has died, confirmed Shimla superintendent of police (SP) DW Negi.

Succumbing to public pressure, the Himachal government on Friday ordered a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the case that has seen massive public outrage with a mob vandalising police vehicles outside the Theog police station. Calling the six arrests an eyewash, the crowd was demanding a CBI probe.

The highway from Shimla to Kotkhai was blocked at several places due to protests on Wednesday morning. (Deepak Sansta/HT)

Unprecedented scenes are being witnessed in Himachal, with people thronging to the Mall Road in Shimla demanding accountability on part of the government. Locals even threw stones at the Kotkhai police station on Wednesday.

Cops suspended

The entire staff of the Kotkhai thana, including the SHO, has been suspended following this death in custody. Sources say the SHO had kept all the six accused in two cells instead of keeping them in separate cells. The police allege that Surat Singh was killed in a scuffle with the other accused in his cell.

Meanwhile, protests continued to rock upper Himachal on Wednesday with protesters stooping traffic at various places on the way to Kotkhai. Seeking justice for the victim, Gudiya, the protesters alleged that the six arrests are a cover-up and the real accused have gone scot-free.

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The lone African white rhino at the Assam State Zoo died of old age late Tuesday night, officials said.

Mohan, 47, who was brought from the United States in 1974, died without mating. The zoo officials failed to find him a female partner in over four decades of his stay, despite him experiencing mood swings and exhibiting violent tendencies such as banging against the enclosure, which officials attributed to his frustration over sexual inactivity.

In 2005, Mohan was diagnosed with paratuberculosis, or Johnes Disease, which is contagious, chronic and often fatal for ruminants such as cows but can also strike hindgut fermenters such as horses and rhinos.

Zoo officials said they never expected Mohan to recover. He was too old to eat. His system was refusing to take food even in liquid form. He had battled diseases earlier, but gave up the fight at 11.30pm yesterday (Tuesday), Tejas Mariswamy, the zoos divisional forest officer (DFO), told HT on Wednesday. The official explained than the average lifespan of rhinos is 45 to 50 years.

Mohan, bought for Rs 50,000 from Southwitch Birds and Animals Inc in Black Stone, US, had attained sexual maturity three years after he landed at the zoo on December 22, 1974. He was long past his sexual prime when he developed the disease in 2005, by which time officials began describing the possibility of bringing a mating partner for him as dangerous.

Sadly, Mohan died without mating because a female white rhino could not be found in India, Mariswamy said.

Officials said Mohan could have been paired with a captive Indian female rhino. But the Central Zoo Authority (CZA) had in 1986 banned cross-mating of animals belonging to different species. The CZAs move was in tune with the worldwide decision to stop hybridisation of big cats after the Alipore Zoo, Kolkata, had experimented with litigons (a cross between a lion and a tigress) and tigons (a tiger and a lioness) in the 1970s .

Sangeeta Goswami of People For Animals said Mohans death is a reminder that feral animals should not be made to undergo life in captivity. The African rhino was denied sexual rights for no fault of his, she said.

A spokesperson of People for Ethical Treatment to Animals said, Captive breeding of animals in zoos is unethical, even if it means depriving a rhino its right to reproduction.

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The much-talked about meeting between chief minister Nitish Kumar and his deputy, Tejashwi Yadav, doesnt seem to have resolved the crisis facing the ruling alliance in Bihar.

The 45-minute meeting was being watched closely as Tejashwi was supposed to explain the corruption charges against him, which have worsened the ties between Kumars Janata Dal (United) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal led by Lalu Prasad, the deputy chief ministers father.

Both the parties are silent on the outcome but the JD(U) on Wednesday said the RJD would have to come clean. The RJD would have to clear itself in public domain. Our stand has not changed, party spokesperson Ajay Alok said, suggesting the crisis was far from over.

We want a public clarification. This remains our official stand, said MLC Neeraj Kumar, also a JD(U) state spokesperson.

Tejashwi was recently named in an alleged land-for-hotels case by the Central Bureau of Investigation. The CBI raided the residence of Lalu, also named in the case, and other properties in five cities.

The land-for-hotels case is the latest in a string of corruption allegations against Lalu and his clan. Kumar is under intense pressure to sack his deputy to protect the image of a clean government.

The RJD, too, has kept quiet except former Rajya Sabha MP Shivanand Tiwary, who declared the crisis had blown over and Kumar was satisfied with Tejashwis stand.

But there was little on the ground to back his claim.

The JD (U) plans to aggressively take up the matter as party sources said no further instructions have been issued to party spokespersons to go slow on the issue.

The party had earlier barred its leaders from speaking in public about the rift, which not only will have a bearing on the politics of Bihar but could also decide the fate of the opposition parties efforts to come together to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modis BJP in 2019 Lok Sabha election.

Kumar stayed off official engagements on Wednesday. Tejashwi left for Delhi while Lalu was headed to Ranchi in neighbouring Jharkhand, where he will appear in a fodder scam case on Thursday.

Though Tejashwis visit is said to be official, sources said, he would also be consulting lawyers to get his clarifications prepared.

The fresh JD (U) attack was a well-thought out move to send a message that all was not well, sources said.

With his credibility at stake, Kumar would like to go into the monsoon session, which begins July 28, with something substantial.

The BJP, which has been questioning his zero tolerance policy against corruption, will be unsparing over the swirl of corruption charges against Lalu and his family.

There were reports that a group of senior JD(U) leaders, including Sharad Yadav, was trying to broker peace between the two warring partners.

Insiders are of the view that the RJD is not in a position to drive a hard bargain and Lalu needs JD (U) for his sons to have a long political inning.

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A Brazilian judge says bank accounts belonging to ex-President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva have been frozen due to his conviction on corruption charges.

The office of federal judge Sergio Moro said Wednesday that the frozen assets amount to over 600,000 Brazilian reals ($190,000) in four accounts.

Moro is the same judge who sentenced Silva to 9 years in prison in connection with a sprawling graft probe involving state-run oil giant Petrobras. Moro also blocked Lula from using three apartments, a piece of land and two cars linked to the former president.

Silva denies any wrongdoing and will remain free until his appeal is decided.

A spokesman for Silva confirmed the assets were blocked by Brazils central bank, but did not comment further.
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core has, with great foresight and a comprehensive perspective, reflected deeply on the future and destiny of mankind as well as the general development trend of China and the whole world. Inspired by the two centenary goals (namely to finish building a moderately prosperous society in all respects by the centenary of the CPC in 2021 and to turn China into a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious by the centenary of the People's Republic of China in 2049) and the Chinese dream of national renewal, the Central Party Committee has broken new ground in both diplomatic theory and practice while maintaining consistency and continuity of China's foreign policy. It has put forward new ideas and propositions with distinctive Chinese features that embody the call of our times and envision greater human progress. It is on this basis that General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy has been formed and established. General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy represents the CPC Central Committee's new governing philosophy and strategy as they apply to diplomacy and is an integral part of the theories of socialism with distinctive Chinese features. It is a vision that has greatly enriched and taken forward the diplomatic thinking and strategy of New China and will have extremely important and far-reaching significance in steering China's endeavor to keep pace with the times and make new progress in external work.

I

Diplomacy is an essential part of the overall work of the Party and the State. At a time when China's relations with the rest of the world are undergoing profound changes and the Chinese nation has entered a crucial stage of achieving renewal, General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy addresses new issues facing China's diplomacy with a Marxist position, viewpoints and approaches. It answers key questions such as what is major-country diplomacy with distinctive Chinese features and how to conduct it, and defines the guiding philosophy, basic principles, key tasks, strategies and tactics, and institutional arrangements of conducting external work in a new era. General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy is a comprehensive and profound system of theories with rich connotations.

1. Setting strategic goals and key missions for China's external work in a new era. Based on his assessment of the global trend and the historical stage China has reached, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out in explicit terms that we are closer than ever to the center of the global stage, that we are closer than ever to fulfilling the Chinese dream of national renewal and that we are more confident and able than ever to realize this goal. General Secretary Xi Jinping has stressed the following: In pursuing diplomacy, China will stay committed to peace, development and win-win cooperation, take into account both domestic and international situation and ensure both development and security. We will stay committed to peaceful development, resolutely uphold sovereignty, security and development interests and preserve and extend the major period of strategic opportunity for China's development so as to pave the way for achieving the two centenary goals and fulfilling the Chinese dream of national renewal. These important statements which expound on the nature, objectives and missions of China's diplomacy are a fundamental guide to the conduct of China's external relations.

2. Boosting confidence in China as a major socialist country with distinctive Chinese features. General Secretary Xi Jinping has repeatedly emphasized that the whole Party should have firm confidence in the path, theories, system and culture of socialism with distinctive Chinese features. The Chinese Communists and Chinese people are fully confident of offering Chinese input to human exploration of better social systems. Since the 18th Party Congress, China has overcome many difficulties and challenges on the diplomatic front, forged ahead in a changing international environment, and made outstanding achievements. It has been proven that socialism with distinctive Chinese features represents the biggest strength, the most salient characteristic and the greatest opportunity of China's external affairs. Having full confidence in the path, theories, system and culture of socialism with distinctive Chinese features underpins and drives China's external work, and ensures its success.

3. Laying out a great vision of building a community of shared future for mankind. With a keen sense of responsibility for the whole mankind and with the historical advance of the human society in mind, General Secretary Xi Jinping shows a deep understanding of the trend of the times and future of mankind. On this basis, he calls for building a new type of international relations featuring win-win cooperation and jointly fostering a community of shared future for mankind. By pointing out the direction and drawing a blueprint for the international community to achieve enduring peace, common development and sustained prosperity, this call represents China's global vision of pursuing both its own development and the development of the world, and demonstrates that China is ready to shoulder its responsibility as a major country. It therefore displays strong appeal, influence and vitality. Since the 18th Party Congress, China has championed this call at important multilateral forums like the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. In conducting external exchanges, China has followed the principle of seeking win-win outcomes and taken steps to achieve the long-term goal of building a community of shared future for mankind. China's endeavors have thus been well received and supported by the international community.

4. Pursuing all-round diplomacy to build a global network of partnerships. With the vision and strategic thinking of an outstanding statesman and strategist, General Secretary Xi Jinping has laid out an overarching plan for conducting China's external work. To this end, he has made vigorous efforts himself to visit various countries across the five continents and major organizations of regional and international cooperation. During these visits, General Secretary Xi Jinping engaged fully with foreign leaders, public figures and ordinary people. By citing touching examples of China's win-win cooperation with other countries and people-to-people friendship, he stressed the need for all countries and peoples to forge partnerships in pursuing a shared bright future. Since the 18th Party Congress, China has fully advanced its friendly relations with other countries, with neighboring countries and major countries being the priority of this pursuit, other developing countries serving as its foundation, and multilateral settings as its platform. We have deepened practical cooperation, enhanced mutual political trust, garnered popular support and improved institution building for this endeavor. China has boosted its all-round, wide-ranging and multi-tiered external exchanges, and China's circle of friends has covered the whole world.

5. Pursuing a new round of opening-up featuring the Belt and Road Initiative. Based on a keen appreciation of new dynamics in China's internal and external environment, General Secretary Xi Jinping put forward the Belt and Road Initiative (the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road). This initiative aims to further advance China's opening-up and share China's development opportunities with other countries, and it will inject strong impetus into global development. Over the past four years since it was launched, the Belt and Road Initiative has been translated into action and delivered concrete outcomes. As a matter of fact, it has developed into an open and inclusive platform of international cooperation and a widely-welcomed public good for the global community. Over 100 countries and international organizations have expressed support for or participated in the initiative, and many landmark projects with wide impact have been launched. The complementarity between China's development strategy and those of many other countries has been enhanced and fast progress has been made in scaling up infrastructual connectivity. China has recently hosted a successful and productive Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, creating more momentum for jointly pursuing the Belt and Road Initiative.

6. Demonstrating China's resolve to uphold its sovereignty and security interests. General Secretary Xi Jinping has unequivocally stated that China stays committed to peaceful development. China does not covet the rights and interests of other countries. Meanwhile, it will never give up its legitimate rights and interests. No country should ever expect China to trade off its core interests or swallow the bitter fruit that undermines its sovereignty, security and development interests. This is what we say, and also what we do. Since the 18th Party Congress, we have particularly staked out our positions on Taiwan, the South China Sea and other issues concerning China's major core interests. We have drawn a clear line of what is unacceptable, and acted forcefully to defend our core interests as well as legitimate rights. All this has greatly boosted the morale of the Party, the military and the general public and won international respect.

7. Exploring new approach to and practice of global governance. General Secretary Xi Jinping has tapped into the rich heritage of governance philosophy and wisdom unique to Chinese culture that is relevant today and given full expression to the shared aspirations of both the Chinese people and the people around the world. In response to major issues and challenges confronting global governance, General Secretary Xi Jinping has put forth a series of new propositions on global governance, security, development, justice, interests and globalization which are aimed at promoting a global governance system that is fairer, more equitable, inclusive and balanced. Since the 18th Party Congress, China has hosted the 2014 APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting in Beijing and the 2016 G20 Summit in Hangzhou, and taken part in many major multilateral diplomatic events. Through such active participation to help steer the global governance process, China has offered its vision and input for reforming and improving the global governance system and establishing a fairer and more equitable international order.

8. Exercising overall leadership by the Central Party Committee over China's external work. General Secretary Xi Jinping has stressed that the Party's role is central to running China's affairs well. The leadership by the Communist Party of China is both the defining feature and the biggest strength of socialism with Chinese characteristics. What is more, such leadership enables us to cope with internal and external challenges. Since the 18th Party Congress, the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core has exercised overall leadership over the conduct of China's external work. It has further enhanced the role of the Central Foreign Affairs Leading Group and convened a meeting on neighborhood diplomacy and a central conference on work relating to foreign affairs to improve top-level design, strategic planning and coordination on external affairs. It has adopted and improved major regulations on foreign affairs management, advanced institutional reforms on external work and coordinated efforts of various departments and regions to form synergy. All these endeavors have provided powerful political support for us to overcome difficulties and forge ahead in external work.

II

General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy is an important component of the new governance philosophy and strategies developed by the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core. It provides a solid theoretical foundation for and guidance to conducting China's diplomacy in the new era. To study and achieve a deep understanding of General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy is an important political task for all of us in conducting China's foreign affairs and diplomacy. It is also a very important guide to us in conducting a systematic review of the achievements and experience of China's external work since the 18th Party Congress and in making new progress in external affairs. Wide-ranging in coverage, rich and profound in connotation, General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy serves as a comprehensive and systematic guidance to the external work of the Party and the State. We should focus on the following four aspects in our efforts to gain a deep understanding of General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy:

1. We should have a keen appreciation of the sense of mission underlying General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy. Demonstrating a strong sense of historical mission and extraordinary political vision, General Secretary Xi Jinping has led us on the Long March of our generation toward the two centenary goals and the realization of the Chinese dream of national renewal. General Secretary Xi Jinping, bearing in mind the responsibility of the leader of a big country, has reflected deeply on the critical issue of what kind of a world we should build and how to build it, an issue that concerns the future of mankind. He has offered China's contribution and input to this endeavor. Since the 18th Party Congress, China has, as its capability permits, undertaken more international responsibilities and obligations. It has fully participated in international peacekeeping missions, played its part in meeting global challenges such as climate change and addressing major regional hotspot issues, and offered global public goods, particularly in the form of the Belt and Road Initiative. China has thus made an important contribution to advancing world peace and development.

2. We should have a keen appreciation of the profound significance of General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy to our times. With an incisive grasp of the growing interdependence among countries and recognizing the need to adapt to and sustain the trend of peace, development and win-win cooperation in our times, General Secretary Xi Jinping has set forth the important vision of building a new type of international relations and a community of shared future for mankind. He calls for making economic globalization a more open, inclusive and balanced process that delivers win-win outcomes to all. He also calls for building a global governance system that reflects well the changing reality of balance of forces in the world. His vision has thus set the direction and pathways to address thorny issues facing mankind such as deficit in peace, development and governance. General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy, formed and developed as China's relationship with the world is going through historic changes, bears a distinctive feature of our times and has great current and historical significance.

3. We should have a keen appreciation of the spirit of innovation embodied in General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy. General Secretary Xi Jinping views reform and opening-up as the defining feature of contemporary China. He has integrated the underlying principles of Marxism with the realities of present-day China, and he is bold in breaking new ground in both theory and practice. General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy builds on past success and is forward-looking in nature. Having drawn on China's fine cultural and philosophical tradition, it has enriched and taken forward the diplomatic thinking and strategy of New China, thus creating a system of theories of major-country diplomacy with distinctive Chinese features. Bearing in mind both China's own development and the world's common development and drawing inspiration from the ancient Silk Road, General Secretary Xi Jinping creatively put forward the Initiative of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, thus building a new platform for China to share development opportunities with the world and developing a new model for international cooperation. The new thinking articulated by General Secretary Xi Jinping, such as upholding justice and pursuing shared interests, a new vision of security and a new vision of global governance, has provided theoretical guidance for countries to reject the Cold War mentality and zero-sum game in favor of peaceful co-existence and win-win cooperation.

4. We should have a keen appreciation of the strategic wisdom underpinning General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy. General Secretary Xi Jinping has always observed the prevailing trend in a strategic context and made strategic decisions accordingly. He has made a profound analysis of external opportunities and challenges facing China, taken into account both China's domestic and international interests, and attached importance to both development and security. On this basis, he has advanced China's external work in a well-planned and coordinated way on various fronts, such as relations with other major countries, the neighboring countries and other developing countries as well as multilateral diplomacy. General Secretary Xi Jinping has put forth a whole range of principles guiding China's diplomatic strategy and policies. He places high importance not just on top-level designing and strategic planning, but also on operations and policy moves. He is thus able to address core issues like pulling an ox by its nose and ensure good coordination among various fronts as a good pianist does with ten fingers, achieving a high degree of balance between firm commitment to principles and appropriate flexibility in policy implementation. Guided by General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy, China has become more confident in pursuing major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics, fully demonstrating its distinctive vision, style and way of conduct as a major country. As a result, China has secured a favorable strategic position in the complex and fluid international arena.

We should fully appreciate the great political, theoretical, practical and methodological significance of General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy. We should, with a keen sense of mission, responsibility, purpose and commitment, work hard to study this thinking and implement it earnestly, systematically and thoroughly. We should strive to gain a deep understanding of the essence and core of this thinking, so that it will become a powerful source of inspiration and strength that guides us in conducting major-country diplomacy with distinctive Chinese features.

III

The world is now at a stage of major development, transformation and adjustment, and China's diplomacy is faced with both unprecedented opportunities and challenges. We must be fully aware of the need to uphold political integrity, keep in mind the bigger picture, follow the leadership core, and meet Party requirements. We must stay true to our ideal and mission and fulfill our responsibility. We must purposefully follow the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core theoretically, politically and in practice, and fully implement General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy. This will enable us to make new progress in conducting China's external work, foster favorable external conditions for achieving the two centenary goals and realizing the Chinese dream of national renewal, and continuously make important contribution to the cause of peace and development for mankind.

1. We should strengthen strategic planning for foreign affairs to accomplish the central task of the Party and the State. We should have an accurate assessment of international situation and overall trend of world affairs, stay committed to peaceful development and national renewal as the theme of China's external work in the new era. We should take into account both our domestic and international interests, and adhere to the general principle of seeking progress while maintaining stability. We should explore new theory and practice in conducting major-country diplomacy with distinctive Chinese features, and consolidate and enhance China's favorable strategic position. Doing so will enable us both to ensure reform, development and stability at home and make new progress in pursuing major-country diplomacy with distinctive Chinese features.

2. We should foster a more peaceful and stable external environment by pursuing an all-round diplomatic agenda. We will continue to enhance friendship and cooperation with all other countries on the basis of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and work to build a global network of partnerships. We should strengthen coordination and cooperation with other major countries, continuously expand areas where our respective interests converge and put in place a generally stable framework of major-country relationship. We should stay committed to the principles of amity, sincerity, mutual benefit and inclusiveness, enhance friendship and cooperation with our neighbors, and work to consolidate strategic support in the neighborhood area. We should foster friendship, uphold justice, and pursue shared interests to further enrich South-South cooperation and strengthen mutual trust, solidarity and cooperation with other developing countries.

3. We should take solid steps in pursuing the Belt and Road Initiative and break new ground in opening-up. We should take the opportunity of the successful Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation to implement its consensus and outcomes in accordance with the principle of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits. We should continue to pursue the strategy of win-win cooperation and opening-up and embrace the world in a more extensive and diversified way. We should actively uphold the multilateral trade regime as the main channel, promote international trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, oppose protectionism in all its forms and endeavor to build an open global economy.

4. We should get fully involved in global governance and promote the establishment of a fairer and more equitable international political and economic order. We should champion and apply a new vision of global governance, uphold the core role of the United Nations as the main channel in addressing issues relating to international peace and security, follow through on the agreements reached at the G20 Hangzhou Summit, Hamburg Summit and the previous summits, and support APEC and other major global and regional cooperation organizations in playing a positive role. These efforts are designed to make the international order and system fairer and more equitable. We should enhance the BRICS mechanism and make the upcoming BRICS Xiamen Summit a success; and we should ensure that emerging markets and developing countries will have a greater say in the international governance system.

5. We should be on high alert against potential danger and effectively uphold China's sovereignty, security and development interests. Upholding core national interests is the noble mission of China's diplomacy. We will continue to uphold China's national interests as the starting point and basic goal of China's external work, and be firm in defending China's territorial sovereignty and legitimate maritime rights and interests. We will stay committed to the one-China principle, firmly oppose and fight against any separatist attempt for Taiwan independence and strive for China's reunification. We should enhance international cooperation in counter-terrorism, cyberspace and law enforcement to uphold and strengthen national security. We should put in place an efficient and well-functioning system to protect China's overseas interests and improve it to better protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese nationals and enterprises overseas.

6. We should actively communicate China's policies to the world and conduct public diplomacy to enhance China's moral appeal. We should enhance confidence in the path, theories, system and culture of socialism with distinctive Chinese features, and share our governance experience with other countries. We should give a good account of the theory and guidelines of socialism with distinctive Chinese features. We should endeavor to let the world know more about the profound connotations of China's policy of pursuing peaceful development and its vision of building a community of shared future for mankind. We should actively put forth new thinking, initiatives and plans aimed at resolving hotspot issues as China fulfills its role as a major responsible country. We should encourage dialogue among civilizations and social and cultural exchanges so that the Chinese dream and the dreams of other peoples will be pursued and realized together.

China has reached a new starting point, shouldering a new historic mission in conducting its diplomacy. We will rally even more closely around the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, and study and implement General Secretary Xi Jinping's thought on diplomacy in a deep-going way. We will forge ahead and keep writing new chapters of major-country diplomacy with distinctive Chinese features, greet the successful convocation of the 19th Party Congress with even more diplomatic accomplishments, and make even greater contribution to realizing the two centenary goals and the Chinese dream of national renewal.

(The author is State Councilor and Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Leading Group.)
The CBI on Wednesday issued summons to Karti Chidambaram, the son of former finance minister P Chidambaram, in its ongoing probe against him in a corruption case, an official said.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), in its third notice to Karti, asked him to appear at its headquarters in south Delhis Lodhi Road on Friday.

The agency wants to examine Karti in a case related to Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance given to INX Media for allegedly receiving funds from Mauritius when his father was the Union finance minister.

The agency had issued summons to Karti and four others for questioning on June 27 and June 29, but they did not turn up.

Karti, through his lawyer, had then informed the CBI that he needed more time to appear.

The CBI on May 15 registered an FIR against Karti on charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating, accepting gratification by corrupt or illegal means, influencing public servants, and criminal misconduct.

Karti is alleged to have received Rs 3.5 crore from Mumbai-based INX media, now 9X Media, for helping it in getting FIPB clearance when it was run by Peter and Indrani Mukherjea, both accused in the Sheena Bora murder case.

The FIR does not mention the name of Chidambaram senior, though it says he cleared the FIPB approval for Rs 4.62 crore Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the FIPB meeting on May 18, 2007.

Karti left for London two days after the CBI registered a case against him.

In May, the agency had conducted raids at the premises of Karti, Peter, and Indrani at 14 locations in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Delhi National Capital Region in connection with the case.
Ashok Patil, 16, who lives in a childrens home in Nasik, still has the last memories of his father fresh in his mind. We had lunch after which he went to the farm. After few hours some people came to our house with his body, he said.

Patel was just nine years old when his father, a cotton farmer in a village in Gadchiroli district, committed suicide unable to pay debt to the money lender.

His relatives sent him to the childrens home in Nasik due to the poor condition of family.

The last time Patil went to his home was when he was in Class 5  four years ago.

My mother calls me once in a month, I want to go home. But where will the tickets money come from? he said.

He lives in the childrens home Adhartirth ashram with 400 others who lost their fathers to penury.

Like Patil, 40 children from this ashram, who have similar stories to share, gathered at Jantar Mantar on Wednesday demanding financial help for the families of farmers who committed suicide and waiver of debt for famers across India.

They were brought to Jantar Mantar by All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee which is holding agitation at Jantar Mantar since past two days demanding complete loan waver of farmers

Pallavi Panwar, 15, who too lost her father after he killed self unable to pay banks loan, said, Our family has suffered but if government does something , at least other farmers in the country will not quit farming.

Ask Pallavi and Ashok, if they wish to join farming, they immediately say no.

Pallavi aspires to be a doctor while Ashok wants to be a scientist.

Member of All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee and Swaraj India President Yogendra Yadav said he had met these children during the Kisan rally in Maharashtra.

We were pained to see what the family members have to go to after a farmers suicide. We wanted to show it to people living in the power corridors of Delhi, he said.

The children also staged a street play on the occasion showcasing the plight of a family after their father commits suicide.

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Samajwadi Party leader and former defence minister Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday claimed that China was ready to attack India in collaboration with Pakistan and asked the government to reverse its stand on the Tibet issue and support its independence.

Raising the matter in the Lok Sabha against the backdrop of tension between India and China, he asked the government to inform Parliament what it has done to meet any likely challenge from the neighbouring country.

India is today facing a big danger from China. I have been cautioning the central government for years. China has joined hands with Pakistan. It has made full preparation to attack India.

China is Indias biggest opponent. What has the government done? In Kashmir, the Chinese army has allied with the Pak army, Yadav, known for his tough stand on China, said during the Zero Hour.

He also claimed that China had buried nuclear weapons in Pakistan to target India, adding that Indian intelligence agencies would know better.

Yadav said Indias stand on Tibet, a reference to its acceptance that the region was part of China, was a mistake and the time has come to support its independence as it had been a traditional buffer between the two big nations.

China is our enemy, not Pakistan. Pakistan can do us no damage, he said. It was Indias responsibility to protect Bhutan and China was eyeing Nepal, he said.

He also spoke against massive amounts of Chinese goods finding a market in India.
A 12-hour shutdown called by the opposition Congress against a tribal partys indefinite road and rail blockade demanding separate state for the tribals crippled life in Tripura on Wednesday.

The Congress also accused the central government and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for conspiring in Tripura, like in Manipur, to get political and electoral mileage before the early next years assembly elections.

The party also blamed the ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) for its failure to govern the state properly.

Police said around 300 activists of Congress were arrested for picketing in front of government offices in different parts of the state.

Most of the government and semi-government as well as private offices, educational institutions, shops and business establishments were closed due to the strike.

Banks and financial institutions were also closed in view of the shutdown, which was also opposed by the CPI-M and BJP.

All vehicles, except those of security forces, went off the roads. The dawn-to-dusk bandh did not affect flights in and out of Agartala.

The shutdown is peaceful, deputy inspector general of police Arindam Nath told IANS.

The strike was total, successful and spontaneous, Tripura Pradesh Congress President Birajit Sinha said. The BJP, like in Manipur and other non-NDA ruled states, is also conspiring to disturb peace and political stability in Tripura. The BJP, as in other states, is funding the conspirators and parties involved in the political turmoil to gain political mileage, Sinha added.

He also charged the Left government with failure to deal with the Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripuras (IPFT) illegitimate demand for a separate state and blocking the vital national highway and lone railway line.

BJP-led central government remained completely inactive while a tribal party stopped plying of vehicles through a crucial national highway and obstructed solitary railway line. Both the highway and the railway line are under the control of central government, the Congress leader pointed out.

The BJP Vice-President Subal Bhowmik strongly denied the Congress allegations and said the people would suffer due to the shutdown.

The IPFT has been blocking National Highway-8, the lifeline of Tripura, and the lone railway line since July 10, leading to shortage of essential commodities, fuel, food grain and other goods of basic necessity.

A senior Tripura Home Department official said on the request of Chief Minister Manik Sarkar, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh had asked his deputy Kiren Rijiju on Monday to talk to the IPFT leaders.

Rijiju, however, did not talk to the IPFT leaders on Tuesday, instead through his officials, asked the tribal leaders to talk to the Tripura Governor Tathagata Roy about their demand.

IPFT General Secretary Mevar Kumar Jamatia and fronts youth wing President Dhananjoy Tripura have been camping in New Delhi since Thursday.

The IPFT has been agitating since 2009 for a separate state, to be carved out, by upgrading the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (TTAADC), which has jurisdiction over two-thirds of Tripuras 10,491 sq.km. area, home to over 12,16,000 people, mostly tribals, of the states 37-lakh population.

Most political parties, including the ruling CPI-M and the Congress, the BJP, and the Indigenous Nationalist Party of Tripura have rejected the IPFT demand, saying it was not practical to divide the already small state.

The IPFT leaders have has also met the Governor Tathagata Roy twice on Tuesday night and demanded tripartite meeting between them, central government and the state government to resolve their issue.

The tribal partys President Narendra Chandra Debbarma said they will hold a meeting on Wednesday and then decide about the withdrawal of the 10-day long National Highway and lone railway line blockades.
AIADMK (Amma) Deputy General Secretary TTV Dinakaran dismissed allegations of special treatment for his aunt and party chief VK Sasikala in prison, asserting that she was being treated as per rules.

In his first reaction since the allegations surfaced, Dhinakaran rubbished claims of payment of bribe for the alleged special treatment. Speaking to reporters, he said such allegations were false, adding we have not even met the DGP (Karnataka).

He said the Supreme Court had only awarded simple imprisonment to Sasikala. Hence, permission to wear personal clothing (rather than one meant for convicts) was as per rules and jail manual and similar to treatment accorded to other prison inmates, he claimed.

Seeking to explain further, Dhinakaran said when he was recently incarcerated in Tihar jail, he had a fan, a television and newspapers and these were given as per norms with the permission of authorities.

He said some television channels were making false claims in this regard by airing some visuals, adding that his party would be forced to initiate defamation proceedings against them.

Our enemies are seeking to politicise allegations made by a Karnataka official and jail inmates are being unnecessarily dragged into the controversy, he said.

Quoting a Tamil proverb that says people who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear, he said no irregularities happened at the prison.

He said he a proper inquiry would be held into the matter, adding that Congress party is not our coalition partner.

On Karnataka BJP staging a protest on the issue, Dhinakaran said it was simply state politics with the ruling Congress party.

BJPs Karnataka unit today slammed the Karnataka government over transfer of DIG (Prisons) D Roopa after she brought to light the alleged special treatment meted out Sasikala.

Dhinakaran said, he will meet Sasikala at the Parappana Agrahara Central Jail tomorrow.

Yesterday, AIADMK (Amma) Karnataka unit secretary V Pugazhenthi had dismissed allegations of Sasikala being accorded special treatment in the jail. He had said the only thing that she was provided in the prison was a bench to lie down and that too on a written request.

The Karnataka government has appointed retired IAS officer Vinay Kumar to probe the alleged special treatment meted out to Sasikala and other erroneous practises in the jail.

He was appointed after Roopa, shunted out as DIG (Prisons) on Monday, highlighted in a report the alleged special privileges given to Sasikala and others inside the Parapana Agrahara Central Jail.

The government had asked DGP (Prisons) H N Sathyanarayana Rao to go on compulsory leave after both officers sparred over the report in public.

The government also shifted Bengaluru central jail chief superintendent Krishna Kumar, who had also been blamed in the report by Roopa for alleged illegal activities in the prison.

In a report submitted on July 12 to Rao, Roopa had said there was talk that Rs two crore had exchanged hands to give preferential treatment to Sasikala and there were allegations against him too.

Rao had rubbished the charges as absolutely false, baseless and wild.
The government is engaged with China on the issue of the Kailash Mansarovar yatra via the Nathu La route, the Lok Sabha was informed today.

Replying to a written question, minister of state for external affairs VK Singh said the route for the yatra via Nathu La Pass in Sikkim became operational in 2015 on the basis of a Memorandum of Understanding signed in September 2014.

This year the yatra via the Nathu La has been deferred after the Chinese government cited unfavourable conditions to ensure the safe and smooth conduct of the yatra. The government is engaged with the Chinese government on this matter, Singh said.

His remarks come amid continued standoff between the Chinese and Indian troops at the Dokalam in Sikkim sector for over a month after Indian soldiers stopped the Chinese army from building a road in the area.
Karnatakas move to set up a panel to look into the legality of having an official state flag has behind it a history of conflicts -- both within the state and with other states.

At the moment, the state is fighting legal cases with all of its neighbours over sharing water from various rivers. Apart from the legal battle over Cauvery, the state is locked in similar battles over the Krishna, Godavari and Mahadayi rivers. There is also a longstanding dispute over Belagavi district, which some want to be integrated with Maharashtra.

Crucially, one of the petitions submitted in 2014 for having an official state flag comes from Belagavi. Speaking to HT, Bheemappa Gadad, an RTI activist, said the reason for such a demand was because some people in the district felt there was a need to assert that the region belonged to Karnataka.

There are some here, who want the district to be a part of Maharashtra. So, we wanted a flag that would show that Belagavi is a part of Karnataka, Gadad said.

The district has a large number of Marathi speakers and a local party, the Maharashtra Ekikaran Samiti, has been at the forefront of the demand to make the district a part of Maharashtra. The MES even hoists its own flag atop the corporation building in Belagavi city, Gadad said.

Towards a Kannada identity?

The proposal for having such a flag is not new. In his Budget speech in 2012, then chief minister DV Sadananda Gowda had said that the Kannada flag, which is made up of strips of red and yellow, would be hoisted atop all government buildings next to the national flag on November 1, which is the state formation day.

However, later that year, while replying to a public interest litigation petition calling for a flag code for the Kannada flag, the Bharatiya Janata Party retracted its decision saying a separate state flag would undermine the sanctity of the national flag.

According to film critic MK Raghavendra, who has written extensively about Kannada identity, the recent developments are just attempts to build a broader identity base for the Congress. Even the anti-Hindi imposition sentiment that is sought to be fanned is part of this, Raghavendra said, referring to the recent controversy over the use of Hindi in the signboards at metro stations in Bengaluru.

The state is dominated by the regions that formed a part of the princely state of Mysore, which is why the state seems to be obsessed with the Cauvery issue, Raghavendra said. According to him, the linguistic reorganisation of Karnataka had meant that those areas that were added to the Mysore state, like the Bombay-karnataka and Hyderabad-Karnataka regions, had always been sidelined.

The chief minister Siddaramaiah is trying to appeal to these areas on the basis of a politics of patronage. But people in these border districts have always felt that they have lost out because of the prominence given to the Old Mysore area, Raghavendra said.

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The first stage of negotiations between India and Russia on developing a fifth generation fighter jet (FGFA) together is over, an official has said.

Sergey Chemezov, CEO of Rostec Corporation, said this on Tuesday, adding that a final decision might be made in the near future.

Asked about the negotiations, on the sidelines of 13th International Aerospace Show MAKS, Chemezov also said the progress was slow as the project and its negotiations are very complicated.

As for the fifth generation, the work is underway. Stage one of negotiations is over. Now, we are discussing the second stage, Chemezov said.

I think that in the near future, all decisions will be made. And the contract documents will be signed, he said.

India and Russia had inked an inter-governmental pact for the FGFA project in 2007.

In December 2010, India had agreed to pay $295 million towards the preliminary design of the fighter, also referred to as the Perspective Multi-role Fighter (PMF).

However, negotiations faced various hurdles in the subsequent years.

The two sides hope to sign a detailed agreement on the design and development soon, though a deadline was not given.

While the slow pace of progress has been a concern, progress in discussions off late are going in a positive direction as per officials on both sides.

Chemezov, however, said there were delays as the project is complicated.

The work is going, it is very complicated, so it is not going fast, Chemezov said.

The only country for India which without any restrictions transfers all technologies is Russia, he added.

Asked about other ongoing projects between India and Russia, he said: We have an enterprise that has been working for a long time producing cruise missiles Brahmos. They are already completely localised today... This is one of the first projects that we implemented in India, as well as the T 90, Su-30MKI. That is a fairly large number of projects - some have already been implemented, some are being implemented.
For TR Zeliang, the chief ministers chair in Nagaland has come under unusual ways -- not once but twice.

The rebel Nagaland Peoples Front leader became the chief minister of the northeastern state on Wednesday five months after he was compelled to step down from the chair following public uproar.

This is the second time 65-year-old Zeliang, present chairman of the ruling Democratic Alliance of Nagaland, was sworn in as chief minister in the third term of the NPF-led DAN government in Nagaland.

Zeliang, who had been minister for planning and coordination in the Democratic Alliance of Nagaland (DAN) III ministry, had become the chief minister for the first time when he succeeded Neiphiu Rio in May, 2014, following Rios election to the Lok Sabha.

This February, he was forced to step down as chief minister following public agitation against the government for reservation of 33 per cent of seats for women in the election to urban local bodies.

Shurhozelie Liezietsu had replaced Zeliang. In these five months, Zeliang was the finance advisor to Chief Minister Liezietsu.

He revolted against Liezietsu on July 8 last claiming the support of a majority of the NPF and Independent MLAs and subsequently in a letter to Governor P B Acharya staked claim to form a new NPF government.

Zeliang joined active politics as president of District Youth Congress (I) in 1976. He had been involved in state politics for nearly four decades and served as a minister in various governments in the state.

Zeliang contested state Assembly elections for the first time in 1982 as an Independent and again in 1987 as an NNDP candidate from 6-Tening constituency in Peren district. He was unsuccessful both times.

He then won from Tening four times in a row beginning with the elections in 1989 as a candidate of the Naga Peoples Council and subsequently in 1993, 1998 and 2003 as a candidate of the Indian National Congress.

He served as Minister of State for Information and Tourism during 1989-90 and as Minister of State for Relief & Rehabilitation from 1994 to 1998.

During 1998-2003, he was the Minister for Environment and Forests and Geology and Mining under S C Jamir government.

In 2003, Zeliang and six Congress MLAs formed the Nagaland Congress after defecting from the Indian National Congress only to merge with the Neiphiu Rio-led Naga Peoples Front.

From 2004 to 2008, he was a Rajya Sabha MP from Nagaland.

Returning to state politics in 2008, he won from 7-Peren Constituency and was appointed minister for planning, animal husbandry and parliamentary affairs under chief minister Rio.

He won the Assembly elections again in 2013 from the same constituency and was appointed Minister for Planning & Coordination, Evaluation & Geology and Mining.

Zeliang was born at Mbaupungwa village in Peren district in 1952. A Zeliang Naga, he matriculated from Don Bosco High School in Dibrugarh, Assam and holds a BA degree from Kohima Arts College.
The Gujarat police arrested four Muslim men for allegedly killing a cow and booked them under a newly-enacted law, which provides for life term for slaughtering a cow.

The four were arrested for killing the cow which had entered their cattle shed in Maanpur village of Banaskantha district, said the police, adding they would be tried under the stringent Gujarat Animal Preservation(Amendment) Act-2017.

The police identified the four accused as Aiyub Vagadiya, Jamaluddin Vagadiya, Arif Vagadiya and Israilbhai Vagadiya of Maanpur village.

The police arrested the four on a complaint by Kansa village resident Raghabhai Bumadiya, who approached Danta taluka police station yesterday and alleged that the accused had killed one of his cows after it entered their cattle shed.

In his complaint, Raghabhai claimed his son had taken their cows and goats for grazing to the neighbouring Maanpur village yesterday. As some of the cows inadvertently entered into a cattle shed, four members of the family confronted Raghabhais son and scolded him, said Police Sub-Inspector AR Vala.

Though his son tendered an apology, the accused attacked one of the cows in a fit of rage and killed the animal using sticks, choppers and axe. Based on his complaint, we lodged a case yesterday for killing the cattle under section 429 of the Indian Penal Code and the Gujarat Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act-2017, said Vala, adding that the four were arrested today.

Since the new Act against cow slaughter has come into force recently, all these accused will be tried under sections 8 and 10 of the Act, said Vala.

The Gujarat Animal Preservation (Amendment) Bill, 2017 was passed by the state assembly on March 31.

This amended Act provides for not less than 10 years in jail which can extend up to life term for those found to be involved in the slaughter of bovines, including cows, calves, bulls and bullocks.

In the previous Act, which was in place since 2011, the maximum jail term for such acts was seven years.
Deputy chief minister Tejashwi Prasad Yadav, during his meeting with chief minister Nitish Kumar, on Tuesday, is said to have played on emotions, while submitting that the FIR filed against him did not have any concrete basis to sustain the charge of corruption levelled against him by the CBI.

The one-to-one meeting took place late Tuesday evening soon after the cabinet meeting had ended at 7pm.

The FIR was registered against Yadav by the CBI in a case of alleged corruption linked to the award of a tender for maintenance of two railway hotels in 2006 when his father and RJD chief Lalu Prasad was railway minister.

Apart from Yadav, Lalu Prasad, his wife Rabri Devi and five others have been made accused in the FIR.

Sources in the ruling Grand Alliance said Yadav touched the feet of the chief minister and started the dialogue by addressing Kumar as his mentor and guardian.

I am new to politics and look up to you for guidance, Yadav is said to have told Kumar and impressed upon him that there was no taint of corruption on him during his 18-month stint as number two in the cabinet.

RJD leaders said the CM told Yadav that he should have met him long back, instead of waiting for the crisis to deepen and asked him to concentrate on his work.

The RJD version, however, could not be confirmed from anyone in the Kumar-led JD(U), with the chief minister not revealing details of the meeting to any party member.

However, JD (U) spokesperson Ajay Alok maintained that the partys stand had not changed and it still insisted on Yadav making a public statement on the charges levelled by the CBI. He said, the JD (U) would never stand for corruption.

By contrast, former MP Shivanand Tiwary, who is now close to the RJD, hit back at the JD (U), asking (CM) Kumar to first give a clarification on whether he has any truck with the BJP, given his silence on the BJPs growing attacks on secular forces.

We thought that yesterdays meeting would end the rift in the GA. But JD (U)s stand is not acceptable, he said.

However, other sources said the RJD managers were confident that Kumar would not insist on Yadavs resignation and allow the issue to die a natural death.

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Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday said the Goods and Services Tax (GST) was a win-win deal for all as it would expand the tax net, end inspector raj and bring down the prices of goods.

While he spoke on the GST at the BJP parliamentary party meeting, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj briefed party MPs on the recent foreign visits of Narendra Modi and said no visiting Indian prime minister had received the kind of welcome accorded to him by US President Donald Trump during his recent to that country.

It was unprecedented, BJP sources quoted her as saying at the meeting.

Pitching the GST as a measure beneficial for the country, Jaitley said the prices of goods had come down between 4-8% since its roll-out on July 1.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar briefed reporters about Jaitleys remarks.

The GST was in the interest of people and states as well as the latter would get 80% of the revenue leading to more development, Jaitley said.

There was no longer tax on tax and the transport of goods across the country was going unhindered now, he said.

More than one crore firms were expected to be migrating to the new tax regime against around 80 lakh companies earlier, Kumar quoted him as saying.

The tax net has expanded. The countrys market has been integrated. Inspector raj is over. The tax burden on the masses has gone down. It is a win-win situation for all, Kumar quoted the finance minister saying.

BJP sources said Swaraj highlighted various aspects of Modis visits to the US, including a working dinner at the White House, Trump giving him a guided tour of his residence, and said it was a rare honour for a visiting Indian prime minister. She also noted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took Modi out on a drive on a beach.

Kumar asked the BJP members to ensure their presence here during the vice presidential election on August 5, which is a Saturday.

Parliamentarians hailing from different states often leave the national capital during sessions on Friday evening and come back by Monday.
Eight weeks into his fast, Azaad Malik, better known as Sant Gopal Das, knows the importance of conserving energy as he scribbles his thoughts on a notepad.

Das also explains in writing his reason for going on a hunger strike to free gauchar bhoomi (pasture land) in villages from encroachments, and passes the piece of paper to visitors at the daycare ward of Pandit Bhagwat Dayal Sharma Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS), Rohtak. He was shifted to the hospital from his dharna spot in Mansarover Park after his health deteriorated.

Few days back, when this reporter met him at the park, the 38-year-old Sant-cum-activist appeared to be in the pink of health despite having been on a fast for over seven weeks. I lost 11.5 kilos, but my will for the cause has increased 1,000 times, he said.

Ask him more about his protest, and he takes out his mobile phone to play a video of cows grazing in the picturesque pastures of Switzerland. Look at them. How free they are. In India, we are okay with our confining our cows to gaushalas, which are nothing but jails. Dont they deserve freedom? he asks.

Das was born as Azaad Malik in Raja Kheri village of Panipat. According to his father, he did not finish his graduation before leaving home to pursue his movement. Das, however, claims he has done a Ph.D in earth balance environment and animal behavior from an un-recognised university.

I studied the effect of emotions of living beings on their surroundings. Cows living in bad conditions in small gaushalas cannot be expected to produce healthy milk. Their milk will contain an element of anger, he declares. His hunger strike has made the opposition parties, including the Congress, INLD and AAP, rally behind him. Even the ruling BJP supports his demands to some extent.

However, Das says he will not give up until all his demands are met. It is not the first time that Das has taken up this cause. He has sat on hunger strikes in Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and many other states.

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A day after he flew a Rafale fighter jet in France, chief of air staff BS Dhanoa on Wednesday said he was impressed with the superior swing role capability of the aircraft and its integrated weapon sensor.

Dhanoa, currently on a visit to France, flew a Rafale jet at the Saint-Dizier airbase on Tuesday to gain a first-hand experience of the aircraft.

Indian Air Force is procuring the Rafale multi-role fighter jets from French aviation major Dassault under a Euro 7.87 billion (approx Rs 59,000 crore) deal signed last September.

I flew a Rafale in a two versus two mission involving two Rafales against two Mirage 2000D opponents. I am impressed with the superior swing role capability of the Rafale and its highly integrated weapon sensor and survivability suite, Dhanoa said.

The Air Chief also interacted with top executives of Dassault who briefed him about progress in the project to supply the jets to IAF.

Read | Dassault sets sights on supplying 200 Rafale jets to India over next decade

Dhanoa is on a visit to France from July 17-20 to ramp up cooperation between the air forces of the two countries in a range of areas.

The fighter jets are capable of carrying nuclear weapons and will be equipped with the latest missiles that will give the IAF greater potency over arch-rival Pakistan.

The Rafale combat aircraft will come with various India- specific modifications including Israeli helmet mounted displays, radar warning receivers and low band jammers, among others.

The Inter-Governmental Agreement for the supply of the jets was signed last September, 16 months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced Indias plans to buy 36 Rafale aircraft in fly-away condition.

According to the deal, the delivery of the jets will start in 36 months and will be completed in 67 months from the date the contract is inked.
Poll-bound Gujarat has joined the likes of Tamil Nadu,Odisha and Rajasthan by coming out with its own version of canteens for providing meals to the poor at a highly subsidised rate.

Under the Shamik Annapurna Yojna launched on Tuesday, labourers will be provided a meal per day at Rs 10. This is probably the first of its kind scheme for labourers, especially the homeless who do not have fuel and utensils for cooking.

The meal  five rotis, mixed vegetable, rice, pickles and green chilies (and desert on Sundays)  will be served through saffron-coloured stalls. These stalls are at spots near various kadiyanakas (labourer markets).

For the time being, some 25,000 labourers will be covered through 83 stalls set up across the state. The government plans to cover over five lakh registered labourers in the future.

No government in the past 60 years thought about addressing issues like the daily food requirement of labourers. Our government has taken an initiative, chief minister Vijay Rupani, who served piping hot meals to workers at a stall in Narol area of Ahmedabad, said.

Each stall has six attendants. While two of them  donning apron, hand gloves and cap  are there to prepare and serve food, the job of two others is to check identity cards and collect cash from the beneficiaries. The other two attendants will be managing crowds.

Beneficiaries have to produce an identity card, either Aadhaar or voter card, and get themselves registered with the stall from which they wish to buy food every day.

NGOs have been roped in to prepare the meal. This will also help us to maintain the quality, said an official from the Labour and Employment department.

The BJP government in Gujarat will seek a sixth-term in assembly elections scheduled later this year. Subsidised canteens called Amma Canteens launched by former Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa proved to be hugely popular and earned her immense political goodwill.

Subsidised meal schemes have been introduced in other states since then, including Odisha where chief minister Naveen Patnaiks Aahar canteens have also been a big hit. Critics, however, say such welfare measures are non-productive and are a big drain on the exchequer.

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The United States said Tuesday it was concerned by the border standoff between India and China and urged the two countries to work together to settle it amicably.

I know that the United States is concerned about the ongoing situation there, US state department spokesperson Heather Nauert said in response to a question at the daily briefing.

I know we believe that both parties, both sides should work together to try to come up with some better sort of arrangement for peace, she added.

Chinese and Indian soldiers have been locked in a face- off in the Doklam area of the Sikkim sector for more than a month.

The US has largely kept silent on the standoff which started mid June and the remarks on Tuesday came in response to a question.

There was no response from the White House to a request for comments on the standoff till the writing of this report.

China has claimed its troops were constructing a road within its territory in the Doklam plateau, demanding the immediate pull-out of Indian troops. However, New Delhi has expressed concern over the exercise, conveying to the Chinese government that the construction would represent a significant change of status quo with serious security implications. (with inputs from agencies)
Villages in Rajouri and Poonch bore the brunt of the firing, which left a civilian with injuries, while a soldier who was injured on Tuesday succumbed to his injuries.

The army confirmed the death of its officer in a statement in the evening.

Subedar Shashi Kumar, who was grievously injured during the unprovoked CFV (ceasefire violation) by Pakistan on 18 Jul 17 and was being administered medical treatment at Command Hospital Udhampur succumbed to his injuries, it said in a statement.

Subedar Shashi Kumar was a brave and sincere soldier. He loved his job to the core. The nation will always remain indebted to him for the supreme sacrifice and devotion to duty.

Kumars death is the second from Tuesdays violence. Sepoy Jaspreet Singh was killed in Kalsian in Nowshera sector.

Defence spokesperson Lt Col Manish Mehta said Pakistan Army began unprovoked and indiscriminate firing from small arms, automatic weapons and mortars from 8.45 am to 11.45 am along the Line of Control (LoC) in BG sector in Rajouri and Poonch.

The Indian Army is retaliating strongly and effectively, he said.

Rajouri deputy commissioner Dr Shahid Iqbal Choudhary told Hindustan Times over phone that Pakistan on Wednesday again shot 10 to 12 mortars on two primary schools in Klotra and Kote Dhar in Manjakote area of Rajouri district.

Schools were already shut in this sector two days back. There were no adverse reports. At least 3,411 people are putting up in five relief camps in Nowshera town, he said.

More than 8,000 people  3,000 in Naushera and 5,000 in Manjakote-Rajdhani-Panjgrain-Naika  have been affected by the Pakistan shelling in the last two days.

Pakistan Army also shelled areas in Balakote, Dhar, Lambibari, Rajdhani, Mankote, Sandote in Rajouri and Poonch districts since early morning.

On Tuesday, authorities rescued 217 students and 15 teachers from various government schools along the LoC in Rajouri district.

Trade across the two countries from the Line of Control remained suspended for the second straight week.

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A powerful US Congressional committee has said that India which is a regional partner to Afghanistan and a major defence partner of the US is well- suited to assist Kabul in its border security.

In a report attached along with the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2018, the all-powerful Senate Armed Services Committee said it believes that India, as a regional partner to Afghanistan and a major defence partner of the US, is well-suited to assist the Government of Afghanistan to improve the security of Afghanistan and the broader region, and can work on a trilateral basis with the US and Afghanistan to do so.

The committee also believes that timely actions by the Indian government to fill identified needs in Afghanistan would significantly benefit the short- and long-term security and stability of the region, the Senate Armed Services Committee said as it passed the NDAA-2018.

Concerned by the current stalemate in Afghanistan, the Committee which is headed by Senator John McCain said the US should leverage the capabilities of allies and partners to more effectively secure regional stability and security.

The committee believes that the US needs to recommit to the fight in Afghanistan and that India, as a major defence partner of the US and a contributor to regional security, has a critical role to play in this effort, it said.

The Pentagon and the Trump Administration has praised Indias efforts in Afghanistan.

On February 9, General John W Nicholson, Commander of US Forces, Afghanistan, testified before the committee that With over USD 2.0 billion development aid executed since 2002, and another USD 1.0 billion pledged in 2016, Indias significant investments in Afghan infrastructure, engineering, training, and humanitarian issues will help develop Afghan human capital and long-term stability.

In its report, the committee noted that General Nicholson highlighted significant short-term materiel and training needs within the Afghan Air Force (AAF), and has personally urged India to provide this targeted support to meet urgent gaps.

As such it encouraged the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Secretary of State, to enhance trilateral cooperation between the Governments of Afghanistan, India, and US for the purposes of strengthening the sovereignty and security of Afghanistan.

In doing so, the committee expects that any increase in investment and assistance pursuant to this trilateral cooperation would take into account the mutual priorities of the three respective governments.

This assistance could include logistical support; joint training; combined military planning; threat analysis; intelligence, materiel, and maintenance support for Afghan National Defense and Security Forces for humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, security assistance, and any other areas deemed appropriate, it said.
The Supreme Court is on Wednesday expected to hold a hearing to decide if privacy is a fundamental right, a question that has a bearing on the governments push for Aadhaar, the 12-digit biometric identity number.

The court said on Tuesday that before taking up the petitions that challenged Aadhaar for violating privacy, the court needed to settle the constitutional status of right to privacy.

During the course of hearing today it has become essential for us to determine whether right to privacy is a fundamental right under the Constitution, a five-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of India JS Khehar had said.

It ordered a nine-judge bench to look into the matter and revisit the courts rulings that said the right to privacy was not a fundamental right.

The determination of this question would essentially entail whether the decision recorded by an eight-judge bench in 1954 and also by a six-judge bench in 1962 that there is no such fundamental right is the correct expression of constitutional provisions, the court said.

The government is batting for Aadhaar, saying it is necessary to plug leakages in subsidy schemes and to ensure benefits reach those targeted. But critics say the move violates privacy, is vulnerable to data breaches and helps government spy on people.

More than 1.4 billion people or 95% of Indias population now have an Aadhaar number, which is to be obtained by all residents. Aadhaar is not a proof of citizenship.

The court referred the matter to the larger bench after the Centre cited the 1954 and 1962 judgments to argue privacy was not a fundamental right.

Our founding fathers have encompassed all rights. But consciously this is omitted, attorney general KK Venugopal said.

But justice J Chelameswar said it was illogical to argue that the Constitution didnt mention the right to privacy while common law identified it.

Textually it is correct today that there is no right to privacy in the Constitution. But even freedom of press is not expressly stated. This court has interpreted it, the judge said, adding the earlier verdicts should be looked at again.

One cant overlook the constant view held by smaller benches in their later judgments holding right to privacy is a fundamental right.
The Kashmir issue remains the core dispute between India and Pakistan, and its resolution is imperative for bringing peace in the region, Pakistans top diplomat said on Wednesday.

Sartaj Aziz, the Prime Ministers advisor on foreign affairs, made the remarks during his meeting with a 9-member delegation of All Parties Hurriyat Conference (Pakistan Chapter) here, the Foreign Office said in a statement.

The adviser noted that Jammu and Kashmir remains the core dispute between India and Pakistan, and its resolution is imperative for bringing peace to South Asia, it said.

Pakistan continues to pursue its principled position on Jammu and Kashmir and extends its steadfast support to the Kashmiris in their just struggle, as Kashmir cause remains close to the hearts of every Pakistani, he added.
Abu Dujana, the Lashkar-e-Taibas top commander in south Kashmir, gave security forces the slip in Pulwama district on Thursday.

Police said they tracked Dujana to a village of Pulwama, and decided to launch a search operation. We received inputs that it was him. However, Dujana managed to escape before security forces reached the spot, Kashmir inspector general of police Muneer Khan told HT.

A local news portal reported that Dujana was accompanied by two of his associates, and there was a brief exchange of fire between militants and security forces. Khan, however, did not confirm this.

Dujana reportedly assumed command over the militant group in South Kashmir after the death of his predecessor, Abu Qasim. Since then, Dujana has escaped from the security forces several times. On some occasions, it was due to stone-pelters disrupting their cordon-and-search operations.

The militant commander, believed to be in his twenties, has a reward of Rs 15 lakh on his head and figures in the top A++ militant category. He is said to hail from the Gilgit-Baltistan region, and has been named by police as the mastermind in many militant attacks across south Kashmir.

Active since 2014, he has made many public appearances at funerals of his militant colleagues. This includes the one held for Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in July 2016.

In May, Dujana figured in an Army-released list of 11 top militants in Jammu and Kashmir. Police say at least 200 militants are active in Kashmir, 90 of whom are foreigners.
Kerala police on Wednesday voiced confidence it has enough evidence to nail superstar Dileep in the alleged abduction and molestation of a popular actress in February this year.

AV George, superintendent of police and one of the key officials behind the probe, refused to give out much about the probe, but said they would not have arrested the actor without evidence.

He appeared confident that he has all the evidence against Dileep.

However, the actors manager Appunny, who is currently on the run, in his anticipatory bail plea filed on Wednesday said that police has no evidence against Dileep. He alleged that police is trying to put pressure on actor-turned-director Nadir Shah and himself to turn approver in the case.

Dileep is presently housed at the Angamaly sub-jail near his home town Aluva as a remand prisoner.

On Thursday, a single bench of the Kerala High Court is to take up his bail application. Last week, the trial court denied bail to the actor.

In a related development, revenue officials have found that the theatre complex owned by Dileep near here has been built on encroached land. They have started to initiate legal proceedings against the actor.

Giving the developments a political colour, state Congress president M.M. Hassan blamed Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan over the actor usurping government land in two places.

The closeness the actor shared with Vijayan and the CPI-M is well known. It is the CPI-M which helped Dileep usurp government land. The revenue department is now looking into this, Hassan told reporters in Kasargode.

The superstar was arrested on June 10th and the next day he was remanded to 14 days judicial custody for conspiring in the abduction and molestation of a popular actress in February in Kochi.

The police had earlier arrested the prime accused Pulsar Suni and his accomplices a week after the incident.
Malayalam media giant Mathrubhumi on Wednesday decided to grant period leave to its women employees. Initially it will be implemented in Mathrubhumi News, electronic wing of the group, and later it will be extended to other sister organizations.

The decision came in the wake of Mumbai-based digital media start-up group, Culture Machine, announcing leave for women employees on the first day of the menstrual cycle. Interestingly in many countries like Japan, South Korea and Italy menstrual leave is part of women employees leave policy.

Speaking to the Hindustan Times, Mathrubhumi joint managing director MV Shreyams Kumar said it was an instant decision and no employee asked for it. It is not empowering women but understanding their needs. This is also an attempt to remove taboo surrounding the biological cycle, he said.

Initially the first day of the period will be considered as a casual or medical leave and employees have an option either to accept or leave it. In Mathrubhumi News out of 320 employees 75 are women. When we came across such a news we felt it was a genuine issue. It was an instant decision and we took it not because any woman employee asked for it, Kumar, also a former MLA, said.

Later many women employees of Mathrubhumi News took to social media lauding the initiative of the media group. For us it is a historical achievement and we are proud to be part of this group. It buttresses the point what women need is not sympathy or support but understanding, an employee wrote. Though women activists have more or less supported the move some felt that it may lead to further discrimination.

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Little did Surajs children know what fate had in store when the cops arrested the Nepalese national on July 13.

Suraj was allegedly strangled by another suspect, Rajendra Singh, during a scuffle at the Kotkhai police station on Tuesday night. The duo were among the six men arrested for the gangrape and murder of a 16-year-old girl.

Hailing from Bajuara district in Nepal, Suraj had for the past four years worked as a daily wager with a leading orchardist in Kotkhai tehsils Halia village.

He was an ordinary labourer like us, said Janak Bahadur, a relative of Suraj, adding that the deceaseds five-year-old daughter Kaali had died on Diwali night last year.

How could a man who was in mourning since his daughters death nine months ago be involved in a ghastly crime like this? he asked.

Kaali died of jaundice last year. Suraj is survived by his 25-year-old wife Mamta, daughter Asha and son Shubam.

Janak is now worried about Surajs wife and daughter, who were picked up by the police for identifying Suraj, from Kotkhai bazaar.

My wife called me up that cops had taken Surajs wife to Shimla. She informed me that since the roads to Shimla were closed, cops took her through the lateral roads connecting Rajgarh to Sainj, he said.

Nepalese migrants, who are the back bone of the apple economy of the hill state, are shocked over the incident.

I work in Gumma bazaar in Kotkhai, and was horrified on learning of Surajs murder. So I joined the protest at Kotkhai police station, says Dil Bhadur, a labourer.

Surajs body was taken from Kotkhai to Shimlas premier Indira Gandhi Medical College (IGMC) for autopsy, even as people protested on the national highway connecting Parwanoo to Narkanda at Fagu Dhalli and Theogh. His body reached IGMC around 5 pm , amid a large crowd and a battery of mediamen waiting anxiously at the IGMC.

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Bhiku Daji Bhilare, who was claimed to have saved Mahatma Gandhi from being killed by Nathuram Godse in 1944, passed away today after a brief illness.

The 98-year-old Gandhian, popularly known as Bhilare Guruji, was cremated at his village, Bhilar, in Mahabaleshwar Teshil in western Maharashtras Satara district, family sources said.

Bhilare, born on November 28, 1919, is survived by three sons.

While there is no documented history about Bhilare having foiled Godses earlier attack, the great grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, Tushar Gandhi, in his new book has dwelled on how fundamentalists had planned and made many attempts on the life of the Father of the Nation before he was finally killed.

According to him, there were four attempts on the Mahatmas life, before Godse killed him in 1948.

The attack at Panchgani in 1944, where Bhilare Guruji overpowered Nathuram, was the second of these attempts, he has claimed in the book.

(In) July 1944, after his release from the Aga Khan Palace Prison Camp in May 1944, Gandhi contracted malaria and was advised rest by his physician. He retired to Panchgani, a mountain resort near Poona (now Pune), where he stayed at Dilkhush Bungalow.

A group of 18 or 20 men reached Panchgani by a chartered bus from Poona and held a day-long protest against Gandhi. When Gandhi was told about this, he contacted the leader of the group, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, for a discussion. Nathuram rejected the invitation and continued with his demonstration, the book says.

During a prayer meeting that evening, Nathuram Godse, dressed in a Nehru shirt, pajama and jacket, rushed towards Gandhi. He was brandishing a dagger in his hand and shouting anti-Gandhi slogans. Godse was overpowered by Manishankar Purohit, the proprietor of the Surti lodge of Poona, and D Bhilare Guruji of Satara, who later became a Congress legislator from Mahabaleshwar. The other youth accompanying Godse ran away, it said

In 2008, at an event in Mumbai, Bhilare was lauded for having had the presence of mind and the daring to twist the knife out of Nathuram Godses hand as he rushed to kill Gandhiji in a frenzy.

In 1944, Bhilare was the taluka pramukh of the Rashtra Seva Dal.

It was a wet July evening in Panchgani in 1944, Bhilare Guruji had recalled at the event.

All of us had assembled in the Batha High School hall for the evening prayers when suddenly a door opposite me opened and in rushed Nathuram Godse. He was wielding a knife and muttering incoherently.

Bhilare blocked his path and twisted the knife out of his hand.

My colleagues in the Seva Dal were also quick to react, and threw him out of the premises, he had recalled.

Bhilare had also claimed that Gopal Godse and Narayan Apte, who were implicated in the Mahatmas assassination, were present at the spot.

The Panchgani incident has been documented in the memoirs of Gandhijis close associate, said Pyarelal, a functionary of Mani Bhawan in Mumbai from where Mahatma Gandhi initiated satyagraha and propagated the cause of swadeshi.
Police have arrested a 41-year- old man for allegedly threatening to kill social activist Shabnam Hashmi in an encounter while claiming to be a police official.

The accused would to make calls to random numbers after consuming alcohol in the night in the hope of talking to women, said Romil Baaniya, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Southeast).

Hashmi had written to Delhi police commissioner Amulya Patnaik and said that a man who called her identified himself as sub-inspector Sandeep Malik from the Lajpat Nagar police station.

Hashmi is co-founder of NGO Pehchan, which runs sewing classes.

She said a woman, who learnt sewing at her centre, told her that her husband got a call from police on July 14 asking him to appear at the Lajpat Nagar police station.

The man, autorickshaw driver Mohd Haseen (38), got scared because the policeman did not tell him the reason and just asked him to appear at the police station at the earliest, she said.

Hashmi had said when she called on the number to know the reason why Haseen was summoned, the policeman hurled abuses at her.

The social activist said she disconnected the call and downloaded a phone call recording application before calling back on the same number.

In the initial conversation, this man was quite abusive. Since I did not have a call recorder on my phone, I disconnected the call and downloaded a call recorder, she said.

I was directly threatened that I will be killed in an encounter and that there is the new law according to which whoever does not have an Aadhaar card and address proof should be culled out/surrounded and killed (sic), she said.

Hashmi had also alleged that the man seemed to be drunk. Following her complaint, an inquiry was initiated in the matter.

The man was nabbed today from his house in Uttaranchal Colony in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, said the officer. The mobile phone that he used for making the phone call has also been seized.

During investigation it was found that the mobile number was registered in the name of Maliks previous employer. The accused is not a police officer but an knitting machine mechanic, said the DCP.

He is unmarried and had a tendency to call on random numbers. If the call was received by a woman, he would talk in an obscene or vulgar way with them, the police said. If the woman threatened him with police action, he would say that he is posted in the police force.
The Congress led the Opposition charge against the government over cattle-related lynchings and anti-Dalit attacks in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday, leading to noisy scenes and repeated adjournments through the day.

Mob lynching cases in the name of cow protection have increased across the country in the last three years. Those involved in the lynchings are being protected by the ruling party, Ghulam Nabi Azad, party leader and head of the Opposition in the upper house, alleged. He also asked if these attacks were being carried out in an understanding with the ruling BJP.

Incidentally, this comes days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi instructed leaders of every state to clamp down on people who indulge in vigilantism in the name of cow protection.

The ruckus reached a crescendo in the afternoon, when members of the treasury benches said certain remarks made by Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Naresh Agarwal were hurtful to the sentiments of the majority community. Though pandemonium prevailed for a while, the matter was resolved after the member apologised and the remarks were expunged by the chair.

The issue had taken centrestage in the morning itself, when SP leaders stormed the well of the House to express dissatisfaction over the Centres response to a question on lynchings carried out in the name of cow protection. Finally, chairman Hamid Ansari had to adjourn the proceedings for 10 minutes.

Raising the issue during Question Hour, Agrawal asked if innocents were being lynched or attacked in the name of cow protection and sought details of such incidents. Minister of state for home affairs Hansraj Gangaram Ahir replied that states have the power to act against offenders, and the ministry has already issued an advisory asking them to register FIRs in such cases. He also referred to Modis open condemnation of cow vigilantes to drive home his point, and said that the National Crime Records Bureau has  for the first time  started keeping a record of lynchings that occurred since 2014.

Countering the Opposition attack, minister of state for parliamentary affairs Muktar Abbas Naqvi said lynching was a crime and those indulging in such acts were criminals. He then proceeded to speak on the NDAs commitment to the all-round development of India.

However, CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury refused to buy into the governments argument. Asserting that mob lynchings strike at the very root of Indias republican constitution, he said: Today, you have people who question who eats beef and who doesnt to identify Hindus and non-Hindus. Is this what my country is coming to? And these private armies are roaming around freely.

Yechury also demanded a ban on all cow vigilante groups and anti-Romeo squads. The Prime Minister said this is a state subject because it is a law-and-order issue. But these private armies, which are taking the law and order in their own hands, need to be banned by a central order. They cannot be banned by state governments, he said.

Trinamool Congress member Derek OBrien accused the central government of lighting fires in states across the country. He said Opposition parties should fight for the cause of the poor and marginalised people who were being lynched in these violent times, and not get cowed down by the political terrorism being unleashed by the ruling party.

The Opposition, meanwhile, received support from unexpected quarters when the Shiv Sena condemned recent incidents of cow vigilantism and wondered what the self-appointed gau rakshaks were doing when terrorists targeted Amarnath pilgrims in Kashmir recently. Even the Prime Minister has had to face criticism over the ruckus created by gau rakshaks across the nation. They did not stop even after he criticised them. This has become more of a business now, an editorial published in the partys mouthpiece, Saamna, said.

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Nagaland governor PB Acharya on Wednesday dismissed the five-month-old government of Shurhozelie Liezietsu after he failed to prove his majority in the assembly, a Raj Bhavan official said.

The official told IANS that the governor has invited veteran Naga Peoples Front (NPF) legislator TR Zeliang to form a new government.

Zeliang, who will take oath as chief minister at Raj Bhavan, has been told to prove his majority on the floor of the House on or before July 22.

This is the second time the 65-year-old Zeliang will be the chief minister after he resigned following violent protest by tribal groups opposed to his move to hold civic polls with 33% seats reserved for women.

Liezietsu, 80, was made to come out of retirement from electoral politics to take over as Chief Minister following Zeliangs resignation.

Acharya dismissed the government under Clause (I) of Article 164 of the Constitution after receiving a letter from Assembly Speaker Imtiwapang Aier on Liezietsus failure to prove his majority on the floor of the Assembly.

According to a report from the Speaker, Liezietsu did not attend the Assembly session convened today at 9.30am. for the purpose of testing majority of the cabinet led by (him), Acharya said in his order dismissing the Liezietsu government.

Forty-eight legislators (including Speaker) attended the session. Therefore, it is clear that Liezietsu has failed to obtain the vote of confidence despite repeated opportunities given for the same, the governor said.

The governor had on July 11 and 13 issued directives to Liezietsu to seek a vote of confidence on or before July 15.

Liezietsu, a non-elected member to the 60-member House, has the support of 10 NPF legislators and one Independent member.

Zeliang, who had staked claim to form a new government, was present in the House with his supporters -- 35 NPF legislators, four BJP legislators and seven Independent members.

Speaker Aier, who adjourned the House sine die, said the motion to prove the majority of the chief minister could not be taken up as he was not present.

In the 60-member Assembly, one seat is vacant. The ruling Democratic Alliance of Nagaland coalition has 47 NPF legislators, four Bharatiya Janata Party members and eight Independents.

The rebellion within the ruling coalition erupted when a section of the NPF accused Liezietsu of indulging in nepotism by appointing his son Khriehu Liezietsu as his advisor with cabinet status.
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has issued notices to two top Karnataka prison officials taking cognisance of a complaint about alleged torture and transfer of 32 convicts serving terms in the Central Prison.

An NHRC release said the complaint alleged the prisoners were beaten black-and-blue and shifted overnight (on July 16) in an injured condition to various other prisons at Mysore, Ballari, Belagavi and Davanagere.

According to the complaint, lodged on Tuesday by BJP MP Shobha Karandlaje, the family members of these prisoners were not being allowed to meet them.

The complaint was filed a day after the prisoners, in a sudden move, were shifted at around 1 am to jails in Ballari and Belagavi for allegedly trying to voice their grievances.

The commission observed that the allegations of physical torture of the prisoners and their overnight transfer to other jails in an injured condition, if true, raised a serious issue of violation of their right to life and dignity.

It issued notices to Karnataka director general of police (DGP) and inspector general (IG), Prisons, asking them to file within four weeks a detailed report on the allegations, along with a note on the current location and health condition of the injured and shifted prisoners.

It need not be restated that a prisoner is not a slave of the State and is not denude of his fundamental rights while in judicial custody, the release said.

Allegedly, the prisoners were meted out this inhuman treatment because of their bid to stage a dharna inside the jail premises as they were not allowed to speak to (then) DIG (Prisons) D Roopa, who had visited the jail, it added.

Roopa had recently flagged certain grave irregularities inside the Central Jail, including providing a sophisticated kitchen to one of the prisoners, (AIADMK Amma chief) V Sasikala, and VIP treatment to another prisoner, Abdul Karim Lala Telgi, the release said.

The issue of alleged preferential treatment to Sasikala, serving a four-year term in a disproportionate assets case, came to the fore after Roopa submitted a report to her superior, DGP (Prisons) H N Sathyanarayana Rao.

Both Roopa and Rao were transferred after they sparred over the report in public.

The government has also ordered a probe by a retired official into the allegations.

The release said that according to the complaint, the 32 prisoners were allegedly shifted in a hasty manner in order to avoid any disclosure to the inquiry officer.
Pakistan says Indian troops fired across the Line of Control in Kashmir, killing a soldier and two civilians.

A military statement on Wednesday said another seven people, including two soldiers, were wounded, and that Pakistani forces returned fire.

It said the Indian attack was unprovoked, and violated a 2003 cease-fire agreement in the Himalayan region, which is split between Indian and Pakistani zones. The nuclear-armed rivals each claim Kashmir in its entirely, and have been to war twice over it.

The two sides frequently trade fire across the heavily militarised Line of Control.
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The cognoscenti pronounce it as a word  Eta  not E.T.A. But this is not an armed separatist organisation; its a subsidiary of the Swatch Group, the worlds biggest watchmaking conglomerate. ETA makes movements, both quartz and mechanical, fully assembled or in kit form, for brands in its own group and for external clients. Its a powerful, largely independent, multifaceted company, whose exact size and footprint is difficult to pin down with any accuracy. What is sure, however, is that it is omnipresent in the watchmaking industry, and its position is unassailable.



Within the vast portfolio of Swiss watch industry players, only fifty or so have the capacity to make their own movements, and even those are rarely fully self-sufficient. The hundreds of others call upon specialised companies, of which ETA is by far the biggest. The majority of Swatch Group brands dont make their own movements. ETA thus makes calibres for Tissot, Longines, Mido, Swatch, Rado, Hamilton and Flik Flak. And that all adds up to tens of millions of units. ETA also makes most of Omegas calibres, even if some of them are exclusive to the brand. Like all movement makers, ETA has a catalogue of off-the-peg items, but it can also produce pieces on commission, within their own autonomous units if necessary.

ETA provides movements for Swatch, including this entry-level automatic  Swatch

The catalogue includes all the most popular calibres, including the six legendary references: 2824, 2892, 2894, 6498, 7001 and 7750. Then there are their larger-sized variants, designed for contemporary oversized watches, and other variations that feature complication modules. And, while were on the subject of mechanical movements, there are also some very small ones. ETA also produces more than 100 different quartz movements, mostly analogue but some digital.



ETAs strength comes first and foremost from its history. Through all the upheavals and crises of the 20th century, many manufacturers of movements and other watch parts merged, or were forced to merge in order to survive. ETA is the sum of the manufacturing activities of firms including Valjoux, Unitas, Peseux, Tavannes, Ebauches SA (which was a result of the fusion of FHF and A. Schild), to mention just those names that are familiar from vintage watches. Into this crucible also went the manufacturing heritage of the company probably responsible for designing more movements than any other: Longines.



Another of ETAs strengths is its complex industrial fabric. By taking over the assets of other companies, ETA found itself with multiple production sites. Far from being a problem, this has become an advantage. The company has a presence in all of Switzerlands labour pools, and it can call upon a highly qualified, productive and geographically stable workforce. Thats what explains why such remote regions as the Franches Montagnes and the Vallee de Joux have become international centres of excellence.

ETAs headquarters in Granges  ETA

The third reason for its power is that ETA is a central component of the Swatch Groups industrial framework. It supplies itself from sister companies which themselves are often the product of successive mergers: Nivarox FAR (balance wheels, balance springs, escapements, springs and screws), Comadur (rubies, magnets), EM Microelectronic (integrated circuits) and Micro Crystal (electronic oscillators).



Like all sizeable industrial concerns, ETA is based on a culture of quantity. Its margins and prices are a direct consequence of high production volumes. These volumes are what give it an unprecedented overview of industry statistics, enabling it to identify weaknesses and bottlenecks in the production chain, over the short, medium and long term. This analysis goes all the way back to the people who design the movements, who, with the aid of their experience, propose modifications which, in turn, increase the reliability of production. This has reached a point now where ETA is able to supply movements for under CHF 500, which will pass COSC certification.

ETA develops products on request for brands in the Swatch Group, like this enlarged Valjoux calibre with column wheel, for Longines  Longines

ETAs real clout, however, comes from its technical heritage. When mechanical watchmaking began to recover, around the mid-1990s, ETA was the only company in a position to offer relatively inexpensive mass-produced mechanical movements. This was how it came to have so many clients, so many watch companies, on its books. But before the boom reached its zenith, in the 2000s, Swatch Groups management decided it was time to start wielding some of the power they had gained by virtue of the companys enormous reach. They announced that they would cut down on delivery of movement blanks  unmounted movements  which are the nitty gritty of the watch industry. Movement blanks are watchmakers primary material: they personalise them to leave their stamp on the watch as a whole. ETA thus became more and more expensive, while remaining competitive and omnipresent.



ETA in effect owns the de facto standards of Swiss watchmaking: calibres 2824, 2892 and 7750. While they are in the public domain, ETA has the experience and the dedicated industrial tooling to make movements better and faster than anyone else. All of ETAs mechanical movements are available in several different finishes, from the most basic for the entry-level brands to meticulously decorated versions, even if they are machine- rather than hand-finished. Almost all of them are capable of passing the COSCs tests if required.

ETA movements have been cloned and modified by competing manufacturers, of which Sellita is the biggest. Differences are minimal, and thats the point. Client brands can use the movements interchangeably, depending on supply and price, without needing to change their dials, cases, hands or processes. Today, alternatives exist, and it is possible to secure base movements from other suppliers. But these other suppliers will always look to the monolothic ETA as the industry standard, the movement maker of reference.
The Monsoon Session of Parliament is currently underway and will go on till August 11. Amid the characteristic pandemonium and many adjournments, the government answered several questions in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday. Here is look at the data revealed in the answers.

In the Lok Sabha

Declining trend in digital transactions since March 2017

The number of digital transactions, which grew significantly in the aftermath of demonetisation last year, has started showing a declining trend since March 2017, according to official data.

The number of digital transactions has come down from 119.07 crore in March 2017 to 118.01 crore in April and further to 111.45 crore in May, P P Chaudhary, Minister of State for Electronics and IT, said in a written reply in the Lok Sabha.

The number of digital transactions was only at 71.27 crore in October 2016. It went up to 83.48 crore in November 2016 and shot up to 123.46 crore in December 2016.

The increase in digital transactions was witnessed after demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes on November 8, 2016.

These transactions numbered 114.96 crore in January 2017, and about 101.18 crore in February 2017.

AIR earns Rs 10 crore from PMs Mann Ki Baat in last 2 fiscals

Prime Minister Narendra Modis monthly radio address Mann Ki Baat has generated a revenue of about Rs 10 crore for the All India Radio (AIR) in the last two fiscals, the Lok Sabha was informed.

In 2016-17, the revenue was to the tune of Rs 5.19 crore, while it was Rs 4.78 crore in 2015-16, Minister of Information and Broadcasting Rajyavardhan Rathore said in a written reply.

Launched on October 3, 2014, Modi addresses the nation every month in Mann Ki Baat programme.

61% dip in penalties imposed by CIC

The number of penalties imposed by the Central Information Commission have reduced by 61% between 2013-14 and 2015-16.

In so far the Central Information Commission (CIC) is concerned, penalty was imposed in 138 number of cases in the year 2013-14, 44 cases in 2014-15 and 54 cases in 2015-16. No data is centrally maintained for state information commissions, Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Jitendra Singh said in the Lok Sabha.

He said recovery of penalty amount from penalised officials is done by public authorities from their salaries.

Gentle deceleration in IT net hiring growth rate

The growth in net addition of employees by Indian IT players has been gradually decelerating as the sector focuses on enhanced efficiency and innovation.

There is a continuing trend of gentle deceleration in net hiring growth rate (but with a growing base) as industry ocuses on innovation, new digital technologies and enhanced efficiencies, Minister of State for Electronics and IT PP Chaudhary said in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.

The growth in total employees stood at 7% in 2014-15, which came down to 6% the following year and was 5% in 2016-017.

The net addition stood at 2.17 lakh (2014-15), 2.03 lakh (2015-16) and 1.75 lakh in 2016-17. The total employee base was at 34.85 lakh in 2014-15, which increased to 36.88 lakh in 2015-16 and 38.63 lakh in 2016-17.

20% positions vacant in CBI

The CBI has about 20% positions vacant and the vacancies have not affected the performance of the agency adversely, Lok Sabha was informed today.

In a written response, Minister of state for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions Jitendra Singh presented data which showed that as against 7,273 sanctioned strength there are 5,868 officers in the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which comes to a vacancy of about 20%.

With effective use and optimal deployment of existing personnel, the vacancies have not affected the performance of the CBI adversely, he said.

The data shows that there is about 18% shortage in executive ranks, about 27% shortage of law officers, about 56% shortage of technical officers, about 18% in ministerial staff and 44% shortage in canteen posts.

34 cases of WannaCry, Petya ransomware reported

Thirty-four incidents of WannaCry and Petya ransomware were reported to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) from organisations and individuals in the country, Parliament was informed by Minister of State for Electronics and IT P P Chaudhary .

The cyber attacks, which took place in May and June, crippled thousands of systems across the world in countries including the US, the UK, Russia and Ukraine.

(Thirty-four (34) incidents have been reported to the (CERT-In) from organisations and individuals regarding infections of WannaCry and Petya ransomware. As reported to CERT-In, operations of one sea port were partially affected by the Petya ransomware, Chaudhary said in a written reply to Lok Sabha.

Rise in cyber crime cases

In a separate reply, Chaudhary said that with proliferation of information technology (IT) and related services, there has been a rise in instances of cyber crime in the country, like elsewhere in the world.

He cited data from National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) to state that a total of 9,622 and 11,592 cyber crime cases were registered during 2014 and 2015 respectively.

This includes cases registered under the IT Act, 2000 and related sections of Indian Penal Code and special and local laws involving computer as a medium/target. Similar data for the year 2016 is under collection, he said.

Further, as per the information reported to and tracked by CERT-In, a total number of 44,679, 49,455, 50,362 and 27,482 cyber security incidents were observed during the year 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 (till June), respectively, Chaudhary said.

He added that the types of cyber security incidents include phishing, scanning/probing, website intrusions and defacements, virus/malicious code, ransomware, denial of service attacks etc.

859 complaints against IAS officers

A total of 859 complaints were received against the officers of Indian Administrative Service (IAS) working across the country, Union minister Jitendra Singh said.

The complaints were received during the year from January 1, 2016 upto June 30, 2017, he said in a written reply in response to a question in Lok Sabha.

Of the total complaints, 93 pertain to IAS officers working with the government of Uttar Pradesh, said Singh, Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions. Appropriate action can be taken against officials only after the cases reach finality, he said.

210 govt sites found displaying Aadhaar details

About 210 websites of the central and state government departments were found to be displaying personal details and Aadhaar numbers of beneficiaries, Parliament was informed.

UIDAI (The Unique Identification Authority of India) has taken note of the same and is regularly monitoring the status to get the Aadhaar data removed from the said websites, Minister of State for Electronics and IT, PP Chaudhary said in a written reply in Lok Sabha.

The monitoring came after it was found that around 210 websites of Central Government, State Government Departments including educational institutes were displaying the list of beneficiaries along with their name, address and other details and Aadhaar numbers for information of general public.

There has been no leakage of Aadhaar data from the UIDAI, he added.

Over 11 lakh public grievances against govt depts in 2016

Over 11 lakh public grievances were received against various central government departments last year, 33% more than the previous year, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said.

A total of 11,72,918 plaints were received through the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS) in 2016 of these about 98%  11,56,335  were disposed of, he said in a written reply to Lok Sabha.

As many as 16,583 grievances were pending resolution as on July 12, 2017, said Singh, Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions. A total of 8,81,132 public grievances were received in 2015.

No new organisation or institution is proposed to be set up for early redressal of public grievances, however, a call centre is in operation which rings up officials concerned of ministries/departments receiving bulk of the grievances, where grievances are pending for more than two months, the minister said.

No foreign contributions received in National Skill Fund

There have been no foreign contributions received so far towards the National Skill Development Fund even though they are exempted under the FCRA provisions, Parliament was informed.

The total funds accrued in the National Skill Development Fund (NSDF) from the government to implement skill development activities under various programmes were to the tune of Rs 487.45 crore in 2014-15, Rs 1,020 crore in 2015-16, Rs 807.74 crore in 2016-17 and Rs 17.5 crore till date in 2017-18, Union Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy said in a written reply in the Lok Sabha.

Till now, no foreign contributions have been received in National Skill Development Fund, said the minister.

Issue of dependent tax raised with Saudi Arabia

India has raised with the Saudi government the issue of the dependent tax, imposed on expatriates who have dependents living there, from July 1, the Lok Sabha was informed.

Minister of State for External Affairs MJ Akbar noted that the resident Indian community in Saudi Arabia has marginally increased during the last one year and is estimated at 3.03 million in March.

Beginning July 1, the Saudi government has imposed the tax at the rate of Saudi Riyal (SR) 100 (Rs 1,700 approx) per month on each dependent, he said.

The dependent tax will be increased to SR 200 in 2018, SR 300 in 2019 and SR 400 in 2020 per dependent member of the expatriate family, Akbar added.

Replying to a separate question, Akbar said there were 220 complaints against unregistered agents received till June 30 and were referred to the state governments.

In the Rajya Sabha

Rs 1,200 crore sanctioned for development of beaches, rivers as tourist spots

The government has sanctioned more than Rs 1,200 crore for the development of beaches and rivers as tourists spots, the Rajya Sabha was informed.

Replying to a query, Union Tourism Minister Mahesh Sharma said that 11 projects, worth Rs 896.66 crore, have been sanctioned under the coastal circuit of the Swadesh Darshan Scheme and four projects, costing Rs 119.27 crore, have been earmarked under the Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spirituality Augmentation Drive (PRASAD) to harness the potential of beaches as a tourist attraction.

Goa is set to receive the highest payout of around Rs 200 crore during financial years 2016-17 and 2017-18 to develop its beaches while Andhra Pradesh has been sanctioned Rs 130 crore in FY 2014-2015 for its coastlines.

Karnataka has been sanctioned Rs 95.67 crore during 2016 -2017 and West Bengal and Maharashtra have been sanctioned Rs 85.39 crore and Rs 82.17 crore respectively during 2015-2016.

Rivers too, have found funds to make them attractive for tourists. The culture ministry has sanctioned Rs 194.41 crore to five states  Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal  to develop their river fronts under the PRASAD Scheme.

Law and order situation in J-K, number of terror incidents in state and terrorists killed

The law and order situation in Jammu and Kashmir was much better than the last year and the Centre was open for talks with those who abstain from violence and work within the Constitution, the government said in Parliament.

As reported by the state government, the law and order situation in Jammu and Kashmir is much better than the previous year as 583 cases have been registered during the current year till date, against 2,897 cases of previous year, Minister of State for Home Hansraj G Ahir said in a written reply to Rajya Sabha.

He said 1,2650 miscreants/separatists were either arrested or bound down under substantive and preventive laws by the police since 2016 and it also imposed restrictions in the vulnerable areas to thwart such incidents.

The minister said a number of schemes were started for providing employment to the youth of the state like additional recruitment of 10,000 special police officers, recruitment of 5,381 personnel in five new India Reserve Battalions (IRBs) and recruitment of 1,079 personnel in central paramilitary forces and the Assam Rifles.

In addition, to accelerate the process of development in the state, the Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) on November 7, 2015 has announced a development package of Rs 80,068 crore, he said.

In a separate reply, Ahir said a total of 172 terrorist violence incidents were reported in the state till July 9 where 12 civilians and 38 security forces personnel were killed. A total of 95 terrorists were killed during the same period, the data provided by the minister said.

22% decline in violence, 78% increase in killing of Maoist cadre in last 3 years

There has been a 22% decline in incidents of violence in the Naxal-affected states since the Narendra Modi government came to power three years ago, the Rajya Sabha was informed.

In a written reply, Minister of State for Home Hasnraj G Ahir said that in Left Wing Extremism affected areas, during the last three years (July 2014-June 2017) there is reduction in incidents of violence by 22.25% (3,999 to 3,109) compared to the preceding three years (July 2011-June 2014).

He further said that an increase of 78%(228 to 406) was also witnessed in the killing of Maoist cadres during the same period, as compared to the preceding three years (July 2011-June 2014).

The Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government took charge at the Centre in May 2014.

Nearly 50 complaints concerning SAIL resolved

Action has been taken on 49 complaints out of 53 concerning SAIL over the last three years, Parliament was informed.

During 2014, 2015 and 2016... 53 complaints have been received by the government from different sources on various allegations pertaining to SAIL, out of which action on 49 has been completed, Minister of State for Steel Vishnu Deo Sai said in a written reply in Rajya Sabha.

One crore artistes registered under culture mapping project

Over one crore artistes across the country have registered themselves under a project for culture mapping launched by the government across the country at an estimated cost of Rs 480 crore, Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma said.

During the Question Hour in Rajya Sabha, Sharma said over one crore persons have registered under the scheme and there were expectations that the number could go upto four crore.

He also gave details as per which 3,882 artistes are being given pension by the government. This pension has also been raised by the government by 69%.

We have launched a scheme with Rs 480 crore for cultural mapping of artistes living in 6.2 lakh villages in the country and how to protect them. We will put all their details on a portal, he said.

He said there has been a 110% increase in financial assistance to artistes through various scholarships and pensions in the country.

165 people arrested in sedition cases

As many as 165 people were arrested on the charge of sedition in the last three years across the country, the Rajya Sabha was informed.

Citing data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Minister of State for Home Gangaram Ahir said that 58 people were arrested in 47 such cases registered in 2014.

73 people were arrested in 30 cases registered in 2015 and 34 people arrested in 28 cases registered in 2016 under the offence of Sedition (Section 124A of IPC), he said.

The 2016 figure excludes Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal as data from the two states were not available.

Ahir said the names those arrested and the current status of cases were not recorded in the NCRB data. The data related to 2017 are being collected by the NCRB.

SIT probing anti-Sikh riots cases examined 1,000 witnesses

The SIT set up by the Centre for re-investigation of the 1984 Sikh riots cases examined more than 1,000 witnesses in different states, the Rajya Sabha was informed.

Minister of state for home Hansraj Ahir said the Special Investigation Team has scrutinised records of 293 cases and after scrutiny, a total 60 cases were re-opened for further investigation.

Out of these 60 cases, charge-sheet has been filed in four cases, 51 cases have been closed after conducting further investigation and further investigation in five cases is under progress. The SIT has examined more than 1,000 witnesses in different states in the country, he said replying a written question.

Meat export rises to 13.53 lakh tonnes in 2016-17

Indias meat export increased to 13.53 lakh tonnes in 2016-17 from 13.36 lakh tonnes in the previous fiscal, Parliament was informed.

In value terms, however, the export declined to Rs 27,184 crore in the last fiscal, from Rs 27,528 crore in 2015-16.

Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, said no complaint was received at her ministry with regard to prevention in production of meat and leather.

However, she said, as per data, export of buffalo meat has declined. During April-May 2016-17, the buffalo export stood at $554 million whereas for the same period in the current year, it came in at $530 million.

She also said the export of leather products and footwear declined during 2015-16 and 2016-17 in value terms due to various factors, including some external ones like recession in European market, instability in the Middle-East countries.

(With agency inputs)
A Patna court on Tuesday vacated the interim stay on execution of a Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) order, terminating the petrol pump licence of Bihar health minister and elder son of RJD chief Lalu Prasad.

Patna sub-judge Sachi Mishra, in her order, referred the matter to an arbitrator under the Arbitration & Conciliation Act.

The public sector oil firm had on June 17 sent the licence termination order to Lara Automobiles, represented by its proprietor Tej Pratap Yadav, after he failed to furnish a satisfactory explanation to the notice issued over the allocation of the property at Anisabad in Patna.

Tej Pratap challenged the oil firm order in the court, which granted an ex parte temporary injunction, restraining the BPCL from causing obstruction to the plaintiff till he appears and files his say to application for temporary injunction

The BPCL had on May 3 issued notice to Tej Pratap, seeking an explanation on the petrol pump licence. The oil company had sought an explanation how he acquired the licence, and asked him to reply within 15 days.

The BPCL notice, served by its territory manager (retail), Patna, Manish Kumar, followed a complaint that Tej Pratap had acquired the petrol pump on Patnas busy Anisabad bypass road on the basis of wrong information he had furnished.

Tej Pratap had applied for the licence in 2012 and the retail outlet was commissioned to Lara Automobiles, represented by him as its proprietor, on February 27 this year.

READ | From fodder scam to properties: Lalu Prasad and his family are caught in a web of trouble

Senior BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi had earlier alleged that the petrol pump was fraudulently allotted to Yadav during the UPA II regime at the Centre. Modi had alleged that Yadav did not have the stipulated 43 decimal of land for setting up the petrol pump at the time of applying for it.

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A rare 9-judge bench of the Supreme Court said the right to privacy is not absolute, making its first observations on Wednesday as it began hearing on an issue that could have a sweeping impact on issues such as the Aadhaar scheme and the law criminalising homosexuality.

Led by the Chief Justice of India JS Khehar, the Constitution bench said that if right to privacy is defined as a fundamental right, the top courts 2013 ruling upholding Section 377  which criminalises homosexuality  falls.

The bench began the process to decide if privacy can be regarded as a fundamental right guaranteed to all Indians, a question that arose from the legal challenge to the Aadhaar programme that activists say impinges on the right to privacy.

If privacy is about right to make a choice, then choice in what areas? Family, sexual orientation, gender identity, surveillance, what all? it observed.

The judges will revisit previous rulings by the Supreme Court one by an eight-judge bench in 1954 and the other by a six-judge bench in 1962  to study if they were the correct interpretation of constitutional provisions. Both rulings rejected the idea that privacy was a fundamental right.

Privacy was one of the grounds on which the Delhi High Court had struck down Section 377 in 2012, but its ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court a year later. A curative petition against the ruling filed by NGO Naz Foundation has raised the issue of right to privacy afresh.

If yes (i.e. if right to privacy is a fundamental right), then Naz Foundation (ruling) falls, Justice DY Chandrachud a member of the bench  said to the lawyers who argued privacy was a facet of liberty, which the Constitution guarantees.

In addition to the Section 377 case, the SCs ruling on privacy will impact a case against mobile communication application WhatsApp in which petitioners have opposed its policy to share user data with its parent Facebook.

Based on a ruling by this bench, a separate bench of three judges will decide on petitions that challenged the governments decision to make Aadhaar compulsory for crucial procedures such as Income Tax declarations and for opening bank accounts.

NEED TO DEFINE PRIVACY

During the hearing the bench felt that right to privacy was too amorphous a term and said that to recognise privacy as a definite right, it had to first define it.

How do we define privacy? What are its contents? Its contours? How can the State regulate privacy? What obligations does the State have to protect a persons privacy? Justice Chandrachud asked the lawyers representing petitioners in Aadhaar case. An attempt to define the right to privacy may cause more harm than good, the bench said.

The observations may or may not be a part of the courts final ruling.

Justice Chandrachud also posed several questions on data protection in the age of social media, saying social media did not exist when the Constitution was made. If people have put themselves in the public realm using technology, is that not a surrender of their right to privacy?, the judge said, asking if right to privacy is non-negotiable.

Earlier, former Attorney General Soli Sorabjee called governments argument that privacy is not sacred because the Constitution does not mention it as fallacious. It does not signify that the right does not exist, he told the court in a brief submission. Sorabjee reminded the bench that even freedom of press was denuded from other fundamental rights given in the Constitution.

Senior advocate Shyam Divan placed before the bench a statement made by a minister in March admitting privacy was probably a fundamental right and part of individual liberty. The statement was made during the presentation of the Aadhaar Bill in Parliament.

Divan said in the internet age, one should have the right of informational self-determination. I should know how much I should put forward and not be compelled, he submitted.

He complained there was hardly any data protection in this digital age, leading to a compromise in privacy.

Former solicitor general Gopal Subramanium said right to liberty and lead a life of dignity includes the right to privacy.

The right to liberty means the right to make personal choices, the right to develop ones personality, ones aura, ones thinking and actions, the freedom of religion and conscience, the freedom to believe or not believe, he told the bench, which will continue hearing the case on Thursday.

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An accused in the murder and gangrape of a 16-year-old girl in Himachal Pradeshs Kotkhai died in police custody early Wednesday, triggering violent clashes across the state that saw a mob burn down a police station and pelt stones at security personnel.

The accused, Nepalese national Surat Singh, was allegedly strangled by another suspect, Rajendra Singh, during a scuffle inside the lock-up around 3am on Wednesday, police said. News of his death sent ripples of anger through the Himalayan state as people shouted slogans, clashed with police and blocked arterial roads, demanding an overhaul of what protesters deem a shoddy probe.

Shimla superintendent of police DW Negi said a fight broke out between Rajendra and Surat around midnight inside the lock up. Surat was rushed to hospital where he was declared brought dead, said Negi.

Violence in kothkai, shimla, after an accused in rape and murder of a minor died in police custody pic.twitter.com/BkDez8PHM1  Chetan Chauhan (@chetanecostani) July 19, 2017

The gangrape of the minor girl has rocked the poll-bound state where such crimes are uncommon. The girl, a Class 10 student, went missing on her way home from school on July 4 and her naked body was found two days later with injury marks. Since then, her photos have gone viral on social media as hundreds of people have come out on the streets to protest in candlelight marches, silent processions and road blockades. The state government also bowed to increasing public pressure and transferred the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation.

The entire staff of Kotkhai police station, including the station house inspector, were suspended following the custodial death. Sources said the SHO kept all the six accused in two cells instead of keeping them in separate enclosures.

Surat Singhs death sparked protests across the state as Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad members took out a rally in central Shimla. There were long traffic jams in the upper regions of Himachal Pradesh as people blocked the highway from Shimla to Kotkhai.

The epicentre of the incident  Kotkhai, around 60 kilometres from Shimla  resembled a war zone. In the afternoon, a violent mob of around 3,000 surrounded the police station, set it on fire and injured several personnel. The police fired in the air to disperse the crowd but failed as protesters surrounded the living quarters of personnel.

Unrest over the case has been simmering since the police claimed a breakthrough on July 13, and arrested six people: Ashish Chauhan (29), Rajinder Singh (32) of Sharaal village, Subash Singh Bisht (42) of Pauri Garhwal, Surat Singh (29) of Nepal, Lok Jan (19) of Nepal and Deepak (38) of Garhwal. They were produced before a court in Theog and sent to seven-day police remand.

The police alleged that Rajendra Singh offered her a lift to her village Shirguli, nearly five kilometers from the school. Rajendra was not alone and was accompanied by four-five friends who were drunk. The occupants of the vehicle pulled her out and raped her, police said.

Shimla: Villagers pelt stones&protest outside Kotkhai Police Station after 1 of the 6 accused in gang rape & murder of minor,died in custody pic.twitter.com/aE8dWOWSgE  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

But those arrested were different from the six men whose photos were being circulated on social media, and had also been temporarily posted on the official website of chief minister Virbhadra Singh. This raised further suspicion over the probe.

The incident has seen massive protests against the state government even in the Congress stronghold of Shimla as protesters called the investigation an eyewash. The outrage is also expected to singe the Virbhadra Singh government in elections scheduled for later this year as the opposition BJP is attempting to steer public anger against the government and police for going slow on the probe into the case.

Virbhadra, also the states home minister who is facing several cases of corruption, has come under criticism from even his own party men for the slow progress in the investigation.

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A storm is brewing in the Janata Dal (United). And the catalyst is Nitish Kumars dalliance with the BJP.

With Bihars Mahagathbandhan (Grand Alliance) facing an uncertain future amid speculations that Kumar was reconsidering a tie-up with the BJP, sources say that sections within the JD (U) have started to chart out an independent political course for themselves.

The partys lone MP from Kerala, Veerendra Kumar, has not only ruled out the possibility of associating with a likely decision of the party leadership to align with the BJP, he also defied the partys official line to vote in favour of the NDA s Presidential nominee Ram Nath Kovind.

Sections of JD (U) legislators  particularly those from the bordering Kosi belt  have been getting into a huddle to consider the political options. There is little likelihood that all party legislators or workers will continue to support Kumar, in case he decides to mend ties with the saffron party. In such an eventuality, the JD (U) will split, a senior party leader prophesized.

Senior party leaders such as Sharad Yadav are unlikely to go along with Kumar, in case of a possible decision by him to rejoin forces with the BJP, JD (U) sources hinted.

JD (U) legislators such as Sarfaraz Alam, Mujahid Alam, Sharfuddin and Naushad Alam are unlikely to remain associated with the party, in case Kumar decides to switch horses mid-way in order to ensure the continuance of his government, said a veteran Bihar watcher.

According to sources, half of the 12 JD (U) MPs in Parliament do not favour a tie-up with the BJP. We expect that Kumar will display political sagacity by keeping the BJP at bay, said Anisur Rehman of the Patna-based Imarat Shariah mosque.

Read more: Tejashwi cannot defend 26 properties to his name at age 26, says Modi

The Bihar verdict of 2015 was for the Mahagathbandhan and not for any individual (read Kumar). His party apparatus will get dismantled, if Kumar decides to switch sides to the BJP, said Husn Ahmed Quadri of the Patna-based Jamait Ulema.

The alliance has come under severe strain over the past few weeks following the CBI filing an FIR against Kumars deputy and RJD chief Lalu Prasads son Tejashwi Prasad Yadav in a land-for-hotels scam.

The JD(U) which at one point appeared to threaten the RJD of even sacking Tejashwi if he was not forthcoming with his explanation on how he acquired his property and rebut the CBIs charges, seems to have climbed down.

Tejashwi even met Kumar on Tuesday to clarify the CBIs charges. It was the first time the two had met alone since the CBI raided the RJD chief and his family on July 7.

The BJP which has been after Lalu Prasad and his family for alleged corruption had even said it would offer outside support to the JD(U) if Kumar severs ties with the RJD which is the largest party in the Bihar assembly.

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The traders in Surat have called off their two-week-long strike against the imposition of 5% GST on textiles following the Centres assurance to look into their demand for its rollback.

Thousands of textile merchants in Surat had shut their shops since the last two weeks to protest the new tax structure.

The announcement to withdraw the protest was made on by the traders who met finance minister Arun Jaitley in Delhi on July 17.

During the meeting, Jaitley assured us that the issue of the Goods and Services Tax on cloth will be taken up in the next GST Council meeting to be held on August 5. Thus, we have decided to call off the strike till that date, said Manoj Agrawal, a textile trader.

If no favourable decision comes in that GST Council meeting, we will think of going on strike again to raise our demand for abolishing the five per cent GST, he said.

Surat has one of the biggest textile markets in the country.

On July 3, thousands of protesting traders had gathered near the Ring Road in Surat, where the main market is situated, demanding scrapping of GST on textiles.

Police then wielded batons to disperse the agitators who allegedly engaged in stone-pelting, an official earlier said.

On July 8, the textile traders organised a silent march here to protest against five per cent GST imposed on the sector.
A mob in a Dhanbad village tied a 26-year-old mentally ill man to a tree and assaulted him on Wednesday believing that he was a cattle thief, according to the police, which rescued the victim.

The attack comes within months of a spate of mob killings in Jharkhand where at least seven people were lynched over rumours that they were child abductors.

On Wednesday, Afroz, from Wasseypur, was apparently seen with three cows and the suspects took him to be a cattle thief.

He is not a cattle-smuggler, neither did he intend to steal the cows. The villagers saw him with three cows and jumped to the conclusion that he was stealing them, said East Basuria OP in-charge Premchandra Hansda, adding that the attack was sparked from a rumour.

Due to his mental disorder, he failed to speak in his defence when the villagers accused him of stealing cows, possibly for slaughter, he said.

Police said the attackers were not part of so-called gau rakshaks  vigilante groups that have killed and assaulted several people in different parts of the country to protect cows.

Cow is considered sacred by the Hindus, and its slaughter and smuggling has been in focus since the electoral successes of Prime Minister Narendra Modis Bharatiya Janata Party.

In Jharkhand, there have been at least three instances in the last month when mobs have attacked Muslim men for allegedly stealing or transporting cattle and beef.

Police said Afroz sustained injuries on his head, back, feet and neck, and is doing fine after first aid. They said Afroz is mentally unwell and was being treated at Ranchi Institute of Neuro-psychiatry and Allied Sciences (RINPAS) for at least five years.

It was an incident of mob rage. Villagers here are often very strict with people who pose to be a threat to their cattle, said investigating officer Hansda.

Fearing the incident may snowball into a communal confrontation, police have put a scanner on social media use in the area since the incident.

Giridih, less than 45km from Dharjori village, simmered in communal tension hours before the assault on Afroz.

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TR Zeliang was on Wednesday sworn in as Nagalands 19th chief minister after the states governor PB Acharya dismissed Shurhozelie Liezietsu for failing to turn up for a trial of strength in the assembly.

This is 65-year-old Zeliangs second stint as chief minister in a little more than three years. The ruling Naga Peoples Front (NPF) had chosen in to replace Neiphiu Rio in May 2014 after the latter became the states lone Lok Sabha member.

Soon after taking oath of office, Zeliang said he will go for a floor test on July 21. The governor, while naming him CM, had given time till July 22 to prove his majority.

Zeliang had to step down on February 22 after a series of violent protests over his governments decision to conduct civic polls with 33% quota for women. The NPF made party chairman Shurhozelie, 80, the chief minister.

Most of our MLAs did not want to go to polls under the politically-retired Shurhozelie, who had at the time of becoming CM said he would hold the reins of power only for two-three months. But power got to him and his style of functioning became undemocratic, Zeliang said before the swearing-in.

Around the same time as Zeliang was made CM, the pro-Shurhozelie members of NPF expelled him from the party for six years. The expulsion order signed by NPF working presidents Huskha Yepthomi and Along Pongener said Zeliang has been ousted for defying the party leadership.

Acharya dismissed the government under Clause (I) of Article 164 of the Constitution after receiving a letter from Assembly Speaker Imtiwapang Aier on Liezietsus failure to prove his majority on the floor of the Assembly.

According to a report from the Speaker, Liezietsu did not attend the assembly session convened today at 9.30 a.m. for the purpose of testing majority of the cabinet led by (him), Acharya said in his order dismissing the Liezietsu government.

Forty-eight legislators (including Speaker) attended the session. Therefore, it is clear that Liezietsu has failed to obtain the vote of confidence despite repeated opportunities given for the same, the governor said.

In the 60-member Assembly, one seat is vacant. The ruling Democratic Alliance of Nagaland coalition has 47 NPF legislators, four Bharatiya Janata Party members and eight Independents.

(With agency inputs)
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) will recruit 5,000 religious soldiers in the district who will fight like commandos. They will be selected from among trained Bajrang Dal activists and will be responsible for controlling cow smuggling and love jihad. The enrolment drive will be launched in September.

This decision was taken at a VHP meeting held in Aligarh on July 14-16, in which the outfits international president Pravin Togadia was also present.

Sectional chief Ram Kumar Arya told HT, Five thousand religious soldiers will be recruited in Aligarh district for which only those Bajrang Dal activists will be eligible who have completed bravery training. These soldiers will control cow smuggling and love jihad. They will also protect Hindu boys and girls, maths, temples, sant samaj and the country.
Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop on Tuesday said her country opposes Beijings construction of artificial reefs and their militarisation in the disputed South China Sea, holding that freedom of navigation must be ensured.

The minister, who was delivering a lecture in New Delhi, said at the same time that there was a need to engage with Beijing as it would be in no ones interest to see the Chinese economy falter.

Rising nationalism is leading to a narrow definition of national interest and a more transactional approach in negotiations. These factors reduce the prospects of multilateral cooperation in collective interest, said Bishop, who is on a two-day visit to New Delhi.

China has constructed artificial reefs in the resource- rich South China and has been ramping up military infrastructure there despite stiff opposition from countries including Indonesia, Vietnam and Philippines, which are involved in the territorial dispute.

We continue to oppose the construction of artificial reefs and militarisation of those structures in the South China Sea, the visiting minister said.

India has commercial interests in the South China Sea and has been pressing for resolving the dispute as per the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, besides advocating freedom of navigation in the resource-rich area.

Bishop said the right to freedom of navigation must be ensured as it its crucial for trade.

It is important that all states respect international laws including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) using it as a guide to resolve disputes, she said while delivering the Second Indo-Pacific Oration, organised by think-tank ORF and the Australian high commission.

Our objective must be to encourage China to exercise its economic and strategic weight in a way that respects the sovereign equality of states that upholds and strengthen the rules-based order and benefits all nations, she said.

The Australian foreign minister also applauded India for successfully and peacefully resolving a long-running maritime dispute with Bangladesh in 2014 under the provisions of the UNCLOS.

Bishop emphasised on the need to close the gaps for an early conclusion of the negotiations for a free trade agreement between India and Australia.

She said that in years to come, the greatest hope of peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region lies in all nations respecting and contributing to international law to protect national sovereignty of other nations and strengthen the norms that guide relations between countries.

In the Indian Ocean, we need a collective leadership of Australia, India, Indonesia and other partners to ensure a strong rule-based culture is respected, she said.

Bishop also pitched for strengthening the Indian Ocean Rim Association forum.

She also said Australia has always supported Indias bid for a seat in the United Nations Security Council to better reflect contemporary realities.

Bishop welcomed the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax and said this will increase Indias competitiveness, enable it to open up its market and benefit from trade opportunities.

She also called for a quadrilateral maritime exercise involving India, Australia and other Indo-Pacific countries.

As India looks to increase its energy supply security through a combination of traditional, nuclear and renewable resources to support its growth, Australia is more poised as reliable supplier of resources and technology, she said.

India and Australia have signed a nuclear cooperation agreement under which it latter can supply uranium.
Earlier this week, Israel installed metal detectors and cameras at the entrance to the Haram Al-Sharif Compound, prompting protests from Palestinians

Egypt warned Israel on Wednesday of the dangerous repercussions that could result from Tel Aviv's escalating security measures at Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, which have left many Palestinians injured and endangered the life of the mosque's Imam Ekrima Sabria, a foreign ministry statement read.

Earlier this week, Israel closed the mosque to Palestinians for Friday prayers for the first time since Israel occupied Jerusalem in 1967 and installed metal detectors and cameras at the entrance to the Haram Al-Sharif Compound following the killing of two policemen at the site.

Palestinians then boycotted the Muslim holy compound for three days, in condemnation of the new security measures at the gates, preferring to pray outside the mosque in order not to pass through the metal detectors.

Confrontations and scuffles have erupted between Israeli occupation forces and Palestinians camping outside the holy site, leaving tens of Palestinians injured by rubber bullets and tear gas.

The Egyptian statement also called on Israel to stop the violence, respect the Palestinians' right to worship safely and freely, and not to take actions that could lead to further escalation and weaken the chances of reaching a peaceful and just settlement.

Egypt has repeatedly called for a fair and comprehensive solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that guarantees the rights of Palestinians to have their own independent state.

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Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi said on Wednesday that his party will put pressure on the Rajasthan government to get the farmers loans waived off.

We will not let the CM sleep till then, he said.

Addressing the Kisan Akrosh rally in Rajasthans Banswara district , Gandhi said last year the Congress had asked PM Narendra Modi to waive loan of Uttar Pradesh farmers. We even submitted a petition to the government signed by two crore farmers, he said.

Maintaining that the demand for loan waiver was not just limited to UP farmers, Rahul said Congress-ruled Karnataka and Punjab had conceded to the farmers demand and waived off their loans. He said in Uttar Pradesh, too, the BJP government waived off loans only after the Congress put pressure on them.

The BJP-led NDA government has faced flak for its handling of the agrarian crisis with the Congress alleging that PM Modi had failed to keep his poll promise to beleaguered farmers. The Congress V-P has repeatedly accused the PM of siding with the corporates and ignoring farmers.

Congress hopes that the issue of farmers distress will play a vital role in dethroning Rajasthans BJP government in the 2018 state elections.

On Wednesday, Rahul asked the party leaders to exert pressure on the Vasundhra Raje government to waive off the farmers loan. If required, I am ready to go to any district. We are not in the government, if we had been, then there would not have been need for this speech, he said.

Gandhi accused Modi of not creating enough jobs in the country reminding the PM of his poll promise of providing employment to two crore youth every year. He said the government was helping 50 big industrialists of the country at the cost of dalits and tribals.

The government is being run for few big businessmen who earn lot but for small traders, dalits and farmers, they do not have any concern, he said, while claiming that the government did not allow a discussion on farmer issues in Lok Sabha.

Rajasthan Congress chief Sachin Pilot alleged that the farmers were suffering in the BJP rule both at the centre and the state. Incidents of farmers suicide are on constant rise in Rajasthan, last year the number was 60. This rally will give a message that under the leadership of Gandhi, the farmers of India will throw out BJP of power.

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As far as promises go, this one could be hard to keep.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has assured NDA vice-presidential candidate M Venkaiah Naidu that the treasury benches would not allow his blood pressure to rise in the Rajya Sabha.

Its our assurance that we will not allow your BP to shoot up in the Rajya Sabha. We will continue to give as much support as we can, sources quoted the PM as saying.

Modi was addressing a BJP meeting called on Tuesday to felicitate Naidu on being picked as the V-P candidate.

The 68-year-old BJP veteran, whose victory in August 5 election is a forgone conclusion, will need all the support he can get.

As the vice-president, the former union minister will also be the chairman of the Rajya Sabha, where the ruling NDA is in a minority. The ruling side and the Opposition have clashed bitterly in the Upper House, leading to disruptions.

The Opposition has delayed passage of bills or sent them to parliamentary panels for reviews, slowing down the process of law-making.

Though there was no data available but he was confident that Naidu would be the first vice-president to have spent so many years in the Rajya Sabha, Modi said.

Modi said the party and the cabinet always consulted Naidu on agricultural issues. When policy is finalised, Naidus touch is there, the PM was quoted as saying by sources.

Naidu will go up against Congress-led Opposition pick Gopalkrishna Gandhi in a one-sided contest. The vice-president is picked by the members of Parliament. Out of a total of 790 MPs, the NDA has 410.

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A Rajasthan minister has sounded an ominous warning: if immediate steps were not taken to increase the production of milk of indigenous cows, the day is not far away when it would be sold through medical stores.

Health conscious people prefer to drink cows milk. However, the milk available in the market is of exotic and crossbred cows such as Jersey and Holstein and not of indigenous breeds such as Rathi, Tharparkar, and Gir. The milk of indigenous cows is rich in A2 beta casein protein, while that of crossbred cows has A1 beta casein protein, which is not as healthy as A2, Prabhu Lal Saini, state minister for agriculture and animal husbandry, said.

The demand for indigenous cows milk is more because of its qualities, but the supply is very less. If cow milk production is not increased, then a day will come soon when it will be sold in bottles in medical stores, the minister said.

This is not the first time when Saini has extolled the virtues of the indigenous breeds over foreign-bred cows. The source of -amino acids in indigenous cows milk, which is also found in mothers milk, is extremely beneficial in preventing cancer, curing high blood pressure, helping in digestion, and also for diabetes patients, he had earlier said.

The minister also offered a solution to those rearing cows. To increase milk production, farmers need to pay attention to improving the breed, timely treatment of the bovines and ensuring them proper feed, he said.

Farmers need to pay attention towards rearing indigenous breeds of cow along with agriculture, so that their income increases, Saini said, adding cattle rearing will play an important role in fulfilling the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief minister Vasundhara Raje to double the income of farmers by 2020.

The minister said that the animal husbandry department is informing farmers on rearing indigenous cow breeds.

Rajasthan is home to 1.16 crore indigenous cows as per 19th livestock census 2012. According to Rajasthan Cooperative Dairy Federation (RCDF( sources total milk production in state in 2015-16 was 4.55 crore litres per day, of which 50 per cent is marketable surplus, while the rest is kept for personal use by farmers. It means, 2.27 crore litres of milk reaches market every day of which RCDF purchases 11-12%. Of the total milk produced per day, 40% (1.82 crore litres) is cows milk. The major cow milk belt is Bikaner, Ganganagar, Jodhpur and Hanumangarh.

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A 17-year-old girl in Rajasthan chopped off her hair after her classmates teased her for having long hair. But the teen was scared that her parents may not like her hair so she cooked up a story and said that a ghost chopped off her tresses.

However, after her story created a scare in the neighbourhood and the police reached her house, she spilled the beans and said she made up the story as girls in her family were not allowed to keep short hair.

Police said that a Class 12 student in Prem Nagar area of Kota city on Tuesday alleged that a ghost had chopped off her hair when she was serving fodder to the goats in her backyard. She said she felt a burning sensation and later saw her hair on the ground.

Her parents were not home when the alleged ghost attack took place.

Theres a rumour in some parts of the western Rajasthan about a mythical bogeyman who chops womens hair. Several women in Jodhpur, Barmer and Jaipur have reported that some ghost cut their hair and left a mark on their body. However, psychiatrists have said such women suffer from delusion. In most cases, women admit to cutting their hair themselves.

News of Kotas first such incident spread like wildfire and a large number of people gathered at the girls house. Her family registered a complaint with the Udyog Nagar police about the supernatural attack, said Suresh Kumar, SHO of the police station.

However, when Dr Seema Chauhan, a young lady officer under probation, spoke to the girl, she told her the truth.

I spoke to her at length and won her confidence after which the girl told me that she wanted to keep her hair short but her parents wouldnt approve of it, said the police officer.

The girl told the officer that her schoolmates teased her for her tresses. When she heard about the hair-chopping rumours on TV, she got the idea to cut her hair.

The girls father is a labourer and works in a local factory. Her mother is a housewife. The girl has two younger siblings, who were sleeping in the house when she chopped off her hair.
Raj Rajeswari Hall, a British-era community hall run by the Bengali Association of Kurseong, was completely destroyed in the wee hours on Wednesday when alleged Gorkhaland supporters set it on fire. Made of wood, stone and concrete, the single-storey building on Dow Hill Road in Kurseong town was set up in 1930.

The hall was part of local history and venue of the only Durga Puja held in the town. The puja turned 100 last year. In February, chief minister Mamata Banerjee had allocated funds for renovation of the heritage structure.

The arson took place on the 35th day of the bandh in the hills and hours after the 15 political parties and non-political organisations heading the agitation decided to stage rallies and seminars in Delhi to draw the Centres attention to their demand for a separate state of Gorkhaland.

The decorated Raj Rajeswari Hall during Durga puja in 2016. (Bikram Sashanker)

Chandan Karmakar, a member of the trustee board that looks after the building said that all documents, furniture and the audio system were gutted. Interestingly, the property was never attacked during the earlier Gorkhaland movements in 1986-1988 and 2007-2011. The state PWD department had recently started a renovation project at a cost of Rs 38 lakh. Brijmohan Ghosh, secretary of the Bengali Association of Kurseong, said, A part of Darjeelings history is lost.

Members of the local Bengali community and tourists at Raj Rajeswari Hall during Durga puja in 2015 (HT file photo)

With only around 75 members left, the 100-year-old association is a proof of the ethnic tension and exodus of Bengalis from the hills since mid-1980s. Though many government and private properties, including Darjeeling Himalayan Railway stations, have been targeted since June 8, Raj Rajeswari Hall was never attacked. It was used for community events such as marriage and social gatherings. People of Kurseong used to take pride in the property.

Read: Indefinite Darjeeling bandh bleeds Siliguris business of Rs 2 crore every day

Alleged Gorkhaland supporters also set on fire the Nagari gram panchayat office and attacked the Kurseong tourist lodge and a police outpost. They also set on fire all the furniture inside the Trinamool Congress office in Darjeeling. On Wednesday afternoon a police vehicle was set on fire near the official residence of the deputy superintendent of police, Darjeeling.

Read: Darjeeling witnessing violent insurgency, Maoists from neighbouring country, Bengal govt tells HC

State tourism minister Gautam Deb said that repeated act s of arson has proved that Gorkhaland supporters are not interested in peace talks. We strongly condemn this violence, said the minister who is also president of the Darjeeling Trinamool Congress district unit.

A police jeep on fire near a police officers quarters in Darjeeling town on Wednesday. (Bikram Sashanker)

On Tuesday, Union law & information technology minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, had brushed aside allegations by the Bengal government which accuses the Centre of encouraging the unrest. Such allegations are baseless. The Union government is keen to see peace restored in the hills and we are ready to cooperate with the state. We have already sent Central forces. If needed, we will send more. The state government should initiate talks to restore normalcy, Prasad said on the sidelines of a seminar organized by the Indian Chamber of Commerce.

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Jugaad, the overworked Hindi word signifying innovative fix will be one of the highlights around which a six-month long exhibition will be held in London Science Museum to showcase India's contribution to the world of science over the past 5,000 years.

Titled Scientific Thought in South Asia, the exhibition starts on September 27 and will feature 80 items.

Read: India placed at 43rd among 45 nations in global innovation index

Among the exhibits to be showcased in the British capital are the Jaipur foot, neonatal warming pouches, dabbas to transport hot food and even autorickshaws.

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1887-1937) was one of the most brilliant scientists of the country who invented some basic technologies such as wireless communication. (Wikipedia)

The concept of jugaad, which is becoming increasingly important and popular across the world, will be seen in technological innovations for medicine, transport and communications in India. We will look at how jugaad has played an important role in contemporary innovation, exhibition curator Matt Kimberley told HT in an email interview.

The exhibition will also highlight ancient Indian astronomy and Indias contribution in mathematics. Ideas, instruments and principles related to Jain mathematicians, astronomer-mathematician Brahmagupta, physician Susruta, emperors Asoka, Akbar, Jahangir and Jai Singh II will be showcased alongside those of the modern day scientists J C Bose, C V Raman, S N Bose and Srinivasa Ramanujan.

Last year, British Prime Minister Teresa May and Narendra Modi announced this exhibition.

Read: First in India: Punjab bags first UN agency-backed innovation centre

From dabbas and neonatal warming pouches to the Jaipur foot prosthetic and even the autorickshaw all reflect the spirit of jugaad in innovative design, Kimberley said.

The ubiquitous auto-rickshaw is also one of the Indian products that will be on display at the exhibition. (HT Photo)

Jaipur foot is a low-cost and user-friendly artificial limb invented by Jaipur-based traditional craftsman Ram Chandra Sharma in 1968 and popularised by orthopaedic surgeon P K Sethi, who went on to win the Magsaysay award for revolutionising the use of artificial limbs. Low-cost neonatal warming pouches were developed by the organisation Embrace in 2011. It is being seen as a major progress towards reducing infant deaths.

Objects on display come from the ancient, medieval, Mughal, British and modern periods, exploring Indias contributions to science and technology from the engineering feats of the Indus Valley Civilisation 5000 years ago to the work of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) today.

Ancient Indian astronomy and Indias contribution to mathematics are at the core of the exhibition.

Read: Science is well: Innovation is alive and kicking in India

Astronomy was one of the most important areas of scientific observation and we are highlighting that through some of the exquisite astronomical instruments manufactured in India. Mathematics is also one of the most important areas. We will show how Indian thinkers defined mathematics from, quite literally, zero to infinity, Matt Kimberley, curator of the exhibition, told HT.

The astronomical instruments on display in the exhibition will include a 19th century astrolabe designed and manufactured by Lala Balhumal Lahuri and a 16th century bhugolak (globe).

Other exhibits include the Bakshali script, considered the first evidence of the concept of zero and objects on Jain mathematicians concepts on infinity. The Bakhshali manuscript was discovered in 1881 in present-day Pakistan. The manuscript is written on birch bark and is considered to be too fragile to be examined by experts.

The 16th century bhugolak reflects the melding of Hindu and Ptolemaic ideas about the cosmos in its design, Kimberley said.

Star objects include a set of Indus Valley Civilisation standardised weights from around 3000 BCE, instruments used to carry out the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India in the 19th century, CV Ramans original spectroscope that led to the discovery of Raman Effect and instruments designed and built by JC Bose to measure growth in plants.

Indias role in the global story of science and technology began in the earliest days of civilisations but we will be showing how that role is as vital today as it was then, Kimberley said.

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The Mamata Banerjee government has issued an order banning wheat cultivation within five km from the Bangladesh border. The direction has been prompted by an advice from the Centre to avoid the deadly wheat blast disease, the fungus of which travelled to some bordering villages earlier this year and posed the threat of spreading throughout the country.

The fungus has become the latest menace after fake currency notes and infiltrators that enter India through the Bangladesh border.

Bangladesh has a 4,096-km border with India of which 2,217 km is with West Bengal.

Read: Fungus sees wheat crops in Bengal go up in flames as govt controls its spread

We are in constant talks with agriculture scientists for this purpose. But unless a lasting solution is available, banning wheat cultivation is the only option, West Bengal agriculture minister, Purnendu Bose, told HT.

Wheat blast is a deadly virus that devastated the wheat production of Brazil for the first time in 1985. In 2016, the fungus entered Asia for the first time, creating havoc in Bangladesh where crops of over 20,000 hectares in six districts had to be burnt. Subsequently, it travelled to the West Bengal districts of Murshidabad and Nadia. Experts said cattle straying into India from Bangladesh can be a carrier of the fungus.

A farmer helplessly stares at his crop after setting the field on fire in Nadia district. (Suvankar Chakraborty)

Alarmed that it may find its way into the wheat bowl of north India, the state government tried to tackle it on a war footing and ordered burning of wheat crops in March this year.

The agreement to ban cultivation was reached at a meeting between the officials of the Union agriculture ministry and Bengal agriculture department in New Delhi on June 27, following which the state government issued the order on July 15.

Read: Ground Zero: Farmers stare helplessly as govt race against time to contain spread of wheat blast like symptoms

The minister said that about 800 hectares of land in Murshidabad and Nadia districts will come under the ban. The crop on this land in the two districts had to be burnt to control the spread of the disease. The state government also paid compensation to the wheat farmers following the loss, he said.

During 2016- 17, the state government paid around Rs 4 crore to the wheat farmers to compensate for their loss. The government paid a total compensation of about Rs 4.10 crore. The rate was Rs 1,625 per quintal, which is the minimum support price of wheat, said a state agriculture official.

Bose also said the government is now trying to trying to decide which crops can be cultivated as an alternative to wheat in these areas.

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A special court on Wednesday rejected a plea by lawyers of former Uttar Pradesh minister Gayatri Prajapati, an accused in a gang-rape case, for the removal of POCSO charges on him.

Uma Shanker Sharma, the judge of the special court, fixed August 1 as the next date of hearing wherein evidence would be submitted against Prajapati.

The court also framed charges against the senior Samajwadi Party (SP) leader and six others under the POCSO Act.

The court also observed a strong doubt was enough as an evidence and added that there were eye witness accounts and other evidence as well against the accused Gayatri Prajapati, Vikas Verma, Ashish Shukla, Ashok Tiwari and others in the chargesheet.

Keeping these things in mind, the court observed, revoking the charges under POCSO would not be correct.

Prajapati, one of the most powerful ministers in the previous Samajwadi Party government in Uttar Pradesh, is languishing in prison in gang-rape charges. He was given bail a few weeks ago but it was cancelled after a furore.

A committee formed by the Allahabad High Court to probe the granting of bail had discovered that the former minister was given bail by a judge set to retire a day later at a bribe fixed at a round Rs 2 crore.
An eyewitness to last months killing of five people at Rae Barelis Etaura Bujurg village died in the neighbouring Bargdaha hamlet under the Unchahar police station here on Monday night.

Amrit Lal Prajapati, 55, succumbed to the injuries that he sustained on June 26 night when he was hit by a speeding Tata Safari during a clash between two groups.

Three persons were lynched and two others were burnt alive during a group clash in Uttar Pradeshs Rae Bareli district on June 26 night. All the five killed were Brahmins and the issue has taken political colour since then.

Locals described Prajapatis death as suspicious. They claimed he had witnessed the clash when he had gone to a village field nearby to relieve himself.

The police could not record Prajapatis statement in the 21 days since the killings.

His body was cremated at Gokana Ghat in Rae Bareli under strict police vigil on Tuesday. The police helped in making the arrangements since the family was too poor.

After the June 26 incident, Prajapati was first treated at the Rohania primary health centre, the Rae Bareli district hospital and then referred to Lucknow .

He returned home as he was unable to afford the medical expenses in Lucknow.

Unchahar station officer Dhananjay Singh received information about Amrit Lals death on Monday.

The station officer told HT: We did not receive any application from him about the June 26 incident in which five people were killed. Amrit Lal was injured by a Safari when he was in a field to relieve himself on June 26 evening.

Singh also said, I could not record Amrit Lal s statement because I was posted to Unchahar just eight days ago .

He said he was aware that Amrit Lal was undergoing treatment at different places in the last 20 days.

The body has been sent for a post-mortem.

Prajapatis death angered the locals but the police in preventing them from putting up a road block.

The clash at the districts Etaura Bujurg was the result of a long-drawn animosity between village head Ram Shri Yadav and his bete noire Rohit Shukla, police had said.

Shukla and his supporters allegedly attacked Yadavs three sons Raja Yadav, Pradeep Yadav and Krishna Yadav, leading to firing from both sides.

As more supporters of Yadav rushed in on June 26 night, Shukla and his gang tried to escape in a Tata Safari. But in the course of chase, the driver lost control and fell into a ditch after hitting an electric pole.

Supporters of Yadav soon pounced on them and lynched three persons dragging them out of the vehicle. They then torched the vehicle, burning alive two injured trapped inside.

Rohit Shukla was among those killed. Other deceased were identified as Brijesh Shukla, Anoop Mishra, Narendra Shukla and Alnkush Mishra.
Employees of Tata Consultancy Services organised a candle light protest in front of their office in Vibhuti Khand, Gomti Nagar, here on Tuesday evening against the companys decision to wind up its Lucknow operations. The employees sought to draw the state governments attention to the matter in order to stop TCS from transferring all the staff of its Lucknow office to Noida where the company has rented a building for the next five years.

The employees said they were not protesting against anyone, but were praying for the company to stay back in Lucknow as transfer of 2,000 employees will disturb 2,000 families of the state capital.

Read more: Wont let TCS pull out of Lucknow, says UP finance minister

The decision will not only have a financial impact but will also have social, emotional and career consequences for every individual, they said.

The TCS employees have demanded a meeting with chief minister Yogi Adityanath on the issue.

Deputy chief minister Dinesh Sharma has assured the TCS employees that the government will do everything to stop TCS from leaving the state capital.

Sharma said, The state government is in touch with the TCS top management. One of the top officials of the TCS is supposed to meet the chief minister soon.

Sharma said the state government has offered all kinds of support, including a building for the company office to remain in Lucknow.

TCS officials refused to comment on talks between the company and the state government .

The TCS decision to leave Lucknow has stunned the BJP government which completed 100 days in office last month and claims to be improving conditions for investment in the state.

Read more: TCS to wind up Lucknow operations, company says no job loss

A protesting employee, who refused to be named, said: Lucknow is on way to becoming the next information technology (IT) hub in Uttar Pradesh after Noida but if TCS shifts base to Noida, no company will opt to come to Lucknow as they will be sceptical of investing in the state capital. The exit of TCS will send a wrong signal to other software giants who were planning to set up base in Lucknow.

The employees claimed the Lucknow centre was not incurring losses. Senior company officials wanted to justify their decision of renting a building in Noida which has a capacity of 5000 employees with most of it lying vacant, they said.

The lease of the TCS office was coming to an end in Lucknow, so the officials decided to shift all the employees to Noida without considering the impact of this decision, the protesting employees said.

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In May 2015, three improvised bombs were set off near Judge Moatez Khafagis home in the southern Cairo district of Helwan. The judge was not harmed but four others were injured

A Cairo Criminal Court sentenced Wednesday four individuals to life in prison for attempting to assassinate a judge by detonating improvised explosive devices (IEDs) near his home two years ago.

The court also sentenced two others in the same case to 15 years in prison.

A life in prison sentence in Egypt is equivalent to 25 years in jail.

The prison sentences can still be appealed in front of the appeals court.

In May 2015, three improvised bombs were set off near Judge Moatez Khafagis home in the southern Cairo district of Helwan.

Khafagi, who had presided over cases and handed down a number of death sentences to Islamists, was unhurt in the explosion but four others were injured.

A few weeks after the attack on Khafagis home, the interior ministry said it killed two individuals involved in the attack as they were trying to arrest them in a house raid. The men were identified as Ahmed Hassan Abd El-Latif, 32, an engineer at Helwans health department, and Saeed Ahmed El-Sayed, 33. The interior ministry said they were members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group, which was also deemed a terrorist organisation in 2013.

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The Uttar Pradesh government announced in the state assembly on Tuesday that action will be taken against those found responsible for the fire at the King Georges Medical University Trauma Centre on Saturday.

Minister for medical education Ashutosh Tandon said chief minister Yogi Adityanath had ordered an inquiry into the incident. Tandon said the incident was unfortunate and no one should indulge in any politicking on the issue. The previous government dedicated the buildings to the public without their completion, he said.

Minister for medical and health Siddharth Nath Singh said a fire safety audit had been ordered and fire safety drills would also be carried out there. He said fire safety measures should have been checked at the time of construction of the building.

As Tandon had targeted a Samajwadi Party leader for politicising the Trauma Centre fire incident, leader of opposition Ram Govind Chaudhary said the minister too had been indulging in politicking by blaming the previous regime for lapses. The ministers were not able to forget the work the Akhilesh Yadav government had done for states development, he said.

Read more| Trauma centre fire: Services restored,but attendants say all medicines not available

Bahujan Samaj Party member Uma Shankar Singh had raised the issue through an adjournment motion in the house. He said the divisional commissioners inquiry report had pointed out laxity by the university administration. The minister incharge of medical education department should have ensured installation of fire safety instruments at the trauma centre, he said. A probe should also be conducted to find out whether the incident was the result of any attempt to destroy records about the purchase medicines, he said.

Another BSP member Sukhdev Rajbhar said incidents of fire were reported from other government buildings like Jawahar Bhavan and the state government should monitor such incidents.
Overheating of a heavy-duty refrigerator in the store room on the second floor led to the fire at the KGMUs Trauma Centre on Saturday evening, said the district administrations report, which was submitted to the government here on Tuesday.

FIRE DEPARTMENT HAD SERVED NOTICES The fire department had earlier served many notices to the KGMU, directing it to make enhanced fire safety arrangements. But, the KGMU turned a blind eye towards the intimations from the fire department, stated the report. Poor fire safety equipment and ill-trained staff failed to minimise the damage that had put the lives of hundreds of ailing patient at risk, stated the report.

Due to the overheating of the refrigerator, the plastic bottles and hardboard boxes kept nearby caught fire, turning the second floor into a fireball, the report said.

Read more| Trauma centre fire: Services restored,but attendants say all medicines not available

Besides, laxity of the KGMUs staff led to the chaotic situation after the blaze, it suggested.

The 22-point report was submitted by the divisional commissioner on the orders of the chief minister (CM). It was prepared by a team comprising the district magistrate, SSP, chief fire safety and electrical safety officer.

The report not only highlighted the causes of the fire, but also underlined the poor fire safety arrangements at the hospital.

Poor fire safety equipment and ill-trained staff failed to minimise the damage that had put the lives of hundreds of ailing patient at risk, stated the report.

It was also mentioned (in the report) that the fire department had earlier served many notices to the KGMU, directing the medical university to make enhanced fire safety arrangements at the hospital. But, the KGMU turned a blind eye towards the intimations from the fire department.

The probe report also termed the safety equipment installed at the Trauma Centre a show piece.

Fire safety equipments at the Trauma Centre were no less than show pieces. Things like hosepipes and others were not functional, the report said.

The report also had a suggestion column through which it directed the hospital to upgrade fire safety arrangements on the campus. The district magistrate and SSP also directed that the Trauma Centre should immediately install fire alarm system on its premises and train staff to tackle fire incidents.

Read more| Trauma Centre fire: Minister says previous UP government dedicated incomplete buildings

On Saturday, a major fire broke out at the KGMUs Trauma Centre. Doctors, paramedics, attendants and security personnel had a tough time evacuating about 200 critical patients amidst the smoke. The evacuation process continued till late in the night. The district administration claimed two deaths so far in the incident. But unconfirmed reports put the toll at eight.
Champagne is probably the worlds most famous wine --- and the worlds least understood. For a start, Champagne does not mean a sparkling wine with a cork that goes pop. To be called Champagne, the wine has to be made from grapes grown in the Champagne region of France and also bottled there. All other sparkling wine, no matter how good, cannot be called Champagne.

Then, there are the grapes. Champagne is usually made from three grapes: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. Some Champagne, intended for long maturing, will not have Pinot Meunier but the majority of all other Champagne will have the other two. You can make champagne from a single one of these grapes (Blancs de Blancs is all Chardonnay) but you must say so on the bottle.

Champagne is the wine that is made from grapes grown in the Champagne region of France and is bottled there.

These three grapes do not grow easily in every country so most countries use different grapes for their sparkling wine. Even the worlds largest Champagne company, Moet-Hennessy decided to use the sweeter Chenin Blanc grape when it started making Chandon, a sparkling wine in India. This is why Chandon, while wonderful in its own way, tastes nothing like Champagne.

The process of making Champagne is even less understood, even by those who drink it. And frankly, it is a little tedious. Most other wines are treated in vats or barrels and then put into bottles. But champagne has a complicated double fermentation system, that involves two different corks or stoppers, twisting the neck of each bottle, adding sugar halfway through the process and lots of other refinements.

The consequence of all this is that Champagne will never be a cheap wine. It is almost impossible to make a bottle of champagne for less than 14 (or around  1400). By the time you have added transportation, packaging, marketing distribution, profit margins, etc., champagne could cost a minimum of 20 (or  2000). In fact, it often costs considerably more.

Naturally, this limits its appeal so cheaper bubbly wines (chiefly Prosecco, a sweeter Italian sparkler and Chandon) fill the gap in the Indian market. But it is hard for a Champagne drinker to get used to the substitutes and anyway, none of the surrogates have the celebratory associations of real Champagne.

And so, Champagne still continues to sell well all over India. The leader is Moet & Chandon (you pronounce the t in Moet, it is not Moey), which has nurtured the Indian market for nearly two decades. The giant Pernod Ricard owns Mumm, but for some reason its Champagne has never taken off and so, smaller (and often, excellent quality) brands pop up all over India.

But even people who drink lots of Champagne, dont always realise that it is usually a blend. The bulk of the Champagne business is in the non-vintage (NV) sector. A bottle of Moet & Chandon Brut Imperial will not mention the year it was bottled. That is because NV Champagne is supposed to taste the same, year after year.

In practice, this is difficult to achieve because each years harvest is different. So, every Champagne house keeps vast stocks of so-called reserve Champagne from previous years. Each year, when the NV Champagne is being readied for the bottle, the wine-maker will create a blend, using the newly harvested wine and his reserve wines so that it tastes just the same as the year before.

Then, there are the premium labels, names we have all heard: Dom Perignon, Krug, Cristal etc. These will cost three to four times as much as ordinary NV Champagne.

And yet, even at those prices, they are some of the best value great wines in the world. These days, the increase in demand from the global (mainly, Chinese) market has pushed up the prices for most of the worlds great wines. Fortunately, the Chinese have yet to fall in love with Champagne. So, for the moment at least, a bottle of Dom Perignon will cost only a fraction of the price of say, Chateau Lafite.

The Champagne companies say that this is terribly unfair and perhaps it is. But speaking for myself, I am delighted because it means that of the worlds great wines, premium Champagne is the only one that I can sometimes afford. It is also relatively easy to get my hands on. (Most great Champagnes are legally imported into India and many turn up on restaurant wine lists.)

I have been, on my visits to Champagne, to most of the great houses but the one I am most familiar with is Dom Perignon, largely because I am friends with Richard Geoffroy.

Richard Geoffroy, a legend in the wine business, was in India recently.

Within the wine business, Richard is a legend. When he took over as winemaker at Dom Perignon in 1990, it was a very great house but it did not have the kind of stature it has today. Not only did he change the character of the wine (for a start, he reduced the dosage or the sugar that is added during the second fermentation), he also held the ship steady in the crucial decade from 1990 to 2000. Though there were bad harvests in that decade, he managed to make great wines. And as his bosses at Moet-Hennessy asked him to ramp up production, he was able to create more bottles of Dom Perignon without sacrificing the quality. In fact, you could argue that quality actually improved during that period.

Since 2000, production numbers have remained largely fixed. But Richard has faced a new challenge. Traditionally, you only make Dom Perignon in an exceptional year, when the grapes are of high quality. But as global demand has grown, there has been more and more pressure on Richard to create a Dom Perignon vintage in a less-than-extraordinary year. Other wine makers may have funked it. But there have been times when Richard has accepted the challenge and surprised everyone. Given the state of the 2003 harvest, it should have been impossible to turn out a great champagne. But Richard did it and he now says that the 2003 is his personal favourite.

India is not a huge market for Dom so Richard is here infrequently. I first met him over a decade ago at a jolly Dom Perignon dinner at the Delhi Oberoi where everyone got drunk and the Spanish ambassadors wife danced the flamenco. (I thought to myself, Richard recalls, so this is what India is like: singing and dancing!)

Then, a few years later, he came for some socialite-heavy Dom Perignon events which I avoided.But we spent a quiet evening at the Delhi Leela matching two bottles of Dom Perignon he had brought along (his 2003 and an older 2000 Rose) along with two bottles I had got from home (1998 and 1999) with all kinds of food: Mutton biryani, Wagyu carpaccio (those were the days!), a porcini risotto, sashimi and much more.

We met a little later in Istanbul for the launch of the 2002 Rose (where the pouring Champagne was the Oenotheque, a range of wines that deserve a column to themselves) and then again at the Dom Perignon chateau in Champagne where he led me through a tasting of a dozen vintages, dating back 50 years. I am not sure I could tell the difference but Richard is a nice man so he pretended not to notice.

Dom Perignon, a brand of vintage Champagne, is one of the many premium labels.

Richard was back in Mumbai for a packed two days last week. He spent one day at a media lunch and then, before we went out for dinner, he dropped into my room for a tasting of two more recent vintages and a long natter.

Moet had requested the investment banker Rajiv Sahney to host a small dinner (ten people in all) at his house with catering from Prateek Sadhu, the chef behind Masque. The food was interesting, the Sahneys are good hosts (they opened a 1962 Chateau dYquem and had to be dissuaded (not by me, I hasten to add) from opening Chateau Margaux! Richard was relaxed --- not bad going considering that he was off at 7.30 am the next morning for a hectic day trip to the Chandon winery in Nasik.

We talked about wine, of course, and about Champagne in general. Ever since I first met Richard all those years ago, I have stopped drinking good Champagne from flutes. According to Richard, they do not show off the wine to best advantage and they demean Champagne. A great Champagne is really a great white wine (like a great white Burgundy) and it should be drink in exactly the same way.

The Dom Perignon vineyards, by Michael Kenna.

I am not sure what the cut-off point is but speaking for myself, I drink Moet & Chandon in flutes (because that is how people serve it) but Dom and all the vintage Champagnes get white wine glasses in my house.

The discussion about glasses brought us back full circle. Yes, Champagne is the worlds most famous wine. And yes, it is the right drink for celebrations. But it is first and foremost, a very good wine. (There should be no bad wines in Champagne.) And when you are dealing with the great vintages, then you treat them with the respect you would accord to the worlds great wines.

It is about depth, not about the pop!

Read last weeks column here

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The new helicopter that the state plans to buy for its VIPs is likely to cost nearly Rs90 crore and may take at least a year to be delivered. While procuring the chopper will take four months, the bidding process before and registration after it will lengthen the procedure, said an official.

A committee headed by chief secretary Sumeet Mullick decided to speed up the process on Wednesday. Its decision comes two weeks after chief minister Devendra Fadnavis escaped a potential chopper accident while returning from Alibaug.

During a meeting at Mantralaya, the committee endorsed a decision to suspend the choppers operations during the monsoon. It also decided to dispose of a grounded helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft as soon as possible.

The state will appoint a pilot and co-pilot for its only aircraft in service  a Cessna Citation 560 XLS  for VIPs.

We will call for global tenders to buy a chopper. It is likely to be a modern make of Sikorki S76 or Bell. The state favours the advanced make of Sikorki S76, which was grounded after it crash-landed in Latur in May. Reports revealed that its sturdiness helped the pilot avoid further damage, said an official.

The state expects about Rs15 crore to be recovered from the Sikorki S76s insurance cover.

After a failed attempt to dispose of the Beechcraft Super King Air 350 and Eurocopter AS 365 Dauphin, the state has decided to relax norms to ensure their speedy disposal.

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With neither Prime Minister Narendra Modi nor any of his relatives alleging defamation or insult through the meme on Twitter, the Mumbai police are contemplating closing the case against All India Bakchod (AIB) co-founder Tanmay Bhat.

On Thursday, the AIB tweeted a picture of Modis doppelganger peering into his mobile phone at a railway station. They also uploaded a picture of Modi superimposed with a Snapchat filter with #Wanderlust, allegedly meant to mock Modis frequent foreign trips.

After receiving a barrage of insults and hate messages from trolls, the group deleted its post.

A senior police official told HT the case is weak.

He said the post against Modi led to outrage on Twitter, with a complaint on the official Mumbai police Twitter handle too. Taking note of the complaint, the police booked the group for obscenity and defamation under the IT Act and IPC.

Legal experts like Majeed Memon, Abha Singh, Dr Olav Albuquerque said the aggrieved person, in this case Modi, should file the defamation case.

Albuquerque said the police can file an FIR only when they have consent of Modi or any of his relatives.

Even as police officials close to the investigation are refusing to come on record they said the case may not stand in court.

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Mumbais Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) will get help from the Belgian government to conserve its biodiversity and revamp the park.

The national park, one of the few forests in the world to be situated in an urban area, was chosen for the project from among four other urban forest areas. The national park is home to a free roaming leopard population of more than 30, nearly 250 bird species, 40 kinds of reptiles and over a thousand types of plants.

The conservation project took off in February after Belgiums consul general Peter Huyghebert visited the park, following a tender for SGNPs revamp. The Belgian consul generals office said they needed time to respond to HTs queries about the project.

Technologies from Belgiums Antwerp Zoo will be replicated at proposed projects in SGNP such as a mini zoo towards the Borivali end of the park, near the forest offices, and the leopard safari. Also, breeding centres and care research centres are going to be developed, said Sanjiv Chavan, former forest officer, in-charge of the project. Belgiums king and queen might be visiting Mumbai in November as part of their trip to India, which is when the MoU will be signed.

Maharashtras forest minister Sudhir Mungantiwar told HT that his ministry has approved a proposal by the Belgian consulate to provide new technologies to carry out research on the rich biodiversity of SGNP. The proposal was approved by forest department.

Out of four global urban forests, the Belgians chose SGNP and declared it as the most unique national park in the world, said Mungantiwar. The delegation that visited SGNP was astonished after they saw current biodiversity of forest and was amazed by presence of 35 leopards in and around the periphery of national park. Even the variety of flora and fauna is much more impressive than any other parks they were considering.

Three other national parks  Table Mountain National Park in Cape Town, South Africa, Nairobi National Park in Kenya, and Serra da Cantareira National Park in Sao Paulo, Brazil  all located on the fringes of metropolitan cities, were identified by the Belgian government for the conservation project.

Mungantiwar added that a memorandum of understanding (MoU) will be signed in November and work will begin from April-May 2018. The Belgians will fund 75% of the project, and we will fund the rest, he said.

The Antwerp Zoo, which opened in 1843, is one of the oldest in the world and has 5,000 animals of 950 species in its 10.5 hectares. The zoo is listed as a monument with over eight buildings housing animals. It has separate breeding programmes and a dedicated centre for research and conservation for endangered species including the bonobo, golden headed lion tamarin and the okapi.

We have already chalked out different areas where projects for research centres or breeding programmes can be developed. However, all details will be revealed post the MoU is signed. Our objective is to have a world class national park by next year, said Anwar Ahmed, chief conservator of forest, SGNP adding, While talks are still on, we have been told that the crown prince and princess of the current Belgian monarchy might be visiting Mumbai later this year.

About Sanjay Gandhi National Park

SGNP covers an area of 103.8 square kilometres in Mumbai suburban and Thane district. It was created in 1950 as the Krishnagiri National Park.

Tulsi and Vihar lakes, which were created in the late nineteenth century to supply water to Mumbai, are located within the boundary of the park. Another lake, Powai, is located south of the park.

The forest is home to 274 species of birds, 35 species of mammals, 40 species of reptiles, 170 species of butterflies and 1,300 species of flowering plants. HT had reported in June last year that a study undertaken by the SGNP, in collaboration with the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), found 35 free-roaming leopards in and around the national park.

Despite being surrounded by urban sprawl with a population of 24 million people, SGNP is the only park in the world that stands for conservation of a large biodiversity, said Anwar Ahmed, chief conservator of forest, SGNP. While SGNP is home to the almost extinct Chevrotain (mouse deer species) it also has the highest number of carnivores per square kilometre across the world.

https://sgnp.maharashtra.gov.in/1035/Home

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The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Opposition criticised the Shiv Sena and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) administration for targeting RJ Malishka by sending a notice for mosquito-breeding to her house on Tuesday.

Malishka became a target for ruling party Sena after the channel that she works at, released a video mocking the BMC for its ill-preparedness during monsoon.

Read: RJ Malishka hits back at BMC, tweets she has six more songs ready

Corporators from the BJP said that instead of sending a notice, the BMC should have given a reply by improving the quality of roads. This sort of behaviour is childish and stupid. There should be an inquiry against the official who issued this notice, said Manoj Kotak, group leader of BJP in BMC. Another BJP corporator, Makarand Narvekar, said that the Senas style of hooliganism was spreading to its officials also.

Read more: RJ Malishka in trouble? Yuva Sena leaders want BMC chief to file 500-crore suit against her

BJP leader Ashish Shelar and NCP leader Nitesh Rane also extended their support to Malishka on Twitter.

Congress corporator Ravi Raja alleged that the assistant commissioner of H/West ward (Bandra) was asked to find the house and send a notice. We want to thank Malishka for making a video, which highlights Mumbais pathetic condition during the monsoon. This is a democracy where criticism should be taken positively.

Read more: RJ Malishka to Kapil Sharma: Celebrities who faced BMCs ire

Samajwadi Party (SP) corporator Rais Shaikh, during a civic standing committee meeting on Wednesday, stated that BMC officials were becoming intolerant of criticism.

Ruling party Shiv Sena, however, defended all the criticism coming its way. Yashwant Jadhav, Sena corporator said that the notice was issued to Malishkas mother and not her. I wish corporators understand the issue before blaming anyone. If she (Malishka) had a complaint about roads, then why did she not send a letter to the municipal commissioner? Why is she blaming BMC for traffic and delay of trains when it is not under our jurisdiction? he said. Jadhav also alleged illegal alterations at Malishkas Bandra house.

Mangesh Satamkar, a Sena corporator said, A person who cannot take care of her own house should not criticise BMC.

Read More trouble for RJ Malishka: Now, BMC sends her notice for mosquito-breeding at Mumbai home
While heavy rain over the past two days left Mumbaiites battling with traffic snarls and potholes, municipal commissioner Ajoy Mehta said that the civic body is not counting potholes this year.

Mehta said, We are not counting the number of potholes as it remains a futile exercise. Instead, we are looking at the roads and attending to citizens complaints. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), before the onset of monsoon, had taken up 1,032 priority-I and II roads depending upon the urgency of repair needed.

Till 2015, the BMC was using a third-party system, where citizens could complain about potholes and civic engineers had to attend to complaints within 48 hours or face a penalty. The BMC started a pothole-tracking website in 2011. After discontinuing the system, the BMC released its own data of potholes in the city till last year and the number of potholes they attended. However, before this monsoon, the BMC said it will not count the number of potholes, but concentrate on repairing bad patches of roads, rather than isolated spots.

While the BMC denied releasing the number of potholes complaints they received, officials claimed that they have already attended to 90% of complaints. At present, the BMC is receiving complaints on its mobile application MCGM 24x7, where citizens can capture the longitude and latitude of the potholes location and upload a photograph.

This will be the first monsoon that will test the quality of roads repaired after a road scam hit the BMC and which left two of its chief engineers suspended. The BMC has also released 24 WhatsApp numbers to solve citizens problems from each ward. At many places BMC is using paver blocks to fix potholes instead of potholes mixture bought from Israel and Australia, which they claimed to use, said Nikhil Desai, member, F-north federation.

Second lake to overflow

In a week, the Tansa lake becomes the second to overflow, taking the water in the catchment area to 10, 28, 421 million litres on Tuesday. The water in the catchment area is already 71% of the stock Mumbai requires for a year. Last year, the water stock had just reached 50%, while in 2015 it was just 18%. In 2016, Tansa started to overflow on August 2.

Read

Weekend gave Mumbai half its average rain for the season

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The press is in one sense a custodian of public interests, any attempt to hamper its freedom by repressive legislation is bound to affect their interests prejudicially, and cannot fail in the end to react upon the position of the Government itself, thundered Gopal Krishna Gokhale in the Imperial Legislative Council in 1879.

The titan was responding to the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 which the British government had enacted to curb the growing influence of the press in the mid-19th century. The influence of the pro-Raj English press among the masses was limited but the anti-Raj independent press was popular. It was the catalyst in shaping pro-freedom opinions. Indeed, the history of the freedom movement cannot be read without stepping into the domain of the press.

Bengal is regarded as the pioneer of the Indian press in the 18th century, but the press in Bombay, in English and Indian languages, expanded and deepened the freedom movement. Bombay was the citadel from where the Indian press launched its social reform movementand then the political movement, noted Rangaswami Parathasarathy, journalism history chronicler, in his book Journalism in India.

The Bombay Herald was the first newspaper launched in the city in 1789; it was later called the Bombay Gazette. The Courier was launched in 1789-90. But these were early experiments without a nod to nationalism. The Bombay Darpan started by the stalwart Bal Shastri Jambhekar as an Anglo-Marathi fortnightly in 1832 carried the torch for socio- political reform. Dadabhai Naoroji, among the first pan-Indian nationalist leaders, was the editor of a daily, Rast Goftar, launched in 1851 and later launched his own monthly, Voice of India, in 1882.

The journalist-editors then reflected the popular unrest in their publications, they also fuelled it. When the Indian National Congress was formed in Bombay in 1885, a third of the members involved were journalists or editors. The story of Indian journalism is a saga of adventure, patriotism, sacrifice and dedicationan exciting tale of the pen fighting along with ahimsaof journalists leaving their homes, facing bullets, lathi blows and being locked up in prison for long years, of editors and proprietors who wrote with undying faith in the cause of freedom and (often) lost everything, remarked Parathasarathy.

Among those who led this charge in the early phase was Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak. An ideological hardliner, Tilak fused the nationalist cause with religious symbols and strenuously argued for freedom in his newspapers Kesari (Marathi) and Mahratta (English), both launched in 1881. In its first editorial, Kesari compared newspapers to night watchmen of the country. Tilak was convicted of sedition and spreading disaffection in 1897 and 1909.

The Gujarati, Kannada and most of the Urdu papers in Bombay were also fiercely pro-independence. The Mumbai Samachar (Gujarati) launched in 1822, ran with commercial-trade news but found space intermittently for socio-political issues of the day.

A beacon of the English press was the Bombay Chronicle, started by Sir Pherozeshah Mehta and edited by an Englishman, BG Horniman. He championed the cause of freedom so aggressively that he was deported and the paper placed under censorship in 1919. But Horniman returned to continue the good fight. It motivated Mahatma Gandhi to say: Mr Horniman is a very brave and generous Englishman. Gandhi frequently spoke to and through the newspaper; his friends there tipped him off about his arrest in August 1942.

Gandhi himself edited, printed and published the Indian Opinion, Young India, Navjivan and Harijan, and was a popular, uncompromising editor. He too was prosecuted for spreading disaffection through his writing, convicted and imprisoned most notably in 1922. Another crusader was S Sadanand who started the Free Press Journal which, historians noted, became a rage in the 1930s. The paper was persecuted and Sadanand penalised a number of times.

In the roar of their nationalism, the pro-Congress papers ignored the voices of the down-trodden, said Dr BR Ambedkar. He launched three publications: Mook Nayak (weekly newspaper), Bahishkrit Bharat (fortnightly), and Janata (weekly magazine). They championed the Dalits cause and argued for meaningful freedom, not just independence from the British.

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From next week, arrested gangster Chhota Rajan will face trial for a murder he allegedly committed 45 years ago, in February 1983. The murder of fisherman-turned-smuggler John Pareira is the oldest pending murder case against Rajan, who was extradited from Indonesia in November 2015.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which took over the investigation of all cases against the gangster after his extradition, filed a closure report in the Pareira murder case on July 10. In the three-page report, the CBI wrote that it was satisfied with the Mumbai polices investigation and there was no need to probe the case further.

The court accepted the closure report and asked the prosecution to begin the trial. It scheduled the first hearing for next week after Rajans lawyer sought time to study the case papers.

Rajan faces charges of murdering Pareira over a dispute relating to his smuggling business in February 1983. Pereira was killed early morning on February 21,1983 while he on a morning walk at Juhu beach with his daughter Helen and two-year-old son. Rajan was arrested on March 3, 1983, but escaped. He was absconding when three others accused in the case went on trial.

A police source said at the time of the murder, Rajan was an associate of Rajan Nair, aka Bada Rajan, had not made his name in the underworld.

The case is one of 70 others that the CBI took over after Rajan was extradited. A source in the police said it took much effort to dig up the court records and that barely any of their own records had survived the passage of time.

The source added, however, that it could be the strongest of all the cases registered against Rajan.

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A North Cairo prosecution referred on Wednesday two men accused of raping and filming a woman in Imbaba district in 2016 to the criminal court.

The defendants are accused of abducting the victim from the Sahel Shoubra district before taking her to Imbaba, where they raped her in an apartment after threatening her with weapons, according to the prosecution.

The men then allegedly robbed the victim of her jewelry and filmed her, threatening her with exposure if she reported the incident.

The defendants were arrested after the victim reported the crime in November 2016.

According to Egyptian law, the defendants could face the death penalty if convicted.

In May 2017, Egyptian prison authorities executed a 22-year-old man convicted of raping and murdering a five-year-old girl in Upper Egypt's Minya governorate in 2014.

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Amid allegations of sexual assault of their son by school trustee, parents of the three-year-old claimed they have no complaint against the man.

The police approached the boys parents after a woman on May 18 alleged the school trustee raped her three-year-old daughter. She claimed the trustee sexually assaulted the boy too.

According to the woman, her daughter told her that she was taken to the trustees cabin with the boy. Before filing an FIR, the girls mother phoned the boys mother, who also complained of change in his behaviour.

However, an official from MIDC police station said the parents of the boy have refused to appear before the child welfare committee (CWC), saying they have no complaint against the trustee.

Read more: Mumbai school trustee booked for raping 3-year-old: What we know about the case

Meanwhile, the accused, who was on a foreign trip, returned to India on Monday. The police recorded his statement and will call him for round of questioning soon.

The man has not been arrested as there is no evidence against him, said police sources. While the alleged offence took place after Diwali, the FIR was registered in May.

The police have also recorded statements of a woman teacher, who allegedly took the girl to the trustees cabin.

The police said the investigations are on and the possibility of another man from the school being involved in the crime has not been ruled out.

The police said the school does not have CCTV surveillance. So far, they have recorded statements of more than 50 people.

Read more: Six months after 3-year-olds rape, cops say difficult to gather evidence
A document released by the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) shows that consumers are being overcharged for more than 100 drugs sold on the market.

The government body released the data on its website last month. It shows that several pharmaceutical firms have been overcharging customers for commonly used drugs, such as anti-diabetic and cholesterol lowering tablets.

The NPPA, which puts out this quarterly data on its website, has issued notices to the pharmaceutical companies. The report shows that they overcharged consumers to the tune of Rs36.8 crore for a single drug.

Pharmaceuticals overcharge in many ways. Companies that manufacture non-scheduled drugs cannot increase the prices more than 10% of the MRP. However, they do so, said Dr Bhupendra Singh, chairman, NPPA.

It all depends on the market volume of the drugs. The company may have overpriced a drug by between 50 paisa and Rs10, but when one looks at the cumulative figures, the amount runs into lakhs and crores, he added.

The ceiling price of the drugs has been fixed by the government under the Drug Price Control Order (DPCO) 13, which makes them affordable to most.

Doctors who have been working to improve the affordability of healthcare said this was yet another example of profiteering by big pharmaceutical companies.

It is not surprising to see pharma companies overcharging commonly sold medicines, said a doctor from a health activist group.

In February, the NPPA capped the price of stents in India slashing the cost up to 85%. The price of drug eluting stents was fixed at Rs 29,600, while that of bare metal stents was capped at Rs7,260.
It has been five days since the launch of the Mumbai Food Truck Park in Bandra and Perry Road Residents Association is already opposing it.

The residents said they did not want any commercialisation of their residential area.

We do not want this locality to become another Union Park, Linking Road or Hill Road, said Dwayne Pereira, a photographer.

In 2015, the group had written to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), demanding that no business-related activities be allowed in their neighbourhood. The petition was supported by Ashish Shelar, the MLA of Bandra (West) .

I have always believed that there should be no commercial activity in a residential complex. The area in question is a peaceful locality, so I will ensure that it remains that way. I will meet the ward officer and DCP with the residents and see to it that action is taken, said Shelar.

Since the lane in question is narrow and requires police monitoring during peak hours, residents believe that there will be traffic snarls because cars are parked there all the time, now that the food truck park has started.

Anil Joseph, chairperson of the association, questioned the legality of the park saying that according to the Motor Vehicles Act, one cannot cook in a vehicle. How can the BMC give permission for something that is prohibited by the RTO? he said.

The senior police inspector of Bandra police station said he had not received any complaints regarding the issue, but agreed that cooking in vehicles was not permitted.

However, Royston Misquietta, founder of Bombay Food Truck Company, clarified that they had a no-objection certificate from the owner of Anthonys Garage, on whose premises the food trucks operate.

He added that they ensured that there was no commotion on the day of the launch.

Bandra needed a food truck park, and we have just provided that. We are causing no harm to anyone. From noise pollution to the waste generated, we are abiding by the rules. In fact, people are quite happy with the service we provide, he said.

Meanwhile, Sharad Ughade, ward officer, H-West, said that he was not aware of the issue. If it is unauthorised, then action will be taken, he said.
With 87 accidents in the first six months of the year, the Sion-Panvel highway has become one of Navi Mumbais most dangerous roads.

As many as 15 were killed and 49 injured between January and June. The number of accidents rose sharply after monsoon started, said police.

Serpentine traffic snarls are common on this road near the Vashi toll naka, Belapur, Kharghar and Kalamboli. Traffic officials attribute these issues to potholes that have surfaced on the stretch.

The highways streetlights have been defunct at several places for the past few months. Several subways constructed for the convenience of commuters are now filled with rainwater.

Statistics show that more accidents took place on the stretch last year, compared to this year. Between January and June last year, 151 accidents took place on the highway, said traffic police. However, around half of them  73  were minor and no one was hurt.

The highway has been in bad shape for the third year in a row, since it was widened by Sion Panvel Tollways Pvt Ltd (SPTPL), which bagged the contract from the public works department. However, after light vehicles were exempted from paying toll, SPTPL officials refused to maintain the stretch, saying the PWD had not paid it.

PWD officials started repairing potholes only after Navi Mumbai police commissioner Hemant Nagrale and joint police commissioner Prashant Burder asked them to take measures to reduce the number of accidents on the stretch.

Most of the potholes near the Vashi toll naka have been filled. The road is comparatively better there. We are now working on other parts of the stretch. However, work is progressing slowly owing to incessant rains over the past few days, said a PWD official.

Traffic officials said managing the highways traffic has become a challenge.

Whenever there are snarls, we ask officials not to collect toll so traffic can move quickly. Sometimes, they refuse and even argue with us. They argued with us on Monday, despite the traffic jam being severe. We registered a non-cognisable offence against them at the Vashi police station, said Satish Gaikward, senior police inspector, Vashi traffic unit.

An officer, who did not wish to be identified, said several motorists did not follow traffic norms, adding to traffic woes. Violations such as rash driving, drink driving, driving helmetless are common on the highway. We conduct various drives to reduce such illegal activities. More officials have been deployed near the toll nakas and other important junctions. But, unless motorists cooperate with us, accidents will not cease, he said.

Highway to hell

July 17: Biker Satish Pujari, 23, was run over by an unidentified vehicle on the Sion-Panvel highway when he was heading from Panvel towards Vashi

July 3: A driver was killed in a three-vehicle pile-up near the Uran Phata bridge near Nerul

June 23: An Innova car on its way from Panvel to Mumbai was hit by a tempo near DY Patil stadium. The rear side of the vehicle was completely damaged. No one was injured

June 17: An auto-driver died and another person was injured after they were hit by a tempo near Kharghar railway station

June 14: A 23-year-old man from Chembur died after his bike was hit by truck near Sanpada

May 1: An 18-year-old student from Kamothe, Rahul Gangurde, died after his bike collided with a car. Gangurde, a resident of sector 34, was on his way to Juinagar from Kalamboli. He hit a car ahead of him and succumbed to severe head injuries

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The state government has granted another 15 days to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to submit the citys Development Plan (DP) 2034.

NR Shende, director, the town planning and valuation department, confirmed that the extension has been granted till August 2. This is the third extension the state government has given to the corporation since 2014. The constant delays were hampering the already struggling real-estate sector, said experts.

Last week, when corporators started discussing the blueprint, the Shiv Sena demanded another 15 days to discuss the plan.

HT on Wednesday reported that corporators were going to bring in around 300 amendments to the plan, which will be tabled in the general body.

The highest number of amendments will be demanded by ruling party Shiv Sena  about 100-150, followed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is likely to demand another 80 changes.

Opposition parties such as the Congress, Samajwadi Party (SP) and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) will submit about 20 amendments each. The amendments made by the corporators will be sent to the state governments urban development department for consideration.

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The Maharashtra government has decided to increase compensation for rape and acid attack survivors to Rs10 lakh. This compensation, however, will be for those survivors, who have been meted with the most horrific acts of violence, including gang-rape, leading to physical and mental disability.

The state cabinet on Tuesday took this decision to increase the compensation offered under the 2013 Manodhairya scheme to provide financial assistance to survivors. The scheme offered assistance of up to Rs3 lakh.

In cases where women face gang-rape or permanent physical or mental disability through violent actions, such survivors need the maximum amount of help for rehabilitation. But there may also be other cases where rape is attempted on the pretext of marriage or the crime doesnt lead to permanent physical trauma or disfigurement. Considering this, we have categorised compensation for different cases, said Vinita Singhal, principal secretary, women and child development department.

In the most cruel crime, where the survivor faces permanent disability, financial assistance will be Rs10 lakh. Of this, 25% or Rs2.5 lakh will be disbursed immediately to the survivor while the remaning Rs7.5 lakh will be a fixed deposit in the bank and the survivor will continue to get monthly interest on it, she said.

For other cases, the monetary help will be Rs3 lakh, Rs2 lakh and Rs1 lakh

Under the old scheme, the state government would give a maximum of Rs3 lakh to survivors who suffered from complete disfigurement of the face or physical handicap in case of an acid attack, while those with minor injuries were getting Rs50,000.

Apart from the monetary compensation, the government, under this scheme, also provides counselling to the survivors and vocational or educational training.

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Entering Mantralaya in Mumbai, considered to be the headquarters of the government, may now get more difficult for common man, as the home department plans to tighten the internal security by controlling access points for visitors and vehicle monitoring system.

Citizens looking to enter the building will now be given a visitors pass with his/her picture taken at the entry points. Also, the access will be restricted to the departments people want to visit.

The home department has chalked out a plan to beef up security, in association with the public works and general administration departments, on the directives of chief minister Devendra Fadnavis immediately after a farmer alleged he was hit by a police on duty in Mantralaya four months ago.

The plan is being finalised by a high-powered committee headed by the chief secretary, after a private consultancy firm, in its report, stated the measures would cost Rs12 crore.

As part of the plan, the main and annexure buildings of Mantralaya will get additional 300 CCTV cameras to keep a check on the internal security.

Security agencies have also suggested restricting vehicle entries inside the building by issuing specially-coded passes to permitted vehicles.

The blueprint has a plan to revive the vehicle scanning system, which has been defunct for the past few years. It has also been suggested not to allow passengers in cars to enter the building without frisking.

At least 2,500 citizens visit Mantralaya daily, while the number goes up to 4,000 on the day of the cabinet meeting, when all ministers attend their office in the state government headquarters.

The fencing wall will be raised to 6-foot, with intrusion detection devices on three sides of the building. It will be built by the PWD, which also plans to set up a waiting room for visitors. We want two-tier scanning of vehicles entering the building, said an official from Mantralaya.

Although we have a CCTV monitoring system at entry levels, the cameras inside the building dont work. The plan is likely to be executed in the next four months, said the official.

SK Shrivastava, additional chief secretary (home), confirmed the development and said the security beef-up will be carried out with help from the Mumbai police.
Drug enforcement agencies in Mumbai have received information that chemical companies outside the city are manufacturing Mephedrone (MD) in bulk in a single night and cleaning all evidence from the scene to avoid being caught. Sources in the anti-narcotics cell (ANC) of the Mumbai police told HT this was being done as selling MD is very profitable.

There have been several raids on factories located outside the state apart from MIDC areas in Western Maharashtra in the recent past, which has made these manufactures cautious. The manufacturing cost for producing MD in bulk is very low, and it gets sold at a much higher profit. It costs Rs30,000 to manufacture one kg of the drug, which is then sold for over Rs3 lakh per kg to the distributor, who sells it at an even higher price in market, a source in the agency said.

Read: Mumbais Breaking Bad moment: One man who made the citys most popular party drug

The official added that most of the raw material was easily available legally, and mostly importantly, at a cheap rate.

In one of the raids, police found that the factory had 26 different rooms, and MD got manufactured in just one small room. This was being done to ensure there was no suspicion, and that they did not come on the radar of the agencies.

Read: Mumbais anti-narcotics cell seizes Mephedrone worth Rs3.4 lakh, two arrested

Chemical factories in Western Maharashtra were in focus after a raid in Pune, in which a foreign national was allegedly involved, in 2016. Sources said the government allots licenses to these companies with a manufacturing limit for a stipulated time. However, companies at times exceed the limit and there is no foolproof mechanism to keep a check. Past investigations have revealed that in a large set up, a small machine was enough for the production of Mephedrone. The components are easily available and manufacturers just need a small room to mix the components in proper proportion.

officials claim that they have managed to stop the flow of the drug in the city but now dealers may be changing strategy. Deputy Commissioner of police (ANC) Shivdeep Lande told HT, We have managed to bust MD suppliers and distributors in the city, and we are working on inputs to ensure no MD is supplied in the city from outside.

Read: Mumbai businessman arrested with 1kg of Mephedrone in Andheri

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Radio jockey Malishka Mendonsas video for a local FM channel mocking the BMC for its ill-preparedness this monsoon may have gone viral, but the civic body is not laughing.

The BMC issued a notice under section 381B of the Mumbai Municipal Corporation (MMC) Act to Malishkas mother Lily Mendosa for dengue breeding at her house in Bandra.

After the video, Mumbai tula BMC var bharosa nahi kay (Mumbai, dont you trust BMC?) was released, the Shiv Sena had reacted bitterly with a leader of its youth wing urging the civic body to sue Malishka for defaming the civic body. On Tuesday, Sena corporator from Prabhadevi, Samadhan Sarvankar, also demanded the municipal commissioner file a Rs500-crore defamation suit against the FM channel for targeting the BMC.

Read more: RJ Malishka to Kapil Sharma: Celebrities who faced BMCs ire

Malishka, however, tweeted on Thursday saying, Just wanna thank you for all your support.You guys are awesome Mumbai you are the best. Mala tujhyavar bharosa aahe. (sic)

According to officials, the breeding was found in a routine survey at the RJs sixth floor flat at Sun-rise apartments at Pali Naka. According to the notice, aedes mosquitoes (dengue-transmitting mosquitoes) breeding was found in a clay bowl kept under a pot outside the door and indoor breeding was found in plant pots .

Read more: RJ Malishka in trouble? Yuva Sena leaders want BMC chief to file 500-crore suit against her

Civic officials, however, insisted that they did not know the house belonged to Malishkas mother. A statement issued from the municipal commissioners office said, The BMC carries out routine inspection to prevent the spread to vector-borne diseases like dengue and malaria. A similar exercise was carried out by the H/West ward office. Malishkas name is nowhere is any of the notices.

Sharad Ughade, ward officer of Bandra, said, We had carried out a routine inspection in Bandra on Tuesday when the notice was issued.

The BMC can take legal action against the owners for breeding mosquitoes, sources said. Lily faces prosecution that may lead to a penalty ranging from Rs2,000 to Rs10,000.

Read: RJ Malishka hits back at BMC, tweets she has six more songs ready

Another flat owner in the same building was also served a notice on Tuesday, officials said. According to data, the BMC has issued 8,744 notices where mosquito breeding was spotted between January and July 15 this year. The civic body has also collected Rs20 lakh as penalty from residents in the same time period.

The BJP, however, slammed the Shiv Sena and the civic administration over the issue. Instead of sending a notice, the BMC should answer how it will improve the roads, said BJP corporators.

This sort of behaviour is childish and stupid. There should be an inquiry on the official who issued this notice, said Manoj Kotak, group leader of the BJP in the BMC. Another BJP corporator Makarand Narvekar said Senas style of hooliganism was spreading to officials also.

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After the Andheri (East) ward office sent notices to demolish five crosses and a grotto of Mother Mary, civic officials have decided to visit the shrines with resident associations on Wednesday before taking action.

Following a Bombay high court order to demolish illegal shrines in public places, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) listed 482 shrines that obstruct traffic. K/East ward office identified five crosses and a grotto of Mother Mary as illegal and sent out notices.

D K Jain, K/East ward officer, agreed to visit the shrines on July 19 on the request of residents and Catholic groups like Watchdog Foundation, Bombay Catholic Sabha and East Indian Association.

Residents and owners of shrines met with ward officials on Monday. They opposed the decision to demolish the shrines saying that they were centuries old and must not be touched.

Godfrey Pimenta, trustee of Watchdog Foundation, said, There is no way BMC can relocate the cross at Andheri-Kurla Road in Gundavali (one of the five the BMC wants to demolish) as it is a protected (category A) structure.

Pimenta said around 50 people, including residents, will accompany the officials.

He added that there were 221 such category A shrines that could be regularised but not relocated or demolished.

After getting a notice for a one of these crosses in Gundavali, Catholics had demanded that Jain be removed from office for harassing them. Jain told HT, We will see if the crosses can be shifted amicably. If a category A cross is in the way, it will be shifted as development of the area is also important. More meetings will be held to decide what should be done.

Most of the illegal crosses were in G/North (Dadar, Mahim) ward. The G/North ward office also held a meeting with owners of three Dadar crosses that were to be demolished.

Chairman of Bombay Catholic Sabha Rita Dsa said, All crosses obstructing movement on roads are to be relocated as BMC does not want to demolish any. The three crosses in Dadar will be relocated soon.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi appointed on Wednesday judge Ahmed Abu Al-Azm as the new head of the Egyptian Council of State, as the outgoing head reached the age of retirement, the council's vice president Fouad Abdel-Fattah said on Wednesday.

The presidential appointment comes in accordance with a new judicial authority law ratified by El-Sisi in April, which gives the president the right to appoint the heads of the country's top judicial bodies by choosing from three nominees proposed by each body.

The new judicial authority law applies to the countrys top judicial bodies: the State Lawsuits Authority  which represents the government in legal cases  the Administrative Prosecution, the Court of Cassation  the country's top appeals court  and the Council of State, the country's highest administrative judicial body.

Judge Abu Al-Azm, 68, is the current head of the Council of State's legislative department.

He was among many of the council's senior judges who had expressed strong objection to the law, arguing it would undermine the independence of judiciary vis-a-vis the executive authority.

Prior to the passing of the new law, the heads of judicial bodies were selected based on seniority, with the president merely ratifying the selection.

Last month, the council proposed to the president the name of its senior-most deputy Yehia Dakroury to hold the post, and did not abide by the new three-candidate rule.

Under the new law, if concerned boards fail to present three candidates to the presidency, the president has the authority to select a new head from the seven senior-most deputies.

Judge Abu Al-Azm is currently the fourth senior-most deputy on the council's board.

Dakroury is the head of the Administrative Court who issued a ruling last year annulling a controversial maritime border accord to hand over two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia, which were eventually transferred to the kingdom after parliament approved the deal.

New heads of the country's other three top judicial bodies were appointed by El-Sisi late in June, replacing judges who have reached the age of retirement.

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The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) on Wednesday received bids from 17 companies for the construction of the 22-km Mumbai Trans Harbour Link (MTHL).

Consortia such as Afcons-FLUOR-SPCPL, Daweoo-TATA, HCC-SKECL, IL&FS-TNL, Larsen & Toubro, Simplex, NCC, J Kumar have bid for the three-phase construction of the Indias longest proposed sea link. Senior MMRDA officials said that the financial bids would be opened after evaluating technical bids, following which the contract would be awarded.  The first two phases involve building sea-bridge components, while the third will see construction of a road up to Chirle.

The sea bridge will be 16.5-km-long, while the road will be 3.813-km-long. Once completed, the link will provide faster connectivity to the proposed Navi Mumbai International Airport, Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust and other highways going to Pune and Goa. The sea link will also help develop parts of Navi Mumbai, Raigad district and its surrounding areas.

 MMRDA, which has already commenced the bidding procedure for the 22-km link that will connect Sewri in island city and Nhava Sheva on the mainland, is expected to start ground work by December.

 The construction of the link has been divided into three parts. The first two packages are sea-bridge components, while the third includes construction of a road up to Chirle. The sea bridge will be 16.5-km long, while the road will be 3.813-km long.

Once completed, the link will provide faster, shorter and more comfortable connectivity to Navi Mumbai International Airport, Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust along with the highways going to Pune and Goa. The sea link will also help develop parts of Navi Mumbai, Raigad district and its surrounding areas.

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The sessions court on Saturday sentenced a 26-year-old man to seven years and his 63-year-old mother for one year in jail for allegedly kidnapping and raping a 13-year-old girl in 2013. The convicts, who are originally from Kolkata, were the girls neighbours in Andheri (East). The man, who did odd jobs, befriended the girl and raped her on the pretext of marriage. His mother approached the girls parents with a marriage proposal. The girls parents turned it down.

The mother-son duo then kidnapped the girl and took her to Kolkata in October 2013. The girl was traced and brought back a week later. The girl told the police the man allegedly raped her while they were in Mumbai.

Based on testimonies of seven witnesses, including a doctor who conducted the medical test, and the girls mother, the court convicted the duo.
A 40-year-old container driver died after he rammed his vehicle into a stationary truck while injuring the driver of a four wheeler at Thane on Wednesday morning.

The container driver, Choturam Shabluram Balai, 40, is a resident of Rajasthan. The police are yet to ascertain the identity of the man driving the other vehicle.

According to the police, Balai was driving the container towards Thane from Borivli when he lost control over the vehicle and rammed it into a stationary truck before hitting a four wheeler near Vedant hospital at Kasarwadavli in Thane.

D Dhole, senior police inspector from Kasarwadavli police station, said, We suspect that Balai might have fallen asleep while driving. We are probing what led to the accident and in the process of registering a case. Balai initially hit a four wheeler which was thrown off the road, and after that he hit a stationary truck which was loaded with iron rolls. He was speeding.

The impact of the accident was such that Balais body got stuck in the containers cabin. It was impossible to remove his body. We finally called a fire brigade and a crane to help us to take it out. The stationary truck was pulled ahead and the injured was sent to hospital immediately. Later, the cabin was cut and Balais body was taken out and sent to Thane civil hospital. We are tracing his family members who will be alerted about the accident, added Dhole.

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The Nerul police on Tuesday allegedly averted a cadaver donation, which could have saved lives of four end-stage organ failure patients, after they failed to provide proper guidance to the donors parents.

A 19-year-old man from Sangli, who worked as a newspaper vendor, met with a bus accident in Nerul on Tuesday after which he was taken to DY Patil Hospital. He was shifted to another hospital in the same locality. On Wednesday morning, he was shifted to Apollo Hospital, Navi Mumbai, where the doctors declared him brain-dead.

While his parents initially gave their consent to donate their sons organs, they later withdrew it after being mislead by the police officials, said a hospital staff. The hospital authorities had accompanied the parents to the Nerul police station at 6:30pm on Wednesday to secure a no-objection certificate (NOC) for cadaver donation, as it was a medico-legal case.

Not only did the police refused to issue the NOC, they even mislead the boys parents saying that he was alive, the official said.The police also questioned the parents if the [Apollo] hospital had paid them to obtain their consent for organ donation. Intimidated and confused, the parents withdrew their consent.

This is not the first time where ignorance pertaining to organ donation on the part of police has delayed the process which can save lives.

Refuting the allegations, Sudhakar Pathare, deputy commissioner of police (Zone 2), said the hospital staff had visited the Nerul police station without the parents. So the officer in-charge refused to issue the NOC.

Annirudh Kulkarni, organ transplant coordinator at Jupiter hospital, Thane, said, Lack of NOCs from the police delays the entire process. While many police personnel are aware of the concept of cadaver donations, there are some pockets in the city, like the one near Apollo hospital, where the police is yet to be sensitised to this issue.
The police on Tuesday arrested Kalpesh Deodhare, a 27-year-old pervert, who ran off after allegedly flashing two women in Powai, from Govandi.

ND Reddy, deputy commissioner of police, zone 10, said, The accused, a resident of Jivdayani Chawl, Chincholi Bandar, Malad west, is a habitual offender.

Balwant Deshmukh, inspector, crime, said,We got some obscene pictures he sent to other women from his mobile phone. We have added obscenity charges against him in the FIR. We are looking for the women he targetted.

The registration number of the bike and CCTV footage helped police crack the case.

An officer from Powai police station said Deodhare has nine cases against him, mostly of molestation. He is a school dropout.

Read more: Biker flashes 3 women in Mumbai, asks them how they felt, flees
Corporators from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) are likely to make 300 amendments in the citys long-pending Development Plan (DP) 2034, sources privy to the party meetings said. According to sources, the highest number of amendments will be demanded by ruling party Shiv Sena  about 100-150, followed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is likely to demand another 80 changes.

Opposition parties like the Congress, Samajwadi Party (SP) and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) will submit about 20 amendments each. Before starting the discussion on Friday, Mumbai mayor Vishwanath Mahadeshwar had also said Sena will not allow any changes to the existing open spaces in the city. Sena has been opposing the reservation of the Metro car-shed at Aarey, which the state is keen on. When asked about an amendment to change the Metro car-shed reservation, Mahadeshwar said, Open spaces are the lungs of Mumbai. We will not allow any changes on pristine green spaces.

The amendments made by the corporators will be sent to the state governments urban development department for consideration. A senior civic official from the DP department said, All the amendments will be marked in the DP sheets and then sent by the commissioner to the state for final approval.

Read more: From height of buildings to space for Metro: 10 things Mumbais development plan tells you

Party leaders said most of the amendments are demands for social amenities, changes in reservations and change in road width if it is affecting structures.

Rais Shaikh, corporator from Byculla and SP leader, said, I am currently scrutinising about 18 amendments proposed by SP corporators. One of our demands is for reservation for a college in Mankhurd of the M/East ward as the area does not have any higher education institutes. Shaikh is also going to put forth amendments for the Development Control Rules (DCR) 2034.

Mangesh Satamkar, a Shiv Sena corporator from Antop Hill, said he will put forward a demand to scrap a newly proposed road at Antop Hill and instead increase the width of the present road from 30 feet to 90 feet.

Ravi Raja, Congress corporator from the same area, said the party will be against de-reserving any open spaces in the city, a demand made by the Sena, too. Raja said, I have got about 22 amendments till now, all of which will be scrutinised. BJP group leader Manoj Kotak said there will be a discussion on the amendments for two days in the general body meeting.

Leaders said all the amendments will be put forth in the general body meeting by next week. Last week, the Sena demanded another 15-day extension to pass the plan stating that every corporator must get a chance to put forth his/her view.

This is the third extension sought by the corporation to pass the crucial document. There are 227 elected and five nominated councillors in the BMC.

Read more: Before BMC blunders again, we give you 5 reasons to speak up for Mumbais future

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Students have opposed Veermata Jijabai Technological Institutes (VJTI) decision to increase the fees for post-graduation courses by 150% to 250%.

The autonomous engineering institutes board of governors recommended the fee hike, which has been approved. All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) stopped funding our PG courses from 2008. All these years, we were hoping to receive some aid from the state or Centre, but to no avail. So we decided to increase the fees to keep these courses running, said Dhiren Patel, director of the institute.

VJTI is a University of Mumbai- affiliated college which was granted autonomy in 2004. It gets financial aid from the state for UG courses. Members of Nationalist Student Congress (NCS), student wing of NCP, said the annual fees for MTech (aided section) may be increased from Rs23,665 to Rs83,734  a hike of 253%. Those who have a sponsor, may have to pay Rs93,734 from the current annual fees of Rs38,565. Similarly, the fees for pursuing PhD may rise from Rs26,092 to Rs83,954 for non-sponsored students and from Rs41,092 to Rs1,08,954 for sponsored students.

Students are being victimised for a few crores. It seems that the government doesnt want them to pursue higher education, said Amol Matele, president, NSC.

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Golden Baba, who is famous for participating in Kanwar Yatra wearing gold ornaments, has added a gold chain weighing two kilograms to his collection. Baba aka Sudhir Makkar is well known throughout the 200km yatra route from Hardwar to Delhi.

The addition of the chain has taken Babas gold ornaments to about 14.5kgs which include a collection of 21 gold chains, 21 lockets of deities, armlets and even a gold jacket which he wears sometimes during the yatra sitting atop his SUV which is one among the cavalcade of 16 vehicles that accompany him.

The new chain weighs two kgs and has a locket of Shiva. I am not wearing much gold on this journey as its weight has affected my nerves at the neck and also affected vision of one eye. This is my penultimate Kanwar Yatra and 2018 will be last ending with a silver jubilee, Baba said.

Apart from his fetish for gold, Baba also wears a Rolex watch worth Rs 27 lakh and owns a BMW, three Fortuners, two Audi and two Innova vehicles which are part of his cavalcade. On several occasions, he has taken cars such as Hummer, Jaguar and Land Rover on rent for his trip to Haridwar.

The love for gold and cars will not die. I remember it was in 1972-73 when gold price was Rs 200 per tola (10 grams). I started wearing gold items and had nearly four tolas that time. Gradually, the gold increased. I will keep the gold with me till I die. It will be handed over to my favourite disciple when I leave the world, said the 55-year-old.

Before moving to spiritualism, Makkar ran a successful cloth and property business from the Gandhi Nagar market in Delhi. He now has a luxurious flat at a high-rise in Indirapuram, Ghaziabad.

The initial years of life were, however, difficult for him. He went to a gurukul at the age of six and went to Haridwar in search of livelihood. He sold rosary beads and cloth on pavements.

Later, my business flourished with the grace of lord Shiva. I sold jeans, shirts and jackets with the brand name Bittu. Even the property business flourished as I got completely devoted to Shiva, he said.

These days Baba travels along with a team of 18 bouncers and eight security officers who keep an eye on his gold while he is on the move. Popular also as Shri Mahant Ji Golden Puri Babaji, Makkar said that he still has a lot of property in Delhi. His disciples estimate that Baba, who has no children, owns property worth over Rs 150 crore.

Baba is a popular figure in the annual pilgrimage. Children, women and youngster wait eagerly for his cavalcade to arrive on erstwhile NH-58. They make his videos, click selfies with him and even touch his feet for blessings.

It is out of affection that everyone loves me, more so as I wear gold. Throughout the route, people from all communities, including Muslims, shower love on me and cheer me up, he said.

His participation, however, keeps the local police officers on toes.

He often stops midway and we have to rush to make arrangements for his security. It is tough as he has a large number of cars and other vehicles in his cavalcade. Our arrangements are in place and we hope that his last yatra will also be successful and without hindrance, said Atul Kumar, sub divisional magistrate, Modi Nagar.

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Nearly two months after a group of robbers had waylaid a family on Jewar-Bulandshahr highway, robbed them, killed a person and allegedly gang-raped four women, the victims and sympathisers staged a silent protest and a black-band demonstration in Jewar on Wednesday morning.

The protesters criticised the lack of progress in the investigation and demanded speedy action from the police.

More than 200 persons marched from their village and gathered at the Jewar police station on Wednesday around 11am to express their concerns. They alleged police inaction in the matter.

The Gautam Budh Nagar police, who had earlier assured action and arrests within 24 hours in the matter, have failed to make any progress in the case even after two months, the protesters alleged. The protesters also demanded government jobs for two members of the victims family.

Rajpal Singh Tomar, the station house officer of Jewar police station, said,The villagers expressed their apprehensions about the investigation in the case and dispersed after we explained to them that we have made progress in our investigation.

Through our informers, we have zeroed in on a few gangs and are awaiting the right time to strike, said Tomar.

The senior superintendent of police, Love Kumar, said, The police are making every possible effort to arrest the accused. We will soon make a breakthrough in the case.

Kumar also said that the results of the forensic examination to ascertain rape of the victims are still pending.

The preliminary medical examination of the victims, which was released two days after the incident, ruled out rape assault, following which vaginal swabs of the victims were sent to the forensic lab in Lucknow.

The victims alleged that a gang of six highway robbers ambushed their vehicle near Sabota village, shot dead a 38-year-old relative for resisting the robbery, took Rs50,000 that they were carrying and raped four women in the nearby fields.

The incident took place on the midnight of May 25, when eight members of a family were travelling to Bulandshahr from Jewar to provide monetary assistance to a pregnant relative.

Uttar Pradesh, the state with the longest road network, accounts for the highest number of highway crimes in India. According to the 2014 data of the National Crime Records Bureau, 80% of the 84,000 such incidents across the country were recorded in the state.
The last week was eventful for those keeping track of the debate on freedom of expression in India. The movie Indu Sarkar gained a degree of fame because an event related to its launch was disrupted, apparently by some members of the Congress party, of which I am a part. Before that, the Mumbai police filed a case of defamation and obscenity against the comedy group All India Bakchod (AIB) for applying a Snapchat dog filter to a photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Unsurprisingly, many who were furious with AIB for its portrayal of PM Modi were vociferously supportive of the freedom of expression of Madhur Bhandarkar, the filmmaker behind Indu Sarkar. Many who supported AIBs freedom of expression were relatively subdued in speaking up for Bhandarkar. I am unsurprised because we have seen this movie before. In India, freedom of expression is mostly about whose freedom is being violated. Selective outrage is the norm.

Let us do some plain-speaking. Salman Rushdies Satanic Verses upset most Indian Muslims as did Kamlesh Tiwaris toxic comments about Prophet Mohammad. In a similar vein, Wendy Donigers The Hindus: An Alternative History was banned, MF Husain was hounded out over paintings of goddesses and the RSS and the BJP sought a ban on Perumal Murugans Mathorubhagan.

In India, as in most countries, freedom of expression is not unfettered. However, beyond legal restrictions, we conspire to further restrict each others freedoms. Surely, a book or a painting about religious figures is not going to doom the great religions of the world. I am reasonably confident that the legacy of one of Indias greatest leaders is not about to be fundamentally undermined by a movie that most people would have likely ignored in the absence of its recent publicity. This should not mean that people cant protest what they dont like. Of course they can. It is their democratic right. But we must encourage peaceful dissent and stand against threats, intimidation and violence.

Globally, the debate around free expression is ongoing and complicated. I personally prefer a maximalist position on free expression with rare restrictions such as those for incitement to violence. However, I do recognise that at this time most Indians may not agree to such a standard. A Pew Survey from 2015 clubbed India with countries like Russia, Turkey and Pakistan as being less supportive of free expression. But, what we must watch for is the trajectory of free expression in India. Will we have more of it or less?

I believe there is much scope for progressively removing restrictions on free expression. Freedom of expression is not just about protecting offensive speech. More importantly, it is about the free flow of ideas, debates and inquiry that leads to inventions, discovery and progress. Crucially, it is also about protecting us from those in government who may want to restrict our freedoms. So, if citizens restrict each others freedom of expression, we are in effect weakening our democracy and paving the way for authoritarianism. Who wants that?

Salman Anees Soz, formerly with the World Bank, is a national media panellist of the Indian National Congress.

Follow the author on Twitter @salmansoz

The views expressed are personal.
Egypt is ready to help Iraq restore its security and stability as well as reconstruct Iraqi cities after the country's recent victories over the militant group Daesh, Egypt's foreign minister Sameh Shoukry told Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi during Shoukry's first visit to Mosul following its liberation from Daesh.

Shoukry expressed his appreciation for the historical relations between the two countries, and said that his visit to Mosul comes as part of efforts by Egypt to intensify coordination and cooperation on all levels, according to a statement by Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid.

Shoukry said Egypt is helping Iraq restore its regional status in a way that promotes Arab countries' ability to combat challenges that threaten their security and stability.

Shoukry also praised efforts by the Iraqi PM in working towards a national reconciliation in Iraq, as well as supporting Iraqi security apparatuses and preserving the unity and sovereignty of the country.

Al-Abadi said that Iraq's recent victories over Daesh go towards ensuring the security of the Iraqi people and the stability of the country.

The PM also pointed out the importance of uprooting the organisation from its base in Syria so peace and security can be restored in the Arab region.

The meeting also involved discussions of issues of mutual interest as well as the outcomes of interventions by some countries in the region, including Turkey.

Both sides stressed the importance of the international community bearing its responsibility in combating terrorism and extremism, including targeting sources of funding and propaganda outlets.

Iraq declared victory in Mosul this week after a nearly nine-month fight ravaged the city and took a heavy toll on residents and security forces.

The battle for Mosul  by far the largest city to fall under the militants' control  has left large areas in ruins, killed thousands of civilians and displaced nearly one million people.

Egypts has affirmed its commitment to standing by Iraq in its fight against terrorism as a part of ongoing efforts by Egypt to rid the region of terrorism.

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For a fortnight now, the gangrape-cum-murder of a Class 10 girl in in Shimla has caused an unprecedented turmoil among the peace-loving Paharis. But the conscious-keepers in Delhi have been unmoved by the sheer brutality of the crime and the shoddy investigation that followed. The silence of the activists and the political class is all the more glaring given the Congress-led governments inept handling of the case and a huge social media uproar against the botched probe.

According to police, 16-year-old Gudiya (the name given to the victim by locals) was allegedly waylaid by six people while she was returning home from school. They injected the girl with intoxicants before taking turns to rape her, strangling her at the same time. The marks on her body bear witness to the fact that she was bitten savagely by her captors. Then the six dragged her body away from the road and dumped it in a forested area near her home at Kotkhai tehsils Halaila village. When Gudiyas body was finally discovered on July 6, two days after she went missing, it was crawling with maggots.

The police, as usual, were slow to react. It was only when pictures of the girls naked body, her legs horribly twisted, went viral that the government began taking the case seriously. Public anger swept through Shimla, and people from all walks of life  students, housewives and commoners  took out candlelight marches to demand swift action against the guilty.

A special investigation team was constituted under inspector general of police Zahur Zaidi, who cracked the case nine days later with the arrest of six people  including Ashish Chauhan, an engineering graduate, and 32-year-old Rajendra Singh, a local resident. The other accused were non-Himachalis, and strangely enough, they hadnt fled after allegedly committing the crime.

A police station in Kotkhai near Shimla was set on fire on Wednesday by protesters. (PTI)

Zaidis version of the crime further infuriated the people, who alleged that the six were framed by police to protect rich and influential locals closely linked to the ruling dispensation. Chief minister Virbhadra Singh initially resisted calls for a CBI investigation, stating that the police probe was fair, but buckled when an unruly crowd burnt police vans and blocked highways last week.

The crisis reached a tipping point on Wednesday, when Suraj Singh  a Nepalese national accused in the case  was reportedly strangled by another suspect, 32-year-old Rajender Singh, at the Kotkhai police station. What happened at the police station remains a mystery because the two were housed in adjacent cells with minimal security.

While 83-year-old Virbhadra blamed the BJP for causing the unrest, he failed to read the sentiments of a population that has traditionally supported him in electoral contests. The Opposition party, for its part, accused the chief minister of camping in Delhi to deal with corruption cases against him while Shimla simmered with anger.

Making things worse on the social media as well as the streets was Virbhadras apparent disinterest in the worst crime to be reported from the hills in a long time. He has not visited the victims family yet.

Another factor that has angered most Himachalis is the failure of liberal voices in Delhi to take note of Gudiyas rape-cum-murder despite all the online campaigns and petitions. They believe this crime was no less brutal than the 2012 Delhi gang rape case, and the only reason for the lack of outrage among liberals was Himachal Pradesh accounting for just four Lok Sabha seats  making it less politically significant than other states like West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

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The Opposition misses the presence of a personality like the late CPI(M) leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet who would have by now got Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar to sit across the table and find a way out of the impasse that is developing in Bihar, threatening the Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) government which was crafted by the two foes-turned-friends in 2015. And it was this that stopped the otherwise unstoppable Modi juggernaut in its tracks.

Though Sharad Yadav met Sonia Gandhi last week, urging her to mediate, and the JD(U) leaders have urged the Left leaders to use their good offices with Lalu, so far it has yielded little.

With neither side ready to give way, the situation is becoming graver by the day. Lalu has ruled out the resignation by his younger son Tejashwi Prasad, who is deputy CM of Bihar, after serious allegations have surfaced against the RJD chief and his family for holding huge benami properties. On Tuesday, Nitish had a meeting with Tejashwi at the old secretariat in Patna, where the deputy CM clarified on the charges against him.

For Nitish who had earlier sent three of his ministers packing, when faced with similar charges, including former CM Jitan Ram Manjhi, it is becoming a do or die battle. For if he accepts the situation as it is, he will lose his unique selling point which distinguishes him from other regional leaders like Mayawati, Mulayam Singh Yadav, or Lalu. The others have also stood for backward/Dalit consolidation and for the advocacy of secularism, but Nitish has stood apart because of his clean image and his track record in governance. That is why, in 2014, the people of Bihar voted for Narendra Modi in the general elections, but turned to Nitish during the state polls a year later. And, it was his coalition with Lalus RJD that won the polls.

Yet, Nitish knows only too well that whenever he has contested on his own, he has come a cropper. He has won only when in an alliance, either with the BJP or with Lalu; and he is too much of a realist not to realise this ground reality.

But the Bihar chief minister also knows that if he has to compromise on his USP (anti-corruption, clean image) to stay in power, he and Lalu will both be devoured by Modi in the 2019 general elections and in the 2020 state assembly polls.

Thus, breaking with Lalu and turning to the BJP for help is an option  though after initially signalling its readiness to extend outside support to Nitish, if his alliance with the RJD fell apart, the BJP has suddenly turned cold. With outside support Nitish would remain CM, but he realises that under a Modi dispensation things would not be the same as it was during the Vajpayee-Advani era when he had enjoyed a functioning autonomy in his alliance with the BJP. There is also no reason why a resurgent BJP should hand Nitish the post of the CM in 2020, when it can have a leader of its own.

Given the mood in India today, clearly, it will have to be someone with a clean image who can take on Modi in 2019. Backward and secular politics by itself, or politics of entitlement, where social justice parties (be it the SP, RJD, INLD, or for that matter the Congress) depend on a single family, will not be enough of a draw for an India that is becoming increasingly young and aspirational. Gone also are the days when amassing wealth was passe in the name of secular politics.

Just as the continuation of the Mahagathbandhan is a better option for Nitish, so is it for Lalu. Out of power, the situation will become even more untenable for Lalu and his family.

In this situation, the best case scenario is for Tejashwi to resign in the larger interest of the Mahagathbandhan, and make a virtue out of a necessity. He is young with a future ahead of him and quitting at this stage, in the larger interest, will only enhance his stature. Nitish has not asked him to quit, but only to go to the people and tell his side of the story. What is more, if he decides to go back to the people, and contest again for his assembly seat, even resigning as MLA (as suggested by some), he might just win and that would be a political endorsement of his stand. Lalu knows only too well that he will have to fight politically to counter the charges that have been levelled against him and his family.

If the Bihar Mahagathbandhan cracks, the Opposition can forget about its chances in the 2019 polls. So, all the Opposition parties that want to craft an alternative to the BJP have a stake in what happens in Bihar in the coming days.

Neerja Chowdhury is a senior journalist

The views expressed are personal
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) recently announced the Draft Food and Standards (Organic Food) Regulations, 2017, aimed at curbing sale of fake organic products. This regulation will require products sold in the market as organic to be certified by either the National Programme for Organic Production (NPOP) of the commerce and industry ministry, or the Participatory Guarantee Scheme (PGS) of the agriculture ministry.

The NPOP was designed for the export market and involves third-party companies, which verify organic status, while in PGS, a collective of farmers guarantee that everyone in the group is practicing organic farming. The draft, however, exempts unprocessed organic food sold directly by farmers or farmer organisations to consumers.

On the face of it, this looks like an excellent regulation, with a promise of protecting consumers rights. But an analysis shows that it cannot curb sales of fake organic products, and it might do more harm than good to the organic farming movement in India.

The demand for a regulation on organics itself is suspect, as it is led by the Crop Care Federation of India (CCFI), which represents pesticide companies. In December 2014, CCFI released a report, prepared by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), on pesticides in organic vegetables from Delhi. Interestingly, IARI has not made this report public.

The institute tested 150 vegetable samples from one organic store in Delhi and found traces in 50; in 10 of these, the levels were above the maximum residue limit (MRL). The store identified a certified farm in Sonipat as the source of the vegetables. The farm was certified by one of the largest NPOP certifiers.

To begin with, sampling from one store from one city is scientifically untenable. Second, finding small traces of pesticides in organic vegetables is not surprising because pesticides are present in water and air, and will find their way into a produce even if the farmer is practicing organic farming. This is why many countries prescribe a tolerance limit for presence of pesticides in organic products. Third, the 10 samples in which levels exceeded the MRL were sourced from a certified farm  which means certification cannot be an answer to the problem.

Let us accept that fake organic products do exist. But the scale is difficult to ascertain till we have a pan-India study on it. Second, a fake organic product is not a safety concern; it is an issue of misbranding or misleading advertisement. Fake products can be as safe or unsafe as any other products sold in markets. So the question is: Is certification required to tackle misbranding?

The FSSAI has a definition of and penalty for misbranding of food and misleading advertisements. The penalty for misbranding is up to Rs 3 lakh and for misleading advertisement, up to Rs 10 lakh. The food safety act does not specify that to prevent misbranding or misleading advertisement, a product has to have a certification. Why, then, are organic products being singled out?

To understand how this new regulation impact farmers, one must examine the certification itself. First, both NPOP and PGS are process-based certification systems. Their main concern is processes and practices of farming and food-processing, not testing food for pesticide residues. The former (NPOP) being more expensive than PGS, is preferred by big farmers, companies and exporters.

Under NPOP, only the produce of a NPOP-certified farm can be processed by a NPOP-certified processor and sold as organic. The NPOP processor cannot take fresh produce from a PGS farmer, process it and sell it as organic.

Under PGS, only the food processed by the PGS group of farmers can be labelled as organic. The problem: PGS groups, run by small farmers, are not capable of processing organic produce. They sell their produce to other processors for value addition.

The draft regulation will make it difficult for small farmers, who are either PGS certified or non-certified, to sell their produce for value addition. They will be forced to sell fresh produce directly to consumers or get NPOP certification.

If a small farmer gets NPOP certification, it makes his product more expensive and so uncompetitive. If he sells only fresh produce, his value addition is low. So the draft regulation will dissuade small farmers from doing organic farming.

The Indian organic farming movement is witnessing a revival, largely led by small farmers. Consumer numbers are on the rise. This has happened without any support from the government. In fact, in 2017-18, the outlay on organic farming is a mere Rs 350 crore; in comparison, the annual subsidy for chemical fertilisers is over Rs 70,000 crore.

But the FSSAIs regulation is going to hinder its growth. Instead of targeting organic food, why not make laws that require mandatory labelling of foods grown with pesticides, chemicals or GMO etc?

If the FSSAI is so anxious about fake organic products, it should set standards and use its misbranding provision to penalise them. Like it does for every other food product.

Chandra Bhushan is deputy director general, Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi

The views expressed are personal
With Lokmanya Tilaks great grandson Rohit Tilak facing rape charges, it has once again revived the debate of whether consensual sex on the promise of marriage can be called rape or not?

In her complaint, the 41-year-old woman in this case said, Tilak repeatedly raped her on the pretext of marrying her." The Pune police have booked Tilak under various sections of the Indian Penal Code including section 376 and have launched a probe.

The complainant alleged that she became pregnant and Tilak forced her to abort the child.

There have been various rulings in the past by the Supreme Court and the High Court on the issue. Some of these rulings clearly stated that when two adults enter into a physical relationship on the pretext of marriage, the sexual act cannot be termed as rape.

Recently, the Bombay High Court observed that when two consenting adults consciously enter into a physical relationship, they are fully aware of the consequences and must bear the same.

High Court judge Mridula Bhatkar, while discharging Kunal Mandaliya of rape charges, observed that the complainant was above 18-years-old and educated.

The judge further observed that the complainant was a working woman, and thus, it could be assumed that she was aware of the consequences of keeping sexual relations with a man.

The Supreme Court has also observed that if a man has consensual sex with a woman with the intention to marry her then it cannot be termed as rape, even though the marriage does not take place.

The SC observation came in May 2013 while hearing a case in which the suspect was charged with rape after he failed to marry the girl with whom he had consensual sex on the promise of marrying her.

HT spoke to lawyers to understand what the law says.

According to advocate Milind Pawar while the law clearly says that any physical relationship that is not without free consent is considered to be rape, there have been numerous rulings by the courts in the recent past questioning the veracity of such complaints.

On multiple occasions, the high courts and Supreme Court have ruled that consensual relationship by two adults on the pretext of marriage cannot be considered as rape, said Pawar.

Asim Sarode, human rights activist lawyer, said, In such cases, it is not right to book a person under rape charges. As the victim knows the law and is of an understandable age. It is not justified for the victim to use a defence of under the pretext of marriage as she was fully aware of the sexual relationship she was involved in.

Once you have consensual sex you cannot impose or compel the opposite sex for marriage. The police, too, cannot be judgemental. However, today, the police are inclined towards the victim, especially women, he added.

However, booking the person under section 376 is not right. Under section 42, the Supreme Court has passed an order where the police has to give 15 days notice to the accused before arrest or booking them. If the accused presents valid clarifications then arrests should be completely avoided, said Sarode.

Harshad Nimbalkar, advocate and former chairman of the bar council of Maharashtra and Goa said, Consensual sex is not rape and when both the parties in question are above the age of 18, then, the situation shouldnt arise. It is for the couple to come to a conclusion without involving others. The laws are already strict and the definition of rape is clear. So, the police should not be in a hurry to book the accused in such an offence. They should clear it from both sides first. The accused should definitely not be booked under rape, yes whether he has to be booked under cheating has to be checked.
A day after a local court denied permission to a 10-year-old rape survivor to medically terminate her pregnancy, it emerged that the girl is not six months, but 30 weeks pregnant.

Doctors of Government Medical College and Hospital (GMCH), Sector 32, plan to go ahead with a natural delivery as per protocol, lest the need for C- section arises.

Sources at the hospital told HT that they were planning to take up the matter regarding the unborn child for adoption with the Missionary Of Charity.

Earlier this week, Doctors including gynaecologists, paediatricians and anaesthetist met during the board meeting chaired by Dr Harish Dasari, head of forensic department, wherein it was decided that why the abortion in this case wasnt possible.

Doctors at GMCH clarified that as per the Supreme Court guidelines, no person who is 26 weeks or over can be allowed to get her child aborted. Besides, the girl is very young and hence it is not feasible to abort the baby.

The foetus is viable- which means it is a separate entity at this stage, almost that of another person separate from the mother and hence it is not legally advisable to abort in such cases, a senior doctor at GMCH-32 told HT.

According to sources, the family is planning to move to High Court flower rejected their plea for abortion.

Victim belongs to a Nepalese family and her mother works as a domestic help in Chandigarh.

In 2015, the apex court allowed a 14-year-old to terminate her 25-month pregnancy. In May earlier this year, a 10-year-old girl who had carried her baby between 18-20 weeks was granted permission to proceed with abortion in Haryana after a medical team concluded that it would endanger her life.

Read more | Chandigarh court rejects abortion plea of 10-year-old rape survivor

THE CASE

The court of additional district and sessions judge, Poonam R Joshi, took the decision on the basis of a medical report filed by the gynaecology department of Government Medical College and Hospital (GMCH), Sector 32.

The report cited that abortion at this stage could lead to dangerous complications. A senior doctor of the gynaecology department said abortion at this stage could lead to serious health issues for the girl, who was raped by her maternal uncle. He had allegedly rape her six to seven times at her house. The pregnancy came to light after the girl complained of stomach ache.

The accused was arrested on the basis of a formal complaint filed by the victims mother.

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A local court on Tuesday evening denied permission to a 10-year-old rape survivor to medically terminate her six-month pregnancy. The court of additional district and sessions judge, Poonam R Joshi, took the decision on the basis of a medical report filed by the gynaecology department of Government Medical College and Hospital (GMCH), Sector 32.

The report cited that abortion at this stage could lead to dangerous complications. A senior doctor of the gynaecology department said abortion at this stage could lead to serious health issues for the girl, who was raped by her maternal uncle. He had allegedly rape her six to seven times at her house. The pregnancy came to light after the girl complained of stomach ache. The accused was arrested on the basis of a formal complaint filed by the victims mother.

The doctor said, The girl is already too advanced into her pregnancy. Hence, an abortion is not legally permissible. Nor is it safe for her health.

Meanwhile, sources said the family is planning to move the High Court to seek permission for the abortion.
The Central government has turned down Jet Airways proposal to run a flight between Chandigarh and Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

Reason: Limited watch-hour facility at the Chandigarh International Airport. The operations at the airport take place between 7am to 10pm.

The revelation was made by independent adviser senior advocate ML Sarin during the resumed hearing of a petition before a division bench considering a bunch of petitions related to the airport infrastructure in Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh.

As per Sarin, the Jet Airways flight was to land at 2.15am and fly back to Abu Dhabi at 4.30am.

However, the proposal, learnt to have been moved to the civil aviation ministry, was turned down by the Union ministry of defence. Jet Airways is the biggest private carrier in India.

Runway recarpeting to begin in Nov

The Centre told the court that runway recarpeting will commence in November.

When the HC bench of justices SS Saron and Avneesh Jhingan asked why the work couldnt start early, the court was informed that it would take three to four months for the private firm, engaged for the job, to put in place the necessary machines.

As per Chandigarh International Airports Limited (CHIAL), the work on the runway would be carried out in such a way that there is minimal disruption of air operations. The work is likely to stretch up to two years, but for around eight months, the operations will be restricted to 10-12 hours.

Earlier, the Air Force had stated that air operation could be restricted between 5am and 5pm, cut of three hours to normal timings, for the development work.

But the court had opined that the new runway would be very useful for Air Force as well and it should also consider shifting its early morning flights to nearby airports so that time for development work could be increased.

The early-morning flights of Air Force cater to supplies to Jammu and Kashmir and other parts.

Air Indias flight to Bangkok from Oct 29

The Air India told the court that it has decided to start the Chandigarh-Bangkok flight from October 29.

The information was given by Air India station manager, Chandigarh airport, GS Tomar. Air India has only one international flight from Chandigarh, connecting it to Sharjah.
The doyens of India's heritage industry on Tuesday sought a clear road-map from the Punjab government to unlock the state's tourism potential.

This was after Punjab tourism minister Navjot Singh Sidhu shared the government's plans to restore the states royal and Mughal era assets and develop these as tourist destinations. Four circuits  Maharaja, Mughal, Sufi and Spiritual would be developed in Punjab, Sidhu said, adding that the idea was to go beyond religious tourism. All this was discussed during an interactive session at the Indian School of Business, Mohali, where delegates from the Indian Heritage Hotel Association and Punjab governor VP Singh Badnore were present.

"One lakh tourists visit Golden Temple daily, Amritsar, but we are not able to attract them to other destinations. We have failed to preserve our rich heritage and tap its tourism potential," said Sidhu.

Seeking IHHA's help in restoring these properties, he disclosed that the religious circuit would connect the three Takht Sahibans in the state (Sri Akal Takht Sahib Amritsar, Sri Kesgarh Sahib Sri Anandpur Sahib, and Damdama Sahib, Talwandi Sabo).

The Maharaja Circuit will connect Quila Mubarak, Patiala; Sheesh Mahal, Bathinda Fort; Darbar Hall Sangrur; Maharaja Jagatjit Palace and Bagghikhana in Kapurthala.

"I don't see any reason why tourism can't play a major role in reviving its economy and generate employment especially in rural areas. Most heritage properties are in villages," he said.

The Congress government will first bring the required infrastructure on ground to facilitate the tourists before branding these properties, he claimed.

Clarity needed on role of private sector

IHHI president Gaj Singh, also a royal scion of Jodhpur, said Punjab had great potential as a heritage destination, but things needed to be organised better.

We could develop Rajasthan because most of the heritage properties were in private hands. In Punjab, assets are under the custody of state government. We need clarity on how the state plans to rope in private industry to develop these properties, he added.

In place with a clear policy, it was imperative that the state develops better civic facilities and roads around its heritage structures, it added.

The state government is planning an ambitious move, but it will definitely transform tourism in the state, said Punjab governor VP Singh Badnore.

Industrys wishlist Proper documentation of all heritage properties in the state with clear title Capital investment subsidy of 20% of project cost Concession on stamp duty for purchase of heritage hotels Excise fee licence for properties in rural areas Industry status for heritage tourism Perfect drainage system, water and electricity supply around heritage buildings
In an exclusive chat, actor Varun Tej opens up on his forthcoming Telugu release Fidaa, the experience of working with filmmaker Sekhar Kammula, sharing screen space with Sai Pallavi and why he likes to break the monotony by doing different kinds of cinema.

Could you point out one aspect of the film that made you go Fidaa?

It would be the climax scene. It breaks the tradition of how marriage is viewed in our society. Its not a very contemporary issue and has been around for a long time but the way Sekhar dealt with it in his writing and even while filming the sequence made me fall in love with the story. That would be my Fidaa moment in the film.

You play an NRI doctor in the film. How different was the experience of playing such a character?

Even though I play an NRI, we wanted the characters Telugu sensibilities, especially his ability to speak the language, to be very strong. The Telugu I speak cant be similar to the way someone from Hyderabad speaks. It had to be slightly different but at the same time we took the liberty to make the character mouth dialogues in a certain way. The workshop we did before we started shooting came very handy.

Varun Tej and Premam girl Sai Pallavi in a still from Fidaa.

How was the experience of working with Sekhar Kammula, who is returning to direction after a gap of three years?

He is very different from all the directors I have worked with. I know each filmmaker has a style of working but Sekhar enjoys the process more than anyone else. I really dont know why he took so long to make this film. He told me he narrated the script to a few people and then finally approached me. I like movies where everything is dealt naturally and with a sense of realism. Sekhars work stands testimonial to that kind of cinema. He doesnt like to go overboard for the sake of satisfying a section of the audiences. His style of working is very subtle and natural. Also, he lets his actors improvise with dialogues and scenes which I dont think many directors appreciate. I thoroughly enjoyed working with him.

This is Sai Pallavis Telugu debut. How was working with her?

I dont have to tell you about her popularity. A lot of us are already aware of her talent and the work she has done in Malayalam. Shes like a book and she knows way too many things. She is very dedicated and you only expect the best from her. Both of us shared a very healthy competition, which made working with her even more exciting. Our director felt the competitiveness will reflect on screen in our performances. She is very genuine in her work and I believe she has a golden heart. I play a doctor and there were instances I took her (Pallavi is a real life doctor) help when I had to inject someone or take someones blood pressure in some montage shots. The most fascinating part about Pallavi is her commitment towards learning Telugu, and it shocked me. She didnt learn Telugu overnight but the effort she put in to learn the language took me by surprise.

You come from a very popular film family in Tollywood. Is there constant pressure on you to do certain kind of cinema?

When I was doing Kanche, a lot of my well-wishers and friends in the industry suggested that I concentrate on doing commercial films. But when my films such as Loafer and Mister didnt work at the box-office, the same people suggested I should stick to doing films like Kanche. I didnt do Mister because people asked me to do commercial films. Irrespective of what people think I should do, I choose the kind of film I want to do next. I believe its always about things falling in place at the right time.

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Never mind their recent public spat but news is Baahubali director SS Rajamouli and Bollywood actor Sridevi may be working on a new film together. The said film, which will also star Malayalam heavyweight Mohanlal, is rumoured to be a fantasy drama.

According to a report in IB Times, the film will be of fantasy genre but is set in current times and deals with real life struggles and situations.

The makers have approached Sridevi and if all goes well, the trio will work together.

There has been a lot of speculation about Rajamoulis next film, given the stupendous success of his Prabhas starrer Baahubali. While all the major actors of the franchise -- Prabhas, Rana Daggubati, Anushka Shetty and Tamannaah Bhatia -- have moved on to their next projects, nothing has been heard about Rajamouli.

However, the news about casting Sridevi has come as major surprise, given the bitterness between the two over Rajamoulis comments on the actor as to why the makers didnt cast her in Baahubali, a role which eventually went to Ramya Krishnan.

Speaking on a Telugu chat show, Rajamouli had revealed in May 2017 that Sridevi had reportedly asked for a hefty fee for the role. After hearing series of wishes from her (Sridevi), our team got fed up. We also thought that it would be above our budget to meet her demands. Then we approached Ramya Krishnan and she proved herself [to be] fantastic. We now feel [that] we were lucky that we dropped the idea of having Sridevi in our film.

In June, during the promotions for her latest Bollywood film, Mom, the issue resurfaced when Sridevi was asked for her comment. I was shocked and hurt by his interview. Rajamouli is a calm and dignified person. I was very happy to work with him. But, the way he spoke about the issue made me feel very sad, she said in an interview to the channel, NTV Telugu.

Talking about her starry demands for working in Baahubali, Sridevi added, People would have sent me packing if I was like that. I dont know if the producer wrongly told Rajamouli that I made all these demands, but it is not in good taste to speak like this.

Regretting his decision to speak about the actor, Rajamouli was quoted by DNA as saying, One thing is for sure. I shouldnt have discussed the details on a public platform. Thats a mistake. And I regret it.

Rajamouli was all praise for Sridevis contribution to regional films down South. I have huge respect for Sridevi ji as a flag-bearer of the southern film industries in Mumbai for many years. I wish her all the best. And I wish Mom a big success. The trailer looks very intriguing and promising, he further said in his interview to DNA.

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Egyptian authorities have thwarted attempts at irregular migration from Egypt's borders by some 3,000 people of diffrent nationalities in the first half of 2017, a statement by the Armed Forces said on Wednesday.

Over the past few years, thousands of migrants have attempted to cross the Mediterranean for Europe through Egypts northern coast, with thousands detained by Egyptian authorities while attempting the journey.

In late 2016, Cairo introduced a law stiffening penalties against human traffickers.

The move came after a migrant boat sank in September 2016 off the Mediterranean coast, killing hundreds.

Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi has spoken on multiple occasions about Egypt's ongoing efforts to curb irregular migration from its shores to Europe  a key concern for European countries facing a growing migrant crisis.

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North Koreas tourism agency has recently launched a website offering holiday options ranging from surfing to rice planting. This comes despite strong US warnings to avoid travel to a nation where several trips have ended in jail.

Sixteen Americans have been detained in the past decade in North Korea, including 22-year-old student Otto Warmbier who was given a long prison term for stealing a hotel propaganda banner. He was sent home in a state of coma in June but died several days later.

The DPR Korea Tour website, run by the Norths National Tourism Administration, depicts the country -- which is subject to stiff sanctions over its weapons programmes -- as just another tourist destination.

It introduces package trips to various parts of the country including the capital Pyongyang, and offers various theme tours for travellers seeking something more unusual. Visitors are invited to check out beaches on the east coast, including the Majon Bathing Beach, where surfing has come into vogue among tourists for its favourable conditions and clean water.

The website also provides basic travel information like air and train routes and ways to get around Pyongyang using public transport such as cabs and buses. However, it does not allow users to book tours directly and does not list the handful of foreign agencies that arrange trips to the isolated state.

The site is available in Korean, English, Chinese, Russian and Japanese and can be found at tourismdprk.gov.kp. The countrys official name is the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. However, the US State Department strongly warns Americans against travelling to North Korea, citing serious risk of arrest and long-term detention. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are among other nations giving similar warnings.

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During nearly two months of de facto exile in Turkey, Afghanistans embattled vice president Gen Abdul Rashid Dostum hastily formed a new coalition of the discontented. On Monday, he tried to return to Afghanistan to advance their cause.

But as hundreds of supporters waited late into the night at an airport in northern Afghanistan, the small private plane carrying Dostum, an ex-warlord, was denied permission to land on orders from the central government, according to several Afghan and Western officials.

The episode will probably deepen Afghanistans political crisis, testing the limits of Dostum, a politician who has been volatile in the past and who has threatened to turn his wrath against President Ashraf Ghanis government, which he helped bring to power but now accuses of marginalizing him.

Supporters of Dostum who gathered at the airport in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif to greet him were frustrated when he was turned away. There were about 500 to 1,000 people waiting for him, and we waited for three hours, said Raees Abdul Khaliq, a member of the Balkh provincial council who was at the airport Monday night. The central government, against all the laws of Afghanistan and the world, against the fact that the president cannot rule an ordinary citizen  let alone the vice president  a criminal until proven by a court, told the plane not to land.

Dostum has been in conflict with the government for months, most recently over a criminal investigation into accusations that he and his bodyguards kidnapped and sexually assaulted a political rival. The vice president is turning out to be one of the biggest headaches of Ghanis presidency.

As it became clear that Dostum would not answer to the Afghan legal system on the sexual assault charges, defying multiple requests by the attorney generals office, Ghanis team sought to disregard Dostum and drive him into self-imposed exile in Turkey. That approach was also used in 2008, when Dostum was accused of a similar assault against another rival. Dostum left for Turkey in the middle of the night on May 19.

Dostums new political alliance, which was announced last month in Ankara, the Turkish capital, has a strong base in northern Afghanistan. Members of the alliance have been working on a grand introduction for the alliance in Mazar-i-Sharif.
The four Arab nations that cut ties with Qatar on Tuesday urged the Gulf nation to commit to six principles on combatting extremism and terrorism and negotiate a plan with specific measures to implement them  a step that could pave the way for an early resolution of the crisis.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain broke diplomatic relations with Qatar in early June largely over their allegations that it supports terrorist and extremist groups  a charge Qatar rejects. They initially made 13 demands, which Qatar also dismissed.

Saudi Arabias UN ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi told a briefing for a group of UN correspondents that the four nations are now committed to the six principles agreed to by their foreign ministers at a meeting in Cairo on July 5, and hope Qatar will support them as well.

The principles include commitments to combat extremism and terrorism, prevent financing and safe havens for such groups, and suspend all acts of provocation and speeches inciting hatred or violence.

Al-Mouallimi said the four-nation quartet thinks it should be easy for the Qataris to accept the six principles. He stressed that implementation and monitoring must be essential components, and there will be no compromise when it comes to principles.

But he said both sides can talk about details of the tactics and the tools to implement them  and thats where we can have discussion and compromise.

The Saudi ambassador explained that the initial 13 points included some principles and some tools to achieve compliance.

Mixed in the 13 points were what Western nations might see as fair demands, such as cracking down on support for extremists and curbing ties with Iran, and tougher-to-swallow calls to shut down the Al-Jazeera television network  one of Qatars best-known brands  and kick out troops from Nato member Turkey, which has a base in Qatar.

Al-Mouallimi stressed that stopping incitement to violence is essential, but he said closing Al-Jazeera might not be necessary.

If the only way to achieve that is by closing down Al-Jazeera, fine, he said. If we can achieve that without closing down Al-Jazeera, thats also fine. The important thing is the objective and the principle involved.

UAE minister of state for international cooperation Reem Al Hashimy said all the countries involved have strong relations with the United States and we believe that the Americans have a very constructive and a very important role to play in hopefully creating a peaceful resolution to this current crisis.

US President Donald Trump has sided strongly with Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the dispute, publicly backing their contention that Qatar is a supporter of Islamic militant groups and a destabilizing force in the Middle East.

Secretary of state Rex Tillerson recently concluded several days of shuttle diplomacy and sealed a deal to intensify Qatars counterterrorism efforts. The memorandum of understanding signed by the US and Qatar lays out steps Qatar can take to bolster its fight against terrorism and address shortfalls in policing terrorism funding.

Al Hashimy called the MoU an excellent step.

Wed like to see more of that, she said. Wed like to see stronger measures taken and stronger commitment made to address that.

Al Hashimy said at this stage the ball is in Qatars court.

Were looking for a serious change in behaviour, serious measures, she said. No more talk.

Qatar has further escalated the situation by encouraging Turkeys military presence, Al Hashimy said. We do not want to see a military escalation of any kind, she said. We hope to be able to resolve this internally and among ourselves with the assistance of strong mediation, whether its from the US or the Kuwaitis.

UAE Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh said that if Qatar is unwilling to accept core principles around what defines terrorism or extremism in our region, it will be very difficult for it to remain in the Gulf Cooperation Council with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain.

So it may be a parting of ways for a little while in order to work things out, she said.
China has partially blocked the popular messaging service WhatsApp, as authorities tighten their grip on the internet ahead of a major leadership reshuffle in Beijing.

Photo, video and voice messages sent by the Guardian from Beijing were all blocked on Wednesday, but text messages were not affected. Dozens of users in China complain of a total ban on sending any type of messages on WhatsApp.

The ban comes as Chinese officials are preparing for a twice-a-decade leadership shuffle later this year, with various factions within the Communist Party jockeying for control of key positions and President Xi Jinping likely to further consolidate power.

The company declined to comment.

China operates the worlds largest censorship system, known as the Great Firewall, blocking thousands of websites including popular platforms such as Facebook, Google, Instagram, YouTube and a host of foreign news outlets.

Xi, who came to power five years ago, has pushed for tighter government controls on what information Chinese citizens inside the country can access in the name of cyber sovereignty. Recent months have seen Beijing restrict live streaming video apps, online video content, celebrity news and VPNs.

In China, WhatsApp pales in popularity compared with homegrown messaging service WeChat, which boasts more than 900m users. But the American app is increasingly being used by Chinese concerned about privacy or those communicating with friends or business contacts abroad.

While WhatsApp encrypts all messages, WeChat conversations are routinely monitored.

It would not be surprising to find that everything on WhatsApp gets blocked, forcing users in China to use unencrypted, monitored and censored services like WeChat, a Chinese censorship researcher known only by the pseudonym Charlie Smith, told the Associated Press.

Before this weeks ban, WhatsApp was the only service owned by Facebook still accessible within China. The popular social network has been blocked since ethnic riots in Chinas far west in 2009 and Instagram was banned during pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2014.

Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook boss, has made a high-profile push to get the companys services unblocked, showering praise on Xi and other Chinese officials, but has little to show for his efforts so far.
China has transported tens of thousands of tonnes of military hardware and army vehicles into the mountainous Tibet region against the backdrop of the standoff with India near the Sikkim border, according to a military newspaper.

The equipment and vehicles were moved simultaneously by road and rail from across the entire region late last month, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP) quoted the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) Daily, the official mouthpiece of Chinas military, as saying.

The vast haul was transported to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command  which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India, the report said.

State media releases video "Crossing the line of fire " of PLA soldiers' drill in Tibet at 5000 metres amid Donglang standoff @htTweets pic.twitter.com/uLpe60brIn  sutirtho patranobis (@spatranobis) July 19, 2017

Another section of same state media video "crossing the line of fire" military exercise in Tibet @htTweets pic.twitter.com/3OAl0RySr6  sutirtho patranobis (@spatranobis) July 19, 2017

3rd part of the same PLA exercise video in Tibet @htTweets pic.twitter.com/BYjPaekQXs  sutirtho patranobis (@spatranobis) July 19, 2017

The standoff between Indian and Chinese troops in the Donglang or Doklam sector began on June 16, when India acted in coordination with Bhutan to oppose the construction of a road by Chinese troops. The PLA Dailys report suggested the gear was moved after the face-off began.

The reports did not say whether China moved the equipment to support military drills held in Tibet, including in the middle and lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo river, close to the border of Indias northeastern states, or for other reasons.

Sources in the security establishment in New Delhi said there was no unusual military movement in China during the past two months. The sources also said China had been conducting military exercises in the Tibet region since 2009.

Ni Lexiong, a Shanghai-based military commentator, suggested to SCMP the movement of military equipment was most likely related to the standoff and could have been designed to bring India to the negotiating table.

Diplomatic talks must be backed by military preparation, he said.

Wang Dehua, from the South Asia Studies Centre at Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, said the scale of the troop and equipment movement showed how much easier it is for China to defend its western borders.

Military operations are all about logistics, he told SCMP. Now there is much better logistics support to the Tibet region.

Beijing has accused New Delhi of illegal trespass in Donglang sector and said the withdrawal of Indian troops is a must for resolving the face-off and opening talks.

Donglang is under the control of Beijing but the area at the strategic tri-junction of India, Bhutan and China is claimed by Thimphu.

India has said the road being built by the Chinese troops has serious security implications and will alter the status quo in the region.

Earlier this week, state-run CCTV beamed footage of PLA troops from a mountain brigade engaged in a military exercise with live ammunition in the Tibet region. The location of the drill was not far from the Donglang and the state-run media reported that troops which were involved were responsible for frontline combat missions.

The live-fire drills included the quick delivery of troops and different military units working together on joint attacks, the state media reported. The troops also carried out anti-aircraft defence drills

Other media reports said Tibets mobile communication agency had conducted a drill in Lhasa on July 10 during which personnel practiced the setting up of a temporary mobile network to secure communications in an emergency.
Israels Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has launched a withering attack on the European Union at a closed-door meeting of eastern European leaders in Budapest, saying the political grouping would wither and die if it did not change its policy towards Israel.

The remarks, caught on an open microphone, underlined Netanyahus often barely disguised contempt for the European political union, which has criticised Israel  and his government in particular  over issues including Jewish settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territories and the peace process.

Netanyahu also made a rare public admission that Israel has struck Iranian arms convoys in Syria bound for Hezbollah dozens and dozens of times.

The overheard remarks were reported by Israeli journalists covering the trip.

The bombastic remarks, which bizarrely predicated Europes future on its attitude towards Israel  not one of the most burning issues on an EU agenda confronting the challenges of immigration, Brexit and economic growth  were made in a meeting with the leaders of Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Poland, whom Netanyahu urged to close their doors to refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

I think Europe has to decide if it wants to live and thrive or if it wants to shrivel and disappear, he said. I am not very politically correct. I know thats a shock to some of you. Its a joke. But the truth is the truth  both about Europes security and Europes economic future. Both of these concerns mandate a different policy toward Israel.

The European Union is the only association of countries in the world that conditions the relations with Israel, which produces technology in every area, on political conditions. The only ones! Nobody does it, Netanyahu said before officials realised the meeting was being overheard by reporters and cut the feed.

Its crazy. Its actually crazy, he added, urging the leaders present to help push Europe to expedite the EU Association Agreement with Israel that has been held up because of current Israeli policies.

Netanyahus remarks were made following criticism of his visit to Budapest , where he has been accused of soft-pedalling on accusations against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban for allegedly stoking anti-semitism, not least in a high-profile campaign targeting billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros.

Netanyahus comments also come in the midst of problems for the embattled Israeli prime minister at home, where he is under investigation in two police inquiries and amid an escalating corruption scandal involving his government over the purchase of German submarines.

I think that if I can suggest that what comes out of this meeting is your ability perhaps to communicate to your colleagues in other parts of Europe: Help Europe  dont undermine the one western country that defends European values and European interests and prevents another mass migration to Europe, added Netanyahu.

So stop attacking Israel. Start supporting Israel  start supporting European economies by doing what the Americans, the Chinese and the Indians are doing, he said, referring to increasing technological cooperation.

There is no logic here. The EU is undermining its security by undermining Israel. Europe is undermining its progress by undermining its connection with Israeli innovation, he added.

We are part of the European culture, Netanyahu continued. Europe ends in Israel. East of Israel, there is no more Europe. We have no greater friends than the Christians who support Israel around the world. Not only the evangelists. If I go to Brazil, Ill be greeted there with more enthusiasm than at the Likud party.
Delighted to be the first turban-wearing Sikh MP in Britains Parliament, Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, in his maiden speech in the House of Commons on Tuesday, said that a glass ceiling has been broken, expressing hope that more MPs like him are elected in future.

Labours Dhesi was elected from Slough, where he previously served as mayor. There have been Sikh MPs, but the 38-year-olds election has been hailed as an example of growing participation of minority communities in Britains politics.

Participating in a debate on drugs policy, Dhesi, whose family has roots in Jalandhar district, recalled his father working in a car factory and his mother at a local petrol pump: Little could they have imagined that their sonthe son of immigrantswould go on to serve as the towns MP.

Slough is a town of firsts. It elected the UKs first ever black lady mayor and now, more than three decades later, it has elected the first ever turbaned Sikh to the British Parliamentindeed, I believe, the first ever to be elected to any European Parliament.

A glass ceiling has truly been broken. I sincerely hope that many more like me will follow in the years and decades to come. The enormity of what has been collectively achieved has not escaped me. The hand of historythe huge excitement, anticipation and sheer expectationsweigh heavily on my shoulders, he said.

As MPs applauded his speech, the UK-born and raised Dhesi recalled how he was bullied at school for looking different. But, he said, his election was also about being respected and embraced by his fellow countrymen and women, including within the highest echelons of the establishment.

What could demonstrate greater embrace than being elected to serve and sit on these green benches in this august House in the mother of all Parliaments? When I served as mayor in 2011, integration was my mayoral themefor those of us who were born and brought up in Britain, are British nationals, we should also be proud to be British, he said.

However, Dhesi also noted that besides human rights abuses in the world, even acceptability remained a problem  for example, in neighbouring France.

He said it was extremely disappointing and incredibly ironic that more than 80,000 turbaned Sikh soldiers died to liberate the very country where their descendants cannot even have their ID photos taken without having to remove their turbans, and cannot even send their children to most state schools without removing their turbans.

This same warped interpretation of secularism precludes Muslims from wearing their hijabs and niqabs, Jews from wearing their skull caps and Christians from wearing their crosses. Acceptability is still a problem in advanced nations, such as our close ally the United States, where several Sikhs have been shot dead because of mistaken identitymistaken for being terrorists, he added.

Calling Slough the Silicon Valley of England, Dhesi said the constituency had a vibrant and diverse community, with Kashmiris living harmoniously side by side with Punjabis and those with Irish, Polish and African-Caribbean ancestry.

Besides Dhesi, another landmark in the June 8 poll was the election of Preet Kaur Gill, the first Sikh woman MP, from Edgbaston. Gill, who also has roots in Jalandhar, has also been elected to serve as member of the home affairs select committee chaired by senior Labour leader Yvette Cooper.

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While Uber has changed ground transport in many cities, Sao Paulos infernal traffic jams have sparked a new app that opens the sky to commuters: Voom, a helicopter taxi service that charges according to distance and the passengers weight.

Its a godsend for those in a rush -- but only if the weather permits.

Gustavo Boyde, a Brazilian living in the United States who goes to Sao Paulo for business, is one of those who says the hops above the city are the only way to get around.

Ive opted for helicopters, he said, pointing to the metropolis sprawling beyond the horizon as he choppered from a chic central district to the airport.

Sao Paulo -- South Americas biggest city, home to 12 million residents within its municipal limits and millions more in satellite towns -- is regularly choked by gargantuan traffic jams.

There are 5.9 million vehicles, or one for every two people. At peak hour, traffic can be backed up as much as 576 kilometers (358 miles).

Not so pricey

A new venture launched in April by Europes Airbus, Voom has taken a page out of Ubers marketing manual to put clients above it all -- at a competitive price.

The app asks passengers to enter their weight and that of any baggage, then immediately sends the calculated fare.

A helicopter lands on the roof of a building in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil on June 23. (AFP Photo)

Boydes run, from the southeastern neighborhood of Itaim Bibi to the airport some 30 kilometers (20 miles) away, takes nine minutes and costs $150.

Compare that with the market rates before Voom became available. Individual helicopter companies wanted 10 times more -- and trips needed to be booked at least two days in advance.

Our goal is to make helicopter transport accessible to more people, so that the helicopter is seen as an alternative, said Vooms executive director, Uma Subramanian.

In Boydes case, taking a helicopter through the app was a no-brainer. Using a traditional taxi on the clogged roads would have cost him $50 and an hour and a half of frustrating stop-and-go.

I chose Voom because it fits within my travel budget, its economical and its practical, Boyde said.

Those are two hours I can now use for work, which is handy given the tight schedule I have, he said.

According to Subramanian, saturated roads in Latin America mean that people lose up to 10 hours a week stuck in traffic.

Biggest fleet

Sao Paulo topped a list of 500 cities Voom considered for its debut, for a variety of reasons.

The city, which sits in a state of the same name whose population exceeds 45 million, has the biggest fleet of helicopters in the world.

ANAC, the National Association for Civil Aviation, says 700 choppers, or nearly a third of Brazils total number, are located there, alongside 528 helipads.

Brazilian businessman Gustavo Boyle prepares to board a helicopter in Sao Paulo, Brazil on June 23. (AFP Photo)

Brazils deep recession also means that many in Sao Paulos aviation sector have embraced Voom.

In the current situation of a contracting market, the arrival of this service is a positive, said Arthur Fioratti, head of the ABRAPHE association of Brazilian helicopter pilots that covers some 2,000 professional flyers.

Back during Brazils boom time, between 2010 and 2013, the sector flourished. ABRAPHE said there were 2,000 helicopter flights a day in Sao Paulo state.

Today, there are 1,300.

Voom has deals with three helicopter companies which operate five helicopters in Sao Paulos metropolitan zone.

Business travelers are the companys target clientele -- an elite used to taking a lift to the top of a glass-and-steel tower to be picked up on the rooftop helipad.

But it hopes to eventually broaden the appeal of flitting across the sky by bringing fares down to below what a taxi would charge.

Eye on the weather

Currently, between six and 10 people use Vooms service daily.

When my friends saw me using a helicopter to get to the airport they asked if Id become a millionaire. When I told them how much it cost, they were surprised, said Lucas Amadeu, head of marketing for Voom.

I think that once people know what it costs, the service will grow a lot, he added.

A helicopter overflies Sao Paulo, Brazil on June 23. (AFP Photo)

But while market forces are one thing, Mother Nature is another, and the sometimes violent storms and tropical rain that lash Sao Paulo can ground Vooms fleet.

At those times, users are forced to resort to ordinary taxis -- and to confront road traffic made even more choked by the weather.

Within Brazil, the poor quality of public transport in Sao Paulo is well known. In 2013, the biggest protests the country has ever known erupted when authorities tried to raise fares for the creaking, overburdened network of buses and metros.

One risk for Voom is that it might become too popular. An abrupt rise in the number of helicopters flying above the city could prompt the same sort of response as in New York, where officials are considering ways to limit flights.

For now, though, the company has its view fixed on other horizons.

Its next city pegged for expansion is Mexico City, another badly choked megapolis.

For Boyde, who goes to Mexico City almost as often as he does to Sao Paulo, that is good news.

If they do the same thing over there, Ill be their customer, he said.
Four Arab nations that cut ties with Qatar are urging the tiny Gulf nation to commit to six principles on combatting extremism and terrorism, and to negotiate a plan with specific measures to implement them - a step that could pave the way for an early resolution of the crisis.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain broke diplomatic relations with Qatar in early June over allegations that it supports extremist groups a charge Qatar rejects.

They initially made 13 demands, which Qatar dismissed.

Saudi Arabias UN ambassador Abdallah Al Mouallimi said the four countries were now committed to the six principles agreed to by their foreign ministers at a meeting in Cairo on July 5 and to having Qatar support them.
The Indonesian government on Wednesday banned Hizbut Tahrir, an organization that wants to establish a global caliphate, under a new presidential decree criticized as draconian by rights groups.

Hizbuts legal status had been revoked to protect national unity, said Freddy Haris, a director-general at the ministry of Justice and Human Rights, at a brief news conference.

The decree signed last week by President Joko Jokowi Widodo gives the government almost unfettered power to ban organizations deemed against the constitution and the official state ideology Pancasila. Rights group say governments could easily abuse the decrees power.

The measures follow months of sectarian tensions that shook the government and undermined Indonesias reputation for practicing a moderate form of Islam.

Hizbut Tahrir, along with groups such as the violent Islamic Defenders Front, was behind a series of massive protests against the Jakarta governor, a minority Christian and Jokowi ally who was accused of blaspheming Islam. He subsequently lost a bid for re-election to a Muslim candidate and was imprisoned for two years for blasphemy despite prosecutors downgrading the charge to a lesser offence.

Hizbut, already banned or circumscribed in some countries, is estimated to have tens of thousands of members in Indonesia.
An air strike on a group of displaced Yemenis has killed at least 20 civilians, mostly from the same family, a UN statement and witnesses said Wednesday.

The attack on Tuesday afternoon hit a group of civilians in the Mawza district of the southwestern province of Taez, a statement by the UN refugee agency said.

Residents said the attack was carried out by a warplane from the Saudi-led coalition fighting Shia rebels in support of Yemen's internationally recognised government.

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The Communist Party of China (CPC) wants its members to give up religion and seek faith and belief within the partys ideology or face punishment, the countrys top official overseeing religious affairs has said.

Writing for CPCs top political theory journal, Qiushi or Seeking Truth, Wang Zuoan, the director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA), said CPC members should be atheists and not have religious beliefs.

Party members should not have religious beliefs, which is a red line for all membersParty members should be firm Marxist atheists, obey Party rules and stick to the Party's faiththey are not allowed to seek value and belief in religion, Wang wrote.

Officials who have religious faith should be persuaded to give it up, and those who resist would be punished by the Party organisation, he wrote.

China is officially an atheist country but the CPC-run government recognises five religions: Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, Protestantism and Catholicism.

Under Chinas Constitution, citizens have the liberty to follow a religion of choice but in reality, the freedom of religion is severely curtailed.

In recent years, the government has carried out crackdowns on fast spreading Christianity, besides restricting the practise of Islam in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

Wangs pronouncement in Qiushi seems to be the latest effort to curb individual freedoms, which can be a threat to unity as perceived by the CPC.

His writing echoed, almost word-to-word, what President Xi Jinping had said earlier this year.

We must resolutely guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means and prevent ideological infringement by extremists, Xi had told a conference on religion.

In the article, Wang wrote: Some foreign forces have used religion to infiltrate China, and extremism and illegal religious activities are spreading in some places, which have threatened national security and social stability.

He added: Religions should be sinicisedWe should guide religious groups and individuals with socialist core values and excellent traditional Chinese culture and support religious groups to dig into their doctrines to find parts that are beneficial to social harmony and development.

The need to renew the call to CPC members  around 89 million at the end of 2016  to shed religion or face punishment could mean that many among them are searching for faith beyond the partys doctrine.

Interestingly, a report published by Washington-based Freedom House earlier this year had said that overall religious controls have intensified across China under Xis rule.

The report added Xi had presided over an overall increase in religious persecution and four communities had borne the brunt - Protestant Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, and Hui and Uyghur Muslims.
Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai was greeted with cheers on Tuesday by dozens of young women in northeastern Nigeria, where she spoke out for the many girls abducted under Boko Harams deadly insurgency.

The 20-year-old Pakistani activist said she was excited by the courage of the young women who are undaunted as they pursue an education amid one of the worlds worst humanitarian crises.

This is part of my girl power trip, visiting many parts of the world, said Yousafzai, who also met with the freed Chibok schoolgirls taken in a mass abduction by Boko Haram more than three years ago. I am here now because of the Nigerian girls. Fighting for them and speaking up for them.

Yousafzai visited internally displaced camps in and around the city of Maiduguri, where thousands have sheltered from Boko Harams violence. The extremist group continues to carry out deadly attacks there, often using young female suicide bombers.

They have lived in the period of extremism, Yousafzai said of the young women around her. Many have seen family members killed.

Yousafzai was 15 when she shot in the head by Taliban militants in 2012, targeted due to her advocacy for womens education.

Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai (in blue) during a visit to a school in Maiduguri, Nigeria, on Tuesday. (AP Photo)

The Nobel winner said her Nigeria visit was significant because it was the partial fulfilment of what she advocated the last time she was there. In 2014, she pressed then President Goodluck Jonathan to ensure the rescue of the more than 200 abducted Chibok schoolgirls.

On Monday, Yousafzai met with more than 100 who have since been rescued and now stay in the capital, Abuja, for what the government calls rehabilitation.

While she told the AP she shared their joy at being freed, she said she was not happy that the girls havent been allowed to reunite fully with their families.

She said she hopes they will live with their family, live a normal life.

Many others remain in Boko Haram captivity, and the government must unite so that they should make sure that these girls are released, Yousafzai said.

Boko Haram themselves should learn that in Islam, such things are unacceptable, she added. This is against humanity, this is against Islam.

Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai (L) speaks with Nigeria's Acting President Yemi Osinbajo during her courtesy visit to the presidency in Abuja on Monday. (AFP)

Yousafzai also met with acting President Yemi Osinbajo, speaking up for the more than 10 million children displaced by Boko Haram and pressing for the declaration of a state of emergency for education in Nigeria.

She also urged the international community to address the crisis in the countrys northeast. Girls at the internally displaced camps said the Nobel winners story of courage gave them inspiration for a brighter future.

Her story give us hope, thats why we too want to go to school and become something in life, said 15-year-old Fatima Ali. We have to bear all pains like hunger to go to school. We barely eat once a day here. We have not eaten since morning because government people no longer bring us food for about two months now.

Three million children in Nigerias northeast are in need of support to keep learning, according to the UN childrens agency. Nearly 1,400 schools have been destroyed during Boko Harams insurgency, which began in 2009, and more than 2,295 teachers have been killed, the agency says.

Ali said she was in school when Boko Haram attacked her town three years ago. I want to become a soldier so that I could help my community to fight and kill Boko Haram, because they are not good people, she said.

Another student, 15-year-old Fatima Grema, said she sees herself in Yousafzai. Boko Haram abducted me and wanted to marry me, she said. After being taken from the town of Baga to a location near the Cameroon border, I later managed to escape, she said. I was not in school until I came to the camp here.

Grema said she now wants to become a teacher.

UNICEFs country representative Mohamed Malick Fall said Yousafzais visit is a symbol of hope, and we will do everything in our power to make sure all children can keep learning.
Detailed sea-floor maps made during the unsuccessful search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, released by Australia on Wednesday, could help increase the knowledge of rich fisheries and the prehistoric movement of the earths southern continents.

The Indian Ocean search ended in January after covering a lonely stretch of open water where under-sea mountains larger than Mount Everest rise and a rift valley dotted with subsea volcanoes runs hundreds of kilometres long.

The whereabouts of the plane, which vanished in March 2014 en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board, remains one of the worlds greatest aviation mysteries.

However, information gathered during painstaking surveys of some 120,000 sq km of the remote waters west of Australia should provide fishermen, oceanographers and geologists insight into the region in unprecedented detail, said Charitha Pattiaratchi, professor of coastal oceanography at the University of Western Australia.

An undated supplied image from Geoscience Australia shows a map view of the sea floor obtained from mapping data collected during the first phase of the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. (Reuters)

There are the locations of seamounts which will attract a lot of international deep sea fishermen to the area, Pattiaratchi told Reuters by phone.

High-priced fish such as tuna, toothfish, orange roughy, alfonsino and trevally are known to gather near the seamounts, where plankton swirl in the currents in the inhospitable waters.

Pattiaratchi said the location of seamounts would also help model the impact of tsunamis in the region, given undersea mountains help dissipate their destructive energy, and potentially change our understanding of the break-up of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana.

The data consists of three-dimensional models of undersea landforms as well as raw bathymetric survey information. It was published online by Geoscience Australia on Wednesday, with a further tranche due to be published next year.

An undated supplied image from Geoscience Australia shows a computer generated three-dimensional view of the sea floor obtained from mapping data collected during the first phase of the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. (Reuters)

It is estimated that only 10 to 15% of the worlds oceans have been surveyed with the kind of technology used in the search for MH370, making this remote part of the Indian Ocean among the most thoroughly mapped regions of the deep ocean on the planet, said Stuart Minchin, chief of Geoscience Australias environmental geoscience division.

Australia has not ruled out resuming the search for the Boeing 777 airliner but has said that would depend on finding credible new evidence about the planes whereabouts.

No new information has been discovered to determine the specific location of the aircraft and the underwater search remains suspended, Australian Transport Minister Darren Chester said in a statement on Wednesday.
Embattled Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif contested the graft charges against him and his family in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, saying the Panama probe panel did not produce any document to prove that he was the owner of the posh London flats which are at the centre of the high- profile case.

The apex court had started hearing the scandal on Monday after the JIT submitted its final report on July 10, recommending that a corruption case be file against Sharif and his family for alleged money laundering in the 1990s, when he twice served as Prime Minister, to purchase assets in London.

Sharifs lawyer Khawaja Harris stressed that the JIT did not level any specific charge of corruption against Sharif.

He also said that the JIT has not produced any document to prove that Sharif, 67, was the owner of the London flats.

Harriss arguments were directed at the six-member JIT, two of whom were from the Inter-Services Intelligence and the Military Intelligence.

He said the JIT had overstepped its mandate given to it by the court and had based its findings on the documents, which were of no evidentiary value as per the Pakistani laws.

If Sharif loses the case in the Supreme Court, it could cost him his premiership, throwing Pakistan into a turmoil.

Sharif has refused to quit, calling the JIT report a compilation of allegations and assumptions. His decision to stay in power was endorsed by the federal cabinet last week.

However, the three-member apex bench observed that Sharif has not provided the details of all assets and source of income in the form of his tax returns.

Justice Ijazul Ahsan said the Sharif family has not produced any document to prove that the prime ministers son Hussain Nawaz was the original owner of the London flats. He said JIT has found that Sharifs daughter Maryam was the real owner of those apartments.

Justice Ejaz Afzal told Sharifs counsel that the Sharif family has not provided the money trail to establish that the London flats were legally purchased.

We have been waiting for them since day one to come forward and provide the money trail, he said, but added that the court would decide the case on the basis of evidence and it was not bound by the findings of the JIT.

Justice Azmat Saeed Sheikh raised questions about the sources of funds used to set up the Hill Metal steel company in Saudi Arabia, which is allegedly owned by the Sharifs.

The judges appeared quite aggressive and grilled Sharifs counsel about the source of money used to establish businesses in Gulf and the UK by the Sharif family.

The real question is where did the money for [family] properties in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and London came from? We have not yet received an answer to this fundamental question, Justice Ijazul Ahsan said.

The bench also asked Sharifs counsel whether the court should decide the case by its opinion over the concealment of facts or refer the case to an accountability court for trial.

The counsel urged the court to decide it on merit and stressed that the JIT was biased and his client had done nothing illegal.

Later, finance minister Ishaq Dars counsel began his arguments but the court adjourned the case until tomorrow.

The scandal surfaced when the Panama Papers leaks last year revealed that Sharifs sons - Hassan and Hussain - and his daughter Maryam - owned offshore companies which managed their familys properties. The assets in question include four expensive flats in Park Lane, London.

Opposition parties say the London flats were purchased through illegal money which Sharif and his family have rejected. But so far they are unable to satisfy the court about the source of money used to purchase these properties.
As next in line to be king of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Nayef was unaccustomed to being told what to do. Then, one night in June, he was summoned to a palace in Mecca, held against his will and pressured for hours to give up his claim to the throne.

By dawn, he had given in, and Saudi Arabia woke to the news that it had a new crown prince  the kings 31-year-old son, Mohammed bin Salman.

The young princes supporters have lauded his elevation as the seamless empowerment of an ambitious leader. But since he was promoted June 21, indications have emerged that Mohammed bin Salman plotted the ouster and that the transition was rockier than has been publicly portrayed, according to current and former US officials and associates of the royal family.

To strengthen support for the sudden change in the line of succession, some senior princes were told that Mohammed bin Nayef was unfit to be king because of a drug problem, according to an associate of the royal family.

The decision to oust Mohammed bin Nayef and some of his closest colleagues has spread concern among counterterrorism officials in the United States who saw their most trusted Saudi contacts disappear and have struggled to build new relationships.

And the collection of so much power by one young royal, Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has unsettled a royal family long guided by consensus and deference to elders.

You may have now such a concentration of power within one branch and within one individual who is also younger than so many of the cousins and sons of former kings that it may begin to create a situation where the family is out of whack, said Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at Rice Universitys Baker Institute for Public Policy, who studies Persian Gulf politics.

The insularity of Saudi Arabias sprawling and phenomenally wealthy royal family is well known, often leaving diplomats, intelligence agents and members of the family itself struggling to decipher its inner workings.

But since The New York Times reported last month that Mohammed bin Nayef had been confined to his palace, US officials and associates of senior royals have provided similar accounts of how the elder prince was pressured to step aside by his nephew. All spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to endanger their contacts inside the kingdom, or themselves.

In response to questions from The Times, a written statement by a senior Saudi official denied that Mohammed bin Nayef had been pressured and said that the Allegiance Council, a body of senior princes, had approved the change in the best interest of the nation.
Singapore said on Wednesday it has offered surveillance drones and urban warfare training to Philippine troops battling Islamist fighters, to prevent the militants becoming entrenched and threatening the rest of Southeast Asia.

Philippine troops have been battling to dislodge militants loyal to the Islamic State group who seized parts of the southern city of Marawi on May 23 in a bid to establish a base in Mindanao region, which shares sea borders with Malaysia and Indonesia.

IS has said it plans to establish a caliphate in Southeast Asia as it did in parts of Iraq and Syria.

More than 550 people, including 413 militants and 98 government forces, have been killed in the Marawi fighting, hich enters its third month this weekend.

Singapores defence ministry said its offer includes the use by Filipino troops of its urban warfare training facilities and a detachment of drones. It also offered a C-130 transport plane to deliver humanitarian supplies to evacuees from Marawi, the ministry said in a statement issued after a visit to Manila by defence minister Ng Eng Hen on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Ng on Tuesday met his counterpart Delfin Lorenzana, who expressed his appreciation and in-principle acceptance of the offer from Singapore, the statement said.

Philippine troops, long used to fighting in the jungle against communist and Muslim insurgents, have struggled against the militants in bloody street-to-street combat. Singapores offer is the first from a fellow member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) apart from joint maritime patrols involving the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Australia and the US provided spy planes, and China sent some guns and ammunition to help troops in Marawi.

Singapores defence ministry said Philippine forces were confident of liberating Marawi, but further concerted efforts are required to ensure that other terrorist cells do not entrench themselves in the southern Philippines as this would cause instability to the rest of ASEAN.

IS could use bases like Marawi to launch further attacks against other cities within the Philippines and ASEAN, and urge their cells to attack targets in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, added defence chief Ng in a Facebook post.
US President Donald Trump had a previously undisclosed meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Hamburg recently, the White House acknowledged on Tuesday.

This was the two leaders second meeting at the summit, but unlike the first, it was not disclosed till now by the White House, which confirmed it only after it was made public by Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

The revelation about the meeting came days after Trumps eldest son, Donald Jr, released emails showing he held a meeting during the campaign with Kremlin-connected figures, hoping to get dirt on his fathers election rival Hillary Clinton.

The Trump-Putin meeting took place at a private dinner for G-20 leaders and lasted an hour during which the American president was not accompanied by any member of his team or a translator, while his Russian counterpart brought along his translator.

The White House said in a statement the two leaders spoke briefly but did not offer a readout of their conversation, which it often does, though not always.

During the course of the dinner, all the leaders circulated throughout the room and spoke with one another freely, the White House said. President Trump spoke with many leaders during the course of the evening. As the dinner was concluding, President Trump went over to Mrs (Melania) Trump, where he spoke briefly with President Putin.

It is not merely perfectly normal, it is part of a presidents duties, to interact with world leaders. Throughout the G-20 and in all his other foreign engagements, President Trump has demonstrated American leadership by representing our interests and values on the world stage, it added.

President Trump followed up with his own version in series of tweets.

Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is sick. All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew! he tweeted.

The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!

Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

Though the meeting was normal, as claimed by the White House, critics asked why was it not disclosed before. Trump and Putin had spoken earlier the same day for 135 minutes, for a meeting that had been slotted for 30 minutes.

Trump spoke to reporters at length later about that conversation  that he had asked Putin twice if he had interfered with the 2016 US elections. But he did not mention the second meeting, conversation.

Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, Bremmer told The New York Times on the basis conversations he had with those at the dinner, that here is the President of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesnt care.

Though seemingly not apparent to Trump, a private one-on-one meeting with Putin was unlikely to go unnoticed back home, specially if it remained unacknowledged, fitting a pattern of undisclosed meetings between his family and aides with Russians.

Trump Jrs meeting with a group of Russians continues to generate headlines because it was not disclosed at first and then followed up with muddled explanations.

Trumps first National Security adviser Michael Flynn was fired for misleading the White House about his meetings with Russians and attorney general Jeff Sessions found himself in trouble for not disclosing his meetings with Russian officials.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan met Prime Minister Binali Yildirim at the presidential palace on Wednesday, and a cabinet reshuffle could be on the cards, sources with knowledge of the matter said.

Erdogans office announced the unscheduled meeting earlier on Wednesday, and three sources said a reshuffle could be in the works, declining to be identified because the information is not yet public.

There is a strong likelihood that there could be a decision on a cabinet reshuffle after the meeting, said one of the sources, who is close to the presidency.

In a separate statement, Erdogans office said Yildirim would hold a news conference at the presidential palace in Ankara after the meeting.

A cabinet reshuffle has been widely expected since May, when Erdogan resumed his leadership of the ruling AK Party following an April 16 constitutional referendum giving him sweeping new powers.
Pakistan remained in the dock in the Trump administrations first worldwide assessment of terrorism and related threats, released on Wednesday, for not doing enough to combat terrorist groups and individuals operating from its soil.

The state departments 2016 Country Reports on Terrorism named Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad(JeM), the two groups behind most terror attacks in India, and the Haqqani network, which has attacked US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan, as organisations that operate from Pakistan havens.

In language lifted almost word-for-word from its previous iterations, the latest report said, Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad in 2016, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan.

The report stated further, The Pakistani military and security forces undertook operations against groups that conducted attacks within Pakistan such as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (but they) did not take substantial action against the Afghan Taliban or HQN (Haqqani network), or substantially limit their ability to threaten US interests in Afghanistan

As before, Pakistan figured on the list of countries in the report that the US says provide safe haven to terrorist groups such as Haqqani Network, LeT and JeM.

Although LeT is banned in Pakistan, it said, LeTs wings Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FiF) were able to openly engage in fundraising, including in the capital, it said.

The report said Indian authorities continued to blame Pakistan for cross-border attacks in Jammu and Kashmir. In January, India experienced a terrorist attack against an Indian military facility in Pathankot, Punjab, which was blamed by authorities on JeM, the report said.

Worldwide, the Islamic State remained the most potent terrorist threat to global security, the report said, with eight recognised branches and numerous undeclared networks operating beyond the groups core concentration in Iraq and Syria.

And, the report added, Iran remained the foremost state sponsor of terrorism in 2016 as groups supported by Iran maintained their capability to threaten US interests and allies.

Read | US looks to cut aid to Pakistan, other client nations in coming budget

In terms of the number of terrorist attacks, an appendix prepared for the state department by an outside body found a dip. The total number of terrorist attacks in 2016 decreased by 9% and total deaths due to terrorist attacks decreased by 13%, compared to 2015. This was largely due to fewer attacks and deaths in Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Yemen.

The observations on Pakistan were almost the same as observations in the country reports for 2015, for instance, reflecting a continuity from the previous Obama administration that had in August 2016 punished Pakistan for its patchy counter-terrorism by withholding $300 million in defence aid.

Earlier that year, the US Senate had come together in a bipartisan effort to kill a proposal for a subsidised sale of eight new F-17 combat jets to Pakistan for exactly the same reason  not acting resolutely enough against terrorists based on its soil.

The Trump administration has already indicated its views on Pakistans counter-terrorism efforts are no different. National Security Adviser HR McMaster delivered that message directly to the Pakistani leadership during a visit to Islamabad in April, emphasising the need to confront terrorism in all its forms.

President Donald Trump has personally not weighed in on this yet, but his remarks on Twitter from 2012 may point to his thinking: Get it straight. Pakistan is not our friend When will Pakistan apologize to us for providing safe sanctuary to Osama Bin Laden for 6 years?! Some ally.
Germany raised the possibility on Wednesday of suspending European Union aid payments to Turkey after summoning Ankara's ambassador to Berlin to protest over the arrest of six human rights activists including a German citizen.

The moves mark a further escalation of tensions between NATO allies Germany and Turkey, who are at loggerheads over a wide range of issues.

This month, Turkey arrested rights activists including Amnesty International's Turkey head Idil Eser and German citizen Peter Steudtner on terrorism charges, which Berlin has labelled "absurd".

"Unfortunately we have constant cause to talk to Turkey about civil and press freedoms," government spokesman Steffen Seibert told a news conference. "We think it is important to review aid in light of the latest developments."

Seibert was referring to a package of assistance totalling three billion euros that the EU has promised to Turkey to help stem flows of migrants, mostly from conflict zones in the Middle East, into Europe.

The deal has helped to sharply reduce the number of arrivals and has been especially welcomed by Germany, the preferred destination for the migrants, and Chancellor Angela Merkel.

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel cut short his holiday to deal with the latest rise in tensions with Turkey, whose ability to rekindle Europe's refugee crisis could harm Merkel's prospects in a national election due in September.

The six rights activists are among tens of thousands of Turks swept up in a crackdown that followed last year's failed coup against Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. Many have accused Erdogan of using the dragnet as an excuse to purge opponents.

"Claims of terrorist links are absurd," the German foreign ministry said in a statement demanding consular access to its citizen and the release of all the activists. "It is appalling to accuse Amnesty and other rights organisations of terrorism."

Bilateral relations have already been tested by, among other issues, Turkey's arrest of Deniz Yucel, a Turkish-German dual national who is a correspondent for the German newspaper Die Welt, on similar terrorism and propaganda charges.

Ankara is seeking the extradition of army officers whom it accuses of involvement in the coup attempt. Berlin has declined to return the men, who have sought asylum in Germany

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The US Supreme Court rejected on Wednesday a bid by President Donald Trump to include grandparents and other relatives in his travel ban on people from six Muslim-majority countries.

But in a partial win for Trump, the court gave the government more leeway to enforce a separate ban on refugees that was included in a March 6 executive order the president said was necessary for national security.

A federal judge had ruled against the government on the scope of both bans last Thursday, prompting the administration to seek Supreme Court intervention.

The high courts decision means that, for now, grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, and siblings-in-law are not covered by the 90-day travel ban on people from the six countries who want to enter the United States.

The courts action on refugees could block entry of up to 24,000 refugees who have a connection to a US resettlement agency, according to court papers.

The brief order said the courts decision is temporary while the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals considers a separate appeal on the same issue. Three of the conservatives on the court of nine justices noted that they would have granted Trumps request in full.

In a statement, Hawaii attorney general Douglas Chin, who challenged the bans in court, said his office is preparing arguments for the 9th Circuit on the refugee issue, and said the Supreme Court ruling validated Hawaiis position.

This confirms we were right to say that the Trump administration over-reached in trying to unilaterally keep families apart from each other, Chin said.

The Supreme Court also announced on Wednesday that it has scheduled oral arguments on broad questions on the lawfulness of the ban for October 10.

The Trump administration last Friday asked the high court to overturn a decision on Thursday by a US district judge in Hawaii, which limited the scope of the administrations temporary ban on travellers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and the 120-day ban on refugees.

Naureen Shah, senior director of campaigns at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement that the courts decision on refugees jeopardises the safety of thousands of people across the world including vulnerable families fleeing war and violence.

The latest round in the fight over Trumps executive order began after the Supreme Court intervened last month to partially revive the two bans. Both had been blocked by lower courts.

The Supreme Court said then that the bans could take effect, but that people with a bona fide relationship to a US person or entity could not be barred.

The administration had narrowly interpreted that language, saying the ban would apply to grandparents and other family members, prompting the state of Hawaii to ask Hawaii-based US District Judge Derrick Watson to expand the definition of who could be admitted. He ruled for the state late on Thursday.

In his decision, Watson harshly criticised the governments definition of close family relations as the antithesis of common sense.

Watson also ruled that the assurance by a resettlement agency to provide basic services to a newly arrived refugee constitutes an adequate connection to the United States because it is a sufficiently formal and documented agreement that triggers responsibilities and compensation.
China is exploiting its economic leverage to advance its regional political objectives, a top US military commander has said while expressing concern over the PLAs growing assertiveness in the strategic Asia-Pacific region.

The modernisation of Chinas Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) emphasises the development of capabilities with the potential to degrade core US military-technological advantages, Gen Paul Selva of the US Air Force said on Tuesday.

The Chinese have shown their willingness to exploit their economic leverage as a way to advance their regional political objectives, he said in a written response to questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee considering his nomination for reconfirmation as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As Chinas military modernisation continues, the US and its allies and partners will continue to be challenged to balance Chinas influence, Selva, Americas second-highest ranking military officer, said.

Noting that a long-term, sustained presence is critical to demonstrating that America is committed to the Asia-Pacific region, Selva said the US will continue to develop a security network through multilateral partnerships.

We will continue to develop capabilities to counter Chinas improving military capabilities, he said.

According to Selva, Chinas leaders remain focused on developing the capabilities to increase its regional influence and to counter any third party intervention  including by the US  during a crisis or conflict.

China is also seeking resources and economic opportunities outside of the region to support continued domestic economic growth and prosperity. Chinas growing military is being designed and postured to be able to protect its interests both in the Asia-Pacific region and abroad, he said.

Selvas comments came as a key Senate committee called for continued US engagement in the Asia-Pacific to maintain its security and stability in face of increased Chinese aggressiveness and military build-up in the area.

Continued engagement by the US in the Asia-Pacific region is critical to maintaining security and stability in the region, the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee said on Tuesday.

The committee noted in its report that certain activities by China have recently called into question its commitment to the rule of law, and furthermore are continuing to destabilise the security of the region.

Such actions directly threaten the national security interests of the US, it said, noting that a UN arbitral tribunal declared in July 2016 that China has no legal basis to claim rights to the resources within its nine-dash line, invalidating the assertions of the Chinese government.

The tribunal also went on to outline a number of actions that China had recently taken that are unlawful and created a serious risk of collision. These actions are alarming to the committee, it said, adding that these concerns are compounded by the fact that the US has taken only limited actions or operations in the last several months to ensure freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea.

As the US has the unique capabilities to carry out such activities, the committee is concerned that the absence of such sends a signal to the Chinese government that their actions will go uncontested, the report said.

China claims nearly all of the strategically vital waterway, despite counter-claims from the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam. The PLA has built several artificial islands in the area and militarised some of them.
The fate of the world hinged on one mans answer.

All of Europe tensed during the fateful summer of 1914 as the Austro- Hungarian Empire determined to eradicate the small Balkan kingdom of Serbia. There was little to covet in Serbia, a land Austrian Emperor Franz Josef characterized as consisting only of plum trees, goat droppings and murderous people. But the Serbs, with their prickly nationalism honed to a razors edge by four centuries of Ottoman oppression, had gone too far. Radical elements had set in motion the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife.

German Kaiser Wilhelm II had given the Austrians a blank check of Germanys support for their plans to conquer Serbia. (See Hard Choices, July 2012 ACG.) The Russians, on the other hand, rallied to the aid of the little Slavic country, and on July 29 initiated a partial military mobilization aimed only at Austria. This lit the match of German paranoia of a two-front attack by the Russians and their French allies.

The paranoia was the result of Germanys failure to maintain former chancellor Otto von Bismarcks alliance with Russia. The Germans had also unnecessarily antagonized the British by building a competing fleet. The French snapped up the Russian alliance, which Britain joined unofficially in the Triple Entente. At the same time, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy allied as the Central Powers.

All the continental major powers possessed large standing armies with deep reserves to be mobilized as war became imminent. Mobilization plans, based on intricate railroad planning, were at the heart of a countrys ability to marshal its strength. It was imperative that no prospective enemy be allowed to mobilize first and hence seize the ability to strike first.

Germany in 1914 had the densest and most efficient railroad network in the world. Thousands of German officers were assigned to make sure that mobilization functioned like clockwork. The German army would have 56 corps, and each one required 6,010 railcars organized into 280 trains running with astounding precision. This incredible machine was in the hands of the very able chief of the General Staff s Railway Department, General Herman von Staab.

Germanys mobilization was tied to its war plan created by the brilliant former chief of the General Staff, the late Alfred von Schlieffen. The plan entailed throwing seven of the eight initially mobilized armies at France, and then after their victory turning everything against Russia. The essence of the Schlieffen Plan was to swing the weight of Germanys armies through Belgium to sweep around the left flank of the French armies and crush them against their own countrys borders.

The violation of Belgiums neutrality was seen as a necessity, though Germany was a guarantor of that countrys independence. The problem, which German planners failed to take seriously, was that the British were also guarantors of Belgium, and the German invasion would pose a direct threat to British security. The Germans believed that the British could not intervene in time to affect the fate of France.

The plan became an article of almost mystical belief simply referred to as Der Tag (The Day). The man the Kaiser chose to execute the plan if war came was General Helmuth von Moltke, the nephew and namesake of the legendary field marshal whose mid-19th century victories had created the German Empire. Wilhelm appointed the younger Moltke chief of the General Staff despite the mans repeated and prescient protestations that he was simply not up to the task. The decision would come to haunt Wilhelm.

As Der Tag neared, the Kaiser was having serious second thoughts, concerned about the consequences of Britain entering the war. On August 1, 1914, the German ambassador to London wired that British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey had stated that Britain would guarantee Frances neutrality. Grey had said no such thing, but his vague words had been misinterpreted.

The Kaiser, however, relieved at the thought of only a one-front war, recalled Moltke, who was carrying the signed mobilization order. Overjoyed, he exclaimed to Moltke: Now we can go to war against Russia only. We simply march the whole of our army to the east! Although presented in his typically bombastic, overbearing manner, Wilhelm was essentially asking Moltke one of historys most fateful questions: Was it possible to confine the fighting to a one-front war against Russia?

Moltke was shaken to the core. Everything he had devoted his life to for years would be erased. Instead of opportunity, he saw only chaos, replying: Your Majesty, it cannot be done. The deployment of millions cannot be improvised. If Your Majesty insists on leading the whole army to the east it will not be an army ready for battle but a disorganized mob of armed men with no arrangements for supply. Those arrangements took a whole year of intricate labor to complete and once settled, it cannot be altered.

Stunned, Kaiser Wilhelm could only say after a strained silence, Your uncle would have given me a different answer.

Yet what Moltke did not tell the Kaiser was that a plan for an attack to the east had also been drawn up with all the care lavished on the Schlieffen Plan. Nor did he explain that the German mobilization railroad plans contained yearly exercises that included rerouting and rescheduling trains to accommodate interruptions in the rail network as well as changing strategic situations. Moltke did not ask Staab if it were even possible to change the mobilization plans, so sure was he in his rigid and unimaginative mind that it could not be done. Thus the fleeting, unforgiving moment in which a different answer to the Kaisers question might have confined the war to only Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia had passed.

Britain delivered an ultimatum that an invasion of Belgium meant war. The Germans marched anyway, determined to get at the French. They never realized that France neither wanted a war nor was obligated to go to war to support Russia  the alliance only required that the countries consult if an enemy mobilized against either party of the treaty. The French had even withdrawn all their troops 10 kilometers from the German border to indicate that they intended no offensive action.

Only after the war did Staab learn of the Kaisers 1914 question and Moltkes response. He was outraged at the insult to his Railway Department and wrote a book in 1925 showing how in just 10 days he could have moved a million German troops in four armies to the east.

Peter Tsouras is the author of 26 books on military history. He served in the Army and Army Reserve and worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency until retiring in 2010 to devote himself to writing, his roses and his grandchildren.

Originally published in the July 2013 issue of Armchair General.
Kate Middleton was just heard talking about babies as she joined Prince William at The Heart which is an incubator or digital and tech start-ups in Poland. The royal couple was on their first day of the royal tour in Poland and Germany together with their kids Prince George and Princess Charlotte.

The Duchess of Cambridge made headlines again and let royal fans wonder if she and Prince William are still thinking of having another baby. As she was gifted with a couple of cuddly toys for newborn babies, Kate Middleton looked at her husband and laughed, "We will just have to have more babies."

Even if this was only a joke for Kate Middleton, people and her fans can't help but wonder if babies are on her mind again same with Prince William. According to E!News, the said gifts came from the company Whisbear which creates and manufacture toys for newborns by imitating the sound of the womb and responding to their cries in order to comfort them.

Apart from the toys, Kate Middleton also received a T-shirt which read "i'mperfect" on its front. It was reported that this was part of the company's campaign to inspire mothers not to feel the pressure in order to look flawless.

But previous reports just claimed that Kate Middleton is having some hard time in parenting her two children. Also, during one of her royal engagements, she mentioned the difficulty that a mother has to go through in order to survive motherhood. With that, the royal fans were quick to conclude that the Duchess of Cambridge is having a hard time dealing with parenting.

Moreover, it was claimed that he was seeking an online forum for mothers who are also having the same dilemma. It was said that she sought help from that particular website which she can use in order to deal with her parenting duties properly.

Meanwhile, Kate Middleton and Prince William just started their summer tour of Germany and Poland together with their two children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte. The said royal family just touched down Warsaw which marked the start of their royal tour. This tour also marks the royal couple's first joint visit to the country and their royal tour for their two children.

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The United States through the Trump administration just announced new sets of sanctions against Iran over the latter's ballistic missile programme. The said sanctions have something to do with economic penalties which targeted at least 16 individuals and entities deemed to have supported the transnational criminal activity or the illicit Iranian actors.

The US Treasury Department believed that these individuals played a great role in the above-mentioned crimes. This action and decision came one day after the Trump administration warned Iran was not adhering to the conditions set before its nuclear weapons agreement. It can be recalled that President Donald Trump has been a long-time critic of the said nuclear weapons deal last 2015.

According to CNN, the news sanction set by the US are not associated to the conditions in the said nuclear deal which originally Iran has been complying with and the Washington sees no problem regarding that. Instead, the new sanctions have something to do with means to target the proliferators of weapons of mass destruction as well as the supporters of such activity.

With this, the report also added that the new sanctions will target the individuals and groups which the US claimed have supported the military of Iran or the Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the IRGC. It was then reported that what prompted the US to announce the new sanction was because of reported three networks which have been supporting Iran's military procurement.

It was reported that these three networks have been supporting Iran's development of unmanned aerial vehicles and military equipment. Moreover, these groups likewise supported the production and maintenance of the fast attack boats.

Apart from the above-mentioned sanctions, this will also target businessmen who performed theft of US and western software programmes which reportedly were sold to the government of Iran. With this, the US shall freeze any assets these targets might have in the US. Further, the US government will also stop it citizens from doing any business with these targets.

The US further claimed that the penalties and sanction will continue to target Iran's suspicious activities as well as the latter's ongoing support of terrorism, human rights abuses and their ballistic missile programme. The Trump administration will also continue to pressure Iran to stop its missile programme.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Palestinian lawyers and civil society groups Wednesday urged the International Criminal Court to speed up inquiries and open a full investigation into alleged war crimes in Gaza, the occupied east Jerusalem and the West Bank.

"Since two years Palestine is under preliminary examination," said lawyer Gilles Devers, adding "in Gaza, we think two years is too long."

The Palestinian Authority has formally asked the ICC to investigate Israel, which is not a party to the Rome Statute that governs the court, for alleged war crimes.

It has presented the court with a dossier alleging abuses during the 2014 Israeli military offensive on Gaza , and for the Israeli occupation and settlement of Palestinian territories.

In January 2015, the tribunal opened a preliminary examination into alleged abuses by all sides in the conflict. And an ICC delegation visited Israel and the West Bank in late 2016.

But Palestinian activists told reporters Wednesday the investigation has stalled, calling for both the ICC and the Palestinian Authority to speed up efforts.

Lawyers representing 448 named victims, and more than 50 Palestinian trade unions and organisations, were handing over Wednesday a thick dossier to the ICC prosecutor's office which they said showed "clearly that crimes within the jurisdiction of the court have been committed."

The Israeli offensive on Gaza, in which according to UN figures 2,251 Palestinians, including 551 children, were killed, was clearly "a war crime" and the "ICC was competent" to handle it, said Devers, speaking in English.

Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda had "an obligation" to move beyond a preliminary examination to a full investigation, he told reporters before meeting with representatives from her office.

The dossier has been drafted by more than 30 lawyers in the Palestinian territories, and it is the first time that Palestinian civil groups, including doctors, farmers, fishermen and teachers, have appealed directly to the ICC.

The group said it has taken the action because of "the lack of political will on behalf of the Palestinian Authority" which it said had not made an official complaint as a state member of the ICC.

Devers said the group was also hoping to persuade the ICC to open a full investigation "as a matter of urgency" into the situation in east Jerusalem.

Protests and scuffles between demonstrators and Israeli police have erupted in recent days outside the Haram al-Sharif compound, which includes the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque.

The site is venerated by Muslims as the third holiest site in Islam.

But Israel closed the compound on Friday and Saturday, after an attack by an Arab Israeli on Friday left two Israeli police dead, as has triggered Palestinian fury by installing metal detectors at its entrances.

*This story was edited by Ahram Online.

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T he number of sales of homes worth more than 1 million grew by 195 per cent between 2011 and 2016, nearly four times faster than the rise in transactions in the overall property market, says a new report.

Historically - and predictably - the majority of sales in the 1 million-plus property market take place in London.

However, partly because of the spread of rising house prices as Londoners seek more space and better value in the suburbs, growth in the prime property market was greater in commuter hotspots than the capital between 2015-2016.

During this time period London was outpaced by six locations in terms of million-pound property purchases.

If the trend continues, more than half of homes bought for more than 1 million will be outside London this year for the first time on record, predicts mortgage broker Private Finance, which compiled the analysis using Land Registry data.

Where the growth of million-pound homes is rising fastest

Hertfordshire, which stretches from Rickmansworth to Royston and offers commuters direct links to Kings Cross and Liverpool Street, saw the biggest growth of 1 million-plus property purchases over the course of the year.

This was closely followed by Surrey, south-east of London home to the so-called wealth corridor between the A3 and M25 and the Surrey Hills famously an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Essex, north-east of London, is home to the third fastest growing million-pound property market. It stretches much further than TV-show TOWIE would have you believe - pass Brentwood and youll find Clacton-on-Sea and Saffron Walden on the fringes of the county.

Hampshire, Kent and Greater Manchester also saw more growth in this property market than London during this time period.

Shaun Church, director at Private Finance, reports that this is because large family homes in the capital are now out of reach for even highly-paid professionals.

He says: With buyers looking further afield as a result, this has contributed to significant growth in the number of million pound-plus transactions in areas like Kent, Essex and the Home Counties, which are all within easy commuting distance of London.
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WASHINGTON - Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Tuesday that he is bullish that the United States can come to a deal on a "new North American energy strategy" with Mexico and Canada that would increase energy production and exports while improving security on the countries' power grids, pipelines and "energy systems" at large.

Perry, speaking at a news conference with the director of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, said he discussed the prospect of North American cooperation on energy during a visit with Mexican officials in Mexico City last week. As an example of the potential, he pointed to the recent discovery of up to 2 billion barrels of crude off Mexico's Gulf Coast by Houston company Talos Energy, the first major find since Mexico opened its energy sector to foreign companies three years ago.

"Mexico is going to be a massive influence in the energy markets going forward," Perry said. "I'm excited they're our partner, and we look forward for many decades of economic prosperity for this region."

The prospect of turning North America into an energy powerhouse to rival the Middle East has been discussed by U.S. politicians for years. Since the advent of the shale boom, the U.S. has emerged as the world's largest oil producer. Canada is the world's fourth-largest oil producer, and Mexico, which has undertaken historic reforms to its energy sector under President Enrique Pena Nieto, is 11th, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Now, with the Trump administration preparing to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, some in the energy sector believe it could lead to improvements in how the three countries move energy resources between themselves and to the rest of the world.

"The U.S. is now the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world," said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, the industry's leading trade group. "This, coupled with enhanced energy integration with Canada and Mexico, will increase long-term U.S. energy and national security."

The North American strategy is part of a larger vision within the Trump administration of expanding U.S. energy production while increasing exports abroad. The former Texas governor discussed the administration's hopes to expand the liquefied natural gas industry and develop clean coal technology that could be sold abroad.

Asked how the Trump administration planned to expand the domestic coal industry, considering the glut of cleaner, cheaper natural gas and the expense of developing clean coal technologies, Perry chided society for thinking the current situation would be the same a decade from now.

"All too often we want to take a snapshot in times, like we did 15 years ago with peak oil, and say this is where we are," Perry said. "Back in the '70s, acid rain was a major issue on the East Coast of this country, and now we never even hear about it."

The press event with Birol came as the U.S. power industry and its teams of lobbyists await a study ordered by Perry three months ago into whether federal policies supporting wind turbines and solar panels were threatening the reliability of the nation's power grid.

On Friday, Bloomberg News reported that a draft of the report concluded wind and solar energy were not the primary cause behind a series of closures of so-called "baseload" generators like coal and nuclear plants, which typically run day and night to supply the bulk of the nation's power needs.

"Costly environmental regulations and subsidized renewable generation have exacerbated base-load power plant retirements," the draft says, according to Bloomberg. "However, those factors played minor roles compared to the long-standing drop in electricity demand relative to previous expectation and years of low electric prices driven by high natural gas availability."

The Energy Department did not respond to calls or email for comment. But a department spokesman told Bloomberg, "Those statements as written are not in the current draft," which is "constantly evolving."

Now, industry insiders worry how Perry might adjust the report, given the Trump administration's promise to increase U.S. energy production and put coal miners back to work.

But Perry declined to offer any hints, stating that he had not yet seen the study.

"There's lots of people breathlessly waiting to read that," he said, "and lots of folks throwing Jell-O at the wall."
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AUSTIN - When did it become OK for the state's top politicians to ignore Texas executives on issues critical to our economic future?

Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick are reviving their bill that would deny transgender Texans the liberty to live public lives. These politicians, pandering to a few Republican primary voters, have rejected calls from Texas' top business leaders to stop this quixotic effort to bring opprobrium and boycotts to our state.

Texans now need the entire business community to demand that their state representatives and senators kill this hurtful bill, fulfilling the wishes of the majority of Texans, according to numerous polls.

The Texas Association of Business is rallying executives in Austin this week to tell lawmakers face-to-face that Carrollton Rep. Ron Simmons' bill to restrict what public facilities transgender people can use is both morally unacceptable and fiscally dangerous. Hundreds of groups and businesses have promised to boycott Texas if the bill becomes law, and recruiters warn that people don't want to live in places with bigoted laws.

"Because high-tech jobs can be done anywhere, companies like IBM, both large and small, have to figure out where to locate those jobs. And those jobs have to be located places where people want to live and work," said Phil Gilbert, global head of design for IBM, based in Austin. "A bathroom bill, or any legislation that targets the LGBT community, hurts our ability to recruit and retain talent in Texas."

IBM has 10,000 employees in Texas, and Gilbert said the company will reconsider the company's investments here if Abbott signs the bill into law.

Sally Larrabee, human resources and safety director at Baytown's Process Control Outlet, a small engineering and technology company, said recruiting top talent is hard enough without ruining the state's reputation.

"As a life-long Republican, and a Texas business leader, I ask the Texas Legislature to make common sense choices for our state and oppose discriminatory legislation that takes us backwards," she said.

Larrabee urged other Houston business leaders to get involved before it is too late.

"You may not see the impact now, because it hasn't happened, but look at North Carolina. We don't want that to happen here," she added. "We have to work together as a group, as business owners, to make sure our voice is heard."

Ensuring your lawmaker knows how you feel is especially important after Abbott promised to keep a list of the people who help pass the bathroom bill and those who don't.

"We all need to establish lists that we publish on a daily basis and call people out - 'Who is for this, who is against this, who has not taken a position?' No one gets to hide," the governor said, implying there will be a price for defying him.

IBM will certainly top the governor's enemies list after running full-page ads opposing the bathroom bill in the state's major newspapers and posting opposition ads on Facebook.

Abbott can also add the CEOs of American Airlines, Apple, Atmos Energy, AT&T, Beck Group, BNSF, Crow Holdings, DFW International Airport, Facebook, Fleur, Google, Kimberly Clark, Southwest Airlines, Tenet Healthcare and Texas Instruments to his list, along with 70 major employers who oppose him.

These business leaders recognize that this bill serves no purpose but to humiliate transgender people by denying them public accommodations. They know that transgender people have used the public restrooms of their choice for decades with not one arrest for predatory behavior. They know millions of people live without any problems in the 19 states that have enshrined transgender rights.

Texas businesses are also beginning to feel the pain from simply debating such a bill.

More than $66 million in conventions have already been canceled in Houston, Austin, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Dallas and Arlington out of concern that a bill might pass, according to Texas Welcomes All, a coalition of Texas convention and visitors bureaus. Organizers of another $205.2 million in conventions have warned that they will cancel if a bathroom law passes, said Phillip Jones, CEO of VisitDallas.

Sponsors of another $1.5 billion worth of conventions and events say they are on the fence.

"The economic costs are already being felt, and they cut to the heart of our tourism industry, our small businesses and everyday Texans working to make ends meet," Jones said.

Before the regular session in January, Patrick promised to hold urgent legislation hostage to force his bathroom bill through. Many business leaders didn't speak up to protect bills they needed passed, which while understandable, was a bit cowardly.

Patrick forced a special session by hijacking the renewal of the Texas Medical Board. Business leaders urged Abbott not to put the transgender discrimination act on the agenda, but he ignored them. Defying Republican orthodoxy, he ignored the state's most respected job creators.

There is no excuse for business leaders to keep quiet now, silence only enables Abbott and Patrick to pass this reprehensible legislation. If the Texas economy is important to you, denounce this bill now.
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Police revealed Wednesday that two groups got into an argument and fired shots, which apparently led to the shooting of an infant in Meyerland in May.

A short time before the shooting around 5 p.m., two group of males in their early 20s were arguing at a gas station in the 5300 block of North Braeswood. One group was in a gray Nissan Maxima, and the other group was inside a black Nissan Versa.

During the argument, one of the males in the Versa got out and pointed a pistol. The passengers inside the Maxima sped away from the scene, but the Versa continued to follow and fired shots at the car.

READ MORE: Police release sketch of suspect wanted in shooting of baby near Meyerland

The Maxima eventually was able to drive away from the Versa, but a short time later an infant and his mother were traveling southbound on Mullins Drive. They passed the Versa traveling northbound. As they passed, shots were fired from inside the Versa, striking the 11-month-old in both legs. The child was treated at a local hospital and released.

His mother and 4-year-old sister were also in the car, but not injured.

The shooting has caused anxiety in the community after a 10-month-old was also shot and killed in June nearby.

Police released a sketch on Friday of the suspect involved in the May shooting of the 11-month-old. The suspect apparently displayed a pistol at the gas station prior to the incident. He is described as being in his 20s, with an average build and 6 feet and 1 inch tall.

A surveillance photo of the suspect's vehicle was also released on Friday. The vehicle is a 2006-2013 black Nissan Versa hatchback with stock style wheels and no window tinting.

The Nissan Maxima is gray-colored with left front-end damage.

Anyone with information is asked to call HPD Homicide at 713-308- 3600 or Houston Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS.
Editor's note: Rice computer-science professor Dan Wallach's post has been updated to include a factual correction and a response from Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart. We've asked Wallach to respond in turn, and hope to post more updates from both in a rolling debate.

Last September, in the run-up to the election, we learned that Russians had attempted to attack 33 states' voter registration databases, later revised upward to 39 states. I was asked to testify about this in Congress, and my main concern was that the Russians might attempt to simply delete voters altogether, creating electoral chaos.

All the pieces were in place, but the election came and went without wide-scale problems. What happened? We know that the Obama and Putin had a "blunt" meeting at the G20 that same September, so it's possible that Obama was able to rattle Putin enough to make him pull back. Maybe Putin decided that leaking stolen emails was good enough.

We may never know the full story, but what is clear is that we need to adequately defend ourselves against future nation-state attacks on our elections, whether from Russia or elsewhere. As James Comey warned the Senate Intelligence Committee recently, "They will be back."

Computer security experts who deal with nation-state activities use the term "advanced persistent threats" (APT) as a shorthand to indicate that our adversaries have significant capabilities, including both engineering resources and spycraft, to quietly break into our computers, spread out across our networks, and avoid detection. It's common for APT attacks to last for months to years prior to detection.

Given these threats, we need to conduct a serious analysis of where our elections stand. Harris County's Hart InterCivic eSlate voting machines, for example, haven't had any major security updates following studies conducted a decade ago by the states of California and Ohio. (I was part of the California effort.) In short, an attacker need only tamper with a single voting machine. After that, the infection can spread "virally" to every machine in the county.

Compounding the problem, all of our vote-tabulating systems are running Windows 2000, for which Microsoft dropped all software support, including security patches, seven years ago 2007, which is two versions behind the latest release.

Michael Ciaglo/Houston Chronicle

In the lead-up to the 2018 election, it may be financially infeasible for a complete replacement of our voting machines. We only just recently purchased our voting machines after a 2010 warehouse fire destroyed our original fleet of eSlate machines, so the funds aren't likely to be available so soon for replacements.

What's clearly necessary, since we know the Russians targeted voter registration systems, is a major upgrade to the way our voter registration systems are managed. A redesigned system would still, by necessity, require Internet connections so voters can verify their correct polling places, see sample ballots, and so forth. Most notably, during our early voting period, we need an online database to track which voters have cast ballots.

A modern design, intended to operate even if the entire Internet failed while the election was ongoing, would involve making local copies of the database at every voting center. Unsurprisingly, the needs of Harris County are essentially the same as the needs for every other county in our state, suggesting that a state-level procurement could be an efficient way to improve the voter registration security for every county's voters.

Another short-term recommendation will be for Harris County to upgrade its systems to the latest versions of Microsoft's operating systems, even though this will require a waiver from Texas's election certification requirements. Even though our vote tabulation systems are hopefully never connected to the Internet, they are nonetheless unacceptably weak in the present threat environment.

Likewise, Harris County needs to hire a professional security "penetration testing" firm to identify other soft points in its infrastructure and prioritize repairs; such consultants need to be brought in on a regular basis for check-up exams. We also need forensic security auditors to do a deep dive into our county's existing systems to make sure they're as clean as we hope them to be. This isn't just a matter of running some anti-virus scanner, since APT adversaries use tricks that automated scanners won't detect.

When we're talking about APT adversaries, we have to be clear about their motives and capabilities as well as our own defensive posture. As best as we can tell, the Russian goal was to influence who won the election, and they were prepared to take a variety of steps, ranging from subtle email "phishing" campaigns to outrageously visible attacks against our voter registration systems.

When faced with an adversary like this, we have to assume that they're capable of reverse-engineering our systems to build custom exploits. Given our limited resources, we need to be confident that we'll at the very least be able to detect adversarial actions, and we need to have concrete fallback plans in place, such as commissioning millions of paper ballots to be printed at the last minute.

BUT THOSE are only stop-gap measures, able to reduce only the most glaring holes in our defense. We ought to re-engineer things properly, ensuring that no nation-state adversary will ever be able to tamper with our elections.

The most seemingly obvious solution would be hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with this approach. For starters, in close elections, hand-marked ballots' ambiguities in voters' intent will lead to painful adjudications. We saw this problem in spades during the tight 2008 Minnesota Senate election between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. (Minnesota Public Radio hosts a great interactive website with many of the challenged ballots.)

Furthermore, manual tabulation would be far too slow, particularly when we have vast numbers of judicial offices on our ballots. Electronic scanning and tallying can be significantly faster, and is considered the best practice available with today's voting technologies. Doing it securely requires conducting compliance audits to make sure the electronic tallies correspond to the paper ballots, and the procedural details matter.

One of our big lessons from the recounts in Wisconsin and Michigan this year was that poor recount procedures can be used to mask underlying problems. In Michigan, if the seals on a paper ballot box are broken, then the contents of the box will never be recounted. This is great news if you want to tamper with an election, but it's bad news if you want to detect election tampering.

Back in 2011, Dana DeBeauvoir, the county clerk of Travis County, which uses the same eSlate systems as Harris County, decided that their voting systems were reaching the end of their service lifetime, yet nothing then on the election systems market was a suitable replacement for Travis County's needs.

Consequently, DeBeauvoir asked me and a number of other election experts to help design something completely new, from scratch, with the intent of being secure against a variety of adversarial models, transparent to election observers even in the face of possible computer tampering, auditable for recounts and testing purposes, and reliable in the face of all the things that can go wrong. And it also has to also be easy to use and cheap to maintain.

Our resulting STAR-Vote design features both securely encrypted electronic ballots and human-readable printed paper ballots. A touch-screen interface helps voters with their choices and eliminates issues of ambiguous intent. Electronic ballots can be tallied rapidly, while paper ballots can be sampled to make sure that the electronic ballots are accurate. Pragmatically, STAR-Vote is meant to run on off-the-shelf tablet computers, costing a fraction of the price of dedicated voting machines.

We then wrote a readable academic paper and a detailed request for proposals. Travis County's government allocated $4 million to start a procurement process and is currently evaluating 12 submissions. Travis County estimates it will take an additional $6 million to complete the process, yielding all the necessary software, and then another $2 million to $3 million to purchase the equipment.

It seems unlikely that we'll see an infusion of federal dollars to pay for new gear like we saw in 2002's Help America Vote Act. Consequently, we need the State of Texas to step up to the plate. By accelerating the funding for STAR-Vote, Texas could hasten a new option for every county in the state, many of which are locked into older insecure voting systems, while operating on limited budgets.

Briefly, I'll mention two seemingly attractive alternatives so I can explain how complicated voting security can be to get right. One alternative is to conduct the election entirely through the postal mail, which is how everybody in Oregon and Washington State, and a substantial fraction of California, cast their votes. The essential problem with postal voting is that it completely surrenders the privacy of the voting booth, enabling coercion (from a spouse, employer, union, or other community group), vote selling, and other sorts of local election fraud.

Some have even suggested we vote over the Internet, which combines all the disadvantages of postal voting with all the risks from voters' poorly secured personal computers. If we care at all about the integrity of our elections, then it's valuable to stick with voters going to polling places, where we can have well-designed systems, ensuring that, no matter what the Russians have in mind, they won't be able to tamper with our votes.

Dan S. Wallach is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and a Rice Scholar in the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. He has also served on the Air Force Science Advisory Board.

Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart responds:

First and foremost, the title of the article "Harris County's vote isn't safe from the Russians" is unproven, misleading, factually inaccurate, and highly inflammatory. (Editor's note: The headline has been changed to reflect the current nature of this article, including Stanart's response. Wallach stands by the original headline.)

Apparently, the author is purposely misleading or is unfamiliar with the security of Harris County's voting system as there are many inaccuracies in the article. The comment in the first paragraph, "the Russians might attempt to simply delete voters altogether," does not take into account that voter registration does daily backups, that there are logs of every change made, and that the Secretary of State obtains copies nightly of any changes or updates made to the voter roll.

In addition, my office receives daily all updates to the voter roll. We back up these daily and store them on and offsite. There are many other processes in place to identify suspicious activity and we have the ability to restore a previous version, if it was ever needed. The copy of the voter roll on the voter registrar's website, or HarrisVotes.com, is a separate system that is used by the voter for finding their polling location is simply one of many copies and not the official version used to conduct an election. How can any rational person really believe that the Voter Registrar's copies and backups, the County Clerk's copies and backups, and Secretary of State's copies and backups could be hacked at the same time without anyone noticing?

The statement by the author that "an attacker need only tamper with a single voting machine. After that, the infection can spread "virally" to every machine in the county" is ridiculous.

Apparently, there is an attempt to deceive or a total lack of knowledge of the software on the Hart eSlate voting machines. The software is very specific in its functionality; and does not contain the functionality to download code from another unit so as to spread a virus to other machines when connected. In addition, even if the functionality was there, the connections are limited to a single string of 1-12 voting machines making it impossible to spread to "every machine in the county".

We run hash code tests to verify the integrity of the voting software code and the only thing that changes from election to election is the ballot specific items such as candidates and propositions. We also run a publicly held logic and accuracy test that is overseen by appointees from both major political parties for every election to ensure that the voting machines are accurately recording the vote.

The accusation that the voter tabulation system is running windows 2000 is simply false. All tabulation systems are running on Windows 7. In addition, these machines are never connected to any network, that includes the county network or to the internet. There is no access or opportunity for hacking, mischief or manipulation.

The author states that we need a major upgrade to our systems so that voters can verify their polling locations. Apparently, he has never visited Harrisvotes.com during an election cycle because I put this in place approximately five years ago. HarrisVotes.com runs on a separate copy of the voter roll so that the voter can see their polling locations, print their personal sample ballot, and obtain a Google map to their voting location.

The author once again is wrong when he states that we need an online database to track voters who cast votes during early voting. Harris County has been doing this for over a decade. Per Texas Election code, we provide the list of early voters the next day.

I understand the author has considerable time invested in the Star-Vote system that he worked on with the Travis County Clerk. Our understanding is the system is not complete and has not been certified by Federal Election Assistance Commission or the Texas Secretary of State making it illegal for us, or any county in Texas to use it. Harris County has a significant investment in our current Hart eSlate voting system. We should be able to easily get an additional five years of use from our existing technology after which, we will be evaluating the most current and secure election technology at that time to be the replacement product. As the author mentions, he was part of the team that evaluated the Hart eSlate voting system in California and attempted to manipulate it for eight weeks and was unable to change any votes, add any votes, or corrupt any votes.

The concept of taking off-the-shelf computers without them going through a full testing cycle is dangerous. Off-the-shelf equipment has firmware that's embedded within the machine that is more susceptible to hacking than the technology in the secure Hart machines used in Harris County.

In the earlier years of my career, I was the manager of BIOS Development and Test for consumer PCs at Compaq computer. I have extensive knowledge and experience in the internals of a personal computer. Without fully testing every piece of code that could actually run on a PC including the BIOS and all the firmware, and operating system of a computer, it is not possible to ensure the integrity of the whole system.

This is why the Federal Elections Assistance Commission has voting machines standards and a full suite of tests that a voting machine must pass to ensure the integrity of a voting system. The complexity of a complete operating system whether that be Windows, Apple's IOS, Android, etc., makes it much much more complicated to fully test all of the potential code that could interact with any voting software. That is why having a very small, special-purpose, dedicated operating system that does not have the ability to transmit viruses is a much more secure and safe system to have as the basis for our voting machines.

Stan Stanart was elected the county clerk of Harris County in 2010. He graduated from Oklahoma State University with a Bachelor of Science in electronic engineering, and worked 16 years in the aerospace industry. In 1994 he joined Compaq Computer Corporation, where he was a developer and advanced system architect and held numerous managerial positions. In 2007 he joined the Harris County Tax Office as Manager of Hardware Information Technology.

Dan Wallach responds:

Stan Stanart has disputed many of the things that I wrote about the security of Harris County's voter registration system and Hart InterCivic voting system. Before I get into a point-by-point response, I'll first note that this debate isn't new. Back in 2008, I testified about this issue before the Texas House Committee on Elections, where several of the election equipment vendors testified. I wrote a blog piece that responded to much of the misinformation they were saying at the time, and it's unfortunate that I need to reiterate many of the same issues again now, a decade later.

Voter registration databases. Stanart notes that Harris County does regular backups with the Secretary of State's office. That's great news, and it's a necessary step. Unfortunately, it's not sufficient if we consider what a nation-state/advanced-persistent-threat (APT) adversary is capable of doing.

For example, during our early voting period, we maintain an online database that tracks which voters have and have not cast ballots. Under the APT threat model, it's possible for our adversary to simply mark voters as having cast ballots, even though they didn't. This would manifest itself with voters arriving to do their civic duty and being turned away.

Alternately, our adversaries could slowly introduce errors into the database over time, such that our backups were every bit as tampered as the primary databases. All of these attacks would be categorized as "denial of service" attacks, which are generally the hardest class of attacks to defend against.

Prior to 2016, no voter registration management system in the country was explicitly engineered with this attack model in mind. Now, every voter registration management system must be engineered with APT adversaries in mind, and that's going to require a large engineering effort.

Stanart writes, "The author once again is wrong when he states that we need an online database to track voters who cast votes during early voting. Harris County has been doing this for over a decade. Per Texas Election code, we provide the list of early voters the next day."

When a voter goes to an Early Voting location, there's a computer that checks whether that voter has already cast their ballot. That computer must be connected to a database. If that database is online, then it's potentially vulnerable to attack. If that database is offline (i.e., a local copy at each polling location), then there's a risk that a voter can drive from one early voting location to another and vote multiple times.

A best practice would be to maintain both online and offline copies, preferably using the online database, but maintaining offline copies if the Internet becomes unavailable or if tampering is detected (i.e.., by the actions of an APT adversary). We also need to design suitable auditing procedures to carry out during the Early Voting period to validate the system.

In short, our practices were perfectly acceptable under our previous understanding of the threat. With what we learned of Russian activity last year, we need to step up and improve our game.

Windows 2000 vs. Windows 7, and general IT issues. I last visited the Harris County elections warehouse in 2012 as part of a recount effort. At the time they were running Windows 2000 on all their systems.

Since then, Harris County upgraded to Windows 7, which is commendable. Microsoft dropped "mainstream support" for Windows 7 two years ago but still provides security patches; newer versions of Windows would still be preferable from a security perspective.

The challenge for Harris County is maintaining a regular cadence of security patches for machines that must never be connected to the Internet. Microsoft does allow for security patches to be copied to CDs and installed offline, but it's a cumbersome process. Alternately, if these machines were even briefly connected to the Internet to run Windows Update, that would provide a window for external attackers to break in. APT adversaries make a point of watching for these sorts of transitory opportunities to attack systems.

In short, our IT management practices require a detailed review in light of the new threats that we face. Furthermore, we require a detailed forensic investigation to make sure that we weren't already compromised. Again, we need to improve our game.

Prior voting systems' security reviews. The states of California and Ohio commissioned security analyses in 2007 of all the major electronic voting systems then on the market, including the Hart InterCivic eSlate system that we use here in Harris County. I was part of the California team that analyzed the source code to the Hart InterCivic system. Our report describes a variety of vulnerabilities.

Notably, every eSlate has a network connection on its back panel. This network connection is used for a variety of purposes, including connecting the eSlates in a local precinct during an election, and also in the elections warehouse to load ballot definitions, extract copies of the votes, and do basic inventory tracking functions.

In conducting our analysis, we found that the commands we could issue, via this networking port, could overwrite the code and data within an eSlate. Even worse, when a compromised eSlate is connected to computer servers in the elections warehouse, it turns out that those servers have "buffer overflow vulnerabilities" that allow an eSlate to attack them. At that point, a compromised server can use the very same network interface to attack every subsequent eSlate machine that connects to it. This "viral" vulnerability was central to our 2007 report and led the State of California to issue serious restrictions (see the top paragraph on page 5), requiring the whole server to be rebooted after each and every eSlate machine was connected to it.

These sorts of attacks can easily defeat the "hash code testing" and "logic and accuracy testing" that Harris County regularly conducts. Hash code testing, as implemented by Hart InterCivic, is analogous to an airline employee asking you if you've packed your own bags. It's trivial for you to lie. Logic and accuracy testing has a handful of votes cast for each candidate, in a controlled environment, where the final totals should come out exactly as expected. Malware can generally detect when it's operating under such testing conditions, for example behaving correctly until a certain volume of votes have been cast, or waiting until an unusual write-in vote is cast before commencing with its misbehavior.

In short, our current security practices are not an adequate mitigation against the vulnerabilities of the voting machines that we use and the threats that they potentially face.

How did Hart InterCivic respond? In early 2008, a Hart InterCivic representative and I both testified at a hearing of the Texas House Committee on Elections. I subsequently wrote a blog piece picking apart their misinformation at the time.

Anyone can look at the Texas Secretary of State's web site, which shows all of the vendors' submissions of voting systems for certification in the state. On the Hart InterCivic page, the last submission by Hart InterCivic for the voting system that we use in our current elections was examined by the state in January 2008; this was the same version (6.2.1) that we considered in the California review. Hart InterCivic has issued no software updates since then!

Instead, Hart InterCivic has developed a new voting system, effectively discontinuing its software support for the voting systems that we use here. When Harris County bought our fleet of Hart InterCivic equipment in 2010, we unfortunately purchased a system that was already obsolete. We're running a voting system with vulnerabilities that have been known to the public for a decade. The hardware should continue functioning, but whatever problems exist in its software aren't going to be fixed.

Furthermore, the analysis we did in 2007 does not represent a comprehensive catalog of every possible vulnerability in Hart InterCivic's system. In the past decade, the toolbox available to attackers has radically improved. In the same way that Harris County was correct to upgrade its antiquated Windows 2000 systems to run the newer Windows 7, it similarly needs Hart InterCivic to conduct regular software maintenance and updates on its voting systems, which isn't happening.

In short, our vendor is no longer supporting our voting systems, leaving them in a vulnerable state. We need to have plans for moving on.

STAR-Vote. Travis County votes on the same Hart InterCivic system that we use here in Harris County. Facing the same obsolescence issues, they recruited me and a number of other experts in cryptography, computer security, statistics, and usability, to collectively design something better. Travis County is now in the procurement stage, looking for the right vendor or vendors to implement STAR-Vote to meet our detailed specifications. Once it's complete, it will go through the same testing and certification that all Texas voting systems are required to pass, and the resulting system would be suitable for use across the entire state.

Stanart specifically denigrates general-purpose PCs in favor of dedicated devices, from a security perspective. This is an outdated viewpoint. In recent years, our smartphones and PCs have incorporated "trusted boot" and "code signing" features that make it very difficult for malware to be installed on these computers. This specific issue came to a head in the dispute between the FBI and Apple over the "San Bernadino iPhone," wherein the FBI demanded Apple create a version of iOS specifically to overcome the security features preventing the FBI from accessing the contents of the phone. (The FBI subsequently paid almost $1 million to an undisclosed firm for an exploit to work around Apple's security features.)

As with Apple's iPhone security, the "trusted boot" security features of modern PCs are quite strong but far from perfect, which is why STAR-Vote uses sophisticated "end-to-end" cryptographic mechanisms that allow voters to take home a receipt that lets them verify that their vote was tabulated correctly while not being able to compromise the privacy of their vote.STAR-Vote even includes a "blockchain" feature that allows one voter's receipt to verify the integrity of other votes cast earlier in the day.

On top of all that, STAR-Vote requires the use of printed paper ballots, cast in a standard ballot box, which no computer can possibly tamper with once printed. These and other security features allow STAR-Vote to minimize its reliance on its software being free of bugs.

In short, we know how to build stronger voting systems, and we can do it at a reasonable cost.





Bookmark Gray Matters. As James Comey warned the Senate Intelligence Committee recently, "They will be back."


President Donald Trump had another, previously undisclosed conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit in Germany this month.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer and National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton confirmed that Trump and Putin spoke at a dinner for world leaders and their spouses at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

The conversation came hours after Trump and Putin's first official face-to-face meeting on July 7, which was originally scheduled to last just half an hour but stretched on for more than two.

The two world leaders were also captured on video shaking hands and exchanging a few words after they arrived at the G-20 summit of industrialized and developing nations earlier that day.

Anton would not specify the duration of the conversation

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Last week, Professor Mark Jones at Rice University sought to "swim against the tide" by making the case that the Trump Administration "has performed competently."

Self-deprecatingly, he compared his effort to Doonesbury's MacArthur, tasked with listing Duke's accomplishments as Governor of American Samoa. But we can go back further than 1975, when this strip was published, to find a more apt comparison.

Namely, to the 18th century's Gary Trudeau, Voltaire, and his comic masterpiece "Candide, or Optimism." The tale's fount for philosophical optimism is Dr. Pangloss, who insists that this is the best of all possible worlds. As a result, the good doctor reasons that the syphilis that ravaged his face, the storm that sank his ship, the inquisition that hanged him and the events that led him to become a galley slave were all for the good.

By story's end, Pangloss's student, Candide, concludes that optimism is a mania for saying things are going well when one is in hell. He would, I suspect, have said the same of Jones's argument. A world  or, in this case, an administration  performing as competently as it can makes for bad history and worse morality.

Jones identifies two areas where Trump has acquitted himself well: "He has honored many of his campaign promises, and he has brought talented people into his administration."

As for campaign promises, Jones argues that Trump's border crackdown "seems to have reduced illegal immigration into the country." Yet Jones ignores statistical and existential facts. Not only has illegal immigration into the U.S. declined every year since 2009, but Jones's allusion to the "fear and anxiety" rippling across immigrant communities scants the visceral reality of these policies.

ICE arrests of noncriminal immigrants who are here without documentation have increased by 150 percent  a statistic which speaks to the stark reality of thousands of men and women who built lives, started families and obeyed the law, but are being torn from that and hauled back to countries they left decades ago.

As for replacing the Affordable Care Act, Jones writes that Trump has made a "concerted effort to ... keep his promise  even though the reform legislation might not obtain congressional passage."

While many words can describe Trump's approach to policy  ignorance or indifference come to mind  "concerted" is not one. There is also little concert between Trump's words and our reality: Every congressional variation of Trumpcare entails massive cuts in Medicaid, which candidate Trump promised to protect and which will hit his own supporters hardest.

GRAY MATTERS: Criticism of Trump is piling up. What has he done right?

Finally, there is the "America First" foreign policy. As Professor Jones, a member if the Baker Institute, should know, the phrase recalls Charles Lindbergh own America First Committee, a movement fueled by nativism and xenophobia, isolationism and kinship with Nazi Germany.

Moreover, the phrase "foreign policy" no more describes the president's whims and impulses than "domestic policy" does to my children's attitude towards household chores. But they, at least, have not embraced autocracies and excoriated democracies, savaged international agreements and scorned European alliances.

Nevertheless, Jones insists the administration boasts "extremely capable and talented people" who will "serve as a partial check on any ill-advised actions or policies that might emanate from the White House." He cites James Mattis at Defense  to paraphrase Voltaire, if Mattis didn't exist, the Republicans would have to create him  as well as Rex Tillerson at State and Steven Mnuchin at Treasury.

HOGP

Tillerson led ExxonMobil, but does this make him "capable" as Secretary of State? Running a corporation, which emphasizes transactional relationships, is not the same as running the State Department, whose ties to the world cannot be reduced to cost-effective analyses. As to whether Tillerson acts as a check on the White House's "ill-advised actions," recall that this same White House nixed Tillerson's first choice as assistant secretary of state, Elliot Abrams, because of his criticism of its present occupant.

As for Mnuchin, he is crazily capable, if you measure capability by the amount of money he made as an investment banker. This was especially the case when he led OneWestBank, which during the recession was repeatedly accused of aggressive foreclosure tactics. In his current position, Mnuchin defended President Trump's proposed cyber-security pact with Russia as "like any other strategic alliance." (Unfortunately, he mistimed his defense: A few hours after Mnuchin offered this gem of geopolitical wisdom, the president himself declared the plan DOA.)

There was, as well, Mnuchin's rolling out of Trump's ballyhooed tax reform. It was a one-page document larded with generalities and punctuated by deep tax cuts benefitting the top 1 percent. Professor Jones, had a student handed this in as an assignment, would you give it a "C" for capable?

As for the cabinet members Jones mercifully did not name, there is only room enough to observe that most of them lead departments they tried to destroy in their previous professional lives. How will they serve as a "partial check" on Trump's indifference to policy making? The only true checks on President Trump have been the courts and state governments. (In this regard, as author of a book on electoral laws and democracy, Professor Jones can surely speak more knowledgeably than I can on the overwhelming state response to the Orwellian-inspired Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.)

The real rub, though, is the lack of moral mindfulness to Jones' claim. The voice of the people  or, at least, the minority who voted for Trump  is the voice of God. Or, more accurately, the voice of a tribal god. By "remaining true to his word," Jones states, Trump retains the support of those voters who "believe he is doing something right, if only by providing a populist voice for a marginalized group." Jones then slaps a Tea Party hat on Jeremy Bentham, defending Trump because he has given the greatest satisfaction to the greatest number of members of a single political party.

It is also as an historian of modern Europe that I find Jones' claim perplexing. Did Hitler do something right when he followed through on the promises he made in "Mein Kampf"? By acting on his nihilistic fantasies, after all, Hitler retained and even gained widespread popular support during the 1930s.

Alternatively, was President Roosevelt wrong to favor American intervention in World War II, even though great swaths of the American public were opposed? By insisting on America First isolation, he would have acted on the desire of many Americans. On the other hand, their descendants would now be living in a world where Hitler died of old age.

As there is no end to similar historical parallels, let us finish with a few questions. Can Jones do no better, in swimming against the tide, than cling to the rhetorical flotsam and jetsam he offered up? Does he truly believe that the ultimate justification, practical no less than ethical, for a president's policies is that they speak to his base? Is this, really and truly, the best of all possible worlds we can or should expect?

Robert Zaretsky teaches at the University of Houston and is the author, most recently, of "Boswell's Enlightenment." He's currently writing "The Empress and the Philosophe: Catherine the Great, Denis Diderot and the Eclipse of the Enlightenment."





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A Dallas County grand jury on Monday brought a rare murder charge against a fired Balch Springs police officer who shot and killed an unarmed 15-year-old honor student leaving a party in April.

The grand jury's action stands in stark contrast to instances in which grand juries in Harris County have considered fatal shootings by Houston officers.

The last time a Houston police officer was charged with murder came in March 2004 following a fatal on-duty shooting by Arthur Charbonnneau, who killed 14-year-old Eli Escobar as he struggled to detain the unarmed youth at an apartment complex.

Since then, hundreds of HPD officers have been cleared of criminal liability by grand juries in the shootings of residents, including many who were not armed.

Harris County grand juries over the past decade have charged just two law officers for on-duty shootings, in Bellaire and Pasadena.

Most recently, a Harris County grand jury last month returned a murder indictment against Harris County Sheriff Deputy Chauna Thompson and her husband, Terry Thompson. The couple is charged in the death of John Hernandez, 24, during an off-duty brawl at a Houston-area Denny's on May 28.

See the Chronicles three-part series Bulletproof

The white Dallas-area officer, Roy Oliver, was fired from the Balch Springs Police Department in May after he fired shots from his rifle at a car driving away from a party.

The charges accuse Oliver of murdering Jordan Edwards, 15, an African American, who was shot in the back of the head as he sat in the car driven by his brother.
AUSTIN - Attorney General Ken Paxton raked in more than $1 million during the first half of the year, bringing the indicted Republican's political war chest to more than $5.2 million, according to state records.

Details of Paxton's political fundraising, filed Monday with the Texas Ethics Commission, shows that the attorney general, who is facing felony charges of securities fraud, enjoys political and financial support from big donors as he nears his trial and first re-election bid as the state's top lawyer.

"Even prior to his public service, he was a GOP activist working in the political trenches at the local level," said Matt Welch, Paxton's campaign spokesman. "The fact that more people are supporting Attorney General Paxton's campaign to a greater extent than before is a testament to his track record of success and outstanding leadership on issues important to all Texans."

Most of Paxton's support comes from big donors who cut five-figure checks to his campaign. Eighty-five percent of his take this year came from contributions of at least $10,000, and nearly all came from within the state.

Corporate money

The bulk of his contributions in the six-month reporting period spanning January through June came from corporate CEOs and presidents, including those from oil and gas companies and investment firms.

More than half of the $1,056,356 collection was made in checks for more than $20,000. Paxton's largest contribution came from the Republican Attorneys General Association, which gave him $100,000.

The largest check from an individual came from Dan Wilks, who gave $51,000. Wilks' brother, Farris, nearly matched the contribution with a $50,000 check.

The two West Texas fracking billionaires are listed as CEOs of Wilks Brothers LLC and spent at least $15 million to support Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential bid. The Wilks family has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Texas tea party groups and conservative causes, including those pushing efforts to unseat House Speaker Joe Straus, a moderate Republican from San Antonio.

Paxton received a third $50,000 check from Kenny Troutt, chairman and CEO of Mount Vernon Investments, headquartered in Dallas. The former director of Excel Telecommunications Inc., Troutt's net worth is valued at $1.41 billion, according to Forbes.

$25,000 from Webb

The attorney general also received a $25,000 check from James Webb of Frisco, CEO of Preferred Imaging. Paxton has received contributions in the past from Webb, although Webb's company was under investigation by the attorney general's office for Medicaid fraud. Paxton's office and the U.S. Justice Department signed off on a $3.5 million settlement on a whistleblower lawsuit against the company. Paxton's spokesman said at the time the attorney general was not involved in the case.

While the campaign finance reporting period covers from January to June, office holders are barred from fundraising directly before, after and during a legislative session. That left 12 days for Paxton to accept donations, during which he collected more than $1 million.

In the first six months of the year, Paxton spent $298,249 from his campaign account. His total cash on hand totals $5,270,565, although no one has announced plans to run against him in the primary or general election.

Paxton, a tea party Republican from Collin County, has spent much of his tenure in the attorney general's office fighting allegations that he committed securities fraud by failing to tell friends and colleagues he would make a commission off their investment in Servergy, a North Texas tech company. He is also charged with failing to register with the state as an investment adviser. He faces two first-degree felony charges and one lesser, third-degree charge.

He maintains his innocence and contends he is the victim of a political witch hunt. A federal judge this year tossed similar charges brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He raised nearly $218,000 in 2016 in gifts from friends and relatives to support his legal defense fund.

Paxton, who faces 99 years in jail and thousands of dollars in fines if found guilty, is due in Houston for a criminal court hearing July 27.
AUSTIN - The Texas Legislature started its much anticipated special session on Tuesday just like it ended the regular session 50 days ago, with Democrats grasping at procedural straws and the state's mighty, bright red Republicans mired in deep divide.

Hundreds of immigration activists, transgender rights groups and other protesters jammed the Texas Capitol inside and out for what promised to be a highly contentious affair as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Houston, the ultra-conservative leader of the Senate, squared off against moderate House Speaker Joe Straus of San Antonio, who is already on record as calling Gov. Greg Abbott's 20-bill, highly conservative agenda a pile of manure.

It didn't take long for a sense of deja vu to kick in. In the House, where Straus has shown little interest in taking up Abbott's dictated agenda, the day's business was shut down in less than an hour. After just about 50 minutes, the speaker adjourned for the day with little action to show for it.

In the Senate, meanwhile, Patrick fought Democrats to fast track the bill that ultimately forced the special session in the first place and is considered must-pass. Patrick and Senate Republican leaders tried to bend Senate rules to take up a pair of bills re-authorizing the Texas Medical Board and four other state boards quicker than normally allowable. Under the usual rules, the bills would not have been allowed to be heard in committee until Thursday. Instead Republicans wanted to suspend those rules to let them be heard on Tuesday with a chance to hit the floor Thursday.

But Democrats, though vastly outnumbered, showed immediately they were ready to use any political and procedural tool to slow Patrick and Senate Republicans, even if just for one day.

Sen. Jose Rodriguez, D-El Paso, and other Democrats immediately called points of order to try to block the attempt to sidestep traditional Senate rules. Specifically, Rodriguez said Patrick was trying to allow the bill to be assigned to a committee before members and the public had the 48 hours they should have to prepare for the legislation.

Ready to fight agenda

For nearly an hour, Democrats succeeded in gumming up Patrick's plans by debating the rules and raising questions. Ultimately, the lieutenant governor denied their objections to block the vote and let the straight party line vote happen to fast track the bills.

"Today is a sad day for the democratic process in the Texas Senate," Rodriguez said after the votes. "The leadership ignored long-standing Senate rules that are intended to protect members and the public to have enough time to study bills and have input in those bills."

Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, said the goal of keeping the Texas Medical Board functioning merited changing the rules and fast-tracking the bills. He said there is no threat to democracy, just a realization that doctors would face a crisis come September if the medical board is not re-authorized as soon as possible.

Still, Rodriguez said the show of force from Democrats made clear to GOP leaders that Democrats would not allow an even faster vote to happen on Tuesday - a move that would have required five Democrats to break ranks.

While the bill re-authorizing the Texas Medical Board isn't overly controversial, what comes next is anything but. Once Patrick has cleared the deck of that issue, Rodriguez said it will open the flood waters for the other 19 bills - almost all opposed by Democrats in the House and Senate.

It's those bills that had the south steps of the state Capitol filled with a wide-ranging contingent of protesters who declared they are ready to fight the agenda. Among the proposals drawing the most ire was the nationally watched bathroom bill limiting transgender access to restrooms, a bill to cut funding to abortion providers and another to enact a limited school voucher program.

"Trans lives do matter," Carmarion Anderson, the leader of a Dallas based group called Black Transwomen Inc., told the hundreds who gathered in upper 90s temperature to demand their voices be heard by state legislators. "We're talking about a ridiculous bill for me to have privacy to relieve myself."

And there were celebrities too.

Inside, former Sen. Wendy Davis, who ran against Abbott in 2014, was among those to fill the Capitol rotunda to help lead chants against much of the rest of the agenda in coordinated protests that more than two dozens groups called the One Texas Resistance Rally and Day of Action.

On the south steps, Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, whipped up the crowd by urging them to keep fighting and that national Democrats were watching.

"We stand with each and every one of you," Perez said to an ovation.

No signs of relenting

In the House, Democrats also pushed back at the agenda. Members of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus and the Black Caucus vowed to fight proposals that allow discrimination, such as the bathroom bill.

"We are going to use every conceivable tool that we have at our disposal to stop discriminatory bills. The stakes are too high in the state of Texas," said Rep. Rafael Anchia, a Democrat from Dallas and chair of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus in a news conference moments after the House adjourned.

He joined a chorus of business leaders who have stumped at the Capitol for days saying Texas is losing $66 million in convention cancellations over the prospect of the bathroom bill. Several business leaders said Tuesday they would support a repeal of SB4, legislation passed during the regular legislative session allowing law enforcement officers to look into someone's citizenship status during routine stops and require local law enforcement to acquiesce to federal immigration detainer requests.

The Democrats said they plan to use the legislative session as an opportunity to point out how SB4 hurts people, pointing to the July 1 shooting of Jose Ontiveros, a 58-year-old Fort Worth taco vendor who was shot and later died trying to stop a robbery. One of the suspects, who was among a group of teenagers who reportedly committed about a dozen other robberies, said they targeted Hispanics "because they've got money and they don't call the police."

Rep. Ramon Romero, a Fort Worth Democrat, is sponsoring legislation to repeal SB4. The law, which is now under challenge in the courts, endangers people who live in Latino communities, he said, and the governor should support its repeal.

"You signed SB4 very proudly," said Romero. "Is the blood not on your hands?"

Some business leaders and city governments have also ramped up their opposition to the special session issues. Business leaders from around the state, including IBM, have publicly fought the bathroom bill.

Despite the protests, Democratic opposition and Straus' unenthusiastic approach to the session, Patrick has celebrated the agenda Abbott has lined up and vowed to support all 20 items. He shows no signs of relenting.

"Greg Abbott's 20 priorities are my priorities, are the Senate's priorities, are the people's priorities," Patrick told the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation.
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The Harris County District Attorney's Office dropped the murder charge against a homeless man accused in the brutal stabbing death last year of 11-year-old Josue Flores - the second suspect freed in a case that shook the north Houston community.

First Assistant District Attorney Tom Berg announced Tuesday that DNA evidence and blood analysis were inconclusive for Andre Timothy Jackson, 29, who was arrested June 3, 2016, in the death of the Marshall Middle School student.

But Jackson, a Marine veteran, remains a suspect, Berg said.

"We have received DNA analysis which makes it impossible for us to go forward at this time with a case that we think we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt," Berg said. "The results of the DNA and blood analysis are at best inconclusive, and in some respects, exclude him as a suspect."

Tiffany Dupree, the trial prosecutor, said she and Berg gave the news to Josue's family Tuesday on their front porch.

More Information Who killed Josue Flores? Anyone with information about the May 17, 2016 stabbing death of 11-year-old Josue Flores is asked to call CrimeStoppers at (713) 222-TIPS. See More Collapse

"Obviously, they are disappointed, but they want justice for Josue Flores and they want us to be able to prove the case and have sufficient evidence to make the case," she said. "We're not saying Andre Jackson is innocent and excluded as a suspect. We're just saying at this point, if we tried this case to a jury, we don't feel we could secure a conviction."

In the Near Northside community, where Flores was killed more than a year ago, community members felt blindsided by the news.

"It rips the scab off the wound that was just beginning to heal," said Karla Cisneros, a council member whose district includes the neighborhood.

"We're astounded," said Susan Graham, a community activist. "It feels like he sat in jail and the police and the District Attorney's office did nothing."

During an already scheduled community meeting at Carnegie Neighborhood Library, others also expressed heartbreak at the dropped charges. The neighborhood has created several teams that meet frequently to address safety issues. Now, they want help from city officials.

"We have never stopped since the day that Josue Flores was killed," said Stella Mireles Walters, who founded Safe Walk Home Northside, a neighborhood patrol that watches students as they walk to and from school. "We united. We used everything that we could in order to keep this community informed. Where's all the help that we need now?"

DNA did not match

Adam Sifuentes, a student at Northside High School who lives down the street from where Flores was killed, said residents are more fearful to walk outside in the wake of the boy's slaying. Sifuentes doesn't like his grandmother to sit out on the front lawn by herself. His family, in turn, often checks to make sure he makes it to places safely.

"Every time, I go to the store, they call me and tell me be to careful," said Sifuentes.

First Assistant Berg said the decision was made to dismiss the murder case when tests found that DNA on Josue's clothes did not match Jackson's and DNA on Jackson's clothes did not match Josue's. If they took the case to trial and Jackson was found not guilty, prosecutors would be unable to try the case again under the law against double jeopardy.

Jackson's attorney, Jerome Godinich, who attended the Tuesday press conference, said he is sure that Jackson is innocent.

"Since about November of last year, my office and myself were convinced that Mr. Jackson could not have committed this offense," Godinich said. "We were waiting for those results from the DNA, and frankly, I was not surprised."

He said staffers in his office had gone through surveillance videos and witness statements to reach their conclusions.

Godinich also said Jackson may be leaving Houston when he is released from jail, probably late Tuesday.

"His family is very eager to have him back home, and they do not live here in Houston," he said.

Josue was stabbed about 4:40 p.m. on May 17, 2016, as he walked home from school after staying late to attend a Science Club celebration.

Jackson, who had been living at the Salvation Army, matched the description of the man witnesses said stabbed the boy. He was tracked down after being shown in surveillance video trying to use the ATM at a Chevron gas station about 6:30 a.m. that day, hours before the stabbing.

Jackson broke down sobbing in court shortly after his arrest when prosecutors told the judge the boy had been stabbed at least 20 times. He has remained in the Harris County Jail ever since under $100,000 bond.

'Back at square one'

The stabbing struck fear in the community, with residents rallying to watch children as they walked to and from school.

Soon after the announcement, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo tweeted out a statement saying he had spoken with Flores' family and that the department was treating the case as an "ongoing murder investigation." He pledged to "devote whatever resources needed" to close the case.

"Our homicide detectives believed then and continue to believe that Mr. Jackson is the suspect in the case."

Berg said the decision not to prosecute was difficult because Jackson was the second suspect against whom charges were dismissed. He noted that District Attorney Kim Ogg ran on a campaign pledge of running an "evidence-based" office.

At the press conference, CrimeStoppers spokesman Jeff McShan urged anyone with information about the case to call their agency at 713-222-TIPS.

"We're back at square one," he said. "We need the evidence, so whoever did this to (Josue), we'll be able to find that person and present that to the DA's office."
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AUSTIN - Seventeen-year-old Magdalena Juarez came to the Texas Capitol Wednesday to protest the sanctuary cities law quinceanera-style.

She was among a group of young women who wore colorful, fancy dresses for a demonstration that included dancing along with impassioned speeches, saying they wanted to protest not with hate, but with a celebration of their heritage.

SB4 makes simply being brown a crime, said Juarez. We will resist by celebrating our families and our culture. We will resist by standing in unity.

Senate Bill 4 is the law signed by Gov. Greg Abbott to crack down on local entities seen as providing sanctuary to undocumented immigrants, with its backers focusing on those who commit crimes.

Of particular concern to opponents is a provision that ensures local law officers can ask people who are detained about their immigration status, which critics say could lead to racial profiling.

Critics include police chiefs in numerous cities, including San Antonio, who say it will interfere with their relationship with the community. San Antonio and Bexar County are among entities that are challenging the measure in a lawsuit.

The special session called by Gov. Greg Abbott has become a focal point for people protesting not only the contentious items he has placed on its agenda, such as a proposal affecting transgender peoples use of public restrooms, but those who are against the sanctuary cities law, which is not on the agenda.

The Quinceanera at the Capitol protest combined the SB 4 demonstration with the tradition of families celebrating quinceaneras, celebrations of girls transition into adulthood as they mark their 15th birthdays that may include photographs taken at the Capitol to mark the occasion.

The demonstration was sponsored by Jolt, an organization aimed at building Latino political power and influence.

pfikac@express-news.net

Twitter: @pfikac
PHILIPPINES

Duterte makes bid to extend martial law

MANILA - With Islamic militants holding a stubborn grip on the southern Philippines city of Marawi, President Rodrigo Duterte has asked Congress to extend martial law on the island of Mindanao through the end of the year to quell the rebellion, his government said Tuesday.

Duterte acknowledged to Congress the rebellion in Marawi "will not be quelled completely by 22nd July 2017," when martial law is slated to end. Duterte's request is essentially an admission that the fighting to dislodge the Islamic State group-linked fighters from Marawi would not end in a matter of days, despite his vows.

AFGHANISTAN

Ex-warlord, politician denied entry to nation

KABUL - After nearly two months of de facto exile in Turkey, Afghan Vice President Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum tried to return to Afghanistan on Monday.

But as hundreds of supporters waited late into the night at an airport in the country's north, the small private plane carrying Dostum, a former warlord accused of torturing and sexually assaulting a political rival, was denied permission to land on orders from the central government, according to Afghan officials.

MEXICO

Officials uncover fraudulent pay linking teachers

MEXICO CITY - Mexico's education secretary says an audit of the nation's teaching payroll found more than 44,000 teachers who were getting paid, but not in the classroom.

Aurelio Nuno says that more than 17,000 of those teachers were allegedly diverted into union work and receiving pay without teaching. Nearly 15,000 teachers were in administrative positions, but have been sent back into the classroom. The audit also found that more than 1,300 teachers who had been fired were being paid.

From wire reports
WASHINGTON  U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz's "Consumer Freedom" amendment to the stalled Republican health care bill would expand coverage and reduce premiums, though at the cost of steep deductible and out of pocket costs, a government study has found.

The Texas Republican touted the study Wednesday as President Donald Trump met over lunch with Republican senators at the White House to revive legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act, known widely as Obamacare.

"It was a good and productive meeting," Cruz told Fox News afterwards. "I think we're close. There's a lot of common ground."

But the meeting came as a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis showed that a new Senate GOP health care plan would result in 32 million more people without health insurance. The measure is similar to a 2015 repeal bill passed by the Senate.

Republicans were still reeling Wednesday from the collapse of the repeal effort after three Republican senators balked at provisions that would severely curtail planned Medicaid funding in their states.

The three holdouts   Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia  all also said they would oppose Republican Leader Mitch McConnell's alternative plan to vote immediately to repeal Obamacare, but leave the current health care law in place for two years while lawmakers come up with a replacement plan.

But it remained far from certain Wednesday that Republican holdouts would agree to repeal Obamacare without certainty about what a replacement plan might look like.

The CBO projected that 32 million more people would become uninsured over the next decade under a plan to repeal Obamacare now and replace it later. It also found that 17 million more people would become uninsured next year, compared to current law. Average premiums, the study found, would increase by about 25 percent.

The hit to McConnell's late-game strategy also came as it appeared to be at odds with Trump's pronouncement on Wednesday that he prefers to have a replacement plan in place.

''We have no choice," Trump said. "We have to repeal and replace Obamacare...We can repeal it. But the best is repeal and replace, and let's get going.''

Amid the uncertainty, the new analysis by the Trump's Department of Health and Human Services offered a needed day-brightener for Cruz, who saw several conservative allies bail this week on his amendment to allow sales of both Obamacare and non-Obamacare plans.

The study showed that his amendment would expand coverage by more than 2 million people, and reduce health insurance premiums by more than $7,000 a year.

That projection, however, is based on the assumption that the bare-bones, non-Obamacare plans on the market would come with $12,000 annual deductibles and $12,000 out-of-pocket limits.

Cruz, however, focused on the potential upfront savings.

"For people who are hurting that's real money and that shows exactly what we've been saying for a long time, which is the way you lower premiums is through competition, through market forces, through giving consumers the freedom to choose their own health care," he said.

Critics say those costs would be unaffordable to many Americans who might be tempted to buy more skimpy coverage. Insurance companies also have argued that it would create a two-tiered insurance system, with young and healthy people buying non-Obamacare plans, and sicker, older people lopped into the more expensive and comprehensive Obamacare plans.

Cruz revised his proposal to maintain a single risk pool, but that change cost him conservative support, including that of Utah Republican Mike Lee, his strongest Senate ally.

The study also estimated by enrollment would rise in the individual market under Cruz's plan. But that does not take into account cuts to Medicaid contemplated in various Republican health care bills.

An earlier Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Senate GOP's first draft of the health bill estimated that 22 million Americans could be dropped from the insurance rolls.

Senators are still waiting on a new CBO analysis of the Cruz amendment, though it could be moot if Republicans, with a 52-seat Senate majority, cannot muster the 50 votes necessary to either repeal or replace Obamacare.

McConnell announced a last-ditch effort to rally support for his new repeal plan, enlisting Vice President Mike Pence, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma and other administration officials to press senators who "so far had some difficulty getting to yes."

Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, the Republican Majority White, suggested that leaders still have to work on about a dozen recalcitrant Republicans. "I think it's just the ones who have remaining, unresolved issues," he told reporters. "I would say 40 members of the conference are ready to vote on any agreed upon product."

McConnell, however, promise a vote next week on motion to proceed to the House-passed repeal and replace measure. That would allow the Senate to then substitute and then vote on a repeal-only bill.

Neither vote is a certainty. And without a motion to proceed, there will be no bill to amend.

Nevertheles, McConnell said he wanted to "disabuse" anybody who thought that the Republican repeal effort has halted and that a vote won't take place.
Russian MPs on Wednesday passed a law to strip naturalised citizens of passports for offences classed as "terrorism" following a deadly April suicide bombing in the Saint Petersburg metro.

The lower house of parliament passed the bill in its final third reading. It now goes through the senate and to President Vladimir Putin for a final signature.

Putin called for such a law after the April 3 attack in the second city of Saint Petersburg by a bomber who was born in Kyrgyzstan but then gained Russian citizenship.

The bomber and 15 others died in the attack.

Putin said authorities should have the power to revoke the passports of naturalised citizens on terror grounds, citing large numbers of Russian nationals joining the Islamic State group to fight in Syria.

The new legislation introduces an oath for those who acquire Russian citizenship to observe the laws and constitution and "to be true to Russia, to respect its culture, history and traditions."

The new legislation says anyone who is convicted of committing or preparing to commit a crime "involving terrorist activity" can be stripped of naturalised citizenship.

Those convicted of such offences will be treated legally as if they lied when they swore the oath of allegiance.

Courts would be obliged to inform the immigration authorities within five days of such a verdict entering force.

The new legislation also makes it easier for Ukrainians to gain Russian citizenship.

If signed into law, it will enter force on September 1 this year.

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KABUL, Afghanistan - Last summer, an Afghan police commander invited me to his post for tea - and to view his "beautiful" boy sex slave.

I stumbled through a farm of chest-high opium poppy stocks to reach his mud-and-wattle outpost on the outskirts of Tarin Kot, the capital of southern Uruzgan province that is teetering in the face of a Taliban upsurge. On its open roof, a slight teenager sat next to his hulking captor, stealing sad glances at me as he quietly filled our tea glasses. A shock of auburn curls jutted out of his embroidered pillbox hat and his milky eyes were lined with kohl. The commander flaunted him the way a ringmaster exhibits an exotic animal. "See my beautiful bacha (boy slave)," he said, blithe and casual, a gun dangling at his side.

The commander, an ally of the United States in the war against the Taliban, is not an anomaly. Hundreds of such outposts of the Afghan Local Police (ALP), a front-line force armed and funded with U.S. taxpayer dollars, and other pro-government militias are believed to have enslaved young boys for dancing and sexual companionship, many of them kidnapped.

Freedom from the Taliban's puritanical regime in 2001 also brought freedom to do "bacha bazi," the cultural practice of sexual slavery and abuse of boys who are often dressed effeminately and whose possession is seen by Afghan strongmen as a marker of power and masculinity.

As the United States sinks deeper into the Afghan quagmire, preparing to send additional troops into a seemingly endless war, it is glossing over this hidden but pervasive abuse of children by its local allies. U.S. tolerance of this egregious inhumanity sends out the message that it is acceptable for U.S.-backed forces to keep child sex slaves.

It also has strong security implications. I reported last year how the Taliban are exploiting entrenched bacha bazi to infiltrate Afghan security ranks, effectively using child sex slaves - many of them brutally abused and hungry for revenge - as Trojan Horses to mount deadly insider attacks.

Institutionalized bacha bazi, described as culturally sanctioned male rape, is likely to continue unabated in the absence of any real deterrent. The United Nations has called on Afghanistan to urgently adopt legislation to criminalize bacha bazi and swiftly prosecute state officials guilty of the practice.

One senior official in Uruzgan described bacha bazi as an addiction worse than opium, saying commanders compete - and sometimes battle - one another to snatch pretty boys. Many prowl neighborhoods for boys "who have not seen the sun for years," a cultural euphemism for unblemished beauty.

Last year when I unearthed a kidnapping epidemic of boys, it was disturbing to see local authorities pussyfooting around the issue and using security to rationalize their inaction. On the surface, President Ashraf Ghani has vowed zero tolerance for bacha bazi in security forces. But multiple officials in southern Afghanistan told me that any action against guilty commanders - a bulwark against insurgents - would anger them and cause them to abandon their posts with their loyalists, paving the way for the Taliban. There is therefore no desire to recover or rescue the innocent victims whose lives have been upended by this practice.

To completely understand this perverse logic, imagine an American sheriff with pedophilic proclivities openly snatching children - and instead of rescuing the victims and bringing the sheriff to justice, the administration pandered to his criminal behavior and justified letting him keep his job.

This heartless apathy explains why the commander I met was so shockingly blase about keeping a sex slave. No senior official has ever been prosecuted for bacha bazi; the commander probably knows that he, too, will escape punishment.

Afghanistan has also become a living tapestry of institutionalized abuse on Washington's watch. As the conflict unspooled over 16 years, abusive strongmen were propped up to fight insurgents - from unruly militiamen sowing tyranny in their fiefdoms to torturers in military uniforms.

Buttressing abusive allies is a strategy best described as fighting fire with fire, which is pushing Afghanistan deeper into instability and chaos.

Security is a legitimate concern, but turning a blind eye to crimes such as bacha bazi amounts to a serious contravention of America's Leahy amendment, which bans U.S. assistance or training to foreign military units that fail to honor basic human rights.

The United States needs to deploy the leverages at its disposal in a country heavily dependent on it for aid to end this overriding culture of impunity. Additional troops and financial assistance must be contingent upon urgent reform and prosecution of abusers.

To win in Afghanistan, America cannot afford to lose its humanity.

---

Chopra is the outgoing Kabul bureau chief of Agence France-Presse (AFP). His next posting for AFP will be Riyadh. He tweets at @AnujChopra.
A Houston police officer on patrol earlier this month happened upon 12 desperate people locked in a sweltering truck in the parking lot of a strip mall off Westpark Tollway. Those inside - 10 men, one woman and a 16-year-old girl - were believed to be undocumented immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. The officer likely saved their lives.

The Chronicle's Brian Rogers reported that the three suspects accused of leaving them in the unventilated truck may be part of a larger human smuggling conspiracy. The three are believed to be from El Salvador and were charged with two counts of human smuggling likely to cause injury or death and one count of human smuggling involving a minor.

This close call is what border security is all about. No one benefits when human traffickers, most likely affiliated with vicious drug cartels, take advantage of people desperate to better themselves and their families. No one benefits when individuals believe they must resort to dangerous and illegal measures to find work in this country.

About the same time Houston police were saving lives, a House panel unveiled legislation to begin building President Donald Trump's monument to policy ignorance and opportunistic xenophobia. Money for his vaunted wall along our southern border, a $1.6 billion down payment on a project estimated to cost at least $21 billion, was embedded in a homeland security funding bill released by the House Appropriations Committee.

Unlike what happened in Houston last week, the multi-billion-dollar boondoggle that helped get Trump elected has nothing to do with keeping the border secure. It is, instead, a monumental waste of money and resources, all in service to a monumental ego.

And you thought the president was serious about his beloved border barrier. During his flight to Paris last week, he told reporters that he wanted a transparent wall. Not glass or clear plastic, we presume, but something you could see through. He said he worries - perhaps during commercials for "Fox and Friends" - about people getting hit in the head by bags of drugs hurled alley oop-style from Mexico into the U.S.

"As horrible as it sounds, when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don't see them - they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff? It's over," Trump said. "As crazy as that sounds, you need transparency through that wall."

As one border expert told Adrienne LaFrance of The Atlantic, "Over a 2,000 mile border, I think you'd have a higher chance of getting hit by a meteorite than a bag of drugs."

But now we learn that Trump's not really expecting a 2,000-mile wall, transparent or otherwise. He says he now has in mind a wall that covers "anywhere from 700 to 900 miles."

As it turns out, that's pretty much what we have now. Thanks to President George W. Bush's 2006 Secure Fence Act, some 650 miles of the border have been blocked off with pedestrian or vehicle fencing. You can see it in Brownsville, in Eagle Pass, in El Paso. Thus, Trump's remarks would suggest that his "big, beautiful wall" might actually involve erecting maybe 50 miles of new fencing.

We're relieved, and yet it begs the question: Why should Trump's adoring supporters believe any of his bombastic campaign promises? Why do Republican lawmakers feel compelled to scurry about like Santa's elves trying to make his cynical dreams come true?

A president serious about border security would push lawmakers to enact guest-worker legislation making it unnecessary for desperate migrants to attempt to sneak into this country for work. He would work with Mexico in its efforts to curtail the cartels. He would spend money on border infrastructure, so that vital economic ties between Mexico and the U.S. (particularly Texas) would continue to grow, providing mutual benefit. And yes, he would insist on money for border security, not on a useless wall but on drones, sensors, cameras and other technology designed to stop smugglers and human traffickers. (Most illegal drugs, by the way, come right through legal checkpoints.)

Drug enforcement, border security and undocumented immigration are legitimate national concerns. Sealing the border (if that were even possible) and closing off this nation to the rest of the world (which seems to be Trump's aim) does nothing to address those concerns. Some day, perhaps, we'll try yet again to fix our border problems - beyond tossed bags of drugs, that is.
Onerous tone

Regarding "Battle Over Control Begins" (Page A1, Tuesday), Gov. Greg Abbott describes his own version of "the Texas brand" in chilling terms.

He, in tandem with Lt. Gov. Patrick, employs scathing and often sensationalistic terms to push his personal wish list and priorities into the legislative special session agenda. Liberally employing the words "socialism," "collectivism" and "Ponzi scheme" is dismissive and threatening, but even more so it falls into the great abyss of faux facts and misleading statements in this year's already woefully muddied waters of politics.

A single-minded emphasis on trees, toilets and his attempts at gutting school finance initiatives deeply and direly affect real lives and real futures.

It demonstrates a general disregard for the rights and needs of our Texas citizenry.

While I cannot say for sure who is the puppet and who is the puppet master in this governing partnership, I take personally the threatening tone implicit in Abbott's declaration that "No one gets to hide." This is an unacceptable and onerous statement which does not bode well for the coming days.

Judith Lasseter, Houston

Priorities

Is everyone as confused as I am about our "conservative" party initially proclaiming that "big government is entering our private lives way too much," but then wants to take away the power of our local governments to pass laws that may be exclusive to our particular community?

And how dare our governor threaten our local representatives by "keeping a list" of who doesn't have the same priorities as he has.

Our past governor actually vetoed a bill passed by both Texas houses to ban texting while driving, saying that big government was intruding too much into our lives. It almost seems like our Texas governors want to become the dictators of our conscience.

Is our governor better able to tell us how to pass local laws to help local economies or banning plastic bags to prevent deaths to our sea creatures? Trees are very important to Galveston residents but not so much to West Texas residents. Same goes for plastic bags. There are not always "laws that fit all ..."

Carolyn James, Houston

Conservatism

When I registered Republican 55 years ago, conservatism was all about getting intrusive government out of our lives. Today, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Gov. Greg Abbott are loudly demanding THEY know what is best for us. How did conservatism become the enemy of local control?

Roger Vaught, Houston
An honorable discharge

Regarding "Bad labels" (Page A13, July 11), thank you so much for the timely and thoughtful editorial based on the article about Dustin Greco and other soldiers who were denied an honorable discharge after their service in Iraq.

As the editorial stated, military veterans deserve treatment for mental conditions related to their service; they don't deserve the boot. The fact that the impact of his military experience was overlooked is a terrible reflection on our leaders in the government and the military.

I call that failing our military personnel in a deplorable and inexcusable manner.

Joe Davidson, Tomball

The thrill is gone

Regarding "Diamond dazzles, but fans' energy fizzles" (Page D1, Tuesday), as a baby-boomer I attended many concerts in '70s, but as a senior citizen I no longer go to live musical performances for the reason described in Robert Morast's review of Neil Diamond's performance at the Toyota Center.

As a 20-something I obliged the performer by showering "the stage with energy and excitement and helped the artists sustain their 90-minute stand onstage."

As a 60-something, I no longer have the energy and, unfortunately, excitement I once had.

Bill Spear Bartlett, Houston

Health bill dilemma

Regarding "GOP's health plan just shifts costs" (page B1, Monday), the health care industry is unique in that it is a for-profit business and also a humanitarian service. Because of this, it does not lend itself to the free-market system of capitalism, which is based on the concept of price negotiation between buyer and seller. It is difficult to negotiate when your life may be at stake. Just as it would be if your house were on fire or if an armed intruder were trying to break into your home while you were there.

This might lead one to believe that health care should be under single-payer control of the federal government. Unfortunately the federal government through Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Affairs Hospital operations have shown themselves to be grossly unfit to manage such a system efficiently. This is the conundrum with which we are faced.

Trying to shoehorn in some combination of private and government control like the Affordable Care Act, aka, Obamacare, doesn't work either. So what are we to do?

Perhaps if the federal government could demonstrate its ability to manage a major medical program like Medicare efficiently and without waste and fraud we could then think about a single-payer government controlled health care system.

Ralph Tibiletti, Spring

Visiting foreign countries

Regarding "American scholar jailed in Iran is innocent, professor says" (HoustonChronicle.com, Monday), once again, an America citizen is jailed in a country that is openly unfriendly to the United States. Whether the causes of incarceration are proven or not, why do we insist on going to these places?

They have their own laws and, while they may seem harsh and unfair, they are still the laws of that country. And when our citizens run into problems, like being put in jail for 10 years, they expect the U.S. to get them out.

The important thing to remember is that these countries do not like us. They will go out of their way to embarrass the U.S., even if it means jailing our people on trumped up charges.

Paul Amici, Houston
WASHINGTON - It wasn't quite a wicked-witch-is-dead Munchkin happy dance, but the white noise of foregone conclusions drowned out Republicans' relatively muted regret over their failure to repeal and replace Obamacare.

It was never gonna happen. Not no how.

This is partly because the GOP version of reform would have first done harm to our most vulnerable citizens - the elderly, the disabled and the poor. Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins cited drastic Medicaid cuts as her reason for withholding support of the so-called "Better Health Reconciliation Act." Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul also said he wouldn't support the bill, because it didn't go far enough in repealing Obamacare.

When two more GOP senators - Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas - defected Monday night, the deal was undone. Lee said the bill failed to repeal all of the Obamacare taxes. He also said the bill didn't go far enough in lowering premiums for middle-class families or in loosening costly regulations.

Thus, the weeks-long tornado of hot tempers and chill winds culminated Tuesday morning when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell realized he didn't have enough votes.

Health care is such a mind-numbing boondoggle that one must take frequent breaks from thinking about it. Therefore, let us pause for a moment to applaud the relatively unknown L. Frank Baum (1856-1919), author of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." Neither the passage of time nor the contempt usually bred by familiarity seems to dim the popularity or the seemingly eternal applications of his masterwork. In my experience as a columnist, I've found few issues, characters or moments - whether writing about Bill Clinton's steamy White House encounters or McConnell's bland ruminations on regret - that don't benefit from Baum's contextual frameworks.

There. Now to yawn-inspiring health care reform in all its failed foregoneness.

During almost a decade of writing sporadically about health care in its various iterations, I've interviewed dozens of people from a mix of related fields - medical, business, legislative and political. Not once have I found a single person who thought the GOP could pull off a repeal and replace. Why?

Firstly, because the vast majority of Americans are fundamentally opposed to allowing others to suffer. And secondly, sort of, the ACA affects one-sixth of the U.S. economy. How does one untangle a knot of 20 million strings? Why not just repeal and replace California and call it a day? It would be easier.

The fact is, Obamacare was never perfect nor should anyone have expected it to be. Today, we have a health care system in pitiful disrepair, as insurance companies opt out of exchanges, premiums continue to climb and healthy, young people forgo insurance premiums that would have subsidized coverage for unhealthy, older Americans and the less fortunate.

Therein lies the crux of the least solvable problem inherent in such a gargantuan, multifaceted overhaul: It denies, emphatically, the nature part of being human, which is in constant tension with government-mandated insurance coverage.

The central question is: How do you make it both cost-effective as well as fair?

Many Americans simply don't see the fairness in a system that requires them to pay high premiums for others' poor health, some of which is, let's face it, earned. Not deserved, but sometimes resulting from poor lifestyle choices. Why, indeed, should a single, childless 30-year-old male who runs three miles a day, eats rationally, doesn't drink, smoke or take drugs, be saddled with insurance premiums to cover pregnancy, abortion, alcoholism, addiction or an abundance of health consequences resulting from obesity and inertia?

For that matter, why should women have to subsidize men's sexual dysfunction curatives when, by the way, men don't have to pony up for women's corresponding, post-menopausal, medically appropriate intercessions. Here you see one of the finer-print dilemmas. We'd rather force nuns to concede tacit approval of abortion than insist that insurance subsidies be tied to healthy behaviors.

I'm sorry if this sounds heartless; the brain calls it reality. No wonder Obamacare was so difficult to craft and a replacement equally so. There are simply too many moving parts to make the sucker float - and too many reasons to not sink it.

Since McConnell's repeal-only idea seemed doomed Tuesday afternoon after GOP Sens. Collins, Shelley Moore Capito and Lisa Murkowski said they oppose immediate repeal, perhaps, finally, Republicans and Democrats can snap on their wizard hats and cobble something workable together. After all, it's the only thing they haven't tried yet.

Parker's email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.
Personnel from the Houston Rural Fire Department responded at about 3 p.m. on Wednesday of last week to hay bales burning on Highway ZZ west of Houston, about 1.5 miles off Highway 17.

Houston Rural Fire Chief Don Gaston said the fire began when bulldozed piles were burned and flames spread to the nearby bales on property owned by Chad Smith. About 40 bales burned, but about 60 more were spared thanks to work done by Smith and the firefighters.

He would have lost every bale there, but he had a track-loader and cut us a groove between them and we put water on the rest of them, Gaston said. He stayed all night that night and pushed them up in a pile where he could work with them.

Gaston said three trucks and seven personnel responded on the sultry summer afternoon.

It was terribly hot, Gaston said. We had trouble making ourselves sweat.

On Monday of last week, Houston Rural sent two trucks and four firefighters to a blaze at a large mobile home on Ridge Road east of Houston.

Gaston said the fire was contained to a closet, and the residence sustained mostly only smoke damage.

When the call came in I thought, oh man, a trailer house; itll be burned down before we get there, he said. But we got on it pretty quick and got it out before it spread.

How the fire started inside the closet isnt known, Gaston said.

The following fires also involved responses from area fire departments:

 Firefighters from Summersville and Clear Springs were called mid-afternoon last Friday to a structure fire on Highway JJ. A shed, tree and utility line were on fire at the end of the roadway, authorities said.

 Lickings fire department battled a fire last Wednesday afternoon that involved wood at the Royal Oak charcoal plant. Three different calls for additional assistance went out  the latest at about 12:45 p.m. amid blistering heat.
When Rep. Paul Curtman said Thursday he was weighing a challenge to Sen. Claire McCaskill, he became the third Republican on the record running to stop the Missouri Democrat from winning a third term.

Theres little doubt that Curtman  or fellow GOP hopefuls Tony Monetti and Austin Petersen  are conservative enough to win their partys nomination.

But none of the three Republicans publicly interested in defeating McCaskill have the profile of potential candidates such as Attorney General Josh Hawley, or U.S. Rep. Vicky Hartzler.

Another possible candidate is Treasurer Eric Schmitt, whose recent speech in St. Louis criticizing Illinois fiscal policy and decision-making signals interest at running for higher office.

A Republican familiar with Schmitts plans said the treasurer was in Washington, D.C., on Thursday to meet with leaders in the National Republican Senatorial Committee. And a spokesman for Schmitt noted that Eric is receiving significant encouragement from Missourians to consider the U.S. Senate race.

McCaskill, knowing that shes considered vulnerable and is likely to face heavy financial opposition from the right, is already campaigning full-steam ahead. She made 10 stops in small mid-Missouri towns last week and raised about $3 million from April to June.

She also recently named David Kirby as her campaign manager. Kirby, an attorney who studied at Washington University in St. Louis, worked on McCaskills 2006 Senate campaign and also has served as an assistant attorney general in Missouri, according to a news release.

Claire recognizes that shes the underdog heading into this race, and so we fully expect a long line of politicians to compete for the nomination to run against her, said spokesman John LaBombard, but shes going to keep her focus on listening and showing respect to Missourians, and fighting for them in the Senate.

The GOP Senate primary has attracted national attention, and another candidate is almost certain to declare his or her interest.

But Thursday, the News-Leader spoke with three Republicans who are definitely running for the GOP nomination, in the order they spoke with the newspaper.

A libertarian walks into a GOP primary

Petersen, a 36-year-old publisher living in Kansas City, said the platform for his Senate run is 100 percent carried over from his previous presidential campaign as a Libertarian. He came in second to Gary Johnson.

I believe in liberty, Petersen said, defining the word as the freedom of an individual to act without unnecessary burdens.

Asked about his policy priorities, Petersen rattled off a slew of ideas such as reducing government spending, changing the tax code, cutting federal regulations and repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Petersen said the U.S. should take steps to dig itself out of its debt, which is steadily approaching $20 trillion.

His solution is spending cuts  he suggests 1 percent across the board  and a balanced budget Constitutional amendment to put us on the path toward fiscal solvency.

Austin Petersen, a former Libertarian Party presidential hopeful, is running to secure the Republican nomination to run against Sen. Claire McCaskill.

Citing Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky as inspiration, Petersen said he wanted to institute a flat tax rate of 15 percent as well as eliminating exemptions and perhaps nixing the payroll tax, which he called a job-killer.

President Donald Trumps efforts to roll back regulations were on Petersens mind while on the subject of jobs, and he cautioned against red-tape and business handouts alike.

Many times, corporations want socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor, he said.

Petersen also criticized Obamacare, which he said has caused his own monthly health insurance payments to jump and called for the health care laws repeal.

If the Senate has not done so, I will champion a clean repeal of that bill, he said.

From Washington, Missouri, to Washington, D.C.?

Curtman, 36, says his dislike for Obamacare inspired him to challenge the laws constitutionality at a McCaskill town hall eight years ago.

Thats the moment he cites as his entry into politics, and hes been serving as a state representative in eastern Missouri since 2010. Curtman chairs the House Republican Caucus, which counts Rep. Jered Taylor, R-Nixa, among its members.

When hes not in Jefferson City, Curtman lives in Washington, Missouri, and works as a financial adviser. Asked to describe himself, he identified as a Christian, husband, father, (and) U.S. Marine.

Paul Curtman, a state representative from Washington, Missouri, is eyeing the Republican nomination to run against Sen. Claire McCaskill.

But its not about me, Curtman said. Its about making Claire McCaskill a private citizen.

A full repeal of Obamacare is a top priority Curtman, who said that government should protect consumers choices. He cited the Affordable Care Acts insurance mandate as the opposite of that and said a repeal would unleash insurance companies, drive up competition and decrease costs.

Obamacare doesnt do anything for the consumer except force them to buy a new product, he said.

Curtman also said it was important to drive down debt and reduce Americans unfunded liabilities, which he and Peterson both cited as topping $100 trillion.

We need to rein all that in, Curtman said.

The four-term state lawmaker also said bureaucracy needed to be scaled back and that he wanted to replace the current graduated income tax system, perhaps with a flat tax.

We need more people who are willing to fight for fiscal sanity, Curtman said.

Greitens 2.0

An outsider who served in the military with experience as a motivational speaker, a few books under his belt and a distaste for career politicians is running for federal office in Missouri for the first time.

No, not Gov. Eric Greitens. Its Tony Monetti of Warrensburg, the first Republican to declare his candidacy.

Monetti, who readily admits he was inspired to run after watching Greitens and Trump win their races, is campaigning on his conservative outsider status as well as his history as B-2 stealth bomber pilot and small businessman.

The timing might be right for our country to look for leaders rather than these career politicians, he said.

Monetti introduced himself as the 52-year-old son of Italian immigrants (legal immigrants, he stressed) who loves his country. He served as an officer and pilot in the U.S. Air Force, flying combat missions in Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf and Operation Allied Force in the Balkans.

Outside the cockpit, Monetti worked with NATO to coordinate time-sensitive joint operations among numerous different armed forces.

Back stateside, he ran a restaurant for several years before returning to the Air Force to become director of operations for the B-2 program at Whiteman Air Force Base. After three years there, he took a position with the University of Central Missouri, where he said he has worked to right a struggling aviation program for five years.

I surround myself with winners and bring people together to find common ground, he said. Im just blessed with a wonderful team.

If elected, he said hell work to bring Missouri values to D.C. One way he says hell do that is by campaigning to reduce how long federal lawmakers can serve.

I will only serve two terms, and I will fight for term limits, Monetti said.

Describing his watchword as altruism, Monetti also said he was passionate about creating free-market solutions for mental health. He noted that his wife is a mental health counselor and said more needs to be done to help people whose lives are in disarray due to drug addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Rather than throwing them in jail and not helping them, we need to promote the general welfare, Monetti said.

On the whole, his philosophy sounds akin to that of many conservatives: Less government. Less tax. Strong defense.

Monetti said he wanted to focus on empowering people to work together to solve problems and get government out of their lives, and he said he wanted to deliver a message to members of the Republican establishment who might prefer a more recognizable candidate: Theres a B-2 stealth pilot thats about to be seen on radar.

SPRINGFIELD NEWS-LEADER

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Berlin on Wednesday summoned Turkey's ambassador over the detention of a German human rights activist who was remanded in Turkish custody this week.

"The Turkish government needs to immediately and directly hear the German government's outrage and incomprehension as well as its crystal-clear expectations in the case of Peter Steudtner, and this time without diplomatic niceties," ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer said.

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From July 5-11, I had the pleasure of taking a trip to Helena, Mont., with my friend Harold Mitchell and staying at the home of his brother, Sam, and sister-in-law, Robin.

To say the least, there were many, many memorable moments. Heres a chronological recap that pretty much scratches the surface of the epic experience.

Wednesday, July 5: Our flights from Springfield to Denver and Denver to Helena were OK. Both segments took about 1 1/2 hours and the rides in the smallish Bombardier CRJ-200s was a bit snug, but adequate.

Once on the ground, we immediately got into the groove with a stop at Papa Rays Pizzeria in Montana City, just outside Helena. The place had good food and there was good company. I made a discovery, too: A local craft beer called Cold Smoke (named after the way powder snow flies around you when you ski through it  a favorite pastime in the Montana mountains).

We went to Sam and Robins home and were greeted by their three big, friendly dogs: Moose (a huge Labrador/mastiff mix who proved to be about as gentle a giant as imaginable), Walter (a lab mix who was always in fun mode) and Moxie (a pit bull/husky mix who loves people and is literally always in a good mood). Moose went to the water bowl and showed how much water he could drink. Highly impressive.

After going to bed at about 11 p.m., I was awakened at about 12:30 a.m. by  of all things  a 5.8 earthquake! It about shook me out of my upstairs bed, and not surprisingly, was the talk of the town for the next couple of days. The 4.5 aftershock was like a whole second quake!

Nothing like that had happened in the area for more than 60 years, and this is the first night of our stay. What are the odds?

Thursday, July 6: The four of us embarked on a day trip to the relatively nearby Elkhorn Mountains, close to Boulder, about 25 miles south of Helena.

The Houston Heralds Doug Davison leans on the body of a Ford Model T near the ghost town of Elkhorn, Mont.

On the beautiful drive from the highway to the Elkhorn Peak trailhead, I got my first look at a mule deer as it stood on a steep slope next to the roadway. Several miles into the wilderness on the well maintained dirt road, we passed through the ghost town of Elkhorn, which (at an elevation of about 6,400 feet) features several historic buildings left over from the late 1800s when it was a bustling silver mining hub with a population of more than 2,500 people. When we couldnt drive any further, we hiked up Elkhorn Peak to about the 8,500-foot level, enjoying incredible views, taking in the smells of native pines and spruces, marveling at numerous mountain wildflowers and observing various forms of old mining equipment and other signs of the areas past.

I sensed a strong Montana flavor to the surroundings. It was just what I had hoped for.

Buildings still remain at the ghost town of Elkorn, Mont., which was a thriving town during silver mining days in the late 1800s.

In the evening, the Mitchells hosted the first of two gatherings on back-to-back nights in honor of Sams 50th birthday. We hung out with about 20 great local residents, and Robins pulled pork enchiladas were fantastic. A man who was a friend of the hosts sang and played guitar as everyone sat near the fire pit made of an oil drum with large cut-outs shaped like Montana, arrowheads and a buffalo head.

Sleeping that night felt good, as my body was a bit taxed from spending several hours rambling up and down the mountain and breathing the noticeably thin air.

Friday, July 7: The four of us went for a ride on the Last Chance Tour Train, a tram-like vehicle that takes passengers on a wonderful trip around Helena. The driver was extremely knowledgeable about the citys history, which began with the gold rush in the 1860s.

A mural on the side of a building as seen from the Last Chance Tour Train in Helena, Mont.

After that, we stopped in at Papa Rays again partook in some of the places famous breadsticks (that were more like a thin crust pizza) and pizza made with sauerkraut as one of the toppings. Im a fan of sauerkraut, but I had never heard of it as a pizza ingredient.

It was awesome. Along with the meat, cheese sauce and perfectly prepared crust, the sauerkraut made for a phenomenal result!

After chilling out at the Mitchell place for a while, we geared back up for the Sammypalooza at Chubbys in Clancy, where another fine cross-section of individuals gathered to share and enjoy Sams big milestone.

The place had two regulation horseshoe pits, and Harold and I played for hours with a few different opponents. Chubbys also served an gorgeous 10-ounce burger, and I even got up in front of the crowd and sang the Eagles Peaceful Easy Feeling with the nights talented one man act, John Montoya, who bills himself as Late Night Radio, has a pure, exacting voice and plays both a mean acoustic and electric guitar.

Saturday, July 8: The temperature peaked at a record high of 104. But get this: The humidity was about 12-percent, and the feels like temperature was only 102 (when I looked at weather.com and saw that, I just had to laugh).

We all took a wonderful site-seeing drive around Canyon Ferry Lake, a 35,000-acre reservoir west of Helena behind a dam on the Missouri River. We saw antelope (a.k.a. speed goats), sheep (a.k.a. pasture maggots, because they look like maggots from the air) and pretty Russian olive trees. We toured several very nice lakefront campgrounds, some operated by the Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation and others by the U.S. Forest Service. To the east of the lake, sprawling fields of hay, alfalfa and sagebrush backed up by a long range of mountains formed a classic Montana scene.

Canyon Ferry Lake east of Helena, Mont.

Heading back toward Helena, we stopped at the Big Bull Bar and Grill and had a scrumptious 1/2-pound cheeseburger.

That night, it was dinner at the Montana City Grill and Saloon. I really like big, juicy cheeseburgers and consumed another delectable 1/2-pounder. Let me tell you, Montanans know how to treat their beef.

Oh, and both places had Cold Smoke (pretty much everywhere did, and I can understand why).

Sunday, July 9: This day was all about something I had looked forward to big-time: A float trip on the upper Missouri River. I wasnt disappointed; in fact the real thing surpassed my expectations by a long shot.

We used big tandem tubes that Sam and Robin had, with them in one and Harold and I in the other. We connected them with a rope so we could stay together, and plopped in at Mid Canon access, near Dearborn. After an entirely hassle-free float, we took out at Prewett Creek about four hours later.

This was the epitome of a great float. At this point in its cross-continent run, the Missouri is about two to three feet deep in most places, and about 100 yards wide or so. The water temperature was ideal, and it flowed incredibly consistently, with a current perfect for keeping a steady momentum.

Interstate 15 spans the Missouri River near Wolf Creek, Mont.

And the scenery is just breathtaking, with Rocky Mountain peaks and crags of dark volcanic basalt rising above the river, sometimes framed by huge mountains in the distance. We passed by dozens of fishermen angling for rainbow, brown and cutthroat trout with both fly rods and conventional gear, and saw a young man pull what had to be a 20-incher into the raft he and three other people were in.

Every time we went around a bend, Harold and I would look at each other and say, man, thats beautiful. On several occasions, we were like, I cant believe were doing this. We even saw a golden eagle standing by the shore working over a fish it had caught.

On the way back to town, we toured Holter Lake, a Missouri River reservoir where Sam and Robin like to go ice fishing in the cold months. They said the regularly haul in dozens of yellow perch (a fish similar to a walleye, and every bit as good to eat).

Mountains make up the landscape behind Holter Lake near Helena, Mont.

At one end of the lake, we went up a road that entered the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Departments Beartooth Wildlife Management Area. The views were spectacular, once again with that classic Montana look, with a huge expanse of grassy land flanked by high mountains. In one spot, you could turn around where you stood and see that view in one direction and a giant portion of Holter Lake in the other (of course, with Rocky Mountain peaks in the background).

Monday, July 10: Sam and Robin went back to work, but allowed Harold and I to use a vehicle for the day. Subsequently, our last day in Montana turned out to be like the rest: Amazing.

We basically took a road trip loop of about 120 miles that began with a stop at the Continental Divide in MacDonald Pass west of Helena. Not surprisingly, the views were magnificent; the kind that photos dont really do justice to.

The Houston Heralds Doug Davison stands on the steps of an old observation tower at the Continental Divide west of Helena Mont.

We continued on and went north into the mountains, and ended up alongside the pristine Blackfoot River (the stream where Brad Pitts fly fishing scenes were shot in the movie, A River runs Through It). We stopped in the small mountain town of Lincoln, which so happens to be where the epicenter of the earthquake was located. It was an attractive, charming place, surrounded by mountains and evergreen forests, and we agreed it seemed like the kind of town where we wouldnt mind having a cabin close by.

We turned back toward the east and headed once again for the Missouri River, this time to take a boat tour at Gates of the Mountains.

The place is yet another incredible natural wonder, with the river (another dammed portion above Hauser Lake) flowing between high cliffs of gray granite (some like 1,500-feet high) that form a deep canyon unlike any other I had ever seen. Its name was coined by Captain Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark fame, who navigated the upper Missouri while his partner, Second Lt. William Clark, took a more southerly route on the Yellowstone River.

The Canyon Voyager returns to the dock after taking passengers on a tour at Gates of the Mountains near Helena, Mont.

Lewis wrote that the spot where the river entered the canyon looked like a gateway to the mountains, as a large formation jutting out from the left side obscures the waterway (as if it ended right there) and then appears to open as a boat passes by. I cant begin to adequately describe how beautiful this place is.

Suffice it to say that theres nothing like it, and I was in awe the whole time as we motored along inside the Canyon Voyager, a high-tech twin-diesel engine vessel specially designed for its mission. And the boats captain was highly knowledgeable about the areas past, and told many interesting stories about the early residents who settled the canyon and men who began the boat tour many decades ago.

That night, Miss Robin took us to a few more eating and drinking establishments, but by then Harold and I were a couple of pretty worn out men.

Tuesday, July 11: I was ready to go home. I missed my wife, Wendy, and was well spent after we packed about three weeks worth of fun into six days.

Unfortunately, the day wasnt without its adventure. Our flight from Denver to Springfield was canceled, and somehow I was re-booked onto another flight that left at about the same time as the original one, but poor Harold was booked onto a flight that didnt depart until seven hours later.

The United Airlines customer service woman tried to explain, but what she said didnt really make sense.

Despite the squirrelly ending, we both felt we had been through a week to remember. Montana has several nicknames, including the Treasure State and Big Sky Country. But theres one I find most appropriate for this immense chunk of North America that supports barely over a million people and is as fine a showcase of Gods creation as youll find: The Last Best Place.
An astronomy buff and her fiance want to make sure nothing eclipses their Missouri wedding ceremony.

Samantha Adams told The Kansas City Star (http://bit.ly/2vqYs6r ) that her longtime fascination with the stars prompted her to schedule the ceremony for 12:30 p.m. on Aug. 21  during an extremely rare total solar eclipse.

I couldnt think of a more dreamlike wedding for myself, said Adams, 28, who has a tattoo of the space probe Voyager on her left arm.

The couples entire ceremony in St. Joseph, Missouri, will have an eclipse theme and every guest will be provided with a pair of solar glasses. During the wedding, the couple plans to watch the eclipse with their guests before taking their vows.

Adams fiance, Cameron Kuhn, 27, said hes happy to go along with the eclipse wedding because it makes his bride happy.

Adams once dreamed of becoming an astronaut, but multiple knee surgeries forced her to take a different path. She lives in Overland Park, Kansas and has a masters degree in industrial education.

The couple grew up in Platte City, Mo., a grade apart in school before they started dating while attending the University of Western Missouri.

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>By Francis MonfortOffice workers in Singapore spend the least time performing their primary duties, according to a global productivity study commissioned by enterprise systems provider Unit4.Respondents in Singapore spend only 60% of their time performing their roles primary functions, the least among the countries surveyed.In comparison, respondents in Norway spend 81% of their time on primary duties, the highest in the survey. Workers in Sweden followed closely at 78% and France at 76%.However, data also revealed that Singapore respondents spend the least time on repetitive administrative tasks among the workers surveyed. This translates into Singapores lowest administrative costs among the countries surveyed of only US$26.3bn.The service industry covered by the study saw the cost of lost productivity at more than US$5trn per year. Based on the study and official figures, the U.S. has the biggest annual administrative cost of US$2.87trn.Additionally, the study found that on average, office workers across all countries surveyed spend 552 hours a year, equivalent to about one-third of the working year, performing administrative or repetitive tasks.To compete effectively for talent in the future, service organizations will need to make systems automated and self-driving to ensure productivity, but also to help younger workers to better engage at work by delivering them a similar experience to what they are used to at home, said Stephan Sieber, CEO of Unit4.This will help them to feel they are spending their time on the right things, on their primary work and being effective. Left unchanged, the situation could be crippling for business, particularly services organizations who rely on the strengths and output of their people, he added.DJS Research conducted the study in April and May among office workers in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, Spain, France, Netherlands, Germany, Norway and Sweden.
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As South Koreas Boknal summer season, during which more than one million dogs are killed and eaten as a spicy soup, gets underway, Humane Society International has changed the grim fate of 149 dogs and new born puppies saved from the pot. Once destined to be sold to a nearby dog meat market to be killed by electrocution and butchered in time for the Boknal days, the fate of the dogs all changed when the dog meat farmer asked HSI to help him close his dog meat farm in rural Yesan.

The dogs are being flown to animals shelters and rescues in the United States to help them get a new life. Fifteen tiny puppies are too young to fly so will stay with their moms at a foster home until they can make the trip to the States. See below for a list of shelters receiving dogs from this rescue.

This is the ninth dog meat farm that HSI has permanently closed since 2014, rescuing and rehoming nearly 1,000 dogs by working in cooperation with dog meat farmers keen to get out of the trade. This latest farmer is considering a move into crop growing, and if so HSI will help him with a business plan. Other dog farmers who HSI has helped have moved into humane livelihoods like chili plant growing and water delivery.

The rescues and farm closures are part of HSIs broader strategy that aims to encourage the South Korean government to end the cruel dog meat industry.

Nara Kim, HSIs South Korea dog meat campaigner, said: With every dog meat farm we close, we are not only saving the lives of these poor, terrified dogs caught up in this cruel trade, but we are also presenting a successful blueprint for change that we hope the government will follow. Eating dog is a dying practice in Korea, especially among young people. However, the Boknal days of summer still lead many to eat dog meat soup in the mistaken belief that it will invigorate the blood in the sluggish heat. Our campaign shows them the disgusting conditions in which the dogs are forced in live in their own feces, and their pitiful suffering, and it is changing hearts and minds.

Help us fight the dog meat trade.

More than 2.5 million dogs a year are reared on thousands of dog meat farms across South Korea. The farm in Yesan is a typical dog meat farm with row upon row of bored, frustrated, frightened dogs in barren metal cages, many with injuries and deep pressure sores. For example, Emily is a beautiful young mastiff-cross suffering from painful skin diseases and swollen paws. HSI found her cowering in her cage, too afraid to lift her head or make eye contact. Angel is a 4-month-old puppy who has been kept in lonely isolation, so desperate for company she leapt into the arms of our HSI team when they first opened her rusty cage.

Opposition to the dog meat trade is growing among Korean citizens and politicians, and even the newly elected President Moon Jae-in recently adopted a dog named Tory who was rescued from a dog meat farm.

Kim says: Some people say that dog eating is Korean culture, but you wont find many young people who feel its a cultural habit we want to hold on to. Its intellectually lazy to use culture as an excuse for cruelty because all cultures evolve over time and we often shed practices of the past. We are hopeful that things will change, and that the new Korean president will advance a new culture of compassion to animals. I am so happy that for these dogs the dog meat trade is over, but we have to fight on for the millions who are still suffering.

Across the summer, HSI is taking its campaign to the streets of Seoul to raise awareness. An eye-catching advertising poster featuring Korean-American actor Daniel Henney recently launched on the Seoul subway, and next the charity will invite Seouls citizens to experience the grim reality of dog farm life for themselves by trying out their iDog virtual reality experience. The charity is also running a petition in English and Korean with campaign partners Korean Animal Rights Advocates.

Facts:

The Boknal days are not a festival or single event, but the three hottest days of summer according to the lunar calendar, falling on July 12 (Cho Bok), July 22 (Jung Bok) and Aug. 11 (Mal Bok).

During the Boknal days, 70-80 percent of dog meat is eaten in South Korea, mainly as a peppery soup called bosintang that is believed to improve stamina and virility.

Most people in South Korea never visit a dog meat farm and are unaware of the suffering experienced by the dogs. HSI is keen to dispel the widespread misconception that farmed dogs are somehow different in nature to companion dogs.

In addition to their life of suffering on the farm, the method used to kill the dogs is brutal  death by electrocution is most common, with dogs usually taking up to five minutes to die, although there have been instances of dogs taking up to 20 minutes to die. Hanging is also common. Dogs are killed in full view of the other dogs, and their final moments will be terrifying and extremely painful.

The dog meat industry is in legal limbo in South Korea, neither legal nor illegal. Many provisions of the Animal Protection Act are routinely breached, such as the ban on killing animals in a brutal way including hanging by the neck, killing in public areas or in front of other animals of the same species.

In China, Vietnam, Nagaland in India and other places across Asia an estimated 30 million dogs are brutally killed and eaten each year. However, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore have dog meat bans in place.

At each dog meat farm closure, HSI has a veterinarian test for the presence of the H3N2, or dog flu, virus at the time the dogs receive their rabies, DHPP, and corona virus vaccines. HSI then quarantines the dogs on the farm or at a temporary shelter with no dogs in or out for at least 30 days prior to transport to the US.

For more information visit hsi.org/dogmeat

Media contacts:

UK: Wendy Higgins: whiggins@hsi.org, +44 (0)7989 972 423

US: Raul Arce-Contreras, rcontreras@humanesociety.org, +1-301-721-6440

South Korea: Nara Kim, nkim@hsi.org

Note: Below is a list of HSUS Emergency Placement Partner shelters receiving dogs from this latest rescue. The dogs are being transported on various days in the coming weeks; please check their websites for dog arrival and adoption information.

Florida:

Humane Society of Sarasota County, Sarasota, Fla.

Leon County Humane Society, Tallahassee, Fla.

Illinois:

Magnificent Mutts, Hillside, Ill.

Indiana:

Humane Society of Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Ind.

New Jersey:

St. Huberts Animal Welfare Center, Madison, N.J.

New York:

Animal Haven, New York City

Pennsylvania:

South Hills Pet Rescue, South Park, Pa.

Virginia:

Lynchburg Humane Society, Lynchburg, Va.

Wisconsin:

Elmbrook Humane Society, Brookfield, Wis.

Humane Animal Welfare Society (HAWS), Waukesha, Wis.

Northwoods Humane Society, Hayward, Wis.

Sheboygan County Humane Society, Sheboygan, Wis.

Washington County Humane Society, Slinger, Wis.

In addition to our shelter and rescue partners, we are grateful to the Pittsburgh Aviation Animal Rescue Team (PAART), which provided transport to Pennsylvania.
Dan Kitwood via Getty Images

I have a thing about bad behaviour in public places. Yesterday, whist on the underground, I told a young chap after he'd adjusted his trousers so more of his underpants were visible, that it would be better for all of us if he pulled them back up. That shocked him.

We have become too tolerant of bad behaviour from people who should know better, in my view. So I'm glad the Prime Minister decided to tackle what's been going on behind her back. Not for her sake, but for everyone else's.

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It's safe to say that Theresa May will not be remembered as a brilliant politician, but what she has going for her is a great sense of duty and public service. And don't knock it as some consolation prize. Right now, it's what the country needs.

The last 12 months in politics has been about 'outsiders'. From Trump and Sanders in the US, Macron and Le Pen in France, to Jeremy Corbyn here, 'outsiders' have been winning and attracting support. Mrs May has never been an 'outsider', but early on in the minds of voters, she was definitely not a "business as usual politician". And they considered that a very good thing.

Her handling of Brexit up to the time of triggering Article 50, together with her empathetic speech on arrival at Number 10, made her seem like a breath of fresh air. Through her actions she displayed the kind of characteristics voters now only associate with 'outsiders': sincerity and selflessness.

Now of course, those of us who are already members of a political tribe or political commentators might question whether any of the politicians listed above are actually sincere and selfless. But in this context, what we think doesn't matter. Floating voters are drawn to 'outsiders' because in their view, and unlike traditional politicians, they share the same understanding of what's right and are prepared to stand up for it and back everyone else who does to. Successful outsiders are able to demonstrate sincerely that they are not 'in it' for themselves.

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It's a sad indictment on other politicians but - fairly or unfairly - that's what makes these non-politicians seem different and fresh. And, it's what earns them the right to speak and be heard and why they enjoy their supporters' loyalty.

To a lot of people's huge disappointment during the election campaign, Mrs May stopped being a 'breath of fresh air' and became another politician, and not a very good one when she made a u-turn but then claimed it wasn't a u-turn. That's when some of her support turned to Jeremy Corbyn, the only 'outsider' in the race.

We all know what happened next. This Hung Parliament means the country now feels even more unstable. And it's made all the more worse because the Brexit negotiations are underway and the clock is ticking.

The only good news is that Mrs May has decided to ditch any pretence of remaining a politician for the long-term and instead re-found her inner public servant and sense of duty when the country needs it most. The bad news is, at a time when the nation needs all its politicians to do the same, she seems to be on her own.

The Cabinet plotters and their supporters seem to think all this public service stuff is admirable in others, but not more important than self-serving clever politics. Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters are allowing hubris to jeopardise his status as a non-politician and laughing at the Prime Minister's invitation to help. And Tony Blair and others who voice legitimate concerns about getting Brexit right are so discombobulated by recent results they've decided what's needed now is to insist they were right all along and to educated the voters on why they are wrong.

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What's so frustrating is that all of these people and the groups they represent would be in a much stronger position to achieve their aims if they got together with the Prime Minister in the national and public interest for the next couple of years to deliver Brexit. More worrying is what risks happening if they continue behaving as they are: more instability and disruption whenever voters get the chance to go to the polls.

If we stopped and thought about it for the shortest of times, it would be obvious. Why should we expect others to change their pattern of behaviour which is designed to shock us into action, if we haven't changed ours?

It's hard to say all this without sounding like some kind of Prefect or Pollyanna, but last summer was the moment when voters took back control for themselves, not for us, and made a decision. Yes, 48% didn't vote for it - but I'd happily bet that all the Remainers who work hard, try to do the right thing, but don't feel supported by the rest of us more prosperous than them, would still like us to change our ways so they feel more sure we're 'in it' for them. For many Leavers, Brexit isn't about Europe but a way of showing their frustration at being misunderstood, not taken seriously, and having little opportunity to contribute and succeed in a world so distant from their own. Leaving the European Union is a means to change, not an end in itself.

The only way any political party will succeed in the future will be by respecting that and working with their opponents to create a new system which is and feels more inclusive. Debates about hard, soft, single market, customs union, ECJ - these are process issues which perpetuate 'exclusivity' and the sense to those outside them that what they want doesn't matter.

Whereas, if we shift the focus to what needs to change and how we can use Brexit to make that happen - including how we behave in exercising power - we stand a better chance of building people's confidence for things like transition periods and so on. In other words, it won't seem like these things we keep arguing about are ways of not doing what the voters have decided needs to happen.

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Just as importantly, changing our behaviours will reset politics so that, in future, voters do not believe the only candidates they can trust are the outsiders who, more often than not, are the ones with the extreme views.

Tony Blair concluded his recent essay thus: "Politics today are volatile and unpredictable. In these times, best hold to what you believe. The centre may appear marginalised; but in the hearts and minds of many, it simply needs to be renewed. Brexit makes this renewal urgent."

I would argue that what those of us in positions of responsibility in all parties and none - together with leaders in other fields - have to understand is this: Brexit is the route to renewal chosen for us by those who feel most let down and who most want things to change.

In these times, we owe it to them and everyone else to get it right.
Egypt's agricultural exports rose 12.1 percent during the first half of 2017, reaching 3.5 million tonnes compared to 3.1 million last year, agriculture ministry spokesman Hamid Abdel Dayim said on Wednesday.

Egypt's agricultural exporters have seen a surge in demand since the country floated its currency last November, allowing it to roughly halve in value as part of reforms tied to a three-year $12 billion International Monetary Fund loan agreement.

Exports increased in citrus, potatoes, grapes, and strawberries, and fell only for onions, Dayim said.

The export growth comes after a turbulent year for Egyptian produce, with a Hepatitis A scare in North America linked to Egyptian strawberries and a temporary ban of Egyptian fruits and vegetables in Russia, one of Cairo's major buyers.

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When it comes to being a good mum there is a very definite list of rules. Only no one tells you these. You get to find out these for yourself at the same time as you learn what the hell to do with this baby you just produced that didn't come with a manual, and seems intent on doing the exact opposite of what the baby books said.

Here's a heads up for the rules on how to be a good mother

1 Feed Your Child The Correct Foods

All future failings of your child will be blamed on whether or not they were breastfed. It goes on the university applications.

You must only ever feed them homemade organic wholesome food. Beige food is bad. All meals must be made into smiley faces or cute animals to encourage your child to eat the 100% organic, no added flavour couscous you have lovingly prepared for them.

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2 Enjoy Every Moment

You must enjoy every moment of parenting. Cherish them in fact. If you are not enjoying the sleepless nights, mountains of laundry, vomit, poo, tantrums, whining, and asking your kids to put their shoes on 39 times every single morning, you are not normal. Everyone else is enjoying every single second. Why aren't you? What is wrong with you?

Children are a blessing. You must never complain about any aspect of parenting, or anything your child does. This means you do not love your children. Do not joke about selling your kids on eBay as this means you do not deserve them and you are the worst parent ever.

3 Do Not Give Your Children Screen Time

TV is bad. Only terrible parents allow their kids to watch television. It doesn't matter that there are wonderful educational programs that encourage your child's development and learning. TV should never ever be used as a babysitter in order for you to get shit done. The correct thing to do is to enlist your child's help when cleaning the kitchen, where they will happily mop the floor and not attempt to empty the entire contents of the cupboards. If you have a baby just do the housework whilst the child naps. This may contradict the other rule about sleeping when the baby sleeps.

4 Accept That You Can't Win

When your child has a contagious illness you keep them at home for a specified amount of time so as not to spread their disease onto other children. Your child will be punished for missing a week of school due to having chickenpox by not receiving an attendance certificate and bring a letter home to patronise you about their attendance. Even when you follow the rules for being a good mother, you will still be a bad mother.

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5 Milestones Are Crucial To Your Success

You should never allow your child to reach milestones at their own pace. Every child should be on the exact same path and develop at the exact same rate. They must walk by the time they are 1, speak French by age 3, and be able to tell you what a compound noun phrase is at age 7. If they don't reach these milestones at the time dictated you are not a good mother.

6 Do Not Enjoy Things Without Your Children

Once you become a parent you are no longer allowed to have fun without your children. Respectable mothers do not enjoy a girls' night out. Good mothers do not drink gin or Prosecco. Decent mothers stay at home with their children and do not need time to themselves to recharge. A good mother knows that her children should be everything she needs to be a complete person.

7 Never Trust Your Own Instincts

If you can still hear your instincts over all the opinions on how you should be parenting, don't listen to them. They are wrong. There will always be an expert or complete stranger that absolutely knows your child better than you do. You are just their mother. You are not an expert in anything. The expert may not know your child's favourite food, the best tickle spot, what they need to get them to sleep, how to turn their tears into laughter, or who their favourite Paw Patrol pup is, but they always know better than you and your silly instincts.

Of course these rules are nonsense. Unless you read the Daily Mail who would have you believe that they are all true, that you are completely failing as a parent, and that you are not a good mother. Do not read the Daily Mail. Ever. No good can come of it. Make your own rules. You've got this.
Jack Taylor via Getty Images

#Imwithnoel

I spent last Friday enjoying a wonderful boat trip from Westminster Pier beyond Greenwich and back again. It was a lovely sunny day and there was great food to eat. I met some other wheelies too and it was good to swap stories.

But, this wasn't just a "jolly". The purpose of the boat trip was to support Noel Conway's wish to die with dignity at a time of his choosing.

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Dignity in Dying chartered the boat to raise awareness of Noel's forthcoming High Court case. The boat was adorned with banners, and several hundred passengers held placards. We shouted our support for Noel, in front of the Houses of Parliament. This was to remind MPs that 82% of the public support the choice of assisted dying for terminally ill adults.

Noel Conway is a 67-year-old retired college lecturer from Shropshire. He was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a form of motor neurone disease in 2014. His condition is incurable and he is not expected to live beyond the next 12 months. Noel feels that he is prevented from exercising his right to choice and control over his death under the current law. He fears that without a change in the law he may be forced to suffer against his wishes.

I've never nursed someone with ALS but I have nursed people with Motor Neurone Disease. This is a cruel illness with basically ends with someone drowning from the secretions in their lungs. The person I remember most was Dougie. He was the Charge Nurse on the second ward I worked on during my training. He taught me so much about how to be a good nurse, which I have never forgotten. But I've also never forgotten nursing him until he died, during my final year of training.

Dougie, like many nurses was not an easy patient. He would allow you to care for him once and if you didn't meet his high standards he would make sure you never gave him routine care again. I passed the test, and spent many hours trying to keep him comfortable and pain free. Dougie has to be moved carefully and slowly so we could ensure he did not develop pressure sores. Despite the morphine he received he was still in pain. Moving him on to his side made it much harder for him to breathe.

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I had been caring for him for about two weeks when I had a long weekend, four days, off duty. When I went in to see him that Thursday night, he touched my hand longer than usual and rasped "Thanks for everything, bye". I tried telling him I would see him again in five days, but he just shock his head.

When I returned to the ward, Dougie's room was empty. I spoke to the Ward Sister about how Dougie somehow knew he was going to die. She told me that many patients know when they are going to die. Dougie was perceptive as ever. The Ward Sister also told me that Dougie had had a good death, he was pain free and he died peacefully. I shed some tears with my colleagues. I was also thankful that I was part of the ward staff who enabled him to die gently. It's that knowledge that has lead me to understand and support what Noel is asking for.

I know from other experiences I had, especially on busy wards, that it is not always possible to give people a good, pain free death. Even if there is great medical and nursing care, sometimes we cannot control distressing symptoms at the end of a patient's life well enough.

I'm very aware that I too, at some point in the future will get to the stage when the doctors can do no more for the conditions I have. I don't want my children and grandchildren, or my partner seeing me suffering, struggling to breathe or being in unbearable pain. I know already from the close brushes I've had, that the feeling of being unable to breathe is terrifying.

I want to have a good death, I also want to choose when that moment will be. This is why I'm supporting Noel Conway. His lawyers are in the High Court this week, asking for him to be able to die when he chooses. Noel's plea is for him, and him alone to be given that option.

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This is not about the beginning of euthanasia for disabled people. This is not the start of a slippery slope. This is not about coercing disabled people to die. It is about enabling people to have a choice. We can refuse further treatment for an illness, we can refuse to take medication. Those are choices we are allowed. Why are we not permitted a choice about the way we die?

I don't have the money to go to Dignitas in Switzerland. Even if I did, why should I have to travel abroad to die?

I understand and respect that not everyone feels the same as I do, as Noel does. I know some people would not want that choice themselves. That's fine. But please do not prevent or interfere with Noel making his choice. He is making that choice as a rational person, who has considered his situation carefully.

I hope Noel will be allowed his choice. That is a decision solely for the High Court Judges. I'm with Noel, because I believe he has the right to ask for his choice to be respected.
This Saturday, my local LGBT families community in Berkshire will come together to celebrate Pride. I'm part of a group of around 20 same-sex couples with children who wanted to throw our own party to celebrate this important event because we were unable to make the main event this year. As anyone with a family will know, getting tiny people out and onto a tube into central London is not easy!

I feel so lucky to have a supportive network around me alongside my family. We find a lot of people in our local community are keen for their kids to fully embrace diversity, so want to get involved in a supporting allies programme. That's great not only for us, as it means we have an excellent support network, but also great for our kids as it gives them a trusted circle of peers and family friends to rely on as they grow up.

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It's been over a year since I came back to work after taking seven months of Shared Parental Leave to be at home with my wife after she gave birth to our daughter, Lexi. The close bond I have with Lexi is in no small part due to the quality time I was able to spend with her at the beginning of her life. When we started planning to have a family, I was determined to make sure I found a solution with my employer Accenture, and was so excited to see how the firm developed its generous Shared Parental Leave policy.

I will never forget those first few weeks after the birth. It can be quite an isolating time for a new mother and I'm glad I was able to be there to support Taryn, not only in looking after Lexi but also by helping to keep our home running smoothly, doing errands and cooking meals - something I feel all partners should have the opportunity to do.

I'd originally planned to take three months off, because I was keen to get back into the office and continue to build my career. But my senior leadership team really encouraged me to take longer and make the most of the Shared Parental Leave policy, so I ended up having seven months off. It was a huge surprise when my boss called me about a month after Lexi arrived to tell me I was being promoted. In the midst of long nights and nappy changing, I'd completely forgotten about my review!

Knowing that my decision to take some time out to be with my family hadn't impacted on my career progression was a huge relief and something that continues to reflect what I and my colleagues believe a supportive workplace should look and feel like. When I first came back to the office, I decided to use the annual leave I had accrued to take Mondays off and work part-time, to ease the transition back to work. My senior leadership made it clear I should take the first few months to find my feet again and I used the time to network as much as possible. Now that I'm fully immersed into projects, I try to work from home at least one day a week - it helps to ensure I can do the bath and bed time routine with Lexi a few times a week.

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I'm very aware that I was lucky to have such a supportive employer. But I believe there are some steps every new parent can take to help manage their work/life balance. Firstly, I'd really recommend having a conversation about flexible working as soon as possible. For example, one of my friends who has young children will start work at 7:00am so she can leave early to do bath time.

It's also really important to switch off as much as possible when you walk through the door - logging off emails for a few hours to have quality time with your children and partner helps you unwind and ultimately be more productive as a colleague. Maybe unsurprisingly the time and demands a toddler put on you are an excellent way to switch off very quickly! I often log on to wrap things up later on in the evening, once Lexi is in bed, rather than try to rush through everything before I leave the office, ensuring I am still productive.

Every day there are so many tiny changes in Lexi's development and it can sometimes be hard missing out on things like hearing her say a new word. But I treasure the time my wife and I had together as a family whilst I was on Shared Parental Leave and I'll continue to be as hands on as possible as she grows up. I'm a passionate advocate of flexible working with my team and I'm so pleased that one of my colleagues has decided to take Shared Parental Leave to be with his wife, after seeing the positive impact it has had on my personal development and my career.
For more than a month now, the two million people in the Gaza Strip have endured severe electricity shortages. Electricity is only available for up to three hours a day. Life in the Gaza Strip has reached new levels of hardship. It is the hottest time of year. Basic services, such as sewage disposal are inoperable due to the lack of power. Lives are at risk due to the higher risk of disease and the inability of hospitals to function adequately. Everyday life tasks such as cooking, washing, laundry as well as working and going to school have all become more difficult.

The immediate trigger for the current crisis is the Palestinian Authority's effort to isolate its rival Hamas in Gaza by refusing to pay for Israeli electricity supplies to the territory. Gaza has its own power station but this is dependent on diesel imported from Israel or Egypt. Both countries obstruct the imports and combat smuggling. In any case, the power station cannot meet all of Gaza's electricity needs. The Hamas administration in Gaza does not have the financial resources to pay for the diesel, even if it was allowed to import it.

This is a crisis that has been years in the making. Its origins stretch back to before the blockade imposed after then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005 ordered a unilateral withdrawal of Israeli security forces and settlers from the Strip. The blockade does not help the situation. It has made the supply of diesel erratic at best and prevented investment in the transmission grid or other parts of the power generation system.

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The irony is that the Gaza Strip could be self sufficient in energy and even be an energy exporter. It is not going to become the next Kuwait or Qatar but is does have a share of the immense natural gas resources found in the region since the start of the century. In 2000, the then FTSE 100 listed gas company BG Group drilled two wells around 36 kilometres from the Gazan coast and found around 1 trillion cubic feet of gas. This is not a huge resource but would be sufficient to meet Gaza's needs and provide a surplus for export.

The Gaza Marine gas field remains developed. The gas remains under the seabed. It would have taken between three and four years to design and install the facilities to produce the gas and pipe it to shore. A combination of political and commercial factors have kept the gas under the sea and prevented development. BG Group announced the Gaza Marine discovery on 28 September 2000. The next day, 29 September, Ariel Sharon made his provocative visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The resulting protests triggered the second Intifada. The political backdrop became more difficult following Hamas' victory in the January 2006 Palestinian elections and its subsequent assumption of power in Gaza.

On the commercial front, the main issues were finding a large enough market for the gas and agreeing a fair price for the gas. While the Gaza Strip was one market for the gas, there was insufficient gas demand to underpin the costs of developing the field which run to several hundred million dollars. The Gaza power station was (and remains) the only large scale gas consumer. The World Bank in May 2007 recommended converting it to use gas. Even so, it would only account for 10-15% of the potential production from Gaza Marine, leaving 85% of the gas for export and to earn much needed revenues for the Palestinian economy.

When gas was first discovered off Gaza, the other obvious market was Israel itself. At the time, it had sufficient long term demand to meet the field development costs. Israel was committed to converting its power stations to gas and encouraging new entrants to the sector. Its own gas production was declining (its own large discoveries were still to come). However, the Israelis were demanding a low price and commercial negotiations with BG finally broke down in December 2007. This was after BG had also taken a serious look at exporting the gas to Egypt for onward export to world markets. In 2006, the Israeli government directly intervened to ask the British government to persuade BG to return to negotiating with Israel.

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There were other factors at play that have also prevented the Gaza Marine field from being developed. There was rarely 100% commitment from all the participants all the time to make progress on the project. After 2007, BG's interest in developing the field waned as it became a less material part of its portfolio and there were easier prizes to go after. The Palestinian National Authority (PNA), who had awarded the licence in 1999 always seemed reluctant to really push for agreement. The PNA was worried about the political price the Israelis would ask it to pay to allow the project to go ahead. They were also concerned about internal criticism that whatever deal they reached would not be good enough.

Agreement on Gaza Marine would have been a win for everyone. Gaza residents would have gained access to a reliable energy supply, the PNA would have gained revenue for economic development, Israel would have gained access to more gas at a time in need it and BG would have made a return on its investment.

The lack of agreement means that everyone loses. Insufficient energy has contributed to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israel continues to face the threats from an unstable situation and criticism for its policy towards Gaza, the PNA does not have the revenue stream and BG was left with a stranded asset.
Danny Lawson/PA Wire

What on earth is Katie Hopkins doing?

No, not just "what" is she doing in terms of saying something outrageous (again) - part of her modus operandi to drive traffic - but in this case, why is she fraternising with far-right extremists and Holocaust deniers down in the Mediterranean and re-sharing their content on social media?

And why is the MailOnline happy to give her a platform to do so?

I'm referring to a series of articles Ms Hopkins plans to write from the Mediterranean this week about the refugee crisis. This is the same former Apprentice star who wrote in The Sun in 2015 that "I'd use gunships to stop migrants".

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Some context - Italy has been struggling to cope with increased numbers of migrants and refugees landing on its shores, as the focus switches to Libya as the main route for refugees and migrants to reach Europe across the Mediterranean.

Over 2,500 people have drowned on this migration route this year alone (more than 5,000 last year), as the Turkish route shrinks to a trickle, thanks to a deal between the EU and Turkey to return those arriving in Greece.

Apparently incensed by what they view as 'taxi services' they claim humanitarian NGOs are providing to drowning people, far-right activists in the guise of a group called 'Defend Europe' have managed to crowd-fund close to 200,000 and charter a 422-tonne vessel to block and harass these NGOs.

Defend Europe is comprised of far-right 'Identitiarians', a network of young European extremists with large social media followings and a history of direct action stunts. The media often give them a soft ride, claiming they are 'far-right hipsters', but they are anything but 'cuddly'.

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They've clambered up the Brandenburg Gate and National Theatre in Vienna to display banners with phrases such as "Secure Borders Secure Future"; occupied mosques; blockaded roads around the Calais Jungle; disrupted plays put on by refugee actors; and clashed on the streets with leftist demonstrators.

Make no mistake, though - despite their appearances and glib talk of protecting European culture and identity, and "remigration" of refugees, Muslims and immigrants - in reality they hold deeply anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views and, in many cases, have links to notorious far-right groups as well as being actively supported by white supremacists worldwide, including former KKK leader (and infamous antisemite) David Duke and many alt-right activists in the USA.

How did Ms Hopkins react to Defend Europe's hiring of a boat (owned by a convicted fraudster) and entering into the Mediterranean with, it claimed in its early postings, the expressed aim of 'blocking' NGO ships?

She retweeted one its tweets and one of its banners and said she was looking forward to meeting its crew in Sicily.

Then pictures surfaced on social media showing that Hopkins had already met with Peter Sweden in Sicily. Sweden is a so-called journalist who has previously tweeted antisemitic and Holocaust denying statements. A veteran politician, Filip Dewinter, from the far-right Flemish Block (which has links to Nazi collaboration in World War Two) is aboard the C-Star, Defend Europe's chartered ship, which may also have armed guards on board.

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We have profiled other key Identitarian leaders who are likely to be on the ship, including Martin Sellner from Austria, Daniel Fi from Germany (who has links to the anti-Muslim street movement, PEGIDA, and is a former member of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party) and the French Identitarian leader, Clement Galant, whose group released a fairly extreme video in 2013.
Do our cities have the people they need to thrive in a tech-enabled future? A number of conversations recently have bought home to me the importance of having smart technology skills in city administrations.

We all know waves of technology change are crashing over us. As VC firm Andreessen Horowitz say, 'Software programs the world'. As chips continue to drop in price, they will be embedded in everything, and all these things will be networked. Soon, they argue, the whole world will be programmable.

Digital technologies will shape how city administrations interact with citizens, how they deliver services, and how they enable new companies to grow. City leaders I talk to know that this digital future is upon us. But most are still not investing enough in the people and facilities they need to harness these technologies.

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Of course, there are high profile exceptions. In New York, the Mayor's Office of Data Analytics is a civic intelligence centre that allows the city to aggregate and analyse data from across agencies, to more effectively address crime, public services, and quality of life. In Amsterdam, the redoubtable Ger Baron works as Chief Technology Officer to lead their smart city efforts. While in Singapore, the new GovTech Agency is deploying the Smart Nation Platform to help public agencies deploy sensors, collect data, and use analytics to run the city more efficiently.

But what about the next tier down of cities, the smaller places that don't have global cachet, that face tough budget cuts, that lack tech-savvy staff, that are fighting to deliver the daily priorities?

A UK government official said to me a while ago: 'If this is smart agenda is so amazing, cities will do it themselves anyway. They shouldn't need any central Government support'.

This ignores the fact that there is not a perfect market, with economically rational actors. It ignores the fact that local authorities are often populated at the senior levels with a pre-digital generation. And it ignores the fact that city administrations can't know what they don't know.

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As Theo Blackwell, London Borough of Camden says in his recent report 'the Start of the Possible' local councillors are not 'digital dinosaurs'. They mostly hold positive views about technology, automation and data and how public services can benefit from them. However, digital is not usually led by the very top decision makers in local councils, and there is thirst for councils to be better supported to understand more about technology and transformation.

If they are left behind, administrations may miss opportunities to proactively shape the future. They will find their cities changed under their noses. Uber will decide how people move, AirBnB will shape the property market, and a myriad of companies will swallow up and profit from the city's data.

So what should be the response?

First, invest in digital skills. I know local authorities face painful cuts, but digital should be a core part of how they respond and reshape for the future. Recruit a senior person with responsibility, co-opt a trusted advisor, appoint experts to the LEP. London is currently following other global cities in hiring a Chief Digital Officer. Belfast is implementing a Smart Belfast Framework, further investing in its team, and launching a 'Smart Belfast Collaborative Challenge' to harness start-up expertise.

Second, share learning and resources. There's some great sharing of best practice and intelligence already through the Local Government Association, Core Cities Group and the Scottish Cities Alliance. And cities are also starting to share human resource. Twenty-seven Scottish local authorities have joined forces to appoint a chief digital officer and chief technology officer to drive digital transformation. The Greater London Authority and London councils are considering setting up a London Office of Technology and Innovation to co-ordinate their innovation efforts.

Third, universities can help. They are a major employer, a big property developer, a deep well of intellectual capacity, and a source of continuity through perennial changes in city administrations. UK Universities are increasingly engaging in their host cities. Two of the preeminent examples are how Professor Enrico Motta of the Open University helped drive MKSmart in Milton Keynes, and how Mark Tewdr Jones of Newcastle University is galvanising Newcastle City Futures.

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Finally, Central Government should act to support capabilities, rather than wait for the market or city collaboration to deliver. If there aren't people to act as intelligent clients for smart city technology, the private sector won't solve the problem. And as cities are increasingly asked to compete, there is a risk that the leading players will want to maintain their advantage rather than share. Whitehall could support training, help fund Chief Digital Officers, and more proactively support digital transformation through city deals and further devolution.
We've come a long way as a society on fighting mental illness. There used to be a time, and maybe there still is in large parts of the world, where depression or anxiety were seen as forms of weakness. They were never taken seriously, never looked at as an illness but just failings on your character make-up.

The idea that money can wash away sadness, or that behind a smiling face isn't a world of pain, got shattered I think by the suicide of Robin Williams. Materialism isn't linked to happiness, it can only buy you distractions. There's this story where someone goes to see a doctor and says they're feeling depressed. The doctor turns around and tells him that a comedian is performing that night and he might feel cheered up if he goes and watches, to which, the patient replies that he is the comedian.

But though we have come a long way, there is still so much to do. On a wider, political level, it's about recognising that mental health is both linked to material insecurity and yet not resolved by material security. Social pressures undoubtedly contribute to mental illness, especially on young children experiencing peer pressure and suffering a deep identity crisis.

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For those who suffer from mental illness, understanding what they're going through is the first part of the problem. The second is finding people to talk to. We live in a world where the word "depressed" becomes used to explain feelings related to the mundane everyday experiences rather than a deeper, more serious illness. And the sympathy of people can be limited; after a while there is an expectation on those with mental illness to simply move past their issues. This after all isn't an illness you can visibly see.

Particularly within Muslim South Asian communities, mental illness is dismissed because supposedly all prayers can cure sadness. Depression is regarded as a lack of faith. The low energy and motivation to do anything, the distancing from the things you love, become seen as signs of weak faith. You're told that maybe you're being possessed by evil supernatural spirits, and you're not allowed to scoff at this because you're supposed to believe in this stuff. Within the Muslim world, there are massive cultural barriers regarding mental illness and the scale of how it affects British Asians is not yet fully appreciated by wider society. There are numerous stories within South Asian communities where those suffering from anxiety or paranoia are seen as under supernatural influence, and in addition to being shamed by their family, are subjected to often terrible treatments. No one wants to be seen as having a shortage of faith, yet bubbling underneath remains a growing sadness that, try as we might, a prayer simply won't fix.

Mental illness has been worse for women as there is a huge stigma attached to it. Many have simply been shut off from talking about it, either out of fear of being seen as possessed or what it does for their marriage prospects. A good marriage doesn't simply reflect on them but the family, bringing into the equation, ideas of family honour which is an important tenet in the Muslim and wider South Asian culture. The pressures that family honour create contribute massively to mental illness if it means that women remain trapped in abusive or unhappy marriages to spare their families the apparent shame of divorce. A single mother is seen as a stain on someone else's honour, and those who wish to leave can be threatened into staying. It's also unsurprising that most stories within Muslim families of demonic possession often involve a female victim.

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But across wider society, depression is one of the biggest killers of men because the image of masculinity, of ignoring pain, of repressing issues, mean that men bottle feelings up rather than discuss them. "The Office for National Statistics published a report covering the years from 2001 to 2013, showing that suicide among men has reached its highest levels since the early Eighties, rising sharply in 2007 and hitting a peak in 2013." We don't talk about it; we're told to "man up", and that crying is for girls. So we keep it quiet, right up until to the moment some of us can't take it anymore. Depression amongst men is linked to our understandings of masculinity, of patriarchy and feminism. From a young age, boys aren't taught to accept they have feelings, but just made to bury it. We regard feelings and emotions, sadness and grief as feminine concepts and therefore alien to us. And so when young men are forced to handle grief or a difficult period in their life, they simply do not know how to cope with it because society has wired into them a fixed mentality that to talk about issues is to act like a woman. Which is of course, seen as a bad thing. This literally kills.

We need to be a society where those with mental health issues feel confident enough to come forward and discuss their problems, rather than being blamed for either being weak or faithless. Ignoring mental illness simply abandons those suffering from it to lonely, awful lives.
Saturday saw the first ever LGBTI Pride take place on the Isle of Wight, that diamond-shaped bit off the south coast of England. And if you weren't there, you missed a treat. Here's why.

1 Diversity

Considering the Isle of Wight is characterised as being something of a retirement home, and the 2011 census found almost 95% of the population identifying as 'White British', the diversity in evidence on Saturday was really encouraging. Thousands of young people came out, and lots of older people too. I saw more BAME people than I expected, and quite a lot of people with disabilities too. It was fantastic to see the Parade led by young people wearing trans flags, too.

There was lots of diversity on stage. Gender diversity was excellent and there were bi and trans speakers and performers alongside acts including La Voix, Horse McDonald and The Freemasons.

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2 Parade

The Parade was huge - and it was probably the biggest Parade I've ever seen at an inaugural Pride. Groups included the fire service, Sainsbury's, the Labour Party and lots more. I was privileged to be in the open top bus at the front of the Parade - and as we reached the bottom of the hill, and looked back, there were people as far as the eye could see. I wasn't the only one with a tear in my eye and goosebumps on my neck.

3 High Street crowds

The Parade had assembled on a school playing field and, as we left, a few people lined the back streets at the start of the route. Again, there were young people and older people, families, people in work uniforms, and people sat drinking Prosecco. But as we reached the high street, the crowds were several people deep, and the long straight hill down to the seafront was lined with thousands of people. They were hanging from windows, sat in shop doorways, and stood at the side of the road. They danced, they cheered, they clapped.

4 Ferries and Hovercraft

Whether you use the ferry, hovercraft or catamaran, you can't get to the Isle of Wight without crossing water and it was fantastic to see the operators supporting Pride. The hovercraft - which lands on the beach right next to the Pride stage - even replaced the union flags on the side with the Isle of Wight Pride logo. Which was nice, especially as it blew sand all over us.

5 Families

It's always heart-warming to see families at Pride events. It shows just how far we've come in the last few years. There are families with two mums and some with two dads. There are trans parents. And mixed gender parents which, by the way, doesn't indicate 'straight' - one or both could be bisexual. These families were in the Parade, dancing at the stage, strolling around the community stalls, and everywhere else across the Pride event.

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6 The colour-in Police car

In what is definitely the best example I've ever seen of the police engaging with their local communities, Hampshire Constabulary's lesbian and gay liaison officers (LAGLOs) took their specially sign-written Ford SUV to Isle of Wight Pride. The design on the car includes lots of landmarks from across Hampshire, and at each Pride event they go to, they invite local children to colour in the black-and-white graphic. Every time I walked past the car, it was surrounded by children enthusiastically Sharpie-ing its panels.

7 It was political

Peter Tatchell talked about the current anti-LGBTI abuses in Chechnya, and mentioned Uganda. Linda Riley talked about hate crime and the homophobic DUP propping up the government. I talked about the importance of Pride in creating a sense of community. Other speakers included trans campaigner Justine Smithies and author and poet Sally Edwards. Stonewall and Amnesty and political parties had stalls. I loved the political element to Isle of Wight Pride, and it was great to see so much grassroots political activity too.

8 It was on a beach

It wasn't just the first Isle of Wight Pride, it was - we think - the first Pride ever to take place on a beach in the UK. There was a stage, there were food traders, a couple of bars and, thoughtfully, a plastic trackway installed so that people using wheelchairs and pushchairs could get across the sand. And it was lovely golden sand, too!

9 People came from far and wide

I met up there with friends from Exeter, Oxford, Brighton, London and even as far as Scotland. My early morning train from London was busy with obvious Pride-goers, and the short ferry journey was full of people carrying rainbow flags and banners. It was fantastic to see so much support not just from the Island, nor Hampshire, but from far and wide.

So impressed by the first @IWPride - the team did an INCREDIBLE job pulling off this event in just a few months.  #IWPridepic.twitter.com/QE0Uw7btXU  Steve Taylor (@danophile) July 15, 2017

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10 Sponsors

Some people think Pride shouldn't have sponsors, but those people are living in an altered reality. Prides cost money to deliver; the fairy who delivers a fully functioning stage free of charge is a fairy I'd love to meet. Isle of Wight Pride's sponsors included local travel companies, a trade union, the local travel authority, and even the local gin distillery. All the sponsors should be hugely proud of what they helped the team to organise last weekend!

11 Volunteers

All Prides rely heavily on volunteers (my own Pride, Pride in London, needs almost 1,000 to put on our annual event) and Isle of Wight Pride was no different. But what was truly amazing was the extent of what they've achieved in the last six months, with just a small handful of people. And on Saturday, as I stopped to talk to one of the committee members, Yve, she was dashing off to empty rubbish bags. It was all hands on deck, and I pay a massive tribute to them all for a job very well done!

12 The whole Island was Rainbowy

From the minute I stepped off the catamaran at Ryde Harbour and walked into the town centre, there were rainbows everywhere. Bars and restaurants, florists, coffee shops, toy shops and other retailers were hanging rainbow flags, and lots of flags were visible in the windows of houses and apartments along the route. The whole town got a lot more Rainbowy - at least for one day.

13 No-one had sex with a lamppost

Thankfully. But then again that was a concern raised last December by a newspaper columnist who didn't like the idea of the Isle of Wight getting a Pride event - and my blog for HuffPost back then helped to increase support for the event. It was also something of a relief to see the new Conservative MP for the island, Bob Seely, not only tweeting his support but actually being there. His predecessor, Andrew Turner, told a group of students in April that he thought homosexuality was 'dangerous to society', and resigned within 24 hours after his comments caused understandable furore.

The homophobes, biphobes and transphobes appear to get the message that they should stay away from Isle of Wight Pride. They weren't missed.

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14 T-Shirts

In a fabulous tribute to Andrew Turner's harmful comments, a number of people were wearing Isle of Wight Pride t-shirts with the message 'Dangerous to know'. Another which said 'Wight Trash' was a personal favourite, as was the man wearing a unicorn t-shirt with the words 'TOTALLY STRAIGHT'. I've seen some of the best t-shirts this Pride season at Isle of Wight Pride.

15 It was someone's first Pride

Everyone remembers their first Pride. For me it was Pride London in 1997, and what makes your first Pride special is different for everyone. Whether it's a sense of community, of safety, of just being 'okay', Pride can help people come to terms with who they are, their sexual orientation or gender identity. And given the physical barrier between the Isle of Wight and the mainland, there's a good chance that lots of people on the island had never been to a Pride before. I reckon Isle of Wight Pride was a first Pride for lots of people there.

I think Emily makes the point best, so I'll leave it to her.

My first pride was life changing. Words can't describe how happy I felt the whole time. Thank you @IWPride#Pride#IsleOfWightPridepic.twitter.com/ifMGKC0R0p  Emily (@BluSquish) July 16, 2017
Although cryptocurrencies have been studied and argued for a long time, they are just now becoming known as financial tools t
The cave is thought to have been used by pilgrims and travelers

An Egyptian mission has stumbled upon a cave in Upper Egypt which contains Medieval-era Arabic graffiti.

The cave was discovered during an archaeological survey carried out at the archaeological sites located in the area known as the Golden Triangle in the Red Sea governorate.

Deputy Minister of Antiquities Mohamed Abdellatif told Ahram Online that studies reveals that the cave was a rest house for pilgrims, traders and passengers who used it to protect themselves from the hot weather during their trips from Egypt to Mecca or Palestine.

During their stay in the cave, said Abdellatif, they carved graffiti on the walls, some of which remain while others have disappeared due to erosion.

The ministry is now studying the possibility of putting the cave on the official list of antiquities sites in an attempt to protect it, as well as restoring the texts.

Mohamed Tuni, an archaeologist at the governorates Islamic and Coptic Antiquities Department, said that the texts are composed of two sections. The first reads: "there is no God except Allah" while the second reads: "God has returned the poor slave Youssef Bin Hatem Al-Shati to his family in 755 of Hegira. May God have mercy on him and his parents and all the Muslims. Amen."

Tuni describes the texts as unique within the Golden Triangle area, which consists of the cities of Safaga and Qusseir at its base with the Upper Egyptian city of Qena at the top.

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Lisa Blackmer, seen in this file photo, has been a city councilor for 10 years and is now seeking a seat in the state Legislature.

North Adams Councilor Blackmer To Seek State Rep Seat

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.  The longest current sitting city councilor, Lisa Blackmer, is looking to make an even bigger impact.

Blackmer announced on Friday her bid for state representative in the special election to fill out the term of the late Gailanne Cariddi. Blackmer has been a city councilor for 10 years and served two years as president. She also served last year as the president of the statewide Massachusetts Municipal Association.

She has held municipal positions in various parts of Western Massachusetts and that experience is what she hopes to bring to the Beacon Hill.

"I have a vision for the future and the experience to make it happen," Blackmer said on Friday.

The North Adams Democrat has not only served on the City Council but was the town administrator for Sandisfield and is the current treasurer and collector for the town of Buckland. She has already taken that municipal experience and knowledge of issues facing cities and towns to the state level through the MMA and now she feels it is time to "take to the next level."

The MMA meets frequently throughout the year with state lawmakers and gives input on bills and proposals. Blackmer said she's had successes, particularly as president, in helping to craft the Municipal Modernization Bill, which eliminated and updated an array of municipal regulations.

"You learn to compromise and you learn to build coalitions with like-minded representatives," Blackmer said of her six years on the MMA.

She's worked on issues regarding zoning laws, advocated for state funding assistance, and brought issues such as simply allowing small towns to deficit spend on veterans benefits without having to go to a special town meeting  a burden many on the east of the state wouldn't understand.

Blackmer believes she has a head start on finding representatives in the State House with like-minded views.

"I tried to take the case farther east," Blackmer said of her time on the MMA board and specifically reaching out to lawmakers from outside of the area to help them understand the technical details of issues facing Berkshire County. "I think I've done a good job of informing people about the issues."

As a councilor and working in town administration, she said she's learned exactly how important state support is for cities and town. Blackmer says she would advocate particularly for Chapter 90 funding for road construction projects.

"We can't afford to repair the infrastructure ourselves," Blackmer said.

There is an omnibus zoning bill pending, she pushed for broadband expansion, and she believes towns need additional support for regionalization and shared services, and funding for schools.

"As a city councilor, town administrator, and treasurer/collector, I have extensive knowledge of the challenges facing our communities and schools, and look forward to debating the issues with the other candidates," Blackmer said.

Blackmer said she is also in tune with many projects in the works in the Berkshires  from the Hoosic River Revival to the Berkshire Mall  in which she would be able to advocate for state support, whether that be funding or legislatively.

But, there is a whole lot more than the municipal-focused bills, which has been her expertise, and all of it is interconnected. From the opioid drug issues to poverty to workforce development, Blackmer said she wants to take a collaborative approach to solving those issues facing the communities in the 1st Berkshire District.

"I would continue to advocate for more community members who are affected by the opioid crisis," she said. "There are so many issues and so many ways."

Workforce development is another priority for her. That includes local schools, job training programs, and higher education.

"We have quite a few job openings but there is a disconnect between the jobs that are available and the skill sets," Blackmer said.

But first thing is first, Blackmer said she will focus on the legislation Cariddi had already filed. She worked with Cariddi in her first few terms on the City Council and the General Government Committee and Blackmer wants to emulate the "detail-oriented" approach Cariddi took on in her work. Blackmer said she'd be picking up where Cariddi left off.

"She got me involved in politics. She kind of showed me the way," Blackmer said.

The Pittsfield native moved to North Adams 30 years ago and raised a family with her husband, William Blackmer. She is a Massachusetts College Liberal Arts graduate, with a degree in business administration, and first won election to the council in 2007.

"We, in a lot of ways, are a tight-knit community. We support each other," Blackmer said about the Northern Berkshires. "That makes us special."

Blackmer is also a board member of the Girl Scouts of Central and Western Massachusetts, the Northern Berkshire Santa Fund, and previously a co-chair of the Gala Committee for Berkshire County Kid's Place.

"I am running to make sure those who reside in the 1st Berkshire District have the opportunities they need to prosper in their lives, their work and raising their families," Blackmer said.

Blackmer becomes the second to formally announce a bid for the seat, following Democrat Stephanie Bosley. Republican Christine Canning-Wilson, of Lanesborough, has indicated that she intends to run for the seat as well.
Peter Kavanaugh of National Grid says 1.9 miles of the Northeast Renewable Link Transmission Project's 23-mile utility line will run through Cheshire.

Proposed Renewable Energy Line to Run Through Cheshire

CHESHIRE, Mass.  A proposed renewable energy utility line may pass through town adjacent to existing electricity lines.

Peter Kavanaugh of National Grid said 1.9 miles of the Northeast Renewable Link Transmission Project's 23-mile utility line will run through Cheshire.

"We want to make sure we are being as proactive and as honest and forthcoming as we can be throughout this process," he told the Selectmen on Tuesday night. "Obviously, this is just the first step of what we hope is many, but we are still months away, perhaps years away from the permitting process."

Kavanaugh said the project was unveiled a few months ago. National Grid is the majority owner of the project along with non-profit Citizens Energy Corp. based in Boston.

The project will be bid as part of the Massachusetts Clean Energy request for proposals that was created by the Clean Energy legislation that passed last July. The legislation forces energy companies to distribute specific amounts of energy from different renewable sources by 2022.

Kavanaugh said the lines will be the same as those currently in the transmission corridor. The 345-kilovolt transmission line will be able to deliver 600 megawatts.

"It is a new line adjacent to the current line ... there is basically a weak link in the system," he said. "There is no way to transport clean energy from the Alps substation (in Nassau, N.Y.) all the way over to the Berkshires and then beyond there with the current capacity."

He said the rights of way will have to be expanded 90 to 100 feet and that the current lines will stay in operation.

The line will run from Nassau, move through Stephentown, cross the border into Berkshire County and end at the Berkshire substation in Hinsdale.

Kavanaugh anticipates a majority of the power will come from wind in upstate New York with a small amount of hydro. The provider will be known once the RFP is accepted.

The capability of the nation's electrical grid to handle clean energy loads has been stretched, including transmitting wind power from rural areas such as upstate New York to more urban areas where the need is greatest.

"First and foremost, it is bringing new sources of clean energy into the grid here in Mass," Kavanaugh said. "There will be substantial economic benefits to the host towns though tax revenue as well as job creation."

He said there will be host community benefits, however, these numbers have yet to be calculated. He said whatever they initially offer the town will act as a baseline.

Citizens Energy also gives 50 percent of its profits to host communities.

"They primarily focus on medium- to low-income families and helping them with heating assistance, home weatherization and some solar and geothermal," Kavanaugh said. "Part of the conversation over the next year or so is to figure out what each town thinks will be most beneficial."

Selectwoman Carol Francesconi noted the line somewhat follows the proposed Kinder Morgan natural gas pipeline path that never came to fruition and added that there will be wetland issues.

Kavanaugh said the line does in places follow the pipeline path and that currently wetlands are still being delineated.

He said there will be a need for some easements and if a deal cannot be struck with property owners, the project will likely not move forward.

"We have started identifying who owns the plot and the parcels and we are going to start reaching out to these folks," he said. "We are not willing to move ahead with the project if it is not voluntary and we can't get easements."

Francesconi added that only four or five property owners should be affected.

Kavanaugh said those who live near the right of way have received mailers explaining the project and providing contact information. He added that a community meeting is planned in the fall.

Bids for electricity suppliers should come in next week and will be accepted in January. He said the permitting process is expected to take 18 months with construction in 2019 or 2020. He said if all goes to plan, the line should be in service by 2021.

"We will see how it goes," Francesconi said. "We will have more questions as we go along."
Sevenars in South Worthington, Mass., welcomes Alexis Kende Walls, violinist, and Lynelle James, pianist, in a program of violin/piano masterpieces.

Tanglewood and Sevenars: Classical Music Heaven

Tanglewood enters its third week, and the highlights are many; indeed, every concert will be memorable. The legendary Emerson String Quartet present a musico-theatric "Russian Fantasy," followed by an all-Schubert evening. Deeply moving symphonies by Bernstein and Tchaikovsky ensue, with heroic piano concertos by Beethoven and Prokofiev to follow. Orchestral masterworks by Kernis, Britten and Sibelius, and a celebration of early-20th century French vocal music conclude this week's listing of stellar performances of great and amazingly diverse musical offerings.



If, for whatever inexplicable reason the bounteous musical fare at Tanglewood isn't enough to pique your interest, theres also the captivating Sevenars Chamber Music Festival, in South Worthington, Mass. This week, expect a rich musical palette showcasing stylistic diversity, with a program of classics by Brahms, Faure, Kreisler and Bartok.



Both venues present wonderful music performed at magnificent venues in pristine, bucolic settings by marvelous performers. Read below for the details.

Tanglewood



The Emerson String Quartet is coming to Tanglewood.

 Wednesday, July 19, 8 p.m. in Ozawa Hall: The astounding Emerson String Quartet visits Ozawa Hall for the first of two consecutive programs. Accompanied by an ensemble of seven actors, including David Strathairn and Jay O. Sanders, the Quartet presents "Shostakovich, Stalin, and the Dream of a Second ChanceA Russian Fantasy." The program, written and directed by James Glossman, weaves the tale of Dmitry Shostakovich's obsessive 50-year quest to create an opera from "The Black Monk" - Anton Chekhov's theatrical chamber masterpiece about love, art, madness and freedom. Through music  including a complete performance of Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 14  supported by the actors and multimedia projections, we view Shostakovich himself attempting, over decades, to retell Chekhov's haunting and heroic story of a writer struggling for his sanity, only to be sidetracked again and again by the composer's own struggle to survive as an artist amid the ever-changing difficulties and anxieties of Stalin's Soviet regime. Don't miss this performance; it's certain to be a Tanglewood highpoint.



 Thursday, July 20, 8 p.m. in Ozawa Hall: For the second program in Tanglewood's six-part "Schubert's Summer Journey" concert series, BSO Artistic Partner Thomas Ades and Italian baritone Andre Schuen, in his U.S. debut, open the program with five night-inspired songs by Schubert  "Auf der Bruck," D. 853 ("At the Brook"); "Der Wanderer an den Mond," D.870 ("The Wanderer Speaks to the Moon"); "Nachtstuck," D.672 ("Nocturne"); "Wanderers Nachtlied II," D.768 ("Wanderer's Nightsong"); and "Willkommen und Abschied," D.767 ("Welcome and Farewell"). As the centerpiece of the program, the Emerson Quartet performs Mark-Anthony Turnage's "Shroud" for string quartet, which memorializes two of the composer's close friends. Closing the program, Mr. Ades and BSO principal bassist Edwin Barker join the Emerson Quartet for Schubert's "Trout" Quintet for piano and strings, D. 667, which the composer completed when he was just 22 years old, and which is one of the most beloved works in the chamber music repertoire.



 Friday, July 21, 8 p.m. in the Shed: The charismatic French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet joins the BSO and conductor Gustavo Gimeno  who returns to the Tanglewood podium after making his debut with the orchestra last summer  for Bernstein's Symphony No. 2 (with Mr. Thibaudet as soloist,) subtitled "The Age of Anxiety," after W.H. Audens poetic masterpiece - a work dedicated to Serge Koussevitzky and premiered by the Boston Symphony in 1949. Maestro Gimeno concludes the program with Tchaikovsky's bravura Symphony No. 4.



 Saturday, July 22, 8 p.m. in the Shed: BSO Artistic Partner composer/conductor/pianist Thomas Ades opens this Boston Symphony program leading his own "but all shall be well," a composition inspired by poetry of T.S. Eliot. The program also features pianist Emanuel Ax as the soloist in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 ("Emperor"), the last and most prodigious of Beethoven's five piano concertos, and also the dramatically expressive "Sinfonia da Requiem" of Benjamin Britten (1913-1976).



Russian pianist Nikolai Lugansky

 Sunday, July 23, 2:30 p.m. in the Shed: BSO Assistant Conductor Ken-David Masur is joined by Russian pianist Nikolai Lugansky for Prokofiev's iridescent Piano Concerto No. 3. Maestro Masur opens the afternoon program with Aaron Jay Kernis' (b. 1960) moving "Musica Celestis" ("Heavenly Music"), completed by the Grawemeyer Award-winning composer in 2000. Concluding the concert is Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 2, ("Little Russian").

For tickets, call 888 266-1200, or go to the website. Music lovers can follow Tanglewood via its new social media accounts on Facebook, on Twitter @TanglewoodMA, and on Instagram @TanglewoodMusicFestival. The Boston Symphony is on Facebook, on Twitter @bostonsymphony, and on Instagram @bostonsymphony. The Boston Pops is on Facebook, on Twitter@thebostonpops, and on Instagram @thebostonpops.

Sevenars Music Festival

Sevenars Concerts, established in 1968, was selected one of the six best small music festivals in the USA by Time Magazine. Founded by internationally known pianist Robert Schrade and his composer/songwriter/pianist wife Rolande Young Schrade, it was founded in 1968 with performances in the Methodist Church in the idyllic village of South Worthington, Mass. - now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.



Today, concerts are held at the Academy, located at the junction of South Ireland Street and Route 112, in South Worthington.



 Sunday, July 23, 4 p.m.: Sevenars welcomes Alexis Kende Walls, violinist, and Lynelle James, pianist, in a program of violin/piano masterpieces: Brahms' Sonata in A Major; Faure's Sonata in A Major; Bartok's "Roumanian Dances" and Kreisler's "Praeludium and Allegro."



You can order Sevenars tickets and get general information by phone at 413-238-5854 (please leave a message for return call), on the website or by email. Admission is by donation at the door (suggested $20). Refreshments are included.
Osama Afifi, one of Egypt's most renowned and established culture editors, died Sunday at the age of 63.

Afifi, who was the top culture editor in many publications  mainly Nasserist leaning ones  was one of the best regarded journalists in culture journalism in Egypt.

Afifi, who was known for his objectivity and decency and hailed as a noble journalist, was also a poet though he never collected his poems in a book.

He leaves behind hundreds of articles and reviews, and also a vast legacy alive in most cultural publications in the form of tens of journalists whom he trained.

"No culture journalist has ever invested so much time and effort in training journalists and students and encouraging them to be critical thinkers, as much as him," said one of Afifi's students, adding that he not only trained them but helped them to get opportunities to write and work.

Amr Ezzat, an op-ed writer and journalist who worked closely with Afifi for years, said in a Facebook post, "He had a clear view of the hard situation that journalism was passing through at the time I joined him in 2004. He even tried jokingly to stop me from moving my career from engineering to journalism, but he was also very serious about how to become a respected journalist that avoids going with the flow of cheap and tacky journalism running in every journalist institution and controlling its top editors."

Ezzat added: "He was devoted to train the people who work with him in a very loving and friendly manner, unlike many other top editors who were infested with their arrogance and vanity."

Even though Afifi had a Nasserist leaning, he always accepted difference and conceded his point when proven wrong.

Afifi left a lot of unfinished work and projects, hundreds of unpublished poems, a book on the scene of the plastic arts in Egypt, a topic that always concerned him and of which he had encyclopedic knowledge, to the extent that you can find his name credited in most books written on the fine arts in Egypt in the past 30 years.

Sayed Mahmoud, former editor of Al-Kahera cultural newspaper, hailed Afifi as "The Mentor" and called for his poems to be collected in a book and published posthumously.

"Afifi was a great value to me; he was very keen to assert the need of a culture editor to have a strong command of the arts. Though he was writing from a nationalist perspective, in many instances he always welcomed disagreement and cheered his proteges when they proved him wrong," Mahmoud said.

Osama Afifi is survived by his wife and two daughters.

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Jerusalem has always managed to expel any invaders and preserve its character. Likewise, one day, it will end the Israeli occupation

He who has witnessed with us Jerusalem in the last three Fridays of the holy month of Ramadan can perceive the extent of Israeli hysteria towards the city, Al-Aqsa Mosque and Palestinians in general.

After 50 years of occupation and 50 years of settlement and Judaicisation, Jerusalem is still Palestinian, Arab and Islamic, through hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who flocked to pray in Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Like Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands lofty, visited by Palestinian Christians and Muslims whenever they can.

Although Gaza's inhabitants and most of the West Banks men and youth under 40 years old (this constitutes 90 percent of men and youths) were prevented from reaching Jerusalem, the spaces of Al-Aqsa were brimful with hundreds of thousands of worshippers.

Even thousands of the youth who were denied access to Jerusalem succeeded in breaking through barriers and climbing walls in order to reach Jerusalem and some of them suffered injuries and fractures when they were jumping the Separation Wall constructed by Israel.

Hundreds of male and female volunteers and paramedics of Palestinian civil society filled the streets of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa and were deployed near the barriers leading to the city to support patients and those who were tired from the travel and the obstacles. All these people came in order to present new evidence of Palestinian societys vitality and solidarity.

I wonder what the armed-to-the-teeth Israeli soldiers think when they see the persistence of a very old man or a woman worn out by disease walking with difficulty to reach, despite all hardships, Al-Aqsa and praying inside it.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, who visited Jerusalem every Friday in Ramadan, ignored and are ignoring these soldiers as if they were shadows with no effect.

Perhaps the expressions of astonishment and dazzlement drawn on the faces of the children and youngsters seeing Jerusalem for the first time were among the most beautiful scenes one can ever see while one is watching Jerusalem recovering its breath amid throngs of human beings crossing its streets.

Like the old town in Hebron, Old Jerusalem is wrestling with its occupation and its settlers with every yell of the vendor in its streets, with every baby born in the houses of its narrow alleys, with every muezzin calling for prayer in its mosques, with every bell tolling in its churches, with every house built without a permit in its quarters and with every marriage contracted between the sons and daughters of its people.

Two years ago, I sneaked a visit to Jaffa one Friday in Ramadan and was astonished from its Palestinian sons ability to preserve its Arab nature, customs, traditions and heritage. For a moment, when people were about to breakfast, it seemed that the whole city was totally Arab.

Every corner, every bend and every street are parts of ancient history and a mark of an unforgettable incident.

If the Israeli occupiers comprehended history well, they would have realised that their occupation of Jerusalem is going to end, for many invaders before them failed to impose their character on it.

They occupied, abused, killed and settled, then went away and Jerusalem survived and its people survived.

For Jerusalem, alive with resistance, will survive while its occupiers will perish.

The writer is secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative.

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During the last few months I followed the arrests of several young people who protested the border agreement with Saudi Arabia according to which Egypt would give up the Tiran and Sanafir islands. These protests, it should be noted, were all peaceful: no weapons were brandished, roads cut, or citizens or security personnel attacked. Protestors simply held posters against the ratification of the agreement, urging parliament to postpone its debate pending the opinion of the Supreme Constitutional Court.

Since that time, the detention of many of these youths has been renewed, and some were referred to criminal trial on charges of inciting to demonstrations and joining illegal organizations, even though they are members of legitimate, legal political parties operating under state oversight.

And as I followed these events, I recalled all the conferences organized by the state to encourage youth political participation and statements from officials stressing the need to mobilize youth efforts and energies and build new political cadres for the future.

As it happens, I personally know one of the young men being prosecuted. Islam Marei is an officer of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, the party I belonged to until I left it last year. Like most of the party youth, Islam wasnt much of a political activist before the January revolution. When he joined the revolution in Sharqiya, it was with the belief that here was an opportunity to contribute actively to changing and bettering the country. His enthusiasm led him to join one of the newly established parties, participate in the 2011 parliamentary elections, take his subsequent loss in stride, and continue to work in the party with the conviction that the goal was to serve the country, not win a parliamentary seat or immunity. And when the Muslim Brothers abandoned the constitutional path, Islam took to the streets again on June 30th 2013, clinging to the hope for change. He supported the 2014 constitution unreservedly and campaigned for it in his governorate. He didnt lose hope in formal party politics even as many others turned away, believing it important to continue striving, instead of yielding to despair or seeking refuge outside Egypt.

So when I read that he was arrested for protesting the transfer of the islands, I was troubled and worried for him and his comrades, but I thought the matter would be resolved once parliament approved the agreement and the president ratified it. I told myself that as long as the state got what it wanted, it would seek to placate the enthusiastic young people, and mend the deep rift caused by its mismanagement of the controversial issue.

Unfortunately, Islams detention was renewed and he was referred to trial, demonstrating that we still have a way to go before tensions are defused and young people are encouraged to freely participate in partisan politics, a crucial safety valve for the country.

The truth is that these youths arent guilty of inciting against the state, joining underground organizations, or subverting public institutions. On the contrary, their crime is to have believed that young people should contribute to determining the future of the country and that political work in the framework of legitimate parties is a national duty.

Now its up to the judiciary, which I believe will bring them justice. But more important, however, is for the state to reconsider its attitude to youth political participation. Its a mistake to believe that such participation can be wholly managed and controlled by state agencies. When young people are encouraged to enter the public sphere, this must come with a broad margin of freedom, an acceptance of criticism and peaceful protest, and room to make mistakes. The risks are worth it, for it allows the harnessing of heartfelt energy, genuine enthusiasm, and an inexhaustible willingness to sacrifice for the nation.

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J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter universe is enormous. And since closing the book on the main series in 2007, she keeps adding to it. There are spinoff books, movies, and a play in the franchise  many of which reveal new insight about Harry, Ron, Hermione, and other characters from the original series.

The wealth of Harry Potter material also means that there's a wealth of behind-the-scenes information that yields new details of how JK Rowling thought up the books, how the filmmakers made the movies, and a ton of other information about the Harry Potter universe. Rowling even launched Pottermore, which has become a sort of ever-evolving encyclopaedia of trivia and back stories from her world.

It's a lot to keep up with. But for Harry Potter fans, all of it is fascinating.

Here are 23 things you probably didn't know about J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter universe:

Harry Potter is rich, because his ancestor was a pharmaceutical tycoon.

One of the first things Harry does when he finds out he's a wizard way back in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, is visit the Gringotts wizarding bank in Diagon Alley. After all, he'll need some cash to buy school supplies for Hogwarts.

In his vault, he finds out that he has piles and piles of gold galleons. Harry's rich! Way more rich than most of his friends. Why? The books don't really explain. But Rowling addressed the issue on Pottermore.

In the 12th century, Harry's ancestor Linfred of Stinchcombe developed pharmaceutical remedies that were the basis for Skele-gro and Pepperup Potion. He built a business out of it, and the Potter family maintained the fortune for generations. Some time later, Harry's grandfather Fleamont Potter  the son of the original Harry Potter  quadrupled the family fortune with hair potion. The hair potion is even advertised in a stray newspaper in Fantastic Beasts.

Gringotts does exchanges between magical and muggle money.

As J.K. Rowling pointed out, it's the only way Muggle-born wizards and witches could buy wands, since Ollivanders only takes galleons, knuts, and sickles  not pounds or euros.

There's one character from the books who existed in real life.

In Rowling's series, Nicolas Flamel is the alchemist who created the Philosopher's Stone, the magical object at the centre of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone that can grant a person immortality.

In real life, Flamel was a French scholar and bookseller who lived in the 14th and early 15th centuries. After his death, he got a reputation as an alchemist who secretly achieved immortality. Rowling wrote about the inspiration on Pottermore, where she said Flamel attended the French wizarding school Beauxbatons in her version of his life.

Green gloves were used to make the books fly around in the Hogwarts library.

For the movies  particularly a scene in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince  the books in the Hogwarts library have a knack for organising themselves on shelves. The secret behind the magic is that green gloves were used. They worked the same way green screen does, and were wiped away in post-production so it looked like the books floated on their own.

There were two Harry Potters.

No, this isn't about time travel. Before Harry Potter, there was his great grandfather, who was also named Harry Potter. Rowling wrote about the wizard, who lived in the late 1800s and early 1900s, on Pottermore. As she explained:

Henry Potter (Harry to his intimates), was a direct descendant of Hardwin and Iolanthe, and served on the Wizengamot from 1913 - 1921. Henry caused a minor stir when he publicly condemned then Minister for Magic, Archer Evermonde, who had forbidden the magical community to help Muggles waging the First World War. His outspokenness on the behalf of the Muggle community was also a strong contributing factor in the family's exclusion from the 'Sacred Twenty-Eight.'

The original Harry Potter didn't show up in the books, but he lived around the time of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. So don't rule him out for a surprise appearance in the movie series.

The film designers have been hiding a secret character in the movies' fake newspapers.

(Warner Bros)

The Fourth Estate is an important part of Rowling's universe. The Daily Prophet covers magic in Britain and The New York Ghost covers the same in the United States.

In almost every Harry Potter movie, it was the design firm MinaLima that put together the fake newspaper props for different scenes. They had fun with it. Throughout the series, you can spot stories about The Ginger Witch. She's a hooligan with a multinational criminal past spanning decades.

We know now that things do get seen, designer Miraphora Mina told INSIDER. In the past, we didn't realise how much these would be scrutinised by fans.

There's a perfume company that exists in the background of both the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts movies.

Another one of MinaLima's inventions is the Divine Magic perfume company. We first see it in a poster behind Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when he meets with Harry at the beginning of the film. In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, there's a street poster advertising the same brand more than half a century earlier.

Before becoming headmaster, Dumbledore was a Transfiguration teacher at Hogwarts.

(Warner Bros)

Dumbledore is an academic and something of a magical genius. As his chocolate frog card attests, he's particularly famous for his defeat of the Dark wizard Grindelwald in 1945, for the discovery of the twelve uses of dragons blood, and his work on alchemy with his partner, Nicolas Flamel. So it makes sense that he was a teacher at the wizarding school, not just the administrator.

It was while Dumbledore was a Transfiguration teacher that Tom Riddle  later to become Lord Voldemort  attended Hogwarts. He also taught Newt Scamander, the main character in Fantastic Beasts, with whom he has a close bond. An issue of the publication Transfiguration Today in the movie has an article featuring his work. Jude Law is slated to play Dumbledore in the forthcoming Fantastic Beasts movies, which will be about taking down his rival Gellert Grindelwald.

Newt Scamander was a Hufflepuff.

Speaking of Newt Scamander and Hogwarts, the character  played in Fantastic Beasts by Eddie Redmayne  was sorted into the Hufflepuff house. You might have spotted his canary-and-black scarf throughout the movie, signalling Hufflepuff's colours.

J.K. Rowling wanted The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore to look like a trashy airport novel.

(Getty) (Getty Images)

The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore was a biography written by Rita Skeeter, a gossip columnist hell-bent on destroying his reputation. For the movies, Rowling wanted to reflect the poor, salacious quality of the book. So she told MinaLima to make it overwrought like a trashy airport novel.

MACUSA president Seraphina Picquery has a big throne that looks like Dumbledore's from Hogwarts.

Her golden throne in Fantastic Beasts was intentionally made to be a visual reference to Dumbledore's in Hogwarts's Great Hall.

There were props designed to connect the film back to the 'Harry Potter' series,supervising modeller Pierre Bohanna wrote in Inside the Magic: The Making of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Colin Farrell didn't read a single page of Harry Potter before reading J.K. Rowling's script for Fantastic Beasts.

Farrell told SFX Magazine earlier this year that he was a big fan of the Harry Potter movies, but he didn't read any of J.K. Rowling's work before reading her script. He wanted to play the role of auror Percival Graves based on that screenplay alone.

There's a good reason the Horcrux inside Harry wasn't destroyed in Chamber of Secrets.

For years, Harry Potter fans wondered what, exactly, was going on with the portion of Voldemort's soul that was inside Harry. When Voldemort tried and failed to kill Harry himself, he ended up inadvertently leaving a Horcrux inside him.

But if that's the case, why wasn't it destroyed when the Basilisk in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets bit Harry, just as its poison-infused fang destroyed the horcrux that was in Tom Riddle's diary?

A Horcrux can only be destroyed if its container is damaged beyond repair, Rowling explained. Harry was healed by Fawkes. Had he died, the Horcrux would indeed have been destroyed.

Many of the spells are derived from Latin roots.

Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Daniel Radcliffe in 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2' (Jaap Buitendijk)

When coming up with magical spells, Rowling clearly worked her studies of Classical language and mythology at the University of Exeter. Many of them are based in the Latin language. Accio, for example, sounds like accerso, which means to summon or fetch. Wingardium Leviosa, the summoning charm, from from the word wing (referring to flight); ard (from the Latin aardus, which can mean elevated); and levi (which means to lift).

J.K. Rowling wrote a Harry Potter prequel short story  and the original copy was stolen.

In 2008, Rowling hand wrote an 800-page story about James and Sirius Potter noodling around on magical motorcycles and escaping some muggle cops. You can read it here. She auctioned it off for charity, but in April of 2017, that handwritten draft was stolen and it hasn't been found to this day.

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore has a specific meaning for each of his names.

Rowling is famous for her memorable, magical character names. She's put a lot of thought into them, and a lot of the names refer to some deeper meaning for each character. Dumbledore, as the character with the most names, might be the best example.

Albus is Latin for white, which could be symbolic or just refer to his beard. Percival was one of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table, who went in search for the lost grail. Wulfric may be a reference to the 12th-century British figure Wulfric of Haselbury, who was known as a miracle worker. And Brian is often thought to be derived from an Old Celtic word that roughly means noble.

Dumbledore is one name that Rowling has discussed explicitly. It's an Old English word for bumblebee.

Because Albus Dumbledore is very fond of music, I always imagined him as sort of humming to himself a lot, Rowling said in a 1999 interview.

Some of the food in the movies was real.

One of the highlights of the Harry Potter movies and books are the feasts in the Hogwarts Great Hall. Shepherds pie, Yorkshire pudding, and pumpkin juice seem to be served at every meal. During the epic feast scene in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, many of the dishes were actually cooked up for a more realistic effect. In general, the food was fake and made with resin.

The glass bottles in Snape's potions classroom was filled with really weird stuff.

The movie's set designer found things like tufts of hair and unwanted guts and bones from local butchers for the potion ingredient vials. The room itself also expanded between movies, making room for more extras in later entries in the series.

Four different owls played Hedwig, Harry's owl, in the movies.

(Reuters/Warners Bros) (REUTERS/WARNER BROS)

More than 12 rats played Scabbers, Ron's pet rat, four cats played Hermione's pet Crookshanks, and nine Neapolitan Mastiffs played Hagrid's dog, Fang.

Movie producers stood in for the Hogwarts moving portraits.

One of the magical castle's features is that it has paintings that move. Some of them had plot significance, like the Fat Lady in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, who was played by comedian Dawn French. Others, though, were played by the movie's producers, who wanted to immortalise themselves in some way on screen.

15,000 glass orbs were made for the Room of Prophecy scene in Order of the Phoenix. None of them were used.

In the end, the producers decided to digitise the whole thing and none of the orbs made it to the movies.

The Black family tree wasn't canonised until the Order of the Phoenix movie.

The Black family is one of the oldest and most important in the wizarding community. There's Harry's godfather, Sirius Black, who's cousins with Voldemort's right-hand woman, Bellatrix Lestrange, and there's also Regulus Arcturus Black, who tried to destroy one of Voldemort's Horcruxes, and Phineas Nigellus Black, a former headmaster of Hogwarts.

It's confusing, and the books refer to a big tapestry in 12 Grimmauld Place, Sirius's family home, that features a family tree that lays it all out. But the actual content of that tapestry isn't entirely included in the books, so there are some gaps.

For the Order of the Phoenix movie, designer Miraphora Mina needed to include the tapestry in one of the scenes. So she called up J.K. Rowling, who mapped out the entire Black family for her. It's only from the movie that we have all of the relationships specified.

It took six months to design the Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes scene in Half-Blood Prince.

GCHQ helped stop the sixth Harry Potter book from being leaked (STR/AFP/Getty)

The joke shop  which Harry, Ron, and Hermione go to at the beginning of the movie  is filled with whizzing magical pranks, bubbling potions, and everything from Anti Gravity Hats to Self-propelling Custard Pies. It's a feat of imagination and hard work from Fred and George Weasley, and it all had to be re-created for the movie.

MinaLima made the boxes and labeling for every single item. Everything in the shop had to look like it was manufactured and sold by the Weasley twins, and have a bit of backstory to it.

It was a bit of a dream, really, to have six months to design a load of crazy packaging, Mina told INSIDER.

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Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk has garnered overwhelmingly positive reviews in the UK, but French newspaper Le Monde has criticised it in no uncertain terms for what it sees as historical inaccuracies and the erasure of France and Dunkirk itself from the narrative.

Critic Jacques Mandelbaum accused the director of being "witheringly impolite" and "indifferent" toward the role the French played in the evacuation of Allied troops, writing: No one can deny a directors right to focus his point of view on what he sees fit, as long as it does not deny the reality of which it claims to represent.

"Where in the film are the 120,000 French soldiers who were also evacuated from Dunkirk? Where are the 40,000 who sacrificed themselves to defend the city against a superior enemy in weaponry and numbers?"

 Dunkirk IMAX Featurette

All the main characters in the film are British, with Mandelbaum noting that there are only "a dozen seconds devoted to a group of French soldiers defending the city who were not very friendly and a few more to a French soldier disguised as British in order to try to flee the massacre."

Finally, he asks "where is Dunkirk itself?", Nolan having chosen to set the film almost entirely on the beaches and ocean.

You can find our review of the film, out 21 July, here.
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Felicity Jones is set to play a formidable feminist icon.

She's signed on to star as a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the biopic piece On the Basis of Sex (via Variety), directed by Mimi Leder and focusing on Ginsburg's battles for equal rights throughout her law career, from its early days at Harvard University and Columbia Law School, all the way to Washington.

It's an enviable role for any actor, and a cosy route to awards recognition, so it's no surprise that Jones isn't the first to be attached to the project.

Recommended Felicity Jones to star in a new take on Swan Lake

Natalie Portman had previously been circling around Daniel Stiepleman's screenplay back in 2015, which had topped the Black List of unproduced screenplays the previous year.

Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton and become the second female justice after Sanda Day O'Connor. She continues to serve as an associate justice as part of the court's liberal wing, one of three female justices in the current court.

 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Clip - Jyn Rallies The Rebel Alliance

Jones comes off the back of Rogue One's success last year, having recently signed up to Luca Guadagnino's new adaptation of Swan Lake.
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Christopher Nolan, 106 mins, starring: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, James D'Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy

All we did was survive, one traumatised British soldier mumbles toward the end of Christopher Nolans superb new film. Hes bashful and ashamed at being treated back at home like a hero after a defeat. Survival is enough, hes reassured.

Nolan, who wrote and produced as well as directed Dunkirk, has made an intensely dramatic and moving film about what Winston Churchill called a colossal military disaster. He has managed to combine the epic and the intimate. We are a long way from next years Oscars but Dunkirk must surely already be a frontrunner.

This is a juddering, nerve-fraying movie to sit through. Nolan doesnt skimp from showing the blind terror and helplessness of the 400,000 British soldiers stranded on the beach in the summer of 1940, seemingly abandoned, as German planes bomb them, picking them off like fish in a barrel.

The sound editing (a cacophonous symphony of explosions and gunfire) and Hans Zimmers pounding, disorienting electronic soundtrack induce a sense of extreme anxiety. However, the film also has moments of surprising grace and lyricism, not least when we see Spitfires powered by their Rolls Royce Merlin engines soaring through the air or when the flotilla of tiny boats finally reaches the stricken soldiers.

The filmmakers have gone to extraordinary lengths to portray the Dunkirk evacuation in as realistic a fashion as possible. At the same time, the film has a mythic dimension. Amid the suffering and squalor, it showcases the quiet heroism of pilots, sailors, soldiers and civilians alike.

Theres a very British restraint and understatement about many of the characters, Even in the face of terror and bereavement, they try keep their emotions in check. Its typical of Nolans approach that Churchills We shall fight on the beaches speech isnt heard directly. (Instead, a solider reads it from a newspaper.)

Older figures like naval Commander Bolt (Kenneth Branagh) or amateur sailor Mr Dawson (Mark Rylance) make it a point of principle not to betray any sign of grief, frustration or fear. The younger figures are less phlegmatic. Desperate to survive, they show selfishness and cowardice as well as courage.

 Dunkirk IMAX Featurette

This is an ensemble piece with a huge cast. Nolan edits in quickfire fashion, intercutting constantly between the stories of the soldiers, the RAF pilots and of Mr Dawson on his boat chugging toward Dunkirk. We have different perspectives (from land, air and sea) and different time frames.

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One Directions Harry Styles was an unlikely piece of casting (were a long way from the world of boy bands) but makes a creditable debut as a young private who will go to extreme lengths to stay alive. Tom Hardy has one of the most prominent roles as an RAF pilot in a dogfight against the Luftwaffe but we see even less of his face here than when he played the masked and disfigured arch villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.

Branagh and Rylance rekindle memories of actors like John Mills and Bernard Miles in old British war movies. Their stoicism is contrasted with the neurotic energy of the younger actors, notably Fionn Whitehead as Tommy, the British army private desperately looking for a way off the beach. Then, there is the haunted, shell-shocked officer, played by Nolan regular Cillian Murphy, forced to head back in the direction of the carnage he has just managed to escape.

Much of the imagery has a surrealistic quality. As the film opens, a few British soldiers are alone on the empty streets of Dunkirk as Nazi propaganda leaflets rain down on them like confetti, telling them they are surrounded. The only way out is by sea.

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We hardly see the Germans at all, only their planes as they swoop down to bomb the soldiers. Theres a wonderfully eerie moment in which a soldier wanders out from the town (which seems all but empty) out onto the beach and suddenly sees the hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the British Expeditionary Force.

Nolan throws in cut-aways to shots of abandoned tin helmets on the sand or of rifles leaned up against a wall with no sign of their owners or of hundreds of life jackets being loaded onto boats back home in British ports.

There are dead men on the beach. Some of their colleagues try to bury them beneath the sand. The tension comes from the soldiers wait for deliverance that may never come. Individual episodes play like self-contained mini dramas.

For example, Nolan homes in on the plight of an RAF pilot who crash lands at sea, whose Spitfire is sinking but who cant get out of his cockpit or that of the soldiers who hide out in a trawler that has run aground, praying that the tide will turn and take them out to sea.

Were so used to big budget superhero movies in which the protagonists rescue themselves and others with their own special powers. Dunkirk is refreshing precisely because of the helplessness of its protagonists.

As the intertitles at the start of the film explain, theyre hoping for a miracle. No individual can save them. The only real chance lies in what later came to be known as the Dunkirk spirit, namely a bloody-minded determination to stick together and not to give up.

Compared to some of Nolans earlier features like Inception or Interstellar, Dunkirk is relatively strait-laced. There are no dreams within dreams or time-travelling voyages through space here. Plot-wise, it is very predictable.

What the film demonstrates, though, is the directors Stanley Kubrick-like drive and perfectionism. It is made in hyper-realistic fashion and with such intensity that it leaves most other recent Second World War movies looking very insipid by comparison.

Dunkirk hits UK cinemas 21 July.
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Former Eastenders star Paul Nicholls is seriously injured in a Thai hospital after spending three days trapped at the foot of a waterfall with no food.

The actor, who played Joe Wicks on the BBC soap opera, plunged from a waterfall in a remote part of the jungle in Koh Samui island.

The 38-year-old was only rescued after a local villager stumbled across a deserted motorbike which the actor had used to travel to the far-flung spot. After contacting local police, he discovered it had been hired by a Briton who had since gone missing, the Sun reported.

After searching for hours through the dense jungle vegetation, rescue-workers found Nicholls ensnared in water at the bottom of Khun Si falls.

Recommended Australian CEO falls 70m to death in Thailand parasailing accident

Nicholls was semi-conscious and suffering from hypothermia because severe injuries had left him unable to climb out of the water for the duration of three days. He had not eaten in three days and hospital medics said he had caught a bug and described him as being seriously ill.

Speaking to the newspaper, the Bolton-born actor said: I'm lucky to be alive I had a phone with me but I fell from such a height into the water it was unretrievable.

He added: It took such a long time to find me. Its an understatement to say it wasnt a great situation. It wasnt that I was lost.

Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures Show all 14 1 /14 Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures Barbara-Windsor.jpg Getty Images Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures 256262.bin Getty Images Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures 256263.bin Getty Images Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures 256264.bin Getty Images Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures 256265.bin Getty Images Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures 256266.bin Getty Images Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures 256267.bin Getty Images Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures 256268.bin Getty Images Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures 256269.bin Getty Images Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures 256261.bin Getty Images Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures peggy-mitchell-eastenders.jpg BBC Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures 256273.bin Getty Images Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures 256275.bin Getty Images Dame Barbara Windsor: career in pictures peggy-mitchell.jpg PA

The problem was I couldnt move to get out of there. Ive got a broken leg and Im missing a kneecap. It needs complete reconstruction.

Footage obtained by the paper shows the actor deliriously crying out in pain as he is carried away on stretchers by rescue workers and medics.

A source told the paper Nicholls had travelled to Thailand a week ago as he was "between filming".

He needs surgery. But its going to cost 90,000 for him to have it in Thailand," the source was quoted as saying.

Nicholls rose to fame for his Eastenders role, being highly applauded for his portrayal of schizophrenia and appearing in multiple magazines such as Attitude, Gay Times, Heat, Just Seventeen, and Radio Times as a teenager in the 1990's. He then appeared in Goodbye Charlie Bright and had a cameo in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason before more recently starring in ITV series Law & Order and Channel 4 drama Ackley Bridge.
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Google Glass has returned with a brand new vision.

The wearable was widely thought to have been killed off after failing to impress consumers, but its now been reimagined for the workplace.

Google Glass Enterprise Edition is designed to help businesses maximise the output of their employees.

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

Its miniature display can be used to show members of staff instructions, so they dont have to constantly abandon their work in order to consult a physical manual or computer.

The headset can also let workers quickly report problems theyve found, or be used to record and transcribe conversations, which could benefit medics in particular.

Wearers begin their tasks by saying, Okay Glass, proceed, reports Wired.

Workers in many fields, like manufacturing, logistics, field services, and healthcare find it useful to consult a wearable device for information and other resources while their hands are busy, wrote Jay Kothari, Google Glass product lead.

Thats why weve spent the last two years working closely with a network of more than 30 expert partners to build customized software and business solutions for Glass for people in these fields.

Weve also made improvements to the design and hardware so that its lightweight and comfortable for long term wear. Weve increased the power and battery life too.

The new version of Glass can last for up to eight hours, and has been equipped with an 8-megapixel camera and a more powerful processor.

The previous version could only last up to five hours off a full charge and used a 5-megapixel camera. It was also buggy, raised privacy concerns in public and didnt serve a clear purpose.

The move to the workplace seems to make sense.

Another huge criticism that was levelled at the consumer version of Glass was that it made people look silly, but that isnt as big a worry at work.

Its being sold through a number of software companies that specialise in a range of field, including healthcare, logistics and manufacturing.
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Theresa May will this week launch a new advisory group designed to respond to concerns of the business community and trade bodies as Brexit negotiations gather pace.

Her office said that the Prime Minister will chair the first in a regular series of the new council in Downing Street on Thursday, at which terms of Brexit and the Governments wider industrial strategy would be discussed with representatives of some of Britain's biggest firms.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, Business Secretary Greg Clark, and Brexit minister Robin Walker will join the meeting, as will Ralf Speth, chief executive officer of Jaguar Land Rover, Tescos Dave Lewis and Prudentials Paul Manduca.

Stephen Martin from the Institute of Directors, Carolyn Fairbairn, from the Confederation of British Industry, and Mike Cherry from the Federation of Small Businesses will also be in attendance.

Many of the biggest trade bodies in the UK have expressed deep concerns around Brexit and what it might mean for tariffs, trade and the free movement of people. And many have also criticised the Government's lack of transparency on some of the most pressing issues for companies of all sizes.

Scores of firms, especially in the financial sector, have already committed to moving staff or shifting their European headquarters to the continent to ensure that they can provide a seamless service to clients in the aftermath of the split.

Earlier this year, CBI president Paul Drechsler said that Britain would face a Pandoras box of economic consequences if it crashed out of the EU without a new trade deal in place.

Adam Marshall, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, earlier this month called for day-one certainty and stability on the rules and regulations they will face when the UK leaves the EU.

"Continuity and equivalence are needed to prevent any disruption to British business, particularly in terms of our trade with partners and markets in Europe and beyond, he said.

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), the professional body for the recruitment industry, in a report on Wednesday said that the Governments failure to outline a post-Brexit immigration policy was adding to uncertainty for both business and EU workers in the UK.

A survey of 607 employers conducted by the REC found evidence that a growing number are taking on temporary workers to plug gaps caused by skill shortages. Some 87 per cent intend to maintain or increase their use of temporary staff in the next three months.

Other senior business figures due to join Thursdays meeting include chairman of BAE Systems, Roger Carr, BCC president Francis Martin and John Pettigrew, the chief executive officer of National Grid.

Additional reporting by newswires
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More than 600,000 jobs could be at risk in Germany from a potential ban on combustion engine cars by 2030, the Ifo Economic Institute said in a study commissioned by Germany's VDA car industry lobby.

Pollution from cars, including those with diesel engines, has become a sensitive subject in Germany since Volkswagen admitted to systematic cheating of emissions tests to mask levels of health threatening nitrogen oxides.

Cities such as Munich and Stuttgart are looking at banning older diesel cars, whose emissions they blame for causing an increase in respiratory diseases.

The Ifo study, published on Tuesday, said a switch to sales of zero-emission cars would threaten 426,000 car manufacturing jobs, with the rest coming from related industries, such as suppliers.

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Two months before Germany's national elections, the government faces growing pressure to reduce emissions or face complete bans on diesel cars in some cities. Representatives of federal and regional governments will meet with carmakers on 2 August to find ways to curb diesel-related pollution.

The VDA, representing carmakers such as Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW has already been talking to the government on steps to curb pollution from diesel cars that the industry hopes will avert driving bans which have already hit sales of diesel models.

"Industry groups are deliberately pushing the worst-case scenario to safeguard their vested interests," NordLB analyst Frank Schwope said.

For every 2-3 jobs that will be lost from phasing out combustion engines, one new position will be created in R&D, IT and other sectors related to zero-emission technology, Schwope said, dismissing Ifo's findings as incomprehensible.

Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks told Tuesday's edition of German business daily Handelsblatt: "The car industry has the responsibility that it will not come to this (driving bans)." She said the industry had to retrofit the affected cars as quickly as possible and must do so at its own cost.

Ifo president Clemens Fuest dismissed criticism that Germany's car industry has been slow to embrace new technologies as it has focused on defending the combustion engine that has driven its prosperity.

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.

"That thesis doesn't stand up given efforts on innovation," Fuest said, noting German carmakers own 40 per cent of international patents on combustion engine cars and a quarter of patents on fuel cell cars.

But Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, head of the Center of Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen, said high spending on R&D has mainly benefited combustion technology and carmakers had some catching up to do on battery research.

"The VDA is getting its defences in position," he said. "They're still keeping to combustion engines because it's hard to predict how electric car demand will pan out."
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Charlie Gard has reportedly been granted permanent residence in the US so he can travel to America to receive experimental treatment. The decision by US Congress may oblige Great Ormond Street Hospital to release the sick baby so he can receive nucleoside therapy.

Nebraska representative Jeff Fortenberry said an amendment has been passed "that grants permanent resident status to Charlie Gard and family so Charlie can get the medical treatment he needs".

Charlie, who has a rare genetic disease, is being kept on life support at the children's hospital amid an ongoing court battle between his parents, who want him to receive the treatment, and doctors, who say it is unlikely to work and it is kinder for life support to be switched off.

An American doctor flew to London this week to examine the critically ill baby as part of a last-ditch attempt to persuade a High Court judge the treatment stands a chance of working.

Charlie, who was born on 4 August 2016, has a faulty RRM2B gene, which affects the cells responsible for energy production and respiration, leaving him unable to move or breath without a ventilator.

Dr Michio Hirano, a neuroscientist from Columbia University in New York, is said to have spent over five hours trying to convince doctors, along with an expert from a Vatican hospital in Rome. The specialist told the High Court nucleoside therapy has a 10 per cent chance of improving Charlie's condition, adding his research clearly indicates it reduces muscle weakness in patients with a similar genetic disorder.

This is the best scientific data we have, he told the judge last week, adding he was prepared to extrapolate the findings on patients with TK2 depletion to Charlies genetic deficiency. These are small numbers, but with very rare diseases we must use every patient and gather as much detail from each patient as possible.

He said he hoped a high dose of nucleosides, which are found naturally in the body, would enter Charlies cells, affect the mitochondria and prove therapeutic.

But Katie Gollop QC, representing the hospital, called the doctors findings all very theoretical, saying: You're trying to translate one experiment to another.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 9 November 2022 Australia and Spain play during the Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup group A match at the Copper Box Arena, London PA 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 Florence Kasumba, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta and Lupita Nyongo attend the European Premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in London Getty 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 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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. 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Charlie being granted permanent residence in the US could mean his parents Connie Yates and Chris Gard, in their thirties, no longer need permission from doctors at Great Ormond Street to take him across the Atlantic for treatment, according to MailOnline.

Currently police can be called into arrest the parents if doctors believe they will cause suffering to their child.

It was previously reported Charlie had been granted US citizenship.

The Independent has contacted Great Ormond Street hospital for comment.
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Among the deluge of leaks flooding out of the Tory party in the past weeks, one briefing to The Sunday Times on 2 July perhaps told us the most about the partys prospects for the next election. In response to anger from Conservative MPs at being massively outgunned by Labour on the ground and on social media, the party is planning to quadruple their social media team, as well as create their own Momentum-style social action groups to galvanise their dwindling membership. Conservative Renewal would give practical help and assistance to community projects, yet also provide the media team with a steady stream of engaging content and third party endorsement from ordinary punters. Who the next Tory leader will be is still fiercely contested: how elections will be fought is becoming much clearer.

However, the Conservatives are a few steps behind. A third of the UKs Facebook users were reached by pro-Labour Momentum-made content over the six week election period; thousands of Momentums members were contacted by others via phone canvassing app Calling for Corbyn to inform them of doorknocking sessions; tens of thousands of activists were directed into marginal seats (which Labour HQ had all but given up on) through the groups website My Nearest Marginal. Despite being written off as a rabble in 2016 by the Labours deputy leader , Tom Watson; Momentum, the grassroots activist organisation set up to support Jeremy Corbyn and democratise the Labour Party, have received plaudits from across the political spectrum and is now commonly conceived as a pivotal player in Labours election turnaround. Tory plans to emulate their electioneering model might just be the most flattering praise theyve received yet.

Momentums Digital Hub, a kind of collaborative hackathon held in a community space in east London over the weekend, is a sign that the organisation are looking to stay ahead of the curve. This weekends for problem-solving and talking about all the things we wished wed have had during the election, says Erika Uyterhoeven, 30, a Momentum organiser and former Bernie Sanders activist. But its also about kicking off a network of people who can volunteer to devote a couple of hours of their week to solving some of these problems.

Nerve centre: Momentums Digital Hub in east London

In the event space, theres a relaxed air to proceedings: pockets of people are dotted around, some zoned into their computers, others taking a break and chatting cheerily to one another, with a few sipping on cans of beer. For many present, the Digital Hub is an extension of their working week  most of them work as analysts, developers or designers for their day jobs  yet the buoyant atmosphere illustrates theyre happy to give up their weekend for a cause they believe in. Ive got a fair degree of social anxiety so Im not very good at doorstepping and stuff like that, says Adam Englebright, 24, an analytics consultant from Brighton. This event came around and I thought maybe I could use my actual skills. I quite enjoy my day job but the moment yesterday when I realised they had actually had things for me to do that I had expertise in was magic.

Although some of the participants are understandably guarded about their projects, others are willing to explain what theyre labouring over. Dan Fahey, 28, a data analyst for a blue chip construction company in London, is working on a way to allow Momentum to target Facebook adverts more precisely. Both Labour and the Tories spent in excess of 1m on interrupting peoples news feeds with targeted political messaging over the course of the election. However Fahey is unsure of the accuracy of these adverts, and is looking to create a process by which Momentum can direct ads by constituency, local authority, or even ward.

They cost money so its important were efficient with them  we dont want ads to go to the same people twice, says Fahey. Unfortunately, you cant just select a constituency on Facebook. But using simple geometry and a lot of processing power, hopefully we can find a way to allow Momentum to focus Facebook advertising on even more exact areas.

Lily, 27, a principal consultant for a digital consultancy firm, is setting up the architecture of a system to allow Momentum to use Google to analyse what people have searched for in order to inform the organisations social media content. Google advertising tools will let you see whos searched for certain things and how that search has changed day to day, she says. So you can see things like how much interest there is in Jeremy Corbyn over time  people were more interested in him in 2015 than they were in the election  and you can build up big lists of related words to get a sense of an area and find what people were concerned about. Hopefully we can use this for general research but also more timely stuff, what is it that people are searching for right now, and can we create content to get in front of those people. Thats the more immediate sense of it.

As the Tories cotton on to the new election campaigning paradigm, the worry for Momentum and the Labour Party must be that with the resources the Conservatives have, they may soon be able to outdo them at their own game. Despite its massive reach and influence, Momentum has very few paid staff and mostly relies on the goodwill and enthusiasm of volunteers and activists such as Adam, Dan and Lily. One Momentum organiser, who prefers not to be named, thinks that this is in fact its strength.

PC brigade: activists Adam Englebright (left) and Dan Fahey (Casper Hughes)

If you dont have all this money to burn, youre going to find the leanest, most effective things to work on, she says. Typically, the bigger a project is the slower it goes. If people have the agency to self-organise and they know what theyre doing and have the skills, then its far more effective than having a big organised project which involves governance: procurement, strategy meetings, a project initiation document etc. The fact that this network isnt top down means there are no bottlenecks.

Others are more concerned about the Tory backlash. In the aforementioned Sunday Times article, as well as plans for Conservative Renewal, a letter from Andrew Bridgen, the Tory MP for North West Leicestershire, was quoted, which urged the party chairman to recruit the chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign, Matthew Elliot. Alongside Leave.EU, Vote Leave are known to have used Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm funded by American billionaire Robert Mercer, and also used by Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Im unsure how much of it is smoke and mirrors to be honest, says Dan Fahey. But Ive heard Cambridge Analytica were using some quite sophisticated analytics. When I heard about them I thought woah, I better come and volunteer.

The enthusiasm and passion of volunteers was the basis of Momentums success during the election campaign and events like the Digital Hub are evidence that this energy isnt dwindling. However, in the Tories, Momentum will always be up against a more well-resourced political machine.

Momentum cant afford my day rate so I better come and give it for free for the cause, right? says Fahey. All that Cambridge Analytica stuff, if this is the level of sophistication that were going to be up against then well fight back and do it better.
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Anti-gay protesters who called on revellers at a Pride march to Return to Jesus, found their stunt backfired when the messiah himself appeared to show up with a placard that read: Keep queer and carry on.

The mock son of God turned up in a show of support for some 85,000 LBGT supporters who marched through the streets of the South Korean capital, Seoul, in a bloom of rainbow colours to celebrate their day.

The Conservative Christians demonstrators held crosses on a stage nearby under a banner that read: Homosexuality is a Sin.

Together they chanted hate messages in a bid to rain on the parade.

But the protest fell flat on its face when revellers ignored the demonstration and instead lined up to hug the would-be Jesus amid cheers from the crowds that drowned out their chants.

Another messiah who turned out against the protest held a placard in support of LBGT that read: Im cool with it.

The Christ-like figure was decked out in full biblical regalia including a fake beard and a white robe in an outfit that was snapped by revellers and quickly did the rounds on the internet.

One of the mock Jesus figures said he was inspired not by the man above but to help spread a message of support for his gay friends who had been heckled in the citys Pride two years ago.

Robert Evans, 27, an American living in Seoul, told the Irish Examiner: Walking amongst them and feeling [the protesters] pure hatred directed right at me as if I was gay was an unforgettable moment.

The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe Show all 15 1 /15 The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 15. Italy Getty Images The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 14. Macedonia The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 13. Poland Getty Images The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 12. Liechtenstein The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 11. Lithuania The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 10. Latvia This content is subject to copyright. The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 9. San Marino The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 8. Moldova The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 7. Belarus Getty Images The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 6. Ukraine Getty Images The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 5. Monaco The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 4. Turkey Getty Images The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 3. Armenia The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 2. Russia Getty Images The top 15 worst countries to be gay in Europe 1. Azerbaijan Getty/AFP

The hate was tangible and intense, and as a straight western male, I had never felt anything like it.

Noting that he bears some resemblance to the classic representation of Jesus in his day-to-day life, Evans said he felt it would be meaningful to present an alternative interpretation of Christs teachings.

Korea still has a long way to go in terms of rights and acceptance but Im glad to see and be a part of the small steps it is making in the right direction, he said. Every year Pride gets bigger, the protests get smaller, and the long road towards equality gets a little bit shorter.

It came three years after another Christ-like figure turned out at Chicagos Pride parade in 2014, shutting down anti-LGBT protesters with a sign that read: Im Not With These Guys.

A year earlier, another man in Jesus-like garb attended the 2013 AIDS Walk Los Angeles to protest against demonstrators with anti-gay signs.
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Australia was colonised about 20,000 years before humans first arrived in Europe, according to new research.

The discovery of the worlds oldest stone axes with ground edges, ochre used to make "spectacular rock art" and other artefacts in northern Australia pushes back the earliest known presence of humans to 65,000 years ago.

Despite the relative closeness of Europe to Africa, where modern humans first evolved about 200,000 to 3000,000 years ago, the first concrete signs of Europeans are about 45,000 years old.

In addition to their sophisticated axes, the people who first arrived on Australias shores may also have been armed with spears.

The objects were found at Madjedbebe within the traditional lands of the Mirarr clan, an area of land that was excluded from the surrounding Kakadu National Park after a lease to mine uranium in the area was granted in 1982.

Representatives of the Mirarr said the research showed the universal importance of the area and called for it to receive the highest level of conservation and protection.

Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers said: The settlement of Madjedbebe around 65,000 years ago  sets a new minimum age for the human colonisation of Australia and the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa and across south Asia.

The final stages of this journey took place at a time of lower sea level, when northern Australia was cooler and wetter.

Our chronology  extends the period of overlap of modern humans and Homo floresiensis [the hominin species better known as hobbits] in eastern Indonesia to at least 15,000 years and, potentially, with other archaic hominins  such as Homo erectus  in southeast Asia and Australasia.

In addition to changing the story of our species expansion across the globe, the new much older date challenges theories that Australias astonishing megafauna  a two-tonne wombat, giant kangaroos that were so big they couldnt hop and a two-metre-tall bird  were quickly wiped out by humans.

Our chronology places people in Australia more than 20,000 years before continent-wide extinction of the megafauna, the Nature paper said.

Professor Chris Clarkson, who led the research, stressed how significant the site was.

The site contains the oldest groundedge stone axe technology in the world, the oldest known seed grinding tools in Australia and evidence of finely made stone points which may have served as spear tips, he said.

Most striking of all in a region known for its spectacular rock art are the huge quantities of ground ochre and evidence of ochre processing found at the site, from the older layer continuing through to the present.

Justin OBrien, chief executive of the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, which represents the Mirarr clan, echoed this point.

This study confirms the sophistication of the Australian Aboriginal toolkit and underscores the universal importance of the Jabiluka area, he said.

These findings reinforce the need for the highest level of conservation and protection for this site.

An article in Nature commenting on the research by Professor Curtis Marean, of Arizona State University, noted how quickly humans had reached Australia after they first began to leave Africa.

We now know that modern humans, after they left Africa around 70,000 years ago, dispersed rapidly to a coastal area that became the departure gate for their journey to Australia, he wrote.

From that launch pad, perhaps some of them envisaged other lands across the water that they could not see.

They decided to take a chance and built boats, loading them with both new and tested technologies.

Then, with their families, they boarded to embark on a journey of discovery. Sounds familiar  sounds like humans reaching for the stars.
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Runaway global warming is, without a doubt, a nightmare scenario for humanity.

As the temperature rises, it has knock-on effects that drive the mercury higher still in a vicious circle that the likes of Professor Stephen Hawking have warned could turn the Earth into a planet like Venus, where its a balmy 250 degrees Celsius and the rain is made of sulphuric acid.

One of the most feared of these feedback loops is the vast amount of organic material currently trapped in permafrost, which would release methane and other greenhouse gases in large amounts given the right conditions.

And now a team of researchers has discovered another significant source of emissions that would result from the thawing of the tundra. For the frozen ground acts as a cap on much more ancient gas deposits, preventing them from escaping into the atmosphere.

These seeps were known about, but just how important they would be was poorly understood.

The new study, of 10,000 square kilometres of the Mackenzie Delta in Canada, found that the seeps there were responsible for 17 per cent of the total emissions from the land even though they were only found in about one per cent of the area, according to a paper in the journal Scientific Reports.

One of the researchers, Professor Torsten Sachs told The Independent: We were a bit surprised  we saw these very strong emissions. It means a very tiny fraction of the area produces quite a big share of the estimated annual emissions.

And that tells us maybe we should not just focus on biogenic methane production in the upper lawyers of the permafrost, but pay a bit more attention to this potential effect.

If we punch holes in the lid [created by the permafrost], the stuff underneath may find its way up.

Professor Sachs, of the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, said the area they studied had been discontinuous permafrost for a long time and so probably had had such seeps well before humans began to notice global warming.

10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Show all 10 1 /10 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A group of emperor penguins face a crack in the sea ice, near McMurdo Station, Antarctica Kira Morris 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Floods destroyed eight bridges and ruined crops such as wheat, maize and peas in the Karimabad valley in northern Pakistan, a mountainous region with many glaciers. In many parts of the world, glaciers have been in retreat, creating dangerously large lakes that can cause devastating flooding when the banks break. Climate change can also increase rainfall in some areas, while bringing drought to others. Hira Ali 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Smoke  filled with the carbon that is driving climate change  drifts across a field in Colombia. Sandra Rondon 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Amid a flood in Islampur, Jamalpur, Bangladesh, a woman on a raft searches for somewhere dry to take shelter. Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable places in the world to sea level rise, which is expected to make tens of millions of people homeless by 2050. Probal Rashid 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Sindh province in Pakistan has experienced a grim mix of two consequences of climate change. Because of climate change either we have floods or not enough water to irrigate our crop and feed our animals, says the photographer. Picture clearly indicates that the extreme drought makes wide cracks in clay. Crops are very difficult to grow. Rizwan Dharejo 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Hanna Petursdottir examines a cave inside the Svinafellsjokull glacier in Iceland, which she said had been growing rapidly. Since 2000, the size of glaciers on Iceland has reduced by 12 per cent. Tom Schifanella 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A river once flowed along the depression in the dry earth of this part of Bangladesh, but it has disappeared amid rising temperatures. Abrar Hossain 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A shepherd moves his herd as he looks for green pasture near the village of Sirohi in Rajasthan, northern India. The region has been badly affected by heatwaves and drought, making local people nervous about further predicted increases in temperature. Riddhima Singh Bhati 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A factory in China is shrouded by a haze of air pollution. The World Health Organisation has warned such pollution, much of which is from the fossil fuels that cause climate change, is a public health emergency. Leung Ka Wa 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Water levels in reservoirs, like this one in Gers, France, have been getting perilously low in areas across the world affected by drought, forcing authorities to introduce water restrictions. Mahtuf Ikhsan

But the thawing of permafrost in places like the coastal plains of North Alaska and the major river basins of Siberia could open up new methane seeps.

By studying the Mackenzie Delta, Professor Sachs said the researchers had opened a window into the future.

How big an effect this new source of methane would be was "speculative", he added, adding that further study was needed to try to work this out.
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A heavily pregnant woman has had acid thrown over her stomach in an attack in London in which her partner also suffered facial burns.

The attack on the couple took place when they were walking along Bow Road in Mile End on 4 July.

A man reportedly approached the pair in the early hours of the morning and sprayed the corrosive substance at them. They were both immediately rushed to hospital.

The police have arrested one suspect following the attack.

Prosecutor Kavitha Tharson said: A substance was thrown in the complainants face that burned him instantly, Thames Magistrates Court heard.

The girlfriend also had liquid thrown over her that caused her harm. The acid has gone on her tummy, I have no information as to the impact on the pregnancy.

I can only assume some impact has been made.

Prior to the attack, the pair had been involved in an argument with a group of Somali men.

Mustafa Ahmed, 19, of Stepney, has been charged with wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm and one count of attempted wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm.

He did not speak during his appearance at court, but confirmed his name, age and address.

Mr Ahmeds legal representative, Larry Matthews said his client emphatically denies any part in the attack.

He said: Theres no doubt that the attack was a horrible one and I am conscious of the fact that offences of this nature are a matter of public concern at the moment.

It is an extremely serious allegation and if convicted there would be an extremely lengthy sentence.

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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 Florence Kasumba, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta and Lupita Nyongo attend the European Premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in London Getty 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

But he emphatically denies any involvement in this particular incident.

He did so when interviewed by police yesterday.

The acid attack follows a spate of similar crimes in London and a protest by delivery drivers on scooters outside parliament over safety concerns when working in the evenings.
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Water was thrown over two women standing outside a mosque in an apparent fake acid attack police are treating as racially aggravated assault.

The women, who were wearing traditional head coverings, were attacked as they waited outside the Bashir Ahmed Masjid in Southampton on Tuesday. CCTV footage shows a black car slowing down next to them before speeding away. The pair react in horror before realising they are unhurt.

Recommended This is what you should do immediately if you witness an acid attack

The mosque, in the southern city's Portswood district, has been forced to issue a safety warning to worshippers.

Police described the women as "understandably shaken" while on Facebook the mosque shared their fears that a subsequent attack could involve acid. It follows a string of acid attacks, including five committed inside 90 minutes in London last week.

A message the mosque said came from one of the women read: "Sisters just to warn you to be careful when u are out and about, you all know about the recent acid attacks in London.

"Today my friend and I were standing outside Bashir Masjid in Portswood, waiting to be picked up when a group of men in a black car drove past us and threw water at us. We are both OK because it was only water, but if they get away with doing stuff like this then it could embolden them to next time use bleach or acid."

Footage suggests the assault took place at about 2pm.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 11 November 2022 City workers attend a Remembrance Day ceremony at Lloyd's of London, in the City of London, to mark Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War PA UK news in pictures 10 November 2022 A grey heron lands on the river Dodder in Dublin on a sunny autumn morning PA UK news in pictures 9 November 2022 Australia and Spain play during the Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup group A match at the Copper Box Arena, London PA 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 Florence Kasumba, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta and Lupita Nyongo attend the European Premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in London Getty 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

A Hampshire Constabulary spokeswoman said: "We received a report yesterday regarding a racially aggravated assault in Portswood Road, Southampton.

"A woman reported that she was stood outside a mosque in Portswood Road, with her friend, when they had water thrown over them by someone in a passing car.

"Our investigations are continuing today and we are in contact with the victims who were understandably shaken by this incident. The vehicle is described as a black estate car."

Recent acid attacks have led to calls for tougher controls on corrosive substances, while Home Secretary Amber Rudd has suggested acid attack convictions could soon carry life sentences. A Home Office review will examine the law enforcement and criminal justice response, existing laws, access to harmful products and the support available for victims.

Anyone with information about the Southampton assault should call Hampshire Constabulary on 101, and quote reference 44170276157.
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The BBC has defended the number of its presenters who are paid more than 150,000 a year as the corporation prepares to reveal the full list of names of its highest-earning stars for the first time.

But the corporation's director general Tony Hall admitted the corporation had a gender pay gap problem, as around two thirds of the highest earners are men.

Ninety-six members of on-screen and on-air staff earning more than the Prime Minister are to be identified on Wednesday morning following sustained pressure from the Government for the corporation to increase transparency on pay.

The hotly anticipated report is expected to reveal that stars including Gary Lineker, Graham Norton, Fiona Bruce and Chris Evans earn well above the 150,000 threshold. Journalists including political editor Laura Kuenssberg and the Today presenter John Humphrys are also widely expected to be named.

 John Humphrys asks Johanna Konta 'Where are you from?' in 'disgraceful' interview

The BBC is bracing for a backlash after the list is published, and is understood to be offering support and advice to employees on dealing with the fallout, as well as permitting staff to defend themselves on social media after details of their pay are revealed.

But Director-General Tony Hall urged that he was not afraid of money becoming an issue, defending the corporation as the biggest investor in new British talent there is and insisting the public get it for extraordinary value. He insisted that the BBC had to pay to secure top talent from competition which now includes Netflix, Amazon and Apple.

Mr Hall also defended a gender pay gap at the BBC, which will show that 60 per cent of the highest earners are men, saying that plans were in place to redress the imbalance.

He highlighted the BBCs record on efficiency, boasting that the corporation had made 172 million savings across the year, with its talent bill down by more than 4 million on the previous year, from 198 million to below 194 million.

Less than a quarter of one per cent of 43,000 contracts were paid more than 150,000, Mr Hall said in a speech to staff on Tuesday. He added that spending on senior managers has fallen from 78.5million in 2009 to 42.2million, with the number employed now 306 compared with 640 in 2009.

Were not afraid to walk away if money becomes an issue, he said. And thats one of the reasons were the biggest investor in new British talent there is.

People want the very best talent on the BBC. And the reality is that the BBC today costs them less in real terms than it did 20 years ago. But now we offer four times as many television channels, twice as many national radio stations, iPlayer  and everything we do online.

All for less than three pounds a week  thats about 40p a day. And, youll see in our Annual Report, the extraordinary value that represents.

He said the BBC had tried to fight off the transparency measures, saying putting the names of staff against what theyre paid could set up a poachers charter, but had to concerned because the Government insisted.

BBC Wages Show all 11 1 /11 BBC Wages BBC Wages Graham Norton PA BBC Wages John Humphrys pa BBC Wages Huw Edwards PA BBC Wages Steve Wright PA BBC Wages Laura Kuenssberg PA BBC Wages Alan Shearer PA BBC Wages Andrew Marr Getty BBC Wages Danny Dyer Getty BBC Wages Adam Woodyatt Getty BBC Wages Peter Capaldi PA BBC Wages Alex Jones

BBC supporters insist the corporation pays less than its competitors while striving to deliver high-quality content in a competitive market which is now being disrupted by popular newcomers such as Netflix and Amazon.

One issue I think the disclosures highlight is the need to go further and faster on issues of gender and diversity, Mr Hall told staff. In over four years here, I have made this a particular priority of mine. Weve made real progress.

Its great to listen to the Today programme some mornings presented entirely by women. And when I said I wanted half the presenters on local radio morning shows to be women  weve done it.

Currently, one third of the top-earners are women, Mr Hall said, adding that he strives to go further, claiming: Are we pushing further and faster than any other major broadcaster? Most certainly.

Earlier this year, BBC presenter and broadcaster Andrew Marr said the pay disclosure would be uncomfortable for all staff. Im well paid but Im much less overpaid, perhaps, than people working for rival organisations who wont go through this process, he said.

Senior executives at the corporation earning more than 150,000 are already required to release their salaries, but the amount high-profile individuals are paid has traditionally been kept secret.

The BBC is required to make the disclosure under the terms of its new 11-year royal charter negotiated with David Camerons Conservative government.

Mr Cameron ordered the BBC to disclose what it paid on-air talent earning more than 450,000 a year, but the figure was slashed to 150,000 under Theresa May.
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A former university lecturer has declared his home an independent republic to protest the Brexit vote.

Visitors to retired academic William Riches Gloucestershire home will require a visa costing at least 50 once Britain leaves the EU.

The 77-year-old has made his wife Judith president and gave his children and grandchildren citizenship so they will not need a passport to cross the threshold to his three-storey home in the village of Newnham on Severn, according to GloucestershireLive.

A notice in the window of the house, named Middlewatch, reads: "The Independent Republic of Middlewatch.

"This Republic is a proud member of the European Union.

"All non-EU residents wishing to visit the Republic must have a valid EU passports."

Dr Riches said he is a passionate supporter of the EU and wanted to declare his home a republic to express the wishes of the 48 per cent.

"I am a staunch Remainer and cannot see a future for this country now," he said.

Brexit Concerns Show all 26 1 /26 Brexit Concerns Brexit Concerns Brexit will put British patients at 'back of the queue' for new drugs Brexit will put British patients at the back of the queue for vital new drugs, the Government has been warned  forcing them to wait up to two years longer A medicines regulator has raised the alarm over a likely decision to pull out of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), as well as the EU itself. ealth Secretary Jeremy Hunt dropped the bombshell , when he said he expected the UK would quit the EMA  because it is subject to rulings by the European Court of Justice. Getty Images Brexit Concerns London to lose status as 'gateway to Europe' for banks One of Germanys top banking regulators has warned that London could lose its status as gateway to Europe for the banking sector after Britain quits the European trading bloc. Andreas Dombret, who is an executive board member for the BundesbankGermanys central banktold a private meeting of German businesses and banks earlier this week in Frankfurt that even if banking rules were equivalent between the UK and the rest of the EU, that was still miles away from [Britain having] access to the single market, the BBC reports. Jason Hawkes Brexit Concerns Exodus The number of financial sector professionals in Britain and continental Europe looking for jobs in Ireland rocketed in the months after the UK voted to leave the European Union Shutterstock Brexit Concerns Brexit is making FTSE 100 executives richer Pay packages of many FTSE 100 chief executive officers are partly tied to how well share prices are doing rather than the CEOs performance -- and some stocks are soaring. ritish equities got a boost since the June vote because the likes of Rio Tinto, Smiths Group and WPP generate most sales abroad and earn a fortune when they convert these revenues back into the weakened pound. Sterlings fall also made UK stocks more affordable for overseas investors. Rex Brexit Concerns Theresa May: UK to leave single market Theresa May has said the UK "cannot possibly" remain within the European single market, as staying in it would mean "not leaving the EU at all". Getty Brexit Concerns Lead campaigner Gina Miller and her team outside the High Court Getty Brexit Concerns Raymond McCord holds up his newly issued Irish passport alongside his British passport outside the High Court in Belfast following a judges dismissal of the UK's first legal challenges to Brexit PA wire Brexit Concerns SDLP leader Colum Eastwood leaving the High Court in Belfast following a judges dismissal of the UK's first legal challenges to Brexit PA wire Brexit Concerns Migrants with luggage walk past a graffiti on a wall as they leave the 'Jungle' migrant camp, as part of a major three-day operation planned to clear the camp in Calais Getty Brexit Concerns Migrants leave messages on their tents in the Jungle migrant camp Getty Brexit Concerns The Adventist Development and Relief Agency (Adra) which distributes approximately 700 meals daily in the northern Paris camp states that it is noticing a spike in new migrant arrivals this week, potentially linked the the Calais 'jungle' camp closure - with around 1000 meals distributed today EPA Brexit Concerns Migrant workers pick apples at Stocks Farm in Suckley, Britain Reuters Brexit Concerns Many farmers across the country are voicing concerns that Brexit could be a dangerous step into the unknown for the farming industry Getty Brexit Concerns Bank of England governor Mark Carney who said the long-term outlook for the UK economy is positive, but growth was slowing in the wake of the Brexit vote PA Brexit Concerns The Dow Jones industrial average closed down over 600 points on the news with markets around the globe pluninging Getty Brexit Concerns Immigration officers deal with each member of the public seeking entry into the United Kingdom but on average, 10 a day are refused entry at this London airport and between 2008 and 2009, 33,100 people were detained at the airport for mainly passport irregularities Getty Brexit Concerns A number of global investment giants have threatened to move their European operations out of London if Brexit proves to have a negative impact on their businesses Getty Brexit Concerns Following the possibility of a Brexit the UK would be released from its renewable energy targets under the EU Renewable Energy Directive and from EU state aid restrictions, potentially giving the government more freedom both in the design and phasing out of renewable energy support regimes Getty Brexit Concerns A woman looking at a chart showing the drop in the pound (Sterling) against the US Dollar in London after Britain voted to leave the EU Getty Brexit Concerns Young protesters outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, to protest against the United Kingdom's decision to leave the EU following the referendum Getty Brexit Concerns Applications from Northern Ireland citizens for Irish Passports has soared to a record high after the UK Voted in favour of Leaving the EU Getty Brexit Concerns NFU Vice President Minette Batters with Secretary of State, Andrea Leadsome at the National Farmers Union (NFU) took machinery, produce, farmers and staff to Westminster to encourage Members of Parliament to back British farming, post Brexit Getty Brexit Concerns The latest reports released by the UK Cabinet Office warn that expats would lose a range of specific rights to live, to work and to access pensions, healthcare and public services. The same reports added that UK citizens abroad would not be able to assume that these rights will be guaranteed in the future Getty Brexit Concerns A British resident living in Spain asks questions during an informative Brexit talk by the "Brexpats in Spain" group, about Spanish legal issues to become Spanish citizens, at the town hall in Benalmadena, Spain Reuters Brexit Concerns The collapse of Great Britain appears to have been greatly exaggerated given the late summer crowds visiting city museums, hotels, and other important tourist attractions Getty Brexit Concerns The U.K. should maintain European Union regulations covering everything from working hours to chemicals until after the government sets out its plans for Brexit, said British manufacturers anxious to avoid a policy vacuum and safeguard access to their biggest export market Getty

"All our literature, all our art, all our culture, all our history is intertwined with Europe so the idea that we are not part of Europe, that we are some small but significant little island, just annoyed me so much I had to do something.

"I was so mad after the vote to leave that I decided to put the signs up and declare my home an independent republic.

"I feel very strongly that the wishes of the 48 per cent of us who voted Remain are being totally ignored so this is the only way I have left to protest. If I could declare us a republic and join Europe I probably would. Maybe Ill look into it.

Dr Riches son was born in Ireland but now lives in Germany and has successfully applied for Irish and German citizenship following the vote.

Under Theresa May's proposals, EU nationals will have the same "indefinite leave to remain" in the UK as many non-European nationals who have lived in the UK for five years.

Yet critics have said the plans are too vague, with the EU's Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier tweeting that "more ambition, clarity and guarantees" were needed.

EU residents will lose the right to bring a spouse to live in Britain unless they are earning 18,600 under the Government's plans.

Several other areas are uncertain, with healthcare and the rights of self-employed EU citizens still up for negotiation.

"I dont think the notice will change any minds because our friends and neighbours voted Remain anyway, but its our way of making a protest and people who come here often apologise for not bringing their passports," Dr Riches said.
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The family of a bullied teenager have stormed out of her inquest after hearing no-one went looking for her until 90 minutes after she went missing.

Dagmara Przybysz was found dead inside a toilet cubicle at Pool Academy in Redruth, Cornwall in May last year after failing to go to a lesson.

The 16-year-old, who moved to the UK with her family from Poland in 2007, had been severely bullied by a group of girls over her nationality.

She was told she was a stupid Pole and did not belong here, her parents told an inquest at Cornwall Coroners Court in Truro.

Despite this, assistant head principal Lisette Neesham said there was no record of Dagmara being subjected to bullying or racist comments.

At one point on the third day of the inquest at the court, Dagmaras father Jedrzej Przybysz and uncle Tomasz Dobek stormed out of the inquest in anger after hearing a member of staff had come into the bathroom where Dagmara was, looking for another pupil, but left without finding her.

Marie Exelby, a pastoral support manager, told the inquest she had gone into the bathroom at 12:56pm but denied she was also looking for Dagmara, saying she did not know she was missing.

She said she left the bathroom after receiving a radio call that the other child had been found.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 11 November 2022 City workers attend a Remembrance Day ceremony at Lloyd's of London, in the City of London, to mark Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War PA UK news in pictures 10 November 2022 A grey heron lands on the river Dodder in Dublin on a sunny autumn morning PA UK news in pictures 9 November 2022 Australia and Spain play during the Wheelchair Rugby League World Cup group A match at the Copper Box Arena, London PA 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 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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. 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The inquest was told earlier that Dagmara had entered the toilets at 12:14pm but was not found until 1;50pm.

Staff co-ordinator Paula Hosking said she eventually found the teenager after students raised the alarm about a toilet being occupied for a very long time, saying they feared it may be Dagmara, the Daily Mail reported.

Dagmara settled into her primary school but struggled with racist bullying at secondary school and had asked to be moved.

The inquest previously heard she told her family that she thought she had taken tablets on the morning of the day she died, but her parents said she did not look like she had taken anything and sent her to school.

Dale Collins, representing the school at the hearing, asked Ms Neesham whether that incident had been reported to the school.

She said: "No. If I was aware the situation took place I would have insisted that the parents come and speak to me.

"I would have insisted that urgent medical attention be sought. This is something that is in practice."

In a heated exchange with Ms Neesham, Dagmara's parents questioned why a conversation between their daughter and pastoral support manager Susan Kent the day before she died had not been logged on the system as she said it should have been.

Dagmara told the anonymous question and answer site that she had suffered from racism at school (Ask.FM/The Independent) (Ask.FM)

The inquest heard Dagmara told Ms Kent said she had problems and was worried about her sister being bullied as she had been previously.

Ms Neesham said: "I am not aware of the conversation being recorded... My perspective would be that Dagmara doesn't say it is an issue any more."

Dagmaras mother, Ewelina Przybysz, told the inquest she said she had a problem and added: "She does not have to use that word (bullying). She does not have to know that word... she is a child she does not have to name the problem bullying."

Dagmara had previously said she had been a victim of racism when answering questions on the social media site, Ask.FM.

The inquest continues.

Additional reporting by PA
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The Government has won its High Court bid to obtain a permanent ban on industrial action by prison officers, in a move unionists have warned will leave only a matter of time before a member of staff gets killed.

The Ministry of Justices application follows a move in February by the Prison Officers Association (POA) to call on its members to take action short of a strike over a lack of safety in a prison run by Her Majestys Prison service.

This led to a judge granting an interim injunction requiring the POA to withdraw instructions to members to refuse to undertake certain voluntary tasks, in tune with the Governments demands.

Following the permanent ban on industrial action on Wednesday, the POA accused the Government of failing to confront a situation in which lives are at risk, warning that, without the ability to take action, prison officers will be at risk of serious harm while carrying out their jobs.

The ruling in London followed a hearing earlier this month when Daniel Stilitz QC told Mr Justice Jay that the case was brought to ensure that POA does not seek to breach the law again.

Any inducement which leads prison officers to cease to provide services which they otherwise would have done is unlawful, said counsel.

The Secretary of State is concerned that, unless the position is determined definitively by the court, there will be renewed calls for unlawful industrial action in the future."

It comes just a day after the UK prison watchdog reported a staggering rise in violence in prisons across England and Wales over the past year, with not one youth jail in England and Wales now deemed safe.

Peter Clarke, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, warned that easy access to drugs and soaring numbers of inmates locked up for well over the recommended period have also contributed to a vicious cycle in which emphasis on rehabilitation has declined.

In response to the ruling, Andy Darken, deputy general secretary of the POA, told The Independent: Its our opinion that we shouldnt be doing industrial relations through the court.

In this case, Her Majestys Prison and Probation Service should have sat down with us to discuss the real issues around the violence in our prisons and the health and safety of staff. But they decided to seek relief through the courts to run their industrial relations. Weve got some issue with that.

Mr Darken, who worked as a prison officer 25 years ago, said the ruling now left staff unable to act if they feel unsafe, warning that the situation could likely lead to a member of staff being killed.

We heard just yesterday from the prison inspector Peter Clarke about the lack of safety in our young offender institutions. It appears that our members now cant do anything about it, he said.

If someone is not safe, and staff now cant walk out of that area and keep themselves safe, what do they do now? Following this ruling, it is only a matter of time before a member of staff gets severely injured or killed.

He denied that the action they had taken earlier in the year amounted to a strike, and claimed the union was being handcuffed by the Ministry of Justice because of a lack of funds to resolve a severe staffing and funding shortage.

Its not striking. It was taking action to protect our members and themselves. Were saying we couldnt go in there because its not safe, and that the employer should be ensuring that they are keeping us safe, he said.

The violence in our prisons is going up and up month on month, year on year, and we do know that it has gone up in the last quarter, even though they havent yet been published.

The budget cuts and staffing cut has reduced the amount of security searching going on. The regular searching of cells have reduced and reduced. All the security procedures you had in place have been watered down to the effect that theres hardly any. And thats been the big problem.

To reverse violence and improve health and safety in prisons it will take money they havent got, so theyve decided to handcuff the union, by getting an injunction that might stop our members protecting their health and safety.

Commenting on the ruling, Frances OGrady, General Secretary of the Trade Union Congress (TUC), said the decision would "do nothing to fix the crisis in our prisons", adding: "Ministers should be listening to prison officers concerns about staffing and safety, rather than pursuing legal action against them.

The ban on industrial action has demoralised staff providing a vital service. It needs to be overturned.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures 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, 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following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA UK news in pictures 28 September 2022 Criminal barristers from the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), demonstrates outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, as part of their ongoing pay row with the Government PA UK news in pictures 27 September 2022 David White, Garter King of Arms, poses with an envelope franked with the new cypher of King Charles III 'CIIIR', after it was printed in the Court Post Office at Buckingham Palace in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 26 September 2022 A gallery staff member poses next to a painting by Lucian Freud - Self-portrait (Fragment), 1956 - on show at a photocall for the Credit Suisse exhibition - Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery in London PA UK news in pictures 25 September 2022 Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer is interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg in Liverpool before the start of the Labour Party annual Conference which he opened with a tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and sang the national anthem PA UK news in pictures 24 September 2022 Handout photo issued by Buckingham Palace of the ledger stone at the King George VI Memorial Chapel, St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle PA UK news in pictures 23 September 2022 A climate change activist protests against UK private jets while lighting his right arm on fire during the Laver Cup tennis tournament at the O2 Arena in London EPA UK news in pictures 22 September 2022 Woody Woodmansey, Lee Bennett, Kevin Armstrong, Nick Moran and Clifford Slapper attend the unveiling of a stone for David Bowie on the Music Walk of Fame at Camden, north London PA UK news in pictures 21 September 2022 A flock of birds in the sky as the sun rises over Dungeness in Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2022 Flowers which were laid by members of the public in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland are collected by the Hillsborough Gardening Team and volunteers to be replanted for those that can be saved or composted PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2022 The ceremonial procession of the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II travels down the long walk as it arrives at Windsor Castle for the committal service at St Georges Chapel AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 18 September 2022 A man stands among campers on The Mall ahead of the Queens funeral Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2022 Wolverhampton Wanderers Nathan Collins fouls Manchester Citys Jack Grealish leading to a red card. City went on to win the match at Molineux Stadium three goals to nil. Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 16 September 2022 Members of the public stand in the queue near Tower Bridge, and opposite the Tower of London, as they wait in line to pay their respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II, in London AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 15 September 2022 Members of the public in the queue on in Potters Fields Park, central London, as they wait to view Queen Elizabeth II lying in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA

A Prison Service spokesperson said: We fully share the POA objectives to make prisons safe and decent places where frontline staff are recognised and rewarded for the challenging work they do. Unlawful industrial action is not the way to achieve that aim.

We are committed to building on the essential reforms that are already underway to make prisons places of safety and reform.

We are investing 100m a year to recruit an extra 2,500 frontline prison officers. The most recent figures show the number of prison officers in post has increased by 515 compared with the previous quarter, meaning we are on track to delivering this important commitment.
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Brexit is now becoming just another job for the boys, according to a group of female Labour MPs who have signed a letter to Theresa May urging her to review the gender balance of the governments EU negotiating team.

Pointing out that women form 51 per cent of the UK population and 32 per cent of parliament, they said that only one out of nine or 11 per cent of civil servants listed by the Department for Exiting the EU as members of the core team for the talks.

Our European counterparts, on the other hand, have women in nearly half of their teams positions, they write.

Arguing that leaving the bloc will have major implications for women, it says that the negotiations will need womens voices on mainstream issues like the economy as well as on directly addressing, for example, how we maintain workplace rights  much of which are underpinned by EU legislation.

If workers rights were watered down they add that it would impact women the most, from maternity leave to discrimination in the workplace.

Among the signatories are Yvette Cooper, Harriet Harman, Labours women and equalities minister, Sarah Champion and Seema Malhotra, who is a member of parliaments Brexit select committee.

Ms Malhotra told The Guardian it was staggering that Ms May had allowed our negotiating team to have as low a level of womens representation as parliament had 25 years ago.

The only woman on the list of the nine key players in negotiations that The department put out the names last month is Catherine Webb, who is director of market access and budget.

Oliver Robbins, the departments permanent secretary, and his deputy is Philip Rycroft. Others include Glyn Williams, the prime ministers national security adviser, Mark Sedwill, Simon Case Alex Ellis, and Mark Bowman.

Sir Tim Barrow, who is effectively the UKs ambassador to the EU was also included.

In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions Show all 12 1 /12 In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions European commission member in charge of Brexit negotiations with Britain, French Michel Barnier listens at the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker speaking at the European Parliament in Strasbourg Getty Images In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions Frank-Walter Steinmeier, President of the Federal Republic of Germany, delivers his speech at the European Parliament in Strasbourg EPA In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt, President of the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), addresses the European Parliament during a debate on Brexit priorities and the upcomming talks on the UK's withdrawal from the EU Reuters In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions Michel Barnier, European Chief Negotiator for Brexit reacts during a meeting at the European Parliament in Strasbourg EPA In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions Member of the European Parliament and former leader of the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage wears socks with Union Jack flag at the European Parliament in Strasbourg Getty Images In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions Nigel Farage, United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) member and MEP, addresses the European Parliament during a debate on Brexit priorities and the upcoming talks on the UK's withdrawal from the EU Reuters In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions European commission member in charge of Brexit negotiations with Britain, French Michel Barnier gestures during speeches at the European Parliament in Strasbourg Getty In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions The President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker (L) speaks with European commission member in charge of Brexit negotiations with Britain, French Michel Barnier at the European Parliament in Strasbourg Getty In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt, President of the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), addresses the European Parliament during a debate on Brexit priorities and the upcomming talks on the UK's withdrawal from the EU Reuters In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions Getty In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier delivers a speech during a plenary session at the European Parliament in Strasbourg Getty In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions The European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France Getty Images

Ms Malhotra said Ms May's administration should be leading the way, not taking us backwards", adding the danger was that women would emerge from Brexit "with fewer rights.

Comparing the line up to the Kremlin in the 1950s, Ms Harman said: This is the old boys network at the top of the civil service laid bare  this is not a meritocracy, it is a boys club.

A Conservative source said: The prime minister is the person ultimately in charge of the Brexit negotiations and is a woman. I would also point out that Labour have never elected a female leader.
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Brexit continues to threaten to break up the United Kingdom, as a committee of peers warns that the government must "raise its game" in talks with the devolved administrations in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

The Joint Ministerial Committee (European Negotiations) was set up to allow ministers from the UK, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to discuss the process, but a new report said it "is clear that at a basic level its meetings are not being treated with respect or organised efficiently".

Peers on the House of Lords EU Committee insisted "this needs to change" as they said the committee should be allowed to agree common positions on the Brexit issues of most importance to the governments in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast.

The call comes after Scottish Brexit Minister Mike Russell demanded the JMC meetings be urgently reconvened by the UK Government.

In their report, looking at the impact of exiting the European Union on the devolved administrations, peers said they back "the view of most of our witnesses that the UK Government needs to raise its game to make the JMC (EN) effective".

Recommended Tory MP attacks huge NHS cuts while cash handed to Northern Ireland

This should include better preparation, including bilateral discussions ahead of meetings, a structured work programme, greater transparency "and a willingness to accept that the JMC (EN), even if not a formal decision-making body, is more than a talking-shop", according to the report

Here the Lords suggested the JMC "should be authorised to agree common positions on key matters affecting devolved competences in time to inform the UK Government's negotiating position"

The report highlighted concerns over the "apparent deterioration of relations between the UK and Scottish governments" as a result of the UK's vote to leave the EU.

After almost two-thirds (62%) of Scots voted to remain in the 2016 referendum, the Lords also stressed there is a "strong political and economic case for making differentiated arrangements for Scotland".

However they dismissed Scottish Government calls to remain in the European single market after the rest of the UK leaves the trading bloc as being "politically impracticable, legally highly complex and economically potentially disruptive to the functioning of the UK single market".

The report made clear the "integrity and efficient operation of the UK single market must be an over-arching objective for the whole United Kingdom" during the Brexit process - but added "that objective does not preclude differentiated arrangements for Scotland in some areas, and nor does it justify excluding the Scottish Government from the Brexit process".

Ministers in London and Edinburgh need to "set aside their differences and work constructively together to protect the interests of the citizens of Scotland in the final Brexit deal", the Lords said.

While they made clear they did not want new areas of powers to be devolved, the report said the "specific labour market and demographic needs of the devolved nations should be accommodated in the context of Brexit".

With Scotland having relied on immigration to boost its population, the report said the UK Government should use its forthcoming Immigration Bill "to look for opportunities to enhance the role of the devolved institutions in managing EU migration", adding that "local and regional economic and demographic needs, rather than central targets, should drive decision-making".

In Northern Ireland it "appears that the Brexit debate has undermined political stability and exacerbated cross-community divisions", contributing to the collapse of the Northern Ireland Executive and the calling of an early Assembly election, the report said.

Consequently the Lords warned: "Political stability in Northern Ireland must not be allowed to become 'collateral damage' of Brexit."

Meanwhile, they said Wales could be "profoundly affected" by leaving the EU as the economy is "highly reliant" on membership of the single market - with the report saying it is "therefore particularly vulnerable" if UK access to this is reduced.

Lord Jay of Ewelme, a member of the committee and former head of the diplomatic service, said: "Brexit's impact on the future of the United Kingdom will be profound and unpredictable. At the moment the internal politics are pretty toxic, and we saw only last week the start of what could become a deep and bitter dispute on the role of the devolved institutions in passing the EU (Withdrawal) Bill.

"We can't afford this. The UK Government must respect the devolved institutions. It's not enough saying it's listening to them-it's actually got to take account of what they say and adjust its approach to accommodate their specific needs. Equally the devolved administrations must work with, not against, the UK Government to get the best Brexit for the whole of the UK."

Mr Russell said: "As is becoming clearer by the day, Brexit is causing deep uncertainty across Scotland - and an extreme Brexit outside the single market and customs union will cause severe long-term economic damage, hitting jobs, growth and living standards.

"This report makes clear Brexit should not be used as cover for a 'power grab', and that powers in areas such as fisheries, agriculture and environmental protection should be returning from Brussels to Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast - not Westminster.

"But just as there should be no power grab, there should be no attempt to use Brexit to cut Scotland's budget, and under the current constitutional arrangements the Scottish Government supports the retention of the Barnett Formula.

"This report also calls on the UK Government to 'raise its game' in consulting the devolved governments - UK ministers should heed that call by resuming the JMC process, as this report calls for, and by agreeing to involve the Scottish and other administrations directly with a seat at the negotiating table.

"Our clear position is that we want a way forward that allows Scotland to remain within the single market and this report notes the need for a specific Scottish solution. We will do everything we can to help deliver the best possible deal for our society and economy."

A UK Government spokesman said: "We have been clear that the Repeal Bill will not take away any decision-making powers from the devolved administrations immediately after exit.

"Instead, to protect the UK internal market, some decision-making powers being transferred into UK law will be held temporarily to allow intensive discussion and consultation with the devolved administrations.

"As the Secretary of State has made clear, it is our expectation that the outcome of this process will provide a significant increase in the decision-making power of each devolved administration and we are committed to positive and productive engagement."
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A senior German MEP has sided with Theresa May in the Brexit talks, by accusing the EU negotiators of attempting to punish Britain.

Hans-Olaf Henkel accused Michel Barnier, the chief negotiator, of planning to impose a bad exit agreement on Britain as a warning to other countries tempted to leave the EU.

Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament's Brexit negotiator, was also guilty of wanting to make a mess out of this whole unhappy situation.

I have the impression, by their public statements, that indeed they would like to set an example, said Mr Henkel, the deputy head of the European Parliament's industry, research and energy committee.

They want to punish Britain and make sure that non-one else is leaving the European Union.

By the very fact that they say that a country which leaves the European Union should not have the same deal as a country which is in the European Union you can demonstrate what they mean.

Mr Henkel, the president of the Federation of German Industries and a former chief executive of IBM, urged other MEPs  who enjoy a potential veto of any Brexit deal  not to listen to their own negotiators.

His outburst will strengthen the hand of the Prime Minister who has repeatedly accused the EU of seeking to punish Britain  and even of a plot to stop Brexit.

The criticism came as the second round of the talks appeared to have run into trouble within 24 hours of resuming in Brussels, over the vexed issue of the so-called divorce bill

EU diplomats have hit out at Britains failure to agree it must pay a hefty financial settlement for Brexit, suggesting the controversy will stall the talks.

Eyebrows were raised after David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, left the talks after just one hour on Monday, leaving the negotiations to his officials.

The agenda for the four-day talks includes the rights of EU citizens in the UK  and British ex-pats in the EU  and the Northern Ireland border, as well as the exit bill.

Last week, Mr Barnier urged the British side to present detailed proposals on all three priorities before the talks resumed, but there is no evidence that this happened.

Instead, the UK is expected wait to several weeks before formally setting out its position on the bill, using this week's talk to interrogate and challenge the EU's stance.

Mr Henkel is a member of a Eurosceptic grouping in the Parliament and his views on the EUs approach to the talks are not thought to be shared by most European politicians.

Nevertheless, the German MEP called Brexit disastrous, pointing to the controversy over Britains withdrawal from the Euratom nuclear regulator.

He said the UK received funding for worlds largest nuclear fusion experiment, at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, which is of fundamental importance for the world.

I see that the whole project may collapse if this funding doesnt work anymore, Mr Henkel warned.

Both the EU negotiators and the Prime Minister were wrong to believe EU withdrawal meant pulling out of Euratom as well, he insisted.
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Some child refugees have been waiting more than a year to transfer from Greece to the UK, ministers have been told.

Outgoing Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said he was aware of two young people who signed a consent form to be transferred under the Dubs scheme in 2016 but are "still stuck" in Greece.

Mr Farron also questioned when the Government would meet its "measly" commitment to transfer 480 unaccompanied minors from Europe, noting 200 have so far been given sanctuary.

His remarks came as he asked an urgent question on Section 67 of the Immigration Act 2016.

It is known as the Dubs scheme after Labour peer Lord Dubs, who was the architect of the policy which requires ministers to make arrangements to relocate and support unaccompanied refugee children from Europe.

Speaking in the Commons, Mr Farron asked how many children have arrived from Greece under the Dubs scheme and if the UK has signed a memorandum of understanding with Greece to get the transfers under way.

He said: "I know of two young people who signed a consent form to be transferred under Dubs over a year ago, they are still stuck in Greece.

"The horrific truth is that the longer this goes on, the more likely these children will go missing and fall into the evil hands of traffickers.

"According to Oxfam, 28 children every single day are going missing in Italy alone.

"Will this Government step up or continue to ignore the plight of these desperate children?"

Mr Farron earlier labelled the Government's commitment to bring 480 children to the UK under the scheme as "measly" because it could "do so much more".

He pointed to Freedom of Information requests which, he said show, councils have "voluntarily offered to accept 1,572 more children" in addition to those they already support, something Home Office Minister Brandon Lewis said was "simply wrong".

Mr Lewis said: "We consulted with local authorities, which is what we said we'd do when this legislation was before the House; that's what has led to the figure of 480.

"The FOI request you are talking about actually doesn't look at what local authorities can provide, it's actually talking about the 0.7% threshold - which is an entirely different calculation.

"But what we're very clear about is that making sure we do not create a pull factor, but at the same time we do the right thing - as we have done with the 2.46 billion of support, making us one of the biggest contributors with the biggest humanitarian aid project this country has ever conducted to look after the people who need our care the most.

"Instead of playing politics with children's lives, we should get on with looking after them and I wish you would join us in doing that."

Mr Lewis said the UK has a range of schemes which seek to bring 23,000 people over, adding that the Government needs to work with Italy, Greece and France while recognising they are nation states.

Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott said the Commons understands the Government's preference to take unaccompanied children from the affected region

But she added: "I've visited the camps in France and Greece and the minister needs to be reminded those children are already there, often living in horrible conditions, and are particularly at the mercy of traffickers and sexual exploitation."

Ms Abbott warned the Government against diminishing family reunification rights post-Brexit, questioning if it will "walk away from its moral obligations".

Mr Lewis said Ms Abbott's final remark "doesn't do her or this House or this country justice".

Conservative former minister Tim Loughton praised work he had seen in Greece, adding: "There is a criticism that it is taking too long to get those children properly processed and assessed who have got a right to be here."

Tory MP Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) asked what would happen to the Dublin III rule when "we move towards this brave new Brexit world".

She asked how many children had come to the UK under the rule already, and said: "How are we going to make sure that those pieces of legislation are embedded in our own laws when we leave the EU?"

Mr Lewis said the Government was "determined to make sure we fulfil our commitments" on Dublin III.

He said: "Obviously as we go through the negotiations of leaving the European Union, exactly what format that will take in terms of technically what that Dublin commitment becomes, it's too soon to say, but we are very determined to stick with the moral and ethical duty that we are deciding to participate in in continuing to provide that support to people that need it most in the way that we do through the Dublin agreement."

Former shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper criticised the Government for its "shameful" response and urged ministers to "get on with" helping lone child refugees.

She said: "Parliament told the Government to help lone child refugees from Europe when it passed the Dubs Amendment last year.

"I know the Government didn't want to agree to it, but it was passed, and frankly, the way in which they have narrowed the criteria, dragged their feet, failed to even count the council offers properly, is shameful."

Mr Lewis said the Government wants to "give them the right support" and provide families with "the support network to be able to be an important and valued part of our community".

"It is important we do that within what local authorities can actually provide and within the restrictions that they have got and the capacity that they have got, and that is what we are doing to make sure they get the right support.

"In 2016 we did grant asylum or some form of leave to over 8,000 children, and since 2010 some 42,000.

"So we are doing our bit, we want to continue doing that work."
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Protesters in wheelchairs have attempted to blockade the entrance to the House of Commons in protest at cuts to disability benefits.

The demonstration took place as MPs attempted to exit the chamber following Prime Minister's Questions. Eight people in wheelchairs positioned themselves in front of the doors into the Commons.

They chanted "no justice, no peace" and demanded to speak with MPs, saying they were campaigning aganist cuts to social care and the Independent Living Fund.

Recommended May refuses to rule out further disability benefits cuts

Two of the protesters, who are believed to be part of the Disabled People Against Cuts group, began chanting "Ohh Jeremy Corbyn" as the Labour leader walked past.

The protest took place in Parliament's Central Lobby, in front of doors that lead to the Commons chamber. There are other routes to the chamber, meaning MPs were still about to get in and out of the room.

Police formed a protective cordon as protesters chanted: "This is a message to Theresa May: while we have no justice, you will have no peace" and "No more deaths from benefit cuts".

46-year-old Paula Peters, a member of the national steering group of Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) told The Independent she was in the Palace of Westminster to protest against the closure of the Independent Living Fund in 2015.

"Many disabled people with high support needs have had their care packages cut between 20 to 60 per cent and are facing a bleak future in residential care or imprisoned at home, excluded from society, she said.

I tell this Government now, disabled people will fight for their rights till the last person in their wheelchair to the last disabled person in this country. We are being treated horrifically under this Government. We have borne the brunt of austerity nine times more than any other group."

The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Show all 6 1 /6 The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Brexit The big one. Theresa May has spoken publicly three times since declaring her intent to stand in the Tory Leadership race, and each time she has said, Brexit means Brexit. It sounds resolute, but it is helpful to her that Brexit is a made up word with no real meaning. She has said there will be no second referendum and no re-entry in to the EU via the back door. But she, like the Leave campaign of which she was not a member, has pointedly not said with any precision what she thinks Brexit means Reuters The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address General election This is very much one to keep off the to do list. She said last week there would be no general election at this time of great instability. But there have already been calls for one from opposition parties. The Fixed Term Parliaments Act of 2010 makes it far more difficult to call a snap general election, a difficulty she will be in no rush to overcome. In the event of a victory for Leadsom, who was not popular with her own parliamentary colleagues, an election might have been required, but May has the overwhelming backing of the parliamentary party Getty The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address HS2 Macbeth has been quoted far too much in recent weeks, but it will be up to May to decide whether, with regard to the new high speed train link between London, Birmingham, the East Midlands and the north, returning were as tedious as go oer. Billions have already been spent. But the 55bn it will cost, at a bare minimum, must now be considered against the grim reality of significantly diminished public finances in the short to medium term at least. It is not scheduled to be completed until 2033, by which point it is not completely unreasonable to imagine a massive, driverless car-led transport revolution having rendered it redundant EPA The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Heathrow expansion Or indeed Gatwick expansion. Or Boris Island, though that option is seems as finished as the man himself. The decision on where to expand aviation capacity in the south east has been delayed to the point of becoming a national embarrassment. A final decision was due in autumn. Whatever is decided, there will be vast opprobrium PA The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Trident renewal David Cameron indicated two days ago that there will be a Commons vote on renewing Britains nuclear deterrent on July 18th, by which point we now know, Ms May will be Prime Minister. The Labour Party is, to put it mildly, divided on the issue. This will be an early opportunity to maximise their embarrassment, and return to Tory business as usual EPA The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Scottish Independence Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP are in no doubt that the Brexit vote provides the opportunity for a second independence referendum, in which they can emerge victorious. The Scottish Parliament at Holyrood has the authority to call a second referendum, but Ms May and the British Parliament are by no means automatically compelled to accept the result. She could argue it was settled in 2014 AFP/Getty

Asked what was the aim of blocking the Commons entrance, she responded: Our rights were never handed to us. We fought for our rights.

"We are doing this kind of action to raise awareness of what this Government is doing to disabled people in the UK. We want the world to know what the UK Government is doing to disabled people. In the 21st century, the fifth richest country on earth  they are killing disabled people in large numbers. Our rights are being eroded. We want that to stop.

"We dont take this action lightly. We feel we have no choice by a Government that is refusing to listen to us, is not interested in listening to us, who just wants to keep cutting and cutting and cutting until there is nothing left to cut.

Theresa May had her magic money tree for the DUP we say enough. We want this stop."

A second campaigner, Victoria, a 29-year-old with disc degenerative disease and epilepsy, echoed the comments regarding the Prime Ministers deal with the Northern Ireland party in a bid to cling to power following the general election last month.

At the moment, obviously, the fact of all this money given to the DUP at the moment when we were told about a magic money tree, she said. "Yet they have been taking money away from disabled people.
Parliament will rise this week and return in early September (PA)

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Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn have clashed at PMQs for the last time this parliamentary year.

The exchanges focused mostly on living standards, with the Labour leader highlighting falling wages and the Prime Minister defending the Conservatives' economic record.

After a tumultuous year in Parliament, which included a general election, the triggering of Article 50 and the start of Brexit negotiations, both party leaders will be relieved to have survived the last 12 months. Mr Corbyn undoubtedly goes into the summer recess in a stronger position than Ms May, who was weakened by a disastrous election result.

While she has so far managed to cling on to her job, a number of Tory MPs are ready to wield the knife and it is unlikely but not unthinkable that this PMQs could be Ms May's last.

The Prime Minister is likely to use the summer break to try to reassert her authority and strengthen her hold on power, as she attempts to enforce discipline on an increasingly divided cabinet.

Earlier this week Ms May was forced to tell ministers to stop briefing about their colleagues and instead get on with their jobs, after a string of negative stories about Chancellor Philip Hammond appeared in Sunday newspapers.

Mr Hammond is not the only senior minister under pressure this week; David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, also faced criticism after turning up to Brexit negotiations in Brussels apparently without any briefing notes and stayed for just one hour before returning to London and leaving his officials to handle the talks.

Some Tory MPs are likely to use PMQs to raise the issue of BBC salaries on the day the corporation revealed 96 members of staff who are paid more than the Prime Minister.

Here are the main political stories today:

EU set to halt Brexit talks because the UK is not ready

Theresa May to chair new advisory group aimed at building bridges with business before leaving EU

Theresa May under pressure to drop migration target after warning over Brexit recruitment crisis

Labour granted emergency debate on student tuition fees

Tory party split laid bare after Theresa May gets go-ahead to sack disloyal ministers

Jeremy Corbyn tells Theresa May to scrap 'invasive' tests for trans people
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Britains Labour Party has thrown its weight behind demands from US 9/11 survivors for Prime Minister Theresa May to release a suppressed report into the extent of Saudi Arabias financing of Islamic extremism within the UK.

The report was commissioned by David Cameron as part of a political deal to obtain political support for a parliamentary vote on UK airstrikes on Syria.

After Ms Mays Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, said last week the report would not be released for national security reasons, a group of survivors and relatives of those who died in the attacks on New York and Washington, wrote to Ms May urging her to change her mind and release the report.

Ms May met with King Salman of Saudi Arabia last year in Bahrain (Getty)

The UK now has the unique historic opportunity to stop the killing spree of Wahhabism-inspired terrorists by releasing the UK governments report on terrorism financing in the UK which, according to media reports, places Saudi Arabia at its centre of culpability, says the letter, signed by 15 people.

The longer Saudi Arabias complicity is hidden from sunlight, the longer terrorism will continue. They must be stopped; but who will stop them? We submit that you are uniquely situated to shine the cleansing light of public consciousness.

Sharon Premoli, one of the authors of the letter, was on the 80th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre when the first Al-Qaeda plane struck, also sent the letter to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott.

Now, Ms Abbott and the Labour Party have backed the demand from the victims of the deadliest terror attack in US history. The public has a right to know how extremism in the UK is funded, she said in a statement.

 Independent candidate claims Amber Rudd shut down his speech about arms sales to Saudi Arabia

Last week, the Government published a summary rather than a full report on the subject. This decision raises serious concerns that the report is being suppressed to protect commercial relations with possible sources of funding, including Saudi Arabia.

Labour has consistently called for Theresa May to publish the report in full and echoes the demand of these 9/11 survivors.

Saudi Arabia has always denied any involvement in the attacks on New York and Washington, even though 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens.

Ms Premoli has claimed that rather than confronting Saudi Arabia, the US and Britain have supported the kingdom's unelected monarchy and even encouraged its dispersal of extremism when it has suited Western economic or strategic aims. She said, the US and UK were both continuing to sell arms to Riyadh, even though they were being used in its operations against Yemeni rebels - something that has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths.

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 week, Reuters reported that at least 20 Yemeni civilians were killed and many others were wounded when a Saudi-led coalition air strike hit a village in the south

The UN said the victims of Tuesdays bombing, which hit al-Atera village in Taiz province where fighting between Yemens two warring sides has intensified, were internally displaced people.

The victims request that Ms May make public the report, even if it is not complete, has also received the backing of Green Party co-leader Caroline Lucas.

In a statement to The Independent, she said: I fully support these 9/11 survivors in their appeal to Theresa May to release this report. The Governments refusal to publish it, and their recent vague statement on the issue, are completely unacceptable.

The Government accepts that foreign funding is a significant source of income for some extremist groups here in Britain - but they wont say in public where that money is coming from. This group of 9/11 survivors are right to demand answersand I hope Theresa May takes heed of their calls.


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Theresa May has refused to deny the involvement of Rupert Murdoch in Michael Goves return to Cabinet after the general election.

In the days following last months election, Labour deputy leader Tom Watson wrote to the Prime Minister to ask whether she had re-appointed Mr Gove due to pressure from Mr Murdoch.

In the email, Mr Watson said it had been suggested to him that Ms May could have made the appointment to curry favour with the Murdoch press.

Upon first taking office as Prime Minister in 2016, Ms May immediately fired Mr Gove from his position as Justice Secretary after he launched an ill-fated leadership bid against her in the wake of David Camerons resignation after the Brexit vote.

But after last months election, Mr Gove made a surprise return to the front bench as Ms Mays environment secretary.

The Government has now responded to Mr Watsons message, but has not denied Mr Murdochs involvement outright.

Damian Green, the First Secretary of State, said that decisions over appointments to the Cabinet are taken by the the Prime Minister alone.

In a letter Mr Green said: All those appointed by Her Majesty the Queen to Cabinet and ministerial roles are selected by the Prime Minister based on their merit and experience, drawing on each members best talent. The decision is the Prime Ministers alone. Your email raised the important issue of transparency about meetings with senior media executives.

Government ministers are fully transparent about such meetings, but I observe that the Labour party has still failed to publish any information about shadow cabinet members meetings with senior media executives since Jeremy Corbyn became leader  including your own meetings.

The Labour Party has faced criticism for lack of transparency over Jeremy Corbyns meetings with the press for some months. In April this year Mr Corbyns office said it would release a list of meetings in due course. The party has since cited an administrative issue it says is yet to be resolved.

Mr Watson said people could make their own conclusions about the Governments response to his letter.

In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions Show all 12 1 /12 In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions European commission member in charge of Brexit negotiations with Britain, French Michel Barnier listens at the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker speaking at the European Parliament in Strasbourg Getty Images In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions Frank-Walter Steinmeier, President of the Federal Republic of Germany, delivers his speech at the European Parliament in Strasbourg EPA In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt, President of the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), addresses the European Parliament during a debate on Brexit priorities and the upcomming talks on the UK's withdrawal from the EU Reuters In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions Michel Barnier, European Chief Negotiator for Brexit reacts during a meeting at the European Parliament in Strasbourg EPA In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions Member of the European Parliament and former leader of the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage wears socks with Union Jack flag at the European Parliament in Strasbourg Getty Images In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions Nigel Farage, United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) member and MEP, addresses the European Parliament during a debate on Brexit priorities and the upcoming talks on the UK's withdrawal from the EU Reuters In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions European commission member in charge of Brexit negotiations with Britain, French Michel Barnier gestures during speeches at the European Parliament in Strasbourg Getty In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions The President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker (L) speaks with European commission member in charge of Brexit negotiations with Britain, French Michel Barnier at the European Parliament in Strasbourg Getty In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt, President of the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), addresses the European Parliament during a debate on Brexit priorities and the upcomming talks on the UK's withdrawal from the EU Reuters In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions Getty In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier delivers a speech during a plenary session at the European Parliament in Strasbourg Getty In pictures: European parliament Brexit discussions The European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France Getty Images

I asked Theresa May to deny a deeply worrying allegation that had been made to me about her and she refused to do so, Mr Watson told the Guardian.

Its such an easy thing to deny - unless its true. People will draw their own conclusions.

With 21st Century Foxs bid for Sky being considered by the Government right now, questions about Rupert Murdochs influence over Theresa May were already being asked. This makes them all the more relevant.
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Theresa May has insisted it is not possible to go around promising people more money as she faced criticism from the Labour leader over the public sector pay cap.

While Ms May said she recognised the sacrifice made by the public sector in the last seven years of austerity, she defended the cap at the last Prime Ministers Questions before the parliamentary recess.

She continued: The right honourable gentlemen seems to think its possible to go around promising people more money and promise that nobody will have to pay for it. He and I both do value public sector workers. We both value our public sector services. The difference is on this side of the House we know you have to pay for them.

But Mr Corbyn quipped back saying the Prime Minister had no problem finding money for her deal with the Democratic Unionist Party following the general election last month.

During the session, Labour MPs could also be heard shouting Give them a pay rise after Ms May praised the emergency services for their response to the recent terror attacks in Manchester and London.

The Conservatives have been in office for 84 months  52 of those months have seen a real fall in wages and income in our country, Mr Corbyn added.

Mr Corbyn quoted Ms Mays pre-election pledge to ensure everyone would feel the benefits of a strong economy, asking: Do you agree you cannot have a strong economy when six million people are earning less than the living wage?

Ms May replied: Ill tell you when you cant have a strong economy, its when you adopt Labour Party policies of half a trillion pounds extra borrowing which will mean more spending, more borrowing, higher prices, higher taxes and fewer jobs.

The [last] Labour government crashed the economy, the Conservative Government has come in  more people in work, more people in jobs, more investment.

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

During the session, the Labour leader also claimed that a recently reported stall in life expectancy was a consequence of austerity economics, introduced by the Conservatives in 2010. His comments came after a former government adviser claimed a century-long rise in life expectancy was pretty close to having ground to a halt and had stalled since 2010.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot, who previously chaired a government-commissioned review into health inequalities, said he was deeply concerned and said it is a matter of urgency to try and examine why this has happened.
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Theresa May has denied suppressing a report into Saudi Arabias funding of Islamist extremism in Britain to protect lucrative arms sales to the country.

The Prime Minister was also accused of burying the results of the investigation because publication would embarrass the Governments friends in Saudi Arabia.

Or is it because ministers care rather more about arms sales to Riyadh than they do about public safety in Britain? asked Caroline Lucas the Green MP.

But Ms May, speaking during Prime Ministers Questions, replied: It is absolutely nothing to do with that.

She added: There is certain confidential information in the report which means it would not be appropriate to publish it.

The Opposition parties had been allowed to see the report through the Privy Council, the Prime Minister said  something Labour was unable to confirm immediately.

It was the first time Ms May had spoken about the controversy since the Home Secretary sparked criticism by insisting the report would be kept under wraps

It was commissioned by the Coalition government, after Liberal Democrat pressure, but must be held back on national security grounds, Amber Rudd said.

An exclusive poll for The Independent revealed that most people want to see the facts about foreign funding of Islamist extremism in Britain, even if it damages relations with Saudi Arabia.

It found that 64 per cent of the public wants the report to be made publicly available in full, with only 11 per cent backing its suppression.

The same survey found Britain must end arms sales to Saudi Arabia while the country is accused of the large-scale slaughter of civilians in Yemens civil war.

The results laid bare the publics deep unease about Britains close relationship with an autocracy embroiled in a devastating war in neighbouring Yemen.

In the Commons, Ms Lucas also pointed to The Independents overnight revelation that survivors of the 9/11 attacks have written to Ms May calling for the reports release.

She said it showed that the Government was refusing to budge despite pressure from all sides of the House and beyond

With survivors of 9/11 last night also urging her to make this report available, will she explain if her refusal is simply because the contents of the report would embarrass the Governments friends in Saudi Arabia? she asked.
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We have the identity of the eighth person in Donald Trump Jr's Russia meeting. The Post's Rosalind S. Helderman reports that it's Ike Kaveladze, an American-based employee of a Russian real estate company.

According to his lawyer, Kaveladze planned to serve in the June 2016 meeting as an interpreter and the representative of Emin and Aras Agalarov, the Russian pop star and developer who hosted President Trump's 2013 Miss Universe pageant.

It's not clear how the presence of Kaveladze, a US citizen, might change perceptions of the meeting, for which Trump Jr was promised opposition research about Democrats courtesy of the Russian government.

But the big takeaway here is this: The meeting is now under investigation.

Kaveladze's lawyer, Scott Balber, told Helderman that he received a phone call over the weekend from special counsel Robert Mueller's office seeking an interview with Kaveladze. That means Mueller is now looking into the meeting, and it's the first on-the-record indication that he is.

That may not be terribly surprising, given Mueller's investigation is examining coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, which makes this meeting a logical thing for him to look at. Indeed, it would be odd if he didn't. But we now have confirmation.

In addition to possible coordination, the president himself is being looked into for possible obstruction of justice. And the finances and business dealings of his son-in-law and senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner, are also being probed as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

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

Despite Trump Jr's claims of transparency in releasing his emails arranging the meeting, we continue to learn new things about it - specifically the presence of three people he didn't disclose. First it was Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet counterintelligence officer. Now we have learned the identities of Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya's translator and Kaveladze.

Mueller probing the meeting would suggest, despite Trump Jr's opacity, that we would now hear more about it - at least eventually - including perhaps most notably what was in that folder that Akhmetshin said Veselnitskaya provided to the Trump campaign. We'd also likely hear more about specifically who these people are and how substantial their alleged ties to the Russian government are.

Where this will wind up, who knows? But we're now in a situation in which the president, his most trusted adviser/daughter's husband and his own son who is running his business are all in Mueller's sights. That is troubling for the president because distancing himself from his family is going to be very difficult.

The Washington Post
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A former Nebraska teacher has been sentenced to 90 days in jail for having sex with a student on his 16th birthday.

Emily Lofing, 27, was charged with debauching a minor as the boy was 16 years old, the age of consent in Nebraska. Lofing did not contest the charge, WOWT reports.

The married former teacher was working in Weeping Water at the time of the offence. She is alleged to have met up with the teenager to have sex in July 2016.

Her lawyer, Desirae Solomon, claimed she had suffered a mental breakdown and pleaded with the judge to consider Lofings stress from work and family history of depression as contributing factors to her behaviour.

Ms Solomon said Lofing had been leading a double life and people who have known her for her whole entire life were shocked at this type of behaviour, KWBE reports.

Deputy Otoe County Attorney John Palmtag requested that Lofing be given 180 days in jail and the maximum fine to send a strong message that we wont tolerate predatory acts among students.

Judge John Steinheider drew attention to the timing of the offence, and told Lofing in court: This alleged indiscretion, Ill say, took place on the victims 16th birthday.

You were less than 24 hours away from a felony here.

Lofing has been sentenced to 90 days in jail, which could be reduced to 53 days for good behaviour, two years probation, 240 hours' community service and a $1,000 (767) fine for contributing to the delinquency of a child.

She has resigned from her job at Nebraska City Middle School and surrendered her state teaching certificate.
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A young boy from New Mexico recently made an accidental discovery thats sure to make his classmates  and scientists around the world  extremely jealous.

Nine-year-old Jude Sparks was walking with his family in Las Cruces, New Mexico when he tripped and fell over something protruding from the dirt.

On further examination, he and his brother determined it to be the remains of a big fat rotten cow. The two brought it to their parents, who identified it as an elephant skull.

They were all wrong.

According to Peter Houde, a biology professor at New Mexico State University who the family consulted, the skull belonged to a 1.2 million-year-old Stegomastodon  a distant relative of the elephant, similar to a mastodon.

This is really very unusual to find, Mr Houde told The New York Times, adding that it was fantastic that such a young person had made the discovery.

Newly discovered fossil revealed as the mother of modern-day molluscs Show all 2 1 /2 Newly discovered fossil revealed as the mother of modern-day molluscs Newly discovered fossil revealed as the mother of modern-day molluscs 381245.bin MARIANNE COLLINS Newly discovered fossil revealed as the mother of modern-day molluscs 381243.bin JEAN-BERNARD CARON

Stegomastodon fossils are a rare find in the US, for reasons scientists have yet to pin down. Only a couple hundred have been found in the world, according to Spencer Lucas, curator of palaeontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

After talking to the Sparks family in November, Mr Houlde quickly got to work gathering a team, securing a permit, and finding funding for the dig. He conducted the final excavation in May  six months after the initial discovery.

Were really, really grateful that [the Sparks family] contacted us, because if they had not done that, if they had tried to do it themselves, it could have just destroyed the specimen, Mr Houde said. It really has to be done with great care and know-how.

Mr Houde now hopes to put the fossil on display at the university.

As for Jude, the whole experience has reignited his interest in  and greatly expanded his knowledge on  the field of palaeontology.

Im not really an expert, but I know a lot about it, I guess, he told the Times.
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Carrier Corp, the company where Donald Trump claimed to have saved 1,000 jobs, is laying off 338 people on the six-month anniversary of the President's inauguration.

The terminations mark the first round in a previously-announced slate of of layoffs, in which about 630 people are projected to lose their jobs.

News of the layoffs coincides with the President's six-month anniversary in office, and with the White Houses Made in America Week, which was intended to celebrate the vital contributions of American workers and job creators to our Nation's prosperity and strength.

Carrier first drew the ire of Mr Trump in April of last year, when the company announced plans to shut down its Indianapolis, Indiana factory. the shut-down would result in layoffs of approximately 2,100 people.

Then-candidate Trump singled out Carrier in a speech where he threatened to tax the hell out of companies that outsourced jobs.

Shortly after his inauguration, Mr Trump brokered a deal with the air conditioner manufacturer to keep their Indianapolis plant open for another 10 years. In exchange, he arranged for $7m in conditional state tax incentives and training grants. The state has yet to finalise approval for this deal.

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 then-President-Elect bragged at the time that he had saved 1,000 jobs at the plant.

These companies arent going to be leaving any more, he said. Theyre not going to be taking peoples hearts out. Theyre not going to be announcing, like they did at Carrier, that theyre closing up and theyre moving to Mexico.

Shortly thereafter, Carrier announced it would still be moving part of its operation  the fan coil construction  to Mexico, resulting in more than 600 layoffs at the Indianapolis plant. The upcoming layoffs with be the first of these dismissals.

Carrier said in a statement to the Indy Star that it "continues to honour its 2016 commitment to employ approximately 1,100 associates in Indianapolis. The company did not respond to questions from The Independent about the timing of its layoffs.

Robert James, the president of the union that represents Carrier workers, said many of the Carrier workers do not believe that the plant will stay in Indianapolis for the full 10 years.

"There's just too much uncertainty, Mr James told the Indy Star.

Mohan Tatikonda, an operations management professor for the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, echoed these sentiments.

"The Carrier factory stayed active in Indianapolis for years longer than we should have expected it to," he said.

Carrier said that all employees who are laid off will receive one week of severance pay for every year they spent with Carrier, plus six months of insurance.
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Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a second, previously undisclosed meeting at the G20 summit earlier this month in Germany, a White House official has confirmed.

The meeting followed the two leaders formal two-hour meeting on 7 July in which Mr Trump said Mr Putin denied allegations that he directed efforts to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election.

The second meeting, which took place some hours later, was only attended by Mr Putin, Mr Trump and Mr Putins translator. It had not previously been disclosed by the White House.

The White House official did not say how long the second meeting took place or what was discussed.

The second meeting between Mr Putin and Mr Trump was first reported by Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group.

Mr Bremmer said the meeting, which went ahead without Mr Trumps own translator present, was a breach of national security protocol, though he added that it was one the president likely would not know about.

Their formal meeting - their first face-to-face talks amid investigations in the US into possible collusion between Russia and Trump campaign figures during last year's presidential vote - lasted more than two hours, despite being scheduled for only half-an-hour.

At one point, First Lady Melania Trump entered the room to hurry them along.

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

Afterwards, Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov claimed Mr Trump accepted Mr Putins assurances that Russia did not meddle in the US presidential election - a claim later denied by the White House.

However, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Mr Trump had raised the issue of Moscows alleged cyber-meddling in the election at the start of their conversation.

He said the US had talked about such attacks represented a threat to the democratic process.

I think the president is rightly focused on how do we move forward from something that may be an intractable disagreement at this point, Mr Tillerson said.

The President later hit out at negative coverage of the previously undisclosed discussion, writing on Twitter: "Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is 'sick.' All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!"

A few minutes later he added: "The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!"

National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton said: "A conversation over dessert should not be characterised as a meeting."
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Donald Trump has reportedly decided to end the USs funding and training of so-called moderate Syrian rebels opposed to Bashar al-Assad - something that has long been requested by Moscow.

The plan to train and equip rebels opposed to Mr Assad was started in 2013 under the administration of Barack Obama, as an effort to try and put pressure on the Syrian leader to step aside. While most of the heavy weapons and cash were provided by Saudi Arabia, the CIA took the lead in the training.

Now, it has been reported that Mr Trump has decided to cancel the programme, something that will likely be welcomed by Russia, which has for years supported the Assad regime.

 Lindsey Graham says Assad is sending 'F you' message to Donald Trump

The limited CIA programme - known as Timber Sycamore - also received funding from Qatar, Jordan and Turkey. It was seen by the Obama administration as a limited means of offering support in a conflict in which it had no interest in placing US troops on the ground.

A second programme, overseen by the Pentagon, was aimed at training rebels to combat Isis fighters in Syria. The programme was halted last year after it emerged that despite spending more than $500m, with the aim of training up to 5,000 rebels, it resulted in just five trained fighters.

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. 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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. 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The Washington Post said that the decision to scrap the CIA programme was made a month ago, after a meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser HR McMaster, and before the July 7 meeting in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20.

After the meeting between the two leaders, the US and Russia announced a new cease-fire in southwest Syria, along the Jordanian border, where many of the CIA-backed rebels have reportedly long operated.

John Pike, Director of the military and strategic research group GlobalSecurity.Org said the CIA programme was one of the biggest funding of foreign militia in its history. The Pentagon programme, by contrast, had been a huge failure.

I think Putin will be thrilled, he told The Independent. Now America has the option of backing [Isis] or backing Assad.
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Donald Trump is still saying that the 2016 election was rigged against him.

During an address at his voter fraud commission, he insisted - without evidence - that votes cast in the name of dead people were responsible for his popular vote election loss to Hillary Clinton. Mr Trump, who fell short of Ms Clinton by nearly three million votes, won in the electoral college after wins in a few key states that were considered to be Democratic "firewall" states.

Mr Trump created the voter fraud commission in response to that popular vote embarrassment, and has steadily insisted that he should have won the popular vote but was snubbed as a result of fraudulent ballots.

"Every time voter fraud occurs, it cancels out the vote of a lawful citizen," Mr Trump said. "Any form of illegal or fraudulent voting, whether by non-citizens or the diseased, and any form of voter suppression or intimidation, must be stopped."

The commission's highest profile action thus far has been to request voter data from states, which many state officials have rejected. That request asked for information including the names of voters, their addresses, their political party registration, and the last four digits of their social security numbers. Most of that data is already made available by many states, and is frequently sold to political campaigns hoping to beef up their operations.

"If any state does not want to share this information one has to wonder what they're worried about," Mr Trump said. "I ask the vice president, I ask the commission what they're worried about? There's something. There always is."

Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Show all 22 1 /22 Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Donald Trump's international Presidential trips French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Donald Trump AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Donald Trump talk as they leave the Army Museum at Les Invalides in Paris AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump arrive for the group photo at the G7 Taormina summit on the island of Sicily in May 2017 Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Mr Trump was pressed on the subject at the G7 summit in Italy Getty Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump gives a speeech at the Warsaw Uprising Monument on Krasinski Square Getty Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump and Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May during a ceremony at the NATO headquarters before the start of a summit in Brussels, Belgium Reuters Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Montenegro's Prime Minister Dusko Markovic is seen to the right of Donald Trump at a Nato summit in Brussels REUTERS Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Pope Francis meeting with US President Donald J. Trump EPA Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Pope Francis poses with US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump arrives at Palazzo del Quirinale ahead of the meeting with Italian President Sergio Mattarella Ufficio Stampa Presidenza della via Getty Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump is seen during a joint press conference with the Palestinian leader at the presidential palace in the West Bank city of Bethlehem AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas meets US President Donald Trump PPO via Getty Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with US President Donald Trump prior to the President's departure GPO via Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands after delivering a speech at the Israel Museum AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump lay a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance as White House senior advisor Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump watch on during a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump visit to Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem accompanied by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu GPO via Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump takes his seat before his speech to the Arab Islamic American Summit in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia Reuters Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, US President Donald Trump and US First Lady Melania Trump look at a display of Saudi modern art at the Saudi Royal Court in Riyadh AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud take part in a signing ceremony at the Saudi Royal Court in Riyadh AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips King Salman presents Donald Trump with The Collar of Abdulaziz al-Saud Medal at the Royal Court Palace on 20 May AP Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump is welcomed by Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud upon arrival at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump walk on the South Lawn prior to their first foreign trip Getty Images

Mr Trump's voter fraud commission has been criticised, with opponents saying that the commission may have violated federal law in asking for the voter data. Before the first meeting, Democrats penned a letter to Vice President Mike Pence to request that he remove Kris Kobach from the commission. Mr Kobach is the Kansas secretary of State, and has been sued several times by the American Civil Liberites Union, which has alleged that his policies pose restrictive and unconstitutional challenges for voters.
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Republicans have stalled a bid to restrict Donald Trump's ability to wage war, in a move the bills sponsor is calling an underhanded and undemocratic.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee was pleasantly surprised earlier this month when the bipartisan House Appropriations Committee passed her amendment to revoke the Authorisation for Use of Military Force (AUMF)  a 2001 law that allows the US president to undertake war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates without Congressional approval.

But her hopes were dashed on Tuesday night, when the House rules committee stripped the amendment from the larger National Defense Authorisation Act (NDAA). The full House had voted to pass the NDAA just days before.

Taking to Twitter, the Representative lashed out at House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Ryan stripped my 01 AUMF repeal amdt from DOD Approps in the dead of night, Ms Lee tweeted. This is underhanded & undemocratic. The people deserve a debate!

In a statement on her website, the Representative accused Congress of being missing in action on matters of war and peace for nearly sixteen years.

Refusing to debate and vote on our ongoing wars is an abdication of our constitutional responsibility, she said. Our men and women in uniform deserve better.

Republican leaders defended the move, saying the the amendment should have been taken up by the Foreign Affairs Committee, not attached to the NDAA. The committee used a so-called "deem and pass" rule to strip the amendment without bringing it to a debate on the floor.

The rules committee replaced Ms Lees amendment with one written by Republican Representative Tom Cole, which requires the president to request a renewed authorisation from Congress and provide legislators with a strategy and budget for defeating Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS.

Congress owes it to the American people and our men and women deployed for battle, to reaffirm our national commitment to the missions we are sending our soldiers into, Mr Cole said in a statement.

The Speaker, meanwhile, had pushed for the AUMF to be taken up in completely separate legislation, calling Ms Lees amendment irresponsible and a mistake.

A spokesperson for Mr Ryan told Talking Points Memo that the amendment would have left service members in the field without an authorisation to defeat al-Qaeda and ISIS.

She added: There is a way to have this debate but an amendment that endangers our national security is not it.

The most iconic images from the war in Iraq Show all 20 1 /20 The most iconic images from the war in Iraq The most iconic images from the war in Iraq U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman HM1 Richard Barnett, assigned to the 1st Marine Division, holds an Iraqi child in central Iraq, March 29, 2003 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq An explosion rocks Baghdad during air strikes March 21, 2003 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq An Iraqi woman watches U.N. weapons inspectors leave Saddam airport in Baghdad March 18, 2003 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq An Iraqi girl holds her sister as she waits for her mother (R) to bring over food bought in Basra March 29, 2003 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq U.S. Marine Corp Assaultman Kirk Dalrymple watches as a statue of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein falls in central Baghdad's Firdaus Square, April 9, 2003 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq US Marines kick in a door while securing a building next to the main hospital in central Baghdad April 15, 2003 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq A soldier of U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division (Task Force Ironhorse) searches through dense vegetation around the Diala river where Iraqi militants are hiding outside Baquba early November 13, 2003 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq An Iraqi detainee gestures toward U.S. soldiers through bars of his cell at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad May 17, 2004 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq Mays, a young Iraqi Shi'ite girl, cries after a mortar shell which landed outside the family's home in a Najaf residential area injured her uncle August 18, 2004 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq U.S. Marines carry an injured colleague to a helicopter near the city of Falluja, November 10, 2004 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq An Iraqi man suspected of having explosives in his car is held after being arrested by the U.S army near Baquba, Iraq, October 15, 2005 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq A wounded Iraqi woman is helped after several bomb attacks in central Baghdad, July 27, 2006 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq A man runs down a street warning people to flee shortly after a twin car bomb attack at Shorja market in Baghdad, February 12, 2007 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq An Iraqi girl holds her hands up while U.S. and Iraqi soldiers search her family house in Baquba early June 30, 2007 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq An Iraqi woman tries to explain that she has nothing to do with illegal fuel as soldiers from the 2nd battalion, 32nd Field Artillery brigade patrol search for illegal fuel sellers in Baghdad August 6, 2007 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq U.S. President George W. Bush (L) walks in front of Humvees with Defense Secretary Robert Gates (C) and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice following remarks to the press after nightfall at Al-Asad airbase in Anbar Province September 3, 2007 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq U.S. soldiers blindfold an Iraqi man after arresting him during a night patrol at the Zafraniya neighborhood, southeast of Baghdad September 4, 2007 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq An Iraqi baby lies in a cradle while a woman argues with U.S. soldiers of 1/8 Bravo Company searching for weapons, explosives and information about militants in the area during a foot patrol in a neighbourhood of Mosul June 26, 2008 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq Policemen cry during a funeral of their colleague a day after a bomb attack in Baghdad's Jihad district November 3, 2010 Reuters The most iconic images from the war in Iraq Staff Sgt. Keith Fidler kisses his wife Cynthia, as their son Kolin looks on, during a homecoming ceremony in New York, April 8, 2011 for the New York Army National Guard's 442nd Military Police Company's return from Iraq Reuters

Ms Lees amendment would have revoked the Presidents ability to declare war starting eight weeks after the NDAA passed. The eight-week period would have given Congress the opportunity to pass a new military force authorisation if desired.

The original AUMF, enacted shortly after the 11 September terrorist attacks of 2001, has been used to authorise conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the AUMF has been used to justify military action more than 37 times in 14 countries since 2001.

After her amendments surprise victory in the House earlier this month, Ms Lee told Politico she felt her fellow Congress members had changed their minds on the blanket authorization.

People are beginning to really recognise, Democrats and Republicans, that the 2001 resolution was a blank check, she said. We've got to reassert Congress' role and do our job. We've been missing in action.
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This is the moment when gunmen in Venezuela shot into a crowd of defenceless voters in an attack that left one woman dead  pushing the South American country closer to all-out civil war.

Xiomara Escot, 61, lost her life and three others were wounded in the capital, Caracas, during an assault blamed on supporters of Venezuelas socialist government.

Shaky footage shows several men break through scores of anti-riot police officers before opening fire on crowds who had been lining up to have their say in an informal referendum led by the opposition.

Recommended Video of brutal police attack on lone man emerges in Venezuela

Hundreds are seen fleeing for cover in the sanctuary of a church as the shots ring out. Police officers standing nearby failed to react as they battled to hold back angry pro-government protestors.

One of the armed gang, described as paramilitaries, later unfurled a red T-shirt  the party colour of the ruling socialist government  as shots were fired at voters running for their lives.

Some 100 people have been killed since unrest broke out in April in Venezuela amid anger over shortages of food and medicine on the back of a crippling economic crisis blamed on the government.

Voters on Sunday turned out to have their say on President Nicolas Maduro in an informal referendum set up by opposition figures.

Thousands had lined up for hours for the unofficial ballot in the poor neighbourhood of Catia in Caracas before the gang fired shots at crowds in the attack that killed Ms Escot.

Opponents rolled out the unofficial referendum in a bid to undermine under-fire President Maduro, who is accused of trying to tighten his grip on Venezuela as he pushes for more power for his government.

The socialist leader, for his part, has described the informal ballot as illegal and meaningless.

In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Show all 22 1 /22 In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela A girl scavanges for food in the streets of Caracas Getty Images In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela A man scavenges for food next to girls in the streets of Caracas. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is resisting opposition efforts to hold a vote on removing him from office. The opposition blames him for an economic crisis that has caused food shortages Getty Images In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Venezuelans line up to get the 'Fatherland's Card' at Bolivar Square in Caracas Getty Images In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela The mother of Venezuelan Rebecca Leon, who scavenges for food in the streets of Caracas, feeds her grandson at their house in Petare shantytown. Getty Images In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Venezuelan Rebecca Leon, who scavenges for food in the streets of Caracas, with her two-year-old son at her house in Petare shantytown Getty Images In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Members of a pro-government community organisation work in an expropriated bakery in Caracas. Supported by popular militiamen, Venezuelan government inspectors oversee bakeries as bread comes out of the oven, to undermine an alleged plot to induce scarcity of this staple food Getty Images In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Forensic police stand next to the body of a man outside a supermarket, where he died of a heart attack after waiting in a long line to buy food, in Caracas Getty Images In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Venezuelan opposition activists take part in a protest against the government of President Nicolas Maduro at the Francisco Fajardo highway in Caracas Getty Images In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela National guard throws a tear gas canister during a rally against Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas, Venezuela Reuters In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Opposition supporter shouts at a police officer during a rally against Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas Reuters In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Opposition supporters clash with national guards during a rally against Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas Reuters In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela A boy wearing a t-shirt with the colours of the Venezuelan national flag, during a demonstration against President Nicolas Maduro's government at Foreign Affairs Ministery, in Buenos Aires, Argentina AP In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Protesters cover themselves from tear gas fired by the Venezuelan National Guard officers during a protest in Caracas AP In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Opposition supporters clash with national guards during a rally against Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas Reuters In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Venezuelan opposition activists take part in a protest -blocked by the National Guard- against the government of President Nicolas Maduro at the Francisco Fajardo highway in Caracas Getty Images In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela A Venezuelan national guard reacts to the effect of pepper spray during a protest of opposition supporters against Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas Reuters In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Opposition supporters holding a Venezuelan flag protest against Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro's government during a rally in Caracas Reuters In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Opposition supporters clash with riot police during a protest against Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas, Venezuela Reuters In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Opposition supporters protest against Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro's government during a rally in Caracas Reuters In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Venezuela's Supreme Court abandoned measures to seize power from the opposition-controlled legislature after the moves drew international condemnation and raised pressure on President Nicolas Maduro. The president of Venezuela's National Assembly Julio Borges dismissed the court's gesture and told reporters that nothing had changed and the coup continued Getty Images In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Venezuelans living in Peru and other protesters take part in a rally against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government, outside the Venezuela embassy in Lima, Peru Reuters In pictures: The crisis in Venezuela Venezuelans living in Peru and other protesters take part in a rally against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government, outside the Venezuela embassy in Lima, Peru Reuters

Opposition leader Freddy Guevara spoke out against the horror on Sunday: The day was stained by the killing of a Venezuelan woman who was protesting and exercising her rights.

But violence cannot hide what has happened. The people are not afraid and are clear in their decision.

President Maduro shrugged off the informal referendum and added: I urge the opposition: Dont go crazy, calm down. As president of the republic, I make a call for peace.

Angry Venezuelans last night lashed out at the gun attack, which took place against a backdrop of growing violence in Venezuela often blamed on heavy-handed security forces.

Morelba Briceno told The Independent: In recent days we have been able to witness Venezuelans suffering from a brutal repression by national police forces and National Guard.

These people are civilians and the only thing they carry in their hands is a flag and slogans demanding to the government: 'No more repression'.

Nevertheless, what has been seen is an excessive use of force on the part of these police bodies, killing innocent people, especially very young students, showing that Venezuela is led by a dictator.

Others spoke out on social media, including supporters of President Maduro.

One wrote: Anti-government activists themselves are also behind violence in Venezuela.

Opposition figures called for the informal referendum on Sunday in a challenge to President Maduro  who has called to install a new congress that would give his government more power.

Nearly 7.2 million Venezuelans turned out to have their say, with the bulk (98%) of voters shooting down Mr Maduro's plans - which allow him to rewrite Venezuelans constitution.
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A 10-year-old girl has reportedly been killed by a lion just metres from her Zimbabwe home.

Mitchell Mucheni had gone behind her house in the southeastern Chiredzi district to relieve herself, but when she did not return her aunt went to look for her, according to The Chronicle state newspaper.

Mawonei Muchacha saw the lion dragging her niece away and later recovered her body after desperately searching for her with the help of a neighbour, the paper said.

Police spokesperson Kudakwashe Dehwa told The Chronicle: "They were guided by a trail of bloodstains until they stumbled on Mitchells lifeless body, some 300 metres from the homestead."

Reports of fatal lion attacks on humans are not uncommon in remote areas of rural Zimbabwe.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

In 2013, two people were mauled to death by rogue lions in Kariba, a popular resort town in northern Zimbabwe.

In 2015, a 14-year-old boy was also killed  and eaten  by a lion as he guarded his familys crops in the north-eastern village of Mariga.
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Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai was greeted with cheers by dozens of young women in northeastern Nigeria, where she spoke out for the many girls abducted under Boko Haram's deadly insurgency.

The 20-year-old Pakistani activist told The Associated Press on Tuesday she was excited by the courage of the young women who are undaunted as they pursue an education amid one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

"This is part of my girl power trip, visiting many parts of the world," said Yousafzai, who also met with the freed Chibok schoolgirls taken in a mass abduction by Boko Haram more than three years ago. "I am here now because of the Nigerian girls. Fighting for them and speaking up for them."

Yousafzai visited internally displaced camps in and around the city of Maiduguri, where thousands have sheltered from Boko Haram's violence. The extremist group continues to carry out deadly attacks there, often using young female suicide bombers.

Recommended Dozens of Chibok girls reunited with their families after years apart

"They have lived in the period of extremism," Yousafzai said of the young women around her. Many have seen family members killed.

Yousafzai was 15 when she shot in the head by Taliban militants in 2012, targeted due to her advocacy for women's education.

The Nobel winner said her Nigeria visit was significant because it was the partial fulfillment of what she advocated the last time she was there. In 2014, she pressed then-President Goodluck Jonathan to ensure the rescue of the more than 200 abducted Chibok schoolgirls.

On Monday, Yousafzai met with more than 100 who have since been rescued and now stay in the capital, Abuja, for what the government calls rehabilitation.

While she told the AP she shared their joy at being freed, she said she was not happy that the girls haven't been allowed to reunite fully with their families.

She said she hopes they will "live with their family, live a normal life."

Many others remain in Boko Haram captivity, "and the government must unite so that they should make sure that these girls are released," Yousafzai said.

"Boko Haram themselves should learn that in Islam, such things are unacceptable," she added. "This is against humanity, this is against Islam."

Yousafzai also met Monday with acting President Yemi Osinbajo, speaking up for the more than 10 million children displaced by Boko Haram and pressing for the declaration of a state of emergency for education in Nigeria.

She also urged the international community to address the crisis in the country's northeast.

Girls at the internally displaced camps said the Nobel winner's story of courage gave them inspiration for a brighter future.

"Her story give us hope, that's why we too want to go to school and become something in life," said 15-year-old Fatima Ali. "We have to bear all pains like hunger to go to school. We barely eat once a day here. We have not eaten since morning because government people no longer bring us food for about two months now."

Three million children in Nigeria's northeast are in need of support to keep learning, according to the U.N. children's agency. Nearly 1,400 schools have been destroyed during Boko Haram's insurgency, which began in 2009, and more than 2,295 teachers have been killed, the agency says.

The rise of Boko Haram Show all 20 1 /20 The rise of Boko Haram The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram The leader of the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram Abubakar Shekau delivers a message. Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for the mass killings in the north-east Nigerian town of Baga in a video where he warned the massacre was just the tip of the iceberg. As many as 2,000 civilians were killed and 3,700 homes and business were destroyed in the 3 January 2015 attack on the town near Nigeria's border with Cameroon AFP The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram People displaced as a result of Boko Haram attacks in the northeast region of Nigeria, are seen near their tents at a faith-based camp for internally displaced people (IDP) in Yola, Adamawa State. Boko Haram says it is building an Islamic state that will revive the glory days of northern Nigeria's medieval Muslim empires, but for those in its territory life is a litany of killings, kidnappings, hunger and economic collapse The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Nitsch Eberhard Robert, a German citizen abducted and held hostage by suspected Boko Haram militants, is seen as he arrives at the Yaounde Nsimalen International airport after his release in Yaounde, Cameroon on 21 January 2015 The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Officials of the Nigerian National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) visit victims of a bomb blast in Gombe at the Specialist Hospital in Gombe. According to local reports at least six people were killed and 11 wounded after a bomb blast in a marketplace in Nigeria's northeastern state of Gombe on 16 January 2015. Islamist militant group Boko Haram has been blamed for a string of recent attacks in the North East of Nigeria The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram People gather at the site of a bomb explosion in a area know to be targeted by the militant group Boko Haram in Kano on 28 November 2014 The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram People gather to look at a burnt vehicle following a bomb explosion that rocked the busiest roundabout near the crowded Market in Maiduguri, Borno State on 1 July 2014. A truck exploded in a huge fireball killing at least 15 people in the northeast Nigerian city of Maiduguri, the city repeatedly hit by Boko Haram Islamists The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram President Goodluck Jonathan visits Nigerian Army soldiers fighting Boko Haram Getty Images The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Displaced people from Baga listen to Goodluck Jonathan after the Boko Haram killings AFP/Getty The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan speaking to troops during a visit to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State; most of the region has been overrun by Boko Haram AFP/Getty The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Members of the Nigerian military patrolling in Maiduguri, North East Nigeria, close to the scene of attacks by Boko Haram EPA The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Boko Harams leader, Abubakar Shekau, appears in a video in which he warns Cameroon it faces the same fate as Nigeria AFP The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Nana Shettima, the wife of Borno Governor, Kashim Shettima (C) weeps as she speaks with school girls from the government secondary school Chibok that were kidnapped by the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram, and later escaped in Chibok The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram South Africans protest in solidarity against the abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria by the Muslim extremist group Boko Haram and what protesters said was the failure of the Nigerian government and international community to rescue them, during a march to the Nigerian Consulate in Johannesburg The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Boko Haram militants have seized the town in north-eastern Nigeria that nearly 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped from in April 2014 AFP The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram A soldier stands guard in front of burnt buses after an attack in Abuja. Twin blasts at a bus station packed with morning commuters on the outskirts of Nigeria's capital killed dozens of people, in what appeared to be the latest attack by Boko Haram Islamists, April 2014 The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram The aftermath of the attack, when Boko Haram fighters in trucks painted in military colours killed 51 people in Konduga in February 2014 AFP/Getty Images The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram The leader of Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau (with papers) in a video grab taken in July 2014 AFP/Getty The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Ruins of burnt out houses in the north-eastern settlement of Baga, pictured after Boko Haram attacks in 2013 AP The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram A Boko Haram attack in Nigeria, 2013 AFP/Getty Images The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Abubakar Shekau, Boko Harams leader AP

Ali said she was in school when Boko Haram attacked her town three years ago. "I want to become a soldier so that I could help my community to fight and kill Boko Haram, because they are not good people," she said.

Another student, 15-year-old Fatima Grema, said she sees herself in Yousafzai.

"Boko Haram abducted me and wanted to marry me," she said. After being taken from the town of Baga to a location near the Cameroon border, "I later managed to escape," she said. "I was not in school until I came to the camp here."

Grema said she now wants to become a teacher.

Unicef's country representative Mohamed Malick Fall said Yousafzai's visit is a symbol of hope, and "we will do everything in our power to make sure all children can keep learning."

AP
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It has been reported that the cyber security office in the State Department may be closed as its top diplomat quits.

Christopher Painter, the Coordinator for Cyber Issues, is leaving his post at the end of the month after well over two decades of leadership on the issue, per Politico.

The news outlet also reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson may shut down Mr Painters office, which is responsible for negotiating joint agreements with other countries on issues like protecting critical infrastructure and developing cyber norms.

Recommended Donald Trump backtracks on plan to work on Russian cyber security unit

Mr Tillerson may also merge the cyber security office with an office in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs.

Mieke Eoyang, Vice President for the National Security Program at DC-based think tank Third Way, told The Independent the closure is problematic, at best.

The news comes on the heels of a meeting between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

Mr Tillerson, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and translators were the only people present at the meeting.

The former ExxonMobil CEO addressed the media after the bilateral and said the Mr Trump did ask Mr Putin if Russia hacked the US election, a fact that has been corroborated by several US intelligence agencies.

Mr Putin said his denial was accepted by the US president, a narrative that did not match Mr Tillersons and has since not been resolved.

There was also a discussion - according to Mr Tillerson's account - that there would be a joint US-Russia effort tasked with ensuring cyber security. It was ridiculed by Mr Trump's critics and he later backtracked on his statement.

Mr Trump's campaign team is also under investigation by the FBI, Congress, and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller for alleged ties to Russian officials prior to Mr Trump taking office.

The possible closure points to a real lack of interest in what other countries are going through, Ms Eoyang said.

The State Department should be the natural point of contact for diplomats wanting to discuss cybersecurity issues, Ms Eoyang explained, adding that no country will want to talk the National Security Agency (NSA).

The may not want to deal with the Trump administration-proposed US Cyber Command either, to be carved from the NSA.

The nature of these US government offices is not inherently about diplomacy like the State Departments office.

The Government Accountability Office is still reviewing the proposed split and Representative Adam Smith, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, told Politico that we must avoid leaving either organisation with diminished capabilities or creating institutional gaps that could endanger national security.

 Sen. Lindsey Graham: Trump is empowering Putin by ignoring the cyber attacks

Jason Healey, a senior cyber researcher at Columbia University told Politico that if the US were to surrender that leadership [on cyber security]...[it] would mean the future internet will have more Russian and Chinese characteristics.

Michael Sulmeyer, director of the Harvard Belfer Centers Cyber Security Project and former director of Cyber Policy Plans and Operations at the Defence Department, told The Independent that the closing this office would be a step backwards for U.S. leadership in the world on this issue.

Another former US cybersecurity official told The Independent that because cyber security is an increasingly important national security issue in light of Russia, the Untied States creates risk for itself when it short-changes the diplomatic element.

Ms Eoyang points out as well that what Russia did by breaking into a campaigns headquarters as they did in hacking the Democratic National Committee is criminal and Mr Tillerson may shut down the office under his purview responsible for dealing with that problem.

Part of the problem is that Mr Painter was, according to Mr Sulmeyer, the voice of American diplomacy on such a wide-range of technology and cyber security issues.

Mr Painter had investigated and prosecuted cyber crime cases in Los Angeles as a US Attorney, in the Department of Justice, FBI, and National Security Council.

He is not a political appointee, but a career civil servant, which the former US cyber security official felt limits the Mr Painters power in the position.

However, Mr Sulmeyer said Mr Painters breadth and depth of experience made it easy for him to work across the US government and understand the concerns of other countries from a more holistic view.

The risks are that it will take the State Department a long time to select a permanent successor if they ever do, and that the learning curve on these issues is steep, said Mr Sulmeyer.

Whoever is appointed - because someone has to represent the US in international fora...better be a quick study and good at working towards constructive outcomes. A pit-bull mentality is not ideal for this kind of job. But that person must be on-guard for efforts to undermine US interests.

It would not be surprising if the position does go unfilled given the many positions within the State Department that Mr Tillerson has yet to fill.

At the highest level, the Trump administration only has six Senate-confirmed Ambassadors around the world: the United Nations, Israel, Senegal/Guinea-Bissau, Congo-Brazzaville, China, and New Zealand/Samoa.

Coalitions require maintenance, and senior leadership is a part of that. But if [Mr] Tillerson decides to fill the role...they will find a very capable staff of career officials advising them, said one former US official.
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Three female senators excluded from all-male healthcare policy talks appear to have just derailed an attempt by the Republican leadership to put forward a measure that would repeal parts of Obamacare without an immediate replacement.

Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska immediately declared that they could not vote for such a plan.

With a majority of 52 senators, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could only afford to lose two 'yea' votes on his latest plan to dismantle Obamacare, which he announced on Monday after efforts to repeal and replace the healthcare law at the same time  one of Donald Trump's key campaign promises  collapsed.

Recommended Trump sat in a fire truck as his healthcare bill was about to die

Mr McConnell had assembled a 13-senator working group to craft the now-defunct healthcare bill, which was released last month. Observers have called the defections by Ms Collins, Ms Capito and Ms Murkowski the revenge of the GOP women for not being included in the healthcare talks.

Barely two days into writing the bill, the Majority Leader and other legislators were bombarded with questions about why no women had been included on the panel.

The working group that counts is all 52 of us, Mr McConnell told reporters in May. Nobody is being excluded based upon gender ... Everybody's at the table. Everybody.

Thousands march against Donald Trump in LGBT rights parade Show all 8 1 /8 Thousands march against Donald Trump in LGBT rights parade Thousands march against Donald Trump in LGBT rights parade AP Thousands march against Donald Trump in LGBT rights parade AP Thousands march against Donald Trump in LGBT rights parade AP Thousands march against Donald Trump in LGBT rights parade AP Thousands march against Donald Trump in LGBT rights parade AFP/Getty Images Thousands march against Donald Trump in LGBT rights parade AP Thousands march against Donald Trump in LGBT rights parade AFP/Getty Images Thousands march against Donald Trump in LGBT rights parade AP

But Democrats accused their colleagues on the other side of the aisle of crafting a secret healthcare plan behind closed doors, which I really hope is not happening in the men's locker room, said Senator Patty Murray, a member of Democratic leadership.

The bill the male senators wrote would have defunded Planned Parenthood for a year  a proposal that Ms Murkowski and Ms Collins took issue with  as well as dramatically cut spending on Medicaid, a healthcare programme for low-income Americans that pays for nearly half of all births in the US.
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South Korean police are investigating how a North Korean woman who defected and appeared on cable television shows in South Korea ended up back in the North.

An official from the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said the woman who was known as Lim Ji-hyeon in South Korea left the country earlier this year for China.

The official says police will try to determine whether the woman returned to the North willingly or was abducted.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of office rules.

The police official also said Lim is clearly the same woman who appeared in a North Korean propaganda video on Sunday.

In pictures: North Korea military drill Show all 8 1 /8 In pictures: North Korea military drill In pictures: North Korea military drill North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un watches a military drill marking the 85th anniversary of the establishment of the Korean People's Army (KPA) KCNA/Handout via REUTERS In pictures: North Korea military drill A military drill marking the 85th anniversary of the establishment of the Korean People's Army (KPA) is seen in this handout photo by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) KCNA/Handout via REUTERS In pictures: North Korea military drill A military drill marking the 85th anniversary of the establishment of the Korean People's Army (KPA) is seen in this handout photo by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) KCNA/Handout via REUTERS In pictures: North Korea military drill A military drill marking the 85th anniversary of the establishment of the Korean People's Army (KPA) KCNA/Handout via REUTERS In pictures: North Korea military drill A military drill marking the 85th anniversary of the establishment of the Korean People's Army (KPA) KCNA/Handout via REUTERS In pictures: North Korea military drill This image made from video of still images broadcast in a news bulletin by North Korea's KRT, shows what was said to be a 'Combined Fire Demonstration' held to celebrate the 85th anniversary of the North Korean army, in Wonsan, North Korea. KRT via AP Video In pictures: North Korea military drill This image made from video of still images broadcast in a news bulletin by North Korea's KRT, shows what was said to be a 'Combined Fire Demonstration' held to celebrate the 85th anniversary of the North Korean army, in Wonsan, North Korea. KRT via AP Video In pictures: North Korea military drill This image made from video of still images broadcast in a news bulletin by North Korea's KRT, shows what was said to be a 'Combined Fire Demonstration' held to celebrate the 85th anniversary of the North Korean army, in Wonsan, North Korea. KRT via AP Video

The woman said was living with her parents again after returning to the North in June and described her life in the South as hellish.

Associated Press
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Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, has said he condones the killing of gay people by their families in so-called honour killings.

During an interview with HBO, Mr Kadyrov denied there were any gay men in Chechnya and dismissed reports of a gay purge in the Muslim republic as nonsense.

David Scott, from HBOs Real Sports, asked the 40-year-old head of state: I wanted to ask you about the alleged roundup, abduction, and torture of gay men in the Republic. What, Mr President, do you want to say about that?

This is nonsense, Mr Kadyrov said. We dont have those kinds of people here. We dont have any gays. If there are any, take them to Canada.

He added: Praise be to God. Take them far from us so we dont have them at home. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them.

The White House said it found his remarks very concerning and also upsetting and had raised the issue with Russian officials at the highest levels.

Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic (EPA/Alexei Druzhinin)

When he was asked about reports of honour killings, which are illegal in Russia and the republic of Chechnya, Mr Kadyrov said: If we have [gay] people here, Im telling you officially their relatives wont let them be because of our faith, our mentality, customs, traditions.

Even if its punishable under the law, we would still condone it.

Survivors have claimed Chechen police have urged parents to kill their gay children in so-called honour killings.

Mr Kadyrov went on to call those making the allegations devils.

He said: They made it up. They are devils. They are for sale. They are subhuman.

God damn them for slandering us. At any rate, they will have to answer to the Almighty for this.

 Human Rights Watch report confirms 'gruesome' extent of gay persecution in Chechnya

Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim region in southern Russia, was devastated by two wars between separatists and Russian forces in the past quarter-century.

Mr Kadyrov, a former rebel who switched his loyalties to Moscow, has been the dominant figure there since the 2004 assassination of his father and the republics former president, Akhmad Kadyrov.

His security forces have been widely accused of extensive human-rights abuses including abductions and killings in Chechnya.

A former officer of his security forces has been convicted of the 2015 assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.

He has strongly promoted Chechnyas Islamic culture, including opening what is claimed to be Europes largest mosque in the capital, Grozny.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. 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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. 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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. 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In the interview, Mr Kadyrov claimed the United States is conducting an anti-Russian policy against the countrys leadership but then dismissed the country.

America is not really a strong enough state for us to regard it as an enemy of Russia. We have a strong government and are a nuclear state.

Even if our government were completely destroyed, our nuclear missiles would be automatically deployed, he said.

We will turn the whole world over to screw it from behind.

Additional reporting by AP
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Unaccompanied child refugees are being wrongly identified as adults by Greek authorities and denied vital care in squalid camps, a new report has found.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) interviewed children as young as 15, who said they had been denied special protections required under international law.

The group found Greeces legal age assessment procedure was not being followed in practice on the island of Lesbos, which has been at the epicentre of the Aegean refugee crisis.

A Bangladeshi teenager called Akash said he was 17 when he arrived there in summer last year, but was soon removed from camps reserved for unaccompanied children and vulnerable migrants.

In the beginning, they wrote I was 17 but then they took me to the doctor and wrote down 18, he added.

The doctor just examined my teeth I tried as much as I could, but they never accepted my age.

Zahid, a Pakistani boy who said he was 16 when he arrived on Lesbos in March 2016, said authorities listed him as 19 without any kind of examination.

Migrants clash with riot police while protesting to demand better living conditions at the Moria asylum centre on Lesbos, Greece, on 18 July 2017. (EPA)

They never explained to me why I told them I was 16, he said. I dont know why they changed my age. I asked them many times and the only thing they told me is to sign some papers.

Under Greek law, the government is supposed to appoint a guardian for each child to represent them in legal proceedings, hear their views and act in their best interests, separating minors into designated areas of hotspot processing centres.

The Greek Reception and Identification Service (RIS) is responsible for identifying unaccompanied children and other vulnerable groups, with support from the UN, Frontex border agency and EU, and referring them to social services and information.

But HRW said the authority was failing to meet its responsibilities and sometimes arbitrarily recording ages above those given, sometimes using controversial dental examinations without any other evidence.

Those classified as adults are left to fend for themselves at heightened risk of exploitation, trafficking and other abuse, including prostitution, aid workers have warned.

They live in official and unofficial sites with unrelated adult single men; are exposed to inhumane living conditions, including overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and frequent incidents of violence; and are unable to go to school or otherwise access education, HRW said.

Its staff interviewed 20 asylum seekers who said they had been wrongly registered as adults by Greek authorities on Lesbos, with most reporting teeth examinations but not the interviews with psychologists and social workers required for full assessments.

 MP calls for child refugees from Calais to have teeth checked to verify age

They are among at least 60 people registered as adults who claim to be children according to other charities active on the island.

Eva Cosse, a HRW researcher for Greece, said: The misidentification of unaccompanied migrant kids on Lesbos as adults leads to real problems, including lumping them together with unrelated adults and denying them the care they need.

Greek authorities need to take responsibility for properly identifying unaccompanied children and providing them the protection and care every child needs.

In some cases, HRW said children had themselves pretended to be adults in the belief they could avoid detention, before realising their mistake and attempting to correct the record  a process that can take so long they pass the age of 18 and lose rights including that of family reunification before it is resolved.

Amid a lack of information and understanding among migrants arriving on boats, some have also been caught falsely claiming to be minors while over the age of 18 in attempts to secure help.

Reports of the trend last year sparked huge debate in the UK, including calls for dental checks from David Davis, although experts have warned the method is unreliable and can be wrong by up to three years.

Denmarks immigration service said three quarters of asylum seekers claiming to be under 18 tested were found to be adults last year, while the Home Office said two thirds of refugees disputing their classification were shown to be adults by examinations of their physical appearance and demeanour.

The arrival of almost one million asylum seekers in flimsy boats over the Aegean Sea since the start of 2015 has left Greece with a chronic shortage of space, which has worsened since the EU-Turkey deal came into force in March last year to see all new arrivals held in island camps.

In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Show all 12 1 /12 In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugee children at the Moria camp in Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees queuing for food at the Kara Tepe camp in Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees' tents at the Kara Tepe camp in Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees at the Oxy transit camp in Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees waiting to board ferries to the Greek mainland in Mytilene, Lebos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees waiting to board ferries to the Greek mainland in Mytilene, Lebos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees waiting to board ferries to the Greek mainland in Mytilene, Lebos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos The graves of drowned refugees in Mytilene, Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos A building used to house unaccompanied children at the Moria camp in Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees queuing to register at the Moria camp in Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees at the Moria camp in Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees arriving on smugglers' boats from Turkey in Lesbos

When there is no space in safe shelters for unaccompanied children, authorities frequently detain them in police stations, immigration detention facilities and asylum processing centres, with 1,149 unaccompanied minors currently awaiting places.

The uncertainty and distress provoked by the process is worsening an ongoing mental health crisis in Greek camps, aid workers said, having already warned of increasing rates of suicide and self-harm.

Samil, an Afghan boy who said he was 14 when he reached Lesbos, spent nine months living in a tent among adults before being transferred to the childrens section in Moria with his brother.

Every day we were living in fear because of the many fights, he said.

Ive been injured on my shoulder during a fight. Our tent was in the middle and it had been broken and burned twice Ive reached a point where I harmed myself three times.

All children interviewed on Lesbos experiencing psychological distress, suffering from anxiety, depression, headaches, insomnia, and loss of appetite, with two saying they had self-harmed.

Greek officials told HRW that a thorough procedure is followed to establish the ages of asylum claimants, and have not yet responded to The Independents request for comment.

The group called on authorities in Greece to bring age assessments in line with international best practice, so proper accommodation, care, education, counselling and legal aid can be given to those who need it.

A child waits with her father at the migrant processing center at the increasingly overwhelmed Moria camp on the island of Lesbos (Picture: Getty)

Vulnerable kids in Greece who have endured dangerous journeys far from their families should not have to fight for months just to prove they are children, Ms Cosse said.

Greece should do a better job identifying these children so they get the care they need and deserve.

The EU-Turkey deal has dramatically cut the number of refugees arriving on Greek islands as deaths on the longer and more treacherous Central Mediterranean route pass the 2,300 mark.

But arrivals over the Aegean continue, with more than 1,800 unaccompanied child asylum seekers formally registered in Greece in the first five months of 2017, from countries including Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

Around 13,000 asylum seekers are currently being held on Greek islands, where 10,000 more have arrived so far this year despite the threat of deportation to Turkey under the countrys controversial deal with the EU.

Research by Save the Children previously found the agreement had dramatically reduced the number of refugees journeying to Greece but had given people smugglers a firmer grip on a hugely profitable business.

A study by Harvard University found girls as young as four had been raped in an Athens refugee camp, while asylum seekers elsewhere in the country were selling sex to raise money to be smuggled out.

Meanwhile, a House of Lords report found the Operation Sophia, the EUs anti-smuggling mission, has failed and may have contributed to rising deaths in the Mediterranean.

Around 110,500 migrants have arrived in Europe so far this year by sea, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, Bangladesh and Syria, with more than 2,300 dying in the attempt.
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The head of the French armed forces, General Pierre de Villiers, has quit his post after publicly clashing with Emmanuel Macron over proposed budget cuts.

In a statement from his office, Mr de Villiers said he had sought to maintain a French defence force able to do an increasingly difficult job within the financial constraints imposed on it.

In the current circumstances I see myself as no longer able to guarantee the robust defence force I believe is necessary to guarantee the protection of France and the French people, today and tomorrow, and to sustain the aims of our country, he said.

He added that, as a result, he had tendered his resignation to Mr Macron and that it had been accepted by the new President.

It came days after Mr Macron watched a show of Frances military force alongside Donald Trump in a grand parade marking Bastille Day.

The state visit, which saw the two presidents mark the centenary of the USs intervention in the First World War, acted as a temporary distraction from dissatisfaction within the defence ministry.

 Donald Trump salutes US troops in Bastille Day parade

There was widespread speculation that Mr de Villiers could step down in protest ahead of a formal meeting scheduled on Friday with Mr Macron, who is proposing 850m (750m) worth of military cuts.

It is part of the French Presidents programme aiming to achieve 60bn (53bn) of savings over five years  while upholding an election pledge to cut taxes.

Last week, his government announced plans to cut the defence budget for 2017 to bring Frances deficit below the EU limit of 3 per cent GDP.

Mr de Villiers was said to have told a parliamentary committee he would not let the government f*** with him on spending cuts.

I wont let myself be f***ed like that, he said in the closed-door hearing, according to sources.

Emmanuel Macron (R) talking with Chief of Staff Gen Pierre de Villiers (C) after flying over Gao during a visit to Gao, northern Mali, on 19 May 2017 (AFP/Getty Images)

I may be stupid, but I know when Im being had.

On Monday, a government spokesman told France Info that the French President and Mr de Villiers would take the decision together about the generals future.

In his first defence policy speech last week, Mr Macron said he would not tolerate public dissent from the military.

For me its undignified to wash dirty linen in public, he told dozens of top army officers and their families in a traditional annual address.

I have made commitments, I am your boss what I like is the sense of duty, the sense of discretion that has taken our army to where it is today. And what I sometimes find hard to tolerate in certain sectors, I tolerate it even less when it comes to our military.

Mr Macron then raised eyebrows with a newspaper interview in Le Journal du Dimanche, saying: If the military chief of staff and the President are opposed on something, the military chief of staff goes.

French President Emmanuel Macron, visits soldiers of Operation Barkhane, France's largest overseas military operation, in Gao, Northern Mali, (AP)

The former chief of the French armed forces, Henri Bentegeat, said that the way the new President was imposing his authority will leave marks.

You cant publicly question a military leader like that in front of his subordinates, he told Le Monde.

But Mr Macron appears to have heeded calls for higher military spending by defence officials and opposition leaders by pledging to increase expenditure from 2018 onwards.

Frances defence spending is scheduled to reach 34.2bn (30bn) next year, including 650m (575m) for external operations, up from 32.7bn (29bn) in 2017, Mr Macron said.

Its a considerable effort, considering the current context of budgetary constraints, he added, after pledging to raise Frances total defence budget up to 2 per cent GDP from the current 1.7 per cent by 2025.

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. 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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 unprecedented row and resignation has shocked France, where the military tends to refrain from political comment, earning itself the nickname la grande muette.

Jean-Jacques Bridey, chairman of the parliamentary committee on defence, was among those announcing his opposition to the cuts while our men risk their lives every day.

The far-right Front National and left-wing opposition groups also opposed the move as French troops continue to fight al-Qaeda-linked insurgents in Mali and remain stationed in countries including the Central African Republic, Chad and Libya.

Mr Macron restated his commitment to military intervention in Mali during his first foreign trip earlier this year, telling soldiers in the former jihadi stronghold of Gao he would be uncompromising in the fight against terrorism.

France is also a member of the US-led coalition bombing Isis territories in Iraq and Syria.
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An image of a Swedish midwifes scrubs drenched in blood after a hectic night shift at a Stockholm hospital has gone viral.

Petra Vinberg Linder shared a photo of her crotch-stained work clothes to demonstrate her job can be so busy she has no time to even change her sanitary products.

"Night shift midwife = had three childbirths. You don't have time to pee or change sanitary products. Thanks and goodnight," she said.

Ms Linder initially just shared the photo with her friends but eventually succumbed to requests to make it public. Before long, the image was picked up by a number of Swedens leading publications and elsewhere in Scandinavia.

She said she shared the image to show people what a strenuous job being a midwife in Sweden is. She said in her hospital each midwife has an average of two deliveries to help with at any given time and the working conditions are leaving people exhausted and burnt out.

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She said many people in Sweden were keen to work in midwifery but chose not to because of the frenetic nature of the work.

"I shared it with my private friends on Facebook, went home and went to sleep, then when I woke up I saw people had asked me to make it public. So I did, then it became a big thing, but that wasnt the original idea," she told The Local.

"It's a very difficult field of work. I love my job, I chose it and I want to work in this field, but I wonder after a night like this how many years I'll manage. I'm 40, I'll work to 65 if I'm fit, but can you manage that? There are so many people in this country who want to work with childbirth, but don't because of the working conditions.

Period euphemisms around the World Show all 8 1 /8 Period euphemisms around the World Period euphemisms around the World Germany 'Erdbeerwoche': translates as 'strawberry week' iStock Period euphemisms around the World France 'Les Anglais out debarque' or 'The English have arrived' referring to past wars with England and possibly the British army's red coats Getty Images Period euphemisms around the World Brazil 'Eustou Com Chico' or "I'm with Chico' in reference to socialist Chico Mendes and possibly his gruesome assassination in the late 80's Getty Images Period euphemisms around the World Finland The Finnish affectionately refer to periods and pms as 'Hullum Lechman Tauti' or 'mad cow disease' Getty Images Period euphemisms around the World The United States Though there are many varied terms, a popular americans commonly refer to periods as 'Aunt Flo' iStock Period euphemisms around the World China In China you may hear 'its little sister to come in' iStock Period euphemisms around the World Denmark 'Der Er Kommunister i Lysthuset' or 'There are communists in the funhouse' Getty Images Period euphemisms around the World South Africa A famed colloquialism for a period in South Africa is 'Grannys stuck in traffic' iStock

"Though I've only worked as a midwife for a week, before that I was an assistant nurse here for many years and it was always high pressure. But it has escalated. It's just getting worse and there has to have a change. We need another clinic in Stockholm, and there's a problem in the countryside too, where they closed the maternity ward in Solleftea."

Her colleague Hannah Dahlback shared an image of her own to social media in order to demonstrate the fact hardly any places were available at maternity wards in Stockholm, Uppsala, Vasteras, Nykoping and Eskilstuna on Friday night.

Ms Linders observations arguably mirror the situation in the UK. It was recently found the number of nurses and midwives leaving the profession has risen 51 per cent in the space of just four years, with those under the age of retirement citing low pay and poor working conditions.

 Theresa May tells nurse who says she hasn't had a pay rise 'there is no magic money tree'

At the beginning of July, new figures from the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) showed that for the first time in recent history more midwives and nurses are bidding farewell to the register than are joining, with homegrown UK nurses leaving in the largest numbers.

Between 2016 and 2017, 20 per cent more people left the register than joined it, and among those first registered in the UK, the figure was 45 per cent.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) urged the Government to axe the pay cap as a matter of urgency to curtail the number of people leaving the profession.
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A German judge has banned a Syrian woman from appearing in court without removing her headscarf, claiming religiously-motivated attire is prohibited.

Najat Abokal, a lawyer representing the woman, said the order was made for divorce proceedings in the district court in Luckenwalde, Brandenberg.

She said the letter warned of legal action against the woman if she does not comply, but also ordered her to appear in person to present her case against her husband.

Ms Abokal has accused the judge of acting unconstitutionally, the Tagesspiegel newspaper reported, saying she would contest the order amid fierce debate over Islamic dress in Germany.

One of her colleagues confirmed the information to The Independent but said no further comment could be given while the case continued.

A spokesperson for the district court in Luckenwalde said they could not comment, saying the judge was responsible for conduct within the courtroom.

The German parliament has voted in favour of a partial ban on the burqa and other Islamic veils that cover the face, while existing neutrality laws can be used to forbid the wearing of any religious or political symbols by some judicial officials.

 Angela Merkel calls for burqa ban 'wherever legally possible' in Germany

But the restrictions do not apply to witnesses, claimants, victims or any other participants in legal proceedings, while a 2006 ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court found a judge had no right to throw out a spectator for wearing a headscarf..

Klaus F Garditz, an law professor at Bonn's Friedrich-Wilhelms University, described the letter as an attempt to humiliate the woman that violates freedom of religion.

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He accused the judge of pursuing provincial racism and sexism under the pretext of following legal procedures, noting that only women were affected by such orders in an article for the Legal Tribune Online.

The case comes amid intense debate over Islamic veils in Germany, where a law to partially ban the burqa  but not the hijab (headscarf) - has not yet come into force.

Angela Merkel announced her support for the move in December, saying full-face veils were not acceptable in Germany and calling them to be banned wherever it is legally possible.

Some right-wing politicians have called for a full ban on the burqa in public, which has been imposed in France and Belgium, but ministers have said a blanked prohibition would violate the countrys constitution.

Refugees settle in Germany Show all 12 1 /12 Refugees settle in Germany Refugees settle in Germany Germany Mohamed Zayat, a refugee from Syria, plays with his daughter Ranim, who is nearly 3, in the one room they and Mohamed's wife Laloosh call home at an asylum-seekers' shelter in Vossberg village on October 9, 2015 in Letschin, Germany. The Zayats arrived approximately two months ago after trekking through Turkey, Greece and the Balkans and are now waiting for local authorities to process their asylum application, after which they will be allowed to live independently and settle elsewhere in Germany. Approximately 60 asylum-seekers, mostly from Syria, Chechnya and Somalia, live at the Vossberg shelter, which is run by the Arbeiter-Samariter Bund (ASB) charity 2015 Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany A refugee child Amnat Musayeva points to a star with her photo and name that decorates the door to her classroom as teacher Martina Fischer looks on at the local kindergarten Amnat and her siblings attend on October 9, 2015 in Letschin, Germany. The children live with their family at an asylum-seekers' shelter in nearby Vossberg village and are waiting for local authorities to process their asylum applications. Approximately 60 asylum-seekers, mostly from Syria, Chechnya and Somalia, live at the Vossberg shelter, which is run by the Arbeiter-Samariter Bund (ASB) charity Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Kurdish Syrian asylum-applicant Mohamed Ali Hussein (R), 19, and fellow applicant Autur, from Latvia, load benches onto a truckbed while performing community service, for which they receive a small allowance, in Wilhelmsaue village on October 9, 2015 near Letschin, Germany. Mohamed and Autur live at an asylum-applicants' shelter in nearby Vossberg village. Approximately 60 asylum-seekers, mostly from Syria, Chechnya and Somalia, live at the Vossberg shelter, which is run by the Arbeiter-Samariter Bund (ASB) charity Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Mohamed Ali Hussein ((L), 19, and his cousin Sinjar Hussein, 34, sweep leaves at a cemetery in Gieshof village, for which they receive a small allowance, near Letschin Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Mohamed Zayat, a refugee from Syria, looks among donated clothing in the basement of the asylum-seekers' shelter that is home to Mohamed, his wife Laloosh and their daughter Ranim as residents' laundry dries behind in Vossberg village on October 9, 2015 in Letschin, Germany. The Zayats arrived approximately two months ago after trekking through Turkey, Greece and the Balkans and are now waiting for local authorities to process their asylum application, after which they will be allowed to live independently and settle elsewhere in Germany Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Asya Sugaipova (L), Mohza Mukayeva and Khadra Zhukova prepare food in the communal kitchen at the asylum-seekers' shelter that is their home in Vossberg village in Letschin Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Efrah Abdullahi Ahmed looks down from the communal kitchen window at her daughter Sumaya, 10, who had just returned from school, at the asylum-seekers' shelter that is their home in Vossberg Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Asylum-applicants, including Syrians Mohamed Ali Hussein (C-R, in black jacket) and Fadi Almasalmeh (C), return from grocery shopping with other refugees to the asylum-applicants' shelter that is their home in Vossberg village in Letschin Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Mohamed Zayat (2nd from L), a refugee from Syria, smokes a cigarette after shopping for groceries with his daughter Ranim, who is nearly 3, and fellow-Syrian refugees Mohamed Ali Hussein (C) and Fadi Almasalmeh (L) at a local supermarket on October 9, 2015 in Letschin, Germany. All of them live at an asylum-seekers' shelter in nearby Vossberg village and are waiting for local authorities to process their asylum applications, after which they will be allowed to live independently and settle elsewhere in Germany 2015 Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Kurdish Syrian refugees Leila, 9, carries her sister Avin, 1, in the backyard at the asylum-seekers' shelter that is home to them and their family in Vossberg village in Letschin Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany Somali refugees and husband and wife Said Ahmed Gure (R) and Ayaan Gure pose with their infant son Muzammili, who was born in Germany, in the room they share at an asylum-seekers' shelter in Vossberg village on October 9, 2015 in Letschin, Germany. Approximately 60 asylum-seekers, mostly from Syria, Chechnya and Somalia, live at the Vossberg shelter, which is run by the Arbeiter-Samariter Bund (ASB) charity, and are waiting for authorities to process their application for asylum 2015 Getty Images Refugees settle in Germany Germany German Chancellor Angela Merkel pauses for a selfie with a refugee after she visited the AWO Refugium Askanierring shelter for refugees in Berlin Getty Images

Concerns about integration have also risen following the arrival of more than a million asylum seekers, who are mainly from Syria and other countries in the Middle East.

A poll carried last year showed that 81 per cent of Germans supported a ban on the burqa within public institutions.

Dutch MPs voted for a similar prohibition in the Netherlands last year, covering public transport, education, healthcare and government buildings and punishing any infractions with fines.

Support for bans on full-face veils has been growing across Europe since France became the first country to implement such a law in 2011, followed by countries including Belgium and Bulgaria, with partial bans being imposed in Austria and parts of Spain, Italy and Switzerland.

Attempts to ban female employees from wearing headscarves and veils have sparked several legal cases, which have so far seen the European Court of Human Rights and European Court of Justice support national prohibitions.

In the UK, an estate agent is suing her former employer at a tribunal after she was allegedly told to remove her black hijab because it had terrorist affiliations.


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Turkey's new school curriculum drops Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and adds the concept of jihad as patriotic in spirit.

The move has fuelled fears President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is subverting the republic's secular foundations.

The chairman of a teachers' union has described the changes as a huge step in the wrong direction for Turkey's schools and an attempt to avoid raising "generations who ask questions".

 Turkey's president Recep Erdogan wins referendum to greatly expand powers

Ismet Yilmaz, the country's education minister, said the controversial decision to exclude the theory of evolution was "because it is above the students' level and not directly relevant."

A member of the opposition Republican People's Party, Mustafa Balbay, said any suggestion the theory was beyond their understanding was an insult to high school students.

"You go and give an 18-year old student the right to elect and be elected, but don't give him the right to learn about the theory of evolution...This is being close minded and ignorant."

The theory of evolution is rejected by both Christian and Muslim creationists, who believe God created the world as described in the Bible and the Koran, making the universe and all living things in six days.

In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Show all 17 1 /17 In pictures: Turkey coup attempt In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Erdogan attends the funeral service for victims of the thwarted coup in Istanbul at Fatih mosque on July 17, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey Burak Kara/Getty Images In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soldiers involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge with their hands raised in Istanbul on 16 July, 2016 Gokhan Tan/Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A civilian beats a soldier after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 REUTERS/Murad Sezer In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Surrendered Turkish soldiers who were involved in the coup are beaten by a civilian Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soliders involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wave flags as they capture a Turkish Army vehicle Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt People pose near a tank after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers block Istanbul's Bosphorus Brigde Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A Turkish military stands guard near the Taksim Square in Istanbul Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Pierre Crom/Twitter In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers secure the area as supporters of Recep Tayyip Erdogan protest in Istanbul's Taksim square AP In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Murad Sezer/Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers detain police officers during a security shutdown of the Bosphorus Bridge Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish Army armoured personnel carriers in the main streets of Istanbul Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Chaos reigned in Istanbul as tanks drove through the streets EPA/TOLGA BOZOGLU In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks to media in the resort town of Marmaris Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of President Erdogan celebrate in Ankara following the suppression of the attempted coup Reuters

Mr Erdogan, accused by critics of crushing democratic freedoms with tens of thousands of arrests and a clampdown on media since a failed coup last July, has in the past spoken of raising a "pious generation".

The curriculum, effective from the start of the 2017-2018 school year, also obliges Turkey's growing number of "Imam Hatip" religious schools to teach the concept of jihad as patriotic in spirit.

"It is also our duty to fix what has been perceived as wrong. This is why the Islamic law class and basic fundamental religion lectures will include [lessons on] jihad," Mr Yilmaz told reporters. "The real meaning of jihad is loving your nation."

Jihad is often translated as "holy war" in the context of fighters waging war against enemies of Islam; but Muslim scholars stress that it also refers to a personal, spiritual struggle against sin.

A woman takes a selfie next to the statue of Omer Halisdemir in Istanbul, in front of a memorial with the names of people killed last year during the failed coup attempt (AFP/Getty Images)

Mehhmet Balik, chairman of the Union of Education and Science Workers (Egitim-Is), condemned the new curriculum.

"The new policies that ban the teaching of evolution and requiring all schools to have a prayer room, these actions destroy the principle of secularism and the scientific principles of education," he said.

Under the AKP, which came to power in 2002, the number of "Imam Hatip" religious schools has grown exponentially. Erdogan, who has roots in political Islam, attended one such school.

He has spent his career fighting to bring religion back into public life in constitutionally secular Turkey and has cast himself as the liberator of millions of pious Turks whose rights and welfare were neglected by a secular elite.

Liberal Turks see Mr Erdogan as attempting to roll back the work of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Western-facing founder of modern Turkey who believed education should be free of religious teachings.

A woman holds placard depicting Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan during 'National Unity March' to commemorate the one year anniversary of the July 2016 botched coup attempt (AP)

Some government critics have said the new curriculum - which was presented for public feedback earlier this year - increased the emphasis on Islamic values at the expense of Ataturk's role.

But Mr Yilmaz said nothing about Ataturk or his accomplishments had been removed. Changes only emphasised core values such as justice, friendship, honesty, love and patriotism.

He said discussion of the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Isis and the network of the US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames for last year's attempted coup, would also be added.

Mr Balik, the head of the union, said the changes were being made in an attempt to stamp out dissenting ideas.

"The bottom line is: generations who ask questions, that's what the government fears," he said.

Additional reporting by Reuters
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Hundreds of climate scientists, including a number from the United States, have applied to work in France after the countrys president, Emmanuel Macron, appealed for them to come and help make out planet great again.

The slogan was a deliberate parody of the climate science-denying Donald Trumps campaign slogan, make America great again.

Germany has announced it is to set up a similar scheme.

While most of the researchers applied for short sabbaticals, 154 were seeking to work in France for four or more years, Dr Anne Peyroche, chief research officer of the CNRS, a national research agency, told the journal Nature.

Applications continue to come in every hour, she said.

In June, Mr Macron said those disillusioned by Mr Trumps dismissal of accepted science about climate change would discover a very different situation in France.

To all scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, responsible citizens who were disappointed by the decision of the president of the United States, I want to say that they will find in France a second homeland, he said.

I call on them: come and work here with us. To work together on concrete solutions for our climate, our environment. I can assure you, France will not give up the fight.

I call on you to remain confident. We will succeed, because we are fully committed, because wherever we live, whoever we are, we all share the same responsibility: Make our planet great again.

The French scheme, worth a total of about 53m, offers four-year grants worth up to about 1.3m. Officials were also headhunting some leading researchers, Dr Peyroche added. The 50 scientists given grants under the scheme will be announced towards the end of this year.

Ashley Ballantyne, a bioclimatologist at Montana University, is one of the applicants.

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

There are very few funding opportunities in the United States that promote research on carbon-climate interactions at the global scale, so the fact this programme was looking for visionary thinking was appealing, he told Nature.

A German fund, made up of 13m from the government and more money from research bodies, is also being created to attract climate scientists from overseas.


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Arresting photos of men suspected of fighting on behalf of Isis in Mosul being held in overcrowded and stifling hot conditions in a nearby prison have emerged as the Iraqi security forces struggle to clear the city of militants.

The site south of the city is currently home to 370 detained men, an official at the facility told visiting AP reporters, who photographed dozens of men crammed into small, dark, unventilated rooms in daytime temperatures exceeding 45 degrees C.

His staff had been overwhelmed by the number of prisoners brought to the facility by the US-backed coalition forces as they sweep the city clean of militants after a gruelling nine-month-long campaign.

Hundreds of suspected Isis members swept up by Iraqi forces in Mosul are being held in a cramped and stifling prison just outside the city (AP)

Prisoners are infected with diseases, lots of health and skin problems, because they're not exposed to the sun, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The majority can't walk. Their legs are swollen because they can't move.

One prisoner said that to his knowledge at least two fellow detainees had died at the facility. Several more had gone to hospital with pus oozing out of their wounds and come back with amputated arms and legs, he claimed.

The prison south of Mosul has seen 1,150 detainees pass through in the last three months, the official in charge said, while another 540 had been sent to Baghdad. Over 3,000 are thought to be held at other facilities in Nineveh province.

For many Iraqi soldiers and civilians, there is very little sympathy for those accused of fighting with Isis.

Detainees protest their innocence. Oganisations such as Human Rights Watch have repeatedly accused Iraqi forces of unlawful interrogations, beatings and even executions of men and boys believed to be Isis which could amount to war crimes (AP)

But detainees protest their innocence - and organisations such as Human Rights Watch have repeatedly accused Iraqi forces of unlawful interrogations, beatings and even executions of men and boys believed to be Isis which could amount to war crimes.

You won't find 10 real (Isis members) among these guys. And all of them have spent more than six months here, one prisoner who said he was a civil servant told the AP out of earshot of his guards.

They said my name was in their database. I haven't seen any court or judge. I don't even know what I'm accused of. A lot of names are the same, he said.

 Drone footage shows the devastation in Mosul's old city and the destroyed al-Nuri Mosque

We really want to die, another said. None of us have received any visitors, relatives, family members. They don't even know where we are.

Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi declared earlier this month that Mosul had been freed from Isis, which overran the city from neighbouring Syria in 2014.

The battle to liberate what was once Iraqs cosmopolitan and intellectual hub has left 40,000 civilians dead, according to new figures seen by The Independent.
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An Israeli art student is facing criminal charges in Poland for stealing items from the Auschwitz Holocaust memorial site which she used in an exhibition, Israeli media has reported.

27-year-old Rotem Bides made six separate trips to Auschwitz-Birkenau in recent years in which she took objects such as spoons, burnt soup bowls, pieces of glass and a sign warning visitors not to remove anything.

The items were featured in Ms Bides final project at Beit Berl College in Kfar Saba, along with a vial of her own blood and other items from Poland such as a rabbits leg and water from the river the ashes of victims of the Nazi atrocity were thrown into.

On learning of the objects presence in Ms Bides show, the museum said it will be pressing charges, Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported.

This is a painful and scandalous act. This is a protected site and proof of the tragedy of the Holocaust that needs to be preserved for future generations, Yedioth quoted a museum spokesperson as saying on Wednesday.

Ms Bides - all four of whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors - defended her actions in an interview with the paper. I felt it was something I had to do. Millions of people were murdered based on the moral laws of a certain country, under a certain regime. And if these are the laws, I can go there and act according to my own laws, she said.

 Last Holocaust-Related Case? 94-Year-Old Former Auschwitz Guard Stands Trial

The statement Im making here is that laws are determined by humans, and that morality is something that changes from time to time and from culture to culture.

These are the things I want to deal with. I am a third generation to the Holocaust, but Im not saying Im allowed to do it because my grandfather was in Auschwitz. Im simply asking the questions. Im concerned that after all the survivors are gone, the Holocaust will turn into a myth, something that cannot be perceived.

Ms Bides work was removed after the museum filed an official complaint with Polands public prosecutor general and the student has received a disciplinary hearing.

Survivors remember the liberation of Auschwitz Show all 4 1 /4 Survivors remember the liberation of Auschwitz Survivors remember the liberation of Auschwitz 32-auschwitz.jpg AP Survivors remember the liberation of Auschwitz 32-ausch-2.jpg AP Survivors remember the liberation of Auschwitz 32-ausch-3.jpg EPA Survivors remember the liberation of Auschwitz 32-auschwitz-4.jpg Getty

But some members of staff have come to her defence on the grounds of creative and cultural freedom.

What is interesting is that [Ms Bides] is taking this to the most extreme place in which she feels the need to shock herself before she shocks others, said Michal Naaman, the students supervisor.

She is not manipulative in the uninteresting sense, in that she wants money, success or fame. I am of course referring to to the act of stealing from Auschwitz.
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Archaeologists working on a site in southern Turkey have made an unexpected discovery: a 4,000 year old smiley face, drawn on the side of a jug.

For the last seven summers, a team of Turkish and Italian archaeologists have been exploring a site on the Turkish-Syrian border, which was once home to Karkemish, an ancient Hittite city  but they have never encountered such an object before, Dr Nicolo Marchetti of Bologna University, who led the excavation, told The Independent.

The smiling face is undoubtedly there (there are no other traces of painting on the flask) and has no parallels in ancient ceramic art of the area, he said.

Several ancient artefacts used for preparing and eating food and drink more than 4,000 years ago were unearthed this year, Dr Marchetti added.

The unusual pitcher in question was originally off-white in colour and features a short thin neck, wide body and small handle. Found in a burial chamber, it was used for a sweet sherbet-like drink, and dates back to 1,700 BC.

Archaeologists only realised the smile was there when the pot was taken to a lab for restoration work, Turkish news agency Anadolou reported.

A total of 25 experts have worked on the large site comprising Karkemish for the last seven years. The site itself has a long history, after the first excavations there were led by Lawrence of Arabia between 1911 and 1914.

In 2018, it will be opened to the public as an open air museum, Turkeys culture and tourism ministry said.

 Man finds ancient medieval city on border of England and Wales

The ancient smiley jug is to be displayed at the nearby Gaziantep Museum of Archaeology.

The Hittites were an Anatolian people who ruled an empire that stretched from modern-day Greece and Egypt across Turkey into Syria. Karkemish itself is where a huge biblical battle between Egypt and allied Assyria, and Babylonia, Medes, Persia and Scythia is believed to have taken place in 605 BC.

Their civilisation eventually collapsed into smaller states during the Bronze Age and finally succumbed to the Neo-Assyrian empire around 1,178 BC.

The smiley, on the other hand, rose to worldwide prominence in the 1960s along with the widespread use of keyboards.
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At least 20 civilians have been killed in an air strike by the Saudi-led coalition while attempting to escape fighting in Yemen, according to the UN and witnesses.

Survivors said a vehicle packed with families fleeing battles between government forces and Houthi rebels near the city of Taiz was hit on Tuesday.

Officials said many of those killed were from the same family, including women and children.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said it was shocked and saddened by the deaths in the Mawzaa district, where civilians had been displaced by intensified hostilities in the nearby port of Mocha.

Nowhere in Yemen safe for civilians, said UNHCR spokesperson Shabia Mantoo.

Each of Yemen's mainland governorates is affected by conflict and tens thousands have been killed and injured.

We have been advocating incessantly for respect of international humanitarian law and protection of civilians in Yemen. More must be done.

 Michael Fallon claims Saudi Arabia is only 'defending itself' when attacking Yemen

Ms Mantoo told The Independent it was a travesty that civilians displaced by the conflict are being trapped in areas themselves hit by violence, with numerous sieges underway.

More than a quarter of all men, women and children forced from their homes in Yemen are from Taiz governorate, but it also hosts 15 per cent of the countrys internally displaced people.

International rights groups have accused the Saudi-led coalition of bombing civilian gatherings, markets, hospitals, and residential areas across Yemen since the beginning of its campaign in support of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi in 2015.

Saudi Arabia is using British-manufactured weapons in the offensive, sparking failed legal challenge by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade in the High Court.

Judges found that the Saudi-led coalition was not deliberately targeting civilians and alleged massacres were under investigation, concluding that it had not been established that there was a clear risk that the items might be used in the commission of a serious violation of international humanitarian law.

Dr Abdullah al-Rabeeah, a former Saudi minister and now head of the countrys state aid agency, told The Independent there is no intention whatsoever to bombard or kill civilians.

The situation in Yemen Show all 14 1 /14 The situation in Yemen The situation in Yemen Houthi supporters trample on a US flag during a gathering mobilizing more fighters into several Yemeni battlefronts, in Sana'a, Yemen EPA The situation in Yemen People carry the coffins of men, who were killed in the recent Saudi-led airstrikes during their funeral, in the Old City of Sanaa, Yemen AP The situation in Yemen Pro-government fighters give food to Yemeni children on the road leading to the southwestern port city of Mokha. Yemeni rebels are putting up fierce resistance in a key Red Sea port city where they are encircled by pro-government force Getty Images The situation in Yemen A Yemeni stands in front of a graffiti protesting US military operations in war-affected Yemen, in Sana'a, Yemen. According to reports, US Special Forces troops allegedly disembarked from US helicopters in the Yemeni town of Yakla and attacked several houses belonging to members of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda, killing three high-ranking Al-Qaeda members and nine civilians, six women and three children. One American serviceman has been killed and three injured in the attack EPA The situation in Yemen US Special Forces troops allegedly disembarked from US helicopters in the Yemeni town of Yakla and attacked several houses belonging to members of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda, killing three high-ranking Al-Qaeda members and nine civilians, six women and three children. One American serviceman has been killed and three injured in the attack EPA The situation in Yemen A Yemeni female fighter supporting the Shiite Huthi rebels, and carrying weapons used for ceremonial purposes, takes part in an anti-Saudi rally in the capital Sanaa Getty Images The situation in Yemen Yemeni female fighters supporting the Shiite Huthi rebels, and carrying weapons used for ceremonial purposes, take part in an anti-Saudi rally in the capital Sanaa Getty Images The situation in Yemen A boy shouts slogans next to pro-Houthi fighters, who have been injured during recent fighting, during a rally held to honour those injured or maimed while fighting in Houthi ranks in Sanaa, Yemen Reuters The situation in Yemen Balls of fire and smoke rise from a Houthi-held military camp following alleged Saudi-led airstrikes, in Sana'a, Yemen EPA The situation in Yemen Yemenis search under the rubble of damaged houses following reported Saudi-led coalition air strikes on the outskirts of the Yemeni capital Sanaa Getty Images The situation in Yemen A Yemeni boy looks on as Yemenis search under the rubble of damaged houses following reported Saudi-led coalition air strikes on the outskirts of the Yemeni capital Sanaa Getty The situation in Yemen A Yemeni boy sits amidst the rubble of damaged houses following reported Saudi-led coalition air strikes on the outskirts of the Yemeni capital Sanaa AFP/Getty The situation in Yemen Marine One with US President Donald Trump flies with a decoy and support helicopters to Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, for the dignified transfer of Navy Seal Chief Petty Officer William 'Ryan' Owens who was killed in Yemen Getty Images The situation in Yemen US President Donald Trump aboard the Marine One to greet the remains of a US military commando killed during a raid on the al Qaeda militant group in southern Yemen on Sunday, at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, US Reuters

When there is a conflict there will be mistakes, but we account for our mistakes and apologise for them, and try to compensate those who have been hurt, he added, claiming the autocracy was also the number one donor for aid and development in Yemen.

While the conflict is killing 75 people every day, according to UN figures, many more are falling victim to a cholera outbreak and severe food shortages pushing the country to the brink of famine.

Separately, UN officials said the coalition barred one of its flights to Yemen's Houthi-controlled capital, Sanaa.

The plane was going to bring aid workers and BBC reporters from Djibouti. The coalition shut down the citys international airport a year ago.

The war has been mired in stalemate for most of the last two years, with more than 10,000 civilians killed and three million displaced.

Additional reporting by AP
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There are work outings and then theres an all-expenses-paid, three-day trip to Marbella to bond with your colleagues.

Red7, a travel company which specialises in stag and hen dos, recently celebrated its 20th anniversary by whisking the entire workforce to the Costa del Sol.

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Managing director Ian Lucas, who founded the Brighton-based company and organised the trip, treated all 42 of his underlings to four-star digs, Michelin-starred cuisine and VIP nightlife. They were given a boat tour around the Med, had a slap-up dinner, and then stayed on to make a weekend of it, spending time at Oak, Tibu, La Sala by the Sea and Mahiki Beach, the first outpost of the legendary London club, which opened in June.

The nightlife might well have been the highlight, since the company has organised over 300,000 trips to 50 destinations over the past two decades.

The group had a boat trip around the Med to kick off their stay (Red 7)

Lucas described his employees as the beating heart of the company and said they deserved the treat.

Some of them have been with the company since it started, so its only right that these people are at the centre of our celebrations, he said. A cash bonus or a gift is a nice reward in the moment, but I cant think of a better way to express my thanks than by treating my employees to a lavish, money-cant-buy trip and creating lasting memories."

He told The Independent: Marbella is our biggest-selling Spanish destination, so this was the ideal opportunity for my staff to experience what they organise for our clients.

It was a fun break and a reward for their hard work, but equally it was an educational trip and a chance to make sure that the team has a first-hand understanding of what our partners provide.

Red7 staff invest their time, effort and hard work in the company - its only right that we invest in them too. This trip is the perfect example of that  blending experience-based training with an all-expenses paid jolly.

Its not the first time Lucas has treated his employees  every year on "Red7 day" he does something special. To mark the 10th anniversary of the company, he flew all his staff to Benidorm, and he says hes already planning the next milestone  which could be Vegas.

The company specialises in stag and hen dos (Red 7)

Treating employees to foreign trips isnt unheard of in the travel industry, and its also a growing perk for forward-looking startups and US-based companies.

San Francisco-based Betabrand, which uses a crowdfunding model to manufacture clothes, picks an employee to send on a trip to a destination of their choice every four to six weeks. Other startups spring perks such as Christmas trips abroad for staff.
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Summerhill, a cocktail bar and sandwich shop in Brooklyns rapidly gentrifying Crown Heights neighbourhood, is already proving divisive, having only been open a month.

It launched in June on Nostrand Avenue in Crown Heights, where an increasing number of trendy bars and restaurants over the last few years has brought affluent people flocking to the area, pushing up rents.

The neighbourhood's majority-black population decreased between 2000 and 2010, while the white population nearly doubled to 16 per cent. The 11216 zip code, which covers parts of Crown Heights, also had one of the biggest rises in the number of high-income renters in New York City between 2011 and 2015, according to a DNAInfo analysis.

Into this dynamic has come Summerhill, which ruffled feathers when it sent out a press release recently promoting the bars bullet-hole ridden wall plus a rumoured backroom illegal gun shop, reports Eater.com.

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The rumour was an anonymous comment left on a community website post about the building, which said: If I'm not mistaken this was the corner store where you could buy a 'certified pre-owned' firearm back in the day." The bars owner, Becca Brennan, told Gothamist she didnt investigate the story any further  but thought it good enough to weave into Summerhills marketing.

"Just looking at the angle I don't know if that is possible that that's a bullet hole, she told Gothamist.

The bar also has plans to serve wine in paper bags alongside $12 cocktails, leading to claims it is commodifying the areas less affluent past while erasing its West Indian roots.

The response to the bar using bullet holes to promote itself has been largely negative on social media. Twitter user Justin tweeted: The hipsters and rich are destroying Brooklyn. Send them back! Indigo W, meanwhile, wrote: So now we're gentrifying and turning it into an instagrammable cartoonish attraction?? This is embarrassing.

Scrolling Summerhills Instagram feed, its even clearer that not everyone is happy with the areas continuing slide into gentrification, with angry comments adorning many of the bars perfectly filtered pictures.

Jenlafemmexx commented under a post about running a small business: You are exactly the kind of white person that terrifies us. Move into our space, pretend to be an ally all while ridiculing us in the process with your subtle racism.

However, in a profile of Brennan on Hello Living, she said she was keen to give back to the neighbourhood by hiring local residents and providing culinary training to those who may not otherwise have access to it.
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Every week, Jack Sheldon from Jacks Flight Club selects a flight deal from the UK for Independent readers that you cant afford to miss. This week: Japan over Easter next year from 258.

How about a return trip to Tokyo for 258? It sounds unreal, but Aeroflot is offering just that if you're savvy enough to find this less-than-obvious route. These fares are for late Spring 2018, an amazing time to visit Japan, and also include some options over the Easter half-term school holidays when fares are often at their highest. A return fare from London will typically run you around three times this price, but if you look for an open-jaw flight (details below), you can grab a ticket to Japan for less than you would often pay for a flight to Europe.

How to book

This one is an open-jaw flight, which, in flight-speak, is a flight that departs from one airport and returns to another. In this case, flights depart from Paris (CDG), but return to Heathrow, so you'll have to add in a one-way Eurostar journey or a budget flight to Paris in order to take advantage. With this deal being many months away, you can book tickets across the Channel for very little.

The best way to find these flights is to head to google.co.uk/flights and select the 'Multi-City' search option. Then mark Paris (CDG) as the departure airport, Tokyo (NRT) as the destination, and London (LHR) as the return airport. The cheapest dates to fly are between early May and mid-June, so a two-week itinerary from 12-28 May would give you the absolute lowest fare of 258. Overall, I find that Monday, Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday departure dates and Monday or Saturday return dates turn out the lowest fares.

If you're limited to school holiday travel, try departing 3 April and returning 14 April, catching the celebrated cherry blossom festival.

When to fly

Mid-May to early June offer the best fares, but there are also plenty of options from January through April for only slightly more, including options over the Easter holidays for only 342.

When to book

These fares should last three or four days

Pro tips

While this flight does have a quick stop in Moscow, no visa is required if you are not planning to leave the airport. And obviously, if you arrive in Paris a day or two early, it's like snagging two holidays for the price of a single ticket.

Also, don't be put off by the fact that it's Aeroflot. It may have a bad name from the Soviet era, but Russia's national carrier is actually a really good airline now, and they use the same Boeing and Airbus planes BA does.
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Hundreds of passengers arriving back into Gatwick Airport found themselves stranded after the meet and greet car parking firm theyd used abruptly stopped trading.

Gatwick First Parking, which isnt officially affiliated with the airport, had been operating for 10 years, keeping clients cars in a secure CCTV monitored compound.

But the company seems to have ceased trading, leaving over 100 vehicles abandoned in sites in Surrey and Sussex. There doesnt currently appear to be a winding up order against the company  a court order that forces an insolvent company into compulsory liquidation.

Sussex Police helped reunite cars with their owners, tracking down around 120 vehicles plus car keys, which had been left in an office in Surrey. The police are still looking for around 30 cars that theyve found the keys for.

The Gatwick First Parking website, gatwickfirstparking.co.uk, currently has the message that it has been suspended.

Matthew Waring, 28, arrived back in the UK after spending a week in Cape Verde with his girlfriend Carly Hale, 27, to discover their car was missing. The couple had paid 60 to leave their Honda Civic with Gatwick First Parking.

He told MailOnline: We went to the car park where the 'meeting point' was but nobody was there. We were told by someone that they had heard the company had gone bust and both Carly and I were extremely worried at this point.

I phoned the police but they said they were not dealing with it as it was a matter for trading standards.

We had to wait at the airport for 14 hours. It was depressing, we were tired, fed up and miserable. We did not know if we were ever going to get our car back. I did not know if it had been stolen or where it was.

We eventually found the car parked on an industrial estate. We thought it was going to be left in a secure car park but it was just parked by a kerb.

Police have encouraged people to only use official Gatwick parking services in the wake of the incident.

Sergeant Darren Taylor said: "It's essential that Gatwick Airport passengers use official on-airport parking, or companies registered with Gatwick's off-airport approved parking operators scheme only, to avoid this sort of thing from happening.

"We're carrying out further inquiries to locate the outstanding vehicles, and the owners of those vehicles will be contacted and kept up to date. Our priority is to find and return their vehicles to them as soon as we possibly can."
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The Giants Club, the conservation initiative supported by the Independent and Evening Standard, today announced it would stage Africas first Conservation and Tourism Investment Forum on 6th October 2017.

The event, which will be held in Uganda, was announced by the countrys President, Yoweri Museveni, at a special press launch at State House in Entebbe. The President told the attending dignitaries that this would be a unique opportunity to harness the financial muscle of the worlds leading hotel and lodge operators to raise vital funds to support and protect Ugandas wildlife.

Uganda has Africas fastest growing elephant population but, with urgent development needs and limited budgets, the country lacks adequate financial resources to fully support its conservation requirements.

This announcement today is an important step in our commitment to unlocking the new and innovative investment models needed to effectively protect our most beautiful landscapes and wildlife for the benefit of the Ugandan people, President Museveni said.

The Forum is aimed at launching a new initiative to attract tourism into Uganda, to make it a destination for high-end paying clients, and secure long-term sources of funding for the protection and maintenance of Ugandas Protected Area network.

By inviting conservation-motivated investors to help build a nature-based economy, we will rehabilitate and manage Ugandas network of protected areas while delivering economic growth."

The Giants Club was created by the conservation charity Space for Giants and its patron is Evgeny Lebedev, the Independent's proprietor. It has been working with its partners, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), to assist the Ugandan government in identifying which of the country's 3.1 million hectares of wildlife zones would suit new international investment.

Ugandas Giants Club Conservation and Tourism Investment Forum will then present the best of those opportunities to interested companies who are committed to wildlife-friendly development. Their investment will help preserve and manage Ugandas protected areas long term.

Key to the Forum's approach is to introduce an enabling investment framework and a transparent investors pathway, to simplify the steps needed to take to launch new business operations under the initiative.

The event follows the inaugural Giants Club summit held in Kenya last year which saw 3.8 million committed to conservation and was followed by the burning of Kenyas stockpile of seized ivory, drawing international media attention.

It's understandable that in the present economic climate, governments must prioritise where they spend their money, and conservation may not be top of the list, said Max Graham, Founder and CEO of Space for Giants.

But it's also true that there are legions of companies around the world who are very keen to take up that slack, to fund conservation of wilderness areas in ways that also build their businesses. The Forum, uniquely, helps to bring these two sides together, the investors and the authorities, in a way that will drive economic benefits and environmental ones too.

Following the Forum, a series of events will be staged across the world to widen the reach of the initiative by showcasing Uganda's conservation investment opportunities. These will highlight the new investment framework, and convey how potential investors can work with conservationists to protect the countrys ecosystems.

At todays launch Almaz Gebru, UNDPs country director for Uganda, made clear the organisations commitment to the success of the Forum and in encouraging responsible investment to help boost the Ugandan economy.

Kaddu Sebunya, AWFs President, said: The African Wildlife Foundation is excited to be partnering with the Giants Club on this important initiative. Uganda is blessed with some of the worlds most important wildlife and wildlands; however, the country needs resources to ensure their long-term conservation and adequate management. That is why AWF is keen to be working with partners in optimising the commercial opportunities in Ugandas protected areas and to catalyse effective partnerships.

The Giants Club unites African heads of state, conservation experts, philanthropists and global companies in order to work towards its mission of protecting half of Africa's elephants by 2020. President Museveni is one of four founding Presidents of the Club, along with the leaders of Kenya, Gabon and Botswana.

To find out more about the Giants Club visit www.spaceforgiants.org
Farmers have been warned to be vigilant when making silage and spreading slurry after two fish kills in the last 48 hours.

Making the warning, Dr Greg Forde of Inland Fisheries Ireland said on RTE Radio that agriculture is a factor in a 'significant number' of fish kills.

In 2016, agriculture was identified as the source of eight fish kills.

Silage effluent is 200 times more potent in water than human sewage If effluent gets into the water it uses up all the oxygen and fish are killed, he said.

According to Dr Forde, the problem is being exacerbated at the moment by low water levels and high temperatures.

Farmers need to make sure they have properly sealed silage pits with no cracks Farmers spreading slurry must also be vigilant against runoff.

Dr Forde said levels of agriculture pollution has been steady in recent years but said that often the cause of a fish kill is difficult to identify.

There was a large amount of unidentified fish kills last year. One bad incident can wipe out a huge amount of fish, he said.

In the last 48 hours Inland Fisheries Ireland received a report from a member of the public on Athenry regarding a fish kill on the Eiscir River (Clarinbridge River).

An individual had encountered up to 15 brown trout on Sunday afternoon which was subsequently reported to Inland Fisheries Ireland on Monday.

Investigations are still ongoing, however it is suspected that the source of the enrichment that led to the kill may be agricultural in origin.

The stream where the fish kill occurred shows signs of enrichment, however it may be that the incident occurred sometime before the mortalities were recovered and as a result, it may be that no source can be detected at this stage. All possibilities are still being investigated at this stage.

Meanwhile, Inland Fisheries Ireland also confirmed that there was a fish kill on the River Tolka last night.

It investigated an incident reported yesterday evening and is following a definite line of enquiry.

Estimated numbers of dead fish are several hundred, with species of Brown Trout (all age classes), Minnow and Stone loach. The extent of the fish kill is from the bridge in Mulhuddart to Connolly hospital (2.7km).

Recently, in Northern Ireland a dye test used in investigation to convict farmer of polluting river.

The source of the polluting discharge was traced to the farm where inspectors discovered silage effluent had entered a storm inspection chamber and from there it flowed to the waterway.

A dye test carried out and demonstrated continuity between the storm chamber and the waterway. The waterway was impacted for a distance of some 1.6 kilometres.
Farmers are being subjected to "haphazard" treatment by some local authorities when it comes to greenway leisure and tourism developments, IFA environment committee chairman Thomas Cooney has warned.

The IFA contend that Government funding for such amenities should be contingent on an official "code of practice" for engaging with landowners.
Tighter supplies for spring lamb through the factory gates in Ireland and Britain have seen prices remain steady, with less New Zealand lamb entering the UK market.

So far 1.39 million head have been through the factory gates, up 11pc or 133,000 on 2016.

However, the numbers being processed stood at 58,000, back 3pc or 2,000, for the week ending July 8 compared with the same week in 2016.

Spring lambs so far are back 4pc compared with last year.

Bord Bia's sheep market analyst Declan Fennell said the supply and demand have remained tight but inevitably the numbers would start to build up.

Mr Fennell said a "big factor" has been the tighter numbers for spring lamb in the UK market. He pointed out that less New Zealand lamb was entering the UK with sterling having an impact on trade.

Figures for May show the volume of Kiwi chilled lamb exports into the UK were back 35pc. Mr Fennell said there was a tightness of supply in New Zealand, coupled with the country sending more lower value lamb cuts into China.

UK retailer Sainsbury's, joined the Co-op and Morrisons, in announcing all its fresh lamb will be 100pc British.

However, Mr Fennell pointed out they were already in the early to high 90s in terms of the percentage of UK stock already on the shelves.

He said it did work as a reminder that UK consumers were being urged to buy local and reinforces the need for promotion that is underway on the continent.

In the long-term, Mr Fennell said the new trade agreement with Japan could be a "treasure chest" for exports as it was an affluent society.

Both the IFA and the ICSA pointed out farmers are receiving around 5.50/kg for spring lamb, with some dealers hitting 5.60/kg for agreed numbers.

The ICSA's John Brooks said there is also talk among exporters of buying beginning for live shipments. He pointed out this is a valuable trade that must be targetted.

The IFA's John Lynskey said the trade remained positive. However, he claimed the differences between the prices quoted by the factories and those paid to farmers was impacting negatively on average prices agreed for producer groups.
Aldi Ireland will be opening one of its new concept stores in Blackrock as part of the renovated Frascati Shopping Centre in Co Dublin.

The well known shopping centre will almost double in size from 100,000 sq ft to 170,000 sq ft upon completion.

An additional 23 retail units and space will be set aside for restaurant dining with views of Dublin Bay.

Improved access to the centre will be facilitated by a new road junction which will be built on the Frascati road, allowing a right turn into the centre when coming from Dublin city.

Aldi recently announced its 60m investment in Project Fresh which will also see its store portfolio nationwide refitted to the latest layout; whereby fresh produce is displayed more prominently at the front at the store. The Blackrock store will meet this format.

"We are excited to be expanding our Dublin presence at such a fantastic location," Aldi Group Managing Director, Giles Hurley said.

"We are confident that our presence in the new and improved Frascati Shopping Centre will make Blackrock an even more attractive destination for shoppers."

Aldi currently has 129 stores across the country and operates stores in Dublin at Newlands Cross, Tallaght Cross West, Parnell Street, Coolock, Fonthill Retail Park, Belgard Road, Finglas, Palmerstown, Santry, Longmile Road, Rathmines, Mulhuddart, Nutgrove Retail Park, Sandyford, East Wall Road, Ballyfermot and Terenure.
Goodbody forecasts PTSB will book an underlying pre-tax profit of 51m and net income of 31m for the first half of the 2017 financial year. Photo: Collins

Shares in partially nationalised lender Permanent TSB, fell by as much as 4pc yesterday amid heightened anxieties about its soured loan exposures and high volume of low-growth tracker mortgages.

The decline in PTSB's share price to 2.50 - was the steepest since May 8 before recovering to 2.54 late in the session followed a negative report from analysts at Macquarie, a global bank headquartered in Sydney.

According to Owen Callan at Investec, the slump emerged from thin volumes and likely reflects investors' desire for greater clarity on the PTSB's bulging 5.8bn book of non-performing loans (NPLs).

While the bank is due to unveil its strategy for resolving its NPLs in September, Mr Callan said that as the first half results loom, the lack of clarity on this issue has set nerves jangling.

Yesterday Goodbody noted the rump end of PTSB's NPL exposure, equating to some 1.5bn of "untreated" loans, will most likely be earmarked for sale, as this segment of "the book will command the highest level of regulatory scrutiny."

However in the report, analysts Eamonn Hughes, Cian Harty and John Cronin, caution that an accelerated run off in NPLs could dent provisions and excess capital levels, reducing their "fair value" estimation of PTSB.

Yet the analysts calculate the bank could swallow a 12pc haircut on NPL sales and still be "capital neutral" - a position that stems form the level of provisions. Goodbody forecasts PTSB will book an underlying pre-tax profit of 51m and net income of 31m for the first half of the 2017 financial year.
Ryanair has urged the Attorney Generals Department to expedite primary legislation to make the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) the competent authority to monitor noise regulation.

The legislation is necessary to allow the second runway to proceed, the airline claim, and they say that repeated delays by the Attorney Generals Department to expedite this legislation are totally unacceptable.

The Minister for Transport, Shane Ross, and his predecessor have already confirmed that the IAA are the competent authority in the noise monitoring area.

Read more: 'Nobody has done more for Irish families than Ryanair' - Airline defends controversial seating policy

At a time when runway capacity at Dublin is full at peak times leading to repeated slot delays, Ryanair reiterated its support for the development of a 240m second runway at Dublin Airport.

"The development of the second runway is a critical piece of national infrastructure which needs to be expedited, especially when Ireland is trying to attract overseas investment that may be leaving the UK in the run up to Brexit in March 2019," Ryanair ceo, Michael OLeary, said.

The airline also said that it was unable to based addition aircraft at Dublin because there are no spare slots in the early morning for additional departures.

"The fact that this statutory instrument has been repeatedly delayed in the Attorney Generals office for over 12 months is unacceptable," Mr OLeary said.

In separate news Ryanair this morning announced that it has bought back 75,000 ordinary shares as part of its on-going share buy-back scheme which it announced earlier this year.

Read more: 'New UK air deal needed by next year'

The airline said that it had purchased for cancellation the shares for a nominal value of 0.006 each in the capital of the company.

The companys average share price is 18.7560.

The buy-back programme will operating until 31 October with Citigroup and Davy making trading decisions in relation to Ryanair's ordinary shares repurchased under the buy-back programme.

A spokesperson from the Department of Transport said that Minister Ross is fully committed to promoting the development of airport capacity to promote air transport connectivity.

"The short term requirement in this regard is the new runway at Dublin Airport that is being progressed by the daa. The importance of delivery of a new runway is highlighted in the National Aviation Policy published in 2015 and remains a key Government objective," he said.

"The Minister published a policy statement last September in relation to regulatory changes to promote the abatement of aircraft noise last September which will impact on the operating arrangements for the airport. The delivery of legislation in line with this statement is what is being referred to by Mr OLeary and the Ministers Officials are continuing to work closely with the Office of the Attorney General to bring that necessary legislation forward.

"This is complex legislation and the fact of the matter is that it takes time. Of course the Minster would prefer if this process could move more quickly - and indeed has acknowledged his concerns about the delays in the Dail - but it has to be recognised that early delivery of potentially flawed legislation that falls to be resolved through the courts is not the right answer.

The spokesperson also said that the Minster had commissioned a study to look at development of capacity at the State Airports locking out to 2050.
Independents4change TD Clare Daly has won an appeal against a speeding conviction.

Ms Daly, with an address in Elmwood Drive, Swords, was convicted on October 26, 2016, after it was alleged she was travelling at 59kph in a 50kph zone on January 1, 2016, at Ballymany, Newbridge.

Her appeal focused on the fact that no evidence of a contract between the Minister for Justice and the company Go Safe, which administers speed detection and prosecutions, was presented to the court as part of the State's evidence.

A recording was replayed to confirm whether the witness for Go Safe had or had not given such evidence.

Judge Sarah Berkely concluded he had not and allowed the appeal.

Last October 26, Deputy Daly was fined 300 at Naas District Court for speeding despite an attempt to plead not guilty to the charge. She was also accused of "a total abuse of court process" in the course of the hearing by judge Desmond Zaidan.
The journalist who interviewed the young woman who made a sexual assault allegation against Sgt Maurice McCabe has rejected suggestions he was given a Garda file on the case.

Irish Independent correspondent Paul Williams said he was aware of the suggestion but described it as being "completely baseless and false".

Appearing at the Disclosures Tribunal, Mr Williams also vehemently denied suggestions he was "too close" to Garda Headquarters.

He said he was never briefed by Garda Commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan, former commissioner Martin Callinan or former Garda press officer David Taylor in relation to rumours which circulated about Sgt McCabe.

Mr Williams said he was contacted directly by Ms D's father and told she wanted to speak to him. While he had been aware of "vague rumours" circulating about Sgt McCabe, he did not know what Ms D had alleged against him until he interviewed her in March 2014.

Mr Williams said he did not know where the rumours had come from.

Expand Close Maurice McCabe and his wife Lorraine at the The Disclosures Tribunal in Dublin Castle. Photo: Gareth Chaney / Facebook

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Whatsapp Maurice McCabe and his wife Lorraine at the The Disclosures Tribunal in Dublin Castle. Photo: Gareth Chaney

Two articles were published in the Irish Independent the following month referring to an unnamed woman who believed her complaint of sexual assault against an unnamed garda had not been properly investigated.

The tribunal has previously heard how, as a teenager, Ms D complained to gardai in 2006 that she had been molested by Sgt McCabe when she was aged six or seven during a game of hide and seek. The complaint was investigated but no prosecution was directed by the DPP.

The tribunal is investigating whether there was a conspiracy against Sgt McCabe and if the allegation was used by senior gardai to smear him.

Mr Williams said Ms D was "upset" as media reports of Sgt McCabe's whistleblowing activity had "brought it all up again".

Expand Close Supt David Taylor. Photo: Collins / Facebook

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Under questioning from tribunal counsel Diarmaid McGuinness SC, Mr Williams said he did not consult with any senior gardai before going to Ms D's family home.

Mr McGuinness said a suggestion might be made that Mr Williams in some way acted as "a puppet of the guards in participating, willingly or otherwise, in a smear campaign relating to Sgt McCabe".

Mr Williams replied: "I have read that extensively and that is absolutely false."

He said that about a week after the interview he contacted Supt Taylor by phone with a series of questions.

Expand Close Michael McDowell at the The Disclosures Tribunal. Photo: Collins Photos / Facebook

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Whatsapp Michael McDowell at the The Disclosures Tribunal. Photo: Collins Photos

He wanted to know had an investigation taken place, what was the decision of the DPP, had there been an arrest and whether the investigation had been logged on Pulse.

The journalist said Supt Taylor went away to do some research and later came back to him to confirm an investigation took place, a file had been sent to the DPP and no charges were directed.

Mr Williams said there were a number of contacts with the superintendent in relation to his queries.

However, John Ferry BL, for Supt Taylor, said his client would be disputing this account of events.

He said Supt Taylor would say Mr Williams phoned him on the day he interviewed Ms D and told him he was at Ms D's house.

The barrister said his client would claim Mr Williams "did not ask Supt Taylor to confirm anything specific or to confirm or deny any facts in that call".

Mr Williams said he never called Supt Taylor that day and what the officer was alleging was "totally untrue".

Mr Ferry said Supt Taylor's evidence would be that he took a note of the conversation with Mr Williams and passed it on to then Commissioner Martin Callinan and his then Deputy Commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan by text message.

Mr Williams confirmed he helped Ms D get in contact with Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin, who was in possession of a dossier in relation to alleged failings in Garda investigations. He also confirmed he helped Ms D meet with Alan Shatter, after the Fine Gael TD had stepped down as justice minister. He denied suggestions by Michael McDowell SC that he had orchestrated events or put pressure on Mr Martin by mentioning a proposed meeting in an article.

Mr Williams said he had helped victims of crime or their families to secure meetings with politicians before if they wished to do so.

Mr McDowell read from a letter an official in the DPP's office had written giving reasons for not mounting a prosecution.

The letter said: "Even if there wasn't a doubt about her credibility, the incident that she describes does not constitute a sexual offence or indeed an assault."

Mr Williams said Supt Taylor had told him the DPP had found there was "insufficient evidence" and had not given any hint of the force and substance of the DPP's directions.
Irish firm Rentokil has reported that Dublin accounts for almost a fifth of all fly infestations in the country. Photo: GETTY

Households have been warned to keep their bins away from their living areas to reduce the risk of an infestation of flies swarming through their homes.

Dublin has been named the "most fly-infested county in Ireland", according to a leading pest control provider.

Irish firm Rentokil has reported that Dublin accounts for almost a fifth of all fly infestations in the country.

Some tourists hotspots have been affected; Galway accounts for 16pc of all fly infestations while Kerry accounts for 14pc.

Cork also reported high levels of flies buzzing around the city centre.

"Flies can be a common cause of food poisoning, particularly salmonella," said Dr Colm Moore, area manager with Rentokil.

"They create a real risk to the hospitality industry.

"A continued rise in the fly population could lead to a greater incidence of fly-borne disease, such as stomach upset and diarrhoea."

Richard Faulkner, advance technical field consultant, said: "Flies are opportunistic so you need to make the environment you live in as harsh as possible.

"They are attracted to food and bins, so people should keep their bin areas away from the homes," he told the Irish Independent.

The company predicts that the number of infestations will continue to rise, as recently reported by residents in Dublin 4.

Wary

Residents of Sandymount, Ringsend and Irishtown were plagued for several days last month by a noticeable increase in flies.

Rentokil has warned hotel and restaurant owners to be vigilant in safeguarding their premises against fly infestations this summer, as it predicts a bumper season for the pests.

The company noted a 39pc increase in the number of fly infestations between April and the end of June, compared with the same period last year.

Local businesses and restaurants are advised to be wary of flies and to try to keep the pests away from food.
The latest Dublin housing waiting list figures would take 180 years to clear, Sinn Fein Dublin City Councillor Daithi Doolan has claimed.

According to the latest statistics, which were released today, there are 19,752 people currently on the waiting list to be housed in Dublin. This does not include the 7,509 people currently on Dublin City Council's transfer list which increased by 941 since April.

Councillor Doolan told Independent.ie he believes the current figures are "shocking and damning" as they expose the government's "sleep-walking approach" to the housing crisis.

"The government need to wake up and wise up. It shows their consistent lack of funding and commitment,. At this rate it will take 180 years to fill," Cllr Doolan said.

The national housing budget is currently 732m, which is a decrease of 100m since 2010. Councillor Doolan said this allocation is 'crumbs' when it comes to the capital's housing crisis.

"There are 2,700 people on the waiting list in Dublin Central alone. 200 are homeless. My clinic tomorrow will be run out the door with people at the end of their tether not knowing where they'll sleep."

Cllr Doolan stated that he made a public appeal at a Dublin City Council meeting today for the Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy to increase the budget and to allow the council to plan and develop sites across the city which would be suitable for housing.

"We have the plans, just let us do it ourselves. We want to develop plots of land like St Michael's in Inchicore and Oscar Traynor Lands in Coolock. I got cross-party support for the proposal today. Dublin City Council has the land. Minister Murphy needs to cut the red tape and meet with us and discuss funding our proposals," the councillor said.

In a statement addressing Councillor Doolan's claims Dublin City Council said; "The figures are accurate but the level of need would vary. "It is a big challenge and we're working on it."
A report into families living in direct provision found that children suffer from "creepy" advances from older men and that they feel "unsafe" and "unhappy" in their overcrowded conditions.

The report which was carried out by researchers at University College Cork on behalf of the Government, shows that children also have concerns relating to their food and relationships with "mean" staff.

The report found that children are "unhappy" about the length of their stays in the system with a number of children saying they have lived in the system since they were born.

Many also feel they are stigmatised because of where they live, in addition to suffering from racism.

Some of the complaints were about the standard of accommodation, food and the length of time they had to stay in the system.

Children also said they did not feel safe when sharing space with single men, and described their living conditions as "overcrowded" and "dirty".

"There are loads of men bothering us, said one child, while another commented: There is so many men, and . . . they look creepy at you.

These are among the findings of a Government consultation with 110 children, aged between eight and 17, living in 11 direct provision centres across the State.

Of the 4,786 residents of direct provision in May this year, some 1,230, or 25 per cent, were 17 years or younger. Of these, 1,042 were aged 12 or younger.

Speaking on RTEs Morning Ireland, Tanya Ward, Chief Executive of the Children's Rights Alliance, said she was "concerned" by the reports.

"The issue was them being accommodated with large groups of single men.

"Men looking at them in a creepy way, men propositioning them. It is not a good idea to put large groups of single men in with families."

Ms Ward warned that having this could lead to "grooming type scenarios" and called on the Government to do more.

She also told Morning Ireland that food was a huge issue in the report.

"Children complained about undercooked food, chicken with blood still on it, food being tasteless, and never seeing their mothers being able to cook food.

"I know since then the Government has been piloting self-catering for families and that is an important step forward."

Ms Ward said while the report found that the children thought staff were respectful, kind and caring, some issues did arise.

"The vast majority said they felt disrespected by centre staff and that they were mean to them. This is the kind of treatment you would expect in large scale institutions and there would be real parallels for survivors of industrial schools."

The report was welcomed by Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan who said hearing the voices of children will help direct policy.

This report is an important contribution to our policy development in this area and the stories of children and young people living in State-provided accommodation continue to contribute to the ongoing improvements in services in accommodation centres, the minister said.
(L-R) Sepp and Eamonn are trekking across Europe to raise money for dementia research

A grieving man who is walking over 1,500 miles to raise funds for dementia research has said the condition "robbed" his late mother of her personality.

Eamonn Donnelly and his friend Sepp Tieber set off on their trek from Austria to Ireland on June 18 to raise funds for the Alzheimer's Society.

They hope to reach Rosslare by the end of August and Eamonn, who is originally from Co Armagh, said he is thinking of his beloved mother Margaret every step of the way.

Speaking on The Ray D'Arcy show on RTE Radio One today, Eamonn said Margaret was in the "prime of her life" when she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of dementia at the age of 69.

He said: "She was robbed of herself but the last two years of her life she became something else.

"She had raised seven kids and went back to school. She did her GSCEs and A-Levels and went to Queen's University and got her Bachelors and then did a Masters and then this happened."

Eamonn said that the form of dementia that his mother had affected her ability to communicate and she eventually lost her life to the condition in April 2014, two years after she was diagnosed.

She said: "She eventually lost her words and her personality. She passed away when she was 71, so it was a very quick decline in her health."

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Eamonn, who has lived in Austria since 1990, said that it was his mother's "do-gooder" attitude throughout her life that inspired him to do the charity trek.

He said: "She was involved in the local community and always doing things and trying to make things better for the kids around the town and was involved in a lot of youth projects.

"She was always trying and was very modest at the same time. She was always trying to find solutions."

An emotional Eamonn recalled how frustrating it was to be told by doctors there were no solutions to combat his mother's dementia and he said he wants to highlight this.

"There was a lot of support from the Alzheimer's Society but what my brother and sisters found very frustrating was the fact that there were no solutions and I want to raise awareness of that very fact. There's a dead end."

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Eamonn and his Sepp are 870km through their challenge and he said it hasn't been smooth sailing.

He said: "We sleep rough most nights but book a guesthouse once a week to clean ourselves up. It's just us and our rucksacks and maps at the moment.

"It's very tough. I wish it was near the end."

With the Irish population getting older, the number of people with Alzheimer's in Ireland is set to increase, Eamonn said that something needs to be done to tackle this.

He said: "Our clocks are ticking. If you spend the last few years of your life not the same person you've strived to be your whole life it's particularly cruel."

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Following the ruling there was an outburst in the court.

A man accused of drugging and raping a 14-year-old girl in Belfast must remain in custody, a judge ruled on Tuesday.

The 29-year-old defendant, who cannot be identified, was refused bail amid concerns he would not adhere to release conditions.

He faces eight charges related to an alleged sex attack on the schoolgirl at a location in the west of the city in May.

They include three counts of rape, two sexual assaults and a further sexual assault by penetration.

The man is also accused of possessing cocaine and administering a substance to the alleged victim with the intention of stupefying or overpowering her to enable sexual activity with her.

He denies the charges, claiming any sexual contact was consensual.

As the accused appeared before Belfast Magistrates' Court via prison video-link, his barrister argued that he could be released under strict conditions.

Counsel also insisted there would be no contact with the complainant and cited the potential delay in the case.

District Judge George Conner was also told three other suspects have been questioned but not yet charged as part of the same investigation.

Mr Conner acknowledged the inquiry was likely to take time, putting back the date of any trial.

But denying the application, he said: "I'm afraid I form the view that there's just too high a risk of non-compliance with bail terms."

He ordered the accused to be remanded in custody for another four weeks.

The decision prompted an outburst from dismayed relatives of the defendant in the public gallery.
Garda Commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan is heading off on a five-week holiday as calls mount for her resignation.

The latest crisis to hit the embattled Commissioner saw her accused of being part of a "cover-up" over an alleged "slush fund" at the Garda Training College in Templemore.

The Dail Public Accounts Committee (PAC) added to the mounting pressure on Ms O'Sullivan in its publication of a damning report on how Garda management handled serious financial irregularities at the college. Two of the PAC's members, Labour TD Alan Kelly and Fianna Fail TD Marc MacSharry, later claimed what happened amounted to a "cover-up". The report also concluded it was "unacceptable" Ms O'Sullivan did not tell the Comptroller and Auditor General about issues at the college as soon as she learned of them in the summer of 2015.

The findings resulted in repeated calls for her resignation. However, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are standing by her.

The Commissioner is now going away for up to five weeks, despite the controversies engulfing the force. She will be out of the country for the last week of July and all of August, the Irish Independent has learned.

The Commissioner is due to appear at the Charleton Tribunal in the autumn.

A Garda spokesman said the force would not comment on the Commissioner's leave. The spokesman said when the Commissioner was away, a deputy covered for her. Deputy Commissioner John Twomey is expected to step in during her absence.
More than 100 electric vehicles will be available for hire in Dublin and Cork. Stock photo: Getty

More grants for driving environmentally friendly cars, improving home insulation and running carbon-efficient farms are among proposals being tabled as part of the Irish bid to fight climate change.

The Cabinet will today hold a special meeting and Climate Change Minister Denis Naughten will brief colleagues on a new National Mitigation Plan.

Among the ideas to be put forward by the minister is a new electric car-sharing scheme modelled on Dublin Bikes.

More than 100 electric vehicles will be available for hire in Dublin and Cork.

The mitigation plan, seen by the Irish Independent, highlights the massive challenge facing the agricultural sector.

It also warns that there would have to be a further examination of the impact of a carbon tax on people's behaviour.

Action points in the plan also commit the Government to:

Electrify the Northern Dart line to extend the service to Balbriggan.

Maintain a grant scheme for electric vehicles, with support levels to be reviewed annually.

Consider the introduction of a grant scheme to encourage eco-driving for HGVs and buses.

Develop proposals to establish regional climate action offices to co-ordinate local authority response to climate action.

In a foreword for the plan, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar says: "Climate change is one of the biggest global challenges of this century."
The Domestic Metering Programme concluded in early February, with a total of 11,400 meters installed since the start of the year. Photo: Colm Mahady/Fennells

Irish Water has not installed a single domestic meter since February despite an Oireachtas committee recommending they should be fitted to all newly built homes.

As construction ramped up over the past six months, the water utility pulled back completely from meter installations while it waits for Government legislation to chart its future course.

The Domestic Metering Programme concluded in early February, with a total of 11,400 meters installed since the start of the year.

The revelation comes as the Cabinet yesterday signed off on the continued suspension of water charges until the end of the year.

This is to give new Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy breathing space to finalise legislation which will ensure the vast majority of households will never be billed for water again.

The legislation to be brought forward must factor in the recommendations of the all-party Oireachtas committee on water which was released in April.

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The report said the Government must use general taxation to give Irish Water "funding certainty and long-term stability".

It also said building regulations should be changed so that water meters would be mandatory in all new dwellings and any refurbishments which required planning permission "so that the amount of household water consumption is clear to users and as a means of effective leak detection and conservation".

Approximately 890,000 water meters have been installed nationwide as part of the domestic metering contracts.

In a statement, Irish Water told the Irish Independent the bulk of metering was complete by August 2016 but the company retained third-party contractors until last February "to complete work orders already issued and to continue the 'First Fix' leakage programme".

A spokesperson said: "We are continuing to read meters to find and fix leaks.

"The constant flow alarms [leak alarms] in 7pc of homes with a water meter are activated in each meter reading cycle which helps Irish Water and homeowners to find and fix up to 12,000 leaks every quarter under the First Fix programme.

"Leaks repaired through this programme are saving 89 million litres of clean, treated drinking water every day."

Separately, contractors are continuing to provide "a range of services for Irish Water that did not come under the original domestic metering programme".

This includes the replacement of commercial meters and bulk meters.

Asked how quickly Irish Water could begin metering newly built homes if ordered to do so by the Government, a spokesman replied: "Contractors are already in place who could carry out this work if required."

Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe last night said all money needed to fund water refunds will come from an underspend in Government departments.

"All of the plans that we committed to in Budget 2017 for this year in terms of public services are going to happen.

"But as is the case in any year potential develops for under-spends against plans that ministerial colleagues were able to deliver within their own departments, and this is the case for this year as it has been the case in other years," he said.

"By the end of June, my current estimate is that we had an under-spend across all of the Government departments put together of approximately 300m, and my objective in the second half of the year would be to use those under-spends, to use any gains that we may have in revenue later on in the year to deliver what the Taoiseach outlined over the weekend."
Gardai at the scene where Linda Christian's body was discovered at Coolmine Wood. Photo: Collins

A 'predator' wanted for questioning by gardai over the suspected murder of Dublin woman Linda Christian (29) is in his native Romania, sources revealed last night.

The man is wanted in relation to the violent death of Ms Christian, whose badly decomposed remains were found in undergrowth in the Coolmine area of the capital on Monday.

Sources said the "vulnerable" woman had been "taken advantage" of by the man, who she met several months ago.

"Gardai know this man is in Romania. The indications are that he was a predator and he is considered a person of interest in this tragic case," a source said last night.

Hospital

A post-mortem carried out on Ms Christian's remains proved inconclusive.

Gardai appealed on July 3 for information in relation to her disappearance. She had been reported missing on June 24, and when last seen she was wearing a green bomber jacket and blue jeans and carrying a pink gym bag.

Sources said she was being treated in hospital at the time of her disappearance.

Gardai again appealed for information last Wednesday and also on Saturday.

It has emerged since the discovery of Ms Christian's body that she was a vulnerable young woman preyed upon and taken advantage of by people who saw her as a soft touch.

Neighbours and residents in the Dublin 15 addresses where she lived said they feel she was failed by the system of care in Ireland and should have been more protected by the State.

She was fostered by the Christian family early in life and spent the first few years with them, living in their home on Hadleigh Green in Castleknock.

Foster father Myles Christian, who was from the UK, was a lecturer in the department of civil engineering at UCD, while foster mother Jackie was a Dubliner.

The Christians had a family of their own, but as one person who knew them well said, they were comfortable and wanted to share what they had with others.

"They fostered many children and they were devoted to their own children and any other children they took in," said a neighbour.

The family later moved to the newly-built Ongar estate in Clonee and Ms Christian moved with them.

In Blackwood Crescent, Ongar, the Christians continued to raise their own and fostered children with love, care and affection. In February 2008, Mr Christian died suddenly of a heart attack.

The family continued to live in Ongar until the children grew up and moved on with their lives.

In November 2012, Mrs Christian sold the house and moved to Wexford.

"Linda had moved out at this stage. She left when she was around 18, but she came back to live in the area and she would be spotted around Ongar," said a local resident.

Shame

"The Christians did as much as anyone could have done in helping her, but in the end Linda seemed to be let down by the system.

"It's a terrible shame. She just seemed to be vulnerable."

The house where Ms Christian spent the last years of her life was not far from Blackwood Crescent. It was in Manor Place, Ongar, and is thought to have been supplied either through the local authority or the HSE.

Neighbours said groups of people had taken advantage of her, and there would regularly be trouble at the house.

"I knew when she went missing that it was going to be bad news,'' said local man Derek Armstrong.

''If she got the care that she was supposed to get, this might not have happened."
Up to 200,000 people in Ireland are affected by eating disorders - and many of those may feel overwhelmed with the content of the controversial new Netflix film, To the Bone, which premiered last week.

The storyline centres on Ellen (played by Lily Collins), a 20-year-old woman who suffers from anorexia. She has supposedly undergone every kind of treatment available for the condition, without success, before she is finally shipped off to a residential programme under the unconventional guidance of Dr Beckham (Keanu Reeves).

Tackling anorexia as a subject is no easy task, as it is impossible to avoid issues, images and situations which may act as triggers to vulnerable viewers.

Having suffered from anorexia for the best part of her life, Stephanie McAlinden (29) is only too aware of what To The Bone presents, and has decided to give the film a wide berth. She doesn't believe people really understand how susceptible some who have suffered the condition are to relapsing.

"I'm definitely steering clear of the film as I couldn't even make it through the trailer," she says. "I appreciate that it was written and acted with great intentions but even though I am in a stable place right now, I would be very worried that it could be a trigger.

"The main character is so stereotypical, which I know she should be, but the messy bun, smudged eyeliner, cigarette and baggy jumpers make up an image of perfection to pro-ana (anorexia) blogs. This is exactly the look everyone is trying to achieve. Plus the fact that the film is released during the summer, when people are even more concerned about their body, is a bad idea.

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Stephanie says that even though the makers have experience of eating disorders, "I just don't think they truly understand how vulnerable we can be".

Stephanie (29) is originally from Dublin but is doing a PHD in eating disorders at Queen's University in Belfast. She developed anorexia nervosa when she was still in primary school.

"I have always had problems dealing with intense emotions and when I was 11 my kitten died and I felt totally helpless," she says. "I was a chubby child and after losing my pet I stopped eating certain things as it felt as if it was the only thing I could control in my life. Then the inevitable happened and people started telling me I looked great as I had lost weight, so as the months rolled on, I started skipping meals altogether and by the time I was 12, I regularly didn't eat for days.

"My parents soon picked up on this and I was brought to the doctor who told my mum I was just going through a phase. This allowed me to carry on being secretive with food. It had become a way of life for me and the less I ate, the harder it became to break the cycle."

Throughout her early teens her condition became worse, and Stephanie was convinced that she would not live to become an adult.

"When I started secondary school, I became known as 'the anorexic one'," she says. "I literally ate nothing and survived solely on Pepsi Max. I started having panic attacks when I was about 14 or 15 and was on medication, but I was in such a bad way. I remember having a bread roll on St Patrick's Day one year and it was the first thing I had actually eaten in three months.

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"I was barely conscious most of the time and knew that I was dying, but wanted to get on with it quickly rather than have to go through weeks of suffering. I remember being resigned to the fact that I would never get to see the third Lord of the Rings, but as far as I was concerned, this was the price I had to pay. Eventually I passed out in the bath one day and I was rushed to hospital where my parents were told I had two weeks left to live."

Fortunately Stephanie had been caught just in time and was slowly brought back to life and after being administered food and nutrition on a daily basis and monitored closely for three months, she was finally allowed to return home - but her story didn't end there.

"As soon as I was discharged, I went back to my old ways," she admitted. "People don't seem to realise that anorexia is a mental health disorder and you don't get cured just like that. I still had a very complicated relationship with food and was so afraid of calories. But I returned to school and thankfully all my friends had remained constant, which really helped me to cope. But then with the Leaving Cert looming, I developed bi-polar and had a really tough time for several years.

"I was like a rag and bone lady with hardly any hair and by the time I was 25, I was very thin again. But I really wanted to go to Queens to study my condition, so knew I had to pull myself together and this is really how I survived.

"My brother, who is a body builder, gave me some advice on working out so I have learned to combine food and exercise. Plus I have a wonderful boyfriend who is so understanding and really keeps me together - I eat the same thing every day and allow myself one cheat day; it's all about routine. This is why I believe To the Bone could be detrimental to someone like me as I am still so fragile and couldn't risk being sucked into something which could trigger my condition again."

Barry Murphy, communications officer with Bodywhys believes the filmmakers "have understood the seriousness and complexity of eating disorders". However, he does advise against watching it alone and urges discussion about its content.

"Visual and other elements of the film may raise concerns for parents and people affected by eating disorders," he says.

"The lead character, Ellen, is in crisis and unwell. Some scenes involving specific eating disorder behaviours are shown, along with personal and emotional conversations.

"So it may be useful for family members to watch it together - and if you have any concerns, speak to a professional or Bodywhys to seek support for how the film might have an impact on you."

Anyone with any concerns regarding eating disorders should contact their GP or visit www.bodywhys.ie or call 1890 200 444

To the Bone is available on Netflix now

According to Bodywhys

To the Bone contains a number of key messages:

 Eating disorders are psychological illnesses.

 They are not about food, dieting or vanity.

 They pose a significant risk to a persons emotional and physical health.

 Symptoms can include: a change in someones relationship with food, weight loss, low self-esteem, social withdrawal and a marked personality change.

OFFICIAL FIGURES SHOW THAT...

 Up to 200,000 people in Ireland may be affected by eating disorders.

 An estimated 400 new cases emerge each year, representing 80 deaths annually.

 12pc of all admissions for under 18s to Irish psychiatric units and hospitals had a primary diagnosis of eating disorders.

 Females accounted for 87pc of all admissions of those affected by eating disorders.
With more than 90,000 cars expected to be imported this year, buyers should be on heightened alert over "worrying increases" in clocking across the UK.

According to a major new report, UK motor dealers are concerned that 'clocking' of used cars is becoming "increasingly common".

The figures, from automotive data experts cap hpi, show that a quarter of dealers are concerned that clocking and mileage discrepancies had worsened in the past 12 months. The data experts calculate there has been a 25pc rise in the number of cars showing mileage discrepancies.

They claim you now have a one-in-16 risk of being landed with a clocked car as opposed to a one-in-20 chance back in 2014. Among the reasons for the increase is the ease of online access to technologies that can alter digital odometers. Another attributed factor is the increase in mileage-related finance deals, such as PCPs, whereby motorists try to reduce" the amount they have travelled to avoid penalties for excess. Irish buyers have been snapping up 7,500 imports a month on average this year.

Some industry figures here forecast 95,000 registrations by year's end. Imports are running at more than 50,000 year to date (38,000 for corresponding 2016 period) All of which makes the latest revelations on clocking even more relevant - and a history check essential. Irish experts have consistently warned about levels of clocking, citing discovery of examples where anything from 30,000km to 150,000km have been reduced on used cars, regardless of their origin.

Not alone does that affect the subsequent sell-on or trade-in value of the car for unsuspecting buyers, it could have major wear-and-tear safety implications for them too.
Four-in-five people who buy Jaguar's new E-PACE baby SUV will be totally new to the marque.

That means there is going to have to be a lot of 'conquesting' from other car segments, models and makers in what would be a major shift of allegiance.

Despite the size of the shift, Jaguar are confident buyers will flock to this, based on projections of demand and the success of the F-PACE (which also had to attract swathes of new-the-marque). All the more reason that the price of their E-PACE "cub", as they call it, is pitched competitively and goes on sale in January.

As I revealed last week on Independent.ie, it will come in under the 40,000 mark, but just how much under will be interesting because for 10pc more or so you can buy a larger F-PACE.

Regardless of all that, they expect the new baby to become their best-selling model.

They do so on the back of surging demand for compact SUVs worldwide (23pc growth forecast by 2020).

Being the least expensive car Jaguar has made, it means a new set of potential buyers get another juicy newcomer to mull over on their compact SUV menu.

Many of those who make the switch will, they believe, be in their thirties with a young family. They'll be looking for practical room, smart looks, a sporty drive and that Jaguar badge.

I understand the distributors here may get a few E-PACE models over for pre-181 reg viewing late, late in the year, but the real action starts from January.

While we await a drive in the car to suss it out, the underpinnings offer promise of decent dynamics.

Derived from the D8 architecture that underpins the Land Rover Discovery Sport, it also draws a lot on the big-selling (and World Car of the Year winning) F-PACE, especially in the cabin.

Critically, it employs a multilink integral rear suspension - just like in the F-PACE - and that should aid handling and ride.

There will be three diesel and two petrol engines. The 2-litre 4cyl diesels have 150PS, 180PS and 240PS outputs, with the 2-litre 4cyl petrol turbos pumping 249PS and 300PS.

The only version with front-wheel-drive will be the 150bhp diesel with 6spd manual transmission. The rest will be all-wheel-drive, we're told, and will come with an 9spd auto too.

For a relatively small car, it has a towing capacity of up to 1,800kg (braked). For the record, it is 4,345mm long, 1,984mm wide, 1,649mm high and has a wheelbase of 2,681mm, making it one of the shorter cars in its class (BMW X1, Audi Q3 are longer) though boot space (480 litres = four conventional suit cases) is competitive. The rear seats fold to create 1,234 litres.

There was plenty of room for two large adults in the back seat when I sat in at the London reveal. And there are loads of cubbyholes, with the central slot capable of taking two 1-litre bottles of water.

We're promised high levels of spec and connectivity, of course. Standard items will include a tablet-like TouchPro 10in display, LEDs front and rear, parking sensors and rear camera.

There are five USBs, one for each passenger (they do call it a 5dr, 5-seater but the middle rear seat is quite, quite small), several charging points and a 4G hotspot that can cater for eight devices.

Among the options menu are 21in alloys (17in are standard), 12in display, next-gen Head-Up Display technology and Activity Key.

As well as the core line-up, there will be a specially specced First Edition - 150PS diesel or 180PS petrol powered.

I have to say I prefer the look of the cub to the F-PACE. I said it to Ian Callum, the genius designer behind both, and he good humouredly, if cryptically, said how we all learn as we go along. Mmmm.

I like the cabin. It is driver-orientated, just like in the F-PACE, but has a gear lever rather than rotary selector - for sporty effect, they say. I prefer that to the rotary.

With so many models having AWD, handling (should also be helped by lower centre of gravity) and performance will be emphasised to woo some of those 80pc conquests, as will its off-road technology.

It's fair to say that, from talking to several executives, they reckon they can set a rattling good pace (no pun intended) with this new baby. But I keep coming back to price and how critical it could be. It's a matter of waiting and seeing for now.

These are busy times at Jaguar. Their all-electric I-Pace SUV is due here late next year/early 2019.

I had to ask if a seven-seater SUV was planned. No comment on that from Finbar McFall, global product marketing director. What about an even smaller SUV than the E-PACE? No comment either.

* Jaguar here are upping the ante with a 0pc APR PCP deal for some models - or what they call a 6,000 "purchase contribution".

In the case of the F-PACE, it's 3.9pc APR or a 3,000 purchase contribution. Who says it's not a cut-throat market out there?
The Churchillian definition of success hinges on stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. By such a yardstick, the performance of Noirin O'Sullivan as Garda Commissioner has been stellar. Whatever the temperature, Ms O'Sullivan has remained cool, almost insouciant, as all around her sizzles in the white heat of one inquiry after another. She manages to emerge unperturbed and unruffled, her fervour for the fray as ardent as ever.

Yet, there comes a point when the public has had enough of scandals and controversy concerning the Garda, and that point was passed some time ago. Yesterday, the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee (PAC) published a withering report into the Garda Training College at Templemore.

Ms O'Sullivan is directly in the firing line, as it found it was "unacceptable" that the Comptroller & Auditor General (C&AG) was not informed about financial issues there until 10 months after Ms O'Sullivan was told about them.

More troubling still, the report deemed that her claim to the C&AG that she was disclosing all relevant information was "not accurate". As for the force in general, the committee detected a notable absence of common purpose between senior management. It also felt Ms O'Sullivan should have informed the Justice Minister of concerns over Templemore sooner.

For too long the Garda has been at the centre of a slew of lurid and damaging inquiries. The problem has been that no one has been deemed responsible and therefore no one can be accountable. You could carpet the Phoenix Park with reports calling for a change in culture and the urgent need for reform. But despite the establishment of Gsoc and the Garda Authority, problems first identified more than a decade ago persist. The damage to the reputation and morale of the force has been incalculable.

Last night, based on the report's conclusions, Alan Kelly, vice-chairman of the PAC, called on Ms O'Sullivan to go. It is time to end the descent. Clearly, relationships are breaking down at senior management level. Resistance to change and reform from the top down is taking a catastrophic toll. Ms O'Sullivan has tried, but palpably failed to improve matters.

Looming famine in Africa is a crisis we can't ignore

For all our faults, few countries have out-performed our own in terms of helping the developing world.

As is often pointed out by NGOs in the sector, human need never sleeps. The news that more than 20 million people in four African countries are at risk of starvation in the coming months is a searing reminder of this. Yet, for one reason or another, the response so far to this looming catastrophe has been shameful. The United Nations says a mere 43pc of the $6.27bn (5.42bn) so desperately needed to save the lives of millions spread across Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria has so far been raised. The International Rescue Committee is sufficiently alarmed to describe it as "the least reported, but most important major issue of our time".

Aid groups do not overstate matters - when they warn that more than half the populations of Somalia and South Sudan are in dire need of emergency food assistance, we should sit up and take notice.

Civil wars in those countries and a failure of the spring rains have resulted in a drastic reduction of food supplies. In Nigeria, some five million people are at risk in the north-eastern provinces, where the terrorist group Boko Haram is active. But Yemen is worst hit, where 20 million people need humanitarian aid. The United Nations has labelled it the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. This time, we can't say we haven't been warned.
The Duchess of Cambridge with Princess Charlotte leave Warsaw, Poland, as they head to Germany

The Duke of Cambridge with Prince George leave Warsaw, Poland, as they head to Germany

The Duchess of Cambridge with Princess Charlotte leave Warsaw, Poland, as they head to Germany

The Duchess of Cambridge with Princess Charlotte leave Warsaw, Poland, as they head to Germany

Princess Charlotte leaves Warsaw, Poland, as she heads to Germany

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with Prince George and Princess Charlotte leave Warsaw, Poland, as they head to Germany

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with Prince George and Princess Charlotte leave Warsaw, Poland, as they head to Germany

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have said goodbye to Poland, leaving the country hand in hand with their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte.

William and Kate's two-day visit ended with a low-key departure from Warsaw, where the royal couple were based.

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George, who appeared a little hesitant and shy when the family first arrived on Monday, strode confidently across the runway, holding hands with his mother and father.

He even tugged at his father's hand as the Duke said goodbye to waiting dignitaries, appearing eager to board the private chartered plane.

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The young Prince went ahead of William and carefully climbed up the steps of the Embraer Legacy 600 jet, which seats 13 people.

Charlotte also seemed impatient, and pulled at Kate's hand in attempt to join her brother as he made his way up to the plane cabin.

The Cambridges were flying to Germany for the second leg of their five-day European trip.
Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Prince George of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte of Cambridge arrive at Berlin Tegel Airport during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge carries Princess Charlotte of Cambridge as they arrive with Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Prince George of Cambridge on day 1 of their offical visit to Poland on July 17, 2017 in Warsaw, Poland. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

Prince George of Cambridge arrives at Berlin Tegel Airport during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Robin Utrecht - Pool/Getty Images)

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Prince George of Cambridge arrive at Berlin Tegel Airport during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Robin Utrecht - Pool/Getty Images)

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge with Prince George of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte of Cambridge as they arrive at Berlin Tegel Airport during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Robin Utrecht - Pool/Getty Images)

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Prince George of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte of Cambridge arrive at Berlin Tegel Airport during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Prince George of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte of Cambridge arrive at Berlin Tegel Airport during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

Princess Charlotte of Cambridge arrives at Berlin Tegel Airport during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

The Duchess of Cambridge with Princess Charlotte leave Warsaw, Poland, as they head to Germany

Prince George of Cambridge rubs his eyes as he arrives at Berlin Tegel Airport during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Ian Vogler - Pool/Getty Images)

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge with Prince George of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte of Cambridge as they arrive at Berlin Tegel Airport during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Ian Vogler - Pool/Getty Images)

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with Prince George and Princess Charlotte leave Warsaw, Poland, as they head to Germany

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Prince George of Cambridge arrive at Berlin Tegel Airport during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Ian Vogler - Pool/Getty Images)

Princess Charlotte of Cambridge as she arrives at Berlin Tegel Airport during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Ian Vogler - Pool/Getty Images)

Prince George of Cambridge rubs his eyes as he arrives at Berlin Tegel Airport during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Ian Vogler - Pool/Getty Images)

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge arrive at the Brandenburg Gate during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge arrive at the Brandenburg Gate during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge arrives at the Brandenburg Gate during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge arrives at the Brandenburg Gate during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge arrive at the Brandenburg Gate during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge arrives at the Brandenburg Gate during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Britain's Prince William, Duke of Cambridge (L), his wife Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge (unseen) with their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte (Unseen) arrive at the airport in Berlin on July 19, 2017

Britain's Prince William, Duke of Cambridge (L) and his son Prince George arrive at the airport in Berlin on July 19, 2017

Britain's Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and his wife Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge with their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte arrive at the airport in Berlin on July 19, 2017

Britain's Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, his wife Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge with their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte arrive at the airport in Berlin on July 19, 2017

Britain's Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, his wife Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge with their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte arrive at the airport in Berlin on July 19, 2017

Prince George holds the hand of his father Britain's Prince William (L), Duke of Cambridge, upon their arrival at the airport in Berlin on July 19, 2017

Britain's Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and his wife Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge with their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte arrive at the airport in Berlin on July 19, 2017

Britain's Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and his wife Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge pose in front of Berlin's landmark the Brandenburg Gate on July 19, 2017. The British royal couple is on a three-day-visit in Germany. / AFP PHOTO / John MACDOUGALLJOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images

Princess Charlotte stole the the show during the latest leg of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's European tour - scampering up the plane's steps and receiving her first official bouquet.

When William and Kate said goodbye to Poland, the two-year-old scaled the private jet's steep steps using her hands and feet.

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Kate watched carefully as her daughter made her way up to the cabin of the Embraer Legacy 600 jet, following her brother, Prince George, who had been eager to board the flight to Berlin.

The Duke and Duchess were leaving Warsaw after a two-day visit that saw them celebrate the nation's history, culture and ties with the UK.

When the family arrived in the Polish capital, Warsaw, on Monday, George, who will turn four on Saturday, looked shy and reluctant to take part in the official welcome staged by the European nation.

However for the official departure he strode confidently across the airport runway, holding hands with his mother and father.

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He even tugged at William's hand as he was saying goodbye to waiting dignitaries, appearing eager to board the plane. He then went ahead of his father and carefully climbed the steps of the jet, which seats 13 people.

When the plane touched down in Berlin, where a small group of officials were waiting to greet the royal visitors, Charlotte was spotted peering out of a window.

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After clambering up the plane steps in Warsaw, the journey down them in Berlin was slower, with the young princess holding on to a rail with one hand while clasping Kate's fingers with the other.

Till Knorn, the German government's head of protocol, presented the Duchess and her daughter with a posy each.

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Charlotte's floral gift was a miniature version of her mother's and, as she smelt her bouquet, George, who was holding William's hand, reached out for Kate's posy and she lifted it out of his way.

The three-year-old prince appeared a little bored with the formalities of the official welcome and at one point buried his face in his arm as William chatted to Sir Sebastian Wood, Britain's ambassador to Germany.

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As William and Kate made their way along the line of dignitaries on the runway, Brigadier Rob Rider, the British embassy's defence attache, shook hands with the two-year-old princess.

Kate, who was wearing a Catherine Walker dress, walked off the red carpet with her daughter, husband and son to start their three-day tour of Germany.

Later the Duke and Duchess had extended discussions with Chancellor Angela Merkel, meeting her at the German Chancellery.

Flanked by security the beaming royal couple shook hands with Mrs Merkel as a European flag fluttered in the background.

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Whatsapp Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge with Prince George of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte of Cambridge as they arrive at Berlin Tegel Airport during an official visit to Poland and Germany on July 19, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Robin Utrecht - Pool/Getty Images)

Kate and William - both wearing blue which is seen as representative of unity and solidarity in the EU - have been dubbed Brexit ambassadors, helping to maintain ties with Europe as Britain leaves the EU.

Welcoming Kate, Mrs Merkel asked if she spoke German to which a smiling Kate replied: "No, no. Sorry."

The trio then stood for pictures on a red carpet before Kate ushered William to stand between herself and Mrs Merkel for a final pose. They then headed inside the building for a private lunch.
Real Madrid football player Cristiano Ronaldo and Georgina Rodriguez are seen on July 8, 2017 in Ibiza, Spain. (Photo by Europa Press/Europa Press via Getty Images)

Real Madrid and Portugal's forward Cristiano Ronaldo poses with partner Georgina Rodriguez and his son Cristiano Ronaldo Jr as they arrive for The Best FIFA Football Awards 2016 ceremony

Real Madrid and Portugal's forward Cristiano Ronaldo poses with partner Georgina Rodriguez and his son Cristiano Ronaldo Jr as they arrive for The Best FIFA Football Awards 2016 ceremony

Cristiano Ronaldo will definitely have his hands full.

The Real Madrid superstar (32) has confirmed his girlfriend Georgina Rodrigeuz is expecting, just weeks after he welcomed twins.

He has been dating the 22-year-old model for nearly seven months and she has been rumoured to be pregnant for five months now, but he has finally confirmed the news to Spanish newspaper El Mundo at a party in Ibiza.

When he was asked if he was happy to have another baby on the way, he replied in Spanish, "Yes, very".

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He also gushed over his new arrivals.

Earlier this month, Ronaldo shared a sweet family picture of him with son Cristiano Jr (seven) and one-month-old twins Eva Maria and Mateo, saying he feels "blessed" with his young family.

In the case of his three children, he has not identified the mother - in 2010, he confirmed the news of his first child by announcing on social media, "With the agreement of the mother, who wishes to remain anonymous, I will have exclusive custody of my son."

In June, he announced the two new arrivals after weeks of speculation.

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"I was in the service of the national team, as always, body and soul, even though my two children were born," he wrote on Facebook.
In a running series on Independent.ie Style, we speak to Irish women who inspire us and find out how they got the job they're in today, what trials and tribulations they faced on their career path and what advice they have to give to working women in today's world.

This week, we speak to best-selling author and renowned writer Cathy Kelly.

What is your job title?

I dont have one! I am CEO of Whatever The Heck I Need To Do Today, which might be writing 1,000 words; looking at yesterdays 1,000 words and thinking they are hopeless; doing interviews; catching up on endless international emails; schlepping round the grocery store trying to work out what to cook for dinner; discussing homework with my sons. Most of the time, I am doing all of these things on the same day. Sometimes, I even get eyeliner on too.

Did you always want to work as a writer?

Yes but to be honest, I didnt think someone like me could be a writer. Writing was what I did for solace and fun but other people, they were writers. Ive always read all the time and written but it took me time to build up any confidence to think that I could be a writer. I like to think this is a good path because it keeps you anxious about your work and not ever taking anything for granted and not thinking you are fabulous are prime requirements for writing. That said, Sylvia Plath was right when she said the worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt.

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Growing up, what did you want to be?

When I was four, I apparently wanted to be a jockey. I am certainly short enough. I wanted to be an artist for a long time too - I still love to paint and draw. I dallied with the law, science and physiotherapy but as careers rather than the wild love that writing is. (BTW - that wild-love feeling may go when you are racing to finish a book!)

How did you find yourself on this career path?

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I went into journalism after completing the two-year DIT journalism course in the 80s - yeah, the 80s! - and worked as a reporter for a long time, while secretly harbouring a desire to write novels and reading all sorts of great novels. Great fun used to be to be knocked out of me in the newsroom by people saying: "So you like French novels, do you?" Eventually, I stopped talking about writing a book and did it, which is the way to go when it comes to this job. The bum-on-seat approach works better than the "Ill write a book one day" approach. I wrote my first book, it was published, was successful, and I ended up - via an Irish publisher who sold the rights to my books - with a three-book deal with a UK publisher. After working in journalism for the first three books, I gave the day job up to be a full-time writer.

Did you face any challenges along your way to this career?

Does the Pope wear a funny hat? You have to break into the industry which takes time. You have to learn to talk about yourself and your books,which is so hard when you are used to being the person asking the questions. Journalism taught me how to be professional at all times. The main challenge is how to always improve your writing and how to stop your crazy head telling you that you are an idiot as you stare at the computer. I am still working on that one.

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If so, what are some notable obstacles you faced and how did you overcome them?

The self-doubt, which I think is a part of writing, is an obstacle and you have to remind yourself that at a certain point in every book/every day, you think you are a moron. Also, not all books do as well as other books. You have to take it on the chin and keep going. You also have to be spectacularly self-disciplined. I write a book a year and that takes discipline. Plus a lot of coffee and a dark sense of humour.

Are you a believer in having a five year plan?

No! I should, probably. Ive never written a five-year-plan in my life, even in my head. My plans involve making sure my family are safe and happy: its that simple. With work, well, what will be will be. I will keep writing.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to work as a writer?

Read. Read. And read some more. Learn from everyone. Talk to everyone  I talk to cashiers, guys collecting for charity, random people. I think writers have to observe and engage and I love engaging. I engage so long, I go down to the village here to get milk and come back an hour later because I have had two intense conversations. And write. Dont talk about writing, but do it. Finally, if you get advice, take it on board. Ive given people advice over the years and sometimes, people dont like what youre telling them. I suck up advice like a mosquito sucks up blood. I think every day has something to teach you.

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What women inspire you?

Women like the women I meet with my work in UNICEF who are trying to raise families in the hardest conditions in the world, in places in Africa where drinking the water can kill you, where lack of medical care can kill you. People who help those in our communities who need help. Anyone who works with the homeless or rape victims or domestic abuse victims. They inspire me. Kindness inspires me. Women who take care of other women. That is so important in my life. One of my favourite quotes comes from the great Madeleine Albright: "There is a special place in hell for women who dont help other women."

Whats a typical day like?

Whey my sons are in school, I wake early, read, then get up, let the dogs out, listen to the news, rouse the sleeping hordes, and, after breakfast, drive my sons to school. I try to start the day with us laughing. Once home, I make coffee and go into my study and do emails. Yes this is fatal. I try not to do emails first (as per all the secrets of successful people) but cannot. I make lists. I love lists. I then write and when I write, I get really into it and dont hear anything or anyone until my fingers hurt. Arthritis.

I have lunch  I used to have lunch standing up but now, and this is a big move for me, I sit down! I write some more but I am now thinking of what to make for dinner, does it require the supermarket, and then I pick up my sons from school and unless I am finishing a book or have a lot more emails to do, I am out of the study cooking. I like cooking but sometimes, I wish I had a magic wand to cook with. After dinner and homework, if there is time, we chill watching things like Modern Family or anything David Attenborough is narrating. Then bed and more reading.

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What has been the highlight of your career so far?

I have no sensible answer for this! I think, staying published for twenty years  my first book was published twenty years ago - is my highlight. I am so grateful that I can still make my living this way.

What skills/traits do you think are necessary for your job?

A love of reading and writing. You dont always love it when its going badly but you do have to love creating those new lives with words. And you have to love reading, which I adore.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

I hope I have a healthy, happy family. Thats all I want.

Secrets of a Happy Marriage paperback is out now.
A woman who did not want her cancelled 26,000 wedding to go to waste threw a party for homeless people instead.

Sarah Cummins arranged for guests including local war veterans to be bussed in to the reception at a swanky venue in Indianapolis, Indiana, that she had originally booked with her fiance.

She had been planning her dream wedding with partner Logan Araujo for two years, but called it off just a week before they were due to marry.

"I called everyone, cancelled, apologised, cried, called vendors, cried some more and then I started feeling really sick about just throwing away all the food I ordered for the reception," the 25-year-old told the Indianopolis Star.

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Whatsapp Guest Janice Williamson-Cox hugs Sarah Cummins as she arrives at the Ritz Charles (Kelly Wilkinson/The Indianapolis Star via AP)

The couple, who did not want to disclose why the wedding was cancelled, were left with a non-refundable booking including dinner for 170 guests at the Ritz Charles.

After discussing it with her ex-fiance, Ms Cummins contacted four local homeless shelters and invited residents to the party.

"For me, it was an opportunity to let these people know they deserved to be at a place like this just as much as everyone else does," she said.

The reception was held as it had been planned for the wedding, but with the seating plan rearranged to remove the head table.

Guests tucked into bourbon-glazed meatballs, goat cheese and roasted garlic bruschetta, chicken breast with Chardonnay cream sauce, and even wedding cake.

Some wore suits and gowns donated by Indiana shops as Ms Cummins' goodwill swept through the city.

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She and her mother arrived early at the venue on Saturday to set up centrepieces they had designed themselves, before greeting guests when they turned up.

Erik Jensen, a guest who has lived in a homeless shelter for five months, said he was humbled by Ms Cummins' kindness.

"It's just a really great opportunity for us, that was going to be a huge tragedy in her life," he said. "It's a great opportunity to spread love. Being homeless is kind of a big loss for all of these guys. This is just a very nice thing to do."

Mr Araujo footed most of the bill for the wedding, with Ms Cummins and her parents, along with one of Mr Araujos family friends, paying the rest.

Three of Ms Cummins' seven bridesmaids, along with her mother and aunts, came to support her at the event.

Ms Cummins flew out to the Dominican Republic with her mother on Sunday on a holiday that would have been her honeymoon.

But she is not sure yet what she will do with the wedding dress.

"Its too painful to think about," she said.
Andrew Power (9) having fun with his friends on bales of hay in North County Dublin yesterday. Photo: Mark Condren

Farmers have been packing away their machinery before the rain comes after a bumper harvest of hay and silage.

One Roscommon farmer said he had been "flat out" during an "exceptional year" for hay and silage across the country.

Yesterday, farmers including John Hanley, from Creggs, Co Roscommon, and Peter Sheehan, from Clostoken, Loughrea, Co Galway, were busy making hay while the sun shone. Even budding young farmer Jessica Meehan (4) gave her dad a hand as he was harvesting the barley at the family farm near Lifford in Co Donegal.

Mr Hanley told the Irish Independent that today's rain was "coming just at the right time". Last night, he said he was "trying to pack away all the machinery in time before the rain comes".

"No two years are the same," he said. "Last year, there was a tillage crisis, so you just have to take it when it comes."

Roscommon saw the highest temperatures yesterday at 25C, as well as parts of Donegal. Across the country, temperatures were "deep into the 20s", Met Eireann said.

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John Eagleton, forecaster with Met Eireann, said thunder was on the cards for today, and tomorrow and Friday would be "fresh, blustery days with sunny spells and passing showers". He said Saturday would bring heavy showers, but warm, clear weather could return as early as Sunday.
A man looks at a damaged driveway caused by water from flash flooding in Coverack (Ben Birchall/PA)

Flash flooding has hit the coastal village of Coverack in Cornwall.

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Heres what we know so far.

Was anyone injured?

A spokeswoman for the Maritime and Coastguard agency said two people had been rescued from a house, by helicopter. They were not injured.

Several more were also rescued from houses, a council spokesman said.

Cornwall Fire and Rescue have urged people to stay away from the area.

What was the cause?

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Forecasters said heavy rainfall and thunderstorms in Cornwall and Devon led to the extreme conditions.

Witness Karla Wainwright, who works in Coveracks Paris Hotel, told the BBC: It literally just came over like a massive mist.

Wright said the weather worsened at about 3pm on Tuesday, and that hailstones the size of 50p coins had smashed some glass on the building.

How bad is the damage?

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Some 50 properties were damaged and further witness accounts tell of damage to roads, as well as one person who lost their shed to the water.

A Coverack business owner, who wished to remain anonymous, said: Our neighbours across the road from us, their shed disappeared down the river. Our neighbours, just up the road from us, their oil tank disappeared down the river.

But luckily nobody (was) hurt, anyway. I think the biggest sufferer is the main road into Coverack. I dont think that is passable at the moment.

What happens next?

Truro County Hall opened an emergency centre on Tuesday, while a hotel in the area has offered accommodation for those unable to access their homes.

A meeting will be held for affected residents on Wednesday.
A startling video has captured the moment a boat full of tourists had a very close encounter with a whale in Australia.

Mark Collins had taken his family and friends out whale watching off the coast of Exmouth when a whale breaching just ahead of a small dinghy took them all by surprise.

It was very spectacular when it happened but immediately afterwards it dawned on us how close to tragedy it was, Mark told The West.

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That was more than a little intense  and came just as the family were discussing how dangerous the situation could become.

The Ningaloo Coast, and in particular the Exmouth Gulf, experience the highest density of humpback whales in the southern hemisphere during their migration to Antarctica between June and November  with an estimated 30,000 gathering around the gulf to rest before making their return journey south.

Luckily, no-one was hurt in the incident and those tourists probably went home with a very cool story to tell.
The latest attempt by Republican senators to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act ended in defeat, prompting President Trump to declare he was going to let Obamacare fail.

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However, it was the Fox News breaking news graphic which really got people talking. And meme-ing.

The US president, in his characteristically defiant manner, insisted that the Republicans day will come when it comes to passing their healthcare bill to override President Barack Obamas law.

After he asserted that eventually, we will get something done, the graphic which followed quickly spread.

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The setback in Trumps quest to establish a new healthcare bill follows another attempt earlier this year, which overshadowed his 100-days landmark.

Some four out of 52 Republican Senators had proposed to block the measure, leading to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, conceding defeat and stating the proposed legislation will not be successful.

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The GOP have worked to replace former President Obamas healthcare law since 2010.

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Trump said he and the Republicans were not going to own Obamacare.

He added: I am disappointed because for so many years weve been hearing repeal and replace.

Im sitting in the Oval office right next door, pen in hand, waiting to sign something and Ill be waiting and, eventually, were gonna get something done and its gonna be very good.

Obamacare is a big failure and it has to be changed.
Shoes and clothing are visible at a Swiss glacier where two bodies were found

Swiss police say they have formally identified two bodies found on an Alpine glacier as those of a couple missing for nearly 75 years.

Valais canton police said that forensic experts using DNA analysis identified the two as Marcelin Dumoulin and his wife, Francine. They were 40 and 37, respectively, when they disappeared on August 15, 1942.

The couple's daughter, now 79, has said her parents set off on foot to feed their animals, but never returned.

Police were alerted on Friday to the bodies on the Tsanfleuron glacier at 2,615 metres (8,580 feet) above sea level.

Regional police have a list going back to 1925 of missing people.

They note that, because of climate change, bodies of people missing for decades regularly emerge from receding glaciers.
Charlie Gard has reportedly been granted US citizenship so he can travel to America to receive experimental treatment.

The decision by US Congress to give the 11-month-old citizenship may oblige Great Ormond Street Hospital to release the sick baby so he can receive nucleoside therapy.

Nebraska representative Jeff Fortenberry said an amendment has been passed "that grants permanent resident status to Charlie Gard and family so Charlie can get the medical treatment he needs".

Charlie, who has a rare genetic disease, is being kept on life support at the children's hospital amid an ongoing court battle between his parents, who want him to receive the treatment, and doctors, who say it is unlikely to work and it is kinder for life support to be switched off.

An American doctor flew to London this week to examine the critically ill baby as part of a last-ditch attempt to persuade a High Court judge the treatment stands a chance of working.

Charlie, who was born on 4 August 2016, has a faulty RRM2B gene, which affects the cells responsible for energy production and respiration, leaving him unable to move or breath without a ventilator.

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Dr Michio Hirano, a neuroscientist from Columbia University in New York, is said to have spent over five hours trying to convince doctors, along with an expert from a Vatican hospital in Rome.

The specialist told the High Court nucleoside therapy has a 10 per cent chance of improving Charlie's condition, adding his research clearly indicates it reduces muscle weakness in patients with a similar genetic disorder.

This is the best scientific data we have, he told the judge last week, adding he was prepared to extrapolate the findings on patients with TK2 depletion to Charlies genetic deficiency.

These are small numbers, but with very rare diseases we must use every patient and gather as much detail from each patient as possible.

He said he hoped a high dose of nucleosides, which are found naturally in the body, would enter Charlies cells, affect the mitochondria and prove therapeutic.

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But Katie Gollop QC, representing the hospital, called the doctors findings all very theoretical, saying: You're trying to translate one experiment to another.

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Charlie being granted US citizenship could mean his parents Connie Yates and Chris Gard, in their 30s, no longer need permission from doctors at Great Ormond Street to take him across the Atlantic for treatment, according to MailOnline.

Currently police can be called into arrest the parents if doctors believe they will cause suffering to their child.
Theresa May said she can "completely understand" people's concerns about the Democratic Unionist Party's attitude to gay rights.

The Prime Minister, who relies on a parliamentary deal with the DUP to prop up her minority government, stressed that she did not agree with the Northern Irish party's opposition to gay marriage.

She insisted the Conservatives - which she once said was viewed as the "nasty party" - had not gone backwards by signing a pact with the DUP and pointed out the deal was not a formal coalition.

In an interview with LBC Radio, Mrs May - the daughter of a vicar - said the Church of England "will want to reflect" on whether to allow the clergy to bless gay marriages.

Challenged on whether the deal with the DUP had taken the Tory party back decades, she said: "The Conservative Party hasn't gone back but I can completely understand why people who are concerned about some of the attitudes that the DUP... some of the policies that the DUP promote, why they are concerned about this."

She added: "I'm very clear that the Conservative Party in Government doesn't agree with the DUP on those issues, on issues on LGBT rights.

Expand Close Britain's Conservative party leader and Prime Minister Theresa May (R) stands next to Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Arlene Foster (L), as DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson (2L) sits and signs paperwork with Britain's Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, and Chief Whip, Gavin Williamson, whilst posing for a photograph inside 10 Downing Street in central London on June 26, 2017. REUTERS/Daniel Leal-Olivas/Pool / Facebook

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Whatsapp Britain's Conservative party leader and Prime Minister Theresa May (R) stands next to Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Arlene Foster (L), as DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson (2L) sits and signs paperwork with Britain's Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, and Chief Whip, Gavin Williamson, whilst posing for a photograph inside 10 Downing Street in central London on June 26, 2017. REUTERS/Daniel Leal-Olivas/Pool

"We will continue to push forwards, to enhance LGBT rights and we are pleased with what we have been able to do so far and want to do more.

"That won't be changed by our relationship with the DUP, which of course isn't a formal coalition."

Read More

But she defended the DUP deal, saying: "If you think back to what happened after the election, we were the only party who could form a government and there's a responsibility to the country to ensure that it has a government, and a government that can put legislation through."

Mrs May was asked whether her father, who died in 1981, would have been sympathetic to the idea of the Church of England blessing gay marriages.

She said: "I think as an individual he very much valued the importance of relationships, of people affirming those relationships and of seeing stability in relationships and people able to be together with people that they love."

Pushed on whether there should be a change in the law, she said: "This has to be a matter for the Church... the Church of England has itself come a distance in terms of looking at these issues and obviously they will want to reflect, as attitudes more generally change, as society changes."

Read More

At a Downing Street LGBT reception, Mrs May said she believed same-sex marriage should be introduced in Northern Ireland.

"I think that LGBT people in Northern Ireland should have the same rights as people across the rest of the UK," she said.

The PM also indicated she is preparing to reform laws to allow trans people to legally choose their gender without undergoing invasive medical checks.

"While homophobic bullying may be in decline, we know that transphobic bullying remains a very serious problem," she said. "Indeed when it comes to rights and protections for trans people, there is still a long way to go.

"That is why the Government is reviewing the Gender Recognition Act and we hope to make an announcement very soon on the action we will take to reform it by making it less medical and less intrusive."
CHARLIE Gard's parents remain "optimistic" following a brain scan that will determine whether he can have experimental therapy.

The scan took place at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, where a US professor of neurosurgery examined the 11-month-old boy on Monday.

Prof Michio Hirano was studying the scan and other medical records before deciding whether he felt the boy could benefit from treatment for the rare mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome.

The hospital said there was an honorary contract in place, meaning that for the duration of the visit, Dr Hirano had the same rights as one of the hospital's own clinicians. He was also given full access to Charlie's medical records, and hospital and clinical facilities, including diagnostic images.

Meetings between the American neurosurgeon and other medical experts continued yesterday.

The hospital believes Charlie has suffered irreversible brain damage and that life support should be switched off, allowing him to "die with dignity".

Charlie's parents Chris Gard and Connie Yates say he should be given a chance of treatment. A source close to them said: "They remain optimistic after the scan."

The brain scan was conducted on Sunday, the first since March. Prof Hirano has said that the scan in March did not show irreversible brain damage.

A British High Court judge has already decided that the ventilator keeping Charlie alive should be removed, but could change his mind.
RUSSIAN-BACKED rebels fighting against Kiev yesterday announced the creation of a new "state" that they said would take the place of Ukraine and have its capital in their territory.

The proposed country - which has no chance of getting off the ground - would be founded after a referendum and called Malorossiya, a tsarist-era name, meaning "Little Russia", that once described most of the area covering Ukraine.

A constitution presented by rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko said representatives from the insurgents' self-declared Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics and other regions had agreed to "declare the establishment of a new state, which is the successor of Ukraine".

The document - released by the separatists' news agency - said rebel bastion Donetsk would become the capital, while Kiev would be reduced to a "historical and cultural centre".

The leader of self-declared Lugansk People's Republic, Vladimir Degtyarenko, denied taking part in the project and expressed doubts about "the appropriateness of this decision", the Lugansk Information Centre news outlet reported.

"Such decisions can only be made based on people's opinion. Right now, we are complying with the Minsk agreements, and there's no alternative to that," he was quoted as saying.

The proposal elicited reaction from authorities in Kiev, who have been locked in a conflict with the Moscow-supported rebels since 2014 that has cost the lives of 10,000 people.

Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko said he would "restore sovereignty over Donbass and Crimea", and predicted that the Malorossiya project would fall apart.

According to the rebels, 19 regions of Ukraine supported the move. The Kremlin has not yet commented on it.

A Russian politician called creating a new "state" in Ukraine unavoidable. State Duma deputy Leonid Kalashnikov told the RIA Novosti news agency that Ukrainian authorities had reached a dead end in eastern Ukraine.

"People can't be at war forever; creating an independent state could be a way out for them," he said.

A peace deal brokered by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany in 2015 has hit a wall as clashes drag on along the volatile frontline.

The latest move by the rebels could throw the troubled plan even further into doubt.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Iran's president has said that his country will stand up to the United States and reciprocate any new sanctions that America imposes on the Islamic Republic.

Hassan Rouhani's remarks came a day after the Trump administration announced new, non-nuclear sanctions on Iranians while at the same time warning Tehran that it would face consequences for breaching "the spirit" of the nuclear deal with world powers.

The new sanctions, perceived as the latest attempt to clamp down on Iran's military financing, target 18 Iranian individuals and groups, ranging from an Iranian-based company accused of aiding the country's drone program to a Turkey-based provider of naval equipment and a China-based network that helped secure electronics for Tehran.

If Washington, under any pretext, imposes new sanctions against Iran, "we will stand up to the United States," Mr Rouhani said, adding that the "great nation of Iran will have an appropriate answer" and that the Iranian parliament will also act.

He did not elaborate. His speech, at a weekly cabinet meeting, was broadcast on state TV.

The 68-year-old cleric and political moderate, who secured a resounding re-election over a hard-line opponent in May, has been increasingly outspoken against the US, calling relations with Washington "a curvy road" even as he touted the 2015 nuclear accord Iran secured with world powers.

The Trump administration on Monday confirmed that Iran had met its obligations under the 2015 nuclear deal, but warned the country it would face consequences for breaching "the spirit" of the accord - a reference to Iran's continued pursued of a ballistic missile programme.

Mr Rouhani speculated that such statements seek to dissuade Iran from continuing to comply with the nuclear deal.

The International Atomic Energy Agency already verified that Iran has lived up to its nuclear commitments.

"This plot will never succeed," he added. "We will always remain loyal to our international commitments."

Iran's foreign ministry in a statement condemned the latest US sanctions, calling them "mean and pointless" and said it will in return impose sanctions on more Americans.

Iran in April and May imposed reciprocal sanctions on dozens of American companies and individuals, alleging they support terrorism and repression against people in the region such as the Palestinians.

AP
Baby Mariana was born to Nicole Sifrit (left) and her husband on July 1. Six days later, she contracted a potentially deadly infection, which claimed hr life on Tuesday. Photo / Facebook

A couple in the US are mourning the loss of their 18-day-old daughter who succumbed to a life-threatening herpes infection contracted through a kiss.

Iowa couple, Shane and Nicole Sifrit, announced that their newborn daughter had passed away on Tuesday.

Their daughter, Mariana, was born on July 1.

She rushed to hospital on July 7 when her parents became concerned over her behaviour.

The newborn had stopped eating and didn't respond when they tried to wake her.

ABC report that doctors diagnosed Mariana with meningitis linked to HSV-1, a form of herpes that can cause cold sores.

Both parents tested negative for the herpes virus, which means that it's possible Mariana contracted the kiss from someone carrying herpes - but not necessarily showing the symptoms - when they had visited her in the hospital or at home.

"Just keep your babies isolated," Nicole told an ABC news channel.

"Make sure visitors constantly are washing their hands. Don't let people kiss your baby. Make sure they ask before they pick up your baby."

The heartbroken babies mourned the loss of their daughter on Facebook.

"She is now no longer suffering and is with the Lord," Nicole wrote in a post on Tuesday morning.

"In her 18 days of life she made a huge impact on the world and we hope with Mariana's Story we save numerous newborns life. R.I.P. sweet angel"
David Blackmon called police when his cocaine was stolen

An alleged drug dealer was arrested after calling the police to report that his cocaine was missing

David Blackmon (35) called the police on Sunday morning after his car had been broken into and a quarter of an ounce of cocaine and $50 (43) were missing.

The Miami Herald reports that police from Fort Walton Beach in Florida searched his car and seized a bag of cocaine, crack cocaine and a crack pipe.

Deputy Dennis Fields said: "Blackmon asked if I knew the cocaine was there, why did I let him keep talking."

Blackmon was arrested and charged with resisting an officer without violence for allegedly refusing to follow commands and possessing drug paraphernalia and cocaine.

He was released on Monday on a $4,000 (3,4700) bond.
There's a transition point that comes in many scandals when the facts make it impossible to sustain the argument the administration's allies had been using. Specifically, it requires them to go from saying, "these accusations are false; it never happened" to saying, "sure, it happened, but there's nothing wrong with it".

That is where Republicans now find themselves, and there's a deep irony at work. Donald Trump rode into office on the widespread belief that politics is corrupt and only an outsider like him could clean it up. Now, it looks like his all-purpose excuse for his own misdeeds and those of his family and advisers will be: "Hey, don't blame me - we all know politics is corrupt."

You can see it in this tweet Mr Trump sent: "Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That's politics!"

As numerous politicians and political professionals from both parties have attested since the story of the meeting between Don Jr, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and a group of Russians who were explicitly presented to them as acting on behalf of the Kremlin, that's not just untrue, but absurd. When a hostile foreign government offers you help in your campaign, what you do is call the FBI.

The idea animating Mr Trump's position is that during a presidential campaign there is virtually no sin or even crime that can't be justified on the grounds that it's a campaign. As Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro said in defending Trump: "As someone who's run for office five times, if the devil called me and said he wanted to set up a meeting to give me opposition research on my opponent, I'd be on the first trolley to Hell to get it." Or in the words of Fox News host Sean Hannity: "It always happens. And if anyone says it doesn't, it's a lie."

So having spent months claiming the accusation the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government in its attempt to swing the election to Mr Trump was ridiculous, now the position is there's nothing wrong with collusion.

This can become a handy excuse for almost anything. Did Mr Trump fire FBI director James Comey to shut down the Russia investigation? It's politics! Is Mr Trump using the office of the presidency to enrich himself and his family? It's politics!

Read more: Trump defiant in face of defeat on Obamacare

Having convinced his supporters Washington is an irredeemable swamp of corruption that he will clean up, Mr Trump now holds himself blameless for any malfeasance, because look at what a swamp this place is. The people who actually have experience in politics agree there are ethical limits to what you may do in pursuit of your political goals. But Mr Trump, believing his own caricature of what politics is, feels constrained by no limits whatsoever. He approaches governing as though it was professional wrestling, not something with any substantive meaning but a series of staged fights you perform so your side cheers. Sure, there are "rules" but they're no more important than the rule that you're not supposed to hit your opponent with a folding chair. If it's part of the show, you do it.

In the context of that show, there's no such thing as a political opponent with whom you still share some things in common, like a commitment to the country's founding ideals. There are just enemies, and the war against them has to be total. If Russia wants to help you fight your true enemy (Hillary Clinton), then you welcome the help.

And there are a number of Mr Trump's supporters for whom the fight is its own reward, just as his 2016 campaign was its own reward even before he won. It was thrilling and liberating, allowing them to stop hiding their thoughts and give vent to their feelings, no matter how "politically incorrect" they might be. No need to worry about some liberal calling you racist or sexist - just put on your 'Trump That Bitch' T-shirt, tell somebody with a Spanish accent what you think of immigrants, and let it rip. Who cares if he actually accomplishes anything on policy? As one Republican voter tells the 'Des Moines Register': "I just want him to annoy the hell out of everybody, and he's done that."

Just to be clear, there are Republicans criticising the Don Jr/Jared/Manafort meeting and no doubt dreading what the next revelation will bring. Mr Trump's approval is down to the mid-30s, and when the latest 'Washington Post'/ABC News poll asked about the meeting, only 48pc of Republicans said it was appropriate, hardly unified support for the White House's position.

There's a great risk for Trump and his allies in using the "it's politics" defence. As pollster Guy Molyneux said in the 'American Prospect', while we use the word "populism" to describe both Mr Trump's appeal to working-class voters and that of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, unlike those Democrats, Mr Trump made an argument focused not on economic elites but on politicians and "Washington", and his voters responded. But he's now saying he's no different from any other politician, and the people he brought with him are simply adopting the standards of Washington.

Even if that excuse was to fly, it wouldn't leave him a lot of room to claim in 2020 he had transformed politics, drained the swamp and fulfilled the promise of his campaign.

Most of his supporters might decide it's enough for him to have the right enemies. But they may not be as excited to get out to the polls again if he keeps telling them what he does is just politics. ( Washington Post)
US President Donald Trump has attacked congressional Democrats and "a few Republicans" over the collapse of the Republican Party's effort to rewrite the Obama health care law, and warned: "We will return."

Mr Trump's early morning tweet led a barrage of Republican criticism of Congress over the party's failure on its flagship legislative priority. For seven years, the party has pledged to repeal former president Barack Obama's law.

"Most Republicans were loyal, terrific & worked really hard," Mr Trump tweeted yesterday morning. "We were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans.

"As I have always said, let Obamacare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan. Stay tuned."

Two Republican senators - Utah's Mike Lee and Jerry Moran of Kansas - sealed the measure's doom when they announced they would vote "no" in an initial, critical vote that had been expected as soon as next week. That meant that at least four of the 52 Republican senators were ready to block the measure - two more than Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had to spare in the face of unanimous Democratic opposition.

On the Senate floor, Mr McConnell conceded the legislation repealing the 2010 law and replacing it with Republican-preferred programmes "will not be successful", essentially waving a white flag.

He said instead the Senate would vote on legislation dismantling much of Mr Obama's statute that would take effect in two years, which Republicans say would give Congress time to approve replacement legislation.

Legislation

However, such legislation seems unlikely to be approved, with many Republicans concerned the two-year gap would upset insurance markets and produce a political backlash against the Republicans.

"This doesn't have to be the end of the story," Mr McConnell said.

Read more:

At the White House, Mr Trump appeared to recognise defeat, at least for the moment, while insisting he bore none of the blame.

"I think we're probably in that position where we'll just let Obamacare fail," the president said. "We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you that the Republicans are not going to own it. We'll let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us and they're going to say, 'How do we fix it?'."

The retreat was the second stinging setback on the issue in three weeks for Mr McConnell, whose reputation as a legislative mastermind has been marred as he's failed to unite his chamber's Republicans behind a health overhaul package that highlighted jagged divides between conservatives and moderates. In late June, he abandoned an initial package after he lacked enough Republican support.

Mr McConnell's failed bill would have left 22 million uninsured by 2026, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, a number that many Republicans found unpalatable. But the vetoed 2015 measure would be even worse, the budget office said last January, producing 32 million additional uninsured people by 2026 - figures that seemed likely to drive a stake into that bill's prospects for passing Congress.

That would seem to leave Mr McConnell with an option he described last month - negotiating with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. That would probably be on a narrower package aimed more at keeping insurers in difficult marketplaces.

"The core of this bill is unworkable," Mr Schumer said in a statement. He said Republicans "should start from scratch and work with Democrats on a bill that lowers premiums, provides long-term stability to the markets and improves our health care system".
President Donald Trump had a second, previously undisclosed conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit in Germany earlier this month.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Mr Trump and Mr Putin spoke during a world leaders' dinner at the G20 summit in Hamburg.

US intelligence officials have accused the Russian government of meddling in the 2016 election to help Mr Trump win.

Mr Trump and Mr Putin had a formal meeting that lasted more than two hours earlier that day.

It was not immediately clear how long the informal conversation lasted or what was discussed.

But Mr Trump defended the dinner in two angry tweets that noted the dinner had been on his public schedule.

He wrote: "Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is 'sick.' All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!"

A few minutes later he added: "The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!"

National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton said: "A conversation over dessert should not be characterised as a meeting."

The news came as Mr Trump announced his intention to nominate former Utah governor Jon Huntsman to be US ambassador to Russia.

If confirmed, the former 2012 Republican presidential candidate would take over the post amid the investigations into contacts between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.

Mr Huntsman has twice served as an ambassador. He was the nation's top diplomat to Singapore under President George HW Bush. He then served in that role in China under President Barack Obama before returning to the US to run for president.

Earlier, it emerged that a Russian developer's representative was the eighth attendee at a Trump Tower campaign meeting arranged by Mr Trump's oldest son.

In emails, Donald Trump Jr enthusiastically agreed to the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others after he was promised dirt on his father's rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The special counsel investigating possible Trump campaign ties to Russia wants more information about the meeting.

Officials from the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller have contacted a lawyer for Ike Kaveladze, who also goes by the name Irakly Kaveladze, lawyer Scott Balber told The Washington Post and CNN.

It is the first public indication that Mr Mueller is probing the June 2016 gathering in Trump Tower.

Mr Kaveladze w orks for a Russian developer who once joined with Mr Trump to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow.

Mr Balber told the media outlets that Mr Kaveladze works for developers Emin and Aras Agalarov and was there to represent them. The father and son, who worked with Mr Trump on the pageant in 2013, were named in the emails that promised damaging information on Mrs Clinton.

Ms Veselnitskaya has denied she works for the Russian government and said the meeting focused on US-Russian adoption policies and a sanctions law.

Mr Balber said Mr Kaveladze attended the meeting to help translate, but did not have to because Ms Veselnitskaya brought her own translator.

The meeting was also attended by Mr Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, music publicist Rob Goldstone and Rinat Akhmetshin, a prominent Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer.

Mr Trump Jr scheduled the gathering after Mr Goldstone, a British publicist for Emin Agalarov, said Ms Veselnitskaya might have damaging information on Mrs Clinton she could share.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his panel wanted to talk to the meeting's attendees.

He said: "I doubt if this individual who had a history of setting up thousands of fake accounts in Delaware was really there to talk about Russian adoptions."

Mr Warner appeared to be referring to a 2000 New York Times story about Mr Kaveladze.

It identified him as running a company cited in a Government Accountability Office report for laundering 1.4 billion dollars (1.07 billion) in wealthy foreigners' funds via US banks using thousands of Delaware corporations. No criminal charges were filed in the case.

AP
President Donald Trump wants to push through the health care bill. (AP)

President Donald Trump has said that a bill to overhaul the Obama health care law will "get even better" during a White House lunch with Republican senators.

President Trump is hosting Republican senators after a bill to repeal President Barack Obama's law collapsed in the Senate this week.

President Trump said on Twitter that GOP senators "MUST keep their promise to America".

The GOP has promised to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act for seven years.

President Trump said: "Republicans never discuss how good their healthcare bill is, & it will get even better at lunchtime. The Dems scream death as OCare dies!

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced on Tuesday that the Senate would vote early next week on trying to move ahead on a straight-up repeal vote.
An Introduction to Doing Business in India 2017 is designed to introduce the fundamentals of investing in Indi...
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The Indiana Minority Business Magazine will honor 12 women who have excelled as business professionals and community leaders during the 2017 Summer Golden Laurel Professional Reception: Women Excelling in Business.

The recipients of the Golden Laurel distinction will be awarded on Thursday, July 27th at the Mid-States Minority Supplier Development Council office, located at 2126 N. Meridian St. Indianapolis, IN 46202. A networking reception will begin at 5:30 p.m., and the awards presentation will begin promptly at 6:00 p.m.

This event is presented in partnership with the Mid-States Minority Supplier Development Council and sponsored by IndyGo  Indianapolis Public Transportation Corporation.

The feminist movement of the 1960s led women to the workforce en masse, presenting women with agency and access outside of their homes. Since then, women have not stopped fighting for equal representation in their respective fields, said IMBM President Shannon Williams. As a woman in leadership I have experienced firsthand the struggles that women are subjected to compared to our male colleagues. In spite of disparate treatment and insurmountable odds, we rise and uplift each other along the way. I find that it is my both my honor and responsibility to congratulate these 12 extraordinary women who represent exactly what women are capable of during this seasons Golden Laurel Professional Reception honoring women excelling in business.

Below are the 2017 Summer Golden Laurel award recipients:

Kim Borges  Vice President, Area Marketing Manager, Regions Bank

Joan Carter  Owner, The Jewelry Lady

Tamika Catchings  Founder, Catch the Stars Foundation and Owner, Teas Me Cafe

Sonia Chen-Arnold  Counsel-Litigation and Legal Compliance, Eli Lilly and Company

Susan Decker  CEO, Susan Decker Media

Deb Hallberg  Business Development Manager, Barnes & Thornburg LLC

Tavonna Harris Askew  Chief of Staff and General Counsel, Health & Hospital Corporation of Marion County

Denise Herd  President, Herd Strategies

Deborah Hearn-Smith  CEO, Girl Scouts of Central Indiana

Jackie Morales  Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs, Morales Group

Deborah Oatts  Owner, Nubian Construction Group

Angela Smith-Jones  Deputy Mayor of Economic Development, City of Indianapolis
Researchers in Finland might have just found a new lozenge that can potentially curb your craving to smoke. The lozenge contains the amino acid L-cysteine, which makes it an effective, non-toxic smoking-cessation product, according to them.

bccl/representational image

At least two U.S. experts are not convinced, however.

The study was conducted by Dr Kari Syrjanen who, along with five coauthors, works in Helsinki for Biohit Oyj, the company that funded the study and markets the lozenge as Acetium.

L-cysteine is an amino acid that eliminates acetaldehyde, a compound in cigarettes believed to play a role in tobacco addiction by enhancing the brains responses to nicotine.

bccl/representational image

The research team recruited close to 2,000 cigarette smokers online and randomly assigned about half to use the L-cysteine lozenge with every single cigarette they smoked for six months, and the other half to use a dummy lozenge.

All participants kept an electronic diary, recording the number of cigarettes smoked and how much they enjoyed smoking each one.

bccl/representational image

Altogether, 753 people followed the directions for the entire study, and another 944 followed the directions most of the time, according to the report in Anticancer Research.

Over six months, 331 people who finished the whole study quit smoking: 181 (18.2 percent) who took the L-cysteine lozenge and 150 (15 percent) who took the placebo.

Among those who adhered strictly to the directions, 170 (45.3 percent) who took the L-cysteine lozenge quit smoking compared with 134 (35.4 percent) who took the placebo.

Less smoking pleasure and smoking sensations changed were given as strong reasons for quitting. Six percent of participants in the study reported adverse events (although the researchers didnt collect the details), and the rate was about the same in both groups.

bccl/representational image

Dr Scott Sherman, co-director of the Section on Tobacco, Alcohol, and Drug Use at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York called the study promising but said the lozenge is not ready for prime time.

The results are modest, he told Reuters Health by email. The researchers didnt compare the lozenge to other smoking-cessation treatments, he noted, and its not clear if it would have worked as well if participants werent required to complete the daily diary.

The lozenge isnt available in the U.S., and other formulations of L-cysteine might not work as well as the one that was tested, Sherman noted. If the manufacturer wanted to sell the product in the U.S. and claim that it helps with quitting smoking, it would need to be approved and regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, he said.

bccl/representational image

Martha Tingen, director of the Tobacco Control Initiative at Augusta University in Georgia, also noted study limitations, including the fact that one-third of the people who originally enrolled didn't actually participate.

Also, she pointed out in an email to Reuters Health, The study was based solely on self-report. There was no face-to-face and no one checked participants blood, saliva or expelled air to see if they actually decreased or quit smoking.

Most successful smoking-cessation interventions also include behaviour counselling, she added. If you have somebody youre accountable to, it makes you feel better.

bccl/representational image

Sherman said if one of his relatives wanted to quit smoking, I would tell them to use one of the seven medications demonstrated in (the U.S.) to be effectivenicotine replacement (patch, gum, lozenge, inhaler and nasal spray), bupropion and vareniclinein conjunction with a call to Quitline (1-800-QUIT-NOW), as that remains the best way to quit smoking.

His preference? The combination of a nicotine patch plus either nicotine gum or lozenge, particularly since they are available over the counter.
With the territorial tussle between India and China is at an all-time high in recent decades, the Indian soldiers are putting up a brave foot forward in what the China is illegally claiming to be their territory. And with China warning India of consequences bigger than those it borne in 1962, India seems all ready to face any kind of challenge put forward by the aggressor.

AFP

With nearly 300 Indian soldiers stationed at a meagre 100 metres away from the almost same number of Chinese soldiers at Doklam, the standoff has become a bone of contention between the two countries with none ready to back out.

It has been a month now since both armies standing against each other with barrels of guns down, at least for the time being.

Here is all about Doklam standoff, what led to it and why its critical for India and Bhutan.

Where is Doklam?

IndiaTimes

Doklam plateau is an 89 sq km pasture that falls close to dagger shaped Chumbi Valley at the corner of India-Bhutan-China tri-junction. Doklam is the point where the borders of all three nations-India, China and Bhutan meet.

How did it start?

Both China and Bhutan claim over Doklam as its a disputed territory. On the night of June 8, China initiated a manoeuvre in Doklam that would trigger a chain of events leading to the most dangerous standoff between India and China in recent years.

A PLA platoon is said to have removed two stone bunkers raised by the Royal Bhutan Army (RBA) had constructed years ago and manned occasionally and went ahead with construction of a road. At the behest of Bhutan, Indian Army intervened and stopped the Chinese construction of the road.

Soon, the situation escalated and the impasse which was limited to some squabbles and arm twisting between armies of two sides turned into a standoff with 300 odd soldiers from each side facing each other with barrels down.



What are the Chinese allegations?

While China has accused India of infringing upon Bhutans sovereignty and to confuse right from wrong, India says that it has come to aid at Bhutans behest and would continue to assist the Himalayan Kingdom. But apart from just aiding Bhutan which doesnt have diplomatic relations with Beijing, India has its own concerns to deal with.

AFP

In order to cover up the illegal entry by Indian troops into the Chinese territory, Indian side wants to infringe upon Bhutans sovereignty and they try to confuse right from wrong. This is futile. We have no objection to normal bilateral relations between India and Bhutan but are firmly opposed to the Indian side infringing on Chinese territory using Bhutan as an excuse, said Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) spokesperson Geng Shuang.

Indias major concern

Indias concern is the protection of its vulnerable Siliguri Corridor aka Chickens Neck a narrow stretch of land which connects mainland India with Indias north-east and if China builds this road, it will get closer to Doka La, the last Indian military post on its border with Bhutan and China.

IndiaTimes

If China builds a road there, it can easily mobilise its troops in the time of conflict to cut mainland India with its north-east.

Five possibilities from here on

With no country ready to back off, the experts believe that Doklam standoff has the potential of unleashing a full-fledged war between the Asian giants. But some are still hopeful of a peaceful solution to the issue. China has been adamant of India withdrawing its troops from the region and through its paper Global Times, the Chinese government has threatened India of consequences bigger than 1962. In reply, Indian Defence minister Arun Jaitley also has given a befitting reply that China shouldnt mistake India as India of 1962.

With the war of words getting louder and both sides giving no quarter to retreat, the standoff can trigger a limited as well as a full-fledged war.

Here are the five things that can possibly happen during the current deadlock:

1: India withdraws its security forces, China continues with the construction of the road which looks unlikely to happen.

2. China withdraws its army unilaterally, India stays back which also look impossible citing Chinas aggression over this issue.

3. None side moves and deadlock continues. This would maintain a status quo and would be a repeat of 1987 Sumdorong Chu Valley in Arunachal Pradesh faceoff where both armies stood against each other for several months.

4. Reaching diplomatic engagement and both sides withdraw which is perhaps the best solution to the issue.

5. Escalation by China in other areas. China doesnt any chance in a limited confrontation in Doklam as India's position is too strong there. Therefore, it can open other fronts like Ladakh, Arunachal Pradesh and others. China has already threatened India of entering Kashmir at Pakistans behest.

6. Finally, an all out war between two nuclear-armed nations.

Doklam issue certainly requires a diplomatic solution, but the posture that India has taken so far couldn't be argued against because for far too long, India has played subservient to Dragon's might. And if at all, India harbours the ambition to be a global power, it ought to face China at some point now or in future.
The Enforcement Directorate will soon send a Letter Rogatory (LR) to six countries, including France, Singapore, Mauritius, Ireland, USA and United Arab Emirates (UAE), after it has been established that fugitive former liquor baron Vijay Mallya has set up shell companies.

AFP/ File

According to the ED Mr. Mallya has set up 13 shell companies through which over Rs 1,300 crore has been laundered.

A two member team of ED has also reached London with documents and charge sheet, which will be submitted to Crown Prosecution office which is fighting the case of Mallya's extradition.

The former liquor baron who is facing multiple case in India has been living in London since March 2016 after he fled the country to avoid arrest.

AFP/ File

Meanwhile, British liquor giant Diageo has decided to withhold remaining USD 35 million due to Mallya as part of the USD 75 million (Rs 515 crore) deal for his exit from United Spirits Ltd.

Diageo had last year paid USD 40 million to Mallya as part of its payout package.

"They have decided not to pay the remaining USD 35 million as there was a violation of terms of the agreement by the other side," a source told PTI on the condition of anonymity.

The British liquor giant was supposed to pay the remaining USD 35 million in two equal amounts.

AFP

In July 2016, United Spirits disclosed Rs 1,225.3 crore worth fund diversion and improper transactions with entities associated with Mallya including Kingfisher Airlines and his Formula One team.

Making it clear that the settlement reached earlier with Mallya would cover the latest disclosures, USL, which is now controlled by Diageo, had said the former Chairman would be liable for claims over the amount.

BCCL/ File

Several banks have declared him 'wilful defaulter' for failing to pay back loans amounting to thousands of crores.

A consortium of 17 banks led by SBI has been trying to recover dues of over Rs 9,000 crore from now defunct Kingfisher Airlines, which was promoted by Mallya.
bccl

While Tamil Nadu farmers are reeling under a financial crisis and have been asking for a loan waiver, MLAs from the state have given themselves a 100% hike in their salaries.

With a hike of Rs 50,000, the MLAs will now get a monthly salary of Rs 1.05 Lakh.

Pensions have also seen a steep jump. The Rs 12,000 pension has now been raised to Rs Rs 20,000 and the local area development fund to develop their constituencies has also been increased from Rs 2 crore to Rs 2.6 crore. Read more.

Here're 5 more stories that you may like:

1.Massive Protests In Shimla After The Rape & Murder Accused Of A Teenager Dies In Police Custody

PTI

Hundreds of locals have blocked the national highway and other key roads in Shimla after one of the six men accused of rape and murder of a class X student was found murdered inside a jail.

Suraj Singh, a Nepalese labourer was killed allegedly by Rajinder Singh alias Raju, the main accused in the rape case inside the Kotkhai Police Station late Monday night.

According to police, the two were locked in the same jail cell, and there was a scuffle between them. Raju then allegedly banged Suraj's head against a wall and he died. Read more.

2. Blind Woman Recognises Her Rapist By His Voice, He Raped Her On Pretext Of Marriage

Representational Image

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A blind man, who worked as a trainee officer at a public sector bank, has been found guilty of repeatedly raping a 32-year-old widow, also blind, on the pretext of marriage. The complainant, mother of an eight-year-old girl, identified her tormentor by his voice in the court.

Additional sessions judge Rajni Yadav convicted Saurabh Kapoor (33), a resident of Mayur Vihar (Delhi), on Tuesday based on the call details of both the accused and the survivor, medical evidence, forensic report, and the woman's statement. Read more.

3. ED To Seek Information On Shell Companies Owned By Vijay Mallya From Six Countries

AFP/ File

The Enforcement Directorate will soon send a Letter Rogatory (LR) to six countries, including France, Singapore, Mauritius, Ireland, USA and United Arab Emirates (UAE), after it has been established that fugitive former liquor baron Vijay Mallya has set up shell companies.

According to the ED Mr. Mallya has set up 13 shell companies through which over Rs 1,300 crore has been laundered.

A two member team of ED has also reached London with documents and charge sheet, which will be submitted to Crown Prosecution office which is fighting the case of Mallya's extradition. Read more.

4. How Noorjahaan Khatun, A CISF Intelligence Expert, Is Reuniting Missing People At Delhi Metro

bccl

Twenty seven-year-old CISF constable, Noorjahaan Khatun, is a veteran at reuniting missing people with their families. In December 2016, a young woman was found crying at the News Delhi metro station, Hailing from Bengal, she could not speak Hindi or English, but the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) knew exactly what they had to do.

Noorjahaan probed into the matter and found that the woman had been separated from her husband while boarding the train.

The woman didnt remember the phone number of her husband but she knew the name of the hotel where they were staying. I called the hotel and got her husbands mobile number. He was located and both were reunited, Khatun said. Read more.

5.China Moved Huge Military Hardware Into Tibet After Sikkim Standof

AFP/Representational Image

The Chinese Army moved tens of thousands of tonnes of military hardware into the remote mountainous Tibet region after the standoff with Indian troops in the Doklam area in the Sikkim sector, the mouthpiece of the PLA said today.

The vast haul was transported to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command - which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India, reported the PLA Daily, the official mouthpiece of Chinese military.

The move took place late last month and involved hardware being moved simultaneously by road and rail from across the entire region, the report said. Read more.
Hundreds of locals have blocked the national highway and other key roads in Shimla after one of the six men accused of rape and murder of a class X student was found murdered inside a jail.

Suraj Singh, a Nepalese labourer was killed allegedly by Rajinder Singh alias Raju, the main accused in the rape case inside the Kotkhai Police Station late Monday night.

PTI

According to police, the two were locked in the same jail cell, and there was a scuffle between them. Raju then allegedly banged Suraj's head against a wall and he died.

Following the killing, the entire staff of the Kotkhai Police Station has been shifted and recommendation for a judicial enquiry into the custodial death has been made.

A Class X student was raped and murdered at the Kotkhai area of Shimla district on July 4 after she took a lift in a vehicle driven by one of the accused Rajender.

ALSO READ: I Should Have Warned Her About Dangerous Men, And Not Animals, Says Father Of Shimla Teenager Who Was Raped And Murdered

PTI

The body of the victim was recovered from the nearby Halila forest two days later. Six persons were arrested in connection with the case.

PTI

IG Southern range Z H Zaidi said Suraj had narrated the entire sequence leading to the rape incident and named Raju, the driver of the pickup, as the main accused.

The police is already facing a lot of criticism for tardy investigation and protest are continuing in Kotkhai, Shimla and other places demanding justice for the minor girl.
Every single day come across those in need, knocking on car windows, tugging at our clothes and imploring us to feed them. Most of us would pity their plight and give them a rupee or two.

However, there are good Samaritans who got out their way to brighten the day of the underprivileged people.

More recently a Facebook page 'As If I Have Eaten' shared a heartwarming story of man who randomly helped a helpless beggar on the streets of Pakistan. This man has certainly set an example of generosity for all of us.

The post talks about a beggar called Baba Hameed, was trying to sell garlands on a rainy night. Shaken by his plight, Muhammad Usman, spotted him and took him to Subway for dinner.

According to the post, the old man said that he was accumulating money for his daughters marriage and it is still short of 50,000 PKR (approximately Rs 30,000) Soon after the story was posted online, it went viral and helped poured in from different places for the beggar.

This is how a small act of compassion can completely change a person's life and this story stands testimony.

Read the full post below:



Deal with Baba Hameed

On Friday's night at 2:00 AM when it was raining hard and everybody was rushing towards home. An old man standing at the start of "Khayaban e Ittehad" road was trying his best to sell the Jasmine garlands. I parked my car some meters away. While looking at him few questions raised in my mind.

Instead of going back to home, Why is he getting wet in the rain? Don't he knows its 2:00 AM?

No car was stopping near to him due to late night, bad weather or perhaps some other reasons, But he was still trying to sell the garlands. Why?

I decided to chat with him. Prior to initiate the conversation, I went in a Subway (which was just behind him) and asked the staff if they can allow that old man to dine in? They said with a welcoming gesture "Why not".

Then I went back to the old man and asked him Me: Khana khaya Baba?" (Have you took the dinner?)

He: "No"

Me: Can you please come and have dinner with me?

He: ( Surprisingly ) Yes, Where? (Too much hunger made him saying yes in no time).

Me: There, just at your back.

After entrance he sat at the corner, may be he was shy and his expression was showing that he never expected to dine in there.

He was wet, clothes were torn and start shivering due to AC cooling. I asked Subway to turn off the AC and they did so, there was only us as a customer ).

We sat and I asked Subway waiter to make a perfect meal for Baba. So that I can talk to him.

Upon asking about him, He said.

My name is Hameed. Nowadays I am trying hard to arrange some amount for my only daughter's marriage for which I am in short of 50,000 PKR. Her marriage is planned to be held in the end of this month.

He further said " My take home daily wage is 200 to 300 PKR and How can I go hone until I do not earn my targeted amount. But now I am worried as marriage date is very near and I have to do lots of things.

I was getting goosebumps as i was listening to him.

Well at that time i did whatever i could do. If anybody who wants to help can directly approach him. You may easily find him at starting of Khyaban e Ittehad road near Subway. OR you may contact us on our below mentioned page. Click on the below link and like our page. "As if i have eaten."

https://www.facebook.com/AsIfIHave/

Highly appreciated Subway guys who did not only shown a great gesture and hospitality, they also offered him juice and tea for me named "KHAAS DOST"

In last, to keep up his dignity I make a deal with Baba Hameed to give me a beautiful garland in place of my treat to him.

Below are the snaps and a little video of all scene.

The epitome of the story is that there are many people who are working hard to survive instead of begging. These are the real people who needs to be supported.
When it comes to women and their choices in public sphere, Saudi Arabia clearly does not stand as a great example. In fact, there is a huge debate over the rights the Kingdom gives to its female citizens. Moreover, there is clearly very strict modesty rules in the country that are criticised by people around the world. This time a young woman found herself at the centre of attention after she posted a video of herself on Snapchat wearing a crop top and mini skirt.

Twitter

After huge public outcry, Riyadh Police has now arrested the woman for wearing suggestive clothing, Saudi state television station Al Ekhbariya reported. However, no information has been released on how the authorities plan to punish her for disobeying the countrys rules on womens clothing. Women in Saudi Arabia are not to be seen in public without an abaya.

Also read: Saudi Model Wears Crop Top And Mini In Birthplace Of Wahhabism, Posts Video On Snapchat

The short video filmed in Ushayqir in Najd province, went viral soon after and needless to say everyone had an opinion. Some supported her, saying that she should be allowed to wear anything she wants, while others said that she should follow countrys rules, no matter how stringent they are. Here are a few tweets:

Imagine the pathetic insecurities of men who arrest a woman for daring to wear a skirt. https://t.co/MIU8eXNnut  Michael Heaver (@Michael_Heaver) July 18, 2017
The Chinese Army has reportedly moved tens of thousands of tonnes of military hardware into the remote mountainous Tibet region after the standoff with Indian troops in the Doklam area in the Sikkim sector.

The vast haul was transported to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command - which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India, reported the PLA Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese military.

AFP/Representational Image

The move took place late last month and involved hardware being moved simultaneously by road and rail from across the entire region, the report said. China's state-run media has stepped up its rhetoric against India in recent weeks but there was no way to confirm the veracity of such claims.

Earlier this week, state-run CCTV had broadcast People's Liberation Army troops taking part in heavy military exercises using live ammunition on the Tibetan plateau.

The location was not far from the disputed Doklam area where Chinese and Indian troops are locked in a standoff, the Hong-Kong based South China Morning Post reported.

Youtube/Representational Image

The PLA Daily report, however, did not say whether the movement of the military equipment was to support the exercise or for other reasons.

Wang Dehua, an expert on South Asia studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, said the scale of the troop and equipment movement showed how much easier it is for China to defend its western borders.

"Military operations are all about logistics," he said. "Now there is much better logistics support to the Tibet region."

Chinese and Indian soldiers have been locked in a face- off in the Doklam area of the Sikkim sector for over a month after Indian troops stopped the Chinese army from building a road in the disputed area.

AFP/Representational Image

China claimed that they were constructing the road within their territory and has been demanding immediate pull-out of the Indian troops from the disputed Doklam plateau.

New Delhi has expressed concern over the road building, apprehending that it may allow Chinese troops to cut India's access to its northeastern states. India has conveyed to the Chinese government that the road construction would represent a significant change of status quo with serious security implications for it.

Of the 3,488-km-long India-China border from Jammu and Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, a 220-km section falls in Sikkim.
The first Google Glass was supposed to be the next big thing in AR. It failed to live up to the hype. But Google hasn't given up on it yet. Oh no, sir!

In a masterstroke of subtlety, Googles parent company Alphabet has just announced a brand new device available. Or rather, an old device in a brand new form. The Google Glass is back once more, this time in a from theyre calling the Enterprise Edition.

Alphabet

When the Google Glass first debuted at the companys I/O event in 2012, it didnt receive a particularly warm welcome. Those enthusiastic to try it out felt it failed to deliver on its promises when it launched a year later. Meanwhile, other people had their own comments. Notwithstanding how ridiculous a Glass user would look staring into the distance in public, most people worried about interacting with them. After all, how would they know when their personal conversations were being recorded?

Exciting though the technology was, it was just too scary and too incapable to take root in the consumer electronics market. Eventually, the project went dark in January 2015, with most assuming Google had just killed off the project. However, that wasnt the case.

However Alphabets X division (which pursues experimental projects like this one, and Aria) just revealed in a Medium post that it actually continued development on the device, working with various industry partners to change the Google Glass entire mission.

The Google Glass Enterprise Edition has a more powerful processor than the original, obviously scaled up for modern day requirements. Its 5MP camera has been improved to 8MP, and the battery life lasts for close to eight hours, up from the earlier five hour limit. The camera button also now doubles as a trigger to detach the device from a frame, allowing you to easily use it with prescription or safety glasses.

All that being said, the Google Glass looks the same as its predecessor, with its tiny transparent display. The major difference now though, is that its aimed at industrial uses. Workers in many fields, like manufacturing, logistics, field services, and healthcare find it useful to consult a wearable device for information and other resources while their hands are busy, project lead Jay Kothari wrote. Thats why weve spent the last two years working closely with a network of more than 30 expert partners to build customised software and business solutions for Glass for people in these fields.

This time around, the Google Glass will be sold through a range of specialised software companies, that will bundle it with their own services for logistics and manufacturing.
North Korea does not have the ability to strike the United States with "any degree of accuracy" and while its missiles have the range, they lack the necessary guidance capability, Vice Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff General Paul Selva said on Tuesday.

"I... am not sanguine that the test on the Fourth of July demonstrates that they have the capacity to strike the United States with any degree of accuracy or reasonable confidence or success," Selva said while appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Earlier this month North Korea said it had conducted its first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, and that it had mastered the technology to mount a nuclear warhead on the missile.


Home "Zero Day" for Violent Regime Change in Venezuela By Moon Of Alabama July 18, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - The U.S. supports the right-wing opposition in Venezuela against the socialist government of President Maduro. Since April the opposition tries to dislodge the government by instigating a regime change by force. Its protests and street fights with the police are led by violent, militarized gangs : Venezuelas ongoing street protests are increasingly looking like outright warfare. As security forces shoot rubber bullets, tear-gas canisters and sometimes live rounds at the churning crowds, increasingly restive mobs are responding with lethal slingshots, homemade mortars and Molotov cocktails. This week, seven National Guard members were injured in Caracas when a roadside bomb exploded as they drove by on motorcycles. Leading the opposition shock-troops are loose-knit groups of young men and women that have names like The Templars, The Warriors and The Arcadias. Collectively, theyre known as the Chamos de la Resistencia or, roughly, the Youth Resistance. This is not just by chance a similar development as was seen during the U.S. instigated color revolutions by force in Libya, Ukraine and Syria. Para-military forces hiding behind "peaceful protesters" attack police, military and civil government institutions to provoke an escalation towards a civil war. Last week the opposition in Venezuela announced that today is the "zero day" for another violent coup attempt against President Maduro: The fugitive police pilot who allegedly stole a helicopter and used it to attack Venezuela's Supreme Court has appeared at an opposition rally in the capital, Caracas, attendees tell CNN. Oscar Perez, an officer in the country's investigative police force, addressed the gathering, urging the opposition to continue protesting.

...

"A general walkout for July 18, walkout with no return. The zero-hour will start on Tuesday. The referendum we'll do it, with dignity, we'll be in the street defending the people." The date was confirmed yesterday: Venezuelan opposition leaders have called for their supporters to escalate street protests and support a 24-hour national strike later this week after more than 7.1 million people rejected a government plan to rewrite the constitution.

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A coalition of some 20 opposition parties assembled in its headquarters Monday to call for a zero hour campaign of civil disobedience in the two weeks leading to the government vote. On Sunday the opposition held a private poll in which less people attended than the opposition had hoped for. No results but the number of attendees was announced: The opposition released only turnout numbers Sunday night, not tallies of responses to those questions, although virtually all who voted were believed to have answered yes to the central rejection of the constitutional rewrite. There are some 19 million registered voters in Venezuela. A seven million turnout for a private poll, if real, is significant but neither decisive nor relevant. The hiding of the results lets one assume that the answers to the poll questions were not in favor of the opposition's plan. It is difficult to ascertain what the real opinion of people in Venezuela is. Polls in the country are traditionally skewed. Maduro's economic polices, restricted by falling oil prices, sabotage by rich im- and exporters and U.S. sanction, was not successful. But the 2015 National Assembly vote won by the opposition was more a protest vote against the economic problems than a vote for the opposition's vague program . No Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is Independent Media Get Our Free Daily Newsletter It is obvious that the opposition in Venezuela is heavily supported by the various regime change institutions of the United States. Some of its operatives have deep ties with DEA and the CIA. U.S. media is -as usual- completely on the side of the U.S. regime change program. It has long agitated against the socialist government of Venezuela. An official Trump statement on Venezuela released yesterday is noticeable for its lack of facts: Yesterday, the Venezuelan people again made clear that they stand for democracy, freedom, and rule of law. Yet their strong and courageous actions continue to be ignored by a bad leader who dreams of becoming a dictator. The United States will not stand by as Venezuela crumbles. If the Maduro regime imposes its Constituent Assembly on July 30, the United States will take strong and swift economic actions. Would Trump write a similar statement about the will of the "American people" if Democrats held a private poll against him with an assured multi-million strong turnout? The Maduro government has called for a July 30 vote to elect members of an upcoming constitutional assembly. There is nothing "imposed" with that. The opposition will try to sew chaos in the streets up to that date and likely has planned for some culmination point of action. The government has so far reacted passively to the violent protests. The police protects some government buildings and removes some road blocking barricades. But no arrest wave or more assertiveness for government control has been ordered. One wonders at what point such measures will become inevitable. This article was first published by Moon Of Alabama - The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. Click for Spanish , German , Dutch , Danish , French , translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load. What's your response? - Scroll down to add / read comments Please read our Comment Policy before posting - It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on ICH. Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section. Click here to comment on our Facebook page
The Korean Matrix By Pepe Escobar South Korea wants to talk to North Korea. July 18, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - The Defense Ministry in Seoul proposed to talk at the border village of Panmunjom, while the Red Cross proposed separate talks to discuss family reunions.

So South Korean President Moon Jae-in has made up his mind  after his inauguration on May 10 and Pyongyang's ICBM test on July 3.

Pyongyang may also be inclined to talk  as it had already indicated. But there may be preconditions, as in the suspension of those provocative, annual US-South Korean military drills. The US will say no. Once again, it's all about Washington.

It's unclear whether US intelligence has 100% proof that Pyongyang, apart from the ICBM, is on the path to soon achieve other technological breaks, such as building a guidance system and a miniaturized, functional nuclear weapon capable of surviving both the missile launch and re-entry into the atmosphere.

Now for some crude, hard facts. Kim Jong-un very well knows that nuclear weapons are absolutely essential for the survival of the Kim dynasty. Beijing not only knows it  but also calculates that Pyongyang does not exactly see it as a trustful ally. During the Korean War  whose memory is pervasive all across the North  Mao's key concern was to protect China's borders, not the safety of its neighbor.

The open secret though is that a nuclear North Korea may represent a perennial dissuasion against the US, much more than a threat, but not against China. So that frames the case, once again, as a Washington-Pyongyang drama.

Beijing's margin of maneuver against Pyongyang is rather limited  something that President Trump as well as the US deep state still do not understand. And North Korea is not a Chinese national security priority  unless the regime would collapse and there would be an uncontrollable influx of refugees.

The only thing that matters for the Chinese leadership is  what else  trade. And as far as China-South Korean trade is concerned, business is booming anyway.

Feverish speculation in the US about a "strike" against Pyongyang is idle. Anyone with minimum knowledge of the Korean Peninsula knows that the response would be Pyongyang virtually wiping Seoul off the map. Not to mention that US intel is clueless on where all the dispersed North Korean nuclear and missile development sites are.

A minimally competent US "attack" would requires a lot of infiltrated US Special Forces, as in boots on the ground, with no guarantee of success. In a nutshell; Washington, realistically, is incapable of eliminating North Korea's nuclear and missile programs.

Enter the Trans-Korean Railway

So what to do? The only logical strategy would be to admit  just as with India and Pakistan in the late 1990s  that North Korea is a de facto nuclear power.

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Pyongyang's strategy, after all, is actually a small marvel; you imprint the feeling you're a totally unpredictable actor, and you scare the living daylights out of everyone while preventing any attempt at destabilization. As much as wishful thinking prevails, that a US surgical strike would be able to paralyze the North Korean political/military/command/communication structure, US intel is clueless when it comes to predicting Pyongyang's actions.

A Western intel source familiar with the high stakes in the Korean peninsula adds a few stark observations; "The point that is not even touched upon is that South Korea already is within the range of North Korean nuclear bombs even if the United States is not, and can be liquidated by North Korea. We have to examine the nature of the defense alliance with South Korea. Does it mean that we can and will attack North Korea to protect ourselves when we cannot protect South Korea, triggering their destruction in our self-defense?"

The point is that if South Korea is virtually destroyed by Pyongyang's response to American strikes, "then our allies around the world will have the uneasy feeling that they too would be sacrificed as allies should they get in the way. I would say that would be the end of the entire US alliance structure, which actually is already imaginary."

The informed source is convinced that "the South Koreans have forced the United States to agree to forbear on any strike on North Korea, as to support such a strike would be national suicide for South Korea. The United States will do nothing."

All this is happening just as what Seoul really wants is to do business  in a Korean variant of the China-driven New Silk Roads, renamed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Seoul wants to build a Trans-Korean Railway, and go even beyond, connecting it with the Trans-Siberian and, what else, the Chinese-built Eurasian land bridge. That happens to be the so-called Iron Silk Road concept, which South Korea has been dreaming about since an Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) summit in 2004.

"Overcoming the land divide between Asia and Europe", connected to the vast trans-Eurasia network, means the fifth-largest export economy in the world would be getting even more business. Handicapped by North Korea's isolation, South Korea is de facto physically cut off from Eurasia. The answer to all this trouble? The Trans-Korean Railway. If only President Moon could entice Kim Jong-un towards a connectivity dream  and make him forget his nuclear toys.

This article was first published by

Sputnik

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Mass Media Siege: Comparing Coverage Of Mosul and Aleppo By Media Lens July 18, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - When Russian and Syrian forces were bombarding 'rebel'-held East Aleppo last year, newspapers and television screens were full of anguished reporting about the plight of civilians killed, injured, trapped, traumatised or desperately fleeing. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, both Official Enemies, were denounced and demonised, in accordance with the usual propaganda script. One piece in the Evening Standard described Assad as a 'monster' and a Boris Johnson column in the Telegraph referred to both Putin and Assad as 'the Devil'. As the respected veteran reporter Patrick Cockburn put it : 'The partisan reporting of the siege of East Aleppo presented it as a battle between good and evil: The Lord of the Rings, with Assad and Putin as Saruman and Sauron.' This, he said, was 'the nadir of Western media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Syria.' Media reporting focused laser-like on 'Last calls (or messages or tweets ) from Aleppo'. There were heart-breaking accounts of families, children, elderly people, all caught up in dreadful conditions that could be pinned on the 'brutal' Assad and his 'regime'; endless photographs depicting grief and suffering that tore at one's psyche. By contrast, there was little of this evident in media coverage as the Iraqi city of Mosul, with a population of around one million, was being pulverised by the US-led 'coalition' from 2015; particularly since the massive assault launched last October to 'liberate' the city from ISIS, with 'victory' declared a few days ago. Most pointedly, western media coverage has not, of course, demonised the US for inflicting mass death and suffering. As Cockburn pointed out , there were 'many similarities between the sieges of Mosul and East Aleppo, but they were reported very differently'. He explained: 'When civilians are killed or their houses destroyed during the US-led bombardment of Mosul, it is Islamic State that is said to be responsible for their deaths: they were being deployed as human shields. When Russia or Syria targets buildings in East Aleppo, Russia or Syria is blamed: the rebels have nothing to do with it.' For example: 'Heartrending images from East Aleppo showing dead, wounded and shellshocked children were broadcast around the world. But when, on 12 January, a video was posted online showing people searching for bodies in the ruins of a building in Mosul that appeared to have been destroyed by a US-led coalition airstrike, no Western television station carried the pictures.' Cockburn summarised : 'In Mosul, civilian loss of life is blamed on Isis, with its indiscriminate use of mortars and suicide bombers, while the Iraqi army and their air support are largely given a free pass. [...] Contrast this with Western media descriptions of the inhuman savagery of President Assad's forces indiscriminately slaughtering civilians regardless of whether they stay or try to flee.' Mopping Up Pockets Of Resistance In October 2016, the US-led coalition stepped up its bombing raids and artillery attacks on Mosul, over and above what had already been an intensive military campaign following the city's capture by ISIS in 2014. According to a new report by Amnesty, 5,805 civilians were killed as a result of attacks launched by the coalition between February and June of 2017. As with Iraq Body Count figures for the whole of the country, this figure is likely to be much too low . Moreover, it excludes the first few months and the final few weeks of intensive bombardment. Amnesty says that the people of Mosul were subjected to: 'a terrifying barrage of fire from weapons that should never be used in densely populated civilian areas.' US political writer Bill Van Auken comments : 'In Amnesty's typically cautious fashion in dealing with the US government, the report stated that "US-led coalition forces appear to have committed repeated violations of international law, some of which may amount to war crimes."' Van Auken adds: 'While Amnesty indicts ISIS with far greater conviction than it does the US military, it raises no questions as to who is responsible for ISIS in the first place, much less the historical roots of the human catastrophe inflicted upon Mosul.' As informed people are all too aware: 'ISIS had been well-armed, funded and trained for use as a proxy force in the wars for regime change orchestrated by the CIA and Washington's regional allies, first in Libya and then in Syria.' This is all part of a bigger picture involving decades of: 'war, sanctions, invasion and occupation inflicted by US imperialism on the oil-rich country, resulting in the decimation of an entire society, the loss of well over a million lives, and the turning of millions more into homeless refugees.' Media coverage of the 'victory' over ISIS in Mosul has omitted this history, of course; just as it has either ignored or downplayed the huge numbers of civilians killed by the coalition there. True, there are now reports emerging of the plight of civilians leaving Mosul, and the BBC has noted Amnesty 'allegations', while giving prominent space to a coalition spokesperson dismissing the Amnesty report as 'irresponsible and an insult'. But if BBC News was genuinely impartial, for the past few months it would have regularly headlined the destruction wreaked by the US-led coalition, with particular emphasis on the massive civilian death toll. Instead, this BBC headline said so much about its coalition-friendly stance: 'Battle for Mosul: Iraq army mops up final IS pockets' The article's opening line was: 'The Iraqi army has been mopping up the last pockets of resistance from Islamic State (IS) militants in Mosul, after a long battle to recapture the city.' And how many civilians had been killed by these US-backed forces in 'liberating' the city? The piece did not say. On March 17 this year, as many as 240 civilians were killed in an air strike on Mosul by the coalition. Patrick Cockburn reported that three buildings were reduced to rubble, while many people were seeking refuge in cellars. For months before and after this atrocity, BBC News had featured several reports from its correspondent Jonathan Beale who was 'embedded' with Iraqi troops. These pieces had titles like 'On the ground with Iraqi forces in battle for Mosul', and they were sprinkled with propaganda phrases such as: 'The US-led coalition appears confident that fighters of the so-called Islamic State (IS) will be defeated in Mosul.' 'a brutal fight for every street.' 'The troops both battle hardened and battle weary.' 'We hear coalition aircraft overhead. Then a whoosh and a thud, followed by an explosion...There's another whoosh, thud and boom and then a plume of smoke from an air strike.' 'No-one can question the bravery of the Iraqi forces.' 'this is unforgiving, urban warfare and for the Iraqi forces there is still a mountain to climb.' This was a bang-bang style of 'journalism' that obscured or blanked the deaths of civilians being killed in the 'Battle for Mosul', as the BBC News television studio graphic called the massive bombardment, time after time , for months on end. It was always 'Battle for Mosul'; never 'US air strike massacres civilians' or 'US seeks hegemony in the Middle East'. It's Good ('Us') vs Evil ('Them'). The BBC website offered a single article, titled 'Can civilian deaths be avoided in RAF strikes on IS?' , as a pitiful 'balance' to the rolling barrage of pro-coalition propaganda. Tellingly, Beale's piece revealed its propaganda stance in closing with the perspective of RAF Air Commodore Johnny Stringer who said: 'We have an opponent who just hates us and everything we stand for. We have to deal with that and defeat them militarily. And that is why we're here.' Beale ended the article with a line of his own, indicating that the BBC correspondent stood full-square behind the coalition: 'They are fighting a brutal enemy, who unlike them, has no worries about killing civilians.' Once the 'last pockets of resistance' in Mosul had been 'mopped up', the BBC could then publish a typically whitewashing report on its website headlined, 'Mosul: Iraq PM in city to celebrate victory over IS'. And, of course, no questions were asked about the democratic credentials of the Iraqi government that had 'liberated' Mosul. Does Iraq have free elections, a free press and full respect for human rights? These issues have been of little or no concern for the corporate media since a puppet government was installed, amid much PR posturing, in 2004. 'A Heroic Fight Against Terrorists' The propaganda pitch of BBC News towards government power is longstanding; indeed it was hard-wired from its Reithian origins, as we have pointed out many times. Sometimes this propaganda bias is most obvious when its news reporters examine the propaganda of Official Enemies, blithely unaware of how it reflects on themselves and their own employer. No Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is Independent Media Get Our Free Daily Newsletter On December 15, 2016, Moscow correspondent Sarah Rainsford delivered a classic example on Aleppo in this segment shown on BBC News at One (the BBC also published this article ). Consider her words: 'On the ground in Syria, Russia's special forces  shown here for the first time on state television. The commentary is all about a heroic fight against terrorists. No mention here of any civilians caught up in the bloodshed.' Imagine Rainsford saying this of Western reporting on Mosul: 'The commentary is all about a heroic fight against terrorists. No mention here of any civilians caught up in the bloodshed.' Then, to camera, Rainsford said: 'For Russia, the conflict in Syria was always about projecting its power and influence. As the West stalled [sic], Moscow moved in. The message to Russians here that they were helping to protect the world from terrorism. The message to the world, that Russia under Vladimir Putin is a political and military power to be reckoned with.' A BBC News reporter would never point out that war in the Middle East is about the US 'projecting its power and influence'. Rainsford continued, over library footage of the severe damage done by Russian forces to Grozny: 'As to brutal bombing campaigns, Russia has done that before. This is not Aleppo, but Grozny in Chechnya  a city flattened in what President Putin also called a war on terror. In this latest conflict, he's faced no calls at home for restraint.' Finally, over a clip of ISIS fighters with captured Russian arsenal at Palmyra: 'But, with all the focus on Aleppo, this happened. Russian troops were forced to abandon their positions in Palmyra, as militants from ISIS moved in. Recapturing this Syrian city was also once trumpeted by Russia as a great victory.' Can you imagine BBC News ever doing a comparable segment analysing US or British propaganda about the assault on Mosul? Or Sirte in Libya? Or Fallujah? Or Belgrade? Have BBC News journalists not, in fact, effectively 'trumpeted' each of these 'as a great victory' for the West? So, it is a worthy task for the BBC to critically assess the propaganda of the evil enemy, but not that of 'our' own side. Another standard feature of BBC News, as with all corporate media, is to identify with the victims of Official Enemy military action, far more than with victims of 'our' military action. Thus, last year, Bridget Kendall, could report in this fashion for the BBC: 'What looks like a Russian fighter jet in the skies over northern Syria. And then this. Suspected cluster bombs. Imagine being in one of those buildings, apparently north of the city of Aleppo yesterday.' (BBC News at Ten, February 1, 2016; clip captured by Media Lens reader Daniel Collins in this tweet ; our emphasis) A BBC News reporter would never invite the audience to 'imagine being in one of those buildings'  in Mosul or Baghdad or Gaza, for instance - hit by 'our' bombs or those of a major ally, such as Israel. As with the BBC, so with the Guardian. Consider a Guardian editorial last October highlighting a quote by Assad on Aleppo that he had to: 'keep cleaning this area and to push the terrorists to Turkey to go back to where they come from, or to kill them'. The editorial continued: 'International diplomacy pays lip service to the idea that such actions are, if proven, war crimes.' And what, then, of Mosul? 'The west, too, faces a chance to demonstrate that it does respect the constraints of international law. Soon western-backed Iraqi forces will aim to retake Mosul, Islamic State's last major stronghold in the country. The conduct of the battle will determine whether victory comes at an unacceptable humanitarian cost.' The Guardian seems to have missed the fact that the West has, for decades, regularly flouted, rather than respected, 'the constraints of international law'. This blindness and ignorance was already obvious from the title of the Guardian editorial which included the tragi-comic plea, 'The crimes committed in the wars of the Middle East must in the end be punished. Meanwhile the west must not add to them' [our emphasis]; as though the West had not, in fact, already contributed the overwhelming bulk of crimes in the Middle East. We have not been able to find a single Guardian editorial since October 2016 appraising the US-led assault on Mosul. The contrast with its anguished comments on Aleppo is stark. In June 2016, the paper gave its view on the battle for Aleppo , saying simply: 'stop it now', and describing it as 'an urgent humanitarian catastrophe'. In October 2016, a Guardian editorial stated that 'Russian and Syrian warplanes above Aleppo appear to be intentionally targeting civilians', and demanded the enforcement of international law. And, in November 2016, the Guardian spoke of 'the West's grim failure' to stop 'a humanitarian and military disaster'. The editorial also noted that: 'Russia's propaganda machine is hard at work alongside the Syrian regime's, trying to frame these events as the "liberation" of a population described as hostages of Islamic terrorists.' Again, to emphasise, at the time of writing, there has been no Guardian editorial examining whether the 'victory' of the US-led coalition in Mosul has 'come at an unacceptable humanitarian cost'; or exposing the West's propaganda campaign promoting 'liberation'. It's no surprise. After all, that would come too close to demolishing the myth of benevolent Western power; and the Guardian's own role in propping up the fiction. Conclusion Neil Clark rightly observes that: 'The very different ways in which the respective 'liberations' [of Aleppo and Mosul] were portrayed tells us much about the way war propaganda works in the so-called free world.' The bottom line is that what we are seeing in Iraq, and much of the rest of the world, is an imperial Western project targeting countries that 1) do not conform to the West's dictates; and 2) are unable to defend themselves adequately (unlike China, Iran or nuclear-armed North Korea, for example). Clark notes that: 'The truth of what has been happening is too shocking and too terrible ever to be admitted in the Western mainstream media. Namely, that since the demise of the Soviet Union, the US and its allies have been picking off independent, resource-rich, strategically important countries one by one.' David Whyte and Greg Muttitt point out that when the UK invaded Iraq, the Middle East country had nearly a tenth of the world's oil reserves, and that government documents 'explicitly state' oil was a motive for the war. But the Chilcot Report shamefully avoided this evidence and ignored oil as a driving force for the invasion. As Mark Curtis says , after an illegal invasion and one million dead Iraqis, UK trade minister Greg Hands recently had the gall to boast that: 'UK companies and brands are already well established in Iraq: from BP and Standard Chartered to G4S and JLR' The minister added : 'Iraq has the world's fourth largest proven oil reserves, sixth largest gas reserves, and huge untapped potential across both.' The minister proclaimed proudly that UK firms are 'strategically well-placed' to exploit this massive potential. Could the real motivation for the 2003 war be any clearer? Moreover, Perpetual War is a highly lucrative business for arms manufacturers and the military machine in the West. As Bill Van Auken observes : 'US commanders have made it clear that they don't see American forces leaving the country [Iraq] in the foreseeable future. And the Pentagon has asked for nearly $1.3 billion in its 2018 budget to fund continued support for Iraqi security forces.' And let's not forget that UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia have been deemed 'lawful' by the High Court 'after seeing secret evidence'. With the nightmare of a US/UK-supported, Saudi-led assault on Yemen  beset by mass starvation, poverty and a cholera epidemic  the appalling reality of Western 'democracy' is once again exposed. This article was first published by Media Lens - The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Netanyahu Pushes Trump Toward Wider Wars





Russia-gate is empowering Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to strong-arm President Trump into escalating the Syrian war by abandoning a recent cease-fire and challenging Iran and Russia, reports Robert Parry.



By Robert Parry

July 18, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - A weakened, even desperate President Donald Trump must decide whether to stand up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or to repudiate the Syrian partial ceasefire, which Trump hammered out with Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 7.

Whether intentionally or not, this crossroads is where the months of Russia-gate hysteria have led the United States, making Trump even more vulnerable to Israeli and neoconservative pressure and making any cooperation with Russia more dangerous for him politically.

After meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Sunday, Netanyahu declared that Israel was totally opposed to the Trump-Putin cease-fire deal in southern Syria because it perpetuates Iranian presence in Syria in support of the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Netanyahus position increases pressure on Trump to escalate U.S. military involvement in Syria and possibly move toward war against Iran and even Russia. The American neocons, who generally move in sync with Netanyahus wishes, already have as their list of current goals regime changes in Damascus, Tehran and Moscow  regardless of the dangers to the Middle East and indeed the world.

At the G-20 summit on July 7, Trump met for several hours with Putin coming away with an agreed-upon cease-fire for southwestern Syria, an accord that has proven more successful than previous efforts to reduce the violence that has torn the country apart since 2011.

But that limited peace could mean failure for the proxy war that Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other regional players helped launch six years ago with the goal of removing Assad from power and shattering the so-called Shiite crescent from Tehran through Damascus to Beirut. Instead, that crescent appears more firmly in place, with Assads military bolstered by Shiite militia forces from Iran and Lebanons Hezbollah.

In other words, the regime change gambit against Assads government would have backfired, with Iranian and Hezbollah forces arrayed along Israels border with Syria. And instead of accepting that reversal and seeking some modus vivendi with Iran, Netanyahu and his Sunni-Arab allies (most notably the Saudi monarchy) have decided to go in the other direction (a wider war) and to bring President Trump along with them.

Neophyte Trump

Trump  a relative neophyte in global intrigue  has been slow to comprehend how his outreach to Netanyahu and Saudi King Salman runs counter to his collaboration with Putin on efforts to defeat the Sunni jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda and Islamic State, which have served as the point of the spear in the war to overthrow Assad.

Al Qaeda and Islamic State have received direct and indirect support from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Turkey, Israel and even the Obama administration, albeit sometimes unwittingly. To block Assads overthrow  and the likely victory by these terror groups  Russia, Iran and Hezbollah came to Assads defense, helping to turn the tide of the war since 2015.

In his nearly half year in office, Trump has maintained an open hostility toward Iran  sharing a position held by Washingtons neocons as well as Netanyahu and Salman  but the U.S. President also has advocated cooperation with Russia to crush Islamic State and Al Qaeda inside Syria.

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Collaboration with Russia  and indirectly with Iran and the Syrian military  makes sense for most U.S. interests, i.e., stabilizing Syria, reversing the refugee flow that has destabilized Europe, and denying Al Qaeda and Islamic State a base for launching terror strikes against Western targets.

But the same collaboration would be a bitter defeat for Netanyahu and Salman who have invested heavily in this and other regime change projects that require major U.S. investments in terms of diplomacy, money and military manpower.

So, in last weekends trip to Paris, Netanyahu chose to raise the stakes on Trump at a time when Democrats and the U.S. mainstream media are pounding him daily with the Russia-gate scandal, even raising the possibility that his son, Donald Trump Jr., might be prosecuted and imprisoned for having a meeting in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer.

If Trump wants the Russia-gate pain to lessen, he will be tempted to give Netanyahu what he wants and count on the savvy Israeli leader to intervene with the influential neocons of Official Washington to pull back on the scandal-mongering.

The problem, however, would be that Netanyahu really wants the U.S. military to complete the regime change project in Syria  much as it did in Iraq and Libya  meaning more American dead, more American treasure expended and a likely wider war, extending to Iran and possibly nuclear-armed Russia.

That might fulfill the neocon current menu of regime change schemes but it runs the risk of unleashing a nuclear conflagration on the world. In that way, liberals and even some progressives  who have embraced Russia-gate as a way to remove the hated Donald Trump from office  may end up contributing to the end of human civilization as well.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, Americas Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).

This article was first published by Consortium News -

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 -

US Government Officials Caught On Camera Meeting With White Helmets and FSA Terrorists

Neocons Have Been Destroying Sovereign Nations for 20 Years

Left-Wing Author Blasts Trump-Russia Narrative
After Mosuls Liberation, Horror of US Siege Continues to Unfold

By Bill Van Auken

July 18, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - One week after Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi proclaimed the liberation of Mosul, Iraqs second-largest city, the scale of destruction wrought during a nine-month, US-backed siege is becoming clearer, even as reports mount of collective punishment being meted out to survivors.

Abadi presided over a victory parade in Baghdad on Saturday in which elements of the security forces marched past the prime minister and other officials in the Iraqi capitals heavily fortified Green Zone. It is a measure of the state of the country that the parade was not publicly announced because of security concerns, with the media learning about it only afterwards and the population of the city excluded.

Evidence of the death toll inflicted upon Mosuls civilian population during the siegelargely the result of unrelenting US-led air strikes and artillery bombardments carried out against crowded neighborhoods, particularly in western Mosuls Old Citycontinues to mount.

Conservative estimates have put the number of civilians killed at over 7,000. The London-based monitoring group Airwars documented the deaths of 5,805 civilians between February and June of this year. There were undoubtedly many more deaths that went unreported, not to mention those killed in the four months preceding this period, as well of those who died in the intense assault waged on the area of the city during the last three weeks of fighting.

Officials in Mosul report that civil defense workers have already dug some 2,000 corpses from the rubble created by US 500- and 2,000-pound bombs as well as heavy artillery shelling and strikes by attack helicopters.

It is clear that neither the Iraqi government nor the Pentagon has any interest in clarifying the scale of carnage unleashed upon the city.

According to a report published in the Washington Post Saturday, the grim task of recovering the dead from Mosuls rubble has been relegated to a 25-man civil defense unit with one bulldozer, a forklift truck and a single vehicle to carry the corpses. The Post reports that the unit has found hundreds of people suffocated under the ruins of their homes after they were flattened by US air strikes. Most of the victims are reportedly women and children.

The head of the civil defense unit, Lt. Col. Rabia Ibrahim Hassan, told the Post that he had asked the government for more equipment and resources, but had received no response.

While vast resources were expended by the Pentagon on organizing the siege of Mosul and providing the arms and ammunition to lay waste to the city, it is by no means clear that either Washington or Baghdad has any plan to mobilize comparable resources to rebuild it. One Iraqi government official conservatively estimated that the cost of rebuilding Mosul would exceed $50 billion.

The regime in Baghdad was compelled last May to negotiate a $5.4 billion standby loan with the International Monetary Fund, which demanded sharp austerity measures. The countrys economy contracted 10.3 percent in 2016 as a result of falling oil prices and the destruction wrought by war.

The scale of civilian casualties, the massive destruction caused by US bombs, missiles and shells, and the reported use by the American military of white phosphorous, a weapon internationally banned for use in populated areas, all point to a US war crime of historic proportions.

This crime continues, as the survivors of the massacre in Mosul face collective punishment at the hands of US-backed forces. According to the International Organization for Migration, the nine-month siege forced 1,048,044 people to flee their homes. As of last Friday, according to the IOM, fully 825,000 remained displaced by the offensive.

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Return for the majority of these internally displaced war refugees is impossible. Many have no homes to return to as a result of the US air strikes. Most of the city lacks access to water and electricity, food is scarce, and schools and hospitals have been destroyed.

Meanwhile, the wreckage of the city is littered with unexploded ordnance. It is estimated that at least 10 percent of the high explosives dropped and fired into Mosul by the US-led coalition failed to detonate, meaning there are thousands of bombs and shells waiting to go off, on top of the booby traps left behind by ISIS. Experts have warned that it could take a decade to clear the city of explosives.

Men, women and children who have escaped from the destruction of Mosul have been housed in tent camps, in many cases as virtual prisoners. Women and children suspected of being family members of ISIS fighters killed in the siege are being sent to desolate rehabilitation camps.

As for young men found in and around Mosul, there are increasing reports of summary executions, torture and abuse at the hands of the Iraqi security forces and allied Shia militias. A video posted on the Mosul Eye Twitter account, set up by an independent historian in Mosul who has documented the citys destruction, shows members of the Iraqi security forces dragging men to the edge of a 30-foot parapet, throwing them off it and then pumping automatic weapons fire into their bodies. Other disturbing videos show a gang of soldiers beating a teenager to death and a member of the security forces stabbing a prisoner repeatedly in the face and neck.

The British Guardian reports that unidentified corpses are washing up with grim regularity on the banks of the Tigris downstream from Mosul, with the bodies heavily decomposed, most bound and blindfolded, some mutilated. Human rights groups have blamed these killings on Iraqi security forces, which operate in close collaboration with US Special Forces advisors.

The same US and Western media that endlessly denounced last years Russian-backed siege of Aleppo by the Syrian government as a war crime have, for the most part, chosen to ignore crimes of a more massive scale carried out against the people of Mosul.

In the first instance, the media was mobilized in defense of the Islamist militias holding eastern Aleppo because they were fighting as part of the CIA-orchestrated war for regime change in Syria. In the second, the destruction of Mosul was hailed as a victory and even liberation, because similar Sunni Islamist fighters had challenged the US-backed regime in Baghdad. Nothing could more clearly expose the duplicity and hypocrisy of US foreign policy in the region and the functioning of the corporate media as the obedient propaganda arm of American militarism.

This article was first published by WSWS -

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Poll: Americans Massive Disapproval of Both Parties

By Eric Zuesse

The Monthly Harvard-Harris Poll: June 2017 is the latest poll in that series, and it scientifically sampled 2,258 U.S. registered voters, of whom (as shown on page 30) 35% were Democrat, 29% were Republican, and 30% were independent). It indicates (page 24) that 37% approve and 63% disapprove of the way the Republican Party is handling its job. It also indicates (page 25) that 38% approve, and 62% disapprove, of the way the Democratic Party is handling its job. So: despite there being 6% more self-described Democrats than Republicans, there was only 1% more disapproval of the Republican Party than of the Democratic Party; and, this indicates that there was a substantial disapproval of the Democratic Party by Democratic voters (more disaffection by them for their Party, than by Republicans for theirs).

The answers to other questions in the poll also help to answer why this is so, and why the voting public dont hold either Party in high regard  why Americas supposedly democratic (small-D) politics is currently a contest between uglies, with neither Party offering anything like what the U.S. voting public want their government to do (i.e., it fits what this scientific study  linked there  found actually to control U.S. politics):

(Page 27) 41% think President Trump should be impeached and removed from office, and 45% think no action should be taken against him.

(Page 28) 36% think the investigations into Russia and President Trump are helping the country, but 64% think the opposite: that these investigations are hurting the country.

(Page 39) Of listed U.S. government officials, the highest percentage-favorable ratings were: Bernie Sanders (52%), Mike Pence (47%), Donald Trump (45%), Hillary Clinton (39%), Paul Ryan (38%), Elizabeth Warren (37%), Jim Comey (36%), Robert Mueller (34%), Nancy Pelosi (31%), Jeff Sessions (28%), and Rex Tillerson (28%).

(Page 40) The highest percentage-unfavorable ratings were: Hillary Clinton (56%), Nancy Pelosi (51%), Donald Trump (50%), Paul Ryan (45%), Mitch McConnell (42%), Jeff Sessions (41%), Mike Pence (40%), Jared Kushner (39%), Bernie Sanders (38%), Jim Comey (36%), and Elizabeth Warren (36%).

(Page 72) 48% think President Trump colluded with the Russians during the election over the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and John Podestas emails. 52% say No  Trump did not do that.

(Page 73) 54% say associates of President Trump did it; 46% say No to that.

(Page 74) 38% say There is evidence of such collusion by Trump; 62% say No.

(Page 75) 54% say this is a legitimate investigation; 46% say its fueled to create a cloud over the Trump administration.

(Page 79) 44% say Keep the focus on the Russia investigation; 56% say Move on to other issues.

(Page 83) 73% say they are concerned that there has been lost focus and energy by the administration and Congress because of the Russia investigation. 67% say theyre concerned about future interference by Russia in U.S. elections.

(Page 95) 54% say Yes and 46% say No to Do you think the so called Deep State  the collection of intelligence agencies and holdover government workers from the Obama administration  is trying to unseat President Trump?

(Page 96) When asked Who do you think is more to blame for Hillary Clintons loss of the election? 67% choose Hillary Clinton and her campaign team for running a weak campaign and 33% choose Forces like the Russians, former FBI director Comey, and the Democratic National Committee not having reliable voter data.

(Page 124) 74% Favor Offering incentives for electric cars and renewable energy such as wind and solar. 62% Favor Setting much tougher emission standards for cars and other vehicles. 34% Favor Putting coal, and all coal and clean coal plants, out of business. Todays American public take global warming seriously  or at least more seriously than Republican public officials do..

(Page 133) 47% think it was Right and 53% think it was Wrong for Trump to pull the United States out of the current version of the Paris Climate Agreement.

(Page 151) 49% think the media is being fair to President Trump; 51% say Unfair.

(Page 154) 21% Favor raising the U.S. governments debt ceiling. 69% Oppose.

(Page 155) 36% Favor a government shut down over the issue; 64% Oppose.

What this poll found is basically the same thing that has been shown in many different polls . So: former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who was the last person who was able to win the White House without needing to rely upon billionaries in order to do it , was correct when he said that ,

Now its just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members.

Anybody who refers to this government as being a democracy is way behind the times, because it has been, ever since 1980, controlled by its aristocracy; it is an oligarchy instead of a democracy; it is a regime instead of a government that represents its public. This regime represents its aristocrats. And that is why the publics disapproval of this countrys leaders is so high. That happens in a regime, not in a democracy. Both of Americas Parties represent this countrys aristocracy, not Americas public. The latest Harvard-Harris poll simply adds to the already-overwhelming evidence of this. But the basic evidence on the matter was the Gilens-Page study . In their section American Democracy? they said:

What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of populistic democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule  at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

One of the aristocracys many magazines, The Atlantic, headlined on June 21st, Is American Democracy Really Under Threat? and tried to fool their readers to think the answer is no; but, of course, they were pointing, as evidence, merely to nominal adherence to democratic forms, and ignored the actual evidence on the matter, such as Gilens and Page examined in depth, and such as the many polls that have also been referred to in the links here have additionally reinforced. None of this actual evidence was even so much as mentioned. The honest answer to the articles title-question is not just Yes but more than that: their question itself is more like their having asked Is there a danger of the horse being stolen? after the horse was already stolen, and has for decades (since at least 1980) already been absent from the barn; so, that articles very title is a deception, even without its text (which is written for outright fools who cant recognize what constitutes evidence that is suitable for a given allegation). A better question would therefore be: Why do people still subscribe to vapid propaganda-magazines like that? All propaganda should be free of charge. But, of course, in a dictatorship like this, people pay even for the right to be deceived. Its no longer free-of-charge. Thats just the way things are  really are. Its shown in the data  not in anybodys mere platitudes about the matter. People pay to embellish the lies that they already believe. Most people want that, more than they want to come to know the truth. The worse the truth is, the more that people crave the myth which contradicts it  theyll pay good money to mainline that into themselves: evidenceless reassurances, such as that article. But anyone who takes that type of pap seriously, wont be able sensibly to understand such findings as were reported in the latest Harvard-Harris poll.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of Theyre Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRISTS VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .

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Is Russiagate Really Hillarygate?





By Paul Roderick Gregory

The role of Fusion GPS and one of its key associates, a former Soviet intelligence officer, must raise the question as to whether the Steele dossier, which was orchestrated by a suspected unregistered agent of Russia, was a plant by Russian intelligence to harm Donald Trump?

David Satter, one of our top experts on Russia and himself expelled by the Kremlin, writes :

Perhaps most important, Russian intelligence also acted to sabotage Mr. Trump. The Trump dossier, full of unverified sexual and political allegations, was published in January by BuzzFeed, despite having all the hallmarks of Russian spy agency creativity. The dossier was prepared by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer. It employed standard Russian techniques of disinformation and manipulation.

Much of the credibility of the Orbis dossier hinges on Steeles reputation as a former M15 intelligence agent. Satter writes, however, that after the publication of the Trump dossier, Mr. Steele went into hiding, supposedly in fear for his life. On March 15, however, Michael Morell, the former acting CIA director, told NBC that Mr. Steele had paid the Russian intelligence sources who provided the information and never met with them directly. In other words, his sources were not only working for pay. Furthermore, Mr. Steele had no way to judge the veracity of their claims.

If Steele disappeared for fear of his life, we must suspect that he feared murder by Russian agents. The only secret he might have had to warrant such a drastic Russian action would be knowledge that Russian intelligence prepared the dossier.

According to a Vanity Fair article , Fusion GPS was first funded by an anti-Trump Republican donor, but, after Trumps nomination, Fusion and Steele were paid by Democratic donors whose identity remains secret. Writes Satter: Perhaps the time has come to expand the investigation into Russias meddling to include Mrs. Clintons campaign as well.

As someone who has read every word of the Steele Trump dossier and has studied the Soviet Union/Russia for almost a half century, I can say that the Steele dossier consists of raw intelligence from informants identified by capital letters, who claim (improbably) to have access to the highest levels of the Kremlin. The dossier was not, as the press reports, written by Steele. No matter how experienced (or gullible) Steele might be, there is no way for him to know whether his sources are clandestine Russian intelligence agents.

In Stalin's day, some of the most valued KGB (NKVD) agents were called "novelists," for their ability to conjure up fictional plots and improbable tales to use against their enemies. Some of Steele's sources claim detailed knowledge of the deepest Kremlin secrets, such as Putin's personal control of Clinton emails or negotiations with Putin's head of the national oil company. If they truly had such knowledge, why would they "sell" it to Steele? The most likely explanation is that the Steele dossier is the work of Russian intelligence "novelists" charged by the Kremlin with defaming Trump and adding chaos to the American political system.

Muellers Difficult Task

While leaks from within the investigation focus on possible obstruction of justice, Special Counsel Robert Muellers writ  to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election  requires him to consider matters that Dems would prefer be left alone.

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Special Counsel Mueller has been given a broad charge and no deadline -- a formula for trouble. He is supposed to investigate Russias intervention in the 2016 election. Given the many accounts of Russian contacts of Trump campaign officials and hangers-on, Mueller must follow these leads, which apparently have lead nowhere over a nine month investigation as reported even by Trump unfriendly sources like CNN. Mueller, therefore, should not require much time to rule out coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia state actors. Mueller must be careful to avoid detours into loosely related issue by scalp-hunting investigators. Mueller also must shut down leaks from within his office, if he wishes his reports to be credible to the American people.

Mueller must also conduct an investigation which is perceived as fair to both sides. On the Clinton/Democratic side, there are a number of unanswered questions related to Russian electoral intervention. Among them is the question of whether the wiped clean Clinton e-mails are in Russian hands (as asserted by the Steele dossier), whether the tarmac meeting of Bill Clinton and the Attorney General quashed the investigation of Hillarys e-mails, and whether the Clintons and Russian uranium interests engaged in quid pro quo and pay to play operations.

The most important unanswered question is whether the Clinton campaign funded the Orbis Trump smear campaign and did they understand the campaign could be conducted by Russian intelligence?

Mueller must question Steele himself on his sources and some of the sources themselves, investigate whether they could be Russian intelligence agents, and determine the role of Clinton donors and campaign officials in the funding of the anti-Trump dossier.

The Fusion-Steele matter is explosive because it suggests that Russias most damaging intervention in the 2016 campaign may have been its creation of the Steele Dossier, remarkably paid for by the Clinton campaign! If so, the Clinton campaign (not Trump) was the prime sponsor of Russias intervention in the 2016 election.

Paul Roderick Gregory is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, and energy fellow and Cullen Professor of Economics at the University of Houston. He is also a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research Berlin. His specialties are Russia and Comparative Economics. He has written more than 20 books on economics, Russia and comparative economics. www.paulgregorysblog.blogspot.com

This article was first published by

Forbes

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Gulf Crisis: US Admits Fake News of Russian Hacking

By Finian Cunningham

July 18, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - In a sharp about-turn, US intelligence agencies are now accusing the United Arab Emirates for hacking into Qatars official news agency, thereby sparking the Gulf crisis between Washingtons Arab allies. The latest twist amounts to an admission that the US is guilty of previously broadcasting fake news blaming Russia.

This week, the Washington Post cites US intelligence officials when it reported Monday: The United Arab Emirates orchestrated the hacking of Qatari government news and social media sites in order to post incendiary false quotes attributed to Qatars emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al Thani, in late May that sparked the ongoing upheaval between Qatar and its neighbors.

However, last month, on June 7, the American news outlet CNN had a completely different take on the Gulf crisis, when it blamed Russia for trying to sow division between US allies in the Persian Gulf. It reported in an exclusive article with the headline: US suspects Russian hackers planted fake news behind Qatar crisis.

That CNN report went on to claim: US officials say the Russian goal appears to be to cause rifts among the US and its allies. In recent months, suspected Russian cyber activities, including the use of fake news stories, have turned up amid elections in France, Germany and other countries.

While CNN hinted that the alleged Russian hackers in the Gulf could have been criminal privateers, the thrust of its report last month very much pointed the finger of blame at the Russian government for hacking into the Qatar news agency. Using assertion, speculation and anonymous sources, the alleged Russian cyber-attack on Qatar was linked to alleged meddling by the Kremlin in the US presidential election last year.

US intelligence has long been concerned with what they say is the Russian government's ability to plant fake news in otherwise credible streams, according to US officials, reported CNN.

But now this week, US intelligence officials have changed their tune on who they think is whipping up the Gulf crisis. It is not Russia, it is the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

[US] Officials became aware last week that newly analyzed information gathered by US intelligence agencies confirmed that on May 23, senior members of the UAE government discussed the plan and its implementation, reports the Washington Post this week.

For over a month now, the UAE has aligned with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to blockade Qatar, another member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The crisis has become deadlocked with neither side willing to back down, much to the strategic concern of Washington. All of the monarchial energy-rich states are longtime allies of the US and together as a unit are a linchpin in maintaining the global petrodollar system. The other GCC members, Kuwait and Oman, have taken a neutral stance in the diplomatic crisis and have acted as brokers to resolve the dispute. Egypt, has joined with the Saudi-led bloc, to impose sanctions against Qatar.

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The row blew up dramatically days after US President Donald Trump made an official state visit to Saudi Arabia on May 20-22. In exchange for a record $110-billion arms deals with the Saudi rulers, it seems clear that Trump gave the green light for the Saudis to instigate a blockade on Qatar. Ostensibly, the Saudis and the others are accusing Qatar of sponsoring terrorism and, they say, that is why they acted to isolate the neighboring gas-rich state. The absurd hypocrisy behind the accusation belies the real motive of petty rivalry among the Gulf monarchs. In particular, the Qatari-based Al Jazeera news network has been a bane for the Saudi and Egyptian rulers owing to its relatively independent and critical reporting on repression in those countries. Qatars support for the Muslim Brotherhood has also rankled the Saudis and Egyptians.

Two days after Trump flew out of Saudi on May 22, the official Qatari News Agency was hit with a fake news attack. Its news reports attributed statements to the Qatari emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al Thani, in which he praised Iran  the Shia arch-enemy of the US-backed Sunni monarchies  as well as making critical comments about Trump.

The whole debacle was an obvious set-up. Despite urgent notices from Qatar that its new agency had been hacked with fake news, the Saudi, Bahraini and Emirati media continued to prominently report the statements as if they were genuine, with the evident intention of smearing Qatar and provoking a stand-off.

The stage was then set for Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain and Egypt to announce on June 5 a total embargo of commercial, media and transport links with Qatar because of its support for terrorism and friendly relations with Iran.

US President Trump initially voiced support for the blockade on Qatar, claiming it as a success from his trip to Saudi Arabia.

So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King [Saudi King Salman] and 50 countries already paying off, Trump smugly declared through his Twitter feed. They said they would take a hard line on funding extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!

But ever since Trump set off the worst crisis in the Gulf among US allies, his top diplomat Rex Tillerson has been busy trying to calm the row.

Qatar serves as the base for US Central Command in the Middle East with an airbase housing 10,000 troops. American warplanes flying out of Qatar are the main strike force for operations in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Strategic planners in Washington realize that the US cannot afford to alienate Qatar.

Tillerson has diverged noticeably from Trumps simplistic broadside supporting Saudi Arabia, and has instead sought to bring Qatar back into the GCC fold. The US Secretary of State has hinted that the Saudi-led blockade is draconian and unrealistic. On June 23, Saudi Arabia and its partners demanded that Qatar shut down the Al Jazeera network along with a dozen other ultimatums. Qatar refused.

Last week, Tillerson had a frenetic week of shuttle diplomacy flying between Qatar and Saudi Arabia to get both sides to compromise. On Friday, July 14, the former Exxon CEO returned to the US deflated, unable to break the deadlock.

While traveling back to the US, Tillerson alluded to the strategic importance at stake for Washington in maintaining Gulf Arab unity. He said it is really important to us from a national security standpoint. We need this part of the world to be stable, and this particular conflict between these parties is obviously not helpful.

This would explain why the US has now moved to expose the Saudi-led camp as being behind the fake news hack incident against the Qatari news agency.

That disclosure undermines the Saudi-led position. It confirms what the Qataris have been saying from the outset; namely, that they have been set up for a faux crisis by Gulf rivals, whose objective is to subjugate Qatari sovereignty under Saudi tutelage. Shutting down the offensive Al Jazeera news station being one of the desired outcomes.

By undermining the Saudis and UAE in this way, the US is waging that it can lever the Saudis and the others GCC members into softening their demands on Qatar.

So keen are the US military and geopolitical planners to defuse the prolonged Gulf crisis  a crisis that threatens the petrodollar system  that they were obliged to come clean about the real identify of the perpetrators of the cyber attack on Qatar. That means dishing the dirt on the Saudis and UAE as the source of the hack, and abandoning the earlier claim that Russia was to blame.

CNN is once again caught out faking news about Russian hackers. At the time of its exclusive last month accusing Russia of destabilizing US allies in the Gulf, the news channel at least had the decency to quote Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on the claim.

Peskov said in the June 7 report: It is another lie.. CNN again and again publish references to unnamed sources in unnamed agencies, etc, etc. These streams of information have no connection with the reality. It is so far away from the reality. Fake is a fake.

What the whole episode shows is not just how irresponsible US intelligence officials and major media are in publishing false claims defaming Russia. It also shows them as unscrupulous and expedient.

Just because the lingering Gulf crisis is spiraling to threaten US strategic interests, only then is there a sudden switch to a version of events that more accurately reflects reality. If it werent for US strategic concerns in the Gulf, the fake news put out about Russian hackers would no doubt continue. Which begs the question: if Russian hackers in the Gulf is fake news, then what does that say about similar claims of Russian hacking in the US?

Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Masters graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent
Users of WhatsApp in China and security researchers have reported widespread service disruptions amid fears that the popular messaging service may be at least partially blocked by authorities in the world's most populous country.

WhatsApp users in the country reported Tuesday on other social media platforms that the app was partly inaccessible unless virtual private network software was used to circumvent China's censorship apparatus, known colloquially as The Great Firewall.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook and offers end-to-end encryption, has a relatively small but loyal following among Chinese users seeking a greater degree of privacy from government snooping than afforded by popular domestic app WeChat, which is ubiquitous but closely monitored and filtered.

Questions over WhatsApp's status come at a politically fraught time in China. The government is in the midst of preparing for a sensitive party congress while Chinese censors this week revved up a sprawling effort to scrub all mention of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died Thursday in government custody.


The Massacre of Mosul





40,000 feared dead in battle to take back city from Isis as scale of civilian casualties revealed



By Patrick Cockburn

Exclusive: Many bodies are still buried under the rubble and the level of human suffering is 'immense', a top Kurdish official reading from latest intelligence reports tells Patrick Cockburn in the last of his special series on the last days of the caliphate

July 19, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - More than 40,000 civilians were killed in the devastating battle to retake Mosul from Isis , according to intelligence reports revealed exclusively to The Independent - a death toll far higher than previous estimates.

Residents of the besieged city were killed by Iraqi ground forces attempting to force out militants, as well as by air strikes and Isis fighters, according to Kurdish intelligence services.

Hoshyar Zebari, until recently a senior minister in Baghdad, told The Independent that many bodies "are still buried under the rubble". "The level of human suffering is immense," he said.

"Kurdish intelligence believes that over 40,000 civilians have been killed as a result of massive firepower used against them, especially by the Federal Police, air strikes and Isis itself," Mr Zebari added.

Mr Zebari, a native of Mosul and top Kurdish official who has served as the Iraqi Finance Minister and prior to that Foreign Minister, emphasised in an exclusive interview that the unrelenting artillery bombardment by units of the Federal Police, in practice a heavily armed military unit, had caused immense destruction and loss of life in west Mosul.

The figure given by Mr Zebari for the number of civilians killed in the nine-month siege is far higher than those previously reported, but the intelligence service of the Kurdistan Regional Government has a reputation for being extremely accurate and well-informed. Isis prevented any monitoring of casualties while outside groups have largely focused on air strikes rather than artillery and rocket fire as a cause of civilian deaths. Airwars, one such monitoring group, estimated that attacks may have killed 5,805 non-military personnel in the city between 19 February and 19 June 2017.

Drone footage shows the devastation in Mosul's old city and the destroyed al-Nuri Mosque

Mr Zebari accuses the government in Baghdad, of which he was until recently a member, of not doing enough to relieve the suffering. Sometimes you might think the government is indifferent to what has happened, he said. He doubts if Christians, Yazidis, Kurds and other minorities, who have lived in and around Mosul for centuries, will be able to reconcile with the Sunni Arab majority whom they blame for killing and raping them . He says some form of federal solution for future governance would be best.

Reading from Kurdish intelligence reports, Mr Zebari says that a high level of corruption among the Iraqi military forces occupying Mosul is undermining security measures to suppress Isis in the aftermath of its defeat. He says that suspect individuals are able to pass through military checkpoints by paying $1,000 (770) and can bring a vehicle by paying $1,500. He says corruption of this type is particularly rife in the 16th and 9th Iraqi Army Divisions and the Tribal Volunteers (Hashd al-Ashairi), drawn in part from the Shabak minority in the Nineveh Plain.

The ability of Isis militants to remain free or be released from detention by paying bribes has led to a change in attitude among people in Mosul whom Mr Zebari says were previously willing to give information about Isis members to the Iraqi security forces. They are now wary of doing so, because they see members of Isis, whom they had identified and who had been arrested, returning to the streets capable of exacting revenge on those who informed against them. Several anti-Isis people in Mosul have confirmed to The Independent that this is indeed the case and they are frightened of these returnees and Isis sleeper cells that continue to exist.

Civilians in Mosul say they do not fault the behaviour towards them of combat units that have borne the brunt of the fighting, such as the Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), but they are concerned about what to expect from less well-disciplined troops. A belief that Isis fighters and officials detained in Mosul are later able to bribe their way free explains why soldiers, most of whom are not complicit in bribery networks, have summarily executed Isis prisoners, sometimes by throwing them off high buildings .

Corruption by the occupying military forces takes different forms, according to Kurdish intelligence information cited by Mr Zebari. Some people are being charged $100 for removing a body from the rubble and others $500 to reoccupy their house, where it is still standing. Iraqi army and militia units have always been notorious for exacting fees and protection money from civilians, with trucks moving goods on the roads being a particularly profitable target when they pass through military checkpoints.

Much of the blame for the calamitous level of destruction in west Mosul has been put on air strikes, but it is evident at ground level that a lot of the damage was caused by artillery shells and rockets. This is confirmed by an Amnesty International report issued last week titled At Any Cost: The Civilian Catastrophe in West Mosul, which points to a greater and more indiscriminate use of its firepower by pro-government forces in the final stages of the attack on east Mosul, starting in January 2017 and continuing over the following six months during the assault on west Mosul. It says that Iraqi government and US-led coalition forces relied heavily upon explosive weapons with wide area effects such as IRAMs (Improvised Rocket Assisted Munitions). With their crude targeting abilities, these weapons wreaked havoc in densely populated west Mosul, where large groups of civilians were trapped in homes or makeshift shelters. The UN estimated that Mosul had 1.2 million inhabitants at the start of the siege.

In addition, Isis snipers killed great numbers of civilians trying to escape whose departure would have robbed Isis of its human shields, though in the event their presence shielded very little. Mr Zebari said that intelligence had even intercepted messages from Isis fighters to their commanders saying they were tired of killing civilians.

Mr Zebari says that he is disappointed by the lack of Iraqi government plans to reconstruct Mosul. As Finance Minister in Baghdad until late last year, he had made provision for $500 million in the budget for rebuilding Mosul. He says: I wanted $500 million upfront to encourage other donors, but now the government has withdrawn from the fund and used the money elsewhere. This was not an encouraging sign.

Even if there is reconstruction, Mr Zebari, who grew up in Mosul and still has a house in the east of the city (though long confiscated, first by Saddam Hussein and later by Isis), laments that the soul of Mosul has gone and its iconic buildings are destroyed. He says he cannot imagine Mosul without the Nabi Yunus mosque (the tomb of Jonah) that Isis blew up as a heretical shrine in 2014 and the al-Nuri mosque , with its 12th century leaning minaret, which Isis destroyed in the last stage of the battle to prevent its capture by government forces. In addition, there is an unimaginable level of human suffering with more than one million people displaced.

He agrees that the government has won a big victory by destroying the Islamic State as a state structure controlling extensive territory. But he warns that Isis has shown that it is capable of adapting themselves to new realities. He says that the arms and heavy equipment from three Iraqi army divisions that Isis captured when it seized Mosul in June 2014 has never been fully accounted for. He says that there have been reports that much of it was hidden by Isis in tunnels, gorges and valleys in the arid wastelands of western Iraq and eastern Syria. This is where they came from when they started their attacks, he says.

'They killed my brother in front of me' - Nine-year-old girl talks of life under ISIS

Asked if the self-declared Caliph Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi is alive or dead , Mr Zebari said he did not know. But he added that, if Baghdadi was dead, it was strange that no new Caliph or Isis leader had been declared since part of the ideology of such movements is that they do not rely on a single human being. Successors had been quickly announced when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in a US air strike in 2006 and Osama bin Laden was shot dead by US special forces in Pakistan in 2011. Moreover, he says that there has been no sign of a change in the Isis command and control structure.

Read more from Patrick Cockburn's series on the Last Days of the Caliphate

This article was first published by

The Independent

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Home Why is CIA Director Weighing in With Policy Advice on Iran?



By Jim Lobe July 19, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - Are we once again witnessing the politicization of intelligence of the kind that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq? Only applied to Iran this time? There are a number of indications that such a process may indeed be underway. The latest was disclosed in the wake of Mondays certification by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that Iran is indeed complying with the letter of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran nuclear deal. The New York Times published part of the backstory shortly after the certification was formally delivered to Congress. Heres the most interesting paragraph (although the whole article needs to be read in order to get a better sense of how just how close the United States is to a real crisis both with its allies and Iran): At an hourlong meeting last Wednesday, all of the presidents major security advisers recommended he preserve the Iran deal for now. Among those who spoke out were Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson; Defense Secretary Jim Mattis; Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser; and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to an official who described internal discussions on the condition of anonymity. The official said Mr. Trump had spent 55 minutes of the meeting telling them he did not want to. I found it passing strange that Trump used all but an hour to keep saying that he didnt want to approve the certification. After all, such a conversation would become mighty trying for all parties (except the principal), something similar to persuading a really stubborn four-year-old he had to go to the dentist because he would otherwise lose his teeth. And it was very difficult to imagine that Trump was, by himself, making substantive or even political arguments as to why he shouldnt certify that Iran was complying with the JCPOA in the absence of any real evidence that it wasnt. If indeed the consensus recommendation of his national security team was that Iran had complied and that certification was clearly in order, why then did it take so long to conclude the meeting? Part of the answer may be found in a Bloomberg column Tuesday morning by Eli Lake (whose mostly neoconservative opinions I find very difficult to take but whose reporting is accurate almost all the time). Here are the relevant paragraphs: White House and other administration officials tell me the president nonetheless is serious about cracking down on Iran for its regional aggression, and is leaning closer to those of his advisers who are pushing him to pull out of the agreement that defines Obamas foreign policy legacy. In this sense, he is moving away from some of the most important members of his national security cabinet. Administration officials tell me that National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Tillerson have made the case that it was in the U.S. national interest to certify Irans compliance. They argued that the deal is structured so that the U.S. and its allies delivered the benefits to Iran up front. This included sanctions relief, a recognition of Irans right to enrich uranium, and removing Iranian companies and individuals from various sanctions lists. Others in the administration, including CIA Director Mike Pompeo and senior strategist Steve Bannon, have argued against the deal. In some ways this is not surprising. Pompeo was one of the pacts harshest critics when he was in Congress. Bannon has been opposed to most international agreements, from the Paris accord on climate change to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. [eq] Of course, it is indeed unsurprising that Bannon is opposed to the deal, despite the risks that withdrawing from it will greatly enhance the chances of the U.S. becoming involved in a new Middle East war, not to mention that such a move would further isolate the U.S. from its NATO allies (but what does Bannon care about Western unity?) Of course, Bannon is supposedly no longer on the presidents national-security team. Was he in the room? But what is especially remarkable about Eli Lakes story is his disclosure that Pompeo , consistent with his radically anti-Iranian record in Congress, is argu[ing] against the deal, presumably as the CIA director. My impression was that the CIA director is not supposed to be arguing for any policy position. His or her job is limited to providing the best intelligence produced by his agency. So, despite Lakes lack of surprise, I do find it surprisingand deeply disturbingthat the CIA director has been arguing along with Bannon to withdraw from the agreement. Did Pompeo take part in the debate over certification that lasted 55 minutes Monday evening? No Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is Independent Media Get Our Free Daily Newsletter It would also be interesting to find out whether and how Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates is participating in this debate. He, too, had been an Iran hawk prior to joining the administration, only slightly less hawkish than Pompeo. Just three years ago, he was speaking out against the embryonic JCPOA under the sponsorship of such virulently anti-Iranian groups as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the soon-to-be-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative, and the Iran task force of the Bipartisan Policy Center. On the other hand, he was one of a handful of Republican senators who declined to sign Tom Cottons infamous letter to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warning that any agreement signed by Obama would not be binding on the U.S. Congress. One would think that his would be an important voice in the policy debate. It would be very useful to get more details of the 55-minute discussion to determine who exactly in the administration is arguing for isolating the U.S. even more from its western allies and risking a new and likely even more devastating and costly war in the Middle East. Jim Lobe served for some 30 years as the Washington DC bureau chief for Inter Press Service and is best known for his coverage of U.S. foreign policy and the influence of the neoconservative movement. http://lobelog.com/ 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 - US should move bases 1,000km from Iran if it wants to pursue further sanctions or risk paying a price: army chief Click for Spanish , German , Dutch , Danish , French , translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load. What's your response? - Scroll down to add / read comments Please read our Comment Policy before posting - It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on ICH. Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section. Click here to comment on our Facebook page
U.S. Lawmakers Seek to Criminally Outlaw Support for Boycott Campaign Against Israel

By Glenn Greenwald

July 19, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - The criminalization of political speech and activism against Israel has become one of the gravest threats to free speech in the west. In France, activists have been arrested and prosecuted for wearing t-shirts advocating a boycott of Israel. The U.K. has enacted a series of measures designed to outlaw such activism. In the U.S., governors compete with one another over who can implement the most extreme regulations to bar businesses from participating in any boycotts aimed even at Israeli settlements, which the world regards as illegal . On U.S. campuses, punishment of pro-Palestinian students for expressing criticisms of Israel is so commonplace that the Center for Constitutional Rights refers to it as the Palestine Exception to free speech.

But now, a group of 45 Senators  30 Republicans and 15 Democrats  want to implement a law that would make it a felony for Americans to support the international boycott against Israel, which was launched in protest of that countrys decades-old occupation of Palestine. The two primary sponsors of the bill are Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland and Rob Portman of Ohio. Perhaps the most shocking aspect is the punishment: anyone guilty of violating its prohibitions will face a minimum civil penalty of $250,000, and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison.

The proposed measure, called the Israel Anti-Boycott Act (S. 720), was introduced by Cardin on March 23. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that the bill was drafted with the assistance of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC]. Indeed, AIPAC, in its 2017 Lobbying Agenda , identified passage of this bill as one of its top lobbying priorities for the year:





The bills co-sponsors include the senior Democrat in Washington, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, his New York colleague Kirsten Gillibrand, and several of the Senates more liberal members, such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Maria Cantwell of Washington. Illustrating the bipartisanship that AIPAC typically summons, it also includes several of the most right-wing Senators such as Ted Cruz of Texas, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Marco Rubio of Florida.

A similar measure was introduced in the House on the same date by two Republicans and one Democrat. It already has amassed 234 co-sponsors : 63 Democrats and 174 Republicans. As in the Senate, AIPAC has assembled an impressive ideological diversity among supporters, predictably including many of the most right-wing House members  Jason Chaffetz, Dutch Ruppersberger, Liz Cheney, Peter King  along with the second-ranking Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer.

Among the co-sponsors of the bill are several of the politicians who have become political celebrities by positioning themselves as media leaders of the anti-Trump #Resistance, including three California House members who have become heroes to Democrats and staples of the cable news circuit: Ted Lieu, Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell. These politicians, who have built a wide public following by posturing as opponents of authoritarianism, are sponsoring one of the most oppressive and authoritarian bills that has pended before Congress in quite some time.

Last night, the ACLU posted a letter it sent to all members of the Senate urging them to oppose this bill. Warning that proponents of the bill are seeking additional co-sponsors, the civil liberties group explained that it would punish individuals for no reason other than their political beliefs. The letter detailed what makes this bill so particularly threatening to basic civic freedoms:

It is no small thing for the ACLU to insert itself into this controversy. One of the most traumatic events in the organizations history was when it lost large numbers of donors and supporters in the late 1970s after they defended the free speech rights of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois, a town with a large community of Holocaust survivors.

Even the bravest of organizations often steadfastly avoid any controversies relating to Israel. Yet here, while appropriately pointing out that the ACLU takes no position for or against the effort to boycott Israel or any foreign country, they categorically denounce this AIPAC-sponsored proposal for what it is: a bill that seeks only to punish the exercise of constitutional rights.

The ACLU has similarly opposed bipartisan efforts at the state level to punish businesses who participate in the boycott, pointing out that boycotts to achieve political goals are a form of expression that the Supreme Court has ruled are protected by the First Amendments protections of freedom of speech, assembly, and petition, and that such bills place unconstitutional conditions on the exercise of constitutional rights. The bill now co-sponsored in the Congress by more than half of the House and close to half of the Senate is far more extreme than those.

Thus far, not a single member of Congress has joined the ACLU in denouncing this bill. The Intercept this morning sent inquiries to numerous non-committed members of the Senate and House who have yet to speak on this bill. We also sent inquiries to several co-sponsors of the bill  such as Congressman Lieu  who have positioned themselves as civil liberties champions and opponents of authoritarianism, asking:

Congressman Lieu: Last night, the ACLU vehemently denounced a bill that you are cosponsoring  to criminalize support for a boycott of Israel  as a grave attack on free speech. Do you have any comment on the ACLUs denunciation? Youve been an outspoken champion for civil liberties; how can you reconcile that record with an effort to make it a felony for Americans to engage in activism that protests a foreign governments actions? Were writing about this today; any statement would be appreciated.

This morning, Lieu responded: Thank you for sharing the letter. The bill has been around since March and this is the first time I have seen this issue raised. We will look into it (the Intercept will post any response from Rep. Lieu, or any late responses from others, as soon as they are received).

Senator Cantwell told The Intercept she is a strong supporter of free speech rights and will be reviewing the bill for First Amendment concerns in light of the ACLU statement.

Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, when asked by the Intercept about the ACLUs warning that the bill he is co-sponsoring criminalizes free speech, affirmed his support for the bill by responding: I continue to support a strong U.S./Israel relationship.

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Meanwhile, some co-sponsors seemed not to have any idea what they co-sponsored  almost as though they reflexively sign whatever comes from AIPAC without having any idea whats in it. Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, for instance, seemed genuinely bewildered when told of the ACLUs letter, saying whats the Act? Youll have to get back to me on that.:

And there is this similar exchange with another co-sponsor, one of AIPACs most reliable allies, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who said: Id want to read it . . . . Id really have to look at it.

Perhaps most stunning is our interview with the primary sponsor of the bill, Democratic Senator Benjamin Cardin, who seemed to have no idea what was in his bill, particularly insisting that it contains no criminal penalties. Cardin either has no idea how draconian his own bill is, or is purposely feigning ignorance. Either way, there is no question that, as the ACLU put it, violations would be subject to a minimum civil penalty of $250,000 and a maximum criminal penalty o f $ 1 million and 20 years in prison.

Thats because, as Josh Ruebner expertly detailed when the bill was first unveiled, the bill seeks to amend two laws  the Export Administration Act of 1979 and the Export-Import Bank Act of 1945, and the potential penalties for violating this bill are steep: a minimum $250,000 civil penalty and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years imprisonment, as stipulated in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act .

Indeed, to see how serious the penalties are, one can just compare the bills text in Section 8(a) , which provides that violators will be punishedin accordance with section 206 of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act ( 50 U.S.C. 1705 ), to the penalty provisions of that law , which state:

The bill is designed to extend the current prohibition on participating in boycotts sponsored by foreign governments to cover boycotts from international organizations such as the U.N and the European Union. It also explicitly extends the boycott ban from Israel generally to any parts of Israel, including the settlements. For that reason, Ruebner explains, the bill  by design  would outlaw campaigns by the Palestine solidarity movement to pressure corporations to cut ties to Israel or even with Israeli settlements.

This pernicious bill highlights many vital yet typically ignored dynamics in Washington. First, journalists love to lament the lack of bipartisanship in Washington, yet the very mention of the word Israel causes most members of both parties to quickly snap into line in a show of unanimity that would make the regime of North Korea blush with envy. Even when virtually the entire world condemns Israeli aggression, or declares settlements illegal, the U.S. Congress  across party and ideological lines  finds virtually complete harmony in uniting against the world consensus and in defense of the Israeli government.

Second, the free speech debate in the U.S. is incredibly selective and warped. Pundits and political officials love to crusade as free speech champions  when doing so involves defending mainstream ideas or attacking marginalized, powerless groups such as minority college students. But when it comes to one of the most systemic, powerful, and dangerous assaults on free speech in the U.S. and the west generally  the growing attempt to literally criminalize speech and activism aimed at the Israeli Governments occupation  these free speech warriors typically fall silent.

Third, AIPAC continues to be one of the most powerful, and pernicious, lobbying forces in the country. In what conceivable sense is it of benefit of Americans to turn them into felons for the crime of engaging in political activism in protest of a foreign nations government? And this is hardly the first time they have attempted to do this through their most devoted Congressional loyalists; Cardin, for instance, had previously succeeded in inserting into trade bills provisions that would disfavor anyone who supports a boycott of Israel.

Finally, it is hard to put into words the irony of watching many of the most celebrated and beloved Congressional leaders of the anti-authoritarian Resistance  Gillibrand, Schiff, Swalwell and Lieu  sponsor one of the most oppressive and authoritarian bills to appear in Congress in many years. How can one credibly inveigh against authoritarianism while sponsoring a bill that dictates to American citizens what political views they are and are not allowed to espouse under threat of criminal prosecution? Whatever labels one might want to apply to the sponsors of this bill, anti-authoritarianism should be not be among them.

This article was first published by The Intercept -

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 -

Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped

Palestinians clash with Israeli forces near al-Aqsa

Israel wants US to cut funding to Palestinians over armed resistance to occupation .

On hot mic, Israeli PM admits to Syria strikes on Hezbollah
The Brutal Realities of Israels Iron-fisted Occupation





Israel is well-known for having a potent U.S. lobby that not only influences Congress and the mainstream media but intimidates Americans who dare criticize its policies toward the Palestinians, as Dennis J Bernstein describes.



By Dennis J Bernstein and John Pilger

The Price for Criticizing Israel

July 19, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - There are very few journalist in the U.S. or Europe who have the courage to report fairly on Israels seemingly endless illegal occupation of Palestinian lands. Personally, as a Jewish-American, and the grandson of a revered Rabbi, I have been roundly denounced by pro-Israeli representatives and their Zionist lobbyists in the U.S.

Ive stopped counting the number of vicious personal attacks that have labeled me a self-hating Jewish anti-Semite. Heres one that got my attention and the attention of journalist Robert Fisk of the Independent of London, who I introduced one night for a lecture in Berkeley, California, and who then wrote an article about the plight of Jewish journalists and activists in the U.S. who dare to write or speak honestly about Israels brutal and illegal occupation of the Palestinians:

You mother-fucking-asshole-self-hating Jewish piece of shit. Hitler killed the wrong Jews. He should have killed your parents, so a piece of Jewish shit like you would not have been born. God willing, Arab terrorists will cut you to pieces Daniel Pearl-style, AMEN!!! The latter reference to the late Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and decapitated in Pakistan.

And at another level, the Israeli consulate in San Francisco has complained to my managers at KPFA/ Pacifica Radio repeatedly about my pro-Palestinian terrorist and anti-semitic reporting, and my apparent hatred for the Jewish State.

Emmy award-winning filmmaker and investigative reporter John Pilger is one of the rare exceptions who has plowed head-first into this crucial story of our time. Pilger has made two documentaries 25 years apart about Palestine, with almost the same name, Palestine is the Issue and then Palestine is Still the Issue.

I spoke recently with Pilger about Palestine and the brutality of the continuing occupation, and also about the responsibility for empowering and sustaining the occupation that falls at the feet of the Western press, based on its misreporting and, in some cases, not reporting at all the brutal realities of Israels iron-fisted occupation of Palestinians, which many critics, as well as several UN officials, have labeled as a form of ethnic cleansing that borders on genocide.

I also spoke with Pilger about the recent G-20 meetings in Germany, where President Trump held his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin amid the Russia-gate frenzy. John Pilgers latest film is The Coming War on China. He recently gave a moving talk at the Palestine Expo in London on the ongoing battle for the liberation of Palestine, excerpts of which have been published by Consortiumnews.

Dennis Bernstein: Lets start with some current events. We just had the G20 meeting in Europe with a big deal made about the meeting between Trump and Putin and a lot of action in the streets. Your thoughts on what happened there and some of the goings-on?

Click below to listen to full interview with John Pilger

The discussion was appropriated by the meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Putting aside all the grotesque, cartoon qualities of Trump, the one thing that he has been consistent about is doing some deal with Russia. This has gotten him in a lot of trouble because the Democratic Party and, in fact most of the beltway institutions in Washington, dont want this to happen. They would like Russia to remain a perennial enemy.

Without Moscow there as the demon, it is very difficult to justify a lot of the infrastructure of power in the United States, particularly the massive armament and military industries. Trump openly challenged this, virtually from the beginning. Although he seemed to have to prove himself to the pillars of power in Washington by firing missiles at Syria, this element in his presidency has remained pretty much constant.

This was of course the first meeting between Trump and Putin. They spoke for two hours and twenty minutes and, by all accounts, some kind of rapport was developed. In previous times that would be good news. It used to be called detente. These days this is not good news, either in the US political establishment and corporate media or, to a large degree, here in Britain.

The ridiculous allegations that the Russians helped to elect Trump by directly interfering in the great American democratic process have converged with the news that Trump and Putin may well have struck some kind of deal. Whether Trump is allowed to pursue whatever arrangements he has made toward normalizing relations with Russia, given the institutions of power in the United States, is rather doubtful.

DB: Of course, the corporate press is not at all interested in detente in Syria. Their main story ever since Trumps meeting with Putin has been that his son may be guilty of treason.

JP: Ive never heard something so absurd in my life, especially as the United States has intervened so aggressively in post-Soviet Russia. All through the 1990s the open and quite successful intervention was blatant. And for these powerful forces in the United States to obsess with Russian meddling in our election process demonstrates a kind of double standard that is difficult to comprehend.

DB: In light of your new film, The Coming War on China, this is a time when detente at all levels is crucial because the dangers of staying the course are so huge. It is interesting to see that right-wing hawks in Washington are helping to foster a new relationship between Russia and China. But detente is the only answer at this point, isnt it?

JP: Yes, it is. Whats needed is a diplomatic settlement. Unfortunately, the United States doesnt do that anymore. It doesnt have diplomats in the real sense of the word. To now see the presidents of two of the major nuclear-armed powers in the world seemingly forging some kind of political arrangementagreeing, apparently, that they shouldnt go to war with nuclear weapons. This is a throwback to a time before George W. Bush abolished the START treaties and others that were put together so painstakingly over so many years between the Soviet Union and the United States. It demonstrates how far the worldat the level of its political elitehas regressed. The United States is a very frightening vision for most of us because nuclear weapons are in the background all the time. The chance of a mistaken launch of nuclear weapons is high.

Consider the case of Korea, where the United States has installed its very aggressive THAAD so-called defense system which threatens China. No one believes for a minute that these missiles are pointed at North Korea, which could be dealt with in many other ways by the United States. The long-term strategy of an ascendant Pentagon is the balkanization of the Russian Federation and the intimidation of China. And if there is any glint of some kind of pullback from that position, as there might have been in the meeting between Trump and Putin, then that is good news.

DB: And of course it is so bizarre that you have America talking about the role that China should be playing and how we are so disappointed that they are not doing all they can to facilitate THAAD, which is part of a strategy to surround their country in what we know is shaping up to be the Chinese century.

John, Id like you to talk about how you first began to report on Palestine and then Id like to fast forward to current issues.

JP: I first went to Palestine in the 1960s and stayed on a kibbutz. I probably came with the popular assumption that Israels myths about itself were true, that Israel was a good idea. I conflated the horror of the Holocaust with the new Jewish state. The people on the kibbutz regarded themselves as both socialists and Zionists.

I came to understand the doublespeak or the contemporary amnesia that is so pervasive in Israel. We had some very lively discussions but rarely mentioned the majority people. I saw them one evening and they were referred to as them, as silhouettes beyond the limits of the kibbutz. I asked about them and was told, well, theyre the Arabs. One man called them nomads. By just asking the question I was crossing a line, and a disturbed silence followed. I was with good people on the kibbutz, they had principles, many had memories of the horrors in Europe. They knew, of course, that they were on stolen land.

The word Palestinian was almost never used, rather echoing Golda Meirs later remark that theres no such thing as Palestinians. Because once the term Palestinian was recognized, the state of Palestine had to be recognized. For me it was a very interesting introduction to the extraordinary situation in Palestine. I learned a lot from a wonderful photographer named Dan Hidani who lost all his family in Germany during the War. We talked out this subject of the so-called Arabs and I learned a lot from him about the guilt of the colonizers that can never quite be covered up. These early experiences really alerted me to the huge injustice the Palestinians were suffering and of course still suffer today.

DB: Could I ask you to tell the story of the novelist Liana Badr, because it really does speak to what has happened to many Palestinians and the way they have been treated?

JP: In 2002, when Ariel Sharon was prime minister and several times sent the Israeli army and tanks into the West Bank, I arrived in Ramallah just when the Israeli army was withdrawing. Ramallah was devastated and one of the places I visited was the Palestinian Cultural Center. There I met the centers director, the renowned Palestinian novelist Liana Badr, who teaches at Columbia University now. Her manuscripts were torn and scattered across the floor. The hard drive containing her fiction and a whole library of plays and poetry had been stolen by the Israeli soldiers. Not a single book had survived. Master tapes of one of the best collections of Palestinian cinema were lost.

This was an assault on a peoples culture. The soldiers had urinated and defecated on the floors and on the desks and smeared feces on childrens paintings. It was the most vivid and telling symbol of what a colonial power does to the people whose country it occupies.

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It was an attempt to dehumanize, that is what this assault on the Palestinian Cultural Center represented. What struck me, as well, was the determination of the Palestinians in this situation not to comply with what was expected of them as victims. That is the most astonishing thing about the Palestinians. As you walk through the rubble of Gaza, where the Israelis have attacked so many times, all of a sudden you see in the distance a group of school girls beautifully turned out in their starched and pressed uniforms and their hair done. It is a vision of defiance and determination to keep going. So the occupation may have worked physically but it hasnt worked spiritually. And perhaps in the near future it may not work politically.

Jaffa oranges are famous around the world. Actually, Jaffa is a Palestinian town taken by Israel. Jaffa oranges form part of the mythical history of modern Israel, the idea that the desert of Palestine would be made green by the arriving Jews, who would make the desert bloom. But the oranges and grapes were in fact grown by Palestinian farmers and the oranges had been exported to Europe since the eighteenth century. At one time, a rather melancholy name for the town of Jaffa used by its former inhabitants was the place of sad oranges.

DB: I want to talk to you about Palestine and journalism. Maybe we could compare and contrast Mohammed Omer, on the one handwho is dodging bombs and trying to get food for his family as the drones are flying past his window, trying to get as best he can the truth from the groundcompare Mohammed Omer with the people at CNBC and the BBC.

JP: Well, we know that most of mainstream journalism is simply an extension of the state. Weve talked about the extraordinary McCarthy-like propaganda campaign that wants to blame everything including the weather on Russia. That happens because the media is the propaganda wing of the institutions that form power in the West.

The one that produces the most refined propaganda is the BBC. CNN and the others are just cruder versions. Any truth about Israel/Palestine or, more generally, the Middle East is not going to come from the mainstream media. Those of us who know this should rather stop beating our heads against a brick wall, asking why they dont tell the truth. Thats not what theyre there for.

Fortunately, there are now many independent sources, such as your program. You mentioned Mohammed Omer. We saw how brilliant and objective his reporting was from Gaza during the last terrible attack in 2014. His own family was under attack, they had very little food and water and so on, but every day he would produce these concise reports of no more than maybe 800 words, together with his photographs that would tell you what was happening as he witnessed it. It was about how people were still leading their lives in the most extraordinary ways, despite all the grief and suffering.

In other words, he did what the official media in the West rarely does: He put faces and names on people, he described their lives. He has collected those pieces together in a book. And there have been other journalists, particularly Palestinian photographers and camera people, who have done similar work. They make me proud to be a journalist.

DB: I only bring up the corporate journalists because they sustain these kinds of conditions by not reporting them or misreporting them.

JP: From my own point of view, I find it unwatchable, unless I am either monitoring it or deconstructing it. It is their censorship by omission, by distortion, by demonology. General Petraeus once said he spent most of his time with the media because that mattered more than trying to defeat the Taliban.

The good news is that a lot of people dont believe it anymore. One of the elements in the rebellion rolling across Western societies is an anger with the media. This is certainly true in Britain. Ive never known the media to be so popular a subject for debate. And its being discussed with a great deal of resentment. Reporters find themselves now having to account for their actions. Thats a new development.

Yesterday, The Guardian ran a rather defensive front-page article about journalists being called to account by the survivors of the terrible Grenfell Tower fire here in London. Well, that was emblematic of the media being called to account over a wide range of issues. People are becoming aware, they understand now. Theyre no longer simply consumers of this sort of nonsense.

Certainly, the power of the media remains. But one of my favorite stories is that, on the night that Jeremy Corbyn almost won the election here, there was a party at the Times newspaper, which of course is run by Rupert Murdoch. When the first results came in and it became clear that Labor was doing so well, Murdoch stormed out. That was a very symbolic moment because it meant that his media and the media like his no longer had the power to ensure that certain politicians were elected. Two days before the election, The Daily Mail devoted thirteen pages to an attempted character assassination of Corbyn. It had no effect whatsoever.

DB: We just had on our show Arab Barghouti, the son of Mustafa Barghouti, who hasnt touched his father for two years. Mustafa Barghouti has been in prison for fifteen years and just led a major hunger strike. Strong, articulate, he cant be silenced. Or you mentioned Dr. Mona El-Farra, a medical director on the ground who had a good part of her extended family wiped out in 2014. She is still ministering to the people and telling the truth to anyone who will listen. Its amazing.

JP: Yes, these are amazing people and its quite inspiring to be in their company. Even amidst all the carnage in the world, they make you feel good about being human.

DB: Why do you think Nelson Mandela said Palestine is the greatest moral issue of our time?

JP: There is a lot to criticize about Mandela but one of the things that was interesting and admirable about Mandela was that he was loyal to those who had supported and given solidarity to the people in South Africa struggling for their freedom. Certainly, right through his time in prison he always stressed the importance of that solidarity. In other words, of people standing together. It was a rather old-fashioned internationalist view of struggle.

He associated the struggle of the majority people of South Africa against the apartheid regime with the plight of the Palestinians who were struggling with their own form of apartheid. In the same way, Desmond Tutu has been to the West Bank and has been very outspoken in echoing what Mandela said. Tutu is on the record as saying that he regards the structures of apartheid in Israel/Palestine as in some respects even worse than those in South Africa.

I suppose Mandela considered Palestine the greatest moral issue because it was about a people wronged. The Palestinians were not the Germans, they didnt do terrible things to the Jewish people. In fact, they had lived peacefully with the Jewish people for a very long time. They were the majority people in their country. Jews, Muslims, Christians lived together in peace, generally speaking, until the state of Israel was imposed on them.

As Mustafa Barghouti put it, The Zionists wanted a state at the expense of the Palestinians. Thats what Mandela meant. Palestine is a classic colonial injustice. [Israel] is the fourth largest military power in the world backed by the largest military power, the European Union and other Western countries, taking away the freedom and imposing oppression on the people of Palestine.

DB: And the idea of a free Palestinian people is one that is very troubling to the Arab world that is aligned with the United States. It seems nobody wants to think about the liberation of Palestine because then they have to think about their own corrupt and vicious dictatorships. Palestine really is the issue of war and peace. Whether there will ever be peace depends on whether these people will ever have a place to call their home again.

JP: Certainly, until the Palestinians have justicein a way that they recognize itthere will be no peace in the region. In a sense, all roads of conflict in this troubled region lead back to Palestine. If the Palestine issue were resolved, that would mean that Israel would be a normal country. Not armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and intimidating and oppressing the indigenous people, but a normal country living with equality within its own sphere. If that happened, if that were resolved, Im not saying that peace would suddenly break out all over the Middle East, but it would be the beginning.

DB: Do you see the boycott/divestment movement as a hopeful light? Clearly, people who have supported it in the US, students and teachers, have suffered great repression. But do you see this as a viable movement? In some ways it is modeled on the South African anti-apartheid movement.

JP: All you have to do is look at the reaction in Israel. They are terrified of it. They have brought all kinds of pressure to bear on governments, particularly the British government, to stop the BDS movement having an influence. Just the other day, a court judgment found that local councils in Britain could indeed boycott, dis-invest and sanction whoever they please. The British government had told them they couldnt. Well, they can.

The BDS movement really worries the Israeli regime because its popular. In Norway, the biggest trade union has endorsed it. Student bodies in the United States are going along with it. People have had their say and they have voted for it. It represents a kind of local democracy. Its much more widespread in the United States than people realize and it certainly is across Europe.

BDS on its own is not going to bring about freedom for the Palestinians. In South Africa, the sanctions did undoubtedly have an effect. But White South Africa managed to get around the sanctions. It was when it lost a powerful friend, when the Reagan administration decided that South Africa was causing more trouble than it was worth and finally withdrew its support, that the system fell.

Im afraid that that is the way power works. But there is no doubt that power is always influenced by popular movements such as BDS. Ultimately, I believe that the solution is in the United States. Without US backing in all its forms, Israel would have no choice but to become a normal country.

DB: It is interesting to see how strong the reaction has been to the boycott/divestment movement. Professors have lost their jobs, kids have been beaten up. Below the corporate media surface, it has really been reverberating out there in the grassroots.

Dennis J Bernstein is a host of Flashpoints on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom . You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net .

John Pilgers website is http://johnpilger.com/
Zombies R Us

By John W. Whitehead

Monsters in movies are us, always us, one way or the other. Theyre us with hats on. The zombies in George Romeros movies are us. Theyre hungry. Monsters are us, the dangerous parts of us. The part that wants to destroy. The part of us with the reptile brain. The part of us thats vicious and cruel. We express these in our stories as the monsters out there. The zombies are back. They are hungry. And they are lurking around every corner.Filmmaker John Carpenter

RIP George Romero (1940-2017).

July 19, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - Romeroa filmmaker hailed as the architect of the zombie genreis dead at the age of 77 , but the zombified police state culture he railed against lives on.

Just take a look around you.

We the people have become the walking dead of the American police state.

Were still plagued by the socio-political evils of cultural apathy, materialism, domestic militarism and racism that Romero depicted in his Night of the Living Dead trilogy.

Romeros zombies have taken on a life of their own in pop culture, as well.

Indeed, you dont have to look very far anymore to find them lurking around every corner: wreaking havoc in movie blockbusters, running for their lives in 5K charity races, and putting government agents through their paces in mock military drills arranged by the Dept. of Defense (DOD) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

In fact, the CDC put together a zombie apocalypse preparation kit that details everything you would need to have on hand in the event the living dead showed up at your front door.

Zombies also embody the governments paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats that need to be monitored, tracked, surveilled, sequestered, deterred, vanquished and rendered impotent.

Case in point: in AMCs hit television series The Walking Dead and the spinoff Fear the Walking Dead, its not just flesh-eating ghouls and cannibalistic humans that survivors have to worry about but the police state tasked with protecting the vulnerable that poses some of the gravest threats to the citizenry .

As David Sims writes for the Atlantic :

More than anything, Fear the Walking Dead is a drama about occupation, the breakdown of society, and the ease with which seemingly decent people can decide that might makes right. Like any dystopian fiction, its easy to dismiss as fantasy, but remove the zombies and Fear could be taking place in dozens of real-world locations This is happening here  but it could happen anywhere.

Why the fascination with zombies?

Perhaps its because zombie fiction provides us with a way to envision how we and our own would thrive if everything went to hell and we lost all our societal supports. As Time magazine reporter James Poniewozik phrases it, the  apocalyptic drama lets us face the end of the world once a week and live .

Writing for the New York Times, Terrence Rafferty notes :

In the case of zombie fiction, you have to wonder whether our 21st-century fascination with these hungry hordes has something to do with a general anxiety, particularly in the West, about the planets dwindling resources: a sense that there are too many people out there, with too many urgent needs, and that eventually these encroaching masses, dimly understood but somehow ominous in their collective appetites, will simply consume us. At this awful, pinched moment of history we look into the future and see a tsunami of want bearing down on us, darkening the sky. The zombie is clearly the right monster for this glum mood , but its a little disturbing to think that these nonhuman creatures, with their slack, gaping maws, might be serving as metaphors for actual peopleundocumented immigrants, say, or the entire populations of developing nationswhose only offense, in most cases, is that their mouths and bellies demand to be filled.

In other words, zombies are the personification of our darkest fears.

Fear and paranoia have become hallmarks of the modern American experience, impacting how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.

Fear makes people stupid .

Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.

The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is working on the American populace.

Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist , we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an endthe source of money and power.

We have allowed ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.

Most everyone keeps their heads down these days while staring zombie-like into an electronic screen, even when theyre crossing the street. Families sit in restaurants with their heads down, separated by their screen devices and unaware of whats going on around them. Young people especially seem dominated by the devices they hold in their hands, oblivious to the fact that they can simply push a button, turn the thing off and walk away.

Indeed, there is no larger group activity than that connected with those who watch screensthat is, television, lap tops, personal computers, cell phones and so on. In fact, a Nielsen study reports that American screen viewing is at an all-time high. For example, the average American watches approximately 151 hours of television per month .

Psychologically, such screen consumption is similar to drug addiction . Research shows that regardless of the programming, viewers brain waves slow down, thus transforming them into a more passive, nonresistant state .

Historically, television has been used by those in authority to quiet discontent and pacify disruptive people. Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet , according to Newsweek.

Given that the majority of what Americans watch on television is provided through channels controlled by six mega corporations , what we watch is now controlled by a corporate elite and, if that elite needs to foster a particular viewpoint or pacify its viewers, it can do so on a large scale.

We are being controlled by forces beyond our control.

This is how the police state takes charge.

As the Atlantic notes, The villains of [Fear the Walking Dead] arent the zombies, who rarely appear, but the U.S. military, who sweep into an L.A. suburb to quarantine the survivors. Zombies are, after all, a recognizable threatbut Fear plumbs drama and horror from the betrayal by institutions designed to keep people safe .

What we are experiencing is a betrayal of the very core valuesa love of freedom, an adherence to the rule of law, a spirit of democracy, a commitment to accountability and transparency, and a recognition that civilian rule must always trump military methodsthat have guided this nation from its inception.

The challenge is not whether we can hold onto our freedoms in times of peace and prosperity, but whether we can do so when all hell breaks loose.

Fear the Walking Dead drives this point home by setting viewers down in the midst of societal unrest not unlike our own current events (a bunch of weird incidents, police protests, riots, and  rapid social entropy). Then, as Forbes reports, the military showed up and we fast-forwarded into an ad hoc police state with no glimpse at what was happening in the world around our main cast of hapless survivors.

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that it will not take much for the governmenti.e., the militaryto lock down the nation in the event of a national disaster.

The government is not out to keep us safe by monitoring our communications, tracking our movements, criminalizing our every action, treating us like suspects, and stripping us of our means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons.

No, this is not security. It is an ambush. And it is being carried out in plain sight.

For example, for years now, the government has been carrying out military training drills with zombies as the enemy. In 2011, the DOD created a 31-page instruction manual for how to protect America from a terrorist attack carried out by zombie forces. In 2012, the CDC released a guide for surviving a zombie plague . That was followed by training drills for members of the military, police officers and first responders .

The zombie exercises appeared to be kitschy and fungovernment agents running around trying to put down a zombie rebellionbut what if the zombies in the exercises are us, the citizenry, viewed by those in power as mindless, voracious, zombie hordes?

Consider this: the government started playing around with the idea of using zombies as stand-ins for enemy combatants in its training drills right around the time the Army War College issued its 2008 report , warning that an economic crisis in the U.S. could lead to massive civil unrest that would require the military to intervene and restore order.

That same year, it was revealed that the government had amassed more than 8 million names of Americans considered a threat to national security , to be used by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. The programs name, Main Core , refers to the fact that it contains copies of the main core or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.

Also in 2008, the Pentagon launched the Minerva Initiative , a $75 million military-driven research project focused on studying social behavior in order to determine how best to cope with mass civil disobedience or uprisings. The Minerva Initiative has funded projects such as Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why? which  conflates peaceful activists with supporters of political violence who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on armed militancy themselves.

In 2009, the Dept. of Homeland Security issued its reports on Rightwing and Leftwing Extremism , in which the terms extremist and terrorist were used interchangeably to describe citizens who were disgruntled or anti-government.

Meanwhile, a government campaign was underway to spy on Americans mail , email and cell phone communications. News reports indicate that the U.S. Postal Service has handled more than 150,000 requests by federal and state law enforcement agencies to monitor Americans mail, in addition to photographing every piece of mail sent through the postal system .

Fast forward a few years more and you have local police being transformed into extensions of the military , taught to view members of their community as suspects, trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and equipped with all of the technology and weaponry of a soldier on a battlefield.

In 2015, the Obama administration hired a domestic terrorism czar whose job is to focus on anti-government American extremists who have been designated a greater threat to America than ISIS or al Qaeda . As part of the governments so-called war on right-wing extremism, the Obama administration agreed to partner with the United Nations to take part in its Strong Cities Network program , which is training local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism.

In other words, those who believe in and exercise their rights under the Constitution (namely, the right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share their political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), are now at the top of the governments terrorism watch list .

Earlier this year, it was revealed that the Pentagon has been using a dystopian training video to prepare armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems which they anticipate arising by 2030. Its only five minutes long, but the military training video says a lot about the governments mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called problems that the military must be prepared to address in the near future, which include criminal networks, illicit economies, decentralized syndicates of crime, substandard infrastructure, religious and ethnic tensions, impoverishment, economic inequality, protesters, slums, open landfills, over-burdened sewers, and a growing mass of unemployed.

Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesnt say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of using the military to address political and social problems.

Noticing a pattern yet?

We the people or, more appropriately, we the zombies are the enemy in the eyes of the government.

So when presented with the Defense Departments battle plan for defeating an army of the walking dead , you might find yourself tempted to giggle over the fact that a taxpayer-funded government bureaucrat actually took the time to research and write about vegetarian zombies, evil magic zombies, chicken zombies, space zombies, bio-engineered weaponized zombies, radiation zombies, symbiant-induced zombies, and pathogenic zombies.

However, in an age of extreme government paranoia, this is no laughing matter.

The DODs strategy for dealing with a zombie uprising, outlined in  CONOP 8888 , is for all intents and purposes a training manual for the government in how to put down a citizen uprising or at least an uprising of individuals infected with dangerous ideas about freedom.

Rest assured that the tactics and difficulties outlined in the  fictional training scenario  are all too real, beginning with martial law.

So how does the military plan to put down a zombie (a.k.a. disgruntled citizen) uprising?

The strategy manual outlines five phases necessary for a counter-offensive: shape, deter, seize initiative, dominate, stabilize and restore civil authority. Here are a few details:

Phase 0 (Shape): Conduct general zombie awareness training. Monitor increased threats (i.e., surveillance). Carry out military drills. Synchronize contingency plans between federal and state agencies. Anticipate and prepare for a breakdown in law and order.

Phase 1 (Deter): Recognize that zombies cannot be deterred or reasoned with. Carry out training drills to discourage other countries from developing or deploying attack zombies and publicly reinforce the governments ability to combat a zombie threat. Initiate intelligence sharing between federal and state agencies. Assist the Dept. of Homeland Security in identifying or discouraging immigrants from areas where zombie-related diseases originate.

Phase 2 (Seize initiative): Recall all military personal to their duty stations. Fortify all military outposts. Deploy air and ground forces for at least 35 days. Carry out confidence-building measures with nuclear-armed peers such as Russia and China to ensure they do not misinterpret the governments zombie countermeasures as preparations for war. Establish quarantine zones. Distribute explosion-resistant protective equipment. Place the military on red alert. Begin limited scale military operations to combat zombie threats . Carry out combat operations against zombie populations within the United States that were previously U.S. citizens.

Phase 3 (Dominate): Lock down all military bases for 30 days. Shelter all essential government personnel for at least 40 days. Equip all government agents with military protective gear. Issue orders for military to kill all non-human life on sight. Initiate bomber and missile strikes against targeted sources of zombie infection, including the infrastructure. Burn all zombie corpses. Deploy military to lock down the beaches and waterways.

Phase 4 (Stabilize): Send out recon teams to check for remaining threats and survey the status of basic services (water, power, sewage infrastructure, air, and lines of communication). Execute a counter-zombie ISR plan to ID holdout pockets of zombie resistance. Use all military resources to target any remaining regions of zombie holdouts and influence. Continue all actions from the Dominate phase.

Phase 5 (Restore civil authority): Deploy military personnel to assist any surviving civil authorities in disaster zones. Reconstitute combat capabilities at various military bases. Prepare to redeploy military forces to attack surviving zombie holdouts. Restore basic services in disaster areas.

Notice the similarities?

Surveillance. Military drills. Awareness training. Militarized police forces. Martial law.

Mind you, the government is not being covert about any of this. Its all out in the open.

If there is any lesson to be learned, it is simply this: as I point out in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People , whether the threat to national security comes in the form of actual terrorists, imaginary zombies or disgruntled American citizens infected with dangerous ideas about freedom, the governments response to such threats remains the same: detect, deter and annihilate.

Its time to wake up, America, before you end up with a bullet to the head (the only proven means of killing a zombie).

As television journalist Edward R. Murrow warned in a 1958 speech:

We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent . We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute . His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org .
Pentagon Furious After Turkey Leaks U.S. Base Locations In Syria





"Hard Not To See This As A F-You"



By Tyler Durden

July 19, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - So much for NATO-alliance members working for the common good.

In a move that has angered the U.S. for obvious reason, Turkeys state-run news agency Anadolu Agency has leaked the precise locations of U.S. bases in northern Syria. The move - which exposes the exact locations of American soldiers on the front lines in the war-torn nation - has sent the ongoing feud between the two NATO allies to new lows. As Bloomberg details , in reports published in both Turkish and English on Tuesday, Anadolu provided detailed information about 10 U.S. bases in northern Syria, including troop counts and a map of the U.S. force presence in the Turkish version.

Without citing specific sources, the state-run news agency unveiled the ten US outposts located in areas controlled by terrorist Kurdish militias in the provinces of Aleppo, Hasakah and Raqqa. The reports said that the military outposts are usually hidden for security reasons, making it hard to be detected. It said they were located in the terrorist PKK/PYD-held Syrian territories, a reference to Kurdish groups that Turkeys government considers terrorist organizations.

While locations of two of the bases, in Rmeilan district (in Hasakah province) and Harab Isk village (near Kobani, in Aleppo province), had already been widely publicized, the others had been mentioned only in outside reports, or were completely unknown. Anadolus story also provided systematic and detailed information about troop numbers, equipment, and US operational procedures at the outposts.

Needless to say, the Pentagon was furious.

According to the Daily Beast , Washington was so incensed that it even tried to prevent US media from reprinting the story, after it had already appeared in the Turkish media.

The discussion of specific troop numbers and locations would provide sensitive tactical information to the enemy which could endanger Coalition and partner forces, Colonel Joe Scrocca, director of public affairs for Operation Inherent Resolve, reportedly wrote to the New York-based Daily Beast, which was the only major US outlet to pick up the story by Wednesday morning.

Publishing this type of information would be professionally irresponsible and we respectively request that you refrain from disseminating any information that would put Coalition lives in jeopardy, Scrocca added.

It is no secret that over the past few years Turkey and the U.S. have been at odds over the U.S. backing of Kurdish fighters in Syria who are affiliated with separatist movements inside Turkey. The Turkish government probably leaked U.S. troop locations to Anadolu as retaliation, according to Aaron Stein, a fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

The U.S. takes force protection seriously, obviously, Stein said by email on Wednesday. The Turkish government knows this, and still decided to leak the locations of U.S. bases in Syria. Hard not to see this as a F-you.

Indeed, on Monday, Turkeys National Security Council proclaimed that the Syrian-based YPD is the same organization as the separatist PKK that operates inside the country, and which Turkey has branded as terrorist. Turkish officials said that weapons freely flow between the two groups, and last month accused Washington of arming terrorists, saying that some allies apply double standards.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon said it had conveyed its concern to the Turkish government.

While we cannot independently verify the sources that contributed to this story, we would be very concerned if officials from a NATO ally would purposefully endanger our forces by releasing sensitive information,  Major Adrian J.T. Rankine-Galloway, a Defense Department spokesman, said in an emailed statement. The release of sensitive military information exposes Coalition forces to unnecessary risk and has the potential to disrupt ongoing operations to defeat ISIS.

According to Bloomberg, Levent Tok, an Anadolu Agency reporter on the story, said the information about U.S. troop positions wasnt leaked. "The story was based on field work by Anadolus Syria reporters and some of the information on bases had been broadcast on social media by Kurdish fighters", he told Bloomberg on Wednesday. The U.S. should have thought about this before it cooperated with a terrorist organization, he said.

The Anadolu report claims that the US operates several types of facilities in the Kurdish-controlled territories. Some are field-type military points which are usually hidden for security reasons, making it hard to be detected. The most prominent of these is Rmeilan, established in the Al-Hasakah province in October 2015. It has an airfield through which cargo planes deliver weapons to the fighters  one of the two major arms routes into the country, along with a land route from Iraq, according to the news agency. Another is Harab Isk, a helicopter base set up near Kobani in March 2016.

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Apart from the more traditional facilities, the US-led coalition uses some other places which are hard to be detected like residential areas, PKK/YPD camps, easily transformed factories. Eight of the facilities are staffed with officers responsible for airstrikes and artillery shelling, military consultants, training officers, [and] operational planning officers.

The equipment in the military points includes artillery batteries with high maneuverability, multi-barrel rocket launchers, various mobile equipment for intelligence and armored vehicles such as Stryker for general patrols and security, the report adds.

* * *

The incident was the latest to strain relations between Turkey and a major NATO ally.

Last week, a senior Turkish official told Bloomberg that Turkey had agreed to purchase a missile defense system from Russia, a move that could jeopardize Turkeys relations with the Western security bloc. Germany is in the process of withdrawing from Turkeys most important NATO base, Incirlik, after Turkey repeatedly refused to allow German lawmakers to visit troops there.
The Torture-Friendly Trump Administration





Only stupid people say torture works  and one of them is sitting in the White House.



By Medea Benjamin

It should come as no surprise to anyone that Donald Trump is pro-torture. He said on the campaign trail hed approve waterboarding in a heartbeat, plus  a hell of a lot worse.

He added : Only a stupid person would say it doesnt work.

There are certainly a lot of stupid people then, because everyone from interrogators to researchers have repeatedly concluded that torture doesnt work . People will say whatever you want them to say to make the pain stop, making torture not only inhumane but also bad for intelligence.

A 2009 Senate Armed Services Committee review concluded that torture damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority. Thats why the Senate voted in 2015 to turn the presidential ban on torture into official law.

To his credit, Trump did water down his original support for torture, allowing Defense Secretary James Mattis  who opposes torture  to override him.

But if the Trump administration is now opposed to torture, why are they nominating the architects of Americas torture fiasco to key posts?

Take Steven Bradbury , nominated to be general counsel for the Transportation Department. Bradbury is infamous for writing the legal memos authorizing CIA torture at the Bush Justice Department.

Bradburys confirmation was placed on hold by Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq veteran who lost her legs in the war. The actions you helped justify put our troops in harms way, put our diplomats deployed overseas in harms way, and you compromised our nations very values, she said angrily at his confirmation hearing.

Or what about Donald Trumps nominee to head the FBI, Christopher Wray?

Wray was at the Justice Department when attorney John Yoo and others were drafting their torture memos . Wray knew about detainee abuse and did not, as head of the criminal division, bring charges against any of the Bush administration torturers  except for one low-level CIA contractor who beat a prisoner to death.

A third person connected to torture is Gina Haspel, who was appointed deputy director of the CIA. Haspel ran a black site prison in Thailand where suspects were waterboarded  and then helped destroy video of the interrogations.

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The Senate Intelligence Committee meticulously documented the sordid U.S. record of torture under the Bush administration in a 6,770-page report. But the public hasnt been able to read it  only the executive summary has been released.

Yet this isnt just an exercise in history. In June, Human Rights Watch and the Associated Press published explosive reports revealing a secret network of prisons in southern Yemen run by U.S.-allied United Arab Emirates and Yemeni forces.

The reports reveal horrific practices in which prisoners, including children, have been arbitrarily detained, forcibly disappeared, sexually assaulted, and tortured. One torture method, known as the grill, had victims tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire.

Reports indicate that the U.S. military knew about the torture, received transcripts of the interrogations conducted by Yemeni interrogators, and interrogated several detainees themselves . According to one Yemeni security officer, American forces were only yards away from a facility where torture took place.

Senators John McCain and Jack Reed immediately expressed outrage, calling on the Trump administration to investigate the allegations. But the reaction of the White House to these revolting reports is telling: radio silence.

Trumps refusal to publicly condemn these secret prisons, together with the appointments of people who played a role in George W. Bushs torture program, should set off alarm bells.
An Article Called for John McCain to Just... Die Already.





A GOP official responded: Amen.



By Kristine Phillips

July 19, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - A member of the Republican National Committee in Nevada apologized after retweeting an article that begged for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to die.

Diana Orrock, a national committeewoman for the Nevada GOP, shared a story headlined Please Just Fing Die Already. In retweeting the piece, which was published on Medium, Orrock wrote Amen.

Several hours after posting the now-deleted tweet, Orrock apologized to McCain and to the Nevada and national GOP, calling the ailing senator an American hero  and her own post disrespectful.

The article was published on Medium  and shared by Orrock on Twitter  as McCain was recovering from eye surgery.

The Washington Post was unable to reach Orrock, but she told CNN on Monday, before she tweeted her apology, that she wasn't calling for the 80-year-old senator's death  just agreeing with the sentiments in the article.

In the article , writer Caitlin Johnstone said McCain can die a proud, happy man.

And he should, Johnstone added. Like, yesterday.

Throughout the article, Johnstone did not mince words. At all.

She described McCain as a murderous warmongering neocon and an evil man who has supported every US military bloodbath in his obscenely long lifetime.

She wrote:

If youre waiting for the part where I say Im just kidding and would never wish death on anybody, please allow me to make myself clear: I sincerely, genuinely hope that Arizona Senator John McCains heart stops beating, and that he is subsequently declared dead by qualified medical professionals very soon. I dont wish him a painful death, I dont wish him a slow death, I dont wish him an unnatural or violent death; I only wish that he becomes incapable of facilitating the merciless slaughter of any more human beings.

Orrock emphasized that she only wants McCain out of the Senate, not harmed or dead.

People are going to read things into things, she told CNN.

Republican National Committee spokesman Ryan Mahoney called Orrock's tweet extremely inappropriate.

Senator McCain is a hero who made countless sacrifices on behalf of all Americans, Mahoney said, according to the Associated Press . We look forward to his speedy recovery so he can return to the Senate and the work of the American people.

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Efforts to reach the Nevada GOP on Tuesday morning were unsuccessful.

McCain's office announced Saturday that he'd undergone a procedure at the Mayo Clinic to remove a blood clot above his left eye.

Dr. Philip D. Pulaski, a neurologist at The Neurology Center, explains what Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) faces as he recovers from surgery after having a blood clot removed from the area above his left eye. (Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post)

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced on the same day that he would delay the vote on the Republican health-care bill as McCain recovers. Two nights later, the effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare, suffered a major blow after two more Senate Republicans declared their opposition to the latest version of the bill.

Orrock, who told CNN that she doesn't agree with McCain on foreign policy, has been a committeewoman for the Nevada GOP since 2012. She ran for the 9th District of the Nevada General Assembly in 2016, but lost to the incumbent, David Gardner, in the primary election. Gardner was later defeated by Democratic candidate Steve Yeager.

Orrock told the Las Vegas Review Journal last year that she decided to run against Gardner after he voted for a $1.5 billion tax package to bolster education funding.

I think a lot of politicians have lost sight of what they're supposed to be doing. They're supposed to be representative of the people who elected them, not the lobbyists, she said then, adding: If that wasn't a slap in the face of the voters in Nevada I don't know what.

She has also been a vocal supporter of President Trump.

In October, after The Post broke the story about an Access Hollywood tape in which Trump could be heard making vulgar remarks about women, Orrock said she wasn't offended by Trump's goofy comments.

We understand the context of that conversation from 11 years ago for exactly what it was, two guys talking, trying to outdo each other as to who caught the bigger fish, she told the Boston Globe . And to think men don't talk that way about women and women don't talk that way about men, I tell you what, you're living in a very protected world of unreality.

She also denounced a U.S. Senate candidate from Nevada who decided to not support Trump because of the Access Hollywood tape.

I am no longer endorsing Joe Heck in the Senate race, Orrock said in October, according to CNBC . How hypocritical of him to denounce Trump on comments that were 12 years old and locker room banter? By not endorsing Trump, he is supporting Hillary.

That same month, she tweeted a list of Republican politicians who opposed Trump, calling for her social media followers to vote them out of office.

Kristine Phillips is a general assignment reporter for The Washington Post. Contact her at kristine.phillips@washpost.com.

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Dear Mr. Putin: Time to Give Up on Better Relations with America

By Joseph Mussomeli

Dear President Putin: It is no use trying any further to accommodate the United States or cooperate with it. We cannot afford any more concessions. It is clear that the United States only respects force and firmness...

Dear Mr. President: The below memorandum regarding Russian-American bilateral relations was drafted by my Ministrys Department of North America. I do not share completely all the views espoused by my Foreign Ministry colleaguessometimes they seem too harsh, even shrill, in their analysis of the United Statesbut I suspect their assessment closely reflects the views of the average Russian, so I believe it would be useful for you to read their analysis unadulterated by my edits. Because of the sensitivity of the conclusion reached, I have classified this assessment as top secret/eyes only. Sincerely yours, Sergei.

July 19, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - The July 7th meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin could have been the beginning of that long-awaited breakthrough in our worsening relations with the United States. Instead, that meeting served only to confirm that there is no longer any chance that we can forestall a new Cold War. Of course, for many American policymakers the Cold War is already here or, perhaps more precisely, for many in the West the Cold War never really ended. They never knew how to handle a more cooperative and friendly relationship with Russia, and are now oddly reassured and comforted that tensions are rising. You will recall how many high-level American officials during the Nineties nostalgically lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union because the world became less predictable and more muddled.

But this new Cold Waror more accurately, phase two of the original Cold Warwill be worse than its predecessor from 1948-1990. This is because all the American elites are now united in their distrust and disdain for Russia as never before in our bilateral history. Although we pose no existential threat to America, embrace no ideology anathema to their way of life, and have dramatically reduced our territory while at the same time dramatically increasing our cooperation with America on a full range of issues over the last two decades, they remain dissatisfied. Indeed, one could argue that the more we give in, the more unreasonable they have become in their demands. When the National Review, the New Republic, the Nation, and the Washington Post are all bleating like good sheep the same uninformed half-truths about Russia, you know that building better relations is now impossible.

The American Psyche

Americans are perhaps unique in the world in their view of the worldthey are truly a conflicted people: they know less about history and the rest of the world than any other developed country, yet they deem themselves experts on all things. More intriguingly, they feel a messianic impulse to save the world, while at the same harboring deep resentment when the world intrudes on them. They are, paradoxically, irredeemably isolationist and compulsively interventionist.

But what is most important to understand about America is that it is not evil. The American people and their leaders are good-hearted and always mean well. Such silly leftwing notions of America the Evil need to be cast aside, onto the trash heap of history so to speak, with so many other myths. They want only to do goodand that is what makes America so dangerous. They do not have a lust for power, nor truly a craving for wealth. But they do lust for glory and they do crave admiration. A white knight on a noble steed, erratically trampling the rest of the world into submission with benign intent.

What is most infuriating about Americas self-image, however, is the ease with which it deflects its own foibles and inclinations onto the rest of the world. For example, the long-held belief among Americans of every political stripe that Russia only understands force and toughness. But hasnt the history of the last several decades shown just the opposite? It is the United States that never sees a concession as an effort at compromise, but instead views every concession as a victory for themselves. One glaring example that puts this into stark relief are the two pivotal events of 1989: the Tiananmen slaughter of peaceful demonstrators and the peaceful tearing down of the Berlin Wall a few months later. The Chinese cracked down on the demonstrators ruthlessly and with considerable violence, and now that massacre is a fading memory and does not at all impede relations with the West nor Chinas ascent to regional hegemony. But our decision not to crackdown on those demonstrators in Berlin, as we had done in years past in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, has caused us endless trouble with the West. Yes, it would have caused a great international crisis and yes Russia would have been severely lambasted by global leaders, but all that fury would have died down by now and all the blood we would have had to spill would have long dried. Our reluctance to killto use force and be toughand to keep what was ours at all cost has cost us dearly.

A Century of Interference

Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of American involvementinterferencein our domestic affairs. It was in 1918 that then President Wilson sent 13,000 American soldiers as part of the multinational invasion force to topple our government. This is a small footnote in history that shamefully few Americans even know about, but even those who know about it justify it because their intentions were good. That is after all the eternal American defense: we meant well. It is a universally applied principle, so for example it doesnt matter that tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead and hundreds of thousands more are homeless and broken because the Americans meant well! It is of little importance that the United States militarily interfered in over a dozen Latin American countries because it also meant well in those places, too. The same for the dozen or more interventions and invasions in the Middle East and Asia. The intent is always good so the results dont matter.

It would be unfair not to admit we too have fallen prey to this self-delusion in our past. Like the average American today who is blissfully oblivious to the harm done because the intent was good, we once felt equally vindicated in all our actions since Marx and Lenin had taught us we had history on our side. But weve grown up; America never will. It always believes its actions are sanctioned by God and its mistakes forgiven by that same God. That is enough to salve any conscience.

The other mental technique employed with great effect by the Americans is having a dual timeline to history; this technique impressively reinforces its good intentions defense. Whenever one raises a past transgressione.g., their interference in various democratic electionsMosaddegh in Iran, Allende in Chile, etc.these offenses are all characterized as ancient history. Whereas when they assess the actions of Russia or any other enemy state, past transgressions are never ancient history; instead, our past aggressions are always seen as an immutable pattern of bad behavior that will never cease unless confronted. Thus, Czar Peters desire for a warm water port three centuries ago is still believed a Russian obsession, while the United States obsession with maintaining absolute hegemony over all of Latin America is a harmless relic of a distant past. Yet, American interference in domestic elections continues unabated. Certainly not as heavy-handed as in the past, but still inexcusable and inappropriate. We need only recall former Secretary of State Clinton publicly criticizing our own 2012 elections: The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted. And that means they deserve free, fair, transparent elections and leaders who are accountable to them. A remarkable statement, without a hint of irony, from a woman who had no hesitation to rig the party rules to ensure her own nomination as the Democratic party candidate in 2016.

But this cognitive historical dissonance is best exemplified in the United States outrage over our annexation of Crimea, which has always been overwhelmingly populated by Russians. For nearly two hundred years Crimea was part of Russia, when in 1954 for purely domestic political reasons it was internally transferred from Russia to Ukraine, both of which were parts of the Soviet Union! Never was it envisioned at that time that Ukraine would ever become an independent state and even when it became one never was it envisioned that the Russian Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol would be threatened. How does this compare to Americas continued occupation of the Cuban port of Guantanamo? Is that naval port intrinsic to the security of the United States? Is it populated by an overwhelming number of Americans? Was it historically ever a part of the United States? Of course, the answer is no to all these questions. Yet, the United States sees no hypocrisy and inconsistency in its retention of Guantanamo despite Cubas legitimate demand to have it returned. It is amusing that the world focuses on the detention center for alleged terrorists at Guantanamo and no oneother than the Cuban governmentsees the far greater outrage in the refusal of the United States to give back to Cuba what was taken at the point of a gun in 1903. Gunboat diplomacy may be condemned by the United States now, but it refuses to give up the fruits of its own past employment of military extortion.

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The Tragedy of the Last Thirty Years

Since Mikhail Gorbachevs 1986 Vladivostok speech, we have tried to reach a true accommodation with America. In that speech, largely ignored in the United States at the time, we announced that we would substantially draw down our troops in Afghanistan with an expectation of finding a political solution that would allow our complete withdrawal. The American analysis should have been instructive and served as a warning: American policymakers dismissed any possibility that we would withdraw our troops and insisted that the promise of a troop withdrawal was a ruse not to be taken seriously. At the same time, they explained that if we did withdraw troops it would only be because we had been defeated! We should have taken this early warning more seriously about the American penchant for holding two opposing views simultaneously. This same American assessment occurred in the months leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall: that we would never allow it to happen, and then that we could not stop it from happening becauseagain!we had been defeated.

The path from those early defeats to our present dire predicament was easy to see, but we were yearned for better relations. When Germany united, we allowed iteven agreeing to keep a united Germany within NATO. But we made clear that would be the extent of NATOs expansion eastward. Gorbachev in his memoirs underscores that NATO provided assurances that it would not expand further toward our border. Indeed, in 1990 it is hard to believe that anyone even considered the prospect of our former allies joining NATO! But soon they did, and again we remained silent. First former President Clinton allowed various former Warsaw Pact countries to join, then former President Bush added insult to that injury by even allowing former Soviet republics to join. At the same time, Gorbachevs suggestion that we be allowed to have a pathway to NATO membership was dismissed out of hand! We were being hemmed in on all sides and all we sought was better relations and to become fully integrated into the Western community.

But to America and NATO we had already amply signaled our weakness and unwillingness to stand up to them, so the threats to our security kept multiplying. One of our few remaining allies, Serbia, had a portion of its territory annexed that became the separate state of Kosovo. This abrogated the crucial understanding among all European states to keep all national borders intact. The sanctity of borders had kept the peace for five decades, but now it was to be tossed aside at the whim of the Americans! (Amazingly, when we did the same thing with Crimeataking Kosovo as precedentwe were roundly attacked.) Yet we accepted the partition of Serbia in order to maintain good relations and we again we kept our mouths shut.

Then in 2002, in light of the horrific 9/11 attacks, former President Bush unexpectedly and mystifyingly withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Had the Americans forgotten that we had originally opposed such a treaty back in 1967? Had they forgotten that it took them five long years of negotiations to convince us to embrace the ABM Treaty, but once it was signed in 1972 we adhered to it completely and came to accept that it was a cornerstone of our relationship with America. But when Bush abrogated the treaty we said very little: that it was a mistake but that withdrawing from the treaty would not have any serious impact on our warm relations. Showing his formidable intellectual prowess, Bush explained that the ABM treaty needed to be abrogated because four hijacked planes had caused widespread destruction on American soil. Of course, an ABM system would have been completely ineffective against such an attack anyway, but that somehow was beside the point. Feeling sympathy for the American tragedy we did nothing to oppose this decision.

Yet even this was not enough obeisance. In 2007, again using the pretext of defending itself and its allies from a different threat, the United States proposed placing a missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, countries once our allies. In 2009 former President Obama declared that the United States would abandon this proposal, but now a site is already operational in Romania and another will be operational in Poland in another year. At the same time, NATO continues its inexorable march eastward. The understanding that no NATO troops would be stationed on the territory of the new NATO members, such as the Baltic states and Poland, is no longer viable. Using so-called Russian aggression as a pretext, NATO is deploying more and more troops closer and closer to our border. It was not until the United States and NATO pushed to undermine Ukraine, orchestrating the removal of a democratically elected president, that we finally started to find our voice and our courage to stand up and say enough.

What Once Was and What Is to Be

Apart from a very brief period of genuine cooperation during the great global struggle against fascism and Nazism, the United States has worked tirelessly to weaken us and bring us to our knees. And how it characterizes that global conflict indicates just how distorted and flawed a view of history the United States embraces. Read any American high school history textbook or watch any Hollywood movie about World War II and you would think that America almost singlehandedly saved the world. Yes, their production capabilities were prodigious and their logistics unrivaled, and their soldiers did fight bravely, but they could never have won without Russia. They mourn the loss of 400,000 Americans, yet think our loss of 20 million Russians just an incidental matter. It was Russian blood more than American production that defeated Germany, but that indisputable fact is found nowhere in the books or hearts of Americans. The Americans faced a German army of only 1,500,000, while we were fighting nearly five times that many Germans. Do the Americans really believe they ever would have gotten off the Normandy beaches had the Germans been able to deploy even a few more troops to the Western front? But they all like to bask in the glow of what they unthinkingly describe as that greatest generation of Americans, while we must shoulder the burden of having endured the greatest loss of a generation of Russians.

A rapidly expanding and aggressive China and a determinedly nihilistic and ruthless Islamic fundamentalism are Americas true threats, but if they cannot see that themselves, we will never succeed in showing it to them. They should be eager to form closer ties with Russia, both to counter China in the East and to safeguard NATO in the west. Are we not part of that same broad Western civilization that they all ought to want to preserve? But only President Trump appears to understand the value of better relations. However, in a sad, strange twist, we would probably be better off if Trump denounced us. Given how the American elites both on the right and the left view Trump, it has become a liability to have him defend us and try to foster better relations for one simple reason: any policy or idea he espouses is automatically assumed to be tainted and twisted.

Given this reality, it is no use trying any further to accommodate the United States or cooperate with it. Our unprecedented and crucial logistical support to the United States in its Afghanistan campaign is already forgotten, and our willingness to cooperate in Syria and elsewhere is always presumed as diabolical attempts to resurrect a long-faded glory and long-lost empire. Perhaps someday the United States will come to its senses, but until then we must safeguard our own interests and ensure our own security. We cannot afford any more concessions. It is clear that the United States only respects force and firmness. If the psychological term that best fits the United States is cognitive historical dissonance, then the psychological term that best fits our foreign policy toward the United States for the last 30 years is battered spouse syndrome. We need to stop making excuses for the United States, we need to stop blaming our own past behavior for their current actions, and we certainly need to say enough is enough and just admit this relationship is broken.

Joseph Mussomeli served for almost thirty-five years as an American diplomat, including tours in Egypt, Afghanistan, Morocco, and the Philippines. He was the U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Slovenia and the Kingdom of Cambodia. Before entering the U.S. Foreign Service in 1980, he worked as a Deputy Attorney General in New Jersey.

This article was first published by The Imaginative Conservative -

 The Imaginative Conservative
Chioma Fidelis, a 20-year-old mother of one, has been arrested for selling her baby, Favour Fidelis, in exchange for half a bag of rice, chairs, provisions and some bags of cement for her to build a house. The young mother who hails from Ehime Mbano local government area of Imo confessed to the crime when she was paraded along with other suspects by Mr Chris Ezike, the commissioner of police in Imo state. The commissioner of police revealed that the arrest of the child traffickers was done on Monday, July 10, 2017 by some members of the surveillance team. Fidelis was arrested along with forty other suspects.

So I decided to sell the child. They told me that they sold the child for Seven hundred thousand naira. I did not collect any money from them. They gave me half bag of rice, chairs, provisions and bags of cement which I used to repair my house, Fidelis said. A 34-year-old woman identified as Mrs Chidinma Unakala Mgba from Mbomiri in Mbaitoli local government area of Imo was also dragged into the plot as she was assisted in the selling of the child. Mgba said the mother of the child had complained about her responsibilities. When the mother brought the baby to me and I took the baby to the hospital and the hospital confirmed that the baby was suffering from kwashoko. From there, I started taking him to various churches to get healing and I succeeded. I spent one hundred and thirty seven thousand naira. I spent two hundred thousand naira on the mother. The buyers of the child were identified as Mr Jonas and Salomi Anyanwu from Umunakanu. The woman confessed to the crime too stating how she and her husband ended up with the baby.

It is true that my husband brought the money that we use in buying the child. Let me tell you, because we need the child my husband had to borrow money, 700,000 and give it to Chidimma, and collect the child. I wanted to reject the child but because of God I collected the child and started training him, she said.
Thailand's new king, who succeeded his late father last year, has tightened control over what is reputed to be the world's richest royal fortune, estimated to be worth more than $30 billion.

A law that became effective Monday places the Crown Property Bureau, essentially a holding company for the royal palace's assets, under King Maha Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun's direct control.

The bureau's assets represent the lion's share of the royal family's wealth, which Forbes magazine in 2011 estimated at more than $30 billion, much of it in real estate.


A graduate of Kwara Polytechnic, identified as Saidi Ayemojuba, who was recently arrested during a foiled robbery operation at a Lotto company in Ajagbadi area of Lagos, said he got into crime so he could provide for his family as he awaits the birth of his baby. Saidi who was paraded before newsmen yesterday, burst into tears after he was informed that the baby he said he went into crime for has been born.

An ex-convict, Saidi was part of an armed robbery syndicate that specializes in stealing from people that leave for their various places of work in the morning. He was arrested, charged to court and afterwards sent to jail. After his discharge, Saidi who is known as Aleeba by his gang members, said he took to robery again because he couldnt get another job. Speaking to newsmen during his parade, Saidi said

I decided to quit robbery when I came back from prison. But I could not find any good job even with my certificate. One day, I got a call from an inmate I met while in prison. He told me there was a job he would like me to execute. I met with other members of the gang . One of the members was a worker at a Lotto company at Ajangbadi, who told us that they usually left money .

We stormed the place at about 1pm . I stood at a vantage position , where I was given a bag containing the money. But one of the ladies in the company ran out and raised the alarm which led to my arrest. Others managed to escaped.

I was beaten until I passed out , only to find myself at the police station. One regret I have is not to have welcomed my new baby to the world. I dont know what they would tell her. I thought of using the lotto money to prepare for her arrival, after which I intended to quit robbery finally. I am naturally not a bad boy because anytime I came back from operation, a gush of guilt will overwhelm me. I went into this out of frustration. No job , even after having my HND

The Lagos state police commissioner, Fatai Oowoseni, who paraded him before newsmen, said he would soon be charged to court.

Source: ( Linda Ikeji )
The General Overseer of the Omega Fire Ministry, Apostle Johnson Suleiman warned Nigerians to against wishing President Muhammadu Buhari dead as no one has the power to kill or make live.

While the Man of God was addressing his church members, he noted that it is irresponsible of any Nigerian to wish the President dead despite his sickness. He, however, admonished Nigerians to pray for the well-being of the ailing president.

Only an irresponsible country will be wishing their leader dead. Its an irresponsible thing for people to be wishing Presidents death. Nobody who has a good heart will be wishing a leader dead. You dont wish your leader dead. Nigerians should be careful. Only God has the power of life and death. Stop wishing the President dead. If your husband is sick do you wish him death? Do you that man is somebodys husband? If your father is sick do you wish him death? That man is somebodys father. And you are wishing him dead. I know this thing Im saying some Christians wont like it. Stop wishing him dead. Pray for his health. Dont wish any leader dead. Only an irresponsible country will be wishing their leader dead., he established.

Suleiman also urged everyone to live in peace instead of allowing the crisis to prevail in the various regions of the country.
A Federal High Court in Abuja on Tuesday ordered that the former Governor of Jigawa State, Saminu Turaki be remanded at Kuje Prison, Abuja as he could not meet his bail condition over N37bn money laundering case.

This is coming barely five days after a High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, Maitama, Abuja, granted bail to the former governor.

Justice Nnamdi Dimgba of the Federal High Court granted bail to the ex-governor on fresh bail conditions on Tuesday, but ordered the defendant to remain in Kuje Prisons, Abuja, pending when the bail conditions were met.

According to PUNCH, Dimgba gave the order shortly after the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission re-arraigned Turaki and three companies on 32 counts of money laundering offences involving about N37bn.

Turaki was said to have allegedly committed the offences between 2006 and 2007 while in office.

Turaki, alongside his co-defendants  INC Natural Resources Ltd., Arkel Construction Nigeria Ltd and Wildcat Construction Ltd  were earlier arraigned before the Dutse, Jigawa State Division of the Federal High Court, in 2011.

But he was said to have since evaded trial until the EFCC, acting on an arrest warrant issued against Turaki by the court in Dutse about three years ago, arrested him on July 4, 2017, at an event in Abuja.

While the EFCC was facilitating how to produce him before the court in Dutse, the judge went on his annual vacation and Turaki then filed a rights enforcement suit before the FCT High Court in Abuja, seeking an order of the court releasing him from the anti-graft agencys custody.

He also filed an interlocutory application which he urged the court to consider before the hearing of the main suit.

The application was opposed by the EFCC on the grounds that with Turakis antecedent of jumping bail earlier granted him six years ago by the Federal High Court in Dutse and his evasion of the arrest warrant issued by the same court about three years ago, he would likely jump bail again.

But in his ruling on Thursday, Justice Yusuf Halilu of the FCT High Court granted bail to the ex-governor on conditions which merely required him to submit his travel documents to the registry of the court, produce two reasonable sureties residing in Abuja, and sign a register to be opened at the EFCCs office every two weeks.

But instead of releasing him, the EFCC filed afresh in the Federal High Court in Abuja, the same set of charges already pending against the defendants before the court in Dutse.

The anti-graft agency then re-arraigned Turaki and the three companies before Justice Dimgba in Abuja, being the only judge sitting as a vacation judge in the northern region of the country while the other Federal High Court judges proceed on vacation.

After Turaki pleaded not guilty to the 32 counts on Tuesday, Justice Dimgba said he was inclined to granting bail to the ex-governor in deference to the earlier bail granted the defendant by Justice Halilu of the FCT High Court.

He asked the prosecution and the defence led by Mr. Ahmed Raji (SAN), to agree on the bail conditions to be imposed on the defendant.

Source: ( PM News )
According to Sahara Reporters, President Muhammadu Buhari who left for the United Kingdom on May 7th, is scheduled to return to Nigeria on July 27th.

According to the controversial online news platform, Buhari is currently being managed by an inner caucaus known as a cabal and they have fixed a date for his return presumably for political reasons as Nigerians are currently demanding for answers about the whereabout and well-being of their President.

FLASH: Cabal around @NGRPresident Buhari make fresh plans for his return from London, allows wife unfettered access, new date is July 27th. the newspaper tweeted.

What is ailing President Buhari has been shrowded in secrecy but the alternative media has reported that the Fulani man might be dealing with cancer, Crohns disease and other sicknesses associated with being 74 years old.

Buharis wife  Aisha Buhari in a Facebook post had earlier insinuated that her husband will be returning soon with no date given.
DAAR Communications Plc, has accounted for a loss of N2.139 billion in 2016, up from N1.515bn in 2015, according to the chairman of the company, Chief Raymond Dokpesi Jnr, stated this at the combined 2015 and 2016 annual general meeting of the company held in Abuja. He attributed the loss to the recession Nigeria is currently struggling to come out of.

According to him, The adverse business environment together with the biting economic recession caused the 2016 turnover of the company to plummet to an all time low of N3.733 billion representing 47 per cent decline over 2015 earnings.

The loss after taxation in 2016 was N2.139 while in 2015 loss after taxation was N1.515 billion. As encapsulated earlier, the losses were as a result of the astronomical increase in cost of operations occasioned by the economic recession and the severe devaluation of the naira which could not be matched with corresponding growth in earnings as the advert budget in the industry declined in the ensuing period, he said.

Mr. Dokpesi Jnr, however assured shareholders that there was bright hope of returning the company to profitability in the coming years following a conscious business restructuring and operations digitalisation and expansion initiative project which is at its final implementation stage.

He said, as part of the initiatives, DAAR Communications has successfully resolved all her pending litigation matters in several courts arising from the last general elections in Nigeria in 2015 and in the process saved a lot of funds in litigation fees as some were settled out of court or struck out for want of evidence.

Source: ( PM News )
In order to curb the incessant malpractice by contractors in Nigeria, the Federal Government has launched a website to monitor contracts in the country.

In a bid to improve transparency and accountability in contracts entered into by public and private enterprises in the country, the Federal Government says it will launch a contract disclosure web portal.

The acting Director-General, Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC), Mr Chidi Izuwah said this on Wednesday in Abuja at a Public Private Partnership (PPP) training workshop organised by the World Bank.

Izuwah said that the ICRC and the World Bank had been working together to ensure more openness and transparency in PPPs in Nigeria. To this end, stakeholder engagements had taken place and an improved PPP Disclosure Framework developed with MDAs input and buy in.

There were currently 51 ongoing PPP projects, entered into by the Federal Government, cutting across all sectors and 77 pipeline projects which the public may not be aware of.

He said that the Website was set to launch at the end of August, 2017 and that all federal governments Ministries, Agencies and Departments were expected to disclose fully all their PPP contracts.

This disclosure initiative is designed to ensure that all non-confidential information relating to PPP contracts, both pre and post contract information is made available and easily accessible to members of the public.

The disclosure is expected to bring improvement and engender confidence in PPP contract transactions in Nigeria.

It is also hoped that Nigerians, through the disclosure, will be better educated and informed on the salient features of PPP contracts.

This includes agreed standards of service, scope of work, parties to the contract, general overview of the project, social and economic benefits of the project, as well as risk allocation and the actual performance levels achieved,he said.

Izuwah said that the portal was not just directed for local use, but would also serve to encourage foreign direct investments into the country. He said also that the new process would ensure that contractors keep their own side of the bargain.

For example, at the airport, what quality of service should you expect, what are your entitlements, what are you paying for?

All these information will be made available so that Nigerians will be equipped to be able to insist and get the services they are entitled to, he said.

Also, the Senior Consultant on Public Private Partnerships, World Bank Group, Mr Prashant Sharma said the bank was assisting Nigeria, Kenya,

Honduras and Ghana develop a PPP Contract Information Disclosure website.

He said this would improve transparency in the procurement process and when the website goes live in August, Nigeria would be the leading country in the world in transparency and accountability in PPP contracts.

We have been working with the ICRC over the last one year to develop an organized platform to actually deliver information and disclose information about public private partnership.

To create a platform through which all relevant information, useful for the public to know more about public private partnerships are made public in a organized and systemized way, he said.
Popular Nigerian comedian, Seyi Law, is at it again. The dark skinned comedian had been in the news for weeks now following the unending drama that ensued between him and Kemi Olunloyo, the daughter of the former governor of Oyo state.

This time around, the comedian posted a beautiful picture on his Instagram page with a caption to go with it.

While explaining the characters in the picture, the comedian allegedly threw an open shade at Hushpuppi, the Nigerian big boy who resides in Malaysia.

The caption shared by Seyi Law reads: Two Great Men And A Dog. One Dead Hero, A Living Legend in the making and Still a Dog. Because of instigators, Here is Nelson Mandela, SEYILAW and a PUPPI. Hush please.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BWtJCALBKvQ/

The words Puppi and Hush occurring in a sentence at the same time was too much of a coincident as people calculated and drew the conclusion that the comedian was definitely talking to Hushpuppi.

Hushpuppi on the other hand went mild as he caught the shade and reacted in a very mature way. He reached out to Seyi Law through a direct message and gave his opinion on the open sub.
UNILORIN Deputy Bursar, Oba has declared during the 9th Muktar Isale-Koto Annual Islamic Lecture, that its not a crime for children to hawk on the streets.

During the 9th Muktar Isale-Koto Annual Islamic Lecture that held at the University of Ilorin on Tuesday, the Deputy Bursar of the University declared that street hawking by children is not necessarily a crime, especially if the children do so when they are not meant to be in school. Dailypost Reports.

According to him, it was possible for a family to face economic recession even while the rest of the country was experiencing growth, hence, the need for children to help the family in making ends to meet.

I and members of my age group in those days hawked to augment the family income while we were children, yet many of us turned out successful professionals.

Oba further charged Muslim to restrain them from falling into the temptation of corruption, saying the vice was endemic among public servants.

Mallam Lukman Isale-Koto of the Bursary Unit of the university called for a paradigm shift in thinking that troublesome children were only fit for Islamic schools.

He urged managers of Arabic and Islamic institutions to upgrade their services by providing children-friendly environment conducive for learning.

Sheikh Muhydeen Al-Kubrah, the Chief Imam and Missioner of the UK-based Ansarul Rahman Islamic Association stressed the need for quality parenting.

It is indispensable in our quest for national development, he said.

Source: Yabaleftonline
The senator representing APC Jigawa North, Sen. Ubali Shitu has donated N20, 000 each to 30 victims of flood in Malammadori Local Government Area state.

Alhaji Fahad Muhammad, the Information Officer in the local government, made this known to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Dutse on Tuesday.

Muhammad said Shitu donated the money to mitigate the suffering of the victims when he visited them in Malammadori town.

The spokesman added that the lawmaker urged the victims to take the disaster an act of God.

According to him, the senator reiterated his commitment to ensuring the establishment of a Federal College of Education in Malammadori.

Source: ( PM News )
King of Instagram Dan Bilzerian has revealed hes in his first monogamous relationship. The 38-year-old poker player can regularly be seen cavorting with busty, scantily-clad models on his Instagram account that now boasts 22.6million followers.

King of Instagram Dan Bilzerian and model girlfriend.

But it looks like its going to be a thing of the past, as he is now dating mode Sofia Bevarly, who is 16 years younger than him.

He told Square Mile magazine: Yeah. Got a girlfriend. First time. Well, I had a girlfriend before, but I was still f**king other girls. Though he went on to admit he had slept with three girls the day he met her at a pool party. Wasnt exactly your storybook love at first sight. I think I f**ked like three girls before her that day. We just started hanging out Shes just a little different, you know? Shes smart, shes cool, and she liked a lot of the shit I like. So here we are.

He added: A girl has to be super-hot now for me to be even semi-interested. You just get pickier. I think thats true of everything. Money, toys, girls  all the hedonistic stuff. You just raise the bar.

Dan has posted a number of snaps of Sofia on his Instagram account since meeting her earlier this year, with her naturally flaunting her eye-popping assets in a range of skimpy bikinis.

Source: Naijaloaded
Hundreds of North Korean fishing boats have washed up on Japan's shores in the last five years after fishermen got lost at sea and died.

Japanese media quoted maritime police as saying 227 North Korean fishing boats have washed up there since January 2013. One Japanese government official said, "We can't reveal the number of dead North Koreans who have been discovered considering diplomatic repercussions."

Yoshihiko Yamada at Tokai University, said the ghost ships wash up mostly in winter, when the wind blows from Siberia toward Japan.

Many more are believed to have been lost at sea, and very few fishermen reach Japanese shores alive. If they set off from the North Korean ports of Hamhung or Wonsan, they drift for 1,000 km over a period of more than two months before their vessel gets stranded on Japanese shores.

The reason seems to be that the North Korean regime ordered fishermen to drastically boost their catch, while local markets that have sprung up since 2012 have also increased economic pressure on fishermen to deliver goods to sell there.

Satoru Miyamoto at Seigakuin University told Japanese broadcaster NHK last year, "After the order to boost fish hauls, fishermen have been venturing recklessly into the ocean. These small wooden boats lack radar and GPS equipment, so if they run into bad weather on the high seas they end up being pushed to Japan by the currents."


A hard drug (Intoxicant) supplier, identified as Stanley Arinze, has been arrested by the Kano Police Command for trying to smuggle hard drugs(tramadol) into Niger state.

The tablets worth N19, 200,000 were intercepted after being concealed inside LG Plasma TV Cartons in a trailer along Kano Eastern bye-pass.

The man who is a native of Anambra State reportedly supplies Tramadol tablets to Kano and Republic of Niger as the tramadol tablets were well concealed in the yellow plasma cartons, he hid so well that one wont be able to know.

The Kano police force were able to apprehend the suspect based on tip off from a reliable source.

See more Photos:

Source: Yabaleftonline
A young man who kidnapped a toddler in the financial hub of Nigeria, Lagos has been arrested by members of the Lagos task force.

Operatives of the Lagos State task force during an over-night patrol arrested a man alleged to have abducted a six-month old baby girl, Darasimi Akinyemi, at No. 55, Oshodi Road, Oshodi. .

Chairman of the task force, SP Olayinka Egbeyemi, disclosed that the suspect would have been lynched but for the quick intervention of his men who were on duty. .

He disclosed that preliminary investigations conducted by the agency revealed that the suspect who stays in the same compound with the mother of the child illegally entered a neighbours room at midnight. .

The 29-year-old mother of the baby, Mrs. Banke Akinyemi, said the suspect came into her room while she was asleep and took the baby beside her. She claimed it was the cry of her baby that woke her up and immediately, the suspect dropped the baby and ran outside. .

Akinyemi added that it was her mother, who is staying with her with the help of other neighbours in the compound who apprehended the suspect. The suspect, Mr. Idama Endurance, aged 31, from Obiakuruku area of Delta State, debunked the allegation that he abducted the baby.

He confessed to have got drunk at a birthday he attended the previous night and when he got home at midnight, he had to jump the gate as he could not locate the key. .

It was after I jumped the gate that I entered into their room looking for a key to the gate as their door was not locked. Since I moved into the compound a year ago, I have been eyeing the mother of the child and when our landlady told me she was two months pregnant then, I immediately stayed off.
The Chairman of the National Caretaker Committee of the Peoples Democratic Party, Sen. Ahmed Makarfi, has fixed the partys non-elective national convention for Aug. 12, in Abuja.

The date was announced by the National Publicity Secretary of PDP National Caretaker Committee, Mr Dayo Adeyeye, on Tuesda after the NEC meeting held on Tuesday in Abuja.

Adeyeye said the decision was to enable the party to meet the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) requirement on national conventions of political parties.

The PDP National Caretaker Committee was set up in s Port Harcourt on May 21, 2016.

The tenure of the committee which lapsed on Aug. 16, 2016 was later extended by 12 months as it was unable to elect new officers at its Aug. 17, 2016 non-elective convention due to litigations.

We have been in court since May 2016. So, the prolonged litigation of the national leadership tussle ended only last week on July 1 when the Supreme Court gave judgement in favour of the National Caretaker Committee.

This left barely one month for the conduct of proper elective national convention.

He said considering the relevant statutory notice that we need to give to the INEC and the requirements of the PDP Constitution 2012 (as amended) it would be difficult to meet deadline.

 Practically, it is going to be impossible to have an elective national convention before Aug. 16 because we need to give certain statutory notices to INEC.

And our own (constitution) has some special provisions that we have to meet and theres no time to meet up with those provisions.

Therefore, NEC took a decision that in view of all the circumstances, NEC invoking the powers conferred on it under Section 31 (2a), decided to convene non-elective national convention on Aug. 12 in Abuja, Adeyeye said.

He said NEC also dissolved the partys caretaker committees in Jigawa and Benue states, set up by the former Chairman of PDP, Ali Modu Sheriff, during the leadership tussle.

Adeyeye added that all state caretaker committees and state parallel executives set up after the Court of Appeal judgment of Feb. 17 at Port Harcourt were nullified.

 You will recall that immediately after the Court of Appeal judgment on the 17th of February and March in Port Harcourt, which gave our victory to Sheriff, he went about installing caretaker committees in some, states, particularly in Jigawa and Benue States.

The Ali Modu-Sheriff group then in authority set up caretaker committees in both Jigawa and Benue states and tinkered with the executives of some other states.

So, we brought a motion before NEC today and the motion was duly passed.

That is bringing normalcy back to the party, installing legality and constitutionality.

Adeyeye said NEC also set up standing disciplinary and reconciliation committees, not targeted at Sheriff but to settle disciplinary issues that rocked the party.

He added that the National Caretaker Committee had been directed to establish and inaugurate the committees immediately.

Finally, we took a decision on important constitution amendments that we intend to effect at the next elective national convention that will come up later in the year.

The constitutional amendment proposals have been circulated to relevant personalities and organs of the party, Adeyeye said.

Source: ( PM News )
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday told government troops not to allow themselves to be captured alive by enemies of the state and instead kill themselves if they are cornered in a battle.

Do not surrender alive, he told soldiers after turning over 3,000 units of 45-calibre pistols for the military. I will give you a pistol with three magazines, but remember one is for you and two is for the enemies.

Duterte said soldiers, especially those deployed in the southern Philippines, should not give Islamist militants the opportunity to execute and behead them, which the terrorists film and later on release on the internet.

It is very horrifying and traumatic for (family members) to see that, he said. I dont mind losing the guns to the enemies, but dont give the guns to them alive. Never allow yourself to be degraded.

Nearly 100 soldiers have been killed in almost two months of fighting with hundreds of Islamic State-allied militants in Marawi City, 800 kilometres south of Manila.

Troops have killed more than 400 militants, who have executed 45 civilians since the fighting started on May 23. Some of the executions have been filmed by the militants and released on the internet, the military said.

Source ( Linda Ikeji )
A 29-year-old cashier,identified as Olawunmi Eze, has been arrested for stealing his employers N340,000, Mr. Eze, who lives at No. 35, Akinolu St., Ota, is facing a charge of stealing.

The accused, according to the police prosecutor, Chudu Gbesi, committed the offence on June 15 at 12.30 p.m. at Jolabel International School, Temidire, Ota.

Mr. Gbesi said the accused, the schools cashier, stole N340,000 belonging to his employer, Kazeem Jolayemi.

The offence contravened Section 390(1), (6) of the Criminal Code, Laws of Ogun, 2006

The Senior Magistrate, S. O. Banjo, in his ruling, granted bail to the accused in the sum of N150,000 with two sureties- in like sum.

He said the sureties must reside within the courts jurisdiction and also show evidence of tax payment to Ogun government.

The accused, however, pleaded not guilty to the charge, the case was adjourned until August 27 for hearing.

Source: ( NAN )
Nigerian Musician Davido travelled with Quilox Boss, Shina Peller for the Peller Unity Cup which is set to hold in Iseyin, Oyo State.

His convoy attracted zealous fans, which caused a roadblock until the Police (also part of his convoy) cleared the way.

Source: Yabaleftonline
A beautiful young Nigerian lady decided to prank her mother by disclosing that she is pregnant for an oyinbo guy.

The young lady whose name was not revealed got the shock of her life when her mother believed the news. When she threatened to terminate the pregnancy, her mom disagreed with her immediately.

According to the WhatsApp conversation which has gone viral on social media, she narrated to her mom how she came about the pregnancy from a one-night stand with the white guy.

She said: Mum I have something to tell you, Ive been looking for an opportunity but I feel I should do it now. I dont want you to be disappointed in me but I had a pregnancy test about a week ago I was shocked mum. Mummy Im sorry I didnt want this to happen but I had a one night stand. Went to the club and lost it. He doesnt even because Im going to terminate it. I dont want a baby now. Hes white from London.
A man whose name was withheld has been arrested by operatives of the Lagos State Police Command for allegedly abducting a six-month old baby girl in Oshodi area of Lagos, Southwest Nigeria.

According to the Chairman of the Lagos State Task Force, SP Olayinka Egbeyemi disclosed that the suspect would have been lynched, but for the quick intervention of his men who were on duty saved the situations.

Egbeyemi disclosed further that preliminary investigations conducted by the agency revealed that the suspect who lives in the same compound with the mother of the child illegally entered the womans room at mid-night.

The chairman stated that the suspect would be transferred to the State Criminal Investigations Department, Panti, Yaba, Lagos for further investigations on the directives of the Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Mr. Fatai Owoseni.

The mother of the alleged abducted baby, Mrs Banke Akinyemi, 29, said the suspect came into her room around mid-night while she was asleep and took her baby beside her.

She claimed that it was the cried of her baby that woke her up and that the suspect immediately dumped the baby and ran outside.

Akinyemi, who hailed from Ejigbo in Osun State said it was her mother who lives with her and other neighbours within the compound who quickly woke up and apprehended him.

According to her If not for the intervention of the operatives of the Lagos State Task Force who were on a mid-night patrol, the man would have been lynched.

The suspect, Mr. Idama Endurance, 31 from Obiakuruku area of Delta State debunked the allegations that he abducted the baby.

He confessed to have been drunken at a birthday he attended the previous night and that when he got home at mid-night he had to scale the gate as he could not locate the gate key.

It was after I jumped the gate that I entered into their room looking for a key to the gate as their door was not locked.

Since I moved into the compound a year ago, I have been eyeing the mother of the child and when our landlady told me she was two months old pregnant then I immediately stayed off, he said.

Endurance, who claimed to be trading on linen clothing materials at Kairo Market at Oshodi, however, confirmed that other neighbours within the compound and passers-by had started beating him and calling him kidnapper before the arrival of the operatives of the Lagos State Task Force.

The landlady, Mrs. Johnson Esther said she was surprised when the matter was reported to her.

She claimed the activities of the suspect looked suspicious as he normally come home late and usually jumped the gate to enter the compound most times.

Source: ( PM News )
Two banks operating Apapa were, on Wednesday set ablazed after a policeman attached to Diamond Bank on Burma Road allegedly shot dead some trailer drivers. The mob also set a Sterling Bank branch on Wharf Road ablaze.



It was gathered that the trailer drivers had indiscriminately parked in front of the bank. Angered by the killing and the banks refusal to hand over the policeman to them, the drivers colleagues moved to set the bank ablaze, destroying properties and other valuables. .

Policemen from Rapid Response Squad, anti-riot squad and Area B command, as well as operatives from the Nigerian Navy Ship BEECEOFT have been deployed to the scene of the incident.
The United Nations on Tuesday commemorated the Nelson Mandela International Day on what would have been his 99th birthday, to honour his lifetime of service and dedication to justice and equality.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a meeting of the General Assembly on the occasion of Nelson Mandela International Day, said the best tribute we can pay this great man is not words or in ceremonies, but actions that improve our world.

Observed annually on July 28, the Day is meant to inspire people all over the world to make a positive difference in their communities by volunteering at least 67 minutes of their time in recognition of Mandelas 67 years of public service.

Each of us can make a difference in promoting peace, human rights, sustainable development, and lives of dignity for all, Guterres said.

The UN chief said that he had met Mandela, also known as Madiba, and was struck by his wisdom, compassion, and humility.

Known as prisoner 46664 for 18 years on Robben Island, Mr Mandela did not succumb to bitterness or personal animosity, but rose above it all to lead his country.

One of the most important lessons we can learn from Nelson Mandela is that to make progress, we must look forward however difficult that may be, Guterres said.

Also addressing the General Assembly, the current president, Peter Thomson, noted that Mandelas fight for a world that is just and fair remains as relevant today as it was during his lifetime.

With conflicts raging, human rights and democratic values eroded, widening inequality and over-exploitation of the environment, todays world is one in desperate need of President Mandelas values of empathy, kindness, and respect for our common humanity.

Mandelas values, Thomson continued, urged the international community to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which envisions the world that Mandela wanted.

Delivering his keynote address, UN Childrens Fund (UNICEF)Goodwill Ambassador Danny Glover called Mandela a beacon of humanity triumphing over inhumanity through the force of his love for all people.

Glover invited everyone to look to his legacy not as admirers, but rather in the spirit of ubuntu or humanity towards others, which Mandela embodied.

Mandela led us on a path of justice, democracy and equity; in the process he showed the world that non-violence resistance, when combined with sustained activism, is the key to transforming a potential dead-end into a new beginning, he said.

As part of the commemoration, the UN partnered with the New York City Mayors office on projects, including a clean-up of a public section of New York City.

Source: ( PM News )
Naver officially launched its translation app papago on Wednesday, about a year after trial service began.

Several auto-translate apps are competing for the market, with Google, Microsoft and Baidu in the lead.

Papago is a "neural machine," i.e. capable of learning from mistakes and user input. Naver claims it can translate five or six newspaper articles or one thesis at a time, rivaling Google Translate.

It can only handle English, Chinese, Japanese, French and Spanish, though the lineup of languages will expand to Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian and the Taiwans Hokkien dialect soon. At the moment the app is free.

Initially only available as a smartphone app, it will also be accessible on PCs.

Kim Jun-seok, who headed the development, said, "At present, papago gets 60 out of 100 points for translation. Our goal is to raise the score to 80 within two to three years."
The police in Niger State have arrested two persons allegedly responsible for the kidnap of students of the Federal University of Technology (FUT), Minna.

Police spokesman Bala Elkana said the suspects were responsible for the kidnap of three FUT Minna students. He added that the police is on the trail of two others who are on the run.

It was learnt the suspects  Abraham Jatto, (30) from Edo State, and Idowu Mafe, (29) from Ogun State, have been on the police wanted list.

Mafe, who claimed to be a graduate of the University of Ilorin, regretted his action, saying it was the quest to make money that led him into it.

He said: When the issue of getting a Dubai job came up, my parents could not afford the N750,000 demanded from us, and Abraham raised the issue of kidnapping which led us to this predicament.

I have dragged my familys name in mud. I am well-brought up but I cant factor what led me to this act. I pray my parents will forgive me. Jatto confessed that they rented a two-bedroom apartment behind the trade fair complex to keep their victims.
It was joy all the way for 15 lucky Wakanow customers on Tuesday after receiving their prizes in the Wakanow Bumper Reward Promo organized by the Nigerias No 1 online travel booking portal.

The promo, which ran from March to April 2017, was among the many initiatives powered by Wakanow to reward 15 lucky customers who made a booking worth a cumulative spend of N250, 000 and above within the promotion period.

During the electronic draw which held earlier at the companys Corporate Headquarters in Lagos, 15 lucky customers won all-expenses paid summer vacation for two to top destinations comprising of New York, London, Zanzibar, Dubai and Cape Town.

According to the management of the company, the promo was organized to specially recognize and appreciate its customers as a demonstration of its long-standing commitment to optimum customer satisfaction.

The winners, who could not hide their excitement commended Wakanow for the laudable initiative.

One of them, Ms. Olanrewaju Oniru, said: When I was contacted by Wakanow about my win, I was skeptical. But today, I am happy to be traveling to the UK with my son, all for free, courtesy of the Wakanow Rewards promo.

I want to appreciate Wakanow for organizing this promo because it has demonstrated that the company values its customers and can go the extra mile to make the customers happy, she said.

Speaking on the promo, Managing Director of Wakanow FinTech, Mr. Kingsley Ulinfun, said the promo is part of a larger customer satisfaction and loyalty program that allows the brand deepen its connection with its numerous customers.

He said: First, we are excited by the massive participation recorded by the promo. As a business, not only do we appreciate our customers unwavering loyalty to our brand, we are equally committed to continually delighting and rewarding their loyalty. The Wakanow Bumper Rewards Promo is one of our numerous initiatives to put smile on the faces of our customers.

Mr. Ulinfun noted that the African travel giant is also leveraging on the promo as a platform to promote inclusive travel and better awareness of the rich cultural heritage of various civilizations around the world, following the United Nations declaration of 2017 as the year of sustainable travel.

About Wakanow

Wakanow is Africas leading online travel management portal with physical presence in the Nigeria, UAE, UK, US and Ghana, with the East African regional hub in Kenya now underway.

Leveraging heavily on technology and accelerated customer service models, Wakanow is rapidly changing the face of travel in Africa with bespoke solutions.
Microscopic versions of the cocoons spun by silkworms have been manufactured by a team of researchers. The tiny capsules, which are invisible to the naked eye, can protect sensitive molecular materials, and could prove a significant technology in areas including food science, biotechnology and medicine.

The capsules were made at the University of Cambridge using a specially-developed microengineering process. The process mimics on the microscale the way in which Bombyx mori silkworms spin the cocoons from which natural silk is harvested. The resulting micron-scale capsules comprise a solid and tough shell of silk nano-fibrils that surround and protect a centre of liquid cargo, and are more than a thousand times smaller than those created by silkworms.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team suggest that these micrococoons are a potential solution to a common technological problem: How to protect sensitive molecules that have potential health or nutritional benefits, but can easily degrade and lose these favourable qualities during storage or processing.

The study argues that sealing such molecules in a protective layer of silk could be the answer, and that silk micrococoons that are far too small to see (or taste) could be used to house tiny particles of beneficial molecular cargo in various products, such as cosmetics and food.

The same technology could also be used in pharmaceuticals to treat a wide range of severe and debilitating illnesses. In the study, the researchers successfully showed that silk micrococoons can increase the stability and lifetime of an antibody that acts on a protein implicated in neurodegenerative diseases.

The work was carried out by an international team of academics from the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Sheffield in the UK; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland; and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. The study was led by Professor Tuomas Knowles, a Fellow of St John's College at the University of Cambridge and co-director of the Centre for Protein Misfolding Diseases.

It is a common problem in a range of areas of great practical importance to have active molecules that possess beneficial properties but are challenging to stabilise for storage Knowles said. A conceptually simple, but powerful, solution is to put these inside tiny capsules. Such capsules are typically made from synthetic polymers, which can have a number of drawbacks, and we have recently been exploring the use of fully natural materials for this purpose. There is potential to replace plastics with sustainable biological materials, such as silk, for this purpose.

Dr. Ulyana Shimanovich, who performed a major part of the experimental work as a St John's College Post-Doctoral research associate, said: Silk is a fantastic example of a natural structural material. But we had to overcome the challenge of controlling the silk to the extent that we could mould it to our designs, which are much smaller than the natural silk cocoons.

Dr. Chris Holland, co-worker and head of the Natural Materials Group in Sheffield added: Silk is amazing because whilst it is stored as a liquid, spinning transforms it into a solid. This is achieved by stretching the silk proteins as they flow down a microscopic tube inside the silkworm.

To imitate this, the researchers created a tiny, artificial spinning duct, which copies the natural spinning process to cause the unspun silk to form into a solid. They then worked out how to control the geometry of this self-assembly in order to create microscopic shells.

Making conventional synthetic capsules can be challenging to achieve in an environmentally friendly manner and from biodegradable and biocompatible materials. Silk is not only easier to produce; it is also biodegradable and requires less energy to manufacture.

Natural silk is already being used in products like surgical materials, so we know that it is safe for human use, Professor Fritz Vollrath head of the Oxford Silk Group said. Importantly, the approach does not change the material, just its shape.

Silk micrococoons could also expand the range and shelf-life of proteins and molecules available for pharmaceutical use. Because the technology can preserve antibodies, which would otherwise degrade, in cocoons with walls that can be designed to dissolve over time, it could enable the development of new treatments against cancer, or neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Diseases.

To explore the viability of silk microcapsules in this regard, the researchers successfully tested the micrococoons with an antibody that has been developed to act on alpha-synuclein, the protein that is thought to malfunction at the start of the molecular process leading to Parkinson's Disease. This study was carried out with the support of the Cambridge Centre for Misfolding Diseases, whose research programme is focused on the search for ways of preventing and treating neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

Some of the most efficacious and largest selling therapeutics are antibodies, Michele Vendruscolo, co-director of the Cambridge Centre of Misfolding diseases, said. However, antibodies tend to be prone to aggregation at the high concentrations needed for delivery, which means that they are often written off for use in treatments, or have to be engineered to promote stability.

By containing such antibodies in micrococoons, as we did here, we could significantly extend not just their longevity, but also the range of antibodies at our disposal, Knowles said. We are very excited by the possibilities of using the power of microfluidics to generate entirely new types of artificial materials from fully natural proteins.

The study, Silk microcooons for protein stabilisation and molecular encapsulation, is published in Nature Communications.
Hog Prices Closed Mixed Barchart - Fri Nov 11, 4:21PM CST Lean hog prices were mixed on Friday with 12 to 52 cent losses through the April contract. The deferred contracts closed 10 to 15 cents in the black with May UNCH. The USDA National Average Base Hog Price... HEZ22 : 84.350s (-0.62%) HEJ23 : 94.100s (-0.13%) KMZ22 : 94.900s (-0.63%)

Friday Cotton Closes Triple Digits Higher Barchart - Fri Nov 11, 4:21PM CST Cotton added 116 to 182 points to the upside on Friday after a brief pause for the WASDE numbers. That kept the board under the high on Tuesday, but ended as a weekly gain of 253 points. USDAs FAS... CTZ22 : 88.20s (+2.11%) CTH23 : 86.33s (+2.09%) CTK23 : 85.56s (+1.89%)

Wheats Close in Black on Friday Barchart - Fri Nov 11, 4:21PM CST Wheat futures ended with +1% gains on Friday. KC HRW closed the strongest on Friday with 1.8% to 2% gains, leaving the Dec contract 10 1/4 cents in the red. CBT SRW closed between 1% and 1.3% higher across... ZWZ22 : 813-6s (+1.28%) ZWH23 : 835-2s (+1.15%) ZWPAES.CM : 7.4644 (+1.39%) KEZ22 : 943-4s (+1.97%) KEPAWS.CM : 9.0182 (+2.07%) MWZ22 : 945-6s (+1.53%)

Triple Digit Losses in Friday Cattle Barchart - Fri Nov 11, 4:21PM CST The cattle complex faded on Friday on a recovery in the grain complex. Front month fat cattle futures ended the day $0.72 to $1.77 lower. December contracts were 13 cents weaker for the week. Feeder cattle... LEZ22 : 151.525s (-1.01%) LEG23 : 153.250s (-1.14%) LEJ23 : 157.050s (-0.91%) GFX22 : 176.950s (-0.94%) GFF23 : 178.575s (-1.72%)

Soy Prices Rally on Friday Barchart - Fri Nov 11, 4:21PM CST Front month soy futures ended the day higher on a bounce back from Thursday. Beans closed with 1.6% to 1.9% gains of as much as 27 cents. That left the Jan contract at a net 12 1/4 cent loss for the week.... ZSX22 : 1455-4s (+1.75%) ZSPAUS.CM : 14.2086 (+1.90%) ZSF23 : 1450-0s (+1.90%) ZSH23 : 1453-6s (+1.80%)

Corn Markets Close in Black Barchart - Fri Nov 11, 4:21PM CST Corn futures bounced back into the weekend with gains of 2 to 4 3/4 cents. USDA announced a private export sale of 209,931 MT of corn to Mexico this morning. The Ukraines Ag Ministry had 7.8 MMT of... ZCZ22 : 658-0s (+0.73%) ZCPAUS.CM : 6.5662 (+0.81%) ZCH23 : 663-0s (+0.53%) ZCK23 : 662-6s (+0.49%)

What are we buying? Blue Line Futures - Fri Nov 11, 4:05PM CST The inflation impact on markets.
Rising interest in renewables from U.K. pension funds is part of a wider trend underscored by the Paris Agreement.

BlackRock has raised more than 1.1 billion ($1.4 billion) for its Renewable Income U.K. fund, making it Britains largest investment pool targeting renewable power.

The firm said Wednesday it attracted $612 million of new commitments for the fund, seeing strong demand from U.K. pensions turning to infrastructure and renewable energy assets to meet long-dated liabilities.

Asset managers are witnessing increased global demand for sustainable energy investments after the 2015 Paris Agreement underscored the commitment of major nations to the development of renewables and related technology, according to a Preqin report last month. The financial data provider cited the BBC Pension Trust as an investor in the BlackRock fund, with similar pools attracting investors including South Koreas National Pension Service and the Church Pension Group in New York.

There is more interest around climate change strategies, said Andy Howard, head of sustainable research at Schroders, a London-based asset manager. It is becoming clear that, unlike a few years ago, renewables are economically viable in their own right, without the requirement for political support.

Renewable energy power has become one of the most active sectors for deal flow in the growing infrastructure asset class, BlackRock said, noting that its renewable fund has already invested more than 600 million in 40 wind and solar projects in the U.K. The New York-based firm, which is the worlds largest asset manager, found that 63 percent of U.K. investors that it polled in November for its 2017 Global Rebalancing Survey planned to increase exposure to real assets.

Beyond diversification, renewable funds can help offset challenges that arise in portfolios from more traditional energy investments, according Schroderss Howard. Renewables-focused funds raised about $5 billion this year through April, exceeding fundraising for conventional energy, according to Preqin.

An April research report commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programmes economy division found that institutional investors made a record $2.8 billion of direct equity commitments to European renewable energy projects in 2016, while the issuance of green bonds to finance environmental projects, including renewable energy, rose 99 percent to $95.1 billion last year.

Commenting on record acquisition activity in the clean power sector, Udo Steffens, president of the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, said in the UN report that investor hunger for existing wind and solar farms is a strong signal for the world to move to renewables.
Farmers and rural clients face a host of challenges spanning from the weather to cyber risk  and with the agricultural sector key for the Australian economy and for insurance brokers, Jim Karafilis, head of regional & rural at Insurance House, said that a host of risks are on the horizon for rural clients.Karafilis said that while unpredictable weather is an obvious peril for farming and rural clients, there are a host of other risk areas that brokers can educate clients on.Management liability is something that we are really educating our business clients on and our large farming clients, Karafilis told Insurance Business. Because of management liability and the exposures that evolve out of that, we have seen some significant claimsbut it is still a product that is not really well understood.That is where the litigation that you are seeing through employment practices is huge.Karafilis noted that, while rural and regional areas may not have a hi-tech reputation, they do face high-tech risk. Like any industry, agriculture faces a growing threat from cyber risk and Karafilis said that for regional clients, a cyberattack could be particularly damaging.Being remote, they can effectively lose access to the outside world and that is a major risk, Karafilis continued.Meanwhile, much has been made of the multi-peril crop insurance market in Australia with Government support a hot button issue. While there are different solutions available for crop-based clients and while the Government is being more proactive, the insurance industry needs to find a solution, Karafilis said.In addition, he noted that while every day may be a challenge for those living and working in regional and rural communities across the country, their resilience is underappreciated.They are very resilient people, farmers - it is pretty hard going out there and I dont think a lot of people really appreciate that, he said.
The Federal government has reaffirmed its commitment to cyber mitigation with a minister warning organisations to up their cyber defences.Minister for Justice, Michael Keenan, addressed the International Conference on Cybercrime and Computer Forensics held in Queensland this week and noted that the Government will continue to protect itself and Australian businesses as global threats rise.We know that criminals will seek to exploit any weakness to gain access to victims and extort funds, and in the 21st century, cyberspace has become their new frontier, Keenan said.Poor cyber security erodes trust and confidence in the online world, and can cause significant financial losses  conservatively estimated to cost Australians over $1bn each year, and $17bn in economic imposts.Ransomware, including the recent WanaCry and Petya incidents, are an increasingly global cyber threat to all organisations that do not have appropriate defences.Keenan noted that between 1 January 2015 and 30 June 2017, the Australia Signals Directorate responded to 1,766 cyber security incidents on government systems as referrals to Australian Federal Police have risen on intrusions from 10 in 2015-16 to 15 last year whilst extortion referrals have risen from one in 2015-16 to 14 in 2016-17.Thus far, the Coalition Government has invested $230m in cyber security nationally with the National Cyber Security Strategy Defence White Paper containing up to $400m more in funding to enhance cyber defences.Keenan said that the government will continue to collaborate with industry, business, academia and the community on cyber risk to respond to rising threats.By combining our expertise, information and tools, we can create a hostile environment for cybercriminals.
Japanese beer has reclaimed the top spot in the imported beer market for the first time in three years.

Superstore chain Lotte Mart said on Tuesday that Japanese brews accounted for 22.2 percent of its imported beer sales so far this year, overtaking German beer with 16.6 percent.

Dutch brands came in third with 12.4 percent followed by Belgium (10.1 percent) and China (7.5 percent).

Japanese beer, led by Asahi, had been the top seller until German rivals overtook it in 2014 with a diversified lineup including Erdinger, Paulaner and Feldschlochen.

This time, it is making a comeback by offering more varieties of its own such as Kirin, Suntory and Sapporo. "Cherry Blossom" and some other limited editions are also selling well.

Overall, Asian beer accounted for 33.7 percent of import sales at Lotte so far this year, continuing a three-year upslope. European beer made up 58.2 percent but has been on the decline since peaking at 60.7 percent in 2015.
It is a criminal offence if directors do not apply for their director ID on time
Hamish McDonald Nye

It finds you, you dont find it.Those are the words of the new executive director of ProRisk , Hamish McDonald Nye, when asked about careers in insurance. However, in his case, that was not exactly true.McDonald Nye studied economics at Monash University and travelled to the UK before he decided what career path to choose and said he came to insurance following several conversations with those already in the industry.While at university, McDonald Nye enjoyed several subjects that related to insurance and soon found that there arent a lot of jobs for economists, before he made his way into this profession.I was pretty lost, McDonald Nye told Insurance Business. I took a rational approach to it and I approached a couple of people I was connected with and one of them was in the insurance industry.They spoke really glowingly about what the industry was and would be and my opportunity within it and that, along with my areas of interest in my undergraduate degree, led me to believe it was a great place to look and a hidden sector.With an insurance career as a goal, McDonald Nye took a different approach to finding work as he decided to market himself rather than apply for positions.I wrote and called up about 60 potential employers and got a pretty good response rate of about 20% and the result of that was I ended up getting a number of job offers, he explained.McDonald Nye chose a position with Blackburn Insurance Brokers before moving on to Freeman McMurrick and Aon before he took a positon with DUAL. Earlier this month, he was announced as the new executive director at ProRisk and will start with the firm later this year.McDonald Nye said that, when he first joined the industry, it was mentioned that the industry was in transition and this proven true over the last decade.There is a professionalism that has come into the industry which you can see, he noted. There have been significant generational trends, and not just the type of generational trends that happen through normal passage of time but through a real shift.With a long and successful career behind him, McDonald Nye said that he hopes his career highlights are still in front of him.In real reflection the things that I value, the things Ive gotten out of the industry, Ive got from working with good people, he said.
The National Insurance Brokers Association ( NIBA ) has announced two Queensland regional awardees, recognising their excellence in the profession of insurance broking.Maria Newman of Marsh was hailed as Broker of the Year, while Stacey Lloyd, also from Marsh, was acclaimed as Young Professional Broker of the Year. The two have qualified for the national awards, which will be revealed in September.NIBA chief executive officer Dallas Booth commented: We wish Maria and Stacey the best of luck in the national awards, and we congratulate all the finalists who exemplify the highest standards of professionalism and competence in the broking industry.We had a significant number of applications this year, and the finalists represent the cream of the crop.The Broker of the Year Award, sponsored by QBE , honours an individual broker who is considered an inspirational role model for the insurance brokering community by demonstrating excellent performance in the profession and client advocacy.Meanwhile, the Young Professional Broker of the Year Award is sponsored by Vero and recognises the rising stars of the broking industry under the age of 35.
The US is the largest and most mature cyber market in the world and as regulatory changes drive uptake of the cover in Australia, the local industry can learn from its US counterparts on ensuring that clients are protected.With mandatory breach notification already in place in many US states, and with Australia soon to follow suit as legislation is rolled out next year, the cyber insurance market in Australia is set to grow.With highly publicised attacks such as Wanacry and Petya grabbing the headlines, cyber risk and insurance is a preeminent risk on the business landscape.Karen Kukoda, a strategic alliance director at cyber security firm FireEye, said that the experience in the US can be used to help Australian clients prepare for both insurance and mitigation.The first thing that everybody needs to think about is that cyber is not just an IT issue, it is an enterprise risk, Kukoda told Insurance Business.The board needs to be prepped.Kukoda said that she considers cyber security to be the ultimate team sport as different areas of a business will all play a role in online defence.She noted that different teams within a business will need to come together in order to offer the best defence. Risk management needs to be involved, as well as IT and the C-suite whilst staff training is also important.Kukoda said that as clients come to terms with their cyber risk, they need to remain vigilant over time. Simply planning for a data breach and training staff once will not be good enough as the threat landscape continues to shift on an almost daily basis.As the industry lacks historical data on the pricing and underwriting of cyber insurance, Kukoda said that US cyber insurers and underwriters have looked to partnerships with firms like FireEye to help further understand good mitigation practices.With a better understanding of good cyber risk practices, the industry can price accordingly for a risk that is difficult to measure.Kukoda said that the legal element of cyber insurance and risk cannot be ignored.Whilst class-actions against breached companies have so far been rare, Kukoda said that a good legal grounding is vital. She noted that FireEye has expanded its partnerships with law firms as many companies remain unaware of the different regulatory concerns that they have depending on industry.If your general counsel isnt prepared and well equipped and knowledgeable on those aspects then it is in your best interest to hire an outside law firm that can provide the right guidance there, Kukoda said.Cyber risk is not going away and many in the industry expect cyber insurance growth to match those concerns. Kukoda said that she expects cyber insurance to become commonplace amongst businesses in the near future.I do think this will become just part of your normal business cost so to speak.

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Everguard Insurance Services has acquired the Anchor Bay Insurance Managers Restaurant, Bar & Tavern (RBT) program, according to a news release. Anchor Bay is a leading provider of insurance for RBT industries in Washington, Oregon, Colorado and Alaska.Existing Anchor Bay policyholders will continue to be serviced by Anchor Bay as the program transitions to Everguard, according to the release. Anchor Bay will provide services to all agents and customers through their policy expiration dates and will also continue to offer renewal proposals to clients with effective dates through July 31.For effective dates beginning August 01, Anchor Bay customers will be provided with quotes for the Everguard RBT program.Anchor Bay and its founder, Bill Tanner, will remain actively involved with the transition of the program to Everguard over the course of the next year, according to the news release.
A former Pennsylvania attorney who defrauded dozens of homeowners out of more than $69,000 has been sentenced to two years in prison.

Forty-eight-year-old Susan Kevra-Shiner, who owned a company in Avoca that sold insurance policies, was sentenced by a federal judge in Scranton, Penn., on Monday. She was previously convicted on seven counts of mail fraud.

According to prosecutors, Kevra-Shiner sold fraudulent insurance policies through her company after her insurance underwriter, Stewart Title Guaranty Company, terminated their business relationship in 2008.

She defrauded 69 people with these invalid policies and must repay them in full as part of her sentence. Kevra-Shiner will also face three years probation after her release from prison.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Fraud Pennsylvania
State House and Senate negotiators reached an agreement Monday on a revamped version of Massachusetts voter-approved marijuana law that would allow retail pot sales to be taxed at a maximum 20 percent rate.

The deal was struck following closed-door negotiations by a six-member conference committee tasked with reconciling sharply different approaches to marijuana regulation and taxation. The talks had dragged on well past the June 30 deadline legislative leaders originally set for crafting a compromise.

The bill mostly splits the difference between a House proposal to raise the total tax on marijuana to a mandatory 28 percent and the Senate version, which called for keeping the tax at the maximum 12 percent established by the November ballot question.

The compromise calls for consumers to pay a 10.75 percent excise tax in addition to the states regular 6.25 percent sales tax. Cities and towns also would have the option of adding a 3 percent local tax.

Municipalities could temporarily recoup an additional 3 percent of sales through host community agreements signed with marijuana businesses.

Lawmakers also compromised on a dispute over local control of pot shops.

In cities and towns where voters backed the ballot question  which was the case in more than 260 of the states 351 communities  a referendum would be required to ban or restrict retail marijuana stores.

But in communities where a majority of residents voted against Question 4, pot shops could be barred by a simple vote of the board of the selectmen or city council, without the need for a vote of local residents.

The compromise bill faces up or down votes in the House and Senate later this week.

Marijuana legalization advocates had discouraged lawmakers from making any changes to the ballot question, but expressed relief Monday that the final bill did not include what they viewed as more onerous language contained in an earlier House-passed bill.

We obviously wanted to see it move forward as passed by voters, but were not naive, said Jim Borghesani, spokesman for the group Yes on 4. We knew there was going to be a compromise of some kind.

Neither the House nor the Senate tinkered with the current legal possession limit of up to one ounce of marijuana, or home growing allowances of up to a dozen pot plants per household.

We have protected the right of adults to grow, possess, and use marijuana. To give them access to a safe, legal supply, the bill removes barriers to the development of a legal market, said Sen. Patricia Jehlen, a Somerville Democrat who was the lead Senate negotiator in the conference committee.

The compromise on taxes would keep Massachusetts below the rates in several states, including Colorado and Washington, which previously legalized recreational marijuana.

We feel confident this will bring in enough revenue to properly implement and regulate this new marketplace, and allow us to invest in key areas such as substance abuse, said Rep. Mark Cusack, a Braintree Democrat who led the House in the talks.

House Majority Leader Ron Mariano, who also was involved in negotiations, called the bill a fair compromise and said the local option taxes would encourage municipalities to embrace marijuana businesses.

The measure calls for a five-member Cannabis Control Commission, appointed by the state treasurer, governor and attorney general, to regulate all aspects of recreational and medical marijuana in Massachusetts. The ballot question envisioned a three-member commission controlled entirely by the treasurer.

Lawmakers also added measures to promote racial diversity in the legal cannabis industry and address the historically disproportionate impact the war on drugs had on minority neighborhoods.

Republican Gov. Charlie Baker said Monday he had not seen details of the final bill, but did not indicate major concerns with the compromise language on taxes or local control.

Related:

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Trends Legislation Cannabis Massachusetts
Fast-moving wildfires in British Columbia have forced nearly 40,000 people to leave their homes and residents are flooding into crowded evacuation centers amid a provincial state of emergency.

Federal Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale announced Monday that Ottawa was deploying military aircraft and Australia was sending 50 firefighters to battle the wildfires. A group of elite Nova Scotia firefighters will also join the front lines.

Speaking in Pilot Butte, Saskatchewan, Goodale said 500 additional Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers have also been sent in to assist with evacuation and police communities when they have been cleared out.

More than 3,000 staff, including firefighters, support staff and 450 personnel brought in from other provinces, are hard at work, said BC Wildfire Service chief information officer Kevin Skrepnek.

Goodale said the fires were expected to worsen.

The entire city of Williams Lake, six hours northeast of Vancouver, was ordered evacuated on the weekend. The community has a population of over 10,000.

Wind over the weekend also caused a flare-up of a huge fire that started near the Ashcroft Indian Band reserve, which has charred just over 154-square miles (400-square kilometers) west of Kamloops.

Near Kelowna, about 60 homes remained on evacuation alert in the community of Lake Country after a human-caused fire was sparked Friday, destroying eight homes.

Officials say they are beginning the difficult process of notifying those who have lost homes.

Cariboo Regional District chairman Al Richmond said Monday that teams have gained access to areas where houses and other buildings have been destroyed northwest of 100 Mile House.

Crews are also working to restore electricity, telephone service and other infrastructure in regions evacuated after the fires broke out July 6.

Our staff is actively engaging in the south Cariboo to look at re-entry plans for our residents, should they be able to return home, Richmond said, although he cautioned return could be a ways off.

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Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Wildfire
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is shutting down an office that coordinates cyber issues with other countries, according to two people familiar with the plan, in a move that critics said will diminish the U.S. voice in confronting hackers.

The Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues, established under President Barack Obama in 2011, will be folded into the State Departments Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, according to the people, who asked not to be identified in advance of an announcement. The coordinator will no longer report directly to the secretary of state, going instead through the bureaus chain of command as Tillerson pushes ahead with a department-wide reorganization, they said.

Its taking an issue thats preeminent and putting it inside a backwater within the State Department, said Robert Knake, a senior fellow for cybersecurity at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington who was director of cybersecurity policy at the National Security Council under Obama. Position to power matters both within the U.S. government and within the international community.

International tensions over cybersecurity have escalated since the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russia meddled in last years presidential election with the goal of hurting Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and helping elect Donald Trump. In 2015, Obama and Chinas President Xi Jinping negotiated a deal to curb corporate hacking, a move that was credited with spurring a decrease in Chinese cyber-espionage.

Cold War Mentality

The decision to shut the office fits a broader pattern under Tillerson, who is eliminating overlap and getting rid of special envoy offices that sometimes wrestle with regional bureaus for authority over issues they handle. He has also championed Trumps plan to cut the departments budget by nearly 30 percent, arguing that it needs to shed its Cold War mentality and adapt to more modern threats  chief among them U.S. national security and the defeat of terrorism.

The State Departments current cyber coordinator, Christopher Painter, is leaving the position by the end of the month, Politico reported on Monday. The spokesman for the coordinators office declined to comment, although Painter posted a Thnx message on Twitter in response to a message that complimented him and linked to a report on his departure.

Instead of closing the cyber office, James Lewis, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argued in a report last year to expand it, promoting the coordinator to ambassador-at-large and creating a new bureau to handle the issues.

No Expertise

The State Departments economic bureau has no expertise on these issues and its a fundamental misunderstanding, Lewis, who specializes in cybersecurity and technological warfare, said in an interview. If thats what they want to do, fine: Someone will fix in a couple years, but in the meantime were going to lose a lot of ground.

A State Department official, who asked not to be identified because the move hasnt been formally announced, said the power of the coordinators office will be enhanced by being folded into a bigger bureau.

The official said that offices such as the cyber coordinator are separated from the policy knowledge and talent in the bigger bureaus, and such stove-piping deprives them of resources to get things done. The official also said Tillerson doesnt want envoys reporting directly to him because he cant give them the attention they deserve or hed have little time for anything else.

Cyber Norms

Another State Department official noted that the agency is in the middle of a massive reorganization  which Tillerson announced earlier this year  and there are no predetermined outcomes.

Painters office was in the thick of several major cyber-related initiatives during the Obama administration. In addition to the U.S.-China accord in 2015, the office has sought to engage with Russia via international forums on establishing cyber norms  a task that failed to stop Russias meddling in the U.S. election.

In an interview last year, Painter said one function of his office was to put other countries on notice when their behavior is unacceptable.

At least talking with each other gives us a better sense of where we are and a chance to find common ground, Painter said at the time.

Companies rely on the government to work with other countries on global dos and donts for the internet, according to Tony Cole, vice president and chief technology officer for the global government unit of FireEye Inc., a cybersecurity firm

Its sad, Cole said of Painters departure in an interview. Without a doubt, Chris Painter was the foundation and bedrock that built the structure that State had on actually trying to initiate norms in cyberspace.

Tillersons State Department overhaul also includes a decision to shut the Office of Global Criminal Justice, first reported by Foreign Policy on its website on July 17. The office, which oversees the U.S. response to war crimes, will be merged into the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

Other envoys in Tillersons sights include the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and the envoy for the Northern Ireland peace process.

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics USA Cyber Russia China
The U.S. Congress on Monday wrote to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer urging him to "closely consult with Congress" during discussions with Korea about the two countries' free trade agreement.

"The U.S. trade agreement with [Korea] remains a key cornerstone of U.S. economic and strategic engagement in the Asia-Pacific region," the letter said. "Preserving and strengthening the strong economic relationship between [the two nations] is particularly important today with rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula."

The bipartisan letter was signed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, Senator Ron Wyden, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, and Rep. Richard Neal.

U.S. President Donald Trump has described the FTA as "a horrible deal," apparently without knowing much about it, and pushed through a request to renegotiate it. But even his own Republican Party has described it as a "win-win" agreement.

"There are a host of areas in which our trade relationship with Korea can be enhanced," the letter says. "A high-level dialogue with Korea also presents an opportunity to address longstanding concerns with respect to implementation of existing commitments on automotive trade, services, customs, and other key matters."

But it warns, "Any changes affecting the United States resulting from the [negotiations] cannot take effect unless either the president exercises his authorities as delegated to him by Congress or Congress makes changes to U.S. statutes."

It urges the USTR "to consult closely with Congress before meeting with Korea and throughout your discussions on these matters, in accordance with U.S. law and longstanding practice."

The administration has to notify Congress of amendments of key clauses in the Seoul-Washington FTA 90 days before negotiations start and get congressional approval for any amendment bill.


Floridas home insurers hope the public doesnt blame them as they implement rate increases, initiate coverage changes and nonrenew policies.

They say they have no choice after the Florida Legislature for the fifth year in a row failed to address the crisis in water damage claims abuse.

We keep saying help us try to solve this problem, said Michael Carlson, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of Florida.

AOB will ultimately be addressed by the marketplace if lawmakers dont do anything

Since lawmakers reneged on enacting reforms, insurance carriers are now taking matters into their own hands and the states regulator is warning consumers to be prepared.

We will continue to see homeowners insurance companies raise their rates for our consumers in a best-case scenario, and in a worst case scenario just simply stop offering their products in certain regions of the state, Insurance Commissioner David Altmaier told the Florida Cabinet last month.

Altmaier said that worst-case scenario has the potential to undo a lot of the great work that has been done in depopulating the state-run insurer of last resort, Citizens, which has taken the brunt of the abuse, particularly in South Florida.

This remains one of our number one priorities on the property and casualty side, Altmaier said.

He was referring to escalating assignment of benefits (AOB) abuse from unlicensed water remediation and roofing contractors working with attorneys to cash in on a homeowners insurance policy for water damage claims. The problem has begun to spread to other segments of insurance, with auto glass claims using AOBs also on the rise.

The Florida Department of Financial Services has stepped up its abuse investigations. Former Florida CFO Atwater told Insurance Journal in May before he left office that the DFS is counting on the industry to alert it to any abuse it sees happening.

This is a real financial crime. These people are making money off of these really exploited AOB claims it is just sophisticated robbery from thousands of people who are having to embed that cost in their next premium payment. It is real, Atwater said.

Insurance carriers say the marketplace has no choice but to respond by moving to cover the costs.

They are raising rates for homeowners policies across the state but say that is not enough after several years of the unchecked AOB abuse. So they are also appealing to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) to be able to do more.

AOB will ultimately be addressed by the marketplace if lawmakers dont do anything. The question is how harmful is that to a policyholder that isnt out to cheat an insurance company  and it is harmful, said Scott Johnson, who has worked on insurance issues for 40 years and currently runs his own consulting firm, Johnson Strategies. AOB is the worst crisis I have seen.

Citizens led the pack in lobbying for reform this past session, warning Florida lawmakers that without it the insurers policy count will start to climb again after years of depopulation efforts, and that homeowners could expect to see statutorily allowed rate increases of up to 10 percent for the foreseeable future.

Last month the warning became a reality when Citizens announced it would seek an overall statewide rate increase again this year, citing AOB as the reason. Citizens also said it would submit a series of policy changes to the OIR that it hopes will reduce claims costs for nonweather water losses.

Among the major policy changes is a $10,000 cap on water loss repairs for customers who decide not to participate in Citizens Managed Repair Program.

Other policy changes include expanding obligations to third parties that accept an assignment of benefits. Currently, contractors who accept an assignment are not bound by the same obligations, including allowing Citizens adjusters to inspect a claim in a timely manner or providing proof that a loss has occurred.

We were hoping for legislative change and a surgical solution, said Barry Gilway, Citizens president/CEO and executive director. Given that this did not occur in 2017, we cannot wait for the trends to worsen and take no corrective action.

Commissioner Altmaier told the Cabinet that OIR is discussing changes to policy forms in an attempt to curb what we believe are an unacceptable rise in costs in this market.

Many insurers in the state are watching and waiting to see what happens with Citizens proposals, and will base their own requests to OIR on what is approved for Citizens.

We will see further rate increases being filed [by insurers]. But as far as doing their due diligence as an insurance company, they will pursue whatever avenue they can get, said Logan McFaddin, regional director for the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCI).

Managed Repair, Preferred Vendors, Premium Discounts

Citizens is already employing one strategy  a managed repair program that provides its policyholders with free water extraction and drying services if they have a nonweather-related water loss. The Citizens Managed Repair Program also includes access to a network of licensed contractors through Contractor Connection. Policyholders can use the network to find a contractor to repair damage to its pre-loss condition with repairs guaranteed for a minimum of three years.

Citizens policyholders who do not want to use the program can hire their own contractors to do permanent repairs, but reimbursement may be limited to $10,000 starting in 2018, if approved by Florida regulators.

Other companies are exploring managed repair or preferred vendor programs as well.

Castle Key Insurance Co. and Castle Key Indemnity Co., Allstate Insurance subsidiaries that write about 2 percent of Floridas homeowners market, offer preferred vendors to customers in the event of a claim.

Who the customer chooses to work with on repairs is entirely their decision, however we do make vendors available if the customer does not have a contractor of choice, said Cathy Mayo, Allstate Florida Regions Field Corporate Relations manager.

Preferred vendor programs are definitely helpful because an insurer is not going to use a vendor that turns around and sues them  it gets rid of that motivation to have an attorney enter the agreement, said PCIs McFaddin. Other insurers could follow what Citizens does if they can make headway with OIR.

In a statement to Insurance Journal, OIR said it wouldnt comment on the Citizens filing, but anticipates that a public hearing will be held for Citizens annual rate filings, where this issue may be presented in more detail by the company.

OIR did say that it has approved some managed repair programs for other carriers in the past as allowed under Florida statutes, but hasnt seen any new filings recently.

Those outside the industry  including public adjusters and law firms  have voiced opposition to such programs, saying they restrict policyholder rights.

Johnson says that response is not surprising.

Guess I would say that too if I was a public adjuster or trial attorney. What is fair to them is something that inflates the claim by at least 20 percent because thats how they get paid. Whats fair to an attorney is if there is a controversy. They need the conflict because thats how they make their fees, Johnson said.

He noted that more than half of water losses have been handled by firms that dont use an AOB and there have not been consumer complaints on the work done. Preferred vendor programs are a tool for carriers to minimize their AOB losses, he said.

Insurance companies are responding to the crisis by doing what they can to guide people to providers that dont use AOBs, he said.

Tampa-based VetCor, which provides restoration services across the state, works with 17 carriers as a preferred vendor and said it has never used an AOB on more than 2,200 jobs in its three years in business.

There are disreputable contractors saying they cant perform work because of big bad insurance carriers. That is accurate if you are going beyond the scope of needed work. These contractors are creating an adversarial relationship, said Paul Huszar, president, VetCor LLC, which provides new careers for military veterans no longer on active duty.

Huszar said his business relies on referrals from carriers, which he said are usually legitimate claims from people who need help.

He said his company has found itself becoming an advocate against AOB abuse, including letting carriers know if they see abuse taking place.

There have been a few incidents where we have been called to put a tarp on a roof and we get out there and there is no damage. The customer says, someone told me to put a claim in and Ill get a new roof. If we see that we call the insurance company and let them know something smells funny. We represent consumers if we think its fraud and we represent carriers if they are getting screwed, he said.

Huszar said all affected parties need to work together in fighting AOB abuse, and managed repair and preferred vendor programs are just one option until lawmakers take up the issue.

The companies have to do something to combat uncontrollable rising claim costs from AOB, he said. But frankly, without legislation this problem is not going to be solved.

Companies are also looking at premium discounts for customers who take proactive measures to protect against water damage, such as outfitting their homes with water damage protection systems.

Neil Schwartzman is the owner of the Coral Spring, Fla.-based company H20 Protection, which sells PipeBurst Pro water damage prevention technology. The Whole Home Water Detection product works by detecting when a pipe bursts and shutting off the main water supply almost immediately to prevent water damage.

Schwartzman said there has been increased interest from carriers in the last several months as they try to find new ways to reduce AOB losses. He said several dozen, mostly high-value homeowner carriers, already offer incentives to have this type of a program.

He is currently working with several Florida insurance carriers seeking approval from regulators to offer premium discounts when a system is installed.

If the [water damage protection] discount was available to all in Florida, then systems would be installed [and] the number of water damage claims would be reduced significantly, Schwartzman said.

What Comes Next?

The industry and regulators agree that substantial progress has been made in educating on the abuse. Commissioner Altmaier said this years visibility and media attention has put his office in a good position for proposals to be heard during the 2018 legislative session.

McFaddin said the industry did an impeccable job staying on message this session and supporting the OIR and Citizens proposal, which died shortly after being introduced in a Senate committee.

Even though the reforms failed, McFaddin said the industry learned that working together is an effective strategy and that needs to continue.

McFaddin added that at least next year the industry wont have to waste time educating the legislature about the abuse because it is now widely known and watched.

Will we get something done for sure, 100 percent? she asked. I cant say that, but I am hopeful  optimistically hopeful.

Former CFO Atwater said the industry did a better job of getting its message out this session, but there is still tremendous rate sensitivity among consumers.

The industry, he said, has not effectively communicated why AOB abuse is translating into higher rates and, until then, consumers will not support legislative efforts.

I think consumers believe that the rates come [because] the insurance company just wants more rates and the government just keeps giving it to them. I dont think that most consumers understand that these losses are required to be built into the rate filing. And theyre going to be granted, he said.

He urged the industry to share with the public the actual evidence that it has in its databases on the magnitude of the losses that are being built into rates.

PIFFs Carlson said carriers data is out there through OIRs data call done in 2016, and Citizens plethora of public information on rising losses, claims and litigation. He said some lawmakers have accused the industry of not being transparent to avoid fixing the issue.

What else do you need us to give you that you dont have? I fear that is a political request and not a policy request, he said.

Until the next session, the industry and regulators say all they can do is continue to beat the drum about AOB abuse and take steps to protect company solvency and their policyholders.

I do believe there is light at the end of the tunnel, Altmaier told Florida Cabinet members. I do believe there are ideas on the table that not only maintain consumer protections and their ability to have their claims paid, but also protects their ability to pay affordable insurance rates and shop insurance products across a wide range of carriers.

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Topics Carriers Florida Legislation Claims Profit Loss Contractors Homeowners
U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen is pressing the Tennessee Valley Authority and state regulators for more information about the discovery of excessive levels of arsenic and lead in groundwater under a coal-fired power plant.

Cohens office said in a statement Monday that the Memphis Democrat sent a letter to the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation asking the agency why it believes toxins found under the TVAs Allen Fossil Plant in Memphis are not affecting drinking water.

Department officials said last week that the TVA has measured excessive levels of arsenic and lead in shallow wells that monitor pollution from coal ash ponds at the aging Allen plant. Coal ash is the dirty byproduct of burning coal.

One well had arsenic at levels more than 300 times the federal drinking-water standard. The monitoring wells run about 50 feet (15 meters) deep and are about a half-mile (four-fifths of a kilometer) from far deeper wells drilled by the TVA directly into the Memphis Sand aquifer, which provides the citys drinking water.

The TVA plans to pump 3.5 million gallons (13.2 million liters) of fresh water out of the aquifer per day to cool a natural gas power plant that is replacing the coal plant next year. Cohen and environmental groups have raised concerns about the strategy.

A layer of clay lies between the groundwater and the aquifer. Still, the monitoring wells proximity to the deeper wells dug into the aquifer has raised concerns among officials and Memphis residents about the safety of the citys drinking water.

The environment and conservation department, through spokesman Eric Ward, said it is confident the contaminants found in TVA wells at the Allen Fossil Plant are not impacting drinking water. However, the department has asked Memphis Light, Gas & Water  the citys water utility  to test treated drinking water. Results are expected late this week.

The department has also told the TVA to pinpoint where the contaminants came from.

Spokesman Scott Brooks said the TVA, the nations largest public utility, doesnt know the source of the toxins and is cooperating with states instructions. Brooks said Monday that TVA has tested its five aquifer wells at the gas plant numerous times in the last month and each time the results are negative for arsenic.

Cohen also wants to know what the TVA and state are doing to make sure the aquifer remains a viable source of drinking water.

We share the congressmans concerns about the recent monitoring results at the TVA Allen Fossil Plant and are in the process of preparing answers to his questions, Ward said Monday.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Tennessee
Cleanup efforts at the site of a sinkhole that swallowed two Florida homes and jeopardized a third house will begin in earnest on Wednesday, as county officials, geologists and insurance adjusters begin the process of figuring out what to do with the properties, local officials said Monday.

Heavy equipment will be brought in Wednesday to the neighborhood in Pasco County, north of Tampa, to clean up debris left over from the damage caused by the sinkhole. It opened up Friday morning and grew to 225 feet (68 meters) in diameter and 50 feet (15 meters) deep, taking with it the two homes and a boat. No one was injured.

In all, 11 homes were affected. Residents of four homes that were initially evacuated were allowed to return over the weekend, and five homes remained evacuated Monday morning.

Kevin Guthrie, Pasco Countys assistant administrator for public safety, said engineers were still trying to determine where the safe edge is at.

We are doing everything in our power to get those folks back in these homes as fast as we can, Guthrie said at a news conference Monday morning.

Local officials believe the sinkhole has stabilized since there has been no new activity.

All of the homeowners had some kind of insurance. Occupants of two of the destroyed homes were renters and they didnt have renters insurance so the contents of the renters are not covered at all, Guthrie said.

Utility workers will be removing overhead obstructions for the heavy equipment, insurance adjusters are visiting the neighborhood and water samples are being taken. Guthrie said the water sample results would be known by Tuesday for the neighborhood where many residents use wells.

The United Way is starting a fund to help homeowners affected by the sinkhole.

Alex Delgado of the United Way of Pasco County said the agency is raising money to help the families who lived in the two homes that were destroyed and nearby homes.

Local officials also are discussing what to do with the properties. There is nothing the county can legally do if the homeowners want to rebuild on the site, as long as they follow code, Guthrie said.

Another option under discussion is having the county purchase the properties and then connecting the sinkhole area to a nearby lake.

Were going to take a look at all the options and then we will come up with the best option that works for the community, the homeowners and all those involved, Guthrie said.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Florida Homeowners
China has become a major source for tourists for all Southeast Asian states. Laos is no exception in trying to attract this revenue earner in the region. As long as the Chinese economy is growing and not facing a recession, it may be possible this trend will continue indefinitely. The transformation of the Laotian tourism sector is also immense as it used to be an impoverished and isolated land-locked state inside ASEAN. In terms of consumption, there are perceptions of strong Chinese tourist spending held by officials in Laos, further accentuating the need to study ways to attract this source of income.





In terms of physical infrastructure, improved connectivity to Laos through high-speed rail (HSR) is one important way to harness this tourism potential and ensure Laos stays competitive in this market. But there are also non-tangible aspects of building up the tourism industry as well. For example, like other Southeast Asian tourism locations, Laos is also studying the preferences, tastes, and cultural norms of Chinese tourists. Some tourism industries in other countries in the region that are more advanced and experienced in interacting with Chinese tourists have already started studying and distinguishing the preferences and tastes of Chinese tourists from the first- and second-tier cities in China.





Regardless of cultural norms, high-quality tourist service standards are a universal requirement for an attractive tourism industry. It appears Laotian provinces located near the boundaries with China are the most proactive and enthusiastic in seeking Chinese tourist revenue. An example is Oudomxay province which already had a heavy Chinese visitor presence even before the onset of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the HSR project, and the recent euphoria over tourist revenue. Lacking capital, Laotian tourism stakeholders are also attracting Chinese firms to sink tourism-related investment in Oudomxay and other provinces sharing the border with China.





Regardless of the background of incoming tourists, a popular attraction in Laos is experiencing the culture, lifestyle, and performances of minority hill tribes and other ethnic groups found in Laos. Laos is likely to capitalize on this unique feature of the Laotian tourism experience. In a recent trip to Laos, the author also noticed that a major draw of tourism in Vientiane, the capital city of Laos, is a tour of historical government buildings and heritage.





Given the proximity of Chinas far southern provinces to Laos, it is quite natural for southern China to be a major source of Chinese tourists for the land-locked Southeast Asian state. Therefore, in addition to China Eastern Airlines, China Southern, Sichuan and Hainan Airlines are also offering direct flights to Laos. Direct flight routes include: Vientiane-Kunming, Vientiane-Guangzhou, Vientiane-Nanning, Vientiane-Hainan, Luang Prabang-Jinghong, Luang Prabang-Chengdu and Vientiane-Changzhou. For Yunnan province that shares a common border with Laos, visitors can simply walk over to the border towns.





There is now greater awareness of the need to protect resources like elephants and other natural assets in a bid to increase the eco-tourism potential of the country.



Officials in Laos are encouraging healthy tourism industry growth by rejecting gambling-related projects and have stopped issuing gambling licenses to operators. In other words, areas near the HSR project are slated for retail shops, hotel development, and other outlets in anticipation of the HSR completion. Ethically and morally, this gives the tourism industry in Laos a new shine. Tourism may have the potential of becoming a major industry in Laos alongside traditional ones like agriculture and hydropower (Laos has an aspiration to become the battery of Indo-China using hydropower).





There are some new trends in Laotian tourism that operators from both China and Laos should be aware of. For example, Laos derived its name from the presence of large numbers of elephants in the country (the other name for Laos is The Land of a Million Elephants). There is now greater awareness of the need to protect resources like elephants and other natural assets in a bid to increase the eco-tourism potential of the country. Animal conservationists from the West have come to Laos to set up eco-sanctuaries that have proven to be an ethical form of environmentally friendly tourism. Projects like these may prove to be as transformative as the BRI in transforming infrastructure and replacing seedy and shady tourist activities with legitimate eco-tourism activities.





Eco-tourism conforms to traditional images and stereotypes of Laos with its untouched hilly greenery, traditional lifestyles, and elephants in the wild. Other enduring images of Laos include monks, Buddhist temples, and backpacking trails. To protect all these assets, care must be taken to preserve the countrys temples, nature trails, and wildlife. Eco-tourism may be able to capitalize on such traditional images even as the Laotian economy continue to develop. This contrast with the immoral and unethical tourism images presented by brothels, nightlife, massage parlors, and gambling dens.





There is synergy perhaps between the state developmental agencies, conservationists initiatives, and infrastructure initiatives to transform the Laotian economic landscape, including the tourism industry. On hindsight, it may be possible to argue that shutting down casinos (in one case, even cutting off electricity to the facility) and not dispensing any more casino licenses or concessions may have been the right decision on the part of the Laotian authorities.





Ethical use of local community resources may help to prevent unfortunate incidents like tearing down heritage Buddhist temples, creating incentives for local gangs to force rural residents into prostitution, encouraging crimes due to indebtedness from gambling, spread of sexually communicable diseases, growth of slums, displaced minority groups, violence and lawlessness, etc. In the long run, it can induce local residents to support connectivity projects and its peripheral retail areas more as their environment is primed to maximize local revenues, as well as to construct family-friendly neighborhoods and environments. Ethical behavior can also extend to bilateral exchanges between governments to create public awareness about the dangers of gambling and indebtedness, including their potential to wreck families.





All these ethical care and concern can prime Laotian local businesses to maximize returns from brand new infrastructure constructed by the BRI and ensure that such infrastructure will continue to contribute to local community development and not degenerate into slums or red-light districts. For such an outcome to materialize, the stakeholders of the BRI projects should work closely with the Laotian authorities and local community private sector to ensure sustainable, environmentally-friendly, and market-friendly profitable development for the region.
There will be no special amnesty on this year's Liberation Day on Aug. 15, Cheong Wa Dae said on Tuesday.

"A special amnesty is impossible this year," a presidential spokesman told reporters. "The government agency in charge is the Justice Ministry, and it takes more than three months to prepare, so it cant be done this time."

But there is speculation that Cheong Wa Dae had other reasons as well.

Except Park Geun-hye, all other presidents granted pardons either right after their inauguration or on their first Liberation Day in office to promote "national unity." It usually involved springing convicted tycoons and corrupt officials from jail, as well as people convicted of minor offenses like shoplifting.

The ministry already last month gave Cheong Wa Dae a list of 37 people convicted of public order offenses who would qualify for an amnesty.

This fuels speculation that Cheong Wa Dae made a political decision to skip the amnesty because it wants to dodge demands from President Moon Jae-in's progressive support base to free controversial figures. They would almost certainly include former Unified Progressive Party lawmaker Lee Seok-ki, who was jailed for sedition under the previous administration.


Update 4.26pm: The Government Minister charged with overseeing Ireland's new plan to combat climate change has declared it a moral necessity.

More than 100 initiatives are proposed to reduce emissions, including cutting the speed limit on motorways from 120km/h to 110km/h and finding cleaner replacement fuel for Moneypoint power station.

Denis Naughten, Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, said it was the first step in getting all of government to address the issue of greenhouse gases.

"As a country, we are playing catch-up on our obligations in relation to climate change," he said.

"This obligation is as much an opportunity as an obligation. In any event, it is a moral necessity and a vital national interest."

The National Mitigation Plan includes a considerable number of reviews over the next few years, such as one on the future of peat power plants and another setting out what subsidies are given for fossil fuels.

It has a goal for all new cars to be zero emission in 2030, that the Dart line can be extended to Balbriggan by 2022 and that HGV speed limits could be reduced to 80km/h.

It recommends 14 compressed natural gas refuelling stations be set up and a grant scheme for electric vehicles by 2020.

Retrofitting of homes is also an important factor in energy efficiency, with a special scheme to see 1,500 properties upgraded, while landlords will come under pressure next year to have minimum thermal standards.

Guidelines on wind energy are to be finalised next year while Government planners are also being asked to consider approaches to integrated policy that would reduce travel demand and encourage more walking, cycling and public transport and more efficient and cleaner transport.

The plan asks for analysis of suitable reservoirs for carbon storage, more support for biomass and a review of how farming can be improved.

Mr Naughten said: "On climate change, change is possible. Our role is to put the levers for change into peoples' hands.

"This is our work at home, while abroad we stand firm in our commitment to the Paris Agreement. Energy efficiency is central to this plan. This is because using less energy and using it more efficiently is the most cost-effective and accessible way to tackle climate change."

The plan has drawn criticism from environmental groups however, with Friends of the Earth Fdrector, Oisin Coghlan saying: "The bottom line is that this plan fails the fundamental test of a climate action plan, it doesn't say how much pollution will be reduced as a result of the actions it lists.

"Perhaps because too many of them are still 'under consideration'.

"A half decent plan - like the last plan 10 years ago - would identify the emissions pathway we are on now, list the measures we are now going to take to reduce emissions, and state how much lower emissions will be as as result of all the measures in the plan.

"This document just doesn't to that."

Earlier:

Environmental campaigners have expressed disappointment with the governments new blueprint for tackling climate change.

The new National Mitigation Strategy includes 106 proposals which are aimed at lowering carbon emissions in line with global targets.

The plan includes a review of subsidies offered for fossil fuels, and commitments to invest in public transport fleets.

But groups like Friends of the Earth say theres no new concrete actions in todays plan.

Director Oisin Coghlan has hit out at he fact the government cant say exactly what effect its own proposals will have.

Opposition TDs have also hit out at the plan.

People Before Profit TD Brid Smith said teh whoil epackage wa snot goo denoiugh.

"By 2020 we will have failed to meet our European targets ... it will work our more expensive and damaging for environment unless we step up to the plate and make some radical changes."
By Ann OLoughlin

St Jamess Hospital has apologised in the High Court to the husband of a woman who died after she underwent a stem cell transplantation there.

Barbara Kozyra (aged 32) had been transferred from a hospital in Northern Ireland to the Dublin hospital for the specialist treatment relating to a bone marrow stem cell disorder, but her counsel Jeremy Maher SC said the 32-year-old died just under two months after the operation.

Counsel said a mistake was made in the filling out of a form. A transplant co-ordinator mistakenly marked Ms Kozyra down as negative for cytomegalovirus (CMV) when she was in fact positive. A common virus which can lie dormant, CMV can be reactivated and become dangerous when someone is immunosuppressed post-transplant.

Counsel said Ms Kozyras immune system did not respond as it should after the transplant and tragically she lost her life in October 2013.

In the apology read to the court as part of the settlement of the case, the hospital offered its sincere condolence to Ms Kozyras husband Piotr Kozyra and the Kozyra extended family on her untimely death.

"The hospital acknowledges that there was a delay in identifying a complication of her illness which contributed to her death," the statement said.

Mr Maher told the court the Coroners Court later recorded a verdict of medical misaventure in the case.

The apology, Mr Maher said, did help Mr Kozyra but he said nothing would replace his wife.

Approving the settlement the terms of which are confidential, Mr Justice Cross sympathised with Mr Kozyra for the "tragic and avoidable" loss of his wife. He said he knew nothing would compensate Mr Kozyra for his loss.

Piotr Kozyra, Barrack Hill Meadows, Loughmacrory, Co Tyrone had sued St Jamess Hospital, Dublin over the death of his wife on October 5, 2013.

Ms Kozyra needed the transplant having been diagnosed at Belfast City Hospital with a bone marrow stem cell disorder. A family match could not be found for her and Northern Ireland does not carry out unrelated donor bone marrow transplants so she was transferred to St Jamess Hospital and the stem cell transplantation took place on August 15, 2013.

It was claimed there was an initial error in transcription at the hospital in filling out a form which described Ms Kozyra as CMV negative when she was in fact CMV positive and it is claimed the situation was further compounded by an alleged failure to pick up on the initial error.

After the transplant Barbara Kozyras condition deteriorated and she died on October 5, 2013.

It was claimed there was a failure to observe and analyse the signs and symptoms of Ms Kozyras post-transplant condition in time or at all and a failure to administer an antiviral agent in time or at all.

It was further claimed there was a failure to consider or to make the correct diagnosis and a failure to apply the normal standards of professionalism to Ms Kozyras care.

All members of Ms Kozyras extended family in Poland as well as her husband, it was claimed, suffered mental distress and anxiety as a result of her death.

The court was told that negligence had been admitted in the case.
A United States politician who has offered Charlie Gard "permanent resident status" in America so he can "get the medical treatment he needs" is shedding more heat than light on a very difficult case, a legal expert has suggested.

Jeff Fortenberry, a congressman who represents Nebraska, has tweeted a message saying: "We just passed amendment that grants permanent resident status to #CharlieGard and family so Charlie can get the medical treatment he needs."
James Elliot Construction (JEC) has brought the petition seeking the appointment of a liquidator to the firm, which is part of the Lagan Group of companies, over an alleged unpaid debt of more than 2.4m.

The application is opposed by Irish Asphalt, directors of the firm, and related entity Lagan Holdings Ltd, which is Irish Asphalts largest creditor.

They claim JEC has an ulterior motive in seeking to have the company liquidated, namely that it will give it a tactical advantage in separate deceit proceedings JEC has brought against the company; its directors Kevin and Terry Lagan and John Gallagher; and another related entity, Lagan Cement Group Ltd.

The debt at the centre of the winding-up petition relates to a High Court judgment it obtained against the company in 2011.

That case arose out of the supply by Irish Asphalt to JEC of a stone infill with excessive amounts of pyrite used in the Ballymun Central Youth Facility building and which subsequently had to undergo major repairs.

That ruling was appealed to the Supreme Court, which in turn referred issues of law arising out of the action to the European Courts of Justice (ECJ).

Ultimately the appeal was dismissed by the Supreme Court and the ECJs findings did not benefit Irish Asphalts position.

Moving the winding-up petition, Patrick Leonard, for JEC, said it was just and equitable that the company, which it was accepted is insolvent, be wound up.

Counsel said his client wants an official liquidator appointed to investigate the companys affairs going back over a decade when litigation concerning pyrites first emerged.

John Gleeson, for Irish Asphalt,

says the company and others in the group underwent reorganisation following the recession.

The company, directors, and Lagan Holdings want JECs application dismissed or stayed until deceit proceedings have concluded.

If a liquidator is appointed, the parties claim the company is unlikely to defend the other proceedings, which could result in them suffering reputational damage, they claim.

JEC rejects claims it has ulterior motives in seeking to wind up Irish Asphalt.

The case opened before Mr Justice Tony OConnor yesterday.
It follows a Labour Court recommendation that the workers receive a 4.5% pay increase, in spite of the company, Lufthansa Technik Shannon Ltd, stating that it absolutely cannot afford to do so.

The dispute, between Siptu and the aircraft maintenance firm, could not be resolved at local level, and was the subject of a conciliation conference, under the auspices of the Workplace Relations Commission.
Despite the unemployment rate holding at its lowest in more than 25 years at 5.5%, job creation has slowed and the number of foreign workers seeking payroll tax registrations has dropped 15% compared with a year earlier.

While no-one knows how Brexit will play out, this new analysis suggests that Londons economy is beginning to wobble, think-tank director Ben Rogers said.

The UK economy performed much better last year than most economists expected in the months after the vote to leave the EU. However, since the start of this year, there have been signs of slowing consumer spending and increased reluctance among businesses to invest.

Demand for luxury housing in central London has fallen sharply, and the Centre for London said that the overall annual rate of house price growth was less than 3%, the weakest since 2012 when the city was still recovering from the 2012 financial crisis.

London has shown remarkable resilience in the years following the recession. However, its growth has not been painless. Levels of inequality have soared. Congestion, pollution and the housing shortage have all worsened, Mr Rogers said. The report was sponsored by Australian property and construction company Lendlease.

It comes as new figures showed British inflation unexpectedly slowed last month for the first time since October, dousing expectations among investors that the Bank of England might soon raise interest rates for the first time in a decade. Consumer prices rose 2.6% compared to a year earlier.

Sterling fell after the data, down by half a cent against the dollar, and fell to 88.9p against the euro, and British government bond prices jumped as the figures suggested the Bank of England was under little pressure to raise rates when it next meets in early August, despite concerns among some of its policymakers about rising prices.

This is going to kill the chances of a rate rise in the short term. We will learn more about the Bank of Englands thinking in a couple of weeks, but we can expect the calls for a rate rise to reduce to a whimper, Lucy OCarroll, chief economist at fund managers Aberdeen Asset Management, said.

Chancellor Philip Hammond said the UK economy will adapt to changes in the value of sterling, when asked by an MP about the impact of the fall in the pound. n Reuters
The U.S. on Monday put a dampener on the South Korean government's eager attempts to engage North Korea in talks.

"I think the president has made clear in the past with respect that any type of conditions that would have to be met are clearly far away from where we are now," White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters.

Spicer added any questions should be referred to the South Korean government. The U.S. State Department and Defense Department pointedly declined to comment.
The college has also revealed it was involved in 20 legal cases in matters related to staff issues despite previously telling the Irish Examiner it was not involved in any cases.

Brendan Murphy, who was reappointed to the post on a five-year term in 2014 despite nearing retirement age, has been paid his pension plus half his original salary since he reached 65, the college has told the committee.

Documents from CIT to the PAC, seen by this newspaper, have detailed the terms of the pension, which has kicked in despite him continuing in the post. However, since then, the college has clarified the president is on contract up to August 31, and will retire at that date.

The president receives his normal pension at retirement age and the institute pays only the difference between the normal salary and the pension amount, said a spokeswoman.

The institute makes a saving of half the presidents salary.

The college has been at the centre of staunch criticism from members of the PAC in recent months and recently submitted an 18-point clarification document to committee members.

According to the documents, 1,108,927 was spent by the college on legal costs from 2014 to 2016 to deal with cases including staff issues.

CIT was involved in 20 cases that may be categorised as matters relating to staff issues, one allegation of protected disclosures made to CIT, and two cases that may be categorised as involving allegations of bullying, the documents said.

The documents also detailed a total of 459,377 in payments to 11 retired senior members of staff between the years 2012 to 2017 including to a former vice president.
Engineers Ireland said current decision-making on significant capital expenditure is spread across government departments with little central oversight.

The body said the rollout of broadband should be seen as being as important as the electrification of rural Ireland.

The comments came following the publication of the groups report, The State of Ireland 2017  A Review of Infrastructure in Ireland.

Speaking at the launch, the president of Engineers Ireland, Kieran Feighan, welcomed the Governments summer economic statement to invest an additional 500m in infrastructure every year from 2019 to 2021.

While progress has been made in terms of increasing capital investment and quickening of project delivery, there are still some frustrating delays with infrastructure, said Mr Feighan.

To ensure it can meet its infrastructural goals, the Government must address how we deliver our capital projects and Engineers Ireland strongly believes a single infrastructure unit is required to plan investment in key areas such as housing, transport, education, health, energy, water, and the digital economy.

As things stand, planning and delivery in these areas are spread across government departments, each competing for finite funding, with multiple layers of decision-making and little central oversight.

A single infrastructure unit, as in the UK and Switzerland, could work collaboratively with external experts such as engineers, planners, and economists to identify priority infrastructure projects as part of an integrated and long-term vision, speed up project delivery, and explore innovative financing and funding mechanisms.

The report recommends the acceleration of the development of Metro North and the M20 Cork to Limerick motorway; that broadband should be considered an essential service similar to electricity and water; and that variable speed limits and multi-point tolling is needed to tackle congestion on the M50.

The installation of Irelands nationwide broadband infrastructure is akin to the electrification of rural Ireland in the last century in terms of scale, ambition, and the socioeconomic benefits it will deliver, said Mr Feighan.

The Government has faced fiscal restraints in recent years and a lack of investment, specifically in land transport, has resulted in bottlenecks and congestion which are beginning to impact on the day-to-day lives of Irish people.

To ensure we can meet our ambitions as outlined in the new National Planning Framework, we must substantially increase capital spend in the long run to meet ever-increasing demand, he said.

The report was launched at the Engineers Ireland offices in Dublin, with the event also involving a roundtable discussion with Mr Feighan and Stephen Kinsella, Department of Economics, University of Limerick; Tony Hanway, Virgin Media Ireland CEO; and Caroline Spillane, the director general of Engineers Ireland.
When Richard Forde was arrested, charged, and cautioned for his part in the attack, he replied to the garda: Polish fucking scum rats.

This reply was put in evidence yesterday at Cork District Court by Inspector Brian ODonovan at the sentencing hearing for Richard Forde, of 28 Courtown Drive, Knocknaheeny, Cork.

The 28-year-old had pleaded guilty to causing criminal damage at 71 Bride Valley View, Fairhill, on September 10, 2015, by breaking windows at the home of Ryszard Suchowiecki.

Insp ODonovan said gardai were called to a disturbance at Bridevalley Park at 12.35am, where they

observed a male, along with about 10 others, throwing stones at the house in question.

Gardai observed Richard Forde throwing a rock from the ground at the windows of 71 Bridevalley View, said Insp ODonovan.

When gardai drove in, all the youths took flight in different directions.

Garda Sharon McCarthy got out of the van and caught up with one youth, namely Richard Forde. He was very unsteady on his feet. Garda McCarthy got a strong smell of intoxicating liquor from his breath and his speech was slurred and froth was coming from his mouth.

Before he was placed in the patrol car he was searched and cannabis grass located in his jacket pocket. Later cannabis resin and cocaine were also found.

Michael Quinlan, defending, confirmed his client had brought some compensation to court as a contribution to the repair bill with which the resident was left.

Judge Aingeal Ni Chonduin adjourned sentencing until September 26 to enable the accused link in with the probation service.
Next week, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission will appear before the UN in Geneva to present its findings on Irelands human rights performance. Issues will include access to abortion, prisoner treatment, support for victims of people trafficking, and policing accountability.

The Geneva meeting on July 27 and 28 will be the first attended by the Irish State since 2011 and will fulfill its obligations under the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT).

Chief commissioner Emily Logan will present the commissions findings, while the State will be represented by junior minister for Justice and Equality, David Stanton. He will detail Irelands progress in meeting its obligations.

Speaking on the publication of the commissions 68-page report, Ms Logan said the report highlights the broad spectrum of current challenges facing people, including those in detention and in custody, those arriving to Ireland seeking asylum, and the State treatment of the most vulnerable children and adults in our society.

It makes clear recommendations for action, Ms Logan said, adding that while the report shows positive developments in some areas, significant gaps in human rights protection remain, which need to be addressed.

The commission raised concerns about the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, regarding access to judicial reviews, as well as regarding the potential impact of assessment and certification procedures on women and girls, particularly in the context of a risk of suicide.

It said Irelands abortion laws impede a womans right to bodily autonomy and have a disproportionate impact on women who face difficulties in travelling to seek a termination of pregnancy, citing women from poorer backgrounds, women living in detention, and migrant women as examples of those significantly affected by restrictions.

The report asks that the Oireachtas committee tasked with considering the Citizens Assemblys findings on the Eighth Amendment note the commissions findings, as well as the findings of other UN treaty-monitoring bodies.

The commission reiterates its endorsement of recommendations by various UN treaty-monitoring bodies, during the reporting period, that Ireland revise its legal framework on abortion, the report said.

On human trafficking, the commission recommended that Ireland have assistance and protection for victims on a statutory basis.

The commission is concerned that victims of trafficking in human beings can be subject to secondary victimisation, for example in securing compensation, the report states.

Irish legislation focuses on the criminalisation of trafficking in human beings, and does not expressly define victim of trafficking in human beings.

Garda stations are not subject to unannounced inspections, the report says, which leaves a gap in national oversight of police custody.

The report also warns that womens prisons remain the most overcrowded in the State.
Richard Pym has also questioned if the UK will actually leave the EU and has said that Theresa Mays minority Government does not have the bandwidth to bring in the necessary policies and regulations in time for the March 2019 Brexit deadline.

Speaking at the MacGill summer school in Glenties, Co Donegal, Mr Pym agreed that Brexit would bring lucrative financial sector jobs here and said Ireland should be promoting itself aggressively to UK firms.

However, he warned: The one downside is that incoming firms will poach their senior staff from the large domestic firms and as they are not subject to the same pay constraints this will weaken our main national financial institutions.

Mr Pym told the summer school: There is nothing wrong with Ireland promoting itself aggressively to UK businesses looking to relocate. It is not an unfriendly act as some have suggested. Do not expect vast numbers of evacuees to arrive in Dublin, as Frankfurt and Paris will be the main job winners. But even a few thousand highly paid jobs arriving will generate knock-on economic activity.

The AIB chairman went on to say that for business- planning purposes firms and the Government must assume that Britain crashes out without a deal.

This minority government just does not have the bandwidth to create the replacement regulatory structures and policies by March 2019, Mr Pym. Amongst this chaos we could easily end up with a hard, car-crash Brexit and it is also conceivable, although unlikely, that Britain could even remain, he said. Also speaking at the event Ibecs Fergal OBrien said debt levels in Ireland have fallen like a stone in recent years and we are living in an incredibly wealthy high-income country.

However, the secretary general of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform Robert Watt disagreed with IBEC that debt is now low and said we do not accept this view that we should go on a spending splurge as this country still has a debt issue.

He said infrastructure would have to by paid through either user charges or taxation and said there is no magic solution.
OBrien, the daughter of trainer Aidan OBrien, was quickly attended to after her mount Druids Cross, trained by her brother, Joseph, slipped up over two furlongs out in the Celtic Steps The Show At Killarney Racecourse Rated Race, the second contest on the card, which was run at 6.20pm yesterday.

The three-year-old Druids Cross was fatally injured, while Ms OBrien was subsequently airlifted from Killarney to Cork University Hospital .
The problem is, due to a lacuna in the relevant law, Grace cannot recover her legal costs of representation and of her involvement in the commission despite her being at the centre of it.

The President of the High Court, Mr Justice Peter Kelly, has directed a hearing tomorrow aimed at ensuring the problem is resolved. There was no way to cut this Gordian knot except to make the minister a party to a formal application, he said.

The commission was set up to carry out a function but, due to a lacuna in the law, that will be frustrated, he said. As an amendment to the law was unlikely to happen soon, an administrative solution would have to be fashioned.

The judge was told by Raymond Comyn SC, for the commission, correspondence received yesterday from the Department of Health about the matter has given great comfort to the commission and hopefully would address the concerns.

The judge, who last April approved a 6.3m HSE-funded settlement package for Grace to ensure lifelong care for her, said he had asked the commission to ask the minister for health to clarify the matter, as his anxiety was that Graces funds will be used only to provide for her needs.

He also noted, when approving the package, he had expressed the view a range of matters concerning her treatment required to be investigated. He described the treatment of the literally voiceless Grace, who was entrusted to HSE care as a child until aged in her early 30s, as not just shocking, but a scandal, particularly as it continued into the 21st century, and involved abdication of responsibility by the relevant health board and state agencies.

Grace was placed with a foster family in the South-East in 1989. Despite a 1996 health board decision that she and other children be removed from them after an allegation a child was sexually abused, evidence of physical abuse and neglect of Grace, as well as suggestions of sexual abuse, she was left there until 2009, the judge noted.

Because Grace is a ward of court, her case was before the judge arising from issues raised by Sara Moorhead SC, for the general solicitor of wards of court, concerning her representation before the commission, and by the commission itself.

Mr Comyn said the commission considers the only practical way of speedily addressing the issue of recovery of Graces legal costs is for the minister to fashion an administrative solution.

Ms Moorhead said the commission had identified a lacuna in the legislation  the Commission of Inquiry Act 2004  which meant costs of work done on behalf of Grace and her representation before the commission were not recoverable for reasons including she is not a person whose good name or reputation will be affected.

She said the general solicitor is very concerned about this as the wards of court office had heard nothing about its costs being covered or about costs of Graces representation.

Mr Comyn said the commission concurred completely with what the judge had said about the use of Graces funds but thought the letter received yesterday from the minister would satisfy the courts concerns.

The judge said, unless the problem is solved, the work of the commission will be brought to a halt.

The commission was also very concerned about matters referred to in an article in todays Irish Examiner which are within the private investigative purview of the commission, counsel said. It was contemplating what to do about the article.
The hosptial provides a residential service for the elderly, but also has rehabilitation patients.

The hospital removed some managers from their roles to undertake frontline care, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation has claimed.

Mary-Rose Carroll, INMO industrial relations officer for the region, said eight nurses were withdrawn from frontline care and the situation was unsafe.

There is a big sign outside the hospital, saying it is recruiting staff, but they are hiring people to fill temporary positions, not permanent ones, she said.

The post of director of nursing is filled on a temporary basis, and other nurse-management positions remain unfilled.

Ms Carroll said most of the ward manager positions had been filled on a temporary basis, while all the junior management posts were vacant. She said the situation created huge instability.

The HSEs Cork Kerry Community Healthcare said there was no reduction in staffing numbers at the hospital, compared to last year.

Savings have been made by replacing staff sourced through agencies with directly employed staff, the HSE stated.

We are completely satisfied that the care at St Finbarrs continues to be safe, caring, compassionate, and of a high standard.

We have full confidence that the current management arrangements are appropriate and allow for the high standard of care we provide at all long-stay facilities in Cork and Kerry.

Ms Carroll said she wrote to the HSE two weeks ago, seeking a meeting, but the health authority had not replied with a date.

The INMO want HSE senior management to restore the agency cover and fill all current vacancies immediately.
Det Garda Sean Minihan originally charged Kelly Lynch, aged 19, of Gartan Park, Douglas Village, Cork, and her co-accused with two counts each of causing criminal damage to cars.

Each defendant was charged with setting fire to a Nissan Micra at Mount Vernon on South Douglas Rd on March 4, 2016, and burning a Mercedes at Douglas village on the same date.

Lynch was before Cork District Court for sentencing yesterday and Inspector Brian ODonovan outlined the background to the case.

When questioned [by gardai near the Mercedes fire], Kelly Lynch stated that they both started the fire, Insp ODonovan said. The co-accused said that Kelly started both fires.

Both were arrested and conveyed to Bridewell garda station where Kelly admitted involvement in both fires, and the co-accused blaming Kelly for starting both fires.

The total value of damage to both vehicles was 1,700.

Lynchs co-accused was previously before the court for her role in the arson.

Defence solicitor Michelle OMahony said Lynch had no previous convictions.

Alcohol certainly played a part, she said. The Probation Service have identified a way forward for her. I have spoken to her about the prospect of a probation order, as suggested by the report. She is more motivated about that now and enjoys the support of her family.

Judge Aingil Ni Chonduin put the accused on a 12-month probation bond.
In one of the raids, a shop worker in her 60s had a knife pulled on her.

The men, in their early and mid-30s and with addresses in Cork City, were arrested around 11.30am yesterday after a series of high-speed pursuits at several locations across the city.

Gardai had been on the lookout for a black Ford Kuga suspected of being connected to three earlier robberies, two in North Cork and one in the Knockraha area.

The Kuga was spotted in the city and gardai, backed by armed members of the Regional Support Unit, gave chase.

The vehicle was subsequently found abandoned in the car park of an apartment complex on the Boreenmanna Rd, and two suspects were arrested nearby.

They were detained under the provisions of Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act and were being quizzed by detectives at the Bridewell garda station last night.

Gardai believe the Kuga was stolen from a house in the Brooklodge area of Glanmire, around 5am yesterday. It was connected to three robberies over the following hours.

The first raid occurred at McCarthys Topaz filling station, on the Dublin Rd, in Fermoy, at 6.50am. One raider, armed with a knife, entered the shop and stole a quantity of cash.

At 9.16am, a lone raider, wearing a baseball cap, entered the Centra shop in Watergrasshill, walked up to the counter, and demanded cash.

Shopowner Ken Ross said a staff member, a woman in her 60s, thought it was a joke, until the raider brandished a knife and shouted at her to open the cash register.

She stood back and the man rifled through the till, before stealing cash.

A second man was waiting in a black Kuga, which was parked behind the shop, and they both sped off.

The raid, which lasted about a minute, was captured on CCTV.

The third raid occurred at Glenamore Stores, in Knockraha, at around 9.30am. Again, the raider made off with cash.

No-one was injured during the robberies, but staff at all three shops were said to have been extremely shaken by their ordeals.

Gardai were also last night searching for a black Toyota Avensis, with the registration number 05-C-40974. It was stolen from a house in the Grange area of the city, near Douglas, sometime between 2am and 5am yesterday.

Detectives are trying to establish if the vehicle was connected to the robberies, and whether or not it was used as transport from the city to Glanmire, where the Kuga was stolen.
The White House has voiced opposition to President Moon Jae-in's overtures to North Korea in language anyone can understand. It is rare for the U.S. to voice such immediate opposition to an offer by South Korea to hold military and Red Cross talks with North Korea as White House spokesman Sean Spicer's remark on Monday, "I think the president has made clear in the past with respect that any type of conditions that would have to be met are clearly far away from where we are now." The U.S. State Department and Defense Department refused to answer any questions on the rash and disruptive proposal. The U.S. says it is ready to talk with North Korea only if the North takes steps to scrap its nuclear weapons, and this is not the time. The Japanese government also publicly voiced its opposition.

The U.S. position is exactly the same as in a joint statement by Moon and U.S. President Donald Trump after their summit on June 30, where the two leaders clearly stated that the door to talks with North Korea remains open "under the right conditions." The U.S. believes the conditions are not right, especially so soon after the North launched an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching Alaska and Hawaii.

Inter-Korean dialogue has only ever weakened the impact of UN sanctions and resulted in North Korea recovering from crisis after crisis. Moon's offer of talks on Monday was completely inappropriate, and now it is predictably causing discord between Cheong Wa Dae and the White House, less than three weeks after the bilateral summit. Moon and Trump were an odd match from the start, but the discord has erupted sooner than expected. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un must be squealing with delight, but this is no laughing matter.

Moon has at least confessed that South Korea "does not have the strength to resolve the North Korean nuclear standoff" on its own. In that case he should be ensuring efficient cooperation between Seoul, Washington and Tokyo and try to get China aboard, instead of dashing off on harebrained adventures on his own.

Moon needs to become a lot more careful in assessing the timing of inter-Korean dialogue and should have coordinated the rash offer with Washington beforehand. But he appears to be in a dire rush. Does he now think negotiations about the North Korean nuclear crisis can be rushed through like other key campaign pledges such as the minimum wage hike or closures of nuclear power plants here? Any discord between Seoul and Washington ends up benefiting only Kim Jong-un.


When I was younger, I really wanted to be an actor first, and Irish second. I wanted to do American films, and do an American accent, and a British accent, and show that I can do that. But as I get older I think it doesnt matter, says Cillian Murphy. Im very proud of being an Irish actor. Its a smaller industry, but Im really proud to support it.

Over a year since Murphy returned to Ireland from London, it appears hes returning to his roots mentally too. It helps, of course, that he has little to prove now, having succeeded in Hollywood while maintaining his integrity  a balance managed by only a handful of stars.

Whether blockbuster or indie, most of his films, like 28 Days Later, The Dark Knight Trilogy and The Wind That Shakes The Barley, have been critically acclaimed, and his forthcoming film, The Delinquent Season by Mark ORowe (Intermission, Howie the Rookie), suggests that will continue closer to home.

But talk to him about his body of work over 20 years, and hes simply not interested in analysing it.

Its silly to look back if you want to keep working. I dont even go back and look at performances. You have to learn up here, he says, tapping his temple. Your next job should always be your best performance  thats what I want it to be, anyway.

Its fine to look back if you want to retire, but I still feel young and I still have a lot of energy. Indeed: not six months since the prolific actor fought against Nazis in the Sam Ellis-directed Anthropoid, hes on the right side of history again as we meet to discuss Dunkirk. It was here in 1940 that 400,000 British soldiers retreated as France fell to Nazi Germany, with just 26 miles of sea between themselves and home.

Set to be one of this summers biggest releases, its the latest project from the revered Christopher Nolan. That explains why Tom Hardy agreed to represent the RAF defence, despite being given limited acting range (most of his scenes are close-ups of him in a pilots mask), why Harry Styles picked it as his first foray into the acting world, being stranded on the beach surrounded by the enemy, and why Murphy accepted the role of a character whos rescued from the sea, named only as Shivering soldier.

Christopher Nolan is one of the greatest living directors, and you want to work with the best, Murphy says, explaining why he took the unnamed role. You can see the evolution in his films: the way he tells the non-linear nature of his storytelling has become more sophisticated and honed. The way three different storylines [of air, land and sea] intersect is genius, and the way he asks the audience to keep up is so clever.

Speaking to him later, the sentiment is mutual. Nolan explains that Murphy is one of the great actors of his generation and delighted their professional relationship continued in Dunkirk.

Though he was just very happy we didnt put a sack over his head, because weve done three films where weve made him put a sack over his head, he jokes.

Ive known him since before he had kids and now hes got a 12-year-old. Hes an extraordinary presence.

In the case of this film, he was very generous with me, because I sent him a script where his character was very unfinished, and he very politely asked me about that. I said I knew how to complete the character according to the usual Hollywood rhythm, but I wanted to do something thats more truthful. So I needed an actor who will take it on trust, and get on that boat and figure something out.

The movie was filmed straight after Murphys other release this year, the black-and-white drama The Party, which sees Murphy as a guest alongside Emily Mortimer and Kristin Scott Thomas as secrets and drama unfurl over the course of a night. They were very different films  The Party is a small, independent, ensemble film. Im very proud of it, its a very smart piece of work.

But that wasnt good scheduling. I remember I wrapped on The Party at 8pm, and I rushed to the airport, flew to Holland, got a haircut, woke up at 5am, got on a boat and jumped in the sea: it was that first scene in Dunkirk. So it was kind of crazy.

In a perfect world, you do one job, and you have two or three months off, and then you do another job, so youre back to yourself in between. But The Party kept getting pushed its boring stuff. Its not ideal, but you just have to switch your brain if you can. One of the nice things about the job is you take completely different roles and differing types of jobs.

The variation extends to format too; Murphy is a regular in theatre, and his lead role as Tommy Shelby in BBC series Peaky Blinders (alongside Hardy, another frequent colleague) has become his best-known character as much as any from his movies.

So: Film vs theatre? If you trust the filmmaker, your job is to give them the building blocks to make the film. In theatre you make it yourself, so its a very different medium.

Film vs television? Its different only in that theres so much more to make, he says. We make six hours of television with Peaky in four months, so its very full-on schedule, its like three feature films. You have to be incredibly prepared and focused and rested. Whereas Dunkirk I was on it for three weeks.

Often working from project to project, his little down time is reserved for his family, wife Yvonne McGuinness and kids Malachy and Aran. At these points, the Cork-born star says that watching films takes a back seat (you usually just want to go to bed). But he does make an effort to educate his kids on good movies, including some of his own.

Theyve watched Inception, The Wind that Shakes the Barley and the Batman movies. But they dont see me as any different  Im just dad. While Dunkirk is set to keep him in the public eye over summer, the hotly-anticipated fourth series of Peaky Blinders will air later this year, The Delinquent Season is also soon, and Jim Sheridans H-Block has been confirmed but I dont know when that will start.

Looking further ahead, does he have any aspirations to expand his role on film sets to writer or director?

Im not a writer, I know that, he says. Maybe directing, but when you work with people like Christopher Nolan or Danny Boyle or Sally Potter or Ken Loach, how am I going to match that? If you want to do something, you want to do the best you can, so no. I think Ill concentrate on just doing this.

And whod argue with that?
Creation of ubiquitous networks featuring low power consumption without sacrificing necessary functionality is one of the biggest challenges facing the Internet of Things (IoT). If it faces down this challenge, the expansive vision of the IoT has a chance of being realized. If not, the IoT could devolve to localized pockets of connectivity without the ability to communicate with each other.

This is a vital area. The good news is that three announcements touching on IoT networking were made during the past couple of weeks.

In what could be a big deal down the road, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) said that the platform now supports mesh networking. Bluetooth is ubiquitous and could significantly improve the odds that the IoT meets marketers rosy predictions. The press release suggests Bluetooths potential now is that it offers the mesh capability:

It is ideally suited for building automation, sensor networks and other IoT solutions where tens, hundreds, or thousands of devices need to reliably and securely communicate with one another.

The functionality is available on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Bluetooth version 4.0 and higher, the press release says.

The announcement by the Bluetooth SIG was anticipated by the announcement last week of the formation of Nodle.io. TechCrunch details the initiative, which aims to have the same goal as the Bluetooth SIG. The company, which has offices in San Francisco and Hong Kong, will support the IoT through Bluetooth-based mesh networking. Whether Nodle.ios approach depends on the functionality the Bluetooth SIG is introducing is unclear. The point, however, is that Bluetooth is positioning itself as a valuable IoT platform.

Companies are also taking up the challenge. The third announcement is that Comcast is launching its machineQ platform in 12 additional markets. The network, which uses technology from Semtech, is already active in Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay area and Chicago. The new markets are Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Oakland, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

The goal is to support businesses and municipalities. So far, the company says that it has gotten expressions of interest from organizations in health care, public utilities, automotive and smart cities sectors.

The IoT faces two key challenges: the creation of adequate networks and security. Security is inherently more dramatic and has gotten most of the headlines. The Comcast and Bluetooth SIG announcements and the Nodle.io launch suggest that attention is being paid to networking challenges, as well.

Carl Weinschenk covers telecom for IT Business Edge. He writes about wireless technology, disaster recovery/business continuity, cellular services, the Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communications and other emerging technologies and platforms. He also covers net neutrality and related regulatory issues. Weinschenk has written about the phone companies, cable operators and related companies for decades and is senior editor of Broadband Technology Report. He can be reached at [email protected] and via twitter at @DailyMusicBrk.
The cloud is starting to dominate IT infrastructure and the hyperscale providers are starting to dominate the cloud. So is it game-over for the data center? Or the small cloud providers? Not exactly.

To be sure, the vast bulk of the enterprise workload appears headed for the top providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. According to Synergy Research Group, worldwide revenue from cloud and SaaS services is on pace to hit perhaps 29 percent annual growth for the remainder of the decade, passing $200 billion in 2020. This will be driven largely by 11 percent annual growth from the hyperscale providers offering primarily infrastructure and software services, to the point that they will soon control upwards of 80 percent of all cloud and SaaS revenues.

Still, that 20 percent represents a huge business for the many smaller providers who dont have to own the industry in order to be successful. As Fortunes Barb Darrow points out, many providers like Equinix and BackBlaze have developed specialty software that provides unique services in areas like workload visibility and archive management  things that the enterprise values highly once they agree to shift data to someone else. Meanwhile, top Amazon users like Netflix are starting to make a pretty good living selling the software that it has developed for itself to management hyperscale resources more efficiently.

In fact, says CIO Dives Justine Brown, if you look at Gartners latest Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure and services, youll notice a raft of new names in the niche player quarter, few of whom are actually new but are making their presences known in an increasingly diverse industry. Companies like Interoute and Skytap are sharing space with NTT Communications and Fujitsu by targeting narrower use cases that nonetheless have the potential to generate substantial revenues because the customer base is now measured on a global scale. In this way, the cloud is evolving along the lines of the software market: a few dominant players but still plenty of room for innovation and differentiation.

And while it is true that much of this cloud activity will come at the expense of local data center infrastructure, particularly hardware, this still represents an opportunity for those willing to go for it. SUSE and Supermicro recently entered a partnership to build Linux-embedded compute modules designed to give organizations a quick and easy way to build their own private clouds. The platform will be built around SUSEs YES Certified hardware architecture that will house platforms like SUSE OpenStack Cloud, SUSE Enterprise Storage and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on footprints as small as the 1U SuperServer. Leveraging technologies like multiple hot-swappable NVMe Flash drives, the companies say they can supplant larger and less efficient infrastructure with systems that provide higher performance per watt, per dollar and per square foot.

So overall, the cloud is growing and the data center is shrinking, but because data loads are becoming larger and more diverse, it appears that market opportunities for providers, platform designers and software developers are on the rise.

As the old saying goes, wherever theres a problem, theres a way to make a buck by solving it.

Arthur Cole writes about infrastructure for IT Business Edge. Cole has been covering the high-tech media and computing industries for more than 20 years, having served as editor of TV Technology, Video Technology News, Internet News and Multimedia Weekly. His contributions have appeared in Communications Today and Enterprise Networking Planet and as web content for numerous high-tech clients like TwinStrata and Carpathia. Follow Art on Twitter @acole602.
Application development can be a key differentiator for your business, and the wizards who can whip up a market-leading mobile app or just the right custom code to make the business hum are well worth the investment. But the truth is, we developers arent always straight with you. We have a few secrets we like to keep for ourselves.

The fact that we dont tell you everything is understandable. Youre the boss, after all. Do you tell your boss everything? If youre the CEO, do you loop in the board on every decision? So dont be so surprised when we do it.

Sometimes less knowledge on your part is more. You dont need to know the directory where we stash the Java updates. Nor do you care about the password for the backups as long as theyre encrypted. You probably arent all that bothered if we switch to a different tool without asking every stakeholders approval.

[ Beware the 12 best practices IT should avoid at all costs while heeding the 9 forces shaping the future of IT work. | Get an inside look at 10 real-world digital transformations. | Get the latest insights by signing up for our CIO daily newsletter. ]

But other things may make a difference. Other facts just might control the fate of the company and both of our paychecks. So in the interest of disclosure, here are nine things we arent telling you that could come back to haunt the business.

We have less of a clue than we lead you to believe

Developers are smart folks. And some of us are pure geniuses. But we do have a tendency to allow the impression that we know everything about those 1s and 0s get us over our heads at times.

Of course we know the foundations of programming backward and forward. We can write a loop or send a query to the database. And those foundations can get us far, even when were encountering a language, code base or development tool for the first time. But youre rarely asking for the basics. You want us to fix a flow of functionality and we may be lucky if we know where all the code involved in that flow actually lives. And when we find it, fixing it could end up being easy or it might be hard. We wont really know until we download the code, rewrite a few lines and see what happens. Its not just scope creep that blows your timelines. Its sometimes our inability to estimate the scope of the real work involved in the first place.

But who wants to say, I dont know? at a meeting? Who wants to tell the boss that they dont have a clue how to even begin or what tool will be best for the job? So we grab an estimate or a solution out of thin air and hope were right. And if were not, well have to spin up some smart-sounding excuse like the flux capacitor was overloaded and get down to doing what we like least, reading the manual.

Your technical debt is a lot bigger than you think

When it comes to working on an existing application, management has a choice: Push the development team to make quick fixes or ask them to re-engineer the whole stack. Quick fixes often feel good  and appear to cost less. With a quick fix, you get to solve your problems immediately and we get to please you, which for the most part we like to do.

But over time the bandages and duct tape build up. Some smart developer coined the term technical debt to capture all the real work that should have been done but was delayed by a decision to use bailing wire and chewing gum.

Of course, its not an accurate term. You dont need to pay the debt. If youre lucky, you can keep the software running without reworking everything. But eventually some major event is going to break everything in a way that cant be fixed easily. Usually it involves a close partner who finally upgrades to the latest version of some software package. Suddenly our code wont run. Suddenly everything crashes and our code no longer interacts with our partners. Sometimes our partner will take pity on us and keep the old gateway running but that only works if were bringing our partner revenue. If were just a freeloader or a small account, the partner will kiss us good bye and there goes our business.

Were bored  and looking at the door

The biggest problem for a business is retaining the smart developer who knows everything about your code but cant stay interested in doing anything with it. This developer can knock out a fix or a feature enhancement ten times faster than the new kid who may be smart but doesnt know anything about the code base. There are millions of reasons that leave us bored. Sometimes the code is written in a language that went out of fashion a few years ago. Sometimes we have bad memories of the hard work that went into building the code in the first place. Sometimes its all too easy to make the tables a bit wider or the background a bit bluer and we want a new challenge.

Theres not much you can do to alleviate the crushing boredom of plowing through the same code again and again. Letting developers rewrite it in the latest, greatest framework can help. As Ezra Pound said the poets job is to make it new again. Perhaps its the managers job as well. Or at least maybe it should be if you want to retain us.

Were infatuated with our own code

Did you see that clever way I used the indexOf function? Just one line of code but it parses the cookie string completely. If you gave me another few days, I could have solved world hunger with that clever hack.

Were in love with our own particular ways to program. Weve settled into comfortable ruts and we love to deploy the same idioms again and again. You know the joke that every disease needs cutting when you go to a surgeon and that every task looks like a nail to a carpenter with a hammer? Its like that for us, but with our own particular corners of the language. Functional languages? Object-oriented code? Assembly code? Weve taken sides and were ready to deploy our favorite solutions  regardless of whether it makes sense for the company.

On the best of days, this isnt a problem. Good developers dont let their particular choices turn into dogma. And usually weve got good enough taste to fall in love with a pretty good idea. We should be flexible enough to recognize that many programming techniques are pretty much interchangeable. We should also be smart enough to recognize that theres no perfect solution and every great feature or amazing hack comes with downsides.

But on the worst of days, weve got our muskets ready for civil war. Too many of us demonize and denigrate the developers who make different choices. Managers need to tread lightly but it can be confusing. Its hard to know whether a technique is truly braindead or merely different when the programmers toss out harsh criticism so casually. And when you dont know whether the developer pushing back is on to something or is simply being stubborn about their work, it can be difficult to make the optimal decision for the business.

Were obsessed with the flavor of the month

Did you see the new open source project described on Slashdot? Did you see that article on InfoWorld? We absolutely need to pull down the code, compile it and integrate it with our stack. Its going to make everything run so much faster. It will be sick. So much better than the slick new idea I wrote you about last month. Thats so yesterday. So last week. This is the real deal.

Progress is a big part of the tech industry. Its generally a good thing that makes the machines better and better. All it takes is a visit to the Wayback Machine to recognize just how much everything has improved.

But developers often take this too far. We love to fall for new gimmicks and better code like a new car buyer falls for shiny things. Its no coincidence that Google named its browser Chrome.

Reining in this instinct is a challenge. You dont want to say no too often because our infatuation is often grounded in some practical need, if only to improve. But if we chase every new idea, we can lose track of whats best for the business. Or worse, we can push a portion of the business over the cutting edge.

Were often too lazy to advance the business

The only thing worse than chasing every new idea is not chasing any of them. There are too many developers whove grown so cynical that they dont try to improve anything or research a new tool that could produce significant business results.

Yes, the new flavor of the month is going to be replaced soon. Yes, its often just a warmed-over version of something from a few years ago with some small improvements. Yes, the code weve got is running smoothly. Yes, it would be stupid to replace something thats functioning with something else just because its new and improved. But if we ignore progress too often, well wake up one day and realize were miles behind.

We often cloak this laziness with pride and some overly strong devotion to some technical detail. Did you know that Multics is pretty much the best operating system thats much more secure than Windows? Or maybe Solaris is the best Unix ever? Or real BSD, not that wacky version from Apple that will never amount to anything because Mac users just want icons to click. We know the stuff we cut our teeth on is still the best.

This laziness is a close cousin of the Not-Invented-Here response that often slows progress. There are a lot of smart people on the internet, but somehow all the flashy ideas come from the dumb ones. If we didnt think of it ourselves, its not worth doing.

The way to fight this is by indulging the one developer who gets ambitious occasionally. Even if the plan to deploy some new technology doesnt make much business sense or promise to really change anything, it can be good just to get the blood pumping around the office. Shake things up a bit. After all, its just this kind of itch that could have your company making good on machine learning, the internet of things or whatever else comes next.

Wed rather build than maintain

One of the best teams Ive met rewrites its app every single year. They spend the first three months rebuilding everything from scratch. Then they coast and by September theyre planning next years rewrite.

They are quite proud of their code, which is well-engineered, modular and usually built the right way. Their pride in their craft shows in their code. Its not cobbled together. Its solid.

But this approach is expensive, in time, money and emotional energy. The size of the team is bigger than one just devoted to bug fixes and maintenance. And theyre always thinking about whether something can be improved  which can get expensive and lead to burn out. Sometimes its best to build the stack and select a smaller set of the developers to stick out the maintenance, moving the rest to new teams on new projects  no matter what we say.

Not every app needs to be rewritten

Some of us like to get on our high horse about re-engineering and rebuilding things the right way. Were not making this up. Were usually correct about faults that can only be solved by a complete rewrite. Sometimes were 100 percent correct.

But just because it would be nice doesnt mean it makes business sense. If 30-year-old Pascal or Cobol is doing the job, why mess with it? Are the new features going to add much to the bottom line? To make matters worse, nothing exists in a vacuum. Fixing X is going to disturb Y and Z, which depend on X. And those will trigger small errors in A, B, C and D. Its like a chain reaction. No good deed will go unpunished.

Sometimes progress makes things worse. I remember one manager started pulling out his hair after giving into the fussy, buzzword-obsessed programmers who insisted that it was time to replace decades-old mainframe code that spit out uppercase letters on a green screen. The new code was buzzword-compliant with the latest, greatest open source libraries. The binary code was 1,000 times better than the old version. Yet it was also 10 times slower. I listened to one engineer defend the slowness because the new app does so much more. And by more, he meant animate TrueType fonts on a color background.

We dont understand the business case

We may be super-smart about the world of databases, protocols and new programming languages, but most of us dont understand much about why average people do what they do. And that means were not the best people to create a strategy for keeping customers happy and spending. We can keep the databases happy but we dont have a clue what keeps customers coming back.

One good option is big data and successful metrics. These boil down transactions to numbers and numbers are what we understand. The real benefit of big data and artificial intelligence is that it creates a linguistic framework so business people on the front lines can communicate with the developers behind them.

Dont be afraid to expand these metrics. Raw sales numbers are obvious. Look for squishier measurements like brand engagement and brand recognition. Theyre not always perfect but they help us understand that appearance and emotional connections matter.

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The federal Department of Veterans Affairs has requested that a judge hold off on proceeding with a ruling that negatively affects IFB Solutions Inc.s optical lab until another case is settled.

On June 30, federal Judge Nancy Firestone upheld her ruling in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. It could mark the end of IFBs eyeglass manufacturing contracts with the Veterans Administration as soon as October.

VA officials requested Monday that Firestone put her ruling on hold until the VA and IFBs appeal options have been concluded.

The VA is listed as a defendant in the case in federal court for the District of Columbia, being sued for altering part of its stance on the issue.

The three plaintiffs  IFB, Bosma Industries for the Blind Inc. and the National Industries for the Blind  oppose the VAs motion.

At stake is a potential $15.4 million annual revenue cut for the Winston-Salem nonprofit group and the risk that 52 jobs  more than half of its local laboratory workforce  would be eliminated.

The optical lab at IFB, formerly known as Winston-Salem Industries for the Blind Inc., has 45 jobs filled by employees who are blind, including 43 locally, and seven filled by veterans, including three locally.

The legal fight involves the VA as the defendant  with IFB joining as an intervenor  and PDS Consultants Inc. of Sparta, N.J., as the plaintiff. PDS says it is a small business owned by a disabled veteran. It has provided visual products to the VA since 1998.

On Aug. 25, PDS filed a protest in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, objecting to the way VA contracts for eyeglass manufacturing are bid and awarded and saying businesses owned by disabled veterans should have priority.

In May, Firestone ruled against the VA and IFB in determining which nonprofit group should have priority when it comes to bidding on and being awarded annual production contracts.

The VA said in its motion that considerations of consistency and judicial efficiency warrant application of staying one case pending resolution of the other case since there is the potential for conflict in the two cases.

Firestones judgment would prevent the VA from entering any new eyewear contracts unless it performs the rule of two analysis upheld by a recent U.S. Supreme Court interpretation of the Veterans Benefits Act of 2006. The act is also known as Veterans First legislation.

The most immediate impact of Firestones ruling is on an IFB contract, known as VISN 7, set to expire July 31.

VISN is the acronym for Veterans Integrated Service Network, which can cover one or multiple clients in differing production amounts.

IFB estimates the ruling could cost it about 54 percent of its annual optical lab revenue  and 15 percent of its overall revenue  if the VA is not allowed to extend IFB contracts through annual options.

Veterans First is considered one of the ways Congress recognizes and repays disabled veterans for their military service. The requirement holds that orders for visual-related products and services can be filled first by at least two small businesses owned by disabled veterans.

Meanwhile, IFBs VA contract comes through the act known as AbilityOne, passed by Congress in the 1930s, that gives federal government preference to companies that employ the blind or severely disabled.
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JURIST Guest Columnist Dhruv Sharma of National Law University, Delhi discusses the tense relationship between India and Pakistan magnified due to recent events 

On May 8 2017, the President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), exercising his powers under Rule of the Court 74(4), forwarded a request to the government of Pakistan to act in such a way as will enable any order the court may make on this request to have had its appropriate effects. This request was made pursuant to Indias petition before the court to institute proceedings against Pakistan and pass provisional measures to suspend the execution of Mr. Kulbhushan Jadhav, an Indian national, who was captured, tried and sentenced to death by Pakistan on charges of espionage and terrorism.

India moved to The Hague under Article I of the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations concerning the Compulsory Settlement of Disputes (Optional Protocol) which grants compulsory jurisdiction to the ICJ in matters of interpretation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR or Convention). The matter was heard on May 15, 2017, wherein the ICJ was pleased to grant provisional measures in favor of India.

Background

Like every other India-Pakistan exchange, two narratives have arisen from the arrest of Mr. Jadhav, with each side preferring one that posits them in good light.

As per the Indian version of events, Kulbhushan Jadhav is an Indian businessman who retired from the Indian Navy in 2002. He ran his business from Iran and was arrested on the Iran-Pakistan border. Thereafter, he was framed for committing espionage and terror related activities in Balochistan based upon a tutored and doctored confessional video wherein Mr. Jadhav accepted the charges framed against him under immense mental and physical torture. India claims that it has been denied consular access to Mr. Jadhav since his arrest despite numerous requests. India has argued that the continued denial of access to Mr. Jadhav is in breach of Pakistans obligations under the VCCR and Indias rights under Article 36 of the Convention.

According to the Pakistani version of events, Kulbhushan Jadhav, a commander-rank navy officer, was arrested by the Pakistan Police in March 2016 on charges of fomenting unrest in Karachi and Balochistan as an agent of the Indian intelligence agency (the Research and Analysis Wing). He was tried and found guilty under section 59 of Pakistan Army Act, 1952 and Section 3 of the Official Secret Act, 1923 by the Field General Court Martial (FGCM) which consequently awarded him the death penalty on April 10, 2017. To buttress its arguments Pakistan also released a video of Mr. Jadhavs confession wherein he admitted to carrying out terror activities in Balochistan. As per Pakistans case, Mr. Jadhavs acts preclude any right to consular access to him or his host state.

The two versions therefore align on the point of lack of consular access. This lack of consular access and the consequent alleged violation of the VCCR was the primary reason for Indias application before the ICJ against Pakistan.

Institution of Legal Proceedings

Failing access to Mr. Jadhav, India moved for an application to the institution of proceedings relying upon the Optional Protocol under Article 36(1) of the ICJ Statute. An application under Article 36(1) grants jurisdiction to the court based on referral by a state or through specific provision for grant of jurisdiction under the UN Charter or other treaties in force. The application under Article 36(1), instead of Article 36(2), of the ICJ Statute means that India has considerably limited the final scope of its application as it can only realize remedies for lack of access to Mr. Jadhav. This precludes relief as to validity of the sentence imposed or the eventual release of Mr. Jadhav under international human rights law. However, the application also astutely goes around any objections to compulsory jurisdiction that Pakistan could raise based on its declaration to the court dated March 29, 2017 that limited the scope of the compulsory jurisdiction of the court under Article 36(2).

In the present case the application for exercise of jurisdiction relies on the violation of Article 36(1) of the VCCR.

The VCCR, under Article 36(1)(b), provides the arrested person of a foreign state with the right to communicate with his/her consular post without delay. The receiving state is further under a duty to inform the arrested person of the aforesaid right immediately upon his/her arrest. Similarly under Article 36(1)(c) the consular officers of the sending state have the right to visit the arrested national to converse, correspond and arrange for his legal representation. This right continues even after a judgment is passed against such person.

While we cannot presume Mr. Jadhav knows of his rights Article 36 (1)(b) or the communication of the same by Pakistan to him, Indias continued attempts and Pakistans express and admitted denial to such access is in violation of at least Article 36(1)(c) of the VCCR.

Now the violations of the VCCR may be adjudicated by the ICJ in accordance with Article 1 of the Optional Protocol that provides it with jurisdiction over the interpretation of its parent treaty, the VCCR. India and Pakistan ratified the Optional Protocol in 1977 and 1976 respectively and thereby conferred jurisdiction upon the ICJ to interpret their rights and obligations flowing from the VCCR. Put simply, the impending death sentence awarded to Mr. Jadhav combined with alleged violation of rights under Article 36(1) and the conferment of jurisdiction upon the ICJ by both the parties involved could establish a prima facie case for jurisdiction, institution of proceedings against Pakistan and the passing of provisional measures in favor of India.

Application for Provisional Measures

Since his arrest in March 2016, India has made numerous failed attempts at gaining consular access to Mr. Jadhav. The continued diplomatic failure combined with growing concerns regarding the well-being of Mr. Jadhav compelled India to move an application before a forum it has not used since 1971. Indias application for institution of proceedings was interestingly accompanied by a request for grant of provisional measures. The application for provisional measures relied on the egregious violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations through the delayed information regarding Mr. Jadhavs incarceration and the subsequent lack of access to him despite repeated requests.

The grant of provisional measures, while not the courts final say in a matter, may still provide time to India to pursue all means to ensure the release of Mr. Jadhav. However the same does not imply final jurisdiction in the matter as was observed by the court in the LaGrand case (Germany v. United States) wherein the court passed an order to stay the impending execution of a Walter LaGrand (the United States, though, never complied with the order). In paragraph 13 of that order, the court specifically observed that:

Whereas, on a request for the indication of provisional measures the court need not, before deciding whether or not to indicate them, finally satisfy itself that it has jurisdiction on the merits of the case, but whereas it may not indicate them unless the provisions invoked by the Applicant appear, prima facie, to afford a basis on which the jurisdiction of the court might be founded.

The Proceedings

The provisional measures hearings in the Jadhav case were conducted on 15 May 2017.

India began by reiterating its reliance on Article I of the Optional Protocol to the VCCR and not on Article 36(2) of the ICJ Statute. It relied on the precedent set by the World Court in the case of Paraguay v. United States of America, the LaGrand case and the case of Avena and Other Mexican Nationals to argue for provisional relief in the form of suspension of death sentence till the pendency of the court proceedings. India argued that despite 17 attempts it was precluded access to Mr. Jadhav in contravention of Article 36(1) of the VCCR. The Indian contingent acknowledged that India and Pakistan had entered into a Bilateral Agreement on Consular Access in 2008, however, denied that the same limited the application of the VCCR and argued that it simply supplemented the Convention. India, therefore focused on the immediacy of the request, arguing that considering the impending death sentence awarded to Mr. Jadhav, irreparable injury would be caused to Indias rights were he to be executed during the pendency of the proceedings.

Pakistan initiated its arguments with a touch of drama, by attempting to play a video of Mr. Jadhav confessing to his crimes. However, the video was disallowed by the court. Arguments first focused on the lack of jurisdiction enjoyed by the court in the matter considering Pakistans declaration under Article 36(2) of the ICJ Statute and the subsequent bilateral agreement between India and Pakistan that made the VCCR inapplicable in the present case. Pakistan further argued that the Vienna Convention did not apply to individuals involved in espionage and terrorist activities. Finally, Pakistan argued that India had failed to establish that Mr. Jadhav was an Indian national and therefore India lacked any locus in the matter despite the fact that it has in the past claimed that Mr. Jadhav is an Indian spy captured in the Baloch region of Pakistan, and has used the video confession to show his admission of being Indian.

Order of the Court

The order of the court was delivered on 18 May 2017 wherein the court, as expected, granted provisional measures in favor of India. The court, finding prima facie jurisdiction, found merit in Indias arguments that the application for provisional measures had been moved under Article I of the Optional Protocol along with Article 36(1) of the ICJ Statute and therefore reservations/declarations made with respect to Article 36(2) were irrelevant. The court similarly satisfied itself of having jurisdiction ratione materiae through the ostensible violation of Indias right to communicate and have access to Mr. Jadhav as per Article 36(1) of the VCCR. The court found that the VCCR did not exclude its application to individuals suspected of espionage or terrorism and that the 2008 Bilateral Agreement also did not expressly prohibit such right of access.

Finally as regards the urgency of the proceedings, the court held that despite the opportunities available to Mr. Jadhav to petition or appeal his conviction and sentence, the mere fact that Mr. Jadhav is under a death sentence and might be executed is sufficient to demonstrate the urgency.

The Road Ahead

Since the order on provisional measures, the court has set a timeline for the filing of initial pleadings by India and Pakistan, Pakistan has rejected Indias 18th attempt at gaining consular access to Mr. Jadhav and, in Pakistan, Mr. Jadhav has allegedly petitioned for clemency.

While the provisional measures granted in favor of India, based purely on a prima facie establishment of jurisdiction, is a substantial victory in delaying the death sentence, the same does not in any way preclude Pakistan from raising questions of jurisdiction, admissibility and merits of the case in the advanced proceedings.

Going forward it is likely that the Bilateral Agreement between India and Pakistan on consular access would play a substantial role in ascertaining any violation of Indias rights. During the time of the arguments for provisional measures, the Bilateral Agreement had not been registered with the Secretariat of the United Nations and technically it could not have been relied upon by Pakistan. However the agreement has since been registered with Registration ID 54471 on May 17, 2017. The subsequent registration raises interesting questions regarding the effect of the delay of around nine years on the registration of Treaties with the Secretariat and whether the court can look into an agreement whose violation has not been argued by the complainant state.

In a scenario that the court allows for the application of the Bilateral Agreement it will then have to satisfy itself whether an agreement between two countries can in fact limit the application of the VCCR in light of Article 73 that only allows for other agreements confirming or supplementing or extending or amplifying the provisions of the Convention. Subsequently another inquiry would have to be done on Article VI of the Bilateral Agreement which allows each state to examine an arrest made on political or security grounds on its own merits and therefore potentially deny consular access.

In conclusion, regardless of the temporary nature of the provisional measures, what transpired on May 15, 2017 would potentially have a long-standing effect on not only the progression of the present case, but also the relationship shared between the countries. For while India has historically attempted to keep the strained relations between the two countries at a bilateral level, this internationalizing of the dispute reflects a definitive break from the past.

Dhruv Sharma is a New Delhi based lawyer from the National Law University, Delhi. Upon graduation, he moved to The Hague for three months to work at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, where he worked, among others, on the issue of the death of an accused during pendency of criminal proceedings.

Suggested citation: Dhruv Sharma, India v. Pakistan  Round Four, JURIST  Professional Commentary, July 10, 2017, http://jurist.org/professional/2017/07/dhruv-sharma-india-pakistan.php.
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte [BBC profile] asked Congress on Tuesday to extend his order of martial law for the lower third of the country. Duterte declared martial law [JURIST report] on the island of Mindanao in May when heavily armed militants linked to the Islamic State [BBC profile] took over large parts of Marawi City, a provincial capital in the predominantly Roman Catholic country. More than 500 people have been killed in the fighting that has taken place since the take-over. The 60-day proclamation is due to expire on July 22 but Duterte contends that the rebellion that justified the declaration will not be quelled by then. Duterte requested that Congress, which is scheduled to reconvene for its regular session July 24, hold a special session to discuss the proposed extension. Opposition lawmakers question Dutertes motivation behind the extension and feel that the move is unjustified calling it a whimsical proposal that has no substantive grounds.

Philippines has been on the international spotlight ever since Rodrigo Duterte took office as the president of the nation. Earlier this week, the Philippines Office of the Ombudsman [official website] announced plans to charge [JURIST report] former Philippines president Benigno Aquino III [Britannica profile] for the botched anti-terror raid that led to what is known as the Mamasapano massacre in 2015. In June, Philippine opposition lawmakers petitioned [JURIST report] the Supreme Court [official website] to reject President Rodrigo Dutertes imposition of martial law. In April, a lawyer filed a complaint [JURIST report] against Duterte accusing him of extrajudicial killings during his nationwide anti-drugs crackdown. In March, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website] released a report accusing the police of falsifying evidence [JURIST report] in relation to the alleged police killings of citizens. This policy of sanctioned killings has been part of Dutertes rhetoric since his time as mayor of Davao City. In December the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein [official profile] called for a murder investigation [JURIST report] for a murder investigation of Duterte after he admitted to killing people while he served as mayor of Davao.
The US Supreme Court [official website] on Wednesday affirmed in part [order, PDF] a ruling by the US District Court for the District of Hawaii [official website] concerning the scope of the Trump administrations travel ban. The state of Hawaii filed a brief [PDF] on Tuesday in response to the governments request that the US Supreme Court clarify who can enter the US while the order is in place. Earlier this month, a judge for the US District Court for the District of Hawaii expanded [JURIST report] the exemptions permitted under the temporary travel bar on visitors from six predominantly Muslim countries. Although he refused to define the Supreme Courts ruling, Judge Derrick Watson agreed to review the governments interpretation and after doing so widened the definition of close family members to include grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins and brothers-and-sisters-in-law. Additionally, Watson stated that refugees with an assurance from a US resettlement agency meet the Supreme Courts requirements because it is a formal, documented contract that places obligations upon a specific individual who has been approved for entry by the Department of Homeland Security [official website]. The government responded by petitioning the Supreme Court for emergency relief and sought to obtain an expansion of the stay the Court ordered [JURIST report] on the grounds that the District Courts modification eviscerated the ruling. Hawaii stated that the governments claim is nonsense and that

the District Court faithfully applied this Courts opinion, holding that close relatives like grandparents and nieces are permitted to enter, and recognizing that the charities, non-profits, and churches that have made a formal, contractual commitment to shelter and clothe refugees would suffer concrete hardship if those refugees are excluded.

The government responded [SCOTUSBlog post] with the assertion that the Supreme Court is the only court that can properly interpret its own order. The Supreme Court lifted [CNN report] the exemption judge Watson ordered for refugees but allowed the application to exclude grandparents and other relatives from the ban. The Court also directed that further review of the issue should be directed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit [official website].

Cases concerning issues of immigration from predominantly Muslim countries continue to be processed in the federal judiciary. In June the US District Court for the Western District of Washington [official website] denied in part [JURIST report] and granted in part a motion to dismiss a class action suit filed against President Donald Trump and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) [official website]. Also in June the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan [official website] temporarily blocked [JURIST report] the deportation of more than 100 Iraq nationals, arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) [official website] agents, to determine whether it has jurisdiction in the matter. Earlier that same month the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against [JURIST report; case materials] the majority of Trumps revised executive order limiting travel from six Muslim-majority countries. That ruling affirmed [JURIST report] the majority of a district court injunction in March that blocked the order from being enforced. In May a federal district court in Washington granted a temporary restraining order [JURIST report] to allow legal aid groups to continue to provide certain kinds of assistance to undocumented immigrants. Five days prior a Michigan federal district court ordered [JURIST report] the Trump administration to disclose the draft of the so-called Muslim ban executive order.
UN Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein [official website] on Tuesday expressed concerns [UN report] that the Libyan National Army (LNA) has committed and will continue to commit summary executions of men that have been taken prisoner. Through a spokesperson, Hussein stated that the alarm over the worsening human rights conditions in the nation was heightened after recent fighting in Benghazi. Reports of torture and videos of summary executions by LNA officials have surfaced beginning as early as March. A video posted this month showed prisoners being physically and verbally assaulted by officers while being accused of terrorism. The Commissioner also noted that unlawful killings have occurred on both fronts of the conflict in Libya, called for an end to the impunity offered on both sides, and urged the LNA to conduct a full and impartial investigation into alleged war crimes.

Libya has remained politically unstable since the 2011 deposition of Muammar Gaddafi [JURIST backgrounder] and subsequent civil war. In April Sicilian prosecutor Carmelo Zuccaro stated to reporters that an investigation[JURIST report] has revealed evidence of direct contacts between some non-governmental organizations and human traffickers in Libya. In September the UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Kate Gilmore, spoke on the deteriorating human rights situation [JURIST report] in Libya and called for accountability and reform. Earlier last year the UN released a report detailing a litany of violations and abuses being committed by both state and non-state actors in Libya that may amount to war crimes [JURIST report].
Nagappan stated that he had denied having seen the letter from the Mayor in his statement to Crime Branch officers.
GIBBON  When it comes to giving in the community, Jamie Olson and Jodi Peterson of Gibbon know the right ingredients.

Together, they organized a group called Gibbons Little Free Pantry to help children and families in need.

Olson, a paraprofessional at Gibbon Public Schools, saw the need for donated food when kids would come to school hungry. She has worked as a kindergarten paraprofessional for GPS for four years.

Kids would come to school saying they wouldnt have breakfast or what not, and out of the 600 students at our school, 60 percent of them are on free and reduced lunch, Olson said.

In addition, the crucial need for food in the childrens lives also was seen at Gibbon Baptist Church when youths met there once a week.

We have a food for kids program at Awana. The amount of food the kids could eat might have been their only meal for that day. They were just so hungry, so we saw a need there, too, Peterson said.

Olson came across an article one day on Facebook talking about a woman, Jessica McClard of Arkansas, who started something called the Little Free Library. The idea was that people could take and leave books as they pleased.

McClard then realized she could do that with non-perishable food and household goods. She started the Little Free Pantry in Arkansas, and the idea has exploded.

People call it Blessing Boxes or all kinds of things, Olson said. The motto is, Take what you need, give what you can. People are free to come and take what they want and give what they want.

Olson and Peterson have been working on the idea since last fall. The ribbon cutting was Feb. 25. Peterson and Olson said their secret ingredient is the community.

The Gibbon High School shop class built the pantry box. Adams Corner Market in Gibbon let the duo set up a donation bin at the grocery store.

Shoppers at his store can shop, buy stuff and put it right there and one of us will go there and pick it up and store it or put it where its needed, Olson said. It has been a community effort.

Peterson and Olson said there had been some doubts.

They were concerned about vandalism, and we were going to have more people take than give and it is always going to be empty, Peterson said. I think everyone is shocked how everyone has come together.

Gibbons Little Free Pantry is in the parking lot of the Baptist Church at 705 Court St. Other churches have helped gather food for it, as well. The box has been empty once, and that was on July 4.

Olson and Peterson update the community about how the pantry is doing on their Facebook page  Gibbons Little Food Pantry.

As long as it is being used and being successful that way, (it will be around) forever, I guess, Olson said, laughing.

Though it is called a food pantry, people are encouraged to leave household items such as toilet paper, deodorant, toothbrushes and more. The hygiene products have actually gone faster than the nonperishable food items in Gibbon, Peterson and Olson said.

I thought it would work. You doubt yourself when other people doubt you, Peterson said. I knew that the need was out there and as long as people give and, really, people are generous. If they have extra or not very much, you might take from it one day and give back the next day. Its a way that you can give and take.

The final ingredient to the Gibbon Little Food Pantry success is prayer, Olson and Peterson said.

I think we just prayed about it, and this is what we are going to do and it worked, Peterson said.

If God puts it on your heart to do it, and if Hes the one who is behind it, it is going to be successful and it has been, Olson added.

If someone has the thought they want to do this, jump on it and follow through, and you will see the rewards and the benefits. And it will be worth anything you have to go through to get it, Peterson said.

We just love spreading the word, and this is an easy way to give back to your community and share with people if you can. Its a little box but holds a mighty meaning, Olson said.
KEARNEY  University of Nebraska at Kearney physics and astronomy professor Mariana Lazarova is the Citizen CATE Experiment state coordinator for Nebraska and site coordinator for Ravenna.

The Citizen CATE, which stands for Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse, Experiment will capture images of the suns inner corona during the Aug. 21 Great American Solar Eclipse by using more than 60 telescopes operated by area scientists, high school groups and universities.

Volunteers from more than 20 high schools, 20 universities, informal education groups, astronomy clubs, five national science research labs and five corporate sponsors from across the country are involved in the experiment.

The goal of CATE is to produce a scientifically unique data set  high resolution, rapid-cadence white light images  of the inner corona for 90 minutes.

Lazarova will work with two students from the UNK Society of Physics for the project.

From Bulgaria, Lazarova came to the United States for undergraduate and graduate school and is now an assistant professor for the UNK Physics and Astronomy Department. She also is the UNK planetarium director. She studies the host galaxies of quasars using the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope.

For the CATE experiment, volunteers will track the sun using 68 identical telescopes, software and instrument packages spaced along the 2,500-mile path of totality. Each site will produce more than 1,000 images.

Kearney will experience totality (total coverage) at 12:57:30 p.m., and the duration is 1 minute, 54 seconds. Partial coverage begins at Kearney at about 11:30 a.m. and continues until about 2:30 p.m.

Resulting data from the CATE experiment will consist of 90 minutes of continuous, high resolution and rapid-cadence images detailing the suns inner corona  a region of the solar atmosphere typically very challenging to create images of.
LINCOLN  The filmmaking brothers who put Fargo on the movie map are turning their cameras loose in Nebraskas Panhandle.

Joel and Ethan Coen are planning to shoot six episodes of a new miniseries project called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in wide-open ranch country in Sioux County beginning in September.

And, they are seeking about 50 ordinary looking Nebraskans to appear as extras on a wagon train.

News of plans to shoot part of the frontier-era project in Nebraska began trickling out on Friday, when a casting call for extras was announced. It will be held Aug. 1 at Scottsbluffs historic Midwest Theater.

The telephones been ringing off the hook and Facebook inquiries have been pouring in since, from as far away as Denver, Montana and South Dakota, according to Billy Estes, executive director of the theater.

Were super excited, Estes said on Monday. We at the theater have been Coen brothers fans for years.

The brothers, who are native Minnesotans, are well-known for their off-beat and dark independent movies such as the Academy Award-winning Fargo in 1996, The Big Lebowski in 1998 and O Brother, Where Art Thou? in 2000.

Their 2007 film, No Country for Old Men, won Academy Awards for best picture and best supporting actor (Javier Bardem). More recently, the brothers remake of True Grit in 2010 was nominated for 10 Academy Awards.

So, will a wood chipper  which ground up one of the bad guys in Fargo  be coming to the grassy plains of western Nebraska?

Nope, says Estes. But the title of one of the episodes, The Gal Who Got Rattled, does imply that something is going to happen involving rattlesnakes.

And out there in Sioux County, there are plenty of them, he said.

Shooting for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is supposed to begin in New Mexico this summer, with shooting in Nebraska planned throughout September. The set will be closed to the public.

Tim Blake Nelson, who starred as one of the dim-witted convicts in O Brother, Where Art Thou? is cast as the title character, a singing cowboy.

Tyne Daly, James Franco and Ralph Ineson are among the other cast members in Buster Scruggs, which follows a young woman headed west on the Oregon Trail, with some High Plains drifters, gold prospectors and a traveling show mixed in.

Estes said the filmmakers chose private land north of Mitchell for authenticitys sake.

You cant replicate the Nebraska prairie or the Oregon Trail, so you have to go to it, Estes said. Its breathtaking country.

State Film Officer Laurie Richards said she has been working with the production company for Buster Scruggs since the first of the year.

Starr Lehl, a former mayor of Gering who works for the Nebraska Department of Economic Development and serves as western Nebraska representative for the governor, helped the Coen brothers scout locations.

Laurie called me and said she had some folks who are looking for rolling hills, Lehl said. Oh, my gosh, we have that.

She said the Coen brothers, when they visited in May, fell in the love with the site, which has wide-open vistas unmarked by modern civilization, and the rancher on whose land the filming will take place.

They got out the car and said, Wow. This is exactly what we are looking for,  Lehl said.

She said the economic impact on the region will be substantial, with more than 150 motel rooms needed for a couple of weeks. Support services  like food, portable toilets, tents and tables  are also being obtained locally.

As for the extras, a press release from the producers said they are looking for men with beards and mustaches, women with long hair (not obviously dyed hair, no highlights), and families with children older than 10.

The extras will fill nonspeaking positions, and costumes will be provided.

Authentic, western-looking characters shouldnt be hard to find in the Panhandle, Estes said.

They work the land, they know what its like. Their faces tell the story, he said.
GRAND ISLAND -- The citys proposed public safety personnel cuts would increase response time, increase the citys crime rate and make the city less safe, fire, police and union officials say.

These claims are a few of the reasons these officials oppose the citys proposal to have 15 public safety positions either cut or left unfilled.

For the Grand Island Fire Department, the recommendation of city administration is to eliminate two positions and two additional currently vacant firefighter positions, as well as leave two future retirements unfilled.

The Grand Island Police Department may have two full-time equivalent (FTE) community service officer (CSO) positions eliminated, two currently vacated police officer positions remain unfilled, two currently vacant part-time CSO positions left vacant, and three future retirements left unfilled.

Phil Thomas, president of Grand Island Firefighters IAFF Local 647, said the department needs six additional firefighters/EMTs, not six less.

Just to even talk about making cuts, we are worried about safety, Thomas said. Its hard to believe we would lose six firefighters when we are at this tipping point where we may not be able to respond to a fire.

Grand Island Police Chief Robert Falldorf said the citys proposal would have a negative effect on the Police Department as well.

You cannot get rid of that many personnel and not have it have a negative effect, Falldorf said. It is hard to say what impact it is going to have. But if I look back through history and statistics, I can show where there have been decreases in manpower and it has had a negative effect to the department where crime rates will actually go up.

Jarret Daugherty, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 24, said the union is also opposed to this reduction due to the negative impact on the citys crime rate. He said with two homicides, multiple burglaries and other violent crimes this year, the decrease in manpower will impact the safety of the community.

Weve done a great job over the past two years of reducing our crime rate, being proactive, stopping crimes before they start and actually getting some of our repeat customers to leave the area so we dont have to deal with them repeatedly. Since weve lost one or two positions in the last six to eight months, those crime numbers seem to be creeping back up.

Daugherty added the violence the city has experienced is something the community cannot ignore or allow to increase. He said the manpower is needed in the Police Department to allow visitors to Grand Island to feel safe.

They deserve to enter and stay in a city that is well-maintained and safe, he said. If they do have a need for service of any kind, that service should be met in a timely manner, especially if there is a need for emergency care.

Grand Island Fire Chief Cory Schmidt said the Fire Department has not added personnel to the shift level since 2000. If the City Council approves the proposed cuts and reduces the force by six, the department will be at the same staffing level as it was in 1996.

Grand Island has grown significantly since then and our call volume has gone up, Schmidt said. It (personnel cuts) will affect safety, no doubt. You cannot reduce your staffing and not have that come into play.

Thomas said the union has concerns about not only increased response times, but also safety that will be put at risk due to the personnel cuts.

Our No. 1 concern is safety of the citizens. Our next concern is safety for ourselves, he said. We need to have those guys on the trucks so that we can put a fire out within a reasonable amount of time.

Both Falldorf and Schmidt said the average dispatch time  the time between an officer receiving a call and responding to the call  will increase if the personnel cuts are approved by the City Council.

Our average dispatch time right now is about 10 minutes, Falldorf said. There are times when the 911 Emergency Center will dispatch an officer and within five to 10 seconds, they are able to go to that detail. There are other times where we dont even have any officers to respond to details so calls are then holding. Thats why there is a 10-minute average right now of officers being available to go and handle a call. That can be a little concerning, too.

Schmidt said about 75 percent of the Fire Departments calls are medical calls, so an increase in response time could be a matter of life and death.

If we dont provide an early intervention with CPR, defibrilation and advance life support, your chance of making it through a cardiac event reduces by 7 to 10 percent every minute, he said. When we have a four-minute response time, you are already behind and if that time is delayed, your odds of surviving are even less.

When it comes to operations, Schmidt said, the department will be short-staffed two engine companies at Fire Stations Nos. 2 and 4. He added another, less popular, option is to take a fire station out of service.

In my 25 years in the fire service field, I have not seen any other city in our area or surrounding states that runs two-person engine companies, Schmidt said. There are a certain amount of tasks that have to take place within a certain amount of time. With a three-person crew, it really isnt that accepted to do something like that.

Falldorf said personnel cuts will also have an effect on the Police Departments overtime, but will not change the way shifts are run.

We will be working shorter in the Patrol Division, he said. We will have less officers working the patrol, so that is more than likely more overtime.

Daugherty encouraged citizens who are opposed to the citys proposed public safety personnel cuts to call their City Council representatives.
After two months in Nebraska, I think Im getting the hang of your dirt roads. I lived most of my life in the Cleveland suburbs. In Ohio, even country roads were paved, but in Nebraska, dirt roads are as common as puddles after a rain. They intimidated me. I feared theyd drag me to the ends of the earth, smother me in dust and dirt and spit me out on the dark side of the moon.

Sure, for the last two years I drove a 13-mile thread-thin dirt road around cliffs to Mass every Sunday near Abiquiu, N.M., but fierce shoulders of mesas and mountains fenced that road in. Here, theres nothing but corn.

Nevertheless, since returning to Nebraska in May, Id stare at my Nebraska Atlas & Gazetteer  my geographic Bible  and the way its pages wiggle with tiny blue lines like varicose veins. I feared if I took one of those fragile roads, Id tumble into Wonderland like Alice.

Then last weekend, I went camping at Rock Creek Station State Recreation Area east of Fairbury. It was accessible only on a dirt road. What if I got lost? What if I had to turn into some isolated farm and knock on the door and tell them I was a dumbbell from the city who needed help?

Bah. I swatted away my fears, tossed my tent in my car and drove off. I took I-80 to Highway15 and ventured south beyond Fairbury to Steele. Id slow down through hamlets where signs said the population is 102 or 118 or 166. I love those signs. In Ohio and New Mexico, town signs dont include population.

South of Steele, I saw a dusty sign for Rock Creek Station, with an arrow pointing to a dirt road. I turned.

The road went up and down like a roller coaster. Three miles, four miles. I was in deep. I came to another dirt road. Like a Boy Scout troop, it bore a number. All these dirt roads bore letters (A, B, C) or numbers (746, 767) despite being unmarked on the map. Then, abruptly, unexpectedly, I saw a sign for Rock Creek Station. I was gleefully astonished. This dirt road got me where I wanted to go. I turned in.

Rock Creek was the most serene, unruffled, wooded campground Ive found in this state. It had no reservoir, no roaring outboards, no shrieking Jet-Skis. Just dozing picnic tables and fire rings and showers. At last, I found Nirvana in Nebraska.

On Saturday, I went exploring. Like a trained puppy, I used the same dirt roads to get to pavement as I had to get in, then happily reunited with paved Highway 8. I meandered into lovely Fairbury and found a drug store that still wont take credit cards.

I drove northeast on Highway 136 to Highway 4 and spent a fascinating afternoon at Homestead National Monument near Beatrice. It was a sobering visit. Here I was, skittish about dirt roads, yet the pioneers faced granite-hard soil, remote water, snakes, bugs, grasshoppers and more. I gained a shiny new respect for modern Nebraska.

On the way back to the campground, I no longer feared dirt roads. I turned off Highway 136 and zigzagged through the dust. I wasnt even deterred when one road was closed for repairs (how do they repair a dirt road?) Unruffled, I turned around, opted for another dirt path, turned west on another, and bingo! Rock Creek Station State Recreation Area popped up like a lone prairie flower. I was home.

I cant wait to see where dirt roads take me this weekend.
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Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart speaks at a news conference in Chicago, Wednesday, July 19, 2017, where he announced the identity of James Byron Haakenson, of Minnesota, as one of the victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy. The teenager had left his home in 1976 and was last heard from in August of that year when he called his mother and told her he was in Chicago. (AP Photo/G-Jun Yam)
In this image made from video released by the Democratic Voice of Burma, left to right, Burmese journalists La Wei, from the Irrawaddy, Aye Nai, from the Democratic Voice of Burma, and Pyi Phone Aung, from the Democratic Voice of Burma raise their chained wrists decrying the lack of freedom and democracy as they leave the court after facing charges of unlawful association, Tuesday, July 18, 2017, in Hsipaw, Shan state, Myanmar. The video was recorded Tuesday, and it underscores just how little has changed in this Southeast Asian country since former Nobel Laureate and longtime opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi won elections last year. (Democratic Voice of Burma via AP)
One of the hallmarks of the Ugly American is the habit of thinking foreigners will understand what youre saying if you just shout it louder and louder.

The Ugly Environmentalist does something similar. He exaggerates the challenge of global warming by using evermore hysterical rhetoric, thinking that if the last doomsday prediction didnt work, this one will.

For instance, Stephen Hawking, the famous astrophysicist, recently said that the consequences of Donald Trumps withdrawal from the Paris climate accord were monumental: Trumps action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees (Celsius), and raining sulfuric acid.

As Nathan Cofnas notes in the Weekly Standard, this is nuts. The share of the atmosphere taken up by that vile gas carbon dioxide (which just happens to sustain all plant life) is 400 parts per million. Its been much higher than that in the past without boiling the oceans or raining acid from the sky. Cofnas also mentions that Venus is nearly 26 million miles closer to the sun, and that the share of carbon dioxide in the Venusian atmosphere is 965,000 parts per million, or about 2,412 times greater than Earths.

And thats Hawking, a serious scientist (at least in his own field). Journalists, always looking for novelty and drama, can be worse. A recent New York Magazine cover story on climate change assured readers that all of the previous climate change alarmism was too tepid. Basically, by the end of the century, the living will envy the dead and much of the planet will be uninhabitable or a re-enactment of a Mad Max movie.

To the credit of some journalists and climate scientists, the New York Magazine article got considerable pushback, even from normally alarmist Penn State professor Michael Mann.

Rachel Becker, a science writer, had a good take as well. Research shows that scare tactics can backfire when people put up their psychological defenses against the threatening information, Becker wrote at The Verge, rather than defending against the threat itself.

Thats true. The more you sound like some cowbell-wielding street preacher wearing a sandwich board that says The End is Nigh! the more likely people will ignore you. Particularly if your last few terrifying predictions didnt pan out.

But this focus on how using scare tactics doesnt persuade skeptics overlooks another problem. What about the people it does persuade? If you honestly believe that climate change will end all life on earth (it wont) or lead to some dystopian hell where we use the skulls of our former friends and neighbors to collect water droplets from cacti, what policies wouldnt you endorse to stop it?

Theres a rich school of journalistic and academic nonsense out there about how democracy may not be up to the job of fighting climate change, and why people who question climate change must be silenced by the state. Its remarkable how many of the people who rightly recoil in horror at the idea of using, say, the war on terror to justify curtailing civil liberties have no such response when someone floats similar ideas for the war on climate change.

The environment editor for the left-wing British newspaper The Guardian, Damian Carrington, recently wrote a piece fretting about how having kids doesnt help fight climate change. Jill Filipovic, a feminist writer, endorsed the article. Having children is one of the worst things you can do for the planet, she wrote on Twitter. Have one less and conserve resources.

I found this interestingly dumb. Filipovic is precisely one of those writers youd expect to go ballistic if some conservative Christian opined about the reproductive choices women should make. But if its in the name of the environment? Lets wag those fingers, everybody!

I believe, along with the late economist Julian Simon, that humans are the ultimate resource. We solve problems, and I think well solve climate change too.

But if you really want to yoke your reproductive choices to the issue of climate change (a bizarre desire if you ask me), maybe you should have as many kids as possible and educate them in science and engineering so they can come up with a solution.

For instance, did you know America may end up complying with our Paris accord obligations despite our withdrawal? Its all thanks to breakthroughs in natural gas, energy efficiency and renewable energy. Thank goodness the people who came up with that stuff didnt have parents who believed all the hype.

Jonah Goldbergs email address is goldbergcolumn@gmail.com.
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On her visit to young women in northeastern Nigeria, Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai was greeted with cheers on Tuesday by dozens of where she spoke out for the many girls abducted under Boko Haram's deadly insurgency.

The Pakistani activist told a news agency that she was excited by the courage of the young women who are undaunted as they pursue an education amid one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

"This is part of my girl power trip, visiting many parts of the world," said Yousafzai, who also met with the freed Chibok schoolgirls taken in a mass abduction by Boko Haram more than three years ago. "I am here now because of the Nigerian girls. Fighting for them and speaking up for them.

She highlighted the significance of her Nigeria visit as it was the partial fulfillment of what she espoused the last time she visited the land. In 2014, two years after she was shot because of her advocacy of women's education. She had pressed the then-President Goodluck Jonathan to ensure the rescue of the more than 200 abducted Chibok schoolgirls.

She also proposed the international community to address the crisis in the country's northeast.



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Some days, it is about crossing paths with others that bring a smile to your face. Here is one such individual.

Sitting in my office was my new patient and her husband. She was a just-pregnant Brazilian woman wearing a warm smile; he was an older, overweight, unkempt American who sat uncomfortably in the chair. I imagined he had never been to a gynecologists office and was perhaps unsure what to expect. Together they seemed an odd pair, and I wondered if this was an arranged marriage.

Mail-order bride, I breathed in; Oh boy, I breathed out. If this truly was an arranged union, how would they not only survive the stresses of a new marriage but a new pregnancy as well, with such striking cultural differences?

This wasnt the first time I had seen a mismatched couple like this, but this couple was different. With previous arranged couples I have seen, usually the woman was quite young, early 20s and spoke limited English, deferring to her husband whenever I asked a question. This woman though, was in her 30s, a bit zaftig, and radiated joy and light. She not only answered my questions herself, but her voice carried the words to me in a song filled with her passion for life. I wasnt prepared for her to have such a strong presence and, inversely, her husband to be so quiet. But in unison, they revealed their excitement about their anticipated child.

And thus we began, our relationship growing as her baby grew inside her. She beamed every time she heard her babys heartbeat and loved when she could finally feel it kick. I cant stop eating or Im so plump, she would giggle each visit. Sitting next to her at every appointment, her husband had a quiet, gentle presence that countered her radiant energy. At delivery, she required a C-section for her rather large baby girl. And postpartum, the whole family came, including their new baby with rosy cheeks just begging to be pinched. Mom, with tired eyes, still had her giggle and smile. Dad, with his calming presence, was rocking their baby in her car seat.

A few years later, my patient came back again pregnant. By this time her daughter had grown to become quite the precocious little girl. I want to help! she would excitedly say as she jumped off her dads lap and together we would find her baby brothers heartbeat. Dad still came to each visit, now sitting more comfortably in my office, quietly juggling his daughter and her toys on his lap. And mom, more commanding of her English and her place here in the states. I found myself marveling at this family that truly was a loving family.

Recently, I saw the patient for her yearly exam. As I sat down to talk to her, I found myself asking her boundless questions. I wanted to know all about her children, when she visited Brazil last, if her parents came here to visit yet. Lulled in by her sing-song voice, I relished the love and joy within her stories. She truly embodied happiness. I could have sat there all afternoon listening to her. I wanted to sit there all afternoon listening her.

I realized that I had known her for 10 years. I vividly remembered her broken English and uncertain future from our first meeting. I admired the bravery it must have taken for her to leave her home country, learn a new language and way of life with a man she barely knew. But she had that sparkle about her, that despite difficulties in her life, including missing her family, every moment still deserved a smile. She loved her husband and children wholeheartedly and made a loving, joyful home for them.

I am fortunate that I have the opportunity to be a part a patients life through many phases. One of my favorites is watching families grow. Seeing this family, in particular, has been such a pleasure for me. And every year, it is my treat to see my bubbly, giggly, warmhearted, Brazilian patient who always makes me smile.

Andrea Eisenberg is a obstetrician-gynecologist who blogs at Secret Life of an OB/GYN.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
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Recently, Twitter exploded with angry commentary directed at the American Diabetes Association (ADA) after the organization actively attempted to censor what was posted on Twitter during their annual sessions in San Diego. The fiasco began when an attendee posted a picture of slides on Twitter  in an attempt to live Tweet during a session on the recommended #ADA2017 hashtag. The @AmDiabetesAssn Twitter feed then began to post tweets instructing individual attendees to take down specific tweets that involved photography. In fact, the ADA Twitter feed at one point was dominated by their repeated requests for attendees to delete tweets. Quickly, the censorship became the focus of the hashtag  not the science. Comparisons to George Orwells thought police from his novel 1984 were made on social media platforms including Twitter.

What followed was nothing short of Twitter outrage. Twitter has become one of the most important tools in scientific information sharing in modern medicine. For many, meeting attendance is not always possible  some physicians have to stay back at their respective institutions and care for patients. Others who are based in another country may not be able to afford the time and cost associated with travel to the United States. There has been a huge push by most academic societies within my specialty of cardiovascular medicine to actively participate in the meetings from a virtual platform and guidelines for virtual participation have been published in Forbes. Many of us in cardiology are very active on Twitter, and we began to debate the merits of such an outdated and restrictive policy. After a matter of hours, numerous leaders in the cross section of Social media and medicine, such as Dr. Michael Gibson (@CMichaelGibson) became the most influential members of the #ADA2017 hashtag.

(Screenshot image via Symplur.com Healthcare Hashtag Project)

Most societies have worked diligently to engage members online and have promoted live Tweeting at their respective Annual Scientific Sessions. In fact, at the Heart Rhythm Society (@HRSonline), we actually provided attendees with a special Social Media Guru ribbon to add to their name badges to recognize active engagement. Next year, we plan to add Twitter handles to the registration process so that they appear on badges along with the attendees name and institution. The American Heart Association, the Society for Angiography and Intervention (@SCAI ) as well as the American College of Cardiology (@ACCinTouch) all actively promote live tweeting from their annual scientific sessions and have seen increased engagement online as a result of these policies.



(HRS 2017 Analytics via Screenshot from Symplur)

What are the benefits of live Tweeting?

1. Immediate and widespread dissemination of information. The average Twitter user expects a response in less than 15 minutes. When new findings and ideas are tweeted live from a meeting, a wider swath of clinicians will have access to new and potentially impactful information right away. Rather than only having 300 attendees hearing the late-breaking clinical trials presentations, hundreds of thousands more can benefit from new treatment insights in real time when live tweeting is promoted.

2. Collaboration and engagement. When we actively discuss newly presented data and treatment applications, we often begin to debate the merits and validity of new research. This process can sometimes take years. In the digital age, the debate can occur in real time, and clinicians from all around the world can participate in the discussion. These discussions often become mini think tanks and can lead to new applications and treatments for patients. At the very least, these collaborations and new online engagements lead to new (and in some cases) lifelong friendships.

3. Spur discussion that may lead to new research questions. When we discuss new data with a larger group of physicians, many perspectives and opinions can be considered. In many cases, there are differing opinions as to how best to apply research findings in the clinical arena. When there is disagreement and debate, new research questions and ideas are created. By engaging online around a particular subject, experts from around the world can build new studies and work together to solve clinical problems.

4. Sharing data may lead to faster advancement of therapies. One of the biggest problems with medicine today is that we all seem to live in our own silos  many scientists remain resistant to data sharing. Now that we are in an age of digital innovation and real-time data generation and dissemination, there is no reason we should not be sharing data. Rather than duplicating success and failures, if we foster cooperation, we will certainly significantly decrease the time it takes to produce new and potentially life-saving treatments for our patients. Social media and digital can play a huge role in data sharing and should be encouraged rather than censored. There is no longer a role for data hoarding in modern medicine.

What can we learn from the #ADA2017 fiasco?

1. Medicine is now digital, and any effort to change that will be poorly received. After years of gaining momentum, the digital world is now intertwined with medicine. As Dr. Eric Topol (@EricTopol ) has said in his book The Creative Destruction of Medicine: The digital world has been in a separate orbit from our medical cocoon, and its time the boundaries be taken down  The problem is that it takes physicians so long to accept a radical change. And the lag is unacceptable. No longer can we work and live in separate academic silos  the digital world is a part of medicine, and this will not change  our patients lives depend on it.

2. Societies and their leadership must be flexible and respond to changes in membership needs and priorities. In short, listen to your members. The way societies are functioning is changing. Physicians and researchers have a choice when it comes to where and how to present their findings and novel research. Societies that are restrictive and put forward Draconian policies will see their numbers dwindle. No longer can an academic society survive solely on their previous reputation. Physician members are increasingly digitally engaged and expect innovation and forward thinking from their societies. It is vital that the old guard who has led our societies for decades makes way for the new digital physician  in short, adapt or get out of our way.

The American Diabetes Association has had a difficult weekend. Due to the lack of preparedness for a digital audience and a lack of connection with their members who are engaged in social media, the societys academic sessions and all of the presented science has been overshadowed by a Twitter controversy. This has been a disservice to physicians, attendees and most importantly, the patients the society and its members tirelessly serve.

Kevin R. Campbell is a cardiac electrophysiologist who blogs at his self-titled site, Dr. Kevin R. Campbell, MD. He is the author of Women and Cardiovascular Disease.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
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Recently, I had the privilege of presenting the Clinical Specialty Award for General Surgery at the 2017 Graduate Awards Celebration at Western University of Health Sciences College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific (COMP-NW). It was amazing to hear all the accomplishments and meet so many wonderful new doctors in this years class. I also got the opportunity to meet a few proud parents and professors.

The list of accomplishments of this class was incredible and included community service, community clinics, overseas work, research projects and so much more. The recipient of the General Surgery Award, Vanessa R. Majeski, was no exception. Before she began her medical training, she had already been working to stamp out disease in West Africa and spent time as a research assistant studying colorectal cancer in Prague. Now, she heads off on her next great adventure as a general surgery resident. She represents the future of surgery.

Seeing those students walk across the stage reminded me of what an incredible group of people make the decision to become physicians. The amount of talent, drive and intelligence is incredible.

After an 11 to 16 year journey to become an attending physician, they emerge ready to begin their medical practice and tackle the massive student debt accumulated during their training. There are very few professions that require such a commitment just to get started.

When I talk with doctors a few years after graduation, that spark that was in their eyes as medical students is often gone. How does such an accomplished group of people go from an excited group of students to such a depressed existence as attendings? Society has recently turned our noble profession into a commodity. We cannot sit down and listen to our patient who is hurting and in need of our help because we have a quota to meet. So, we only allow 15 minutes for the visit and charting. We cannot order a needed test for the next patient because it is not in her insurance contract as a covered test. We cannot perform a needed operation on the next patient as that condition falls under the line and will not be covered by their policy. We waste more than a third of our day staring at a computer screen and not communicating with the patients we so want to help. Our offices are so full, meeting quotas, that an urgent patient cant get in to see us and ends up going to the emergency department at the hospital or a nearby urgent care facility instead. We actually work for an employer who has no medical training and doesnt understand much about medicine beyond the economic bottom line of profit.

How did we lose ourselves in this mess? How did we become a profession known for its high rate of burnout and suicide? Why does one of the perceived least stressful of our specialties, dermatology, still have a 50 percent rate of showing symptoms of burnout?

Go back and read the personal statement on your medical school application. The feelings expressed are likely those of excitement and hope for the future. Back then, we were talking about what a great privilege it would be to help people, and the great responsibility we would have as our patients trust us with their lives. We really do have a noble profession and are entrusted with a great responsibility. Sometimes we just need to look back and remember the why that keeps us going. It is hard to continue a difficult job if we do not have a good why to keep us motivated.

What was your why?

Why did you become a physician? Why do you continue to practice medicine? Why have you not left medicine for another career?

It is the answer to these questions that will make the difference between you going to work happy every day or spending your entire day complaining about your job. If your why isnt strong enough, you will not be able to keep up the pace this very stressful profession requires.

When you have established your why, write it down and put it in a prominent place where you will see it several times a day. This will help you keep your frustrations with the EMR in perspective since it is a necessary evil you must endure in order to accomplish your why. If the why is strong enough, you can do anything.

What you do in your daily practice is not as difficult as what you did during your residency, and you were able to survive that.

I would like to personally thank you all for your continued service in this difficult profession; for the time you spend away from your families to help your patients, for the late night calls and the long days, for the weekends of working when you could have been at the beach and for the years of dedication to pay back the debt you accumulated during your education.

Heres to all the new graduates as they move into the next phase of their lives. Thank you for your continued dedication to learning and caring. Please keep it up because one day you will be my doctor.

Cory Fawcett is a general surgeon and can be reached at his self-titled site, Dr. Cory S. Fawcett. He is the author of The Doctors Guide to Starting Your Practice Right and The Doctors Guide to Eliminating Debt.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar told a parliamentary standing committee on Tuesday as he was bombarded with hard hitting questions from the Congress.

Some of the members asked Jaishankar about the sequence of events that led to Dokalam standoff, whether India has kept its "friends" in the loop, the nature of response from Russia and United States, the increasing influence of China in India's neighbourhood and the perceived worsening of India's relations with its immediate neighbours.

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi wanted to know why after years of hard work to build a relationship of mutual respect with China through set mechanisms, things had collapsed. Was that a failure of Indian foreign policy, he asked. According to some members, Congress MP Rahul Gandhi asked the foreign secretary whether the Chinese response was designed to convey to Bhutan that India cannot defend it.

The Foreign Secretary said MEA was trying to resolve the standoff diplomatically through negotiations. He said Ministry of External Affairs was in contact with the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi, while New Delhi's Beijing mission is engaged in negotiations with the Chinese Foreign Ministry. He also explained, according to sources that China was asserting its own position, and that India was operating in a fast-changing world. The Foreign Secretary reassured the MPs that everything would be eventually resolved.

Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, Trinamool Congress' Sugata Bose, Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s Mohammad Salim, Bharatiya Janata Party's Sharad Tripathi and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam's Kanimozhi were among 20 of the 31 members who attended the meeting.



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There is a lot of superstitions around the world. Like you can't go out if someone sneezes infront of you. Apart from this, there are many superstitions. Not surprisingly, there are many things that make you laugh also. So let's tell you about some blind faith:

* If you run empty-scissors in Egypt then it is considered bad and if it is left in open it is considered miserable.

* Here, if a man first sees the owl, then it is considered unfortunate.

* 4 number is not considered good in China. Even in Chinese, its pronunciation is compared to death.

* If you put left foot on the poop of the dog in France then it is auspicious, but it is unfortunate if you put the right foot.

* It is said in Lithuania that if you whistle inside the house, you call such devils who scare you.

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Sonal Sehgal asked an apology for her fairness soap advertisements

Aerial view of Varanasi in the month of Saavan

Things which make a girl bitch
A 24-year-old accused of the manslaughter of a Kilkenny man in an early morning fracas will face a re-trial. That's after a jury failed to reach a verdict in the case where Goresbridge native, Kevin Kelly died after being hit a number of times.

The jurors at Luton Crown Court spent 12 hours considering a verdict. Judge Michael Kay QC brought them back into courtroom to ask them that,if given more time, was their a reasonable chance they could bring in a verdict.

When the foreman said their wasnt the judge said he would discharge them from continuing with their deliberations.

The prosecution then announced it would be seeking a retrial for the man accused of the manslaughter Mr Kelly, 24 years old Richard Wood. The retrial will take place in January 2018. The Goresbridge man who lived in Beds. Luton died after getting into a street fight in the town centre in the early hours of May 1 last year.

He had just come out of a nightclub in the town and was making his way home along Upper George Street at around 5am when he got into a fight with Mr Wood who was coming in the opposite direction.

The jury have been told Kevin, a 27 year old father of one who ran his own plastering company died as a result of a sub-arachnoid haemorrhage - a bleed on his brain caused by damage to a his vertebral artery which is found in the back of the neck at the base of the skull.

A pathologist told the court that the bleed happened when the sudden violent twisting of Kevins head - probably caused by a punch to his jaw - had torn the artery so that a jet of blood had gone under the thin arachnoid membrane which covers the brain. Mr Wood went into the witness box to tell the court how he had struck the blow to Mr Kelly as he defended himself He said it was Mr Kelly who had started the fight Mr Wood who lived in Luton at the time but who now lives in Bognor Regis said I was just trying to protect myself
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A Kilkenny company which teaches skydiving has launched a High Court action over an order by Kilkenny County Council that the firm ceases operations.

The action has been brought by Skydive Ireland Ltd and its director Mr David Byrnes both of Kilkenny Aerodrome Holdensrath, Kilkenny. The company instructs its customer how to perform parachute jumps from aircraft that take off and land at the airfield.

The company and Mr Byrnes' proceedings arise out of a decision by Kilkenny County Council of May 22 last to issue an enforcement notice requiring the company to cease all sponsored skydiving at the airfield. The enforcement notice was issued because the council claims the applicants have breached the planning laws.

In a sworn statement to the court, the applicants reject this claim. They argue the council's claim that the use of the airfield for skydiving amounts to an intensification of an existing use which requires planning permission is 'unsubstantiated by evidence'.

The company and Mr Byrnes say no intensification has taken place and that skydiving is an activity exempt from requiring planning permission. The applicants, represented by Jack Tchrakian Bl and instructed by Robert Emmet Bourke Solicitors, seek various orders including one quashing the council's decision that skydiving must cease at the airfield.

They also seek a stay on the council being allowed exercise any of the powers contained in the enforcement notice until the proceedings have been determined.

Counsel told the court that the airfield has been a base for skydiving since 1965. The company acquired the airfield in 2014 after borrowing "a substantial amount of money."

In advance of that purchase the applicants sought to clarify the planning situation with the local authority. The applicants say they made it clear in extensive dialogue with the council that skydiving services would form an integral part of what the airfield was bought for.

The applicants say the council informed them in 2014 that the airfield was an authorised development. As a result, the applicants said they had a legitimate expectation the council would not take any enforcement proceedings against them over the provision of skydiving services from the airfield.

The facility would not have been bought unless that had such an assurance from the council, the applicants claim. The applicants claim the council reversed its position and referred the matter to An Bord Pleanala.

The Bord ruled in early 2015 that the skydiving activities did constitute development and it was not exempted development.

The applicants disagree with the Bord's decision and brought High Court action against that finding. Those proceedings failed as they were not brought within the required time limit of eight weeks.

In November 2016, the Bord issued a warning notice to the applicants in relation to their skydiving activities which was followed in May by the Council issuing the enforcement notice. The company and Mr Byrnes say the council's decision is unlawful, has breached their legitimate expectation that they would be allowed operate skydiving services from the airfield.

They also claim the decision breach their Constitutional rights to a lawful enjoyment of their property.

Permission to bring the action was granted on an ex-parte basis, by Ms Justice Margaret Heneghan. The Judge made the matter returnable to a date in October, however the application for a stay has been adjourned for a week.
Manuel Pulido returned to his townhouse in Chicagos Gold Coast neighborhood one evening last December to find water spewing from the chandelier in his dining room. A pipe had burst in the second-floor bathroom, and the explosion of water quickly made its way into the master bedroom and leaked through to the dining room on the floor below. The ceilings, floors, walls, carpets, furniture (including some antiques) and light fixtures were drenched.

Pulido turned off the water and electricity and called his agent, who contacted Chubb, his insurance company. A water-remediation service arrived within 1 hours to start drying out the damaged areas. The service spent five days in his house with giant fans and wet/dry vacuums to prevent further damage.

When Pulido and his wife, Rena, were shopping for insurance several years ago, they met with independent agent Rebecca Korach Woan, who gave them price quotes and discussed the pros and cons of several companies. They chose to pay extra for the Chubb policy because the company had a reputation for handling claims efficiently and taking care in repairing or replacing special items, such as antiques and artwork. The company had sent an appraiser to the house to itemize valuable property and take pictures of the items in every room.

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When the pipe burst, Chubbs claims rep was able to access those before pictures. An adjuster came to see the damage and returned a few times with experts to check on special items, such as an antique table. By February, the Pulidos had received more than $200,000 from Chubb to cover the damage to their home and possessions. I made one phone call and everyone followed up with me, Pulido says.

Most insurance claims take more phone calls  sometimes many more. If you have a homeowners or an auto claim, heres what you need to know to avoid hassles and get a fair payment from your insurance company.

Homeowners insurance

Andrea Johnson went for years without filing a homeowners insurance claim. Then on the afternoon of May 20, 2013, the sky went dark and a tornado with 200-mile-per-hour winds ripped through her town of Moore, Okla.

The tornado wiped out so many houses that she had a hard time finding her street when she returned. The neighborhood behind ours was totally destroyed and was just debris, she says. Only a few houses on her block were still standing. One side of her house was completely gone, and my neighbors house was in my house.

Act fast. When you file a claim that involves damage to your home, an adjuster usually comes within 24 to 48 hours, but it can take longer after a catastrophic event. Johnson contacted her State Farm agent after the tornado, and she met with the adjuster three days later to determine the extent of the damage. Johnson also contacted a builder who came to the site with an engineer and sent the insurer a report explaining why the house was unfixable. The insurer finally decided it was a total loss, she says.

Your insurer or agent may be able to help you find contractors, water-remediation services and other experts to help make the repairs, or you can use your own contractors. It can help to have your contractor at your house when you meet with the adjuster. They can walk through together, and we can assure theyre both seeing the damage from the same perspective, says Patrick Gee, senior vice president for auto and property claims at Travelers. The insurer may adjust the payout if the contractor finds more problems after starting the work.

Take inventory. Filing the claim for the contents of Johnsons home ended up being complicated. By the time the adjuster arrived, she had little evidence of her missing possessions; many items had been scattered by the tornado, and some had been tossed by well-meaning volunteers who came to Moore to help homeowners remove debris. They asked for page after page of information to tell them about everything  how many pairs of shoes, how long you had them, how much they cost. Who remembers that? she says. Johnson wishes she had kept a home inventory or had taken pictures before the items were removed.

Keeping an updated inventory isnt the tedious hassle that it used to be. Many insurers have home inventory apps you can use. Take pictures of your rooms, closets, attic and your backyard, says John Doak, Oklahomas insurance commissioner. Open drawers and cupboards so that the photos show all your possessions. Keep the photos and copies of receipts for valuable items outside of your home, with your insurance agent or online. If possible, have your insurance agent visit your home, take pictures and let you know if youve reached your policy limits, says Doak.

Know whats covered. Most homeowners policies pay for additional living expenses  including rent, food and other costs  for up to a year while youre unable to live in your home. Keep the receipts for reimbursement; some insurers provide debit cards for these expenses. State Farm paid Johnsons rent for a small apartment while she waited for her claim to be settled.

In a disaster area, you may be out of your house a long time because of a shortage of contractors. You could potentially be paid more for the additional living expenses than for the home if youre out of your home for a year or more, says Doak. Johnson decided to take the insurance money and move to Oklahoma City rather than rebuild her house.

Periodically review your policy or ask your agent what is and isnt covered and how to fill the gaps. Flooding isnt covered by homeowners insurance, but you can get a policy from the National Flood Insurance Program (opens in new tab); your home-insurance agent may sell those policies. Sewage and drain backups usually arent covered automatically, but it may cost just $50 to add about $10,000 in coverage, says Rene Hernandez, an independent agent in Oklahoma City.

Most policies cover only about $5,000 worth of jewelry, but you can add a rider to provide coverage at the items appraised value.

How to fight back. If your insurer drags its feet or you dont think youre getting adequate reimbursement, you can get help from your state insurance department (find your state insurance department here (opens in new tab)). If theres an impasse, the insurance department can step in and speed things up, says Doak, whose office fielded about 30,000 calls to help policyholders last year. The Oklahoma Insurance Department, like departments in many states, sets up a mobile office to answer consumers questions about their coverage and rights after a major disaster. It also offers a mediation program to help resolve disputes between homeowners and their insurance companies, an option that several state insurance departments offer.

Auto insurance

The steps you take immediately after a car accident can make a huge difference in how quickly and smoothly the claims process goes.

Gather evidence. Youre likely to have a smartphone camera with you when you drive; if not, keep a camera in the glove compartment. If youre in an accident, start taking pictures as soon as its safe  of your car, the other car, the intersection, and the other drivers license and insurance card. You may even want to take a photo of the other driver. Also keep a notebook and pen by the drivers seat so you can jot down a license plate number quickly, says Sharon Jansma, who owns a Farmers Insurance agency in Visalia, Calif.

If there are witnesses, get their contact information. Having a police report can help, especially if theres a question of whos at fault. Dont tell anyone the accident was your fault, even if you think it was, says Kip Diggs, a State Farm spokesman. Dont sign any document unless its for the police or your insurance agent.

Some insurers, including State Farm and Travelers, have mobile apps that make it easy to submit photos and walk you through the next steps. Or you can call your insurance company or agent.

Find the right shop. You can usually use any body shop, but most insurers have preferred shops that work directly with the adjusters and guarantee their work. This can speed up the claims process, but it can help to have a second opinion. I always tell my insureds to get a few estimates to make sure theres consistency, says Hernandez. If you have rental-car coverage, your insurer will pay for at least a portion of the cost of a rental car while yours is in the shop.

If the car is a total loss, the insurer will generally pay the cars actual cash value (the market value for a car of its age and condition). Ask how the insurer came up with the number. Farmers compares the cost of cars selling in the area that are the same make and model, with similar mileage and upkeep, then adjusts the figure for your specific details. I like to see a sample size of five to 10 cars selling in your area, says Jansma. If you think the number is too low, gather your own list of similar cars for sale locally. The insurer will either send you a check for that value (minus your deductible) or pay the financing company and send you any additional money, if you have a loan.

Claims can get complicated  and take longer  when another car is involved. It usually takes 60 days or less, says Jana Schellin Foster, who owns an independent insurance agency in Carson City, Nev. Anything beyond that, somebody is dropping the ball. In that case, Foster will generally have a conference call with the agent, the insurer and the customer. That way there is no miscommunication, she says.

The final payment can be delayed while the two insurers decide who is at fault. A typical scenario: Your insurer pays the claim while you pay your deductible, even if theres a good chance you werent at fault. Your deductible could be returned to you months later, after the insurance companies determine who is to blame. That process, called subrogation, can take anywhere from 10 days to a year, says Jansma.

How to fight back. If the insurer seems to be lowballing the repair costs, ask your body shop to provide a detailed estimate of what needs to be fixed. If that doesnt help, find out if you have an appraisal clause in the policy, under which a third party reviews your body shops appraisal and the insurers and settles on a number.

Your agent may be able to help with stalled claims. You may have one claim in a lifetime, but we do this every day, says Sarah Brown, of Keller-Brown Insurance Services, in Shrewsbury, Pa. As an independent agent, she often has contacts at the other drivers insurance company as well as at her clients and can find out whats causing the delay. The state insurance department can also explain your rights and get the insurance companies moving.

Check an insurers complaint record

One way to minimize the chances of having claims problems is to avoid insurers that have a history of hassling people at claim time. You can look up the insurers complaint record with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners Consumer Information Source (opens in new tab).

Type in the companys name, then click on property/casualty for the business type for auto and homeowners insurers. When you see the list of companies, click on closed complaints, then select closed complaint ratio report.

Youll see a ratio of the insurers market share of resolved complaints to the companys market share of premiums for that type of insurance (so larger insurers arent penalized for having more complaints). The national median is 1.00; companies with ratios below that median have a better track record than those above the median.

You can also contact your state insurance insurance department to learn about any actions taken against the insurer.

Check an Insurer's Complaint Record

One way to minimize the chances of having claims problems is to avoid insurers that have a history of hassling people at claim time. You can look up the insurers complaint record with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners Consumer Information Source (opens in new tab).

Type in the companys name, then click on property/casualty for the business type for auto and homeowners insurers. When you see the list of companies, click on closed complaints, then select closed complaint ratio report.

Youll see a ratio of the insurers market share of resolved complaints to the companys market share of premiums for that type of insurance (so larger insurers arent penalized for having more complaints). The national median is 1.00; companies with ratios below that median have a better track record than those above the median.

You can also contact your state insurance department to learn about any actions taken against the insurer.
We scoured the nation to identify the best stock in every state. CenturyLink (symbol CTL (opens in new tab)) is the publicly traded company we picked in Louisiana. The company headquarters is located in Monroe.

A word of caution: Since we selected a single stock from each state (plus one from D.C), and choices in some states are sparse, a few of our picks are best suited to investors comfortable with a higher degree of risk. This is not necessarily one of our 51 favorite stocks in the entire U.S., in other words.

CenturyLink by the Numbers

Headquarters: Monroe

Monroe Share price: $24.35

$24.35 Market value: $13.4 billion

$13.4 billion Price-earnings ratio: 11

(Prices and data are as of June 22, 2017)

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The third-largest telephone company in the U.S., CenturyLink provides broadband, voice and wireless services to residential and business customers.

The companys stock plummeted last October when it announced plans to acquire telecom rival Level 3 Communications, likely over investor concerns that CenturyLink was overpaying, says Value Line analyst Daniel Henigson. That the company reported a 4% year-over-year revenue decline in the first quarter didnt improve investor sentiment, and long-term concerns remain about wireless providers depleting CenturyLinks highly profitable landline business.

Though cautious about the revenue declines, CFRA analyst Angelo Zino says the companys sales are growing in more-profitable areas, such as high-bandwidth broadband, and the Level 3 acquisition should increase CenturyLinks geographic reach (the new company will serve some 350 metropolitan areas in more than 60 countries). He adds that the company has plenty of cash to support its mouth-watering dividendthe stock yields 8.9% annually. He rates the stock a buy, with a 12-month price target of $28.
We scoured the nation to identify the best stock in every state. General Motors (symbol GM (opens in new tab)) is the publicly traded company we picked in Michigan. The company headquarters is located in Detroit.

A word of caution: Since we selected a single stock from each state (plus one from D.C), and choices in some states are sparse, a few of our picks are best suited to investors comfortable with a higher degree of risk. This is not necessarily one of our 51 favorite stocks in the entire U.S., in other words.

General Motors by the Numbers

Headquarters: Detroit

Detroit Share price: $34.19

$34.19 Market value: $51.6 billion

$51.6 billion Price-earnings ratio: 6

(Prices and data are as of June 22, 2017)

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Eight years after filing for bankruptcy protection, Motor Citys biggest automaker has a simple plan for success: Keep costs low and quality high.

GM has excellent earnings potential, says Morningstar analyst David Whiston, even though analysts expect U.S. light vehicle sales overall to stay flat or dip in upcoming years. The cars rolling off GMs line boast the best quality and design in decades, he says. And the company has cut costs, reducing its North American division to just four brands, down from eight, for example, and negotiating benefit concessions with union workers. GMs North American business needs to sell 10 million to 11 million cars per year to break even, Whiston says. Assuming average annual demand of about 17 million units, he believes the companys new structure should allow it to break even during down economic cycles and realize solid earnings growth during upswings. Morningstar believes the stock is fairly valued at $51 a share, which would be up 49% from current levels. CFRA analyst Efraim Levy, who rates the stock a strong buy, assigns a more modest 12-month price target of $42 a share. With a yield of 4.4%, GMs total return represents an attractive opportunity.
We scoured the nation to identify the best stock in every state. Medtronic (symbol MDT (opens in new tab)) is the publicly traded company we picked in Minnesota. The company headquarters is located in Minneapolis.

A word of caution: Since we selected a single stock from each state (plus one from D.C), and choices in some states are sparse, a few of our picks are best suited to investors comfortable with a higher degree of risk. This is not necessarily one of our 51 favorite stocks in the entire U.S., in other words.

Medtronic by the Numbers

Headquarters: Minneapolis

Minneapolis Share price: $89.09

$89.09 Market value: $122.0 billion

$122.0 billion Price-earnings ratio: 18

(Prices and data are as of June 22, 2017)

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Medtronic is reshuffling its business lines, joining forces with fast-growing partners and jettisoning laggards. In January 2015, Medtronic, which specializes in therapeutic medical devices such as pacemakers, defibrillators and stents, acquired Covidien, a leader in minimally invasive surgical devices.

With the acquisition, says CFRA analyst Jeffrey Loo, Medtronic becomes a worldwide leader in a diverse array of medical products. Then, in April, Medtronic agreed to sell its hospital-supply business, which focused on patient-care products, to Cardinal Health. Medtronic will use $1 billion of the after-tax proceeds to buy back shares, and it will pay down debt with the remaining $4.5 billion. Analysts at UBS say the sale exemplifies Medtronics commitment to selling its less profitable, slower-growing business segments in favor of higher-growth opportunities. The company has also committed to spending $10 billion on research and development in the U.S. through 2024. CFRAs Loo says the stock is a buy and reckons it could reach a price of $100 a share over the next 12 months.
We scoured the nation to identify the best stock in every state. Hancock Holding Co. (symbol HBHC (opens in new tab)) is the publicly traded company we picked in Mississippi. The company headquarters is located in Gulfport.

A word of caution: Since we selected a single stock from each state (plus one from D.C), and choices in some states are sparse, a few of our picks are best suited to investors comfortable with a higher degree of risk. This is not necessarily one of our 51 favorite stocks in the entire U.S., in other words.

Hancock Holding by the Numbers

Headquarters: Gulfport

Gulfport Share price: $46.05

$46.05 Market value: $3.9 billion

$3.9 billion Price-earnings ratio: 16

(Prices and data are as of June 22, 2017)

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Hancock provides financial services to customers in the Gulf South region through its subsidiaries, Hancock Bank, which operates in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi, and Whitney Bank, purchased in 2010, operating in Louisiana and Texas.

Results have been mixed since the merger, with charge-offs on loans made to energy companies dinging profits in recent years. But things may be looking up. In April, the bank acquired $1.6 billion worth of deposits, $1 billion in assets (mostly cash) and 29 branch locations from failed First NBC Bank in a transaction with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. This was just five months after Hancock purchased $1.3 billion in loans directly from First NBC, along with $500 million in deposits and nine branches. Value Line analyst Michael Ratty says the deals should help the company boost earnings this year, as should growth in fee revenues and interest income. And with energy companies stabilizing, Hancock can set aside much less money for nonperforming loans. Wall Street analysts, on average, expect earnings to increase 40% this year, followed by a 21% jump in 2018. HBHC shares have been in the penalty box for far too long, says David Long, an analyst at financial services company Raymond James. He rates the stock a strong buy with a 12-month price target of $54.
We scoured the nation to identify the best stock in every state. Glacier Bancorp (symbol GBCI (opens in new tab)) is the publicly traded company we picked in Montana. The company headquarters is located in Kalispell.

A word of caution: Since we selected a single stock from each state (plus one from D.C), and choices in some states are sparse, a few of our picks are best suited to investors comfortable with a higher degree of risk. This is not necessarily one of our 51 favorite stocks in the entire U.S., in other words.

Glacier Bancorp by the Numbers

Headquarters: Kalispell

Kalispell Share price: $35.05

$35.05 Market value: $2.7 billion

$2.7 billion Price-earnings ratio: 19

(Prices and data are as of June 22, 2017)

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Glacier is a regional bank holding company that provides commercial banking services at 146 locations in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The company has grown through acquisition, with the management team snapping up small, regional banks that they believe have potential for growth. This company of banks model puts Glacier in a unique niche, says Tim Skiendzielewski of Aberdeen Asset Management, whose Small Cap Equity fund counts the stock among its top-ten holdings.

Glaciers size and resources, he says, allow its subsidiaries to offer more sophisticated products than local, mom-and-pop banks, while being more involved on a community level than bigger super-regionals. Glaciers conservative underwriting, well-managed expenses and good loan growth have led to superior return on average equity (ROAE) and return on average assets (ROAA)  both key measures of banks profitability  compared with its peers. Analysts who cover the stock see per-share earnings growth climbing 12% this year, followed by a 11% jump in 2018. The company has hiked its annual payout every year since 2012, and in January paid a 30-cent special dividend on top of its normal quarterly payout for the third straight year. The stocks annualized regular payout of 84 cents per share gives it a yield of 2.4%.
We scoured the nation to identify the best stock in every state. Rockwell Collins (symbol COL (opens in new tab)) is the publicly traded company we picked in Iowa. The company headquarters is located in Cedar Rapids.

A word of caution: Since we selected a single stock from each state (plus one from D.C), and choices in some states are sparse, a few of our picks are best suited to investors comfortable with a higher degree of risk. This is not necessarily one of our 51 favorite stocks in the entire U.S., in other words.

Rockwell Collins by the Numbers

Headquarters: Cedar Rapids

Cedar Rapids Share price: $103.99

$103.99 Market value: $16.9 billion

$16.9 billion Price-earnings ratio: 15

(Prices and data are as of June 22, 2017)

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Before an $8.6 billion acquisition of B/E Aerospace in April, Rockwell was a leading manufacturer of avionics, flight control, communications and navigation systems that go into planes cockpits. In B/E, which manufactures, among other things, seating, lighting, oxygen systems and kitchen equipment, Rockwell has effectively acquired the rest of the plane.

Both companies are cash-rich, and the combined entity should be able to quickly pay down debt accrued during the merger, say analysts at Credit Suisse. The deal gives Rockwell more-direct exposure to commercial airlines, which is a more lucrative business than selling to other parts manufacturers. Credit Suisse analysts expect Rockwell to boost earnings by 24% and sales by 66%, cumulatively, through the two fiscal years ending in September 2018. They believe the stock has potential to reach $120 over the next 12 months, representing a potential gain of 15%.
SHANGHAI, July 19 (Reuters) - China's benchmark stock indexes rose on Wednesday, but small caps extended losses on fears that regulators will roll out more tightening measures as they clamp down on riskier types of financing.

The blue-chip CSI300 index rose 0.4 percent to 3,682.26 points by 0202 GMT, while the Shanghai Composite Index also gained 0.4 percent to 3,199.40.

Banks and resources stocks led gains, with an index tracking coal shares up nearly 4 percent.

But Shenzhen's start-up board ChiNext slid about 0.4 percent.

ChiNext slumped over 5 percent on Monday after President Xi Jinping vowed on Sunday to take stronger action to deal with financial risks, as he announced the establishment of a new financial oversight body.

Nearly 500 stocks, most of them small firms, plunged the 10 percent limit on Monday in what some media described as China's 'Black Monday'.

China's securities regulator said late on Tuesday that it would support efforts to curb risks in capital markets, and would improve the quality of listed companies and improve the delisting system.

(Reporting by Samuel Shen and Andrew Galbraith; Editing by Kim Coghill)
Editor's Note: Kitco readers, have your say! Check out our newest feature  KITCO CHAT!  where you can share your comments and ask questions directly to us.

UBS looks for gold to continue drawing support, commenting that the metals ability to hang onto recent price levels is encouraging. We had seen bits and pieces of interest from more strategic players around the recent lows -- although there appeared to be no urgency to build large positions, it suggests to us that gold continues to be viewed as a diversifier and this should help keep the market supported overall, the bank says. Physical demand has been steady at best, although seasonal patterns suggest not much can be expected at the current time, the bank says. A more dramatic selloff, perhaps towards the lows at the start of the year, is probably needed to get a reaction from physical buyers at this point, UBS says. Looking ahead though, indicators of healthy demand in India and expectations of a good monsoon suggest that buying should pick up during the wedding and festival season in the coming months. Still, UBS adds, Indian gold imports for the first half of the year of around 525 tonnes were strong compared to past years, which could mean second-half volume will be slower. Overall we expect gold demand in India this year to be around historic averages, UBS says.

By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com

UBS: Gold Short Covering More Likely Than Fresh Longs For Now

UBS figures buying in gold is more likely to be short covering than fresh longs in the immediate future. Short covering is when traders who have short, or bearish, trades opt to buy to exit or cover those positions, while longs refers to fresh buyers. Positioning has been in gold's favor, with most recent data showing that net length is at the lowest level since January last year, UBS says. In addition, shorts have started to become more active in recent weeks, raising upside risks in the near term [should those traders buy to cover]. In fact, the bank adds, the recovery from the low $1,200s over the past week was likely short covering, while longs are likely taking their time and are in no rush to jump in for

now. This may understandable as market participants wait for further guidance from a European Central Bank meeting Thursday and the U.S. Federal Open Market Committee next week, UBS adds.

By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com

Commerzbank: Gold Rally Fueled By Speculators; ETF Holdings Fall

Recent strength in gold prices appears to be the result of speculative buying, which is a double-edged sword since an exodus by these short-term players can also undercut the market, says Commerzbank. Analysts note that global gold exchange-traded funds Tuesday posted renewed outflows of 4.6 tonnes. Outflows since the beginning of the month have totaled a good 37 tonnes, Commerzbank says. Thus the $40 rise in the gold price since early last week was driven first and foremost by speculation, which puts it on a less solid footing. After all, speculative financial investors can jettison their positions just as quickly if their expectations of rising prices are disappointed. It therefore makes sense to keep an eye on the 200-day moving average, which is currently at just shy of $1,230. A fall below this threshold would presumably spark follow-up selling. Spot gold was roughly steady for the day as of 8:13 a.m. EDT, trading at $1,242.20 an ounce.

By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com

Metals Focus: Platinum Output Falls Far Less Than Prices Since 2011

Global platinum production has fallen only 5% since 2011 even though prices have fallen some 50%, says Metals Focus. Companies have maintained their output largely as a result of cutting total cash costs, the consultancy explains. South African output is down slightly more  at 9% -- since this is primary output rather than platinum mined as a by-product of other metals. However, a 9% drop since 2011 with prices down 50% is nonetheless a somewhat surprising performance, Metals Focus says. During 2011 [in South Africa], the average total cash cost of producing an ounce of platinum equivalent was $1,264/oz and $1,569/oz on an all-in sustaining cost basis; all other things being equal, the entire South African industry would be loss making at todays prices. However, by 2016, the average total cash cost had fallen to $868, or $975 on an AISC basis. The main factor behind lower costs has been the sharp depreciation of the South African rand. That being said, some 50% of the industry was still under water during 2016 using the AISC basis, Metals Focus says. Still, with South African unemployment of some 25%, companies would face a political backlash if they cut too many jobs, Metals Focus continues. In addition, the mines are large, complex operations with high sunk costs, making mine closures a last resort, Metals Focus adds.
Editor's Note: Kitco readers, have your say! Check out our newest feature  KITCO CHAT!  where you can share your comments and ask questions directly to us.

(Kitco News) - The London Metal Exchange (LME), the worlds biggest industrial metal exchange, will be voting on various new measures in August, including items such lower fees and new live implied prices for monthly contracts not traded electronically, Bloomberg cited sources as saying.

The move comes after two months of consultations with clients in an effort to reverse a drop market share and improve relations with customers. The board members are set to vote on the outcome of the discussions on August 2, according to the media report.

The changes mark a shift toward a more conciliatory tone since Matthew Chamberlain took over as chief executive officer in April after years of confrontation with customers over rising fees and efforts to promote electronic trading, the news agency said quoting unnamed sources.

Some of the proposed changes include a cut to fees on so-called short-dated carries, technology improvements to establish live implied prices for monthly contract currently not being traded electronically, an investigation into switching to a volume-weighted average method for figuring out closing prices and a development of an OTC dealer-to-client trading platform.

The LME is likely to make a formal announcement sometime in early fall.

The discussion around the new strategy is an attempt to fix a fractious relationship with clients after accusations of being heavy-handed, the media report said.

The planned changes represent a conservative response to a controversy over moving from the LMEs benchmark three-month forward contracts, a relic of the 1800s when ships needed that time to haul copper from Chile to the U.K., to a more standardized contract, it added.

Earlier this year, LME said rising fees are impacting trading behavior and it could be appropriate to consider a modification to the fee schedule, whereby fees on certain carries are reduced.

The news comes after LME introduced gold and silver futures contracts earlier in July. The venture, the first of its kind for the LME since the mid-1980s, marks a significant development in London's $5 trillion-a-year gold trade, as it offers traders more options and creates additional competition. The LME said that almost 80 tonnes of gold and 397.5 tonnes of silver were traded in their first week.
DUBAI, July 19 (Reuters) - Gulf stocks may move sideways on Wednesday in the absence of major fresh news while banks in Saudi Arabia could diverge because of earnings and one bank going ex-dividend.

Alinma Bank reported that second-quarter net profit came in at 488 million riyals ($130 million) versus 409 million riyals year ago; analysts surveyed by Reuters had on average predicted 417 million riyals.

Al Rajhi Bank goes ex-dividend on Wednesday, however, and this may push it down; earlier this week, Banque Saudi Fransi fell sharply on the day that it went ex-dividend.

In Dubai, Emirates NBD , the largest lender, posted a 6 percent rise in second-quarter net profit to 2.02 billion dirhams ($550 million), at the high end of analysts' forecasts; three analysts had on average forecast 1.88 billion dirhams. Dubai's index , last at 3,578 points, is technically bullish after rising this week above resistance at 3,573 points, the April peak. That level is now immediate support.

Meanwhile, Qatar Islamic Bank , which analysts say is one of the banks most vulnerable to any pull-out of foreign deposits due to Qatar's diplomatic crisis, reported a 10 percent rise in first-half net profit and a 2 percent rise in deposits from the end of last year, which may reassure investors.

MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan is up 0.4 percent at its highest since April 2015, but Brent oil has slipped 17 cents to $48.67 a barrel.

(Reporting by Andrew Torchia)
By Davide Barbuscia

DUBAI, July 19 (Reuters) - State-owned Oman Oil expects to close imminently, within two months at the latest, a pre-export financing (PXF) loan of around $1 billion, a source close to the matter told Reuters.

The petroleum firm has hired Natixis and Societe Generale to lead the debt transaction, which is being marketed to other lenders. The loan is in the region of $1 billion, but the final size could be larger, the source added.

In PXF loans, which are often used by commodity producers, the borrower raises funds based on confirmed orders for its production. Another Omani government-controlled company, Petroleum Development Oman, raised in June 2016 a $4 billion loan with a similar structure.

Oman has increasingly relied on external debt financing since a slump in international oil prices hit its finances in late 2014.

In the last few weeks Oman Oil closed a $2 billion loan package comprising a $1.15 billion revolving credit facility with a five-year maturity, and the amendment of an existing $850 million revolving loan maturing in 2019. (Editing by Andrew Torchia)
Following are news stories, press reports and events to watch that may affect Poland's financial markets on Wednesday. ALL TIMES GMT (Poland: GMT + 2 hours):

SUPREME COURT OVERHAUL

Poland's parliament put on hold for several hours until 0700 GMT on Wednesday a debate over the bill giving itself the power to appoint Supreme Court judges, amid opposition's criticism that the law would politicise the judiciary. ECONOMIC DATA

The statistics office is due to publish industrial output, retail sales and producer price data for June at 1200 GMT. KGHM Copper prices should gradually rise which should be reflected in a gradually improving economic environment for the company, KGHM's Chief Executive Radoslaw Domagalski-Labedzki told Parkiet daily.

He also said that copper prices above 20,000 zlotys ($5,491.94) per tonne were very beneficial for KGHM and could be maintained.

JSW JSW is preparing to put aside part of its profit - initially about 1 billion zlotys ($274.64 million) - for an internal stabilisation fund to be used during periods of weaker financial results, Chief Executive Daniel Ozon told Rzeczpospolita daily.

IT TENDER

Poland's state-run agency paying out pensions, the Social Security Office (ZUS), may "soon" announce a tender for a new IT system, which could be the biggest in years, Puls Biznesu daily said quoting ZUS deputy head.

****Reuters has not verified stories reported by Polish media and does not vouch for their accuracy.****

For other related news, double click on: Polish equities E.Europe equities Polish money Polish debt Eastern Europe All emerging markets Hot stocks Stock markets Market debt news Forex news For real-time index quotes, double click on: Warsaw WIG20 Budapest BUX Prague PX ($1 = 3.6417 zlotys)

($1 = 3.6411 zlotys)

(Reporting by Warsaw Bureau)
WASHINGTON, July 19 (Reuters) - U.S. homebuilding rebounded more than expected in June after declining for three straight months, but construction activity remains constrained by rising lumber prices, labor and land shortages.

Housing starts jumped 8.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.22 million units, the highest level since February as both single-family and multi-family construction increased, the Commerce Department said on Wednesday.

May's sales pace was revised up to 1.12 million units from the previously reported 1.09 million units.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast groundbreaking activity rising to a rate of 1.16 million units last month. Homebuilding rose 2.1 percent on a year-on-year basis.

Despite the bounceback, homebuilding has lost momentum after strong gains in both the fourth and first quarters. Economists blame the slowdown on supply bottlenecks.

A survey on Tuesday showed confidence among homebuilders hit an eight-month low in July amid complaints about high lumber prices and shortages of building lots and labor. Lumber prices have surged after the government in April imposed anti-subsidy duties on imports of Canadian softwood lumber.

Single-family homebuilding, which accounts for the largest share of the residential housing market, surged 6.3 percent to an 849,000 unit-pace last month, also the highest level since February. Single-family construction has lost ground since vaulting to a near 9-1/2-year high in February, despite strong demand for housing.

Starts for the volatile multi-family housing segment increased 13.3 percent to a 366,000 unit-pace, after five straight months of declines. Construction had slowed amid a jump in multi-family homes coming on the market.

Building permits last month shot up 7.4 percent to a 1.25 million-unit rate, the highest level since March. Single-family home permits rose 4.1 percent after three straight months of declines. Permits for the construction of multi-family homes surged 13.9 percent in June.

(Reporting By Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
DAR ES SALAAM, July 19 (Reuters) - Vodacom Tanzania has extended the offer period for its initial public offering for a second time to allow foreign investors to take part, the telecom operator said on Wednesday.

The company, a subsidiary of South Africa's Vodacom Group , said it had received approval from Tanzania's capital markets regulator to extend the offer period until July 28 after the country changed its laws to allow foreigners to buy telecoms shares.

"This extension will help ensure participation by international investors," the company said in a statement.

A listing on the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange was tentatively set for Aug. 15, the company said.

The government lifted a ban on foreigners participating in telecoms IPOs last month, a move expected to widen the pool of potential investors for several major companies. Vodacom plans to raise 476 billion shillings ($213.07 million) by selling 560 million shares at 850 shillings each.

Traders said purchase of the shares by local investors was slow even after the offer period was extended twice due to concerns about adequate liquidity in the local market.

Telecom operators are required by law to have 25 percent local ownership via IPOs at the local bourse.

The government hopes the listings will bring more transparency and offer the public a share in the industry's profits.

Two other major telecoms operators, Millicom's subsidiary Tigo and the local business of India's Bharti Airtel , have also submitted prospectuses to the regulator and are awaiting approval for their IPOs.

The number of mobile phone subscribers in Tanzania rose by 0.9 percent in 2016 to 40.17 million. Mobile phone use has surged over the past decade, helped by the launch of cheaper mobile phones.

($1 = 2,234.0000 Tanzanian shillings)

(Reporting by Fumbuka Ng'wanakilala; Editing by Duncan Miriri and Jane Merriman)
Three receive Tennessee Bar Journal's Joe Henry Award





NASHVILLE  Nashville lawyer Benjamin K. Raybin, Memphis Lawyer Amy J. Amundsen and South Carolina attorney Jeffrey L. Levy, formerly of Nashville, were honored recently with Justice Joseph W. Henry Memorial Award for Outstanding Legal Writing at the Tennessee Bar Association's annual Convention in Kingsport.



The Joe W. Henry Award is given each year to a member of the Tennessee Bar Association who contributes the most outstanding article to the TBA's monthly magazine, the Tennessee Bar Journal. Raybin received the award for his article "Pardon Me: How Executive Clemency Works in Tennessee (and How It Doesn't)," published in the August 2016 issue. Amundsen and Levy were honored for their point/counterpoint articles, "Confusion / Clarity: Two Family Law Attorneys on How to Balance Best Interests of Children and Doctor-Patient Privilege," published in May 2016.



Raybin is an associate at Raybin & Weissman, P.C., where he practices primarily criminal defense and civil rights law. He received his J.D. from Vanderbilt University, where he was a member of the Law Review. He clerked for Judges Jane B. Stranch and Gilbert S. Merritt, both of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He has successfully argued cases in front of the Tennessee Supreme Court and the Tennessee Court of Appeals.



Amy practices law with Rice, Amundsen & Caperton PLLC in Memphis. She is a graduate of the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. She has served as chair of the Tennessee Bar Association Family Law section, president of the Memphis Bar Association, president of the Memphis chapter of the American Inns of Court and is one of the 100 Diplomates in the American College of Family Trial Lawyers. For the past 15 years she has chaired the Alimony Bench Book Committee of the TBA Family Law Section.



Levy has been a family law practitioner in Nashville, but recently relocated to South Carolina and is in the process of retiring. A graduate of Vanderbilt University Law School, he is a past chair of the Tennessee Bar Association's Family Law Section and of the Nashville Bar Association's Domestic Relations Committee. He has also a past chair of the TBA's Family Law Code Committee.



The Joe Henry award is named for Justice Joseph W. Henry, a former chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court, practicing lawyer, scholar, and writer with a rare talent for clear, forceful and often dramatic prose. The award was established in 1981 to encourage scholarly yet practical writing to benefit the members of the bar. The winners were chosen this year by a panel which included Judge Brandon Gibson of the Western Section Court of Appeals, TBA President Jason Long, Dean Gary Wade of the Lincoln Memorial University Duncan School of Law and Dean Melanie D. Wilson of the University of Tennessee College of Law.



The Tennessee Bar Association (TBA) is the largest professional association in Tennessee with more than 13,000 members. Founded in 1881, the TBA provides opportunities for continuing legal education, professional development and public service. The TBA's dedication to serving the state's legal community is evidenced by its membership roll, which represents the entire spectrum of legal practice: plaintiff and defense lawyers, corporate counsel, judges, prosecutors, public defenders, government lawyers and legal services attorneys.



Published July 19, 2017










A scene from "Coffee Noir: Black Brown" starring Cho Soo-hyun and directed by Chang Hyun-sang./ Courtesy of BIFAN



By Jason Bechervaise



BUCHEON _ In recent years I have been inclined to pick non-Korean films at the Bucheon International Film Festival (BIFAN) because the selection of foreign films tended to be stronger.



In the 21st edition, while there were some films of the non-Korean variety I was keen on seeing such as the "Psycho" documentary "78/52" and the acclaimed horror film "Raw," for the first time I was adamant on catching Korean genre films at BIFAN.



For the most part, it paid off. I certainly wasn't able to see all that many, but from the films I saw with the exception of one, it was a stronger year for Korean films at the festival in terms of world premieres. Here are two that resonated.



The one I was most eager to see was "Room No. 7," which opened the festival. Directed by Lee Yong-Seung who made the impressive "10 Minutes," it was produced by Myung Films headed by influential film producer Sim Jae-myung. Therefore, it seemed like there was enough strong pedigree involved to warrant attention. Indeed, the concept of a film largely set in a DVD room sounded like an intriguing one.



Although it didn't quite deliver in the same way as a film called "Karaoke Crazies" that was released in June and predominately set in a Karaoke bar, tonally "Room No. 7" works well combining elements of a comedic nature with more thrilling moments.



Shin Ha-kyun plays an entrepreneur who runs a DVD shop in a once-prospering but now somewhat dead shopping district. In order to make a living, he works as a chauffeur, but is determined to sell the shop as soon as possible but ensuring he gets the highest amount for it.



He hires a new part-timer to join his team that also consists of Tae-jung who is buried in student loan debt. Things start to liven up, but things take a turn for the worse when the unexpected happens leading to a struggle between the owner and Tae-jung.



On the whole, it is competently staged, taking advantage of the confinements of space. It is not as polished as it could be, but it remains engaging throughout, while Shin Ha-kyun leads a solid cast.



More of a surprise was "Coffee Noir: Black Brown" which is not a hardcore genre film given the lack of gore, but is certainly bizarre, fascinating and often hilarious.



Directed by Chang Hyun-sang ("Kissing Cousin"), the film is set in a time when coffee is banned. Yes, no coffee, which would be disastrous for the thousands of cafes that are located throughout the country and for those who can't live without it. There would be a riot.



Seemingly influenced by the era of prohibition that was captured in Brian De Palma's "The Untouchables," the film follows Ju-won (Cho Soo-hyang) a cafe owner who is determined to keep her premises open refusing to allow gangs to control her business as they seek to take advantage of the decaffeinated coffee market.



It quickly becomes apparent that as Ju-won, along with her endearing colleagues, fight against the system to ensure their survival, the new restrictions on coffee are being fully exploited to fuel rampant corruption.



It is not difficult to see the parallels to current day issues where corruption remains a problem underscored by the presidential scandal that erupted last year. But it is rather telling that the employees of this coffee shop are young and faced with a situation where the system appears to fail them. In February of this year, youth unemployment in Korea reached a staggering 12.3 percent according to Statistics Korea.



With its young cast, and young director this is a wonderful and creative example of a film that finds laughter, horror and thrills in the most unusual yet also eerily familiar of situations that documents their struggles. It was a very welcome surprise and certainly worth checking out for those who want to watch something entertaining and unique.



BIFAN continues until July 23.





Jason Bechervaise is a movie columnist for The Korea Times. He can be reached at jase@koreanfilm.org.uk.
New Financial Services Commission Chairman Choi Jong-ku pledges allegiance to the Korean flag during his inauguration ceremony at the Government Complex in Gwanghwamun, Seoul, Wednesday. The new top regulator vowed to guide Korea's financial industry to be more productive, contributing to job creation and economic growth. / Courtesy of Financial Services Commission
By Kim Jae-kyoung



SINGAPORE  It seems President Moon Jae-in and his policymakers are painting a rosy picture of Korea's relationship with the United States following the summit between Moon and U.S. President Donald Trump.



However, a series of incidents showing gaps between the two administrations over substantive issues is casting doubt on such optimism. The Moon administration's clumsy approach has exposed its lack of sophistication in diplomacy.



This is because they did not try to catch the true message Trump's rhetoric carries. They have focused only on positive remarks by Trump who usually says good things with no details when meeting with his counterparts.



This is well manifested in the divergent views about the free trade agreement between the two administrations.



Trump officially called the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) into question during the summit in late June. But the Moon administration underestimated his remarks, claiming there was no official discussion about the trade deal.



A week ago, the U.S. notified South Korea it wanted to start the process of revising the agreement. It called for convening a meeting in Washington in August.



The Korean government said the U.S. was seeking modest amendments to the agreement, while Trump made it clear the U.S. was renegotiating the KORUS FTA, calling it a "horrible" deal.



Seoul's blind optimism based on empty rhetoric by Trump and an arbitrary interpretation of U.S. demands has raised concerns about the future course of renegotiations and other contentious issues.



Although the Moon administration argues there will be only minor modifications, many analysts think the other way around.



"I think the U.S. wants a full scale resetting of the free trade deal. I don't think they will be content with minor tweaks and modifications," Rob Carnell, the Singapore-based chief economist at ING Asia-Pacific, told The Korea Times.



"Having failed to make progress on any of their other policy goals, such as health care, fiscal policy and only limited progress on immigration, trade is one area where they can score some policy wins."



Taking these into consideration, there are two simple things that Moon should keep in mind when interpreting Trump's words.



First, Trump always talks about the positive side of issues. Second, he has no details in his words.



Trump gimmick



Given his businessman-style speech, it could be a mistake to take Trump's positive statements seriously. He engaged in his usual rhetoric at that time, according to analysts.



"His words tend to be very generic and always try to find the positive side of the issues," said Antonio Fatas, professor of economics at INSEAD's Asia campus in Singapore.



Trump always stresses "great relationship" when he meets with his counterparts even if there is a contentious issue. Trump's recent remark about Chinese President Xi Jinping is a case in point.



"We have a great relationship with China and I really like President Xi," Trump said in a speech during a political rally June 21. His comments came a day after he tweeted that Beijing's efforts to contain Pyongyang have "not worked out."



Most governments now are playing the same game with the Trump administration. They try to be nice and complimentary about Trump's policies while waiting for the U.S. to make a move and ask for something specific.



The Korean government should try to figure out what the Trump administration is really about and focus on details when preparing for negotiations.



"They (Trump's words) lack details. They show his ignorance of the most basic economic concepts," Fatas said. "The Trump administration lacks the experts and expertise to move forward with the details."



Carnell suggested Seoul closely watch the NAFTA renegotiations because it can be a benchmark for the KORUS FTA talks.



"If aggressive, then we should expect similar treatment for South Korea, though there is also a political element here which is absent with NAFTA: North Korea," he said. "So timing-wise, this makes it a little awkward for Trump to play hard ball."



Once the Korean government comes up with a detailed plan with scenario-based strategies, chances are South Korea will reap the desired results from its diplomacy with the U.S., including the KORUS FTA renegotiations.




Kyobo Life Insurance Chairman Shin Chang-jae, right, and International Insurance Society (IIS) President Michael Morrissey, left, pose with Ginger Turner, second from left, and Thomas Holzheu of Swiss Re after presenting them the 2017 Shin Research Excellence Awards at the IIS Global Insurance Forum in London, Tuesday. / Courtesy of Kyobo Life



By Nam Hyun-woo



Kyobo Life Insurance said Tuesday Thomas Holzheu and Ginger Turner of Swiss Re received the 2017 Shin Research Excellence Awards.

Holzheu, chief economist, and Turner, strategy development manager, received the much-coveted prize for their paper titled "The Natural Catastrophe Protection Gap." The Geneva Association and International Insurance Society (IIS) reviewed the paper.

The research was presented during the IIS Global Insurance Forum in London taking place from July 17 to July 20. It will also be published in The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance.

The research underscored that societal resilience and loss mitigation on climate risks requires the involvement and cooperation of multiple actors. Thus, the researchers advanced the importance of cooperation among governments, the insurance sector, corporations and individuals.

"The steadily widening protection gap is in an area where the insurance industry is poised to have significant impact," IIS President and CEO Michael Morrissey said. "There is considerable momentum and enormous potential to enhance communities' resilience against climate risks, thereby protecting lives and livelihoods. The research is a critical underpinning of this effort."

The award, named after Kyobo Life Insurance Company founder Shin Yong-ho, was established by IIS in 1997 to commemorate Shin, who was inducted into the Insurance Hall of Fame in 1996 for creating the world's first education insurance policy.

It is aimed at promoting practical and applied research in insurance and risk management to directly influence business operations.

This is the only award granted to international insurance scholars under the name of a Korean. Some 60 insurance scholars have won this award over the past 20 years.

Kyobo Life has been supporting insurance scholars through various academic awards in and outside of Korea.

In addition to the Shin Research Excellence Awards, the Seoul-based insurer established the APRIA-Kyobo Life Contribution Award for Asian insurance scholars in 2011 and the Daesan Insurance Grand Award in 2006 for domestic insurance scholars.

Kyobo Life Chairman and CEO Shin Chang-jae attended the IIS Global Insurance Forum and presented the award.
/ Korea Times file



By Chyung Eun-ju



Austria's Salzburg, widely known as the birthplace of legendary 18th-century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, will publish a travel guidebook in Korean. The book, "Salzburg and its getaways," will be distributed to travel agencies in South Korea.

The book is an updated version of the existing one, with the latest information about the city and major tourist attractions such as Ski Amade, Kitzsteinhorn and Zell am See.
North Korea does not appear to have the technology to strike the United States with accuracy, the vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday, referring to the North's recent launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile.



Air Force Gen. Paul Selva told a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee that despite recent developments in the North's ICBM capability, the July 4 test-firing did not demonstrate an ability to guide a missile to the U.S.



"I ... am not sanguine that the test on the 4th of July demonstrates that they have the capacity to strike the United States with any degree of accuracy or reasonable confidence of success," he said.



On the missile's range, Selva acknowledged it could reach the U.S. and that improvements to the technology will have to be watched carefully.



The North claimed success in its first ICBM launch, saying the Hwasong-14 reached an apogee of 2,802 kilometers while traveling 933 km for 39 minutes.



"I'm reasonably confident in the ability of our intelligence community to monitor the testing, but not the deployment of these missile systems," Selva said. "(North Korean leader) Kim Jong-un and his forces are very good at camouflage, concealment and deception."



The general assured lawmakers the U.S. has a series of programs demonstrating the ability of the military and civilian intelligence community to monitor the North's activities. He did not elaborate, citing the sensitivity of the issue. (Yonhap)




By Park Si-soo



South Korea has lifted the entry ban imposed on Korean-American Christine Ahn, 44, who organized a controversial march of 30 female peace activists spanning the two Koreas in 2015.

It came a day after The New York Times reported that South Korea had denied her entry. She learned that she was "persona non grata" after Asiana Airlines stopped her from boarding a flight at San Francisco Airport on Thursday (local time).












By Yi Whan-woo





Kim Moon-hwan

Korean Ambassador to Ethiopia Kim Moon-hwan is suspected of sexually abusing a female embassy staffer, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Wednesday.

It said Kim is also accused of sexually harassing several volunteers at Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), an aid organization under the ministry's wing.

The ministry will send a team of internal inspectors to Ethiopia, Thursday, after investigating the cases on its own.

The revelation comes after a series of sexual offenses committed by diplomats over the past few years and a call for Kang Kyung-wha, the country's first female foreign minister, to better protect the increased number of female officers.

The ministry said the victim testified against Kim during an internal inspection last week in Seoul of her superior who she said raped her after having a dinner and wine with her in Ethiopia, July 8.

"The victim testified that Kim sexually assaulted her, which she found very offensive, in addition to her statements about the case involving her superior," a ministry official said.

The ministry questioned Kim, who was on leave in Seoul last week, but allowed him to return to Ethiopia as he denied all allegations against him.

The ministry has been looking into the case involving KOICA volunteers after receiving tip offs that Kim sexually harassed them while drinking together.

Kim denied such allegations as well.
By Chyung Eun-ju

A foreign woman and two Korean brokers have been indicted for violating the nation's anti-prostitution law.

The woman, whose nationality is unknown, was charged with prostitution, while the two Koreans were accused of arranging "events" with local customers. The trio was said to have run the illegal business in Samcheok, Gangwon Province.

The woman, who entered the country on a tourist visa, was paid 150,000 to 170,000 won ($133-151) per "event," according to police.

Although prostitution is illegal in Korea, over 1 million women are believed to work in the industry, according to the Korean Feminist Association.
By Lee Han-soo



The Supreme Court on Tuesday acquitted a Sri Lankan man, 51, who was identified as the culprit in an aggravated rape that happened 19 years ago.



The man stood trial after the prosecution re-opened its investigation of the case based on new evidence. But the man was freed because the crime exceeded the statute of limitations and because of the prosecution's lack of evidence to support the new allegations.



The case was based on an incident in Daegu on Oct. 17, 1998, when a college student, surnamed Jung, died after being hit by a 25-ton dump truck.



Police put it down to a simple traffic accident.



But the family insisted that police continue their investigation. This led to finding the culprit's DNA in Jung's underwear.



Based on this, the investigation proceeded, but the man was not found and the DNA samples were sent to the National Forensic Service.



The case was reopened when the man was arrested for sexually assaulting another woman in 2011.



His DNA matched the DNA found in Jung's underwear 13 years earlier.



The prosecution indicted him on an aggravated rape charge and a robbery charge -- which has a statute of limitations of 15 years -- claiming the man stole Jung's books and money after he raped and killed her.



The court acknowledged the rape charge, but acquitted the man as the case had passed the statute of limitations and the prosecution failed to provide sufficient evidence.



The statute of limitations for rape is five years, while it is 10 years for aggravated rape.



"There is no statute of limitation for this case until the truth is revealed on how my daughter died," Jung's father told the JoongAng Ilbo, a Korean news outlet. "I believe that someday the truth will be revealed if the laws are truly implemented in Korea."



The man is set to be deported after being sentenced to 18 months' jail, suspended for three-years, for a separate sexual assault case and driving without a license from 2008 to 2009.



The Supreme Court's decision has reignited the public outcry to abolish the statute of limitations and to bring criminals to justice no matter how much time has passed.




South Korea plans to establish a national memorial day to remember the country's "comfort women," victims of sex crimes committed by Japan during the second World War, according to a state policy blueprint announced Wednesday.



The government said it has approved a plan by the State Affairs Planning Advisory Committee to designate an official remembrance day for the country's hundreds of thousands of women forced to work in front-line brothels for Japanese soldiers during the war.



It is expected to fall on Aug. 14, the anniversary of when Kim Hak-sun, a former comfort women, first publicly testified in 1991 about Japan operating an organized military brothel program during World War II. International Memorial Day for Comfort Women, introduced in 2013, also falls on Aug. 14, the eve of South Korea's Independence Day. Korea was under Japanese colonial rule from 1910-45.



The announcement is in line with President Moon Jae-in's pledge to review an agreement signed in December 2015 to end the feud over the comfort women issue, a long-standing point of contention between the two countries.



Under the deal calling for a "final and irreversible" end to the conflict, Japan agreed to provide 1 billion yen ($8.84 million) to financially support the victims. The agreement forged under then-President Park Geun-hye was met with widespread public criticism, with many calling into question its legality and the sincerity of Japan's apology.













In May, South Korean President Moon Jae-in told Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in a telephone conversation that most South Korean people could not "emotionally" accept the deal, strongly hinting at a possible renegotiation.



The South Korean government also plans to launch an institute dedicated to research on Japan's wartime sex crimes by 2019 and build a museum to shed light on the atrocities by 2020. The Ministry of Gender and Equality will spearhead the projects. (Yonhap)
By Ko Dong-hwan





Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha

Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha says the "final and irreversible" agreement between South Korea and Japan over Korean sex slaves for the Japanese military during World War II needs a second look.

She said she will set up a task force to investigate how the deal ended up with such controversial terms, according to her interview with the JoongAng Ilbo Wednesday. The agreement, known as "the comfort women accord," was inked in December 2015 by her predecessor Yun Byung-se and Japan's Fumio Kishida under the Park Geun-hye administration.

Kang reportedly thought it was "a weird kind" of agreement when it was signed. After becoming the minister, she came across information about the deal and decided it needs to be revisited.












Bareun Party Chairwoman Rep. Lee Hye-hoon, center, along with fellow lawmakers and party members, salute the national flag at the National Assembly, Wednesday, during a launch ceremony for the party's special committee on improving people's livelihoods. / Yonhap



By Kim Hyo-jin

The minor conservative opposition Bareun Party launched a massive door-to-door drive in Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province, Wednesday, to woo the conservative heartlands away from the bigger conservative Liberty Korea Party (LKP).



Party members described the campaign as a "do-or-die" battle with the LKP, which they claim is controlled by "far-rightists."



The Bareun Party's senior lawmakers and the party's former presidential candidate Yoo Seong-min visited the region Wednesday and started meeting citizens. They will have face-to-face meetings with the voters for two days.



It was the first regional tour of the party leaders since the party launched an official campaign to expand its support base, dubbed "Looking for the Real Owners of Bareun Party."



The southeastern region, the traditional conservative home ground, is the main target for the breakaway conservative party to gain momentum for local elections next year.



It has the priority task to disperse voters' doubts on the nascent party and clean up an image of "betrayers" against disgraced ex-President Park Geun-hye.



Party Chairwoman Lee Hye-hoon and other party leaders visited the Korean Senior Citizens Association and the Veterans hall and also canvassed in downtown Daegu, handing out leaflets and encouraging citizens to apply for party membership.



Lee, who won the leadership in late June, has stressed that they need close contact with Daegu and Gyeongsang citizens to shift their negative perspective on the party.



"Off-line, one-to-one meetings are key to winning them over. I will visit where people gather casually, such as community centers, hairdressers, and real estate agents, with fellow lawmakers and talk them into standing by our side," she told The Korea Times.



The young conservative party has recently stepped up clarifying its identity in a bid to solicit old LKP supporters' backing.



Joo Ho-young, the party's floor leader, openly criticized the Korea Post, the state postal service, for having cancelled a plan to issue stamps commemorating President Park Chung-hee, the assassinated father of the ousted Park.



"Though his performances have been controversial, the people generally agree that he contributed to the country's industrialization. It is worth issuing stamps to commemorate the birth of the past leader," he said.



Public surveys on citizens of Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province reflect that they are still on the fence between the main opposition LKP and its breakaway, the Bareun Party.



In Korea Gallup polls for the past four weeks, support rates for the LKP went from 24 percent to 10 percent, 21 percent, and 17 percent. The Bareun Party's shifted from 8 percent to 18 percent, 17 percent, and remained at 17 percent in the latest poll.



A lawmaker whose constituency is in the Gyeongsang region said, "It seems people there feel a bit lost between the two parties: the LKP they backed in the May presidential election but failed, and the Bareun Party that they find bothersome because of the fact they betrayed the former leader."
Planning committee presents 100 tasks for construction of new Korea

By Kim Rahn





The Moon Jae-in administration unveiled its policy roadmap for his five-year presidency Wednesday.

With a state management philosophy of "The People's country, just the Republic of Korea," the new government's policies will be carried out based on the principles of reflecting citizens' opinions in state affairs, and providing a just and fair economic and social system, according to the presidential advisory committee.

The State Affairs Planning Advisory Committee, the de facto transition team for the Moon administration which was inaugurated without a transition period, presented 100 tasks under five main policy goals, each dedicated to political reform, a fair economic system, expanded welfare, balanced regional development and peace on the Korean Peninsula.

Moon said the new government will succeed the spirit of the candlelit protests that removed former President Park Geun-hye from power over a massive corruption scandal.

"We'll make a people's country where citizens are treated as owners, and make a just Republic of Korea where all privileges, unfairness, discrimination and disparity are eradicated," the President said at the committee's presentation of the agenda.

He said changes have already begun  presidential orders to abolish state-authored history textbooks and reduce fine dust, the restarting of trans-government anti-corruption meetings, a minimum wage hike toward 10,000 won ($8.91) per hour by 2020, the operating of a job creation committee and measures to improve inter-Korean relations.

"The roadmap announced today will be a blueprint and compass toward a new Korea," Moon said. "Each ministry and agency in charge will develop and confirm the agenda and carry out its tasks. At the end of every year, I'll check on how they are proceeding and report this to the public."
By Kim Rahn

The Moon Jae-in government will seek an agreement with North Korea by 2020 for its denuclearization and peace on the Korean Peninsula through dialogue and an updated relationship with Pyongyang, according to its policy roadmap announced Wednesday.

Achieving joint prosperity by resolving the nuclear programs issue and increasing inter-Korean exchanges will be a goal for the administration's five-year term, it said.

The presidential advisory committee, a de facto transition team, said the government will seek to restart talks with the North with the aim of reaching an agreement by 2020 for complete nuclear disarmament.

"The government will pursue restoring inter-Korean communication lines and holding talks regularly. If the circumstances are right, it will also seek to open meetings of high-ranking officials and form an inter-Korean agreement based on declarations reached under previous liberal governments," said Lee Su-hoon, who is in charge of foreign affairs and security at the committee.

Such an agreement, if reached, will require the National Assembly's ratification and support from United Nations members, he added.

The plan is in line with Moon's earlier speech in Berlin, in which the President presented a set of peace overtures, including a peace treaty with Pyongyang, despite the latter's recent test-firing of a long-range ballistic missile.

For the goal, the government will use all possible options, both sanctions and engagement, and pursue negotiations for a peace treaty if the denuclearization process is set in motion.

"If the conditions are right, we will discuss the re-opening of the Gaeseong Industrial Complex and the resumption of tours to Mount Geumgang, as well as economic cooperation over natural resources, logistics and tourism," Lee said.












President Moon Jae-in talks about his plan for the next five years at Cheong Wa Dae in central Seoul, Wednesday. / Yonhap



By Jung Min-ho

President Moon Jae-in promised to restore justice and fight corruption, saying "change has already begun."

Setting up a comprehensive anti-corruption body and reforming the prosecution system are among the highlights in the government's five-year plan, which was revealed Wednesday.

"I will eradicate corruption and unfairness to make the nation work for everyone," he said.

According to the plan, which has 100 specific objectives, Cheong Wa Dae will cooperate with the Ministry of Justice to create an independent, comprehensive anti-corruption body next year.

The presidential office will also push ahead with making stronger laws on corruption of government officials.

Moon hopes to raise Korea's ranking on the Corruption Perceptions Index into the world's top 20 from 52nd in 2016 in the next five years.

As part of the effort, Moon reckons a sweeping reform of the prosecution is necessary. He promised mainly two things _ removing most of its investigative powers and establishing an independent body empowered to investigate and indict all top-ranking government officials. The plan calls for the former to be accomplished by the end of this year and the latter by next year.

Moon will also set up a human rights evaluation system to prevent police from abusing their extended investigative powers.












President Moon Jae-in talks with the leaders of four political parties over tea ahead of their luncheon meeting at Cheong Wa Dae, Wednesday. From left are People's Party interim chief Rep. Park Joo-sun, ruling Democratic Party of Korea Chairwoman Rep. Choo Mi-ae, Moon, Bareun Party Chairwoman Rep. Lee Hye-hoon and Justice Party Chairwoman Rep. Lee Jeong-mi. Hong Joon-pyo, leader of the main opposition Liberty Korea Party, boycotted the meeting. / Korea Times photo by Koh Young-kwon



By Jun Ji-hye

President Moon Jae-in vowed, Wednesday, to consult with the National Assembly in handling possible revisions of the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA).

The President made the comment during a five-way luncheon meeting with leaders of ruling and opposition political parties at the Cheong Wa Dae compound.

The participants were ruling Democratic Party of Korea Chairwoman Rep. Choo Mi-ae, People's Party interim chief Rep. Park Joo-sun, Bareun Party Chairwoman Rep. Lee Hye-hoon and Justice Party Chairwoman Rep. Lee Jeong-mi.

Last week, Washington officially requested Seoul start the "process of negotiating to remove barriers to U.S. trade and consider needed amendments" to the KORUS FTA in a letter sent by U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Lighthizer to Seoul's Trade Minister Joo Hyung-hwan.

Moon stressed that Washington's request should be understood as "revision or modification," not a "renegotiation" of the agreement, according to Rep. Park.

Moon told the party leaders President Trump is increasingly using the word "renegotiation" of the KORUS FTA for rather complicated reasons having to do with domestic politics, Rep. Park said.

Presidential spokesman Park Soo-hyun quoted Moon as saying, "I discussed FTA issues several times at the Seoul-Washington summit during which time we said it would not be a renegotiation."

Trump earlier called the KORUS FTA an "unacceptable" and "horrible" deal in which Washington has sustained enormous losses.

Moon told party leaders he made it clear during the summit with Trump that the deal is well balanced for both countries as the U.S. has had a gain in the services sector while Korea gained in manufacturing industries, according to the spokesman.

"I will fully consult with the National Assembly," Moon said. "I can confidently say you don't have to be worried about it too much."

Regarding the government's official offers made on Tuesday for dialogue with North Korea as a follow-up measure to the peace overture he proposed in his recent speech in Berlin, Moon told the party leaders he notified the U.S. in advance.

"Japan also understood it," Moon said, adding he explained the need to distinguish talks for denuclearization and humanitarian issues when he met with heads of state during his recent overseas tours including the G20 summit.

"South Korean will lead inter-Korean dialogue on humanitarian issues, and this will also help denuclearize the Korean Peninsula," Moon said.

The meeting between the President and four party leaders lasted about two hours.

It marked first time for Moon to meet with them since his May 10 inauguration.

He also asked the opposition parties to cooperate in passing bills on government reorganization and an 11.2 trillion won ($9.8 billion) supplementary budget aimed largely at creating public service jobs.

Meanwhile, Hong Joon-pyo, chairman of the main conservative opposition Liberty Korea Party, boycotted the meeting.

Instead, he visited Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, to support restoration work following flood damage. The city was among the hardest hit, seeing 290 millimeters of rainfall over the weekend. Two people died in landslides.

Hong, who was the runner-up candidate in the May 9 presidential election, told reporters in Cheongju he refused to attend the meeting because he did not like the Moon government and the ruling party's attitude on the U.S. government's actions to amend the KORUS FTA.

"If I begin to talk about the free trade agreement with Moon, I will have no choice but to get angry," Hong said to them.

Hong said when he led the National Assembly endorsement of the KORUS FTA in 2011 as chairman of the then-ruling party, Moon and the DPK, at the time the main opposition party, strongly opposed its passage, even calling Hong a "traitor to the country."

"The DPK at the time claimed it would push for renegotiations with the United States if it took power. But it now faces calls from the U.S. to renegotiate the agreement."

LKP insiders noted Hong wants the Moon government and the ruling party to apologize for their previous criticism of him, as well as their current attitude toward the renegotiations.
Members of environmental civic groups hold a press conference at the National Assembly on Yeouido, Seoul, demanding the government halt moves to build coal-fired power plants, Wednesday. /Yonhap



Joint research with NASA finds domestic industries emit more pollutants

By Kim Se-jeong

Fifty-two percent of fine dust posing a growing health threat to Koreans is generated within the country, not from abroad, according to the preliminary results of joint research by the Korean government and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced Tuesday.

Of the remaining 48 percent, 34 percent came from China, 9 percent from North Korea and 5 percent from other places, said the report.

Fine dust, or Particulate Matter 2.5, is so small that it can directly enter lung tissue.

There has been debate on where the fine dust comes from. The results are expected to silence those who blamed China the most for Korea's bad air quality. Some people even filed a compensation suit against the Chinese government earlier this year.

The joint research was conducted between May 2 and June 12 last year. A special jet from NASA equipped with specialized monitoring equipments flew over the Korean peninsula collecting data on pollutant levels; in addition ground-level monitoring, satellite observations and computer modeling were used to get a fuller picture.

"Local emissions play a significant role and are often sufficient to create air quality violations," according to the report.

But it said, "transboundary pollution must be considered as an exacerbating factor."

Vehicles, coal-fired power plants and factories on the West Coast are blamed as major sources of pollutants.

The result also identified two major local sources of pollutants and warned nearby residents of the public health danger.

One is the Taean coal-fired power plant on the coast in South Chungcheong Province which is a major source of nitrogen compounds and sulfur dioxide which have chain chemical reactions in the air generating more fine dust and ozone.

Another is the Daesan Petrochemical Complex located in Seosan, South Chungcheong Province, a major source of benzene and 1,3-butadiene, both cancer-causing chemicals.

"The abundance of toxic compounds near chemical facilities raises an important concern for their potential health impact on workers and local residents."

The team also said Korea's ozone level was high for a "long period of time" during the one month period, exceeding the Korean air pollution standard. It didn't specify for how many days exactly.

The results stressed that it was critical to curb emissions from industries on the West Coast because the secondary air pollutants from chain reactions are abundant.

Prof. Kim Dong-sool of the Environmental Science and Engineering Department at Kyung Hee University hailed the study as a good example of conducting quality preliminary testing. "The joint research enabled the Korean authorities to identify fine aerosol, secondary air pollutants including ozone and their generation mechanism."

However, he added: "I worry that the study results will dictate the government's future air pollution policies. That shouldn't happen because it was a one-time project done over one month. Korea needs its own monitoring infrastructure that will make long-term and comprehensive monitoring and analysis possible. And only with that, can reasonable policies be formulated."



Greenpeace Korea also gave credits to Tuesday's result. "We find it meaningful in that the report stressed the importance of managing pollutant sources in the West Coast."
By Richard Ruffin





"Writing about writer's block is better than not writing at all." _ Charles Bukowski

We have all looked at a blank piece of paper, or a blank computer screen, on various occasions. Some of us all the time, others, less frequently. This is known as writer's block. Or, more figuratively, blank page syndrome.

Victor Hugo took 17 years to give the world "Les Miserables." But he finally succeeded, delivering one of the longest novels ever written. The musical is one of the longest-running pieces to ever grace the stage.

Yet Hugo suffered from writer"s block, and he would write naked in order to overcome blank page syndrome. He would roll up his clothes, give them to a servant, and sit unclothed in his study, until his muse started talking to him.

Many of us suffer very severe bouts of writer's block (not that we also write naked). And we continually make excuses for our shortcomings: The assignment is too difficult. I will do it after I check my email, surf Facebook, do the dishes, make dinner, pay the bills, do the laundry. I have been working hard and I need a break. I currently am incapable of brainstorming, etc, etc. But anxiety reigns supreme. What if I fail? What if my work is rejected? What will I do then? Such are the questions that we put forth.

But the many answers we can come up with do not involve writing. They involve everything BUT writing.

Some creative people who have suffered from this most uncreative of afflictions are Charles Schultz, Adele, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joseph Mitchell. The latter was a writer and New Yorker, and was known for not contributing a single article of significance to the New Yorker magazine, 30 years prior to his death. He wrote about writer's block in one of his novellas. He also wrote a story about a writer who suffers from writer's block.

Herman Melville, author of "Moby Dick," also knew this malady well, quitting writing altogether a few years after his classic was published.

Blank page syndrome was even written about by British novelist George Orwell, author of the book about a dystopian future, "1984." In it, his protagonist struggles with a lengthy poem. In the end the poem wins.

So, a lot has been written about this affliction, this scourge, calamity, kiss of death, misfortune, sorrow, torment, woe, tribulation, trial, vexation, difficulty, ill fortune, misfortune, anguish, dolor...need I say more?

So much has been written about this that all those blank pieces of paper, were they made into books, would be no match for the advice on how to avoid writer's block.

What has it cost us in hard revenue, in U.S. dollars, in lost paychecks? We will leave it to some company that is obsessed with figures to find out.

In the meantime we can all rest assured that bouts of barrenness, and uncreativity affect us all.





Richard Ruffin writes from Curitiba, Brazil. Write to rick.ruffin@gmail.com.
By Raekyong Lee





It is worrisome that President Moon Jae-in and his advisers have relegated the issue of a U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile interceptor, to a procedural violation, ordering an environmental impact at the venue in Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province, where it is being deployed.

The THAAD issue has become a symbolic as well as substantive issue. First, it is about Korea being made part of the U.S. missile defense (MD) against Chinese and Russian long-range missiles aimed at it. Second, it is about Korea being integrated into the U.S.-Japan alliance and made subordinate to it.

For years, the Korean government has been under U.S. pressure to adopt its MD program. But it has avoided committing to it for fear that Korea's inclusion would have a huge impact on both security and politics in Northeast Asia.

Unfortunately, the previous government led by Park Geun-hye deviated from this, suddenly announcing its decision to allow the deployment of a THAAD battery last July. It claimed that THAAD is not part of the MD program, obviously accepting U.S. assurances without close examination.

Some critics like Yonsei University professor. Choi Jong-geon dismissed this as absurd, comparing the claim with one that the Galaxy S8 mobile phone is not internet-connected.

Recently, Japan has collaborated with the U.S. in developing the most advanced anti-ballastic missile (ABM) system as a core part of the MD program. Japan is eager to conduct military exercise abroad with the U.S. or independently. Such aggressive moves are barred under its current pacifist Constitution.

Definitely, it would enhance tension and the danger of an all-out war in the region.

Koreans rightly fear Japanese rearmament will lead it to attack neighboring countries as it did in the lead-up to World War II.

That is why China opposes THAAD deployment, raising an issue over the X-band radar, key component of the system, which has the capability to spy on its military bases and paralyze Chinese nuclear weapons against U.S. strikes.

China has boycotted Korean products and prevented Chinese tour groups from traveling to Korea to press it to cancel the THAAD deployment.

In this regard, the THAAD issue is about Korea's sovereignty and security. Whether to deploy it or not should be conducted in a transparent manner.

Without due process, the previous government allowed the THAAD battery to arrive in Korea in an unannounced midnight operation during a joint exercise in March. The original schedule was for December 2017. The location for its deployment in Seongju was selected without a proper environmental survey.

I believe that the United States has acted with its own scenario of making the THAAD deployment an irreversible fact that can't be undone by the new government. The THAAD system would put Korea under firmer U.S. control, leading to its integration into the U.S.-Japan alliance.

The Moon administration should act on this realization, making its opposition to THAAD deployment clear.

It also should resume and finish investigations into how and why the deployment was accelerated even after the new government took office. There are rumors about corruption as well. There should be no questions left over the procedures and if anybody did anything wrong, they should be held accountable. Then, the government should make clear its commitment to the indigenous Korea Air Missile Defense system (KAMD).

Also, the current Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) governing U.S. military affairs, among other things, should be updated. It is 50 years out of date. Plus, the government needs to take back wartime operational control as soon as possible.

The Korea-U.S.-Japan axis envisioned by the U.S. and Japan is against history and unrealistic. Instead, a multilateral defense format including China and Australia should be sought instead.

Moon should have courage to say no to the THAAD to rejuvenate the ROK-U.S. relationship.





Raekyong Lee is president of The Tomorrow, a leading progressive think tank in Seoul. He was deeply involved in Korea's democracy movement.
President Moon Jae-in has ordered the restoration of a trans-government consultative body as an anti-corruption control tower. The so-called Council of State Agencies Against Corruption was formed in 2004 under the liberal Roh Moo-hyun administration, but it was abolished under the ensuing Lee Myung-bak government. Moon will chair the council comprised of chiefs of the National Intelligence Service, the prosecution, the Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) and other key government organs.



By reinstating the body, the President intends to take the reins of anti-corruption and reform. No one can question the government's strong push to uproot corruption that undermines our national competitiveness. Ramping up an anti-corruption campaign is a process our society should go through to boost transparency.



The Moon administration has already set in motion its drive to eradicate deep-rooted evils. The prosecution has been carrying out full-scale inspections into irregularities in the defense industry, and the spy agency has launched an audit to find if its agents were involved in domestic politics. The BAI laid bare wrongdoings in the previous governments' issuance of licenses for duty free shops.



Most people seem to support the new government's anti-corruption drive. But there are growing grievances about political retaliation as the campaign sets its sights on the previous conservative governments. The Moon administration is also accused of trying to tame the opposition under the pretext of liquidating graft.



These suspicions are not without reason. Most problematic is that powerful state organs are taking part in the council, reneging on their duties to maintain political neutrality. That Moon will chair the council meeting in person reminds the public of a similar body that existed during the nation's dictatorial period.



Ordering the revival of the council Monday, the liberal President said corruption became more rampant here during the conservative administrations. But the truth is the presence of the council has had little to do with our corruption level, as measured by the corruption perception index announced by Transparency International every year.



The new government may feel tempted to crack down on individual corruption cases, but this can be wrong-headed. Rather, it is necessary to paint a big picture _ retooling anti-corruption policies and institutions.




By Kyung Moon Hwang





A deep sadness spread around the world last week with the death of Liu Xiaobo, the longtime Chinese dissident who had been incarcerated since 2008, when he helped draft an online statement calling for basic democratic reforms. He was widely admired for his courage in the face of oppression and in 2009 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which he was not allowed to accept in person.

In fact the Chinese authorities immediately condemned the Norwegian government, as if it could somehow revoke a decision made by the Nobel committee, and pressured foreign governments not to publicly support Liu as he rotted away in jail. Even after he was given a medical parole a month ago for terminal cancer, very few officials in established democracies dared call for a complete release for his final days, and likewise world leaders have stayed silent after his death.

Such circumstances invite comparisons to the plight of a Korean intellectual, the noted composer Yun Isang, from a half-century ago. In the summer of 1967, Yun, along with the poet Cheon Sang-byeong, painter Yi Eungno, and scores of other innocent people, were jailed, tortured, and forced into confessions of communist subversion in what became known as the East Berlin Case.

Yun had been one of several Korean students in western Europe and West Germany at the time who took advantage of the relative freedom of movement and association by interacting with North Koreans stationed in East Berlin. The North Koreans of course had an interest in using these occasions to spread propaganda, and Yun even accepted an invitation to visit North Korea in 1963. He saw this as an opportunity to see some of the celebrated Goguryeo wall paintings that could inspire his music, a blend of Korean and Western conventions.

The East Berlin Case was triggered in May 1967 when another such visitor, Im Seokjin, decided to turn himself in directly to the South Korean president, Park Chung-Hee (who had just been re-elected), and to reveal details of the relationships centered in the North Korean embassy in East Berlin.

The sensationalistic incident that exploded two months later showed well South Korea's ongoing descent into authoritarian rule. That dictatorship, however, would not arrive in full form until the 1970s, and this might explain why Yun did not suffer the same fate as Liu. Most important, perhaps, was the role of international actors, whose influence appears to have been far greater with the South Korean government at the time than with today's Chinese government.

This was because, incredibly, Park's security forces had reached into sovereign foreign countries, notably France and West Germany, to nab dozens of expatriate Koreans through deception, coercion, or outright kidnapping (the current Chinese government has done something similar). They were among approximately two hundred people rounded up in July 1967 for even the slightest connection to the situation in Germany.

Even with the mechanisms of an autocratic state working against them, however, the lack of evidence led to the early dismissal of charges against most defendants, although several, including Yun, were convicted and given harsh sentences. But the violation of state sovereignty in the South Korean government's kidnappings, as well as the violation of core principles of justice, brought forth a public outcry and pressure from the West German government, civic organizations in Europe, and renowned artists around the world.

It is difficult to determine which of those interventions played a greater role in convincing Park to change his mind, but eventually every single one of the arrested Koreans was released, including Yun Isang, who in 1969 was granted a "pardon" but forced to leave the country.

South Korean history is scarred with many such episodes from the dictatorship era, and some, including the East Berlin Case, were formally investigated after democratization. According to the government's exhaustive 2006 report, the entire affair, while sparked by Im's "confession," was concocted by the notorious Korean Central Intelligence Agency in the frenzy of anti-communism. None of the Koreans arrested was actually guilty of spying, subversion, or even North Korean sympathies. Those who had taken trips to North Korea harbored no political motivation beyond curiosity and nationalist idealism.

Documents also showed that the Park regime pursued its case very publicly in order to intimidate into silence the growing protests, led by students, against the irregularities of the parliamentary election of June 1967. The apparent victories that Park's party won in this election provided enough seats to pass a referendum, two years later, to amend the constitution to allow Park to run for a third consecutive presidential term.

All of this, in short, was part of a process toward implanting firmer dictatorial rule. In this sense, despite the differences with the Liu Xiaobo case, the larger commonalities are just as important.

Because he refused to accept the original verdict that had branded him a spy, Yun Isang, who was born a century ago on the south-central coast, never stepped foot again in South Korea before his death in 1995. He was buried in Berlin, and earlier this month South Korea's current first lady, a former music student, visited his grave to offer her respects, but no official expression of remorse.

We will have to wait for this formal apology, just as we will have to see whether China will ever undergo the fundamental changes for which Liu Xiaobo had fought and died.
You Seok-hwan, founder and ceo of Rokit, poses in front of the 3D bio-printer Invivo at his office in Gasan Digital Complex in western Seoul, Tuesday. / Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk



By Kim Ji-soo



Grit and perseverance are what Rokit founder and CEO You Seok-hwan looks for when recruiting for his commercial 3D printer and 3D bio-printer company.

He emphasizes "bio-printer" in his company's description because while Rokit started out making commercial 3D printers and continues to do so through its 3DISON line of products, it has shifted its focus toward the production and application of its 3D bio-printer line, called Invivo. While 3D bio-printing is a highly watched field, it is still years away from effectively producing artificial human organs.

"Because 3D printing is about creating new added value through customization, not mass production. It is about creating high value through design and customization. And because every human body is different, there could not be a better market than the human body," You said in an interview at his office in Gasan Digital Complex in southwestern Seoul.

The shift to bio-printers seems to be a smart move for Rokit, which was founded in 2012 to produce commercial 3D printers, including one called Chocosketch that uses chocolate for ink.

"And with that 3D printer, people can make something out of chocolate and eat it later," he said.

The company's other commercial products are used in many fields  manufacturing, architecture, design, medicine, fashion and bioengineering. But the company has gained attention once again with the 3D bio printer.

"Business, I think, is about identifying a megatrend and then creating the business in tandem with the trend," You said.

You learned that valuable lesson after decades working at Daewoo Motors, then at U.S. security solutions company Tyco and finally at Korean biopharmaceutical R&D company Celltrion Healthcare.

Taking all those experiences, he bet on the bioindustry as a growth engine for Korea for the next two or three decades. In his view, the longer lifespan and accompanying additional health costs mean 3D bio-printing, which can be tailored to each patient's needs, would be a megatrend.

At about $50,000 per unit, Invivo is relatively cheaper than products already out there. The 3D printer is a compilation of nearly 100 or more biological technologies, You said. Invivo has an extrusion system to print out such filament-type bio materials as PLA and a dispenser method able to print bio-ink such as collagen and gelatin. Also, Invivo has a hot-melting dispenser with a pneumatic system that allows it to handle any types of material with high-temperature and combine a wide range of materials.

What Invivo owners can do is use these materials to produce cell structures in the form of organic tissue, to make it possible to create customized and transplantable tissue cells collected from a specific patient. Currently, the company mainly sells the printers and the biomaterials. It also sells kidney, pancreas and cardiac tissues for testing at laboratories.

"It's mainly a laboratory market in Korea for now," he said. But he is betting on that to change.

"In five years or so, I expect to see our company not only as a provider of 3D bio-printing hardware and software, but also of artificial organs."

He estimates Korea accounts for only 1.5 percent of the world's 3D printing market. But he expects Korea will account for a larger share. In Korea, Rokit now accounts for 90 percent of the market.

It may well be a long way off, but You said in the high-tech business, one should not be deterred by naysayers or skeptics.

"For 3D bio-printers, you need to understand biology and not only focus on precision," he said.

Since its founding, Rokit has grown from only four employees to 50.

"In the initial days, I spent about 1.2 million won on Starbucks coffee a month, as there wasn't much to do," You joked.

But things soon picked up. In 2016, the company registered 5 billion won in sales; sales for this year are expected to reach 15 billion won.

It helped that Rokit received $3 million in Korean government support to produce artificial skin for implants, for which the company collaborated with the Korean Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, Hanyang University and Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials.

It is interesting to note that You's disappointment in his corporate life and the cutthroat competition led him to search for a sustainable, high-potential industry.

His experience, especially at Celltrion Healthcare, made him realize the potential of biomedicine.

"People are living longer while spending more on health care, especially toward the latter 30 years of their lives, if we were to say people who used to live until 60 can now can live up to 90," he said.

The various hardships he experienced at his previous jobs taught him how to be calm and optimistic, traits that have helped him succeed with Rokit. He has written about those experiences in a book titled "Break the Taboos."

"The changes in the next 10 years might be greater than in the past 1,000 years or so," You said.
By Lee Han-soo

A Japanese home-stay operator who allegedly sexually assaulted a Korean guest on Monday is an Airbnb host, adding to controversy surrounding some of the home-sharing application's members.

Incidents in the past year have heightened concerns.

In July 2016, a Korean woman traveling Switzerland found a camera hidden in the living room of her accommodation.

In May, a Korean woman discovered a hidden camera in the bathroom of her Airbnb house in Japan.

On June 28, a Korean couple found a camera disguised as a fire detector in their Airbnb house in Japan.

There has been an outcry to strengthen controls but Airbnb is in a bind because the only measure it can take is to expel hosts that have committed sexual offenses.

The controversy has led people to cancel trips or avoid using Airbnb.

"I initially planned my trip through Airbnb," Hwang Min-su, 27, who is going to Taiwan in August, told The Korea Times. "However, the recent news has led me to believe that the application is not safe."

Hwang said she has cancelled her Airbnb reservations and booked a hotel instead.

"It may be more expensive, but I can sleep comfortably knowing that it is safe."

Meanwhile, Airbnb officials said they do not tolerate sexual crimes.

"The host who is involved in a crime will be expelled from the application for the safety of our guests," an Airbnb official told the Chosun Ilbo, a Korean news outlet.
Seen above is Samsung Electronics' R&D campus in southern Seoul. The facility drives the electronics giant's design, software and digital media innovation. / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics



By Lee Min-hyung

Samsung Electronics' R&D campus is at the forefront of design innovation for the firm's premium home appliances.

The facility  located in Umyeon-dong, southern Seoul  was established in November 2015, housing more than 5,000 Samsung employees of the research workforce in design, software and digital media and communication.

Samsung calls the 53,000-square-meter R&D center its "design hub," with more than 1,500 in-house designers driving innovation by teaming up with each tech department in such areas as the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI).

The Samsung Design Management Center on the campus is at the center of setting the firm's future design strategies under the goal of establishing a stronger brand identity.

The company created the division in 2001 under direct control of the CEO, and has since secured top-notch design experts in various areas such as user experience, color and engineering.

"Driving changes and innovations from our daily lives is the core mission of all Samsung Electronics designers," said Lee Don-tae, vice president at the center.

The company also set its breeze-free air conditioner and air care lineups as examples of its design innovation.

The breeze-free air conditioner, launched at last year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), was the firm's cash-cow premium air product, taking up 70 percent of the nation's floor standing air conditioner market share, the company explained.

Backed by the explosive market response, Samsung also launched a wall-mounted breeze-free air conditioner this year. The company said the total breeze-free air conditioner products set a 550,000 sales record in the first half of the year.

Samsung attributed its success to its five-year-long R&D efforts, driven by collaborations between its development division and the design center.

The breeze-free air conditioner features metal cooling panels, maximizing cooling effect for a longer period of time. The design innovation can be found in its air currents designed to flow in a three-degree arc, which helps the device deliver cool air to a wider area than the conventional direct linear design.

The Blue Sky air purifier is also another example of combining technology and innovation, Samsung said.

Its sales during the first half of this year exceeded the 2016 total sales by more than 30 percent, according to Samsung.

The device delivers purified air equally in three directions to the top and both sides, which the firm says can cover a wider area in a short period of time.

"The design is not all about external beauty, but an important element to determine functions and conveniences of products," said Song Hyun-joo, vice president at the firm's consumer electronics division.
POSCO Chairman Kwon Oh-joon listens to explanation about PosFrame at the Smart POSCO Forum 2017 at the POSCO Center in Seoul, Wednesday. / Courtesy of POSCO

By Park Jae-hyuk

POSCO has come up with a better way to spread its smart technology throughout all its subsidiaries and clients, demonstrated during the Smart POSCO Forum 2017 at the POSCO Center in Seoul, Wednesday.

"POSCO must keep working hard for the realization of Smart POSCO in the Fourth Industrial Revolution," POSCO Chairman Kwon Oh-joon said.

"The whole manufacturing process will follow the good example of our smart factory. We will apply our smart technology to our finance, personnel and purchasing departments to attain more sophisticated management."

The chairman emphasized that POSCO will share its achievements with its clients, as well as the group's subsidiaries.

In addition to POSCO employees and executives, more than 700 people attended the forum, including experts in artificial intelligence (AI) and those who work for POSCO's clients and subcontractors.

The world's fourth-largest steelmaker was praised for sharing its knowhow with participants at the forum.

Thanks to its ability to predict the transformation of thick plates through big data analysis, POSCO improved the evenness of products. It also produced the best slabs in the industry, by analyzing the fuel quality of its furnaces.

In addition, POSCO E&C's virtual construction allows the builder to prevent errors and risks in construction.

"Since last year, POSCO has run the Smart Solution Council led by its CEO for the realization of Smart POSCO. Using big data and AI, we have reduced costs by 15.7 billion won ($14 million)," said Park Mi-hwa, managing director of POSCO ICT.

"We will develop a new type of smart factory to support the innovations of our small- and medium-sized clients and subcontractors. To foster them and to create jobs, we will also offer them smart platforms, by lightening the weight of PosFrame made by POSCO."

At the forum, Prof. Zhang Byoung-Tak and AI experts offered sophisticated information, as they had a heated debate on manufacturers' strategies for harnessing AI technology.

The forum participants learned POSCO's knowhow and experience the steelmaker's own PosFrame platform that allows users to collect and monitor big data.

POSCO said it has been training 25 AI experts since earlier this year, cooperating with POSTECH. The company has also begun to offer free AI education to marginalized young people.
By Lee Min-hyung





KAI CEO Ha Sung-yong

The prosecution is widening its investigation into Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) President and CEO Ha Sung-yong over his alleged slush fund and the firm's attempt to destroy evidence. Concerns have sprung up over its alleged unfair business practices with subcontractors.

"We have obtained information that the KAI bought an eraser program to delete evidence left on PCs and other electronics devices," said Lee Dong-yeul, a prosecutor from the Seoul Central District Prosecutor's Office in charge of the investigation.

The prosecution noted Wednesday the investigation team also found out the data destruction software has been installed on a number of KAI computers.

The prosecution is looking into whether the KAI handed out the program to its employees, in a move to sidestep the prosecution's intensifying investigation into the company's multiple corruption allegations.

Ha is particularly suspected of embezzling billions of won from the state-run agency by signing unfair contracts with its subcontractors.

The prosecution speculates he used the slush fund to lobby government officials to extend his presidency. Ha began his three-year term in May 2013. The prosecution alleges he was able to extend his term last year by using the slush fund.

On Friday, the prosecution raided KAI offices in Seoul and Sacheon, South Gyeongsang Province, to obtain evidence over the firm's multiple corruption allegations. It is also expanding its investigation into five KAI subcontractors over their alleged involvement in the unfair business partnership.

Prosecutors said they are tracing money flows by securing data from the firm's financial statement.

The KAI is also alleged to have inflated production costs to develop such aerospace defense aircraft as the Surion helicopter and the FA-50 light-weight attack aircraft. The company is particularly suspected of making excessive profits by attracting government investments of 1.3 trillion won ($1.15 billion) for the Surion development.

This is not the first time the KAI has been embroiled in a corruption scandal. In 2015, the Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) requested the prosecution probe embezzlement allegations involving Ha and a group of KAI officials.

At that time, the prosecution kept a low profile, citing lack of evidence. For this reason, some reports have said this is because the prosecution had been under pressure from the former President Park Geun-hye administration.

The prosecution, however, denied the claim, saying it could not launch an in-depth investigation based on the request alone.

Of note is whether the scandal would negatively affect the KAI's businesses such as its efforts to export its T-50 supersonic trainer jets.

KAI developed the T-50 in 2001 with technical assistance from the U.S. aerospace giant Lockheed Martin.

About 2 trillion won was invested in the large-scale national project to develop the homegrown supersonic trainer jet that took eight years to develop. The Korean company has also manufactured aerobatic and combat variants, namely the T-50B, TA-50 and FA-50.

The South Korean Air Force has deployed 144 units of the T-50 family, while 16 T-50s were exported to Indonesia in 2011.

KAI officials were not available for comment.
By Park Jae-hyuk





Orion Group Vice Chairwoman Lee Hwa-kyung, left, and Chairman Dam Chul-gon.

Orion Group Vice Chairwoman Lee Hwa-kyung has been indicted for embezzling 400 million won ($356,000) through appropriating artwork, prosecutors and the conglomerate said Wednesday.

Chairman Dam Chul-gon, Lee's husband, had earlier been acquitted after also being charged with embezzlement in addition to tax evasion. Dam married Lee, the daughter of the late Tongyang Group founder Lee Yang-gu, in 1980.

The vice chairwoman, who managed the company-owned artwork, moved some pieces to her house, according to the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office.

Lee allegedly order an Orion subsidiary executive to move "Triple tier Flat-surfaced Table" by Maria Pergay to her house from the company's training institute in Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi Province, in February 2014.

She displayed imitations in the company-owned building instead of the authentic masterpiece worth 250 million won.

In May 2015, the businesswoman was also alleged to have taken "Untitled" by Jean Dubuffet to her house from her office at the group's headquarters at Yongsan, Seoul.

Orion borrowed the artwork appraised at 174 million won from Showbox, one of its subsidiaries.

The prosecutors initially began to investigate the case this March when civic groups accused Chairman Dam of appropriating the two pieces.

Prior to the recent case, the chairman had been sentenced to three years in jail suspended for five years in 2013 for purchasing other high-priced artwork with the company's money in 2011.

However, the prosecutors said they could not prove the charges this time.

Civic groups criticized the prosecutors for switching the charges to his wife, naming her the main culprit.

"The vice chairman is expected to avoid heavy punishment. She has already avoided detention," the Vampire Capital Hunter said in a statement. "Dam would have faced heavier punishment, as he committed the crime during the prison term suspension period."

Admitting the vice chairwoman's misconduct and the company's poor management of its artwork, Orion promised stricter supervision in the future. The food firm, however, denied the civic group's claims.

The chairman was accused of having illegally given shares in Orion subsidiaries to his son.

Also, Tongyang Group Vice Chairwoman Lee Hye-kyung accused Dam of embezzlement in February.

The older sister of Hwa-kyung claimed that her brother-in-law unilaterally sold stocks of a wrapping paper company, which were inherited by the heirs of the late Tongyang founder. The Orion Group spun off from Tongyang Group in 2001.

Meanwhile, Orion has also suffered from China's economic retaliation over a U.S. anti-missile defense system. The company has partly halted operations of its factories in China, due to increasing inventory after a Chinese consumer boycott of Korean products.

After Seoul decided to deploy the U.S. missile shield here last year, Beijing came up with a series of retaliatory measures, claiming the system could also monitor airborne objects in China. The anti-missile battery is being installed to counter threats from Pyongyang.
The new show at the La Jolla Art Association (LJAA) gallery combines the painting-like photography of Lisa Ross Imaging The World: Africa North/South with the Dale Chihuly-influenced glass work of Dick Ditore  and is an absolute gem.

Its probably the finest exhibition at the gallery in a long time. Ross artistic photographs from her travels in Africa blend well with the swirling colors and interesting shapes of Ditores glass. You can see it through July 16 at 8100 Paseo Del Ocaso in La Jolla Shores.

Modifications made to the gallery space for the show, which improved lighting and helped create a truly beautiful white space, also contributed to the overall improved look of the gallery.

Although Ross has had an amazingly diverse career, she said her involvement with photography runs deep, tracing itself to the most renowned American photographer of all time  Ansel Adams.

Ross was a student of Adams at Hamilton High School in west Los Angeles, which had a prestigious photography program. Adams, who lived near the school, encouraged the students and judged their competitions. We students would go over to Adams house, said Ross. Once he took me aside and said to me, You need to be a photographer! 

But Ross went on to do other things first. She started out in film school at USC, but because the field was so male-dominated at the time, she switched to study counseling psychology, where she ended up ABD (All But Dissertation). She taught courses like Psychopathology, as a grad student at USC, and then as a professor at National University.

After her teaching stint, Ross worked as a freelance political consultant and journalist in San Diego. She found her way back to photography in 2001, when the first digital cameras came out. Ross said she also bought a very expensive Epson 9600 printer that printed photographs on canvas, making them look like paintings.

Her work at the LJAA Gallery is from her Africana collection. I love Morocco in north Africa, Ross explained, and in the south, Botswana is great for its wildlife, and Namibia has wonderful deserts. Cape Town is lovely and a lot like La Jolla, but the surrounding poverty, left over from apartheid, is very detracting.

In Africa, her primary means of travel was bush plane. She said she planned out some of her shots, but other photos were just spontaneous. With the digital camera, you just shoot tons of images and then take it to the computer where the interesting stuff kind of emerges on its own, she noted, adding her favorite thing is to shoot landscapes and abstract images, sometimes wildlife, but rarely portraits, which she considers too difficult. Ross has photographs from some 100 countries, which she ells online and at her gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Ross said she brought glass artist Ditore into the show, after meeting him at a wildlife benefit at her home. Ditore was an electrician by trade for much of his adult life, but has worked with glass for the past 17 years. He said he took his first classes in glass art at Alpine Glass in Mission Valley. After that, he switched over to the Arts & Crafts Center at UC San Diego, which was headed by Ron Carlson.

A few years ago, much to everyones dismay, UCSD cited financial difficulties and the Craft Center was torn down. Ditore called the destruction a travesty that denied students and the public a great opportunity to take art and craft classes.

Ditore said he developed a great passion for glass and felt that he needed more instruction, so he began to go up to Washington State to study at Dale Chihulys Pilchuck Glass School. He went there every summer for 13 years before getting hired as an instructor, five years ago to teach engraving, carving and glass polishing.

Pilchuck is a 50-acre campus in the middle of a 15,000-acre tree farm. The summer session lasts 6-8 weeks and everyone there is interested in glass art, so its an exhilarating and stimulating experience, Ditore said. Chihuly, probably the most famous glass artist in the world, comes by once or twice a summer.

Sadly, there is really only one glass art program left in San Diego and that is at Palomar College in San Marcos, Ditore said. He sells most of his work through the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, and at a private gallery in Ashville, North Carolina. He also does private commissions.

My most recent commission was a glass Viking ship modeled after the one archaeologists unearthed in the mud of a Swedish harbor, he explained. I also did a glass scroll with Hebrew characters for the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition at the Museum of Natural History in Balboa Park.

I dont like making production-line stuff where you make the same thing over and over just to sell it. I like new challenges. And I am not a social commentator. My work is purely aesthetic. I want to bring a little beauty and joy into peoples lives. Personally, what I like best about glass is its smooth touch. That is why I always encourage people to touch my work.

IF YOU GO: The LJAA Gallery is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday; closed Monday. Free. (858) 459-1196. Next show: July 16-30, Just Beachy with seascapes galore. lajollaartassociation.org
Watching a play within a play can be complicated, but thats not the case with Nagle Jacksons At This Evenings Performance, directed by Andrew Barnicle and onstage at the North Coast Repertory Theatre until Aug. 6.

When the fun begins in this comedy, a lively cast of seven actors are traveling to Eastern Europe to a country now called Strevia, pronounced by the actors with a spfff. Within set designer Marty Burnetts two dressing rooms, the actors discuss their new play At This Evenings Performance, talk about themselves and complain about things.

The first is that people are not responsive enough to their old classic works being redone, and two, the Minister of Culture in Strevia, formerly named Dunsk, a certain Pankoff (John Nutten).

Actor Oskar (Kyle Colerider-Krugh) is the elder cast member who makes comments often filled with humor. Piers (Paul Turbiak) is a young man who has two agendas  one to romance Saskia (Sierra Jolene) and the other to heap suggestion after suggestion upon his colleagues, who mostly ignore him. Saskia is a lively actress who enjoys risque moments with Piers and has no fear her husband will find out.

Hippolyta Posnik (Katie MacNichol) has a lighthearted role and is also married to Gunther (Bruce Turk), an actor throwing out orders by the minute to the cast that most of them oppose. Returning after many roles at the NCRT is Richard Baird, a terrific actor who excels in every character he portrays. As Valdez, he has authority to warn the actors there is a spy among the cast and someone will get shot! This ups the anxiety and humor. Can the Minister of Culture overcome this horrific announcement?

Barnicle does a great job of directing a play that requires just the right simultaneous dialogue and actions to remain an enjoyable farce. Anyone who enjoys the genre  which NCRT does very well  will relish the humor and perfection in the casts unveiling.

IF YOU GO: At This Evenings Performance, is on stage through Aug. 6 at the North Coast Repertory Theatre, 987 Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Solana Beach. Tickets from $43. (858) 481-1055. northcoastrep.org
The La Jolla Town Council held its fourth Crisis at The Cove hearing during its July 13 meeting at the La Jolla Rec Center. At issue was whose recommendations the City should follow when taking action to deter the sea lion congregation at La Jolla Cove, which has led to dangerous human-sea lion interactions, health department-ordered beach closures, and a pervasive noxious odor that has been detrimental to business and tourism, and caused by the marine mammals effusions.

About 25 people were in attendance, including San Diego Department of Park & Recreation director Herman Parker.

Thus far, the City has installed informational signage at The Cove, and plans to install gates at the base of the stairs to prevent sea lions from climbing to the nearby Scripps Park. Several dissatisfied La Jollans and Cove users at the hearing questioned why the City took that route, considering a list of alternatives was provided via the La Jolla Town Council Sea Lion Task Force (made up of representatives from different community groups across La Jolla and San Diego) and the Marine Coastal Management Plan, authored by Hanan & Associates.

The Mayor has never contacted our Task Force nor our committees about the problem, and we feel we have a lot of local insight to offer, said La Jolla Town Council president Ann Kerr Bache. Weve offered money, volunteers, ideas and brains, representing hundreds of years of recreational use. So all these decisions are being made without regard for any of the intelligent information that is being provided at no cost.

Further, the Task Force drafted a Call to Action petition asking for community support to have prompt and effective action taken to move and exclude California Sea Lions from areas where their presence creates severe public health and safety problems. By installing signs and gates, some suggested the City is attempting to move and exclude humans rather than sea lions.

Swimmer Doug Burleigh opined that the sign approach is just going to cause people to back up further and further away from the beach. As a result, more sea lions will come onto the beach because there is more room for them.

The petition was sent to Mayor Kevin Faulconers office in November 2016, and the Task Force has yet to receive a reply.

La Jolla Cove Swim Club president Dan Simonelli said of all this, We feel slighted. There has been no response from the Mayors office  and seemingly no interest in solving this problem beyond installing signs. The situation continues to be a problem and it is frustrating for those who live here and use The Cove. Its silly and ridiculous. Im not sure why Mayor Faulconer is ignoring the problem.

In addition to the ideas the Task Force has submitted, the committee stated it is in agreement with the preferred alternative identified in the Marine Coastal Management Plan. The Plan lists several sea lion deterrence methods ranging from no action to livestock fencing.

However, the preferred alternative is a combination, which reads: Implement expanded signage and docents to educate the public regarding pinnipeds and pinniped behavior; Use the National Marine Fisheries Service approved harassment techniques to try and keep sea lions off La Jolla Cove beach and any other selected haul-out areas. First test and then if this appears to work, use the technique at other sites chosen for public use.

In an impassioned speech, Kerr Bache asked Parker why the City was not following the recommendation of the report or the local community. She said, Weve heard the complaint that it is difficult to deal with La Jolla because we have different organizations and speak with different voices.  But we pulled everyone together from different groups, we have one voice  The City has no excuse for why it is not listening to its citizens. We are not going to stop this effort and we are not going to give up.

She added, Tell the Mayor to answer his constituents. He only has a little bit of time left in office, this is his chance to leave a legacy, to be a national leader and actually do something about a real problem. Its an insult to the citizens to not pay attention to them. Who are you listening to? You arent listening to us and not listening to the Hanan Report.

Responding, Parker said the City has gone through a long process involving the Hanan Report  and I have to say it is data the City needed. With that information, the City is determining our best approach. Right now, we are trying to implement an education process to keep people safe. Weve implemented signage to educate people about sea lion behaviors and are looking at installing gates.  This is a first step.

As to a timeline to any future steps, Parker said such information was not available. In the meantime, Parker said the La Jolla community is well organized and encouraged concerned citizens to keep sending the message that they are not pleased with the situation and the Citys progress.
Fellow La Jollans! We need your help to contact Mayor Kevin Faulconer. The La Jolla Town Council, chaired by its president, Ann Kerr-Bache, held a public forum Crisis at The Cove: Hearing Part 4  Community Task Force on California Sea Lion Occupation of La Jolla Beaches, City Marine Mammal Plan, last Thursday at the Rec Center, and has sent summations from the previous hearings to the Mayor, who has done NOTHING, and has totally ignored the problem.

This affects all of us as The Cove received a D grade from Heal the Bays annual report card, and is No. 5 on the Top 10 list of Bummer Beaches (those with the worst water quality in the State of California). The failing grades indicate a significant health hazard to tens of thousands of year-round ocean users, who can contact a respiratory or gastrointestinal infection from one morning swim or surf session in polluted waters, it reads, in part.

Now, our historic, annual Rough Water Swim at The Cove has been canceled for the second time.

Various Town Council committee members indicated the problems  from sea lions eating the local fish to health impacts on local lifeguards in the forms of infections and respitory illnesses. The potential problem is an actuality, and the public has already been notified and is not coming to The Cove.

We need everyones help because the Mayor has been given the authority to fix the problem, but he has ignored it. Please either e-mail him: NO SEA LIONS at kevinfaulconer@sandiego.gov or write him a letter at 202 C St., 11th Floor, San Diego, CA 92101 or call (619) 236-6330. Urgency is needed NOW. Thank you!

Sally Fuller, a concerned La Jollan

Heres more about safe driving in La Jolla

Kudos to La Jolla Light journalists for the great local educational articles! The speed limit report was interesting, though I mainly drive the speed of safety in La Jolla and Pacific Beach  which is slow, very slow and be the responsible one  expect a pedestrian will walk out from between cars without eye contact or pause.

I would like to suggest a follow-up explore of another driving habit in La Jolla: Navigating the narrow resident streets (Bird Rock) when cars are parked. Who has the right of way? Who should yield? and, How should the driver yield? I drive these sort of streets all over from North Chicago, Ireland, Netherlands, and Bethesda, Maryland.

When my lane is clear of parked cars and Im moving forward, I may continue. If my lane has parked cars and there is an oncoming car, then to continue puts us in danger of a log jam, and then Im the one who must stay behind the parked cars until lane is clear of traffic.

Im not sure I explained that clearly. But if you drive it, then Im sure youll understand what I mean. I find folks in Bird Rock do not show the expected road courtesy. It is always the unexpected event that can cause an accident, so I drive defensively here.

A little education on this might help at least one percent!

Suzanne Sheridan

Heres more on shared-use of our roads

While I fully understand motorists frustrations with slower traffic, I urge them to be fully aware of cyclists rights to the road and the responsibilities placed upon cyclists by California Vehicle Code Section 21202.

A letter on the subject in last weeks issue fails to convey the full content and application of Section 21202. Of major importance is that this section of the Code only applies to cyclists riding slower than the speed of traffic. An example of where this section may not apply is in The Village where experienced cyclists have no trouble riding at traffic speeds. Another location is the Bird Rock business district.

Other portions of the section allow slower riders to move away from the right. The letter-writer, Mr. Haas, mentioned two exceptions and added unsafe conditions. The Code section gives a list of unsafe conditions, including, not limited to: fixed or moving objects, vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, animals, surface hazards or substandard width lanes, which is a lane that is too narrow for a bicycle and a vehicle to travel safely side by side within the lane.

Another exception is when approaching a place where a right turn is authorized. This means that if the cyclist is approaching an intersection where motorists either MUST or CAN turn right, cyclists may move away from the right. In my experience, motorists are most appreciative when I move left and allow them to turn right unhindered by my presence.

I also note that the Section 21760 requires motorists to pass no closer than three feet to cyclists unless they slow and pass only when prudent. This applies even if the cyclist is in a bike lane.

Motorists should always be aware of the vulnerability of cyclists and pedestrians as they drive and behave accordingly, i.e. in a non-aggressive and socially acceptable manner.

Richard Wolf

Now I know where the compassion is!

I sent a letter to La Jolla Light in April titled Wheres our compassion for people in need? in response to a not-so-pleasant letter about panhandlers in a previous issue. Now that Ive seen the letter Three thoughts on trying to solve the homeless issue in the July 13 issue, I now know where the compassion is!

I am pleased to see that Martin Pszczola (and hopefully other caring people like him) have compassion, as well as sensible and practical suggestions, on how to help the homeless situation. This is so much more productive than hate and condemnation.

Linda Pequegnat

Loved the story on the Community Center concert

Just a word of thanks for giving writer Will Bowen the go-ahead to cover the exciting show at the La Jolla Community Center, featuring, Ossie, Carlos and Kevin, Peruvian crooner delights guests at the Community Center. Nobody covers events and personalities as well as Bowen, and this article was no exception. His interviews get right into the flavor of the event and really bring it to life for the public.

Thank you for finding space to cover these three talented and versatile performers, who give so much musical pleasure to the community. I am proud to count them as friends. The La Jolla Light is an asset to the community and Ive enjoyed your overall coverage of local news for more than 30 years. Keep up the good work.

Mary Rayes

Whats on YOUR mind?

Letters published in La Jolla Light express views from readers in regard to community issues. To share your thoughts in this public forum, e-mail them with your name and city of residence to editor@lajollalight.com or mail them to La Jolla Light Editor, 565 Pearl St., Suite 300, La Jolla, CA 92037. Letters reflect the writers opinions and not necessarily those of the newspaper staff or publisher.
Editors Note: As a world renowned surfing town, La Jolla has its legends of the sea. Were stoked to bring you their stories in this new summer series. If you know someone who should be included, please provide their contact information to reporter Maria Jose Duran at mduran@lajollalight.com or (858) 875-5951.

When asked, Who is a better surfer? Margo Schwab and Scott Johnston pointed in unison to one another. Thats the most diplomatic answer Ive ever heard! she exclaimed in protest. She dances ballet on the board! he reciprocated.

Lets put it this way, Schwab began, we both have our own forte, Im more into the style, I add a little ballet into it, which is sort of fun, and Scott is like, Is there a bigger wave? 

Schwab and Johnston (philanthropists and owners of The Social Diary) are a pair of surfers who came into the sport later in life  at age 36 and 43, respectively.

It all fell into place very quickly, because we started dating and he said, You know, obviously if I want to see you, Im going to have to learn how to surf. So I taught him how to surf and from the get go, no problem, Schwab said. Hes just a total natural, he went at it and became addicted right away, which is great, because I love surfing, its so much fun!

Although they met in 1993, this couple from La Jolla Shores didnt start dating until the year 2000. The time was right! Johnston explained. They ride twin 9-foot wood-looking longboards, and when they go surfing together, Schwabs favorite thing to say to him is My wave! right before she takes off paddling.

The couple has surfed together in destinations such as Hawaii and Mexico. One of the aspects of surfing they said they enjoy the most is the closeness to nature. They have stories about encounters with baby seals, dolphins, and even whales.

Last year, I was surfing right at The Shores, and there was a whale with its calf, and it was breaching for like 20 minutes, and I was like 50 yards from it! Johnston told La Jolla Light. To be that close was kind of scary, but it was fascinating! Its just wonderful to see that.

Johnston, who is a retired San Diego Police Department officer, said although he grew up in the region, he hadnt tried surfing until Schwab taught him the sport. Rather than going to the beach, Id be going to the mountains, camping, going to the forests, and Id love it, its beautiful, he said. But once I started surfing, thats all I wanted to do. Love at first sight.

Schwab said she felt the same way. From the get go, I could not stop. I surfed two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, my arms were sore, but I couldnt stop. The first wave and that was it; totally addicted.

As to what they love about surfing, for Johnston its being able to choose the intensity of the exercise. You can be so serene and Zen-like, be calm and still and take in the ocean, and on the other hand, you can turn the switch and work as hard as you like, he explained, adding that he surfs most days for at least two hours, and then he doesnt have to go to the gym.

For Schwab, surfing is a nice juxtaposition to the real world.

The Surfmobile

Johnston and Schwab arrived at the interview in narrow, four-wheeled electric vehicle with wood finishes that matched their surfboards. They call it their Surfmobile.

One day we saw this electric vehicle online, and it had the woody look, and our boards are woodies, he explained. I thought, This is a different take on the concept of a woody, its good for the environment, and its street legal. You can actually drive it on streets with speed signs posted for 35 miles per hour or less.

Surf etiquette

When the couple were newbies on the waves, they had to learn surf etiquette. One rule you learn pretty quickly is when you go out to a break, theres usually what they call the lineup,  Johnston explained. There are surfers who go there a lot, and if youre new to the area, they watch you and they expect you to defer to them and not try to get in the way when theyre trying to catch the wave.

Some are more territorial than others. For instance in Del Mar, we surfed out there once and they got very territorial with me. And the situation got to the point that it was going to erupt into a fight.

Then, Schwab had to intervene. I thought, I came out here for Zen, this is not going to happen, this is my guy! I just said really loudly, 242 PC assault and battery, thats about $40,000 in attorney bills and three months in jail! And everybody stopped.

With a playful laugh, Johnston explained that he passed some of his hard-earned knowledge of the law onto his partner.

Surfin hard

Johnston is a fan of what he calls surfing hard because I come from 32 years of being a cop, Im used to Code 3 here, getting somewhere fast and helping out people. Ive been in four shootings, and a bunch of other stuff that led me to believe I have more lives than a cat! But the big guy upstairs has been watching out for me. What I get from the surfing is that adrenaline rush.

The recipient of a Purple Heart, Johnston said he likes to catch quantity as well as quality of waves, but as far as moves go, hes on the short side. I can twirl around and ride on the nose, flip the board around  but Ive never competed. If I had taken this up in my teens, that would have been a cool life to have, but I got into this so late in life that I just enjoy catching waves as much as possible, socialize with other surfers out there.
For La Jolla resident Edie Littlefield Sundby, who was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer and given a three-month life expectancy 10 years ago, battling Stage 4 cancer is like fighting a war.

Her book The Mission Walker, an account of her experiences from the time she was diagnosed with cancer at age 55 until she completed the 1,600-mile El Camino Real, will be released July 25.

My story is more than a personal story, its history, because as Im walking, Im experiencing everything that those explorers and men of the Sierras experienced (when they walked El Camino Real), she told La Jolla Light.

El Camino Real is usually defined as the road that connects the old Spanish Missions in California from Southern San Diego to Sonoma. But theres another, lesser-known part of the trail that starts in the Baja California city of Loreto and runs north to San Diego. Littlefield Sundby discovered that side of the trail, too.

(In my book) I tell about Harry Crosby of San Diego, who Helen Copley commissioned to go to Loreto for Californias anniversary and find the old Mission Trail and photograph it, map it, she explained.

What I was attempting to do, just like Harry Crosby, was to follow Fr. Junipero Serra. The Spanish Jesuit priest, Serra, is known as a driving force in the colonization of California.

All this walking, Littlefield Sundby related, she did with one lung. I have one lung, and I need to walk very vigorously to keep it healthy, she said. Her lung, one of many body parts she said to have lost to cancer, never stopped her from taking another step. As she tells herself in the book, Edie, if you can move, youre not sick.

A healing miracle

Cancer came as a surprise to Littlefield Sundby. When she learned she had it in 2007, it had spread to several of her organs and the illness was in Stage 4, which usually is accompanied by the word incurable.

I have no idea why Im alive, she said. She reported going through 79 rounds of chemotherapy and four major surgeries. Its been many months when I was very close to death, but many others when Ive lived very vigorously, because I always walked. I never stopped moving since I was diagnosed, she continued.

Littlefield Sundby is hopeful that a cure for cancer is forthcoming, But a lot of the success with traditional chemo is still anecdotal, with immunotherapy, its anecdotal. Im alive, but Im anecdotal. Cancer is still a mystery with all our science and medicine.

In this deeply spiritual narration, she often speaks of God. I try to just do what I can, but trust in God that all will be well, she said. Because Im dying, so what? Everybody is! I love life so much I want to live.

Writing the walk

The idea to write the book came when the publishing house Harper Collins contacted her after reading her story in The New York Times. A year ago, in May 2016, they wanted the book and they wanted to get it in 90 days, she recalled.

My husband took me to a little casita outside of Palm Springs, and I started to write. I wrote every day for 90 days. Just like walking, the book was the same way, I wrote every day, one word at a time, and God decided how long to tell the story. The story wrote itself pretty much, she said. They hardly edited a word of it.

These days, when shes in La Jolla, she said she takes walks along the Torrey Pines canyon, which is part of the Mission Trail. She takes care of business related to the book, she does interviews with reporters who want to know more about her.

Shes aware that she has incurable cancer and it may come back any day. If cancer comes back Ill accept it, deal with it, pray. Ill be terrified. I will go inside my body and just ask my body to bear with me here, and it may not be up to it again. I dont know. My spirit may be just ready to go and join my maker. Its a life of unknowns and uncertainty, and Ive become very comfortable with uncertainty.

 To learn more, visit facebook.com/TheMissionWalker

Launch Party at Warwicks: Edie Littlefield Sundby will present her book at a launch party, 11:30 a.m. Sunday, July 23 at Warwicks Bookstore, 7812 Girard Ave. RSVP to booklaunch@themissionwalker.com
ELKHORN  Most people will never receive official recognition from the state Legislature, but Joseph Schaefer was not most people.

Schaefer served on the Walworth County Board for 43 years until his death in early January at the age of 73.

In order to honor this man, who was the third generation of county board supervisors in his family, state officials presented a plaque to Schaefers family during last Tuesdays county board meeting.

State Sen. Steve Nass and Rep. Tyler August were both in attendance for the event.

Meaningful recognition

According to Nass, the state Legislature does not often offer this type of recognition.

That way, Nass continued, when they do, it is much more meaningful.

Anyone who serves on the county board is sacrificing for the job, Nass said, but Schaefers approach to the board was unique.

Joe Schaefer took that opportunity and stepped forward as those before him had done, he said. But he did it for a long, long time.

And during Schaefers long tenure, Nass pointed out that he was never one to become divided by partisanship.

Rather than focus on political leanings, Schaefer focused on solutions, Nass said.

August reflected on an example of this character trait.

He said that the first time he met Schaefer, Schaefer pulled him aside, saying to the Republican representative, you know Im a proud Democrat, right?

It was this type of friendly banter that made Schaefer well-liked, August stated.

August then read the plaque aloud.

The plaque reads, On behalf of the state of Wisconsin.

Whereas Joseph H. Schaefer of Lyons was a veteran, father, grandfather, great-grandfather and dedicated public servant.

And whereas Joseph served in the United States Army from 1965 to 1967, including a tour of duty in Vietnam.

And whereas upon returning from war, Joseph formed and operated the Ye Old Hotel in Lyons, Wisconsin, became an active member of St. Joseph Catholic Church and joined the Lyons Fire Department and drill team.

And whereas Joseph served on the Walworth County Board of Supervisors for 43 years, becoming the third generation of his family to serve on the board for over a decade.

And whereas the town of Lyons, Walworth County and the state of Wisconsin sorely miss Joseph H. Schaefer and will long remember his many contributions to his community and the state of Wisconsin.

Now therefore be it resolved that Sen. Steve Nass and Rep. Tyler August, on behalf of the state of Wisconsin hereby honor and remember Joseph H. Schaefer. May 7, 2017.

J.J. Schaefer, Joseph Schaefers son, accepted the plaque with a short, but heartfelt statement.

The family really appreciates it, he said. We miss him.
Jabez (sometimes spelled Jabish) Moore was born in upstate New York in 1818. At the age of 18, he came with his father to the newly (1836) established Wisconsin Territory where his father settled on the Big Foot Prairie at the western end of Geneva Lake, where the Big Foot Country Club is located today. In 1842 his friend Dr. Philip Maxwell spent the winter with him on his farm on Big Foot Prairie. In 1856 he moved to the village of Geneva where he opened a grocery store. When the Civil War began he enlisted in the Union Army and became a First Lieutenant in the First Illinois Light Artillery and was promoted to command Taylors Battery, Company B, of the Second Illinois Light Artillery. He fought in many significant battles in the Civil War, including the battle for Fort Donelson in Tennessee on February 12-16, 1862, where General U.S. Grant earned the nickname Unconditional Surrender Grant.

After the war Jabez Moore returned to Geneva where he engaged in business until 1872 when he turned his business over to his son Phillip H. Moore. As he grew older, he was obliged to move to the Soldiers Home (today the Zablocki Veterans Administration Medical Center) in Milwaukee, where he lived until his death in April 1912 at the age of 93. He was buried in the northwest corner of the Pioneer Cemetery where his grave is marked by a distinguished tombstone.

Phillip Henry Moore was born at Big Foot Prairie on April 1, 1845, the son of Jabez and Susan Davis Moore. He moved to Geneva with his family in 1856 at the age of 11. He became a businessman in Geneva in 1869 in partnership with his father and succeeded his father as the owner of their store in 1872. He operated the clothing store in Geneva from 1872 to 1885 when he sold it to O.C. Colby and Company. After that he devoted his time to his other business interests in and near Lake Geneva including another store that he built on Main Street. He also served as a director of the Farmers National Bank and was very active in various civic organizations. On Tuesday April 5, 1929, after an illness of three months, he passed away and was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery.

Several readers have asked if Frank Sherwood Moore, who owned Moores Hardware store at 731 Main Street (where the Lake Geneva Antiques and Art Bazaar is located today) was related to Jabez and Phillip H. Moore. I was able to find no evidence that he was related to them, nor was I able to learn where and when Frank S. Moore was born. During the decades followed World War II, Lake Geneva had two hardware stores, Moores Hardware and Cobbs Hardware. Cobbs was established by Timothy Christian Smith whose house still exists on the east side of Cook Street just north of Main Street. It is on the National Register of Historical Sites. Known as the Cobb House, it was originally located on the north side of the 800 block of Main Street, but was moved around the corner to its present Cook Street location on September 9, 2004.

Moores Hardware store was owned during the post-World War II decades by Frank S. Moores grandson, Frank Bullock and his partner, Louis Kimball. Moores Hardware was founded in 1848 by Simon W. Spaford, who sold it in April 1856 to a Mr. Delaware, who in turn sold it to James and John Haskins (for whom Haskins Street is named) on Dec. 31, 1869. In 1889, Frank S. Moore bought the store. In 1903 Frank Moore built a new concrete store at 731 Main Street, the store that many Lake Geneva old timers will remember as Moores Hardware store. Frank Moore eventually sold the hardware store to Arthur Bullock and Andrew Malsch, who sold it in turn to Louis Brown, who sold it to Frank Moores grandson, Frank Bullock, and Louis Kimball.

But Frank S. Moore was more than just the owner of a hardware store. He served on the city council for several terms, and was mayor of Lake Geneva from 1901 to 1909. He was Post Master of Lake Geneva from 1901 to 1909, and was a founding member of the Lake Geneva Knights of Pythias Lodge. Frank Sherwood Moore died at his home at 833 Wisconsin Street on Tuesday, Nov. 10, 1936. He was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery.

Perhaps the most well-known Moore associated with Lake Geneva was the wealthy Chicago businessman, James Hobert Moore, who in 1900 built a palatial mansion on Geneva Lakes south shore, which he named Loramoor in honor of his wife, Lora Josaphine Small. James Hobart Moore was born on June 14, 1852 in Tioga County, New York. He died on July 17, 1916. With his brother, William Henry Moore, he was the co-founder of U.S. Steel, and also was a founder of Nabisco. His mansion on Geneva Lake had several owners after his death. For 30 years it was a Franciscan Monastery. In 1984, J. H. Moores magnificent mansion was torn down.

Despite the fact that Jabez Moore and his son, Phillip H. Moore, are long gone, and that James Hobart Moore has been dead for more than a century, the name Moore still resonates in Lake Geneva because of Frank S. Moores well-known hardware store on Main Street, which he built in 1903.


Screen grab from LATimes.com.



The Los Angeles Times investigation into the secret drug life of USC's former medical school dean has been (unscientifically, I admit) the most talked-about Los Angeles story since it broke Monday morning. In the works for many months, the story lays out skillfully and convincingly how Dr. Carmen A. Puliafito, an eye surgeon who was then dean of the Keck School of Medicine and a prolific rainmaker of donations and talent for USC, smoked meth and took other drugs with a skeevy crowd in Pasadena that included a prostitute 40 years younger than him. The doctor brought his druggie friends to his USC office, allegedly prescribed inhalers to soothe their smoked-out throats, and let videos and photos be taken of their partying together. The secret life only began to come to light after the prostitute overdosed in Puliafito's presence in a Pasadena hotel room, following a couple of failed attempts by her to get off drugs. She survived and talked to the Times for the story.

Monday's main story bore five reporter bylines: Paul Pringle, Harriet Ryan, Adam Elmahrek, Matt Hamilton and Sarah Parvini. Here are a few of their nut grafs:

The Times interviewed six people who partied with Puliafito in Pasadena, Huntington Beach and Las Vegas, as well as at USC. They ranged in age from late teens to late thirties. None were USC students.

One, Sarah Warren, was the woman who overdosed in the Pasadena hotel room. She told The Times she met Puliafito in early 2015 while working as a prostitute. She said they were constant companions for more than a year and a half, and that Puliafito used drugs with her and sometimes brought her and other members of their circle to the USC campus after hours to party. He would say, They love me around here. The medical students think I am God, Warren said.



USC and Puliafito both refused to comment for the story: deny, confirm, explain, anything. He stepped down abruptly as dean in March 2016, a few weeks after Warren's overdose. But he remained on the USC faculty  just this past Saturday, the Times reports, he spoke at a Keck-sponsored program at the Langham Huntington Hotel in Pasadena  "one of the hotels Sarah Warren said she frequented with him." Boom. I'll note here that the hotel where Warren OD'd (on a March afternoon) was the Hotel Constance on Colorado Boulevard.

I gave the investigation big props in my LA Observed segment on KCRW on Monday (4:44 p.m. every Monday.) I liked how the reporters were transparent about what they knew and what they didn't. Mostly they did know. The story also explained how the whole thing began for the paper: "It was a tip about the incident in the Pasadena hotel that led The Times to discover Puliafitos other life."

After stonewalling the first day, USC officials said late Monday that Puliafito would no longer see patients at USC facilities. On Tuesday, USC president C. L. Max Nikias sent a letter to the campus saying that we understand the frustrations expressed about this situation...[and] we are working to determine how we can best prevent these kinds of circumstances moving forward. Adding to the intrigue, Pasadena police did not write a report on the hotel overdose and tried at first to put the Times off the story. An officer has been disciplined, the story says.

The first place I saw the story getting big reaction was among investigative journalists on Twitter, particularly those who pursue stories in the health field (and ex-LA Times reporters):

Holy shit story. During his tenure, USC Med School dean kept company with a circle of criminals and drug users https://t.co/LRrHTTiwf9  Charles Ornstein (@charlesornstein) July 17, 2017

Seriously still marveling at this story. AND NO COMMENT FROM

@KeckMedUSC https://t.co/hxR9RYQcUs  tracyweber (@tracyweber) July 17, 2017

This story is CRAZY. https://t.co/hZ3BMzpvbq  Ellen Umansky (@umanskyellen) July 17, 2017

Also a reminder that LA is the country's most undercovered city. https://t.co/qszgX6DYKW  Nick Riccardi (@NickRiccardi) July 17, 2017



On Tuesday the Columbia Journalism Review said the Times investigation "highlights local news that gets results." Excerpt:

The Los Angeles Timess investigation into the troubling behavior of Dr. Carmen A. Puliafitodean of USCs Keck School of Medicine, renowned eye surgeon, and key fundraisermanaged to break through the national conversation percolating with news out of DC by engaging in that most honorable tradition in local journalism: taking on a powerful institution and getting results....

Five Times reportersPaul Pringle, Harriet Ryan, Adam Elmahrek, Matt Hamilton, and Sarah Parvinicontributed to the story, an impressive allocation of resources for a paper that has faced difficulties both financial and internal in recent years. They contacted witnesses, dug through police reports and emergency call records, and gained access to video evidence, producing a 4,000-word story that resulted in Puliafito no longer seeing patients and disciplinary action for a Pasadena police officer who failed to report the hotel overdose of Puliafitos companion. While the salacious details of the story no doubt helped propel its reach, the Times reporters deserve credit for delivering local news that packs a punch. Beyond the work of those five journalists, the papers investment of time and resources into the investigation is commendable. At CJR, we dedicated our most recent print issue to local news in all its successes, failures, and experimentations. Its nice to have a story break through that highlights the value of what a well-supported group of reporters can accomplish when they get a tip about a powerful institution and are given free rein to chase it down.



Yep. And it should be noted, for those who have bought into the lazy and false narrative that reporters at big American newspapers carry out some agenda of their corporate owners, the Times has plenty of partnerships with USC. The editor of the paper is also the publisher who deals with USC on non-journalistic things like the annual Festival of Books. No matter: when a tip on a good story came up, the newsroom got the go-ahead and the resources to chase it. That's how it's supposed to work.
PRESS RELEASE

China Poses Belt and Road Solution for Korea and Northeast Asia

July 18, 2017 (EIRNS)A leading engineer professor in China has presented a powerful and optimistic proposal for solving the Korea crisisthrough the New Silk Road. Called "Belt and Road Initiative [BRI], [it] meshes with South Koreas Northern Policy," the op-ed in todays Global Times is written by Ding Rongjun, Chairman of the Board of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a professor of diplomacy at Tongji University.

Ding notes that South Korean leaders since Park Chung-hee have promoted linking the country with Europe, but it is now both possible and urgent. The Belt and Road Initiative, he says, is "one way of achieving regional or even global peace, stability and cooperation among states." China and South Korea have the ability to "dial down emerging regional tensions" by "increasing the connectivity of Eurasia via the passageway of Busan-Pyongyang-Russias Far East-Central Asia and Europe."

He writes:

"From Chinas perspective, such a plan has four major benefits. First, cooperation with Seoul can unleash the potential of Chinas three northeastern provinces which need external stimuli for growth. Second, the plan can push North Koreas reform by providing economic incentives and transportation and energy infrastructure, thereby creating a peaceful environment conducive for BRIs successful implementation. Third, it can link with Russias Eurasian Economic Union [EAEU] which is one of Putins key policies to develop its desolate Far East region, thereby alleviating Russias concerns over BRI. Fourth, cooperation with Seoul can reduce the risk of exacerbating security tensions on the Korean Peninsula, thereby altering the regional structure from a hostile balance of power to one of peace and order, where cooperation and non-competition become the norm. From South Koreas standpoint, a trilateral framework with China and Russia toward North Koreas opening and reform can be realized. "Lastly, it is generally accepted in international politics that economic engagement and connectivity is conducive for peace. Creating momentum for such a spillover effect to take place on the Korean Peninsula is what China and South Korea can achieve via connecting the BRI and Northern Policy."

It is of note that the BRI has not played a significant role in East Asia, largely due to the North Korea problem. Now, although Ding does not mention it, the potential for China, Russia, South Korea and the United States under Trump to agree on a workable approach to the Korea problem now makes a BRI solution possible.
PRESS RELEASE

Neocons Set Up Another Trans-Atlantic Anti-Russia Hit-Squad in D.C.

July 18, 2017 (EIRNS)They are calling themselves the "Alliance for Securing Democracy," but its just another regrouping of the war-mongers of the Bush and Obama administrators, famously dubbed "the Children of Satan" by the LaRouche movement. Russia is the current enemy, and China comes next, of this bipartisan, trans-Atlantic hit squad, which now operates out of the offices of the German Marshall Fund in the Washington, D.C.

The Intercepts Glenn Greenwald yesterday called attention to this "Alliance," founded on July 11, incensed at the role of leading establishment Democrats in rehabilitating "these war-loving neocons" who had been rightfully marginalized by the American people with the discrediting of the Bush administration.

It has two co-chairs: Democrat Laura Rosenberger, foreign policy advisor for "Hillary for America" in the 2016 election, and a former high-level Obama State Department and NSC staff member; and Republican Jamie Fly, former Marco Rubio advisor, Bush, Jr. Defense and NSC official, and erstwhile editor of the soon-to-close Foreign Policy Initiative founded by his buddy, the notorious Project for the New American Centurys Bill Kristol. (Among their exploits together, Fly and Kristol published a joint call for bombing Irans nuclear sites in 2012.)

Among others on the Alliances Advisory Council, are Kristol, Bush, Sr.s Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff, Obama CIA director Michael Morell, the infamous Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, Joe Biden national security advisor Jake Sullivan, and former NATO Adm. James Stavridis. Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves is the sole European of the bunch.

"With upcoming elections in Germany and Italy, and the U.S. 2018 mid-term elections fast approaching, there is an urgent need for a deeper understanding of Russias tactics, how they are evolving, and how to defend against and deter them,"

its German Marshall Fund hosts stated in announcing the Alliances "launch."

The Alliances Mission Statement is rabid. "Finding out what happened in the United States in 2016 and the impact it had is important. But that is not enough.... Russias efforts are also ongoing across Europeand we also need to prepare for other state actors to replicate Putins tactics.... "Meeting this challenge to our democracy demands that Republicans and Democrats in the United States unite with our democratic allies around the world to better understand Russias multifaceted aggression in order to defend ourselves and our democratic partners, and deter such activity in the future.... "The Alliance will forge partnerships across the Atlantic with political leaders, policymakers, like-minded institutions, and technical experts to address the urgent need to secure our democracies,"

they promise.
PRESS RELEASE

International Observers To Be Invited to Russia-Belarus Zapad 2017 Exercise To Counter False Claims

July 18, 2017 (EIRNS)Belarusian Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Andrey Ravkov told TASS yesterday that international observers are being invited to the joint Russian-Belarusian Zapad 2017 exercise set for mid-September 2017.

"Despite the fact that the planned number of troops due to take part in the West-2017 exercises, the number of armored combat vehicles, artillery pieces and aircraft does not reach the threshold for notification, we will invite our partners so that they can see with their own eyes that the drills do not solve the tasks they declare,"

Ravkov said, in reference to claims made in some NATO capitals that the exercise will number as many as 100,000 troops or is a cover for provocations against the Baltic states. Ravkov stressed though that invitations will be sent not only to defense attaches accredited to the country's Defense Ministry but also to a number of international organizations, such as the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, NATO, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

"We will also fulfill our obligations in terms of regional confidence-and security-building measures. We are waiting for observers from our neighborsUkraine, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Observers from Estonia, Sweden and Norway have been invited as well as part of bilateral agreements,"

Ravkov said, and that more than 80 observers will be invited. "We have nothing to hide. Our exercises are purely defensive," the minister said.

Ravkov reported that the total number of troops involved will be over 10,000.

"Up to 12,700 servicemen are planned to be involved in the drills. About 10,200 troops will be involved on the territory of our country, including 7,200 servicemen from the Belarusian Armed Forces and about 3,000 from the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation,"

he said. Ravkov stressed that
PRESS RELEASE

U.S. and Russia Hold Tough Talks in Washington

July 18, 2017 (EIRNS)Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov met with Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Shannon for two-and-a-half hours, yesterday, after a previously scheduled meeting between the two men had been canceled by the Russian side. Ryabkov told TASS that he had laid out to Shannon the conditions for improving U.S.-Russian relations, including but not limited to the return of the two diplomatic compounds that had been seized under orders from President Obama in December 2016. "We came up with a number of ideas on how to achieve a visible and tangible improvement in relations," he said. "However, it would be an exaggeration to say that we are on the verge of finding a solution and resolving this situation." According to Ryabkov, the meeting with Shannon "went off predictably."

"We expected great difficulties during the consultations with the Americans not only on the diplomatic property issue, but on most other issues as well, and so it happened,"

he stated. He warned, however, that if the properties are not returned, retaliation will follow.

"The conversation was tough, forthright, and deliberate, reflecting both parties commitment to a resolution," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert reported in a statement this morning. "The talks reflected a spirit of goodwill, but it is clear that more work needs to be done." Shannon and Ryabkov, the statement further reported, are

"committed to holding future New START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] Bilateral Consultative Commission and Strategic Stability Talks and will exchange scheduling proposals in the near future."

In Moscow, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement after the meeting saying that Russia is ready to revive a regular dialogue with the U.S. on strategic stability, but the matter depends on Washington. "Some current strategic stability issues have been touched upon," the Russian ministry noted.

"The American partners attention was drawn to the fact that Russia stands for renewal of a regular dialogue on this problem that had been suspended by the former U.S. administration."

"Its up to Washington," the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
Shares in cable television programmers Discovery Communications and Scripps Networks Interactive jumped late Tuesday in after-market trading following reports that the two companies were once again trying to merge.

The Wall Street Journal first reported talks between Discovery, which owns the Discovery channel, Animal Planet and TLC; and Scripps Networks, which owns such lifestyle channels as HGTV, Cooking Channel, Travel Channel and the majority stake in the Food Network.

Scripps shares soared 14% to more than $76 a share in after-hours trading. Discoverys A shares also experienced a bounce of more than 9% to $28.50.

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The talks reflect an increasingly challenged landscape for cable programmers, particularly medium-sized companies like Discovery and Scripps that are dependent on pay-TV programming fees for much of their income. That source of revenue is under pressure as more consumers opt for so-called skinny bundles or cut the pay-TV cord altogether.

Representatives of Discovery, based in Silver Spring, Md., and Scripps, based in Knoxville, Tenn., declined to comment.

The two companies would make a good fit because both specialize in nonfiction programming. The added girth would give Discovery more leverage in carriage fee negotiations with such massive distributors as AT&T, Comcast, Charter Communications and Dish Network.

Scripps has remained popular among pay-TV distributors that are offering smaller and lower-cost bundles of family-centric channels to budget-conscious subscribers. The company is valued at about $8.8 billion.

Discovery, whose largest individual voting shareholder is cable television mogul John C. Malone, has a market capitalization of $15 billion. Malone spurred last years combination of Lionsgate and the premium movie channel Starz.

The two companies attempted to combine in late 2013, but those discussions collapsed, reportedly over the purchase price and because the family that controls Scripps was not ready to sell. Scripps has long been viewed as a jewel in the cable landscape because its programming is distinct from other channels.

Reuters separately reported that Viacom also discussed a combination with Scripps. A Viacom spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

meg.james@latimes.com

@MegJamesLAT
SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk on Wednesday downplayed expectations for the upcoming demonstration flight of the companys giant Falcon Heavy rocket, saying there was a good chance the vehicle would not make it to orbit in its first launch.

Musk gave insight into the Falcon Heavy development process, as well as the Hawthorne space companys other current projects, during a keynote speech at the International Space Station Research and Development conference in Washington, D.C.

During the on-stage conversation with NASA International Space Station program manager Kirk Shireman, Musk said development of Falcon Heavy has been way harder than the team initially thought.

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The 229.6-foot-tall rocket will have 27 engines. SpaceX will attempt to land its two side boosters  which will be reused first-stage boosters from previous missions of the smaller Falcon 9  as well as its center core.

Musk described the first demonstration flight, which is expected to occur later this year, as guaranteed to be exciting.

I hope it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage, he said during the speech. I would even consider that a win, to be honest.

Musk also teased a part of his updated Mars plans, which he first unveiled last year, involving launching spaceships to travel en masse to the Red Planet. Musk mused Wednesday that the Mars vehicle could be downsized a bit, making it capable of performing Earth-orbit missions, as well as the expected trips to Mars.

He said those Earth-orbit missions could be a way to pay for the cost of the system.

Its a little bit smaller, Musk said, adding that he would likely give a fuller update on his plans for Mars at the September International Astronautical Congress conference in Adelaide, Australia. Still big, but I think this ones got a shot at being real on the economic front.

Musks latest tunnel-digging exploits outside SpaceXs headquarters in Hawthorne could eventually play a role in the companys plans for the Red Planet. When asked by an audience member about whether his new firm, the Boring Co., could be a way to create habitats on Mars, Musk said that getting good at digging tunnels could be really helpful.

There would need to be a lot of ice mining and mining in general, he said, adding that tunneling could also be used to create underground habitats that could provide radiation shielding.

Closer to home, Musk gave some more details about the companys latest attempts to reuse space hardware.

SpaceX recently relaunched and recovered a Dragon space capsule that first flew in 2014. Musk said SpaceX internal accounting said preparing that capsule for its second flight cost almost as much as building a Dragon 1 from scratch.

The company had said prior to that June flight that some parts of the capsule, such as the heat shield, had to be replaced, though a SpaceX executive said the majority of the spacecraft had flown in space before.

This had a lot of re-work, Musk said. But the next one, we think, has a decent shot of being about 50% the cost of a new one.

He said the company plans to recover the fairing  the clamshell covering that protects a satellite at the tip of the rocket  by the end of the year, and will try to re-fly it by later this year or early next year.

samantha.masunaga@latimes.com

Twitter: @smasunaga

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After an unexpectedly amicable start to U.S.-China relations under President Trump, including high-level economic talks Wednesday, many are wondering when the other shoe will drop.

Trump early on was preoccupied with the North American Free Trade Agreement and then on trade rivals such as Germany, largely giving China, the biggest U.S. trading partner, a pass.

Trump neither labeled Beijing a currency manipulator as he had promised to do, nor has he yet hit China with any significant sanctions. Why rock the boat, Trump has said more than once, if Chinese President Xi Jinping might help the U.S. rein in North Koreas nuclear weapons program.

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But the honeymoon may be over. It has become clear to Trump that China cant or wont deliver on North Korea, and the 100-day action period after Trump welcomed Xi at his Mar-a-Lago estate ended this week with some notable but overall modest results, including a reopening of U.S. beef exports to China and a little more access to Chinese financial markets.

All the while, the U.S. trade deficit in goods with China, by far the largest, has widened since Trump assumed office. This deficit is on pace to surpass $360 billion this year.

On Wednesday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin hosted a Chinese delegation led by Vice Premier Wang Yang, continuing an economic dialogue that has spanned three U.S. administrations and marks the institutionalizing of commercial relations between the two largest economies, which account for one-third of the worlds economic output.

Yet amid the usual pomp and toasts hailing the importance of cooperation, there were indications of rising tensions. Ross opened the dialogue by noting that although U.S. exports to China had grown on average 14% annually over the last 15 years, Chinese shipments to the U.S. have soared as well to the point where the Asian country now accounts for nearly 50% of Americas overall trade deficit.

It is time to rebalance our trade and investment relationship in a more fair, equitable and reciprocal manner, he said, adding that a fundamental asymmetry in our trade relationship and unequal market access must be addressed.

Wang, obliquely responding to U.S. complaints about an uneven playing field, said that the two nations are at different stages of development. He added that confrontation will immediately damage the interests of both.

After the meeting, Mnuchin and Ross issued a statement saying, China acknowledged our shared objective to reduce the trade deficit which both sides will work cooperatively to achieve.

Both the American and Chinese parties earlier in the day abruptly canceled news conferences scheduled at the end of talks, with neither side explaining why.

Few analysts would be surprised at a deterioration of U.S.-China relations, given Trumps harsh rhetoric on the campaign trail, when he bashed Chinas mercantilistic practices and blamed its large trade surplus for the loss of American factories and jobs.

As president, Trump has continued to put trade front and center in his economic policy. But by making the trade deficit  its size and whether it is going up or down  the primary measure for judging bilateral economic relationships, Trump has put himself in a difficult position, economists said.

Its a strategy thats almost certain to fail, said Nicholas Lardy, a China economy expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Thats because U.S. trade deficits are largely the result of the shortfall in national savings relative to investments  a long-running imbalance that isnt likely to change any time soon. Chinas share of exports globally, meanwhile, is growing as it steadily moves up the value chain. The U.S. dollar remains strong, making its goods relatively expensive in foreign markets. And although Chinas Wang urged the U.S. to relax its export controls to sell China more advanced technologies, political pressures in the U.S. appear to be moving in the opposite direction.

Everything is working against Trumps announced objective, Lardy said.

In promising China a better deal on trade if it tightened the screws on North Korea, Trump hoped to score a big short-term win in what has become an increasingly worrisome threat to the U.S. and its allies in East Asia.

For presidents, linking national security and foreign relations to trade is nothing unusual. But Trump overtly and repeatedly put the North Korea issue ahead of others, even though Asia analysts agree it was never realistic to expect China to dramatically ratchet up the pressure on Pyongyang.

More recently the Trump administration has threatened to sanction businesses and even countries doing business with North Korea. And the administration is finding it has little common ground with China on some other international issues.

Unlike Obama, who sought Chinese cooperation on restraining Irans nuclear program and the problem of global warming, Trump has pulled out of the Paris accord on climate change and this week slapped new sanctions on Iran after reluctantly agreeing to recertify that Tehran is complying with an international nuclear agreement.

Those issues provided ballast to the relationship, and now weve lost that ballast, said David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and formerly the World Banks China country director.

Even so, Dollar believes theres an underlying stability to the U.S.-China economic relations that is independent of the politics, borne out of three decades of investments and activity from businesses on both sides that are keen on preventing disruptions in trade and commerce.

In a U.S.-China business leaders meeting in Washington this week ahead of the two-nation economic dialogue, executives including chiefs of e-commerce giant Alibaba and U.S. multinationals like General Motors and JPMorgan Chase urged leaders of the two countries to resolve disputes through negotiations instead of resorting to remedies such as sanctions, which could trigger a trade war.

One action the Trump administration could announce soon is tariffs on steel imports, of which there is a worldwide excess thanks to overproduction in China. Trump officials are considering applying tariffs on the grounds that the imports present a threat to U.S. national security, but businesses and analysts alike fear such a move could prompt retaliation from China and other countries.

Andy Rothman, a former career U.S. Foreign Service worker in China who is now an investment strategist at Matthews Asia in San Francisco, said the Trump administration would do better to work on opening Chinas markets further rather than focusing on the trade deficit or sanctions on steel and aluminum.

From Xi and the Chinese, Rothman said, all the signs are that they want to have a good, stable and productive relationship with Trump and the U.S. But like other analysts, Rothman is more dubious about where Trump stands on the matter, given the erratic and the conflicting signals from the White House on trade and from Trump himself.

I was expecting him to come out of the gates on January 20th blasting at China, based on what he said during the campaign, Rothman said. All of a sudden he and Xi are buddies. Its hard to know what the deal is.

don.lee@latimes.com

Follow me at @dleelatimes
Google Glass is back, but this time the much-hyped, yet oft-ridiculed eyewear isnt leaving the workplace.

On Tuesday, Google announced the launch of Glass Enterprise Edition, a second version of the augmented reality gadget intended for use in warehouses, hospitals and factories  where Glass has found some success despite its lackluster public reception.

Google pulled the plug on its Glass pilot program in 2015 amid concern that owners could use the devices camera to record people without their knowledge. Yet the device remains in use in some workplaces where displaying information in an employees line of sight can help streamline tasks.

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Jay Kothari, project lead of Google Glass, wrote in a blog post Tuesday that General Electrics mechanics have improved their efficiency between 8% and 12% using Glass.

The new version, with an improved camera, battery and connections with other devices, is designed to be attached to glasses frames. That lets wearers choose frames  or safety goggles  that suit their face or profession, according to the Glass press website.

Costs vary based on a companys level of software customization, customer support and training needs. Google declined to comment on specifics.

The Mountain View, Calif., companys shift from a $1,700-gadget sold to individuals to a business tool sold to corporations is a savvy pivot, said J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst at research firm Forrester.

Gownder said companies praise the technology  a stark contrast from the consumer criticism of a few years ago.

They are really making clear that this is for the enterprise market and not consumers, Gownder said. Consumers, they really hated the privacy dimension of Google Glass a few years ago, they found that hard to deal with  this idea of people recording people at bars, walking down the street. But all thats gone when its just used in the workplace all day.

The public may be growing more at ease with face-mounted gadgets after the success of Snapchat maker Snap Inc.s Spectacles  a pair of sunglasses with a camera in the hinge. The buzzed-about device faced little consumer backlash and as of Tuesday is available for purchase on Amazon, the Verge first reported.

But analysts say Google and Snaps products are more different than they are alike.

Spectacles use case is obviously focused primarily on hands-free sharing video with friends when it would otherwise be too cumbersome to do so with your phone  think GoPro scenarios, said Michael Kim, chief executive at Kim Advisory Capital, who has consulted for Google and other clients on Google Glass. Google Glass Enterprise, however, has a far broader set of valuable potential use cases like surgery, law enforcement, military, healthcare, sports, theme parks, even the theater.

Kim doesnt see Google trying again with a consumer market any time soon and said the business-to-business market will be far more profitable for the foreseeable future.

Google now has the potential to earn a large share of the immersive headset market, which is anticipated to reach $26.7 billion by 2020, said Stephanie Llamas, vice president of research and strategy at SuperData Research.

alexa.dangelo@latimes.com

@andangelo15
Wielding sharpies, foam swords and protective tubes to guard the exclusive treasures they hope to find, more than a hundred thousand pop culture and comics aficionados are about to descend on the city of San Diego for Comic-Con International, the annual gathering for all things geek.

But for some longtime fans and retailers, a tipping point has been reached in the profitable but uneasy alliance between the comic-book world and Hollywood.

For the first time in 44 years, retailer Mile High Comics will be skipping the convention. Considered the countrys largest comic-book dealer, Mile High regularly brought 100,000 comics to sell on the convention hall floor.

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San Diego has grown far beyond its original premise, wrote Chuck Rozanski, founder and president of the Colorado-based Mile High Comics, on the retailers website, morphing from what was originally a wonderful annual gathering of the comics world, into a world-renowned pop culture and media festival.

RELATED: Inside Comic-Cons Hall H, the most important room in Hollywood

Its no secret that Comic-Con went Hollywood years ago, but with each new convention its harder for independent comics retailers to make an impression, especially when they not only have to compete with major studio presentations in the famed Hall H and displays from DC and Marvel that dominate the convention floor, but with a growing number of attractions outside Comic-Con, available to anyone who happens to be in the area.

The now-defunct Zombie Walk, seen here in 2013, was an attraction fans without a convention badge enjoyed outside Comic-Con. This year, zombie-loving fans of late director George Romero will gather Saturday evening at San Diegos Childrens Park for a horror cosplay meet up. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)

Offering tributes of buttons, T-shirts and manicures, the entire Gaslamp Quarter will transform into a geek metropolis. NBCs new series Midnight, Texas will offer free food and tarot card readings at a local restaurant, coffee drinks will be renamed White Walker Mochas and the Syfy channel will legally marry superfans in a makeshift chapel with the help of officiant Orlando Jones from American Gods.

As a businessman, I can tell you that the fact that the city of San Diego is allowing dozens of [attractions] around the venue is contributing to a decline in traffic in that main hall, Rozanski told The Times. The off-site traffic is good for fans because it enhances the experience. But when you have HBO putting their Game of Thrones experience across from the convention center, that acts as a real magnet. As an exhibitor, when youre paying $18,000 [for a spot on the convention floor] you dont want to see your customers leave for across the street.

The hard truth is that many of those potential customers would rather see their favorite stars than shop for comic books. As the masses sweep in, so do the winds of change for the annual convention.

Each year a new contender jockeys for prominence and applause from the hordes of pop culture connoisseurs. The shifting power dynamic ushers in new faces like first-timer Krysten Ritter, aka TVs Jessica Jones, who will join her fellow cast mates from Netflixs new Marvel team-up series The Defenders.

Krysten Ritter, whose portrayal as Jessica Jones was a Netflix hit, is making her first appearance at Comic-Con with the cast of Marvels new Netflix series The Defenders. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)

Were all on the same flight, its going to be a party bus situation, Ritter told The Times. Thats right, somewhere up in the sky before their Hall H appearance Friday night Jessica Jones (Ritter) will be riding high with Daredevil (Charlie Cox), Luke Cage (Mike Colter) and the Iron Fist (Finn Jones) en route to Comic-Con.

We roll like that, Ritter continued, revealing that shell most likely end up sharing a seat with Colter. And Ill call in advance to cancel all their cars, so we all have to ride together. Its more fun.

The list of rookie inductees includes the brand-new series Krypton and Black Lightning, which will both premiere their pilots on Wednesdays preview night. Broad City has constructed a life-size coloring book to be displayed off-site, and the hotly anticipated Star Trek: Discovery will be making a cameo on Saturday in Ballroom 20.

Yet no matter how bold the marketing gesture, each attempt to win over fans must appease the chorus of the crowds lest they be marked with the unspeakable shame of being not canon or even worse, meh.

I always argue with the studios about the best way to deal with Comic-Con, director Matthew Vaughn, no stranger to the congregation of Comic-Con, told The Times, taking a break from working on his latest film. And Ive always said be honest with everyone. Show them scenes and footage, not big montages and lots of gimmicky distractive tactics.

Director Matthew Vaughn, a Comic-Con veteran, is appearing at the conventions vaunted Hall H with his newest film, Kingsman: The Golden Circle. (Karwai Tang / WireImage)

His time in Hall H with Kick-Ass and Kingsman: The Secret Service has served him well  he knows what the people want. When he returns to the stage this year with the 20th Century Fox panel Thursday, hell show a sneak peek of Kingsman: The Golden Circle, the sequel to his cult-loved spy flick. Joining Vaughn on stage for the studios panel will be the stars of the spy comedy, Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Halle Berry, Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges and Pedro Pascal.

But if youre looking for big spoilers, dont hold your breath, Vaughn knows how to play to the crowds.

My rule for Comic-Con has always been: Only show stuff from the first two reels, said Vaughn. I did that on Kingsman 1 and Kick-Ass. Its such an obvious thing to do  show the big, flash stuff toward the end of the movie and try and dazzle people. If youve got an ace, you dont always have to play it. And weve got a lot of aces.

For some, like It director Andres Muschietti, the experience of presenting at Comic-Con will be more of a release than anything else. After working on the much-talked-about Stephen King adaptation for three years, hes ready to show off what he and his team have been working on. Throughout [filming] I was basically feeling and sensing the presence of the fans, Muschietti told The Times. Its going to be a thrill to finally meet them in person.

The horror maker isnt nervous, just a bit restless about having to only tease a little bit. The thing that makes me anxious is the movie wont be out for another month and a half, Muschietti explained. But I cant wait to show it!

The real prize fight, however, will continue to be between the DC Extended Universe and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. How will Marvel respond to the success of Warner Bros. Wonder Woman? And can the next offerings from the DC world compete with the tremendous cast of Avengers: Infinity War? The two duke it out on Saturday, separated only by time and measured by who can drop the biggest bombshell announcement or trailer.

But is it all too much? Vaughn, for one, understands why many say that Comic-Con has been hijacked in recent years: A little too many films and too many people and stars all turning up, sort of forgetting what Comic-Con is.

After all, the heart of Comic-Con has always been comics. And despite the defection of Mile High Comics, many large and small comic book writers and artists will be well represented. Whats more, even with the dominance of Hollywood at the convention, few can deny the appeal of bringing the two worlds together: When movies and comics are combined, Vaughn said, thats like that gold dust at Comic-Con.

When Hollywood star power and comics come together: Fast and Furious actor Tyrese Gibson introducing his comic book Mayhem to a friendly crowd at ComicCon International 2009. (Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times)

Still, Mile High will be missed. No one from Comic-Con was available to respond to owner Rozanskis complaints that the organization has gotten too big to service the needs of devoted retailers or that longtime supporters will no longer be given priority for next years convention passes in favor of the automated computer lottery. But he wishes this years attendees well.

San Diego Comic-Con is magic, Rozanski said. Its an entity all its own. It is a pop culture mecca for people from all around the world and I wish them nothing but the best. But it moved on and its not my world anymore.

Yet no one can deny the appeal of bringing the two worlds together: When movies and comics are combined, thats like that gold dust at Comic-Con,

See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour 

The Best Moments of Comic-Con 2017: Star Trek: Discovery, Blade Runner and more On Now Video: The Best Cosplay of Comic-Con 2017 2:04 On Now "The Tick" Cast Says The Fan Pressure Is Real at Comic-Con 2017 9:45 On Now Video: Inside the LA Times studio at Comic-Con On Now The stars of "Riverdale" talk season 2 at Comic Con On Now "Stranger Things" Cast At Comic-Con 2017 On Now "Inhumans" Cast Was Blown Away By The Comic-Con Panel Turnout 4:44 On Now Watch: The cast and writers of "Ready Player One" talk Easter eggs and Spielberg's nerd cred at Comic Con On Now "Twin Peaks" Cast Talks About Working With David Lynch 5:03 On Now "Annabelle: Creation" Cast Says They Blessed The Set 6:40 On Now "Supergirl" Cast Loves To Sing 4:13

meredith.woerner@latimes.com

Twitter: @MdellW

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CBS S.W.A.T. reboot will take on the Trump years, #BlackLivesMatter, says Shemar Moore By Meredith Blake Stephanie Sigman and Shemar Moore (Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP) Dont let the funky theme song or the 70s origins fool you. While technically a remake  of both the original series and the subsequent 2003 film based on it  CBS upcoming cop drama S.W.A.T. is very plugged into the current moment, according to its cast and creators. In the series, former Criminal Minds star Shemar Moore plays a native Angeleno who runs a tactical unit for the LAPD and finds his loyalty torn between his fellow officers and the community in which he was raised. As co-creator Aaron Rahsaan Thomas told reporters Tuesday at the Television Critics Assn. press tour, the series was inspired by his experiences growing up in Kansas City, which have helped him understand both sides of the raging debate over police violence. I grew up in a neighborhood that had a very complicated view towards police officers, said Thomas, who created the series with veteran showrunner Shawn Ryan. On one hand, a 12-year-old kid who was a neighbor of mine was shot and killed by a police officer. On the other hand, another neighbor of mine was an actual police officer. Moore, best known for his long run on the CBS procedural Criminal Minds, noted the diversity of the cast and creative team and added that, while the show is primarily designed to entertain, it will also resonate politically. Were taking on the Trump years, he said. I dont care who you voted for. Its just whats happening today. Its Black Lives Matter. As much as some people dont want to hear it, its All Lives Matter. Its not just black versus blue or black versus white. Its every ethnicity. Its fear. Its racism. Its terrorism. Its subject matter of today. Ryan, who created the groundbreaking drama The Shield, about corrupt Los Angeles police officers, said he was excited about the chance to examine the often charged relationship between law enforcement and the communities they serve. Los Angeles is such a diverse, amazing community, and seeing an officer who kind of lives in the city and sort of sees the people that are being policed as humans and as neighbors and as friends was really important to me. Facebook

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Netflix getting A Little Help from Carol Burnett By Libby Hill What do you get when you pair up a living legend with a bunch of little kids? Comedy gold, if Netflix has its way. The online streaming service announced Monday that comedy icon Carol Burnett will be returning to television with A Little Help With Carol Burnett, an original unscripted series that pairs Burnett with children to tackle lifes dilemmas. Someone once asked me how old I am inside, Burnett said in a statement Monday. I thought about it and came up with, Im about 8. So its going to be a lot of fun playing with kids my age. Kids ages 4 to 8 will join Burnett as celebrities and everyday folks bring their real-life problems to the show to get advice in front of a live studio audience. Were thrilled Carol is bringing her unique sensibilities to Netflix, Bela Bajaria, the services vice president of content acquisition, said in Mondays announcement. Carol is truly a legend in the entertainment industry with unprecedented success and fandom across TV, film and the stage, and we are both honored and excited to work with her. A Little Help With Carol Burnett will be produced by Dick Clark Productions and is the companys first Netflix project. This is the second television project announced this year for Burnett, 84. In February, ABC ordered a pilot for the multi-camera comedy Household Name, starring Burnett, though the series has not been picked up in its current iteration. Debuting in 2018, A Little Help With Carol Burnett will feature 12 half-hour episodes. Facebook

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Ken Burns explains why his Vietnam War documentary is more relevant than ever By Libby Hill Ken Burns in Beverly Hilton on Sunday. (Richard Shotwell / Invision) History doesnt repeat itself, Ken Burns told a room of journalists gathered Sunday at the Television Critics Assn. summer press tour in Beverly Hills Were not condemned to repeat what we dont remember, Burns explained. Its that human nature never changes. Its a curious statement from the storied documentarian, particularly given his latest project, the 18-hour, 10-part documentary series The Vietnam War, directed with Lynn Novick. But just because humanity isnt trapped in a constantly repeating cycle doesnt mean that the echoes of modern strife arent plentiful throughout the upcoming PBS series. This is a story about mass demonstrations all across the country against the current administration, Burns said in response to a question about what the youth of America will find relevant in The Vietnam War. About a White House obsessed with leaks and in disarray because of those leaks, about a president railing against you, the news media, for making up news. Its about asymmetrical warfare, which even the mighty might of the United States Army cant figure out the correct strategy to take, and its about big document drops of classified material thats been hacked, that suddenly is dumped into the public sphere, destabilizing the conventional wisdom about really important topics and accusations that a political campaign reached out to a foreign power at the time of a national election to influence that election. This is the film we started in 2006, and every single one of those points are points about the Vietnam War having nothing to do with today, Burns concluded. By creating a fully-formed picture of Vietnam, Burns hopes to shed light on the rancor and alienation defining this present moment, he explained. For Novick, the thematic relevance only serves to help teachers who have long struggled in tackling the Vietnam War. Weve had great response from teachers already that the Vietnam War is difficult to teach because its controversial and unsettled history and theyre looking forward to using the film in the classroom, Novick said. Those resonances that Ken is talking about, those will be assignments for students. Were not going to have to work very hard with teachers to come up with those themes, and students are curious about whats happening now. The Vietnam War premieres Sept. 17 at 8 p.m. PDT Facebook

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Goodbye, MTV Moonman trophy. Hello, Moon Person By Emily Mae Czachor MTVs token space cadet just scored an identity revamp  and gender didnt make the cut. In a recent interview with the New York Times, MTV President Chris McCarthy said the networks iconic Moonman trophy has been discontinued. From now on, the metallic figurine  whose impenetrably opaque helmet has become the unofficial face of MTVs Video Music Awards  will go by Moon Person instead. Because who knows whats really going on beneath that lacquered astronaut getup, anyway. Why should it be a man? McCarthy told the Times. It could be a man, it could be a woman, it could be transgender, it could be nonconformist. This new development is just the latest installment in MTVs string of efforts to do away with gender norms during its awards proceedings. The network eliminated gender-specific categories at its MTV Movie & TV Awards earlier this year, where all nominees were placed in neutral categories (i.e. best actor in a show, best actor in a movie). And the network isnt going to stop there. McCarthy also announced a new MTV reality series  still in development called We Are They about a group of gender-nonconforming young adults coming of age. With Katy Perry hosting, the VMAs will broadcast from the Forum in Inglewood on Aug. 27. Heres the full list of nominees. Facebook

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Sam Shepard: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor and ... avant-garde drummer? By Randall Roberts Sam Shepard in 2014. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) Sam Shepard, whose death at 73 was announced on Monday, will be remembered for his cross-discipline versatility. As a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, he penned classic off-Broadway plays including True West, Buried Child and Fool for Love. An Oscar-nominated actor, he starred in films including Days of Heaven, The Right Stuff, Crimes of the Heart and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. To fans of underground music, however, Shepard served a lesser-known role as the drummer for seminal New York avant-garde folk band the Holy Modal Rounders, with whom he performed on the crucial late 1960s albums Indian War Whoop and The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders. The band is best known for its song If You Want to Be a Bird, which plays during the classic scene in Easy Rider in which Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson roar down the highway on their motorcycles. Thats Shepard playing drums as Rounders founders Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber whoop and yowl. It was in his capacity as a percussionist, in fact, that he drew the attention of a young Patti Smith, who, in her 2010 memoir Just Kids, recounted their first early 70s meeting at seminal music club the Village Gate. Escorted to the club by Todd Rundgren, who had just issued his album Runt, Smith described the Holy Modal Rounders set as like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies. I was fixed on the drummer, who seemed as if he was on the lam and had slid behind the drums while cops looked elsewhere. Smith, who at the time was freelancing for Crawdaddy magazine, introduced herself to this drummer, who said his name was Slim Shadow. The two started hanging out, wrote Smith, describing his tales as being even taller than mine. He had an infectious laugh and was rugged, smart, and intuitive. In my mind, he was the fellow with the cowboy mouth. Only later did she learn Slims real identity when a friend pulled her aside after seeing them at a restaurant together. As recounted in Just Kids, Smith wrote that her friend asked, What are you doing with Sam Shepard? Sam Shepard? I said. Oh, no, this guys name is Slim. Honey, dont you know who he is? Hes the drummer for the Holy Modal Rounders. No, corrected her friend, Hes the biggest playwright off-Broadway. He had a play at Lincoln Center. He won five Obies! Once she learned of his reputation and acclaim, Smith and Shepard continued to see each other -- despite his being married at the time -- and eventually collaborated on a play called Cowboy Mouth. Smith described telling him of nervousness at writing for the stage, which she had never done. But Shepard urged her on, Smith wrote, telling her that you cant make a mistake when you improvise. Replied Smith: What if I screw up the rhythm? You cant, Shepard explained. Its like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another. 7:15 a.m. Updated to correct the title of Smiths memoir, Just Kids, and to identify the Holy Modal Rounders co-founders, Stampfel and Weber. Facebook

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Lady Gaga subpoenaed in producer Dr. Lukes lawsuit against pop singer Kesha By Randall Roberts The ongoing offstage drama between the pop singer Kesha and her former producer Dr. Luke has entangled another platinum superstar: Lady Gaga. On Saturday, attorneys for Dr. Luke, whose real name is Lukasz Gottwald, issued a statement regarding their attempt to depose Lady Gaga about relevant conversations she may have had with Kesha. The artist, who was born Kesha Sebert, is the subject of a defamation suit filed in New York by Dr. Luke stemming from allegations of sexual misconduct, which the producer vigorously denies. The statement reads: Dr. Lukes counsel served a subpoena on Lady Gaga because she has relevant information regarding, among other things, false statements about Dr. Luke made to her by Kesha. This motion has become necessary because Dr. Lukes counsel has not been able to obtain, despite repeated request [sic], a deposition date from Lady Gaga. The protracted legal battle between Dr. Luke, left, and Kesha has brought Lady Gaga into the fray. (Kevin Winter / Getty Images) Representatives for Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, said in a statement issued to The Times on Monday morning: As Lady Gagas legal team will present to the court, she has provided all of the relevant information in her possession and is at most an ancillary witness in this process. Dr. Lukes team is attempting to manipulate the truth and draw press attention to their case by exaggerating Lady Gagas role and falsely accusing her of dodging reasonable requests. Among the information Lady Gaga has provided are copies of text messages that were, according to a report on TMZ, heavily redacted. Lady Gaga has been a vocal Kesha supporter. Last year, Gaga wrote about her peers plight in an Instagram post: The very reason women dont speak up for years is the fear that no one will believe them or their abuser has threatened their life or life of their loved ones/livelihood in order to keep their victim quiet and under control. What happened to Kesha has happened to many female artists, including myself, and it will affect her for the rest of her life. The news comes at a particularly crucial moment for Keshas career. On Aug. 11, she will release her highly anticipated new album, Rainbow. The record, featuring songs such as Learn to Let Go, will arrive via Dr. Lukes imprint, Kemosabe, a situation Kesha sought to avoid in a 2014 lawsuit of her own, which she later dropped. Facebook

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Ride on, genius: Celebrities mourn the loss of Sam Shepard By Emily Mae Czachor Acclaimed actor and playwright Sam Shepard died July 27 at age 73. (Charles Sykes / Associated Press) Sam Shepard  Oscar-nominated actor and critically acclaimed playwright, author, screenwriter and director  died on July 27 after suffering complications from ALS (Lou Gehrigs Disease). When news of his death broke Monday morning, Twitter erupted with posts to mourn, honor and remember one of show business beloved renaissance men. View Instagram post This story was updated with additional reactions. Facebook

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Macaulay Culkin got his first tattoo with goddaughter Paris Jackson, and its a match By Emily Mae Czachor For Paris Jackson, getting inked is nothing out of the ordinary. With more than 50 tattoos already under her belt, the 19-year-old daughter of late pop king Michael Jackson collects body art like postage stamps. According to E! News, the budding actress got her latest over the weekend: an understated sketch of a red spoon, just below the crook of her left arm. A new tattoo might be old-hat for Jackson, but it wasnt for Macaulay Culkin, Jacksons 36-year-old godfather -- and first-time tattoo patron -- who emerged from West Hollywoods Tattoo Mania with a matching spoon on his own forearm. Though neither Jackson nor Culkin spoke to the meaning of the double-inking, the design is supposedly meant to represent a kind of chronic struggle. And thats not the only news that Culkin made recently. The Internet nearly lost its collective mind last week when a new photo emerged of the Home Alone actor looking healthy and happy. E! News even declared that Culkin definitely just won 2017s greatest makeover. Your eyes aren't deceiving you. Macaulay Culkin definitely just won 2017's greatest makeover (thus far, at least). https://t.co/IdKjxii5KZ pic.twitter.com/SOAuSx57oU  E! News (@enews) July 27, 2017 Facebook

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Alex Jones products are almost as bad as his conspiracy theories, says John Oliver By Meredith Blake Over the last year, conspiracy theorist and influential radio host Alex Jones has come under intense scrutiny for his fringe beliefs, most notably his claim that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax perpetrated by the government. On Sundays Last Week Tonight, John Oliver noted that Jones status as a Sandy Hook truther qualified him for an Easy Pass to hells version of the champagne room. But he spent most of his time on a relatively overlooked aspect of Jones conspiracy empire -- the wide range of products that he sells in order to fund it. According to Oliver, Jones spends nearly a quarter of his airtime plugging InfoWars-branded merchandise, including Wake Up America Patriot coffee to Combat One Tactical Bath Wipes and a powder called Caveman True Paleo (made from chocolate and domesticated bird corpses, Oliver joked). As the comedian pointed out, it just so happens that many of the products Jones sells, often at a significant markup, purport to address the conspiracy theories with equally wild-eyed zeal. Think: water filters to remove chemicals that supposedly turn frogs gay or vitamins to boost your immunity and ward off germs from allegedly disease-ridden refugees. Jones even has his own in-house expert, Dr. Edward Group, with dubious qualifications (and equally questionable hair) to back up his various outlandish claims. InfoWars is essentially a QVC for conspiracy, Oliver argued. So in the spirit of InfoWars, Oliver decided to introduce his own personal care product, John Oliver Moisture-Armored Tactical Assault Wipes, available via Infowipes.com. The price? A mere $1 million. Worth every penny, were sure. You can watch the complete segment here. Facebook

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Vintage Casablanca poster sells for $478,000 By Trevell Anderson How much would someone pay for a vintage movie poster? Well, if that film is Casablanca, one persons answer is $478,000. Thats how much a bidder coughed up Saturday for the only known surviving Italian-issue poster for the 1942 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. The poster sold through Heritage Auctions of Dallas. The buyer has just set a world record and acquired what we in the poster collecting world would equate to a masterpiece, said Grey Smith, Heritages director of vintage posters. The stunning artistry put into this poster makes it stand head and shoulders above any paper produced for the film. The poster, measuring 55.5 inches by 78.25 inches, was produced in 1946. The film opened in Italy on Nov. 21 that year, almost four years after its U.S. premiere. Featuring artwork by Luigi Martinati, the poster is considered the best of the pictures numerous advertisements, Smith said. Previous Italian-issue posters for the film have sold for as much as $203,000. A U.S.-issue of the poster has fetched $191,200. The auction featured other rare posters for the film, with a half-sheet going for $65,725, and a postwar Spanish-release poster selling for $35,850. ---------- For the Record An earlier version of this article misstated the purchase price of the Casablanca poster sold Saturday as $487,000. Facebook

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There is no Plan B for public broadcasting without federal funding, PBS president says By Libby Hill Paula Kerger, chief executive of PBS (Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images) PBS President and Chief Executive Paula Kerger wasnt pulling any punches Sunday at the Television Critics Assn. summer press tour in Beverly Hills. When people say, What is the Plan B for [loss of federal funding]? There is no Plan B for that, Kerger said of the potential budget crisis public broadcasting faces under the Trump administration. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been under fire for months, with President Trumps proposed budget axing the institutions $450-million budget. Though its easy to suggest that budget cuts would threaten Big Birds livelihood, the true victims of defunding would be far more human. Kerger explained that of PBS $450-million budget, one-third goes to radio. Of the television budget, most goes to community service grants that local stations use for up to 50% of their operating budgets. PBS itself will not go away. But a number of our stations will. If you are a station for whom 30 or 40 or 50% of your funding is suddenly pulled away, theres no way you can make up that money, Kerger said. You will find big parts of the country that will suddenly be without public broadcasting. The fate of public broadcasting is currently in flux, waiting for the end of Congress August recess for resolution. Currently, the House Appropriations Committee has approved the bulk of the PBS budget, while the House Budget Committee recommended doing away with funding altogether. Budget concerns aside, Kerger also addressed other unresolved PBS matters. The second seat of PBS NewsHour has been vacant since the untimely death of co-host Gwen Ifill in November 2016, leaving Judy Woodruff as the shows sole anchor. We have encouraged [executive producer] Sara Just and Judy Woodruff and the team at NewsHour to take their time and think very carefully about who that right person [to replace Ifill] is, Kerger said. Im hopeful that they will be making an announcement sometime over the next few months of a new anchor. Kerger also announced an upcoming project aimed at inspiring the country to come together in celebration of literature. The Great American Read is an eight-part series launching in spring 2018 that explores the nations 100 best-loved books, chosen by the American people and culminating in the first-ever national vote to choose Americas Best-Loved Book. Facebook

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AMC Visionaries adds Eli Roth, Roots, Gibney for new docu-series By Meredith Woerner Robert Kirkman, left, and Eli Roth at the Television Critics Assn. summer press tour in Beverly Hills. ( Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images for AMC) AMC announced several additions to its upcoming Visionaries docu-series Saturday at the Television Critics Assn. summer press tour in Beverly Hills. Writer-director-actor Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel) will be offering a deeper look into his signature style of genre filmmaking with Eli Roths History of Horror (working title) and Ahmir Questlove Thompson, Tariq Black Thought Trotter (founding members of The Roots) and Alex Gibney (Going Clear, History of the Eagles) will executive produce a series called Rap Yearbook (another working title). The cable network also has three other installments in development: History of Video Games, Outlaws of the Internet, and History of Martial Arts. The new Visionaries members join the previously announced programs Robert Kirkmans Secret History of Comics and James Camerons Story of Science Fiction. Kirkman and Roth were present at the AMC panel with Cameron appearing via satellite to show sneak peeks from the comics and sci-fi iterations of the series. A sizzle reel for the Secret History of Comics utilized plenty of classic panel pages and a sort of motion comic-like animation to illustrate the early days of Marvel Comics, going all the way back to the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby days. But the real treat was a collection of cameos, famous faces opining about their love of the form including Lee himself, J.K. Simmons, Kevin Smith, and Method Man, who earnestly revealed, You have to be born a comic book fan, I think. And there are plenty more talking heads to come, the AMC press release promised Patty Jenkins, Lynda Carter, Famke Janssen, Michelle Rodriguez, and Todd McFarlane. The second clip shared a look at Camerons love letter to science fiction. Today, science fiction is mainstream but it didnt used to be that way, the director explained. When I was a kid science fiction wasnt cool, but I thought it was cool. Cameron wants to focus on closing the gap between current fans knowledge of modern day sci-fi to the pioneering works of literature that inspired the blockbuster offerings of today. The Terminator and Avatar director noted that without Jules Verne and H.G. Wells there would be no Avengers, Star Wars or his own works. The series will be divided by theme -- space travel, time travel etc.-- and include appearances from Paul W. Anderson, Roland Emmerich, Paul Verhoeven, Bryan Singer, Keanu Reeves, Jonathan Nolan, David Gerrold and D.C. Fontana. When asked how their respective series would showcase diversity -- the footage screened was very male-centric -- Kirkman responded that History of Comics would have two episodes devoted to diversity. One will focus on the women who helped Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston steer the course of the hugely famous female superhero, and another highlighting people of color titled The Color of Comics. The episode explores the history of black characters, and the lack of black characters in the comic book industry, said Kirkman. which touches on the creation of Black Panther  the Marvel character  and does a really cool focus on this company called Milestone Comics that was founded by a group of African American comic book creators to create characters that appealed to them and represented them, because there was a huge lack of representation in comics even in the 90s. You wouldnt have horror without Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, Roth added. He cited the late George Romero as an example of how he wants to break down the themes within the horror genre. At the height of the civil rights movement [Romero] puts an African American as the lead of Night of the Living Dead and at the end of the movie hes shot by a bunch of rednecks. Not because of the color of his skin, but because they think hes a zombie. But you can read into the implications of that. What [Romero] was doing with using genre to explore racism was so ahead of its time. its just as potent today as it was 50 years ago. Its absolutely something were going to be discussing. Roths urgency to document the horror masters was apparent. It was the death of Scream moviemaker Wes Craven that inspired Roth to get involved in Visionaries. The panel then took a turn for the analytical when the creators were asked how their series would reflect the world today. The fact that dystopian science fiction has come back, especially in television and in movies, is very important, said Cameron. It means that in the age that we live in right now the challenges that face us are technological. Theyre science challenges: climate change, genetics, artificial intelligence, things like that. These are really on our horizon as major, existential threats. The best horror reflects whats going on in our times, said Roth. He used Jordan Peeles Get Out  which addressed modern day racial tensions as a reference. Its no accident that movie coming out right now is making over $200 million at the box office. You can tell its really resonating with people. Bouncing off Camerons dystopia revelation, Roth then turned his lens onto the current political climate, I dont think weve ever seen a cast of characters like this in our White House thats straight out of WWF wrestling in the 80s. When [Anthony Scaramucci] is coming out with things that would make Rowdy Roddy Piper in his heyday blush. This is a farce, is this actually happening? When will we start seeing this dystopian outlook on the current political climate in the movies? Possibly before Roths series, which will air sometime in 2018, after History of Comics and the Story of Science Fiction in 2017. Facebook

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President Trump got a fan letter from a young boy this week. Stephen Colbert introduced another young fan Friday By Greg Braxton Stephen Colbert, host of CBS The Late Show. (Michael Loccisano / Getty Images) White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders took time during a White House briefing this week to read a fan letter to President Trump from a 9-year-old boy named Dylan who has the nickname of Pickle. Sanders read part of the letter to reporters: Youre my favorite President ... I dont know why people dont like you. Sanders interjected, Neither do I, Dylan. The letter continued, You seem really nice. Can we be friends? Sanders assured Pickle that she had spoken directly to Trump about him, and the president would be more than happy to be your friend. Stephen Colbert on Friday brought another young fan of Trumps onstage Friday night to read her own letter during his CBS Late Show. Dear President, my name is Norah, but everybody calls me Mustard, the little girl recited. She continued, Youre my favorite current president. Norah then presented some probing questions to Trump: I was wondering, does the attorney general enjoy your full support? And how do you plan to implement the ban on transgender people currently serving in the military? Will those on active duty be called home? Sounds like a logistical nightmare. She continued, One more thing: Are you a puppet of Vladimir Putin? I love puppets! I made one at camp! Love, Mustard. The Late Show audience cheered. Facebook

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Broadways Great Comet producer apologizes for controversial Mandy Patinkin casting By Nardine Saad (Jeff Schear / Getty Images) The producer behind Broadways struggling musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812" has joined the apologetic refrain for the diversity uproar that followed the decision to bring in Mandy Patinkin to replace departing star Okieriete Oak Onaodowan, who is black. The production came under fire this week following its move to replace Onaodowan, who was in the original cast of Hamilton, with Tony Award winner Patinkin in a titular role. As part of our sincere efforts to keep Comet running for the benefit of its cast, creative team, crew, investors and everyone else involved, we arranged for Mandy Patinkin to play Pierre, co-producer Howard Kagan said in an official statement posted Friday on Twitter. Kagan said they had the wrong impression of how Onaodowan felt about Patinkins casting and how it would be received by members of the theater community, which we appreciate is deeply invested in the success of actors of color  as are we  and to whom we are grateful for bringing this to our attention. We regret our mistake deeply, and wish to express our apologies to everyone who felt hurt and betrayed by these actions, he said. The legendary Broadway star dropped out of the musical on Friday after the announcement that he would be replacing the African American star was met with disdain. Patinkin was to join the cast for a limited run from Aug. 15 through Sept. 3, but declined the part because he would never accept a role knowing it would harm another actor. I hear what members of the community have said and I agree with them. I am a huge fan of Oak and I will, therefore, not be appearing in the show, the Homeland alum tweeted. Another tweet on the shows account included an apology to Patinkin for any misunderstanding and said they understood his decision to withdraw from the show. Our deepest apologies. pic.twitter.com/Mks7XLGxbq  The Great Comet (@GreatCometBway) July 28, 2017 pic.twitter.com/vSZk6K2KOV  The Great Comet (@GreatCometBway) July 28, 2017 Onaodowan, who had replaced recording artist Josh Groban in the role of Pierre earlier this month, is scheduled to continue to perform through Aug. 13, after which, he stated Friday on Twitter, he will not return to the show. It is unclear if his decision to leave the production was his own or prompted by other factors. Show creator Dave Malloy, whose musical was inspired by a portion of Leo Tolstoys War and Peace, also apologized Friday on Twitter for how everything went down and missing the racial optics of their casting decision. They had previously asked actress Brittain Ashford to step aside for the casting of better-known singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson during the summer months and they didnt anticipate that Patinkins casting would be viewed differently, Malloy said. Despite 12 Tony Award nominations, Comet only received two wins -- for set and lighting -- at the June ceremony and ticket sales ebbed when Groban departed. Malloy said that sales for shows after Aug. 13, when Michaelsons run would also end, were catastrophically low. So they decided to cast Patinkin, hoping that his star power would help boost sales, because the weird show was in desperate shape and on the brink of closing. Facebook

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Eagles, Doobie Brothers will play Classic Northwest show Sept. 30 in Seattle By Randy Lewis The reconfigured Eagles, shown during a July 15 performance at Dodger Stadium, will continue with a Sept. 30 Classic Northwest concert with the Doobie Brothers in Seattle. (Kevin Mazur / Getty Images) The EaglesClassic music festival series will continue with at least one more stop, this time in Seattle. But unlike the inaugural Classic West bill July 15-16 at Dodger Stadium, which is having a Classic East encore this weekend in New York, the added Classic Northwest show on Sept. 30 will be just a single day and feature the Eagles and Doobie Brothers only. The Classic West and East shows teamed the Eagles, Steely Dan and Doobie Brothers on one day, with Fleetwood Mac, Journey and Earth, Wind & Fire on the second day of each. Tickets for the Classic Northwest bill go on sale Aug. 5 at 10 a.m. at Ticketmaster. At the outset of the Eagles portion of Classic West on July 15, co-founder Don Henley indicated it was still uncertain how much of a future his long-running band might have absent co-founder Glenn Frey, who died last year at 67. To make the Classic West and East shows possible, the group tapped Freys son, singer-guitarist Deacon Frey, and country music star Vince Gill to handle the lead vocals on the many Eagles songs that were originally sung by Glenn Frey. In case this is our last dance, Henley told the crowd at Dodger Stadium, where he was joined by longtime bandmates Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit, we want to thank all of you in Southern California for all your support. Facebook

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In her new Hulu series, Sarah Silverman wants to love America -- seriously By Greg Braxton Executive producers Amy Zvi, left, and Adam McKay, star/executive producer Sarah Silverman and executive producer Gavin Purcell at Hulus I Love You, America panel at the TCA summer press tour. (Willy Sanjuan / Invision/Associated Press) From her stand-up act to her Comedy Central series to her Twitter account, comic-actress Sarah Silverman has a long history of courting laughs and controversy. Her outspokenness and sometimes absurd, sometimes acerbic views on everything from celebrity to culture to politics, particularly President Trump and his administration, have raised eyebrows. On her upcoming Hulu series, I Love You, America, Silverman is focused more on forming bonds than being provocative. In surveying the current political landscape and the comedy shows that skewer it, Silverman says she wants to reach out to all on the political spectrum. For me, [those shows are] great, but they really connect with more like-minded people. Theyre brilliant. Theyre funny. But Im hoping to, with this show, connect with un-like-minded people, Silverman said Thursday during a panel at the Television Critics Assn.'s summer press tour in Beverly Hills. The mission of the show is that were all the same. But whats important is that its funny. Although the exact format of the show is still being refined, Silverman did reveal some elements, including a monologue, a focus group in the studio and field pieces in which she travels around the country talking to people. For example, Silverman says she plans to go to Slidell, La., to meet a family that says they have never met a Jewish person. I cant help but have preconceived notions. They cant help but have preconceived notions, said Silverman. All I can do is just try to be open and brave and go into the situation. And same for them. Although Silverman and executive producer Adam McKay didnt make any sharp criticisms about Trump at Thursdays session, they did take exception to his attacks against so-called entertainment liberals or the Hollywood elite. What is he talking about? said Silverman. Im from ... New Hampshire. Everybody out here is from somewhere else. The goal of the show will be to seek common ground and understanding, she said: Ultimately were all the same. The thesis of the show is that everybody just wants to be loved. Facebook

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Jerry Seinfeld is Forbes highest-paid comedian; Amy Schumer still only woman to crack the top 10 By Nardine Saad If Jerry Seinfeld is this years king of comedy, then Amy Schumer is the queen. The Comedy Central star once again landed on Forbes list of highest-paid comedians, the financial magazine announced Thursday. She was the first woman comic to crack the top 10 last year and remains the only woman on the list this year. The Trainwreck and Snatched star made an estimated $37.5 million between June 2016 and June 2017 thanks to her Netflix show The Leather Special, her memoir The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo and endorsement deals with Bud Light and Old Navy. That ranked the raunchy comic No. 5 on the list filled with veteran comedy heavyweights. Meanwhile, the Seinfeld and Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee star shot back to the top of the list this year, earning an estimated $69 million. Seinfeld was eclipsed last year by Kevin Hart, who this year dropped to the No. 6 spot with $32.5 million. Chris Rock trailed Seinfeld for the second spot on Forbes list, earning $57 million. His record-breaking $20 million-per-special contract with Netflix paved the way for several comics, including Seinfeld, to cut lucrative deals with the streaming service, which is poised to become the go-to-destination for comedy specials. In addition to touring, those deals significantly padded the incomes of several stars on Forbes list. In the third and fourth spots, funnymen Louis C.K. and Dave Chappelle, who earned $52 million and $47 million, respectively, also made expensive deals with the streaming service to make their millions. To see Forbes complete list, click here. For the record, 10:40 a.m.: A previous headline and version of this story said that Schumer was the first woman to make the top 10 list this year. Schumer was the first woman to make the top 10 last year. Facebook

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American Horror Story: Cult gets sickeningly sweet in official poster By Libby Hill We're just beneath the surface... #AHSCult pic.twitter.com/GvnMD1KieQ  AmericanHorrorStory (@AHSFX) July 27, 2017 What exactly is beneath the surface in American Horror Story: Cult? Bees, apparently. The seventh season of FXs hit horror anthology series is slowly revealing itself via its official Twitter account. On Thursday, the series shared the official poster for the series, and it is super messed up. The poster features a deathly pale woman who happens to be missing the top of her head and, for that matter, her brain. Instead, the inside of her head is a honeycomb, replete with bees and, of course, honey. This is creepy for so many reasons. Here are a few: This poor woman has had the top of her skull removed, bringing to mind that particularly gruesome dinner scene featuring Anthony Hopkins and Ray Liotta in the 2001 film Hannibal. Even more horrifying is that this poor, sweet woman is definitely dressed like a clown. The white makeup, lines through the eyes and exaggerated ruby red lips suggest that AHS: Cult is drawing inspiration from traditional grotesque whiteface clown makeup. Think more Pennywise, less juggalo. (And if none of that is enough to scare you, please enjoy this clown dating site I stumbled across while researching all of this.) FXs American Horror Story: Cult premieres on Sept. 5. Facebook

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Stephen Colbert had some [bleeped] thoughts on Anthony Scaramuccis NSFW rant By Yvonne Villarreal (Richard Boeth / Associated Press) Stephen Colbert took a cue from incoming White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci -- or the Mooch, as hes called -- by giving Thursdays episode of The Late Show a decidedly NSFW vibe. We got an incredible taste of unfiltered Mooch today, Colbert said during his monologue. He was, of course, referring to Scaramuccis disapproving -- and often vulgar -- comments about White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Steve Bannon in a New Yorker article that sent social media tongues wagging Thursday. But to even discuss the matter, Colbert had to issue a warning to CBS censors: Youre going to want to break out the extra bleeps for this one, he said before diving in. (If only we could get our ellipses to put in some overtime!) In his colorful conversation with New Yorker correspondent Ryan Lizza, which took place Wednesday night,Scaramucci was trying to get to the bottom of who leaked that he had dinner at the White House with President Trump, the first lady, Sean Hannity and the former Fox News executive Bill Shine. Scaramucci described Priebus as a  ... paranoid schizophrenic who had blocked him from the White House for six months -- prompting Colbert to break out an impression of Scaramucci. Yes, the guys paranoid, OK? He thinks his own communications director is gonna stab him in the back again, Colbert said with an exaggerated Italian accent. Front stab! he added with a knifing gesture. The New Yorker article also detailed how Scaramucci accused Bannon of seeking to build [his] own brand off the  strength of the president and made some other inflammatory remarks that we cant fully detail. So well let Colbert take it from here. Facebook

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Longtime Disney imagineer Martin Sklar dies at 83 By Richard Verrier (Jae C Hong / Associated Press) Martin Marty Sklar, the pioneering Walt Disney Co. imagineer who played an instrumental role in the design of Disney theme parks, has died, the company announced Thursday night. He was 83. During his 54 years at Disney, Sklar worked closely with Walt Disney and led the creative development of the Burbank companys theme parks, attractions and resorts around the world, including the companys ventures in the cruise business, housing development and the redesign of Times Square in New York. Everything about Marty was legendary  his achievements, his spirit, his career, Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger said in a statement. He embodied the very best of Disney, from his bold originality to his joyful optimism and relentless drive for excellence. He was also a powerful connection to Walt himself. No one was more passionate about Disney than Marty and well miss his enthusiasm, his grace, and his indomitable spirit. Sklar was born in New Brunswick, N.J., and attended UCLA, where he was editor of the Daily Bruin newspaper when he was recruited to create the Disneyland News for Walt Disneys new Anaheim theme park in 1955. After graduating in 1956, he joined Disney full-time and would become Disneys lieutenant. He wrote speeches, marketing materials and a film showcasing Walts vision for Walt Disney World and the Epcot theme park in Florida. READ MORE> Facebook

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Is a happily ever after coming to The Mindy Project? By Yvonne Villarreal The Mindy Project creator/executive producer/star Mindy Kaling with executive producers Matt Warburton, left, and Ike Barinholtz at the shows Television Critics Assn. press tour panel. (Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP) Is there a happily ever after written in the stars for the final season of The Mindy Project? Series creator Mindy Kaling, who also plays the titular heroine at the center of the Hulu comedy, took the stage Thursday at the Television Critics Assn. press tour in Beverly Hills to discuss the shows swan song season. And when asked if Kalings rom-com-obsessed character, Mindy Lahiri, would get her storybook ending, the 38-year-old actress suggested it wouldnt necessarily be in the way viewers expect. I think that all of us would agree that we do have happily ever after, the connotations of it, said Kaling, who was joined onstage by executive producer and showrunner, Matt Warburton, and producer and star Ike Barinholtz (sporting a neck brace from a recent stunt gone wrong). But happily ever after isnt the same as no loose ends, she said. That everything is tied up neatly in a bow is something we arent super interested in. That side of it I think were trying to avoid, Kaling added, while also leaving the audience with the sense of feeling that it was about something and that it really was a project and that she had some growth in the end. And for fans wondering whether or how Danny Castellano (played by Chris Messina) would factor into all that, the season promises to shed some light on that. For the unitiated, Messinas Danny is Mindys former fiance and the father of her child. Messina, who hasnt been a series regular since Season 4, is set to return for multiple episodes. And while the Season 5 finale ended with Mindy marrying boyfriend Ben (Bryan Greenberg), hints were thrown that the new episodes would bring some clarity to the Mindy-Danny relationship. The one thing we can promise the audience is a little bit of clarity about where they stand, Warburton said. Its so great to see him back because weve always known theyre always going to be in each others lives  but its great to actually see what that means this season. Its complicated, added Kaling. Theyre both married to other people, so we went into that season with all of that, which makes things sort of fun and delicious. Other familiar faces set to return for the final season are Mark and Jay Duplass, Adam Pally and Glenn Howerton. Kaling, in discussing the decision to end the series, promised a good finale. The decision to end the show was our decision, and I think thats always very hard, Kaling said. It was like, God, should this be the end? ... I think right now the idea of doing a prequel or something like that just felt  we just have such a good finale. We have such a good finale that weve known about for awhile. The final season of The Mindy Project will start its rollout on Hulu in September. Facebook

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Tiffany Haddish clarifies controversial Bill Cosby remarks: Im not afraid of the Big Bad Wolf By James Reed Actress Tiffany Haddish has clarified her remarks about wanting to work with Bill Cosby. (Christina House / For The Times) A joke that Tiffany Haddish recently told The Los Angeles Times has backfired on the breakout star of the new film Girls Night. Talking to The Times Trevell Anderson, Haddish credited Bill Cosby as a comedy inspiration, seemingly unfazed by the multiple sexual-abuse allegations levied against the beleaguered, 80-year-old TV legend. I still want to work with Bill Cosby, I dont care, she told The Times earlier this month. Ill drink the juice. Ill take a nap. I dont give a damn. But seriously, I would love for him to play my grandfather in something. Her remarks raised eyebrows and ire on social media, with some fans questioning her intentions and a New York magazine story noting that the actress seems to have wandered into problematic fave territory. I've been rooting hard for Tiffany Haddish but I find nothing funny about her making light of Bill Cosby drugging women  Stephanie. (@qsteph) July 26, 2017 Twitter: "We loved Tiffany Haddish in #GirlsTrip. Sweetie is doing amazing!"



Tiffany Haddish: "I'd love to work with Bill Cosby."



Twitter: pic.twitter.com/X23DQWb2wi  hellresidentNY (@hellresidentNY) July 27, 2017 On Thursday, Haddish attempted to clarify those comments while speaking on a panel at the Television Critics Assn.'s summer press tour in Beverly Hills. What I said was a joke, she said, noting that when youre expected to be funny in promotional interviews, there are risks. Youre going to say some bad jokes. Haddish said her point had been that Im not afraid to do anything. Im not afraid of any kind of job. Im not afraid to play any kind of girl as long as it doesnt compromise my morals.... Ive been through things. Ive been victimized, she added. I dont agree with what he did or anything, but, at the end of the day, Im not afraid of the Big Bad Wolf. Thats what I was trying to say, and I was trying to do it in a humorous way. Times staff writer Sarah Rodman contributed to this report. Facebook

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Tracy Morgan thanks God, and Tiffany Haddish reflects on her success at Last O.G. panel at TCA By Sarah Rodman Tracy Morgan, left, Tiffany Haddish and Ryan Gaul of the new TBS comedy The Last O.G. at the TCA press tour in Beverly Hills on Thursday. (Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images) Thank God. Thats what Tracy Morgan had to say about what it means for the 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live alum to be returning to TV three years after the devastating accident that put him in a coma and resulted in the death of his friend James Jimmy Mack McNair. The stand-up comic and actor, whose new TBS comedy, The Last O.G. premieres Oct. 24, was full of gratitude and thoughts on starting over during the presentation for the show at the Television Critics Assn. summer press tour Thursday in Beverly Hills. Executive produced by Morgan, Jordan Peele and John Carcieri, The Last O.G. chronicles the adventures of Tray (Morgan). Newly sprung from prison after serving 15 years, he has to acclimate to the changed times, his gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood and his former girlfriend (Tiffany Haddish of Girls Trip) raising the children he didnt know existed with another man. This is a show about humanity, this is a show about second chances, this is a show about redemption, said Morgan, answering a question about whether it would explicitly explore African American issues. I wanted to transcend that... I wanted to deal with humanity. Haddish, naturally, fielded several questions about Girls Trip, the new comedy film that has minted her as a star. I feel like a foster kid whos been in the system for a long time and then turned 16 and somebody adopted them and said, You can go to college and you aint got to pay no school loans or nothing,  she said of how shes been feeling in the wake of the films superb box office. Im happy! Ive been accepted finally after all these years of hard work, blood, sweat and tears. Haddish said she was looking forward to her role in The Last O.G. since its a character who has gone through a transition in her life, just as she herself has. Her fellow cast mates, including Cedric the Entertainer, good-naturedly ribbed her about becoming a diva since shes now a movie star. But Morgan noted seriously that Haddish has been nothing but a pro: She comes to work. Haddish joked: My bank account, it dont show movie star yet. Im waiting on it. They say nine months; its like a baby. Im waiting for the delivery. Morgan said it was important to surround himself with scene stealers such as Haddish and Cedric and was clearly earnest in his appreciation of his collaborators and their sensitivity to his physical needs. They make sure I sit down... they dont ask me, they [say] sit down for a little while. So Im good. Im taken care of by my people, and I love them with my heart. Facebook

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It can be TGIF every day on Hulu: The service lands popular ABC programming block in SVOD deal By Yvonne Villarreal Every day can be Friday in the 90s with help from Hulu. The streaming service announced Thursday it has signed a deal with Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution for the exclusive streaming rights to programs that were part of the popular ABC programming block known as TGIF. The announcement was made during the streaming services day of panels at the Television Critics Assn. press tour in Beverly Hills. The shows under the deal include Full House, Family Matters, Perfect Strangers, Step by Step and Hangin With Mr. Cooper. Nabbing the rights to Full House is particularly noteworthy considering Hulus rival Netflixs success with reviving the comedy, which is returning for a third season in September. With the Hulu deal, more than 800 episodes of the five sitcoms from the bygone family friendly lineup will be available beginning Friday, Sept. 29. These shows are more than just beloved hits, they were part of a cultural tradition to tune in every Friday night, said Craig Erwich, Hulus senior vice president of content in a statement. Facebook

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TV Academy announces which awards will be handed out during Primetime, Creative Arts Emmys By Nardine Saad Get your Emmys ballot ready  the Television Academy has announced which categories will be awarded during this years 69th Primetime Emmy Awards and the separate Creative Arts Emmy Awards. The main event will take place at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on Sept. 17 and will be hosted by The Late Show star Stephen Colbert. Prizes will be awarded to comedy and drama series, limited series, reality competition, variety talk and sketch, television movie, acting, directing, and writing during the live telecast on CBS. HBOs Westworld and NBCs Saturday Night Live lead the nominees with 22 nods apiece, a total that includes several below-the-line categories to be doled out at the two Creative Arts Emmys ceremonies the week before. Honoring artistic and technical achievements that could make or break your play-at-home ballot, the Creative Arts Emmys will be held in the same venue on two consecutive nights on Sept. 9 and 10. Theyll be put together for one show, produced by Bob Bain, that will air on FXX on Sept. 16. The first night will cover categories that include animation, choreography, cinematography, costuming, make-up, hairstyling, documentary and nonfiction awards, editing, lighting, sound-mixing, technical direction, variety special and some writing awards. The second night will lean more heavily on front-of-the camera talent, awarding the likes of guest actors and actresses and stunt work, in addition to childrens programs, commercials, main title designs and theme music, music composition and supervision, prosthetic makeup and additional sound and editing categories. For a complete list of this years nominees, click here. Heres the complete list of the awards being handed out during the Primetime Emmys telecast: COMEDY SERIES

DIRECTING FOR A COMEDY SERIES

DIRECTING FOR A DRAMA SERIES

DIRECTING FOR A LIMITED SERIES, MOVIE OR DRAMATIC SPECIAL

DIRECTING FOR A VARIETY SERIES

DRAMA SERIES

LEAD ACTOR IN A COMEDY SERIES

LEAD ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIES

LEAD ACTOR IN A LIMITED SERIES OR MOVIE

LEAD ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES

LEAD ACTRESS IN A DRAMA SERIES

LEAD ACTRESS IN A LIMITED SERIES OR MOVIE

LIMITED SERIES

REALITY-COMPETITION PROGRAM

SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A COMEDY SERIES

SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIES

SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A LIMITED SERIES OR MOVIE

SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES

SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A DRAMA SERIES

SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A LIMITED SERIES OR MOVIE

TELEVISION MOVIE

VARIETY SKETCH SERIES

VARIETY TALK SERIES

WRITING FOR A COMEDY SERIES

WRITING FOR A DRAMA SERIES

WRITING FOR A LIMITED SERIES, MOVIE OR DRAMATIC SPECIAL

WRITING FOR A VARIETY SERIES Facebook

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Kesha finds redemption in new song: The past cant haunt me if I dont let it By Emily Mae Czachor For Kesha, Learn to Let Go is not just an aptly titled track off her upcoming Rainbow LP. Its become one of my mantras over the last few years, she said in a remarkably uplifting letter that the singer published Thursday to accompany a new video for the song. (This is her new M.O., it would seem.) Learn to Let Go, which Kesha co-wrote alongside her mother, Pebe Sebert, is a heartrending chronicle of redemption. Had a boogeyman under my bed/ Putting crazy thoughts inside my head, she sings, while real home-video footage of a whimsical young Kesha cuts between clips of a grown Kesha frolicking through the forest. The chorus rings like a self-empowered anthem: The past cant haunt me if I dont let it. My mom is always telling me how you have to learn to accept that you cant try to control everything, she wrote in the letter. When you realize that you are not the one in control and you stop holding onto regrets  its liberating. Your past only has as much effect on your future as you want it to, Kesha continued. Its about embracing your past, but not letting it define you. Her new album, Rainbow, will be released Aug. 11. Facebook

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Stephen Colbert to bring animated Trump series to Showtime By Meredith Blake Stephen Colbert has ridden anti-Trump sentiment to the top of the late-night ratings. Now hes riding it all the way to premium cable. On Thursday, Showtime announced it had ordered 10 episodes of an as-yet-untitled animated series featuring cartoon renderings of the president, his family and inner circle. The satirical half-hour series, executive produced by Colbert and The Late Shows show runner Chris Licht, will debut on Showtime this fall. According to the network, turnaround on the series will be quick in order to incorporate current events. Stephen and Chris have an uncanny genius for deconstructing the world of President Trump, and this series opens a new realm for them, Showtime President David Nevins said in a press statement. Tim Luecke, who co-created the animated version of Trump who frequently appears in Late Show bits  including a recent segment from the notorious presidential suite of the Moscow Ritz-Carlton  will serve as lead animator. The announcement caps off a period of good news for Colbert, who racked up six Emmy nominations this month and will be hosting the awards in September. The recently concluded Russia Week, in which the comedian traveled to Moscow and St. Petersburg, brought The Late Show its biggest margin over The Tonight Show since its premiere in 2015. While The Late Show airs on CBS, Colbert has also developed ties with his corporate cousins at Showtime. Many point to his riveting election night special Stephen Colberts Live Election Night Democracys Series Finale, which aired on the premium network, as a turning point after an uneven transition from The Colbert Report. For its part, Showtime has invested heavily in political content over the last 18 months, most notably the documentary series The Circus, from journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Facebook

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Matt Damon gets punched right in the face in George Clooneys Suburbicon trailer By Nardine Saad  Matt Damon, Oscar Isaac and Julianne Moore star in the trailer for George Clooneys Suburbicon. In George Clooneys latest directorial effort, Suburbicon, the pleasantries of a 1950s town are undone when a home invasion exposes the communitys criminal subculture and racial tensions. And Matt Damons Gardner Lodge gets stuck in the thick of it -- defending his young son, making death threats, killing mobsters and getting popped square in his bespectacled face at the office -- as seen in the first trailer that Paramount unveiled Thursday. Did we mention this is a comedy? The dark, screwball kind from the minds of screenwriters Clooney and frequent collaborators Ethan and Joel Coen and Grant Heslov? Well, it is, in case that wasnt clear from the previous description. These animals took everything from us, a blood-splattered Gardner tells his son Nicky (Noah Jupe) at the dinner table. I have to make decisions like whats best for the family. After Gardners wife is murdered, he invites Auntie Margaret (Julianne Moore) to come live in the manicured suburban community to help with his son. Meanwhile, he gets mixed up with a loan shark that sets him on the warpath of a formidable, coffee-swilling collector named Roger (Oscar Isaac). The film is based on a script that the Coen brothers wrote years ago that Clooney found, and they agreed to have him direct it, according to Moore. Paramount acquired the U.S. rights to the film, billed as a comedy, crime and mystery, at the Berlin Film Festival last year. It will be shown at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and hits theaters on Oct. 27. Facebook

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Woody Allens Wonder Wheel to complete Amazons turn to full-service distribution By Mark Olsen Woody Allen at the American Film Institutes Life Achievement Award tribute to Diane Keaton on June 8, 2017, in Los Angeles. (Christopher Polk / Getty Images for Turner) Thursday it was announced that Woody Allens latest film, Wonder Wheel, will have its world premiere as the closing-night film at this years New York Film Festival. The film stars Kate Winslet, Justin Timberlake, Juno Temple and James Belushi in a story set around Coney Island in the 1950s. But that wasnt the only Allen item of the day. Variety reported that Wonder Wheel will also be the first film fully distributed by Amazon when it opens in theaters on Dec. 1. The company has already made fast inroads to the movie business, winning Academy Awards this year for Manchester by the Sea and The Salesman, but has up to now worked with established distribution partners such as Roadside Attractions or Bleecker Street to help get those movies into theaters. Amazon released Allens 2016 film, Cafe Society, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart and Steve Carell, in partnership with Lionsgate. The online giant also released Allens six-part Crisis in Six Scenes, in which he starred alongside Elaine May and Miley Cyrus, late last year via the Amazon Prime Video streaming service. The move by Amazon is yet another way the company is distinguishing itself in relation to streaming rival Netflix. Where Netflix has been seen as pulling back from theatrical distribution, opting for either extremely limited or no theatrical release at all of its titles to drive viewers to its own platform, this latest push by Amazon renews its commitment to traditional theatrical releases. The New York Film Festival slot for Wonder Wheel gives Amazon the three marquee spots at the showcase. Previously announced, Richard Linklaters Last Flag Flying will open the festival, and Todd Haynes Wonderstruck, which premiered at this years Cannes Film Festival, will show in the centerpiece slot. Other upcoming Amazon titles include Mike Whites Brads Status, starring Ben Stiller, and Luca Guadagninos remake of Suspiria, starring Dakota Johnson. Facebook

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Mick Jagger releases two new, politically charged singles By August Brown (Dave Gatley / Los Angeles Times) Mick Jagger has been looking to the past on recent albums and festival dates. But a pair of urgent new singles are firmly set in the present. On Thursday, the Rolling Stones frontman released two tracks, Gotta Get A Grip and England Lost, that describe, as he put it in a statement, the anxiety, unknowability of the changing political situation in a post-Brexit U.K. The production is resolutely modern, built on programmed drums and clanging guitar noise. The London grime artist Skepta even joins him for a verse on England Lost. Ostensibly, its about seeing an England football team lose, but when I wrote the title I knew it would be about more than just that. Its about a feeling that we are in a difficult moment in our history. Its about the unknowability about where you are and the feeling of insecurity, Jagger said in a statement. Its obviously got a fair amount of humour because I dont like anything too on the nose but its also got a sense of vulnerability of where we are as a country. The Girls actress Jemima Kirke also stars in a new clip for Gotta Get A Grip. The songs are Jaggers first new solo material since 2001s Goddess In the Doorway. Facebook

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Katy Perry to host 2017 MTV Video Music Awards By Libby Hill The MTV Video Music Awards are returning to California and getting a certified California Gurl to host. Katy Perry took to her Twitter feed Thursday to announce her upcoming gig hosting -- and performing -- at the VMAs in August. Ive been training with MTV in zero gravity, eating astronaut ice cream, and Im on a group text with Buzz Aldrin and Neil deGrasse Tyson, Perry said in a statement. Come August 27th, Ill be ready to be your MOONWOMAN! Brace for impact, kids. Perry will kick off the evening as the first announced performer for the ceremony. On Tuesday, Perry earned five VMA nominations for her video contributions over the last year, tying with the Weeknd, with only Kendrick Lamar earning more. Were thrilled to have global phenomenon Katy Perry as the host and a performer at the 2017 VMAs, said Bruce Gillmer, head of music and music talent for Global Entertainment Group, Viacom, in a statement from MTV. She is at the forefront of music culture and the perfect person to anchor this years show, which promises to be one of the most diverse and music-filled in VMA history. The 2017 MTV Video Music Awards will air from the Forum in Inglewood on Aug. 27. Find a full list of nominees here. Introducing your MOONWOMAN. Brace for impact! August 27th on @MTV @VMAs pic.twitter.com/WJsIYq7WiM  KATY PERRY (@katyperry) July 27, 2017 Facebook

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Turns out Larry David and Bernie Sanders are related! By Yvonne Villarreal Turns out Saturday Night Live was on to something when it cast Larry David to play Sen. Bernie Sanders. During his freewheeling appearance Wednesday at the Television Critics Assn. press tour in Beverly Hills to promote the upcoming ninth season of HBOs Curb Your Enthusiasm, David revealed that the resemblance is rooted in reality: Sanders is a distant relative. Hes in the line ... like a third cousin, or something, he said. The genealogical discovery comes courtesy of Davids appearance in an upcoming episode of the PBS series Finding Your Roots. I was very happy about that, David said. I figured there was some connection. David played Sanders on Saturday Night Live through the 2015-16 election cycle and also appeared alongside the senator on the late-night sketch show. Its the kind of family secret that David isnt ashamed to admit. I love Bernie, yes, David said. I love Bernie. Facebook

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Trumps proposed transgender military ban turns late-night into hostile territory By Libby Hill If theres one upside to the Trump administrations early-morning Twitter proclamations, its that it gives late-night shows all day to craft their reactions. Wednesday began with President Trump announcing a ban on transgender individuals serving in the United States military and ended with late-night hosts uniformly blasting the policy decision in hilarious fashion. On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert had plenty to say about Trumps tweets, which ended with an uncharacteristic thank you. Thank you? Colbert responded, shocked, before offering his own profane two-word response to the president. Colbert went on to discuss what he saw as the greatest fallacy of the presidents reasons for banning transgender soldiers: increased medical costs. Though a 2016 study funded by the Pentagon found that military medical spending on transgender soldiers would increase anywhere from $2.4 million to $8.4 million, Colbert wanted to reframe those figures. To put that number in perspective, the military spends five times as much on Viagra, Colbert explained, And if your erection lasts for more than four hours, thats too bad, because youre stuck on a submarine for the next six months. On The Daily Show Trevor Noah had similar concerns about the presidents cost-related excuse, pointing out that taxpayers are paying $60 million for Trump to travel to his various properties throughout his presidency. Noah also pondered which of Trumps generals hed consulted with, given that the Pentagon was unaware of his proclamation, suggesting that perhaps hed spoken with The General Online. Late Night With Seth Meyers also invoked the cartoon general from the car insurance commercials, when Meyers opted to turn discussion of Trumps tweets over to four of his female writers. Today it might be trans people, but tomorrow its gay people, and then the next day its black people, and after that its women, and then its immigrants, the writers pointed out, all of those groups represented between them. On The Tonight Show Jimmy Fallon had the good sense to turn over a portion of his monologue to transgender comedian Patti Harrison, who had plenty to say about Trumps Wednesday announcement. When I saw the headline this morning, at first I just read, Donald Trump bans transgender people, and I was like, Yeah, that sounds like him, Harrison deadpanned. But then I realized it was just in the military and I was shocked, because I assumed he already did that. But it was James Corden who took a completely different take on the transgender military ban, opting for a stylish and heartfelt song and dance, expressing his love and appreciation for the LGBT community. Facebook

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Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are on the road again in new song collaboration By August Brown Ringo Starrs new LP includes a collaboration with fellow former Beatle Paul McCartney. (Ethan Miller / Getty Images) Any time the surviving Beatles reunite on record is a historic occasion. But a new single from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr packs in even more classic-rock star power. Starrs new song Were on the Road Again is one of several collaborations with his former bandmate on his new LP, Give More Love. The song also has guest appearances from Joe Walsh, Edgar Winter and Steve Lukather. Its a slightly goofy ode to life on the road, as Starr boasts that, We play really tight; we play really loud and cheekily references his own song Photograph. The two Beatles last recorded together on Starrs 2010 album, Y Not, and performed McCartneys Queenie Eye at the 2014 Grammys. Starr announced the McCartney studio collaboration back in February, thanking the fellow Beatle in a Twitter post. Thanks for coming over man and playing Great bass. I love you man peace and love.  pic.twitter.com/Z5kpyLLlkO  #RingoStarr (@ringostarrmusic) February 20, 2017 Set for release on Sept. 15, Give More Love will also feature cameos from Peter Frampton, Don Was, Richard Marx and Dave Stewart, among others. You can hear Starrs new track with Paul McCartney via Rolling Stone. Facebook

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Curb Your Enthusiasm returns this fall -- and you can expect a Pirates of the Caribbean vibe? By Yvonne Villarreal Actor-creator-executive producer Larry David speaks at the Curb Your Enthusiasm panel during the Television Critics Assn. summer press tour at the Beverly Hilton. (Chris Pizzello / Invision/AP) Larry David revealed the real reason Curb Your Enthusiasm is at last returning after a six-year hiatus: People wouldnt stop bugging him about it. The Seinfeld co-creator took the stage Wednesday at the Television Critics Assn. press tour in Beverly Hills -- joined by his Curb cohorts Susie Essman, Jeff Garlin and J.B. Smoove and executive producer Jeff Schaffer -- to discuss the shows coming ninth season. So, why bring back the show now after all these years? Im not a misser, David told reporters. I dont really miss things, people that much, but I was missing it. I thought, yeah, what the hell. And I got tired of people asking me if the show was coming back. I couldnt get asked that question anymore and I wasnt ready to say, No, never. The often madcap and sometimes hilariously perplexing 30-minute panel -- led by Davids gruff wit and deadpans -- kicked off with a teaser for the season. There was David in a shower, David talking about constipation, David enduring the displeasure of middle-seat status on a flight. The amount of uncomfortable situations [real Larry David] has been in these last six years, Schaffer said, youre going to see it all. Its like were sitting in the Ft. Knox of awkward. As for TV Larry David, Schaffer said viewers will learn very quickly what hes been up to during the years that have passed. Once the show starts to air, it will be self-evident, he said. It goes to this really strange, fun, crazy place.... And you will never expect where it ends. The trip to that ending begins Oct. 1 when the comedy returns to HBO. The 10-episode season brings back Curb favorites like Cheryl Hines, as well as frequent faces Richard Lewis, Bob Einstein, Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen. And what would a long-awaited return be without some guest stars? Elizabeth Banks, Ed Begley Jr., Carrie Brownstein, Bryan Cranston, Lauren Graham, Jimmy Kimmel, Nick Offerman, Nasim Pedrad and Elizabeth Perkins will get in on the fun. For those who still need something to pin their hopes on about what this season will entail, Garlin offered this absurdly brilliant comparison. It really thematically follows Pirates of the Caribbean. ... Its more like the last one than the first few. Facebook

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At TCA 2017, HBO defends Confederate, announces Jon Stewart special and says Deadwood movie is inching closer By Greg Braxton Casey Bloys, president of HBO programming, addresses reporters at the Television Critics Assn.'s summer press tour at the Beverly Hilton on Wednesday. (Chris Pizzello / Invision / Associated Press) HBO, which has the hottest show on television with Game of Thrones, recently came under fire with the announcement of a new series called Confederate from a team that includes Game of Thrones producers D.B. Weiss and David Benioff. The series revolves around events that lead to the Third American Civil War and examines an alternate reality in which the South seceded from the Union and thus, slavery is still legal. Casey Bloys, president of HBO programming, defended the project Wednesday during the premium networks session at the summer edition of the Television Critics Assn. gathering at the Beverly Hilton. Bloys said that, in hindsight, the announcement was mishandled because it lacked the context and the vision that he received from Benioff and Weiss in discussing the series. He admitted it was misguided to believe they could simply announce a series with such a sensitive and volatile subject matter. We could have done a better job with the press release, he said. There was no benefit of context. My hope is people will judge the actual material instead of what it could be or should be or might be, he said. Well rise or fall based on that material. He added that he felt the series, rather than being divisive, would be able to advance the racial discussion. Although the topic is controversial, he said he and the producers of the show all feel this is a risk worth taking. Bloys also stressed that the depiction of slavery would not echo Gone With the Wind and would not include whips and plantations. In other major HBO news, former Daily Show host Jon Stewart will perform a stand-up special at a date and time to be announced, and host the latest Night of Too Many Stars, an all-star benefit for autism. Also, a movie reboot of HBOs western Deadwood is closer to reality. Bloys said the shows creator, David Milch, has completed a script that will please fans of the series while also being accessible to those less familiar with the show. But, he said, reuniting the large cast, which included Timothy Olyphant and Ian McShane, may prove challenging. Facebook

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Two Jon Stewart comedy specials are coming to HBO By Yvonne Villarreal Jon Stewart, seen here presenting at the ESPYS, will return to HBO for his first stand-up special in two decades. (Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP) Jon Stewart will headline two stand-up specials for HBO. The news was announced Wednesday at the Television Critics Assn. press tour in Beverly Hills. The former Daily Show host will get a stand-up special  his first since since 1996s Jon Stewart: Unleavened aired on the network. A date and location have not been confirmed. Were excited to bring Jon to the network with this pair of specials, said HBO programming president Casey Bloys in a statement. Weve all missed his uniquely thoughtful brand of humor. Im really thrilled to be able to return to stand-up on HBO, added Stewart in a statement. Theyve always set the standard for great stand-up specials. Plus, I can finally use up the last of the Saddam Hussein jokes left over from my first special. Stewart will also host the latest Night of Too Many Stars, the all-star benefit for Next for Autism, a nonprofit organization focused on people living with autism spectrum disorder. The special will air live this fall and will take place from the Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York. The specials are part of Stewarts four-year deal with the premium cable network. Facebook

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Angelina Jolie talks about difficult split from Brad Pitt By Nardine Saad A-lister Angelina Jolie is adjusting to the domestic growing pains of life as a single mom  making a proper breakfast, keeping house and picking up dog poop. I never woke up and thought, I really want to live a bold life. I just cant do the other. Its the same as I cant make a casserole. I cannot sit still, she said in a sprawling new interview with Vanity Fair, in which she discussed her high-profile split from actor Brad Pitt. Ive been trying for nine months to be really good at just being a homemaker and picking up dog poop and cleaning dishes and reading bedtime stories. And Im getting better at all three. But now I need to get my boots on and go hang, take a trip, the humanitarian said of her plans to head to Africa for a mission with the preventing Sexual Violence Initiative. Angelina Jolie opens up about putting her family first, life after Brad, health issues & her most personal film yet https://t.co/nKyf4dO8ls pic.twitter.com/WkXCgWR1PV  VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) July 26, 2017 The Oscar-winning actress explained how and when her marriage devolved, though she didnt go into great detail about the breakup for the sake of their six kids. The marriage began suffering in the summer of 2016 while she was in post-production on her fifth directorial effort, First They Killed My Father, a film about Cambodias Khmer Rouge genocide, which hits Netflix in September. Things got bad, Jolie said. I didnt want to use that word. ... Things became difficult. The director became slightly defensive at the mention of the familys globe-trotting lifestyle, which reportedly had been grating on Pitt. "[Our lifestyle] was not in any way a negative, she asserted. That was not the problem. That is and will remain one of the wonderful opportunities we are able to give our children. ... Theyre six very strong-minded, thoughtful, worldly individuals. Im very proud of them. After 12 years together and a few years of marriage, Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt in September 2016. While her ex was couch-surfing, she and the kids spent nine months in a rental property before settling into a six-bedroom, 10-bathroom Los Feliz manse once owned by film legend Cecil B. DeMille. Its just been the hardest time, and were just kind of coming up for air. [This house] is a big jump forward for us, and were all trying to do our best to heal our family. The divorce filing came suddenly for the health of the family on the heels of a spat Pitt had with their 15-year-old son, Maddox. They reached a divorce settlement privately in January after battling publicly for months over custody of the kids. The Oscar-winning producer had been vilified with accusations of child abuse and having an affair with his Allied costar Marion Cotillard. But he arguably won over public opinion with his introspective GQ Style interview in May in which he admitted to sobering up after boozing too much. Last year, Jolie was diagnosed with hypertension and developed Bells palsy when nerve damage caused one side of her face to droop. She took up acupuncture to treat it. Sometimes women in families put themselves last, she said, until it manifests itself in their own health. Thats just the latest in her medical history. Following a preventative double mastectomy in 2013, she had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed in 2015, which sent her into menopause. I cant tell if its menopause or if its just been the year Ive had, she said, quipping about her dry skin and the idea that she could still be considered a sex symbol. I actually feel more of a woman because I feel like Im being smart about my choices, and Im putting my family first, and Im in charge of my life and my health. I think thats what makes a woman complete. For the record, Aug. 4, 12:55 p.m.: A previous version of this story said that First They Killed My Father would hit Netflix this month. It debuts in September. Facebook

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Caitlyn Jenner questions why Trump isnt fighting for transgender service members By James Reed (Taylor Jewell / Invision/Associated Press) There are 15,000 patriotic transgender Americans in the US military fighting for all of us. What happened to your promise to fight for them?  Caitlyn Jenner, tweeting in response to President Trumps transgender military ban announced Wednesday Read More Facebook

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Robert Pattinson confirms hes kind of engaged to singer FKA Twigs By Nardine Saad (Mike Coppola / Getty Images for People) Twilight heartthrob Robert Pattinson says hes kind of " engaged to singer FKA Twigs. The actor addressed the engagement rumors Tuesday in a direct response to shock jock Howard Sterns questioning on Sirius XMs The Howard Stern Show. Youre engaged, right? Stern said after calling the edgy English songstress his fiancee. Yeah, kind of, Pattinson, 31, responded uneasily. The Good Time star, whose relationships have been intensely scrutinized since he dated Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart at the height of the teen vampire frenzy, agreed that hes been a bit protective of his romances. Hes been dating the Water Me singer, real name Tahlia Barnett, since 2014 and theyve been rumored to be engaged since April 2015. Save for public appearances together, Pattinson has kept pretty mum about the relationship. Its one of the most frustrating things in the world because you want to be able to show off a relationship, he told Stern. You kind of get stuck in this position where you have to make decisions whether you want to let the kind of crazy people in. Pattinson was referring to the Twi-hards or, as he called them, a crack troupe of crazies who believe every decision he makes is part of some big conspiracy. To protect [the relationship] you kind of think, I want to create a big boundary between it. But then it makes it difficult for your actual relationship, he said. Additionally, Pattinson also discussed the racial disparagement his fiancee faces on social media for dating him. He tries to tune out the hate when he can, but he isnt always successful. I think its like professional trolls, he said of rude commenters. They get so addicted to kind of just wanting to cause hurt and pain on someone and its just one of the most difficult things to know how to confront. Its a faceless enemy. ... It might seem fake to them, but its definitely real in your life. Pattinson said responding to hate can just be feeding into it. It makes me feel less powerful if youre trying to attack and make it go away. Its like trying to attack a reflection in the water or something. You just look crazy, he said. Facebook

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David Letterman cringes when late-night TV hosts refer to viewers as fans By Emily Mae Czachor A profoundly bearded David Letterman made a rare talk-show appearance Monday -- one of just a handful of public ventures since the end of his run on The Late Show in 2015. Only this time, Letterman arrived as a guest. In an unusual turn of events, the former late-night host played interviewee on the season premiere of stand-up comedian Norm Macdonalds podcast, Norm Macdonald Live. The longtime pals discussed a number of matters, from Lettermans first-ever hosting gig (a game show called Wordbusters) to the time he found himself face to face with Richard Nixon. The two also discussed late-night TVs changing landscape and how Letterman never felt comfortable thinking of himself as the star of his own show. I could not possibly, and still dont, consider myself a star, because I couldnt refer to myself as a star, Letterman said. Johnny Carson was a star, theres no question of that. So for me to adopt that -- Starring Dave Letterman -- that was just ridiculous. In the same way, I always cringe a little when people refer to the folks who watch their show as their fans, Letterman added. I just think thats a little too  you know, you kind of just stepped over the line of basic humility there. Macdonald commented on late-nights packed roster of big-name hosts -- none of whom he finds particularly unique, except Conan OBrien, who he thinks has changed it up a little. On any plans for a late-night return to the host seat, Letterman told fans not to expect too much. Ive done it for 30 years, he said. I dont want to do it anymore. Watch the full episode above (warning: some profanity). Facebook

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Olivia de Havilland, 101, files motion to expedite her Feud lawsuit By Nardine Saad Olivia de Havilland at her Paris home in 2003. (Jean-Marc Giboux / Getty Images) Citing her advanced age, legendary actress Olivia de Havilland has filed a motion in her Feud lawsuit for a preferential trial date this fall. De Havillands attorneys filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday, requesting that the jury trial be set in November or no later than 120 days of her motion being granted. The 101-year-old is hoping that a judge will fast track the trial during her Sept. 13 hearing date, which is just days before Feud is expected to be a big winner at the Primetime Emmy Awards. (The miniseries is nominated for 18 awards.) The Gone With the Wind star sued FX and Feud showrunner Ryan Murphy last month over her depiction in the miniseries about rival actresses Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The two-time Oscar winner, who was played by actress Catherine Zeta-Jones on the show, makes legal claims about violations of her common law and statutory rights of publicity, her right to privacy and unjust enrichment. Based on her unusually advanced age, resulting particular susceptibility to disease, and recurring health issues, there is a substantial likelihood that she, as with anyone at this advanced age, may not survive for any extended period of time, the motion said. It is likely that if a trial preference motion is not granted, Olivia de Havilland will be prejudiced, because on the normal schedule, trial would not be set within the next 120 days. Her team also argued that because she is the sole plaintiff, De Havilland is crucial to the trial. Olivia de Havilland has a substantial interest in the litigation as a whole here as her personal statutory right of publicity cause of action does not survive her death. ... Further, should Olivia de Havilland die before her trial date, she will not be able to enjoy the benefits which she would receive in damages, the motion said. De Havillands June 30 lawsuit said the show damaged her professional reputation for integrity, honesty, generosity, self-sacrifice and dignity. She claimed that FX, Murphy and Fox producers never sought or obtained her permission to be depicted in the series and that Zeta-Jones portrayal of her in an episode about the 1963 Oscars cast her in a false, hurtful and damaging light. The defendants have not yet responded to de Havillands initial filing. According to Deadline, the Paris-based actress will not be attending the September hearing but may return to Hollywood if the trial is expedited to November. Olivia de Havilland 101: Everything you need to know as the movie legend celebrates her 101st birthday Facebook

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Despacitos Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee call out Venezuelan president for using song to push agenda By Nardine Saad Luis Fonsi, left, and Daddy Yankee. (Sergi Alexander / Getty Images) Despacito singers Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee and co-writer Erika Ender have condemned Venezuelas President Nicolas Maduro for appropriating their international hit song for political gain. The chart-topping Puerto Rican recording artists and Panamanian songwriter on Monday called out Maduro, currently the subject of violent and sometimes fatal nationwide protests over his policies, for reworking their lyrics to appeal to voters during his weekly television show on Sunday. The revision promoted the leaders plans for a controversial citizens assembly to be elected on July 30 and tasked with rewriting Venezuelas 1999 constitution and bypassing the opposition-led legislature. Our call to the Constituent Assembly only seeks to unite the country ... despacito, Maduros version said. The term despacito means slowly in Spanish and in the original version of the song refers to the singers wooing techniques. Maduros supporters swayed to the remix dressed in matching T-shirts and baseball caps that brandished campaign slogans. the Associated Press said. The president was seen clapping along to the remix while the audience danced, according to the BBC. I DO NOT AGREE WITH THIS, Ender wrote in Spanish on Instagram, citing a news story about Maduros use of the song. I cannot see so much pain in people I love so much. Warrior people, people with iron will. Good people, who are fighting for freedom of rights and expression. ... I love Venezuela, a land that has given me true brothers and sisters. Brothers who suffer because of the situation that exists. Ender also lamented seeing the song she co-wrote be used without permission to advertise campaigns linked to a regime that has sowed so much discontent and suffering. View Instagram post On repeated occasions, I have said how much I enjoy the versions of Despacito that have been released on a global level. However there has to be a limit, Fonsi also wrote in Spanish on Instagram. I have never been consulted, nor have I authorized the use of or the change of lyrics of Despacito for political means, much less in the middle of the deplorable situation in a country I love so much, Venezuela. He added that his music is for everyone who wants to listen to it and enjoy it, not to use as propaganda that tries to manipulate the will of the people who are crying out loud for their liberty and a better future. View Instagram post Daddy Yankee took a much more blunt approach in his post, sharing an image of a news article about Maduro with a large red X superimposed on it. What can you expect of a person who has stolen lives from young dreamers and people who are looking for a better future for their children? the reggaeton rapper wrote in Spanish. That you illegally appropriated Despacito does not compare to the crimes you commit and have committed in Venezuela. Your dictatorial regime is a mockery not only for my Venezuelan brothers, but for the whole world. With that nefarious marketing plan, you will only continue to highlight your fascist ideology, which has killed hundreds of heroes and injured more than 2,000. View Instagram post Millions of Venezuelans joined a general strike last week amid economic turmoil and a shortage of food and medicine in the country. Government opponents dealt a symbolic blow on Sunday to Maduro, casting votes in an unofficial referendum that rejected his plan for the constitutional overhaul. The government denounced the opposition balloting as illegal and seditious, according to The Times, but turnout appeared high at thousands of makeshift voting places set up throughout the country and abroad. Facebook

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Netflix invests in Matt Groenings Disenchantment By Libby Hill Matt Groening is ready to take another crack at this television thing. The creator of The Simpsons, which debuts its 29th season on Fox this fall, has a new show courtesy of Netflix. The streaming service provider announced Tuesday that it had ordered 20 episodes of Disenchantment, an adult animated comedy series set in a deteriorating fantasy kingdom. The show centers around a hard-living young princess named Bean, voiced by Abbi Jacobson (Broad City), her elf companion, Elfo (Nat Faxon), and personal demon Luci (Eric Andre). Ultimately, Disenchantment will be about life and death, love and sex, and how to keep laughing in a world full of suffering and idiots, despite what the elders and wizards and other jerks tell you, Groening said in a statement Tuesday. Matt Groenings brilliant work has resonated with generations around the world and we couldnt be happier to work with him on Disenchantment,  Cindy Holland, vice president of original content for Netflix, said in a statement. The series will bear his trademark animation style and biting wit, and we think its a perfect fit for our many Netflix animation fans. The series joins Netflixs Bojack Horseman in aiming for an audience unafraid of exploring the less-savory aspects of adulthood. Disenchantment will premiere on Netflix 10 episodes at a time, beginning in 2018. Facebook

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Broad City stars talk about the decision to bleep President Trumps name on the show By Yvonne Villarreal Abbi Jacobson, left, and Ilana Glazer of the series Broad City speak at the Television Critics Assn. press tour at the Beverly Hilton on Tuesday. (Chris Pizzello / Invision/Associated Press) Broad City creators and stars Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson consider the bleeping out of President Trumps name from the comedys upcoming fourth season a different kind of joke. The two appeared onstage Tuesday at the Television Critics Assn. press tour in Beverly Hills to discuss the new season and how they reworked the show in the wake of Trumps election. We just got to a point where in real life were talking about the current administration, were talking about Trump  and it sounds so gross every day saying it so many 
The best waffles commercially available, I am prepared to state, come from Brown Sugar Kitchen, a small, fragrant breakfast diner on Mandela Parkway in West Oakland.

The waffles, Tanya Hollands cornmeal-enhanced riff on Marion Cunninghams famous yeasted waffles, are crisp, light and so violently leavened that they threaten to leap from the waffle iron in which they are cooked. If you drive up from Los Angeles about 6 a.m., you can be at Brown Sugar Kitchen by noon. The hour you spend in line on a weekend morning will be the longest hour of your life.

Holland includes a splendid recipe for these waffles in her book Brown Sugar Kitchen, and it works as well in my battered old waffle iron as it does at the restaurant. You mix the batter the night before, chill it in your refrigerator while you sleep, and stir in a bit of baking soda just before you pour it into your hot iron. (Remember to grease the iron well, or your first waffle will tear into delicious waffly shards when you attempt to lever it out onto a plate.) At the restaurant, Holland serves it with a sticky syrup made from boiled-down cider, but I always end up using good maple syrup instead, because I am lazy and I am a barbarian. They are the best waffles you will ever taste.

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I still wouldnt rule out an early morning drive to Oakland, though. Holland tends to pair the waffles with insanely delicious herbed fried chicken, and you also get a shot at her shrimp n grits.

Food Bowl Alert: Tanya Holland is participating in this years Los Angeles Times Food Bowl. She will be cooking at Plant Power, The No Beast Feast on May 19 at 6:30 p.m. at the Coral Tree Plaza at Border Grill in Downtown L.A. Tickets are $150 to $250.

BROWN SUGAR KITCHENS CORNMEAL WAFFLES WITH APPLE CIDER SYRUP

Apple cider syrup is poured onto a cornmeal waffle. ((Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times) )

Recipe in our California Cookbook 

1 hour, 15 minutes, plus proofing time. Serves 12

APPLE CIDER SYRUP

1  cups firmly packed brown sugar

1  teaspoons apple cider vinegar

1 quart apple cider

2 cinnamon sticks

 cup (1 stick) butter

In a large pot, combine the brown sugar, vinegar, cider, cinnamon and butter. Bring to a boil, then reduce the mixture to a simmer, and cook, stirring occasionally, until reduced to 1  cups, about 45 minutes. Discard the cinnamon. The syrup can be made up to 1 month in advance; cover tightly and refrigerate until needed, then warm and stir well before serving.

WAFFLES

2 teaspoons active-dry yeast

 cup warm water

3 eggs

3 cups milk

1 cup cornmeal

2 cups plus 2 heaping tablespoons (9 ounces) flour

1  teaspoons kosher salt

1  teaspoons sugar

 cup (1  sticks) butter, melted

Vegetable oil for the waffle iron

 teaspoon baking soda

1. In a small bowl, combine the yeast and warm water. Set aside until foamy, about 10 minutes.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs and milk. In another large bowl, whisk together the cornmeal, flour, salt and sugar. Add the yeast mixture to the eggs and milk, then whisk in the flour mixture until thoroughly combined. Whisk in the melted butter until just combined. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 4 hours, up to overnight.

3. Heat the oven to 250 degrees. Heat the waffle iron and grease lightly with oil. Set a wire rack over a baking sheet.

4. Remove the batter from the refrigerator and whisk in the baking soda. Ladle some batter into the waffle iron, close the lid, and cook until the waffles are golden and cooked through, about 3 minutes or according to the manufacturers instructions. This makes about a dozen waffles, depending on the size of your waffle iron.

5. Transfer the waffle to the rack to keep warm in the oven. Repeat with the remaining batter, placing the cooked waffles in a single layer on the rack.

6. Serve the waffles warm with warm apple cider syrup.

Each of 12 servings: Calories 498; protein 7 grams; carbohydrates 67 grams; fiber 1 gram; fat 23 grams; saturated fat 14 grams; cholesterol 103 mg; sugar 39 grams; sodium 252 mg

Note: Adapted from a recipe in Brown Sugar Kitchen: New-Style, Down-Home Recipes From Sweet West Oakland by Tanya Holland.

SOS REQUESTS: Send Culinary SOS requests to noelle.carter@latimes.com or Culinary SOS, Food section, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. Please include your name, phone number and city of residence.

jonathan.gold@latimes.com

@thejgold
My 26-year-old niece is moving here soon, so Ive made a few notes for her about life in Los Angeles:

Dear Amy, looking forward to your arrival. I want to warn you that Southern California is a little different. For instance, it is the only American city strung together by beach volleyball nets. Like vertebrae, they form a skeletal underpinning that protects us from earthquakes. Mostly it works.

As you know from visits, L.A. is a diverse place  in activities, in skin tone, in temperament. It is the land of Richard Nixon and Jane Fonda, of Silicon Beach and the Warners lot. Volleyball nets form its spine, and so do freeways. Youll find that there is a freeway to everywhere, except the places everyone needs to go  Fairfax and 3rd or West Hollywood.

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Before you come, be sure to read your Chandler. Be sure to read your Nathanael West. They were both sort of right about Los Angeles.

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class, Chandler once wrote. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

And Amy, that pretty much sums up your adopted new town.

A man carries a surfboard at sunset at El Porto on Monday, February 8, 2016 in Manhattan Beach, Calif. A record high of 88 degrees was set at Los Angeles International Airport, breaking the old record of 87 set in 1996. (Patrick T. Fallon/ For The Los Angeles Times) (Patrick T. Fallon / For The Times)

L.A. was built in one hour, on a very hot Friday afternoon.

The challenge and the glory of Los Angeles is that it changes so fast that it defies definition. You cant really chronicle L.A., except maybe in a tweet. L.A. was built in one hour, on a very hot Friday afternoon.

Change is life, change is grand. When you find a place in L.A. with a sense of history, maybe some exposed brick, appreciate it, because theyre about to tear it down.

Thats the flip side of progress, of idealism, of a restless and creative spirit.

In L.A., unlike other big cities, nobody recognizes the city council members, no matter how badly they screw things up. There are more homeless people out here than trees.

We are a town of thundering special effects and no weather. There is rarely a cloud in L.A. The river is empty but the ocean stays pretty full.

When it does rain, everyone rejoices and then skids off the road. Once every two years, someone uses a turn signal.

Cars are what we mostly worship, but youll find many religious choices here too. Approximately 20% of L.A. residents believe in unicorns. Some 30% believe in hobbits. Only 5% believe in a benevolent God.

Oh, I jest because after living here for nearly 30 years, I love L.A. and its open minds  its empty minds, and every now and then, its very brilliant minds. In L.A., youll run across the smartest people youll ever meet, and theyll probably be driving for Uber.

Still, it is a magnificent and inspiring place  Americas shining city on a hill. Youd have to move to Monaco to find mountains this close to beaches, or wild animals this close to ingenues. In the foothills, we keep black bears as pets.

Los Angeles is absolutely a wonderful place to eat. For a few bucks, you can get fish tacos with a tangy sauce you cant identify. Or, for $300, you can have a sit-down dinner at Totoraku, a restaurant without a sign.

This is the place where fusion meets fusion, where Asia meets America, where good marries evil then immediately begins to see other people. If you live right, most of the time you will have seawater in your hair. Most of the year, your bare feet will have a leathery bottom, as if it is always summer.

It isnt.

All that endless summer stuff comes from the 50s and 60s. The bohemian vibe from that time is slipping away, quashed by gentrification and surprisingly long work weeks. The only thing endless about L.A. now is the talk of making LAX better, which we never will.

LAX is our failed welcome mat and proof that we dont really care about what outsiders think.

Amy, you know that awkward moment when someone in the audience starts a standing ovation but no one joins them? You see that a lot in L.A. It defines the sweet but obstinate nature of our town. Here, even school plays dont necessarily receive standing ovations. Even as a third-grader, you have to earn it.

In that sense, Los Angeles is a very tough town. As I tell my kids: Dont be nice, theres no future in it.

Yet, your cousins grew up here and have managed to stay very nice, as have most of the people we know. Strangers on the street are genuinely nice. That person on the next bar stool, or at the table next to you at the Farmers Market, might be from Chile or Germany, or Prague or Peoria.

And theyll have a smile and a nod for you, and an interesting story to share.

Soon, like Chandler and West, you will too.

chris.erskine@latimes.com

Twitter: @erskinetimes

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About 31,000 fully qualified students were turned away from California State University for the fall term because their desired school was at capacity, administrators told trustees during a meeting Tuesday as they discussed budget challenges and new directives to increase enrollment at the largest public university system in the nation.

Although Cal State has made room for an additional 30,000 students since 2013, administrators said, the number of eligible applications continues to outpace the amount of funding provided by the state. After months of lobbying by faculty, students and staff, Gov. Jerry Brown last month signed off on a $20-million boost dedicated to increasing enrollment by about 3,000 students across the 23-campus system.

The number of qualified students seeking a spot at Cal State is expected to grow in the years ahead  particularly as the states community colleges embark on an effort to help more transfer into the university system. Officials are grappling with how to enroll every Californian who wants a shot at higher education  all while juggling efforts to double the Cal State systems four-year graduation rate to 40% by 2025, faculty salary demands and a number of other priorities.

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If you have too many first priorities, you end up having no priorities, Chancellor Timothy P. White said during the meeting in Long Beach.

Although the $3.4 billion in taxpayer funds earmarked this year for the system was more than what Brown initially proposed, it was not enough to reverse a controversial tuition increase and take on certain needs such as upgrading aging buildings and labs.

The states 2017-18 budget gave Cal State an additional $177.2 million in recurring annual funds  $20 million more than earlier proposals. Brown also approved a one-time, $20-million expenditure for efforts to increase graduation rates, as well as to address student hunger and fund equal employment opportunity programs.

The funding boost for this fiscal year, which began July 1, amounted to about half of the additional money trustees had estimated was necessary to meet their budget needs. Revenue from the tuition increase will help cover some of the remaining budget gap.

According to policy directives included in Browns budget, university officials have until May to develop a policy for redirecting rejected but qualified applicants to less-crowded campuses.

Officials also have to approve a policy that requires Cal State schools to give local students priority admission for impacted programs  undergraduate majors and programs with higher demand than campus resources are able to support. At Cal State L.A., for example, impacted programs include biology, criminal justice, psychology and social work.

The challenge with enrolling more students, officials said, is having enough faculty, staff and other resources to accommodate their needs while also supporting ongoing efforts to help more of the systems current 479,000 students graduate on time.

Administrators and staff have been working on basic student needs, such as housing and food security, as well as mental health services, academic support and extracurricular programs that help ensure a sense of belonging on campus. The trustees agreed that finding ways for students to connect meaningfully with a faculty member, a club or other student group makes a huge difference in motivating them to continue their studies.

The challenge is making sure that the resources are there to provide support for both the graduation initiative and for access to new students, said Eric Forbes, assistant vice chancellor for student academic support.

rosanna.xia@latimes.com

Follow @RosannaXia for more education news
A small coffee shop at the center of multiple anti-gentrification protests in Boyle Heights was vandalized Wednesday, according to its owners.

Footage from surveillance video at Weird Wave Coffee showed a person  clad in black clothing and a black mask  stepping out of an alley, then quickly using what may be a slingshot to shoot an object at the shops logo. The object cracked the coffee shops glass door.

Shop owners John Schwarz and Jackson Defa said they dont know whether the vandalism is associated with the protesters.

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It could have been just some punk kid, Defa said.

The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating.

Since it opened in June, the coffee shop has been the target of multiple protests and online trolling. Activists say the cafe poses a threat to local shops because it will draw in similar hip, new businesses that cause rents to go up, ultimately ousting tenants who have been doing business along Cesar Chavez Avenue for many years.

Its not the first time a business has been vandalized. In November, someone scrawled profanity in front of an art gallery. The month before that, police said three acts of vandalism involving galleries had taken place. No details were provided.

A growing arts scene has taken root in the industrial section of the Eastside neighborhood, which is heavily Latino. Some residents say they worry the galleries will change the neighborhood, increase rent and push working-class families out.

Along Cesar Chavez Avenue, activists fear the coffee shop will do the same for businesses.

Yeah, but that has always happened here, said Guillermo Banegas, 67, the owner of a barbershop four doors down from the coffee shop. If I leave, my landlord is going to raise the rent on the next person who opens a business here.

Banegas has been running his barbershop for about 20 years and has lived in Boyle Heights for 30 years.

In the 80s I was paying $650 in rent and now $1,100, he said.

Banegas knows his days of cutting hair along Cesar Chavez Avenue may soon come to an end. A new property owner already is threatening to raise his rent by $300. But Banegas said thats the nature of business.

I want the coffee shop here, Banegas said. If its going to bring more people, the better for us.

Banegas said he doesnt agree with the recent protests and doesnt quite understand why they have been targeting the coffee shop.

They have a right to run a business, he said. Its up to you if you want cheap coffee or expensive coffee.

We all want to be prosperous business owners, he added.

Customers were surprised to see the shattered glass door.

Its disheartening, said Rachel Chang, 31, a Boyle Heights resident and frequent customer.

Granville Ampong, 47, said he has seen the neighborhood change for the better and hopes it continues.

Social change is coming, Ampong said.

As for the shop, the owners said they dont plan on leaving.

We all want to keep going and would like for this to be resolved peacefully, but to do that, we need engagement, Schwarz said.

Defa said that despite the protests, many residents have been supportive of the business.

Were blessed, blessed, blessed to be here, Defa said.

ruben.vives@latimes.com

Twitter: @LATvives

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After decades of controversy, the Newhall Ranch development in the Santa Clarita Valley cleared its last major hurdle Tuesday when county officials certified a revised environmental analysis and approved two of the projects five planned subdivisions.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved an environmental impact report addressing concerns about greenhouse gas emissions and threats to a native fish species that were raised in a 2015 California Supreme Court decision rejecting an earlier version of the report. The board also re-approved the land-use permits for the Mission Village and Landmark Village communities. The actions were approved in two 4-0 votes.

On the whole, this is a well thought-out project that will bring needed housing supply while ensuring that environmental resources are being protected, said Supervisor Kathryn Barger, whose district includes the proposed development.

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The 21,000-home project has long been opposed by residents and environmental groups, who contend that it will generate greenhouse gases and other pollution and threaten the Santa Clara River ecosystem.

Santa Clarita can look forward to more toxic air, greater traffic congestion, stress on our already inadequate infrastructure and poor quality of life overall for the foreseeable future, Santa Clarita resident Cher Gilmore said during the public comment period.

The development site is across a highway from the Chiquita Canyon Landfill, whose expansion was recently approved.

Environmental advocates and the state Supreme Court had also raised concerns about potential harm to the unarmored threespine stickleback. The developer had originally proposed trapping and relocating the fish as a mitigation measure, but the court said that was illegal.

In its revised plan, the developer proposed building bridges and taking other steps to keep construction out of the river, eliminating the need to relocate any fish. It also proposed net-zero measures to offset greenhouse gas emissions, such as retrofitting buildings in low-income communities in L.A. and purchasing cleaner cookstoves in Africa.

Greenhouse gas will always be generated by human activity, Emile Haddad, chief executive officer of Five Point Holdings, which is developing Newhall Ranch, said in an interview. The question is, how do you mitigate?

About 200 people showed up at Tuesdays meeting to support the development, many wearing Yes to Net-Zero Newhall stickers. The developer provided bus transportation for some of them, as well as sandwiches and water in a tent outside the Hall of Administration.

The supporters included representatives of the business community and economic development organizations, who argued that Newhall Ranch would provide needed jobs and housing in the Santa Clarita Valley. A member of a Native American tribe associated with the land also testified in support, as did Climate Resolve, an L.A.-based climate change advocacy organization.

Supervisor Sheila Kuehl abstained from both votes.

I want to applaud the work that Five Point has done to mitigate the projects greenhouse gas emissions, she said, before expressing concerns about using open, agricultural land for the project, and about potential harm to air quality beyond greenhouse gases.

Newhall Ranch was first proposed in 1994, with construction envisioned to begin in 1998, but has been delayed by political and legal battles.

With the countys vote, the developer has all but cleared the remaining hurdles before it can break ground.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge must sign off on the revised environmental impact report, which was also approved last month by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. And opponents of the project could take further legal action.

John Buse, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, which sued the state over the original environmental analysis, said he had mixed feelings about how things had played out.

The resulting environmental report that the county has now prepared is so much better  it does what the Supreme Court told them to do, he said. At the same time, we still have these two large environmentally damaging projects approved.

Buse said his group had not yet decided whether to pursue further legal action.

nina.agrawal@latimes.com

Twitter: @AgrawalNina
A man described as a white nationalist is fighting extradition to California on assault charges in connection with a brawl between extreme-right groups and counter-protesters that ended with seven people stabbed near the state Capitol last year, officials said.

The California Highway Patrol had initially asked prosecutors to charge more than 100 people in connection with the wild melee. But the Sacramento County district attorneys office has issued only four arrest warrants in the case. By Wednesday afternoon, all four of those suspects had been arrested, prosecutors said.

William Scott Planer, a 34-year-old Denver resident, was charged recently with assault with a deadly weapon and participation in a riot for his role in the violent clash that took place at the state Capitol on June 26, 2016, Sacramento County Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Grippi said in a statement. He is described by experts on hate groups as a member of a white nationalist group known as the Traditionalist Worker Party.

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Porfirio Paz, a supporter of an anti-fascist group that police blamed for inciting the violence, was also recently arrested on the same charges in Southern California, prosecutors said. He is due in court next week.

On Wednesday, Sacramento prosecutors announced the arrest of two suspects. Yvonne Felarca was arrested Tuesday night in Southern California on charges of assault with a deadly weapon, participating in a riot and inciting a riot, prosecutors said. Michael Williams was captured Wednesday in Yolo County and charged with assault with a deadly weapon and participating in a riot.

Both Felarca and Williams were supporting the anti-fascist group, according to Shelly Orio, a spokeswoman for the district attorneys office.

Planer is currently being held in Colorado Springs, where he was arrested July 12 after he allegedly affixed a sticker reading Fight Terror, Nuke Israel, to the outside of a Jewish center, said Lt. Howard Black, public information officer for the Colorado Springs Police Department. He was charged with a bias-motivated crime, according to Black, who said Planer was caught on video applying the sticker.

Planer is being held in lieu of $500,000 bail there and plans to fight extradition to California, said Jacqueline Kirby, a spokeswoman for the El Paso County Sheriffs Office in Colorado.

Earlier this year, the CHP presented a 2,000-page report asking Sacramento prosecutors to charge more than 100 people involved in the brawl with a wide array of crimes, including 514 misdemeanors and 68 felonies. On Tuesday, Grippi said prosecutors had declined to bring charges in many of those cases due to insufficient evidence.

The fact that many of the suspects had obscured their faces with balaclavas or masks made prosecutions difficult, Grippi said. The garb is common among members of Antifa  shorthand for anti-fascists.

The CHP reviewed hundreds of hours of surveillance video before presenting its report, but prosecutors were unable to identify or charge suspects in some of the most egregious instances of violence on that day, including several stabbings and an attack on a local television reporter, Grippi said.

In all, arrest warrants for 101 individuals were submitted for consideration. Many of the charges submitted did not meet the District Attorneys filing guidelines including: 85 counts of Unlawful Assembly, 55 counts of Conspiracy to Unlawfully Assemble and 32 counts related to the possession of illegal signs and banners, he said in the statement. In several other cases, there was clear evidence of felonious conduct but the identity of the perpetrators could not be established. Unfortunately, included in this category were all of the stabbings and the attack on a local television reporter.

When asked about the decision not to file charges against most of the suspects, CHP spokeswoman Fran Clader said, Ultimately, it is the role of the district attorneys office to determine who should be arrested and face charges.

The melee at the Capitol grew out of a rally held by the Traditionalist Worker Party and the Golden State Skinheads, considered to be one of the largest hate groups in California.

The groups previously said they were demonstrating to condemn attacks on supporters of President Trump in California. They had a legal permit to hold the rally but were attacked by a large crowd of Antifa members and other counter-protesters, according to the CHP. Members of the group Antifa Sacramento have previously denied those claims.

Seven people were stabbed, and a total of 10 were hospitalized as the warring factions squared off, said Officer Deby Sherrick-Lopez, public information officer for the CHPs Capitol Protection Section, which investigated the clash. A loaded gun was recovered at the scene, but police failed to locate any of the weapons used in the stabbings.

Orio said the arrest warrants were issued late last month.

Photo of William Scott Planer, 34 charged with Bias-Motivated Crimes pic.twitter.com/0PIWWHZgWk  Springs Police (@CSPDPIO) July 18, 2017

Planer has allegedly attended anti-Muslim events and rallies organized by the National Socialist Movement, one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in the country, in the last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a group that focuses on anti-Semitic actions but also tracks hate-based activity across the U.S. The ADL posted evidence of those claims, from some of Planers social media accounts in a blog published Monday afternoon.

Oren Segal, who heads the ADLs Center on Extremism, said many members of the white nationalist groups are emblematic of a younger, confrontational wave of the extreme right, who see counter-protesters such as Antifa as sworn enemies and are willing to travel to rallies in order to fight them. Planer lives in Denver but has been spotted at rallies in several other cities and states, according to Segal.

Part of what they do is not only to physically confront them, but they like to dress the part. They view themselves as the superheroes of the far-right, Segal said. Its these new, younger, more violently inclined white supremacists that are willing to travel and take these risks of physical confrontation.

james.queally@latimes.com

Follow @JamesQueallyLAT for crime and police news in California.

UPDATES:

July 19, 2017, 4:25 p.m.: This article was updated with information about additional arrests.

This article first published on July 18, 2017 at 8:35 p.m.
A gunman accused of firing at Los Angeles police and wounding a search dog during a gun battle has been charged with 19 counts of attempted murder on officers as well as other charges, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Jose Rauda, 34, faces 27 additional counts of assault with a firearm on a peace officer, assault with a firearm, assaulting a police animal causing injury and possession of a firearm by a felon in connection with the June 15 shootout.

According to police, officers were preparing to launch a probation search about 7 p.m. in the 400 block of East 49th Street when they came under fire from someone inside a house.

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Police returned fire and saw Rauda run off, Los Angeles County prosecutors said in a news release.

#LAPD Our job has many risks, but we continue to protect & serve. Pic of helmet w/ graze from bullet @lapdnewton OIS pic.twitter.com/NnSiyxyQxK  LAPD HQ (@LAPDHQ) June 16, 2017

Two hours later, a K-9 searching for Rauda near a trash can in a backyard was shot in its hind leg. Before officers arrived, the shooter fled, officials said.

It wasnt until about midnight that police found Rauda hiding in a laundry room behind a nearby house, prosecutors said. When officers closed in, Rauda opened fire, police said, adding that one officers helmet was grazed by a bullet.

After a gunfight with police, Rauda eventually surrendered and was taken into custody.

At least 13 officers were involved in the incident, police said.

If convicted, Rauda could face life in prison.

joseph.serna@latimes.com

For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter.

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The former head of South Koreas earthquake research center was convicted this week of laundering more than $1 million in bribes from two seismological companies, including one based in Pasadena, that paid him in exchange for insider information.

After a four-day trial, a federal jury convicted Heon-Cheol Chi, a 59-year-old resident of South Korea, of one count of transacting in criminally derived property, according to the U.S. attorneys office. The jury failed to reach a verdict on five other counts of money laundering.

Chis conviction hinged on the jurys determination that the payments were illegal under South Koreas bribery laws. Prosecutors said Chi abused his public position by accepting kickbacks, but his attorney argued that consulting agreements are common in South Korea and that the law was not properly explained to the jury.

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Money laundering is only a crime if you can prove the money came from an illegal source. The only illegal source they charged him with was violating Korean law, said defense attorney Joel Koury, adding that Chi was never charged with taking bribes in South Korea. If the judge got Korean law wrong, then its not a crime.

For years, Chi headed the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources Earthquake Research Center in South Korea, where he tested seismological equipment, offered technical certifications for equipment used in government-funded projects and developed an early-warning earthquake system.

Starting in at least 2009, two companies  Kinemetrics in Pasadena and Guralp in the United Kingdom  began dumping large sums of money into Chis bank account in Glendora, authorities said.

In turn, prosecutors said, Chi gave those companies an upper hand in doing business in South Korea, advocating for the purchase and use of their equipment and offering confidential information about their competitors and the research centers bidding process.

In emails to the companies, Chi called the payments advice fees, acknowledging that it was illegal for him to accept them as a public official, according to federal court records.

Due to my position, I am not allowed to participate in any activity of private companies, he wrote in 2010, according to court records. That is why I got the advice fee from you through the American bank.

Meanwhile, he urged representatives of the companies to delete or not reply to his emails.

Through 2015, prosecutors said Chi accepted more than $1 million in payments  roughly $650,000 from Guralp and $386,000 from Kinemetrics. Each year, he pocketed more from the bribes than from his research center salary, according to court records.

He then made a series of transfers between his California bank account and his brokerage account in New York, using the money for personal purposes, largely in South Korea, court records show.

Chi was arrested in December on his way to a seismology convention in San Francisco, Koury said. Chi, who faces up to 10 years in federal prison and is scheduled to be sentenced in October, plans to appeal his conviction, he added.

Meanwhile, Acting U.S. Atty. Sandra R. Brown said in a statement that Chis conviction sends a message that should be heard around the world.

The American financial system is not to be used as a storehouse for the proceeds of corrupt activity, she said.

alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter @AleneTchek
The Medical Board of California confirmed Wednesday that it was investigating a report in the Los Angeles Times that USCs former medical school dean abused drugs and associated with criminals and drug users.

The Medical Board is looking into the allegations based upon the information provided in the L.A. Times article. However we do not discuss complaints or ongoing investigations by law, Cassandra Hockenson, a spokeswoman for the medical board, said in an emailed statement.

Asked Tuesday if the university had discussed the case of the former dean, Carmen A. Puliafito, with the medical board, USC said reports by peer review organizations were confidential.

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We can confirm, however, that the California Medical Board is aware of the situation, USC said in a statement. They have the sole authority to decide whether and how much to investigate.

The medical board initiates investigations of doctors after receiving a complaint. According to the board, cases are given higher priority if the complaint concerns physician impairment or poses immediate harm to patients.

Puliafito, 66, a renowned eye surgeon, led the Keck School of Medicine for nearly a decade before resigning in 2016. He remained on the Keck faculty and continued to represent the university at public events as recently as Saturday.

On Monday, The Times published a lengthy article reporting that Puliafito, during his tenure as dean, kept company with a circle of criminals and addicts who said he smoked methamphetamine and other drugs with them.

An overdose, a young companion, drug-fueled parties: The secret life of USC med school dean 

The same day, USC said that Puliafito was no longer seeing patients and was on leave. Attempts to reach Puliafito were unsuccessful.

Puliafito resigned his $1.1-million-a-year deans post in March 2016, in the middle of the spring term, saying he wanted to explore outside opportunities.

He did not mention that three weeks earlier, a 21-year-old woman had overdosed in his presence in a Pasadena hotel room. The woman was rushed to a hospital, where she recovered. Police found methamphetamine in the hotel room, according to a police report, but made no arrests.

A tip about the episode prompted The Times to investigate. The newspaper interviewed six people who said they partied and used drugs with Puliafito in Pasadena, Huntington Beach and Las Vegas, as well as at USC. They ranged in age from their late teens to late thirties. None were USC students.

Do you have information about USCs former med school dean? We want to hear from you 

Members of the group captured their exploits in photos and videos shot in 2015 and 2016.

In one video, a tuxedo-clad Puliafito displays an orange pill on his tongue and says into the camera, Thought Id take an ecstasy before the ball. Then he swallows the pill.

In another, Puliafito uses a butane torch to heat a large glass pipe outfitted for methamphetamine use. He inhales and then unleashes a thick plume of white smoke. Seated next to him on a sofa, a young woman appears to smoke heroin from a piece of heated foil.

USC has declined to say when it first learned of Puliafitos conduct or how it responded.

On Tuesday, USC President C.L. Max Nikias said in a message to the campus that the the university would examine and address the Times reporting, adding we understand the frustrations expressed about this situation.

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Acknowledging widespread concern on campus, USC President C.L. Max Nikias said Tuesday the university would examine and address a report in The Times that its former medical school dean abused drugs and associated with criminals and drug users.

Nikias, speaking about the controversy for the first time in a letter to the campus community, said that we understand the frustrations expressed about this situation involving Dr. Carmen A. Puliafito and we are working to determine how we can best prevent these kinds of circumstances moving forward.

Our university categorically condemns the unlawful possession, use, or distribution of drugs, the president said. We are concerned about Dr. Puliafito and his family and hope that, if the articles assertions are true, he receives the help and treatment he may need for a full recovery.

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Puliafito, 66, a renowned eye surgeon, led the Keck School of Medicine for nearly a decade before resigning in 2016. He remained on the Keck faculty and continued to represent the university at public events as recently as Saturday.

On Monday, The Times published a lengthy article reporting that Puliafito, during his tenure as dean, kept company with a circle of criminals and addicts who said he smoked methamphetamine and other drugs with them.

An overdose, a young companion, drug-fueled parties: The secret life of USC med school dean 

The same day, USC said Puliafito was no longer seeing patients and was on leave. Attempts to reach Puliafito were unsuccessful Tuesday.

Asked Tuesday if the university had discussed the Puliafito case with the California State Medical Board, USC said reports by peer review organizations were confidential.

We can confirm, however, that the California Medical Board is aware of the situation, USC said in a statement. They have the sole authority to decide whether and how much to investigate.

In California, the medical board initiates investigations of doctors after receiving a complaint. According to the board, cases are given higher priority if the complaint concerns physician impairment or poses immediate harm to patients.

Do you have information about USCs former med school dean? We want to hear from you 

Puliafito resigned his $1.1-million-a-year deans post in March 2016, in the middle of the spring term, saying he wanted to explore outside opportunities.

He did not mention that three weeks earlier, a 21-year-old woman had overdosed in his presence in a Pasadena hotel room. The woman was rushed to a hospital, where she recovered. Police found methamphetamine in the hotel room, according to a police report, but made no arrests.

A tip about the episode prompted The Times to investigate. The newspaper interviewed six people who said they partied and used drugs with Puliafito in Pasadena, Huntington Beach and Las Vegas, as well as at USC. They ranged in age from late teens to late thirties. None were USC students.

Members of the group captured their exploits in photos and videos shot in 2015 and 2016.

In one video, a tuxedo-clad Puliafito displays an orange pill on his tongue and says into the camera, Thought Id take an ecstasy before the ball. Then he swallows the pill.

In another, Puliafito uses a butane torch to heat a large glass pipe outfitted for methamphetamine use. He inhales and then unleashes a thick plume of white smoke. Seated next to him on a sofa, a young woman smokes heroin from a piece of heated foil.

USC has declined to say when it first learned of Puliafitos conduct or how it responded.

Carmen A. Puliafito (Alex J. Berliner / AP)

UPDATE: Drug allegations against former USC medical school dean are probed by Medical Board of California 

A few days after the incident at the Pasadena hotel last year, a witness phoned Nikias office and told two employees about what happened, the witness told The Times on condition of anonymity.

Phone records confirm that the witness made a six-minute call to Nikias office on March 14, 2016, 10 days after the overdose.

In his letter Tuesday, Nikias said the university was continuing the path to improve our support system for people with substance abuse issues.

Unfortunately, the issue of substance abuse is not uncommon and impacts individuals at all levels of society, he wrote. Reports of high-powered executives, doctors, and others with substance abuse issues have become all too common individuals who function in their workplace but have serious issues affecting their private lives.

USC officials hired the Harvard-educated Puliafito in 2007 to raise the profile and ranking of the Keck School.

As dean, he oversaw hundreds of medical students and thousands of professors and clinicians. He was also a key fundraiser for USC, bringing in more than $1 billion in donations, by his own estimation.

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The Wal-Mart greeter who took the retail giant all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in the largest gender bias class-action lawsuit in U.S. history has died, a family member said Tuesday.

Betty Dukes died July 10 at her home in Antioch, Calif., said her niece, Rita Roland. Dukes was 67.

She was a very tough lady, very driven and passionate about what she believed in. She was persuasive. She just didnt want to tell her point, she wanted you to have an understanding so you could come to the same conclusions that she had, Roland said.

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As the lead plaintiff in Dukes vs. Wal-Mart, she alleged in the 2001 lawsuit that the company violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of race, creed or gender.

Dukes said Wal-Mart systemically paid women less than male counterparts and promoted men to higher positions at faster rates than women. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011, where it was dismissed. But Roland said the dismissal was not in vain for her aunt.

The one thing I do know is the work that she did is fluid. It has not stopped, said the Milpitas woman who often traveled with Dukes when she was working on the case. She was one of many voices fighting for the same cause.

An ordained minister, Dukes faith was the foundation for everything she did, including taking on the retail giant, Roland said.

She believed in helping people, Roland said.

In her off time, Dukes helped organize community banquets with speakers celebrating Martin Luther King Day, Black History Month and the election of President Obama. She also helped distribute food to the needy.

At least twice a year, she would also speak to groups about her past struggles and how people should work to fight for womens rights and against discrimination, Roland said.

And she always did it looking her Sunday best. Matching purse, shoes and accessories. She took pride in the way she dressed, said Roland.

Born in Louisiana in 1950, Dukes moved west at a young age with her mother, who was in search of work. She later married but had no children. In 1994, she enthusiastically accepted an offer to work the Wal-Mart cash registers part time for $5 an hour. She dreamed of turning around a hard life by advancing, through work and determination, into Wal-Mart corporate management.

I was focused on Wal-Marts aggressive customer service, Dukes said in 2011 interview during her lunch break, after first saying grace over a meal of fast-food hamburgers and chicken nuggets. I wanted to advance. I wanted to make that money.

When Dukes needed change to make a small purchase during her break she asked a colleague to open a cash register with a one-cent transaction, which she claimed was a common practice.

She was demoted for misconduct. She complained to a manager that the punishment was too severe and part of a long campaign of discrimination that began almost as soon as she started working for Wal-Mart in Pittsburg, a blue-collar city of about 100,000 about 45 miles east of San Francisco.

When those complaints were ignored, Dukes sought legal advice and ended up serving as the lead plaintiff in what would become the vast class-action suit.

Dukes worked for Wal-Mart until last year.

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A 44-year-old mother might seem an unusual visitor on the drug corners of Baltimore, but Erricka Bridgeford has shown up for weeks to make her pitch for peace.

Forget your grudges for one weekend, she urges the young men she finds. Help bring a 72-hour truce to a city besieged by gun violence.

Its a citywide call, she tells them, but Im talking to you.

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Bridgeford and other neighborhood leaders are gathering support for a three-day cease-fire the first weekend of August to quell Baltimores violence. She admits that such peace is a tall order for a city thats seen 189 killings this year.

Organizers aim to stop the shooting from Aug. 4 through 6, with a unified and blunt message: Nobody kill anybody.

Their message has been printed on T-shirts and fliers. They designed a website and held community meetings. More than 1,600 people visited their Facebook page. The grass-roots campaign has swelled since it began in May.

Ive seen the momentum build over the past several weeks, said T.J. Smith, spokesman for Baltimore police. We are all in this together, and were 1,000% supportive of the efforts.

The campaign urges people to put aside their guns and join weekend events for healing, from a peace rally that Friday evening to a vigil Sunday where participants will read the names of every person killed in 2017.

The Baltimore Ceasefire was not declared by any one organization, organizers wrote on their website. This ceasefire is the product of Baltimore residents not only being exhausted by homicides, but believing that Baltimore can have a murder-free weekend if everyone takes responsibility.

More than 600 people have pledged to keep the peace, they wrote. Among them are some of the young men Bridgeford has met on the corners.

You just talk to them like theyre your little brother, she said.

A professional mediator, neighborhood volunteer and part-time Uber driver  Everyone who gets in my car leaves with a flier and a speech  Bridgeford says her younger brother was gunned down a decade ago in southwest Baltimore. His killer was never caught.

Next months cease-fire would prove successful if it deters a single shooting, she said. And she figures the movement has already saved a life somewhere.

Somebody was plotting on this weekend, she said. Now theyre not going to do it because of a rumbling in their soul.

The organizers are raising money through their website for more fliers. Some of the money will be donated to the families of anyone killed over the cease-fire weekend. Bridgeford is urging everyone she meets to echo the call for peace.

Jumping out in open-air drug markets might not be for everyone, she said. But were asking everyone to do their part.

Community cease-fires, however, have failed to stem the violence in the past. The group Mothers of Murdered Sons called for a cease-fire over Mothers Day weekend, but at least four people were shot, including a 59-year-old man and 17-year-old woman. Both were killed.

Other communities have called for cease-fires after spates of violence in Birmingham, Ala., and Berkeley, Calif. Such efforts are as much about empowering residents as reducing homicide statistics, said Cassandra Crifasi, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins-Baltimore Collaborative for Violence Reduction.

Persistent violence often leaves neighbors feeling powerless, she said.

Communities feel like they cant do things for themselves. They dont have a voice. They dont feel heard, Crifasi said. This effort seems to me like the people most affected by violence are standing up and saying, Were not going to take this anymore.

A similar awareness campaign that began in Chicago in 2013 has spread across the country, with people wearing orange in June to draw attention to the scourge of gun violence. Across the country, more than 90 people are shot and killed every day, according to the Wear Orange campaign.

Baltimore, meanwhile, remains gripped by its own violent surge, with 2017 on pace to be the citys deadliest year ever. The number of homicides shot up to 344 in 2015; 318 people were killed last year. Baltimore had not exceeded 300 annual homicides for decades before 2015.

Im cautiously optimistic, Crifasi said of the cease-fire. It indicates to me there are lots of people in Baltimore still invested in the safety and security of their communities.

People like Bridgeford, who has carried the message to Baltimores drug corners. She found an unexpected audience, even encouragement in the streets.

Ive absolutely heard skepticism, she said. But even the skeptics are like, Stay out here.

Prudente writes for the Baltimore Sun.
Despite repeated attempts by Senate Republicans to dismantle the Affordable Care Act , the healthcare debate in Washington appears to have collapsed  for now.

The United States has much room for improvement when it comes to healthcare, experts said. The U.S. spends more on healthcare, but we dont have the same health outcomes [as other countries], said Cynthia Cox, associate director at Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization that researches national health issues.

Americans have also long voiced their disillusionment with a system that many experts have warned does not meet the health needs of its population.

But while lawmakers engaged in heated back-and-forth debates in recent months over how to reform the U.S. healthcare system  ending in a lack of sufficient votes on Monday to make changes  people in many other countries have managed to get it right for years and enjoy a stable healthcare system.

Viewed from a global perspective, the current U.S. healthcare impasse underscores just how poor health outcomes for people in the United States are when compared with other countries.

Countries with largest per capita healthcare expenditures, 2015

Source: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Not all OECD members shown. (L.A. Times Graphics)

In 2015, the United States spent almost three times on healthcare as the average of other countries with comparable incomes, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, also known as the OECD, a group of 35 countries, the majority of which have advanced economies, that work to promote economic development. And despite spending more, the results dont necessarily yield better health. Both Italy and Britain, for example, spent at least $5,000 less per person than the United States on healthcare, and yet the population of each of those countries has a higher life expectancy at birth than the United States.

According to experts, there are two underlying reasons why the United States spends so much on healthcare: It uses expensive medical technology and prices for healthcare services, and goods are higher than in other countries.

As a result, the United States spends more on healthcare than any other country, including those belonging to the OECD.

The U.S. spends more money, but we definitely have worse health outcomes, said David Squires, president of the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation based in New York that carries out independent research on healthcare issues.

It doesnt appear that people in the U.S. use more healthcare in general. We go to the doctor less often than people in other countries and get hospitalized less, so its not like we are making greater use, but we are paying more for the things we do use, he said.

Countries with longest life expectancy, 2015

Source: World Health Organization (L.A. Times Graphics)

Despite investing heavily in healthcare, Americans live shorter lives than people in 30 other countries, data from the World Health Organization showed. On average, life expectancy in the United States is 79.3 years, the lowest rate among other advanced economies such as Switzerland, Australia and Canada.

Life expectancy is one way experts measure the effectiveness of a healthcare system, and experts say the United States poor ranking, compared with other Western nations, indicates a weak healthcare system.

This is a troubling statistic at just how poor American health is compared to other countries that have similar economic status, Squires said.

Health coverage rate by OECD country, 2015

Source: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (L.A. Times Graphics)

When it comes to healthcare access, in many ways the United States trails behind other countries, including access to health insurance.

According to 2015 data from the OECD, the United States has a higher percentage of people who go without health insurance than at least 12 other comparable countries.

Although no two countries have the exact same healthcare system, many nations on the list  such as Sweden, Japan and the Netherlands  provide their residents with a universal healthcare insurance plan. Subsequently, nearly 100% of the population from these countries have their healthcare needs covered. That means, in exchange for free healthcare, many governments play an active role in creating the variety of systems to help fund it.

The United States is the only wealthy country without universal coverage. The idea of creating a healthcare system based on principles of universal coverage is one of the main points of contention in the current U.S. healthcare debate, Squires said. After President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, it succeeded in providing insurance to millions of people. But while other countries have normalized such principles, experts said many Republicans are against the idea.

Number of deaths per 100,000 from preventable diseases or complications had adequate healthcare been available, in 2013

Source: European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies 2017 (L.A. Times Graphics)

In 2013, more people died in the United States from preventable diseases or complications than those in 12 other high-income countries, according to data from the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, a health policy organization with offices around Europe.

For every 100,000 people who died in the United States before age 75, 112 people died from complications or conditions that could have been avoided with timely and effective care.

This indicator, known as mortality amenable to healthcare, measures the number of preventable deaths had adequate medical care been available. By tracking this number over time, health experts can monitor both setbacks and improvements in healthcare systems.

By studying the barometer over time, health experts found that the United States has continuously struggled to keep up with other countries in this measure. According to the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker, although the rate has been decreasing globally since at least 1982, more people still die in the United States from preventable diseases or complications than in other countries with similar advanced economies.

Hospital beds per 1,000 people by OECD countries, 2015

Source: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (L.A. Times Graphics)

Health experts also use the number of beds in a hospital as an indicator of the capacity and quality of resources a healthcare system is able to provide. A low number of hospital beds, for instance, may suggest people have limited access to care. The OECD definition of hospital beds includes psychiatric care beds, long-term care beds and other beds in hospitals.

The United States has one of the lowest numbers of hospital beds per capita among all OECD member countries, with 2.83 hospital beds for every 1,000 people, data from the OECD showed.

The number of hospital beds per capita is highest in Japan, with about 13 beds for every 1,000 people and then Korea, with about 11 beds for every 1,000 people. The number of hospital beds in Germany, Austria and Hungary also are above average for other OECD countries.

Over the last decade, most OECD countries have decreased the number of hospital beds per capita. In 2000, the average number of hospital beds in OECD member countries was 5.5 per 1,000 people, according to data from the OECD. That number decreased to 4.8 beds per 1,000 people in 2013. One reason, according to a 2015 study by the OECD, is that as medical technology improves, hospitalization time is reduced. But a reduction in hospital bed numbers also can reflect policies that seek to reduce public spending on health.

melissa.etehad@latimes.com

kyle.kim@latimes.com

UPDATES:

FOR THE RECORD

July 19, 7:47 a.m.: A previous version of this article stated that 112 out of every 1,000 people who died in the U.S. before the age of 75 passed away from a complication or condition that could have been avoided with timely and effective care. The ratio is 112 out of every 100,000.
The stated goal of President Trump s voter fraud commission is to restore confidence and integrity in the electoral process.

But so far the panel, which opponents have assailed as both a sham created by an insecure president and a tool to suppress votes, has faced strong pushback from Democrats and Republicans alike.

On Wednesday, the bipartisan commission held its first meeting in Washington to discuss the voting process and registration.

Heres a look at the goals of the panel and some of the uproar its faced:

Why was the commission created?

In January, Trump  without evidence  said that between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 presidential election. (Although Trump won the electoral college, he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes.) Trumps comments were castigated by elections officials on both sides of the aisle, who questioned the validity of his allegations.

Even so, Trump vowed to look into voter fraud. In May, he issued an executive order creating a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

Is voter fraud widespread?

No. Nationwide studies have consistently shown that voter fraud is almost nonexistent.

A recent comprehensive investigation of voter fraud conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute, found 31 credible instances between 2000 and 2014 of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion votes cast. The study examined every federal election in that time period.

Trump, Pence defend voter fraud panel at first meeting 

Who is on the commission?

It consists of about a dozen current and former secretaries of state, clerk and recorders and judges.

Vice President Mike Pence serves as chairman, while Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is vice chairman. (In recent years, Kobach, who is running to become governor of Kansas, has helped create some of the strictest voter ID laws in the country.)

Others on the panel include former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Republican, and Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, a Democrat.

What has the panel done so far?

Nothing yet, but its just getting started.

Last month, Kobach sent a letter to top election officials in each state asking that they provide, among other things, voters names, addresses and the last four digits of Social Security numbers.

It is crucial for the commission to consider your input as it collects data and identifies areas of opportunity to increase the integrity of our election systems, wrote Kobach.

But dozens of secretaries of state pushed back against the request.

To date, 21 states and the District of Columbia have declined to provide any data, according to a tally by the Brennan Center. Others, citing state law, will provide some, but not all of the data requested.

What did secretaries of state say about the request?

Many of them called it unwarranted and cited state laws that prevent them from sharing some of the data. (Even Kobach announced that Kansas law forbade him from handing over Social Security numbers.)

Wyoming Secretary of State Ed Murray was among the Republican officials who rebuffed the commissions request. Insisting he was going to safeguard the privacy of Wyomings voters, Murray said in a statement to The Times this month that the commissions request could lead to federal overreach.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla , a Democrat, similarly declined, saying that to honor the commissions request would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud made by the president, the vice president and Mr. Kobach.

What has been the commissions response?

Kobach has seemingly taken a page from Trumps playbook.

In a statement issued days after he sent the letter to the secretaries of state, Kobach said that opposition to the commission was fake news and that the panels work was vital to enhancing election integrity.

Despite media distortions and obstruction by a handful of state politicians, this bipartisan commission on election integrity will continue its work to gather the facts through public records requests to ensure the integrity of each American's vote because the public has a right to know, he said.

Has that stopped opposition or lawsuits?

Not at all. The commission has faced a flurry of lawsuits.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center , a nonprofit research group, filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to block the commissions requests for voter data. During oral arguments, the commission agreed to stop collection of voter information pending the courts decision. A ruling is expected in the days ahead.

In addition to EPIC lawsuit, the Lawyers Committee and the American Civil Liberties Union, among others, filed lawsuits this month over privacy concerns associated with commission. A federal judge ruled against the Lawyers Committee and the ACLU suits, but appeals are expected.

What is the commissions end task?

Its supposed to provide Trump with a written report.

When Trump created the commission in May he ordered its members to meet and collaborate with elections officials from all 50 states. Their work is expected to be completed by next year.

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The sudden collapse of Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnells healthcare bill on Monday was much more than a tactical setback for the Senate Republican leader once considered an unbeatable legislative wizard. It was a catastrophic failure for the GOPs attempt to make one-party government work. Its one thing to produce gridlock when control of Congress is divided. When one party manages to produce gridlock all by itself, something is seriously wrong. The setback means that Obamacare will almost certainly survive for the foreseeable future, despite seven years of GOP promises to repeal it.

McConnell and his allies clearly overestimated the cohesion of their fragile 52-seat majority in the Senate  a majority so small that any three defections meant defeat. Moderate-conservative Republicans wanted to protect the expansion of Medicaid, the health insurance plan for low-income families, especially in their home states. Hard-line conservatives wanted, above all, to shrink Medicaid and reverse the expansion.

Theres no easy way to compromise between those two positions. McConnell promised some senators that the bill would shrink Medicaid, but privately assured others that the shrinkage might never happen. That gambit backfired.

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Bills normally go through a long process of public hearings and debate that, with luck, build popular support; that didnt happen this time.

In his attempts to appeal to both pragmatists and hard-liners, McConnell produced an incoherent bill that became less attractive to each camp, not more.

Nor did he succeed in selling the bill to voters; several polls found less than one-fourth of the public liked the legislation. Bills normally go through a long process of public hearings and debate that, with luck, build popular support; that didnt happen this time. And McConnell got little help on that score from a president who seemed jarringly unaware of the details of the bill.

Worst of all, from the GOP point of view, the debate inadvertently built new constituencies for Obamacare. The long battle over repeal educated millions of voters on what the law has actually delivered, especially through Medicaid expansion.

Before the House and Senate Republicans drafted proposals to replace Obamacare, the choice voters confronted was between a flawed status quo and an undefined alternative that Trump promised would be beautiful. Not surprisingly, many chose beautiful.

Once the legislation was unveiled, the choice changed. Now it was between Obamacare and a plan that reduced future spending on Medicaid, weakened the guarantee to cover preexisting conditions, and threatened to close rural hospitals.

Given that alternative, a majority rallied to Obamacare. The long-derided law is now more popular than President Trump, 53% to 38% in recent Gallup polls.

That helps explain why McConnells Monday night fallback plan to repeal Obamacare without a replacement (although the repeal would not take effect for two years) didnt survive past lunchtime on Tuesday.

Three pragmatic Republican senators  Susan Collins of Maine, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska  rejected the idea almost instantly, saying it would throw insurance markets into chaos.

I did not come to Washington to hurt people, Capito explained with spare eloquence.

McConnell said he would still seek a vote on repeal, but the defections appeared to doom his plan.

The healthcare debate isnt over, of course. Obamacare still needs short-term support and long-term fixes, which the president isnt eager to provide.

Trump said Tuesday he will now revert to a messy solution he has long proposed: standing back and letting the federal health law fail on its own.

Well let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us, and theyre going to say, How do we fix it?

Im not going to own it, he added. I can tell you, the Republicans are not going to own it.

Except he already does, in the eyes of many voters. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll last month found that 59% of Americans think the Trump administration now bears responsibility for making Obamacare work  including 56% of Republicans. Translation: Voters expect the governing party to fix problems whether it wants to or not.

Some Senate Republicans have accepted that burden already. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Health Committee, said hes getting to work to stabilize the individual [insurance] market. John McCain of Arizona, hospitalized in his home state, said its time to draft new legislation with input from members of both parties.

With the collapse of McConnells effort, the GOP appears to have lost its chance to pass a bill in the Senate through reconciliation, the arcane budget process that requires a majority of only 50 votes. Any future healthcare bill will need 60 votes instead of 50  which requires winning support from at least eight Democrats.

If they want to repeal, replace or merely fix Obamacare, Senate Republicans now have no choice but to try to legislate piecemeal changes the old-fashioned way  with hearings, open debate and even a measure of bipartisanship.

Thats probably too optimistic. But as McConnell warned a few weeks ago, they may have no alternative. Theyve tried everything else and failed.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook.

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

Twitter: @DoyleMcManus

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In the long run, failure to repeal Obamacare may not hurt Republicans

Bill Nye on the terrifying ascendancy of American dingbatitude

Ive chronicled 23 years of unrelenting change in The Times. This is my last weekly column
From the Emmy-winning science guy on the PBS childrens television program to the lab-coat crusader who saves the world on Netflix, Bill Nye is a longtime science-is-entertaining educator, a onetime mechanical engineer and a perpetual science lover. He writes books at the publishing equivalent of the speed of light, and the latest, Everything All at Once, brought him to Los Angeles Times Ideas Exchange events at the Ace Theatre in Los Angeles, where he extolled science education for every kid in every classroom. The head of the Planetary Society wants to recruit nerds from all walks of life to join him in radical curiosity, and he nailed his flag to the mast over that deep divide in the world of scientists, Star Trek or Star Wars?

Click here for the full archive of "Patt Morrison Asks" podcasts 

What are the qualifications of a nerd? What do you have to be?

You have got to be into something  you have to be passionate about something. I like tinkering, Im a tinkerer. So I became a mechanical engineer. But I can imagine people are nerdy about all sorts of things and we want you to take that passion and do something great with it. Save the world!

This book covers a lot of territory. It goes to problem solving, and theres the title, Everything All at Once. But youre a fan of monotasking. Your license plate advances the cause of mono-tasking.

My license plate frame says try monotasking. Sure, you want to be driving and texting and eating an ice cream cone and faxing or whatever one does. But just try doing one thing at a time.

Nevertheless, youve got to keep the idea that we have a lot of problems to solve here as humankind on Earth. You know, you know humans now move more earth and rock than Mother Nature does. I mention that to point out that we have a responsibility. We are in charge now of the planet. So you cant just solve one problem or another problem. We have to solve all the problems and we have to solve them all at once.

And so what I want: for everyone in the world to have access to clean water, reliably produced renewable electricity and access to the Internet or whatever the future of electronic information is called  worldwide information  and that will almost certainly involve space assets, low-altitude satellites handing the Internet signals from one to the other like a mobile phone call, but literally on a global scale. So lets go! Get that done!

You probably saw the recent Pew poll that found that, two years ago, 54% of Republicans said colleges and universities have a positive impact. Now 58% say its negative. Even a number of Democrats 

Universities have a negative impact? Well, thats not good news. So, OK  why are universities bad?

This poll finds that some people say they have a negative impact on the way things are going. And it seems to me that we are in retreat in some ways from having any regard for knowledge.

This is it  the so-called experts: What do they know? Theyre experts, for crying out loud! Ones intuition about climate change is not as good as facts about climate change.

What keeps the United States competitive in the economic sphere is innovation, new ideas. And new ideas come from science.

It just sounds like people are scared. It just sounds like people are afraid. And the people who are afraid in general  with due respect, and I am now one of them  are older. Climate change deniers, by way of example, are older. Its generational. So were just going to have to wait for those people to age out, as they say. Age out is a euphemism for die. But itll happen, I guarantee you  thatll happen.

One of your book chapters is everybody knows something you dont. But heres a cartoon from The New Yorker. Its a man standing on a plane with his hand in the air, and hes yelling 

 hand in the air, facing the passengers, most of whom have their hands up. And he says, These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly this plane?

So is this what were up against?

Kind of. Thats pretty insightfully, ironically brilliant. Flying a plane is something that takes practice. Youd just as soon have experts that are good of that.

We love the practical impact of technology, we love the new iPhone, and yet we retreat from the abstract, like the idea of theory. In science theory is different from the way people regard it in real life.

Thats always been kind of a problem. The word theory is a special thing in science. Do you know what the special thing in science is? You can make a prediction. A theory is a system of thought that provides a prediction you can verify by observation and experiment. As the saying goes, the climates changing whether you believe it or not, and weve got to get to work on this.

I was born in the U.S., I went to engineering school in the U.S., I got my engineering license in the U.S., so Im all about the U.S. And I want us to lead instead of not lead. And I dont know how long you can sustain things if everybody hates you around the world.

Why do people like conspiracy theories? Is it because its easy?

Easy!! Wouldnt it be nice if there were just 60 people screwing everything up? Just go find those 60 people and tell em to cut it out! But its a much bigger problem than that.

Those of you out here who want to deny humans landing on the moon, if youre into that  look at the amount of paper NASA generated. You couldnt afford to fake that much paper! Im not kidding, you guys. Itd be prohibitively expensive. Theres warehouses full of documents, of specifications and drawings and engineering drawings and so on  just that alone would overwhelm you as a faker.

Buzz Aldrin [the Apollo 11 astronaut and the second human to set foot on the moon] punched out a man who called him a liar and a coward for saying he had landed on the moon.

Oh, he was fed up with that guy.

Have you ever been tempted?

Oh no! No no! [laughs]. Oh no, Mr. Carlson. I dont know if you saw that, me and Mr. [Fox TV host Tucker] Carlson. It was 

We have the situation where people are acting against their own self-interest, and that thing about universities and colleges that you mentioned is probably part of that. What keeps the United States competitive in the economic sphere is innovation, new ideas.

And new ideas come from science, and they come from basic research and they come in sometimes from universities and colleges. You say the Department of Defense  well, they get their innovators from universities.

Its not that we want everyone to be a scientist  and believe me, we do not want everyone to be an engineer, no. The fashion crisis alone would be troubling.

No, you just want people who support it. You want a voting populace that supports innovation, attorneys who protect intellectual property, venture capitalists who make it possible, people who sweep the floors in the buildings where the innovators are innovating  you want everybody to support the tradition of new ideas.

I grew up in the Space Age. Im of a certain age. People presumed that NASA could do anything. And still NASA is the best brand the United States has; you travel anywhere in the world, people hate the U.S. but they respect the space program. And the space program is so well-respected that many countries have a space program. Vietnam has a space program. South Africa. Mexico is revving up. Britain is re-revving its space program, because people know what it does for your society.

Theres this optimism, and you solve problems that have never been solved before, and you make discoveries that influence the way everybody feels about living in the cosmos. So its of great value. And NASA is still the largest space agency in the world, larger than most other space agencies combined.

Where did our official enthusiasm for science go?

For me it was in the 1980s. People started taking it for granted. And  of course, everybody loved him  it was Mr. Reagan, or the people around him who were very influential, in taking solar panels off the roof of the White House, curtailing the efforts to teach schoolchildren the metric system  this was all kind of a throwback time for me.

So you ask, when did it start to go to heck? It was along about that era when this presumption that making money was the best thing that you could do; that was like the greatest achievement of anybody, was to make money. You know, I dont mind it, but its not all Im into.

The classic opponent of knowledge is ignorance. But now there seems to be a willful pushback  people in positions of power or authority who ought to know better. There was a Republican state senator in Kentucky at a hearing on manmade climate change in 2014 who said, I dont want to get into the debate about climate change, but I will simply point out that I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here. Nobody will dispute that.

By the way, if you go to Mars, its really cold, OK?

And Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a proponent of the notion that vaccines can cause autism.

That we can understand nature as well as we do is an amazing thing, and worthy of respect. And its hard not to be critical of people who want to be ignorant, but I dont think it can last. I dont think the celebration of dingbatitude can stick with us because well get out-competed by the non-dingbats. People will want to look to non-dingbats to innovate and keep the United States competitive.

As much fun as it sounds, coal mining isnt really that great of a job. I was in West Virginia a year and a half ago and people are fed up with the coal industry. Theyre tired of it. And thats going to catch up with our leaders sooner or later.

There are a lot of things that sound reasonable that arent. And autism with the vaccination is really the classic. The symptoms of autism are diagnosed at about the same age that certain vaccines are administered. It looks like cause and effect. But that is not provably medically.

And for all the anti-vaxxers out there [in the theater audience], you have to get vaccinated. I dont care about you. If you go ahead and get sick and die, knock yourself out. The reason I insist you get vaccinated is to protect me from you. Me! You get sick, the virus, the bacteria, mutates inside of you. You are the petri dish of death for the rest of us. Vaccines were discovered in the 17-freaking-hundreds, people. Its not some new freaking thing! So we push back against that.

When you were a Boeing engineer, did you ever expect youd have to engage politically to defend science?

I know! What the heck is that? Im not the guy denying climate change. You guys started it. I didnt want be political. You made it political  clowns. You know, climate change is something we should all be very concerned about, and we should get to work on it as soon as we can. Its really an extraordinary time. Thats why I wrote the book, to get people excited about the process and how can use our nerdiness to improve things for everyone.

[Regarding carbon dioxide as the principle culprit in climate change], if there were no carbon dioxide, the Earth would be about 30 degrees Celsius colder. This room right now is about 20, 21 degrees Celsius. We all know liquid water would be frozen. Thats the difference caused by carbon dioxide.

The amazing thing to me is the amount of carbon dioxide is tiny. Its .04 percent of the earths atmosphere. Its 400 parts per million. When I was your age, it was 300 parts per million. Its gone up by a third in just three decades.

Its extraordinary. Its never gone that fast ever in the earths history that we can tell from the geologic record. So this is whats causing climate change, that carbon dioxide going from what used to be 280 parts per million around the year 1750.

1750 is a year we like to choose because its when the really usable successful steam engine was invented. Its never had this much carbon dioxide get into the atmosphere this fast. And thats why the earth is warming so fast. And its our responsibility. Humans did this.

Weve talked about how theory is used differently by lay people and scientists. You also talk about skepticism, which people think is a kind of denial, which it isnt.

So, skepticism. I think the word is used or interpreted wrongly in two ways. The first one: Skepticism is not the same as cynicism. Being skeptical  that is to say not accepting a claim, especially an extraordinary claim, without evaluating it  is not the same as dismissing the claim outright because youre cynical.

The other thing is, skepticism is what we call critical thinking. It doesnt mean that its necessarily wrong. Skepticism and scientific inquiry is often based on a claim. You make a statement and you evaluate it to see whether or not its true, and you set up a test, an experiment, to see whether or not its true.

That is a process that is a result of not taking something at face value. For example, Macys has a holiday motto, believe. Get into the fantasy of angels and Tinkerbell people and so on.

But you dont want to believe for beliefs sake. You want to believe in something for good reason.

And people say that science is like a religion because you have faith in it.

In science we have faith in things because theyre based on experiment and observations that are verifiable. Its not the same as having faith for faiths sake. However, what we do have in science and skeptical thought is the belief that the universe or nature is knowable. Every time we come up against something that seems to be unknowable in science, we keep pushing to find out that it is knowable.

Organized religion has had conflicts with science back to Galileo, and before. Are they mutually exclusive?

First of all, there would be no conflict between religion and science. If you have faith in a higher power, good. The amount of support people get from their religions is extraordinary, the community. But the Earth is not 6,000 years old. If your religion makes you critical of me, if it makes you insist that the Earth is 6,000 years old despite the overwhelming evidence it is much older than that, then you have a problem with your religion. Its not my problem. Well, it actually has become my problem. Ive made it my problem because of young people. You dont want to teach young people that the earth is 6,000 years old.

This whole thing about states should have the rights to teach this and that  you guys, its just a smokescreen for states that dont want to teach evolution. Evolution is the main idea of all biology. Its like not teaching plate tectonics in geology. Its like not teaching gravity.

People get a lot out of their religion. Science is not out there to take religions down. At least Im not. But there are provable facts by means of science, or the the scientific method. If your religion conflicts with the provable facts, its not sciences problem. You have beliefs that are incompatible with the observable universe.

Theres one issue that has over the decades tended to split the science and nerd community, and Im going to put it to you to find out which side of this you are on. So, which is it  Team Star Wars, or Team Star Trek?

Im of a certain age. I grew up with Star Trek, so Im going with Star Trek.

The other thing I will say objectively as viewer of both  Star Trek is an optimistic view of the future through science. Star Wars is a family story about royalty and conflict in the palace, and also it has magic or religion in it  it has a force which travels across galaxies faster than light, unexplained.

For me, Star Trek is my thing.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook

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Was President Trumps second, undisclosed meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 meeting early this month a big deal, or just a little getting to know you session by a couple of world leaders? The only people who know the answer to that, unfortunately, are Trump, Putin and Putins translator.

Thats one problem  our impetuous president handed the Russians the opportunity to write whatever public script they want about what was said.

Another problem, though, is Trumps obliviousness to the potential consequences of a little impromptu  if it indeed was impromptu  chat with Putin. And his disingenuous tweet Tuesday  The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!  only makes the president look more idiotic.

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The issue isnt the dinner for the G-20 attendees, but the quiet, and undisclosed, tete-a-tete with the man accused of meddling in the election that got Trump into office. And the investigations into the meddling and other possible connections between Trumps campaign and Russians.

Serious, seasoned political figures would immediately have seen how such a one-off meeting with Putin witnessed only by a Russian translator would play out in the perceptions of a public already wondering how much the Russians sought to meddle in the election, wary of coziness between the Russians and Trumps inner circle, and suspecting that Trumps refusal to release his tax returns is an effort to hide evidence of Russian business connections.

Trump and his handlers, though, failed to see the minefield they laid for themselves. Trump at the least should have been warned away from a meeting without his own translator to serve, if nothing else, as a witness to what was said. By treating Putins presence at the table like that of just another guest at one of his country clubs, somebody to be dropped in on and glad-handed, and not disclosing the talk, was an unforced error.

And whatever spin the White House now embraces has little credibility, which is Trumps largest self-inflicted problem.

Who is the public to believe, an international political-risk consultant quoting unidentified sources, or the White House?

Trumps mendacity knows no bounds, and his serial lies make it impossible to put much faith in any pronouncements from Trump or his surrogates  including on such basic elements as how long the Trump-Putin meeting lasted. A White House spokesman told NPR it was a brief conversation at the end of dinner. National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton tried to dismiss it entirely: A conversation over dessert should not be characterized as a meeting.

But Ian Bremmer, head of the political risk consulting firm Eurasia Group who disclosed the meeting on NPRs All Things Considered  which forced the White House disclosure  said other world leaders at the dinner told him the Trump-Putin discussion lasted about an hour.

It was very warm and friendly, Bremmer said. It was extremely animated. There was, you know, sort of a lot of hand gestures, gesticulations, that sort of thing. It was clear they were very close. It was clear that they were very much closer to each other than Trump is with any of his allies at the meeting, which I think is why they found it so disconcerting  and also the fact that it lasted roughly an hour.

So who is the public to believe, an international political-risk consultant quoting unidentified sources, or the White House? The answer, unfortunately, is clear  and its not the White House.

Scott.Martelle@LATimes.com

Follow my posts and re-tweets at @smartelle on Twitter
To the editor: Jamil Smith criticizes an African American doctor, Geoffrey Mount Varner, for suggesting that people will be less likely to be hurt or killed by police if they exercise decorum. He bases his argument on one tragic police killing of a black man in Minnesota who behaved very politely to the officer who shot and killed him. (Respectability politics wont save us from police violence, Opinion, July 14)

Most police shootings involve people disobeying or otherwise posing a threat to officers. Police are not perfect, but Mount Varner is clearly correct that cooperating with police is safer than resisting.

Police-civilian relations are a two-way street. Police need better training, but civilians must do their part too.

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Dwight Filley, La Jolla

..

To the editor: When it comes to police stops and the all too frequent violence that results from them, we need to focus our attention and policies on the armed professionals, not civilians. The police officers are the ones with the power and responsibility for defusing tense situations and preventing them from escalating into violent confrontations.

Sadly, their training does not prepare them for it.

As of 2015, the typical police cadet in the United States received about 58 hours of training on how to use a gun and 49 hours on defensive tactics  thats more than 100 hours on how to use force. However, cadets spent just eight hours learning de-escalation techniques.

This must change.

Hector O. Villagra, San Gabriel

The writer is executive director of the ACLU of Southern California.

..

To the editor: I cant get out of my brain an interview I heard on National Public Radio with a psychologist who described a white police officer who confessed to her that he is afraid of black men. The psychologist said that since that revelation, shes had such discussions with numerous white police officers.

How do we make sure that police departments never hire people like that man, that is, people who are afraid of a specific race?

Susan Guilford, Orange

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
Kamala Harris works to forge relationship with Central Valley

Sen @kamalaharris talking grapes with Fowler Packing Co president Dennis Parnagian in the fields outside metro Fresno pic.twitter.com/smVuRfbSpQ  Cathleen Decker (@cathleendecker) July 5, 2017

The drought may be over in the minds of urban Californians, quite literally washed away by huge accumulations of rain last year that filled reservoirs and left the states mountains covered with snow even now.

But the farmers and others in the Central Valley, veterans of multiple drought-and-flood cycles, know the reprieve is only temporary. On Wednesday they pressed new U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris to work to ensure a more reliable source of water for the nations most bountiful farming region.

This area is drying on the vine, Ryan Jacobsen, executive director of the Fresno County Farm Bureau, told Harris during a roundtable with Central Valley officials.

A long-term solution can only come through federal and state action to protect the areas water supply, he said.

Jason Phillips, chief executive of the Friant Water Authority, said recent rainfall had done little to stem problems caused by nearly a decade of drought.

A canal that runs from Fresno to north of Bakersfield sunk in some places as much as 2 feet in two years, he said, wreaking havoc on a system that operates on the force of gravity.

We cannot get all the water to our growers, he said.

The meeting between Harris and nearly two dozen agriculture and water officials was meant to ease what is typically a fraught relationship between the states Democratic leaders  all of whose power bases are in metropolitan areas  and the mostly Republican Central Valley powers that traditionally look at them with skepticism.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein has worked for two decades to aid the agricultural industry  at the roundtable, several nodded as Harris referred to the senior senator as an incredible warrior for the area.

But Harris predecessor, former Sen. Barbara Boxer, was allied more with environmental groups that have fought dams and other water systems. As a result, she was viewed negatively by many here.

Harris was intent Wednesday on persuading the Central Valley representatives of her interest in places beyond her base in Alameda and San Francisco counties.

They, on the other hand, worked to convince her to be more in the Feinstein mold on issues important to the area  from reliable water to immigration programs to environmental protections that take into consideration the areas needs.

President Trump was highly popular in much of the Central Valley, apart from Fresno County, which leans Democratic because of its metropolitan shadings. But some issues important to the valley cut in politically unorthodox ways.

Republicans here are more concerned than those elsewhere with passing a plan that would give legal status to immigrants, on whom agriculture depends. With undocumented workers worried about deportation, and the border tightening to those not yet here, the labor supply has already shrunk, farmers said.

Theyre out there working, being productive people, said farmer Joe Del Bosque. They work hard for us, and we have nowhere to reach.

Del Bosque said he recently held a training session for new workers. Of the 200 people who showed up, only a handful were born in the United States, he said.

Environmental regulations prized by Democrats elsewhere are often frowned on by some party members here and blamed for the areas water difficulties.

Several of the participants lobbied Harris for her support of dams that have long been under consideration by federal and state officials, particularly the Temperance Flat Dam, which would be constructed on the San Joaquin River.

Harris offered no assurances on the topic to the group on Wednesday. Afterward, speaking to reporters, she also did not take a position.

One of the things that were going to have to figure out ... is what is the right solution for that, she said of a plan to construct the Temperance Flat Dam and several others. Is it going to be about the building of dams? Is it also going to be about looking at  also looking at  other sources of renewable and sustainable reliable sources?

Both sides signaled they did not expect an alliance on all fronts. But Harris said she would serve as an advocate for farmers during the crafting of a new farm bill and other measures before the Senate.

William Bourdeau, executive vice president of the politically influential Harris Farms, told the senator he wished the majority of her supporters who reside in urban areas would have a better understanding of the risks and challenges of farming.

We need somebody to explain the symbiotic relationship we have, he said.

I agree with you completely, she replied.
Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions has expanded the authority of law enforcement to seize criminal suspects money and property, bucking a movement in Congress and many states to rein in a practice that critics said led to flagrant abuses and was unconstitutional.

The Justice Department announced Wednesday it was restoring so-called adoptive forfeitures, where local or state authorities can seize valuable assets from suspects under federal law, circumventing more restrictive state laws.

Asset forfeitures are controversial because law enforcement agencies often take possession of cars, homes, jewelry and cash from suspects implicated in drug deals or other crimes without first obtaining convictions or, in some cases, indictments.

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Such practices have led to criticism that local and state law enforcement agencies have deliberately misused the law to seize property that could help fund their operations. Partly as a result, two dozen states have restricted asset forfeitures.

In 2015, then-Atty. Gen. Eric Holder drastically curtailed the practice amid growing concerns in Congress that police were improperly seizing valuable belongings from suspects without any convincing connection to crimes.

In the previous eight years, adoptive forfeitures  mostly by the Drug Enforcement Administration  had garnered about $880 million, according to a March report by the Justice Departments Inspector General.

The report found that many of the forfeiture cases were not linked to provable crimes. It cited a case in South Florida that led to seizures of $49 million but not one criminal indictment.

Both liberal and conservative legal organizations have condemned forfeitures. In a rare bit of bipartisanship, Republicans and Democrats in Congress have joined forces to sponsor bills intended to curb the practice, although none has passed.

Sessions opposed some of those reform measures as a U.S. senator from Alabama. Since he was confirmed as attorney general, the nations highest law enforcement official, he has moved to reinstitute several aggressive drug war policies.

He has instructed prosecutors to file the most severe offenses against criminal suspects, for example, ending another Obama-era policy that tried to ease long mandatory sentences for nonviolent offenders.

At a news conference Wednesday, Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein said the Justice Department would require more stringent oversight and training to help prevent abuses by police during asset forfeitures and make sure that such seizures meet constitutional standards.

We heard loudly and clearly from local police agencies that they think this is a valuable tool, Rosenstein said.

He said the new policy will not require criminal convictions before police can take possession of a suspects property. But, he added, there has to be evidence of a crime.

Under the new policy, local authorities must ask the Justice Department to intervene within 15 days, and demonstrate probable cause before seizing any suspected contraband.

Sessions said the new rules will help protect against abuses and allow people to contest the seizures.

In the vast majority of cases, this is really not an issue, Sessions told reporters. He said that 4 out of 5 forfeiture cases are uncontested.

Theyre not challenging [the seizures] because this was usually drug money, and they know it was drug money, he said.

Some law enforcement officials attended the announcement and applauded the policy change. Seizing ill-gotten gains breaks the backs of criminal groups, they said, adding that the criminals depend on the confiscated funds to support their budgets.

For eight years, we felt we didnt have the support of this department, and we finally feel that we do, said Ron Brooks, speaking for the National Narcotics Officers Assn. Coalition.

But Darpana Sheth, senior attorney for the Institute for Justice, a conservative legal group, said many forfeitures are uncontested simply because people dont have the resources to fight the government.

Its not surprising that the only defenders of this program are the ones who stand to financially benefit from it, she said of police and prosecutors.

Liberal groups also have condemned forfeitures. Kanya Bennett, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the new order bucks widespread public opinion that seizing assets of people who have not been convicted is unjust and un-American.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), who sponsored legislation this year to more tightly regulate asset forfeiture, called the new policy a troubling decision for the due process protections afforded to us under the 4th Amendment of the Constitution.

Criminals shouldnt be able to keep the proceeds of their crime but innocent Americans shouldnt lose their right to due process, or their private property rights, in order to make that happen, Issa said in a statement.

Six members of the Senate urged Sessions in a May 31 letter to revise the asset forfeiture policies in light of increasing indications that the Supreme Court views the practice as unconstitutional.

Instead of revising forfeiture practices in a manner to better protect Americans due process rights, the [Justice Department] seems determined to lose in court before it changes its policies for the better, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), one of the six, said in a statement Wednesday.

joseph.tanfani@latimes.com

Twitter: @jtanfani

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Congressional Republicans, their campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act in shambles, face mounting pressure to work with Democrats to make fixes to the 2010 healthcare law rather than roll it back.

But it remains unclear whether the White House and GOP leaders are prepared to reach across the aisle to stabilize insurance markets and shield Americans from rising healthcare costs, especially if that also means being seen as betraying their years-long promise to repeal Obamacare.

President Trump continued to attack Democrats after the collapse of the GOP healthcare overhaul bill Monday, followed the next morning by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnells failure to rally Republicans around a last-ditch bid to repeal most of the law without a replacement.

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Were not going to own it. Im not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. Well let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us, Trump said Tuesday.

With Trump appearing increasingly isolated, however, and support evaporating for the GOP campaign against the law, Republicans in Congress may have little choice but to reset their healthcare strategy.

Congress should go back to the drawing board and work in partnership with patient groups like the March of Dimes and other stakeholders to craft a bipartisan plan that seeks to provide affordable, quality health coverage to all Americans, March of Dimes President Stacey D. Stewart said.

The March of Dimes was among the scores of leading patient advocates, physician groups, hospitals and others that have vehemently opposed the GOP repeal campaign.

Tuesday afternoon, Senate Health Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) indicated he would convene hearings soon to explore ways to develop more-limited healthcare legislation.

A growing number of GOP senators  including John McCain of Arizona, who called for input from members of both parties  are also urging a new process that would bring in Democrats.

Polls show most Americans would support a bipartisan approach, with 71% of respondents in a recent national survey saying they want congressional Republicans to work with Democrats to make improvements to the law rather than repeal it.

By contrast, less than a quarter of the public wants Republicans to continue working on their own plan to repeal and replace the law, according to a poll by the nonprofit Kaiser family Foundation.

Congressional Democrats renewed their own calls for bipartisanship Tuesday, urging Republicans to drop their repeal campaign and work with them on fixes to the law.

Its time to start over, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor. Rather than repeating the same failed, partisan process yet again, Republicans should work with Democrats on a bill that lowers premiums, provides long-term stability to the markets and improves our healthcare system.

Such fixes wouldnt be particularly hard, according to many insurance industry officials and state regulators.

There is widespread agreement, for example, that the federal government must continue funding assistance to low-income consumers to help offset their co-pays and deductibles, known as cost-sharing reduction payments.

Most industry and state marketplace officials also say the federal government must fund a better system to protect insurers from big losses if they are hit with very costly patients

And the Trump administration must commit to enforcing the mandate on Americans to get insurance, and aggressively market to younger, healthier consumers to get them to sign up for coverage.

The elements of what is needed are pretty straightforward, said Blue Shield of California Vice President Gary Cohen, who oversaw the marketplaces in the Obama administration.

Thus far, administration officials have shown little interest in taking such steps, with the president repeatedly threatening to cut off payments to low-income consumers.

Moving past the repeal campaign could allow Republicans to turn to other legislative priorities, such as overhauling the tax code, an increasingly pressing imperative for a party with a thin list of accomplishments despite having control of all branches of government.

But it is unclear what Republican lawmakers might demand and how that could complicate any bipartisan deal.

For example, eliminating the laws insurance mandate or loosening rules on health plans  two bedrock GOP demands  could further weaken insurance markets.

Meanwhile, many GOP officials appear in no mood to compromise.

In addition to Trumps attacks on Democrats on Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence fired off his own criticism at lawmakers during a speech to a business group.

Congress needs to step up. Congress needs to do their job. And Congress needs to do their job now, Pence said.

On Capitol Hill, many GOP senators were reluctant to give up on their long repeal campaign.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a key architect of the failed strategy, vowed to press on. I continue to believe we can get this done, Cruz told reporters. We can honor our promise and repeal Obamcare.

Others appeared to still be stunned as they struggled to make sense of what happened  and what comes next.

Many were blindsided late Monday when Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas jointly announced they would oppose McConnells bid to advance legislation repealing and replacing major parts of the law.

That was followed Tuesday morning by a quick revolt among three female Republican senators against McConnells backup plan to bring up a bill to repeal the law but delay implementation for two years to provide Congress a window to develop an alternative.

Dooming that plan was opposition from Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who all said they would not back the repeal and delay bill.

Ohio Sen. Rob Portman also voiced concerns and others were expected to follow.

I did not come to Washington to hurt people, Capito said in a statement.

Murkowski urged senators to take a step back and engage in a bipartisan process to address the failures of the ACA and stabilize the individual markets. That will require members on both sides of the aisle to roll up their sleeves and take this to the open committee process where it belongs.

The repeal-and-delay plan would cause even more widespread disruption to the nations healthcare system and throw millions more Americans off the insurance rolls, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

McConnell signaled Tuesday he would nevertheless bring up the repeal-and-delay legislation for a vote early next week.

But that appears to be mostly a show vote, as it doesnt have enough support for passage.

This has been a very, very challenging experience for all of us, McConnell said at the Capitol. We have demonstrated that Republicans, by themselves, are not prepared at this particular point to do a replacement.

That means that the next chapter of the healthcare debate may unfold in the more conventional setting of a congressional hearing room, a venue that McConnell shunned as he crafted his repeal legislation behind closed doors.

Alexander said he would hold committee hearings soon. However the votes come out on the healthcare bill, the Senate Health Committee has a responsibility during the next few weeks to hold hearings to continue exploring how to stabilize the individual market, he said.

Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said she and her colleagues would be there.

Democrats are at the table when the Republican-controlled government is ready to actually govern, she said.

Obamacare vs. Trumpcare: A side-by-side comparison of the Affordable Care Act and the GOPs replacement plan 

Obamacare 101: A primer on key issues in the debate over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. 

noam.levey@latimes.com

@noamlevey

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As his partys healthcare plan imploded Monday night, President Trump could look across the country to the state he seems to disdain the most and see success forged by the very thing he ran against: old-fashioned politics.

California Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative Democrats worked with Republicans to craft a climate change measure that found just enough support among Republicans to pass even though many in the party continue to oppose it.

The victory was surely propelled by the Democratic advantage in the Legislature, but undeniably benefited from the singular focus of an executive steeped in government experience and willing to publicly plead and deliver concessions to get his measure over the line.

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The effort to repeal and replace Obamacare was marked by neither those executive attributes, nor the overwhelming partisan advantage. Together, that made all the difference.

Brown ran for his second set of terms as governor by promising to meld his outsider spirit with a realistic notion of how to govern, based on his tenures as mayor of Oakland, attorney general and, for 14 years now, governor.

Trump ran as an outsider who reveled in his lack of experience and insisted that he would be able to solve the nations problems  alone and easily. That has not proven to be the case, as demonstrated most potently by the destruction of the Republican healthcare plan at the hands of Republican senators.

You can be anti-institution all you want, but you have to know not just how to run a government, but how to run a governing coalition, said Republican strategist Rob Stutzman. It would appear this is beyond, so far beyond, the presidents grasp. This is the danger of having someone as president who has never played in politics.

On both coasts, the fights betrayed splits among Republicans. Trump repeatedly tried to blame Democrats for the failure of the repeal-and-replace bill, but schisms among Republicans were what doomed the measure.

The decision by Republican leaders not to work with Democrats meant that they could afford defiance by no more than two Senate Republicans  and gave them nowhere to go when more opposition arose.

In California, schisms arose between Republicans who found the climate bill a decent deal and those who scorned the Democrats concessions as insufficient. But enough Republicans  seven in the Assembly and one in the state Senate  sided with the Democratic majority to offset minimal Democratic nay votes and secure passage.

The willingness of some Republicans here to cooperate with Democrats  and the contrast between that compromise and the harder gridlock in Washington  involves differences between the national and state Republican DNA.

In many parts of California, and in statewide races, success for Republicans has often depended on moderation on certain issues, especially environmental ones. Nationally, thats not been true for the party in the last decade.

Pete Wilson, a former U.S. senator and two-term governor, anchored much of his statewide success by taking moderate positions on the environment. Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made climate change a key component of his tenure and continues to work on the issue, often needling Trump for positions such as abandoning the Paris climate agreement.

The need to come to terms with voters who put a high priority on environmental issues was enough to cause some Republicans in Sacramento to break with the partys aversion to taxes.

The eight Republicans who voted with Brown accepted higher taxes as the price for extending by 10 years the cap-and-trade program, which helps regulate greenhouse gases. Many represent areas where the environment has long been a key issue.

By contrast, in Washington, the drive to cut taxes was a key element in the Republican healthcare package.

Schwarzenegger on Tuesday lauded what he termed a courageous vote and took a subtle dig at Republicans in Washington.

I hope Republicans around the country can learn from the example  that we can fight for free-market policies to clean up our environment for our children at the same time we fight for a booming economy, he said in a statement posted on Facebook.

But the biggest difference between the somewhat bipartisan effort in California and the collapse of the Republican-only healthcare effort in Washington rested on the behavior of the chief executives.

Brown spent decades being derided by more conventional politicians across the nation for ahead-of-his-time pitches on topics like computers and state satellites  the genesis of the Gov. Moonbeam insult.

He has sometimes been outside the mainstream even for liberal audiences; he ran the precursor to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders presidential campaign more than two decades before Sanders did.

But in his long turn on the political stage, he has also honed a respect for what can and cannot be pulled off and for the sort of horse-trading that is central to accomplishing anything of note.

The cap-and-trade measure was opposed by some on the left and the right but succeeded by being acceptable to a larger middle. Both the GOP healthcare plan and the measure it was meant to replace, Obamacare, were fully partisan votes, which in both cases has contributed to lasting animosity from the other side.

Although Brown and his Democratic allies attempted to pick off Republicans with a unified front, in Washington, there appeared to be three sides to the healthcare equation: Democrats, Republicans and Trump.

Trump has been all over the map when it came to his goals for healthcare reform. After pledging in the campaign that he would protect the Medicaid program, which was expanded under Obamacare, and make sure those who couldnt afford insurance would still receive care, he flipped on both those issues to support the GOP bill. He also went back and forth on whether Republicans should repeal and replace Obamacare simultaneously or simply repeal it.

The president has seemed unaware of many of the policy details in the Republican plans. That cast the healthcare vote as something that he valued solely for its potential for victory, regardless of the impact it might have on Americans or his own partys elected officials.

In recent days, the president publicly put Senate leader Mitch McConnell on notice about passing the bill, yet complicated McConnells work by going after Republican senators. Earlier, after House Republicans voted for their version of the healthcare plan, one that was risky for dozens of them, Trump cut off the limb behind them by calling their plan mean.

On Tuesday, Trump declared that the failure was not his.

Were not going to own it. Im not going to own it, he said of the nations healthcare system, which he described as failing.

Brown took the opposite tack, going so far as to appear before a legislative committee as the climate bill progressed  a position usually deemed beneath the states chief executive. He was vehement in demanding the measures passage.

Im not here about some cockamamie legacy that people talk about, the 79-year-old governor said. This isnt for me. Im going to be dead. Its for you.

That spoke to some central truths about politics: Americans want it to be about them, not about the politicians. And they also value effort, successful or not.

Brown succeeded on both fronts. Trump did not, and in his flippant remarks amid the wreckage, he gave little indication any lesson had been learned.

For more on politics from Cathleen Decker 

cathleen.decker@latimes.com

Twitter: @cathleendecker

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The latest from Washington

Updates on California politics
A California businessman born in a former Soviet republic attended Donald Trump Jr.'s controversial meeting with a Russian lawyer at the height of the presidential campaign last year, adding a new level of intrigue to the political scandal roiling the White House.

Irakly Ike Kaveladze, 52, is the eighth person known to have taken part in the unusual Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, The Times has learned. His identity was not previously disclosed.

Kaveladze, who lives in Huntington Beach, is an employee of a large Russian real estate development firm. He was the focus of a scathing congressional inquiry in 2000 into alleged Russian money laundering through banks in California and New York but was not charged.

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Investigators for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is leading the federal probe into possible coordination between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government, have asked to interview Kaveladze, according to Scott Balber, Kaveladzes lawyer.

Balber said his client was cooperating fully with investigators. Muellers office declined to comment. No one answered the door or the phone at Kaveladzes three-story home in a gated community in Huntington Beach. A dresser and other small pieces of furniture sat on the front lawn.

Kaveladzes involvement is more evidence of the role that Moscows powerful Agalarov family played in arranging the meeting with Trump Jr. that now is a key focus of Muellers probe. The former FBI director appears to be exploring the relationship between the Trumps and the Agalarovs, who were partners on a project for a Trump hotel in Moscow that was never built.

Aras Agalarov, a billionaire developer, and his son Emin, a Russian pop star, also hosted the Trump-owned Miss Universe contest in Moscow in 2013, which Trump attended.

The family runs a real estate development firm favored by Russian President Vladimir Putins government. It was President Trumps most visible Russian business connection before he was elected to the White House.

Kaveladze has worked for the Agalarovs holding company, the Crocus Group, since 2004, Balber said. He is now a vice president focusing on real estate and finance.

Kaveladze emigrated from the Republic of Georgia to the United States shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and later became a U.S. citizen. He was asked to take part in the Trump Tower meeting by Aras Agalarov, according to Balber.

Neither the White House nor Trump Jr. had disclosed Kaveladzes presence at the 2016 meeting despite repeated public statements about a sit-down that involved three of Trumps closest aides  his eldest son, Donald, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, Trumps then-campaign manager.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that Mueller had told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he has no objection to the panel publicly questioning Trump Jr. and Manafort.

Lawyers for the two have said they are willing to cooperate with congressional panels looking at Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow, but it is unclear if they will agree to testify. Neither Trump Jr. nor Manafort are in the Trump administration.

During the meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who had traveled from Moscow, handed Trump Jr. a sheaf of documents that she said showed improper donations to the Democratic National Committee, information that she said could be used against Trumps Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Kaveladze was asked to attend the meeting purely tomake sure it happened, said Balber, who is based in New York. He literally had no idea what the meeting was about until he showed up right before.

Kaveladze did not recall saying anything at the meeting, which lasted less than half an hour, and does not understand why the meeting has become so controversial, Balber said.

Hes absolutely baffled, said Balber, who also represents the Agalarovs. Even the Agalarovs are absolutely baffled. Nobody had any expectation this would be what its become, especially this poor guy, who had not been involved before.

Balber said Veselnitskaya  who did real estate work for the Agalarovs in Moscow  asked one of the Agalarovs to provide an introduction to the Trumps. The Agalarovs then asked a British music publicist, Rob Goldstone, to contact Trump Jr., he said.

This was not a highly important item to the Agalarovs, Balber said. If it were, I suspect it would have happened very differently.

But Balbers account of who set up the meeting is at odds with email exchanges at the time between Trump Jr. and Goldstone, which Trump Jr. released last week.

They indicated that the Agalarovs, not Veselnitskaya, pushed for the meeting.

Goldstone told Trump Jr. in an email dated June 3, 2016, that Aras Agalarov had met that morning with a Russian prosecutor who had offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary.

Goldstone called the offer part of Russia and its governments support for Mr. Trump  helped along by Aras and Emin. Goldstone told Trump Jr. that Emin just called me and asked me to contact you.

Trump Jr. responded a few minutes later, agreeing to talk to the younger Agalarov and later to meet in person with Veselnitskaya, whom Goldstone identified as a Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow for this.

In addition to Veselnitskaya, Kaveladze and Goldstone, others at the meeting included Rinat Akhmetshin, a Washington lobbyist with dual U.S.-Russian citizenship, and Anatoli Samochornov, a translator.

After giving Trump Jr. papers purporting to describe illegal donations, Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin shifted the conversation to the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that imposes sanctions on Russian businessmen, which both have lobbied against.

During the 1990s, Kaveladze headed a Delaware-based company called International Business Creations and set up 2,000 U.S. corporations for Russian brokers, according to a critical report in November 2000 by an arm of Congress that is now known as the Government Accountability Office.

Some of the corporations operated as shell companies and moved about $1.4 billion through wire transfers to 236 accounts at Citibank of New York and the Commercial Bank of San Francisco, the GAO report said.

It concluded that it was relatively easy to anonymously move large amounts of money though U.S. banks to launder ill-gotten gains.

The banks said at the time that no illegal activity in the Kaveladze-related accounts was found, but they closed the accounts after they were contacted by investigators.

Kaveladze told investigators that he did not know who owned the corporations because the law in Delaware, which permits an unusual degree of secrecy for registered corporations, did not require it. He denounced the inquiry as another Russian witch hunt in the United States.

Former Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, who had requested the GAO inquiry as the senior Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said Tuesday that he remembered Kaveladze well.

GAO came across the numerous corporations and bank accounts established by Irakly Kaveladze on behalf of people in Russia, Levin, who retired in 2015, said in a statement that criticized the use of U.S. companies to hide foreign assets.

He described Kaveladze as the poster child of efforts in Congress and by law enforcement to end the hidden ownership of U.S. corporations and to enforce a requirement that banks know the true owner of their accounts.

Times staff writer Hailey Branson-Potts contributed from Huntington Beach.

david.cloud@latimes.com

Twitter: @DavidCloudLAT

joseph.tanfani@latimes.com

Twitter: @jtanfani
The two seats of government are 2,729 miles apart if youre driving. Politically speaking, though, Washington and Sacramento seemed light-years away from each other this week.

As lawmakers squabbled back East, they celebrated in the Golden State.

Good morning from the state capital. Im Sacramento Bureau Chief John Myers, and the comparison is clearly one that Gov. Jerry Brown relishes as state lawmakers ratified his plan to extend Californias cap-and-trade climate program.

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In Washington, its healthcare thats shined a bright light on divisions among Republicans. And the leader of their party made it clear: He doesnt think this ones on him.

NO REPLACE, NO REPEAL, NO OWNERSHIP

The promise by President Trump and congressional Republicans to swiftly repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act seems to be all but officially scrapped as of this morning.

On Tuesday, the day after two GOP senators said they wouldnt support bringing the latest replacement proposal up on the Senate floor, three other Republican senators rebuffed an effort to start off with a simple repeal of Obamacare.

The three lawmakers  Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Maine Sen. Susan Collins and West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito  refused to go along with the effort by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to scrap Obamacare now and wait until later to replace.

I cannot vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians, Capito said in a statement.

So how did that go over at the White House, where Mondays collapse of the replacement plan happened while the president was dining with GOP senators?

Trump not only said that the existing law should be allowed to fail on its own, it sounded as though he sought to wash his hands of the whole topic.

Were not going to own it. Im not going to own it, he said on Tuesday.

The presidents attempt to distance himself was a curious statement when compared to criticism through the years that former President Barack Obama had done the same thing.

Matt Pearce dug through old tweets to show how Trumps tune has changed.

And David Lauter makes an interesting point about the 45th president: He seems very focused on undoing the work of the 44th president.

IN SACRAMENTO, A BIPARTISAN VOTE ON CLIMATE CHANGE

The legislators who walked on to the stage in the state Capitols media room on Monday night were an unusual sight: a group of Democrats and Republicans, all of whom had voted to add 10 years to the life of the centerpiece of Californias climate change efforts.

Eight Republicans  seven in the state Assembly, one in the state Senate  joined Democrats to extend the cap-and-trade program until 2030. It was the culmination of weeks of intense, closed-door negotiations between Brown and lawmakers, and provided a sharp contrast in political imagery with whats been happening in Washington.

When you can lock something in with the support of Republicans and Democrats, it has durability, the governor told reporters after the final legislative votes.

But bipartisan good feelings werent universal. On Tuesday, Melanie Mason found there were some in California who didnt like what they saw on a deal that imposes longer greenhouse gas limits on some industries and is expected to have an ongoing impact on gas prices.

SCHWARZENEGGER CHEERS ON REPUBLICANS

Brown had eight Republicans vote for the cap-and-trade extensions. Thats seven more than former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had when he signed the states landmark climate legislation more than a decade ago.

In an interview on Tuesday, he was thrilled more members of his party were stepping up to the plate on an issue hes championed.

The Republican Party has moved forward in a big step, Schwarzenegger said.

ABOUT THAT SACRAMENTO-WASHINGTON COMPARISON

Cathleen Decker tackles the comparison between the two capitals in her analysis this morning. On the left coast was Brown, a governor who used wiles honed by decades in political life to draw in some members from both sides to craft a successful measure.

On the other side was Trump, his Oval Office a spot that Brown long coveted, who as president has seen his first six months come to a close with consternation and defeat.

THE STATES HOUSING CRISIS IS NEXT

Amid the cap-and-trade debate, Brown and legislative leaders put off a decision on addressing the states housing problems until lawmakers return from summer break in late August.

Legislators and housing advocates are encouraged that the governor is putting his weight behind housing bills, Liam Dillon reports, but an ultimate deal is far from a slam dunk.

HUNTERS SPENDING ON LAWYERS

Under investigation by the FBI for possibly misusing campaign funds, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine) has spent $336,664 with seven law firms this year.

Sarah Wire reports that Hunters most recent campaign finance report shows $152,859 in spending and $114,412 in debt to law firms in the San Diego and Washington, D.C., areas in the months since the House Ethics Committee disclosed the FBIs investigation in order to explain why it wasnt pursuing its own investigation.

Meanwhile, Hunter picked up another challenger on Tuesday: retired U.S. Army veteran Daniel Casara.

TODAYS ESSENTIALS

-- New polls paint similar, and not encouraging, pictures on how voters see the presidents job performance so far.

-- The healthcare fight on Capitol Hill has put Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake in a tough spot.

-- The attorney for Californias campaign finance watchdog says the agency shouldnt loosen contribution limits for Democrats seeking to help state Sen. Josh Newman (D-Fullerton) fend off a recall.

-- Russian officials are frustrated they cant get their U.S. properties back, seized by Obama late last year.

-- Can a small-town New Mexico congressman help Democrats win back the majority in the House?

-- The Trump administration chastised Iran just hours after saying the country was complying with its 2015 treaty.

-- House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says Democrats are willing to work with Republicans on healthcare fixes.

-- Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Menlo Park) is asking the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to withdraw its request for voter information from all 50 states.

-- Sen. Kamala Harris said Tuesday theres enough common ground on criminal justice reform that shes optimistic Congress can come together to pass a new plan.

-- L.A.'s newest congressman gets assigned to a powerful House oversight committee.

-- After 23 years, Ron Brownstein is signing off from his L.A. Times column.

LOGISTICS

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Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders announced Monday that the states housing crisis will be at the top of their agenda when lawmakers return in August from a monthlong break.

Now they have to figure out whether what they put together actually can pass.

Housing bills under consideration involve new funding, which requires a two-thirds vote of the Legislature. Democrats hold bare supermajorities in the Senate and Assembly and can only afford to have one assembly member of their caucus vote against a housing plan if it is to pass on a party-line vote.

Already, one influential Democrat is balking.

Assemblyman Adam Gray of Merced, who leads a coalition of business-aligned Democrats, said the state needs to do more to penalize cities and counties that are blocking development before agreeing to spend more dollars subsidizing projects.

Communities that arent acting in good faith shouldnt be rewarded with more money, Gray said.

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Grays comments underscore the tough politics surrounding the housing debate, especially as Democratic lawmakers could be wary of voting for more measures that raise taxes and fees after increasing the gas tax this year and on Monday extending cap and trade, the states primary program to fight global warming.

For those reasons, progressive Democrats in the Assembly pushed for a housing resolution during cap-and-trade discussions. They worried legislation to increase low-income housing subsidies might fall by the wayside without a firm commitment from the governor to support them, and wanted a decision at the same time as cap and trade.

Its been a little bit hard to wait our turn,  said Assemblyman Rob Bonta (D-Oakland), one of the advocates for faster action on housing.

Instead of a vote, progressive Assembly Democrats received a commitment from Brown, Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles) and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount) to back a housing deal that includes a new state funding source for low-income developments, a bond measure also to subsidize low-income projects and efforts to lessen regulations for building homes. The trio hasnt offered further details, but Bonta said conversations have centered on four parts:

Senate Bill 2 from Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), which would levy a $75 fee on real estate transactions to raise roughly $250 million a year for low-income developments.

Senate Bill 3 from Jim Beall (D-San Jose), which would put a $3-billion housing bond on the 2018 statewide ballot.

Senate Bill 35 from Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), which would force cities that have fallen behind on state goals for home building in their communities to ease development regulations.

A larger share of the money generated by cap-and-trade auctions, the mechanism by which businesses pay to pollute, for housing projects.

The three bills have passed the Senate, with SB 2 and SB 3 requiring two-thirds votes, and are awaiting a decision in the Assembly.

Ray Pearl, executive director of the California Housing Consortium, said he is disappointed that lawmakers, after a recent history of failed housing legislation, again put off a decision. But hes encouraged that its now the top priority.

Weve seen that when there is legislative and gubernatorial leadership, the two-thirds hurdle is high but not insurmountable, Pearl said.

At a news conference Monday night celebrating the cap-and-trade deal, Brown said he was confident a housing package was going to pass, too.

Were committed to doing serious work on affordable housing, and well get it done, Brown said.

liam.dillon@latimes.com

@dillonliam

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Gov. Jerry Brown, California legislative leaders commit to push an affordable housing plan next month

California lawmakers have tried for 50 years to fix the states housing crisis. Heres why theyve failed

Updates on California politics
How peculiar are the politics of climate change in California? Just look at this weeks vote on cap and trade, which saw a Republican former grape farmer from Modesto and a Democratic former math teacher from Bell Gardens aligned against a mild-mannered Santa Cruz liberal and a provocative anti-tax crusader from Huntington Beach.

Its not often that a contentious vote yields a roll call as unusual as the one Monday, when lawmakers approved a measure to extend the life of the states cap-and-trade program, which requires companies to purchase permits to emit greenhouse gases.

But when aforementioned lawmakers Sen. Tom Berryhill and Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia find themselves in the yes column, while Assemblyman Travis Allen (R-Huntington Beach) and Assemblyman Mark Stone (D-Scotts Valley) notch no votes, it indicates just how much cap and trade has upended the political status quo.

Mondays vote put an end to months of backroom negotiations, but the aftermath rippled throughout the state Tuesday.

Heres how the political repercussions are playing out.

Assemblymember Marc Steinorth (R-Rancho Cucamonga), pictured in 2015. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Fissures among Republicans

Eight GOP votes were pivotal in passing the cap-and-trade bill and gave Browns plan an imprimatur of bipartisanship that is rare on big-ticket legislation  particularly on bills concerning climate change.

"When you can lock something in with support of Republicans and Democrats, it has durability, Brown said Monday night.

Although cap and trade may be on solid ground, those GOP members now find themselves in thorny territory.

The Republican base largely despises the measure, calling it burdensome regulation that will increase gas prices. Conservative talk radio and bloggers have railed against cap and trade, and the Wall Street Journal editorial board lashed out Tuesday at GOP lawmakers political self-sabotage and voter betrayal.

Assemblyman Rocky Chavez (R-Oceanside) said he expected more of his colleagues  as many as 12 GOP lawmakers total  to join him in backing the bill.

But, he said, in the run-up to the vote, opposition from established conservative groups, such as the anti-tax Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., and an entreaty to Republican legislators from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) and three other GOP congressmen urging a no vote may have spooked some would-be supporters.

Thats a powerful letter, Chavez said. These are congressional Republicans who have great stature within the state and impact some of these members districts.

Hoping to tamp down the backlash, Assemblyman Marc Steinorth (R-Rancho Cucamonga) posted his cellphone number on social media Tuesday, inviting constituents to call and discuss their concerns about his aye vote. By lunchtime, he estimated that he had received around 50 calls.

They feel betrayed, they feel hurt, they feel angry. What theyre hearing on talk radio  they believe it, Steinorth said.

His pitch: Making note of the states existing aggressive greenhouse gas reduction targets enshrined in law, and countering that without cap and trade, the state could pursue more direct regulation to reduce emissions  which could be costlier to businesses and consumers.

But with some of his GOP colleagues launching a salvo of criticism at the bill, Steinorth acknowledged, Its a very hard situation.

Much of the ire so far has been focused on Assembly GOP leader Chad Mayes (R-Yucca Valley), who has been the most visible of the Republican supporters.

It was poor judgment, bad leadership, to spike the ball like that in the face of widespread opposition within his party, said Harmeet K. Dhillon, a San Francisco lawyer and a Republican National Committee official.

Allen, who recently launched a bid for governor and came out forcefully against the measure, said there was a clear division in the Assembly GOP caucus, adding, I think Mayes leadership may very well be in jeopardy.

Mayes office said he wasnt bothered by the scrutiny of his stance.

Thats what leaders do, said Joe Justin, Mayes chief of staff. They take arrows to defend their members.

For me, there was just too much given away  Assemblyman Mark Stone (D-Scotts Valley), who voted against the cap-and-trade bill

For Democrats, dissent on the left

For all the attention paid to Republicans, the cap-and-trade measure was carried largely by Democrats, who overwhelmingly control the balance of power in the Capitol.

Still, there were notable dissensions among the ruling party. Four Democrats voted no on the measure  one of those lawmakers, Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva of Fullerton, switched from abstaining to no after the floor vote  and Assemblywoman Sabrina Cervantes of Riverside abstained.

Stone said the legislation aligned too much with business demands to win his vote.

For me, there was just too much given away, Stone said. I feel we got kind of rolled, if you will, where the priorities of the oil industry really won out.

But Stone said the cap-and-trade negotiations marked a significant milestone for the more liberal Democrats, who at times have grumbled about being taken for granted when it comes to passing tough bills.

This is the first time that progressives haven't said, 'We're in, we're in, we're always in, Stone said.

With progressive pushback, the governors office backed a companion measure to improve local air quality and assured lawmakers that the next item on the to-do list was affordable housing.

That was little comfort to environmental justice groups, which focus on contamination in communities. Those advocates, who were ascendant after notching wins in last years debate on climate bills, savaged both the cap-and-trade and air quality measures as insufficient.

"Instead of taking a giant step forward, we have chosen instead to shuffle backward, Veronica Garibay, the co-director of the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, said in a statement.

Liberal Democratic lawmakers on social media fended off swipes for being too cozy with industry.

Although environmental justice advocates stewed, some took heart in noting that lawmakers were promising the air quality measure was a down payment for future action.

If anything, the fact that they're acknowledging that there could've been more that they did is a statement to the growing influence that the environmental justice movement and those impacted communities are having in the Capitol, said Parin Shah, senior strategist at the Asian Pacific Environmental Network.

Times staff writer Patrick McGreevy in Sacramento contributed to this report.

ALSO

California Legislature extends state's cap-and-trade program in rare bipartisan effort to address climate change

GOP establishment figures Pete Wilson and George Shultz endorse California cap-and-trade plan

Here's what to watch for in the vote to extend California's cap-and-trade program
Trump called him my African-American. But he has few kind words for the president. By Mark Z. Barabak (Mark Z. Barabak/Los Angeles Times) On the day that changed his life, Gregory Cheadle almost stayed in bed. He was tired  he traveled a lot in his long-shot bid for Congress  but asked himself: How often does a candidate for president come to the far reaches of Northern California? And why pass up a crowd and the chance to hand out more fliers? So Cheadle roused himself that June 2016 morning and secured a spot up close when Donald Trump swooped in for a rally at Reddings municipal airport. It was hot, the atmosphere was loose and Trumps patter seeming more stand-up comedy than campaign spiel. He went into one of those sidelong digressions, about protesters and an African American  great fan, great guy  and, by the way, whatever happened to him? It was then, Cheadle said, he raised his hand and jokingly shouted, Im here. Trump looked and pointed, his voice a throaty rumble. Look at my African-American over here! he exclaimed. Are you the greatest? In the days and weeks that followed Cheadle was attacked on social media and harassed by people who dug up his phone number and email address. For a time he stayed home, too nervous to venture outside. All, he said, because the media portrayed him as something he was not and never has been: a Trump sycophant. Read More Facebook

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Trump quietly signs Russia sanctions bill By Noah Bierman President Trump quietly signed legislation Wednesday that imposes new sanctions on Russia and limits his ability to remove them, according to two White House aides. Trump signed the bill without cameras or an immediate press release. He had opposed imposing new sanctions on Moscow but had little choice after a nearly unanimous Congress approved the bill, guaranteeing they would override a veto. The bill, which also imposes new sanctions on Iran and North Korea, prevents American companies from investing in many energy projects that are funded by Russian government interests. It also prevents Trump from unilaterally lifting the sanctions. It thus marked an unusual move by Congress to tie the presidents hands on foreign policy. Trump did not want to give up that leverage. But the vote in Congress was a strong sign that lawmakers do not trust Trump to stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump has repeatedly praised, and the widening federal investigation into possible coordination last year between his presidential campaign and Moscow. Passage of the sanctions bill already has sparked a harsh reaction in Moscow. Putin announced last week that the United States would need to shed 755 personnel, including U.S. diplomats, from its embassy and consulates in Russia. President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats, said to be spies, from the United States last December. A White House aide said a statement would be issued later Wednesday. Facebook

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Senior GOP senators serve notice: No action on healthcare at this point By David Lauter Trump administration officials continue to push the Senate to take another run at healthcare legislation, but on Monday senior Republican senators pushed back, making clear that theyre done with the topic for now. Theres just too much animosity and were too divided on healthcare, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), the head of the Senate Finance Committee, said in an interview with Reuters. I think we ought to acknowledge that we can come back to healthcare afterward, but we need to move ahead on tax reform, Hatch said. His remarks were quickly followed by others in GOP leadership positions. I think its time to move on to something else, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri told CNN. If the question is do I think we should stay on healthcare until we get it done, I think its time to move on to something else. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota also chimed in. Until someone shows us how to get that elusive 50th vote, I think its over, he told reporters. The remarks seemed a coordinated effort to respond to administration officials, including budget director Mick Mulvaney and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who said over the weekend that they wanted the Senate to keep working on healthcare. Last week, the Senate defeated several different Republican plans to repeal all or part of the Affordable Care Act. The votes made it clear that with unified Democratic opposition to repeal, and divisions among Republicans, the campaign to overturn the law has stalled out, at least for now. Congress faces several other pressing issues that will be demanding lawmakers attention, including deadlines at the end of September to raise the federal debt ceiling and fund government agencies for the coming fiscal year. And the administration is eager to move on tax proposals, with officials rather optimistically saying they hope to see votes by November on a tax package that is not yet written. Facebook

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Good news for Atty. Gen. Sessions: Trump has 100% confidence in Cabinet By Noah Bierman To Q re Sessions, spox Sanders says Trump has 100% confidence in Cabinet. Last wk she wouldn't say if he had it in Sessions. Kelly effect?  Jackie Calmes (@jackiekcalmes) July 31, 2017 President Trump has called Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions beleaguered and even VERY weak, but Sessions seemed to get good news from the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on Monday. Trump has 100% confidence in all of his Cabinet secretaries, Sanders said in response to a question about Sessions job status during the daily White House briefing. Last week, when speculation about Sessions was rife, Sanders repeatedly declined opportunities to provide assurances that the attorney general enjoyed the presidents full confidence. Trump himself said time will tell when he was asked last week about Sessions. The willingness to tamp down speculation about Sessions may reflect the arrival Monday of retired Gen. John F. Kelly as the new White House chief of staff. He is tasked with restoring order to the administration. Sanders also batted down reports that the White House was discussing moving Sessions to another post, as secretary of Homeland Security. That job became vacant Monday after Kelly was sworn in as Trumps new chief of staff. Sanders said the White House has had no conversations about any Cabinet members switching jobs. Republican senators have publicly opposed firing Sessions, and a couple have objected to shifting him to another post as well, given that it could appear that Trump is trying to affect the investigations of himself and his campaign in the context of Russias election interference. Trump has said publicly that his frustration with Sessions, once among his closest allies, stems from Sessions decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, an act that led to the appointment of a special counsel. Facebook

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Can Trump really cut health insurance payments for members of Congress and their staff? It would be easy By Lisa Mascaro Reeling from the failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, President Trump now threatens to block federal funding that lawmakers and their staff rely on to help buy health insurance. Trumps threats are not empty. The administration could simply stop the payments -- which are provided to Capitol Hill lawmakers and staff much the way many employers help pay employees monthly insurance premiums -- by dashing off new federal regulation. But the easy attack on lawmakers skims over what many say was a complicated, but fair-minded, compromise made during the Obamacare debates several years ago. Under Obamacare, if lawmakers want insurance through their employer - the federal government - they are required to buy policies through the ACA exchanges. There had been great criticism at the time, largely from opponents of the healthcare bill, that lawmakers and congressional staff should not be exempt from the law. The argument was they should have to live under it. So they did. Usually those buying individual insurance on the exchanges can apply to see if their income and geographic area allow them to qualify for a federal subsidy. For lawmakers, though, that was prohibited. Instead, they get the regular employer contribution they did before, much in the same way other workers do when their companies buy insurance. For federal workers, the government covers about 70% of the costs, about the same paid by employers in the private sector, according to Kaiser Family Foundation. The administration affirmed that federal support for lawmakers and their staffs in an Office of Personnel Management regulation issued in 2013. To cut those funds off, Trump administration could simply reverse course, and issue another regulation changing the rules. Trump appeared ready to do so in a series of weekend tweets. Why should Congress not be paying what public pays, Trump tweeted over the weekend. If a new HealthCare Bill is not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of Congress will end very soon. But such a move would likely cause an uproar in Congress. Its not just members of Congress, but also their staffs, who would have to pay full price for their insurance. Stopping Trumps action, though, seems tough. It would require Congress to pass legislation ensuring the federal payments would continue to be made. Few lawmakers would likely take up that cause. And even if Congress were able to pass a bill protecting the payments, it seems doubtful Trump at this point would sign it into law. Facebook

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U.S. hits Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with sanctions By Associated Press Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro celebrates the results of Sundays election in Caracas. (Ronaldo Schemidt / AFP/Getty Images) The Trump administration has hit Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with financial sanctions. The move comes after Venezuela held a weekend election that will give Maduros ruling party virtually unlimited power in the South American country. The Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control announced the sanctions against Maduro in a brief statement on Monday, a day after the Venezuelan vote to elect a constituent assembly that will rewrite the constitution. A longer explanation from the White House was also expected. The administration imposed sanctions on more than a dozen senior current and former Venezuelan officials last week, warning the socialist government that new penalties would come if Maduro went ahead with Sundays election for the assembly. Facebook

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Anthony Scaramucci is out as White House communications director By Brian Bennett Anthony Scaramucci, the brash New Yorker who was announced little more than a week ago as President Trumps White House communications director, was ousted Monday before he had even officially taken the job. John F. Kelly, the newly sworn-in White House chief of staff, told Scaramucci around 9:30 a.m. EDT that he was going to be replaced, according to a person close to White House. In a statement officially announcing the move, the White House said Scaramucci felt it was best to give Chief of Staff John Kelly a clean slate and the ability to build his own team. While Scaramuccis time at the center of the presidents circle was short, it was consequential, prompting the resignations of first Sean Spicer as White House press secretary and then Reince Priebus as chief of staff. The most notable firings and resignations in the Trump administration >> A former hedge fund executive on Wall Street, Scaramucci, who enjoyed media attention, also had come on strong stylistically, highlighted by a profane tirade against colleagues Priebus and Trump strategist Steve Bannon in an exchange last week with a New Yorker reporter. The abrupt shift in Scaramuccis status seemed to reflect Kellys mission to bring order to the chain of command within the chaotic administration. In getting Scaramucci to leave, Kelly was undoing Trumps own hiring decision. Scaramucci had told reporters when he was hired that he would be reporting directly to the president at Trumps request, bypassing the normal chain that would have the communications director -- like all staff -- report to the chief of staff. Scaramuccis unusually short tenure reflects a moment of extreme turbulence in the White House, which has been embroiled in infighting as it confronts low poll numbers for the president, a floundering legislative agenda and the investigations involving Russian meddling in last years presidential election. After word spread of Scaramuccis ouster, Spicer, who resigned when Scaramucci took over but was still working in the White House, walked out of his office to a throng of reporters. Is this a surprise party? he asked. UPDATE 12:15 p.m.: This story has been updated throughout with additional details and background. This article was originally published at 11:49 a.m. Facebook

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Trump swears in John Kelly, says ex-secretary of Homeland Security will do an even better job as chief of staff By Noah Bierman President Trump swore in his new chief of staff, John F. Kelly, on Monday morning, formalizing a shake-up in his top ranks that was announced Friday evening with word of the resignation of Reince Priebus. We look forward to - if its possible - an even better job as chief of staff, Trump said to Kelly, formerly the secretary of homeland security. Ill try, sir, Kelly replied. JOHN KELLY is now chief of staff. Sworn in during ceremony in Oval Office minutes ago. pic.twitter.com/dMEQ4rhpFA  Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) July 31, 2017 Trump is hoping that Kelly, a retired general, will retool and bring order to a White House that has struggled with low poll numbers, staff infighting, a faltering legislative agenda and an investigation into Russian election meddling and potential collusion and obstruction of justice. Yet Trump said the administration has done very well after a reporter asked what would be different under Kelly. He cited the unemployment rate, the thriving stock market and unnamed polls that, he said, show high business confidence. Were doing very well. We have a tremendous base, he said.The country is optimistic. And I think the general will just add to it. Trump praised Kellys performance at the Department of Homeland Security, where Kelly focused on immigration issues at the southern border, as record-shattering, with very little controversy. There was no word on whom the president might name to replace Kelly at the department. Trump reportedly has considered moving Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions there from the Justice Department, reflecting his unhappiness with the attorney general, but Republican senators preemptively have signaled their opposition to such a move. Facebook

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Risky investigation, stalled agenda  Trumps in trouble, so heres his strategy By Noah Bierman (Spencer Platt / Getty Images) Hosts of Southern Californias Morning Answer radio show were wrapping up a two-hour live broadcast from a white tent just outside the West Wing last week and marveling at their access to Cabinet secretaries and prominent administration figures. If youre a Trumpkin, host Brian Whitman told his listeners on AM 870, this is like fantasy camp. The White Houses daylong hospitality for Salem Radio Network, a nationwide chain of Christian and conservative stations, underscored President Trumps continued courtship of  and increased dependence on  core supporters as he confronts a stalled agenda and increasingly perilous investigations into whether his campaign colluded with Russia and he subsequently sought to obstruct the inquiries. Read More Facebook

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Obamacare vote isnt the only sign of GOP resistance to Trump By Noah Bierman In the year since Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, party leaders have been reluctant to challenge a man who has formed a tight bond with conservative voters, even when he upset party orthodoxies and norms of presidential behavior. But that reticence is breaking down. A convergence of contentious issues, as well as embarrassing infighting and shake-ups at the White House, have a number of Republicans suddenly in open resistance to Trump on a number of fronts. Read More Facebook

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Trump ousts Reince Priebus as chief of staff in latest White House shake-up By Noah Bierman John Kelly (Susan Walsh / Associated Press) President Trump ousted his beleaguered chief of staff, Reince Priebus, naming Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly to replace him Friday in the latest White House shake-up as the administration struggles to emerge from bitter staff infighting and a stalled legislative agenda. Trump announced the abrupt reshuffle in three posts on Twitter hours after the Senate killed his latest plans to rewrite President Obamas signature healthcare law, dealing another harsh blow to the White House. The tweets, sent as Trump was returning on Air Force One with Priebus after a speech on gang violence in New York, caught Capitol Hill and others off guard even though Priebus stature in Trumps inner circle has been in sharp decline for some time. Read More Facebook

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Putins spokesman accuses U.S. of political schizophrenia By Associated Press Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov attends a meeting in Moscow on June 21. (Sergei Karpukhin / EPA) Russia urged the United States on Monday to show political will to mend ties even as it ordered sweeping cuts of U.S. embassy personnel unseen since Cold War times. President Vladimir Putins spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said it will take time for the U.S. to recover from what he called political schizophrenia, but added that Russia remains interested in constructive cooperation with the U.S. We are interested in a steady development of our ties and are sorry to note that we are still far from that, he said. Peskovs statement followed Sundays televised comments by Putin, who said the U.S. would have to cut 755 of its embassy and consulate staff in Russia, a massive reduction he described as a response to new U.S. sanctions. The Russian Foreign Ministry had previously said that the U.S. should cut its embassy and consular employees to 455, the number that Russia has in the United States. Along with the caps on embassy personnel announced Friday, it also declared the closure of a U.S. recreational retreat on the outskirts of Moscow and warehouse facilities. Moscows action is the long-expected tit-for-tat response to former President Obamas move to expel 35 Russian diplomats and shut down two Russian recreational retreats in the U.S. over reports of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Facebook

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White House urged to refrain from Obamacare sabotage as Trump mulls subsidy cutoff By Laura King A pair of prominent lawmakers urged President Trump on Sunday not to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in the wake of failed Republican efforts to scrap his predecessors signature legislative achievement. But Trump urged GOP senators to try again to push through some version of repealing and replacing the law, even though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said last week it was time to move on to other matters. Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway said the president would decide in coming days whether to block subsidies that are a crucial component of the existing healthcare law. Hes going to make that decision this week, and thats a decision that only he can make, Conway said on Fox News Sunday. Two of the lawmakers who blocked the Senate GOP repeal plan last week, however, criticized the administrations continued efforts to overturn the law. Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who steadfastly rejected a series of GOP healthcare measures last week, blamed the Trump administration for encouraging instability in the insurance markets by continuing the uncertainty over whether the subsidies  cost-sharing payments that reduce out-of-pocket healthcare costs for poorer Americans  would continue. Im troubled by the uncertainty that has been created by the administration, Collins said on NBCs Meet the Press. She contested Trumps characterization of the payments as an insurance company bailout. Thats not what it is, she said, calling the reduction payments vital assistance to low-income Americans. And Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said further action on healthcare should be done in a bipartisan manner and not rushed. You cannot do major entitlement reform singlehandedly, and you wouldnt do major legislative initiatives singlehandedly, she told reporters in Alaska. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) echoed Collins criticism of Trumps threat to stop making the cost-sharing payments. You know, I really think its incomprehensible that we have a president of the United States who wants to sabotage healthcare in America, make life more difficult for millions of people who are struggling now to get the health insurance they need and to pay for that health insurance, he said on CNNs State of the Union. Prior to heading out for a day at his Virginia golf property, Trump tweeted that Republican senators should press ahead with efforts to scrap Obamacare -- a day after he tauntingly exhorted them not to be quitters in the quest for a legislative victory for him. Don't give up Republican Senators, the World is watching: Repeal & Replace...and go to 51 votes (nuke option), get Cross State Lines & more.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2017 The White House budget director, Mick Mulvaney, on CNNs State of the Union, said it was official Trump administration policy that the Senate should keep working to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, eschewing an August recess if necessary. Senators, he said, need to stay, they need to work -- they need to pass something. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, while acknowledging a responsibility to follow the law -- Obamacare -- also signaled that Trump was not accepting defeat in efforts to get rid of the measure. Our goalas well as the presidents goal, is to put in place a law, a system, that actually works for patients, he said on Meet the Press, adding, You cant do that under the current structure. Facebook

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Frustrated in defeat, Trump threatens healthcare of voters  and lawmakers By Joseph Tanfani Frustrated by the failure of the Obamacare repeal in the Senate, President Trump on Saturday threatened to end federal subsidies for healthcare insurance  for Congress as well as the rest of the country. After seven years of "talking" Repeal & Replace, the people of our great country are still being forced to live with imploding ObamaCare!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2017 If a new HealthCare Bill is not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of Congress will end very soon!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2017 If a new HealthCare Bill is not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of Congress will end very soon! Trump tweeted, fuming about Congress failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which he said was imploding. Such a move could cause havoc and much higher premiums in insurance markets, since many low- and moderate-income people depend on those subsidies to help cover the cost of their policies. Through a series of administrative maneuvers by Congress and the Obama administration, members and their staffs also benefit from those subsidies. Targeting congressional healthcare might score Trump some populist points with his base, but it would likely come at a cost of poisoning his relationship with Congress. Just making the threat on Saturday highlights how far things have eroded between Trump and top GOP lawmakers. And it comes a day after Trump pushed out former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, an establishment Republican who was the GOP congressional leaderships trusted liaison in the White House. Trump actually has a jarring amount of leverage over thousands of congressional staff who depend on employer health care contribution. https://t.co/lRPmrmDIJs  Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) July 29, 2017 Trumps longstanding threat to let the health insurance plans fail would come with its own political price. The federal government sends about $600 million a month to insurance companies to help cover the cost, and Trump is threatening to cut that off to allow Obamacare markets to collapse. His goal is to pressure Congress to send him a repeal bill, but so far the strategy has failed. The confidence Trump has expressed that if he followed through with the threat the fallout would land not on him but on Democrats, because they created Obamacare, is not widely shared in Washington. If health care collapses, voters will blame Trump and the GOP.



That's what happens when you control the White House and Congress. pic.twitter.com/iEjEGyapAL  Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) July 29, 2017 Facebook

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Iran condemns new U.S. sanctions, vows to pursue missile program By Ramin Mostaghim Iran defied Washington and condemned new U.S. sanctions over its development of missiles capable of being armed with nuclear warheads. We will continue with full power our missile program, Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi told state television IRIB on Saturday, dismissing new sanctions passed by Congress last week as, hostile, reprehensible and unacceptable. Its ultimately an effort to weaken the nuclear deal, Ghasemi said, adding, The military and missile fields  are our domestic policies and others have no right to intervene or comment on them. Iran had agreed to limit its nuclear activities under the 2015 agreement with the U.S. and other world powers in exchange for sanctions relief. Ghasemi argued Saturday that the U.S. had violated that agreement by linking the missile program to the nuclear deal and restricting Iranian banking activities in the U.S. He argued that Irans latest missile tests dont break the agreement because the weapons are defensive. The new wave of pressure on missile projects in Iran will push the Islamic theocracy into a corner, predicted Iran analyst Hojjat Kalashi in Tehran, noting that the government of President Hassan Rouhani, who was reelected in May, is coping with an economic downturn and may step back from the compromise nuclear deal. The new Iran sanctions bill, which also targets Russia and North Korea, was passed by the House and Senate this week. It would penalize those involved in Irans ballistic missile program as well as those who do business with them, impose an arms embargo on Iran and label its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps a terrorist group. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders has said President Trump will sign the bill. On Friday, the U.S. was joined by Britain, France and Germany in condemning Irans recent launch of a satellite-carrying rocket and warned that it violated a United Nations resolution implementing the 2015 nuclear deal. In a joint statement, they urged Iran to stop developing missiles and rockets capable of carrying nuclear warheads that have a destabilizing impact on the region. In response to a rocket launch Thursday, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on subsidiaries of an Iranian company involved in Tehrans ballistic missile program. But Nader Karimi Juni, an analyst close to Rouhanis government, said Iranian leaders dont believe the U.N. and European powers will ultimately back the U.S., and so Iran will not compromise on missile projects and will remain defiant. Facebook

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Trump jabs U.S. mayors, who push back, calling president out of touch with cities By Kurtis Lee (Spencer Platt / Getty Images) President Trump wants police to know that he  not mayors  has their back. Ive met police that are great police that arent allowed to do their job because they have a pathetic mayor or a mayor that doesnt know whats going on, Trump said Friday in a speech before police officers in Brentwood, N.Y. The comments from Trump, who in his address highlighted crime in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, drew applause from some in attendance. In a statement following Trumps remarks, the United States Conference of Mayors, a bipartisan group, released a statement pushing back against the president. The presidents comments today prove how out of touch he is with the realities of life in American cities. Mayors number one priority is  and always will be  the safety and protection of their residents, said New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, the groups president. There is no daylight between the mayors of our cities and the uniformed officers who work tirelessly to keep us safe every single day. During the speech Trump called on police and immigration officials to be rough with suspected gang members in cities nationwide. In a recent interview with The Times, former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who recently launched a $200-million initiative to empower city governments and mayors, stressed the key to good governing is experience as a manager  something, he said, Trump was not. Bloomberg added that the mayors are much more in tune with the needs of residents than the federal government. You got to remember a mayor and the local city council are much closer to the public than the governor and the state legislature, or the president and the federal legislature. So if the public is in favor of something, the local officials know it and they get held responsible, he said. Facebook

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The growing parade of exits under Trump administration By Len de Groot A lot of people have left President Trumps early administration  Chief of Staff Reince Priebus was replaced Friday. The White House communications department has been the scene of many of the recent turnovers as it wrestles to craft a message sometimes at odds with Trumps frequent tweeting. At the National Security Council, there has been a leadership struggle since Michael Flynn resigned in the face of pressure over undisclosed contacts with Russia. One appointee was fired over comments he made at a private function. Others have been removed as Flynns successor, H.R. McMaster, has moved to add loyalists to the council. Here are the most noteworthy departures: Read More Facebook

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Trump urges officers and immigration officials to be rough on animals terrorizing U.S. neighborhoods By Barbara Demick ( (Evan Vucci / Associated Press)) President Trump on Friday called for police and immigration officials to be rough with suspected gang members in order to rid the country of animals he said are terrorizing communities. Please dont be too nice, Trump told police recruits at Suffolk County Community College in Brentwood, a heavily Latino suburb of New York City. Like when you guys put somebody in the car and youre protecting their head, you know the way you put the hand  like, dont hit their head, and theyve just killed somebody?  You can take the hand away. He implied that he was satisfied with rough handling of suspects by the police. When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon  you just see them thrown in, rough, he said. Scoffing at calls for what he describes as political correctness, Trump also renewed his pledges to build a wall along the Mexican border. He accused the Obama administration of admitting criminals into the United States. Read More Facebook

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Analysis: In a Washington run by men, two overshadowed Republican women make their point on healthcare By Cathleen Decker In a Washington that has grown demonstrably more testosterone-fueled since President Trumps inauguration, it took two Republican women to secure the end of a long effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. They were the same two women  Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski  who had been excluded from the 13-member working group drafting the Republican bills. Nobodys being excluded based upon gender. Everybodys at the table, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had said of his all-white-males group. In the early hours of Friday, the duo was overshadowed by the more dramatic and unexpected no vote from Sen. John McCain of Arizona. There was reason for the attention lavished on McCain  a war hero and veteran senator returns to the Capitol days after a dire cancer diagnosis. But without both Collins and Murkowskis steadfast opposition, his vote would have been meaningless. Also largely overlooked: Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat who like McCain made an arduous trip to Washington despite her recent diagnosis of late-stage kidney cancer. Social media buzzed Friday with praise for the women senators from many fronts, including from men. But from many women, there was also a sense of familiarity at being ignored or taken for granted. Read More Facebook

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Clinton Foundation donor who was denied a visa settles leak case against the U.S. By Joseph Tanfani A billionaire Nigerian businessman and major Clinton Foundation donor banned from entering the U.S. two years ago on terrorism grounds has settled a lawsuit against the U.S. government. Gilbert Chagoury last year sued the FBI and other government agencies in U.S. District Court in Washington, saying he had been damaged by what he described as improper government leaks to the Los Angeles Times. The Times reported last year that Chagoury had been denied a visa to travel to the U.S. in 2015 on suspicion that he had provided aid to terrorist groups. One document, citing unverified information from an unnamed source, said that Chagoury  who is of Lebanese heritage  had funneled funds to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia and political group designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. Chagoury, an ardent Lakers fan who for decades lived part of the year in Los Angeles, angrily denied that he ever provided funds for terrorism. He said the publicity forced him to sell his Beverly Hills mansion at a loss and caused a bank to close his account. A philanthropist, Vatican ambassador and longtime friend of Bill Clinton, Chagoury once was invited to the White House after contributing to a Democratic get-out-the-vote campaign. He donated at least $1 million to the Clinton Foundation. Emails released last year showed that a Bill Clinton aide pushed Hillary Clintons aides at the State Department to get Chagoury access to top U.S. diplomats. In the settlement filed in court on Friday, the Justice Department said Chagoury has never appeared on the list of Specially Designated Nationals, figures such as terrorists and narcotics traffickers who are generally barred from doing business in the U.S. The government did not grant Chagourys request for a court hearing to dispute the reports that led to his exclusion from the U.S. As I have often said, I have loved America my whole life because it was the land of freedom and justice, he said in a statement, adding that he hopes the agreement will help repair his reputation. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Chagoury, who lives most of the time in Paris, has not applied for another visa, said his spokesman, Mark Corallo. Facebook

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Trump ousts Priebus, announces John Kelly as new chief of staff President Trump announced via Twitter on Friday that he had named retired Gen. John Kelly, head of the Department of Homeland Security, as White House chief of staff, replacing Reince Priebus. I am pleased to inform you that I have just named General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff. He is a Great American....  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 28, 2017 ...and a Great Leader. John has also done a spectacular job at Homeland Security. He has been a true star of my Administration  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 28, 2017 I would like to thank Reince Priebus for his service and dedication to his country. We accomplished a lot together and I am proud of him!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 28, 2017 Read More Facebook

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Rep. John Delaney of Maryland to run for president By Associated Press Rep. John Delaney of Maryland says hes running for president, instead of governor or reelection, in 2018. Delaney, a Democrat, announced his plans in a statement Friday. The politically moderate banking entrepreneur is in his third term in Marylands 6th Congressional District, which includes western Maryland and a large section of Montgomery County, the states largest county. The 54-year-old is worth roughly $90 million and is one of the Houses wealthiest members. He spent about $2 million to help finance his first House race in 2012. His consideration of a possible Maryland gubernatorial bid months ago quickly drew interest in his House seat. Several candidates already have expressed interest in running for the seat. Facebook

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McCain set to head back to Arizona to undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatments By Kurtis Lee (Shawn Thew / EPA) Sen. John McCain is headed home. Hours after McCain spurned his party and voted in opposition to a GOP measure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the senators office announced Friday he will return to Arizona to undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatments for his recent diagnosis of brain cancer. McCain, 80, was found this month to have a brain tumor known as a glioblastoma. He is scheduled to return to Washington in September after his initial treatments. The glioblastoma  an aggressive type of cancer  was discovered when McCain had a blood clot removed from above his left eye. According to the Mayo Clinic, which is overseeing McCains treatment, glioblastoma is difficult to treat. After returning to Washington this week and voting in favor of opening Senate debate on repeal, McCain was among three Republicans early Friday morning to vote in opposition to a so-called skinny bill that would repeal the ACA, known as Obamacare. The move by McCain, who has served in the Senate since 1987, has drawn the ire of members in his own party and some in the right-wing media. Facebook

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McCains surprise vote doomed GOP healthcare bill, but did it open the door for Senate bipartisanship? By Lisa Mascaro Sen. John McCain is usually happy to spar with reporters, but he ducked into an elevator ahead of the Senate healthcare vote late Thursday without saying a word about how he would vote. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, though, already knew the answer. The Democratic leader had been talking with the Arizona Republican all week  four, five times a day  ever since McCain returned to work after being diagnosed with brain cancer. Earlier in the week, McCain had dramatically salvaged the stalled GOP bill by voting to begin debate, only to go on to deliver a blistering speech against his own party leaders partisan, closed-door process in crafting it. Weve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle, he told them. Were getting nothing done. Schumer and McCain have been longtime colleagues, a kind of frenemies who seem like throwbacks to an earlier era of Congress. They worked together on big legislation, including the 2013 immigration overhaul  grand ideas that seem all but impossible in todays Congress. They had plenty to discuss. About the Senate, about it working again, about working together, and about how this bill was so poor for the American people, Schumer said. And he knew that, so did half his colleagues, but he had the courage to vote no. The moment stunned the Senate when McCain stepped up to cast his vote  a single down-turned finger  dooming the healthcare bill. Audible gasps filled the galleries, which were packed with onlookers. But his vote  along with no votes from Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska  did more than shelve the long campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It cracked open a new divide in the Senate, which seems to be split not so much between Republicans and Democrats, but by those senators who want to work together versus those stuck in hardened partisan tribes. Read More Facebook

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U.S. hits Iran with more sanctions in response to satellite launch By Associated Press The United States is slapping Iran with new sanctions in response to its launch of a satellite-carrying rocket into space this week. The sanctions target six Iranian subsidiaries of the Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group. The Treasury Department says that group is central to Irans ballistic missile program. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says the sanctions illustrate deep U.S. concerns about Irans missile testing and other actions. He says the U.S. will continue countering Irans ballistic missile program, including Thursdays provocative space launch. The U.S. has said that launch flouted a U.N. Security Council resolution because the technology is inherently designed to be able to carry a nuclear payload. The sanctions come as the Trump administration continues debating its Iran policy and whether to scrap the 2015 multilateral deal that limits the development of Irans nuclear capabilities. Facebook

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Political betrayal. McCain vote against Obamacare repeal draws ire from conservative writers By Kurtis Lee (Cliff Owen / AP) Though John McCain was one of three Republicans who helped Democrats squash the legislation to repeal Obamacare, conservative media is homing in on the Arizona senator for spurning his party in the healthcare vote. Here are some of todays headlines: John McCain: Traitor to the conservative cause (Washington Times) McCain, who was recently diagnosed with brain cancer, has been a staunch opponent of Obamacare, but in the end he could not support the so-called skinny repeal measure put forward by his colleagues in the Senate. In this piece, Cheryl K. Chumley, jabs McCain for his vote. For American voters expecting their Republican-dominated House, Senate and White House to honor their years of repeal promises and actually, well, repeal Obamacare, McCains thumbs-down was a face-slap moment that will be remembered in history as a textbook classic case of political betrayal, she writes. McCains odd definition of leading the fight to stop Obamacare (National Review) This article is simple  its a quick compare-and-contrast of McCains recent comments versus his vote on Friday. Last year, during a tough reelection, McCains campaign ran a television ad that boasted the senator is leading the fight to stop Obamacare. But last night his office put out a statement noting the GOP Senate bill did not offer a replacement to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens. The author of this piece, Jim Geraghty, concludes: Its very difficult to characterize McCains decision as leading the fight to stop Obamacare. Thats more like leading the fight to keep Obamacare in place while you continue to look for a replacement that you like better. John McCain burns Mitch McConnell sides with Democrats (American Spectator) When McConnell, the majority leader, stood on the Senate floor Friday after the bills failure, he was clearly annoyed. McCains no vote had led to applause moments earlier from Democrats. In a move thats no surprise to anyone, John McCain voted against the embarrassingly named Skinny Repeal, voted against his party (or is it his party?) and voted to keep Obamacare going as is, writes Melissa Mackenzie. Facebook

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Meet the two female GOP senators who opposed the healthcare bill from the start By Kelcey Caulder Sen. John McCain shocked Republicans and Democrats alike with his vote early Friday morning to kill the latest Republican effort to repeal Obamacare. But McCain was not the only Republican to play a role in blocking the final version of the overhaul bill. Two female Republican lawmakers, Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, also voted against the bill. Collins has opposed repeal and replace efforts from the beginning, and Murkowski has also been critical of much of what the Senate Republican leadership has proposed. Collins said it would be a big mistake for Republicans to pass legislation without trying seriously to work with Democrats to reach bipartisan solutions. Instead, she called for both parties to work together to improve the healthcare system. Murkowski and Collins were the first from their party to come out against repealing the ACA without having new, replacement legislation on the table. In statements posted on Twitter, Collins, who voted against the same proposal in 2015, said she did not think it was constructive to repeal the law without a replacement, while Murkowski encouraged senators from both sides of the aisle to work together to address healthcare issues. I will vote no on the motion to proceed to repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement. I voted against this same proposal in 2015. pic.twitter.com/Szuke5zYNL  Sen. Susan Collins (@SenatorCollins) July 18, 2017 My recent statement on the Senate Healthcare Process: pic.twitter.com/j19Ok1KwWw  Sen. Lisa Murkowski (@lisamurkowski) July 18, 2017 The two senators were also the only Republicans to vote against opening debate on repeal of Obamacare earlier this week. Their opposition to Republican healthcare efforts has drawn a lot of criticism within the party, some of it expressed in vulgar, even violent terms. Georgia Rep. Buddy Carter said in an interview Wednesday with MSNBC: Somebody needs to go over there to that Senate and snatch a knot in their ass. A Texas congressman said the female senators narrowly avoided an Aaron Burr-style showdown with him. President Trump publicly rebuked Murkowski on Twitter for her vote. Senator @lisamurkowski of the Great State of Alaska really let the Republicans, and our country, down yesterday. Too bad!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2017 Trump has not criticized Collins by name for her vote, but warned Tuesday at a rally in Ohio that any senator who votes against repeal and replace is telling America that they are fine with the Obamacare nightmare, and I predict theyll have a lot of problems. Facebook

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The current Senate GOP effort to repeal Obamacare is dead. Now what? By Noam N. Levey (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press) The sudden collapse of the GOPs Senate campaign to repeal or replace the Affordable Care Act does not mean the issue disappears. Significant problems and challenges remain, particularly for Obamacare insurance marketplaces. The defeat increases the odds that Congress will begin to look at a more limited approach to shore up the current law and stabilize markets. The GOPs repeal effort may return, but in the meantime heres a look at what a temporary fix might look like: Read More Facebook

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Paul Ryan responds to the failure of the GOP healthcare bill By Associated Press House Speaker Paul Ryan said Friday that hes disappointed and frustrated by the failure of Republican healthcare legislation in the Senate. But Ryan said in a statement that we should not give up after promising for years to repeal and replace Obamacare. We were sent to Washington to fulfill the pledges we made to our constituents, the statement said. While the House delivered a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, unfortunately the Senate was unable to reach a consensus. At the same time, the speaker said that overhauling the tax code is at the top of the Houses list of priorities. He pledged to pursue historic tax reform in the fall. He issued his statement as the House prepared to leave Washington for its annual August recess. The House passed legislation repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act in May. But after a failed vote early Friday in the Senate, its not clear if GOP leaders will be able to resuscitate the efforts. Facebook

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Economic growth rebounded to 2.6% annual rate in second quarter By Jim Puzzanghera The Port of Los Angeles (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times) The U.S. economy rebounded this spring after a weak winter, expanding at a solid 2.6% annual rate as consumers picked up their spending pace, the Commerce Department said Friday. Total economic output, also known as gross domestic product, for the April-through-June period was in line with analyst expectations for a bounce-back based in part on pent-up demand. The economic growth rate was more than double the 1.2% pace in the first quarter. That figure was revised down Friday from an earlier estimate of 1.4%. After the winter blues, the economy has rebounded, said Sung Won Sohn, an economist at Cal State Channel Islands. Read More Facebook

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Never mind healthcare. President Trump has made slogans great again By Mark Z. Barabak ( (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)) His promise to repeal and replace Obamacare has crashed and burned. Tax reform hasnt gotten far. The White House is in disarray, and big plans to rebuild the nations infrastructure have hit a brick wall. But there is one unimpeachable triumph President Trump can point to: Hes made great again great again. The Make America Great Again 2016 campaign slogan  limned in block letters and emblazoned on countless cherry-red ball caps  has been reimagined, repurposed and cheekily appropriated for countless pitches and commercial products. Apart from the now-familiar caps, mercantile options include aprons, beanies, beer cozys, coffee mugs, hoodies, leggings, swimsuits, T-shirts, water bottles and, for the special someone, Donald Trump Make America Great Again Womens Booty Shorts. But MAGA, as the president short-hands the phrase in Twitter posts, is also popping up in places having little or nothing to do with politics: on a catwalk at New Yorks Fashion Week, high in the sky promoting classical music in Phoenix, on the menu at an Italian restaurant in Atlanta. Read More Facebook

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If Adam Schiff is Californias next U.S. senator, he might want to thank President Trump By Mark Z. Barabak (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press) The road to elected office can be long and winding and is not always paved with the best of intentions. Some politicians  think of the Kennedys or the Bush family  are born to the trade. Others are borne by tragedy. Former Santa Barbara Rep. Lois Capps succeeded her husband when he died of a heart attack. Former New York Rep. Carolyn McCarthy was spurred to run when her husband was killed and her son gravely wounded in a mass shooting on the Long Island Rail Road. Typically, though, the ascension is more methodical, one rung after the next, often with a pinch of right-place, right-time fortune thrown in for good measure. Lately that bit of luck has visited itself on Adam B. Schiff, in the form of Russian meddling and a president who hurls tweets like poison thunderbolts. Read More Facebook

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Kris Kobach says Trumps voter fraud panel will keep voter data secure. Some states arent buying it By Kurtis Lee (Jessica McGowan / Getty Images) After weeks of legal battles and bipartisan pushback from top election officials nationwide, President Trumps voter fraud commission has renewed a message for the states: Its safe to pass along your data about voters. Individuals voter registration records will be kept confidential and secure throughout the duration of the commissions existence, Kris Kobach, vice chairman of the commission, wrote in a letter sent late Wednesday to all 50 secretaries of state. Even so, by Thursday, much of the criticism that greeted an earlier request from the commission was repeated by election officials and activists, who have expressed concerns about privacy and have called the panel both a sham created by an insecure president and a tool to suppress votes. Trump  without evidence  has repeatedly alleged that 3 million to 5 million illegal votes were cast in last years presidential election. (Trump prevailed in the electoral college, while Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by about 3 million votes.) Read More Facebook

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President Trump said our guys are rougher than the violent gang MS-13. What did he mean? By Brian Bennett (SAUL LOEB / AFP ) When President Trump said this week his administration is going after bloodthirsty criminal gangs like the notoriously violent MS-13, he added a menacing flourish: Our guys are rougher than their guys. The comment raised concerns that Trump was instructing immigration agents to use excessive force when going after suspected gang members. Not so, Trumps top spokeswoman said on Thursday. I think the president means that our guys are going to do whatever it takes to protect Americans, protect American lives, protect our borders, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in response to a question about what Trump meant by rougher. Trump wants people to do their jobs, not go beyond the scope of what they should do, Sanders said. Trumps comment came during a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Tuesday night. We are throwing MS-13 the hell out of here so fast, he said, boasting that his administration is liberating towns and cities from gangs. And, well, I will just tell you this, were not doing it in a politically correct fashion, Trump added. Were doing it rough. Our guys are rougher than their guys. Trumps comment was meant to boost morale among immigration officers looking to arrest and deport gang members, said one senior administration official, who would speak only without being identified to discuss the presidents thinking. As part of Trumps crackdown on immigrants in the country illegally, he has instructed the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to target a suspected gang member for deportation before that person has been convicted of a crime, said ICE director Thomas Homan. Homan joined Sanders at her daily briefing at the White House. The two spoke to preview the presidents Friday trip to Long Island, N.Y., where he will tout his administrations efforts against MS-13 and other gangs. For Trump, who grew up in Queens, recent headlines about MS-13 violence in central Long Island have hit close to home. In April, four young men were found hacked to death in a park in Central Islip, N.Y., a senior administration official told reporters Thursday night. He is a New Yorker and he knows New York, the administration official said. It is absolutely a personal issue. And he knows whats happening in New York -- and its not just Long Island -- is a tragedy and there are communities like that all across America. Facebook

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Boy Scouts chief apologizes for presidents political rhetoric at national Jamboree. Trump wont By Brian Bennett President Trump wont apologize for a surprisingly political speech this week to Boy Scouts that provoked a backlash for his attacks on his predecessor, his election rival, dissident Republicans and the news media. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders delivered that word on Thursday, just after a top executive of the Boy Scouts of America issued an apology on behalf of the organization for allowing the political rhetoric to occur during Trumps address Monday evening at the National Scout Jamboree held in West Virginia. Michael Surbaugh, the organizations chief executive, in a statement extended his sincere apologies to those in our Scouting family who were offended by the political rhetoric that was inserted into the jamboree. He noted that the groups invitation to the president to speak was in keeping with a long-standing tradition since 1937; eight of 11 incumbent presidents have attended. But, Surbaugh wrote, we have steadfastly remained non-partisan and refused to comment on political matters. We sincerely regret that politics were inserted into the Scouting program. At the White House, however, Sanders indicated that neither she nor Trump saw any reason to apologize, or considered his remarks in any way out of line. I was at that event and I saw nothing but roughly 40,000 to 45,000 Boy Scouts cheering the president on throughout his remarks, Sanders said. I think they were pretty excited that he was there and happy to hear him speak to them, she added. Sanders said she had not seen the statement from the Boy Scouts chief. During his rambling 38-minute speech to the Scouts in Glen Jean, W.Va., Trump criticized Hillary Clinton and President Obama and singled out congressional Republicans who were not in lockstep with him on healthcare. He got much applause and supportive chants from his audience, and even credited the Scouts -- who are too young to vote -- for being among the millions who elected him. But almost immediately, the Boy Scouts organization was inundated with protests from former Scouts, parents and others angered by the presidents partisan words. Facebook

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Trumps words kind of hurtful, Sessions says, but he has no plans to resign By Joseph Tanfani President Trumps scathing criticisms have been kind of hurtful, Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions said Thursday, even as he again signaled that he wants to stay on the job. He wants all of us to do our job, and thats what I intend to do, Sessions said in an interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News. Separately, Sessions told the Associated Press that it hasnt been my best week  for my relationship with the president. He made the comment in El Salvador, during a visit to highlight joint efforts to take on the MS-13 gang. The attorney general said he hadnt met with Trump but looked forward to talking to him about it. If he wants to make a change, he has every right, Sessions said. I serve at the pleasure of the president. Ive understood that from the day I took the job. But, he said, I believe with great confidence that I understand what is needed in the Department of Justice and what President Trump wants. I share his agenda. The comments were the first this week on the subject from Sessions, who has been subjected to harshly critical tweets from Trump for three days. The president has called him weak and said he wasnt aggressive enough in going after leakers. Last week, after Trump criticized Sessions in a New York Times interview, Sessions told reporters he planned to stay on as long as it was appropriate. Sessions has seemed to redouble his attempts this week to win back the presidents favor. He announced another crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities that dont cooperate with immigration enforcement and on Friday traveled to El Salvador to highlight arrests of MS-13 gang members, both favorite topics of the president. The Justice Department also plans to address leaks next week. Sessions said his department was stepping up leak investigations. Some people need to go to jail, he said. The president has every right to ask the DOJ to be more aggressive on that, and we intend to. On Wednesday evening, after Anthony Scaramucci , Trumps incoming communications director, falsely claimed in a tweet that hed been the victim of a leak, Sessions chief spokeswoman released a statement agreeing that leaks are undermining the government and promising to aggressively pursue leak cases wherever they may lead. Trump has made it clear that he is most angry with Sessions for recusing himself from supervising the ongoing investigation into his administrations ties with Russia. But Sessions defended that decision. I understand his feeling about it because this has been a big distraction for him, he said on Fox. Im confident I made the right decision, the decision thats consistent with the rule of law, and an attorney general who doesnt follow the law is not very effective at leading the Department of Justice, he said. In the interview, Sessions reached back to Trumps campaign slogan to praise the president as a strong leader. He is determined to move this country in the direction that he believes it needs to go to make it great again, he said. Sessions has received considerable support in recent days from conservative Republicans, including many of his former Senate colleagues. On Thursday, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) went to the Senate floor to discourage Trump from moving against Sessions, saying that the Senate would not allow the president to make a recess appointment that would bypass the normal confirmation process. A recess appointment would allow Trump to appoint a person who could serve without confirmation until the start of 2019. Such appointments can only be made if the Senate formally takes a break, which senators of both parties have said they will avoid in order to prevent Trump from avoiding confirmations. If youre thinking of making a recess appointment to push out the attorney general, forget about it, Sasse said. The presidency isnt a bull, and this country isnt a china shop. 1:55 p.m.: This post was updated with additional remarks by Sessions and remarks by Sen. Ben Sasse. 5:50: This post was updated with additional quotes from Sessions interview. Facebook

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For Trump White House, cable television becomes the venue for intramural sniping By Noah Bierman President Trump and his aides love to complain about leaks from within the White House. But on Thursday, the infighting was out in the open. The incoming communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, in a morning phone call broadcast on CNN, compared the West Wing to a fish that stinks from the head down, implying that White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus is responsible for at least some of the leaks. Later, Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to come to Priebuss defense and say whether Trump has full confidence in his chief of staff. Another Trump advisor, Kellyanne Conway, used a prison analogy for the broader backstabbing among aides, telling Fox News that her West Wing colleagues were using the press to shiv each other. While the knifings might suggest a new level of chaos in a White House known for it, the style is all Trump. As a businessman, he has a history of fostering rivalries among his employees. He always did sort of like competition, backstabbing, infighting kind of stuff, said Barbara Res, who spent nearly two decades as a top executive in Trumps real estate business. He set people up to do that. Trump led the charge this week, using his Twitter account and an interview with the Wall Street Journal to ridicule his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, one of Trumps first and most prominent campaign supporters. By Thursday, both Priebus and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson were seeing their fates publicly debated, less than a week after Sean Spicer was forced out as press secretary after months of speculation and presidential slights. The Priebus intrigue was amplified by Scaramucci on Twitter and in the CNN interview. He blamed Priebus for leaking Scaramuccis personal financial disclosure forms -- which are publicly available -- and suggested that Trump encouraged Scaramuccis offensive in a phone conversation the two men had just before the aide dialed into CNN. When Sanders was asked about the Scaramucci-Priebus dustup, she said that the president likes healthy competition on his staff. The president likes that kind of competition and encourages it, Sanders said. The result is a White House that increasingly suggests the presidents former way of life. As the star of a reality TV show, he fomented internal competition and firings among apprentices; their cable television appearances, meanwhile, recall the confessionals familiar to reality show fans, in which characters confide directly to the camera their anger or enmity toward others on the show. The primary attribute for a successful tenure in the Trump White House is masochism, tweeted Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican operative and Trump critic. The repeated evidence of dysfunction and the high level of insecurity among Trumps core aides help explain the White Houses inability to focus on its agenda. Trumps critics voiced suspicions on Twitter that the public staff blow-up was a deliberate distraction from the struggle in Congress to pass a healthcare bill, as well as from the ongoing investigations into potential collusion between his presidential campaign and Russia and the backlash to Trumps surprise Twitter announcement on Wednesday that transgender people will be barred from military service. But those issues also were being heavily covered on cable news. The stories that were overshadowed were those Trump was trying to promote: a deal his administration helped strike with Foxconn to build a production facility in Wisconsin, possibly creating thousands of new jobs, and nascent efforts to craft a tax overhaul plan. Facebook

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Democrats criticize financial industry backgrounds of two Trump bank regulator nominees By Jim Puzzanghera Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). (Joe Raedle / Getty Images) Senate Democrats on Thursday criticized the financial industry backgrounds of President Trumps nominees for two key banking regulatory positions, arguing they would not protect the interests of average Americans. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and others sharply questioned Joseph Otting, the former chief executive of Pasadenas OneWest Bank, and investment fund manager Randal Quarles during a confirmation hearing by the Senate Banking Committee. Trump nominated Otting to be the comptroller of the currency, a powerful regulator of national banks. Quarles has been tapped to be the Federal Reserves vice chairman for supervision, who is in charge of the Feds oversight of the nations largest bank holding companies and other regulatory efforts. The two are expected to be friendlier to the banking industry than recent Democratic appointees. Read More Facebook

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Senator warns Trump there will be holy hell to pay if he fires Sessions By Joseph Tanfani A prominent Republican Senator issued a blunt warning to President Trump not to interfere with the Russia investigation, saying any effort to get rid of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III could be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters Thursday that there will be holy hell to pay if Trump fires Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, a favorite of conservatives who represented Alabama in the Senate for 20 years. Grahams warning was the sternest yet from Senate Republicans to Trump about the potential consequences of firing either Sessions or Mueller. The chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, Sen. Charles Grassley, (R-Iowa), issued his own warning in a tweet Wednesday night, saying his committee would not take up a nomination of a replacement attorney general this year, which is required before the Senate can vote to confirm. Everybody in D.C. Shld b warned that the agenda for the judiciary Comm is set for rest of 2017. Judges first subcabinet 2nd / AG no way  ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) July 27, 2017 Starting with an interview in the New York Times last week and continuing with a three-day barrage of critical tweets, Trump has raged at Sessions for his decision to recuse himself from supervising the investigation into the Russian attempts to influence the election, and into whether anybody involved in Trumps campaign participated in the scheme. Trump also has bitterly complained about Mueller, whom he has accused of leading a witch hunt, and Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod J. Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller and who is now supervising the probe. Justice Department regulations say that only the attorney general, or in this case Rosenstein acting in his place, can fire the special counsel. If Sessions were gone, Trump could try to appoint a replacement willing to carry out the firing. Graham said he will introduce a bill next week that would require court review if anyone tried to fire a special counsel who was investigating the president. I think Ill get all the Democrats and I hope to get a good number of Republicans, he said, adding that the enacting such a law is not just for Trump but for any future president. We need a check and balance here. Graham said Trumps campaign to marginalize and humiliate the attorney general is not going over well in the Senate or among conservatives. He also said Trump, who has called on Sessions to investigate his former rival Hillary Clinton, has gone way beyond what is acceptable in a rule of law nation. This is not draining the swamp, he said. What hes interjecting is turning democracy upside down..taking 200-year-old concepts that were a nation of laws and not men and trying to turn it upside down. Sen. Graham: "Any effort to go after Mueller could be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency." https://t.co/6Pd60LrGRU pic.twitter.com/EXBOwBC35C  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) July 27, 2017 Facebook

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Watch live: White House news briefing with Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders Facebook

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Trump administration threatens to retaliate against Alaska for GOP senators Obamacare repeal vote, news site reports By Noam N. Levey The Trump administration threatened to block federal aid to Alaska in an effort to bully one of the Republican senators opposed to the current Senate GOP push to roll back the Affordable Care Act, according to a report by the Alaska Dispatch News. The news site reports that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Wednesday called Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan with a warning that Murkowskis vote had put Alaskas future with the administration in jeopardy. According to the report: Sullivan said the call from Zinke heralded a troubling message. Im not going to go into the details, but I fear that the strong economic growth, pro-energy, pro-mining, pro-jobs and personnel from Alaska who are part of those policies are going to stop, Sullivan said. I tried to push back on behalf of all Alaskans.  Were facing some difficult times and theres a lot of enthusiasm for the policies that Secretary Zinke and the president have been talking about with regard to our economy. But the message was pretty clear, Sullivan said. The threat followed disparaging comments made by the president about Murkowski, including a Twitter attack Wednesday morning Senator @lisamurkowski of the Great State of Alaska really let the Republicans, and our country, down yesterday. Too bad! Trump wrote. Murkowski dismissed the presidents attacks in an interview with MSNBC. Were here to govern. Were here to legislate, she said. Were here to represent the people who sent us here. And so every day shouldnt be about campaigning. Every day shouldnt be about winning elections. How about just doing a little bit of governing around here? Thats what Im here for. Murkowski and Maine Sen. Susan Collins were the only Republicans who voted against a procedural motion Tuesday to begin debating legislation rolling back the 2010 healthcare law, often called Obamacare. Sullivan, also a Republican, voted in favor of advancing the bill. Murkowski has urged a more open process to develop the legislation, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) has put together behind closed doors without committee hearings or input from Democrats. A spokeswoman for Zinke did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Facebook

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Iran angered by report that Trump wants additional nuclear inspections By Shashank Bengali Iran responded angrily Thursday to reports that the Trump administration would push for inspections of military facilities to ensure Tehran is complying with the 2015 nuclear deal. Iran will not succumb to further pressure, Hamid Reza Taraghi, a hard-line analyst who is close to Irans leadership, told The Times. Taraghi did not say whether Iran would refuse inspectors access to military facilities but insisted the Islamic Republic was complying with the agreement, which required Iran to shelve its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. President Trump has said he wants to tear up the deal and doesnt believe Iran is complying, although his administration certified it was in a report to Congress this month. The Associated Press reported Thursday that Trump was pushing for inspections of suspicious Iranian military sites, either to prove that Iran was violating the deal or force it to refuse, which could cause the agreement to collapse. Iranian officials have argued in the past that inspections of military sites would be off-limits. But under the agreement it signed with the United States and five other world powers, Iran agreed to the so-called Additional Protocol, which allows U.N. inspectors limited access to any site where illicit nuclear activity is suspected. Taraghi, a former lawmaker, said the Additional Protocol allowed for snap inspections and that international inspectors had installed closed-circuit cameras in all nuclear-related facilities. They have access to everything going on here on the ground, Taraghi said. What else do they want to know? It was not immediately clear what military sites the Trump administration was seeking to have inspected, or whether it had evidence that Iran was breaching the terms of the deal. U.N. inspectors monitoring Irans compliance had not requested access to military facilities as of July 25, according to a paper published Thursday by Mark Fitzpatrick, executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Washington. If US has good evidence of #Iran violations, then an inspection request is warranted, Fitzpatrick tweeted. A request designed to trap Iran into saying no isnt. Facebook

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Top U.S. general says Pentagon will not change policy on transgender troops until White House acts By W.J. Hennigan The nations senior military officer said Thursday that there will be no modifications to Pentagon policies for now despite President Trump social media posts declaring a ban on transgender troops in uniform. Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a memo to commanders and senior enlisted leaders of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines that the military will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect. Dunford said Pentagon policy on transgender troops would not change until the White House has issued Trumps directive to Secretary of Defense James Mattis through formal channels  not on Twitter  and the secretarys office issues guidance on implementation to the service chiefs. Its unclear when that might happen. The unusual memo appeared intended to calm widespread confusion and concern at the Pentagon, which was blindsided when Trump wrote Wednesday that Pentagon would not accept or allow transgender troops to serve in any capacity. The presidents posts appeared to reverse a year-old Pentagon policy that allowed transgender soldiers to openly serve for the first time, and to seek sex reassignment surgery, hormone therapy and other treatments at military hospitals. Trumps surprise announcement not only marked a retreat for the Pentagon push to bar gender-based discrimination. It also was an about-face for Trump, who had repeatedly vowed his support for the LGBT community during the campaign last year. The posts raised questions about the fate of thousands of transgender service members, including some deployed overseas, and whether they would be kicked out of the military under Trumps directive. Dunfords memo appeared to address those fears, at least for the short term. There will be no modifications to the current policy until the Presidents direction has been received by the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary has issued implementation guidance, he wrote. In the meantime, we will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect, he added. As importantly, given the current fight and the challenges we face, we will all remain focused on accomplishing our assigned missions. In his tweets, Trump said he had decided to bar transgender troops because the military cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Experts said neither justification was accurate or fair since the expected medical costs were negligible and transgender troops have been openly serving for the past year without disruption. The sweeping declaration drew rebuke from war veterans and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy groups, who vowed to challenge Trump in federal court if self-identified transgender service members are forced out of the military. VoteVets, a liberal military veterans advocacy group, said Thursday it had collected more than 20,000 signatures from veterans, military families and other supporters to oppose the ban. Facebook

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Analysis: Trumps war against elites and expertise By Cathleen Decker (Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images) When President Trump campaigned this spring at the Hermitage, the home of Andrew Jackson, one part of his predecessors approach got a special endorsement. It was during the Revolution that Jackson first confronted and defied an arrogant elite. Does that sound familiar? Trump asked to laughs from his audience. When Trump ally and National Rifle Assn. President Wayne LaPierre teed off six weeks later on Americas greatest domestic threats, he cited not homegrown terrorists but what he termed the three most dangerous voices in America: academic elites, political elites, and media elites. The rhetoric against elites came from two men who would seem to be card-carrying members of the club: LaPierre made more than $5 million in 2015, the most recent year for which his compensation was publicly released. Trump lived before his inauguration in a gold-plated home in the sky above New Yorks Fifth Avenue, a billionaires luxurious domain. Yet for Trump and his allies, a war on elites has been central to the campaign which put him in the presidency and has maintained the loyalty of his core voters. Trump has taken particular aim at entities that could counter his power, which has helped stoke the ardor of his political backers. Read More Facebook

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Top Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway says colleagues using the press to shiv each other By Noah Bierman White House staffers continued their angry campaign against leaks -- and each other -- as top advisor Kellyanne Conway used vivid language in a Fox interview Thursday to denounce colleagues who are using the press to shiv each other in the ribs. The comments came shortly after Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director, delivered his own attack on leakers -- all but blaming Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff -- in an interview on CNN. If the Trump White House at times resembles a reality show, cable television has become the confessional booth where the players vent their anger at each other. That dynamic was on vivid display Thursday morning. Kellyanne Conway: "Now, there are leaks, and then there are people using the press to shiv each other in the ribs. Thats different." (Fox)  David Wright (@DavidWright_CNN) July 27, 2017 Conway largely backed Scaramucci without explicitly taking sides in his public war against Priebus, whom he publicly suggested leaked Scaramuccis financial disclosure forms to the press. The forms are public and available through a request. We just have to cut down on people thinking its cute and its popular and it somehow enhances their resume and their portfolio for later on to curry favor with folks who are more interested in covering the style and not the substance here, Conway said of those who leak to he press. Asked specifically whether she agrees with Scaramucci that Priebus leaked the financial forms, Conway passed on the opportunity to defend Priebus. Leakers are easier to figure out than many think, she said, perhaps ominously given Scaramuccis threats to fire suspects. This West Wing is a very small place. Facebook

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Warfare in the West Wing breaks into the open as Scaramucci takes aim at Priebus By Brian Bennett A knife fight for control of the West Wing broke into the open Thursday morning as President Trumps new communications director Anthony Scaramucci lashed out at White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus in a televised interview, accusing Priebus of leaking and standing in the way of Trumps agenda. The fish stinks from the head down, I can tell you two fish that dont stink, OK, and thats me and the president, Scaramucci said, calling in to CNNs morning show New Day. I dont like the activity thats going in the White House, he said. Scaramucci, who had said the day he was named to the White House job that he and Priebus were like brothers, drastically amended that in the interview, comparing the two of them to the brothers who, in the Bible, were the characters in the first murder. Some brothers are like Cain and Abel, other brothers can fight with each other and get along. I dont know if this is reparable or not  that will be up to the president, he said. Scaramucci on his relationship with Reince: "Some brothers are like Cain and Abel." Uh, Cain killed Abel. https://t.co/UQ8F9HiXLx  Dan Merica (@merica) July 27, 2017 President Trump has a track record of encouraging rivalries among people who work for him. Scaramucci said he had spoken with Trump for 15 minutes to go over what he was going to say before he called CNN, implying his warning to Priebus carried Trumps backing. Trump, Scaramucci said, has given me his full support and his full blessing. When Scaramucci was hired, Trump told him he would report directly to the president, bypassing the chief of staff, and setting up the clash that played out Thursday on national television. If you want to talk about the chief of staff, we have had odds, we have had differences. When I said we were brothers from the podium, thats because were rough on each other, Scaramucci said. The tension between Scaramucci and Priebus flared after Politico published a story Wednesday about Scaramuccis publicly available financial disclosure form showing he still stands to profit from his stake in an investment firm he founded. The disclosure form was available to the public because Scaramucci had been nominated earlier this year for a job at the Export-Import Bank of the U.S., and the forms become public 30 days after they are filed. But Scaramucci, in a tweet Wednesday night, seemed to imply Priebus had leaked the form to make him look bad, or knew who did, and called for an FBI investigation. He later deleted the tweet, apparently after being informed that the form was not leaked. Over the last five days, Scaramucci said to CNN, he has done a major amount of work interviewing assistants to the president and communications staff. He also had dinner with Trump on Wednesday night in addition to his phone conversation with the president Thursday morning. The two of them want everyone to know we have a very, very good idea of who the leakers are, who the senior leakers are, in the White House, he said. Scaramucci took aim specifically at Priebus for leaking details about internal White House discussions and maneuvers. If Reince wants to explain that hes not a leaker, let him do that, Scaramucci said. Scaramucci appears to be giving voice to Trumps frustration with people in the White House the president believes are slowing down policy efforts, even though Trump has shown a pattern of repeatedly stepping on his own efforts on healthcare, job creation and other initiatives with unplanned tweets on topics such as Russia, transgender troops and unfounded allegations of voter fraud. There are people inside this administration who think its their job to save America from this president, Scaramucci said. Its not their jobs ... to rein him in or do things to him that slow down his agenda. People in the Washington are back-stabbers, Scaramucci said. Im more of a front-stabbing person. Facebook

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Scaramucci tweets, then deletes, confusing statement that referred to information in Politico report as a leak By Colleen Shalby In a now deleted tweet, incoming White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci sent out a confusing statement Wednesday night, addressing information reported earlier by Politico as a leak. The article reported on Scaramuccis financial disclosures. According to Politico, those details had been filed with the Office of Government Ethics, so its unclear what  if anything  was leaked information. Scaramuccis tweet further confused as it ended with White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus Twitter handle. Just before those characters, he noted that he intended to contact the FBI and the Justice Department. Some speculated that Scaramucci was implying that Priebus was behind the leak. But in a new tweet roughly two hours after the original, he tweeted what appeared to be a clarification, correcting a headline of news site Axios. Wrong! Tweet was public notice to leakers that all Sr Adm officials are helping to end illegal leaks, he tweeted, ending it  once again  with Priebus handle. Wrong! Tweet was public notice to leakers that all Sr Adm officials are helping to end illegal leaks. @Reince45 pic.twitter.com/AB0reseuX1  Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) July 27, 2017 Five days ago, Scaramucci, responding to a question about reported tensions between him and the chief of staff, said he and Priebus are a little bit like brothers, where we rough each other up a little, which is totally normal for brothers. 10:15 p.m. PT: This post was originally published at 8:52 p.m. It was updated with information from Scaramuccis new tweet. Facebook

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Senate Judiciary chair fires off warning to Trump about Sessions By David Lauter Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, fired off an unmistakable warning to President Trump on Wednesday evening: Dont even think about trying to get a new attorney general confirmed this year. Trump has been publicly tormenting Jeff Sessions, appearing to want to push the attorney general into stepping down from his job. But in a tweet, Grassley made it clear that if Trump pushed Sessions out, he would have to live with an acting attorney general for a long time. Everybody in D.C. Shld b warned that the agenda for the judiciary Comm is set for rest of 2017. Judges first subcabinet 2nd / AG no way  ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) July 27, 2017 Any nominee for attorney general would have to pass through the Judiciary Committee before getting a confirmation vote, so Grassleys no way would be a formidable barrier. Grassley has been an administration loyalist on nearly all issues so far, but as a veteran senator, he has a strong independent streak and, as previous administrations have found, he can be implacable if angered. His message comes as conservative allies rally support for Sessions. Several other Republican senators have spoken out in favor of the attorney general, a former colleague who was well liked during his years as senator from Alabama. Senate Democrats already have said they would use procedural motions to prevent the Senate from formally going on a recess this summer, blocking Trump from making a recess appointment that would bypass the Senate. Republicans used similar maneuvers to block recess appointments by President Obama. If Sessions were to step down and not be replaced, Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein would become acting attorney general. Trump has been critical of Rosenstein as well as Sessions, so that option presumably would not appeal to him. Facebook

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Under fire from Trump, Sessions should stay focused on his job, White House says By Joseph Tanfani (Alex Brandon / Associated Press) In spite of a daily barrage of Twitter attacks from President Trump, the White House press secretary said Wednesday that Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions should stay focused on performing his duties as the nations top law enforcement officer. You can be disappointed in someone and still want someone to continue to do their job, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday, hours after Trump criticized Sessions for the third straight day  this time for not replacing acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe. Sessions was one of Trumps earliest and most loyal supporters, but the relationship has turned icy as Trump continues to seethe about Sessions decision to step aside from supervising the investigation into alleged Russian interference with last years election. Sessions was at the White House for meetings Wednesday, the second time this week hes visited the West Wing, but once again did not see Trump, Sanders said. Sanders did not clear up the main question surrounding Trumps strategy of publicly battering the attorney general: If the president is so unhappy, why doesnt he simply fire Sessions? Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Wednesday that Trumps apparent attempt to humiliate Sessions into quitting was a sign of weakness. To me, weakness is when you play around the edges, and you dont use the power you have, Graham said in an interview on CNN. Sanders said that Trump wants Sessions to continue to lead the Department of Justice. He wants him to focus on things like immigration, leaks and a number of other issues, she said. One of Trumps public complaints has been that Sessions hasnt been aggressive enough in pursuing leakers of classified information. In fact, the Justice Department is expected to announce next week some leak prosecutions. On Tuesday, Sessions also announced new measures to cut off some federal funds to so-called sanctuary cities that dont cooperate with immigration enforcement, another favorite issue for the president. But Sanders added that, at this point, a leak investigation would not salvage Sessions standing with Trump. I dont think thats the nature of the relationship, she said. In two tweets Wednesday morning, Trump criticized Sessions for not replacing McCabe, whose wife ran for office as a Democrat in Virginia in 2015. He suggested that McCabe had a conflict of interest in his duties as deputy director of the FBI during the investigation of Hillary Clintons handling of classified emails as secretary of State, although McCabe did not move into that job until months after his wifes campaign was over. McCabe took over the bureau as acting director when Trump fired James B. Comey in May. Sanders also declined to answer a question on why Trump did not fire McCabe himself, saying only that Trump looked forward to seeing his nominee as FBI director, Christopher Wray, be confirmed by the Senate soon. Facebook

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Trump, on Twitter, announced a ban on transgender service members. Now the military has to figure out what he means By Brian Bennett (Alex Brandon / Associated Press) President Trump surprised even the Pentagon on Wednesday morning by his unexpected announcement, via Twitter, of a ban on transgender service members. The military has not had a chance to decide how to put such a ban into effect, acknowledged Trumps top spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, as she fielded numerous questions on the topic later from White House reporters. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who was on vacation, wasnt informed until Tuesday that Trump had decided to bar transgender service members from serving in any way. Sometimes you have to make a decision and once he made a decision, he didnt feel it was necessary to hold that decision, Sanders said. The president concluded, based on consultations with his national security team, that allowing transgender individuals to serve erodes military readiness and unit cohesion, she said. White House and Pentagon officials had been discussing details of medical coverage for transgender service members on active duty. But Trump went far beyond that with his series of tweets that the military will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the military. It will be up to the Defense Department to determine the specifics of the policy, including whether active-duty transgender service members will be kicked out of the military, Sanders said. Estimates of the number of current service members who are transgender range from 1,300 to about 16,000. The implementation policy is going to be something that the White House and Department of Defense will have to work together to lawfully determine, Sanders said. I would imagine the Department of Defense will be the lead on that, she added. Trumps tweets overshadowed other announcements he had planned to make Wednesday about adding manufacturing jobs to the economy and donating $100,000 of his second-quarter paycheck to the Department of Education to support science and math education. The president has expressed concerns since this Obama policy came into effect, Sanders said. She added that the president considered allowing transgender people in the ranks is a very expensive and disruptive policy. At one point, an exasp
Passenger numbers continue to climb at Hollywood Burbank Airport as officials reported this week a 15% increase during May compared to the same month in 2016.

A combination of competitive fare pricing, a recovering economy and traffic congestion at Los Angeles International Airport are some of the reasons local airfield staff members attribute to the growth at Hollywood Burbank, said Denis Carvill, deputy executive director of engineering, maintenance, operations and airline relations, during a Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority meeting on Monday.

There were 403,522 passengers who traveled through Hollywood Burbank in May, which was 52,479 more than the previous year, Carvill said.

He said the airlines have continued to keep their fare prices competitive with one another as the economy recovers. Additionally, Carvill said construction at LAX has driven passengers to fly out of Burbank.

LAX is suffering from this whole redevelopment plan that theyre going through, and thats going to go on for some number of years, he said. For passengers who may have gone to LAX in the past, they are using the airport here to get to the cities they need to get to.

Southwest Airlines, the largest airline at Hollywood Burbank, reported 304,123 passengers in May, which was 46,067 more than a year ago. Alaska Airlines also had a jump in its numbers, tallying 42,648 passengers, which was 2,804 more than May 2016.

Delta Air Lines had positive gains, reporting 10,188 passengers, a 2,250 hike from the previous year. United Airlines showed similar improvement, reporting 25,907 passengers in May, a boost of 2,156 more passengers compared to 2016.

JetBlue Airways had relatively flat numbers for May, with 8,464 passengers for the month, which was 130 more than May 2016.

American Airlines, which had been reporting rising passenger numbers since the beginning of the year, had its first dip in May. The airline reported 12,192 passengers, which was 928 fewer than the same month last year.

Though Hollywood Burbank has seen an increase in the number of passengers it serves, the airports monthly parking revenue has remained relatively unchanged.

Excluding revenue generated by the parking structure, Carvill said the airport made about $1.34 million from its parking lots and valet service in May, which was about $1,000 more than the previous year.

Carvill said the parking structure, by itself, generated $349,670 in May. However, that total does not take into account the $3 tickets pulled by short-term users and ride-sharing drivers who are picking up passengers.

Ride-sharing companies continue to make up the difference lost at the parking structure. A total of $182,304 was made in May  $98,073 for 32,691 passenger drop-offs and $84,231 for 28,077 passenger pick-ups.

anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com

Twitter: @acocarpio
A 54-year-old man suspected of stealing a safe full of cash, an antique saxophone and a bronze statue in a series of burglaries was arrested Sunday in Laguna Beach, police said.

The burglaries were reported between July 1 and Sunday at Mozambique Steakhouse, Tortilla Republic, an architecture business in downtown Laguna Beach and a residence. A thief entered by using a pry bar, kicking in doors or breaking windows, said police Sgt. Jim Cota.

Surveillance footage at one of the businesses showed a vehicle and its license plate. Police stopped a vehicle with that description at South Coast Highway and Cleo Street on Sunday evening.

Officers interviewed the driver and obtained a search warrant for the car, where Cota said they found the safe, the saxophone, the statue, methamphetamine, designer purses, a picnic bag with a bottle of wine and more than $10,000.

Reed Swingley of Sun City was arrested on suspicion of burglary, possession of stolen property, possession of a controlled substance and other theft-related allegations, Cota said.

Swingley was booked into Orange County Jail with bail set at $120,000.

Police are looking for possible additional victims in the case. Anyone with information is asked to call Det. Abraham Ocampo at (949) 497-0370, or Det. Jordan Mirakian at (949) 497-0368.

hannah.fry@latimes.com

Twitter: @HannahFryTCN
With temperatures reaching the mid-90s in Glendale last weekend, authorities conducted two separate rescues of dogs that became overheated on the citys hiking trails.

The most daring rescue occurred on Sunday when a dog had to be airlifted from the San Gabriel Mountains after the chocolate Labrador became stranded with his owner on a trail near Mount Lukens. According to Anita Shandi, a spokeswoman with the Glendale Fire Department, the dog suffered from heat exhaustion as well as cuts and bruises to his paws rendering him unable to walk.

Authorities from the Burbank and Glendale fire departments were called to the scene to help the dog and the hiker, who was a Glendale resident.

Shandi said a helicopter from the Los Angeles Fire Department eventually airlifted the two to Deukmejian Park. The dog was subsequently taken to a veterinarian to be examined.

The owner of the dog will not have to foot the bill for the airlift.

In an email, LAFD spokesman Peter Sanders said the department has mutual aid agreements with neighboring cities and counties and does not charge individual people or other departments for rescues.

Charges would only be made if a person was transported by helicopter to a hospital for treatment. In that case, Sanders said the cost would be similar to an ambulance ride.

On Saturday, Glendale firefighters were called to Brand Park after receiving word of a hiker who became stranded and whose dog was suffering from heat exhaustion.

While that dog was not airlifted from the area, it received water and was taken to safety.

andy.nguyen@latimes.com

Twitter: @Andy_Truc

UPDATES:

July 21, 2017; 4:54 p.m.: This article was updated with information about the airlift from the Los Angeles Fire Department.

This article was originally published at 1:10 p.m. on July 19, 2017.
The creator of a documentary that examined Glendales history since its founding is now raising funds to give the Crescenta Valley the same narrative treatment.

Velvet Rhodes, who released the documentary Vintage Glorious Glendale in 2015, wants to spotlight the history of the Crescenta Valley  which includes La Crescenta, Montrose, La Canada Flintridge, Sunland and Tujunga  with profiles of historical locations as well as interviews with important figures and longtime residents.



For the record: A previous version of this story said Rhodes plans to film inside the former Rockhaven Sanitarium. Currently there is a moratorium on filming at Rockhaven and Rhodes hopes to film once it is renovated.

I got a lot of requests from local people in Crescenta Valley because of [the Glendale documentary], Rhodes said. Many [historians] of the area came forward and said, Why dont you do a documentary about us?

Rhodes is asking for $10,500 through the crowdfunding site Indiegogo to pay for the project, most of which will be spent on filming, advertising and DVD production costs. The rest will help with the creation of a companion book filled with vintage photos of the Crescenta Valley.

Some backers will be able to visit the set, and others can get their names in the credits, Rhodes said.

Similar to her Glendale project, the new documentary will be modeled after the style of Huell Howsers Californias Gold and filmmaker Ken Burns work, Rhodes said. However, Rhodes added that she wants her new work to be longer and more in depth than her previous film.

I am in touch with the Historical Society of Crescenta Valleyand weve been given permission to go into the archives of the Lanterman House  another historic site that will be spotlighted.

Although the project aims to cover all of the Crescenta Valley, the centerpiece of the documentary will be the former Rockhaven Sanitarium site in Montrose. Rhodes said she hopes shell be able to film inside the historic location once it is renovated. Currently, there a moratorium for filming on the premises.

Theres so many people who have lived [in the Crescenta Valley] for years, and they have fabulous memories and experiences, Rhodes said. What we are trying to do is bring all that out into a very historic documentary, but informative and entertaining at the same time.

For more information, visit indiegogo.com/projects/vintage-crescenta-valley-film-history.

jeff.landa@latimes.com

Twitter: @JeffLanda
Bridging cultural divisions can be dirty work, but on a recent visit to the Community Center of La Canada Flintridges ceramics department, local teens and visitors from Villanueva De La Canada, Spain, rolled up their sleeves and got to it.

In a July 12 two-hour ceramics class  arranged by the center and the nonprofit La Canada Flintridge Sister Cities Assn.  students tried their hands at wheel-thrown pottery under the instruction of Ceramics Director Miriam Balcazar.

CCLCF Executive Director Maureen Bond said the center became a charter member of the Sister Cities Assn. so it could open its doors, and the experiences therein, to international visitors.

We wanted to be a part of their trip here, Bond said. Now they have a better appreciation of the art and what it takes to build a pot or bowl.

Balcazar said the lesson was a fun way for the kids to have a hands-on experience together.

They were laughing with each other and learning something and getting dirty  they really were bonding, she said.

On Tuesday, visiting Spanish students Daniel Fernandez Multigner and Eva Prieto Perez began the nearly 5,800-mile journey back to their hometown, marking the end of a two-week stay with their host families. German student Conni Backhaus, who traveled separately, returns to native Dusseldorf.

But the fun isnt over yet. On Friday, La Canada High School junior Jack Applebaum and Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy senior Catherine Condit travel to Villanueva De La Canada as their erstwhile guests return the host-family favor.

Its unclear what exciting adventures lie in store for Condit and Applebaum, but if its anything like the first two weeks, its sure to be just as exhilarating.

sara.cardine@latimes.com

Twitter: @SaraCardine
The La Canada Flintridge City Council loves to make safe decisions. It did so when it made a call for applicants instead of a call for an election to fill a vacant council seat following the passing of beloved Councilman David Spence. It did so again with the appointment of former Councilman Greg Brown. When Brown announced in 2010 he would retire from City Council when his term expired in 2011, he said he wanted to make room for new blood. It seems he now feels differently.

If it was new blood that the council and Brown were looking for, they should have called for an election. Only in an election will the voters of the city of La Canada Flintridge be in a position of genuine power. Term limits may provide some genuine power to the people as well. The councils selection of a former council member without giving more than a quarter of an hours consideration to anyone else suggests a certain clubiness and opacity among our elected and appointed officials. Many of the 15 applicants offered creative solutions and new ideas for the city. The voters will decide on March 5, 2019.

Kevork Kurdoghlian

La Canada

--

Re: Why we fight for universal healthcare, commentary, July 13. Rep. Schiff details the need to expand healthcare to millions of Americans, and while this is an admirable goal worth full-throated support, any healthcare reform effort maintaining the status quo of insurance companies covering so many Americans must address the tactics used by insurance companies to inflate their profit margins.

Reforming the nations healthcare system requires scrutinizing the tactics insurance companies use to slash covered benefits, while bilking patients out of more money. It gives patients little peace of mind if they purchase insurance to prevent bankruptcy from a single medical crisis, only to find their insurer wont pay for necessary treatments once a crisis hits.

Insurance companies are refusing to cover a growing number of prescription medications  now including treatments for leukemia and prostate cancer  through a tactic called formulary exclusions and by restricting access to oncology care to the lowest bidder. The number of prescriptions excluded from health plans has quadrupled in the last five years, yet a 2015 Kaiser study found that Americans with employer-sponsored healthcare have seen their premiums rise by 255% since 2006.

Insurers try to save money by excluding the most expensive drugs, preferring cheaper alternatives. While several drugs can treat similar illnesses or symptoms, doctors make choices based on both a drugs specific characteristics and a patients physiology. In too many cases, the treatment the insurance company will cover isnt as effective as the treatment a doctor preferred, or the covered treatment introduces complications that could have been avoided, had the insurance covered the preferred medication.

Americans should not have to doubt whether their insurance will cover treatments their doctors say are essential to continued health and well-being.

Mariana S-B Lamb

Upland

The writer is president of Efficient Physician, Inc., executive director of the Medical Oncology Assn. of Southern California, Inc.; president of the National Oncology Society Network, Inc.; advisory board member of the Community Oncology Alliance, Inc. and editorial board adviser to Oncology Practice Management magazine.
At its D23 Expo fan fest in Anaheim last weekend, Disney revealed plans for an immersive Star Wars hotel designed to take you into a galaxy far, far away at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla.

Get ready to put on a uniform, board a starship and embark on an adventure with characters such as BB-8 and R2D2 at your side. Its unlike anything that exists today, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Chairman Bob Chapek said last Saturday. His comments were posted on the companys blog.

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The idea is to provide a starship experience with stories and adventures that play out during visitors stays. No timeline was given for the new resort.

Disney also announced another immersive resort: Hotel New York: The Art of Marvel, planned for Disneyland Paris. It promises to take guests into the world of Iron man, Spider-Man and other superheroes.

But back to Star Wars. The new themed land coming to Disneyland in 2019 will be called Galaxys Edge. It will also arrive at Disneys Hollywood Studios at the theme parks Orlando site.

Two attractions will dominate: one that puts visitors into a battle between the First Order and the Resistance, and one that sends them flying on the Millennium Falcon. The 14-acre land will feature characters from the film too, including BB-8, Chewbaca and others.

travel@latimes.com

@latimestravel

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You desperately need a vacation. Or just you want to travel. But you worry. Did you choose the right place? Do you have the right gear? Will you be safe?

Join Times Travel staffers Catharine Hamm and Christopher Reynolds on Sunday afternoon for a fun and informative eventwith four guest presenters who promise to help you make good travel decisions.

The event is from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, July 30; check-in begins at 12:30. Its free, but we ask that you register in advance. Come to the The Times building at 145 S. Spring St. in downtown Los Angeles.

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Joining Hamm, who writes the On the Spot travel advice column, will be retired Det. Kevin Coffey, who will talk about travel safety.

Coffey, a favorite at the Times Travel stage at the Festival of Books, gives practical advice based on more than three decades of law enforcement experience and a wealth of knowledge earned as a world traveler.

And just a sneak preview: Coffey will tell Hamm why she nearly cost herself a boatload of heartache on a recent flightbecause she didnt follow his advice.

At 2 p.m., Reynolds will talk about cool and close-to-home travel ideas straight from the California Bucket List, your daily guide to the best adventures and experiences in the Golden State.

the daily feature began Jan. 1, which means by Sunday, he (and staffer Chris Erskine and various other writers) will have published more than 200 great ideas.

He will be joined by Laurel Moglen and Julia Posey, authors of 111 Places in Los Angeles That You Must Not Miss, and Andrew Bender, guidebook author (including Lonely Planets California) and contributor to the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.

Reynolds also will host a session titled How Amateur Photographers Get Great Pictures at 3 p.m. Hell offer ideas for creating visual keepsakes of all your travels.

Join us at Travel Talks at the Times.

ALSO

Now accepting your best summer photos  and videos too

Alexa, please book a hotel room for me. Now, the virtual assistant can

Travel print section returns Aug. 20. Got an idea for redesign? Were listening.

travel@latimes.com

@latimestravel
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has cursed world leaders, threatened to kill criminals and promised to eat the livers of terrorists, but Shibby de Guzman and her friends dont seem intimidated.

Shibby, a 13-year-old ninth-grader, and other young activists are calling for the end of extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers and other aggressive policies by Duterte, a tough-on-crime leader who wants to extend martial law in part of the country because of rebellion.

We are being called to make a stand against extrajudicial killings, creeping authoritarianism and emerging dictatorship, Shibby said this week in an impassioned speech at her Manila school.

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After the speech, about 200 students and others marched through the streets of the capital to make their point. The youths are among many Filipinos concerned about the autocratic tendencies of Duterte, who was elected president last year and is scheduled to give a State of the Nation address Monday.

The presidents spokesman said Duterte on Tuesday asked legislators to extend martial law, which began in the south of the country May 23, until the end of the year because of security concerns caused by Islamic State-affiliated militants.

The Maute extremist group in May seized the city of Marawi. Hundreds of people, most of them militants, have been killed in the fighting, and more than 200,000 residents have fled the city, which is on the island of Mindanao.

Duterte called for a special session of Congress to deal with the issue of martial law before the planned opening of the new regular legislative session Monday.

Demonstrators in Manila on July 7 protest Philippine President Rodrigo Dutertes declaration of martial law for the southern region of Mindanao. (Bullit Marquez / Associated Press)

In the meantime, Shibby and her classmates at St. Scholasticas College, a Catholic private school, as well as members of Millennials Against Dictators, a coalition of youth groups and student council alliances, and others, plan to keep pressuring the government on human rights issues and hold Duterte accountable for violent deaths during his presidency.

Millennials Against Dictators plans to hold a vigil Sunday that organizers say will run until Dutertes address the next day. It also plans outreach programs for families who have lost loved ones to violence.

We want to empower families to speak up for themselves, said 22-year-old Shamah Bulangis from Akbayan Youth, one of the coalition members.

Despite the concerns, Duterte remains a wildly popular president, with ratings at 82% and trust ratings at excellent. Few are willing to speak against him or publicly oppose him. There is online backlash to contend with, and officials this year jailed one of his fiercest critics, Sen. Leila de Lima.

Salvador Panelo, the presidents chief legal counsel, said the drug-related killings largely pertain to disputes among people involved in illegal activities.

They are simply killing each other, Panelo said.

Shibby and others emerged as activists last year during protests opposing the burial of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos at the Heroes Cemetery. Duterte had pushed to transfer Marcos remains to the cemetery from his home province of Ilocos Norte, where they were on display in a glass coffin, arguing that Marcos deserved it. The Philippine Supreme Court approved the burial.

A photo of the students protesting attracted substantial Internet attention, but some of the response was not supportive.

Mocha Uson, an influential Duterte supporter with more than 5 million online followers, called it child abuse.

Dutertes other supporters and Marcos loyalists took the accusations further, saying the youths were brainwashed and too young to know why they were protesting. Some said the youths were being used to destabilize the government  insinuating they had been paid.

Shibbys mother, Melay Lapena, was worried and anxious but was promptly mollified by her daughter.

She showed me her inbox. There were hate mails, but also many messages of support and love, Lapena said.

Sister Mary John Mananzan, former president of St. Scholasticas College, said the protest made her feel happy that young people were taking a stand.

That is what is happening to our country now  insanity. In just one year, there has been an erosion of moral fiber. A culture of death has been perpetuated, Mananzan said.

At the protest this week, Shibby remained firm, polite and pragmatic while answering questions from reporters.

We are protesting against extrajudicial killings and violations of civil liberties. The only thing that matters now is the country, she said. Engage in conversations, not fights. Dont approach someone aggressively if youre looking to make a change.

Santos is a special correspondent.

Reporting for this article was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
The Russian government said it was taken by surprise Tuesday when the rebel leader of a breakaway region of eastern Ukraine proposed the creation of a new nation-state called Malorossiya, or Little Russia.

The head of the self-declared Donetsk Peoples Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, told reporters that the new country would include his territory and the neighboring self-declared Luhansk Peoples Republic, and that it would eventually become part of a wider union with Belarus and Russia.

We believe that the state of Ukraine cannot be reinstated the way it used to be, he said.

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Russia, which openly sympathizes with the pro-Russia separatists but rejects allegations that it has provided military support, denied any role in the proposal and said it still backed the 2015 peace agreement crafted in Minsk, Belarus, to reintegrate the breakaway territories into Ukraine.

The proposal for Malorossiya was nothing more than a personal initiative of the rebel leaders, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

The idea should be subject to reflection and analysis, but we remain committed to the Minsk accords, he said.

Boris Gryzlov, Russias envoy to the Minsk talks, remained silent for several hours after the announcement, but later in the day dismissed the idea as nothing more than fodder for public discussion.

This announcement does not have any legal consequences, he told Russian news agencies.

Even the rebel government in Luhansk seemed caught off guard by the proposal to include it in a new country.

Luhansk had not been informed of the plans and we are not willing to consider it as something that needs attention, a representative told the news agency Interfax.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, however, suggested that Russia was behind the rebel announcement, saying at a news conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, that Zakharchenko is not a political figure, but a puppet transmitting the Kremlin messages.

He promised to bring the eastern regions and Crimea back into Kievs fold.

The conflict in Ukraine began in 2014 after a mass street movement led to the ousting that February of pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovich.

Russia, which criticized the demonstrations as a Western-orchestrated coup, moved troops into the Crimean peninsula, ostensibly to protect its compatriots and Russian speakers from Ukrainian nationalists. But in March 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, and in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, pro-Russia separatist militia groups took over government buildings and declared independence from Kiev.

The Minsk peace talks, which were orchestrated by Germany, Britain and France, have stumbled as fighting has continued to flare up in the region. More than 10,000 people have died in the conflict, many of them civilians. Peace talks were scheduled to resume this week.

Zakharchenko made his announcement at a news conference in the city of Donetsk, which he said would be the capital of the new country. He wore fatigues and various medals on his chest.

He presented a newly written constitution for Malorossiya, a map showing all of Ukraine except Crimea, and a flag to represent the new state. The flag was adapted from that of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a 17th century Cossack leader who led a revolt against Polish rule in Ukraine and later swore allegiance to Russia.

Its not a revolution; its a return to history, Zakharchenko said.

The name Malorossiya comes from the historical name for parts of Ukraine that once made up the Russian empire. By choosing the name, the rebel governments seemed to be replacing Novorossiya, another historical term once used by Russian President Vladimir Putin to describe the southeast territories of Ukraine.

Novorossiya became a concept many rebel leaders and fighters saw as a Kremlin-approved initiative to expand its territories. But Russia distanced itself from the idea as the war raged on, Western sanctions began to hurt its economy and the Minsk agreement came into force.

In Washington on Tuesday, a representative of the State Department who was asked about Malorossiya said: That is something thats certainly an area of concern to us, but  beyond that, I dont want to dignify it with a response.

Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona released a statement blaming the Russian president, saying that the ultimate responsibility for this latest flagrant violation of Ukraines sovereignty lies squarely with Vladimir Putins Russia, upon whose leadership, financing, troops and weapons the separatists are entirely dependent.

Ayres is a special correspondent.

sabra.ayres@latimes.com

Twitter: @sabraayres
The nine-month U.S.-backed offensive to expel Islamic State militants from Mosul was a relentless and savage fight. Now that it has been won, another daunting battle has begun: to bring Iraqs second-largest city back from the dead.

Thousands of buildings have been reduced to rubble, more than 120 miles of roadways have been damaged, and the citys airport, railway station and at least one university are wrecked.

As the militants retreated after 2 years of occupation, they intentionally targeted infrastructure, demolishing vital bridges, attacking the water and sewage systems and tearing down electricity lines. They also laced neighborhoods with booby traps and homemade bombs.

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The destruction is massive, said Saroj Kumar Jha, who oversees Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon for the World Bank. It will be a very big reconstruction effort.

He said Iraqi authorities and Mosul residents would have the opportunity to replan the city and improve the quality of life there.

East Mosul, which was recaptured in January, is on the mend. But in the recently reclaimed west of the city, the picture is very different, said Lise Grande, the United Nations Development Programs resident representative for Iraq.

Of western Mosuls 54 residential districts, the U.N. characterizes 15 as heavily damaged, meaning the majority of the buildings are uninhabitable. Some 32,000 houses have been destroyed in those areas.

If you were to go into those 15 districts, what you would see is very alarming, Grande said over Skype from the Iraqi capital Baghdad. They look like theyre flattened.

Additionally, 23 districts are moderately damaged, meaning possibly up to half of the buildings have been destroyed or are structurally unsound, and 16 districts are lightly damaged, Grande said. Some 16,000 homes have been destroyed in these areas.

The U.N. estimates that repairing Mosuls basic infrastructure will cost more than $1 billion.

Residents of west Mosuls Jadidah neighborhood remove debris after an airstrike in March 2017. (Molly Hennessy-Fiske / Los Angeles Times)

So where to begin?

The first step is stabilization, Grande said.

We start at the bottom of the grid in reestablishing temporary services so that people can start to rebuild their lives.

A so-called command cell, consisting of community members, tribal leaders and representatives of the security forces, set the priorities, Grande said. Then the U.N., humanitarian groups and other international partners help the government meet its goals.

Humanitarian groups have started trucking water into the city while stabilization teams work to repair pumping facilities and substations, Grande said.

Massive mobile electrical generators will also be moved in and mounted on concrete slabs and hooked up to individual homes in neighborhoods lacking power.

The World Bank has an ongoing project to help the Iraqi government design and reconstruct several bridges on a fast-track basis, said Jha, the World Bank official.

Mosul depends on various supplies coming from different parts of Iraq, he said. Without access, nothing will happen.

Experts said that restoring the citys pharmaceutical factories and once-thriving industries such as furniture-making is paramount to reviving Mosul.

Bringing people home

So is restoring the population.

Some 940,000 people fled the city of 2 million after the fighting started last October, according to the U.N. About 240,000 have returned, while 320,000 have found refuge in emergency camps and the rest shelter with family and friends or in mosques and public buildings, Grande said.

Their return to their homes could take months as unexploded ordnance is identified and cleared and Iraqi forces shore up security.

The governments national operations centers will tell the public when neighborhoods are safe for return, Grande said.

Residents who fled the fighting in Mosul line up for aid from the World Food Program. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

Under a U.N.-supported program, communities would be brought together to decide which houses get repaired, and contractors would hire local residents to rebuild the homes.

The reason that process is so important is that there is a consensus among everybody about which houses get rebuilt and which dont, and thats critical, Grande said. That helps to mitigate social tension at the neighborhood level.

Rebuilding trust

But rebuilding and reviving Mosul will require more than physical reconstruction, experts said.

Obviously theres a cosmetic issue, but underpinning that is governance, said Eric Bordenkircher, a researcher at the Center for Middle East Development at UCLAs International Institute. You can build all these houses, but people may not want to return if they dont trust the Iraqi government.

Such confidence is lacking between the Shiite-led Iraqi government and predominantly Sunni communities such as Mosul. Experts say the Shia monopoly on power has caused Sunnis to feel alienated from the state and the political process.

The government will need to be more inclusive, Bordenkircher said. Sewage, running water, electricity are a little more immediate, but the issue of trust, accountability, inclusiveness  those are time-intensive and are going to take not days, not weeks, not months, but years to merge.

Jha of the World Bank, said creating a mechanism for people to be at the center of the rebuilding process was critical.

Reconstruction is an opportunity for reconciliation, he said.

A destroyed bridge in east Mosul. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Lingering concerns

Hovering over the recovery effort are the threats of corruption and mismanagement.

In the real world, you can state all kinds of good intentions, but the real question is going to be, very early on, have you appointed people who are willing to work together, who are competent and reasonably honest, said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. Theres a tendency to assume that reconstruction and recovery are enough. A lot depends fundamentally on what people actually do on the ground.

And then there is Islamic State. Experts believe the militant group will continue to undermine security efforts. And Iraqi government forces will need to adopt counterinsurgency strategies.

Youre going to need at least paramilitary and probably military efforts in the Mosul area for at least a year, Cordesman said. This isnt going to be something where you can go back to a normal civilian rule of law and policing.

Iraqi officials would also have to find a way to counter the lingering influence of Islamic State ideology, particularly among young men who may feel disenfranchised.

Bordenkircher said that Mosul faces the risk of Islamic State 2.0 if people still continue to feel that theyre marginalized, that theyre excluded from the governing process, that theyre being discriminated against by the Iraqi government in Baghdad.

Cosmetically, it may recover, Bordenkircher said. But the heart and soul of the city may never really return.

ann.simmons@latimes.com

For more on global development news, see our Global Development Watch page, and follow me @AMSimmons1 on Twitter

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When Pixuleco made his first public appearance at a Brasilia protest in August 2015, he became an instant star.

The 42-foot, 660-pound inflatable version of former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, complete with a black-and-white striped prison jumpsuit, drew not only stares, but also chuckles, as it floated above protesters calling for the ouster of Lulas successor, then-President Dilma Rousseff.

It wasnt just that it was this funny caricature of Lula, it was also the size that made it stand out, said Ana Lucia Palma, who first saw Pixuleco in photographs from Brasilia and then in person as the inflatable hovered over Sao Paulo. It represented the magnitude of our problems in Brazil and that they all started with Lula.

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Pixuleco  who got his name from a slang term in Brazilian Portuguese for dirty money thats become synonymous with bribes in a billion-dollar corruption scandal  was conceived in the eastern state of Alagoas by a nonpartisan, anti-corruption group called Movimento Brasil.

A large inflatable doll of former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva prompted many knock-offs, including a giant balloon of his successor, Dilma Rousseff. (Andre Penner / Associated Press)

While the group wanted to call attention to what it saw as the root of the political crisis in the country, it also didnt want to be mean-spirited, which led to the design thats less real-life than caricature, with a wide-eyed Lula looking perplexed.

The prisoner ID number on his chest  13-171  is filled with symbolism. Brazilian political parties are identified by numbers, and Lulas Workers Party is 13. The 171 refers to the police code for larceny.

The design was prescient. Lula was found guilty this month of accepting $1.2 million in bribes and sentenced to 9 years in prison. Lula, who maintains he is innocent, remains free on appeal.

When the guilty verdict was announced last week, gleeful protesters waved their Pixuleco balloons, which wasnt surprising. Pixuleco seems just about everywhere these days.

After his celebrity spread  he has 223,391 followers on his official Facebook page  Pixuleco was invited to protests in cities all over and ended up touring the country.

It cost about $3,700 to make a Pixuleco  and hundreds more for transportation  and Movimento Brasil now has three Pixulecos stored in different regions of Brazil to avoid the headache of carting him around. It never intended to Pixuleco to be a moneymaker.

We never tried to sell Pixuleco, said Alessandro Gusmao, one of the founders of Movimento Brasil who also participated in the design of the original character. This was never our objective, and it still isnt. What we wanted was to draw attention to the political situation in Brazil.

But with fame comes the sincerest form of flattery, and other groups started making mini-versions of Pixuleco, which can be found both online and at protests, generally for 10 reais, or about $3, each.

Its also common to see inflatables of Rousseff  who was impeached last year  and of Sergio Moro, a judge in the investigation, code-named Car Wash, that led to the downfall of scores of Brazilian politicians.

Gusmao said that Movimento Brasil has no affiliation with other groups using the Pixuleco image, but that hes happy to see the message has continued to spread.

A demonstrator in Rio de Janeiro celebrates the conviction of former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on corruption charges. (Silvia Izquierdo / Associated Press)

Pixuleco now has a life of his own, he said. We cant really say hes ours anymore. Hes become a symbol for all indignant Brazilians.

Gusmao did, however, give another Sao Paulo-based anti-corruption group, called Nas Ruas Contra a Corrupcao, permission to sell mini-Pixulecos alongside its inflatables of Rousseff and Moro, which were designed by Nas Ruas co-founder, Vitor Santisteban.

Santisteban has no problem with acknowledging that his group monetized its inflatables, but he makes it clear that nobody is making a profit with the sales.

We pay 5 reais for them and then sell them for 10 reais, he said. That extra 5 reais goes toward paying for our protests. They arent cheap. Security can cost 10,000 to 12,000 reais and the cheapest sound car is 2,000 or 3,000. And thats for a small protest, not the massive ones you see on TV.

That high cost has left Santisteban and the other members of his group, which translates as In the Streets Against Corruption, more than irritated when they see vendors at protests selling contraband Pixulecos.

We tried to track down who was in charge of selling [the fakes], but it was a dead end, he said. We couldnt find the shop that printed them.

As for the real Lula, his appeal is expected to last at least a year. In the meantime, he continues to be eligible to run for office and, in some polls, is the most popular choice for president.

Michel Temer, who succeeded Rouseff as president when she was booted from office, also faces corruption charges, but his likeness has not appeared on a balloon. So far.

Langlois is a special correspondent.

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Reihane Taravati, an outspoken social media activist, was riding in a taxi the other day when she received a stern reprimand from the driver.

Unbeknownst to Taravati, 26, her headscarf  which Iranian women are required to wear as a show of modesty  had slipped down the back of her head, leaving most of her hair exposed.

Fix your scarf, or the undercover [moral] police will see it, the cabbie told her. He worried about receiving a ticket in the mail, which would cost him about $30.

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As Taravati relayed this story while sipping tea with friends in a Tehran cafe, a debate was raging in the Iranian capital that combines two things that people here obsess over: cars and the way women dress.

Specifically: Is the car a public space, where women must clothe themselves modestly in accordance with Islamic laws, or a private space in which Irans ruling clerics have tolerated a bit more personal freedom?

In this traffic-choked city, private vehicles are the latest battleground in Irans ongoing culture wars, which Tehran denizens are watching ever more closely after the May presidential election.

There is growing tension between President Hassan Rouhani, who comfortably won reelection and has said that Irans police should not be empowered to enforce adherence to Islam, and hard-line clerics who favor a stricter interpretation of religious laws.

President Rouhani has reiterated over and over in the past year that a police officer is not authorized to poke his nose into peoples private lives and enforce what they perceive as Gods preferred lifestyle, Taravati said.

Questions over what is often referred to as bad hijab  a lax interpretation of the official dress code that requires women to cover their hair and figures  tend to rise in the summer along with Tehrans temperatures, which frequently touch 100 degrees in July.

Last week, in the closely watched Friday sermon at Tehran University, a leading cleric, Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Movahedi Kermani, took on the issue directly, saying: Private cars are not the private sphere.

Kermani invoked the forcible removal of the hijab in the 1930s by Irans former secular government, led by Reza Shah Pahlavi, and argued that those who flouted the dress code were thumbing their nose at the ideals of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

I have heard that in some cars women do not wear hijab at all, he said. You who dont have proper hijab, you are violating the countrys independence. I thank law enforcement for trying to enforce the Islamic hijab.

In the political Shiite Islam that prevails in Iran, there is no concrete boundary between what is private and what is public. Moral police have been known to break up private parties attended by both men and women and arrest people for posting Instagram selfies because they are seen as immodest.

This month, reformist news sites reported that satellite dishes had been seized from the rooftops of private residences in two districts of Tehran. The dishes are officially outlawed  hard-liners view them as a weapon of cultural invasion  but a common feature of middle-class households.

You who dont have proper hijab, you are violating the countrys independence.  Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Movahedi Kermani, Iranian cleric

Since taking office in 2013, Rouhani has insisted that peoples private lives should be protected from the regular police force and the moral police. But since May, Irans judiciary, which is close to the clerical establishment, has tried to further curtail the social freedoms that Rouhani promised.

The invisible part of the car, such as the trunk, is a private space, but this does not apply to the visible parts of the car, Hadi Sadeghi, deputy head of Irans judiciary, said this month.

Golnar Ramesh, a 28-year-old tour guide, said the postelection backlash against Rouhani supporters was a predictable turn in the rivalry between conservative and reform-minded Iranians.

In public, women and men should have the right to choose what they wear, Ramesh said. That is the meaning of the 24 million votes given to President Rouhani. It has become a repetitive and vicious pattern to crack down on freedom of choice for clothing after elections, whenever the hard-liners lose.

Shiva Ershadi, a 30-year-old interpreter who works with Afghan refugees in Tehran, recalled driving her car one evening in February 2016 after parliamentary elections in which moderates and reformists won a sizable victory. She was stuck in traffic when she heard a loud banging noise  it was a Basij paramilitary soldier, in plainclothes and sporting a beard, warning her to fix her hijab, which had fallen off her head.

He was mad with rage and saw people like me responsible for [the election] loss, Ershadi said.

The logic behind [the hard-liners] argument is flawed and demagogic. The police consider people as potential sinners who must be punished whenever they are caught, rather than regarding them as respectful citizens entitled to the right of privacy.

Not all Rouhani supporters endorse the view that the car is private. Monireh Turkmanazar, a 66-year-old attorney, said anything visible on the streets should be considered part of the public domain  and subject to police monitoring.

I think the opposition  whether based abroad or inside Iran  are raising a minor, irrelevant issue to raise pressure on reformists and moderates.

A reformist human rights defender, Saleh Nikbakht, said that because both cars and houses have roofs and windows, both should be considered in the private domain. But the frequent raids on houses show that the private sphere in Iran has been under attack, he said.

Hard-liners argue that when the police see through car windows that clear crimes are happening, then they can arrest people, said Nikbakht, 61. They do not want to distinguish between a woman without a scarf and a true criminal.

Taravati  the free-spirited activist who in 2014 was arrested for participating in an online video set to the hit Pharrell Williams song Happy  said the enforcement of Islamic dress was an attempt by hard-liners to punish Rouhani supporters.

Private life in the car, in the house and in the apartment must be respected, she said. That is what we voted for, and it is time for the president to deliver.

Special correspondent Mostaghim reported from Tehran and Times staff writer Bengali from Mumbai, India.

shashank.bengali@latimes.com

Follow @SBengali on Twitter

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All material is subject to strictly enforced copyright terms & conditions and cannot be repurposed or reproduced.  19882022 Latin American Financial Publications Inc.
#football Injured star Son Heung-min named to S. Korean World Cup squad The injured South Korean football star Son Heung-min was named to the country's World Cup squad Saturday, as the football-crazed nation waits with bated breath to see if the belove...
Lights, sirens, and tire spikes were not enough to stop a drunken driver, who was only arrested after she crashed into a state police cruiser, according to troopers.

Margaret Bonnie Sajez led police on a chase early Monday morning, which began on Interstate 78 West and ended when she crashed near her Upper Saucon Township neighborhood, troopers at the Belfast barracks said.

The 42-year-old Sajez was arrested and charged with four counts of reckless endangerment, as well as fleeing police, DUI and nine traffic summary violations.

Sajez is being held in Northampton County Prison in lieu of $500,000 bail. At the time, Sajez was free on bail in two Lehigh County DUI cases.

Records show she was given $2,500 unsecured bail in a Dec. 19 DUI case in Allentown, and then $5,000 unsecured bail on June 30 when she was arraigned in a Jan. 8 DUI case in South Whitehall Township.

A little before 1:30 a.m. on Monday, state police said a trooper traveling on the ramp from Route 33 South to Interstate 78 West checked the registration of a Subaru Forrester and learned the registered owner, Sajez, had a suspended license due to DUI charges.

The trooper reported he was able to see a photo of Sajez on the state's JNET system before he saw the vehicle weaving over the fog lines and dash lines on the highway.

The trooper turned on his lights and sirens to stop the Forrester. State police said Sajez slowed down and pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway, but then sped up and pulled back onto the highway.

The trooper followed and, at one point, pulled up next to the driver and used the cruiser's public address system to tell her to pull over. At that point, he confirmed Sajez was driving the Forrester, police said.

Sajez led police on a chase, and troopers deployed spike strips to try and stop her, state police said. Sajez drove her left-side tires over the strips, but kept going, according to troopers.

Sajez took the Route 145/ South Fourth Street exit, and began driving through her neighborhood to her home on Bittersweet Road.

When it looked like Sajez was traveling back to the highway, another trooper sped up to pass Sajez, and then pulled in front of her and slowed down in an attempt to stop her, state police said.

Sajez slowed down, then allegedly swerved to the left into a home's yard before striking the cruiser in front of her. Troopers said Sajez was traveling down the road when the damaged cruiser struck the back of her Forrester, and Sajez's vehicle traveled off the road and struck several small trees.

Sajez had glassy, blood-shot eyes, her speech was slurred and she smelled like she had been drinking, troopers said. State police found an open can of beer in the center console and several other cans of beer in the Forrester.

Sajez reportedly told troopers she has been drinking beer at a friend's house and was on her way home when she encountered state police.

Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
As Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act collapsed after failing to garner enough votes Tuesday in the U.S. Senate, legislators took to social media to share their stance.

Tuesday's development marked the third straight defeat for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as he struggles to make good on longstanding GOP promises to get rid of "Obamacare." President Donald Trump said he does not blame McConnell for the decision by three Republican senators to come out against the latest legislation.

Trump said it's time to "Let Obamacare fail," and that "I'm not going to own it."

Here are what Pennsylvania and New Jersey senators, and Gov. Tom Wolf, had to say on Tuesday.

Pa. Sen. Pat Toomey (R)

Read my statement regarding further Senate action on health care reform: pic.twitter.com/UQVhGKwRyM  Senator Pat Toomey (@SenToomey) July 18, 2017

Pa. Sen. Bob Casey (D)

Whats worse than the @SenateGOP replacement plan? Undermining our health care system without one.  Senator Bob Casey (@SenBobCasey) July 18, 2017

The @SenateGOP played this game in 2015 so we already have the numbers on what this would look like.  Senator Bob Casey (@SenBobCasey) July 18, 2017

956,000 Pennsylvanians would lose their insurance. Thats 135% increase in the number of uninsured. https://t.co/wdOnx4LelT  Senator Bob Casey (@SenBobCasey) July 18, 2017

Between 2019 and 2028, PA would lose $13.3 billion in premium tax credits and subsidies. https://t.co/wdOnx4LelT  Senator Bob Casey (@SenBobCasey) July 18, 2017

Between 2019 and 2028, PA would lose $13.3 billion in premium tax credits and subsidies. https://t.co/wdOnx4LelT  Senator Bob Casey (@SenBobCasey) July 18, 2017

With more uninsured, local providers and hospitals will have to take care of more people who cant afford their care.  Senator Bob Casey (@SenBobCasey) July 18, 2017

This will push more of the cost on to those who can, resulting in HIGHER premiums and less coverage for those with insurance.  Senator Bob Casey (@SenBobCasey) July 18, 2017

N.J. Sen. Cory Booker (D)

The fight isn't over. These efforts have to be completely defeated and then the important work of building upon the ACA must move forward. https://t.co/ooVcFpTVL1  Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) July 18, 2017

N.J. Sen. Bob Menendez (D)

Time 4 GOP to abandon this partisan charade. Dems still ready 4 bipartisan effort to expand coverage, lower costs & build a healthier nation pic.twitter.com/VURpQuSdpg  Senator Bob Menendez (@SenatorMenendez) July 18, 2017

Republicans' partisan bill to repeal & destroy the Affordable Care Act is dead. But our offer of bipartisan cooperation is very much alive pic.twitter.com/VhbV65a2b8  Senator Bob Menendez (@SenatorMenendez) July 18, 2017

We can't let up. POTUS admits he is determined to let Obamacare fail & risk the lives of millions of Americans. Sabatoge is not leadership.  Senator Bob Menendez (@SenatorMenendez) July 18, 2017

Pa. Gov. Tom Wolf (D)

This is reckless. It will hurt PA families. A bipartisan group of governors is ready to work with D.C. https://t.co/9HlKGIiNCK  Governor Tom Wolf (@GovernorTomWolf) July 18, 2017

Proud to join Democratic & Republican governors from across the country to call for a new, bipartisan approach to fix our healthcare system. pic.twitter.com/e384wLUCEP  Governor Tom Wolf (@GovernorTomWolf) July 18, 2017

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Steve Novak may be reached at snovak@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @type2supernovak and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Rural communities should tap into a 120 million EU Wi-Fi fund to to access to speed up their internet access, according to an MEP for Laois.

Matt Carthy said Wifi4EU funding amounts to 120million will provide up to 8000 free public Wi-Fi hotspots across the EU. He said he proposed prioritising rural areas in in the schemes rollout which he said received 'overwhelming support' from MEPs.

Under an agreement the Border, West, Midlands MEP said funding will go on a first-come, first-served basis prioritising rural and remote communities, that do not currently avail of public Wi-fi hotspots.

CLICK HERE FOR #wifi4eu EXPLAINER AND SHORT VIDEO

He said the approach of the Wifi4EU initiative provides an opportunity for rural areas to avail of internet connectivity in public spaces.

I will endeavour to ensure rural communities are aware of the proceedings and possibilities of the Wifi4EU scheme. Applications should open at the end of the year and I will be encouraging local authorities to apply for the scheme, he said.

The MEP said successive Irish governments have failed "abysmally" in providing rural committees with the levels of connectivity required.

A digital divide exists between rural and urban areas, as a direct result of government broken promises to provide a scheme of rural broadband. It often appears that the Fine Gael government is purposefully trying to keep rural Ireland in the dark ages.

The Sinn Fein MEP said he was committed to voicing the need for substantial internet connectivity in rural areas. Rural communities require the same internet resources as urban areas, which is a measure of quality of life.

Increased internet connectivity benefits the promotion of tourism, which is an essential sector in many rural areas. Additionally, the development of local domestic economies, particularly those dependent on SMEs, rely upon a decent infrastructure and reliable internet connectivity in order to emerge into a rapidly changing market.

People located in rural areas deserve to be able to live and work in their areas and not have to move to where internet connectivity and other resources are accessible. It is unacceptable that rural broadband is not a norm across the fifteen counties of the Midlands North-West constituency, unlike other EU regions," he concluded.
Childcare services in Laois are to receive 171,709 in extra funding, according to Laois/Offaly TD and Minister for Justice and Equality Charlie Flanagan.

The financial boost comes at a key moment in Irelands move to accessible affordable quality childcare.

The money will be used to provide more than new childcare places, maintenance and building work as well as outdoor play areas and is available for immediate draw-down by providers here in Laois," he said.

Childcare providers such as Laois Community and Enterprise Development Company Ltd, Portlaoise Community and Family Resource Centre Limited and Mountmellick Community Childcare Limited are to benefit from funding under the scheme.

I hold the provision of quality, affordable and accessible childcare as a very highest priority, ensuring local children get the very best start in life.

This funding will benefit children, families and providers under our Early Years programmes, and will contribute to the development of an infrastructure that is ready to meet the radical new approach to subsidising childcare outlined in Budget 2017.

Since first entering Government, Fine Gael has prioritised hard pressed working families; the people who bore the brunt of the economic recession. A major part of this has been to reduce the cost of childcare for working parents.

We introduced the free pre-school year, and subsequently extended it to a second year. It is estimated the extended scheme provides an average saving of 4,000 per child.

We also recently introduced paternity leave for the first time ever. Dads are now entitled to two weeks paid leave.

From September an estimated 70,000 children nationwide will get extra supports. This will really benefit families in Laois.

Families will benefit in two ways. First there is a universal support for all children aged 3 and under then there are supports for those families who need it most.

The second targeted support is based on income and also for those parents who have had to turn down jobs, training and education because they cannot afford childcare.

I encourage parents in Laois to take the time to study the increased supports which are available and prepare for the autumn, by checking out the new website www.affordablechildcare.ie or by talking to staff at your local childcare centre," said Minister Flanagan.
The Bord na Mona (BNM) Group of Unions has stated that there is a growing jobs crisis in Kildare and the midlands resulting from its decision to move away from peat briquette production in favour of solar, wind and biomass.

On Monday BNM announced its decision to invest 1.2 billion in its solar, wind and biomass businesses.

This was welcomed by the Group of Unions as being a positive step and one that indicates the continued success of the companys fuel businesses.

However according to BNM Group of Unions secretary and SIPTU Organiser, John Regan, the negative element of this major investment plan is that it provides no job security for BNM peat workers.

He stated that if BMN proceeds with its plan to exit peat production it may result in widespread local job losses.

Last February union members expressed disappointment at the decision by management at Bord Na Mona (BNM) to purchase White Moss Horticulture (WHM), a UK compost manufacturing company.

They raised concerns at the time that the purchase of the UK company has implications for the job security of the workforce locally in their Kilberry plant.

However Bord na Mona immediately reassured staff in its Kilberry plant after the UK acquisition saying it will 'underpin Irish jobs'. In a statement to the Leinster Leader Bord na Mona CEO Mike Quinn said the acquisition helps support the sustainability of our retail horticulture business. Vitally, it will underpin Irish jobs and continued production across the group and within the broader Horticulture business and strengthen it's position in the UK market.

And last December union representatives rejected a management proposal to reduce employee numbers at the semi-state company this year and argued that the Irish workforce should be expanded.

According to John Regan the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Denis Naughten, has acknowledged a request by the BNM Group of Unions for an urgent meeting to discuss the threat to the future of the company and to its workers livelihoods resulting from the decisions of its board of management.

This meeting is expected to take place in the coming days.

Meanwhile a spokesperson for the BnM in response said the 1.2billion investment plan is a clear demonstration of Bord na Monas commitment to building a sustainable business that protects employment.

"Bord na Mona has already diversified significantly away from being an exclusively peat-based company and has throughout this process managed to sustain its business and employment. This announcement will continue to support this strategy, as the company invests in its Powergen, Peat, Biomass, Horticulture, Resource Recovery and Fuels businesses which directly employ 2,100 people.
Two of the nine trails have already sold out for the Curragh Thoroughbred Trail, as part of Longines Irish Champions Weekend.

This unique event, which takes place prior to racing at the Curragh on Sunday September 10, allows racing fans to go behind the scenes at many of the leading racing yards, stud farms and world-class equine hospitals based on the famous Curragh plains.

SEE ALSO: Kate scoops Most Stylist Lady title at the Curragh Racecourse

Visits to the yards of Dermot Weld and Johnny Murtagh are already full, but the Curragh Thoroughbred Trail, supported by Horse Racing Ireland Ownership, still has limited places available at the yards of John Oxx, Adrian Keatley, Willie McCreery, Michael OCallaghan, Michael Halford and Tracey Collins.

The Irish National Stud, Kildangan Stud, the Racing Academy and Centre for Education (RACE), the Irish Farrier School and some of the top equine hospitals are some of the other locations included in the Thoroughbred Trail.

Each trail is limited to 50 people and is filled on a first-come-first-served basis. All proceeds from the Thoroughbred Trail will be donated to horse racing charities.

Evan Arkwright, Commercial Manager of the Curragh Racecourse, commented: The Thoroughbred Trail is a fantastic opportunity for visitors to see behind the scenes of the Curragh, to experience areas not normally accessed by the public. We are hugely grateful to the support of the trainers, studs and veterinary facilities who are opening their doors on Sunday September 10 as the Thoroughbred Trail is an integral part of Longines Irish Champions Weekend.

Longines Irish Champions Weekend features the QIPCO Irish Champion Stakes on Saturday September 9, and the Comer Group International Irish St. Leger at the Curragh on Sunday September 10.

Racegoers can choose their own trail by booking online
Lidl are to assess their options regarding their next steps in Carrick-on-Shannon after they were refused planning permission for a new store in the town last week.



The planning application by AvantCard for a two storey Lidl store at Attifinlay on the Dublin Road was refused by Leitrim County Council on two grounds; that the floorspace applied for exceeds the retail cap in the county as per Leitrim County Retail Strategy 2015 -2021; and that An Bord Pleanala previously refused the application.



Lidl can appeal the decision. Julianne Galvin, PR Manager for Lidl Ireland & Northern Ireland, stated, We are disappointed with the decision from Leitrim County Council in relation to our proposed development in Attifinlay. We will assess our options with regards to next steps.



Carrick Town Councillor and businessperson Finola Armstrong-McGuire, who objected to the planning, said local councillors and representatives will need to sit down with Leitrim County Council shortly to discuss future re-zoning and plans for the green site in front of MBNA on the Dublin Road. She added work will soon start on a new development plan for the county town.



There were 126 objections to the planning application and the news of the refusal last week was welcomed by many local people.

Objections focused on an increase in traffic to the area, concerns over flooding and the use of the Circular Road as an alternative route during flooding of the N4. The green site was noted as being an advantage to tourism and many objectors claimed a successful Lidl planning application could have a possible negative effect on the potential to lure a multinational businesses into the old offices of MBNA.

Others mentioned health and safety issues for students from Carrick Community School who need to cross several lanes of traffic at that area.

However some readers took to Facebook to give out about the decision and raise concern about jobs being lost, or Lidl moving out of the area. Others said the move would have made shopping prices more competitive.
The Vintners Federation of Ireland (VFI) has welcomed todays vote in the Seanad passing all stages of the Intoxicating Liquor Bill 2017, which brings the abolition of the current ban on all licensed premises selling alcohol on Good Friday a step closer.

VFI CEO Padraig Cribben says, Todays vote in the Upper House means the archaic law banning the sale of alcohol in licensed premises on Good Friday is coming to an end.

The current law comes from a different era and fails to reflect the contemporary, diverse society we now live in.

Besides the antiquated nature of the law, the Good Friday ban is unfair to tourists and presents a negative image of our country. Removing the ban is positive news for the tourist industry as we fight the effects of Brexit and a weak Sterling.

The VFI would like to thank Independent Senator Billy Lawless, who proposed the Bill, as well as Michael McDowell, Victor Boyhan and Gerard Craughwell who co-sponsored it.

The Bill will now be sent to the Dail.

Padraig Cribben continues, We are asking the Government to expedite the Bills passage through the Dail and enact legislation that is long overdue.
I have to say Im feeling sad tonight. Two Summers ago, I worked hard to elect Tim Farron as our leader. Id hoped hed be there for one if not two Parliaments, at least a decade. I felt that the party needed his Tiggerish energy and passion even if his 100,000 members target scared me slightly.

Tim inspired us to pick ourselves up, raise our eyes and fight. He took on the fight for the most vulnerable, speaking up for the thousands of refugees fleeing war in Syria. He made it his mission to present a coherent case for unaccompanied children to come to this country, even trying to enact it into law. I was never prouder of him than when he was the first party leader to head to Calais and Lesvos.

Tim was not one to always make life easy for himself, as we saw from the Syria vote. He was prepared to risk upsetting his core support on the left of the party. Nor did he shy away from the battles we needed to have. On diversity, he was prepared to lead from the front, supporting the Electing Diverse MPs motion which was passed in York in 2016.

His leadership was a whirlwind of campaigning at all levels around the country. He went to Council by-elections to the winning Richmond Park parliamentary by-election. He was brilliant in the Scottish and Welsh elections last year.

He was proactive in the fight for LGBT equality, arguing for an end to the gay blood ban and for transgender rights. What a signal it sent to young people struggling with their gender identity to have a major political leader sitting in the front row supporting a motion on transgender rights.

And on that sin issue, I wrote the first time it came up that I didnt think that politicians should be pontificating about any sort of sin:

Do we really think that it is appropriate for politicians to be expressing personal views on whether ANYTHING is a sin or not? If hed given a direct answer, hed have opened the floodgates to that line of questioning. Mr Farron, is sex outside marriage a sin? It could go as far as: Mr Farron, see that Caron Lindsay, shes a total heathen, will she burn in hell? It would never end. If he answered that either way, I think Id be a bit livid. Its not up to him to be making a value judgement on my heathen-ness, its up to him to protect my right to be as heathen as I like. And he will, because hes a liberal, in the same way that he will always come down on the side of LGBT equality. LGBT people can be confident that Tim has their backs.

The recent election came too soon for us. It is difficult to see a scenario when we could have made a breakthrough. Id have preferred us to have taken a stronger line on Brexit  a very clear we will revoke Article 50 statement and Id have taken the 20% of the vote that would most likely come our way if we had been like that. He maybe put too much emphasis on keeping everyone together but how much difference would it actually have made? Im not convinced wed have won that many more seats, given the nature of our electoral system. In any event, he increased us by 50% from 2015 and came within 500 votes of another 4 MPs. Its about as good as we had hoped for.

You have to remember the context in which he was operating  an environment in which there was very little interest in giving the Liberal Democrats any exposure whatsoever, regardless of the uniqueness of our position on Brexit. At the Social Liberal Forum conference on Saturday, David Howarth showed us a slide which set out our appearances on Question Time  which had plummeted not just since 2015, but since 2010.

The fact that we are still here, still fighting on is at least in part due to Tims energy, passion and enthusiasm.

This is his last video as leader in which he sets out what he has achieved in these two eventful years.

He came along to Federal Board the other night and was optimistic and upbeat. His commitment to the party is as strong as ever it was. He said that he would still be around playing an active role as an MP. He knows that with only 12 MPs, they all have to pull their weight.

Cheers, Tim. Youve done a great job and done us proud. I and so many other members are going to miss you as leader.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
A year ago Emmanuel Macron held is first political rally. 12 months on he sits firmly ensconced in the Elysee Palace and En Marche enjoy a comfortable majority in the Assemble Nationale.The obvious question this demands is whether, at a time when the gulf between the two main parties grows ever wider, there is an opportunity for a new centrist party to make a similar breakthrough here in the UK.

Last week, the team that created the Lib Dem Newbie Facebook group put a poll asking members of the group a simple question: If a new liberal centre party were to emerge as a result of the increasingly polarised state of Labour and the Tories, with the backing of more moderate MPs escaping the madness currently consuming those parties should we join the new party or stick to our guns and keep on focusing on the task of rebuilding the Lib Dems?

This was only ever a hypothetical scenario. That party does not exist yet. It may never emerge and unless it does, and is able to prove itself to be genuinely liberal in its heart and soul, then there is no question of anyone being asked to consider any steps that might negatively affect the Liberal Democrat party. It remains our belief that within the current political landscape the Lib Dems remain the best and most capable vehicle to promote and defend liberalism, to stand up for peoples rights and liberties, to make the case for a decent, fair, open and tolerant society and to wholeheartedly fight to stop the Eurosceptic ideologues delivering a hard Brexit that would be a total disaster for this country and future generations.

In less than 24 hours, more than 500 people within the group responded to our poll  and it drew some passionate debate, including many people who were fiercely determined not to see the Liberal Democrats wound up. This is undoubtedly a good thing  it would be a very sad day if no one wanted to fight for the future of a party that so many people have worked so hard to build and maintain.

Nonetheless, the result of the poll also tells an important story  62% of respondents (primarily new members who have joined the party since 2015) would be prepared to join a new party were it to emerge (and of course to meet their criteria in terms of policy, approach etc). This is important in two ways.

Firstly, it suggests that there is appetite within our own party for a new political force to emerge in this country that could potentially put an end to the era of polarised two party politics in the UK. The sense appears to be that were such a party to emerge, which is better placed than the Liberal Democrat party to achieve our goals and champion our values, then we should embrace it rather than fight it. And if we did, and the poll is reflective of the membership as a whole, then the new party would potentially have an army of over 60,000 seasoned activists ready to call upon. This is not without obvious challenges  how would such a party avoid the fate of the SDP and struggle to undo the Gordion Knot that first past the post places on our political system, and what makes us think there really is an appetite for centrist politics after an election in which more people than ever before appeared to vote for the very opposite?

Secondly, and perhaps more pertinently however, it also suggests there is recognition that in our current state, we are not the force for good that our country so desperately needs us to be. That is a message that urgently needs to be heard by the partys leadership  if we are to prove there isnt a need for a new party in the centre of British politics then we clearly need to reform and change the whole way in which we operate, campaign, develop policy and present those polices to potential voters. There already appears to be appetite for this  Paddy Ashdown has consistently be calling for us to become a new, more digitally enabled type of party  but whether that amounts to much more than rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic remains to be seen. Its hard to imagine a successful political party that isnt digitally enabled in 2017 so that alone wouldnt appear to offer much differentiation.

What seems clear is that, at such a critical juncture in the UKs history, we need a strong liberal voice that can help to steer the country on a more positive course. The brutal reality is that a party which struggles to gain more than 7.5% of the vote simply cannot do that  we therefore need to build a much more formidable party that can better appeal to the majority of people in this country who share our hopes, fears and values. Its now in our own hands to determine whether that can be done through our existing party, or to build a new one that isnt held back by the trappings of the past.

In truth, maybe there isnt that much real difference between the two options. Whether carrying the Lib Dem brand or not  a centrist liberal party that successfully challenges the status quo needs to offer something substantially new and different to what currently exists. To genuinely break the mould it would need to be able to attract politicians, activists and supporters from across the current party spectrum, it would need to offer a clear and optimistic vision of Britains place in the world and its relationship with its European partners that is neither a desperate attempt to retain the status quo nor a disastrous hard Brexit that would damage our country for generations, and it would need to operate in a way that enables it to talk and engage with voters the length and breadth of the country and from all parts of society, rather than focusing on localised strongholds and a narrow demographic base.

Is this possible you may ask? But arguably the more important question is can we afford not to try. There is undoubtedly a pool of talented and dynamic politicians who look increasingly out of place in their own parties and with the leadership of both Labour and the Conservatives determined to ignore the concerns of the 48% who voted remain just over a year ago, theres almost certainly a core vote to play for as well. And if we cant truly beat FPTP then its worth bearing in mind that a third party with over 100 seats would be strongly positioned to reform it. Unfortunately in our current state were unlikely to be in that position for many years.

To do that requires a party that can truly challenge everywhere and not just where its traditionally strong. To finish with an analogy from another example from across the channel  we need a party thats a bit more like Chris Froome and a bit less like Mark Cavendish.

* Ben Maitland is a new member
Well provide the pizza, if you come and make some calls followed of course by a trip to the pub!

The phone bank makes a real difference, giving you the chance to encourage uncertain voters to make their voices heard, and provide real time feedback for the teams campaigning on the ground. Its also really important after the General Election that we continue to be successful in our local government by-election campaigns.

Our next Give It A Go  Phoning evening is Thursday 3 August, between 6-8pm when we are focusing on gaining two seats from the Conservatives. Well provide a briefing on the areas we phone through to, so youll have all the answers to whatever the voters ask of you.

If youve never given it a go before  I only made my first calls back in January and now I run the evenings  which just shows that anyone can get the hang of it! And well be on hand at all times to show you how the system we use to record calls works, and answer any questions that you might have.

Were based at 23 New Mount Street, Manchester, M4 4DE  a five minute walk from Shudehill.

P.S. If you have any questions, contact ALDCs Campaigns and Communications Officer Jenny Lamb at the Association of Liberal Democrat Campaigners and Councillors, on 0161 212 1012 or via [email protected].

* ALDC is the Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors and Campaigners
Tonight at midnight, Tim Farron hands over the reins of Liberal Democrat power to Vince Cable. Were showing some of his best bits in his two years as leader.

Here is his passionate, heartfelt first speech to Conference, given just days after the death of 3 year old Aylan Kurdi who was killed while crossing the Mediterranean as his family fled to what they hoped would be safety in Europe.

This is what I wrote about it at the time.

Today, though, he took the tried and tested formula for leaders speeches. You know the Rules, where they slag off the other parties, they carefully talk about a few issues considered to be the key interests of the electorate, utter a few platitudes, tell a few jokes and end on a high note.

Its all a bit contrived sometimes, way too polished, and leaves the listener wanting a bit of genuine discourse and emotion.

Not today. Liberal Democrats are not known for their deference to their leader. Its impossible to imagine any of us being as devoted to our leader as SNP activists are to Nicola Sturgeon. We dont always do their bidding and we usually answer back if they do something we dont like. We are definitely not the sort of people who give people massive standing ovations in the middle of their speeches like we did this afternoon because he spoke so passionately, as we would, for the refugees whose plight is pretty much dismissed by the Government. He was angry and he showed it and he took us with him.

And what weve had from David Cameron is a careful calibration of what it will take to manage that story, the minimum effort for the maximum headlines.

And a policy which will not directly help a single one of the hundreds of thousands currently on the move across Europe.

Its pitiful and embarrassing and makes me so angry.

Because I am proud to be British and I am proud of Britains values, so when Mr Cameron turns his back on the needy and turns his back on our neighbours.

I want the world to know, he does not speak for me, he does not speak for us, he does not speak for Britain.

That was delivered with raw, unfiltered and entirely justified rage. These were not words that had been written for him. Much of the speech had been written by Tim himself with minimal interference from his staff.

The important thing about this speech is that Tim needed to put flesh on the bones about what it means to be a liberal. He concentrated on two areas:

Thinking the best of people, not the worst  opposing the politics of division and separation.

Being the outsiders, standing up for outsiders against vested interests.

So often in recent years, our leaders have spoken in managerial, polished tones. Sometimes, they have been too defensive of what the Government did. Farrons stance was instinctively unequivocal:

Liberalisms roots are buried deep in anti-establishment politics, opposing privilege.

We speak for the outsiders, for the governed not the governors. The voiceless and the voteless.

He also talked about four key issues that he was going to be fighting on, which you may not find in a focus group near you:

Housing

Importance of staying in the EU

Green issues

Refugees

We know that housing is at the very epicentre of his political soul. He clearly understands the practicalities. He know and understands and feels the damage that t insecure and expensive housing does to people::

Maybe your housing situation is comfortable. But the chances are that your childrens isnt, and I bet your grandchildrens wont be.

Access to affordable housing affects us all because it is the entry ticket to society, to security and stability, to work, health and community.

Because without secure, affordable and stable housing how can you be sure that you can send your kids to the same school one term after the next?

How can you be confident you can keep your children safe and warm?

How can you apply for and hold down a job to feed and clothe them?

And, without this confidence, how can you have the peace of mind to concentrate on anything else?

The worry and the burden of not knowing if you can pay the mortgage, pay the rent, stay in the same place for more than six months at a time, is devastating to millions and millions of British people.

People often talk about moving house being one of the most stressful experiences in life. But for millions of British people, without a stable or affordable home, that stress, that instability, that uncertainty is a debilitating reality, every single day. And I will not accept it.

We will not tolerate it, so together we will fix it.

Note the challenge at the beginning of that. Hes asking people to look beyond themselves and their experience to understand what it is like for others.

In a fringe meeting for the Child Poverty Action Group on Monday where I spoke, a theme amongst the questioners was to ask how we could challenge the accepted narrative from the Daily Fail and others who peddle demonisation of the most vulnerable people in our society on a daily basis. We need to get Tims powerful words from the conference hall to the street.

His speech ended with a bit an audacious call for liberals in other parties to join us.

Maybe you are currently a Conservative  and you see your vote being used to punish working people on low incomes and to punish business by toying with exit from Europe?

Maybe you are currently in the SNP  and you see your vote being used to chase a second referendum while devolved services like the NHS are creaking at the seams.

Maybe you are currently in the Labour party  and you see your vote being used to pedal fantasy economics that will cause greater poverty and austerity.

I have this message for you.

If you are a liberal, why dont you join the liberals?

If you are a liberally-minded person in another party which is not what you would want it to be, join us.

If you have never been involved in politics before but are dismayed by the blame, division, fantasy or fear you see peddled by others, join us.

If you have been a Liberal Democrat before and find your passion reignited, join us.

Because, now more than ever, being a spectator is not an option. Action is vital.

Go online now  join the Liberal Democrats today.

Its interesting that there was very little bashing of the other party leaders and minimal criticism of their policies. His plea to Jeremy Corbyn to get behind the EU cause was genuine.

This was one of the best leaders speeches I can remember, and Ive seen a lot. Our challenge now is to take it an call it represents out on doorsteps and take people with us. We cant let this chicken soup for the liberal soul go un-supped. It will be interesting to see how Cameron and Corbyn respond.
At midnight tonight, Tim Farron hands the mantle of Liberal Democrat Leadership to Vince Cable. We are looking at some of the best bits of his two year and four days in charge.

Less than 3 weeks after being elected leader, Tim Farron went to Calais to see the refugee crisis for himself. As the humanitarian crisis worsened and the Tories ignored the dreadful suffering on our doorstep,, Tim, alone amongst UK wide party leaders, called for action. He was the first to go to Calais to see for himself what was going on. Heres how we brought you that news at the time.

For Tim Farron, the situation in Calais has always been primarily a humanitarian one. He was furious last week when David Cameron described the desperately vulnerable people there as a swarm. Most recently he asked Cameron to make sure that we were doing our fair share to end the immeasurable suffering of the people in Calais. He wrote:

I am sure you agree that it is heartbreaking to see hundreds of desperate people subsisting in makeshift camps night after night, willing to risk life and limb in the hope of a better future while many in Kent and across the country see their daily lives hugely disrupted through no fault of their own. I welcome your commitment yesterday to providing France with the resources needed to deal with the situation and am writing to seek assurances that alongside the necessary security measures, support will also be given to humanely process those seeking asylum, return those who have no right to remain, and ensure that, in line with international obligations, standards of welfare and accommodation are urgently improved.

Today he went to Calais to see the situation on the ground for himself.

Ive been in Calais today meeting with refugees and NGO workers to learn about the situation on the ground pic.twitter.com/1kIJncgmDV

 Tim Farron (@timfarron) August 4, 2015

And hes not just gone and met with officials. Hes actually been talking to refugees themselves.

Its been good to meet with refugees and see the work of organisations like Medecins du Monde in Calais today pic.twitter.com/6jtiDQobHi  Tim Farron (@timfarron) August 4, 2015

No doubt we will hear more from him in the next few days about his experience in Calais.

Update: Here he is talking to the Guardian:

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
At the beginning of the election campaign this year, Tim came to Edinburgh West one sunny Monday evening. He spoke brilliantly with a message that at that point in the campaign was just bang on. This is Tim at his best.

More from that evening is here.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
A YOUNG man who is charged in connection with a shooting incident on the southside of the city last week is to apply for bail.

Raymond Dore, aged 20, of Dromroe, Rhebogue, is charged with possession of a 410 gauge Spanish made double-barrelled breech loading sawn-off shotgun with intent to endanger life.

The charge relates to a shooting incident at Maple Court, Kennedy Park, during which another man and a juvenile sustained injuries.

The man sustained a gunshot wound to the stomach as well as an injury to his left elbow. The juvenile sustained a hip injury.

The incident happened in broad daylight at around 2.30pm last Wednesday  July 11.

The defendant first appeared before Limerick District Court on Monday and yesterday solicitor John Herbert indicated that his client wishes to apply for bail.

Sergeant Donal Cronin, prosecuting, said there will be a garda objection to any bail application and the matter was adjourned to next Tuesday, July 25, for hearing.

Separately, directions are awaited in the case of another young man who is charged with unlawful possession of the same shotgun less than two hours after the shooting.

Keith Lillis, aged 23, of Galvone Road, Kennedy Park, was refused bail when he appeared before Limerick District Court last Thursday evening.

It is the State case that Mr Lillis had a sawn-off shotgun on his person when approached by gardai.

Detective Garda John Keane alleged that when the shotgun was seized by gardai, it was loaded with two live cartridges.

A further cartridge was allegedly located in Mr Lillis pocket when he was searched. Yesterday, the case was adjourned until August 2, next for DPPs directions.

Two other young men have been arrested and questioned by investigating gardai. Both were released without charge.
OVER 140 potential jurors were on hand for the first day of trial in the death of Limerick man Jason Corbett this Monday in North Carolina.

Molly Martens Corbett and her father, Thomas Martens, have both pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder charges of the 39 year-old father-of-two, claiming self-defence.

The prosecution dropped the involuntary manslaughter charges against both parties Monday, saying Ms Martens and her father will face the more significant of the two charges.

Potential jurors were required to complete a 16-page questionnaire, which included their knowledge of potential witnesses, in order to expedite the process of selecting a jury of 12 individuals, according to Judge David Lee, who presided over the proceedings.

Three jurors were dismissed Monday as one was not a citizen of the United States, while another moved moved to nearby Forsyth County. A third juror was dismissed after lying to prosecutors under oath regarding her criminal history.

After a series of questions asked by Assistant District Attorney Alan Martin, the pool of potential jurors was cut to 140.

Jurors were assigned to one of three groups. Group A was madeup of 50 individuals who remained in the courtroom for Mondays selection process. Groups B and C were released for the afternoon, but are expected to serve as alternates in the event a jury of 12 cannot be selected from Group A, which was randomly drawn.

It remains unclear whether Mr Martens and his daughter will testify. Judge Lee clarified for the jury that both defendants are presumed innocent and Davidson County prosecutors have the burden of proving that they are guilty of second-degree murder. Neither are compelled to testify or offer any evidence.

Assistant District Attorneys Greg Brown, Alan Martin and Ina Stanton will serve as prosecuting attorneys in the case. Judge Lee has deferred ruling on a motion to redact statements made by Jack and Sarah Corbett, the children of Mr Corbett, regarding their exposure to domestic violence.
A LIMERICK man who is accused of tasering and stabbing another man at a house in Prospect last year has been refused bail.

Michael Hayes, aged 38, who has an address at Galvone Road, Kennedy Park, is accused of intentionally or recklessly causing serious harm to the alleged victim in the early hours of April 4, 2016.

The defendant, who allegedly fled to the UK following the incident, was arrested last week and appeared before a special court sitting at the weekend.

Opposing a bail application, Detective Garda Paul Crowley said it will be alleged Mr Hayes stabbed the injured party in the right side of his upper body after tasering him in the neck.

A serious injury was caused, he sustained a laceration to the liver he said.

Detective Garda Crowley said he believes the defendant is a drug addict and will engage in criminality, if released, to fund his habit.

He told Judge Mary Larkin he also has concerns Hayes will not appear in court for any future trial.

He has connections in the UK, I do not believe he will appear in court, he said.

The witness agreed with solicitor John Herbert that his client was never questioned about the alleged assault before being charged at the weekend.

He has never been given the opportunity to give his version of events, he said adding that his client denies the allegations against him.

Mr Herbert said his client believes he may have left the country prior to the date of the alleged offence and that he is adamant he did not perpetrate the assault.

Judge Larkin was told Mr Hayes returned to Limerick from the UK off his own bat in recent months and that he was willing to abide by any conditions imposed by the court if granted bail.

He will do whatever is required of him, said Mr Herbert.

Having considered the matter, Judge Larkin said she was upholding the garda objection and refusing bail.
SIXTY jobs have been created in Limerick following the opening of a new branch of Supermac's.

The fast food firm has opened its latest outlet at the Ballysimon Road, and will also include the Papa Johns and the Supersubs brand.

Managing director of Supermac's Pat McDonagh said: We are delighted to add Supermacs Ballysimon Road to the Supermacs family.

"These are exciting times as Supermacs embarks on an expansion plan throughout the country providing good quality Irish food at affordable prices. What makes Supermacs different is its commitment to the communities we are involved with.

"Not only do we provide sustainable jobs but we become active members of the community as well, he added.

Supermac's is Irelands largest indigenous quick service restaurant chain. The franchise currently has over 105 outlets across the Republic and Northern Ireland.

It also operates the Papa Johns pizza brand and SuperSubs.

Pat McDonagh also owns the Castletroy Park Hotel, which recently announced a 6m expansion which will create 150 jobs.
A MURDER trial jury has been shown CCTV footage of the moment a Limerick biker was shot dead at the gates of his motorcycle club.

The jurors were also shown a sawn-off shotgun gardai found in a wooded area behind the accused man's home and they heard that a search of the club premises yielded a bullet-proof vest and weapons including an improvised firearm and a pipe bomb.

Alan 'Cookie' McNamara, 51, from Mountfune, Murroe, Co Limerick has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Andrew ODonoghue on June 20, 2015 at Mountfune.

Also on trial is Mr McNamaras stepson Robert Cusack, 28, of Abington, Murroe who has pleaded not guilty to impeding Mr McNamaras apprehension knowing or believing him to have committed a serious offence.

The trial has previously heard that the deceased was a member of the Road Tramps motorcycle club while Mr McNamara was associated with the rival Caballeros.

Garda Nicholas Jones told prosecuting counsel Michael Delaney SC this Wednesday that he compiled CCTV footage from various locations between Doon to the Road Tramps club where Mr ODonoghue was shot dead.

On the afternoon of Saturday June 20 a camera at the gates of the Road Tramps clubhouse showed Mr ODonoghue coming in and out with a bar in his hand when a green Honda CRV arrived.

Just before 2.45pm an individual emerged from the same direction as the Honda. The man appeared to be wearing gloves and brandishing a firearm, the garda said.

Garda Jones said the man appears to discharge the firearm and then make an attempt to reload by breaking the barrel and reaching in and out of his left pocket. At one point he dropped one of his gloves onto the ground.

Less than one minute after the shooting, a silver Ford Focus passed the club followed 15 seconds later by a navy VW Passat.

When the Passat pulled up the man handed the gun to a person in the back seat and picked his glove up off the ground before leaving the scene. The prosecution says the Ford Focus was driven by Road Tramp member Seamus Duggan who was being chased by members of the Caballeros in the navy Passat.

CCTV footage collected at various locations showed the Ford Focus followed closely by the Passat travelling from Doon to the gates of the motorcycle club in the lead-up to the shooting.

Mr Duggan said that he drove at speeds up to 100mph in an attempt to get away from the Caballeros and into the clubhouse yard for safety. But when he arrived the clubhouse gates were shut and Mr O'Donoghue was lying on the ground fatally wounded.

Garda Brian Begley told Mr Delaney that he was involved in the search of Mr McNamara's home at Mountfune on June 21, the day after the shooting. At the back of the property there was an area of trampled grass leading to a wooded area. He followed the trampled grass and, using a slash hook, made his way into the wooded area where he found a black plastic bag. Inside it was a sawn-off shotgun.

Sergeant Andrew O'Riordan told Mr Delaney that he carried out a search at the Road Tramps clubhouse. Inside there was a well-stocked bar, a lounge, meeting room, kitchen and motorbike repair garage.

He found a bullet-proof vest in the lounge and in a safe in the kitchen he discovered 2,500 and seven cans of pepper spray. In a small room off the meeting room he found a pair of jeans with two shotgun cartridges in the pocket. A box he found on a patio contained 30 rounds of ammunition, some of which were so rusted they could not be used.

Outside the building there were several mobile homes, most of which were unlocked and in disrepair. One stuck out because it was locked and seemed clean and well cared for. When he searched inside he found a decommissioned grenade, rounds of ammunition, an improvised firearm and a pipe bomb.

A car on the premises contained a pump action shotgun with two rounds, a balaclava and more pepper spray. He also found a knuckle duster and one knife, plus an 'assortment of weapons' including sticks, batons, an axe, a hurl and various piping 'all within easy reach around the compound'.

Under cross examination the garda told Hugh Hartnett SC, representing Mr McNamara, that he did not know if anyone had been prosecuted in relation to possession of those weapons.

Detective Garda Niall Fitzgerald and Detective Garda Brendan Casey told the court that they arrested each of the accused at a home in Garryowen in Limerick on the evening of June 20, 2015.

Det Gda Fitzgerald also found a typed document inside a red notebook in a bedroom during the search of Mr McNamara's home. The document contained 41 names alongside phone numbers.

The list included the names "Cookie" and "Rob Cusack".

The trial continues in front of Justice Paul McDermott and a jury of seven men and four women.
THREE men were arrested during a planned garda operation at the direct provision centre in Mount Trenchard, Foynes this Wednesday.

A large number of gardai  mainly from the Newcastle West district  descended on the facility as part of an investigation which relates to suspected false documentation.

The investigation, which has been ongoing for some time, is being led by Superintendent Tom OConnor who is based in Newcastle West garda station.

A spokesperson at the Garda Press Office confirmed that various documentation and some electronic equipment was seized by gardai during the search. The items have been sent for analysis.

A 30-year-old man who arrested at the direct provision centre is being detained at Newcastle West garda station where he is being questioned as part of the investigation.

It is expected that he will appear before the district court this Thursday.

While two other men, aged in their 40s, were also arrested at the centre, gardai have confirmed their arrests were not connected with the ongoing investigation.

Both were brought before Limerick District Court this Wednesday afternoon having been charged in relation to unrelated matters.
Apr 29, 2021, 11 PM

This local post sheet of four imperforate stamps honors Eugene R. Cinelli, a member of the New Mexico Legislature who died in 1973. Presumably, N.M.L.P.S stands for New Mexico Local Post Service.

U.S. Stamp Notes  By John M. Hotchner

Local post stamps, a division of cinderella philately, constantly surprise me with examples not previously seen.

A new entry in the derby of these philatelic labels recently came to my attention. It is a small sheet of four imperforate stamps inscribed N.M.L.P.S. and Paid 5.

The stamps show a portrait with the name Eugene R. Cinelli above the image and Humanitarian below it.

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After a Google search, I take the N.M.L.P.S. inscription to mean New Mexico Local Postal Service.

Information on the left side of these stamps reveals that they were printed in St. Louis, Mo., so it would be easy to miss the New Mexico connection. However, Cinelli (1931-1973) was a Democrat from Albuquerque who had been elected multiple times in the 1960s to the New Mexico Legislature.

The precise date of the sheet is not part of the printing information, nor do I know much about Cinellis service  or why he is labeled a humanitarian. Google has its limits!
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Officials with the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency have opened an investigation into whether the approval process behind an industrial development in West Oakland was racially discriminatory because of high levels of air pollution that are expected to seep into the surrounding community.

Oakland officials approved the Northeast Gateway development, a 256,000-square-foot warehouse for processing and transporting cargo, in October. Dozens of truck docks and truck trailer parking stalls will be included on the site of the former Oakland Army Base near the bayfront at Maritime Street and West Grand Avenue when it opens this fall.

The investigation will focus on whether the construction approvals  and the broader public participation process for developing the former Army base  discriminated against black, Latino and Asian American residents in violation of the federal Civil Rights Act, according to a letter sent Tuesday by the federal agencies to Mayor Libby Schaaf and Michael Colbruno, a port commissioner.

The letter doesnt specify how the process may have been discriminatory. But the investigation was requested in April by the San Francisco law firm Earthjustice and the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, a community group. Their complaint alleged that city and port officials pushed through expanded freight activities at the Army base without analyzing or trying to mitigate negative health and environmental impacts.

Even as the community was saying this isnt what we want and we dont want more truck traffic, the city was pursuing that avenue, said Adenike Adeyeye, a senior researcher and policy analyst at the law firm. Being exposed to a lot of exhaust from trucks affects peoples entire systems  heart, lungs, brain  and can have devastating impacts.

Mike Zampa, a spokesman for the port, said his agency will cooperate with the investigation and is working to reduce diesel fuel emissions.

Claudia Cappio, an assistant city administrator, said Oakland takes the review extremely seriously and will cooperate, as well.

We fully recognize the disproportionate industrial impacts on the West Oakland community, Cappio said. She said the area has gone through a typical public vetting process, and as evidence she cited an environmental impact review from 2002, and a 2012 addendum.

At a groundbreaking ceremony last year, Schaaf and Councilwoman Lynette Gibson McElhaney, who represents West Oakland, hailed the development as an engine of economic opportunity in the neighborhood.

Oakland officials have long known that air pollution and associated health problems are higher in low-income, minority neighborhoods because of poor housing conditions and proximity to industrial plants. Black children under age 5 in Alameda County are six times as likely as white children to be hospitalized for asthma emergencies, according to a city report published in March that looked at public health data.

Schaaf and Colbruno have 30 days to respond in writing to the federal agencies.

The federal probe comes just weeks after an Alameda County civil grand jury slammed the Oakland City Council for failing to abide by state and local laws governing open meetings, saying that officials engaged in backroom dealing as they negotiated with developers over public land sales.

Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov
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A 69-year-old man died at the hospital Tuesday after crashing into a utility pole across the street from a Danville high school, officials said.

The man was driving east on Stone Valley Road at Monte Sereno Drive across from Monte Vista High School about 10:35 a.m. when he crashed into a utility pole, according to Chief Allen Shields of the Danville Police Department.
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Tamaulipas authorities said Monday they arrested two men who allegedly used firearm replicas to carry out armed robberies in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

The Policia Estatal Acreditable, or accredited state police officers, arrested Guillermo Morales Sanchez, 19, and Cornelio Dominguez Rodriguez, 20, on Sunday.

Authorities also seized replicas of a submachine gun and a handgun and two vehicles, one of which was reported stolen. In addition, police said the men possessed baggies of marijuana.

READ MORE: Laredo woman had $2 million of liquid meth in cleaning jugs during traffic stop, police say

Morales and Dominguez are believed to be connected to a string of armed robberies reported in the Sister City, according to police.

They were arrested after officers said they spotted two men acting suspicious near Carretera Anahuac and Calle Eva Samano.

One suspect was in a Ford Explorer while the other was the occupant of a Honda vehicle. When they noticed police, both tried to get away in the Honda. Officers caught up to them soon thereafter on Calle Berlin.

RELATED: Laredo man accused of fatally shooting landlord with high-powered rifle pleads not guilty

An inspection of the Explorer rendered two baggies of marijuana while the Honda had six more baggies and the two firearm replicas, according to police.
Fed up with criminal activity, residents of a southwest neighborhood in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, are warning thieves that vigilantes are watching them.

A photo posted on social media Sunday by the blog Nuevo Laredo Frontera Al Rojo Vivo shows neighbors putting up a banner with a warning message to thieves.
Luxury car rental service Sixt Rent-a-Car is opening its second location in Texas at the San Antonio International Airport this fall.

Sixt is also opening a branch in San Diego, California.
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San Antonios Graydon Mears started out with a bang on Jeopardy today. The first to score, he sailed through the first two clues of a movie category.

However, after a valiant up-and-down game  and a nice spike from a daily double wager  the local analytics director went out with a whimper, ending up in last place at the close of the half-hour.

Although he wrote the correct answer in final Jeopardy, his score was topped by both rivals.

Mears took home a mere $1,000, a pittance compared to the winnings by the shows new champ, Deborah Elliott, an educator from Cleveland, Ohio. She finished with $36,800 and a chance to play again Tuesday.

In a phone chat afterward, Mears described the experience as a little disappointing, but still positive. He said being on the show was surreal.

We always watched it growing up, he said..

Mears did have a winning story at the ready, however, during host Alex Trebeks conversation segment with the three contestants.

The Alamo City resident, who has worked at CGI here for three years, said he inadvertently engaged in some daring cliff diving during a jaunt in Vietnam.

While white-water rafting, he and his wife had to climb onto the rocky banks at points, sending the raft ahead. To get back to it, the two had to dive over waterfalls. . .40-feet high. We had to jump straight into the water, he said, agreeing with Trebek that the experience was scary.

The syndicated Jeopardy airs locally at 4:30 p.m. on KENS-TV.

jjakle@express-news.net
A Texas couple started a sweet tradition in adopting a shelter dog for every wedding anniversary they celebrate and Twitter went crazy over the news.

Neydi, 22, and Carlos, 25, Romero of Bedford spoke to BuzzFeed News about their unique tradition, but it first started as a coincidence.

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"For our first anniversary, Carlos brought in Captain without telling me," Neydi told BuzzFeed News. "Then for the second anniversary, we brought in Teddy. Me and Carlos were talking about how we get a dog every single year and we were talking about continuing the tradition." The pair recently celebrated their third-year anniversary and they adopted Chewy.

Neydi's sister, Odalis, posted the couples' story on Twitter and the news took off like wildfire with jokes and #RelationshipGoals in the replies.

GREAT HOUSTON: Dozens rescue 59 puppies released to animal shelter in one hour

Though, not everyone was impressed.

While many of the jokes said they were going to be overrun with dogs in a few years, Neydi told BuzzFeed they plan on stopping adopting at their fifth wedding anniversary.

"It makes more sense. If we keep going, it's going to be pretty wild," Neydi told BuzzFeed. "In a perfect world, we would be getting dogs every year ... but it's the real world."
A man has been cited for causing a crash that left a motorcycle rider in critical condition, according to Laredo police.

Alfredo Saldana, 69, was cited Friday for failure to yield the right-of-way from a private property.
Were always hearing people complain about big bad corporate America: how executives and directors make megabucks and employees get the shaft. How the big banks and institutional investors have all the clout and individual investors get the short end of the stick. Many use that as motivation to start their own business.

If youre one of them, youll inevitably learn that its a lot harder up close and personal than it looks from a distance. But that shouldnt dissuade you from going for it. I can think of no better reason for you to start your own enterprise than to show the world that you can do better than those who came before you. Thats my challenge to you.

Should you take it? I did. And while I started out as most young up-and-comers do more arrogant and confident than I had any right to be  I came away with copious amounts of humility and empathy for those who choose to lead.

Running anything  a business, a division, a corporation, a nonprofit  is a great job. Nothing is more challenging or more fulfilling. Nothing makes you feel more alive. Many of us live for that. If that describes you, then maybe someday itll be your turn. If and when that happens, Godspeed. Keep in mind, thats just the beginning. Thats the easy part. The hard part is being successful at it, right up to the very end.

In business as in life, there are no absolutes. There are no givens. Nothing is static. Everything is up for grabs. But thats only true if you choose to lead. Most dont. Instead, they choose to follow others. But even following great leaders is a flawed strategy. At best, you end up as a poor copy.

When Walter Isaacsons biography of Steve Jobs first came out, everyone tried to emulate the man and his management style. They tried to imitate everything from the way he presented to his relentless attention to detail. CEOs even bought copies of the book for their management teams to study.

While I believe that many of Jobs philosophies are fundamental, you simply cant copy and paste talent and wisdom. That comes from your DNA and experience, both of which are unique to the individual. Its one thing to learn from others, but you cant replicate them.

Lei Jun, CEO of Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, is such a fan of Jobs he emulates the iconic leader right down to the black shirt and jeans and one last thing tease during product announcements. The New York Times once called him a Steve Jobs knockoff. Its no coincidence that some have said the same about Xiaomis products.

While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, its not the best way to build a career or run a company. As Apples former head of marketing Allison Johnson once told an audience of entrepreneurs, The thing that Steve did better than anyone else is, he was his authentic self. We dont need more Apples. We need more you.

If nothing else, successful entrepreneurs are themselves. And the cultures they create reflect their own principles, their own methods, their own unique DNA. Thats where their breakthrough innovations come from.

Had Jobs, John Mackey and Howard Schultz decided to follow others instead of going out on a limb and creating Apple, Whole Foods and Starbucks, wed all still be using BlackBerrys, shopping at Safeway and drinking Folgers coffee. But fast-forward 10 years and who knows how well be interacting, shopping and getting our caffeine buzz.

Not to compare myself to those iconic leaders, but I started out with nothing, as they did. Looking back, its surprising how far a person can come in life. The human capacity for learning and achievement can be extraordinary under the right conditions. Adversity and competition can certainly be powerful motivators, if you learn to embrace them.

As you continue your career journey, the best advice I can give you is to do as they did. Be your own person. Carve your own path. Never stop striving for excellence. Most important, choose to lead, not follow. Remember, only unique individuals who dare to shatter the status quo can lead us into the future. Will you be one of them?

If you enjoyed this article, you'll also enjoy reading Steve Tobak's book Real Leaders Don't Follow: Being Extraordinary in the Age of the Entrepreneur. Pick it up today.

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S. Allen Counter, a Harvard neurobiologist and explorer who reclaimed the reputation of Matthew A. Henson, a black explorer on Robert E. Peary's 1909 expedition to the North Pole, and tracked down his descendants in Greenland, died Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 73.

The cause was cancer, his daughter Philippa Counter said.

Counter, a member of the Explorers Club, combined a scientific career with travel to the four corners of the Earth. At Harvard Medical School, which he joined in 1970, his research on nerves and muscle synapses led him to such far-flung destinations as Ecuador, to study the neural damage caused by lead-glazing in the village of La Victoria, and China, to study acupuncture.

One of his interests  discovering the cause of widespread hearing loss among the Inuit of Greenland  dovetailed with a historical mystery he hoped to solve. While dining with Swedish colleagues in the late 1970s, he was told that both Peary and Henson, Peary's main assistant on all but one of his Arctic expeditions, had left descendants in northern Greenland, the product of their relationships with Eskimo women.

Counter, who had been fascinated by Henson since childhood and had written extensively on the contributions of black Americans in remote places, made it his mission to track down their sons and descendants.

In summer 1986 he traveled to northern Greenland, where his questions about "kulknocktooki," or "dark-skinned people," and the man known as "Miy Paluk" ("Matthew, the kind one"), led him and an interpreter to a remote settlement of some 30 people in the Inglefield Bay Area.

There, an old man emerged from a wooden house and said: "You must be a Henson. You've come to find me." It was Anaukaq, the son of Henson and Akatingwah, his Eskimo companion. Anaukaq was now 80 and the father of five sons, with 22 grandchildren. "One of the great moments of my life was walking into that village," Counter told The Boston Globe in 1986.

Anaukaq mentioned a childhood friend he called his cousin, who lived 90 miles to the north. Counter, traveling by helicopter and boat to Qaanaaq, the northernmost nonmilitary settlement in the world, met a white-skinned Eskimo, who also greeted him with the words "You must be a Henson." This was Kali, the 80-year-old son of Peary and his Eskimo companion, Alakaseena.

"These men said that they had never been to the land of their fathers, and before they died they would like to physically touch a member of their fathers' families," Counter told the journal New Scientist in 2008. He arranged for Anaukaq and Kali, along with several of their sons and grandchildren, to visit the United States in 1987 and meet their American relatives in a get-together he called the North Pole Family Reunion. Anaukaq died later that year.

Samuel Allen Counter Jr. was born on July 8, 1944, in Americus, Ga., and grew up in Boynton Beach and West Palm Beach, Fla. His father managed several businesses. His mother, the former Anne Johnson, was a nurse.

In 1965 he graduated with a degree in biology from Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State College (now Tennessee State University), a historically black college.

He studied neurophysiology and earned a doctorate in communication from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1970 before joining Harvard Medical School. He later earned a medical degree from Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, where he studied audiology and deafness.

His marriage to Ann-Charlotte Hogstadius ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Philippa, he is survived by two other daughters, Olivia and Maya Counter; a sister, Jean Powell; and a half brother, Timothy Daniels.

In 1981, with Derek Bok, Harvard's president at the time, Counter created the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations. As the foundation's director, a position he held until his death, he helped found Cultural Rhythms, an annual festival of the performing arts.

Having found Anaukaq, Henson's son, Counter set about reclaiming the father's reputation. Long described as Peary's valet, Henson was actually much more: He was an expert navigator who spoke Inuit, drove sled teams with a skilled hand and knew how to build snow shelters.

In his 1912 memoir, "A Negro Explorer at the North Pole," Henson recalled Peary explaining to the members of his expedition why Henson would be making the final five-day push to the Pole with him, quoting him as saying: "He must go with me. I cannot make it without him."

On April 6, 1909, it was Henson who led the way to the goal line. Peary, his toes frozen, had to be transported in a sled, Henson wrote. Arriving 45 minutes after his assistant had reached the spot, Peary announced: "89 degrees 57 minutes! The Pole at last!"  and then rebuffed Henson's congratulatory handshake.

"I was in the lead that had overshot the mark a couple of miles," Henson told The New York Times in 1955. "We went back then, and I could see that my footprints were the first at the spot." Henson died later that year at 88.

Most historians now agree that the Peary expedition fell short of the North Pole. But for decades the deed shone bright, and on that momentous day the participants basked in glory.
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Wednesday brokered a new compromise over President Donald Trump's travel ban, saying the government for now may enforce tight restrictions on refugees but also must make it easier for people from six mostly Muslim countries to enter the United States.

The court's terse order means the administration cannot impose a blanket prohibition on people from those countries who have grandparents, aunts and uncles and other relatives in the United States. The Trump administration has advanced a stricter interpretation of what kind of family relationships could entitle a person to receive a U.S. visa, but a lower court in Hawaii ruled that the criteria were too tight.

The Supreme Court's action on Wednesday had two parts. In one, the justices said they will not disturb the lower court's decision that expanded the definition of close family ties.

But in another, the justice granted the government's request to put on hold a part of the lower court's order that would have made it easier for more refugees to enter the country. That order could have granted granted entry to about 24,000 refugees who were already working with resettlement agencies.

Wednesday's unsigned, one-paragraph order gave no reasoning for the Supreme Court's action. Three justices - Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch - said they would have granted the administration's request to put the entire order on hold.

The majority said the government's appeal of the lower court should go through normal channels, with the next stop at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

The Justice Department reacted to the action only by saying it "looks forward to presenting its arguments to the 9th Circuit."

Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin said the court's action "confirms we were right to say that the Trump Administration over-reached in trying to unilaterally keep families apart from each other."

The National Immigration Law Center said that while "family unity won today," it will continue to litigate "to ensure that refugees can find the shelter they were offered by settlement agencies in the United States."

The court's decision was the latest development in the Trump administration's nearly six-month effort to temporarily shut down the nation's refugee program and bar visitors from several Muslim-majority countries while officials examine vetting procedures.

The Trump administration has said the effort was needed to protect the country. Challengers have fought the ban as an unconstitutional effort at keeping out Muslims, which Trump had advocated during the presidential campaign.

The latest version of the ban bars visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. These restrictions and the refugee ban had been put on hold by lower courts.

The Supreme Court will consider the merits of the challenge to the administration's travel ban on Oct. 10. In the meantime, the court said last month that the ban could go in effect and be applied to those without a connection to the United States, but that people with a "bona fide relationship" with a person or entity in the United States must be exempted from the ban.

The justices did not define such a relationship but gave examples of what would qualify for the exemption: a close relative in the United States, a spot in an American university, a job offer or speaking engagement.

The Trump administration interpreted the Supreme Court's requirement of a "close familial relationship" to be a parent, spouse, fiance, son or daughter, sibling, son-in-law or daughter-in-law in the United States. The government would continue to bar refugees who had an offer from a refugee resettlement operation.

The challengers went back to U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson of Hawaii, who had earlier issued a nationwide injunction against the ban. Watson ruled last week that the government's "narrowly defined list" of exemptions was not supported by either the Supreme Court decision or by the law.

"Common sense, for instance, dictates that close family members be defined to include grandparents," Watson wrote. "Indeed, grandparents are the epitome of close family members. The government's definition excludes them. That simply cannot be."

He extended the exemptions to include those with grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law. Watson wrote that refugees with an assurance from a resettlement agency are also exempt from the ban.

The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to stay Watson's ruling.

His interpretation of what kinds of family relationships qualify "empties the court's decision of meaning, as it encompasses not just 'close' family members, but virtually all family members," the administration said in its brief to the court. "Treating all of these relationships as 'close familial relationships' reads the term 'close' out of the court's decision.

The administration added that Watson's ruling would cover virtually all refugees.

The state of Hawaii, which has led the challenge of the travel ban, told the justices that the government's argument was "nonsense." Any rule that maintained grandparents are not part of a close familial relationship was suspect as applied both to those who sought visas and refugees, the state said in its brief to the court.

"That argument is as wrong as it sounds, and nothing in this court's opinion, the immigration laws, or common sense supports it," the state wrote.
Google rolled out an updated version of its news feed in the Google app on Wednesday that uses machine learning to create customized collections of news stories based both on your search history and topics of your choosing.

A limited version of the feed was introduced in December for Android users, but Google added a few new features in Wednesday's update and expanded it to iOS, Apple's operating system.

Now, the stories that appear will be affected by what's trending in your geographic location (provided you share it with Google.) Also, you can exert some control over what appears in your feed by "following" certain subjects or personalities.

If you're interested in "Game of Thrones," for example, just search for that phrase and click the "follow" button.

If you're tired of a certain topic popping up on your feed, like perhaps "Donald Trump," you can tell Google to stop showing stories about him in your feed.

Finally, Google will choose stories based on the topics for which you've been searching.

For example, if you spend your spare time reading about the band Waxahatchee or searching for antique clock parts, then news items and blog posts about those topics will appear in your feed - even if you don't follow them yourself. The stories don't have to be recent, either. If Google decides you'd love an interview with Waxahatchee from 2015 or a blog post on restoring old clocks from 2011, those will pop up on your feed.

Don't worry if you spend your time searching for more adult content or frantically Googling symptoms in hopes of self-diagnosing a potential illness. Upsetting and mature content will not appear on the feeds, Google says.

Currently, the feed is only on mobile devices, but soon it will appear on Google's main webpage, which has long been iconic for its minimalism - usually displaying just a logo, a Google Doodle and the search function.

The upside here for Google is directly stated in the news release: "The more you use Google, the better your feed will be."

It continued:

"As the world and your interests change, your feed will continue to grow and evolve along with you. You'll notice that your feed will also reflect your interest level for various topics - for example, if you're a photography enthusiast but just casually interested in fitness, your feed will show that."

The feed is designed to encourage you to spend more time on the Google app rather than just using it for searches.

It combines the two functions as well, allowing you to click on certain topics to immediately perform a Google search for that item. If you're reading news about Vladimir Putin, you can click on his name to perform a search.

The newly updated feed brings Google one step closer to competing with Facebook's news feed, which is tailored to users based on "your connections and activity" on the social media site, meaning it bases its feed both on the stories your friends share and which of those you click on, according to its online help center.

Though the similarities are clear, Google employees were "adamant that this news feed is nothing like Facebook's News Feed," Wired reported. Such insistence may be in part because Facebook's feed has often been called an "echo chamber" and accused of helping reinforce beliefs by only sharing stories that share an ideological viewpoint with the user.

Unlike Facebook's feed, though, the Google feed won't be affected by what your friends on social media read, share or like.

"This feed is really about your interests - it's not really about what your friends are interested in, which is what other feeds do," Ben Gomes, Google's vice president of engineering, said at a news conference. "It's about learning something and taking it a step further. . . It's built on search. All the things we do in search will carry over."

The Facebook News Feed has also been accused of disseminating fake news, a problem that only grew after Aug. 26, 2016, when "Facebook laid off its editorial team and gave the engineers who replaced them a much different mandate when it came to vetting news," as The Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey reported.

Seemingly as a nod to Facebook's troubles, Google promised in its news release that "when available, you'll be able to fact check and see other relevant information to help get a more holistic understanding about the topics in your feed."

The new feed is only available in the United States, but it will be rolled out internationally during the next several weeks.
The health insurance industry's Obamacare drama reached a climax on Tuesday, but it isn't over.

With Senate Republicans' failure to advance their bill to replace Obamacare, insurers are facing a summer of uncertainty. President Donald Trump's administration won't commit to making critical payments under Obamacare. Health plans have pulled out of some markets, and raised rates in others. And there's always the chance that Republicans could revive their effort to repeal the law.

"Our members and all Americans need the certainty and security of knowing coverage will be available and affordable for them," said Justine Handelman, senior vice president of policy and representation for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.

The next key moment comes Thursday. That's the date when the administration -- which has threatened to let Obamacare fail -- is scheduled to make its next monthly subsidy payment to insurers under the ACA. Known as cost-sharing reduction payments, the subsidies were created by Obamacare to help low-income people afford to use medical services, and their legitimacy is the subject of a legal dispute.

So far, the White House -- which has threatened to halt the subsidies in the past -- hasn't committed to making the payment.

"Of course it's always an option" not to make the payment, said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary. "We have a couple days left."

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association said it has "consistently urged that there be immediate, certain funding for the cost-sharing reduction program." The insurers that sell under the brand collectively cover more than 100 million people in the U.S.

For some insurers, the best way to deal with the uncertainty around Obamacare has been to back away from it.

On Tuesday, UnitedHealth Group, the U.S.'s biggest insurer, showed the benefits of avoiding the political minefield the law has become. It reported second-quarter profit that beat estimates and raised its 2017 forecast after turning its business away from the ACA's individual markets and more toward Medicare, Medicaid and coverage sold to employers.

With Republicans in Congress reeling Tuesday from the failure of their latest Obamacare repeal effort, the health care industry is facing an accumulation of "ifs." Obamacare's insurance markets still have problems. Trump has many powers at his command to undermine them further. And there's no map and no timeline by which lawmakers might find a resolution.

"There is no clear path out of this," said Robert Laszewski, an insurance industry consultant who has been critical of Obamacare. "Individual markets continue to spiral downward partly because of the inherent issues in Obamacare's market architecture and partly because of Republican efforts to make things even worse."

Humana and Aetna have retreated from the law, and Anthem, a key Obamacare player, has announced plans to quit or limit its presence in at least four states. The industry has cited the volatile politics around Obamacare as a reason for their pullback.

The next step in Congress is unclear. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed holding a vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan, on a two-year delay. But enough GOP senators quickly said they opposed that plan to effectively kill it.

Meanwhile, Trump expressed support for a plan sure to dismay insurers.

"We'll let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us," Trump said Tuesday at the White House. "We're probably in that position where we'll let Obamacare fail. We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it."

Kristine Grow, a spokeswoman for America's Health Insurance Plans, another lobbying group for insurers, declined to comment directly on Trump's threats. "We remain committed to working with every policy maker and the administration to ensure the short-term stability and long-term improvement of health care," she said.

A third insurance group, the Association for Community Affiliated Plans, said it also wanted lawmakers to try and stabilize the ACA. "We believe there are a number of fixes needed to stabilize the individual market, such as guaranteeing funding for cost-sharing reductions and ensuring that coverage is truly affordable for consumers," said Margaret Murray, the group's chief executive officer.

---

Bloomberg's Anna Edney and Justin Sink contributed.
House Republicans issued a 2018 budget bill Tuesday afternoon that rejects several higher education cuts proposed by President Donald Trump but upholds plans to pull billions of dollars in reserves out of the Pell Grant program for needy college students.

Ahead of a markup slated for Wednesday, the House Appropriations Committee released the full funding report for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and related agencies that provides money for programs placed on the chopping block in the White House budget.

Instead of eliminating the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, the committee wants to set aside the same $733 million keeping the program afloat this year. It also maintained the existing funding for the federal work-study program that helps students work their way through college, rather than cut the program's funding in half, as Trump proposed.

Trump had sought nearly $200 million in cuts to the TRIO and Gear Up programs, which help disadvantaged students in middle and high schools prepare for college, but appropriators are pouring $60 million and $10 million more into each respective program. Policy analysts anticipated that the White House proposal would run into bipartisan resistance on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers have historically supported the college-readiness programs, albeit with modest appropriations.

Not all programs earmarked for cuts by the White House are safe. House appropriators still want to eliminate all funding for Child Care Access Means Parents in School, a program that subsidizes campus-based day care for low-income parents earning a degree. Committee members blamed budget constraints for the cut, while the White House and Education Department has said "subsidizing expenses associated with child care is not consistent with the department's core mission."

Resources for the campus child-care program have been stretched thin as the number of parents in college has grown from 3.2 million to 4.8 million in the past 20 years, according to the Institute of Women's Policy Research. The percentage of public institutions with centers on campus is dwindling, and without support from the federal government, many worry that student parents will struggle to remain in school. Still, student parents could get a bit of a reprieve: The committee is recommending $4 million more in funding for existing child-care programs within the Department of Health and Human Services.

The House GOP is standing with Trump on drawing down the reserves for the Pell Grant program, calling for a $3.3 billion recision on top of the $1.3 billion cut outlined in the fiscal 2017 spending agreement. The committee maintained level funding for the program, but advocacy groups say raiding the reserves could jeopardize the program in the future.

Forty organizations representing students, consumers and colleges sent a letter Tuesday urging House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., and ranking member Rep. Nita M. Lowey, D-N.Y., to oppose the cut.

"Cutting an additional $3.3 billion in FY18 would put much-needed investments to strengthen the Pell Grant further out of reach, and place the program at risk of future cuts to grant amounts or eligibility that would exacerbate student debt and limit access to higher education," the organizations wrote. "To support students, the American workforce and a growing economy, Pell dollars must remain in the Pell Grant program."

The American Federation of Teachers, one of the 40 groups involved in the letter, is planning a rally Wednesday on Capitol Hill to speak out against education budget cuts.
WASHINGTON - Vice President Mike Pence arrived at the National Governors Association summer meeting with one mission: to revive support for the flagging GOP plan to rewrite the nation's health-care laws.

He failed.

Instead of rousing cheers on the Providence, Rhode Island, waterfront, Pence was greeted with an icy air of skepticism Friday as he pitched the legislation, which would reduce federal Medicaid funding and phase out coverage in dozens of states.

By Monday evening, when President Donald Trump and Pence gathered a cluster of Republicans senators in the Blue Room of the White House over plates of lemon ricotta agnolotti and grilled rib eye, the measure was all but dead.

"The president talked about France and Bastille Day," Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., said in an interview on Tuesday, recalling the president's tales during dinner of parades and pomp from his recent trip to Paris.

Daines described the group's conversation, which also touched on issues ranging from health care to the debt limit, as loose - as if Trump "sat down and went out to dinner with friends, acquaintances, people you work with. It was just dinner to talk about what's going on."

As the dinner ended, reality returned. Two more Republican senators had suddenly bolted from supporting the health-care bill, lifting the total number of Republicans opposed to four and effectively killing it.

"I was very surprised when the two folks came out last night," Trump told reporters Tuesday. "We thought they were in fairly good shape."

Yet the dramatic collapse of the GOP proposal in the Senate was hardly a shock to most, especially those intimately involved in a venture that has been deeply troubled since the House passed its version in May.

The upheaval on Monday night was a tipping point after weeks of burbling discontent within the party about whether passing the legislation made sense. Nearly every GOP senator was eager to check the box of repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act they had long opposed - but many were also distressed by the possible costs of upending a law that has grown deep roots in states, risen in popularity and is relied upon by some Republican governors.

Moderates were always skittish about the drastic Medicaid cuts opposed by many of their governors. Conservatives were always unhappy with the scope of the Senate's legislation, which they felt did not go far enough to gut the law.

And Trump was frequently disengaged, sporadically tweeting and making calls to on-the-fence senators but otherwise avoiding selling the bill at the kind of big rallies that he often holds on issues he champions.

"It has been obvious to me for some time, and likely obvious to the leaders, that up to 10 Republicans were uncomfortable with the bill and were thinking about voting against the motion to proceed," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a critic of the bill, said in an interview on Tuesday. "So it's surprising to me that after the administration failed to win over the governors this past weekend, there wasn't more of a recognition of the fact that the bill was probably in fatal trouble."

McConnell, who has long cultivated a reputation as a canny Senate operator, found it nearly impossible to wrangle together his conference amid the mounting concerns. He could offer them tweaks and adjustments but not the political cover that they coveted.

Neither could the White House, which kept tabs on GOP senators but did not drive the negotiations at all.

"None of us knew what the meeting was about last night. We just were invited to the White House," Daines said. "There was no topic given to us."

Still, a false sense of confidence from the White House and Senate GOP leadership came to define the entire process. Each day seemed to bring a wave of new assertions that Senate Republicans were committed to fulfilling what has been the party's signature pledge for nearly a decade - and then there would be new twists that threatened that ambition.

With Trump engulfed in the fallout from investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, Pence became the Trump administration's main advocate for the legislation. He went to Senate lunch after Senate lunch, and eventually to the governors' meeting.

But Pence, like the bill, never caught on.

While Pence has clout with conservatives nationally, he drew blank stares from those in front of him in Rhode Island - despite being a former Indiana governor himself. When he targeted Ohio Gov. John Kasich, R-Ohio, who opposed the bill, he sparked outrage for appearing to incorrectly link waiting times for disabled people in Ohio to the expansion of Medicaid.

Kasich was newly furious about the hardball tactics. Other influential GOP critics of the bill, such as Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, also would not budge, in turn keeping Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., almost certainly in the "no" camp.

"This is a dramatic change to what most of us have reacted to within the last four years," Sandoval told reporters over the weekend. He likened the health-care push to shaking an Etch-a-Sketch.

Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, D, who attended the governors' conference, summed up the Democratic view in a Tuesday interview: "If he's treating a Republican governor in Ohio that way, how would he treat me?"

Malloy singled out a private breakfast session Saturday, in which administration officials sought to win over governors on the Senate legislation, as particularly problematic for the White House's sale. He said one official sought to discredit the Congressional Budget Office; less than a minute later, another official cited a CBO statistic to defend his argument.

"It was heavy handed. It was ham-handed," Malloy said of the administration's efforts at the summit.

The CBO had been set to release another report as soon as Monday on what the bill would do to insurance coverage levels, premium costs and the federal budget deficit, but it ended up not being released. A CBO report on an earlier version of the legislation projected that it would result in 22 million fewer Americans with insurance by 2026 than under current law. It predicted that the measure would reduce the budget deficit by $321 billion over the same period.

Inside the West Wing, Pence and Trump advisers continued to operate as if passage was possible, in spite of the unsuccessful turn in Providence. When the dinner convened Monday, Pence was scheduled to have dinner at his residence later that week with undecided Republicans.

Despite the negative feedback, the White House believed the Providence meetings went as well as they could have expected considering that the governors were expected to be clamoring for more federal money than the bill would provide. Pence and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price - both former House members - teamed up on the call list, wooing Sunday and Monday by phone.

Among the members who were being monitored closely by Pence was Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. In multiple discussions with Pence, Lee indicated that he had reservations but was not a firm "no" and was open to further talks.

But it was Lee and Sen. Jerry Moran , R-Kan., who ended up announcing their opposition on Monday night as Pence and Trump dined with other lawmakers at the White House - a final, vivid reminder of how the rosy view among many senior Republicans rarely if ever tracked with the actual state of play.

Lee and Moran made it four Republican "no" votes. They joined Sen. Rand Paul , Ky., and Collins, who had declared their opposition days earlier. With a 52-seat majority, Republicans could afford to lose only two votes to pass the bill since all 46 Democrats and two independents were expected to vote against the proposal, with Pence as the potential tiebreaker.

One sign that the White House and McConnell didn't see it coming: the senators who were in the Blue Room on Monday night. They were not holdouts but mostly heavyweights of the Republican leadership: Sens. John Cornyn, Texas, Lamar Alexander, Tenn., and Roy Blunt, Mo., among others.

Trump, impatient with the Senate's glacial pace, asked for a candid assessment of the legislation's status from the veteran lawmakers, according to officials familiar with the meeting. He implored them to hurry up and get the bill to his desk. But it was Paris and the flag-waving festivities he had witnessed alongside French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday and Friday that occupied much of his attention during the conversation, the officials said.

As difficult as the health-care debate had been, there was a pervasive feeling that McConnell would somehow prevail.

"I wouldn't put it on him," Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said on Tuesday about Trump. "The bottom line is there are members here who understood the president's preference and were willing to vote against it anyways."

Some Senate Republicans said McConnell's strategy of working an inside game and largely leaving Trump to observer-cheerleader status was misguided from the start. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said the public should have been far more informed about the bill.

"We didn't have the courage to lay out exactly what caused premiums to increase," Johnson said. "We don't even have the [CBO] score on this latest version. It's an insane process. If you don't have information how can you even have a legitimate discussion and debate?"

Tuesday only brought more tension. There was finger-pointing and faction-forming as Pence and White House chief of staff Reince Priebus worked to repair relationships with senators, many of whom saw the president and his team as perhaps well-intentioned but fumbling in their understanding of Congress.

When McConnell broached voting Wednesday on a bill that would simply repeal Obamacare during a Senate lunch, he was met with resistance, according to aides familiar with the meeting. McConnell had speakers lined up to support his plan but a number of senators, fuming over the Monday drama and other issues, asked for a pause rather than quick legislative action.

After the lunch, McConnell did not say when a health-care vote would happen, other than the "near future." By the end of the day, he said it would happen "early next week."
Iran will not fall into the "trap" that the Trump administration is attempting to set in order to force the collapse of the 2015 nuclear deal, President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday.

The U.S. "ploy today is to behave in such a way as to have Iran say 'I am walking away'" from the agreement, Rouhani told his Cabinet, according to the state-run Iranian Students News Agency. Iran "needs to be aware not to fall into their trap," he said.

Rouhani's intervention came after the U.S. again made clear its readiness to confront Iran and the accord that scaled back its nuclear program in return for sanctions relief. On Monday, it affirmed that the Islamic Republic has continued to meet the agreement's conditions -- as required every three months -- but hours later imposed new sanctions over what it called Iran's persistent efforts to destabilize the Middle East.

There is "a school of thought in the administration" that wants to push Iran into walking away from the deal, said Henry Smith, lead analyst on Iran and the Middle East at the Dubai office of Control Risks, a research group. "The motivation for that is to make Iran look like it's at fault rather than" the U.S, he said. The White House is conducting a broader review of policy toward the Islamic Republic.

President Donald Trump lambasted the Iran deal during the presidential campaign and vowed to dismantle or renegotiate it if elected. But he's now being advised by officials including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis who don't seem to "want the U.S. to be viewed as the aggressor" if the deal were to fall apart, according to Smith.

"They would much rather that that is perceived by the Europeans as being Iran's fault, because otherwise it's isolating," he said.

Viewed from Tehran, it's the U.S. that hasn't been living up to its end of the bargain. By pressing businesses not to work with Iran, Iranian officials say, the Trump administration is undermining the pact's objective of normalizing trade, preventing Iran from benefiting from the accord while appearing to uphold it.

Iran has boosted oil exports and attracted foreign investment since sanctions relief was implemented in January 2016. But a set of sanctions not related to the agreement by the U.S. prevent most American entities from doing business with Iran.

Under the agreement, Iran is allowed to enrich and store some uranium for energy production, although it had to reduce its uranium stockpile by 96 percent, idle many of its enrichment centrifuges and pour concrete into its heavy water nuclear reactor. The Obama administration insisted the provisions would slow the time it would take Iran to produce nuclear weapons, something Iran has said it wasn't trying to do.

Rouhani said Iran will respond to any new U.S. sanctions that violate the terms of the nuclear deal with countersteps.

If the U.S. wants "to implement sanctions under any pretext or excuse, the Iranian nation will respond accordingly," he said in comments broadcast on state television. "When it comes to congressional legislation, our parliament will approve corresponding measures."

As the U.S. announced the new sanctions, Iran's parliament moved to introduce a bill that would increase funding for the Revolutionary Guards and the country's missile program, over which Congress is considering new sanctions. The legislation would need to be approved by parliament and the influential Guardian Council of Islamic law experts and jurists.

The five other deal signatories, which include the U.K., France and Russia, have continued to back the landmark foreign policy success of the Obama presidency. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors Iran's compliance with the accord, has found that it has largely met its obligations.

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said Monday that his country's vow not to seek nuclear weapons "never expires." Still, he cautioned that Iran would withdraw from the accord in the event of a "major violation" on the part of the U.S. He didn't say what would qualify.

For now, Iran won't want to risk imperiling the deal, according to Smith at Control Risks. It's much more likely to take "retaliatory measures using their own sanctions, or do something provocative like missile testing" that portray it standing up to the U.S. but won't fundamentally threaten the accord, he said.
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Postal Service engaged in widespread violations of federal law by pressuring managers to approve letter carriers taking time off last fall to campaign for Hillary Clinton and other union-backed Democrats, investigators said Wednesday.

High-level postal officials had for years granted employees requests for unpaid leave, leading last year to an "institutional bias" in favor of Clinton and other Democrats endorsed by the National Association of Letter Carriers, one of the largest postal unions. The Postal Service's Office of Special Counsel and inspector general found that the agency violated the Hatch Act, which restricts federal employees from working for or against a political candidate or party during election season.

"The culture and practice was, 'It's mandatory, it's the directive' " to ensure employees got time off, Adam Miles, acting director of the Office of Special Counsel, told Senate lawmakers at a hearing.

The investigation found that 97 letter carriers took time off, sometimes weeks, to take part in the union's Labor 2016 program, canvassing, making phone calls and working on other get-out-the-vote efforts to help elect Clinton and other pro-labor candidates. The workers were dispatched to battleground states, including Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio. They were reimbursed for their unpaid leave by the union's political action committee.

Federal employees, including postal workers, are allowed to use their time off to campaign or donate to political candidates. But by directing that time off be granted even over the objections of local post office managers who said they would be understaffed, the Postal Service showed a workplace bias toward Clinton and other Democrats endorsed by the union, Miles said.

"USPS . . . facilitated [the union's] political activity by directing local supervisors to approve union official [leave without pay] requests to participate in Labor 2016," a report by the Office of Special Counsel found. "Characterizing this political activity as union business conferred a special status on carriers' leave requests."

The practice dates to the 1990s, investigators told the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. But the favoritism toward union-backed candidates was not necessarily because the letter carriers union endorsed Democrats.

"The evidence suggests that USPS engaged in this practice to engender good will with the unions," Miles said. About 92 percent of postal employees are covered by collective bargaining agreements.

Postmaster General Megan Brennan tried to assure lawmakers at Wednesday's hearing that she took the mistakes seriously and is working to make sure they are not repeated.

"To be labeled as having an institutional bias is pretty damning," Brennan said. "I will communicate that this is heard throughout this organization."

The time-off-to-campaign-at-any-cost practice was brought to lawmakers' attention by a letter carrier in Wisconsin, who testified that the absence on short notice of multiple employees at his post office and those in nearby towns left them short-staffed and paying out overtime to the workers who stayed behind. One letter carrier was gone five weeks.

The local post office manager pushed back and tried to deny the time-off requests, the letter carrier, Timm Kopp, testified Wednesday, but was rebuffed by upper management.

"I know it's true that historically the Democrat Party has been the party to help the Postal Service," Kopp told lawmakers, "but these partisan acts will not help, only hinder its efforts."

Investigators said the union gave a senior labor relations official a list of letter carriers it wanted to be released to campaign. That official emailed the names to local postal managers across the country. They interpreted the missive as a directive to give the carriers the time off, even if their absence would cause havoc and require overtime.

"When supervisors get the message, 'You have to let these people off,' that's a pretty clear political operation, quite frankly," said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla.

But investigators found that managers did not collude with the union to choose candidates it should support, or ask the union to advocate for Clinton or any other Democrats whose policies would benefit the Postal Service.

The Postal Service, on the recommendation of the Office of Special Counsel, did not take action against the high-level official or others, angering several Republicans on the Senate committee.

"You kind of have to scratch your head when you have such systemic violations of the Hatch Act and nobody's really held accountable," said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., the committee chairman.

Brennan said that since the labor-relations official was implementing a long-standing practice and not motivated by a desire to be partisan, she agreed that no discipline should be taken.

But she said that going forward, managers will weigh similar requests for time off based on the request, the needs of the Postal Service and the cost of any overtime needed to cover the employee's missing shifts.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said it was impossible to know if the time-off arrangement was a net financial loss for the agency.

The union posted a message on its website saying it would submit a statement to the committee " to address the legitimacy and accuracy of some of the data and statements from the investigation and the hearing."
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WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump's ascendancy has reverberated across a workforce of 2.1 million civil servants, upending their sense of mission or empowering it, depending on where they sit.

The career employees, who form the backbone of the federal bureaucracy, have become targets of the president's campaign vow to "drain the swamp," and they heard White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon pledge the "deconstruction of the administrative state."

Where Trump is putting resources and priorities, many employees describe a sense of validation and optimism. Where he is dismissive of their mission and their value as public servants, they are anxious, discouraged and sometimes hostile. And in offices where the White House envisions severe budget cuts and has set in motion buyouts, early-retirement offers and possible layoffs, civil servants are ill at ease, their futures uncertain.

Amid this upheaval, employees have kept the government humming. Social Security checks are still going out, and the Labor Department is still enforcing wage and hourly pay laws. But in some offices, employees say there is little direction from above and few initiatives underway.

After just six months, it is too early to gauge the impact of the Trump administration's zeal to shrink the size and reach of government. Congress controls not only spending, but also in many cases whether the White House actually can eliminate agencies and programs.

But this much seems clear: Across the far flung bureaucracy, employees are either on edge or waiting with high expectations for the change Trump promised, with few, it seems, weighing in at neutral.

- - -

For Thomas Decker, who works at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the change has been dramatic and welcome.

"Right now, we're enforcing immigration laws," said Decker, who is director of enforcement and removal operations for ICE's operations in the New York area. "The morale is up. We're able to do what we were hired to do, which is making the homeland safe."

For the first time in years, he feels his agency is really doing the job, a reflection of the priority the president has placed on cracking down on illegal immigration. And he feels the future is secure for ICE's 19,330 employees.

Arrests in his region were up 31 percent from January through the end of April over the same period in 2016, thanks to Trump's sweeping new immigration policies instructing ICE agents to move aggressively to take people into custody and rolling back Obama-era rules that prioritized the arrest of serious criminals.

Decker, who rose over the course of his career from interviewing immigrants applying for citizenship to supervising 340 agents, is used to his job being a center of public debate. Now, though, it has become more entwined with local politics in the Democratic-run city where he is based. New York City has limited the kinds of felonies that require police to hold undocumented immigrants in local jails to give ICE agents time to deport them.

"I would say that before [under Obama] there was a working relationship [with New York]," Decker said. "Probably the difference now is the politics with the mayor's office."

- - -

Charles Doolittle's experience has been just the opposite.

Doolittle was a rising star at the Department of Education, hired four years ago through a prestigious fellowship for aspiring public servants. The self-described policy wonk was a good fit for the agency's policy shop, where he focused on teacher and principal issues and helping states carry out a sweeping federal law that gives them a larger role in deciding how to fix troubled schools.

Doolittle, 28, loved the work, putting in 60 to 70 hours some weeks. "This was my dream job," he said.

But he did not like what he saw in Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos. Doolittle considered her inexperienced, disagreed with the priority she put on private school alternatives to public education, and feared she would erode the federal role in education.

His tipping point came in May after the release of the White House budget, which would cut 13.5 percent from the Education Department. Watching DeVos testify before Senators on C-SPAN, Doolittle was aghast at her refusal to definitely say whether she would block federal funding for private schools that discriminate against LGBT and African-American students and others from marginalized populations.

"I just found it absolutely repugnant and inexcusable," Doolittle recalled. "We're a civil rights agency. That's our role if nothing else."

So he quit. His last day was June 30.

"A lot of people like me tried to hold on for the first six months," he said. "I went from being so proud to say where I worked to avoiding the subject. . . I could no longer stay there in good faith without considering myself part of the problem."

- - -

At the Commerce Department, a trade expert at the small International Trade Administration is feeling anxious about the future. Buyouts are looming, and if not enough employees take them, layoffs could be next, she said.

This employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized by her agency to talk to a reporter, said she loves working in government. But Secretary Wilbur Ross is drawing up plans to get rid of 10 percent of the agency's 90 field offices and staff.

"Possibly my job will be eliminated," she said. "What's going to happen moving forward, I don't know. I'm depressed."

The employee said she would prefer to be laid off than to take a buyout, because a severance package would be more generous. So she is waiting nervously to see what transpires and regrets that her job does not entail enforcing trade practices, since that is a priority for the new administration.

Other changes are also worrying her. Her boss is filling in for someone who is filling in for someone else whose boss is acting in a senior role because the department has just a handful of political appointees.

"I have no supervisor," she said. "I'm having trouble keeping myself motivated. I'm normally an extremely productive person, and yet I can't get anything done."

This month, she went shopping in the middle of a weekday. Frequently, she walks around the Commerce headquarters building to burn off stress, she said.

- - -

Brandon Coleman, an addiction therapist who counsels veterans at risk of suicide for the Department of Veterans Affairs in Prescott, Arizona, had lost trust in VA.

But when Trump started making campaign promises to clean up the agency, Coleman paid attention. The president's appointment of David Shulkin, who had run the veterans' health program under Obama, to lead the agency, has Coleman feeling a lot more upbeat about his job.

He has watched Shulkin make the cable news rounds to press Congress for legislation to make it easier for him to fire bad employees, a bill the president signed in June. Then there was the executive order creating a division within VA to protect whistleblowers.

Coleman himself had been suspended for 15 months on what were found to be unsubstantiated charges of assault. These followed his decision to go public with concerns that large numbers of at-risk veterans were walking out of the emergency room at the Phoenix VA Medical Center without proper monitoring.

A decorated Marine veteran, Coleman was reinstated to an outpatient clinic last year. But he continued to call out the agency's culture, in which he says rule-breakers rarely are punished, three years after a scandal over falsified records for medical appointments.

Now Coleman sees sign of progress in the fight to expand veterans' access to private doctors and improve mental-health services.

He shook hands with Shulkin in the Oval Office when Trump signed the executive order. The new secretary promised a meeting on protecting whistleblowers. Coleman is still waiting.

"I was not a big fan of Shulkin," Coleman recalled. "But he's trying to bring transparency to an agency that had none. I think we have a secretary that has a backbone."

- - -

This report is part of a series looking at President Trump's first six months in office.

- - -

Video: President Trump promised to shake up the federal workforce if elected. Six months into his presidency, workers see a changing landscape - but while some like it, others don't. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

URL: http://wapo.st/2tf2K04

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Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman will be nominated as the U.S. ambassador to Russia, the White House announced Tuesday, ending months of delay in formalizing the appointment amid deteriorating relations between the two countries.

The White House confirmed in March that it would name the former Republican presidential contender and U.S. ambassador to China under President Barack Obama to the Russia post. But the White House had delayed formally naming Huntsman and sending the nomination to the Senate for confirmation as the United States waited for the Kremlin to approve his selection.

The nomination comes amid what could be a thaw in U.S. relations with Russia following the first face-to-face meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany this month. The Trump administration is also under fire amid a widening investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election and the possible collusion of Trump campaign associates.

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Trump and Putin met for over two hours in a formal bilateral setting at the G-20. And the two met a second time for an additional hour at a dinner for G-20 leaders following the bilateral meeting. The White House on Tuesday confirmed the second meeting, but said that it was a "brief conversation."

RELATED: A body language expert analyzes the first Trump-Putin meeting

In their wide-ranging bilateral meeting, Trump pressed Putin on Russian interference in the 2016 election and the civil war in Syria. Both leaders reported that the meeting went well. But Russia and the United States remain locked in a dispute over sanctions imposed by the Obama administration.

Huntsman's nomination was announced one day after Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov met at the State Department with Undersecretary of State Thomas Shannon. They discussed what the State Department characterized as "irritants" in the U.S.-Russia relationship, including Moscow's demand that the United States return two Russian-owned mansions in Maryland and New York that were seized in December in part as a response to Russian meddling in last year's election.

White House officials have said that the United States is open to returning the sites to Russia, although the Obama administration had said they were being used for espionage.

The Kremlin approved Huntsman's appointment Monday night about the same time that the United States approved Russian politician Anatoly Antonov to serve as Russia's ambassador in Washington, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak publicly about pending appointments. Ambassadors must be approved by the governments of the countries that will host them.

Huntsman, a Republican, was ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011 . He also was ambassador to Singapore from 1992 to 1993 under President George H.W. Bush. He ran for president in 2012.

The company owned by Huntsman's family has business interests in Russia, and he has traveled to that country in that capacity. But he is better known for his expertise in China. He speaks Mandarin Chinese, and he and his wife have adopted a daughter from China.

---

The Washington Post's Carol Morello contributed to this report.
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Police are counting their blessings after arresting two of Texas' "Most Wanted" fugitives in the same day.

The Texas Department of Public Safety recently announced the capture of Briggs Clinton Lawhon, 57, an affiliate with the Bandidos Outlaw Motorcycle Gang. His past felony convictions include aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, burglary of habitation and delivery of methamphetamine.

U.S. Marshals arrested Lawhon in Angelton, Texas, roughly 40 miles south of Houston. He was a fugitive since December 2015.

WITNESS DESCRIPTION: How police sketches can lead to arrests, even if they're not the most accurate drawings

Authorities also arrested Erasmo Zapata, 45, after he turned himself into police in San Patricio County, near Corpus Christi. Zapata was a fugitive on Texas' list of most wanted sex offenders.

In 2006, he was convicted of two counts of aggravated sexual assault and one count of indecency with a child/sexual contact involving a 12-year-old-girl, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. He was wanted by police since January 2017 for parole violation.

The two recent arrests bring the total of tip reward payouts to $48,000 in 2017, which has seen 17 of Texas' "Most Wanted" arrested.

STRANGER THAN FICTION: The weirdest, most bizarre reasons people have been arrested in Texas in 2017

Anyone with any information on the fugitives featured on Texas' 10 Most Wanted list should call the Crime Stoppers hotline at 1-800-252-TIPS (8477).

Click through above to see recent fugitives on the run from Houston-area police.
Jay Janner

AUSTIN -- The Texas Senate and House of Representatives haven't been on the same page for a while, and it's no wonder.

During Dan Patrick's press conference last week, the lieutenant governor admitted that he and House Speaker Joe Straus hadn't met one-on-one since the start of the 85th legislature, 190 days ago.
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Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Arts & Culture, Politics

By Long Island News & PR Published: July 19 2017

The Legislation Unanimously Passed Both The Assembly and Senate.

Long Island, NY - July 19, 2017 - Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele and Senator Ken LaValle are urging the Governor to sign their legislation providing New York State recognition to the Montaukett Indian Nation. The measure received bipartisan support when both Houses of the Legislature approved it unanimously this past session.

In the letter to the Governor requesting the acknowledgment of the tribe, the Legislators noted that the Montauketts recognition had been wrongfully removed back in 1910. They stated, The courts misdeed declaring that the Montauketts no longer exist has been perpetuated for over a century, despite the fact that the members of this sovereign Indian nation continue to live in our community, maintain their culture, and govern themselves. This issue has continued to be relevant to us and our constituents who seek to rightfully restore their place in history. As you take this bill into consideration, we respectfully ask you to keep in mind that the Montaukett Indian Nation is alive and thriving. We wholeheartedly believe that they deserve to be acknowledged by the State.

Such recognition and acknowledgment was wrongfully removed from the Montaukett Indians in the 1910 case of PHAROAH V. BENSON, 69 Misc. Rep. 241 (Supreme, Suffolk Co., 1910), affirmed 164 App. Div. 51, affirmed 222 N.Y. 665. In that case, the Montaukett Indians were declared to be extinct, in order to rule against them in a land claim.

In 1994, State Supreme Court Judge William Underwood, in the case of BREAKERS MOTEL, INC. V. SUNBEACH MONTAUK TWO, INC., subsequently described the PHAROAH case, which declared this venerable and noble Algonquin nation to be extinct, as being of "questionable propriety.
School & Education, Local News, Business & Finance

By Long Island News & PR Published: July 19 2017

Mr. Vecchio spoke on the topics of local governance and the medias influence on education.

Greenvale, NY - July 19, 2017 - William Floyd Board of Education President Robert Vecchio was recently tapped by Dr. Joseph Lemke, a lecturer at William Floyd Board of Education President Robert Vecchio was recently tapped by Dr. Joseph Lemke, a lecturer at LIU Post and Director of Social Studies in the Bay Shore School District, to speak to his Multiple Perspectives on Educational Policy Analysis and the History of Educational Reform class in the universitys Doctor of Education Program. Mr. Vecchio spoke on the topics of local governance and the medias influence on education.

I enjoyed talking to current and future school leaders about the issues we face in public education, said Mr. Vecchio. We discussed what is going well and, just as important, where there is room for growth in our system throughout New York State.

Dr. Lemke noted that student feedback from Mr. Vecchios visit was very positive. They were quite inspired by his knowledge of the issues, as well as his passion and dedication.

Mr. Vecchio, a 25-year resident of the William Floyd School District, just completed his 14th year of board service (first elected in 2003). He has served as president of the Board of Education since 2006 and continues to provide strong board leadership. Throughout his tenure, the district is experiencing an upward trajectory including a graduation rate that has increased by 20 percentage points in the past 11 years. He, along with his Board colleagues, successfully championed many new and innovative programs such as the in-house Career and Technical Education program, the creation of the on-site William Floyd Family Center, and successfully navigated the district through the recession with fiscally smart and responsible oversight and budgeting. Mr. Vecchio also spearheaded the creation of the first Brookhaven Town chapter of Our Community Salutes, a program that recognizes high school seniors who have committed to serve in the Armed Forces after graduation.
Woman Arrested for DWI Following Centereach Crash With Grandson in Vehicle, Cops say

Local News, Crime

By Long Island News & PR Published: July 19 2017

Melinda Duncan of Coram, 56, is charged with violating Leandras Law.

SCPD have arrested Melinda Duncan of Coram, 56, for DWI with a child in the vehicle after she was involved in a motor vehicle crash on Tuesday, July 18.

Centereach, NY - July 19, 2017 - Suffolk County Police arrested a woman for driving while intoxicated with a child in the vehicle after she was involved in a motor vehicle crash in Suffolk County Police arrested a woman for driving while intoxicated with a child in the vehicle after she was involved in a motor vehicle crash in Centereach on Tuesday, July 18, at approximately 10:35 p.m.

Melinda Duncan was driving a 2014 Ford Focus southbound on South Coleman Road near Hettys Path when she struck a 1999 Chevrolet Suburban that was parked on the shoulder. Duncan and her 11 year old grandson, who was in the backseat, were not injured.

Sixth Precinct Patrol officers arrested and charged Duncan, 56, of Coram , New York, with Aggravated Driving While Intoxicated with a Child Passenger 15 Years or Younger (Leandras Law), Driving While Intoxicated and Endangering the Welfare of a Child. Duncan will be held overnight at the Fourth Precinct and will be arraigned at First District Court in Central Islip on July 19.
The Pakistan military recoiled after Afghanistans Ministry of Defense called on Pakistan to launched operations against terrorist centers throughout the country, including in the Pakistani cities of Quetta and Peshawar.

Pakistans Inter-Services Public Relations branch said that Afghan Ministry of Defense spokesmans comments that Pakistan is a hub for terrorist activity is unwarranted and runs counter to Pakistan Armys efforts for better Pak-Afghan coordination and cooperation.

Pakistan Army looks forward for trust based security coordination and cooperation for fight against common enemy, the ISPR statement continued. Rhetoric of blames and suggestive allegations are agenda of forces working against order and peace in the region which should be avoided.

The ISPR responded to comments made by Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Dawlat Waziri, who responded to Pakistans announcement of Khyber 4, an operation in Pakistans Khyber tribal agency.

Military operations need to be launched in [sic] both sides of the Durand Line. Everyone understand [sic] the terrorist centers are located in Pakistan; Quetta Council, Peshawar Council and Miranshah Council that are Taliban groups, Waziri said, according to ATN News. Waziri made the comments after ISPR spokesman Major General Asif Ghafoor suggested that the Afghan military launch an operation on its side of the border to support Khyber 4.

The three councils mentioned by Waziri refer to Afghan Talibans command structure that is based inside Pakistan. The Quetta Shura, the Talibans main decision body, is based in the city of Quetta in Pakistans Baluchistan province. Additionally, the Taliban operates four regional military councils in Quetta, Peshawar, Miramsha, and Gerdi Jangal.

The Talibans top leadership has been based inside Pakistan for decades, with the knowledge, approval and support of the military and its Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. The Talibans first two emirs died while in Pakistan. Mullah Omar, the Talibans founder and first emir, died in a Pakistani hospital near Quetta in April 2013. His successor, Mullah Mansour, was killed by the US in a drone strike in Baluchistan in May 2016. They and other senior, middle and lower level leaders have operated inside Pakistan without consequence.

In order to justify its policy of support to jihadist groups, Pakistani elites have attempted to distinguish between what are referred to as good Taliban and bad Taliban. The so-called good Taliban are groups that advance Pakistans foreign policy goals and do not threaten the state or wage war within its borders. Good Taliban and other groups deemed acceptable by the Pakistani establishment include the Afghan Taliban and its subgroups, the Haqqani Network, the Mullah Nazir Group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, and Jaish-e-Mohammed. These groups conduct numerous heinous acts of terrorism in the region, and are directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and civilians, and yet are supported by the Pakistani state.

Bad Taliban are any jihadist faction that challenges the primacy of the Pakistani state. These groups include the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, the Turkistan Islamic Party, and the weakened Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The Pakistani military has pursued these groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province with some success. However, when targeting these groups, the military has avoided pursuing groups such as the Haqqani Network, which provided shelter and support for the bad Taliban.

Pakistani officials have denied that it pursues a policy of strategic depth and differentiates between good and bad Taliban, or alternatively, have claimed it will no longer differentiate between the two. However, these claims are false. This is demonstrated in Pakistans continuing support for the aforementioned groups and others, as well as an unwillingness to round up leaders and key operatives.

Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.

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Business / Business of Luxury

Jul 07, 2017 | By Jonathan Ho

Back in 2013, it was reported in Wall Street Journal that Financiere Richemont SA, better known as Richemont to industry insiders, decided against selling some of its struggling business units, including pen maker Montblanc, and instead will increase their investment into each of the 20 brands within their portfolio. Some, like Montblanc have become success stories with the addition of a watchmaking concern; others are still struggling to find their feet four years later and among the first to go  Shanghai Tang.

The Richemont  Shanghai Tangs relationship goes back close to 20 years. The Group first acquired a majority stake in 1998 before completely taking over the brand in 2008. At the time, the acquisition was considered to be strategic just when the luxury goods market started to peak in China.

A primer on Shanghai Tang

Since the early 90s, Hollywood celebrities like Demi Moore and Nicole Kidman have flirted with the Qipao or Cheongsam and perhaps, founder David Tang thought that a brand tapping into a zeitgeist of western upscale clientele would propel a brand with Chinese flourishes into critical and commercial success. Headlined by a body hugging dress of Chinoiserie design, Shanghai Tang was born in 1994, producing the iconic 1920s Shanghainese socialite uniform except that this time, it was interpreted for modern women. The formula appeared to work when in the late 90s, the eras IT girl Kate Moss started to produce her own collaboration of Cheongsams with Topshop, coinciding with a trend of western celebrity appropriation of Chinese cultural dress.

Almost 10 years later, during a 2013 interview with Business Insider, it was reported that as the global curator of modern Chinese aesthetics, Shanghai Tang had managed to achieve 43% increase of global sales by 2005; fuelled by an expanded collection of not just Chinese-inspired fashion but also accessories and homewares.

Physically, Shanghai Tang operated a majority of boutiques within China (30 out of 45 stores) and at the time (2013), Asians represented 51% of the brands consumers with native Chinese forming the bulk while 49% went to a market of Westerners. Then, in the intervening four years, things started to go wrong

Luxury Business Science 201: What went wrong with Shanghai Tang?

First, lets just say that culturally, the cheongsam can be considered fairly analogous to a bespoke suit. If one were to follow the 1920s Shanghainese model, wealthy socialites would typically get measured and then fitted for a bespoke or made-to-measure qipao cheongsam. As a cultural garment, the raison detre of the qipao was to be as form fitting, emphasising the feminine attributes of her owner. An off-the-rack offering was possible but at those price ranges, you were could consider a bespoke version at your local and often, longtime seamstress.

Second, consider for a moment the odd cultural crossroads where you are marketing a brand to a highly nationalistic citizenry where a large number of your clientele are gwai lo  or lao wai  and you begin to have a contradiction of cultural expectations which complicates potential brand direction.

Finally, the rise of millennials and the corresponding soft economies in which they have grown up have led to a bifurcation of expectations. On one hand, a group of millennials who do not harbour aspirations of status or pretense and the other, a group of millennials who do aspire to luxury but dollar for dollar would prefer clearly European luxury brands, as a result Shanghai Tang was placed in a confluence of increasingly tepid performance and certainly, they were not the sort of brand within the Richemont portfolio which was as easily understood like watches and jewellery (or for that matter, guns  Purdey, purses  Lancel).

For Richemont, Shanghai Tang just wasnt a solid performer and given the different market variables, they sold the 23 year old brand to Italian fashion entrepreneur Alessandro Bastagli and private equity fund Cassia Investments Ltd.

What does this mean for foreign owned Chinese Luxury Brands? Are Chinese Luxury Brands doomed?

Richemont Group is not alone in their divestiture of a chinese luxury brand. Earlier this year, LVMH dropped luxury Chinese spirit label Wenjun. For some reason, luxury conglomerates practiced at marketing brands with a depth of history and tradition appear to be finding it problematic to market brands from China, even when they have the equivalent depth of Chinese history and culture; Case in point  The Wenjun Distillery, a premium white spirit or bai jiu  maker has a heritage going back to the Han Dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD), thats over 2000 years of heritage. LVMH, itself a specialist in premium liquors through Moet Hennessy decided in January to drop Wenjun Distillery, having acquired a 55% stake in 2007.

What is not immediately certain is whether Chinese President Xi Jinpings anti-graft measures are curbing consumption of premium liquors (traditionally a deal-making lubricant in Chinese culture) to such a degree or that Chinas growing wealthy upper middle class are just not consuming luxuries at a pace that LVMH had projected (similar to the millennial issue with luxury goods).

Former British accountant and now luxury analyst, Rupert Hoogewerf began studying the Chinese market by establishing Hurun Report, a luxury research unit based in Shanghai in 1999. Over the years, Hurun Report and Hoogewerf have won numerous awards for their ground-breaking lists, among them an eye opening 2017 Best of Best (BOB) top 10 list which ranked popular luxury brands for women in China  the findings? Shanghai Tang was dead last. More tellingly, it ranked nowhere for men. As for Wenjun? It was not ranked on a list of top 10 bai jiu brands either.

In this context, Richemont and LVMHs decision to sell the underperforming Shanghai Tang and Wenjun brands appear to be backed by strong evidence that both were not performing to expectations. But does this herald the end of the European adventure into owning Chinese luxury brands? Not yet.

How Hermes differs from Richemont: Shanghai Tang vs. Shang Xia 

In 2008 Hermes created Shang Xia. Unlike Shanghai Tang or Wenjun, Shang Xia is a bona-fide Chinese brand in that it is developed in China and helmed with a Chinese team (no foreigner direct it) and based on deep Chinese cultural roots and craftsmanship, that is to say, for all intents and purposes, Shang Xia is Chinese-made, Chinese-designed and Chinese-run but with capital injections from a French company. In fact, when Hermes CEO at the time backed renowned Chinese designer Jiang Qionger to start Shang Xia, the French maison had declared that they were not only not in a rush to breakeven but had pledged an ambitious capital infusion of US$10-15 million annually. Hell, Hermes long term objectives for the brand are baked into the name itself  Shang Xia  literally means to grow up strong or Shang  (up) by putting roots down, ergo Xia  (down); and in founder/designer Jiang Qionger, Hermes found all the skillsets to incubate their revolutionary concept of fine contemporary chinese craftsmanship  her creativity extends through not just fashion but also painting, graphics, jewellery and furniture  in fact, the first Chinese designer to show her collection at a Paris furniture Salon. More tellingly, when French brands invite you to design their corporate headquarters and interiors, you know that your talents are beyond reproach. Most importantly, unlike Richemont or LVMH, Hermes is not in a hurry to maximise shareholder value  in essence, theyre taking their time to wait for the brand to literally take root and then branch out, organically.

Shang Xia is a cultural investment project  [At other brands] the life of the project is five years or 10 years, at Shang Xia the dream is 100 years, 200 years.  Jiang Qionger, Shang Xia Founder/Creative Director, speaking to Financial Times

Beyond the lofty ideals espoused by the branding, Hermes and Jiang literally took their time, seeking out genuine Chinese master artisans before they even considered their first boutique in Shanghai. In fact, in the last few years, a traditional Shanghai mansion, similar in spirit to the Hermes maison in Paris Faubourg Saint Honore has been painstakingly rebuilt and renovated to host not only Shang Xia and Hermes but also a dedicated area focused on imparting knowledge of traditional Chinese rituals (e.g. the Pu-erh tea ceremony) and customs to visitors to the maison.

As a brand, Shang Xia avoids the pitfalls of Chinese luxury brethren Shanghai Tang and Wunjun through sheer patience, unquestioning venture funding, an emphasis on genuine ancient Chinese crafts techniques and a carefully curated collection of limited products that are not for general sale, but auctioned through auction houses like Christies. While Hermes intends to break-even this year, it is too soon to say if the strategy for intentional blurring of lines between art and commerce is going to be successful, but LUXUO can say this, it is a singularly unique one, not even the most rarified of watch brands comes close. In an interview with Financial Times, Jiang states, Shang Xia is a cultural investment project  [At other brands] the life of the project is five years or 10 years, at Shang Xia the dream is 100 years, 200 years.

Truthfully, if Mao Zedongs Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution decimated Chinese culture, tradition and history from 1966 until 1976. Shang Xia  is quite possibly amongst its last defenders and preservers, even if theyre not successful commercially, Hermes is doing the world a big favour artistically and culturally  there is some great PR value in that, after all, Shang Xia is a perpetuation in that quintessential Hermes belief in craftsmanship, creativity, heritage and integrity  something which even some venerable watch brands have commoditised and automated.

Business of Luxury: Does Richemonts failure with Shanghai Tang provide an allegory for Shang Xia?

Richemonts sale of Shanghai Tang does indeed cast a pallor over the viability of Chinese luxury brands but if anything Hermes carefully paced expansion in China has not only kept the French maison profitable but also retained that aura of ultra-exclusivity, a lynch pin of luxury retail and branding. It would seem that Shang Xia is being incubated and nourished in the same vein as its adoptive parent.

Richemonts ignominious venture with Shanghai Tang was also the result of a confluence of increasingly exorbitant Hong Kong rentals (closing a flagship in 2011), over expansion and perhaps also, a misreading of a growing generation of millennials. That said, with Hermes expecting breakeven from Shang Xia this year and a jarring (Hermes not only never sells online but their website is similarly vague and opaque) eCommerce platform on Tmall that runs contrary to typical Hermes strategy, it is likely that this out-of-character decision is also the result of knee-jerk impatience of shareholders of the publicly traded company and it is anyones guess what will happen should Shang Xia fail to break even by years end.

Though no figures for the Shanghai Tang sale were released by Richemont, the brand was one of four labels that were under threat of divestiture since 2013: The other brands being Dunhill, Chloe and Azzedine Alaia. After announcement of the sale, Richemont Group shares were up 0.7%.
President Xi Jinping welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Xi received the highest Palestinian medal from Abbas. WU ZHIYI / CHINA DAILY

President voices support for a sovereign state based on borders dating to 1967

China will continue supporting the Palestinian people's pursuit of restoring their legitimate national rights, President Xi Jinping said on Tuesday as he received the highest Palestinian medal from visiting President Mahmoud Abbas.

China firmly supports the establishment of the State of Palestine, enjoying full sovereignty on the basis of 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital, Xi said while holding talks with Abbas at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Abbas is making a state visit to China through Thursday. It is his fourth state visit to China. Witnessed by the two presidents, China and Palestine signed four documents to enhance cooperation in diplomacy, economy, technology, human resources, culture and education.

It's important for all parties concerned to abide by the relevant UN resolutions, the principle of "land for peace" and the Arabic Peace Initiative, so as to achieve the comprehensive, just and durable settlement of the Palestinian issue through dialogue and negotiation, Xi said. China will continue to play its positive role to help resolve the Palestinian issue, he said.

The president called for earnest implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 calling for an immediate stop of all settlement activities in the occupied territories. China hopes that immediate measures will be taken to prevent violence against civilians, he said.

Xi said it is imperative to restart negotiations as soon as possible, speed up the political settlement of the Palestinian issue and achieve joint and durable security fundamentally. He also called for further international efforts to strengthen the synergy for peace.

China will hold a Palestinian-Israeli peace symposium this year to contribute ideas and solutions to the Palestinian issue, Xi said.

While promoting peace talks, it's also important to emphasize the issue of development, Xi said.

The friendship between China and Palestine has a long history, Xi said, adding that China is one of the first countries to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization and the State of Palestine.

"There is a Chinese saying: Ancient friendship is like true gold, the color of which will never fade despite being smelted hundreds of times," Xi told Abbas.

In the past half-century, the Chinese and Palestinian people have understood, trusted and supported each other, and they are truly good friends, partners and bothers, Xi said.

Calling Abbas "an old friend and good friend of the Chinese people", Xi spoke highly of his efforts toward Chinese-Palestinian cooperation.

Mentioning that he had sincere and friendly talks with Abbas during the Palestinian president's last visit to China in May 2013, Xi said the two sides reached important consensus at that time.

The high-level exchanges between China and Palestine have been strengthened in the past four years, Xi said, adding that both sides have enhanced political mutual trust and steadily developed cooperation in all areas.

After their talks, Abbas awarded Xi the top medal of Palestine to express gratitude for China's support of Palestine's pursuit of justice and to emphasize how highly the Chinese president is trusted and revered. Xi hosted a grand welcoming ceremony for Abbas before their talks.

Palestine congratulated China's great progresses in economic and social development, Abbas said, while calling for enhanced exchanges with China in all areas.

The Palestinian president expressed willingness to participate in the Belt and Road Initiative's construction and to expand cooperation with China in areas such as the economy, science, infrastructure, industrial parks and tourism.

Palestinian leaders speak highly of China's constructive proposals to press for a political resolution of the Palestinian issue, he said, adding that China is expected to play a bigger role in the Middle East peace process.
New Delhi: India has decided to construct 73 roads along India-China border. While answering a question at Loksabha, Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju informed that out of 73 roads of tactical significance , 46 of them are being constructed by Ministry of Defence while other 27 by Ministry of Home Affairs.

The construction of thirty roads has already been completed and the government cant achieve its goal to complete the whole project in 2012-13 itself due to climatic conditions and other technical issues.

Rijiju also stated that a high level empowered committee headed by Union Home Secretary has been authorised to overview the progression of current infrastructural projects in the border and also to expedite the road construction.
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When it comes to the cafe game, Jakarta does not lack behind in the slightest. Sure, while Johor Bahru in Malaysia and even the little city state of Singapore have are pretty strong contenders, producing amazing cafes that are visited by flocks of people, Indonesia has an absolute gem up its sleeve as well. After all, the capital of Indonesia is not just amazing museums and monuments  the food options here are absolutely impeccable as well.

But, much more than Indomie and bakso (meatball noodles), Jakartas cafe scene has been rising rapidly in popularity. There have been troves of new eateries opening up, seemingly one around the street every day, making this place a food haven. If you are looking for delicious food in an absolutely Instagrammable minimalist cafe, look no further than within this article. Weve rounded up 10 cafes that have it all: delectable dishes, good service and, of course, a wonderful backdrop for you to keep your Insta-feed going. With neutral tones that will up your game, what else are you waiting for? Scroll back up to check our gallery, and prepare to leave with a hungry stomach and an insatiable craving.

Lee Hui Bing

Read More:

10 Impressively gorgeous boutique hotels to stay at in Jakarta

Best Served Cold: Best dessert parlours in North Jakarta

From cheap to chic: The best noodles in Jakarta
Description

Now one of the most performed shows in America, Seussical is a fantastical, magical, musical extravaganza! Tony winners, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (Lucky Stiff, My Favorite Year, Once on This Island, Ragtime), have lovingly brought to life all of our favorite Dr. Seuss characters, including Horton the Elephant, The Cat in the Hat, Gertrude McFuzz, lazy Mayzie and a little boy with a big imagination  Jojo. The colorful characters transport us from the Jungle of Nool to the Circus McGurkus to the invisible world of the Whos.

The Cat in the Hat tells the story of Horton, an elephant who discovers a speck of dust that contains the Whos, including Jojo, a Who child sent off to military school for thinking too many "thinks." Horton faces a double challenge: not only must he protect the Whos from a world of naysayers and dangers, but he must guard an abandoned egg, left in his care by the irresponsible Mayzie La Bird. Although Horton faces ridicule, danger, kidnapping and a trial, the intrepid Gertrude McFuzz never loses faith in him. Ultimately, the powers of friendship, loyalty, family and community are challenged and emerge triumphant.

Seussical is fun for the whole family!

Saturday: 7/15 at 7:00 PM

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Wednesday: 7/19 at 7:00 PM

Friday: 7/21 at 7:00 PM

Saturday: 7/22 at 7:00 PM

Sunday: 7/23 at 2:00 PM

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Saturday: 7/29 at 7:00 PM

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Back by popular demand - the NYC Food Trucks will be returning to the Tanger Outlets in Deer Park on Saturday, July 22 from 11AM - 4PM. Enjoy gourmet foodie treats from a variety of New York's best food trucks serving everything from shrimp, fried mac & cheese balls, deli delights and Italian pastries! PLUS, visit the Tanger table for a special gift, while supplies last!



Check out our food trucks!

Andy's Italian Ice

ANEWYORKICANTHING

Blondie's Bake Shop

Chiddy's Cheese Steaks

Deli N Dogz

Fry Daddy

Gorilla Cheese NYC

Grill Boys

LaBella Torte

Mr. Smith's Seafood & More II

On the Scene Cuisine

Rolling Smoke Grill

Sweet Chili

Toum Food Truck

Whole Le Crepe

Yankee Doodle Dandy's
SPRINGFIELD -- Groups including Jobs with Justice, Arise for Social Justice, Neighbor to Neighbor, Out Now, Black Lives Matter 413, Progressive Democrats of Massachusetts protested expected cuts to PVTA bus service Wednesday prior to a vote.

The Pioneer Valley Transit Authority board of Advisors is set to vote at noon in Springfield on cuts to 22 bus routes that could impact 1,200 riders each day.

According to a news release from the demonstrators, the cuts fall disproportionately on low-income communities and communities of color.

Others have opposed the cuts saying people need the bus to go to work or to school, or arguing that cutting service runs counterproductive to efforts to improve employment and work force readiness.

Routes on the chopping block include ones serving the five colleges in Hampshire County and the Tiger Trolley route in South Hadley. Also set to get cut is a route from Westfield's new bus station to Holyoke Community College.

But the PVTA, which carries 12 million people a year, is looking to make up for a $1.4 million budget gap.

Gov. Charlie Baker's fiscal 2018 budget signed Monday cuts the PVTA's annual state stipend from $23.55 million to about $22.4, said Matthew Casale, a staff attorney for MASSPIRG, a public policy think tank advocating for greater expenditures on mass transit.

PVTA has $48.2 million in fiscal 2018 to maintain all services and keep up with higher costs of fuel and wages. Its FY17 budget was $47 million.

Besides the state, the PVTA relies on passenger fares, advertising, funding from cities and towns and money it earns through paratransit and transporting senior citizens.

The cuts would take effect Aug. 27 or Sept. 4.

This is a developing story which will be updated as reporting continues.
A popular hardware store owner was shot and killed on Tremont Street in Boston Tuesday afternoon. Three suspects were tracked down and arrested in connection to what Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans called "a brazen daytime shooting of a good, well-respected man doing the right thing."

Boston Police responded to a call around 4 p.m. for a person shot at 1562 Tremont St., in Boston's Mission Hill neighborhood. Multiple reports say the victim was 58-year-old victim Andres Cruz, owner of AC Hardware and a popular figure to local residents.

Cruz was shot at the address of his shop after three men tried to rob him, according to police. AC Hardware is located among several other businesses on Tremont Street, just two blocks from the bustling student area on Longwood Avenue where several Boston colleges intersect.

Cruz was transported to a local area hospital before being pronounced dead, according to Boston Police. Officers chased the suspects' van until they were forced to flee on foot around Cedar and Lambert Streets, where officers caught and arrested them. The suspects were identified by Boston Police as Christian Soto-Olivero, 21, of Mattapan, Jerome D. Hobson, 38, of Dorchester, and Shawn Redden, 26, of Brockton.

"Allegedly we have three real punks here who came into this neighborhood and brought a lot of pain and suffering to this community," Boston Mayor Marty Walsh told reporters at the scene of the shooting.

The three suspects will be arraigned in Roxbury District Court on Wednesday. They each face charges of first-degree murder as well as firearm-related charges.
By Kristin LaFratta, MassLive

Andres Cruz was more than a business owner in Boston's Mission Hill neighborhood. He was a permanent fixture, offering old-school values in one of the city's changing urban districts.

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Carmen Pola, 78, leads a small group of neighbors in prayer next to a vigil for Andres Cruz, who was shot at his hardware store in Mission Hill

"There are two figures who run this neighborhood. Father John Lavin and him," Seventy-eight-year-old Carmen Pola said, referring to her longtime friend Cruz.

Standing in front of a vigil, Pola warmly recalled how Cruz grew tomatoes and oregano in a garden behind his store, AC Hardware, on Tremont Street. Each summer he'd divvy up his small harvest and freely give away the fresh food to others in the neighborhood  such as Ms. Pola.

"I love him dearly," Pola said shortly before leading the small group of neighbors, friends and onlookers in prayer. "He took care of us...whatever we needed."

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A signed paint brush pays tribute to Andres Cruz

Cruz, 58, was shot and killed on Tuesday during an attempted robbery at his hardware store. Police say Cruz put up a fight against the attackers, but a bullet ultimately robbed the store owner of his life. Three suspects have been arrested and arraigned in connection to the shocking murder. Two suspects were held without bail on Wednesday, while a third suspect is recovering at Boston Medical Center. He is scheduled to be arraigned at a later date.

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Those who knew him say Cruz was a hardworking and friendly man who was always happy to help a neighbor out.

"There's so much new now...this used to be a real family neighborhood," said Mary Burns. "But he was one of the familiar, old faces. Smiling, old faces."

Burns, a retired Brigham and Women's nurse, says she has lived in the area for more than 40 years. Her husband, Seth Burns, often had coffee dates with Cruz and other local workers.

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Lou-Anne Kroutil, of Jamaica Plain, takes a photo of the vigil. Kroutil said she would visit the neighborhood when she needed something fixed, saying that Cruz was "always so helpful."

Neighbors and former customers of the store paid tribute to Cruz on Wednesday at a small vigil in front of AC Hardware. People trickled by the array of candles, flowers, newspaper clippings and a framed photo of the beloved community member.

Almost every person had some story about how Cruz had been so helpful, whether it be explaining a light repair, making a free home visit or giving people time to pay him back later.

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Mash Abdirahman, owner of Butterfly Coffee next to Roxbury Crossing, remembered a time when he went to AC Hardware to retrieve new keys, but had forgotten his wallet.

"[Cruz] said, 'bring it when you're ready...later, tomorrow, whenever,'" Abdirahman said, adding that Cruz was a decent guy, "and a hard-working person, too."

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Jose Hernandez (left) and friend Frankie hold up a Puerto Rican flag in front of AC Hardware. The flag honors shooting victim Andres Cruz, who they say had a strong impact on the Puerto Rican community in Mission Hill.

Cruz's vibrant, kind personality also left an impact on the neighborhood's Puerto Rican community. Local resident Jose Hernandez and a friend who preferred not to be named stopped by the vigil with a Puerto Rican flag, which they lifted in front of the store, creating a backdrop to the colorful display on Tremont Street.

"For us Hispanics, he made us very proud," said Hernandez's friend, recalling when Mayor Marty Walsh visited AC Hardware less than a month ago, when Cruz received a formal "Main Streets Business of the Year" award from the city of Boston. Fellow members of the community had nominated AC Hardware to win the award.

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Mayor Marty Walsh returned to the storefront on Tuesday under vastly different circumstances.

"Allegedly, we have three punks here who came into this neighborhood and brought a lot of pain and suffering," Walsh told reporters at the crime scene.

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Mission Hill resident Charmeine Cudjoe mourns the loss of Andres Cruz, a beloved community member and owner of AC Hardware on Tremont Street. "I cannot understand," Cudjoe said with tears in her eyes.

That pain and suffering was visible on the faces of some affectionate neighbors Wednesday. Between sobs, local resident Charmeine Cudjoe said she could not understand how someone would hurt Cruz.

"Everybody loved him," Cudjoe cried.
When would-be robbers arrived in his Boston hardware store Tuesday afternoon, Andres Cruz stood his ground.

"He didn't go down easily," Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans told the Boston Herald. "He went down fighting."

Cruz, the owner of AC Hardware on Tremont Street in Boston's Mission Hill neighborhood, was fatally shot Tuesday afternoon.

Boston police were called to the store shortly after 4 p.m. where they found Cruz. Three suspects were taken into custody within 10 minutes of police arriving on scene.

"They went in to rob the hardware store, and in the process there was a struggle -- a violent struggle -- and unfortunately he was shot," Evans told the Herald. "The suspected robbers were injured by him in their violent struggle, and that's why they're in the hospital."

Jerome Hobson, 39, of Dorchester and Shawn Redden, 26, of Brockton, and Christian Soto-Olivero, 21, of Mattapan were arrested on murder and firearms charges in connection with Cruz's death. Two of the men sustained injuries Tuesday and Soto-Olivero was taken to Boston Medical Center for treatment where he remained hospitalized Wednesday morning.

Cruz opened the hardware store after the one that previously stood in its place closed. He's remembered fondly in the neighborhood as someone who helped his neighbors whenever possible, lending tools, offering advice.

AC Hardware was chosen by members of the community as the 2017 Mission Hill Main Streets Business of the Year, an honor Cruz received weeks before his death.
Andres Cruz received his crowning achievement in June. His store, AC Hardware, in Boston's Mission Hill neighborhood was named the 2017 Business of the Year.

"It was his dream to have that store," State Rep. Jeffrey Sanchez told the Boston Herald, of Cruz. "He used to work for the guys who owned True Value and when True Value shut down he took his pennies and started that hardware store."

Less than a month after the award ceremony, Cruz was fatally shot in what Boston police are calling a botched robbery attempt at the store.

Where once Cruz was seen sweeping the sidewalk outside his store on Tremont Street, a barrier with police tape has been set up. A banner honoring his store as the "2017 Mission Hill Main Streets Business of the Year" hangs on Tremont, featuring a smiling photo of Cruz. Following his death, a memorial has been created for Cruz outside the store, featuring flowers and photos of the small business owner.

The hardware store was chosen as business of the year by fellow by members of the community.

"He's someone that all of us grew up with in this community. He helped people. He was a quiet business owner," Sanchez told the Boston Herald. " Every year when I do my pig roast he'd let me borrow his machete. I'd go over there when I needed things for the house. I'm surprised he was by himself because there was always somebody there hanging out with him because he was a nice guy to be around. It's devastating."
Two suspects in the violent death of a Boston store owner were ordered held without bail Wednesday.

Andres Cruz was fatally shot around 4 p.m. Tuesday inside his Mission Hill store, AC Hardware, in what Boston police believe was a botched robbery attempt.

Three men were taken into custody 10 minutes after police arrived on scene Tuesday.

Jerome Hobson, 39, of Dorchester, Shawn Redden, 26, of Brockton, and Christian Soto-Olivero, 21, of Mattapan were arrested on murder and firearms charges in connection with Cruz's death.

Cruz is believed to have fought his attackers, injuring them before he was fatally shot.

Hobson and Redden were arraigned in West Roxbury Municipal Court Wednesday. Not guilty pleas were entered on their behalf. Soto-Olivero remains at Boston Medical Center. His arraignment will be held at a later date, the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office said.

Friends and family of Cruz attended the arraignment, fighting back tears as the assistant district attorney shared details of Cruz's final moments.

"We have three punks here who came into this neighborhood and brought a lot of pain and suffering," said Mayor Marty Walsh during a press conference alongside police. "We need to stop making excuses for our guns. We need everyone to step (up) and help us here. Enough is enough."
The 21-year-old woman who was seriously hurt in Boston when a chimney collapsed on her earlier this month may never walk again, her family said.

Erin Field of Maine was resting in a hammock on the roof of her brother's apartment in the North End when the chimney cracked and landed on her. The hammock was attached to the chimney on one side and a wall on the other side.

"She luckily had her boyfriend, Jack with her who lifted the chimney off of her and called her brother Todd who called 911 and held her still and calm until the rescue team came," Field's family wrote in a GoFundMe.com page.

Field was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital. She has injuries to her ribs, lungs and c6 vertebrae.

"She has lost all feeling in her legs, and most feeling in her arms," her family wrote. "With this type of injury it is very rare that Erin will be able to have use of her legs again. Of course we are staying as positive as we can, but, for lack of a better term, it would be a miracle if she can walk again."

Field remains in the intensive care unit and will be there for roughly three more weeks before she is brought to a rehabilitation center. She will be at the center for at least two months.

The young woman will have to regain the use of her arms and hands. Field has one surgery on her spine. A metal rod that goes to her lower neck to her mid-back is being used to stabilize her.

Another surgery for a torn artery in her shoulder is needed. Field's family said she may not regain the use of her fingers.

Field was heading into her senior year at Goucher College in Maryland where she majored in English and planned on attending law school.

The Gofundme.com page has raised just over $46,000 as of Wednesday.
SOUTH HADLEY -- Curiosity about a proposal to stimulate economic development near the former Big Y plaza brought a big crowd to a recent public forum.

The initiative targets an approximately 14-acre plot on Newton and Lyman streets, that includes the plaza, for both commercial and residential development. The proposal, according to a town document released prior to the July 11 meeting, would create the "Newton Street/Lyman Street Smart Growth District."

Separate residential and business zoning districts currently govern land use in that area. Town officials hope to adopt a regulation known as 40R, which refers to a chapter of Massachusetts general laws that allows greater flexibility to direct land use.

The new owners of the plaza have begun demolition and plan to build a larger Rocky's Ace Hardware store. One of the owners, Peter Picknelly, said this week that he and his partners are still working on development plans for the site. They are talking with South Hadley officials about the possibility of locating some municipal offices there as well, he said.

Approval of the zoning change would require state review and adoption by Town Meeting.

Local officials say adoption of 40R would increase tax revenue, improve stewardship of the environment by better management of storm runoff and energy efficiency, encourage economic development, and improve pedestrian access.

"We didn't expect this big a crowd," Town Administrator Michael Sullivan said at the start of the July 11 meeting, which was broadcast on the municipality's public access TV station. Sullivan served as moderator for the public hearing.

Preliminary Public Hearing on a Proposed Newton Street/Lyman Street Smart Growth Zoning Overlay District from SHCTV15 on Vimeo.

"I gather most of you are familiar with what is being suggested, to some degree," Sullivan said, when the hearing opened.

"No," attendees responded to Sullivan. "That's why we're here," a member of the audience said.

The Pioneer Valley Planning Commission is assisting the town's planning director, Richard Harris, with the proposal. Harris and the PVPC's Larry Smith attended last week's meeting.

Harris said that when the town's most recent master plan was promulgated in 2010, mention of 40R was not included for development of the Newton Street area, but that research since then shows that 40R would be a good tool to use.

"We didn't mention 40R in the master plan," Harris said, "because at the time we didn't think 40R -- I didn't think 40R was even appropriate for the town, but we learned a lot more about 40R after that." He called 40R "a viable tool ... to achieve some of our housing goals."

Smith said among the reasons 40R became law in 2004 was to "address what is perceived as a housing shortage in the state" while also encouraging commercial development initiatives.

Smith said Harris approached him in 2013 for guidance on creating four "smart growth" 40R districts in South Hadley -- one each in the Falls village, the Lyman and Newton street area, the area surrounding the new Big Y at 44 Willimansett St., and surrounding the Village Commons near Mount Holyoke College.

Town adopted a 40R district in the Falls three yeas ago, Smith said.

Several public hearings on the Newton Street proposal will be scheduled prior to when the Planning Board determines whether to put a zoning bylaw amendment before Town Meeting for consideration. Sullivan said the town will continue to accept public comment on the idea, and that in addition to giving testimony at meetings, individuals can email him at msullivan@southhadleyma.gov.

According to the state Department of Housing and Economic Development, "Chapter 40R seeks to substantially increase the supply of housing and decrease its cost, by increasing the amount of land zoned for dense housing. It targets the shortfall in housing for low- and moderate-income households, by requiring the inclusion of affordable units in most private projects."

The law "encourages communities to create dense residential or mixed-use smart growth zoning districts, including a high percentage of affordable housing units, to be located near transit stations, in areas of concentrated development such as existing city and town centers, and in other highly suitable locations."

The Republican's Jim Kinney contributed to this report.
If a Massachusetts county sheriff wants to send inmates beyond the Bay State's borders, he would have to get sign-off from the state's top public safety officials and lay out a budget for the venture, under a bill lawmakers are weighing at the Statehouse.

Testimony is expected Wednesday on the bill, which the sponsor acknowledges was prompted by Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson's offer to deploy inmates to the US-Mexico border so they could help build President Donald Trump's proposed wall.

Hodgson is seeking to send inmates who are serving short-term sentences for "minor" offenses 2,000 miles away, the sponsor of the bill, state Sen. Michael Barrett, said Wednesday.

"County sheriffs don't spend their own money when they send their inmates to and fro outside of state borders," he said. "They are spending state appropriations. So of course there has to be state oversight."

"He's looking for publicity," Barrett continued. "This is an item that makes a big splash and he's not even playing with his own money."

Hodgson was not immediately available for comment. Earlier this year, he told the State House News Service, "We've done more with less ever since I've been in office, so we don't really need the oversight of a senator or someone else to tell us that we can't help other communities and other states when they're in times of need."

Barrett's bill has an exception for emergencies, like sending inmates to Rhode Island to help repair a sea wall after a hurricane.

"The idea of sending them down to the Mexican border to advance Mr. Trump's political purposes at a time these individuals are serving relatively minor sentences and ideally receiving rehab services is just crazy," Barrett said. "But it's real. The wall is real and Sheriff Hodgson's intentions are genuine.

The bill calls for the governor's office and the Legislature to receive 90-day notice in advance. The sheriff would also be required to submit a written plan with a budget and an explanation of how these inmates are going to receive transportation, housing, health care and maybe some job training.

"Let's give him his time on the soap box and make him come forward with a very specific and thoughtful approach," Barrett said.

The bill doesn't prohibit inmates getting sent outside of Massachusetts.

Another bill, filed by a state representative from New Bedford, does seek to prevent it from happening. The bill cleared the Massachusetts House in May.
UPDATE, 4:57 p.m.: Jurors went home for the day without reaching a verdict. Deliberations will resume on Thursday.

SPRINGFIELD -- Defense lawyer Timothy Bradl told jurors Wednesday the prosecution has not met its burden of proving the murder charge against Jorge Concepcion-Pesquera.

"It just doesn't come together for the commonwealth. It just doesn't work," Bradl told jurors in his closing argument. He said it is a "classic reasonable doubt case."

Assistant District Attorney Eduardo Velazquez, acknowledging that testimony from many of the prosecution witnesses was different from their police statements, said he has proven the case against Concepcion-Pesquera.

Concepcion-Pesquera, 22, of Springfield, is on trial for murder for the death of Larry Santiago Jr., 26, who was shot while sitting in his SUV at 12:44 a.m. March 13, 2016, outside Open Door Cafe in Ludlow.

Velazquez said many of the people who were at the bar that night, and who were called by the prosecution as witnesses, were related to the defendant and may have had motive to be biased in their testimony.

Bradl told jurors that when they start to sift through the evidence they will find reasonable doubt.

"You won't have what the judge will tell you is an abiding conviction to a moral certainty that the charge is true," he said.

"I suggest the witness testimony by and large is incredibly unreliable," Bradl said. "We have people that are turning the truth on and off like a faucet to suit their own needs at a particular time."

He said there has been no suggested motive why Concepcion-Pesquera would shoot Santiago, since the two men were reportedly friends.

Velazquez said no one claimed to have seen the shooting. The prosecutor said the best witness in the case is video, which he called "the one witness in this case that was clearly not capable of lying to you."

Surveillance video from various cameras inside and outside the bar has been played for the jury and they will have that in the jury room to view again during deliberations.

Velazquez said jurors will have to decide if it is Concepcion-Pesquera who is shown in the video at the car in which Santiago was shot and running from the scene.

"The shooter ran. Consider the sneakers, consider the pants, consider the jacket, consider the hairstyle, consider the complexion of the person who ran," he said.

Video from earlier showed Concepcion-Pesquera entering the bar and showed the clothes he was wearing, Velazquez said.

Velazquez said there were drugs in Santiago's SUV as well as cash, but this is not a drug case. He said it may simply be about someone feeling disrespected "to the point where they lost it and shot somebody else to death."

As in many murder trials, family members of the victim are on one side of the courtroom and family members of the defendant are on the other side across the aisle.

Many of the Ludlow police officers and state police detectives who worked on the case came into the courtroom to listen to closing arguments, as did Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni.
A 37-year-old man plummeted down a previously covered abandoned well in his backyard early Wednesday morning in Cohasset, prompting dozens of firefighters to respond, according to

.

The man fell up to 15 feet and injured his back and legs. His fall occurred at 1:20 a.m. at 25 Ripley Rd.

At one point during the rescue, the firefighters needed to pump fresh air into the hole to continue their efforts, say police.

Once removed, the victim, who was conscious, was flown by helicopter to a Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

According to police, somebody had removed the cover off the 18-inch well, causing the incident.
SPRINGFIELD -- A married couple and purported former CEOs behind a company called Sinful Innocence pleaded guilty to criminal charges in U.S. District Court Wednesday in connection with running a prostitution ring and recruiting women from other states.

Milford and Tiana Lewis, newlyweds from Springfield, were charged with human trafficking after their arrests in the parking lot of a local strip club in late 2015.

Investigators said the couple advertised the business online as a lucrative opportunity for women interested in "modeling, stripping and porn" but later forced them into prostitution for low pay or no pay, in some instances.

They struck a plea deal for reduced sentences with prosecutors and escaped 15-year mandatory minimum prison sentences.

This is a developing story that will be updated with further reporting.
The Horse Mountain ridge forms an iconic landscape element separating the towns of Williamsburg and Hatfield.

Now 128 acres of the ecologically diverse forest land will be preserved forever, serving recreation, wildlife habitat, and resiliency in the face of climate change.

Over the course of many months, Kestrel Land Trust worked with the two communities, secured grants, and helped coordinate a complicated process. The towns now own the land, with 34 acres in Williamsburg and 94 acres in Hatfield.

Former landowner Robert Cole had carefully stewarded the property for decades, and sold at a good price to ensure its preservation, said Kat Deely, a conservation manager with Kestrel. Deely said a realtor working with Cole contacted the land trust.

The area is critical for large animals -- such as black bear and bobcat -- that require wide ranges. The Horse Mountain property is a piece of the puzzle potentially connecting hundreds of acres of contiguous forest in Western Massachusetts.

There's hope the new area will eventually be directly linked to the 600-acre Terry Blunt Conservation Area in Hatfield, and to hundreds of preserved acres in Northampton near Fitzgerald Lake and Broad Brook. Other nearby land is owned by the Northampton Water Department and Massachusetts Audubon Society. A bit to the north lies the Conway State Forest, with its 1750-plus acres.

Plans are afoot to develop better public access for hiking on Horse Mountain, said Deely.

The diverse terrain, combined with its dramatic change in elevation, support species of plants and animals that might need to shift their homes due to climate change, said Deely. Parts of the area host endangered species, and are recognized by the state's Natural Heritage Program. The land also provides critical wildlife corridors.

This project was supported by $163,000 in Massachusetts LAND grants to Williamsburg and Hatfield; $40,000 from Hatfield's Community Preservation fund, $45,000 from the Amelia Peabody Foundation, and $40,300 from the Open Space Institute's Resilient Landscapes Initiative, made possible with a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

"As we look to the future, land conservation is a critical tool in the fight against climate change," said Peter Howell of the Open Space Institute.

Deely praised officials in Hatfield and Williamsburg, members of the Cole family, and the grant partners, saying everyone pulled together to realize a complicated project.

The Amherst-based Kestrel Land Trust, founded in 1970, has helped preserve more than 25,000 acres of land in the region.

Mary Serreze can be reached at mserreze@gmail.com
SPRINGFIELD -- The state's highest court has denied an appeal for a new trial by Caius Veiovis, convicted of three counts of murder in the grisly 2011 killings and dismemberment of three men in Berkshire County.

The decision says the state Supreme Judicial Court affirms the convictions and conclude that the defendant is not entitled to relief under the law.

The decision listed Veiovis' four primary claims on appeal:

"(1) that the evidence of his knowing participation in these crimes was insufficient as a matter of law to support his convictions; (2) that the judge abused his discretion in admitting evidence of other acts the probative value of which was outweighed by the risk of unfair prejudice; (3) that the judge abused his discretion in admitting in evidence a statement by the defendant regarding the scars on his right arm; and (4) that the prosecutor presented facts in closing argument that were not supported by the evidence at trial."

In his 2014 trial 2014 before Judge C. Jeffrey Kinder, the jury found Veiovis guilty of first-degree murder in the 2011 killings of three Pittsfield men: David Glasser, Edward Frampton and Robert Chadwell.

After the verdicts were read, Veiovis yelled at members of the jury as they were led from the courtroom: "I'll see you all in hell, remember that, every f[..]ing one of you. I'll see you all in hell."

Veiovis was the last of three defendants convicted in the murders. Two co-defendants, Adam Lee Hall and David Chalue, were also convicted of murder at trials earlier in 2014.

Jurors deliberated for about 37 hours over six days before delivering the verdicts convicting Veiovis. He was also found guilty of three counts of kidnapping and three counts of intimidation of a witness.

All three men are now serving life sentences without the possibility of parole.

In August 2011, weeks before he was to testify against Hall in an assault case, Glasser and his roommate, Frampton, and their friend Chadwell disappeared. Their dismembered bodies were found in Becket 10 days later.

Prosecutors said Hall, 37, of Peru; Chalue, 47, of North Adams, and Veiovis, 34, of Pittsfield, kidnapped the three victims from Frampton's Pittsfield home sometime in the early hours of Aug. 28, 2011, and fatally shot them.

The cases were moved to Hampden Superior Court by Kinder after defense lawyers said extensive publicity in Berkshire County would prevent a fair jury from being selected.

This is a developing story that will be updated after further reporting.
MANSFIELD - The man who died in a fiery crash in Mansfield earlier this month has been identified as 24-year-old Rhode Island man Omar Barrientos, according to Massachusetts State Police.

Barrientos was from Providence, police said in a statement Wednesday.

He was killed shortly after his pickup truck slammed into a tractor-trailer on Interstate 95 in Mansfield on July 15.

At the time of the collision the tractor trailer had been parked in the breakdown lane of the highway with a flat tire; Barrientos' vehicle was traveling at a high rate of speed in the breakdown lane when it struck the trailer from behind, according to police.

Immediately after the crash the Rhode Island man's truck caught fire.

Barrientos was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.

The driver of the tractor-trailer, a 56-year-old Providence, Rhode Island man, sustained minor injuries in the crash, but refused immediate medical treatment, according to state police.

The cause of the crash and the circumstances surrounding it are still being investigated, State Police said.

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Barrientos was from New Hampshire.
NEWARK, N.J. - New Jersey state police on Monday arrested a man wanted in connection to a fatal stabbing at a home in Milford, Massachusetts.

Jusselo Dias Dos Reis, 44, appeared in court Tuesday on charges that he is a fugitive from justice. The Worcester County District Attorney's Office said prosecutors will work to get him returned to Massachusetts.

Reis was wanted on a warrant issued out of Milford District Court charging him with aggravated assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. Massachusetts State Police alerted their New Jersey counterparts that Reis could be in the state.

"I want to thank the New Jersey State Police, particularly the NJSP Fugitive Unit, for capturing the suspect," Worcester D.A. Joseph Early said in a statement. "This arrest is a textbook example of cooperation in law enforcement that reaches across state lines."

The Department of Homeland Security warned authorities that Reis was in the U.S. illegally, and had entered "without inspection."

The DA's office said Brazil is believed to be his country of origin. There was concern he would return there if he was not captured.

State and Milford police are investigating after the body of a man was discovered inside a 42 North Bow St. apartment Sunday morning. The victim's name has not been released.
AMHERST -- Eight days before the start of the fiscal year, officials with the Amherst-Pelham Regional School District found out four students from Pelham had enrolled at the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School last year -- and would again this year.

The revelation means a surprise cost to the district of $67,000 for the new fiscal year. The unplanned expense represents 4 percent of the Pelham school's $1.675 million budget.

And despite the fact that it was the charter school's reporting error, the burden falls to Pelham -- a "virtually insurmountable financial hurdle for our school and our town," according to a letter that will be sent to the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Pelham School Committee members voted Wednesday to send the letter to the state board, seeking financial relief.

Richard Alcorn, the charter school's executive director, said the staff person who handles residency data is on vacation.

He said he needs to find out what information parents submitted to the school, and said he doesn't know that the error was necessarily the school's fault. He takes issue with the state laying blame with the school.

After learning about the error June 22, district Finance Director Sean Mangano wrote to the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education for clarification since the district had no records of the enrollments.

A staff member wrote that two students are siblings who spend half their time in Pelham, meaning they effectively count as one student. The other two students were incorrectly identified by the charter school as living in another town.

Only July 5, Interim Superintendent Michael Morris wrote to the state that the news "is particularly unjust given the magnitude of the financial impact and receipt of the notice after the budget had already been passed and contracts issued."

Morris continued: "The district's ability to manage this cost was severely limited by these factors."

According to a timeline of events Morris provided the Pelham School Committee, an assistant commissioner responded: "We fully appreciate the difficulty that managing such a change may pose, though changes of this nature can really occur at anytime for a multitude of reasons (e.g. a change in student residency mid-year, a new enrollment at the charter school that occurs after Oct. 1, etc.) --whether due to a reporting error or not -- and we do not have authority to provide reimbursement beyond what is provided for by law."

In the timeline, Morris said the logic is "difficult to accept." He argued that the charter school reimbursement law had not been followed since 2012 -- leading to underpayments to the Amherst, Pelham and Amherst-Pelham Regional School Districts over the past four years in excess of $900,000.

"It appears that the state believes it has the flexibility to considerably underfund the law as it relates to traditional public school districts, but not the flexibility to rectify data/reporting mistakes when they disproportionately affect a traditional school district like Pelham," Morris wrote.

According to the letter drafted by Pelham Elementary School Committee chairwoman Cara Castenson, "We write to respectfully request that you provide financial relief to Pelham Elementary School from the unforeseen and unbudgeted charter school tuition expense... that was only recently presented to us due to a reporting error by the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School."

They are asking that the students be listed as enrolled in 2018, not 2017.

According to the letter, also signed by three other committee members, funding is difficult even with advance notice. But, "doing so less than two weeks before the start of the fiscal year, long after the FY2018 budget has been passed and teacher contracts signed, is a virtually insurmountable financial hurdle for our school and our town."

The cost to send three full-time-equivalent students to the charter school is $22,477 each, Mangano said, or $67,431.

The Amherst-Pelham districts receives $5,000 when a student comes here to study.

"The impact of the charter school funding formula cannot be overstated in a small-school setting," Castenson said.

In an email, state education department spokeswoman Jacqueline Reiss said mistake belonged to the charter school. She added that the state plans to increase "... efforts to ensure that charter schools receive notice and further training regarding the importance of submitting correct residency information during the October 1 data collection."

She added: "Please note, however, that this situation can arise even when no error is made: Families do move in the course of a year, and students might enroll in a charter school after October 1."

The state does not have authority to reimburse the district "beyond what is provided for by law," she wrotel.

The Pelham Elementary School Parent Teacher Organization, meanwhile, is also asking state Sen. Stanley Rosenberg for help in dealing with the funding gap.

In a letter the organization argued the state has "not fully funded charter school reimbursements for sending districts."

The letter cited numbers from the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center showing that reimbursements were underfunded by $35.3 million in fiscal 2015 and $47.1 million in 2016.

The Amherst-Pelham district, meanwhile, doesn't know where the money will come from and plans to attend the next state board of education meeting to address issues raised in the letter.

Morris said he wants "to see how the advocacy" on the district's behalf plays out.

BOE Letter (Signed) by ledermand on Scribd
Reports out of New York are that WWE executive Shane McMahan, the son of WWE founder Vince McMahon and Small Business Administration head Linda McMahan, escaped injury Wednesday morning when his helicopter had to make a forced water landing in the ocean off Long Island.

According to WABC Eyewitness News 7 in New York, a helicopter carrying McMahon developed problems and the pilot was forced to make a landing in the waters off Gilco Beach at around 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.

The station cites FAA officials saying the helicoper, a Robinson R-44, landed on its pontoon skids and remained afloat. Neither McMahon or pilot Mario Regtien were injured.

Regtien is quoted saying "We heard some noise, and it became very clear to me that I could no longer continue flying the helicopter. So I decided to do an auto-rotation landing in the water."

The helicopter was cruising at around 1,400 feet when it experienced trouble, he said.

McMahon tweeted a short time later thanking "the man upstairs for looking out this morning & thanks to pilot Mario, Suffolk Co. Marine Bureau & Fire Island Coast Guard."

I'd like to thank the man upstairs for looking out this morning & thanks to pilot Mario, Suffolk Co. Marine Bureau & Fire Island Coast Guard  Shane McMahon (@shanemcmahon) July 19, 2017

After the helicopter landed, several emergency response vessels went out to rescue McMahon and Regtien.

McMahon had chartered the helicopter to take him from New York City to the family's home in Westhampton on Long Island.
The husband of the emergency room nurse Elise Wilson, who nearly died from a knife attack inside Southbridge's Harrington Hospital more than a month ago, pleaded with Statehouse lawmakers to pass workplace safety legislation.

An emotional Clifton Wilson said his wife, who has been a nurse for 45 years, had 11 stab wounds after an angry patient repeatedly knifed her and severed an artery on June 14.

The young man allegedly sat in the parking lot sharpening his knife for 20 minutes before entering the emergency room, Clifton Wilson told lawmakers. Conor O'Regan, 24, is accused of the attack.

After receiving a call informing him of the attack, Clifton Wilson said he sped to UMass Memorial, where a helicopter was taking his wife.

"It was flesh and blood everywhere," he told lawmakers, recalling the moment when they moved her from the helicopter to the hospital. "I said to myself, she's not going to make it. She's just not going to make it."

Eight and a half hours of surgery later, the surgeons at UMass Memorial had saved her life.

Clifton Wilson said the trauma surgeon at UMass told him the tourniquet applied to his wife at Harrington Hospital was "absolutely textbook and that that's what saved her life."

"She bled out three times and almost died," Clifton Wilson continued.

Clifton Wilson on Wednesday appeared before the Legislature's Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, asking lawmakers to pass a bill calling for health care employers like Harrington Hospital to develop, implement and review employee safety measures on an annual basis.

Since the knife attack, the bill has been dubbed "Elise's Law."

Nurses aren't "expecting to encounter violence but they do, every single day of the week," Clifton Wilson said. "They are cursed, spit upon, bitten, punched, kicked, and yes, stabbed."

Directly addressing members of the committee, he added, "You're the ones who can save them."

Since the attack, Harrington Hospital has beefed up security, and now has a metal detector, he said. They've also hired a Southbridge police officer.

"So it can be done," Clifton Wilson said.

A "simple wand-ing" by a security officer would have detected knife and saved his wife's life that day, according to Wilson.

The legislation, pushed by the Massachusetts Nurses Association, was first introduced in 2009 and currently has 128 co-sponsors in the House and Senate, according to state Rep. Denise Garlick, who is a nurse. She said health care employers note that they have safety programs, but she argued they aren't updated regularly enough.

Dr. Mark Kenton, doctor at Mercy Medical Center, also testified in support of the bill and offered to put lawmakers in scrubs for a tour of the hospital.

Kenton said he could show them what can happen when a patient is given the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, naloxone, also known as Narcan. The patient can wake up "swinging," according to Kenton.

"We're asking you to protect us," Kenton said.
SPRINGFIELD -- Hey, ease up on that gas pedal.



That is the warning from city officials after the City Council voted Monday night to reduce the speed limit in Springfield from 30 miles per hour to 25 miles per hour on residential streets that have no posted speed limits.



"The hope is to make neighborhoods a little bit safer by reducing the speeding problem," Council President Orlando Ramos said Wednesday. "In response to a lot of complaints we're getting from residents about speeding in their neighborhoods, we felt it was the appropriate thing to do."



A state law allows cities and towns across Massachusetts to adopt the new reduced speed limit on residential streets with no speed limit signs, targeting thickly settled areas and business districts, but not state highways.



The law does not affect streets already having a posted speed limit such as wider streets in open areas with higher speed limits, said Christopher Cignoli, the city's director of the Department of Public Works.



Many residents complain about speeding cars in their neighborhoods and ask for lower speed limits. The process to lower the speed limit involves steps including a traffic study, Cignoli said. With the council vote, there is a blanket reduction for unposted streets that reduces the limit from 30 to 25 miles per hour, he said.



Cignoli estimated that 65-75 percent of streets in Springfield do not have speed limit signs and will be affected by the law. The Springfield Traffic Commission also supported the change in advance of the council vote.



"If we can get vehicles to slow down on many roads, they become safer," Cignoli said. "This allows us to kind of in a blanket way through the city to bring down the speed."



However, the city wants to get the word out about the new law before ticketing at the new speed limit level, Cignoli said. That includes a plan to put signs at some of the outer limits of the city to warn motorists that enforcement is coming in Springfield, he said.



Cities such as Boston and Cambridge have adopted the lower speed limit, and Worcester is also considering it, Cignoli said.



In Springfield, the City Council also adopted a speed limit amendment that allows the city to post special safety zones of 20 miles per hour in addition to school zones, Cignoli said. The city, in consultation with hospitals and others, can establish 20-mile-per-hour zones outside hospitals, day care centers, senior centers and other locations involving buy pedestrian traffic, similar to the existing law for school zones, he said.



The statute calls for an engineering study in conjunction with the special 20-mile-per-hour zones.




By GREG JAFFE and ADAM ENTOUS

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump has decided to end the CIA's covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.

The program was a central plank of a policy begun by the Obama administration in 2013 to put pressure on Assad to step aside, but even its backers have questioned its efficacy since Russia deployed forces in Syria two years later.

Officials said the phasing out of the secret program reflects Trump's interest in finding ways to work with Russia, which saw the anti-Assad program as an assault on its interests. The shuttering of the program is also an acknowledgment of Washington's limited leverage and desire to remove Assad from power.

Just three months ago, after the United States accused Assad of using chemical weapons, Trump launched retaliatory airstrikes against a Syrian air base. At the time, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, said that "in no way do we see peace in that area with Assad at the head of the Syrian government."

Officials said Trump made the decision to scrap the CIA program nearly a month ago, after an Oval Office meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser H.R. McMaster ahead of a July 7 meeting in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Spokesmen for the National Security Council and the CIA declined to comment.

After the Trump-Putin meeting, the United States and Russia announced an agreement to back a new cease-fire in southwest Syria, along the Jordanian border, where many of the CIA-backed rebels have long operated. Trump described the limited cease-fire deal as one of the benefits of a constructive working relationship with Moscow.

The move to end the secret program to arm the anti-Assad rebels was not a condition of the cease-fire negotiations, which were already well underway, said U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the secret program.

Trump's dealings with Russia have been under heavy scrutiny because of the investigations into the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 election. The decision on the CIA-backed rebels will be welcomed by Moscow, which focused its firepower on those fighters after it intervened in Syria in 2015.

Some current and former officials who support the program cast the move as a major concession.

"This is a momentous decision," said a current official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a covert program. "Putin won in Syria."

The decision will not affect a separate Pentagon-led effort to work with U.S.-backed Syrian rebels fighting the Islamic State. And the CIA-backed rebels were part of the larger moderate opposition.

Some analysts said the decision was likely to empower more radical groups inside Syria and damage the credibility of the United States.

"We are falling into a Russian trap," said Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, who focuses on the Syrian resistance. "We are making the moderate resistance more and more vulnerable. . . . We are really cutting them off at the neck."

Others said it was recognition of Assad's entrenched position in Syria.

"It's probably a nod to reality," said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama administration official and director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

U.S. intelligence officials say battlefield gains by rebels in 2015 prompted Russia's direct military intervention on the side of the Assad regime. Some U.S. officials and their allies in the region urged President Barack Obama to respond by providing the rebels with advanced antiaircraft weapons so they could better defend themselves. But Obama balked, citing concerns about the United States getting pulled into a conflict with Russia.

Senior U.S. officials said that the covert program would be phased out over a period of months. It is also possible that some of the support could be redirected to other missions, such as fighting the Islamic State or making sure that the rebels can still defend themselves from attacks.

"This is a force that we can't afford to completely abandon," Goldenberg said. "If they are ending the aid to the rebels altogether, then that is a huge strategic mistake."

U.S. officials said the decision had the backing of Jordan, where some of the rebels were trained, and appeared to be part of a larger Trump administration strategy to focus on negotiating limited cease-fire deals with the Russians.

Earlier this month, five days into the first cease-fire in southwest Syria, Trump indicated that another agreement was under discussion with Moscow. "We are working on the second cease-fire in a very rough part of Syria," Trump said. "If we get that and a few more, all of a sudden we are going to have no bullets being fired in Syria."

One big potential risk of shutting down the CIA program is that the United States may lose its ability to block other countries, such as Turkey and Persian Gulf allies, from funneling more sophisticated weapons - including man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS - to anti-Assad rebels, including more radical groups.

Toward the end of the Obama administration, some officials advocated ending the CIA program, arguing that the rebels would be ineffective without a major escalation in U.S. support. But the program still had the support of a majority of top Obama advisers, who argued that the United States couldn't abandon its allies on the ground and give up on the moderate opposition because of the damage that it would do to U.S. standing in the region.

Even those who were skeptical about the program's long-term value, viewed it as a key bargaining chip that could be used to wring concessions from Moscow in negotiations over Syria's future.

"People began thinking about ending the program, but it was not something you'd do for free," said a former White House official. "To give [the program] away without getting anything in return would be foolish."
By KRISTINE PHILLIPS

The Washington Post

A member of the Republican National Committee in Nevada apologized after retweeting an article that begged for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to die.

Diana Orrock, a national committeewoman for the Nevada GOP, shared a story headlined "Please Just F- - - -ing Die Already." In retweeting the piece, which was published on Medium, Orrock wrote "Amen."

Several hours after posting the now-deleted tweet, Orrock apologized to McCain and to the Nevada and national GOP, calling the ailing senator "an American hero" - and her own post "disrespectful."

The article was published on Medium - and shared by Orrock on Twitter - as McCain was recovering from eye surgery.

My apologies to @SenJohnMcCain, @NVGOP & @GOP. Today's retweet was disrespectful. Sen. McCain is an American hero. I don't wish anyone harm.  Diana Orrock (@DianaOrrock) July 18, 2017

The Washington Post was unable to reach Orrock, but she told CNN on Monday, before she tweeted her apology, that she wasn't calling for the 80-year-old senator's death - just agreeing with the "sentiments" in the article.

In the article, writer Caitlin Johnstone said McCain "can die a proud, happy man."

"And he should," Johnstone added. "Like, yesterday."

Throughout the article, Johnstone did not mince words. At all.

She described McCain as a "murderous warmongering neocon" and an "evil man" who has "supported every US military bloodbath in his obscenely long lifetime."

She wrote:

"If you're waiting for the part where I say I'm just kidding and would never wish death on anybody, please allow me to make myself clear: I sincerely, genuinely hope that Arizona Senator John McCain's heart stops beating, and that he is subsequently declared dead by qualified medical professionals very soon. I don't wish him a painful death, I don't wish him a slow death, I don't wish him an unnatural or violent death; I only wish that he becomes incapable of facilitating the merciless slaughter of any more human beings."

Orrock emphasized that she only wants McCain out of the Senate, not harmed or dead.

"People are going to read things into things," she told CNN.

Republican National Committee spokesman Ryan Mahoney called Orrock's tweet "extremely inappropriate."

"Senator McCain is a hero who made countless sacrifices on behalf of all Americans," Mahoney said, according to The Associated Press. "We look forward to his speedy recovery so he can return to the Senate and the work of the American people."

Efforts to reach the Nevada GOP on Tuesday morning were unsuccessful.

McCain's office announced Saturday that he'd undergone a procedure at the Mayo Clinic to remove a blood clot above his left eye.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced on the same day that he would delay the vote on the Republican health-care bill as McCain recovers. Two nights later, the effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare, suffered a major blow after two more Senate Republicans declared their opposition to the latest version of the bill.

"Thanks to @MayoClinic for its excellent care - I appreciate your support & look forward to getting back to work! " McCain tweeted.

Orrock, who told CNN that she doesn't agree with McCain on foreign policy, has been a committeewoman for the Nevada GOP since 2012. She ran for the 9th District of the Nevada General Assembly in 2016, but lost to the incumbent, David Gardner, in the primary election. Gardner was later defeated by Democratic candidate Steve Yeager.

Orrock told the Las Vegas Review Journal last year that she decided to run against Gardner after he voted for a $1.5 billion tax package to bolster education funding.

"I think a lot of politicians have lost sight of what they're supposed to be doing. They're supposed to be representative of the people who elected them, not the lobbyists," she said then, adding: "If that wasn't a slap in the face of the voters in Nevada I don't know what."

She has also been a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump.

In October, after The Post broke the story about an "Access Hollywood" tape in which Trump could be heard making vulgar remarks about women, Orrock said she wasn't offended by Trump's "goofy" comments.

"We understand the context of that conversation from 11 years ago for exactly what it was, two guys talking, trying to outdo each other as to who caught the bigger fish," she told the Boston Globe. "And to think men don't talk that way about women and women don't talk that way about men, I tell you what, you're living in a very protected world of unreality."

She also denounced a U.S. Senate candidate from Nevada who decided to not support Trump because of the "Access Hollywood" tape.

"I am no longer endorsing Joe Heck in the Senate race," Orrock said in October, according to CNBC. "How hypocritical of him to denounce Trump on comments that were 12 years old and locker room banter? By not endorsing Trump, he is supporting Hillary."

That same month, she tweeted a list of Republican politicians who opposed Trump, calling for her social media followers to vote them out of office.
Massachusetts-based bridal shop Bridal and Prom Discount Warehouse is offering free wedding dresses to brides who will not receive their Alfred Angelo Bridal dresses after the chain filed for bankruptcy.

Alfred Angelo Bridal, a major wedding dress retailer with 60 stores and 1,400 locations worldwide that sell its products, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation on Friday, leaving customers and employees with no answers.

With brides-to-be now left without a wedding dress after already paying for it, a Massachusetts bridal shop is stepping up to the plate.

"We feel absolutely horrible that Alfred Angelo left so many brides without wedding dresses," Bridal and Prom Discount Warehouse of Fall River wrote in a Facebook post. "This situation has made us want to try to help as many brides as we can during this stressful situation."

"If you are a bride effected buy the closing of all Alfred Angelo stores and you are not going to get the wedding dress you paid for, we would like you give you a FREE WEDDING DRESS," the post continued.

FREE WEDDING DRESSES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! For Alfred Angelo Brides We feel absolutely horrible that Alfred Angelo left so... Posted by Bridal And Prom Discount Warehouse on Sunday, July 16, 2017

All that Bridal and Prom Warehouse is asking for is proof of purchase from any Alfred Angelo retailer and the purchase of a veil to offset the donation.

The inventory at Bridal and Prom Warehouse ranges from $99 to $499. Anything within this price range is included in the giveaway.

The generous giveaway will last 5 days, beginning on Thursday, July 20 and end on Monday, July 24.

Other wedding and bridal shops like David's Bridal are also offering discounts to former Alfred Angelo brides.

For more information on Bridal and Prom Warehouse and the dress giveaway, visit the shop's Facebook page.
Every startup lucky enough to get some traction gets to the point where they decide to hire some "regular employees" for sales, marketing, and administrative tasks. Then they are surprised to see productivity and creativity take a big dip. What they should be doing is hiring only "entrepreneurs," meaning people who think and act as if this is their own business.

Marty Zwilling

Full Story: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com/2017/07/startups-need-employees-who-react-like.html
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock http://governor.mt.gov/ was seated as the vice chairman of the National Governors Association last week at its summer meeting in Providence, Rhode Island.

Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada is the chairman of the organization for the coming year. Bullock will be seated as chairman next summer.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article161728493.html#storylink=cpy

***

Montana Governor Downplays Presidential Aspirations

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock is downplaying his national political ambitions even as he sets up a committee that would pay for his travel to political events across the country.

By BOBBY CAINA CALVAN, Associated Press

Full Story: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/montana/articles/2017-07-18/montana-governor-downplays-presidential-aspirations

***

Bullock hints at presidential run in 2020, forms federal PAC to share Montanas story

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock said Tuesday he is forming a federal political action committee to allow him to travel and be a larger part of the national political conversation.

On Monday evening, the New York Times published a story saying Montanas Democratic governor is taking "the first steps" toward a run for president in 2020.

Tuesday afternoon, Bullock told reporters the PAC will allow him to "share Montanas story."

HOLLY K. MICHELS [email protected]

Full Story: http://helenair.com/news/politics/state/bullock-in-interview-with-new-york-times-hints-at-presidential/article_38829bc0-660e-5d36-9ee4-27746f7ada51.html

***

As Party Drifts Left, Pragmatic Democratic Governors Have Eye on White House

"I believe the time is right to lend my voice, the voice of someone that after getting elected has been able to govern in whats viewed as a red state," Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana said in an interview. "Some of the things that Ive been able to do in Montana can also translate beyond just the states border."

By JONATHAN MARTIN

Full Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/us/politics/democrat-governors-bullock-mcauliffe.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share
Morgan County Veterans Day Parade slated Nov. 11 Audio Article The Morgan County Veterans Day Parade will be held on Friday, Nov. 11. The parade will form at the Commons, in McConnelsville, at 9:30 a.m. and set out at 10 a.m. The American Legion Post 24 will render honors at the monuments at the Commons, Riecker Building, the Square, at...

A concert with two purposes Audio Article Wednesday, Nov. 30, a concert with dual purposes is being held at the Twin City Opera House in McConnelsville, Ohio. Its a thank-you to healthcare workers, who can attend for free, and its a benefit for the Lymphoma and Leukemia Society. In September 2021, Rick Shriver contracted COVID-19. He collapsed...

BOE reminder of early voting hours and polling location change Audio Article Remaining early voting hours at the Morgan County Board of Elections are as follows: from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov, 2 through Friday, Nov. 4; 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 5; from 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 6; and from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m....

Lions Club announces annual Wreaths Across America Audio Article On Saturday, Dec. 17, the Chesterhill Lions Club will be joining with National Wreaths Across America in the laying of wreaths at each of the seven cemeteries located in Marion Township. The mission is to honor the local veterans who have served our nation so their families can rest assured...

Governor DeWine awards $6.7 million for domestic violence survivor programs Audio Article Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has announced that he is awarding $6.7 million to support the work of the Ohio Domestic Violence Network (ODVN) to offer mobile and health advocacy services and temporary residential services for domestic violence survivors across the state. The announcement comes during National Domestic Violence Awareness Month....

CDC committee vote wont change Ohio school vaccine requirement Audio Article Ohio Department of Health Director Bruce Vanderhoff, MD, MBA has released the following statement: The CDCs Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommendation for the COVID-19 vaccine to be added to the formulary or schedule of vaccines for children does not mandate this vaccine for school children. Ohio law determines...
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As you lie in slumber, your spirit body snaps free and drifts upward while your physical shell is left lonely on the bed below, connected only by a fragile, silvery cord. You turn and observe yourself peacefully sleeping. Could this be evidence of the soul? Could it be proof of life after death? Share on Pinterest What can out-of-body experiences teach us about ourselves? Reports of out-of-body experiences (OBEs) vary. Some consist of little more than a fleeting feeling that body and mind have come loose, while others recount tales of floating far from the persons physical body and traveling to otherworldly plains. Either way, OBEs have fascinated humanity for centuries, entering folklore, spiritual belief, and mythology. In the 19th century, for instance, OBEs became a popular topic of the romantic literary movement, and unsurprisingly, they were eagerly discussed by early psychical researchers. I suddenly seemed to divide into two distinct beings. [] One of these beings remained motionless on the sofa; the other could move some little distance, and could actually look at the motionless body on the sofa. Journal of Society for Psychical Research, July 1894 According to surveys, around 10 percent of the population have experienced an OBE at least once  so there must be more to it than a desire to live forever or an over-charged imagination. Although, historically, most research into OBEs has come from the unkempt fringes of science, it has attracted a little more serious attention over recent years. In this article, we will discuss some of these findings.

When do OBEs occur? OBEs have been documented in a variety of situations. These can be split into two categories: spontaneous and induced. Spontaneous OBEs A variety of factors could trigger a spontaneous OBE. These include: Sleep: Spontaneous OBEs are most commonly reported as occurring just before falling asleep or just prior to waking. They are more likely to occur when sleep is not particularly deep  due to noise, stress, or illness, for example. Physical effort: OBEs have also been reported following or during extreme exertion. Near-death experiences (NDEs): OBEs sometimes occur alongside light at the end of the tunnel visions. Other spontaneous OBEs have been reported during meditation, non-life-threatening accidents, anesthesia, hypnosis, child birth, when suffocating, after being shot, while dancing or talking, or, as one 36-year-old police officer relates, during her first night at work. When I and three other officers stopped the vehicle and started getting [to] the suspect [] I was afraid. I promptly went out of my body and up into the air maybe 20 feet above the scene. I remained there, extremely calm, while I watched the entire procedure  including watching myself do exactly what I had been trained to do. Induced OBEs From a scientific standpoint, induced OBEs offer a more tantalizing glimpse into the physical basis of OBEs. They include: Drugs: Hallucinogenic drugs, and dissociative hallucinogenics in particular  such as DMT, MDA, LSD, and ketamine  can give rise to induced OBEs. Sensory deprivation or overload: Either too little sensory information (floatation tanks or listening to white noise) or too much (torture) can also trigger them. Strong G-forces: Pilots and astronauts occasionally experience OBEs. For instance, when extreme G-forces are encountered, blood can partially drain from certain parts of the brain. This, it seems, has the power to induce an OBE. In this instance, OBEs occur as part of a phenomenon called gravity-induced loss of consciousness. The more surreal parts of this experience are not freely discussed by most pilots, but some give vivid accounts. I was there. But I, like, wasnt there. I was floating. I was looking at myself from outside of myself. Col. Dan Fulgham It is not only extreme G-forces that can spark OBEs in pilots. Even during standard flights, pilots can endure odd sensory experiences, which are referred to collectively as spatial disorientation (SD). In one particular SD episode, known as the break-off phenomenon, a pilot may feel as though they are sat on the wing, watching themselves fly the plane. SD is considered one of the most common factors contributing to aviation accidents. Fatigue, stress, drugs, low light levels, and sensory overload or deprivation are among the factors potentially involved.

Verifying veridical perception Perhaps the most controversial aspect of OBEs is veridical perception, which is the claim that during an OBE, the viewer is able to literally float out of their body and witness something or someone that they could not have otherwise seen. A well-known example is the case of Pam Reynolds, a brain surgery patient who underwent a highly invasive operation to remove a brain tumor. Share on Pinterest Can OBEs be pinned down by research into NDEs? Following surgery, Reynolds was able to describe aspects of the procedure that had happened at a time when she was clinically dead. She claimed to have surveyed the scene during an OBE. Although skepticism abounds, proponents of the afterlife have repeatedly used this story as evidence of an ability to float beyond the body. Some of these stories are intriguing and compelling. But at this stage, they are nothing more than unverifiable stories. A study from 2014, titled Awareness during Resuscitation (AWARE), was the first serious large-scale investigation to look at NDEs. The study addressed the possibility of veridical perception during OBEs. The research involved multiple hospitals and hundreds of interviews with cardiac arrest survivors. To investigate whether any individuals had genuinely floated above themselves and viewed their surroundings, researchers placed pictures on shelves that would only be viewable from above. In this way, they could test whether people experiencing OBEs really could leave their bodies. Although there were only two veridical OBEs during the study, neither could accurately relate the images from the shelves. We eagerly await the next phase, known as AWARE II. As the authors write, Another veridical recall is a real possibility in the 1,000+ monitored cases, and who knows, that ever elusive visual recall may yet be found. Direct brain stimulation In 1955, a Canadian neurosurgeon called Wilder Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of people with epilepsy. On one occasion, he stimulated a patients right temporal lobe and the patient exclaimed, Oh God! I am leaving my body. Share on Pinterest The temporoparietal junction (shown here in red). In 2002, a Swiss group also working on patients with epilepsy passed a weak current through a patients right angular gyrus , which is where the parietal lobe meets the temporal lobe. This region is also called the temporoparietal junction. The patient relayed a sensation of falling from a height. As they increased the current, she said, I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk. Our brains do such a wonderful job of pinning us in reality that we often forget that the pins are an illusion and can, therefore, sometimes be shaken loose. Blanke, one of the scientists involved in the Swiss experiment, believes, OBEs are related to a failure to integrate multisensory information from ones own body at the temporoparietal junction (TPJ). In another study conducted by Blanke, he and his team studied six neurological patients with brain lesions that caused them to experience occasional OBEs. They found the angular gyrus to be involved in all five patients in whom lesion analysis could be performed.
Presbycusis is the gradual and persistent loss of hearing in both ears that is related to aging. The effects increase over time and are linked to genetic and environmental factors. Presbycusis affects around 1 in 3 adults in the United States between 65 and 74 years of age and is one of the most common causes of hearing loss in older adults. One of the leading causes of presbycusis is long-term exposure to noise, and it typically results in an inability to hear high-pitched sounds. Human hearing is a result of sound waves being turned into electrical signals. This process depends on delicate hair cells vibrating in the inner ear. Noise and other factors can damage these hair cells and, once gone, they never grow back, resulting in irreversible hearing impairment.

Causes Share on Pinterest Whilst presbycusis is mainly a result of the body aging, it may also be caused by genetic or environmental factors Presbycusis may be caused, or made worse, by environmental and genetic factors, other diseases, and certain medication types. Environmental Exposure to loud music or noise in the workplace, such as traffic or construction noise, are leading environmental causes of presbycusis. Other loud environmental sounds include lawn mowers, firearms, leaf-blowers, and other loud tools and appliances. Genetic factors Genetic factors can cause some people to develop this kind of ear damage, and they may experience problems with their hearing as they age. Other diseases Other conditions that can cause presbycusis, include: diabetes

high blood pressure

heart disease

problems with blood circulation

smoking These illnesses can affect hearing because the essential hair cells depend on a good blood supply. Medication Some drug treatments, including some antibiotics, aspirin, and chemotherapy have a toxic effect on the ear and nerve supply. These medicines may cause presbycusis as a result.

Symptoms Presbycusis typically affects a persons ability to hear high-pitched sounds. As the condition progresses, people may find it difficult to hear what others are saying, particularly in noisy places. These symptoms can make social interactions challenging. As a result, a person with presbycusis may find their quality of life deteriorates, and they may also experience social isolation, depression, and lower self-esteem.

Prevention Share on Pinterest Continual exposure to loud noises, for example when working in the construction industry, may potentially cause presbycusis. Avoiding noise and other risk factors from an early age can help prevent damage to the hair cells in the inner ear, which can minimize the effects of presbycusis later on in life. Managing illnesses such as such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease may improve circulation and minimize symptoms linked with presbycusis. Avoiding medications that are toxic to the ear, such as some antibiotics and aspirin, can also be helpful in preventing or lessening the side effects linked with presbycusis. However, doing so may not always be possible. People should always speak with a doctor before they stop taking any medication.

Diagnosis A doctor will likely suspect presbycusis if an older adult experiences gradual hearing loss in both ears. Before diagnosing presbycusis, a doctor will first rule out other causes of hearing loss by checking the eardrum for damage and the ear canal for blockages. The doctor will also look out for signs of inflammation and infection in the ear. If further investigation is needed, the doctor will usually refer the person to a hearing specialist called an audiologist. An audiologist can test a persons hearing by asking them to respond to sounds played to one ear at a time through headphones. This test, called an audiogram, will establish whether or not the person can hear specific tones and will usually indicate whether a person has presbycusis.

Treatment Successful treatment for presbycusis usually takes time and requires patience. An approach that involves specialists from different areas of healthcare can be beneficial. Share on Pinterest Hearing aids are discrete devices that can improve hearing, especially in places where there is a lot of noise. People who could help in developing and administering an effective, personalized treatment plan include experts in: otolaryngology (ear, nose, and throat)

audiology

neurology

psychology Many people with presbycusis seek treatment after a few years, once the symptoms have already progressed. People may not be aware of the extent of their hearing loss because it happens gradually. Also, hearing loss is often considered to be inevitable. Some people do not know that presbycusis can be treated. Others are reluctant to use a hearing aid because of what other people will think of them. In some cases, people only seek treatment if family members insist. There are no approved drugs that can restore hearing loss due to presbycusis. The effects of age-related hearing loss on daily life can be successfully lessened with symptom management and, in severe cases, with surgery. Treatment options may include the following: Management techniques People who have difficulty hearing will usually rely more on visual cues. This can include lip reading and interpreting posture and gestures. In severe cases, it can include sign language. It is usually helpful to face a person directly when talking to them. Avoiding noisy situations and ensuring adequate lighting can make it easier to take part in conversations with confidence. Telling family and friends about hearing problems, and asking them to communicate in helpful ways, can go a long way toward making life easier for a person who has difficulty hearing. Assistive listening devices Hearing aids can be useful for people who find it hard to hear in noisy situations. A hearing aid is an electronic device that is worn inside or behind the ear. The device has a microphone, an amplifier, and a speaker. The microphone receives the sound, the amplifier magnifies the sound, and the speaker relays it to the ear. A hearing loop is a sound system typically used in public places. It provides a magnetic, wireless signal that can be received by a person using a hearing aid. Hearing loops are likely to be used for counter services, such as a post office, a shop, or in a bank. They can also be found in places of worship and classrooms. Telephone amplifiers can be effective, as can devices that convert sound to text. Subtitles are frequently available for television and films. Cochlear implants Implants can restore hearing in those people who have severe hearing issues. An electrode array in the inner ear bypasses the damaged part of the ear known as the cochlea. Electrical signals directly stimulate the remaining nerve cells in the cochlea. Most people with cochlear implants have significantly improved hearing, particularly if hearing aids are ineffective.
Researchers from Missouri reveal that blood test screening may identify markers of Alzheimers disease before individuals begin to experience memory loss and confusion. This finding is a significant step toward predicting disease risk. Share on Pinterest Predicting Alzheimers disease may one day be as easy as taking a simple blood test. The research was presented at the Alzheimers Association International Conference, held in London, United Kingdom, and the findings were published in the journal Alzheimers and Dementia. For people with Alzheimers disease, extensive neuronal loss occurs before symptoms of the disease begin to appear. As the brain engages in daily tasks, it repeatedly produces and clears away a sticky protein called amyloid beta. Some of the amyloid beta gets washed away in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid. But if the protein begins to build up, it can accumulate into plaques in the brain, stick to neurons, and cause neurological damage, contributing to the development and progression of Alzheimers disease. For this reason, there is an urgent need for simple screening tests that can predict a persons risk for Alzheimers disease long before plaque buildup occurs. At present, the only methods that are viable for detecting amyloid beta in the brain are using positron emission tomography (PET) scanning or a spinal tap. However, PET scanning is expensive and not widely available, and a spinal tap is invasive and requires a specialized medical procedure provided by very few practitioners.

Assessing blood test feasibility To overcome these hurdles, researchers assessed measures of amyloid beta present in blood to find out whether a blood test could help to identify altered levels of the protein in an individuals brain and cerebrospinal fluid. Blood screening implementation could be a cheap and less invasive way of selecting those people more likely to develop Alzheimers disease, years before they would receive a diagnosis based on their symptoms. However, previous studies have not demonstrated a correlation between measures of amyloid beta in the blood and brain. Senior study author Dr. Randall J. Bateman, the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO, and team conducted a study involving 41 individuals aged 60 and older to assess blood concentrations of amyloid beta. A total of 23 people were amyloid positive, which means that they had signs of cognitive impairment. These participants had PET scans or spinal taps to confirm the presence of amyloid plaques in the brain or amyloid alterations in their cerebrospinal fluid. The remaining 18 participants involved in the study, none of whom had amyloid buildup, were also measured for subtypes of the protein. The levels, production, and buildup of amyloid were measured by taking 20 blood samples from each individual over the course of 24 hours.
Although they often occur together, the relationship between depression and marijuana use in young people is unclear. Now, a new study that examines the cumulative effect of depression in young teenagers finds that it is linked to a higher likelihood of developing marijuana-use disorder as they reach adulthood. Share on Pinterest Research carried out by scientists investigating depression in early teenage years and the use of marijuana later in life has found a concerning link. The study is the work of a team from the University of Washington in Seattle, and their findings are published in the journal Addiction. Depression, also known as clinical depression or major depressive disorder, is a common but serious illness that affects mood, thinking, and behavior. Depression is more than just feeling a bit sad now and again. It diminishes many aspects of daily living, such as sleeping, eating, working, enjoying hobbies, and socializing. Major depression is a common mental disorder among teenagers in the United States. National estimates for 2015 suggest that 3 million young people aged between 12 and 17 had experienced at least one major depressive episode in the past year. This figure represents 12.5 percent of that age group in the U.S.

Teens at risk for marijuana-use disorder People with cannabis- or marijuana-use disorder often have symptoms of withdrawal when they stop using the substance. In some cases, it can take the form of a severe addiction. It has been suggested that 30 percent of marijuana users may have some degree of marijuana-use disorder. The likelihood of developing marijuana-use disorder is four to seven times higher in people who start using the drug before the age of 18. Dependence on marijuana develops when the brain adapts to the drug and reduces its own production of, and sensitivity to, similar compounds called endocannabinoid neurotransmitters, which it produces naturally. The researchers behind the new study note that over the past decade, use of marijuana has overtaken tobacco use among U.S. teenagers. Marijuana and alcohol are now the two most commonly used substances in this age group.
It's been a while since HMD global launched their peer portfolio of smartphones in India, and it seems like the Finnish start up is now going to expand it further by introducing their very own premium flagship smartphone.

The Nokia 8 has been expected to release soon and a few leaks have revealed the design and specifications of the smartphone. However, we also notice that HMD has partnered up with Nokia's old buddies at Zeiss optics. The latest leaks point towards a camera module that will have Carl Zeiss lenses as we have seen before in Nokia smartphones.

Evan Blass from Venture Beat tweeted rendered images of the Nokia 8 and there are a few things we can pick up about the design language. The smartphone will have a vertical dual-lens setup that is probably developed in partnership with Zeiss lenses.

 Twitter

The Nokia 8 was accidentally revealed when a company photographer uploaded a short video which showcased the entire lineup of Nokia smartphones made by HMD Global. One can see from the renders that the model number for the rendered image of the Nokia 8 reads TA-1012'. This corresponds with earlier benchmark leaks which had the same model listed in the results. The same benchmark leak pointed out that the same smartphone will also be powered by Qualcomm's latest chipset i.e. The Snapdragon 835.

 Twitter/Evan Blass

German website Winfuture also listed the Nokia 8 with a different model number TA-1004' and was retailing for 600 euros (Approximately Rs 44,300).The website claims that their sources tell them that the smartphone will be available to purchase on July 31st. As of now, there is no news whether the smartphone will launch in India anytime soon, however, it seems likely that it may appear in the Indian markets soon enough.

Source: VentureBeat
Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias will meet at the Foreign Ministry at 13:00 on Friday, 21 July, with the EU High Representative and Vice-President of the European Commission, Federica Mogherini, who will be carrying out a visit to Greece.

Following their meeting, at about 13:30, they will make joint statements to the news media, after which Mr. Kotzias will host a working luncheon in Ms. Mogherini's honour.
I. KASOULIDES: I had the great pleasure of hosting my brother, the Foreign Minister of Greece, Mr. Kotzias, here at the Foreign Ministry, and the even greater pleasure of your giving me the opportunity to hold the press conference here.



The substance of the matter can be summarized in a few words: that a battle was fought for the Cyprus problem at Crans-Montana, hand in hand with Greece. President Anastasiades and Nikos Kotzias fought the battle, on a field where the battle had never been fought before. On the field of guarantees, rights of intervention, and security.



A solution was not achieved because these following elements were missing: that is, that Cyprus has the right to be a normal state, and those are not my words; they are the words of the UN Secretary-General. It has the right for guarantees and rights of intervention not to be included in any agreement, because they are non-sustainable -these too are not my words, but the words of the UN Secretary-General. So, from what I understand, this is where the next battles will be fought, if the international community wants to first persuade Turkey to accept, and if the Turkish Cypriots prefer the resolution of the Cyprus problem to being rendered fully subservient to Turkey. But the floor belongs to the Foreign Minister of Greece, Nikos Kotzias.



N. KOTZIAS: I once said, here in Nicosia, that Cyprus is emotion and sentiment. And of course, when I am with Ioannis Kasoulides, the Foreign Minister of Cyprus, with whom we collaborate so well, I am even more deeply moved.



Today I had the great honour of being invited by the President of the Republic, Mr. Anastasiades, to attend a meeting of the National Council. I remind you that this is a gesture that comes following another invitation, an invitation to Mr. Kasoulides, who attended a special session of the National Council on Foreign Policy, where we discussed the Cyprus issue, and in fact he led the discussion that day.



I think that the negotiations on the Cyprus issue, and the absolutely positive manner in which we worked together with the Cypriot government and, first and foremost, President Anastasiades, brought the two countries and the two peoples even closer together. Two peoples with common values, common principles, a great common history and culture. Two societies and two peoples that have a common history going back thousands of years. Today, in the Cypriot National Council, I listened carefully to the presidents of the political parties and the former Presidents of the Republic, as well as the current President of the Republic. I also presented, from my part, the experience I gained at Crans-Montana: what we saw and how we saw it.



There, we saw a Turkey that played with words, but when decision-time came, it demonstrated lack of will. It was not yet ready, for a substantial solution. We made great gains there: we were able to put the issue of guarantees and security on the Cyprus-problem agenda. There is no question that, in every future negotiation, this will be the issue from which the negotiations begin.



But beyond the great honour of participating in the National Council, an invitation the President of the Republic, Mr. Anastasiades, was generous enough to extend to me, I also had the honour and, I would say, the good fortune of speaking with Mr. Kasoulides, with the Cypriot Foreign Ministry's delegation, together with our delegation, about how we can further intensify the relations between the two states, about how we will proceed from here, regarding the issues we have a say on, for a future solution of the Cyprus issue. About how we need to conduct ourselves and how to capitalise on the capabilities provided by the European Union, and about how we will handle the negotiations, in the coming months, on the EU-Turkish customs union.



We also talked about many other aspects of our cooperation, even our cooperation on communication issues. I would like once again to thank the Cypriot government, and in particular Ioannis Kasoulides, for the hospitality and for the manner in which he always moves us when we meet, for his passion and love for the great universal human values, the sovereignty and independence of Cyprus, the friendship between Cyprus and Greece. Thank you.



JOURNALIST: An observation or clarification. It is my impression that the term 'normal state' ...



N. KOTZIAS: I must say that I see it as a great honour that wordings I have used from time to time on specific major problems have been adopted by major figures and have taken on their own dynamic. Ideas are not to be kept for oneself. They are to be transferred.



The wording, the phrase, was "normal state"; that is, a normal or, one might say, legally speaking, a regular state. And let me take this opportunity to explain something: we went to the negotiations where everyone started saying one, two, three, four, etc. And I said, great. For us to judge points one, two, three, four, we have to determine what the goal of this conference is. And I posed this simple question to them: is it our common goal that Cyprus should be a regular, normal state? That is, an independent state with territorial integrity and full sovereignty? If we agree on that and no one disagrees, let's talk about the path we need to take to get there. In my opinion and the opinion of the Republic of Cyprus, this path is Cyprus's release from the bonds of the two treaties of 1959-1960, Zurich and London, the Treaty of Guarantee and the Treaty of Alliance.



JOURNALIST: The question I want to ask is, with regard to Turkey, whether you see a prospect of Turkey's adopting a constructive stance on the Cyprus issue, given that it hasn't cleared up the Syria issue, it hasn't cleared up the Kurdish issue, and it also has ahead of it the presidential elections of 2019, which Erdogan is very eager to win, aspiring to be President on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Turkey. Given these circumstances, and if these issues aren't cleared up, does Turkey have any incentive to make a positive move on the Cyprus issue, Mr. Minister?



N. KOTZIAS: What you mentioned are counterincentives, but there exist also incentives. The incentives are its relations with the Western world, the tools the European Union has at its disposal  at this time, the customs union  the international environment in which Turkey is not as successful as it hoped to be. We see it in Syria, where the "invincible" Turkish army is not having such an easy time. There are many domestic controversies in Turkey that can, when they manifest themselves, oblige the country to take a different path. There is an international environment in which we must work so that Turkey is compelled to comply, in the positive sense, creatively, with International Law.



JOURNALIST: I would like to ask, Mr. Kotzias, whether the result we got in Switzerland might free up another process for the Cyprus problem that is aimed more at serving Turkey's schemes? Mr. Cavusoglu has already spoken of thoughts that involve seeking a solution outside the UN parameters. If the outcome was this foundering that took place at the conference, which concerned the issue we all said had not been discussed to date, does this create a situation that, for Greece and Cyprus, is controllable as to the form, from here on in, that a dialogue for a solution to the Cyprus problem might take?



N. KOTZIAS: There is a major question as to whether Turkey led the negotiations to this negative outcome because it has in mind other things it wants to play with. But it isn't the Crans-Montana negotiations that brought "alternative" solutions to Turkey's mind. Our job is to block it from playing with solutions A, B, C, and make it take international law into consideration.



My sense from Geneva I was that many international players, and not just Turkey, believed or thought that what we were saying about guarantees or the abolition of the system of guarantees, of the Treaty and Turkey's "rights" of intervention, as well as the keeping of troops on Cyprus  they thought we were saying those things just to strike a pose, and that we would give in as soon as the negotiations started. Turkey saw that, on these issues, not only did we not give in, but that these issues were included and will be at the top of the agenda for all future negotiations.



My personal opinion is that the references to plans B, C, D, etc., are an element of the negotiation for a solution to the Cyprus problem, in the manner that Turkey wants and understands the negotiations. I want to make a clarification, because here in Cyprus I heard various things about the choices of the Greek government and my personal choices: that the negotiation of the solution to the Cyprus problem is not just the ten days in Crans-Montana or just two days in Geneva. The daily statements, the daily pressures, the alternative solutions drawn up, the manner in which a given side convinced its own society or tried to influence the society of another side, the manner in which one tries to limit certain players or not allow them to recklessly serve third-party interests  all of these things are elements of the negotiations. The negotiations themselves are not independent of everything else. That is why we are talking today about public diplomacy, about citizen diplomacy.



All of these elements are part of the negotiations. The core of the negotiations is negotiation itself. Consequently, when you read about ministerial statements, bear this in mind. It is negotiating its position and trying to avoid being assigned the corresponding blame.



JOURNALIST: In your assessment, Mr. Kotzias, to what extent will there be a new initiative in the near future, in the coming months, because we've heard about some new things.



N. KOTZIAS: We have to work so that a new chance is given to the negotiations on the Cyprus issue, but this new chance must be well prepared and effective. I blame Mr. Eide for, among other things, coming unprepared and without having allowed the necessary preparations for the conference in Switzerland.



JOURNALIST: Provocations from Turkey, particularly in the exclusive economic zone, and our energy policy: a message from each Minister for the compatriots watching us right now.



I. KASOULIDES: My message is that the provocations, as troublesome as they are, are manageable.



N. KOTZIAS: Turkey is a country that has difficulty adapting to international law. The job of the Foreign Ministries is to help it understand its obligations.
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...
President Donald Trump met Tuesday with four troops who served in Afghanistan to get their ideas on the next steps in the war even as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis prepares to submit a revised strategy that could involve deploying 3,000 to 5,000 more service members.

Ahead of a White House lunch, Trump said that he and Vice President Mike Pence would be hearing from "four great soldiers who spent a lot of time in Afghanistan" to ask them "what you think, your views. These are people on the ground -- know it probably better than anybody."

"And we're going to be getting some ideas because we've been there -- it's our longest war -- we've been there for many years. We've been there for now close to 17 years, and I want to find out why we've been there for 17 years, how it's going, and what we should do in terms of additional ideas," Trump said.

"I've heard plenty of ideas from a lot of people, but I want to hear it from the people on the ground," Trump said in referring to Army First Sgt. Michael Wagner, Army Master Sgt. Zachary Bowman, Army Master Sgt. Henry Adames and Air Force Maj. Eric Birch.

The White House meeting came as Mattis, who has been delegated authority by Trump to set troop levels in Afghanistan, readied a strategy that was expected to bolster the current train, advise and assist role of U.S. troops and focus on increased air support.

Mattis promised that he would deliver a plan in mid-July, and last Friday said he would stick to that timeframe, but he's also had to consider the late submission of a soldier-of-fortune option backed by White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and Senior Adviser Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law.

On the Saturday morning of July 8, Bannon reportedly went to the Pentagon and presented the mercenary plan to Mattis that came from Erik Prince, founder of the security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen Feinberg, billionaire owner of the military contractor DynCorp International.

Mattis "listened politely" to Bannon's pitch, but made clear that the Prince-Feinberg option would not be included in the new strategy he was working on with Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the White House National Security Adviser, according to The New York Times.

In a May 31 op-ed for the Wall St. Journal, Prince outlined his plan that would involve an "American viceroy" and outsourcing much of the mission now performed by U.S. and coalition troops to a private army of mercenaries. As Prince saw it, the private army could eventually perform better, since they would remain in Afghanistan indefinitely and not be limited by the rotations of the U.S. force.

The American viceroy would also have a long-term presence and "would lead all U.S. government and coalition efforts -- including command, budget, policy, promotion and contracting -- and report directly to the president," Prince said.

He likened the role to that of Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan after World War II. He did not mention that the Japanese submitted to MacArthur because his role was sanctioned by Emperor Hirohito.

The viceroy would also operate under much more relaxed rules of engagement, Prince said. "Troops fighting for their lives should not have to ask a lawyer sitting in air conditioning 500 miles away for permission to drop a bomb," he said.

At a session with Pentagon reporters last Friday, Mattis confirmed that he had heard out Bannon on Prince's plan, but said it was only one of a number of viewpoints he has considered.

"I listen to everybody who's got an idea that I think I might find value from, and there [are] themes consistent from a number of people, a number of advisers, and there's things that we will incorporate and there's things we won't," Mattis said. "Right now, I don't want to go any deeper than that."

Drawing up a new strategy for Afghanistan was especially difficult after the long U.S. involvement, Mattis said.

"This is hard, and there's a reason we got into some wars in our nation's history and didn't know how to end them," he said. "This is hard work and, if anyone else says otherwise, [he] is either somebody who didn't have to deal with it or deal with the consequences of the decisions of it."

Mattis new strategy was being readied as the U.S. military reported small signs of progress under the old strategy.

Last week, Dana White, the Pentagon's chief spokeswoman, said that U.S. forces had killed Abu Sayed, leader of the ISIS offshoot known as Islamic State-Khorasan Province, or IS-K, in a raid in Afghanistan's Kunar province.

"The raid also killed other IS-K members and will significantly disrupt the terror group's plans to expand its presence in Afghanistan," White said in a statement.

On Monday, the Marines of Task Force Southwest reported that the Afghan National Defense Security Forces had retaken from the Taliban the Nawa district center just south of the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah in southwestern Helmand province.

Marine Maj. Kendra Motz of Task Force Southwest said in a statement that U.S. F-16s and AH-64 Apache gunships supported the Afghan attack aimed at relieving pressure on Lashkar Gah, which the Taliban have been trying to take for nearly a year.

"So far during this operation we have seen some significant gains in leadership and maneuver from the Ministry of Interior forces, particularly the Afghan Border and National Police," said Col. Matthew Reid, deputy commander of Task Force Southwest. "The vast majority of the ABP officers are from Helmand, many from Nawa, and they are aggressively fighting to clear insurgents from Nawa district."

Also on Monday, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan released a report showing that civilians killed in the war reached a record high in the first six months of 2017.

"A total of 1,662 civilian deaths were confirmed between 1 January and 30 June -- an increase of two per cent over the same period last year," UNAMA said in the report.

"The human cost of this terrible conflict in Afghanistan -- loss of life, destruction and immense suffering -- is far too high," said Tadamichi Yamamoto, the Secretary General's Special Representative for Afghanistan and head of UNAMA said.

"The continued use of indiscriminate, disproportionate and illegal improvised explosive devices is particularly appalling and must immediately stop," Yamamoto said.

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
The second highest-ranking U.S. military official said on Tuesday that despite North Korea's intercontinental ballistic missile's range, Pyongyang does not have the ability to hit the U.S. with "any degree of accuracy," Reuters reported.

North Korea is believed to possess hundreds of missiles capable of striking South Korea and Japan. Its recent test of an ICBM put it one step closer to its goal of developing nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching anywhere in the United States.

"What the experts tell me is that the North Koreans have yet to demonstrate the capacity to do the guidance and control that would be required," Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

South Korea on Monday offered talks with North Korea to ease animosities along their tense border and resume reunions of families separated by their war in the 1950s.

It was unclear how North Korea will react since it remains suspicious of new South Korean President Moon Jae-in's outreach to it. But Moon's overture, the first formal offer of talks since his inauguration in May, indicates he wants to use dialogue to defuse the international standoff over North Korea's weapons programs, despite having condemned the North's first intercontinental ballistic missile test on July 4 and vowed a firm response.

After the ICBM launch, Kim said he would never negotiate over his weapons programs as long as U.S. hostility and nuclear threats persist.

The two Koreas have been divided since the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. About 28,500 American troops are stationed in South Korea.

Selva was asked about the U.S.'s next move in the region and said a pre-emptive military operation is something that should be considered.

-- The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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GRAND RAPIDS, MI - As Michigan's blueberries, peaches and apples ripen for harvest, growers say the political rhetoric from the Trump Administration has had a chilling effect on their ability to get migrant workers to work in Michigan.

The demand for migrant workers is driving up wages and encouraging some growers to mechanize.

More growers also are applying for "H2A" visas to ensure there will be enough workers available for the harvest.

"I haven't heard anybody complaining they cannot find labor, but I have heard complaints that there's not enough labor," said Mark Longstroth, a Michigan State University Extension Service tree fruit expert based in Paw Paw.

Wages for migrant workers are rising in Michigan as growers compete for their services. An estimated 90,000-plus migrant workers arrive in Michigan every year to help with the harvest, which starts with asparagus in the early spring and ends with the apple crop in the fall.

Migrant workers in the Great Lakes region were being paid an average of $12.28 an hour this spring, a 5.5 percent increase over the same time last year, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics.

Growers who can offer their migrant workers free housing also have a better chance of getting the workers they need, Longstroth said.

H2A visas are granted to growers who can guarantee work, housing and $12.75 an hour in wages. Through July 1, nearly 6,000 were authorized, a big jump from nine years ago, when only 442 were issued in Michigan, Anderson said.

"It is not a cheap program. It is not a way to reduce your labor costs," Anderson said. But the H2A program does guarantee a grower will have workers on hand to harvest their crops, he said.

Generally speaking, fruit and vegetable growers in Michigan say they are expecting average yields.

"Generally speaking, the crop is going to be okay," said Larry Ensfield, CEO of MBG, a marketing organization for some 250 blueberry growers. "We're looking for a good year volume-wise and we're looking for a good year quality-wise."

Recruiting of migrant workers to hand-pick their blueberries has been "fair," Ensfield said. "I don't want to say it's plentiful, but it's coming in very evenly. There's enough labor to take in the crop."

Michigan growers may have a leg up on growers in other states this year because southern growers were hit with a late frost that did not hit most Michigan growers, Ensfield said.
Amy Sherman | asherma2@mlive.com

Pictured are Chronic Fries from Stella's Lounge in Grand Rapids.

BY AMY SHERMAN | asherma2@mlive.com

During our search for Michigan's Best French fries we came across quite a few other dishes that feature the lovely potato, enhanced with other toppings and sauces. The most popular across Michigan is, of course, chili cheese fries.

Solid chili cheese fries are comforting, filling, and usually pretty cheap for a whole meal. The ones that we fell in love with had a great balance of flavors and textures going on, while still maintaining the integrity of the fries.

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Amy Sherman | asherma2@mlive.com

Pictured are Red Flannel Fries from Cedar Springs Brewing Company.

Since the whole dish rests on the quality of the fries, and their ability to stand up to heavy layer of chili, those fries better be good. Many of the chefs we talked to made their fries specifically with toppings in mind, making sure that their version were extra crispy and substantial in order to hold up under all that stuff.

These four places have some of the best chili cheese fries in Michigan. Some are very traditional, while others are totally unique, all are delicious.

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Tori Schneider | MLive

#4-Mussel Beach Drive In, Bay City

Mussel Beach Drive In makes some fantastic food all the way around. They finished in the top three on our search for Michigan's Best coney dog in 2012, and in the top ten for Michigan's Best breakfast the same year. Everything is home made here, and the fries are hand cut.

The fries are a little bit thicker than a standard cut, which gives them nice heft, and meatiness to them. They have no problem standing up to a liberal dousing of chili, which here is a coney style. Then the fries get both nacho sauce and shredded cheddar. The use of two styles of cheese is inspired.

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Tori Schneider | Mlive

Owner Jacquie Larner, center front, has owned Mussel Beach for the last 15 years. Her whole family works here, cranking out incredible amounts of food all day long.

Located right across the street from the Bay City State Recreation Area, it's the perfect stop after a day at the beach. Or on your way to the beach. Or for a break from the beach.

If you go:

Mussel Beach Drive In

3540 State Park Dr

Bay City, Michigan 48706

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Amy Sherman | asherma2@mlive.com

#3-Cedar Springs Brewing Company, Cedar Springs

Owner David Ringler always has the perfect outfit for every occasion, the perfect German style beer to pair with every dish, and practically perfect, if untraditional, chili cheese fries.

The fries here are totally unique. Known as Red Flannel Fries, Cedar Springs has them made according to their special specifications. Ringler wanted to duplicate the type of fries that he'd had in Germany, and spent months getting them just right. These have a thicker center, balanced out by thinner, crispier ends. Fried in lard, the greatest of the fats, they are perfect for dipping, especially in the Cedar Sauce that comes with an order.

Vegetarians can ask to have their Flannel Fries cooked in canola oil.

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Amy Sherman | asherma2@mlive.com

Here the chili cheese fries are known as Sloppy Fries, and feature Sloppy Shaun Sauce on them, which is a house made sloppy joe style meat sauce. It's got great flavor, complex, and interesting. Creamy cheese sauce, made from classic Velveeta flows all over, and the very welcome note of freshness comes from a few thinly sliced jalapenos. These are the perfect compliment to a couple of Cedar Spring's excellent beers.

If you go:

Cedar Springs Brewing Company

95 N Main

Cedar Springs, MI 49319

(616) 696-2337

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Michael Clark | Mlive

#2-Stella's Lounge, Grand Rapids

The Crack Fries at Hopcat are pretty legendary, so when the crew opened up sister restaurant/ dive bar Stella's Lounge across the street, they knew they had to do something different.

Known as Chronic Fries, they get the unique addition of dehydrated and pulverized Frank's Red Hot dusted all over them. They have a slight tang to them, and just a tiny bit of heat. These are extra crispy fries that can totally hold up to toppings.

These were the only chili cheese fries we tried that had vegan chili on them. It was absolutely fantastic. Loaded with a variety of beans, great notes of tomato, and the perfect level of hot spice, the chili made this dish really stand out. Add the house made queso sauce, made with a little PBR beer in in, and you have chili cheese fry perfection.

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Stella's Lounge has been open since 2010, and has gone through several evolutions through the years. Barfly Venture's ring leader Garry Boyd, left, explained "It's been a punk bar, vegan bar, whiskey bar, speakeasy, hamburger joint, and an arcade. Now it's just Stella's. And if you're in GR, you have to go to Stella's." And if you go to Stella's, you have to try the chili cheese fries.

If you go:

Stella's Lounge

53 Commerce Ave SW

Grand Rapids, Michigan 49503

616-742-4444

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Amy Sherman | asherma2@mlive.com

#1-Here's to You Pub and Grub, Hillsdale

The chili cheese fries at the Here's to You Pub and Grub are so, so good. Lovely hand cut fries, standard size, are fried up extra crispy, while still maintaining a very creamy interior. The fries alone are fantastic.

The chili here is house made, and is a coney style version, with nice notes of cinnamon and other spices, and a lovely hum of heat. These fries get the double dose of nacho cheese sauce and shredded cheese, which is my new preferred method for cheese fries. The whole mess comes together perfectly, into the most wonderful basket of awesomeness ever.

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Amy Sherman | asherma2@mlive.com

Owners Kevin Conant, left, and Tim Hergert roll through about 500 pounds of potatoes a week to keep up with the demand. The bar is a gathering place for professors, students, and lots of out of town visitors. They've been open for seven years now, and host everything from pool leagues, to karaoke, to a book club at this downtown Hillsdale pub.

If you go:

Here's to You Pub and Grub

45 North St

Hillsdale, Michigan, MI 49242

517-437-4002

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Youngrae Kim | MLive.com

More Michigan's Best fun

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The ten best French fries in Michigan.

44 great places to get the tastiest French fries in Michigan.
ROMULUS - A DTE Energy contractor who died in an accident Wednesday, July 19 may have been electrocuted, according to fire officials.

A 46-year-old man working for Asplundh Construction Company was killed at about 11 a.m. Wednesday while crews were switching out a telephone pole at Grover and Mary roads, said Romulus Deputy Fire Chief Kevin Krause.

That's near the intersection of Wayne and Wick roads, just northwest of the Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

Investigators suspect the incident was electrical, Krause said.

Firefighters attempted to resuscitate the man, who was later pronounced dead at Beaumont Wayne hospital, Krause said.

The Michigan Occupational Safety and Health is investigating the incident.

"We were saddened to learn of a tragic accident Wednesday morning involving a lineworker employed by Asplundh Construction Company, which was performing work for DTE Energy in Romulus," DTE Energy said in a statement. "The safety of our employees - including our supplier family - is our No. 1 priority at all times. We are working with local authorities to investigate the cause of the accident. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the worker's family and co-workers during this extremely difficult time."

Asplundh Construction is a Pennsylvania-based company that provides tree-pruning and clearing services, according to its website.

Krause said his department's condolences go out to the crew members, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union members and the victim's family members.
Floyd Galloway Jr.

LIVONIA, MI - Police are searching Livonia's Hines Park in connection with the disappearance of 28-year-old Danielle Stislicki of Farmington Hills, according to Farmington Hills police.

The FBI, Michigan State Police, Farmington Hills police and Livonia police were searching the park on the morning of Wednesday, July 19 in relation to a person of interest in the case, Floyd R. Galloway Jr., 30, who is accused of an attempted rape in the park.

Stislicki was last seen about 5 p.m. Friday, Dec. 2, 2016 leaving her job at Metlife in Southfield. She failed to make it to dinner with a friend, uncharacteristically did not go to work the next day and her locked vehicle was found at her apartment complex.

"Law enforcement authorities have expressed since day one that Danielle Stislicki was a victim of a crime," Farmington Hills Police Chief Chuck Nebus said. "The facts of the case lead us to believe she is not alive. "Several air, land, and water searches have been conducted at various places throughout the investigation" ... and (Hines Park) "is a location that requires searching. There is no specific information or evidence that leads us to believe Danielle's remains are in the park."

Galloway, of Berkley, Michigan, is charged with kidnapping, criminal sexual assault with intent to commit sexual penetration and strangulation for an alleged attack on a jogger in the park on Sept. 4, 2016.

He previously worked as a security guard at MetLife and his home has been searched, along with a number of locations, in connection with Stislicki's disappearance.
ANN ARBOR, MI - Hundreds of community members came out for a vigil and rally to show support for the family of Lourdes Salazar Bautista, an Ann Arbor mother of three facing deportation.

After gathering inside the sanctuary at St. Mary's Student Parish, where prayers were said, candles were lit and blessings were offered, supporters carried signs and marched through downtown to the federal building on Liberty Street where they rallied.

Several local officials, including Mayor Christopher Taylor and state Rep. Yousef Rabhi, joined in the demonstration Tuesday night, July 18. They're among many urging U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to reconsider the decision to force Salazar Bautista to leave the country and go back to Mexico by Aug. 2.

"It is up to us to do everything we can to keep this family together, that we tell the administration that its fearful vision of immigrants and refugees is an affront to our history and our values," Taylor said.

"It is up to us to do everything we can to tell the world that Trump is not America," he added, drawing cheers and applause.

Taylor also asked the question, "What kind of country are we if we deport hardworking parents?"

Salazar Bautista, who came to the United States in 1997 on a travel visa and then stayed in the country illegally, has lived in Ann Arbor for the past 20 years and has no criminal record.

Her husband already was deported to Mexico in 2010 and now she's being told by ICE she has to leave. She is currently supporting her family by running a cleaning business in Ann Arbor.

"I'm not a threat to this country," Salazar Bautista said during an emotional speech at her church, sharing some of her story and saying she now functions as both a mother and father to her children.

She was joined by two of her children, 13-year-old Bryan Quintana-Salazar, a student at Forsythe Middle School, and 15-year-old Lourdes Quintana-Salazar, a student at Community High.

Her oldest daughter, Pamela Quintana-Salazar, is a student at Michigan State University.

Whether the family will remain together if Salazar Bautista is deported remains uncertain at the moment.

Salazar Bautista's children are U.S. citizens, having been born here, but they're planning to travel with her to Mexico in two weeks if she's forced to leave the U.S., and the two youngest children could stay there with their father and mother. Salazar Bautista's oldest daughter is planning to continue attending MSU.

The family is still talking about the possibility of having the two youngest children come back to stay with an uncle here so they can continue living and going to school in Ann Arbor.

"It would be a real struggle without my mom," Bryan said of that possibility. "It's a real struggle already without my dad."

Lourdes Quintana-Salazar thinks she and her brother will end up living in Mexico if their mother is deported.

She said it would be scary and sad to leave the U.S. and she hopes they don't have to go, but she said she has gone to Mexico three times to visit her father, so she has some familiarity with it.

"I'm so happy this many people came and showed up and supported us. I just feel so loved by everyone," the 15-year-old said after Tuesday night's rally in support of the family.

"I feel really grateful that so many people showed up here and I just want to thank them all," Bryan said, looking around at the large crowd, which included friends, family, classmates, school officials and others.

Addressing the crowd inside the church, Salazar Bautista spoke in Spanish while an interpreter translated in English. She told the hundreds who were listening she arrived here in 1997 and she and her husband had a normal life until 2010 when she was detained by ICE.

"When I was taking one of my daughters to school, five cars arrived at my house," she said of how she came to be detained.

"I was asked if I was Lourdes Salazar. I said, 'Yes.' I was told, 'You have to go back to your country right away because you are illegal here.' I responded that I had a petition from one of my brothers to be here in this country," she said. "They took me away. I was in jail for 23 days, despite the fact that I'm not a criminal."

Salazar Bautista said immigration authorities made a deal with her attorney at the time, allowing her to stay in the country with her children while her husband was deported to Mexico.

"I was only able to see my husband to say goodbye and he has been in Mexico for seven years now," she said, adding she has been allowed to continue living and working in the U.S. on a year-by-year basis until March of this year when, due to changing policies under President Donald Trump, she was told by ICE she must be deported. "Now my case was a priority and I had to leave the country."

ICE spokesman Khaalid Walls said a federal immigration judge ordered Salazar Bautista's removal from the country in 1998, and the decision was upheld by the Board of Immigration Appeals. He said ICE already granted her multiple stays of removal in the past.

"In a current exercise of discretion, the agency has allowed her to remain free from custody while timely finalizing her departure plans," he said in a statement this week. "The agency will continue to closely monitor her case to ensure compliance."

Asked why Salazar Bautista is a deportation priority now after being granted stays over the past several years, Walls said ICE typically focuses on people who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security, but anyone in violation of immigration laws may be subject to arrest, detention and deportation.

Salazar Bautista said faith is keeping her going and fighting for a chance to continue raising her children in the U.S. and guiding and educating them so they can have a better future.

"I have a lot of faith," she said.

As she spoke Tuesday night, she encouraged others to continue to fight for other families in the same situation.
ANN ARBOR, MI - A 60-year-old man found guilty of trying to kill his ex-wife by running her over with a car was sentenced to 30-60 years in prison Tuesday, July 18.

A jury in June found Gary Mitchell guilty of assault with intent to murder for hitting his 21-year-old ex-wife with his Cadillac in the parking lot of a Milan Taco Bell last summer.

One reason Washtenaw County Trial Court Judge Carol Kuhnke agreed to the lengthy sentence was Mitchell's extensive criminal past, detailed by Assistant Washtenaw County Prosecutor Blake Hatlem prior to sentencing.

Hatlem said Mitchell has prior convictions in different states for several "very violent" felonies including robbery, kidnapping and aggravated rape. While in prison, he was also convicted of sexually assaulting a female prison guard, according to Hatlem.

He came to the Ann Arbor area in 2011 and was quickly in trouble with the law again, according to Hatlem. Mitchell first appeared on local law enforcement's radar when he was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of minors in Ann Arbor's 15th District Court, for "plying" 14-year-old girls with alcohol and drugs, Hatlem said.

Afterwards, the convicted sex offender was closely watched by local police and even the FBI, according to Hatlem.

"Mr. Mitchell is not someone who comes into a neighborhood or area without drawing notice because of his violent, criminal history," he said.

Mitchell has a history of preying on young girls, Hatlem said, and his ex-wife was also much younger than him. The woman is now 21 years old, but was 14 years old when they met.

Mitchell met the woman woman in the Ann Arbor area, but they lived in Tennessee for a few years. The woman moved back to her hometown of Milan in July 2016 after she and Mitchell separated, she testified at a preliminary examination. The couple had a child together.

Mitchell's ex-wife claimed that they had been arguing over their separation and custody of the child when Mitchell used his Cadillac to hit and pin her against a pole in the parking lot at the Taco Bell on Dexter Street in Milan on Aug. 6, 2016.

The woman suffered a collapsed left lung, back pain and gash on her arm, records show. She testified at a preliminary hearing that she blacked out, then awoke to find Mitchell on top of her with his hands around her neck. She escaped and found safety in a garbage truck, where she called 911.

Mitchell claimed it was an accident, according to his court-appointed attorney Robert Killewald.

"You don't try and kill someone going seven miles per hour," Killewald said.

Killewald said Mitchell has served his punishment for previous crimes and requested a more lenient 225-month prison sentence, a little more than 17 years.

Hatlem asked for the full 30-60 year sentence.

"He's one of the most substantial threats to public safety I've encountered in 20 years," Hatlem said. "He is someone who simply cannot be stopped. He's someone who's not able to be reformed."

When given a chance to speak, Mitchell did not apologize. He pointed out that his ex-wife didn't show up to the sentencing and suggested that the criminal justice system had been duped, though didn't elaborate.

"You guys have been manipulated," he said. "You guys got what you wanted."

Judge Kuhnke said she didn't think the jury was wrong.

"I'm troubled by Mr. Mitchell's lengthy criminal history," she said before siding with the prosecution and sentencing him to 30-60 years.
PITTSFIELD TOWNSHIP, MI - The Michigan Department of Corrections and dozens of prison employees are accused in two federal lawsuits of depriving a mentally ill, 66-year-old inmate of food, water and medication and leaving her to live in filth for a period in 2014.

A lawsuit filed in Detroit federal court June 9 claims the department, it's employees and health care workers violated the Americans with Disabilities Act and the civil rights of the inmate by denying her appropriate care, ultimately leaving her in extremely poor health and in need of round-the-clock care.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Darlene Martin, now 69, of Washtenaw County, by her conservator, Robert Martin of Southfield.

A medical malpractice lawsuit is also pending in Washtenaw County Trial Court.

Darlene Martin was serving a 2.5-to-15 year prison sentence for first-degree retail fraud at the Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility when her mental health began rapidly deteriorating.

She suffered a mental health and medical episode that caused respiratory arrest, dehydration, liver and renal failure, and anoxic brain injury that eventually left her in need of 24/7 care, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit claims that Martin was diagnosed on June 11, 2014 with an adjustment disorder with anxiety and antisocial personality disorder and, with no treatment plan in place.

Days later, she began acting more bizarrely - flooding her cell, standing in pools of pool of urine, and feces, dancing naked in the window, spreading her food on the floor, rambling and suffering from auditory hallucinations, according to the federal court complaint.

From then to June 22, 2014, as Martin's condition worsened, those in charge of her care and supervision, according to the lawsuit, used a Taser on her without reason, wrote her up for splashing water, disconnected water to her cell, failed to make sure she was fed and hydrated, and failed to monitor, observe and request evaluations for her properly.

The lawsuit also claims that Martin was given a dangerous combination of medications, then given the wrong amount of medication and that employees failed to respond immediately when she was found unmoving and later found unresponsive.

Aside from the MDOC, 36 current and former prison employees, three health care and mental health companies - Corizon Health Inc., MHM Correctional Services Inc. and MHM Services Inc. - and 14 health care and mental health workers, including nurses, physicians, psychologists, a social worker and a psychiatrist, are named as defendants in the case.

A companion federal case, filed June 14, accuses an additional five MDOC employees of contributing to Martin's deteriorated state.

The second federal complaint accuses the other MDOC employees of a number of the same wrongdoings listed in the initial lawsuit, but also accuses employees of covering all cracks surrounding Martin's cell to limit the stench from her incontinence, and ignoring concerns specifically raised by prisoner observation aides.

Another, similar federal lawsuit was previously raised against some, but not all, of the defendants in 2016, but was dismissed without prejudice in January.

MDOC spokesman Chris Gautz said the department does not comment further on pending litigation.

Representatives for other parties in the three lawsuits could not be reached for comment.

Gautz said he was not immediately aware of disciplinary action taken as a result of Martin's injury against the individuals named in the lawsuits.

Prison health care services were combined into an integrated model in June 2016 and Corizon Health now handles physical, mental health and pharmacology for the department facilities, he said.

The lawsuits seek damages in excess of $75,000.

No court dates or responses had been filed in either federal case as of July 18.

A local medical malpractice suit was initially filed in December 2016 against Corizon Health Inc., MHM Correctional Services Inc., MHM Services Inc., and 14 health care and mental health workers, but the case against Corizon has since been dismissed. The amount in controversy exceeds $25,000 in the matter.

In response to the lawsuit, which largely resembles the federal lawsuits, one doctor has requested summary disposition, claiming he was not working during the incident. Several mental and health care employees have also filed affidavits denying a number of the allegations, including that the wrong amount of medication was given, claiming the allegations are outside the scope of their duties and leaving much of the rest to be proven.

A motion hearing in the matter is scheduled for Aug. 16.
BAY CITY, MI -- As the founder of Wirt Financial Services, Steve Wirt often had tasks for his employees to accomplish.

When his employees would respond with "I'll try," Wirt fired back with, "Don't try, do" - referencing a Yoda quote from the Star Wars franchise.

It's a phrase Donna Bacigalupo, who worked with Wirt for 29 years, still holds to this day. She said Wirt always challenged his employees and often looked to them for ideas and input.

"He liked to work behind the scenes and he wanted everyone to excel," Bacigalupo said. "He pushed everyone to achieve their best."

Wirt died on Sunday, July 16, at the age of 70 after battling brain cancer for the past two years. He leaves behind a legacy of donations and philanthropy to various organizations in Bay City, a community he deeply cared about, Bacigalupo said.

"He's given so much to the community, he's put so many kids through college," Bacigalupo said. "He was a wonderful man who put others before himself. He was an amazing person. Bay City is going to miss him."

Wirt was born on March 9, 1947, in Bay City to Alice and Jack Wirt -- for whom the public library on Center Avenue is named after. After graduating from Bay City Central High School, he earned a bachelor's degree in business from Eastern Michigan University.

After spending some time in Detroit, Wirt and his wife Dena started Wirt Financial Services in 1985 out of a spare bedroom in their Bay City home. The financial and leasing services company eventually evolved into the Wirt-Rivette Group with business partner Clarence Rivette. The business is currently housed at 3520 Davenport Ave. in Saginaw.

Steve Wirt's philanthropic contributions led to the creation of the United Way Non-Profit Center, 900 Washington Avenue. Wirt also supported the Bay County Public Library System, Bay Area Women's Center, the Boys & Girls Club and the Bay Area Community Foundation.

Steve Wirt helped establish scholarships at Michigan public universities and was a member of the Bay City Elks Club. Wirt also served as a member of Temple Israel, where he served on the dues and assessment committee.

It was his father who instilled a desire to give back the community, his wife said.

"(Steve) was a very unique person," Dena Wirt said. "He never cared about how people looked. He treated everyone equally. He respected ambition and he liked to help people who were trying to get somewhere."

Wirt suffered from both prostate cancer and terminal brain cancer. While he recovered from prostate cancer, he often walked outside or on a treadmill.

Dena Wirt said her husband suffered setbacks while walking, including breaking his hip and pelvis. But when he decided to do something, he would take it on fully.

Steve Wirt did not have an office. His wife joked that his cell phone was where he would conducted his business -- all while walking or exercising on the treadmill.

"He just wanted to be active and he never let anything get him down," Dena Wirt said.

Despite losing strength on the left side of his body, Wirt walked as much as his body let him. During his son Daniel's wedding last year, the couple walked their son down the aisle.

"He did what he could do physically, and then he did a little more," Dena Wirt said.

Wirt's other son, Matthew Wirt, preceded him in death.

Mike Bacigalupo, husband of Donna Bacigalupo and chief operating officer of the State Theatre in Bay City said Wirt made several donations to the theatre over a span of eight years and donated the equipment for Movies in the Park at Wenonah Park on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

"Just the smile on his face was worth the time I was able to spend with him," Mike Bacigalupo said.

"He will be missed by his family and the community greatly."

Donna Bacigalupo said Steve Wirt never wanted to be in the spotlight. He didn't even want to be called boss, she said. Donna Bacigalupo said Wirt became part of her family.

"He's going to be forever in our hearts and missed every day," she said.

Dena Wirt said her husband never accepted the "status quo."

"He always tried to move forward and improve whatever situation he was in," she said.
PINCONNING, MI -- Pinconning City Council members walked out of their meeting Tuesday, July 18, with an interim city manager in place and the steps needed to move forward with the city's police contract.

With a unanimous vote Tuesday, Pinconning City Council tapped Bay City Commissioner Andrew Niedzinski, 3rd Ward, as its interim city manager. Niedzinski is filling the position that became vacant following the abrupt resignation of former City Manager William Jasura last month.

Commissioner Andrew Niedzinski, 3rd Ward, at a City Commission meeting in March 2016.

Niedzinski, who is finishing up his master's degree at Central Michigan University, starts the position Thursday. The interim role is a part-time position that requires Niedzinski to work 20 hours per week for $25 per hour, he said.

"I saw this as an opportunity that I could gain some experience and apply what I've learned in Bay City to Pinconning on an interim basis," Niedzinski said.

Asked if he will still be able to be a Bay City commissioner along with being the interim Pinconning city manager, Niedzinski said that remains to be seen. City attorneys in Bay City are looking to see if that is an option to do both, he said. Niedzinski added there is a state statute that may prevent him from doing both.

Niedzinski said if it was illegal to do both jobs, he would most likely resign his seat from the Bay City Commission.

"I've got to do what's best for me and my family," Niedzinski said. "I think going into this type of career (public administration) is what I would like to do. It's what I have the passion for."

Niedzinski, 31, was a finalist for the city manager position for the village of Cass City. However, the Thumb town informed him on Saturday, July 15, that he was not selected for the job, citing his lack of experience in public administration.

With an interim position in Pinconning, Niedzinski said he hopes it will help him gain the experience necessary to fill that type of role.

Niedzinski said he talked with Pinconning Mayor Jason Brazeau last week about the interim position. Brazeau recommended Niedzinski to the council, which then voted unanimously to make him the interim city manager.

"I hope to help (Pinconning) solve through this contract with the police department and make sure they don't miss the bills or any sort of deadlines," Niedzinski said. "Without adequate leadership, they might fall behind. I've got to make sure the Pinconning residents don't suffer through the transition."

Police contract

Regarding the city's police contract, the council voted to appoint City Attorney Richard Sheppard as the city's representative for contract negotiations with the Police Officers Association of Michigan.

The council also named Niedzinski and Clerk Yvonne Broderick as correspondents to the council during discussions.

The Pinconning Police Department's three-year contract with the city expired June 30. Approval of a contract renewal was tabled at the council's May and June meetings. At a special meeting June 29, council members denied the contract and voted to send it back to the bargaining table for a one-year agreement.

Operating on a budget of $110,000 -- the police department includes Chief Thomas Tober and Sgt. Terry Spencer. A third officer, Donald Lusty, departed at the end of June for a job in the Upper Peninsula.

Spencer said there have been applicants for a third police employee and interviews are being conducted.

Brazeau said during the meeting the city is in favor of keeping the police department in place.

During the meeting, Councilwoman Jennifer DeLorge said the contract hadn't been looked over by an attorney in about nine years. She said if the city approved a one-year deal, it could fix legal matters and the council could vote again next year.

Councilman Brian Saha added a short-term contract would fully correct the current contract through a later bargaining session.

Spencer, a union president of POAM, said he was in negotiations with Sheppard prior to him being appointed. Spencer has been in communication with his union representative and the feedback is that Sheppard is well-educated on contract issues.

As the only full-time employee of the Pinconning Police Department, Spencer said he would like to expedite the contract as soon as possible but added there is no hurry.

"The city has a lot of issues on the table now with a city manager appointed," Spencer said. "Even though the contract (expiration) date has passed, we're still in the negotiation process. We still continue our service just as before the expiration date."

Spencer reaffirmed his stance that he is not interested in a one-year contract.

"Having a one-year contract doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me," Spencer said. "If you look at the date today, in 10 months we'll have to negotiate another contract."

Other matters

Brazeau said during the meeting that there were 32 applicants for the full-time city manager position and 20 for the vacant treasurer job. He said interviews for those positions would take place soon.

Outgoing Treasurer Dawn Hoder, who departed last month after more than 10 years in Pinconning City Hall, has helped the city through its transition and will stay on until the end of July, Brazeau said.

A July 6 meeting of the Finance and Personnel Committee discussing items like open positions and the city's police contract violated the Open Meetings Act (OMA), according to the Pinconning Journal.

Section 15.262 of the OMA states, "'Meeting' means the convening of a public body at which a quorum is present for the purpose of deliberating toward or rendering a decision on a public policy..."

Brazeau was in attendance and took part in discussions in a closed session, The Journal reported. An article in the Wednesday, July 12, edition of the Journal states, "The inclusion of Mayor Brazeau in the discussions and deliberations of the Committee meant that a quorum of the City Council was present at a meeting posted as a Finance and Personnel Committee."

At Tuesday's regular council meeting, Brazeau apologized and thanked Journal Editor Craig Barnt for bringing it to the committee's attention.
Logan D. Larson

BAY CITY, MI -- A Linwood teen who police say drunkenly split a car in two and broke his passenger's back in the process is a step closer to facing a jury or accepting a plea offer.

Logan D. Larson, 18, on Friday, July 14, waived his right to a preliminary examination in Bay County District Court, prompting Judge Timothy J. Kelly to bind his case over to Circuit Court.

"The preliminary examination in this case wasn't needed for either side," said defense attorney Marcus R. Garske. "Mr. Larson waived his right to his prelim so that negotiations could be continued in Circuit Court."

A plea offer from the prosecution states that if Larson pleads guilty or no contest to a five-year felony count of operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated causing serious injury, they'll dismiss a one-year misdemeanor charge of second-offense operating while intoxicated. The offer does not include a sentencing recommendation.

Larson has remained in custody at the Bay County Jail on a $25,000 bond since his June 5 arraignment.

Authorities issued a warrant for him on June 2.

The crash occurred about 11:15 p.m. on March 19. Michigan State Police troopers arrived at the collision site at Mackinaw and Linwood roads and found a red 2012 Kia Optima had been split in half after colliding with a utility pole.

An 18-year-old female passenger was trapped inside. Pinconning-Fraser firefighters managed to extract her and she was later transported to Covenant HealthCare in Saginaw.

According to police reports, the woman suffered four breaks in her left arm, a shattered left ankle, a broken pelvis and four fractures in her back. Her spleen was also injured.

Larson, the Kia's alleged driver, was absent from the scene, having apparently fled southwest through a field, according to witness statements. Troopers soon located Larson lying on the floor of a shed, a large cut on the back of his head that was heavily bleeding, according to police reports obtained by MLive via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Larson told troopers "he should not have been driving because he drank too much," reports state. He had bloodshot, watery eyes, slurred speech, and smelled heavily of intoxicants. Troopers did not conduct sobriety tests due to his injuries.

Larson was also transported to Covenant HealthCare. Troopers interviewed him at the hospital, but his pat response to each of their questions was "I don't know."

A judge signed a warrant to obtain a blood sample from Larson at 1:46 a.m. The Michigan State Police Crime Lab completed their analysis of the sample on March 29 and determined his blood alcohol level was at 0.106 when it was drawn from him.

In Michigan, a person is legally intoxicated when his or her blood alcohol level reaches 0.08.

Investigators determined the Kia had been traveling north on Mackinaw Road when it veered into the southbound lane. Larson turned the car back into the northbound lane, then entered a ditch sideways.

"The vehicle continued to rotate and collided with a utility pole with the rear of the vehicle," police reports state. "Due to the collision with the pole the car was nearly severed in half. The car was split from the trunk to just in front of the passenger's fender."

Police previously told MLive the passenger suffered permanent injuries and that Larson would have died if they had not located him.

Despite his age, Larson already has a lengthy criminal record. In December 2015, he pleaded guilty to single counts of first-offense driving while impaired, reckless driving, and third-degree retail fraud. In exchange, prosecutors dismissed charges of operating a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol level of 0.17 or higher, operating while intoxicated, fourth-degree fleeing and eluding police, and driving with an invalid license.

The following month, a Bay County District Court judge sentenced Larson to eight months' probation and to participate in at least 12 outpatient sessions, attend school regularly, attend a crime victim panel, complete a mental health assessment, adhere to a curfew from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. unless he's working or with his mother, and submit to random drug and alcohol testing. The judge also ordered him to pay $1,165 in court fines and costs.

Come June 2016, Larson was again in court and was sentenced to 30 days in jail for violating his probation. He was discharged from probation on July 26, 2016.
FLINT, MI - The Genesee County Sheriff's Office was justified in suspending an employee for speaking publicly about an ongoing case in which a former lieutenant was convicted of criminal sexual conduct and stalking deputies under his command, the Michigan Court of Appeals has ruled.

Reversing an order from Genesee Circuit Judge Judith A. Fullerton, the Michigan Court of Appeals released an unpublished opinion last week stating that Genesee County Undersheriff Christopher Swanson and Capt. Michael Tocarchick were justified in suspending former deputy Paul Brooks from his job after he violated a gag order preventing him from talking about ongoing litigation involving former Lt. Michael Chatterson.

Chatterson was sentenced to five years of probation in September 2014 after pleading no contest to fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct and stalking other deputies who were under his command.

Brooks, who was on the witness list in the case, filed a lawsuit against Genesee County, Tocarchick and Swanson in 2013, alleging that his rights under the Whistleblowers' Protection Act and the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act were violated after he was suspended from his post after he "repeatedly and admittedly violated a 'gag order' in significant ways," according to the suit. Brooks eventually quit the office.

In Genesee Circuit Court, Fullerton denied the county, Swanson and Tocarchick's motion for summary disposition, instead granting it, in part, to Brooks.

However, the Michigan Court of Appeals said that Brooks' claims that he felt "targeted because [he] was on a witness list and ... wasn't on their side" did not constitute reports to a public body of violations or suspected violations of law.

Brooks' attorney, Tom Pabst, said the appeals court's decision to toss the case was "shocking" and the "worst [he'd] seen in 30 years."

"It's hard for me to imagine a worse decision," Pabst said. "The very document that the defendants wrote said that Paul Brooks talked about the case to a judge, the judge's secretary and an attorney. That's protected by law."

But Genesee County Sheriff Robert Pickell said he was shocked Fullerton initially "bought into the lawyer talk," and that the "appeals court did the right thing" by reversing the decision.

"What [a gag order] does, in this case, is simply protecting the integrity of the case and the integrity of the witnesses," Pickell said. "Why does a judge not see that?"

The appeals court centered in on the fact that Brooks himself admitted to violating the gag order, and that he simply disagreed with the order's scope and said that Brooks has not "presented more than mere speculation in this case."

"Stated simply, the record is clear in that defendants had a legitimate reason for adverse employment actions that were taken against plaintiff -- specifically, plaintiff repeatedly and admittedly violated the 'gag order' at issue a variety of times in significant ways," the court's opinion said.

Pabst, who said he intends to submit a leave to appeal with the Michigan Supreme Court, said he hopes the court's decision doesn't stand "for the sake of Paul Brooks and all the other witnesses who feel intimidated testifying in court."
GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Kurt Reppart is running for a First Ward seat on the nonpartisan Grand Rapids City Commission, open as longtime commissioner Dave Shaffer departs due to term limits.

Voters will decide in the Aug. 8 primary if Reppart advances to the Nov. 7 general election.

Reppart is one of three candidates seeking the First Ward seat, which comes with a four-year term. The two candidates that garner the most votes will appear on the November ballot -- unless one of the candidates receives more than 50 percent of the vote. In that case, the candidate is elected outright.

Below are his responses to a questionnaire The Grand Rapids Press/MLive sent to each candidate running for office in the August primary.

Name as it will appear on the ballot: Kurt Reppart

Age: 37

Family: Married to Matteah Spencer-Reppart; two children: Raiya, 7; Koen, 5

Kurt Reppart (Courtesy | Ben Beltman)

Education: B.A in Biblical Literature, Taylor University

Military service: None

Employment: Executive Director, The Other Way Ministries

Previous employment: International Aid - Director of Development / Manager of Church Relations (2006-2009)

List companies you own or hold more than a 5 percent stake: Proponents, LLC

Have you ever held public office? Please detail: No

Other community positions currently held:

West Fulton Business Association Board

Kirkhof College of Nursing Advisory Board (GVSU)

Neighborhood Match Fund Advisory Committee (City of Grand Rapids)

Westside Collaborative Leadership Team

Have you ever run for public office and lost? Please detail: No

Have you ever been arrested: No

Have you ever been convicted of or pleaded no contest to a crime: No

Have you ever declared bankruptcy: No

Has a company you owned a stake of 5 percent or more ever declared bankruptcy: No

Have you ever failed to pay taxes on time? If so, please explain: No

The Grand Rapids Press/MLive asked Reppart several questions about his qualifications and platform. Responses were kept to 150 words or fewer for readability.

Why should voters elect you?

First Ward residents should vote for me because of my long standing and effective work in the community, my executive leadership experience, my strong knowledge of the current issues and my history of working collaboratively in order to achieve results. For 15 years I have been working as an advocate for First Ward families to connect them with opportunities including jobs, education and health services. I will bring with me to the commission the fiscal responsibility the residents of the First Ward expect and the integrity they deserve.

If elected, what would be your top priorities for the next four years?

I have four main priorities to focus on within my first four years.

First is a commitment to fiscal responsibility. I will ensure the city continues to have a balanced budget and 25 percent rate of saving as well as prioritizing investments in our core city services like street repair, public services and parks.

Second, I will work to ensure we are a city that is open for business and will promote policy that encourages more job creating developments.

Third, I will work to ensure city policy is aligned so that housing can be developed at all price points and that home values continue to rise.

Finally, I will work for a safer Grand Rapids. I will support the men and women of our police and fire departments in the difficult work they do to keep our city safe as well as be attentive to concerns expressed by the community.

Do you think the city is doing enough to improve police-community relations? If not, what more should be done?

The city has made this a priority this year and given the significant portion of the budget it represents it should be considered a top priority.

First, the Grand Rapids Police Department (GRPD) has been transparent and has made many changes that we should acknowledge. They have adopted body cam technology, they went through a traffic stop study, they have completed implicit bias training as well as taken deliberate steps toward diversifying their team. These efforts should be commended. There is still work to be done to ensure the entire Grand Rapids community feels safe and protected by the GRPD. I am grateful that the City Commission has allocated significant funds to improve police-community relations. I believe there is a great opportunity to make further progress in this area in the coming years.

What role should the city play in addressing residents' concerns about a lack of affordable housing?

Grand Rapids is an amazing place to call home and has seen a remarkable recovery since the Great Recession with a growing number of people moving here every day to find opportunity. The challenges of the shrinking supply of affordable housing cannot be solved by Grand Rapids alone, Grand Rapids has been a leader in creating affordable housing opportunities within the region and we must work collaboratively with our neighboring municipalities to grow the supply of affordable housing throughout West Michigan. It is also incumbent upon the city to establish policy which allows more housing units to be created at all price points. The basic issue is that we do not have enough housing available throughout the city, therefore we need policies that ensure that additional housing units can be created as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Downtown businesses say parking shortages will limit their ability to grow. What should the city do to address this situation?

As our downtown continues to grow we are facing some challenges with parking. The city needs to continue to be a partner with the business community to expand parking opportunities that enhance and encourage business growth and development. Any opportunities we have to expand daytime parking options for business and evening parking for residents and downtown visitors should be explored. The city should expand public private partnerships which can grow parking options as a part of future developments. It is also important that we make strategic investments in not just parking but also in transportation systems such as the DASH service that can effectively and efficiently move people throughout our community.
HOLLAND TOWNSHIP, MI -- A 3-year-old girl in a car seat was critically injured in a four-vehicle collision on Tuesday, July 18, police said.

The girl was a rear-seat passenger in a vehicle stopped for a traffic light on 136th Avenue at River Avenue about 1 p.m. Tuesday, July 18

Ottawa County sheriff's deputies said three vehicles were headed south on 136th Avenue, stopped at the River Avenue traffic light, when a fourth vehicle crashed into the rear of the line-up and caused a chain-reaction crash.

Deputies said Francisco Ramirez-Pablo, 21, of Holland, was driving the vehicle that failed to stop. He was taken to Holland Hospital with serious injuries.

His vehicle struck the rear of another vehicle driven by Jordan Valdo, 26, of Holland Township. The 3-year-old was in the rear seat of Valdo's vehicle and she was pinned in the vehicle.

The girl was taken by Aero Med helicopter to DeVos Children's Hospital.

Valdo and a front-seat passenger, 22-year-old Marisela Martinez, had injuries not considered life-threatening.

The drivers of two other vehicles were not injured.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI - Some racial divides in Grand Rapids have changed little since 1967.

What has changed in the past 50 years is the role local government chooses to play.

The summer of 1967 was marred by deadly race riots in Detroit and across the country -- the same unrest and sense of racial injustice fueled a three-day uprising in Grand Rapids. No one was killed in Grand Rapids, but the feeling among black residents that they were treated as "second-class citizens" was not resolved.

In 2015, Forbes ranked Grand Rapids the second-worst in the nation for economic success for African Americans. And a city-funded study released this spring showed the police department pulls over black drivers at a higher rate than non-black drivers.

City officials are owning up to disparities in Grand Rapids now more than ever. This spring has seen a renewed emphasis on police-community relations, as black, white and Hispanic residents have all demanded change from the department.

Local government is leading a charge to diversify city and police staff -- as well as to rally business and nonprofit leaders together to come up with solutions. Equitable distribution of city services is top of mind at city hall, using data from the city's 311 call center.

"We've just got to stop causing disparate impact -- government can't be part of that," City Manager Greg Sundstrom said.

The Division Avenue corridor has never fully recovered from the 1967 uprisings. In the neighborhood where the local violence caused people to sleep on their floors and keep the lights off, the population has dropped to what it was in 1960. Double-digit unemployment persists and household income continues to fall.

"The difference between 1967 and 2017: In 1967 our country was focused on basic rights for everyone. And we didn't have a lot of data about the disparities," Sundstrom said. "What's compelling today is not a group of people that are standing up and demanding equal rights. What's compelling is to see data that goes back as far as we have data to show that these problems are not getting better. That's the disturbing part."

The city is trying to bridge existing gaps and avoid conflicts. Much of that has been driven by forces outside of Grand Rapids: namely the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.

In Ferguson's wake, city leaders met with the community through the Safe Alliances for Everyone -- a citizen committee that developed a long list of recommendations, which eventually evolved into a 12-point plan to improve community and police relations.

Police Chief David Rahinsky joined the Grand Rapids force in 2014 and was quickly faced with the "watershed moment" Ferguson posed. Since then, the city has spent $1.8 million to equip every officer with a body camera. Officer-involved shootings are now investigated by outside agencies, and officers are now trained to recognize their own implicit bias.

The department believes those steps have helped Grand Rapids navigate what could have been an explosive situation May 3, when police shot and killed 18-year-old Malik Carey in the back seat of a parked car. Carey, a black man, had pulled a gun from his waistband and fired four shots at officers after the police had been talking to him.

Shots from the incident hit adjacent homes in the 1300 block of Dickinson Street SE -- though police believe they came from Carey's gun.

"That event could have resulted in a full-blown riot, based on the fact how hot it was, we had people who were upset," Sgt. Terry Dixon said. "It could have been a lot worse, and I don't think people really realize that unless you go back and you look at everything that took place, everything that's been put into place to mitigate that before it happened and we were able to withstand it."

Rahinsky has made efforts to be publicly accessible throughout challenging discussions in the community in the past three years -- giving out his cell phone number, meeting with concerned families and opening his office door to the public.

"When I came in I really thought that was my mandate post-Ferguson," Rahinsky said, explaining that he was looking for how he could add to what he saw as top-notch policing by the department.

"I thought that was what I brought: the ability to bridge either some gaps that may be real, or gaps that may be perceived in terms of what we do."

A renewed emphasis on police-community relations arose again this spring after police stopped five unarmed black youths at gunpoint March 24, as they were investigating a report of a gun. The male youths, ages 12 to 15, were innocent.

They weren't hurt, but were shaken. Many saw it as an overreach of police authority and called on the city commission for change.

"That was really tough for this community but we were able to weather it," Sundstrom said. "For us and the police department, we were able to learn from it."

Mayor Rosalynn Bliss has put racial equity out front as a priority. Her suggested reading book for the community during her first year in office was "A City Within a City: The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan" by Todd E. Robinson.

"I believe that we have to know history - I do believe that's part of change," Bliss said. "There were very deep disparities then (in 1967) as well. It was a different time, with different social issues, but there are some parallels."

This February at her second state of the city speech, Bliss announced a racial equity initiative. She is putting together a group led by her and Grand Rapids Community College President Bill Pink. They will start meeting this October to come up with a plan for intentional changes to address economic disparities in African American and Hispanic communities in the city.

"I fundamentally believe that the city can only do so much," Bliss said. "We are one piece of this puzzle -- but I do believe that when the community comes together and says, 'This is not OK in our city,' we can do great things," Bliss said.

Internally, city hall is working with the Government Alliance on Race and Equity to see how systems and structures in local government are creating different outcomes for residents of different races and backgrounds.

For example, the city may be sending more work crews to fix streetlights and streets Grand Rapids 1967 riot: When anger, oppression erupted into 'chaos'in neighborhoods where people know how to file a complaint -- or have the free time to file a complaint, Bliss said. That may mean the city needs to move to a more proactive way of delivering services instead of just relying on complaints, Bliss said.

And as city hall and the police department continue to look for new hires to replace retiring workers, there's a great emphasis on finding diverse, local candidates. About 12 percent of the city's workers are minorities, Bliss said.

"I am not arguing that if our workforce was exactly as diverse as our community that somehow we don't have problems -- that's not the solution," Sundstrom said. "I am saying that if we have only - in the extreme - white males and we're trying to deliver services to females and family members and youth and seniors we can't possibly understand our customers as well as when we have a diverse workforce here that understands our customers from 10 different angles."

City leaders are making an effort to listen to residents. This June five forums asked residents to help the city guide its spending of $5 million in earmarks for police and community relations throughout the next five years - instead of using the money to hire 12 police officers as First Ward Commissioner Dave Shaffer proposed.

Though it may be too soon to see if the city's pains are making a difference in neighborhoods, officials feel their efforts are keeping violent conflicts at bay.

"I think any time people are held down or held back, are treated such that they have disparate outcomes, it may take a while -- but they will rise up," Sundstrom said, speaking to the uprising of the summer of 1967. "I feel pretty good and confident that even with the disparity levels that we have today - knowing that what we know about them and what we need to do to try and address them that no, that will not happen again in Grand Rapids."
GRAND RAPIDS, MI - The city of Grand Rapids and Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital are hoping to make a mid-block crosswalk on Wealthy Street safer for pedestrians.

Employees and visitors to the hospital park on the south side of Wealthy, and cross the road in the middle of the block where Cass Avenue dead-ends into the hospital campus, about halfway in between the roundabouts at Lafayette and Jefferson.

The city has taken steps to make the block safer for pedestrians over the years, including moving a bus stop, adding pedestrian warning signs and painting the pavement.

"We continue to find there's a need for more and more," said Chris Zull, the city's traffic safety manager.

Adding the roundabouts to Wealthy Street has slowed traffic some on the 25-mile-per-hour street, Zull said.

Rectangular rapid flashing beacons will soon be added to the crosswalk. They're activated with the push of a button.

Under local law, drivers must stop when there's a person walking in a crosswalk, Zull said.

There are two other marked crosswalks on Wealthy Street in that area -- one at the Lafayette roundabout and one at the Jefferson roundabout.

Mary Free Bed and Downtown Grand Rapids Inc.'s Alliance for Investment will be paying for the beacons - an $8,000 investment. The city of Grand Rapids will be pitching in $1,500 towards that for traffic signs, labor and equipment for installation.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Duthler's Family Foods on Bridge Street has been a fixture in the Grand Rapids' West Side neighborhood for two decades.

Customers learned Tuesday, July 18, the grocery, at 648 Bridge St. NW, will soon shutter. A sign on the door announced a store closing sale, offering 20 percent everything but beer, wine and tobacco.

The decision comes a few weeks after retail giant Meijer broke ground a block away on Bridge Street Market, a new urban-style store, slated to open early fall 2018.

The family-owned chain decided not to renew its lease for financial reasons, the store manager told WOOD-TV. She said the store would close sometime in August.

The store's pending closure was greeted with mixed reactions by customers on Tuesday evening.

"It would have been nice if they had waited until the new store opened," said Valerie Hudgins, pushing a cart of grocery bags to her car. "While there is some issues with the store, for the community, this is the only grocery store."

Hudgins and other shoppers said the store was overdue for an upgrade.

Richard Sloan, another neighbor, worries Meijer's new store will bring a new set of problems to the longtime working class neighborhood that is undergoing significant redevelopment.

"The new store is going to bring traffic and chaos," Sloan said.

He thinks some customers will take their business to Ralph's Food Market, neighborhood grocery a little over a mile away on Leonard Street NW.

Duthler's has been in the neighborhood since 1997, when the Grand Rapids grocer bought the former Piggly Wiggly market.

The closure of the West Side store will leave one remaining Duthler's store, at 1226 Madison Ave SE, on the city's Southeast Side. The third generation business is run by brothers Jon, Tom and David Duthler and their brother-in-law Ian Smith.

In November, they closed their Alpine Township store, at 1025 4 Mile Road NW, because it didn't draw enough shoppers.

Over the decades, Duthler's has operated as many as four stores at one time across West Michigan.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI - Lieutenant Governor Brian Calley was in West Michigan today, advocating for a more effective process in combating the state's lead epidemic.

Flint infamously grabbed national attention when unsafe lead levels led to deadly consequences.

Similarly, 80 percent of the homes in Grand Rapids were built before 1978 and, as a result, the people who live in them could be at a higher risk for lead poisoning.

Statistics such as that one inspired Kent County to create its Lead Task force after areas of the county was listed among parts of the state with the highest number of children exhibiting elevated blood lead levels.

"There is not a fast and easy solution to dealing with this problem," Calley told the Kent County officials. "It just takes a lot of hard work.

"Our goal is to completely eliminate this problem. It's a tall order."

Calley chairs Gov. Rick Snyder's Lead Task Force.

The lieutenant governor said government agencies should take a more proactive approach to preventing lead contamination rather than a "reactionary" one and praised the county for taking the safety of its most at-risk communities seriously.

Calley suggested everything from universal testing for children in certain zip codes to the promotion of daily tasks such as washing toys and clearing sand or other potentially contaminated debris near or around the home.

Funding educational or implementation programs will cost the county money, Calley acknowledged.

He mentioned a request for proposals issued by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services July 19 for community organizations to provide residential lead hazard control services to Medicaid Children's Health Insurance Plan enrolled residents.

Grants up to $1.5 million are available for qualifying cities, counties or consortia to provide lead hazard control services. The Healthy Homes Section of MDHHS hopes to fund up to six agencies to provide these services in Michigan communities.

"I can guarantee we will be looking into that," Kent County task force Chairwoman Emily Brieve told Calley.

With the water crisis in Flint still hanging over Calley and Snyder's administration, Calley said county money spent on lead contamination prevention is money well spent.

"Flint raised awareness," Calley said. "And it led to action."
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We wish to inform you that, the next Meeting of Board of Directors of the Corporation will be held on August 04, 2017 to consider inter-alia the Un-audited Financial Results of the Corporation for the First Quarter ended June 30, 2017 (April  June 2017).A notice to this effect is being published in the leading newspapers.This is for your information.Source : BSE
Meta layoffs | Why Zuckerberg's Metaverse bet has proven to be a bit too costly
business Govt may ask low-cost carriers to shift partial operations to New Delhi airport: Sources The Civil Aviation Ministry is likely to ask low-cost carriers to shift partial operations to a new terminal at the Delhi airport by October to decongest Delhi airport. Sources tell CNBC-TV18 that the ministry has held several meetings trying to convince domestic airlines to shift before winter schedule.
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Undeterred by pricing pressures and competition in the worlds largest market for generic drugs, Ajanta Pharma plans to rapidly scale up its US business.

The Mumbai-headquartered drug maker, which gets much of its revenues from domestic formulations and emerging markets, has now set its eyes on US market.

The decision to enter US was not sudden as the company has been investing for the last five years on R&D to develop a pipeline of abbreviated new drug application (ANDAs) and building US FDA compliant facilities.

After filing eight ANDAs in FY17, the company plans to almost double that number this year. The company said it is focused on niche and complex products in the oral solid space.

It (US business) would one of the important growth drivers of the company, Managing Director Yogesh Agrawal said at the companys recent annual general meeting.

So far, Ajanta Pharma has filed 34 ANDAs, of which it has received 17 final approvals and two tentative approvals.

We are awaiting approvals for 15 ANDAs and plan to file 12-15 ANDAs in FY 2018 with the US FDA, Arvind Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer of Ajanta Pharma told Moneycontrol.

Agrawal said it costs around USD 0.5 to 1 million for each ANDA filing.

The company is encouraged by the fact that two of its manufacturing facilities in Dahej, Gujarat and Paithan, Maharashtra have successfully completed US FDA inspections in February and April this year, giving a major fillip to companys US business plans.

While Paithan received an establishment inspection (EIR) report with a few minor observations, Dahej, the newer facility, has gone through the US FDA audit without any observations. Dahej is yet to get an EIR.

The company expects the US to contribute at least 15-20 percent to sales by the end of this financial year from around 9 percent in FY17.

Ajanta posted Rs 2,026 crore revenues in FY 2017, much of it coming from domestic formulation and emerging markets.

In line with the US expansion - Ajanta said it will enhance R&D spend to 8 percent of revenue, going forward from 6 percent of revenue last year.

Smaller and mid-sized Indian drug makers such as Ajanta Pharma are trying to emulate their larger peers who derive close to half of their sales from the highly regulated yet profitable US market.

But analysts say those days of high margins are over owing to intense competition and consolidation of the distribution channels.

Earlier Indian generic drug makers used to enjoy margins of over 35-40 percent with relatively less competition in US, but now margins have contracted to 15-20 percent, said an analyst tracking the pharma sector. However 15-20 percent margins are still decent for late entrants, also given the low base, Ajanta Pharma is expected to grow much faster than its Indian counterparts in US."
Ganesha Ecosphere | The promoter shareholding for September quarter 2019: 39.91%; December quarter 2019: 40.13%; March quarter 2020: 40.36%; and June quarter 2020: 40.37%. It's debt-to-equity for FY20 was 0.19x. In the last one-year stock price has moved up 10 percent to Rs 269.85 as on September 08, 2020.

Government-body Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) has locked horns with private ethnic retailer Fabindia for selling non-khadi garments under the label of khadi products in its stores across the country.

Alleging "unfair practice", KVIC sought payment from Fabindia and said that the government agency may have lost around Rs 100-200 crore business due to this, as per a TOI report.

The khadi tag spat has been going on for a while now between the private and the government backed entities.

Also: Fabindia removing 'Khadi' brand name for its products

This is highly speculative, with no basis. Fabindia has been sustaining artisanal livelihoods for last 57 years. We would like to clarify that Fabindia sources handcrafted products, including fabrics, from artisans across the country. We have been in conversation with the KVIC on certification since 2015, a Fabindia spokesperson said as per the report

Whats the rule?

Legally, khadi products can only be sold if they are sourced from appropriate units.

KVIC  the agency responsible for promoting khadi  rejected Fabindias application for selling khadi products as the foreign investor - backed entity refused to accept its terms and conditions.

The agency had warned the clothes retailer back in 2015 regarding the non-khadi products issue, however, Fabindia refused to respond and it continued to sell non-khadi products until this January.

Raymond and Arvind Mills are other firms who have been granted to use the khadi trademark.

Earlier this year, FabIndia had said that it was removing the Khadi brand name from its products after a legal notice was issued by Khadi Village and Industries Commission against them alleging "unfair trade practice".

The KVIC notice had also asked Fabindia to remove display banners from its showroom to which Fabindia complied.

Fabindia had also sought a meeting with KVIC officials to explain its position in order to resolve the matter to the satisfaction of Khadi India.

KVIC chairman V K Saxena had previously said in a September 29, 2016 letter that upon the request for FabIndia several meetings were held.

However, the private ethnic retailer did not communicate anything to KVIC, and on this grounds, the KVIC assumed Fabindia was not interested obtaining the Khadi mark certificate for sales and promotion of khadi products.

Fabindia is a foreign investor backed retailer that sells ethnic clothes in India claiming to source them from artisans and villagers.
Air India employees would get an exposure to the corporate culture that would be introduced after the privatisation of the airline. In a letter to employees, Chairman Ashwani Lohani, also assured the employees that their valid interests would be "safeguarded".

Ownership changes that we expect at Air India would also lead to change in the working environment and the work culture. The complexities of working in a PSU (public sector unit) environment would get replaced by a corporate culture, a culture in which merit would get a better deal, wrote Lohani in the letter on Tuesday.

The airline is grappling with a huge debt of nearly Rs 50,000 crore after purchase of 111 aircrafts at USD 11 billion, and working capital cost.

Unless a solution is found to this huge debt, survival in the long run is almost impossible and the proposal to consider disinvestment is a step in this direction. It is the firm conviction of the government that the process of disinvestment is only meant to make Air India a much stronger world-class airline capable of competing with others successfully, said Lohani.

However, the governments decision to privatise Air India has not been received well by the employees who staged a protest against the disinvestment of the national carrier at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi on Tuesday.

Lohani, in his letter, also reassured the employees that during the process of disinvestment, the government and airline management would like to safeguard your genuine and valid interests and ensure that suitable measures to this effect are put in place.
Answer: Tata.

India's salt-to-software Tata Group is considering a plan to streamline its technology and infrastructure businesses, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

The restructuring plan would involve moving several of its technology businesses under Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, the country's top software services exporter, the report said.

Tata Group has not made a final decision about which companies would be folded under TCS, the report added.

Bloomberg said the group may sell some smaller units that do not fit with its strategy and that the conglomerate was also mulling a plan to merge infrastructure businesses into one company.

A Tata Sons spokesperson told Reuters the company does not comment on market speculation while TCS declined to comment on the report.
Cab aggregators Uber / Ola

Customers of cab aggregators such as Ola and Uber have paid little attention to the fact that the terms and conditions (T&C) listed by these companies are heavily stacked against them, reports The Hindu Business Line.

Any liability arising out of disputes that the aggregator may face are severely restricted by some of these clauses. In the case of Uber, any mediation or arbitration should be conducted in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

ANI Technologies, the parent firm of Ola, indicated that its liability is limited to Rs 1,000 only and it can change the terms without giving any notice to its users.

The timing of the disclosures come at a time when many state governments are yet to give approval for the services provided by them.

A draft notification issued by the government last year laid down conditions in which the operator can function. A driver's licence can be revoked found to be violating any of the norms states one of the conditions.

The contention of the cab aggregators is that they are just a technology service providers allowing independent third-party service providers to provide transport services to users.

The terms and conditions of Uber state that it is governed by the Dutch law plus the dispute arising between passenger and Uber have to be resolved in the Dutch court.
Employee retrenchment has been the flavour of this season with several players across the IT sector handing out pink slips to their employees. But can the employee have any say in this matter? Moneycontrol gives you a lowdown on what you can do to fight it:

--Have the documents in place

If the company has asked you to leave for performance-related issues, see that you have adequate documentation required to deal with the allegations. Also, any rewards and recognition handed to you in the recent past can be used as evidence that your performance was up to the mark.

--Build up credible evidence

Any photographs of manhandling by employer or any audio recordings will be admissible as evidence only if you get it properly verified in an independent lab prior to presenting it in court.

--Read the employment contract carefully

A contract usually provides for a notice period or pay in lieu of notice. Hence, a company can merely pay you and ask you to leave within hours. Read the contract to see if you are eligible for both notice and payment.

--Approach the Labour Commissioner

An employee can approach the Labour Commissioner in the region to present their case. This will lead to the company being called to present their side of the story and a possible resolution.

--Keep employer in the loop

Even if you plan to take an action against the employer, it is advisable to inform them through a formal mail about your decision.

--Stay away from bad-mouthing the company

Whatever be your grouches against the employer, it is considered unprofessional to bad mouth the company on a public platform or social media.

--Approach industrial court to escalate the matter

If a dispute has not been resolved within 45 days of moving the labour commissioners office, one can also move the industrial Ccourt of that region.

--Be prepared to wait

Court cases take time especially in the area of employer-employee conflicts due to a huge backlog of existing cases. Even if you have joined another company, a lot of time has to be invested in court hearings.

--Keep a legal backup ready

Though legal help is not necessary at the level of the Labour Commissioner, it is advisable that employees take legal help, especially since companies come armed with their lawyers.

--Out-of-court settlement could be easier

Many employers choose to opt for out-of-court settlements since they are quicker and save the reputation of the company. If a company does give you this option, unless it has been a very unfair termination, it would be a good idea to go for this if the court case has been stretched for too long.
Import of coking coal from Canada is likely to rise in future keeping pace with the increase in steelmaking capacity in India, the Steel Ministry said in a statement today.

As per the production targets in National Steel Policy 2017, the coking coal requirement is projected to increase from the current level of around 60 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) to 160 MTPA.

Although various measures are being taken to increase the supply of indigenous coking coal, dependence on import would continue. In such a scenario, multiple options for sourcing coking coal imports would lead to cost advantage and choice, the statement said.

Canada annually exports about 30 million tonnes of coking coal out of which Indian steel companies purchase around three million tonne.

According to the statement, Steel Minister Birender Singh led a delegation comprising senior officials from the ministry and its PSUs to Canada earlier this month. The minister had extensive interaction with Canadian Natural Resource Minister James Carr.

The discussion included growth of steel industry in India and the strategic importance of Canadian coking coal for Indian steelmakers, collaborations in the area of environmental friendly mining, coal beneficiation and R&D.

Another highlight of the visit was wide-ranging deliberations with representatives of Canadian Institute of Steel Construction (CISC).

Singh expressed keen interest in the working and structure of the institute with the objective of exploring the possibility of setting up the same in India.

The delegation held a joint meeting in Toronto, with various steel-related Canadian institutions and industry representatives for deliberating on issues of mutual interest.

It discussed efficient mining and logistics managements, enhancing steel intensity of the Indian economy, R&D in steelmaking and promotion of steel as a preferred material for construction.

Earlier, the delegation visited a coking coal mine in the State of British Columbia.
A box with vacuum-sealed beef meat is pictured at the Biernacki Meat Plant slaughterhouse in Golina near Jarocin, western Poland July 17, 2013. The abattoir in this small town in western Poland has a special dormitory to house the more than 30 Jewish men designated by Israel's chief rabbi to oversee the production of kosher beef there. Poland exports 90 percent of its beef, a third of which was kosher or halal worth some 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion). But this booming industry has ground to a halt because, after a campaign by animal rights activists who say the method of slaughter is cruel, Poland's constitutional court banned the practice and this month its parliament rejected an amendment that would have allowed the slaughter to resume. Picture taken July 17, 2013. Photo: REUTERS.

India's meat export increased to 13.53 lakh tonnes in 2016-17 from 13.36 lakh tonnes in the previous fiscal, Parliament was informed today.

In value terms, however, the export declined to Rs 27,184 crore in the last fiscal, from Rs 27,528 crore in 2015-16.

Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, said no complaint was received at her ministry with regard to prevention in production of meat and leather.

However, she said, as per data, export of buffalo meat has declined.

During April-May 2016-17, the buffalo export stood at USD 554 million whereas for the same period in the current year, it came in at USD 530 million.

She also said the export of leather products and footwear declined during 2015-16 and 2016-17 in value terms due to various factors, including some external ones like recession in European market, instability in the Middle-East countries.

In a separate reply, she said the government has received some representations for ban or restriction on meat exports.

"Some of the representations were received from GauVansh Vikas Prakoshth, Shree Bharat Vashiya Digamber Jain Mahasabha Charitable Trust, Akhil Bharat Krishi Go Seva Sangh and Govanshi Hatya Evam Niryat Nidhi Parishad," she added.

In another reply on e-commerce, the minister said the government has received communications from All India Online Vendors Association and others raising issues relating to e- commerce, including payment settlement.

"The issues raised by the associations regarding payment settlement emanated from disputes arising out of business operations of the entities involved," she said.

She added that the government takes action under suitable laws or statutes in such issues routed through appropriate authorities.
A man walks past a logo of State Bank of India outside a branch in New Delhi, India, February 1, 2017. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

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Following the successful State Bank of India merger, the government is working on creating a handful of big global banks -- a leaner, more efficient banking universe consisting of only 3 or 4 entities. However, bank unions feel this may not necessarily help strengthen the balance sheets of the beleagured public sector banks.

According to CH Venkatachalam, General Secretary of All India Bank Employees' Association (AIBEA), What purpose will it serve? What kind of banks are being looked at for the merger? There are many questions. The weakness in the banks is due to bad loans. The solution is by resolving those and getting recovery."

Reports suggest that the government is looking at merging some of the 21 public sector banks into 10-12 banks in the medium term. As part of a three-tier structure, it plans to build at least 3-4 banks of the size of State Bank of India, the country's largest lender, which is among the top 50 in the global bank list.

One of the possibilities is that large public sector banks (PSBs) such as Punjab National Bank, Bank of Baroda, Canara Bank and Bank of India could absorb other smaller banks. One of the major reasons for the consolidation is the growing number of weak banks.

Nine of the 21 public sector banks, including IDBI Bank and Indian Overseas Bank, reported losses during 2016-17, as per information shared in the Parliament. This number was 13 in the previous year ending March 2016.

Venkatachalam says mergers will not at all make them stronger. SBI is bigger today and still their NPAs are huge. How is it making them more efficient?

This year, SBIs five associate banks and Bharatiya Mahila Bank (BMB) got merged from April 1.

Venkatachalam said that India needs banks which can touch the common people. The bigger the bank grows, the less accessible it becomes for people. Big banks will naturally give big-ticket loans with higher risks. We have seen Lehman crisis, it (Lehman Brothers in 2008-09) was a too big to fail bank in the USA and it collapsed.

He also suggested that we can think of creating specialised or expertised banks. We can maybe have a foreign exchange bank, agriculture bank, small industries bank or housing bank. Today, a bank manager is handling everything from gold loan, home loan, industrial loan, education loan, etc. How to make a bank more beneficial and accessible is more important. It must be restructured but it should aid recovery.

In the upcoming consolidation drive, factors like regional balance, geographical reach, financial burden and smooth human resource transition will have to be looked at while taking a merger decision, said a government official, adding that a very weak bank should not be merged with a strong one "as it could pull the latter down".

Some region-centric banks like Punjab and Sind Bank and Andhra Bank will continue as independent entities, while some mid-size lenders would also co-exist, the official told PTI news agency.

Last month, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had said the government is "actively working" towards consolidation of PSBs but declined to provide details, saying this was a price-sensitive information.

Given the smooth transition and success of SBI merger, the Finance Ministry is considering clearing another such proposal by this fiscal if the bad-loan situation comes under control.

The government along with the Reserve Bank of India are working towards resolution of non-performing assets (NPAs) by sending top large defaulters to insolvency courts on a priority basis.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed Australia's joining of the International Solar Alliance (ISA) and said it will provide a great boost to the grouping.

He conveyed this to Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop when she called on him here, according to a statement issued by the Prime Minister's Office (PMO).

Before calling on the prime minister, the visiting dignitary signed the Framework Agreement to join the ISA, a common platform for cooperation among sun-rich countries.

The initiative was launched at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015 Modi and the then President of France Francois Hollande.

During the meeting, Modi and Bishop also discussed regional and global issues of mutual interest, the PMO said.

The Australian foreign minister briefed Modi on the progress in bilateral relations since the visit of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to India in April this year, it said.

Modi warmly recalled the successful visit of Turnbull to India in April and said the bilateral relationship has deepened a lot since his own visit to Australia in 2014, the statement said.
E-commerce major Flipkart will give 20 select customers a behind-the-scene experience of its operations to give them a feel of how online shopping works after an order has been placed.

"Customers are our most important stakeholder... We want to thank customers for being a part of our fabulous journey by giving them an inside track on Flipkart and showing them how we go about fulfilling their wishes," Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy said in a statement.

An internal jury at Flipkart will choose 20 such participants, based on their responses on why should they be given access to Flipkart offices.

The chosen customers will be given a tour of Flipkart's offices, customer service centre and delivery hubs. They will also get an opportunity to interact with Flipkart's leaders to understand the business and technology of e-commerce.

This will give customers a peek into the functioning of some of Flipkart's teams such as technology, customer support and products.

The Bengaluru-based firm has already had its top executives, including CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy, meeting customers as part of the company's 10-year celebrations.

Flipkart, which is locked in an intense battle in the Indian e-commerce market, has a registered customer base of over 100 million.
Have a long-term outlook | Timing investment is logically impossible because the best entry and exit opportunities are known only in hindsight. No one can predict market movements with certainty. Therefore, it is important to allow your investments to compound over a long term.

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With a view to support India's green building initiative, International Finance Corporation (IFC) is planning to invest over USD one billion in next five years, a senior official said.

IFC, a member of World Bank, has planned an investment of around USD 5-6 billion for the next five years in India for participating in the country's climate change programs, its Country Head (India) Jun Zhang told reporters on the sidelines of an event here.

"We will be investing around 20 per cent of this amount which is over USD one billion in creating green buildings," he said.

He also said affordable and sustainable homes is a key part of IFC's strategy in India.

"We invest and advice housing finance companies, developers and have also helped leading private sector banks to issue green bonds to finance green homes," Zhang said.

The remaining amount of the USD 5-6 billion IFC will invest in India's programs like renewable energy among others, he said.

IFC has so far invested USD 2 billion in sustainability development projects in India since 2005, he said, adding it will continue to participate in the country's various development initiatives.

"Given the scale of the challenge we want to influence the ecosystem so we can build a more sustainable and greener India," he added.

IFC is focused on the private sector in emerging markers and is working with more than 2,000 businesses worldwide, he said.
By Satish Gupta of astrostocktips.in

Todays planetary position: Moon will be transiting in Taurus. Jupiter in Virgo, Lord Rahu in Leo. , Lord Saturn in Sagittarius. Mercury, Sun & Mars in Cancer. Venus in Taurus. Ketu in Aquarius. Pluto in Sagittarius. Neptune in Aquarius & Uranus in Pisces.

Rahu kal time: - 12.00  13.30

Following sectors will be receiving astrological support:

Plastic: Jain Irrigation, Sintex Industries, Astra Microwave, Bright Brothers, Hitech Corporation, etc.

Timing is most crucial element in investing or trading. This timing can be known through financial astrology. Astrology is only science which can predict future correctly & guide us about sectors which have to outperform.

Every year with commencement of new Samvat (Hindu New Year), astrologically, based on planetary position, certain new sectors start getting strong astrological support & start outperforming, while some others sectors which were performing earlier start underperforming. Some sectors/stocks remain laggards. Stocks of astrological supported sectors outperform resulting in exorbitant gains irrespective of market behaviour, either bull market or bear market.

Predicting bullish sectors of next Samvat 2074

Every year we release sectors of new Samvat in the month of March/April when new Samvat starts. But this year, we shall prepone release of next Samvat sectors, which are going to get strong astrological support & stocks from those sector outperform markets. Purpose of releasing sectors of next Samvat earlier is that investors & traders should get maximum advantage of down trend of markets by good timing.

We firmly believe that these special astrological positions present very unique opportunities to investors and traders both. This opportunity, if utilised properly, can safeguard your existing portfolio and simultaneously optimise your future investments and trading also. Successful investing and trading is all about good timing only.

Needless to mention our innumerable past predictions, where most stocks from the SECTORS of SAMVAT gave exorbitant returns & certain stocks appreciated by over 500 percent.

During current Samavat 2073 among other sectors  dyes/chemical/sugar sector received strong astrological support & outperformed and gave exorbitant return. Many stocks from dyes/ chemical sector appreciated by over 500 percent

Sectors which get very strong astrological support are not normally affected by downfall in the market.

: The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts on moneycontrol.com are their own, and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.
It might be a coincidence or sheer luck, but whenever India went to polls to select its new president, the stock market has given a double-digit return on 3 out of 4 occasions in the last 20 years.

Although there is no logical connection between the Sensex and presidential elections, but anecdotal evidence suggest that D-Street is likely to fare better in 2017. The Indian market has already rallied 20 percent so far in 2017 and if history holds true then we should close the year on a high note.

Parliamentarians voted to elect the 14th President of India earlier this week and the results will be declared on July 20. Former Bihar Governor Ram Nath Kovind is the BJP-led NDA's nominee for the presidential election 2017, former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar is the opposition's pick.

Media reports suggest that NDA's candidate Ram Nath Kovind, the former Bihar Governor has an advantage over Opposition candidate Meira Kumar as India picks its 14th President.

India selected four Presidents in the last twenty years. K R Narayanan took charge in the year 1997 when Sensex closed the election year with gains of 19 percent which was followed by Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam in the year 2002 but Sensex fell flat and closed the year with gains of just 4 percent.

Pratibha Patil took charge in the year 2007 when Sensex ended the election year with gains of over 40 percent followed by Pranab Mukherjee in the year 2012 when the index closed 26 percent higher.

The Indian Economy opened up in a true sense after the liberalisation steps taken by Dr. Manmohan Singh when he opened gates of Indian Capital Markets to the foreign Investors.

Historically and generally no direct correlation is found between the Presidential candidate and the Sensex or index returns. Markets are the function of corporate earnings & healthy corporate earnings, in turn, translate into robust equity markets resulting into good investor returns, Anita Gandhi, Whole Time Director at Arihant Capital Markets Ltd told Moneycontrol.

If we look back in last 2 decades, amongst the then Presidents of India, Mr. Pranab Mukharjee had held very important portfolios including Finance Ministry in his earlier career history & also had very good understanding of the Indian Economy, she said.

Gandhi further added that best returns came during the tenure of Pratibha Patil i.e. in 2007, year in which maximum flows came to India from FIIs & part of which was also hot money & therefore the returns of 2007 did not sustain in the year 2008.

In 2002 the Economy had just come out of Ketan Parekh scam and saw lower returns in that particular year, however, the economy got geared up for a big turnaround in the tenure of Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam (2002-2007) & gave overall good returns during his tenure, said Gandhi.

The year 2017 is also unlikely to disappoint investors as India is still one of the fastest growing economies in the world. The Modi-led government has not left and stone unturned to fuel growth in the economy.

Riding the wave of global liquidity Indian market has already risen by 20 percent in the first six months of 2017. Despite mounting concerns of heated markets, analysts are not overly concerned about valuations at current levels.

The main factors which have led to a strong performance of the market include factors like strong global and local liquidity, pro-growth reforms, stable currency, the robust economy as well as expectations of a bounce back in earnings growth, especially after GST.

The market is hoping for a strong revival in domestic earnings growth by pushing the trajectory of the economy into a new phase. But, till date earnings growth has been muted and is likely to be lackluster in the near-term, Vinod Nair, Head of Research Geojit Financial Services told Moneycontrol.

Developments on earnings growth will be carefully watched by the market while the start to Q1FY18 result has been weak, which provide a chance of underperformance during the second half of the year, he said.
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ITC which got hammered on Tuesday after the government increased the cess on cigarettes but it is unlikely to lose its charm among fund managers, suggest analysts. The smart money is unlikely to move out considerably from ITC or HUL.

The number of funds holding ITC increased from 376 recorded in the month of May to 381 in the month of June with an aggregate market value of Rs16,593 crore, according to Morningstar India data.

On the other hand, the number of funds holding HUL decreased from 219 funds in the month of May to 211 funds in the month of June with an aggregate value of Rs3664 crore.

The decision of GST Council meeting earlier this week to increase the cess on cigarettes wiped out Rs50,000 crore of investors wealth on Tuesday from ITC when the stock crashed nearly 13 percent.

The stock had plunged 15 percent in intra-day trade on Tuesday, the sharpest fall in a decade, to hit a low of Rs 276.4 on the National Stock Exchange (NSE).

The increase in cess, according to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, was taken to reduce profiteering by companies and harm to public health, but that didnt go well for investors.

After a sharp fall, there were reports that smart money might move into HUL which might become the next favoured choice for investors in the FMCG space.

However, analysts which Moneycontrol spoke to have a mixed view as 2 out of 3 experts feel that ITC will still attract smart money as HUL is trading at slightly stretched valuations.

We believe ITC will give superior returns after Tuesdays fall. In past as well, tax rates have been increased on several occasions. This could be a temporary phenomenon and the FMCG major is available at reasonable valuations compared to other FMCG players, Rahul Shah, VP - Equity advisory, MOSL told Moneycontrol.

On one hand, HUL trades at a rich valuation. The biggest problem with the sector is volume growth, so after this event, we might see some volume de-growth in ITC. But, lower valuation augurs well for ITC, he said.

Increased compensation cess on cigarettes leads to 8-9 percent increase in effective tax rate for ITC. If ITC takes a price hike then it might lead to lower sales and single-digit EBIT growth in the cigarette business.

Reacting to the news event, most global brokerage firms have already downgraded the stock and lowered their respective target price.

Credit Suisse downgraded ITC to neutral from outperform and also slashed target price to Rs310 from Rs400 following cut in FY18-20 estimates by 10-12 percent.

Morgan Stanley, too, downgraded the stock to equal-weight from overweight and reduced target price to Rs 285 from Rs 395, saying it is a clear negative with obvious impact on volume growth and valuation multiples.

According to the research house, ITC will need 12-13 percent weighted average cigarette price hike here on with around 20 percent price increase in KSFT segment to offset the tax increase.

Given that ITC has already taken around 4 percent price hike versus an average of FY17, it expects an incremental 8-9 percent pricing action over the next few days, said the report.

Investors should understand that the fall in ITC's share price is a temporary phenomenon seen due to a hike in the effective GST rates on cigarettes.

If we have a look at the past tax increase on cigarettes in the past budgets the history suggests it is a non-event from a profitability point of view. In fact, falls arising from such an event always was a great opportunity to invest, Jimeet Modi, CEO, SAMCO Securities told Moneycontrol.

The 5-year CAGR sales growth of ITC has 6.74 percent while HUL's sales have grown by only 4.2 percent. ITC's profits have increased by 6.25 percent 5-year CAGR while HUL's have increased by only 3.2 percent 5-year CAGR. This shows that even after the tax hikes, ITC performs better than HUL, he said.

Modi further added that the smart money is more likely to move to ITC because HUL is currently trading at a PE and PB of 66 and 37 times respectively while ITC is trading at PE and PB of 36 and 8.52 respectively.

Commenting on the price action, Modi said that ITC's stock plummets at every tax hike and then start rising again in 20-25 days. This is the right time to buy the stock.

However, some analysts are of the view that HUL will find some flows trickle into the counter post increase in cess on ITC after the FMCG major reported a stellar performance in the June quarter.

HUL delivered a stellar performance in Q4FY2017, beating D-Street expectation with high single digit revenue growth and OPM improving by almost 100bps despite a significant increase in the raw material prices.

HUL is a better play in the FMCG as it will be one of the key beneficiaries of implementation of GST and recovery in the rural demand, Kaustubh Pawaskar, analyst, Sharekhan by BNP Paribas told Moneycontrol.

We expect volume growth to improve in H2FY2018 and would gradually improve in the subsequent years. So, it becomes a better play in the large cap FMCG space. We believe that investors might opt for stocks with better-earning visibility in the term coupled with decent valuations at the current juncture and wait for a better entry point to enter HUL, he said.
MV Agusta

Italian biking giant MV Agusta today launched the Brutale 800 in India priced at Rs 15.59 lakh.

Powered by a 798cc, three cylinder engine, developing 109bhp the Brutale 800 achieves a top speed of 237km/hr.

The premium bike will be brought to India in kits to be later assembled. It already has nine confirmed bookings and will be commercially available from August 17.

MV Agusta started in India with 3 models in 2010 and increased it to 4 models over the years. In 2016 the Italian company partnered with Punes Kinetic Group to extend its reach under the Motoroyale brand.

There are presently three exclusive dealerships in Pune, Ahmedabad and Bangalore and will be soon followed by openings in Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi, Surat, Chandigarh and other cities.

MV Agustas range starts at Rs 16 lakh and sold more than 100 bikes since launch last year in India. The Italian company is one of several brands present in the premium superbike category which includes Harley Davidson, Indian, Triumph, Honda, Yamaha, Aprilia, Hyosung, Kawasaki to name a few.

Last year about 13,000 super bikes were sold in India and this figure is expected to rise to 20,000 by 2020. These bikes are priced above Rs 5 lakh, according to Kinetic.

The volume of superbikes is nearly doubling every year, said Ajinkya Firodia, Managing Director, Motoroyale-MV Agusta. MV Agusta is known as the Ferraris of the two-wheeler market, globally, added Firodia.

Motoroyale intends to tie up with at least 3-4 biking companies. The Kinetic group will import, homologate, localise, market and distribute the bikes.
The Butler Did It par Read more [...]
manufacturer of Titanium alloys in India.

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The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) today allowed Essar Steel to file objections to petitions moved by the State Bank of India (SBI) and the Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) to initiate insolvency proceedings against it.

The Ahmedabad bench of the tribunal of judicial member Bikki Raveendra Babu granted time to Essar Steel till July 22 to file objections to the petitions moved by the two lenders against the company after the Gujarat High Court dismissed its petition yesterday. The tribunal posted the hearing in the matter for July 24.

The Gujarat High Court had yesterday dismissed the steel major's plea against the RBI's directive to the banks to initiate insolvency proceedings against it, saying it is not proper for it to interfere in the matter.

A bench of Justice S G Shah had said in its order that with the firm owing a debt of a whopping Rs 45,000 crore, the lenders should be allowed to exercise discretion to take legal steps to recover the amount.

The SBI, which leads the joint lenders forum, and the Standard Chartered Bank have sought initiating insolvency proceedings against Essar Steel under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC).

The RBI had allowed on June 13 allowed the banks to initiate proceedings against a dozen companies, including Essar Steel, under the IBC to recover outstanding loans.

The high court had in its order said that the company can raise its objections against the banks before the NCLT. Based on the order, the company sought time from the NCLT to file its objections.
Delhis Signature Bridge project receives additional funds for completion

The Delhi government has released Rs 100 crores for the Signature Bridge project, which was hit by a fund crunch, slowing down its last phase of construction, tourism minister Rajendra Pal Gautam said, on  READ FULL STORY

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The Delhi government has released Rs 100 crores for the Signature Bridge project, which was hit by a fund crunch, slowing down its last phase of construction, tourism minister Rajendra Pal Gautam said, on July 17, 2017. He said the finance department had sanctioned the amount, after examining the contractors demand for an additional Rs 250 crores. The total cost of the project is around Rs 1,500 crores. See also: Delhi L-G approves Pragati Maidan underpass, other infrastructure projects

A bow-shaped steel pylon of the bridge, which was conceptualised by the Sheila Dikshit government in 2004, will be twice as high as the Qutub Minar. It is being executed by the Delhi Tourism Department. Being built on the lines of the London Bridge, it was meant to be showcased during the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

The initial project cost was pegged at around Rs 1,131 crores, which was later revised to Rs 1,575 crores. In January, Lt Governor Anil Baijal had directed the authorities concerned, to send to him a monthly progress report of the project.

The post Delhis Signature Bridge project receives additional funds for completion appeared first on Housing News.
Malaysia shows interest in developing Mumbai-Nagpur Expressway

The Malaysian government has evinced interest in developing the Mumbai-Nagpur Expressway, Maharashtra Public Works Department minister, Eknath Shinde said on July 17, 2017. A delegation from Malaysia called on Shinde and discussed the intricacies  READ FULL STORY

The post Malaysia shows interest in developing Mumbai-Nagpur Expressway appeared first on Housing News.













The Malaysian government has evinced interest in developing the Mumbai-Nagpur Expressway, Maharashtra Public Works Department minister, Eknath Shinde said on July 17, 2017. A delegation from Malaysia called on Shinde and discussed the intricacies of the 700-km road project that will connect two key cities of Maharashtra.



See also: Mumbai-Nagpur Expressway: State to make upfront payment to farmers

He was speaking to reporters at Mantralaya, after meeting the visiting delegation. Shinde said the Malaysian government is keen to be a part of the venture and the state appreciated their cooperation. We would also like to work with them, not only on this project, but more such projects, he said.
IRB Infrastructure Developers | In 2020 so far, the share price has moved up 76 percent to Rs 131.20. It's trailing twelve months (TTM) P/E was 6.40 multiple while 5-year average P/E was 8.30 multiple.

Indias office space market witnessed a steep decline in absorption as well as supply. According to a report by Cushman & Wakefield, the total net absorption in the first half of 2017 (January  June 2017) closed at a deficit of 11 percent from the same time last year and was recorded at 12.5 million square feet (msf).

Chennai was the only market among top 8 cities to register a y-o-y growth of over 110 percent during this period. All other cities registered a y-o-y decline in net absorption in the first half of the year due to a slow start in the first quarter, the report said.

Anshul Jain, Managing Director, India, Cushman & Wakefield said, Leasing activity has gathered pace in the second quarter owing to large transactions by IT-BPM and BFSI occupiers. Despite headwinds and cautious stance by IT-BPM occupiers, the IT-BPM sector continues to be the primary demand driver. Limited availability of quality supply has encouraged occupiers to pre-commit office spaces resulting in a significant increase of about three times in such activity; primarily driven by IT-BPM and healthcare sectors in Hyderabad, Gurgaon and Bengaluru.

Supply for the first half of the year recorded a decline of close to 50 percent as compared to last year with almost all markets experiencing a slowdown. Total supply was recorded at approximately 10 msf in H1 2017. Chennai being again the only exception to this saw an increased supply of 32 percent y-o-y. This lack of supply has been a critical reason for the slowdown in uptake of space in the first half of 2017.

As the dust settles on the geo- political and economic upheavals across the world along with some ground changes such as increased supply of office space, we are expected to see a healthy net absorption of close 32  35 msf by end of the year. Further with a pre-commitments of close to 6 msf, we can expect the momentum of absorption to continue, he added.
Bull's Eye, CNBC-TV18's popular game show, where market experts come together to dish out trading strategies for you to make your week more exciting and compete with each other to see whose portfolio is the strongest.

Remember these are midcap ideas not just for the day, but stocks that look attractive in the medium-term as well.

This week, Sameet Chavan, Rakesh Bansal and Sumeet Jain battle it out for top honours.

Below their top stock picks and analysis:

Sameet Chavan of Angel Broking

Buy Mastek with a stoploss at Rs 291 and target of Rs 332

Buy Just Dial with a stoploss at Rs 347 and target of Rs 385

Sell Jet Airways with a stoploss at Rs 616 and target of Rs 575

Sell Can Fin Homes with a stoploss at Rs 3220 and target of Rs 3020

Rakesh Bansal of RK Global

Buy Anant Raj with a stoploss at Rs 62.5 and target of Rs 74

Buy JSW Steel with a stoploss at Rs 209.9 and target of Rs 223

Buy Infibean with a stoploss at Rs 1100 and target of Rs 1313

Buy Future Enterprises with a stoploss at Rs 33.7 and target of Rs 42

Sumeet Jain of Destimoney Securities

Buy EID Parry with a stoploss at Rs 318 and target of Rs 344

Buy Bank of India with a stoploss at Rs 148.50 and target of Rs 162

Buy KRBL with a stoploss at Rs 414 and target of Rs 475

Sell Indo Count Future with a stoploss at Rs 164 and target of Rs 153
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We met Mr. Manish Nuwal, MD, Solar Industries (SOIL), to gain insights in latest developments in the companys defence business and factors propelling its domestic & overseas explosive operations. Management is confident of the defence business bright prospects and buoyed by the expanding opportunity pie, SOIL has earmarked further capex of INR4.0bn (in addition to INR3.5bn invested so far) over FY1820 and is targeting INR5bn revenue by FY20. In the domestic business, it is eyeing growth of 810% from Coal India and 20% from Infra. Further, with commencement of South Africa operations and healthy growth in other subsidiaries, SOIL is targeting revenues of INR10bn by FY20. We believe, pick up in defence revenue is key and entails rerating potential due to the segments high margin and return ratios. Maintain HOLD with target price of INR839.

Outlook

Our SOTPbased TP of INR839 values base business at P/E of 22x FY19E (INR711/share) and defence business NPV is based on P/E of 24x FY21E (INR128/share). We maintain HOLD as current price factors in most positives.

For all recommendations report, click here

Disclaimer: The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts/broking houses/rating agencies on moneycontrol.com are their own, and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.

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Share price of Majesco surged 5 percent intraday Wednesday as it has been selected by a leading provider of financial protection benefits globally, to transform their collections operation across multiple geographies.

Majesco, USA, the insurance arm and a subsidiary of Majesco announced about the selection of the Majesco CloudInsurer platform by a leading provider of financial protection benefits globally.

"In the first phase, they will implement Majesco Cloudlnsurer to modernize their collection operations in one country to be followed by other Latin America countries and additional territories in the Middle East and Asia," as per company release.

Prateek Kumar, EVP of the P&C and L&A and Group business at Majesco said, "We are honored to add this premier insurer to our growing customer community. We are committed to providing the market with exceptional solutions that help them achieve their growth strategies."

At 10:43 hrs Majesco was quoting at Rs 375.05, up Rs 13.80, or 3.82 percent on the BSE.

Posted by Rakesh Patil
People wait to enter a bank in Mumbai, India, November 15, 2016. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui - RTX2TSDY

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There are increasing number of messages on WhatsApp and other social media platforms informing people about closure of nine banks. However, these are baseless, untrue and all depositors money is safe, according to Finance Ministry and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

Since last few weeks, Whatsapp Groups have seen a barrage of messages claiming closure of nine public sector banks  Corporation Bank, UCO Bank, IDBI Bank, Bank of Maharashtra, Andhra Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, Central Bank of India, Dena Bank, and United Bank of India.

The Finance Ministry has confirmed that the reports of the PSBs shutting down are ridiculous, baseless and incorrect.

At present, these banks are weak with respect to their increased bad loans and low capital buffer because of which they are put under prompt corrective action (PCA) by the banking regulator RBI.

Urging all to not fall prey to falsehoods on the future of these weak banks, RBI Deputy Governor SS Mundra on July 14 said the lenders inclusion under PCA is for timely improvement of their performance.

PCA is one among such tools which involves monitoring of performance indicators of banks as an early-warning exercise and is initiated once such thresholds as relating to capital, asset quality are breached, Mundra had said at a banking event.

However, stating that the PCA is akin to taking an injured athlete to bed rest, he said, By no means does the framework suggest that the bank would cease to carry out normal banking operations, including lending, as is being mischievously suggested.

The RBI deputy governor expressed strong displeasure on social media messages spreading false information about the future of some of the nine banks under the PCA framework and urged everybody to apply the mind while reading those.

Its objective is to facilitate the banks to take corrective measures, including those prescribed by the RBI in a timely manner in order to restore the thresholds or financial strength, Mundra added.

The PCA framework has been in existence since December 2002 and the guidelines were last reviewed in April this year to make it contemporary.
In an indirect message to India Chinese media stated that concerned nations should 'get used to the Chinese naval presence in the Indian Ocean'. An article in Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece Peoples Daily Online alludes that Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean is a permanent aspect of the countrys future policy.

The article which pointed out various reports published in Indian magazines and newspapers regarding the increasing numbers of Chinese naval vessels in the region the daily quoting an expert stated that China should send more submarines to the Indian Ocean to make concerned countries get used to their presence in that region.

Taking a direct dig at the ongoing Malabar Naval Exercise the media accused India, Japan and the USA of harbouring hostility against China terming it as Cold War mentality. Stating that the extension of the military power was a natural action to protect the interests of China, the media said that the navy was conducting escort missions in the Gulf of Aden region at an increasing rate since 2008. An expert added that the use of submarines were only reasonable in this context as they were a key part of the navy.

The region has been seeing an increase in volume of Chinese naval vessels in the region. With the establishment of a military base in Djibouti there is an increased concern that China is trying to control the strategic waterways in its attempt to become a superpower.
Mumbai houses around 3,000 housing societies are present on the Class II or Collectors land. Thats the land given out by the government to sections of society for housing purposes on long-term lease at concessional rates. So technically, any modification needs approval from the collector's office.

These buildings can be found in prime locations like Bandra, Kurla, Andheri, Goregaon, Nariman Point, Backbay and Wadala, where owning a home can cost you a fortune.

Most of these buildings are quite old and dilapidated. The residents have raised the questions of the ownership of land and claim that it is very difficult for them to get their buildings redeveloped.

The thing is our lands are the occupancy lands which means we are owners of the land, the property card is in our names. Government still thinks that it is the owner, it works in the zamindari system. It still wants to control, every transfer, redevelopment. They even charge us for renting and mortgaging apartments. The redevelopment of many buildings is not been able to take off because of the permission issues, says Salil Rameshchandra, Member, Shivsrushthi Associations of CHS.

To address this concern in 2016, the government amended the Maharashtra Land Revenue Code (1966) and allowed conversion of Class II and leasehold land to freehold by paying a premium to the government. A committee was set up under Principal Secretary Revenue to decide the premium. Initially, the committee was given two months time to submit its report. But even after a year, the committee is yet to submit it. This has caused a lot of angst among the residents.

The revenue minister of Maharashtra assures that the report should come out within a weeks time.

The report of the committee is ready. Within 8-10 days this report will be discussed in the cabinet. Once the cabinet approves it or makes necessary changes to it, this issue will be sorted within a month," Chandrakant Patil, Revenue Minister of Maharashtra said.

The residents also say, given the present situation, no developer is keen to take up redevelopment projects on collectors land.

The thing is that for redevelopment very few builders are willing to come because they understand the problems that are present. Even those who have come forward have not been able to redevelop properly. That is the reason there are very few redevelopment projects on the collector lands," Rameshchandra said.

According to the experts, conversion of collectors land into free-hold will be a win-win situation for both the government as well as the residents.

The land  when it was sold by the government  had absolutely no value. It was either a reclaimed land or acquisition land, so government had to bear no cost at that time Today, when they are going to sell it for development by putting premium, the government is going to get tremendous revenue from the land which was otherwise yielding no revenue to the government," said Uday Wavikar, a property lawyer.

Clearly, the conversion of class II and leasehold land to freehold will help cut red tape and create additional housing stock for the city. What the Maharashtra government needs to ensure is that the committee does not delay coming out with a decision on conversion premium, and the premium is not a ridiculous high number like 25 percent, as is being heard on the street.
Cikmagalur: Pro- Kannada activists protesting against releasing of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu by state government at Chikmagalur in Karnataka on Wednesday. PTI Photo(PTI7_5_2017_000106A)

On Tuesday, the Congress-led government in Karnataka announced the setting up of a nine-member panel to explore the legality of the state having its own flag and to suggest a design for the same.

The announcement received instant criticism from opposition parties including the Bharatiya Janata Party who alleged that political considerations were at play.

In response, Karnataka Chief Minister S Siddharamaiah said: "Is there any provision in the Constitution which prohibits a state from having its own flag? Have you come across any such provision in the Constitution? Did the BJP come across such a provision?"

What does the law say?

According to the Indian Constitution, states are not prohibited from having a separate state flag. However, the state flag must fly at a lower height than the national flag.

Do other Indian states have their own flags?

Currently, Jammu & Kashmir is the only state permitted to fly its own flag under Article 370 of the Constitution that gives the state special autonomous status.

Nagaland is also in the process of getting its own flag under Article 371 (A) of the Constitution.

Outside India, states in countries like the United States and Germany have their own flags.

The arguments

Those in favour of state flags argue that they are not secessionist but instead reflect Indias diversity and federal structure. They say that separate state flags would give people a sense of identity and cultural belonging.

In addition, they argue that considering all states have their own insignia and many states also have their own anthems, would having a state flag make a big difference?

People against state flags say that the tricolour binds India together and any move to allow states to have flags would reduce the standing of the national flag. They feel that allowing one state to have its own flag could trigger demands from others states too. They also say that state flags can become symbols of separatism and threaten India's unity and integrity.

History of the issue

People of Karnataka have been using an unofficial flag since the 1960s during a pro-Kannada agitation. It is popularly known as the "Kannada flag". The flag has two horizontal strips of yellow (representing Turmeric) and red (Vermilion). The flag symbolises auspiciousness and well-being of the state. It is, however, not considered a symbol of separatism.

A demand to make it the state flag first put forward in 1998 by the Kannada Development Authority. However, the proposal was quashed after seeking the law department's advice.

In 2009, then Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa quashed a circular that enforced restrictions on hoisting the Kannada flag on government buildings. Later, in 2012, Chief Minister SV Sadananda Gowda made it mandatory for government offices, schools and colleges to hoist the Kannada flag on November 1, which is celebrated as the formation day of the state. But the notification was withdrawn later that year after a legal battle.

Immediate triggers

With less than a year to go for the assembly elections in the state, the announcement is being seen by some as Siddharamaiah's attempt to assert Kannada identity, riding on the ongoing wave of anti-Hindi protests.

In June, people protested against the usage of Hindi language signage at metro stations in Bangalore.

Earlier this month, the state government made Kannada compulsory in all Karnataka schools including CBSE and ICSE. It also made it mandatory for the state anthem to be sung in schools.
The Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) in Tamil Nadu on Wednesday granted themselves a 100 percent pay hike, CNN-News 18 reported.

The taxpayers in the state will now be paying each of their elected representatives Rs 1.05 lakh a month, as opposed to Rs 55,000 previously.

Farmers from Tamil Nadu, currently protesting at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, have expressed their outrage over the pay hike, saying that they have been abandoned by their leaders.

The farmers from the southern state have been demanding a drought relief package of Rs 40,000 crore and the setting up of Cauvery Management Board by the Centre.
To improve the educational standards of the state, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath Yogi has regularised the fees of 13 dental and 23 private medical colleges across the state according to a report by FE

According to the new regulations, the fee for MBBS programmes will now be in the range of Rs 8.50 lakh to Rs 11.50 lakh. The fee for BDS programmes is now, Rs 1.37 lakh to Rs 3.65 lakh. This new fee structure will be applicable for three academic sessions  2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20.

Medical Education Minister Ashutosh Tandon also said that there were cases where private colleges were found conning students under the name of fees.He added saying, the fixed structure will force the medical and dental colleges to follow the directives.

The Yogi government formed a committee on fee regularization after attending various complaints of harassments regarding fees, from the students.

Tandom said that the decision will be followed by all the 23 medical colleges and 13 dental colleges of the state. Private medical colleges were charging a fee of about Rs 21-23 lakh for five-year MBBS course and between Rs 9-13 lakh for BDS. Moreover, the government has ordered that no institution can charge more fees than the above fixed fees.

Aditynath Yogi has a sharp focus on the states medical services. He also talked about his plan to open 6 AIIMS-like hospitals and 25 medical colleges to be opened in Uttar Pradesh in next five years.
Ajay Bhushan Pandey, Chief Executive Officer of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), says in jest that the jobs of Bollywood scriptwriters are going to get tougher in the coming years. Why? Because with most people enrolled with a 12-digit Aadhaar number, the old film plots of siblings getting separated at a Kumbh Mela, or a criminal disguising himself as innocent, or opening shell companies, will no longer make sense.

In a candid interview with Moneycontrol, Pandey, an IIT-Kanpur graduate and a 1984 batch IAS officer, says that Aadhaar will be for India what the Internet meant for the world and amid legal challenges. He also made important clarifications on concerns regarding privacy of citizens.

Edited Excerpts:

Q: What is your vision behind Aadhaar with regards to other existing identity programmes?

A: Now that we have given Aadhaar to more than 116 crore people, this has become the most widely prevalent identity in our country. The majority of people in India do not have any other identity except Aadhaar card.

Some people may have more than one (other) ID card such as PAN, driving license, ration card, etc. But there are crores of others who only have the Aadhaar card. Therefore what we are trying to do is deliver more and more services through the Aadhaar card.

There are many organisations and agencies that are saying you provide ID x,y,z (to avail their service). We are telling them that here is one ID which you should accept. If you need some other verification then you do some other verification. But this (Aadhaar number) you must ask for.

Particularly when it relates to giving subsidies and benefits or when it is being funded by taxpayers money from the Consolidated Fund of India. We are saying that if the money is being spent we have to ensure it is going to the right person.

Aadhaar is a great enabler because it can potentially de-duplicate any system and remove duplicates, bogus and fake data from the system. It also ensures that somebodys right cannot be taken away by others. With Aadhaar, the government knows who has been given benefit and who hasnt been, who has been excluded and who has not been excluded. The government can take corrective action, accordingly.

Q: There is feeling in certain sections of India that with Aadhaar the government is becoming a Big Brother who will watch over every move and transaction of a resident. Your comments.

A: When some people talk about Aadhaar, they have this feeling that the government is becoming very powerful. Of course, the government is being enabled. But more than that it is the people who are becoming more powerful with Aadhaar.

Watch: UIDAI Chief's Views On Digital Entrepreneurship In India

Let's illustrate an example. in India, many cases are reported where somebody else sells land belonging to some other person, he impersonates identity and then the person comes to know later that their name and signature was forged. If your property record is linked to your Aadhaar number, then no power on earth can dispossess you from your right to property.

Aadhaar is fully compliant and respects privacy at the highest level. Aadhaar Act also takes care of this. Aadhaar does not know any of your transactions, and if it does not know, there is no question of watching you as a Big Brother. There is no central repository of transactions and no interlinkage.

Q: Has Aadhaar made life easy or more difficult for a common man to avail a government service or buy a product from the private market?

A: Aadhaar also allows authentication through mobile phone, through the internet so people can access various services online without physically visiting. Earlier, many of these services could not have been offered online to everyone.

Only those who had digital signatures etc. could be authenticated online, or those who could handle a complex username and password (could authenticate themselves). It was leading to a kind of an exclusion of a large section of society because they could not prove their identity online.

People like you and me can now prove our identity online. This also has empowered them (because) Aadhaar number can be digitally authenticated in a secure manner - you can put your fingerprint from anywhere, you can receive OTP on your phone and then you can avail any service. All these services are now available online to everyone.

Lets take the example of SIM cards. It is has become so easy to get a SIM card, just put a fingerprint and you get one. Similarly, you go to a bank and without any piece of paper, through the Aadhaar e-KYC you can open your bank account, just on the basis of giving Aadhaar and your fingerprint, in a secure manner.

Q: What is Aadhaars future? Will private companies also make it more mandatory for availing their services such as watching a movie or entering a pub (for age authentication)?

A: More agencies will start giving services using Aadhaar, because Aadhaar is a platform, it is an infrastructure, which is meant not only for the government but it is meant for everyone- private sector, public sector- for people to use.

It's like a road, the road has been constructed not only for use for government vehicle, but it is for everyone. We cant even imagine as of now for what purposes the road will be used for in future.

If you consider the other identity systems, like for example you consider the driver's license, it can be used only for driving - such things are purpose specific. But not Aadhaar. It is an identity which can first of all be used for any purpose, as a way to be authenticated online. The list is endless, it is left to human ingenuity what services they (government departments and companies) would like to give in future using Aadhaar platform.

Another very important aspect is black money, tax evasion, money laundering - all used to happen because of bogus PAN cards, fake transactions and shell companies. It was becoming very difficult to trace such transactions. Now through Aadhaar, it will become possible to put a check on this. This will also be very very good for the country.

Q: In five to ten years from now, do you envision a scenario where Aadhaar will become a de-facto identity for casting a vote or even basic things such as booking a train, airline tickets or checking into a hotel?

A: These things are possible. Aadhaar is a big disrupter. For example, today you need a debit card, and Aadhaar is linked to your bank account. There are different digital payment modes such as BHIM-Aadhaar where the money can directly go from your bank account to somebody else's bank account. So you can do this transaction in a secure manner (with a fingerprint).

Once you have created a platform, you dont know exactly what will happen on that platform. We have constructed an identity highway and people will run all kinds of things, which even the creator of the highway wouldnt have known.

When the Internet was discovered, did anyone know all these things (such as mobile apps) will happen? Its that kind of a platform. We have created a platform, and people will figure out more and more innovative uses as time goes by.

Q: What is the rationale behind the recent move to have Aadhaar enrollment agencies based out of banks and government buildings? Will this be applicable to private banks as well?

Aadhaar impacts every person. People have to get their Aadhaar card made, so they will have to get their details changed on the Aadhaar card, sometimes their name will also change. They will go to certain agencies (to avail a service). We are trying to ensure there are centres which are easily approachable to the public, and these should be at public places.

These centres should largely be run in a public premises, which could be post offices, banks, and government service delivery centres. Yes, both private and government banks will be required to provide space for Aadhaar enrollment centres starting next month.

Q: What has been the response to BHIM-Aadhaar?

A: BHIM Aadhaar is being pushed, and is coming up very well. The banks are trying to market this. A 20 lakh (transactions) target has been set and is to be done by September. The banks are working very hard to achieve that target and hopefully they will, but it has to be further expanded.

Q: Can Aadhaar be allotted to foreign nationals?

A: If you are a foreign national, you have to be here (in India) for at least 182 days for verification. Our aim is to give Aadhaar to every resident of India whenever he wants. It doesnt prove a persons citizenship.

Q: Why should Aadhaar be compulsory? Cant it be made an optional ID to avail government services?

A: Aadhaar is mandatory for certain things, this is what the Aadhaar Act says, But the Act also says that in case you don't have Aadhaar then the agency (such as a bank) which is requiring Aadhaar will have to provide you a facility for enrollment. And till you are allotted an Aadhaar number, the agency cannot deny you their benefits.

However, if somebody says I do not want to enroll in Aadhaar, then he or she has to decide if they do not want to get that service or benefit (where UID is mandatory).

Q: Aadhaar is still technically not a proof of address. Will that change?

A"Aadhaar is not a proof of residence. It only says that here is the person whose biometric identity is this, and Aadhaar number is this and this is the address at which they can be contacted.

I am not saying a proof of address is not there in data field. If the person says I am addressable at this place, he should be addressable at that place.

An agency should be able to send a letter or service at that address. What is more important is what is your proof of identity, that you are the person you are saying you are.

Other agencies can say that this address (on Aadhaar card) is good enough for me. Supposing some agency has a higher security requirement, that agency is free to go and verify of the person stays there or not.

Q: Cyber-attacks are becoming more mainstream in India. How safe is Aadhaar database from such attacks?

A": We have given Aadhaar to about 116 crore people, we have been in operation for the last about seven years, and we have done more than 700 crore authentications. So far, we have not heard of a data breach or something of that kind from UIDAI.

We were alert before, therefore these attacks we could survive, but we have to continue to remain alert and vigilant to ensure that data is safe. Cybersecurity is very important and very critical for all of us.

Q: Is there a separate cybersecurity team within UIDAI?

A: Yes, we have teams fully devoted to such things and working. We don't discuss these things in the public domain.

Q: Do the regulatory and policy frameworks for cybersecurity need to be updated given that you are handling world's largest database of people?

A: We do all these things but we don't talk about it. This is our strength, we do all these things, and otherwise we wouldn't have survived.

Q: There are complaints from old and retired citizens that their pensions are getting stopped if they dont have an Aadhaar. What about old people whose fingerprints aren't good enough for a biometric authentication?

A: Because of some technical reason, if biometric doesn't work, then there is an iris match. Ideally iris scan should work. If an old person is bed-ridden, if a doctor can come and attend, then why cant the enrollment agent give him or her assistance at doorstep.

In case of special assistance, we should build this in to our governance system itself. If a senior citizen is denied benefits, the bank or agency should be held responsible and the person being denied a benefit can escalate it within that organisation.

Q: What if the limbs of an Indian resident are missing?

A: You use iris scan. If in a rare case both things dont work, then we make an exception.

Q: Can a person have two Aadhaar numbers?

A: It is statistically very improbable.

Q: Will Aadhaar be like a social security number in the US? Do you envision Aadhaar like that?

A: I would say that this is perhaps, in my own personal view, more powerful than the Social Security Number. First of all it is based on biometrics, it is de-duplicated, in SSN there is no de-duplication. Plus there is also online authentication, so in times to come this will be a much bigger enabler than any other ID system in the world.
Parliament

A united opposition today forced the adjournment of the Lok Sabha proceedings for nearly an hour by storming the Well and raising slogans slamming the government for allegedly ignoring the well-being of farmers.

As soon as the question hour was taken up, opposition members raised the issue of farmers.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar reminded the opposition that a discussion on the issue of farmers is listed in today's agenda. He said the government was ready for a debate and would answer all the questions raised by members. "Do not interrupt the House. Let us debate," he said.

But the opposition members, including those from the Left and the RJD, continued raising the issue from the Well.

Most of the Congress members, who were also in the Well, raised slogans such as "Mann ki Baat band karo, karza maafi shuru karo (stop talking on radio programme, implement loan waiver)" and "stop shooting farmers".

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was present in the House.

An apparently peeved Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said the opposition was not interested in the proceedings to run and adjourned the House for 50 minutes till noon.
Smriti Irani has been given the additional charge of Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in the recent cabinet reshuffle.

Irani already holds the Ministry of Textile portfolio which was given to her last year.

From the sacking of vice chancellors and criticism of the introduction of Sanskrit in schools and colleges to the hullabaloo over JNU, which drew the attention of the whole nation Smriti Irani has had her share of controversies during her tenure as the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD).

Last year when she was shifted out of the MHRD, many commentators considered this as her demotion.

Smriti Irani was born in Delhi to a Bengali mother and a Punjabi father. Smriti got married into a Gujarati family. Zubin Irani, her husband is a Parsi businessman and they got married in 2001.The current Rajya Sabha member from Gujarat started her career as an actor in her early twenties, she quickly became a known face in the Indian households with Balaji Telefilms popular TV serial Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi playing the role of Tulsi.

Besides Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, her other works as an actor include Kya Haadsa Kya Haqeeqat, Mere Apne among others on television and theatre plays like Muktidham and Maniben.com. However, these shows could not match the success of the Ekta Kapoor produced show.

During her stint in the television industry, she won the Best Actress (Popular) award for five times at the Indian Television Academy Awards for the daily soap. Apart from that she also won several other awards including Indian Telly Awards and Star Parivaar Awards.

Her and the party

The 40-year-old actor-turned-politician is not new to the politics. She joined the Bhartiya Janata Party in 2003 and before that she has been associated with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh since her childhood.

Her popularity and acceptance in the party is apparent from the fact that she was not just picked to challenge Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi in his bastion at Amethi in 2014 general elections but was also given the cabinet ministers rank.
T R Zeliang

Naga People's Front leader and ruling DAN chairman T R Zeliang was today sworn-in as the chief minister of Nagaland, five months after he had to resign amidst state-wide protests.

Governor P B Acharya administered him the oath of office.

Zeliang later told newsmen he would face the floor test on July 21. The Cabinet members will be sworn-in only after the floor test, he said.

The governor has asked him to prove his strength in the House on or before July 22.

Zeliang becomes the 19th chief minister of the Northeastern state.

He was appointed as the chief minister in the morning by the governor as the embattled incumbent Shurhozelie Liezietsu and his followers failed to turn up to prove majority in the House as directed by Gauhati High Court yesterday.

The House was then adjourned sine die.

The court had dismissed Liezietsu's petition for a stay on the governor's directive to him to seek vote of confidence in the House on or before July 15.

Zeliang returns to the helm after a gap of five months. He had to quit on February 19 amidst the state-wide uproar over elections to urban local bodies with 33 per cent reservation for women.

He had approached the Governor on July 9 claiming the support of 42 NPF MLAs in the House, with an effective stength of 59.
T R Zeliang

On a day of fast-moving political developments, T R Zeliang was on Wednesday sworn in as the new chief minister of Nagaland replacing Shurhozelie Liezietsu, who was sacked by Governor P B Acharya.

But within hours, the Naga People's Front (NPF) expelled Zeliang for six years for 'anti-party activities', indicating the political turmoil was far from over.

"He was adamant and has already planned to dismantle the NPF party," NPF working presidents Huska Yepthomi and Apong Pongener said.

Zeliang, however, was unfazed saying he would continue to remain the NPF leader in the House.

"The expulsion from the party does not affect the membership inside the House," he said.

Zeliang was appointed shortly after embattled Liezietsu and his supporters failed to turn up in the assembly to face the floor test following which the house was adjourned sine die.

Zeliang was administered oath of office and secrecy by the governor at a function at Durbar Hall in Raj Bhavan in the presence of Speaker Imtiwapang Aier, 42 NPF MLAs and state BJP president Visasolie Lhoungu.

After being sworn in to head the NPF-led Democratic Alliance of Nagaland (DAN) government for the second time, Zeliang told newsmen he would prove his majority in the house on July 21. The governor has directed him to go for the floor test by July 22.

He said he would induct his council of ministers after proving his majority in the assembly. Parliamentary secretaries would also be appointed after July 21, he added.

Zeliang had spearheaded the rebellion against Liezietsu on July 8 and staked claim to form new the Naga People's Front government with the support of majority MLAs.

The governor had asked Liezietsu to prove his majority in the House by July 15 but the latter had filed a writ petition in the Gauhati High Court, which was dismissed on Tuesday.

Subsequently, the governor had summoned the special session of the house on Wednesday.

On reconciliation within the party, he said that once the formation of the government is complete, the process for reconciliation at the party level will start.

"We are hopeful of providing a stable government with the support of the majority of the members of the house to complete the remaining term of the government", he said.

On the possibility of resumption of public protests with his taking over as the chief minister, Zeliang said that he would discuss the matter of women reservation in urban local bodies with the tribal 'hohos' (apex bodies) and other organisations.

"We will do what is best for the people and not go for confrontation with them", he said.

Zeliang was compelled to step down as chief minister in February in the face of massive protest against his government for conducting elections to urban local bodies with 33 per cent women reservation.
Pete Lau, founder and CEO of China's mobile company OnePlus, attends the launch of OnePlus 5 in Mumbai, India June 22, 2017. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui - RTS186JV

Some of the new users of the recently launched OnePlus 5 have been complaining about a peculiar bug that forces the phone to reboot whenever an emergency number is dialed.

It all started with a Facebook users post of a video about how he discovered the bug on OnePlus 5 as he chanced upon to dial 911 (an emergency number in the US) on his phone.

Several users on Reddit have also stated they face similar issues on the OnePlus 5.

The cause for the trigger of the bug remains unclear, however, the issue is alarming as it occurs only when one dials emergency numbers.

"We have been in touch with the customer and have tested a software update that has resolved the issue. We will be rolling out the software update shortly," OnePlus said in an official statement.

Other OnePlus 5 issues

Multiple media reports suggest that OnePlus 5 has several other issues such as jelly-scrolling bug that renders the interface incorrectly while scrolling through a web page.

There have also been reports about the OnePlus's most recent launch failing to adjust stereo left and right audio channels after reversal of orientation.

Also Read: 'Flagship killer' OnePlus 5 launched in India at Rs 32,999

The emergency dial issue has been seen both with emergency numbers of US 911 and the UKs 999. It is yet to be seen if the same problem is being faced by Indian OnePlus 5 users or not.

The company has asked customers to reach out to them by dropping a mail to support@oneplus.net in case of issues with their new OnePlus smartphone.

OnePlus 5 comes with a 128 GB of storage, 8 GB of RAM, latest Snapdragon 835 processor and rear dual camera system in the rear of the handset.

The OnePlus 5 is giving a tough competition to high-end phones like Samsung Galaxy S8 and iPhone 7 despite costing much less.
Nokia is all set to release its latest feature phone in the market, the all new Nokia 105. The phone will be priced at Rs 999 for single SIM model and Rs 1,149 for double SIM variant, effectively making it the first phone from Nokia ever, to be priced at less than Rs 1,000.

The phone will be available in three colour variants such as Blue, White and black and will have a curved ergonomic polycarbonate body which looks quite refreshing. It will feature a 1.8 inch QQVGA display.

The feature phone will come with a removable 800 mAh battery which the company claims will provide more than 15 hours of talk time. On standby, the once fully charged phone can last for about 35 days.

The phone will run on Nokia Series 30+ software and will possess 4 MB RAM. On connectivity front, it has a Micro-USB port and Mini-SIM slot.

The device will also feature an LED torchlight, which can be activated quickly by double pressing the up key. Nokia claims the phone can save more than 2,000 contacts.

Nokia has also pre-loaded the phone with games like Snake Xenzia, Doodle Jump and Crossy Road, the latter two being try-and-buy variants of games.

HMD Global Oy, the Finland based startup, which operates Nokia is the exclusive licensee of Nokia phones and brands laid focus on the role of feature phones in this day and age of high-end smartphones with cutting edge.

Arto Nummela, the CEO of HMD Global in a statement said, More than 400 million feature phones were sold globally in 2016. We cannot underestimate the need and benefit of being connected and we are dedicated to delivering devices that can enable many people around the world to expand their horizon.
Skytrax released its list of worlds 100 best airports. Singapore Changi Airport continues to lead for the eighth consecutive year. Four Indian Airports managed to take their place in the list. Delhis Indira Gandhi International Airport ranked 50th, while Mumbais Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, Bengalurus Kempegowda Airport and Hyderabad Rajiv Gandhi International Airport ranked 52, 68 and 72 respectively. Here are the worlds top 10 airports of 2020 on the basis of airport customers review. (Image: PTI)

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It is now up to Delhi International Airport Pvt Ltd, a joint venture company of GMR Infrastructure that operates the Delhi airport, to decide on which of the low-cost airlines would shift to terminal T2.

The three airlines that fly to and out of the airports terminal T1InterGlobe Aviation that runs Indigo Airlines, Spicejet and GoAirwere set July 15 deadline to decide amongst themselves on who would shift from the terminal they currently operate from which is T1.

DIAL wants one or more of these airlines to shift their operations to T2 in order to undertake expansion of T1. As per the agreement signed between the airlines and the airport operator, DIAL has the right to ask any airline to shift its operations. It remains to be seen if the civil aviation ministry will extend the deadline. A DIAL official told Moneycontrol no decision had yet been taken.

Low-cost carriers use T1, also called the domestic airport, for all their local and international flights from and to Delhi. The Delhi airport currently has three terminals with T3 being used by full service local carriers for both their domestic and international flights. International airlines as well as their Indian units like that of AirAsia also use T3. T2 is currently being used mostly to operate Haj flights.

The expiry of the latest deadline is among the several given to the airlines that have lapsed but this one most crucial, coming, as it does, close to the time when the operator and the airlines too need to start planning for the winter schedule that starts Sep 29 this time.

Airlines are reluctant to shift their operations to T2 due to higher cost of operations there.

Normally, theres a half-hour lag between one landing and a take-off. The same operation at T2 will increase the interval by 15 minutes. This will reduce plane utilization and increase fuel costs. No airline, on its own, would like to walk into that scenario unless adequately incentivised, an official with one of the low-cost carriers said.

It was hoped that either InterGlobe or Spicejet would shift its operations to T2 with the other two staying at T1. GoAir alone shifting was not expected to help the matters as the airline still runs comparatively much smaller operations. Now with none agreeing to shift, DIAL is faced with two options.

One of the two options could be to ask all three airlines to shift a certain percentage of their operations to T2, according to an official with another low-cost carrier. The other could be to simply reserve T1 for select destinations while assigning other routes to T2, irrespective of the airline.

All options are fraught with complications related to marketing of seats, passenger convenience and communication from the airlines to flyers, particularly in cases where tickets are already booked.
Akzo Nobel India Q1 | Loss at Rs 20.26 crore versus profit Rs 57.14 crore, revenue at Rs 258.5 crore versus Rs 719.6 crore YoY. (Image: Reuters)

The chief executive of Akzo Nobel, Ton Buechner, has stepped down for health reasons, leaving his successor to deliver the higher sales and margins promised when the Dutch paintmaker fended off a U.S. takeover attempt this year.

Chemicals division chief Thierry Vanlancker, 52, who joined in 2016, replaces Buechner, who repelled a 26.3 billion euro ($30.35 billion) bid by U.S. rival PPG Industries with promises to produce better investor returns alone.

A chunk of the Dutch firm's shareholders, including hedge fund Elliott Advisors, were open to a PPG buyout and frustrated by Buechner's defence.

PPG cannot swiftly launch a new bid after the change of CEO as Dutch market rules mean it must wait until November at the earliest. PPG may also be reluctant to try again as its bid was equally opposed by Akzo Chairman Antony Burgmans, who remains.

Akzo shares traded flat at 77.96 euros in mid-morning trade.

Vanlancker, a Belgian, now has to deliver the stronger sales growth and margin improvements that Buechner and Burgmans promised in their struggle to avoid a merger. Analysts say those targets will be tough to achieve.

In his resignation statement, Buechner said: "For me this was an extraordinarily difficult decision to make but my focus must now be on my health."

Burgmans declined to elaborate on details of Buechner's illness, saying he regretted "only that he has decided to step down."

Buechner "felt that if he continued to subject himself to the pressures of his office, that would endanger his health," Burgmans told reporters on a conference call.

Buechner told Akzo's board about his decision on Tuesday, Burgmans said.

Vanlancker was previously identified as the person who would take Buechner's job as part of emergency contingency planning.

In his current post, Vanlancker was expected to oversee the sale or initial public offering (IPO) of Akzo's specialty chemicals division. Vanlancker previously worked for Chemours, which was spun off from DuPont in 2015.

Buechner's surprise announcement means his tenure at Akzo Nobel has ended almost as it began.

In September 2012, a half year after he took the top job, Buechner stepped down on his doctor's advice, suffering from what the company described as "over-tiredness." He resumed work in December the same year.

Buechner's tenure was mostly regarded as successful.

"Buechner has been responsible for overseeing the successful transformation of the business, including portfolio reshaping ..., de-risking of the pension funds, cutting costs and driving efficiency gains that have raised both margins and returns," Morgan Stanley analyst wrote in a note.

But the firm faced a minor shareholder rebellion after it rejected talks with PPG, leading to a shareholder lawsuit still in progress seeking to have Burgmans ousted.

Faced with opposition from Akzo's board, many employees and Dutch politicians, PPG walked away from its bid for Akzo on June 1.

Baader Helvea analysts said changing the CEO was "neither an indication that a renewed PPG bid with a higher success chance might occur nor that the activist investors were successful."

Repeating a "sell" rating, they said Akzo Nobel's supervisory board was the main obstacle to a merger and said the company's operations have likely been suffering from higher raw material prices for key paint ingredients.

Akzo reports second quarter earnings July 25.
Keeping up with the competition in the defence industry China has started producing its deadliest drone ever, the CH-5, which gives a stiff competition to its US-made counterpart General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper.

Part of the Chinese Aerospace Science and Technology Corporations series of unmanned vehicles termed Caihong (Rainbow) also known as Clever Hawk the CH-5 as per reports by the Newsweek is capable for both combat and reconnaissance missions. Further, it is capable of staying in the air continuously for 60 to 120 hours.

The company website says that the drone has a cruise speed of 150 km/h and a payload capacity of 30 kg. Reports by the Newsweek state that it has a range close to 10000 km and can reportedly carry 16 air-to-surface missiles.

Besides its specifications, what grabs the attention more is its ridiculously low price when compared to the US-made General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper. According to an expert who spoke to the South China Morning Post, the Chinese drone may come at half the price of its US rival which is priced around USD 17 million.

Though it is more cost-effective questions regarding the effectiveness of the CH-5 drone due to its altitude limitations have been raised. The CH-5 can climb only up to 29500 feet which make it vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire. The US Reaper, on the other hand, can fly at a height of over 49000 feet.
Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany are among the best placed wealthy countries to cope with shocks like large-scale migration due to their strong safety nets, education programmes and economic opportunities, said a global report by KPMG.

Switzerland took first place overall in KPMG's "Change Readiness Index," which measures the ability of 136 countries to respond to shocks and long-term trends, such as natural disasters, economic crises and climate change.

Britain, in the early stages of Brexit negotiations to leave the European Union, moved into the top 10. The United States moved up eight places to 12, while Syria and Somalia ranked bottom of the list.

"The countries that tend to be doing better are the ones who have a more inclusive approach to growth," said Trevor Davies, global head of KPMG's International Development Assistance Services.

"There's increasing expectations by citizens who are increasingly better educated, better informed, more engaged, they want to see greater equity," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The biennial index by the accounting and advisory firm analyses the capacities of business, government and civil society, with findings highlighting areas that need improvement - potentially helping policy makers, companies and aid donors, said Davies.

When it comes to migration, national income alone is not a clear indicator of a country's capacity to accommodate new arrivals, with Spain and Greece struggling to cope, according to the report.

It said Jordan and Lebanon lacked sufficient capacity to absorb refugees, which also proved a major strain for Chad.

Among African countries, Rwanda was "punching very much above its weight," with a focus on strengthening its economy and governance helping push it to number 43, above Greece.

Chad, Sudan and South Sudan ranked among the five countries least able to cope with shocks.

Oil-rich Nigeria's position at 120 demonstrated "wealth in itself is not enough" to prepare countries for change, said Davies, noting it has failed to cut poverty or create enough jobs for its growing population.

High levels of inequality limit the capacity of Latin American countries to respond to shocks, Davies said. While high-income Chile and Uruguay both ranked among the top 30, Mexico stood at 71 and Brazil at 79, with Venezuela languishing at 119 and Haiti at 123.

"Income inequality is one of the key factors that's holding back a number countries. The countries towards the top of the index that have greater income equality are certainly more prepared for change as they have a greater degree of flexibility in the economy," said Davies.

In Asia, Singapore slipped from the global top spot to number four, while Japan stood at 21 and China at 36.

Afghanistan ranked lowest among Asian countries for its ability to respond to shocks at 127.

While Asia's enterprise sector was strong, countries needed to ensure the benefits of growth were better spread across society, said Davies. The region faces complicated demographic challenges with Japan's population ageing and India's yet to peak.
airports

Employees of China Eastern Airlines were less than impressed when they realised how a passenger was duping them by having free lunches from their first class lounge for as many as three hundred times.

According to a report in news.com.au, which was first published in a Malaysian Chinese Daily Kwong Wah Yit Poh, a man in China devised a conniving way to get free food and drinks.

The man booked a first class ticket with the China Eastern Airlines and used the ticket before his flight to eat and drink to his satisfaction in the VIP lounge at Xi'an airport in Shaanxi, China only to reschedule the flight for the next day.

The passenger did this every day for 300 times. When the airline staff grew suspicious, the man cancelled his ticket.

Interestingly, the man also managed to get a full refund for the cancellation of the ticket.

The staff of the airline, however, expressed their helplessness to do anything about it. A spokesperson said there was no way to stop this rare act.
The Wal-Mart greeter who took the retail giant all the way to the US Supreme Court in the largest gender bias class-action lawsuit in US history has died.

A niece, Rita Roland, says Betty Dukes died July 10 at her home in Antioch, California.

She was 67.

The San Francisco Bay Area woman was the lead plaintiff in Dukes v. Wal-Mart.

The 2001 lawsuit alleged the company violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of race, creed or gender.

Dukes claimed Wal-Mart systemically paid women less than male counterparts and promoted men to higher positions at faster rates than women. The case reached the US Supreme Court in 2011, where it was dismissed.

Dukes worked for Wal-Mart until last year.
It's time to end Dual Citizenship.. in Australia, Canada, America.. and frankly all other nations. The granting of Canadian citizenship should be conditional on renouncing that to all other nations, including the country of origin.



The taking of another country's citizenship should nullify that to Canada. The muddling of identity and patriotism are an offshoot of the attack on the Nation State by the forces of Globalism.



There should be not tolerance of divided and competing loyalties, that reduces citizenship to a mere convenience, without implicit responsibility or loyalty.
Send items for Worship News to religion@thereporteronline.com. Address questions to Nancy March, editor, at nmarch@thereporteronline.com. Deadline is noon Thursday to appear in the Saturday Worship News and Notes. Presentation of Our Lord Ukrainian Catholic Church has one more Sidewalk Ukrainian...
Rabbis installation at Keneseth Israel will get a boost of student creativity
Friends In Pink is still on the radar and growing every year
July 19, 2017 On Crapified News And Foreign Policy Significant parts of the Trump administration, Congress and the general Zionist borg would love to start a war between the U.S. and Iran. A war is unlikely. Iran's geography and strategic position is unassailable. Its global political standing has increased during the last decades. Any war with Iran would be extremely costly yet unwinnable. But with U.S. pressure again increasing on Iran it is important to learn and understand what happens inside of country. Unfortunately most reporting about politics within Iran is bit of a mess. Considers the piece below from the Washington Post. Written from Turkey by a journalist who (to my best knowledge) does not speaks Farsi nor has any special knowledge of the country: With U.S. scholars conviction, power struggle escalates between Irans president and hard-liners ISTANBUL  A high-stakes power struggle between Irans moderate president and his hard-line opponents in the judiciary appeared to escalate with the arrest of the presidents brother and the conviction of an American student for espionage this weekend  rulings that seemed timed to embarrass the Iranian leader at home and abroad. The piece should be classic foreign reporting. But who is speaking here? ... Nader Hashemi, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver, said ...

... Khamenei said in a speech this month, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, an independent nonprofit based in New York

... said Alex Vatanka, an Iran expert at the Middle East Institute in Washington

... said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington

... [a]ccording to Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow and expert on Iran at the Brookings Institution ... There is certainly no reason to lambast the journalist, Erin Cunningham, for being lazy. Getting five telephone or email interviews and authorized quotes for the piece was surely a day's work. But how come there is no voice from Iran? The only quote from an Iranian person, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, is in translation of a lobby shop in New York which does not reveal its sponsors. Is the quote correct? The other "expert" are all from outlets that are more or less adverse to Iran's system of governance. The piece makes the recent dispute and judicial action look extraordinary and sensational. It connects it to actions in Washington DC: The tensions come as Iran and the United States spar over the terms of a nuclear deal struck with world powers to limit Irans nuclear weapons program.

...

The Trump administration has taken a much harsher stance on Iran, threatening to abandon the deal, and the Treasury Department on Tuesday announced new sanctions primarily targeting Irans ballistic missile program.

...

The arrest and conviction of Wang, a 37-year-old scholar at Princeton, appeared to target Rouhanis wider foreign policy and engagement with the West. Although Wang was detained in August 2016, the timing of the verdict is suspect, analysts say. Why did they keep it a secret as long as they did? Timing is important, said Alex Vatanka, an Iran expert at the Middle East Institute in Washington. Conflicts between the executive and the judiciary in Iran are legend and reoccur at least every other year. They are independent of the president being "moderate" or "hard-line" himself. Consider the obvious similarities between the above lede and this one from 2012: TEHRAN, Iran (AP)  The head of Iran's judiciary lashed out at the country's president Wednesday, the latest salvo in an escalating political conflict that has undermined much of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's political clout. The Iranian constitution and political system is build on the principal of Vilayat-e Faqih, the guardianship of the (Islamic) jurists. The undecided question is how absolute the primacy of the jurists is supposed to be. The interpretations vary widely and often depend on the issue at hand. The executive will naturally assert primacy wherever it can, while absolute principalists in the judiciary will always assert that their jurisprudence is prime. The conflict is daily bread in Tehran and it makes no sense to sensationalize it. The arrest of the presidents brother for corruption may well be justified. It should astonish no one. It could be timed to assert pressure but we have no way to know that. It would be mere speculation to say so. Experience has show that effective coordination within the Iranian state machinery is way less than western authors tend to assume. The U.S. student/spy had already been imprisoned for eleven months. That he was convicted now is likely not related to any Trump tantrum or epiphany. Washington's capers are less important in Tehran as the U.S. would like them to be. All together the piece shows the typical pitfalls of U.S. reporting on Iran (and many other countries). Original and relevant voices from the ground are absent. None of the people involved in the issues is questioned. "Expert" quotes from often partisan western think thanks are the sorry substitute.

Cultural and historic characteristics are neglected. The current dispute between Rouhani and the judiciary has its background in a century old discussion in Iran about the limits of vilayat-e faqih. (The importance of this is comparable to conflicts about "executive privilege" or "state rights vs. federal rights" in U.S. politics.) With that background the spat between Rouhani and the judiciary is simply the marking of territories for his now beginning second term.

Most of the issues happening in a foreign country's politics are NOT related to whatever happens in Washington DC. U.S. writers love to draw such causal connections. But not every hiccup in Moscow is in response to some fart in DC. More often then not there is no connection at all. One original voice from within Tehran's ruling circuit would have been more valuable to the above piece than the five think tank quotes. A few more words about the historic role of the judiciary would have helped to set some perspective. Connecting the political theater in Tehran to Trump's zigzags makes it easier to write the lede. But there is no justification for it without evidentiary backing. Despite the nitpicking I don't regard the Cunningham piece as bad at all. Each day there are way worse reports in the papers and on cable TV. It is probably the best one can do when the editors demand a fast one on some less familiar issue. Over the last years many experienced foreign correspondents were fired or paid to leave. Main-stream media replaced serious foreign reporting with childish "listicals", high school level "explainers" and cat pictures. When a few dailies and news shows drive foreign policy making the lack of in-depth reporting becomes a serious issue. Members of Congress and the administration get much of their foreign policy knowledge from U.S. media reports. It is no wonder that they are clueless when those reports lack insight and details. The crapification of high decision making is probably directly related to the crapification of the news media. Trump taking his clues from Fox News (and others) is bad. Fox News (and others) having no well reported clues at all is even worse. Posted by b on July 19, 2017 at 15:36 UTC | Permalink Comments
captain morgan said: Didn't Chretin get elected on the promise of eliminating the GST.... Red Book an all Click to expand...

Yup. He said "We ate the GST and will kill it" along with NAFTA.Sept. 23, 1989: The GST is "an attack on the weaker regions of the country, regressive, against the lower income groups, invisible, sneaky and of course ... an administrative nightmare." - Liberal Leader John TurnerNov. 28, 1989: "Mr. Speaker, the goods and services tax is a stupid, inept and incompetent tax." - Liberal MP Paul MartinApril 4, 1990: "I would abolish the GST.'' - Liberal MP Paul MartinSept. 27, 1990: "I want this tax dead.'' - Liberal Leader Jean ChretienOct. 29, 1990: "I am opposed to the GST. I have always been opposed to it, and I will always be opposed to it. It is a tax that is both regressive and discriminatory." - Liberal Leader Jean ChretienNov. 19, 1990: "We will continue to oppose the GST and the tax won't be long in place when the Liberals win the next election." - Opposition Leader Herb GrayFeb. 11, 1993: "I say we will replace the tax. This is a commitment. You will judge me by that. If the GST is not gone, I will have a tough time the election after that." - Liberal Leader Jean Chretien1993 - Liberal Party Red Book: "A Liberal government will replace the GST with a system that generates equivalent revenues, is fairer to consumers and to small business, minimizes disruption to small business, and promotes federal-provincial fiscal co-operation and harmonization."May 2, 1994: "We hate it and we will kill it." - Prime Minister Jean ChretienAug. 11, 1995 - The Canadian Press: "On Wednesday, [Prime Minister Jean]Chretien said the replacement for the GST will be announced in the federal budget, though he didn't provide details."Nov. 1, 2007 - The Canadian Press: "[Liberal Leader]Stephane Dion's suggestion that he might one day increase the goods-and-services tax had some of his Liberal troops shaking their heads Wednesday."Dec. 18, 2008: "So I'm not going to take a GST hike off the table later. I just think it'd be a bad idea now in a recession." - Liberal Leader Michael IgnatieffJan. 29, 2010 - Liberal MP calls for debate on increasing GST
Did you miss out on the Pop Quiz this week? It's time to catch up and get ready for next week!
This week the Government revealed the contractors who would be responsible to build the first phrase of HS2  the new high speed railway between London and Birmingham. The initial contracts are worth a weighty 6.6 billion.

Shares in those winning contractors Carillion (CLLN), Costain (COST) and Balfour Beatty (BBY) rallied following the announcement, as investors looked to benefit from their participation in the HS2 construction. Carillion was up 20% at the end of the trading day on Monday, while Costain and Balfour Beatty ended 5.4% and 3.1% higher respectively.

This 56 billion HS2 rail networks project plans to connect London to Birmingham and to Manchester and Leeds. The first trains are not expected to run until 2026. Investors looking to profit from the completion have years to wait, and should steel themselves for disruption during construction that could cause the completion date to be delayed.

Shareholders have the Crossrail project, which links Ealing with Central London, as an example of these disappointments. Last month Crossrail said the project would be delayed until 2019  although it was meant to be finished by the end of August this year.

Profiting from Existing Infrastructure

Mike Pinggera, manager of the Sanlam FOUR Multi Strategy fund says investors would be better off investing in operational infrastructure, as projects that have been completed are a relatively less risky option.

If something goes wrong in these developing constructions, they cost money. However, it is less risky to own a wind farm which has already been working for two years. You know how much power it produces and how reliable the income is. When the wind blows and produces electricity that is your revenue stream, said Pinggera.

Pinggera added that his renewable energy infrastructure investments generate up to 6% yield in his portfolio.

Nathan Sweeney, senior investment manager with Architas Multi-Manager echoes Pinggeras views. Sweeney believes that infrastructure is currently a better investment than property.

The lease term of an office building is short when you compare it to an airport. The Government can offer the lease to a private company, which the lease of that airport can be more than 12 years that is longer than offices. It is a more volatile investment when you have a shorter lease, as the market can go down when you are renewing the lease, said Sweeney.

Dan Kemp, chief investment officer at Morningstar Investment Management reminded investors that infrastructure is a very diverse investment area and so it is essential that the investor knows exactly what they are buying before they invest.

An element of this diversity comes from the variety of contracts under which infrastructure projects operate. For example, some pieces of infrastructure are demand led leading to volatility in profits while others have more stable returns as the contracts simply require them to supply the infrastructure assets, he explained. Equally some infrastructure projects are built using long term concessions and will revert to government ownership over time. Consequently, the investor is acquiring a stream of cash flows rather than the permeant ownership of the assets, said Kemp.

Liquidity and Infrastructure Investing

Last year during the first week of July, following the Brexit vote, a number of open-ended UK commercial property funds suspended trading, thereby restricting investors ability to redeem their shares.

Liquidity is a key question investors should ask when investing in UK commercial property funds  and other less liquid assets such as infrastructure.

Morningstar Investment Managements Kemp says that infrastructure trusts can often trade at a big discount or premium to their net asset value  creating volatility for the shareholder. He urged investors to be mindful of this characteristic before investing.

While all of this does not necessarily diminish the usefulness of infrastructure as an asset class, it does necessitate a lot of digging and hard work to ensure success  much like HS2, said Kemp.

Architas Sweeney agreed, saying he only invests in closed-end funds with a level of price stability.

We invest in John Liang Environmental Assets (JLEN), which is an investment trust investing in solar panel and windfarms. They are very UK-centric. Basically it pays 6% yield a year, by selling electricity back to the grid, he explained.

They are very consistent in delivering them. These windfarms can run for more than 20 years, and their fields are backed by government subsidy. These windfarms will be less impacted by political headwinds, to us, they are offering a more stable investment.

Sanlam FOURs Pinggera also invests in renewable energy investment trusts, including Greencoat UK wind (UKW).

Sweeney also likes the Bronze Rated First State Global listed Infrastructure fund and Legg Mason Global Infrastructure Income fund. He believes global infrastructure spending will start picking up as global central banks stop helping to the economy, which will force the Government to introduce taxation or infrastructure investments in order to boost the economy.

Farima Khizou, Morningstar fund analyst said First State Global Listed Infrastructure is a seasoned duo of infrastructure specialists and a disciplined investment approach that have rewarded investors well thus far.




It is instructive because it makes it clear it is not a joke or satire. She honestly wishes this man death, and immediately. Why?





"This evil man has supported every US military bloodbath in his obscenely long lifetime, and has been actively involved in both promoting and manufacturing support for every single despicable act of military invention throughout his entire career."





That is not entirely true, which should not come as a surprise since Ms Johnstone was one of the primary proponents of the debunked claims regarding the killing of Seth Rich was done because he had been involved in the leaking of DNC emails. She also appears to be a firm believer in debunked 9/11 Conspiracy Theories.





Senator McCain called for the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Lebanon before the bombing of the Marine Barracks, withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Somalia in 1993 and from Haiti in 1994. Guess he didn't support every military operation, eh?





* * *





The reason this non-story flared up into a big story is because a Republican National Committee member from Nevada shared a link to this story with the word "Amen." Meet Diana Orrock. She ran against the incumbent in Nevada's 9th Assembly District primary last year and lost.





Apparently she did not grasp that adding just the word amen to a share of a tweet with a link to an article calling for the death of a hero would not be seen as an endorsement of that call.





So was she wishing the man an immediate death, as Ms Johnstone was, or was Mrs. Orrock merely incredibly clueless? Her subsequent deletion of that tweet and the posting of the following may be a clue.





"My apologies to @ SenJohnMcCain , @ NVGOP & @ GOP . Today's retweet was disrespectful. Sen. McCain is an American hero. I don't wish anyone harm."





But that's is what Mrs. Orrock did. She endorsed the article without clarifying her intent. Then she went even further down the road of idiocy by saying she was "...just agreeing with the sentiments of the article."





The sentiment, hell the entire article was a call for Senator McCain to die. And she agreed.





From the FWIW file, she had no problem with the remarks of the Liar-in-Chief during his "locker room talk" with Billy Bush. She withdrew her endorsement of the candidacy for U.S. Senate of Joe Heck in 2016. Mr. Heck lost the seat to his Democratic opponent by less than 2.5% of the vote.





Why did she pull her endorsement? Because Joe Heck would not support Agent Orange after those Access Hollywood tapes were released.





And she managed to give someone who doesn't need any more attention, a lot of it.













John McCain is an American hero. That is not in question, in spite of the scurrilous attacks made on Senator McCain by the Liar-in-Chief when he was still a candidate. He spent 23 years of his adult life as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy. Nearly six of those years were endured as a POW in North Vietnam after he was shot down.Recently, a self-described rogue journalist from Australia, Caitlyn Johnstone, wrote a piece calling for the death of Senator McCain. Its title "Please Just F*****g Die Already" is catchy as well as disgusting. I found this passage particularly instructive:
If there is one thematic event at the heart of the past 4 weeks, it was a series of comments from European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi back on June 27th, essentially foreshadowing a winding-down of asset purchases. In other words, markets quickly began entertaining the idea of a European taper tantrum.

The taper tantrum brought important lessons though--especially for central bankers who might be a bit too eager or forceful when the time came to make a shift. There's no material reason for the ECB to begin tapering immediately or to maintain a fast pace of reductions once it commits.

The ECB can learn from the Fed's mistakes and take a much more measured approach. Intentional or not, Draghi's June 27th comments were a trial balloon for the market's mood with respect to ECB tapering. "Unnamed ECB officials" would later push back on Draghi's thesis--further hinting at the possibility that the ECB was feeling things out.

Today, traders decided to call the ECB's bluff. Specifically, there were some big instances of buying in the bond complex--bets that the ECB won't be announcing anything concrete this Thursday, and that we're merely at the beginning of a process that will be slow and steady by design.

10yr yields rallied more than 5bps and Fannie 3.5s gained a quarter point. None of the movement lined up with any economic data or headline. Instead, it was quite clear that it was that aforementioned "big buying" that set the tone. looked at another way, this is traders' way of "leading off" ahead of Thursday's events. The only question is how much of that lead-off was taken today. Traders themselves won't know for sure until they see how other traders are reacting on Thursday morning.
The city of Plattsmouth honored Nebraska Public Power District Monday for its employees quick response to repairing power lines disrupted by the June 16 storm.

The council unanimously approved Resolution 1700-6 noting the 40-year partnership between the city and NPPD. The resolution notes NPPD immediately responded to the storm damage by dispatching crews from York, South Sioux City, Kearney and Norfolk to Plattsmouth to assist in getting power restored to the 2,800 customers affected that night. The following day the 2,800 customers without power had been reduced to 480, and by Monday afternoon, almost all customers had their power restored, the resolution states.

The resolution also explains that NPPD linemen, Ed Boyle and Doug Bauer, noticed a Plattsmouth resident providing aid to a neighbor who was weak and had trouble standing. Boyle and Bauer put aside what they were doing to help the resident and her neighbor inside to safety, the resolution states.

City Administrator Erv Portis said he attended a meeting with NPPD officials and staff last Friday to thank them for their swift actions.

The staff members and board members thanked me for coming out. Sometimes we hear a lot more complaints than thanks and appreciation. NPPD has plenty of good services available, Portis said.

Mayor Paul Lambert said he drove around Saturday and noticed there were very few trees and brush on the streets waiting to be hauled away.

I think its great to have NPPD as partners here. It was organized chaos that night to begin with, but it quickly became organized.

Councilman Steve Riese added a thank you to Plattsmouth and area firefighters and Emergency Medical Services staff. He said one of the Nehawka firefighters was ready to return home when he was asked to guard a downed power line in Plattsmouth, which became an all- night vigil.

There were a lot of people who did a lot of good work that night, the mayor said.
Mount Pleasant, SC (29464)

Today

Cloudy early, becoming mostly sunny this afternoon. High around 75F. Winds SW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. Low around 55F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph.
Twenty of 49 state senators co-signed a letter Tuesday to Attorney General Doug Peterson, asking him to rescind his support of a lawsuit aimed at ending the support of immigrant youths who are in the country illegally.

Sen. Tony Vargas of Omaha and 19 others told Peterson they were profoundly disappointed he had joined a June 29 letter to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions asking President Donald Trump to rescind the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Last month, the Trump administration left the program in place, which shields the youth from deportation.

Vargas said he felt there was a need for senators to weigh in and reiterate a long history of the Legislature supporting the DACA youth with laws to ensure they can stay and continue to contribute to the state, allowing them drivers licenses and professional certification.

The program has helped more than 3,000 young Nebraskans contribute to their communities, continue their educations and help fuel the states economy, the letter said.

The support of the DACA youths has widespread support, the senators said, from businesses, local leaders, faith groups and chambers of commerce.

Their success is inescapably intertwined with our own states success, the letter said. Time and time again these young Nebraskans have inspired us and have shown us that they are a vital and vibrant part of our states community.

During this years session the Legislature reaffirmed its support for the youth by adopting a resolution (LR26) that stated its opposition to any federal action that would rescind the program.

Senators have heard from many of the DACA youth, through social media and phone calls, Vargas said, since the Nebraska attorney general signed on with nine other Republican attorneys general in the country to reverse an earlier federal decision to allow the youth to retain legal presence in the United States.

We have heard story upon story from DACA youth, for the last so many years now, talking about how much they love this state, how much they want to contribute, continue to be members of their community, he said.

Many of them have been here since a very young age and so this is the only America they know, and they dont want to leave. ... They are law-abiding citizens, getting their education, starting businesses, entrepreneurs, scientists, teachers. Why wouldnt we want more people to contribute to our economy?

The letter was signed by Vargas and Sens. Adam Morfeld, Roy Baker, Carol Blood, Kate Bolz, Ernie Chambers, Sue Crawford, Laura Ebke, Matt Hansen, Burke Harr, Sara Howard, Rick Kolowski, Bob Krist, John McCollister, Mike McDonnell, Patty Pansing Brooks, Dan Quick, Justin Wayne, Matt Williams and Anna Wishart.

Members of the Fremont area legislative delegation did not sign the letter: Sens. Lynne Walz of District 15, Bruce Bostelman of District 23, Lydia Brasch of District 16 and Lou Ann Linehan of District 39.
Instagram can be a treasure trove for ideas for weddings, baby showers, maternity shoots and all the important milestones in your life. These moms-to-be from the Lone Star state are nothing short of stunning.

But not all maternity shoots have to be about glamor as proved by one momma-to-be in her CrossFit inspired photo shoot. The photo shows the pregnant woman lifting weights clear over her head and is showing the world that even while carrying a baby, women can do just about anything.
A Midland County jury on Tuesday found an Odessa man guilty of attempted indecency with a child, according to a report from the Midland County District Attorneys Office.

Sergio Gonzalez, 30, was alleged to have committed a crime against a girl under 14 on Nov. 16, 2016, according to the press release. Jurors deliberated 17 minutes before reaching a verdict.
Homestead National Monument of America has come full circle.

Located on the site where Daniel Freeman, one of the very first homesteaders, staked his claim in 1862, Homestead will soon be the new and permanent home of a tractor belonging to Ken Deardorff, the last homesteader.

On Monday afternoon, the Homestead National Monument showed off Deardorffs tractor, a 1945 Allis-Chalmers Model C that he bought when he moved to his homestead in the Alaskan wilderness in 1974.

The tractor will be sent to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for refurbishment before it goes on display, but the team that brought it 3,500 miles back to the Homestead via helicopter, barge, ship and truck had a story to tell.

In 1974, Deardorff was a 29-year-old Vietnam veteran from California. The Homestead Act was still two years away from being repealedthough the Alaskan repeal was 10 years away, due to its late addition to the United States. Dearsdorff staked a claim and settled on 80 acres about 200 miles from Anchorage and nearly 50 miles from the nearest town.

He traveled by dog sled to get to his homestead and slept in a tent in sub-zero conditions until he was able to finish building his log cabin. There were no roads, electricity or modern amenities at all when he arrived, and the property remains the same way.

Using his tractor, Deardorff cleared a forest to grow his cropsmostly hays and grasses, as those were the only things that would grow in the climate. The tractor was his most important tool.

When he left the Alaskan homestead ten years after starting it, the tractor was left sitting outside for the next 30 years. Officials from Homestead Monument learned about the tractor and were determined to bring it to Beatrice.

Last year, the Friends of Homestead started an online fundraising campaign to bring the tractor to Nebraska. Asking $44,000 at the time, they were falling short until Dr. C.T. Frerichs of Beatrice happened to read about it in the Omaha World Herald.

Frerichs had recently lost his wife and was looking for a way to honor her memory, said Diane Vicars, president of the Friends of Homestead National Monument.

When Frerichs and his wife, Julia, were engaged, the couple came to Nebraska to visit his parents in September of 1950. During that visit, a photo of Julia was taken as she sat on a tractor.

She liked the experience, Frerichs said. He still has that photo of Julia perched on the tractor. A late 1940s-era Allis-Chalmers Model C. Just like the one Deardorff used on his homestead.

Frerichs was inspired and made a significant financial contribution to bring the tractor to Nebraska.

After cutting off the protective plastic that surrounded it from its trip to Homestead, Frerichs got a little choked up.

I think she would just sit here and cry, he said. Shed probably shed a tear, but she would be surprised and extremely thankful.

Rob Ruskamp, chief of maintenance at Homestead, went on the Alaskan trek to retrieve the tractor. They did a little bit of recon work, he said, in looking for the tractor based on information Deardorff had given them before finding it in a clearing. It was rough, but still very much recognizable.

They called in a helicopter to lift the tractor to Big Lake, Alaska, where a crate was custom built for it. It was put on a barge to Anchorage, then onto a ship to Seattle before being trucked to Beatrice.

The team also found a plow and other pieces of equipment located in a river sandbed, he said.

We just stumbled upon these pieces of equipment and huge trees were growing up through them, he said. The helicopter was coming that morning to get the tractor, so we only had a couple of hours, so we just went crazy digging them up.

The tractor will be heading to UNL for restoration in the next week or so, Homestead National Monument superintendent Mark Engler said, but they dont want it looking like new. Its an American treasure, he said.

Theyre aiming for what it would have looked like when Deardorff was using it. Theyll fix up the tires and repair the rotting wood on the hand-made seat, but thats about it. No new paint or anything too fancy. Authenticity is what theyre going for.

I would like to add that the Allis-Chalmers seat on which my future wife sat in September of 1950 was much nicer and cleaner than that, Frerichs joked. And Im afraid if it had been that one, she might have said no.
It used to be that Americans recognized government intrusion and recoiled against it, but in the era of terrorism, weve become so accustomed to Uncle Sam watching over us that we hardly take notice when the feds attempt to dig deeper and know more about us.

An example of this new permissiveness can be observed as the White House attempts to obtain voter records from each of the 50 states to support Donald Trumps claim that 3 million votes were fraudulently cast in the presidential election.

Last week the curiously labeled federal Commission on Election Integrity asked for detailed information on every voter in the country. Nebraska Secretary of State John Gale balked initially, but agreed to turn over some information with assurances none of it would fall into the wrong hands. We would rather that Gale would have refused the commissions request, citing concerns about unwarranted intrusion, but for now a court has put a hold on the release of voter info until it determines the legality of the commissions request.

Across the border, our friends in Kansas have a big problem.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is sold on Trumps voter fraud claim and is willing to intrude to whatever degree necessary to uncover the alleged 3 million fraudulent voters. Kobach serves as vice chair of the Commission on Election Integrity and drafted the letter that went to the nations secretaries of state requesting the voter data.

Kobach wants names, addresses, birth dates, party registrations, voting histories and the last four digits of Social Security numbers.

Some states have refused the request, some have just not responded. Others said they would hand over their voter records.

Americans should be deeply concerned by the commissions inquiry, supposedly in the name of election integrity.

Every American wants honest and fair elections, but the commission seeks information that serves no valid purpose. However, it does provide unethical lawmakers the toehold they need to suppress voters, such as repealing motor-voter registration laws. Gale should retract his approval, and all secretaries of state should refuse to comply, or theyll risk voter privacy and worse, lose trust theyve worked hard to earn from voters.
'The big truck is still on ...
Already flying from Detroit, Seattle and Los Angeles, Delta Air Lines announced its 4th route to Shanghai, China from the United States.

Deltas new service is between Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Shanghai Pudong International Airport starting in July 2018. The flight will provide convenient one-stop access to more than 150 destinations in the U.S. and Latin America from Shanghai. In addition, the flight will also provide access to more than 50 destinations in China with codeshare partner China Eastern.

"Strong demand for Delta service across the Pacific and to China nonstop from the U.S. as well as our China Eastern partnership make this route compelling for both business and leisure travelers," said Ed Bastian, Delta's Chief Executive Officer. "We look forward to connecting Delta's hometown and China Eastern's home with this route, while offering our customers innovative products, thoughtful in-flight service and leading operational reliability."

The flight creates a direct link between one of China's major commercial and industrial centers and Atlanta. The new flight adds to Delta's existing service to Seoul and Tokyo, providing Atlanta with non-stop service to the three largest markets in Asia and convenient one-stop access to more than 75 destinations in Asia with partners China Eastern and Korean Air.

"This is a huge win for Georgia jobs and businesses. I'm glad to see Delta leading the charge to connect the U.S. business sector to one of the world's largest financial hubs in Shanghai," said U.S. Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.)
Mr. Chiruit Isarangkun Na Ayuthaya, the newest President of Thailand Convention and Exhibition Bureau or TCEB announces 4 directions for enhancing the MICE industry to create more stability and 5 QUICK WIN strategies to drive the industry.

Mr. Chiruit Isarangkun Na Ayuthaya, President of TCEB said that "TCEB is a governmental organisation that was established with the mission to promote and develop the capabilities of the Thai MICE industry that government gives great importance as a key service industry for businesses that helps to drive Thai economy. TCEB therefore has the direct duty of developing every aspect of the MICE industry, from considering the needs of the market, the strengths and weaknesses of the country, the problems within the country, and to find ways to overcome those issues, as well as developing every area related to MICE, which is the appropriate role of the public sector."

The economic problems of ASEAN countries have many facets, including high household debts, a shortage of working-age population, and the movement towards an aging society. As a result, the way to overcome these obstacles is to adjust both the people and the policies of the country, including Thailand 4.0, or setting the target industries of the country to create growth. Therefore, the MICE industry role should take more parts in developing the country.

"To build MICE into a key sector in developing the country, therefore, requires the use of 4 directions for enhancing the MICE industry to create more stability. These include: 1. Growing in parallel with the development of the country, which focuses on keeping the current market and finding new markets by placing MICE in parallel with the development of the country's economy, pulling the MICE industry into other target industries, such as those covered by Thailand 4.0, as well as into special economic areas.

2. Growing in a high potential market, focusing on the regions that have high growth and strong connection with the development of Thailand's economy, such as ASEAN, Greater Mekong Subregion, East Asia/South Asia and Australia/New Zealand.

3. Growing with equality, by increasing the opportunities for the MICE industry growth in provinces that have potential, such as Chiang Mai, Khon Kaen, Pattaya/Chonburi and Songkhla.

4. Growing strongly, which involves the development of the internal system to meet the needs of the market, developing the organisation and regulations to better support the industry in the future."

From these directions, 5 QUICK WIN strategies were stated to drive the MICE industry. These include:

1. Promote, support, push and enhance the country to become a Global Leader by proceeding with important projects, such as the development and enhancement of the MICE industry through project "Thailand MICE Venue Standard" / to promote and support Thai MICE operators to gain certification of standards from international organisations such as "Certified Exhibition Management" programme and "Certified Meetings Professional" programme / to attend at least 8-10 international trade shows and road shows in target regions, such as ASEAN, Europe, America and Middle East a year.

2. Be the leader in developing the MICE industry for both the public and private sectors, which focuses on integrating the public and private sectors, including important projects such as cooperating with MICE operators in the private sector to bring in more world-class events into Thailand such as SITE Global Conference 2019 / Thailand MICE United campaign to facilitate cooperation between partnered agencies to offer goods and services for MICE travelers / setting up sub-committee to coordinate with government agencies to facilitate convenience for goods and services trade for the MICE industry, whose main mission is to study and set a direction to solve the current problems and obstacles faced by operators so they will be able to do business in the MICE industry more conveniently in Thailand.

3. Distributing economic development to other regions through the MICE industry, which focuses on raising MICE as a platform for income creation in the area, such as Empowering Thailand Exhibition (EMTEX), promoting the Thai exhibition industry in the regions to develop the economy and enhancing MICE cities through the creation of new exhibitions, distributing business and improving events by expanding from Bangkok to other regions. These events will focus on creating events for target industries in accordance with Thailand 4.0, including the agriculture, biology, and energy, and in the main MICE cities and special economic areas / MICE City project to study and build strategic information on MICE cities and other high potential areas to ensure high quality development for the areas / MICE City Summit project to create a platform for sharing for TCEB and MICE cities to gather opinions and exchange knowledge and experiences for all those in the MICE industry.

4. Drive for the use of innovations and building MICE Intelligence to support and enhance the competitive capabilities, focusing on creating SMART MICE business, increasing modernity, sustainability and creativity to help to create better experiences and more interest in MICE events / MICE Intelligence & MICE Innovation programme that will gather information, analyse market directions and help develop business plans for operators in the private sector to improve competitive capabilities.

5. Improving TCEB as an organisation with Good Governance, such as setting up TCEB information centre to share information and improve public perception towards the organization's role as a government agency that demonstrates good governance in action.

"It is expected that in the 2017 budget year, there will be a total of 27.1 million MICE travellers in Thailand, generating revenue of 155 billion baht, separated into 1,109,000 international MICE visitors, generating revenue of 101 billion baht, and 26 million domestic MICE travellers, generating 54 billion baht in revenue. Additionally, we will be able to meet the target of driving the MICE industry to be a key player in creating prosperity, distributing income to the regions through the MICE industry, and creating strength and sustainability for the economy of the country," Mr. Chiruit said in conclusion.

In 2017, Thailand is preparing to host of several important international conferences, such as 2017 PCMA Global Professional Conference -- Asia Pacific, between 28th-31st August in Bangkok, UIA's Associations Roundtable Asia-Pacific 2017, between 21st-22nd September in Chiang Mai, IT&CM Asia & CTW Asia Pacific 2017, 26th - 28th September in Bangkok, which is an important trade show for Asia that Thailand will be hosting for the 16th time, SIGGRAPH Asia 2017, between 27th - 30th November in Bangkok, which is a world-class seminar and exhibition on computer graphics and animation. Additionally, in 2019, Thailand has won the rights to host other global events such as SITE Global Conference 2019, which is the international conference of organisations in incentive business.

From statistics over the last 10 years, Thailand has received approximately 150 billion baht of revenue from the MICE industry, both domestic and international, created approximately 164,000 jobs, and gained around 10.5 billion baht of revenue from taxation. Furthermore, in 2016, the International Congress and Convention Association, or ICCA, placed Thailand as having hosted 151 events, ranking Thailand 24th, an improvement from 27th in 2015, with Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Pattaya ranking higher than the previous year as well.
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A woman who runs a horse rescue operation in Eustis is now facing several counts of animal cruelty after investigators said several horses were found severely malnourished at the Lake County-based rescue.

Woman who runs horse rescue operation accused of animal cruelty

Angel King, 46, faces 7 counts of animal cruelty

PREVIOUS: 7 horses in poor condition removed from Eustis property Lake County rescue caring 2 neglected horses



Angel King, 46, is charged with seven counts of animal cruelty  a count for each of the seven horses deputies seized from Kings Cove Horse Rescue last week. One investigator said it was the worst condition he has ever seen horses in.

"They were in such bad shape (that) the county veterinarian said they had to be taken immediately," said Sgt. Jim Vachon, with the Lake County Sheriff's Office.

Investigators said they've had to go out to King's rescue multiple times in the last year after getting anonymous tips about skinny horses. King was determined not to be at fault two previous times.

"In both instances, one of our investigators went out and determined they were a recently dropped off rescue horse and she did, in fact, have the materials to get them into good shape," Vachon said.

But after getting another anonymous tip last week, deputies said they visited the rescue. The county veterinarian told King she needed to do more to care for the horses. When they checked back two days later, deputies said the veterinarian saw no improvement.

"Nobody expected the horses' health to improve in two days, but something needed to be done  get the right kind of food, get the right kind of nutrition involved," Vachon said. "Basically, she had done nothing."

Investigators said King was properly taking care of other horses at her rescue someone was paying her to board. Those horses were returned to their owners.

The seven horses seized from King's rescue are now in foster care.

"These are large animals that need a very specific kind of care and a very specific kind of nutrition," Vachon said.

As of Tuesday night, King was still in custody in the Lake County Jail on a $35,000 bond  $5,000 for each of the horses investigators said she neglected.

Lake County Animal Services took in two horses from a property near King's rescue off Huff Road in Eustis in early July. That property's owner told deputies someone placed the two horses on her property. One of those horses later died at a foster rescue and the other is still recovering.

Investigators said they can't prove there's any connection to King's rescue at this time.



Seven horses that were found severely malnourished at a Eustis rescue have been placed into foster care. (Lake County Sheriff's Office)
Police can once again take cash and property from people suspected of crimes, with the help of federal officials. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions revived a long-curtailed civil asset forfeiture policy Wednesday, with new safeguards to curb abuse.

Dept. of Justice revives civil asset forfeiture policy

Allows police to take cash, property from suspects

Revived policy includes new safeguards to curtail abuse

RELATED: READ the Justice Dept.'s announcement READ the Justice Dept.'s policy directive (.PDF)



Under the Obama administration, the practice of asset forfeiture was limited because of complaints of abuse.

The Justice Dept. sees this as an important tool to combat crime, particularly drug cases.

How does it work?

Called adoptive forfeiture, the program lets police skirt more restrictive state laws to seize property under federal law.

Under the program, up to 80 percent of the proceeds from a seizure can be shared with local agencies. Some police departments see this money as an important way to shore up funding.

More than $6 billion in forfeited funds has been shared with state and local law enforcement since fiscal year 2000, according to the Justice Departments inspector general.

The Justice Dept. says the program helps strip suspects of proceeds from their activities, deters crime and can be used to compensate victims. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said the move will help fight drug dealing that has perpetuated the nations opioid epidemic.

If we seize and forfeit criminal proceeds from drug dealing, its going to result in less money to reinvest in drugs by that dealer, he said. And its going to have a deterrent effect.

What are the changes?

The new changes include requiring more details from police agencies on probable cause to justify a seizure, and requiring the Justice Dept. to decide more quickly whether to take on local seizures.

The government also has to let property owners know their rights and the status of their belongings within 45 days of the seizure.

Another change makes it harder for police to seize less than $10,000 unless they have a state warrant, have made an arrest in the case, have taken other contraband, such as drugs, or the owner has confessed to a crime.

The previous policy set the threshold at only $5,000.

But critics say the new rules don't fix the larger problem, which is that some police departments still rely on the proceeds to help foot their bills. It creates a profit incentive.

Some top-ranking Republicans found the move troubling, especially since a number of states already have their own laws safeguarding abuse.

"I'm glad that at least some safeguards will be put in place, but their plan to expand civil forfeiture is, really, just as concerning as it was before," said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California. "Criminals shouldn't be able to keep the proceeds of their crime, but innocent Americans shouldn't lose their right to due process, or their private property rights, in order to make that happen."

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, had been pushing for tighter regulations with Democrats in the Senate. He says his pleas have been ignored.

Instead of revising forfeiture practices in a manner to better protect Americans due process rights, the DOJ seems determined to lose in court before it changes its policies for the better, said Lee.

The ACLU called it another step by Sessions to bring back the failed and racist War on Drugs.

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
Texas, Margaret, Texas.

These were supposedly the last words Sam Houston spoke before he passed away in his Huntsville home on July 26, 1863.

Margaret was his wife of 23 years. Texas, of course, was the Republic he led as president, and the state he represented in the United States Senate before serving as its governor.

Texas was his home, and it still is. He is buried at the Oakwood Cemetery in Huntsville, Texas, 70 miles north of the Bayou City named in his honor, Houston.

Engraved on his tombstone are the words The World Will Take Care of Houstons Fame, and its clear the City of Huntsville has done its part. In addition to his gravesite, those who make it to Huntsville can visit Sam Houston State University, the Sam Houston Memorial Museum, and Sam Houstons Steamboat home.

But the biggest tribute to Texas first president is Big Sam, a 67-foot statue so grand you can see it from more than 6 miles away. David Adickes, a Huntsville native famous for memorializing historys giants in a size that reflects their continued influence, crafted the statue over 2 1/2 years using 30 tons of concrete and steel. Big Sam was dedicated in 1994 under the formal title A Tribute to Courage, and now boasts the very specific distinction of being the largest freestanding figure of an American hero.

As the United States senator who currently holds the seat Sam Houston first occupied, I often reflect upon his career of public service. He was a selfless and fearless leader, dedicated to the advancement of the Texas spirit and the preservation of our great nation. And this month on the anniversary of his passing, I ask that you join me and the City of Huntsville in remembering his legacy that helped shape the great State of Texas.
AMARILLO  Electricity, and the company that provides it, delivers more than just cool comfort on hot summer days across the towns and cities of Xcel Energys Texas and New Mexico service area.

Committed to doing more than just keeping the lights on, Xcel Energy focuses on spending locally and supporting neighbors with hundreds of skilled employees who give back to their home communities.

Recently compiled data show that Xcel Energy spent more than $103 million in area towns and cities during 2016 as it continued a historic capital investment initiative that will position the regional power grid for years of growth and upgrades. Thats money spent on anything from steel and concrete for new high-voltage power lines down to food, fuel and lodging for linemen and substation workers building new power facilities and working to restore power after storms.

Xcel Energy employs approximately 1,700 men and women in Texas and New Mexico to serve more than 370,000 customers. The company operates more than 22,000 miles of power lines, eight generating plants and 490 substations in the companys 52,000 square mile Texas-New Mexico service area. These valuable facilities benefit local cities, counties and school districts in the form of sales and property taxes. Total taxes paid by Xcel Energy, including franchise fees paid to area cities, amounted to more than $29 million in 2016.

Our roots in the southwest go back to 1904, and we grew up with the towns and cities in our service area, said David Hudson, president, Xcel Energy  New Mexico, Texas. We live and work here, and the hours employees spend volunteering are just as valuable to Xcel Energy as the time they spend ensuring the company delivers safe, affordable and reliable electric service. We understand the responsibility we have to invest in our region and help it prosper.

Xcel Energy employees and retirees, with help from Xcel Energy Foundation matching dollars, supported their hometowns with more than $1 million in donations to nonprofits in 2016, a figure that includes more than $800,000 to area United Way organizations. Employees also donated close to 2,000 volunteer hours assisting dozens of area nonprofits, and these hours were matched with Dollars for Doing gifts from the Xcel Energy Foundation.

As older workers move toward retirement in increasing numbers, Xcel Energy hopes to replenish its regional workforce with men and women who grew up in the area and wish to remain here to start families and advance their careers. The company recruits potential new employees not only from regional universities, but also from high schools. Beginning apprentice salaries for craft positions start at close to $50,000 a year, before overtime, and all employees are encouraged to continue their educations by utilizing tuition reimbursement programs that cover up to 80 percent of degree program costs.

If we can attract more home-grown talent, we know these young people will likely remain with us for many years, Hudson said. This is not only good for us, but also for the towns where these employees live and work because our employees are very generous with their time and talents.

Looking ahead, Hudson expects the companys impact on the regional economy to grow larger as it lays plans for additional investment in the power lines and generating equipment that will drive the regional economy for years to come. In March, Xcel Energy announced plans for $1.6 billion in new wind energy facilities that will add 1,230 megawatts of low-cost wind energy to the regional generation mix. The largest of the new wind farms, Sagamore Wind, will be built south of Portales, N.M., with another large project, Hale Wind, planned in Hale County northeast of Lubbock. Energy from these new company-owned facilities, when combined with the energy from a new wind contract signed with an outside developer, will generate savings of $2.8 billion for regional electricity customers over 30 years.

More information about Xcel Energys wind proposal and other investments in the regional power system can be found at www.xcelenergy.com/ourenergyfuturesw.
Middlefield has begun discussing a potential affordable housing project in town called Raspberry Ridge. The project was proposed by the Middlefield Housing Authority.



At a special meeting of the Board of Finance on Tuesday, July 18, board members, representatives of the housing authority and a small audience of residents discussed the proposal, a 36-unit project on about 9 acres on Cedar Street.



The Middlefield Housing Authority is a public agency with board members appointed by the Middlefield Board of Selectmen, but otherwise independent. The housing authority runs the 30-unit Sugarloaf Terrace, the senior housing facility which is on the same Cedar Street property as the proposed affordable housing development.



Alma Elder, chair of the housing authoritys board, told the BoF that affordable housing was lacking in Middlefield. Affordable housing, Elder said, would attract people like new teachers or recent retirees to Middlefield and enrich the town.



Connecticut uses financial and some legal means to encourage towns to have 10 percent of their housing stock categorized as affordable, which is defined as having a rent no higher than 30 percent of the median income.



Less than 2.5 percent of Middlefields housing is considered affordable. The Raspberry Ridge development would bring Middlefields total to slightly less than 5 percent.



BoF member Jim Irish said, At the end of the day, the number of students is the most dramatic impact on the town.



Sylvia Rutkowska, an attorney representing the housing authority, said that studies suggested that a development of Raspberry Ridges size would have about nine school age children. That number of students, Rutkowska said, should not significantly increase the set costs of the school, such as the number of employees.



BoF chair Bob Yamartino pointed out that Middlefield was part of a regional school system, meaning the town paid a bill based on the ratio of students between Durham and Middlefield. Even a shift of a few students could significantly impact each town.



The proposed development consists of six three-bedroom units, 17 two-bedroom units, and 13 one-bedroom units.



At least twice during the July 18 hearing, representatives of the housing authority were asked if Middlefield residents would be given preference in applying for the units, which would be illegal. Representatives from the housing authority said that could not happen.



BoF member Dave Lowry referred to language from the original meeting in 1975 when Middlefield gave the land to the housing authority. According to Lowry, the land was given with certain caveats that dont look like they are being followed with this plan.



Dedicating this land to elderly housing was pretty well spelled out, Lowry said.



Elder said that Lowrys account was accurate, but that requirement had been fulfilled and the land is ours and we can use it as we wish.



If the town could just change the conditions, one resident asked later in the meeting, Who is going to give [the town] land in the future?



At different times during the nearly two-hour meeting, Rutkowska and Peter Sibley, the housing authoritys executive director, said that financing for senior housing was not viable.



The state currently makes financing for affordable housing more attractive with tax credits, and in return, the landlord, in this case the housing authority, makes payments to the town equal to 10 percent of the rental payments. This is called a PILOT program  payment in lieu of taxes.



Yamartino asked the housing authority for its financial plans with the development, which the representatives were reluctant to discuss, but estimates put the amount Middlefield might collect in PILOT money at $40,000 to $50,000 per year.



As the cost per student in Regional School District 13 is just under $20,000 for 2017-2018, nine students could cost about $180,000 per year.



The intangibles of affordable housing were also mentioned, such as more young people and volunteers in town. Blue collar people need homes, BoF member Alice Malcolm said.



Rutkowska noted that nothing prevented a private developer from creating a similar development with more of an emphasis on profit. What you have here is a landlord that is committed to the town, Rutkowska said.



The issue is scheduled to be discussed at a Planning & Zoning Public Hearing Wednesday, July 19, 7 p.m., at the Middlefield Community Center.






SOUTHINGTON  Three holiday light decorations for the Farmington Canal Heritage trail arrived Wednesday from Utah.



Dawn Miceli, a town councilor, started raising money for the lights in January. She was inspired by the light display at Hubbard Park in Meriden every winter and wanted similar decorations on the trail, which connects downtown Plantsville and downtown Southington.



The decorations, created by the same artist who makes Meridens displays, depict a moose, bear and apple.



They will really pop, Miceli said.



Two separate downtown holiday events in Southington and Plantsville were merged this past winter, and attendees were shuttled between the two downtowns via hay rides on the trail.



Miceli raised about $11,000 from companies and individuals, including HQ Dumpsters, the Calvanese Foundation, the Main Street Community Foundation, James Garstang of Six Point Wealth Advisors and the Community Foundation of Greater New Britain.



This was a major investment. These companies were very generous, Miceli said.



Michael Fasulo, chairman of the Parks and Recreation Board, praised Micelis work.



She did a fantastic job of raising money to get these things, he said. Its a great addition to our decorations downtown.



Milton Neeley, the artist and welder from Utah, has built more than 200 unique aluminum and steel creations for Meridens Hubbard Park. He built Southingtons decorations out of stainless aluminum.



In a 2014 interview with the Record-Journal, Neeley said he started with his familys metal fabricating business and made ornamental railings, gates and doors.



The lights will be on display on the trail for the White Christmas in the Community event scheduled for Dec. 1 and then will move to the downtowns.



jbuchanan@recordjournal.com 203-317-2230 Twitter: @JBuchananRJ






MERIDEN  A local man faces charges after police said he was intoxicated and running into traffic on East Main Street early Wednesday.



Miguel Ramos, 56, of 254 Liberty St., Apt. 3B, was issued a citation for creating a public disturbance and entering the road to create a hazard under the influence.



Police responded to the area of 250 E. Main St. just after midnight for a report of a man stumbling in the road, blocking traffic and yelling, said Sgt. Darrin McKay, police spokesman.



Officers found the man, later identified as Ramos, yelling at a woman walking across the street, McKay said. After officers asked Ramos to stop and go home, he ran into the road, causing a hazard, McKay said.



Ramos was taken to a local hospital for evaluation, McKay said.






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In one of the first legal actions involving Californias right to die law, the family of a deceased cancer patient is suing UCSF Medical Center, alleging the system did not appropriately aid the woman in ending her life.

The San Francisco Superior Court suit, filed by attorneys for the family of Judy Dale on July 7, claims that Dales caretakers at the hospital told her they would assist her in obtaining medication to help her die  but then suddenly backtracked.

Dale succumbed to her terminal cancer in September 2016, according to the lawsuit. She did so without the medication that would have killed her on her own terms, the suit says.

Californias End of Life Option Act went into effect in June 2016, a landmark and controversial piece of legislation that allows terminally ill adults to obtain medication to end their life if certain conditions are met. Among them: The patient must make two oral requests to a doctor that are spaced at least 15 days apart, as well as a written request.

Doctors are not legally obligated to participate in the procedure. In a statement, UCSF did not comment specifically on the lawsuit, citing the pending litigation.

The hospital said it was one of the first in the state to develop a protocol for complying with the state law, adding that it respects the right of its physicians to opt out at their discretion.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, also names the University of California Board of Regents, among other UCSF-connected entities.

As Dale grew sicker over the summer of 2016, the lawsuit claims, her doctors told her over and over that they would dispense the aid-in-dying drugs for which she had asked.

But the suit claims that on Aug. 18, a social worker of Dales told her that her doctors would turn down her request.

When Dale was discharged from the hospital near the end of the summer, she tried each day until her death to obtain a prescription from another doctor, the suit states. She never did.

Judys final weeks were brutal, the suit said.

Michael Bodley is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mbodley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @michael_bodley
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Rapamycin Holdings has tapped a new CEO as it prepares to begin human trials for its prostate cancer drug eRapa later this year.

Dan Hargrove, chief development officer of Cancer Insight, has joined Rapamycin as its top executive. He replaces Randy Goldsmith, who is staying on as a director. The company plans to start human trials with eRapa in October or November of this year.

The clinical trial will take place at UT Health San Antonio and Christus Santa Rosa Hospital and was designed by Dr. George Peoples, Rapamycins chief medical officer, and Dr. Ian Thompson, a local urologist.

Rapamycin believes eRapa could have more uses than just prostate cancer. The drug is designed to regenerate the bodys immune system, helping to fight cancer and other age-related diseases, Hargrove said.

Like a lot of biotech companies, they have one product and its one shot on goal. Here, because of the unique aspect of this fascinating compound, eRapa, we think it can be used for multiple unmet medical needs, Hargrove said.

Rapamycin issued $2 million in convertible bonds earlier this year and is currently in the process of raising an additional 3.5 million to fund the clinical trial, Hargrove said.

The eRapa drug came from experiments at UT Health San Antonio where researchers found the drug increased the life span of mice and reduced incidences of cancer, Hargrove said. The compound is based on a drug called Rapamycin, for which the company is named, that has been around for decades.

Rapamycin is focusing its trial on prostate cancer because of the large population of patients with early-stage prostate cancer that could participate in the trial. The American Cancer Society estimated there would be more than 160,000 new cases of prostate cancer in the country this year.

Through the prostate cancer trial, Rapamycin is looking to gather data that could be useful in studying future applications for bladder cancer and cognitive diseases, Hargrove said. The company has had preliminary discussions with the Food and Drug Administration but still has to file a new drug application for eRapa, which is required before beginning clinical trials, Hargrove said.

Just 12 percent of drugs that begin human trials are eventually approved by the FDA, according to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

Rapamycins leadership has previously been recognized for its success in San Antonio. Last year, BioMed SA, a non-profit that promotes the biomedical industry in San Antonio gave Peoples its Award for Innovation in Healthcare and Bioscience.

The company started out with great science, and theyve gone on to build a dream team, said Ann Stevens, director of BioMed SA.

As co-founder and chief development officer at Cancer Insight, Hargrove designed clinical oncology trials and oversaw a subsidiary company that developed drugs. Hargrove will remain with Cancer Insight as he adds his new role at Rapamycin.

Hargrove was on active duty with the U.S. Army for six years and is currently a reservist. He previously served as an assistant professor of law at the U.S. Army JAG school and has a masters degree in health care law. Peoples and Thompson have also served in the military.

Rapamycin, founded in 2012 as an outgrowth of research by scientists from UT Health San Antonio and other research centers in Maine and Michigan, was previously focused on using its eRapa compound in a veterinary medicine. Hargrove said that portion of the business is now on the backburner.

Right now, all our force is going to be concentrated on this prostate cancer trial, Hargrove said.

jpound@express-news.net

Twitter: @jesserpound
The Oakland Police Department can no longer designate its investigators as U.S. customs enforcement officers  a classification that allows local police agencies to work with federal immigration officials on cases of human trafficking, narcotics smuggling and other cross-border crimes.

Citing concerns over data sharing and heightened fear of deportations, the Oakland City Council on Tuesday unanimously rescinded an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement signed last summer by former Police Chief Sean Whent, hours before he resigned amid questions over his handling of a sexual misconduct scandal.

But whether the memorandum of understanding with the criminal investigations arm of ICE was ever actually put to use in Oakland  and the consequences of revoking it  remains in dispute, even within the Police Department.

A report issued by Chief Anne Kirkpatrick in May showed that the only recent involvement her department had with an ICE operation was in October, when two officers were asked to provide cover while federal agents served a search warrant. But last week, Deputy Chief Danielle Outlaw told a city public safety committee that active investigations into sex and labor trafficking would be jeopardized by rescinding the agreement with Homeland Security Investigations.

The work with Homeland Security allows us to have that federal arm and to have that transnational piece that we just as a local municipal agency do not have access to, Outlaw said as she advocated for keeping the arrangement.

A police spokesman said Outlaw wasnt available to answer questions Tuesday, and other interview requests made to police and city officials were not returned.

Oaklands Privacy Advisory Commission, which pushed for the agreement to be rescinded on the basis that police data could be shared with federal agencies, asked the Police Department for a list of officers who participated in the ICE program and was told no one had actually done it yet, according to Brian Hofer, who chairs the commission.

San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Mateo counties have similar versions of the agreement, which lets local law enforcement investigators be deputized as Homeland Security Investigations task force officers. The arrangement is limited to solving crimes and doesnt cover cases of immigration law.

Even though it might not be immigration-enforcement-related, its still this guilt-by-association chilling effect were seeing, Hofer said, referencing comments from the Los Angeles police chief, who said in March that reports of sexual assault and domestic violence by Latino residents had sharply decreased amid fears of deportation. We see this as a public safety threat. Its causing confusion and trauma in the community.

The two halves of ICE  immigration enforcement and criminal investigations  can sometimes cross paths, as they did in Santa Cruz earlier this year, when federal agents working with county sheriffs deputies conducted a sting against suspected members of the notorious MS-13 gang. Swept up in the arrests were people whose only offense was being in the country without legal permission.

Also Tuesday, the Oakland City Council unanimously passed an ordinance that increases oversight and public engagement in surveillance-related agreements between the city and federal agencies.

Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov
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Behind every great taco is a great recipe.

And that taco recipe can lead to a perfectly matched beer recipe too.

Just ask the taco journalists at Tacos of Texas and the owners of Independence Brewing Company in Austin.

The brewers made a beer that was specifically formulated to bring out the taste of tacos and "it was the carnitas," that inspired the recipe for the craft beer, Amy Cartwright, told mySA.com.

It started after the release of the book, The Tacos of Texas, last year.

"I am a professional taco eater," said Mando Rayo, one of the authors of The Tacos of Texas, who alongside his fellow taco journalists, documented the stories behind the tacos of the Lone Star State.

READ ALSO: 365 Days of Tacos: Week 28 roundup

The passion that Rayo feels for tacos has since found its match within the craft beer pros at the Independence Brewing Company.

Upon the book's release, the brewing company jumped at the idea to collaborate with the taco enthusiasts.

Inspired by the complex recipes found in tacos, the two Texas companies created the ultimate taco complement  a taco beer deemed, Revolucion Saison Ale.

A recipe perfected to heighten the flavors of tacos, Revolucion celebrated its unveiling on July 1. More than 2,000 enthusiastic Texans came out to try it and the hype hasn't let up, the brewery said.

The beer is now available in major cities in the Lone Star Sate and, according to the brewery, "is going fast."

RELATED: The top cinco tacos in San Antonio, according to "The Tacos of Texas"

The partners tasted numerous tacos with numerous brews to get the flavor just right.

The saison ale complements the citrus flavors found in carnitas, fajitas marinade or the pineapples in tacos al pastor and is made to draw out the notes of coriander, cilantro and cumin. It's brewed with pale malt to make it light and refreshing.

In a word, crisp.

"We just didn't want a Bud Light Lime," Rayo said. "We didn't want to just slap a label on it."

Cartwright said the collaboration has allowed the brewery to bring new beer to the masses, something she is particularly passionate about.

"It's our job to keep putting the word out there on new beer," Cartwright said. "Just do the unexpected."

To get your hands on Revolucion Saison Ale drop by these Texas locations.

jthorpe@express-news.net

@jerilynnthorpe
Geekologie has shut down.

Thank you to everybody.

Now go be happy.
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One plan calls for a Tricentennial Arch, apparently modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Another features a Plaza for the People. A third is based on wide, curving ramps on each side of steep concrete steps.

All lead to City Halls front door in an effort to make it more accessible to people with special physical needs.

The City Hall for All design competition has drawn 22 proposals from 20 design firms.

Although City Hall is in compliance with disability regulations, access to the historic building for those who cant climb steps is now through a side entrance; the design plans propose ways of opening up the front entrance facing Flores Street to those who get around in wheelchairs and with walkers.

It is unacceptable when I see people struggling up those front steps of what is perhaps the most important building in San Antonio, said District 1 Councilman Roberto Trevino, an architect himself, who is a driving force behind the competition. A design competition is a way to unleash some great ideas.

RELATED: Drone video shows work progressing on $175 million San Pedro Creek redevelopment project

The design proposals were unveiled this week, and a winner will be announced Aug. 16, chosen by a jury of architectural and accessibility experts.

The winning designer will receive a $20,000 prize, provided by the Gordon Hartman Family Foundation.

Renderings of the design proposals are on view through July 31 at the American Institute for Architects Center for Architecture Gallery, 1344 S. Flores St., Suite 102. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Trevino, reached by phone, said City Hall is technically compliant with state and federal disability codes.

But those are the minimum standards, he said. At City Hall, we should aspire to much more. Im surprised nobody has brought suit before, so were being proactive. And I think were making a statement to the entire state on how we can solve problems and how good design works.

RELATED: Zoning commission clears way for growth next to The Pearl

sbennett@express-news.net
Carlos Javier Sanchez / For The Express News / Carlos Javier Sanchez / For The Express News

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Central Texas will be home to a new water park resort by 2020.

Kalahari Resorts will build its fourth property  a water park accompanied by a resort and convention center  in Round Rock, about 15 minutes north of Austin, according to a news release. It will be the company's first property in the Southwest.

The resort pegs its business as providing "authentically African-themed all-under-one-roof experiences."

The company is privately owned by Todd Nelson and his family. They spent 23 days touring Africa to bring back "a variety of experiences" to feature at their properties, according to the site.

RELATED: 25 new things to do, see and eat in San Antonio this summer

According to the site, they have imported coffee from Rwanda and will create atmospheres that mirror places in Botswana.

The resort will have 1,000 guest rooms, a spa, fitness center, restaurants, shops and a conference center. The other three Kalahari properties in Wisconsin Dells, Sandusky, Ohio and the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania are similar.

As for the community, the project is expected to generate millions of dollars in annual revenue to local governments and the state and add at least 700 jobs, according to a previous mySA.com report.

Click through the photos of the company's other parks to see what's to come for Round Rock, about a two-hour drive north from San Antonio.

mmendoza@mysa.com

Twitter: @MaddySkye
Matthew Brown / Hearst Connecticut Media

Stamford Yoga Center is hosting a benefit class on Saturday to raise money for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. This by-donation class will be led by Shannon Carlin Aleksa, and 100 percent of the money raised will go to the nonprofit Exhale to Inhale. this program uses the healing practice of trauma-informed yoga to empower survivors while helping communities to develop skills and knowledge to support them. Part of Stamford Yoga's mission is to give back to the community and, as part of the studios grand opening celebration, theyre offering this class to benefit Exhale to Inhale. The class is on July 22 from 1 - 2:15 p.m. and the grand opening celebration is from 2:30 - 4:30 p.m. Stamford Yoga Center is located at 13 Spring Street on the second floor. For more information, email bernadette@stamfordyoga.com or call 203-274-5235.

sborise@stamfordadvocate.com
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STRATFORD  The flights were high and loaded with marijuana.

Now a federal grand jury in New Haven has indicted Donald Burns, 59, of Milford, the pilot and two alleged distributors Robert Capelli, 31, and Scott Bodnar, 38, of Ansonia with trafficking at least 2,200 pounds of marijuana by airplane.

Shortly after Burns landed his Piper-single engine aircraft June 29 at Sikorsky Memorial Airport in Stratford, law enforcement agents searched the plane and discovered a duffel bag containing 880 pounds of marijuana in vacuum sealed packages.

Authorities learned the marijuana was to be delivered to Capelli and Bodnar so they arranged for that to happen in Derby. The men were then arrested.

The Federal Aviation Administration began investigating Burns in 2016 after becoming aware that his plane was making frequent flights from Sikorsky to northern California with stops in Texas or Arkansas.

On June 28, 2017, they tracked a flight. The plane left northern California and stopped in Lubbock, Texas. The following day it flew from Lubbock to Arkansas and then West Virginia before landing at Sikorsky where it was searched and the marijuana found.

The three-count indictment alleges that from 2015 to June, 2017, the trio moved more than 2,200 pounds of marijuana from northern California to Connecticut.

The indictment charges the three with conspiring to possess and distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana which carries a minimum 10-year prison term and a maximum of life upon conviction.

Additionally they are charged with one count of possession with intent to distribute 220 pounds of marijuana found aboard a U.S. registered aircraft and possession with the intent to distribute 220 pounds of marijuana. Both charges carry a mandatory five year prison term with a maximum of 40 years in prison.

Neither Tara Knight, who represents Bodnar or Audrey Felsen, Burns lawyer could be reached for comment Wednesday.

The aircraft is subject to government forfeiture.

The three have been released on bond. Bodnars bond was set at $250,000 and Burns at $300,000. No details were available for Capelli.

They are expected to plead not guilty to charges next week. Their case has been assigned to Senior U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton who sits at the federal courthouse in New Haven.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Rahul Kale is prosecuting the case which was investigated the Federal Aviation Administrations Law Enforcement Assistance program as well as Bridgeport, Derby and Stratford police.
GREENWICH  A man accused of using stolen credit cards  and struggling with Greenwich police during his arrest  has been sentenced to one year in prison.

Superior Court Judge Gary White rejected a recommendation Tuesday by state prosecutors to jail Jerome Harris, 32, of Brooklyn, for five years, the maximum.

Harris was accused of coming to the Walgreen store in Greenwich in November of 2012 with a stolen credit card, buying cigarettes there. He returned to the store again, and this time police were called. The defendant was found to have four fraudulent credit cards in his possession, according to the prosecution, and he resisted arrest.

Harris eventually pleaded guilty to a felony charge of identity theft.

According to the prosecution, Harris did 30 months in prison in New York state on a charge of weapons possession and menacing.

The defendant told the judge he was a drug-user in the past, and he now was changing his ways. I know I did wrong...Any leniency would be greatly appreciated, he said.

Harris also pleaded with the judge to allow him to attend his young daughters birthday party next month, a promise he made to her. The judge allowed him to begin his sentence after the birthday party  but warned him he would receive the full five-year sentence if he disobeyed court directions to turn himself in at the proper time.

Harris earlier missed court dates in New York and Connecticut. He had been released on a $100,000 bond.

rmarchant@greenwichtime.com
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A woman allegedly arrested after troopers caught her with nine pounds of marijuana while driving on the Thruway is among the fugitives State Police said they are searching for as part of their Warrant Wednesday initiative.

Paulette A. Reid, 58, is wanted in Montgomery County on a charge marijuana possession. Reid was traveling on the Thruway when she was stopped by troopers for a traffic violation and found to be in possession of nine pounds of marijuana.

 Carrie D. Coons, 41, is wanted by State Police in Albany. Troopers said Coons is wanted in court for allegedly failing to appear for an court appointment and for failing to pay a fine. Troopers said the caught Coons will crack cocaine curing a traffic stop in September 2016. They allege the passenger in her car was smoking crack cocaine.

 Joseph Hart, 36, is wanted by State Police after a warrant was issued for his arrest in the city of Rome. Troopers said Hart failed to appear in court to answer charges of attempted grand larceny. The warrant was issued on May 9.

 Jacob A. Cook, 40, is wanted in the town of Brighton for allegedly failing to appear in court to face a felony drug possession charge. State Police said he was caught with over three grams of cocaine and hydromorphone during a Dec. 30 traffic stop.

 Daniel Lutner, 34, is wanted by State Police in Rochester on a bench warrant that accuses him of misdemeanor drug possession. State Police said Lutner was initially confront by police for driving without a seat belt on and was subsequently charged with aggravated unlicense operation of a motor vehicle and the drug charge.

 Arsenio Marquez, 27, is wanted in the town of Kinderhook for allegedly bank fraud. State troopers said Marquez deposited a forged check into his National Union Bank of Kinderhook account and withdrew just under $1,000. The fraud was reported in September and town court issued a warrant in May, State Police said.

 Royal L. Howard, 53, is wanted in Ithaca for allegedly failing to appear in Newfield Town Court to answer a charge of criminal contempt. State Police said Howard sent text messages to a person he was forbidden from contacting.

 Carl Merchant, 51, is wanted by state troopers in Liberty for allegedly writing a bogus check worth $3,257 to a local business. Charged with issuing a bad check, Merchant did not return to court for an appearance and he did not pay restitution, State Police said.

 Jessica A. Valvano-Hoag, 22, is wanted in Batavia Town Court for a bench warrant that accuses her of petit larceny. The warrant was issued in October and accuses her of stealing froma a Walmart store.

 Marcos Carpio, 33, is wanted by State Police in Suffolk County for failing to appear in court on a drunken driving charge from 2010, state troopers said. Carpio was pulled voer on the Southern State Parkway and charged with driving while intoxicated.
1 Search suspended: Crews looking for a man who was swept away in a flash flood in central Arizona suspended their search over concerns that thunderstorms moving through the area would cause more flooding. Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management spokeswoman Tiffany Davila says the search for 27-year-old Hector Miguel Garnica in Tonto National Forest is scheduled to resume Wednesday. Garnicas wife, three young children and other extended family members were killed Saturday after a torrent of water from a thunderstorm upstream roared through the area.

2 Condemned inmates: Three condemned killers with upcoming execution dates asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday for a delay while they continue challenging Ohios new lethal injection method. Lawyers for the death row inmates argue the procedures first drug, the sedative midazolam, creates an unconstitutional risk of pain by not rendering prisoners deeply unconscious before two other drugs kick in. Midazolam has been used in some executions that were problematic, including in Ohio, Arkansas and Arizona. The request for the delay was made to Justice Elena Kagan, who handles such appeals for Ohio.
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The banner photo on the Airbnb rental listing gets right to the point.

"Welcome to the party," the caption reads, offering a spacious home in a quiet neighborhood as ideal for get-togethers.

Early Wednesday, however, the party went south fast. A 17-year-old reveler was struck in the stomach by bullets fired about 1 a.m. into an open door of the home in the 5600 block of Edgemoor in southwest Houston, police said.

A neighbor recalled looking through his home's window and seeing the block erupt into chaos as at least 50 young partygoers poured out of the house and ran to the dozens of cars parked on the street.

"It was crazy," said Lawrence Djeukwe, who said he has rented the other half of the home for about six weeks.

Djeukwe woke to the sound of gunfire, about a half-dozen shots. He said he saw other revelers carry the bloodied victim out of the home.

The teen was taken to an area hospital in stable condition, said John Cannon, spokesman for the Houston Police Department. A party guest said he was expected to survive.

Witnesses said three men pulled up about 1 a.m. to the house in a white car and fired at the residence, Cannon said. The spokesman later added that police had not responded any previous calls at that address so far this year.

Most of the partygoers appeared to be in their 20s and 30s, one nearby resident said.

Travion Bryan, who answered the door at the home mid-morning Wednesday, said he was shocked by the gunfire.

Bryan, a musician who's part of a local rap group, said a friend of his rented the home and threw the party to commemorate the birthday of a friend who was killed several years ago.

Parties seem to be routine at the unassuming beige house near the intersection of Bellaire Boulevard and Chimney Rock Road.

The property's owner appears to rent out the three-bedroom home full-time through Airbnb for about $200 a night.

Parties are encouraged on the premises - with a $50 fee and a $250 refundable deposit.

"We remember the time that we didn't have the space to have a party and couldn't afford a hotel room while traveling," the hosts' description on Airbnb reads. "So we would like to provide a place for you to celebrate and enjoy with your friends, as well as an affordable, well-furnished apartment for your stay."

Previous renters posted on Airbnb that the home had been the site of their daughter's first birthday party. "Great for a get-together or BBQ," another wrote.

Djeukwe said he hadn't minded the socializing. Other events had been quiet, he added. And devoid of gunfire.

It appears that house was not the only property in the neighborhood aimed at party hosts.

A new Airbnb listing just around the corner had a banner photo that featured adults splayed on a wooden floor near an open 24-pack of Heineken beer bottles. "Special Place & Location," the profile announced. The one-bedroom, one-bathroom listing with no reviews was available for $52 per night.

However, as of Wednesday afternoon, that listing no longer appeared on Airbnb. Neither did the Edgemoor Drive party house.

In the aftermath of the shooting Wednesday, police gathered shell casings from the street. By mid-morning, the only remnants of the night's chaos were a blue plastic cup and an empty Sprite can.

Neighbors said Wednesday the area was generally quiet during the day, filled with churches and nursery schools.

Sylvia Rivas, who manages a neighboring commercial property, said the Airbnb house previously was home to a day care.

"I'm really surprised, number one, that there was an Airbnb here," Rivas said as she inspected damage to the wooden fence between the house and the commercial building she manages. "And number two, that this happened."

Airbnb responded to the incident with a statement offering sympathy for the victim and saying the company had offered its assistance with the police investigation.

Company spokeswoman Laura Rillos also said the guest who reserved the house had been removed from the website, adding that the host could benefit from the companys $1 million liability insurance.

The overwhelming majority of Airbnb hosts are good neighbors, but when issues happen, we work to make things right, Rillos said. Hosting is a big responsibility and those who repeatedly fail to meet our standards and expectations will be subject to suspension or removal.

The companys website allows neighbors to register complaints at www.airbnb.com/neighbors.

Owners of short-term rentals such as Airbnb are required to register with the city and pay Houstons hotel occupancy tax, said Lara Cottingham, an official with the citys Administration and Regulatory Affairs Department. Aside from that, there are no city rules governing such rentals.

HoustonFirst, the entity that collects hotel occupancy taxes for the city, does not have a record of the Edgemoor Drive houses owner registering or paying those taxes, said Jonathan Newport, the agencys director of government affairs.

The owner of the 2,042-square-foot house is Lu Xu, according to Harris County property records. The Airbnb listing identifies Xu as a marketing director, and his 24 reviews helped earn him the sites distinction as a superhost.

Xu did not respond to voicemails left at his office and on the phone listed for his wife, real estate agent Helen Xu.

Bryan said he had not spoken to the Airbnb host in the hours after the gunfire. But he had advice for someone looking to throw a similar bash.

"Throw a party in a warehouse, not a house," Bryan said. "And get security."

This article has been updated with the correct spelling of Travion Bryan's last name and to clarify his role. He said he was a party guest at the house, not the person who rented the house.
The family of a young boy who was injured in a July 6 shooting incident at Garner State Park that involved Liberty County Pct. 2 Commissioner Greg Arthur says they want the incident to be treated as an act of negligence, not an accident.

"I never thought I would be treating a bullet wound on my 4-year-old son," said La Porte resident Autumn Flores, mother of Cash. "My son keeps asking me, 'Why did that man shoot me?' He doesn't understand."

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, which is making inquiries into the incident, says the investigation is still ongoing but no laws appear to have been broken.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Liberty County commissioner comments on accidental shooting

"Anyone who is licensed to carry in the state of Texas can carry on state park property. If they have a license for open carry, the firearm must be in a holster," said Tom Harvey, spokesperson for TPWD. "This firearm was being carried lawfully."

Arthur and the boy, both on holiday with their respective families, were attending a children's dance at the park when the shooting incident occurred. Arthur, a former sheriff for Liberty County, says he was wearing his concealed handgun when it began to shift around. He claims that while making adjustments, he accidentally hit the trigger, causing his Smith & Wesson handgun to fire downward toward the ground. The bullet grazed Arthur's leg, causing a gash.

Cash and a 27-year-old man reportedly were struck by bullet fragments that ricocheted off the concrete floor of the pavilion.

Autumn was not with her son at the time of the incident as he had attended the dance with his uncle and aunt, Ryan and Stacy Lenz, and other family members.

"Police showed up at the house and could only tell us that he had been hurt. It never once crossed my mind that my child was shot," Autumn said.

Accompanied by the officer and another family member, the child's parents made the long 15-mile drive from their rented vacation home to Garner State Park. There they met with other family members who reportedly filled them in on what had occurred.

The child's Aunt Stacy said she was standing in the pavilion alongside her husband, Cash and his older sister.

"We took the kids to the dance like we do every summer. Some of the other kids were on the dance floor when we heard this loud pop right next to us. It was definitely the sound of gunfire," she said. "Then I saw a man and woman turning around and rushing off."

Stacy said she was still trying to assess what happened when she picked up Cash and handed him to her husband. She then began looking for her other children.

"I found all the other kids and assessed everybody really quick. It was so fast. I looked everybody in the eyes and realized they were all okay. Cash wasn't crying or anything but at this point, he said, 'Aunt Stacy, I am bleeding,'" she said. "I told my husband, 'Oh, my god, Cash has been shot.'"

After the incident, Cash was first taken to a local hospital in Uvalde County before being transferred to a trauma center in San Antonio where he had to undergo surgery. Two bullet fragments were found in the area around his knee, lodging two inches below the surface of the skin in soft tissue, his mother said.

After a two-day stay at the hospital, Cash was released into his parents' care.

"I thought it was all behind us but then I realized what all we were going to have to do to care for him while his wounds heal. The bullet fragments didn't hit anything major but because there wasn't an exit wound, we had to pack the bullet wound on our 4-year-old," Autumn said. "My husband and I had to hold him down every day so we could pack his wound. Part of his treatment involved taking a Q-tip and pushing it into his wound to perform a debridement. It was painful for him and he just screamed."

Autumn said the family has hired an attorney to help them with the aftermath.

"I can't even imagine what the medical bills will be. He had two ambulance rides and had a cardiovascular team waiting on him when he arrived in San Antonio," she said. "I want to be sure he has no residual effects from this. I know what I am going through as his mother but he's only 4 and it's hard for him to communicate. I just want him (Arthur) to do what is right."

Arthur says he is extremely remorseful for the incident and has already filed a claim on the child's behalf.
State Sen. Brandon Creighton has introduced what he terms a pro-life insurance reform bill.

During the first day of the Legislature's special session, Creighton, R-Conroe, filed Senate Bill 8, a measure he says will keep Texans who are pro-life from "unknowingly or unwillingly" subsidizing abortion coverage for others through their insurance premiums and tax dollars.

Under current law, the federal Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare, includes a provision for states to opt out of default abortion coverage, with according to Creighton, more than half of the states deciding to opt out. Creighton says his bill would ensure that ACA-subsidized plans, state employees and private basic health insurance plans do not include coverage for elective abortions. Creighton's bill would essentially prohibit Texas from subsidizing the cost of elective abortion procedures, with instead, such coverage having to be included as additional and optional coverage.

"Texans deserve the right to decide where their insurance and tax dollars go," Creighton, said in introducing the bill Tuesday, the first day of the special session. "As a pro-life Texan, I don't believe anyone should be forced to pay for another's elective abortion."

Creighton's office says 19 senators -- including all the Senate Republicans -- have signed on to the bill.

Gov. Greg Abbott also supports such legislation. When Abbott called for a special session he listed a pro-life insurance reform bill as one of 20 items that would be on the agenda.

"As Governor, I will always fight to protect Texas values and ensure Texans are not coerced into funding a procedure that ends the life of an unborn child," Abbot said when he listed the matter on the agenda in calling for the session last month.

Measures similar to Creighton's proposed legislation have passed the Texas Senate in the past, but never made it out of the House.
WASHINGTON - Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein said in an interview that aired Wednesday that neither the president nor the White House had asked him for an update on the investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election, and that he was "not doing any micromanagement" of that probe.

The comments came during a wide ranging conversation with Fox News's Martha MacCallum about the Justice Department's new asset forfeiture policy, his recommendation to fire FBI Director James B. Comey and his appointment of a special counsel to lead the Russia investigation.

Rosenstein sought to assure people that the special counsel, former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, was operating with some degree of independence from the Justice Department, though he also was getting the cooperation he needed.

But Rosenstein did not go to great pains to defend the special counsel team when pressed about whether he was bothered that several people on it had donated to Hillary Clinton's campaign.

"The Department of Justice, we judge by results, and so my view about that is: We'll see if they do the right thing," Rosenstein said. He said he had not been involved in Mueller's hiring decisions.

Around the same time the interview aired, the New York Times published a story about an interview with Trump in which the president said he would not have appointed Jeff Sessions as attorney general had he known Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia investigation. It was Sessions' recusal that led Rosenstein to be in a position to appoint Mueller.

"Sessions should have never recused himself and if he was going to recuse himself he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else," Trump said, according to the New York Times.

Trump also criticized Mueller's office for having conflicts of interests - noting that Mueller had replaced Comey, whom Trump fired. He noted Rosenstein, too, had recommended Comey be fired, then appointed Mueller, who is investigating whether the president obstructed justice.

"Well, that's a conflict of interest," Trump said, according to the Times. "Do you know how many conflicts of interests there are?"

Trump also noted that Baltimore, where Rosenstein served as U.S. attorney before Trump appointed him as deputy attorney general, had "very few Republicans."

Asked by The Washington Post at an unrelated briefing earlier Wednesday on how he could maintain his authority over Mueller when he might become a witness, Rosenstein declined to say.

"Going to have to move on to the next question. Not going to be talking about that," he said.

In his interview with Fox, Rosenstein did offer some sentiments that might please the president, suggesting, for example, he did not approve of Comey engineering a leak of information about a request from the president to shut down the bureau's probe into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Rosenstein said in an interview with Fox News that those who work for the Justice Department have an obligation to keep documents about ongoing matters confidential, though he took pains to stress he was not commenting on any particular case.

Asked by Fox News' Martha MacCallum whether it would "ever be proper" for the FBI director to "make notes of a conversation in that regard and leak them to the press," Rosenstein responded, "As a general propositioner, you have to understand the Department of Justice. We take confidentiality seriously, so when we have memoranda about our ongoing matters, we have an obligation to keep that confidential."

When MacCallum said she interpreted his answer as indicating he would not approve the release of a memo about a conversation with the president, the deputy attorney general reiterated his position.

"As a general position, I think it is quite clear. It's what we were taught, all of us as prosecutors and agents," Rosenstein said.

Comey has acknowledged that he asked a friend to share with the media the content of a memo he wrote about an interaction with President Trump in which Trump told him of Flynn: "He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go." The request, by Comey's account, came after a meeting in the Oval Office, and the president first cleared the room of other officials.

Comey said he engineered the leak "because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel" in the probe of possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in the 2016 election. He got his wish. After the New York Times reported on the leaked material, Rosenstein appointed Mueller to lead the investigation.

An attorney for Comey declined to comment.

That Rosenstein does not approve of Comey's behavior is perhaps no surprise. Rosenstein wrote a memo that lambasted Comey for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, laying out the case that Comey should be replaced as FBI director. The memo was initially cited by White House officials as a reason that Trump fired him, though the president later said he intended to do so no matter what leaders in the Justice Department recommended.

Rosenstein declined to say to Fox News whose idea it was originally to fire Comey, saying he was "not going to be talking publicly about anything that may be within the scope of the ongoing investigation." He said he was concerned personally with Comey's public statements on the Clinton email probe and stood by his own memo.

After Comey was fired, Mueller began investigating whether the president might have attempted to obstruct justice. Given Rosenstein's role in Comey's firing, it seems possible that he could become a witness in that case. Rosenstein can remove Mueller or veto his decisions, although he does not have day-to-day supervisory authority over the investigation. He told Fox News he had not "personally been involved in any decisions" about personnel on the case, and he was "not doing any micromanagement."

In his interview with Fox News, Rosenstein said he appointed Mueller "based upon his reputation" and noted there was "bipartisan support for his integrity."

Sessions, a strong supporter of Trump during the campaign who has recused himself from the Russia probe, had previously told "Fox & Friends" that Mueller was "entitled lawfully, I guess at this point, to hire who he desires, but I think he should look for people who have strength and credibility by all people."

Pressed on whether he had confidence in Mueller, Sessions had said: "I feel confident in what he'll do. That's all I can say to you about that."
WASHINGTON - Sealed law enforcement requests to track Americans without a warrant through cellphone location records or Internet activity grew sevenfold in the past three years in the District, new information released by a federal judge shows.

Details about the growth come as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs whether to rein in such rapidly expanding demands.

Legal experts said the disclosure Monday appears to mark a first, and that neither the Justice Department nor private companies have previously made public such specific data about how often law enforcement agencies seek those court orders.

The summary data gave counts of requests by year from 2008 through 2016 made in criminal cases handled by the Justice Department or U.S. attorney's office for the District. Details about each individual case, such as the name of a suspect or what records were sought, were not disclosed.

The requests were made under a 1986 statute that enables law enforcement agencies to obtain court orders requiring communication service providers to turn over records about individual customers. The orders do not apply to information about telephone calls, such as the time, date, duration and numbers dialed, which can be obtained in other ways.

Instead, the requests seek individuals' Internet connection records or cellphone tower records. Those records exclude the content of communications but can be highly valuable to investigators seeking to establish a history or pattern of movement, conduct or relationships.

The information requests can include Internet browsing logs and activity; the time, date, size, sender and recipient of email, instant or social media messages, or other transaction records; as well as computer identification numbers and information about websites that a user accessed.

The tallies were released as part of an open-records lawsuit brought by journalists to unseal a much larger collection of information about court-ordered electronic surveillance in closed criminal investigations in the nation's capital.

James Dempsey, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, said that the data confirms the common-sense conclusion that secret law enforcement requests for phone and Internet records have surged as they have become routine in criminal cases. He said that the data probably will be noted in a pending Supreme Court debate over the extent of privacy protections and surveillance technology.

The Supreme Court in 2014 ruled unanimously that police generally must obtain a warrant to search the contents of cellphones. Last month, it announced that it will decide next term whether law enforcement agencies need a warrant to track suspects' locations through cell site location records, in a challenge brought by a criminal defendant convicted after police obtained five months' worth of his location data from his phone company.

Lower courts have said that decades-old privacy rulings may need to be updated to account for society's reliance on rapidly changing technology.

For example, appellate courts are also weighing whether a warrant is required by law enforcement agencies to covertly collect cellphone information using new devices that mimic cell towers to elicit data from targeted numbers.

Separately, major technology companies including Facebook and Google also have objected to court orders that prohibit them from letting users know when law enforcement investigators ask to search their political communications.

The information release for the District shows that as of 2014, requests for Internet activity and phone-location records began to exceed and now far outnumber requests for telephone metadata, such as the timing and duration of calls to or from specific phone numbers.

Requests for records of Internet activity and phone location hovered between 55 and 160 from 2008 to 2013 before jumping to 334 in 2014, 581 in 2015 and 1,136 in 2016, according to this week's release. By comparison, the D.C. federal court previously reported that metadata requests have ranged from 329 in 2006 to a low of 189 in 2016.

Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia released the information following a petition by investigative journalist Jason Leopold, now with BuzzFeed, that was joined by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press.

They seek all government electronic surveillance applications and orders in closed investigations that directed private service providers to turn over users' call information as well as information related to tracked devices, stored emails or customer records.

The latest count may have missed some requests because the court clerk's office relied on a search of header information in its electronic case-filing system and overcounted others if a particular request was renewed for more than one year, Howell wrote in a court notice.

But neither potential error would necessarily account for the three-year surge in the Internet search requests.

Jeffrey Louis Light, Leopold's lawyer, said he had "no idea" why the volume of requests has surged, "but I now know this is the next question to ask."

"We're starting to put together the framework of how the government has been using these various tools at its disposal, and how it has changed over time," Light said. "I certainly hope that other district courts would eventually make these kinds of numbers available as well."

Under current law, prosecutors seeking Internet connection and cell-tower records are not required to obtain a search warrant, which requires showing a judge probable cause that a crime has been committed. Instead, they need to meet a lower legal threshold, offering reasonable grounds to believe the records they are after are "relevant" to an ongoing criminal investigation.

Dempsey said the spike and volume of such requests in the District will factor into the Supreme Court deliberations.

"The government, in arguing against warrants, will say this has become a standard technique and often one of the first steps we take in an investigation before we've even established probable cause, and requiring us to obtain a warrant will cut off an important building block of many investigations," Dempsey said.

He added that those seeking a warrant requirement "will say, look, this has gotten out of control. . . . It's time for the court to make it clear this information is highly sensitive and revealing and therefore should only be obtained in the later stages of an investigation."

Katie Townsend, litigation director for the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, said that the government's use of such orders "is shrouded in secrecy."

"Not only do individuals not know that their communications records are being sought from third parties," she said, "but applications are filed on dockets that are not public, and they are generally kept under seal, often permanently."

She added, "We think it is critically important that there be more transparency when it comes to these kinds of legal demands."

A spokesman for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The office of U.S. Attorney Channing Phillips of the District has said in court filings that it agreed in principle that surveillance cases did not necessarily need to be permanently sealed, and has agreed to some earlier disclosures.
In a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Monday evening, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan parried blows on the administration's proposals to reorganize the State Department and gut the diplomacy and foreign aid budget.

Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., slammed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's proposed 31 percent cut to the $47 billion the combined State and USAID budget, saying it would "very seriously compromise the ability of the United States to maintain its global leadership on diplomacy."

Tillerson has coupled the budget cuts with a massive effort to reorganize the State Department, which also drew fire from Democrats. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., bashed the reorganization drive as "an ill defined process that thus far seems to be no more than an exercise in undermining and pushing out career diplomats."

Most veteran diplomats and lawmakers agree the department is in sore need of reform. But the State Department's skeleton crew of leaders, controversial reform ideas, and proposed cuts have unnerved rank-and-file diplomats in Foggy Bottom.

Sullivan, however, denied a decision had been made to fold the U.S. Agency for International Development into the State Department. The proposal, first reported by Foreign Policy in April, is one of the most controversial reforms the administration has floated.

"There is no intention to fold [USAID] into State," Sullivan said. "That has been proposed by people outside the department. It is something that could be considered," he said, but only with "full input" from from USAID and State first.

Other proposed reforms include nixing a slew of "special envoy" posts that proliferated under previous administrations and closing several functional bureaus, including the State Department war crimes office, cyber security office, and Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM).

In response to reports the White House was mulling moving PRM into the Department of Homeland Security, 40 former top diplomats, officials, and human rights leaders signed an open letter urging Tillerson not to go forward with the plan. DHS "has neither the international staffing infrastructure nor the expertise to identify refugee groups in need of protection or resettlement, nor to understand the diplomatic consequences or opportunities to leverage resettlement for U.S. foreign policy interests," the signatories wrote.

Tillerson kickstarted the reorganization process with a months-long "listening tour" of the department, which included an internal survey that some 35,000 employees filled out.

Sullivan is in charge of the next phase, which involves reviewing input from the listening tour. The State Department will submit a final assessment of how to reorganize itself to Congress by Sept. 15.
In a society where the standard for attractiveness is the model on the cover of fashion and menswear magazines, its very easy to become dissatisfied over our appearance. One of the areas that can cause the most insecurity is our legs, especially in these warmer summer months when we wear shorts and swimsuits.

If you have varicose veins or spider veins on your legs, you may not feel any physical pain, but these large and discolored blood vessels that appear under the skin can make you extremely self-conscious.

Fortunately, most varicose veins do not require medical treatment since they do not typically cause health issues, but many patients do want to know if something can be done about the appearance of them. The answer is yes.

Veins are deceptively complex. While their function is simple  transporting blood around the body  they actually have one-way valves that keep blood traveling in a single direction. When these valves weaken or loosen, blood can flow backward and accumulate in the veins, causing them to become enlarged and appear blue or purple under the skin. The blood vessels affected most are the ones farthest away from the heart such as those in the legs.

Medical experts are not certain why the valves weaken or loosen, but some of the causes are standing constantly, being overweight, having regular constipation, being pregnant or using birth control pills. You can also experience them as a result of genetics if they run in your family.

To diminish the appearance of varicose veins or spider veins, there are a few simple things you can do at home. Be sure to put your feet up whenever you can, try to start exercising several days each week to get to a healthy weight, and avoid standing up for very long periods of time. There are also various creams and lotions that can be purchased over the counter at drug stores that are designed to make the veins less visible.

Many patients also use garments called compression stockings which can be worn during activities or while sleeping. These specially designed socks reach from the ankle to the knee and fit very tightly. The tightness supports the veins and helps blood circulate better. Compression stockings can be found at stores, but its always best to seek the help of your physician in choosing the right ones if you want to try them.

When varicose veins are very, very large and fail to respond to any of the common at home treatments  or if they are causing pain and achiness  there are several procedures which can be performed that will collapse them so they no longer appear large, swollen or discolored.

In the most severe cases, varicose veins are collapsed and removed surgically under general anesthesia. In milder cases, veins will be injected with solutions or targeted with lasers that cause them to collapse and become less visible.

It is best to begin with the simpler, at home treatments and monitor improvement over time. If you do not see a reduction in the appearance of your varicose veins or spider veins after several weeks, then discuss potential medical treatments with your physician.

Dr. Omar P. Haqqani is the chief of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery at Vascular Health Clinics in Midland.
WASHINGTON  President Trump had another, previously undisclosed conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit in Germany this month.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer and National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton confirmed that Trump and Putin spoke at a dinner for world leaders and their spouses at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

The conversation came hours after Trump and Putins first official face-to-face meeting on July 7, which was originally scheduled to last just half an hour but stretched on for more than two. The two world leaders were also captured on video shaking hands and exchanging a few words after they arrived at the G-20 summit of industrialized and developing nations earlier that day.

Anton would not specify the duration of the conversation. But he said the discussion was casual and should not be characterized as a meeting or even a less formal, but official, pull-aside.

A conversation over dessert should not be characterized as a meeting, he said.

The dinner, hosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was open only to world leaders and their spouses, as well as one interpreter per couple, according to a senior White House official who described the event on condition of anonymity despite the presidents criticism of unnamed sources.

The official stressed that Trump spoke with many leaders over the course of the dinner and said he spoke briefly with Putin, who was seated next to first lady Melania Trump, as the event was concluding. Trump spoke with Putin using Russias interpreter, since the American interpreter did not speak Russian.

But Ian Bremmer, who said he spoke with two people who attended the dinner, said that Trump and Putin spoke for nearly an hour while sitting among the other world leaders and their spouses at the dinner. Bremmer is a foreign affairs columnist and the president of the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm.

Attendees described the meeting as startling, said Bremmer, who was told Trump was very animated as he spoke with Putin, often using his hands to gesture.

Trump defended the dinner in a pair of angry tweets late Tuesday that noted the dinner had been on his public schedule.

Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is sick. All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew! he wrote.

A few minutes later he added: The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!

U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election in order to help Trump.

Vivian Salama and Jill Colvin are Associated Press writers.
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Despite there being more than two dozen surveillance cameras at the top of Twin Peaks, crime at the popular San Francisco tourist attraction continues to increase, hitting a troubling pitch over the weekend with the murder of a 71-year-old photographer.

One problem is the cameras near the overlooks main parking lot are not intended to prevent or help solve crimes targeting sightseers inside the city park. Instead, the equipment was set up to protect one of San Franciscos most vital telecommunication hubs, at the top of the famous Christmas Tree Point lookout where Edward French  a local film scout  was shot dead during a robbery on Sunday.

Its not clear if Frenchs slaying was captured on video from the nearby red brick building, but some city officials are no longer satisfied with merely hoping the cameras catch criminal activity on the hill.

San Francisco Supervisor Norman Yee, who represents District Seven, which includes part of Twin Peaks, is seeking funds in the latest city budget for additional security cameras at the overlook to cut down on the hundreds of auto burglaries a year in the park and to help prevent another tragedy like Frenchs killing.

The budget went before the Board of Supervisors for a first reading on Tuesday.

I think that crime at Twin Peaks is something that the whole city needs to pay attention to, Yee said Tuesday. The locals up there understand that its not as safe as it used to be and you have to be careful.

Locals may well understand the growing risks on Twin Peaks, but with a consistent stream of tourists seeking the hilltops breathtaking views, criminals have a wealth of fresh targets every day.

Property crimes at Twin Peaks have gone up 34 percent in the first half of the year compared with the same period in 2016, according to the San Francisco Police Departments crime statistics.

Most of those crimes are vehicle break-ins, 247 this year. There have also been several armed robberies in the past two years, including one this month. And before French was killed, two people were slain at Twin Peaks on Valentines Day 2016 in a high-profile early-morning triple shooting.

Richard Contreras, 27, has pleaded not guilty to the killings and his case is set for a preliminary hearing in early August.

For the most part the crimes go unsolved, and police and city officials hope Frenchs killing doesnt see a similar fate.

It illustrates my sense that its a priority to get these security cameras up there, Yee said of Sundays killing. It reinforces it even more.

The dozens of cameras currently in place are crucial for monitoring the transmission building and its radio towers, which transmit signals for the police, fire department and other city agencies.

Yee said hes asked for $45,000 in the budget to go to the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department specifically for cameras on Twin Peaks dedicated to the parking lot and roads.

Once we approve the budget, I will urge Rec and Park to expedite this as quick as possible, he said.

In the meantime, city police have a fixed patrol monitoring Twin Peaks while investigators work to identify Frenchs killers.

Police said French was approached by a young man and woman shortly before 8 a.m. on Sunday as he took photos in the parking lot.

Witnesses reported hearing a single gunshot before the suspects ran to a dark gray Honda Accord and fled the scene with the victims camera, said Officer Robert Rueca, a San Francisco police spokesman.

A jogger found French bleeding in the parking lot and performed CPR, but he later died at San Francisco General Hospital.

Despite having descriptions of suspects and their vehicle, Rueca said it hasnt been determined if any of the attack was captured by cameras on the nearby building. Additional cameras on the summit, though, would be welcomed by the department, he said.

Anything that is going to assist us in catching people who are committing crimes  and more importantly will stop crime from occurring altogether  we completely support that, Rueca said.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@

sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky
Each year, the American Cancer Societys National Cancer Information Center (NCIC) receives about 800,000 calls, emails and chats from people who are in need of answers  they may need information and support or they may want to volunteer or make a donation. Those contacts lead to more than 1.7 million services being provided. Phone lines are open around the clock, 365 days a year, to ease fears and give people all the answers they need about cancer.

While many people are familiar with the research efforts of the American Cancer Society, few are aware of the full scope of free services available to cancer patients and their loved ones, said Kevin Babb, vice president of the National Cancer Information Center. These services can be obtained through one easy toll-free call to the American Cancer Society at 1-800-227-2345.

According to Babb, when an individual calls the American Cancer Society they will be connected to a live Cancer Information Specialist. These specialists, who staff the phone lines 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, are specially trained to listen to and identify the needs of cancer patients and their caregivers, then match them with services or resources to meet their needs.

Our specialists really listen to where the patient is in their cancer journey, Babb said. Did they just get diagnosed and need educational materials? Are they in the middle of treatment and looking for a ride to their appointments? We make sure to manage all requests through to completion. No one will be left to navigate a cancer experience alone when they reach out to us.

Through the process of probing and clarifying, NCIC specialists often discover that a persons needs may go beyond their initial question. For example, a woman asking about the side effects of chemotherapy treatment actually may be concerned about losing her hair and how to prepare her children for this journey.

Look Good Feel Better is a free program for women who are undergoing cancer treatment. Volunteer facilitators teach women to improve their appearance and self-image through beauty techniques designed to overcome the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation. During the sessions, licensed beauty professionals present makeup, skin and nail care tips. They also demonstrate how to disguise hair loss using wigs, turbans and scarves. Each woman leaves the session with a free goodie bag of makeup, donated by major manufacturers, to help maintain her new look. This program is a collaboration between the American Cancer Society, Personal Care Products Council Foundation, and the Professional Beauty Association.

Women who battle with cancer fight more than just the disease, Babb said. Many women feel a loss of identity from the side effects of cancer treatments, such as hair loss or skin issues. Look Good Feel Better gives women a chance to feel like themselves again and enjoy camaraderie with other women who are facing the same issues.

The National Cancer Information Center can provide information on smoking cessation, clinical trials, and emotional and financial support. They have access to thousands of resources and can help cancer patients and their caregivers in both English and Spanish with more than 200 other languages available via a translation service.

Whatever their needs might be, no matter how big or small, we always try to help, Babb said. Even if a person is just lonely or scared and needs to talk, were here. We are dedicated to serving the needs of all cancer patients. Our entire structure revolves around helping them get well.

For more information about the many free American Cancer Society patient programs and services, or to learn how you can become a volunteer or donate, please call 1-800-227-2345 or visit cancer.org. For more information on how you can get involved with the American Cancer Society Relay For Life of Mitchell County scheduled for Friday, July 21 in St. Ansgar, visit us online at RelayForLife.org/mitchellcountyia or contact Nancy Hackenmiller at 641-713-3109.
San Antonio Firefighter Brad Phipps has been moved out of the intensive care unit after two months of surgeries following a blaze on the far Northwest Side earlier this year.

Phipps was injured in a fire May 18 at the Ingram Square Shopping Center, a blaze that killed fellow firefighter Scott Deem. Firefighter Robert Vasquez was also injured that day, but was released from the hospital in May.
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When Jessie Guajardo returns home from Iraq, he plans to make visiting a Chick-Fil-A a priority.

Because when Guajardo -- a first lieutenant for the Texas Army National Guard stationed in Iraq for five more months -- was in need of barbecue sauce, the chicken restaurant delivered.

About a month ago, Guajardo sent a message to a Chick-Fil-A in his hometown of Flower Mound, in North Texas.

"I find myself day dreaming of the luxuries afforded to me stateside and how I take many simple things for granted. For instance, every Sunday is chicken tender night which is one of the highlights of every week," he wrote.

RELATED: 'Belligerent' Waco woman calls 911: 'I'm not going anywhere until I get my chicken nuggets'

But, the chicken served at the base is only so-so and in desperate need of some barbecue sauce, he said. And sauce from a bottle would need to be refrigerated.

"Trouble shooting, we realized the best solution to our dilemma would be to obtain individual servings where the best place for that is obviously Chick-Fil-A," he said, before asking for the restaurant's individual sauce packets to be sent over.

Guajardo didn't hear back until three weeks later when he visited the mail room on chicken tender night.

He had gotten a few boxes, he told mySA.com.

"We were overjoyed to open up the boxes and see the almost 500 packets of sauce," he said. "Everyone was thrilled and laughing. They couldn't believe we had pulled off such a feat."

RELATED: RANKED: The 20 most successful fast-food chains right now

Since that fateful day two weeks ago, Guajardo and his unit have tried to ration the barbecue sauce, only going through 50 of them so far.

On Facebook, employees at the Chick-Fil-A thanked Guajardo for his service Tuesday.

"We hope you and your fellow soldiers enjoy the sauces and we look forward to your return home," reads a post.

Jason Driscoll, owner of the Flower Mound restaurant, said it was "a miracle" that the sauces arrived on chicken tender night.

"Who would have ever thought you would see Chick-Fil-A sauces in Iraq," he said.

kbradshaw@express-news.net

Twitter: @kbrad5
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A 34-year-old New Braunfels man was sentenced to life in prison Wednesday after he was convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a young child and determined to be a high risk for committing further offenses.

On May 4, a jury found Michael Ellsworth guilty of sexually abusing a 4-year-old child in Feb. 2015.

A doctor testifying in the trial said Ellsworth "returned one of the highest risk scores for risk of further offenses that [he] had ever obtained," according to a statement from the Comal County Criminal District Attorney's office.

RELATED: Seguin man indicted on 8 charges of sexual abuse of a child covering a decade

The doctor, Michael Ferrara, reportedly testified during trial that Ellsworth likely "cannot be maintained in the community without endangering public safety."

During the trial, a 3-year-old child told authorities Ellsworth had also abused him, though Ellsworth was not tried on the accusations.

Prosecutors also presented in the trial a 911 call in which Ellsworth can be heard "verbally berating" the victim for making calling authorities about the abuse.

According to the Comal County Criminal District Attorney's office, Ellsworth testified in his own defense. He denied abusing the victim, but said he shared a bedroom with him while "battling an addiction to marijuana and methamphetamine."

RELATED: Woman stabbed boyfriend, punctured his car tires at East Side gas station, police said

The judge in the trial, Gary Steel of the 274th Judicial District Court, sentenced Ellsworth to life in prison.

"Michael Ellsworth is a predator that targeted young children while reveling in drug addiction, with no disregard for the laws of a civil society," read a statement from the district attorney's office. "The life sentence imposed by Judge Gary Steel was well earned. We are thankful that Ellsworth will not be able to hurt another child in our community."

Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com

cdowns@mysa.com

Twitter: @calebjdowns
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A 41-year-old man was jailed Monday after he allegedly confessed to committing five robberies in a single night earlier this month.

Steve Farias of San Antonio now faces a single charge of robbery. He remains in the Bexar County Jail on a $20,000 bond.

RELATED: Homeless man may have been dead behind doughnut shop for 2 days before discovery

According to his arrest affidavit, Farias robbed a Family Dollar in the 2600 block of West Southcross Boulevard on July 10, 2017.

Police say Farias acted as though he was going to buy something, then pulled a gun on the cashier and took "all the money in the cash register." He fled in a black four-door vehicle, authorities said.

The Family Dollar robbery was his fifth hit that night, according to police. A man fitting his same physical description with similar clothing committed four other robberies that night, police said. The affidavit does not specify where the other alleged robberies took place.

RELATED: Employee allegedly threw away and stole computers from LULAC lawyer after taking $3,000 from client

Faris was apprehended after the Family Dollar robbery. Police found a replica firearm and a "large sum" of cash on him, according to the affidavit.

The Family Dollar cashier positively identified Farias as the man who robbed the store, police said, and during an interview with police at SAPD headquarters, Farias gave a full confession to the Family Dollar robbery and the four other robberies that night, according to the affidavit.

Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com

cdowns@mysa.com

Twitter: @calebjdowns
Central Texas police discovered a stash of meth last week worth $2 million after pulling a 23-year-old over for speeding, according to a news release from the Austin Police Department.

Seline Lizbeth Ayala was arrested July 12 in Austin and is facing federal drug trafficking charges, according to APD. Around 11:20 p.m.,
CEDAR RAPIDS  Congressional Republicans shouldnt give up on writing a new health care policy  even if it means working with Democrats, U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley said Wednesday.

Grassley wants to get all 100 senators involved in repairing the broken promises of the Obamacare bill.

The House approved its plan, the American Health Care Act, with difficulty and the Senate GOP has been unable to get the necessary votes to proceed with debate on its version of health care reform.

We shouldnt give up in the United States Congress, Grassley told reporters.

Grassley, who voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act in December 2015, said he would vote for that plan again because it would give Congress two years to come up with a replacement for Obamacare.

I would vote for almost any motion to proceed because I think all 100 senators should have an opportunity to participate in a serious way, he said, adding that he would like to see a return to regular order. Thats the normal legislative process of bills being assigned to committees for discussion and hearings, and the text being released to the public.

Although he wants all members of the Senate to be able to join the discussion and offer amendments, the Iowa Republican is not optimistic about the likelihood of a bipartisan effort.

Its kind of hard to take Democrats seriously on bipartisanship when Schumer has said they shouldnt work with us, Grassley said, referring to U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.

Repealing Obamacare would force Congress to take action, Grassley said. If no action is taken, the Affordable Care Act remains in place indefinitely with all the faults that youve heard me talk about, all of the broken promises and all the increases in premiums.

However, when legislation sunsets or expires, Congress takes action, Grassley said.

So, in two years, there would be nothing and that forces Congress to act, he said.

Grassley again downplayed concerns that the Congressional Budget Office has projected that more than 22 million people would lose their health insurance under the GOP plans.

Obamacare, he said, was premised on people being able to keep the doctor of their choice, the insurance plan of their choosing and that premiums would go down.

Those were things that CBO projected were possibilities, but they didnt turn out that way, Grassley said.

This doesnt even start for three years for Medicaid then phases in over five years, he added, once again referencing the GOP plan. Weve got opportunities to change things if they dont work out.
A consummate homemaker who kept an immaculate house, set the table with china and silver at every meal and volunteered so much she was named Club Woman of the Year by the local newspaper, Kathryn Kitty Fisher Roberts Barclay didnt hesitate to get a job after her husband died when she was 41.

She had three children  two who still needed to go to college, her daughter Judy Godinez said. She knew how to write shorthand and take dictation  (so) started working as a legal secretary.

It wasnt until years later that Barclay, who had a high school education, enrolled at San Antonio College to earn an associates degree.

With three children and a husband who were college graduates, Barclay felt it was important.

She did fabulously, Godinez said. She made great grades, was an extremely serious student.

As a nontraditional student at San Antonio College  she was 50 when she enrolled  Barclay became known for her meticulous note taking.

She took her notes word-for-word in shorthand and transcribed them, Godinez said. She shared them with anybody who asked her.

Barclay died July 14 at 97.

More Information Kathryn "Kitty" Fisher Roberts Barclay Born: Dec. 3, 1919, Seat Pleasant, Maryland Died: July 14, 2017, Seguin Preceded by: Parents Annette Perrygo and Edwin Fisher; husbands Willard Roberts and David Barclay Survived by: Daughters Pat Riebe and son-in-law Burton, and Judy Godinez; son Alan Roberts and daughter-in-law Jerolyn; three stepchildren; ten grandchildren; and 27 great-grandchildren Services: Graveside service at noon Wednesday at Mission Burial Park South, 1700 S.E. Military Drive See More Collapse

She met her first husband, a Texas native, while he was receiving FBI training at Quantico, Virginia. They got married in 1939.

Moving first to Detroit and then New York for her husbands career, the couple had two daughters by the time they moved to San Antonio, where they had their youngest, a son.

Her husband, who had rheumatic fever as a child, died after heart surgery, which was still a rare procedure at the time.

Barclay met her second husband, also an FBI agent, a few years later, and remarried in 1965.

Though they traveled a lot while still working, Barclay and her husband took even more trips after retiring, flying to various foreign destinations and taking road trips throughout the United States, Mexico and Canada while living in a travel trailer.

They  moved their possessions into storage unit and lived in the Rambler for two years, Godinez said.

The lesson Barclay came away with from that experience was that there could be a little too much togetherness, her daughter said.

Settling in Kingsbury for while, Barclay and her husband later decided to move to his home state of Washington to be closer to his family, and later moved to Oregon, where her son and his family live.

She returned to Texas to be closer to her daughters after her husband died about four years ago.

mheidbrink@express-news.net
Its been rough times for the White House, so reportedly  yet again  Reince Priebus might get fired.

Surely, no high-level government official in American history has been on the verge of ouster so early and so often. Being the subject of shake-up rumors is practically Priebus job description. If hed been fired every time the possibility had been raised in the press, hed be the Billy Martin  the legendary oft-fired and rehired Yankees manager  of the Trump administration.

Priebus isnt the only one. You dont truly qualify as part of the Trump team unless the president has vented about how woefully you are failing him.

Donald Trump may imagine himself surrounded by incompetents and wreckers, but the sabotage of his White House is an inside job that reaches to the very top.

Consider the Russia bombshell. Itd be nice if Trump could distance himself from the instantly infamous meeting with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya by ruthlessly throwing his erstwhile campaign staff under the bus. But two of three Trump officials at the meeting were family, including his son, who brokered the confab, and his son-in-law, whom Trump has put in charge of a swath of the American government.

Short of that, perhaps Trump could punish the White House spinners who crafted a witlessly misleading statement upon the publication of the initial New York Times article about the meeting. Except the president himself was involved in its drafting.

This is why, as always, the finger-pointing at Priebus  and the rest of the staff  is a misdirection. No one will mistake Priebus for, say, James Baker, Ronald Reagans supremely effective chief of staff. But Trump doesnt want a James Baker, who would unduly constrain him. And everyone knows that its not Priebus coming up with the cracked ideas that keep Trump from finding his footing.

These are things that Trumps chief of staff definitely hasnt said:

Sir, we had a successful trip to Europe for the G-20 summit, but I have just the idea to cap it off: a U.S.-Russia cybersecurity unit  an impenetrable one. People will love it!

Hey, you really want to yank that nutjob Comeys chain? Tell him hed better hope there arent tapes of your conversations with him. That will drive him crazy, and I mean, what could he possibly do to retaliate?

Mr. President, Ive noticed that your coverage on Morning Joe hasnt been so great. I recommend a couple of tweets and strongly believe, sir, that you should make them as repugnant as possible. Lets take it to the next level.

Trump could parachute into a White House staffed by literally the best and the brightest, abiding by a crisp organization chart and armed with a carefully considered policy agenda. And immediately the place would be swamped by needless controversies, tangled lines of authority and policy confusion. All these things dont emanate from below but from the top.

The past week or so shows the opportunity that Trump is missing. The unhinged reaction to Trumps Warsaw speech spoke to how far left the Democrats have gone and how Trump could occupy the political center  if only he could exercise some self-control.

Not a lot, only a little. Enough, to put it bluntly, to show up and read his lines and otherwise shut up. Reince Priebus never would have been elected president, but he could do a better job at this elementary task than the president himself. He could be forgiven for occasionally musing about firing Trump rather than the other way around.

Regardless, Trump will continue to step on his teams message, advertise his worst instincts on Twitter and make whatever might still be lurking out there on Russia worse with robustly counterproductive counterpunching. And hell do it no matter who is, in Trumps mind, the manifestly unsuited and failing White House chief of staff.

comments.lowry@nationalreview.com
Both Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick take great pride in promoting proposals that would get more money in teachers pockets, but they make no effort toward funding their largesse.

The cost of these unfunded mandates fall squarely on the shoulders of taxpayers back home. Instead, state officials should concentrate on fixing Texas deeply troubled public eduction finance system.

These promises of raises and bonuses are disingenuous unless they are backed with equal state funding.

Abbott is promoting legislation that would give the more than 350,000 classroom teachers in the state a $1,000 pay hike. That is a recurring expense that would cause many school districts to dip into their fund balances.

And Patrick last week announced a plan calling for longevity bonuses for current and former teachers. Each March, districts would give $600 bonuses to teachers who have been on the job six to 10 years. Those with 11 years or more experience would get $1,000.

Retirees would get annual bonuses, too. They would start out at $600 and be capped at $1,000 after four years.

State leaders take great pride in being fiscally conservative, but apparently they have no qualms about actions that would place a higher financial burden on cash-strapped school districts. The states level of funding has steadily declined over the years. In the 2018 budget year, that level will dip to 37 percent.

If the Texas Legislature is not going to address the inadequacies in the public school finance system, it at least needs to stop creating new problems.
U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith is concerned about Russia meddling, but its not the interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election he has in mind.

Despite overwhelming intelligence that Russia tried to influence the election outcome, Smith has said, I havent seen any hard evidence, according to The Texas Standard radio show.

No, Smith is concerned Russia is funding environmental groups to destabilize the oil and gas industry. In a recent letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Smith warns of this scheme, citing numerous conservative media articles and even, in an ironic twist, documents on Wikileaks, which published the material that Russia hacked.

Understand, its not implausible that Russia would attempt to undermine the U.S. oil and gas industry, but it is implausible to us that responsible groups would knowingly take that money. The point is, however, that Smith hasnt connected the dots and is still making wild accusations at environmental groups that, by the way, are raising awareness on global warming and other environmental threats.

Essentially, Smith claims Russia is funneling money through a shell company in Bermuda to a U.S.-based private foundation, which then has funded organizations such as the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, and others. All in the name of destabilizing U.S. energy to increase demand for Russian energy.

None of the claims has been substantiated. The Sierra Club has characterized them as false and a smear campaign.

Smith is requesting a federal investigation into environmental groups over unfounded concerns that Russia is supporting environmental activism. By all means investigate, but wed welcome equal outrage over Russian attempts to manipulate our democracy, attempts that our intelligence agencies widely accept occurred.

As chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Smith has carved out a reputation as a climate change skeptic. He has used his position to dispute and challenge the work of respected climate scientists, and this latest maneuver does his national reputation no favors.

Smith should focus on the science rather than on the groups backing that science. In the case of climate change, the science clearly links carbon emissions to warming.

Smith recently took an Arctic tour to Greenland and Alaska to meet with lawmakers and scientists about federal climate change research. Our hope is that this experience enlightens his views on climate change. Such enlightenment descending on the person who heads a key congressional committee could serve the nation well.
DES MOINES  Gov. Kim Reynolds said Tuesday she is frustrated with the inability of federal officials to come up with a long-term health insurance solution or even agree to approve the states stopgap proposal to stabilize the individual insurance market that 72,000 Iowans rely on for coverage.

Ive focused on the things that I can control and that I have an impact on, the Republican governor told reporters who asked her to weigh in on GOP efforts in Congress to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, which have come to a halt in the Senate.

Im still optimistic that at some point they will be able to get something done because they have to, she said. But in the meantime, she and other governors are concerned about the rising cost of Medicaid and she is working with the congressional delegation to make changes to bolster Iowas individual insurance market.

Reynolds said she met last week with top federal health care administrators in seeking approval for a stopgap plan to temporarily encourage more insurance carriers to offer policies for up to the 72,000 Iowans not covered by employers or government insurance programs.

We have a condensed time line to get that done, she said.

The stopgap would provide consumers with age- and income-based tax credits, as well as use a reinsurance mechanism for costly medical claims. The state asked for a response from the federal government in 14 days  more than a month ago.

Sen. Chuck Grassley also weighed in Tuesday on the proposed stopgap.

I hope the state of Iowa gets an answer soon on the waiver proposal that would help people in dire straits this fall, the Republican senator said in a statement. If nothing is done, the 72,000 Iowans on Obamacare will face hardship keeping their insurance this fall. The states proposal would help, and it should go forward. Beyond that, the Senate should continue looking for ways to make health insurance more affordable and accessible.

Talking with reporters and later with members of the Partnership for Progress board, Reynolds said she was concerned about finding a way to address escalating costs to provide Medicaid services that are just taking over state budgets while still protecting the states most vulnerable population.

They have to do something. Doing nothing is not an option, she said of the impasse in Washington.
FORT DODGE | Ron Willis put his bloody coat on Peter Veal, who was under the influence of drugs, so he would take the fall in a Mason City double homicide, a public defender said Wednesday.

Steven Kloberdanz during closing arguments also claimed Willis shot his cousin, Melinda Kavars, because she was laughing at him, and had plenty of time to clean up before police arrived.

Prosecutor Scott Brown said Kloberdanz "told quite a story."

"Wow," Brown said. "What was all that based on? Nothing."

Kloberdanz objected, saying Brown was attacking him. The objection was overruled, but the judge told Brown to proceed with caution.

Brown questioned if Willis is the "mastermind" defense claims, why would he have identified himself in a 911 call and said he was at a crime scene.

The case, in which Veal has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder, has been submitted to a Webster County jury.

The jury has gone home for the night and will resume deliberations at 9 a.m. Thursday.

Our previous story:

FORT DODGE | A public defender on Wednesday questioned why an eyewitness was not investigated as a suspect in a Mason City double homicide.

Steven Kloberdanz said Ron Willis DNA, not Peter Veals, was found on the grip of a gun recovered at the scene.

Veal, 31, of Lake Mills, is on trial in Webster County Court for two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Melinda Kavars and Caleb Christensen. He is also charged with attempted murder for allegedly trying to kill Willis.

Kloberdanz also questioned why the trunk of Willis car wasnt searched, and why investigators didnt take clothing from him.

A woman testified Tuesday that Willis raped her two weeks before Christensen and Kavars were found dead at Christensens North Hampshire Avenue home on Nov. 17.

The woman, who the Globe Gazette is not identifying, said Christensen was mad at Willis after she told him Willis sexually assaulted her. The woman said she never told police about the alleged incident because she was scared of Willis.

While Veals hands were found to be covered in blood, Kloberdanz said his DNA was not found on the knife prosecutors say was used to fatally stab Christensen.

Christensen was stabbed 25 times in the head, neck, stomach and spleen, prosecutor Scott Brown said.

This was a brutal, senseless slaying of two people and a near miss on a third, Brown said, describing the crime scene as a slaughterhouse.

Brown said Willis' head was cut open when Veal hit him with gun and a piece of Willis' tissue was found on the gun.

Physical evidence connects Veal to murders, Brown argued, but no such evidence links Willis to them.

Veal ran when a cop spotted him, shedding bloody clothing as he ran, Brown said, noting the blood on the clothing matched Christensens DNA.

Defense closing arguments are continuing in Webster County Court, where the trial was moved due to publicity.

This is a developing story. Check back later for more details.
ALEXANDRIA, Va.  NACS, along with NATSO, the Advanced Biofuels Association, Society of Independent Gasoline Marketers of America (SIGMA), Petroleum Marketers Association of America (PMAA) and the American Trucking Associations (ATA), applauded U.S. Reps. Diane Black (R-TN) and Ron Kind (D-WI) for introducing bipartisan legislation that would extend the biodiesel blenders tax credit and ultimately phase it out over five years.

NACS supports H.R. 3264, and appreciates the leadership of Reps. Black and Kind in introducing this legislation, said Paige Anderson, NACS director of government relations. The biodiesel blenders tax credit has played an important role in bringing more biodiesel into the marketplace. However, the year-to-year extension process has led to increased uncertainty. This bill eliminates the uncertainty, keeps the tax credit with the blender, and provides a smooth transition in phasing out the tax credit. We urge members of Congress to support H.R. 3264 and hope it will be included in any tax bill that Congress considers.

The trade groups also support the proposals five-year phaseout. In the past, the federal biodiesel tax credit has been allowed to expire (as it did at the end of 2016), forcing market participants to wait for it to be retroactively renewed at the end of each year. Under the phaseout proposed by Representatives Black and Kind, the tax credit amount for all biodiesel blenders would be $1 per gallon in 2017 and 2018, $0.75 per gallon in 2019, $0.50 per gallon in 2020 and 2021, and zero in 2022 and later.

The legislation provides a viable off-ramp for the tax credit, ultimately facilitating free market economics to drive biodiesel supply and demand. Since 2005, the $1 per gallon biodiesel blenders tax credit has helped fuel retailers sell biodiesel at a price that is cost-competitive with diesel, thereby incentivizing consumer consumption. This tax credit expired at the end of 2016.

Under the proposed measure, the tax credit will remain at the blender level, a decision strongly supported by the trade groups. There has been a coordinated effort by lawmakers representing states where biodiesel is produced and where its feedstock is grown to convert the biodiesel blenders tax credit to a producers credit. This would increase prices for consumers and therefore constrict biodiesel consumption, ultimately impeding U.S. efforts to advance the utilization of cleaner burning fuels.
In this Real News Network interview, Daryl Kimball, executive director of the independent, non-partisan Arms Control Association, based in Washington, D.C., discusses the U.S. decision to deploy, for the first time, advanced Patriot missiles as part of military exercises in the Baltic region, thus escalating tensions with Russia and helping boost military industry stock prices to record highs.

Aaron Mate: Its The Real News. Im Aaron Mate. The Russia news in the US this week is all about Donald Trump Jr.s emails, so you might have missed whats also happening right now with Russia and its neighbors. The US has deployed long-range Patriot missiles to the Baltics for the first time. This comes as the US and NATO allies conduct military exercises in the Baltic republics on or near Russias border. Russia is conducting exercises of its own nearby and, in just the past week, the US has approved Patriot missile sales to both Poland and now Romania. The main contractors include Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. As all this happens, major defense industry stocks have hit an all-time high. According to CNBC, NATO concerns about Russia are seen as a positive for the defense industry, particularly missile defense systems makers such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

Daryl Kimball is Executive Director of the Arms Control Association and he joins me now. Daryl, welcome.

Daryl Kimball: Thank you.

Aaron Mate: Thanks for joining us. So talk about whats happening right now in the Baltics, a story that is not getting very much attention.

Daryl Kimball: Well, this is part of a longer-term pattern that has been in motion for several years, especially since Russias invasion and then annexation of Crimea, which was a part of Ukraine, now Russia. These Baltic states, which are members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, have always been concerned about their security vis-a-vis Russia because they are on the frontier with Russia. They directly border Russia.

So theyre even more concerned about their security and NATO and Russia have been for the last two or three years paying more attention to beefing up their defensive hardware, their exercises, in preparation for a possible conflict. So what were seeing here with the deployment of the Patriot missile batteries is part of this larger pattern and its meant to reassure Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, these three Baltic states, as much as it is to provide, you know, hardware that could be useful in a military conflict. Now these are defensive missile systems. Theyre designed to knock down short-range, offensive missiles. These have been deployed in other parts of the world where there are possibility of regional conflict.

So the US-Russian security relationship remains tense despite the fact that Donald Trump is, on the surface, making nice with Vladimir Putin. But beneath the surface, there are very deep and serious tensions.

Aaron Mate: Okay, you know, Daryl, I dont want to get sidetracked into a discussion of Ukraine because it is tangential but I do think its important to note that there is a counter-narrative in terms of Baltic states being concerned because of Russias actions in Ukraine. That would be the Russian perspective, which would be that if Baltic nations are concerned about Ukraine then they should not be blaming Russia but the Western states who helped overthrow the Russian-backed government, now leading Ukraine to talk about joining NATO, which is on Russias border. Putin has said that he was acting in response to that threat, because Russia does not want another hostile NATO country on its border.

But let me ask you, if Russia threatens these Baltic states and theyre already members of NATO, and NATO already has Article 5 in which states are obligated to defend each other, why isnt that protection enough for them already?

Daryl Kimball: Well, Article 5 is words on paper and has never really been exercised with respect to a conflict with Russia. Whats different today, I think, is the fact that, you know, Russia has used unusual means to deal with its neighbor, in this case Ukraine. We could get into a long discussion about Ukraine. I disagree with that contra-narrative you just mentioned but the reality is that tensions are high on both sides of the NATO-Russia border. Whats very important in our view, the view of the Arms Control Association, as well as military and security experts in Europe, in the United States, and Russia, is that there is a more consistent, effective, and sustained dialogue between Russia and NATO countries about the deployment of conventional forces along the border, that there is a tighter and regular means of communication between Russian and NATO military officers to avoid the possibility of military-to-military incidents and, apparently as a result of the Trump-Putin meeting that just took place on the margins of the G20 meeting, there is going to be a meeting between Russian and American military personnel to try to avoid military close encounters that could lead to an accidental shootdown over the Baltic Sea, for instance.

So these are the kinds of measures that are necessary to reduce tensions, to start building back the trust that has been lost over the past few years between Russia and NATO about their respective security situations.

Aaron Mate: And again, on Ukraine, Im no expert on it. What I do know though is that this week Ukraine, the government met with NATO for talks about joining it and Ukraine being on Russias border, obviously that is a ominous prospect. I think youd agree with that.

Daryl Kimball: Well, there have been discussions between Ukraine and Russia over the years about economic ties. There have been discussion between Ukraine and the European Union on economic issues. I dont think that NATO is anywhere close to considering an official bid by Ukraine to join NATO, even though some in Ukraine might want to do that. Given the situation in eastern Ukraine, the ongoing conflict, I dont think that thats something that NATO wants to consider. So I dont think thats a real threat. But the real concern now is that the United States and Russia are increasing their military postures and it could lead to miscalculation.

The other thing I would just note is very important for the two sides to discuss is the future of the treaties that regulate their nuclear arms. The United States and Russia reached an important agreement in 2010, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, that sets up monitoring of each sides strategic, that is long range, nuclear forces. It limits each side to no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads on 700 delivery vehicles. Thats land-based missiles, bombers, sea-based missiles. That treaty goes into, those limits have to be met in 2018, but the treaty is set to expire in February of 2021. So before Donald Trump leaves office, he will have to decide with Vladimir Putin about whether to negotiate a new agreement to replace that one, to extend that agreement by another five years beyond 2021, or to let the whole thing expire. If they let it expire, that would be the first time since the early 1970s that the United States and Russia do not have an agreement regulating the worlds most dangerous nuclear weapons.

These are the worlds two most powerful nuclear superpowers, so thats a key issue. Then, also, there are-

Aaron Mate: Daryl, let me ask you, sorry, didnt Trump already tell Putin in a phone call this year that he doesnt want to renew it?

Daryl Kimball: Well, its hard to tell what Donald Trump said. Reportedly, President Putin, in that initial phone call back in February, I believe it was, Putin suggested the two sides should discuss the extension of the treaty beyond 2021. The two presidents can decide to do this without the approval of their respective parliaments. Trump reportedly said, The New START agreement is a bad deal. I dont know about that. Right now, the Administration, the Trump Administration, is undertaking a formal review of US nuclear policy and part of that decision will probably be to determine whether Trump wants to extend New START, negotiate a new agreement, or let it all just go away in 2021.

So we dont know for sure, but I would also just note that, up until that phone call, Russia had rejected the idea of extending New START. President Putin had rejected a proposal from President Obama in 2013 to negotiate deeper reductions in the two sides still-bloated nuclear arsenals. So that would have been a shift for Putin. Well have to see what Trump decides to do. I am worried that the Trump Administration will decide to let this treaty go by the wayside and that would be a terrible mistake.

Aaron Mate: And, Daryl, I cut you off there. You were raising a second area of concern.

Daryl Kimball: Yeah, one other area of concern regarding the two sides nuclear forces is that there is a very severe dispute over compliance with the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, the IMF Treaty. That was struck between Presidents Gorbachev and Reagan and that eliminated an entire class of intermediate-range, nuclear-armed missiles, the so-called Euro missiles. So neither side is supposed to have any ground-launched, intermediate-range missiles but the United States two years ago detected activity by Russia that suggests that Russia may not be in compliance. The two sides have only met once to discuss this issue, to try to resolve this dispute. The concern about Russias compliance with this treaty is leading some in the US Congress to propose that the United States should counter Russias non-compliant missile testing with our own, ground-based, intermediate-range missile.

So if this issue is not resolved, if the two sides dont sit down soon and find a way to address this compliance issue, we could see an escalation of tensions over this IMF Treaty dispute. So there are a lot of things on the security agenda for these two countries. And, of course, there is a long, long history between the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States and Russia, NATO and Russia. The two sides can debate until theyre blue in the face about who is right and who is wrong, but the reality that weve got to face is that we have these problems today and we need forward-looking solutions. And we need compromise and realism and pragmatism on both sides, Russia and the United States.

Aaron Mate: Yeah, I just want to know what Putin says about all this. Hes accused the US of rejecting Russian offers to cease weapons production. And hes pointed to the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty under George W. Bush. How much has that, if at all, factored into the current situation today, the withdrawal of the US from the ABM?

Daryl Kimball: Well, about 15 years ago, yes, the George W. Bush Administration decided to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and that treaty was all about limiting each sides strategic missile interceptor capabilities, so that they didnt get into both an offensive and a defensive arms race. But by the early 2000s, the United States was becoming increasingly concerned about Iranian and North Korean ballistic missile capabilities and wanted to pursue systems that would have exceeded the treaty. Now, over these 15 years, the United States has only deployed 44 interceptors in Alaska and California that would not be compliant with the ABM Treaty. These missiles do not in any way threaten Russia or Chinas massive nuclear retaliatory potential but, yeah, the Russians are concerned that the United States might further expand the United States strategic missile interceptor capabilities, particularly in Europe.

So that is another area where the two sides need to sit down, have an adult conversation. They need to avoid lobbing accusations back and forth or bringing up old issues, water under the bridge, and they need to find some solutions. Right now, there is not a serious, sustained dialogue between the United States and Russia on these strategic weapons issues, missile defense, the IMF Treaty, the future of New START, or how to avoid a dangerous military-to-military incident that could lead to a small conflict that then grows into a major crisis.

Aaron Mate: Right, Daryl, so on that point, if the Baltics where these military exercises are going on right now on both sides, Russia and NATO, if the Baltics are a potential flashpoint, how could that situation be resolved in a way that doesnt involve, you know, putting all these massive missiles inside Russias neighboring or nearby countries?

Daryl Kimball: Well, I think one thing that needs to be done is both sides need to avoid the kinds of provocative exercises that theyre now engaged in in a tit-for-tat basis. You know, both sides need to, for the purpose of military readiness, they need to conduct exercises somewhere in some way. But to do so on the border of either side, it is provocative. It is worrisome and its particularly worrisome for the Baltic states who are in a vulnerable position because, you know, the Russian mainland is right up against their border. So I think, you know, there needs to be a long term dialogue between NATO and Russia about how to pull back ground-based forces from the frontier, so to speak.

There was a treaty negotiated back in 1990, the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, that was designed to limit each sides conventional force deployments in a way that made their militaries less threatening to the other side. That treaty has fallen apart for many different reasons and theres not a replacement on the horizon. So the German government has proposed the renewal of a dialogue about conventional force limitations and transparency so that there is not this fear of some sort of lightning move across the frontier either from the West to the East or the East to the West.

Aaron Mate: For people who want to know just what the scale is of the military build-up on both sides inside Eastern Europe between Russia and its NATO neighbors, can you give us an overview of just the kind of missiles and weapons systems that were talking about and how dangerous they are?

Daryl Kimball: Well, its hard to catalog the whole list but let me just mention what kind of nuclear and missile weaponry the United States and Russia have. The US and Russia, as I said, have deployed about 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads. The United States has close to 800 nuclear delivery systems, the Russians close to 600. Each side deploys these on submarines, strategic bombers, and on land-based missiles. And then, in addition to that, you know, Russia has a force of several hundred tactical nuclear warheads for battlefield use. The United States still deploys, this is a vestige of the Cold War days, about 160 nuclear gravity bombs on 5 NATO bases in Europe.

So in addition to the conventional military forces that are on the ground in Russia, that are on the ground in the NATO countries, you have this nuclear firepower just behind it. So if there is a hot war between NATO and Russia and one side is losing on the battlefield, there will be the temptation to threaten or to use nuclear weapons in order to counteract that loss or to avoid a loss. So thats why, you know, its important to avoid any kind of conflict and thats one of the reasons why, you know, US and Russian leaders have said for decades that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought, because it would mean the utter destruction of all of these countries in ways that would make World War II look mild by comparison. So, thats whats at stake and we cant forget that thats what were still living with, the world that were still living in.

Aaron Mate: Daryl Kimball, Executive Director of the Arms Control Association. Daryl, thank you.

Daryl Kimball: Yep, thank you.

Aaron Mate: And thank you for joining us on The Real News.
Cell-permeable nanobodies (Nanowerk News) Antibodies are one of the main weapons of our immune system. They dock to viruses, bacteria and other invaders that course through our blood, and thereby render them harmless. Antibodies also play a key role in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases and in research.

"One clear limitation is that due to their size and various other factors, antibodies are unable to permeate living cells," emphasises M. Cristina Cardoso, Professor of Cell Biology and Epigenetics in the Department of Biology at the TU Darmstadt.

Working in close collaboration with the research group led by Christian P. R. Hackenberger at the FMP Berlin, Professor of Chemical Biology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the inter-disciplinary team has now, for the first time, managed to permeate living cells with small antibodies, also called nanobodies, and observe them microscopically. Medicine has extremely high hopes for these tiny antibodies. Although they do not occur in the human body, they have been found in camels and in cartilaginous fish.

Ring peptides open the cell membrane door allowing antibodies and other therapeutic agents to enter cells. (Image: Christoph Hohmann, Nanosystems Initiative Munich)

"In order to open up the path into the cell for the nanobodies, we decorated them chemically with cyclic cell-permeating peptides that effectively act as keys to the direct permeation through the cell membrane into the cells," explains Christian Hackenberger. As the researchers report in the current issue of Nature Chemistry ("Cell-permeable nanobodies for targeted immunolabelling and antigen manipulation in living cells"), the key peptides are either coupled stably to the nanobodies or, more loosely, so that the connection is dissolved on the inside of the cell.

The scientists successfully permeated living mouse and human cells with nanoantibodies, and examined their benefits. Cell-permeable nanobodies are suited both to the recognition and manipulation of antigens and to the analysis of protein-protein interactions. The researchers were able to observe the interaction between the tumour inhibitor p53 and its counterpart, protein HDM2, using the nanobodies and special fluorescent markings. This interaction plays an important part in the development of cancer.
Titanium dioxide nanoparticles can exacerbate colitis (Nanowerk News) Titanium dioxide, one of the most-produced nanoparticles worldwide, is being used increasingly in foodstuffs. When intestinal cells absorb titanium dioxide particles, this leads to increased inflammation and damage to the intestinal mucosa in mice with colitis (Gut, "Titanium dioxide nanoparticles exacerbate DSS-induced colitis: role of the NLRP3 inflammasome"). Researchers at the University of Zurich recommend that patients with colitis should avoid food containing titanium dioxide particles.

The frequency of inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis has been on the rise in many Western countries for decades. The illnesses are caused by an excessive autoimmune reaction against the intestinal flora. In addition to genetic factors, environmental factors like the Western lifestyle, especially nutrition, play an essential role in the development of these chronic intestinal diseases.

Use of titanium dioxide nanoparticles in food is increasing

The research of Gerhard Rogler, professor of gastroenterology and hepatology at the University of Zurich, now shows that titanium dioxide nanoparticles can intensify the inflammatory reaction in the bodies of patients with inflammatory intestinal diseases. Titanium dioxide is a white pigment used in medicines, cosmetics and toothpaste and increasingly as food additive E171, for example, in icing, chewing gum or marshmallows. Until now, there have been no restrictions on its use in the food industry.

The scientists led by Gerhard Rogler concentrated their research on a protein complex inside cells: the NLRP3 inflammasome. This protein complex is part of the non-specific immune system, which detects danger signals and then triggers inflammation. If the inflammasome is activated by bacterial components, for example, and the inflammatory reaction plays a vital role in the defense against infective agents. In the same way, NLRP3 can be activated by small inorganic particles  sometimes with negative consequences: If uric acid crystals form in the cells, for example the inflammation leads to gout.

Titanium dioxide can be absorbed from food in case of intestinal disease

The research team first studied the effect of inorganic titanium dioxide particles in cell cultures. They were able to show that titanium dioxide can penetrate human intestinal epithelial cells and macrophages and accumulate there. The nanoparticles were detected as danger signals by inflammasomes, which triggered the production of inflammatory messengers. In addition, patients with ulcerative colitis, whose intestinal barrier is disrupted, have an increased concentration of titanium dioxide in their blood. "This shows that these particles can be absorbed from food under certain disease conditions," Rogler says.

In a further step, the scientists orally administered titanium dioxide nanoparticles to mice, which serve as a disease model for inflammatory bowel disease. Here, as well, the particles activated the NLRP3 complex, which led to strong intestinal inflammation and greater damage to the intestinal mucosa in the mice. In addition, titanium dioxide crystals accumulated in the animals' spleens.

Researchers recommend abstinence from foods containing E171 in case of colitis
Silk 'micrococoons' could be used in biotechnology and medicine

(Nanowerk News) Microscopic versions of the cocoons spun by silkworms have been manufactured by a team of researchers. The tiny capsules, which are invisible to the naked eye, can protect sensitive molecular materials, and could prove a significant technology in areas including food science, biotechnology and medicine.

The capsules were made at the University of Cambridge using a specially-developed microengineering process. The process mimics on the microscale the way in which Bombyx mori silkworms spin the cocoons from which natural silk is harvested. The resulting micron-scale capsules comprise a solid and tough shell of silk nano-fibrils that surround and protect a centre of liquid cargo, and are more than a thousand times smaller than those created by silkworms.

Silk from the Chinese silkworm Bombyx mori was used in this study. (Image: 2017 Oxford Silk Group)

Writing in the journal Nature Communications ("Silk microcooons for protein stabilisation and molecular encapsulation"), the team suggest that these "micrococoons" are a potential solution to a common technological problem: How to protect sensitive molecules that have potential health or nutritional benefits, but can easily degrade and lose these favourable qualities during storage or processing.

The study argues that sealing such molecules in a protective layer of silk could be the answer, and that silk micrococoons that are far too small to see (or taste) could be used to house tiny particles of beneficial molecular "cargo" in various products, such as cosmetics and food.

The same technology could also be used in pharmaceuticals to treat a wide range of severe and debilitating illnesses. In the study, the researchers successfully showed that silk micrococoons can increase the stability and lifetime of an antibody that acts on a protein implicated in neurodegenerative diseases.

The work was carried out by an international team of academics from the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Sheffield in the UK; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland; and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. The study was led by Professor Tuomas Knowles, a Fellow of St John's College at the University of Cambridge and co-director of the Centre for Protein Misfolding Diseases.

"It is a common problem in a range of areas of great practical importance to have active molecules that possess beneficial properties but are challenging to stabilise for storage" Knowles said. "A conceptually simple, but powerful, solution is to put these inside tiny capsules. Such capsules are typically made from synthetic polymers, which can have a number of drawbacks, and we have recently been exploring the use of fully natural materials for this purpose. There is potential to replace plastics with sustainable biological materials, such as silk, for this purpose."

The silkworm spins a silk cocoon around itself for protection during metamorphosis. Researchers have found that silk can protect other precious cargos. ( NPG)

Dr. Ulyana Shimanovich, who performed a major part of the experimental work as a St John's College Post-Doctoral research associate, said: "Silk is a fantastic example of a natural structural material. But we had to overcome the challenge of controlling the silk to the extent that we could mould it to our designs, which are much smaller than the natural silk cocoons."

Dr. Chris Holland, co-worker and head of the Natural Materials Group in Sheffield added: "Silk is amazing because whilst it is stored as a liquid, spinning transforms it into a solid. This is achieved by stretching the silk proteins as they flow down a microscopic tube inside the silkworm."

To imitate this, the researchers created a tiny, artificial spinning duct, which copies the natural spinning process to cause the unspun silk to form into a solid. They then worked out how to control the geometry of this self-assembly in order to create microscopic shells.

Making conventional synthetic capsules can be challenging to achieve in an environmentally friendly manner and from biodegradable and biocompatible materials. Silk is not only easier to produce; it is also biodegradable and requires less energy to manufacture.

"Natural silk is already being used in products like surgical materials, so we know that it is safe for human use," Professor Fritz Vollrath head of the Oxford Silk Group said. "Importantly, the approach does not change the material, just its shape."

Silk micrococoons could also expand the range and shelf-life of proteins and molecules available for pharmaceutical use. Because the technology can preserve antibodies, which would otherwise degrade, in cocoons with walls that can be designed to dissolve over time, it could enable the development of new treatments against cancer, or neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Diseases.

To explore the viability of silk microcapsules in this regard, the researchers successfully tested the micrococoons with an antibody that has been developed to act on alpha-synuclein, the protein that is thought to malfunction at the start of the molecular process leading to Parkinson's Disease. This study was carried out with the support of the Cambridge Centre for Misfolding Diseases, whose research programme is focused on the search for ways of preventing and treating neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

"Some of the most efficacious and largest selling therapeutics are antibodies," Michele Vendruscolo, co-director of the Cambridge Centre of Misfolding diseases, said. "However, antibodies tend to be prone to aggregation at the high concentrations needed for delivery, which means that they are often written off for use in treatments, or have to be engineered to promote stability."
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.
NATO Allies and partners are providing aircraft and helicopters to help Montenegro deal with forest fires in the Lustica peninsula. Montenegro approached NATOs Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre (EADRCC) for assistance on Monday (17 July 2017), and the request was immediately circulated to NATO Allies and partners. A Ukrainian fire-fighting aircraft Antonov 32P has been in Montenegro since Tuesday, and two helicopters  contributed by Bulgaria and Switzerland  arrived in Montenegro on Wednesday. Two more fire-fighting aircraft will be deployed from Israel in the coming days.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed the assistance today, saying: I welcome that Allies and partners came forward in a matter of hours to help Montenegro deal with its devastating forest fires. Montenegro is our newest Ally, having joined the NATO family just over a month ago. Our rapid response demonstrates that we stand with our Allies. This is what Euro-Atlantic solidarity is all about.

The EADRCC is NATOs principal civil emergency response mechanism in the Euro-Atlantic area. It is active all year round, operational on a 24/7 basis, and involves NATOs 29 Allies and all partner countries. The Centre functions as a clearing-house system for coordinating both requests and offers of assistance mainly in case of natural and man-made disasters. More information is available here: www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_52057.htm.
Junk Raft: An Ocean Voyage and a Rising Tide of Activism to Fight Plastic Pollution

Marcus Eriksen Beacon: 2017. 9780807056400

The story of a voyage bearing witness to plastic pollution in the oceans, Junk Raft is a stimulating, thought-provoking and factually grounded read. Science educator and researcher Marcus Eriksen's navigational feat is gripping  88 days crossing some 4,000 kilometres of open ocean between California and Hawaii in 2008, on a raft crafted from 15,000 plastic bottles wrapped in fishing nets. But it is more. Woven through the chronicle are two equally fascinating storylines: Eriksen's evolution from soldier to research director of the environmental non-profit 5 Gyres Institute in Los Angeles, California, and the journey we all need to take towards a more sustainable use of plastics. Joel Paschal on Junk, the raft made of plastic bottles that he and Marcus Eriksen sailed from California to Hawaii in 2008. Credit: Peter Bennett/Citizen of the Planet

Around 75% of all the litter in our oceans is plastic, and an estimated 5 million tonnes of plastic waste enter the seas annually.

Around 75% of all the litter in our oceans is plastic, and an estimated 5 million tonnes of plastic waste enter the seas annually. Inevitably, this contaminates marine habitats worldwide and, as Eriksen explains, it is now present at the sea surface and on shorelines, in Arctic seas and on the sea bed at depths of 3,500 metres. Around 700 marine species, from sea turtles and corals to sperm whales and albatrosses, are known to come into contact with plastic debris  and can be harmed or killed by ingesting or becoming entangled with it. There are also concerns about plastics accumulating in commercially important species of fish and shellfish. (The waters and shores of Hawaii are particularly heavily contaminated, giving a rationale for Eriksen's destination.)

This environmental challenge has attracted increasing scientific, media and societal attention in recent years, yet few accounts have conveyed the wider picture accessibly. Junk Raft does just this  while exposing our frustratingly slow progress on an issue of major importance to fisheries, tourism and, ultimately, the health of the world's oceans.

Eriksen catalogues the issues associated with the accumulation of marine plastic: the causes, consequences and potential solutions. Our throwaway culture is the main culprit. For more than 60 years, society and industry have been producing more and more single-use items, particularly packaging, designed for disposability. Some solutions lie in better capture of materials at the end of their lives, in a circular economy (see B. Kiser et al. Nature 531, 443446; 2016).

Eriksen contextualizes the crisis with a timeline of scientific discovery and advancement in our understanding since the 1970s. Alongside this he gives a very personal, somewhat North American, perspective on the tribulations of industry and policy engagement: the side plots and blind alleys, and the tactics of avoidance, distraction and denial he has so often encountered in his environmental work. There are parallels, he shows, with the obstacles that faced those who fought to raise awareness around the health impacts of smoking. Eriksen also gives due credit to his collaborators  notably oceanographer Charles Moore, discoverer of the 'garbage patch' in the North Pacific Gyre. Moore founded the Algalita Marine Research and Education in Long Beach, California, which co-sponsored the Junk Raft project.

Throughout, we are regularly brought back to the realities of life aboard the raft, with Eriksen's fellow sailor Joel Paschal. This is both mesmerizing and eventful, from their slow, occasionally perilous progress to the moments when it seems the raft will disintegrate, littering the ocean with the detritus Eriksen is trying so hard to combat. We see the pair working, eating and sleeping in the confined space of the raft's cabin, a repurposed light-aircraft fuselage. Alongside this are high spots such as the culinary delights of fish and squid cooked straight from the sea. Eriksen's wider journey also takes him onto dry land, where he touches on the accumulation of terrestrial plastic. He learns about the consumption of plastic bags by camels  a serious issue in some desert countries  as he travels back to Kuwait and Iraq, where, 25 years earlier, he had fought as a US marine in the Gulf War.

It can be difficult to gauge the direct impacts of projects such as Eriksen's, but he rightly notes the importance of raising awareness of the risks of disposable plastic. Eriksen has also done much to highlight the environmental consequences of polymer microbeads in the US Great Lakes, providing key evidence that led to the introduction of legislation. (My own team was the first to show the temporal accumulation of microplastics in UK waters, in 2004; see R. C. Thompson et al. Science 304, 838; 2004.)
Discovering the Mammoth

John J. McKay Pegasus (2017) 9781681774244

Long before mammoths were described by science, wild debates raged over their hulking fossils. From classical Greece to China, claims that they were dragons' teeth or giants' bones sprang up. As John McKay vividly relates, the scientific saga began in the seventeenth century, when the evocative remains became pivotal to the evolution of vertebrate palaeontology. Among the turning points, he shows, was Siberian tribesman Ossip Shumachov's discovery of a near-complete mammoth carcass around 1800  later reconstructed, in a stupendous feat of guesswork, by Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius.

The Sun

Leon Golub and Jay M. Pasachoff. Reaktion (2017)

9781780237572

It may be just another yellow dwarf, but to us Earthlings the Sun is the undoubted star of celestial objects. Astrophysicist Leon Golub and astronomer Jay Pasachoff elucidate all things solar in this scientific primer. They anatomize sunspots by way of US astronomer George Ellery Hale, who pioneered their observation with his 1889 invention of the spectroheliograph. They explore helioseismology, which allows us to peer inside the Sun; look at chromosphere and corona; and proffer pointers on safe amateur observation. Beautifully illustrated, history-rich and bang up to date.

The King's City

Don Jordan Little, Brown (2017) 9781408707296

Plague-ridden and half-destroyed by fire, late-seventeenth-century London was also a scientific hotbed. Presiding over it for more than two decades was Restoration monarch Charles II. Don Jordan's history captures the shifts he engineered in trade and culture, and his great decision  as one eager to support astronomy and medicine  to establish the Royal Society. Under its aegis, luminaries such as Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke parsed nature, from the springiness of air to the rotation of Mars, in the process doing much to establish the physical and intellectual London of today.

Zapped

Bob Berman Little, Brown (2017) 9780316311304

As astronomy writer Bob Berman notes in this nimble history of radiation, the idea of invisible light has an oxymoronic flavour. Yet without that spectrum, the Universe would be unimaginable and much of modern technology impossible. His roll call of the brilliant scientists who unpeeled this world include Johann Ritter, Heinrich Hertz and William Herschel, who discovered ultraviolet, radio and infrared waves, respectively. There is plenty, too, on mundane exposure, from the potassium-40 in bananas to the odd mash-up in 'cosmic rays', which includes helium nuclei, protons and antimatter.

Inheritors of the Earth

Chris D. Thomas Allen Lane (2017) 9780241240755
MASON CITY | More than 35 women gathered in the hot sun at Habitat ReStore to construct walls for Habitats new home project Saturday.

Habitats Women Build event brings together local women for a great cause and volunteering, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of North Central Iowa Melissa Schoneberg said.

We try to do it every year, Schoneberg said. Some communities nationwide have this event.

The ladies built all of the exterior walls and some of the interior walls for a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home to be located on South Polk Place in Mason City.

Its really empowering, Schoneberg said. It love it and its so much fun.

The home is being built for Sarah Peverill and Leonard Fenton and their three daughters, Jessica, Madelynn, and Emerson. Henkel Construction and Thrivent Financial are the main sponsors for the event and Thrivent Financial is sponsoring the construction of the home.

While constructing the walls, the ladies worked beside the family helping build their own home. The family has faced financial difficulties due to medical costs.

Being with women all wanting to support a family in need, Schoneberg said. Woman power.

The aim of the event is to help women who want to get involved not feel intimidated on a work site.

Its a fun way for women to get together and learn about constructing, Schoneberg said.

The next step will be to transport the walls to the site where the foundation has been prepared. Members of Trinity Lutheran Church will help with the wall-raising on July 29.

Schoneberg said that more volunteers will be needed to complete the home by the end of the year.

Women are always welcome, Schoneberg said.
Death in the Ice: The Shocking Story of Franklin's Final Expedition

National Maritime Museum, London. 14 July 2017  7 January 2018.

No one ever embarked on an expedition with more causes of rejoicing than ourselves. So wrote naval officer John Franklin before setting off from England in May 1845 to complete navigation of the North-West Passage through the Arctic reaches of North America. His bold declaration was soon to ring hollow. The last moments of John Franklin's Arctic expedition, imagined by William Thomas Smith in 1895. Credit: RMG-NMN, London

Visitors to London's National Maritime Museum (NMM) this year can see the only written evidence of what happened to Franklin, his crew and their vessels, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. Found in 1859 in a cairn on King William Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, the note  dated 25 April 1848  is scrawled around the edge of a log entry from the previous year. It describes the deaths of Franklin and 23 of his companions, the abandonment of their icebound ships, and survivors' plans to set out on foot.

They failed. All 129 members of the expedition vanished.

The note is one of more than 200 artefacts on show in Death in the Ice, an exhibition on the ill-fated voyage developed by the NMM and partners including the Canadian Museum of History (CMH) in Gatineau (the exhibition will be on show at the CMH from 2 March to 30 September 2018). Exhibits range from humble eating utensils to the grand Royal Guelphic Order medal awarded to Franklin for his long service to the British Empire. Some of the objects were discovered by later expeditions looking for clues; there were 36 such hunts between 1847 and 1859 alone.

More remarkable are items recovered from the wrecked Erebus, discovered in 2014 (followed by Terror in 2016), preserved in the cold waters off the coast of Canada's Nunavut territory. Finds retrieved from Erebus are now on display for the first time, alongside a video of the sunken vessels.

The Franklin expedition was the largest Britain had sent to the Arctic. As senior NMM curator Claire Warrior says, It was a matter of pride and prestige, of scientific research, of mapping and of projecting Royal Naval power. The expedition aimed to catalogue regional wildlife, geology and weather, as well as to fly the flag. The ships were strengthened to handle the harsh polar seas and provisioned, notes Warrior, with those British essentials tea, chocolate and very strong rum. Snow goggles recovered from John Franklin's ship Erebus. Credit: RMG-NMN, London

After a while, the silence from Franklin and his crew became unnerving, Warrior says. The missing expedition turned into a national obsession. Lurid reports of starving men, icy deaths and, shockingly, cannibalism began to trickle back to London from other explorers in the region. Literary lion Charles Dickens took issue with the idea of men of the British Navy resorting to such behaviour, asserting that the claim was based on the testimony of covetous, treacherous, and cruel indigenous people who might have done in the valiant tars themselves. Whatever the expedition's fate, it was clear  as Warrior relates  that a surefire triumph had become tragedy.

The show probes several theories about the mass disappearance. One hint is a single shoe raised from Erebus: it looks like something you'd wear to the corner shop, not on a brutal voyage through freezing gales. One of Franklin's mittens, fashioned from wool and silk, looks equally conducive to frostbite. A 'forensic zone' unpicks evidence for other culprits. Did the crew succumb to lead poisoning from the solder that sealed their canned food? Perhaps it was that traditional foe of sailors, scurvy. The ultimate answer is elusive, although a combination of these factors with unusually harsh weather and ice probably fits the bill best.

What scores of searchers failed to find until this decade was the resting places of Erebus and Terror. The video reveals the ships as remarkably well preserved, but they look frail to modern eyes. The silenced bell from Erebus sits in the room, too. More intriguing are objects created from expedition detritus. The local Inuit are thought to have assisted expedition members as they attempted to reach civilization, later repurposing files and tins to make knives, sledge runners and other objects. Their oral history proved decisive in pinpointing the location of the wrecks. Says CMH director-general Jean-Marc Blais: It was Inuit knowledge that first revealed to searchers where the expedition had become trapped. Local people call an island near where Erebus was found Kivevok, meaning where it sank, notes Paul Watson in his chronicle of the expedition, Ice Ghosts (W. W. Norton, 2017).
ASSET ALLOCATION COMMITTEE OUTLOOK 4Q2022

Tighter Conditions Begin to Squeeze the Economy

As the economy slows, an epic climb in short-dated rates and bond yields appears to have shocked investors into accepting the prospect of stickier inflation, but they still seem reluctant to price for substantially lower earnings.
California took its first step Tuesday toward addressing a dangerous, cancer-causing chemical that 1 million residents across the state could be drinking in harmful amounts.

The State Water Resources Control Board voted unanimously to implement a maximum contaminant level in drinking water for a chemical known as 1,2,3-TCP, used primarily as a degreasing solvent and pesticide ingredient.

A May NBC Bay Area investigation found the chemical is currently found at dangerous levels in the drinking water served by 94 different California public water systems, mostly in the farming communities of the Central Valley. Those numbers dont take into account the nearly 2 million Californians, mostly in rural areas, who get their water from private wells. Experts say many of those wells are also assuredly plagued by 1,2,3-TCP.

Although the chemical was removed from pesticides marketed by Shell and Dow Chemical in the 1980s, its use was so prevalent that it seeped into groundwater where it remains today in levels state scientists say would increase cancer risks after a lifetime of exposure.

California now becomes the second state in the country, after Hawaii, to regulate the chemical in drinking water.

Its a very serious challenge, this particular chemical, California Water Resources Control Board Vice Chair Steven Moore said at Tuesdays hearing. As folks have said, its a very serious public health threat. California officially determined this is a carcinogen. Its still under discussion at the federal level. And when you look at the science and the experiments and all that was done to show it, it is disquieting how serious and insidious this chemical is.

Tuesdays decision means drinking water providers across the state will be required to begin testing for 1,2,3-TCP by January. If testing shows greater average concentrations than five parts per trillion over one year of testing, the provider would be in violation of the new drinking water standard. The water provider would then be required to notify its customers about the violation and take corrective action, according to a spokesperson for the Water Resources Control Board.

At Tuesdays hearing, State Water Board Chair Felicia Marcus vowed to hold stakeholders accountable moving forward.

I think we have a group commitment from many people to try and work together and move forward, Marcus said. And I will hold folks to that, including ourselves.

The vote is welcome news to advocacy groups across the state, many of which have been lobbying state water officials to regulate the chemical for years.

The State of California has known about the dangers of 1,2,3-TCP for decades, Community Water Center Policy Director Jonathan Nelson said. The time has come and is indeed long overdue to pass the action proposed today.

Small water providers across the state have taken Shell and Dow Chemical to court in efforts to recoup cleanup costs associated with 1,2,3-TCP contamination. San Francisco attorney Todd Robbins represents the majority of the 43 small water systems who have sued the chemical giants for damages. Eight of the lawsuits have settled out of court and 33 remain pending.

I think that its a pretty dirty little secret that a state as prosperous as California has so many water quality problems, Robbins told NBC Bay Area in May.

Under the new regulations, water providers that remain out of compliance could face enforcement actions by the state, but they would still be allowed to deliver contaminated drinking water to their customers.

According to the advocacy organization Environmental Working Group, California is not the only state with troubling amounts of TCP in drinking water. The group collected water data from water utilities across the country and found the chemical in at least 17 different states.
The search for a missing boater whose unmanned motorboat was located in Tomales Bay Tuesday evening was expected to extend late into the night and early Wednesday morning, according to officials with the Marin County Fire Department.

The boater has been identified only as a 70-year-old man employed by the Tomales Bay Oyster Company. But friends in the community said they are looking for the owner of the company, Tod Friend.

Marin County rescue crews said late Tuesday night they planned to stay out on boats until 2 a.m. using sonar equipment.



The man was reported missing at about 3:15 p.m., after fire officials received an emergency call from an employee at the Hog Island Oyster Company in Marshall.

The employee said their boat was near the boat that was being operated by the missing man. Operators on the Hog Island Oyster Company boat said they looked back and saw the Tomales Bay Oyster Company boat going in circles.

Rescue crews were able to recover the missing man's motorboat.

Officials said Friend wasnt wearing a life jacket. Friends say he is an experienced water man who worked on the water daily and knew the bay well. They also said he is a beloved member of the community.

Using rescue watercrafts and helicopters, the search includes personnel with the fire department, the Marin County Sheriff's Office, the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office, the U.S. National Park Service, the U.S. Coast Guard and the California Highway Patrol.
Antioch police are investigating the robbery of a jewelry store on Wednesday morning at the Somersville Towne Center mall.

Officers responded at 11:20 a.m. to a report of a disturbance at the mall at 2550 Somersville Road and learned of a robbery that occurred at the Ron's Jewelers store, police said.

Four suspects entered the business inside the mall and smashed glass cases with metal tools, then fled with jewelry and drove away in a silver Infiniti sedan, according to police.

The four suspects all wore similar clothing and remain at large on Wednesday afternoon. Police declined to provide descriptions of the suspects.

An employee at the jewelry store was pepper-sprayed during the robbery and later went to a hospital for treatment, police said.

The value of the jewelry taken by the suspects has yet to be determined and the case remains under investigation. Anyone with information is encouraged to call Antioch police at (925) 778-2441.
In a push to protect undocumented residents from the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration, Oakland City Council on Tuesday revoked an agreement that allowed the city's police department to collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The ordinance, which passed unanimously, also requires the police chief to submit an annual report on surveillance activities in Oakland with federal agencies.

Under the abolished agreement, Homeland Security was able to deputize Oakland officers as "task force officers," allowing them to help solve crimes and aid in investigations. Similar partnerships exist in San Francisco and San Mateo counties.

Oakland's Privacy Advisory Commission discovered the agreement during a fact-finding mission into joint operations between the city and federal law enforcement. According to a report from the East Bay Express, the agreement was signed the day before disgraced Oakland Police Chief Sean Whent resigned last year amid a far-reaching sex exploitation scandal.

At a July 11 Public Safety Committee meeting, Oakland's Deputy Police Chief Danielle Outlaw said the agreement aided the department on human trafficking and gang investigations.

"We do use them as a force multiplier within the parameters of (Oakland Police Department) policy, and its also to focus on cases where we could charge federally," she said, advocating for keeping the agreement.

That argument did little to sway city council members.

Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan noted that the agreement was forged under the Obama administration, when fewer people were concerned about ICE activities.

Under the new presidential administration, we've seen increased use of ICE to target non-criminals, including arresting people dropping their kids off at school, including arresting people coming out of church, and including arresting a woman in court who was there to testify against the man who had raped her," Kaplan said, referencing several highly-publicized incidents outside the Bay Area.

Kaplan added that the ordinance would be a "further step to take" to protect Oakland residents and ensure that undocumented residents feel safe reporting crimes to local law enforcement.

Brian Hofer, the chair of the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission, noted that the commission spent more than three months trying to determine what partnerships exist between local law enforcement and the federal immigration agency. He concluded that the city's police department had not violated Oakland's sanctuary city ordinances, but it was "inadvertently putting data in the hands of ICE."

"There is a chilling effect going right now  a dramatic decrease in the reporting of crime in the Hispanic communities," Hofer said. "Houston and Los Angeles police chiefs are already reporting that Hispanic communities will not report crimes because they're so scared of the data getting into the hands of the feds."

Commenters overwhelmingly agreed, speaking about the rising fears in the community under a federal administration that has promised to "build a wall" and tried numerous times to enforce a travel ban.

"Aggressive racial profiling has absolutely terrorized this community..." said Christina Sinha, an attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice, an advocacy group. "While this problem is complicated, the solution  this ordinance  is actually very simple.
United States Postal Service officials say thieves broke into four mail trucks over the past two months in San Jose.

The post office is offering a $10,000 reward with information that might help them catch the person or persons responsible for the thefts.



The most recent incident occurred last week in the Willow Glen neighborhood. Officials said someone broke into a locked USPS truck and took off with a mail bag while a carrier was delivering mail.

"They're getting into locked vehicles," US Postal Inspector Jeff Fitch said. "They're getting in and taking some of the mail."

Dozens of residents have received a letter from the post office alerting them their mail was stolen.

"If there's any compromised information with accounts that's concerning," said Lisa Jenkins, a San Jose resident who received the alert from the post office.

Jenkins said the letter was short on details.

Willow Glen residents said any crime in the neighborhood is unexpected.

"I'm very surprised that someone would do something like this," San Jose-resident Lynn Kucera said. "I consider this neighborhood safe and we watch out for each other. So to hear about someone stealing mail from a postal truck is very disturbing."

Some neighbors said they plan to take their important mail directly to the post office to avoid the risk of it being stolen from a truck.

Fitch would not reveal where the other three truck break-ins were in San Jose. Mail theft is a federal crime.
A blaze in the rugged mountains outside of Yosemite National Park is threatening 1,500 structures and forcing thousands of nearby residents to flee their homes as it rages toward a historic Gold Rush era town.

It's burning near Highway 49, a historical route winding its way up California foothills of the western Sierra Nevada dotted with communities and landmarks that sprouted up during the state's Gold Rush.

Fast-Moving Blaze Destroys Structures, Threatens Homes in Mariposa County

As of Wednesday morning, the fire had scorched 71 square miles (183 square kilometers), according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The blaze burning since Sunday was making its way to the hills on the edge of Mariposa, a town of about 2,000 people under a mandatory evacuation order. About 5,000 people from a half-dozen communities are under evacuation order.

No injuries have been reported, but the fire has destroyed eight structures. It is unclear what type of structures were destroyed.

Record rain and snowfall in the mountains this winter was celebrated for bringing California's five-year drought to its knees, but it has turned into a challenge for firefighters battling flames feeding on dense vegetation, officials said.

"There's ample fuel and steep terrain," said California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokeswoman DeeDee Garcia. "It makes firefighting difficult."

The Northern California blaze is also threatening powerlines that provide electricity to the park, officials said. The park remained open Wednesday but several roads frequented by tourists were closed.

The wildfire near Lake McClure, a reservoir about 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of Modesto, was 7 percent contained Wednesday as at least 1,400 firefighters battled it on the ground and from the air.

Joey Street, 49, a tree trimmer who's lived in Mariposa for about 25 years, was among the people who were first evacuated to a Red Cross makeshift shelter set up at Mariposa Elementary School, which was later closed.

"(Firefighters) don't have control of it now, so they'd better be safe than sorry," Street told the Fresno Bee while waiting to be bused to an evacuation center in nearby Oakhurst.

Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday declared an emergency, bolstering the state's resources to battle the fire that he said has forced thousands of residents to flee and is expected to continue burning.

The cause of the blaze remains under investigation.

Smoke from the fire in Mariposa County drifted more than 150 miles away to Reno.

In a remote northeastern corner of Nevada, roughly 14 homes were damaged or destroyed by a wildfire that started Monday. Officials have lifted an evacuation advisory, allowing hundreds of people to return home and assess damage, authorities said.

Wind is driving the flames through invasive cheat grass  growing twice the norm, U.S. Bureau of Land Management spokesman Greg Deimel said.

"It is very thick, very dense," he said. "You get the winds and the density of the grass, the fire just goes."
A New York City family is outraged and seeking answers after being booted from a JetBlue plane at Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport over what the airline called "a verbal altercation."

Tamir Raanan, Mandy Ifrah and their three young children were headed home to New York on July 2 after attending a wedding in South Florida, according to a statement from family attorney David Templer on Wednesday. Ifrah said she got into a dispute with a nearby passenger on the plane when Ifrah's 1-year-old daughter kicked the back of the passenger's seat.

Ifrah said the matter was soon resolved with the passenger after exchanging a few words and apologizing, according to the statement.

JetBlue gave its own account of the incident in a statement Wednesday: "After a verbal altercation that included physical threats and profanities against a nearby customer, the aircraft door was reopened and our airports team politely asked the customers to step off to discuss the situation."

Cell phone video recorded by the family shows a JetBlue manager speaking to Raanan and Ifrah and asking them to exit the plane but not giving a reason why. The couple soon became angry and repeatedly asked the flight attendant why they were being asked to leave.

JetBlue said, "the customers refused repeated requests and our crewmembers deplaned the entire aircraft."

A second cell phone video shows the family at the gate repeatedly questioning the same JetBlue manager. Broward Sheriffs Office deputies were also at the gate to help mediate the situation. The officers can be heard asking the couple to calm down and to leave.

Ifrah said the airline told them they would be booked on a flight the next day. The family claimed they didnt get their checked luggage until a week later, that JetBlue never explained why they were removed from the flight, and that they were banned from all future flights.

JetBlue confirmed that the airline provided the family a refund but that "the customers were not removed due to the actions of their children."

"We are investigating whether the customers behavior warrants restrictions on JetBlue travel and we thank our crewmembers for their professional handling of this unfortunate incident," the statement said.

Its unclear what legal action the couple plans to take.
DUNCAN | The former Duncan Heights Residential Care Center property remains on the market.

The Hancock County Board of Supervisors after a closed session July 17 declined an offer from Brent and Teresa Powers to sell the 9.7-acre property for $110,000, Auditor Michelle Eisenman said.

Board Chairwoman Florence Sis Gremain said because discussion took place in closed session, she was unable to speak to why the board rejected the offer.

Itll stay up on the listings, and well continue to receive offers, she said.

Realtors seek Duncan Heights listing DUNCAN  Two North Iowa realty companies are seeking to represent Duncan Heights Residential

The board in March voted to extend the listing for the former home for people with mental disabilities with Schoneman Realtors for six months. The listing, which is currently priced at $250,000, expires in August.

Gremain said the supervisors will have to discuss the propertys future at an upcoming meeting.

The county has been trying to sell the property since September, which is when the last of its approximately 40 residents moved out in accordance with a 1999 Supreme Court ruling that people with disabilities have a right to live in the community.

Before Duncan Heights closed, the county leased it to a nonprofit organization that ran the center.
A trip to Disney World is a magical experience for any child. But for a pair of foster children from Pennsylvania, the visit was life changing.

Courtney and Tom Gilmour became foster parents to Janielle, 12, and Elijah, 10, three years ago. The couple planned a trip to Orlando in April with the two kids to attend the Star Wars Convention and visit Disneys Magic Kingdom.

Just before they left for Florida, the Gilmours learned that they had finally received an exact adoption date for the two foster children, Courtney told NBC.

They decided to surprise the siblings with the great news during their trip to Disney and enlisted the help of Mickey Mouse himself to help with the reveal.

Gilmour said she got in touch with Disney employees through their Twitter account, and a staffer quickly jumped in to help put the plan in motion.

In a video posted on Courtney Gilmours Facebook page, the two kids, clad in Mickey T-shirts, walk in for a meet and greet with Mickey Mouse thinking they are only getting autographs.

After taking some pictures, a Disney staffer tells the kids that Mickey has "something really special to share with you guys," before showing them a message board with the words they had so longed for: Your Adoption Day, May 24th, 2017.

The two kids burst into tears of joy as Mickey Mouse comforts them. Courtney and Tom join them, video shows, and the four hug as a family.

"I told you it was going to be magical," Courtney Gilmour tells them.

Gilmour, who lives in Portland, Pennsylvania, only recently posted the video online. The video has been viewed more than 1.4 million times.

"I shared the video because I want to continue to draw attention to foster care and adoption," she told NBC. "Being a former foster child myself and now a foster/adopt mother, it's very important we don't forget there's lots of kids who need help.
President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin a second time during the G-20 summit earlier this month, a White House official confirmed to NBC News.

Trump spoke to Putin at the end of a couples-only social dinner at the summit in Hamburg, Germany, the official said. The pull-aside conversation is considered less formal than an official bilateral meeting, which Trump and Putin also shared at the summit.

The White House did not previously disclose or offer a record of the meeting at the dinner, where Putin was seated next to first lady Melania Trump.

The New York Times described it as a private, hourlong conversation and the contents of the meeting remain unknown.
U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan will be in Massachusetts Thursday afternoon to visit a factory and discuss tax reform.

Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, will travel to Lawrence and tour the New Balance factory. He will also partake in a business leader roundtable.

The speaker plans to promote "the historic tax reform plan currently being developed by the House, Senate, and Trump administration," Ryan's office said in a press release.

Ryan will make his tax reform remarks at 3:15 p.m.
The mother of an Illinois inmate who died in custody says she's not buying what the prison or coroner are telling her and she wants answers and the truth to be told.

Morose and surrounded by her family and loved ones Tuesday, Janel Charles says she doesn't want another family to go though what hers is going through.

"I wanna fight for justice or my son," she said.

She says her son, 27-year-old Michael Jefferson was at Menard Maximum Security Correctional Facility on a parole violation.

Earlier this month, Jefferson, who suffers from bipolar disorder, was found unresponsive in his private cell.

"I'm so angry," Charles said.

The Randolph County coroner's office tells NBC 5 that the July 12 autopsy preliminary findings show no signs of trauma and is pending completion, awaiting toxicology results.

"I didn't understand how you didn't see any trauma," Charles said. "Is that how they come out of Menard looking when they die?"

The Department of Corrections says its investigating, adding in a statement: "It is the department's understanding that the wounds seen in the pictures of Mr. Jefferson's body are consistent with those incurred during an autopsy and the swelling a result of the body's rapid decomposition."

"I wanna know why my son died. He was under your care. You knew he was mentally ill. You say he was in a cell alone. No human could inflict that much pain on himself," Charles said.

The family has hired an attorney and looking to have a second autopsy done as soon as possible.
Flooding last week destroyed all the cash in the vault of a southeastern Wisconsin bank.

Fox River State Bank president Keith Polleck refused to disclose how much money was ruined, but said the Federal Reserve will have to replace every dollar.

Polleck told a local station that the vault at the bank in Burlington, 35 miles (55 kilometers) southwest of Milwaukee, is water resistant but not waterproof. As the Fox River rose above flood stage, water flooded the bank, rising up to 21 inches (53 centimeters) deep inside the facility.

Now that the river is back below flood stage, restoration crews have started to clean up. Carpets have been ripped out. Drywall is being replaced. The bank's documents are drying, though most are backed up electronically.
President Donald Trump announced his intention Tuesday to nominate former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman to be U.S. ambassador to Russia.

If confirmed, the former 2012 GOP presidential candidate would take over a high-profile post amid ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and potential contacts between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.

Huntsman has twice served as an ambassador. He was the nation's top diplomat to Singapore under President George H.W. Bush and then served in that role in China under President Barack Obama before returning to the U.S. to run for president.

Huntsman was also briefly under consideration to be Trump's secretary of state.

Still, the White House misspelled Huntsman's first name in its press release announcing Trump's intention, calling him "Governor John Huntsman Jr. of Utah" instead of Jon.

The White House made the announcement shortly after it confirmed that Trump had a previously undisclosed conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a dinner at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, earlier this month.

Huntsman is the son of a billionaire industrialist whose company Huntsman International LLC currently has a handful of businesses in Russia, including plants that make pigments and polyurethanes, the Salt Lake Tribune has reported.

Huntsman Jr. played a role in the family's early business dealings in the country shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the paper has said.

The former governor, a Mormon, had an up-and-down relationship with Trump during last year's campaign. He was slow to endorse any candidate for the Republican nomination though he did back Trump once he became the presumptive nominee. But Huntsman then called for Trump to drop out after the October release of a 2005 video in which Trump was captured on a hot microphone making lewd comments about women.

Huntsman said then that the "campaign cycle has been nothing but a race to the bottom" and called for Trump's running mate, then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, to top the GOP ticket.

Trump also went after Huntsman during his tenure as ambassador to Beijing. In a series of tweets in 2011 and 2012, the celebrity businessman called Huntsman a "lightweight" and "weak" and claimed that China "did a major number on us" during his tenure.

But Huntsman and Trump buried their differences during Trump's transition.
Three men accused of trafficking marijuana by airplane from California to Connecticut have been arrested on federal charges.

Deirdre Daly, the United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut, said in a statement that a federal grand jury in New Haven returned a three-count indictment today charging Robert Capelli, 31, of Milford; Scott Bodnar, 38, of Ansonia, and Donald Burns, 59, of Milford.

Federal officials said the Federal Aviation Administration began investigating Burns Piper single-engine aircraft, which was making regular flights between Stratford and northern California, via the southwest United States, in 2016.

Over a two-day span in June, Burns flew from northern California to Lubbock, Texas, then to Arkansas, West Virginia and Stratford, Connecticut, where he landed at Sikorsky Airport. When law enforcement searched the plane, they found around 400 kilograms of marijuana in vacuum-sealed packages in a duffle bag, federal officials said.

As the investigation continued, authorities said they determined the marijuana was intended for Cappelli and Bodnar and conducted a controlled delivery in Derby, where the two men were arrested.

The three are accused of trafficking more than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana from California to Connecticut between 2015 and June 2017.

They have all been charged with one count of conspiracy to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute 1,000 kilograms or more of marijuana.

They were also charged with one count of possession with intent to distribute 100 kilograms or more of marijuana on board an aircraft registered in the U.S., and one count of possession with intent to distribute 100 kilograms or more of marijuana.
Workers and leaders from Pratt and Whitney, one of the nations largest engine manufacturers, showed off the companys top-selling engine during a visit to Washington D.C. on Wednesday.

The Geared Turbofan Engine for commercial aircraft has been in service for a year, and after 200,000 flight hours, has proven to be remarkably popular in the competitive commercial aerospace sector.

Eight thousand engines are on order and theyre made all over the United States.

"Were really excited about this. And this is good for the entire nation because these engines are not only made here for American engines.. we sell them all around the world," said John Larson, who represents Connecticuts First Congressional District which includes Pratts East Hartford corporate headquarters.

Pratt and Whitney has already hired more than 4,500 employees over the past 18 months and reiterated its goal to hire about 25,000 more nationwide.

In Connecticut, Michael OConnor works as a Final Engine Assembly Inspector at the companys Middletown plant.

"This engine is going to be the long pole for the future employees at P&W and in our suppliers base," OConnor said.

Pratt and Whitney will invest more than $400 million in expansion in Connecticut which is all related to the production and assembly of the engine. For that reason, OConnor predicts a boom that will continue for years.

"Theres 8,000 plus orders. Its a long term assembly future for Connecticut and the country," O'Connor said.

In Middletown at the Middlesex Chamber of Commerce, they couldnt be happier with the relationship with Pratt and Whitney, with the groups president Larry McHugh describing it as part of the heartbeat of the region and the state.

"We are really really bullish on Pratt and Whitney," McHugh said. "They mean so much to our community, Middlesex County and the state of Connecticut. I really believe that they are the diamond in the state of Connecticut."
Hunkered down in sniper positions on the top floor of an abandoned building in the Syrian city of Raqqa, two Americans and a British volunteer face off Islamic State snipers on the other side of the front line. The trio, including two who were battle-hardened by experience in the French Foreign Legion and the war in Iraq, have made the war against ISIS in Syria their own.

They are among several U.S. and British volunteers in the decisive battle against the Islamic State group for Raqqa, the city in northeastern Syria that the militants declared the capital of their self-proclaimed caliphate in parts of Syria and neighboring Iraq.

The men joined U.S.-allied Syrian militias for different reasons  some motivated by testimonies of survivors of the unimaginable brutality that ISIS flaunted in areas under its control.

Others joined what they see as a noble quest for justice and a final battle with the "heart of darkness," in a belief that violence can only be met with violence.

Taylor Hudson, a 33-year old from Pasadena, compares the fight for Raqqa to the 1945 Battle of Berlin in World War II that was critical to ending the rule of Adolf Hitler.

"This is the Berlin of our times," said Hudson, who doubles as a platoon medic and a sniper in the battle against the militants. For him, ISIS extremists "represent everything that is wrong with humanity."

Syria's war, now in its seventh year, has attracted foreign fighters to all sides of the complicated conflict.

Islamic extremists from Europe, Asia and North Africa have boosted the ranks of the Islamic State group, as well as rival radical al Qaeda-linked groups. Shiite Iranian and Lebanese militias have sided with the Syrian government, deepening the sectarian nature of the conflict that has killed over 400,000 people and displaced over 11 million, half of Syria's pre-war population.

On the anti-ISIS side  though far less in numbers than the thousands of foreigners who swelled the ISIS ranks  most Western foreign volunteers have been drawn to the U.S.-allied Kurdish militia known as The People's Protection Units, or by their Kurdish initials as the YPG. The U.S. military has developed a close relationship with the YPG and its extension, the Syrian Democratic Forces, in the war against ISIS.

Some Western volunteers have died in battle  earlier in July the YPG announced that 28-year-old Robert Grodt, of Santa Cruz, California, and 29-year-old Nicholas Alan Warden, of Buffalo, died in the battle for Raqqa.

Since launching the push on Raqqa on June 6, the U.S.-backed forces have conquered a third of the city.

Hudson, who has been fighting in Syria for the past 13 months, said he was moved to tears by stories in the media of Iraqi Yazidi women who were enslaved by ISIS militants and looked for a way to help. A pharmacy student who learned combat medicine in the field, he said he had treated some 600 wounded ahead of the march onto Raqqa.

The presence of Western anti-ISIS volunteers in Syria has created something of a conundrum for their governments, which have often questioned them on terrorism charges.

"I am not a terrorist," said Macer Gifford, a 30-year former City broker in London, who came to Syria three years ago to volunteer first with the Kurdish militia. Now he is fighting with an Assyrian militia, also part of the U.S-backed forces battling ISIS militants.

"I am here defending the people of Syria against terrorists," he added.

Gifford has been questioned by both his British government and by the U.S government. At home, he has written and lectured about the complex situation in Syria, offering a first-hand experience of ISIS' evolving tactics.

He believes the militants can only be defeated by sheer force.

"The Islamic State (group) is actually an exceptional opponent," Gifford said. "We can't negotiate them away, we can't wish them away. The only way we can defeat them is with force of arms."

For Kevin Howard, a 28-year old former U.S. military contractor from California who fought in Iraq in 2006, the war against the Islamic State group is more personal.

A skilled sniper who prides himself in having killed 12 ISIS militants so far, Howard said he is doing it for the victims of the Bataclan theatre in France, where the sister of one of his best friends survived. The Nov. 13, 2015 attacks claimed by ISIS killed 130 people at Paris cafes, the national stadium and the Bataclan, where 90 died.

"This is a continuation of that fight, I think if you leave something unfinished, it will remain unfinished for a lifetime," he said, showing off his 1972 sniper rifle.

On his forehead and neck, he has tattooed the "Rien N'empeche"  or "Nothing Prevents" words from the song of the French Foreign Legion in which he served, and "life is pain."

"For me this is a chance to absolutely go to the heart of darkness and grab it and get rid of it," he added.

From his sniper position on Raqqa's front line, he peeked again through the rifle hole. For Howard, the orders to march deeper into the ISIS-held city can't come soon enough.
Revelations that a Russian developer's representative was the eighth attendee at a Trump Tower campaign meeting arranged by President Donald Trump's eldest son prompted a new round of castigation on Tuesday from Democrats. It also brought word that the special counsel investigating possible Trump campaign ties to Russia wants more information about the sit-down.

Officials from the office of special counsel Robert Mueller reached out over the weekend to a lawyer for Ike Kaveladze, who also goes by the name Irakly Kaveladze, attorney Scott Balber told The Associated Press. Kaveladze works for a Russian developer who once partnered with Trump to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow,

Balber's comments are the first public indication that Mueller is probing the June 2016 gathering in Trump's namesake New York City skyscraper.

In emails, Trump Jr. enthusiastically agreed to the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others after he was promised dirt on his father's rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton. He has since denied such material ever materialized.

Kaveladze works for Emin and Aras Agalarov and was there to represent them, according to Balber, who is serving as legal counsel for both Kavaladze and the Agalarovs. The father and son, who worked with Trump on the pageant in 2013, were named in the emails that promised damaging information on Clinton.

Balber cast Kaveladze as a minor player in the meeting, saying he had "no idea what the subject of the meeting was until an hour before" and doesn't remember saying anything other than his name during the discussion. Balber said Kaveladze believed he was attending the meeting to translate for Veselnitskaya, but the attorney brought her own interpreter.

Veselnitskaya said the meeting focused on U.S.-Russian adoption policies and a sanctions law. She has denied working for the Russian government.

Democratic lawmakers skeptical of that account repeated their concerns on Tuesday.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his panel wanted to talk to the meeting's attendees.

"I doubt if this individual who had a history of setting up thousands of fake accounts in Delaware was really there to talk about Russian adoptions," Warner said.

Warner appeared to be referring to a 2000 New York Times story that identified Kaveladze as running a company cited in a Government Accountability Office report for laundering $1.4 billion in wealthy foreigners' funds via U.S. banks using thousands of Delaware corporations.

Former Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, who ordered the GAO report, called Kaveladze the "poster child" of using hidden ownership of American shell corporations to launder money.

Balber disputed that characterization, noting that no criminal charges were filed in the case.

The meeting was also attended by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, music publicist Rob Goldstone and Rinat Akhmetshin, a prominent Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer. Trump Jr. scheduled the gathering after Goldstone, a British publicist for Emin Agalarov, said the elder Agalarov had met with a Russian prosecutor who offered to provide the campaign with damaging information about Clinton.

Balber denied such a meeting ever took place and said he didn't know why Goldstone made the assertion. He said Goldstone stopped working for Emin Agalarov in January for reasons unrelated to last year's meeting.

In an online profile, Kaveladze lists himself as a vice president of Russia-based Crocus Group, Aras Agalarov's firm, and says in a separate LinkedIn profile that he handled tax preparation for the company.

He holds a master's degree in business administration from the University of New Haven in Connecticut, according to those profiles. His most recent U.S. address appears to be in Huntington Beach, California, although several websites he maintains say he is based in Moscow. He didn't respond to multiple attempts to reach him through his online sites.

Kaveladze was named a vice president of the Crocus Group in 2004. He lists among his achievements the development of Russia's Far Eastern Federal University, a cluster of more than 70 college buildings near Vladivostok that Agalarov built, according to websites that contain profiles of him. In 2012, Russian President Vladimir Putin opened the facility and, a year later, gave Agalarov a national "Order of Honor."

The Times reported in 2000 that Kaveladze was born in the Soviet Republic of Georgia in 1960 and graduated from the Moscow Finance Academy  a degree that Ike Kaveladze also reports on his LinkedIn and internet pages. The newspaper reported he operated a firm called International Business Creations, which the GAO report said opened the bank accounts based on the Delaware shell companies.

Also Tuesday, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, said Mueller had approved Manafort and others to testify before the panel, though it was unclear if Manafort would agree to talk.

A person familiar with the discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to publicly discuss the ongoing investigations, said Manafort hasn't committed to appearing next week and hasn't decided which committees he'll meet with.

Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Jeff Horwitz in Washington, Desmond Butler in Baltimore, and Jake Pearson in New York contributed to this report.
MASON CITY | Henry Vierkant called it one of the best times of his life.

And for a man who is 102, that's quite a statement.

Vierkant, a retired farmer and now resident of Apple Valley Assisted Living in Clear Lake, was recently a patient at Mercy Medical Center-North Iowa.

During his hospital stay, he happened to mention his "bucket list" to one of his nurses, Allie Maxwell. He said he wanted to ride in a helicopter.

Maxwell decided to see if she could make that happen for him. She talked with hospital officials who arranged for him to take a ride on Mercy's Air Med helicopter.

Mercy coordinated with Apple Valley, and Vierkant got his wish Tuesday morning.

His flight took off at 9:30 a.m. and he was in the air about 20 minutes, enjoying seeing the sights of North Iowa from a special vantage point.

"It was wonderful," said Vierkant. He said he was surprised at all the lakes and streams he saw from the air.

Vierkant farmed for many years in the Meservey area and retired when he was in his 60s. Last year, in a belated 100th birthday present, he got a ride on a John Deere combine.

Man who farmed in North Iowa celebrates 102nd birthday with a combine ride CLEAR LAKE  Though Henry Vierkant is not yet 102, he got his present a little early this ye

This year, he was flying. He said he wasn't scared, but added, "I had a pretty good driver."

Today, Vierkant is back at Apple Valley, probably checking to see what's next on his bucket list.
A Chipotle restaurant in Sterling, Virginia, is back open after being closed for two days because people said they got sick after eating there.

Chipotle said Tuesday that it temporarily closed the restaurant, marking a possible setback in the chain's efforts to recover from past food scares.

The company said it became aware of a "small number" of reported illnesses. The reported symptoms are consistent with norovirus, for which symptoms include vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pain.

The restaurant was back open Wednesday morning.

The specific cause of the outbreak has not been found, the Loudoun County Health Department said in a statement Wednesday.

"We are encouraged that those affected are starting to feel better, and we are focused on preventing any new infections," the statement said.

The health department did not release information on how many people said they got sick.

Other Chipotle locations in the D.C. area remained open.

Beth Oteyza said she and her daughter got severely ill after they shared a salad with chicken from the Chipotle location in Sterling on Friday.

"We decided to call the ambulance because I couldn't even sit up," Oteyza said. "The ambulance took me to Leesburg hospital. My daughter came and my husband came, and as they were waiting for me in the ER, she started throwing up."

"They both diagnosed us with the same thing, which is gastroenteritis. And when we compared our notes, we determined that the one thing we had both eaten in common was the Chipotle carryout food," Oteyza continued.

On Tuesday afternoon, she said she still felt sick.

Customer Chris Lee said he also got sick after he ate at the restaurant on Friday. He also ordered a salad with chicken.

"About 7 o'clock on Saturday, really bad stomach pains. I just got better today," he said Tuesday afternoon.

The Denver-based company said norovirus does not come from its food supply and it is safe to eat at its restaurants.

"We take every report of illness seriously. In accordance with our established protocols, our team is working to ensure the safety of our customers and employees, including voluntarily closing the restaurant yesterday to conduct a complete sanitization," Jim Marsden, executive director for food safety, said in a statement issued Tuesday.

Norovirus is a highly contagious virus you can get from contaminated food, surfaces or people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Food workers can spread the virus through poor hygiene practices.



Chipotle said Tuesday morning that it planned to reopen the restaurant later that day after a "complete sanitization." A Loudoun County health inspector at the restaurant Tuesday afternoon said she believed the restaurant would not reopen Tuesday.

Chipotle has been working to bounce back from food scares that included an E. coli outbreak in the fall of 2015 and a norovirus case in Boston later that year. Among the changes the company has announced are tweaks to cooking methods and training for employees to prevent such cases.

In addition to reassuring customers of the safety measures it has taken, Chipotle had been giving away coupons for free burritos and stepping up marketing to win back customers. For the first three months of this year, sales were up 18 percent at established locations. That followed a 20 percent decline in 2016.

Norovirus is the leading cause of illness and outbreaks from contaminated food in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Infected employees are frequently the source of the outbreaks, the CDC says, often by touching foods such as raw fruits and vegetables with their bare hands before serving them.

Anyone who at at the Sterling location and fell ill is encouraged to call the county health department at 703-771-5411.

Chipotle Mexican Grill's shares fell more than 5 percent Tuesday, after Business Insider reported the closure in Virginia.

One Chipotle customer outside the restaurant on Tuesday said she'll return no matter what.

"I love Chipotle," she repeated and laughed.
What to Know Renee Hall will start her tenure as Chief of Police on Sept. 5, nearly a year after David O. Brown resigned.

Hall has served as Deputy Chief of the Detroit Police Department since May 2014.

Hall's father, who was also a Detroit officer, was shot and killed while working a case when she was only 6 months old.

The City of Dallas named U. Renee Hall the next chief of the Dallas Police Department Wednesday. Hall, the daughter of a murdered Detroit police officer, is the first woman to hold the position in the department's 136-year history.

"I am honored to be chosen to lead the Dallas Police Department at this critical time in its history, Hall said in a prepared statement. "I look forward to building on the successes of the past, preserving community trust and ensuring the safety of our officers and the entire Dallas community."

Her appointment means women of color now hold the top three law enforcement positions in Dallas County. Hall joins Sheriff Lupe Valdez, the first openly gay Latina to be elected Dallas County sheriff, and District Attorney Faith Johnson, the first black woman appointed to the position.



Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax admitted choosing the city's new police chief was a difficult choice. He said he was looking for fresh eyes, new perspective and someone who could connect with the community. On Wednesday, Broadnax announced Detroit's Renee Hall is the city's next chief.

Before coming to Dallas, Hall spent more than two decades with the Detroit Police Department, most recently as deputy chief. Under Hall's leadership in Michigan, the city of Detroit experienced a 40-year low in homicides and double-digit reductions in violent crime for three consecutive years.

She is expected to begin work in Dallas on Sept. 5.

Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax said Wednesday Hall is a proven leader with a stellar background and a passion for public service.

"My belief is Renee Hall will be a dynamic chief and do great things in this community," Broadnax said. "She's going to have a great impact, not just on the police department, but the entire city."

City officials said that while Hall was in Detroit she "developed and implemented comprehensive community policing and mentor programs, forged partnerships and established trust within minority communities while also building strong relationships between officers of all ranks and community stakeholders."

In an exclusive interview with NBC 5 Investigative reporter Scott Friedman, Hall said she will work to implement these same types of programs in Dallas. Among her objectives, she said, is having officers more involved in the community, doing service projects, feeding the homeless and working with teens, because "officers can't police a community they don't understand."

"What I've learned from being in the city of Detroit, as you know the city of Detroit went through bankruptcy, we went through pension reform, pay cuts for the officers  they even had holidays taken away, and morale was very low. We did have mass exodus, much like Dallas had, but when we got down to talking to the officers, officers don't necessarily leave just about money. It's not always monetary. They just need to have an environment where they have unwavering support from their leaders, creating an environment of excitement," Hall said.

Detroit's U. Renee Hall gives a statement after being named Dallas next chief of police, July 19, 2017.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings welcomed Hall to the city in a series of tweets where he said, "I knew we would get many great candidates, and we did because of the great opportunity. We needed an excellent leader and we got a proven one. I'm pleased with our choice."

Pleased to welcome our new @DallasPD Chief of Police U. Renee Hall. She will be the first female police chief in @CityOfDallas history. pic.twitter.com/n0qc9L3b6Y  Mike Rawlings (@Mike_Rawlings) July 19, 2017

"Weve done our homework on her. We were told that she was very strong in the community that even as a chief level officer in the city of Detroit she gets out and engages the community and actually gets involved in police incidents and maintains a presence in the community, said Thomas Glover, president of the Black Police Association of Greater Dallas.

The city launched a nationwide search for a new police chief last fall after Chief David O. Brown abruptly announced his retirement. Brown, who grew up in Dallas and attended UT, had led the department for six years, but had spent decades on the force. His departure came only a few months after five law enforcement officers were ambushed and gunned down in downtown Dallas near the end of a peaceful protest.

Since Brown's departure on Oct. 22, the department has been led by interim Chief of Police David Pughes who said early on that he was not seeking to fill the position permanently.

Congratulations to Chief Hall as she becomes the next Chief of Police for the Dallas Police Department. https://t.co/bjOfybnzDq  Chief David O. Brown (@ChiefDavidBrown) July 19, 2017

During an event earlier this month in Dallas, Hall joined seven other finalists at City Hall to meet with stakeholders and greet the public. She said then she recognized the city's need to heal after the ambush attack last summer and that she could help do that.

"This job is about skill. It's about the ability to lead, boost morale and fight crime," Hall said. "To bring a city that needs to heal together as a whole. I bring that."

Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax announces Renee Hall as the new chief of police.

Hall, who was promoted to deputy chief in Detroit in May 2014, was one of two black women among the eight finalists for the job. She edged out five local finalists, four from within the Dallas Police Department, including Dallas Assistant Chief of Police Gary Tittle; Dallas Deputy Chief Malik Aziz; Dallas Deputy Chief Rick Watson and Grand Prairie Chief of Police Steve Dye.

Both Johnson and Valdez released statements of support following Wednesday's announcement.

I want to welcome our new Chief of Police, Ulysha Renee Hall to Dallas ... its exciting that she will serve as the first female chief at the Dallas Police Department. I am proud that she is joining me and Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez on the growing list of females in top law enforcement positions in Dallas County," Johnson said. "There is much work to be done building bridges between law enforcement and our communities, and I am looking forward to all of us working together to ensure success." "The Sheriffs Department congratulates Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax on the selection of Dallas Polices new chief. It was a tough decision because any one of the seven candidates would have made an excellent chief. We welcome Chief U. Renee Hall and look forward to working with her. I am personally aware of the challenges that the first female chief will face. My staff and I stand ready to help in any way that we can," said Valdez.

Deputy Chief Renee Hall is the new Police Chief of Dallas! The Detroit Police Department congratulates Chief Hall, we will miss her. pic.twitter.com/qUlMar3JOY  Detroit Police Dept. (@detroitpolice) July 19, 2017

Hall has a bachelors degree in criminal justice from Grambling State University and Masters degrees in Security Administration and Intelligence Analysis from the University of Detroit Mercy. A graduate of the FBI National Academy, she also completed the Police Executive Leadership Institute and is a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, Hall was 6 months old when her 27-year-old father was gunned down while working a prostitution and gambling case. After failing to report in for 12 hours, his body was discovered only after a man reported finding a person had been shot in the chest. To date, his murder remains unsolved.

"I know what it's like to grow up without a parent who died at the hands of a violent crime. And I know what the citizens feel when their loved one has been taken away from them," she told NBC 5. "So it's important for me to make sure that those individual are brought to justice so there's closure in their lives. Because I never received that closure," she said.

She told The Dallas Morning News that closure was important to her family and that she believed she was finishing what her father started.



Dallas police union and city leaders react to the news of U. Renee Hall as the next Dallas police chief.

During a lighter moment with the media, Hall was asked Wednesday if she'd continue to support the Detroit Lions after moving to Dallas. She said though she was a lifelong Lions fan, she'd be wearing a Dallas Cowboys hat on Sundays -- except for when the Cowboys play the Lions. There will be no conflict this year unless the team's meet in the postseason -- the Cowboys and Lions are not scheduled to play in the 2017 season.

Hall is expected to begin work in Dallas on Sept. 5.

NBC 5's Ashleigh Barry, Ken Kalthoff, Scott Friedman and Eva Parks contributed to this report.
Dallas police say they've made an arrest in a sexual assault that may be related to another attack that took place last month.

The latest attack happened when police said the offender assaulted a woman at her home in the 2900 block of Kendale Drive at about 1:30 p.m. Tuesday. He then robbed her as he escaped.

During the assault, a witness knocked on the door and asked for the woman. The offender answered the door and said she was not there.

A short time later, the man fled from the home with some of the victim's property and was spotted by the same person who had knocked on the door, police said.

Police, who said Friday they'd made an arrest but released no other details, initially described the person of interest as a man in his 20s with black, spiky hair and tattoos on his forearm.



Police said the case has similarities to a June 26 attack in the 8600 block of Lazy Acres. The descriptions of the two attackers are also similar.

Police released a sketch of the person responsible for the June attack and ask anyone with information to contact detectives.
Authorities say a Texas man has been charged with gross abuse of a corpse in Ohio after his wife's body was found in the hatchback of her sport-utility vehicle.



The Mansfield News Journal reports a judge on Monday set a $1 million bond for 35-year-old Dequalan Harris, of Cedar Hill, Texas. He was arrested Saturday in Mansfield, Ohio, after Texas police asked officers to check on the missing woman's vehicle after its onboard system showed its location there.



Mansfield police then found Tamara Harris' body in the hatchback. Police used a stun gun on Dequalan Harris during his arrest.



Harris has pleaded not guilty. Online court records don't show whether he has an attorney.



A county children's services agency has taken custody of a child found with Harris.
Before the Mezcal Taco Lounge opens for business next month between the Dallas North Tollway and FC Dallas Toyota Stadium in Frisco, the owner will have to hire about 15 employees.

Some of those workers will likely be drawn from a roster of previous employees of a market in McKinney that Hector Meza owned until last year. But the rest, he said, will likely come from traditional Help Wanted ads. Unless, of course, a recent trend in Collin County holds true.

Everybody is talking about the same thing," Meza said. "I believe we [in the restaurant business] all agree that finding workers is difficult.

Meza said he has previously run restaurants in other cities in North Texas and in California, and that finding quality employees is always a difficult task. But complicating matters in Collin County is the rising cost of living.

This week, NBC DFW reported that Frisco appears to have the third highest average monthly rent  $1,323 per month  for an apartment in Dallas-Fort Worth. The difficulty becomes that employers in the service industry cannot typically afford to pay a wage that would allow their employees to actually live in fast-growing cities like Frisco and McKinney, Meza said.

A recent article from Community Impact quoted Tony Felker, the Frisco Chamber of Commerce president, as saying he has witnessed this phenomenon all around town.

You cant go to a restaurant anywhere in town without Hiring Now signs, Felker told that publication.
A 17-year-old woman whose body was found floating in a park lake Sunday has been identified as the stepdaughter of a Texas doctor who is currently facing charges of distributing a controlled substance.



The Dallas County Medical Examiner's Office has identified the victim as Mikayla Mitchell, whose home address is the same as 56-year-old Dr. Howard Gregg Diamond.

Diamond is accused of writing unnecessary prescriptions for powerful drugs that contributed to the overdose deaths of at least seven people over a four-year period. Diamond was arrested July 11 and is facing charges that include conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance.



While the medical examiner has not confirmed the woman's cause of death, police initially said she died from homicidal violence.



Mitchell's body was first reported to authorities at about 11:30 a.m. and was said to have been found in a creek. As the case developed, police updated the statement to say she was found in the lake at Blair Park along the 3000 block of Rochester Street.

A statement from the Sherman Independent School District said Mitchell was a high school student there until May 2016.

"We are saddened by the loss of any member of the Bearcat family," the district said. "Our thoughts, prayers, and support are with Mikayla's family during this difficult time."

Investigators have not named any suspects or revealed any motive in the woman's death.



Anyone with information on this offense is asked to call Detective David at 214-671-3627, or Crime Stoppers at 214-373-TIPS, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

NBC 5's Hannah Everman contributed to this report.
California lawmakers are considering a proposal to provide gender-neutral identification.

State Sen. Toni Atkins (D - 39th District) introduced a bill to streamline the process of providing a gender neutral or nonbinary option on the California driver license, birth certificate and other forms of state identification.

The proposal is passing through various committees of the legislature.

Oregon and the District of Columbia recently issued the gender neutral option on their drivers licenses.

Whats most valuable to us is the right to freedom liberty, justice for all. That may sound hokey but I think if you talk to the individuals this applies to they want to be part of, not separate from, part of and yet be able to be who they are," said Atkins.

a.t. furya who grew up in San Diego is only the fifth person in the country, according to the Transgender Law Center, to obtain court documents that grant nonbinary as their legally designated gender.

Nonbinary means the person does not designate male or female as a gender.

Agender for me or not having a gender has been spot on because then I dont feel like okay like, Im this, but Im not really. It fits. I dont know how else to explain it," said a.t.

NBC 7's Marianne Kushi digs deeper into the issue in this video report including opposition from State Sen. Pat Bates (R - 36th District) who says its a matter of security.
Travelers beware: San Diego's bustling San Ysidro border crossing with Tijuana, Mexico, will be closed to southbound cars for more than two days in September.

Closures are planned that will affect tens of thousands of people who use the worlds busiest border crossing, officials confirmed Monday.

The closure is due to the final phase of the $741 million expansion of the San Ysidro Port of Entry.

Starting Saturday, Sept. 23 at 3 a.m., all cars will be barred from entering Tijuana through San Ysidro until noon on Monday, Sept. 25.

Vehicle traffic into Mexico will be rerouted to the Otay Mesa Port of Entry.

Changes will include additional northbound lines, the renovation of the historic customs house, and a new pedestrian processing building on the east side of the junction.

"You can feel the excitement among the community about the possibility of a new pedestrian inspection building on the east side of the port, which could be available from the fall of 2018," said Jill Manzi, Project Manager with US General Services Administration. "It will include 22 inspection lines as well as a roofed road to protect pedestrians in line."

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Construction will not affect pedestrians or travelers crossing into the U.S. from Mexico.

"There's really great transit options on both sides of the border," said Anthony Kleppe, the Port of Entry Program Manager with the GSA. "The pedestrian facilities which are very friendly and really convenient will be fully open and people will be able to cross as pedestrians and take transit to the port."

From September 27 to November 12, San Ysidro POE will be reopened but with only three lanes active during this period. The gate usually has six lanes.

From November 13 to May 2019, only four lanes will be open at the San Ysidro checkpoint.
Tall grass from a deluge of winter rains is fueling wildfires throughout the Western U.S., damaging more than a dozen homes in Nevada and leaving Gov. Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency in California as thousands of residents outside of Yosemite National Park fled a 30-square-mile blaze, authorities said Tuesday.

Flames threaten more than 1,500 homes and buildings in mountain communities southwest of Yosemite, clearing out the small town of Mariposa, California. At least eight structures had been destroyed and one damaged by late Tuesday in what is being dubbed the Detwiler Fire, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) said.

Yosemite, though, remains open to the public.

The fire burning since Sunday also put at risk power lines providing electricity to the park, and it has closed roads traveled by tourists, officials said.

Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday declared an emergency, bolstering the state's resources to battle the fire that he said has forced thousands of residents to flee and is expected to continue burning.

The fire burned at least 30 square miles and was just 5 percent contained, Cal Fire officials said late Tuesday.

Record rain and snowfall in the mountains this winter was celebrated for bringing California's five-year drought to its knees, but it has turned into a challenge for firefighters battling flames feeding on dense vegetation, officials said.

"There's ample fuel and steep terrain,'' said California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokeswoman DeeDee Garcia. "It makes firefighting difficult.''

AP

Smoke from the fire in Mariposa County has drifted more than 150 miles away to Reno.

In a remote northeastern corner of Nevada, roughly 14 homes were damaged or destroyed by a wildfire that started Monday. Officials have lifted an evacuation advisory, allowing hundreds of people to return home and assess damage, authorities said.

In Nevada, wind is driving the flames through invasive cheat grass _ growing twice the norm, U.S. Bureau of Land Management spokesman Greg Deimel said.

"It is very thick, very dense,'' he said. "You get the winds and the density of the grass, the fire just goes.''

This summer's high temperatures follow a very wet winter that dumped more than 60 feet of snow at ski resorts in the Sierra west of Reno.

The California blaze near Lake McClure east of Modesto has charred more than 24 square miles. Officials report having it 5 percent contained.

It's burning near Highway 49, a historical route winding its way up California foothills of the western Sierra Nevada dotted with communities and landmarks that sprouted up during the state's Gold Rush.

To the south, crews have increased containment of a 29-square-mile blaze burning for a 10th day in the mountains of Santa Barbara County. It is 62 percent contained after destroying 16 homes.
MASON CITY | Two Mason City School Board incumbents plan to run again, while a third says he will be stepping down.

Janna Arndt, 37, and Jodi Draper, 46, this week announced their intentions to seek a second term on the board. Both said they still have unfinished goals to accomplish.

Arndt, who is a telehealth clinical technician for Veterans Affairs, was first elected to a four-year term in 2013. She is the board's current president.

Draper, who is a chief financial officer for County Social Services, was elected to a two-year term in 2015 after a previous board member resigned.

"I honestly feel the school is in a better place in the last year, year and a half," Arndt said via phone Tuesday. "I think (Dave) Versteeg is going to bring a lot of things to the school and the children that we've been looking for the last four years.

"I'm not finished and want to see that through," she said.

Arndt also said she thinks the district should pursue additional partnerships with NIACC to create more opportunities for students.

Draper said via phone Monday she's running because she has a "passion for our school district, families and their children to get what they said they'd get."

That includes creating environments conducive to learning, spending taxpayer dollars correctly, utilizing 1:1 technology and preparing kids for life after school, Draper said.

"I won't run long-term; I don't believe in that," she said. "My term was two years, so I didn't get to finishing implementing what I started."

Draper ran against incumbent Travis Hickey for the second ward City Council seat in 2013. That seat is now up for election again, but Draper says she's not interested at this point.

"I need to stick true to my word and finish what I started," she said.

School Board filings begin July 10 MASON CITY | Monday, July 10 is the first day for candidates to file nomination papers for p

Paul DeRoy on Tuesday said he isnt planning on filing for re-election this summer.

It takes a lot of time and a lot of commitment, he said via phone, noting juggling his time on the School Board and North Iowa Builders Exchange has been difficult. I dont want to be an absent board member. With all of the activities I have going on I dont feel like I can contribute the time that it deserves.

DeRoy, 51, who works for Andersen Windows, was appointed to the school board in May 2015 to replace former Board President Bob Thoms, who resigned. DeRoy was then elected to a two-year term in 2015.

I know there are other people interested in getting involved in the school board, so I felt comfortable not refiling, he said.

Longtime chiropractor Richard Haas of Haas Chiropractic Clinic has filed for one of the three seats in the Sept. 12 election.

Mason City chiropractor running for Mason City School Board MASON CITY | Longtime chiropractor Richard Haas will run for a seat on the Mason City School

School Board terms are elected on a rotating basis. The other board members -- Doug Campbell, Lorrie Lala, Brent Seaton and Scott Warren -- won't be up for re-election until 2019.
A Bay Area woman's wish for a peaceful death has been dashed, and now her family is taking legal action.

Judy Dale's family is filing a lawsuit against UCSF, claiming her doctors misled her about participating in California's End of Life Option Act.

Dale's family said she asked her doctors to help her end her life. The lawsuit claims the doctors didn't live up to the agreement, and she suffered as a result.

"Her mother had cancer, she had cancer, she knew what cancer looked like," attorney Kathryn Stebner said. "In the end, she made a strong decision; she didn't want her life to end that way."

Stebner said the 77-year-old Dale wanted to have control over her death. California's End of Life Option Act passed one month after she was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer. Dale spoke with her doctors at UCSF about it.

"During the entire time she is there, she is having conversations with health care providers, saying, 'I want to take advantage of this.' It's all over the records," Stebner said.

According to the lawsuit, a social worker told Dale in August her doctors did not plan to help her. Dale's family then scrambled to find a doctor who would. But before a new doctor could be found, Dale died. That was in September.

"She died the exact kind of death she didn't want," Stebner said.

UCSF's website says participation in the End of Life Option Act is voluntary for doctors. It also says if a patient's doctor refuses, a social worker will help that patient find a doctor who will participate.

In a statement Monday night, UCSF outilined its protocols, but said it can't comment on Dale's case.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, accuses UCSF of elder abuse and fraud. Dale's family wants the health care organization to change.

"This lawsuit says if you are not going allow it, tell people," Stebner said. "Super simple. For her it's too late."

Stebner says Dale's children don't want this to happen to another family.
A Florida man who identified himself as a drug dealer was arrested after he called authorities to report that a baggie of cocaine had been stolen from him, officials said.

David Blackmon, 32, is facing possession of cocaine, resisting arrest without violence and possession of drug paraphernalia charges after he called the Okaloosa County Sheriffs Office Sunday morning, authorities said.

Blackmon, of Fort Walton Beach, told a responding deputy that someone had entered his car and stolen $50 and a quarter-ounce of cocaine off the center console, sheriff's office officials said.

But when the deputy looked, he not only found cocaine in the car but also a crack pipe and a crack rock, officials said.
The South Miami City Commission approved Tuesday night a measure that requires new homes to be installed with solar panels. The measure passed in a 4-1 vote.

The new law requires owners of new homes larger than 1,100 square feet -- including single-family homes, townhouses and multi-story residential buildings -- to install solar panels. It also applies to owners who expand their homes by 75 percent or greater in size. The requirement takes effect in September.

South Miami becomes the fourth U.S. city that requires new homes to be installed with solar panels. San Francisco and two small cities in California have similar renewable energy building laws.

"We're concerned about the future of children and grandchildren," said Mayor Philip Stoddard. "So, the question becomes what can we do today to give our kids and our grandchildren an better future in the face of climate change and sea-level rise and we have to do everything we can." The mayor along with supporters of the law say it will help cut costs.

But, not everyone agrees. Commissioner Josh Liebman was the only "no" vote. He along with Family Businesses for Affordable Energy argue the measure it will increase costs for residents.

"This is going to raise the average cost of the home," said Commissioner Liebman.



The group says poor residents will be greatly affected by the ordinance. Other opponents say solar panels should be a personal choice, not a mandate.
What to Know Tamir Raanan, Mandy Ifrah and their three kids were headed home to New York on July 2 after attending a wedding in South Florida

The mom said she got into a dispute with a passenger when her 1-year-old daughter kicked the back of the traveler's seat; it escalated

JetBlue said in a statement the family was asked to get off the plane after a verbal altercation that included physical threats

A New York City couple and their three young children were booted off a JetBlue plane at Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport over what the airline called "a verbal altercation that included physical threats and profanities."

Tamir Raanan, Mandy Ifrah and their three kids were headed home to New York on July 2 after attending a wedding in South Florida, family attorney David Templer said in a statement Wednesday. Ifrah said she got into a dispute with a nearby passenger on the plane when Ifrah's 1-year-old daughter kicked the back of the passenger's seat.

Ifrah said the matter was soon resolved with the passenger, according to the attorney statement.

Cellphone video recorded by the family shows a JetBlue manager speaking to Raanan and Ifrah and asking them to exit the plane. The couple soon became angry and repeatedly asked the flight attendant why they were being asked to leave. Raanan and Ifrah did not agree to deplane the craft.

JetBlue then asked all the passengers to disembark, according to the family's statement.

A second cellphone video shows the family at the gate repeatedly questioning the same JetBlue manager. Broward Sheriffs Office deputies were also at the gate to help mediate the situation. The officers can be heard asking the couple to calm down and to leave.

Ifrah said the airline told them they would be booked on a flight the next day. The family claimed they didnt get their checked luggage until a week later, that JetBlue never explained why they were removed from the flight and that they were banned from all future flights.

JetBlue issued a statement Wednesday explaining why the family was asked to leave the plane.

"After a verbal altercation that included physical threats and profanities against a nearby customer, the aircraft door was reopened and our airports team politely asked the customers to step off to discuss the situation," JetBlue said in a statement. "The customers refused repeated requests and our crewmembers deplaned the entire aircraft. Law enforcement escorted them out of the gate area and we provided a refund."

"The customers were not removed due to the actions of their children. We are investigating whether the customers behavior warrants restrictions on JetBlue travel and we thank our crewmembers for their professional handling of this unfortunate incident," the statement continued.
The grandparents of a 3-year-old Queens boy who died at a Long Island hospital just days before Christmas last year have been arrested and charged in connection with his death, authorities said Wednesday morning.

Sita Parsad-Moore, 42, and Vincent Moore, 40, both of Queens, are both charged with first-degree reckless endangerment and acting in a manner injurious to a child less than 17, police said.



Romeo Lewis' death was ruled a homicide in June, police said.

It was back on July 28, 2016, that authorities responded to a 911 call at Long Island Jewish Hospital for a report of possible child abuse. They say they found Lewis with bruising and trauma all over his body.



Police learned family members had originally brought the boy to Jamaica Hospital, closer to their home, and that he had been transferred. It wasn't immediately clear if those family members were the suspects charged.

It's not clear what transpired in the months between the 911 call over the summer and the boy's death just three days before Christmas.

It wasn't immediately clear if the pair had an attorney who could comment on the allegations.
What to Know President Trump met with Russian President Putin a second time during the G-20 summit earlier this month, a White House official confirmed

Chipotle says it temporarily closed a restaurant in a Washington, D.C., suburb after reports that customers had become ill

An impending auction of Madonna's personal items, including a love letter from her ex-boyfriend, the late rapper Tupac, has been halted

Get the top headlines of the day in your morning briefing from NBC 4 New York, Monday through Friday. Sign up for our newsletter here.

Trump, Putin Had 2nd, Private Meeting at G-20 Summit

President Trump met with Russian President Putin a second time during the G-20 summit earlier this month, a White House official confirmed to NBC News. Trump spoke to Putin at the end of a couples-only social dinner at the summit in Hamburg, Germany, the official said. The pull-aside conversation is considered less formal than an official bilateral meeting, which Trump and Putin also shared at the summit. The White House did not previously disclose or offer a record of the meeting at the dinner, where Putin was seated next to first lady Melania Trump. The New York Times described it as a private, hourlong conversation and the contents of the meeting remain unknown.

Russian Developer's Staffer Also at Trump Tower Meeting

Revelations that a Russian developer's representative was the eighth attendee at a Trump Tower campaign meeting arranged by President Trump's eldest son prompted a new round of castigation from Democrats. It also brought word that the special counsel investigating possible Trump campaign ties to Russia wants more information about the sit-down. Officials from the office of special counsel Robert Mueller reached out over the weekend to a lawyer for Ike Kaveladze, who also goes by the name Irakly Kaveladze, attorney Scott Balber told The Associated Press. Kaveladze works for a Russian developer who once partnered with Trump to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. Balber's comments are the first public indication that Mueller is probing the June 2016 gathering in Trump's namesake New York City skyscraper. In emails, Trump Jr. enthusiastically agreed to the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others after he was promised dirt on his father's rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton. He has since denied such material ever materialized.

Justices Urged to Reject Trump Plea to Tighten Travel Ban

Opponents of President Trump's ban on refugees and visitors from six mostly Muslim countries are urging the Supreme Court to leave in place a federal judge's order that would relax restrictions on entry into the United States. The lead challengers say in a high court filing that the administration's argument in favor of a broader travel ban that excludes grandparents and grandchildren is "nonsense." Up to 24,000 refugees could be affected by the Supreme Court's decision. The administration is appealing a ruling from U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson that requires the government to allow in refugees formally working with a resettlement agency in the United States. Watson also vastly expanded the family relations that refugees and visitors can use to get into the country. Last month, the justices allowed the administration to partially reinstate a 90-day ban on visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and a 120-day ban on refugees from anywhere in the world.

Chipotle Restaurant Closed After Reports of Illness

Chipotle says it temporarily closed a restaurant in a Washington, D.C., suburb after reports that customers had become ill, marking a possible setback in the chain's efforts to recover from past food scares. The company says it shut down a location in Sterling, Virginia after becoming aware of a "small number" of reported illnesses. It says it is working with health authorities to understand the cause, but the reported symptoms are consistent with norovirus. Symptoms of norovirus include vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pain. Chipotle says it plans to reopen the restaurant after a "complete sanitization." A Loudoun County health inspector at the restaurant said she believed the restaurant would not reopen. Other Chipotle locations in the D.C. area remain open.

Auction of Madonna's Panties, Love Letter From Tupac Halted

An impending auction of pop star Madonna's personal items, including a love letter from her ex-boyfriend the late rapper Tupac Shakur, a pair of previously worn panties and a hairbrush containing her hair, has been halted by a judge. Manhattan state Supreme Court Judge Gerald Leibovitz ordered Gotta Have It! Collectibles to pull 22 items from its rock-and-roll-themed auction. The Material Girl had earlier sought an emergency court order saying she was "shocked to learn" of the planned online auction of the Tupac letter and had no idea it was no longer in her possession. Court papers said the Tupac letter was expected to fetch up to $400,000. Tupac, one of the best-selling rappers of all time, dated Madonna in the early 1990s and died of injuries suffered in a Las Vegas drive-by shooting in 1996. Madonna, behind such hit songs as "Like a Virgin" and "Vogue," has sold hundreds of millions of albums.

Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton Announce Final Performance Together

Two of country music's biggest stars, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, whose onstage chemistry spawned hit duets like "Islands in the Stream" and "Real Love," will be making their final performance together this year. Rogers, who is retiring from touring, says his final performance with Parton will be part of an all-star farewell show to be held at Nashville's Bridgestone Arena on Oct. 25. The two have been performing together for more than 30 years since "Islands in the Stream," written by the Bee Gees, became a pop crossover platinum hit in 1983. Other performers for the farewell show are Little Big Town, Flaming Lips, Idina Menzel, Elle King, Jamey Johnson and Alison Krauss. Rogers made the announcement at a press conference in Nashville.
Authorities say a 14-year-old Missouri girl remains missing after the arrest of the registered sex offender from New York who may have been with her.

An endangered person advisory was issued early Wednesday for Mersadiez Shiann Rohr, of Smithton, according to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The town is about 150 miles west of St. Louis, between Jefferson City and Kansas City.

Police say the girl and her family's 2004 GMC Yukon were discovered missing at about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday.

At the time, police say they thought the girl may have gone with the sex offender, identified as Matthew Fischer, according to the paper. Police updated their advisory Wednesday morning to say that the man was arrested in Pettis County, Missouri, but the Yukon remains missing.



Details on Fischer's criminal history weren't immediately available.
What to Know Signal problems caused delays for subway riders Thursday morning, and PATH had signal issues as well

It was the fourth morning in a row of widespread disruptions to multiple transit systems around the region

Most of the rail disruptions this month were unrelated to the repair work at New York Penn Station

It turns out that Penn Station is the least of commuters' problems in this transit Summer of Hell.

Thursday brought suspensions and delays on the PATH and Newark AirTrain, more cancellations on NJ Transit due to manpower issues, ticketing problems and a rash of subway delays due to sick customers and signal failures.



After earlier delays, PATH service was suspended around 11:15 a.m. between World Trade Center and Newark in both directions because of a signal problem, authorities said. Service had resumed, again with delays, after an hour.

It was the fourth day in a row that the region's transit system saw widespread problems, though none of them had anything to do with the long-feared rehab work at New York Penn.

NJ Transit's MyTix app, which lets people pay their fares on their phones, went down Thursday morning. The rail service urged people to tell their conductors the app was down, but social media was still full of outraged customers who were forced to pay a penalty cash fare nonetheless.

In Newark, 70 people were pulled off an AirTrain after power issues. There were no injuries, but service was suspended and passengers had to take buses instead. The airport tweeted service had been partially restored shortly after 11 a.m., but said customers should use buses "until we are fully operational."

In Manhattan the B and C subway lines had delays due to signal problems at 81st Street, while in Queens a sick customer at Kew Gardens caused problems on the F line.

NJ Transit cancelled one train early Thursday due to an engineer shortage; that same issue caused nearly 30 cancellations the last three days.

'EVERYBODY'S SWEATING, CAN'T BREATHE'

Thursday morning's rush-hour delays followed a rash of problems during Wednesday night's commute home. In both cases a heat wave only made the misery that much worse -- one subway rider waiting for the train in Queens even fell onto the tracks after he was overcome by heat. He's expected to be OK.

Straphangers were confronted with signal and power problems on six lines in Manhattan and Brooklyn on Wednesday evening as Metro-North riders were stuck on a disabled train.

In Manhattan, signal problems at 72nd Street caused service changes for 2 and 3 trains. Regular service resumed by 5:15 p.m. In Brooklyn, loss of Con Edison power caused signal problems at 59th Street, leading to service changes to D, N and R trains. Regular service resumed by 5:20 p.m.

These 15 Tri-State Area Restaurants Have Some of the Best Hot Dogs in America, New Ranking Says

Photos posted to Twitter at the start of the evening rush showed packed crowds at the Barclays Center subway station, which serves the D, N and R lines.

Some commuters told News 4 New York that they had to wait for N and R trains at the 59th Street station in Manhattan for more than an hour and a half. Danny Sierra said he had to get off a train and go upstairs to get some fresh air.

"It was like an hour wait on the train, it's crazy," Sierra said. "Everybody's sweating, can't breathe, got a diabetic, got all type of people on the train. There's something wrong with the MTA."

[NATL] Top News Photos: Pope Visits Japan, and More

Meanwhile, Hudson Line commuters were stuck on a Metro-North train for nearly 90 minutes shortly before 4 p.m. after the train they were on became disabled at 101st Street.

Metro-North spokesman Aaron Donovan said it's unclear why the train was unable to receive power. The train was towed to 125th Street, where the passengers disembarked shortly after 5 p.m. Donovan said lights and air conditioning were on in the train the entire time.

@MTA the D N and R platform at Barclays was so dangerous! Why are there constant accidents, signal problems and delays all of a sudden?? pic.twitter.com/NLCTyNMLsh  kiera (@fvlkinaround) July 19, 2017

MORNING SNARLED TOO

Earlier on Wednesday, more sporadic disruptions struck NJ Transit and the Long Island Rail Road, the third straight day of problems moving commuters around the region.

NJ Transit cancelled at least 19 buses Wednesday morning due to what it described on its bus Twitter feed as an "operational issue," which a spokeswoman explained was the reallocation of buses to accommodate new summer schedules.

NJT also suspended the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail between 2nd Street and Port Imperial Wednesday due to a reported chemical leak in Hoboken. The multibillion-dollar line is a key artery bringing New Jersey commuters to and from Hoboken. Service was restored after about 70 minutes.

These 3 Tri-State Cities Have Some of the Worst Traffic in the Nation, New Study Says

Separate from all of those issues, a mechanical problem forced the cancellation of a rush-hour train out of Newark Penn Station Wednesday morning.

A frustrated passenger is captured screaming at a LIRR worker inside a booth at Jamaica Station Tuesday evening. Riders caught in the Penn Station delays had just disembarked at Jamaica to hear a last-call announcement for an Oyster Bay train. They ran to the platform and rushed to catch the train only to have the doors close on them ...

But it wasn't just New Jersey; the LIRR continued to have its own difficulties early Wednesday. At least three trains were late due to single tracking, mechanical issues or late-arriving connections, and a fourth was cancelled.

That followed Tuesday's twin crises; in the morning an empty train derailed and shut down Long Beach branch service, and in the evening, signal problems near Jamaica snarled rush hour.
Lawyers for New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez are trying again to have political corruption charges against him thrown out, citing a 2016 Supreme Court decision and recent rulings they say narrow the scope of the federal bribery statute.

In a court filing Tuesday, they point to an appeals court ruling last week that reversed the corruption conviction of former New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan found sufficient evidence but flawed jury instructions in light of last year's Supreme Court ruling that reversed the conviction against former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and narrowed the definition of what it takes to convict a public official. Prosecutors have vowed to retry Silver, a Democrat.

Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, was indicted in 2015 on charges he took official action on behalf of a longtime friend who had given him gifts and campaign donations, including flights aboard a luxury jet and a Paris vacation.

The friend, Florida eye doctor Salomon Melgen, was convicted in April in Florida on multiple counts of Medicare fraud that are separate from the counts he faces in the Menendez indictment.

The indictment alleges Menendez used his official influence to set up meetings with government officials aimed at helping Melgen in the Medicare dispute and with a business interest involving port security in the Dominican Republic.

Menendez has contended that he was seeking to influence future policy instead of advocating on behalf of his friend and that the government is attempting to use the timing of campaign donations to create a quid pro quo between him and Melgen that Menendez claims never existed.

The Supreme Court in March declined to hear his appeal of his corruption indictment, setting the stage for a federal trial in the fall.

In the McDonnell case, the Supreme Court aside the Republican's bribery conviction, writing that actions he took that benefited a businessman who gave him luxury gifts might have been distasteful but did constitute illegal conduct.
AUSTIN, Texas, July 18, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Jones Energy, Inc. (NYSE:JONE) (Jones Energy or the Company) today announced initial production rates for the Companys Merge wells, second quarter production, and has scheduled a conference call with management to discuss mid-year updates. The conference call is scheduled for tomorrow, July 19, 2017 at 10:30 a.m. ET.



Highlights:

BOMHOFF #2, JONEs first Meramec well, achieves top decile of Merge wells, reaching a peak rate of 650 Bo/d and 6,306 Mcf/d.

BOMHOFF #1, JONEs first Woodford Generation 3 frac, shows 3x uplift from Generation 2 frac average, achieves peak rate of 278 Bo/d and 3,574 Mcf/d.

Second Merge rig deployed as planned July 1, 2017.

Arkoma divestiture is anticipated to close on August 1, 2017.

Second quarter production of approximately 23,800 Boe/d, exceeding high end of guidance.

Jonny Jones, the Companys Founder, Chairman and CEO said, We now believe the Meramec to be a proven resource across our Merge acreage and I am proud to announce outstanding well results today. Our second rig was added on-schedule starting July 1st and is currently drilling our eighth well in the program while our other rig is drilling our ninth well in the Merge. I look forward to discussing additional details of our initial results on the management call tomorrow.

2017 Program Update

Eastern Anadarko (Merge)

Initial production results from the Companys Merge program include Jones Energys first Meramec well, the BOMHOFF 20-12-7 2H, an Upper Meramec target drilled to a 4,428 lateral length, reached a peak rate of 650 Bo/d and 6,306 Mcf/d. This well has achieved the top decile of wells drilled to-date in the Merge. Jones Energys first Woodford Generation 3 frac, the BOMHOFF 20-12-7 1H, was drilled to a 4,366 lateral length from the same pad, and achieved a peak rate of 278 Bo/d and 3,574 Mcf/d. The Companys second Meramec well, the GARRETT 4-11-6 1H, an Upper Meramec target was drilled to a 4,697 lateral length and has achieved rates to-date of 672 Bo/d and 1,580 Mcf/d with rates still increasing. The GARRETT has already exceeded oil rates of the best-in-class BOMHOFF #2 well.

Jones Energy deployed its second rig in the Merge as planned on July 1st and continues to anticipate adding a third rig by year-end. The Company has drilled and completed its first six wells (four Woodford, two Meramec) which are on production, and has its seventh well (Meramec) undergoing completions. One of the rigs is currently drilling the two-well HARDESTY pad, while the other rig is drilling the Companys first three-well pad, the ROSEWOOD, that includes two stacked Meramec wells and a Woodford well. The ROSEWOOD pad is located adjacent to the BOMHOFF pad.

Western Anadarko (Cleveland)

Jones Energy is running three rigs in the Western Anadarko, two which are focused on core Cleveland drilling and the third which is dedicated to long lateral drilling in Hutchinson County, TX. The Company plans to maintain the existing rig schedule, but acknowledges that it has a high degree of flexibility in the 2017 program and could take swift action to reallocate or reduce capital, if warranted.

Production Update

Jones Energy expects second quarter production of approximately 23.8 MBoe/d, or 2.17 MMBoe, which is approximately 10% above the top end of prior guidance of 20.7  21.7 MBoe/d for the quarter. The Company believes it remains on pace to achieve its full year 2017 production guidance of 20,700 to 23,000 Boe/d.

Non-Core Asset Sales

Jones Energy expects the previously announced divestiture of its Arkoma Basin properties to close on August 1, 2017. As previously announced, the Company expects a sale price of $65 million cash, subject to closing adjustments, plus up to $2.5 million contingent payment based on improving natural gas prices. To-date in 2017, the Company has sold an additional $2.5 million of non-core assets, bringing total non-core divestitures, including the Arkoma Basin properties but excluding the contingent payment, to $67.5 million. Jones Energy continues to market additional non-core assets.

Conference Call Details

Jones Energy will host a conference call for investors and analysts to discuss its mid-year update with management tomorrow, July 19, 2017 at 10:30 a.m. ET (9:30 a.m. CT). The conference call can be accessed via webcast through the Investor Relations section of Jones Energys website, www.jonesenergy.com, or by dialing (833) 231-8272 (for domestic U.S.) or (647) 689-4117 (International) and entering the conference code 58204155.

An updated presentation will be posted to the Investor Relations section of the Companys website prior to the call.

If you are not able to participate in the conference call, the webcast replay and a downloadable audio file will be available shortly following the call through the Investor Relations section of the Companys website, www.jonesenergy.com.

About Jones Energy

Jones Energy, Inc. is an independent oil and natural gas company engaged in the development and acquisition of oil and natural gas properties in the Anadarko basin of Texas and Oklahoma. Additional information about Jones Energy may be found on the Companys website at: www.jonesenergy.com.

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. All statements, other than statements of historical facts, included in this press release that address activities, events or developments that the Company expects, believes or anticipates will or may occur in the future are forward-looking statements. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, forward-looking statements contained in this press release specifically include the expected timing of the closing of the Arkoma Basin divestiture, the proceeds received therefrom, the Companys continued marketing of non-core assets, anticipated production for the second quarter and full-year 2017, the deployment of rigs, and the Companys future operating plans. These statements are based on certain assumptions made by the Company based on managements experience and perception of historical trends, current economic and market conditions, anticipated future developments and other factors believed to be appropriate. Such statements are subject to a number of assumptions, risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the control of the Company, which may cause actual results to differ materially from those implied or expressed by the forward-looking statements.

Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which such statement is made and the Company undertakes no obligation to correct or update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law.
A small plane landed on Sunrise Highway in the Shirley area Wednesday afternoon.

An FAA spokesman confirmed a Cessna C206 made "a precautionary landing" on the westbound lanes at Exit 57 around 1 p.m. A friend of the pilot told News 4 on the scene that there was some sort of engine trouble.

The plane had taken off from Brookhaven Airport in Shirley when the pilot landed between a large road sign and an overpass, with just a few hundred feet of space to work with, according to a police official on the scene.

"It was pretty good piloting under the circumstances," said Suffolk County Police Chief Stuart Cameron. "If he was having mechanical issues, he probably didn't have full control of the plane, so to be able to do that is good."

"He had a very short distance to put the plane down on the pavement, and he avoided obstacles across the roadway that the plane could potentially hit and no one got hurt," he added.

The pilot was the only person aboard, and there were no injuries.

Photos on social media showed people gawking at the single-propeller plane on the side of the highway.

Traffic was backed up as authorities responded. Crews have towed the plane, which was heading to Eagles Nest Airport in West Creek, New Jersey, back to Brookhaven Airport.

The pilot's son told News 4 on the scene that his father has been flying for more than 20 years and was skilled enough to make the landing without any cars getting damaged or people getting hurt.

The landing was about 45 miles east of another unusual Long Island aircraft incident that occurred earlier Wednesday, when a helicopter chartered by Vince McMahon's only son landed in the water off Gilgo Beach.
David Johns sits down with Nessa to talk about his mission to end LGBTQ bias and stigma. He says the first step is to have conversations, and the second step is to be an accomplice to the LGBTQ community, not an ally. Johns also emphasizes the importance of preventing HIV through medications, like PrEP and PEP.
UPDATE: Sources say DiNardo claims to have killed a woman and man in Philadelphia.

A suspect in the murders of four young men in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, made claims that he had killed other people prior to the most recent homicides, according to NBC10 sources.

Now, Philadelphia police plan to investigate his claims.



Cosmo DiNardo, 20, told police he killed others years before he and his cousin were charged in a grisly crime spree that ended with police unearthing the victims' bodies from two deep pits on the DiNardo family's sprawling Bucks County farm, sources said.

However, the sources have not confirmed the validity and time frame of the alleged admission.

"Given what he was already been accused of its certainly a possibility we would be remiss if we didn't investigate further," Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross said Tuesday morning.

Ross noted that Philadelphia homicide detectives have yet to talk to DiNardo and that everything is speculative at this point.

"In order for us to lend any credence to it we would have to talk to him directly," Ross said. "When you're dealing with someone who is pathological like that you don't know where he is coming from."

DiNardos attorneys refused to talk about the case or their clients alleged claim of prior murders when approached by NBC10s Deanna Durante on Monday.

Last week, DiNardo's attorneys told reporters he confessed to murdering Jimi Taro Patrick, 19; Dean Finocchiaro, 19; Mark Sturgis, 22, and 21-year-old Tom Meo.

Police found the four men at the 90-acre Solebury Township farm after a grueling, five-day search in sweltering heat and pelting rain. The confession was in exchange for being spared the death penalty, according to DiNardos attorney.

DiNardos brushes with the law began in his early teenage years. His first encounter with the Bensalem Police Department was around age 14. Over the next six years, he had more than 30 run-ins with its officers, department director Frederick Harran said, although court filings reflect only the minor infractions and traffic stops that came after age 18.

Prior to the Bucks County murders, DiNardos contacts with police resulted in one arrest; a gun charge that was later withdrawn. Prosecutors say DiNardo is schizophrenic and was not allowed to possess a gun. Officials also say a family member had DiNardo involuntarily committed to a mental institution, though the details of his institutionalization remain unclear.

Despite frequent interactions with police, DiNardo still managed to sell guns and marijuana in the area, according to a source familiar with DiNardo's confession. A police affidavit confirmed the source's story  DiNardo allegedly lured each of the victims to his family's 90-acre Solebury Township farm under the guise of marijuana deals.

Patrick, his first victim, was set to buy $8,000-worth of marijuana but arrived with only $800, DiNardo told police, so he brought the Loyola University student to a remote part of the farm and shot him with a .22 caliber rifle. He buried Patrick in a hole he dug with a backhoe.

DiNardo then allegedly enlisted his cousin, Sean Kratz, to help him rob Finocchiaro, Sturgis and Meo. The three victims were shot, placed with a backhoe into an oil tank that had been converted into a cooker, which DiNardo called a "pig roaster," and then lit on fire, according to the affidavit. He buried the drum deep underground on his family's farm.

Court records show Kratz was previously arrested on two separate burglary charges in Philadelphia for thefts in June and December of last year where he reportedly stole $1,000 in tools and $450 worth of jewelry.

A week before the second theft arrest, Kratz was picked up for shoplifting $200 worth of clothing at a Macy's near Philadelphia. Police say Kratz had been using pliers to cut off security tags. He pleaded guilty in June to retail theft after more serious charges were withdrawn.

With the Philadelphia cases still pending in January, court records show Kratz skipped bail and went to Illinois. That prompted a judge to issue a bench warrant for his arrest. Out on bail again, a prosecutor said Friday, Kratz became a killer.

Kratz, who said he works at a tiling company, did not have a lawyer with him at his arraignment. Clad in a blue jumpsuit and flanked by detectives, he told a judge that he has trouble walking because he'd been shot three months ago. Kratz's mother, Vanessa, declined to comment.

At a news conference Friday announcing that police had recovered all four previously missing bodies, a reporter asked Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub why DiNardo felt the need to kill the young men.

"I'm not really sure we could ever answer that question," he said.

Law enforcement sources told NBC10 multiple agencies continue to get calls about DiNardo and Kratz, with social media fueling their rumored involvement in other crimes. However, sources say that so far there is no indication that those rumors are valid.

Weintraub did not have any further comments on the case Monday but said any lead or report his office receives will be tracked down and if anyone has info of suspected crimes from the suspects, they will look into it.

Both DiNardo and Kratz are being held in the Bucks County Jail.

Sturgis' family has retained personal injury law firm Ross Feller Casey, LLP to represent them since DiNardo possibly used family-owned weapons to commit the murders, the Philadelphia-based law firm said.

"We will likely never make sense of this ghastly murder spree, but we will not rest until we understand every detail, every nuance surrounding this horrific crime," Sturgis family attorney Robert Ross said. "The families of these young men deserve nothing less."

No lawsuit was immediately filed against DiNardo or his family, which has various real estate holdings.

The families of Finocchiaro, Meo, Patrick and Sturgis have announced funeral plans for family and friends.

Funeral services for Finocchiaro will be held Saturday in Levittown followed by private burial. His family asked that donation's in his name be made to NOVA, 2320 York Road, Suite B-1, Jamison, PA 18929.



Meo's funeral will be held Thursday in Northeast Philadelphia following a viewing Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

Funeral services for Patrick will be held Friday in Newtown followed by private interment. His family asked that donations in Patrick's name be made to Boys Town, 14100 Crawford St., Boys Town, NE 68010 or Nami-Bucks Chapter, 600 Louis Dr., Suite 106 Warminster, PA 18974.

Yellow ribbons now line the Newtown street where Patrick lived with his grandparents. On Tuesday night at 7:30, Holy Ghost Prep planned a prayer service in the 2016 graduate's memory.



A memorial gathering for Sturgis will be held Thursday night in Bensalem.
A deadly synthetic opioid developed as an elephant tranquilizer has killed a Chester County person, authorities said Wednesday, the second week in a row that it has been confirmed as the cause of death in a southeast Pennsylvania overdose.

A Phoenixville resident died July 4 from what initially appeared to be a heroin overdose, but toxicology tests performed during the autopsy revealed that carfentanil was in the mans blood. The Chester County Coroner has classified the 34-year-olds death as caused by acute carfentanil toxicity.

The drug known by users and dealers as gray death has arrived in the region, with two other fatalities confirmed last week in Montgomery County. Carfentanil, which was anticipated by local law enforcement for months, not only adds to fears of increased overdose deaths. It also is causing medics and police to change the way they respond to reports of drug-induced medical emergencies.

The drug began killing people in Ohio during the last few years, and more recently began popping up in western and central Pennsylvania, authorities have said.

The drug is hundreds of times stronger than heroin and fentanyl, a chemically similar synthetic drug that drug dealers occasionally mix with heroin to increase potency. Synthetics have complicated Americas already overwhelming opioid epidemic by enticing users with the allure of supposed stronger effects, but with much deadlier potential.

As matter of reference it has been determined that it would only take 23 milligrams of fentanyl to induce respiratory depression, arrest and possibly death. When visually compared, 2 to 3 milligrams of fentanyl is about the same as five to seven individual grains of table salt, the Drug Enforcement Administration has told local law enforcement.

Carfentanil, developed as a tranquilizer for large mammals, is even stronger than fentanyl, which is prescribed to patients with very severe pain levels.

The slightest amount ingested can be fatal and a recent scare for first responders in Bucks County has led a local ambulance squad to purchase additional protective gear.

Two paramedics, an emergency medical technician and a firefighter fell seriously ill after treating a possible overdose in Newtown Township.

All four began to show signs and symptoms of exposure to an unknown substance, possibly believed to be carfentanil or another substance mixed with heroin. They were treated at St. Mary Medical Center.

The July 7 scare caused the Newtown Ambulance Squad to look at its safety procedures. The organization decided to purchase new equipment to protect against accidentally ingesting narcotics while treating patients.

They also revived a debate among the medical community over whether an extremely deadly opioid like carfentanil can be ingested through the skin.

While there is much disagreement within the medical community that transdermal contact can cause exposure to first responders, there have been a growing number of reports nationwide that lead us to believe that our personnel on this incident experienced such an exposure, according to a statement from the squad.

In Chester County, the district attorney similarly warned Wednesday that carfentanil poses a significant danger to first responders because of the high risk of accidental ingestion and its potency in almost indistinguishable doses.

Think of it as a grain of salt, District Attorney Thomas Hogan said. That is the amount carfentanil that can kill a drug user looking for a new high or a police officer unlucky enough to accidentally ingest the drug.

A spokesman for Newtown Ambulance Squad said the new protective gear is a Hazmat-grade arm sleeve made of a material called Tyvek.

The gear has not yet arrived, spokesman Evan Resnikoff said Thursday.

Its on back order because this stuff is so popular now, he said.

Tiny Amount of Fentanyl Can Be Lethal
On the heels of a similar action filed by the city of Philadelphia, the tiny Delaware County borough of Sharon Hill has filed a lawsuit against Wells Fargo & Co., accusing the bank of engaging in discriminatory lending practices that have targeted minority borrowers.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia on June 23, claims Wells Fargo has a "longstanding, unbroken policy and practice of intentionally steering minority borrowers in Sharon Hill into 'discriminatory mortgage loans (defined herein as loans that have higher costs and risk features than more favorable and less expensive loans issued to similarly situated white borrowers) and engaging in facially neutral business policies and practices that created and artificial, arbitrary and unnecessary barrier to fair housing opportunities for minority home purchasers and owners."

In addition, it says Wells Fargo maintained a policy of refusing to extend credit to minority borrowers seeking to refinance the more expensive loans they previously received when such credit was extended to white borrowers.

The lawsuit, which claims the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was violated, seeks relief and damages caused by: the origination of discriminatory mortgage loans to minority borrowers that are the result of unlawful practices by Wells Fargo; the banks subsequent refusal to extend credit to minority borrowers seeking to refinance previously issued loans deemed discriminatory.

"These illegal practices suppressed property tax values in the borough, a minority and low-income community, reduced the borough and supporting school districts tax revenues and increased the cost of providing municipal services such as police fire fighting and code enforcement, as well as the housing counseling and other housing-related services that the borough provides and/or funds," the complaint said.

San Francisco-based Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC), the Philadelphia regions largest bank by deposits, released almost the identical statement it did in May when Philadelphia made similar claims of discriminatory lending. The statement called Sharon Hills accusations "unsubstantiated" and said it does not reflect how it operates in the borough or elsewhere.

To read the full story, click here.

For more business news visit Philadelphia Business Journal
The wife of a Princeton graduate student sentenced to 10 years behind bars in Iran called on authorities there to release him Tuesday, saying the Chinese-American man has been "unjustly imprisoned."

Xiyue Wang was arrested nearly a year ago but his confinement only became known Sunday when Iran's judiciary announced his sentence, accusing him of "infiltrating" the country and sending confidential material abroad.

The 37-year-old, described by Iranian authorities as holding Chinese and American citizenship, was in Iran doing research for his doctorate in late 19th and early 20th century Eurasian history when he was detained.

In her first comments on his case, Wang's wife Hua Qu described her husband as "one of the kindest, most thoughtful, and most loving men I have ever known." She said the couple has a 4-year-old son.

"Our son has missed his father for more than a year of his young life, as my husband has been unjustly imprisoned for espionage that I know he did not and never would commit," she said in a statement distributed by Princeton. "We fervently hope that the Iranian authorities will release him soon so that he can return home to his young family."

Princeton has been working quietly with Wang's family, the U.S. government, lawyers and others to secure his release, and hopes he will be released on appeal.

In an email released to staff and obtained by The Associated Press, university President Chris Eisgruber said Princeton has been working on a daily basis to try to free Wang and support his family.

The university and his family had chosen not to publicize Wang's arrest because U.S. government officials and other advisers had said that doing so might harm Wang's interests, Eisgruber said.

Wang was arrested on Aug. 8, 2016 and is accused of passing confidential information about Iran to the U.S. State Department, Princeton's Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, the Harvard Kennedy School and the British Institute of Persian Studies, according to Mizan Online, a website linked to Iran's judiciary.

It alleged he scanned some 4,500 pages of digital documents, paid thousands of dollars to access archives he needed and sought access to confidential areas of Tehran libraries.

His advising professor, Stephen Kotkin, said Wang planned to continue his research in Russia after Iran. His work in Iran involved scanning large numbers of documents that he intended to use while preparing his dissertation after he had left the country  something that Kotkin described as "normal, standard scholarly practice."

In addition to Mandarin and English, Wang was able to communicate in Persian, Turkish and Pashto, and had worked as a Pashto translator in Afghanistan, Kotkin said. It was his first trip to Iran.

The U.S. State Department has not provided details on the case but called on Tehran to immediately release "all U.S. citizens unjustly detained in Iran."
The City of Imperial Beach and two other California cities is suing dozens of the world's biggest oil companies over climate change.

Mayor Serge Dedina said Imperial Beach has already started to see the effects of climate change impact the city first-hand.

"We did a sea level rise release study and we had scientists do an assessment of what would happen in the future here," said Dedina.

Those numbers came out two years ago, and Dedina said flooding has only gotten worse.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in Superior Court, challenges 37 global oil, gas and coal companies. Some of the largest names include Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Chevron.

The companies are directly responsible for the climate change some coastal cities are experiencing, he said.

"We are working with a whole group of scientists that have measured their carbon inputs in the environment," Dedina said.

NBC 7 reached out to the American Petroleum Institute, one of the companies being sued by Dedina.

In a statement, they said:

"The United States is leading the world in the production and refining of oil and natural gas, creating thousands of American high paying jobs, saving consumers at the pump and in heating and cooling costs, while we are also leading the world in reducing carbon emissions which are near 25 year lows. We are also investing more than double that of any other industry in zero- and low-emissions technologies and almost as much as the federal government."

Dedina said the companies' greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, melting the glaciers and in turn, making the sea-level rise.

"We are talking about [Date Street], Seacoast Drive. We are talking about Bayfront, and two elementary schools could be impacted by coastal flooding," he said.

Imperial Beach is surrounded by water on three sides. Dedina said flooding became a problem during El Nino's tropical storms and the rainy months in the winter.

It's been an issue for the past two to three years, he said.

Dedina said he believes that in less than 100 years, the city will have to deal with beach erosion, property loss, and readjusting infrastructure systems that control wastewater.

There is currently a political and popular debate concerning whether climate change exists.

Mayor Dedina said he hopes to get a response from the companies by September.
Employees say the owner of a local business, in a coma after being hit by a train in Downtown San Diego, was someone who gave people a new lease on life.

Jeff Clark owns Thrift Trader--a business built on buying and selling used clothes and music.

On June 24, Clark was hit by an Amtrak train in Little Italy near W Hawthorne Street and California Street.

According to the San Diego County Sheriff's Department (SDSO), witnesses said Clark had been looking down at his cell phone at the time of the crash. He apparently did not notice that he was standing near the track, and did not notice the approaching train, witnesses told officials.

Clark suffered serious injuries and was taken to UC San Diego Medical Center.

Employees told NBC 7, he is in a coma after the incident.

"I was in between jobs and he gave me one and tried me out, just because I asked him and he took a chance," said employee Brian Weibel.

Weibel said he worked at Thrift Trader for three years until the doors were closed after Clark was hit by the train. Like many others, Weibel said he is hoping Clark, the man who once gave him a chance, will get another chance at life.

"I hope he can make a full recovery and get back at it. He was doing what he loves to do. He loves his business and his music," said Jonathan Nordeman, who worked for Clark at a previous business where they became friends.

Clark's passion for music turned into several CD's and the Music Trader chain back in the 1980's. After selling it, Clark started Thrift Trader.

The stores in Pacific Beach, Hillcrest and North Park closed last Monday, according to employees.

Clark and the stores' absence is felt by many in the community.



"He would have homeless people come in and paint and do some plumbing, give them a few dollars to eat for whatever they needed," Weibel said.

"Him just being such a generous person, they're going to miss him being there. Hes taken in people hard on their luck, giving them jobs," said Nordeman.

Employees said Clark is doing better, but this has been a tough year for him after suffering a stroke that impacted vision in his left eye.

Its not clear if that played any role in the incident.
Integration of Cardholder Dispute Resolution Network (CDRN) to Help Protect Konnektive Merchants E-commerce Transactions

MELBOURNE, Australia, July 19, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Verifi, Inc., a leading provider of payment and risk management solutions for card-not-present (CNP) merchants, announced that Konnektive CRM has completed an API integration of its award-winning Cardholder Dispute Resolution Network (CDRN) solution, enabling merchants to resolve cardholder disputes before they become chargebacks. Previously, Konnektive merchants were only able to combat chargebacks through third parties. CDRN will deliver greater efficiency to the chargeback prevention process, enabling merchants to deal directly with CDRN disputes within the Konnektive CRM interface.



We chose to work with Verifi based on their reputation as an industry leader, said Matthew Martorano, CEO of Konnektive CRM. The ability for our clients to receive and respond to disputes in near real-time will deliver greater efficiencies for our sales and campaign management operations and help protect our clients stream of commerce.

Konnektive is a complete CRM/OMS (customer relationship management and order management system) platform that converges the best in technology and user interface for product and campaign management for trial/continuity, straight sale, and multi-pay. Further services include a landing page builder, shopping cart technology, online sales tracking system, sales scripting and order entry software that can be integrated to telephony platforms, an easy-to-use customer service interface, billing system that completely integrates with any accounting system, and a complete fulfillment management system. All these services and features are combined into one unique product that is completely web-accessible and secure.

Konnektives adoption of CDRN is reflective of a worldwide demand for a comprehensive platform that directly connects merchants and issuing banks to resolve consumer complaints, delivering the highest quality service and true protection for merchants and issuers alike around the globe.

We are thrilled to have Konnektive CRM be the first CRM partner to integrate our CDRN API and take on a key role in reducing chargebacks and fraud for their extensive clientele, said Matthew Katz, CEO of Verifi. Fraud and chargebacks continue to be a major issue for merchants and will continue to grow as shoppers migrate more of their shopping to online and mobile commerce. This partnership illustrates our continued commitment to enable merchants and issuing banks to efficiently resolve true cardholder-initiated disputes at their origin, stopping them from becoming chargebacks and incurring all of the added costs and pain that goes along with them.

Verifis CDRN prevents hundreds of thousands of chargeback cases every month, providing real protection from costly fees, fines or penalties, and cardholder dissatisfaction which affect merchants and issuers alike. With year-over-year growth since its launch in 2007, Verifis unique and patented CDRN closed loop process directly integrates with top issuers, providing unmatched service, quality, and accuracy for merchants in collaboration with issuers to resolve disputed payments, and dramatically minimise fraud and non-fraud related chargebacks and cardholder dissatisfaction. CDRN covers approximately 50% of the US market and has resolved 90% of fraud and non-fraud related disputes before they turn into costly chargebacks for merchants and issuers alike.

In response to the Companys rapid expansion and demand for services, Verifi has extended their award-winning chargeback solutions to the UK, Australia, New Zealand, with plans for further expansion to other markets including France and Germany later this year.

About Verifi

Verifi is an award-winning provider of end-to-end payment protection and management solutions, founded in 2005 to help merchants effectively manage the payments challenges they face every day. Verifis Cardholder Dispute Resolution Network supports over 15,000 accounts globally, preventing each month hundreds of thousands of fraud and non-fraud chargebacks. Verifis full suite of services helps merchants combat fraud, prevent and resolve costly chargebacks, as well as facilitate sharing of transaction details. Our best-in-breed solutions and white glove support are trusted by a wide range of industries, from emerging companies to the Fortune 500. With our APAC headquarters in Melbourne, Australia, we process more than 27 billion transactions annually and currently serve more than 25,000 accounts globally. For more information, visit: au.verifi.com.
A Maryland police officer worked through the night to return a toy stolen from a little girl.

On Sunday, Jason Hendricks posted video evidence showing his daughters toy dragon and dinosaur being stolen from their porch the night before.

As outrage built in the comment section, a friend of Hendricks called upon La Plata Police Department Officer Robert Bagley to assist.

"I'm on it," Bagley wrote back.

Hendricks posted his security video with a time and date stamp from that night. Bagley immediately recognized the suspect taking the toys in the footage.

"I recognized the suspect as someone who hangs out in that area a couple streets down from where they live and I had a pretty good idea where she might be located," Bagley said. "I didn't find her, but I was making a U-turn in the cul-de-sac and I saw the little toy sitting there laying up against the curb."

Bagley found the toy about 2 a.m. and decided it was too late to go knock on the Hendricks' door. "I figured I could swing by there in the morning hours after my shift," he said.

The toy dragon had a broken arm, though, and before buying glue to fix it, Bagley stopped at the hospital.

"I usually stop by the hospital when I'm working nights anyway," he said. "I just kind of go walk through the ER, make my presence known, check on people I know and see if they need coffee or anything."

While there, Bagley asked hospital staff to wrap up the dragon's arm and pose for a picture.

"The idea just kind of popped in my head to do this story for the girl. Give her something to look at in the morning and kind of cheer her up a little bit," Bagley said. "I took pictures throughout the night on some routes that I was on and areas I was checking. I never really expected it to get this big."

By Wednesday, Hendricks' original Facebook post, where the story unfolded, received more than 2,600 reactions, about 4,700 shares and more than 200 comments commending Bagley.

Bagley didn't expect such a huge showing of support because community policing is a routine part of his daily patrols.

"I've taken several classes and trainings and have worked on my community policing for several years," he said. "It's definitely something I've noticed helps the community out and creates trust between the city and police."

Given the political climate and the bad press police have received in recent years, Bagley said establishing connections with young people is an important part of what makes the fabric of his community strong.

"We got a job just like their moms and dads do and I think its good to establish those relationships young and let kids know were out to help them, not cause problems," Bagley said.

La Plata Police are still working to positively identify the person who stole the toys, but there was no word as to whether they will face charges.
After finally being allowed entrance into the United States, an Afghan girls' robotics team mingled with teenagers from all over the world at the first Global Challenge in Washington D.C.

For these girls, ages 14 to 16, putting together a robot was only one of the challenges they faced. They traveled 500 miles from Herat, Afghanistan, to Kabul to apply for their travel visas so they could enter the U.S. for the competition. And even after they were denied, they continued to work on their robot, hoping it might inspire other students in Afghanistan and around the world.

"I wanted to show the talent and ability of Afghan students," one of the girls said. "Afghan women can make robots, too."

After President Donald Trump intervened late last week to allow them entry into America, the girls made the 20-hour trip from Kabul to Dulles International Airport to go up against teams from more than 160 countries at Constitution Hall.

Each team started with a box of the same parts and built a robot to perform a specific task.

The contestants partnered with other teams to foster a global spirit.

The Afghan team said they learned a lot from the other groups and hope to teach the world about Afghanistan.

Under the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, girls were forbidden to attend school under the penalty of death. After girls were allowed back to school in 2002, challenges remained because of deeply ingrained customs.

Though the girls didnt win the Global Challenge competition, they did receive a silver award for their courageous achievements.
A Prince George's County father is looking for answers after his 20-year-old son was shot several times during an attempted home invasion in District Heights, Maryland, Wednesday morning.

The incident happened at 12:30 a.m. at a home on the 1900 block of Addison Road South.

Leroy Butts says his son was shot multiple times and is in for the fight of his life.

"My son's beat up in the hospital right now. He's got gunshot wounds everywhere, everywhere," Butts said. "He's got a fight on his hands. My son's in there fighting for his life."

Butts says his son was shot in the neck, head and leg.

Officer Tyler Hunter with the Prince George's County Police Department said multiple people were inside the home at the time of the attempted home invasion. Police have not determined the victim's involvement in the incident, but Butts believes his son may have been targeted.

No arrests have been made at this time.

No other injuries were reported.
Police released a composite sketch Tuesday of a man who was found dead early Sunday on a road in Riverdale, Maryland.

Someone found the man in the 6200 block of 60th Avenue about 4:10 a.m. Sunday, Prince George's County Police said. The man was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Police said he died of trauma to the body, but investigators don't know yet exactly what caused the trauma. His manner of death was ruled a homicide.

Police have not been able to identify the victim but said he was a Hispanic man between 35 and 40 years old. He does not have any distinguishing marks or tattoos.

A man who said he discovered the body told News4 the man's body was partially exposed.



"It's really scary. Right near home," one woman said.

Detectives are also working to identify the suspect or suspects and motive. Investigators canvassed the area Tuesday evening in hopes of getting more information.

"We are in desperate need to find out who this man is. It's very difficult for our detectives to really, truly begin this investigation until we have a starting point," said Cpt. Tyler Hunter, a spokesman for Prince George's County police.

"I was just thinking how did that happen here?" Marty Newhouse, the head of the community association, said Sunday. "We're very engaged. Neighbors know neighbors. They look out for one another, so this was just a shock."

A reward of up to $25,000 is offered for information leading to an arrest and indictment in the killing. Anyone with information is asked to call the Homicide Unit at 301-772-4925. Those wishing to remain anonymous may call Crime Solvers at 866-411-TIPS (8477), text "PGPD" plus their message to CRIMES (274637) or submit a tip online at www.pgcrimesolvers.com.

Prince George's County has seen a string of homicides in July. This victim was the 13th man killed in 16 days.

The homicides occurred across the large county. In one case, a 55-year-old father of four was shot on the Capitol Beltway as he headed home. In another case, two men in their 20s were shot in Suitland. One victim ran into a Popeyes restaurant for help.

In response to the violence, police have extended shifts to 12 hours, keeping officers on the job an extra two hours per day to try to prevent more homicides.

"It's a measured and temporary response to something we're seeing," Police Chief Hank Stawinski said. "I'm confident that the men and women of this department will bring stability and then we'll move back to normal operations quickly."
Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai was greeted with cheers Tuesday by dozens of young women in northeastern Nigeria, where she spoke out for the many girls abducted under Boko Haram's deadly insurgency.

The 20-year-old Pakistani activist told The Associated Press she was excited by the courage of the young women who are undaunted as they pursue an education amid one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

"This is part of my girl power trip, visiting many parts of the world," said Yousafzai, who also met with the freed Chibok schoolgirls taken in a mass abduction by Boko Haram more than three years ago. "I am here now because of the Nigerian girls. Fighting for them and speaking up for them."

Yousafzai visited internally displaced camps in and around the city of Maiduguri, where thousands have sheltered from Boko Haram's violence. The extremist group continues to carry out deadly attacks there, often using young female suicide bombers.

"They have lived in the period of extremism," Yousafzai said of the young women around her. Many have seen family members killed.

Yousafzai was 15 when she shot in the head by Taliban militants in 2012, targeted due to her advocacy for women's education.

The Nobel winner said her Nigeria visit was significant because it was the partial fulfillment of what she advocated the last time she was there. In 2014, she pressed then-President Goodluck Jonathan to ensure the rescue of the more than 200 abducted Chibok schoolgirls.

On Monday, Yousafzai met with more than 100 who have since been rescued and now stay in the capital, Abuja, for what the government calls rehabilitation.

While she told the AP she shared their joy at being freed, she said she was not happy that the girls haven't been allowed to reunite fully with their families.

She said she hopes they will "live with their family, live a normal life."

Many others remain in Boko Haram captivity, "and the government must unite so that they should make sure that these girls are released," Yousafzai said.

"Boko Haram themselves should learn that in Islam, such things are unacceptable," she added. "This is against humanity, this is against Islam."

Yousafzai also met Monday with acting President Yemi Osinbajo, speaking up for the more than 10 million children displaced by Boko Haram and pressing for the declaration of a state of emergency for education in Nigeria.

She also urged the international community to address the crisis in the country's northeast.

Girls at the internally displaced camps said the Nobel winner's story of courage gave them inspiration for a brighter future.

"Her story give us hope, that's why we too want to go to school and become something in life," said 15-year-old Fatima Ali. "We have to bear all pains like hunger to go to school. We barely eat once a day here. We have not eaten since morning because government people no longer bring us food for about two months now."

Three million children in Nigeria's northeast are in need of support to keep learning, according to the U.N. children's agency. Nearly 1,400 schools have been destroyed during Boko Haram's insurgency, which began in 2009, and more than 2,295 teachers have been killed, the agency says.

Ali said she was in school when Boko Haram attacked her town three years ago. "I want to become a soldier so that I could help my community to fight and kill Boko Haram, because they are not good people," she said.

Another student, 15-year-old Fatima Grema, said she sees herself in Yousafzai.

"Boko Haram abducted me and wanted to marry me," she said. After being taken from the town of Baga to a location near the Cameroon border, "I later managed to escape," she said. "I was not in school until I came to the camp here."

Grema said she now wants to become a teacher.

UNICEF's country representative Mohamed Malick Fall said Yousafzai's visit is a symbol of hope, and "we will do everything in our power to make sure all children can keep learning."
At less than a month old, Iowa baby Mariana Sifrit has died just 10 days after she was hospitalized on her parents' wedding day with an unexpected illness that may have been caused by contact with someone who had a cold sore.

"Our princess Mariana Reese Sifrit gained her angel wings at 8:41 am this morning in her daddy's arms and her mommy right besides her," her mother Nicole Sifrit wrote on Facebook Tuesday.

Mariana had been fighting for her life over the last few weeks after being rushed to the hospital earlier this month.

"In her 18 days of life she made a huge impact on the world and we hope with Mariana's Story we save numerous newborns life," Sifrit wrote.

Mariana Sifrit was born on July 1, but less than a week later, the infant was being rushed to the hospital for what would become a life-threatening infection her parents never anticipated.

Nicole and Shane Sifrit, of West Des Moines, said they noticed their daughter wasnt eating and wasnt waking up.

The couple quickly left their own wedding to rush Mariana to the hospital, where they discovered she had Meningitis HSV1, or meningitis caused by the herpes simplex virus, which also causes cold sores.

Both parents tested negative for the virus, meaning Mariana couldnt have contracted it during pregnancy or from her parents, but likely got it from someone carrying the virus.

They touch her and then she touches her mouth with her hand, Nicole Sifrit told NBC affiliate WHO-TV.

According to the Meningitis Research Foundation, many people carry the herpes simplex virus without ever knowing they have it. They can even transmit the virus without showing symptoms.

Mariana was quickly admitted to the NICU, where her parents said things immediately went down hill.

Mariana quit breathing on her own and her organs began failing. She was life-flighted to the University of Iowa Hospital and placed on life support, her parents told WHO.

But the young baby continued to fight.

She has a kidney team, a liver team, a blood team, a neurology team, Nicole Sifrit said.

Marianas parents said they dont want what happened to them to happen to other parents.

"I always thought this stuff happens and it's a shame and never thought it would happen to me. I was not prepared at all, Shane Sifrit said.

The couple reminded parents to be careful of who they let around their newborns and make sure anyone handling your baby washes their hands.

Dont let people kiss your baby and make sure they ask before they pick up your baby, Nicole Sifrit said.

The Meningitis Research Foundation says most causes of viral meningitis are not preventable, but emphasizes that handwashing is a good precaution to take.

A GoFundMe page had been launched to help the family with hospital bills.
It started off as a family vacation to remember: walks on sandy beaches, poolside relaxation and a tropical atmosphere.

But what was supposed to be a relaxing getaway quickly turned into a horrific nightmare, and now, a Wisconsin family is searching for answers after their 20-year-old daughter suddenly died at a Mexico resort earlier this year.

The family of Abbey Conner says the college student was on winter break with her older brother, mother and stepdad in Playa del Carmen when Conner mysteriously suffered a "traumatic brain injury."

John and Ginny McGowan, Conners mother and stepdad, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel they had spent their afternoon relaxing by the pool while their children swam. Just before 6 p.m., the couple went up to their rooms to get ready for dinner with their children, but when they arrived in the lobby to meet them an hour later, they realized something was wrong.

Ginny McGowan said she asked the hotel desk to call her childrens room, but the employee quickly appeared flustered. She told the Journal Sentinel hotel workers said her children had been in an accident and she needed to go to a nearby hospital.

Both Abbey and her brother Austin, who had spent part of their afternoon at a poolside bar, were found unconscious, face down in chest-deep water.

Iberostar Paraiso Resort confirmed the two received "immediate medical attention" by on-staff doctors, paramedics and security guards before they were taken to a hospital.



Austin survived, but Abbey Conner was transferred to a hospital in Cancun and later flown to Broward Health Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the publication reports. There, doctors confirmed Conner was brain-dead.

On Jan. 12, the family decided to withdraw life support and donate Conners organs.

But months later, they still dont know what actually happened to their daughter.

The Journal Sentinel reports the official cause of death was "accidental drowning," but family said they have doubts about that ruling.

Conners brother reportedly told the publication the duo had done a few shots together before a group invited them to do a shot together. They all drank one, and that was the last thing he remembers before waking up in an ambulance.

According to the report, Austin Conner's blood-alcohol level was 0.26 and Abbey's was 0.25.

A police report was given to the family for the first time last week, which includes statements from three staffers who arrived at the scene and pulled the kids from the water, family members told the Journal Sentinel. It does not contain any statements from hotel guests, the bartender or a woman who alerted hotel staff after seeing the Conners in the pool, the family said.

"My kids were at this hotel for less than two hours. The last thing my son remembers is having a drink in the pool," the children's father, Bill Conner, who was not in Mexico at the time, told NBC affiliate WMTV in April. "The next thing my son remembers is they woke up in the hospital. Somebody got to them This was at 5:30 in the afternoon, daylight, exclusive hotel and you just don't think it'll happen to you."



"It's all too convenient," the McGowans attorney, Florentino Ramirez, told the Journal Sentinel. "If it was an accident, where was everybody? It just doesn't make sense. There are too many open ends."

Iberostar Paraiso Resort released a statement to say they are taking the situation "very seriously" and that the company "has always remained cooperative."



"The safety and security of guests is utmost priority for us," the statement said. "We are deeply saddened by this incident and reiterate our deepest sympathies and condolences to the family."



A State Department official confirmed to NBC 5 the department is aware of this case.

We extend our sincere condolences to family and friends, the official said in a statement. In cases of U.S. citizens injured overseas, the Department of State works to provide all appropriate consular assistance. Out of respect for the family, we have no further comment.

Conner's organs went on to save the lives of four others, her family said.

Bill Conner has since rode his bicycle 2,000 miles across the country, from Madison to Fort Lauderdale, to the hospital where his daughter took her last breath. The ride raised money for Donate Life America in an effort to honor his "daughter's good deeds and empower others to the same."

"Organ donation and carrying Abbey's name forward, that's what she'd want me to do," Conner told WMTV.

A GoFundMe page for the ride raised more than $23,000.
A 17-year-old male has been arrested for the murder of a man whose burned body was found in Attleboro, Massachusetts, on Tuesday.

The arrest came after police searched a home on Edgewood Avenue in Cranston, Rhode Island, on Wednesday morning. Police said the search was related to the grisly discovery in Attleboro the day before.

The smoldering body was found along the woodline adjacent to Prescott Street in Attleboro around 3 a.m. Tuesday. Police said it appeared the body was set on fire and then extinguished. A preliminary investigation revealed that the victim had also been shot.

The victim has been identified as 24-year-old Valdez Loiseau. He is believed to have lived on Edgewood Avenue in Cranston with his 35-year-old girlfriend Melonie Perez and her 17-year-old son.

Police said Loiseau was last seen at the residence the night before his body was discovered and that he had been involved in a physical altercation with Perez.

While executing a search warrant inside the Edgewood Avenue residence on Wednesday, police observed a semi-automatic handgun and blood on the bottom of Perez's shoes.

During an interview with investigators, the 17-year-old reportedly told police that he shot Loiseau inside the home with a handgun. The teen said he shot Loiseau as a result of the altercation between Loiseau and his mother. He said he and his mother then brought the body to Attleboro, where he placed it in a wooded area and set it on fire.

The teen - whose name was not released by police - is charged with first-degree murder, use of a firearm while committing a crime of violence and compounding or concealing a felony. He is being held at a juvenile corrections center.

Perez, his mother, was also charged in connection with her boyfriend's death. She is charged with compounding or concealing a felony, report of crimes to law enforcement officials and vandalism. She was arraigned Wednesday and released on $10,000 personal recognizance bail.

Also charged were Samantha Rastella, 18, and another 17-year-old male, both of Cranston.

Rastella is facing charges for compounding or concealing a felony and report of crimes to law enforcement officials and was released on personal recognizance.

The 17-year-old is charged with possession of ammunition by a minor and was released to a parent.
A fugitive wanted in connection with a death in Milford, Massachusetts, has been arrested in New Jersey.

New Jersey State Police said they arrested Jusselo Dias Dos Reis, 44, of Brazil, for allegedly stabbing a man to death in Milford. He was taken into custody without incident at a residence in Newark on Monday.

Evens Seney, who lives at the home where Dos Reis was found, told NBC Boston he doesn't know the suspect but thinks his landlord does.

"When he came here he was very, very relaxed, seemed like nice people. Behaved like a nice guy," Seney recalled.

He said Dos Reis arrived to the home over the weekend but didn't stay long. Police arrived in the middle of the night to make their arrest, he said.

"With the dog, when the cop they come over and they try to - he tried to hide," Seney recalled.

Dos Reis is being held in a New Jersey jail pending rendition to Massachusetts. He was wanted on a charge of aggravated assault and battery with a dangerous weapon in connection with the Milford incident.

Police responded to a multi-family home on North Bow Street in Milford on Sunday morning where they found a man dead inside.

The victim was identified by prosecutors as 48-year-old Geraldo Carlos Do Amaral. He is believed to have died between 3 and 4 a.m.

One neighbor told NBC Boston that he heard yelling early in the morning. Another said he heard "partying" overnight.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Dos Reis is believed to have illegally entered the country.
French English

MONTREAL, July 18, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Dedication, courage, teamwork and innovative law enforcement techniques in fighting financial crimes earned 11 police officers the Canadian Banks Law Enforcement Award (CBLEA), awarded today by the Canadian Bankers Association at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police.



Project Royal  Detective Constables Michael Kelly and Timothy Trotter, Toronto Police Service

In winter 2016, Detective Constables Michael Kelly and Timothy Trotter of the Toronto Police Department discovered a fraud and money laundering operation with links to North America, Africa and Asia. The value of criminal proceeds associated to these activities was estimated in the tens of millions of dollars.

The two officers launched Project Royal, to identify the individuals involved in this organization, decipher their relationships with one another and uncover the true extent of their crimes.

Through their diligent investigation, Detective Constables Kelly and Trotter were able to place five individuals under arrest and dismantle the transnational group of criminals responsible for significant losses to Canadian financial institutions. The remaining members of this syndicate were placed under investigation by various international law enforcement agencies.

The Bayfield Case  York Regional Police, Toronto Police Service, Belleville Police Service, Halton Police Service and Cobourg Police Service (Group Award)

Joint investigations by York Regional Police, Toronto Police Service, Belleville Police Service, Halton Police Service and Cobourg Police Service led to the capture of a lone assailant who had committed seven bank robberies in Southern Ontario.

Coordinating between five different law enforcement agencies, officers tracked their suspect's crimes until April 4th, 2016, when a pair of eyeglasses were recovered at the scene of the latest robbery, in Burlington, Ontario. The information on the glasses allowed police to positively identify 40 year old Zak Bayfield as the perpetrator. He confessed to the robberies and admitted to having planned more.

Winners of the group award are: Detective Alec Tompras (York Regional Police), Detective Constable Dan Moore (York Regional Police), Detective Sebastian Cultrera (York Regional Police), Detective Constable Paul Mills (Toronto Police Service), Detective Steve Smith (Toronto Police Service), Detective Joe Matys (Toronto Police Service), Detective Sergeant Pat Kellar (Belleville Police Service), Detective Constable Alan MacEwan (Halton Police Service), and Detective Constable Amy Sharpe (Cobourg Police Service).

CBA Quote

The number of bank robberies in Canada has been decreasing over time. This is evidence that the deterrent measures the banks are taking are working and that the police are doing a great job of apprehending these criminals, said Malcolm Chivers, Director of Corporate Security, Canadian Bankers Association. These awards are our way of celebrating this relationship by recognizing the great work police do to prevent, detect and respond to financial crime.

About the Canadian Banks Law Enforcement Award

Since its creation in 1972, 259 officers from across Canada have been honoured with the CBLEA for their outstanding bravery, dedication and other noteworthy achievements in combating crimes against Canadas banks. For additional information, please visit www.cba.ca/award.

About the Canadian Bankers Association

The Canadian Bankers Association works on behalf of 64 domestic banks, foreign bank subsidiaries and foreign bank branches operating in Canada and their 280,000 employees. The CBA advocates for effective public policies that contribute to a sound, successful banking system that benefits Canadians and Canada's economy. The Association also promotes financial literacy to help Canadians make informed financial decisions and works with banks and law enforcement to help protect customers against financial crime and promote fraud awareness. www.cba.ca.

Follow the CBA on Twitter: @CdnBankers

Follow the CBA on LinkedIn
A Norwalk mother who has lived in the United States for 24 years faces deportation, and now a lawyer in New Haven and a group of advocates are working on her behalf against an immigration policy that isnt in her favor.

Nury Chavarria left her native Guatemala in 1993, when she was 19, and applied for asylum. Her application was denied, but she remained in the US, with nothing to go back to at home.

Since 2011, she has had yearly check-ins with immigration officials. Each year she was given the approval to remain in the US.

Chavarria said she has no criminal record, works as a housekeeper, and pays taxes. She believed those factors would allow her to remain in the US, despite the Trump Administrations focus on deportations. All that changed at her June check-in, when ICE officials told her in five weeks she would have to pack up her life and leave.

I told him Im not a criminal. Im a mother with four children. They are citizens. USA. I want to stay here to help them and keep my family together, she said.

ICE issued Chavarria an ankle-monitor to track her movements ahead of her removal. Meanwhile, her 9-year-old daughter has a plea for President Donald Trump.

Please let my mom stay because she has four children and Im one of them and I really want her to stay, Hayley Chavarria said.

New Haven attorney Glenn Formica and volunteer activist group Connecticut Shoreline Indivisible have taken on the case, hoping to reverse the order that will separate Nury from her four children on July 20.

"The current policy doesnt allow common sense adjudication. Doesnt allow them any discretion them to say 'Yeah, it doesnt make sense to force Nury to leave her four children here and become burdens on the state,'" Formica said.

This is just inhumane. Things have to change. This is not who we are as a people. We have compassion, we care about people, added Charla Nich of Connecticut Shoreline Indivisible.

NBC Connecticut reached out to ICE on the case, and they released the following statement Monday:

"Nury Chavarria was allowed to voluntarily depart by a federal immigration judge in 1998, and failed to comply, rendering her subject to final order of removal in 1999. In 2010, the agency deferred her removal for one year on humanitarian grounds.

As a current exercise of discretion, the agency has allowed her to remain free from custody while finalizing her timely departure plans. The agency will continue to closely monitor her case to ensure compliance."

Nury's request to stay was denied Tuesday. Nury and her attorney will again request to stay, but if that request is denied, she will have to leave on Thursday.
With temperatures soaring, New England utilities hope consumers can curb their power use. Doing so could save cash for the whole region.

Everything we can do to lower that use saves everybody, said Kristin Carlson of Green Mountain Power.

Montpelier, Vermont's National Life Group, a thousand-person office full of computers, lights, television monitors, and a busy air conditioning system, is trying to help reduce regional demand.

We use a lot of power, acknowledged Ross Sneyd of National Life Group.

But National Life unplugs from the grid entirely for a few hours on select summer days.

Instead, it relies on diesel generators as it tries to help Green Mountain Power cut electricity use when the regional supply is most in demand.

We dont want to be spending diesel fuel to supply the buildings, but in an emergency, were happy to do it, Sneyd said.

The amount of energy we use at a specific peak of regional consumption is a big factor in the yearly cost to utilities for wholesale power.

That peak usually comes when cities like Boston and Hartford are the hottest.

Several Vermont utilities, including Green Mountain Power, Vermont Electric Cooperative, and Burlington Electric, have predicted peak summer usage could possibly come some afternoon this week.

If your light company can somehow cut usage at those moments when the grid is most stressed, it could slash hundreds of thousands of dollars on what it pays for power.

Those savings would be passed onto you in the form of lower or more stable rates on monthly bills.

When a big company like National Life does it, its going to save you as a homeowner at home, Carlson said.

Burlington Electric just launched a new incentive program to help it Defeat the Peak.

If enough customers turn up their thermostats a few degrees, delay doing laundry, or turn off lights when demand spikes  helping BED meet its consumption reduction goals  itll donate $1,000 to city non-profits.

BED declared a Defeat the Peak day for Thursday from 3 to 7 p.m.

The first recipient of a donation, if reduction goals for Thursday are achieved, is the Humane Society of Chittenden County, said Neale Lunderville of Burlington Electric.

Burlingtonians love to give back, Lunderville said. So we see this as a great way to inspire community-wide saving, well hopefully achieve our goals, and well help some worthy charities.

Vermont Electric Co-op spread the word to its customers urging power conservation for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week, from the hours of 3 to 7 p.m. each day.

If VEC members can collectively beat the peak by conserving electricity during peak energy times, they can help to control costs that impact electric rates, CEO Christine Hallquist said in a written statement. In a cooperative, when one member conserves, we all save.

VEC suggested the following steps to help reduce consumption:

 Turn off all unnecessary lights.

 Delay the use of major appliances like dishwashers, washing machines, and clothes dryers until after the alert time has passed.

 Reduce use of air conditioning as much as safely possible.

Green Mountain Power said in addition to more energy generation like solar, the future face of power management for communities and large users of power may feature battery storage, to turn to on these potential peak days.
New headteacher says event was 'gorgeous'

ASHFORD Hill Primary Schools annual sunmmer fete was held on Saturday to raise money for an emotional literacy support assistant (ELSA) room at the school.

There was all the usual fair favourites to cater for all ages, including a bouncy castle, barbecue, bar, games and childrens races.

The Hampshire police and fire service were also in attendance in their vehicles.

Chair of the parent teacher association (PTA), Suzanne Macdonald, said: We raised 4,000 and we had a brilliant day.

The sun shone and we had lots of people come and enjoy themselves.

Kate Keen, the new headteacher due to start at the school in September, said: It was exactly what I hoped it would be, a gorgeous village school fete.

I am so excited to join Ashford Hill.

The Ashford Hill pupils, from all classes, entertained the visitors with dance performances.

The money raised will be used to build an ELSA room to support pupils with their emotional needs.

There is already a trained ELSA teacher at the school, but at the moment there is nowhere suitable to carry out the sessions.

Mrs Macdonald said: There are 127 pupils in the school and at one point or another most of them need some emotional support.

ELSA trains teaching assistants to manage and support childrens social skills, emotions, bereavement, social and therapeutic stories, anger management, self-esteem, and counselling skills.
PARIS, LONDON, AMSTERDAM, the Netherlands, NEW YORK and PUNE, India, July 19, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Synechron, a global financial services consulting and technology services provider, has signed a Calypso implementation agreement with the SIX Group Ltd., a financial services provider and Swiss Stock Exchange operator. Synechron was selected as systems integrator for the implementation of Calypso v15, the SFR (Securities Finance Renewal) Program, in collaboration with Calypso. The objective of the program is to update SIXs post-trade services where it acts as a contractual Triparty agent for its clients to enhance its Triparty collateral management services.



This innovative project is the first implementation where Calypso is being used to manage contractual Triparty agent activities. The project has been divided into two phases with the first to launch in January 2017. It is scheduled to last two years and will employ a total of forty staff from SIX, Calypso, and Synechron in 2017-2018.

Synechron is a certified Calypso partner, which gives us access to considerable expertise and concrete Calypso implementation experience. Furthermore, Synechron already is working with Calypso in Switzerland, notably on collateral management implementation, which gives them highly relevant subject matter expertise, said Robert Borntrager, Division CEO of SIX IT who is responsible for the development and operation of SIXs IT Services since 2008.

Project scope and production support

The first team of twelve Synechron consultants was deployed on the SIX project during the first quarter of 2017. A portion of the team works on site while the rest is based at Synechrons European Delivery Centre in Serbia. Synechrons team of onsite and Serbia-based consultants have joined forces with staff from SIX and consultants from Calypso to work together to manage the project, integrate Calypso into SIXs systems, and build a testing and a production support team. Moreover, Synechron will play an important role in providing SIX staff with training covering the technical and functional aspects of Calypso. The project also includes a significant digital services offering which gives SIX clients access to the functionalities of the SFR project through their own infrastructures.



A strategic and cultural fit

Synechron was chosen by SIX among four companies following a competitive call for vendors during 2016. We are extremely pleased to participate in this ambitious and innovative SFR project together with SIX and with the support of our partner Calypso. This project consolidates all the knowledge we have built up over the past few years in terms of financial software integration including our expertise in collateral management, added Pascal Rellier, Managing Director, Synechron.

In addition to being a Calypso Alliance Partner, one of Synechrons key assets is the existence and strength of its Calypso Centre of Excellence with more than 50 Calypso experts in Europe able to provide in-house training with the Calypso Campus program. The Centre of Excellence was created in 2015.

Furthermore, SIX has found a strategic partner in Synechron: One of SIXs fundamental values is to foster working relationships with its suppliers that are based on trust. Synechron has shown its commitment to building a long-term partnership with us, added Roger Oehen, in charge of the SFR project at SIX.

About SIX

SIX operates the infrastructure underpinning the Swiss financial sector and offers a comprehensive range of services around the world in the fields of securities trading and settlement, financial information and payment transactions. The company is owned by its users (approximately 130 banks of various orientation and size). Its workforce of over 4,000 employees and presence in 25 countries throughout the world generated operating income of CHF 1.8 billion and a Group net profit of CHF 221.1 million in 2016.

www.six-group.com

About Synechron
By Reuters

NEW DELHI: India's state refiners plan to buy less Iranian oil in 2017/18 compared with the last fiscal year, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Wednesday.

Iran has offered a credit period of 60 days for oil purchases in the current fiscal year, Pradhan told lawmakers in a written response. In 2016/17, Iran had offered 90 days credit period.

The minister said state oil refiners import oil as per commercial and operational consideration. He did not elaborate further.

India's state refiners have cut oil import plans from Iran by a quarter in the year to March 2018, sources earlier told Reuters.

NEW DELHI: India's state refiners plan to buy less Iranian oil in 2017/18 compared with the last fiscal year, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Wednesday. Iran has offered a credit period of 60 days for oil purchases in the current fiscal year, Pradhan told lawmakers in a written response. In 2016/17, Iran had offered 90 days credit period. The minister said state oil refiners import oil as per commercial and operational consideration. He did not elaborate further. India's state refiners have cut oil import plans from Iran by a quarter in the year to March 2018, sources earlier told Reuters.
By Express News Service

CHENNAI: The National Evaluation coum Entrance Test or NEET issue rocked the Assembly again on Tuesday with DMK leaders crossing swords with ministers in a fierce debate.

Raising the issue during zero hour, Leader of Opposition M K Stalin accused the Edappadi K Palaniswami government of failing to protect the interests of the State Board students, and counselled the ruling party to use the Vice-Presidential election as an opportunity to exert political pressure on the Centre to get Presidential assent for the two Bills unanimously adopted by the State Assembly to exempt Tamil Nadu from NEET.

The State government has committed an unpardonable betrayal of students of Tamil Nadu by not utilising the presidential polls to exert pressure, Stalin said.

Health Minister C Vijaya Basker accused DMK of failing to thwart the move to introduce the national common test by the erstwhile UPA government of which it was part of. That failure has now ruined the future of students in Tamil Nadu, he said.

Noting that NEET was made mandatory by a Supreme Court verdict, Vijaya Basker said Tamil Nadus is the only State government that is firm on opposing it.

Stalin said the then DMK rule had indeed opposed the move strongly. Until the DMK government was in power, NEET was not held in Tamil Nadu, he reminded the minister.

Deputy leader of opposition Durai Murugan said the government should step down for its failure to safeguard students rights. Retorting, School Education Minister K A Sengottaiyan wondered why the DMK government failed to step down when UPA government took initial steps to introduce NEET.

At one point, Vijaya Basker charged that some persons were desperately looking for issues to gain political mileage every day.

This drew vehement protest from Stalin who wanted them expunged. When Speaker P Dhanapal refused, Stalin had led his colleagues in a walkout.

CHENNAI: The National Evaluation coum Entrance Test or NEET issue rocked the Assembly again on Tuesday with DMK leaders crossing swords with ministers in a fierce debate. Raising the issue during zero hour, Leader of Opposition M K Stalin accused the Edappadi K Palaniswami government of failing to protect the interests of the State Board students, and counselled the ruling party to use the Vice-Presidential election as an opportunity to exert political pressure on the Centre to get Presidential assent for the two Bills unanimously adopted by the State Assembly to exempt Tamil Nadu from NEET. The State government has committed an unpardonable betrayal of students of Tamil Nadu by not utilising the presidential polls to exert pressure, Stalin said. Health Minister C Vijaya Basker accused DMK of failing to thwart the move to introduce the national common test by the erstwhile UPA government of which it was part of. That failure has now ruined the future of students in Tamil Nadu, he said. Noting that NEET was made mandatory by a Supreme Court verdict, Vijaya Basker said Tamil Nadus is the only State government that is firm on opposing it. Stalin said the then DMK rule had indeed opposed the move strongly. Until the DMK government was in power, NEET was not held in Tamil Nadu, he reminded the minister. Deputy leader of opposition Durai Murugan said the government should step down for its failure to safeguard students rights. Retorting, School Education Minister K A Sengottaiyan wondered why the DMK government failed to step down when UPA government took initial steps to introduce NEET. At one point, Vijaya Basker charged that some persons were desperately looking for issues to gain political mileage every day. This drew vehement protest from Stalin who wanted them expunged. When Speaker P Dhanapal refused, Stalin had led his colleagues in a walkout.
By Express News Service

HYDERABAD: For the second consecutive day Tuesday, rains lashed the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad causing inconvenience to people and bringing vehicular movement to halt.

Due to the downpour, trees were uprooted at a few places in the city hindering the free flow of traffic movement. Several roads were reduced to rubble bringing back the haunting memories of last years monsoon.

The Southwest monsoon remained active over the twin cities leading to continuous rains during the last two days. All thanks to the well-marked low-pressure area over Northwest Bay of Bengal off the Odisha coast, which induced a depression. The city is expected to witness more spells on Wednesday. So far the city has recorded 115 mm of rain against the normal average rain of 179-180 mm. With more rains in offing, city is expected to surpass its monthly record.

Vehicles moved at a snails pace in Punjagutta, Khairatabad, Mehdipatnam, Masab Tank, Malakpet, Saroornagar, Basheerbagh, Himayatnagar, Nampally, M J Market, Ameerpet, SR Nagar, Erragadda, Uppal, Paradise, Patny, L B Nagar, Tarnaka, Secunderabad, Moosapet and several main roads in Old City. With heavy inflows, water level at Hussainsagar reached 513.10 feet mark against the Full Tank Level of 513.41 feet.

Meanwhile, GHMC has opened emergency help desk to attend complaints of water-logging and uprooting of trees. GHMC commissioner B Janardhan Reddy and Chief City Planner Devender Reddy held a teleconference with officials and instructed them to maintain constant vigil as rains are likely to continue over next few days.

Meanwhile, residents across various parts of the city complained of waterlogged roads. Residents of Yakutpura complained of a few minor accidents near the Road Under Bridge. However, Srinivas Reddy, Zonal Officer, GHMC, South Zone, when contacted, said, Everything is functioning smoothly, no waterlogging has been found and no accidents have been reported.

An Old City resident Syed Mohsin who frequently pays visit to Osmania Hospital in Afzal Gunj to provide aid to poor patients said, Patients have been complaining of power cuts for long hours in the hospital. However, DCP South Zone B Satyanarayana said there is 100 per cent power supply in Old City.

Rain batters Khammam, Bhadradri on second day

Khammam/Bhadrachalam: Torrential rains due to depression in the Bay of Bengal threw normal life out of gear in Khammam and Bhadradri Kothagudem since Sunday night. Due to the incessant rains, a two-year-old boy died while his mother sustained injuries when they accidentally came in contact with a live wire in Sarapaka village near Bhadrachalam town. According to Burgampad police, Gandipocha Muthayalu and her two-year-old son Yesu Raju lived in a hut at Sarapaka. She begged on the streets as her husband is in jail.

On Tuesday morning, while it was raining, she along with her son went to the backside of the hut to attend to natures call, but unfortunately, the boy touched a live electric wire and died on the spot. His mother Muthayalu received injuries. Doctors said her condition is stable. Streams overflowing. Due to continuous rain, many tanks and streams in the agency area are overflowing and causing road blocks. In view of the heavy rains, officials have lifted 15 gates of Taliperu project and released 79,000 cusecs of water into Godavari river. With rains not subsiding, a hut in Gompalli in Cherla mandal and a compound wall of a government school in Kandukur village in Vemsoor collapsed. Meanwhile, coal production has been affected in all open cast mines in Kothagudem, Yellandu, Manugur and Sattupalli areas.

Real-time automatic weather stations installed by GHMC in the Greater Hyderabad limits to receive rainfall data in millimetres up to 5 pm include

Malkajgiri 31.8

Moulali 28.5

Balanagar 28.0

Quthbullapur 27.3

Bandlaguda 25.5

Amberpet 22.8

Tirumalgherry 24.5

West Marredpally 22.0

Srinagar Colony 21.3

Madhapur 20.5

Begumpet 19.5



HYDERABAD: For the second consecutive day Tuesday, rains lashed the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad causing inconvenience to people and bringing vehicular movement to halt. Due to the downpour, trees were uprooted at a few places in the city hindering the free flow of traffic movement. Several roads were reduced to rubble bringing back the haunting memories of last years monsoon. The Southwest monsoon remained active over the twin cities leading to continuous rains during the last two days. All thanks to the well-marked low-pressure area over Northwest Bay of Bengal off the Odisha coast, which induced a depression. The city is expected to witness more spells on Wednesday. So far the city has recorded 115 mm of rain against the normal average rain of 179-180 mm. With more rains in offing, city is expected to surpass its monthly record. Vehicles moved at a snails pace in Punjagutta, Khairatabad, Mehdipatnam, Masab Tank, Malakpet, Saroornagar, Basheerbagh, Himayatnagar, Nampally, M J Market, Ameerpet, SR Nagar, Erragadda, Uppal, Paradise, Patny, L B Nagar, Tarnaka, Secunderabad, Moosapet and several main roads in Old City. With heavy inflows, water level at Hussainsagar reached 513.10 feet mark against the Full Tank Level of 513.41 feet. Meanwhile, GHMC has opened emergency help desk to attend complaints of water-logging and uprooting of trees. GHMC commissioner B Janardhan Reddy and Chief City Planner Devender Reddy held a teleconference with officials and instructed them to maintain constant vigil as rains are likely to continue over next few days. Meanwhile, residents across various parts of the city complained of waterlogged roads. Residents of Yakutpura complained of a few minor accidents near the Road Under Bridge. However, Srinivas Reddy, Zonal Officer, GHMC, South Zone, when contacted, said, Everything is functioning smoothly, no waterlogging has been found and no accidents have been reported. An Old City resident Syed Mohsin who frequently pays visit to Osmania Hospital in Afzal Gunj to provide aid to poor patients said, Patients have been complaining of power cuts for long hours in the hospital. However, DCP South Zone B Satyanarayana said there is 100 per cent power supply in Old City. Rain batters Khammam, Bhadradri on second day Khammam/Bhadrachalam: Torrential rains due to depression in the Bay of Bengal threw normal life out of gear in Khammam and Bhadradri Kothagudem since Sunday night. Due to the incessant rains, a two-year-old boy died while his mother sustained injuries when they accidentally came in contact with a live wire in Sarapaka village near Bhadrachalam town. According to Burgampad police, Gandipocha Muthayalu and her two-year-old son Yesu Raju lived in a hut at Sarapaka. She begged on the streets as her husband is in jail. On Tuesday morning, while it was raining, she along with her son went to the backside of the hut to attend to natures call, but unfortunately, the boy touched a live electric wire and died on the spot. His mother Muthayalu received injuries. Doctors said her condition is stable. Streams overflowing. Due to continuous rain, many tanks and streams in the agency area are overflowing and causing road blocks. In view of the heavy rains, officials have lifted 15 gates of Taliperu project and released 79,000 cusecs of water into Godavari river. With rains not subsiding, a hut in Gompalli in Cherla mandal and a compound wall of a government school in Kandukur village in Vemsoor collapsed. Meanwhile, coal production has been affected in all open cast mines in Kothagudem, Yellandu, Manugur and Sattupalli areas. Real-time automatic weather stations installed by GHMC in the Greater Hyderabad limits to receive rainfall data in millimetres up to 5 pm include Malkajgiri 31.8 Moulali 28.5 Balanagar 28.0 Quthbullapur 27.3 Bandlaguda 25.5 Amberpet 22.8 Tirumalgherry 24.5 West Marredpally 22.0 Srinagar Colony 21.3 Madhapur 20.5 Begumpet 19.5
By Express News Service

KOCHI: A prime tourist spot in Kochi, Marine Drive, will soon get an advanced boat jetty, Marina and a boat jetty complex with all modern amenities. The Kochi Metro Rail Ltd (KMRL) and the Greater Cochin Development Authority (GCDA) will sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in this regard on Wednesday. The project is being implemented as part of the Rs 747 crore Water Metro project of the KMRL which aims to create a modern water transport infrastructure in the Greater Kochi region.

The integrated jetty facility will accommodate water metro operations and also cater to the needs of tourist boats, which will provide safe and secure access to tourists and passengers, without affecting free movement of pedestrians on the marine drive walkway. The move will also facilitate the growth of tourism sector here, according to KMRL spokesperson.

The new boat jetty and related infrastructure facilities should be set up in the land owned by GCDA between the existing KINCO jetty and the boat jetty from where the services to Mulavukadu area are conducted. As per agreement, the land will be provided by GCDA. More details including revenue sharing will be disclosed later, the officer said.

After exchanging the MoU, AECOM Consortium, which is the general consultant (GC) for the Water Metro project, will come up with a proper plan for the project which includes design, maintenance and operation. The general consultant is in charge of the project management, planning and construction, supervision for finalisation of routes, carrying out study on the types of boats to be purchased and construction of new jetties.

However, as per the initial plan, there will be a floating jetty for passenger services, a Marina which will help yachts and small tourist vessels to dock at Marine Drive and a state-of-the-art jetty complex. The building will have refreshment area for passengers, rest rooms and commercial spaces. The Water Metro project envisages the rolling out of 78 modernised boats along 16 routes, connecting 38 jetties in Kochi.

The agreement will be signed by Konain Khan, General Manager (Operation, Maintenance and Water Transport), KMRL and MC Joseph, Secretary, GCDA in the presence of GCDA chairman C Mohanan, and KMRL managing director Elias George. The signing will take place at the office of the KMRL.

Revamp

The project is being implemented as part of the D747 crore Water Metro project of the KMRL

The KMRL and GCDA will sign an MoU in this regard on Wednesday

A month goes by

Kochi: The Kochi Metro, which commenced commercial services between Aluva and Palarivattom successfully completed one month of operation on Tuesday. KMRL authorities said just short of one day to the first month of operations, the Metro earned D4.62 crore. The ridership varied from 20,000 to 98,000 during the month. The average daily ridership was 47,646.

The traffic was more on holidays, but maintained an average ridership of around 20,000 during weekdays. While completing one month of operation, the KMRL is happy about the cooperation and patronage shown by the passengers, said a KMRL officer. The KMRL authorities hope the system will attract more regular passengers once the services are extended up to Maharajas College by September. We will introduce facilities like daily pass, monthly pass and Smart Cards by then, the KMRL spokesperson.

KOCHI: A prime tourist spot in Kochi, Marine Drive, will soon get an advanced boat jetty, Marina and a boat jetty complex with all modern amenities. The Kochi Metro Rail Ltd (KMRL) and the Greater Cochin Development Authority (GCDA) will sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in this regard on Wednesday. The project is being implemented as part of the Rs 747 crore Water Metro project of the KMRL which aims to create a modern water transport infrastructure in the Greater Kochi region. The integrated jetty facility will accommodate water metro operations and also cater to the needs of tourist boats, which will provide safe and secure access to tourists and passengers, without affecting free movement of pedestrians on the marine drive walkway. The move will also facilitate the growth of tourism sector here, according to KMRL spokesperson. The new boat jetty and related infrastructure facilities should be set up in the land owned by GCDA between the existing KINCO jetty and the boat jetty from where the services to Mulavukadu area are conducted. As per agreement, the land will be provided by GCDA. More details including revenue sharing will be disclosed later, the officer said. After exchanging the MoU, AECOM Consortium, which is the general consultant (GC) for the Water Metro project, will come up with a proper plan for the project which includes design, maintenance and operation. The general consultant is in charge of the project management, planning and construction, supervision for finalisation of routes, carrying out study on the types of boats to be purchased and construction of new jetties. However, as per the initial plan, there will be a floating jetty for passenger services, a Marina which will help yachts and small tourist vessels to dock at Marine Drive and a state-of-the-art jetty complex. The building will have refreshment area for passengers, rest rooms and commercial spaces. The Water Metro project envisages the rolling out of 78 modernised boats along 16 routes, connecting 38 jetties in Kochi. The agreement will be signed by Konain Khan, General Manager (Operation, Maintenance and Water Transport), KMRL and MC Joseph, Secretary, GCDA in the presence of GCDA chairman C Mohanan, and KMRL managing director Elias George. The signing will take place at the office of the KMRL. Revamp The project is being implemented as part of the D747 crore Water Metro project of the KMRL The KMRL and GCDA will sign an MoU in this regard on Wednesday A month goes by Kochi: The Kochi Metro, which commenced commercial services between Aluva and Palarivattom successfully completed one month of operation on Tuesday. KMRL authorities said just short of one day to the first month of operations, the Metro earned D4.62 crore. The ridership varied from 20,000 to 98,000 during the month. The average daily ridership was 47,646. The traffic was more on holidays, but maintained an average ridership of around 20,000 during weekdays. While completing one month of operation, the KMRL is happy about the cooperation and patronage shown by the passengers, said a KMRL officer. The KMRL authorities hope the system will attract more regular passengers once the services are extended up to Maharajas College by September. We will introduce facilities like daily pass, monthly pass and Smart Cards by then, the KMRL spokesperson.
Express News Service

After a break of three years, director Sekhar Kammula is back in action with Fidaa. The romedy marks his first collaboration with Varun Tej and Sai Pallavi. The director admits that his three-year wait to return with an out-and-out love story has now turned fruitful with Fidaa. Every film is a dream for me. I believe that the best comes out only when I take ample time to write and execute what I conceive. I lose five-six kilos for each of my films. I endure all the pain and work relentlessly with my team.

Set in the backdrop of Telangana, the film is all about a village belle falling in love with a US-based doctor and how their paths come across. Interestingly, Varun was not the first choice for Sekhar and the script was initially penned for Mahesh Babu. I pitched the story idea to a few heroes but things never worked out. Then, I met Varun whom I believe was expressive. Now that the movie is completed, I can confidently say, no one could have pulled off this role better than Varun, Sekhar adds.

Varun says it was an altogether different experience playing an NRI. Even though I play an NRI, we wanted the characters Telugu sensibilities, especially his ability to speak the language, to be strong. The Telugu I speak cant be similar to the way someone from Hyderabad speaks. It had to be slightly different but at the same time, we took the liberty to make the character mouth dialogues in a certain way. The workshop we did before we started shooting came very handy.

The Kanche actor points out that the climax scene made him go Fidaa over the film. The climax breaks the tradition of how marriage is viewed in our society. Its not a contemporary issue and has been around for a long time but the way Sekhar dealt with it in his writing and even while filming the sequence made me fall in love with the story. That would be my Fidaa moment in the film.

The Anand director maintains that Fidaa goes against the grain and breaks the stereotype in love stories.

Usually, the brother, sister or any other supporting roles have become typecast, but Fidaa will be refreshing in its narrative, says Sekhar.

Varun doesnt believe in confining himself to films considered safe bets and explains that he is not bogged down by constant pressure to do certain kind of cinema.

When I was doing Kanche, a lot of my well-wishers and friends in the industry suggested that I concentrate on doing commercial films. But when my films such as Loafer and Mister didnt work at the box-office, the same people suggested I should stick to doing films like Kanche. I didnt do Mister because people asked me to do commercial films. Irrespective of what people think I should do, I choose the kind of film I want to do next. I believe its always about things falling in place at the right time.

Varun shares a great camaraderie with Sai Pallavi. She is a gifted actress and an encyclopaedia. Both of us shared a healthy competition, which made working with her even more exciting. Many a time, Sekhar said the competitiveness will reflect on screen in our performances. I play a doctor and there were instances I took her (Pallavi is a real life doctor) help when I had to inject someone or record someones blood pressure in montage shots. Her commitment to learn Telugu took me by surprise, recalls Varun.

The way she owned the role, perfected the lines and got the Telangana diction right is truly amazing. She will be a rage post Fidaa and her role in the film will make the girls proud, concludes Sekhar.

After a break of three years, director Sekhar Kammula is back in action with Fidaa. The romedy marks his first collaboration with Varun Tej and Sai Pallavi. The director admits that his three-year wait to return with an out-and-out love story has now turned fruitful with Fidaa. Every film is a dream for me. I believe that the best comes out only when I take ample time to write and execute what I conceive. I lose five-six kilos for each of my films. I endure all the pain and work relentlessly with my team. Set in the backdrop of Telangana, the film is all about a village belle falling in love with a US-based doctor and how their paths come across. Interestingly, Varun was not the first choice for Sekhar and the script was initially penned for Mahesh Babu. I pitched the story idea to a few heroes but things never worked out. Then, I met Varun whom I believe was expressive. Now that the movie is completed, I can confidently say, no one could have pulled off this role better than Varun, Sekhar adds. Varun says it was an altogether different experience playing an NRI. Even though I play an NRI, we wanted the characters Telugu sensibilities, especially his ability to speak the language, to be strong. The Telugu I speak cant be similar to the way someone from Hyderabad speaks. It had to be slightly different but at the same time, we took the liberty to make the character mouth dialogues in a certain way. The workshop we did before we started shooting came very handy. The Kanche actor points out that the climax scene made him go Fidaa over the film. The climax breaks the tradition of how marriage is viewed in our society. Its not a contemporary issue and has been around for a long time but the way Sekhar dealt with it in his writing and even while filming the sequence made me fall in love with the story. That would be my Fidaa moment in the film. The Anand director maintains that Fidaa goes against the grain and breaks the stereotype in love stories. Usually, the brother, sister or any other supporting roles have become typecast, but Fidaa will be refreshing in its narrative, says Sekhar. Varun doesnt believe in confining himself to films considered safe bets and explains that he is not bogged down by constant pressure to do certain kind of cinema. When I was doing Kanche, a lot of my well-wishers and friends in the industry suggested that I concentrate on doing commercial films. But when my films such as Loafer and Mister didnt work at the box-office, the same people suggested I should stick to doing films like Kanche. I didnt do Mister because people asked me to do commercial films. Irrespective of what people think I should do, I choose the kind of film I want to do next. I believe its always about things falling in place at the right time. Varun shares a great camaraderie with Sai Pallavi. She is a gifted actress and an encyclopaedia. Both of us shared a healthy competition, which made working with her even more exciting. Many a time, Sekhar said the competitiveness will reflect on screen in our performances. I play a doctor and there were instances I took her (Pallavi is a real life doctor) help when I had to inject someone or record someones blood pressure in montage shots. Her commitment to learn Telugu took me by surprise, recalls Varun. The way she owned the role, perfected the lines and got the Telangana diction right is truly amazing. She will be a rage post Fidaa and her role in the film will make the girls proud, concludes Sekhar.
By Express News Service

HYDERABAD: Wednesday morning would mark the beginning of questioning sessions wherein film personalities will be grilled by Telangana Prohibition and Excise Departments Special Investigation Team (SIT) to know their level of involvement in the drug racket. The first celebrity to face questions at SITs office in Telangana Prohibition and Excise department at Nampally would be director Puri Jagannadh.

A total of 12 film personalities (10 men and two women), who were sent notices, would attend the questioning sessions from July 19 to 27. Actresses can choose a place of their choice to appear before the officials, as mandated under Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act (NDPS) Act.



All evidence is being gathered to corner the celebrities. Call Data Records (CDR) would be the key to explore link between celebrities and narcotic peddlers. The officials will try to find if any rules in NDPS Act was violated by the celebrities, and whether they are only a user or supplied narcotics too.



However, officials are wary that celebrities would come to the sessions after undergoing several rounds of drug detox sessions to flush out traces of drugs from their system. It was published in these columns that some film personalities who were served notices are already undergoing the detox sessions.



Mumaith to be informed about Excise notice at reality show set Officials from Telangana Prohibition and Excise department approached a TV Production Enterprise to convey message to actress Mumaith Khan that a notice has been issued to her by the department. The actress, whose name came up in connection with drugs investigation, is participant in a Telugu reality show which is being shot in Lonavla, Mumbai. She would be informed about the notice in the confession room of the show, sources said.

Drug bust: Focus shifts back to schools

Hyderabad: The focus is back on schools across Telangana. State Prohibition and Excise departments commissioner RV Chandravadan has written to the State School Education department asking them to sensitise parents against drug abuse. The Excise departments sleuths suspect that drugs and narcotics are being supplied to schoolchildren in the immediate premises of schools. While a meeting was scheduled to be held on July 14 between the Excise departments officials, principals and management of schools, and psychiatrists, it did not take off.

TS sleuths explore means to nab drug supplier

Hyderabad: There is a strong focus on drug suppliers and users as at least three law enforcement agencies of TS are closely monitoring their activities. Even such close surveillance is not deterring some narcotics addicts from scoring. A drug user is learnt to have sent a message to a peddler to buy a blot of LSD and that he was ready to pay two times the price.

These are the days when sleuths of Telangana Prohibition and Excise department are exploring all means to nab more drug suppliers and Telangana state police department too is extending support to them. And the message was sent about three days ago. This shows how desperate a person is to consume the narcotics product, sources said. Officials in the department who found phone numbers of users have been calling them to the office, if a user is major, and inquiring to find if the person is using drugs for personal consumption or a peddler.

Awareness campaign on drug abuse in Warangal

Warangal: In the wake of reports that children studying in some renowned educational institutions in Hyderabad are using LSD, Warangal West MLA D Vinay Bhaskar with the help of an NGO, People for Urban and Rural Empowerment (PURE), is planning to take up awareness campaign to help students understand the harmful effects and consequences of drug use.

HYDERABAD: Wednesday morning would mark the beginning of questioning sessions wherein film personalities will be grilled by Telangana Prohibition and Excise Departments Special Investigation Team (SIT) to know their level of involvement in the drug racket. The first celebrity to face questions at SITs office in Telangana Prohibition and Excise department at Nampally would be director Puri Jagannadh. A total of 12 film personalities (10 men and two women), who were sent notices, would attend the questioning sessions from July 19 to 27. Actresses can choose a place of their choice to appear before the officials, as mandated under Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act (NDPS) Act. All evidence is being gathered to corner the celebrities. Call Data Records (CDR) would be the key to explore link between celebrities and narcotic peddlers. The officials will try to find if any rules in NDPS Act was violated by the celebrities, and whether they are only a user or supplied narcotics too. However, officials are wary that celebrities would come to the sessions after undergoing several rounds of drug detox sessions to flush out traces of drugs from their system. It was published in these columns that some film personalities who were served notices are already undergoing the detox sessions. Mumaith to be informed about Excise notice at reality show set Officials from Telangana Prohibition and Excise department approached a TV Production Enterprise to convey message to actress Mumaith Khan that a notice has been issued to her by the department. The actress, whose name came up in connection with drugs investigation, is participant in a Telugu reality show which is being shot in Lonavla, Mumbai. She would be informed about the notice in the confession room of the show, sources said. Drug bust: Focus shifts back to schools Hyderabad: The focus is back on schools across Telangana. State Prohibition and Excise departments commissioner RV Chandravadan has written to the State School Education department asking them to sensitise parents against drug abuse. The Excise departments sleuths suspect that drugs and narcotics are being supplied to schoolchildren in the immediate premises of schools. While a meeting was scheduled to be held on July 14 between the Excise departments officials, principals and management of schools, and psychiatrists, it did not take off. TS sleuths explore means to nab drug supplier Hyderabad: There is a strong focus on drug suppliers and users as at least three law enforcement agencies of TS are closely monitoring their activities. Even such close surveillance is not deterring some narcotics addicts from scoring. A drug user is learnt to have sent a message to a peddler to buy a blot of LSD and that he was ready to pay two times the price. These are the days when sleuths of Telangana Prohibition and Excise department are exploring all means to nab more drug suppliers and Telangana state police department too is extending support to them. And the message was sent about three days ago. This shows how desperate a person is to consume the narcotics product, sources said. Officials in the department who found phone numbers of users have been calling them to the office, if a user is major, and inquiring to find if the person is using drugs for personal consumption or a peddler. Awareness campaign on drug abuse in Warangal Warangal: In the wake of reports that children studying in some renowned educational institutions in Hyderabad are using LSD, Warangal West MLA D Vinay Bhaskar with the help of an NGO, People for Urban and Rural Empowerment (PURE), is planning to take up awareness campaign to help students understand the harmful effects and consequences of drug use.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday created sensation when he claimed in the Lok sabha that China has buried nuclear bombs in Pakistan to attack India.

His statement in the Parliament drew attention of many as he is also a former Defense Minister. However, Army sources in Delhi denied reports that China has carried out any major troop mobilisations close to the border and called recent wargames as routine.

Yadav also claimed that Indian intelligence agencies would know better about Chinese nuclear weapons in Pakistan. Dubbing China as the biggest enemy of India, Mulayam said Beijing is ready to attack India in collaboration with Pakistan.

India is today facing a big danger from China. I have been cautioning the central government for years. China has joined hands with Pakistan. It has made full preparation to attack India, Yadav said.

Asking the government on the issue, Yadav said, What has the government done? In Kashmir, the Chinese army has allied with the Pak army, Yadav said during the Zero Hour.

Amidst ongoing border tension between India and China, Mulayam said that Chinese military personnel have been seen in Pakistani military facilities in Pak-occupied-Kashmir and China was also building roads there. It must be opposed at the diplomatic level, Yadav said.

Mulayam kept on speaking on the issue of China even after repeated requests from Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan to cut short his speech.

Mulayam urged the centre to support Tibets independence. Without naming anybody, the SP leader said that India's stand on Tibet, a reference to its acceptance that the region was part of China, was a mistake and the time has come to support its independence as it had been a traditional buffer between the two big nations.

Yadav said that India should give maximum support to the Dalai Lama. China is our enemy, not Pakistan. Pakistan can do us no damage, he said.

The former defence minister further said that it is Indias responsibility to protect Bhutan and China was eyeing Nepal, he said. He also spoke against the Chinese goods finding a market in India.

Earlier during the day, a united opposition forced the adjournment of the Lok Sabha proceedings for nearly an hour by storming the Well and raising slogans slamming the government for allegedly ignoring the well-being of farmers.

Defense Ministry denies reports

Defence ministry has denied reports that of China has carried out any major troop mobilisations close to the border and called recent wargames as routine.

Claiming a general state of alert on both sides of Line of Actual Control, army sources said that there have been a couple of videos in the media showing massive exercises by the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army while Chinese media has reported huge mobilisation of heavy equipment and resources in the face of the standoff at Doka La.

As per the mouthpiece of Chinas peoples Liberation Army, the Chinese Army moved tens of thousands of tonnes of military hardware into the remote mountainous Tibet region after the standoff with Indian troops in the Doklam area in the Sikkim sector. It further stated that the vast haul was transported to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command - which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India.

Here, in national capital, Army sources claimed that exercise in the video that has been going around is a routine annual exercise which took place in early June and is nothing unusual. It took place near Lhasa in Tibet, about 700 km from the border.

On June 16, Chinese troops tried to construct a road through the disputed Doka La Plateau which was physically blocked by Indian troops in the area triggering the present standoff. Since then both sides have pitched tents and are sitting facing each other. About Indian 300 soldiers are facing a slightly lesser strength of Chinese troops. They are about 100-150m away from each other.

NEW DELHI: Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday created sensation when he claimed in the Lok sabha that China has buried nuclear bombs in Pakistan to attack India. His statement in the Parliament drew attention of many as he is also a former Defense Minister. However, Army sources in Delhi denied reports that China has carried out any major troop mobilisations close to the border and called recent wargames as routine. Yadav also claimed that Indian intelligence agencies would know better about Chinese nuclear weapons in Pakistan. Dubbing China as the biggest enemy of India, Mulayam said Beijing is ready to attack India in collaboration with Pakistan. India is today facing a big danger from China. I have been cautioning the central government for years. China has joined hands with Pakistan. It has made full preparation to attack India, Yadav said. Asking the government on the issue, Yadav said, What has the government done? In Kashmir, the Chinese army has allied with the Pak army, Yadav said during the Zero Hour. Amidst ongoing border tension between India and China, Mulayam said that Chinese military personnel have been seen in Pakistani military facilities in Pak-occupied-Kashmir and China was also building roads there. It must be opposed at the diplomatic level, Yadav said. Mulayam kept on speaking on the issue of China even after repeated requests from Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan to cut short his speech. Mulayam urged the centre to support Tibets independence. Without naming anybody, the SP leader said that India's stand on Tibet, a reference to its acceptance that the region was part of China, was a mistake and the time has come to support its independence as it had been a traditional buffer between the two big nations. Yadav said that India should give maximum support to the Dalai Lama. China is our enemy, not Pakistan. Pakistan can do us no damage, he said. The former defence minister further said that it is Indias responsibility to protect Bhutan and China was eyeing Nepal, he said. He also spoke against the Chinese goods finding a market in India. Earlier during the day, a united opposition forced the adjournment of the Lok Sabha proceedings for nearly an hour by storming the Well and raising slogans slamming the government for allegedly ignoring the well-being of farmers. Defense Ministry denies reports Defence ministry has denied reports that of China has carried out any major troop mobilisations close to the border and called recent wargames as routine. Claiming a general state of alert on both sides of Line of Actual Control, army sources said that there have been a couple of videos in the media showing massive exercises by the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army while Chinese media has reported huge mobilisation of heavy equipment and resources in the face of the standoff at Doka La. As per the mouthpiece of Chinas peoples Liberation Army, the Chinese Army moved tens of thousands of tonnes of military hardware into the remote mountainous Tibet region after the standoff with Indian troops in the Doklam area in the Sikkim sector. It further stated that the vast haul was transported to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command - which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India. Here, in national capital, Army sources claimed that exercise in the video that has been going around is a routine annual exercise which took place in early June and is nothing unusual. It took place near Lhasa in Tibet, about 700 km from the border. On June 16, Chinese troops tried to construct a road through the disputed Doka La Plateau which was physically blocked by Indian troops in the area triggering the present standoff. Since then both sides have pitched tents and are sitting facing each other. About Indian 300 soldiers are facing a slightly lesser strength of Chinese troops. They are about 100-150m away from each other.
Anand ST Das By

Express News Service

PATNA: Amid crisis within the ruling JD(U)-RJD alliance of Bihar, beleaguered Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav held a closed-door meeting with Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Tuesday. He is understood to have sought more time to decide if and when he should resign. Though the leaders of ruling alliances refused to reveal the details, reliable sources told Express that Kumar insisted on Tejaswis resignation.

The CM expressed his displeasure over the way Tejashwi and the RJD issued clarifications on charges levelled against him and family members. The CM explained the political situation and told him that resignation is the best option, said an RJD leader familiar with the development.

Tejashwi is understood to have listened to Kumar with utmost patience and sought time to think over his options. Its not clear how much time he has been granted or whether a time span was even discussed. However, sources claimed Lalu Prasad Yadav wanted to wait till the partys upcoming anti-BJP rally in Patna is over on August 27.

JD(U) leaders perceptibly upbeat after the meeting, though they made no public statement on the development. His resignation would be in the best interests of the grand alliance and the State government.

They (Tejaswi and Lalu) cannot be too blind to see this, said a senior JD(U) leader close to Nitish. Congress leaders, who have been trying hard to defuse tensions between RJD and JD(U) ever since the Yadavs Patna residence was raided by CBI on July 7, expect Lalu to give the go-ahead for Tejaswis resignation in order to save the 19-month-old grand alliance government. will he, wont he:p9

PATNA: Amid crisis within the ruling JD(U)-RJD alliance of Bihar, beleaguered Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav held a closed-door meeting with Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Tuesday. He is understood to have sought more time to decide if and when he should resign. Though the leaders of ruling alliances refused to reveal the details, reliable sources told Express that Kumar insisted on Tejaswis resignation. The CM expressed his displeasure over the way Tejashwi and the RJD issued clarifications on charges levelled against him and family members. The CM explained the political situation and told him that resignation is the best option, said an RJD leader familiar with the development. Tejashwi is understood to have listened to Kumar with utmost patience and sought time to think over his options. Its not clear how much time he has been granted or whether a time span was even discussed. However, sources claimed Lalu Prasad Yadav wanted to wait till the partys upcoming anti-BJP rally in Patna is over on August 27. JD(U) leaders perceptibly upbeat after the meeting, though they made no public statement on the development. His resignation would be in the best interests of the grand alliance and the State government. They (Tejaswi and Lalu) cannot be too blind to see this, said a senior JD(U) leader close to Nitish. Congress leaders, who have been trying hard to defuse tensions between RJD and JD(U) ever since the Yadavs Patna residence was raided by CBI on July 7, expect Lalu to give the go-ahead for Tejaswis resignation in order to save the 19-month-old grand alliance government. will he, wont he:p9
NEWTOWN, Conn, July 19, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As defense markets continue to adapt to dynamic economic and political forces, the major players continue to hold their entrenched positions.

"Regional turmoil in parts of the Middle East, Europe and Asia continue to drive the need for more spending," said Forecast International Defense & Aerospace Companies analyst Richard Pettibone. "Further, international sales for many firms are set to expand, driven by fear over the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), a more bellicose Russia, and regional pressures from China and North Korea."

These issues are key drivers of recent spending increases in the U.S. According to government transparency site usaspending.gov, the U.S. government awarded a total of $473.8 billion in contracts in FY16, up 8.2 percent from $437.9 billion in FY15. Of this $473.8 billion, $303.7 billion, almost 64 percent, was awarded by the Department of Defense.

Recently, the General Services Administration's U.S. Federal Procurement Data System - Next Generation released its annual Top 100 Federal Contractors report - Fiscal Year 2016. The top 10 federal contractors accounted for $140 billion of the obligated dollars, with Lockheed Martin at the top with $43.4 billion (9.1% of the total), followed by Boeing with $26.5 billion (5.6% of the total).

With a new U.S. administration in charge, many defense companies are adopting a wait-and-see attitude in regard to future spending priorities. The consensus is one of guarded optimism that sequester will be revisited and defense expenditures will rise dramatically.

"Initially, companies such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing were taken to task over high-profile programs such as the Lockheed Martin F-35 and Boeing 747 Air Force One," Pettibone said. "But in the subsequent months following the start of President Trump's administration, the rhetoric has toned down and defense spending is now set for an upswing."

According to Forecast International's Defense & Aerospace Companies reports, growth isn't limited to U.S. markets. The Trump administration has also caused a ripple effect in defense spending among European allies that should see firms such as Airbus, BAE Systems, and Leonardo benefit in the years ahead.

In Asia, many governments are facing a variety of threats, most notably from North Korea. As a result, defense spending on new programs in Japan and South Korea is on the rise. Standing to benefit from this growth are firms such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Kawasaki in Japan as well as Hanwha and Korea Aerospace Industries in South Korea.

Perhaps most importantly, many of these firms will be seeking to bulk up their cybersecurity operations. Almost every major defense firm in the U.S. has added operations related to this sector over the past five years. With Internet-based attacks now a daily occurrence, this market will continue to experience strong growth for the firms that can deliver in the years ahead.

Attachments:

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/ff8dcb2c-cdb9-4b56-9e3a-9eb992fe075f

Attachments:

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/41433d5e-1154-441a-ba31-7877b7f8f010
Ejaz Kaiser By

Express News Service

RAIPUR: Former Chattisgarh chief minister Ajit Jogi on Wednesday challenged the report of the high power committee that recently rejected his claim of belonging to a tribal community.

We have produced a 600-page petition in the high court highlighting the gross illegalities committed by the panel, whose decision was politically motivated and it's a conspiracy against us. The committee did not even serve us a notice since its formation, Jogis son Amit told the New Indian Express.

Jogi filed the petition through his counsels Shailendra Shukla and Rahul Tyagi.

Earlier, the committee, constituted by the state government on a directive of the Chhattisgarh High Court to examine the legitimacy of Jogis caste, turned down the evidences that Jogi submitted in support of his claim that he was part of the Kanwar tribe.

Following the panel's decision, the Bilaspur collector cancelled the tribal status certificate of Jogi.

Three members of tribal community including National Commission for Schedule Tribes (NCST) chairman Nand Kumar Sai, Sant Kumar Netam and Sameera Paikra, opposing Ajit Jogi's claim, also filed a caveat in the high court after the panel's decision.

We have served copies of the petition to them too, Jogi said.

There was political interference during every scrutiny meeting and procedure followed by the committee. It was an absolutely one-sided decision. I have full faith in judiciary, the 70-year-old bureaucrat-turned politician said.

Chief minister Raman Singh cited that the state government has nothing to do with the decision of the committee. It was constituted on the directive of the court. Now the judiciary will decide on it, Singh said.

The controversy regarding Jogis caste began some 30 years ago after he resigned from the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) and was elected to the Upper House of the parliament from Raigarh as Congress member in 1986.

RAIPUR: Former Chattisgarh chief minister Ajit Jogi on Wednesday challenged the report of the high power committee that recently rejected his claim of belonging to a tribal community. We have produced a 600-page petition in the high court highlighting the gross illegalities committed by the panel, whose decision was politically motivated and it's a conspiracy against us. The committee did not even serve us a notice since its formation, Jogis son Amit told the New Indian Express. Jogi filed the petition through his counsels Shailendra Shukla and Rahul Tyagi. Earlier, the committee, constituted by the state government on a directive of the Chhattisgarh High Court to examine the legitimacy of Jogis caste, turned down the evidences that Jogi submitted in support of his claim that he was part of the Kanwar tribe. Following the panel's decision, the Bilaspur collector cancelled the tribal status certificate of Jogi. Three members of tribal community including National Commission for Schedule Tribes (NCST) chairman Nand Kumar Sai, Sant Kumar Netam and Sameera Paikra, opposing Ajit Jogi's claim, also filed a caveat in the high court after the panel's decision. We have served copies of the petition to them too, Jogi said. There was political interference during every scrutiny meeting and procedure followed by the committee. It was an absolutely one-sided decision. I have full faith in judiciary, the 70-year-old bureaucrat-turned politician said. Chief minister Raman Singh cited that the state government has nothing to do with the decision of the committee. It was constituted on the directive of the court. Now the judiciary will decide on it, Singh said. The controversy regarding Jogis caste began some 30 years ago after he resigned from the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) and was elected to the Upper House of the parliament from Raigarh as Congress member in 1986.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the opposition vice presidential candidate, plans post card diplomacy as part of his campaign to reach out to 785 MPs.



Gandhi, in order to give a personal touch to his campaign for the VP elections scheduled August 5, will send post cards to all MPs who will vote in the elections for the post, which is the second highest constitutional office in the country.

Opposition leaders were all for it when Gandhi presented the idea. One of the leaders of the opposition parties even asked his aide to buy 1,000 post cards and by Tuesday afternoon all were bought from the post office closest to Parliament  GPO, Gol Market.



Besides, Gandhi will also send emails and letters to all MPs. A video message will also be recorded and it will accompany the emails to members of both houses of Parliament.

Gandhi was interested in giving a personal touch to the campaign and he proposed to send post cards to all MPs. The post cards will broadly have bullet-point kind of content highlighting issues while the emails and letters will have his detailed views on various issues, said a leader of the opposition.

Gandhi, after filing his nomination for the VP election left for Chennai. He is likely to return to Delhi on August 4 and will personally reach out to MPs in Parliament. When asked about not having enough numbers, Gandhi said: Arithmetic is about numbers, philosophy is about principles and I choose to fight on principle.

On the Shiv Senas attack on him for petitioning the President to save Mumbai blast convict Yakub Memon, Gandhi said, Shiv Sena is doing its duty with dedication... I feel that the death penalty and capital punishment belong to the medieval ages. Death penalty is wrong and this is my principle. He said he had also written a similar petition for Indian citizen Kulbhushan Jadhav, facing death sentence in Pakistan.

NEW DELHI: Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the opposition vice presidential candidate, plans post card diplomacy as part of his campaign to reach out to 785 MPs. Gandhi, in order to give a personal touch to his campaign for the VP elections scheduled August 5, will send post cards to all MPs who will vote in the elections for the post, which is the second highest constitutional office in the country. Opposition leaders were all for it when Gandhi presented the idea. One of the leaders of the opposition parties even asked his aide to buy 1,000 post cards and by Tuesday afternoon all were bought from the post office closest to Parliament  GPO, Gol Market. Besides, Gandhi will also send emails and letters to all MPs. A video message will also be recorded and it will accompany the emails to members of both houses of Parliament. Gandhi was interested in giving a personal touch to the campaign and he proposed to send post cards to all MPs. The post cards will broadly have bullet-point kind of content highlighting issues while the emails and letters will have his detailed views on various issues, said a leader of the opposition. Gandhi, after filing his nomination for the VP election left for Chennai. He is likely to return to Delhi on August 4 and will personally reach out to MPs in Parliament. When asked about not having enough numbers, Gandhi said: Arithmetic is about numbers, philosophy is about principles and I choose to fight on principle. On the Shiv Senas attack on him for petitioning the President to save Mumbai blast convict Yakub Memon, Gandhi said, Shiv Sena is doing its duty with dedication... I feel that the death penalty and capital punishment belong to the medieval ages. Death penalty is wrong and this is my principle. He said he had also written a similar petition for Indian citizen Kulbhushan Jadhav, facing death sentence in Pakistan.
Fayaz Wani By

Express News Service

SRINAGAR: There has been no let up in firing and shelling along Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistani troops targeting army positions and civilian areas in twin border districts of Poonch and Rajouri on Wednesday. A Junior Commissioned Officer (JCO) of army succumbed to injuries sustained by him in yesterdays firing.

Defence spokesman in Jammu, Lt Col Manish Mehta said Pakistani troops breached border ceasefire and resorted to unprovoked firing and mortar shelling on army positions and civilian areas in Bhimber Gali (BG) sector in Poonch district from 8.45 am.

He said Pakistan Army also targeted army positions and civilian areas with small arms and automatic weapons and mortars from 11.45 am in Poonch sector of Poonch district.

Mehta said the army men also effectively returned the fire in both the sectors.

Defence sources said the Pakistani troops also resorted to heavy mortar shelling at Dhar, Lambibari area of upper Rajdhani in Manjakote sector of Rajouri district.

They said the Pakistani troops also fired on civilian areas in Balakote and Sandote sectors.

A civilian was injured after mortar shell fired by Pakistani troops landed near his house in Sandote hamlet along the LoC, an official said.

He said the injured civilian has been hospitalized.

Deputy Commissioner Rajouri, Shahid Choudhary said 10-12 mortar shells landed in premises of primary schools at Koltra and Kote Dhar area in Manjkote sector.

There were no injuries or casualties in the shelling as administration had shut most of the schools in border areas, which witnessed heavy shelling yesterday, for indefinite period .

Shahid said Government Primary School, Kadali in Nowshera sector of Rajouri was damaged in the Pakistani troops shelling.

He said 12 students were rescued in the swift action by security forces.

The near daily Pakistani troops firing and shelling has caused fear psychosis among border residents in Poonch and Rajouri and many have moved to safer places.

About 852 families comprising 3411 persons are residing in five relief camps in Rajouri, an official said.

He said in view of repeated ceasefire violations, three more buildings have been earmarked as relief camps in the border district.

The Pakistani troops also breached border ceasefire in Nowgam sector in North Kashmirs Kupwara district this evening.

The Pakistani troops fired on army positions from light machine guns and mortar shells, defence sources said.

They said the army men were also effectively returning the fire from similar caliber weapons.

Meanwhile, JCO Subedar Shashi Kumar, who was grievously injured in Pakistani troops firing in Nowshera sector of Rajouri district yesterday, succumbed to injuries at Command Hospital , Udhampur today.

Kumar was a resident of village Galon, Hamirpur in Himachal Pradesh. He is survived by wife Ms Santosh Sharma and children.

Subedar Kumar was a brave and sincere soldier. He loved his job to the core. The nation will always remain indebted to him for the supreme sacrifice and devotion to duty, the defence spokesman said.

SRINAGAR: There has been no let up in firing and shelling along Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistani troops targeting army positions and civilian areas in twin border districts of Poonch and Rajouri on Wednesday. A Junior Commissioned Officer (JCO) of army succumbed to injuries sustained by him in yesterdays firing. Defence spokesman in Jammu, Lt Col Manish Mehta said Pakistani troops breached border ceasefire and resorted to unprovoked firing and mortar shelling on army positions and civilian areas in Bhimber Gali (BG) sector in Poonch district from 8.45 am. He said Pakistan Army also targeted army positions and civilian areas with small arms and automatic weapons and mortars from 11.45 am in Poonch sector of Poonch district. Mehta said the army men also effectively returned the fire in both the sectors. Defence sources said the Pakistani troops also resorted to heavy mortar shelling at Dhar, Lambibari area of upper Rajdhani in Manjakote sector of Rajouri district. They said the Pakistani troops also fired on civilian areas in Balakote and Sandote sectors. A civilian was injured after mortar shell fired by Pakistani troops landed near his house in Sandote hamlet along the LoC, an official said. He said the injured civilian has been hospitalized. Deputy Commissioner Rajouri, Shahid Choudhary said 10-12 mortar shells landed in premises of primary schools at Koltra and Kote Dhar area in Manjkote sector. There were no injuries or casualties in the shelling as administration had shut most of the schools in border areas, which witnessed heavy shelling yesterday, for indefinite period . Shahid said Government Primary School, Kadali in Nowshera sector of Rajouri was damaged in the Pakistani troops shelling. He said 12 students were rescued in the swift action by security forces. The near daily Pakistani troops firing and shelling has caused fear psychosis among border residents in Poonch and Rajouri and many have moved to safer places. About 852 families comprising 3411 persons are residing in five relief camps in Rajouri, an official said. He said in view of repeated ceasefire violations, three more buildings have been earmarked as relief camps in the border district. The Pakistani troops also breached border ceasefire in Nowgam sector in North Kashmirs Kupwara district this evening. The Pakistani troops fired on army positions from light machine guns and mortar shells, defence sources said. They said the army men were also effectively returning the fire from similar caliber weapons. Meanwhile, JCO Subedar Shashi Kumar, who was grievously injured in Pakistani troops firing in Nowshera sector of Rajouri district yesterday, succumbed to injuries at Command Hospital , Udhampur today. Kumar was a resident of village Galon, Hamirpur in Himachal Pradesh. He is survived by wife Ms Santosh Sharma and children. Subedar Kumar was a brave and sincere soldier. He loved his job to the core. The nation will always remain indebted to him for the supreme sacrifice and devotion to duty, the defence spokesman said.
By PTI

JAMMU:Violating the ceasefire again, Pakistan today targeted several villages and Indian posts with mortar bombs in the Poonch-Rajouri belt of Jammu and Kashmir leaving a civilian injured.

The Indian Army retaliated effectively. "Pakistan Army initiated unprovoked firing on Indian Army posts in Naushera sector in Bhimbher Gali sector at around 0845 hours. The Indian Army retaliated strongly and effectively," a defence spokesman said. Pakistan Army also shelled areas in Balakote, Dhar, Lambibari, Rajdhani, Mankote, Sandote in Rajouri and Poonch districts since early morning.

A civilian identified as Raza has been injured in the shelling in Sandote hamlet along the LoC and has been hospitalised, police officials said. Yesterday, two jawans were killed and six persons injured as Pakistan violated the ceasefire five times and pounded several villages and forward posts with mortar bombs. The Pakistani shelling endangered lives of hundreds of school students in Rajouri district. Over 8000 people including 3000 in Naushera and 5000 in Manjakote-Rajdhani-Panjgrain-Naika have been affected by the Pakistan shelling in the past two days.

Amidst the Pakistani shelling, authorities rescued 217 students and 15 teachers from various government schools along the LoC in Rajouri district.The students were ferried in bullet-proof vehicles.

JAMMU:Violating the ceasefire again, Pakistan today targeted several villages and Indian posts with mortar bombs in the Poonch-Rajouri belt of Jammu and Kashmir leaving a civilian injured. The Indian Army retaliated effectively. "Pakistan Army initiated unprovoked firing on Indian Army posts in Naushera sector in Bhimbher Gali sector at around 0845 hours. The Indian Army retaliated strongly and effectively," a defence spokesman said. Pakistan Army also shelled areas in Balakote, Dhar, Lambibari, Rajdhani, Mankote, Sandote in Rajouri and Poonch districts since early morning. A civilian identified as Raza has been injured in the shelling in Sandote hamlet along the LoC and has been hospitalised, police officials said. Yesterday, two jawans were killed and six persons injured as Pakistan violated the ceasefire five times and pounded several villages and forward posts with mortar bombs. The Pakistani shelling endangered lives of hundreds of school students in Rajouri district. Over 8000 people including 3000 in Naushera and 5000 in Manjakote-Rajdhani-Panjgrain-Naika have been affected by the Pakistan shelling in the past two days. Amidst the Pakistani shelling, authorities rescued 217 students and 15 teachers from various government schools along the LoC in Rajouri district.The students were ferried in bullet-proof vehicles.
Harpreet Bajwa By

Express News Service

CHANDIGARH: An accused in the Shimla rape case was murdered by the main accused inside a prison cell at Kotkhai police station in the Shimla district of Himachal Pradesh. Following the incident, an irate mob ransacked the police station and set fire to it in protest.

Sources said the 29-year-old Suraj Singh (a Nepalese labourer) was murdered by the main suspect, the 32-year-old Rajinder Singh, late on Tuesday night. Rajinder reportedly smashed Surajs head on the floor of their cell.

Both the accused were lodged in the same cell. Soon after the incident on Tuesday night, Rajinder Singh and three other accused were shifted from the jail to an unknown location.

Sources alleged that Rajinder was angry at Suraj for spilling details of the incident to the police and blaming it entirely on Rajinder. Both had an argument late on Tuesday night during which Rajinder Singh allegedly banged Surajs head on the floor. Suraj died by the time an on-duty policeman could intervene, sources said.

He was taken to a hospital. However, doctors there said he was brought dead. His body was later sent to Indira Gandhi Medical College in Shimla for post-mortem. The police have sought a judicial probe into Surajs death. As the news spread, a mob entered the police station and ransacked it and set fire to it. Earlier, the police had fired in the air to disperse the mob that had gathered outside the police station.

More forces were rushed to Kotkhai to bring the situation under control. As the news of the incident spread, protests were held at other places in the district  Dhalli, Theog and Mashobra. Shops were shut down in Kotkhai and protesters blocked the highway connecting the town to Shimla. The Himachal Pradesh High Court has summoned the Director General of Police in this case.

Advocate General Sharwan Dogra assured the court the police were investigating the case and demanded the matter should be handed over to the CBI. Himachal Pradesh chief minister Virbhadra Singh, who was in Mandi, cancelled his tour and rushed to Shimla to oversee the developments. He said:  I wrote a letter to the Prime Minister asking him to order a CBI enquiry in the case. The murder inside the station cell has put the police in a tight spot at a time when it was under public scrutiny for the lackadaisical approach to the investigation of the rape case.

The police had earlier said that the main accused Singh was acquainted with the victim, as he offered her lifts twice earlier. She was offered a lift by the accused on July 4 when she was returning home from school. The family of the girl alleged that the real culprits belong to high-profile families and the state government had made sure that they get away scot-free. The deceaseds elder sister said, Our protests will continue till the real culprits are apprehended. Suddenly, the police arrested six persons, four of whom are labourers  two from Uttarakhand and two from Nepal.

She also questioned the delay in handing over the case to the CBI. We were told that the case has been handed over to the CBI. But till now no CBI official has come and nor any investigation has been started, she said. A delegation of MPs, led by union health minister JP Nadda met union home minister Rajnath Singh and requested him to direct the state government to maintain law and order.

CHANDIGARH: An accused in the Shimla rape case was murdered by the main accused inside a prison cell at Kotkhai police station in the Shimla district of Himachal Pradesh. Following the incident, an irate mob ransacked the police station and set fire to it in protest. Sources said the 29-year-old Suraj Singh (a Nepalese labourer) was murdered by the main suspect, the 32-year-old Rajinder Singh, late on Tuesday night. Rajinder reportedly smashed Surajs head on the floor of their cell. Both the accused were lodged in the same cell. Soon after the incident on Tuesday night, Rajinder Singh and three other accused were shifted from the jail to an unknown location. Sources alleged that Rajinder was angry at Suraj for spilling details of the incident to the police and blaming it entirely on Rajinder. Both had an argument late on Tuesday night during which Rajinder Singh allegedly banged Surajs head on the floor. Suraj died by the time an on-duty policeman could intervene, sources said. He was taken to a hospital. However, doctors there said he was brought dead. His body was later sent to Indira Gandhi Medical College in Shimla for post-mortem. The police have sought a judicial probe into Surajs death. As the news spread, a mob entered the police station and ransacked it and set fire to it. Earlier, the police had fired in the air to disperse the mob that had gathered outside the police station. More forces were rushed to Kotkhai to bring the situation under control. As the news of the incident spread, protests were held at other places in the district  Dhalli, Theog and Mashobra. Shops were shut down in Kotkhai and protesters blocked the highway connecting the town to Shimla. The Himachal Pradesh High Court has summoned the Director General of Police in this case. Advocate General Sharwan Dogra assured the court the police were investigating the case and demanded the matter should be handed over to the CBI. Himachal Pradesh chief minister Virbhadra Singh, who was in Mandi, cancelled his tour and rushed to Shimla to oversee the developments. He said:  I wrote a letter to the Prime Minister asking him to order a CBI enquiry in the case. The murder inside the station cell has put the police in a tight spot at a time when it was under public scrutiny for the lackadaisical approach to the investigation of the rape case. The police had earlier said that the main accused Singh was acquainted with the victim, as he offered her lifts twice earlier. She was offered a lift by the accused on July 4 when she was returning home from school. The family of the girl alleged that the real culprits belong to high-profile families and the state government had made sure that they get away scot-free. The deceaseds elder sister said, Our protests will continue till the real culprits are apprehended. Suddenly, the police arrested six persons, four of whom are labourers  two from Uttarakhand and two from Nepal. She also questioned the delay in handing over the case to the CBI. We were told that the case has been handed over to the CBI. But till now no CBI official has come and nor any investigation has been started, she said. A delegation of MPs, led by union health minister JP Nadda met union home minister Rajnath Singh and requested him to direct the state government to maintain law and order.
By PTI

CHANDIGARH: The Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) has ordered that troopers injured in pre-Independence wars be given 'war injury pension' like those wounded after it, in a relief to a 94-year-old war veteran.

Seeking to end the discrimination in injury benefits to soldiers injured in pre-Independence and post-Independence wars, the Chandigarh Bench of the tribunal said they should be treated equally.

The AFT has also directed the government to identify similarly placed soldiers and release their benefits without forced litigation.

Bhiwani-based 94-year-old Sowar Amar Singh of the Armoured Corps had approached the AFT with a plea that despite having been injured during World War II, he was being paid regular 'disability pension' as is admissible in cases of normal diseases incurred during service such as hypertension and heart diseases.

He was not being given a war injury pension that is granted to soldiers disabled in operational areas.

Singh aid that it made no difference that soldiers were fighting for the British Crown during those times since WWII was a war of humanity against fascist forces.

He said the same British Indian Army was inherited postIndependence and the governments of India and Pakistan had assured the British government that they would take care of all such cases. They had also taken over the serving soldiers and pensioners of pre-Independence India.

Singh in his petition had said that though he was being paid disability pension as per the existing government rules and rates, he was being refused the payment of war injury pension.

The government resisted Singh's claim, saying when war injury pension was initially introduced, it was applicable only to post-Independence wars and disabilities in international 'peacekeeping missions'.

The concept of war injury pension for disabilities incurred in 'international wars' was introduced only in January 1996 vide a letter issued in 2001 but since the soldier was a pre-1996 retiree, the said benefit could not be granted to him.

Holding Singh entitled to the war injury pension, the AFT bench comprising Justice Bansi Lal Bhat and Lt Gen Sanjiv Chachra has held that such discrimination could not be perpetrated by distinguishing between injuries suffered in various wars.

The bench in its last week's order reminded the government that the cut-off date of 1996 in the government letter had already been struck down by the Supreme Court.

Hence, the same could not be used to deny such benefits.

The AFT held Singh entitled to war injury pension with effect from January, 1996.

CHANDIGARH: The Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) has ordered that troopers injured in pre-Independence wars be given 'war injury pension' like those wounded after it, in a relief to a 94-year-old war veteran. Seeking to end the discrimination in injury benefits to soldiers injured in pre-Independence and post-Independence wars, the Chandigarh Bench of the tribunal said they should be treated equally. The AFT has also directed the government to identify similarly placed soldiers and release their benefits without forced litigation. Bhiwani-based 94-year-old Sowar Amar Singh of the Armoured Corps had approached the AFT with a plea that despite having been injured during World War II, he was being paid regular 'disability pension' as is admissible in cases of normal diseases incurred during service such as hypertension and heart diseases. He was not being given a war injury pension that is granted to soldiers disabled in operational areas. Singh aid that it made no difference that soldiers were fighting for the British Crown during those times since WWII was a war of humanity against fascist forces. He said the same British Indian Army was inherited postIndependence and the governments of India and Pakistan had assured the British government that they would take care of all such cases. They had also taken over the serving soldiers and pensioners of pre-Independence India. Singh in his petition had said that though he was being paid disability pension as per the existing government rules and rates, he was being refused the payment of war injury pension. The government resisted Singh's claim, saying when war injury pension was initially introduced, it was applicable only to post-Independence wars and disabilities in international 'peacekeeping missions'. The concept of war injury pension for disabilities incurred in 'international wars' was introduced only in January 1996 vide a letter issued in 2001 but since the soldier was a pre-1996 retiree, the said benefit could not be granted to him. Holding Singh entitled to the war injury pension, the AFT bench comprising Justice Bansi Lal Bhat and Lt Gen Sanjiv Chachra has held that such discrimination could not be perpetrated by distinguishing between injuries suffered in various wars. The bench in its last week's order reminded the government that the cut-off date of 1996 in the government letter had already been struck down by the Supreme Court. Hence, the same could not be used to deny such benefits. The AFT held Singh entitled to war injury pension with effect from January, 1996.
By IANS

SATARA: Bhiku Daji Bhilare, who had once saved Mahatma Gandhi from a knife attack by his assassin Nathuram Godse at Panchgani in July 1944, passed away due to old age here on Wednesday, a close aide said. He was 98.

Bhilare is survived by two sons, said state Congress Vice President Ratnakar Mahajan, who has been a close family friend since many years.

Renowned in political circles as 'Bhilare Guruji', Bhilare breathed his last at home in native village of Bhilar, sandwiched between the twin hill stations of Mahabaleshwar and Panchgani.

His funeral was held late on Wednesday in Bhilar in the presence of a large number of Congress leaders, freedom fighters and legislators.

"Always engaged in social and public services, he was twice elected as a legislator from Mahabaleshwar constituency and was a very active figure fighting for rights and benefits of freedom fighters. Though active almost till his last breath, for the past few years, he rarely stepped out of his village," Mahajan told IANS.

Revered in the Congress and political circles, Bhilare, as a 25-year-old sub-district president of the Rashtra Seva Dal, one of the frontal groups of the Congress, prevented one of the six assassination attempts on the Mahatma made by Godse.

"Gandhiji used to visit Mahabaleshwar-Panchgani during the summer months. On one such trip in July 1944 after he was released from the Aga Khan Palace prison in Pune (following his arrest during the Quit India movement), he went to Panchgani to recuperate," Mahajan recalled.

One evening during a prayer meeting near a school, Godse, along with two other associates, rushed towards Gandhi with a knife, but Bhilare saw them, blocked their way, and after a brief struggle, succeeded in disarming Godse and one of his associates, Narayan Apte, with the help of M.S. Purohit, a proprietor of a local lodge, Mahajan said.

Years later after India secured Independence on August 15, 1947, Godse succeeded in assassinating the Father of the Nation on January 30, 1948, in Delhi, gunning him down at Birla House.

Top Congress leaders, including party Vice President Rahul Gandhi condoled the death of Bhilare.

"A staunch Gandhian and a freedom fighter, Bhilare Guruji was a selfless custodian of the values we hold dear. Very sad to learn of his passing," Gandhi said in a tweet.

Nationalist Congress Party leader Jitendra Awhad recalled the services of Bhilare Guruji, describing him as the man "who bashed Nathuram Godse when he attacked Mahatma Gandhi in Maharashtra".

Several Congress state units across India have also expressed grief at Bhilare's demise.



SATARA: Bhiku Daji Bhilare, who had once saved Mahatma Gandhi from a knife attack by his assassin Nathuram Godse at Panchgani in July 1944, passed away due to old age here on Wednesday, a close aide said. He was 98. Bhilare is survived by two sons, said state Congress Vice President Ratnakar Mahajan, who has been a close family friend since many years. Renowned in political circles as 'Bhilare Guruji', Bhilare breathed his last at home in native village of Bhilar, sandwiched between the twin hill stations of Mahabaleshwar and Panchgani. His funeral was held late on Wednesday in Bhilar in the presence of a large number of Congress leaders, freedom fighters and legislators. "Always engaged in social and public services, he was twice elected as a legislator from Mahabaleshwar constituency and was a very active figure fighting for rights and benefits of freedom fighters. Though active almost till his last breath, for the past few years, he rarely stepped out of his village," Mahajan told IANS. Revered in the Congress and political circles, Bhilare, as a 25-year-old sub-district president of the Rashtra Seva Dal, one of the frontal groups of the Congress, prevented one of the six assassination attempts on the Mahatma made by Godse. "Gandhiji used to visit Mahabaleshwar-Panchgani during the summer months. On one such trip in July 1944 after he was released from the Aga Khan Palace prison in Pune (following his arrest during the Quit India movement), he went to Panchgani to recuperate," Mahajan recalled. One evening during a prayer meeting near a school, Godse, along with two other associates, rushed towards Gandhi with a knife, but Bhilare saw them, blocked their way, and after a brief struggle, succeeded in disarming Godse and one of his associates, Narayan Apte, with the help of M.S. Purohit, a proprietor of a local lodge, Mahajan said. Years later after India secured Independence on August 15, 1947, Godse succeeded in assassinating the Father of the Nation on January 30, 1948, in Delhi, gunning him down at Birla House. Top Congress leaders, including party Vice President Rahul Gandhi condoled the death of Bhilare. "A staunch Gandhian and a freedom fighter, Bhilare Guruji was a selfless custodian of the values we hold dear. Very sad to learn of his passing," Gandhi said in a tweet. Nationalist Congress Party leader Jitendra Awhad recalled the services of Bhilare Guruji, describing him as the man "who bashed Nathuram Godse when he attacked Mahatma Gandhi in Maharashtra". Several Congress state units across India have also expressed grief at Bhilare's demise.
Aishik Chanda By

Express News Service

KOLKATA: The burning down of an 87-year-old community hall of the Bengali Association late on Tuesday night has exposed the brewing ethnic divide between the Gorkha and Bengali population in Kurseong town of Darjeeling district.

While many of the 200-odd Bengali residents of Kurseong are astonished at the attack on Raj Rajeswari community hall  considered as the only Bengali symbol in Kurseong since 1930  most fear that inter-community relations may now worsen. This seems to be a handiwork of outsiders. We have no fear from the local Gorkha populace and have never faced any dangers even during the 1986-88 armed movement but we fear that outsiders may try to create problems between the local Gorkhas and Bengalis, said Arun Ghosh, secretary of Raj Rajeswari community hall.

Though more than 50 public properties were burnt since the beginning of the present phase of Gorkhaland agitation on June 8, no places of worship or community centres of minorities were harmed, which makes this attack unprecedented in the history of Gorkhaland agitation.

Only last year we celebrated 100 years of Durga Puja at Raj Rajeswari Hall. Most of the Bengalis openly support Gorkhaland statehood but this burning has made the Kurseong Bengalis really upset, said Arunava Banerjee, whose great grandfather Bibhutibhushan Banerjee helped build the hall.

The burning has also made the Bengalis more vocal against Gorkhaland. We are forced to support the Gorkhaland statehood movement in the open but deep down we dont want it to materialise, said Ghosh.

Relations between the two communities have also changed a lot over the period.

More than 95 per cent of the Bengalis have left town since 1980s. Only per cent of us remain, Ghosh said indicating at the Bengali exodus from the hills since the beginning of Gorkhaland agitation in the mid-1980s.

Gorkhas of the town feel that the burning was part of a conspiracy. Burning down of Raj Rajeswari Hall was a calculated move to instigate problems between the two communities, said Jimmy Pradhan, a local Gorkha whose house is situated right beside the burnt hall.

Raj Rajeswari Hall was part of Gorkha history too. People from outside Kurseong  either from Darjeeling or from the plains  might have done this to ignite communal passion in this town as a substantial portion of the towns 42,500 residents are Bengalis, Marwaris and Biharis. This burning may have been done to scare them, said cafe owner Rajesh Gurung.

Apart from this, a police vehicle and a Trinamool Congress party office were also set on fire by angry protesters on Wednesday in Darjeeling town.

KOLKATA: The burning down of an 87-year-old community hall of the Bengali Association late on Tuesday night has exposed the brewing ethnic divide between the Gorkha and Bengali population in Kurseong town of Darjeeling district. While many of the 200-odd Bengali residents of Kurseong are astonished at the attack on Raj Rajeswari community hall  considered as the only Bengali symbol in Kurseong since 1930  most fear that inter-community relations may now worsen. This seems to be a handiwork of outsiders. We have no fear from the local Gorkha populace and have never faced any dangers even during the 1986-88 armed movement but we fear that outsiders may try to create problems between the local Gorkhas and Bengalis, said Arun Ghosh, secretary of Raj Rajeswari community hall. Though more than 50 public properties were burnt since the beginning of the present phase of Gorkhaland agitation on June 8, no places of worship or community centres of minorities were harmed, which makes this attack unprecedented in the history of Gorkhaland agitation. Only last year we celebrated 100 years of Durga Puja at Raj Rajeswari Hall. Most of the Bengalis openly support Gorkhaland statehood but this burning has made the Kurseong Bengalis really upset, said Arunava Banerjee, whose great grandfather Bibhutibhushan Banerjee helped build the hall. The burning has also made the Bengalis more vocal against Gorkhaland. We are forced to support the Gorkhaland statehood movement in the open but deep down we dont want it to materialise, said Ghosh. Relations between the two communities have also changed a lot over the period. More than 95 per cent of the Bengalis have left town since 1980s. Only per cent of us remain, Ghosh said indicating at the Bengali exodus from the hills since the beginning of Gorkhaland agitation in the mid-1980s. Gorkhas of the town feel that the burning was part of a conspiracy. Burning down of Raj Rajeswari Hall was a calculated move to instigate problems between the two communities, said Jimmy Pradhan, a local Gorkha whose house is situated right beside the burnt hall. Raj Rajeswari Hall was part of Gorkha history too. People from outside Kurseong  either from Darjeeling or from the plains  might have done this to ignite communal passion in this town as a substantial portion of the towns 42,500 residents are Bengalis, Marwaris and Biharis. This burning may have been done to scare them, said cafe owner Rajesh Gurung. Apart from this, a police vehicle and a Trinamool Congress party office were also set on fire by angry protesters on Wednesday in Darjeeling town.
Swaran Singh By

Chinese soldiers were already advancing towards Doka La when Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping shook hands on June 9 at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Astana. The standoff had reached its peak when the two met a month later on July 7 at the G20 summit at Hamburg. The standoff has since tapered offthough imperceptiblyand by most estimates it is likely to continue till late autumn, even early winter. Why the standoff happened, persisted and defied an early resolution has meanwhile triggered a whole range of prognosis.

Lets answer the what before exploring the whys: This standoff seems to be part of an evolving pattern. Chinese and Indian forces were likewise face-to-face at Chumar and Demchok during the September 2014 Xi-Modi summit and a similar standoff at Depsang had marked Premier Li Keqiangs visit to New Delhi in May 2013 when Dr Manmohan Singh was the prime minister.

And now, as Indian ministers and officials begin hectic visits to China in the run-up to the September 2017 BRICS summit in Xiamen, this border standoff once again shows signs of a similar gradual climbdown. The current standoffs trilateral nature however is what makes it complicated this time with perilous implications for the India-Bhutan special relationship.

Second, this also seems to be part of Chinas growing assertiveness against all its neighbouring countries. The last four years of Xis presidency mark Chinas coming out of its closet biding ones time. China pursued unilateral muscle flexing to reclaim territories that it always believed to be part of China. The standoff at Doka La is similar to China asserting claims against Russia, Japan, and other ASEAN members. China today has the will and wherewithal to retrieve its territories lost to unequal treaties.

China however is extremely selective: It is validating a few of these legal instruments while rejecting others. An apt example could be the judgement by the Court of Arbitration that last year debunked Chinas historic claims to the South China Sea based on the Communist nations so-called nine-dash line.

Now we can explore the why part beginning with President Xis domestic compulsions.

The sacking of Chongqing Party Secretary Sun Zhengcai this Saturday reflects the Communist Partys internal political turmoil around its impending leadership succession. Sun, a protege of former Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, had emerged as contender for the top position in the post-Xi leadership that Xi is expected to outline at the coming National People Congress meet this autumn.

He will also present the NPC with a work report thereby justifying his second term till 2023. Incidentally, former party secretary of the same Chongqing municipality, Bo Xilai had become the scapegoat in the last power transition in 2012 where he had emerged as a strong contender against Xi.

Xilai, a protege of former President Jiang Zemin, has since been publicly disgraced and jailed since 2013. This pattern has become increasingly transparent as also vicious, generating new pressure points on Chinas leaders. Xi has limited space to manoeuvre and cannot be seen making any concessions to India. The Peoples Liberation Army is celebrating its 90th anniversary which also makes accommodation a difficult option.

Externally as well China feels unhappy. It has had 24 rounds of border negotiations with Bhutan over 33 years and has not been able to resolve its border issues with this tiny kingdom. China holds India responsible for Thimphus tenacity to withstand China. Politically, China abhors the Doka La episode as it has brought Bhutan closer to India. On June 16, Thimphu invited Indian soldiers to push back advancing PLA soldiers as they entered Doka La. Militarily, China feels insecure with its forces in Chumbi Valley being sandwiched by Indians forces in Sikkim and Bhutan. China wants to widen the Chumbi Valley, jetting towards Indias Siliguri corridor to gain military advantage of proximity and the height of Doka La.

Diplomatically, China seeks to delink Bhutan from India to unleash incentives and manipulate Bhutans ruling class. Strategically, the Chinese believe in killing the money to scare the tiger. So browbeating Bhutan, for them, has lessons for other neighbours. Conversely, losing face to India will bolster all its neighbours who may gang up against Chinas aggressive posturing and land grabs.

However, the repeated visits of Indian officials in the run up to the BRICS summit may offer China a face saver. Ajit Dovals visit to China next week to attend the BRICS national security advisors meet may confirm the thesis of tapering off in Chinas rhetoric and strengthen atmospherics for future trilateral dialogue. Chinas rather well-calibrated rhetoric has been tapering off indicating a prolonged standoff without raising the costs. India nonetheless must remain conscious to Chinas efforts at injecting anxieties amongst the Bhutanese.

China for example has been projecting this standoff as if it is between China and India, fanning sentiments on how Bhutan remains vulnerable to such muscle flexing by two big neighbours. Or, how India may be using Bhutan to pursue its own security interests.

An unusual trip last week by Dr Jiang Yili, counsellor at Chinas Embassy in New Delhi and wife of Ambassador Luo Zhaohu, who has a doctoral degree from and on India, to Bhutan and her meetings with all royals including the Queen Mother is symptomatic of Indias potential vulnerabilities. The couple has been extremely active in meeting Indias political personalities, visiting Indias Northeast which has gone mostly unreported.

There is also little official clarification available on whether this is happening in consultation with India or does it mark Indias inability to even keep a tab on these visits, meetings, their outcomes and implications for India-Bhutan ties?

Swaran Singh

Professor, School of International Studies, JNU, New Delhi

Email: ssingh@jnu.ac.in

Chinese soldiers were already advancing towards Doka La when Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping shook hands on June 9 at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Astana. The standoff had reached its peak when the two met a month later on July 7 at the G20 summit at Hamburg. The standoff has since tapered offthough imperceptiblyand by most estimates it is likely to continue till late autumn, even early winter. Why the standoff happened, persisted and defied an early resolution has meanwhile triggered a whole range of prognosis. Lets answer the what before exploring the whys: This standoff seems to be part of an evolving pattern. Chinese and Indian forces were likewise face-to-face at Chumar and Demchok during the September 2014 Xi-Modi summit and a similar standoff at Depsang had marked Premier Li Keqiangs visit to New Delhi in May 2013 when Dr Manmohan Singh was the prime minister. And now, as Indian ministers and officials begin hectic visits to China in the run-up to the September 2017 BRICS summit in Xiamen, this border standoff once again shows signs of a similar gradual climbdown. The current standoffs trilateral nature however is what makes it complicated this time with perilous implications for the India-Bhutan special relationship. Second, this also seems to be part of Chinas growing assertiveness against all its neighbouring countries. The last four years of Xis presidency mark Chinas coming out of its closet biding ones time. China pursued unilateral muscle flexing to reclaim territories that it always believed to be part of China. The standoff at Doka La is similar to China asserting claims against Russia, Japan, and other ASEAN members. China today has the will and wherewithal to retrieve its territories lost to unequal treaties. China however is extremely selective: It is validating a few of these legal instruments while rejecting others. An apt example could be the judgement by the Court of Arbitration that last year debunked Chinas historic claims to the South China Sea based on the Communist nations so-called nine-dash line. Now we can explore the why part beginning with President Xis domestic compulsions. The sacking of Chongqing Party Secretary Sun Zhengcai this Saturday reflects the Communist Partys internal political turmoil around its impending leadership succession. Sun, a protege of former Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, had emerged as contender for the top position in the post-Xi leadership that Xi is expected to outline at the coming National People Congress meet this autumn. He will also present the NPC with a work report thereby justifying his second term till 2023. Incidentally, former party secretary of the same Chongqing municipality, Bo Xilai had become the scapegoat in the last power transition in 2012 where he had emerged as a strong contender against Xi. Xilai, a protege of former President Jiang Zemin, has since been publicly disgraced and jailed since 2013. This pattern has become increasingly transparent as also vicious, generating new pressure points on Chinas leaders. Xi has limited space to manoeuvre and cannot be seen making any concessions to India. The Peoples Liberation Army is celebrating its 90th anniversary which also makes accommodation a difficult option. Externally as well China feels unhappy. It has had 24 rounds of border negotiations with Bhutan over 33 years and has not been able to resolve its border issues with this tiny kingdom. China holds India responsible for Thimphus tenacity to withstand China. Politically, China abhors the Doka La episode as it has brought Bhutan closer to India. On June 16, Thimphu invited Indian soldiers to push back advancing PLA soldiers as they entered Doka La. Militarily, China feels insecure with its forces in Chumbi Valley being sandwiched by Indians forces in Sikkim and Bhutan. China wants to widen the Chumbi Valley, jetting towards Indias Siliguri corridor to gain military advantage of proximity and the height of Doka La. Diplomatically, China seeks to delink Bhutan from India to unleash incentives and manipulate Bhutans ruling class. Strategically, the Chinese believe in killing the money to scare the tiger. So browbeating Bhutan, for them, has lessons for other neighbours. Conversely, losing face to India will bolster all its neighbours who may gang up against Chinas aggressive posturing and land grabs. However, the repeated visits of Indian officials in the run up to the BRICS summit may offer China a face saver. Ajit Dovals visit to China next week to attend the BRICS national security advisors meet may confirm the thesis of tapering off in Chinas rhetoric and strengthen atmospherics for future trilateral dialogue. Chinas rather well-calibrated rhetoric has been tapering off indicating a prolonged standoff without raising the costs. India nonetheless must remain conscious to Chinas efforts at injecting anxieties amongst the Bhutanese. China for example has been projecting this standoff as if it is between China and India, fanning sentiments on how Bhutan remains vulnerable to such muscle flexing by two big neighbours. Or, how India may be using Bhutan to pursue its own security interests. An unusual trip last week by Dr Jiang Yili, counsellor at Chinas Embassy in New Delhi and wife of Ambassador Luo Zhaohu, who has a doctoral degree from and on India, to Bhutan and her meetings with all royals including the Queen Mother is symptomatic of Indias potential vulnerabilities. The couple has been extremely active in meeting Indias political personalities, visiting Indias Northeast which has gone mostly unreported. There is also little official clarification available on whether this is happening in consultation with India or does it mark Indias inability to even keep a tab on these visits, meetings, their outcomes and implications for India-Bhutan ties? Swaran Singh Professor, School of International Studies, JNU, New Delhi Email: ssingh@jnu.ac.in
US President Trump recently said something could happen on the Paris climate accord, fuelling speculation that he might reconsider quitting the deal. Nicaragua and Syria are the only nations which have not signed the deal

No to Paris Climate Accord

Syria has been ravaged by civil war for six years, so it is understandable that it did not take part in the talks. But what about Nicaragua? Does the Central American country also toe the Trump line? Does it prefer fossil fuels?

Deal too soft

In November 2015, when world leaders met in Paris to reach an agreement on combating climate change, Nicaraguas lead envoy Paul Oquist said the country would not support the agreed-upon plan as it hinged on voluntary pledges and would not punish those who failed to meet them, writes Adam Taylor in the Washington Post

Renewable energy paradise

Nevertheless, the country already gets more than half of its energy from renewable sources and plans to bump it up to 90 per cent by 2020, according to the BBC. Nicaragua is what many experts call a paradise of renewable energies: extensive geothermal resources  with excellent exposure to the wind and sun, said a 2013 World Bank report

The goal of the Paris accord is to restrict temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. Oquist had said at the conference that voluntary commitments would not be enough to achieve that goal

US President Trump recently said something could happen on the Paris climate accord, fuelling speculation that he might reconsider quitting the deal. Nicaragua and Syria are the only nations which have not signed the deal No to Paris Climate Accord Syria has been ravaged by civil war for six years, so it is understandable that it did not take part in the talks. But what about Nicaragua? Does the Central American country also toe the Trump line? Does it prefer fossil fuels? Deal too soft In November 2015, when world leaders met in Paris to reach an agreement on combating climate change, Nicaraguas lead envoy Paul Oquist said the country would not support the agreed-upon plan as it hinged on voluntary pledges and would not punish those who failed to meet them, writes Adam Taylor in the Washington Post Renewable energy paradise Nevertheless, the country already gets more than half of its energy from renewable sources and plans to bump it up to 90 per cent by 2020, according to the BBC. Nicaragua is what many experts call a paradise of renewable energies: extensive geothermal resources  with excellent exposure to the wind and sun, said a 2013 World Bank report The goal of the Paris accord is to restrict temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. Oquist had said at the conference that voluntary commitments would not be enough to achieve that goal
TORONTO, July 19, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CRS Contractors Rental Supply Limited Partnership (CRS) has entered into a unit purchase agreement to sell CRS to Sunbelt Rentals (Sunbelt), the North American business of Ashtead Group plc, for C$275 million plus a potential earn-out. CRS is Sunbelts first acquisition in Eastern Canada and will become Sunbelts operational platform in Ontario. The proposed transaction is expected to close in the coming weeks after satisfaction of certain regulatory approvals.



Steve Fay, Chairman of CRS, said We are very pleased to be partnering with Ashtead and Sunbelt. Their culture, values and total focus on their people and customers is exceptional, and perfectly aligned with CRS. The CRS partnership with Clairvest Group which began in 2013 has been very successful and we look forward to continuing to provide our customers with industry-leading equipment and service as part of the Ashtead team.

While all parties involved have a strong desire to complete the sale, there can be no guarantee that the transaction will be completed, or if it is completed, that it will close within the anticipated time period.

Catalyst Strategic Advisors, LLC is acting as the exclusive strategic and financial advisor to CRS and its Board of Directors in this transaction.

About Contractors Rental Supply Limited Partnership

CRS was founded in 2000 by a group of industry veterans, and has developed and maintained a reputation for providing the best customer service in the industry of equipment sales, rentals and services. CRS has grown significantly and now employs over 400 people across 28 locations in Ontario, Canada.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Telugu Desam Party (TDP) MP Diwakar Reddy, who was banned from flying on all major domestic airlines for his alleged misbehaviour with an IndiGo airline staffer, was on Wednesday allowed to fly again by the same airline without any apology. Soon after IndiGo gave the big relief to Reddy, most other domestic airlines including Air India, SpiceJet, and Vistara followed suit and revoked the flying ban.

GoAir, which had also banned Reddy, refused to comment on the matter.

Budget carrier IndiGo issued a statement saying the issue was amicably resolved on Wednesday at a lunch hosted by Reddys colleague YS Chaudhary, who is also the union minister of state for ministry of science and technology and earth sciences. The airline further stated that Reddy will also withdraw the case he had filed against the airline in the same matter. Incidentally, civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju belongs to the same political party as Reddy.

The statement issued on Wednesday by IndiGo read, Senior IndiGo officials today met Diwakar Reddy at a lunch hosted by senior MP YS Chaudhary, to resolve the issue. The issue is amicably resolved between the two and IndiGo has decided to lift the said ban with immediate effect and Reddy is withdrawing the case he has filed.

Reddy, who is Lok Sabha MP from Anantapur, had approached Hyderabad High Court challenging the ban and had sought the courts direction to consequently direct the airlines to immediately allow him to fly in all domestic flights.

On June 16, Reddy allegedly misbehaved with IndiGo staff at the Vishakhapatnam airport when they refused to give him a boarding pass for his flight to Hyderabad since the gates had been closed. The lawmaker went on to shout at the airline employees, and surveillance footage showed him banging his hands on a printer and pushing an IndiGo staffer.

The incident with Reddy, and the response from the airlines, was a near repeat of what had happened with another member of Parliament who had misbehaved with an Air India staffer. Shiv Sena MP Ravindra Gaikwad was also temporarily banned by airlines after he assaulted an Air India staffer, triggering a controversy that prompted the civil aviation ministry to release proposed rules for a national no-fly list for unruly passengers. The rules, yet to be formalised, propose a ban on flying from at least three months up to an indefinite period for unruly behaviour with airline staff.

NEW DELHI: Telugu Desam Party (TDP) MP Diwakar Reddy, who was banned from flying on all major domestic airlines for his alleged misbehaviour with an IndiGo airline staffer, was on Wednesday allowed to fly again by the same airline without any apology. Soon after IndiGo gave the big relief to Reddy, most other domestic airlines including Air India, SpiceJet, and Vistara followed suit and revoked the flying ban. GoAir, which had also banned Reddy, refused to comment on the matter. Budget carrier IndiGo issued a statement saying the issue was amicably resolved on Wednesday at a lunch hosted by Reddys colleague YS Chaudhary, who is also the union minister of state for ministry of science and technology and earth sciences. The airline further stated that Reddy will also withdraw the case he had filed against the airline in the same matter. Incidentally, civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju belongs to the same political party as Reddy. The statement issued on Wednesday by IndiGo read, Senior IndiGo officials today met Diwakar Reddy at a lunch hosted by senior MP YS Chaudhary, to resolve the issue. The issue is amicably resolved between the two and IndiGo has decided to lift the said ban with immediate effect and Reddy is withdrawing the case he has filed. Reddy, who is Lok Sabha MP from Anantapur, had approached Hyderabad High Court challenging the ban and had sought the courts direction to consequently direct the airlines to immediately allow him to fly in all domestic flights. On June 16, Reddy allegedly misbehaved with IndiGo staff at the Vishakhapatnam airport when they refused to give him a boarding pass for his flight to Hyderabad since the gates had been closed. The lawmaker went on to shout at the airline employees, and surveillance footage showed him banging his hands on a printer and pushing an IndiGo staffer. The incident with Reddy, and the response from the airlines, was a near repeat of what had happened with another member of Parliament who had misbehaved with an Air India staffer. Shiv Sena MP Ravindra Gaikwad was also temporarily banned by airlines after he assaulted an Air India staffer, triggering a controversy that prompted the civil aviation ministry to release proposed rules for a national no-fly list for unruly passengers. The rules, yet to be formalised, propose a ban on flying from at least three months up to an indefinite period for unruly behaviour with airline staff.
By Express News Service

KOCHI: A.S.Sunilraj alias Appunni, manager and driver of Malayalam actor Dileep, who is in judicial custody in connection with the actress abduction and assault case, submitted before the Kerala High Court that police was trying to "fabricate" evidence by making filmmaker Nadirsha, a close friend of the actor, and him as approvers in the sensational case.

In his anticipatory bail petition, filed through his counsel here, the 27-year-old Appunni, who is still at large, submitted that there was no evidence to implicate Dileep in the crime.

The Kerala High Court will consider Dileep's bail petition on Thursday.

Appunni feared that he may be implicated in the case. He said, a special investigation team had earlier interrogated him but found nothing against him.

However, in the past few days there have been media reports against him.

The petition said Appunni feared that he will be intimidated and tortured, if taken into custody.

Appunni claimed he had no connection or association with Pulsar Suni, the prime accused in the sexual assault case. On April 18, the petitioner received a phone call from a man named Vishnu who reportedly contacted him on behalf of Pulsar Suni.

Appunni believes that Suni was attempting to blackmail Dileep, the petition said.

KOCHI: A.S.Sunilraj alias Appunni, manager and driver of Malayalam actor Dileep, who is in judicial custody in connection with the actress abduction and assault case, submitted before the Kerala High Court that police was trying to "fabricate" evidence by making filmmaker Nadirsha, a close friend of the actor, and him as approvers in the sensational case. In his anticipatory bail petition, filed through his counsel here, the 27-year-old Appunni, who is still at large, submitted that there was no evidence to implicate Dileep in the crime. The Kerala High Court will consider Dileep's bail petition on Thursday. Appunni feared that he may be implicated in the case. He said, a special investigation team had earlier interrogated him but found nothing against him. However, in the past few days there have been media reports against him. The petition said Appunni feared that he will be intimidated and tortured, if taken into custody. Appunni claimed he had no connection or association with Pulsar Suni, the prime accused in the sexual assault case. On April 18, the petitioner received a phone call from a man named Vishnu who reportedly contacted him on behalf of Pulsar Suni. Appunni believes that Suni was attempting to blackmail Dileep, the petition said.
By Express News Service

KALPETTA: The police on Tuesday arrested the priest against whom the parents of two boys had lodged a complaint of sexual abuse with Meenangadi police station here. Senior police officers said the accused priest, Fr Saji alias Joseph, 40, of Kottiyoor in Kannur, was nabbed by a special team from Mangaluru where he had gone into hiding after the parents of the children lodged the complaint.



He was produced before the court and remanded in judicial custody. The incident came to light on July 14 when the parents of the two boys approached Childline after their wards aged 15 and 14 revealed to them about the sexual abuse incident.



The complaint alleged the priest had sexually abused the children while they were at a Bala Bhavan for summer course. The priest, who was working at the institution that time, has been charged with cases under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO), IPC 337 and Juvenile Justice Act.

KALPETTA: The police on Tuesday arrested the priest against whom the parents of two boys had lodged a complaint of sexual abuse with Meenangadi police station here. Senior police officers said the accused priest, Fr Saji alias Joseph, 40, of Kottiyoor in Kannur, was nabbed by a special team from Mangaluru where he had gone into hiding after the parents of the children lodged the complaint. He was produced before the court and remanded in judicial custody. The incident came to light on July 14 when the parents of the two boys approached Childline after their wards aged 15 and 14 revealed to them about the sexual abuse incident. The complaint alleged the priest had sexually abused the children while they were at a Bala Bhavan for summer course. The priest, who was working at the institution that time, has been charged with cases under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO), IPC 337 and Juvenile Justice Act.
M Sabari By

Express News Service

SALEM: A few years ago, 23-year-old Valarmathi was felicitated by the then Salem city commissioner of police for her electric speech that left the audience spellbound. Little would have she imagined that come 2017, it would be the same oratorical skills that would land her behind the bars. The difference between then and now lies in the context.

Former Salem city police

commissioner Sunil

Kumar Sing awarding her.

From a promising teenager, she transformed into a fiery orator the police deemed a threat to the society, fit enough to be booked under the Goondas Act and confined to a jail cell. Valarmathi first grabbed headlines when she was detained by the police when she was en route to Neduvasal to throw her lot with the farmers, protesting a proposed ONGC project to extract hydrocarbon.

The over a month-long detention did not dampen her spirits and she continued mobilising support against the project. On July 12, she was arrested along with an accomplice for allegedly fomenting trouble by distributing pamphlets to students. Her earlier tryst with law ensured that the police had reasons enough to pitch for her detention, which the administration readily nodded to.

Coming from a middle-class Vanniyar community, Valarmathis father Mathaiyan (54) was himself a CPI (ML) activist during his youth. Her mother Kamala (52), a farmer, too dabbled in politics, becoming a ward member and even throwing her hat in the hustings as an independent candidate. The family resides at Veeranam in the city, known for its own brand of fiery communism. Little wonder then that activism and the urge to uplift the lot of the marginalised rubbed off on her.

Valarmathis brother Jeevanandham, a powerloom owner, recalls her as a bright student with a penchant for public speaking. She inherited the skill of oration from my father. She won over 50 prizes in elocution competitions from classes VII to XII, he said. It was after one such competition that the then Salem city police commissioner Sunil Kumar Singh awarded her. Her skills were felicitated by former collector Mathivanan and former minister Veerapandi S Arumugam as well.

Her first tryst with law came when she was a BSc (Agriculture) student at the Annamalai University. Participating in a protest urging the government to give scholarships to the meritorious students, she incurred the wrath of the police, getting a case slapped on her in the bargain. Ever since then, police have been targeting her with a slew of cases, her brother adds.

No less fiery is Valarmathis mother, who demands that the police drop charges against her daughter. Kamala says, Farming is the backbone of our country. The State and the Central governments are mute spectators to the farmers protest for livelihood. If a protest is organised here for the same cause, I myself would participate. Mobilising students for such protests is normal at a young age. However, the police are branding her as a terrorist, a Maoist. This is a blatant attempt to make people fear the system.

Ever since the detention, neighbours have stopped talking to us. However, we are not going to wilt under pressure. We have strong ties with communism and we will face everything that comes our way. This is the first time in the history of the State that a student has been detained under the Goondas Act, Mathaiyan said.

The police, especially the Q Branch, are spreading rumours. It all began the day she protested in Annamalai University. Over 40 police personnel arrested her and since then, we have been facing problems. We ordinary people allow our children to participate in protest for a good cause and the police want to suppress the voice of student community by threatening us like this, he added.

Speaking to Express, Tamil Nadu Makkal Urimai Katchi State president Poomozhi said that through her arrest, the police were indirectly warning the youngsters to abstain from taking to the streets against the government.

Do the police have courage to book political leaders? Such attempts are made only on poor people. The police are constantly trying to crush the democratic and fundamental rights guaranteed by law. The government must withdraw the case, Poomozhi added.

SALEM: A few years ago, 23-year-old Valarmathi was felicitated by the then Salem city commissioner of police for her electric speech that left the audience spellbound. Little would have she imagined that come 2017, it would be the same oratorical skills that would land her behind the bars. The difference between then and now lies in the context. Former Salem city police commissioner Sunil Kumar Sing awarding her.From a promising teenager, she transformed into a fiery orator the police deemed a threat to the society, fit enough to be booked under the Goondas Act and confined to a jail cell. Valarmathi first grabbed headlines when she was detained by the police when she was en route to Neduvasal to throw her lot with the farmers, protesting a proposed ONGC project to extract hydrocarbon. The over a month-long detention did not dampen her spirits and she continued mobilising support against the project. On July 12, she was arrested along with an accomplice for allegedly fomenting trouble by distributing pamphlets to students. Her earlier tryst with law ensured that the police had reasons enough to pitch for her detention, which the administration readily nodded to. Coming from a middle-class Vanniyar community, Valarmathis father Mathaiyan (54) was himself a CPI (ML) activist during his youth. Her mother Kamala (52), a farmer, too dabbled in politics, becoming a ward member and even throwing her hat in the hustings as an independent candidate. The family resides at Veeranam in the city, known for its own brand of fiery communism. Little wonder then that activism and the urge to uplift the lot of the marginalised rubbed off on her. Valarmathis brother Jeevanandham, a powerloom owner, recalls her as a bright student with a penchant for public speaking. She inherited the skill of oration from my father. She won over 50 prizes in elocution competitions from classes VII to XII, he said. It was after one such competition that the then Salem city police commissioner Sunil Kumar Singh awarded her. Her skills were felicitated by former collector Mathivanan and former minister Veerapandi S Arumugam as well. Her first tryst with law came when she was a BSc (Agriculture) student at the Annamalai University. Participating in a protest urging the government to give scholarships to the meritorious students, she incurred the wrath of the police, getting a case slapped on her in the bargain. Ever since then, police have been targeting her with a slew of cases, her brother adds. No less fiery is Valarmathis mother, who demands that the police drop charges against her daughter. Kamala says, Farming is the backbone of our country. The State and the Central governments are mute spectators to the farmers protest for livelihood. If a protest is organised here for the same cause, I myself would participate. Mobilising students for such protests is normal at a young age. However, the police are branding her as a terrorist, a Maoist. This is a blatant attempt to make people fear the system. Ever since the detention, neighbours have stopped talking to us. However, we are not going to wilt under pressure. We have strong ties with communism and we will face everything that comes our way. This is the first time in the history of the State that a student has been detained under the Goondas Act, Mathaiyan said. The police, especially the Q Branch, are spreading rumours. It all began the day she protested in Annamalai University. Over 40 police personnel arrested her and since then, we have been facing problems. We ordinary people allow our children to participate in protest for a good cause and the police want to suppress the voice of student community by threatening us like this, he added. Speaking to Express, Tamil Nadu Makkal Urimai Katchi State president Poomozhi said that through her arrest, the police were indirectly warning the youngsters to abstain from taking to the streets against the government. Do the police have courage to book political leaders? Such attempts are made only on poor people. The police are constantly trying to crush the democratic and fundamental rights guaranteed by law. The government must withdraw the case, Poomozhi added.
By Express News Service

CHENNAI: After flirting at the margins with statements and cryptic comments on social media, award-winning filmmaker Kamal Haasan took an apparent step closer to the political field on Wednesday, asking his fans and general public to shoot off complaints about corruption under the present State government to the concerned ministers.

Listen to his appeal to the public to write to minister about corruption they have come across

The exhortation came within a few hours after Chief Minister 'Edappadi' K Palaniswami said that Kamal did not know about politics, and added that he was ready to answer Kamal's charges if he made them after entering politics.

Palaniswami's was the latest in a series of attacks that the actor had to face from AIADMK leaders including ministers, ever since he began commenting on the political situation in Tamil Nadu - starting with the support he pledged to the jallikattu protesters at Marina beach and elsewhere.

"My younger brother [finance minister] D Jayakumar and [BJP national secretary] H Raja, who challenged me to enter politics, do not know that I have been politics for a long time. I became a politician the moment I raised my voice against Hindi imposition," said Kamal Haasan, pitching himself right at the heart of Dravidian politics.

"There are persons who received bribes openly but forgot to discharge their duties... Their intimidation that action would be taken against me for tax evasion evokes laughter and anger at the same time," he added.

Taking a step forward, Kamal asked his fans and general public to send complaints to ministers themselves, explaining their hardships due to corruption under the present regime.

Let the ministers understand that the people are more honourable than them. People are not herds. Let you (ministers) have the honour to listen to the people's voice. Very soon, that voice will be heard clearly, Kamal said in the two-page statement.

Unlike others who only pointed fingers elsewhere, he spoke out against corruption within the film industry, Kamal said. This is my voice. If people with guts in film industry raise their voice, that alone would make the complaint box overflowing.

Expressing confidence that at least a few lakh people would send their complaints to the ministers, he wondered whether all those complainants would be arrested or would the ministers respond to them. There are no sufficient prisons in the southern India to imprison so many lakhs of persons, he added sarcastically.



Referring to the demand that he should level charges with evidence, the actor said, "The entire media was blaring about the corrupt deeds.. Even after witnessing that, people ask about evidence.. This is characteristic of the obdurate," he added.

CHENNAI: After flirting at the margins with statements and cryptic comments on social media, award-winning filmmaker Kamal Haasan took an apparent step closer to the political field on Wednesday, asking his fans and general public to shoot off complaints about corruption under the present State government to the concerned ministers. Listen to his appeal to the public to write to minister about corruption they have come across The exhortation came within a few hours after Chief Minister 'Edappadi' K Palaniswami said that Kamal did not know about politics, and added that he was ready to answer Kamal's charges if he made them after entering politics. Palaniswami's was the latest in a series of attacks that the actor had to face from AIADMK leaders including ministers, ever since he began commenting on the political situation in Tamil Nadu - starting with the support he pledged to the jallikattu protesters at Marina beach and elsewhere. "My younger brother [finance minister] D Jayakumar and [BJP national secretary] H Raja, who challenged me to enter politics, do not know that I have been politics for a long time. I became a politician the moment I raised my voice against Hindi imposition," said Kamal Haasan, pitching himself right at the heart of Dravidian politics. "There are persons who received bribes openly but forgot to discharge their duties... Their intimidation that action would be taken against me for tax evasion evokes laughter and anger at the same time," he added. Taking a step forward, Kamal asked his fans and general public to send complaints to ministers themselves, explaining their hardships due to corruption under the present regime. Let the ministers understand that the people are more honourable than them. People are not herds. Let you (ministers) have the honour to listen to the people's voice. Very soon, that voice will be heard clearly, Kamal said in the two-page statement. Unlike others who only pointed fingers elsewhere, he spoke out against corruption within the film industry, Kamal said. This is my voice. If people with guts in film industry raise their voice, that alone would make the complaint box overflowing. Expressing confidence that at least a few lakh people would send their complaints to the ministers, he wondered whether all those complainants would be arrested or would the ministers respond to them. There are no sufficient prisons in the southern India to imprison so many lakhs of persons, he added sarcastically. Referring to the demand that he should level charges with evidence, the actor said, "The entire media was blaring about the corrupt deeds.. Even after witnessing that, people ask about evidence.. This is characteristic of the obdurate," he added.
B Anbuselvan By

Express News Service

TIRUVANNAMALAI: Eight months after a mysterious fever claimed many lives at Tandarai in the district, fear returned to the village as A Prem Charan (4), son of Anthony Raj, fell victim to it on Monday. With this, the death toll in the family have gone up to seven.

Sources said around 2.30 pm on Sunday, Charan was playing in front of his house when he started to vomit and swooned. He was rushed to the Government Tiruvannamalai Medical College Hospital by his mother Vimala.

After examining him, the doctors told the family that the boy could probably be discharged the next day.

On Monday morning, his condition worsened and he was shifted to the critical care unit. Some doctors from the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital, Chennai, were summoned to treat the boy, but he died within two hours.

A pall of gloom descended on the village after the news of the boy's death reached the village.

The family blamed the apathy of the doctors for the boy's death. "Had I known the reason for the deaths of my daughter (Kirthika Merlin) and mother (Christha), I could have saved my son," Anthony Raj said.

He added that they had decided to leave the village three months ago to move to Bengaluru. "But as I could not support my family with my meager earnings, we stayed back," said the diferently-abled daily wager.

Of the seven persons who died in the village since October 5, three were from Anthony's family and the other four were his relatives.

K Soundar, a cousin of Anthony Raj, said police and other officials did not show interest in finding out the cause despite the recurring deaths. "Will the officials have the same attitude if others die. How can we live peacefully without knowing why our family members died," said Soundar.

On Wednesday, the health department launched a camp and began screening the villagers.

Meena, deputy director of Medical Health Service, Tiruvannamalai, said they were awaiting the autopsy report. Superintendent of Police R Ponni said that special teams have been formed to find out the exact reason of the death.

Collector Prashant M Wadnere was not available for comment.

Victims until now

Oct 5, 2016: Christopher, aged 13, dies after vomiting

Oct 8: A day later, Vinoth Kumar, Christophers uncle who came from Bengaluru to attend the funeral, started to vomit, dies soon after

Oct 9: Nelson (6), Christophers cousin, dies after showing

the very same symptoms

Oct 12: Krithika Merlin (8), daughter of Vinoth Kumars cousin, vomits while at school, dies within two hours

Oct 24: Joseph, the grandfather of Vinoth Kumar, complains of stomach ache and dies in a hospital in Chennai the next day

Nov 4: Christha (65) also complains of stomach ache,

dies two days later

Nov 8: Autopsy report of Christha suggests presence of yellow phosphorus (rat poison)

July 17, 2017: Prem Charan succumbs in hospital

TIRUVANNAMALAI: Eight months after a mysterious fever claimed many lives at Tandarai in the district, fear returned to the village as A Prem Charan (4), son of Anthony Raj, fell victim to it on Monday. With this, the death toll in the family have gone up to seven. Sources said around 2.30 pm on Sunday, Charan was playing in front of his house when he started to vomit and swooned. He was rushed to the Government Tiruvannamalai Medical College Hospital by his mother Vimala. After examining him, the doctors told the family that the boy could probably be discharged the next day. On Monday morning, his condition worsened and he was shifted to the critical care unit. Some doctors from the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital, Chennai, were summoned to treat the boy, but he died within two hours. A pall of gloom descended on the village after the news of the boy's death reached the village. The family blamed the apathy of the doctors for the boy's death. "Had I known the reason for the deaths of my daughter (Kirthika Merlin) and mother (Christha), I could have saved my son," Anthony Raj said. He added that they had decided to leave the village three months ago to move to Bengaluru. "But as I could not support my family with my meager earnings, we stayed back," said the diferently-abled daily wager. Of the seven persons who died in the village since October 5, three were from Anthony's family and the other four were his relatives. K Soundar, a cousin of Anthony Raj, said police and other officials did not show interest in finding out the cause despite the recurring deaths. "Will the officials have the same attitude if others die. How can we live peacefully without knowing why our family members died," said Soundar. On Wednesday, the health department launched a camp and began screening the villagers. Meena, deputy director of Medical Health Service, Tiruvannamalai, said they were awaiting the autopsy report. Superintendent of Police R Ponni said that special teams have been formed to find out the exact reason of the death. Collector Prashant M Wadnere was not available for comment. Victims until now Oct 5, 2016: Christopher, aged 13, dies after vomiting Oct 8: A day later, Vinoth Kumar, Christophers uncle who came from Bengaluru to attend the funeral, started to vomit, dies soon after Oct 9: Nelson (6), Christophers cousin, dies after showing the very same symptoms Oct 12: Krithika Merlin (8), daughter of Vinoth Kumars cousin, vomits while at school, dies within two hours Oct 24: Joseph, the grandfather of Vinoth Kumar, complains of stomach ache and dies in a hospital in Chennai the next day Nov 4: Christha (65) also complains of stomach ache, dies two days later Nov 8: Autopsy report of Christha suggests presence of yellow phosphorus (rat poison) July 17, 2017: Prem Charan succumbs in hospital
By IANS

SANAA: At least 20 civilians including women and children died in an air strike on the city of Taiz in southern Yemen, the UN said on Wednesday, condemning the attack.

"Injuries have also been reported with a number also taken to nearby hospitals for treatment," the UN refugee agency UNHCR said in a statement.

UNHCR said it was "deeply shocked and saddened" by the attack and the reported casualties.

The civilians killed in the attack were refugees fleeing embattled Mawza district in Taiz governorate aboard a packed vehicle and were understood to be from the same family, UNHCR said.

"A peaceful political solution to resolve the conflict in Yemen is urgently needed to end civilian suffering," UNHCR stated.

The air strike is believed to have been carried out on Tuesday by war planes from the Saudi-led coalition, according to Sabaa news agency, which is controlled by Yemen's Shia Houthi rebels.

Coalition warplanes also flattened three buildings in the village of al-Atira in Taiz province, according to Sabaa.

The coalition has since March 2015 been targeting Houthi rebels fighting pro-government forces in Yemen in the country's deadly civil war and international rights groups accuse it of bombing civilian gatherings, markets, hospitals and residential areas across the country.

The war has been mired in stalemate for most of the last two years, with more than 10,000 civilians killed and several million left homeless.

SANAA: At least 20 civilians including women and children died in an air strike on the city of Taiz in southern Yemen, the UN said on Wednesday, condemning the attack. "Injuries have also been reported with a number also taken to nearby hospitals for treatment," the UN refugee agency UNHCR said in a statement. UNHCR said it was "deeply shocked and saddened" by the attack and the reported casualties. The civilians killed in the attack were refugees fleeing embattled Mawza district in Taiz governorate aboard a packed vehicle and were understood to be from the same family, UNHCR said. "A peaceful political solution to resolve the conflict in Yemen is urgently needed to end civilian suffering," UNHCR stated. The air strike is believed to have been carried out on Tuesday by war planes from the Saudi-led coalition, according to Sabaa news agency, which is controlled by Yemen's Shia Houthi rebels. Coalition warplanes also flattened three buildings in the village of al-Atira in Taiz province, according to Sabaa. The coalition has since March 2015 been targeting Houthi rebels fighting pro-government forces in Yemen in the country's deadly civil war and international rights groups accuse it of bombing civilian gatherings, markets, hospitals and residential areas across the country. The war has been mired in stalemate for most of the last two years, with more than 10,000 civilians killed and several million left homeless.
By PTI

BIJING: In a controversial move, China's ruling Communist Party has directed its nearly 90 million members to shun religion for maintaining party unity, warning that religious belief is a "redline" for the cadres and those who resist would be punished.

The head of China's top religious affairs regulator said that party members should not seek value and faith in religion and those who have religious beliefs should be persuaded to give them up. Experts said the direction is meant to maintain party unity, the official media reported today. "Party members should not have religious beliefs, which is a redline for all members...Party members should be firm Marxist atheists, obey party rules and stick to the party's faith...they are not allowed to seek value and belief in religion," Wang Zuoan, director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) wrote in an article released in the Qiushi Journal on Saturday, the flagship magazine of the CPC Central Committee.

Officials who have religious faith should be persuaded to give it up, and those who resist would be punished by the party organisation, Wang wrote. The order came as the CPC, which has about 88.76 million members, geared up to hold its 19th Congress expected to be in October this year in which President Xi Jinping who heads the party and the military is likely to get elected for another five-year term. Wang said the party members are also forbidden from supporting or getting involved in religious affairs in the name of developing the economy or diversifying culture.

Elaborating on the new order by the party, Zhu Weiqun, chairman of the Ethnic and Religious Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said "It is important that Wang constantly reminds Party members not to have religious beliefs. Some people who claim to be scholars support religious beliefs in the party, which has undermined the party's values based on dialectical materialism."

"Once the party's values are damaged, party unity as well as the party's basic policy to regulate religions would be sabotaged," Zhu told state-run Global Times. Wang also stressed the need for a firm political direction in managing religious affairs. "We should guide religious groups and individuals with socialist core values and excellent traditional Chinese culture to dig into their doctrines to find parts that are beneficial to social harmony and development," Wang said.

Apparently referring to the fast-spreading Christianity in China, which Beijing apprehends posed a major threat as it could emerge as a force like in previously socialist countries like Poland to overthrow Communist Party rule, Wang said foreign forces are "infiltrating" into China in the name of religion. China also has over 20 million Muslims. Xinjiang where the Turkik speaking Uygur Muslims are a majority is in turmoil as Uygurs were restive about the increasing settlements of majority Hans from other provinces.

Next to Buddhism, Christianity is regarded as the fastest growing religion in Communist China. Unofficial estimates say China has over 65 million Christians including Catholics, Protestants as well as other church groups. The ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) has tenuous ties with Rome apprehending political impact of the rapid growth of Christianity as it could become a movement in later years challenging the CPCs power base.

According to reports, a number of Chinese Christians were involved in preaching Christianity in Muslim countries. Two Chinese nationals, accused of being involved in preaching in Pakistan, were killed allegedly by Islamic State militants in the restive Baluchistan province. Recent reports spoke of backchannel contacts between Beijing and Vatican to establish diplomatic ties which broke off in 1951, two years after CPC came to power.

"Some foreign forces have used religion to infiltrate China, and extremism and illegal religious activities are spreading in some places, which have threatened national security and social stability," Wang added.

"Guiding religions to suit to China's development is a core policy to solve China's religious problems. The moves evolve with traditional Chinese values over years and meet the demand of socialist development," said Su Wei, a professor at the Party School of the CPC Chongqing Committee. Some foreign forces have used religions, including Christianity and Islam, two non-local religions, to deliberately spread their political views in China, Su said, adding that some religious doctrines shall be adjusted to match Chinese ethics and customs. Su also noted that the regulation banning party members from having religious beliefs would be permanent, but may involve more work in Northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Gansu Province as well as Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region.

BIJING: In a controversial move, China's ruling Communist Party has directed its nearly 90 million members to shun religion for maintaining party unity, warning that religious belief is a "redline" for the cadres and those who resist would be punished. The head of China's top religious affairs regulator said that party members should not seek value and faith in religion and those who have religious beliefs should be persuaded to give them up. Experts said the direction is meant to maintain party unity, the official media reported today. "Party members should not have religious beliefs, which is a redline for all members...Party members should be firm Marxist atheists, obey party rules and stick to the party's faith...they are not allowed to seek value and belief in religion," Wang Zuoan, director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) wrote in an article released in the Qiushi Journal on Saturday, the flagship magazine of the CPC Central Committee. Officials who have religious faith should be persuaded to give it up, and those who resist would be punished by the party organisation, Wang wrote. The order came as the CPC, which has about 88.76 million members, geared up to hold its 19th Congress expected to be in October this year in which President Xi Jinping who heads the party and the military is likely to get elected for another five-year term. Wang said the party members are also forbidden from supporting or getting involved in religious affairs in the name of developing the economy or diversifying culture. Elaborating on the new order by the party, Zhu Weiqun, chairman of the Ethnic and Religious Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said "It is important that Wang constantly reminds Party members not to have religious beliefs. Some people who claim to be scholars support religious beliefs in the party, which has undermined the party's values based on dialectical materialism." "Once the party's values are damaged, party unity as well as the party's basic policy to regulate religions would be sabotaged," Zhu told state-run Global Times. Wang also stressed the need for a firm political direction in managing religious affairs. "We should guide religious groups and individuals with socialist core values and excellent traditional Chinese culture to dig into their doctrines to find parts that are beneficial to social harmony and development," Wang said. Apparently referring to the fast-spreading Christianity in China, which Beijing apprehends posed a major threat as it could emerge as a force like in previously socialist countries like Poland to overthrow Communist Party rule, Wang said foreign forces are "infiltrating" into China in the name of religion. China also has over 20 million Muslims. Xinjiang where the Turkik speaking Uygur Muslims are a majority is in turmoil as Uygurs were restive about the increasing settlements of majority Hans from other provinces. Next to Buddhism, Christianity is regarded as the fastest growing religion in Communist China. Unofficial estimates say China has over 65 million Christians including Catholics, Protestants as well as other church groups. The ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) has tenuous ties with Rome apprehending political impact of the rapid growth of Christianity as it could become a movement in later years challenging the CPCs power base. According to reports, a number of Chinese Christians were involved in preaching Christianity in Muslim countries. Two Chinese nationals, accused of being involved in preaching in Pakistan, were killed allegedly by Islamic State militants in the restive Baluchistan province. Recent reports spoke of backchannel contacts between Beijing and Vatican to establish diplomatic ties which broke off in 1951, two years after CPC came to power. "Some foreign forces have used religion to infiltrate China, and extremism and illegal religious activities are spreading in some places, which have threatened national security and social stability," Wang added. "Guiding religions to suit to China's development is a core policy to solve China's religious problems. The moves evolve with traditional Chinese values over years and meet the demand of socialist development," said Su Wei, a professor at the Party School of the CPC Chongqing Committee. Some foreign forces have used religions, including Christianity and Islam, two non-local religions, to deliberately spread their political views in China, Su said, adding that some religious doctrines shall be adjusted to match Chinese ethics and customs. Su also noted that the regulation banning party members from having religious beliefs would be permanent, but may involve more work in Northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Gansu Province as well as Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region.
By PTI

BEIJING: The Chinese Army moved tens of thousands of tonnes of military vehicles and hardware into the remote mountainous Tibet region after the standoff with Indian troops in the Dokalam area in the Sikkim sector, the mouthpiece of the PLA said today.

The vast haul was transported to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command  which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India, reported the PLA Daily, the official mouthpiece of Chinese military. The move took place late last month and involved hardware being moved simultaneously by road and rail from across the entire region, the report said.

China's state-run media has stepped up its rhetoric against India in recent weeks but there was no way to confirm the veracity of such claims. Early this week, state-run CCTV had broadcast People's Liberation Army troops taking part in heavy military exercises using live ammunition on the Tibetan plateau. The location was not far from the disputed Dokalam area where Chinese and Indian troops are locked in a standoff, the Hong-Kong based South China Morning Post reported.

The PLA Daily report, however, did not say whether the movement of the military equipment was to support the exercise or for other reasons. Wang Dehua, an expert on South Asia studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, said the scale of the troop and equipment movement showed how much easier it is for China to defend its western borders. "Military operations are all about logistics," he said.

"Now there is much better logistics support to the Tibet region." Chinese and Indian soldiers have been locked in a face- off in the Dokalam area of the Sikkim sector for over a month after Indian troops stopped the Chinese army from building a road in the disputed area.

China claimed that they were constructing the road within their territory and has been demanding immediate pull-out of the Indian troops from the disputed Dokalam plateau. New Delhi has expressed concern over the road building, apprehending that it may allow Chinese troops to cut India's access to its northeastern states.

India has conveyed to the Chinese government that the road construction would represent a significant change of status quo with serious security implications for it. Doka La is the Indian name for the region which Bhutan recognises as Dokalam, while China claims it as part of its Donglang region. Of the 3,488-km-long India-China border from Jammu and Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, a 220-km section falls in Sikkim.

BEIJING: The Chinese Army moved tens of thousands of tonnes of military vehicles and hardware into the remote mountainous Tibet region after the standoff with Indian troops in the Dokalam area in the Sikkim sector, the mouthpiece of the PLA said today. The vast haul was transported to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command  which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India, reported the PLA Daily, the official mouthpiece of Chinese military. The move took place late last month and involved hardware being moved simultaneously by road and rail from across the entire region, the report said. China's state-run media has stepped up its rhetoric against India in recent weeks but there was no way to confirm the veracity of such claims. Early this week, state-run CCTV had broadcast People's Liberation Army troops taking part in heavy military exercises using live ammunition on the Tibetan plateau. The location was not far from the disputed Dokalam area where Chinese and Indian troops are locked in a standoff, the Hong-Kong based South China Morning Post reported. The PLA Daily report, however, did not say whether the movement of the military equipment was to support the exercise or for other reasons. Wang Dehua, an expert on South Asia studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, said the scale of the troop and equipment movement showed how much easier it is for China to defend its western borders. "Military operations are all about logistics," he said. "Now there is much better logistics support to the Tibet region." Chinese and Indian soldiers have been locked in a face- off in the Dokalam area of the Sikkim sector for over a month after Indian troops stopped the Chinese army from building a road in the disputed area. China claimed that they were constructing the road within their territory and has been demanding immediate pull-out of the Indian troops from the disputed Dokalam plateau. New Delhi has expressed concern over the road building, apprehending that it may allow Chinese troops to cut India's access to its northeastern states. India has conveyed to the Chinese government that the road construction would represent a significant change of status quo with serious security implications for it. Doka La is the Indian name for the region which Bhutan recognises as Dokalam, while China claims it as part of its Donglang region. Of the 3,488-km-long India-China border from Jammu and Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, a 220-km section falls in Sikkim.
By PTI

RUSSIA: India and Russia will soon sign a contract for jointly developing the much-delayed fifth-generation fighter aircraft, a top Russian official has said. Sergei Chemezov, the CEO of Rostec State Corporation, said that all decisions over the multi-billion dollar project to jointly develop the fifth-generation fighter aircraft (FGFA) will be finalised in the "nearest future".

India and Russia inked an inter-governmental pact for the FGFA project in 2007. "As for the 5th generation (fighter aircraft) - the work is underway. Stage one is over. Now we are discussing the second stage. And I think that in the nearest future, all decisions will be made and the contract documents will be signed," Chemezov told reporters on the sidelines of Russia's premier air show MAKS 2017 here.

"But the work is going, it is very complicated, so it is not going fast," he acknowledged. His remarks come over two months after government sources in New Delhi had said that almost all the ground work had been completed to finalise the deal for the design of the FGFA jet as well as some other critical issues.

"The contract for the detailed design would be signed soon and that will be a major milestone. It should be signed in the second half of the year," a top official involved in the negotiations with Russia on the project had said. The official had said that both the countries are co- developers and India will have equal rights over the technology.

In February last year, India and Russia had revived talks on the project after a clearance from then defence minister Manohar Parrikar. Since then, a lot of issues related to work share, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and technology transfer among others have been sorted out between the two sides, along with the monetary commitments.

In December 2010, India agreed to pay USD 295 million towards the preliminary design of the fighter, which is called in India as the 'Perspective Multi-role Fighter' (PMF). However, negotiations faced various hurdles in the subsequent years.

RUSSIA: India and Russia will soon sign a contract for jointly developing the much-delayed fifth-generation fighter aircraft, a top Russian official has said. Sergei Chemezov, the CEO of Rostec State Corporation, said that all decisions over the multi-billion dollar project to jointly develop the fifth-generation fighter aircraft (FGFA) will be finalised in the "nearest future". India and Russia inked an inter-governmental pact for the FGFA project in 2007. "As for the 5th generation (fighter aircraft) - the work is underway. Stage one is over. Now we are discussing the second stage. And I think that in the nearest future, all decisions will be made and the contract documents will be signed," Chemezov told reporters on the sidelines of Russia's premier air show MAKS 2017 here. "But the work is going, it is very complicated, so it is not going fast," he acknowledged. His remarks come over two months after government sources in New Delhi had said that almost all the ground work had been completed to finalise the deal for the design of the FGFA jet as well as some other critical issues. "The contract for the detailed design would be signed soon and that will be a major milestone. It should be signed in the second half of the year," a top official involved in the negotiations with Russia on the project had said. The official had said that both the countries are co- developers and India will have equal rights over the technology. In February last year, India and Russia had revived talks on the project after a clearance from then defence minister Manohar Parrikar. Since then, a lot of issues related to work share, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and technology transfer among others have been sorted out between the two sides, along with the monetary commitments. In December 2010, India agreed to pay USD 295 million towards the preliminary design of the fighter, which is called in India as the 'Perspective Multi-role Fighter' (PMF). However, negotiations faced various hurdles in the subsequent years.
SAN FRANCISCO, July 19, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- With cybercriminals costing the global economy $454 billion last year alone1, digital threat management leader RiskIQ has examined the growing volume of malicious activity on the internet to reveal the inaugural Evil Internet Minute. In a single evil internet minute, close to $858,153 is lost to cybercrime, and 1,080 people fall victim. Despite businesses best efforts to guard against external cyberthreats, spending up to $142,6942 in 60 seconds, bad actors continue to proliferate online.



Scott Gordon, chief marketing officer, RiskIQ, said, As the internet and its community continue to grow at pace, researchers have been trying to make the vast numbers associated with it more accessible by framing them in the context of an internet minute. As the same growth applies to cybercrime, we have framed malicious internet activity, leveraging the latest research as well as our own intelligence, to define the darker happenings across the web in that quick but impactful timeframe.

The threats are complex, with tactics ranging from malware to phishing, and intentions including monetary gain, inflicting large scale reputational damage, or perhaps even to entertain. Cybercriminals continue to find success deploying tactics from 818 pieces of unique malware, 1,214 ransomware attacks, and more than 100,000 phishing emails in just one evil internet minute.

RiskIQs research has also uncovered additional malicious activity, ranging from blacklisted mobile apps to malvertising:

New blacklisted mobile apps: 0.3 per minute

New phishing pages: 100 per minute

Malvertising: 14.5 new malicious ads per minute

Pirate content: 4,300 people globally exposed to malware from content theft sites per minute

As companies innovate web, social, and mobile means to engage with their customers, partners, and employees, threat actors will prey on business exposures and brands to capture users trust, access credentials, and sensitive data, Gordon said. This requires organizations to extend their security programs to monitor and mitigate threats outside the firewall.

To view RiskIQs Evil Internet Minute infographic, please click here.

About RiskIQ

RiskIQ is the leader in digital threat management, providing the most comprehensive discovery, intelligence, and mitigation of threats associated with an organizations digital presence. With more than 75 percent of attacks originating outside the firewall, RiskIQ allows enterprises to gain unified insight and control over web, social, and mobile exposures. Trusted by thousands of security analysts, RiskIQs platform combines advanced internet data reconnaissance and analytics to expedite investigations, understand digital attack surfaces, assess risk, and take action to protect business, brand, and customers. Based in San Francisco, the company is backed by Summit Partners, Battery Ventures, Georgian Partners, and MassMutual Ventures.

Visit https://www.riskiq.com or follow us on Twitter.

Use RiskIQ Community Edition for free by visiting https://www.riskiq.com/community/.

_____________________________

1 Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report 2017, http://www.hiscox.com/cyber-readiness-report.pdf

2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevemorgan/2016/03/09/worldwide-cybersecurity-spending-increasing-to-170-billion-by-2020/#397cfbcf6832
By AFP

TEHRAN: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday that Tehran would "respond appropriately" to new US sanctions but that Iran remained committed to its nuclear deal with world powers.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran will always stick to its international commitments," Rouhani said in a televised cabinet meeting.

But if the US wants "to press forward with new sanctions under any pretext... the great nation of Iran will respond appropriately," he said.

"We will not forgive violations by the Americans and we will stand against them."

His comments came a day after the US and Iran traded tit-for-tat sanctions over the Islamic republic's ballistic missile programme.

The State Department slapped sanctions on 18 individuals and entities in Iran, hours after the White House admitted Tehran was sticking to the 2015 agreement.

Iran hit back with its own sanctions against "American people and entities that have acted against the Iranian people and other Muslim peoples of the region."

Rouhani on Wednesday accused Washington of "duplicity".

"On one hand they send official reports to Congress verifying that Iran has been completely loyal to the nuclear deal," Rouhani said.

"On the other hand they seek new sanctions under various excuses against logic (and) the spirit and text" of the accord, he said.

Iran's parliament on Tuesday voted to streamline a bill that would increase funding for the country's missile programme and Revolutionary Guards in response to Washington's "adventurism" in the region.

An overwhelming majority of lawmakers voted to prioritise the motion that would see an additional $260 million allocated to developing the missile programme and the same amount to the elite Revolutionary Guards' foreign operations wing, the Quds Force.

Rouhani accused his American counterpart Donald Trump of breaking international deals on Cuba, North Korea and climate change, all reached under Trump's predecessor Brack Obama.

He said Washington was pushing Iran to "abandon its commitments" and that the US was "worried over improved economic relations between Iran and Asia and Europe".

"We are happy that so far the 5+1 (world powers) have stood strongly to protect" the nuclear deal, he said.

TEHRAN: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday that Tehran would "respond appropriately" to new US sanctions but that Iran remained committed to its nuclear deal with world powers. "The Islamic Republic of Iran will always stick to its international commitments," Rouhani said in a televised cabinet meeting. But if the US wants "to press forward with new sanctions under any pretext... the great nation of Iran will respond appropriately," he said. "We will not forgive violations by the Americans and we will stand against them." His comments came a day after the US and Iran traded tit-for-tat sanctions over the Islamic republic's ballistic missile programme. The State Department slapped sanctions on 18 individuals and entities in Iran, hours after the White House admitted Tehran was sticking to the 2015 agreement. Iran hit back with its own sanctions against "American people and entities that have acted against the Iranian people and other Muslim peoples of the region." Rouhani on Wednesday accused Washington of "duplicity". "On one hand they send official reports to Congress verifying that Iran has been completely loyal to the nuclear deal," Rouhani said. "On the other hand they seek new sanctions under various excuses against logic (and) the spirit and text" of the accord, he said. Iran's parliament on Tuesday voted to streamline a bill that would increase funding for the country's missile programme and Revolutionary Guards in response to Washington's "adventurism" in the region. An overwhelming majority of lawmakers voted to prioritise the motion that would see an additional $260 million allocated to developing the missile programme and the same amount to the elite Revolutionary Guards' foreign operations wing, the Quds Force. Rouhani accused his American counterpart Donald Trump of breaking international deals on Cuba, North Korea and climate change, all reached under Trump's predecessor Brack Obama. He said Washington was pushing Iran to "abandon its commitments" and that the US was "worried over improved economic relations between Iran and Asia and Europe". "We are happy that so far the 5+1 (world powers) have stood strongly to protect" the nuclear deal, he said.
By AFP

RIYADH: Saudi Arabia's national carrier said a US ban on laptops and tablets in the cabins of its US-bound planes had been lifted on Wednesday.

The kingdom's civil aviation authorities informed Saudia that the ban had been lifted after a US team inspected security measures at airports in Riyadh and Jeddah, the airline's spokesman Abdulrahman al-Taieb said.

Washington in March barred all electronic devices larger than a mobile phone in the cabins of direct flights to the United States from 10 airports in Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, only allowing them in hold luggage.

The ban was brought in after intelligence officials learned of efforts by jihadists from the Islamic State group to produce a bomb that could be hidden inside such devices.

Washington said it would abolish the ban for companies that implemented new safety measures.

Saudia, also known as Saudi Arabian Airlines, was the last carrier to have its ban lifted.

RIYADH: Saudi Arabia's national carrier said a US ban on laptops and tablets in the cabins of its US-bound planes had been lifted on Wednesday. The kingdom's civil aviation authorities informed Saudia that the ban had been lifted after a US team inspected security measures at airports in Riyadh and Jeddah, the airline's spokesman Abdulrahman al-Taieb said. Washington in March barred all electronic devices larger than a mobile phone in the cabins of direct flights to the United States from 10 airports in Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, only allowing them in hold luggage. The ban was brought in after intelligence officials learned of efforts by jihadists from the Islamic State group to produce a bomb that could be hidden inside such devices. Washington said it would abolish the ban for companies that implemented new safety measures. Saudia, also known as Saudi Arabian Airlines, was the last carrier to have its ban lifted.
By PTI

WASHINGTON: China is exploiting its economic leverage to advance its regional political objectives, a top US commander has said while expressing concern over the PLA'S growing assertiveness in the strategic Asia-Pacific region.

The modernisation of China's People's Liberation Army emphasises the development of capabilities with the potential to degrade core US military-technological advantages, General Paul Selva of the US Air Force said yesterday. "The Chinese have shown their willingness to exploit their economic leverage as a way to advance their regional political objectives," he said in a written response to questions to the Senate Armed Services Committee considering his nomination for reconfirmation as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"As China's military modernisation continues, the United States and its allies and partners will continue to be challenged to balance China's influence," Selva, America's second-highest ranking military officer, said. Noting that a long-term, sustained presence is critical to demonstrating that America is committed to the Asia Pacific region, Selva said the US will continue to develop a security network through multilateral partnerships.

"We will continue to develop capabilities to counter China's improving military capabilities," he said. According to Selva, China's leaders remain focused on developing the capabilities to increase its regional influence and to counter any third-party intervention  including by the United States  during a crisis or conflict. "China is also seeking resources and economic opportunities outside of the region to support continued domestic economic growth and prosperity. China's growing military is being designed and postured to be able to protect its interests both in the Asia-Pacific region and abroad," he said.

Selva's comments came as a key Senate committee called for continued US engagement in the Asia Pacific region to maintain its security and stability in wake of the increased Chinese aggressiveness and military buildup in the area. "Continued engagement by the US in the Asia-Pacific region is critical to maintaining security and stability in the region," the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee said yesterday.

The Senate Armed Services Committee it its report noted that certain activities by China have recently called into question its commitment to the rule of law, and furthermore are continuing to destabilise the security of the region. "Such actions directly threaten the national security interests of the US," it said noting that a United Nations arbitral tribunal declared in July 2016 that China has no legal basis to claim rights to the resources within its nine- dash line, invalidating the assertions of the Chinese government.

The tribunal also went on to outline a number of actions that China had recently taken that were unlawful and created a serious risk of collision. These actions are alarming to the committee, it said, adding that these concerns are only compounded by the fact that the United States has taken only limited actions or operations in the last several months to ensure freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea.

"As the US has the unique capabilities to carry out such activities, the committee is concerned that the absence of such sends a signal to the Chinese government that their actions will go uncontested," the report said. China claims nearly all of the strategically vital waterway, despite counter-claims from the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam. The PLA has also built several artificial islands in the area and militarised some of them.

WASHINGTON: China is exploiting its economic leverage to advance its regional political objectives, a top US commander has said while expressing concern over the PLA'S growing assertiveness in the strategic Asia-Pacific region. The modernisation of China's People's Liberation Army emphasises the development of capabilities with the potential to degrade core US military-technological advantages, General Paul Selva of the US Air Force said yesterday. "The Chinese have shown their willingness to exploit their economic leverage as a way to advance their regional political objectives," he said in a written response to questions to the Senate Armed Services Committee considering his nomination for reconfirmation as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "As China's military modernisation continues, the United States and its allies and partners will continue to be challenged to balance China's influence," Selva, America's second-highest ranking military officer, said. Noting that a long-term, sustained presence is critical to demonstrating that America is committed to the Asia Pacific region, Selva said the US will continue to develop a security network through multilateral partnerships. "We will continue to develop capabilities to counter China's improving military capabilities," he said. According to Selva, China's leaders remain focused on developing the capabilities to increase its regional influence and to counter any third-party intervention  including by the United States  during a crisis or conflict. "China is also seeking resources and economic opportunities outside of the region to support continued domestic economic growth and prosperity. China's growing military is being designed and postured to be able to protect its interests both in the Asia-Pacific region and abroad," he said. Selva's comments came as a key Senate committee called for continued US engagement in the Asia Pacific region to maintain its security and stability in wake of the increased Chinese aggressiveness and military buildup in the area. "Continued engagement by the US in the Asia-Pacific region is critical to maintaining security and stability in the region," the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee said yesterday. The Senate Armed Services Committee it its report noted that certain activities by China have recently called into question its commitment to the rule of law, and furthermore are continuing to destabilise the security of the region. "Such actions directly threaten the national security interests of the US," it said noting that a United Nations arbitral tribunal declared in July 2016 that China has no legal basis to claim rights to the resources within its nine- dash line, invalidating the assertions of the Chinese government. The tribunal also went on to outline a number of actions that China had recently taken that were unlawful and created a serious risk of collision. These actions are alarming to the committee, it said, adding that these concerns are only compounded by the fact that the United States has taken only limited actions or operations in the last several months to ensure freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea. "As the US has the unique capabilities to carry out such activities, the committee is concerned that the absence of such sends a signal to the Chinese government that their actions will go uncontested," the report said. China claims nearly all of the strategically vital waterway, despite counter-claims from the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam. The PLA has also built several artificial islands in the area and militarised some of them.
By PTI

WASHINGTON: The US today listed Pakistan among the nations providing "safe havens" to terrorists, saying terror groups like the LeT and JeM continued to operate, train, organise and fundraise inside the country.

In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the State Department said the Mumbai attack mastermind and UN-designated terrorist Hafiz Saeed continued to address large rallies, although in February 2017 Pakistan proscribed him under relevant provisions of Anti-Terrorism Act.

"Although LeT is banned in Pakistan, LeT's wings Jamaatud-Dawa (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FiF) were able to openly engage in fundraising, including in the capital," it said.

"LeT's chief Saeed continued to address large rallies, although in February 2017, Pakistan proscribed him under relevant provisions of Schedule Four of the Anti-Terrorism Act, thus severely restricting his freedom of movement," it noted.

The 2015 ban on media coverage of Saeed, JuD, and FiF continued and was generally followed by broadcast and print media, it said.

The report listed Pakistan as one of the safe havens of terrorism and said that numerous terrorist groups, including the Haqqani Network (HQN), the LeT and JeM continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2016.

It said Pakistan did not take substantial action against the Afghan Taliban or Haqqani, or substantially limit their ability to threaten US interests in Afghanistan, although Pakistan supported efforts to bring both groups into an Afghan-led peace process.

"Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups, such as LeT and JeM in 2016, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan," the report said.

The Haqqani network has carried out a number of kidnappings and attacks against US interests in Afghanistan.

The group is also blamed for several deadly attacks against Indian interests in Afghanistan, including the 2008 bombing of the Indian mission in Kabul that killed 58 people.

India, it said, continued to experience attacks, "including by Maoist insurgents and Pakistan-based terrorists".

Indian authorities continued to blame Pakistan for cross-border attacks in Jammu and Kashmir, it said.

"In January, India experienced a terrorist attack against an Indian military facility in Pathankot, Punjab, which was blamed by authorities on JeM. Over the course of 2016, the Government of India sought to deepen counterterrorism cooperation and information sharing with the United States," the State Department said.

The Indian government continued to closely monitor the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), which made threats against India in their terrorist propaganda. A number of individuals were arrested for ISIS-affiliated recruitment and attack plotting within India, the report said.

According to the State Department, the Pakistani government did not publicly reverse its December 2015 declaration that neither JuD nor FiF is banned in Pakistan, despite their listing under UN sanctions regimes, although in January 2017, Pakistan placed both organisations "under observation" pursuant to Schedule Two of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

While not a ban, keeping the outfits under observation allows the government to closely scrutinise the activities of both organisations.

On November 11, Pakistan's National Counterterrorism Authority published its own list of banned organisations that placed JuD in a separate section for groups that are "under observation" but not banned.

Pakistan continued military operations to eradicate terrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, although their impact on all terrorist groups was uneven, it said.

In its report, the State Department said in 2016, India and the US pledged to strengthen cooperation against terrorist threats from groups including al-Qaeda, the ISIS, JeM, LeT and D-Company (Dawood Ibrahim's group), including through greater collaboration on designations at the UN.

Indian and US leaders directed officials to identify new areas of collaboration through the July US-India Counterterrorism Joint Working Group, applauded finalisation of a bilateral arrangement to facilitate the sharing of terrorism screening information, and called upon Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of terrorist attacks against India to justice, the report said.

The United States and India worked together to designate JeM leader Maulana Masood Azhar, although the listing was blocked in the UN 1267 Committee, the State Department said.

Other areas mentioned in the report as safe havens are Afghanistan, Somalia, the Trans-Sahara, Sulu/Sulawesi Seas Littoral, Southern Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Columbia and Venezuela.

WASHINGTON: The US today listed Pakistan among the nations providing "safe havens" to terrorists, saying terror groups like the LeT and JeM continued to operate, train, organise and fundraise inside the country. In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the State Department said the Mumbai attack mastermind and UN-designated terrorist Hafiz Saeed continued to address large rallies, although in February 2017 Pakistan proscribed him under relevant provisions of Anti-Terrorism Act. "Although LeT is banned in Pakistan, LeT's wings Jamaatud-Dawa (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FiF) were able to openly engage in fundraising, including in the capital," it said. "LeT's chief Saeed continued to address large rallies, although in February 2017, Pakistan proscribed him under relevant provisions of Schedule Four of the Anti-Terrorism Act, thus severely restricting his freedom of movement," it noted. The 2015 ban on media coverage of Saeed, JuD, and FiF continued and was generally followed by broadcast and print media, it said. The report listed Pakistan as one of the safe havens of terrorism and said that numerous terrorist groups, including the Haqqani Network (HQN), the LeT and JeM continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2016. It said Pakistan did not take substantial action against the Afghan Taliban or Haqqani, or substantially limit their ability to threaten US interests in Afghanistan, although Pakistan supported efforts to bring both groups into an Afghan-led peace process. "Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups, such as LeT and JeM in 2016, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan," the report said. The Haqqani network has carried out a number of kidnappings and attacks against US interests in Afghanistan. The group is also blamed for several deadly attacks against Indian interests in Afghanistan, including the 2008 bombing of the Indian mission in Kabul that killed 58 people. India, it said, continued to experience attacks, "including by Maoist insurgents and Pakistan-based terrorists". Indian authorities continued to blame Pakistan for cross-border attacks in Jammu and Kashmir, it said. "In January, India experienced a terrorist attack against an Indian military facility in Pathankot, Punjab, which was blamed by authorities on JeM. Over the course of 2016, the Government of India sought to deepen counterterrorism cooperation and information sharing with the United States," the State Department said. The Indian government continued to closely monitor the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), which made threats against India in their terrorist propaganda. A number of individuals were arrested for ISIS-affiliated recruitment and attack plotting within India, the report said. According to the State Department, the Pakistani government did not publicly reverse its December 2015 declaration that neither JuD nor FiF is banned in Pakistan, despite their listing under UN sanctions regimes, although in January 2017, Pakistan placed both organisations "under observation" pursuant to Schedule Two of the Anti-Terrorism Act. While not a ban, keeping the outfits under observation allows the government to closely scrutinise the activities of both organisations. On November 11, Pakistan's National Counterterrorism Authority published its own list of banned organisations that placed JuD in a separate section for groups that are "under observation" but not banned. Pakistan continued military operations to eradicate terrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, although their impact on all terrorist groups was uneven, it said. In its report, the State Department said in 2016, India and the US pledged to strengthen cooperation against terrorist threats from groups including al-Qaeda, the ISIS, JeM, LeT and D-Company (Dawood Ibrahim's group), including through greater collaboration on designations at the UN. Indian and US leaders directed officials to identify new areas of collaboration through the July US-India Counterterrorism Joint Working Group, applauded finalisation of a bilateral arrangement to facilitate the sharing of terrorism screening information, and called upon Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of terrorist attacks against India to justice, the report said. The United States and India worked together to designate JeM leader Maulana Masood Azhar, although the listing was blocked in the UN 1267 Committee, the State Department said. Other areas mentioned in the report as safe havens are Afghanistan, Somalia, the Trans-Sahara, Sulu/Sulawesi Seas Littoral, Southern Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Columbia and Venezuela.
By expanding our investments from commercial scale projects to include off-grid additionally, we are positively impacting the lives of millions of people in Burundi and throughout Africa - Yosef I. Abramowitz, CEO, Gigawatt Global

BUJUMBURA, Burundi, July 19, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Downtown Bujumbura just got a little brighter, thanks to an innovative partnership between Mayor Freddy MBONIMPA and Gigawatt Global (http://GigawattGlobal.com), a founding member of United States Power Africa's Beyond the Grid program.

[Access multimedia content here: http://APO.af/ePScuQ/ http://APO.af/xxruhc/ http://APO.af/gdfypU/ http://APO.af/Xpw3uh]

This week solar-powered light islands began appearing in the heavily-trafficked central bus station and nearby marketplace, extending commercial hours and personal safety.



The city of Bujumbura is very pleased to be working with Gigawatt Global on this important solar street lighting project, said Mayor Freddy MBONIMPA. This project will enhance security as well as provide opportunities for economic development to the citizens of Bujumbura. It is the hope and wish of all involved that this project can spread throughout the city, as well as expand to other cities in Burundi within the near future.



Gigawatt Global is now in discussions to scale the solar-powered light islands program throughout the city and in other major Burundian towns. We are grateful and pleased to work with the city of Bujumbura, and the Honorable Mayor Freddy MBONIMPA to realise this important first step of the solar street lighting project, said Michael Fichtenberg, Managing Director of Gigawatt Global Burundi. We intend to expand throughout the capital and to other locations as part of our larger program of green electrification in Burundi, with 40 'light islands' planned in the first phase of the program, Fichtenberg continued. Every country in which we develop commercial scale solar fields will receive additional benefits like these light islands and rural electrification with mini-grids.



Gigawatt Global, which provides 100% financing for its projects, pioneered commercial scale solar power plants in sub-Sahara Africa, launching the first one in Rwanda in 2014, which is currently supplying 6% of the country's generation capacity. Gigawatt Global will complete a 7.5 Mw solar field in the Gitega region of Burundi in the next six months, which will supply 15% of the East African country's generation capacity. Similar projects are currently being developed in 10 African countries, including Liberia and South Sudan, among many others.



Over 95% of Burundi's 11 million people lack access to electricity. Gigawatt Global is honoured to play a role in advancing economic and social development through green power in the country, says Josef Abramowitz, CEO of Gigawatt Global. By expanding our investments from commercial scale projects to include off-grid installations, we are positively impacting the lives of millions of people in Burundi and throughout Africa, and are becoming a leading force in green energy projects across the continent.



The light islands project in Bujumbura is produced by a team that includes local members Patrick NZINTUNGA, Gigawatt Global Regional Coordinator, and Deo HUGERE, Gigawatt Global Engineer. The engineering, procurement, and construction components of this project are being carried out by Asantys System. The pilot program is supported by the Energy & Environmental Partnership (EEP), an initiative of the governments of the United Kingdom, Austria and Finland, and with an impact investment from entrepreneur Alex Goldberg.



God bless the people of Burundi, says Goldberg. In Bujumbura, we found a place ripe for innovation and open to economic development.



As part of Gigawatt Global's commitment to additional Corporate Social Responsibility, one of its investors, Mark Gelfand, funded and built the STEM Centre (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) at the Universite Polytechnique de Gitega.

Distributed by APO on behalf of Gigawatt Global.

Starting in Rwanda and Burundi, Gigawatt Global is a solar and social development enterprise, concerned with empowering Africans.

About Gigawatt Global:

Gigawatt Global is a multinational renewable energy company bringing new sources of green power and social development to Africa. Led by a team of seasoned project developers, financiers, impact investors and solar energy experts, the American-owned Dutch company develops, finances, owns and operates renewable energy installations (solar, wind and hydro) across the African continent.

About Power Africa's Beyond the Grid:

The USAID Power Africa Initiatives goal is to enable electricity access by adding 60 million new electricity connections and 30,000 MW of new and cleaner power generation. Power Africa works to bring together technical and legal experts, the private sectors, and governments from around the world to work in partnership to increase the number of people with access to power.
What's next for Chase Marina? RIDEM has received plenty of proposals

Bob Ballou, assistant to the director of RIDEM, spoke about the goal of establishing a state port in Tiverton similar to Newports State Pier #9.
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Scattered snow showers during the morning. Then partly to mostly cloudy this afternoon. High 38F. Winds WNW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of snow 60%. Snow accumulations less than one inch..

Tonight

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low 23F. Winds NW at 10 to 15 mph.
FORM 8.3

PUBLIC OPENING POSITION DISCLOSURE/DEALING DISCLOSURE BY

A PERSON WITH INTERESTS IN RELEVANT SECURITIES REPRESENTING 1% OR MORE

Rule 8.3 of the Takeover Code (the "Code")

1. KEY INFORMATION

(a) Full name of discloser: Sanne Fiduciary Services Limited as trustee of the Novae Group plc Employee Benefit Trust (b) Owner or controller of interests and short positions disclosed, if different from 1(a):

The naming of nominee or vehicle companies is insufficient. For a trust, the trustee(s), settlor and beneficiaries must be named. Trustee: Sanne Fiduciary Services Limited

Settlor: Novae Group plc

Beneficiary: Means the directors, employees and former directors and employees of Novae Group plc or any subsidiary and the wives, husbands, widows, widowers and children or step-children under the age of 18 of such directors and employees but excluding any individual who is a resident in Jersey (c) Name of offeror/offeree in relation to whose relevant securities this form relates:

Use a separate form for each offeror/offeree Novae Group plc (d) If an exempt fund manager connected with an offeror/offeree, state this and specify identity of offeror/offeree: N/A (e) Date position held/dealing undertaken:

For an opening position disclosure, state the latest practicable date prior to the disclosure 18 July 2017 (f) In addition to the company in 1(c) above, is the discloser making disclosures in respect of any other party to the offer?

If it is a cash offer or possible cash offer, state "N/A" NO

2. POSITIONS OF THE PERSON MAKING THE DISCLOSURE

If there are positions or rights to subscribe to disclose in more than one class of relevant securities of the offeror or offeree named in 1(c), copy table 2(a) or (b) (as appropriate) for each additional class of relevant security.

(a) Interests and short positions in the relevant securities of the offeror or offeree to which the disclosure relates following the dealing (if any)

Class of relevant security:







Interests Short positions Number % Number % (1) Relevant securities owned and/or controlled: 1,027,994 1.59% (2) Cash-settled derivatives:



(3) Stock-settled derivatives (including options) and agreements to purchase/sell:



TOTAL: 1,027,994 1.59%

All interests and all short positions should be disclosed.

Details of any open stock-settled derivative positions (including traded options), or agreements to purchase or sell relevant securities, should be given on a Supplemental Form 8 (Open Positions).

(b) Rights to subscribe for new securities (including directors' and other employee options)

Class of relevant security in relation to which subscription right exists: Details, including nature of the rights concerned and relevant percentages:

3. DEALINGS (IF ANY) BY THE PERSON MAKING THE DISCLOSURE

Where there have been dealings in more than one class of relevant securities of the offeror or offeree named in 1(c), copy table 3(a), (b), (c) or (d) (as appropriate) for each additional class of relevant security dealt in.

The currency of all prices and other monetary amounts should be stated.

(a) Purchases and sales

Class of relevant security Purchase/sale



Number of securities Price per unit None





(b) Cash-settled derivative transactions

Class of relevant security Product description

e.g. CFD Nature of dealing

e.g. opening/closing a long/short position, increasing/reducing a long/short position Number of reference securities Price per unit None





(c) Stock-settled derivative transactions (including options)

(i) Writing, selling, purchasing or varying

Class of relevant security Product description e.g. call option Writing, purchasing, selling, varying etc. Number of securities to which option relates Exercise price per unit Type

e.g. American, European etc. Expiry date Option money paid/ received per unit None

(ii) Exercise

Class of relevant security Product description

e.g. call option Exercising/ exercised against Number of securities Exercise price per unit None





(d) Other dealings (including subscribing for new securities)

Class of relevant security Nature of dealing

e.g. subscription, conversion Details Price per unit (if applicable) None





4. OTHER INFORMATION

(a) Indemnity and other dealing arrangements

Details of any indemnity or option arrangement, or any agreement or understanding, formal or informal, relating to relevant securities which may be an inducement to deal or refrain from dealing entered into by the person making the disclosure and any party to the offer or any person acting in concert with a party to the offer:

Irrevocable commitments and letters of intent should not be included. If there are no such agreements, arrangements or understandings, state "none"



None





(b) Agreements, arrangements or understandings relating to options or derivatives

Details of any agreement, arrangement or understanding, formal or informal, between the person making the disclosure and any other person relating to:

(i) the voting rights of any relevant securities under any option; or

(ii) the voting rights or future acquisition or disposal of any relevant securities to which any derivative is referenced:

If there are no such agreements, arrangements or understandings, state "none"



The Trustee is under no obligation to be involved in the affairs of the company and ordinarily would not vote on company matters





(c) Attachments

Is a Supplemental Form 8 (Open Positions) attached? NO





Date of disclosure: 18 July 2017 Contact name: Tom Hicks Telephone number: 01534 750547

Public disclosures under Rule 8 of the Code must be made to a Regulatory Information Service.

The Panel's Market Surveillance Unit is available for consultation in relation to the Code's disclosure requirements on +44 (0)20 7638 0129.

The Code can be viewed on the Panel's website at www.thetakeoverpanel.org.uk.
Dupuytren's contracture, also known as Dupuytren's disease, occurs with a thickening of the tissue fibers in the layer below the palm and skin of the fingers. The condition often does not cause pain, but it can be discomforting. The contracture involves how the tissue becomes thick and tight. It shortens, essentially causing the fingers of the hand to become curled and take on a spiral shape. The condition is more predominant in men, especially those more than 40 years old.

Diagnosing the Condition

Dupuytren's starts as a lump, or nodule, then slowly evolves to finger contracture. In this manner, it differs from other causes of contracture. When examining patients, doctors should record the location of any nodules, as well as the existence of dimples, pitting of the skin, and tenderness. If a physician notes the presence of any contractures, they should record the angles of the contractures at the metacarpophalangeal joint, as well as at the proximal interphalangeal joint. The extent and history of progression also should be recorded.

The Hueston tabletop test should be used as part of the diagnosis. The diagnosis is positive if a patient is not able to place their fingers flat on a table. If a finger can turn toward the center of the hand, clinicians will determine the extent of the deformity and the severity of the condition.

Doctors will determine the extent of the condition by applying a grading system. At grade 1, the condition appears as a thick lump, or nodule, and as a band in the muscles of the palm. This band, or stretched line, could evolve or lengthen, as well as cause some pitting of the skin to occur. Grade 2 appears as a band surrounding the tendon, impeding the ability to extend the affected finger. Grade 3 involves the inability to fully straighten the finger.

Dupuytrens appears to be a type of disorder in which the mutated gene is located on one of the nonsex chromosomes. It is a dominant gene. A person only requires one mutated gene to be affected by the disorder. Dupuytren's and diabetes also have a significant association, with up to a 33% prevalence of the condition in diabetics.

Dupuytrens could involve both hands at the same time, although one may be more significantly involved than the other. The fourth, fifth, third, and second fingers, in decreasing order, are the fingers most often affected by the condition. The disease usually evolves more rapidly in those less than 50 years of age. In about one-tenth of cases, the disease regresses without being treated. The consumption of alcohol and the use of tobacco often increase the potential for the disease, and that surgery will be required.

While researchers have found Dupuytren's in patients of all races, certain populations seem to experience many of the reported cases of the disease, including the northern Scottish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Australian populations.

Treating the Condition

Stainless Steel Pins used to stabilize joints of man's hand after surgical procedure to relieve Dupuytren's Contracture of hand and little finger. Taken a few days before removal of sutures and pins. Image Credit: Warren Price Photography / Shutterstock

If the extent of Dupuytrens is mild, a physician may not recommend any treatment because the condition may not worsen. In severe cases, medication is a possible route. Another approach would involve a fasciotomy, which is a minor surgical procedure in which a thin sheath of fibrous tissue is cut. In more severe instances, additional surgery may be needed to correct the condition.

More specifically, a Grade 1 diagnosis may be manageable with little treatment. Injecting the lumps with a steroid would ease the condition. Surgery may be required if there is impaired functionality, or severe contracture or deformity. There may be need for surgery if the contracture of the metacarpophalangeal joint or if contracture of the proximal interphalangeal joint is extensive.

Still, the condition may recur. An alternative is a minimally invasive approach which involves using needles to pierce the contracting cords, weakening them so that they can be broken manually, usually by snapping them. One study indicated that injecting patients every month with the steroid triamcinolone acetonide for up to five months, with the potential for reinjecting them again after a six month wait, can cause the disease to regress.

Further Reading
What are the best ways to diagnose and manage asthma in adults? This can be tricky because asthma can stem from several causes and treatment often depends on what is triggering the asthma.

A team of experts from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston examined the current information available from many different sources on diagnosing and managing mild to moderate asthma in adults and summarized them. They determined that essential, effective treatment must involve a physical and breathing exam, a comprehensive health history of the patient and ask questions that may answer what triggers may cause an asthma attack. The findings are now available in JAMA.

Asthma affects nearly 8 percent of adults and leads to 1.8 million hospitalizations and 10.5 million visits to the health care provider's office each year in the U.S.

"When a patient comes in who may have asthma, it's important for providers to learn their health history, conduct a spirometry breathing test and a physical exam," said senior author Dr. William Calhoun, UTMB professor in the department of internal medicine, pulmonary critical care and sleep medicine division. "Once diagnosed, the provider should give the patient a questionnaire during each office visit to learn more about how well their asthma symptoms are controlled and how good they perceive their quality of life. Spirometry testing should be repeated every one to two years if the patient's symptoms haven't changed."

Chest imaging may be useful in diagnosing asthma in certain situations, including when the patient has a medically important smoking history or occupational chemical exposure, has long standing disease or mat be at risk for chronic obstructive lung disease or lung cancer.

"The goals of asthma treatment are to reduce the patient's symptoms, help ensure that they can maintain their normal activities, perform well on pulmonary function tests and minimize asthma associated risks such as future asthma attacks and medication side effects," said Jennifer McCracken, UTMB assistant professor in the department of internal medicine, division of allergy and immunology. "Because of the complex nature of asthma, providers need to approach patients with a guideline-based plan that takes environmental triggers such as allergens, viruses and occupational irritants into consideration as well the strengths and weaknesses of the medication that they are using in order to provide a well-tailored action plan."

The study authors noted that a key part of asthma management is a written asthma action plan that details the signs and symptoms of worsening asthma and the steps needed to combat it in layman's terms.

There are both short-acting and long-lasting asthma medications. For quick relief of symptoms, it's important for all asthma patients to have short acting inhalers readily available. These inhalers alone are appropriate for patients who only have periodic asthma. For patients with more constant asthma, longer-lasting daily maintenance controller medications are commonly prescribed in addition to short acting inhalers.
Researchers at University of Massachusetts Medical School and Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine are nearing human clinical trials on a genetic therapy for two rare neurological diseases that are fatal to children.

The scientists are seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), to test a gene therapy treatment for Tay-Sachs and Sandhoff diseases, genetic disorders in a category known as lysosomal storage diseases.

Tay-Sachs and Sandhoff are inherited neurologic diseases that occur when genetic mutations prevent cells from producing enzymes needed to break down and recycle materials. Without these enzymes, the materials accumulate to toxic levels, slowly destroying the nervous system. The researchers are working on a gene therapy to correct the enzyme deficiency using adeno-associated virus, or AAV, vectors.

Genetics & Genomics eBook Compilation of the top interviews, articles, and news in the last year. Download a copy today

The average life expectancy for children with infantile Tay-Sachs or Sandhoff disease is only 3 to 5 years. There is currently no treatment. The gene therapy in development has shown promise in animal models of these diseases by extending lifespans by up to four times those of untreated animals.

"The proof-of-concept studies in affected animals are compelling, and the FDA provided a clear path of remaining experiments needed to seek approval for human clinical trials," said Douglas R. Martin, a professor at Auburn University's College of Veterinary Medicine. "We now need the funding to complete the studies."

The animal phase of toxicity studies necessary to demonstrate the safety of the gene therapy for Tay-Sachs and Sandhoff diseases has been completed with the support of the National Tay-Sachs & Allied Disease Association and the Cure Tay-Sachs Foundation.

"Too many children with Tay-Sachs and Sandhoff have died since we started this project. The time has finally arrived to push back on these diseases," says Miguel Sena-Esteves, PhD, associate professor of neurology at UMass Medical School. "Our single-minded goal is to get a safe and potentially effective therapy to patients and their families as quickly as possible."

"Hopefully, once the news gets out that we are this close to human clinical trials, fundraising efforts will be sufficient so we can complete the IND-enabling studies and proceed to human clinical trials," said veterinarian Heather Gray-Edwards, an assistant professor at Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine.
NANTES, France, July 19, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- OSE Immunotherapeutics SA (ISIN:FR0012127173) (Mnemo:OSE) announced today that the Company will receive a 9.2 million grant from the Projets de R&D Structurants Pour la Competitivite (PSPC) of the Invest in the Future Program (PIA). This program is overseen by the General commissariat of investment (CGI) and led by Bpifrance.

OSE Immunotherapeutics will lead the consortium collaborating on this project named EFFI-CLIN aiming at developing a new generation of checkpoint inhibitor in cancer immunotherapy. The consortium also includes the European Center for Transplantation and Immunotherapy (CESTI), a public organization based in Nantes (France) and HISTALIM, a SME based in Montpellier (France).

EFFI-CLIN will evaluate the safety and the clinical efficacy of new cancer immunotherapy OSE-172 as a monotherapy and in combination in various indications where myeloid cells represent a poor prognosis factor. The project will include in particular the product manufacturing compliant with pharmaceutical standards, translational studies conducted from tumour tissues to measure the presence of immunological targets including SIRP-alpha, and a clinical program planned until the phase 2.

We are very happy to support OSE Immunotherapeutics and its partners in this innovative R&D program to serve the future of unmet medical needs, said Catherine Borg-Capra, Director of Industrial Innovation sector at Bpifrance.

Dominique Costantini, Chief Executive Officer of OSE Immunotherapeutics, said: We thank the Invest in the Future Program for supporting us with this grant that will allow to accelerate the development of our monoclonal antibody platform based in Nantes, in a high-level scientific environment, and to conduct our product OSE-172 to the clinical phase, a step planned for the end of 2018.

Bernard Vanhove, Chief Operating Officer and Head of R&D and International scientific collaborations at OSE Immunotherapeutics, adds: "We are very pleased to collaborate with the highly-skilled teams of CESTI and HISTALIM to conduct this ambitious project and to provide innovative scientific, diagnostic and therapeutic outcomes in immuno-oncology.

Tumours have the particularity of secreting molecules that allow the recruitment and/or generation of suppressor cells that prevent the immune system from eliminating tumour cells. Among the major players in immune dysfunctions promoting tumour growth, pro-tumour and suppressor myeloid cells have been identified (MDSC or Myeloid-Derived Suppressor Cells / TAM or Tumour-Associated Macrophages).

OSE Immunotherapeutics was the first to identify the SIRP-alpha target (Signal Regulatory Protein alpha) as a major checkpoint for myeloid cells. The company has developed a selective SIRP-alpha antagonist antibody that transforms the tumour microenvironment by blocking suppressor cells and activating anti-tumour effector cells.

The exploration of SIRP-alpha in key indications will be carried out jointly with CESTI and its various technological platforms. The European Center for Transplantation and Immunotherapy Sciences (CESTI) is a University Hospital Institute (IHU B Nantes, headed by Professor Gilles Blancho) focused on the control of the immune response. CESTI benefits from a recognized expertise in immunotherapy and relevant experimental and translational platforms ahead of clinical trials and development of therapeutic innovations. The proximity of these research laboratories with clinicians and patients is an asset for conducting preclinical and translational studies from tissues derived from patients.

The company HISTALIM will develop a tool called HISTOPROFILE, for help in the decision-making in a perspective of personalized medicine. This tool will use multiplex immunohistochemistry techniques (several targets measured at the same time on the same tissue) coupled with image analyses. The objective is to characterize the immune profile and the biomarkers found in a patient. This will make it possible to define the most appropriate treatment using algorithms integrating the multiple pieces of information obtained from a clinical biopsy.

OSE-172 addresses unmet medical needs in immuno-oncology

Current therapeutic strategies in immuno-oncology are largely based on T-lymphocyte checkpoint inhibitors (CKI). The CKIs that target T-lymphocytes have revolutionized oncologic practice, with several products in this class leading to sustained tumour reductions. However, a significant medical need remains because a high percentage of patients do not respond or relapse after an initial response to treatments of this type. The search for new targets is focused on T-lymphocytes, with a significant number of product candidates currently being evaluated. However, research into drugs that target myeloid cells, which are present in large numbers in the tumour microenvironment, are still in the preliminary stages.

Bpifrance is the managing operator for research and development projects structuring competitiveness under the Investments for the Future Program led by the General Investment Commission. The goal of these projects is to frame and organize industry sectors or to generate new ones. They aim to strengthen the positions of French businesses in key markets by providing funding for ambitious programs. More broadly they aim to enhance the economic standing of a network of enterprises, by building or consolidating sustainable collaborative relationships between manufacturing, service industries and research organizations.

About the PIA (Programme dInvestissement davenir  Investments for the Future Program)

Steered and coordinated by the CGI (Commissariat General a lInvestissement), the PIAs budget reaches 47bn including more than 36bn already engaged since 2010 to promote six strategic priorities to prepare France for the challenges of tomorrow:

 Higher education and training

 Research and its valorization

 Modernisation of industrial sectors

 Sustainable development

 Digital economy

 Health and biotechnologies

Find out about the program  Investing for the Future

http://www.gouvernement.fr/investissements-d-avenir-cgi

About Bpifrance

Bpifrance, a subsidiary of Caisse des Depots and the French State, is a trusted partner of entrepreneurs which provides companies with credit, collateral and equity financing support from start up through to stock exchange listing. Bpifrance also provides guidance services and enhanced support for innovation, external growth and export, in partnership with Business France. Bpifrance offers companies a continuum of financing for each key stage of their development and an offer adapted to specific regional features.

With 47 regional offices (90% of decisions are made regionally), Bpifrance offers entrepreneurs a tool for economic competitiveness. Bpifrance works in support of the public policies pursued nationally and regionally by the French government, to meet three objectives:



support the growth of businesses;

prepare for future competitiveness;

contribute to the development of a favourable ecosystem for entrepreneurship.



With Bpifrance, companies have a strong and effective local contact to meet all their financial, innovation and investment needs.

For more information, please visit: www.bpifrance.fr http://investissementsdavenir.bpifrance.fr/ Twitter:@bpifrance

ABOUT OSE IMMUNOTHERAPEUTICS

Our ambition is to become a world leader in activation and regulation immunotherapies

OSE Immunotherapeutics is a biotechnology company focused on the development of innovative immunotherapies for immune activation and regulation in the fields of immuno-oncology, auto-immune diseases and transplantation.

The company has a balanced portfolio of first-in-class products with a diversified risk profile ranging from clinical phase 3 registration trials to R&D:

In immuno-oncology:



Tedopi , a combination of 10 optimized neo-epitopes to induce specific T activation in immuno-oncology  Continuation of the registration Phase 3 trial in advanced NSCLC in already included HLA A2+ patients EU /US - Orphan Status in the US - A Phase 2 with Tedopi in combination with a checkpoint inhibitor in NSCLC is considered.

, a combination of 10 optimized neo-epitopes to induce specific T activation in immuno-oncology  Continuation of the registration Phase 3 trial in advanced NSCLC in already included HLA A2+ patients EU /US - Orphan Status in the US - A Phase 2 with Tedopi in combination with a checkpoint inhibitor in NSCLC is considered. OSE-172 (Effi-DEM), new generation checkpoint inhibitor targeting the SIRP- receptor - In preclinical development for several cancer models.

(Effi-DEM), new generation checkpoint inhibitor targeting the SIRP- receptor - In preclinical development for several cancer models. OSE-703 (Effi-3), cytotoxic monoclonal antibody against the alpha chain of IL-7R - Under a multi-year strategic research collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York

In auto-immune diseases and transplantation:



FR104 , CD28-antagonist in immunotherapy - Phase 1 trial completed  For the treatment of autoimmune diseases and for use with transplantation - Licensed to Janssen Biotech Inc. to pursue clinical development.

, CD28-antagonist in immunotherapy - Phase 1 trial completed  For the treatment of autoimmune diseases and for use with transplantation - Licensed to Janssen Biotech Inc. to pursue clinical development. OSE-127 (Effi-7), interleukin receptor-7 antagonist - In preclinical development for inflammatory bowel diseases and other autoimmune diseases. License option agreement with Servier for the development and commercialization.

The portfolios blockbuster potential gives OSE Immunotherapeutics the ability to enter global agreements at different stages of development with major pharmaceutical players.

Immunotherapy is a highly promising and growing market. By 2023 Immunotherapy of cancer could represent nearly 60% of treatments against less than 3% at present * and the projected market is estimated at $67 billion in 2018 **.

There are more than 80 autoimmune diseases that represent a significant market including major players in the pharmaceutical industry with sales towards $10 billion for the main products. The medical need is largely unmet and requires the provision of new innovative products involved in the regulation of the immune system.

*Citi Research Equity

**BCC Research

Click and follow us on Twitter and Linkedln

https://twitter.com/OSEIMMUNO

https://www.linkedin.com/company/10929673



Forward-looking statements



This press release contains express or implied information and statements that might be deemed forward-looking information and statements in respect of OSE Immunotherapeutics. They do not constitute historical facts. These information and statements include financial projections that are based upon certain assumptions and assessments made by OSE Immunotherapeutics management in light of its experience and its perception of historical trends, current economic and industry conditions, expected future developments and other factors they believe to be appropriate.

These forward-looking statements include statements typically using conditional and containing verbs such as expect, anticipate, believe, target, plan, or estimate, their declensions and conjugations and words of similar import.

Although the OSE Immunotherapeutics management believes that the forward-looking statements and information are reasonable, the OSE Immunotherapeutics shareholders and other investors are cautioned that the completion of such expectations is by nature subject to various risks, known or not, and uncertainties which are difficult to predict and generally beyond the control of OSE Immunotherapeutics. These risks could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed in or implied or projected by the forward-looking statements. These risks include those discussed or identified in the public filings made by OSE Immunotherapeutics with the AMF. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance.

This press release includes only summary information and should be read with the OSE Immunotherapeutics Reference Document filed with the AMF on 28 April 2017 under the number R.17-038, including the annual financial report for the fiscal year 2016, available on the OSE Immunotherapeutics website.

Other than as required by applicable law, OSE Immunotherapeutics issues this press release at the date hereof and does not undertake any obligation to update or revise the forward-looking information or statements.
Globally, the health and well-being of women, children, and adolescents are improving faster than at any point in history, even in the poorest nations. The transformation is due in great measure to the interventions promoted by one of the most successful global multi-stakeholder partnerships in history, Every Woman Every Child.

This massive public-private effort, launched by the United Nations in 2010, is still gaining momentum. In total, it has gathered nearly 650 commitments from hundreds of partners worldwide. But, in the past two years alone, more than 200 commitments have been made, about one-third of the total.

One key success measure of these interventions is that women's survival during pregnancy and childbirth has improved in every region of the world. Since 1990, the world's maternal death rate has fallen by 44 per cent. Still, in 2015, an estimated 303,000 women died from preventable causes during pregnancy and childbirth.

Another significant achievement: From 1990 to 2015, death rates of children under five declined by 53 per cent. Still, in 2015, an estimated 5.9 million children under five died - 16,000 every day - mainly from avoidable causes.

To respond to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, the UN launched the Every Woman Every Child Global Strategy for Women's, Children's and Adolescents' Health (2016-2030), building on momentum under the movement's first Global Strategy (2010- 2015) and aligning with the SDGs. The Global Strategy is a detailed roadmap for countries to begin implementing the SDGs, reducing inequities, strengthening fragile health systems and fostering multi-sector approaches to end all preventable deaths of women, children, and adolescents and ensure their health and well-being.

Major reasons for the current success of Every Woman Every Child are:

* Since 2010, more than $45 billion of committed money has already been disbursed to target a wide range of needs, including midwifery training; improved nutrition for women, children and adolescents; community counseling and education; and improved water and sanitation.

* Leadership from low and lower-middle income countries, where 99 per cent of maternal, newborn and under-five child deaths occur. In the 16 months from September 2015 to December 2016, an estimated $8.5 billion was pledged in support of the Global Strategy by these countries - more than half of what high-income countries have committed in the same period.

* Platforms for stakeholders, partnerships, and finance have worked in the past and are working now. For example, from September 2015 to December 2016, 215 commitments have been made totaling $28.4 billion.

Governments account for 28 per cent of all commitments. The private sector, 24 per cent; civil society organizations and non-government organizations, 23 per cent; UN agencies and joint partnerships, 7 per cent and 4 per cent each. Private and philanthropic foundations; health care professional groups; intergovernmental bodies; and academic, research and training institutions pledged the balance.

These findings are presented in a new report developed by the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health (PMNCH), a coalition of more than 800 organizations, and the World Health Organization (WHO), with guidance from the Executive Office of the UN Secretary-General. Progress in Partnership: 2017 Progress Report on the Every Woman Every Child Global Strategy for Women's, Children's and Adolescents' Health provides a comprehensive snapshot of progress against the Global Strategy for Women's, Children's and Adolescents' Health, nearly two years into its implementation. The report will be launched at the UN's High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development in New York this week.

The report is the result of a long and careful process of consultation between all the EWEC partners involved.

To provide the latest status on progress towards the targets of the Global Strategy, the report highlights the latest available country data on 60 indicators, 34 of which come directly from the SDGs and an additional 26 taken from existing indexes and processes. This data, from WHO and other UN agencies, is included in an open-access online data portal launched in May 2017 on the World Health Organization's Global Health Observatory website. Annex 1 of the report provides a 2017 snapshot of The Global Strategy's 16 key indicators.

"Regular monitoring and accountability are vital to assess progress and to ensure that all people at all ages are getting the quality care they need for their health and well-being. We must find where gaps exist and act to make universal health coverage a reality for all. If we collectively invest the amount that is needed, we can save and improve the lives of millions of women, children and adolescents by 2030," says Dr. Flavia Bustreo, Assistant Director-General for Family, Women's and Children's Health at the World Health Organization.

The report documents contributions from countries, the private sector, intergovernmental bodies, academic, research and training institutions, philanthropy, foundations and health care professionals. It also reports on major disparities between high-income, low- and middle-income nations, as well as the poor and rich within countries. Other factors that hinder progress are lack of economic opportunities and supporting laws, cultural practices, poor access to health care and quality of care.

Here are some of the major problem areas and barriers that the Every Woman Every Child movement is seeking to address:

Poor quality of health services and inequities in accessing care. These are major obstacles to improving maternal and newborn survival and reducing stillbirths. For example, more than a third of women around the world receive less than four antenatal care visits and nearly half (48 per cent) do not receive any postnatal care at all. More than a quarter of all women (27 per cent) do not receive skilled assistance during labor and delivery.

Maternal and newborn deaths are still both too high and declining too slowly. In 2015, 2.7 million newborns died within 28 days of birth, representing 45 per cent of all deaths among children under five. More than half of maternal deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa and almost one-third in South Asia. Similarly, newborn deaths occur disproportionately in these regions.

Stillbirths remain a major neglected problem. In 2015, 2.6 million stillbirths were estimated, half of which occur during labor and birth mostly from preventable conditions.

Stunting. In low- and middle-income countries, 250 million children or more than 40 per cent of children are at risk of sub-optimal development, due to poverty and stunting. Adults who have had a poor start in life can lose about one-quarter of average income per year - a loss for some countries of twice their current GDP expenditures on health and education.

Lack of trained health workers. Ongoing gaps are exacerbated by the global shortage of qualified health workers. Global projections to 2030 estimate that an additional 18 million health workers will be needed to meet the requirements of the SDGs.

"We made major improvements in basic coverage of maternity services during recent decades, but quality and equity have lagged behind," says Helga Fogstad, a health economist and Executive Director of The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health. "It's expensive for countries to guarantee universal access and quality services, but it's more expensive if we don't invest in health. We miss huge opportunities to expand social and economic benefits if we don't scale up our investments in quality care."

Adolescent health remains a key concern, particularly because lack of earlier focus on this age group has resulted in less rapid progress compared with areas such as maternal and child health. In addition, there are large gaps in adolescent health data. Girls under age 15 account for 2 million of the 7.3 million births to adolescent girls under age 18 every year in developing countries. Maternal mortality is the leading cause of death for older adolescent girls, with self-harm being the second. For boys aged 15 to 19, road injuries and interpersonal violence are the leading causes of death.

Child marriage has gained greater attention in recent years. The percentage of girls marrying before age 15 declined from 12 per cent to 8 per cent, comparing the early 1980s with 2014. Early marriage remains a chief cause of early pregnancies: 19 per cent of girls in developing countries become pregnant before the age of 18.

Violence against women and children is alarming. Worldwide, almost one-third of all women who have been in a relationship have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by their intimate partner. Intimate partner violence often starts early in the lives of women, with 30 per cent of adolescent girls (aged 15-19) having experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner. In the South-East Asia region, the estimate is 43 per cent of adolescent girls; in the Africa region, it is 40 per cent.

Lack of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Despite the formal commitments to national and international legislation, many women have neither the freedom to control their health and body nor equal access to a health system. Access to comprehensive SRHR education and services, including modern contraceptive methods, safe abortion, treatment and prevention of infertility, and prevention of sexual violence, are critical. Restrictions by marital status, third-party authorization, and age are the most common legal barriers preventing access to sexual and reproductive health services. Access to justice mechanisms is crucial.

Education. Although the number of out-of-school children of primary school age declined globally from 99 million to 59 million between 2000 and 2013, progress has stalled since 2007. Just one per cent of the poorest girls in low-income countries complete upper secondary school. Poor education parallels poor health.

To tackle such challenges, many governments are responding with powerful new ways to improve women's, children's and adolescents' health and rights. These include investments, laws, and policies that target the underlying determinants of health outcomes, including women's empowerment, early childhood development, nutrition, water and sanitation, as well as peace and security.

Some commitments are coming from countries where the risk of humanitarian crises and disasters are greatest, leaving women, children and adolescents particularly vulnerable.

A new tool for decision makers

The INFORM risk index, compiled by global development partners including WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA and UN Women, is an indicator for the Global Strategy, linked to the WHO's Global Health Observatory. The index highlights countries most at risk from humanitarian crises and disasters, including hazards and exposure, vulnerability and lack of coping capacity - each of which have disproportionate effects on women, children and adolescents.

The 2017 INFORM map highlights the 12 most at-risk countries in the world, supporting planning and preparedness for response. Seven of these 12 countries have made commitments since 2010 to Every Woman Every Child to protect women, children, and adolescents from these risks: Afghanistan, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Niger, South Sudan and Yemen.

For example, Afghanistan made a commitment to Every Woman Every Child in 2015 to improve quality education for midwives and enhance medical services and supplies in hard-to-reach and insecure areas. It also commits to creating a multi-sectoral movement to strengthen gender equity and women's empowerment, improving peace and security in Afghanistan.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo pledged in 2015 to subsidize family planning services and reduce regional disparities in contraceptive access; to improve emergency obstetric care, and increase domestic health spending from $5 to $15 per person by 2020.

In addition to these countries, other governments are responding to the call of the Global Strategy with their own commitments. For example:

Bangladesh is scaling up programs in health and health-enhancing sectors, such as education, gender equality, and empowerment, WASH and nutrition. It plans to increase the number of family planning mobile workers, provide free education, meals, and stipends to encourage girls to remain in secondary school. It will increase efforts to lower the current stunting prevalence rate of 38 per cent in children by reaching more than 25 million children per year.

India's Prime Minister recently announced the Pradhan Mantri Surakshit Matritva Abhiyan (PMSMA) initiative, popularly referred to as "I pledge for 9." This invites the private sector to provide free antenatal services on the 9th day of every month to pregnant women, especially those living in underserved, semi-urban, poor and rural areas. In three months, PMSMA served 3.2 million women.

Nigeria is committed to universal health coverage. The government has defined a package of basic health-care services, including tailored interventions addressing the unique needs of children, adolescents, women, and men, regardless of location. In line with this approach, the Ministry of Health is strengthening its engagement with civil society, and improving monitoring and evaluation, quality of care and data reporting lines in order to initiate evidence-based programs at the grassroots level and then implement them nationally.

Malawi. As one of nine countries leading Every Woman Every Child's efforts to improve quality, equity and dignity (QED), the Minister of Health of Malawi hosted a global launch meeting of partner countries and other stakeholders in February 2017, announcing a goal of halving maternal and newborn deaths in participating health care facilities by 2022. The Quality of Care Network, coordinated by WHO, UNICEF and UNFPA, is underpinned by the values of quality, equity and dignity and contributes to the Every Woman Every Child Global Strategy for Women's, Children's and Adolescents' Health. PMNCH coordinates the advocacy network for the QED initiative, led by civil society partners White Ribbon Alliance and Save the Children.

Non-governmental stakeholders, including the private sector and civil society, are core Every Woman Every Child partners, supporting governments with a range of important contributions guided by the Global Strategy. These range from supporting contraceptive access and family planning counseling to newborn and child life-saving interventions such as vaccination, pediatric HIV prevention and treatment programs, and anti-diarrhea and hand-washing programs.

Since 2015, commitments to Every Woman Every Child made by non-governmental stakeholders have resulted in:

28 million women reached with contraceptives

1 million women reached with family planning counseling

52 million children reached with vaccines for pneumonia, measles, and rubella

15 million children reached with oral rehydration salts and zinc treatment for diarrhea

11 million children reached with hand-washing training

1.7 million newborns reached with improved care through training of nurses and midwives.

Source: Hoffman & Hoffman Worldwide
California's Obamacare exchange scrubbed its annual rate announcement this week, the latest sign of how the ongoing political drama over the Affordable Care Act is roiling insurance markets nationwide.

The exchange, Covered California, might not wrap up negotiations with insurers and announce 2018 premiums for its 1.4 million customers until mid-August  about a month later than usual. Similar scenarios are playing out across the country as state officials and insurers demand clarity on health care rules and funding, with deadlines fast approaching for the start of open enrollment this fall.

"It's insane," said John Baackes, CEO of L.A. Care Health Plan, which has about 26,000 customers on the California exchange. "Here we are in the middle of July and we don't even know what rules we will be operating under for open enrollment. It is not how you want to run a business."

Consumers could face sharply higher premiums and fewer choices if more health insurers leave the insurance marketplaces due to lingering uncertainty. State and industry officials around the United States are concerned that the federal government could stop funding so-called cost-sharing subsidies that reduce out-of-pocket costs for low-income consumers. And they worry the Trump administration won't enforce the individual mandate that requires people to purchase health coverage or pay a penalty.

Amid those concerns, there was a sense of relief Tuesday among many exchange officials and insurers after the U.S. Senate's latest attempt to replace the Affordable Care Act failed.

Two large insurer trade groups bluntly warned last week that parts of the Senate plan were "unworkable" and could plunge the market into chaos. In a letter to the Senate, America's Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association particularly objected to an amendment by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that would have allowed insurers to sell bare-bones health plans to people who wanted cheaper premiums. That provision, the insurers said, would split the market between the healthy and the sick, driving up costs for people with preexisting conditions.

However, the Republicans' failure to pass that ACA replacement plan did not resolve questions swirling around the current health law.

Tuesday, President Donald Trump expressed disappointment at the outcome in the Senate, telling reporters, "We'll let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us and they're going to say, 'How do we fix it?'"

Some Senate Republicans struck a more conciliatory tone, suggesting that lawmakers should work on a bipartisan measure that would help stabilize the individual insurance markets.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said he plans to hold hearings in the coming weeks on ways to shore up the individual insurance market. Lawmakers may look at creating a new stabilization fund that helps compensate insurers for higher-cost patients. Such a fund would be similar to one that existed during the first three years of the ACA exchanges.

Some insurance industry executives welcomed the talk of bipartisanship, but they said action must be taken quickly to resolve key issues affecting consumers.

"We are running out of time and we need a resolution on what we are charging for 2018," said Gary Cohen, vice president of public affairs at Blue Shield of California in San Francisco, the largest Covered California insurer by enrollment.

Cohen, who helped launch the exchanges in 2014 as an official in the Obama administration, noted that the Republican bills in both the House and Senate included money for reinsurance that can help lower premiums industrywide. Those provisions are among the "immediate steps Congress and the Trump administration need to take in order for markets to provide coverage that is affordable."

A federal reinsurance program helps compensate insurers for the high costs incurred by the sickest patients. That, in turn, allows health plans to keep their overall premiums lower and attract healthier customers into the insurance pool.

Lawmakers could also appropriate federal funds for the cost-sharing subsidies, which have a price tag of about $7 billion a year. Those payments, made directly to insurers, help reduce deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs for policyholders who earn up to 250 percent of the federal poverty level. This year, that's up to about $29,000 for an individual or around $61,000 for a family of four. More than half of the people enrolled on exchanges nationwide qualify for this financial assistance.

Without it, many consumers would face annual deductibles of $2,000 or more when visiting the doctor or undergoing medical tests. That would make people far less likely to sign up with participating insurers.

Conservatives generally oppose the subsidies, calling them a bailout of the insurance industry and arguing that the Obama administration didn't have the authority to pay them. Trump has repeatedly threatened to cut off those cost-sharing subsidies as well.

With their future up in the air, some states, including California and Pennsylvania, allowed insurers to submit two sets of proposed premiums. One filing reflects continued federal funding of those subsidies, and a separate one assumes they are eliminated and their cost is included in health plan premiums.

In Pennsylvania, premiums next year without the subsidies would increase by an average of 20 percent, compared with 9 percent if they remained intact.

Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner Teresa Miller said the market in her state would be in good shape without the uncertainty over federal policy. "The only thing right now keeping everyone on edge is what's going to happen in Washington, D.C.," Miller said. "If things calm down in D.C. and if we don't see further changes, then Pennsylvania's market really is stabilizing."

On Tuesday, Covered California said the two different rate filings its health plans submitted will be released Aug. 1. The exchange may announce that same day what the final premiums are, or it could postpone the decision for several more weeks if Congress has begun to pursue fixes to the ACA.

"This decision is based on the ongoing federal uncertainty around the repeal and replacement attempts of the Affordable Care Act and the dramatic potential impacts such uncertainty has on the rates and on California consumers," the exchange said in a statement.

A recent analysis commissioned by Covered California estimated that premiums for silver-tier plans would jump by 16.6 percent if the federal government stopped paying for the cost-sharing subsidies. That would be in addition to normal increases meant to cover rising medical costs. An exchange spokeswoman declined to comment further Tuesday, citing the ongoing developments in Washington.

In the Florida exchange market, health insurers have sought an average rate increase of nearly 18 percent. But Florida Blue, the state's largest health insurer, said those rates would go even higher if the cost-sharing reduction payments disappeared.

Robert Laszewski, an industry consultant in Virginia and a frequent ACA critic, said the exchange markets aren't imploding, despite what the Trump administration has often said. But their premiums will continue to rise unless more young and healthy people are persuaded to buy coverage, he said.

"I think most insurance companies will at least break even, or even make a profit, in 2018," Laszewski said. "Coverage will be 'stable,' but it will stabilize at a horrific premium rate level."
The human body holds many mysteries, and function of the BRCA1 gene is among them. Women who inherit a faulty copy of BRCA1 have up to a 65 percent chance to develop breast cancer by age 70. They also have up to a 39 percent chance to develop ovarian cancer.

Rong Li, Ph.D., and colleagues at The University of Texas Health Science Center, now called UT Health San Antonio, are building on 15 years of BRCA1 studies. Their latest discovery, reported June 26 in Nature Communications, is of a new, previously unrecognized function of BRCA1.

Explaining tissue specificity

"BRCA1 plays a very important role in DNA repair in almost any cell type you choose to study," said Dr. Li, professor of molecular medicine at UT Health San Antonio and a holder/manager of the Tom C. and Patricia H. Frost Endowment to Advance Cancer Research and Education. "This is a function of BRCA1 that presumably is important for every cell type in the body. But we also know there is a tissue-specific cancer predisposition associated with BRCA1. If a woman loses BRCA1 function, breast and ovary are the two places that preferentially develop tumors. Is there something else BRCA1 does that could contribute to this tissue specificity?"

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The answer, fleshed out in this latest Nature Communications paper, is yes.

Study of human tissues yields insights

Dr. Li and his team obtained human breast tissue specimens from breast oncologists including those led by Ismail Jatoi, M.D., Ph.D., FACS, and Richard Elledge, M.D., at the UT Health Cancer Center of UT Health San Antonio, as well as Oscar Ochoa, M.D., FACS, at PRMA Plastic Surgery. The team compared tissues of BRCA1 mutation carriers versus non-carriers and found interesting differences:

Gene expression-related stress is higher in BRCA1 mutation carriers;

This stress is only higher in luminal epithelial cells, where BRCA1-related breast tumors originate;

Within the luminal epithelial cells, the stress is higher in estrogen-responsive genes.

Gene expression-related stress is a result of cells expressing (or switching on) genes to carry out functions. This process sometimes damages the genetic blueprint, DNA, resulting in abnormal structures that scientists label as stress.

"The breasts and ovaries are two major estrogen-responsive sites in a woman's body," Dr. Li said. "This zooming in on the stress location is the connection we sought to make between BRCA1 dysfunction and breast and ovarian cancer predisposition. This is a very attractive model to further test, and points to an interesting direction for drug development."

The study reported in Nature Communications focused on breast tissue. Similar studies of ovarian tissue will be conducted.

Source: https://news.uthscsa.edu/brca1-mutations-breast-cancer/
Scientists at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt, Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) Munich and the Leibniz Institute for Molecular Pharmacology (FMP) have managed to introduce tiny antibodies into living cells. The researchers now report on the synthesis and applications for these nanobodies in "Nature Chemistry".

Antibodies are one of the main weapons of our immune system. They dock to viruses, bacteria and other invaders that course through our blood, and thereby render them harmless. Antibodies also play a key role in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases and in research. "One clear limitation is that due to their size and various other factors, antibodies are unable to permeate living cells," emphasizes M. Cristina Cardoso, Professor of Cell Biology and Epigenetics in the Department of Biology at the TU Darmstadt. Working in close collaboration with the research group led by Christian P. R. Hackenberger at the FMP Berlin, Professor of Chemical Biology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the inter-disciplinary team has now, for the first time, managed to permeate living cells with small antibodies, also called nanobodies, and observe them microscopically. Medicine has extremely high hopes for these tiny antibodies. Although they do not occur in the human body, they have been found in camels and in cartilaginous fish.

"In order to open up the path into the cell for the nanobodies, we decorated them chemically with cyclic cell-permeating peptides that effectively act as keys to the direct permeation through the cell membrane into the cells," explains Christian Hackenberger. As the researchers report in the current issue of the renowned scientific journal "Nature Chemistry", the key peptides are either coupled stably to the nanobodies or, more loosely, so that the connection is dissolved on the inside of the cell.

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The scientists successfully permeated living mouse and human cells with nanoantibodies and examined their benefits. Cell-permeable nanobodies are suited both to the recognition and manipulation of antigens and to the analysis of protein-protein interactions. The researchers were able to observe the interaction between the tumor inhibitor p53 and its counterpart, protein HDM2, using the nanobodies and special fluorescent markings. This interaction plays an important part in the development of cancer.

Nanobodies are also highly promising medically because they are able to transport proteins to living cells. The symptoms of Rett syndrome, for instance, a genetic disease with aspects of autism, could possibly be reduced by the protein Mecp2. The researchers permeated mouse cells with Mecp2 bound to nanobodies, and were able to prove that the protein was still intact and it reached its target in the cell. According to the report in "Nature Chemistry", the cell-permeable nanobodies are general tools that deliver therapeutically relevant proteins into living cells. This opens up a new door to treatments for diseases that have so far been untreatable.

The work by the researchers from Darmstadt, Berlin, and Munich was made possible by the DFG priority program 1623, which deals with the synthesis of functionalized proteins.
Urbanization and the electrification of homes do not decrease the amount that we sleep, a new study in the journal Scientific Reports finds.

In this study, researchers from the University of Surrey, in collaboration with groups in South Africa, Brazil, Colombia and the USA, examined the sleeping patterns of people from two neighboring communities in Mozambique  the small electrified urban town Milange and the non-electrified rural community Tengua.

It has previously been suggested that the post-industrial world is experiencing a sleep deprivation epidemic. Scientists have proposed that people who have electricity stay up later, but do not necessarily get up later to compensate. The Surrey-led research team found that although the people in the town retired to bed on average one hour later, they did not sleep less than the people in the village without electricity because they also rose one hour later in the morning.

The study was performed by Dr. Andrew Beale, who spent more than two years living in Milange before he returned to the UK to work as a research fellow at the University of Surrey. He said:

I noticed that the sleep-wake patterns of people around me were much earlier than I was used to from the UK. There is an intense debate going on right now on how our ancestors might have slept, and how this was changed by industrialization. Looking at the effects of urbanization on these communities is one way of helping us understand what happens.

Professor Malcolm von Schantz from the University of Surrey, corresponding author, said:

What these findings indicate is that the delay in sleep timing that comes with access to electricity does not directly cause people to sleep less. In other words, if indeed people do sleep less in industrialized countries, we can't just blame electrification. The step from delayed to shortened sleep seems to require more changes in behaviors.

Associate Professor Laura Roden from the University of Cape Town, senior author on the study, added:
New Delhi: Air India is drawing up a proposal to offer voluntary buyouts to just over a third of its 40,000 employees, two government officials said, in what would be one of the largest such offers in India's state sector, as the airline slashes costs ahead of a 2018 sale.



The state-owned airline has also put fleet expansion on hold, scrapping a proposal to lease eight Boeing 787 wide-body aircraft, said one of the officials, a senior Air India employee who requested anonymity as the plans are not public. Air India's board approved that proposal in April but nothing further had been done.



"Nothing has been finalised but our aim is to make the strategic sale as simple as we can," the company official said, adding that any fresh investment would also be put on hold.



Air India spokesman Dhananjay Kumar said the company had not offered employees voluntary buyouts.



The flag carrier is on the block after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Cabinet last month approved plans to privatise the loss-making airline by selling part or all of the company and ending decades of state support.



Founded in the 1930s and known to generations of Indians for its Maharajah mascot, Air India has a complex fleet, too many staff relative to rivals and $8.5 billion in debt. Since 2012, New Delhi has injected $3.6 billion to keep it afloat.



An official in Modi's office said the Prime Minister, under pressure to cut spending and boost basic infrastructure such as ports and roads, was in "no mood" to provide fresh monetary assistance to any loss-making public sector company.



The two government sources, who are familiar with Air India's plans, said top officials in the civil aviation ministry and at Air India had been asked to present a report on how a Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS) could be offered to some 15,000 of Air India's 40,000 staff, including contractors.



Many of the contractors, including office staff and ground handlers, have worked for the airline for years, and would need to be given buyout offers to prevent protests from them, said the senior company official, who is involved in the airline's daily operations.



Previous attempts to offload the airline have failed mainly because of the scale and complexity of Air India's problems, as well as its influential unions.



If Modi can pull the privatisation off it will buttress his credentials as a reformer brave enough to wade into some of the country's most intractable problems.



Separately on Tuesday, Air India Chairman Ashwani Lohani sent a letter to employees assuring them the government and the airline management "would like to safeguard your genuine and valid interests", according to a copy of the letter seen by Reuters. Kumar, the company spokesman, confirmed the letter.



UNITED FRONT



In its heyday, Air India boasted a talent pool that newly founded airlines dipped into. The government will need to convince seven trade unions to accept the plan to make the airline attractive to potential buyers, including buyouts and other efforts to slash costs. Their initial response was not positive.



"The government will propose a VRS scheme and we will throw their proposal in the dustbin," said JB Kadian, leader of a union that represents 8,000 non-technical Air India staff. Kadian said a joint forum of unions representing Air India employees would launch an "agitation" in August if the government pursues its privatisation plans.



On Tuesday, dozens of members of the Air Corporations Employees' Union gathered near Delhi airport holding placards and shouting slogans opposing the privatisation and demanding the airline's debt be written off, marking the first protest against the government's plan.



A committee of five senior federal ministers, led by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, is expected to meet this month and begin ironing out the finer details of the privatisation plan.



In the meantime, Civil Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju said he wanted Air India to begin cutting at all levels.



Earlier this month, the airline decided to stop serving non-vegetarian meals in economy class on domestic flights in a bid to save up to Rs 100 million ($1.6 million) over 10 months.



The action provoked uproar on social media and was belittled by aviation experts, who argue that Air India's management needs a massive structural overhaul, tackling thornier issues such as its fleet and staff, rather than meals.



The airline is also working to reduce the time its planes spend on the ground and launching direct flights to new international destinations.



In July, Air India started a direct flight to Washington and will start flying to Stockholm, Copenhagen and Los Angeles later this year. "Keeping planes in the hangar makes no sense when Air India is trying to find new sources of income. We should optimize the use of all possible resources," Raju said. "The idea is to present a robust company to potential buyers."
New Delhi: Seeking a follow-up of open house discussion on contentious issue of call connect charges, telecom operators body COAI has alleged that the regulator Trai is "acting in undue haste" to conclude review of the matter and to meet the procedural requirements.



In a communication to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, COAI has alleged that Trai is "acting in undue haste to conclude the review of IUC (interconnection usage charges)".



Telecom operators levy interconnection charge (IUC) on incoming calls from the network of other operator. These charges are passed on to mobile subscribers by service providers.



Trai fixes IUC which has several components. Charges levied for interconnecting mobile calls dominate the IUC issue. A telecom operator charges 14 paise per minute for every incoming mobile calls that it receives from other operator's network.



Incumbent operators -- Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular -- on Tuesday sought doubling of mobile termination charge (MTC), a part of IUC, saying that terminating incoming calls on their networks costs 30-35 paise per minute.



When contacted, Cellular Operators Association of India Director General Rajan S Mathews said the industry body has asked the regulator to share the model that it used in last consultation process and the one that it plans to use for upcoming review of IUC.



In the letter, COAI had requested TRAI to postpone the open house discussion on review of IUC scheduled for July 20,2017 to a date which is at least four weeks after the sharing of cost models.



"The letter was written before TRAI's workshop (held on July 18). We were expecting TRAI to share the model that it plans to use to determine IUC but the regulator said that it will finalise model based on all the discussions. We told TRAI that once it takes the decision then share the model with stakeholders so that we can point out shortcoming if any," Mathews said.



He said that last time the regulator had missed to include some of elements in IUC like spectrum cost which was added later.



Mathews said that COAI will request TRAI to hold another round of discussion after it shares cost model for IUC that it firms up for ongoing review.



The COAI in the letter said "it seems that the process is being followed mechanically to comply to the procedural requirements for framing the regulation under the TRAI Act, rather than actually sharing the models with the stakeholders followed by detailed deliberations."



Mathews said COAI wants TRAI to complete the review process after listening about all the aspects of IUC.



Any change in IUC has a direct impact on mobile call rates as the charge is taken into account while setting telecom tariffs.



Mathews, however, said "Some people have wrongly carried the perception that MTC can drive up retail tariffs for the consumer. This is wrong, as the retail tariffs are driven by market dynamics and competition and MTC can be one of the many components in retails prices.



The industry body which represents all the leading telecom operators said that Aircel and Reliance Jio have divergent view on the subject and will represent individually before the regulator.
Last weekend, I was in Pune just after the suicide of a techie who was feeling depressed as he saw a very bleak job landscape for IT professionals. During my visit, I met several people in Pune and the common talk was about the IT jobs scarcity / layoffs.



The previous week, I was in Chennai where I met a senior manager heading marketing for a software services company. Her CTC was Rs 35 lakh. She had come for a job change and when I asked her why she wants to leave her present employer, a top 10 software services company, her response was shocking.



She said in the last six months, in her department alone, she was asked to send off 6 people  25% of her total staff. She is having sleepless nights because she does not know when the Axe will fall on her. According to her, the company has identified, a supporting service like Marketing as expendable. She is a single mother and she does not know where to go if she loses her job. The point is she is still employed, but the Axe looming over her Head is something which is very difficult to describe.



As a Headhunter, I keep meeting people across industries looking for jobs. Most of them are in the middle management level and above. The people who meet me / call me on phone are in general those who are in dire need of jobs.



These days, I find that the number of calls / people who come and meet me has increased 5 fold. The reason either they have lost jobs or the sword is hanging.



Four weeks ago, I met an engineer from IIT in a 5 star hotel in Mumbai with the added qualification of a MBA from IIMA. He was 33 years old. To his credit, he was not asked to leave. He was an entrepreneur who ran out of funds. In the last eight months, he has been living on his wifes savings. She is pregnant and now on leave.



I could see the desperation on his face. He was willing to take up a job anywhere in India. Regarding salary, I told him that he should not negotiate and try to get a CTC matching his peers. Reason he is unemployed. The advice I gave him was, first get a job, dont worry about location or CTC. No potential employer will underpay you. Even if they pay you less in the beginning, knowing your strength, they will increase your salary so that they dont lose you.



The other day a Fintech COO came to my office in Bangalore. He is 46 years, engineer, MBA from a reputed organisation. He has worked in some of the top FMCG companies in India  MNC and Indian. 2 years back, the start up bug caught him. He joined a Fintech company as a COO. Unfortunately, the company ran out of funds and he had to leave.



The anecdotal incidents I have described above is something which I am witnessing for the first time in my 30 years in Executive Search in India.



For the first time, across sectors  IT / BPO / Telecom/ Retail / BFSI / Autos etc etc , companies are laying off people in large numbers.



In the IT industry alone, we expect about 100,000 to 200,000 jobs to disappear every year for the next 3 years. Beyond 3 years it is difficult to predict what will be the extent of job losses.



Recently, Tata Motors, gave a VRS for middle managers. CTS did the same some time back. Ashok Leblanc did this exercise 2 years back.



I am aware of a top steel company having identified 7000 people excess on their rolls.



Some of the top industrial Groups in India have decided to deploy / redeploy people within, rather than go for outside recruitment. Obviously, specialised positions are exempt.



As a person whose future depends upon Executive Recruitment, I keep close watch on the happenings globally.



Two years back, the World Bank, predicted that in India 60% of the jobs as we know will disappear. In China, according to the same study, it will be 70%. In the western countries, the jobs which will disappear will be around 50%.



We will be soon in the area of driver less cars, robots cooking at McDonalds/Dominos.



While we can say that India is different, let us not forget that the banking industry, before our eyes, we have seen ATMs have replaced cash tellers in banks. Further, PAYTMs are fast replacing ATMs.



We are entering an era of jobless growth globally. Robots will increasingly play more and more important roles in our life.



Yesterday I was watching Elon Musk speaking about need to control Robots. According to him, if we dont, the Robots will rule the earth. A scary prospect indeed.



So what do we do after 10 years when jobs will become increasingly difficult to get. Some experts are talking about UBI  Universal Basic Income. Already, some of the European countries are trying this out.



To conclude, I would say that things are not as bad as painted. There are silver linings among the dark clouds.



Knowledge workers will always be in demand. Today it may be big data, Hadoop, analytics, AI etc etc. I am told that an engineer who is well qualified and experienced in self driving cars can get a salary of US$ One million in Silicon Valley today. A mind boggling figures, isn't it for a 30 year old.



Coming to India, I see that this is a great opportunity for us to overtake the western countries due to our superior intelligence and education.



Kris Lakshmikanth is a Founder Chairman & Managing Director of The Head Hunters India Pvt. Ltd. Views expressed are personal.
New Delhi: Country's state refiners plan to buy less Iranian oil in 2017/18 compared with the last fiscal year, oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Wednesday.



Iran has offered a credit period of 60 days for oil purchases in the current fiscal year, Pradhan told lawmakers in a written response. In 2016/17, Iran had offered 90 days credit period.



The minister said state oil refiners import oil as per commercial and operational consideration. He did not elaborate further.



India's state refiners have cut oil import plans from Iran by a quarter in the year to March 2018, sources earlier told Reuters.
Jammu: As many as 47 Amarnath pilgrims lost their lives due to a terror attack, accidents and health reasons in a span of 18 days, an official said on Tuesday.



"Between June 29 and July 16, 19 pilgrims died due to medical reasons and 20 were killed in accidents. On July 10, eight pilgrims were killed in a terror attack on their bus," said Umang Narula, the CEO of the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board (SASB).



Till Tuesday, the board had spent Rs 14,66,975 on transportation and Rs 1,34,75,000 towards ex-gratia payments, he added.



Narula said a decision had been taken to enhance the amount of ex-gratia relief to the next of the kin of those killed in the terror attack in south Kashmir's Anantnag district.



The CEO had earlier ensured that the cost of sending the mortal remains of the terror attack victims by air to their respective home towns was borne by the board.



In 37 cases, the board had also borne the cost of providing an escort with the coffin of the attack victim.



Sixteen pilgrims were killed on July 16 in a bus accident near Banihal, said Narula.



The mortal remains of the deceased, along with the escorting attendants, were sent to their respective home towns yesterday by Air India and Indigo flights.



Besides the attendants, who were selected from among the pilgrims, Jammu and Kashmir Police personnel had also been deputed to accompany the dead bodies, he added.



"The mortal remains of 12 yatris were transported by air to the nearest airports in Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh," said the CEO.



The coffins of three pilgrims were transported in ambulances to Sikar (Rajasthan), Panipat (Haryana) and RS Pura (Jammu), he added.



The mortal remains of one female pilgrim, Chaya Devi, the wife of Vijay Chourasiya Singh and a native of Bihar, was kept in a mortuary at Jammu as her husband and son, both of whom had received injuries in the Ramsoo road accident, were still undergoing medical treatment at Jammu, said Narula.
NEW YORK, July 19, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Greystone, one of the nations preeminent commercial real estate lending, investment and advisory companies, announced that it has welcomed Commercial Property Advisors of West Bloomfield, Michigan, to the Greystone network. The new joint venture, Greystone Bel Real Estate Advisors, focuses on providing a full range of multifamily advisory services to clients in Michigan for both market-rate and affordable housing properties, capitalizing on Greystones comprehensive financial platform and Commercial Property Advisors multifamily sales expertise in that region.



As Commercial Property Advisors, the group established itself as a nationally connected, local leader in providing commercial real estate services, having handled over 275 transactions with an aggregate value of more than $650 million. Cary Belovicz, CEO and founder of Commercial Property Advisors, will lead the regional Greystone Bel Real Estate Advisors team as an Executive Managing Director.

Prior to founding Commercial Property Advisors, Mr. Belovicz was an Associate at Hendricks & Partners (now Berkadia). He also marketed and sold assets for Key Bank, Hartford, AIMCO, CapMark, Centerline (now Hunt), and private equity groups located all over the world. Cary and his team bring experience in finance, development and management of multifamily assets to Greystone, creating a truly broad set of capabilities to complement the firms established debt and equity platforms, including long-term Agency financing and mezzanine loans.

Coming on board with a nationally-renowned platform such as Greystones is the opportunity our group has been looking for, said Mr. Belovicz. Greystone offers something truly unique for us and our clients  a miles-deep bench of multifamily lending, investment and advisory expertise and resources, and the open culture to support the active growth of an investment sales component.

Cary and his team are a natural fit for Greystones entrepreneurial environment, and we are thrilled to welcome such a dynamic and enthusiastic team to our growing national multifamily investment sales platform, said Jim McDevitt, President, Greystone Real Estate Advisors. With their breadth and depth of experience beyond just sales advisory work, we know that the value of this addition will stretch beyond transactions, and truly lie in the holistic advisory relationship built with clients.

About Greystone Real Estate Advisors

Greystone is a real estate lending, investment and advisory company headquartered in New York. Its Real Estate Advisors team provides services in sales, acquisitions, and a full spectrum of advisory services including debt, equity, acquisition, and investment sales to multifamily owners and investors of affordable and market-rate housing. For more information, visit www.greyco.com.
Kolkata: Days after it witnessed violent clashes, the sleepy hamlet of Basirhat in Bengal North 24-Parganas district, is once again in news, this time for a National Intellectual Meet.



Organised by All India Sunnat Al Jamayat, the event will see the participation of scholars from across the world, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar.



The event - scheduled for July 22-24 in Jamia Nagar near Gopalpur More - courted a controversy after a section of people questioned why Basirhat, which was communally tensed a few days ago, was chosen as a place for such an event.



The people have also raised questions over the participation of Simsarul Haq Hudavi from Abu Dhabi and Abdul Rauf Hudavi from Qatar. "What interest do they have in such a meeting and that too in such a remote village of Bengal," a person asked.



Though organisers dispelled people's apprehensions, calling it an attempt to spread peace, the right-wing organisations are not convinced.



It is an event to refresh our thoughts and knowledge. Recently, Basirhat witnessed communal tension and our effort is to spread the message of communal harmony, Tarikul Islam, one of the organisers, told News18.



Islam also made it clear that the three-day event will only focus on peace and development in the area. "Our focus will be to address how we can provide quality education to students in villages. We have invited Muslim scholars from Kerala and we are adopting the Kerala model of education for students in Bengal.



When asked to describe the Kerala model of education, Islam said: "Literacy level in Kerala is high and therefore, we have decided to inculcate the same model of education in some of the villages in Bengal. Initially, we have decided to educate students in 50 such villages in North 24-Parganas, South 24-Parganas and Howrah."



There is nothing controversial about it and those who are invited from Abu Dhabi and Qatar are originally from Kerala, but they are based in these countries. They will spread the message of love among people, he said.



Jishnu Basu, the RSS general secretary in South Bengal, said, We suspect the objective of the event. There is no need for such an event in Basirhat."



When the state government is restricting leaders from entering Basirhat, why are they allowing such an event in the disturbed area. This could lead to another flare up. The government should be more sensitive in this matter.



Shankar Majhi, a local resident at Mayerbazar in Bashirhat, said, This is a local issue and the matter was resolved locally. Now people are living peacefully in the area. We dont understand why the state government was entertaining such groups to organise the event.



Basirhat and Baduria witnessed violent clashes over an "objectionable" Facebook Post by a student. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, then, ordered a judicial inquiry and warned people against indulging in communal disharmony.


New Delhi: China has transported thousands of tonnes of military vehicles and equipment to Tibet since its involvement in a border standoff with India, according to Chinese state media.



The reports said the equipment was moved to the south of Kunlun mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command of Peoples Liberation Army. The Western Theatre Command oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India.



The hardware was moved simultaneously by road and rail from across the entire region, the South China Morning Post quoted the PLA Daily as saying.



The report, however, did not say whether the movement of the military equipment was to support the exercise or for other reasons.



On Monday, it was reported that China's military has conducted live-fire exercises in Tibet.



The PLA conducted live-fire exercises in Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, reported state-run China Central Television (CCTV) on Friday, without mentioning the exact timing of the drills.



The brigade that conducted the drills was from the PLA's Tibet Military Command and is one of China's two plateau mountain brigades.



The PLA Tibet command guards the Line of Actual Control (LAC) of the India-China border along several sections connecting the mountainous Tibetan region.



The live-fire drills included the quick delivery of troops and different military units working together on joint attacks.



China and India have been engaged in a standoff in the Doklam area in the Sikkim sector, where Indian troops stopped road construction by Chinese soldiers on June 16.



Doka La is the Indian name for the region which Bhutan recognises as Dokalam, while China claims it as part of its Donglang region.

Of the 3,488-km-long India-China border from Jammu and Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, a 220-km section falls in Sikkim.






On July 22, 2015, the central government raised for the first time its contentions on status of the right to privacy under the Indian Constitution.The then Attorney General, Mukul Rohatgi, created a flutter by stating that a nine-judge bench should reconsider all decisions of the Supreme Court in last six decades on this issue.Almost two years later, the apex court on Tuesday accepted that a nine-judge bench should be constituted to scrutinise correctness of its judgments on the subject.A five-judge bench, presided over by Chief Justice of India JS Khehar, said that it was opportune that a larger bench examine whether right to privacy is a fundamental right or not.The Constitution doesnt specify the right to privacy as a right but it is through judicial interpretations that several rights are read into the constitutional scheme. Right to privacy is sought to be read as a facet of fundamental rights relating to life and liberty (Article 21) or the right to free speech, movement and peaceful association (Article 19).What necessitates setting up the nine-judge bench is a six decade old ruling by an eight-judge bench of the top court.In ML Sharma case, the eight-judge bench ruled in 1954 that the right to privacy cannot be a fundamental right. That judgment held that when the Constitution-makers chose not to prescribe for constitutional limitations by recognising the fundamental right to privacy, there is no justification for importing into it, a totally different fundamental right by some process of strained construction.Another SC judgment by a six-judge bench in 1963 held that the right of privacy is not a guaranteed right under our Constitution.But the apex court sought to reverse this position in 1970s and carried on with the new proposition. In Maneka Gandhi's case and in subsequent decisions, the SC emphasised that the right to privacy can be construed as a fundamental right subject to certain restrictions and circumstances.But notably, all these judgments were by the smaller benches and therefore, legally, what the eight-judge and six-judge benches said about the right to privacy, per se, stood the good law.In August 2015, a three-judge bench, while adjudicating a clutch of petitions relating to validity of Aadhaar scheme, underlined the dichotomy and said the contradictory views of the top court in these judgments required to be reconciled.The issue cropped up after petitioners against Aadhaar claimed that collection and sharing of biometric information was a breach of their fundamental right to privacy. They argued that the Constitution has to be read as a dynamic document, requiring interpretations to suit modern times.On Tuesday, Attorney General KK Venugopal told the five-judge bench that if the court wished to appreciate the petitioners arguments on right to privacy, it should either accept the eight-judge bench decision that it is not a fundamental right or to reopen the entire debate by having this issue examined by a nine-judge bench.The court agreed with the second proposition, observing it was "essential" to examine if what the eight-judge bench held was "constitutionally correct".The CJI also clarified that the larger bench will lay down the law on right to privacy  not just for Aadhaar but as a constitutional principle in all cases for decades to come.Once this issue is settled, the matter will come back to the five-judge bench to decide whether Aadhaar violates the right to privacy  whose contours will be authoritatively defined by that time.
Chennai/New Delhi: Tamil Nadu MLAs have given themselves a generous hike of Rs 50,000, taking their monthly salaries to Rs 1.05 lakh at a time when farmers from the state have been vociferously protesting for loan waivers.



Apart from the salary hike, the pension of the MLAs has gone up from Rs 12,000 to Rs 20,000, while the local area development fund to develop respective constituencies was increased from Rs 2 crore to Rs 2.6 crore.



The announcement to the effect was made by Chief Minister E Palaniswami in the Assembly on Wednesday.



A similar pitch was made in Parliament when Samajwadi Party MP Naresh Agarwal and Congress MP Anand Sharma demanded a pay hike for MPs.



Indian parliamentarians are the worst-paid in the world, former Union minister Anand Sharma said moments before the Upper House took up the crippling farmer distress up for discussion. The heated debate led to several disruptions in proceedings.



Speaking later to CNN-News18, Agarwal defended the demand. If journalists and judiciary stop asking for better salaries, we will also stop. Why is it a problem if we get hikes? Why cant MPs ask for salary hikes if judges can? We have demanded what we deserve under the 7th Pay Commission, he said.



In Tamil Nadu Assembly, Speaker P Dhanapal said he could see happiness was writ large on the face of all MLAs cutting across party lines. He was happy too about the increase.



Allowances for the Chief Minister, Ministers, the Speaker, Deputy Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition and the Government Chief Whip were also increased with (retrospective) effect from July 1 this year.



Similarly, 'MLA Constituency Development Scheme' fund allocation was hiked to Rs 2.50 crore from the present Rs 2 crore from this year (2017-18), Palaniswami said.



He said the fund could be used for initiatives, including laying roads, constructing additional buildings for schools and PDS outlets.



Pension for former MLAs and members of the now defunct legislative council will be increased to Rs 20,000 from the present Rs 12,000.



The Chief Minister also hiked the monthly pension for journalists to Rs 10,000 from the current Rs 8,000 and allowance for the Assembly Watch and Ward staff as well. Giving the break-up of MLA's pay hike, he said their salary would be increased from Rs 8,000 to Rs 30,000.



Similarly, compensatory allowance will be Rs 10,000 from Rs 7,000 while telephone allowance has been revised to Rs 7,500 from Rs 5,000.



The constituency allowance goes up to Rs 25,000 from Rs 10,000 and consolidated allowance to Rs 5,000 from Rs 2,500. Vehicle allowance will be upwardly revised to Rs 25,000 from 20,000. Postal allowance will continue to be same at Rs 2,500.



As regards the Chief Minister, Ministers and Speaker, their Compensatory allowance will now be Rs 15,000 and expenditure allowance Rs 10,000 and constituency allowance Rs 25,000.



The Deputy Speaker, Leader of the Opposition and Chief Government Whip will get compensatory and constituency allowances on par with Ministers, their expenditure allowance will be slightly lower at Rs 7,500.



Family pension for kin of late MLAs will be hiked by Rs 10,000. They get 50 per cent of the pension drawn by pensioner-legislators.



The annual medical allowance (for retired MLAs) will be increased to Rs 25,000 from the present Rs 12,000.



(With PTI inputs)
New Delhi: The CBI on Wednesday summoned Karti Chidambaram, the son of former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, to appear before it on July 21, in an ongoing probe against him in a corruption case.



In its third notice to Karti, the CBI asked him to appear at its headquarters in south Delhi's Lodhi Road on Friday.



The agency wants to question Karti in a case related to Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance given to INX Media for allegedly receiving funds from Mauritius when his father was the Union Finance Minister.



The CBI had previously issued notices to Karti and four others on June 27 and June 29, but they did not turn up.



Karti, through his lawyer, had informed the CBI that he needed more time to appear.



The CBI on May 15 registered an FIR against Karti on charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating, accepting gratification by corrupt or illegal means, influencing public servants, and criminal misconduct.



Karti is alleged to have received Rs 3.5 crore from Mumbai-based INX media, now 9X Media, for helping it in getting FIPB clearance when it was run by Peter and Indrani Mukherjea, both accused in the Sheena Bora murder case.



The FIR does not mention the name of Chidambaram senior, though it says he cleared the FIPB approval for Rs 4.62 crore Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the FIPB meeting on May 18, 2007.



Karti left for London two days after the CBI registered a case against him.



In May, the agency had conducted raids at the premises of Karti, Peter, and Indrani at 14 locations in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Delhi National Capital Region in connection with the case.



(With Inputs from IANS)
New Delhi: The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has proposed to hold class X and XII board exams on same dates, although on different time slots, which will allow teachers more time to correct papers.



The new plan was designed after the board met principals of some of the top schools in National Capital Region. The two panel CBSE committees, which suggest ways to improve the system, will now review the plan.



The board, which has around 1800 affiliations, usually holds exams from the beginning of March, barring this year due to state Assembly elections. The exams last 45 days due to the number of subjects and separate time-tables for the two classes.



Because of this, teachers get very little time to correct the papers before the results are declared in May.



The plan is devised to decrease the overall duration of the finals. At present, exams are not held in the afternoon.



The reduced number of exam days will give evaluators a pool of schoolteachers selected by the CBSE more time to check the answer-scripts of students before the results are declared in May.



The teachers usually get a small window to check the answers, given the sheer size of the number of examinees.



Conducting class X and XII exam on same day is a suggestion that emerged during a meeting with Principals of CBSE-affiliated schools. By conducting Class XII and X exams on the same day, we can reduce the examination period and provide more time to the evaluators, a senior board official told CNN-News18.



It has also been suggested that the board should ask students to suggest teachers who could be good evaluators. Another suggestion is to increase the remuneration of evaluators, at least by 20%, and to set a figure as to how many copies they need to check.



CBSE came under severe criticism this year due to errors in correction after it was reported that those who sent their papers for revaluation saw up to a 400 percent rise in their marks.
Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court on Tuesday issued a notice to the Reserve Bank of India on a petition filed by an accused in a kidnapping case who wants Rs 2.5 lakh, seized by police before demonetisation, back in new currency notes.



Justice A J Desai today issued notices to the RBI, Union Finance Ministry and registrar of district and sessions court at Banaskantha after the central bank declined to exchange demonetised currency notes when police approached it following an order of a lower court on March 24.



Petitioner Kalpesh Patel was arrested on the charge of kidnapping before demonetisation was announced. Police had seized Rs 2.5 lakh and his motorcycle.



Patel then approached the Banaskantha district and sessions court in January with the plea to release his money in new currency notes.



The court, in its order dated March 8, had allowed his petition and asked police to exchange the currency notes with the RBI. Police approached the RBI with the money on March 24, but the latter declined to exchange the notes, saying that a Finance Ministry circular prohibited it at that stage. The RBI said the window was open only for NRIs.



Patel then approached the lower court again but, as the matter was not urgently heard, he moved the High Court. The HC issued notices to the RBI, Finance Ministry and the registrar of the Banaskantha district sessions court. The matter will come up for hearing again on August 21.
New Delhi: Chief of Air Staff B S Dhanoa on Tuesday flew a sortie in a Rafale fighter jet from a French airbase to gain first-hand experience of the aircraft, 36 of which are being procured for the Indian Air Force.



Dhanoa is a on a four-day visit to France to ramp up cooperation between the air forces of the two countries in a range of areas.



He flew the fighter at the Saint-Dizier airbase  a prominent installation of the French air force, an IAF official said.



India is procuring the Rafale multi-role fighter jets from French aviation major Dassault under a Euro 7.87 billion (approx Rs 59,000 crore) deal inked in September last year Air Chief Marshal Dhanoa will also take stock of progress in their supply.



The fighter jets are capable of carrying nuclear weapons and will be equipped with the latest missiles that will give the IAF greater "potency" over arch-rival Pakistan.



The Rafale combat aircraft will come with various India- specific modifications including Israeli helmet mounted displays, radar warning receivers and low band jammers, among others.



The Inter-Governmental Agreement for the supply of the jets was signed in September last year, 16 months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced India's plans to buy 36 Rafale aircraft in fly-away condition.



According to the deal, the delivery of the jets will start in 36 months and will be completed in 67 months from the date the contract is inked.
Thiruvanathapuram: A 51-year-old woman tried to commit suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills as she was allegedly sexually harassed by a sitting MLA.



The woman's husband has alleged that the Congress legislator M Vincent, who represents Kovalam constituency in Thiruvanathapuram, used to call up the man's wife and speak to her in a sexually suggestive manner. The husband has also alleged that his wife took the extreme step as she was continuously harassed over the phone.



The police have registered a case of abetment to suicide against MLA M Vincent.



Meanwhile, the MLA rubbished the allegations and said that he is open to any investigation. He also alleged that it is a political conspiracy.



According to the police, the incident happened on Wednesday afternoon. The woman allegedly overdosed on sleeping pills, following which she had to be rushed to a private hospital at Neyyatinkara.



Neyyatinkara Dy SP B Harikumar said that the police have booked the MLA under section 306 (abetment of suicide) of IPC.



The woman, a mother of two, is under treatment and in the ICU.



The police are yet to record her statement. If the woman stands by her husband's statement, sections for sexual harassment and criminal intimidation too may be invoked against the MLA.



As per the statement of the woman's husband, the MLA has been harassing the woman over phone for several months.



The woman in question is a resident of the same neighbourhood where the MLA resides.
Thiruvanathapuram: Seeking increase in their basic salary, the Nurses in private hospitals in the state will go on a mass leave from Thursday. The casualty and emergency services will not be affected though.



Nurses under the United Nurses Association and Indian Nurses Association have been demanding an increase in their basic salary.



The nurses are demanding a basic salary of Rs 20,000 according to the Supreme Court guidelines. At present they are getting about Rs 8,00 to 9,000 and in many hospitals it is as less as 5,000.



There has been several round of talks, but no headway so far. The management is not ready to pay a basic salary of Rs 20,000.



The mediation talk by the high court on Wednesday also failed.



On Thursday, Chief Minsiter Pinarayi Vijayan has called for a talk at 4 pm. Already in Kannur and Kasargod districts nurse have been protesting by staying away from work.



The nursing students in Kannur also protested after the Collector ordered them to treat patients as nurses were striking.



About 90,000 nurses in the state are part of this protest.
New York, New York, July 19, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

NEW YORK, NY, July 19, 2017  Teaching Matters, a leader in the national movement to support teacher leadership, today awarded its seventh annual Elizabeth Rohatyn Prize for Schools Where Teaching Matters to the Academy of Applied Technology and Mathematics (MS 343) from District 7. Educators at the Bronx middle school introduced an initiative titled Looking at Student Work that empowers teachers to isolate students mistakes and misconceptions, shift instructional strategies and provide highly personalized intervention.

New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina attended the awards luncheon at the Harvard Club to congratulate all five finalists for this years award. In 50-plus years as an educator, Ive learned how essential teacher collaboration and leadership are for ensuring equity and excellence for all students. I congratulate MS 343 and the finalists for the Elizabeth Rohatyn Prize on their efforts to create a culture that supports teacher collaboration and leadership, which ultimately fosters better instruction and outcomes for our students.

Each year, more than 100 public schools enter to win the $25,000 prize. Named after Teaching Matters founder, Elizabeth Rohatyn, the prize is awarded each year to a public school that advances opportunities for students by positioning teachers to lead, learn, and thrive. Judges reached a unanimous decision after reviewing MS 343s constructive approach to empowering students.

When schools position teachers to lead, it is no surprise that this translates to student success. Schools that empower teachers also empower students, said Teaching Matters Executive Director Lynette Guastaferro. At MS 343, students are learning to identify and address their own strengths and weaknesses, rather than waiting for a teacher to tell them what they are.

MS 343s award-winning initiative follows the development of explicit teacher leadership roles and a new culture in which teachers lead instructional practices and play a key role in decision making. Teachers are implementing a learning target process based on major standards within each grade and using formative data to benefit both teachers and students, promoting self-assessment of student work.

The initiative advocates for student leadership and ownership, helping students feel more confident in their abilities. The $25,000 prize will support the expansion of a data bank to house multiple sources of student data that are accessible to teachers and students.

It can be very discouraging for a student to receive a failing grade if they dont know why they received it, said MS 343 Principal Vincent Gassetto. Our educators created a self-reflecting system to combat the negative feeling students have about themselves as learners. Feedback is a very important part of learning, and an essential part of teaching.

The other four finalists for this years Rohatyn Prize are:

International Community High School (Bronx, Affinity High Schools District)

Renaissance High School for Musical Theater & Technology (Bronx, Bronx High School District )

The Richard H. Hungerford School (Staten Island, District 31)

PS 253Q (Queens, District 27)

About the Elizabeth Rohatyn Prize

The annual $25,000 Elizabeth Rohatyn Prize for Schools Where Teaching Matters is presented to a school that demonstrates an initiative that positions teachers to lead, learn, and thrive. To be eligible, public schools must be within a 100-mile radius of New York City. The committee is comprised of five judges, representing a distinguished cross-section of the philanthropic and education communities within the eligible geographic area. This year's judge panel consisted of representatives from Learning Forward, The Overdeck Foundation and Hunter College School of Education. It also includes the winner of the sixth annual Elizabeth Rohatyn Prize and a New York City Gates Fellow/Teacher Leader.

About Teaching Matters

Teaching Matters is a leader in the national movement to support teacher leadership as a critical means to improving teacher effectiveness and student achievement across the nations school systems. The organization works to promote lasting changes to teacher quality and has been at the forefront of professional development for teachers in the U.S. Teaching Matters aims to close the opportunity gap in urban schools by providing competency-based professional learning. Over the course of 20 years, Teaching Matters has offered year-round, in-depth programming to approximately 1,000 schools, 30,000 teachers and 500,000 students. For more information, visit teachingmatters.org.

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A 'Kisan Mukti Yatra' led by the Swaraj Abhiyan, that kicked-off a fortnight ago, today reached the national capital where scores of peasants, activists and a few political leaders gathered in solidarity for the cause of the farmers.The yatra had started on July 6 from Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh and has covered six states so far.At the city's Jantar Mantar area, farmers from all parts of the country, "made two specific demands -- farming be made remunerative and farmers be made debt-free," Swaraj Abhiyan said in a statement.The agitating farmers also "questioned the silence" of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the Mandsaur shootings, it said."I campaigned for Narendra Modi, I supported him, only because he promised to waive off loans of farmers but later his government in the Supreme Court gave an affidavit claiming that waiving off farm loans is not possible. I want to ask him that if this was not possible, why did he make this promise to me and in his election manifesto, to the people of this country," said Member of Parliament, Raju Shetti.Farmers of Tamil Nadu who have relaunched their agitation also joined the agitation under the leadership of Aiyyakannu. On the other hand, the children of farmers from Maharashtra, who have committed suicide performed a skit at the venue to bring attention to their plight, the Abhiyan said.CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury said, "Along with you, I take the pledge to fight for the rights of farmers and I promise you that I am going to take this fight to Parliament."Senior advocate Prashant Bhushan, in his address, alleged, "The government is deliberately designing policies that are anti-farmer and pro-corporate. The govt is supporting products such as GM mustard which are designed to benefit the corporate and destroy the farmers as well their farming."Swaraj Abhiyan leader Yogendra Yadav said "It is not the farmers who are under debt in this country but the country that is indebted to farmers".Convener of All India Kisan Sangarsh Coordination Committee, V M Singh, said, "This is not just a fight of farmers but of all citizens of this country. Why should a farmer, despite feeding the whole country, be unable to feed his own family."
New Delhi: The National Green Tribunal has directed the AAP government to convene an immediate meeting to decide a detailed mechanism for dealing with the waste lying at various overflowing landfill sites in Delhi.



A bench headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Swatanter Kumar ordered the chief secretary of Delhi government to hold the meeting and come out with a complete mechanism to reduce the accumulated waste which was over 50 feet in height at some sites and address issues related to it.



"We direct the chief secretary, NCT Delhi to hold a meeting immediately and submit report in relation to dumped waste at Bhalswa, Okhla and Ghazipur.



"If the meeting has not already been held and complete clarification in that behalf including reduction in huge dump and utility of the waste deposited in these sites. Complete methodology and process to be adopted in this regard should be specified," the bench said.



The matter is fixed for next hearing on July 25.



Noting that Delhi generated over 14,000 tonnes of garbage a day, the tribunal had earlier rapped the Delhi government for lack of infrastructure to deal with "mountain dumps" of decaying garbage at various landfill sites in the city.



It had directed the AAP government to apprise the tribunal of the steps it has taken to lower the height of the garbage dumps at Bhalswa, Ghazipur and Okhla landfill sites, saying these were a source of air and water pollution.



The tribunal had last year constituted a committee to look into the working of waste-to-energy plants in the national capital.



It had also asked the Central Pollution Control Board and the Delhi Pollution Control Committee to approach the Delhi government to provide more landfill sites in the city and maintain them strictly in accordance with the Solid Waste Management Rules of 2016.
New Delhi: She took the internet by storm last year in the Hindi and Urdu speaking world when an interview of her launching a tirade at Pakistani authorities went viral. Netizens in India and Pakistan are now well acquainted with the golden words, Yeh Bik Gayi hai Gormint! (This government is a sell-out!), but Karachi resident Qamar, better known as Gormint Aunty to her fans, may be facing social boycott in her neighbourhood.



A report by Pakistani news outlet Samaa TV said that Qamar, a resident of Karachis Martin Quarters, has been at the receiving end of a cold shoulder from friends, neighbours, and relatives due to her anger management issues. A Samaa TV reporter quoted Gormint Auntys son in her blog post. She hurls abuses whenever her blood pressure is high and she doesnt even realize what she is saying. She uttered whatever came in her mind when the TV vaalay came in our area that day because she was extremely angry and her blood pressure was also high, he told reporter Shahla Mahmood.



He spoke of how his mother, now an internet sensation, has struggled with a short temper. But the aftermath of the now-famous interview has been disastrous for her. He added, Our extended family has socially boycotted us. Everyone makes fun of my mother. We have stopped attending family events because people, instead of enjoying the family functions, shift their focus on my mother. We have had many altercations with our relatives and neighbours over the issue. As a result, no one comes to our house anymore.



Qamars words Yeh Bik Gayi hai Gormint! became an oft-repeated phrase on the internet after her interview went viral. A reporter asked her about power cuts in her Karachi neighbourhood, which sent Qamar into a diatribe filled with expletives. Memes, jokes and sketches, including one from Bollywood actor Irrfan Khan, flooded the internet. Manufacturers in India have even started selling T-shirts and other merchandise, some even depicting her as Revolutionary icon Che Guevara, bearing the words Yeh Bik Gayi hai Gormint!.




The Rajya Sabha is witnessing uproar with members demanding apology from SP leader Naresh Agarwal over his statement on god and alcohol.

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New Delhi: The debate surrounding the right to privacy took an interesting turn on Wednesday with the Supreme Court indicating that its judgment against homosexuality may get reopened if privacy is assigned the status of a fundamental right.



A nine-judge bench, led by Chief Justice of India J S Khehar, observed that sexual orientation was a matter of privacy and if the court were to hold privacy as a fundamental right, then the 2013 judgment against homosexuality would be susceptible to a fresh legal challenge.



As the bench discussed the facets of the right to privacy, Justice D Y Chandrachud said it will be extraordinarily dangerous to give an exhaustive catalogue of what will constitute privacy.



Marriage, procreation are facets of privacy sexual orientation is also about privacy. If we say there is a fundamental right to privacy, our judgment in Naz Foundation becomes vulnerable, observed the judge.



In Naz Foundation case, a two-judge bench had in 2013 ruled that Section 377 will continue making gay sex  irrespective of age and consent  an offence.



The court had held that Section 377 did not suffer from any constitutional infirmity and that it was for Parliament to consider the desirability and propriety of deleting Section 377 from the statute book or amend it. Under Section 377, voluntary carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal," is punishable with imprisonment from 10 years to life.



This judgment had turned the clock back on the rights of homosexuals in the country, as the SC set aside the historic 2009 Delhi High Court judgment that decriminalised gay sex by holding that Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, by criminalising consensual sexual acts of adults in private, violated the principles of equality and non-discrimination in the Constitution.







The review petition filed by Naz Foundation against this judgment was dismissed in 2014. But the case is still alive since the curative petition is still pending before the top court.



If the nine-judge bench elevates the status of the right to privacy, the ruling will come handy for Naz Foundation, which has asserted that private acts of consensual sex between consenting adults in private could not be criminalized by sanction of law.



Further, an authoritative ruling by the nine-judge bench will bind the smaller benches and therefore, the bench hearing the curative petition in Naz Foundation case would have to adhere to the principles evolved by the larger bench.


Visuals from Nowshera where Pak shells target a local school. These shocking visuals bring home the reality of how far Pak is daring to go. pic.twitter.com/2KfSWJ1iYv  News18 (@CNNnews18) July 19, 2017

: The local administration in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district on Wednesday closed several schools as a precautionary measure after Pakistani troops initiated unprovoked and indiscriminate firing on Indian posts and forward villages along the LoC.According to reports, the local police and district administration rescued several students and teachers who were trapped in three schools close to the LoC during a deadly rain of mortar shells from Pakistan on Tuesday.No casualties have been reported so far. Empty brass shells of bullet casings were discovered lying on several school premises.Indian Army jawans responded to Pakistani firing with equal calibre weapons after a school in Noweshra sector came under enemy firing.On July 16, Pakistan's army said four of its soldiers drowned in a river in Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) after their vehicle was hit by shelling by Indian troops and plunged into the river Neelum.
I used to hate my father. And now that I am older, I understand it wasnt my fathers fault. It was the governments fault.Fourteen-year-old Ashoks words can pierce through anyones heart. He is a farmers son born in Gadchiroli, in Maharashtras Vidarbha region. He is one of the 350 children who have lost a parent to farmer suicides during the last decade in the state. Ashok and his friends have come all the way to the Jantar Mantar in the national capital to take part in the Kisan Mukti Sansad.I came here to urge the government to do something so that no other child is orphaned like I have been, says Ashok.Farmers from all across India have gathered in Delhi to demand their rights. Nearly 2,000 farmers from Maharashtra, Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh have united under the umbrella of Kisan Mukti Sansad to reiterate their two demands  farm loan waiver and remunerative prices for their produce.(Image credits: Zeba Warsi/News18)For 55-year-old Bhanu Ram, these protests have become a routine. A wheat farmer in Madhya Pradesh, he has lost a child to starvation. This is the 65th protest he has been part of over the last one year. We keep screaming. It seems the government has gone deaf and mute. Is there no value for the life of a farmers son? Ram asks.Archana, 13, hails from Yavatmal district of Maharashtra. She was barely three years old when her father Shivpal Patil hung himself. Her mother was left all alone to fend for her three daughters. Archana being the youngest was sent to a childrens home in Nasik.I have not lived with my family all my life. I dont know who my father was. But I have lost my family and my childhood. No farmer should commit suicide. Its not just his life, but all the lives that depend on him that are devastated, says Archana.(Image credits: Zeba Warsi/News18)The farmer agitation is simmering for months now. Six farmers were killed in Madhya Pradesh when one such agitation boiled over. Farmers from Tamil Nadu have protested indefinitely in Delhi, sitting with skulls they claim are of their friends who committed suicide. They have tried to do everything to gauge the attention of both the government and the civil society. Aayakannu, the man who leads the resilient protest by Tamil Nadu farmers at Jantar Mantar, says they will not give up.We will fight till we die. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promised us our rights and we will not give up till we get what we were promised. Farmers in this country are anyway living under the constant fear of death, says Aayakannu.(Image credits: Zeba Warsi/News18)The government waives off huge debts of rich people but my father was not given any relief and he committed suicide. Was the Rs 25,000 that my father owed too big an amount that the Government of India could not bear? This question raised by 12-year-old Pallavi, who is from Sholapur in Maharashtra, sends a chill down the spine.These children who have been robbed of their family and their childhood are the real face of this tragedy that is the farmer distress in India.
Washington: The United States on Wednesday named Pakistan among the countries and regions providing "safe havens" to terrorists, saying terror groups such as LeT and JeM continued to operate, train, organise and fundraise inside the country in 2016.



"Country Report on Terrorism", the Congress-mandated annual report of the State Department, said that Pakistani military and security forces undertook operations against groups that conducted attacks within Pakistan such as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the PTI reported.



However, it clearly said that "Pakistan did not take substantial action against the Afghan Taliban or Haqqani, or substantially limit their ability to threaten US interests in Afghanistan, although Pakistan supported efforts to bring both groups into an Afghan-led peace process."



"Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in 2016, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan," the report said. India, it said continued to experience attacks, "including by Maoist insurgents and Pakistan-based terrorists".



Indian authorities continued to blame Pakistan for cross-border attacks in Jammu and Kashmir, it said.



"In January, India experienced a terrorist attack against an Indian military facility in Pathankot, Punjab, which was blamed by authorities on JeM. Over the course of 2016, the Government of India sought to deepen counterterrorism cooperation and information sharing with the United States," the State Department said.



The Indian government continued to closely monitor the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), which made threats against India in their terrorist propaganda. A number of individuals were arrested for ISIS-affiliated recruitment and attack plotting within India, the report said.



In a separate chapter, the State Department listed Pakistan as one of the "safe havens of terrorism".



The State Department said that numerous terrorist groups, including the Haqqani Network (HQN), the LeT and JeM continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2016.



"Although LeT is banned in Pakistan, LeT's wings Jamaat- ud-Dawa (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FiF) were able to openly engage in fundraising, including in the capital," it said.



"LeT's chief Hafiz Saeed (a UN-designated terrorist) continued to address large rallies, although in February 2017, Pakistan proscribed him under relevant provisions of Schedule Four of the Anti-Terrorism Act, thus severely restricting his freedom of movement," it noted.



The 2015 ban on media coverage of Saeed, JuD, and FiF continued and was generally followed by broadcast and print media, it said.



According to the State Department, the Pakistani government did not publicly reverse its December 2015 declaration that neither JuD nor FiF is banned in Pakistan, despite their listing under UN sanctions regimes, although in January 2017, Pakistan placed both organisations "under observation" pursuant to Schedule Two of the Anti-Terrorism Act.



While not a ban, keeping the outfits under observation allows the government to closely scrutinise the activities of both organisations.



On November 11, Pakistan's National Counterterrorism Authority published its own list of banned organisations that placed JuD in a separate section for groups that are "under observation" but not banned.



Pakistan continued military operations to eradicate terrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, although their impact on all terrorist groups was uneven, it said.



In its report to the Congress, the State Department said in 2016, India and the United States pledged to strengthen cooperation against terrorist threats from groups including al-Qaeda, the ISIS, JeM, LeT and D-Company (Dawood Ibrahim's group), including through greater collaboration on designations at the UN.



Indian and US leaders directed officials to identify new areas of collaboration through the July US-India Counterterrorism Joint Working Group, applauded finalisation of a bilateral arrangement to facilitate the sharing of terrorism screening information, and called upon Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of terrorist attacks against India to justice, the report said.



The United States and India worked together to designate JeM leader Maulana Masood Azhar, although the listing was blocked in the UN 1267 Committee, the State Department said. Other areas mentioned in the report as safe havens are Afghanistan, Somalia, the Trans-Sahara, Sulu/Sulawesi Seas Littoral, Southern Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Columbia and Venezuela.



(With inputs from PTI)
After having spent quality time in New York with her girl friends and family, including son Arhaan, Malaika Arora Khan was snapped at the Mumbai airport on her return in the wee hours of Wednesday along with ex-husband Arbaaz Khan.The actress-turned-fitness expert had made a pitstop in the the city that never sleeps after spending a gala time with Arbaaz's family in Spain earlier.The sexy siren looked super chic in checkered pants, a shrug which she teamed with a black tee and white sneakers. She let her hair down and added a dash of color on the lips to accentuate her look.Malaika's travel outfit looked both super comfortable and stylish at the same time. Take a look.(Photo: Malaika Arora at the Mumbai airport/Yogen Shah)(Photo: Malaika Arora with ex-husband Arbaaz Khan and son Arhaan at Mumbai airport/Yogen Shah)She also posted a photo of herself on Instagram enroute Mumbai.Credit: @ Malaika Arora Khan Here are some pictures of Malaika enjoying her time in New York."Perfect sunny day in my fav city....nyc," Malaika captioned the image on Instagram.Credit: @ Malaika Arora Khan Malaika, seen here with her friend Pressy Nathan, looked fashionable in an off-shoulder checkered black-and-grey short dress which she teamed with a stylish bag and slippers. She opted for a pair of sunglasses to accessorise.Credit: @ Malaika Arora Khan Malaika looked hot in white shorts teamed with a white crop top which featured statement sleeves. Strappy footwear, pair of sunglasses and a black belt completed her look.Credit: @ Malaika Arora Khan Earlier, Malaika Arora was snapped spending some quality time with her girl gang in New York.Credit: @ Malaika Arora Khan She was also seen on a shopping spree with son Arhaan. The two were joined by actor Chunkey Pandey's wife and daughter in New York.Credit: @ Malaika Arora Khan Malaika's vacation pictures have been breaking the internet for a while now. Seems like the star is having a gala time juggling between her professional roles and taking time off for her family and herself. 
Guy Fieri is hitting the road with his family and taking TV cameras with him, in a new show for The Food Network that will chronicle his all-American road trip this summer.



While TV audiences know Fieri best for his series "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives," "Guy's Family Road Trip" will bring along his wife Lori and sons Hunter and Ryder for the cross-country trip that takes the family from their California home to Florida.



With dad Guy at the wheel of the RV, the Fieris indulge in a creole crawfish boil in New Orleans, fresh oysters in Alabama and Belgian waffles during a road trip to Lake Tahoe. They also participate in the local Chile Festival in Flagstaff, Arizona.



"I'm excited to hit the open road for the ultimate RV trip," Fieri said in a statement.



"With years of experience seeking out the country's funkiest joints, I can't wait to dig into America's signature dishes and destinations with my family. The best part is that I get to bring the viewers along for the ride."



Along with road-side campfire feasts, the family also takes a helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon, and raft the Colorado River.



The series premieres on The Food Network Friday, August 18 at 9 pm ET/PT, while a sneak peek airs Sunday, August 13 at 10 pm ET/PT.
MISSISSAUGA, ON., July 19, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Associa Maple Ridge Community Management (MRCM), one of the largest community management firms in southwestern Ontario, is honored to announce the recent partnership with Harmony Management. Harmony Management is a boutique property management company that provides services to communities throughout the greater Toronto area.



The strategic partnership between MRCM and Harmony Management will strengthen the support provided to community residents by advancing internal processes, incorporating new, state-of-the-art software that enhances the current systems, and help prepare for changes to the new condominium legislation.



We are excited to be partnering with such a respected local property management company and their dedicated team, stated Michael Le Page, Associa Maple Ridge Community Management president. Together, we will not only make advances to our operating systems but also strengthen our core foundation so we can better serve our clients and residents.



Harmony Management brings more than 5,500 units and 25 employees into the new venture with MRCM. Residents of the managed communities will see only positive changes in their unparalleled service and current staffing will remain in place.



Being a part of the Associa Maple Ridge Community Management family will allow us to expand our current operations and provide additional management services to our residents, said Scott Newhouse, Harmony Management president. We are excited to embark on this partnership and will continue to focus on providing the highest quality of customer service available.



Maple Ridge Community Management has proudly served the condominium industry since 1984. MRCM is Association of Condominium Managers of Ontario 2000 certified. MRCM is an award-winning firm, and has been recognized as Management firm of the Year, Managers of the Community of the Year plus numerous individual awards including Industry Leader of the Year. The company manages a diverse portfolio of recently constructed and long-established high rise and townhomes across southwestern Ontario, serving locations designed for first-time buyers through to retirement communities.



With more than 180 branch offices across North America, Associa delivers unsurpassed management and lifestyle services to nearly five million residents worldwide. Our 10,000+ team members lead the industry with unrivaled education, expertise and trailblazing innovation. For more than 40 years, Associa has provided solutions designed to help communities achieve their vision. To learn more, visit www.associaonline.com.



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Mumbai: While there has been an intellectual uproar over the cuts ordered by the Central Board Of Film Certification (CBFC) in Suman Ghosh's documentary The Argumentative Indian, the CBFC chairperson speaking on the cuts argues that the mere deletion or beeping of six words is no reason to feel creatively smothered when those words indicate a clear contempt for Indian culture and democracy.



"I've been flooded with calls from print and television channels asking why we've beeped six words in the documentary. For the first and last time, here's the reason why. Because we felt a documentary on an Indian Nobel laureate referring so insensitively to our politics and religion could result in a serious breach of the peace and harmony of the country. At one point, Prof. Sen talks about Indian democracy and refers to Gujarat's 'criminalities'. We've asked for 'Gujarat' to be removed," said Nihalani



"At another point in the documentary, there is a reference to the enemy in India being religious leadership. We've asked for India' to be removed here. The third word we've ordered cut is when Prof. Sen speaks of India being interpreted as Hindu'. We've asked for Hindu to be removed. The fourth cut is that of the word cow' where Professor Sen while speaking of religious integration, makes a frivolous reference to the cow'.



"The fifth, and according to us, minor change is in Professor Sen's line about the Vedas being used in a sectarian way these days. We've asked for the words used' and these days' to be removed. And finally, Professor Sen refers to the Hindutva view of India as "banal". We asked for the offensive adjective to be removed," he added.



Nihalani says the removal of six words in the documentary is wrongly being seen as pro-government chamchagiri.



"We are not asking for the removal of the words under pressure from the Government. We seriously feel the removal of the words causes no injury to Professor Amartya Sen's thought processes in the documentary.



"On the other hand, referring to a cow in a flippant manner or calling Hindutva "banal" could seriously breach the communal harmony of the country. When filmmakers talk about freedom of expression, they should know that such freedom comes with a responsibility. You may be a Nobel laureate but if you speak disparagingly about things held sacred by the population you are vulnerable to attacks," he said.



Nihalani wants the documentary's director Suman Ghosh to calm down.



"Simply reacting because six words are beeped out when they in no way affect your artistic freedom is just a knee-jerk reaction. Please look at the larger picture," he said.



The censor chief also points out a serious legal breach on the part of the documentary's makers.



He said: "They have been screening the film without a censor certificate in various public places of India. That's illegal. Freedom of expression is fine. What about breaking the law?"
Bhopal: There seems to be no end to RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadavs legal troubles  first the fodder scam, and now the land-for-hotels deals case in which his wife and son are also accused.



And if Shabnam Mausi Bano, Indias first transgender MLA is to be believed, its all because of her curse.



Lalu Prasad Yadav had promised me financial help when I fought from Kotma constituency (in Madhya Pradesh) in 2008. He had also promised to be present during campaigning. But he never kept his promise, she said.



Lalu Yadav betrayed me and the voters, especially from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, kept asking me about his visit which never happened.



Bano ended up losing the election which she had fought on RJD ticket. She stood fourth with just 560 votes.



This was her re-election bid, having created history with her win in 1998 as an Independent from Sohagpur constituency.



Her next electoral foray came in 2012 when she fought from Kanpur Cantt constituency in Uttar Pradesh. This, too, ended in failure.



She maintains that she would have won had Lalu kept his promise and campaigned for her in Kotma, an area with sizeable voting population from UP and Bihar who worked local coal mines.



Accusing Lalu of amassing unimaginable wealth, Bano said the former railway minister had laughed off her election debacle. When I met him in New Delhi later, he asked his men to give me Rs 10,000 for kiraya-bhaada (fare and rent).



I was deeply hurt by his betrayal. Its my curse which has brought about bad days for him, says the 56-year-old.



Bano now hopes to reclaim electoral glory in 2018 from MPs Rewa constituency.



Several organisations disappointed with the local MLA have approached me and urged me to contest the next election. I told them I am penniless, so they need to arrange everything.



Bano is not new to struggles. Having been abandoned by her father, a Superintendent of Police and a staunch Brahmin, she faced several hardships and fought social stigma to land small roles in Bollywood movies.



Bollywood led to politics and Bano entered the Assembly in 1998.



Her life story was the subject of 2005 movie Shabnam Mausi where veteran actor Ashutosh Rana played the title role.



Bano is fluent in 12 Indian languages and spends most of her time today creating awareness on HIV/AIDS and fighting gender disparity.
New Delhi: At 4:30 pm on Wednesday, top leaders from across the opposition spectrum gathered at the Constitution Club in New Delhi to demand the passage of a draft bill titled 'Maanav Suraksha Kanoon' (MASUKA) that aims to put an end to instances of mob violence.



Seated beside each other were representatives from parties such as the Congress, CPI (M), DMK, Aam Aadmi Party, RJD, SP and BSP - political parties that don't necessarily see eye to eye.



The JD (U), BJD and TMC could not send representatives but expressed their support for the draft law. But one notable exception to this mosaic was AIMIM chief and Lok Sabha MP Asaduddin Owaisi.



The absence of Owaisi, who is also a lawyer, was particularly noticeable since he declared his intention of introducing a private member bill of his own against mob violence. If there was any doubt that Owaisi was being snubbed, the organisers of the event made it clear.



Shehzaad Poonawalla, Congress leader and member of the team that drafted the proposed MASUKA, said, Asaduddin Owaisi has a habit of hijacking such things and making it a Hindu-Muslim issue. We don't want MASUKA to be viewed on religious lines at all. Whether a Junaid gets lynched in Haryana or a Hindu gets killed elsewhere or even if African students are attacked, we are against mob violence in principle. All human life is precious. We will not allow this law to be communalised.



The organisers did, however, invite representatives from the BJP by virtue of it being the ruling party.



Among those present were senior Congress leaders Digvijaya Singh, Shashi Tharoor and Salman Khurshid, AAP leader Sanjay Singh, RJD's Manoj Jha, DMK's TK Ilangovan and CPI (M) MP MB Rajesh.
Lucknow: The white powder found in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly has caused quite a confusion. Initially, it was supposed to be powerful explosive PETN, but reports from the Agra forensic lab found no traces of explosive. The Yogi Adityanath government has now clarified that the sample was not sent to Agra lab, instead tests were conducted in the Lucknow lab and preliminary reports confirmed the presence of a nitrate.



The sample wasnt sent to Agra as they dont have the wherewithal to conduct the tests. The factual position is that SFSL Lucknow has found the substance to be water insoluble. Different reagents confirm the presence of a nitrate, preliminary tests using explosive detection kit were positive for PETN, said the Principal Secretary (Home).



The officer said results of two confirmatory tests conducted by the Lucknow lab are expected on Thursday.



The Uttar Pradesh police website, however, says that the Agra lab has an explosives division. An explosive division was sanctioned for undertaking the examination of explosive material. This division started functioning at Agra in the year 1987. It is expected to cater to the needs of all the districts in the state, says the website.



IG ATS, Aseem Arun, said tests are usually being done by two labs for a reliable report. We have sent the sample to Lucknow Forensic Lab. It is not our concern that from which of their lab they are conducting the tests. ATS always gets the tests done from two labs, now the sample will be sent to Hyderabad Forensic Lab, he said.



According to sources, all the experts who conducted the tests at Lucknow are not experts. While the sources said the report at Agra laboratory was prepared by a panel with expertise in examining explosives.



On July 12, around 60 grams of the PETN was detected near Leader of Opposition Ram Govind Chaudharys seat in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly by the dog squad during a security sweep, following which a forensic investigation was launched.



Speaking in the Assembly on Friday, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath called for an NIA investigation. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) should investigate the matter. A response team to act on such threats should also be immediately put in place. It should have been done a long time ago, the CM said.



Pentaerythritol tetranitrate or PETN can easily dodge metal detectors and its colourless crystals are hard to detect in sealed containers. It is a powerful explosive, 100 gram of which is enough to blow up a car to pieces, say experts.
Mumbai: In a scathing attack, the Shiv Sena has accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of surrendering to gaurakshaks (cow vigilantes) and questioned why no action has been taken in recent cases of lynchings by self-styled cow protectors.



In an editorial in its mouthpiece Saamana, the Shiv Sena said gaurakshaks are taking the law into their hands from Delhi to Nagpur but the law implementation machinery has been a mute spectator. The party questioned if this was a conspiracy.



The reference to Nagpur is an apparent jibe at the RSS, the BJPs ideological fount, which is headquartered in the Maharashtra city.



It seems like Modi has surrendered before gaurakshaks. It is appalling that the gaurakshaks take law in their hands and beat up a person, the editorial said.



It also questioned why the cow vigilantes were not targeting those within the BJP who have proclaimed their love for beef, a possible reference to the partys members in Meghalaya who have opposed the restrictions on cattle sale.



There are many states where beef isn't banned. Beef is a part of food there, and even the members of BJP government in those states have proclaimed their love for beef. Will the gaurakshaks go and beat them?



The Sena also questioned why these gaurakshaks dont face bullets in Kashmir. Where are these gaurakshaks when the security conditions in the country are bad? Why they don't face bullets Kashmir? (sic)



The Shiv Sena and the BJP are in alliance in the state but have shared an uncomfortable relationship. They had parted ways in the civic polls held earlier this year.



The editorial in Saamana comes days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke out against cow vigilantism at an all-party meeting, and put the onus on the states to act.



Speaking to CNN-News18, Sena MP Sanjay Raut said: Those who are beating people are not gaurakshaks.. Its basically Pakistan which wants Hindus and Muslims to fight in India. They want to divert attention from the ceasefire violations and terrorism.




New Delhi: TR Zeliang was on Wednesday appointed as the Chief Minister of Nagaland by Governor PB Acharya.



Zeliang, who belongs to the Naga Peoples Front (NPF), will be sworn in at 3 pm. He has to prove his majority on the floor of the House on or before July 22.



This came after current Chief Minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu failed to turn up to face a floor test at a special session of the State Assembly. The House was adjourned sine die.



Liezietsu is facing rebellion by 43 ruling NPF MLAs led by Zeliang demanding change of leadership in the present house of 59, to seek vote of confidence on or before July 15.



Zeliang, who was forced out of office in February following large scale protests over holding of urban local bodies election with 33 percent reservation for women, had staked claim to form the government saying he had majority support in the House.



Earlier in the day, four BJP legislators and Nagaland BJP president Visasolie Lhoungu called on the governor and submitted a letter supporting TR Zeliang. BJP is a pre-poll alliance partner of the Naga People's Front and a constituent of the Democratic Alliance of Nagaland (DAN) government in the state.



The legislators in their letter to the governor said, "BJP has been a constituent of the DAN and continues to remain a part of the arrangement till date."



However, they said that in the present political crisis in the state government, the BJP has decided to be with the DAN group-led by Zeliang.



The four BJP legislators are Minister for Transport and Civil Aviation, Paiwang Konyak, Advisor for Treasury and Accounts, Labour and Employment T M Lotha, Advisor for Cooperation Imtilemba Sangtam and MLA and Chief Whip of BJP Mmhonlumo Kikon.


The US-based Apple launched a campaign in China this week to promote its mobile payment platform and break the current duopoly of tech giants Tencent and Alibaba. Apple is set to offer a series of discounts of up to 50 per cent to clients who opt to pay using Apple Pay in stores, with whom it has an agreement, to increase its share in the world's largest mobile payment market, Efe news cited Chinese financial news website Caixin as saying on Wednesday."Our goal is for all Apple users to use Apple Pay," Jennifer Baily, vice president of Apple Pay, told Caixin. The digital payments market in China -- dominated by tech giants Tencent with Wechat Payments and Alibaba with Alipay, with a combined market share of 92 per cent -- is valued at 35 trillion yuan (nearly $5.2 trillion), according to Caixin. After the US, China is Apple's second largest market. However, currently, Apple Pay does not figure among the top eight of China's online payment companies in terms of transaction volume, according to consulting firm Analysys..Apple entered the Chinese mobile payments sector late, launching its services only in February 2016, which might explain the low volume of its business. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Apple appointed Isabel Ge Mahe as its Vice-President and Managing Director for China, a new post created to head and coordinate Apple's team based in China and oversee compliance with the new cyber security regulations for foreign companies in the country.Last week, Apple had announced a $1 billion investment project in Guizhou province with a data storage facility, as part of the Chinese government's new requirements where foreign firms are required to store data collected in the country on servers within China.
Signifying the growing popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI), global research firm Gartner has predicted that AI will be virtually pervasive in almost every new software product and service by 2020.Owing to its market hype, almost all established software vendors are working to introduce AI into their product strategies which is creating considerable confusion in the process.The term 'artificial intelligence' was not even in the top 100 search terms on gartner.com in January 2016 but by May 2017, it ranked at number 7, indicating the popularity of the topic."As AI accelerates up the 'Hype Cycle', many software providers are looking to stake their claim in the biggest gold rush in recent years," said Jim Hare, Research Vice-President, Gartner, in a statement."AI offers exciting possibilities, but unfortunately, most vendors are focused on the goal of simply building and marketing an AI-based product rather than first identifying needs, potential uses and the business value to customers," he added.Instead of using cutting-edge AI techniques for every solution, Gartner recommends vendors to use the simplest approach that can do the job."Software vendors need to focus on offering solutions to business problems rather than just cutting-edge technology. Highlight how your AI solution helps address the skills shortage and how it can deliver value faster than trying to build a custom AI solution in-house," suggested Hare.The survey also indicated that lack of necessary staff skills was the top challenge in adopting AI in the organisations.Gartner said that AI can greatly augment human capabilities and the combination of machines and humans can accomplish more together.
Asia's first public planetarium, the MP Birla Planetarium in Kolkata, has been upgraded after 52 years with the latest hybrid projection system from German optical giant Zeiss, at a cost of Rs 42 crore, officials said on Tuesday.Equipped with state-of-the-art Skymaster Velvet projection system, full-dome digital projectors and an astro corner, the renovated planetarium will open its doors to the public from July 22."We have transformed the planetarium from only opto-mechanical to hybrid projection system. The contrast (resolution) of the projection system is 2,500,000:1. This is really high-end technology for India. It is basically an opto-mechanical projector capable of showing the night sky as it is seen naturally. There are accompanying nine hybrid resolution digital projectors that create an immersive impression of the cosmos," said observatory director Debiprosad Duari.The observatory, inaugurated in 1963, was the second one to be opened in the Commonwealth after London.According to Martin Wiechmann, Vice President of Strategic Business Unit Planetariums at Carl Zeiss, the planetarium's resolution is probably the highest in India."The system was customised as per the planetarium's needs. This may be the system with the highest resolution in India at the moment," Wiechmann told IANS.In its 52 years of operation, the planetarium has hosted more than 25 million people and designed and presented over 300 astronomical shows.West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who unveiled the new look of the planetarium, advocated inclusion of the observatory in the Indian and international tourist map as a "must-see" destination.
Global telecom operator VEON said on Wednesday it was making progress in its strategy to reinvent itself as an online player by introducing its messaging and mobile services app in four new markets, including its largest in Russia and Pakistan. The messaging app, which is designed to compete with the likes of Facebook, WhatsApp and Rakuten Viber, offers free services to customers via its mobile network without users incurring data charges as other apps do.It was introduced late last year to customers of its Wind Tre joint venture, which VEON, formerly known as VimpelCom, runs in Italy with CK Hutchison of Hong Kong. Two more markets where VEON will offer the app are Ukraine and Georgia. Italian users will receive an upgraded version of the messaging app later this week, the company said in a blog post. VEON aims to offer basic communication for free, while taking a cut of proceeds from partnerships with popular internet services it offers through its app, using data insights it can glean as a network operator.A VEON spokesman provided few further details, saying the company plans to make the self-titled VEON messaging app available in major app stores for customers to download and that other details will be announced at local events in coming weeks. Deals are expected to range from streaming music to ride-hailing to retail to financial services offers. Early partners have included music streaming service Deezer and credit card company MasterCard.Amsterdam-based VEON is working to overhaul its classic mobile phone business by offering free or low-cost services. It ranks among the world's 10 largest communications network operators, with around 235 million customers in 13 countries. VEON's makeover is among the more radical reincarnations being considered by the world's telecom industry, which is stuck in a rut of falling prices and tight regulation.
HOUSTON, July 19, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Targa Resources Corp. (TRC, Targa or the Company) (NYSE:TRGP) announced its quarterly dividend on common shares and its quarterly dividend on its Series A preferred shares for the second quarter of 2017.

Targa Resources Corp. announced today that its board of directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of 91.00 per share, or $3.64 per common share on an annualized basis, for the second quarter of 2017. This cash dividend will be paid August 15, 2017 on all outstanding common shares to holders of record as of the close of business on August 1, 2017.



Targa also announced today that its board of directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $23.75 per Series A preferred share for the second quarter of 2017. This cash dividend will be paid August 14, 2017 on all outstanding Series A preferred shares to holders of record as of the close of business on August 1, 2017.

About Targa Resources Corp.

Targa Resources Corp. is a leading provider of midstream services and is one of the largest independent midstream energy companies in North America. Targa owns, operates, acquires, and develops a diversified portfolio of complementary midstream energy assets. The Company is primarily engaged in the business of: gathering, compressing, treating, processing, and selling natural gas; storing, fractionating, treating, transporting, and selling NGLs and NGL products, including services to LPG exporters; gathering, storing, and terminaling crude oil; storing, terminaling, and selling refined petroleum products.

The principal executive offices of Targa are located at 1000 Louisiana, Suite 4300, Houston, TX 77002 and their telephone number is 713-584-1000. For more information please go to www.targaresources.com.



Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements in this release are "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. All statements, other than statements of historical facts, included in this release that address activities, events or developments that the Company expects, believes or anticipates will or may occur in the future, are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements rely on a number of assumptions concerning future events and are subject to a number of uncertainties, factors and risks, many of which are outside the Companys control, which could cause results to differ materially from those expected by management of the Company. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, weather, political, economic and market conditions, including a decline in the price and market demand for natural gas, natural gas liquids and crude oil, the timing and success of business development efforts; and other uncertainties. These and other applicable uncertainties, factors and risks are described more fully in the Companys filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K. The Company does not undertake an obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Berlin/Ankara: German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday blasted Turkey's detention of six human rights activists, including a German, and pledged to work for his release.



One of those remanded in custody on suspicion of belonging to a terrorist organisation was Amnesty International's Turkey director, Idil Eser. Amnesty said truth and justice had become "total strangers".



Eser, the German Peter Steudtner and eight other activists were detained this month while attending a workshop on digital security near Istanbul.



A Turkish prosecutor asked a court on Monday to extend their detention pending trial on suspicion of links to the network of Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames for last year's attempted coup. The court ordered four of the 10 released, the newspaper Hurriyet said.



In unscheduled remarks at a ceremony for athletes, Merkel said the case was another example of innocent people being "caught up in the wheels of the justice system".



She said Steudtner's arrest was absolutely unjustified.



"We declare our solidarity with him and all the others arrested ... the German government will do all it can, on all levels, to secure his release."



The comments were likely to further strain ties between Berlin and Ankara. These are already beset by a host of issues including Ankara's arrest of Deniz Yucel, a Turkish-German dual national who is a correspondent for the German newspaper Die Welt, on charges of spreading propaganda in support of a terrorist organisation and inciting violence.



"POLITICAL WITCH-HUNT"



Amnesty International's secretary general, Salil Shetty, said the decision to keep six of the activists in detention "shows that truth and justice have become total strangers in Turkey".



"This is not a legitimate investigation," he said, "this is a politically motivated witch-hunt that charts a frightening future for rights in Turkey."



In June, authorities detained Amnesty's local board chairman, Taner Kilic, along with 22 other lawyers, also for suspected links to Gulen, who has condemned the coup attempt and denied any involvement.



Some 150,000 people have been sacked or suspended from jobs in the civil service, military and private sector and roughly 50,000 people have been detained since the coup.



Rights groups and some Western allies say Turkey is using the crackdown to quash all dissent. Opposition media outlets have been closed and around 160 journalists detained. Turkey is now the world's biggest jailer of journalists, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.



The government - which on Monday extended the state of emergency brought in after the failed putsch for another three months - says such measures are necessary because of the gravity of the security threat.



Steudtner's friends, family members, and colleagues urged Turkey to release him immediately, saying in a statement that he and his Swedish colleague, Ali Gharavi, had been on an assignment for a development organisation.
Washington: U.S. President Donald Trump will nominate Jon Huntsman, an envoy to China under former Democratic President Barack Obama, as U.S. ambassador to Russia, the White House said on Tuesday.



The job, all the more high-profile because of allegations that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, requires confirmation by the U.S. Senate.



If confirmed, Huntsman, who has long been expected to be Trump's pick for the job, will head to Moscow as the U.S. Congress and a special counsel investigate Russia's role in the 2016 presidential election and allegations that Trump's campaign had ties to Moscow.



Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied the interference, and Trump has said there was no collusion with Moscow.



Huntsman, a former Utah governor, was U.S. ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011. He has served in the administrations of five U.S. presidents and was a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.



Trump has said he wants to improve relations with Russia.



The Republican president met with Putin in Germany at the gathering of G20 leaders there earlier this month and officials said he raised the issue of Russian meddling in the election before moving on to other issues such as the war in Syria.



Reports in March that Huntsman would get the Moscow envoy post were greeted with mixed reviews in Moscow, with one politician saying he was "not a dove" and the Kremlin saying it would welcome anyone who was a "convinced proponent" of establishing a dialogue with Russia.
Hong Kong: Hundreds turned out in Hong Kong Wednesday night to pay their respects to late Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, the pro-democracy Chinese dissident whose death in custody shocked the world.



Liu, a government critic and thorn in the side of the authorities for decades, died last week aged 61 after losing a battle with cancer, more than a month after he was transferred to a hospital from prison on the mainland.



The prominent democracy advocate, a veteran of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, had been sentenced to 11 years in jail in 2009 for "subversion".



His death prompted an outpouring of grief in semi-autonomous Hong Kong, where pro-democracy forces must also contend with an increasingly assertive Beijing.



His ashes were buried at sea on Saturday, depriving supporters of a place to pay tribute, though thousands in the Asian financial hub took to the streets Saturday night, holding candles as they marched in his memory.



Supporters on Wednesday laid white flowers next to Liu's portrait at another memorial event at a waterfront park in the city centre to mark the seventh day of his passing -- an important date in Chinese tradition for those who have died.



"We should not forget him," Yanki Lee, 45, who took part in a minute's silence, told AFP.



"I think all who are out here tonight are very thankful for what he did from the bottom of their hearts," she said.



The world had not heard from the Nobel peace prize winner since he was formally arrested and jailed, but he remained an influential heavyweight of China's democracy movement and an inspiration for opponents of the Communist-ruled system.



Following his terminal cancer diagnosis, Liu requested to receive treatment abroad -- a wish that friends believe was in reality for his wife's sake. But the authorities refused to let him go.



His death in custody triggered rage and frustration among the dissident community and a sense of hopelessness as they face hardened repression under China's President Xi Jinping.
Washington: A powerful US Congressional committee has said that India which is a regional partner to Afghanistan and a major defence partner of the US is well- suited to assist Kabul in its border security.



In a report attached along with the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2018, the all-powerful Senate Armed Services Committee said it believes that India, as a regional partner to Afghanistan and a major defence partner of the US, is well-suited to assist the Government of Afghanistan to improve the security of Afghanistan and the broader region, and can work on a trilateral basis with the US and Afghanistan to do so.



"The committee also believes that timely actions by the Indian government to fill identified needs in Afghanistan would significantly benefit the short- and long-term security and stability of the region," the Senate Armed Services Committee said as it passed the NDAA-2018.



Concerned by the current stalemate in Afghanistan, the Committee which is headed by Senator John McCain said the US should leverage the capabilities of allies and partners to more effectively secure regional stability and security.



"The committee believes that the US needs to recommit to the fight in Afghanistan and that India, as a major defence partner of the US and a contributor to regional security, has a critical role to play in this effort," it said.



The Pentagon and the Trump Administration has praised India's efforts in Afghanistan.



On February 9, General John W Nicholson, Commander of US Forces Afghanistan, testified before the committee that "With over USD 2.0 billion development aid executed since 2002, and another USD 1.0 billion pledged in 2016, India's significant investments in Afghan infrastructure, engineering, training, and humanitarian issues will help develop Afghan human capital and long-term stability".



In its report, the committee noted that General Nichols on highlighted significant short-term materiel and training needs within the Afghan Air Force (AAF), and has personally urged



India to provide this targeted support to meet urgent gaps. As such it encouraged the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Secretary of State, to enhance trilateral cooperation between the Governments of Afghanistan, India, and US for the purposes of strengthening the sovereignty and security of Afghanistan.



In doing so, the committee expects that any increase in investment and assistance pursuant to this trilateral cooperation would take into account the mutual priorities of the three respective governments.



"This assistance could include logistical support; joint training; combined military planning; threat analysis; intelligence, materiel, and maintenance support for Afghan National Defense and Security Forces for humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, security assistance, and any other areas deemed appropriate," it said.
On a recent visit to Cave Mountain Lake near Natural Bridge, I spotted two dark heads bobbing in the water, about 100 yards from some oblivious human swimmers.

River otters! These playful cousins of sea otters, weasels and mink are a joy to watch. I fetched my binoculars and soon realized there were three otters, two younger pups and their mom.

They swam all around the lake, disappearing under the water and re-emerging several feet away. River otters can hold their breath for up to eight minutes.

They rustled the tall reeds along the shoreline and then all three wiggled up on the bank of the lake to do a little grooming.

As I watched, another three or four heads emerged in a different part of the lake. Wow! I had never seen so many at once.

River otters make their homes in burrows near the water's edge and thrive in rivers, lakes, wetlands and estuaries. They dig numerous tunnels, one of which is usually a direct entrance to the water.

Otters seem to enjoy swimming as they glide effortlessly along. They propel themselves with powerful tails and webbed feet. They have water-repellent fur and keep their nostrils and ears closed in the water.

River otters generally hunt at night but I saw them munching in broad daylight. Fish are a favorite food, along with turtles, crayfish, crabs, frogs, birds eggs and birds. With a high metabolism, they need to eat frequently.

Though swimming is their forte, river otters can hit speeds of 15 mph on land. They remain active in winter, using ice holes to surface and breathe. Their playful snow and mud sliding, tail chasing, water play and snow burrowing activities also help strengthen social bonds and allow young otters to practice hunting techniques.

Males do not help raise the young. Females retreat to their underground dens to deliver litters of one to six. When the pups are about two months old, their mother pushes them into the water. Fortunately, swimming comes naturally.

These sleek mammals communicate with whistles, yelps, growls and screams, as well as touch and body posture. They also scent-mark using glands near the base of their tails.

Otters are three- to four-feet long including their tails, which make up about a third of their length, and weigh between 11 and 30 pounds. Males are generally larger than females. They live eight to nine years in the wild.

River otters occur in much of Canada and the United States, except for portions of the Southwest, and in Mexico in the Rio Grande and Colorado River deltas.

Otters were hunted and trapped extensively for their fur in the 19th and 20th centuries, and some states still permit trapping, including Virginia, which banned the practice west of the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1978 when otters nearly disappeared, and resumed limited trapping in 2009 after a significant comeback.

I cant imagine wanting to trap these lovely creatures.

As dusk settled on the lake, the otters disappeared from sight.
Police are searching for information regarding the Sunday morning theft of a utility trailer, according to a Lynchburg Police Department news release.

The trailer, a black 5-foot-by-10-foot 2002 Hooper utility trailer, was loaded with lawn equipment and reported stolen from the 1000 block of Dandridge Drive on July 16, according to the release.

It contained Troy-Bilt equipment, including two weed eaters, one leaf blower and a zero-turn lawn mower, according to the release.

Video of the event shows a white General Motors SUV leaving with the trailer early Sunday morning at about 2:48 a.m. The trailer has a permanent Virginia tag No. 644954TR, according to police.

Anyone with information regarding the theft can contact LPD Officer H. Shumate at (434) 455-6060, ext. 539, or Crime Stoppers at 1-888-798-5900. Anonymous tips can be submitted online at cvcrimestoppers.org or by texting CVCS and the tip to 274637.
Don't dwell on the political past

I really like to read the letters to the editor that The News & Advance publishes on a daily basis. They show me the opinions of those in my community: Sometimes I agree with them, and sometimes I disagree with them.

I read Michael A. Whorleys July 14 letter, Facts in a fact-free era, with interest. Whorley made some interesting points if you are of the Democratic point of view, but he could not resist the typical liberal Democratic habit of name calling and mocking those with whom he disagrees.

Here are some specific examples from his letter: Like many liberal Democrats he refers to The New York Times and The Washington Post as if they were the Bible. He mocks other news outlets by calling them Faux News (I presume that means Fox News) and Flush Limbaugh. He even has Breitbart in his sights. Whorleys letter is ended with this: You might want to rethink that for a moment or two, if you actually love this country more than you love being a tribal Republican. I guess if you disagree with the Democrats, you dont love your country.

I respectfully ask these questions. When will Democrats ever put country before politics? All I hear from them is Russia, Russia, Russia. (And for almost a year) What about the nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran? (I wonder who helped create these threats?) What about job creation? What about Obamacare that is a disaster? What about the welfare state that is breaking us? What about the $20 trillion national debt? The Democrats and their supporters may not realize this, but Hillary Clinton lost, Donald Trump won and we have a lot of problems and threats that need attention from responsible government officials. Perhaps I am asking too much. Hopefully, it will not take a disaster to wake these folks up to the needs of this country.

RICHARD EFTHIM

Lynchburg

It all boils down to money

Its a bit late to run, but the main reason Donald J. Trump should have never run for president is now apparent. The New Republic has an article in its latest edition called Trumps Russian Laundromat by Craig Unger showing that Trump has been connected to Russian dirty money since 1984 when a Russian emigre purchased five luxury condos in Trump Tower. Trump attended the closing.

According to the article, since then the Russian crime bosses have used Trump properties as safe-houses for wanted felons, headquarters for numerous illegal activities and just to launder billions of dirty Russian dollars. Trump Tower seems to have been (maybe still is) their primary business location, but they have also been active in Florida properties tied to Trump. It appears that it was not Trumps savvy deal-making but illicit Russians with billions stolen from their country that saved Trump from complete insolvency and financial disaster.

The reporter could find no direct evidence that Trump knew of all this unlawful activity, but then he was just a reporter working on an article. Using the ground he has broken, an investigator like Robert Mueller with subpoena power should get quite a crop of evidence pointing to hundreds of illegal Russian connections with Trump, connections that made Trump their man in the United States.

One question now becomes, will the Republican leaders in Congress still stand by the Kremlins man or will they grow some backbone and rid the White House of this abomination? For the man himself, two questions: Will all these connections to crime and illegalities show the Trump brand for what it really is, cheap sleaze? And with all this publicity will the Russian crime bosses reason he is a bigger problem alive than dead?

Trump should have never put himself in the position to be investigated so fiercely; he should never have run for president.

MIKE TABONY

Gladstone
Instead of waiting for a company to move to the region, construct a building and create jobs, Campbell Countys Industrial Development Authority is taking the matter into its own hands by building a space in the hopes of attracting a business.

Earlier this month, the Campbell County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to transfer ownership of a five- to seven-acre parcel of land in the county-owned Seneca Commerce Park to the authority. It is the most recent step toward the construction of a 10,000-square-foot building Economic Development Director Mike Davidson hopes will help land jobs for the countys citizens.

While the county currently maintains three industrial parks with cleared and subdivided lots and two partially designed, but not built, buildings that can be modified for companies needs, Davidson said he has observed companies are looking for faster start-up times and prefer to move into existing buildings instead of building their own.

For the past three years, we have seen empirical data that the [companies] out there are looking for buildings, he said. Theres a vast amount of buildings all over the East Coast because factories have shut down. Most of those properties are dated, and theyre not the most advantageous, but its still fast to come in and get up and running with that type of building.

Each of Campbell Countys three industrial parks have been partially developed, the level of which depends on funding. Several lots have been cleared in each park, and both Seneca Commerce Park, located off U.S. 29 near Yellow Branch, and Dearing Ford Business & Manufacturing Center, located near Altavista, have water, sewer and broadband connections. The Brookneal/Campbell County Industrial Park, located north of Brookneal on U.S. 501, has water and broadband but no sewer connection.

Although land has been cleared at these sites, many companies also prefer localities to already have completed environmental assessments, grading and permitting to ensure a rapid start-up. Several years ago, Campbell County discussed using capital improvement funds for industrial parks to grade several sites, but the project was deemed too expensive.

Davidson hopes by providing the newly built space, he will be able to attract a company to move to the county within a year of construction. According to Davidson, in the two years the county has worked with a Richmond-based consulting firm to find interested companies, more than a third have been interested in a building of that size and specification.

In order to finance the project, the authority received a grant from the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission that will pay for about half of the $1.4 million structure. Under the grant agreement, Campbell County must construct the type of building that was stated in the application. If the project does not get completed as originally advertised, the Tobacco Commission must be repaid. The other half will be funded by a commercial bank loan, which the authority only could obtain if it owns the land.

Last month, Integrated Technology Group, a commercial technology solutions firm, announced it would move to Amherst County into a building owned by the countys Economic Development Authority after it was vacated by CMC Rebar. The building originally was constructed by the EDA for CMC Rebars use in 2007. The EDA also constructed a shell building to attract business in 2004, and it was purchased by Old Dominion Footwear, which still is doing business there.

Bedford County completed a similar project in 1999 and built a shell building to serve as a temporary court house, which was transitioned in space for businesses. The building now is home to Central Virginia Community Colleges Bedford Satellite Campus and East Coast Fabricators, a company specializing in making parts out of plastics.

According to the states economic development agency Virginia Economic Development Partnership, between 65 percent and 70 percent of the companies the agency works with to find manufacturing locations look for an existing building.

I definitely would confirm that a publicly owned shell building can be a really effective marketing tool to attract industries that might lack available existing real estate, VEDP spokesperson Suzanne Clark said.

Currently there only are six localities that have publicly owned shell buildings, like the one Campbell County is preparing to build, on the market statewide, Clark said. They are located in Mecklenburg, Botetourt, Russell, Cumberland and Lee counties as well as the city of Martinsville.

When searching for sites, companies work with government agencies like VEDP as well as private site selectors who travel the world to scout locations for businesses seeking to open or expand.

If a tenant is found, the building will be sold at fair market value, and the authority plans to use the profits to try to build another building to bring in another company, Davidson told the board of supervisors July 6.

Prior to the vote to transfer the property, Timberlake Supervisor Mike Rousseau inquired about the possibility the building would not be sold and questioned the governments role in creating jobs. He pointed to the fact only two parcels in Seneca Commerce Park have been sold to Shentel, a telecommunications company, despite the money sunk into preparing the land to make it more attractive for businesses. The park is a total of 88 acres, with approximately half of it undeveloped.

Now were going to start building buildings for businesses with no guarantee that were going to find tenants for them or sell them, Rousseau said. What we need to understand is if we go down this road, and we dont have a better track record than what we have so far, there is a very real possibility that were going to be going to the taxpayers and having to explain why theyll be picking up the mortgage payments on this.

In response, Davidson pointed out the authoritys history of purchasing both the former Thomasville furniture factory in Brookneal and the former Hirschfeld Steel building near the Lynchburg Regional Airport to renovate for Banker Steels use. In 2013 the authority used bank loans to build a 40,000-square-foot building for a Banker Steel expansion.

Weve been successful with the other projects weve done, and we are confident that we can put a tenant in there, Davidson said, citing the three previously completed projects where the authority had purchased the two former factories and built a new building for Banker Steel. Is that a 100 percent guarantee? There are no 100 percent guarantees in life. I cannot sit here and say that we will find a tenant, but I can say it is highly unlikely that theyre not going to find one.

He went on to tell the board the authority has the funds to pay for the building for two years, but even if the building is not sold in two years, the Industrial Development Authority, as a legal body, is able to incur debt so it would not fall on the taxpayers.

After hearing from Davidson that the authority does not operate with taxpayer money but instead uses money from selling and leasing industrial properties in the county along with bank loans, Rousseau questioned how the authority got started in the first place without a jumpstart from taxpayer money.

All I can remember is the 19 years Ive been here, Davidson said. The only funds the county has given the IDA are the funds for the board stipends. They have not used taxpayer money for any of their projects.

Rousseau challenged him, saying taxpayer money had to be involved with the authority at some point.

Well, respectfully, Mr. Davidson, this is a government organization, he said. It had to start with money from somewhere. They didnt find it at the end of a rainbow.

Sunburst Supervisor Bob Good weighed in and said he felt the investment was worth it to attract business, and it came with less risk due to the grant received by the county.

Concord Supervisor Eddie Gunter agreed and said it was a good suggestion to try and grow the countys economy.

Altavista Supervisor Stanley Goldsmith said although this project is not a guarantee, economic development is a competitive process, and the county must take risks to grow its tax base.

Were competing with every town, every county, every city in this entire country to bring a business in to this place, he said. If were not willing to take a little chance every now and then, were going to be behind.

Despite his earlier misgivings about the project, Rousseau ended up voting for the proposal and gave his good wishes.

I have been and remain highly skeptical in governments involvement in these types of ventures, but I am in the minority here, and I would like to see the thing succeed as much as anybody else, so Im going to give this a yes vote, he said. I wish the very, very best of luck to the IDA, and I hope they can pull it off.

The board voted unanimously to transfer the parcel. Now, the authority will proceed with selecting a contractor to complete the building and pick which bank it wants to procure the necessary loan from.
PM: I will not advise myself

The Prime Minister made this point at a news conference at Tower D of the Port-of-Spain International Waterfront Centre, following three hours of talks on this and other matters with Opposition Leader Kamla Persad- Bissessar at the same venue.

Rowley disclosed that he discussed the need to review the future of the Integrity Commission and other service commissions.

On the issue of crime, the Prime Minister said Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi will provide the Opposition with new legislative proposals about how to appoint a Commissioner of Police, while he will provide Persad-Bissessar with a report on what Government has been doing non-legislatively on crime, by the end of this month.

DPPS SUGGESTION

Rowley said following consultations between Al-Rawi and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), the AG came to him with a proposal from DPP Roger Gaspard, SC, to legislate amendments to the Summary Courts Act and Preliminary Inquiries Act, so that the problem that now exists of people not being able to have their matters heard could be dealt with. The Prime Minister said that Chief Justice Ivor Archie concurred with DPP Gaspards view. However, he added, Persad-Bissessar made it clear yesterday that, the Opposition is not prepared to support this approach because they do not believe that approach is sound. Rowley said Persad-Bissessar indicated that people who are affected have already begun to challenge the situation and, whatever we legislate will be open to challenge.

 Rowley said the Opposition is proposing a solution be found under Section 137 of the Constitution which involves the removal of a judge from office and appointment of a tribunal as part of the process. I am not going to advise myself on this matter, he stated. Rowley said, We had no agreement on that. What we did have was an agreement that the AG will consult with the Constitution and I will have to take my guidance from elsewhere. There is a lot more to be done here. Rowley said Persad-Bissessar agreed with him that Government and the Opposition have further discussions about the process whereby judges are appointed to the High Court, with a view to modernising the process.

The Prime Minister said there was no discussion between Persad- Bissessar and himself about calls for Archie and other members of the JLSC to resign. He disagreed with the view advanced from some quarters that the Government should have intervened in this matter. Rowley maintained that the matter is on in the Judiciary and Government will have to be advised on the options available to it.

IC MUST BE REVIEWED

On the Integrity Commission (IC), Rowley said no statement he made could have contributed to citizens losing confidence in that Commission because confidence was already lost. It is my view as the head of this government, that the Integrity Commission as an institution fit for purpose, ought to be reviewed for us to determine whether what happens now is in fact having any chance of providing what we anticipated when that body was brought into being. He said the AG will advance to the Opposition, positions for review of the legislation to determine whether other models can be considered in the light of the failure of our efforts to bring about what was anticipated when this commission was brought into being. Rowley also said he told Persad- Bissessar that the purpose for which many of the service commissions came into being, might in many circumstances have been outlived.

Noting there is poor accountability and questionable performance by some of these commissions, Rowley said, Therefore the time has come as a country, for us to review this situation. The Prime Minister said he would write to the Canadian government about providing assistance which respect to improve the management systems in these commissions.
Kamla: Build the Integrity Commission

Speaking at a news briefing at the office of the Opposition Leader at Charles Street, Port of Spain, Persad-Bissessar said that during the meeting Rowley said the Integrity Commission would be scored at only three out of 10, as he alleged a loss of confidence in that body and the mere charade of filling out declaration forms under the Integrity in Public Life Act.

Persad-Bissessar said the Law Reform Commission can look at other models of this body in other jurisdictions to try to strengthen the commission. But I do not share the view that there is a total loss of confidence in the commission, Persad-Bissessar said.

She urged care, given that many people from Rowleys party have appeared before that very same commission.

I want you to remember that the PNM has a history of never bringing integrity legislation to Parliament, the Opposition Leader reminded. She said integrity laws were brought by former prime ministers Arthur N.R Robinson and Basdeo Panday. So we are open to proposed amendments and so on for strengthening the Integrity Commission.
GOVT NEEDS HELP

Reporting to the media at her office on Charles Street in Port of Spain after the meeting, Persad- Bissessar said, Several matters were raised by Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley and it is very clear from our discussion that the Government is in need of advice and help in many areas. Initially, Persad-Bissessar said there was a good rapport and clear understanding during the meeting which nicely set the tone for future talks. It has been a fruitful day and well worth the discussions. But in a subsequent interview, following the press conference, with CNC3 which was aired live during that stations 7 oclock news broadcast, Persad-Bissessar however expressed some disappointment at the talks.

Asked by Newsday about her efforts to speak on hot topics rather than endless consultations of long standing issues, Persad-Bissessar said she had asked Rowley about crime. She said she had asked him why had the Community Comfort Patrol been shut, why had the National Operations Centre been moved into the Strategic Services Agency, whats the status of the manpower audit into the Police Service and the status of recruitment of more municipal police officers.

On the latter, Persad-Bissessar said Rowley had said these officers are no longer needed. I await his update on the fight against crime. She urged him to mull non-legislative interventions and do so before crimes are committed. On Tobagos self-government, she disagreed with Rowley wanting a study to be done by a House of Representatives Committee.

Firstly, she queried why a committee of a single house and not a Joint Select Committee (JSC) of both houses? Secondly, she said that instead of a committee, the Law Reform Commission (LRC) should collate all past documents and reports of public consultations on Tobago into a compendium to inform crafting of any new draft legislation. I did not share the view that a House Committee should formulate policy. We are not the Government. However, she said Rowley accepted her view that all past documents on campaign finance reform should go to the LRC. While she awaits governments proposal on fresh Anti-Gang legislation, Persad- Bissessar lamented that Government had never supplied details on the past impact of no-bail provisions in the existing Anti-Gang Act, but noted that Rowley yesterday vowed to now do.

She opposed any fresh law to resolve the 53 part-heard cases linked to former chief magistrate Marcia Ayers-Caesar, saying the accused are entitled to a judicial solution.

The ruling in the case of Ferguson versus AG, Persad-Bissessar said, frowned on any laws targeted at a particular court case or at any executive action or intervention.

Persad-Bissessar however urged Rowley to act under the Constitution, using Section 137, to name a tribunal to address the judicial imbroglio that has, in her words, brought the administration of justice to its lowest point. Regarding the Services Commissions, she said they need strengthening, as she lamented only one Director of Personnel Administration (DPA) serving thousands of staff under four commissions. On the Couva Childrens Hospital, she said she was shocked to hear Rowley say the notion of private partners had borne no fruit.
Tobago feels Dons strength

After an emergency meeting yesterday between the Tobago Emergency Management Agency (TEMA) Director Allan Stewart and the Meteorological officer Garry Benjamin, it was announced that ten shelters will be open.

I dont think the storm will affect us as badly as storm Bret but we are in a range where we can get gust strength winds and heavy rainfall. It is in fact a minimal storm, the extent of winds at about 25 km out from the center.

Tobago might get gusts at storm force strength, Stewart said.

The TEMA director added, there is a chance, based on information from MET, that winds coming out of storm Don can have an impact on Trinidad moreso Tobago.

Hence this reason Tobago has decided to take the necessary steps to ensure safety as it relates to standard operating procedures. During the emergency meeting members of the Tobago Disaster Management Committee which included the Tobago House of Assembly, the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service, Tobago division, The Trinidad and Tobago fire Service, TEMA and the Meteorological services decided that Charlottesville, Roxborough, Speyside, L Anse Fourmi, Delaford and Golden Lane were the main villages that were monitored during that period.
No word yet about return of TT Spirit

On Monday, two. weeks after the expected. completion of. maintenance work,. neither Works and. Transportation Minister. Rohan Sinanan. nor TTIT officials. could offer any information. as to when. the ferry would be. returned to service,. if ever.

Sinanan told Newsday. he was unaware. of a one-month time. frame for work to. be completed and. he could give no information. when it. would be returned to. service.

Asked if the new. passenger ferry, the. Ocean Flower 2, now. expected to arrive. in Trinidad and Tobago. next Wednesday,. would be the. only vessel operating. on the sea bridge,. Sinanan said whatever. is required we. will put in place. If it. is that the water taxi. is required, we will. use it.. Meanwhile, TTITs. chairman Charmaine. Lewis told Newsday. engine work is being. done on the TT Spirit. and while she was expecting. a report from. the engineers, she. could provide no information. as to when. the vessel will return. to the route.

TTITs public relations. officer, Vilma. Lewis-Cockburn told. Newsday she was unsure. about the state of. repairs of the vessel.

.
Policewomen complain about unsanitary conditions at Couva station

She had returned to the station from a patrol and needed to freshen up to continue her shift but had to run from the toilet because it was dirty and smelly.

The post read, Can someone please help us... why for the past month and probably longer the female dorm at Couva Police Station is without water.

Complaints are falling on deaf ears...someone please help.

The one toilet and bathroom available for female is inaccessible for such lengthy period.

The station majority is women and we dont have proper facilities...wow. It is 2.51am...

came off patrol... went up to dorm to freshen up and had to literally run out from the scent emanating from the unflushed toilet...with sour flies around too....MY GOSH! The post was removed a few hours later but not before the officer got the thumbs up from her sisters at the station who praised her for her courage to take to Facebook.

Newsday was told inside the dormitory has become unbearable and no one in authority is listening to their cries for help. Each daily shift has as many as four to five women who must share one double- decker bed and one toilet and bathroom.

They said they have spoken to WASA with no results.

We have no water to flush the toilets and you could think what that is like for us women especially during our monthly cycles, said one officer speaking on the condition of anonymity. But if you think the water situation is bad, the station is overrun with fleas and mosquitoes and the Couva/Tabaquite/ Talparo Regional Corporation is doing nothing about it. No one in authority listening to us although letters have been sent out to the relevant agencies and even our own Police Social and Welfare Association (PSWA). The women said their hands are tied as they cannot protest.

When contacted, PSWA president Michael Seales told Newsday he only became aware of the problem yesterday morning when he was contacted by a female officer.

That matter is now engaging our full and urgent attention at this time, Seales said.
Duke: We got no MOU to approve use of port scanners

On Monday, Hinds as chairman of the Joint Select Committee on National Security told a JSC news conference, out of all representative unions at the port, the PSA had not signed an MOU to approve the scanners as the union reportedly had health and safety concerns which, Hinds said, were in fact scotched by experts from the World Health Organisation and the International Atomic Agency.

Yesterday Duke gave a differing account.

We were appalled to hear that we had not signed off on such documents, he told Newsday.

Duke said, if asked for his approval, he would certainly consider it. However he said he first wanted to have all relevant information presented to him so as to ascertain if the scanners pose a danger. We want to see all the information they have. We want full transparency. Duke said he had not seen the WHO and IAA opinions.

The PSA is willing to work with the Port Authority and the Customs Division, but workers health comes first.
PaP Rotarians win international awards

Outgoing President Marvin Ramnarine gave an account of his Boards activities in the Clubs contribution in 2016- 17 to providing relief to the underprivileged, who experience homelessness, hunger and are socially vulnerable.

He praised the female Partners in Service who supported the efforts of the male Rotarians during the past year. The Pointe-a-Pierre Rotary Club continues to be male membership supported by female counterparts who are Partners- in Service in Club activities.

Outgoing President Ramnarine also pointed out the Clubs contribution to both Gasparillo Secondary School and Union /Claxton Bay Secondary School through its outreach programmes, homeless men at Shamrock House Mens Shelter and scores of single parent families benefitting from the hamper drive.

Principal of the Union Claxton Bay Secondary School Preston Kissoon was inducted as a Rotarian and member. Ramnarine and Partner in Service, attorney and former Young Woman of the Year 2005, Cherry Ann Rajkumar both received Paul Harris Awards for their contribution to the Rotary year 2016-2017, Rotary Serving Humanity. Incoming President Bobby Indar pledged to continue the charitable works of the Club and promised to make it a fun-filled year of activity.

The ceremony was attended by notable Rotarians and Partners in Service Roland and Avian Hall, Dave Sookhoo, Faizal and Dawn Saidwan.

The Master of Ceremonies was Lutch Singh and guest speaker Epidemiologist Dr Lisa Indar.
No One Will

Ever Smash

Stuff Quite

Like He Did
An estimated 40,000 mink destined to become coats were freed from a central Minnesota fur farm in what the local sheriff calls an act of "domestic terrorism." Stearns County Sheriff Don Gudmundson says he believes animal rights "nitwits" freed the animals but didn't steal any of them, the Pioneer Press reports. "It's pretty hard to steal 30,000 to 40,000 mink," the sheriff says. "What are you going to do, put them in a trunk? They'd chew your fingers off." Investigators say the burglars, who struck late Sunday or early Monday, dismantled part of an exterior fence before freeing the animals from their cages. A fur industry group is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the perpetrators.

Fur farm co-owner Dan Lang says that since the mink were raised in captivity and have no survival skills, releasing them was a "death sentence," 9News reports. Hundreds of the animals have already been found dead, though others are believed to have killed chickens at a nearby farm. If the perpetrators "actually cared about animals they wouldn't release thousands of mink to die out in the heat," Gudmundson says. "We've already got reports of chickens killed. Don't they care about God's chickens?" Officials say that if many of the predators do survive long term, they could end up killing off a lot of the local wildlife. (Read more mink stories.)
There are some that would accuse the United Nations of being ineffective oras researcher Scott Pauls puts itsimply "a witness of changing policy preferences" in the world. But that's far from the case, according to a study of 65 years of UN voting records published in Physica A. Those records show the UN successfully reduces the chance of war. "The evidence demonstrates that the UN is more effective at achieving its mandate of avoiding wars than many experts think," researcher Skyler Cranmer says in a press release.

The researchers from Dartmouth College and Ohio State University looked at voting alliances in the UNboth large and small, long-term and short-termcalled "affinity communities." Pauls says such voting alliances served to "reduce the probability of conflict" during the past 65 years. "There is more nuance in voting records than was previously thought," Cranmer adds. The study also looked at the UN's effectiveness in spreading democracy and building defensive alliances. (With UN forces packing up, Haiti prepares to have its first army in more than 20 years.)
When twins Mya and Deanna Cook got permission to get braided hair extensions last spring, their white parents Aaron and Colleen Cook say it was in part to let their adopted daughters celebrate their black heritage. But it didn't take long for the 16-year-old students at Mystic Valley Regional Charter School north of Boston to be removed from class for violating the school's dress code. The girls refused to remove the extensions, their parents refused to "fix" their daughters' hair, and the controversy played out in local media. At first, the girls were removed from extracurricular activities, barred from prom, and threatened with suspension, reports NPR. "When our daughters walk with us, they have our white privilege," their father says. "When they're not with us, they're black children."

The school took heat from the Massachusetts attorney general, who accused it of "subjecting students of color, especially black students, to differential treatment and thus denying them the same advantages and privileges of public education afforded to other students," per the Boston Globe. Mystic Valley has temporarily lifted its ban, which it writes is in place because extensions are "expensive" and could lead to inequality among students of different economic backgrounds. One researcher says black females are significantly more likely to receive harsher discipline for things like hair extensions and "natural" hair that has not been straightened, effectively criminalizing their black identity. No word yet on whether Mystic Valley will change its dress code next year. (Dress code is also an issue in the House.)
President Trump had a previously unreported and undisclosed meeting with Vladimir Putin during the G-20 summit, White House officials confirmed Tuesday. The only other person present for the conversation was the Russian president's translator, the Hill reports. According to the Washington Post, Trump had his first face-to-face meeting with Putin during the summit July 7; later that same day he attended a couples-only dinner with other world leaders. Halfway through the meal, Trump left his seat and took one next to Putin. Their hour-long conversation was held just outside listening distance of other diners. Ian Bremmer of the think tank Eurasia Group says other leaders have said they were "bemused, nonplussed, befuddled" by the private conversation.

The meeting was not disclosed to reporters traveling with Trump, and Reuters reports the White House isn't giving details about what was discussed during Trump's second meeting with Putin. National Security Council spokesperson Michael Anton tells CNN he can't say what was discussed as no staff were present. He says the dinner was attended by only leaders, spouses, and translators. Other White House officials say the only version of the meeting they have is Trump's own. Bremmer says Trump breached national security protocol by not having his own translator present for the conversation with Putin. Trump reportedly only brought a Japanese translator to the dinner to facilitate conversation with Japanese President Shinzo Abe. (Read more Donald Trump stories.)
Chipotle's efforts to move past its food scares have been complicated by fresh reports of illnesses, which prompted it to temporarily close a restaurant this week, the AP reports. The company said Tuesday that it closed the restaurant in Sterling, Virginia, after it became aware of a "small number" of reported illnesses consistent with norovirus. The news sent the restaurant's shares down more than 4% as skittish investors worried about the chain's past food scares. Chipotle noted that norovirus, which can cause nausea and diarrhea, does not come from its food supply and said it is safe to eat at its restaurants. But the company has previously said that given its history, any food safety incidents could have an outsized negative impact on its sales, even if reports turn out to be erroneous or stem from factors outside its control.

Chipotle has been working to bounce back from food scares that included an E. coli outbreak in the fall of 2015 and a norovirus case in Boston later that year. It subsequently said it made tweaks to cooking methods and added training for employees to tighten its safety measures. The company also gave away coupons for free burritos and stepped up marketing to win back customers. Sales had been showing improvement against a low bar of comparison. For the first three months of this year, sales were up 18% at established locations. That followed a 20% decline for all of 2016. The company said it planned to reopen the Virginia restaurant, which is in a suburb of Washington, DC, on Tuesday after a "complete sanitization," but did not provide a specific time. (Read more Chipotle stories.)
If the idea of a self-cleaning home sounds like a futuristic vision decades away, you'll want to acquaint yourself with the late Frances Gabe. She not only scored a patent for the ideaback in 1984she built one in Oregon and lived in it for years. Gabe died late last year at the age of 101, and the New York Times catches up with an entertaining obituary. So how does a waterproof home work? The Willamette Weekly has a succinct description in this 2013 story: "The place was, essentially, a giant floor-to-ceiling dishwasher, with rotating water jets on the ceiling and floors gently sloped to drains." Everything inside the home of concrete cinder blocks was water-proofed or otherwise protected when the water came down. The patent encompassed more than 60 inventions, including one that arranged for hanging clothes to be automatically washed, then transported back into a closet.

As the Times recounts, Gabe's invention earned her international attention, including an appearance on the Phil Donahue show and a place in Chuck Palahniuk's book Fugitives and Refugees. "Housework is a thankless, unending job," she once explained. "It's a nerve-twangling bore. Who wants it? Nobody!" Gabe traveled the country with a working model, but, alas, the idea never caught on. Her patent lapsed in 2002, and Gabe herself moved into a nursing home about a decade ago. The house in Newberg is still there, but none of its self-cleaning gizmos are in operation anymore. Still, the Willamette paper calls Gabe "one of Oregon's most interesting figures," while the Times goes further: "a true American original, equal parts quixotic dreamer and accomplished visionary." (Read more obituary stories.)
President Trump says his previously undisclosed one-on-one with Vladimir Putin was no secret and no big dealand the media is "sick" for suggesting otherwise. Trump reportedly spoke to Putin for around an hour after leaving his seat during a couples-only dinner with other leaders during the G20 summit. He had met with Putin earlier in the day with aides present. "All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany," Trump tweeted late Tuesday. "Press knew!" In a statement, the White House said the talk was a "brief conversation" and any insinuation that the administration tried to hide it "is false, malicious, and absurd," USA Today reports.

"The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest!" Trump said in a second tweet. "Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!" But despite efforts to downplay the meeting, some analysts say it raises security concerns. Besides Putin and Trump, the only person party to the conversation was Putin's translator, meaning there is no independent American account of the meeting and what was discussed. "If I was in the Kremlin, my recommendation to Putin would be, 'See if you can get this guy alone,' and that's what it sounds like he was able to do," former ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer tells the New York Times. (Read more Vladimir Putin stories.)
Texas lawmakers are debating a "bathroom bill" that would restrict choice for transgender peoplebut state business leaders have no interest in dealing with the kind of backlash that forced North Carolina to roll back a similar bill. Some 14 CEOs from major Texas employers, including AT&T, American Airlines, and Texas Instruments, sent a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott and other lawmakers Monday, warning that passing the bill "would seriously hurt the state's ability to attract new businesses, investment, and jobs," the Dallas Morning News reports. "This legislation threatens our ability to attract and retain the best talent in Texas, as well as the greatest sporting and cultural attractions in the world," they wrote.

Around 80 business execs gathered at the Capitol on Monday to protest the bill. "On this discussion, conservatives can disagree with conservatives," Jeff Moseley, the head of the Texas Association of Business, told reporters at the scene, saying it's important to protect the "Texas miracle." Execs from tech companies including Apple and Google urged Abbott to reject the measure to restrict bathroom use for transgender people when it was before the legislature in May. It didn't pass during the regular legislative session, but the controversy returned when Abbott made the issue, a conservative priority, part of the agenda for a 30-day special legislative session that began Monday, the Texas Tribune reports. (Read more Texas stories.)
Fireworks may have played a role in the fatal police shooting of an Australian bride-to-be in Minneapolis on Saturday nightbut investigators are having trouble finding out more because the officer involved has clammed up. Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is investigating the shooting of Justine Damond and it says Matthew Harrity, the other officer present, has told them he was "startled by a loud sound" as they drove down an alley following up Damond's 911 call about a possible sexual assault in progress, the Pioneer Press reports. The BCA says Harrity told them Damond approached the driver's side window of the squad car immediately afterward, and was shot by officer Mohamed Noor.

The "loud sound" may have been the "aerial fireworks" referred to in radio conversations between Noor, Hannity, dispatchers, and other officers in the area, reports the Sydney Morning Herald. The BCA says Noor declined to be interviewed by investigators, and his lawyer didn't say "when, if ever, an interview would be possible." Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges says the lack of information is "frustrating," the Star Tribune reports. "We cannot compel Officer Noor to make a statement" but she wishes he would make one, she told reporters Tuesday night. In an interview Wednesday, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said diplomats are seeking information on the "shocking" and "inexplicable" killing. (Read more Justine Damond stories.)
A defector from North Korea who became a well-known TV personality in South Korea has reappeared in the Northand not everyone is convinced that her claims to be happy there after a hellish existence in the South are genuine. In a propaganda video released by Pyongyang on Sunday, Lim Ji Hyun says she was lured away from her homeland by visions of making money and returned to the North voluntarily, the BBC reports. "Every single day of my life in the South was a hell," the 26-year-old, who defected in 2014, says in the video. "When I was alone in a dark, cold room, I was heartbroken and I wept every day." Lim disappeared in April and this is the first that has been heard from her since.

Lim, like dozens of other young defectors, had achieved modest success on TV, where she sometimes discussed life in the North, the New York Times reports. It's not clear how she returned to the North. South Korean officialsas well as many of her fanssuspect she might have been kidnapped by North Korea, possibly after having been lured to the country's border with China. In the video, she says she had been coerced into criticizing the North on South Korean TVand issues a warning to people in the North thinking of defecting. "In the South, where money ruled, there was only physical and psychological pain waiting for people like me who had betrayed their fatherland and fled," she says. (Read more North Korea stories.)
Attorney Deedra Abboud is one of the contenders in Arizona's Democratic primary who hopes to unseat GOP Sen. Jeff Flake in 2018, reports the Hill, but the fact that she's also a Muslim has spurred a flood of Islamophobic comments on her social media posts and videos. The Arizona Republic has documented some of the incendiary remarks, which it notes range from "disturbing to just plain scary," including, "Get out stinking Muslim" and "BAN ISLAM IN THE USA  WE HATE YOUR FILTHY DEATH CULT." But it was Flake himself who appeared on Twitter on Tuesday night with an online message of support for his political adversary.

"Hang in there @deedra2018," Flake tweeted Tuesday evening. "Sorry you have to put up with this. Lots of wonderful people across AZ. You'll find them." Online commenters praised Flake for his note, saying he had "class" and thanking him for promoting "decency." And Abboud herself responded to the senator on Twitter early Wednesday, offering her own thanks for "leadership in rejecting behavior that doesn't reflect our American values. AZ's amazing people deserve more of this." Not everyone was applauding Flake, however, with some commenters noting his stance against same-sex marriage and wanting to defund Planned Parenthood, among other issues. "The person who feeds the captive in his basement should be applauded for keeping them alive? I'll clap with one hand," one person sniffed. (Read more uplifting news stories.)
The United States is still in the negotiating stage over North Koreas nuclear weapons programs, but it is also getting close to the point where it must make a decision about what to do.



Last week, the Trump administration confirmed that North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile. The launch of a two-stage missile that, according to some experts, reached an altitude of 1,700 miles might indicate that the North Koreans have a platform for a nuclear weapon that could reach the United States. But that conclusion is premature. Other things are needed, including a guidance system, material that can survive the extreme conditions on re-entering the atmosphere, and a nuclear weapon that can function after enduring the rigors of launch and re-entry. They may already have perfected those technologies, and U.S. intelligence may know the status. To an outsider, it appears that the North Koreans are getting closer to a deliverable system. At best, we can now only say that we are uncertain whether they have one or not, and that is a huge shift.

This picture taken on July 4, 2017 and released by North Koreas official Korean Central News Agency on July 5, 2017 shows the successful test-fire of the intercontinental ballistic missile Hwasong-14 at an undisclosed location. AFP PHOTO/KCNA VIA KNS/Getty Images The Chinese Cant Entice the North The Chinese have not yet induced the North Koreans to halt their program, and I dont think they will . The North Koreans see nuclear weapons as essential to the regimes survival , and the Chinese have little to threaten or entice North Korea with. Negotiations will be difficult, moreover, because the North Koreans have not trusted the Chinese since the Korean War, when the Chinese intervened not to save the Norths regime but to protect Chinas borders.

The Chinese are content to let things develop as they will. If developed, North Koreas nuclear weapons program it will pose a perpetual threat to the United States, limiting its room for maneuver in Asia. An American attack resulting in massive casualties in Seoul may destabilize South Korea, giving China an opening: If the attack goes well, China can accuse the U.S. of unnecessarily and recklessly attacking North Korea  just when China was making progress in negotiations. Ultimately, China has little interest in solving the American problem, as the only real issue for the Chinese  trade  is going to remain a challenge regardless of where the North Korean weapons program stands.

All of this brings the option of a U.S. strike on North Korea back on the table. But this option is also problematic. An American attack on the North could result in massive South Korean casualties. In addition, the North Koreans have dispersed apparent nuclear and missile development sites so that it is difficult to tell which are primary, redundant and decoy sites. Some of them are built into deep tunnels or into mountains. Conventional airstrikes will set back the program, but they may not stop it.

To increase the probability of success, special operations forces and other troops may need to be used. Failure to destroy the nuclear facilities with catastrophic civilian casualties is a real possibility. The campaign, even if successful, will be extended, complex and inevitably costly. This is why the U.S. is prepared to give China all the time it claims to need, even if success is dubious. The alternative is frightening.

Another dimension of this issue is proliferation. The North Koreans are in need of hard currency and see the proliferation of nuclear threats as diffusing American attention on Pyongyang. The sale of weapons, technology and expertise to other countries and subnational groups is a real threat. The Acceptance Strategy As the point where a decision needs to be made approaches, some have argued that the only viable strategy is to accept North Korea as a nuclear power. As the argument goes, other countries the U.S. regarded as unstable and unpredictable  China and Pakistan, for example  have developed nuclear weapons, and the acquisition of those weapons changed their behavior. Where previously they were insecure and, therefore, given to recklessness, the acquisition of those weapons made them more secure and less impulsive. Possessing nuclear weapons can make nations more prudent. The proof is that no nation, save the United States under radically different circumstances, has used nuclear weapons.

Another point in favor of the acceptance argument is that eliminating North Koreas nuclear and missile programs would be difficult and costly, and the chance of success would be uncertain. One way to increase the likelihood of success would be to use at least tactical nuclear weapons against hardened sites and perhaps against North Korean artillery in the south. But that would also set a precedent for using nuclear weapons in cases that arent of existential importance. Therefore, this is not an option for the United States.

The counterargument  the strategy that was in place at the beginning of this crisis  is that this is in fact an existential crisis for the U.S. There is no reason to believe that North Korea will behave like other nuclear states because even prior to acquiring these weapons, North Korea did not behave like them. Nuclear weapons were not a critical element of regime survival for Pakistan or China. They were at most an enhancement. The North Koreans see themselves as surrounded on all sides by enemies, and in some sense, they are right. The belief that they will change their core behavior by possessing nuclear weapons may be comforting, but the U.S. cant be confident that it is true. And if the proponents of the acceptance strategy are wrong, the costs will be far greater than the costs of launching an attack now.

It comes down to predicting North Koreas behavior, something that it has deliberately made unpredictable. The North has pursued a policy of appearing to be erratic and dangerous in order to deter destabilization tactics. And the strategy has worked. The North Koreans have made a convincing case that they are unpredictable and dangerous. And if those making the case for acceptance are wrong, and Pyongyang doesnt change its behavior after acquiring nuclear weapons, the price will be staggering. Understanding the Command Structure The issue also comes down to the number of casualties an attack would involve. This requires an understanding of North Koreas command system and how it would respond to a U.S. attack on North Korean nuclear facilities. In the event of an attack, will the North Korean artillery complex in the south be ordered to open fire immediately? And perhaps more important, if the political and military command is destroyed or isolated by an attack and communications are disrupted, where will the artillery complex get its orders? In the absence of contact with higher command, are they instructed to open fire on their own initiative? If communication within the artillery complex breaks down, what are the orders to battery commanders? In other words, is it possible to paralyze the artillery complex? Given the nature of the North Korean regime, devolving authority to the levels of lieutenants and captains is hard to imagine, and initiative is not built into the culture.

It is inevitable that as the decision approaches, alternative strategies will appear. And it is in human nature to raise doubts about a strategys effectiveness once its decided on. Going to war overwhelmingly confident is dangerous; it causes you to minimize risks. That said, this debate cannot go on much longer, because if it does, those arguing for acceptance of North Korea as a nuclear power win by default.

A decision must be made, but it cant be based on an assumption of how North Korea will behave. We just dont know. But it can be made based on knowledge of how the command system for the artillery complex works, and a hundred other details that define vulnerability, and therefore risk, on both sides.
A new book alleges that Chris Christie ticked off Donald Trump on election night with an offer to let Trump use his phone, but the New Jersey governor is dismissing the account as bogus. In an interview with MSNBC, Christie took issue with Devils Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency, by Joshua Green of Bloomberg. Green wrote that on election night, Christie approached Trump and offered to let him use his phone to accept a congratulatory call from President Obama, per NBC News. Trump reportedly responded angrily, saying that he didn't want to use Christie's phone and that Christie should instead give Obama his direct number.

"The book is wrong fundamentally in that there was no call from President Obama that evening," says Christie. "I didnt speak to the president that night at all." Instead, he says a senior member of Obama's staff called him to ask how they could get in touch with Trump should he win. "And I said, Just call my phone and Ill give you his number,'" said Christie. He says he passed along the exchange to Trump as good news. "I said, I think they think at the White House you're going to win, because theyre calling and asking how to get in touch with you after that happens." Christie was in charge of Trump's transition team at the time, though he would be fired days later, notes USA Today. (Read more Chris Christie stories.)
It's a gimme: A fugitive who authorities say evaded capture since 2013 has been arrested after he flagged down a deputy in Louisiana looking for a ride. The Lafourche Parish Sheriff's Office says 30-year-old Jansen Simon was walking down Louisiana Highway 182 on Sunday when he flagged down the officer, per the AP. Simon told the deputy he was traveling with his friends, but they had left him on the side of the road. News outlets report the officer verified Simon's identity and took him into custody. In 2013, authorities say Simon struck another man with a hammer during an argument outside a bar, resulting in a fractured skull.

"Its not clear whether he knew he was flagging down a deputy," says LPSO Public Information Officer Brennan Matherne, per Fox2Now. "Although it was a fully marked patrol car it was also 1:30 in the morning." Simon faces charges of aggravated second-degree battery and two counts of contempt of court. (Read more fugitive stories.)
Luck came not once, but twice for Jude Sparks. The then-9-year-old was lucky enough to trip not on a rock, or a tree root, but on a 1.2-million-year-old fossil when trying to dash away from his brothers on a November desert hike with his family. And as New Mexico State University biology professor Peter Houde explains to the New York Times, Jude was lucky to have been at the Las Cruces, NM, site just after a storm had exposed the fossilbut before the exposure reduced the specimen to nothingness. At first he and his brothers thought it might be from a cow; his parents thought it looked more elephant-like. Their research didn't turn up a clear answer, so they turned to Houde, who identified it as part of a stegomastodon skull.

Jude's parents actually weren't that far off. The Times notes the stegomastodon was not a dinosaur (non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out way more than 1.2 million years ago, after all), and Houde says in a university release that the creature "would look to any of us like an elephant." Fox News gets more scientific, explaining they're "a primitive group of proboscideans ('elephantoids') from which modern elephants evolved." The skull was excavated in May and marks what Houde says may be just the second-such full skull found in the state. Houde credits the Sparkses for their restraint in not digging up the bones but rather consulting a professional. He adds, "To be quite honest, all these fossils from this area are radioactive and especially for children, not something you would want in your home." (A 4-year-old found this dinosaur.)
Long intro, short conclusion, strong hypothesis but nothing to back it up, Nick Lutz wrote in red pen on a four-page apology letter his ex-girlfriend left on his car. The 21-year-old college senior graded the lettergiving it a D- but stating his ex could revise it for "half credit"back in February as a gag, the Miami Herald reports. Lutz tweeted a photo of the edited letter with the caption: "When your ex writes you an apology letter so you grade it to send it back." The tweet went viral, with more than 121,000 retweets, and Lutz's story was picked up around the world. Lutz never mentioned his girlfriend's name in the tweet or the subsequent interviews, and that seemed like the end of it.

Then, on July 6, Lutz received word from the University of Central Florida that he was suspended for two semesters for violating the student code of conduct, the Washington Post reports. Apparently, his ex-girlfriend felt she was being cyberbullied. After first trying to take her case to the sheriff's office, his ex then went to UCF, where she isn't a student. Lutz's lawyer, Jacob Stuart, says the school is violating his client's First Amendment rights. There was nothing derogatory about it," Stuart tells the Herald. "It was obvious he was making fun of her, but thats the beauty of the constitution." In addition to the suspension, Lutz was put on probation until graduation, assigned a mentor, and told to create a presentation and write a paper on the "impact" of what he did. WFTV reports Lutz is appealing the punishment and stands by his tweet. (Read more cyberbullying stories.)
New Hampshire has decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana, joining more than 20 states including all of New England in easing criminal penalties on pot, the AP reports. Republican Gov. Chris Sununu on Tuesday signed the bill that reduces the penalty for possession of up to three-quarters of an ounce of marijuana from a criminal misdemeanor to a civil violation. The legislation takes effect in 60 days. Under the new law, a violation would be punishable by a $100 fine for a first or second offense and by a fine of up to $300 for any subsequent offense within three years. A person could be charged with a misdemeanor if they are found with marijuana for a fourth time within the three years.

Under the bill, police cannot arrest someone for a marijuana violation, and any money collected from the fines will go toward alcohol and drug abuse prevention and treatment. "The governor deserves credit for his steadfast support of this commonsense reform," Matt Simon, New England political director for the Marijuana Policy Project, said in a statement. Supporters argued the change would ensure young people's lives aren't ruined by getting caught with marijuana. They also said it would allow law enforcement officers to focus resources on serious crimes. Opponents said decriminalization sends the wrong message as the state battles a drug crisis. (Read more marijuana stories.)
The worst layoffs of 21st-century America affected the finance, retail, and automotive industries the most. Banks cut workers during the Great Recession, Boeing cut workers after Sept. 11, the US Army cut workers during political budget battles, and stores continue to cut workers thanks to Amazon. Using data from an employment consulting firm, 24/7 Wall St. ranked the 27 biggest layoffsthose that affected 20,000 workers or morein the US during the 21st century. Here are the top 10 and approximately how many workers each affected:

Citigroup in 2008 (50,000) US Army in 2011 (50,000) General Motors in 2009 (47,000) US Air Force in 2005 (40,000) US Army in 2015 (40,000) Kmart in 2003 (35,000) Circuit City in 2009 (34,000) Ford in 2002 (34,000) Boeing in 2001 (31,000) US Postal Service in 2010 (30,000)

Read the full list here . (Read more layoffs stories.)
China bigger threat than Pakistan, ban Chinese products, says Mulayam Singh Yadav

New Delhi : Describing China as a "bigger threat to India than Pakistan", Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday sought the government's response on the military stand-off at Doklam.

Speaking in the Lok Sabha, the former Defence Minister also accused China of conspiring against India and urged the government to openly support the independence of Tibet and ban Chinese products in the country.

"China is a bigger threat to India than Pakistan. Pakistan cannot do anything to India. I have been saying this since the last 20 years. Now, it's clear that China is conspiring against us. In Kashmir, China is supporting Pakistan even with arms and ammunition. This should be strongly protested," Mulayam Yadav said during Zero Hour.

Mulayam Yadav's remarks came after the opposition parties staged a walk out of the Lok Sabha demanding immediate discussion on the issue of farmers' plight. The SP leader said that the Chinese army and their weapons have been seen in Kashmir. China is even constructing a road in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

"We should diplomatically protest it. Pakistan with China has adopted a strategy to infiltrate Kashmir, which is very dangerous," he said. Yadav said that India has accepted China's authority on Tibet, which was a "blunder".

"Now, India should openly support Tibet for its independence. India should also help Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama as much as it can. This will be a befitting reply to China," he said.

The veteran leader also demanded a "ban on Chinese products in India in the nation's interest".

"If China continues to help Pakistan and interferes in Kashmir, India should ban Chinese products. If need be, we should have a rethink on diplomatic relations," Yadav said.

He also demanded a complete review of India's relations with China. The stand-off between the armies of India and China in the Doklam plateau in the Sikkim sector has led to strain in diplomatic ties, with the Chinese state-run media openly talking of war. The government last week briefed the leaders of political parties and assured them that the issue will be resolved diplomatically.
China 'unusually aggressive' over Doklam issue, says Jaishankar

New Delhi : Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar on Tuesday briefed the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs on the Doklam stand-off and said that China has been unusually aggressive but India is trying to resolve the issue diplomatically and peacefully.

Giving an overview on the current situation on the border with China in the Sikkim sector, Jaishankar gave a briefing to MPs similar to the one given to leaders of political parties on two occasions last week.

He is believed to have told the committee, headed by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, that China probably did not expect India to be aggressive in its defence. For China now to step backward will not be an easy decision, the committee was understood to have been told.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was among the members who attended the meeting and raised some pointed questions.

The briefing to MPs took place even as India has been keeping foreign envoys in New Delhi posted about developments on India-China relations.

Sources said that the engagement with foreign missions, including the US, was being done at different levels as they were keen to know the latest situation.

The Chinese side had also briefed envoys, particularly of the P5 countries, on the situation along the border.

Tharoor declined to reveal any details about what transpired at the parliamentary committee meeting on Tuesday.

"Every member was asked to respect confidentiality, and that nothing that transpired inside should be revealed," he told IANS.
Now, Malayalam news channel Mathrubhumi TV announces 'menstrual leave' for women staff

Kochi : The Mathrubhumi Group, a media conglomerate, on Wednesday announced an extra monthly leave to its women staff on the first day of their menstruation period after a similar leave policy was announced by Culture Machine, a Mumbai-based media company.

Currently, the provision has only been implemented in Mathrubhumi News, a TV channel headquartered in Kerala, which has 75 women on its staff. It will soon be extended to its other divisions, which include the online and print verticals.

Announcing the policy, M.V. Shreyams Kumar, Joint Managing Director, said that in a country where menstruation is considered a women's issue, never to be discussed with men, they felt the need to provide their women workers with a supportive working environment and considerate policies.

The bold step has been taken in consideration of the long hectic working hours women reporters have to put in while in the field, he said. Culture Machine recently became one of the first companies in India to give a "First Day of Period Leave" to its women employees.

The firm has also started an online petition asking the Minister of Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi and Minister of Human Resource Development Prakash Javadekar to implement the policy across the country.

"First day is obviously a not-so-comfortable day for most. It's time we face the reality. This is not an embarrassment. This is part of life," said Devleena Sanyal Majumder, President, Human Resource Department, Culture Machine, in a video released by the firm.
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New Delhi:

The World Bank will help Indian Railways frame a basic blueprint with an objective to aid its Rs 5 lakh crore investment to transform itself from a colonial-era mass transporter into a strategic platform underpinning growth in Asia's third-biggest economy.

The multilateral lending agency would partner the 164-year-old railroad network, the worlds fourth longest, to help the state transporter with investment and planning, digitisation and technology development, besides establishing a Railway University and the Rail Tariff Authority.

"We needed this arrangement to build our capacity and deliver projects on a mission mode. World Banks expertise would be a great gain," a top rail ministry official said.

Rail minister Suresh Prabhu has drawn up an ambitious plan to transform Railways with an investment of Rs 5 lakh crore in the next four years. For this year, the Railways would spend Rs 1.31 lakh crore to augment capacity.

On the planning front, the World Bank has proposed to set up an organisation for creating detailed forecasting models, traffic optimisation and planning.

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Mumbai:

Director Nitesh Tiwari has revealed that he is definitely looking to cast Varun Dhawan in his next film but nothing has been finalised yet.

The "Dangal" director is working on Siddharth Roy Kapur and Ronnie Screwvala's next film, an adaptation of Varun Agarwal's 2012 bestseller "How I Braved Anu Aunty and Started a Million Dollar Company".

When asked about approaching Varun for the film, Nitesh told PTI, "We are thinking about him. But he is busy right now. We were looking for a good, young hero who has a great screen presence."

Read more: 'Judwaa 2': Taapsee confirms Salman's cameo in Varun Dhawan-starrer

Nitesh said he did bounce the idea of the film to the "Student of the Year" actor.

"I did speak to Varun about the film. He is more than happy about it (film). But only time will tell if he can do the film or not as he has a very busy schedule so I don't know what the future holds."

Besides this, Nitesh is excited about his director wife Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari's upcoming directorial, "Bareilly Ki Barfi". He has co-written the romantic comedy with Shreyas Jain.

"I think she did a good job. I was moved watching the scenes that I had written, it means it has turned out to be better on screen."

Read more: Anushka, Varun to knit romantic pattern with 'Sui Dhaga- Made in India

Starring Kriti Sanon, Ayushmann Khurrana and Rajkummar Rao in the lead, "Bareilly Ki Barfi" will release on August 18.

For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

Assamese actress Bidisha Bezbaruah was found hanging in her Gurugram residence on Monday. According to the media reports the actress, who was last seen in Ranbir Kapoor-Katrina Kaif's 'Jagga Jasoos', has allegedly commited suicide.



"Bezbaruah was found hanging from a ceiling fan in her rented accommodation which she had taken recently," Deputy Commissioner of Police (East) Deepak Saharan said.



Apparently, Bidisha had recently movied to Gurugram from Mumbai. The police was informed by her father after Bidisha didn't pick his calls.



"Her father suspected something foul as she was not picking the phone on Monday evening. He approached the police and gave details of her local address," Saharan said.



When the police reached the spot, the main gate and the door were locked from inside. The police team broke open the door and found her hanging, he said. No suicide note was recovered from her possession.



"The victims father claimed in his complaint that she had a love marriage but would often have quarrels with her husband," Saharan said.



Reportedly, Bidisha's father has also stated that the actress wished to get divorced.



Her mobile phone, Facebook and social networking site conversations are being examined by investigating teams. "We are investigating the case and if required we will call her husband to record his statement," Saharan said.

According to the media reports, a case has been registered under IPC Section 306 (abetment) and her husband has been arrested in the case.

Assamese actor and singer Bidisha Bezbaruah alleged suicide case: Husband Nisheet has been arrested by Gurugram Police pic.twitter.com/9ZyaLQ6Phu a ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

Meanwhile, Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal today spoke to his Haryana counterpart Manohar Lal Khattar seeking proper probe into the death.

Assamese actress&singer Bidisha Bezbaruah's mortal remains being taken for last rites in Guwahati. She allegedly committed suicide yesterday pic.twitter.com/aNfwLs8oSt a ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

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New Delhi:

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday issued a notice to Sajjan Kumar in connection with bail cancellation matter in 1984 Anti-Sikh riots case. The next hearing will take place on November 10.

Justice I S Mehta issued a notice to Kumar on a plea by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) seeking cancellation of the anticipatory bail granted to Kumar by the trial court on December 21 last year in a case of the killing of three Sikhs.

Earlier, two of the High Court judges had recused from hearing the matter.

1984 Anti-Sikh Riots Case: Delhi High court issues notice to Sajjan Kumar in bail cancellation matter, next date of hearing is 10 November.  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

While granting relief to the former MP on a personal bond of Rs one lakh and a surety of the like amount, the trial court had asked him not to leave the country without permission and to cooperate in the probe. (With PTI Inputs)

Also Read: 1984 anti-Sikh riots case: Jagdish Tytler refuses to undergo lie detection test

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New Delhi:

A nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court will commence hearing from Wednesday to decide if the contentious issue of right to privacy is a fundamental right under the Constitution.

Hours after referring the matter to a larger bench, the apex court on Tuesday set up the nine-judge bench to be headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar.

It will also comprise Justices J Chelameswar, S A Bobde, R K Agrawal, Rohinton Fali Nariman, Abhay Manohar Sapre, D Y Chandrachud, Sanjay Kishan Kaul and S Abdul Nazeer.

A five-judge Constitution bench headed by the CJI, which was to deal with pleas challenging the validity of the Aadhaar scheme and the right to privacy attached to it, was faced with the two past verdicts, delivered in 1950 and 1962 by larger benches, holding that the privacy right was not a fundamental right.

The apex court said the nine-judge bench would deal with the limited issue of right to privacy and the correctness of the two judgements. The matter challenging the Aadhaar scheme would be then referred back to a smaller bench, it said.

During the course of the hearing today, it seems that it has become essential for us to determine whether there is any fundamental right of privacy under the Indian Constitution, the bench, also comprising Justices J Chelameswar, S A Bobde, D Y Chandrachud and S Abdul Nazeer, said.

The determination of this question will essentially entail whether the decision recorded by this court in M P Sharma and Ors vs. Satish Chandra, District Magistrate, Delhi and Ors. (of 1950) by an eight-judge Constitution bench, and also, in Kharak Singh vs. the State of UP and Ors. (of 1962) by a six-judge Constitution bench, that there is no such fundamental right, is the correct expression of the constitutional position, it said in its order.

The court asked Attorney General K K Venugopal, representing the Centre, and other senior advocates, including Arvind Datar, Shyam Divan, Gopal Subramanium and Anand Grover, who appeared for petitioners opposed to the Aadhaar scheme, to submit their written briefs in the meantime.

At the outset, Venugopal reiterated the arguments of his predecessor Mukul Rohatgi that there have been inconsistent views so far as judicial pronouncements on right to privacy was concerned.

He said the apex court in M P Sharma and Kharak Singh cases have held that right to privacy was not a fundamental right and later, the smaller benches have said that it was a fundamental right.

Venugopal also said that the right to privacy is not a fundamental right and rather it is common law right which is not recognised by the Constitution.

One of the counsel for petitioners termed as regressive the stand of the Centre that the right to privacy was common law right and not a part of fundamental right under the Constitution.

The apex court, initially, referred to the 1978 judgement in the Maneka Gandhi case and said that there was no need to revisit the judgements in Kharak Singh and M P Sharma cases on right to privacy.

A three-judge bench had in 2015 referred to a larger bench a batch of pleas, including the one filed by Justice (retd) K S Puttaswamy, challenging the validity of the Aadhaar scheme and the aspect of right to privacy attached to it.

The apex court had agreed to set up a bench on July 12 to deal with the Aadhaar-related matters after the attorney general and senior advocate Shyam Divan, appearing for petitioners, had jointly mentioned the matter.

The petitioners had claimed that collection and sharing of biometric information, as required under the scheme, was a breach of the fundamental right to privacy.

Allowing the Centres plea, the court had framed various questions, including as to whether right to privacy was a fundamental right, to be decided by a Constitution bench.

If yes, then what would be contours of right to privacy, the bench had said while referring the matter to the then CJI for setting up a larger bench.

At an earlier hearing, then AG Rohatgi, while backing the Aadhaar card scheme, had contended that right to privacy was not a fundamental right.

No judgment explicitly cites right to privacy as a fundamental right. It is not there under the letters of Article 21 either. If this court feels that there must be clarity on this subject, only a Constitution bench can decide, Rohatgi had said.

He had cited the two judgements, pronounced by six and eight-judge benches, which had held that right to privacy was not a fundamental right.

Subsequently, smaller benches had held a contrary view and, hence the matter needed to be decided by a larger bench, he had said.

Whether right to privacy is a fundamental right guaranteed under Part III of the Constitution of India, in the light of express ratio to the contrary by an eight-judge bench in M P Sharma case and also by a six-judge bench of this court in Kharak Singhs case has to be decided, Rohtagi had said.

Also read: Aadhaar card controversy: SC sets up 9-judge constitutional bench to decide whether privacy is a fundamental right

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New Delhi:

The Chandigarh district court refused to let 10-year-old rape survivor undergo an abortion after medical reports confirmed that she was more than 20 weeks pregnant.

The court on Tuesday ruled out the plea based on the report submitted by doctors of Government Medical College and Hospital-32. According to the report the survivor was found to be 26 weeks pregnant and conducting an abortion on the victim would threaten her health and even risk her life. .

The local police on parents request had filed an application for approval for abortion.

Also Read: IIT Bhubaneshwar PhD scholar accuses professor of sexually harassing her, writes to PM Modi

Also Read: FIR filed against West Bengal BJP MP Roopa Ganguly over rape statement

In India court allow termination of pregnancy up to 20 weeks under Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act and exceptions are only made if the fetus is found to be genetically abnormal.

According to the police reports the minor was allegedly repeatedly raped by her maternal uncle. The incident had come to surface after the victim complained of regular abdomen pain. The survivors father is a government employee. According to several doctors normal delivery is ruled out and even caesarean section can also be dangerous as at this age pelvic bones are not fully developed and carrying full-term pregnancy is risky.According to NCRB reports around 8,800 cases of rape on minors were registered across the country and in over 10 percent of cases the victims were subjected to the gruesome crime by their own family members of relatives.

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New Delhi:

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Wednesday sent second notice to Karti Chidambaram asking him to appear at CBI headquarters on July 21 over INX media case, sources said.

Chidambarams associates and his Charted Accountants were summoned by the central agency earlier this week, but they failed to appear before it and did not notify about the same, sources added.

In the month of May, the CBI had searched the homes and offices of Karti Chidambaram, son of former Finance Minister P Chidambaram, across four cities for allegedly receiving money from a media firm owned by Indrani and Peter Mukerjea to scuttle a tax probe.

CBI sends second notice to Karti Chidambaram asking him to appear at CBI HQ on 21 July over INX media case: CBI Sources  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

CBI sleuths had fanned out across the Chidambarams' properties in Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi and Gurugram. The investigating agency had filed an FIR on charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating, receiving illegal gratification, influencing public servants and criminal misconduct.

Karti Chidambaram's associates & CA were summoned by CBI, earlier this week but they failed to appear & did not notify CBI about it: Sources  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

It is alleged that Karti had received money from INX Media for using his influence to manipulate a tax probe against it in a case of violation of Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) conditions to receive investment from Mauritius.

His father had issued a strong statement in response to say that the government was using the CBI and other agencies to target his son.

Also Read: P Chidambaram, son Karti's homes raided in Chennai, Ex-FM says BJP govt using CBI, ED against Congress

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New Delhi:

Pakistan on Wednesday continued to violate ceasefire along the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir. The Pakistani rangers started unprovoked firing and heavy shelling on Indian posts in Mendhar and Balakot sector.

The Indian forces were replying befittingly to the unprovoked and intense shelling by the Pakistani troops.

Earlier on Tuesday, an Army Jawan was martyred in J&Ks Nowgam sector after a sniper fire from Pakistan side hit him.

In a similar incident of ceasefire violation on Monday, a minor girl and an Indian Army jawan were killed in a cross-border firing by Pakistan near the Line of Control (LoC) in Poonch's Balakote.

More details awaited...

Read More News: Pakistan violates ceasefire in J&Ks Uri sector, one jawan injured; army retaliates

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New Delhi:

As soon as the question hour was taken up, opposition members raised the issue of farmers on Wednesday.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar reminded the opposition that a discussion on the issue of farmers is listed in Wednesdays agenda. He said the government was ready for a debate and would answer all the questions raised by members. Do not interrupt the House. Let us debate, he said.

But the opposition members, including those from the Left and the RJD, continued raising the issue from the Well.

Most of the Congress members, who were also in the Well, raised slogans such as Mann ki Baat band karo, karza maafi shuru karo (stop talking on radio programme, implement loan waiver) and stop shooting farmers.

The Monsoon session started with Opposition uproar on various issues and BSP supremo Mayawati resigned from Rajya Sabha saying that the ruling party BJP does not allow her to speak on the issues related to Dalits.

The Opposition parties including Congress, Trinamool Congress, the Left parties and the RJD created pandemonium in both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha as the Monsoon session started on Tuesday.

The Opposition is expected to get together and demand enactment of Manav Suraksha Kanoon (MASUKA) law against the issue of mob lynching and atrocities being unleashed on Dalits and minorities in the country.

Highligts:

# 1:45 AM

Pakistan cannot do any harm to India, says Mulayam Singh Yadav

# 1:42 AM

It is Indias responsibility to secure Bhutan and Sikkim. Instead of Pakistan, China is bigger enemy: Mulayam Singh Yadav

# 1:38 PM

I have been informed that China has planted atom bombs in Pakistans territory. China has already itself prepared itself to attack India: Mulayam Singh Yadav

# 1:32 PM

India has a severe threat from China. China is conspiring against India, it is also planning to take control of Pakistan as well: Mulayam Singh Yadav

# 12:24 PM

Rajya Sabha adjourned till 12:30 PM after uproar over violence in the name of cow protection

# 12:10 PM

PM stated cow vigilantes shouldn't take law in their hands, MHA issued advisory. Dragging BJP into this not right: MoS Home H Ahir in RS

# 11:25 AM

SP's Naresh Agrawal demands salary hike, says our salary is lesser than our secretaries

# 11:11 AM

Lok Sabha adjourned till 12 noon after uproar by opposition

# 10:35 AM

Delhi: Congress protests in front of Gandhi statue at Parliament complex demanding special package for flood-affected Northeastern states

# 10:35 AM

We hope that both the houses run, we should be ready for positive, says Ananth Kumar

# 10:05 AM

CPI(M)'s Sitaram Yechury gives adjournment motion notice in RS for today to discuss 'communal polarisation in the name of cow protection'

Deputy Chairman P J Kurien said a discussion on the matter has been accepted and the members can raise their points during the debate.

Raising the issue, Sharad Yadav (JD-U) claimed that 15-20 farmers were committing suicide every day.

He said pulses production has been raised by 33 per cent but the government has lowered the import duty on it to zero, resulting in cheaper shipments into the country.

Farmers, he said, are being forced to make distress sale.

Digvijaya Singh (Cong) said the farmers were getting

bullets instead of price.

Kurien said besides Yadav, Pramod Tiwari (Cong), Naresh Agarwal (SP), Ram Gopal Yadav (SP), Kapil Sibal (Cong) and Sitaram Yechury (CPI-M) had given notice under 267 on the issue.

A discussion on the subject has been admitted and the members can raise their points then, he said.

Ali Anwar Ansari (JD-U) through a Zero Hour mention raised the issue of manual scavenging saying this practice was continuing even after the government has declared it illegal.

Four workers, he said, died in the national capital due to toxic gases while cleaning a septic tank.

All four are dalits, he said, adding over 2,500 dalits have lost their lives in last two-and-half-years due to this practice but no cases have been registered or compensation paid.

While the government on the one hand talks of going to Mars, on the other it provides no equipment or apparatus for such cleaning activities, he said. Our sensitivities are dead, he said.

With PTI inputs

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New Delhi:

The issue of lynchings on Wednesday was aggressively discussed in the Rajya Sabha where the Opposition alleged involvement of some members of BJP and Sangh Parivar in these incidents even as the government said communal colour should not be given to such violence.

As the House took up a discussion on the issue, Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said the government is equally concerned about the criminal incidents and everyone should speak in one voice to fight against such destructive forces.

The Centre condemns such incidents, Naqvi said, adding the states should take stringent legal action against those involved.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had also made this clear during the All Party meeting recently, he added during the debate on situation arising out of the reported increase in the incidents of lynching and atrocities on minorities and dalits across the country.

He alleged that its a conspiracy that some are trying to defame the government and divert its agenda in the name of such incidents as they think they could level corruption charges on the government in the last three years.

Initiating the debate, Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad attacked the government, saying the rise in these incidents was spreading the message of fear.

Earlier it was done at individual level. You may not like it, all lynching is done by some members of the ruling party and Sangh Parivar, he alleged.

It is done with a basic understanding and hence no arrests been made in the incidents that happened so far.

Also Read: Lynching people in name of cow protection against Hindutva, says Shiv Sena

They should have been jailed. Even I can identify hundreds. They are known to the media, the Congress leader said.

Insisting that no Opposition party benefits from these incidents, he said but one political party, the ruling party is benefiting. This is done for political harvest.

Urging the government to take the matter seriously, Azad said, This nation belongs to all. Your responsibility is more. You have to take the lead. We can help in creating an atmosphere. If you spoil the atmosphere...

He urged the ruling party to give up vote politics and work towards making the country strong within to fight the external issues.

This is not a religious battle. This is not Hindu-Muslim fight. This is everyones fight for humanity. When our home is weak, how can we fight the external forces...Our house has always been strong. Dont break the house for votes, he said.

Azad said not a single place is safe, from Jammu and Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

Lynchings are reported from all over. Such incidents are happening for the first time. This used to happen during the medieval age, not even during British times, he said.

He expressed sadness over the disturbing trend that no one comes forward to save a person being lynched.

Urging the Opposition to unite and speak with one voice in its fight against the destructive forces, Naqvi said: Please dont give communal angle to these incidents. If you give, you are helping them...

We should together defeat and isolate the destructive forces. We should speak in one voice. ...Please speak truth on this issue, said Naqvi, who is also Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs.

Asserting that the government will not allow any destructive forces to dominate the development agenda, Naqvi said, We do not wish any destructive forces to affect the governments development agenda and the countrys culture.

He added, The policy of our government and the party is clear that we will not allow any destructive agenda to dominate on our development agenda.

It would be misunderstanding on the part of destructive forces to think that by fabricating the issues, they can divert the attention, Naqvi said. Then it would be nothing but Mungeri Lal ke Haseen Sapne (day dreaming), he said.

This is a conspiracy. Anyone could be doing it. I am not taking any party names. I dont want to get into it.

Also Read: Shabana Azmi raises her voice against mob lynching

Stating that lynching incidents were reported in the previous government regime too, the Minister said: Whether lynching incidents happened before or now, strict legal action should be initiated against those involved.

Refuting the Opposition charge that no action was taken against those involved in lynching incidents, he gave details of arrests made in Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharasthra in the last six months.

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Hyderabad:

NDA presidential nominee Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday affirmed that the office of the president was above party politics and he would strive to uphold the Constitution.

Kovind was speaking at a meeting organised by Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao with the legislators of his party, the TRS, which was also attended by a few key leaders of the BJP.

The TRS, though not part of the NDA, has declared support to Kovinds candidature.

It is very important for all of us, particularly the office of presidency and voters like you. We have to maintain and upkeep the supremacy of our Constitution, he said.

The country and the entire world is well aware of the supremacy of the Indian Constitution and Indian democracy. As we know, the Constitution...our country is supreme, he said.

Observing that he has not been associated with any party ever since he became the governor of Bihar, Kovind said he has been functioning in a non-partisan manner.

Ever since I became the governor of Bihar, I have been working throughout in a non-partisan manner, treating every citizen of Bihar with equal status, without any discrimination. I can assure you that I will continue to keep the position of president above party also, he said.

Though he was a member of the BJP earlier, he is not associated with any party now, he said.

Presidential poll: AAP may back Meira Kumar, rules out support to Ram Nath Kovind

The office of presidency must be kept above party politics. I can also assure you that I will always strive for all-round development of the nation, irrespective of caste, creed, language, region, geographical situations, he said.

Kovind also said he would do his best to fulfil the aspirations of the youth.

We have to fulfil the dream of new India which our prime minister has been advocating till 2022, when we will celebrate completion of 75 years of Independence, he said.

He expressed his gratitude to NDA, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and non-NDA parties like the TRS for supporting his candidature.

The TRS chief extended his support to him even before his name was announced as NDAs nominee, Kovind said.

Kovind thanked Rao for putting up hoardings in the city in his honour and also for speaking in Hindi in the meeting.

Also Read: NDA President pick Ram Nath Kovind meets Puducherry Legislators, assured support

Besides the legislators of the TRS, Kovind separately met the legislators and other leaders of the BJP, the TDPs Telangana unit the YSR Congress during a whirlwind visit to Hyderabad as part of his campaign.

Kovind was accompanied by Union ministers M Venkaiah Naidu, Bandaru Dattatreya and other BJP leaders.

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Take yourself back to 2010 for a moment. Lost ended its six-year run of maddening plot holes, that Icelandic volcano made morons of TV reporters, and a little fast food joint called KFC ushered in an era* of stunt foods that will outlive us all. The Double Down has been mocked, heralded, imitated and now imitated again at a new restaurant called Hudson Jane, which opened Monday on Myrtle Avenue and Adelphi Street in Fort Greene. Chef Megan Johnson is serving the "Double Brown" ($15)which she has trademarked!an egg, bacon, tomato, lettuce and Aleppo pepper aioli sandwich served between two hash browns.

There are few who wouldn't answer the siren's call of a well-fried hash brown, and if stunt foods are here to stay they may as well be made by a former Gramercy Tavern chef. The all-day restaurant serves a number of fun dishes in line with their "life's too short to eat sh*tty food!" motto. Guacamole ($15) is served with "chips" made from puffed chicken skin, cheese curds ($10) are served wrapped in bacon like pure protein mozzarella sticks, and there's a "Patty's Melt" ($24) sandwich with a grass-fed beef patty topped with bacon, swiss cheese, tomato, dijon mustard and mayo on chive pain au lait.

The restaurantwhich is co-owned by Johnson's partner Jen LaPortaserves breakfast, lunch, brunch and dinner with offerings both for grab-and-go (pastries and burritos for both carnivores and vegans) and sit-down (the soft-boiled eggs are topped with a potato nest with cow-shaped butter for the toast). Forthcoming dinner entreesthe meal will launch in full in the coming weekswill include Spring Chicken and Dumplings with cheddar biscuit and garlic scapes, Grandma Johnson's Beef and Noodles, and an all-natural wine list.

We can celebrate the restaurant's gratuity free status, but cannot take their suggestion to "tip our cows instead" because those babies are sturdy af.

*We're aware the Double Down was technically a reality in 2009 but it wasn't officially released until 2010.

360 Myrtle Avenue, 347-987-3881; hudsonjane.com

Hudson Jane Opening Menu by Nell Casey on Scribd
New Delhi:

In a shameful incident, a class X student at the Kotkhai area of Shimla district was gangraped and brutally murdered. Her body was recovered from the nearby Halila forest two days later. According to latest report it said that out of the six accused who was arreseted in this case, one died in custody.

The gangrape of the girl took place on July 4 when she was returning from the school. According to police, she took a lift from a private vehicle which was being driven by Rajender Singh. Other accused  Subash Singh Bisht, Surat Singh, Lokjan alias Chottu and Deepak alias Deepu were also in the vehicle.

Police said Rajender alias Raju had heated exchanges with the Nepalese, Suraj, in the jail and a scuffle ensued. Rajuthen allegedly banged Suraj's head against a wall and he died. IG Southern range Z H Zaidi said Suraj had narrated the entire sequence leading to the rape incident and named Raju,the driver of the pickup, as the main accused. The police is already facing a lot of criticism for tardy investigation and protest are continuing in Kotkhai, Shimla and other places demanding justice for the minor girl.

Following the killing, the entire staff of the Kotkhai Police Station has been shifted and recommendation for a judicial enquiry into the custodial death has been made. Additional police force has been rushed to Kotkhai to tackle the law and order situation as it is feared that itwould add fuel to the public rage over the rape incident.



People who was arrested in this case was Ashish Chauhan alias Ashu (29), a resident of Sharaal village in Mahasu area of Kotkhai; Rajender Singh alias Raju (32), the driver of a pick-up vehicle and a resident of Hiliala village; Subash Singh Bisht (42) and Deepak alias Deepu (29), both residents of Pauri Garwal; Suraj Singh (29) and Lok Jung alias Chotu (19), both hailing from Nepal.Demonstrations continued in Shimla over the rape and murder of a school girl after which school students took out a protest march over alleged "lapses" in the investigation.

The protesters, led by Students' Federation of India (SFI) activists, assembled at the Central Telegraph Office here and marched to the Ridge via the Mall Road, carrying placards demanding justice for the victim.

The SFI welcomed the decision of the state government of referring the case to CBI but expressed suspicion over role of the police. Residents of Chamyana, in the outskirts of Shimla, also held protests over the incident.

The Congress also joined the clamour for justice for the victim. Himachal Pradesh Congress Committee (HPCC) president Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu said there certainly was some "negligence" in the police probe.

(With PTI Input)

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New Delhi:

The rebel Nagaland People's Front leader TR Zeliang became thechief minister of Nagaland on Wednesday five months after hewas compelled to step down from the chair following public uproar. This is the second time 65-year-old Zeliang, present chairman of the ruling Democratic Alliance of Nagaland, was sworn in as chief minister in the third term of the NPF-led DAN government in Nagaland.

Zeliang, who had been Minister for Planning and Coordination in the Democratic Alliance of Nagaland (DAN) III ministry, had become the chief minister for the first time when he succeeded Neiphiu Rio in May, 2014, following Rio's election to the Lok Sabha.

This February, he was forced to step down as chief minister following public agitation against the government for reservation of 33 per cent of seats for women in the election to urban local bodies. Shurhozelie Liezietsu had replaced Zeliang. In these five months, Zeliang was the finance advisor to Chief Minister Liezietsu.

He revolted against Liezietsu on July 8 last claiming the support of a majority of the NPF and Independent MLAs and subsequently in a letter to Governor P B Acharya staked claimto form a new NPF government. Zeliang joined active politics as president of DistrictYouth Congress (I) in 1976.

He had been involved in state politics for nearly four decades and served as a minister invarious governments in the state. Zeliang contested state Assembly elections for the first time in 1982 as an Independent and again in 1987 as an NNDP candidate from 6-Tening constituency in Peren district. He was unsuccessful both times.

He then won from Tening four times in a row beginning with the elections in 1989 as a candidate of the Naga People's Council and subsequently in 1993, 1998 and 2003 as a candidate of the Indian National Congress.

He served as Minister of State for Information and Tourism during 1989-90 and as Minister of State for Relief & Rehabilitation from 1994 to 1998. During 1998-2003, he was the Minister for Environment andForests and Geology and Mining under S C Jamir government.

In 2003, Zeliang and six Congress MLAs formed the Nagaland Congress after defecting from the Indian National Congress only to merge with the Neiphiu Rio-led Naga People's Front. From 2004 to 2008, he was a Rajya Sabha MP from Nagaland.

Returning to state politics in 2008, he won from 7-Peren Constituency and was appointed Minister for Planning, Animal Husbandry and Parliamentary Affairs under Chief Minister Rio.

He won the Assembly elections again in 2013 from thesame constituency and was appointed Minister for Planning & Coordination, Evaluation & Geology and Mining.

Zeliang was born at Mbaupungwa village in Peren districtin 1952. A Zeliang Naga, he matriculated from Don Bosco HighSchool in Dibrugarh, Assam and holds a BA degree from KohimaArts College.

With PTI inputs

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Washington:

Onece again, mysterious radio signals coming from a star located about 11 light-years-away have been detected by astronomers, who have been left baffled. Researchers said a small and dim red dwarf star called Ross 128 (GJ 447) is sending out strange signals. This star is 2,800 times dimmer than the Sun and is not yet known to have any planets.



Astronomers at the University of Puerto Rico detected the bizarre radio signals in May. They used the Arecibo Observatory, a massive radio telescope built inside of a Puerto Rican sinkhole.



However, Abel Mendez, an astrobiologist at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo said that the possibility that the strange signals came from intelligent extraterrestrial life cannot be ruled out yet.



"In case you are wondering, the recurrent aliens hypothesis is at the bottom of many other better explanations," Mendez told 'Business Insider'.He also said that the source of the signals could be some kind of manmade object in space, such as a satellite.



"The field of view of (Arecibo) is wide enough, so there is the possibility that the signals were caused not by the star but another object in the line of sight," Mendez said.



The signals were picked up in almost periodic bursts and further investigation is required to figure out the original source of the signals, researchers said.



"The SETI [Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] groups are aware of the signals," Professor Mendez told Business Insider.



Reporting his findings in a personal blog post, Professor Mendez said we have never seen satellites emit bursts like that' and noted that the signals 'very peculiar'.



Professor Mendez said he heard the signals over a ten-minute period at 8.53PM ET (1.53AM BST) and wrote that they were 'unique to Ross 128'.



He added: Observations of other stars immediately before and after did not show anything similar. Success will be to find the signal again' at the star's location but not in surrounding directions. If we don't get the signal again then the mystery deepens.

Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, told Business Insider that the group is well aware of the signals. The chances are high that they're terrestrial interference, in fact. That's really always been the case, said Dr Shostak.

ALSO READ | Scientists confused after mysterious cosmic radio waves detected from outer space

Right now there's really only one compelling signal from outer space that might come from aliens: the WOW signal.

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New Delhi:

Now Moto Z owners can update their smart phones to Android 7.1.1 Nougat. However, people using the phone in India will have to wait for few more days.

Lenovo owned Motorola has initially rolled out the Android 7.1.1 Nougat update for Moto Z in Hong Kong and Indonesia only.

Motorola had launched Moto Z featured with Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Later, the smartphone was updated to Android 7.0 Nougat.

The latest update Android 7.1.1 Nougat brings several enhancements which includes app shortcuts through which the users can easily access their favourite apps by simply long pressing the app icon, multi-tasking features, split-screen multitasking, customisable quick settings, improved Google keyboard, better battery life, enhanced notifications and recent applications window.

Also Read: Moto Z2 Play launched in India; Know prices and full specifications here

Also Read: Lenovo sets Moto Z sales target at 3 million amid strong focus on Motorola brand in 2017, Moto G performs strongly

With the installation of 7.1.1 Nougat, Moto Z users will have access to the duo video chat app, send GIFs directly from the keyboard on apps like Google Messenger. With update also comes the July 2017 security patch.

On getting notification for the update, the users should be connected to Wi-Fi connection and ensure their phones are sufficiently charged. If users do not receive a notification they can check for the update manually by going to Settings>About Phones>Software updates.
Beijing:

China needs to prepare for the standoff with India near the Sikkim sector becoming a long-term situation, an article in a state-run Chinese daily said on Wednesday, warning that more such conflicts can trigger an all out confrontation along the entire Line of Actual Control.

The Op-ed article in the Global Times claimed that the Indian action to stop Chinese troops from building a road near the Doklam plateau was a blatant infringement on Chinas sovereignty.

The road is near the trijunction with Bhutan.

India has expressed concern over the road construction, fearing it may allow Chinese troops to cut Indias access to its northeastern states. It has conveyed to China that the road construction would represent a significant change of status quo with serious security implications for India.

The Chinese action has led to a month-long military standoff.

The article said that if India stirs up conflicts in several spots, it must face the consequence of an all-out confrontation with China along the entire LAC (Line of Actual Control).

Of the 3,488-km-long border India shares with China from Jammu and Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, a 220-km section falls in Sikkim.

The article in the tabloid daily, which is a part of the ruling Communist Party of China media group, said: As the confrontation goes on, China needs to get ready for the face-off becoming a long-term situation and at the same time, needs to maintain a sense of rationality.

China doesnt advocate and tries hard to avoid a military clash with India, but China doesnt fear going to war to safeguard sovereignty either, and will make itself ready for a long-term confrontation, it said.

It said that there are voices within China that call for the Indian troops to be expelled immediately, while Indian public opinion is clamouring for war with China.

However, the two sides need to exercise restraint and avoid the current conflict spiralling out of control, it said.

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New Delhi:

The US on Wednesday listed Pakistan among the nations and regions which offer "safe havens" to terrorists. Further, it also claimed that terror groups such as the LeT and JeM continued their operations, training, and organised fundraising inside the country in 2016.

In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the State Department said that Pakistani military and security forces undertook operations againstgroups that conducted attacks within Pakistan such as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.

"Pakistan did not take substantial action against the Afghan Taliban or Haqqani, or substantially limit theirability to threaten US interests in Afghanistan, although Pakistan supported efforts to bring both groups into an Afghan-led peace process," the State Department said.

"Pakistan did not take sufficient action against otherexternally focused groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in 2016, which continued to operate,train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan," the report said.

India, it said continued to experience attacks, "including by Maoist insurgents and Pakistan-based terrorists". Indian authorities continued to blame Pakistan for cross-border attacks in Jammu and Kashmir, it said.

"In January, India experienced a terrorist attack against an Indian military facility in Pathankot, Punjab, which was blamed by authorities on JeM. Over the course of 2016, the Government of India sought to deepen counterterrorism cooperation and information sharing with the United States," the State Department said.

The Indian government continued to closely monitor the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), which made threats against India in their terrorist propaganda.

A number of individuals were arrested for ISIS-affiliated recruitment and attack plotting within India, the report said. In a separate chapter, the State Department listed Pakistan as one of the safe havens of terrorism.

The State Department said that numerous terrorist groups, including the Haqqani Network (HQN), the LeT and JeM continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2016.

"Although LeT is banned in Pakistan, LeT's wings Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FiF) were able to openly engage in fundraising, including in the capital," itsaid.

"LeT's chief Hafiz Saeed (a UN-designated terrorist)continued to address large rallies, although in February 2017,Pakistan proscribed him under relevant provisions of Schedule Four of the Anti-Terrorism Act, thus severely restricting hisfreedom of movement," it noted.

The 2015 ban on media coverage of Saeed, JuD, and FiF continued and was generally followed by broadcast and print media, it said. According to the State Department, the Pakistani government did not publicly reverse its December 2015 declaration that neither JuD nor FiF is banned in Pakistan, despite their listing under UN sanctions regimes, although inJanuary 2017, Pakistan placed both organisations "under observation" pursuant to Schedule Two of the Anti-TerrorismAct.

While not a ban, keeping the outfits under observation allows the government to closely scrutinise the activities of both organisations. On November 11, Pakistan's National Counter terrorism Authority published its own list of banned organisations that placed JuD in a separate section for groups that are "under observation" but not banned.

Pakistan continued military operations to eradicateterrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered TribalAreas, although their impact on all terrorist groups wasuneven, it said.

In its report to the Congress, the State Department said in 2016, India and the United States pledged to strengthencooperation against terrorist threats from groups including al-Qaeda, the ISIS, JeM, LeT and D-Company (Dawood Ibrahim'sgroup), including through greater collaboration ondesignations at the UN.

Indian and US leaders directed officials to identify new areas of collaboration through the July US-India Counter terrorism Joint Working Group, applauded finalisation of a bilateral arrangement to facilitate the sharing of terrorism screening information, and called upon Pakistan tobring the perpetrators of terrorist attacks against India to justice, the report said.

The United States and India worked together to designate JeM leader Maulana Masood Azhar, although the listing was blocked in the UN 1267 Committee, the State Department said. Other areas mentioned in the report as safe havens are Afghanistan, Somalia, the Trans-Sahara, Sulu/Sulawesi Seas Littoral, Southern Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya,Yemen, Columbia and Venezuela.

With PTI inputs

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
A NYC couple flying home from Florida with their three small children was ejected from their JetBlue flight before departure on July 2nd after a dispute arose over one of their kids kicking a seat in front of them. The outraged parents say JetBlue overreacted, and that they had resolved the dispute with the passenger in the row ahead of them before a JetBlue employee demanded they get off the plane.

Mandy Ifrah admits her one-year-old daughter kicked the seat in front of her before the plane took off, and that words were exchanged with the passenger on the receiving end. But Ifrah says she quickly apologized and insists both sides came to a peaceful resolution. JetBlue, however, alleges that the couple was responsible for "a verbal altercation that included physical threats and profanities."

Two videos filmed by Ifrah's husband Tamir Raanan show their heated dispute with a JetBlue manager on board the plane, and later at the gate, after the entire flight was deplaned because the couple refused to voluntarily leave.





JetBlue's Armando Gonzalez can be seen in the first video telling the couple, "We can discuss this outside the plane. What I need you to do is come with me outside the plane."

Ifrah responds, "Did something happen?" Other passengers can be heard asserting that "nothing" happened. One adds, "I saw the whole thing nothing happened."

In the second video, taken after the family was off the plane, Gonzalez tells the couple, "You were removed from the airplane because you were not cooperating with me, at this point if you want more information about the incident you'll have to call 1-800-JetBlue."

Local police can be seen in the second video, but Ifrah and Raanan were not charged. The family spent the night in Fort Lauderdale, and upon returning to the airport the next morning, they say they were told they were not going to be allowed on another JetBlue flight. They flew home on another airline.

The couple also says their luggage remained checked on their original flight and wound up in NYC ahead of them, forcing them to spend the night in Fort Lauderdale without a change of clothes or their baby supplies. They reportedly did not get their luggage back until a week later.

In a statement, JetBlue said, "After a verbal altercation that included physical threats and profanities against a nearby customer, the aircraft door was reopened and our airports team politely asked the customers to step off to discuss the situation.

"The customers refused repeated requests and our crewmembers deplaned the entire aircraft. Law enforcement escorted them out of the gate area and we provided a refund. The customers were not removed due to the actions of their children. We are investigating whether the customers' behavior warrants restrictions on JetBlue travel and we thank our crewmembers for their professional handling of this unfortunate incident."

The family's attorney, David Templer, questions why, if his clients were threatening other passengers with violence, they were not charged by police at the gate. "It is convenient misinformation," Templer told the Daily Mail. "If the incident had occurred the way JetBlue now claims, then it would have been a violation of laws and regulations to not immediately report it to Federal or State law enforcement, which did not occur."

Templer says JetBlue "unnecessarily humiliated and then abandoned an entire family, including infants and toddlers," and in a statement to ABC 7, said, "It is not remotely possible that a mother traveling with a 1-year-old on her lap and two toddlers would have the gumption to behave like that in front of her kids."

We asked Templer if the family intends to sue JetBlue, among other things, and we'll update when we hear back.

In the meantime, what is the proper way to deal with a child kicking the back of your seat?


Both of New York's Senators have signed on to a bill that would criminalize any attempt by Americans to boycott Israel, according to a new report.

According to The Intercept, Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand are among 43 U.S. Senators who have co-sponsored the Anti-Israel Boycott Act, a bill that the ACLU wote is "antithetical to free speech protections enshrined in the First Amendment" in a letter to lawmakers urging them to oppose the bill.

The Senate bill appears to target the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement that seeks to pressure Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip through economic isolation. Under the terms of the bill, a pair of U.S. laws that prohibit U.S. citizens from supporting a boycott request from a foreign government against an ally of the United States would be updated to specifically prohibit Americans from supporting international boycott efforts against Israel.

Violators of the law "would be subject to a minimum civil penalty of $250,000 and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison" according to the ACLU's letter.

Schumer and Gillibrand aren't New York's first Democratic politicians who've embraced #TheResistance while simultaneously attacking BDS activists. As part of Andrew Cuomo's Definitely Not Running For President efforts, the governor issued an executive order earlier this year instructing the state of New York to boycott any business that supports the BDS movement.

"If you boycott against Israel, New York will boycott you. If you divert revenues from Israel, New York will divert revenues from you. If you sanction Israel, New York will sanction you, period," Cuomo said when he signed the order.

Speaking in the Senate on French President Emmanuel Macron's support of Israel earlier this week, Senator Schumer criticized the BDS movement as anti-Semitic.

"Anti-Zionism, unfortunately, continues to bubble up in many different forms. There is perhaps no greater example than the pernicious effort to delegitimize Israel through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. The BDS movement is a deeply biased campaign that I would say, in similar words to Mr. Macron, is a 'reinvented form of anti-Semitism' because it seeks to impose boycotts on Israel and not on any other nation.

Senator Gillibrand did not respond to requests for comment about their support of the bill.
Union Square is a spot as multi-purpose as they come. The area's popular with both tourists and locals thanks to the arrival of retailers like Whole Foods, Nordstrom Rack and Forever 21, it boasts the city's most popular green market, and serves as a major transit hub. But whenever things hit the fan in this town, Union Square goes back to its roots, transforming into the epicenter for rallies, protests, and political action. Here, we've rounded up some of our favorite facts about Union Square, with some help from the Union Square Partnership and the NYC Parks Department.

1. Union Square was once a potters' field.

Like fellow Square parks Washington and Madison, back in the 18th century Union Square served as a burial ground for poor New Yorkers. By 1807, though, that patch of landlocated at the "union" of Bloomingdale Road (Broadway) and Bowery Road (4th Avenue)was incorporated into Manhattan's grid system and designated Union Place, and in 1833 it became a public park. Unlike Washington Square Park, though, there probably aren't any bodies left in Union Square, thanks to the large number of subway lines running through the area.



May Day 2017 (Scott Heins / Gothamist)

2. Union Square is a true testament to the "Tale of Two Cities."

In the mid-19th Century, as the city began to expand northward, Union Square (then Union Place) turned into one of the city's "most sedate and exclusive suburbs, inhabited by the city's wealthiest citizens," according to the area's 1997 National Historic Landmark report. Then, Broadway and Sixth Avenue played host to "Ladies' Mile," a high-end shopping strip complete with upscale retailers like Bergdorf Goodman, Lord & Taylor, and Tiffany & Co., and B. Altman; the area was also home to the first incarnation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Still, while wealth congregated around the park, once the area was declared a public space in 1831, it became a hub of political activity, including labor union rallies, Civil War rallies, and demonstrations in support in women's suffrage. In fact...



An illustration of the 1886 Workingman's Parade (A.K.A. the Labor Day Parade)(Courtesy of the New York Public Library)

3. The First Labor Day Parade was held in Union Square.

In 1882, while the trade union and labor movement quickly expanded, labor union leaders came up with the idea for a holiday honoring American workers. The first Labor Day took place on September 5th, 1882workers marched from City Hall up to Union Square, chanting and holding banners advocating for workers' rights. The demonstrations were so successful, the Central Labor Union (CLU) of New York proposed a Labor Day be held across the nation annually on the first Monday in September. The labor movement and its association with Union Square is also why May Day rallies in support of that movement are held in the area every year.

Union Square was also home to the first Earth Day celebration on April 22, 1970; speakers included Mayor John Lindsay, Paul Newman, and Ali McGraw.



(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

4. A full-sized U.S. Navy battleship hung out in Union Square for three years.

In 1917, the U.S. Navy built the U.S.S. Recruit as a publicity stunt intended to recruit more men to the Navy in the midst of World War I. "The recruitment numbers in 1916 had been a major embarrassment to the New York City mayor at the time, John Mitchel," Scot Christenson, the director of communications at the United States Naval Institute in Annapolis, Md, told the Times in April. So he realized that if he could not bring people from the middle of New York to a ship, he could bring a ship to the middle of New York.

The ship (modeled after the U.S.S. Nevada) was constructed right in the middle of Union Square, and when it was fully operational, trainee sailors from Newport Training Station swabbed the deck, did the wash, conducted drills, took instructional classes and stood guard over the ship, just like Navy sailors on non land-bound ships. The ship also hosted social events, vaudeville acts and visits by dignitaries, and served as a movie set for the film Over There. It was also used to sell Liberty Bonds.

The U.S.S. Recruit ended up bringing 25,000 recruits for the Navy, but by 1920 the war was long over, and the Navy decided to get rid of the ship. It was dismantled that year.

5. Union Square's George Washington statue is the oldest statue in the city's Parks collection. The iconic statue on the southern end of the Union Square plaza was dedicated in 1865, having been modeled by sculptor Henry Kirke Brown. The statue shows Washington on Evacuation Day in November of 1783, when Washington took NYC back from the British during the Revolutionary War. The statue served as a shrine of sorts after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Brown is also responsible for the statue of Abraham Lincoln that also stands in the park. That one was dedicated in September 1870 and is located on the north end of the plaza. The park also boasts a statue of the Marquis de Lafayette, sculpted by Statue of Liberty sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi and dedicated in September 1876; and a more recent statue of Mohandas Gandhi, sculpted by Kantilal B. Patel and dedicated in 1986. The Gandhi sculpture ended up in Union Square because of the area's history as a flashpoint for political protest.

6. The very first Sherlock Holmes movie (of sorts) was filmed in Union Square in 1900.

In 1900, director Arthur Marvin filmed Sherlock Holmes Baffled at distributor Biograph-Mutoscopes rooftop studio, located at 841 Broadway. The silent movie was the first to feature the fictional detective, who has since made quite a name for himself in film and television, though its 30-second runtime prevents some of the later deductive magic from coming through. You can watch it above.

7. Union Square was the city's first commercial theater district.

Long before the Times Square area became the center of gravity for Broadway theater, New York's the main theater district was in Union Square, from the 1860s to the 1880s. Then, the south side of the Union Square was dubbed the Rialto, playing host to The Union Square Theatre the Academy of Music opera house, and other playhouses, the along with merchants selling props, costumes, wigs, scenery, and other theater-related wares.

The area was also home to the so-called "Slave Mart," which, in the 1860s, referred to the unemployed actors who'd hang around looking for work from the casting agencies in the neighborhood. Per a Times article from 1921:

Before theatrical managers had their enterprises on a business basis by the establishment of "booking" agencies, it was, for many years, the custom to "fill time," as it was called, on the sidewalks and in the saloons of Union Square. "Dates" were made there for the appearance of companies in other cities, sharing terms were arranged, engagements of actors and actresses were effected, and for that reason, the south and east side of "The Square" came to be jocularly known as "The Slave Mart." An actor out of engagement would stand around waiting, as the saying was, to "sign up " for the next season. So soon as he had "signed up," he would convey the tidings to his associates and then would be seen mo moreuntil the next season.

Theaters started making their way uptown in the early 1900s, and in the 1920s and '30s a number of large theaters popped up in Times Square, cementing it as the city's central commercial theater district.

8. Two of Andy Warhol's Factory studios were located just off the north end of Union Square.

Warhol actually had a number of Factory studios in the city over the yearshis first was on East 47th Street, where he paid a hundred dollars a year in rent and threw wild and wonderful parties from 1962 to 1968. But from 1968 to 1984, he relocated to 33 Union Square West near East 16th Street, and then to a larger space at 860 Broadway. In 2011, the Public Art Fund commissioned artist Rob Pruitt to create an all-silver sculpture of Andy Warhol to celebrate the artist. That statue, dubbed "The Andy Monument," stood outside of 860 Broadway from March 2011 to September 2012.



Union Square Greenmarket. (Scott Lynch/Gothamist)

9. The Union Square Greenmarket is the city's longest-running farmer's market.

The Union Square Greenmarket kickstarted the city's greenmarket movement when, in 1976, urban planner Barry Benepe came up with the idea to help out Hudson Valley farmers by establishing city markets where they could sell their harvests right to urbanites. Over the years, the Greenmarket system has expanded from one market with a few farmers to over 50 markets with hundreds of farmers. Still, the Union Square Greenmarket is the flagship, boasting 140 regional farmers in peak seasons and drawing as many as 60,000 market shoppers a day.
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The percentage of available office space in Fairfield County reached a record high this year, according to recently published reports, though some analysts are confident a rebound is on the way.

The office markets 880,000 square feet of leasing activity in the second quarter represents a 15 percent year over year decline, while the availability rate rose above 27 percent, according to a second-quarter report from Newmark Knight Frank.

Yet confidence remains high that a slew of new leases will be signed throughout the rest of the year and boost an otherwise sluggish market, Newmark Knight Frank representatives told Hearst Connecticut Media. Overall, it has been quiet in relation to 2014 and 2015, when there was a great amount of leasing activity, said Karolina Alexandre, research manager at Newmark. And 2017 started more quiet when the end of 2016 saw the market underperform a little, too. But theres a lot activity in pipeline that will materialize by end of year.

Lease renewals comprised the majority of the good news in the countys office market, with several renewals ranking as the markets top deals made so far this year, according to the Newmark report. It stated that new leases declined by more than 23 percent in the first half of 2017 while the total amount of square footage in lease renewals doubled from the amount renewed in the first half of 2016.

Notable renewals included Prudential Annuities Life Insurance Corp.s 200,000-square-foot deal in Shelton and Blue Sky Studios decision to stay at 1 American Lane, located on the outskirts of Greenwich, until at least 2025. The animation studio houses roughly 500 employees in more than 140,000 square feet of class-A office space in Greenwich, which ranked as a top-performing market across Fairfield County in the second quarter.

Greenwichs availability rate fell 150 basis points quarter over quarter to 22.4 percent, and asking lease rates climbed 3.3 percent from last quarter to $65.73 per square foot, according to a market report published by Colliers International Group.

Compared to other markets, Greenwich saw the largest drop in overall vacancy levels within the last year as it fell to approximately 17 percent, according to Cushman & Wakefields report.

Countywide, the numbers tell a less favorable story. Supply continues to outpace demand, as the overall vacancy rate increased from one year ago to 23.2 percent, the Cushman report said.

Nearly half of the countys new leases were inked for Stamford offices. Significant deals included Daymon Worldwide, which has its headquarters in Stamford, expanding into another 45,000 square feet on Ludlow Street, PartnerRe leasing roughly 60,000 square feet in First Stamford Place and search giant Indeeds decision to grow its Connecticut presence amid much fanfare with another 31,000 square feet of offices on Broad Street, according to Cushman and Wakefield.

Meanwhile, Newmark described the office markets in Danbury and Norwalk as lethargic, with Danbury seeing an 86 percent drop in leasing activity in the first half of 2017. Leasing in Norwalk dropped by almost 68 percent when compared to this time last year.

Overall, Fairfield County continued to struggle with negative absorption through the first half of 2017, despite pockets of improvements in some submarkets during the second quarter, according to Newmark.

Large blocks of offices hitting the market, including Sun Products 83,000 square feet of subleased space in Wilton and Glencores 54,000 square feet of offices at Stamford Plaza, contributed to a net occupancy loss of nearly 150,000 square feet, Newmarks report said.

Looking to the rest of the year, good news is surely ahead, Newmark executive managing director Greg Frisoli said. It feels like the worst is behind us, he said. With some of the new announcements we expect to hear, those will have a positive impact.

Chris Bosak, Keila Torres Ocasio, Paul Schott and Alexander Soule contributed to this article.

Contact the writer at mbennett@greenwichtime.com; Twitter @Macaela_
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This summer, catch a movie under the stars.

Several area communities are making the most of the summer weather with outdoor movie nights. Movie-goers are advised to bring blankets, chairs and snacks. The films are generally scheduled to begin at dusk.

The Mill River Park Collaborative in Stamford is hosting Sci-Fi Movies in the Park on select Friday nights, as well as an Animation Celebration Movie Series on select Saturday nights in July and August. "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" and "Moana" are among the movies scheduled to be screened.

Some local beaches are also featuring outdoor movies. In Norwalk, the city's family movie series is held on Saturday nights through August 19 at Shady Beach/Calf Pasture Beach.

For a taste of nostalgia, head to the Southington Drive-In. While the outdoor movie theater is a bit of a drive, it's one of only three of its kind left in Connecticut.

According to the theater's website, films scheduled on Saturday nights through September 2 including "Dirty Dancing," "The Goonies," and "The Trolls." The cost is $15 per carload for non-residents.

Films are screened at the Pleasant Valley Drive-In in Barkhamsted Thursday through Sunday nights. The Mansfield Drive-In in Mansfield Center is the state's other remaining drive-in movie theater.

Click through the slideshow above for a look a more outdoor movies scheduled across the area.
BROOKFIELD  The town has been granted a four-year moratorium on enforcement of a state statute that allows developers to bypass zoning laws if they build affordable housing.

The Department of Housing announced that Brookfield will be the 10th community to have qualified for a moratorium on the law, known as 8-30g. The law was originally passed to encourage the development of affordable housing.

First Selectman Steve Dunn said he was thrilled the towns application was accepted.

This is really good news for the town, he said. It allows us to take back control of development of the town.

The 8-30g law allows developers to move ahead with projects regardless of a towns zoning laws, with certain exceptions, if they pledge to set aside a certain percentage of units for affordable housing. The town already has gone through one such case, when a developer proposed a six-story housing complex in the Town Center.

That's just wrong, Dunn said. The town should have some say in how the town is developed. That is part of a core right of the town.

The town and the developer eventually compromised on that proposal, which is going forward in modified form.

Betsy Paynter, Brookfields economic and community development manager, said many affordable and incentive housing complexes have already been approved. The moratorium allows the town to better manage its growth, she said.

We need to absorb everything that has been approved and get filled up, Paynter said. We don't want to have empty buildings.

To qualify for the moratorium, the town had to show that 2 percent of its housing stock already is considered affordable.

What the granting of the moratorium shows is the town has made significant strides in making more affordable housing available in Brookfield, Dunn said.

But the moratorium will not stop a proposed 112-unit, eight-building affordable housing complex at 468 Federal Road. The application, which the Inland Wetlands Commission is reviewing, was filed before the moratorium goes into effect.

Dunn said the housing on the 10.6-acre property would be too dense and could have limited access for the fire department.

Its just too much on a small piece of property, he said.

Residents on Greenknoll Drive would also look down onto the buildings.

I'm not sure anyone on Greenknoll Drive thought they would have a [112]-unit development in their back yard, Dunn said. If they scale this down, if they make it acceptable to the town, obviously we support it, but right now we don't.

Brookfield is the third town, alongside Darien and New Canaan, to receive moratoriums this year and will be the sixth town with an active moratorium.

What this demonstrates is that the goals set forth under the affordable housing appeals act are being achieved, Department of Housing Commissioner Evonne M. Klein said in a statement. Time and time again municipalities of all sizes have demonstrated that they are capable of building quality, affordable housing.

I applaud Brookfield for reaching this threshold and hope that all of Connecticuts cities and towns will continue working to increase their stock of affordable housing, she continued. Meeting the diverse needs of our residentsthrough the development of quality, affordable housing sparks economic development, helps grow local grand lists, and contributes to the overall vibrancy of our cities and towns.

Dunn said the moratorium does not mean the town is against affordable housing.

I want people who are low-income and middle-income to be able to live in our town, but [8-30g] is not the way to achieve that, he said.
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A coalition of elected leaders including Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton and Ridgefield First Selectman Rudy Marconi is exploring a joint lawsuit to hold the pharmaceutical industry liable for the opioid overdose crisis in Connecticut.

In some cases these companies are part of the problem, Boughton said. We know that many times companies out there will push their products in a competition to get them into the marketplace, and as a result, people are becoming addicted.

The effort initiated by Waterbury Mayor Neil OLeary has not reached the level in other states such as Oklahoma, Missouri and Ohio, where officials have sued manufacturers of opioid pain medications, charging the drugmakers marketing practices have led to an epidemic of addiction and overdose deaths.

Connecticut mayors are just starting to explore whether a coordinated lawsuit could make a difference in a drug crisis that killed 900 people in Connecticut last year  more than all those who died in homicides, suicides and car accidents combined.

People might say Why a lawsuit? Why not put more cops on the street? But this is a problem thats bigger than we are, said Marconi, the chairman of the Opioid Abuse Task Force for a statewide association of towns and cities known as the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities. We are losing people each and every day.

The next step is for the elected leaders to meet with a law firm representing state officials in New York against the pharmaceutical industry. The law firm helped win a $630 million payment from Stamford-based Purdue Pharma and its executives in 2007 for misrepresenting the addiction risks of OxyContin. Purdue settled with Washington and other states that claimed the company aggressively marketed OxyContin to doctors while downplaying the addiction risks, the Associated Press reported.

The formation of the coalition follows news last month that Attorney General George Jepsen had joined his colleagues in other states in an investigation to evaluate whether pharmaceutical manufacturers have engaged in unlawful practices in the marketing and sale of prescription opioids.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said opioid-related deaths nationwide quadrupled to 33,000 from 1999 to 2015.

Connecticuts association of cities and towns said it supports the lawsuit initiative.

Any time our municipal leaders want to take a real leadership role on a topic that that deeply impacts their community, we are going to be supportive of their effort, said Joe DeLong, executive director of CCM. These mayors are dealing with it right on the front lines.

A spokeswoman from the trade association, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, declined to comment on Tuesday.

The opioid lawsuit initiative in Connecticut follows a lawsuit brought by Boughton and other urban leaders to get their fair share of state education aid. That coalition won a partial victory in court last year when a judge ruled the states education funding formula was irrational and unconstitutional. The state is appealing the decision.

Marconi said the opioid lawsuit discussion has been brewing for the last year, particularly in Waterbury.

In speaking with Neil, he has been dealing with a tremendous issue in Waterbury, Marconi said of the citys mayor.

He would tell me I am losing people just about every weekend, and something has to be done, Marconi said. So out of out of frustration for city I know he loves, and seeing people die on a regular basis, he said Okay, lets try this.

rryser@newstimes.com; 203-731-3342
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REDDING  Mary Anne Guitar, a political pioneer who mentored several generations of politicians and help found the towns Land Trust, died Tuesday at 95.

Guitar served as first selectman from 1977 to 1989, making her the first woman to hold the job and one of the first in Fairfield County, but that was only part of the reason she became influential and respected.

No cause was too small or too large for her, said U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who knew Guitar for four decades. She was really a conscience for us in public life. She was a backbone of conviction when needed.

Blumenthal said Guitar backed him at critical moments, including his campaigns for attorney general and U.S. Senate. He often spoke to her on the phone or stopped to see her when he came through Redding. He was one of many friends who attended her 90th birthday party at New Pond Farm.

She was such a force for good, he said. Her spirit was enlivening and energizing.

First Selectman Julia Pemberton said Guitar was one of two women who influenced her the most in town  the other being former Selectman Tina Miller  and someone she often turned to as a mentor.

I will miss being able to walk up Redding Road and chat with Mary Anne, Pemberton said.

More Information Career highlights Redding's first female First Selectman, serving from 1977 to 1989 Co-founded the Redding Land Trust Instrumental in stopping the Super 7 project See More Collapse

She described Guitar as a master politician focused on the public good.

She never backed down from a fight, Pemberton said.

Victor DeMasi remembers that tenacity from the successful effort to stop the Super 7 highway from passing through Redding.

She was rough around the edges but a dedicated conservationist, he said. She was a great person. I hold her in the highest regard."

Guitar was someone you wanted in your corner, he said.

She sure was a fighter when you got in the trenches," DeMasi said.

Guitar was born Jan. 27, 1922, in St. Joseph, Mo. She graduated from Smith College in 1943, where she was a classmate of Nancy Reagan. After graduating, she worked as a freelance writer in New York City. She bought a weekend home in Redding in 1956 and moved to town full-time about a decade later

She was elected to the Board of Selectmen in 1969 and remained a member until 1975, when she became chairman of the state Siting Commission. In 1979, she ran for first selectman and won, holding the post for 12 years. She went to the Board of Finance in 1989 and served until 2005.

Among Guitars greatest legacies is her work to preserve open space. She helped found the Redding Land Trust in 1965 and served as president for years.

The reason Redding is the way it is today is largely due to Mary Anne Guitar, Pemberton said. She left Redding far better off than she found it and protected it for future generations.

In a video made for this years annual meeting of the Land Trust, Guitar described the daily trips she would make as a child with her dog, Spotty, to see wildflowers bloom and scout for tadpoles, adding that she hoped Reddings youth would get to have similar experiences. To her, it was important to feel the frog.

She said working with the trust was the best 50 years of my life. I found something that resonated with what I grew up with.

Jane Ross, the trusts secretary, said the 1,600-plus acres now protected by the trust were saved because of Guitars leadership. She said Guitar was always thinking about the next generation.

She identified civic-minded young women in the community and not only encouraged them to join in activities but would use her positions of power to make them board members and directors of community enterprises such as the Redding Land Trust, New Pond Farm, the Mark Twain Library and the Democratic Town Committee, Ross said. She was always committed to engaging coming generations so that they could carry on her causes of conservation and good government.
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When youre best known for successfully prosecuting former Gov. John Rowland for campaign fraud, you can least afford to be perceived as playing fast and loose with political purse strings.

So when Democrat gubernatorial hopeful Chris Mattei reimbursed a junior-level aide last month for a $94.02 ticket using political contributions, it stupefied friends and foes alike. The expenditure was listed on page 288 of Matteis 318-page finance report that his exploratory committee recently filed with the state Elections Enforcement Commission.

State law doesnt explicitly say political funds cant be used to pay tickets, but it does say they cannot be used for personal use.

Now Mattei is making the staffer, identified as Connor Yakaitis, pay back his exploratory committee for the ticket.

A campaign worker received a ticket in the course of his duties and the campaign covered the expense and reported it, said Julie Edwards, a spokeswoman for Mattei. In retrospect, it should have been paid personally by the staffer and he will reimburse the campaign.

Mattei raised $118,343 and spent $64,306 testing the waters for the states highest office during the past three months. Previously in charge of the public corruption unit in the U.S. attorneys office for Connecticut, Mattei has never run for public office before.

Given anybodys background thats in the public arena, they should know thats a personal situation and it should be handled personally, said Mark Lauretti, a Republican gubernatorial candidate and Shelton mayor. I wouldnt think of (doing) that.

Tip of the Cap

Hes the first and last read of the day for many Connecticut influencers: Tom Dudchik.

The creator of the popular news aggregation site ctcapitolreport.com has been known to have politicians beg him to change a gotcha headline, placement of stories or unflattering photographs  old images can come back to haunt.

Now the former Lowell Weicker Jr. deputy chief of staff and one-time Ansonia state legislator has another platform to go along with his 10 million annual clicks  the Sunday morning political talk show circuit.

Dudchiks Emmy-winning Capitol Report program returned Sunday to WTNH Channel 8, the New Haven ABC affiliate, after a three-year hiatus. The 30-minute roundtable, which airs weekly at 10 a.m., was previously on FOX 61.

The shows inaugural panel was made up of Roy Occhiogrosso, the longtime political adviser to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy; Brookfields Jennifer Schneider, a spokeswoman for SEIU 1199, New England, which represents 28,000 health care workers in Connecticut and Rhode Island; Liz Kurantowicz, a former chief of staff for the Connecticut GOP and political consultant from Fairfield; and Jodi Latina, chief of staff to New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart.

A right to bare arms

Rosa DeLauro has a style all her own  from jackets that look like the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat to lattice glasses.

The 14-term congresswoman from New Haven isnt afraid to push the fashion envelope with her wardrobe.

But DeLauros latest sartorial statement is about what shes not wearing  sleeves.

On Friday, the Democrat was photographed on the steps of the U.S. Capitol with 25 sleeveless congresswomen to protest the House dress code, which requires shoulders to be covered. The move comes as House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., considers changes to the dress code, for which he was criticized after several sleeveless female reporters were recently denied access to the speakers lobby.

Twitter: @gettinviggy; nvigdor@hearstmediact.com; 203-625-4436
DANBURY  Police have confirmed David Patton, of Danbury, died as a result of a Monday car accident on Interstate 84 in New York.

According to police, the accident occurred near exit 20 in Southeast on Monday around imately 12:42 p.m. when a Volvo driven by Nancy Scott, 64, of Carmel, N.Y., failed to slow for traffic near at the exit ramp. Scott slammed into the rear end of a Toyota Avalon, which caused a chain reaction involving four cars and a tractor trailer.
Contributed Photo / Hearst Connecticut Media

Joshua Smith will remain the New Milford Superintendent of Schools, following a unanimous approval of the proposed three-year contract at Tuesdays Board of Education meeting.

Smith just finished his first full year in the position, after holding the position on an interim basis for several months following the former Superintendent JeanAnn Paddyfotes retirement on Jan. 31, 2016.
Continued Progress on Trans Mountain Expansion Project

CALGARY, July 19, 2017 /CNW/ - The Kinder Morgan Canada Limited (TSX: KML) board of directors has declared a prorated dividend for the second quarter of $0.0571 per restricted voting share, payable on August 15, 2017, to restricted voting shareholders of record as of July 31, 2017. The initial dividend represents the dividend payable for the period between May 30, 2017, the day KML closed its initial public offering (Offering) and the end of the quarter. On a full quarter basis, this dividend amounts to $0.1625 per restricted voting share (or $0.65 per restricted voting share on an annualized basis).

"KML President Ian Anderson and his team are making good progress on our flagship Trans Mountain Expansion Project," said KML Board Chairman and CEO Steve Kean. "This project is secured by long-term commitments that were reaffirmed in the first quarter of this year reflecting 2017 oil sands conditions."

"We are on track to begin construction in September and expect to have the project in service at the end of 2019," said KML President Ian Anderson. "We look forward to continuing to work with the provincial government in British Columbia to complete this project, which is critically important to Canada, providing jobs, opportunities and much needed market access."

"We have made significant progress including finalizing of substantial agreements in preparation for construction. We are also moving forward with our commitments to local communities and to Indigenous peoples through our Mutual Benefits Agreements," added Anderson.

For 2017, KML expects to generate Adjusted EBITDA of just under $400 million, distributable cash flow (DCF) of approximately $320 million, and declare a prorated dividend of $0.3821 per restricted voting share (or $0.65 per restricted voting share on an annualized basis). Additionally, from a total project cost of $7.4 billion, which includes capitalized financing costs and capital spent to date, the Trans Mountain Expansion Project has remaining estimated cash spend to completion of approximately $6.1 billion as of the end of the second quarter.

"Overall, we had a good second quarter as KML demonstrated the resiliency of its cash flows, generated by a diversified portfolio of fee-based assets," said Kean. KML reported second quarter net income of $25.1 million, down from the second quarter of 2016, driven by intercompany FX as discussed below. KML also reported total DCF of $79.4 million versus $85.6 million for the comparable period in 2016. The decrease in DCF for the quarter was primarily attributable to lower contributions from the Pipelines segment driven by higher operating costs on the Canadian portion of the Cochin system resulting from integrity work accelerated into the first half of the year, as well as lower throughput on the Puget Sound Pipeline system. Net income was also impacted by a foreign exchange (FX) loss in the quarter of $16 million versus an FX gain of $5.8 million in the second quarter of 2016. These FX items were largely the result of the impact of currency fluctuations on intercompany loans with Kinder Morgan, Inc. (KMI), the principal amounts of which were settled during the quarter.

In the 32 days following the completion of the Offering, KML generated earnings per restricted voting share for the quarter of $0.11, and produced DCF of $8.5 million per restricted voting share relative to our declared $0.0571 per restricted voting share dividend, resulting in $2.6 million of excess DCF above the company's dividend.

Overview of Business Segments

"The Pipelines segment's performance for the second quarter of 2017 was 17 percent lower than the same period during 2016. The largest driver was that, while the Cochin Pipeline saw increased volumes, the system had greater integrity work expense compared to the same period in 2016. KML expects Cochin integrity expense to be lower than plan for the remainder of 2017 given the work completed in the first two quarters. For the Trans Mountain Pipeline, contributions were down due to operating expense and a 21 percent decrease in volumes to Washington state as shippers chose British Columbia destinations," said Anderson.

"The Terminals segment experienced strong performance at its Edmonton Area terminals, which benefited from record volume and rail car loading activity. Across the Edmonton Area tank storage and rail facilities, volume for the quarter was up almost 12 million barrels, or 70 percent versus the second quarter of 2016, driven by increased demand for our product takeaway capabilities and optionality," noted John Schlosser, KML Terminals President. "While the take or pay nature of our contracts largely insulates KML from short-term volume fluctuations, the high degree of utilization of these assets is a testament to their importance."

The segment's Vancouver Wharves terminal benefited from enhancements made to its agricultural product handling system to accommodate growing export demand, with agricultural product volume for the quarter up nearly 244,000 metric tonnes, or 123 percent compared to the second quarter of 2016. Facility earnings for the quarter were offset by elevated maintenance and other operating costs.

Other News

KML Corporate

On May 30, 2017, KML's Offering consisted of 102,942,000 restricted voting shares of KML at a price to the public of $17.00 per restricted voting share for total gross proceeds of approximately $1.75 billion. The proceeds of the Offering were used by KML to indirectly acquire from KMI an approximate 30 percent interest in a limited partnership that holds the Canadian business of KMI with KMI retaining the remaining 70 percent interest.

KML also announced the election of three independent members to its board of directors - Daniel P.E. Fournier, former barrister and solicitor with Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP, Gordon M. Ritchie, retired Vice Chairman of RBC Capital Markets and Brooke N. Wade, President of Wade Capital Corporation. "I am delighted that Daniel, Gordon and Brooke have agreed to join the KML board," Kean said. "They bring a wealth of experience, knowledge and dedication that will aid us in continuing our growth and successful completion of the Trans Mountain Expansion Project."

KML has established a dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP) available to Canadian KML shareholders. This program will entitle holders enrolled in the plan by August 1, 2017, to reinvest their dividends payable on August 15, 2017, in additional KML shares. Enrolled shareholders' dividends will be used to purchase additional shares at a 3 percent discount to the average trading price for the five trading days immediately preceding the dividend payment date. For more information, KML shareholders should contact their brokers. Additional information can be found under "Investor Materials" on the KML website (www.kindermorgancanadalimited.com).

KML's declared dividends for the second quarter of 2017 are designated "eligible dividends" for Canadian income tax purposes according to section 89 of the Income Tax Act (Canada).

Pipelines

Since receiving Government of Canada approval in 2016, KML has been moving forward with the regulatory, commercial and construction planning aspects of the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, achieving significant positive progress. Construction is set to begin in September of 2017, and the project is expected to be in service at the end of 2019. In the first quarter, the project successfully completed a final cost review with its shippers and a supplemental open season. All available long-term firm service capacity remains contracted on the pipeline with a diverse group of 13 customers.

"The conclusion of these steps demonstrates continued strong market support for the project and the much-needed access to new markets it will bring to Canadian producers, as well as providing a secure supply of Canadian crude to refineries throughout the Pacific basin," said Anderson. Collectively, the firm shippers have made 15- and 20-year commitments of 707,500 barrels per day, or approximately 80 percent of the capacity on the expanded pipeline, with the remaining 20 percent reserved for spot volumes as required by the National Energy Board.

Terminals

Construction continues at KML's and Keyera's Base Line Terminal, a 50-50 joint venture crude oil merchant storage terminal being developed in Edmonton, Alberta. The 12-tank, 4.8 million barrel new-build facility is fully contracted with long-term, firm take-or-pay agreements with strong, creditworthy customers. KML's investment in the joint venture terminal is approximately $366 million. Commissioning is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2018 with tanks phased into service throughout that year. The facility is projected to be on schedule and on budget.

Financing

On June 16, 2017, indirectly through its affiliates, KML entered into definitive agreements establishing a $4.0 billion revolving construction credit facility for the purpose of funding the development, construction and completion of the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, a $1.0 billion revolving contingent credit facility for the purpose of funding, if necessary, additional Trans Mountain Expansion Project costs (and, subject to the need to fund such additional costs, meeting NEB-mandated liquidity requirements) and a $500 million revolving working capital facility, which is available for general corporate purposes, including working capital.

The credit facilities have a term of five years and are guaranteed by KML, Kinder Morgan Canada Limited Partnership and other operating entities comprising KML's business. The credit facilities provide for customary positive and negative covenants, including limitations on liens, dispositions, amalgamations, liquidations and dissolutions. For a summary of the material terms of the credit facilities, see "Description of Indebtedness - Credit Facility" in KML's long form prospectus dated May 25, 2017. A copy of the credit agreement associated with the credit facilities is available under KML's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com .

Kinder Morgan Canada Limited (TSX: KML) is responsible for and is the holder of a 30 percent interest in a portfolio of strategic energy infrastructure assets across Western Canada. The financial results of the entire suite of assets held by Kinder Morgan Canada Limited Partnership (Business) have been consolidated into the financial results of KML. KML investors are reminded that KMI holds a majority 70 percent voting interest in KML and a corresponding majority 70 percent economic interest in the entirety of the business contributing to financial results discussed in this new release. Therefore, unless the context otherwise requires, references to KML in this news release are references to the Business in which the holders of restricted voting shares of KML have a 30 percent interest. The Trans Mountain Pipeline system, with connections to 20 incoming pipelines and current transportation capacity of approximately 300,000 barrels per day (based on throughput of 80 percent light oil and refined products and 20 percent heavy oil), is the only Canadian crude oil and refined products export pipeline with North American West Coast tidewater access (specifically, British Columbia and Washington State). In Alberta, KML has one of the largest integrated networks of crude tank storage and rail terminals in Western Canada and the largest merchant terminal storage facility in the Edmonton market. KML also operates the largest origination crude by rail loading facility in North America. In British Columbia, KML controls the largest mineral concentrate export/import facility on the west coast of North America through its Vancouver Wharves Terminal. Through its Puget Sound pipeline system, KML ships crude oil to refineries in Washington state and its Cochin Pipeline system transports light condensate originating from the United States to Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta. For more information please visit www.kindermorgancanadalimited.com

Please join KMI and KML at 4:30 p.m Eastern Time on Wednesday, July 19, 2017, at www.kindermorgan.com for a LIVE webcast conference call which will include a discussion of KML's second quarter earnings.

Non-GAAP Financial Measures

KML's financial information has been prepared in accordance with United States generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). In addition to using measures prescribed by GAAP, this news release includes references to DCF (both in the aggregate and per share), net income before interest expense, taxes, DD&A and adjusted for Certain Items (Adjusted EBITDA), segment earnings before depreciation, depletion, and amortization (DD&A) and Certain Items (Segment EBDA before Certain Items) and Adjusted Earnings which are financial measures that do not have any standardized meaning as prescribed by GAAP (non-GAAP measures). DCF, Adjusted EBITDA, Segment EBDA before Certain Items and Adjusted Earnings should not be considered alternatives to GAAP net cash provided by operating activities, net income or Segment EBDA, respectively, computed under GAAP or any other GAAP measures and such non-GAAP measures have important limitations as analytical tools. The computations of DCF, Adjusted EBITDA, Segment EBDA before Certain Items and Adjusted Earnings may differ from similarly titled measures used by others. Accordingly the use of such terms may not be comparable to similarly defined measures presented by other entities and investors should not consider these non-GAAP measures in isolation or as a substitute for an analysis of results reported under GAAP. Management compensates for the limitations of these non-GAAP measures by reviewing our comparable GAAP measures, understanding the differences between the measures and taking this information into account in its analysis and its decision-making processes.

Certain Items are items that are required by GAAP to be reflected in net income, but typically either (i) do not have a cash impact (for example, unrealized and realized foreign exchange gains and losses related to the KMI loans and asset impairments), or (ii) by their nature are separately identifiable from our normal business operations and in our view are likely to occur only sporadically (for example certain legal settlements and casualty losses).

DCF is net income before DD&A adjusted for (i) income tax expense and cash income taxes (paid) refunded; (ii) sustaining capital expenditures; and (iii) Certain Items. Distributable cash flow is an important performance measure used by us and by external users of our financial statements to evaluate our performance and to measure and estimate our ability to generate cash earnings after servicing our debt, paying cash taxes and expending sustaining capital, that could be used for discretionary purposes such as distributions or expansion capital expenditures. KML uses this performance measure and believes it provides users of its financial statements a useful performance measure reflective of our ability to generate cash earnings to supplement the comparable GAAP measure. DCF should not be used as an alternative to net cash provided by operating activities computed under GAAP. We believe the GAAP measure most directly comparable to distributable cash flow is net income.

Segment EBDA before Certain Items is used by management in its analysis of segment performance and management of our business. The Company believes that Segment EBDA before certain items is a useful measure of the operating performance because it measures segment operating results before DD&A and certain expenses that are generally not controllable by the operating managers of the respective business segments, such as general and administrative expense, unrealized and realized foreign exchange losses (or gains) on long-term debt-affiliates, interest expense, and income tax expense. General and administrative expenses include such items as employee benefits, insurance, rentals, certain litigation expenses, and shared corporate services including accounting, information technology, human resources and legal services. Certain general and administrative costs attributable to Trans Mountain are billable as flow through items to shippers and result in incremental revenues. Segment EBDA before certain items is calculated by adjusting Segment EBDA for the certain items attributable to a segment, as applicable, which are specifically identified in the footnotes to the accompanying tables. KML did not have any certain items that affected the segments for the period discussed in this release.

Adjusted EBITDA is used as a liquidity measure by the Company and external users of its financial statements, in conjunction with net debt, to evaluate certain leverage metrics. ''Adjusted EBITDA'' is EBITDA adjusted for Certain Items, as applicable. We believe the GAAP measure most directly comparable to Adjusted EBITDA is net income. The accompanying tables do not include a reconciliation of forecasted net income to forecasted Adjusted EBITDA. The Company evaluates adjusted EBTIDA in total and does not allocate Adjusted EBITDA amongst equity interest holders as it views Adjusted EBITDA as a liquidity measure against the Company's overall leverage.

Adjusted Earnings is used by certain external users of our financial statements to assess the earnings of our business excluding Certain Items as another reflection of our ability to generate earnings. We believe the GAAP measure most directly comparable to Adjusted Earnings is net income.

Reconciliations of each of the foregoing non-GAAP measures have been provided in the financial tables set out below.

Important Information Relating to Forward-Looking Statements

This news release includes "forward-looking information," "financial outlook," and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities laws (forward-looking statements). Forward-looking statements in this news release include statements, express or implied, concerning, without limitation: the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, and Base Line Terminal project, including completion of such projects, anticipated costs, scheduling and in-service dates, future benefits and utilization, anticipated project returns and the impacts of such projects; KML's anticipated 2017 Adjusted EBITDA and DCF; and anticipated dividends and the intended payment thereof. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance. They involve significant risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Any financial outlook or other forward-looking statements provided in this news release have been included for the purpose of providing information relating to management's current expectations and plans for the future, are based on a number of significant assumptions and may not be appropriate, and should not be used, for any other purpose. Future actions, conditions or events and future results of operations may differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements. Many of the factors that will determine these results, including the ability of KML to pay dividends, are beyond the ability of KML to control or predict. As noted above, the forward-looking statements included in this release are based on a number of material assumptions, including among others those highlighted, or inherent in the factors highlighted, below. Among other things, specific factors that could cause actual results to differ from those indicated in the forward-looking statements provided in this news release include, without limitation: issues, delays or stoppages associated with major expansion projects, including the Trans Mountain Expansion Project; changes in public opinion, public opposition, the resolution of issues relating to the concerns of individuals, special interest or Aboriginal groups, governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations and other third parties that may expose the Business to higher project or operating costs, project delays or even project cancellations; significant unanticipated cost overruns or required capital expenditures; the breakdown or failure of equipment, pipelines and facilities, releases or spills, operational disruptions or service interruptions; the ability of KML and/or the Business to access sufficient external sources of financing, and the cost of such financing; and changes in governmental support and the regulatory environment.

The foregoing list should not be construed to be exhaustive. In addition to the foregoing, important additional information respecting the material assumptions, expectations and risks applicable to the financial outlook and other forward-looking statements included in this news release are set out in KML's final initial public offering prospectus dated May 25, 2017, copies of which are available under KML's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com, under the headings "Notice to Investors - Forward-Looking Statements," "Notice to Investors - Growth Estimates" and "Risk Factors," and prospective investors are urged to review and carefully consider such information prior to making any investment decision in respect of KML's restricted voting shares. The risk factors applicable to KML could cause actual results to vary materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements. KML disclaims any obligation, other than as required by applicable law, to update the forward-looking statements included in this release.



Kinder Morgan Canada Limited and Subsidiaries

Preliminary Consolidated Statements of Income

(Unaudited)

(In millions of Canadian dollars, except per share amounts)

















Three Months Ended

June 30,





Six Months Ended

June 30,





2017

2016





2017

2016



Revenues $ 168.7

$ 165.8





$ 333.2

$ 332.4



Costs, expenses and other























Operations and maintenance 55.9

43.8





104.9

90.3





Depreciation, depletion and amortization 35.6

34.1





70.4

68.2





General and administrative 16.3

14.4





34.3

30.2





Taxes, other than income taxes 9.8

10.1





19.6

20.1





Other expense, net 0.4







2.2







118.0

102.4





231.4

208.8



























Operating income 50.7

63.4





101.8

123.6



























Other income (expense)























Interest, net (2.9)

(7.3)





(9.6)

(15.9)





Foreign exchange (loss) gain (16.0)

5.8





(5.1)

76.3





Other, net 6.8

4.3





12.5

8.3



























Income before income taxes 38.6

66.2





99.6

192.3



























Income tax expense (13.5)

(14.5)





(27.7)

(28.6)



























Net income 25.1

51.7





71.9

163.7



























Net income attributable to KMI interests (20.9)

(51.7)





(67.7)

(163.7)



























Net income available to restricted voting stockholders $ 4.2

$ 





$ 4.2

$ 



























Restricted Voting Shares























Basic and diluted earnings per restricted voting share $ 0.11









$ 0.11

































Basic and diluted weighted average restricted voting shares outstanding 38.8









38.8























































Declared dividend per restricted voting share $ 0.0571









$ 0.0571































Segment EBDA







%

change









%

change

Pipelines $ 54.2

$ 65.1

(17)%

$ 110.5

$ 126.1

(12)%

Terminals 52.3

51.5

2%

106.4

110.6

(4)% Total Segment EBDA $ 106.5

$ 116.6

(9)%

$ 216.9

$ 236.7

(8)%

Kinder Morgan Canada Limited and Subsidiaries

Preliminary Earnings Contribution by Business Segment

(Unaudited)

(In millions of Canadian dollars, except per share amounts)

















Three Months Ended

June 30,





Six Months Ended

June 30,





2017

2016

% change

2017

2016

% change Segment EBDA before certain items





















Pipelines $ 54.2

$ 65.1

(17)%

$ 110.5

$ 126.1

(12)% Terminals 52.3

51.5

2%

106.4

110.6

(4)%

Subtotal 106.5

116.6

(9)%

216.9

236.7

(8)%























DD&A (35.6)

(34.1)





(70.4)

(68.2)



General and administrative (1) (15.0)

(14.4)





(31.8)

(30.2)



Interest, net (2) (2.9)

(7.3)





(9.6)

(15.9)





Subtotal 53.0

60.8





105.1

122.4



























Book taxes (1) (17.4)

(14.5)





(29.2)

(28.6)



Net Income before Certain Items ("Adjusted Earnings") 35.6

46.3





75.9

93.8



























Certain items























Foreign exchange (loss) gain on the KMI Loans (3) (13.1)

5.4





(3.0)

69.9





Other (1.3)







(2.5)









Subtotal certain items before tax (14.4)

5.4





(5.5)

69.9



Book tax certain items 3.9







1.5







Total certain items (10.5)

5.4





(4.0)

69.9



Net income 25.1

51.7





71.9

163.7



Net income attributable to KMI interest (20.9)

(51.7)





(67.7)

(163.7)



Net income available to restricted voting stockholders $ 4.2

$ 





$ 4.2

$ 



























Net income $ 25.1

$ 51.7





$ 71.9

$ 163.7



Total certain items 10.5

(5.4)





4.0

(69.9)



Adjusted earnings 35.6

46.3





75.9

93.8



DD&A 35.6

34.1





70.4

68.2



Total book taxes 17.4

14.5





29.2

28.6



Cash taxes (0.1)

0.1





(0.3)

(1.2)



Sustaining capital expenditures (9.1)

(9.4)





(12.4)

(15.6)



DCF (4) 79.4

$ 85.6





162.8

$ 173.8



DCF to KMI interest (70.9)







(154.3)





U.S. cash taxes attributable to restricted voting stockholders 













DCF to restricted voting stockholders $ 8.5







$ 8.5

























Weighted average restricted voting shares outstanding for dividends (5) 102.9







102.9

























DCF per restricted voting share (6) $ 0.083







$ 0.083





Declared dividend per restricted voting share $ 0.0571







$ 0.0571

























Adjusted EBITDA (7) $ 91.5

$ 102.2





$ 185.1

$ 206.5





Notes (In millions of Canadian dollars) (1) Excludes certain items:

2Q 2017 - General and administrative $(1.3), book tax $3.9.

YTD 2017 - General and administrative $(2.5), book tax $1.5 (2) For the periods prior to our May 30, 2017 initial public offering, amounts primarily represented interest expense on our KMI loans. The principal on the KMI loans was settled with proceeds from our initial public offering. (3) Primarily represents foreign currency (losses) gains on U.S. dollar denominated loans outstanding to KMI. The principal on the KMI loans was settled with proceeds from KML's initial public offering. (4) Included capitalized equity financing costs of:

2Q 2017 - $6.3

2Q 2016 - $4.3

YTD 2017 - $11.8

YTD 2016 - $8.2 (5) The weighted average restricted voting shares outstanding for dividends calculation is based on the actual days in which the shares were outstanding for the period from May 30, 2017 to June 30, 2017, which differs from the GAAP weighted average restricted voting shares outstanding from the date of our formation. (6) Represents DCF per restricted voting share, including capitalized equity financing costs of $0.7 million, for the period from the May 30, 2017 initial public offering through June 30, 2017. If KML had been a public company for the entire three and six month periods ended June 30, 2017, DCF per the combined 345 million of restricted and special voting shares would have been $0.23 and $0.47, respectively. (7) Adjusted EBITDA is net income before certain items, plus DD&A, book taxes, and interest expense (before certain items). Net income to Adjusted EBITDA is reconciled as follows, with any difference due to rounding:

Reconciliation of Net Income to Adjusted EBITDA Three Months

Ended June 30,





Six Months Ended

June 30,





2017

2016





2017

2016



Net income $ 25.1

$ 51.7





$ 71.9

$ 163.7



Total certain items 10.5

(5.4)





4.0

(69.9)



DD&A 35.6

34.1





70.4

68.2



Book taxes 17.4

14.5





29.2

28.6



Interest, net 2.9

7.3





9.6

15.9





Adjusted EBITDA $ 91.5

$ 102.2





$ 185.1

$ 206.5





Volume Highlights

(Historical pro forma for acquired assets)



Three Months Ended

June 30,

Six Months Ended

June 30,

2017

2016

2017

2016















Pipelines















Trans Mountain (MMBbls - mainline throughput) 27.5

28.7

55.1

57.3

Puget Sound (MMBbls - mainline throughput) 15.3

19.3

29.5

36.6

Canadian Cochin (MMBbls - mainline throughput) 8.6

7.8

15.7

14.9















Terminals















Liquids Leasable Capacity (MMBbl) 7.3

7.3

7.3

7.3

Liquids Utilization % 100%

100%

100%

100%

Kinder Morgan Canada Limited and Subsidiaries

Preliminary Consolidated Balance Sheets

(Unaudited)

(In millions of Canadian dollars)



June 30,

2017

December 31,

2016 ASSETS







Cash and cash equivalents $ 194

$ 159

Other assets 3,870

3,580 TOTAL ASSETS $ 4,064

$ 3,739







LIABILITIES AND SHAREHOLDERS' EQUITY





Liabilities







Debt $ 189

$ 1,362

Other liabilities 806

941

Equity 3,069

1,436 TOTAL LIABILITIES AND SHAREHOLDERS' EQUITY $ 4,064

$ 3,739









Net (Cash) Debt $ (5)

$ 1,203









Adjusted EBITDA

Twelve Months Ended

June 30,

December 31, Reconciliation of Net Income to Adjusted EBITDA (1) 2017

2016

Net income $ 110

$ 202

Total certain items 45

(30)

DD&A 139

137

Income tax expense 57

56

Interest, net 24

30 Adjusted EBITDA $ 375

$ 395









Net Debt to Adjusted EBITDA 

3.0

Notes (1) Adjusted EBITDA is net income before certain items, plus DD&A, book taxes, and interest expense (before certain items), with any difference due to rounding.

SOURCE Kinder Morgan Canada Limited

For further information: Media Relations, (855) 908-9734, [email protected]; Investor Relations, (713) 369-9490, [email protected]
TORONTO, July 19, 2017 /CNW/ - Intact Financial Corporation (TSX: IFC) will release its 2017 second quarter earnings results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 1, 2017.

The company will hold its second quarter earnings conference call for analysts and investors on Wednesday, August 2, 2017, at 11 a.m. ET.

Conference call participants will be Charles Brindamour, Chief Executive Officer; Louis Marcotte, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Darren Godfrey, Senior Vice President, Personal Lines; Alain Lessard, Senior Vice President, Commercial Lines and Patrick Barbeau, Senior Vice President, Claims.

To listen to the call via live audio and to view the presentation slides and supplementary financial information, visit intactfc.com and click on "Investors".

The conference call is also available by dialling 647 427-7450 or 1 888 231-8191 (toll-free in North America). Please call 10 minutes before the start of the call.

A replay of the call will be available on Wednesday, August 2, 2017 at 1:45 p.m. ET through 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday, August 9, 2017. To listen to the replay, call 1 855 859-2056, passcode 50952294. A transcript of the call will also be made available on intactfc.com.

About Intact Financial Corporation

Intact Financial Corporation (TSX: IFC) is the largest provider of property and casualty (P&C) insurance in Canada with over $8.0 billion in annual premiums. Supported by over 12,000 employees, the Company insures more than five million individuals and businesses through its insurance subsidiaries and is the largest private sector provider of P&C insurance in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland & Labrador. The Company distributes insurance under the Intact Insurance brand through a wide network of brokers, including its wholly owned subsidiary, BrokerLink, and directly to consumers through belairdirect.

SOURCE Intact Financial Corporation

For further information: Media Inquiries: Anna Rajpat, Vice President, Corporate Affairs & Communications, 416 341 1464 ext. 43014, [email protected]; Investor Inquiries: Ken Anderson, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasurer, 855 646 8228 ext. 87383, [email protected]

Related Links

http://www.intactcf.com


QUEBEC, July 19, 2017 /CNW Telbec/ - Building an economy that supports hard-working families in providing the best start in life to their children is a top priority for the Government of Canada. That is why we continue to support middle-class families and those working hard to join it.

A year ago, the Government launched the Canada Child Benefit (CCB) to help families with the high cost of raising children. Since then, CCB payments have helped more than 6.5 million children. CCB is now simpler, tax-free, better targeted to those who need it most and more generous than previous child benefits programs. For example, families in the Quebec metropolitan area received on average approximately $480 last May from the CCB. In this area, over 134,000 children benefitted from the new and improved initiative. On a provincial level, families in Quebec received a total of approximately $455 million last May from the CCB.

With payments delivered to eligible families every month, the CCB benefits those who need it most and is helping lift approximately 300,000 children out of poverty in Canada. Since the CCB's introduction, approximately 3.6 million Canadian families have received about $23 billion in payments. This means families have more flexibility to put money towards the things that are important to them  such as nutritious food, school supplies, summer programs, or clothing.

Together with initiatives such as the Multilateral Early Learning and Child Care Framework with provinces and territories, and an Indigenous Early Learning and Child Care Framework which is currently being developed, the CCB is part of a larger approach by the Government of Canada to support low and middle-income families and grow our economy.

Quote





"Families are the foundation of Canada and children are our most precious resourceinvesting in them means investing in Canada's future. I am proud of the Canada Child Benefit and look forward to continued support of middle-class families and those working hard to join it."

 The Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, Member of Parliament for Quebec

Associated Links

Canada Child Benefit

Canada Child Benefit Overview

Canada Child Benefit Calculator

Follow us on Twitter

SOURCE Employment and Social Development Canada

For further information: For media enquiries, please contact: Emilie Gauduchon-Campbell, Press Secretary, Office of the Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, P.C., M.P., Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, 819-654-5546; Media Relations Office, Employment and Social Development Canada, 819-994-5559, [email protected]
Oakville resident headed to Nepal after winning World Vision's Mad Mad World 25th Anniversary fan contest

MISSISSAUGA, ON, July 19, 2017 /CNW/ - World Vision Canada is pleased to announce that Oakville, Ontario resident Celina Close is the lucky winner of the Mad Mad World 25th Anniversary Fan Contest. As part of the prize, she will embark on a trip of a lifetime to Nepal this Fall with Canadian music legend and humanitarian Tom Cochrane.

The trip will be more than an opportunity to experience one of the most beautiful places on earth: it will be a chance to learn about how Canadians can help some of the world's most vulnerable children.

"Life Is a Highway continues to be a pep talk to myself that you can't change the world as a single individual in one fell swoop. But as each of us travels the road of life we can all spread some goodwill and love along the way. I can't wait to take this inspirational trip to Nepal with Celina. It's a journey I wish all Canadians could take to help them realize the power of good we all have and the meaningful difference we all can make," says Tom Cochrane, World Vision Celebrity Ambassador.

"'Winning this trip is an absolute honour and a wish come true. The chance to travel with Tom Cochrane and World Vision is truly a once in a lifetime experience. I can't wait to see beautiful Nepal and meet the people who live there, it'll be a great opportunity for spiritual growth and I can't wait to learn more about how to help those who are in the greatest need," says Celina Close, winner of the Mad Mad World 25th Anniversary Fan Contest.

FAST FACTS

Tom Cochrane travelled to Africa with World Vision in 1989. The trip inspired the hit song "Life is a Highway", beginning a journey of more than 25 years of dedicated humanitarian work

travelled to with World Vision in 1989. The trip inspired the hit song "Life is a Highway", beginning a journey of more than 25 years of dedicated humanitarian work 2017 marks the 25 th Anniversary of Tom Cochrane's hit album Mad Mad World

the 25 Anniversary of hit album Mad Mad World More than half of the population of Nepal are children under 18. Extreme poverty is widespread, increasing vulnerability to exploitation including child labour and child marriage

MEDIA RESOURCES

Link to 25 Years on the Highway, a documentary on Tom Cochrane's humanitarian efforts: HERE

humanitarian efforts: HERE More information on World Vision's work in Nepal and how Canadians can help: HERE

World Vision is a Christian relief, development, and advocacy organization working to create lasting change in the lives of children, families, and communities to overcome poverty and injustice. Inspired by our Christian values, World Vision is dedicated to working with the world's most vulnerable people regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, or gender.

SOURCE World Vision Canada

For further information: Brett Tarver (647-825-2712) or [email protected]

Related Links

http://www.worldvision.ca


As reported earlier, a Texas based hairstylist called out Bobrisky in an explosive rant on snapchat for not paying for her services after s...

As reported earlier, a Texas based hairstylist called out Bobrisky in an explosive rant on snapchat for not paying for her services after she handled his "dirty" and "dandruff infested" hair.

The hairstylist accused him of being fraudulent, ugly, disrespectful, dramatic, selfish and conceited. She also shared unedited photos to back her claim that his skin is not as flawless as he portrays it to be. (read HERE





Nigerian male barbie, Bobrisky has responded to the allegations, calling the hairstylist a hater and threatening to sue her for taking his pictures without his consent. He also said he did not refuse to pay but the lady left his house when he went in to get money. Listen to him









The hair, the stylist made for Bobrisky







Listen to his explanation below:
Acting President Yemi Osinbajo on Wednesday condemned the atrocious and cowardly abduction of women which occurred recently in Borno Sta...

Acting President Yemi Osinbajo on Wednesday condemned the atrocious and cowardly abduction of women which occurred recently in Borno State.He sympathises with the families of the abducted women, and assures that the Federal Government will spare no efforts to ensure the safe and speedy return of all the victims.The Acting President, according to a statement by the Senior Special Assistant on media and publicity, Laolu Akande, has therefore directed Nigerias military and intelligence agencies to take all necessary steps including coordinating with our international partners to rescue the abducted women, as well as to ensure further tightening of security in and around Borno State.The Buhari presidency assured that the ongoing efforts of security agencies, including the establishment of additional military and police bases in parts of the country, as well as the improved intelligence gathering will continue, and commends some of the recent significant breakthroughs in combating kidnapping and banditry in the country.
Mayhem is ongoing in Apapa area of Lagos as a policeman attached to Diamond Bank on Burma Road allegedly shot dead three trailer drivers...

Mayhem is ongoing in Apapa area of Lagos as a policeman attached to Diamond Bank on Burma Road allegedly shot dead three trailer drivers.Irate mob have set the Diamond bank on fire as the management of the bank refused to release the trigger-happy policeman to the mob.More details later.
Former Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, has claimed that the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, is trying to destroy every...

Former Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, has claimed that the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, is trying to destroy everything in Nigeria.

Fani-Kayode took to his Twitter account on Wednesday morning, to ask the current regime questions about the plan to ban entertainers from shooting abroad, and taxing of beggars, etc.

He wrote: Why would the Buhari govt. shut the film village in Kano and ban Nigerian actors from shooting films abroad? Must they destroy EVERYTHING?

Why would the Buhari govt.say or do NOTHING after 97 Nigerians were butchered by Camerounian soldiers in Bakassi peninsular a few days ago?

How can we expect our Armed Forces to respond to aggression of the Camerounians when their Commander in Chief has been missing for 70 days?

Why has the Federal Government decided to tax beggars (yes beggars) when they refuse to properly tax the rich? Is it a crime to be poor?
The Central Bank of Nigeria has extended guarantees to Skye Bank Plc for another year, while it considers the banks recapitalisation pr...

The Central Bank of Nigeria has extended guarantees to Skye Bank Plc for another year, while it considers the banks recapitalisation proposal, the mid-tier lender has said.The CBN had last year shored up Skye Bank with N100bn capital injection, after sacking its top management for failing to meet minimum capital requirements.The central bank then appointed a new management team.In a newspaper advertorial on Tuesday, the bank said it had recovered N60bn in bad loans, closed some branches and sold four subsidiaries to boost capital in the past year.It was in talks with shareholders and investors last year to raise N30bn but suspended the plans when weak oil prices hit capital markets and drove foreign investors away.The bank continues to require assistance from central bank and government as it repairs the damage inflicted on the institution in the past and charts a sustainable path forward for the bank, Skye Bank said.It said it had also reached restructuring agreements with many of the chronic bad debtors resulting in improved payments and prospects of future recoveries.The CBN designated Skye Bank as one of systemically important banks due to the size of total deposits it holds after it acquired Mainstreet Bank.This means it has to increase its capital adequacy ratio to 16 per cent, the industry average.The bank said it had appointed advisers to guide it on a recapitalisation process and that it had identified various options with proposals being considered by the CBNSkye Banks management said it had implemented cost-management initiatives in its efforts to stabilise the bank.The measures, it said, had enhanced liquidity and efficient service delivery to its customers since the CBN intervened in the bank one year ago.The bank management said this in the advertorial, which was jointly signed by the Chairman of the bank, Mr. M.K. Ahmad, and the Group Managing Director, Mr. Adetokunbo Abiru.It noted that through the support of the CBN, it had successfully embarked on initiatives to restructure and reposition the financial institution based on its broad mandate which includes cost management and optimisation, as well as divestments to improve the banks financial position.
A teenage girl was found dead in her family's home with multiple stab wounds to the neck and her father has been accused of killing her...

A teenage girl was found dead in her family's home with multiple stab wounds to the neck and her father has been accused of killing her because of a row over her Muslim boyfriend.

Henriette Karra is a 17-year-old from a Christian family, however, she fell in love with a Muslim man who is in prison. She planned to convert to Islam upon his release but his family had a problem with this so they fought often and at some point, she ran to live with the man's family after sending her friends panicked text messages that her family were planning to kill her.

After she was found dead at her family's home in Ramle, Israel on June 13, police arrested her father, Sami, 58, her mother Aliham, and her uncle. Her murder comes weeks after they fought over her romance with the Muslim convict. In the weeks before her death, her father threatened and beat her because of it. She then sent texts to a friend, one of which read:

"You wont believe what they did to me They are sending people to kill me. They are searching for me in every possible place. You dont understand what fear this is. I dont believe I have the strength to stand on my feet and run away."

She moved in with her boyfriend's mother afterwards but her own family tracked her down and forced her to return home. Police started watching the family and placed recording devices inside the home. Her father had been suspected of dealing drugs, so it is not clear if the cameras were placed because of that or if it was because of the teenager's complaint.

The night before Henriette was killed, her father was heard telling her mother: "Forget about her, let her go to hell. Its not worth another shekel to even chase after her, shes garbage. We need to whip her, throw her away like a dog and see how she does Shes already gone, Im sick of her and you."

Her mother later told police that her husband believed she had affronted the family's honor. Sami has denied having a hand in his daughter's death and is currently on trial in Israel.
President of the Senate Dr Bukola Saraki has said that leaders in Africa has a lot to learn from Club de Madrid to help it stamp out extremism and terrorism.Saraki who spoke through his tweeter handle @BukolaSaraki said that African leaders and public servants must continue to consult with leaders who had been there before to learn some lessons in leadership.World Leadership Alliance-Club de Madrid commonly called Club de Madrid are democratic former presidents and prime ministers from around the world.The President of the Senate added: Yesterday, I met with members of Club De Madrid, led by former President Cassam Uteem of Mauritius, and former President Festus Mogae of Botswana.Our discussions centered around ways that we can learn from the past experiences of other African leaders in our quest to stamp out domestic extremism and terrorism in all its forms.As African public servants, it is necessary that we build on the knowledge, networks and experiences of those that have served before us.Hence, we will continue to learn from and consult with the Club De Madrid from time to time, as well as work to emulate their successes and implement their recommendations, he said.World Leadership Alliance-Club de Madrid commonly called Club de Madrid are democratic former presidents and prime ministers from around the world.Since they are no longer in office, they now represent their personal leadership experience and commitment and not their countries or parties.They are therefore freer to share their experiences while still keenly aware of the pressures and problems faced by todays leaders.
Barely five days after a High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, Maitama, Abuja, granted bail to a former governor of Jigawa State,...

Barely five days after a High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, Maitama, Abuja, granted bail to a former governor of Jigawa State, Saminu Turaki, a Federal High Court in Abuja has ordered his remand in Kuje Prison, Abuja.Although Justice Nnamdi Dimgba of the Federal High Court granted bail to the ex-governor on fresh bail conditions on Tuesday, he ordered the defendant to remain in Kuje Prisons, Abuja, pending when the bail conditions would be met.Justice Dimgba made the order shortly after the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission re-arraigned Turaki and three companies on 32 counts of money laundering involving about N37bn.The defendants allegedly committed the offences between 2006 and 2007 while Turaki was in office as the state governor.Turaki, alongside his co-defendants  INC Natural Resources Limited, Arkel Construction Nigeria Limited and Wildcat Construction Limited, were earlier arraigned at the Dutse, Jigawa State Division of the Federal High Court in 2011.But he was said to have since evaded trial until the EFCC, acting on an arrest warrant issued for Turaki by the court in Dutse about three years ago, arrested him on July 4, 2017, at an event in Abuja.While the EFCC was facilitating how to produce him before the court in Dutse, the judge went on his annual vacation.Turaki then filed a rights enforcement suit before the FCT High Court in Abuja, seeking an order releasing him from the anti-graft agencys custody.He also filed an interlocutory application to urge the court before the hearing of the main suit.The application was opposed by the EFCC on the grounds that with Turakis antecedent of jumping bail earlier granted him six years ago by the Federal High Court in Dutse, and evading arrest as ordered by the same court about three years ago, he would likely jump bail again.But in his ruling on Thursday, Justice Yusuf Halilu of the FCT High Court, granted bail to the ex-governor on conditions which required him to submit his travelling documents to the registry of the court; produce two reasonable sureties residing in Abuja, and sign a register to be opened at the EFCCs office every two weeks.Instead of releasing him, the EFCC re-filed in the Federal High Court in Abuja, the same set of charges already pending against the defendants before the court in Dutse.The anti-graft agency then re-arraigned Turaki and the three companies before Justice Dimgba in Abuja, being the only judge sitting as a vacation judge in the North as other Federal High Court judges proceed on vacation.After Turaki pleaded not guilty to the 32 counts on Tuesday, Justice Dimgba said he was inclined to granting bail to the ex-governor in deference to the earlier bail granted the defendant by Justice Halilu of the FCT High Court.He asked the prosecution, led by Mohammed Abubakar, and the defence, led by Mr. Ahmed Raji (SAN), to agree on the bail conditions to be imposed on the defendant.With a little alteration to the terms and conditions agreed on by the two parties, Justice Dimgba granted bail to Turaki in the sum of N500m with two sureties in the sum of N250m each.The judge directed that the two sureties must either be into business or a civil servant holding at least the post of a director.He ordered that the sureties must be resident in the FCT, have landed property in the FCT, including the satellite towns and must swear to an affidavit of means to show their ability to meet the bail conditions.The sureties must also submit, as part of the bail conditions, their tax clearance certificates issued by the Federal Inland Revenue Service.The judge also ordered the former governor to deposit all his travelling documents to the courts registry and must not travel outside the country except on an express permission of the court.He also directed Turaki to report to the EFCCs headquarters on the first working day of every month.The judge said he would only sign the warrant for the release of the defendant from prison only after the EFCC, in writing, confirmed that the bail conditions had been met to its satisfaction, except if the commission failed to do so within 24 hours of the presentation of the sureties to it.Justice Dimgba then adjourned until September 19, the date already fixed by the Federal High Court in Dutse.The case is to be transferred back to Dutse after Turaki must have met his bail conditions.
Nigerian Government on Tuesday announced the award of an oil block license to Ondo State Government for bitumen exploration.

Nigerian Government on Tuesday announced the award of an oil block license to Ondo State Government for bitumen exploration.

Minister of Mines and Steels Development, Dr. Kayode Fayemi who made this known at the 1st Ondo State Investment Forum in Akure, the state capital, said that the license was granted to the state as part of the efforts of the federal government to diversify the economy and boost the countrys foreign exchange.

Represented by Engr. Mohammed Amate, Director of Mining License in the Ministry, Fayemi said the bitumen reserve in Ondo State can serve the whole of Africa hence governments decision to explore the opportunity towards economic development of the country.

Nigeria currently imports over 600,000 tons of asphalt per annum and the nation spends billions of naira on importation of asphalt every year. The naira is weak now because of much demand for dollar and less demand for naira and the poor export policy in the country.

With bitumen being produced in Ondo State, federal Government will ensure that none of its road contractors imports asphalt and I am sure that many state governments will prefer to buy from Ondo state because it will definitely be cheaper here than imports from outside the country, he said.

Responding, Governor Rootimi Akeredolu thanked the federal government for the partnership.

Speaking on investment opportunities, Akeredolu said: Our coastline which is about 120km, is one of the longest in Africa and is home to various fish species like sole snapper, croaker, barracuda, big eye grunter, catfish etc. This is an unchartered territory to be explored as part of this administrations drive towards economy diversification.

Let me announce to this gathering that Ondo State had been granted two Free Trade Zone (FTZ) licenses which are Olokola (being oil and gas FTZ in partnership with Ogun State government) and Ondo State Industrial City (as a non-oil and gas FTZ). They are both coastal FTZs with the Atlantic Ocean bordering the southern flank.

In addition to Oil and Gas, Ondo state boasts of possessing one of the largest reserves of Bitumen and Tar Sands in the world; about 42 billion barrels. Ondo State is also endowed with large deposits of various solid minerals including Limestone, Coal, Granite, Kaolin, Silica Sand amongst other minerals. Whilst attention over the years has been on Oil and Gas; this Government is willing and ready to exploit its Bitumen reserves in a sustainable way particularly in the area of providing asphalt for road development. It is estimated that over 90% of the minerals in Ondo State are unexploited and unutilized.

Ondo State as one of the nine oil and gas producing states has abundant oil and gas reserves that remain undeveloped, even though we produce about 12 % of the daily oil production in the country.

On his plans for Agriculture development, Akeredolu explained that Ondo special focus is on our comparative advantage in agriculture, which are palm oil and cocoa.

We want to develop our palm oil to the extent where we have a self-sustaining palm oil industry. We fed the western region during the first republic and I can assure you that we will do it again.

Meanwhile, we will not leave out rice production in Ondo state. It will interest you to know that our Rice paddies are taken all the way to Lagos or Kogi by our farmers to be processed because we dont have any rice mill in the State.

To complement the production effort of the farmers, the State plans to setup specialized Staple Crop Processing Zones (SCPZ) for these crops to enable investments in the production of finished products ready for export.
Yesterday, I wrote and published in the social media , my opinion on the call for boycott of Anambra election and call for Referendum.

Yesterday, I wrote and published in the social media , my opinion on the call for boycott of Anambra election and call for Referendum.In the ensuing debate, I read all sorts of arguments on why Referendum will come from boycott, amidst dollops of unhinged insults!!Initially I took some of the arguments as mere attempts to win a diatribe with cheap shots. But as I began to read similar lines of dissection from even those I expected to know, I concluded that the discourse needed more depth. Of course the retailers in insults are still welcome.Let me clearly state that I am a believer in a free Igbo nation, if it is democratic, meritocratic and free market oriented. Currently, I don't think Ndi Igbo has really held a Confab to decide what they really want. This is the reason for the apparently discordant tunes from Ohanaeze, IPOB, Bilie Human Rights, MASSOB etc.Back to the self determination issue. One of the arguments proposed was that Bakassi peninsula was excised from Nigeria, without Referendum. Likewise, it has become a precedence for Biafra leaving Nigeria. I attempted to set that record straight in the follow up comments. However for clarity, I will repeat it here.Bakassi case has nothing in common with the Biafran struggle, sui generis. Bakassi matter was a case between two sovereign nations, Nigeria and Cameroun. Biafra case is not. In Bakassi matter, Cameroun took Nigeria to the international court of justice in Hague on March 28 1994, over her claims on Bakassi peninsula. The case lasted till October 2, 2002 when the ICJ ruled in favour of Cameroun. Both countries had already agreed to abide by the judgement before the case ensued.It is important to note that the ICJ entertains only cases between Sovereign nations!! ICJ cannot, under any international law, entertain a case brought by Biafra advocates against Nigeria. This is law, not sentiments. Biafra is not a Sovereign nation, yet!Another argument projected, under thunderous insults, was how any Constitution that stands in variance with international Human Rights laws of UN cannot stand!! This argument was repeated with such certainty. I found it crazily esoteric!I wondered how come North Korea still exist? I wondered how come Myanmar still operate? I wondered how come all the military govts in Nigeria existed? I wondered how all the dictatorial govts in the world existed? When it's obvious they do not conform to international Human Rights laws? I discovered that even well learned Igbo persons are now substituting propaganda & conjecture, for knowledge and facts.The much touted International Bill of Rights, was inaugurated via the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by UN on 10, December 1948. It was followed in 1968 by the International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights, AND the International Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights. These three Covenant form the International Bill of Rights or the International Human Rights.Self determination is the Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights AND on the International Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights. Self determination in these Covenants did not mandate specific policies, just like other rights in those Covenants and Declaration! In fact from the practice, judgements and deliberations of UN human rights committee and Court, countries retain wide latitude on how they put all human rights into practice.All pragmatic leaders in this struggle must acknowledge that UN charter proclaims that it is based on "sovereign equality of all members"! The ICJ has no police force to enforce it's judgement. It relies on the willing submission of member states. In extreme cases, on the force of powerful states against weak states.So people who are thinking or feeling that UN will force Nigeria or compell Nigeria to conduct Referendum, are in dreamland! Nigeria and every country in the world break the laws contained in the International Bill of Rights. Each country break different ones, at different times depending on prevailing circumstances.Let us take Nigeria vs Nnamdi Kanu's case. Nigeria broke several of the International Bill of Rights, of which she is signatory, several times in the course of about 82 weeks Mazi Kanu was in detention! What did UN do? Nothing!!Nnamdi Kanu was arbitrarily arrested and detained. This was against Article 9 of Universal Declaration and Article 9 of Covenant on Cultural & Political Rights. What did UN do? Nothing.Hearing before Independent & Impartial Judiciary is Article 10 of both Universal Declaration AND Covenant on Political Rights. Was it applied for Mazi Kanu? No. Did UN sanction Nigeria, No!Presumption of innocence is Article 11 of the Universal Declaration and Article 15 of Covenant on Political Rights. Buhari, while Kanu was in detention, declared him guilty in a nationally televised interview. And vowed to keep Kanu jailed, irrespective of court ruling. A promise he kept. Did UN sanction him? No!I can go on and on!!The point is that these international Human Rights are often breached by Sovereign member nations of UN. Without consequences. Sovereignty often trump human rights in international politics! That is real politics. UN never sanctioned China over Tiannamen square incident. Only powerful nations like US imposed salutary sanctions, that were lifted not long after.Nigeria has breached and continues to breach a lot of the International Bill of Rights, which she is signatory to. Nigeria yet remains an influential UN member state. We need to know that it is only astute politics that can grant ndi Igbo Biafra, if that is really what we want. Not boycotting politics. That call for boycott is simply an exercise in ego. Even after boycott, we must go back to politics to pursue actualisation.It took the separatist movements of Spain 20 years to get devolution of power, and inclusion of Referendum in their statute. Every body that follows International history will remember that the ETA aka Basque separatist movement used to be one of the most dreaded terrorist group in the world. They arose in the struggle for self determination for Basque country in Spain. However it took the formation of political parties that won control of Basque region in several elections, to engage Madrid & accomplish acceptance of Referendum.Today I hear about Catalan Referendum. This was also achieved through political parties and political process, and like I pointed out earlier, took about 2 decades to be achieved.It was not done or accomplished by UN. It was by politics!!We are not the only indigenous people seeking for self determination, globally. We know the Scots are. The Quebecs are. Of course the Basques and Catalonians. For these regions, their Constitution or laws recognise Referendum.However there is even an ethnic nation with a more compelling case for self determination. They have been fighting for it for decades , yet UN has not been the knight in shining armour some people try to make them in Biafra's case. I am talking of the Kurds of South East Turkey.The Kurds are not even allowed to use Kurdish language in the schools in their region. They are not allowed to practice their cultural identity. The Turkish courts prevent Kurds from even giving their kids Kurdish names. If you broadcast in Kurdish you can go to jail. It is fair to say the Kurds probably are more discriminated against than the Igbos of Nigeria.Yet, UN has not rallied to force Turkey to grant them self determination or conduct Referendum for them. Turkey simply doesn't want to. And the Kurds after trying militancy via the PKK, has not fully unified in politics of emancipation. Hence they continue to suffer in the full glare of the world and UN!!The point of this message is to tell Ndi Igbo that self determination can only come through political process. May we not waste the political capital of the Biafran movement. UN is not about to come and organise any Referendum. Neither are they going to force Nigeria to organise one. It is only by pulling our full political weight, as a people, through political negotiations with other ethnic nationalities that we can get Referendum into our Statutes. It can only come via political process. Except some people are secretly pining for war!!Even after all boycottables are boycotted, we must make recourse to political process. Under the laws of Nigeria. Why not approach the struggle in a multi-faceted way? With pragmatic idealism.As Prof Chinua Achebe of hallowed memory wrote, "It's morning yet on creation day"!Olisa Akukwe
In a bid to improve transparency and accountability in contracts entered into by public and private enterprises in the country, the Fede...

In a bid to improve transparency and accountability in contracts entered into by public and private enterprises in the country, the Federal Government says it will launch a contract disclosure web portal. The acting Director-General, Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC), Mr. Chidi Izuwah said this on Wednesday in Abuja at a Public Private Partnership (PPP) training workshop organised by the World Bank.Izuwah said the ICRC and the World Bank had been working together to ensure more openness and transparency in PPPs in Nigeria. To this end, stakeholder engagements had taken place and an improved PPP Disclosure Framework developed with MDAs input and buy in.There were currently 51 ongoing PPP projects entered into by the Federal Government, cutting across all sectors and 77 pipeline projects which the public may not be aware of. He said that the Website was set to launch at the end of August, 2017 and that all federal governments Ministries, Agencies and Departments were expected to disclose fully all their PPP contracts.This disclosure initiative is designed to ensure that all non-confidential information relating to PPP contracts, both pre and post contract information is made available and easily accessible to members of the public. The disclosure is expected to bring improvement and engender confidence in PPP contract transactions in Nigeria.It is also hoped that Nigerians, through the disclosure, will be better educated and informed on the salient features of PPP contracts. This includes agreed standards of service, scope of work, parties to the contract, general overview of the project, social and economic benefits of the project, as well as risk allocation and the actual performance levels achieved, he said. Izuwah said that the portal was not just directed for local use, but would also serve to encourage foreign direct investments into the country.He also said that the new process would ensure that contractors keep their own side of the bargain. For example, at the airport, what quality of service should you expect, what are your entitlements, what are you paying for? All these information will be made available so that Nigerians will be equipped to be able to insist and get the services they are entitled to, he said. Also, the Senior Consultant on Public Private Partnerships, World Bank Group, Mr. Prashant Sharma said the bank was assisting Nigeria, Kenya, Honduras and Ghana develop a PPP Contract Information Disclosure website.He said this would improve transparency in the procurement process and when the website goes live in August, Nigeria would be the leading country in the world in transparency and accountability in PPP contracts. We have been working with the ICRC over the last one year to develop an organized platform to actually deliver information and disclose information about public private partnership.To create a platform through which all relevant information, useful for the public to know more about public private partnerships are made public in a organized and systemized way, he said.
President Donald Trumps obsessive bid to overhaul or outrightly repeal former President Barack Obamas legacy health law, known as Obamacare, has collapsed.The efforts collapsed in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, dealing a sharp setback to Trump and the Republican Partys seven-year quest to kill President Barack Obamas signature healthcare law.The disarray in the Republican-controlled Senate rattled financial markets as it cast doubt on the chances for getting Trumps other domestic policy priorities, such as tax reform, through a divided Congress.Saying he was disappointed, Trump suggested at the White House that he might let the insurance markets created under Obamacare go under and then try to work with Democrats on a rescue.Were probably in that position where well just let Obamacare fail, Trump told reporters. We will let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us.U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell initially said he would set a vote on a straight repeal of Obamacare after it became clear on Monday night that he did not have enough support to pass an overhaul of the healthcare law, but the new approach unraveled within hours.Republican Senators Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska quickly announced they would not back repeal, appearing to doom the fledgling effort. With Democrats united in opposition, Republicans can only afford to lose two votes to pass the measure in the Senate, where they have a slim 52-48 majority.I do not think that its going to be constructive to repeal a law that at this point is so interwoven within our healthcare system and then hope that over the next two years we will come up with some kind of replacement, Collins told reporters.Obamacare has boosted the number of Americans with health insurance through mandates on individuals and employers, and income-based subsidies. About 20 million Americans gained insurance coverage through the law.
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) plans to hold a non-elective national convention in Abuja on August 12.

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) plans to hold a non-elective national convention in Abuja on August 12.The convention is expected to extend the tenure of the Ahmed Makarfiled executive to allow the Caretaker Committee conduct an elective convention before December. The tenure of the executive will end on August 16.The decision was taken on Tuesday, following series of consultative meetings involving the partys National Caucus, the Board of Trustees, the National Executive Committee and members of the Caretaker Committee.Spokesman Dayo Adeyeye explained that time constraint forced the party to opt for the non elective convention.According to him, given the August 16 expiration of the tenure of the Caretaker Committee, it would be practically impossible to meet timelines prescribed by the Electoral Act and the partys constitution for the conduct of elective convention.Going by provisions of the Electoral Act, the party is required within 21 days, to notify the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in writing of a pending elective convention.The Makarfi-led leadership, which was affirmed by the Supreme Court on July 12, has lost the 21-day window.Another resolution is the decision to disband the caretaker committees set up in Jigawa and Benue States by sacked National Chairman Ali Modu Sheriff shortly after he was declared chairman by the Court of Appeal in February.The two state chapters have been directed to revert to their executive committees prior to their dissolution.Many other states where parallel executives were set up by Sheriff are also to revert to their original status.The party plans also to set up standing Disciplinary Committee and a Reconciliation Committee to handle discipline and reconciliation.Adeyeye said the two committees would have no time frame.The spokesman gave hints of amendment to some provisions of the partys constitution, saying the draft of the proposed amendment had been circulated to the organs of the party for their input ahead of the August 12 convention.According to him, the proposed amendment will be geared toward entrenching internal democracy and checking impunity within the party.Adeyeye said the party will participate in the governorship election in Anambra State billed to hold in November.He said the meeting did not discuss the Lagos State local government election coming up on Saturday, adding that the matter has been left to the Lagos State chapter to handle.The meetings, which were held at the partys secretariat attracted many party faithful across the six geopolitical zones.Former President Goodluck Jonathan and many of tthe governors elected on the platform of the party attended the meetings. So did members of the National Assembly.Also there were former governors, former ministers, past party chairmen and other former executive members.Sheriff and his loyalists however stayed away.Former President Jonathan said Nigerians still believed in the capacity of the PDP to lead the country.Jonathan, who spoke at the expanded National Caucus meeting, said this was demonstrated with reactions to the Supreme Court judgment on the partys leadership crisis.Nigerians still believe in the PDP because when the Supreme Court judgment was given, I was so surprised because some people called and sent text messages to me.They are not even politicians but they are so happy that PDP has come on stream because they were worried that PDP will go down.So, if people who are not even members of PDP are so happy that PDP has now gotten a platform to operate, in spite of the negative propaganda against us, it means people still believe in PDP.PDP is a party that Nigerians still believe in, Jonathan said.He added: The first thing we need to do is to rebuild the party because when the party is strong, everything will be added to that.Makarfi said only a miracle would stop PDP from regaining power in 2019.Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose, Chairman of the PDP Governors Forum, urged party members and leaders to return home and mobilise Nigerians at the grassroots.If this party must win, if PDP must get the confidence of Nigerians, if this party must be restored, our leaders must go back home and work, Fayose said.At the meeting were David Mark, Remi Bakare, Stella Omu, Godswill Akpabio, Nyesom Wike, Sule Lamido, Ahmadu Ali and also Uche Secondus.Others were Olisa Metu, Jonah Jang, Jerry Gana, Grace Bent, Gabriel Suswam, Emmanuel Udom, Sen Ifeanyi Okowa, Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu and Darius IshyakuThe other persons were Jonah Jang, Tom Ikimi, Vincent Ogbulafor, Ahmadu Ali, Jimi Agbaje, Solomon Ewuga, Liyel Imoke, Ibrahim Mantu, Emeka Ihedioha and Dimeji Bankole.
A graduate of Agriculture from Kwara Polytechnic who was arrested during a foiled robbery operation at a Lotto company in Ajagbadi, Lagos, ...

A graduate of Agriculture from Kwara Polytechnic who was arrested during a foiled robbery operation at a Lotto company in Ajagbadi, Lagos, yesterday burst into tears when he was informed that his pregnant wife had given birth.

The suspect, Saidi Ayemojuba , who confessed that he joined a robbery gang due to frustration, explained that he went for the operation with the hope of using its proceed to prepare for his babys arrival, after which he would quit robbery.

He disclosed that he started with a gang which specialised in attacking passengers who were leaving early for their respective places of work, four years ago. He said at times, members of his gang would mount a motorbike, only to snatch it from its rider, half away into the journey,

At other times, he said that members of the gang would pretend to be passengers. They would board a commercial bus, only to order the driver to stop half way, where passengers would be dispossessed of their valuables.

However, during one of the operations at Iyana Sashi, 3 years ago, he was arrested and charged to court, from where he was sent to prison. Upon his discharge , he told Vanguard that he joined another robbery gang which leader he met in prison.

According to him I decided to quit robbery when I came back from prison. But I could not find any good job even with my certificate. One day, I got a call from an inmate I met while in prison. .



He told me there was a Lotto company robbery job he would like me to execute. I was the only one arrested during the operation. I was beaten until I passed out , only to find myself at the police station.



One regret I have is not to have welcomed my new baby to the world. I dont know what they would tell her. I thought of using the lotto money to prepare for her arrival, after which I intended to quit robbery finally.

I am naturally not a bad boy because anytime I came back from operation, a gush of guilt will overwhelm me. I went into this out of frustration. No job , even after having my HND

The Lagos state police commissioner, Fatai Oowoseni, who paraded him before newsmen, said he would soon be charged to court.
The police in Niger State have arrested two persons allegedly responsible for the kidnap of students of the Federal University of Technol...

The police in Niger State have arrested two persons allegedly responsible for the kidnap of students of the Federal University of Technology (FUT), Minna.

He said: When the issue of getting a Dubai job came up, my parents could not afford the N750,000 demanded from us, and Abraham raised the issue of kidnapping which led us to this predicament.



I have dragged my familys name in mud. I am well-brought up but I cant factor what led me to this act. I pray my parents will forgive me. Jatto confessed that they rented a two-bedroom apartment behind the trade fair complex to keep their victims.
Lagos State Police command has dismissed rumours that the six male students of Igbonla Government College, Epe, kidnapped seven weeks ago w...

Lagos State Police command has dismissed rumours that the six male students of Igbonla Government College, Epe, kidnapped seven weeks ago were dead.

On Tuesday, Fatai Owoseni, Commissioner of Police in Lagos, said: We are on course to rescue the boys. The children are fine and we will continue to intensify efforts to ensure that they are returned home and reunited with their parents.

This is a sensitive matter and our main objective is to successfully reunite them with their parents and that will soon be achieved, the police boss said.





Peter Jonah, Isiaq Rahmon, Adebayo George, Judah Agbausi, Pelumi Philips and Farouq Yusuf were abducted on May 25, 2017.

The kidnappers initially demanded N50 million ransom but stopped communication after three of their gang members were arrested by the police last month, despite collecting N10 million from the parents of the students.

They resumed talks last week and after collecting another N20 million from the parents, they failed to release the boys at the weekend as promised.

The kidnappers made a demand for another N1.5 million, a development that caused a stalemate in the negotiations.
President Muhammadu Buhari who left for the UK on May 7th, is scheduled to return to Nigeria on July 27th.





President Muhammadu Buhari who left for the UK on May 7th, is scheduled to return to Nigeria on July 27th.

President Muhammadu Buhari who left for the UK on May 7th, is scheduled to return to Nigeria on July 27th.



This is according to online news agency, Sahara reporters. See their tweet below:
The Senate on Wednesday mandated its Committee on Health to investigate the circulation and sale in the country of 42 anti-malaria drugs ...

The Senate on Wednesday mandated its Committee on Health to investigate the circulation and sale in the country of 42 anti-malaria drugs banned by the European Union (EU).It said that the investigation was imperative and urged the committee to expedite action on it to save the lives of Nigerians.The decision followed a motion by Sen. Theodore Orji (PDP-Abia) at plenary on Wednesday.Presenting the motion, Orji said that the drugs, which were already banned by the EU, were still being sold and consumed in Nigeria.According to him, the reason given for the ban of the 42 drugs in Europe is that they are considered dangerous and linked to cause of kidney failure.He said that according to a report, EU countries must not stock drugs that contain Plasmotrin, Artequin, Co-arinate, Arco, Artecon and Dialquin.Orji disclosed that the President of the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA), Prof. Mike Ogirima, had already confirmed the delisting of those drugs by the EU.It is alarming that the 42 drugs are still being stock-piled, sold and consumed in Nigeria.This situation is already trending and generating panic and concern among medical practitioners and members of the public.The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) and Standard Organisation of Nigeria (SON) that had waged ceaseless war on the influx of fake and substandard items have not adequately addressed the issue, he said.The lawmaker said that most of the drugs in the banned list were popular and common in Nigeria and were easily obtained across the counter with or without proper prescription.In his contribution, the Chairman, Senate Committee on Health, Sen. Olarewanju Tejuoso, commended the lawmaker for coming up with the motion.He said that the committee had invited the Acting Director-General of NAFDAC, Mrs Yetunde Oni, on the matter.However, he explained that from his experience as a medical doctor, some of the drugs were used as combination therapy.There is a conflict between World Health Organisation (WHO) and European Union. The WHO for instance, accepts combination therapy.The most important thing, however, is the need to strengthen the Medical Research Institute through adequate funding to carry out research on what works for us.Every year, we rely on WHO and other organisations to find solution to our problems; so, the institute should be funded to know what works for us, he said.Sen. Jibrin Barau (APC-Kano) said it was pathetic that such drugs still found their way into the country in spite of their adverse effect.He said, no wonder we have rampant kidney failure in Nigeria. Unfortunately the experts are not doing their work properly.It is important that agencies like NAFDAC and experts in health sector are called upon to quickly intervene.Sen. James Manager (PDP-Delta) said that the information given by Orji called for urgent attention, adding that if the drugs were dangerous for use in Europe, they would be dangerous to all humans.According to him, the difference between the Europeans and Africans is only the skin colour, all human organs function the same way.Everyday people die silently because of wrong prescription of drugs.We need to fund the institute if not we are indirectly poisoning Nigerians. So, the proper investigation should be done to give us the details in order to appropriately guide Nigerians.In his remarks, the President of the Senate, Dr Bukola Saraki, urged the committee to expedite action on the matter and report back as soon as possible.He commended Orji for coming up with the motion, adding that the protection of lives was one of the primary responsibilities of the legislature.I hope the committee on health will carry out proper investigation to stop these types of drugs from flooding the market, Saraki said.The list of the drugs as contained in the motion are Alaxin 60 mg tablet (dihydroartemisinine) B/8, Alaxin oral suspension (dihydroartemisinine) FL/80ml, Amadiaguine 200mg compressed B/1000, Arinate 100mgtablet(artesunate)B/6.Others are Arinate 50mg tablet (artesunate) B/6, Arsumax50 mg tablet (artesunate) B/6, Artemax 60 mg tablet (dihydroartemisinine) B/8, Artemedine 40 mg capsule (artemether) B/12, Artemedine 50 mg tablet (artemether) B/12.Also listed are Artenam 50 mg tablet(artemether)B/14, Artenam 60 mg tablet(artemether)b/8, Artesiane 300 mg child powder oral suspension (artemether)FL 38g, Artesunate 100 mg compressed B/120, Artesunate 50 mg tablet B/120, Artexin 60 mg tablet(dihydroartemisinine) B/8.Camoquin 200 mg tablet(amodiaguine) B/9, Camoquin 200 mg tablet(amodiaguine) B/25 blisters, Camoquin 200 mg tablet(amodiaguine) B/55 blisters, Camoquin 200 mg tablet(amodiaguine) B/24 blisters, Camoquin 600 mg tablet(amodiaguine) B/3 blisters, are also part of the list.They are also Camoquin oral suspension 50 mg/5ml (amodiaguine)FL/60ml, Cotecxin oral suspension(dihydroartemisinine)FL/80ml, Cotecxin 60 mg tablet(dihydroartemisinine)B/8, Daraprim tablet(pyrimethamine)B/8.Falcinil 50 mg tablet(artesunate)B/12, Flavoquine oral suspension50 mg/5ml(amodiaquine)FL/90ml, Flavoquine200 mg tablet(amodiaquine)B/16, Flavoquine 200 mg tablet(amodiaquine)B/240, made the list.Others are Gunate strong tablet(artesunate)B/6 gvs labs, Tvitter powder oral suspension(artemether)FL/100ml, Halfan 250mg tablet(halofantrine)B/6, Halfan 250mg tablet(halofantrine)B/120.The listed also contained Halfanoral suspension 5mg/5ml(halofantrine)FL/45ml, Malartin 200mg tablet(artesunate) B/6, Malartin 50mg tablet(artesunate) B/12, mmh-malarex 450mg capsule(peschiara fuchsiaefolia) B/20.It included Paludrine 100mg tablet(proguanil)B/56, Plasmotrim 200mg tablet(artesunate)B/25blisters/6, Plasmotrim 200mg tablet(artesunate)B/6, Plasmotrim 50mg lactab (artesunate)B/12, Plasmotrim 50mg lactab (artesunate)B/25 blisters/6.
The Senate on Wednesday passed the Whistle Blowers Protection Bill, which recommends a five-year jail term or N10m fine against perso...

The Senate on Wednesday passed the Whistle Blowers Protection Bill, which recommends a five-year jail term or N10m fine against persons who raise false alarm on hidden loot.The upper chamber of the National Assembly also approved that five per cent of loot recovered as a result of information from a whistle blower be given to the informant, as currently practiced by the Federal Government.Passage of the bill, which was sponsored by the Deputy Minority Whip, Senator Abiodun Olujimi (PDP, Ekiti-South), followed the consideration and adoption of the report by the Senate Committee on Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters.The panel said the bill was to build a legal framework for whistle blowing as part of the anti-corruption campaign by the current administration.The report said, First, it seeks to encourage and facilitate disclosures of improper conduct by persons, public officers and corporate bodies both private and public. Second, it ensures that matters disclosed are properly investigated and handled appropriately in accordance with the law.Third, the bill seeks to ensure adequate protection for the whistle blowers from reprisals, victimisations, job losses, isolation, humiliation, which are some of the consequences for whistle blowing. Fourth, this legal framework also contemplates financial reward for any disclosure that leads to discovery and recovery of funds, properties, etc., to serve as incentive for potential whistle blowers.On the whole, this mechanism is a recognised concept, which has been adopted by many countries in the world and it has helped in the fight against corruption.The panel, as part of its observations and findings, said stakeholders at the public hearing it organised unanimously supported passage of the bill as it will give more impetus to the fight against corruption and reinforce governments policy on whistle blowing.In the report, the committee also said in order to have a comprehensive legislation and to sufficiently address related issues on whistle blowing in line with global best practices, the panel made further consultations to enrich the bill.The panel further said, The passage of the bill will guarantee adequate protection for potential whistle blowers against reprisals, victimisation, job losses, etc.The provision that contemplates monetary reward for whistle blowers, whose information lead to discovery of looted funds, proceeds of crime or improper conduct, is a laudable and innovative provision of this bill. The provision will further strengthen the policy currently being adopted by the Federal Government, which is already yielding positive results.This proposed legislation has been enforced in other jurisdictions and it has helped in the fight against corruption and improper conducts by public officers, individuals and corporations.President of the Senate, Bukola Saraki, said the legislature had kept its promise on efforts to join the anti-graft war.He said, This is a promise kept. Today, we have passed a landmark piece of legislation to fight corruption and protect patriotic Nigerians who are fighting corruption. This bill will protect the lives of those who risk themselves to expose corrupt practices in Nigeria.
The National Executive Committee of the Peoples Democratic Party in Abuja, on Tuesday, agreed to set up a Standing Disciplinary Committee for its erring members.The need to set up the committee was said to be the outcome of what a source described as fierce arguments by members of NEC following the 14-month crisis in the party, which ended recently with the judgment of the Supreme Court.Before the NEC meeting was held, members of the partys Expanded National Caucus, National Caucus and the Board of Trustees had met.It was gathered that decisions reached at these three meetings were brought to the NEC and debated by members before conclusions were reached.Apart from the disciplinary committee, the NEC also agreed to set up a Standing Reconciliation Committee.Spokesperson for the party, Dayo Adeyeye, said these were part of the decisions taken at the 74th NEC meeting, which was held at the partys national secretariat.It was gathered that majority members of the NEC voted for the establishment of the two committees, especially disciplinary committee.The members, according to some members of NEC, who spoke with our correspondent on condition of anonymity, insisted that the former National Chairman of the party, Senator Ali Modu Sheriff, and his followers be sanctioned for the roles they allegedly played in the 14-month crisis that rocked the party.It had been reported on Tuesday that the national leadership of the party was under pressure to sanction Sheriff and his group.Apart from Sheriff, those likely to be drawn before the proposed committee, include a former National Secretary, Prof. Wale Oladipo; the Deputy National Chairman, Dr. Cairo Ojougboh, and the acting National Publicity Secretary, Mr. Bernard Mikko.It was gathered that some members of the past National Working Committee also played important and what a prominent member of the party described as strategic roles in the Sheriff camp.Some of the identified members were said to have started making overtures to the Senator Ahmed Makarfi-led national caretaker committee.Apart from that, they were said to have attended the Expanded National Caucus meeting of the party on Monday night in Abuja.Though Adeyeye was not specific about those to be invited by the disciplinary committee when it is inaugurated, he alluded to the fact that the last crisis necessitated the need to set it up.He said, People know that this party was rocked by very terrible disciplinary issues which nearly brought the party down completely.NEC decided to set up standing Disciplinary and Reconciliation committees, and the National Caretaker Committee has been directed to establish and inaugurate these committees immediately.The former Minister of State for Works did not say when the two committees would be inaugurated.He also said that the meeting agreed that the party should hold its national convention on August 12, at Abuja.He, however, stated that the convention would be non-elective.Adeyeye said this was because the party needed to give the statutory 21 working days notice to the Independent National Electoral Commission, adding that the party members also needed a reasonable notice.He said this would not be possible because the tenure of the present members of the caretaker committee would expire on August 16.It was however gathered that the convention would extend the tenure of the caretaker committee and might also fix a date for the national convention, where new national officers would be elected.He said, We took a decision on the national convention. So, the prolonged litigation of the national leadership tussle ended only last week on July 12 when the Supreme Court gave judgment in favour of the National Caretaker Committee, leaving barely one month for the conduct of proper elective national convention.Taking into account the relevant statutory notice that we need to give to INEC and the requirements of the PDP Constitution 2012 (as amended), practically, it is going to be impossible to have an elective national convention before August 16 because we need to give certain statutory notices to INEC.And our own has some special provisions that we have to meet and theres no time to meet up with those provisions.Therefore, NEC took a decision that in view of all the circumstances, NEC invoking the powers conferred on it, decided to convene non-elective national convention on August 12, 2017 in Abuja.On the removal of state caretaker committees, Adeyeye said those that were sacked by Sheriff, when the Court of Appeal gave a judgment in his favour on February 17, had been directed to return to office.The PDP spokesman added, All state caretaker committees and state parallel executives, set up after the Court of Appeal judgment of February 17, 2017 at Port Harcourt, had been removed and replaced by the duly elected officials in the affected states.Adeyeye disclosed that the meeting took a decision on constitution amendment, which he said would affect those to be elected at the national convention later in the year.Meanwhile, Sheriff has said he was not invited to any of the four meetings.Sheriff, who was reacting to some reports that he was absent from the caucus meeting, appealed to members of his camp not to leave the PDP.He said this through the former spokesmen for his National Working Committee, Bernard Mikko, adding that he would address a world press conference on the way forward, after studying the Supreme Court judgment that removed him from office.Mikko stated that Sheriff was neither in the country nor invited to the meeting at Wadata Plaza on Monday evening.He said, However, he will address a world press conference on the way forward after we have received and studied the full judgment of the Supreme Court and analysed its import on our democracy.We therefore appeal to all our loyal supporters nationwide not to defect as we are still committed to bringing the party back to the grass roots.We assure them that we will not only give them a voice, but they will also be heard. We will collaborate with global anti-corruption networks to bring all corrupt politicians in Nigeria to book, including the PDP members having criminal cases bordering on dishonesty and malfeasance.
he federal government has asked the Italian authorities to stop humiliating Nigerian immigrants seeking greener pastures in Italy.The government urged Italy to ensure that Nigerian immigrants in that country were treated with dignity and respect.Italy has become the major arrival point for Nigerian migrants en route to Europe, most of them crossing the Mediterranean from Libya.But in recent time, Italy and other European countries, in a coordinated move, have deported hundreds of Nigerians for various immigration offences.The Foreign Ministry called on the Italian government to ensure that immigrants due for deportation are medically fit and returned home with dignity.The ministrys permanent secretary, Sola Enikanolaiye, stated this when the outgoing Italian Ambassador to Nigeria, Fulvio Rustico paid him a courtesy call in Abuja.A statement by Acting Spokesperson of the ministry, Jane Adams said Enikanolaiye thanked the Italian envoy for his pivotal role in the implementation of agreement on Migration between both countries.The Italian envoy, according to the statement, extolled the six-decade bilateral relations between Nigeria and Italy, saying the ties was re-launched through high-level exchange of visits by most senior government officials of both countries.He expressed satisfaction over the increasing bilateral trade volume between both countries, stressing that Italy was positioned to engage in industrial development of Nigeria, including agriculture and oil & gas.He said the enormous investment potentials in Nigeria has made it a priority for Italys investment hub.
Details of the mega-swindle of Nigeria by Messrs. Olajide Omokore and Akanni Aluko have emerged. The details are contained in the assets...

Details of the mega-swindle of Nigeria by Messrs. Olajide Omokore and Akanni Aluko have emerged. The details are contained in the assets forfeiture proceedings filed against Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke and Messrs. Omokore by the United States Department of Justice in Houston.According to the US court processes, both men engaged in money laundering and bribery of a government official. They were found to have bribed Mrs. Alison-Madueke with high-end homes in the United Kingdom, renovated to her taste at dizzying costs; pricey furniture items and other indices of other-worldly lifestyle. Court document obtained by SaharaReporters shows that between Televeras, Arcadia and Glencore, Alukos account in Switzerland received at least $1.2billion in funds that found its way to funding Ms. Diezanis tasty lifestyle.The immodest luxuries provided Mrs. Alison Madueke who, as Petroleum Resources Minister between 2010 and 2015, used her influence to facilitate inappropriate business opportunities for Messrs. Aluko and Omokore by assigning to their companies, Atlantic Energy Drilling Concepts (AEDC) Limited and Atlantic Energy Brass Development (AEBD) Limited, eight oil mining leases (OMLs).The OMLs were assigned under Strategic Alliance Agreements (SAAs) with the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company (NPDC), a subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). Despite lacking the technical expertise and financial capacity to operate the OMLs, as noted in a February 2014 report of the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Mrs. Alison-Madueke greenlighted the process for her cronies.What followed, said US prosecutors, was the sale by AEDC and AEBD of the oil-lifting allocations they were assigned under the Forcados and Brass SAAs to third-party oil trading companies. They made tonnes of money, by not fulfilling the obligations stated in the agreements, using some of it to bribe Mrs. Alison-Madueke.Court papers show that Talaveras Group, one of the third-party oil trading companies, paid copious sums into Mr. Alukos personal accounts. Talaveras Group, registered in Nigeria, is controlled by one of Nigerias youngest billionaires, Igho Sanomi. The stream of payments, prosecutors observed, began shortly after the award of the Forcados SAAs. Over a period of six months, Mr. Aluko received the sum of $15million in his personal account domiciled at LGT Bank (Schweiz) AG in Switzerland (the LGT -090038 Account), from which various purchases for Mrs. Alison-Madueke were funded. The money came from Taleveras Group and its affiliates, including Taleveras Trading Limited and and Taleveras Petroleum Trading BV.On July 12, 2011, prosecutors found that the sum of $1.5million was wired from Taleveras to Mr. Alukos account. Two days later, the sum of $1million also arrived the account from RFB Lengard JVA in which Mr. Igho Sanomi, founder and chairman of Taleveras, owns 30 per cent stake. Another $1million arrived on July 20, 2011, from Taleveras Trading Limited. This was followed on 15 August 2011 by $1million wired by Taleveras to Mr. Alukos account in Switzerland as payment for a Joint Venture contract with RFB Lengard. The same day, he received $650,000 from the same source.On September 12, 2011, Taleveras Trading Limited paid $1million and $1.6million four days later. On 5 October of the same year, Mr. Alukos account was credited with $1.5million by Taleveras Petroleum Trading BV and $500,000 six days later. The next lashing of cash arrived on 14 November 2011, when his account received $2million wired by TaleverasGroup. On January 3 and 10 2012, $600,000 and $1million respectively were paid by Taleveras Petroleum Trading BV.Prosecutors reckoned that the payments were made to Mr. Aluko in return for assigning the AEDCs rights to Taleveras and RFB Lengard to lift oil under the corruptly acquired SAAs.They discovered that each of the transactions was subsequently transferred into and out of correspondent bank accounts at a financial institution, which processes its U.S. dollar wire transactions through Newark, New Jersey.According to prosecutors, AEDC entered into an agreement with the Arcadia Group and its subsidiaries, from which AEDC purportedly took loans. In return, Arcadia was repaid with assignments of AEDCs crude oil liftings under the dodgy SAAs. The company describes itself as a global commodity trading firm covering oil, agricultural, gas and power markets.In particular, two months after the last payment from Taleveras, Arcadia Energy (Suisse) SA and Arcadia Petroleum Limited began making payments to an account held in the name of AEH at LGT Bank (Schweiz) AG ending in -108031 (the LGT -108031 Account), said prosecutors.On April 18, 2012, Acardia paid $10million into the above stated account. On May 14 of the same year, it paid $1.3million and on July 23,$2.4million. On July 24, 2012, the company paid $1.3million into the same account. Less than a month later, it paid $2.9million into the same account and followed it up with a whopping $25million September 17, 2012.The next day, it paid $2.091million into the same account. This preceded a hefty transfer of $23.4million on January 8, 2013. A couple of days later, Acardia paid $1.6million and on February 4, 2013, wired $2million to the account. This was followed by the payment of $1.1million, $6million and $1.7million respectively.The stunt continued with payments to a company, Glencore, by AEBD, which sold to Glencore over 7million barrels of crude oil acquired through the Brass SAA. Glencores payments for these allotments, said prosecutors, were made to an account in the name of AEBD ending in 184001 at Deutsche Bank (Suisse) SA and an account ending in -630350 in the name of AEBD at Standard Chartered Bank, London. They were also made into accounts in the name of AEBD ending in 677644 at Standard Chartered Bank, London; and 9941 at Stanbic IBTC, Nigeria.Glencore, for example, paid $83.6million to AEBD on April 5, 2013; $80.5million, $79.4million on July 4, $19.8million July 17, $19.5million on July 19 and $83.4million on July 21.iner details of the mega-swindle of Nigeria by Messrs. Olajide Omokore and Akanni Aluko have emerged. The details are contained in the assets forfeiture proceedings filed against Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke and Messrs. Omokore by the United States Department of Justice in Houston.According to the US court processes, both men engaged in money laundering and bribery of a government official. They were found to have bribed Mrs. Alison-Madueke with high-end homes in the United Kingdom, renovated to her taste at dizzying costs; pricey furniture items and other indices of other-worldly lifestyle. Court document obtained by SaharaReporters shows that between Televeras, Arcadia and Glencore, Alukos account in Switzerland received at least $1.2billion in funds that found its way to funding Ms. Diezanis tasty lifestyle.The immodest luxuries provided Mrs. Alison Madueke who, as Petroleum Resources Minister between 2010 and 2015, used her influence to facilitate inappropriate business opportunities for Messrs. Aluko and Omokore by assigning to their companies, Atlantic Energy Drilling Concepts (AEDC) Limited and Atlantic Energy Brass Development (AEBD) Limited, eight oil mining leases (OMLs).The OMLs were assigned under Strategic Alliance Agreements (SAAs) with the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company (NPDC), a subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). Despite lacking the technical expertise and financial capacity to operate the OMLs, as noted in a February 2014 report of the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Mrs. Alison-Madueke greenlighted the process for her cronies.What followed, said US prosecutors, was the sale by AEDC and AEBD of the oil-lifting allocations they were assigned under the Forcados and Brass SAAs to third-party oil trading companies. They made tonnes of money, by not fulfilling the obligations stated in the agreements, using some of it to bribe Mrs. Alison-Madueke.Court papers show that Talaveras Group, one of the third-party oil trading companies, paid copious sums into Mr. Alukos personal accounts. Talaveras Group, registered in Nigeria, is controlled by one of Nigerias youngest billionaires, Igho Sanomi. The stream of payments, prosecutors observed, began shortly after the award of the Forcados SAAs. Over a period of six months, Mr. Aluko received the sum of $15million in his personal account domiciled at LGT Bank (Schweiz) AG in Switzerland (the LGT -090038 Account), from which various purchases for Mrs. Alison-Madueke were funded. The money came from Taleveras Group and its affiliates, including Taleveras Trading Limited and and Taleveras Petroleum Trading BV.On July 12, 2011, prosecutors found that the sum of $1.5million was wired from Taleveras to Mr. Alukos account. Two days later, the sum of $1million also arrived the account from RFB Lengard JVA in which Mr. Igho Sanomi, founder and chairman of Taleveras, owns 30 per cent stake. Another $1million arrived on July 20, 2011, from Taleveras Trading Limited. This was followed on 15 August 2011 by $1million wired by Taleveras to Mr. Alukos account in Switzerland as payment for a Joint Venture contract with RFB Lengard. The same day, he received $650,000 from the same source.On September 12, 2011, Taleveras Trading Limited paid $1million and $1.6million four days later. On 5 October of the same year, Mr. Alukos account was credited with $1.5million by Taleveras Petroleum Trading BV and $500,000 six days later. The next lashing of cash arrived on 14 November 2011, when his account received $2million wired by Taleveras Group. On January 3 and 10 2012, $600,000 and $1million respectively were paid by Taleveras Petroleum Trading BV.Prosecutors reckoned that the payments were made to Mr. Aluko in return for assigning the AEDCs rights to Taleveras and RFB Lengard to lift oil under the corruptly acquired SAAs.They discovered that each of the transactions was subsequently transferred into and out of correspondent bank accounts at a financial institution, which processes its U.S. dollar wire transactions through Newark, New Jersey.According to prosecutors, AEDC entered into an agreement with the Arcadia Group and its subsidiaries, from which AEDC purportedly took loans. In return, Arcadia was repaid with assignments of AEDCs crude oil liftings under the dodgy SAAs. The company describes itself as a global commodity trading firm covering oil, agricultural, gas and power markets.In particular, two months after the last payment from Taleveras, Arcadia Energy (Suisse) SA and Arcadia Petroleum Limited began making payments to an account held in the name of AEH at LGT Bank (Schweiz) AG ending in -108031 (the LGT -108031 Account), said prosecutors.On April 18, 2012, Acardia paid $10million into the above stated account. On May 14 of the same year, it paid $1.3million and on July 23,$2.4million. On July 24, 2012, the company paid $1.3million into the same account. Less than a month later, it paid $2.9million into the same account and followed it up with a whopping $25million September 17, 2012.The next day, it paid $2.091million into the same account. This preceded a hefty transfer of $23.4million on January 8, 2013. A couple of days later, Acardia paid $1.6million and on February 4, 2013, wired $2million to the account. This was followed by the payment of $1.1million, $6million and $1.7million respectively.The stunt continued with payments to a company, Glencore, by AEBD, which sold to Glencore over 7million barrels of crude oil acquired through the Brass SAA. Glencores payments for these allotments, said prosecutors, were made to an account in the name of AEBD ending in 184001 at Deutsche Bank (Suisse) SA and an account ending in -630350 in the name of AEBD at Standard Chartered Bank, London. They were also made into accounts in the name of AEBD ending in 677644 at Standard Chartered Bank, London; and 9941 at Stanbic IBTC, Nigeria.Glencore, for example, paid $83.6million to AEBD on April 5, 2013; $80.5million, $79.4million on July 4, $19.8million July 17, $19.5million on July 19 and $83.4million on July 21.(Sahara Reporters)
TRENTON -- A man who is serving a life sentence for a 1985 murder described by authorities as an "outrageously vile, horrible, inhuman slaughter" tried and failed to get out of prison early on a technicality.

Vernon L. Simmons

The state's appellate court ruled Wednesday that Vernon L. Simmons, now 56, should not be released despite the fact that a court clerk mistakenly recorded his sentence as 30 years instead of a life sentence.

The mistake was actually made in 2015 when the lower court was trying to correct a previous mistake in the court record, according to the decision Wednesday.

According to a 1985 Philadelphia Inquirer article, Simmons was convicted on two murder charges in the killing of one man: Herman Bracey, 26, of Browns Mills. The prosecutor at the time said Simmons executed the man after a drug deal fell through, according to the article.

He was sentenced to life in prison without parole eligibility until at least 30 years.

The prosecutor got two convictions out of one killing by making one charge for purposely causing the death and one for knowingly causing the death, according to the decision. On appeal, the Appellate Court ruled in 1987 that the convictions should be merged into one murder count, though that didn't affect his life sentence.

The lower court failed to issue a new judgement of conviction to reflect the change, an error that was rectified by a judge in March of 2015. However, whoever entered the judgement in the court system listed the sentence as 30 years, instead of life with no parole before 30 years.

This was corrected five months later, but Simmons still appealed, arguing that he should be released because the court is bound by its judgement stating the 30-year sentence.

The appellate judges Tuesday said the original life sentence stands because the Supreme Court ruled 50 years ago that mistakes in sentencing can be corrected without violating a defendant's double jeopardy rights.

Simmons is held in Northern State Prison in Newark. He will be eligible for parole May 11, 2021, according to Department of Corrections records.

Rebecca Everett may be reached at reverett@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @rebeccajeverett. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
I think my heart has finally burst!!!! When Chief Robert Regalbuto of the Wildwood Police Department heard that Ethan wanted to be a police offer he gave me a direct order! "I want Ethan and his mom at the Wildwoods Sign at 8am on 7/17/17 sharp!" ... at 8:22am Ethan Kranig was officially sworn in as a Wildwood Police Officer. Patrolmen Kranig was invited to be a part of the departments 2017 staff photo! Congratulations to Ethan and his emergency room nurse and EMT mom Natalie Kranig !!!! Thank you Commissioner Leonetti and Chief Regalbuto! #PowerOfCommunity #YouInspireKindness #SeeTheSea Any Police Departments would like to send a Patch from your department towards Ethan's collection please do so by sending them to: The Lunch With Lynch Foundation PO Box 1322 Wildwood,NJ 08260 ... thank you - John Lynch Posted by John Lynch on Monday, July 17, 2017

-- A 9-year-old Wisconsin boy with a rare genetic disorder was sworn in an honorary Wildwood police officer on Monday, part of a day of fun set up as a break from his medical care.

Ethan Kranig who was on the East Coast to receive treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, has ectrodactyly ectodermal dysplasia, according to John Lynch, a local who works at the Wildwood Convention Center and helped arrange the family's visit to Cape May County.

In addition to appearing in the police department's annual photograph, Ethan and his family also got a police escort to the beach from the Middle Township police.

Kranig has always wanted to see the ocean, Lynch said.

Ethan, his brother Wyatt and mother Natalie Kranig also received a free helicopter ride from a local business.

Ethan has undergone 31 surgeries and lost vision in his right eye, Lynch said.

Lynch also said Ethan likes to collect police department patches.

Any departments or individuals who would like to contribute patches can send them to the following address:

The Lunch With Lynch Foundation

PO Box 1322

Wildwood, NJ 08260

Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
NEW BRUNSWICK-- Undergraduate students at Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus will see a 1.85 percent increase in tuition and fees this fall, or an extra $266 on their annual bill.

The average in-state undergraduate on the New Brunswick campus will pay $14,638 in annual tuition and fees in the 2017-2018 under a plan approved by the school's Board of Governors.

Rutgers is also hiking the cost of room and board by 1.5 percent. Including housing, the total bill for the average New Brunswick undergraduate from New Jersey will be $27,090, a 1.7 percent increase from the previous year.

Along with the tuition increases, the Board of Governors also approved the university's $4.4 billion budget during a meeting Wednesday on the New Brunswick campus. Student tuition and fees represents 40 percent of Rutgers-New Brunswick's total revenue.

School officials called the tuition hike modest and below Rutgers' average 2.1 percent increases of the previous three years.

"We really look to keep (increases) as low as possible and we try to look at other revenue sources first," said Kathy Dettloff, the university's vice president for financial planning and budgeting.

Dettloff said the higher cost of attendance is primarily driven by the 2.5 percent average contract salary increase for faculty. Rutgers' average tuition hike over the past three years was only slightly greater than the average 2 percent increases at comparable, research-driven public universities, she added.

David Hughes, Rutgers' union vice president, urged the board to prioritize students and said the school should not compare its tuition to other universities.

"I urge you to make college affordable for this generation," he said. "There are a lot of other institutions raising tuition... but those institutions may not have our resources."

Danny Taylor, a senior majoring in history, was one of a few undergraduates present at the meeting. The board's decision, he said, would make it more difficult for him to pay off his student loan debt.

"In the immediate, this means I have to take out more loans," he said. "Clearly, (the tuition increase) is not about the well-being of the student population or the workers."

Out-of-state students and in-state undergraduates in Newark and Camden will also see 1.85 percent tuition increases, according to the university.

But many students will pay less than the full amount in tuition and fees due to grants and financial aid, Dettloff said.

"There are many ways the sticker price is reduced for students," Dettloff said. "(Rutgers) is incredibly focused on our neediest students."

Avalon Zoppo may be reached at azoppo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at @AvalonZoppo. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
New Jersey writer Junot Diaz's next book will be a children's book -- a picture book about a young girl titled "Islandborn."

Diaz, 48, first promised his goddaughters 20 years ago that he would write about Dominican girls like them who lived in the Bronx, the New York Times reports, so the project arrives more than a little late (his goddaughters are in their late 20s).

"Behind their request was this longing for books and stories that resonated for them and included them, and opened a space where they could be protagonists in the world," Diaz told the Times.

Junot, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his 2007 novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," was born in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and moved to Parlin in 1974. He says that as a child, he had trouble finding any characters in books that looked like him.

So proud that my old friend #JunotDiaz' newest book will be for children! His love for his goddaughters is brought to life in #IslandBorn! pic.twitter.com/ETyWx9Loid -- E. Miranda-Rodriguez (@MrEdgardoNYC) July 19, 2017

The protagonist of "Islandborn," Lola, was born in the Dominican Republic and lives in Washington Heights, where she seeks to learn about her home country. Diaz said he had been in a car with a friend's child when the girl asked him for a story. The resulting tale wound up being the seed for the picture book, illustrated by Leo Espinosa and intended for children 4 to 8 years old.

Published by Dial Books for Young Readers, the book is due out in the spring of 2018. Diaz's last work, "This is How You Lose Her," a collection of short stories, came out in 2012.

In 2009, while visiting Bergen Community College, Diaz said his work was about allowing children to see people like themselves reflected in literature.

"You know how vampires have no reflections in the mirror?" he asked. "If you want to make a human being a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves," he said. "And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn't see myself reflected at all. I was like, 'Yo, is something wrong with me?' That the whole society seems to think that people like me don't exist? And part of what inspired me was this deep desire, that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors, so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it."

Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.
First NJ.com named it the best hot dog in New Jersey. Now it's being called the best hot dog in America.

It's good to be Rutt's Hut.

Just in time for Wednesday's National Hot Dog Day -- the entire month of July, in fact, is National Hot Dog Month -- foodie website The Daily Meal released its list of the 75 best hot dogs in America. The list has a number of New Jersey classics including the top spot, where Rutt's in Clifton was awarded the crown. That honor comes less than a week after our own Pete Genovese named Rutt's the best hot dog spot in the state.

Rutt's Hut was hailed by The Daily Meal for its signature Ripper, a hot dog that's fried until it rips apart. The whole Rutt's vibe -- a standing-only, tile-covered roadhouse that's been unchanged since 1928 -- was praised just as much as the hot dogs by The Daily Meal.

Sliding into number 23 on The Daily Meal list is Jimmy Buff's Italian Hot Dogs in West Orange and Kenilworth. Unlike other Italian dogs on the list, Jimmy Buff's are loaded down with potatoes. Our own expert Pete Genovese gave props to Jimmy Buff's, but ranks it as only the 16th best hot dog stand in New Jersey.

Other New Jersey outlets on The Daily Mail's list include: Tommy's in Elizabeth (#32) (Genovese ranked Tommy's the second best hot dog joint in New Jersey); Max's Famous Hot Dogs in Long Branch (#56), for which The Daily Meal recommends the onion rings and sweet potato fries just as much as the hot dogs. (Genovese left Max's completely off of his best-New-Jersey list.)

The final member of the New Jersey contingent on The Daily Meal's list is Maui's Dog House in North Wildwood (#73). The Daily Meal raved about Maui's Italian dogs, with toppings sauteed in white wine. (On Genovese's list, Maui's ranked #20.)

Three of the spots we cited in New Jersey's top five were left off The Daily Meal list: Curbside Cafe in Parsippany, Tony's Specialized Hot Dogs in Newark and Randy the Hot Dog Guy in Hillside.

Now get out there and eat some of these dogs -- and let us know what you think of The Daily Meal's ranking in the comments section.

Michael Sol Warren may be reached at mwarren@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MSolDub. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
NEWARK -- Three Georgia men and an Essex County woman were charged Tuesday with conspiring to illegally sell firearms destined for New Jersey in a case that led investigators to seize more than 40 weapons, including an assault rifle, federal authorities said.

Tyheed "Solo" Jefferson, 33, of Albany, Georgia, Carnell Jefferson, 25, also of Albany, Mathias Connor, 41, of Atlanta, Georgia, and Nakiya Glenn, 28, of Irvington, were accused in the gun trafficking scheme, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Newark announced.

Federal authorities said Tyheed Jefferson, Connor, and Glenn were part of the gun trafficking ring that used "straw purchasers" to buy and transport firearms in Georgia between January and July. The practice involves using a buyer to purchase weapons for another person, who may want to avoid background checks or illegally sell the guns in another state.

The U.S. Attorney's Office said Tyheed Jefferson is also charged with distributing methamphetamine, stemming from a May 24 sale of five guns.

Connor is accused of helping Tyheed Jefferson, identified by prosecutors as the ringleader of the alleged gun trafficking scheme, with obtaining, moving and storing the guns in Georgia.

In at least two transactions, the guns were sold in Georgia, knowing the weapons were bound for New Jersey, according to federal authorities. Firearms were also bought in Georgia and resold in New Jersey on at least five cases.

Glenn, the Irvington resident, stored some of those firearms at her residence, federal authorities said.

Carnell Jefferson purchased multiple firearms at federally-licensed dealers in Georgia on behalf of another conspirator between October 2014 and July 2016 knowing that the weapons were being taken to New Jersey, according to the investigation. Jefferson was paid $50 per gun.

Guns that Jefferson purchased were linked to unspecified "criminal activity" in New Jersey between December 2014 and January, court papers said.

Authorities said they seized 47 firearms as part of the probe, which included an assault rifle with a 75-round magazine, semi-automatic handguns, a shotgun, revolvers and numbers of ammunition.

Tyheed Jefferson, Connor, and Glenn were charged with unlawfully selling firearms to an individual that they knew did not reside in their state of residence. Tyheed Jefferson was also charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.

Carnell Jefferson was charged with conspiracy to engage in the business of unlicensed firearms dealing.

Authorities said Connor remained at large. It was not immediately clear if any of those facing charges had retained defense lawyers.

Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahyc and on Facebook. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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NEWARK -- Authorities Wednesday plan to announce the arrests an Essex County doctor accused of supplying 16 members of Atlantic County drug ring with fraudulent prescriptions to get oxycodone pills.

The dealers are accused of buying the prescriptions from the doctor in Essex, and then selling the drugs more than 100 miles away. The ring trafficked tens of thousands of oxycodone pills, authorities said.

Attorney General Christopher Porrino announced he will host a press conference Wednesday afternoon to share the outcome of the "Operation Oxy Highway" investigation.

The investigation "targeted drug trafficking in one of the New Jersey counties hardest hit by the opiate epidemic," and a doctor who allegedly "callously cashed in" on it.

The press conference is set for 1 p.m. Wednesday in Newark.

Jessica Mazzola may be reached at jmazzola@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @JessMazzola. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
JERSEY CITY -- The city's school district is expected to announce next week a plan to re-balance its budget for the coming school year after losing more than $8 million in state aid.

The district has not publicly released details of the new budget, which must be adopted by Aug. 1, but school officials say the 28,000-student district is being refunded money after it was overcharged for charter school students.

Maryann Dickar, a spokeswoman for the Jersey City Public Schools, said the new surplus is being applied directly to the multi-million deficit created when state leaders approved a new school funding plan earlier this month that would redistribute state aid to underfunded districts. As a result, Jersey City is losing $8.4 million in state funding.

In an email obtained by The Jersey Journal, Superintendent Marcia Lyles announced the district expects to be refunded $5.5 million because the state "overcharged us for 418 charter school students" as of June 27.

For every local child who opts to attend a charter school, their home district is mandated to pay 90 percent of the state aid and local tax levy it receives per pupil.

Additionally, the city has announced it will contribute roughly $2.5 million worth of services to the Jersey City Public Schools to help narrow the remaining budget gap. The city will cover police costs at the schools and provide joint services for recreational programming and custodial work. That money will come out of the city's budget for 2018, officials said.

District and city officials do not expect classrooms to be effected by the loss in funding, but Lyles said in her email the district was "able to barely dodge the bullet" of making cuts to critical programs.

The new school budget will be presented during a public meeting at 6 p.m. on Tuesday at the district's central office on Claremont Avenue. The board will vote on the budget following the hearing.

Caitlin Mota may be reached at cmota@jjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter @caitlin_mota. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.
JERSEY CITY - Hudson County has settled a 2014 discrimination lawsuit for $1.5 million dollars after an employee accused the county of firing her for taking time off to treat her depression.

The settlement for Kimberle Malta-Roman, which the county signed off on June 12, ends years of court hearings and comes after a judge vacated the $8.45 million a jury awarded her last year.

In 2012, Malta-Roman - an employee in the Department of Family Services - took three months of medical leave to get treatment for depression. The day she returned, Malta-Roman learned administrators told employees about her treatment. She became distressed and requested two more weeks off, according to the lawsuit.

Malta-Roman spent a year battling with the county over doctors and diagnosis until she was found fit to return to work. Malta-Roman continued to work for Hudson County during her litigation.

In September, a jury awarded Malta-Roman more than $8 million in compensatory and punitive damages, which was later vacated and a new trial was ordered. The county and Malta-Roman reached the $1.5 million settlement before the second trial began, her attorney Colin Page confirmed.

He declined to comment on the ruling, though he previously told The Jersey Journal he was seeking $600,000 for the case.

Malta-Roman is no longer working for Hudson County, her attorney confirmed. A copy of the settlement published online indicates giving up her position was a term of the agreement.

Malta-Roman and a spokesman for Hudson County could not immediately be reached to comment on the ruling.

Caitlin Mota may be reached at cmota@jjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter @caitlin_mota. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.
KEARNY - The 48-year-old woman who died at the Hudson County jail last week had a head injury and inedible objects in her stomach, sources with knowledge of the investigation say.

Jennifer Towle, of Union City, was serving a mandatory six-month sentence for a DWI charge out of the Weehawken Municipal Court when she was found dead in the jail's infirmary at about 2 a.m. July 14, Hudson County spokesman Jim Kennelly has said.

Sources, who were not authorized to speak about Towle's death, said the 48-year-old was nearing the end of her sentence and had spent more than half of her stay in an infirmary cell.

Towle appears to have suffered some type of head injury from a fall from her bunk, multiple sources said.

Additionally, the sources said, Styrofoam and other plastic objects, possibly pieces of a food tray, were found inside her stomach, with one source saying they were linked to "behavioral issues'' that weren't elaborated on.

Medical staff and a corrections officer had checked on Towle about an hour before she was found "unresponsive" and she appeared to be "OK," a source said.

The county jail has faced heavy scrutiny in recent weeks, with Towle being the second inmate in just over a month to die while in custody.

An ad hoc committee was formed last week in response to 35-year-old Rolando Meza-Espinoza's June 10 death. Meza-Espinoza, an immigrant detainee being held in what his lawyer called a case of mistaken identity, suffered "gastrointestinal bleeding" and died after being transferred to the Jersey City Medical Center.

The committee, which was met with dissatisfaction by immigration advocates because it is not a truly independent review board, met this afternoon in response to Towle's death.

Kennelly confirmed that information provided to The Jersey Journal about the circumstances of Towle's death were discussed at the meeting, but he declined to comment further on details of the investigation.

Yesterday, he said that the autopsy is pending and no additional information will be made available until results are released, which he expected will take between 30 and 45 days.

In New Jersey, a mandatory 180 day sentence is given to a person when he or she has been convicted of DWI for a third time.

Medical services at the jail are provided by Marlton-based CFG Health Systems, which received a $29.4 million, five-year contract in December.

Caitlin Mota may be reached at cmota@jjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter @caitlin_mota. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.
Covington community activist Annie Spell: 'If I'm not going to do something, who will?'
New Orleans rapper BTY YoungN, whose given name was Desmone Jerome, was shot dead in Hollygrove on Saturday, April 29, 2017.
Caviar can be served with all sorts of accoutrement. (Brett Duke, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune archive)
WASHINGTON  With thousands of south Louisiana homeowners receiving startling increases in the cost of their flood insurance, members of the Louisiana congressional delegation said Thursday they have run out of patience waiting for FEMA to explain what went into calculating the new rates.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock said Tuesday he is forming a federal political action committee to allow him to travel and be a larger part of the national political conversation.

On Monday evening, the New York Times published a story saying Montana's Democratic governor is taking "the first steps" toward a run for president in 2020.

Tuesday afternoon, Bullock told reporters the PAC will allow him to "share Montana's story."

Montana has a story that Im asked more and more often about as far as how we treat one another with respect, we actually work together to get some things done, from health care to campaign finance transparency and other things, Bullock told reporters Tuesday. The ability to be part of that conversation, I think lending our voice is significant (and) there is no mechanism under state law to do so, so we formed that fed pac both to help out some people and to help travel, (that) allows me to be part of that."

When asked if he would consider a run for president, Bullock said 2020 is a long, long way away. I have no idea what Ill be doing at that point.

Bullock has gained attention as a Democrat from what's viewed as a red state that voted for Republican President Donald Trump by 20 points. He narrowly won re-election against now-U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte last November.

He came into the governorship following popular Democrat Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who has been named as a possible presidential candidate before.

Nationally Democrats have struggled to connect with rural voters in red states, which increases the appeal of a candidate like Bullock, who has worked with state Republican lawmakers to pass Mediaid expansion.

Last week he was elected vice president of the National Governors Association during that groups gathering in Rhode Island.
MISSOULA  The Montana Human Rights Commission voted unanimously Tuesday to affirm a previous finding that determined that Missoula County Sheriff T.J. McDermott and his staff did not discriminate against former Undersheriff Josh Clark after the 2015 election.

In March, the Montana Human Rights Bureau issued a decision denying the claims by Clark, who ran against McDermott in 2014. The Human Rights Commission is an independent five-member panel that has authority to review decisions made by the bureau.
It's official. U.S. Bankruptcy Court Northern District of Illinois Judge Pamela S. Hollis approved the sale of the remaining Strack & Van Til stores to the Jeff Strack-led Indiana Grocery Group.

The newly formed company, which includes the Strack and Van Til families, former longtime Strack & Van Til Chief Executive Officer Dave Wilkinson and other investors, has committed to closing on the deal between Aug. 2 and Sept. 11.

Indiana Grocery Group bested Jewel-Osco in a bankruptcy court-supervised auction, putting forward a bid valued at $91.3 million for 20 stores, the Strack & Van Til headquarters in Highland and a commissary in Valparaiso. The new owners also could have to spend up to $30 million to buy the inventory remaining on store shelves from Central Grocers, which is going out of business.

"We're going to work real hard starting in August to get back and give customers the shopping experience they want," Stack said.

"The reaction from our customers and associates has been overwhelming. I've probably had over 500 texts, emails and phone calls. I've been up late every night responding to each one personally. I've been getting around to it because I think that's part of being local and being part of the community, and I appreciate all those goodwill wishes that have been sent my way."

The trade publication Progressive Grocer described the sale as "a stunning turn of events that will keep Northwest Indianas hometown grocery chain in local hands."

Strack said Tuesday's court ruling was an important milestone

"One more hurdle," he said. "Closing on Aug. 2."
Long Beach, California-based Metro Ports is setting up shop as the new bulk terminal operator at the Port of Indiana-Burns Harbor, and the company hopes to double cargo volumes there in the next two years.

Ports of Indiana Chief Executive Officer Rich Cooper said the presence of Metro Ports, the countrys oldest stevedoring company, could be a "game-changer" that will make the already bustling port even busier.

"We now have a world-class stevedore at the port with such a national presence  they operate on the West Coast, the East Coast and the Gulf Coast," Cooper said. "They see the same tremendous opportunity we do up here in Northwest Indiana. I think we were very successful in selecting a business partner who has a common interest with us in growing this business."

Metro Ports President Michael Ferguson said the 165-year-old company saw the Great Lakes as a potential growth market 18 months ago, and ended up choosing the Port of Indiana-Burns Harbor.

"We've got 27 operations around the United States, but nothing on the Great Lakes," he said. "We've got some pretty strong growth plans."

He said Metro Ports could double cargoes by increasing volumes, finding opportunities with its current client list, and bringing back shipments that once arrived at the deepwater Lake Michigan port but no longer do. The company will load and unload bulk cargoes such as steelmaking, agricultural, manufacturing, energy and construction products on the port's East Harbor.

Federal Marine Terminals serves as the stevedore on the port's West Harbor, where dock workers largely handle steel imports for the cluster of steel-processing plants based at the port that's in both Portage and Burns Harbor.

Last year, the port handled nearly 2.6 million tons of cargo, capping the highest three-year total in its 52-year history.

Metro Ports is well-positioned to bring even more cargo in because it's got a lengthy list of clients who are interested in getting products from the manufacturer to the consumer as quickly and efficiently as possible, Ferguson said. The company handles a slew of different cargoes across the country, including aggregates, potash, coke, coal, cement, fertilizer, borax, bauxite, vehicles, machinery, military hardware, steel products, wind turbine blades, yachts and project cargo.

"This is a great opportunity to add a great company that will bring greater capacity to the market," Northwest Indiana Forum President and Chief Executive Officer Heather Ennis said. "That means being able to attract more businesses, and an exciting future for the community."
DECATUR  Newspaper Publisher Michael Taylor is bringing a new weekly publication to Central Illinois with attention to stories from the region's African-American communities.

The first issue of the Decatur/Bloomington Courier came out Friday in nearly 100 locations between the two cities, Taylor said. A copy costs 75 cents and can be found in various churches and stores throughout town.

Taylor Publications publishes a dozen different newspapers in the Chicagoland and Kankakee areas, as an alternative voice for communities in Illinois, Taylor said, and he's excited to bring forward positive stories in and outside the black community here.

Taylor said his Bourbounnais-based company did a great deal of community outreach in both cities before launching the new paper, and now that the first issue has gone out, he said the response has been positive.
It's official.

U.S. Bankruptcy Court Northern District of Illinois Judge Pamela S. Hollis approved the sale of the remaining Strack & Van Til stores to the Jeff Strack-led Indiana Grocery Group.

The newly formed company, which includes the Strack and Van Til families, former longtime Strack & Van Til Chief Executive Officer Dave Wilkinson and other investors, has committed to closing on the deal between Aug. 2 and Sept. 11.

"We're going to work real hard starting in August to get back and give customers the shopping experience they want," Strack said.

"The reaction from our customers and associates has been overwhelming. I've probably had over 500 texts, emails and phone calls. I've been up late every night responding to each one personally. I've been getting around to it because I think that's part of being local and being part of the community, and I appreciate all those goodwill wishes that have been sent my way."

We want to hear from you Sound off on what the Strack & Van Til purchase by founding family members means to you by writing a letter to the editor of 150 words or less. Include your name, city/town and phone number where we can contact you to verify the letters, and send them to letters@nwi.com.

Indiana Grocery Group bested Jewel-Osco in a bankruptcy court-supervised auction, putting forward a bid valued at $91.3 million for 20 stores, the Strack & Van Til headquarters in Highland and a commissary in Valparaiso. The new owners also could spend up to $30 million to buy the inventory remaining on store shelves from bankrupt wholesaler Central Grocers, which is going out of business.

Not all stores will be saved.

Central Grocers plans to close the recently renovated Ultra Foods in Highland and Kankakee, Illinois, after failing to find a buyer at auction.

The troubled supplier notified the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois on Tuesday it intends to start store closing sales at 8401 Indianapolis Blvd. in Highland and 1200 Kennedy Drive in Kankakee. No successful bidders stepped forward to buy the supermarkets.

Highland-based Strack & Van Til opened the Highland Ultra Foods, the flagship location, near the Hammond border in 1981. Grocers Ernie Strack and Nick Van Til conceived Ultra Foods as a no-frills warehouse-type discount store with low-cost items such as generic cereal that came in bags instead of the traditional cardboard box.

Over the last 36 years, the store has drawn heavily from North Lake County cities of Hammond, East Chicago, Whiting and Gary for its customer base, partly given its proximity to the Borman Expressway. Strack & Van Til officials were concerned in 1993 about threats to close down the Indianapolis Boulevard bridge because of Little Calumet River flooding, which they said at the time could lead to layoffs of most of the store's then-300 employees, according to Times archives.

The Ultra Foods brand grew as Strack & Van Til expanded into the Chicago suburbs in Illinois, largely by acquiring and converting Cub Foods. It had the slogan "finest quality  lowest prices," ran "Ultra Saver" specials that were priced lower than rivals, and bragged in ads its prices were 30 percent cheaper than regular supermarkets.

Ultra Foods once had 15 locations across the Chicago suburbs and Northwest Indiana, and Strack & Van Til recently attempted to rebrand it as Ultra Fresh Foods, adding a pear to the logo, to cater to a growing taste for fresher, healthier foods. The only remaining store with the Ultra Foods brand will be the store at 6001 Broadway in Merrillville.

Indiana Grocery Group will operate that location, as well as 17 Strack & Van Tils and two Town & Country Markets.

Strack & Van Til wrapped up multimillion dollar renovations of both the Highland and Kankakee Ultra Foods in 2015, part of $20 million in improvements it did across the company that year. It added more modern amenities including a bigger produce department, an expanded deli that included 40 more varieties of meats and cheeses, a bulk foods section, a salad bar, a chicken wing bar, more grab-and-go meals and a sushi bar where chefs made sushi fresh daily in front of customers.

The extensively remodeled stores, which ended up looking more like traditional full-service Strack & Van Tils, added amenities like fresh-made sandwiches, in-store floral designs and large sliced fruit and vegetable sections.

The Highland Ultra Foods faced competition when a new Super Walmart opened 1.5 miles up Indianapolis Boulevard, closer to the Borman.

Jewel-Osco was reportedly initially interested in buying both the Ultra stores that will close, but stopped pursuing them and bid instead for 19 Strack & Van Til stores out of concern that the Federal Trade Commission might pursue an antitrust case, the trade publication Progressive Grocer reported.
VIROQUA, Wis.  Craig and Connie Minowa of the band Cloud Cult had been living in Minneapolis and were looking to settle in a small, progressive town with a thriving food culture  a place to get "back to the land."

They found Viroqua, the Wisconsin State Journal reported.

This small town about two hours northwest of Madison is helping put Wisconsin on the culinary map.

Organic Valley, a farming cooperative with 500 farmer members, started in 1988 in nearby La Farge and has been a foundation for the food landscape in Viroqua, which now boasts a James Beard-nominated restaurant to attract food tourists.

One big livability indicator for the Minowas was the quality of a town's food co-op, and when they toured Viroqua, they found a huge, thriving grocery cooperative. That sealed the deal.

Elevated above Main Street, the Viroqua Food Co-op, established in 1995, is open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day. It has 4,400 square feet of retail space and is undergoing an expansion that will double its size, said Charlene Elderkin, the co-op's marketing manager.

In a town of 4,300, the co-op has more than 3,500 members.

"The people here, they are educated about food. They want to have that connection with their local farms and with clean food," she said.

More than 30 percent of the co-op's sales are local products, defined as coming from within 100 miles. And that's not just produce. It's also meat and cheese, and items like Wisco Pop natural soda and Kickapoo Coffee, two Viroqua companies with fans in Madison and beyond.

Jamie Lamonde worked for Organic Valley for 11 years before leaving to stay home with her children. She's now editor and publisher of Edible Madison, a 7-year-old magazine focused on food and agriculture in Southern Wisconsin.

While Lamonde has a P.O. box in Viroqua, she lives about 30 minutes away in La Farge. The magazine's writers and photographers live in Madison and all over Southwest Wisconsin.

She picked the name Edible Madison because of Madison's foodie credentials, but admits that Viroqua's food culture is "pretty amazing."

"It's just really been a pioneer in organic, sustainable farming practices" and Vernon County and Viroqua are hubs of the lifestyle that goes with it, Lamonde said.

That ethic is reflected in everything from the area's alternative schooling options, to its outdoor recreation, its musical life and its farm-to-table local food focus.

And it's drawing like-minded residents, such as the Minowas, from bigger cities.

"There are so many transplants from all over the place," Craig Minowa said.

These days, Driftless Cafe is the heart and soul of Viroqua, tucked just off Main Street at 118 Court St. It's busy day and night, particularly since its chef and co-owner, Luke Zahm, became a 2017 James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef: Midwest.

That recognition, considered one of the highest honors in the restaurant business, has brought in a lot of customers from outside Viroqua, and Zahm is happy to expose them to the town that he loves.

Zahm, 37, grew up in La Farge, and, his wife, Ruthie, 38, in Viroqua. After many years living in Madison, they moved back to Vernon County to raise their three children and have operated Driftless since 2013.

Ruthie Zahm said before they moved back, they would hit a certain point on their drive to Vernon County, and Luke would feel the call of home.

"We love camping as a family, we love canoeing. Although you can do that in Madison . it just wasn't the same home feeling," she said. "Paired with knowing that he could get really great ingredients here and always wanting to kind of come back home, was quite a big push."

Luke Zahm, who worked in the kitchen at Epic Systems in Verona and at Lombardino's in Madison, said he has no idea how the Beard judges knew about him, but guesses it could have come through the advocacy work he's been part of in Washington, D.C.

He's traveled to the nation's capital to lobby for truthful labeling, specifically in regard to GMO products.

Zahm likes to take the opportunity to tell the story of what's happening in Vernon County, which he says with 220 certified organic farms has the highest concentration of organic farms of any county in Wisconsin. Zahm gives that statistic not just as a restaurant owner who uses organic ingredients, but also as president of Viroqua's Chamber of Commerce.

"That is a big, big driver economically," Zahm said about the farming community.

He's pleased that organic farmers from the area are starting to branch out.

When recruiting other chefs at the Culinary Institute of America in 2011 in Hyde Park, New York, he cooked at the campus in the evening. His team was sandwiched between Bobby Flay's people and Mario Batali's people and he said he was overwhelmed by the perceptions of Wisconsin that he heard.

They really only knew about beer, cheese and the Packers, he said. In trying to establish credibility and luring soon-to-be graduates to the Midwest to cook, Zahm kept emphasizing that this is the area where food comes from. "This is the bread basket."

The CIA's star students prepared a meal one night and on a list of their sources were four ingredients from the Driftless Region.

"And that for me was the light bulb," Zahm said.

It's called the "Driftless" Region because of its unglaciated geography. The area doesn't lend itself to industrial farming and one of the reasons Organic Valley started was to find a way for small family farms to make it and not have to "go big or go broke," said the co-op's Elderkin. The landscape really lent itself to smaller farms, she said.

Joe Rogan-Nordstorm runs Cowboy David's Coffee & Bake Shoppe on Main Street in Viroqua, selling vegan, low-sugar and gluten-free bakery items.

The bakery developed out of the popular La Farge lodging property Rogan-Nordstorm co-owns with his husband, David, where they leave one of their signature double chocolate chip-walnut cookies for each guest.

Joe Rogan-Nordstorm said food tourists will drive from Illinois or from Madison on a Saturday to get two dozen of their cookies or their famous cashew, ginger carrot cakes, shop at the town's farmers' market and then eat at Driftless Cafe.

As Driftless' Zahm spoke with a reporter one Thursday in early June, Viroqua's most famous son, Garbage co-founder and music producer Butch Vig, walked into the artfully designed, two-room cafe with his brother.

And Vig, who lives in Los Angeles, was happy to discuss the amazing food culture that is shaping his hometown.

"Viroqua has had a complete 180-degree transformation in the last 20 years," he said. "When I left here in the '70s and went to UW, it was a dying community and people were moving out."

The Vig brothers were in Viroqua that day to visit their father, who is 94. Every time they come to town, they eat at Driftless Cafe for lunch and dinner, Butch Vig said.

Back in the early '90s, Vig said his father told him, "the hippies are saving Viroqua."

"In a way, he's right because it's a little left-wing counterculture that's come in here. It's not what people consider traditional farming. They've transformed this area, and now to have a restaurant like Driftless here is incredible."

A self-described "foodie" who loves dining out, Vig said he's been lucky to travel with his band Garbage and eat in some of the world's best restaurants.

And he's noticed that when he eats out in Madison, or visits the Dane County Farmers' Market, that a portion of the produce is coming from Viroqua.

Sarah Elliott, market manager for the Dane County Farmers' Market, said the market has five members from Vernon County, three of which are from Viroqua proper. Western Wisconsin as a whole is well represented at the market, with a total of 23 vendors from a group made up of Vernon, Crawford, Richland, La Crosse and Monroe counties.

Eddy Nix, who owns Driftless Books and Music in Viroqua, likens his "slow media" business  getting away from technology and smartphone addiction  to the slow food movement.

The food scene is part of what brings people to Viroqua, but good food can't exist without the people who buy it, Nix said. He credits Zahm with pulling off something amazing.

"It wouldn't have worked in most other towns. And if it wasn't for (Driftless Cafe), it would be a completely different town."

The food culture in Viroqua is far different now than when he was a kid in La Farge High School's graduating class of 1998, Zahm said.

"This was another dying farming community in southwestern Wisconsin. Then it wasn't."
Green Goddess Dressing was created at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, an opulent 19th century hotel noted for its celebrity chefs. In those days, celebrity chefs were not Food Network Stars, but usually white-toqued men either from, or trained in, Europe. No one was yelling "Bam!" so much back then.

Chef Philip Roemer debuted the dressing in 1923 to honor actor George Arliss, who stayed at the hotel while performing in William Archer's hit play "The Green Goddess." It is believed to have been inspired by a dressing that hailed from the kitchens serving Louis XIII, served then not with salads but with eel. (If you have long wondered what dressing to serve with your Wednesday Night Eel, as I have, this info could be very helpful.)

The original recipe is reported to have contained mayonnaise, sour cream, parsley, chives, anchovies, lemon juice and vinegar, but it has been tinkered with over the years by countless chefs and home cooks, including yours truly. A modernized version recently served at the hotel includes additional ingredients like spinach and chervil and capers, and a homemade mayo with raw egg yolks. The dressing may have different versions, but it's always creamy and vibrant with herbs, piquant with a bit of acidity, and salty-savory from anchovies.

This is my most recent version, and I will surely continue to play with this dressing forever. You can use it as a salad dressing on any kind of lettuce or vegetable salad, or as a dip with crudites.

For a vegetarian version, substitute a tablespoon of rinsed capers for the anchovies.

Green Goddess Dressing and Dip

Makes 1 3/4 cups (12 servings)

Start to finish: 10 minutes

2 canned or jarred anchovies, rinsed and chopped

1 clove garlic, chopped

1 cup parsley leaves

1/4 cup roughly chopped fresh basil

2 tablespoons fresh tarragon leaves

4 scallions, trimmed and cut into pieces

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

3/4 cup mayonnaise

3/4 cup sour cream

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Place all the ingredients except the salt and pepper into a food processor or blender. Process until fairly smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Nutrition information per serving: 151 calories; 124 calories from fat; 14 g fat (4 g saturated; 0 g trans fats); 24 mg cholesterol; 514 mg sodium; 2 g carbohydrate; 0 g fiber; 1 g sugar; 4 g protein.
HOBART  A 54-year-old Michigan City man with a violent history against prostitutes is now accused in newly filed court documents of beating and raping a woman he solicited for sex on Backpage.com in June 2015.

Police say they are aware of at least two other victims  also alleged prostitutes  who Kenneth Sandford Manley is accused of soliciting for sex through Backpage.com, an online adult classified advertising portal, and holding them against their will.

Michigan City police have secured charges against Manley in one of the cases, and Manley has been serving a six-year sentence at Westville Correctional Center for a similar 2015 offense, Hobart police Lt. James Gonzales said.

During an interview with Mr. Manley, he did admit that (he) would normally solicit prostitutes, so there could very well be additional victims that he has violated and beaten and they are too afraid to come forward and say anything, Lt. Gonzales said.

Manley has been charged with one count of rape, strangulation and sexual battery, and two counts of criminal confinement in connection with the June 12, 2015, incident at a house in the 1000 block of High Street in Hobart, according to a probable cause affidavit filed Wednesday.

The victim told police she had a number of sexual encounters with Manley in the first half of 2015, including one meeting at Blue Chip Casino in Michigan City, where Manley allegedly gave her money in exchange for sex, the affidavit states.

When she went to jail for 30 days for conversion, the victim told police Manley would visit her at the jail and loaned her money, records show.

After her release, the two met at a warehouse in Kingsford Heights, where she allegedly told him she was no longer going to be working as a prostitute, court records show.

Manley allegedly became very upset and forcibly raped her on the couch in the warehouse, records show. The victim told police she didnt report the crime because Manley allegedly threatened to hurt her family and she feared police would not take her claim seriously, records show.

Months later, the victim learned Manley was in prison for kidnapping a prostitute, records show. Around that same time, she was contacted on Backpage.com and drove with her roommate to a motel in Michigan City but left after learning it was Manley who tried to meet with her.

The victim was again contacted on Backpage.com by a couple wanting to arrange a sexual encounter on June 12, 2015, at a house on High Street, records show.

She knocked on a side door, turned around to leave when no one answered and saw Manley standing immediately in front of her, records show. He dragged her into the house, then from room to room, and locked all the doors, holding her against her will, records show.

He offered her $200 in exchange for sex and then raped her, she told police. She agreed to have sex with him because she feared for her life, records show.

In an interview with police, Manley admitted to police he met with prostitutes after his wife died, records show.
GRIFFITH  Griffith Police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are investigating a Wednesday morning burglary at Blythe's Sporting Goods where the windows were broken out to gain entry and an assortment of guns may have been taken.

Griffith Police Chief Greg Mance said they were called to the store about 4:30 a.m. He said this is the second time in the last few weeks the store has been burglarized and the third time in less than a year.

"I can't say how many guns were stolen," he said. "We're working with the ATF on this. I can't say any more about the nature of this investigation."

The store was also reportedly burglarized on Sept. 28, 2016 and July 12. All three burglaries are still actively being investigated.

Anyone with information about these burglaries is encouraged to call Detective Jim Sibley or Detective John Mowery at 219-924-7503 or the Griffith Police Anonymous Tip Line at 219-922-3085.

Last month, the sporting goods store celebrated 65 years in Northwest Indiana. The store no longer is owned by the Blythe family, who operated the store for several decades. The new president and owner is Jeff Neeley. There also is a store location in Valparaiso.
CROWN POINT  A convenience store manager in Cedar Lake is accused of selling fake urine to undercover state police officers.

Palak Patel, 35, was charged Tuesday in Lake Criminal Court with obstruction of justice, possession of a substance to interfere with a drug test and business sales of a synthetic urine.

Patel told The Times on Wednesday that she was unaware the charges were filed.

She said she sold fake urine a long time ago, but she stopped after receiving a warning from police.

They said you cannot sell this stuff, and so I don't anymore, she said.

Indiana State Excise Police District No. 1 received an anonymous complaint last June that Zip Food Store, 7208 W. 132nd Ave. in Cedar Lake, was selling urine to people who needed to pass probation drug tests, according to a probable cause affidavit.

An undercover state police officer visited the store Sept. 28, 2016, and asked Patel for a substance that would help him pass a drug test, the affidavit states.

Patel allegedly sold the officer a bottle of synthetic urine, which included a heating element and temperature gauge to ensure the urine was properly warmed, the affidavit states.

Patel allegedly sold undercover officers the same product Nov. 7 and Dec. 13.

State police officers executed a search warrant Dec. 29 at the convenience store and seized three boxes of Pee Fix, 92 boxes of U Pass Synthetic and 11 boxes of X-Stream, according to the affidavit.

XStream Fetish Urine is described on the company's website as a toxin-free substance that contains all the natural ingredients found in human urine.

A warning on the website states the products are not to be used for any illegal purposes, including use for lawfully administered drug tests.

The officers also seized several bottles of mouthwash and shampoo advertised as tools to beat mouth swab and hair follicle drug tests, the affidavit states.

Patel denied in a statement to police that she sold the fake urine to the undercover officers, though the transactions were secretly video taped, the affidavit states.

Patel's bond is set at $10,000.
CROWN POINT  The 15-year-old girl accused earlier this year in her mother's killing will stand trial as an adult, according to Lake County Prosecutor Bernard A. Carter.

Chastinea Reeves was charged Tuesday in Lake Criminal Court with murder on allegations she fatally stabbed Jamie M. Garnett, 34, Feb. 13 at the family's home in the 4400 block of West 23rd Place in Gary.

The Lake County Prosecutor's Office filed a petition of delinquency Feb. 15 alleging Reeves committed the murder, and prosecutors requested the girl stand trial as an adult.

Juvenile Court Judge Thomas Stefaniak Jr. heard arguments on the issue at two hearings last month and issued his decision Tuesday to waive jurisdiction.

Carter said Reeves will face a maximum sentence of 65 years in prison if convicted of murder.

A court hearing has not yet been scheduled, according to court records.
CROWN POINT  Lake County election officials on Tuesday gave Hammond and Hobart school officials permission to ask voters for millions of dollars Nov. 7.

The five Democratic and Republican elections board members voted unanimously to put public questions on the Hammond and Hobart ballots.

The School City of Hammond will ask voters to authorize borrowing $110.6 million to build a new high school to replace Hammond High, which is more than 100 years old.

That money also would pay for renovations to Eggers Middle, Scott Middle/High, Clark Middle/High, Gavit Middle/High and Morton High schools and to 13 elementary schools.

The construction costs would raise the property tax rate for city property owners by nearly 36 cents per $100 of assessed value.

Hammond school officials also want to raise city property taxes another 44 cents per $100 of assessed value for student instruction. That would generate a total of $70 million over the next seven years.

In Hobart, the School City of Hobart is asking voters' permission to borrow $41.2 million for school improvements for construction of a new elementary school, in addition to improvements to Hobart High School, Hobart Middle School and four elementary schools. It also wants a new city tax rate that will generate $2 million annually, beginning in 2020, to maintain local public funding for student instruction.

The Indiana Department of Local Government Finance requires Hobart's referendum to state it would raise city property taxes by 80 cents per $100 of assessed valuation for construction, and 24.6 cents per $100 of assessed valuation for instruction.

Hobart schools Superintendent Peggy Buffington said Tuesday it actually won't raise local taxes at all.

She said recent reductions in the cost of serving older debt for the new high school will cancel out the new construction borrowing increase.

She said approving the operations referendum for instruction will cancel estimated loses of $2 million a year to the school district of property taxes reduced under the state's tax cap.

Indiana University's Center for Evaluation & Education Policy states voters have approved about 60 percent of the state's school referendums since 2008.

Earlier this spring, Munster voters approved $6.9 million annually for instruction (operations) and $48 million for school construction, and Lake Station voters agreed to raise $5.6 million annually for instruction. However, East Chicago voters turned down a requested $41 million referendum for school instruction spending.
VALPARAISO  In hopes of gaining better accountability and efficiency, the Porter County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday gave its stamp of approval to the idea of enacting a time clock system for employees.

The proposal, which is contingent upon the Porter County Council agreeing and finding the necessary funding, would replace a hodgepodge of approaches around county government departments to track employee work hours.

The proposal calls for the purchase of software for $40,000 from Right Stuff Software Corp. and ongoing maintenance at $3,000 a month to begin having all county employees clock in and out each day on computers using the same program, according to the commissioners.

The commissioners also discussed the potential of purchasing some time clocks, possibly with fingerprint recognition, at $2,000 apiece after a review is done to determine what approach would work best in each department. The time clocks would go further in assuring employees are clocking in and out as claimed.

Porter County Commissioner President Jeff Good, R-Center, said the purchase of the system would complement efforts underway to rewrite the county government employee manual.

"We're basically going to blow it all up and replace it all," he said of the manual.

Porter County Commissioner Jim Biggs, R-North, who voted in favor of the proposal with his two peers, questioned whether the move will result in a savings for the county or just provide convenience for department heads.

Good said the system should result in a savings.

"Technology creates efficiencies," Good said.

Porter County Auditor Vicki Urbanik said the money for the system is available in the county's general fund as long as additional spending is curtailed.

The Porter County Council is scheduled to meet July 25.
MATTOON -- Investigators believe there are people with information on a 43-year-old unsolved murder that make it worth reopening the case.

The Coles County Sheriff's Office is asking for information on the 1974 death of Linda Shriver, who was 23 and a resident of Mattoon when she was apparently abducted and strangled to death.

About four years ago, the office started to take new looks at cold cases, including Shriver's, said Lt. Christina Stephen.

The effort also involved what's called the Airtight Bridge murder of 1980 and led to the arrest of the victim's husband earlier this year, she said.

"This has the potential to be solved or to provide closure to the family," Stephen said of the Shriver case.

She said case records show that Shriver had been "cruising" with a friend in Mattoon on March 9, 1974. Her car was later found abandoned and her body was discovered in another location the following day, Stephen said.

Suspects were questioned at the time but no one was arrested, Stephen also said.

There are no known witnesses to Shriver's abduction but there are accounts of "men trying to get into her car" on Broadway Avenue in Mattoon, she said.

According to Stephen, the last definite locations for Shriver were when she took her friend home and on Broadway Avenue and near the former Gill's restaurant in Mattoon.

Her car, a 1969 Mercury Montego, was found about a mile west of Mattoon just south of Illinois 121, near where the Rural King store is now located.

Shriver's unclothed body was located under a bridge about 7 miles southwest of Mattoon in the area of Lake Paradise, Stephen said.

She said there were "multiple signs of severe trauma" and the cause of death was determined at the time to be strangulation.

Stephen said sheriff's office investigators plan to re-interview everyone who was questioned at the time and who can now be located.

She said the investigators want to hear from people who think they might know someone with information about the case, as well as people with first-hand knowledge.
EAST CHICAGO  Former Fire Chief Emiliano Perez Jr. was chosen on Tuesday to fill the opening on the City Council that became vacant following the death of former Councilman Ronald London last month.

The city's Democratic precinct committee members held a caucus at Club Ki-Yowga to select Perez  who had been serving as chief of staff for Mayor Anthony Copeland  from a pool of candidates that also included Juan Fernandez, Jesus Ortiz, John Panek and East Chicago School Board President Stacy Winfield.

The five candidates who sought the at-large council seat and its annual salary of more than $42,000 were whittled down from the nine who vied for the same seat when London was chosen in a similar caucus last August to replace Juda Parks. Parks is an East Chicago police officer who resigned rather than continue to fight a state law that does not let municipal employees hold office in that same municipality.

London, a lifelong city resident and former East Chicago police officer, had served on the council for less than a year when he died at the age of 55 on June 12.

Perez will serve out the roughly two and a half years remaining in the term won by Parks and then filled by London.

Lake County Democratic Central Committee Chairman James Wieser announced that Perez received 21 of the votes cast by the 28 precinct committee members in attendance.

Each candidate addressed the members to make their pitch as to why they were the best choice.

Perez cited his over 23 years of service to the city in the Fire Department in addition to the year and a half he has spent as chief of staff.

He said he submitted his retirement papers in October, but saw another chance to serve when London's passing created a vacancy on the council.

"This was an opportunity for me to stay involved and stay connected civilly," Perez said.

The father of five said he will now sell real estate in addition to his job as councilman.

"I think that the most important thing that any councilman can do is to be thoughtful, to be practical and to be that check and balance for the executive branch," Perez said.

Councilman Robert Garcia, D-5th, who is also chairman of the East Chicago Democratic Party, said Perez's experience in dealing with budgets should serve him well.

"I think he'll be a good addition," Garcia said.

At the conclusion of the caucus, Perez was sworn into office by City Clerk Adrian Santos.
DYER  Installation of the 5,000 feet of pre-cast concrete fencing along Calumet Avenue south of Main Street has hit snags during the past few months.

In late April, teardown of the original PVC fencing by Dyer public works crews began on the west side of Calumet Avenue near Main Street. In early May, crews from Fence Masters were slated to begin installing the pre-cast fencing called Chiselcrete that has the look of stone.

However, the discovery of unmarked underground utilities halted the project for several weeks.

Town Manager Tom DeGiulio said in May the utilities were found when digging began for the first decorative stone column.

We have to have 2 feet of clearance from utilities, DeGiulio said. We found some utilities by digging for the first columns footing. On the north end of Calumet Avenue, an AT&T vault impeded the first column.

Conservation Design Forum, a landscape architect firm from Elmhurst, Illinois, designed the plan for the new fencing. That design called for the fence installation to be moved back off the sidewalk on the west side of Calumet Avenue into the right of way to prevent a tunneling effect, he said.

It was in this area in the right of way that unmarked utilities were found, DeGiulio said.

Although all the stone columns are now in place along the west side of Calumet Avenue, the delayed delivery of the fencing material has slowed the project, said Peter Biancardi of Fence Masters.

During a recent Dyer Redevelopment Commission study session, Biancardi gave commission members an update on this portion of the Calumet Avenue Beautification Project first proposed in 2015.

We continue to move forward. Some sections of the fencing need adjustments, said Biancardi, who works daily on-site with crew members.

The problem is material supply. If we had more material, wed have two crews working, he said.

Only one half of the Chiselcrete material needed has been delivered, DeGiulio told commissioners.

Biancardi said crews can continue installing fencing during the winter months.

The only thing that would be if there were snow on the ground and if the ground freezes and we cant work, he said.

Although the fencing will run straight on the top, it follows the changing physical features of the land on the bottom, Biancardi said. A cap will be placed on top of each fence section to create the straight lines.

Currently crews are working to complete the fencing through Northgate Park.

With the old PVC fencing removed, the backyards and side yards of homes along the west side of Calumet Avenue remain open, although some residents built fences on their property.

One Dyer resident, whose side yard backs up to the new fencing, said, It took quite a while to do it.

The man who asked not to be named said the new fence isnt as high as the old PVC fencing.

But they still have to put a top on the fence. That should bring it up a few more inches, he said. Its better than not having anything there.
It's been billed by our governor as "the largest nonstop sustainable building program that our state has ever seen."

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb also has said Hoosiers across the state will soon "see" and "feel" the results of a newly passed $4.7 billion infrastructure project.

It's paramount that the governor, state transportation officials and lawmakers ensure they make good on these promises of tangible road improvements  and quickly.

State lawmakers, including Indiana House Rep. Ed Soliday, R-Valparaiso, who led the road-plan charge, showed both wisdom and bravery in shepherding a 10-cent-per-gallon fuel tax through the last legislative session.

That tax took effect July 1, and we're already experiencing the higher pump prices as a result.

That tax is aimed at bringing our most important infrastructure  the roadways that link our points of commerce and way of life  back to respectability.

We've consistently argued the tax plan was both worthy of support and necessary to our state's long-term viability.

But now the state must demonstrate in the most tangible ways possible how it's making good on promises to make our American crossroads the envy of the Midwest and nation.

The road plan has identified 1,295 bridges for rehabilitation, 9,628 miles of roadway for resurfacing and another 122 miles of additional roadway as top priorities throughout the state.

Hoosiers deserve to see a constant flurry of activity as these plans come to fruition.

In turn, we all must exhibit patience as the state makes good on its promise, slowing down in construction zones, leaving earlier for destinations and keeping level heads on busy roadways under remediation.

Many state leaders, not the least of whom was freshman Gov. Holcomb, have promised these tangible results.

We all must hold them to it, keeping a watchful eye peeled for fresh asphalt, hardhats and construction signs dotting Hoosier highways.

It's time for Hoosiers to get the roadways we deserve.
INDIANAPOLIS  The American Legion of Indiana has named two Northwest Indiana residents as the state's top military members for the reserve and National Guard.

LaPorte Mayor Blair Milo, a lieutenant commander in the Naval reserve, was honored for her military and civilian contributions to the country and her community.

"American Legion officers selected Milo because she exemplifies what a member of the United States military should be, both in and out of uniform," said Chuck Wotring, third district commander.

Master Sgt. Alan E. Thomas Jr., of Gary, was recognized for his service as a "citizen soldier" in the National Guard since 2001.

Thomas earned the Army Combat Action Badge and the Valorous Unit Award during two deployments to Iraq.

At home, he's spent hundreds of hours volunteering for the March of Dimes' "March of Babies" fundraising campaign.
In the paper recently, Secretary of Education Betsy Devos looks like she is trying to reverse the Obama administration policy about sexual assault on college campuses. She met with mens right groups about assault on campuses and suggests the policy needs to be changed, effectively reversing the Obama policy. I see a pattern emerging. The Trump administration seems more bent on negating all Obama policies than fixing them.

Obamacare is the main example.

It seems the philosophy is, "Trash it, dont make it better. Lower the tax brackets for the rich, and trash the benefits for the poor to pay for it."

We are losing our status as middle class. The gap between rich and poor is ever widening. Our wages are stagnant, and the only thing that still makes us middle class is benefits.

Yes I would like to reduce the national debt, but I dont want to be the only one paying for it. Trumps likes to remind us that he is an evangelical, but does he understand that charity is part of every religion?

Marcel Thomas, Hobart
American Airlines is dedicating an airplane to a record-setting employee.

Azriel Blackman, 91, has worked as a mechanic with the airline for 75 years, breaking the Guinness world record in the process.

A Boeing 777 will now feature Blackman's signature, a design painted in his honor and a plaque that will be visible to fliers.

Blackman has been with the company since 1942, when he signed on as a sheet metal shop apprentice at 50 cents an hour.

"Working here and working with all my friends and all the people I've known for so many years has been a pleasure," Blackman said. "Skillful people who know what they're doing."

Although Blackman isn't allowed to climb ladders or use tools anymore, he says he loves his job and has no plans to retire.
DECATUR  Police have arrested three men in connection with the July 8 shooting of a man outside of a gas station in the 2100 block of East Wood Street.

The 27-year-old victim suffered two bullet wounds that doctors said fractured his left kneecap and would require surgery, according to a signed police affidavit.

Devoe D. Randall, 26, is accused of shooting the victim and faces preliminary charges of attempted murder and unlawful use of a weapon.

Jerrin J. Milan, 24, and Javaris J. Milan, 25, both face preliminary charges of unlawful use of a weapon and unlawful possession of a weapon. Jerrin Milan also faces a charge of aggravated discharge of a weapon. Javaris Milan faces an armed habitual criminal charge.

Preliminary charges are subject to review by the Macon County State's Attorney's Office.

Detectives identified the suspects after reviewing security footage of the incident, which happened shortly before 3 a.m., according to the affidavit.

Footage showed a man later identified as Randall enter the gas station's convenience store, buy a bottle of water and walk back outside. Jerrin and Javaris Milan were seen standing nearby with a group of people in the parking lot, according to the affidavit.

When Randall returned to the gas station lot, the affidavit said, he had used a shirt to cover his face. He can be seen pointing a gun toward the victim, who was standing with the Milans. Footage showed the victim falling to the ground after being shot and then being helped inside the store.

The affidavit said Randall put the gun in his waistband and walked away through the car wash. Footage showed Jerrin Milan motioning for Javaris Milan to come to him, and Javaris Milan giving him an item that appeared to be a handgun, the affidavit said.

Jerrin Milan ran toward the car wash entrance and pointed his handgun in the direction Randall was last seen walking, according to the affidavit. When officers later arrived, they found nine .45-caliber casings in the area, and five 9 mm casings near the car wash bay.

Jerrin Milan and Javaris Milan were arrested Monday, according to court documents. Police later confirmed that Randall was arrested Tuesday.

All three were being held in the Macon County Jail on Tuesday. Bond for Jerrin Milan is set at $100,000, while Javaris Milan's bond is set at $60,000. No bond has been set for Randall.

Arraignment for Jerrin Milan and Javaris Milan is scheduled for Aug. 18. An arraignment for Randall has not been scheduled as of Tuesday.
Egypts Al Nour Wal Amal orchestra is one of the worlds most remarkable musical ensembles. It consists of around 48 blind women from Cairo who have to rely solely on their memory when performing complicated compositions by classic composers like Mozart, Brahms, Strauss or Tchaikovsky.

Learning to play instruments like violin, chello or flute is a difficult process, but can you imagine mastering any of them without ever being able to see them? Thats what would-be members of the Al Nour Wal Amal orchestra have to do in order to become a part of the ensemble. And, once theyve finally mastered their chosen instrument, they have to train their memory in order to be able to store up to 45 composition pieces in their heads, to be able to perform a concert, all while keeping in sync with the other members during a performance. It seems impossible, but these incredible women are living proof that it can be done.

Photo: Facebook

Founded in 1954, the Al Nour wal Amal Association became the first non-governmental association in the Middle East to help visually impaired girls and women. To this day, it provides them with care, education, vocational training, job opportunities and works to ease their integration into society. One of its most incredible achievements has been to put together a classical music orchestra made up exclusively of completely blind or severely visually impaired women, in the 1960s. The ensemble started out with 15 members, but over the years, it has grown into a 48-strong group, which has since played in concerts on five continents.

Girls aspiring to become members of the Al Nour wal Amal orchestra must first learn to play an instrument from one of the four main sections  strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion. To this end, they practice over five hours a day, under the guidance of teachers from the music academy, the conservatoire and the Cairo Symphony Orchestra, sometimes for several years. Once theyve mastered it, the women move on to memory training.

The musicians start by reading their parts of a composition in braille, memorize it, and rehearse it individually until they get it right. But the hardest part has to be performing as a group. Since they have no musical scores in front of them and cant see the conductor during concerts, the members of the Al Nour wal Amal orchestra have to rely on beats and the vocal guiding of the conductor in order to perform their part at just the right time. Again, it sounds almost impossible, but violinist Shaimaa Zakaria says that it has become second-nature to her and her colleagues.

My ear just knows that after this note, by this instrument, I will start playing. So we are kind of feeling the music as well, Zakaria told Because Magazine. I dont think there are special challenges just because I cant see, but I can tell you that we reach a point were we play classical symphonies by ear with no notes, and thats something not any musician can do.

The blind musicians are apparently so good at what they do that people sometimes cant even tell they are blind. Amal Fekry, vice president to Al Nour wal Amal organization recalls one person who was telling everybody how much he had enjoyed the concert, after their performance, and asking why the girls had played with no scores. That was when he learned that they were in fact blind.

He was so astonished and fascinated that he arranged for us to go play in Malta, says Fekry.

Al Nour wal Amal are the only blind classical music orchestra in the world, but, despite enjoying great success and performing all over the world, the association is struggling to keep the ensemble together. Support from the Egyptian Government has been scarce following the events of January 2011, so they have been forced to rely heavily on donations. Al Art Magazine reports that it can take the association a year or two to secure a substantial donation. They badly need funds to pay the girls music teachers and acquire quality instruments to improve their sound.

Ive been unable to find an official website, or social media page for the Al Nour wal Amal orchestra or the association, so I cant provide any useful information on how you can support them. If anyone can provide any info on this, I would really like to post it here, because these incredibly talented and ambitious women deserve all the help they can get.
In January 2017, a series of fires in central Chiles La Maue region burned down over 457,000 hectares of forest, leaving behind nothing but charred ground. Now, three border collies are helping replant it all by doing what they love most, running.

Das, Olivia, and Summer, three female border collies have been working hard to bring the fire-devastated forest back to life, since March. Not that they know how hard or how important their work is, since they are essentially running and playing. The dogs owner, 32-year-old Francisca Torres, takes them to various areas of charred forest in her truck, equips them with special vests that come with special satchels which she fills with seeds of endemic plants. Then the dogs are sent out to run around and spread as many seeds as they can. When they return, she rewards them with snacks, fills up their satchels and sends them out on another run.

Photo: Pewos/Facebook

Torres, who trains the dogs not to attack any wild animal while on a seed spreading mission, says border collies are perfectly suited for the job, because of their intelligence, energy and speed. Theyve learned that they have to empty their satchels in order to receive their tasty reward when they return, and can cover much more ground than a human ever could. Every day, they can cover up to 30 kilometers and spread around eight kilograms of seeds, whereas a person on foot could only cover 3 kilometers. They are also low maintenance and, most importantly, they love what they do.

Photo: Pewos/Facebook

The main thing is for the fauna to be able to live, Francisca Torres told AFP. We have seen some fields that are now totally green thanks to the work of Summer, Olivia and Das.

Photo: Pewos/Facebook

Replanting the vast forests that burned down in just a few days will take years, but Torres hopes that her dogs will bring back enough vegetation for some of the fauna to return. In some of the 15 forests that the three dedicated border collies have been deployed in, grass is coming back, and seedlings and vines are beginning to push through the charred earth. Hopefully, enough seeds will germinate by the end of the summer for animals to come back.

For more on the work of Summer, Olivia and Das restoring Chiles forests, check out the Pewos official website and Facebook page.
Mara Motherway

Booz Allen Hamilton upped Mara Motherway to head of government relations. She served as business development executive for BAH's military intelligence business. Before joining the firm, Motherway led business development and strategy at BAE Systems. In her new position, she is responsible for strengthening BAHs relationships across the federal government and providing input on public policy issues. A retired U.S. Naval officer and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Motherway brings nearly 25 years of government and private sector experience to her new role.

(L to R) Zahara Fisher, Jenna Aguilera, Karen Kyi & Perla Serrano

W2O Group, in partnership with The LAGRANT Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to increase the number of ethnic minorities in the fields of advertising, marketing and public relations, has placed four communications professionals in the firms offices across the country. Zahara Fisher will work in W2Os Chicago office as a full-time account associate, supporting healthcare clients and assisting with analysis and digital intelligence efforts. Jenna Aguilera has been brought on at TwIst Mktg as a public relations fellow in its New York location. Karen Kyi and Perla Serrano have been added to the staff of W2Os San Francisco outpost as account interns.

Lisa Schmidtke

Allison+Partners promoted Lisa Schmidtke from senior vice president to general manager of the agencys Phoenix office. Schmidtke currently handles communications initiatives for such clients as UPMC Enterprises, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona and Partnership with Native Americans, as well as acting as one of the leads for the agencys healthcare practice. In her new role, she's responsible for business operations and growth, cultivating and managing a diverse group of talent and overseeing a portfolio of clients. The shop also promoted three team members from its New York and San Francisco offices. Sherri Poall is promoted to executive vice president, and Melissa Muskett and Marcus Gamo rise to senior vice presidents.

Perry Communications Group hired Savannah Hadley as account coordinator and Fern Baum as executive assistant. Hadley, a 2016 graduate of UC-Davis, assists with accounts, coordinates special events, develops social media content, conducts media monitoring and helps create content for client projects. Baum, who previously worked as a script analyst and story editor in the film industry, will utilize those skills to help tell PCG clients stories. She will also provide executive, operational and account support.

LANE recruited Ashlee Simpson and Ben Touger in its New York office and Megan Moran and Stephanie Celenza in Portland. Celenza joined the firm as an associate vice president. Prior to joining LANE, she worked for New York City firms Alison Brod Marketing + Communications and LaForce. Simpson is a senior account executive. She previously worked at Olson and SutherlandGold Group. An assistant account executive, Touger joins LANE after working as a PR specialist at Panasonic and brand communications assistant at PMK BNC. Moran joined the firm as assistant account executive from the National Psoriasis Foundation.
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DECATUR  The Macon County Sheriff's Office is investigating racial slurs spray-painted on two pillars on the Rock Springs Conservation Area bike trail near Fairview Park.

Decatur Park District staff were notified of the incident Monday night and painted over the graffiti, which included the letters "KKK" and the N-word, early Tuesday, officials said. It is not known when the vandalism took place, but Sheriff's Lt. Jamie Belcher said it likely happened at night when no one was around to the see the people who did it.

The Macon County Conservation District owns the property, but the pillars support a pipe that belongs to the Sanitary District of Decatur. Its executive director, Kent Newton, said Tuesday that nighttime is typically when people go to the park and conservation areas to spray paint on bridge underpasses, trails and sewer lines.

The site is "under the bike path, so the public is on there on a daily basis, and they would report to us  I would hope  something that's offensive," Newton said.

It wasn't until after 7 p.m. Monday, when members of the Greater Decatur Black Chamber of Commerce saw the graffiti while on a walk in the area, that the incident was reported. Chairman Jacob Jenkins said he was stunned to see the vandalism with people nearby at the time.

"I was mortified, because no one was (reacting)  there were kids playing less than a hundred yards from the trail, and there were families walking up and down this trail," Jenkins said.

Park district Police Chief Ed Culp commended Bill Hunt, the park district employee who found the graffiti and covered it up immediately.

"We strive daily to provide a great quality of life, and we don't want ignorance being visual to the park. It's not who we are," Culp said.

Jenkins said his anger over the incident is not so much the act and the message of the graffiti, but the idea that people walked by and did nothing.

"I wasn't the only person on this trail," he said.

There are no known suspects, Belcher said. Anyone with information is asked to call the sheriff's office at (217) 424-1311 or Crime Stoppers at (217) 423-8477.
Valentinos is used to making lots of pizzas, but stores were overwhelmed by the record-breaking response to a promotion celebrating its 60th anniversary.

The Nebraska restaurant chain on Wednesday offered jumbo hamburger or cheese pizzas for $6 each.

We cant bake them fast enough, said Tony Messineo, Valentinos president.

He estimated that the Lincoln and Omaha restaurants sold about 10,000 jumbo pizzas Wednesday, roughly triple the number sold on other busy days such as Christmas Eve or Valentines Day.

Messineo said stores accepted pre-orders Tuesday. He estimated that a majority of Lincoln stores were sold out of the special deal by late Tuesday evening.

The stores still had ingredients Wednesday, but didnt have enough oven space to meet the demand, he said.

Some Omaha-area stores still were taking orders at midday Wednesday, he said.

Many people who tried to order online were met with an automated message: We are experiencing a high volume of orders at the store and as a result cannot accept additional online orders.

More than 60 phone calls to the Bellevue Valentinos from one hopeful customer went unanswered Wednesday shortly after 11 a.m.

At noon, there was a line out the door at the location near 50th and Leavenworth Streets.

But by late afternoon, the Omaha stores sold out of jumbo pizzas as well.

Some customers expressed frustration on social media about not getting orders filled.

Messineo thanked customers for their loyalty and support over the years and apologized to those who werent able to get their pizza.

We love you, we appreciate you, he said. Youve been great customers for years. We didnt anticipate this much activity. If it were possible, wed make more pizza.

Josh Gregg, social media manager for a Lincoln-based marketing firm that works for Valentinos, said the big response to the anniversary deal shows that the restaurant is special for many Nebraskans.

He said the chain will review what worked well and what didnt with this promotion and come up with ways to please more customers during the next special.

Valentinos pizza was first served in July 1957 at the original location near 35th and Holdrege Streets in Lincoln.

Val and Zena Weiler started the restaurant at their Campus Fruit Market store near the University of Nebraska-Lincolns East Campus. Zena Weiler relied on traditional family recipes, which were passed along to the Messineo and Alesio families when they purchased Valentinos in 1971.
DECATUR  The wooden wind harps that Craig Dongoski made are not to be confused with wind chimes. They do not make music, they make noise  without human intervention.

The Aeolian harps, named after the Greek god of wind, are about communicating and connecting with the earth, Dongoski said. The harp plays when the wind blows through it.

I dont like to manipulate it too much, he said. The wind has its own rhythm it has a voice.

This project began out of his general interest in radio and communicating across the wind, he said. Dongoski, now a professor at Georgia State University, grew up in Decatur. His father is a woodworker and helps him make the harps, which are based on a design from Henry David Thoreau.

They are not what most people would think of as beautiful, but I am interested in it as a form of communication, Dongoski said. People are confused; it is not necessarily aesthetically good sounding. Those experiences tell me Im making art.

Recently, Dongoski decided to test his harps at the National Sequestration Center wind turbines at Richland Community College. His harps need a place with plenty of wind to work properly, so he thought the wind turbines would be a great location.

Dongoski worked with people in Decatur to explore this idea, including people from Millikin University. Brian Justison, a professor at Millikin, began collaborating with Dongoski with a program called Spelling the Wind. Art and percussion students involved in the program and then Dongoski participated in the commission of a work for the synergy festival in February.

(Students) love Craig; hes just a really interesting guy with a lot of ideas, Justison said. He is a really important voice. Hes got something to say.

The two also bonded over exploring and pushing the boundaries of their art forms. Including, Justison participating in a improvisation with the wind turbines and Aeolian harps.

It was an experience of inquiry, and the inquiry is exploring these sound as art and not just something that results from a mechanical device, he said.

Justison is a musician, so he improvised with the sounds of the wind turbine and tried to frame the sounds as something coherent instead of just random sounds.

We went out there and explored the potential of that we recorded a little bit it was mostly (Dongoski) recording me improvising and framing that whole wind turbine and its potential as a work of art, he said.

Dongoski said he is interested in mind machines and experimental agriculture to pick up on the Earths subtle energies for answers. He said some farmers may use a machine to read the energies of their fields and crops. They would hook up the machine to a field, then ask the field a question, such as what is the radionic rate for calcium. Then, the fields energy will respond and the farmer can add the correct amount of calcium to the field.

When your whole livelihood is based on weather and uncontrollable forces, then people are looking into all kinds of things, Dongoski said.

Theres a farmer who has a vineyard in Italy and plays classical music, hes shown there are results, that the crops are more robust and grown stronger. But, Dongoski points out he used man-made music. Instead, Dongoski is interested in trying a more natural, indigenous type of sound, such as the wind. He is interested in seeing what the effect on crops would be for a wind harp to be placed in a field.

It may seem wackadoodle, but no more wackadoodle than the farmers almanac, or reading weather veins, he said. Some get into it, not all do.

Sometimes there is nothing to get, its just interesting and thats enough, he said.

He has also used a similar machine with his students to telepathically re-create a picture. He hid a picture then had his students re-create the hidden picture by asking the machine questions. Then, depending on the reported energy, the students would attempt to draw the photo.

You have a pencil and you ask the device where do I put the pencil, ask which way do you draw the line, how much pressure do I draw, he said. Youre not going in with a preconceived notion.

People take the area around Decatur for granted when it comes to potential for art, Dongoski said. There are many opportunities to interact with the Earth and understand its energies. He hopes to continue working in the area and experimenting with his harps and wind turbines.

To say I totally know what this is, Id be lying, thats not what thats about, he said. Its about not repeating something that is already there, that people already know.

This story has been corrected to reflect that the harp is based on a Henry David Thoreau design.
WASHINGTON  As divisions between the two main ideological camps within the GOP widened Tuesday, Republicans were scrambling to contain the political fallout from the collapse of a months-long effort to rewrite former President Barack Obama's signature domestic accomplishment.

President Donald Trump predicted Tuesday that Republicans would wait for the federal insurance market to collapse and then work to broker a deal to rewrite the nation's landmark health care law, while Senate leaders pressed ahead with a plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act with no immediate replacement.

But it became quickly apparent that GOP leaders, who were caught off-guard by defections of their members Monday night, lacked the votes to abolish parts of the 2010 law outright. Three centrist Republican senators  Susan Collins, Maine, Shelley Moore Capito, W.Va., and Lisa Murkowski, Alaska  all said they would oppose any vote to proceed with an immediate repeal of the law.

"I did not come to Washington to hurt people," Capito said on Twitter. She added, "I will only vote to proceed to repeal legislation if I am confident there is a replacement plan that addresses my concerns."

Collins said in a statement that she had urged Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., to hold hearings in an attempt to fashion a new legislative fix for the ACA, while leaving it in place in the meantime.

"We can't just hope that we will pass a replacement within the next two years," she said. "Repealing without a replacement would create great uncertainty for individuals who rely on the ACA and cause further turmoil in the insurance markets."

A handful of other senators, along with 11 GOP and Democratic governors, also called on congressional leaders to launch a bipartisan process to revamp the nation's health care system.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said Tuesday that lawmakers need to get a more detailed analysis of what has caused consumers' premiums to rise and what could make insurance more affordable.

"We didn't have the courage to lay out exactly what caused premiums to increase," Johnson said, noting that senators didn't even have an up-to-date budget analysis of the latest health care proposal. "It's an insane process. If you don't have information, how can you even have a legitimate discussion and debate?"

The 11 governors  a group that included Republicans Charles D. Baker of Massachusetts, Larry Hogan of Maryland, John Kasich of Ohio, Brian Sandoval of Nevada, and Phil Scott of Vermont  said they "stand ready to work with lawmakers in an open, bipartisan way to provide better insurance for all Americans."

But these appeals did little to sway Trump, who blamed the demise of a plan to rewrite the ACA in a tweet on Democrats "and a few Republicans."

Speaking to reporters in the Roosevelt Room on Tuesday afternoon, Trump said he was "disappointed" in the demise of the Senate bill and viewed the cratering of the nation's individual insurance market as the best way to advance his goals.

Now his plan is to "let Obamacare fail; it will be a lot easier," he said. "And I think we're probably in that position where we'll just let Obamacare fail."

"We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it," the president said. "I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We'll let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us."

Trump's latest comments intensified the current political uncertainty on Capitol Hill, where GOP leaders were debating what to do next, and they raised anxiety among insurers that must commit to staying on the federal health exchange within a matter of weeks.

In many ways, the leadership plan did not go far enough for those on the right but was too radical for GOP centrists. It scaled back some key ACA requirements and made deep cuts over time in Medicaid, but preserved popular provisions of the law such as a ban on denying coverage to consumers with costly medical conditions.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said he was "very concerned" by the overall situation and he offered a blunt assessment of why Senate Republicans fell short on their bill.

"We are so evenly divided and we've got to have every Republican to make things work, and we didn't have every Republican," he said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., showed no signs of abandoning his push for a single-party solution, opening the Senate on Tuesday morning touting his latest plan  to vote on a pure repeal, with a two-year delay, by taking up the House's health care bill.

But in a sign of the extent to which Senate leaders have lost control of the process, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas  whose job is to count votes--said he had "no idea" that Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, was suddenly going to join Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., in defecting Monday night.

Cornyn learned about it that night "a little after 8 o'clock," he said, after he and six other GOP senators dined with Trump at the White House.

As Republicans tried to regroup, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., renewed his calls for the majority to work with Democrats to shore up the health insurance system.

"It should be crystal clear to everyone on the other side of the aisle that the core of the bill is unworkable. It's time to move on. It's time to start over," he said. "Rather than repeating this same, failed partisan process again, Republicans should work with Democrats on a bill that lowers premiums, provides long-term stability to the insurance markets and improves our health-care system."

"Now that their one-party effort has largely failed, we hope they will change their tune," he said, noting that some Republicans have been calling for bipartisan talks.

Schumer quoted Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who said Monday night that "Congress must return to regular order" and rewrite the health-care legislation with input from both parties.

"The door to bipartisanship is open now. Republicans only need to walk through it," Schumer said.

As Schumer spoke on the Senate floor, Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., one of the few in the chamber who has tried to be a bipartisan broker, was placing calls to fellow senators who, like him, are former governors  a total of 11 senators including Alexander, John Hoeven, R-N.D., Mike Rounds, R-S.D., Angus King, I-Maine, Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Maggie Hassan, D-N.H. Aides said Manchin was presenting nothing specific yet to his colleagues, just a plea to "sit down and start bipartisan talking."

But Vice President Mike Pence, speaking at the National Retail Federation's annual Retail Advocates Summit, challenged Congress to "step up" and repeal the current law so that lawmakers can "work on a new health care plan that will start with a clean slate."

And McConnell declared on the Senate floor, "This doesn't have to be the end of the story."

McConnell said the Senate would next take up "a repeal of Obamacare combined with a stable two-year transition period." He said that President Barack Obama had vetoed such legislation before but that "President Trump will sign it now."

While he noted that the measure had overwhelming support among Republican senators in 2015, the Senate leader also acknowledged that his party has suffered a political setback.

"I regret that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failures of Obamacare will not be successful," he said. "We will now try a different way to bring the American people relief from Obamacare."

The confusion over next steps highlights the predicament now faced by Republicans, who have made rallying cries against Obama's 2010 health care law a pillar of the party's identity. They may be forced to grapple with the law's shift from a perennial GOP target to an accepted, even popular, provider of services and funding in many states, which could make further repeal revivals difficult.

Meanwhile, Trump and other Republicans will confront a Republican base that, despite fervent support for the president, still seeks a smaller federal government and fewer regulations.

But the fact that it would reduce federal Medicaid funding and phase out the program's expansion in 31 states and the District of Columbia rankled several key GOP governors and senators, who feared that their states would be saddled with the unpalatable choice of either cutting off constituents' health coverage or facing a massive new financial burden.

The opposing pressures have left McConnell in a tough position as he has struggled to find a solution.

Abolishing several of Obamacare's central pillars  including the mandate that taxpayers buy coverage, federal subsidies for many consumers' premiums and Medicaid coverage for roughly 11 million Americans  could wreak havoc in the insurance market. A Congressional Budget Office analysis in January estimated that premiums in the individual insurance market would rise between 20 and 25 percent next year and would roughly double by 2026.

At the same time, according to the CBO, the number of uninsured would spike by 18 million next year and rise to 32 million by 2026.

"For insurers, the worst possible outcome in this debate has always been a partial repeal with no replacement, which is exactly what Congress is about to take up," said Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation, in an email. "Insurance companies would be on the hook for covering people with pre-existing conditions, but with no individual mandate or premium subsidies to get healthy people to sign up as well."

While pursuing an immediate repeal would please conservatives, the fact that it lacks sufficient support leaves McConnell and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., with few good options.

Another move, which McConnell threatened recently, would be to work with Democrats to prop up the insurance exchange markets that have been imploding in some states  which probably would win passage but would infuriate the conservative base that has been calling for the end of the Affordable Care Act.

But Ryan showed little interest Tuesday in making common cause with Democrats, telling reporters that House leaders "would like to see the Senate move on something" to keep the repeal-and-replace process alive.

In a closed-door conference meeting, according to several members present, Ryan told colleagues that the ball remains in the Senate's court and announced no plans for further action on health care in the House. He also urged House members to be patient and not to openly vent frustration with the Senate, the members said.

Publicly, he emphasized that the Senate had "a razor-thin majority" and that passing legislation is "a hard process."

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said senators' willingness to deny Trump one of his top priorities has less to do with the president's political standing and more with home state pressures, "whether it's their governors, or the way health care is structured in their individual states."

"This is the Senate. Leadership sets the agenda, but senators vote in the interests of their states," Rubio added. "Republics are certainly interesting systems of government. But certainly better than dictatorship."
It could be a patient who cant produce identification, or a young woman whose guardian does not allow her to speak.

No one (signs in) to an emergency room and says they are a sex trafficking victim, said Jodi Hayes, a supervisor of CHI Health nurses who specialize in sexual assault examinations in the Omaha area. The nurse just has to sense that something is not right.

This evening, Hayes will lead a class at Immanuel Medical Center on identifying patients who may be the victims of human trafficking or domestic abuse. The class is for CHI nurses. Sex trafficking involves people who are coerced into sexual activity as opposed to those who voluntarily do it as a source of income.

We want to help as many victims as possible and make sure they have the resources they need and deserve, Hayes said.

Hayes class will go over clues that nurses can keep an eye out for, including evasiveness about an address or injuries that dont match the story of how the patient got them.

It will also go over clues that a person could be the victim of domestic assault. For example, victims in domestic cases sometimes seek medical treatment for anxiety or abdominal pain.

The class will also cover what actions nurses can take, including what social service agencies they can contact and when it is appropriate to call the police.

We are doing a lot more trying to be prepared, or look for the signs, because they are hidden, said Courtney Mahler, a nursing supervisor at Immanuel who is coordinating tonights training.

Mahler said sex trafficking cases are not all that common in emergency rooms. But victims do come in occasionally, and it pays to be alert.

Recently, a guardian for a juvenile female patient who came into Immanuels emergency room had paperwork that didnt seem to be correct. That led to nurses asking a few more questions, and ultimately the police were called.

Her story was not consistent, so there were lots of holes in it and contradictions as to why she was being seen, said Mahler, who was on duty that night. The nurse was instantly on alert to something not being right.
LINCOLN  A judge has ordered final payment of legal fees to the attorney for David Rice, who died in prison last year while serving a life term for the 1970 killing of an Omaha police officer.

The recent payment of $1,251 in fees was for arguing an appeal before the Nebraska Supreme Court, said Timothy Ashford, the lawyer who represented Rice. The money was in addition to $7,400 Ashford received earlier for other legal work hed done on behalf of the inmate, who went by the name Mondo we Langa.

Ashford was appointed to represent Rice on a postconviction motion aimed at getting the conviction overturned. But Douglas County District Judge James Gleason ruled that the motion was frivolous and refused to authorize county payment of his fees.

Ashford appealed the judges decision, which was overturned by the Supreme Court.

Omaha Police Officer Larry Minard died when a suitcase filled with dynamite exploded as he responded to a 911 call reporting a woman screaming inside a vacant house.

Several days after the explosion, Rice and Ed Poindexter turned themselves in to police. At their joint trial, a 15-year-old former member of the Black Panthers, Duane Peak, testified that he had planted the bomb and called 911 at the direction of Rice and Poindexter.

Both men consistently claimed their innocence. Their advocates say the men were framed for their political views because they helped lead a Black Panther-like organization during a time of high racial tension in Omaha.

Rice died last year at the infirmary of the Nebraska State Penitentiary after a lengthy respiratory illness. He was 68.

Poindexter, 72, underwent cardiovascular surgery last year at a Lincoln hospital. He is an inmate at the Nebraska State Penitentiary.
The former Brix employee accused of stealing more than $110,000 in a gift-card scheme has pleaded no contest to theft.

In return, prosecutors dropped a second theft charge against Brenton McLaurine, 30.

McLaurine faces a maximum of four years in prison, two years probation and a $25,000 fine when he is sentenced on the theft-by-deception charge in September. He posted $10,000 bail to be released from jail in October.

Both locations of Brix, a wine and spirits store, closed suddenly in early January. Customers were left with gift cards that they couldnt redeem, although other local stores offered discounts to those with Brix cards.

The company auctioned off its inventory in March and its sister bar, Grane, closed at the end of February.

Dan Matuszek, the owner of Brix and Grane, said he couldnt comment on the case but said McLaurine will have to pay some type of restitution to the company.

McLaurine had worked at the Village Pointe location but was fired on May 3, 2016, after a manager discovered receipts with tip totals that didnt match the cash due to servers.

The manager found multiple gift cards that had balances in the thousands of dollars, including one that reached $68,445.46, according to an affidavit. The companys software allowed employees to add money to a gift card through a cash transaction and then void it, leaving the total on the card.

McLaurine was the only employee present during the gift-card transactions, according to alarm system and keypad records, the affidavit said.

In February, East Campus Realty withdrew a lawsuit alleging four months of unpaid rent against Midtown Bistro Inc., the company representing Brixs Midtown location.

After auctioning off its inventory in April, Brix paid nearly all of an unpaid loan to Mutual of Omaha Bank, Matuszek said, but still owes about $125,000.

A small-business loan lender sued Matuszek in Erie County, New York, in January for money he owed. A judge ordered Matuszek to pay the company about $101,000 for the amount due plus attorney and court fees.

I am aware of it, and we intend to get that paid, Matuszek said.

Suzanne Gage, a spokeswoman for the Nebraska Attorney Generals Office, said Wednesday that the office has received 655 complaints about the Brix cards since the stores closed.

World-Herald staff writer Blake Ursch contributed to this report.
Jessi Domingos apparent last words predicted his fate.

Its OK, Im about to die, the 23-year-old told his cousin on the phone, a prosecutor said in court Wednesday.

Three minutes later, Dustin Salisbury called 911 to report that he had crashed his pickup truck near a Ralston apartment complex.

Salisbury didnt mention Domingo until officers questioned him later.

While preparing for a fishing trip, Salisbury said he argued with a Hispanic man in his yard.

Something triggered his post-traumatic stress disorder, Salisbury told officers, and he blacked out.

Authorities believe that Salisbury intentionally hit Domingo with his pickup on June 21, thrusting him into a garage and killing him.

A judge ruled that Salisbury, 32, will be held without bail on charges of second-degree murder and use of a weapon to commit a felony.

Ralston police officers went to 82nd and Seymour Streets at 4:38 a.m.  four minutes after Salisbury called 911 and seven minutes after Domingo called his cousin.

Salisbury was trapped in his 2016 Honda Ridgeline, which was lying on its side. He had driven through a fence and hit a utility box, a pole and a row of three connected garages at a high speed, said prosecutor Ryan Lindberg on Wednesday.

Authorities believe that Domingo was run down by Salisbury near the pole and first garage.

Domingo suffered blunt force trauma to his limbs, trunk, head and neck  which are consistent with being hit with a vehicle, prosecutors have said.

Salisbury told police that there were no other vehicles involved, Lindberg said.

A pair of size 9 New Balance shoes were found at the scene of the crash.

Domingos body was not discovered until seven hours later in a back corner of the connected garages.

A relative later identified the shoes as belonging to Domingo.

Officers later questioned Salisbury about Domingos body. Salisbury became upset and asked if he was being accused of killing someone, Lindberg said.

Then, Salisbury told officers he had an argument with a Hispanic man that morning and was upset that the man was talking to him in his yard.

He told officers he suffers from PTSD and blackouts and that he didnt remember the crash.

Salisbury was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs, Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine said.

He was booked into jail on Monday and his next hearing is scheduled for August.

Public defender Cathy Saathoff said Salisbury had lived in Ralston for six years and had an 8-month-old daughter. Salisbury also served in Iraq and Turkey with the military, she said.

Domingos relatives were not able to be reached Wednesday night.
An Omaha man charged with threatening to assault Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst will undergo a psychiatric evaluation as a result of a federal court appearance Tuesday.

Robert Simet was transferred from Pottawattamie County, where he was being held without bail, to the Douglas County Jail on Tuesday afternoon so that he can be evaluated at the Douglas County Health Center.

Simet was arrested by FBI agents in Omaha on July 7.

The 64-year-old appeared in the Southern District Court of Iowa. His attorney, federal public defender Michael Lee Smart of Sioux City, requested the transfer to Omaha for the evaluation.

Prosecutor Richard Rothrock with the U.S. Attorneys Office in Council Bluffs agreed with the proposal.

According to federal court records, the FBI was contacted by the Mills County Sheriffs Office on July 5 regarding complaints it received about Simet. An employee at the Loess Hills Harley-Davidson branch in Pacific Junction told authorities that Simet had made threats against Ernst to employees.

Ernst was expected to make an appearance at the store on July 8. Simet said he thought that Ernst was a member of the Islamic State, and employees feared for Ernsts safety.

Simet also made statements regarding conspiracies involving President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, stating that everyone in the government needs to be killed off, according to authorities.

In 1975, Simet was convicted of felony burglary in Nebraska but was granted a full pardon in 2000 that restored his right to own guns. He was charged in 2013 with assault and battery, but the case was dropped, authorities said.

Simet will be allowed to return home, if the psychiatric evaluation allows it, as long as he follows rules set by a probation officer and wears a GPS device to track his whereabouts.

Simet, if allowed to return home, would not be allowed to drink, use narcotics or possess weapons.

Any weapons in Simets home would have to be removed before he can go back.

This report includes material from the Associated Press.
Firefighters made quick work of a house fire Tuesday night in southwest Omaha.

The fire at a home south of 156th Street and West Center Road near Skutt Catholic High School was reported around 8:25 p.m. It was declared under control about 15 minutes later, fire officials said.

The fire, which was considered accidental, began on the exterior of the home in a shed under an enclosed deck, officials said. The fire appeared to be the result of ordinary combustibles too close to a hot small engine on a lawn mower, they said.

No injuries were reported, fire officials said.

Crews said that the $150,000 structure had an estimated $10,000 in damage.
The recall effort against Bellevue City Councilman Pat Shannon has been temporarily halted.

On Wednesday a Sarpy County District Court judge put a stop to the recall effort until a hearing can be held on a complaint filed by attorney Larry Forman on behalf of Shannon.

Judge William Zastera set a hearing on the matter for July 27.

The complaint takes issue with the recall affidavit filed by Bellevue resident Christine Jurgens earlier this month. In her affidavit, Jurgens wrote that the reason for the recall was continuing behavior and actions not representing the legal, ethical, and moral standards expected of an elected official.

After Jurgens submitted her affidavit, Shannon had 20 days to submit a defense to go on the petition. Then Jurgens still needed 6,597 signatures from registered voters in Bellevue to move the effort forward.

But the paragraph Jurgens submitted was so vague that theres no way to defend against it, Forman said in an interview. He said it doesnt point to anything specific that Shannon has done that puts the office in a bad light.

Forman said that Shannon does not have a criminal record and that the only crime his client was accused of was dismissed.

This month, a Sarpy County Court judge found Shannon not guilty of violating electrical license requirements.

The complaint said the recall affidavit also fails to comply with the statute because it is not completed in typewritten form.

The complaint names Jurgens, Sarpy County Election Commissioner Wayne Bena and Nebraska Secretary of State John Gale.

Jurgens did not respond to messages.

Bena referred questions about the complaint to the Sarpy County Attorneys Office.

Bonnie Moore, a deputy Sarpy County attorney, said the office is in the process of reviewing the matter and formulating a response.

In a statement, Shannon said that the affidavit was legally insufficient and that taking the matter to court was essential to preserve the votes of citizens and the integrity of the election process.

For one person to attempt to overturn an election where over 18,000 people voted is a serious matter and to just say I dont like who won and think you can recall somebody just puts every elected official in a position where they would be hanging on by a thread, Shannon said.

Shannon was elected to the City Council in November. As the at-large member, he represents all of Bellevue.

Shannon has been involved in a number of political controversies.

He has an unpaid $16,000 fine from the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission for violating campaign finance laws in 2004. The commission has been trying to collect on that fine for more than a decade.

If it goes unpaid, the fine could prevent Shannon from filing for re-election.

This week Shannon is due to give the City Council redevelopment plans to fix a car wash he owns that residents say is an eyesore and city officials say isnt functional.

Last month, the City Council gave Shannon more time to come up with plans to fix the car wash to avoid condemnation.

Shannon has said the city has a redevelopment plan he submitted more than a year ago.
The General Assembly hiked income taxes earlier this month for individuals and businesses, and many are getting their first paychecks since then. Four other stories to see are armed robberies arrest, birds of prey rehab, singing in Carnegie Hall and woman sentenced in death of husband.

State starts adding to its tax take

The first true impact of lawmakers hiking the states income tax will likely be felt on paychecks starting this week. For Decatur, the actions in the Statehouse during the historic overtime session mean residents will pay an average $580 more annually come next year.

Police arrest man in string of robberies

Decatur police arrested Cameron L. Anderson, 20, of Champaign, on Monday in connection with four armed robberies throughout Central Illinois.

Raptor Center building Super Flight

Soon, the Illinois Raptor Center in Decatur will have a new Super Flight  perhaps the biggest in Illinois  that will provide all the rehabilitation space necessary for any size bird, even eagles.

Harristown girl sings in Carnegie Hall

Only a select few 13-year-olds can say they've performed in the legendary Carnegie Hall. Vanessa Templeton of Harristown is among them.

Bloomington woman sentenced for murder

A Bloomington woman convicted of killing her husband last fall at a campground near Carlock was sentenced to eight years in prison Tuesday in Woodford County Circuit Court.
The Black Caucus of the Nebraska Democratic Party has voted to censure its chair, Chelsey Gentry-Tipton, for remarks she posted about the shooting of U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, according to the vice chair of the caucus.

Maurice Jones, the vice chair, said the caucus executive committee voted 3-0 at a meeting on Monday to censure Gentry-Tipton. Jones said the vote removes her as the chair.

Gentry-Tipton said the meeting was invalid because under caucus bylaws only the chairperson can call a meeting.

In a prepared statement, she said she has scheduled a meeting of the caucus for Sunday.

In a press release Monday, Jones said the committee passed a motion that read, We hereby censure Chelsey Gentry-Tipton for comments and remarks unbecoming a representative or spokesperson of the Nebraska Democratic Party or the Black Caucus thereof, and reflective of attitudes unacceptable to same; and in consequence thereof, remove her as chairman of the Nebraska Democratic Party Black Caucus.

Jones said Gentry-Tipton had not responded to requests from her fellow caucus leaders to apologize for what he called her pernicious remarks on Facebook after Scalise, R-La., was shot June 14.

Nebraska Democratic Party Chairwoman Jane Kleeb called on Gentry-Tipton to step down as caucus chair, but she declined to do so.

In a prepared statement, Jones said, The black community values the lives of all persons, including those of political adversaries.

Cornelius Williams, treasurer of the caucus, said he voted to remove Gentry-Tipton because the fallout from her remarks is keeping her from doing her job as the chair, thus keeping the caucus from working in the community and on upcoming elections.

He said the situation has put the caucus in a position of choosing between being able to function or not to function.

I voted to function, Williams said.
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Donald Trump had another, previously undisclosed conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit in Germany this month.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer and National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton confirmed that Trump and Putin spoke at a dinner for world leaders and their spouses at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

The conversation came hours after Trump and Putin's first official face-to-face meeting on July 7, which was originally scheduled to last just half an hour but stretched on for more than two. The two world leaders were also captured on video shaking hands and exchanging a few words after they arrived at the G-20 summit of industrialized and developing nations earlier that day.

Anton would not specify the duration of the conversation. But he said the discussion was casual and should not be characterized as a "meeting" or even a less formal, but official, "pull-aside."

"A conversation over dessert should not be characterized as a meeting," he said.

The dinner, hosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was open only to world leaders and their spouses, as well as one translator per couple, according to a senior White House official who described the event on condition of anonymity despite the president's criticism of unnamed sources.

The official stressed that Trump spoke with many leaders over the course of the dinner and said he spoke briefly with Putin, who was seated next to first lady Melania Trump, as the event was concluding. Trump spoke with Putin using Russia's translator, since the American translator did not speak Russian.

But Ian Bremmer, who said he spoke with two people who attended the dinner, said that Trump and Putin spoke for nearly an hour while sitting among the other world leaders and their spouses at the dinner. Bremmer is a foreign affairs columnist and the president of the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm.

Attendees described the meeting as startling, said Bremmer, who was told Trump was very animated as he spoke with Putin, often using his hands to gesture.

Trump defended the dinner in a pair of angry tweets late Tuesday that noted the dinner had been on his public schedule.

"Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is 'sick.' All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!" he wrote.

A few minutes later he added: "The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!"

Trump and Putin's relationship has been under scrutiny since the election campaign, when Trump repeatedly praised Putin as a strong leader and publicly encouraged him to hack then-rival Hillary Clinton's emails. Trump aides have since said he was joking.

U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election in order to help Trump. Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on their findings and dismissed investigations into potential collusion between his campaign and Moscow as a "witch hunt."
Hundreds of people are serving time in Nebraskas prisons for manufacturing and dealing illegal drugs. But something is wrong when an inmate dies from a drug overdose while behind bars.

Tecumseh prison inmate Daelan LaMere of Omaha, 22, died in June with traces of methamphetamine and ecstasy in his system.

The logical question arises: How did he get the drugs? He was serving a six- to 11-year sentence for robbery and use of a firearm in a felony.

Prison officials say they are still investigating how the drugs got inside a maximum-security prison. Officials have said no prison staffers had been implicated in LaMeres death.

About 80 percent of inmates have substance use and/or abuse issues, as state prisons director Scott Frakes said after LaMeres death. Such addictions drive demand inside prison walls the same as out, leading to contraband infiltrating these facilities with the help of visitors, friends, other inmates and employees.

Drugs have been confiscated in prisons nationwide, including Californias death row, which is known for its strict security. Alcohol, too, makes it into prisons, as happened in Tecumseh before a March 2 melee that left two inmates dead.

Guards, surveillance, intelligence gathering and treatment can reduce the flow of contraband  and should. Prison write-ups for drug and alcohol violations at Tecumseh grew by 250 percent last year, to nearly 700, a prison spokeswoman said.

But the death of an inmate underscores the seriousness of the problem. Prisons must step up the fight against distribution and possession of drugs in prison, for the safety of inmates and staff.
Imran Khan discharged from hospital, to resume long march from same point where he was shot

This cop from Pakistan became a millionaire overnight: Here is how

4-month-old Pak infant operated successfully, family thanks Sushma

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia

A four-month-old Pakistani baby, who has a complicated heart problem, underwent a heart surgery in a Noida based hospital on Wednesday.

Toddler Rohaan was granted a medical visa on humanitarian grounds by New Delhi recently, after his father Saadiq requested India's foreign minister on Twitter to allow them to visit the country for medical treatment.

India was like home. I want to share my joy with entire world. EAM Sushma Swaraj is fantastic. Hope others awaiting their turn are helped too. We are thankful to her, father of the 4-year-old toddler said.

4-months-old toddler from Pakistan undergoes heart surgery in a Noida-based hospital, parents thank EAM Sushma Swaraj for the visa. pic.twitter.com/fG5k5aQnP2  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

For me, he is just a child, a patient. Nationality doesn't make any difference. His parents had placed their trust in us, said Doctor treating the toddler said.

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Sushma Swaraj helps POK man to get medical visa, slams Pakistan for delaying | Oneindia News

He was critical and had multiple VSDs. We were worried before the operation. It was only after a month that we discharged him. He's doing well now, he added.

On May 22, Rohaan's father had tweeted, "Why my bud suffers for medical treatment!! Any answers Sir Sartaj Aziz or Ma'am Sushma??"

To this, Sushma Swaraj swung into action and helped the family get visa.

OneIndia News
DECATUR  Work on Richland Community Colleges Student Success Center has started  yet again  and officials are hopeful it can still open before the end of the year.

Speaking to the colleges board of trustees on Tuesday night, Vice President of Finance and Administration Greg Florian said contractors were back on site the week after Illinois lawmakers on July 6 approved a budget, the states first spending plan in over two years.

Though work was stopped for only a week due to the state not providing its share of funding for the $6.3 million project, Florian said the delay would likely cause a two- to four-week delay in the overall construction schedule.

We had some items ordered that we had to cancel when we stopped work (at the end of June), he told the board. With a budget in place, weve placed those orders again and well see when we get everything we need.

A meeting is scheduled within the next month to determine the next steps in construction, and Florian reiterated his belief that the center can be open in time for students to apply for spring semester classes.

Once completed, the 22,000-square-foot space will be a centralized location for services, including academic advising, orientation, admissions, testing and assessment, financial aid, career development, job placement and transfer services.

Since its 2014 groundbreaking, construction on the center has stopped twice because of the state budget impasse.

In other business, the board heard of two proposals that could change what students can receive certain scholarships through the colleges foundation.

The specific scholarship under discussion was the Walter and Alice Scherer Scholarship, with this recent school year provided $69,742.50 to Richland students.

Foundation Executive Director Julie Melton told the board that the foundation was looking to cut a provision that allowed the scholarships to be given to Richland graduates attending other four-year Illinois colleges. Last school year, $56,000 was transferred to students attending four-year institutions.

Another planned change is to make the scholarship open not only to graduating high school seniors, but also any high school graduate or current Richland student who meet certain academic criteria.

The changes, which must be approved by the foundations board, would not affect any current recipients. The new criteria would go into effect in the 2018-2019 school year.

Its just a way to help more students and, again, follow the donors intent and really to help Richland too, Melton said after the meeting.
Railway notification

These rules may be called Railway Services (Revised Pay) Amendment Rules, 2017. They shall be deemed to have come into force on the 1st day of January, 2016. In the Railway Services (Revised Pay) Rules, 2016.

In rule 12, for the words "the date of notification of these rules", the following shall be substituted, namely: -"1st January, 2016 and the same shall apply to the pay of officers coming on deputation to posts in the Central Government which are not covered under the Central Staffing Scheme."

Pay matrix

The notification says that in the schedule for Part A, the following part shall be substituted namely.

See notification here

Revision of incentive bonus

Meanwhile the Railway board has constituted a committee for revision of incentive bonus. The committee would look into the issues related to revision of hourly rates of incentive bonus and bonus factors of the workshopsPUs staff under the CRJ pattern.

Read full notification here

Ministry of Railways (Railway Board) have decided to constitute a Committee to examine the issues related to revision of hourly rates of Incentive Bonus and Bonus Factors of workshops/PUs staff under CRJ Pattern/GIS.

The Committe will consits of the following:-

Executive Director/ME(W), Railway Board - Convener

Executive Director/PC-II, Railway Board - Member

Executive Director/F(C), Railway Board - Member

To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the payment of Incentive Bonus and Bonus Factors to Workshops/PUs staff under CRJ Pattern/GIS under 7th Pay Commission pay structure in respect of the following categories of employees:-

1. SSE/SEs in level 7 supervising the work of staff working on the shop floor.

2. Jr. Engineers(s) in Level 6

3. Sr. Technician in Level 5

4. Tech Gr.I in Level 4

5. Tech. Gr.II in Level 3

6. Tech. Gr.III in Level 2

7. Semi Skilled/Unskilled in Level 1

8. Unskilled in -1S (pre-revised scale).

3. The Committee should submit its report within six months from the date of its construction.

4. The headquarters of the Committee will be at New Delhi.

5. PC-VII Branch of Railway Board will be the nodal Branch for functioning of the Committee. Therefore, all related works/issues including Parl. Questions, RTI cases, their execution and other formalities with regard to the Committee should be dealt with by PC-VII Branch.

6. The Convener and Members of the Committee will draw TA/DA as per extant rules.
AP, Telangana to expect heavy rains in 24 hours

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Heavy rains are expected in Odisha and north coastal Andhra Pradesh and surrounding areas in the next couple of days. The depression is expected to make a landfall between Puri and Gopalpur and in the next couple of days Odisha, north coastal AP, south Chattisgarh and Telangana will receive heavy rains.

Meanwhile in a tweet, Madhavan Rajeevan, secretary, ministry of earth sciences said, " Widespread rains with heavy spells are expected in next 8-10 days over central and northwest India."

Further an official release also warned that several rivers and tributaries are expected to observe a rise in levels.

The monsoon has further advanced into parts of Rajasthan and Haryana on Tuesday. Nearly 90 per cent of the country are now covered by the monsoon. THe monsoon entered an active phase three days back. July so far has a 3.5 deficit.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 7:15 [IST]
Prashant Kishor claims Nitish Kumar in touch with BJP says don't be surprised if he joins hands with it again

As Nitish, Tejashwi meet, BJP releases further proof of corruption

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Even as the Chief Minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar tried to break the ice with his deputy, Tejashwi Yadav, the BJP has furnished details of another list of properties alleged to be illegal.

BJP leader Sushil Modi released details of 26 properties allegedly acquired by the Tejashwi. He alleged that 13 properties in Patna and and Gopalganj were registered in Tejashwi's name, while the remaining 13 were owned by companies in which he is either a director or a shareholder.

Two out of the 13 plots of land which Tejashwi directly owns were registered in his name in 1993 when he was around three years old. Ten more properties were registered in his name between 2004 and 2009, when his father Lalu was rail minister. One plot at Bairiya on the outskirts of Patna was registered in his name in 2009, Modi also said.

The BJP leader said that Tejashwi acquired 13 properties through shell firms run by him and other family members of Lalu, including Rabri Devi and elder son and health minister Tej Pratap. These shell firms are Delight Marketing Company Pvt Ltd, Ab Exports Private Limited and AK Infosystems Private Limited, he further said.

The allegations come in the backdrop of Nitish Kumar meeting with his deputy on Tuesday night. Nitish had a conversation with Tejashwi for around 40 minutes following a meeting of the state cabinet.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 6:11 [IST]
International news brief: Floods trap many in Florida; Royal Mint unveils first coins and more

Assam seeks help from Modi to start special plan to tackle flood, erosion

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

Guwahati, July 19: Every day the death toll in Assam flood is rising, showing no sign of ending to the massive human tragedy. On Tuesday, the death toll rose to 69, as four more deaths were reported from the flood-hit state.

Amid the ongoing death and destruction, Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the national capital on Tuesday.

Sonowal asked Modi to launch a Prime Minister's Special Programme for Flood and Erosion Control to develop road-cum-embankments stretching over 5,000 km in Assam.

During the meeting, Sonowal told Modi that most of the embankments in the state were constructed in the 1950s and had become vulnerable to breaches due to floods and erosion.

"If these embankments are developed as road-cum-embankments, it will ensure their regular maintenance and sustainability," he said. The CM added that the state did not have enough resources to develop road-cum-embankments, so requested the PM to start an exclusive programme under his supervision to prevent flood and erosion.

A total of 29 districts, out of 33, in the state have been affected by the floods so far. More than 25 lakh people have been hit hard by the floods. The state government has set up around 1,098 relief camps and distribution centres to help the flood-hit people of the state.

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The CM requested the PM to constitute a high-level team, comprising officials of various ministries and headed by a Union cabinet minister, to study the impact of floods and erosion and suggest permanent measures to mitigate the problem.

Sonowal also submitted a memorandum to Modi, requesting him to direct the ministry of water resources for an early release of central funds amounting to Rs 1,138 crore, to complete schemes undertaken under the flood management programme during the Eleventh and Twelfth Plans.

Under the programme, the Assam government took up 100 schemes during the Eleventh Plan and 41 schemes during the Twelfth Plan. The state shares against the schemes have already been released.

According to the Assam State Disaster Management Authority (ASDMA), the worst hit district is South Salmara where 1,25,040 people are affected, while in Morigaon district nearly one lakh people are facing the flood fury.

The water in the Brahmaputra and the Barak rivers, and their tributaries, have been showing a receding trend at several places in the state with cessation of rainfall.

But the Brahmputra is still flowing above the danger level at Dhubri, Dhansiri at Numaligarh in Golaghat, and the Barak at Badarpurghat in Karimganj, and Kushiara river at Karimganj.

A total crop area of 2,05,587 hectares have been affected in 29 districts, the ASDMA said.

Altogether 15,205 people have been rescued by the national and state disaster response forces, CRPF, Army, police, forest police, and district administrations.

Around 1,22,850 people have taken shelter in 334 relief camps where they have been provided with food, tarpaulins, disinfectants, candles, drinking water and medicines, the ASDMA said.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 6:53 [IST]
Mamata Banerjee announces formation of Board of Administrators for GTA

Binay Tamang asks BJP to clear their stand on Gorkhaland

West Bengal Government provides financial relief to the Hills of North Bengal

WB Govt trying to end Gorkhaland movement: Bimal Gurung to SC

Bengali group launches 'anti-Gorkhland' rally in West Bengal

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

A Bengali organization on Wednesday went on an anti-Gorkhaland rally amid calls for separate Gorkhaland state by Gorkha Janmukti Morcha in the hill district Darjeeling.

The Bengali organization called as 'Amra Bangali' (We are Bengalee) carried out a protest rally in Siliguri.

West Bengal: An organisation called 'Amra Bangali' carried out a protest rally against the demand of separate Gorkhaland in Siliguri. pic.twitter.com/ynkA1Up8sm  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

In fact, last month 'Amra Bangali' along with 'Bangla o Bangali Bachao Committee' (Committee to protect Bengal and Bengalis) went on a rally in the plains and took out massive rallies.

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It may be recalled that early this month, GJM had blamed 'Anti-Gorkhaland forces' for creating division between hills and the plains.

The statement said, "Anti-Gorkhaland forces and TMC government-sponsored elements have been actively inciting the people of Siliguri, Odlabari, Malbazar, Meteli and parts of Dooars in communal hatred and division between hills and the plains."

#VISUALS: Police vehicle set on fire by unknown assailants during GJM protest rally in #Darjeeling pic.twitter.com/J3lRMJm4Pi  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

Meanwhile, a police vehicle was set on fire by unknown assailants during GJM protest rally in Darjeeling on the 35th day of the indefinite shutdown. Police vehicles are under attack since the beginning of GJM movement. Yesterday also pro-Gorkhaland supporters clashed with police and set on fire two security vehicles and an outpost.

Army troops continued to maintain a vigil in Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Sonada. Paramilitary and police personnel also patrolled the streets in the hills.

(With agency inputs)
Imran Khan discharged from hospital, to resume long march from same point where he was shot

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Big blow: US lists Pakistan among countries providing safe havens to terrorists

India

oi-PTI

In yet another setback to Pakistan, US on Wednesday listed it among the nations and regions providing "safe havens" to terrorists, saying government did not take any significant action against LeT or JeM.

In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the State Department said that Pakistani military and security forces undertook operations against groups that conducted attacks within Pakistan such as Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan.

"Pakistan did not take substantial action against the Afghan Taliban or Haqqani, or substantially limit their ability to threaten US interests in Afghanistan, although Pakistan supported efforts to bring both groups into an Afghan-led peace process," the State Department said.

"Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in 2016, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan," the report said.

India, it said continued to experience attacks, "including by Maoist insurgents and Pakistan-based terrorists".

Indian authorities continued to blame Pakistan for cross-border attacks in Jammu and Kashmir, it said.

"In January, India experienced a terrorist attack against an Indian military facility in Pathankot, Punjab, which was blamed by authorities on JeM. Over the course of 2016, the Government of India sought to deepen counterterrorism cooperation and information sharing with the United States," the State Department said.

The Indian government continued to closely monitor the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like ISIS and al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), which made threats against India in their terrorist propaganda. A number of individuals were arrested for Islamic State-affiliated recruitment and attack plotting within India, the report said.

In a separate chapter, the State Department listed Pakistan as one of the safe havens of terrorism.

The State Department said that numerous terrorist groups, including the Haqqani Network (HQN), the LeT and JeM continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2016.

"Although LeT is banned in Pakistan, LeT's wings Jamaat- ud-Dawa (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FiF) were able to openly engage in fundraising, including in the capital," it said.

PTI
CBI Recruitment 2022 Out: Check salary, eligibility, and how to apply

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CBI summons Karti Chidambaram again

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) once again summoned Karti Chidambaram and his associates in connection with INX media kickbacks case probe.

CBI has asked Karti Chidambaram to appear at the CBI HQ on 21 July in the INX media case, ANI reported quoting sources.

Karti, son of senior Congress leader P Chidambaram, and his associates were summoned earlier this week but they failed to appear and did not notify CBI about it.

In the month of May, the CBI had carried out searches at the homes and offices of Karti across four cities for allegedly receiving money from the media firm (INX media) owned by the Mukerjeas' to scuttle a tax probe.

The ED had filed a criminal case against the Mukerjea couple, INX media and others under various sections of the PMLA.

According to investigative agaencies, Karti allegedly received money from INX Media for "using his influence" to manipulate a tax probe against it in a case of violation of Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) conditions to receive investment from Mauritius.

(With agency inputs)

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 19:05 [IST]
'China needs to acknowledge India is a force to reckon with'

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

China needs to acknowledge that India is a force to be reckoned with said a former US diplomat.

"China, I think, needs to acknowledge the fact that there is growing strategic and security capability across Asia, and certainly India is a force to be reckoned with," former US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Nisha Desai Biswal told PTI in an interview.

Biswal, who was Obama Administration's point person for South and Central Asia in its second term, said that there has been a fair degree of assertive actions and signals being sent from China across many different border points, maritime and land, across its geography.

"While I understand that sentiment within China, that I think seeks to try to assert China as a dominant player across the Asia-Pacific, I think China has to content with the fact that across its geography, throughout the Asia-Pacific region, countries are unsettled by its behaviour and by its unilateral actions," she said.

"China has more to gain through diplomacy and dialogue than it does through these kinds of actions, which create a great deal of unease and uncertainty," Biswal said responding to questions on India-China border stand-off.

Biswal said across Asia, nations are stepping forward to assert their interests and their rights.

"So now is an important time to create some greater codification of the rules and, to create more channels for dialogue and diplomacy to address some of these areas of tension and differences on how various boundary and maritime claims are resolved," she said.

She exuded confidence that the leaders of the two countries would be able to prevent further escalation of the situation.

"China is a very mature and calibrated power. It's not a rogue actor, in any sense of the word. And certainly I think that the Indian side has also acted with a great deal of resolve and a great deal of restraint," she said.

"While there are tensions afoot, I do believe that both countries have it within themselves to resolve those tensions, to defuse those tensions. It is in the interest of both countries, in their security interest and in their economic interest, to manage these tensions and to ensure that there are avenues for peaceful and amicable resolution," she added.

The US, she noted, certainly has a role to play in it by ensuring that the international rules are followed.

"Certainly, I think that the US, by standing firm on its commitment towards the rules-based international order and the importance of dialogue and dispute resolution, can signal its own strong preference for these kinds of mechanisms to de- escalate and to resolve differences," she said.

"The US has stood very firmly against the kinds of unilateral actions to settle disputed claims, which we have done very strongly with respect to maritime claims, and which we continue to stand behind with respect to land boundary claims," Biswal said.

"India has proven itself to be willing and be able to resolve issues through arbitration, through negotiation, through dialogue and diplomacy, and, we would hope and expect that China would show itself capable of doing the same," she said.

Implications, of any further escalation, are grave, she warned in response to a question.

OneIndia News
BJP cant afford to turn soft on terror before LS polls, Hurriyat leader writes in Pak daily

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India slams OIC for inviting Hurriyat Conference to its meet in Pakistan

Desist from military adventurism, show 'maturity': Mirwaiz to India, Pak

India

pti-PTI

Srinagar, Jul 19: Expressing concern over the escalation of violence along the LoC, Chairman of moderate Hurriyat Conference Mirwaiz Umar Farooq on Wednesday asked India and Pakistan to demonstrate the "maturity" to resolve the Kashmir issue peacefully.

He said the "root cause" of tension, violence and bitterness between the two nuclear neighbours is the Kashmir issue.

"Until both the countries show a will to resolve the issue, innocent lives will continue to be lost and Kashmiris continue to suffer," the Mirwaiz, who is under house arrest for a month, said in a statement.

The Mirwaiz asked the leadership of both countries to "desist from military adventurism, the consequences of which are directly borne by the people of Jammu and Kashmir on both sides and by poor soldiers".

Instead they should show the maturity to peacefully resolve the issue and put an end to the conflict, he said.

Mirwaiz said the Centre has to shun its "military approach" in dealing with the people of Kashmir.

He alleged it was a "war-like" situation along the LoC and in Kashmir.

"In the present day world, wars do not resolve issues, nor does repression," he said.

Dialogue and serious engagements are the means to be employed to move forward towards resolution, he said.

"It is high time that the three stakeholders to the dispute- India, Pakistan and most importantly the people of Kashmir - get together and deliberate and resolve the dispute keeping the will and aspirations of the people of Kashmir in view, once and for all."

PTI
GST effect: Surat textile traders call off strike after Centre's assurance

India

oi-PTI

Ahmedabad, Jul 19: Following the Centre's assurance to look into their demand for its rollback the traders in Surat have called off their two-week-long strike against the imposition of five per cent GST on textiles.

The announcement to withdraw the protest was made yesterday by the traders who met Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in Delhi on July 17.

"During the meeting, Jaitley assured us that the issue of the Goods and Services Tax on cloth will be taken up in the next GST Council meeting to be held on August 5. Thus, we have decided to call off the strike till that date," said Manoj Agrawal, a textile trader.

"If no favourable decision comes in that GST Council meeting, we will think of going on strike again to raise our demand for abolishing the five per cent GST," he said.

Surat has one of the biggest textile markets in the country.

Thousands of textile merchants in Surat had shut their shops since the last two weeks to protest the new tax structure. On July 3, thousands of protesting traders had gathered near the Ring Road in Surat, where the main market is situated, demanding scrapping of GST on textiles. Police then wielded batons to disperse the agitators who allegedly engaged in stone-pelting, an official earlier said.

The textile traders organised a silent march in Surat to protest against five per cent GST imposed on the sector on July 8.

PTI

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 12:11 [IST]
WARRENSBURG  Not seeing an SUV waiting to turn east onto Park Road, a sedan hit a stopped SUV on Illinois 121 on Wednesday evening, causing it to roll over, the Macon County Sheriff's Office said.

The drivers, a 26-year-old Forsyth woman and a 39-year-old Warrensburg woman, were treated for injuries not considered life-threatening at Decatur Memorial Hospital, the sheriff's office said.

Not aware of the stopped vehicle, the sheriff's office said the rear driver did not apply the brakes before the collision. The Warrensburg woman was cited for failure to reduce speed to avoid an accident, the sheriff's office said.l

The accident was reported at 5:50 p.m., the sheriff's office said. The highway was closed until 7:15 p.m.

The Warrensburg Police Department, Warrensburg Fire Department and Decatur Ambulance Service assisted the sheriff's office at the scene.
Heavy rains create flood-like situation in parts of Maharashtra

India

oi-Anusha

Incessant heavy rains have left villages inundated in parts of Maharashtra. District administrations in regions like Gadchiroli, Ahmednagar, Buldana, Chandrapur are on high alert over flooding of water bodies.

On Wednesday heavy rains resulted in a flood-like situation in Bhamragarh and Chamorshi of Gadchiroli district. Incessant rains brought down the roof of a school. District administration officials who have been monitoring the situation said that a river Gadchiroli city, Kathani, was flowing with maximum capacity. While the traffic remained undisrupted till Wednesday afternoon, officials issued advisory asking people to exercise caution.

More rains are predicted for Ahmednagar, Akola, Amravati, Aurangabad, Bhandara, Bid, Buldana and Chandrapur in next 24 hours. Khobragadi River near Aarmori has remained flooded since the last 36 hours, according to district administration. Officials, however, claimed that the situation was under control despite tributaries of the river inundating few places.

The IMD has sounded heavy rain alert in central Maharashtra and Konkan-Goa for the next 24 hours. Red and orange alerts have been issued for the Konkan and Goa region including Alibaug, Bhira, Dahanu, Goa, Harnai, Mumbai and Ratnagiri. The Madhya Maharashtra region includes Pune, Ahmednagar, Jalgaon, Jeur, Kolhapur, Mahabaleshwar, Malegaon, Nasik, Sangli, Satara and Solapur.

The IMD has asked people to exercise caution while travelling along hilly regions such as Mahabaleshwar, Jalgaon and Nashik.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 14:02 [IST]
How 217 students were rescued as Pak resorted to firing

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

In a daring operation conducted by the Jammu and Kashmir police and district administration, 217 students and 15 teachers trapped in schools near the Line of Control were rescued.

The students and teachers were trapped in the schools as Pakistan resorted to heavy shelling of mortars. Officials say that a school in Nowshera was hit in the shelling, but fortunately there were no casualties.

It was a daring operation that was carried out by the administration. There were 5 bulletproof vehicles and three buses that were pressed in service. Avoiding the shelling and entering the school buildings to rescue the children and teachers was a task in itself. The students were trapped for over six hours as the schools in the area were shut indefinitely.

Dr Shahid Iqbal Choudhary, district commissioner, Rajouri said that bullet proof vehicles and buses were deputed. Students were trapped in various schools and each of them had to be rescued. Meanwhile the students and teachers showed great courage which made the operation easier for the officials. The operation at a school in Sair was difficult as there were 55 students who were trapped in it.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 7:23 [IST]
How Niti Aayog, Health ministry plans privatisation of urban health centres

India

oi-Madhuri

Concerned over the rise in non-communicable diseases in urban India, the Centre is working on a policy that will increase the role of private hospitals in the health sector.

Earlier, the Niti Aayog had sent a draft copy to all state chief secretaries for their comments and views on the policy in which the states will have to allot 50 beds in all 300-bed state-run hospitals to private players for the private-public partnership project in towns other than metropolitan cities.

According to the contract, the state has to sign a lease for 30 years over parts of district hospital buildings and also need to share their back-end services such as blood banks and ambulance services with the private players. Along with this, the state government could also provide part of funds to the private players in order ro set up new hospitals.

However, States like Tamil Nadu have rejected the scheme stating they have been able to provide quality care through the state health insurance scheme that covers 70% of the population at 10% of the health budget.

Scroll in reviewed a copy of the proposal by Niti Aayog and the health ministry along with the note on it sent to the states.

Objective of the policy?

The main objective of the National Health Policy 2017 is to achieve the highest possible level of good health and well-being, through a preventive and promotive health care orientation in all developmental policies, and to achieve universal access to good quality health care services without anyone having to face financial hardship as a consequence. In order to provide access and financial protection, the policy proposes free drugs, free diagnostics and free emergency care services in all public hospitals. The primary aim of the policy is to inform, clarify, strengthen and prioritize the role of the Government in shaping health systems.

However, under the model contract, the private hospitals will be providing treatment for cancer, heart diseases and respiratory tract ailments at prices that are not higher than that of government health insurance schemes. Also, the district government hospital will be expected to share its ambulance services, blood blank, physiotherapy services, bio-medical waste disposal system, mortuary services, parking facilities, electricity load, in-patient payment counters and hospital security with the private enterprise running out of its campus. The contract also says that for treating non-communicable diseases, the hospitals will need to have out-patient departments, in-patient beds, beds for intensive care, operation theatres, centre for angioplasty and angiography, laboratories and radiology services.

Going by the contract:

The district hospitals would be required to lease out 30,000 square feet for a 50-bed private hospital or 60,000 square feet for a 100-bed operation. If the state government agrees initially to a 50-bed private hospital, the district administration will have to provide 75% of this space within the already-built part of the government hospital.

For the private players in critical health care sector:

The Government approved the National Health Policy-2017, bringing to an end a two year long process. A draft of the policy was available since mid-2015 but it is believed that the government, at the Niti Ayog's behest had been unhappy with some specific parts of the earlier draft that was critical of the private sector.

The Scroll.in reviewed the draft policy and said that the first draft of the National Health Policy prepared by the ministry's steering committee in 2015 had pushed for higher investment by the government in public health. However, the latest one limits the role of the private sector to strategic purchase of services.

Meanwhile, the officials of Niti Aayog officials said that several states have welcomed the policy while many others have suggested modifications on the number of beds, paid services and lease term.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 13:10 [IST]
In Valley incidents of stone pelting down, infiltrations up

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

The number of terrorists that were eliminated stands at 95 this year in the Kashmir Valley. 12 civilians and 38 security personnel have lost their lives a written statement by the Union Home Ministry states.

While the number of stone pelting incidents have gone down, the infiltration bids have shot up, the statement also says. As against 18 attempts that were recorded last year, 42 were recorded this year till the month of June, the Home Ministry also said.

The MHA says, 583 cases have been registered this year against 2897 cases last year. The incidents of stone pelting have reduced in 2017. 664 cases of stone pelting were recorded this year as against 2808 cases in 2016. Around 8,932 people were injured because of stone pelting in 2016. 85 people lost their lives due to the violence inflicted by stone pelting in 2016 when compared to 112 in the protests that occurred in 2010, the MHA also said.

172 incidents of violence by terrorists in the state were recorded till July 9, 2017 as compared to the 322 incidents that were registered in the corresponding year of 2016.

89 security personnel were killed in 2016 as compared to 69 in 2010. Looking at the increasing violence against the security forces, the Jammu and Kashmir government has asked the centre to increase the compensation for the police personnel who die in action.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 5:45 [IST]
India-China standoff: Time the media 'shut up'

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Let us start off by saying that the media is entirely to blame for the escalating tension between India and China. Amidst the standoff which is into its 5th week at Doklam, the two nations are clearly not in the mood for war.

Aggressive posturing by both the Indian and Chinese media has only led to the tension escalating feels V Balachandran, former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat. The question now is what needs to be done. What has had to happen has already happened says Balachandran in this chat with OneIndia.

We have had similar problems:

We have had similar problems in the past as well. It may not have been of this magnitude and intensity. However India always took a pragmatic view considering the border was not demarcated. This is about what we feel and what they feel about the boundary, Balachandran says.

In the past when such issues arose, a flag meet would be immediately called for. The issue would be resolved by stepping back. However now the atmospherics have changed, explains the former officer who was with the Research and Analysis Wing.

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Media needs to calm down:

While there is tension already, the media on both sides have become aggressive. This is only adding to the problem says Balachandran. Everything is being blown out of proportion. When a Malabar exercise is held, the media projects it as though it is a confrontation against China.

The Malabar exercise is going on for several years now. When we conduct an exercise with China, it should not be projected as though it is a message for some other country, Balachandran explains.

Such statements only breed hostility. It is time for a dialogue which I am sure our NSA also realises. Another important thing to do is stop sitting on either sides of the border and hurl threats through the media. It is time to cool down. The media needs to stop being hysterical. The aggressive posturing by the Indian media is now being matched with hysteria by the Chinese media too, Balachandran says.

Stop being a satellite of another nation:

Running to the United States is not the solution for India. The US does not have time and they have far too many problems to deal with. The present government should stop being a satellite of another country.

We have to use our own diplomacy and deal with China directly, the former officer explains. This is a direct issue with China and it would be prudent to deal directly on it, Balachandran also says.

The deterioration of ties after Pokhran 2:

There was a time following the visit by former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi when ties with China had improved considerably. I however did not understand the need for the government to dash off a letter to the Clinton administration after Pokhran 2.

India wrote to the US justifying Pokhran 2. It was said that this was not targeted at Pakistan but at some other nation. The letter was leaked in the press and subsequently published. China did take offense to the letter as it felt that India was trying to target it. China wondered why India had complained to the US about it. Following that episode, the ties with China have never looked up and all subsequent meetings with their leaders have been more of photo ops, Balachandran also says.

The Myanmar fiasco:

The government must also reign in on its ministers who make brash statements. Do you recall the statements given by people not connected with the issue following the Myanmar incident? A minister said that India had entered Myanmar and shot down cadres of the NSCN(K).

These people must not speak out of turn. Moreover in the case of China diplomacy and not a muscular policy will work. It is time to gather our heads and find a solution diplomatically. If we withdraw from the tri-junction then it would be a loss of face. I am sure our NSA will find a diplomatic solution to the problem. The next time, we need to ensure that the situation does not reach this stage.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 8:22 [IST]
IndiGo, Air India lift ban on TDP MP JC Diwakar Reddy

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

Private airline IndiGo and publicly owned Air India Wednesday lifted the flying ban on Telugu Desam Party (TDP) MP JC Diwakar Reddy with immediate effect a month after he was banned by most of the domestic airlines from flying due to his alleged unruly behavior.

The ban was lifted two days after the Monsoon session of the Parliament began on July 17.

The TDP lawmaker had allegedly created a ruckus at the Visakhapatnam airport on June 15 after he was not allowed boarding by IndiGo for being late. Reddy had allegedly gone on the rampage, pushing an airline staffer and lifting a printer from the table, after he was denied boarding by IndiGo for being late.

Almost all the domestic airlines in India had announced a flying ban on Reddy following the ruckus.

Last week Reddy had filed a petition in the Hyderabad High Court requesting it to declare flying ban on him illegal.

He made the Union Ministry of Civil Aviation, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), Air India, Jet Airways, Vistara Airlines, IndiGo, GoAir, Air Asia, SpiceJet, Turbo Megha Airways as respondents to his petition.

In the petition, he sought a direction declaring action of respondents in imposing flying ban on him as "illegal, arbitrary, violative of principle of natural justice...And to consequently direct the respondents to forthwith allow the petitioner to fly in all domestic flights".

He said the parliament session is expected to commence from July 17 and since he is an MP and a senior citizen, the ban imposed on him would result in lot of difficulties and hence it should be lifted.

(With agency inputs)
Inhuman treatment in Bengaluru jail, NHRC notice to DGP, IG prisons

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

The National Human Rights Commission has issued notices to the DGP and IG Prisons, Karnataka over allegations of torture and inhuman treatment meted out to 32 prisoners in the Bengaluru Central Jail.

The National Human Rights Commission has taken cognizance of a complaint about inhuman treatment meted out to the 32 prisoners at Parappana Agrahara Bangalore Central Jail, a few days ago. They were beaten black and blue and shifted over night in the injured condition to various other prisons at Mysore, Bellary, Belagavi and Davanagere. According to the complaint, dated 17th July, 2107, by Ms Shobha Karandlaje, M.P., Lok Sabha, the family members of these prisoners are not able to meet them, a press release stated.

The Commission has issued notices to the DGP and IG Prisons, Karnataka to submit a detailed report on the allegations, along with present location and state of health of the injured/shifted prisoners of the Bangalore jail, within four weeks.

The Commission has observed that the allegations regarding physical torture of the prisoners and their overnight transfer to other jails, in an injured condition, if true, raise serious issue of violation of their Right to Life and Dignity. It need not be restated that a prisoner is not a slave of the State and is not denude of all his fundamental rights, while in judicial custody.

Allegedly, the prisoners were given this inhuman treatment due to their initiative to stage a protest dharna inside the jail premises as they were not allowed to speak to D Roopa, Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG), Prisons, Bangalore, who had visited the jail. She has, recently, brought out certain grave irregularities, going on inside the Bangalore Central Jail including, providing special and sophisticated kitchen to one of the prisoners, Sasikala and VIP treatment to another prisoner, Abdul Karim Lala Telgi.

Allegedly, the 32 prisoners were shifted in a hasty manner in order to avoid any disclosure to the enquiry officer, who was expected to visit the Parappana Agrahara jail on Monday, the 17th July, 2017. The alleged comment of Superintendent of Bangalore Jail has also been described as specious that as per jail manual, dharna is not allowed, hence, the prisoners have been punished by shifting to other jails.

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 6:54 [IST]
Is Gorkhaland agitation turning into an armed underground movement?

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

Darjeeling, July 19: Ask any native of Darjeeling and its neighbouring areas what Gorkhaland means to him/her, the answer is simple--a homeland where the Gorkhas (inhabitants of the hills of North Bengal) can live freely and achieve growth and prosperity.

So, the supporters of Gorkhaland--a separate state carved out of West Bengal--feel that time is ripe to honour the demand of the people for the formation of a separate state.

The West Bengal government, on its part, since the Gorkhaland agitation started in the hills on June 8, alleged that the protest had the support of various "anti-social" elements--right from the Maoists of Nepal to various insurgent groups from the neighbouring northeastern states.

Recently, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee alleged involvement of "Chinese hand" in the ongoing turmoil, another indication that the movement in the hills is not just a result of the grievances of the locals.

Amid all these allegations against the protest, mostly led by the people of the hills on the streets of Darjeeling and its adjoining places, a report stated that the West Bengal government fears that the ongoing people's agitation might turn into an "underground armed revolution".

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According to a report published by Huffpost India, the prolonged agitation in the hills may turn into an underground arms movement against the state, like the Maoist movement.

"The fears are not unfounded. There are reports that huge consignments of arms and ammunition have been smuggled into the area over several years. There is the border with Nepal, Northeast and a steady flow of arms from Bihar," police officials were quoted as saying by Huffpost India.

The leaders of the pro-Gorkhaland movement have strongly refuted allegations that the "protest of the people" have got any links with Maoists of Nepal and insurgent groups from the Northeast.

The supporters of the Gorkhaland stress that the Mamata Banerjee government should stop making false allegations against the people of the hills and end the repression against the protesters by security personnel.

On Wednesday, the indefinite bandh in the hills entered the 35th day. Violence was reported on Tuesday, as the pro-Gorkhaland agitators fought a pitched battle with the police, pelting stones and petrol bombs and setting on fire two police vehicles and an outpost in Darjeeling hills where normal life stayed crippled on the 34th day of the indefinite shutdown.

During a meeting hosted by the Gorkhaland Movement Coordination Committee, a group comprising of all the pro-Gorkhaland parties, leaders of the agitation decided to continue with the ongoing strike. The next meeting of the committee is scheduled on August 1.

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 8:14 [IST]
ISIS operative from Bengaluru convicted by NIA court

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

The NIA's special court held one Abid Khan guilty in a case relating to the Islamic State. The quantum of the sentence will be pronounced on July 21.

Abid Khan, 23 years, a resident of Bengaluru was accused of being associated with four persons belonging to the ISIS. He is said to have converted to Christianity to avoid arrest. The NIA says that he went to Sri Lanka for a month in March 2016. Upon his return he took shelter in a Church at Kullu, Himachal Pradesh. During this period he remained in contact with his handlers through various social media platforms.

Accused Abid Khan was found to be a member of a newly formed organisation, "Junood-Ul-Khilafa-Fil-Hind" which was working to further the ideology of the ISIS.

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 20:47 [IST]
J&K: After Balakot, Pakistan violates ceasefire in Rajouri

India

oi-Madhuri

Pakistan again on Wednesday violated ceasefire in Balakot region of Poonch district in Jammu and Kashmir. The violation took place at around 6:45 am, to which the Indian Army is retaliating strongly and effectively.

"Pakistan Army initiated unprovoked firing on Indian Army posts in Naushera sector in Bhimbher Gali sector at around 0845 hours. The Indian Army retaliated strongly and effectively," a defence spokesman said.

In yet another incident, Pakistan Army also shelled areas in Balakote, Dhar, Lambibari, Rajdhani, Mankote, Sandote in Rajouri and Poonch districts since early morning.

A civilian identified as Raza has been injured in the shelling in Sandote hamlet along the LoC and has been hospitalised, police officials said.

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Earlier on Tuesday, the Pakistani troops had resorted ceasefire violation in BG and Poonch sectors of the J&K.

On Monday, a jawan was injured in the ceasefire violation carried out by Pakistan in the Uri Sector. On July 12, two soldiers were killed after Pakistan violated ceasefire in Kupwara Sector of Jammu and Kashmir.

On July 9, the Pakistan Army initiated unprovoked and indiscriminate firing of small arms, automatics and mortars in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch sector along the LoC.

OneIndia News
Karnataka flag: Congress wants explanation

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

In the midst of the Congress being accused of separatism in Karnataka, the party's high command has sought to know why a committee to examine whether a state flag was set up.

A meeting of the top brass of the Congress is scheduled to discuss the issue. The Congress says that the party does not have a policy for a separate flag. A clarification has been sought by AICC general secretary in charge of Karnataka, K C Venugopal.

The Karnataka government's decision to examine the possibility of having a state flag came in for criticism. Although there is no bar in having a state flag, the Union Home Ministry said, " We are one nation, one flag." Legally there is however no provision either for providing or prohibiting a flag, a Home Ministry official said.

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 6:17 [IST]
Karnataka flag row: Can it be compared in the J&K context?

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Is there a bar on having a state flag? A controversy has erupted after the Karnataka government constituted a nine member committee to examine the possibility of having a state flag.

The legal position on this very clear. As long as it does not dishonour the National Flag there is no bar on having a state flag. The National Flag Code authorises the use of other flags subject to the regulation by the court.

In this context one must also visit the S R Bommai vs Union of India case of 1994. The Supreme Court had held that federalism is a basic feature of the Constitution and states are supreme in their sphere. Moreover there is no prohibition in the Constitution for the state to have its own flag.

While the flag code specifically authorises the use of other flags, it would however be subject to the regulation by the court.

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The flag of Jammu and Kashmir:

While there is no bar on having a state flag, in the case of all states except Jammu and Kashmir the flag is permitted to fly along with the National Flag. In the case of all other states the National Flag will fly higher than the state flag.

In J&K, there is an official flag for the state. It consists of a deep red field, representing labour, charged with a ploughto represent agriculture. Three stripes are found on the hoist side and represent the three geographic regions of the state: Jammu, the Kashmir Valley and Ladakh.

Jammu and Kashmir is the only Indian state permitted to fly its own state flag along with the National Flag. Jammu and Kashmir also has a separate Constitution which works under Article 370 of the Constitution of India. This is due to the state's special status under the Indian Constitution.

The Indian Flag Code:

The Indian national flag should always occupy a position of honour and should be distinctly placed in any setting.

When flown over public buildings the national flag should be flown from sunrise to sunset.

The flag should always be hoisted at a brisk pace and lowered slowly.

The saffron band must always be displayed the top most band or the right (of the flag) band (in case of vertical display). It is an offence to display the flag in an inverted position (saffron side down).

Display of a damaged or a disheveled flag is also an offence. The national flag should not be dipped on any occasion.

The national flag of India should not be used as a festoon or a decoration, or allowed to touch the ground. It is not to be used as an advertisement, garment or wrap of any sort.

It cannot be torn, damaged, burnt, or disrespected in any manner. The disposal of a flag should be done as a whole, in private, preferably by burning.

It is also an offence to draw or deface the flag with any inscription or graffiti.

The Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971 (amended in 2003) lays down the punishments meted out in case of any disrespect to the flag. The first offence shall attract a prison term of up to 3 years and a fine. Subsequent offences will be punished with imprisonment for at least a year.

OneIndia News
Karnataka II PUC supplementary result 2017 this week, how to check

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

The Karnataka II PUC supplementary result 2017 is expected to be released this week. Candidates who appeared for the exam can check their results on the official website.

The II PUC exam was conducted from March 9 to 27. 6,84,247 candidates appeared for the exams. The results for the same were declared in May. The results once declared can be checked at results.nic.in, pue.kar.nic.in and karresults.nic.in.

How to check Karnataka II PUC supplementary result 2017:

Log on to results.nic.in , pue.kar.nic.in or karresults.nic.in

, or Click on supplementary results link

Enter required details

View result

Download

Take a printout

OneIndia News
We cannot wait longer now: SC to hear Vijay Mallyas contempt case in January for final disposal

Mallya to get same treatment as other prisoners: India tells UK

India

oi-PTI

New Delhi, July 19: All wanted Indians, including liquor baron Vijay Mallya, will be lodged in a proper jail with facilities on par with European jails, India has told UK authorities.

This was conveyed by Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi to his British counterpart Patsy Wilkinson, the second permanent secretary in the British Home Office, during a meeting last week in London.

The Indian delegation led by Mehrishi told the British authorities that whoever is extradited from the UK, he or she will be lodged in a proper jail with facilities on par with European jails, said the official, who did not want to be quoted.

However, the Indian team made it clear that no extradited persons will be given preferential treatment but would be treated like any other prisoner and asked the British authorities to convey this to the court in London.

This bears significance as Mallya has challenged the Indian government's move in the court to get him extradited from the UK saying the conditions in Indian jails are below standard.

The Indian delegation told their British counterparts that the cells in Indian jails are bigger than European jails and all jails have medical facilities with a proper hospital, the official said.

The home ministry has already written to the Maharashtra government to improve the conditions of its Arthur Road jail, where Mallya would be lodged if extradited from the UK, he said.

Mallya, who is wanted in India for Kingfisher Airlines' default on loans worth nearly Rs 9,000 crore, has been in Britain since March, 2016.

A court in London is hearing a case regarding his return to India.

India has already assured Britain of all assistance in extradition matters to allow the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to present water-tight cases before the courts there against Mallya.

Mehrishi visited London in the wake of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's talks with his British counterpart Theresa May in Hamburg, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting there recently.

Modi had asked for Britain's cooperation in sending "economic offenders" back to India.

Earlier in the day, a joint team of the ED and the CBI is currently in London to brief UK prosecution, working on the extradition of Mallya, and to submit fresh proof in the case.

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Story first published: Thursday, July 20, 2017, 0:03 [IST]
Mani Shankar Aiyar slams Modi govt for neglecting TN farmers plight

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

New Delhi, July 19: It is for the second time, within a couple of a few months, when farmers from drought-hit Tamil Nadu have come to the national capital to make the authorities listen to their plight.

After ending their protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi in April, the farmers from the southern state came back to the national capital on Sunday, again to raise their demands, which include loan waiver, better prices for crops and inter-linking of rivers, to name a few.

In the first phase of Tamil Nadu farmers' protest in Delhi during March-April, not a single politician--except for Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi--from the national capital took the trouble to visit them and listen to their grouses, in spite of constant media coverage about it.

Finally, on Wednesday, the visit of senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar at Jantar Mantar to express his solidarity to the farmers' cause ended the long 'drought' of political apathy towards farmers' plight.

Although Aiyar's meeting with the farmers is more symbolic in nature, nonetheless the gesture gives boost to the poor and troubled men from the southern state.

"Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar joins Tamil Nadu farmers' protest at Jantar Mantar," reported ANI. Aiyar was photographed walking with the farmers during their protest rally at the national capital's favourite protest site.

"These poor people are wandering between Delhi and Chennai not getting any decent answer. So they have come here again," Aiyar was quoted as saying by ANI.

The first phase of the protest of Tamil Nadu farmers ended after the passage of more than 40 days on April 23. They agreed to end their agitation--which also saw a nude protest in front of the Prime Minister's Office--after Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami assured them to address all their concerns.

However, that did not happen and that is why they have to again come back to Delhi to make the authorities, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, listen to their plight and do something about it.

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 14:09 [IST]
Why is Parliament being cut-short so often asks Derek O'Brien

Monsoon session: Naresh Agarwal apologises for remark says he didn't want to hurt anyone

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

New Delhi, July 19: Mob lynching incidents and problems faced by the farmers dominated the discussions on the third day of the Monsoon Session in Parliament.

The opposition leaders also raised the issues of standoff between India and China at the border and cow vigilantism as noisy scenes were witnessed in both the Houses.

SP leader Naresh Agrawal quoting a verse said that he read at a Dharamshala - purportedly juxtaposing alcohol and Hindu gods - invites flak from Treasury for hurting sentiments of Hindus.

Responding to this, Arun Jaitely said Naresh Aggarwal that had he spoken out of this House, he would have been liable to prosecutio.

Meanwhile, Rajya Sabha members attacked Agarwal over his comments linking Hindu gods with alcohol brands and demanded an apology from him.

Agarwal however apologised for his emarks and said that he didn't wanted to hurt anyone.

Meanwhile, the Lok Sabha is continuing the debate on IIIT Bill.

Calling Jharkhand an 'akhara' of lynching, senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said the ruling party has created an atmosphere of fear. He said worst kind of human rights violation are taking place under the present BJP-led regime.

"The topic is a grave matter....this discussion is related to law and order," Azad said.

"From Kashmir to Kanya kumar, there's not a single state where lynching hasn't happened. I'm not saying it didn't happened before. It used to happen before but used to be an isolated issue. But now, the people involved in the incidents are linked to the ruling party's Sangh Pariwar," he added.

Responding to this, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi refutes Azad's contention that no action had been taken. He lists out action taken in cases including the one where Junaid was killed.

There were objections from the Opposition that Naqvi was indulging in a full reply, but they were sounded down by the Chair saying he was speaking for his party and not replying.

Quoting the Prime Minister's call for a crackdown on gau rakshaks at the all-party meeting on the eve of the Monsoon Session of Parliament, Naqvi reiterates that the government is not mixing any diversionary agenda in its development agenda.

The lower House session which began at 11 was adjourned within minutes as Opposition leaders started raising pro farmers' slogan and cornered the government on farmers loan wavier issue and rise in suicide cases.

Opposition plans six agenda for the day

Earlier, the Opposition has identified six issues to target the government on Wednesday after a washout in Parliament on first working day of Monsoon session.

The Opposition has identified six issues- lynchings, the standoff with China, farmer suicides, terror attack on Amarnath yatris, use of CBI and ED to "target" Opposition leaders and the effects of GST and demonetisation.

Sources told that these were identified before the House convened when Opposition leaders met to decide a floor strategy. All parties would submit notices for discussion on the six issues.

Azad, O'Brien, Yechury and Ram Gopal Yadav (Samajwadi Party) have given notices for taking up the lynchings and assaults in Rajya Sabha.

In Lok Sabha, Jyotiraditya Scindia of the Congress and B Mahtab of the BJD will raise a discussion on the agrarian situation in the country under Rule 193.

(With agency inputs)
Nagaland political crisis: CM Liezietsu fails to turn up for his floor test

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

Nagaland Chief Minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu on Wednesday failed to turn up to face floor test in Assembly. The House was adjourned sine die.

A special session of the State Assembly had to be convened on Wednesday after the Gauhati High Court on Tuesday dismissed Liezietsu plea to stay the governor's directive to him to seek a trust vote.

Governor P.B. Acharya on July 18 directed Speaker Imtiwapang to summon an emergent special session of the State Assembly at 9.30 AM for the Chief Minister, who is facing a rebellion from his party MLAs, to seek the confidence vote.

Acharya on July 11 and July 13 directed Liezietsu, who is facing rebellion by 43 ruling Naga Peoples Front MLAs led by former Chief Minister TR Zeliang demanding change of leadership in the present house of 59, to seek vote of confidence on or before July 15.

Zeliang, who was forced out of office in February following large scale protests over holding of urban local bodies election with 33 per cent reservation for women, had staked claim to form the government saying he had majority support in the House.

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 10:42 [IST]
NEET counselling: MCI warns aspiring medical students to be wary of touts

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Medical Council of India has issued a stern warning to students aspiring to enroll medical and dental programmes against falling prey to offer by touts guaranteeing seats for money.

A senior MCI official said anyone tempted by such offers and skipping NEET counselling, which is mandatory for medical courses, runs the risk of having his or her admission cancelled, said reports.

Many aspiring students are getting text messages from from touts promising them seats in private medical colleges for anything between Rs 10 lakh to Rs 1.25 crore.

These touts are promising them direct admissions to colleges without counselling which is strictly against NEET rules.

Reports say that touts are offering admission in private medical colleges in UP and Karnataka by paying donation.

A HT report quoted a tout as saying that his commission is set and the rest of the donation would go to the colleges.

MCI has warned that any attempt to seek "back door entry" through an agent would be strictly dealt with while asserting that such admissions would be caught easily.

NEET counselling is mandatory and joining a medical college directly can lead to disqualification of a candidate, according to the rules. Counselling of students will be done by the Medical Counselling Committee.

According to reports, the MCI had last year cancelled the admission of 519 students from 37 medical colleges across the country for taking direct admission to colleges and skipping the counselling process.

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 9:41 [IST]
People are watching, be careful of your image: Naidu tells lawmakers

India

oi-PTI

Senior politician Venkaiah Naidu on Wednesday asked lawmakers to be careful not only about their image but also the institution of Parliament.

He also asked young lawmakers to learn from the "inspiring" contributions made by great parliamentarians, including the Constitution's architect BR Ambedkar, first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and first home minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

"There is no dearth of TV channels these days. The essence of what I'm trying to say is the message is reaching people. People are watching all of us (through media). So, we have to extra careful, not only about the image, but also the institution," he said, while addressing an award function in the national capital.

Naidu made the remarks at Lokmat Parliamentary Awards 2017, organised by the media house from Maharashtra. BJP veteran LK Advani and senior JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav, members of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha respectively, were among those felicitated at the function.

Vice-President M Hamid Ansari, former prime minister Manmohan Singh, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, senior Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge, former Lok Sabha Speaker Shivraj Patil and NCP chief Sharad and others were present.

PTI

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Story first published: Thursday, July 20, 2017, 0:45 [IST]
Registration of over 1.62 lakh suspected shell companies cancelled: Govt informs Parliament

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Minister of State for Finance Santosh Kumar Gangwar has informed Parliament that registrations of over 1.62 lakh companies have been cancelled for non filing of financial statements for the in the preceding two fiscals.

Highlighting that the government has taken several measures to identify shell companies and investigate their operations, Gangwar said notices have been issued to all those companies which were prima facie not carrying on any business or operation for a period of two immediately preceding financial years.

He said that names of 1,62,618 companies have been removed from the Register of Companies as of July 12, 2017.

In an effective action against shell companies, the I-T department led to detection of more than 1,155 shell companies which were used as conduits by over 22,000 beneficiaries, reported PTI.

"The amount involved in non-genuine transactions of such beneficiaries was more than Rs13,300 crore. Further, prosecution complaints have been filed against 47 persons found involved in wrongdoings through shell companies," Gangwar said in Parliament.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had on July 1, said that the government had cancelled registration of over 1 lakh companies in a single stroke and more than 37,000 shell firms have been identified for strong action.

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 17:45 [IST]
So, how are those summer vacation plans coming?

If things aren't looking so good for you to get away from home this year, it's probably not because you don't have the time. According to a survey by Harris Interactive the American worker left an average of 9.2 days of vacation unused in 2012. That was up from 6.2 unused days in 2011.

More than likely you keep pushing a vacation to the back burner because you just don't have the money. After all, a vacation can be very expensive. These days, you'll spend thousands for a family trip to Disney World, including airfare if you don't live in Orlando.

Of course, there are a number of ways to cut the cost of a vacation, but could you get that cost as low as $150 per adult? You just might be able to pull it off if you change your expectations a bit and adopt a new kind of vacation attitude.

Volunteer vacations are not new, but they've received more attention since Americans are no longer flushed with a lot of discretionary income.

For the cost of getting there and a reasonable amount for your food, like $150 to $300 for a week, you throw your sleeping bag in the car, drive to a nearby park and spend a week in the wilderness rebuilding trails with other nature lovers.

Don't know where to look? Go to the VolunteerMatch website, which has an impressive database of opportunities and groups that have been vetted for compliance with U.S. tax and charity laws.

The site lists not just the well-heeled agencies but also the small organizations that are doing really interesting, innovative work but might not have the funds to advertise.

Doug Cutchins, author of "Volunteer Vacations: Short-Term Adventures That Will Benefit You and Others," notes in an interview with Forbes magazine the changing demographics of those taking volunteer vacations: "The stereotype used to be people right out of college or people who were retired. But we're seeing a lot of mid-career people. ... This is a way for people to go on vacation and also feel really good about it."

Working in a national park is one of the cheapest and most rewarding volunteer vacations you can find, according to Cutchins. He recommends trips organized by the Appalachian Mountain Club, Appalachian Trail Conservancy, Colorado Trail Foundation and the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation in Montana, among others.

Families see the money-saving and stress-reducing benefits of going on this type of vacation.

If you can't afford a trip this year, save up for next year. Although most trips within the United States are on the cheaper side, those wishing to go abroad may need more time to save, as the trips tend to range anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 and up.

Volunteer this year. It'll do you and others a lot of good.
Top posts of President, VP will be held by people from same ideology: PM

Section of Bengal CPI-M not happy with backing vice-presidential candidate Gopalkrishna Gandhi

India

oi-PTI

Kolkata, July 19: The decision to support Vice-Presidential candidate Gopalkrishna Gandhi has not gone down well with a section of the West Bengal CPI-M because Gandhi had criticized the role of the party during the height of Singur and Nandigram stir when he was the governor.

Some of whom have expressed their anger in the party forum and some have taken to the social media to express displeasure.

The disgruntled leaders referred to Gandhi's opposition to 'forcible' land acquisition in Singur in Hooghly district for setting up a Tata Motors small car factory and Nandigram anti-land acquisition movement.

They even went to the extent of describing him as "partisan to Trinamool Congress".

"We really have no idea what our party leadership is upto. First, they decided to forge an alliance with the Congress and now they decide to support Gandhi," a CPI-M state committee leader told PTI on condition of anonymity.

"How can the party forget the partisan role played by Gandhi between 2006 and 2009? This is absolute madness in the name of stopping the BJP. The party is digging its own grave," the leader felt.

Another senior CPI-M state committee leader, who had vehemently opposed the alliance with the Congress in the last Assembly polls, said, "Last year our party leadership told us to forget about the neo-liberal policies and atrocities committed during Emergency by the Congress and instead align with it to stop the TMC and the BJP."

"Now we have decided to forgive Gandhi in order to stop the BJP. Next year the party might even ask us to forgive the TMC and align with it to stop the BJP," he said with his tongue firmly in cheek.

Defending the decision of his party's top brass, CPI(M) politburo member Hannan Mollah told PTI that certain decisions were taken with an "eye on a bigger perspective" irrespective of the anger and heartburn that they might generate.

"There might be anger or reservations about the decision. But these are collective decisions taken in our central committee and politburo. At times it is not about forgiving someone, but about taking a decision with an eye on a bigger perspective. Now the biggest enemy of the country is the RSS and the BJP, so in order to stop them we had to support him (Gandhi)," Mollah told PTI.

Similarly, CPI-M state secretariat member Nepaldeb Bhattacharya said, "Those who are criticizing the party's decision are doing that keeping in mind the Bengal perspective. They may be right from their point of view. But if you think about a pan-India perspective, you will come to see that the party has taken the right decision."

Gopalkrishna Gandhi was the governor of West Bengal from December 2004 to December 2009. The relation between the governor and then CPI-M led Left Front government started deteriorating after Gandhi criticized the state government for 'forcible' land acquisition in Singur and police firing in Nandigram that led to the death of 14 persons in 2007.

During Nandigram agitation in November, 2007 when alleged armed CPI-M supporters had violently taken over the area, he had said, "Darkness descended during Deepavali in Nandigram."

The infuriated CPI-M top brass had then questioned his jurisdiction for commenting on Nandigram. Senior CPI-M leaders Biman Bose and Binoy Konar had criticized Gandhi accusing him of being partial towards the Trinamool Congress.

The party leaders had then told Gandhi 'to pick up a Trinamool flag but have the decorum to get out of the Raj Bhavan and leave for good.'

PTI

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 12:32 [IST]
Suresh Prabhu was chief guest at event in which Priyanka Vadra met Chinese envoy

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

An event of the Chinese embassy at which Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and her husband Robert Vadra were present incidentally had Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu as the chief guest. There were reports in the media which flashed pictures of the event showing Priyanka and Robert standing with the Chinese envoy. Questions such as why they met with the Chinese envoy were being asked.

The office of Priyanka issued a response stating that they had been invited for a Chinese food fest at the Taj Palace by the Chinese embassy.

The event, Bite of Diaoyutai Cuisine in New Delhi's Taj Palace hotel was co-hosted by the Chinese embassy. The website of the embassy says that, "the Chinese Embassy co-hosted the "Chinese Diaoyutai Cuisine Festival" with Diaoyutai State Guest House and Taj Palace Hotel. Chinese Ambassador H.E. Mr. Luo Zhaohui and his wife Dr. Jiang Yili, President of the Diaoyutai State Guest House Ambassador Zhang Junsai attended the inauguration.'

Further the website goes on to say," The Indian Minister of Railways the Honorable Suresh Prabhu participated the festival as the Chief Guest. More than 100 distinguished dignitaries, including political parties leaders, Members of Parliaments, government officials, scholars of think tanks, media, and diplomats in India were present."

The embassy's website also said, " Mr. Suresh Prabhu delivered a warm speech, praised the Chinese food with the hope of seeing more and more Chinese restaurants in India."

OneIndia News
Tamil Nadu MLAs give themselves 100 per cent salary hike

India

oi-Anusha

While farmers from the state are protesting in New Delhi, Tamil Nadu MLAs gave themselves a 100 per cent salary hike. Salary of MLAs in Tamil Nadu has been raised to Rs 1.05 lakh from present Rs 55,000, in addition, to hike on other allowances.

Every MLA's pension has been revised from 12,000 to 20,000. MLA constituency fund has also been increased from Rs 2 crore to Rs 2.5 crore. The announcement was made by Chief Minister Edappadi Palanisamy in the state assembly on Wednesday.

MP demands salary hike amid serious debate in Parliament

The announcement comes at a time when farmers in the state have been demanding a loan waiver owing. Farmers have been protesting in New Delhi, Chennai and other parts of Tamil Nadu seeking help from the state and the centre to aide farmers marred by successive droughts. Farmers in the state continue to be a worried lot since Monsoon has been insufficient so far this year as well.

Tamil Nadu MLAs gave themselves a hike on the day MPs raised the issue in Rajya Sabha. Samajwadi Party leader Naresh Agrawal sought salary hike for Members of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha and stated that their salaries were much lesser than their secretaries'.

OneIndia News
To counter BJP, Congress 'flags off' Karnataka election campaign

India

oi-Prabhpreet

By Prabhpreet

'Desperate times call for desperate measures' is an old expression and nothing describes the actions of politicians around election time better than this.

This should go far in explaining the possible reasons behind Karnataka Chief Minister K Siddaramaiah's decision to get his state a flag of its own. Though such an effort could have been looked at in a different light, the fact that Karnataka is set for polls in less than a year's time before the government completes its term in May, makes it difficult to do so.

An order dated June 6 nominated principal secretary of Kannada and culture department as chairperson of a nine-member committee constituted by the government to design a state flag. The order, signed on behalf of the governor by G Annapurna, under secretary of the Kannada and culture department, reads: "The committee must ready a design for a separate state flag and submit a report on providing it a legal sanctity."

This decision by the Siddaramaiah government can clearly be seen as the beginning of election campaigning by the Congress party and an attempt to push the main opposition, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), on the back foot.

Karnataka key to Modi's last challenge of conquering Nehru and Indira's India

While the mainstream national media will try to raise its TRP ratings by showing tough questions based on nationalism that they will ask the chief minister in the coming days, according to political calculations made by him, he will be happy to be hounded by them as it would allow him to show himself as the one standing up for the state and the identity of its people.

Such a strategy clearly points to the need of not looking at, a step of trying to get the state its own flag and the political goals it is attempting to achieve, in isolation.

First Hindi, now the Flag

Earlier last month, the capital of Karnataka, Bengaluru, saw protests by pro-Kannada groups against the Hindi signage in the city's metro stations. The matter got a lot of attention from the media and the people, with many locals supporting the calls for removal of such signs. This was in line with the state's overall position of resisting Centre's three-language policy of promoting Hindi along with English and the language of the state.

Congress seems to have taken a leaf out of these protests and decided to use the issue of the flag for the state as well as possible protests against such a step from the other national party to its benefit.

Siddaramaiah will try to use the concept of state identity to pitch it against what he will clearly tell the electorate to be BJP's plan to impose another culture and identity on them, like in the case of Hindi. The language seen to be promoted by BJP, a policy, which has seen the party come under criticism from those belonging to the southern states.

This will also put the state unit of BJP in a bit of a dilemma as the matter has the capacity to force it to choose from either breaking from the stand of the national unit on such an issue or going against the will of the people of the state in case Siddaramaiah's decision picks up ground level support.

The flag controversy in itself is not new to the state. The state unit of the BJP too had flirted with the idea during its tenure, but finally took a stand against it in the state high court where it stated that suggestions to declare the red and yellow Kannada flag as the official state flag had not been accepted. The state unit had gotten away at the time, as the party was not in power at the centre.

At national level, both parties caught in a bind

Whether the strategy works or not for either party at the state level, it is likely to put both the national parties in a bind when it comes to the national arena.

While the Congress once had a national presence with it ruling states in southern states, it is now holding out to its last one. The BJP on the other hand has made significant gains in most other parts of the country, except for the southern states but it has been in power in Karnataka in the past.

It is such a situation that would make the national unit of the Congress, while projecting reservations about the state unit's decision for the national audience, not mind being in a difficult position at the national level. Given the dismal political reality it finds itself in, after losing elections in state after state to the BJP, the party would back its chief minister if it feels Siddaramaiah's tactics could lead to a win.

The BJP at the national level though will not be willing to make such a compromise given the tone of a nationalist agenda that it has been campaigning on in the country. And this is what might be a major cause of worry for the party's state unit.

As a strong display of being against a flag for the state can lead to the state electorate becoming disenchanted with the state leadership of the party and effect the performance in the upcoming election.

And if the party does get labeled in such a way, the BJP's reported plan to get its leaders from other states such as Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, among others, for campaigning in order to achieve its 'Mission150' out of 224 seats in the state assembly, will not remain a viable option.

Battleground Karnataka

Though the Congress is currently treating the BJP as the main opposition party, and strategies such as the latest one are directed at it, the voters in the state also have Janata Dal (Secular) as an alternative.

The advantage of Siddaramaiah's latest decision is that JD (S) being a regional party will in all probability have little problems with taking sides with the Congress. This could even lead the way for the two parties to form a 'southern mahagathbandhan' of sorts. A preview of which was seen earlier this year in two bypolls where following an understanding between them the JD (S) did not put up candidates, which led to easy wins for the Congress.

Such a call would also depend on how seriously they would take the gauntlet thrown at them by the BJP, which by all the evidence of election results in different parts of the country and statements by those within the party show that the national party is going to go full throttle in its attempts to wrest back control of the state from the Congress.

Especially since BS Yeddyurappa, former Chief Minister of the state and BJP's most popular leader, who had left the party before the last elections to form his own, is now not only back but also leading it. In doing so, what was seen as one of the major causes behind BJP's defeat in 2013 has also been taken care of.

Identity politics and the threat it carries

Given the fact that Karnataka is the last major state where the Congress is still in power, the desperation to do anything to keep it can be understood to some extent. But the fact that the strategy, which might rile up feeling in the people of the state in a way that it can see them pitted against the rest of the country, might be a step too far. In particular as the situation in other parts of the country like Kashmir, Gorkhaland are already on a boil.

Keeping in mind the diverse nature of India, the makers of the constitution made sure that the form of federalism chosen for India was different to that of a country like US, where each state has its own flag and other distinct features. This was done to make sure that separatist feeling which might take birth in a large and diverse but a newly formed country does not lead to its break up with states seceding from the Union. Though the present case in Karnataka is mostly based in politics, if the issue picks up momentum it could get out of hand.

And if similar calls are made across the country the unity of the country could very well be threatened. While genuine concerns related to imposition of culture alien to the local population might require action and the need to be protested against, the probability that politicians might try to not only use these for their gain but also manufacture new ones for the same should come as a warning to the country.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 5:55 [IST]
After Centre's ban, Nagaland govt declares PFI and its affiliates as 'unlawful association'

AFSPA in parts of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland extended for 6 months from today

TR Zeliang sworn-in as Nagaland CM, to prove majority by July 22

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Nagaland Governor P.B. Acharya on Wednesday appointed T R Zeliang, leader of the rebel NPF MLAs, as the state's Chief Minister and asked him to prove majority in the Assembly by July 22.

Zeliang was administered the oath of office at the Darbar Hall of Raj Bhavan in Kohima.

Earlier on Wednesday, Chief Minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu failed to turn up for the floor test in Assembly following which the House was adjourned sine die.

Liezietsu is facing a rebellion from his party MLAs which prompted Governor Acharya to direct Speaker Imtiwapang to conduct a floor test.

The Gauhati High Court on Tuesday dismissed Liezietsu's plea to stay the governor's directive to him to seek a trust vote.

Liezietsu is facing rebellion by 43 ruling Naga Peoples Front MLAs led by former chief minister TR Zeliang in a 59 member Assembly.

[Political crisis in Nagaland: Zeliang stakes claim to form government]

Zeliang, who was forced out of office in February following large scale protests over holding of urban local bodies election with 33 per cent reservation for women, had staked claim to form the government saying he had majority support in the House.

OneIndia News
Under the garb of nationalism, this Delhi gang undertakes contract killings

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Investigations being conducted by the Delhi police have found an entirely new dimension to the problem being posed by vigilantes. A note found on a man's body claims that on their hit-list are anti nationals, drug dealers and those accused of rape and acid attacks.

On Monday, Vikas alias Vikky was shot several times at Sector 22 of Dwaraka at around 9.30 pm. It was here that the police found that note in which the message was that an attempt was being made to clean up society and bring peace.

The police suspect that the same gang could be involved in the murder of Pradeep near Kanjhawala. In this incident Pradeep was riding along with his brother Pawan when they brushed against a car. An argument followed after which the men in the car opened fire and killed Pradeep. The police managed to identify one of the men in the car after Pawan was shown pictures. It turned out that the same gang was behind the killing in Dwaraka.

Nationalist flavour:

A Delhi police officer part of the investigation said that the note found in Dwaraka was nothing but a cover up act. It was personal rivalry which led to the Dwaraka incident, the officer told OneIndia. Investigations have revealed that these men were hired to kill Vikas.

The officer also said that the second incident was however due to a burst of anger following the argument. The officer said that the note left behind by them attempts to send a loud message to society that the killers are on a clean up spree. An attempt is being made to build an alibi, the officer also said.

The one page note states that their war is against the criminals of society. They say that they will target anti nationals, drug dealers etc. What is even more ironic is that in the note these persons seek the help of the government to clean up society. The police are also verifying the note and comparing it to a similar one found following a murder at Najafagarh a couple of months back.

The police suspect that the murder of Vikas was owing to a property dispute.

The police are also on the look-out for one Umesh who is alleged to have hired these persons to carry out the murder. The note has been sent for forensic analysis and the police are trying to ascertain the names of the criminals mentioned in it.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 9:53 [IST]
4 Arab nations cut ties with Qatar, urges to accept principles to combat extremism

International

pti-PTI

United Nations, Jul 19: Four Arab nations that cut ties with Qatar are urging the tiny Gulf nation to commit to six principles on combatting extremism and terrorism, and to negotiate a plan with specific measures to implement them a step that could pave the way for an early resolution of the crisis.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain broke diplomatic relations with Qatar in early June over allegations that it supports extremist groups a charge Qatar rejects.

They initially made 13 demands, which Qatar also dismissed. Saudi Arabia's UN Ambassador Abdallah Al Mouallimi told correspondents yesterday that the four countries are now committed to the six principles agreed to by their foreign ministers at a meeting in Cairo on July 5 and to having Qatar support them.

PTI
China moved troops, heavy equipment to Tibet amidst standoff with India

International

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

There are reports stating that China moved thousand of tonnes of military equipment including army vehicles to Tibet in June. This incidentally coincides with the standoff with India.

The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post said, quoting the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Daily that the haul was transported to a region south of the Kunlun mountains in northern Tibet by the western theatre command, which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang, Tibet and also handles border issues with India.

Ni Lexiong, a Shanghai-based military commentator, told the South China Morning Post that the transfer of equipment may have been related to the standoff. It could have been designed to bring India to the negotiating table, he also said. He also said that diplomatic talks should be backed by military preparation.

While none of the reports said that the transfer of equipment was to support military drills in Tibet, the PLA said that the hardware was moved late in June.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 14:33 [IST]
Don't allow next Doklam in Arunachal, says BJP MP; claims China has encroached upon 60 km of state

Doklam stand-off: India shouldn't stick to its errors stubbornly, says Chinese media

International

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Asserting that turning a deaf ear to Beijing will worsen the stand-off at Doklam, a Chinese media report has said it is expecting India to abide by the basic principles of international law and that New Delhi should not 'stick to its errors stubbornly'.

The standoff between Indian and Chinese armies have continued for close to five-weeks over the construction of a road by China at Doklam near Sikkim. It is an area where the borders of India, China and Bhutan meet. Bhutan says the land, which it calls Doklam, belongs to its kingdom and not to China, a claim that India agrees too.

India has also said that the road was a serious security concern as it it gives Beijing access to the so-called Chicken's Neck, a thin strip of land that links India with its seven north eastern states.

"In June, Indian troops brazenly crossed into the Chinese territory in Doklam, stayed there and obstructed China from building a road there. Many arguments and protests from China have failed to bring India back to reason," the article published in China's Xinhua news said.

The article also warned India to change its mind before things become worse, adding that there is no room for negotiations on this incident.

[India-China standoff: Time the media 'shut up']

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Sikkim stand-off : India is a force to reckon with US diplomat advice China | Oneindia News

It also said that some "Indian civil groups" have been fuelling anti-China sentiments, which according to the article, would not help the situation get any better.

The report published in Xinhua also called Foreign Secretary Subramaniam Jaishankar's remark that "India and China should not let differences become disputes" as positive.

Jaishankar had, in Singapore on July 11, said said Beijing-New Delhi relations will have a direct impact not only on ASEAN but also globally. He had said that there is an inherent complexity in the India-China realtions as two superpowers are rising almost simultaneously and that too in close proximity.

"At a time of global uncertainty, India China relations are factor of stability and in their relationship India and China must not allow differences to become disputes," the Foreign Secretary had said on July 11.

[India-China must not allow differences to become disputes: Jaishankar]

The Chinese media said that Beijing has a will to solve the problem peacefully by diplomatic means, adding that it "cherishes the peace and serenity in the border areas".

It further said that it is expected of India to "abide by the basic principles of international law" and "not stick to its errors stubbornly".

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 11:39 [IST]
Give up religion and become firm Marxist atheists, says Chinas Communist Party to its members

International

pti-PTI

Beijing, Jul 19: In a controversial move, China's ruling Communist Party has directed its nearly 90 million members to shun religion for maintaining party unity, warning that religious belief is a "redline" for the cadres and those who resist would be punished.

The head of China's top religious affairs regulator said that party members should not seek value and faith in religion and those who have religious beliefs should be persuaded to give them up. Experts said the direction is meant to maintain party unity, the official media reported today.

"Party members should not have religious beliefs, which is a redline for all members...Party members should be firm Marxist atheists, obey party rules and stick to the party's faith...they are not allowed to seek value and belief in religion," Wang Zuoan, director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) wrote in an article released in the Qiushi Journal on Saturday, the flagship magazine of the CPC Central Committee.

Officials who have religious faith should be persuaded to give it up, and those who resist would be punished by the party organisation, Wang wrote. The order came as the CPC, which has about 88.76 million members, geared up to hold its 19th Congress expected to be in October this year in which President Xi Jinping who heads the party and the military is likely to get elected for another five-year term. Wang said the party members are also forbidden from supporting or getting involved in religious affairs in the name of developing the economy or diversifying culture. Elaborating on the new order by the party, Zhu Weiqun, chairman of the Ethnic and Religious Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said "It is important that Wang constantly reminds Party members not to have religious beliefs.

Some people who claim to be scholars support religious beliefs in the party, which has undermined the party's values based on dialectical materialism." "Once the party's values are damaged, party unity as well as the party's basic policy to regulate religions would be sabotaged," Zhu told state-run Global Times. Wang also stressed the need for a firm political direction in managing religious affairs. "We should guide religious groups and individuals with socialist core values and excellent traditional Chinese culture to dig into their doctrines to find parts that are beneficial to social harmony and development," Wang said.

Apparently referring to the fast-spreading Christianity in China, which Beijing apprehends posed a major threat as it could emerge as a force like in previously socialist countries like Poland to overthrow Communist Party rule, Wang said foreign forces are "infiltrating" into China in the name of religion. China also has over 20 million Muslims.

Xinjiang where the Turkik speaking Uygur Muslims are a majority is in turmoil as Uygurs were restive about the increasing settlements of majority Hans from other provinces. Next to Buddhism, Christianity is regarded as the fastest growing religion in Communist China. Unofficial estimates say China has over 65 million Christians including Catholics, Protestants as well as other church groups.

The ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) has tenuous ties with Rome apprehending political impact of the rapid growth of Christianity as it could become a movement in later years challenging the CPCs power base. According to reports, a number of Chinese Christians were involved in preaching Christianity in Muslim countries.

Two Chinese nationals, accused of being involved in preaching in Pakistan, were killed allegedly by Islamic State militants in the restive Baluchistan province. Recent reports spoke of backchannel contacts between Beijing and Vatican to establish diplomatic ties which broke off in 1951, two years after CPC came to power.

"Some foreign forces have used religion to infiltrate China, and extremism and illegal religious activities are spreading in some places, which have threatened national security and social stability," Wang added. "Guiding religions to suit to China's development is a core policy to solve China's religious problems.

The moves evolve with traditional Chinese values over years and meet the demand of socialist development," said Su Wei, a professor at the Party School of the CPC Chongqing Committee. Some foreign forces have used religions, including Christianity and Islam, two non-local religions, to deliberately spread their political views in China, Su said, adding that some religious doctrines shall be adjusted to match Chinese ethics and customs.

Su also noted that the regulation banning party members from having religious beliefs would be permanent, but may involve more work in Northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Gansu Province as well as Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region.

PTI
Our state budget crisis appears to be over; however, funding for schools is still unknown. A new school funding bill, Senate Bill 1, awaits a signature by the governor for schools to be adequately funded. Senate Bill 1 distributes funding based on what research says works and the unique needs of every student in Illinois, driving dollars to the neediest districts first. Senate Bill 1 helps fix inequalities by changing the funding model and considers each districts local resources so money isnt taken away from any district.

I want to thank the legislators who support and voted for Senate Bill 1. Now, our community must urge Gov. Rauner to sign Senate Bill 1. Our students, regardless of their zip code, will be better positioned to have the resources to experience a quality education, and our schools will have the opportunity to continue the educational service our students deserve.

The time is now for Decatur to be engaged. Contact Gov. Rauner by calling (217) 782-0244, leave a message and let him know you support Senate Bill 1 and urge him to sign it. Social media focus can be directed to @GovRauner on Twitter or by using the hashtag #SignSB1. We need to start investing in our states next generation and I encourage anyone who cares about education to contact Gov. Rauner.

Paul Fregeau

Superintendent, Decatur Public School District #61
India China standoff: US expresses concern, urges to maintain peace

International

pti-PTI

Washington, Jul 19: Expressing concern over the India-China border standoff in the Sikkim sector, the US urged both countries to work together to try to come up with some sort of arrangement for peace.

"I know that the US is concerned about the ongoing situation there," State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert told reporters at her daily news conference.

She was responding to questions on the ongoing standoff between Indian and Chinese troops in the Dokalam area of the Sikkim sector.

"We believe that both parties, both sides should work together to try to come up with some better sort of arrangement for peace," Nauert said.

Chinese and Indian soldiers have been locked in a face-off in the Doklam area of the Sikkim sector for over a month after Indian troops stopped the Chinese army from building a road in the disputed area. China claimed that they were constructing the road within their territory and has been demanding immediate pull-out of the Indian troops from the disputed Dokalam plateau.

New Delhi has expressed concern over the road building, apprehending that it may allow Chinese troops to cut India's access to its northeastern states. India has conveyed to the Chinese government that the road construction would represent a significant change of status quo with serious security implications for it.

Doka La is the Indian name for the region which Bhutan recognises as Doklam, while China claims it as part of its Donglang region. Of the 3,488-km-long India-China border from Jammu and Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, a 220-km section falls in Sikkim.

PTI
Saudi police arrest girl for defying 'rules of dress'

International

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

A Saudi woman, who sparked a sensation online by walking in a miniskirt in public, was arrested by police for defying the kingdom's strict dress code, reports said.

The woman, whose name was not given, was detained by police in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, for wearing "immodest clothes" that contradicted the country's conservative Islamic dress code, reported Saudi media.

She has posted a video in which she was seen walking in a miniskirt in public. After the video went viral some conservative Saudis have called for her arrest and others defended her action.

Recommended Video

Saudi woman arrested wearing mini-skirt and crop top, Watch video | Oneindia News

The video, first shared on Snapchat, shows her walking around an empty historic fort in Ushaiager, a village north of the capital, Riyadh, in the desert region of Najd, where many of Saudi Arabia's most conservative tribes and families are from.

Yesterday, Saudi officials in Ushaiager called on the region's governor and police to take actions against the woman in response to the video, without elaborating further. Saudi news website Sabq reported that the kingdom's morality police had corresponded with other agencies to investigate further after the video was brought to their attention.

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 15:10 [IST]
ISIS militants ask for fake sick notes from doctors: Here is why

Customers bought all sweets from this shop to help owner spend time with sick wife

The story of secret dinner with Putin is fake and sick, says Trump

International

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

Washington, July 19: Following reports emerging of US President Donald Trump having a second, undisclosed meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit, President Trump asserted that it was no secret meeting and that the press was informed. Famous for his Tweets, the US president took social media platform to express his anguish.

Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

Trump's livid reaction comes after it was revealed that besides their 'overtime' bilateral meeting at the G20 Summit, the U.S. President and his Russian counterpart had another meeting the same day.

"There was a couples-only social dinner at the G20. Toward the end, the President spoke to Putin at the dinner. No staff or Cabinet were at the dinner at all, for any of the countries," National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton told CNN.

Anton further informed that Trump and Putin did not go to a separate room for their conversation, but remained in the main room, where the dinner was being hosted.

OneIndia News (with agency inputs)

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Story first published: Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 11:57 [IST]
In Iran, men and women are 'equal' only in torture

UN sanctions on Tehran illegal, say Iran Foreign Minister

International

pti-PTI

United Nations, Jul 19: Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has said the Trump administration is trying to "poison the international atmosphere" with new sanctions after it reported that the country met its obligations under the 2015 nuclear agreement.

Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Tuesday, "the international community has read this very loud and clear and continue to deal with Iran without much attention to this theater."

Zarif, who was in Washington to meet US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, had earlier said Tehran is receiving "contradictory signals" from the US administration about the fate of the nuclear deal.

While President Donald Trump's administration indicated Iran's compliance, it also said Tehran would face consequences for breaching the spirit of the nuclear deal.

It followed up the announcement with new, non-nuclear sanctions on Iranians on Tuesday.

Zarif called the new sanctions illegal and told several reporters at UN headquarters that "this unfortunately has become a bad habit for this administration."

He stressed that the International Atomic Energy Agency already verified that Iran has lived up to its nuclear commitments.

Representatives of the five nuclear powers -- China, Russia, France, Britain, the United States -- plus Germany are to meet in Vienna on Friday to take stock of the deal. Zarif said they would discuss Iran's complaints about non-US compliance, accusing the US administration of failing to lift sanctions in line with the deal.

PTI
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On July 18, the Yerevan Press Club (YPC) celebrated its 22nd anniversary and bestowed its annual awards to the best journalists and media organizations in Armenia.

Hetq reporter Yeranuhi Soghoyan was one of the award winners. The Civic Engagement in Local Governance (CELoG) project, led by Community Finance Officers Association, with the financial support of the USAID, awarded Soghoyan for periodically referring to the theme of reforming the local self-governance system. The editor-in-chief of the Community-CELoG newspaper Arevhat Grigoryan presented the award, noting that many reporters write only in negative tones about the enlargement of the communities, whereas balanced coverage is rare to be found.

Lusine Hovhannisyan, who writes also for Hetq, received a prize for her unique presentation style.

Sut.am website won the YPC prize for the initiative to confront the spread of false information. The website is founded by Union of Informed Citizens NGO. The award was handed to the president of the organization Daniel Ioannisyan. In his speech, he mentioned the importance of free media existence in Armenia.

Narine Ghalechyan, a journalist and correspondent of Radio Liberty, Tigran Danielyan, the editor of special projects of Armenian Public Television, Region Research Center, photographer Hakob Berberyan, Ankyun+3 TV were among other winners.

YPC President Boris Navasardyan said in an interview with Hetq that it is always interesting to see how journalists are able to reflect the rapidly changing world. He also mentioned that there are fewer attempts to suppress the media in Armenia than in many other countries
WRITTEN BY PAUL RADU

The Bucharest office of RISE Project, an Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) partner, underwent an unannounced inspection by the anti-fraud bureau of Romanias National Fiscal Agency (ANAF) even as important Romanian politicians threatened the outlet in both public and private.

The July 6 inspection followed the outlets revelation that Liviu Dragnea, president of the ruling Social Democrat Party (PSD) and head of the lower chamber of Parliament, was connected to Tel Drum SA, a secretive company awarded hundreds of millions of euros from Romanias budget in insider deals.

On April 28, OCCRP and RISE Project published an investigation detailing how Dragnea benefitted from investments in Brazil made by a manager of the company. The report was seen by Record TV, Brazils second-largest TV network, and its reporters joined RISE journalists to produce a detailed follow-up story published and aired in Romania and Brazil on July 3.

For that story, new documents from sources within the Brazilian Border Police provided details about Dragneas visits to Brazil with two Romanian businessmen with whom he had claimed to have no dealings. The documents included travel dates and flight numbers as well as entry and exit points into Brazil, proving the trio travelled together.

One of the businessmen was Costel Comana, a railroad company owner who got significant Romanian government contracts but later committed suicide in an airline bathroom. The second was Mugurel Gheorghias, a manager of Tel Drum SA, the secretive road construction company under investigation in Romania for corruption. The two men and Dragnea were long-time friends.

A second follow-up investigation published by RISE Project on July 6 detailed efforts by Dragneas government to hijack a law enforcement agency that had previously investigated his allegedly corrupt dealings.

As Romanias ANAF inspected RISE Project offices, Dragnea and other government officials warned journalists in TV interviews and in WhatsApp messages that he was ready to fight back. He said in a TV interview: The peace is over.

Dragneas party controlled the Romanian parliament when OCCRP awarded it the Organized Crime and Corruption Person of the Year in 2013 for trying to pass legislation that would legalize corruption by Romanian politicians. The government tried to pass the legislation again this January, but street protests by hundreds of thousands of Romanians forced it to back down.

The Brazilian Flights

The RISE story that seems to have provoked Dragnea goes back to Feb. 16, 2009 -- a good year for him and his friends. On that day, according to RISE, a TAP Portugal flight 165 from Lisbon landed in Fortaleza on Brazils northeast coast.

Aboard were the three Romanians who would go on to play such important roles in their countrys economy and politics in the years to come.

Dragnea became one of Romanias most powerful politicians, heading the ruling PSD party despite receiving a suspended jail sentence for rigging a political referendum.

Comanas life followed a more tragic arc. One of his main companies handled hundreds of million of euros in Romanian public funding, only to be subsequently investigated for fraud. Six years later, he committed suicide in the toilet of an airliner just before it landed in Costa Rica.

In 2009, Gheorghias was the manager of Tel Drum SA, a Romanian company Dragnea privatized. The company was controlled by bearer shares, meaning whoever held physical possession of the shares controlled the company. In 2008 that was Gheorghias, but by 2009 the owner was unknown. This company, too, won hundreds of millions of euros in tenders covered by the state budget.

Also in 2009:

Dragnea became secretary general of the PSD, Romanias most powerful party.

He received hundreds of thousands of euros from Comana in a controversial real estate deal.

Tel Drum SA received contract after contract from the state despite its shareholders being hidden.

Regiotrans, a railway company owned by Comana, received 13.5 million in state subsidies.

According to data obtained by Record TV, in all, between 2009 and 2016, Dragnea landed in Fortaleza 16 times; Gheorghias 13 times; and Comana 11 times. Sometimes the three arrived together; sometimes they came in pairs; and on other occasions they left together or in pairs. Most visits overlapped, with Dragnea arriving or leaving a few days apart from Gheorghias and Comana.

The records of these comings and goings counter Dragneas and Gheorghias claims that they had not kept in touch after their college years. Dragnea denied any connection to Tel Drum SA, which his former colleague managed, although he was believed to be its secret owner.

In a 2011 interview with Romanian newspaper Adevarul, Gheorghias said, Yes, we used to be colleagues at the Faculty of Transportation. We sang together in a band.

Whats wrong with this? We did not have many options to have fun. I cant say we kept in touch. Now I know him [only] from TV.

Border logs from Brazil obtained by Brazilian reporters show that their connections were much closer than that. Dragnea and Gheorghias visited Fortaleza three times in 2011 and spent their holidays in a luxury villa that Gheorghias bought the previous year.

On one of those occasions, on Feb. 1, 2011, Dragnea and Gheorghias got Brazilian exit stamps two minutes apart and boarded the same plane back to Europe.

On July 3, the day the investigation into Dragneas travels was published in Brazil and in Romania, an OCCRP/RISE Project editor received a WhatsApp message from Dragnea claiming that RISE reporters were harassing him and breaking the laws related to respecting his privacy and personal data.

Read more
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Singaporean Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dr Vivian Balakrishnan said the efforts made by President Maithripala Sirisena to strengthen reconciliation in Sri Lanka are laudable. Stating this when he called on President Sirisena at the Presidential Secretariat yesterday (July 18), he said that he would visit Jaffna tomorrow to donate books to the Jaffna Library and to sign an agreement to provide training facilities to the library staff. Singapore will also provide facilities to training facilities and set up a professorship at the Orthopedics Department of Jaffna Hospital.

President thanked Singapore for providing such assistance to Jaffna Library and Jaffna Hospital and recalled that Singapore and Sri Lanka have maintained excellent bilateral ties since ancient time. He also thanked Singapore for assisting Sri Lanka at the international forums during the conflict in Sri Lanka. Dr Balakrishnan immediately quipped that whatever Singapore was providing to Sri Lanka was only a repayment of intellectual endowment received from high standard Sri Lankan professionals who augmented Singapores progress over the years.

Dr Balakrishnan said there is immense potential to increase Singaporean investments in Sri Lanka. He said this in reply to President Sirisenas comment to him about the investment opportunities available in tourism and hospitality sectors for investors from Singapore. The Singaporean Minister said that Singaporean investors could also look at other sectors like energy, water, education and technology. Already there are over 300 Singaporean investments in Sri Lanka.

Expressing his appreciation of Sri Lankas international relations, the Minister said, as a small nation living among powerful big neighbours, countries such as Singapore and Sri Lanka have to always maintain extra vigilance on power balance and external relations.

Minister Ravi Karunanayake, Secretary to the President, Austin Fernando, Foreign Secretary, Esala Weerakoon and Singaporean High Commissioner S Chandra Das were also present.

(Presidents Media)
" " People in traditional outfits hold hands between dances at the annual Festa Confederada, or Confederate Party, on April 24, 2016, in Santa Barbara d'Oeste, Brazil. Mario Tama/Getty Images

If you were traveling the world and wanted a taste of America without trekking back to the States, where should you go? That's what Will Pearson and Mangesh (Mango) Hattikudur discuss in an episode of Part-Time Genius called "What's the Most American Place in the World? (Outside the States, that is)."

One contender for this prize might be the various Disneyland theme parks around the globe. A 2016 study conducted by Branding Magazine, asked 4,750 Americans which of 248 brands best personified the patriotism of the U.S. "Ninety-eight percent associated the Disney brand with U.S. patriotism," says Will.

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But for a truly unusual taste of America outside U.S. soil, head for Americana, Brazil.

The city of about 230,000 people in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo welcomed 10,000 Southerners after the Confederates lost the Civil War in the mid-1800s. Today, that connection to the Old South remains strong. "You can spot rocking chairs on porches ... and people still make sweet potato pie," says Will.

The settlers  mainly folks from Alabama, Georgia and Texas  came to Brazil because they wanted to preserve their unreconstructed Southern way of life, and also escape possible prosecution for treason. Brazil offered cheap land and still-legal slaves to help rebuild their plantations. Further, Brazil's emperor, Dom Pedro II, wanted his country to become as skilled and knowledgeable about agriculture as the U.S. So, the government offered to pay moving costs for Southerners willing to relocate even further down south.

Of the thousands who accepted the deal, only one group of Alabama settlers thrived. They held surnames like Baird, Buford, Clark and Currie. They began growing cotton, a new crop to the Brazilians, and named their settlement Americana.

The settlers' descendants spoke English with a Southern accent for generations. Eventually, as they intermarried with the Brazilians and their numbers soared, the group became more Brazilian than American. But they still love Western movies and country music.

While the story of this group of settlers is little-remembered in U.S. history today, it's commemorated in Americana's history. Every year for the last quarter-century, descendants of the Confederate settlers (Confederados) gather for a huge party. Joined by Confederate enthusiasts from the U.S. states, they don gray rebel uniforms and hoop skirts and twirl around a dance floor to fiddle and banjo tunes. Their food of choice? Southern barbecue, fried chicken and beer.

" " A monument to the original Southern American settlers stands during the annual Festa Confederada, or Confederate Party in Santa Barbara d'Oeste, Brazil. Here, the Confederate flag doesn't carry the racial or political implications that it does in the U.S. Mario Tama/Getty Images

Custom dictates partygoers pay a visit to the nearby Confederate cemetery. Many today are quick to insist they are not racist, especially in light of recent movements in America to remove the Confederate flag from government buildings. No, celebrants say, they're simply celebrating their history. Nevertheless, historians note that Confederados have downplayed their ancestors' interest in maintaining slavery as a big reason for their move to Brazil. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery (in 1888.)

To learn more about other contenders for "America overseas" (Canada? Guam?) and to hear an interview with Doug Mack, author of "The Not-Quite States of America," which is about America's overseas territories, download this Part-time Genius episode.

Now That's Interesting Residents of American Samoa, a U.S. territory, are considered U.S. nationals, but not citizens. Yet, as cohost Mango point out, they have the highest military enlistment and casualty rates, beating out all 50 states and America's four other territories (Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Northern Marianas Islands).
Economic and social activities were on Saturday grounded in Enugu, the Enugu State capital as Peter Obi, the Labour Party presidential candidate support group held a two million-man march.

The crowd of men, women and youths from different parts of the state had converged on the Michael Okpara Square from where they marched through the capital city, singing solidarity songs for Obi and dancing as they moved.

Sunday PUNCH observed that members and supporters of political parties other than Obis Labour Party participated in the rally.

Some residents, who were not part of the crowd at the inception, abandoned their activities to join the Obis supporters who were chanting Obi is our next president.

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One of the supporters, Chukwuemeka Okereke, who spoke to our correspondent, said the rally was just to arouse the consciousness of the people about the LP presidential candidate.

I joined the rally because I believe that with Peter Obi as president of the country, things can still turn around in Nigeria for better.

If not, no amount of money can anybody pay me to come out to march under the rain. You can see these people here are hungry for a true change in Nigeria, not the type of change we were promised in 2015.
For the third straight week, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed that the amount of oil the country has in storage had fallen. Further, these declines have been much deeper than the market had expected. This week, for example, crude oil storage inventories fell 4.7 million barrels from last week. Not only was that better than the 3.2 million barrel inventory draw that analysts had expected, but it completely contradicted an earlier report by the American Petroleum Institute showing that crude inventories spiked by 1.6 million barrels this week.

That said, instead of applauding the news, oil traders shrugged, evidenced by the slight rise in the U.S. oil benchmark WTI, which edged up slightly more than 1% to around $47 per barrel. Oil traders had the same reaction yesterday after a report out of Saudi Arabia indicated that the country was considering cutting its oil exports by another 1 million barrels per day (bpd). While oil initially popped on the news, that rally didn't go very far because oil traders remain skeptical. That said, this skepticism could be lulling them into believing that we're in a go-nowhere market. Because of that, it's growing increasingly possible that oil traders could go into a frenzy if they get caught off-guard by an unexpected barrage of bullish news.

Lulled to sleep by lackluster data

Even with today's rise, crude remains well below the mid-$50 a barrel level that the market expected to see this year. Three factors have been weighing on oil prices this year: weaker oil demand growth in the first quarter, a rapid rise in shale output, and increasing production from Libya and Nigeria, which are exempt from OPEC's cuts. Because of these factors, crude oil inventories haven't drained as quickly as OPEC expected. In fact, according to the EIA, even with this week's significant draw, they remain in the upper half of the average range for this time of year.

Meanwhile, there have been some recent hiccups in OPEC's efforts to cap its production. Last month, OPEC's production surged 720,000 bpd thanks to growth from not only Libya and Nigeria, but an unexpected rise from Saudi Arabia. Because of that, OPEC's compliance with its cuts fell to 78% in June. Meanwhile, Ecuador recently said that it no longer plans to hold up its end of the bargain and cap its production at 520,000 bpd because it needs the money. It's issues like these that have oil traders largely ignoring an equally healthy dose of bullish news in recent weeks.

In fact, oil traders have been cutting their speculative bets over the past few months. According to data from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), after peaking at more than 550,000 contracts in late February, market speculators only held 358,000 contracts as of mid-July. With participation from market speculators waning, it could lead to a significant spike in volatility if traders get caught flat-footed by a barrage of bullish news in the coming months because it could cause a torrent of buying to both take bullish positions and cover short ones.

Missing the forest for the trees

One reason to believe market traders could get blindsided is that the bullish data set extends far beyond a three-week stretch where oil inventories have been draining at a healthy clip. One of the most important data points is that "there was a dramatic acceleration" in oil demand last quarter, according to the International Energy Agency's latest market report. Overall, demand grew by 1.5 million bpd during the second quarter after only expanding by an average of 1 million bpd during the first quarter. This spike caused the Agency to bump up its full-year forecast by 100,000 bpd to 1.4 million bpd.

Meanwhile, the rapid rise in shale output might be slowing down. That seems to be the indication of the latest rig count report by oil-field services giant Baker Hughes (NYSE: BHGE), which showed that the U.S. rig count flattened out last week. That's the second time in three weeks that Baker Hughes' rig count data didn't show a gain, which is worth noting since the rig count rose for a record 23 straight weeks earlier this year. That data seems to suggest that shale drillers are making good on their promise not to drill themselves into oblivion.

However, what could push the crude market over the top if shale drillers announce budget cuts and downward guidance revisions when they report second-quarter results in the coming weeks. Several drillers were banking on $55 oil when they set their budgets, and they now might need to reset expectations given where oil is these days. One candidate is leading Bakken Shale producer Whiting Petroleum (NYSE: WLL). The company has been ramping up its drilling activities this year after doubling its capital budget to $1.1 billion. That money would enable Whiting Petroleum to run enough rigs to increase its output 23% by the end of the year. However, given that Whiting has $1.5 billion in debt coming due starting in 2019, and it needs $55 oil to balance the budget, it can't afford to keep drilling at its current pace, making a spending cut all the more likely.

Is a flat-footed freak-out moment on the horizon?

If several shale drillers announce that they're pulling back the reins on their ambitious growth plans, it will signal that U.S. supplies are starting to top out. Combine that with continued robust demand growth and the potential for deeper inventory declines if OPEC gets its act together, and it could shake oil traders out of their slumber. Given the enormous drop in speculative positions, it's possible that oil prices could rally sharply in the second half as traders reposition. It's a rise that would likely take oil stocks up with it, potentially making now a great time to buy top-tier producers as well as service companies like Baker Hughes since they should ride that wave higher.

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 As Federal High Court okays detention for 60 more days

Department of State Services (DSS) has alleged its preliminary investigation established the offences of logistics supplier, aiding and abetting acts of terrorism, against terrorists negotiator, Tukur Mamu.

The agency, in an affidavit in support of its ex-parte motion marked: FHC/ABJ/CS/1617/2022, filed before Justice Nkeonye Maha of the Federal High Court, Abuja, also alleged the investigation established act of terrorism financing against Mamu.

News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) had, earlier on Tuesday, reported that Justice Maha granted the motion ex-parte moved by counsel for the DSS, Ahmed Magaji, seeking an order to detain Mamu for 60 days in the first instance, pending conclusion of the investigation.

The motion was dated and filed on September 12 by U.N. Dauda, a lawyer with the security outfit.

NAN reports that Mamu is the sole respondent in the suit.

In the affidavit in support of the ex-parte motion deposed to by Hamza Pandogari, a legal officer with the DSS, he said it was necessary for Mamu to be detained for 60 days in the first instance, pending the conclusion of investigation of various acts of terrorism against him.

Pandogari alleged that Mamu, the self acclaimed Kaduna train negotiator, exploited the opportunity to perpetrate, aid and abet, as well as render support to both local and international terrorist organisations.

That the respondent was intercepted by Nigerias foreign partners at Cairo, Egypt, on September 6, 2022, while on his way to Saudi Arabia for a clandestine meeting with commanders and top leaders of terrorists organisations across the globe.

That upon his interception and subsequent repatriation to Nigeria, a duly signed search warrant was executed at his residence and office at No. 4, Ali Ladan Street, Sabon Kawo GRA and No. 14, Mamona Road, Anguwan Sarki, Kaduna State, and various exhibits and items to establish his complicity with terrorists were recovered.

The agency listed some of the items recovered from Mamus residence and office as: 151 dollars, 20 pounds sterling; 1,530 Indian Rupees; one Saudi Riyal; 70 Dirham; N1,506,000; and 16 assorted foreign coins.

The DSS also alleged that two packs of pump action cartridges; 16 ATM (automated machine) cards from both local and foreign banks; seven cheque books of different banks; six laptops; four tablets; 24 handsets and three international passports belonging to Mamu; one firearm licence; eight pieces of Nigerian Army uniforms; 16 pieces of Nigerian Navy uniforms, were among 34 items recovered.
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Stefflon Don, a British rapper and former girlfriend of Nigerian singer, Burna Boy, has taken a swipe at him in a
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From: Mba Nnenna- Abakaliki

Hon. Chinedu Ogah (OON) representing Ikwo/Ezza South Federal Constituency has given a week ultimatum to West African Examination Council, WAEC, to release Ebonyi indigenes results in its custody or face the law.

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This was contained in a Press Statement issued Tuesday to newsmen in Abakaliki, Ebonyi state.

Ogah, who expressed displeasure over the development, called on the Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu to summon WAEC to explain why Ebonyi students results was still in its custody.

The House of Rep member noted that the witheld WAEC results will not only delay the affected students in furtherance of their academic pursuit, but also lead to increase in social vices among the youths in the State.

Ogah further gave WAEC one week ultimatum to release the said results or face the full weight of the law.

The Statement reads; This is rather unfortunate and disturbing that the results of Ebonyi indigenes will be seized by WAEC. This is an act of marginalization and an attempt to defraud Ebonyi People of their hard earned resources.

The WAEC examination was monitored by security Agencies and if the affected students violated the law or committed any crime in the course of the examination, they would have been spotted by security agents on duty.

We are giving WAEC one week to release the results of Ebonyi indigenes or we will sue them to court. In furtherance to that also, I am going to prevent a petition at the floor of the National Assembly concerning this matter.

I want to urge the Minister of Education to summon WAEC to answer to this development. Theres is no need for WAEC to withhold the results of this students, when they were not caught engaging in any examination malpractice.

Other examination bodies that conducted similar examination have released their results; why should WAEC withhold that of Ebonyi indigenes. This is unacceptable and we will not fold our arms and watch any Institution jeopardize the future of Ebonyi youths, Ogah added.

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Former Liverpool and England defender, Glenn Johnson has revealed that Chelsea has made a big error appointing Graham Potter as manager after the dismissal of Thomas Tuchel.

In a with Bettingodds.com, the former England international said that it was a wrong decision for the Blues to sack Tuchel.

He said the decision could come back to bite Chelsea, claiming they appointed the wrong manager in Graham Potter.

Johnson insisted that Chelsea would have appointed Mauricio Pochettino as the clubs new manager instead of Potter.

When Thomas Tuchel was sacked, I thought it was obvious that Chelsea would move for Mauricio Pochettino, but obviously I got it wrong, Johnson told Bettingodds.com.

He would have been the man for me. I know some people were saying it would have been a cheaper option to go for Graham Potter, but it doesnt sound that way, does it?

Theyve had to pay many millions for the compensation and then pay a 10 million-a-year salary. You could have saved the 20 million its taken for Chelsea to get Potter and his backroom staff and got Pochettino instead.

On Tuchels sacking, Johnson added: I was as shocked as anybody, to be honest. Obviously, the owners had something in their mind whilst they were buying the club.

It didnt warrant a sacking at all. They were making progress and had made a few signings, so its a total shock, and it could be a decision that comes back to bite them.

His stock wont have dropped at all. He would be on anybodys shortlist. Im not necessarily saying he would be everybodys number one target, but hed definitely be in the conversation. It was only 18 months ago when they won the Champions League.

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The Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, yesterday, declared that the recent vote of confidence passed on the National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Senator Iyorchia Ayu, by the National Executive Council (NEC) of the party was of no consequence.

He, therefore, urged those that were celebrating the development, including the immediate past national chairman of the party, Uche Secondus to shelve their merriment for now.

Wike while speaking in Port Harcourt, at a reception organised for decampees from various political parties who have joined the PDP, said:

I was watching and listening to one man called Secondus who was dancing, celebrating that NEC gave their person a vote of confidence. He has forgotten history. Ask him, the same NEC, through Babaginda Aliyu, who moved the motion for a vote of confidence, supported by Ndudi Elumelu, gave him a vote of confidence. But what happened? He left the office.

We dont fight and go back. If you like you can have as many as 20 votes of confidence, it is not my business. My business and my team are to make sure that the right thing is done in PDP.

And the right thing must be done, whether today or tomorrow. So let nobody worry his/herself. If you are dancing, come home and dance. Come and mobilise for the person you think will win the election.

He challenged Secondus to return home and mobilise support for the candidate he is supporting for the 2023 elections, saying, We are here, I am here waiting for them. No more 419 in this game; no more 419 in this state. We have stopped all these 419 people. Enough is enough.

You people should go home and rest. We know we are already waiting for the day set by INEC for them to blow the whistle.

When they blow the whistle, we will know those who are in charge of Rivers State and those who are mere visitors to the state.

You know that we have those in Rivers State and those who come from Abuja. We stay here as those of us from Rivers State Monday to Sunday. Visitors come Friday and go back on Sunday, Wike said.

Governor Wike commended the decampees for their courage to rejoin their political family because it is true that there is no other political party that can win an election in Rivers State except the PDP.

Rivers State chairman of PDP, Desmond Akawor, said that the party was presenting a certificate to acknowledge the governors excellent performance because he has surpassed their expectations.
Kelechi Nwakali scored his first goal for new club Ponferradina which unfortunately was not enough to avoid a 2-1 home loss to Real Zaragoza in the Spanish second division on Sunday.

Ponferradina have now lost their last three fixtures in the Spanish second division.

Nwakali, who made his fifth league appearance for Ponferradina, scored in the 44th minute to draw his side level.

The last time Nwakali scored a goal was in April 2021 during his time at Alcorcon in a 2-1 home loss to Leganes.

Giuliano Simeone, who is the son of Atletico Madrid coach Diego Simeone, got Zaragozas two goals in the 12th and 51st minutes.

The defeat leaves Ponferradina in 14th position with six points in the 22-team league table.

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Opalesque Industry Update - Northern Trust Corporation announced today that Stephen N. Potter, President of Northern Trust Asset Management, will be appointed as Vice Chairman with responsibilities including oversight of key strategic initiatives and the development of select clients and prospects around the globe. Succeeding Potter as the President of Asset Management is Shundrawn A. Thomas, currently Head of Funds and Managed Accounts Group. Both changes are effective October 1. "Steve's vast experience working with key clients across all of our businesses and his ability to build enduring relationships are invaluable to us," Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Frederick H. Waddell said. "We will benefit from his focused efforts around growing our client relationships." "Shundrawn's experience in developing long-term strategies, creating differentiated products, and developing and retaining talented professionals will help us continue to attract some of the largest, most sophisticated individual and institutional investors in the world," Waddell said. "Our Asset Management business is one of the hallmarks of Northern Trust, with approximately $1 trillion in assets under management. I am pleased we have such a capable leader for this critical role." Thomas currently oversees the development, management and distribution of Northern Funds, Northern Institutional Funds and FlexShares Exchange Traded Funds as well as related business activities. He also oversees the Managed Accounts practice which provides investment advisory solutions to existing clients and financial intermediaries. Previously, Thomas served as President and Chief Executive of Northern Trust Securities, Inc. and Head of Corporate Strategy for Northern Trust Corporation. Prior to joining Northern Trust, Thomas served as a vice president for Goldman Sachs and held positions in sales, trading and research with Morgan Stanley. Thomas received a B.S. degree in accounting from Florida A&M University and an MBA degree from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Thomas currently holds FINRA series 7, 63 and 24 securities licenses.
Acrylic Acid 2017 Global Key Players  BASF, The Dow Chemical Company, Arkema, Nippon shokubai co., ltd., LG chemicals., Shenyang Chemical Co Ltd's., and Mitsubishi Chemical Market Analysis and Forecast to 2022

Acrylic Acid Market

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Acrylic Acid Market 2017Wiseguyreports.Com Adds Acrylic Acid Market-Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Manufacturers, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2022 To Its Research Database.Description:Market Synopsis of Acrylic acid Market:Globally, the market for acrylic acid is growing at a CAGR of 5.14% during forecasted period (2016-2022). Acrylic acid, a specialty petrochemical which has formula CH2=CHOOH and CAS (Chemical Abstracts Services) Number 79-10-7. It is produced from propylene which is a byproduct of ethylene and gasoline production. Properties of acrylic acid includes colorless liquid, adaptable to low temperature, good weather ability, acidic odor easily miscible with water, alcohols, ethers, and chloroform. Owing to such properties the use is diverse in number of applications, namely surface coatings, sealants & adhesive, agriculture, plastic sheets, diapers and others...Request for Sample Report@Super absorbent polymers represent represents of the market share of acrylic acid in U.S. which is slightly higher as compared to its market share in Canada. Acrylic acid is used in broad range of applications namely surface coatings, adhesive & sealants, textiles, paper coating, paint industry and cement modifiers. Surface coatings, such as paints contribute of the market. Solvent based coatings are being replaced by water based paints, as governments across the globe have restricted the use of volatile organic compound (VOCs). Due to this factor the market of surface coatings is growing at a faster pace. Adhesive and sealants are second largest segment accounting two third of acrylic acid application. Acrylic acid esters are also used in other applications including modifiers for synthetic resins; emulsion and solutions for leather finishes and bindersKey PlayersThe key players in market includes BASF, The Dow Chemical Company, Arkema, Nippon shokubai co., ltd., LG chemicals., Shenyang Chemical Co Ltd's., and Mitsubishi ChemicalEnquiry before Buying @If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Key Findings The global acrylic acid market is expected to reach USD 18,315.3 million by 2022 Regionally, North- America has the largest market of USD 4,947.7 million by 2022 China accounted for the largest market share of 58.00% in 2014, with a market value of USD 2,635.5 Million and is projected to grow at the highest CAGR of 5.53% during the forecast period. India was the second-largest market in 2014, valued at USD 681.6 Million in 2014; it is projected to grow at a CAGR of 5.24%. Diaper market accounted for the largest market share registering CAGR of 5.85% during the forecasted period On basis of type segment, superabsorbent polymers holds the market share of 19% in 2015Geographic AnalysisThe report covers brief analysis of geographical region includesNorth America US CanadaEurope Germany France Italy Netherlands U.K. Rest of EuropeAPAC China India Japan Rest of Asia-PacificRoW Middle East AfricaStudy Objectives of Acrylic acid Market To study detail of acrylic acid market by source, by application and by region in forecasted period 2022. To identify the market dynamics of acrylic acid market dynamics by drivers, restrains, opportunities and challenges. To analyze various factors like value chain analysis and porters five forces model. To provide historical and forecast revenue of market segment with respect to North America, Europe, APAC and RoW. 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 mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances, new product development of specified company.Intended Audience Manufacturers and distributors of acrylic acid. Suppliers and traders of acrylic acid. Government, associations and industrial bodies. Investors and Trade experts. Consulting in chemical experts.DC description Methyl Methacrylate Butyl acrylate Ethyl acrylate Acrylic resin Acrylic acid production Methacrylic AcidTable of Contents:1 Report Prologue 132 Introduction 142.1 Definition 142.2 Scope of the Study 142.3 Research Objective 142.4 Assumptions & Limitations 142.4.1 Assumptions 142.4.2 Limitations 152.5 Market Structure 163 Research Methodology 173.1 Research Process 173.2 Primary Research 183.3 Secondary Research 183.4 Market Size Estimation 184 Market Dynamics 204.1 Introduction 204.2 Drivers 204.2.1 Increasing use of superabsorbent polymers in various applications 204.2.2 Growth of construction industry 214.2.3 Rising demand for water based adhesives 214.3 Restraints 224.3.1 Rising Environment concerns and health hazards 224.3.2 Rise in price of raw materials 224.4 Opportunity 234.4.1 Increase use of bio-based acrylic acid 234.4.2 Increasing demand from emerging economies 235 Supply chain analysis 255.1.1 Raw material 255.1.2 Acrylic acid Producers 265.1.3 Acrylic acid Distributor 265.1.4 End-user 26Continued..Buy now @For accessing accurate and deep understanding and to gain latest insights and key developments in the area of your interest, we also have a list of conferences in which you will be interested in, for more information, cordially check:For updating knowledge or for thoroughly understanding various terminologies, we also have vast list of seminars for your reference, for more information cordially check:Contact US:NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:: Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt Ltd: Pune  411028: Maharashtra, Global: Ph: +91 841 198 5042
Cancer Biological Therapy 2017 EMEA Key Players  Amgen Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene Corporation, ELI Lilly and Company, EnGeneIC Ltd., EnGeneIC Ltd. Market Analysis and Forecast to 2022

Cancer Biological Therapy Market

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Cancer Biological Therapy Market 2017Wiseguyreports.Com Adds Cancer Biological Therapy Market-Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Manufacturers, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2022 To Its Research Database.Description:Cancer is the leading and second largest cause of death across the globe. The disease is characterized by disordered and deregulated cellular and stromal explosion along with reduced cell death and growth factor deprivation, and such other factors. There are many biological therapies that have been approved and being used by various cancer specialists across the globe. While there are many other therapies also which are under the research and development phase and are yet to be available for commercial use.Biological therapy treatment is treatment process which is performed with the help of living organisms, parts of living organisms or laboratory manufactured version of such content. Most of the biological therapies uses bacteria or vaccines to mimic the bodys immune system to act against cancer developing cells. These various types of biological therapies, which are most of the times stated to biological response modifier therapy or immunotherapy, but these types of therapies do not always target cancer cells directly. Further there are other biological therapies like sections of genetic material or antibodies which are commonly known as DNA or RNA, do aim at targeting cancer cells directly. There are some other types of biological therapies that inhibit specific molecules involved in development and growth of cancer tumor. Such therapies known as cancer targeted therapies.The Europe, Middle East and Africa Cancer Biological Therapy market is expected to reach US$ 29,776.3 million by 2023 at a CAGR of 5.0% during the forecast period...Request for Sample Report@EMEA Cancer Biological Therapy Market is further segmented into type of therapy which include Monoclonal Antibodies, Conjugated Monoclonal Antibodies, Cancer Growth Blockers, Interferons, Interleukins, Gene Therapy, Targeted Drug Delivery, Colony Stimulating Factor, Cancer Vaccines and other therapies. The Monoclonal Antibodies segment includes sub segment namely Naked Monoclonal Antibodies. Interferon segment is further sub segmented into Alpha Interferon, Beta Interferon and Gamma Interferon.On the basis on end users cancer biological therapy market is segmented into Hospitals & Clinics, Laboratories, Cancer Research Centers and other end users. Hospitals & Clinics accounted for the largest market share of EMEA cancer biological therapy market. Hospitals & Clinics commands maximum share of EMEA cancer biological therapy market in 2015.On the basis of region, Europe accounted for the largest market share in biological therapy market. While Middle East and Africa region is expected to grow with a steady pace during forecast period.Key Players:The leading market players in the Europe, Middle East and Africa Cancer Biological Therapy market include Amgen Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene Corporation, ELI Lilly and Company, EnGeneIC Ltd., EnGeneIC Ltd., F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Merck & Co. Inc., Novartis, Pfizer Inc, Seattle Genetics Inc. and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.Enquiry before Buying @If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Study objectives of Cancer Biological Therapy market: To provide insights about factors influencing and affecting the market growth To provide historical and forecast revenues of the market segments and sub-segments with respect to regional and country-level markets To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments based on type of therapy, end users, and its sub-segments. To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analyzing their market share, core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the marketTarget Audience: Medical devices distributors Hospitals & Clinics Potential investors Key executive (CEO and COO) and strategy growth manager Pharmaceutical companiesKey Findings: Europe accounted for the largest market share of monoclonal antibodies cancer biological therapy market, registering $5,316.8 million in 2015 and expected to reach at $6,844.1 million by 2021 Targeted Therapy is the fastest growing segment with a CAGR of and 5.7% in EMEA Cancer growth blockers is contributing remarkable share towards the market registering $4,990.5 million in 2015The reports also covers regional analysis: Europe Western Europe Germany France UK Italy Spain Rest Of Europe Middle East Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Qatar UAE Kuwait Bahrain Oman Saudi Arabia Rest of Middle East AfricaTable of Contents:1 Report Prologue2 Market Introduction2.1 Definition2.2 Scope of Study2.3 Research Objective2.4 Assumptions & Limitations2.4.1 Assumptions2.4.2 Limitations2.5 Market Structure3 Research Methodology3.1 Research Process3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary Research4 Market Dynamics4.1 Introduction4.2 Drivers4.2.1 Increasing Cancer Survival Rate4.2.2 Growing demand for advanced therapies4.2.3 Less number of side effects as compared to conventional treatment methods4.2.4 Changing lifestyle and increasing smoking population in Middle East & Africa4.3 Restraints4.3.1 High cost of Cancer biological therapy4.4 Opportunities4.4.1 Untapped types of Cancers4.5 Challenges4.5.1 Strong competition5 Market Factor Analysis5.1 Porters Five Forces Model5.1.1 Bargaining power of suppliers5.1.2 Bargaining Power of Buyers5.1.3 Threat of New Entrants5.1.4 Threat of Substitutes5.1.5 Intensity of RivalryContinued..Buy now @For accessing accurate and deep understanding and to gain latest insights and key developments in the area of your interest, we also have a list of conferences in which you will be interested in, for more information, cordially check:For updating knowledge or for thoroughly understanding various terminologies, we also have vast list of seminars for your reference, for more information cordially check:Contact US:NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:: Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt Ltd: Pune  411028: Maharashtra, EMEA: Ph: +91 841 198 5042
Global Wheat Bran Market Outlook 2017-2022 Hindustan Animal Feeds, Siemer Milling Company, Harinera Vilafranquina

Wheat Bran Market

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Wheat Bran Market Research ReportA market study based on the " Wheat Bran Market " across the globe, recently added to the repository of Market Research, is titled Global Wheat Bran Market 2017. The research report analyses the historical as well as present performance of the worldwide Wheat Bran industry, and makes predictions on the future status of Wheat Bran market on the basis of this analysis.Ask For Sample Copy of Report :Top Manufacturers Companies Covered In This Research Report -Hindustan Animal FeedsSiemer Milling CompanyHarinera VilafranquinaWheat Bran Market : Type AnalysisFeed Grade Wheat BranMedical Grade Wheat BranWheat Bran Market : Application AnalysisPharmaceuticalCosmetic IndustriesAnimal FeedBiofuelsThe report studies the industry for Wheat Bran across the globe taking the existing industry chain, the import and export statistics in Wheat Bran market & dynamics of demand and supply of Wheat Bran into consideration. The ' Wheat Bran ' research study covers each and every aspect of the Wheat Bran market globally, which starts from the definition of the Wheat Bran industry and develops towards Wheat Bran market segmentations. Further, every segment of the Wheat Bran market is classified and analysed on the basis of product types, application, and the end-use industries of the Wheat Bran market. The geographical segmentation of the Wheat Bran industry has also been covered at length in this report.Browse full Report here:The competitive landscape of the worldwide market for Wheat Bran is determined by evaluating the various industry participants, production capacity, Wheat Bran market's production chain, and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the Wheat Bran market worldwide.The global Wheat Bran market 2017 is also analysed on the basis of product pricing, Wheat Bran production volume, data regarding demand and Wheat Bran supply, and the revenue garnered by the product. Various methodical tool of Wheat Bran such as investment returns, feasibility, and market attractiveness analysis has been used in Wheat Bran market research to present a comprehensive study of the industry for Wheat Bran 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
North America Textile Printing Inks Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022

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ReportsWorldwide has announced the addition of a new report title North America Textile Printing Inks Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 to its growing collection of premium market research reports.Textile Printing Inks is an ink used in digital inkjet printer, generally; it can be directly applied to the print media in the form of droplets. The main components of the ink are color unit and vectors. Color unit may be a pigment or dye.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Textile Printing Inks in North America market, especially in United States, Canada and Mexico. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, countries, type and application.To view a detailed description and Table of Contents please visit:Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report covers Dupont Huntsman JK Group Kornit DyStar SPGprints BASF Jay Chemical Marabu Dow Corning EFI Sensient Magna Colours Anajet Print-Rite Lanyu Hongsam INKBANK TrendVision INKWINMarket Segment by States, covering United States Canada MexicoMarket Segment by Type, covers Reactive Dye Inks Acidic Ink Paint Ink Dispersion & Sublimation InkMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided into Clothing Industry Textile Industry OthersTo Get Sample Copy of Report please visit @About ReportsWorldwide.comReportsWorldwide.com is a leading provider of global market intelligence reports and services. With research reports from top publishers, consulting and advisory firms, ReportsWorldwide.com offers instant online access to a growing database of expert insights on global industries, companies, products, geographies and trends.Press Contact:Abigail CrastoSenior Vice President101, Arch StreetBoston, MA 02110USPhone +1 (617) 398-4994Fax +1 (617) 398-4995abigail@reportsworldwide.com
Female Sexual Dysfunction Market Upgradation 2017 To 2022

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Female Sexual Dysfunction - Pipeline Review, H1 2017 Purchase This Report by calling ResearchnReports.com at +1-888-631-6977.Research N Reports has proclaimed the addition of a new market research report to its source. The market intelligence publication inspects into the growth trajectory of the Female Sexual Dysfunction Market in terms of income and capacity. The report also evaluates the foremost trends and the key factors that are probably to influence the growth of the market in an optimistic or adverse way. The report also high points the strategies, shares, and product portfolio of the key companies operating in the Female Sexual Dysfunction Market.Researchers anticipate that the Female Sexual Dysfunction Market will unveil a significant growth over the coming years. The market has perceived substantial growth over the last couple of years owing to its development. The market is also anticipated to grow owing to the introduction of testing laboratories at present. Organizations are being gratified to organize tests in offices to ensure employee safety owing to the rising pressure on them and devoid them of proscribed activities.Download Sample Copy@Key features of this report Drivers, restraints, and challenges shaping the Female Sexual Dysfunction market dynamics Latest innovations and key events in the industry Analysis of business strategies of the top players Female Sexual Dysfunction market estimates and forecasts(2017 -2022)The multiple product types in the global Female Sexual Dysfunction market and their various applications are also studied in the report. This helps provide a clear overview of the leading segments of the Female Sexual Dysfunction market and the hierarchy thereof, giving readers actionable insights into which category to invest in. Further, factors that help to propel the growth of the market and presentable opportunities to the market is also mentioned clearly. However, restraining negative factors to the market is given, so in advanced readers can have an idea about the market routes to take.Inquiry for Buying This Report@About Research N Reports:Research N Reports is a new age market research firm where we focus on providing information that can be effectively applied. Today being a consumer driven market, companies require information to deal with the complex and dynamic world of choices. Where relying on a sound board firm for your decisions becomes crucial. Research N Reports specializes in industry analysis, market forecasts and as a result getting quality reports covering all verticals, whether be it gaining perspective on current market conditions or being ahead in the cut throat Global competition. Since we excel at business research to help businesses grow, we also offer consulting as an extended arm to our services which only helps us gain more insight into current trends and problems. Consequently we keep evolving as an all-rounder provider of viable information under one roof.Contact:(Research N Reports)10916, Gold Point Dr, Houston, TX, Pin - 77064,Sunny Denis(Sales Manager),+1-8886316977,sales@researchnreports.com ,
EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) Stationary Lapping Machine Market Report 2017

EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) Stationary Lapping Machine Market Report 2017

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The Herbal Medicine Industry 2017 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Herbal Medicine industry.Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Herbal Medicine market analysis is provided for the international market including development history, competitive landscape analysis, and major regions development status.Secondly, development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures. This report also states import/export, supply and consumption figures as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin by regions (United States, EU, China and Japan), and other regions can be added.Then, the report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials, equipment and downstream consumers analysis is also carried out. Whats more, the Herbal Medicine industry development trends and marketing channels are analyzed.Finally, the feasibility of new investment projects is assessed, and overall research conclusions are offered.In a word, the report provides major statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.EMEA Stationary Lapping Machine market competition by top manufacturers/players, with Stationary Lapping Machine sales volume (K Units), price (USD/Unit), revenue (Million USD) and market share for each manufacturer/player; the top players includingAUTEFA SOLUTIONSKlingelnbergLAM PLANLapmaster Wolters GmbHLogitech LimitedOptoTechPRAWEMA ANTRIEBSTECHNIK GMBHSOMOS InternationalStahliAsk a complete & professional report sample, please send message to tinaning@qyresearch.com or visit atTable of contents:1 Stationary Lapping Machine Overview2 EMEA Stationary Lapping Machine Competition by Manufacturers/Players/Suppliers, Region, Type and Application3 Europe Stationary Lapping Machine (Volume, Value and Sales Price), by Players, Countries, Type and Application4 Middle East Stationary Lapping Machine (Volume, Value and Sales Price), by Region, Type and Application5 Africa Stationary Lapping Machine (Volume, Value and Sales Price) by Players, Countries, Type and Application6 EMEA Stationary Lapping Machine Manufacturers/Players Profiles and Sales Data7 Stationary Lapping Machine Manufacturing Cost Analysis8 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers9 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders10 Market Effect Factors Analysis11 EMEA Stationary Lapping Machine Market Forecast (2017-2022)12 Research Findings and Conclusion13 AppendixRelated Reports:Global Stationary Lapping Machine Market Report 2017China Stationary Lapping Machine Market Report 2017USA Stationary Lapping Machine Market Report 2017Korea Stationary Lapping Machine Market Report 2017Japan Stationary Lapping Machine Market Report 2017India Stationary Lapping Machine Market Report 2017Contact Details:Company Name: QYResearch CO.,LIMITED | focus on Market Survey and ResearchTina| Sales ManagersEmail: tinaning@qyresearch.com Tel: 0086-20-22093278(CN)Web:QYResearch focus on Market Survey and ResearchQYResearch established in 2007, focus on custom research, management consulting, IPO consulting, industry chain research, data base and seminar services. The company owned a large basic data base (such as National Bureau of statistics database, Customs import and export database, Industry Association Database etc), experts resources (included energy automotive chemical medical ICT consumer goods etc industries experts who own more than 10 years experiences on marketing or R&D), professional survey team (the team member with more than 3 years market survey experience and more than 2 years depth expert interview experience),Excellent data analysis team (SPSS statistics and PPT graphics process team); QYResearch has always pursuit product quality, adhere to the quality is the soul of business.Room 2311 VILI International Building No.167 Linhe West Road Tianhe District
N-Methyl-2-Pyrrolidone (NMP) Market will be Worth US$ 985 Mn by 2020

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Future Market Insights (FMI), in its recent report titled, N-Methyl-2-Pyrrolidone (NMP) Market: Global Industry Analysis & Opportunity Assessment, 2014 - 2020, forecasts that the global N-Methyl-2-Pyrrolidone market will witness a steady CAGR of 4.7% between 2015 and 2020. NMP accounted for around US$ 660 Mn of the US$ 3.2 trillion generated by the global chemicals market in 2013, and FMI estimates it to reach a valuation of US$ 985 Mn by 2020.N-Methyl-2-Pyrrolidone, also referred to as N-Methylpyrrolidone, is an organic, colourless, polar aprotic solvent characterised by relatively lower volatility and higher flash point. It is obtained through the process of condensation of gamma butyrolactone and monomethylamine. Owing to such properties, NMP is used across diverse industries in a wide range of end-uses.FMIs latest report analyses the global NMP market in terms of market value (US$ Mn) and volume (000 tonne) by segmenting the market on the basis of applications and regions. The report offers insights and data related to prevalent trends, and impact analysis of the various drivers and restraints in the market. It also provides detailed information and statistics of some of the leading players in the industry in the form of company profiles.Demand from Asia Pacific Anticipated to Fuel the NMP MarketGrowth in the end-use industry is expected to emerge as the primary factor driving growth of the global NMP market during the forecast period. Moreover, growing demand from developing countries across the globe, especially those in Asia Pacific, is expected to fuel growth of the global NMP market between 2015 and 2020. However, NMP has been listed as a developmental and reproductive toxin by regulatory bodies across the globe, particularly in Europe and North America. As such, application of NMP in paints & coatings and industrial cleaners segments is expected to be adversely affected in the near future, especially in markets in Europe and North America. This is likely to result in slower growth rates of the abovementioned segments in the global NMP market over the forecast period.Request For Sample@On the basis of regions, the global NMP market has been segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa and South America. By application, the market has been segmented into electronics, petrochemical processing, pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, paints & coatings and industrial cleaners and others.Asia Pacific accounts for highest share in terms of revenue contribution, owing to industrial growth in the region, and this trend is expected to continue over the forecast period. The region is anticipated to register a CAGR of 7.5% in terms of market value, thus dominating the global NMP market over the forecast period. However, mature markets such as North America and Europe are slated to witness relatively slower growths in terms of NMP consumption during the forecast period.On the basis of application, the electronics segment is expected to account for majority as compared to other application-based segments, and will register a steady CAGR of 6.7% during the forecast period. However, the other major application segments such as petrochemical processing, pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals are also expected to register steady year-on-year growth rates during the forecast period.The Key market players covered in the report include BASF SE, Ashland Inc., LyondellBasell Industries N.V., Shandong Qingyun Changxin Chemical Science-Tech Co. Ltd, Hefei TNJ Chemical Industry Co. Ltd, and Zhejiang Realsun Chemical Industry Co., Ltd among others.Send An Enquiry@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 :
Craft Beer: Coming of Age or Past Its Prime?

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Craft beer growth has begun to rapidly decelerate in its core US market, a possible warning sign for the ever-increasing number of microbreweries in operation. Corporate buyouts and overuse of the "craft" term are adding to a sense of uncertainty regarding the future of the category in mature markets. At the same time, appeal for products with authenticity and heritage continues to spread throughout the world - bringing opportunities and challenges for microbreweries and the wider industry.Request a Sample atPublisher's Craft Beer: Coming of Age or Past Its Prime? global briefing offers an insight into to the size and shape of the Alcoholic Drinks market in both the off-trade and the on-trade, it highlights buzz topics, emerging geographies, categories and trends as well as pressing industry issues and white spaces. It identifies the leading companies and brands by total volume, offers strategic analysis of key factors influencing the market - be they new product developments, packaging innovations, economic/lifestyle influences, distribution or pricing issues. Forecasts illustrate how the market is set to change and criteria for success.Browse Complete Report atProduct coverage: Beer, Cider/Perry, RTDs/High-Strength Premixes, Spirits, Wine.Data coverage: market sizes (historic and forecasts) , company shares, brand shares and distribution data.Why buy this report?- Get a detailed picture of the Alcoholic Drinks market;- Pinpoint growth sectors and identify factors driving change;- Understand the competitive environment, the market's major players and leading brands;- Use five-year forecasts to assess how the market is predicted to develop.Get discount on report purchase atReportsWeb is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Alternative Payment Solution Market Information on its Performance, Including its Revenue Model

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Orbis Research Market brilliance released a new research report of 19 pages on title Alternative Payment Solution: Alipay with detailed analysis, forecast and strategies. The study covers important players Such as Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Agricultural Bank of China, PayPal, Bank of China, SPD Bank, Ping An Bank, etc.Alipay is the largest alternative payment services provider globally in terms of transaction value. It is a subsidiary of Ant Financial Services, which is effectively controlled by Alibaba Group Holding Limited. It allows users to make online, in-app, and in-store payments at home and abroad. In addition, Alipay users can make domestic and international fund transfers. Alipay accounts for 65% of total third-party online payments in China and is the primary mode of payment in Alibabas online marketplaces, including AliExpress, Tmall, and Taobao. The solution has now become mainstream in China and is used to make payments for almost everything, from retail stores to taxis to hospitals. It is now supported by 19 Chinese national banks as well as 40 local commercial banks and 134 other financial institutions in the country.Browse the complete report @Launched in 2004, Alipay is now accepted in more than 110 countries, allowing Chinese tourists to make payments in Chinese yuan, with the amount settled in 14 international currencies. Outside of China, Alipays strategy focuses on onboarding overseas merchants wherever Chinese tourists are likely to shop. As part of its expansion, it has collaborated with a number of banks and payment services providers globally. For instance, Alipay partnered with German payments company Wirecard in 2015. Under the agreement, Chinese Alipay users can make payments at authorized retailers in Europe by using integrated barcode payment functionality from Wirecard. Most recently, in May 2017 it extended its partnership with First Data, enabling Chinese consumers to use the service at more than 4 million retail outlets in the US. The two companies collaborated for the first time in 2016 to roll out Alipay services to high-end retailers.In April 2017, Ant Financial Services merged with helloPay, a payment solution of Southeast Asian online marketplace provider Lazada. Post-merger, helloPay has been rebranded as Alipay in the countries it operates, including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.The report provides information and insights into alternative payment solution Alipay, includingDetailed insight into its business and geographical presenceComprehensive coverage of its products and servicesComparative assessment with key alternative payment solutionsInformation on its performance, including its revenue modelThe company's important events and milestonesRequest a sample of this report @ScopeAlipay was launched in 2004, and is now accepted in more than 110 countries, allowing Chinese tourists to make payments in Chinese yuan, with the amount settled in 14 international currencies.In 2016, estimated transactions worth $417bn were run through Alipay.In May 2017, Alipay partnered with First Data enabling its service to Chinese consumers at 4 million retail outlets in US.In April 2017, online payment solution helloPay was merged with Alipay.Reasons to buyGain insights into Alipay's business operations, geographical presence and key events.Gain insights into its product portfolio and revenue model.Assess the competitive dynamics in the alternative payments industry by comparing its performance against competitors.Buy a report @Companies Mentioned:Apple PaySamsung PayAgricultural Bank of ChinaPayPalBank of ChinaSPD BankPing An BankHSBCChina Construction BankChina Merchants BankIndustrial and Commercial Bank of ChinaCitibankBank of ChongqingChina Guangfa BankBank of NingboBank of ShanghaiAbout Us:Orbis Research (orbisresearch.com) is a single point aid for all your market research requirements. We have vast database of reports from the leading publishers and authors across the globe. We specialize in delivering customized reports as per the requirements of our clients. We have complete information about our publishers and hence are sure about the accuracy of the industries and verticals of their specialization. This helps our clients to map their needs and we produce the perfect required market research study for our clients.Contact Us:Hector CostelloSenior Manager  Client Engagements4144N Central Expressway,Suite 600, Dallas,Texas - 75204, U.S.A.Phone No.: +1 (214) 884-6817; +912064101019Email ID: sales@orbisresearch.com
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Global Smart Airports In-Depth Study of Critical Market Segments, Regions & Forecasts till 2024

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Smart airports have developed as the present need for many related sectors such as tourism, hotels and airlines, since they offer exceptional applications. Looking into this great potential, a new report has been included into the vast online repository of Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE), with the title Smart Airports Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016  2024. The report presents the most promising guidelines with the evaluation of the decisive elements in this research such as players, products and forecasts.Request For Sample Report:Today the world runs to a large extent due to smartphone technology and airports are all geared to start new developments in this phenomenal direction. The report begins with a neat preface, research scope as well as the research methodology used. In this section, a careful executive summary, market snapshot together with the global smart airports market overview is also presented. Readers can also analyze the forecast of the global smart airports between 2014 and 2024. Investors will be pleased to learn easy guidelines through the analysis of the key trends along with the market dynamics. Similarly, the drivers, restraints, and opportunities in this market are also analyzed for the benefit of the buyers. Through the analysis of the pricing trend together with the market in terms of the infrastructure for the forecast period from 2014 to 2024, the study enables the improvement of the work production immensely in the future.In this key research, there are useful guidelines about the market in terms of the endpoint devices, which are sensors, tags, IP phone, and video-conferencing. Whereas, considering the communication systems the market is split into wireless airports, smartphones, near field communication and social media. Furthermore, considering the passenger, cargo and baggage ground handling control the study divides and analyzes the main segments such as lot enabled beacons, robots for passenger and baggage movement, common-use self-service (CUSS) kiosks, the RFID baggage reconciliation system and the E-gates.Browse Full Report with TOC :In terms of region, the study analyzes EU7 which contains the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and Netherlands), CIS, rest of Europe, the U.S. and Rest of North America. In the end, the intelligent research report also evaluates the successful companies in this market such as IBM, Vision-Box, Siemens AG, Honeywell International, Inc., CISCO System, Inc., Thales Group, SITA, QinetiQ Group PLC and Raytheon Company.Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of market intelligence reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.State Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:
ALSTASAN SILVOX Crop Pest Management at Salon Agriculture 2017 Paris

Silver Hydrogen Peroxide-Alstasan Silvox

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The Salon de lagriculture organizes Paris International Agricultural Show at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles every year. And this year the grand opening of Salon International Agriculture Expo saw home coming of a host of exhibitionists, technologists, agriculturists, farmers and students who shared their knowledge on the Theme 2017: Farming: A Passion, A Set of Ambitions. The Paris International Agricultural Show is committed to take long view of farming, bringing together sectors, stakeholders in these sectors and members of the general public. For this 54th edition of the show, they decided to continue lending support to all of the professions in the sector, and accommodate to provide visitors and consumers alike with an overall insight into farming.One aspect of such discussion was HACKATHON: Focus on Responsible Agricultural Practices by the Bonduelle Group, who emphasized on healthily and sustainably feeding the planet while preserving the resources and the quality of the soils. With the constantly evolving agricultural world and increase in the best practices of mechanical and thermal weeding, sustainable chemical disinfection and pest control, mechanical insect traps, observation drones for better crop management etc., the farmers with significant know-how on such matters shared their views. As part of its overall reflection on the Group CSR strategy, Bonduelle gathered for nearly 2 days, farmers, and co-workers from various departments, consumers and business people to jointly brainstorm on how to promote responsible agricultural practices and accordingly last December, they organized a Hackathon with the objective to promote responsible agricultural practices among consumers.One of the participating groups quite elaborately discussed the judicious use of chemical pesticides to reduce damage to crops and also reduce the ultimate environmental and health impacts of the pesticides as encouraged by Bonduelle. On one such note, the presenters highlighted a new chemical pest control technology in the form of Nano Silver Hydrogen Peroxide based Agricultural Disinfectant and Pesticide. It is here that ALSTASAN Silvox was mentioned as a globally accepted eco-friendly all purpose pesticide owing to its superior quality and efficacy at eliminating almost all types of agricultural pests and pathogens.ALSTASAN Silvoxs eco-friendly formulation decomposes into water and oxygen increasing soil life and crop yield without any signs of phytotoxicity. It does not leave poisonous residues and does not require flushing with water. Silver has been shown to have anti-senescence property which likewise expands shelf life of usability of products of the soil.The important characteristics of ALSTASAN Silvox are: It is colorless, odorless, and biodegradable and 100% eco-friendly Multi-functional with wide range applications Multi-media sanitation (Irrigation Water, Soil Surface and Foliar lamina) Nontoxic, breaking into water and oxygen and no other toxic residues Cold sterilant (Does not require any heat for disinfection) Non foaming formulation No Rinse product (Does not require rinsing with water)Benefits to Grower Saves time, energy and manpower and improves crop economics Media fumigation can be done even only 4 (four) hours before plantation Stable over a wide pH and temperature range Does not release toxic fumes and harmful gases Does not require water rinsing after disinfection Soil does not need to be covered with plastic unlike formalin method Safe and nontoxic to humans Non carcinogenic Non mutagenic Minimizes the use of harmful fungicides, pesticides, and bactericides Can be used for regular treatment by drip, foliar sprays, and drenching methodsBenefits to Soil / Growing Media Destroys all fungi, bacteria, viruses and pest populations in soil or media Kills even eggs and larval stage of insects-pests Eco-friendly and biodegradable, breaking down to water and oxygen Improves soil / media porosity Adds more oxygen to soil profile Improves water uptake capacity and capillary action Does not leave behind toxic residues Prevents and treats nematode infestations Increases soil/ Coco peat/ other media lifeBenefits to Crop Increases plant establishment and reduces initial plant mortality Hastens seed germination and enhance crop growth by boosting fresh root formation Works as a crop activator which enables it to fight against diseases Denaturation of DNA helps against pest resistance development Increases both production and marketable yield Silver has an anti-senescence property which prevents ageing of fruits and vegetables Helps in Ethylene inhibition Does not have phyto-toxic effect on other crops Does not cause spotting on flowers and affect taste of fruits and vegetables Improves luster of the produce along with extension of shelf-lifeBeing eco-friendly and bio-degradable, the blend of hydrogen peroxide with silver makes it effective & hassle free solution to all plant pathogen related problems. A high LD50 value makes it nontoxic while its fast action and zero phytotoxicity, makes it effective at reducing the time between soil fumigation and plantation from the conventional 3 weeks to just 4-6 hours.ALSTASAN Silvox finds wide usage in fields of open field cultivation for growing apples, grapes, corn, radish, potatoes, etc., to protective cultivation of apricots, oranges, capsicum, etc. It finds a huge use in floriculture where it not only treats microbial infections but the silver in hydrogen peroxide also increases the shelf life of cut flowers, thereby increasing their market value.Silver Hydrogen Peroxide marketed under the trade name of Alstasan Silvox by Chemtex Speciality Limited is a universal broad spectrum biocide with varied applications from soil disinfection to potable water disinfectant. As a poultry disinfectant, it stops spread of poultry diseases, even as a dairy disinfectant for sterilization of milk and equipment, aquaculture disinfectant for checking microbial growth in waters, effective for waste water sanitation from pharma, textiles and other industries. Swimming pool treatment and irrigation water sterilization are other notable applications. Silver H2O2 achieves effective sterilization in hospitals.Silver Hydrogen PeroxideHaute Street Corporate Park, 86A, Topsia Road (S), Kolkata-700046silvox@silverhydrogenperoxide.com
How Cochineal Extract Market will Grow in Future? FMI Research Offers Insights

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The cochineal is an insect from Dactylopius coccus family, from these insects natural food color dyecarminis derived. The female insect is dried and then dye is extracted from dried insect as well as from eggs. This extract is further mixed with calcium or aluminum salts to use as dye. Carmine is primarily used as a colorant in foodand in lipsticks. Cochineal extract is being used as colorant since centuries, it has wide applications as natural colorant into food, textile, medicine and personal care products. The cochineal insect farming is done to grow the particular insects for red color dye. The origin of cochineal insect is seen in Peru and Mexico.The insects are grown on specific type of cactus plant these insects grow on the moisture and nutrient contents of the cactus leaves. Insects are then collected and sun dried to produce extract. Dried cochineal, contains 17 % to 24% carminic acid, is carefully extracted in an acidic, aqueous, alcoholic solution to produce red, orange color dye.Request For Report Sample@Cochineal Extract Market Segmentation:Cochineal extract market is segmented on the basis of its form, application and region. On the basis of forms, cochineal extract market is segmented into powders and liquid form. The cochineal extract is available in both water soluble as well as oil soluble. Cochineal extract market is segmented on the basis of its applications as food and beverages, textile/fabric, cosmetics & personal care, pharmaceuticals and others etc.Cochineal extract market demand is considerably high in the food and beverage market segment as it is considered as natural color option where synthetic color is prohibited, and hence demanded as colorant in various food products such as bakery and confectionary, beverages, dairy products etc. Thus, food and beverages market segment is dominate market for cochineal extract. In cosmetics & personal care market segment cochineal extract is mainly used as colorant in skin care products, lipsticks, face powders, rouges, and blushes etc. Applications of cochineal extract in fabric/ textile segment is comparatively lesser as numerous new and synthetic color dye options are being invented, however in few of the markets its still popular. In pharmaceutical market segment cochineal extract is basically used for color pills and ointments, however this segment comprises very small share of total market. Others market segment includes cochineal extract uses in the manufacturing of artificial flowers, paints and crimson ink.Cochineal extract market is further segmented on the basis of regions as North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan, Japan, Europe, and Middle East and Africa. Latin America is major export market of cochineal extracts, Mexico and Peru being major regional producers. In European markets France is the major importer for cochineal extract. Due to various government bans on the uses of synthetic food colorant in Japan , Japan is also a becoming major importer for cochineal extract in coming years.CochinealExtractMarket Drivers:Cochineal extract is in high demand in several application sectors across the world. Principle factors driving market demand are continuous rising demand natural colorants. As synthetic colorant had proven allergic and hazardous for health, natural color market demand is high. Also rising market demand for natural products based cosmetics and skin care products is becoming another market driver for cochineal extract. Various government such as Japan has banned synthetic color uses in food and beverage products, this is driving natural colorant market demands such as cochineal extracts.CochinealExtractMarket Restrains:Cochineal extract has no known health risks, number of people have been found to experience occupational asthma, foodand cosmetic allergies due to use of product containing cochineal extracts. Increasing vegan food culture and adoption of 100% plant food concept, many consumers are not ready to accept animal products and not preferring product labeled with cochineal extract or carmine as an ingredients. These are the main restraints for cochineal extract market.Visit For TOC@Cochineal ExtractMarket Key Players:Maximum amount of cochineal extract is produced in Mexico and Peru and get exported into global markets. Key players operating in cochineal extract market are DDW The Color House, Gentle world, Xian LiSheng-Tech Co., Ltd, Chr. Hansen Holding A/S, Colores Naturales EIRL, Lake Foods, and many of the local Mexican and Peru market players extract the cochineal product like Earthue, Biocon del Peru.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:
Government Support will boost Fog Computing Market size During Forecast Period (2017-2027)

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The objective of fog computing is to improve efficiency and the amount of data transferred to the cloud for processing, analysis and storage. This is most commonly done to improve efficiency, but it may also be used for security and compliance reasons. Popular fog computing applications include: smart city, smart grid, smart buildings, software- defined networks and vehicle networks.The key difference between fog computing and edge computing is where the intelligence and compute power is placed. In a fog environment, intelligence is placed at the local area network. Data is transmitted from endpoints to a gateway where it is then transmitted to sources for processing and return transmission. Whereas, in edge computing, intelligence and power of the edge gateway or appliance are in devices such as programmable automation controllers.Usually cloud computing is not a viable option for internet of things (IoT), in such cases fog computing is used. Fog Computings distributed approach attends to the needs of IoT and industrial IoT, as well as the immense amount of data smart sensors and IoT devices generate, which would be costly and time-consuming to send to the cloud for processing and analysis. Fog computing reduces the bandwidth needed and reduces the back-and-forth communication between sensors and the cloud, which turns out to be beneficial to IoT performance.Request For Report Sample@Fog Computing Market: Drivers and ChallengesFog computing market has recently gained importance due to increasing adoption of internet of things worldwide, increasing demand for computing capability at the edge, mainstreaming of cloud computing and high adoption of smart sensors that will create huge amount of data. The growing government and private funding across the globe for research and development in IoT, cloud and fog, and scope for innovative cross-domain applications provide significant growth opportunities in the fog computing market.The challenges faced by fog computing market are existing data protection mechanisms such as encryption fails to secure data from attackers. Fog computing also does not verify whether the user is authorized or not.Fog Computing Market: SegmentationSegmentation on the basis of component:HardwareServersSwitchesRoutersGatewaysControllerSoftwareCustomized application softwareFog computing platformSegmentation on the basis of application:Smart EnergyBuilding and Home AutomationSmart ManufacturingConnected HealthTransportation and LogisticsSecurity and Emergency SystemFog Computing Market: Recent Contracts/Deals and AcquisitionsFew of the recent contracts/deals and acquisitions in Fog Computing market are listed below:In November 2016, Cisco Systems, Inc. completed the acquisition of ParStream Inc. (provider of analytics database in Germany) in order to enhance the ability of the company to provide analytics at networks edgeIn October 2016, Intel Corporation launched new Intel Atom processor E3900 series to enable next generation of smart and connected IoT devicesIn September 2016, Microsoft Corporation introduced new services and products spanning security, productivity, intelligence and the cloud in order to make it easier for IT professionals to drive digital transformation throughout their organizationsIn September 2016, SAP SE acquired PLAT ONE (enterprise-grade Internet of Things (IoT) solution platform provider) in order to make it easy for enterprises and system integrators to build IoT-enabled applicationsFog Computing Market: Regional OverviewFog Computing market is currently dominated by North America region due to countries such as U.S. and Canada taking initiatives to encourage the adoption of internet of things. Europe fog computing market follows next as various industry verticals are realizing the importance of shifting to internet of things and fog computing. APEJ and MEA regions are fast picking up pace in the fog computing market owing to increase in awareness of making use of this technology over cloud computing.Visit For TOC@The report covers exhaustive analysis on:Fog Computing Market SegmentsFog Computing Market DynamicsHistorical Actual Market Size, 2013 - 2015Fog Computing Market Size & Forecast 2017 to 2027Value ChainFog Computing Market Current Trends/Issues/ChallengesCompetition & Companies involvedFog Computing Market Drivers and RestraintsABOUT 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:
Diabetic Neuropathy Market To Reach US$5.718 bn By 2025

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"The Latest Research Report Diabetic Neuropathy Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Diabetic Neuropathy MarketThe report on diabetic neuropathy market analyzes the current and future scenario of the global market. Increase in prevalence of diabetic neuropathy, advent of new therapeutics for treatment of neuropathy, favorable reimbursement scenario, and investment from key players in development of cost effective therapeutics for diabetic neuropathy are the major drivers of the global diabetic neuropathy market.The diabetic neuropathy market report comprises an elaborate executive summary, which includes a market snapshot that provides information about various segments of the market. It also provides information and data analysis of the global diabetic neuropathy market with respect to the segments based on disorder type, treatment type, distribution channel and geography.A detailed qualitative analysis of drivers and restraints of the market and its opportunities has been provided in the market overview section. In addition, the section comprises Porters five forces analysis to understand the competitive landscape in the market. This section of the report also provides market attractiveness analysis, by geography and market share analysis by key players, thus presenting a thorough analysis of the overall competitive scenario in the global diabetic neuropathy market.Get Sample copy of this Report @Global Diabetic Neuropathy Market: SegmentationBased on disorder type, the diabetic neuropathy market is segmented as peripheral neuropathy, autonomic neuropathy, proximal neuropathy, focal neuropathy. The disorder type market segments have been analyzed based on available approved treatment for disorders and patient data. The market size and forecast for each of these segments have been provided for the period from 2015 to 2025, along with their respective CAGRs for the forecast period from 2017 to 2025, considering 2016 as the base year.Based on treatment type, diabetic neuropathy market is segmented into drugs, radiotherapy and physiotherapy. The drug segment is further segmented into analgesic, antidepressant, anticonvulsant drugs and other drugs. The analgesic segment is further segmented into topical, opioid, NSAIDs. The antidepressant segment is segmented into TCAs, SNRIs, and SSRIs. Radiotherapy segment is segmented into Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS), others.View Report @The market segments have been extensively analyzed based on demand for available treatment, and geographical coverage. The market size and forecast in terms of US$ Mn for each segment have been provided for the period from 2015 to 2025. The report also provides the compound annual growth rate (CAGR %) for each market segment for the forecast period from 2017 to 2025, considering 2016 as the base year.Global Diabetic Neuropathy Market: Regional AnalysisGeographically, the global diabetic neuropathy market has been categorized into five major regions and the key countries in the respective region: North America (the U.S., Canada), Europe (the U.K., Germany, Russia, France, Spain, Italy, and Rest of Europe), Asia Pacific (Japan, India, China, Australia & New Zealand and Rest of Asia Pacific), Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, and Rest of Latin America) and Middle East & Africa (South Africa, GCC countries and Rest of Middle East & Africa).The market size and forecast for each of these regions and the mentioned countries have been provided for the period from 2015 to 2025, along with their respective CAGRs for the forecast period from 2017 to 2025, considering 2016 as the base year. The research study also covers the competitive scenario in these regions.Send An Enquiry Request @Global Diabetic Neuropathy Market: Competitive AnalysisThe report also profiles major players in the global diabetic neuropathy market based on various attributes such as company overview, financial overview, product portfolio, business strategies, and recent developments. Major players profiled in this report include  Johnson & Johnson (Janssen Global Services, LLC), Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, NeuroMetrix, Inc., Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline plc, Pfizer, Inc., Lupin Limited, Astellas Pharma Inc., Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Ltd, Arbor Pharmaceuticals, LLC, Depomed, Inc., and others.The Global Diabetic Neuropathy Market is segmented as given below:Global Diabetic Neuropathy Market, by ProductPeripheral NeuropathyAutonomic NeuropathyProximal NeuropathyFocal NeuropathyGlobal Diabetic Neuropathy Market, by Treatment TypeDrugAnalgesicTopicalCapsaicinOthersOpioidsMorphineOthersNSAIDsIbuprofenNaproxenOthersAntidepressantTCAsAmitriptylineImipramineOthersSNRIsDuloxetineOthersSSRIsCitalopramParoxetinOthersAnticonvulsantsGabapentinPregabalinTopimarateOthersOther DrugsRadiotherapyTENSOthersPhysiotherapyGlobal Diabetic Neuropathy Market, by Distribution ChannelHospitalsClinicsRetail PharmacyOnline PharmacyGlobal Diabetic Neuropathy Market, by GeographyNorth AmericaUSCanadaEuropeGermanyU.K.RussiaItalyFranceSpainRest of EuropeAsia PacificJapanIndiaChinaAustralia & New ZealandRest of Asia PacificLatin AmericaBrazilMexicoRest of Latin AmericaMiddle East & AfricaGCC countriesSouth AfricaRest of Middle East & AfricaMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.Mr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz
Global Colposcopy Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 - Philips, Olympus, Zeiss

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Colposcopy is a medical diagnostic procedure to examine an illuminated, magnified view of the cervix and the tissues of the vagina and vulva. Many premalignant lesions and malignant lesions in these areas have discernible characteristics which can be detected through the examination. It is done using a colposcopy, which provides an enlarged view of the areas, allowing the colposcopies to visually distinguish normal from abnormal appearing tissue and take directed biopsies for further pathological examination. The main goal of colposcopy is to prevent cervical cancer by detecting precancerous lesions early and treating them.Fill the form for an exclusive sample of this report @The Global Colposcopy Market Research Report 2017 is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Colposcopy market. Annual estimates and forecasts are provided for the period 2017 through 2022. Also, a six-year historic analysis is provided for these markets. The global market for Colposcopy is expected to reach about 63.8 thousand units by 2022 from 44.3 thousand units in 2017, registering a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.6% during the analysis period, 2017-2022.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Colposcopy in Global market, especially in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, type and application.Market Segment by Manufacturer, this report coversLeisegangWelch AllynPhilipsOlympusZeissCentrelOPTOMICMedGynEclerisDYSIS MedicalLutechATMOSWallachBeijing SWSYEDAN InstrumentsSeilerXuzhou ZhonglianSTARKernelMarket Segment by Region, regional analysis coversNorth America (USA, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina)Middle East and Africa (Egypt, South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversElectronic ColposcopyOptical ColposcopyMarket Segment by Application, can be divided intoPhysical ExaminationCervical Cancer DiagnosticOtherRead Comprehensive Overview of Report @Table of Contents1 Market Overview 11.1 Colposcopy Introduction 11.2 Colposcopy Segment by Types 21.2.1 Global Production Market Share of Colposcopy by Types in 2016 21.2.2 Electronic Colposcopy 31.2.3 Optical Colposcopy 42 Global Colposcopy Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis 232.1 Leisegang 232.1.1 Company Profile 232.1.2 Product Information 242.1.3 Sales, Price, Cost, Gross, and Revenue 243 Global Colposcopy Market Competition, by Manufacturer 613.1 Global Colposcopy Sales and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017) 613.2 Global Colposcopy Revenue and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017) 633.3 Market Concentration Rate 663.3.1 Top 3 Colposcopy Manufacturer Market Share 663.3.2 Top 6 Colposcopy Manufacturer Market Share 673.4 Market Competition Trend 684 Global Colposcopy Market Analysis by Regions 694.1 Global Colposcopy Sales, Revenue and Market Share by Regions 694.1.1 Global Colposcopy Sales by Regions (2012-2017) 704.1.2 Global Colposcopy Revenue by Regions (2012-2017) 714.2 North America Colposcopy Sales and Growth Rate (2012-2017) 734.3 Europe Colposcopy Sales and Growth Rate (2012-2017) 734.4 Asia-Pacific Colposcopy Sales and Growth Rate (2012-2017) 744.5 South America Colposcopy Sales and Growth Rate (2012-2017) 744.6 Middle East and Africa Colposcopy Sales and Growth Rate (2012-2017) 755 North America Colposcopy by Countries 765.1 North America Colposcopy Sales, Revenue and Market Share by Countries 765.1.1 North America Colposcopy Sales by Countries (2012-2017) 765.1.2 North America Colposcopy Revenue by Countries (2012-2017) 785.2 USA Colposcopy Sales and Growth Rate (2012-2017) 795.3 Canada Colposcopy Sales and Growth Rate (2012-2017) 805.4 Mexico Colposcopy Sales and Growth Rate (2012-2017) 81About 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 UsBrooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com
Apheresis Market Driving Factors, Industry Analysis, Investment Feasibility and Trends

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https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/apheresis-market

Market Synopsis of Apheresis Market:Market Scenario:Globally the market for apheresis is increasing rapidly. The major factor that derives the growth of apheresis is the increasing healthcare awareness all around the world. Furthermore increasing development in healthcare services is increasing the growth of apheresis market. Globally the market for apheresis market is expected to grow at the rate of about XX% CAGR from 2016 to 2027.Key Players for Apheresis Market: Asahi Kasei Medical Co., Ltd. (Japan), Cerus Corporation (U.S.), B. Braun Melsungen AG (Germany), HemaCare Corporation (U.S.), Haemonetics Corporation (U.S.), Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA (Germany), TERUMO BCT, INC. (U.S.), Kawasumi Laboratories Inc. (Japan), Medica S.p.A. (Italy), Kaneka Pharma Europe N.V.(Germany)Request a Sample Copy @Segments:Global apheresis market has been segmentedOn the basis of type which comprises of plasmapheresis, plateletpheresis, leukapheresis and others.On the basis of application include myasthenia gravis, lupus, severe rheumatoid arthritis, polymysositis, vacuities and others.Taste the market data and market information presented through more than 50 market data tables and figures spread in 110 numbers of pages of the project report. Avail the in-depth table of content TOC & market synopsis on Global Apheresis Market Research Report- Forecast To 2027Intended Audience Apheresis treatment centers Contract Research Organizations (CROs) Research and Development (R&D) Companies Government Research Laboratories Independent Research Laboratories Government and Independent Regulatory Authorities Market Research and Consulting Service Providers Medical Research Laboratories Academic Medical Institutes and UniversitiesBrowse full report @Study Objectives of Apheresis 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 apheresis market To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth To analyze the apheresis 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- Americas, 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 segments by type, by applications and its sub-segments. To provide overview of key players and their strategic profiling 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 globalKey questions answered in this report What will the market size be in 2027 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 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
Global Sleeping Pillow Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type 2022 - Hollander, Wendre, MyPillow, RIBECO, John Cotton

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A sleeping pillow is a support for the head used while sleeping on a bed. The pillow is a kind of sleep tool. Generally, the sleeping pillow could provide sleep comfort. From the understanding of modern medical research, human spine is a straight line from the front view, but three physiological curves from the side view. In order to protect the normal physiological neck bending protection, sleeping pillow should be used.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Sleeping Pillow in Global market, especially in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, type and application.Fill the form for an exclusive sample of this report @Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversHollanderWendreMyPillowPacific CoastPacific BrandsTempur SealyRIBECOJohn CottonParadise PillowMagniflexComfy QuiltsPENELOPEPATEXLatexcoRomatexNishikawa SangyoBaltic Fibres OuCzech Feather & DownLuolaiFuannaDohiaMendaleShuixingNoyokeBeyond Home TextileSouthbeddingJaliceYour MoonYueda Home TextileHengYuanXiangMarket Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversMemory Foam PillowFoam PillowDown & Feather PillowWool/Cotton PillowPolyester PillowLatex PillowOthersMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoResidentialHotelHospitalNursing HomeSchoolOthersTable of Contents1 Market Overview 11.1 Sleeping Pillow Introduction 11.2 Market Analysis by Type 31.2.1 Foam Pillow 41.2.2 Memory Foam Pillow 41.2.3 Latex Pillow 51.2.4 Wool/Cotton Pillow 51.2.5 Down/Feather Pillow 62 Manufacturers Profiles 272.1 Hollander 272.1.1 Business Overview 272.1.2 Sleeping Pillow Type and Applications 272.1.3 Hollander Sleeping Pillow Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share 28Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @3 Global Sleeping Pillow Market Competition, by Manufacturer 793.1 Global Sleeping Pillow Sales and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017) 793.2 Global Sleeping Pillow Revenue and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017) 813.3 Market Concentration Rate 854 Global Sleeping Pillow Market Analysis by Regions 874.1 Global Sleeping Pillow Sales, Revenue and Market Share by Regions 874.1.1 Global Sleeping Pillow Sales by Regions (2012-2017) 884.1.2 Global Sleeping Pillow Revenue by Regions (2012-2017) 894.2 North America Sleeping Pillow Sales and Growth Rate (2012-2017) 904.3 Europe Sleeping Pillow Sales and Growth Rate (2012-2017) 91About 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 UsBrooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com
Global Apple Cider Vinegar Market Set for Rapid Growth And Trend, by 2027

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Vinegar can be defined as a condiment made from various sugar and starchy materials processed through alcoholic and subsequent acetic fermentation. Apple cider vinegar is one of the type of vinegar, widely used as an antimicrobial and flavoring component in the cuisines. Apple cider vinegar is rich in acetic acid, magnesium, potassium, probiotics and enzymes. It helps to regulate body pH, lowers the blood sugar and cholesterol level, supports heart health, cure sinus infection, and prevent skin irritation. Apple cider vinegar also supports weight loss and metabolism. Additionally, high anti-fungal abilities of apple cider vinegar enables it to be used for cleaning purpose. It kills harmful bacteria and prevents the formation of fungus. It is used as a flavoring agent in soups and condiments, salad dressing.Apple Cider Vinegar Market SegmentationApple cider vinegar market can be segmented on the basis of applications, distribution channel, and by regions. Based on applications, apple cider vinegar is segmented into food & beverages, pharmaceuticals, personal care, and others. Others include various household and industrial applications. Apple cider vinegar, being a key ingredient in various ethnic and foreign cuisines, is anticipated to witness relatively high share in the food & beverages segment. Pharmaceutical segment is expected to expand at relatively high CAGR owing to the wide use of apple cider vinegar in pharmaceutical segment. It helps in balancing blood sugar and help in improving diabetes. It is also applied to soothe sunburn.Request Report Sample@Based upon distribution channel, apple cider vinegar market is segmented into supermarkets/hypermarkets, drug stores, convenience stores, specialist stores, and others. Others include independent retailers. Supermarket/hypermarket is expected to hold relatively high share in the apple cider vinegar market. Expansion of retail chain format on global level has contributed significantly to the growth of supermarket/hypermarket over the forecast period.Regional Outlook of Apple Cider Vinegar Market:On the basis of geographical market segment, it is segmented into seven different regions: North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Asia-Pacific region, Japan and Middle East and Africa. In regional segments, North America is expected to hold relatively high share in terms of market value. Asia Pacific region is expected to witness relatively high growth in the apple cider vinegar market owing to the rising health consciousness and increasing disposable income in the region.Apple Cider Vinegar Market Trends and Market Drivers:Apple cider vinegar market is expected to witness sustained growth over the forecast period. Growth of apple cider vinegar market is driven by its wide applications in the food & beverage industry. It is considered as one of the essential component in salad dressing, sauces and soups, and food preservatives. Other factors attributable to the high growth includes increase in ageing population, rising health consciousness, increasing purchasing power, rise in per capita health expenditure. Presence of natural ingredients in apple cider vinegar coupled with growing awareness regarding its health benefits contributes significantly to its volume growth over the forecast period.Visit For TOC@Apple Cider Vinegar Market Key Players:Some of the key players in the apple cider vinegar market include Barnes Naturals, The Kraft Heinz Company, Carl Kuhne KG, Castelo Alimentos S/A, Old Dutch Mustard Co., Inc., Marukan Vinegar USA Inc., and Aspall among others. Companies in the apple cider vinegar market are heavily investing in research and development activities to enhance the functional profile of apple cider vinegar. Companies also focus upon building efficient supply chain to ensure wide availability of apple cider vinegar in the market.About Us  Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.CONTACT:616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
FMI Releases New Report on the Botanical Flavors Market 2017-2027

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Botanical flavors are extracts from fruits, leaves, flowers, seeds, barks, spices and from many other plant materials. Botanical flavors have wide application in food and beverage industry as it used to enhance the flavor, taste and richness of products including bakery, dairy, savory, confectionery, juices, drinks and alcoholic drinks. Increasing demand of health conscious consumers in the global level market regarding consumption of healthy and nature-based products are expected to drive the market growth of botanical flavors over the forecast period. Currently, the majority of demand for botanical flavors accounts to North American and European market.Botanical Flavors: Growth DriversSome of the key drivers which are influencing the demand for botanical flavors in the global level market are from the side of food and beverage manufacturers as they used these flavors as natural ingredients and functional ingredient in their food recipes. Botanical flavors have wide application in the beverage industry, companies are offering new beverages and using botanical flavors to make improvement in their existing products. Moreover, it has healthy attributes that help the companies to meet consumers demand related to healthy and organic food products. In the global level market, the beverage industry is facing tough competition due to innovation and formulation of nutritional beverages as companies are focusing on offering health benefit and flavored drinks.Request Report Sample@Usage of botanical flavors in food and beverage offers great taste and natural flavor and enriched the nutritional value of products. On the other side, the demand for botanical flavors is also increasing among the consumers who are seeking for enhanced health benefit and nature based products. Botanical flavors have nutritional value including protein, vitamin, and other minerals. Moreover, consumers are experiencing distinctive natural taste while eating and drinking.Botanical Flavors: Market SegmentationBotanical flavors market segment has been segmented on the basis of different segments. On the basis of extraction, the botanical flavor market is segmented by extraction which includes fruits, leaves, seeds, barks and others (herbs and roots). Among this segment, fruits and leaves segment are expected to show robust growth over the forecast period. Another segment is on the basis of form and it is segmented in form of solid, fluid and powdered form. The further botanical flavor market is also segmented on the basis of application which is segmented in food, beverage and personal care industry. On analyzing the demand for botanical flavor on graph, it shows that majority of the demand for botanical flavor is from food and beverage industry.Further market segment of the food industry is sub-segmented into the bakery, dairy, savory and confectionery products and beverages is sub-segmented into alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages as in beverage industry it is used in preparing juices, tea, energy drinks, wines, beer etc. Using of botanical flavors in food and beverages is one of the natural ways to enhance the flavor and taste of food recipes. Further in the personal care industry, botanical flavors have application in cosmetics, hair care, and skin care products. Currently, in cosmetics and personal care product market, the demand for products which includes natural ingredient and flavor has increased due to skin care problems. Adding botanical flavors in personal care products, makes the quality of product better and offer benefits such as healthier hair and softer skin.Botanical Flavors: Regional OutlookOn the basis of regional segment, market of botanical flavors is segmented in five different regions: North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific, japan and Middle East and Africa. It is expected that North America and Europe account to highest growth in terms of both volume and value over the forecast period.Visit For TOC@Botanical Flavors: Key PlayersSome of the key players that are operating in the botanical flavor market: Synergy Flavors, Bell Flavors & Fragrances GmbH, Parker Flavors, Inc., Archer Daniels Midland Company, Kanegrade Limited, Carrubba Incorporated and Sapphire Flavors & Fragrances.About Us  Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.CONTACT:616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Government Support will boost Ortho-Xylene Market size During Forecast Period (2014 - 2020)

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Xylenes are petrochemicals produced by catalytic reforming and coal carbonization in the manufacture of coke fuel. They are used in various industries and medical technology as a solvent. It occurs naturally in coal, wood tar and coal among others. Xylenes are mainly produced as a part of the BTX aromatics. They are derived from various sources within a refinery including pyrolysis gasoline, toluene disproportionation and reformate among others. Reformate accounts for over three fourths of mixed xylenes market. There are three types of xylenes, viz., ortho-xylene, meta xylene and para xylene.Ortho-xylene is a commercial isomer of xylene. It is a hydrocarbon based on benzene with two methyl substituents bonded to the aromatic ring. It is liquid at room temperature. It is used extensively for producing phthalic anhydride (PAN)-primarily dio-octyl phthalate for PVC. The major use for PAN is for producing plasticizers which are largely used in automobile and construction industry. In addition, it is used in solvent based paints. It is extracted by means of distillation from xylene stream in a plant designed for para-xylene production. It is a constitutional isomer of m-xylene and p-xylene. Moreover, it is produced with its isomers paraxylene, metaxylene and ethylbenzene. Friedel Crafts alkylation of toluene yields a mixture of ortho-xylene .This reaction gives a pure form of o-xylene. Furthermore, it is used in alkyd resins having wide applications in the coating industry. It has a large demand in the petrochemical industry.Request For Report Sample@The growing construction industry coupled with burgeoning development in the automobile industry is expected to drive the demand for ortho-xylene within the forecast period. Additionally, the growing paints and adhesive industry is expected to fuel the demand for ortho-xylene further over the next few years. However, acute inhalation or exposure to ortho-xylene in humans results in irritation of eyes and neurological effects. Furthermore, chronic exposure of ortho-xylenes results in central nervous system effects, cardio-vascular and kidney effects. It reacts violently with oxidants causing fire and explosion hazard. Thus, stringent regulations on use of ethylene are expected to hamper the ortho-xylene market in near future.In Asia, prices of xylene are anticipated to weaken due to weak downstream conditions in the purified terephthalic acid and paraxylene sectors. Global manufacturing coupled with supply chain and access to feedstock are the key strengths of the companies involved in the ortho-xylene market.Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing regional market within the forecast period on account of the growing chemical industry and in turn, rapid industrialization. China dominated the otho-xylene production in 2011 and this trend is expected to continue within the forecast period. In India, Reliance Industries is a manufacturer of ortho-xylene with a capacity of 150 KTA. Consumption of ortho-xylene in Eastern Europe and Russia is expected to be strong on account of the thriving construction industry.Request For TOC@The major players in the ortho-xylene market are Creasyn Finechem (Tianjin) Co., Ltd., Doe & Ingalls of North Carolina Inc., DynaChem Inc, Minda Petrochemicals Ltd, Shell Chemicals, Sonoco Chemicals, U.S. Petrochemical Industries Ltd. and Puritan Products, Inc. among others. Ortho-xylene projects by major companies are planned in China, Taiwan and Singapore within the forecast period.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 Aircraft Brake System Market 2017 : Safran, AAR Corporation, Beringer Aero and Lufthansa Technik

Aircraft Brake System

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This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, covering- Safran- UTC Aerospace Systems- Honeywell International Inc- Crane Aerospace & Electronics- Parker Hannifin Corporation- AAR Corporation- Beringer Aero- Lufthansa Technik- Jay-Em Aerospace- Hong Kong Aircraft Engineering CompanyThe survey report by Market Research Store is an overview of the global Aircraft Brake System market. It covers all the recent trends including key developments in the global market in present and in future. Analyses of the global Aircraft Brake System market trends along with the projections of CAGRs (compound annual growth rates) are provided in the research report.Further, an evaluation of the history of the global market and the basic information of the global market is included in the report. A developmental perspective of the industry is also documented in the report. Competitive profiles of the key players in the industry are also discussed.Click Here To Sample Report @The research report provides both an assessment of recent developments in the industry along with forecasts examining the industry from the perspective of major competitors, present players and prospective end users in the Aircraft Brake System market.Forecasts are generated on the basis of region, type, product, supply, demand, and other vital factors of the global market. The research report analyzed the major factors driving the global Aircraft Brake System market in various countries with a satisfactory and manufacturing and structure of the global market. Forecasts are also provided region-wise in the research report.The research report comprises several chapters, tables, figures, graphs, and various other presentations formats so as to provide a precise overview of the market. The sequence of the report is maintained in such a way that highlights the overall flow of the global market. Recent developments in the global market are further described in the research report. The report also summarizes latest trends along with abstracts of the Aircraft Brake System market. Major competitors of the global market including commercial and non-commercial participants in the global market are also covered in the report.Inquiry For Buying @Thus, the research report provides in-depth analysis covering all the major regions, competitors, and vital aspects of the Aircraft Brake System industry.About Us:MarketResearchStore.com is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics released by reputed private publishers and public organizations.Contact US:Joel JohnSuite #8138, 3422 SW 15 Street,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803
Anatomic Pathology Market Size, Share, Analysis, Industry Demand and Forecasts Report to 2022

Anatomic Pathology Market

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Market Research Globe states the newly formulated research report on Anatomic Pathology Market to their group of offerings.Report Includes:-The report based on the Anatomic Pathology Market renders a summary of this market segment including, classification, definition, applications, strategies, segments, process of manufacturing, product specs, value structures, geography-based regional analysis and value chain analysis. The market report provides exclusive highlights to key challenges and potential opportunities along with crucial statistics and data with present situation, forecasts, insights, etc. The research report puts light on prime dynamics of this market sector.Request for Sample Copy @The report comprises of thorough analysis of this market on a global level which impacts the market in terms of restrains, growth drivers, and vital trends. It will determine the market prospects in the coming years along with the profitable areas in the industry. This exhaustive report on Global Anatomic Pathology Market enables customers to evaluate the predicted future sales in the global market and in several regions with financial outcomes, interviews and forecasting returns. This report examines the import and export and accordingly compares the market directing on the development trend.Key features of the report: Industry overview including definitions, segments, classification based on products, application, geographical region and competitive market share Comprehensive evaluation of the market Statistically backed and industry validated market data Statistical analysis and factual data Forecasts of the market for the set time frame Developments and outlook based on the business SWOT analysis, qualitative analysis and commercial developments and product profiles Important participants, market trends, company profiles and business plansBrowse Full Report @Geographical insights:The report on the Global Anatomic Pathology Market enables the user have an extra edge across the focuses regions along with all-inclusive competitive framework. It studies the market based on various segments at regional level paired with profit, rate, price, forecast and approximates. The report examines this industrys market in various segments to determine and predicts the growth prospects for the future. Keeping in mind the current market size and future prospects, the report cloaks the regional analysis of the current market trends. It talks about the present market situation of the Anatomic Pathology in several major geographical locations such as Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific coupled with analysis of many countries markets for the demand for Anatomic Pathology like United Kingdom, Germany, South Korea, United States, China and Japan.Competitive Landscape:With the existence of substantial number of market players, the Global Anatomic Pathology Market is characterized. This market report enables distinguishing crucial organizations accountable for maximum potential. It assists a customer stay at the forefront by identifying the commercial prospects, capabilities, and development of the prime market players. The report states the newest enhanced technologies along with the main industry players which are profiled in this market report. Analysis of micro and macro elements important for the current market players and novel entrants enables the user to assess the competitive dynamics. The commercial insights and market analysis of Anatomic Pathology Market will make the customer remain knowledged with the worthy business intellect on this market.Check for Discount @Table of ContentsPart II Asia Anatomic Pathology Industry (The Report Company Including the Below Listed But Not All)Chapter Three Asia Anatomic Pathology Market Analysis3.1 Asia Anatomic Pathology Product Development History3.2 Asia Anatomic Pathology Competitive Landscape Analysis3.3 Asia Anatomic Pathology Market Development TrendChapter Four 2012-2017 Asia Anatomic Pathology Productions Supply Sales Demand Market Status and Forecast4.1 2012-2017 Anatomic Pathology Capacity Production Overview4.2 2012-2017 Anatomic Pathology Production Market Share Analysis4.3 2012-2017 Anatomic Pathology Demand Overview4.4 2012-2017 Anatomic Pathology Supply Demand and Shortage4.5 2012-2017 Anatomic Pathology Import Export Consumption4.6 2012-2017 Anatomic Pathology Cost Price Production Value Gross MarginChapter Five Asia Anatomic Pathology Key Manufacturers Analysis5.1 Company A5.1.1 Company Profile5.1.2 Product Picture and Specification5.1.3 Product Application Analysis5.1.4 Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value5.1.5 Contact Information5.2 Company B5.2.1 Company Profile5.2.2 Product Picture and Specification5.2.3 Product Application Analysis5.2.4 Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value5.2.5 Contact Information5.3 Company C5.3.1 Company Profile5.3.2 Product Picture and Specification5.3.3 Product Application Analysis5.3.4 Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value5.3.5 Contact Information5.4 Company D5.4.1 Company Profile5.4.2 Product Picture and Specification5.4.3 Product Application Analysis5.4.4 Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value5.4.5 Contact InformationChapter Six Asia Anatomic Pathology Industry Development Trend6.1 2017-2021 Anatomic Pathology Capacity Production Overview6.2 2017-2021 Anatomic Pathology Production Market Share Analysis6.3 2017-2021 Anatomic Pathology Demand Overview6.4 2017-2021 Anatomic Pathology Supply Demand and Shortage6.5 2017-2021 Anatomic Pathology Import Export Consumption6.6 2017-2021 Anatomic Pathology Cost Price Production Value Gross MarginEnquiry before Buying @About Market Research Globe:Market Research Globe is a competent consulting company in the field of Global Market Research. We provide our clients a wide range of customized Marketing and Business Research Solutions to choose from, with the help of our ingenious database developed by experts. We help our clients understand the strengths of diverse markets and how to exploit opportunities. Covering a diverse range of business scopes from Digital products to Food industry, we are your one- stop solution right from data collection to investment advices.Contact us:US: +1-888-376-9998Email- sales@marketresearchglobe.comWeb-
Global Sweet Almond Oil Market 2017 : Croda, Hallstar, Symrise AG, Lubrizol, Res Pharma and BASF

Sweet Almond Oil

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This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, covering- Croda- Hallstar- Shanghai Saifu Chemical Development Co., Ltd.- Symrise AG- AAK AB- Cosphatech LLC- Lubrizol- Res Pharma- BASF- LABIO. Co., Ltd.- Frank B. Ross, Inc.The survey report by Market Research Store is an overview of the global Sweet Almond Oil market. It covers all the recent trends including key developments in the global market in present and in future. Analyses of the global Sweet Almond Oil market trends along with the projections of CAGRs (compound annual growth rates) are provided in the research report.Further, an evaluation of the history of the global market and the basic information of the global market is included in the report. A developmental perspective of the industry is also documented in the report. Competitive profiles of the key players in the industry are also discussed.Click Here To Sample Report @The research report provides both an assessment of recent developments in the industry along with forecasts examining the industry from the perspective of major competitors, present players and prospective end users in the Sweet Almond Oil market.Forecasts are generated on the basis of region, type, product, supply, demand, and other vital factors of the global market. The research report analyzed the major factors driving the global Sweet Almond Oil market in various countries with a satisfactory and manufacturing and structure of the global market. Forecasts are also provided region-wise in the research report.The research report comprises several chapters, tables, figures, graphs, and various other presentations formats so as to provide a precise overview of the market. The sequence of the report is maintained in such a way that highlights the overall flow of the global market. Recent developments in the global market are further described in the research report. The report also summarizes latest trends along with abstracts of the Sweet Almond Oil market. Major competitors of the global market including commercial and non-commercial participants in the global market are also covered in the report.Inquiry For Buying @Thus, the research report provides in-depth analysis covering all the major regions, competitors, and vital aspects of the Sweet Almond Oil industry.About Us:MarketResearchStore.com is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics released by reputed private publishers and public organizations.Contact US:Joel JohnSuite #8138, 3422 SW 15 Street,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803
Signalling Device Market Intelligence and Forecast by Future Market Insights

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Signalling device is a device which generate an alarm to indicate or warn something/somebody & this alarm can be audible or visible depending upon the requirement, application and surrounding of the place where it is needed. These devices are connected with control panel, installed at specific positions so that people can be aware of it & take corrective measures when needed. As for the last some years we have been witnessing drastically change in climate with the occurrence of natural disasters like volcanos, Tsunami, Hurricanes,Earthquakes, in order to minimize the losses from these dreadful unavoidable disasters precautionary measures can be taken by using these signalling devices. Hence the demand of these signalling devices has been increasing in global market.Signalling devices are very important aspect in safety and security management such as mining safety system, Earthquake warning system, Heavy rainfall warning system, Traffic signalling & Fire alarm system. Signalling device continuously observe the parameters and produced safety alarm when observe something undesirable. These devices are manufactured for specific applications so it has some additional features also like fire alarm is made up of fireproof material & continuously to work even in fire.Signalling Device Market: DynamicsTechnological development of signalling devices is the key trend for this market. Market growth is driven by various growth drivers such as increase in the urbanization, growing demand for safety equipment and government focus on improving industrial safety by safety rules and regulations. On the other hand, lack of skilled professionals and high initial cost restraints the growth of this market.Request For Report Sample:Signalling Device Market: SegmentationSegmentation of signalling device market is done on the basis of product types, area of application, end users & geography. On the basis of product type signalling device market is segmented as visual signalling devices, Audible signal devices & other control devices. Further visual signalling device segment is sub-segmented as Beacons & Stack light. Electronics sounder buzzer hooters and bells are the sub segments of audible signalling device while fire alarm, push buttons, stop switches & pilot light are the sub-segments of control devices.On the basis of application, the global market is broadly segmented as Hazardous area signalling, Fire and industrial signalling & wide area signalling. On the basis of end user verticals signalling device market is segmented as Warehouse & factories, Marine, Mining, Commercial & others (sporting, emergency and warning).Geographically, global signalling device market is segmented into seven region such as; North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ), and Middle East and Africa (MEA). North America and Asia Pacific are expected to be the dominating geographies for signalling devices market across the globe.Request For TOC:Signalling Device Market: Key PlayersKey players of signalling devices market are Honeywell International Inc., Hollysys Automation Technologies Ltd, Thales Group, NHP Electrical Engineering Products, Cooper Industries, Koito Manufacturing Co., L3 Communications Holdings, Inc., Auer Signalgerate, Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V & others.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:
Diabetic Neuropathy Market Industry Analysis Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025

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The report on diabetic neuropathy market analyzes the current and future scenario of the global market. Increase in prevalence of diabetic neuropathy, advent of new therapeutics for treatment of neuropathy, favorable reimbursement scenario, and investment from key players in development of cost effective therapeutics for diabetic neuropathy are the major drivers of the global diabetic neuropathy market.Request For Sample Report :The diabetic neuropathy market report comprises an elaborate executive summary, which includes a market snapshot that provides information about various segments of the market. It also provides information and data analysis of the global diabetic neuropathy market with respect to the segments based on disorder type, treatment type, distribution channel and geography.A detailed qualitative analysis of drivers and restraints of the market and its opportunities has been provided in the market overview section. In addition, the section comprises Porters five forces analysis to understand the competitive landscape in the market. This section of the report also provides market attractiveness analysis, by geography and market share analysis by key players, thus presenting a thorough analysis of the overall competitive scenario in the global diabetic neuropathy market.Global Diabetic Neuropathy Market: SegmentationBased on disorder type, the diabetic neuropathy market is segmented as peripheral neuropathy, autonomic neuropathy, proximal neuropathy, focal neuropathy. The disorder type market segments have been analyzed based on available approved treatment for disorders and patient data. The market size and forecast for each of these segments have been provided for the period from 2015 to 2025, along with their respective CAGRs for the forecast period from 2017 to 2025, considering 2016 as the base year.Based on treatment type, diabetic neuropathy market is segmented into drugs, radiotherapy and physiotherapy. The drug segment is further segmented into analgesic, antidepressant, anticonvulsant drugs and other drugs. The analgesic segment is further segmented into topical, opioid, NSAIDs. The antidepressant segment is segmented into TCAs, SNRIs, and SSRIs. Radiotherapy segment is segmented into Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS), others.The market segments have been extensively analyzed based on demand for available treatment, and geographical coverage. The market size and forecast in terms of US$ Mn for each segment have been provided for the period from 2015 to 2025. The report also provides the compound annual growth rate (CAGR %) for each market segment for the forecast period from 2017 to 2025, considering 2016 as the base year.Browse Full Report With TOC :Global Diabetic Neuropathy Market: Regional AnalysisGeographically, the global diabetic neuropathy market has been categorized into five major regions and the key countries in the respective region: North America (the U.S., Canada), Europe (the U.K., Germany, Russia, France, Spain, Italy, and Rest of Europe), Asia Pacific (Japan, India, China, Australia & New Zealand and Rest of Asia Pacific), Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, and Rest of Latin America) and Middle East & Africa (South Africa, GCC countries and Rest of Middle East & Africa).The market size and forecast for each of these regions and the mentioned countries have been provided for the period from 2015 to 2025, along with their respective CAGRs for the forecast period from 2017 to 2025, considering 2016 as the base year. The research study also covers the competitive scenario in these regions.Global Diabetic Neuropathy Market: Competitive AnalysisThe report also profiles major players in the global diabetic neuropathy market based on various attributes such as company overview, financial overview, product portfolio, business strategies, and recent developments. Major players profiled in this report include  Johnson & Johnson (Janssen Global Services, LLC), Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, NeuroMetrix, Inc., Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline plc, Pfizer, Inc., Lupin Limited, Astellas Pharma Inc., Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Ltd, Arbor Pharmaceuticals, LLC, Depomed, Inc., and others.The Global Diabetic Neuropathy Market is segmented as given below:Global Diabetic Neuropathy Market, by ProductPeripheral NeuropathyAutonomic NeuropathyProximal NeuropathyFocal NeuropathyGlobal Diabetic Neuropathy Market, by Treatment TypeDrugAnalgesicTopicalCapsaicinOthersOpioidsMorphineOthersNSAIDsIbuprofenNaproxenOthersAntidepressantTCAsAmitriptylineImipramineOthersSNRIsDuloxetineOthersSSRIsCitalopramParoxetinOthersAnticonvulsantsGabapentinPregabalinTopimarateOthersOther DrugsRadiotherapyTENSOthersPhysiotherapyGlobal Diabetic Neuropathy Market, by Distribution ChannelHospitalsClinicsRetail PharmacyOnline PharmacyGlobal Diabetic Neuropathy Market, by GeographyNorth AmericaUSCanadaEuropeGermanyK.RussiaItalyFranceSpainRest of EuropeAsia PacificJapanIndiaChinaAustralia & New ZealandRest of Asia PacificLatin AmericaBrazilMexicoRest of Latin AmericaMiddle East & AfricaGCC countriesSouth AfricaRest of Middle East & AfricaMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of market intelligence reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.State Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United StatesTelephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comGoogle+:Linked in:Twitter:
Light Detection Ranging Market to See Incredible Growth by 2021

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Light Detection and Ranging, popularly known as LiDAR (derived from the common term RADAR) is a sensing technology that makes use of light pulses in the form of a laser to measure variable distances from the Earth. A three dimensional information about the surface characteristics and shape of Earth is obtained using this technology. LiDAR technology helps mapping professionals and scientists to examine and study man-made as well as natural environments with precision, accuracy and flexibility.Early, the use of LiDAR was confined to the government and military applications. However, with technological advancements, and reductions in the manufacturing cost of LiDARs, it is heavily penetrating into the industrial as well as the commercial sectors. A few of the major applications catered by LiDAR technology include: volumetric mapping, mining, forestry, archaeology, geology, seismology, mining, topographic surveying, and corridor mapping among others.To View Complete Report @ :Additionally, light detection and ranging also encompasses the field of civil engineering with its applications in transportation, urban mapping and planning, infrastructure projects, and roadway planning among others. Currently, civil engineering and planning are the top revenue grossing applications for light detection and ranging systems. The LiDAR market is classified on the basis product type: airborne LiDAR, Terrestrial LiDAR, Mobile LiDAR and Short range LiDAR. However technological innovations are boosting the cost-benefit ratio of terrestrial and mobile LiDAR systems. Further, the LiDAR market may also be classified based on its components such as the inertial navigation system, GPS/GNSS, laser diode, camera and MEMS mirror.A sample of this report is available upon request @Currently, there is no potential substitute for the LiDAR technology. Moreover, market has witnessed increased rapid growth in the automation provided by the LiDARs, along with the technological superiority in its field of application. Owing to these reasons, the LiDAR market is anticipated to grow at a substantial rate in near future. FARO, introduced Focus 3D LiDAR Scanner, a newly added low end device to the stationary 3D scanning market. The PrimeSense 3D Sensor, a non-traditional LiDAR, delivers an innovative solution which is adapted for real-time robotic navigation and is expected to fuel the 3D scanning LiDAR market. The recently found wide application of LiDAR technology in the digital mapping area has helped growth of this technology. Additionally, the introduction of low-cost, hand-held LiDARs is expected to reform the surveying sector in the coming five years.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @Some of the reasons responsible for a slow growth of the LiDAR market is high cost of the equipments and lack of awareness amongst the masses about the adoption of this technology. With technological advancements, LiDARs have found its usage in the field of agriculture majorly to create a topographical map of the fields that reveals the slopes and sun exposure of the farm land. This technology helps farmers to achieve the highest crop yield by indicating key areas for the usage of expensive fertilizers. In addition, the researchers are working on terrestrial LiDARs for automated indoor modeling, which would aid them in modeling interiors of the building.The LiDAR market is geographically diversified with its origin almost across the globe. Some of the key competitors in this market include RIEGL Laser Measurement Systems GmbH, Leica Geosystems, Renishaw Plc, Airborne imaging, Inc., Trimble Navigation Limited and Optech, IncAbout UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Now Available Global Microscope Digital Cameras Market Forecast And Growth 2017-2027

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Microscope Digital Cameras its a new generation for microscope to visualization and characterization of the biological activities under the microscope. Microscope was evolved at Netherlands in1620s, it was a compound microscope. Microscope digital cameras provide the image in a classic way to analysis and process for further understanding in biological research, cancer research, and clinical research.Microscope digital cameras are of various type based on the lens, sensors, and used as CCD cameras is the most mature camera in technology and in pixels. Microscope digital cameras is the perfect balance between technology and biological actives or industrial actives.Microscope Digital Cameras Market: Drivers and RestraintsMicroscope digital cameras market is expected to grow over the forecasted period as the demand of high end research and examination for the sample. Microscope digital camera are used in both biological and industrial segments. The industrial microscope digital camera measure the quality and inspect the process, biological microscope provide the live analysis of the sample with quality and quantity. This segments provide a broad range to the market to come up with new and improve microscope digital camera. The price range of the microscope digital camera with unique feature also provide a growing market. As of restraints the very less players are investing time for research on different microscope digital cameras for different application or used.Request Report Sample@Microscope Digital Cameras Market: SegmentationMicroscope Digital Cameras segmentation based on:Based on type:Biological MicroscopeIndustrial MicroscopeVisualization:ColourMonochromeCamera Mount:C-mountOcular MountSensor Type:Cooled CCD/CMOSNon-Cooled CCD/CMOSCMOS (Complementary metal oxide semiconductor)CCD (Charge-coupled device)End users:HospitalsResearch labs (Clinical and Non-Clinical)Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology industryCosmetologist ClinicMicroscope Digital Cameras Market: OverviewMicroscope digital cameras market is highly fragmented due to the several local and international players with different product in biological and industrial as (DP 74, DP 27 launched by Olympus for microscope with the Image analysis software as Olympus stream). Various other new product are under development, so that the outcome from the cameras will be up to the mark for making the analysis flexible and ease to use.Microscope Digital Cameras Market: Region-wise OutlookGeographically, Microscope Digital Cameras Market is segmented into North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, Japan, Middle East and Africa. North America and Asia Pacific is a growing market as many research oriented programs are going on and the industrial are also using the microscope digital cameras market.Visit For TOC@Microscope Digital Cameras Market: Key PlayersSome of the players in microscope digital cameras market are Leica Microsystems, Nikon Metrology NV, Vision Engineering, Olympus Corporation, ZEISS Group, Local players are also have their presence.About Us  Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and IndiaCONTACT:616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Automotive Composites Market Report  Actionable Insights and Recommendation

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The growing technological advancement and consistent focus on high performance vehicle has surged demand for automotive composites. A composite is a composition of two or more chemically different phases and insoluble materials which are of high performance fiber like carbon or glass in a matrix material like epoxy polymer that when combined with each other provides much more enhanced properties as compared with the properties of the individual materials itself. Such composites when deployed in automobiles and automotive are then called automotive composites. The main advantage of using automotive composites in the manufacturing of vehicles like cars, trolleys, trucks etc. is that they are approximately 60% lighter than steel or iron and are good in terms of stiffness and strength. Moreover, automotive composites are corrosion resistant unlike steel. Vehicle weight is an important factor in respect to performance of a vehicle. Automotive composites can significantly increase the fuel economy of the vehicle by reducing the vehicle weight. Automotive composites can be added to the vehicles body in a single layer as well as in multiple layers. One material between two other materials when mixed gives a sandwich composite which can be used in the construction of the roof and inner coatings of the vehicle. The automotive composites are used in the manufacture and refurbishing of vehicles like cars, utility vehicles, and inner coatings of vehicles, trucks, buses and vehicle interiors. Automotive composites increase the vehicles resistance to heat as well as reduces the external impact on the vehicle.Global Automotive Composites Market: SegmentationOn the basis of composite material type, the global automotive composites market can be segmented into:Metal CompositesPolymer CompositesNatural Fiber CompositesGlass Fiber CompositesCarbon Fiber CompositesCeramic Matrix CompositesRequest For Report Sample:On the basis of manufacturing process, the global automotive composites market can be segmented into:Compression ProcessInjection ProcessManual ProcessOthersOn the basis of composite component application, the global automotive composites market can be segmented into:Engine ComponentsDrivetrain ComponentsInterior ComponentExterior ComponentsOthersGlobal Automotive Composites Market: Drivers & RestraintsIncreasing urban population is the key factor driving the growth of the global automotive composites market. Moreover, rising industrialization in developing countries like India, China etc. is a key element encouraging the deployment of automotive manufacturing facilities in these countries. Increasing automobile production globally is a major factor fuelling the growth of the overall global automotive composites market. Further, increasing carbon emissions from vehicles is promoting the governmental bodies to revamp several aspects in a way to adhere to environmental regulations and norms thus boosting the growth of the global automotive composites market. Since deployment of automotive composites in vehicles increase the vehicles fuel efficiency and reduces the vehicle weight by 60%, customers are more tending towards vehicles made of automotive composites thus driving the growth of the global automotive composites market. Increased demand for electric and hybrid vehicles are also boosting the growth of the market.Request For TOC:The high cost of manufacturing composite materials is the major challenge faced by the global automotive composites market. Moreover, use of automotive composites in high end vehicle models is acting as a challenge to the growth of the global automotive composites market as customers prioritize to buy mid-range vehicles instead of high end vehicles. Moreover, manufacturing of automotive composites take a much longer time than steel and aluminum thus this factor is also acting as a minor restraint in the market.Global Automotive Composites Market: Key PlayersThe key players identified in the global automotive composites market are:Owens CorningToray Industries IncJohns ManvilleCytec Market IndustriesSGL GroupNippon Sheet Glass CompanyTeijin LimitedJushi Group Co, Ltd.SAERTEX GmbH & Co. KGJohnson Controls, Inc.E.I. du Pont de Nemours and CompanyUFP Technologies, Inc.Scott Bader Company Ltd.Koninklijke Ten Cate N.V.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:
Influenza Diagnostics Market 2016-2024 Industry Size, Shares, Research Trends

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Influenza, commonly known as flu, is an infectious disease caused by the influenza virus. Three varieties of this virus affect people: type A, type B, and type C. Influenza spreads through infectious respiratory secretions caused by aerosol formation due to direct contact with an infected person. This virus can cause seasonal epidemics with high levels of morbidity and mortality. According to WHO, these epidemics were estimated to result in about 3 to 5 million annual cases of severe illness, and about 250,000 to 500,000 annual deaths worldwide. In 2009, a pandemic of influenza A, which spread quickly to many countries, gained the attention of scientists to focus on better diagnosis of the virus.Initiatives by government bodies such as WHO and CDC to control and prevent influenza are a factor driving the influenza diagnostics market. Furthermore, the growing amount of research and development, technological advancements in diagnostic tests, and rising demand for influenza diagnosis are likely to propel this market during the forecast period. However the increasing prices of kits and reagents may pose a hindrance.Obtain Report Details:The influenza diagnostics market has been segmented by test type, end-users, and geography. In terms of test type, the divisions include rapid influenza diagnostic tests (RIDT), RT-PCR, cell culture, and others, including serology and immunofluorescence tests. The market share of RIDT has increased considerably due to its ability to provide quick results and recent approvals by the FDA. Based on end-users, the market is split into the following categories: hospitals, research centers, diagnostic laboratories, and point of care testing centers. Currently, hospitals hold a major share in the influenza diagnostics market due to regular epidemics, their easy accessibility, and a generally higher preference for this establishment; however, point of care testing is also likely to develop at a significant rate during the forecast period owing to the ease of usage that the medium offers.Geographically, the influenza diagnostics market is distributed over North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East and Africa. North America constituted a substantial share in the market due to factors such as initiatives by government bodies to control the disease rates, technological advancements, health awareness among population, and research. The market in Asia Pacific is projected to expand rapidly due to its higher disease burden, higher rate of population, and rising initiatives to control the disease rate. For example, the CDC funds non research-related bilateral influenza cooperative agreements in South-East Asia aimed at routine diagnosis of seasonal flu and pandemic influenza.Fill the form for an exclusive sample of this report:Some of the key players in the influenza diagnostics market include Becton Dickinson and Company, Roche Diagnostics, Alere Scarborough, Inc, Princeton BioMedtech corp, Sekisui Diagnostics, SA Scientific, Inc, Quidel Corporation, Meridian Bioscience, Inc, and Thermo Fisher Scientific. These companies focus on introduction of cost-effective products with the ability to deliver quick results. For example, the Alere i test to diagnose types A and B of influenza within 15 minutes was cleared for marketing by the FDA in June 2014.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.Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a U.S.-based provider of syndicated research, customized research, and consulting services. TMRs global and regional market intelligence coverage includes industries such as pharmaceutical, chemicals and materials, technology and media, food and beverages, and consumer goods, among others. Each TMR research report provides clients with a 360-degree view of the market with statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, detailed segmentation, key trends, and strategic recommendations.Contact us:Transparency Market Research90 State Street,Suite 700,AlbanyNY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
State Debate: Foxconn would surely help state's economy, but investing local would be better, claims blogger John Torinus
Turbine Inlet Cooling System Market Intelligence Report for Comprehensive Information

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Increasing demand for power and energy across the globe has led to an increase in number of new gas turbines globally. This increasing installation rate is expected to directly impact the demand for turbine inlet cooling systems. Cooling, in case of the turbines, plays a very important role as lowering the temperature by even a few degrees can improve power output substantially. For power generation plants located in regions having hot & arid, hot & humid climate and seasonal heat, implementing the perfect cooling system is must in order to prevent unnecessary power losses and thus drop in overall power generation plant efficiency. In absence of a proper cooling system, power plants may need to install an additional turbine to bear the power losses. To avoid such uneconomical practices power plants usually incorporate turbine inlet cooling systems. The turbine cooling system market is expected to be profitable market as it provides cost-effective power augmentation. The global turbine inlet cooling system market is segmented on the basis of technology and regions.Turbine Inlet Cooling System Market: Drivers & RestraintsThe increasing demand for power and energy and social concerns such as conservation of energy drives players in the market to focus on reducing energy losses and implementing turbine inlet cooling systems. Further the increased adoption of gas fired power plants increases the requirement for turbine inlet cooling system. However, cost factor and economic downturns globally may act as restraint for the turbine inlet cooling system market.Request For Report Sample:Turbine Inlet Cooling System Market: SegmentationOn the basis of technology, the turbine inlet cooling system market is segmented as:Inlet FoggingMechanical ChillersWet CompressionOthers (Hybrid Systems, Absorption Cooling, LNG Vaporization)Turbine Inlet Cooling System Market: Region-wise OutlookAs of 2013, North America accounted for largest share in the global turbine inlet cooling system market, owing to presence of regions with large power generation facilities/infrastructure such as U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Further, the increasing share of natural gas power production in the region is projected to boost the demand for turbine inlet cooling system. Following footsteps of North America, Europe is the next lucrative market for turbine inlet cooling systems with large number of gas turbine installation in the region. Turbine inlet cooling systems becomes primarily important for the regions with high heat during summers, therefore both Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa are expected to contribute significantly to the growth of global turbine inlet cooling system market.Request For TOC:Turbine Inlet Cooling System Market: Key PlayersThe key players identified in the turbine inlet cooling system market are:American Moistening Company Inc.Siemens AGScore Energy LimitedHumifrio S.L.Baltec IES Pty. Ltd.Camfil Power SystemsCaldwell Energy Company Inc.Mee Industries Inc.UTC Technologies CompanyCat Pumps Inc.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT: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:
Oilfield Chemical Market Forecast Report Offers Actionable Insights

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The increasing population have augmented the energy requirements of the country. In order to cope with energy demands more Oil and Gas E&P initiatives are being taken to cover the household and industrial energy requirement. With the products of oil industries & Gas manufacturing process fuelling various different industries from chemical to cosmetic hence it is necessary to use ensure that only quality product with minimum wastage is available . In order to ensure easy extraction, production a rich and refined product we use oilfield chemicals. With the use of Oilfields chemicals ensure an increase in efficiency oilfield activities such as drilling, completion, production, cementing and enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The Specialty oilfield chemicals impart unique attributes and functionality to the crude product to enhance their recovery of hydrocarbons from the well. Various categories of specialty oilfield chemicals include corrosion inhibitors, emulsion breakers (demulsifiers), surfactants and advanced polymers. Emulsion breakers are used to separate oil and water from crude oil water emulsions and corrosion inhibitors are those chemicals that inhibit corrosion of mild steel equipments in any aqueous medium. Hence, such agent help in increasing the export value of the crude oil thus are essential for use of the Oil and Gas industry.Oilfield Chemical Market: Drivers & RestraintsTo meet the ever increasing demands of energy more Onshore and offshore exploration initiatives are being taken therefore driving the market for oilfield chemicals The increase drilling activity and use of technologies such as hydraulic fracturing and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) boost the demand of oilfield chemicals on global basis to ensure efficient oil and gas recovery. The development in the Oil and Gas industry will directly affect the oilfield chemical market. In order to get premium crude oil with high hydrocarbon content the usage of EOR chemicals is also increasing. These efforts will boost demand for EOR chemicals and of stimulation fluids. Crude oil price volatility could prove as a restrain to the market of Oilfield chemicals over the forecast period. With developing fields of unconventional energy sources the over dependence on hydrocarbons is decreasing and hence the research for environment friendly and biodegradable oilfield chemicals provide promising opportunities in the market for industry participants.Request For Report Sample:Oilfield Chemical Market: SegmentationThe Oilfield chemicals can be segmented on the basis of its function as:Drilling FluidsWater-Based MudsOil-Based MudsSynthetic-Based MudsWork over and Completion FluidsCementing ChemicalsStimulation ChemicalsOilfield Chemical are segmented on the basis of Enhanced Oil Recovery Chemicals as:Alkali Surfactant Polymer FloodingLow-Salinity Water InjectionWater Shut-Off ChemicalsCarbon Dioxide FloodingMicrobial IOROilfield Chemical Market: Regional OutlookThe Middle East being one of the largest markets for crude oil applications such as oil-based power plants, petro refineries, and sludge oil treatment and with the discoveries of more fields in different regions will be one of the strongest and largest market for oilfield chemical and will project greatest growth potential over the forecast years. The growth potential for the regions of Russia will prove to be strong and positive reinforcement for the oilfield market. The shale gas production in U.S. is expected to provide a boost to the Oilfield chemical market.Growth in Latin America, particularly in Brazil and Venezuela, has been significant but could be influenced by the political instability. In Asia Pacific, the emerging economies of China and India are said to one of the most promising market for oilfield chemicals with increase in oil extraction activities.Request For TOC:Oilfield Chemical Market: Key playersSome of the key players in the Oilfield chemical market are Schlumberger, Stephan Company BASF SE, Dow Chemicals Co., The Lubrizol Corporation, Azko Nobel N.V.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:
Sensor Devices for Mobile Health Care Market Trends, Regulatory Landscape and Operational Strategies 2025

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Mobile health, also known as mHealth, is medical care provided using mobile devices. Sensor is a type of device that detects and responds to inputs from physical environment. Advances in telecommunication and sensor manufacturing have brought new technologies and applications in mobile health care. The primary reason to use sensors in mHealth is to improve the quality of and provide easy access to health care services. Integration of sensor device into electronics enables health care providers to gather medical data, provide home care, and other preventive digital health programs. Mobile-based health care solutions can also decrease service cost.Obtain Report Details:The global sensor devices for mobile health care market is expected to witness robust growth during the forecast period owing to maturation of technology leading to miniaturization of sensor devices. Major factors propelling the market are low cost of sensors, integration of sensors into consumer devices, surging geriatric population, rise in awareness about health and fitness, increase in remote patient monitoring, and prevalence of chronic and lifestyle diseases. Surge in penetration rate of mobile and smartphone and reimbursement policies are the other factors likely to drive the global market from 2017 to 2025. Regulatory issues, privacy and security concerns, lack of clarity in health communication, and standard protocols are projected to restrain the global sensor devices for mobile health care market during the forecast period.The global sensor devices for mobile health care market can be segmented base on product type, application, and region. In terms of product type, the global market can be divided into microphone sensors, camera sensors, accelerometer sensors & geolocation facilities, and others. Based on application, the global sensor devices for mobile health care market can be segmented into health and wellness monitoring, safety monitoring, home rehabilitation, early diagnosis of disorders, efficacy assessment (clinical trials), and others. The health and wellness segment is expected to witness high growth owing to rise in awareness about fitness and health and prevalence of chronic disease.Geographically, the sensor devices for mobile health care market can be segmented into five regions: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, and Latin America. North America is expected to dominate the global market in terms of value and volume, followed by Europe. Growth of the market in North America is attributed to rapid innovation of technology, rise in enthusiasm in individuals about gathering quantified data about their health, and prevalence of unhealthy lifestyle.Fill the form for an exclusive sample of this report:The sensor devices for health care market in Asia Pacific is expected to experience fastest growth rate owing to improving technology, rise in geriatric population, health awareness initiatives undertaken by governments, change in lifestyle, and rise in awareness about health and fitness. China is expected to be the fastest growing market due to factors such as low cost, easy availability of the devices, and growing population.The massive potential of the worlds smallest sensor device integrated into consumer devices is the future of the global market. Hence, to maintain a significant position in the global sensor devices for mobile health care market, the key players are adopting various strategies such developing a technologically advanced and highly efficient product, mergers and acquisitions, and geographical expansion to enter into untapped market. Key players operating in the global market are Apple, Inc., Fitbit, Inc., Koninklijke Philips N.V., Samsung, and Medtronic MiniMed.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.Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a U.S.-based provider of syndicated research, customized research, and consulting services. TMRs global and regional market intelligence coverage includes industries such as pharmaceutical, chemicals and materials, technology and media, food and beverages, and consumer goods, among others. Each TMR research report provides clients with a 360-degree view of the market with statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, detailed segmentation, key trends, and strategic recommendations.Contact us:Transparency Market Research90 State Street,Suite 700,AlbanyNY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Growth Opportunities in Microwave Absorbing Materials Market New Research Report

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Microwave absorbing materials absorb radio waves, micro waves & electromagnetic waves of wide frequency range -- from 100 MHz to a millimeter or a micron wave. These materials are commonly used in stealth technology for air-space, marine & military warfare, and signal transmission & reception process. These materials also find applications as a shield from high intensity electromagnetic fields/waves generated during medical diagnostics such as MRI, CAT scans.The properties of microwave absorbing materials include wave reflection reduction, resonance cavity reduction, and null echo. Finished products made using microwave absorbing materials find applications across defense, telecommunication, core & applied electronics industry.Request For Report Sample:Microwave Absorbing Materials Market: Segmentation & TrendsMicrowave absorbing materials are available into following types:Films & ElastomersFoamsMilitary Specialty Microwave and Custom Magnetic AbsorbersMolded, Cast Liquids and CoatingsMajor end-use application sectors include:Military & Defense.AutomationElectronics & TelecommunicationsChemicalsTextilesHealthcareThe global microwave absorbing materials market is skilled-labour-intensive with focus on new product & application developments, and diversification of existing product types a key focus area for manufacturers. The customers requirements range from a standard prototype to a customised one. Concept marketing and product marketing are the key go-to marketing strategies for key players in this region.The global microwave absorbing market has seen many acquisitions by large-scale enterprises, which has been a synergy of supporting capital & expertise in technical know-how. Industrial exhibitions, trade fairs, defense expo are the common platforms of marketing & promotion for the value & supply chain players. The market is oligopoly type, which consists of few specialised manufacturers -- backed by regional distributors & suppliers with defense & telecommunication -- as the major consumer markets.Request For TOC:Microwave Absorbing Materials Market DynamicsThe major producers of microwave absorbing materials are located in North America & other OECD group Nations. U.S. defense sector is a major consumer & one of the key drivers for the markets evolution and growth. The electronic component manufacturing sector in the Asia Pacific region is likely to witness next wave of development over the coming five to six years, creating opportunities for microwave absorbing material manufacturers.Microwave Absorbing Materials Market: Drivers and RestraintsIncrease in spending on defense systems and sustained demand for finished electronic goods will continue to fuel the growth of the microwave absorbing materials market during the forecast period, 2016-2026. On the other hand, taxes & cess imposed on raw materials & finished goods of microwave absorbents and unfavourable export & import policies can act as a deterrent.Microwave Absorbing Materials Industry: Key PlayersThe key players involved in manufacturing of microwave absorbing materials are Lairdtech, ESCO Technologies Corporation, ARC Technologies Inc., Western Rubber & Supply, Inc., Cuming Microwave, Mast Technologies, Thorndike Corporation, Parker Hannifin Corp. and Panashield etc. apart from other existing local & regional manufacturers of respective markets.Browse Full Report: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:
Nutricosmetics Market To Reach US$7.93 bn In 2025

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"The Latest Research Report Nutricosmetics Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2025 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Nutricosmetics MarketNutricosmetics is an oral based natural heath products which include specific nutrients and antioxidant that provides treatment or prevents problems in skin, hair and nails arising due to several deficiencies such as lack in vitamin B12, vitamin D, vitamin A and vitamin C. Consumers over the years have become conscious about the wellbeing of the skin, hair and overall health. The global Nutricosmetics market has been segmented on the basis of product types, primary function, distribution channel, and region. Based on product types, the market has been segmented into supplements and beauty beverages/drinks. The supplements have been further segmented into tablets, capsules, powder and liquids. Based on primary function, the market has been segmented into skin care, hair care, nail care, weight management and multifunctional. Skin care has been further segmented into sun care, anti-aging, radiance, and glow, anti-acne, pimple. The market has been further segmented on the basis of distribution channel into modern trade, health and beauty stores, specialty stores, pharmacy stores and E-commerce.Global Nutricosmetics Market: Scope of StudyThe report also analyzes factors driving and inhibiting growth of the glass tableware market. The report will help manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors to understand the present and future trends in this market and formulate strategies accordingly. The market has been tracked in terms of revenue (US$ Mn) and the same has been segmented based on product type, primary function, and distribution channel.Get Sample copy of this Report @Global Nutricosmetics Market: Market DynamicsThe demand for organic products among the consumers have surged to a great extent in the past few years, on account of increasing awareness about the benefits offered by natural products. Synthetic products are inclusive of harmful chemicals that may have adverse effects on human health. Due to this issue, health conscious consumers are shifting their focus towards natural products. Introduction of new innovative nutricosmetic products having organic elements is another key factor driving the sales of nutricosmetic products. In recent periods, products have been launched presenting innovative elements such as oils, barks, fruits, roots, and seeds. In addition, fruit extracts, green tea, and coenzyme Q10 are the other commonly used ingredients in nutricosmetic products. These are some major factors responsible for the switch from synthetic products to natural products. The popularity of nutricosmetics among the aging population is also considered as one of the key drivers of the global nutricosmetics market. Rapidly growing base of aging population coupled with increasing awareness about health and wellness is also fuelling the demand for nutricosmetics at present.Additionally, many countries across the globe are expected to serve as potentially good markets for nutricosmetic products. For instance, the demand for nutricosmetics products has increased in Asia Pacific. In addition, Japan has made rapid progress with regards to the growth of this market. Further, China is expected to register a healthy growth in the forecast period. Taiwan and South Korea are expected to be lucrative regions for nutricosmetics in coming years.View Report @Moreover, in this report, the study provides different countries included in different regions such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East and Africa. Europe which includes EU5, Nordic, Russia, and Poland among the other regions dominated the global Nutri cosmetics market due to rising consciousness regarding health and beauty among the people. EU5 among the other regions in Europe captured a large part of the market share in 2016. Asia Pacific which includes India, China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand among the other regions also captured a significant market share in 2016. Japan dominated the Nutri cosmetics market among the other regions due to its product launches in recent years which include collagen-based drinks and vitamin infused sodas. North America, which includes the U.S. and Canada showed the fastest growth rate during the forecast period due to the rapid adoption rate of nutricosmetics among the consumers.Global Nutricosmetics Market: Competitive LandscapeThe report provides company market share analysis of the various key participants. Key players have also been profiled on the basis of company overview, financial overview, business strategies and SWOT Analysis. Global key participants of the cosmetic ingredient market include Cargill Incorporated (Minnesota, U.S.), E. I. Du Pont De Nemours and Company (Delaware, U.S.A.), Nestle S.A. (Vevey, Switzerland), LOreal SA (Clichy France), The Coca-Cola company (Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.), Skinside AG (Switzerland), Croda International Plc (East Yorkshire U.S.A), Pfizer Inc.(NewYork, U.S.A), Frutarom Industries Limited (Haifa District, Israel), Nutrikosm (Barcelona, Spain), Robinson Pharma Incorporated (Santa Ana, CA, U.S.A.), Shiseido (Tokyo, Japan), Ashland Incorporated (Kentucky, U.S.A.), Vitabiotics Company (London, U.K.), Medcoll Bio (Westmeath, Ireland).Send An Enquiry Request @The global nutricosmetics market is segmented as follows;-Global Nutricosmetics Market, by Product TypeSupplementsTabletCollagen PeptidesVitamins and MineralsProteinsHerbal ExtractsPlant and Fruit ExtractsCapsuleCollagen PeptidesVitamins and MineralsProteinsHerbal ExtractsPlant and Fruit ExtractsPowderCollagen PeptidesVitamins and MineralsProteinsHerbal ExtractsPlant and Fruit ExtractsLiquidCollagen PeptidesVitamins and MineralsProteinsHerbal ExtractsPlant and Fruit ExtractsBeauty Beverages/DrinksCollagen PeptidesVitamins and MineralsProteinsHerbal ExtractsPlant and Fruit ExtractsGlobal Nutricosmetics Market, by Primary FunctionSkin CareSun CareCollagen PeptidesVitamins and MineralsProteinsHerbal ExtractsPlant and Fruit ExtractsAnti AgeingCollagen PeptidesVitamins and MineralsProteinsHerbal ExtractsPlant and Fruit ExtractsRadiance and GlowCollagen PeptidesVitamins and MineralsProteinsHerbal ExtractsPlant and Fruit ExtractsAnti Acne/PimpleCollagen PeptidesVitamins and MineralsProteinsHerbal ExtractsPlant and Fruit ExtractsHair and Nail CareCollagen PeptidesVitamins and MineralsProteinsHerbal ExtractsPlant and Fruit ExtractsWeight ManagementCollagen PeptidesVitamins and MineralsProteinsHerbal ExtractsPlant and Fruit ExtractsMulti FunctionalCollagen PeptidesVitamins and MineralsProteinsHerbal ExtractsPlant and Fruit ExtractsGlobal Nutricosmetics Market, by Distribution ChannelModern TradeHealth and Beauty StoresSpecialty StoresPharmacy StoresE-CommerceGlobal Nutricosmetics Market, by Geography:North AmericaU.S.CanadaEuropeEU5NordicPolandRest of EuropeAsia PacificIndiaChinaJapanAustraliaNew ZealandRest of Asia PacificMiddle East and AfricaGCCNorth AfricaSouth AfricaRest of Middle East & AfricaLatin AmericaBrazilArgentinaMexicoRest of Latin AmericaMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.Mr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz
Global Interactive Display Market 2017 : Panasonic, Sharp, BenQ, Hitachi and TouchMagix

Interactive Display

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This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, covering- Samsung Display Co., Ltd.- NEC- Panasonic- Planar Systems- Sharp- Smart Technologies- BenQ- LG Electronics- Flextronics International- Hitachi- Julong Educational Technology- Meridian Kiosks- Phoenix Kiosk- Promethean World- Rosendahl Concept KioskThe survey report by Market Research Store is an overview of the global Interactive Display market. It covers all the recent trends including key developments in the global market in present and in future. Analyses of the global Interactive Display market trends along with the projections of CAGRs (compound annual growth rates) are provided in the research report.Further, an evaluation of the history of the global market and the basic information of the global market is included in the report. A developmental perspective of the industry is also documented in the report. Competitive profiles of the key players in the industry are also discussed.Click Here To Sample Report @The research report provides both an assessment of recent developments in the industry along with forecasts examining the industry from the perspective of major competitors, present players and prospective end users in the Interactive Display market.Forecasts are generated on the basis of region, type, product, supply, demand, and other vital factors of the global market. The research report analyzed the major factors driving the global Interactive Display market in various countries with a satisfactory and manufacturing and structure of the global market. Forecasts are also provided region-wise in the research report.The research report comprises several chapters, tables, figures, graphs, and various other presentations formats so as to provide a precise overview of the market. The sequence of the report is maintained in such a way that highlights the overall flow of the global market. Recent developments in the global market are further described in the research report. The report also summarizes latest trends along with abstracts of the Interactive Display market. Major competitors of the global market including commercial and non-commercial participants in the global market are also covered in the report.Inquiry For Buying @Thus, the research report provides in-depth analysis covering all the major regions, competitors, and vital aspects of the Interactive Display industry.About Us:MarketResearchStore.com is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics released by reputed private publishers and public organizations.Contact US:Joel JohnSuite #8138, 3422 SW 15 Street,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803
Polyester Staple Fiber Market To Reach US$34.546 bn In 2025

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"The Latest Research Report Polyester Staple Fiber Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Polyester Staple Fiber MarketPolyester staple fiber is a synthetic fiber solely comprising of a polyester. It is made from PTA & MEG or PET Chips or from Recycled PET Bottle Flakes. PSF made from PTA & MEG or PET Chips is known as Virgin PSF and PSF made from Recycled PET Flakes is called Recycled PSF. Polyester staple fiber has emerged as the fastest-growing fibre amongst all types of manufactured fibers. It widely used in textile, automotive and furniture industries.The report estimates and forecasts the polyester staple fiber market on the global, regional, and country levels. The study provides forecast between 2017 and 2025 based on volume (Kilo Tons) and revenue (US$ Mn) with 2016 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.The study includes drivers and restraints for the polyester staple fiber 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 polyester staple fiber 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.Get Sample copy of this Report @The report includes Porters Five Forces Model to determine the degree of competition in the polyester staple fiber 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 polyester staple fiber between 2017 and 2025.Global Polyester Staple Fiber Market: SegmentationThe study provides a comprehensive view of the polyester staple fiber market by dividing it on the basis of end-use and geography segments. The polyester staple fiber market has been segmented into apparels, automotive, home furnishing, filtration, construction, personal care & hygiene and others based on application. Applications segment have been analyzed based on historic, present, and future trends.View Report @Regional segmentation includes the current and forecast demand for polyester staple fiber 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 application segments. Key countries such as the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, the U.K., Spain, Italy, India, China, Japan, South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil have been included in the study. Market segmentation includes demand for individual applications in all the regions and countries.Global Polyester Staple Fiber Market: Competitive AnalysisThe 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 Alpek S.A.B. de C.V., Indorama Ventures Public Company Limited, Toray Industries, Inc., China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation, Reliance Industries Limited, W. Barnet GmbH & Co. KG, Far Eastern New Century Corporation, Tongkun Group Zhejiang Hengsheng Chemical Fiber Co., Ltd., Zhejiang Hengyi Group Company Ltd., Jiangsu Sanfangxiang Group, ICI Pakistan Limited, XINDA Corp, Komal Fibres, Bombay Dyeing, Nirmal Fibres (P) Ltd., and Ganesha Ecosphere. 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).Send An Enquiry Request @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.The global polyester staple fiber market has been segmented as follows:Polyester Staple Fiber Market  Type AnalysisSolidSemi-dull Optical WhiteBright Optical WhiteBlack Dope DyedColored Dope DyedOthers Semi-dullOthers BrightHollowPolyester Staple Fiber Market  Origin AnalysisVirginRecycledBlend of Virgin & RecycledPolyester Staple Fiber Market  End-user AnalysisApparelAutomotiveHome FurnishingFiltrationConstructionPersonal Care & HygieneOthersPolyester Staple Fiber Market  Regional AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.CanadaEuropeGermanyFranceU.K.ItalySpainRest of EuropeAsia PacificChinaIndiaJapanASEANRest of Asia PacificMiddle East & AfricaGCCSouth AfricaRest of Middle East & AfricaLatin AmericaBrazilMexicoRest of Latin AmericaTable of Content1. Preface1.1 Report Scope and Market Segmentation1.2 Research Highlights1.3 Research Objectives1.4 Key Questions Answered2. Assumptions and Research Methodology2.1 Assumptions and Acronyms Used2.2 Research Methodology3. Executive Summary3.1 Global Polyester Staple Fiber Market Size, by Market Value (US$ Mn) and Market Value Share, by Region, 20163.2 Regional Overview, 20253.3 Top 3 Application Share % Market Share Global4. Market Overview4.1 Product Overview4.2 Key Industry Developments4.3 Polyester Staple Fiber Market Overview, 2016 and 20254.4 Key Market Indicators4.5 Drivers and Restraints Snapshot Analysis4.6 Polyester Staple Fiber Market - Global Supply Demand Scenario4.7 Global Demand-Supply Scenario, 201520204.8 Porters Analysis4.9 Value Chain Analysis4.10 List of Manufacturers4.11 List of Mills4.12 List of Retailers/Brand4.13 List of End-users4.14 Polyester Staple Fiber Market Outlook, by % Market Share (by Revenue), 20164.15 Market Value Share, by End-user (2016)5. Global Polyester Staple Fiber Market Analysis, By Origin5.1 Introduction5.2 Key Findings5.3 Key Trends5.4 Market Size (US$ Mn) and Volume (Kilo Tons) Forecast, by Origin5.5 Origin Comparison Matrix5.6 Market Attractiveness, by Origin6. Global Polyester Staple Fiber Market Analysis, By Type6.1 Introduction6.2 Key Findings6.3 Key Trends6.4 Market Size (US$ Mn) and Volume (Kilo Tons) Forecast, by Type6.5 Type Comparison Matrix6.6 Market Attractiveness, by Type7. Global Polyester Staple Fiber Market Analysis, By End-user7.1 Introduction7.2 Key Findings7.3 Key Trends7.4 Market Size (US$ Mn) and Volume (Kilo Tons) Forecast, by Type7.5 End-user Comparison Matrix7.6 Market Attractiveness, by End-userMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.Mr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz
Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC) Market To Reach US$ 62.71 bn By 2025

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"The Latest Research Report Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC) Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC) MarketThis report on the global Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC) market provides analysis for the period 20152025, wherein 2016 is the base year and the period from 2017 to 2025 is the forecast period. Data for 2015 has been included as historical information. The report covers market dynamics including drivers, restraints, opportunities, and trends expected to influence the global PMIC market growth during the said period. Technologies that are playing a major role in the driving the global PMIC market have also been covered in the study. The study provides a comprehensive analysis on market growth throughout the above forecast period in terms of revenue estimates (in US$ Bn), across different geographies.Global Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC) Market: SegmentationThe PMIC market has been segmented on the basis of product and application. Based on product, the market has been further classified into Voltage Regulators, Motor Control IC, Integrated ASSP Power Management IC, Battery Management IC, Microprocessor Supervisory IC and Others. The others segment comprises of Switching Controllers, Power Factor Correctors, and Gate Drivers.Get Sample copy of this Report @By Application, the market is classified into Automotive, Consumer Electronics, Industry, Telecom & Networking and Others. In application, the others segment includes Medical Electronics and Military applications. Geographically, the report classifies the global PMIC market into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA), and South America; the regions are analyzed in terms of revenue generation. Furthermore, region wise prominent countries covered in the report include the following - U.S, Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Russia, China, Japan, India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina.Global Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC) Market: SegmentationThe report includes drivers, restraints, opportunities and trends in the PMIC market. Porter Five Forces analysis which identifies bargaining power of supplier, bargaining power of buyer, threat from new entrant, threat from substitute and threat from competition in PMIC market is also included in the report. Ecosystem analysis which identifies key stake holders in the PMIC market is also covered in the report.View Report @The report also covers segment wise comparison matrix, market attractiveness analysis and market share analysis for all regions covered in the scope of study.Competition matrix includes segment growth matrix, 2017 - 2025 (%), segment revenue contribution, 2017 - 2025 (%), and segment compounded growth matrix (CAGR %). Market attractiveness identifies and compares segments market attractiveness on the basis of CAGR and market share index for the forecast period.Global Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC) Market: Competitive AnalysisThe report also includes competition landscape which include competition matrix, market share analysis of major players in the global PMIC market based on their 2016 revenues and profiles of major players. Competition matrix benchmarks leading players on the basis of their capabilities and potential to grow. Factors including market position, offerings and R&D focus are attributed to companys capabilities. Factors including top line growth, market share, segment growth, infrastructure facilities and future outlook are attributed to companys potential to grow. This section also identifies and includes various recent developments carried out by the leading players.Send An Enquiry Request @Company profiling includes company overview, major business strategies adopted, SWOT analysis and market revenues for year 2014 to 2016. The key players profiled in the global PMIC market include Texas Instruments, Inc., STMicroelectronics, Mitsubishi Electric, Renesas Electronics Corporation, Dialog Semiconductor PLC, Linear Technology Corporation, Maxim Integrated, ON Semiconductor, Rohm Co., Ltd., Samsung Semiconductor, and Semtech Corporation.The Global Power Management IC market is segmented as below:By ProductVoltage RegulatorsMotor Control ICIntegrated ASSP Power Management ICsBattery Management ICsMicroprocessor Supervisory ICOthers (Switching controllers, Power Factor Correctors, Gate Drivers etc)By ApplicationAutomotiveConsumer ElectronicsIndustryTelecom and NetworkingOthers (Military, Medical Electronics etc.)By GeographyNorth AmericaEuropeAsia PacificMiddle East and AfricaSouth AmericaTable of Content1. Preface1.1.Market Definition and Scope1.2.Market Segmentation1.3.Key Research Objectives1.4.Research Highlights2.Assumptions and Research Methodology3.Executive Summary: Global Power Management Integrated Circuit (IC) Market4.Market Overview4.1.Key Market Indicators4.1.1. Digital Control V/s Analog Control Trends4.1.2. Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) V/s Competing Technology4.1.2.1.Bipolar Processes4.1.2.2.BiCMOS (Bipolar-CMOS) Processes4.1.2.3.CMOS-DMOS Processes4.2.Market Dynamics4.2.1. Drivers4.2.2. Restraints4.2.3. Opportunities4.3.Global Power Management Integrated Circuit (IC) Market Analysis and Forecasts, 2015  20254.3.1. Market Revenue Projections (US$ Bn)4.4.Key Findings4.5.Key Trends4.6.Porters Five Force Analysis4.7.Market Outlook5.Global Power Management Integrated Circuit (IC) Market Analysis and Forecasts, By Product5.1.Overview & Definitions5.2.Power Management Integrated Circuit (IC) Market Size (US$ Bn) Forecast By Product, 2015 - 20255.2.1.Voltage Regulators5.2.2.Motor Control IC5.2.3.Integrated ASSP Power Management IC5.2.4.Battery Management IC5.2.5.Microprocessor Supervisory IC5.2.6.Others5.3.Product Comparison Matrix5.4.Market Attractiveness By ProductMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.Mr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz
Atmospheric Water Generator Market to grow at 30% CAGR from 2016 to 2024

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According to the new research report Atmospheric Water Generator (AWG) Market Size By Product (Cooling Condensation, Wet Desiccation), By Application (Industrial, Commercial, Residential), Regional Outlook (U.S., Germany, UK, France, Italy, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, UAE), Growth Potential, Price Trend, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2016  2024. by Global Market Insights, Inc. says Atmospheric Water Generator (AWG) Market size is set to exceed USD 8 billion by 2024; driven by Technological innovation.Diminishing fresh water accessibility and decreasing water resources along with increasing demand of fresh water for drinking and industrial purpose is predicted to drive industry growth in future.Per capita water accessibility has fallen substantially during last few years. Growing temperatures and scarce rainfall has resulted in drying of lakes and river fronts causing shortage of water. Further, rising industrialization and infrastructural growth specifically in emerging economies has given rise to water scarcity. All these factors are predicted to drive the industry growth.Request for a sample of this research report @Introduction of policies like DWQS (Drinking Water Quality Section) in Japan, Safe Drinking Water Act in U.S., National Rural Drinking Water Program in India , Drinking Water Directive in countries of European Union and various other initiatives taken by respective governments are projected to propel industry growth by ensuring safe accessibility of potable water for its population.As per WHO (World Health Organisation) report, more than half of the world population is affected by water-borne ailments. Due to this, water produced through atmospheric water generator systems is an effective substitute offering pollutant-free water by condensing filtered air through different filtration processes.However, high requirement of power supply for AWG systems like condenser, dehumidifier and evaporator makes it an impractical choice for few regions with high electric charges. Carbon and other greenhouse emissions released by coal or other compounds poses a threat to atmosphere. But investments in research & development activities to produce low priced and clean technology is predicted to generate new growth opportunities for atmospheric water generator(AWG) market.Product TrendsThe industry is segmented into various products like wet desiccation machines and cooling condensation machines. Wet desiccation machines market is predicted to register more than 32% CAGR during forecast timeframe. Technological breakthrough associated with replacement of brine salt with liquid brine to enhance humidity separation from air is predicted to raise the demand for these machines in future.Cooling condensation machines segment dominated the product segment by producing total revenue of more than $800 million for 2015. Higher output along with widespread accessibility of these machines contributed to the growth of the segment. Technological innovation associated with reduction in power consumption is predicted to drive the growth of the segment.Application TrendsThe atmospheric water generator (AWG) market is segmented into applications like industrial applications and residential applications. Industrial applications segment contributed to greater than 25% of overall demand and is predicted to register more than 25% of CAGR during forecast timeframe. They are mainly used in industries that require water production of more than 20,000 gallons per day. Oil & gas firms of middle east regions are using desalinated water from seas. This method has proved cost efficient in comparison to other oil exploring events taking place near sea shore.Residential atmospheric water generator industry experienced biggest system deployment with total amount of consolidated deployments valued over USD 13 million in 2015. Growing customer consciousness about the technology benefits from these systems are predicted to drive the industry growth in these residential applications.Regional TrendsAPAC dominated the global atmospheric water generator industry for 2015 with India and China playing a key role in the regional industry growth. Growing commercial & residential expenditure in regions like Indonesia, China and India is predicted to promote the regional demand. Factors like presence of large number of component producers, less production costs and low labor charges are predicted to fuel the industry expansion.MEA(Middle East & Africa) atmospheric water generator market share will rise significantly over the forecast timeframe. Deficit of fresh water reserves along with high costs involved in deploying desalination plants is predicted to drive the regional demand. Saudi Arabia market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 30% over the period of 2016-2024.Competitive TrendsKey industry players profiled in the report include Ambient Water, Konia, Watair Incorporation, Planets Water, Eurosport Active World Corporation Technologies, Saisons Technocom Private Limited, Water-Gen Limited, Water Technologies International Incorporation, Island Sky Corporation, Atlantis Solar, WaterMaker India Private Limited, Water-Gen Limited, Fujian Yuxin Electronic Company Limited, Air2Water LLC, Dew point manufacturing and Ecoloblue Incorporation.About Fractovia.orgFractovia.org is one of India's leading in-house and free news portal. It is fully automated, and operates on a constant premise, interfacing with news sites and offering redesigned breaking features to readers across the globe. Our mission is to offer individuals opportunities for connections with news writers and distributors which they can pursue. We operate by mapping articles pertaining to breaking news, constantly and progressively, against a pre-determined word-based theme, offering important connections to readers and clients, as well as distributers.Contact us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAFractovia.orgPhone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@fractovia.orgWebsite:
Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market To Reach US$ 1.456 bn In 2025 With Growth At A CAGR Of 8.7%

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"The Latest Research Report Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market - Global Industry Analysis Size Share Growth Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2025 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Workflow Automation and Optimization Software MarketStrategic study of the global workflow automation and optimization software market, and the growth forecast for the period 2017 to 2025, have been provided in this report. Under the scope of the report, competitive analysis of various market segments, based on deployment type, end-use, and in-depth cross-sectional scrutiny of the workflow automation and optimization software market across different regions, have been provided.Global Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market: Drivers and RestraintsWorkflow automation and optimization software solutions are considered as a part of Business Process Management (BPM) solutions and aids in automation, optimization and streamlining of business workflows. Additionally, workflow automation and optimization software solutions aid in betterment of product and service consistency, faster decision making and increases productivity amongst various other advantages. The growing investment in third platform technologies and fast adoption of such technologies for business processes is the primary driver for the workflow automation and optimization software market.Get Sample copy of this Report @Additionally, the advantages offered by these software solutions have also been promoting the growth of the market. The market is also being driven by the increasing usage of cloud for business processes. The growing dependence on cloud systems, coupled with the demand for fast and efficient business processes, has been promoting the demand for cloud based workflow automation and optimization software solutions.Global Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market: SegmentationIn terms of deployment type, the global workflow automation and optimization software market is segmented into on-premise, cloud and mixed. On the basis of end-use, the market has been segmented into banking, financial services & insurance (BFSI), education, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, transportation & logistics, telecommunications & information technology (IT) and others. The market revenue for workflow automation and optimization software has been provided in terms of USD million, along with the CAGR for the forecast period from 2017 to 2025. In-depth analysis of the current trends in different regions including North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, South America and Middle East & Africa (MEA), under the regional market analysis present in the report.View Report @Global Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market: Competitive LandscapeFor supporting strategic decision-making, the report also includes competitive profiling of leading companies of workflow automation and optimization software market, their overview, SWOT analysis, different product and business segments, unique business strategies adopted by them, revenue garnered by the companies and their regional revenue share. The SWOT analysis, provided for each of the companies profiled, focuses on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the profiled companies, thus providing a enhanced understanding of the position of the major players in this market.The regional overview, provided in the report for each region, details the current trends of the workflow automation and optimization software market for the respective regions. The market attractiveness analysis, and competitive landscape included in the report provide insight into market dynamics, competition present in the industry and the most attractive segments in the workflow automation and optimization software market. The competitive landscape, provided in the report, allows for a better understanding of the major strategies undertaken by the industry leaders and their plans for a sustained growth in this industry.Send An Enquiry Request @The report also provides specific assessment of the various factors impacting the global workflow automation and optimization software markets growth, which are described as growth drivers, market restraints, and opportunities. These factors aid in pointing out the various existing and upcoming trends, coupled with their impact on market growth. Overall, considering the various factors affecting the workflow automation and optimization software market, the report includes a comprehensive analysis of the global workflow automation and optimization software market, and provides the anticipated growth for the forecast period 2017 to 2025.Some of the leading players in the market are Xerox Corporation (The U.S.), Oracle Corporation (The U.S.), International Business Machines Corporation (The U.S.), SAS Institute, Inc. (The U.S.), SAP SE (Germany), OnviSource, Inc. (The U.S.), Boston Software Systems (The U.S.), Flexera Software LLC (The U.S.), JDA Software Group, Inc. (The U.S.), and Reva Solutions (The U.S.) among others.The global workflow automation and optimization software market has been segmented as follows:Global Workflow Automation And Optimization Software Market, by Deployment TypeOn-premiseCloudMixedGlobal Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market, by End-useBanking, Financial Services & Insurance (BFSI)EducationHealthcareManufacturingRetailTransportation & LogisticsTelecommunications & ITOthersGlobal Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market, by RegionNorth AmericaThe U.S.Rest of North AmericaEuropeThe U.K.GermanyFranceItalySpainRest of EuropeAsia PacificChinaIndiaJapanRest of Asia PacificSouth AmericaBrazilRest of South AmericaMiddle East & AfricaIsraelSouth AfricaRest of Middle-East & AfricaTable of ContentChapter 1 PrefaceChapter 2 Assumptions and Research Methodology2.1 Report Assumptions and Acronyms used2.2 Research MethodologyChapter 3 Executive Summary - Global Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market3.1 Executive SummaryChapter 4 Global Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market Overview4.1 Introduction4.2 Product Definition and Features4.3 Market Dynamics: Drivers and Restraints Snapshot Analysis4.3.1 Drivers4.3.2 Restraints4.3.3 Opportunities4.4 Market Attractiveness Analysis, by End-use (2016)4.5 Competitive Landscape (2016)Chapter 5 Global Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market Analysis, By Deployment Type, 2016  20255.1 Deployment Type, Overview5.2 Global Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market Value Share, By Deployment Type, 2016 and 20255.3 Global Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market Analysis, By Deployment Type, 2016 - 20255.4 Global Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market Forecast , By Deployment Type, 2016 - 2025Chapter 6 Global Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market Analysis, By End-use, 2016  20256.1 End-Use, Overview6.2 Global Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market Value Share, By End-Use, 2016 and 20256.3 Global Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market Analysis, By Deployment Type, 2016 - 20256.4 Global Workflow Automation and Optimization Software Market Forecast , By End-use, 2016 - 2025MarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.Mr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz
Automotive Hydrostatic spring Industry - Worldwide Market Region, Market Share and Growth Rate

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In 2016, the world economy expanded by just 2.2 per cent, the slowest rate of growth since the Great Recession of 2009. Underpinning the sluggish global economy are the feeble pace of global investment, dwindling world trade growth, flagHydrostatic springg productivity growth and high levels of debt. World gross product is forecast to expand by 2.7 per cent in 2017 and 2.9 per cent in 2018, with this modest recovery more an indication of economic stabilization than a signal of a robust and sustained revival of global demand. Given the close Hydrostatic springs between demand, investment, trade and productivity, the extended episode of weak global growth may prove self-perpetuating in the absence of concerted policy efforts to revive investment and foster a recovery in productivity. This would impede progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) , particularly the goals of eradicating extreme poverty and creating decent work for all.For More Information About This Report:Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Automotive Hydrostatic spring market analysis is provided for the international market including development history, competitive landscape analysis, and major regions' development status.Secondly, development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures. This report also states import/export, supply and consumption figures as well as cost, price, revenue and gross marAutomotive Hydrostatic spring by regions (United States, EU, China, India and Japan) , and other regions can be added.Then, the report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials, equipment and downstream consumers analysis is also carried out. What's more, the Automotive Hydrostatic spring industry development trends and marketing channels are analyzed.Request Sample Copy At:Table of Content2 Industry market structure analysis2.1 Supply & Consumption Analysis 2012-20172.1.1 North America2.1.2 Europe2.1.3 Japan2.1.4 India2.1.5 China3 Industry market environment analysis3.1 Industry requirements for resources and technology3.2 Industry technology development trend3.3 The impact of national macro policy on Industry3.4 Other influencing factors4 Competitive pattern analysis4.1 Industry competitive structure analysis by Region 2012-2017 344.2 Industry competitive structure analysis by Manufacture 2012-20174.3 Market barriers to entry analysis4.4 Threat of substitutesInquire For This Report At:Contact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
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United States 19-07-2017. Charles Brothers Law has over 77 years of experience in providing professional and specialized legal support to people involved in complicated legal matters. Personal injury lawyers are available to assist you by providing step by step guide to claiming for medical expenses or other damages you have experienced. A personal injury claim may include automobile accidents, truck accidents, motorcycle accidents, mass transit accidents, wrongful death, medical malpractice, birth trauma, products liability, premises liability etc.Hiring personal injury lawyers in Allentown is a good decision as they must have the knowledge of complications involved in a personal injury lawsuit. So, they can better advise you to file your case or to claim for major charges to get the adequate compensation for damages youve experienced. A helping hand from expert lawyers will get you out of trouble and give you the best solution possible.You can trust Charles Brothers to represent your personal injury lawsuit as they have handled many personal injury cases. They have all the required knowledge that can give you the best resolution possible. Whether you have experienced huge medical charges or your premises have been damaged because the fault of another party but Charles Brothers can help you to get the right compensation. Charles Law Firm is known for its proven track record and expertise of Charles Brothers who have in-depth knowledge of delivering results.The success of your case is merely depending upon the expertise of lawyers and their tactful nature to fight for your rights. If you are looking for the local, friendly and experienced lawyers in Allentown then consider hiring Charles Brothers Law. Due to their long-term expertise and knowledge, they can easily help you to get out of the mess with the right resolution.Learn more about the firm and personal injury lawyers by visiting at:Charles Law Firm has more than 75 years of experience in State and Federal courts throughout the Pennsylvania. It has highly trained, skilled and professional lawyers who always assist you with complicated legal matters. They provide you step by step guide for the personal injury lawsuits and get you out of trouble within less time.When it comes to representation of personal injury matter then hire Charles Brothers  the professional and certified personal injury lawyers in Allentown.Charles Law441 W Linden St.AllentownPA 18102United States610-437-7064
North America Protein A Resins Market  Estimated to reach USD 206.18 million by 2021 at a CAGR of 7.5%

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According to the report North America Protein A Resins Market, published by Market Data Forecast, the global market is projected to reach USD 206.18 million by 2021, at a CAGR of 7.5% from 2016 to 2021.Monoclonal antibodies can be defined as an antibody produced by a single clone of cells; they antibodies can be produced in large quantities in the laboratory. They can be used to carry drugs, toxins, or radioactive substances straight to cancer cells. Monoclonal antibodies have been showing promising results in the management of chronic diseases such as cancers and rheumatoid arthritis.Get a comprehensive overview of the North America Protein A Resins Market:High selectivity and improved antibody yield coupled with ease of operation in large and small scale antibody purification and immunoprecipitation will further drive the protein A resins market growth. Chromatography with these has several advantages as a separation method, over conventional techniques like solvent extraction, crystallization, and distillation. For instance, it can separate all the components of a multicomponent biochemical mixture without demanding a detailed foreknowledge of the number, identity, or relative quantities of the materials present in the mixture.North America Protein A Resins Market: Drivers & RestraintsGrowing demand for biosimilars and increasing investments in the development of biosimilar products are the major factors driving the market for monoclonal antibodies. However increasing awareness about alternate methods to purify monoclonal antibodies is expected to hamper the Protein A Resins market. High cost of the Protein A resin is also a major factor hindering the growth of the market.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the North America Protein A Resins Market.Request a sample to stay up-to-date on the main trends affecting this marketNorth America Protein A Resins Market: SegmentationBy Product Type Natural Protein A Resin Recombinant Protein A ResinBy Application Immunoprecipitation Antibody PurificationBy End Users Biopharmaceutical Manufacturers Clinical Research Laboratories Academic InstitutesBy Matrix Type Glass or Silica Agarose Organic PolymerFrom simple data collation through secondary and primary research to ad-hoc research requests relating to specific information, we provide our services via customization.Get customization atNorth America Protein A Resins Market: OverviewProtein A resins are crucial and are broadly used as purification and separation materials owing to high resolution, across the biopharmaceutical industry. They exploit the chemical and physical variances among biomolecules for separation of antibodies by immunoprecipitation and antibody purification.The market is showcasing evident potential in the mentioned forecasting period. Increasing research on monoclonal antibodies is expected to drive sales of Protein A resins over the forecast period. Recombinant Protein A segment is estimated to be the fastest growing within this segment. In the application segment immune precipitation is estimated to be the fastest growing. Among the matrix type agarose accounts for the largest share and is estimated to continue its strong hold during the forecast period.North America Protein A Resins Market: Region-wise OutlookGeographically North America Protein A resin market segmented into two regions namely United States and Canada. Within North America, United States is the largest market for Protein A resin accounting for a share of approximately XX% while Canada is estimated to be the fastest growing region.Key Questions Answered What is the current and future Protein A Resins Market outlook North America? What trends are affecting the Global market? What is the competitive landscape and market share of major players in the Protein A Resins space in North America? What are the key, high growth markets that Protein A Resins manufacturers should expand into? Which market segments are growing the fastest? What are the unmet needs with the Protein A Resins currently on the market? How will emerging technologies fulfil these unmet needs? What is physician perception and market outlook of Protein A Resins? What are the challenges and barriers that have hindered widespread adoption of Protein A Resins?North America Protein A Resins Market: Key PlayersMajor Players in the market are entering into strategic agreements to develop raw materials required manufacture Protein A resins. Some of the key companies covered in the report are GE Healthcare, Repligen Corporation, Novasep, Tosoh Bioscience, GenScript, Thermo Fisher Scientific, EMD Millipore and Expedeon Ltd.Reasons to buy North America Protein A Resins Market Report: Global, regional and country-level analysis and forecasts of the study market; providing Insights on the geographical areas in which this industry is prospering Segment-level analysis on basis of product type, application, colour along with market size forecasts and y-o-y estimations to detect key areas of industry growth in detail Identification of key drivers, restraints, opportunities, and challenges (DROC) in the market and their impact on shifting market dynamics Study of macro and micro environmental factors that affect the market presented in an extensive strategic analyses section containing PESTLE and Porters Five Forces Analyses A comprehensive listing of key market players along with company overview, product portfolios, key financial information (subjected to availability), SWOT analysis and Analyst overview to study and sustain the market environment Competitive landscape analysis listing out the mergers, acquisitions, collaborations in the field along with new product launches, comparative financial studies and recent developments in the market by the major companies Expertly devised Market Outlook along with Investment opportunities to provide both individuals and organizations a strong financial foothold in the marketCheckout other related studies in the Pharmaceuticals Segment:North America Antiviral Drugs Market:North America Antifungal Drugs Market:About Market Data Forecast:Market Data Forecast is a firm working in the area of market research and business intelligence. With rich experience in research across various business domains, they cater to the needs of both individual and corporate clients. From all-encompassing umbrella markets to extremely specific niche markets covering all the major regions across the globe as part of the research scope, their research services offer one of a kind specialities with competitive pricing options. For more information, kindly visit,Contact:Abhishek ShuklaSales Manager (International Business Development)Market Data ForecastDirect Line: +1-888-702-9626Mobile: +91 998 555 0206Mail: abhishek@marketdataforecast.comVisit Market Data Forecast Blog @View latest Press Releases of MDF @
French True Fleet secures its 2nd consecutive month of positive growth

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True Fleet in France scores another month of growth helping to push the year-to-date volume towards +3.0% for 2017. The Total Market finished just a little under 231,000 registrations with a month-on-month growth of +1.6%. True Fleet took the highest monthly growth for the channels with a +8.1%, the Private channel also remained in the black with a solid +2.6%, Special Channels though slipped a little with a -4.3% its second negative month of the year.There were no changes to the first four places of the True Fleet manufacturers Top 10, with Renault retaining its crown at the top of the leader board. Peugeot followed in 2nd also achieving the Top 10s 2nd highest growth with +35.9%, Citroen and Volkswagen were 3rd and 4th respectively. The Mercedes brand was the growth winner for the month climbing three places into 5th on the back of a +40.1%, though was closely followed by its German compatriots of BMW in 6th and Audi in 7th. Ford took the 8th spot with a single place ascension while Nissan 9th and Toyota 10th completed the ranking chart. It would be remiss of us not to mention a first-time entry to the True Fleet Top 20, Porsche raced into 20th position accelerating its registrations by +48.3% thanks in no small part to the Macan. The compact SUV was the brands highest seller hitting triple digit fleet registrations for the 3rd time since its launch.After the recent announcement from the French government about the banning of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040 and the continuing Crit-Air environmental zone expansions we decided to look into the fuel segmentation. Diesel is firmly in the spotlight and while currently accounting for 77.0% of all True Fleet registrations year-to-date it is down by 3.5 percentage points when compared to the same time period from last year. For June it achieved a +1.0% but the beleaguered fuel type is still in for a tough future. The other fuel types went on to deliver a +38.8% growth for petrol and +48.0% for hybrid/electric and while these have a long road ahead to catch up with diesel they are both scheduled to receive either further or continued support from the government. Petrol in the form of VAT recovery which started at 10% in January (scheduled to be 80% by 2021) and clean vehicle bonuses at first registration for electric/plug-in hybrid vehicles (though these were reduced in January).Our final look into the fuel segmentation for True Fleet was focussed regionally on Paris, the first municipality to introduce a restricted traffic zone (ZCR) as part of the Crit-Air legislation. Year-to-date figures show diesel has fallen by 5.4% while petrol increased by 6.8% but it is the electric and hybrid channels that are reaping the twin benefits of the bonus system and ZCR with increases of 80.8% and 38.9% respectively.(487 words, 2329 characters)DATAFORCE  Focus on FleetsDataforce is the leading provider of fleet market data and automotive intelligence solutions in Europe. In addition, the company also provides detailed information on sales opportunities for the automotive industry, together with a wide portfolio of information based on primary market research and consulting services. The company is based in Frankfurt, Germany.Gabriel JuhasDataforce Verlagsgesellschaft fur Business Informationen mbHHamburger Allee 1460486 Frankfurt am MainGermanyPhone: +49 69 95930-250Fax: +49 69 95930-333Email: gabriel.juhas@dataforce.de
Spiral Heat Exchanger Market 2017 -Alstom SA, Areva SA, Bharat Heavy Electrical Limited, Dongfang Electric Corporation, Larsen & Toubro Ltd

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Apex Research, recently published a detailed market research study focused on the "Spiral Heat Exchanger Market" across the global, regional and country level. The report provides 360 analysis of "Spiral Heat Exchanger Market" from view of manufacturers, regions, product types and end industries. The research report analyses and provides the historical data along with current performance of the global Spiral Heat Exchanger industry, and estimates the future trend of Spiral Heat Exchanger market on the basis of this detailed study. The study shares "Spiral Heat Exchanger Market" performance both in terms of volume and revenue.Get Free Sample Copy of Report Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of This ReportAlstom SAAreva SABharat Heavy Electrical LimitedDongfang Electric CorporationLarsen & Toubro LtdMitsubishi Heavy Industries LtdSPX CorporationBHI Company LimitedShanghai Electric Group CompanyZio-PodolskThe market research report explores the Spiral Heat Exchanger market across the globe along with major regions and countries. The research report provides a detailed study on each and every aspect of "Spiral Heat Exchanger Market". The research report studies the entire value chain from raw material to end user industries. The report also shares import/export statistics along with production and consumption for all major regions and countries. Moreover, the research study classifies the Spiral Heat Exchanger market based on major product types, application and end users industries of Spiral Heat Exchanger. Besides, the report also covers geographical segmentation for Spiral Heat Exchanger market. The report further provides production, capacity, price per region, gross margin, production cost, for all major regions and countries listed in report.The competitive landscape of the global market for Spiral Heat Exchanger is determined by assessing the major industry participants, production capacity, production capacity utilization rate, Spiral Heat Exchanger market's production chain, pricing by each manufacturer and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the Spiral Heat Exchanger market globally.Enquire Before Buying @The worldwide Spiral Heat Exchanger market 2017 is further analyzed on the basis of product pricing, Spiral Heat Exchanger production volume, data pertaining to demand and Spiral Heat Exchanger supply, and the revenue garnered by the product. The report provides upstream and downstream analysis covering major raw material used in manufacturing of Spiral Heat Exchanger along with detailed manufacturing sources. The report also shares list of major raw material manufacturers along with their manufacturing locations. Detailed raw material price trend analysis along with manufacturing cost analysis is also incorporated into the report. Various methodical tools such as investment returns, feasibility, SWOT analysis and market attractiveness analysis has been implemented in the research study to present a comprehensive, detailed study of the industry for Spiral Heat Exchanger across the world.About UsApexResearch offer reports from top publishers and update to serve you with immediate on-line access to professional insights on global industries, companies, products, and trends. Customers can buys different reports across various categories such as Chemical and Material, Biotechnology, Healthcare, Food and beverages, Automobile and various sectors. Our Website offers safe and secure online ordering experience, convenient payment options.Contact UsFrank ValadezBusiness Development Executive| sales@apexresearch.biz
Heat Pipe Market to record high demand by 2017  2022

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A heat pipe is a closed evaporator-condenser system consisting of a sealed, hollow tube whose inside walls are lined with a capillary structure or wick. Thermodynamic working fluid, with substantial vapor pressure at the desired operating temperature, saturates the pores of the wick in a state of equilibrium between liquid and vapor. When heat is applied to the heat pipe, the liquid in the wick heats and evaporates. As the evaporating fluid fills the heat pipe hollow center, it diffuses throughout its length. Condensation of the vapor occurs wherever the temperature is even slightly below that of the evaporation area. As it condenses, the vapor gives up the heat it acquired during evaporation. This effective high thermal conductance helps maintain near constant temperatures along the entire length of the pipe.Get Sample Copy of this report @Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Heat Pipe in Global market, especially in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, type and application.Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversFurukawaAavidFujikuraCooler MasterAVCYen ChingAurasCCIForcecon TechFoxcconWakefield VetteThemacoreInnergy TechSPCDauTaisolColmac CoilACTNewidea TechnologyShengnuoNovarkBoyuanDeepcoolWtl-heatpipeHarbin DawnHappyGet Discount on this report @Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (USA, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia etc.)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversVapor ChamberVariable ConductanceDiodeThermosyphonOthersMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoAerospaceConsumer ElectronicsProcess IndustryOthersView Complete Report @About Research Trades:Research Trades has team of experts who works on providing exhaustive analysis pertaining to market research on a global basis. This comprehensive analysis is obtained by a thorough research and study of the ongoing trends and provides predictive data regarding the future estimations, which can be utilized by various organizations for growth purposes.Contact us:Email: sales@researchtrades.comCall us: +1 6269994607 / +91 7507349866Skype ID: researchtradesconWeb:
Global Smart Parking Systems Market Industry Analysis, Trends and Forecast 2015 - 2022

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Smart parking system provides real-time information about the availability of parking space in a particular location, thereby enabling hassle-free vehicle parking while saving on time, cost, and fuel. It consists of low-cost sensors, real-time data collection and analytics, and automated payment systems that allow people to find parking in desired locations and pay for it in advance.Request For Sample Report :Once deployed, the smart parking system helps in reducing exhaust emissions from cars in urban cities by reducing the needless circling of city blocks in the search of parking space. It also efficiently manages the availability of parking space for cities and controls illegal parking. The rapid growth in the number of vehicles worldwide is increasing the scarcity of parking space, which is further magnifying the need for smart and innovative parking systems. Whether at airports or shopping centers, parking issues are a regular occurrence, in turn hurting the local business and affecting the quality of life of the city residents. These intelligent parking management systems provide high levels of convenience to the drivers while simplifying and automating the parking site operations. Deploying smart parking systems in cities requires data collection and management, integration with mobile phones, and various software and hardware innovations. Furthermore, there is a need for cooperation among various parking stakeholders such as off and on-street parking operators, transport authorities, municipalities, as well as customers. The smart parking market is growing significantly with numerous advanced solutions being adopted by major global cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Stockholm, Shanghai, Beijing, and Sao Paulo. In the long run, smart parking can significantly transform these and other cities by making them friendlier to citizens. Smart parking systems are expected to open up opportunities for the reuse of commercial as well as municipal parking garages Hence, smart parking systems contribute toward making urban cities cleaner, greener, compact, and thereby more freely walkable and drivable.This research report provides in-depth analysis of the global smart parking systems market based on parking site types, components, application areas, and geography. In terms of geographical regions, the report segments the global smart parking systems market into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa (MEA), and Latin America; these are analyzed in terms of revenue generation. North America is further segmented into the U.S. and Rest of North America, while Europe is divided into EU7, CIS, and Rest of Europe. Moreover, the analysis for Asia Pacific is subdivided into Japan, China, South Asia, Australasia, and Rest of Asia Pacific. Likewise, MEA is further segmented into GCC countries, South Africa, and Rest of MEA, while Latin America is subdivided into Brazil and Rest of Latin America.Browse Full Report With TOC :The report analyzes the factors that drive and restrain the growth of the smart parking systems market. The report also identifies prospective growth opportunities, prevailing market trends, and major strategies enhancing the popularity of smart parking systems. It also provides market estimates and forecasts for all the segments in terms of revenue. The global smart parking systems market is categorized based on parking site types as on-street parking and off-street parking. The market is also segmented on the basis of components that include sensor and network hardware, software, and services. The report further subdivides the smart parking services market into system integration and installation, parking management, and maintenance. This research report provides complete insight into different application areas of the smart parking systems market including airports, government and municipalities, and corporate and commercial institutions. The report also includes profiles of major players engaged in providing these smart parking systems. Key business strategies adopted by the major players, their market positioning, and various recent developments have also been identified in the research report. Besides, market positioning of key players in the smart parking systems market has also been provided. The major players in the smart parking systems market include Streetline, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., ParkMe, Inc., Urbiotica, Skidata AG, Amano McGann, Inc., Swarco AG, Smart Parking Ltd, Nedap N.V., and Parkmobile, LLC.The global smart parking systems market is segmented as below:Smart Parking Systems MarketBy Parking Site TypeOn-Street ParkingOn-Street ParkingBy ComponentSensor and Network HardwareSoftware (Management and Analytics Software and Mobile Applications)ServicesSystem Integration and InstallationParking ManagementMaintenanceBy End-use IndustryAirportsGovernment and MunicipalitiesCorporate and Commercial InstitutionsBy GeographyNorth AmericaEuropeAsia PacificLatin AmericaMiddle East and AfricaMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of market intelligence reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.State Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United StatesTelephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comGoogle+:Linked in:Twitter:
Healthcare Informatics and Patient Monitoring Market - India Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025

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This report on the healthcare informatics and Patient Monitoring Market studies the current and future prospects of the India market. Healthcare informatics and patient monitoring devices enables monitoring of patients health and assists medical practitioners in deciding the treatment regimen as well as track the disease progression during treatment. Patient monitoring is effective in the management of post-acute care and chronic disease. Geriatric population is observed to be at a high risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases and respiratory diseases. Thus, rising geriatric population propels the prevalence of chronic diseases leading to accentuate the growth of healthcare informatics and patient monitoring market in India.Request for Sample Report:The healthcare informatics and patient monitoring market report comprises an elaborate executive summary, which includes a market snapshot that provides information about various segments and sub-segments of the market. It also provides information and data analysis of the healthcare informatics and patient monitoring market with respect to market segments based on the type and demography of end-users and their geographic analysis.Global Healthcare Informatics and Patient Monitoring Market: SegmentationBased on demography, the healthcare informatics and patient monitoring market has been segmented into two major categories: metropolitan and urban hospitals and healthcare facilities and rural hospitals and healthcare facilities. Based on type, the market has been categorized into three segments: Ambulatory care, hospitals and home health care. The market segments have been extensively analyzed based on usefulness, efficacy, revenue, and geographical coverage. The market size and forecast in terms of US$ million for each segment has been provided for the period from 2015 to 2025. The report also provides the compound annual growth rate (CAGR %) for each market segment for the forecast period from 2017 to 2025, considering 2015 as the base year.Global Healthcare Informatics and Patient Monitoring Market: Regional Outlook and Drivers and RestraintsGeographically, the healthcare informatics and patient monitoring market has been categorized into four major regions: North, East, West and South. The market size and forecast for each of these regions has been provided for the period from 2015 to 2025, along with their respective CAGRs for the forecast period from 2017 to 2025, considering 2015 as the base year. The research study also covers the competitive scenario in these regions.A detailed qualitative analysis of factors responsible for driving and restraining the growth of the market and future opportunities has been provided in the market overview section. This section of the report also provides market attractiveness analysis, value chain analysis, Porters Five Forces analysis, and market share analysis by key players, thus presenting a thorough analysis of the overall competitive scenario in the healthcare informatics and patient monitoring market.Browse Full Report with TOC:A list of recommendations has been provided for new entrants as well as existing market players to assist them in taking strategic initiatives to establish a strong presence in the market. The report also profiles major players in the healthcare informatics and patient monitoring market based on various attributes such as company overview, financial overview, product portfolio, business strategies, and recent developments. Major players profiled in this report include Philips India Ltd., Wipro GE Healthcare, Mindray Medical India Pvt. Ltd., Nihon Kohden India Pvt. Ltd., Schiller Healthcare India Pvt. Ltd., Drager India Pvt. Ltd., BPL Medical Technologies Pvt. Ltd., India Medtronic Pvt. Ltd.About UsMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of market intelligence reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.ContactState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY  12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comFollow Us on LinkedIn-Follow Us On Twitter-
Winches Market : Dynamics, Segments, Size and Demand, 2017 - 2025

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A winch is a power-driven equipment used to wind a rope or a cable. Winches are widely used for lifting and moving all kinds of loads in various applications, such as marine, industrial, renewables, automotive and civil engineering, among others. Winches range in design from hand-cranked spools to enormous hydraulic devices used for industrial loading applications. Simple winches consist of a basic structure such as a spool and an attached hand crank, whereas for bigger applications, winches form a major part of machinery used for moving and lifting loads.On the basis of material used, stainless steel winches are estimated to hold a dominant market share and theyre widely used in applications, such as boating. In industrial applications, stronger steel alloys are widely preferred for industrial winch drums & frames and in low weight operations, synthetics and aluminium are used.To view complete report @Winches are categorized as manual, hydraulic, pneumatic and electric winches on the basis of working mechanism. As the global load lifting needs are evolving, there is a growing demand for more advanced systems offering high quality and better efficiency with ease of use. To meet these demands, manufacturers are constantly striving to develop new systems. Hydraulic winches were developed to meet the requirements of modern-day application needs in the winches market. Manual winches are preferred for low lifting weight applications, owing to simplicity and cost effectiveness. Electric winches are estimated to hold a dominant market share over the forecast period, attributing to the high demand from marine and oil & gas applications.The global market is estimated to grow at a stable rate, owing to the use of winches in a wide variety of applications.Global Winches Market: DynamicsDrivers:Growth in end use applications, such as mining, construction, utility, freight, oceaneering and others is expected to be a key growth driver for the global winches market. In automotive applications, winches are used as front or rear mounts to tow heavy weight. Construction cranes use winches to lift & dangle loads and sailboats of all sizes use winches to facilitate the rapid winding and unwinding of the rigging line. The global winches market is estimated to be driven by technological advancements, such as remote control clutch system in advanced winches for better handling & transfer of loads, quick installation and availability of good quality winches with cost-effective prices.A sample of this report is available upon request @Restraints:The high cost of hydraulic systems might act as a growth restraint for this market over the forecast period.Global Winches Market: SegmentationOn the basis of type, the global winches market is segmented into: electric winches, hydraulic winches and manual winches.The global winches market can be segmented on the basis of capacity as: below 7500 lbs, 7500 lbs to 15000 lbs, 15001 lbs to 45000 lbs, 45001 lbs to 60000 lbs, 60001 lbs to 100000 lbs, and above 100000 lbs. Winches are evaluated by line pull weight and gear ratio.On the basis of application, the global winches market can be segmented into: mining, construction, utility, freight, oceaneering and others.Global Winches Market: Regional OutlookNorth America and Western Europe collectively are estimated to account for a relatively large market share in the global winches market during the forecast period. The major demand for winches arises from end use industries, such as marine, industrial machinery and freight. The U.S. winches market is anticipated to grow at a stable pace, owing to it attaining the maturity stage in the product life cycle. On the other hand, the Canada winches market is estimated to register significant growth. In Europe, countries, such as the U.K., Germany, Russia, Poland and France are projected to drive the Europe winches market.Latin America and the Middle-East & Africa winches markets are estimated to witness high growth opportunity over the forecast period. The Asia-Pacific market is forecasted to grow at a rapid pace, owing to growth in urbanization, growing industries and stable economic growth in the region.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @Global Winches: Market ParticipantsExamples of some of the market participants in the global winches market are:Ingersoll-Rand plcRamsey WinchWarn Industries Inc.Harken Inc.TWGPaccar WinchFukushima Ltd.Brevini U.K. LtdNaust Marine ehf.Maxwell Marine International Ltd.Appleton Marine Inc.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
High Voltage Measuring Equipment Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2016 - 2024

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High Voltage Measuring Equipment are high accuracy electrical devices used in the measurement of high voltage (35kV-400kV), extra high voltage (401kV-800kV) and ultra high voltage (>800kV) alternating and direct currents. These instruments can be primarily divided into capacitive voltage transformers, potential transformers and other equipment like high voltage capacitors, multimeters, probes, etc. They are used in several applications like power generation (substation), power transmission, industrial facilities and laboratories, etc. Both, the capacitive voltage transformers and potential transformers are types of instrument transformers. While the capacitive voltage transformer can be used for a wide range of voltages up to 1200kV, the potential transformer has a limited range of ~250kV. During the forecast period, the demand of these equipment for direct current transmission and extra high voltage (401-800kV) transmission is expected to be higher.Request for Sample Report:High Voltage Measuring Equipment Market: Scope of StudyThis report analyzes and forecasts the market for high voltage measuring equipment at the global and regional level. The market has been forecast based on volume (Units) and revenue (US$ Mn) from 2016 to 2024, considering 2015 as the base year. The study includes drivers and restraints of the global high voltage measuring equipment market. It also covers impact of these drivers and restraints on demand for high voltage measuring equipment during the forecast period. The report also highlights opportunities in the high voltage measuring equipment market at the global and regional level.The report includes detailed value chain analysis, which provides a comprehensive view of the global high voltage measuring equipment market. Porters Five Forces model for the high voltage measuring equipment market has also been included to help understand the competitive landscape in the market. The study encompasses market attractiveness analysis, wherein end-users are benchmarked based on their market size, growth rate, and general attractiveness.The study provides a decisive view of the global high voltage measuring equipment market by segmenting it in terms of product type (capacitive voltage transformers, potential transformers & others) and applications such as power generation (substation), power transmission, industrial & others (laboratory, testing centres, commercial purposes, etc.). These segments have been analyzed based on present and future trends. Regional segmentation includes current and forecast demand for high voltage measuring equipment in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa.The report provides the actual market size of high voltage measuring equipment for 2015 and estimated market size for 2016 with forecast for the next eight years. The global market size of high voltage measuring equipment has been provided in terms of volume and revenue. Market volume has been defined in units, while market revenue is in US$ Mn. Market numbers have been estimated based on product type and key applications of high voltage measuring equipment. Market size and forecast for numerous end-users have been provided in terms of global, regional, and country level markets.In order to compile the research report, we conducted in-depth interviews and discussions with a number of key industry participants and opinion leaders. Primary research represented the bulk of research efforts, supplemented by extensive secondary research. We reviewed key players product literature, annual reports, press releases, and relevant documents for competitive analysis and market understanding. Secondary research includes a search of recent trade, technical writing, Internet sources, and statistical data from government websites, trade associations, and agencies. This has proven to be the most reliable, effective, and successful approach for obtaining precise market data, capturing industry participants insights, and recognizing business opportunities.Secondary research sources that are typically referred to include, but are not limited to company websites, annual reports, financial reports, broker reports, investor presentations, SEC filings, IEA, IEEE, internal and external proprietary databases, and relevant patent and regulatory databases such as ICIS, Hoovers, oneSOURCE, Factiva and Bloomberg, national government documents, statistical databases, trade journals, market reports, news articles, press releases, and webcasts specific to companies operating in the market.We conduct primary interviews on an ongoing basis with industry participants and commentators to validate data and analysis. These help validate and strengthen secondary research findings. These also help develop the analysis teams expertise and market understanding.High Voltage Measuring Equipment Market: Regional OutlookDemand for the high voltage measuring equipment is anticipated to increase rapidly because of the heavy investment in transmission grids by various regions. This investment and thereby demand will be highest in Asia Pacific, followed by Middle East & Africa and Latin America. Here, the investment in transmission grids will primarily focus on providing citizens with access to electricity. On the other hand, demand will be comparatively lower in Europe and North America, where the markets are already mature and the demand is likely to come from replacement of old equipment and upgradation of the same to meet newer and stricter environmental regulations.Browse Full report with TOC:The report comprises profiles of major companies operating in the global high voltage measuring equipment market. The global high voltage measuring equipment market is partially consolidated. Key players include ABB, Siemens, GE Grid Solutions, Maxwell Technologies, BHEL, Crompton Greaves, and Shanghai Electric Group Company Limited. Market players have been profiled in terms of attributes such as company overview, financial overview, business strategies, and recent developments.About UsMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of market intelligence reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.ContactState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY  12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comFollow Us on LinkedIn-Follow Us On Twitter-
Authenticom Inc. gained substantial traction in its antitrust lawsuit against two companies that the La Crosse corporation contends are trying to drive it out of business when a federal judge granted a temporary injunction against the pair.

Authenticom founder and CEO Steve Cottrells testimony was more credible than that of executives of CDK Global and The Reynolds and Reynolds Co., Judge James Peterson of Madison said in one part of his 23-page opinion and order issued Friday in U.S. District Court for Western Wisconsin in Madison.

Cottrell founded Authenticom in 2002 in what had been his sons bedroom and built it into one of the three top players  the other two are CDK and Reynolds  in an automotive sector that provides dealerships with daily data to help manage their businesses. He filed an antitrust suit against CDK and Reynolds on May 2. The suit alleges that the two companies are colluding in an illegal plot that has cost Authenticom millions of dollars and pushed it to the brink of insolvency.

The ruling is an important step forward not only for Authenticom, but for the automotive industry as a whole, Cottrell said in a news release.

We look forward to competing with CDK and Reynolds on a level playing field, said Cottrell, who said he has been able to keep his nearly 110 employees on the payroll despite the financial woes he blames on the two companies.

Authenticom, headquartered in the Doerflinger building in downtown La Crosse, created a niche for itself with computer programs to integrate auto dealers data, including facts such as sales figures, inventory tallies of cars, and parts and service reminders for more than 15,000 dealerships nationwide.

We look forward to providing secure, cost-effective, and reliable data integration services to our existing and future customers, finally without the threat of being hindered by CDKs and Reynolds anticompetitive conduct, Cottrells statement said.

In the meantime, Cottrell said in an interview Monday, We are so appreciative of the community support. We also are committed to keeping the community informed through transparency throughout this process.

Cottrell said he was not able to comment beyond that and Authenticoms official statement.

Authenticom is a third-party data integrator, linking car dealers to third-party software vendors such as CDK and Reynolds.

Among other allegations, Authenticom claims that CDK and Reynolds entered into an illegal agreement in February 2015 to eliminate competition in the market. That and other alleged actions, such as blocking dealers access to Authenticom, deactivating dealership logins to the La Crosse companys systems and alleging that its systems are not secure, have crippled it, the suit contends.

Authenticoms profits dropped by 77.22 percent between the third quarter of 2015 and the first quarter of this year because of the two companies collusion, the suit maintains.

The case is complicated both factually and legally, Petersons opinion states. But based on the parties written submissions, documentary evidence, and the evidence presented at a two-and-one-half day hearing, the court concludes that Authenticom is entitled to a preliminary injunction.

Authenticoms evidence establishes at least a moderate chance of success in proving that defendants have violated the Sherman Act. And the balance of harms tips sharply in favor of Authenticom, because Authenticom is clearly at risk of going under without a preliminary injunction, Peterson wrote.

Peterson also brushed aside the claims of CDK and Reynolds that giving Authenticom access to its data presents a security risk because it allows others to do so.

The court did not receive any evidence that Authenticom has ever suffered a security breach or that it has caused a security breach at another entity, the judge wrote.

Peterson also cited the testimony of witness Alan Andreu of the Dominion software company describing Reynolds means of allowing dealers to extract data from its system as comically and horribly insecure.

The actions of CDK and Reynolds have left Authenticom cash flow insolvent, with insufficient earnings and resources to satisfy its outstanding debt obligations. Authenticom was unable to pay an $11 million principal payment on a loan from BMO Harris Bank due April 16, 2017, and has received a limited 90-day forbearance from the Bank pending the outcome of the forthcoming preliminary injunction motion, according to Authenticom, which seeks a jury trial.

Authenticom also could not pay a tax-related obligation of about $1.17 million that was due on April 18, the suit says. Several financial institutions have rejected Authenticom requests for financing, citing doubts about Authenticoms continued viability because of Defendants actions, according to the suit.

Defendants CDK and Reynolds had pressed for a $10 million bond if Authenticoms injunction request were granted, while the judge deemed that as unmanageable, considering Authenticoms financial condition in the controversy. Peterson set the bond at $1 million.

Authenticom routinely makes Inc. Magazines annual list of the nations fastest-growing private companies, an accomplishment that President Barack Obama saluted when Obama delivered an economic speech at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse on July 2, 2015.

CDK Global is a publicly traded Delaware corporation with headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Ill. It provides DMS software and services to car dealerships throughout the country and has more than $2 billion in annual revenues.

The private corporation of Reynolds and Reynolds is headquartered in Dayton, Ohio.

The judges order stipulates that Authenticom, CDK and Reynolds work together to craft the form of the injunction by Thursday. If they cannot agree, they are required to submit competing proposals for Peterson to consider, according to his order.
Global Bread Flour Industry Market Research Report 2017

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SummaryThe Global Bread Flour Industry 2017 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Bread Flour industry.Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Bread Flour market analysis is provided for the international market including development history, competitive landscape analysis, and major regions development status.Secondly, development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures. This report also states import/export, supply and consumption figures as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin by regions (United States, EU, China and Japan), and other regions can be added.Then, the report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials, equipment and downstream consumers analysis is also carried out. Whats more, the Bread Flour industry development trends and marketing channels are analyzed.Finally, the feasibility of new investment projects is assessed, and overall research conclusions are offered.In a word, the report provides major statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.Ask a sample or any question, please email to:hebe@qyresearchglobal.com or hebe@qyresearch.comThe players list(Partly, Players you are interested can also be added):Archer Daniels MidlandAssociated British FoodsGeneral MillsGoodman FielderKing Arthur FlourConagra BrandsFairheaven Organic Flour MillGrain CraftHayden Flour MillsHeartland MillITCNorth American Millers' AssociationSunrise Flour MillThe Birkett MillsTo Your Health Sprouted FlourUnileverWilmar InternationalKey Topics Covered:Chapter One Industry Overview of Bread FlourChapter Two Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Bread FlourChapter Three Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Bread FlourChapter Four Capacity, Production and Revenue Analysis of Bread Flour by Regions, Types and ManufacturersChapter Five Price, Cost, Gross and Gross Margin Analysis of Bread Flour by Regions, Types and ManufacturersChapter Six Consumption Volume, Consumption Value and Sale Price Analysis of Bread Flour by Regions, Types and ApplicationsChapter Seven Supply, Import, Export and Consumption Analysis of Bread FlourChapter Eight Major Manufacturers Analysis of Bread FlourChapter Nine Marketing Trader or Distributor Analysis of Bread FlourChapter Ten Industry Chain Analysis of Bread FlourChapter Eleven Development Trend of Analysis of Bread FlourChapter Twelve New Project Investment Feasibility Analysis of Bread FlourChapter Thirteen Conclusion of the Global Bread Flour Industry 2017 Market Research ReportRelated Reports:US Bread Flour Industry Market Research Report 2017Europe Bread Flour Industry Market Research Report 2017India Bread Flour Industry Market Research Report 2017China Bread Flour Industry Market Research Report 2017Korea Bread Flour Industry Market Research Report 2017Japan Bread Flour Industry Market Research Report 2017If you need a report or have any question, please feel free to contact meHebe | Sr. Manager  Global SalesProfessional Market Research Report PublisherQYResearch Co.LtdQYResearch focus on Market Survey and ResearchPhone: +86-20-8665-5165Email: hebe@qyresearchglobal.com or hebe@qyresearch.comWeb:About QYResearchQYResearch established in 2007, focus on custom research, management consulting, IPO consulting, industry chain research, database and seminar services. the company owned a large basic database (such as National Bureau of statistics database, Customs import and export database, Industry Association Database etc), experts resources (included energy automotive chemical medical ICT consumer goods etc industries experts who own more than 10 years experiences on marketing or R&D), professional survey team (the team member with more than 3 years market survey experience and more than 2 years depth expert interview experience),Excellent data analysis team (SPSS statistics and PPT graphics process team); QYResearch has always pursuit product quality, adhere to the quality is the soul of business. Through the companys years of effort and a lot of customer support, QYResearch consulting group creative design method of many high-quality markets investigation and research team with rich experience. Today, QYResearch brand has become the consulting industry with quality assurance consulting brand. The company has 2500 global well-known customers, covering energy automobile pharmaceutical chemical agriculture more than 30 industries, services from the data analysis and recommendations-Consulting landing one-stop solution, and research regions cover China,US,EU,Asia,Middle East and Africa,South America,Australia,etc Global all regions,and also built research or marketing center in China USA UK France Hongkong etc regions. currently, QYResearch has become the first choice and worth trusted consulting brand in Global and China business consulting services.Media ContactCompany Name: QYResearch CO.,LIMITEDContact Person: HebeEmail: hebe@qyresearchglobal.comPhone: +86-20-8665-5165Address: Room 2311 VILI International Building No.167 Linhe West Road Tianhe DistrictCity: GuangzhouCountry: ChinaWebsite:(US) |(EU) |(JP)
United States Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases Market Report 2017

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In this report, the United States Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases market is expected to grow rapidly during the period of 2016 to 2022Geographically, this report splits the United States market into seven regions: The West Southwest The Middle Atlantic New England The South The Midwestwith sales (volume), revenue (value), market share and growth rate of Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases in these regions, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast).United States Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases market competition by top manufacturers/players, with Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases sales volume, price, revenue (Million USD) and market share for each manufacturer/player; the top players including BASF The Linde Group Air Liquide Praxair Air Products and Chemicals Iwatani Corporation Airgas Matheson Tri-gas Inc Messer IceblickOn the basis of product, this report displays the sales volume, revenue, product price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into Argon Nitrogen Gas MixturesOn the basis on the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, sales volume, market share and growth rate of Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases for each application, including Design and Manufacturing Healthcare Consumer Products OthersGet a free sample copy of Syringe Filters @Table of ContentsUnited States Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases Market Report 20171 Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases Overview2 United States Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases Market Competition by Players/Suppliers3 United States Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases Sales (Volume) and Revenue (Value) by Region (2012-2017)4 United States Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases Sales (Volume) and Revenue (Value) by Type (Product Category) (2012-2017)5 United States Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases Sales (Volume) by Application (2012-2017)6 United States Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases Players/Suppliers Profiles and Sales Data7 Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases Manufacturing Cost Analysis8 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers9 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders10 Market Effect Factors Analysis11 United States Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases Market Size (Value and Volume) Forecast (2017-2022)12 Research Findings and ConclusionTable of FiguresFigure United States Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases Sales Volume (K MT) Forecast by Application (2017-2022)Figure United States Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases Sales Volume (K MT) Forecast by Application in 2022Figure United States Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases Sales Volume Share Forecast by Region (2017-2022)Figure United States Stereolithography 3D Printing Gases Sales Volume Share Forecast by Region in 2022Get access to full report @24MarketReports is the marque of market research industry which identifies massive database of market research reports. We are having a numerous sectors market research gathering which covers diverse verticals around the Earth. Our central focus to make it trouble-free for decision makers to find applicable information and locate right Research reports which can save their time and assist in what they do best.New York City Zone 01, United Stateshelp@24marketreports.comInt'l: (+1) 646 781 7170UK(Toll free): +44 800 088 5734
New Study Reveals Global Food Emulsifier Market to be Worth US$4.3 bn by 2021

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Food Emulsifier Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2015 - 2021" to its huge collection of research reports.The market size in terms of revenue of the global food emulsifier market is forecasted during 2014 to 2021 at each sub-segment level. Food emulsifier are mainly used for providing stability in convenience foods, bakery & confectionery, meat products, dairy products, others. Convenience food leads the market share of food emulsifier market in terms of value. The increasing demand for packaged and convenience foods in western market is raising the demand for food emulsifier in Europe and North America.Browse Detail Report With TOC @Growing demand for packaged and convenience food is one of the major factors boosting the demand for food emulsifier globally. Apart from this, preference of low fat food is also contributing to the growth of food emulsifier market globally. The food emulsifier market has been observing high growth owing to high demand from the end user industries such as bakery and confectionery industries among others. Due to increase in demand of low fat foods Due to an increasing demand for bakery products, the food emulsifier market is anticipated to growth at high rate during the forecast period of 2014 to 2021. In addition, new product developments will also contribute to the growth of food emulsifier market globally.The rise in the number of food borne diseases is driving the growth of the food emulsifiers market as emulsifiers are needed to maintain the overall quality of the product and to retain the fat in food products. The increasing usage of food emulsifiers in bakery products and ice creams is anticipated to boost the growth of the food emulsifiers market globally.Food emulsifier market is segmented by product into stearoyl lactylatess, mono, di-glycerides & derivatives, sorbitan esters, lecithin and others. Amongst various product types, mono, di-glycerides & derivatives constituted the biggest market share followed by lecithin in 2014. Based on application types, food emulsifier is segmented into dairy products, convenience foods, bakery & confectionery, meat products and others. Increasing demand of convenience foods is one of the major factors driving the demand for food emulsifier. Sorbitan esters and stearoyl lactylatess is set to grow at a lager rate as compared to other products segment. Due to rise in demand of packaged and convenience foods, the market of sorbitan esters and stearoyl lactylatess is anticipated to grow at a high rate during the forecast period of 2014 to 2021. In addition, usage of food emulsifier in ice cream in various countries is driving the growth of global food emulsifier market.The growth of the global food emulsifiers market is directly related to the growth of the ingredients market. Therefore, with the rise in sales of ingredients globally, the demand for food emulsifiers is anticipated to increase simultaneously. In regions such as Asia Pacific and Europe, the usage of food emulsifiers is anticipated to rise immensely during the forecast period, which in turn is anticipated to bolster the growth of the food emulsifiers market in such regions.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Based on geography, the global food emulsifier market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World (RoW). Asia Pacific holds the largest market share in the food emulsifier market followed by Europe, North America, and Rest of the World (RoW). The demand for food emulsifier in Asia Pacific is due to the huge population and growing health awareness among the people in developing nations such as India and China. The food emulsifier market in North America is anticipated to witness stable growth due to rise in demand of low fat food by consumers.The key participants in the food emulsifier market are Cargill Inc, Sensient Technologies Corporation, Ajinomoto Co., Associated British Foods Plc., Archer-Daniels-Midlands Company, DSM Nutritional Products AG, CP Kelco U.S., Inc., BASF, Chr. Hansen Holding A/S and Givaudan SA.The report also provides an understanding of value (USD million) of food emulsifier. The study also provides forecast from 2015-2021 and highlights current and future market trends. The market attractiveness analysis is also covered in the report along with qualitative data relating to the drivers, restraints and opportunities governing the global food emulsifier market.The report segments the food emulsifier market as:Global Food Emulsifier Market: By Product Type- Stearoyl Lactylatess- Mono, Di-Glycerides & Derivatives- Sorbitan Esters- Lecithin- OthersGlobal Food Emulsifier Market: By Application Type- Dairy Products- Convenience Foods- Bakery & Confectionery- Meat Products- OthersGlobal Food Emulsifier Market: By Geography- North America- Europe- Asia Pacific- Rest of the World (RoW)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 @
Phosphoric Fertilizer Market 2017 - Agrium Inc., Eurochem, OCP Group, The Mosaic Co., Israel Chemicals Limited, Phosagro

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Apex Research, recently published a detailed market research study focused on the "Phosphoric Fertilizer Market" across the global, regional and country level. The report provides 360 analysis of "Phosphoric Fertilizer Market" from view of manufacturers, regions, product types and end industries. The research report analyses and provides the historical data along with current performance of the global Phosphoric Fertilizer industry, and estimates the future trend of Phosphoric Fertilizer market on the basis of this detailed study. The study shares "Phosphoric Fertilizer Market" performance both in terms of volume and revenue.Get Free Sample Copy of Report Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of This ReportAgrium Inc.EurochemYara International AsaCoromandel International Ltd.Cf Industries Holdings Inc.OCP GroupThe Mosaic Co.Israel Chemicals LimitedPhosagroThe market research report explores the Phosphoric Fertilizer market across the globe along with major regions and countries. The research report provides a detailed study on each and every aspect of "Phosphoric Fertilizer Market". The research report studies the entire value chain from raw material to end user industries. The report also shares import/export statistics along with production and consumption for all major regions and countries. Moreover, the research study classifies the Phosphoric Fertilizer market based on major product types, application and end users industries of Phosphoric Fertilizer. Besides, the report also covers geographical segmentation for Phosphoric Fertilizer market. The report further provides production, capacity, price per region, gross margin, production cost, for all major regions and countries listed in report.The competitive landscape of the global market for Phosphoric Fertilizer is determined by assessing the major industry participants, production capacity, production capacity utilization rate, Phosphoric Fertilizer market's production chain, pricing by each manufacturer and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the Phosphoric Fertilizer market globally.Enquire Before Buying @The worldwide Phosphoric Fertilizer market 2017 is further analyzed on the basis of product pricing, Phosphoric Fertilizer production volume, data pertaining to demand and Phosphoric Fertilizer supply, and the revenue garnered by the product. The report provides upstream and downstream analysis covering major raw material used in manufacturing of Phosphoric Fertilizer along with detailed manufacturing sources. The report also shares list of major raw material manufacturers along with their manufacturing locations. Detailed raw material price trend analysis along with manufacturing cost analysis is also incorporated into the report. Various methodical tools such as investment returns, feasibility, SWOT analysis and market attractiveness analysis has been implemented in the research study to present a comprehensive, detailed study of the industry for Phosphoric Fertilizer across the world.About UsApexResearch offer reports from top publishers and update to serve you with immediate on-line access to professional insights on global industries, companies, products, and trends. Customers can buys different reports across various categories such as Chemical and Material, Biotechnology, Healthcare, Food and beverages, Automobile and various sectors. Our Website offers safe and secure online ordering experience, convenient payment options.Contact UsFrank ValadezBusiness Development Executive| sales@apexresearch.biz
Deodorant and Antiperspirant Ingredients Market Pegged to Value US$ 2,390 Mn by 2021

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According to the report, the global deodorant and antiperspirant ingredients market was valued at US$ 1,520 Mn in 2014 and is anticipated to reach US$ 2,390 Mn by 2021, registering a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.7% through the forecast period.Global deodorant and antiperspirant ingredients market is largely driven by growing demand of deodorant and antiperspirant products by younger consumers. New and innovative ingredients, lower cost of deodorant products compared to other substitutes, enhanced performance of deodorant and antiperspirant products due to a usage of high-quality ingredients, new technologies, and attractive packaging are some major factors causing a shift in preference among younger consumers to purchase deodorants and antiperspirants. Aerosol deodorants and antiperspirants contribute highest in terms of demand and share the global deodorant and antiperspirants market as compared to other product types. In terms of ingredients, alcohol accounted for the largest market share in the global deodorant and antiperspirant ingredients market as compared to other ingredients, which is anticipated to expand at a significant CAGR of 6.5% over the forecast period. However, growing concerns among consumers regarding possible health issues some ingredients used in deodorant and antiperspirant products could cause, and growing environmental concerns could pose a challenge for the growth of the global deodorant and antiperspirant ingredients market.Browse Complete Report @The global deodorant and antiperspirant ingredients market is segmented into deodorant type, antiperspirant type, deodorant and antiperspirant ingredients, and by geography.By deodorant product type, the market is segmented into aerosol deodorants, roll on deodorants, creams & wipes deodorants, sticks & solids deodorants, and others. Among these segments, the aerosol deodorant segment is expected to account for 75.3% revenue share of the overall market by 2021. Furthermore, it is expected to dominate the global deodorant market throughout the forecast period, exhibiting a CAGR of 4.8%. By antiperspirant product type, the market is segmented into aerosol antiperspirant, roll on antiperspirant, sticks & solids antiperspirant, and others. Aerosol antiperspirant is the largest segment in terms of market value and is expected to register highest CAGR of 4.4% between 2015 and 2021 owing to its easy to use characteristic. Furthermore, roll on is the second largest product segment and is anticipated to account for 15.6% share of overall market share by 2021.On the basis of ingredients, the global deodorant and antiperspirant ingredients market is segmented into alcohol, aluminum, antimicrobials, base/ carrier substances, conditioner & moisturizer, fragrances, parabens & propellants, and others. Among the aforementioned segments, alcohol ingredient segment is expected to dominate the global market with over 35% market share in terms of volume throughout the forecast period. Increasing demand for deodorant and antiperspirant products with long-lasting fragrance and effective antibacterial properties is a factor expected to further propel demand for ingredients.A sample of this report is available upon request @On the basis of region, Europe dominated the global deodorant and antiperspirant market in 2014, followed by North America and Asia-Pacific. Europe is expected to remain the dominant market with over 30% market revenue share throughout the forecast period.Request to view table of content @Key industrial participants considered in the global deodorant and antiperspirant ingredients market include Unilever Company, Procter & Gamble, LOreal Company, Avon Product Inc., Shiseido, CavinKare Pvt. Ltd., Henkel AG & Company KGaA, Beiersdorf AG, and Godrej Consumer Products Ltd.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Global Biomass Power Generation Market: Cost-efficient, Eco-friendly Woody Biomass Advances as Favorite Feedstock to Clutch Leading Share

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Biomass Power Generation Market by Feedstock (Woody Biomass, Agriculture & Forest Residues, Biogas & Energy Crops, Urban Residues, and Landfill Gas Feedstock) and by Technology (Anaerobic Digestion, Combustion, Gasification, Co-firing & CHP, and Landfill Gas (LFG)) - Global & U.S. Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2014 - 2022" to its huge collection of research reports.With technological advances and ongoing research and development (R&D) to commercialize the use of biomass for power generation, the biomass power generation market is anticipated to register higher growth in the next few years. Increasing utilization of biomass, including manure and plant materials, to generate electricity and produce biomass fuels for transportation can provide a low-carbon and sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. Both developing and developed economies are increasingly focusing on biomass for power generation in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This is primarily since biomass is carbon-neutral. Biomass power generation produces as much carbon as the plants absorb from the atmosphere.Browse Detail Report With TOC @Power generation through biomass also provides significant benefits to local communities. Biomass is also expected to help a country phase out the use of coal for generating electricity. Biomass power makes productive utilization of wood manufacturing wastes, crop residues and the clean portion of urban wastes. Sustainable biomass resources and scales of operation can be identified by assessing the total biomass production in a particular region, while balancing energy and environmental tradeoffs.The research study is designed to analyze the global biomass power generation market. The market is calculated in terms of installed capacity (MW), power generation (Million KWh), and revenue (USD Million). The market for biomass power generation, based on feedstock, has been segmented into woody biomass, agriculture & forest residues, biogas & energy crops, urban residues, and landfill gas feedstock. On the basis of technology, the biomass power generation market has been segmented into anaerobic digestion, combustion, gasification, co-firing & CHP, and landfill gas (LFG). The regional segments included in this study are North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and Latin America.These regional segments are further divided into country-wise segments for the respective region. North America is further sub-segmented into the U.S. and Rest of North America; Europe is sub-segmented into Sweden, Finland, the U.K., Germany, Italy, and Rest of Europe; Asia Pacific is sub-segmented into China, India, Japan, and Rest of Asia Pacific; Middle East and Africa (MEA) is further sub-segmented into South Africa and Rest of MEA; and Latin America is sub-segmented into Brazil and Rest of Latin America.The report provides a detailed growth forecast for the period 20142022 based on the historical years  2012 and 2013. Projections have been provided for installed capacity (MW), power generation (Million KWh), and revenue (USD Million). The report includes the key market dynamics affecting the demand for biomass power generation feedstock and technologies. As a part of our market dynamics analysis, we have analyzed market drivers, market restraints, and market opportunities. A comprehensive competitive landscape, which includes company market share analysis and market attractiveness analysis, has also been provided in this report.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The report also provides a detailed industry analysis of the global biomass power generation market with the help of Porters Five Forces model. The Porters Five Forces analysis aids in understanding the five major forces that affect the industry structure and profitability of the global power generation technology market. The forces analyzed are the bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, threat from new entrants, threat from substitutes, and degree of competition.The study also includes the value chain of the global biomass power generation market which provides a glimpse of procurement and logistics, biomass conversion techniques as well as interaction of suppliers and buyers with end-users. The company market share analysis has been done considering the biomass installed capacity, number of biomass power plants (installed and upcoming), revenues, and global penetration of key market players in the biomass industry. The market attractiveness analysis involves benchmarking and ranking each technology and region on the basis of numerous parameters. The parameters selected are likely to have a pronounced effect on the demand for each technology in the current scenario as well as in the near future.Key participants in the global biomass power generation market include Alstom SA, Ameresco, Inc., DONG Energy A/S, Drax Group plc, Forth Energy Ltd., Helius Energy Plc, Enviva LP, MGT Power Ltd., The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and Vattenfall AB. This report provides an overview of these companies, followed by their financial revenues, business strategies, and recent developments.Global Biomass Power Generation Market: Feedstock Segment Analysis- Woody Biomass- Agriculture & Forest Residues- Biogas & Energy Crops- Urban Residues- Landfill Gas FeedstockGlobal Biomass Power Generation Market: Technology Segment Analysis- Anaerobic Digestion- Combustion- Gasification- Co-firing & CHP- Landfill Gas (LFG)Global Biomass Power Generation Market: Regional Segment Analysis- North America- U.S.- Rest of North America- Europe- Sweden- Finland- U.K.- Germany- Italy- Rest of Europe- Asia Pacific- China- India- Japan- Rest of Asia Pacific- Middle East and Africa (MEA)- South Africa- Rest of MEA- Latin America- Brazil- Rest of Latin AmericaMake 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 @
Alginates Market Players Analysis  Cargill Foods, P.L. Thomas & Co., TIC Gums, Linyi Viho Chem Co., Ltd., Foodchem International Corporation, Qingdao Tocean Chemical Co.

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Market Research Future published a Half Cooked Research Report (HCRR) on Global Alginates MarketMarket  Overview:Alginates are a group of viscous polysaccharides derived from brown seaweeds and produced as an extracellular matrix by some bacterial species. Traditionally, Alginates have been used as thickeners, emulsifiers and stabilising agents in a number of food applications. A number of new food applications are emerging for Alginates, based on their unique biochemical and biophysical properties.Alginates are a biomaterial that has found numerous applications in biomedical science and engineering due to its favourable properties, including biocompatibility and ease of gelation. Alginates hydrogels have been particularly attractive in wound healing, drug delivery, and tissue engineering applications to date, as these gels retain structural similarity to the extracellular matrices in tissues and can be manipulated to play several critical roles.Over the last decades, Alginates, natural multifunctional polymers, have increasingly drawn attention as attractive compounds in the biomedical and pharmaceutical fields due to their unique physicochemical properties and versatile biological activities.Western countries particularly the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Germany France have higher demand for Alginates. Rise in downstream market applications for Alginates from food and beverages, pharmaceuticals and other industrial applications are driving higher demand for Alginates.Alginates is gaining a huge traction especially from food and beverages industry in the current time, owing to its functional properties such as thickening agent, gelling agent, stabilizer, emulsifier and film-forming property. This increasing demand in food industry is attributed due to its extraction from natural seaweeds is it considered as one of safest food additive in food industry it is also certified by FAO/WHO. Simultaneously, Demand for Alginates from textile industry is also on rise as it can be used for printing, designing and dyeing on cotton and jute fabrics.Request a Sample Report @Key Players:CP Kelco, Ingredients Solutions Inc., Cargill Foods, P.L. Thomas & Co., TIC Gums, Linyi Viho Chem Co., Ltd., Foodchem International Corporation, Qingdao Tocean Chemical Co., Ltd, and Kimica are some of the key players at the forefront of competition in the Global Alginates Market and profiled in MRFR Analysis.Competitive Analysis:The Alginates market appears to be highly competitive and fragmented owing to the presence of several large and small key players accounting for a substantial market share. These key players compete based on pricing, and product innovation. Well established players incorporate acquisition, collaboration, partnership, expansion, and product in order to gain competitive advantage in this market and to maintain their market position. Manufacturers are striving to find ways to reduce raw material prices. Raw material suppliers apply the power to determine prices of raw materials, which has an impact on the business.Access the market data and market information presented through more than 60 market data tables and 25 figures spread over 115 numbers of pages of the project report Alginates Market - Forecast to 2027Market  Segments:The Alginates Market can be segmented in to 4 key dynamics for the convenience of the report and enhanced understanding;Segmentation On the basis of Type: Comprises Laminaria, Macrocystis, Ascophyllum, Lessonia, Durvillaea, Ecklonia and others.Segmentation On the basis of Functions: Comprises Thickeners, Emulsifiers, Stabilizers, Acidity Regulators and others.Segmentation On the basis of Application: Comprises Food and Beverages, Biofuels, Textile Industry, Paper and Pulp, Pharmaceuticals and others.Segmentation On the basis of Regions: Comprises Geographical regions - North America, Europe, APAC and Rest of the World.Market  Synopsis:Alginate is used for substrate of colour paste when applying patterns to print fabrics, scarf, towel, etc. Use of alginate for printing of cotton, jute, rayon is mandatory. Alginate, a seaweed extract, is safer and easier to be decomposed compared with other substrate for textile printing, and gives easier waste water disposal. Alginate is used for the production of welding rod, as a binder of flux. Alginate is used as a binder and thickening agent for pet-food, fish feed, etc.Access Report Details @Regional Analysis:North-America dominated the market for Alginates in terms of demand with the largest market share, accounting for astronomical amounts and is expected to grow further over its previous growth records by 2027; Asia-Pacific is the growing market for Alginates market and is expected to grow at a substantial CAGR from 2016 to 2027.Europe and Asia Pacific regions being the largest producers of Alginates contribute majority of market share in global level market. In terms of value, it is expected that Europe and North America accounted for a major share in terms of value and also as a lucrative market in near future.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.ContactAkash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Global Digital Valve Positioner Market 2017 - Emerson, Flowserve, Metso, General Electric, Siemens, ABB, SAMSON AG, Rotork, Azbil, Burkert

Global Digital Valve Positioner Market

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Global Digital Valve Positioner Market 2017 Analysis Report audits a Market Regions, Product Categories, with Sales, Business Revenue, Goods cost, Digital Valve Positioner piece of the overall industry and Growth patterns, concentrating on driving Digital Valve Positioner industry players, showcase size, request and supply examination, utilization volume, Forecast 2017 to 2022.Get Free Sample Copy of Report Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of This ReportEmersonFlowserveMetsoGeneral ElectricSiemensABBSAMSON AGRotorkAzbilBurkertSchneider ElectricGEMUYokogawaChongqing Chuanyi AutomationMaxonicThe Global Digital Valve Positioner report gives a thorough situation of the present and gauge Digital Valve Positioner showcase procedures, improvement methodologies and development openings. Starting a discussion on the contemporary condition of Digital Valve Positioner showcase, the report extra dissects the market powerful moving each area begun in it.The report additionally concentrates the Digital Valve Positioner bits of knowledge of the organizations and suggestions that will help the perusers to have progressive learning of the Digital Valve Positioner showcase.Enquire Before Buying @A principal diagram of the Digital Valve Positioner market is introduced to the perusers with the assistance of market definition, order, different applications, and production network examination. The Digital Valve Positioner report covers the investigation of conventional and the developing markets. The report more expresses the Digital Valve Positioner showcase rivals, their business profiles, freshest news, their piece of the overall industry, developing arrangements and methodologies, client volume and creating strategies.In next part, the Digital Valve Positioner Report assesses the gross edge examination of various locales i. e. (US, EU, China and Japan). Different areas can be included according to the prerequisite.All in all, it is an exhaustive research report which will help perusers to break down the possibility of interest in Digital Valve Positioner advertise.About UsApexResearch offer reports from top publishers and update to serve you with immediate on-line access to professional insights on global industries, companies, products, and trends. Customers can buys different reports across various categories such as Chemical and Material, Biotechnology, Healthcare, Food and beverages, Automobile and various sectors. Our Website offers safe and secure online ordering experience, convenient payment options.Contact UsFrank ValadezBusiness Development Executive| sales@apexresearch.biz
Global Blood Viscometer Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022

Blood Viscometer Market

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A viscometer is an exclusive instrument which is used to determine any fluids viscosity. Similarly, Blood viscometer is used in the medical sector to identify and measure the viscosity of the blood. Bloods viscosity is nothing but the stickiness and thickness of the blood. A blood viscometer measures the ability of blood to flow through the vessels. It is one of the crucial screening tests, which assesses the amount of friction caused to the vessels by the blood. Besides, the procedure also states whether how laboriously the heart has to function in order to pump blood and the amount of oxygen rendered to the tissues and the organs. Significantly, extreme blood viscosity can efficiently be modified with the help of safe lifestyle based interventions. A healthy and normal adult blood viscosity is 40/100 (40 over 100) and is resulted in the units of millipoise. The blood viscosity of humans alters in dynamic manner from higher shear to low shear at the time of every cardiac cycle. At low shear rate (diastole) the blood is 2 to 5 times thicker, and during high shear rate (systole) the blood is much thinner.Request to Sample of This Report @The Global blood viscometer market is expected to bloom in near future owing to its widespread usability and is predicted to garner considerably higher CAGR during the forecast period. Ascending prevalence of peripheral vascular disorders, latest enhanced technologies, increase in the need for blood viscometers in clinics and hospitals, etc., are expected to flourish the blood viscometer market on a global level. Furthermore, escalating elderly population is also quite accountable for this industrys market to grow lucratively. Additionally, broad variety of applications of these medical instruments is estimated to drive the market of blood viscometers. Other health issues such as diabetes, gastroenterology, dermatology, tumor monitoring and several others are the primary reasons accountable for the market growth of this industry. Obesity along with increasing potential of cardiovascular disorders and growing demand for minimally invasive procedures, further propel this market on a global level. However, stringent regulatory submission needed for market players together with the effectuation of ObamaCare, also known as, the Patient Protection and Affordable Healthcare Act, 2010, in the United States are said to hinder the growth of this market.Browse full report with Table of Content @The global market of this industry geographically has been segmented into North America (USA, Canada and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia), South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia etc.), and Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa). Capillary viscometer and rotational viscometer are the two main types of this market segment. The end-user application of the blood viscometer is clinics, hospital and laboratory. The major market players of the global blood viscometer market are Anton Paar, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Brookfield, RheoSense, Health Onvector, `BioFluid Technology, LAUDA, LAMY RHEOLOGY, Benson Viscometers, and HRD.Request For Discount @Some points from TOC:-1 Market Overview1.1 Blood Viscometer Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Rotational Viscometer1.2.2 Capillary Viscometer1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Hospital1.3.2 Clinic1.3.3 Laboratory1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (USA, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 USA Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.1.2 Canada Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.2 France Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.3 UK Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.4 Russia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.5 Italy Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.2 Japan Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.3 Korea Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.4 India Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 Anton Paar2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Blood Viscometer Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 Anton Paar Blood Viscometer Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 Thermo Fisher Scientific2.2.1 Business OverviewFor more help Speak to our Experts @About Global Info Reports:GIR Market Research is a company that simplifies how analysts and decision makers get industry data for their business. Our unique colossal technology has been developed to offer refined search capabilities designed to exploit the long tail of free market research whilst eliminating irrelevant results. GIR Market Research is the collection of market intelligence products and services on the Web. We offer reports and update our collection daily to provide you with instant online access to the worlds most complete and current database of expert insights on global industries, companies, products, and trends.Contact us:+1-888-376-9998 (US)Email- sales@globalinforeports.comWeb-Blogs-
APAC Broadcasting Equipment Market Pegged to Value US$ 5,104.8 Mn by 2024

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The report has segmented the APAC broadcasting equipment market into traditional TV broadcast, traditional radio broadcast, IP converged broadcasting and asset management systems.According to the latest report published by Persistence Market Research, titled Broadcasting Equipment Market: Asia Pacific Industry Analysis and Forecast, 20162024, the broadcasting equipment market in APAC region is expected to be valued at US$ 5,104.8 Mn by 2024.Browse Complete Report @The broadcasting equipment market in APAC region was valued at US$ 2487.5 Mn in 2015 and is expected to register a CAGR of 8.1% from 2016 to 2024. The growth of broadcasting equipment market in APAC region is primarily driven by convergence of high definition technologies such as 4K with IP. As per the report, 4K services are expected to be available on IP networks over the next four to five years via satellite launching and cable platforms.Traditional TV broadcast segment was valued at US$ 1123 Mn in 2015 and is anticipated to register a CAGR of 8.1% during the forecast period (20162024). The traditional radio broadcast segment was valued at US$ 544 Mn in 2015 and is anticipated to register a CAGR of 7.5% during the forecast period. The IP converged broadcasting is projected to be the fastest growing segment in APAC broadcasting equipment market, exhibiting a CAGR of 10.0% during the forecast period.Traditional TV broadcast segment accounted for 45.1% share in terms of value of the total APAC broadcasting equipment market in 2015. Consumption of high definition content in APAC region is increasing at a rapid pace, supported by rising sales of HD ready TVs.A sample of this report is available upon request @The traditional TV broadcast equipment market is further segmented into camera, monitors, routers, switchers, cable, transmitter, receiver and other accessories. Routers sub-segment is projected to expand at the highest CAGR of 9.2% during the forecast period. Content creators across the region are shifting towards 4K cameras in order to capture high definition video. This is being supported by sales of 4K UHD television that has gained momentum due to rising disposable income in the region.Request to view table of content @Key players of the APAC Broadcasting Equipment market include Media Excel Inc.(US), ChyronHego Corporation (US), TVU Networks Corporation (US), XOR Media Inc.(US), FOR-A Company (Japan), ORACLE Corporation (US), Unlimi-Tech Software Inc. (US), Grass Valley (Canada) and General Dynamics Mediaware (Australia).This report covers trends that are driving each segment and offers analysis and insights regarding the potential of the broadcasting equipment market in APAC regions.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
RACINE  The father of a toddler who died from a gunshot wound last week has been charged in connection with the shooting.

Police found 3-year-old JereMiah Pitt shot and killed on the morning of July 12 in the upper unit of a home in the 1800 block of Howe Street.

On Wednesday morning, prosecutors charged 30-year-old Jeffrey L. Pitt Jr., of the 700 block of Wisconsin Avenue, with first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree recklessly endangering safety and possession of a firearm.

A second man, Laquan L. Russell, 27, of the 1800 block Mead Street, is charged with obstructing an officer and harboring a felon by falsifying information.

The allegations

Jeffrey Pitt, the boys father, reportedly told police he took five shots of alcohol before coming home on the night of July 11. When he got home around 7 p.m., he took JereMiah into the living room and put on a movie, he said. He then passed out with the toddler nearby and his other son lying on his chest, the complaint states.

When he woke up at 6 a.m. Pitt found the child dead, he told police. Police found JereMiah on the floor with a single gunshot wound to the chest. A spent .40 caliber shell casing was found next to his body, according to the criminal complaint.

After initially denying any possession of a firearm, Pitt reportedly told police he went to bed that night with a loaded .40 caliber gun in his waistband.

Pitt said he did not wake to anything in the night, didnt hear any sounds and didnt feel anyone remove the firearm from his waistband, the complaint states.

Finding JereMiah dead and the gun missing the next morning, Pitt reportedly learned Russell had taken the gun from the floor during the night. After Russell later gave him the gun back, Pitt counted the rounds in clip and chamber and determined one of the rounds was missing, according to the complaint.

Pitt then reportedly asked Russell to dispose of the gun and take his other child away from the home.

Russell initially denied any knowledge of a gun but eventually told investigators he spotted the gun lying on the floor on the night of July 11-12 and brought it downstairs, the complaint states.

The next morning, when Pitt told him JereMiah was dead and asked where the gun was, Russell handed the gun to Pitt, police said.

Russell later told police he took the gun from Pitt to dispose of it along the alley behind the house and led officers to its location. An officer who collected the gun found the chamber empty and the magazine one round short of fully loaded.

In court

During an initial appearance in Racine County Circuit Court on Wednesday afternoon, Racine County Court Commissioner Alice Rudebusch found probable cause to pursue the charges against Pitt and Russell. Rudebusch set the bond for for Pitt, who was convicted of possession of cocaine with the intent to deliver in 2006, at $100,000. The bond for Russell, who has been convicted of an assortment of misdemeanors, was set at $25,000.

In requesting bond for Russell, Assistant Racine County District Attorney Rebecca Sommers noted Russell left a loaded gun in an alley where it would have been easily accessible by the public.

Pitt and Russell are slated to appear in court again at 8:30 a.m. on July 27 for preliminary hearings.

Both men remained in custody as of Wednesday at the Racine County Jail.
Global Cardiac Rhythm Management Device Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022

Cardiac Rhythm Management Device

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Cardiac rhythm management is an ascending specialty of cardiology which involves identifying any heart rhythm disorders. It is one of the vital branches of cardiology that comprises of treatment and study of cardiac electrophysiology. Cardiac rhythm management (CRM) devices are embedded medical devices that are used for rendering therapeutic solutions to patients going through cardiac arrhythmias or cardiac resynchronization. These CRM devices are used to make sure that the heart functions properly. The cardiac rhythm management includes medical devices such as external defibrillators, pacemakers, Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators (ICDs) and cardiac resynchronization therapy devices. Irregular heartbeats are a resultant of an intervention with the electrical activity in the upper chambers or atria of the heart. These diseases block the blood flow through the heart and lead to excessive tiredness and fatigue, chest pain and palpitations, and lightheadedness. A few of the severe types of cardiac arrhythmias include atrial fibrillation, tachycardia, familial atrial fibrillation, Romano-Ward syndrome, Wolf-Parkinson-White-Syndrome, Brugada Syndrome, Lange-Nielsen syndrome, QT syndrome and Jervell.Request to Sample of This Report @The global cardiac rhythm management device market is estimated to flourish in the future while registering at a considerably higher CAGR during the forecast period. One of the most vital factors for the growth of this industrys market is the frequent occurrence of cardiac arrhythmias. This increase in cardiac arrhythmias is due to the increase in the global geriatric population. United Nations has stated that the global share of population above the age of 65 will escalate to 16% in 2050 from 7% in 2000. Enhanced technological innovations are fueling this market further. Increasing negative lifestyle habits such as excessive alcohol, smoking, and obesity, all of which makes an individual more prone to cardiac arrhythmias and increase in overall patient awareness will together promote this industrys market further. These medical devices have become less invasive and considerable progression in pulse generator technology has let prolonged device therapy with restricted complications. Superior disposable income is said to upsurge the global cardiac rhythm management devices in the future. However, since the device is not very cost efficient and there is a general lack of awareness about sudden cardiac arrests, are said to hamper the market growth in the future.Browse full report with Table of Content @The market manufacturers of the global cardiac rhythm management device market are Medtronic, St. Jude Medical (Abbott), Boston Scientific, Biotronik, LivaNova (Sorin), Medico, IMZ, Pacetronix, Qinming Medical, Cardioelectronica and CCC. The regional segmentation of this industrys market are North America (USA, Canada and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia), South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia etc.), and Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa). Based on the type, the market is divided into Pacemaker, ICD, and BI-V ICD. The end-user applications of this market are divided into bradycardia, tachycardia, heart failure, and other.Request For Discount @Some points from TOC:-1 Market Overview1.1 Cardiac Rhythm Management Device Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Pacemaker1.2.2 ICD1.2.3 BI-V ICD1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Bradycardia1.3.2 Tachycardia1.3.3 Heart Failure1.3.4 Other1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (USA, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 USA Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.1.2 Canada Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.2 France Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.3 UK Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.4 Russia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.5 Italy Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.2 Japan Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.3 Korea Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.4 India Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 Medtronic2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Cardiac Rhythm Management Device Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 Medtronic Cardiac Rhythm Management Device Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 St. Jude Medical (Abbott)2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Cardiac Rhythm Management Device Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 2For more help Speak to our Experts @About Global Info Reports:GIR Market Research is a company that simplifies how analysts and decision makers get industry data for their business. Our unique colossal technology has been developed to offer refined search capabilities designed to exploit the long tail of free market research whilst eliminating irrelevant results. GIR Market Research is the collection of market intelligence products and services on the Web. We offer reports and update our collection daily to provide you with instant online access to the worlds most complete and current database of expert insights on global industries, companies, products, and trends.Contact us:+1-888-376-9998 (US)Email- sales@globalinforeports.comWeb-Blogs-
Global Solar Farm Automation Market 2016-2020 Key Vendors - ABB, AllEarth Renewables, DEGER, Emerson Electric, First Solar, Mecasolar

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Solar Farm Automation Market 2016-2020" to its huge collection of research reports.A solar tracker is a device used to orient a solar panel or align a solar reflector or lens toward the sun. It ensures that the solar modules remain in the best position to harness the maximum energy from the sun. A solar tracker is bound to the panel so that the position of the latter can be changed based on the sun's position throughout the year. Solar tracking is an effective way to increase the efficiency of each solar panel. The two types of trackers used to increase the output from solar farms are single-axis and dual-axis solar trackers.Technavios analysts forecast the global solar farm automation market to grow at a CAGR of 17.03% 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 solar farm automation market for 2016-2020.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:AmericasAPACEMEAGlobal Solar Farm Automation 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.Browse Detail Report With TOC @Key vendorsABBAllEarth RenewablesDEGEREmerson ElectricFirst SolarMecasolarOther prominent vendorsAbengoa SolarArray TechnologiesArzon SolarEnerga ERCAMFrontier TechnologyGeneral ElectricGRUPO CLAVIJO ELTHaosolarHeliopowerHoneywell InternationalMitsubishi ElectricNEXTrackerRockwell AutomationSiemensSmarttrak Solar SystemsTrabant SolarYokogawa ElectricMarket driverBetter efficiency through automation solutionsFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challengeHigh solar energy storage costFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trendTurnkey solutions lowering distributors' customer acquisition costFor 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 IC Card Management System Market 2017 - OPW, Samsung, ASSA ABLOY, Allegion, Moxa, Censtar, Prospect

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IC card(Intelligent Chip Card), also called smart card, embedded with electronic memory chip, it is widely used in Bank, Telecom, Oil Companies, Government System, Hotel, etc because its high-security.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the IC Card Management System in Global market, especially in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, type and application.Request For Sample Report @Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversCenstarProspectJun InternationalsSanki Petroleum TechnologyOPWSamsungASSA ABLOYAllegionMoxaMarket Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (USA, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia etc.)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversSmart Door LockFingerprint ReadersFuel ManagementOthersAccess Full Report With TOC @Market Segment by Applications, can be divided intoCorporate and Government BuildingsFuel and Gas Filling StationsOthersThere are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global IC Card Management System market.Chapter 1, to describe IC Card Management System Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of IC Card Management System, with sales, revenue, and price of IC Card Management System, in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 4, to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of IC Card Management System, for each region, from 2012 to 2017;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the market by countries, by type, by application and by manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2012 to 2017;Chapter 12, IC Card Management System market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2017 to 2022;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe IC Card Management System sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.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 ManagerPhone: (201) 465-4211Email: sales@fiormarkets.comWeb:Blog:
Android TV Box Market: Global Industry Size, Demand, Trends and 2022 Future Report

Global Android TV Box Market Professional Survey Report 2017

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Global Android TV Box Market 2017 Industry Research Report provides key statistics on the market status of the Android TV Box manufacturers and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the industry.Complete report on Android TV Box market spreads across 104 pages profiling 06 companies and supported with 110 tables and figures @Key Companies Analysis: - profiles overview Nvidia, Amazon, Sony, Xiaomi, MINIX and Qbox.The Global Android TV Box Industry provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Android TV Box market analysis is provided for the international markets including development trends, competitive landscape analysis, and key regions development status.Development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures are also analyzed. This report also states import/export consumption, supply and demand Figures, cost, price, revenue and gross margins.The Global Android TV Box Industry focuses on global major leading industry players providing information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials and equipment and downstream demand analysis is also carried out. The Android TV Box industry development trends and marketing channels are analyzed. Finally the feasibility of new investment projects are assessed and overall research conclusions offered. With the tables and figures the report provides key statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.Place a Direct Purchase on this Report @Major Points Covered in Table of Contents:1 Industry Overview2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Android TV Box3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis4 Production Analysis of Android TV Box by Regions, Technology, and Applications5 Sales and Revenue Analysis of Android TV Box by Regions6 Analyses of Android TV Box Production, Supply, Sales and Market Status 2010-20177 Analysis of Android TV Box industry Key Manufacturers8 Price and Gross Margin Analysis9 Marketing Traders or Distributor Analysis of Android TV Box10 Development Trend of Android TV Box industry2017-202211 Industry Chain Suppliers of Android TV Box with Contact Information12 New Project Investment Feasibility Analysis of Android TV Box13 Conclusion of the Global Android TV Box industry 2017 Market Research ReportList of Tables and FiguresGet more details on this report @About Us:Reports n Reports is digital databank of syndicated market reports for worldwide and China businesses. ReportsnReports.com offers market research reports to businesses, entities and organizations with an objective of assisting them in their decision making process. Our collection of 500,000+ industry & nation research reports shields 5000+ micro markets. We provide 24X7 available, online and offline support to our clients.Contact:Ritesh TiwariUNIT no 802, Tower no. 7, SEZMagarpatta city, Hadapsar,Pune, Maharashtra 411013, IndiaTel: +1-888-391-5441sales@reportsandreports.com
Essential Oils Market Global Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunities, and Forecast 2017-2022

ReportsWeb

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ReportsWeb.com has announced the addition of the Global Essential Oils Market Research Report 2017 The report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification.Global Essential Oils market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingCargillDuPontDSMGivaudan...Request a Sample atGeographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD) , market share and growth rate of Essential Oils in these regions, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast) , coveringUnited StatesEUChinaJapanSouth KoreaTaiwanBrowse Complete Report atOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoOrange oilLemon oilLime oilPeppermint oilCornmint oilCitronella oilSpearmint oilGeranium oilClove leaf oilOtherOn the basis on the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales) , market share and growth rate of Essential Oils for each application, includingFood & beverageCosmetics & toiletriesAromatherapyHome careHealth careOthers (feed, insecticides, and paint)Get discount on report purchase atKey Point from Table of Contents:1 Essential Oils Market Overview2 Global Essential Oils Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Essential Oils Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2012-2017)4 Global Essential Oils Supply (Production) , Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2012-2017)5 Global Essential Oils Production, Revenue (Value) , Price Trend by Type6 Global Essential Oils Market Analysis by Application7 Global Essential Oils Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 Cargill7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Essential Oils Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 Cargill Essential Oils Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 DuPont7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Essential Oils Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 DuPont Essential Oils Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 DSM7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Essential Oils Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 DSM Essential Oils Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview8 Essential Oils Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Essential Oils Market Forecast (2017-2022)13 Research Findings and ConclusionPurchase Complete Report atContact Information:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Global Electric Brake Booster Market 2017 - HITACHI, Continnetal, Bosch

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Electric Brake Booster differs from hydraulic Brake Booster.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Electric Brake Booster in Global market, especially in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, type and application.Request For Sample Report @Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversBoschContinnetalHITACHIMarket Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (USA, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia etc.)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversOne-BoxTwo-BoxMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoSportyCarAutomobilesAccess Full Report With TOC @There are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Electric Brake Booster market.Chapter 1, to describe Electric Brake Booster Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Electric Brake Booster, with sales, revenue, and price of Electric Brake Booster, in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 4, to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Electric Brake Booster, for each region, from 2012 to 2017;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the market by countries, by type, by application and by manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2012 to 2017;Chapter 12, Electric Brake Booster market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2017 to 2022;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Electric Brake Booster sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.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 ManagerPhone: (201) 465-4211Email: sales@fiormarkets.comWeb:Blog:
Global Brown Sugar industry is projected to reach USD 27276.40 million USD by 2022, at a CAGR of 8.22% between 2016 to 2022

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Brown Sugar Market Research Report 2017" to its huge collection of research reports.This research report on the Brown Sugar market intends to offer a comprehensive strategic market analysis including a statistical study on revenue generated in this market and its growth projections over the next few years. With the improvements in Brown Sugar in terms of returns and benefits, this market is expected to experience a high growth rate in the years to come.This research study on the Brown Sugar market offers an in-depth analysis of the various application of Brown Sugar and the requirements of the end users. Further, it assesses this market by segmenting it on the basis of the business and the deployment models. It also talks about the demand for Brown Sugar across various geographies and how it has impacted the growth of this market as a whole. An all-inclusive coverage of the fundamental economic and technological factors that influences the markets progress has also been provides in this market study.This report studies Brown Sugar focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringSudzuckerTate & LyleImperial SugarNordic Sugar A/SC&H SugarAmerican Crystal SugarCargillDomino SugarTaikooWholesome SweetenersGanzhiyuanLotus Health GroupFill the form for an exclusive sample of this report @Research analyst have carried out a number of assessments to identify the volume of the production and the efficiency of the market for Brown Sugar considering the performances of its regional markets. The statistics pertaining to the demand, supply, and sales of Brown Sugar has also been reviewed thoroughly in this market study.Further, the driving forces, restraints, limitations, and growth opportunities have been analyzed at length in this report. With these factors, the research study determines various prominent trends in the Brown Sugar market, which have been influencing this market and are expected to impact the markets growth greatly in the years to come. A detailed analysis of the competitive landscape in the market for Brown Sugar in a bid to highlight the level of the competition between the leading players has also been provided in this study.Table of Contents1 Brown Sugar Market Overview 11.1 Product Overview and Scope of Brown Sugar 11.2 Brown Sugar Segment by Types 11.2.1 Global Production Market Share of Brown Sugar by Types in 2016 11.2.2 Light Brown Sugar 21.2.3 Dark Brown Sugar 32 Global Brown Sugar Market Competition by Manufacturers 152.1 Global Brown Sugar Production and Share by Manufacturers (2016 and 2017E) 152.2 Global Brown Sugar Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2016 and 2017E) 172.3 Global Brown Sugar Average Price by Manufacturers (2016 and 2017E) 202.4 Manufacturers Brown Sugar Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area, Product Types 222.5 Brown Sugar Market Competitive Situation and Trends 24For more information on this report, fill the form @3 Global Brown Sugar Production, Revenue (Value) by Regions (2012-2017E) 283.1 Global Brown Sugar Production and Market Share by Regions (2012-2017E) 283.2 Global Brown Sugar Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Regions (2012-2017E) 303.3 Global Brown Sugar Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017E) 313.4 North America Brown Sugar Production, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017E) 324 Global Brown Sugar Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions (2012-2017E) 344.1 Global Brown Sugar Consumption by Regions (2012-2017E) 344.2 North America Brown Sugar Production, Consumption, Export, Import by Regions (2012-2017E) 364.3 Europe Brown Sugar Production, Consumption, Export, Import by Regions (2012-2017E) 365 Global Brown Sugar Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Types 385.1 Global Brown Sugar Production and Market Share by Types (2012-2017E) 385.2 Global Brown Sugar Revenue and Market Share by Types (2012-2017E) 395.3 Global Brown Sugar Price by Type (2012-2017E) 415.4 Global Brown Sugar Production Growth by Type (2012-2017E) 41Figure Picture of Brown Sugar 1Table Classification of Brown Sugar by the Amount of Molasses Added 2Figure Global Production Market Share of Brown Sugar by Types in 2016 2Figure Light Brown Sugar Picture 3Table Major Manufacturers of Light Brown Sugar 3Figure Dark Brown Sugar Picture 4Table Major Manufacturers of Dark Brown Sugar 4Figure Brown Sugar Consumption Market Share by Applications in 2016About 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 UsBrooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Web:
Global Heparin Sodium Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022

Heparin Sodium Market

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Heparin, an exceedingly sulfated glycosaminoglycan, is generally utilized as an injectable anticoagulant, and has the most elevated negative charge thickness of any known organic particle. It can likewise be utilized to frame an inward anticoagulant surface on different exploratory and medicinal gadgets, for example, test tubes and renal dialysis machine. Heparin sodium is an anticoagulant also known as blood thinner that prevents the formation of blood clots. Heparin is utilized to indulgence and avert blood clot in the arteries, veins, or lung. It is likewise utilized before surgery to lessen the risk of blood clots. Heparin injection should not be utilized to flush (clean out) an intravenous (IV) catheter. A different heparin item is accessible to use as catheter bolt flush. Overdose manifestations may incorporate easy wounding, nosebleeds, blood in the urine or stools, dark or tarry stools, or any type of bleeding that won't stop.Request to Sample of This Report @The Global Heparin Sodium Market is probable with high growth rates in upcoming years in typical medical and healthcare industry. The Heparin Sodium Market with more advantageous utilization with the technologies and several other factors, which are probable to further contribute towards this markets and industry growth as well with the boom CAGR. With the future growth rate opportunities of the Heparin Sodium Market across different segments, such as regions like Asia-Pacific (India, Japan, China, Korea, and Southeast Asia), North America (Mexico, USA, and Canada), Middle East and Africa (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa), South America (Columbia, Brazil, and Argentina etc.), and Europe (UK, Germany, Russia, France, and Italy). The major market applications of the Heparin Sodium Market are Complications of Pregnancy, Treatment of Venous Thromboembolism and Cardioversion of Atrial Fibrillation/Flutter. Key manufacturers of this segment are Aspen Oss, Shenzhen Hepalink, Changzhou Qianhong Bio-pharma, Nanjing King-friend, Dongcheng Biochemicals, Pharma Action, Opocrin, Bioib`rica, Nordmark, and Kraeber.Browse full report with Table of Content @Some points from TOC:-1 Market Overview1.1 Heparin Sodium Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Type 11.2.2 Type 21.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Treatment of Venous Thromboembolism1.3.2 Complications of Pregnancy1.3.3 Cardioversion of Atrial Fibrillation/Flutter1.3.4 Other1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (USA, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 USA Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.1.2 Canada Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.2 France Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.3 UK Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.4 Russia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.5 Italy Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.2 Japan Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.3 Korea Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.4 India Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 Shenzhen Hepalink2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Heparin Sodium Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 Shenzhen Hepalink Heparin Sodium Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 Nanjing King-friend2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Heparin Sodium Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 Nanjing King-friend Heparin Sodium Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 Dongcheng Biochemicals2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Heparin Sodium Type and ApplicationsFor more help Speak to our Experts @About Global Info Reports:GIR Market Research is a company that simplifies how analysts and decision makers get industry data for their business. Our unique colossal technology has been developed to offer refined search capabilities designed to exploit the long tail of free market research whilst eliminating irrelevant results. GIR Market Research is the collection of market intelligence products and services on the Web. We offer reports and update our collection daily to provide you with instant online access to the worlds most complete and current database of expert insights on global industries, companies, products, and trends.Contact us:+1-888-376-9998 (US)Email- sales@globalinforeports.comWeb-Blogs-
Industrial Safety Gloves Market set to increase significantly by 2025

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Global Industrial Safety Gloves Market: OverviewThe global market for industrial safety gloves is predicted to grow at a healthy pace in the next few years. The rising awareness among workers concerning their safety while at workplace is estimated to fuel the growth of the overall market in the next few years. In addition, the strict rules and regulations for the use of safety devices are likely to create promising opportunities for key players operating in the global industrial safety gloves market in the coming years. The rising demand from diverse industries is anticipated to bolster the global market.Global Industrial Safety Gloves Market: Key TrendsThe rising technological advancements in order to offer safety devices for workers and the increasing rate of industrialization are estimated to encourage the growth of the global industrial safety gloves market in the next few years. In addition, the rising awareness regarding the safety and security of workers and the occupational safety regulations are predicted to accelerate the growth of the overall market in the coming few years. On the flip side, the increasing issues to the skin allergies owing to the use of latex is likely to restrict the growth of the market in the near future.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Global Industrial Safety Gloves Market: Market PotentialThe global market for industrial safety gloves is anticipated to grow significantly in the coming years, with the introduction of non-latex alternatives. The rising concern of infections related to the use of gloves is being focused, which is expected to accelerate the growth of the overall market in the coming years. The expansion of the application base is another major factor projected to supplement the growth of the market in the near future.The use of safety gloves helps in avoiding injuries to workers as well as contamination of products. As a result, industries and manufacturing units across the globe are anticipated to rise the demand for industrial safety gloves across the globe.Global Industrial Safety Gloves Market: Regional OutlookAccording to the research study, North America is estimated to experience a strong growth throughout the forecast period. The high growth of this region can be attributed to the rising construction sector in the U.S. In addition, the increasing rate of industrialization and the growing focus on health awareness in industries are estimated to encourage the growth of the North America industrial safety gloves market in the next few years.Request TOC of the Report @Furthermore, strict regulatory framework for the use of industrial safety gloves is projected to fuel the growth of the Europe market in the coming years. On the other hand, Asia Pacific is likely to register a substantial growth rate throughout the forecast period, thanks to the increasing contribution from China, India, Japan, and South Korea.Global Industrial Safety Gloves Market: Competitive AnalysisThe global market for industrial safety gloves is anticipated to witness a increasing level of competition throughout the forecast period. At present, the market is consolidated in nature with a few players accounting for a key share of the overall market. In order to maintain a leading position in the global market, the key players in the market are making remarkable efforts to create an awareness regarding the importance of using industrial safety gloves.Some of the prominent players operating in the industrial safety gloves market across the globe are Riverstone Holdings, Honeywell International, Latexx Partners, Towa Corporation, Rubberex, Dipped Products, Supermax Corporation, Longcane Industries, Top Gloves, RFB, Acme Safety, Kossan, Showa, Ansell, MCR Safety, and Hartalega. The research study offers a detailed overview of the competitive scenario of the market, emphasizing on the key aspects that are encouraging the growth of the market.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report@About TMR Research :TMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services 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
Smart Machines Market Pegged to Value US$ 258.5 Bn by 2024

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Key players in the global smart machines market include Apple Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft Corporation, BAE Systems, Creative Virtual Ltd., Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc., IBM Corporation, Narrative Science Inc., Rethink Robotics, ABB Limited, Rockwell Automation, Inc., and General Electric Co. others.Persistence Market Research (PMR) delivers key insights on the global smart machines market in its upcoming report titled, Smart Machines Market: Global Industry Analysis and Forecast, 2016-2024. In terms of value, the global smart machines market is projected to register a healthy CAGR of 18.8% during the forecast period. This is attributed to various factors, regarding which PMR offers vital insights in detail.On the basis of a component, the global smart machines market has been segmented into hardware, software, and service. Demand for smart machines is enhanced by increasing need to process and analyze big unstructured data among different sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, aerospace, and defense. On the basis of machine type, the global smart machines market has been segmented into robots, autonomous cars, drones, wearable electronics and others.Browse Complete Report @On the basis of technology, the global smart machines market has been segmented into cloud computing, big data, internet of everything (IoE), robotics, cognitive technology and effective technology. Affective technology segment is expected to expand with a substantial CAGR over the forecast period. Various enterprises working on cognitive computing are facing glitches and errors in technology. This, in turn, is encouraging adoption of affective computing. Cognitive computing technology enables emotions linking to a robot, assisting the robot in making rational decisions and performing more complex tasks.Smart machines are deployed to enhance networked resources and implement distributed intelligence in manufacturing industries. Integration of devices provides more accessibility. Smart machines can be easily connected to a broader network of connected devices, enabling users to share data on numerous devices. This ensures users to connect/access their devices from anywhere and anytime. This is expected to fuel demand for smart machines in various industries. The market in Australia is expected to witness substantial growth in adoption rates of smart machines over the next five years. Autonomous robots are expected to find applications in agriculture and commercial sectors to overcome the lack of labor in the country. Australia-based companies have also been investing significantly in advanced technologies such as IoT.A sample of this report is available upon request @Smart machines are programmed to make intelligent decisions in a time efficient manner. They are built to learn from their interactions and their precision increases over time. Hence, new developments in operational intelligence are encouraging companies to adopt systems that are smarter and efficient. Narrative Science Inc., a company that offers analytical solutions uses its virtual assistant Quill, which is programed using natural language processing to provide relevant solutions.Request to view table of content @This report covers trends driving each segment and offers analysis and insights of the potential of the smart machines market in specific regions. The markets in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific are expected to register high growth rates between 2016 and 2024. MEA is a small but significant market for smart machines as governments in the Middle East countries are investing in this sector to digitize government services. The market in Europe is expected to gain substantial market share in terms of revenue. This is attributed to increasing demand for smart machines from the automobile and manufacturing industries in countries such as Germany and France. The APAC accounted for the highest market share in 2015 and is expected to gain 232 BPS by an end of 2024.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Pharmaceutical Excipients for Taste Masking Market By Type And Application, Forecast To 2017  2025

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Taste masking techniques are applied to overcome or mask the unpleasant and bitter taste of active pharmaceutical ingredients to achieve patient acceptability and compliance. Oral administration of bitter and unpleasant tasting drugs is often the biggest challenge for pediatric and geriatric patient groups. Unless the active ingredient is tasteless or does not have any unpleasant taste, taste-masking plays a key role in the success of a final solid oral dosage form. The efficiency of taste-masking is often a key determinant for the success of specialized dosage forms like orally disintegrating tablets and films, and chewable tablets. The mechanisms of taste-masking techniques often rely on two major approaches the first is to add excipients like sweeteners, flavors, and effervescent agents to mask the unpleasant taste, and the second is to avoid the contact of bitter and unpleasant drugs with taste buds.Pharmaceutical Excipients for Taste Masking Market: DynamicsDue to advancement in drug delivery system, there has been a need of novel excipients to fulfill the multi-functional role like affecting release pattern, improvement of bioavailability and stability, taste masking and enhancement of patient acceptability. For these purpose researchers have been investigating on both natural and synthetic excipients. However, disadvantages of synthetic excipients like toxicity, expensive, environmental issues, and incompatibility can led to give more emphasis on extensive investigation of natural excipients. Some of polymers, preservatives, penetration enhancers and sweeteners from various plant sources are also being reviewed and discussed. Herbal excipients are preferable as they not only full filling their role in formulation but provide health benefits by discarding the hazards of synthetic chemicals. More research effort should be provided for investigation on materials to innovate no-toxic, biocompatible, patient acceptable, cost effective, eco-friendly excipient, suitable to be incorporated in pharmaceutical preparations.Pharmaceutical Excipients for Taste Masking Market: SegmentationOn the basis of type of excipient the pharmaceutical excipients for taste masking market can be segmented intoNaturalArtificialBothOn the basis of taste masking technique the pharmaceutical excipients for taste masking market can be segmented intoOrganoleptic MethodsHot Melt ExtrusionMicroencapsulationComplexationSpray DryingOthersStimuli responsive drug delivery systems incorporating ion sensitive and pH sensitive polymers have been developed for masking bitter API tastes. Techniques like nano hybridizing and wet spherical agglomeration have also been used for taste masking Lycopodium derived microcapsules have been used to taste mask.Request to View Tables of Content @Pharmaceutical Excipients for Taste Masking Market: Region-wise OutlookRegionally, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Middle East and Africa. Presently the US, Japan and UK together account for 30 to 35 percent of the global demand for pharmaceutical excipients. The Indian pharmaceutical excipient industry has also come a long way since the time of independence when the multinational corporations dominated the pharma industry. Implementing taste-masking programs into the drug-manufacturing process is crucial to avoid losses due to noncompliance. Pharmaceutical manufacturers are faced with challenges in life-cycle management, cost control, global regulations, and patent protection.Pharmaceutical Excipients for Taste Masking Market: Key PlayersSome of the players in the pharmaceutical excipients for taste masking market are Adare Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Asahi Kasei Corporation, Ashland, Inc., Azelis, BASF SE, Capsugel Belgium, Dow Chemical Company, Gattefosse, SPI Pharma. Both regulators and industry groups are consequently taking steps to establish process for ensuring the safety and quality of excipients across the entire excipient supply chain. Also, leveraging upon the cheap labor available, the manufacturers in the emerging countries are producing competitive products at lower costs which will provide a momentum to the growth of the pharmaceutical excipients market globally.To view complete report @About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.commedia@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Global Medical Gas Pressure Regulators Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022

Medical Gas Pressure Regulators Market

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Medical gas pressure regulators are control valves which decreases the pressure input of a liquid to a decided value at its output. It automatically cuts off the liquid or gas flow at a specific pressure. Use of regulators enables high pressured liquid supply tanks or line to be decreased to safety and usable pressure for several other applications. The medical gas pressure regulators could be a fundamental device with an output pressure setting, a sensor and a restrainer all of this in one single body. Or else, the cylinders have different controller, pressure sensor and flow valve. The regulator helps in precisely managing and controlling the gas flow between the pump and the medical equipment. An adjustment device that is usually a simple knob enables the user to change the pressure by escalating or reducing it at the same time to assure maximum heath benefits. The regulating mechanism which distinguishes a gas regulator from a controller reacts to wavering in the supplied gas.Request to Sample of This Report @The Global medical gas pressure regulators market is estimated to boom in the future constantly growing at a lucrative growth and registering at a considerable CAGR during the forecast period owing to various factors accounting for the growth. Increased prevalence of chronic and respiratory disorders are said to be the key factors accountable for the growth of the global medical gas pressure regulators market. Furthermore, surge in the geriatric population, increasing pollution levels and rising need for point of care and home healthcare products are predicted to hasten this industrys market growth in the future. Besides, fast urbanization, predominance of tobacco smoking, altering eating habits, and effectuation of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Safety and Innovation Act, are a few more factors contributing to the growth of this industrys market. Nevertheless, alterations in medical gas calibration standards, refusing federal reimbursements for respiratory therapies, and shortage of helium on a global level, are factors which might hinder the growth of this market.Browse full report with Table of Content @The prime market players of the global medical gas pressure regulators market Emerson, Ceodeux Meditec, Amico, Essex Industries, Praxair, Flow-Meter, DELTA P, Greggersen, VTI Ventil, Genstar, Megasan Medical and Harris. Regional segmentation of this market industry are North America (USA, Canada and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia), South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia etc.), and Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa). The medical gas pressure regulators based on the types are divided into oxygen pressure regulators, nitrous oxide pressure regulators, medical air pressure regulators and other gas pressure regulators. This market has its applications in home care, hospitals and other places.Request For Discount @Some points from TOC:-1 Market Overview1.1 Medical Gas Pressure Regulators Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Oxygen Pressure Regulators1.2.2 Nitrous Oxide Pressure Regulators1.2.3 Medical Air Pressure Regulators1.2.4 Other Gas Pressure Regulators1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Hospital1.3.2 Home Care1.3.3 Other1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (USA, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 USA Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.1.2 Canada Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.2 France Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.3 UK Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.4 Russia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.5 Italy Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.2 Japan Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.3 Korea Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.4 India Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 Emerson2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Medical Gas Pressure Regulators Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 Emerson Medical Gas Pressure Regulators Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 Ceodeux Meditec2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Medical Gas Pressure Regulators Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 Ceodeux Meditec Medical Gas Pressure Regulators Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 Amico2.3.1 Business OverviewFor more help Speak to our Experts @About Global Info Reports:GIR Market Research is a company that simplifies how analysts and decision makers get industry data for their business. Our unique colossal technology has been developed to offer refined search capabilities designed to exploit the long tail of free market research whilst eliminating irrelevant results. GIR Market Research is the collection of market intelligence products and services on the Web. We offer reports and update our collection daily to provide you with instant online access to the worlds most complete and current database of expert insights on global industries, companies, products, and trends.Contact us:+1-888-376-9998 (US)Email- sales@globalinforeports.comWeb-Blogs-
Knee Pillows Market Size, Industry Analysis & Forecast Report 2017

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ReportsMonitor.com has added a new report to its database Global Knee Pillows Market Report 2017.This report identifies the Knee Pillows market size for the years 2012-2017, and forecast of the same till the year 2022. It also highlights the market drivers, restraints, growth indicators, challenges, and other key aspects with respect to the Knee Pillows market.Knee Pillows Market tracks the major market events including product launches, technological developments, mergers and acquisitions, and the innovative business strategies opted by key market players. Along with strategically analyzing the key micro markets, the report also focuses on industry-specific drivers, restraints, opportunities and challenges in the Copper Strips market. This research report offers in-depth analysis of the market size (revenue), market share, major market segments, and different geographic regions, forecast for the next five years, key market players, and premium industry trends. It also focuses on the key drivers, restraints, opportunities and challenges.For Requesting a Sample Copy of This Report, Please Visit @This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringComfiLifeCushy FormPanacea WellbeingPharMeDocCoop Home GoodsHermell ProductsLANGRIACarex Health BrandsMilliardInteVisionThe competitive landscape of the global market for Knee Pillows is determined by evaluating the various market participants, production capacity, Knee Pillows markets production chain, and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the Knee Pillows market worldwide.This report segments the Knee Pillows marketOne Layer Memory FoamMulti Layered Memory FoamOtherOn the basis of application:For OrthopedicFor Sciatic Nerve Pain ReliefOtherFor comprehensive understanding of market dynamics, the Knee Pillows market is analyzed across key geographies namely:North AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaEach of these regions is analyzed on basis of market findings across major countries in these regions for a macro-level understanding of the market.Some points from TOC:Global Knee Pillows Market Research Report 20171 Knee Pillows Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Knee Pillows1.2 Knee Pillows Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Knee Pillows Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2012-2022)8 Knee Pillows Manufacturing Cost Analysis8.1 Knee Pillows Key Raw Materials Analysis8.1.1 Key Raw Materials8.1.2 Price Trend of Key Raw Materials8.1.3 Key Suppliers of Raw Materials8.1.4 Market Concentration Rate of Raw Materials8.2 Proportion of Manufacturing Cost Structure8.2.1 Raw Materials8.2.2 Labor Cost8.2.3 Manufacturing Expenses8.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Knee Pillows9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers9.1 Knee Pillows Industrial Chain Analysis9.2 Upstream Raw Materials Sourcing9.3 Raw Materials Sources of Knee Pillows Major Manufacturers in 20159.4 Downstream BuyersBrowse Full Table of Contents and Report Description @Reports Monitor (ReportsMonitor.com) is a platform to meet the market research and business intelligence requirements. Our aim is to change the dynamics of the Market Research industry by providing quality intelligence backed by data. Your requirement for market forecasting is fulfilled by our exclusive quantitative and analytics driven intelligence. We have a vast collection of reports, covering maximum industries worldwide. Our process is meticulously planned and executed in order to use maximum resources and explore the market for getting genuine insights. Decision makers can now rely on our distinct data gathering methods to get factual market forecasting and detailed analysis.008, Mihir Co-operative,Above Bharat Suzuki showroom,Fatima Nagar,Pune,Maharashtra,IndiaIndia: +91 2069535353Jay MatthewsDirect: +1 513 549-5911Email: sales@reportsmonitor.comWebsite:
Cardiac Autonomic Neuropathy Treatment Market Trends Estimates High Demand By 2017  2025

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Damage to the nerves that control the regulation of involuntary function due to high levels of blood glucose may cause a condition called autonomic neuropathy. An example of body functions such as heart rate, digestion, blood pressure, sexual activity, and perspiration. Cardiac autonomic neuropathy occurs when the heart is affected by nerve damage. Diabetes mellitus patient commonly suffers from cardiac autonomic neuropathy. More than 26 million people in the Unites States get affected by diabetes mellitus. With the increase in age and duration of diabetes mellitus, a prevalence rate of cardiac autonomic neuropathy increase. Cardiac Autonomic Neuropathy is the reason for several cardiac dysfunctions and many medical symptoms which include exercise intolerance, silent ischemia, postural hypotension, resting tachycardia, perioperative instability, and cardiomyopathy.Cardiac Autonomic Neuropathy treatment market involves aggressively treating cardiovascular risk factors like hypertension. Cardiac autonomicdeficiency of essential fatty acids, increased oxidative stress, autoimmune damage, and formation of advanced glycosylation end products. Other therapies include in Cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment include Aldose reductase inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker.Cardiac Autonomic Neuropathy Treatment Market: Drivers and RestraintsIn diabetic patients, Cardiac Autonomic Neuropathy characterizes one of the main causes of morbidity and mortality as well as is responsible for cardiac arrhythmias and sudden death which is increasing the demand for cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market. Increase in aging population as the well societal influence and changing lifestyles are also the cause of increasing Cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market in the world. According to WHO report, more than 23 million people in the United States and an estimated 250 million worldwide are affected by diabetes mellitus. In diabetic patient Cardiac autonomic neuropathy is very common and leads to abnormalities in heart flow rate as well as vascular and peripheral dynamics and reduced quality of life are the drivers for Cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market. Some of the Cardiac autonomic neuropathy therapies has shown promising initial result but yet to be validated as well Cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment management depends on aggressive strategies due to the absence of direct treatment could be the possible restraint for the Cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market. Poor reimbursement policies by government and private players also challenge the Cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market.Due to increasing aging population and diabetes mellitus, the global market for Cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market is expected to gain pull during the forecast period. It is expected centrally acting Cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market segment to hold the dominant share in the global Cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market due to increasing number of diabetic patients. Also, the increase in number launches of the new drugs cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market is increasing globally. Increasing competition among ading drug firms in the market to develop newer drugs tends to drive the cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market towards the growth rate.Cardiac Autonomic Neuropathy Treatment Market: Region-wise OutlookBased on geographic region, the Cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market is segmented into seven significant regions:North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-pacific, and Middle East & Africa.North America is the largest in Cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market, owing to high number of diabetes mellitus patient and awareness among patients regarding the harmful effects orpulation as well as growing healthcare expenditure is the reason for significant revenue generation from this region in Cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market. Europe is the second largest in Cardiac autonomic neuropathy market due to advancement in technologies and change in lifestyles.Request to View Tables of Content @Asia-Pacific is expected to grow at faster rate in the upcoming period due to the increase in the prevalence of diabetes mellitus thus boosting the Cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market growth.Cardiac Autonomic Neuropathy Treatment Market: Key Market ParticipantsSome of the key players in Cardiac autonomic neuropathy treatment market are Pfizer Inc., Roche Holding AG, Novartis, Amgen Inc., Privi Pharma Limited, Silverline Chemicals Limited, Anthem Biopharma, Praxis Pharmaceutical.The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, application, and industry.The report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macroeconomic indicators and governing factors along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies.To view complete report @About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.commedia@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Adaptive Optics Market Size Is Projected To Be Around $90 Billion By 2025.

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A research study titled, Adaptive Optics Market by Technology and Application - Global Industry Analysis and Forecast to 2025 published by Crystal Market Research, states that the adaptive optics market is projected to be around $90 billion by 2025.Turbulence in the earths atmosphere results into limitations in the performance of astronomical telescopes. As a result, when stars are viewed through ground based telescopes, they twinkle and appear as fuzzy blobs. Adaptive optics (AO) technology can correct the blurring caused due to the turbulence and enhance the visibility of the telescopes. The distortions are removed using wavefront sensors and deformable mirrors resulting in sharpening of the light waves coming from the stars. Adaptive optics is directly related to the enhancement of image quality.It has applications in ophthalmology as well. AO improves the capabilities of ophthalmic instruments where the optics of the eye is concerned. Its use in correcting aberrations in the human eye has greatly enabled ophthalmologists to improve and evaluate vision function of patients. Adaptive optics is extensively used in defense applications such as secure defense communication and laser based missile systems.The wavefront sensor segment held a major share of the global adaptive optics market in 2016, as they have major applications for measuring distortions in wavefronts in optics. The segment is expected to maintain its dominant position in the market during the forecast period also. The wavefront modulator segment will witness a favorable growth over the forecast period due their rising adoption in wavefront corrections.Browse full research report with TOC on Adaptive Optics Market by Technology and Application - Global Industry Analysis and Forecast to 2025 at:The defense and security segment held the major share of the global market in 2016. This segment will continue dominating the overall market during the forecast period, as adoption of this technology for strengthening defense applications is rising considerably for long range target identification, electro-optical camera systems, and other applications.North America dominated the global adaptive optics market in 2016, owing to rising AO applications in the fields of astronomy, ophthalmology, defense and security. U.S. widely adopts optics and photonics for defense and security to maintain its technological superiority in this segment. Asia-Pacific market will grow with the fastest growth rate during the forecast period with rise in research activities related to adaptive optics in the developing nations. In September 2016, China began operating the worlds largest radio telescope to search signals from stars and galaxies and detect radio emissions.With substantial funding for research and development, many players are focusing on deriving advanced applications of adaptive optics in different fields. For instance, in July 2016, Safran Reosc, a subsidiary of Safran Electronics and Defense, received a contract from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) to measure, polish and test the M2 mirror on the E-ETL (European Extremely Large Telescope).Request a sample copy of Adaptive Optics Market Research Report @Some of the key players in the global adaptive optics market are Olympus Corporation, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Canon Inc., Raytheon Company, Iris AO Inc., Sacher Lasertechnik Gmbh, Boston Micromachines Corporation, Carl Zeiss Meditec AG, and Celestron LLC.Key Findings of the Research Study: The wavefront sensor segment held around half of the overall adaptive optics market in 2016, primarily due to wide applications in measuring wavefront distortions. The defense and security segment dominated the global adaptive optics market in 2016 due to rising adoption and research on adaptive optics for defense and security applications such as advanced communication systems and laser based missile systems. U.S dominated the North American adaptive optics market in 2016 and will remain the most attractive market in the region over the forecast period due to aggressive utilization of adaptive optics in ophthalmology, defense and security and astronomy. Japan held the largest share of the Asia-Pacific adaptive optics market in 2016 with rise in usage of the technology in laser precision manufacturing and biomedical imaging.Inquire more about this report at:Adaptive Optics Market Segmentation:By Technology: Wavefront Sensor Wavefront Modulator Control SystemBy Application: Biomedical Communication Astronomy Consumer Devices Defense and Security ManufacturingBy Region: North Americao U.So Canadao Mexico Europeo Germanyo Franceo UKo Italyo Spaino Rest of Europe Asia-Pacifico Japano Chinao Australiao Indiao South Koreao Rest of Asia-Pacific Rest of the Worldo Brazilo South Africao Saudi Arabiao Turkeyo United Arab Emirateso OthersGet Customization in the Report At:Related Reports:Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) Market by Product and Technology - Global Industry Analysis and Forecast to 2025:About Crystal Market ResearchCrystal Market Research is a U.S. based market research and business intelligence company. Crystal offers one stop solution for market research, business intelligence, and consulting services to help clients make more informed decisions. It provides both syndicated as well as customized research studies for its customers spread across the globe. The company offers market intelligence reports across a broad range of industries including healthcare, chemicals & materials, technology, automotive, and energy.Contact:Akhil V.304 South Jones Blvd, Suite 1896,Las Vegas NV 89107,United StatesToll Free: +1-888-213-4282Email: sales@crystalmarketresearch.comBlog:Website:
Global Industrial Exhaust Fan Market 2017 - Systemair, Twin City Fan, Greenheck, Howden, Soler & Palau

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The Report describe Industrial Exhaust Fan Introduction, product scope, market overview, opportunities, risk, driving force also to analyze the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue, and price, market type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2017 to 2022Global Industrial Exhaust Fan Industry 2017 is a comprehensive, professional report delivering market research data that is relevant for new market entrants or established players. Key strategies of the companies operating in the market and their impact analysis have been included in the report. Furthermore, a business overview, revenue share, and SWOT analysis of the leading players in the Industrial Exhaust Fan market is available in the report.Download Free Sample Report @Combining the data integration and analysis capabilities with the relevant findings, the report has predicted strong future growth of the Industrial Exhaust Fan market in all its geographical and product segments. In addition to this, several significant variables that will shape the Industrial Exhaust Fan industry and regression models to determine the future direction of the market have been employed to create the report.The report begins with a market overview and moves on to cover the growth prospects of the Industrial Exhaust Fan market. The current environment of the global Industrial Exhaust Fan industry and the key trends shaping the market are presented in the report. Insightful predictions for the Industrial Exhaust Fan market for the coming few years have also been included in the report. These predictions feature important inputs from leading industry experts and take into account every statistical detail regarding the Industrial Exhaust Fan market.Statistical forecasts in the research study are available for the total Industrial Exhaust Fan market along with its key segments. The key segments, their growth prospects, and the new opportunities they present to market players have been mentioned in the report. Moreover, the impact analysis of the latest mergers and acquisition and joint ventures has been included in the report. The report also provides valuable proposals for new project development that can help companies optimize their operations and revenue structure.Access Full Report @A detailed segmentation evaluation of the Industrial Exhaust Fan 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.Fior 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 ManagerPhone: (201) 465-4211Email: sales@fiormarkets.comWeb:Blog:
Global Surgical Gloves Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022

Surgical Gloves Market

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Surgical gloves are also termed as medical gloves which come under the category of personal protection equipment (PPE). These are exclusively designed to safeguard surgeons and clinicians in the hospital rooms or any other surgical environments. The surgical gloves are mainly intended to be a protective shield for nurses and surgeons to avoid potential transmission of diseases or pathogens at the time of any surgical procedures while working with several surgical instruments. Surgical gloves unlike other examination gloves are generally made to a superior standard and have much accuracy in terms of sizing; also they have better sensitivity and precision. Since these gloves possess several purposes in the medical world starting from dental applications to surgical procedures, surgical gloves always come in sterilized form. Surgical gloves are also used at the time of crime investigation owing to their tight fit and thinness that enables dexterity. Nowadays, instead of latex, nitrile rubber, vinyl or neoprene are the materials more commonly used due to the ascending rate of latex allergy among the general population across the globe. Also, earlier latex was used for manufacturing these gloves since it was a cheaper option. However, superior quality nitrile gloves are double the price of latex and it one reason that environments that are cost effective such as hospitals and clinics have not completely replaced latex gloves yet.Request to Sample of This Report @The Global surgical gloves market is predicted to gain more popularity and will be accountable for major profit while growing at a substantially high CAGR during the forecast period. Several factors that are accountable for the market growth of this industry are increasing awareness of occupational and patient safety in developing countries, escalating healthcare demands across the globe, healthcare markets of the developed regions opting for latex-free environments and compliance to pay for premium quality products. The non-latex surgical gloves market is expected to propel more rapidly than the latex variants owing to its relatively increasing use in the several surgeries as compared to powdered gloves that slows the process of healing in patients. The overall medical and the healthcare segment is swelling at a faster rate, therefore escalating the growth of surgical gloves market. Nevertheless, manufacturing of non-latex surgical gloves is higher and therefore might act as a growth barrier for this market industry during the forecast period. Also, the quality standards of surgical gloves are much stringent and very few market fabricators have the appropriate enhanced technology to cope up with the international quality standards, and this might hinder the overall growth of the surgical gloves market.Browse full report with Table of Content @Based on the type of the material the surgical gloves armlet has been segmented into non-latex surgical gloves and natural latex surgical gloves. The broad end-user application of this market has been segmented into non-hospital and hospital. The major market players of the global surgical gloves market are Ansell Healthcare, Top Glove, Medline Industries, Cardinal Health, Molnlycke Health Care, Kossan, Motex Group, Anhui Haojie Plastic and Rubber Products, Semperit, Hutchinson, Shangdong Yuyuan Latex Gloves, Globus, Kanam Latex Industries Pvt. Ltd., Asma Rubber Products Pvt. Ltd., and Kurian Abraham Private Limited (KAPL). The global market of this industry geographically has been segmented into North America (USA, Canada and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia), South America (Brazil, Argentina, and Columbia etc.), Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa).Request For Discount @Some points from TOC:-1 Market Overview1.1 Surgical Gloves Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Natural Latex Surgical gloves1.2.2 Non-Latex Surgical gloves1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Hospital1.3.2 Non-Hospital1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (USA, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 USA Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.1.2 Canada Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.2 France Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.3 UK Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.4 Russia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.2.5 Italy Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.2 Japan Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.3 Korea Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.4 India Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market States and Outlook (2012-2022)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 Ansell Healthcare2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Surgical Gloves Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 Ansell Healthcare Surgical Gloves Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 Top Glove2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Surgical Gloves Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 Top Glove Surgical Gloves Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)For more help Speak to our Experts @About Global Info Reports:GIR Market Research is a company that simplifies how analysts and decision makers get industry data for their business. Our unique colossal technology has been developed to offer refined search capabilities designed to exploit the long tail of free market research whilst eliminating irrelevant results. GIR Market Research is the collection of market intelligence products and services on the Web. We offer reports and update our collection daily to provide you with instant online access to the worlds most complete and current database of expert insights on global industries, companies, products, and trends.Contact us:+1-888-376-9998 (US)Email- sales@globalinforeports.comWeb-Blogs-
Linear Accelerator Market is Expecting Worldwide Growth by 2017  2025

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Linear accelerator is a device which destroys the cancer cells without affecting the surrounding normal cells. Linear accelerator (LINAC) functions in a way that it accelerates electrons through a linear tube with high speeds resulting in x-rays emission. Higher x-rays generate large electronic potential which is useful in longer accelerating cavity resulting in greater efficiency for destruction of tumors. Linear accelerator (LINAC) can be utilized on any part of human body with greater efficiency for brain tumor applications.Linear Accelerator Market: SegmentationLinear Accelerator Market can be segmented on the basis of preferred method of utilizing the device such as:Dedicated Linear AcceleratorNon-Dedicated Linear AcceleratorLinear Accelerator Market can be segmented on the basis of various applications of this technology which is as follows:Prostate CancerBreast CancerLung CancerHead & Neck CancersColorectal CancersOthersLinear Accelerator Market: DynamicsLinear Accelerator Market is primarily driven by a few key factors such as the rising prevalence of cancers, efficiency of linear accelerator to deliver high doses of radiation to the tumor with limited damage to the surrounding normal tissues or organs, rising adaptation of radiotherapy devices and procedures for treatment of various tumors, increasing number of conferences and symposiums to increase patient awareness regarding new technology advancements, various associations have come forward to educate the patients regarding rising healthcare concerns and solutions to address such issues, increase in healthcare expenditure, rising government initiatives and the increase in automation technologies leading to higher sensitivity, faster and easy performance of the devices for prevention of disease. In addition to this the major advantage of linear accelerator device is that the therapy is painless comparing to normal radiation therapies. Various research institutes are currently ongoing several clinical trials to investigate new ways of treatments for various kinds of cancers using radiotherapy such as linear accelerator and concluding the results. These clinical trials will show the progress of linear accelerator in various clinical settings.Linear Accelerator Market however faces various challenges such as limited literature is available regarding the outcomes of the device usage, and linear accelerator device is not supported by evidence based outcome studies, difficulty in visualizing tumors before targeting them, and the major concern is affordability and accessibility of the treatment. Shortage of trained personnel to prescribe appropriate dosage and sessions is observed in the linear accelerator market. Various healthcare reforms which are unfavorable to the technology also create hindrance in linear accelerator market.Request to View Tables of Content @Linear Accelerator Market: Region-wiseBased on geography, the Linear Accelerator Market can be segmented into five major regions: North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Middle East & Africa. At present, North America holds a leading position in the Linear Accelerator Market due to the growing incidence of tumors and cancers, growing advancement of healthcare infrastructure, increasing per-capita income. The major driving factors which have driven the growth of the Linear Accelerator Market in this region is constantly increasing regulatory scenario monitored by various organizations for the safety and health issues, technological advancement in finding new techniques, rise in funding in public and private sector. Following North America, European countries are also anticipated to show steady growth in the Linear Accelerator Market. Asia-Pacific region has improved its healthcare scenario by showing numerous growth opportunities supporting the current healthcare reforms, launching novel diagnostic products which are anticipated to increase the adoption of these diagnostic tests throughout the continent resulting to emerge as a fastest growing region in Linear Accelerator Market. The factors which would fuel the growth of Linear Accelerator Market in Asia-Pacific are various multinational companies are setting up their operations in this region and aiming to gain huge revenue share from emerging countries, rising healthcare concerns, and improving healthcare scenario of the region. Linear Accelerator Market would evolve at a rapid rate across the regions however North America would maintain its position in the overall Linear Accelerator Market however we are anticipating emerging economies such India, China, Brazil, Russia to have the highest growth in Linear Accelerator Market.Linear Accelerator Market: KeyLinear Accelerator Market holds huge number of players operating in the segment for years with expertise and experience. Multi-national companies are coming forward to develop products especially for the cancer treatment through radiation therapies to address the growing concerns regarding this disease which will impact the linear accelerator market. Some of the major players operating in the Linear Accelerator Market are Elekta Group of Companies manufacturing linear accelerator products such as Versa HD, Infinity/Axesse, Synergy/S, Synergy Platform, Precise and Compact; Siemens Healthcare manufacturing linear accelerator products such as Artiste, Oncor (Impression, Expression, & Avante Garde), Primus K, Primus M; Varian Technologies manufacturing linear accelerator products such as Clinac 600C/CD/6EX, Clinac 600 C/CD, & Unique; Accuray Incorporated, Brainlab AG and many others. Linear Accelerator Market has presence of many regional players which have a huge market share in emerging countries operating at regional or country level.To view complete report @About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.commedia@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Lignosulfonates Market : Analysis and Segment Forecasts to 2025

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Global Lignosulfonates Market: OverviewLignosulfonates is one of the most abundantly available wood chemicals across the globe. Lignosulfonates is majorly obtained as a by-product from a sulfite processing of wood pulp. The rising emphasis of key players on the expansion of the application base is anticipated to encourage the growth of the global lignosulfonates market throughout the forecast period. Some of the key industries boosting the demand for lignosulfonates, such as oil and gas, chemicals, construction, animal feed additives, and ceramics.Global Lignosulfonates Market: Key TrendsThe rising demand from the animal feed industry is one of the key factors expected to encourage the growth of the global lignosulfonates market in the next few years. In addition, the rapid growth of the construction industry is anticipated to accelerate the growth of the overall market in the forecast period. On the other hand, the potential threat from product substitution is anticipated to restrict the growth of the global lignosulfonates market in the coming years. Nevertheless, the rising demand for animal feed binder, especially from developing economies is projected to generate promising opportunities for key players operating in the market across the globe.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Global Lignosulfonates Market: Market PotentialThe growing demand for oil well additives, especially in the Middle East and Africa is expected to create promising opportunities for the prominent players operating in the global lignosulfonates market. Furthermore, the commercialization of key products of lignosulfonates is projected to fuel the growth of the overall market in the next few years. The increasing competition in the market is estimated to enhance the product portfolio and attract a large number of consumers in the near future.Global Lignosulfonates Market: Regional OutlookIn the last few years, North America held a massive share of the global lignosulfonates market and is projected to maintain its topmost position throughout the forecast period. The high growth of this region can be attributed to the presence of a large number of animal feed mills in the U.S. As a result, the production of the finished animal feed is anticipated to increase tremendously, which is likely to encourage the growth of the North America market in the near future.Request TOC of the Report @On the other hand, the Asia Pacific market for lignosulfonates is likely to witness a substantial growth in the next few years. The rising contribution from Japan and India is estimated to augment Asia Pacific market in the forecast period. Moreover, the rising demand for animal feed from China is predicted to accelerate the growth of the market in the near future.Global Lignosulfonates Market: Competitive AnalysisThe global lignosulfonate market is characterized by a high level of consolidation, owing to a few prominent players who are accounting for a key share of the global market. These players are making remarkable efforts to maintain their position in the global market and expand the application base across diverse industries. In addition, the enhancement of their distribution channels so as to reach a large scale of audience is projected to encourage the growth of the overall market in the next few years.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report@Some of the leading players operating in the lignosulfonate market across the globe are Domsjo Fabriker AB, Shenyang Xingzhenghe Chemical Co., Ltd., Green Agrochem, Flambeau River Papers LLC, Tembec Inc., Burgo Group S.p.A., Sappi Limited, Borregaard LignoTech, Nippon Paper Industries Co., Ltd., and Qingdao New World Material Co. Ltd. A rise in the number of players in the coming years is expected to increase the competition among the leading players across the globe.About TMR Research :TMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services 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
Worldwide Scanning Probe Microscopy Market by Product, Trends, Analysis and Forecasts to 2019

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Scanning probe microscope (SPM) is an advanced microscope that uses a physical probe to scan the specimen. These microscopes provide high magnification and are specifically used for observation of three-dimensional specimens. In 1981, it was introduced as a pioneer in providing high atomic resolution. Initially, SPMs were mainly used for measuring 3D surface topography. Although they are now being used for measuring many other surface properties, they are still used primarily for 3D topography. SPMs were the first to produce real-space images of atomic arrangements on flat surfaces. This is done by moving a sharp probe over the sample. The interaction of the probe and sample, and the pressure created, are monitored, and that decides image resolution.Publisher's analysts forecast the global SPM market to grow at a CAGR of 9.76% during the period 2014-2019.For more informationThe report covers the present scenario and growth prospects of the global SPM market for the period 2015-2019. To calculate the market size, the report considers revenue generated through sales of SPMs in the market.The market is divided into the following segments based on the type of product:- Atomic force microscopes (AFM)- Scanning tunneling microscopes- Other SPM technologiesPublisher's report, Global SPM Market 2015-2019, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the Americas, APAC, and EMEA; it also covers the global SPM market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion on the key vendors operating in this market.Key geographies- Americas- APAC- EMEAKey vendors- Asylum Research- Hitachi High-tech Instruments- Key Sight Technologies- NT-MDT- Park SystemsRequest Sample CopyOther prominent vendors- AXT- Budget Sensors- Danish Micro Engineering- Infinitesemia- JPK Instruments- Nanonis- Nanosurf- Novascan Technologies- WITecMarket driver- Growing opportunities in the field of Life Sciences- For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challenge- Limited science and technology budget- For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trend- New image optimizing techniques- For a full, detailed list, view our reportMake an enquiry:Contact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Space Exploration Masters 2017: Brand-New Innovation Competition

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Europes first innovation competition on Space Exploration is looking for applications and services benefitting Earth until 8 September 2017.Gilching, 21 June 2017  Challenging boundaries and exploring the spheres of our planet have always been crucial for the progress of humanity. The exploration of space and the huge exploitation potential it holds are stunning with their offer of unseen treasures and opportunities for innovation and commercialisation. This is the driving force of Europes first innovation competition on space exploration: The Space Exploration Masters.Space exploration contains large potential for the creation of future-oriented applications, products and services, benefitting Earth. New topics and application areas create countless possibilities for technology transfer, novel ideas for solutions and their application in non-space industries, as well as new business opportunities and objectives.Thorsten Rudolph, Managing Director AZO, emphasises: I belong to the people who have the dream to live on the Moon. To take the next big step in that direction, I encourage all people with innovative applications to participate in our new innovation competition. The Space Exploration Masters provides forward-thinking entrepreneurs to become a substantial part of Europes Space Exploration activities and collaborate with the most important international space stakeholders. Together we can shape our future in space with ground-breaking innovation and make life on Earth even better.Calling Innovators to Shape Our FutureThe Space Exploration Masters is seeking innovative business ideas providing major benefits for our global society and economy. In this context, technology transfer plays a major role and functions as a fruitful propulsion component to achieve the ultimate goal of the exploration of low Earth orbit (LEO), the Moon, Mars and beyond. The Space Exploration Masters makes it possible for innovators, entrepreneurs and space geeks to boost space exploration with their forward-looking business idea. Participants with all kinds of backgrounds are highly welcome, including entrepreneurs, R&D as well as patent holders and many more.The two different prize categories Technology Transfer Success and New Business Innovation look for submissions in the fields of human space and robotic missions, space resources and industry, discovery and space observation, spacecraft, rockets, propulsion, space tourism, deep space communication and navigation, space habitats, and life sciences  just to name a few.Most Renowned Space PartnersThe innovation competition has the most important space stakeholders on board, each featuring their own dedicated prize:The European Space Agency (ESA) awards two prizes in both competition categories: The ESA Prize for the best Technology Transfer Success and an ESA Prize in the New Business Innovation category.Thereby, ESA is looking for innovative cases with a tangible business performance in matching at least one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. This engagement displays the importance of the Space Exploration Masters within the overall ESA Space Exploration Strategy framework.In addition, the Ministry of the Economy of Luxembourg with its SpaceResources.lu initiative, aiming to contribute to the peaceful exploration and sustainable utilisation of space resources for the benefit of humankind, hosts the Luxembourg Prize in the New Business Innovation category. In the same category, the Scottish company Stevenson Astrosat Ltd., driving the commercialisation of the space sector by helping end users meet their needs in a sustainable manner using space technology, and Huntsville Madison County Chamber together present the Astrosat & Huntsville Prize. Moreover, Airbus Defence and Space together with Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, a leading science and technology company in healthcare, life science, and performance materials, host the Sustainable Exploration Prize in the New Business Innovation Category. This cross-industry prize will be awarded to technological and business ideas closing the sustainability loop, enabling a sustainable space environment and human life in space..Participants of the Space Exploration Masters benefit from five powerful prizes in these two categories awarded by the above mentioned competition partners. Submissions are welcome from 20 June till 8 September 2017 at:About Space Exploration Masters:In 2017, AZO has launched the Space Exploration Masters on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA) and in line with the goals of the ESA Space Exploration Strategy, in cooperation with strong world-class partners. The Space Exploration Masters is an international competition to identify best technology transfer business successes, as well as to empower and foster business innovation around space exploration activities in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), on Moon, Mars, or beyond  for the benefit of society and Earth.About AZOAZO has established a global network for innovation and entrepreneurship. It supports product innovation and company foundations in the field of commercial space applications along the entire value chain  from the idea all the way to market entry. AZO has extensive experience in organising innovation competitions such as the European Satellite Navigation Competition, the Copernicus Masters (Earth observation), the Space Exploration Masters, the STARTUP WORLD Awards (laser photonics and robotics), as well as the INNOspace Masters (New Space Economy), app developer camps and conferences, and manages ESA BIC Bavaria. More information:Press contact:Regine HeueHead of Marketing & Communicationsmarketing@azo-space.comAZOAnwendungszentrum GmbH OberpfaffenhofenFriedrichshafener Str. 182205 Gilching
Strategic Geographic location and Growth in Service Sector to Boost Economic Growth in Belgian Economy

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Belgium economy is dominated by the service sector, which contributed approximately 79.5% to the total GDP in 2016. Wholesale & retail trade is the major contributing 17.4% of GDP. The government of Belgium is expected to increase investment on number of projects that will help further develop on various sectors such as infrastructure, health, and education. Belgium has Sustainable Development Goals which provides direction for prioritizing capital expenditure, encouraging private investment and creating jobs for nationals in the private sector. The Belgian government is focusing on tax reforms, which will encourage the consumer spending and move the economy toward an externally sustainable path.Lucintel, a leading global management consulting and market research firm, has analyzed the political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors of Belgium and has come up with a comprehensive research report, PESTLE Analysis of Belgium 2017. This report provides an analysis of the Belgian economy from historical, current, and future perspectives. SWOT analysis, scenario analysis, and risk analysis of Belgium is also included in the report. The report also includes forecast for Belgium economic growth through 2022.The report highlights various drivers and challenges which have influence on investment decisions in the economy. Belgium is a politically stable country, which follows a constitutional monarchy and a decentralized unitary state. Belgium is highly dependent on exports to European countries, which is one of the main challenges. The other challenge Belgian economy is high government debt. Belgium has to depend on other countries for food because Belgium has very low agriculture productivity. The drivers for investment decision in Belgium are its Strategic location which enables to tap the major markets of Europe, such as Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and France. The country has highly developed transport network and diversified industrial and commercial base.This 83-page research report will enable you to make confident business decisions in this globally competitive marketplace. For a detailed table of contents and pricing information on this timely, insightful report, contact Lucintel at +1-972-636-5056 or via email at helpdesk@lucintel.com. Lucintel provides cutting-edge decision support services that facilitate critical decisions with greater speed, market insight, and cost efficiency. To learn more, visit. You can also contact us through Live Chat in its website to answer your questions in real time. Lucintel offerings include SWOT Matrix, Due Diligence, Mergers & Acquisitions, Industry/Market Analysis and Strategic Growth Consulting.Lucintel, the premier global management consulting and market research firm, creates winning strategies for growthwhether you need to understand market dynamics, identify new opportunities, or increase your profitability. It offers market assessments, competitive analysis, opportunity analysis, growth consulting, M&A, and due diligence services to executives and key decision-makers in a variety of industries. Over the last 15 years, Lucintel has served over 1,000 corporations in 70 countries. For further information, visitLucintel LLC222 Las Colinas Blvd West, Suite 1650, Irving, TX 75039, USAPh: +1-972-636-5056 Fax: +1-877-883-5140marketing@lucintel.com
UK Power And Control Cable Market Share, By Product, 2017-2024.

Russia Power And Control Cable Market, By Voltage, 2016 (USD Billion)

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UK power and control cable market is set to expand over 3% over the forecast timeline. Government initiatives to shift the dependency to sustainable energy sources will augment the industry outlook.Power And Control Cable Market size is set to exceed USD 180 billion by 2024, as reported in the latest study by Global Market Insights, Inc.Rising investments by developing countries towards construction and infrastructure sector will drive the global power and control cable market size. Introduction of smart city initiatives across several countries including China, India and UAE will further stimulate the product demand. In 2015, the National Development Bank of China in collaboration with the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development announced an investment of over USD 12.8 billion towards the advancement of countrys national smart city project.Growing measures to strengthen the transmission and distribution network to cater the growing electricity demand will embellish the power and control cable market. As per the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the global electricity demand has expanded over 3% from the past six years however, it is 16% lower than the generated electricity owing to inefficient grid infrastructure.Request for a sample of this research report @Utilities across the globe are making significant investments to enhance their transmission capability with the aim to reduce the energy loss, which will positively impact the business outlook. In 2016, the U.S. Federal Government announced USD 10 billion grant to reduce the curtailment rate across their western transmission network through the development of new and improved grid infrastructure.Asia Pacific power and control cable market size is set to exceed USD 100 billion by 2024. Ongoing rural electrification program coupled with increasing demand for reliable and safe electricity will positively impact the industry size. Positive outlook towards renewable energy with growing industrialization will further boost the product demand.Adoption of microgrid network and favorable government initiatives towards expansion of T&D networks to interconnect renewable sources with the central and state grids will complement the MV power and control cable market. In 2016, Belgium based Tideway B.V. awarded USD 14.19 million contract to Prysmian Group for the supply of 33kV MV inter array submarine cables for its 309 MW offshore wind farm projects.Browse key industry insights spread across 190 pages with 264 market data tables & 9 figures & charts from the report, Power And Control Cable Market Size By Product (Power Cable, Control Cable), By Voltage (HV, MV, LV (LV Power, LV Control)), By Application (Utilities, Industrial (Power Plants, Oil & Gas, Cement)), Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, Mexico, UK, France, Turkey, Germany, Russia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa, Egypt, Brazil, Argentina, Peru), Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2017  2024 in detail along with the table of contents:UK power and control cable market is set to expand over 3% over the forecast timeline. Government initiatives to shift the dependency to sustainable energy sources will augment the industry outlook. The Reseau de Transport d'Electricite (RTE) and UK National Grid awarded a contract worth USD 290 million to ABB, to develop high-voltage direct current technology aimed at interconnecting electric networks between UK and France. The company will provide two high-voltage HVDC light converter stations that will be linked by a subsea cable.Make an Inquiry before buying @Middle East & Africa power and control cable market share is set to expand over 7% by 2024. Growing investments towards rebuilding of war affected countries including Syria along with extension of transmission and distribution network will fuel the industry size. According to Siemens, the region is set to increase its current electricity generation capacity by 66% over the next 15 years.Notable players across the power and control cable market include Polycab, Prysmian, CMI, Havells, Nexans, LS Cable & System, Furukawa Electric, Southwire, General Cable, and Sumitomo Electric Industries.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.29L Atlantic Avenue, Suite L 105Ocean View Delaware 19970 United StatesEmail: sales@gminsights.com
2017 Global and Regional Laser Weapon Market Research Report Forecasts 2022

Laser Weapon

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This report focus on Global and regional market, providing information on major players like manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, traders, customers, investors and etc., major types, major applications from Global and major regions such as Europe, North American, South American, Asia (Excluding China), China and etc. Data type include capacity, production, market share, price, revenue, cost, gross, gross margin, growth rate, consumption, import, export and etc. Industry chain, manufacturing process, cost structure, marketing channel are also analyzed in this report.This report provides valuable information for companies like manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, traders, customers, investors and individuals who have interests in this industry.Major companies are as follows:Company 01, Company 02, Company 03, Company 04, Company 05, Company 06, Company 07, Company 08, Company 09, Company 10, Company 11, Company 12, Company 13, Company 14, Company 15, Company 16, Company 17, Company 18, Company 19, Company 20Major types are as follows:Type 1, Type 2, Type 3Major applications are as follows:Application 1, Application 2, Application 3Get a free sample at:Table of Content1.Industry Overview2.Industry Chain Analysis3.2011-2016 Global Market and Major Manufacturers Analysis4.2011-2016 Regional Market and Major Manufacturers Analysis5.Major Manufacturers Analysis6.Major Classification Analysis7.Major Application Analysis8.Global and Regional Market Forecast9.Marketing Channel AnalysisGet access to full report @24MarketReports is the marque of market research industry which identifies massive database of market research reports. We are having a numerous sectors market research gathering which covers diverse verticals around the Earth. Our central focus to make it trouble-free for decision makers to find applicable information and locate right Research reports which can save their time and assist in what they do best.New York City Zone 01,United States,Int'l: (+1) 646 781 7170,UK(Toll free): +44 800 088 5734,help@24marketreports.com
Acne Vulgaris (AV)-Market Insights, Epidemiology and Market Forecast-2023

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SummaryOrbis Research delivers key insights on the Acne Vulgaris (AV) market in a new report titled Acne Vulgaris (AV)-Market Insights, Epidemiology and Market Forecast-2023In this report, Orbis Research sheds light on the various factors and trends impacting market growth over the forecast 2023DescriptionAcne vulgaris is a common chronic skin disease/Disorder of pilosebaceous follicles. The disease is characterized by blockage and/or inflammation of hair follicles and their accompanying sebaceous gland. Acne develops in regions of high sebaceous gland. The disease is seen to occur mostly in adolescence. At puberty androgens due to the increase in sebum production from enlarged sebaceous glands, the glands become blocked. Propionibacterium acnes further colonise and lead to lesion production although its exact role is unclear.Acne Vulgaris (AV) - Market Insights, Epidemiology and Market Forecast-2023 Report provides an overview of the disease and market size of the Acne Vulgaris for the global, United States, EU5 (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom) and Japan for 2013-2023. It also includes global historical and forecasted epidemiological data for the Acne Vulgaris Diagnosed Cases from 2013-2023. According to, the Diagnosed cases in 7 major markets for Acne Vulgaris (AV) were 113,959,366 cases in 2013 and are expected to be 136,929,289 cases in 2023.Get a PDF Sample of Report at:As per estimation, the global market size of Acne Vulgaris (AV) was USD 5,360.1 Millions in 2013 and is expected to reach USD 14,226.3 Million by the end of 2023.The report is built using data and information sourced from proprietary databases, primary and secondary research and in-house Forecast model analysis by Publisher team of industry experts.Scope- Report covers the disease overview including pathophysiology, symptoms, diagnosis, disease management, and current treatment options.- Marketed information including available prescription drugs.- The Report also covers the detailed global historical and forecasted epidemiological data covering United States, EU5 and Japan from 2013-2023.- It also provides Market size of Acne Vulgaris (AV) for United States, EU5 and Japan from 2013 and forecasted Market size to 2023.To Browse the Entire Report, Visit :The Key Players Mentioned in Report are:Report IntroductionAcne Vulgaris Market Overview at a GlanceTotal Market Size of Acne Vulgaris for 7 MM in 2010-2023Total Market Share Distribution of Acne Vulgaris for 7 MM in 2015Total Market Share Distribution of Acne Vulgaris for 7 MM in 2023Acne VulgarisOverviewSigns and symptomsTypes of AcnePathophysiologyDiagnosisEpidemiology and Patient PopulationUnited StatesDiagnosed Cases of Acne Vulgaris in United StatesGermanyDiagnosed Cases of Acne Vulgaris in GermanyFranceDiagnosed Cases of Acne Vulgaris in FranceUnited KingdomDiagnosed Cases of Acne Vulgaris in United KingdomSpainDiagnosed Cases of Acne Vulgaris in SpainItalyDiagnosed Cases of Acne Vulgaris in ItalyJapanDiagnosed Cases of Acne Vulgaris in JapanTreatment AlgorithmMarketed DrugsTop Marketed Drugs for Acne VulgarisAcanya: Valeant PharmaceuticalsDrug DescriptionMechanism of ActionRegulatory MilestonesAdvantages & DisadvantagesSafety and Efficacy of AcanyaPlace a Purchase Order for this Report at:Product ProfileTazorac: AllerganDrug DescriptionMechanism of ActionRegulatory MilestonesAdvantages & DisadvantagesSafety and Efficacy of TazoracProduct ProfileVeltin: Almirall, S.A.Drug DescriptionMechanism of ActionReulatory MilestonesAdvantages & DisadvantagesProduct ProfileDuac: GlaxosmithklineDrug DescriptionMechanism of ActionRegulatory MilestonesAdvantages & DisadvantagesProduct ProfileEpiduo and Epiduo Forte: Galderma S.A.Drug DescriptionMechanism of ActionRegulatory MilestonesAdvantages & DisadvantagesSafety and Efficacy of EpiduoProduct ProfileEmerging TherapiesMajor Pipeline drugsSarecycline: Paratek PharmaceuticalsRegulatory MilestonesAdvantages & DisadvantagesProduct ProfileClinical DevelopmentClinical Pipeline ActivityOngoing Trials InformationClinical Trial by PhaseAczone reform: AllerganAdvantages & DisadvantagesProduct ProfileSB204: Novan, Inc.Advantages & DisadvantagesProduct ProfileClinical DevelopmentClinical Pipeline ActivityOngoing Trials InformationClinical Trial by PhaseGlobal Acne Vulgaris: Country-Wise Market AnalysisOverview on Total Acne Vulgaris Market (2015)Overview on Total Acne Vulgaris Market (2023)United States Market SizeEurope Market SizeUnited Kingdom Market SizeGermany Market SizeFrance Market SizeItaly Market SizeSpain Market SizeJapan Market SizeMarket DriversMarket RestraintsAppendixReport MethodologyConsulting ServicesDisclaimerAbout UsGot any Query? Feel free to ask us at :About Us:Orbis Research (orbisresearch.com) is a single point aid for all your market research requirements. We have vast database of reports from the leading publishers and authors across the globe. We specialize in delivering customized reports as per the requirements of our clients. We have complete information about our publishers and hence are sure about the accuracy of the industries and verticals of their specialization. This helps our clients to map their needs and we produce the perfect required market research study for our clients.Contact Information:Hector CostelloSenior Manager  Client Engagements4144N Central Expressway,Suite 600, Dallas,Texas  75204, U.S.A.Phone No.: +1 (214) 884-6817; +9164101019Follow Us on LinkedIn:
The Cards and Payments Industrial Trend and Market Demand in Israel - Emerging Trends and Opportunities to 2020

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"The Cards and Payments Industry in Israel - Emerging Trends and Opportunities to 2020" The Report covers current Industries Trends, Worldwide Analysis, Global Forecast, Review, Share, Size, Growth, Effect.Description-SummaryGlobalDatas "The Cards and Payments Industry in Israel - Emerging Trends and Opportunities to 2020", report provides detailed analysis of market trends in the Israeli cards and payments industry. It provides values and volumes for a number of key performance indicators in the industry, including credit transfers, direct debit, check payments and payment cards during the review period (2012-2016).Get Sample Report With TOC @The report also analyzes various payment card markets operating in the industry, and provides detailed information on the number of cards in circulation, and transaction values and volumes during the review period and over the forecast period (2017-2020). It also offers information on the country's competitive landscape, including the market shares of issuers and schemes.The report brings together GlobalDatas research, modeling, and analysis expertise to allow banks and card issuers to identify segment dynamics and competitive advantages. The report also covers details of regulatory policy and recent changes in the regulatory structure.The report provides top-level market analysis, information and insights into the Israeli cards and payments industry, including -- Current and forecast values for each market in the Israeli cards and payments industry, including debit, credit and charge cards.- Detailed insights into payment instruments including credit transfers, direct debit, checks and payment cards. It also, includes an overview of the country's key alternative payment instruments.- E-commerce market analysis.- Analysis of various market drivers and regulations governing the Israeli cards and payments industry.- Detailed analysis of strategies adopted by banks and other institutions to market debit, credit and charge cards.- Comprehensive analysis of consumer attitudes and buying preferences for cards.- The competitive landscape in Israel's cards and payments industry.Key Highlights- The emergence of digital only banks is likely to accelerate a shift towards electronic payments in Israel. The latest is the launch of mobile-only bank Pepper, by Bank Leumi, in February 2017 which offers savings and lending products. In January 2015, Bank Leumi launched a service enabling customers from all banks to open accounts via the internet or mobile apps, without visiting a bank branch.- To increase competition in the Israeli merchant acquiring business, in April 2017 the central bank issued an acquirer license to Israel-based credit card processing company Tranzila Ltd. The central bank took numerous actions to remove barriers to entry in the merchant acquiring business. These include making the licensing process shorter and reducing the minimum capital requirement; a starting capital of US$259,620.9 (ILS1 million) is required for a new acquirer.- To increase acceptance of debit cards among retailers in Israel, the central bank reduced the interchange fee from 0.7% to 0.3%. The new rate was implemented effective from April 1, 2016, and will be effective for one year. Other measures taken by the central bank include the removal of various charges associated with debit card transactions, and compulsory issuance of debit cards as a standalone product to both new and existing current accounts, free of charge.Scope- This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the Israeli cards and payments industry.- It provides current values for the Israeli cards and payments industry for 2016, and forecast figures to 2020.- It details the different demographic, economic, infrastructural and business drivers affecting the Israeli cards and payments industry.- It outlines the current regulatory framework in the industry.- It details marketing strategies used by various banks and other institutions.Reasons to buy- Make strategic business decisions, using top-level historic and forecast market data, related to the Israeli cards and payments industry and each market within it.- Understand the key market trends and growth opportunities in the Israeli cards and payments industry.- Assess the competitive dynamics in the Israeli cards and payments industry.- Gain insights into marketing strategies used for various card types in Israel.- Gain insights into key regulations governing the Israeli cards and payments industry.Full Report @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.Researchmoz Global Pvt. Ltd.90 State Street,Albany, NY 12207,United States,Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free),Tel: +1-518-621-2074
Controlled-release Fertilizers Market - Global Industry Analysis, Growth Rate By 2025

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Global Controlled-release Fertilizers Market: OverviewControlled-release fertilizers are fertilizers that are capable of releasing nutrients in the soil in a controlled manner over an extended time frame. This technique, as compared to the fast-release technique of several conventional fertilizer varieties, is made possible with the help of encapsulating nutrient granules in polymeric coatings. Studies have demonstrated that controlled release of nutrients is more effective in providing nutrients to crops as compared to the fast-release technique as the availability of nutrients coincides with crops nutrient requirement - enhancing the efficiency of crop nutrition, improving crop quality, and increasing yield.Controlled-release fertilizers are also known to exert lesser impact on the environment as compared to fast-release fertilizers as they are not washed through or off farmlands, diminishing the possibility of chemicals in fertilizers leaching into water bodies or causing pollution. Earlier used mostly for nursery container crops, the rising awareness about these benefits of controlled-release fertilizers has extended their usage to conventional farming these days.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Global Controlled-release Fertilizers Market: Key TrendsThe vast rise in global population and urban settlements and the resultant reduction in arable land are leading to a scenario wherein the demand for food products is rising and agricultural yield is failing to sustain these demands. Attempts to solve these issues are leading to an increased focus on sustainable agriculture practices, driving the demand for fertilizers with enhanced efficiency, such as controlled-release ones. In the next few years as well, the mounting demand for food products and limited arable lands will be key to the overall development of the global controlled-release fertilizers.Global Controlled-release Fertilizers Market: Market PotentialMergers, acquisitions, and expansion of knowledge base to be able to develop innovative products are some of the key strategies adopted by players operating in the global controlled-release fertilizers. Recently, ICL Innovation, a subsidiary of ICL (Israel Chemicals Ltd.), has recently entered into a multi-year research and development collaboration with Evogene Ltd., a company operating in the field of research and development related to crop production improvement. The collaboration will work towards the discovery of novel crop enhancers for the enhancement of nutrient uptake efficiency of selected crops.Request TOC of the Report @Under the collaboration, Evogene will work towards utilizing its computational discovery platform for identifying the potential of some compounds to improve the efficiency of nutrient use by crops. Successful candidates identified from the research activities could be used in ICL's future products.Global Controlled-release Fertilizers Market: Regional AnalysisFrom a geographical perspective, the global market for controlled-release fertilizers is dominated by the Asia Pacific market. The region single-handedly accounts for over half of the overall revenue generated by the global market and is both a high-production as well as high-consumption region. Rising government support for improvement of the agriculture industry in most agro-based economies and high population base in the region play a key role in encouraging the adoption of a variety of fertilizers that are capable of boosting food production. In the Asia Pacific controlled-fertilizer market, China accounts for a dominant share, in terms of production as well as consumption.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report@The region features the presence of some of the worlds leading controlled-fertilizer manufacturers and low manufacturing costs owing to cheap labor and sustained supply of raw materials are bringing in more companies in the region. In the next few years, Asia Pacific is expected to retain its dominant position in the global controlled-release fertilizers market.Global Controlled-release Fertilizers Market: Competitive DynamicsThe market features a largely fragmented vendor landscape with a large number of companies operating in emerging economies such as India, Malaysia, and China. Cheap labor and steady availability of raw materials allow companies operating in such areas to economically expand their production capacities and supply products in the domestic markets with high-growth potential at low costs.Some of the leading companies operating in the global controlled release fertilizers market are Shandong Shikefeng Chemical Industry Co. Ltd., Chisso Corporation, ICL, Kingenta Ecological Engineering Group Co., Ltd., Ekompany, Agrium, AgroBridge, ATS Group, Compo GMBH & Co. KG, Greenfeed Agro Sdn. Bhd, and Haifa Chemicals ltd.About TMR Research :TMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services 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
Global Heat Pump Water Heaters Sales Market 2017 Region by top Players - Midea, Darkin, Hitachi, Jandy, Wotech, Zhejiang Zhongguang

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http://aperturegames.com

The market research report on Global Heat Pump Water Heaters Market is an in-depth study and analysis of the market by our industry experts with unparalleled domain knowledge. The report will shed light on many critical points and trends of the industry which are useful for our esteemed clients. The report covers a vast expanse of information including an overview, comprehensive analysis, definitions and classifications, applications and expert opinions, among others.Click Here for Report Sample:Extensive primary and secondary research capabilities have been used to prepare the report Global Heat Pump Water Heaters Industry. The report on the Global Heat Pump Water Heaters market presents accurate market estimates and forecasts backed by in-depth primary and secondary research. The research report delivers key insights verified by key industry participants. These include market-leading participants, key clients and consumers and product vendors and distributors.Significant industry insights, industry expectations and key developments have been covered in this research study. Further, a detailed evaluation of the most influential drivers that will fuel the growth of the Global Heat Pump Water Heaters market is also present in the report. The key market restraints and opportunities is also analyzed by the report.The report includes a detailed analysis of the Global Heat Pump Water Heaters market based on different segments, which gives readers a clear perspective of the types of products, services and technologies available in the market. The Global Heat Pump Water Heaters market is expected to demonstrate positive growth in several segments. The key sectors and their sub-sectors have been listed in this report. The drivers fueling the growth of the leading market segments, along with the details about the revenue these segments will generate is available in the report. Additionally, historical data about these sectors has also been included in this report. Besides the historical data, the emerging sectors in the Global Heat Pump Water Heaters market are mentioned in this report.Browse the full report:Geographic segments of the Global Heat Pump Water Heaters market along with a detailed study on the prospects exhibited by the emerging regional markets of the Global Heat Pump Water Heaters industry are included in the report. The regulatory scenario favouring the leading regions in the Global Heat Pump Water Heaters market has been evaluated in the research study. Evaluation of the top market players along with their revenue shares and top strategies elaborated in the report, will help new entrants or established players to form more informed decisions.ABOUT USFior 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 ManagerOffice - 102, Sanskriti Aspirations,Near Post 91, Baner Road,Pune, MH, India - 411045Phone: (201) 465-4211Email: sales@fiormarkets.comWeb:Blog:
Welding Materials Market 2017  Challenges, Key Vendors, Drivers and Trends by Forecast 2022

Welding Materials Market

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Synopsis of the Global Welding Materials Market:Market Scenario:The Market for Welding Materials is driven by the increasing demand for such materials from the transportation, manufacturing, and building & construction industries. The market is highly application based and is dominated by demand from the end-use industries. It is used extensively in all the processes that consume steel across various industries.Request a Sample Report @Electrode accounts for the largest share in the Welding Materials Market by type in 2015. The market for electrodes is highly driven by its demand and cost effectiveness across various applications. The trend is expected to be similar by 2022. The market is expected to grow rapidly both in value and volume.Furthermore, Transportation is leading the Welding Market by application due to high demand for Welding Materials from the automobile industry. Welding technology is used in almost every step of automobile manufacturing. The largest and fastest growing region is seen as APAC with increasing consumption of such materials across all the industries. The Global Welding Materials Market is expected to cross USD 16 Billion by 2022. The market is expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 5% in the forecasted period.Study Objectives of Global Welding Materials Market: To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast for the next 6 years of various segments and sub-segments of the Global Welding Materials Market To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth To analyze the global Welding 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, APAC, 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 Type, Application 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 global Welding Materials market.Make an Enquiry before buying @Key Players:The key players of Global Welding Materials Market report include- Air Products and Chemicals Inc., Illinois Tools Works Inc., Sandvik AB, Praxair Incorporated, Air Liquide S.A., Colfax Corporation, The Linde Group, Lincoln Electric Holdings, Inc., and Tianjin Bridge Welding Materials Group Co., Ltd.Intended Audience: Welding Materials manufacturers Traders and distributors of Welding Materials Production Process industries Potential investors Raw material suppliers Nationalized laboratoryKey Points from Table of Contents:10. Company Profiles10.1 Air Products and Chemicals Inc.10.1.1 Overview10.1.2 Financials10.1.3 Product Portfolio10.1.4 Business Strategies10.1.5 Recent Development10.2 Illinois Tools Works Inc.10.2.1 Overview10.2.2 Financials10.2.3 Product Portfolio10.2.4 Business Strategies10.2.5 Recent Development10.3 Sandvik AB10.3.1 Overview10.3.2 Financials10.3.3 Product Portfolio10.3.4 Business Strategies10.3.5 Recent Development10.4 Praxair Incorporated10.4.1 Overview10.4.2 Financials10.4.3 Product Portfolio10.4.4 Business Strategies10.4.5 Recent DevelopmentBrowse Full Report Details @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 Components, Application, Logistics 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. 524/528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Physical Vapor Deposition Market : Growth, Key Manufacturers Analysis and Regional Forecast 2017-2025

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Physical Vapor Deposition Market: OverviewPhysical vapor deposition (PVD) is a process wherein a thin coating is formed on an object using the base material via evaporation and condensation. This technique is used in automotive, defense, healthcare, and many other industries.The physical vapor deposition market may include a number of materials, equipment, and services. PVD materials include a number of commonly used raw materials such as aluminum, titanium, and nitrogen. Physical vapor deposition services comprise coating services and installation of various equipment. PVD equipment include those used for heating, vacuuming, coating, and condensation.PVD finds application in medical equipment, cutting tools, solar products, data storage, and microelectronics. Owing to a number of photovoltaic and wafer cell manufacturers investing in R&D efforts, the utilization of PVD technology has been quite high in solar products. On the other hand, rising government expenditure in providing people improved healthcare facilities has also resulted in increased usage of physical vapor deposition in medical equipment.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Physical Vapor Deposition Market: TrendsThe global physical vapor deposition market is projected to witness steady growth in the coming years thanks to the application of this technology and equipment in a wide range of industries. This has been possible owing to rising awareness about the many benefits of PVD coatings over traditional coatings. The PVD coating technique offers advantages such as durability, strength, no residue, corrosion resistance, and environmental friendliness.In contrast, the patent-protection defines this technology and this limits the growth opportunities for up and coming players. Moreover, physical vapor deposition requires high amounts of capital investment, which is another roadblock, especially for smaller vendors.Physical Vapor Deposition Market: Market PotentialDespite the consolidated and capital-intensive nature of the global physical vapor deposition market, it offers several opportunities for players. Recognizing the potential in this market, Applied Materials, Inc., a California, U.S.-based company that supplies material engineering solutions, launched a physical vapor deposition system called Applied Endura Cirrus HTX PVD in May 2015. This is used to develop titanium nitride (TiN) thin films and reflects Applieds expertise in the application of physical vapor deposition technology in engineering titanium nitride films.Request TOC of the Report @Physical Vapor Deposition Market: Regional OutlookFrom a regional perspective, the global market for physical vapor deposition is segmented into North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa. Asia Pacific accounts for a major share in the overall market owing to significant demand from several end-use industries. Considering the fact that PVD technology offers a rather high profit margin, large equipment manufacturers have focused their attention toward this lucrative market by setting up shop in many ASEAN countries. Another factor that drives the APAC physical vapor deposition market is growing interest in battery storage for solar PV systems in China, India, and Japan, where there is a high unmet need for power infrastructure.What makes North America a strong contender in the PVD market is the presence of a number of small and medium domestic players, including Vacuum Aurora Scientific Corp., AJA International, Inc., Novellus Systems, and KDF Electronics. In addition to this, strong regulatory support has encouraged rising number of investors to capitalize on the benefits offered by PVD technology.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report@Physical Vapor Deposition Market: Competitive AnalysisSemicore Equipment, Veeco Instruments, Ionbond (IHI Group), Novellus Systems, AJA International, Platit, Hauzer Coating Technology (IHI Group), ULVAC Technologies, and Oerlikon Balzers are some of the prominent players competing in the global physical vapor deposition market. It has been observed that this is an immensely consolidated market owing to the high costs of PVD equipment, which pose severe entry-level barriers for new entrants. Another challenge that new players have to endure is the patent-protected nature of this technology. Product innovation is a key area of focus for most players, in addition to strategic acquisitions and collaborations.About TMR Research :TMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services 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
LED Agricultural Grow Lights Market Research Report 2017 Top Manufacturers in Global Market : Philips, Osram

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Market Research Report 2017" to its huge collection of research reports.This report is a key analysis of all the factors boosting the growth of the global LED Agricultural Grow Lights market. The factors hampering or restricting the growth of this market have also been studied in detail, thus helping readers to equip themselves better for facing the many challenges and competition in the global LED Agricultural Grow Lights industry. The report takes into account the present market figures and also the historical data, for predicting the future forecast of the LED Agricultural Grow Lights market. The trends in the LED Agricultural Grow Lights market have been discussed in detail. The key opportunities lying ahead in the global LED Agricultural Grow Lights industry have also been disclosed. Thus, the report is a valuable asset for new entrants as well as those established.This report studies LED Agricultural Grow Lights in Global market, especially in North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia and India, focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with capacity, production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringPhilipsOsramGeneral ElectricEasy AgriculturalIllumitexFionia LightingLumigrowKind LED Grow LightsCalifornia LightWorksSpectrum King Grow LightsValoyaWeshineFill the form to gain deeper insights on this market @The report is an analysis of the degree of competition, the bargaining supplier power, and bargaining buyer powers have been included in the report. The threat of new substitutes has been discussed in detail. The threat of new entrants is also given in this report. Thus, the report contains valuable data which will help companies and potential investors to clearly understand and comprehend which segment to invest on and why. The segments and sub segments of the global LED Agricultural Grow Lights market have also been included in the report. The report predicts the segment which is most likely to expand at the fastest CAGR as well as the segment which will lead in the years to come. Similarly, the segment witnessing the most sluggish growth is also pointed out. Key players are studied in the report along with their useful data such as business and financial overview and business strategies adopted.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Table of Contents1 LED Agricultural Grow Lights Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of LED Agricultural Grow Lights1.2 LED Agricultural Grow Lights Segment by Type1.2.1 Global Production Market Share of LED Agricultural Grow Lights by Type in 20151.3 LED Agricultural Grow Lights Segment by Application1.4 LED Agricultural Grow Lights Market by Region1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of LED Agricultural Grow Lights (2012-2022)2 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production and Share by Manufacturers (2015 and 2016)2.2 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2015 and 2016)2.3 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Average Price by Manufacturers (2015 and 2016)2.4 Manufacturers LED Agricultural Grow Lights Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 LED Agricultural Grow Lights Market Competitive Situation and Trends3 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2012-2017)3.1 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production by Region (2012-2017)3.2 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production Market Share by Region (2012-2017)3.3 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)3.4 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.5 North America LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.6 Europe LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.7 China LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.8 Japan LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)7 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 Philips7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Its Competitors7.1.2 LED Agricultural Grow Lights Product Type, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 100w7.1.2.2 300w7.1.3 Philips LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2015 and 2016)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 Osram7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Its Competitors7.2.2 LED Agricultural Grow Lights Product Type, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 100w7.2.2.2 300w7.2.3 Osram LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2015 and 2016)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 General Electric7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Its Competitors7.3.2 LED Agricultural Grow Lights Product Type, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 100w7.3.2.2 300w7.3.3 General Electric LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2015 and 2016)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview12 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Market Forecast (2017-2022)12.1 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production, Revenue and Price Forecast (2017-2022)12.2 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production, Consumption , Import and Export Forecast by Regions (2017-2022)12.3 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Production, Revenue and Price Forecast by Type (2017-2022)12.4 Global LED Agricultural Grow Lights Consumption Forecast by Application (2017-2022)QYReseachReports.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.1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United States
Building Automation System Market Pegged to Value US$ 141.1 Bn by 2026

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The global market for building automation systems is crowded with several players. The Rheem Manufacturing Company, United Technologies, General Electric, Lennox International, Philips Lighting Holding B.V., Ingersoll-Rand Plc. Honeywell International Inc., Johnson Controls are some of the major players contributing to the growth of the market. They are establishing smart IT backed platforms to provide advanced building automation systems to their customers.Browse Complete Report @In reference to a new report published by Persistence Market Research, the global building automation systems market will showcase significant growth between 2016 and 2026. Manufacturers of building automation systems are rapidly adopting new regulations set across the globe and they are also lining up new products to meet rising market demand. The Persistence Market Research report titled, Building Automation Systems Market: Global Industry Analysis & Forecast, 2016-2026, talks in detail about the market psyche and also scrutinizes the market drifts which are expected to impact the future of the global building automation systems market. The global building automation systems market was valued more than US$ 43 Bn in 2015 and is expected to mint better revenue by the end of 2016, reaching approximately US$ 48 Bn. The market will continue its journey towards expansion and the market worth will reach US$ 141.1 Bn towards the end of 2026. The global building automation systems market will record a CAGR of 11.1% during the projected period.A sample of this report is available upon request @Governments around the globe are rolling out different precautionary measures to cut down the wastage of energy. Different new regulatory methods are adopted to reduce the consumption of energy. This is a massive booster for the global building automation systems market. Several big economies around the globe such as Europe, US and Japan have already curated some restrictive methods to revise the previous trends. This opens a new window of opportunity for the global building automation systems market. A slew of new technologies that are eroding this market are actively affecting the global canvas of the market. Better and more advanced technologies are enhancing the end-user experience and also increasing market outreach. The introduction of smart web-based, cloud-based control networks backed by the Internet of Things (IOT), mobile technologies, integrated building systems and facility management solutions are expanding the periphery of the global building automation systems market. Last but not the least, the urgent need for consolidated security solutions is also pushing ahead the market growth of the global building automation systems market. These key factors will complement the all-round development of the market within the forecast period but there are also certain key factors that might barricade the normal development of the market within the period of forecast. Building automation systems come with a high price tag and this is expected to impact their widespread adoption. The absence of skilled manpower is another market growth deterrent.Request to view table of content @The rising incidences of security violations across the globe are likely to impact the growth of the security and surveillance segment in the global building automation systems market. The security and surveillance segment will exhibit a robust growth in terms of revenue and will overshadow the market within the forecast period. The commercial segment will contribute notably to the global building automation systems market. Towards the end of the projected period, the commercial segment will touch a market worth of more than US$ 63 Bn and will record a CAGR of 10.9%. Apart from this the government and residential segments will also project promising growth trends by 2026 end. North America will lure maximum investors, as the building automation systems market in this region will exceed a whopping value of US$ 55 Bn by the close of 2026.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Global Whiskey Sales Market 2017 Key Regions with Sales, Share & Growth Rate by Players : Brown-Forman, Heaven Hill

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Whiskey Sales Market Report 2017" to its huge collection of research reports.The lengthy assessment provided by the report on the global Whiskey market offers readers a fresh perspective and unique insight into the various trends that influence it and the current dynamics that identify it. The research study has been compiled by experts from the industry and is created with the aim of being a crucial document for all readers looking to make successful business decisions.The research publication on the global Whiskey market provides a birds eye view of the market from 2017 to 2022 by evaluating the impact of ongoing changes in investment patterns, recent technological advancements, and the presence or lack of government policies on its growth. The report also studies the different drivers and restraints in the global Whiskey market, offering both quantitative and qualitative insights in terms of market performance.Global Whiskey market competition by top manufacturers/players, with Whiskey sales volume, Price (USD/MT), revenue (Million USD) and market share for each manufacturer/player; the top players includingBeam SuntoryBrown-FormanDiageoGruppo CampariHeaven HillAlexandrion Grup RomaniaAlltech Lexington Brewing and DistillingBarrel House DistillingBoone County DistillingBoundary Oak DistilleryKirin BreweryMichter's DistilleryFor more information on this report, fill the form @Analysts compiling the report on the global Whiskey market have utilized a number of industry-specific tools to fully assess its trajectory. This includes tools such as SWOT analysis to gauge the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the Whiskey market. Porters Five Forces analysis model is also a key measurement of overall competitiveness and helps identify the threat posed by new entrants as well as substitute products and services to the global Whiskey market. It also sheds light on the bargaining power of buyers and suppliers and the overall scope of vendor rivalry.Another key feature is the attempt by experts within the industry to investigate the many export and import policies that have had or are likely to have an immediate impact on the global Whiskey market. The report also includes a dedicated section on the competitive landscape, offering accurate and profitable insights into the main participants in the Whiskey market. They have been elaborately profiled, keeping in mind aspects such as financial standing, investment plans, product portfolios, and key marketing and business strategies.Obtain Report Details @Table of Contents1 Whiskey Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Whiskey1.2 Classification of Whiskey by Product Category1.3 Global Whiskey Market by Application/End Users1.4 Global Whiskey Market by Region1.5 Global Market Size (Value and Volume) of Whiskey (2012-2022)2 Global Whiskey Competition by Players/Suppliers, Type and Application2.1 Global Whiskey Market Competition by Players/Suppliers2.1.1 Global Whiskey Sales and Market Share of Key Players/Suppliers (2012-2017)2.1.2 Global Whiskey Revenue and Share by Players/Suppliers (2012-2017)2.2 Global Whiskey (Volume and Value) by Type2.3 Global Whiskey (Volume and Value) by Region2.3.1 Global Whiskey Sales and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)2.3.2 Global Whiskey Revenue and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)2.4 Global Whiskey (Volume) by Application9 Global Whiskey Players/Suppliers Profiles and Sales Data9.1 Beam Suntory9.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors9.1.2 Whiskey Product Category, Application and Specification9.1.2.1 Product A9.1.2.2 Product B9.1.3 Beam Suntory Whiskey Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)9.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview9.2 Brown-Forman9.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors9.2.2 Whiskey Product Category, Application and Specification9.2.2.1 Product A9.2.2.2 Product B9.2.3 Brown-Forman Whiskey Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)9.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview9.3 Diageo9.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors9.3.2 Whiskey Product Category, Application and Specification9.3.2.1 Product A9.3.2.2 Product B9.3.3 Diageo Whiskey Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)9.3.4 Main Business/Business OverviewList of Tables and FiguresFigure Product Picture of WhiskeyFigure Global Whiskey Sales Volume Comparison (K MT) by Type (2012-2022)Figure Global Whiskey Sales Volume Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 2016Figure Global Whiskey Sales Comparison (K MT) by Application (2012-2022)Figure Global Sales Market Share of Whiskey by Application in 2016Figure Global Whiskey Market Size (Million USD) by Regions (2012-2022)Figure United States Whiskey Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2022)Figure China Whiskey Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2022)Figure Europe Whiskey Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2022)Figure Japan Whiskey Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2022)QYReseachReports.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.1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United States
Aromatics Market 2017 - Eastman Chemical, Ashland, BASF SE, Huntsman Corporation

Aromatics Market

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Market Synopsis of Aromatics Market:The Global Aromatics Market has experienced a phenomenal growth in the global market in terms of demand and supply. Huge demand from the end user markets such as pharmaceuticals, automotive, paints & coating, oilfields chemicals and other industries has propelled the overall growth of Aromatics Market. As the automotive industry is growing at a rapid pace which has resulted in increased demand for aromatics market. Geographically, Asia-Pacific is estimated to be the largest market for aromatics both in terms of production and consumption.Request a Sample Report @Segmentation:The Global Aromatics Markets are segmented into types and end users. On the basis of type, the global market is segmented into Benzene, Toluene, O-xylene, P-xylene and others. On the basis of end users, the global market is segmented into pharmaceuticals, automotive, paints & coating, oilfields chemicals and others.Study Objectives of Aromatics 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 Aromatics Market To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth To analyse the global aromatics 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 product type and applications To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analysing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market To track and analyse competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the Global Aromatics Market.Make an Enquiry before buying @Regional Analysis of Aromatics Market:The Global Aromatics Market is poised to reach $XX Billion in 2015 from $XX Billion in 2027, at a CAGR of XX% during the forecasted period.Key Players:The leading market players in the Global Aromatics Market mainly include Eastman Chemical, Ashland, BASF SE, Huntsman Corporation, Celanese Corporation, Petrochem Carless, INEOS AG, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Honeywell and others.Browse Full Report Details @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 Components, Application, Logistics 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. 524/528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Honey Powder Market is Expected to Generate Huge Profits by 2016  2026

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Honey powder which can be used as a sweetener, is just a powder form of liquid honey. The powder is easier to maintain and can preserve well than a liquid honey. The powder form of honey is preferred to be used while making cakes, pastries and other sweet edible items. It is always a better option than a sticky liquid honey and sugar free powders particularly, which credibility is still questionable. An interesting thing about honey powder is, it has long preserving life, if it stored properly. The global honey powder market is projected to show sustained growth during the 10-year period owing to several factors and trends likely to positively impact the performance of the global honey powder market.Honey powder market: Product usage and benefitsHoney powder can be used in bath and beauty products like facial masks, scrub, soap, lotions etc. It can be sprinkled over cereal or fruit and cakes. Its antiseptic properties heals the small injuries. The most beneficial factor of honey is, it has medicinal quality. As honey powder is better in dissolving in almost any food items so it can also be used in medicines, especially cough syrups. The honey powder has low calories, therefore, it can be added in a cup of tea or a coffee or even in a green tea rather than sugar powders which are less trustworthy. It is completely organic and natural, hence better than artificial sweeteners. Honey powder is slightly cheaper than its liquid form, which can be easily available in a bag in almost all grocery shops.Request to View Tables of Content @Honey powder market: TrendsThe organic lifestyle is a fast growing trend. The consumers prefer easy, healthy and environment friendly organic food and natural beauty products. United States, Germany, France, Canada and United Kingdom are some of the countries which have largest market for organic foods. Even the various e-commerce companies are preferring to sell variety of gourmet products and honey powder is one of them. Consumers love for bakery products like cake, muffins, cookies and bread is increasing the demand of honey powder in global market. Not only this, its natural quality of smoothening the skin is also attracting the beauty product manufacturers to make more beauty products using honey powder. Although honey powder is fairly new to the American food market, it has been used in Korean kitchens since long time. It is used as sugar substitute in Korea. These are the main trends likely to be observed in the global honey powder market.Honey powder market: Key market playersChanel, PIAS, Anna Sui, Benefit Cosmetics, Laura Mercier, Guerlain, Max Factor, Shu Uemura, ABLE C & C are the major manufacturers of honey powder.Honey powder market: ForecastAccording to various research, honey powder could potentially be used as dough improver. A new research made in China also indicated that it might be acted as sugar replacer in bread. The increasing usage of natural medicines like Ayurveda will also give a boom to honey powder market. The figure of diabetic patients is also increasing, and in such scenario patients are refraining away from using artificial sugar powders and sweeteners which will ultimately increase the demand of honey powder.The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, types and applications.The report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macro-economic indicators and governing factors along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies.To view complete report @About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.commedia@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Food Colorants Market Set to Witness an Uptick During 2016  2024

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Food colorants are coloring additives also known as dye or pigments which are added to food or beverages to impart color and give an attractive appearance to the food and beverages. Food colorants are added in the food and beverages to maintain and improve safety, freshness, nutritional value, taste, texture and appearance of foods and beverages. Natural colorants segment is expected to hold a significant market share in terms of value owing to easily availability of fruits and vegetables. The global food colorants market is anticipated to witness significant CAGR during the forecast period.Global Food Colorants Market: Drivers and RestraintsEasily availability of raw materials such as fruits and vegetables and edible plants, coupled with rising consumer demand for natural colorants, which is driving the growth of global food colorants market. Furthermore, increasing applications of food colorants in food and beverage industry is expected to boost the consumption of food colorants. In addition, increasing consumer demand for processed foods leads to increase consumption of food colorants.Request to View Tables of Content @However, stringent and expensive certifications and regulations regarding use of food colorants, and side effects associated with synthetic colors on health are expected to limit the growth of global food colorants market.Based on the geographies, the global food colorants market is segmented into five key regions, namely North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. North America is anticipated to dominate among all the regions owing to increasing demand for food colorants in US and Canada. Europe is expected to hold the market share of global food colorants market at a second position in terms of value. This is attributed to increasing consumer awareness for natural products coupled with regulatory support for coloring food stuff in European countries. Owing to the increase in consumption of processed and ready to eat foods in India and China, the Asia-Pacific market is anticipated to contribute significantly to the global food colorants market. The Latin America and MEA regions are expected to contribute collectively in the global food colorants market.This is due to the increasing disposable incomes coupled with changing lifestyles in Brazil, GCC countries and South Africa which is fuelling the consumption of processed foods, resulting in an increase in demand for food colorants.Global Food Colorants Market: Key PlayersSome of the major players identified in the global food colorants market includeCargill IncorporatedBASF SEKoninklijke DSM N.V.FMC CorporationDDW The Colour HouseHansen Holding A/SGNT GroupNaturexLycoredSan-Ei Gen F.F.I., Inc.Sensient Colors LLCSethness Caramel ColorWILD Flavors and Specialty IngredientsRIKEN VITAMIN Co., Ltd.The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to categories such as market segments, geographies, types, technology and applications.The report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macro-economic indicators and governing factors along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies.To view complete report @About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.commedia@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Global Bituminous Roofing Membrane Market Research Report 2017 - 2021

Bituminous Roofing Membrane Market

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The report on the Bituminous Roofing Membrane market gives a meticulous introduction about the Bituminous Roofing Membrane market in the intial part of the report and further the information such as emerging trends, regional markets, application, policy analysis, end-users, and value chain structure are discussed. The report contains complete details about global the market, which comprises the past market scenario, the current situation of the market, and the future conditions forecasted. The report also contains the position of the market in different regions along with its market share.Get full report with TOC @The industrys best tools and methodologies were used in order to evaluate the market dynamics. The market situations are expected to keep on changing as the market trends keep changing along with time, thus zilch remains stagnant in the market. The market players that are involved in the market are also aware of this situation and hence are taking initiatives and are making investments in order to maintain the competitive edge. They are also making efforts in making technological advancements. The prominent market players are involved in the Bituminous Roofing Membrane market further in the report. The company details that are included consist of their mass production, services, sales, collaborations, products, profit made, and the future developments expected.The data collected was taken from reliable databases and the industrial experts evaluation and analysis of the data for validation. Statistical data is represented in the form of graphs, diagrams, pie charts, and so on. This makes the user to understand the data in a much easy way. The concepts of the Bituminous Roofing Membrane market such as trends analysis, recommendations for growth, investment feasibility analysis, SWOT analyses of competing companies, investment return analysis, and the opportunity analysis are included for better understanding of the market. Bottom-up and top-down approaches have been used in the report along with Porters Five Forces model and SWOT analyses for the data analysis purpose. The report also includes details about the smaller markets dependent on the Bituminous Roofing Membrane market.For sample report visit @In the final section, the recommendations and the suggestions of experts and analysts are covered in order to help the companies gain maximum profit and retain their market position.Market Research Store is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics released by reputed private publishers and public organizations. Market Research Store is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air.Contact UsJoel John3422 SW 15 Street, Suit #8138,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442,United StatesTel: +1-386-310-3803GMT Tel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No. 1-855-465-4651Email: sales@marketresearchstore.com
Global and United States Brass Rods Market 2017 Region by top Players - Hailiang Group, Ningbo Jintian, Mueller Industries, Mitsubishi-shindoh

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The United States Brass Rods Market 2017 Industry Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Brass Rods industry. Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Brass Rods market analysis is provided for the international market including development history, competitive landscape analysis and major regions development status.United States Brass Rods Industry is an in-depth report that offers a unique mix of specialist industry knowledge and the region-wise research expertise. The report delivers the market size and the trends for each sector.Click Here for Report Sample:The report on United States Brass Rods market begins with an overview of the market. The report details the historical data of the United States Brass Rods market along with the current scenario. Then the report covers the trends shaping the United States Brass Rods market. The drivers and restraints that will shape this industry during the forecast period have been evaluated in detail. Moving on, the report dwells on the market opportunities and their impact on the key players operating in the market. Moreover, the key threats the United States Brass Rods market will experience during the forecast period are discussed.The next part of the report features an in-depth segmentation of the market. The report includes valuable information about the key segments in the United States Brass Rods market along with their sub-sectors. Revenue share and size along with insightful forecasts of these key segments and other prominent sub-segments are available in this report. The report explores the trends that will impact the growth of the emerging regional sectors in the United States Brass Rods market.The recent findings along with the promise they hold for the future in the United States Brass Rods market have also been analyzed. The report features contributions from several key industry participants along with scientists that are leading figures in their respective fields.Browse the full report:Towards the end, the report scrutinizes the competitive landscape of the United States Brass Rods market. Most prominent players with their business overview are featured in this research study. The key players market revenue, top strategies, innovations, collaborations and other developments are mentioned in detail in the report. These insights about the top companies in the United States Brass Rods market will let the user know about the market opportunities they can tap on to, with the best of tactical decisions.ABOUT USFior 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 ManagerOffice - 102, Sanskriti Aspirations,Near Post 91, Baner Road,Pune, MH, India - 411045Phone: (201) 465-4211Email: sales@fiormarkets.comWeb:Blog:
Diabetic Foot Ulcer And Pressure Ulcer Market Size is Projected To Be Around $5.2 Billion By 2025:

Crystal Market Research

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A research study titled, Diabetic Foot Ulcers and Pressure Ulcers Market by Type of Wound, Treatment Type, and End User - Global Industry Analysis and Forecast to 2025 published by Crystal Market Research, states that the diabetic foot ulcer and pressure ulcer market is projected to be around $5.2 billion by 2025.Diabetic foot and pressure ulcers are chronic wounds caused by increased pressure and low angiogenic response i.e., decreased formation of new blood vessels. Diabetic foot ulcers are characterized by unusual swelling and redness and odor from feet which are some of the early symptoms. High prevalence of diabetes worldwide is one of the leading causes of diabetic foot and pressure ulcers. According to California Podiatric Medical Association (CPMA), 15% of people diagnosed with diabetes tend to develop a foot ulcer and 14 to 24% patients affected by foot ulcers will require amputation during their lifetime. Such high prevalence of diabetes and high risk of developing foot and pressure ulcers will drive the market growth during forecast period. Furthermore, increasing incidence of pressure ulcers owing to high rate of chronic diseases among geriatric population and longer hospitals stays will further drive the market growth.Browse full research report with TOC on Diabetic Foot Ulcers and Pressure Ulcers Market by Type of Wound, Treatment Type, and End User - Global Industry Analysis and Forecast to 2025 at:Diabetic foot ulcers segment dominated the global market in 2016 and is expected to continue its leading position during the forecast period. This can be attributed to high risk of developing foot ulcers among diabetic population and lack of preventive care. Wound care dressing segment was responsible for the major share of the global market in 2016, owing to swelling prevalence of diabetes requiring wound care treatments. Hospital inpatient settings segment dominated the global market in 2016 and is projected to maintain its lead during the forecast period.U.S. accounted for the largest share of the North America diabetic foot ulcers and pressure ulcers market in 2016. This large share can be attributed to increasing geriatric population and rise in number of surgeries performed in the U.S. requiring longer hospital stay. Furthermore, growing prevalence of hospital acquired pressure ulcers will further contribute to the market growth. Emerging markets such as China and India are expected to witness high growth during the forecast period owing to rise in demand for minimally invasive wound-care procedures requiring less hospital stay, increasing elderly population with high risk of developing various chronic infections and rise in incidence of diabetes in this region.Request a sample copy of Diabetic Foot Ulcers and Pressure Ulcers Market Research Report @Product development is the key strategy adopted by the key players operating in this market. These companies are highly focused on the development of advanced wound care devices to gain competitive advantage over their competitors. For instance, in September 2016, ConvaTec, Inc. launched AQUACEL Ag SURGICAL SP dressing, which helps in reducing surgical site infections.Some of the major players operating in the global market include 3M Healthcare, Coloplast A/S, B. Braun Melsungen AG, Acelity L.P. Inc., Molnlycke Health Care AB, ConvaTec, Inc., Smith & Nephew Plc., Medtronic Plc, Medline Industries, Inc., Organogenesis, Inc., and BSN Medical GMBH.Key Findings of the Research Study: Diabetic foot ulcer segment dominated the global market in 2016, owing to increasing prevalence of diabetes and high risk of developing foot ulcers among diabetic population. Wound care dressings segment accounted for the largest share of the market in 2016, owing to its advantages in effective healing of wounds and ability to reduce post treatment complications. Hospital inpatient settings segment accounted for one-third share of the global market in 2016 and will continue to lead the market during the forecast period. North America accounted for over one-third share of the global market in 2016, owing to increasing geriatric population with high risk of developing chronic diseases such as diabetes and rise in demand for minimal invasive surgeries requiring shorter hospital stay. Asia-Pacific is projected to grow at fastest CAGR during forecast period owing to high prevalence of diabetic population in the region and highly unmet medical needs.Inquire more about this report at:Diabetic Foot Ulcers and Pressure Ulcers market SegmentationBy Type of Wound: Diabetic Ulcerso Grade 0o Grade 1o Grade 2o Grade 3o Grade 4o Grade 5 Pressure Ulcerso Stage 1o Stage 2o Stage 3o Stage 4By Treatment Type: Wound Care Dressingso Foam Dressingso Film Dressingso Hydrocolloid Dressingso Surgical Debridemento Hydrogel Dressings Bio-activeso Growth Factorso Skin Grafts and Skin Substituteso Others Wound Care Deviceso Negative Pressure Wound Therapyo Ultrasound Therapyo OthersBy End User:o Hospital Inpatient Settingso Hospital Outpatient Settingso Community Health Centerso Home Healthcareo OthersBy Region: North Americao U.So Canadao Mexico Europeo Germanyo Franceo UKo Italyo Spaino Rest of Europe Asia-Pacifico Japano Chinao Australiao Indiao South Koreao Rest of Asia-Pacific Rest of the Worldo Brazilo South Africao Saudi Arabiao Turkeyo United Arab Emirateso OthersGet Customization in the Report At:Related Reports:Negative Pressure Wound Therapy (NPWT) Market by Product, Application, and End User - Global Industry Analysis and Forecast to 2025:Silver Wound Dressings Market by Product and Application - Global Industry Analysis and Forecast to 2025:Wound Closure Market by Product and Application - Global Industry Analysis and Forecast to 2025:About Crystal Market ResearchCrystal Market Research is a U.S. based market research and business intelligence company. Crystal offers one stop solution for market research, business intelligence, and consulting services to help clients make more informed decisions. It provides both syndicated as well as customized research studies for its customers spread across the globe. The company offers market intelligence reports across a broad range of industries including healthcare, chemicals & materials, technology, automotive, and energy.Contact:Akhil V.304 South Jones Blvd, Suite 1896,Las Vegas NV 89107,United StatesToll Free: +1-888-213-4282Email: sales@crystalmarketresearch.comBlog:Website:
Clear Brine Fluids Market Share, Growth, Key Manufacturers Analysis and Regional Forecasts to 2025

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Global Brine Fluids Market: OverviewThe global clear brine fluids market is poised to rise at a steady pace in the coming years as the overall oil and gas industry is expected to undergo a major change. The increasing investments in ensuring energy security in developed countries and the burgeoning drilling and completion activities are expected to make key contributions to the rising revenue of the overall market.Global Brine Fluids Market: Drivers and TrendsThe ongoing exploration, drilling, and production activities in the oil and gas industry have led an increased consumption of clear brine fluids. These fluids are extensively used for drilling as well as completion processes. The booming oil and gas industry across the globe and persistently rising rigs have consistently provided the global clear brine fluids market a massive fillip. Furthermore, the discovery of shale gas and ongoing extraction of it have also increased the sales of clear brine fluids.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The rapid depletion of natural resources such as natural gas and crude oil has increased the turned the attention of several industrial players towards unconventional sources of energy such as coal bed methane (CBM), tight gas, shale oil/gas, and gas/methane hydrates. Additionally, the spike in the prices of oil and gas have created a dire need for alternative sources of energy, thereby fuelling the demand for clear brine fluids.Global Brine Fluids Market: Market PotentialCompanies in the global clear brine fluids market are focused on expansion to improve their outreach in the overall market. For instance, Great Lakes Solutions, a business owned by Chemtura Corporation, started its new pilot plant in El Dorado in January 2017. The plant is a commitment to developing products that are characterized by innovation and improvement. With the same intention, the facility is expected to mitigate the gap between tradition laboratory experimentation and full-scale commercial production. The plant is located on top of worlds second largest brome-rich brine reserve. This expansion strategy is expected to give this company an edge over others, allowing them to make reliable value additions to their product portfolio.Request TOC of the Report @Global Brine Fluids Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the global clear brine fluids market is fragmented into Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa. Presently, North America dominates the global market due to the growing shale gas activities in the U.S. Additionally, increasing efforts by the governments across the U.S. towards encouraging energy security measures is also expected to support the regional markets growth.Asia Pacific is also expected to be a key regional player in the global clear brine market are China is poised to account for a sizable share in the global recoverable shale gas market. Furthermore, the Middle East and Africa is also expected to be a close contender in the global market as it houses an important oil and gas industry in the world. Despite the plunge in crude oil prices, the relentless demand for energy across the globe is projected to offer the oil and gas industry in the Middle East and Africa lucrative opportunities for growth. Subsequently, the region is expected to show a consistent consumption clear brine fluids.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report@Key Players Mentioned in this Report are:Some of the leading players operating in the global clear brine fluids market are TETRA Technologies Inc., Israel Chemicals Ltd., Albemarle Corporation, Egyptian Mud Engineering & Chemicals Company (EMEC), Geo Drillings Fluids, Inc., Zirax Ltd., Halliburton, and Chemtura Corporation. The competitive landscape will be characterized by strategic mergers and acquisitions by players in order to strengthen their position in the coming years.About TMR Research :TMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services 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
A Madison man authorities say shot an acquaintance earlier this month during a drug deal over money he was owed was charged with intentional homicide Tuesday.

Gregory Howard, 26, was charged in Dane County Circuit Court on Tuesday with attempted first-degree intentional homicide. Howard allegedly shot an acquaintance twice in the face and once in the back during a marijuana deal on Madisons South Side July 2.

The victim, an unnamed 37-year-old Madison man, said he was shot over $20 he owed Howard, according to a criminal complaint filed Tuesday.

He told police that he was trying to buy marijuana from Howard near Moorland Road and Rimrock Road and was shot by him after he left the car Howard was in to get money to complete the transaction.

After the shooting, the victim said he thought he was going to die and drove himself to the Fitchburg McDonalds on Fish Hatchery Road, where his girlfriend worked. Police were called to the fast food restaurant at about 3:15 a.m, according to the complaint.

The victim was taken to UW-Hospital, where he had multiple surgeries, according to the complaint. Police have said the victim is expected to recover from his injuries.

The victim told police that he knew the man that shot him only as Lil G and that he was missing a finger, according to the criminal complaint. Howard is missing half of his left middle finger, the complaint said.

The victim also showed police text messages sent between the two.

Police records and a Facebook search showed that Howard used the same phone number the victim gave them.

Howard was arrested on a parole hold on July 2.

Howards bail was set at $100,000 at an initial court appearance Tuesday.

If convicted of the charge, Howard faces up to 60 years in prison and up to an additional six years for violating his parole.

Howards criminal history includes felony convictions for armed robbery, forgery and taking and driving a vehicle without consent. He has misdemeanor convictions for violating domestic abuse orders, disorderly conduct and trespassing.

His next court appearance is July 25.
Coated Fabrics Market set to increase significantly by 2025

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Global Coated Fabrics Market: OverviewCoated fabrics are composite materials prepared by spreading bonding agents on one or both sides of the fabric and coating it with rubber compounds as per the requirement of the final end-use application. The final product is not only flexible, strong, heat resistant, and washable, they can also be electrically conductive or insulating as per desire. In the automotive industry, coated fabrics are used to manufacture air bags and seat covers. As the automotive industry touches new peaks in the near future, owing to rising population across the world, the demand for coated fabrics is anticipated to increment at a rapid rate during the forecast period of 2017 to 2025.Global Coated Fabrics Market: Key TrendsApart from being utterly useful for the thriving automotive industry, coated fabrics are also used to make protective clothing for labors, which extends the horizon of its demand into several other flourishing industries. Strict government regulations such as European Unions Directive 89/686/EEC and Australia's Model Work Health and Safety Act are urging industries towards industrial protective clothing adoption. Food and beverage, chemical processing, agriculture, and law enforcement are some of the most prominent end-use industries for coated fabrics, after automotive. Conversely, this industry is facing stiff challenge from alternative materials including leather, plastic, uncoated fabrics, and rubber sheeting, which will hinder the growth rate to a certain extend during the forecast period.Request Sample Copy of the Report @In terms of products, the global coated fabrics market can be segmented into polymer, rubber, and fabric-backed wall coverings. Out of these, polymer coated fabrics serve maximum demand as it is relatively inexpensive as compared to other fabrics and offer desirable resistance to water, abrasion, and fire. As the regulations for safety spreads into several other emerging economies, the global polymer coated fabrics market is expected to flourish.Global Coated Fabrics Market: Market PotentialWith technological advancements, the application of coated fabrics now extends to defense, marine, and aviation industries. Herein, coated fabrics are now extensively used for their attributes of barrier protection, air retention, abrasion resistance, and high strength to weight ratio. This factor will open new opportunities for the players in the global coated fabrics market. Moreover, consistent research and development in the field is sure to extend the application of coated fibrics into other fields and further expand the market.Request TOC of the Report @Global Coated Fabrics Market: Regional OutlookNearly all regions are extending the demand for coated fabrics, with Asia Pacific growing at the best rate owing to vast population and a thriving automotive industry. Prosperity of healthcare industry is also expected to positively reflect on coated fabrics market in this region, especially in the emerging economies of India, China, Malaysia, and South Korea. In Europe, with stringent industrial safety regulations in the U.K, France, and Germany, protective clothing segment is most fruitful. Since the implementation of National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), OSHA, and ASTM, similar shift in the market is seen in the region of North America too, wherein the U.S. is extending the demand for coated fibrics to produce protective clothing for firefighting and law enforcement. In gulf, construction is at an all-new peak in the countries of UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, which serves the primary demand for coated fabrics to be used as safety clothing for the construction workers.Global Coated Fabrics Market: Competitive AnalysisSaint-Gobain, Omnova Solutions, Canadian General Tower, Trelleborg, and Takata Corporation are some of the leading companies currently operational in this market, which is fragmented in nature with the presence of several local players.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report@About TMR Research :TMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services 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
New report available: Global Plastic Bag Industry Market Research Report 2017

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SummaryThe Global Plastic Bag Industry 2017 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Plastic Bag industry.Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Plastic Bag market analysis is provided for the international market including development history, competitive landscape analysis, and major regions development status.Secondly, development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures. This report also states import/export, supply and consumption figures as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin by regions (United States, EU, China and Japan), and other regions can be added.Then, the report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials, equipment and downstream consumers analysis is also carried out. Whats more, the Plastic Bag industry development trends and marketing channels are analyzed.Finally, the feasibility of new investment projects is assessed, and overall research conclusions are offered.In a word, the report provides major statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.Ask a sample or any question, please email to:hebe@qyresearchglobal.com or hebe@qyresearch.comThe players list(Partly, Players you are interested can also be added):NovolexAdvance PolybagSuperbagUnistar PlasticsNewQuantumCardia BioplasticsOlympic Plastic BagsT.S.T PlaspackSahachit WatanaXtex PolythenePapier-MettlerBiobagThantawanShenzhen Zhengwang...Key Topics Covered:Chapter One Industry Overview of Plastic BagChapter Two Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Plastic BagChapter Three Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Plastic BagChapter Four Capacity, Production and Revenue Analysis of Plastic Bag by Regions, Types and ManufacturersChapter Five Price, Cost, Gross and Gross Margin Analysis of Plastic Bag by Regions, Types and ManufacturersChapter Six Consumption Volume, Consumption Value and Sale Price Analysis of Plastic Bag by Regions, Types and ApplicationsChapter Seven Supply, Import, Export and Consumption Analysis of Plastic BagChapter Eight Major Manufacturers Analysis of Plastic BagChapter Nine Marketing Trader or Distributor Analysis of Plastic BagChapter Ten Industry Chain Analysis of Plastic BagChapter Eleven Development Trend of Analysis of Plastic BagChapter Twelve New Project Investment Feasibility Analysis of Plastic BagChapter Thirteen Conclusion of the Global Plastic Bag Industry 2017 Market Research ReportRelated Reports:US Plastic Bag Industry Market Research Report 2017Europe Plastic Bag Industry Market Research Report 2017India Plastic Bag Industry Market Research Report 2017China Plastic Bag Industry Market Research Report 2017Korea Plastic Bag Industry Market Research Report 2017Japan Plastic Bag Industry Market Research Report 2017If you need a report or have any question, please feel free to contact meHebe | Sr. Manager  Global SalesProfessional Market Research Report PublisherQYResearch Co.LtdQYResearch focus on Market Survey and ResearchPhone: +86-20-8665-5165Email: hebe@qyresearchglobal.com or hebe@qyresearch.comWeb:About QYResearchQYResearch established in 2007, focus on custom research, management consulting, IPO consulting, industry chain research, database and seminar services. the company owned a large basic database (such as National Bureau of statistics database, Customs import and export database, Industry Association Database etc), experts resources (included energy automotive chemical medical ICT consumer goods etc industries experts who own more than 10 years experiences on marketing or R&D), professional survey team (the team member with more than 3 years market survey experience and more than 2 years depth expert interview experience),Excellent data analysis team (SPSS statistics and PPT graphics process team); QYResearch has always pursuit product quality, adhere to the quality is the soul of business. Through the companys years of effort and a lot of customer support, QYResearch consulting group creative design method of many high-quality markets investigation and research team with rich experience. Today, QYResearch brand has become the consulting industry with quality assurance consulting brand. The company has 2500 global well-known customers, covering energy automobile pharmaceutical chemical agriculture more than 30 industries, services from the data analysis and recommendations-Consulting landing one-stop solution, and research regions cover China,US,EU,Asia,Middle East and Africa,South America,Australia,etc Global all regions,and also built research or marketing center in China USA UK France Hongkong etc regions. currently, QYResearch has become the first choice and worth trusted consulting brand in Global and China business consulting services.Media ContactCompany Name: QYResearch CO.,LIMITEDContact Person: HebeEmail: hebe@qyresearchglobal.comPhone: +86-20-8665-5165Address: Room 2311 VILI International Building No.167 Linhe West Road Tianhe DistrictCity: GuangzhouCountry: ChinaWebsite:(US) |(EU) |(JP)
Single Turbocharger Market Size 2017 Honeywell, BorgWarner, MHI, IHI

Single Turbocharger

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Single Turbocharger MarketA market study  Global Single Turbocharger Market  examines the performance of the Single Turbocharger market Size 2017. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Single Turbocharger market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Single Turbocharger market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Single Turbocharger Market 2017 report includes Single Turbocharger market Size, Revenue, market Share, Single Turbocharger industry volume, market Trends, Single Turbocharger Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Single Turbocharger Price during the Forecast period from 2017 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of Single Turbocharger Market 2017:1. Honeywell2. BorgWarner3. MHI4. IHI5. Cummins6. Bosch Mahle7. Continental8. Hunan Tyen9. Weifu Tianli10. Kangyue11. Weifang Fuyuan12. Shenlong13. Okiya Group14. Zhejiang Rongfa15. Hunan RugidoveSingle Turbocharger Market Analysis: By Product Traditional Turbo TwinPower TurboSingle Turbocharger Market Analysis: By Application Diesel Engine Gasoline EngineFirstly, the report covers the top Single Turbocharger manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Single Turbocharger report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Single Turbocharger industry, Single Turbocharger industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Single Turbocharger Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Inquiry Here:The Single Turbocharger research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Single Turbocharger market revenue worldwide.Finally, Single Turbocharger market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.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,United States
Mice Models Market Dynamics 2017: Opportunities, Risks and Driving Factors to 2022

Reports Monitor

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ReportsMonitor.com has added a new report to its database EMEA Mice Models Market Report 2017.This report identifies the Mice Models market size for the years 2012-2017, and forecast of the same till the year 2022. It also highlights the market drivers, restraints, growth indicators, challenges, and other key aspects with respect to the Mice Models market.Mice Models Market tracks the major market events including product launches, technological developments, mergers and acquisitions, and the innovative business strategies opted by key market players. Along with strategically analyzing the key micro markets, the report also focuses on industry-specific drivers, restraints, opportunities and challenges in the Copper Strips market. This research report offers in-depth analysis of the market size (revenue), market share, major market segments, and different geographic regions, forecast for the next five years, key market players, and premium industry trends. It also focuses on the key drivers, restraints, opportunities and challenges.For Requesting a Sample Copy of This Report, Please Visit @This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringCharles River LaboratoriesThe Jackson LaboratoriesTaconic Farms InternationalHarlan LaboratoriesGenOway S.ACovanceCrescendo Biologics LimitedDeltagenTransGenicSAGE LabsImmunoGenes AGMirimusAblexisThe competitive landscape of the global market for Mice Models is determined by evaluating the various market participants, production capacity, Mice Models markets production chain, and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the Mice Models market worldwide.This report segments the Mice Models marketModelsProductsServicesOn the basis of application:BioengineeringMedical EngineeringOtherFor comprehensive understanding of market dynamics, the Mice Models market is analyzed across key geographies namely:Europe: Germany, France, UK, Russia, Italy and Benelux;Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Israel, UAE and Iran;Africa: South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt and Algeria.Each of these regions is analyzed on basis of market findings across major countries in these regions for a macro-level understanding of the market.Some points from TOC:EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) Mice Models Market Report 20171 Mice Models Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Mice Models1.2 Classification of Mice Models1.2.1 EMEA Mice Models Market Size (Sales) Comparison by Type (2012-2022)7 Mice Models Manufacturing Cost Analysis7.1 Mice Models Key Raw Materials Analysis7.1.1 Key Raw Materials7.1.2 Price Trend of Key Raw Materials7.1.3 Key Suppliers of Raw Materials7.1.4 Market Concentration Rate of Raw Materials7.2 Proportion of Manufacturing Cost Structure7.2.1 Raw Materials7.2.2 Labor Cost7.2.3 Manufacturing Expenses7.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Mice Models9 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders9.1 Marketing Channel9.1.1 Direct Marketing9.1.2 Indirect Marketing9.1.3 Marketing Channel Development Trend9.2 Market PositioningBrowse Full Table of Contents and Report Description @Reports Monitor (ReportsMonitor.com) is a platform to meet the market research and business intelligence requirements. Our aim is to change the dynamics of the Market Research industry by providing quality intelligence backed by data. Your requirement for market forecasting is fulfilled by our exclusive quantitative and analytics driven intelligence. We have a vast collection of reports, covering maximum industries worldwide. Our process is meticulously planned and executed in order to use maximum resources and explore the market for getting genuine insights. Decision makers can now rely on our distinct data gathering methods to get factual market forecasting and detailed analysis.008, Mihir Co-operative,Above Bharat Suzuki showroom,Fatima Nagar,Pune,Maharashtra,IndiaIndia: +91 2069535353Jay MatthewsDirect: +1 513 549-5911Email: sales@reportsmonitor.comWebsite:
3D Printing Medical Devices Market Size Is Projected To Be Around $9.8 Billion By 2025:

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A research study titled, 3D Printing Medical Devices Market by Component, Technology, Application, and End User  Global Industry Analysis and Forecast to 2025 published by Crystal Market Research, states that the 3D printing medical devices market is projected to be around $9.8 billion by 2025.3D printing can be used to make 3D printed models of patients organs to plan and practice complex surgeries. It is relatively new and rapidly expanding field. It finds numerous applications in different industries such as automotive, defense, healthcare, and aerospace. The applications of 3D printing in healthcare industry are booming. It offers several benefits such as the customization of implants and prosthetics, rise in productivity, andcost-effectiveness.Moreover, scientists have undertaken large number of research activities to find out how 3D printers can be used to develop living organs such as liver and heart. However, it is in very early stage of development.Powder bed fusion (PBF) is the most common technology used for 3D printing medical devices. PBF technology works with different materials (such as nylon and titanium) that are used in medical devices.PBF builds a 3D product from plastic or metal powder by pouring onto a platform.PBF adopts different printing techniques such as electron beam melting (EBM), selective laser sintering (SLS),selective laser melting (SLM), direct metal laser sintering (DMLS), and selective heat sintering (SHS).Browse full research report with TOC on 3d Printing Medical Devices Market By Component, Technology, Application, And End User - Global Industry Analysis and Forecast To 2025 at:Selective laser sintering (SLS) powder based 3D printing market accounted for the largest share of the 3D printing medical devices market in 2016, due to its ability to produce highly durable parts; it doesn't require the support structures which protects the design from falling during production. Orthopedic implants market held the largest share of the overall market in 2016, as 3D printed medical devices are largely adopted for orthopedic applications. Hospitals market dominated the global market in 2016, as large number of surgeries requiring 3D printed medical devices are conducted in hospitals.U.S. held the largest share of the North American 3D printing medical devices market in 2016. This can be attributed to factors such as high adoption of 3D printing technology along with emphasis on research and development initiatives. Likewise, Japan accounted for a majority of the Asia-Pacific market for 3D printing medical devices, due to rising awareness about 3D printing technology for medical devices and government initiatives to support developments in 3D technology.Request a sample copy of 3d Printing Medical Devices Market Research Report @Some of the major companies in the global 3D printing medical devices market are Arcam AB, 3D Systems, Inc., Stratasys Ltd., Cyfuse Biomedical K.K., EOS GmbH Electro Optical Systems, Organovo Holdings, SLM Solutions Group AG, FabRx Ltd., EnvisionTEC, and Bio3D Technologies. Technological advancement is the key strategy adopted by key players operating in the 3D printing medical devices market. For instance, in May 2016, Stratasys, a 3D printing and additive manufacturing solutions company launched the worlds first full-color, multi material 3D printer, the J750. This system enables the customers to mix and match full color gradients with a wide range of materials.Key Findings of the Research Study: Plastics segment accounted for more than two-third share of the global market in 2016. Polymers segment accounted for over one-third share of the overall market in 2016, due to their primary use in bio-model printing. North America dominated the global 3D printing medical devices market in 2016, holding over one-third share of the market, owing to the presence of advanced healthcare infrastructure and highly sophisticated research and development facilities. Europe is anticipated to be the second fastest growing 3D printing medical devices market registering a double digit growth rate over the forecast period. India and China are projected to witness robust growth during the forecast period, due to high patient population and increase in need for advanced health care services due to growing disposable income.Inquire more about this report at:3D Printing Medical Devices Market Segmentation:By Component: 3D Printing Equipmento 3D Printerso 3D Bioprinters MaterialsPlasticsThermoplasticsPhotopolymersBiomaterial inksPolymersCeramicsHydrogelsMetals and Alloys Services and SoftwareBy Technology: Digital Light Processing (DLP) Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) Powder Based 3D Printing Electronic Beam Melting (EBM) Stereolithography (SLA)  Liquid Based 3D Printing Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM): Plastic Filament Extrusion Based Technology PolyJet / InkJet 3D PrintingBy Application: Cranio-maxillofacial Implants Orthopedic Implants Dental Implants Internal and External ProsthesesBy End User: Hospitals Ambulatory Surgical Centers Diagnostic CentersBy Region: North Americao U.So Canadao Mexico Europeo Germanyo Franceo UKo Italyo Spaino Rest of Europe Asia-Pacifico Japano Chinao Australiao Indiao South Koreao Rest of Asia-Pacific Rest of the Worldo Brazilo South Africao Saudi Arabiao Turkeyo United Arab Emirateso OthersGet Customization in the Report At:Related Reports:Cardiac Assist Devices Market by Type - Global Industry Analysis and Forecast to 2025:Cardiac Rhythm Management Market by Product and End User - Global Industry Analysis and Forecast to 2025:About Crystal Market ResearchCrystal Market Research is a U.S. based market research and business intelligence company. Crystal offers one stop solution for market research, business intelligence, and consulting services to help clients make more informed decisions. It provides both syndicated as well as customized research studies for its customers spread across the globe. The company offers market intelligence reports across a broad range of industries including healthcare, chemicals & materials, technology, automotive, and energy.Contact:Akhil V.304 South Jones Blvd, Suite 1896,Las Vegas NV 89107,United StatesToll Free: +1-888-213-4282Email: sales@crystalmarketresearch.comBlog:Website:
High Power LEDs Market 2022 Major Industry Players are  Lumileds, Broadcom, Cree, Adafruit, Lumex, LED Engin

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Global High Power LEDs Market Research Report 2017 Purchase This Report by calling ResearchnReports.com at +1-888-631-6977.The Global High Power LEDs Market from the perspective of all its current trends that are influencing it is important to understand in order to obtain the most rounded solution for business strategies in it. These trends are geographical, socioeconomic, economic, consumer, political, cultural, and their overall effect on client or consumer preferences will have a major data in how this market will form itself in the following years to come. Dynamics and the way they impact the Global High Power LEDs Market have been studied in absolute precise details in the report. The ultimate goal for the dissemination of this information is to create a detailed descriptive analysis of how these trends could potentially affect the future of the Global High Power LEDs Market within the reports forecast period.Get discount on Full report@Global High Power LEDs Market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players including Lumileds Broadcom Cree Adafruit Lumex LED Engin OSRAM Oslon TT Electronics Seoul Semiconductor Luxeon Nichia Vishay Wurth Electronics Justar LED Lighting SunLED CompanyThe Global High Power LEDs Market is also presented to the readers as a holistic snapshot of the competitive landscape within the given forecast period. It presents a comparative detailed analysis of the all regional and player segments, offering readers a better knowledge of where areas in which they can place their existing resources and gauging the priority of a particular region in order to boost their standing in the Global MP3 Headphone All-in-one market.Request Sample copy @On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into 1W High Power LEDs 3W High Power LEDs 5W High Power LEDs OthersOn the basis on the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales), market share and growth rate of High Power LEDs for each application, including Oil & Gas Construction Mining Industry Railway Aerospace & Defense OtherAbout Research N Reports:Research N Reports is a new age market research firm where we focus on providing information that can be effectively applied. Today being a consumer driven market, companies require information to deal with the complex and dynamic world of choices. We're relying on a sound board firm for your decisions becomes crucial. Research N Reports specializes in industry analysis, market forecasts and as a result getting quality reports covering all verticals, whether be it gaining perspective on current market conditions or being ahead in the cut throat Global competition. Since we excel at business research to help businesses grow, we also offer to consult as an extended arm of our services which only helps us gain more insight into current trends and problems. Consequently, we keep evolving as an all-rounder provider of viable information under one roof.Contact:(Research N Reports)10916, Gold Point Dr, Houston, TX, Pin - 77064,Sunny Denis(Sales Manager),+1-8886316977,sales@researchnreports.com ,
Automotive GPS Antenna Market Size 2017 Garmin, Lowrance, Globalsat, Laird, Motorola

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Automotive GPS Antenna MarketA market study  Global Automotive GPS Antenna Market  examines the performance of the Automotive GPS Antenna market Size 2017. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Automotive GPS Antenna market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Automotive GPS Antenna market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Automotive GPS Antenna Market 2017 report includes Automotive GPS Antenna market Size, Revenue, market Share, Automotive GPS Antenna industry volume, market Trends, Automotive GPS Antenna Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Automotive GPS Antenna Price during the Forecast period from 2017 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of Automotive GPS Antenna Market 2017:1. Garmin2. Lowrance3. Globalsat4. Laird5. Motorola6. PCTEL7. ShakespeareAutomotive GPS Antenna Market Analysis: By Product Internal Antenna External AntennaAutomotive GPS Antenna Market Analysis: By Application Passenger Vehicle Light Commercial Vehicle Heavy Commercial VehicleFirstly, the report covers the top Automotive GPS Antenna manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Automotive GPS Antenna report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Automotive GPS Antenna industry, Automotive GPS Antenna industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Automotive GPS Antenna Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Inquiry Here:The Automotive GPS Antenna research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Automotive GPS Antenna market revenue worldwide.Finally, Automotive GPS Antenna market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.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,United States
Automotive Lift Market Size 2017 Bendpak/Ranger, Rotary Lift, Nussbaum Group

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Automotive Lift MarketA market study  Global Automotive Lift Market  examines the performance of the Automotive Lift market Size 2017. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Automotive Lift market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Automotive Lift market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Automotive Lift Market 2017 report includes Automotive Lift market Size, Revenue, market Share, Automotive Lift industry volume, market Trends, Automotive Lift Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Automotive Lift Price during the Forecast period from 2017 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of Automotive Lift Market 2017:1. Bendpak/Ranger2. Rotary Lift3. Nussbaum Group4. Forward Lift5. Challenger Lifts6. Gemini Auto Lifts7. Western Lift8. Backyard Buddy9. Target Lifts International10. Hunter Engineering11. Pks LiftsAutomotive Lift Market Analysis: By Product Wheel Engaging Auto Lift Frame Engagement Auto LiftsAutomotive Lift Market Analysis: By Application Residential Garage Use Automotive Oem Industry Car Repair ShopsFirstly, the report covers the top Automotive Lift manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Automotive Lift report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Automotive Lift industry, Automotive Lift industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Automotive Lift Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Inquiry Here:The Automotive Lift research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Automotive Lift market revenue worldwide.Finally, Automotive Lift market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.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,United States
Global Smart Governments Market Size, Share, Status and Forecast 2022 : IBM, IMEX Systems, Nokia

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Smart Governments Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022" to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies the global Smart Governments market, analyzes and researches the Smart Governments development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeABB Ltd.AmazonAvayaCap GeminiCiscoEntrust DatacardHuawei TechnologiesHughes Identification DevicesIBMIMEX SystemsNokiaOpengovOracleSocrataSymantec CorporationMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaEnter your information below to receive a sample copy of this report @Market segment by Type, Smart Governments can be split intoProfessional ServiceManaged ServiceMarket segment by Application, Smart Governments can be split intoGovernment Resource PlanningSecurityAnalyticsOpen Data PlatformNetwork ManagementOthersTable of Contents1 Industry Overview of Smart Governments1.1 Smart Governments Market Overview1.1.1 Smart Governments Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Smart Governments Market Size and Analysis by Regions1.3 Smart Governments Market by Type1.4 Smart Governments Market by End Users/ApplicationObtain Report Details @2 Global Smart Governments Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Smart Governments Market Size (Value) by Players (2016 and 2017)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in Future3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 ABB Ltd.3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Smart Governments Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 Amazon3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Smart Governments Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 Avaya3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Smart Governments Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.3.5 Recent DevelopmentsList of Tables and FiguresFigure Smart Governments Product ScopeFigure Global Smart Governments Market Size (Million USD) (2012-2017)Table Global Smart Governments Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2012-2017)Figure Global Smart Governments Market Share by Regions in 2016Figure United States Smart Governments Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2012-2017)Figure EU Smart Governments Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2012-2017)Figure Japan Smart Governments Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2012-2017)Figure China Smart Governments Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2012-2017)Figure India Smart Governments Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2012-2017)QYReseachReports.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.1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United States
Automotive Locking Switch Market Size 2017 Delphi, Contentinal, Bangtianle, Omron

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Automotive Locking Switch MarketA market study  Global Automotive Locking Switch Market  examines the performance of the Automotive Locking Switch market Size 2017. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Automotive Locking Switch market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Automotive Locking Switch market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Automotive Locking Switch Market 2017 report includes Automotive Locking Switch market Size, Revenue, market Share, Automotive Locking Switch industry volume, market Trends, Automotive Locking Switch Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Automotive Locking Switch Price during the Forecast period from 2017 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of Automotive Locking Switch Market 2017:1. Lear2. Bosch3. Denso4. Delphi5. Contentinal6. Bangtianle7. Omron8. C&K9. Panasonic10. Marquardt11. TE Connectivity12. Wurth Elektronik13. Mitsumi Electric14. ALPS15. E-Switch16. EAO17. NKK SwitchesAutomotive Locking Switch Market Analysis: By Product Button Type Induction TypeAutomotive Locking Switch Market Analysis: By Application Passenger Vehicle Light Commercial Vehicle Heavy Commercial VehicleFirstly, the report covers the top Automotive Locking Switch manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Automotive Locking Switch report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Automotive Locking Switch industry, Automotive Locking Switch industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Automotive Locking Switch Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Inquiry Here:The Automotive Locking Switch research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Automotive Locking Switch market revenue worldwide.Finally, Automotive Locking Switch market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.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,United States
The number of independent charter and private virtual schools in Wisconsin could expand under the new state budget proposal put forward by Senate Republicans this week.

The proposed spending plan authorizes a state charter school office to create charter schools statewide without the approval of local school boards. Currently the office is limited to creating the schools in Madison and Milwaukee.

Another proposal would allow private schools participating in the states taxpayer-funded voucher programs to create virtual schools using state funds.

In addition, school boards would be able to rescind some increases in revenue from referendums previously approved by voters, and enrollment restrictions for the private school voucher program for students with disabilities would be eliminated under other proposals.

The ideas are part of a plan released by Senate Republicans on Tuesday for the delayed 2017-19 state budget in an effort to break the impasse between Republican leaders who continue to disagree about transportation funding.

Some tax and K-12 issues also remain unresolved, and its unclear how the changes proposed by the Senate this week will affect negotiations.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, told reporters after a meeting with Gov. Scott Walker and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, that his caucus is still reviewing the Senates plan.

The Senates proposed budget also increases the income threshold for qualifying for a voucher under the statewide program, but not to the level Assembly Republicans want, and limits school referendums.

Under the Senate plan, the Office of Educational Opportunity within the University of Wisconsin System could authorize charter schools statewide.

The office was created in the 2015-17 state budget and is run by Gary Bennett, a former teacher who worked for Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills. Darling authored legislation to create the office; the UW Board of Regents approves Bennetts authorizations.

The offices first charter school will be one aimed at helping teenagers recover from drug abuse, which was created by legislation passed this year. It will likely open next year.

Two UW System schools and other entities can now create charter schools throughout the state. The Senate budget would let Bennetts office, any System college and any Technical College District Board authorize charter schools statewide.

The proposal also gives the UW Board of Regents oversight over donations given to Bennetts office and how they are spent.

Stephanie Marquis, spokeswoman for the UW System, said UW officials continually look for ways to expand educational opportunities across Wisconsin, and the proposal would empower the (office) to be a part of our statewide (services to) Wisconsin students, families and communities.

Virtual schools

Also under the Senate plan, $7.2 million in the next state budget would be set aside for private voucher schools that want to create virtual schools. That amount would be offset by a reduction in the amount of state aid sent to school districts in which students attending the virtual schools live, and through a reduction in the amount those districts could raise in property taxes.

All rules that apply to private voucher schools would apply to private virtual schools under the proposal, except how they are funded. Private virtual schools would receive an amount of money matching the amount districts receive when a student open enrolls to that district, which would increase under the Senate Republicans plan.

About 1,000 students could attend a private virtual school under the proposal.

Special needs vouchers and referendums

The number of students who could enroll in the voucher program for students with disabilities known as the Special Needs Scholarship Program also could increase under the plan, which lifts enrollment restrictions on who can enter the program.

Senate Republicans propose eliminating the requirement that for a child to be eligible to participate in the program, the student must have applied to attend a school district under the open enrollment program and was denied.

The plan also eliminates the requirement that a child must have been enrolled in a public school in Wisconsin for the entire school year before applying for the program.

Plan authors estimate the program could enroll 250 more students in the 2018-19 school year by eliminating those enrollment rules.

Senate Republicans also propose allowing school boards to reduce their limits on how much revenue they can bring in and spend by adopting a resolution to rescind a portion of any increase to the districts revenue limit approved by a referendum to pay for school operations.

Dan Rossmiller, a lobbyist for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, said his members have concerns over the referendum proposal.
Mobile Payment Transaction Market Pegged to Value US$ 2,849,231.4 Mn

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In terms of revenue, the global mobile payment transaction market revenues valued at US$ 549,917.7 Mn in 2015 will possibly reach US$ 2,849,231.4 Mn in the year 2020.The mobile payment is an integrated system linked by various components of value chain which typically includes the merchant, the consumer, the financial institution involved and not to forget the payment gateway and the telecom network.Mobile payment transaction volume will grow by a massive 41.7% during the forecast period 2015-2020. In terms of volume, the global mobile payment transaction market volume was 18,969.8 million transactions in the year 2015 and this is projected to increase by 106,001.5 million transactions by the year 2020.Persistence Market Research forecasts the global mobile payment transaction market to register a CAGR of 39.1% through 2020 and reach US$ 2.89 trillion in revenues.Browse Complete Report @Even though there will be tremendous growth in mobile payment transactions market, there are many challenges that are obstructing the growth of this market. A major challenge is the slow adoption of smartphone compatible POS systems by the retailers. If taken at face value, a 41.7% volume growth looks amazing, but there is something to be concerned about. One of the major concerns is that apart from few countries, consumers havent fully accepted the concept of mobile payments, even though the facility is much more secure. However, given the inherent nature of the product, it wouldnt be long before consumers all over the world use the facilities provided by mobile payments, as per the research report of Persistence Market Research.By technology, SMS and WAP/WEB will continue to account for most of the transactions conducted worldwide. Mobile payments conducted through SMS will witness a robust CAGR of 24.5% over the forecast period. In the year 2015, the revenue from the SMS segment was US$ 238,884.3 Mn and this is going to be at the value of US$ 678,117.1 Mn by 2020 end.Mobile payments conducted through WAP/WEB will witness a CAGR of 48.0% during the forecast period. In the year 2015, the revenue from the WAP/WEB segment was US$ 164,386.1 Mn and this is going to be valued at US$ 1,725,209.6 at the end of the forecast period in the year 2020.A sample of this report is available upon request @Money transfer and merchandise purchases account for over 90% revenue share of the global mobile payment transaction market on the basis of end-use purpose. Mobile payments made for merchandise purchases will be worth US$ 323.73 Bn in 2016, up from US$ 228.32 Bn in 2015. Money transfer, the largest end-use purpose in the mobile payment transaction market, will grow by over 38% to surpass US$ 381 Bn in revenues.The market for mobile payments will continue to be robust in APEJ and Africa, as majority of people there dont own a credit card, in contrast of the situation in Europe and United States. So, consumers in APEJ and Africa are making a direct shift from using cash to using mobile payments. Growth in the mobile payments market will be particularly strong in China. This is due to the entry of major market players like Apple and Samsung in the Chinese market, making the competition more fierce and interesting.Request to view table of content @Due to a strong showing in China, the market for mobile payment will continue to grow in the Asia Pacific region and this region will be the leading market in the world in terms of volume. However, in terms of value, it is Africa that will maintain its number one position in the mobile payment transaction market. This is due to the spectacular success of M-Pesa in Kenya and this has influenced consumers and businesses in other regions of Africa to adopt the technology of mobile payments. This has boosted the market of mobile payment transaction market in Africa. Currently, Africa has nearly 32% revenue share of the global mobile payment market, and boasts of a subscriber base of over 100 million. Other than Asia Pacific and Africa, Western Europe and United States are other lucrative regions for mobile payment transaction market the world over.Leading players operating in the global mobile payment transaction market are PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Google Wallet, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Alipay.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Mechanical Vacuum Pumps Market Size 2017 Aisin Seiki, Delphi Automotive, Denso, Johnson Electric

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Mechanical Vacuum Pumps MarketA market study  Global Mechanical Vacuum Pumps Market  examines the performance of the Mechanical Vacuum Pumps market Size 2017. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Mechanical Vacuum Pumps market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Mechanical Vacuum Pumps market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Mechanical Vacuum Pumps Market 2017 report includes Mechanical Vacuum Pumps market Size, Revenue, market Share, Mechanical Vacuum Pumps industry volume, market Trends, Mechanical Vacuum Pumps Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Mechanical Vacuum Pumps Price during the Forecast period from 2017 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of Mechanical Vacuum Pumps Market 2017:1. Aisin Seiki2. Delphi Automotive3. Denso4. Johnson Electric5. Robert Bosch Gmbh (Bosch)6. Kspg Ag  A Rheinmetall Company7. Magna International Inc.8. Mikuni Corporation9. Shw Ag10. Trw AutomotiveMechanical Vacuum Pumps Market Analysis: By Product Fixed Displacement Pump Variable Displacement PumpsMechanical Vacuum Pumps Market Analysis: By Application Passenger Car Lcv Hcv Two WheelerFirstly, the report covers the top Mechanical Vacuum Pumps manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Mechanical Vacuum Pumps report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Mechanical Vacuum Pumps industry, Mechanical Vacuum Pumps industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Mechanical Vacuum Pumps Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Inquiry Here:The Mechanical Vacuum Pumps research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Mechanical Vacuum Pumps market revenue worldwide.Finally, Mechanical Vacuum Pumps market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.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,United States
Mobile Biometrics Market Size 2017 3M Cogent, Dell SecureWorks, Samsung?KNOX

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Mobile Biometrics MarketA market study  Global Mobile Biometrics Market  examines the performance of the Mobile Biometrics market Size 2017. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Mobile Biometrics market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Mobile Biometrics market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Mobile Biometrics Market 2017 report includes Mobile Biometrics market Size, Revenue, market Share, Mobile Biometrics industry volume, market Trends, Mobile Biometrics Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Mobile Biometrics Price during the Forecast period from 2017 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of Mobile Biometrics Market 2017:1. 3M Cogent2. Dell SecureWorks3. Samsung?KNOX4. Good Technologies5. Honeywell6. LG Electronics7. Booz Allen Hamilton8. Qualcomm9. Neurotechnology10. FujitsuMobile Biometrics Market Analysis: By Product Fingerprint Recognition Voice Recognition Facial Recognition OtherMobile Biometrics Market Analysis: By Application Mobile Phone Tablet PC Automotive OthersFirstly, the report covers the top Mobile Biometrics manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Mobile Biometrics report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Mobile Biometrics industry, Mobile Biometrics industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Mobile Biometrics Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Inquiry Here:The Mobile Biometrics research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Mobile Biometrics market revenue worldwide.Finally, Mobile Biometrics market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.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,United States
Telecom Energy Integration Market Size 2017 Accenture Plc, BAE Systems Plc, Fujitsu Limited, Harris Corporation

Telecom Energy Integration

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Telecom Energy Integration MarketA market study  Global Telecom Energy Integration Market  examines the performance of the Telecom Energy Integration market Size 2017. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Telecom Energy Integration market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Telecom Energy Integration market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Telecom Energy Integration Market 2017 report includes Telecom Energy Integration market Size, Revenue, market Share, Telecom Energy Integration industry volume, market Trends, Telecom Energy Integration Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Telecom Energy Integration Price during the Forecast period from 2017 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of Telecom Energy Integration Market 2017:1. Accenture Plc2. BAE Systems Plc3. Cognizant Technology Solutions4. Computer Science Corporation (CSC)5. Fujitsu Limited6. Harris Corporation7. Hewlett-Packard Company8. IBM Corporation9. Infosys Technologies10. Lockheed Martin CorporationTelecom Energy Integration Market Analysis: By Product Infrastructure integration services Application integration services OtherTelecom Energy Integration Market Analysis: By Application Telecom EnergyFirstly, the report covers the top Telecom Energy Integration manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Telecom Energy Integration report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Telecom Energy Integration industry, Telecom Energy Integration industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Telecom Energy Integration Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Inquiry Here:The Telecom Energy Integration research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Telecom Energy Integration market revenue worldwide.Finally, Telecom Energy Integration market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.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,United States
Cultured Sugar/Vinegar Market to Witness a Pronounce Growth During 2016  2026

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Cultured sugar/ Vinegar is a food additives used in variety of food products, from meat, poultry products to salad dressing, and it is used to extend shelf life. Vinegar is often used as a natural preservative in poultry items and processed meat. Processing of different types of meats for feeding the global population has paced up speedily because of the rapid increase in globalization. Demand for high protein food and trend for ready to eat meat products are driving the global cultured sugar/vinegar market.in developing countries rise in the income of middle class consumers is growing the demand for convenience foods and ultimately driving the cultured sugar/vinegar market. To increase the consumer appeal many food producers are preferring the use of cultured sugar/ vinegar for obtaining food safety and prolonged shelf life. This application of cultured sugar/vinegar is good for consumers and extended shelf life in such products will optimize the supply chain efficiency and costs too. Increase in beverage industry across the globe is also anticipated to drive the cultured sugar/vinegar market as it prevents microbial spoilage in beverages.Rising popularity of bakery products due to changing food consumption trends will benefit the cultured sugar/vinegar market as cultured sugar is used for a function of mold inhabitation in baked goods. Also growth in market for culinary such as dressing and dips, sauces, salad and sandwich spreads etc. is likely to drive the cultured sugar/ vinegar market in near future. Cultured sugar/vinegar is used as agent which helps in suppressing bacteria and pathogens in food. However lack of awareness about the processing technology and modern methods in developing countries are the main hindrances in the growth of global cultured sugar/ vinegar market. in addition to this economic crises faced by many countries of the world and health risk associated with the processed foodstuffs are the factors which act a restraints for cultured sugar/vinegar market.Request to View Tables of Content @Based on the end use industry type the global cultured sugar/vinegar market is segmented into:Meat and poultry productsBaked goodsBeverageOthersIn terms of geography, the global cultured sugar/vinegar market has been divided in to five key regions including North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Middle East & Africa. The global cultured sugar/vinegar market is expected to register healthy CAGR during the forecast period. North America is anticipated to be the dominant market for global cultured sugar/vinegar market followed by Asia Pacific and Europe. The market in Asia-Pacific region is expected to grow at highest CAGR over the forecast period.Some of the key players in the global cultured sugar/vinegar market are Corbion, PROTERIA etc.The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections done using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to categories such as market segments, geographies, type, machine size and end use.The report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides an in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macro-economic indicators, and governing factors, along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various factors on market segments and geographies.To view complete report @About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.commedia@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Pc Website Builders Market Size 2017 Dudaone, Yola, Jimdo, Yahoo, Godaddy

Pc Website Builders

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Pc Website Builders MarketA market study  Global Pc Website Builders Market  examines the performance of the Pc Website Builders market Size 2017. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Pc Website Builders market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Pc Website Builders market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Pc Website Builders Market 2017 report includes Pc Website Builders market Size, Revenue, market Share, Pc Website Builders industry volume, market Trends, Pc Website Builders Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Pc Website Builders Price during the Forecast period from 2017 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of Pc Website Builders Market 2017:1. Weebly2. Squarespace3. Wix4. Dudaone5. Yola6. Jimdo7. Yahoo8. Godaddy9. Homestead10. IbuiltPc Website Builders Market Analysis: By Product Laptops DesktopsPc Website Builders Market Analysis: By Application Personal Website School Or College Website Business Website OtherFirstly, the report covers the top Pc Website Builders manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Pc Website Builders report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Pc Website Builders industry, Pc Website Builders industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Pc Website Builders Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Inquiry Here:The Pc Website Builders research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Pc Website Builders market revenue worldwide.Finally, Pc Website Builders market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.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,United States
Magnetic Particle Testing Equipment Market Size, Industry Analysis & Forecast Report 2017

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ReportsMonitor.com has added a new report to its database Global and United States Magnetic Particle Testing Equipment Market Research Report 2017This report rigorously investigates the potential of the Magnetic Particle Testing Equipment industry in conjunction with primary market challenges.The report on Magnetic Particle Testing Equipment Market is a professional report which provides thorough knowledge along with complete information pertaining to the Magnetic Particle Testing Equipment industry propos classifications, definitions, applications, industry chain summary, industry policies in addition to plans, product specifications, manufacturing processes, cost structures, etc.Download Sample Pages @The present market condition and future prospects of the segment has also been examined.Moreover, key strategies in the market that includes product developments, partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, etc., are discussed.Besides, upstream raw materials and equipment and downstream demand analysis is also conducted.The report cloaks the market analysis and projection of Magnetic Particle Testing Equipment on a regional as well as Global and United States level. The report constitutes qualitative and quantitative valuation by industry analysts, first-hand data, assistance from industry experts along with their most recent verbatim and each industry manufacturers via the market value chain.This report focuses on top manufacturers in Global and United States market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, covering Magnaflux Rcon Ndt KTA-Tator Inc 360 Magnetics NDT Iternational Inc Western Instrument Andec Mfg. Ltd.The fact that this market report renders details about the major market players along with their product development and current trends proves to be very beneficial for fresh entrants to comprehend and recognize the industry in an improved manner. The report also enlightens the productions, sales, supply, market condition, demand, growth, and forecast of the Magnetic Particle Testing Equipment industry in the Global and United States markets.Every regions market has been studied thoroughly in this report which deals with the precise information pertaining to the Marketing Channels and novel project investments so that the new entrants as well as the established market players conduct intricate research of trends and analysis in these regional markets. Acknowledging the status of the environment and products up gradation, the market report foretells each and every detail.Some points from TOC:2017-2022 Magnetic Particle Testing Equipment Report on Global and United States Market, Status and Forecast, by Players, Types and Applications1 Methodology and Data Source1.1 Methodology/Research Approach1.1.1 Research Programs/Design1.1.2 Market Size Estimation1.1.3 Market Breakdown and Data Triangulation1.2 Data Source2.1.1 Secondary Sources2.1.2 Primary Sources1.3 Disclaimer2 Magnetic Particle Testing Equipment Market Overview2.1 Magnetic Particle Testing Equipment Product Overview2.2 Magnetic Particle Testing Equipment Market Segment by Type2.2.1 Stationary Magnetic Particle Flaw Detector2.2.2 Mobile Magnetic Powder Flaw Detector2.2.3 Portable Magnetic Flaw DetectorView entire report @Reports Monitor (ReportsMonitor.com) is a platform to meet the market research and business intelligence requirements. Our aim is to change the dynamics of the Market Research industry by providing quality intelligence backed by data. Your requirement for market forecasting is fulfilled by our exclusive quantitative and analytics driven intelligence. We have a vast collection of reports, covering maximum industries worldwide. Our process is meticulously planned and executed in order to use maximum resources and explore the market for getting genuine insights. Decision makers can now rely on our distinct data gathering methods to get factual market forecasting and detailed analysis.Jay MatthewsDirect: +1 513 549-5911Email: sales@reportsmonitor.comWebsite:
Neurology EMR Software Market Size 2017 Epic, Athenahealth, Nextgen, Allscripts

Neurology EMR Software

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Neurology EMR Software MarketA market study  Global Neurology EMR Software Market  examines the performance of the Neurology EMR Software market Size 2017. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Neurology EMR Software market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Neurology EMR Software market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Neurology EMR Software Market 2017 report includes Neurology EMR Software market Size, Revenue, market Share, Neurology EMR Software industry volume, market Trends, Neurology EMR Software Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Neurology EMR Software Price during the Forecast period from 2017 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of Neurology EMR Software Market 2017:1. Epic2. Athenahealth3. Nextgen4. healthfusion5. Allscripts6. Greenway Health7. Practice Fusion8. Brainlab9. Kareo10. Bizmatics11. Advanced Data Systems12. NueMDNeurology EMR Software Market Analysis: By Product Advanced Neurology EMR Software OtherNeurology EMR Software Market Analysis: By Application Hospitals College & Research Institutes OtherFirstly, the report covers the top Neurology EMR Software manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Neurology EMR Software report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Neurology EMR Software industry, Neurology EMR Software industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Neurology EMR Software Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Inquiry Here:The Neurology EMR Software research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Neurology EMR Software market revenue worldwide.Finally, Neurology EMR Software market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.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,United States
Nursing Care Market Revenue Predicted to Go Up by 2021

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Nursing care refers to collaborative and autonomous care of individuals of all ages, group, communities and families by skilled person or nurses. Nurses are trained professionals which promote health and prevent diseases. Nurses help patient to cope up with illness and provide assistance to patients in medical procedures. Nurses are responsible for assessing patient, giving medicines and treatments. Nurses also develop and manage nursing care plans. Nursing care includes prevention and cure of diseases. Nursing care includes approaches of personalized care with more safety, convenience and comfort.Get access to full summary @:Nursing care includes people who need intensive rehabilitative care such as people with physical disabilities and long term care. Nursing care helps in delivering right care to right people at right time. Nursing care also provides assurance of quality healthcare services to patients. Proper nursing care provides satisfaction to the patients and thus helps in making them reliable to hospitals. Nursing care is a long term care plan and includes nursing homes, home care, hospice care and assisted living.Nursing care model comprises team nursing, primary nursing and progressive patient care. Primary nursing includes comprehensive and personalized care through the same nurse throughout the period. Progressive patient care is a systematic grouping of patient on the basis of the degree of illness rather than on the basis of medical specialty. Consumerism, Staff mix, human development, economics, diverse populations, politics, technology and client acuity are some of the important elements which should be considered in nursing care.North America followed by Europe is dominating the global nursing care market due to high healthcare expenditures. The U.S. is dominating the North American nursing care market due to increasing prevalence of diseases. Asia is expected to show high growth rate in the next five years. Some of the key driving forces for nursing care market in emerging countries are increasing aging population and increasing number of hospitals.A sample of this report is available upon request @In recent time there is increased demand of nursing care due to rising aging population. Rising concern for better healthcare and increasing prevalence of various diseases such as diabetes and cancer are some of the key factors driving the growth of the global nursing care market. In addition, increasing healthcare awareness and long term care system is also fuelling the growth of the global nursing care market. However, lack of reimbursements for nursing care and high cost of healthcare is restraining the growth of the global nursing care market. In addition, lack of skilled professionals is also restraining the global nursing care market.Rise in personalized care would develop an opportunity for the growth of the global nursing care market. However, lack of proper healthcare system in rural areas and availability of less number of trained nurses are some of the key challenges for the growth of the global nursing care market. Increasing home care market is one of the trends for the global nursing care market.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @Some of the major companies operating in the global nursing care market are Emeritus Corporation, Genesis Healthcare, Life Care Centers for America, Kindred Healthcare and Extendicare.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment Market Size 2017 Abbott, RLC LABS, Allergan, Pfizer

Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment

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Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment MarketA market study  Global Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment Market  examines the performance of the Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment market Size 2017. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment Market 2017 report includes Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment market Size, Revenue, market Share, Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment industry volume, market Trends, Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment Price during the Forecast period from 2017 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment Market 2017:1. Abbott2. RLC LABS3. Allergan4. Merck Sharp& Dohme5. PfizerThyroid Gland Disorder Treatment Market Analysis: By Product Hypothyroidism HyperthyroidismThyroid Gland Disorder Treatment Market Analysis: By Application Hospital Clinic OtherFirstly, the report covers the top Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment industry, Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Inquiry Here:The Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment market revenue worldwide.Finally, Thyroid Gland Disorder Treatment market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.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,United States
On the question of using Wisconsins credit card to pay for roads, state Senate Republicans have come a long way in less than two years.

In November 2015, Senate Republicans on the Legislatures budget-writing committee made a stand against new borrowing, voting against a $350 million borrowing package for roads and saying the states transportation debt levels were unsustainable. But the new Senate GOP budget plan unveiled Tuesday relies on more than twice that amount  $712 million in borrowing to fund road and bridge projects.

Even the committees Senate vice chairman, Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, acknowledged the shift in a Wednesday interview.

Its a little inconsistent with our past actions; youre exactly right, Olsen said.

Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke, R-Kaukauna, said Tuesday that hes confused by the Senates complete 180 on transportation borrowing.

The Senate seems to have completely reversed course, Steineke said.

The Senates proposed $712 million borrowing figure tops Gov. Scott Walkers call for $500 million in road borrowing. Assembly Republicans have said the state shouldnt borrow more for roads at all without new revenue to pay for it.

The dispute over transportation spending is fueling a stalemate on writing a new 2017-19 state budget, which was due July 1. Walker met with legislative leaders Wednesday for further discussions after the Senate on Tuesday unveiled a full spending plan in an effort to nudge along negotiations.

On Wednesday, attention turned to the November 2015 vote on the $350 million borrowing package, passed with support of Democrats and Assembly Republicans, who expressed concern then over the borrowing amount but said a better solution would be needed in future years.

During debate then, Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, co-chairwoman of the budget-writing committee, said the time had come for a sustainable solution for transportation funding.

Another Republican member of the committee, Sen. Howard Marklein of Spring Green, urged colleagues in 2015 to find a solution other than borrowing.

I do not believe we should be going further into debt when we havent created any new sources of revenue to make the payments, Marklein said in a November 2015 statement.

Speaking Wednesday, Marklein said that, starting in 2019, he believes the state will be able to tap more revenues from an existing 2-cent petroleum inspection fee to pay for transportation projects. Bonds that have been paid off with those revenues will be retired in 2019, Marklein said. He acknowledged lawmakers and the governor would need to direct the revenues to transportation, potentially in the 2019-21 budget.

Also in November 2015, another Republican on the committee, Sen. Tom Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst, told WJFW-TV that he was concerned by the states borrowing level for transportation.

Were getting up to where were about 20 cents on the dollar thats going to debt service now for transportation, he said. Thats getting too high.

Tiffany said at the time that he was open to new revenue for transportation. The most likely source would be increasing gas taxes or vehicle fees, but Walker has said he opposes that. Assembly Republicans briefly floated a new fee on heavy trucks earlier this month, but a group of Senate Republicans and industry groups quickly shot it down.

Assembly Republicans have maintained new transportation revenue is needed, though Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said earlier this month that he has accepted it likely wont happen in the next budget.

Tiffany said last week that he now doesnt believe new transportation revenues are needed in the next budget.

What has changed since 2015, Tiffany said, is that lower energy costs are reducing the cost of road projects. That will enable the state Department of Transportation to complete more road work with the same amount of funding, Tiffany predicted.

I am more confident now than I was two years ago that we will continue to see significant savings in putting out these projects, Tiffany said.

Darling could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday. At Tuesdays press conference announcing the Senate plan, Darling defended borrowing as a legitimate way to fund road projects  especially massive, billion-dollar freeway expansions and reconstructions in southeast Wisconsin. She said such freeways are built to last for 30 or 40 years, so it makes sense for taxpayers to pay for them over a period of decades.

It is impossible to pay for those projects in cash. We have never done that, and its not smart to do that, Darling said. Its going to cost us more to delay (projects) than to borrow.

Senate Minority Leader Jennifer Shilling, D-La Crosse, blasted her Senate Republican counterparts for their reversal in a Wednesday statement.
Foam Blowing Agents Market Worldwide Industry Volume By Region 2025

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Global Foam Blowing Agents Market: OverviewFoam blowing agents are essentially used for enhancing the existing properties of polymers. Their very function is to provide the polymer matrix a cellular structure, which, in turn, strengthens the foam. Polymeric foams are known to have low density, low heat transfer, and optimum flexibility amongst other advantages. The various foam blowing agents available in the global market are water, hydrocarbons, azodicarbonamide, methyl formate, inert gases, and methylal.Global Foam Blowing Agents Market: Drivers and TrendsThe demand for foam blowing agents has been on an upswing due to the growing automotive industry. These agents are extensively used in the production of various automotive parts such as side skirts, wiper cowls, roll pans, and bumpers. The demand for foam blowing agents is anticipated to be on the rise in the coming years due to their growing application in the automotive and construction industries. The growth of the booming polyurethane, polystyrene, and other product-based foam industries are fuelling the growth of the global foam blowing agents market.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The exponential rise in the global population has given the construction industry a significant boost in recent years. Demand for housing, hospitality, flooring material, and effective sound furnishing are expected to boost the demand for foam blowing agents in the near future. The foam blowing agents market is also expected to witness a good growth rate due to the emergence of the packaging and medical devices industry.Global Foam Blowing Agents Market: Market PotentialCompanies in the global foam blowing agents market are focused on developing eco-friendly blowing agents to minimize the impact on the environments. Currently, Lapolla Industries Inc. is working on commercializing Solstice, a liquid blowing agent that has the reputation to prevent ozone depletion and minimize global warming. The product is being developed by Honeywell International Inc., which is known to have fewer hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). Lapolla and Honeywell are working in collaboration to develop products that bear a social and an environmental responsibility. Such efforts are expected to add value to the global market and work in favor in its favor in the coming years.Request TOC of the Report @Global Foam Blowing Agents Market: Regional OutlookIn terms of geography, the global foam blowing agents market is divided into Asia Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, Europe, and North America. The research report states that Asia Pacific foam blowing agents market is projected to lead the pack due to the protean construction industry, which is currently focused on making infrastructural developments.Presently, emerging countries of South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and India are undergoing major changes in terms of infrastructure, which is expected to increase the uptake of foam blowing agents in the regional market. Furthermore, significant technological advancements and phenomenal pace of industrialization in Asia Pacific, which is seen through the rise of industries such as medical devices, packaging, and automotive are expected boost the consumption of foam blowing agents.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report@North America is also projected to show a steady growth in the global foam blowing agents market due to rising activities in the packaging and pharmaceutical industries. On the other hand, Europe will show a sluggish market growth in the global market.Key Players Mentioned in the Research Report are:The competitive landscape in the global foam blowing agents market is quite consolidated with the major share in the market held by a few companies. The research report states that the leading players operating in the global foam blowing agents market are Haltermann GmbH, ZEON Corporation, Sinochem Group, AkzoNobel N.V., Daikin Industries Ltd., Arkema S.A., Honeywell, Solvay S.A., Exxon Mobil Corporation, and DuPont.About TMR Research :TMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services 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
Mango Butter Market Share, Growth, Business Overview and Regional Forecasts to 2022

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ReportsWeb.com has announced the addition of the Global Mango Butter Market Research Report 2017 The report focuses on global major leading players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification.Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD) , market share and growth rate of Mango Butter in these regions, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast) , covering North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia and India.Get free sample copy of report atGlobal Mango Butter market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players including Hallstar, Jarchem Industries Inc, Alzo International Incorporated, Manorama Group, EKOLOGIE FORTE PVT. LTD, AVI NATURAL and AOT.Get more information about Mango Butter Market atOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into Refined Mango Butter and Unrefined Mango Butter. On the basis on the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales) , market share and growth rate of Mango Butter for each application, including Cosmetics, Food, Pharmaceutical and Other.Get discount on report purchase atTable of Content1 Mango Butter Market Overview2 Global Mango Butter Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Mango Butter Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2012-2017)4 Global Mango Butter Supply (Production) , Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2012-2017)5 Global Mango Butter Production, Revenue (Value) , Price Trend by Type6 Global Mango Butter Market Analysis by Application7 Global Mango Butter Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 Hallstar7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Mango Butter Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 Hallstar Mango Butter Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 Jarchem Industries Inc7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Mango Butter Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 Jarchem Industries Inc Mango Butter Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 Alzo International Incorporated7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Mango Butter Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 Alzo International Incorporated Mango Butter Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview8 Mango Butter Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Mango Butter Market Forecast (2017-2022)13 Research Findings and ConclusionPurchase complete report atContact Info:Name: Sameer JoshiEmail: sales@reportsweb.comOrganization: ReportsWebPhone: +1-646-491-9876ReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Surgical Apparel Market: Growth, Demand and Key Players to 2020

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Infection diseases mainly acquired in healthcare facility is one of the major cause deaths in the U.S. Surgical apparel is used to provide optimal level of protection by reducing the transfer of bacteria from the skin to the surgical staff. Surgical apparel is also known as surgical clothing. Some of the surgical appeals are surgical gloves, face masks, head wear, scrub suits, chemotherapy gowns, foot wear, drapes and surgical gowns.Get access to full summary @:Surgical apparel is essential as there are always microorganisms on the skin even after conducting sterilization procedure and strict hygiene. Surgical apparels protect bacteria from entering the surgical wound. Surgical apparels also protect healthcare staff from bodily fluids, blood, saline, urine and other chemicals during surgical procedure.The U.S. dominates the North American market for surgical apparel due to large number of aging population and chronic diseases. The North American surgical apparel market is segmented on the basis of type of surgical apparel such as surgical gloves, surgical drapes, surgical gowns and surgical masks.In recent times there is increased use of surgical apparel due to increasing prevalence of infections and chronic diseases. Rise in aging population, increasing healthcare coverage resulting in increase in surgical procedures and increasing stringent regulations for patient and staff safety are some of the key factors driving the growth for the North American surgical apparel market.A sample of this report is available upon request @In addition, increasing incidence of hospital acquired infection is also fuelling the growth of the North American surgical apparel market. However, price fluctuation of raw material and strict regulatory requirements are some of the major factors restraining the growth for the North American surgical apparel market.Emergence of biofunctional textile, non-conventional types of gloves and advanced composite technology would develop opportunity for the North American surgical apparel market. However, maintain a balance between quality and cost would pose a challenge for the North American surgical apparel market. The trend for the North American surgical apparel market is introduction of new products, such as MicroCool gowns, in the North American surgical apparel market.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @Some of the major companies operating in the North American surgical apparel market are Cardinal Health, Inc., DuPont Medical Fabrics, Kimberly-Clark Health Care and Medline Industries.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Nano Copper Oxide Market Expected to Show Steady Growth by 2025

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Global Nano Copper Oxide Market: OverviewNano copper oxide is referred to as a brownish-black or reddish nanoparticle, which is available in variety of forms according to the applications it serves. Nano copper oxide is basically a sold in powder or generally in discrete form in the market. It has various unique chemical and physical characteristics such as antimicrobial activity, low cost, relatively stable, photovoltaic properties, and superconductivity. They display very interesting electrical, mechanical, catalytic, and optical properties. They further possess photoconductive and photovoltaic properties as their crystal arrangements have a thin band gap. They are used in heat transfer fluids, microelectronics, solar energy converters, batteries, gas sensors, and semiconductor devices. Nano copper oxides are produced for specific end use and are almost 100 times finer in quality than copper oxide with absolutely different physical properties.The report examines the growth of the global nano copper oxide market that occurred in the last over the last few years and is likely to occur in the coming years. The research publication additionally explains the causes of the fluctuations in the global market. It does this by assessing of the facets and the different trends that have been prevalent from past few years and also the aspects that are anticipated to maintain a strong impact on the market over the coming years. The Porters five forces analysis has been considered by analysts to present a clear picture of the vendor landscape to readers. Agreements, mergers, acquisitions, and other dealings have been further mentioned in the study. It focuses on the strategies, products, and market share along with position of the companies operating in the market.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Global Nano Copper Oxide Market: Trends and ProspectsThe global market for nano copper oxide is expected to witness stable growth over the coming years owing to growing investments for research and development in the field of nano technology. Rising penetration of nano copper oxide in several end-sue industries and its high physio-chemical properties are further expected to trigger the growth of the global nano copper oxide market over the forecast period. These oxides are basically added in small amount in order to improve the end products performance. However, it has high toxic levels that has negative impacts on aquatic life and human health. As a result of this, the market for nano copper oxide might face hindrances in terms of growth. The mounting demand for the energy storage segment closely followed by paints and coatings, catalysts, and electronics and electrical is expected to drive the growth of the market over the coming years. Players operating in the market are likely to be presented with significant opportunities owing to investments which are being made for innovations in this field.Request TOC of the Report @Global Nano Copper Oxide Market: Regional OutlookRegion-wise, Asia Pacific is anticipated to witness strong growth in the near future owing to rising demand for nano copper oxide from end-use industries in the region. Several new players are trying to venture in the market, mainly in India, China, and ASEAN. Robust industrialization coupled with growing disposable income of consumers is expected to drive the growth of various end-user industries, thus benefitting the nano copper oxide market in the region in return.Global Nano Copper Oxide Market: Vendor LandscapeCompanies such as American Elements, Inframat Corporation, Hongwu International Group Ltd, NaBond Technologies Co., Limited, Nanoshel LLC, and US Research Nanomaterials, Inc., among others are striving to gain an established position in the market.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report@About TMR Research :TMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services 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
System Integration in Telecommunication Market Pegged to Value US$ 36.9 Bn by 2024

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The demand for system integration in telecommunication across APAC countries is projected to witness revenue growth at 7.1% CAGR. A majority of system integration solutions adopted across APAC telecommunications industry will be directed towards OSS, revenues from which will reach US$ 10.6 Bn by the end of 2024. China will contribute with more than one-third of overall revenues, while India, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and ASEAN countries will showcase rampant revenue growth. Vodafone Hutchinson Telecommunications, Telstra Corporation Ltd., SingTel Optus Pty Limited, NTT-Docomo Corporation, Ideal Cellular Ltd., Reliance Communications, and Softbank Corporation are some of the prominent IT service provider in the APAC telecommunications industry.Persistence Market Research projects The future of global telecommunication industry will witness higher adoption of complex information systems which will facilitate speedy data convergenceSystem integrators will play a key role in compiling information emanating from multiple and advanced telecommunication network standardsIntegration of business support systems (BSS) and operation support systems (OSS) will boost the support for end-to-end telecommunication services and bring forth some improved customer management solutionsOwing to rising urban population, growing strength of telecom networks, brimming data transference, and deployment of advanced technologies, the demand for system integration in telecommunication continues to surge in regions namely, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Europe, Middle East and Africa. A latest study published by Persistence Market Research has estimated that the market for system integration in telecommunications across these regions is presently valued at US$ 22.5 Bn. By the end of 2024, these regions will collectively showcase revenue growth at an impressive 6.3% CAGR and witness the market for system integration in telecommunication reach US$ 36.9 Bn in value.Browse Complete Report @On an average, 40% of revenues procured in Latin Americas system integration in telecommunication market will be emanating from Brazil. The demand for integrating OSS and BSS will also gain traction in Mexico and Argentina. Although, the overall system integration in telecom market in Latin America is being projected to expand at a moderate CAGR of 4.4%. High implementation costs of system integration solutions are imposing a relatively less adoption in Latin America, as opposed to the APAC region, Europe or Middle East & Africa. Leading IT service providers mapping Latin Americas telecom industry are identified as Telefonica Brasil, TIM Brasil, Telecom Argentina SA, Nextel, Telcel, Claro Brasil, and Telefonica SA.A sample of this report is available upon request @The EMEA system integration in telecommunication market is presently valued US$ 10.5 Bn. In the Middle East and Africa, South Africa is projected to exhibit high value CAGR of 7%, while the European system integration in telecommunication market will see consolidated growth from the EU5  Spain, Germany, Italy, France and the UK. These five countries will also dominate the overall EMEA region, accounting for over 40% value share by the end of 2024. The MTN Group, Saudi Telecom Company, Vodacom, and Airtel Africa are leading telecom service providers across the Middle East and Africa. The telecom industry of Nordic countries and Russia is mapped by IT service providers namely, Telenor ASA, VimpelCom Ltd., and Mobile TeleSystems. Meanwhile, companies such Deutsche Telekom, Orange SA, BT Group plc., Telefonica SA and Vodafone Group plc. are charting the waters of telecommunication services in EU5 countries.Request to view table of content @The report has also profiled leading providers of system integration solution in telecom across Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East & Africa. These include, Oracle Corp., Redknee Inc., Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Sigma System Canada, NetCracker Technology Corporation, Openet Telecom, Ericsson, Comptel Corp., and Amdocs Inc.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Consumer NAS Market Pegged to Value US$ 4 Bn by 2024

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Apropos the report, titled Consumer Network Attached Storage (NAS) Market: Global Industry Analysis and Forecast, 2016-2024, the global consumer NAS market is presently valued a little over US$ 1,545 Mn, and will exhibit a healthy 11.6% CAGR during the forecast period. Factors such as rising demand for speedy transference of bulk data, growing need for efficient data backup plans, and increasing implementation of cost-effective storage options have been identified as the key drivers for the global consumer network attached storage market. Nevertheless, a steadfast adoption of consumer NAS systems across the globe is facing challenges such as competitive advantage of cloud-based storage services, and complex nature of expensive consumer network attached storage systems.Browse Complete Report @The ineffectiveness of traditional storage solutions has paved way for adoption of advanced storage options, particularly to record crucial consumer-centric data. Handling greater volumes of data transference has also necessitated the need for enclosing such data storage systems within a network. As opposed to single computer storage, individuals, as well as entrepreneurs, are growing more inclined towards setting network attached storage (NAS) servers. Remote access to such servers becomes more convenient for consumers, especially when improving operational efficiency and minimizing storage costs is a must. Persistence Market Researchs recent study explores the opportunities for adoption of such consumer-based NAS systems, predicting that by the end of 2024, the global market for consumer network attached storage will be valued at US$ 4,088.7 Mn.A sample of this report is available upon request @Even though a majority of global consumer NAS revenues emanate from North America, the Middle East & Africa region is being perceived as highly lucrative. Adoption of consumer network attached storage systems is expected to be rapid in this region. The MEA consumer NAS market is also being projected to exhibit the highest value CAGR  14.2%. With North America at the forefront, the global consumer network attached storage market will also witness substantial growth across Europe and Latin America. Meanwhile, the Asia-Pacific consumer network attached storage market will expand at 10.6% CAGR through 2024.Request to view table of content @Based on the report findings, the global market for consumer network attached storage will be showcasing a greater contribution from small & medium enterprises (SMEs). In 2017 and beyond, SMEs will remain as the largest end-users of consumer network attached storage systems in the world. The demand for consumer NAS is also expected to remain substantial among residential end-uses, revenues from which are likely to reach US$ 1,315.2 Mn by 2024-end. Likewise, these end-users are actively adopting standalone consumer network attached storage system, as opposed to rackmount. The design of consumer NAS will continue to play a pivotal role in growth of the global market. By the end of 2024, more than US$ 2,700 Mn worth of standalone consumer NAS systems will be sold in the world. And, leading tech companies that will be catering to such surging global demands include, D-Link Corporation, NEC Corporation, Seagate Technology PLC, Netgear Inc., Western Digital Corporation, Synology Inc., EMC Corporation, ASUSTOR Inc., QNAP Systems, Inc., and Drobo Inc.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Diabetic Nephropathy Market Pegged to Value $3,145.9 million by 2020

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Sanofi is one of the leading players in the diabetic nephropathy market. Other major players in diabetic nephropathy market include Eli Lilly and Company, Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corporation, Novartis AG, Pfizer, Inc., Abbott Laboratories, AbbVie, Inc., Bayer AG, Merck & Co., Inc., Bayer AG and Reata Pharmaceuticals, Inc.According to a new market report published by Persistence Market Research Global Market Study on Diabetic Nephropathy Market  Asia to Witness Highest Growth by 2020,.The global diabetic nephropathy market was valued at USD 2,262.2 million in 2014 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.6% from 2014 to 2020, to reach an expected value of USD 3,145.9 million in 2020.Browse Complete Report @Diabetic nephropathy is a disease of the kidney glomerulus and one of the most significant complications in terms of mortality and morbidity for patients with diabetes. Globally, the diabetic nephropathy market is witnessing significant growth due to increasing prevalence of diabetes and obesity in different regions of the world. In addition, increasing R&D investments in drug discovery and development and raising awareness about diabetes and kidney-related disorders are also driving the growth of the market. However, stringent regulatory requirements and longer approval time for drugs as well as the lack of comprehensive therapeutic management for diabetic nephropathy are inhibiting the growth of diabetic nephropathy market. The global diabetic nephropathy market is estimated at USD 2,262.2 million in 2014. It is likely to grow at a CAGR of 5.6% from 2014 to 2020 to reach USD 3,145.9 million in 2020.In North America, various government programs are spreading awareness about diabetes and related renal complications. For instance, the National Kidney Disease Education Program, one of the major programs organized by the U.S. government, for increasing awareness about the various kidney diseases. In addition, the number of diabetic patients are also increasing in the region; according to the SciELO Public Health, approximately 35 million people were affected with diabetes mellitus in 2000 and this number is expected to reach 64 million by 2025 in North America.A sample of this report is available upon request @In Europe, rise in healthcare expenditure for diabetes treatment and increasing prevalence of diabetes in the various part of Europe is boosting the growth of the European diabetic nephropathy market. According to IDF, approximately 55.4 million people had diabetes in 2010 and the number is expected to reach 66.5 million by 2030 in Europe. According to the IDF, healthcare expenditure for diabetes treatment was approximately USD 105.5 billion in 2010 and is expected to reach USD 124.6 billion by 2030 in Europe.Request to view table of content @Asia represents the fastest growing region in the diabetic nephropathy market due to the rise in a diabetic population in various countries such as Japan and the Southeast Asian countries. According to the International Diabetes Federation (IDF), developing countries, such as India and China, are expected to have the highest number of diabetes mellitus patients compared to developed countries, such as the U.S. and Germany.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Gamma Knife Market Pegged to Value US$ 651,241.9 thousand by 2020

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Elekta AB, Varian Medical Systems, Inc., and Hokai are some of the leading players in the Gamma Knife market. Other major players in the Gamma Knife market include Huiheng Medical, Inc., Cyber Medical Corporation Limited, Masep Infini Global, Inc., Nordion, Inc., ET Medical Group, and American Shared Hospital Services.According to a new market report published by Persistence Market Research Global Market Study on Gamma Knife: Asia to Witness Highest Growth by 2020, the global Gamma Knife market is valued at USD 526,733.2 thousand in 2014 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 3.6% from 2014 to 2020 to reach an estimated value of USD 651,241.9 thousand in 2020.Browse Complete Report @Radiation therapy is a procedure entailing the precise delivery of high doses of radiation to tumors and other relevant anatomical targets. Gamma Knife radiosurgery is a major form of radiation therapy. It is mainly used to treat brain tumors, arteriovenous malformations, trigeminal neuralgia, acoustic neuroma, and pituitary tumors. Globally, the Gamma Knife market is witnessing significant growth due to increasing prevalence of cancer and obesity and growing aging population. In addition, rising number of initiatives undertaken by various government associations and the advanced features of Gamma Knife systems are also driving the growth of the market. However, stringent regulatory requirements and prolonged approval time for Gamma Knife systems and a high cost of implementation and shortage of skilled manpower inhibit the growth of the market. The global Gamma Knife market is anticipated to grow from an estimated USD 526,733.2 thousand in 2014 to USD 651,241.9 thousand by 2020 at a CAGR of 3.6% during the forecast period.In North America, the Gamma Knife market is growing due to the rising incidence of cancer in the region. In addition, increased awareness about Gamma Knife technology for cancer treatment is also boosting the growth of the market in the region. According to WHO, approximately 2.8 million people had cancer, including brain cancer, in the U.S. in 2000. Moreover, according to the Hindawi Publishing Corporation, an international journal of surgical oncology, approximately 98,000 to 170,000 new brain metastases cases occur every year in North AmericaA sample of this report is available upon request @In Europe, increasing prevalence of cancer is boosting the growth of the Gamma Knife market in the region. According to WHO, Europe accounts for only one-eighth of the worlds population. However, the region records around a quarter of global cancer cases. Several government associations, such as the Women Against Lung Cancer in Europe (WALCE) and European Head and Neck society (EHNS), are trying to increase awareness about breast cancer, lung cancer, and head and neck cancer and their brain metastases effects in Europe.However, Asia represents the fastest growing region in the Gamma Knife market due to the rise in cancer patients in various countries such as India, China, and Japan. According to WHO, the occurrence of cancer in India and China is set to climb at a rate of 78% from 2013 to 2030. In addition, growing aging population is also supporting the growth of the Gamma Knife market in the region.Request to view table of content @In Latin America, construction of manufacturing and research facilities by many companies is driving the Gamma Knife market in Latin America. Furthermore, the governments of Latin American countries have recognized the growing epidemic of cancer and are actively devising several patient awareness programs to raise awareness of signs and symptoms of cancer, including brain cancers.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Global Sous Vide Machine Market Growth and Development Overview for 2017-2022

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Global Sous Vide Machine Market 2017 report spread across 121 pages gives Market Segment Analysis by Key Manufacturers, Regions, Types and Applications. Sous vide is a unique process of cooking, the food must be packaged in a vacuum sealed bag, and then cooked at a low and consistent temperature in a water bath. The process started in France and has been growing in popularity; used by chefs on Top Chef and The Taste, as well as restaurants all over. The low consistent temperature ensures the food is cooked evenly throughout; this is why when you order steaks at a restaurant they are so juicy and tender.Complete report is available atScope of the Report:This report focuses on the Global Sous Vide Machine market, especially in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, type and application.Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report covers: Anova, ChefSteps, Gourmia, Oliso, PolyScience Culinary, SousVide Supreme, VacMaster, Sansaire, Nomiku, Vonshef, Other.Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers: North America (USA, Canada and Mexico); Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy); Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia); South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia etc.); Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa). Market Segment by Type, covers: Immersion Types, Water Bath Types & Market Segment by Applications, can be divided into: Home Use, Commercial Use, Other.Request for discount atThere are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Sous Vide Machine market.Chapter 1 to describe Sous Vide Machine Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force.Chapter 2 to analyze the top manufacturers of Sous Vide Machine, with sales, revenue, and price of Sous Vide Machine, in 2016 and 2017.Chapter 3 to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017.Chapter 4 to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Sous Vide Machine, for each region, from 2012 to 2017.Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 to analyze the key regions, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions.Order copy of report atChapter 10 and 11 to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2012 to 2017.Chapter 12 Sous Vide Machine market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2017 to 2022.Chapter 13, 14 and 15 to describe Sous Vide Machine sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.ReportsnReports.com is your single source for all market research needs. Our database includes 500,000+ market research reports from over 95 leading global publishers & in-depth market research studies of over 5000 micro markets.Ritesh Tiwari,+ 1 888 391 5441sales@reportsandreports.com
Citronella Oil Market Driven by Increasing Demand from Perfume and Cosmetic Industries

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Global Citronella Oil Market: OverviewCitronella oil is an oil derived majorly from citronella grass, also called as Cymbopogon nardus. The cultivation of the grass requires rich moisture content and sunshine. The oil can also be derived from different cymbopogon species. The citronella oil is considered as one of the industrially important essential oil. This is owing to the key advantages of citronella oil such as flavour additive, fragrances in cosmetic and perfume industries. The citronella oil contains more than 80 components some of which are at high concentration in oil and functions as repellent property of oil. Some of the important components such as geranial, limonene and citronellal are considered to have desirable repellent characteristics. In trade terms, citronella oil are classified as ceylon citronella oil and java citronella oil where they differ in terms of proportion of citronellal and geranial. Perfume industry is important for citronella oil market since it has majority of the revenue share. Other than perfumes citronella oil is also used in detergents, industrial polishes, soaps, cleaning compounds and other industrial products.Obtain Report Details @Global Citronella Oil Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe global citronella oil market is primarily driven by the increasing demand from perfume and cosmetic industries. Citronella oil offers wide remedies some of which are anxiety and stress control, ability to eject bugs and leeches from body etc. Citronella oil prevents the spread of internal and external infections. These are some of the factors which is boosting the global citronella oil consumption. Furthermore, citronella oil has some unique properties such as distinctive olfactory and steady technical properties. These properties are highly essential for industries such as perfume to incorporate appropriate blending and compounding essences which in turn actually drives the global citronella oil market.However, the substitute for citronella oil such as synthetic isolates from eucalyptus citriodora and turpentine oil might restrain the global citronella oil marketGlobal Citronella Oil Market: SegmentationOn the basis of citronella oil type as per trade, citronella oil market is segmented into:-Java citronella oilCeylon citronella oilFor more information on this report, fill the form @On the basis of citronella oil grades, citronella oil market is segmented into:-Food gradeAromatherapyOthersOn the basis of end use industry, citronella oil market is segmented into:-PerfumeFoodPharmaceuticalDetergentCosmeticOthersGlobal Citronella Oil Market: Region wise OutlookThe global citronella oil market is divided into seven regions, namely North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan and Middle East and Africa (MEA). APEJ holds the major share in the global citronella oil market owing to the high production of essential oils for fragrance and flavour industry and also shares major contribution in essential oils export. The major countries such as Shri Lanka, India, China, Java, Indonesia and Taiwan tops the citronella oil market in terms of production in APEJ region. Followed by APEJ is North America and Europe and are expected to grow at moderately high CAGR during the forecast period. Latin America is anticipate to project stable growth rate in terms of value during the forecast period.Global Citronella Oil Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players identified in the global citronella oil market includes:Van AromaReho Natural IngredientsManohar Botanical Extracts Pvt. Ltd.KIC Chemicals, Inc.Wuhan Dahua Weiye Pharmaceutical Chemical Co., Ltd.Fujian Gaoke Daily Chemical Co., Ltd.AOS Products Private LtdGramme ProductsAromacare HerbalsMeena PerfumeryK.K. EnterpriseAbout 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:
This weeks failure of the Better Care Reconciliation Act, version 5.0 of the Republican health care plan, can best be understood by reviewing two famous statements Donald Trump made about health care policy.

Very early in his campaign for president, Trump promised that the Affordable Care Act would be repealed and replaced with something terrific.

Eighteen months later, very early in his presidency, after actually learning something about health care policy, Trump said, Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.

In fact, anyone whos paid any attention to the system that accounts for one-sixth of the American economy knows health care is hideously complicated. The 2010 ACA was a rare attempt to make it work better for more Americans. Passing it was difficult, but the longer Americans had to get used to it, the more they liked it.

In a nutshell, thats why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, was unable to round up the votes he needed to move forward with the BCRA  even after finagling the rules so he only needed 50 votes. It was not the something terrific that Trump promised. It was something terrible.

The BCRA failed because Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, needed time to recover from surgery last Friday to have a blood clot removed. McConnell needed McCains vote, but in McCains absence, pressure built on GOP senators who didnt like the bill. Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas announced Monday night they would join two other GOP senators in voting against it. Without them and McCain, McConnell had only 47 votes. He laid the bill aside.

Moran said he didnt like the way the bill would hurt rural hospitals and punish states, such as Kansas, that didnt expand Medicaid. The bill would have hurt rural residents and hospitals in Missouri, which also didnt expand Medicaid. But Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt supported it. Go figure.

Trump immediately began advocating repealing the ACA effective in two years while Congress considered a better plan. A similar bill passed in 2015 but President Barack Obama vetoed it.

The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation later reported the 2015 bill would have cost 32 million Americans their insurance coverage by 2026 and raised premiums in the nongroup insurance market by 50 percent. The BCRA would have cost 22 million people their coverage and raised premiums by 25 percent, so repeal-and-replace-later is considerably worse.

Health insurance is complicated because every part of it affects every other part. The ACA began addressing that, and while its not perfect, Americans got used to something better. Trump clearly doesnt understand the issue, and having seen him break one campaign promise after another, theres no reason to bet on something terrific down the road.
Automatic Lapping Machine Market Market Industry Report  Global Market Scenario and Growth strategies

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ReportsMonitor.com has added a new report to its database Global Automatic Lapping Machine Market Research Report 2017This report rigorously investigates the potential of the Automatic Lapping Machine industry in conjunction with primary market challenges.The report on Automatic Lapping Machine Market is a professional report which provides thorough knowledge along with complete information pertaining to the Automatic Lapping Machine industry propos classifications, definitions, applications, industry chain summary, industry policies in addition to plans, product specifications, manufacturing processes, cost structures, etc.Download Sample Pages @The present market condition and future prospects of the segment has also been examined.Moreover, key strategies in the market that includes product developments, partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, etc., are discussed.Besides, upstream raw materials and equipment and downstream demand analysis is also conducted.The report cloaks the market analysis and projection of Automatic Lapping Machine on a regional as well as global level. The report constitutes qualitative and quantitative valuation by industry analysts, first-hand data, assistance from industry experts along with their most recent verbatim and each industry manufacturers via the market value chain.This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, covering AUTEFA SOLUTIONS Klingelnberg LAM PLAN Lapmaster Wolters GmbH Logitech Limited OptoTech PRAWEMA ANTRIEBSTECHNIK GMBH SOMOS International StahliThe fact that this market report renders details about the major market players along with their product development and current trends proves to be very beneficial for fresh entrants to comprehend and recognize the industry in an improved manner. The report also enlightens the productions, sales, supply, market condition, demand, growth, and forecast of the Automatic Lapping Machine industry in the global markets.Every regions market has been studied thoroughly in this report which deals with the precise information pertaining to the Marketing Channels and novel project investments so that the new entrants as well as the established market players conduct intricate research of trends and analysis in these regional markets. Acknowledging the status of the environment and products up gradation, the market report foretells each and every detail.Some points from TOC:Global Automatic Lapping Machine Market Research Report 20171 Automatic Lapping Machine Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Automatic Lapping Machine1.2 Automatic Lapping Machine Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Automatic Lapping Machine Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2012-2022)1.2.2 Global Automatic Lapping Machine Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20161.2.3 Semi Automatic Type1.2.4 Fully Automatic Type1.3 Global Automatic Lapping Machine Segment by Application1.3.1 Automatic Lapping Machine Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2012-2022)1.3.2 Silicon Wafer Fashioning1.3.3 Quartz Crystal Fashioning1.3.4 Ceramic Fashioning1.3.5 Sapphire FashioningView entire report @Reports Monitor (ReportsMonitor.com) is a platform to meet the market research and business intelligence requirements. Our aim is to change the dynamics of the Market Research industry by providing quality intelligence backed by data. Your requirement for market forecasting is fulfilled by our exclusive quantitative and analytics driven intelligence. We have a vast collection of reports, covering maximum industries worldwide. Our process is meticulously planned and executed in order to use maximum resources and explore the market for getting genuine insights. Decision makers can now rely on our distinct data gathering methods to get factual market forecasting and detailed analysis.Jay MatthewsDirect: +1 513 549-5911Email: sales@reportsmonitor.comWebsite:
Organic Fertilizer Market Growing at 7% CAGR

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Global organic fertilizer demand was pegged at 17 million tonnes in 2016. In terms of value, the market was valued at US$ 5.57 billion. Persistence Market Research projects the market to grow at 7% CAGR through 2025 and reach US$ 10.23 billion.Belgium will continue to be the largest exporter of organic fertilizers, with total exports totalling 1.15 million tonnes in 2015. Netherlands and the U.S. will be the other two key exporters. In terms of imports, France continues to be the largest market globally.Key DriversGovernment initiatives and subsidies promoting the use of organic fertilizers. For instance, in the EU, government is promoting organic sector via conversion subsidies and large subsidies on agricultural inputs.Rising awareness among consumers about organically produced food will continue to provide growth opportunities. From a US$ 15 billion market in 1999, the global organic food and drink market has grown to become a US$ 80 billion market in 2014.Organic fertilizers dont cause the same level of damage to the environment as conventional fertilizers. This is promoting their adoption among end-users.While Persistence Market Research maintains a positive outlook on the global organic fertilizer market, premium prices for organic fertilizers are a key impediment to adoption.Browse Complete Report @Organic Fertilizer Market TrendsIntegrated nutrient supply system (INSS) is being adopted by farm owners, as the lower nutrient content alone is insufficient to supplement the demand for nutrients in plant growth.Considering the fragmented nature of organic fertilizers market, leading players are focusing on strengthening their distribution partnerships in local markets.Manufacturers in Europe are focusing on expanding their customer base in high-growth regions, including Latin America and North America.Non-profit organizations are playing a key role in promoting the use of organic fertilizers.According to Persistence Market Researchs analysis, demand for animal-based organic fertilizers is higher than plant-based variants. While 6.84 million tonnes of plant-origin organic fertilizers were sold in 2016, animal-origin organic fertilizer volume was pegged at 10.15 million tonnes.Use of organic fertilizers remains highest in the farming of cereals and crops. This application segment accounted for over 70% revenue share of the market in 2016. By volume, demand from cereals and crops was estimated at 12.53 million tonnes in 2016.A sample of this report is available upon request @Historically, solid organic fertilizers have remained sought-after, and the trend is expected to remain unchanged during the forecast period 2017-2025. While solid organic fertilizers are projected to grow at 6.2% CAGR, liquid organic fertilizers growth rate is estimated to be 5.1%.Europe is the largest market for organic fertilizers, followed by Asia Pacific. While Europe will continue to be the largest market for organic fertilizers, it will lose 2.3% revenue share to APAC during the forecast period. North America, the third largest market for organic fertilizers, is expected to account for 21.8% revenue share of the market by 2025-end.Request to view table of content @In its report, Persistence has profile key players in the organic fertilizers market, including Italpollina SpA, ILSA S.p.A, BioStar Renewables, Sustane Natural Fertilizer Inc., True Organic Products Inc., California Organic Fertilizers Inc., The Fertell Company, Purely Organics LLC, Pupuk Kaltim, and Qingdao Sonef Chemical Co., Ltd.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Worldwide Demand : Instant Coffee Market 2017 - Nestle S.A., Starbucks Corporation, Jacobs Douwe Egberts, Strauss Group Ltd & Kraft Heinz Company

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Albany, New York, July 19, 2017 : Recent research and the current scenario as well as future market potential of " Demand of Instant Coffee Market in Global Industry : Market Development, Analysis and Overview 2017 " globally.Coffee is a popular beverage on the global platform. Being the most popular beverage, this product is the second most traded commodity in the world after crude oil. On the other hand, Brazil, India, Chile, Argentina are the largest producer of coffee in the world. Ethnicity and culture plays a major role in the consumption of coffee on a global level. Since 1910, the popularity of instant coffee has also taken a steady growth in the market where people from the tea consuming nations are slowly getting acquainted to consume this beverage.Get PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @There has been a positive change in lifestyle of people in developing nations, with youngsters heavily adopting the western culture. Countries like India, China, and a few Middle Eastern countries are seeing a transition to heavy consumption of coffee over tea. Consumers with life style seek beverages that can be easily prepared and are pocket-friendly as well. Instant coffee not only maintains the aroma and flavor of the drink but also gives a branded experience to consumers. The impact of this driver is medium in the short run and is expected to be high by the end of the forecast period.Increasing competition in the global market is driving leading companies to undertake intensive research and development. In order to have a balanced product portfolio in the market, leading players like Starbucks and Nescafe are constantly innovating and trying to deliver a brand rich experience to consumers. The Fair Trade concept of producing coffee in underdeveloped countries is also adding to the competition in the global market.Global Instant Coffee Market: Geographical AnalysisThe convenience of preparing the drink due to the ease in its availability has driven the market for this product heavily. Traditional coffee or whole bean coffee machines are usually implanted in most of the households of the major coffee drinking nations. On a recent research, UK has contributed to highest instant coffee consumption in the Western Europe. Instant coffee is easy to prepare and there is no hassle of disposing off the waste, as in the case of the filter coffee. Moreover, the introduction of instant coffee in the market by leading players such as Nestle, Jacobs Douwe Egberts and others are promoting the usage of sachets and jars that will be convenient in preparing coffee quickly.Millennials are driven by convenience and quality products even in India and China, and they are ready to pay a higher price for a rich experience. However, Instant coffee faces a major setback due to the consumption pattern among the population in geographical regions such as North America, Western Europe and Latin America preferred filter coffee over instant coffee. Consumers in this countries prefer filter coffee because of their traditional habit of accepting coffee as a drink that has the true properties of it as a caffeinated beverage. Furthermore, the hassle of preparing filter coffee from the whole bean is hefty, but the original flavor and aroma lies in the espresso shot which comes from the coffee machines, usually installed in most of the households and other industrial areas in these countries. Due to these factors, the impact of this restraint is high currently and is expected to be medium by the end of the forecast period.The global instant coffee market is segmented into two types of packaging- Jars and sachets. In terms of distribution channel the market segmented by B2B and retail. B2B distribution channel is further segmented by hotels, restaurant and others. Retail distribution channel is further segmented by online and offline. Offline retail distribution channel is segmented by departmental store, super and hyper market and others.Global Instant Coffee Market: Competitive LandscapeIn order to get a better understanding of the global instant coffee market, a key trends analysis has been included for all the segments. In addition, the market players in the instant coffee market have also been profiled. The leading players in the market include. Nestle S.A. (Vevey, Switzerland), Starbucks Corporation. (Seattle, Washington, U.S), Jacobs Douwe Egberts (DK Amsterdam, Netherlands), Strauss Group Ltd. (Petah Tikva, Israel), Matthew Algie & Company Ltd (London, U.K), The Kraft Heinz Company (Illinois, U.S.), Tata Global Beverages (Kolkata, West Bengal), Tchibo Coffee (Hamburg, Germany), Keurig Green Mountain.(Vermont, U.S.) and Unilever Plc. (London, U.K.) among others.The global instant coffee market can be segmented as follows:-By Distribution ChannelB2BHotelRestaurantOthersRetailOnlineOfflineDepartmental StoresHyper and Super MarketOthersBy Packaging TypeJarsSachetsMake an Enquiry about TOC @By GeographyNorth AmericaU.S.Rest of North AmericaWestern EuropeU.K.GermanyFranceNetherlandRest of Western EuropeRest of EuropeRussiaPolandBulgariaOthersAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaRest of APACMiddle East and AfricaUAESouth AfricaRest of Middle East and AfricaLatin AmericaBrazilRest of Latin AmericaResearchMoz 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
International Wholesale Carriers - New Business Models & Growth Drivers in the Digital Transformation Era

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ResearchMoz added Latest Research Report titled " International Wholesale Carriers - New Business Models & Growth Drivers in the Digital Transformation Era " to it's Large Report database.International Wholesale Carriers - New Business Models & Growth Drivers in the Digital Transformation EraSummary"International Wholesale Carriers - New Business Models & Growth Drivers in the Digital Transformation Era", a thematic research report by GlobalData, examines the changing dynamics, the new growth drivers and business models of the global international wholesale industry. It lays out, for international carriers, the critical considerations and strategic options for taking the journey to the wholesaler of the future, from the business model drivers to the necessary portolio evolution requirements.Data and insights are derived through a mix of secondary research, qualitative primary research and GlobalDatas industry databases and expert analysis.Request for Sample PDF of Premium Research Report with TOC:The report is structured as follows -- Market Context: Winds of Change in the Global Telecoms Industry. This section provides an analysis of the current and future dynamics shaping the telecom industry, from data traffic explosion to IoT, cloud and virtualized networks.- The Evolving Global Wholesale Market. Here we examine the impact of the changing telecom industry dynamics on the global wholesale market, in terms of revenues, margins, traffic and growth drivers. We also look at the evolving nature of demand for wholesale services.- Positioning for a Wholesale Future: An Assessment of Strategic Options. This section defines the different wholesale carrier strategic groups - based on their portfolio breadth, network depth and business purpose - then assesses and lays down the different strategic options - in terms of business models and strategic actions- available to each group to position itself successfully for a wholesale future.- The Changing Nature of Wholesale Service Portfolios. Along with the strategic positioning options detailed in section 3, here, we give an overview of how wholesale portfolios should evolve and expand to meet the new demand dynamics coming from traditional and new customers.Browse more details @Table of ContentsTable of contents 3List of exhibits 6Executive summary 8Section 1: Market Context - Winds of Change in the Global Telecoms Industry 10The global telecoms industry is in a state of transition 11Data explosion and the OTT disruption 12Migration to the cloud and virtualized networks 13Getting ready for a new world: IoT growth 14Section 2: The Evolving Global Wholesale Market 15The global wholesale market is not immune from broader industry headwinds 16A pervasive decline in traditional international voice traffic flows 17Voice revenue is declining and margins are getting tighter 18-19Roaming regulations have compounded the pressure on wholesale termination 20The data bandwidth explosion is breathing new life into wholesale 21The data segment is already driving wholesale business growth 23Wholesale carriers are investing in subsea cable projects to respond to the data bandwidth explosion 24The evolving nature of demand for wholesale services 25From bulk transport to strategic wholesale solutions 27Section 3: Positioning for a Wholesale Future - An Assessment of Strategic Options 28Drivers of strategy: portfolio breadth, network depth and business purpose 29Where individual wholesale units fall 30Strategic options are a function of wholesale carrier strategic groups 31Strategic options: the stand-alone wholesale voice focused provider 33Strategic options: the stand-alone wholesale mobile data focused provider 34About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the world's 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. ResearchMoz's 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.Contact Us:Mr. Nachiket Ghumare90 State Street, Albany NY, United States - 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074 / Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn at:Follow me on Blogger at:
AB Testing Software Market Research Report 2017 Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast, 2022

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2017 Global AB Testing Software Market Report is a professional and in-depth research report on the world's major regional market conditions of the AB Testing Software Market, focusing on the main regions and the main countries (United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia).This report studies the global AB Testing Software market, analyzes and researches the AB Testing Software development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, like: Optimizely, Wingify, Pagewiz, BlueConic, Evergage, Maxymizely, Sentient Technologies, Startup Compass, Curious Labs, Concurra, Convert Insights, Cxense, Exit Monitor, Insightware, Monetate, Omniata, Payboard, Invesp, UpSellit and Yieldify.Request a Sample Copy of Global AB Testing Software Market Research Report @Market segment by Regions/Countries, AB Testing Software Market report covers are United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia.Market segment by Application, AB Testing Software can be split into: Application 1 and Application 2Enquire about this report @Major Points in Table of Contents:Global AB Testing Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022Industry Overview of AB Testing Software MarketGlobal AB Testing Software Market Competition Analysis by PlayersGlobal AB Testing Software Market Company (Top Players) ProfilesGlobal AB Testing Software Market Size by Type and Application (2012-2017)United States AB Testing Software Market Development Status and OutlookEU AB Testing Software Market Development Status and OutlookJapan AB Testing Software Market Development Status and OutlookChina AB Testing Software Market Development Status and OutlookIndia AB Testing Software Market Development Status and OutlookSoutheast Asia AB Testing Software Market Development Status and OutlookMarket Forecast by Regions, Type and Application (2017-2022)AB Testing Software Market DynamicsMarket Effect Factors AnalysisResearch Findings and ConclusionFor More Info on Market Research @Related Reports: -Global Advocacy Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022This report studies the global Advocacy Software market, analyzes and researches the Advocacy Software development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeCentralize market research purchases across your entire organization in one place.Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Market Study ReportThe Green Suite #4594,Dover, DE 19901United StatesPhone: 1-201-355-0868US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email: sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:News:/news
Key Growth - Global Procedure/Treatment Carts Market Professional Survey Report 2017 - Ergotron, Capsa Solutions LLC, Enovate Medical & Herman Miller

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Albany, New York, July 19, 2017 : Recent research and the current scenario as well as future market potential of " Development of Procedure/Treatment Carts Market in Global Industry : Overview, Size and Share 2017 " globally.This report studies Procedure/Treatment Carts in Global market, especially in North America, China, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan and India, with production, revenue, consumption, import and export in these regions, from 2012 to 2016, and forecast to 2022.Get PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringErgotronCapsa Solutions LLCEnovate MedicalHerman MillerOmnicellThe Harloff CompanyMedline IndustriesAdvantechJACOScott-clarkArmstrong Medical IndustriesWaterloo HealthcareRubbermaidStanleyInterMetroTouchPoint MedicalAFC Industries IncNanjing TianaoBy types, the market can be split intoPoweredNon-Powered (Mechanical)By Application, the market can be split intoHospitalsClinicsAmbulatory Surgical CentresOtherBy Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North AmericaChinaEuropeSoutheast AsiaJapanIndiaTable of Contents1 Industry Overview of Procedure/Treatment Carts1.1 Definition and Specifications of Procedure/Treatment Carts1.1.1 Definition of Procedure/Treatment Carts1.1.2 Specifications of Procedure/Treatment Carts1.2 Classification of Procedure/Treatment Carts1.2.1 Powered1.2.2 Non-Powered (Mechanical)1.3 Applications of Procedure/Treatment Carts1.3.1 Hospitals1.3.2 Clinics1.3.3 Ambulatory Surgical Centres1.3.4 Other1.4 Market Segment by Regions1.4.1 North America1.4.2 China1.4.3 Europe1.4.4 Southeast Asia1.4.5 Japan1.4.6 IndiaMake an Enquiry about TOC @2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Procedure/Treatment Carts2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Procedure/Treatment Carts2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Procedure/Treatment Carts2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Procedure/Treatment Carts3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Procedure/Treatment Carts3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global Procedure/Treatment Carts Major Manufacturers in 20163.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global Procedure/Treatment Carts Major Manufacturers in 20163.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global Procedure/Treatment Carts Major Manufacturers in 20163.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global Procedure/Treatment Carts Major Manufacturers in 2016ResearchMoz 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
Saudi Arabia Cards and Payments Industry : Emerging Trends, Analysis and Opportunities to 2019

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ResearchMoz added Latest Research Report titled " The Cards and Payments Industry in Saudi Arabia: Emerging Trends and Opportunities to 2019 " to it's Large Report database.SynopsisTimetrics 'The Cards and Payments Industry in Saudi Arabia: Emerging Trends and Opportunities to 2019' report provides detailed analysis of market trends in Saudi Arabia cards and payments industry. It provides values and volumes for a number of key performance indicators in the industry, including check payments, credit transfers, direct debits, payment cards and cash transactions during the review period (20102014).The report also analyzes various payment cards market operating in the industry and provides detailed information on the number of cards in circulation, and transaction values and volumes during the review period and over the forecast period (20152019). It also offers information on the country's competitive landscape, including market shares of issuers and schemes.The report brings together Timetrics research, modeling, and analysis expertise to allow banks and card issuers to identify segment dynamics and competitive advantages. The report also covers detailed regulatory policies, recent changes in regulatory structure and profiles of card issuers operating in the country.Request for Sample PDF of Premium Research Report with TOC:SummaryTimetrics 'The Cards and Payments Industry in Saudi Arabia: Emerging Trends and Opportunities to 2019' report provides top-level market analysis, information and insights into Saudi Arabia cards and payments industry, including:Current and forecast values for each market in Saudi Arabia cards and payments industry, including debit card, credit and charge cards. It also includes detailed analysis of the prepaid card market.Detailed insights into payment instruments including credit transfers, cash transactions, checks, direct debits and payment cards. It also, includes an overview of the country's key alternative payment instruments.E-commerce market analysis and online payment types.Analysis of various market drivers and regulations governing Saudi Arabia cards and payments industry.Detailed analysis of strategies adopted by banks and other institutions to market debit, credit and charge cards.Comprehensive analysis of consumer attitudes and buying preferences for cards.The competitive landscape of Saudi Arabia cards and payments industry.Browse more details @Table of Contents1 Definitions and Methodology1.1 Definitions1.2 Methodology2 Key Facts and Events3 Executive Summary4 Payment Instruments4.1 Current Payment Environment5 E-Commerce5.1 E-Commerce Market Analysis6 Alternative Payments6.1 Alternative Payment Instruments6.1.1 Boku6.1.2 Bango6.1.3 T-Pay6.1.4 M-Pesa6.1.5 PayPal6.1.6 PayfortAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the world's 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. ResearchMoz's 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.Contact Us:Mr. Nachiket Ghumare90 State Street, Albany NY, United States - 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074 / Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn at:Follow me on Blogger at:
Global Parenteral Packaging Market is anticipated to increase at a CAGR of 11.2% during the forecast period 2016-2026

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The global parenteral packaging market was valued at 7.9 Bn in 2015 and is expected to grow at a year-over-year rate of 9.5% to reach 8.6 Bn in 2016. North America will continue to be the most lucrative market, representing 27.4% revenue share of the market in 2016. Western Europe, the second largest market for parenteral packaging, will grow by 10.8% in 2016.Increasing popularity of plastics & polymers over glass for production of primary packaging material and global expansion of pharmaceuticals industry will continue to fuel the growth of the market in 2016. Increase in the prevalence of epidemic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, hepatic failure and chronic intestinal diseases will also play a role in ramping up demand for parenteral packaging. Favourable government policies, combined with rising adoption of injection-based treatment will also continue to influence the market positively. Growing geriatric population will also play a role in the overall growth of the parenteral packaging market.On the basis of product, the prefilled syringes & cartridges segment will continue to hold the leading revenue share. This segment is expected to grow by 10.1% in 2016 to reach 1.2 Bn in revenues.Request For Report Sample@On the basis of material, the global parenteral packaging market is largely segmented into plastic & polymer and glass segments. Use of glass for parenteral packaging is witnessing a decline, as plastic & polymer are more durable and resistant to shocks and impacts. The plastic & polymer segment will witness a growth rate of 10.5% in 2016, whereas the glass segment is expected to grow by 8.7%.On the basis of packaging type, the global parenteral packaging market is mostly non-tangible in nature, owing to the needs of the patients as well as storage conditions for drugs. However, the packaging type are primarily segmented into large volume parenteral and small volume parenteral, with the former accounting for higher revenue share of the market.While North America and Western Europe will continue to ramp up demand, growth will also be substantial in emerging economies of APEJ. Increasing healthcare spending and presence of a large geriatric population segment will positively influence market growth in APEJ, with total revenues set to reach 2.0 Bn in 2016.Send an Enquiry @Key participants in the global parenteral packaging market include Gerresheimer AG, Schott AG, Becton, Unilife Corporation, Inc, Dickinson and Company, Ypsomed Holding AG ,West Pharmaceutical Services, Inc., SiO2 Medical Products, Terumo Corporation, Ompi, Stevanato Group and Nipro Corporation.Long-term Outlook: The global parenteral packaging market is anticipated to increase at a CAGR of 11.2% during the forecast period 2016-2026.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 Ophthalmic Viscosurgical Devices Market to grow at a CAGR of 10% from 2016 to 2024

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The research report on Ophthalmic Viscosurgical Devices Market Size By Product (Dispersive, Cohesive, Combined), By Application (Cataract Surgery, Vitreoretinal Surgery, Canaloplasty, Refractive Surgery, Keratoplasty), Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, Germany, UK, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, China, India, Australia, Malaysia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Saudi Arabia), Growth Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2016  2024, by Global Market Insights, Inc., Ophthalmic Viscosurgical Devices Industry worth more than USD 280 million in 2015, is set to cross a revenue of USD 790 million by 2014, increasing exponentially at a CAGR of 10% over 2016-2024.With the rising global elderly population, vulnerable to myriad ocular conditions, ophthalmic viscosurgical devices industry is all set to witness a humongous surge over the coming years. Increasing prevalence of people suffering from eye disorders coupled with growing awareness regarding ophthalmic diagnosis will lead to noticeable market growth.One of the principal reasons of recurring eye diseases is the lack of periodic eye checkups, which contributes to delayed disease detection. With cataract touted to be one of the major causes of blindness worldwide, accurate diagnosis becomes a mandate in order to commence the correct treatment. The trend of timely screening and treatment and the eventual rise in the number of surgical procedures will propel ophthalmic viscosurgical devices market in cataract surgery. This application segment is projected to grow at a CAGR of more than 12.6% over 2016-2024, having accounted for more than 49% of the overall revenue in 2015.Request for a sample of this research report @The U.S. holds a record of more than 10 million cataract procedures being performed annually, which will stimulate business growth. The existence of high-tech healthcare infrastructure and an excellent reimbursement framework will further fuel U.S. ophthalmic viscosurgical devices industry, which was worth more than USD 125 million in 2015.An ever-growing geriatric population highly prone to ocular conditions such as glaucoma, high myopia, cataract, diabetic retinopathy, and retinochoroidal degeneration will propel Japan ophthalmic viscosurgical devices market. This regional industry was valued at USD 12 million in 2015 and is anticipated to be worth more than USD 41 million by 2024.Growing public awareness regarding the seriousness of ocular disorders is also expected to spur Germany ophthalmic viscosurgical devices market, which is set to observe a healthy annual growth rate of 11.9% over 2016-2024.Browse key industry insights spread across 120 pages with 54 market data tables & 6 figures & charts from the report Ophthalmic Viscosurgical Devices Market in detail along with the table of contents:Vitreoretinal surgery is one of the key application segments of ophthalmic viscosurgical devices industry. This procedure helps enhance vision for ocular conditions such as diabetic vitreous haemorrhage, macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy. With the increasing prevalence of such age-related eye disorders and the high demand for vitreoretinal surgical procedures, ophthalmic viscosurgical devices market size in vitreoretinal surgery will exceed USD 150 million by 2024, having registered a revenue of more than USD 53 million in 2015.Cohesive ophthalmic viscosurgical devices industry is anticipated to account for more than 40% of the overall share by 2024. Dispersive ophthalmic viscosurgical devices market size, worth more than USD 130 million, held a revenue share of more than 47% in 2015. This product segment is projected to increase at a CAGR of 12% over 2016-2024, driven by improved rheological properties of the product.Worldwide ophthalmic viscosurgical devices industry is fiercely competitive and ruled by established giants such as Carl-Zeiss, Abbott Medical Optics, Alcon, and Bausch & Lomb, who collectively held more than 50% of industry revenue in 2015.Make an inquiry for purchasing this report @Browse related reports:Corneal Implants Market Size, Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Germany, UK, Italy, Russia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa), Application Growth Potential, Competitive Market Growth & Forecast, 2016  2024About Fractovia.org:Fractovia.org is one of India's leading in-house and free news portal. It is fully automated, and operates on a constant premise, interfacing with news sites and offering redesigned breaking features to readers across the globe. Our mission is to offer individuals opportunities for connections with news writers and distributors which they can pursue. We operate by mapping articles pertaining to breaking news, constantly and progressively, against a pre-determined word-based theme, offering important connections to readers and clients, as well as distributors.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAFractovia.orgPhone:1-302-846-7766Email: sales@fractovia.orgWeb:Contact Us: Facebook | Twitter
Global Military Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems Market: Key Trends, Challenges and Standardization 2021

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Market Research Future published a cooked research report on Global Military Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems Market Research Report- Forecast to 2021  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2021.Global Military Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems Market by Types (TCAS, RADAR, PCAS, GPWS, OCAS, FLARM and TAWS), by Technology (Radar-based system, Lidar-based system and Ultrasonic system), and by Geography- Forecast To 2021Market Synopsis of Military Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems MarketThe global Military Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems (ACAS) market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 5% during 2016-2021. The key drivers behind the growth are increasing demand for airborne collision avoidance system and regulation requirement of ACAS for military aircraft.As per the MRFR analysis, Americas is currently leading the market with around 45% of market share followed by EMEA and APAC. However, EMEA will outpace other regions in terms of sales in the forecast period and APAC will grow at a highest CAGR.The challenges associated with the market are the difficulties to develop a robust ACAS and high cost to retrofit collision avoidance system.Get a Copy of Sample Report @Key Players Honeywell Aerospace L-3 Communications Rockwell Collins SAAB Thales Airbus Alenia Aermacchi Diehl Indra Sistemas Sagem Selex ES.Key Findings The global military ACAS market was valued at $XX million in 2015 and will reach $XX million by 2021, growing at a CAGR of around 5% In 2015, Americas is leading the global Military Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems market followed by EMEA and Asia-Pacific Radar-based ACAS is the most widely used system across all military aircraftStudy Objectives of Military Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems Market To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast for the next 5 years of the various segments and sub-segments of the Global Military Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems Market To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth To analyse the Global Military Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems 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 types and technology To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analysing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market To track and analyse competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the Global Military Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems MarketThe report also cover country level analysis:Americas (North & Latin) US Canada Brazil OthersEurope Germany France Italy Spain UK Rest of EuropeAsia  Pacific China India Japan Australia/New Zealand Rest of Asia-PacificMiddle East & Africa UAE Kuwait Israel Rest of Middle East & AfricaBrowse Full Report Details @The market report for Military Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems of 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 Global Military Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems Market Research Report- Forecast to 20212021 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
Global Procurement Software Market is expected to reach USD 9 Billion by 2023 with a CAGR of 10%

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Market Research Future published a research report on Procurement Software Market Research Report- Global Forecast 2023  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Procurement Software Market, By Deployment (On-Premise, On Cloud), By Software (Spend Analysis, E-sourcing, E-procurement), By Vertical (IT & Telecommunication, Travel & Logistics) - Forecast 2023Procurement software is characterized as a product program that empowers association to complete their buy procedure naturally and oversee stock of merchandise.Expanding interest for programmed buy prepare is one of the significant driving component that backings in the development of acquirement administration Market. The robotization in buy handle replaces the customary, manual upkeep of records. The capacity completed by Procurement software incorporates requesting and buying items or administrations, choosing, electronic treatment of installments, giving obtainment office detail report of item requested, subtle elements investigation of every item requested and supporting right requests, coordinating and getting receipt and request. There are numerous Procurement software in the market, out of which e-obtainment programming is boosting the market. The investigation shows that medium and little measured endeavors are having high usage of acquirement programming and the majority of the undertakings utilize cloud based Procurement software.Procurement software market division is done on the premise of arrangement these incorporate cloud construct and with respect to start. Cloud based acquirement programming empower association by controlling expense and help them in accomplishing higher edge of benefit. It encourages modernize source to pay prepare through mechanization and social cooperation. Association can fortify their business by utilizing social coordinated effort and accomplish quicker outcomes by conveying cloud based obtainment programming. It can control the cost and lessen hazard in settling acquirement handle. The market of Global Procurement Software will achieve USD 9 Billion by 2023, and is required to develop at a CAGR of 10%.Get a Copy of Sample Report @E-obtainment Software can be worked in both on-preface and cloud based. This product empower association in supplanting challenges cause by receiving conventional obtainment prepare. Issues, for example, discovering right class of items, reasonable provider for improving the business, not able to discover the sum spent on buy, much measure of time is spent on non-esteem including exercises. What's more, the examination additionally shows that e-acquisition programming limits every one of these challenges confront by association, by giving precise arrangement. It involves components, for example, index administration, end-to-end obtainment cycle, order and endorsements, electronic information trade and keeping up association with providers as far as improvement in regards to contract and understanding. Moreover, the cloud based innovation, for example, programming as an administration (SaaS ) and stage as an administration (PaaS) will keep on boosting the market , and speak to a twofold digit compound yearly development rate. Additionally, by the use of these product different enterprises are being profited, particularly the one into inventory network and coordinations bolster.Key Players: International Business Machines Corporation (U.S.), Oracle Corporation (U.S.), Proactis (U.K.), SAP SE (Germany), Infor (U.S.), Coupa Software Inc. (U.S.), Epicor Software Corporation (U.S.), Zycus (U.S.), JDA Software Group, Inc. (U.S.), Cvent Inc. (U.S.), Mercateo (U.K.) among others.Study Objectives of Procurement Software Market: To give point by point investigation of the market structure alongside figure of the different fragments and sub-portions of the obtainment programming market. To give bits of knowledge about variables influencing the market development. To examine the obtainment programming market based doorman's five drive investigation and so forth. To give chronicled and estimate income of the market portions and sub-sections as for four fundamental topographies and their nations North America, Europe, Asia, and Rest of the World (ROW). To give nation level investigation of the market as for the present market size and future forthcoming. To give nation level investigation of the market for fragment on the premise of arrangement, sort, association sort and vertical. To give vital profiling of key players in the market, exhaustively breaking down their center capabilities, and drawing an aggressive scene for the market. To track and investigate aggressive advancements, for example, joint endeavors, key organizations together, mergers and acquisitions, new item improvements, and research and improvements in the procurement software market.Browse Full Report Details @Segments:Procurement Software Market for segment on the basis of By Deployment, By Type, By Organization Type and By Vertical.Procurement Software Market by Deployment: On-Premise On-CloudProcurement Software Market by Type: Spend Analysis E-sourcing E-procurement Contract Management Supplier Management OthersProcurement Software Market by Organization Type: Small and Medium Size Large Business EnterprisesProcurement Software Market by Vertical: Retail Automotive Travel & Logistics Electronics IT & Telecommunication Mining OthersRegional Analysis:The regional analysis of procurement software market is being studied for region such as Asia pacific, North America, Europe and Rest of the World. North America region accounts for largest share in procurement software market owing to better network infrastructure, technological advancement and higher digitization across industries in logistics and support. Europe region is one of the prominent player in procurement software market due to increase adoption of e-procurement solution in supply chain management. Whereas, Asia Pacific is expected to grow with a highest CAGR by 2023.Intended Audience Investors and consultants System Integrators Government Organizations Research/Consultancy firms Technology solution providers IT Solution Providers Supply Chain & Logistics Organizations Original Equipment ManufacturersContinueWe are thankful for the support and assistance from Procurement Software Market Research Report- Global Forecast 2023 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
Global Aerospace High Performance Alloys Market Trends and Competitive Landscape Outlook -2021

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Market Research Future published a Cooked research report on Global Aerospace High Performance Alloys Market Research Report  Forecast 2016-2021  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2021.Global Aerospace High Performance Alloys Market by Alloy Type (Wrought, Cast), by Product Type (Iron Base, Cobalt Base, and Nickel Base), by Alloying Element (Aluminum, Titanium, Magnesium), and by Geography - Forecast To 2021Market Synopsis of Global Aerospace High Performance Alloys MarketThe Global Aerospace High Performance Alloys Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 7% during 2016-2021. The key factors driving the growth are the need for lightweight alloys to reduce aircraft weight, usage of high performance alloy (HPAs) in jet engine, and high corrosion resistance of HPAs.As per the MRFR analysis, factors restraining the market growth are cost associated with high performance alloys, and machining & manufacturing complexities.Adoption of cobalt base HPA over nickel-base HPAs, additive manufacturing of alloy parts, and future R&D are the ongoing trends which will impact the market during the forecast period.Get a Copy of Sample Report @Key Players Allegheny Technologies Aperam Carpenter Technology Precision Castparts VSMPO Alcoa Haynes International High Performance Alloys NBM Metals Outokumpu ThyssenKruppStudy Objectives of Global Aerospace High Performance Alloys Market To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast for the next 5 years of the various segments and sub-segments of the Global Aerospace High Performance Alloys Market To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth To analyse the Global Aerospace High Performance Alloys 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 alloy type, product type, and alloying element. To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analysing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market To track and analyse competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the Global Aerospace High Performance Alloys MarketBrowse Full Report Details @The report also covers country level analysis: Americas (North & Latin)o USo Canadao Brazilo Others Europeo Germanyo Franceo Italyo Spaino U.Ko Rest of Europe Asia  Pacifico Chinao Indiao Japano Australia/New Zealando Rest of Asia-Pacific Middle East & Africao UAE,o Kuwaito Israelo Rest of Middle East & AfricaThe market report for Global Aerospace High Performance Alloys Market of 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 Global Aerospace High Performance Alloys Market Research Report  Forecast 2016-2021 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
Global and United States Induction Cooker Depth Research Report 2017-2022

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"The Report Global and United States Induction Cooker Depth Research Report 2017-2022 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"This report splits Induction Cooker By Price, By Pressure Cooker Capacity, By Cookware Material, By Feature Keywords. This shares the history data information from 2012 to 2016, and forecast from 2017 to 2022.And this report mainly introduces volume and value market share by players, by regions, by 4 type product type, by consumers and also their price change details. As a Depth Research Report, it covers all details inside analysis and opinion in Induction Cooker industry.This report focus United States market, it covers details players regions product type and other details as following:Key Players?RosewillUnited States?SecuraUnited States?GourmiaUnited States?TAYAMAUnited States?InductoUnited States?EnsueUnited States?LOSCATOUnited States?MIDEAUnited States?GasOneUnited States?NuWave PICUnited States?ImusaUnited States?Aroma HousewaresUnited States?Chefs StarUnited States?NutriChefUnited StatesGet Sample Copy of this Report @?DuxtopUnited States?Midea(China)?Joyoung(China)?SUPOR(China)?ShangpengtangChina?LeconChina?POVOSChina?AUXChina?TaigrooChina?CHIGOChina?HaierChina?KONKAChina?DUVOGChina?AtingChina?SEKOChina?PHILIPSNetherlandsKey Regions?United States?Europe?Germany?British?France?Italy?Spain?Russia?Others?China?Japan?India?Southeast Asia?OthersView Report @Key Product TypeInduction Cooker Market, By Price?Under $25?$25 to $50?$50 to $100?$100 to $200?$200 & AboveInduction Cooker Market, By Pressure Cooker Capacity?Under 4 Quarts?4 to 4.9 Quarts?5 to 5.9 Quarts?6 to 6.9 Quarts?7 to 9.9 Quarts?10 to 21.9 Quarts?22 Quarts & AboveInduction Cooker Market, By Cookware Material?Aluminum?Stainless Steel?Cast Iron?Ceramic?Multi-Ply?Glass?Hard-Anodized AluminumInduction Cooker Market, By Feature Keywords?Induction?Cooktop?Cooking?Portable?Large Size?120 Volt?CounterKey Consumers (End User)Induction Cooker Market, by Consumer?Home?CommercialAbout usMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.ContactMr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA: Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz
Smart Grid Policy Handbook 2016 Countries: US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, UK, Germany, Spain, France, Japan, Australia, China, India, South Korea, Singapore, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Smart Grid Policy Handbook 2016" to its huge collection of research reports.Smart Grid Policy Handbook 2016 is the latest policy report from GlobalData, which offers comprehensive information on major policies governing smart grid in different countries. The report covers sixteen key countries, providing the current scenario and future plans in implementing smart grid technology, giving a fair idea of overall growth potential of the smart grid industry in each of the countries, and globally. The report also discusses the net-metering policy, and smart meter roll out in the countries. Advanced metering infrastructure, microgrid, smart cities, net metering, time of use pricing, communication protocol and electric vehicles are among the other topics covered in the report.Browse Detail Report With TOC @The report is built using data and information sourced from industry associations, government websites and statutory bodies. The information is also sourced through other secondary research sources such as industry and trade magazines.Scope- The report provides comprehensive coverage of key smart grid initiatives and policies in the key smart grid market countries: US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, UK, Germany, Spain, France, Japan, Australia, China, India, South Korea, Singapore, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia.- This report provides details on topics including: AMI, Microgrid, Smart cities, Net metering, TOU pricing, Communication protocol for smart grid, Important agencies dealing with smart grid, EV, EMSTo Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Reasons to buy- Develop business strategies with the help of specific insights into policy decisions being made on smart grid by different markets- Identify opportunities and challenges in exploiting the smart grid markets- Compare the level of support provided to different smart grid technologies in different countries- Increase future revenue and profitability with the help of insights into future opportunities and critical success factors in the smart grid marketTable of Contents1 Table of Contents 41.1 List of Tables 112 Introduction 122.1 GlobalData Report Guidance 133 Smart Grid Framework 143.1 Smart Grid Technology 143.2 Smart Grid Benefits 173.3 Smart Grid International Association 213.4 Smart Grid Standards 224 Smart Grid Policies and Incentives, US 284.1 Overview 284.2 Major Institutes Involved in Advancing Smart Grid Initiatives 284.3 Major Policies and Incentives, Federal 314.4 Major Policies and Incentives, California 344.5 Major Policies and Incentives, Connecticut 384.6 Major Policies and Incentives, Colorado 424.7 Major Policies and Incentives, Pennsylvania 454.8 Major Policies and Incentives, Massachusetts 475 Smart Grid Policy and Incentives, Canada 495.1 Overview 495.2 Major Institutes involved in Advancing Smart Grid Initiatives 505.3 Federal Funding Initiatives 515.4 Canadian Smart Grid Standards Roadmap 525.5 Smart Metering Standardization 535.6 Smart Meter Rollout 535.7 Net Metering 545.8 Energy Efficiency 555.9 Ontario Smart Grid Initiatives 555.10 British Columbia Smart Grid Initiatives 575.11 Quebec Smart Grid Initiatives 59Make 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 Next Generation Sequencers Market 2017 - Top Players - Illumina, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Pacific Biosciences of California, Roche Holding AG, QIAGEN N. V., BGI, Macrogen

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Next Generation Sequencers Market Research Report 2017" to its huge collection of research reports.In this report, the global Next Generation Sequencers market is valued at USD XX million in 2016 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2022, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2016 and 2022.Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Next Generation Sequencers in these regions, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaGlobal Next Generation Sequencers market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingIllumina, Inc. (U.S.)Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. (U.S.)Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. (U.S.)Roche Holding AG (Switzerland)QIAGEN N. V. (Germany)BGI (China)Macrogen Inc. (South Korea)Eurofins Scientific (Luxembourg)Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Ltd. (U.K.)Otogenetics Corporation (U.S.)On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoSequencing by Synthesis (SBS)Ion Semiconductor SequencingSequencing by Ligation (SBL)PyrosequencingSingle-Molecule Real-time (SMRT) SequencingOtherOn the basis on the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales), market share and growth rate of Next Generation Sequencers for each application, includingDiagnosticsDrug DiscoveryBiomarker DiscoveryPersonalized MedicineAgriculture and Animal ResearchOthersBrowse Detail Report With TOC @Table of ContentsGlobal Next Generation Sequencers Market Research Report 20171 Next Generation Sequencers Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Next Generation Sequencers1.2 Next Generation Sequencers Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Next Generation Sequencers Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2012-2022)1.2.2 Global Next Generation Sequencers Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20161.2.3 Sequencing by Synthesis (SBS)1.2.4 Ion Semiconductor Sequencing1.2.5 Sequencing by Ligation (SBL)1.2.6 Pyrosequencing1.2.7 Single-Molecule Real-time (SMRT) Sequencing1.2.8 Other1.3 Global Next Generation Sequencers Segment by Application1.3.1 Next Generation Sequencers Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2012-2022)1.3.2 Diagnostics1.3.3 Drug Discovery1.3.4 Biomarker Discovery1.3.5 Personalized Medicine1.3.6 Agriculture and Animal Research1.3.7 Others1.4 Global Next Generation Sequencers Market by Region (2012-2022)1.4.1 Global Next Generation Sequencers Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Region (2012-2022)1.4.2 North America Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.3 Europe Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.4 China Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.5 Japan Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.7 India Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Next Generation Sequencers (2012-2022)1.5.1 Global Next Generation Sequencers Revenue Status and Outlook (2012-2022)1.5.2 Global Next Generation Sequencers Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2012-2022)To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @2 Global Next Generation Sequencers Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Next Generation Sequencers Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.1.1 Global Next Generation Sequencers Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.1.2 Global Next Generation Sequencers Production and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.2 Global Next Generation Sequencers Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.3 Global Next Generation Sequencers Average Price by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.4 Manufacturers Next Generation Sequencers Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Next Generation Sequencers Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Next Generation Sequencers Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Next Generation Sequencers Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion3 Global Next Generation Sequencers Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2012-2017)3.1 Global Next Generation Sequencers Capacity and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)3.2 Global Next Generation Sequencers Production and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)3.3 Global Next Generation Sequencers Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)3.4 Global Next Generation Sequencers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.5 North America Next Generation Sequencers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.6 Europe Next Generation Sequencers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.7 China Next Generation Sequencers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.8 Japan Next Generation Sequencers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.9 Southeast Asia Next Generation Sequencers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.10 India Next Generation Sequencers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)4 Global Next Generation Sequencers Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2012-2017)4.1 Global Next Generation Sequencers Consumption by Region (2012-2017)4.2 North America Next Generation Sequencers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.3 Europe Next Generation Sequencers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.4 China Next Generation Sequencers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.5 Japan Next Generation Sequencers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.6 Southeast Asia Next Generation Sequencers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.7 India Next Generation Sequencers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)5 Global Next Generation Sequencers Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type5.1 Global Next Generation Sequencers Production and Market Share by Type (2012-2017)5.2 Global Next Generation Sequencers Revenue and Market Share by Type (2012-2017)5.3 Global Next Generation Sequencers Price by Type (2012-2017)5.4 Global Next Generation Sequencers Production Growth by Type (2012-2017)6 Global Next Generation Sequencers Market Analysis by Application6.1 Global Next Generation Sequencers Consumption and Market Share by Application (2012-2017)6.2 Global Next Generation Sequencers Consumption Growth Rate by Application (2012-2017)6.3 Market Drivers and Opportunities6.3.1 Potential Applications6.3.2 Emerging Markets/CountriesMake 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 @
Bio-Based Polyurethane Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share 2024 | Research Report

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Polyurethanes are used in a wide range of industrial applications due to their chemical versatility, high performance and low cost. They find use in building and construction, consumer products, furniture and fixtures, transportation and in industrial applications. Polyurethane is traditionally a downstream derivative of crude oil, rendering it susceptible to the crude oil market fluctuations. Moreover in this age of the consumers, and the global inclination towards green products and sustainable development, bio based alternative for crude oil is the need of the day.Browse Market Research Report @Polyurethane manufacturers are looking for alternatives so as to reduce carbon footprint, and at the same time positively impact the product quality and economics of production. Thermoplastic polyurethane manufacturers in particular are more inclined towards adopting bio based alternatives and increase the bio based content in their product by using polyester polyols made from natural and renewable raw materials. The main demand for bio based polyurethane is derived from application segments such as automotive, footwear and apparel. Uses in applications such as electronics, carpets, and furniture among others are also gaining momentum.Adipic acid, which is petroleum based product, and some other di-acids are the conventional raw materials for manufacturing polyurethanes. However, natural oil polyols (NOP) or biopolyols, which are derived from vegetable oils by different methods, are used in the production of bio based polyurethane. The most common sources of natural oil polyols are castor oil, soy oil, peanut oil and canola oil. Castor oil accounts for the majority of natural oil polyol as it contains a ready hydroxyl group unlike the others, where hydroxyl group needs to be introduced by prior processes. Natural oil polyols have similar origins and applications but the materials are different depending on their manufacturing process. Apart from these bio based succinic acid and 1,4 butanediol can be combined with the required isocyanates to produce polyurethanes with upto 70% bio content.One of the major factors driving this market is the government regulations regarding carbon foot print control in the developed economies of North America and Europe. In order to meet manufacturing obligations set up by the Kyoto Protocol, that is to reduce carbon emission so as to negate future climate damage, adapting to bio alternative from petroleum in the way forward for most manufacturers. Moreover research suggests that the physical attributes of bio based polyurethanes is strikingly similar to the traditional polyurethane manufactured from crude oil. Moreover, the modern customer prefers bio based green products to traditional products obtained from petroleum. Green product status has become the USP for products and brands.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Bio-Based Polyurethane Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market @Application of bio based polyurethanes in the insulation industry is a major opportunity for the market. Polyurethane foams are extensively used in home insulation and building insulation in the US and Europe. Bio based polyurethane has the potential to capture the insulation market. Polyurethanes market suffers from the regular price fluctuations in the global crude oil market, as it is directly related to the product. The volatile crude oil market is a restraint for traditional polyurethanes as it affects the pricing and market competitiveness compared to other insulation materials such as fiber glass and mineral-wool. Insulation materials manufactured from bio based polyurethanes will not be affected by the global price fluctuations and is a better alternative both financially and environmentally for manufacturers and consumers alike.Some of the players in the bio based polyurethanes market are SNP, Inc.,Cargill, Bio Amber, Inc, and Myriant Technologies among many others.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.ContactTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Acetohydroxamic Acid Market:Global Industry Analysis,Trends and Forecast 2023

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A new research report by Transparency Market Research offers a comprehensive evaluation of the global Acetohydroxamic Acid Market. The study, titled Acetohydroxamic Acid Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Trends and Forecast 2015 - 2023, is available for sale on the firms website.Acetohydroxamic acid is a drug used majorly to treat urinary tract infections. Acetohydroxamic acid is derived from hydroxylamine and ethyl acetate and has a molecular structure similar to that of urea. Acetohydroxamic acid has a mild acidic nature and shows ease of solubility in water. Acetohydroxamic acid inhibits the growth of bacterial enzyme urease, which indirectly inhibits the hydrolysis of urea and reduces the production of ammonia in urine infected with urea-splitting organisms substantially. The rise in urinary tract infections associated with proteus mirabilis is anticipated to boost the requirement of acetohydroxamic acid in the forecast period.Browse Market Research Report @Additionally, the rise in acute cases of urinary infections in diabetic patients is also anticipated to drive the market for acetohydroxamic acid in the next six years. The market for acetohydroxamic acid is anticipated to be significantly high in developed regions such as North America, chiefly followed by Europe. However, the considerable rise in geriatric population in Asia-Pacific region coupled with significant growth in the number of diabetic patients in this region is expected to be the major upcoming market for acetohydroxamic acid based medicines.Acetohydroxamic acid chiefly acts as an anti-microbial agent which inhibits the growth of urea splitting bacteria, those are majorly responsible for urinary tract infections. The urea splitting bacteria are responsible for forming struvite stones. These stones are formed in the presence of highly alkaline urine, having a pH value more than 7.2 and in an environment which is rich are in ammonia content. The ammonia is generated through the splitting of urea by colonization with bacteria that produce urease. The struvite stones generally comprise of 5 to 15 percent of the all the urinary tract stones which is a significant amount in urinary tract infections.Acetohydroxamic acid plays a vital role in decreasing the effect of urea splitting bacteria causing severe urinary tract infections. Additionally, the elderly population, premature infants, infants born with congenital urinary tract malformation, diabetic patients and spinal cord-injured patients are highly susceptible to urinary tract infections. Considerable rise in diabetic patients across the globe is anticipated to drive the demand for acetohydroxamic acid in the next six years. Moreover, the infections associated with urea splitting bacteria being considerably significant in the geriatric population; the global rise in the geriatric population is likely to boost the demand for acetohydroxamic acid in the forecast period.Currently, the acetohydroxamic acid market is dominated by developed regions such as the U.S. and Europe majorly due to rise in the diabetic and geriatric populations that are highly susceptible to urinary tract infections. The increase in number of elderly population, premature infants, infants born with congenital urinary tract malformation, diabetic patients and spinal cord-injured patients are expected to propel the growth of acetohydroxamic acid market. The market for acetohydroxamic acid is expected to increase in eastern countries in next six years considering the potential benefits associated with of acetohydroxamic acid in treating urinary tract infections. Gradual increase in health awareness across developing regions will help acetohydroxamic acid market to flourish across the globe. Asia-Pacific countries such as China, India, Thailand, Indonesia and other developing countries in RoW are anticipated to be the upcoming market for acetohydroxamic acid.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Acetohydroxamic Acid market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market@The potential application of acetohydroxamic acid in medical sector especially treating infections related with urinary tract is anticipated to create a lucrative option for other companies to penetrate in acetohydroxamic acid market. Some of the key players functioning in acetohydroxamic acid industry include Shangrao Newfuture Environment Protection Technology Co. Ltd, Mission Pharmacal Company, etc.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 PacificEuropeMiddle East and AfricaLatin AmericaThis report provides comprehensive analysis ofMarket growth driversFactors limiting market growthCurrent market trendsMarket structureMarket projections for upcoming yearsAbout 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. TMR's experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact UsTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Visit Blog :
Cobalt Powder Industry: Global Survey, Trends, Outlook,Forecast by 2023

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A new research report by Transparency Market Research offers a comprehensive evaluation of the global Cobalt Powder Market. The study, titled Cobalt Powder Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Trends and Forecast 2015 - 2023, is available for sale on the firms website.Cobalt is a hard, grey metal and is generally found in association with nickel in the Earth's crust. Cobalt has many industrial uses due to its unique properties such as retaining its strength at a high temperature, high melting point (1493C), high thermo-stability, being ferromagnetic, and being multivalent. All these properties of cobalt make it effective for enhancing catalytic action. As cobalt possess excellent chemical, physical, and mechanical properties, it is commonly used for fabricating various alloys which are used as wear resistant and high-temperature components, cutting tools, dies, saws, etc. Cobalt is an important ingredient for portable batteries. The growing demand for rechargeable batteries in mobile phones, laptop, tablets, and other portable electronics would be the major growth driver for global cobalt consumption.Browse Market Research Report @Cobalt has a wide range of industrial uses which varies from rechargeable batteries to aircraft engines. Furthermore cobalt is used for industrial chemical processes due to its catalytic properties and is used for the removal of nitrous oxide, desulphurisation of hydrocarbons and others. The typical properties of such as hardness and high temperature resistance of cobalt is used effectively to alloy with other metals. Cobalt alloys is suitable in turbine blades for gas jet aircraft engines and turbines. Various cobalt compounds are used as catalyst in chemical reactions.Furthermore, cobalts chemical and physical properties make it an essential ingredient for electroplating, coloring of pigments and ceramics, manufacture of automobile tires and permanent magnets. Cobalt powder is used as bonding tools in diamond industry and for high speed cutting tools it is used as binder for the production of cemented tungsten carbides. Owing to all such applications of cobalt, is growingly used in end-user industries such as electronic batteries, automotive tires, and other industries across the globe.The growing demand of automotive and electronic industry would have positive impact on cobalt powder market in years to come. Therefore, based on the uses of electronics, Asia Pacific is projected to be the fastest growing market for cobalt powder in the next six years. The main reason for this is the growing demand of electronics batteries from developing countries such as China and India. However, some countries of Africa, South America and the Middle East have shown economic and industrial growth since the last few years which would have a positive impact on the use of cobalt powder in various industries.The U.S. and countries of European region is would have major application of cobalt powder as they are recovering from the economic dispersion. All such factors would enhance the uses of cobalt powder across the globe. Considering this prospect automotive, batteries and other cobalt application related industries are expected to witness a strong growth in the coming years. Furthermore, the disposable income of individuals and increasing uses of portable electronics would have a tremendous market potential for cobalt powder. Due to this, the demand for cobalt powder in the automotive and electronic industry is anticipated to grow at an outstanding rate in the next few years.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Cobalt Powder market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market@Some of the major companies operating in the global cobalt powder market are Sandvik Materials Technology, Umicore - Cobalt & Specialty Materials, Freeport Cobalt Oy, Sherritt International, Sumitomo Corporation, Minara Resources Pty Ltd., Eramet and Norilsk Nickel.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 PacificEuropeMiddle East and AfricaLatin AmericaThis report provides comprehensive analysis ofMarket growth driversFactors limiting market growthCurrent market trendsMarket structureMarket projections for upcoming yearsAbout 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. TMR's experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact UsTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Visit Blog :
Paraphenylenediamine (PPD) Systems - Global Industry Analysis 2023

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A new research report by Transparency Market Research offers a comprehensive evaluation of the global Paraphenylenediamine Market. The study, titled Paraphenylenediamine (PPD) Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Trends and Forecast 2015 - 2023, is available for sale on the firms website.Paraphenylenediamine (PPD) is an organic compound and is a derivative of aniline. Paraphenylenediamine (PPD) is a white solid and is peculiarly used as a component of composites and engineering polymers and also as an ingredient in hair dyes. Moreover, paraphenylenediamine (PPD) is a typical precursor to fibers such as Kevlar and aramid fibers. Paraphenylenediamine (PPD) is also used as rubber antioxidants. Dyeing is one of the important applications of paraphenylenediamine. As paraphenylenediamine (PPD) is easily oxidized, the derivatives of paraphenylenediamine (PPD) are used as antioxidants in the manufacturing of rubber products. The substitutes such as naphthyl and isopropyl are also used in the production of rubber. However, due to the less effectiveness and hazardous health effects such as skin irritation, the derivatives of paraphenylenediamine (PPD) are mostly proffered as antioxidants by the rubber manufacturing industry.Browse Market Research Report @The optimistic growth in the rubber manufacturing industry is anticipated to propel the global paraphenylenediamine (PPD) market during the forecast period. Paraphenylenediamine (PPD) is also used as a developing agent in the color photographic film development process. Paraphenylenediamine (PPD) reacts with silver grains in the film and then forms color dyes which create the image. The growing demand for paraphenylenediamine (PPD) in such a diverse range of applications is expected to drive the global paraphenylenediamine (PPD) market in the next few years.As far as regional markets are concerned, Asia Pacific is predicted to emerge as the fastest growing market for paraphenylenediamine (PPD) in the coming years. The main reason for the growing demand for paraphenylenediamine (PPD) in the Asia Pacific region is the shifting of manufacturing base of plastics products and rubber goods to China, India and South East Asian countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. In addition, the population in these countries is rising at a rapid rate which is resulting in an increase in the overall customer base. Also, due to the economic development of these countries, the disposable income and the purchase parity of the consumers is rising which is ultimately increasing the number of potential customers across these emerging nations.Moreover, the countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Algeria, South Africa, Sudan, Nigeria, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Bahrain, Yemen, Qatar, Kuwait and Israel are rapidly coming up with robust manufacturing infrastructure. Furthermore, the U.S. and European economies are showing strong signs of recovery after a severe economic turmoil. All these factors are ultimately creating a positive outlook for the global economy. Considering this outlook, the industries such as dyes and pigments, plastics and rubber are anticipated to record an astounding growth in the next few years. Due to this, the demand for paraphenylenediamine (PPD) is projected to record an amazing growth in the next few years.The major players operating in the paraphenylenediamine (PPD) market are mainly focusing on the developing economies for tapping their huge market potential. These companies are installing massive production facilities in the developing countries to fulfill the swiftly rising demand for paraphenylenediamine (PPD) from different end-user industries such as dyes and pigments, plastics, rubber and fiber. Therefore, the global paraphenylenediamine (PPD) market is projected to experience a significant growth in the next six years.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Paraphenylenediamine market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market@Anhui Xianglong, RUI YUAN, Yixing Xinyu, Chizhou Fangda, Bayer AG, Lonsen, Alashan Lixin, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Taixing Shangshi, Suzhou Luosen and YSH are some of the important manufacturers of paraphenylenediamine (PPD).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 PacificEuropeMiddle East and AfricaLatin AmericaThis report provides comprehensive analysis ofMarket growth driversFactors limiting market growthCurrent market trendsMarket structureMarket projections for upcoming yearsAbout 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. TMR's experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact UsTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Visit Blog :
Small Hydropower Market: Latest Trends,Analysis & Insights 2023

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According to the findings of a recent report by Transparency Market Research (TMR), the global small hydropower market is highly competitive in nature and is high dependent on government regulations as well as energy targets. Some of the leading companies identified by the report in the global small hydropower market are Siemens, ANDRITZ HYDRO GmbH, Alstom S.A., Voith GmbH, BC Hydro, and StatKraft AS.As per the projections of the report, the demand in the global small hydropower market will increment at a CAGR of 2.85% during the forecast period of 2015 to 2023, estimated to reach an installed capacity of 146.65 GW before 2023 ends, significantly up from the global capacity of 94.70 GW in 2014. Some of the other key vendors operating in this market are Derwent, Agder Energi, Lanco, Hydro Power, StatKraft, Fortum Oyj, and RusHydro. In the near future, replacement of existing plants and focus on refurbishment is expected to be the common strategy by the leading vendors to increase their companys operational activities.This 92 page report gives readers a comprehensive overview of the Small Hydropower market. Browse Market Research Report @Asia Pacific Most Lucrative RegionThis report on the global small hydropower market gauges its potential in the regions of North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and South and Central America. Currently, Asia Pacific is most profitable region, accounting for more than two third of the global demand for small hydropower in 2014. China was the biggest contributor to this high demand from Asia Pacific, as the country is ranked first among all nations with SHP installations, followed by another populous country of India. Together with Japan, India and China are expected to maintain Asia Pacific as most lucrative region for the vendors of the small hydropower market, gaining traction from government initiatives to promote the green energy alternatives with tax credits and other incentives.The same year, 2014, Europe was second most profitable region, gaining maximum demand from Italy, wherein large funding is available the installation of small hydropower systems. The country also has strong inclination towards renewable resources of energy with a well-structured energy policy. While economic slowdown is expected to hider the expansion of the SHP market in Europe, North America will continue to provide opportunities for the players, with the U.S. and Canada as most likeable countries.Low Investment Cost and Long Life-cycle Driving DemandPositive outlook on renewable energy, its suitability for rural and remote areas, low capital investment, low generation cost, and increasing electricity consumption owing to escalating population across the globe, are some of the key regions driving the demand in the global small hydropower market. Small hydropower related to the generation of small-scale hydroelectricity power, which serves moderate-sized communities. These systems are efficient and greenhouse gas emission-free renewable sources of electricity that can be used for both off-grid and on-grid applications. Small hydropower systems are constructed on the rivers or existing dams, and comprise turbines, reservoirs, transformers, and generators.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Small Hydropower market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market@Another prominent factor augmenting the demand in the small hydropower market is its long life-span, of about 50 years, which makes it a reliable investment with economic benefits to go with. As per the TMR author, the maintenance and operation cost of small hydropower is merely 2% to 3% of the overall initial investment, which also prompts adoption significantly. On the other hand, stream expansion limitation and climate and logistics costs are some of the challenges faced by this market.The information presented in this review is based on a Transparency Market Research report, titled, Small Hydropower Market, by Installed Capacity - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth Trends, and Forecast 2015 - 2023.Key Segments of the Global Small Hydropower MarketSmall Hydropower Market: By RegionNorth AmericaEuropeAsia PacificMiddle East and AfricaSouth and Central AmericaAbout UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact UsTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Visit Blog :
Packaged IC Component Inspector Market Competitive Dynamics & Global Outlook 2025

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Integrated circuits are placed into protective packages in order to allow efficient assembly and handling onto PCBs (printed circuit boards) and to protect the electronic devices from damage. Different sort of packaging techniques are present. Packaged IC component inspector systems primarily increase the throughput and boost the package changeover than traditional methods.The market has been segmented into by IC packaged inspection type surface mounting, through-hole mounting, pin grid array, ball grid array, flip chip inspection, plastic encapsulated IC inspection, flat package, molded underfill inspection among others.Moreover, the market has been also segmented by end use industry which includes consumer electronics, industrial equipment, aerospace and military, automotive, telecommunication, healthcare among others. The market for packaged IC component inspector by region has been segmented into, Europe, Asia Pacific, North America, MEA (Middle East and Africa) and South America.Obtain Report Details:Integrated circuit packages are made of different sort of materials for instance plastic of a molded package, silicon circuit contained within the package and ceramic package. Each package material carries different mechanical characteristics, for example elastic modulus and thermal expansion, primarily which cater to development of mechanical stresses when the whole package is subjected to thermal excursions.Circuits are exponentially smaller in size and defects have become smaller and much more difficult to identify or detect. Detecting defects is a crucial process in order to prevent mechanical, electrical and thermal failures. To ensure no defects reach the end users, packaged semiconductor producers are looking for advanced analytic capabilities along with finer-resolution imaging to fine-tune their processes and designs.In addition, increasing customer demand for higher throughput to enable 100% semiconductor inspection at production speeds is also fueling the market for packaged IC component inspector.Some of the defects which are inspected by the packaged IC component inspector include number of the cracks in the IC die, delamination of one package interface from another and cracks in the body of the package. Some of the major inspection system application includes flip chip inspection, stacked die imaging, multi-chip and hybrid module inspection and ball grid arrays among others.Increasing technological advancement in the field of semiconductor component manufacturing is one of the prime reasons behind the growth of packaged IC inspection globally. Major semiconductor component manufacturer are focusing on innovating improved semiconductor inspection technology to meet the complex packaging challenges.Improved performance, fault less semiconductor components, higher throughput are some of the prime characterization of packaged IC component inspector, which in turn is fueling the application in different end use industries.Cyclical nature of semiconductor industry may be considered as one of the restraining factor which may inhibit the growth of the packaged IC component inspector market. However, application of packaged IC component inspector for nanoelectronics industry is one of the prime opportunities for the market.In 2016, North America held the largest market share in terms of revenue for the packaged IC component inspector market, followed by Asia Pacific and Europe. The U.S. is leading the packaged IC component inspector market in North America. In Asia Pacific, China, Japan, and India, South Korea among others are some of the major market contributing in the positive development of the market for packaged IC component inspector.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Packaged IC Component Inspector Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.Germany, Italy, U.K., France among others are contributing positive share in the packaged IC component inspector market. In Middle East and Africa, there has been considerable advancement and development in the field of electronics and other industries for example, automotive and telecommunication sector is stimulating the demand for packaged IC component inspector market. In South America, Brazil and Argentina are anticipated to contribute positive growth over the forecast period from 2017 to 2025.KLA Tencor Corporation (The U.S.), Sonix, Inc. (The U.S.) and Nidec Corporation (Japan) among others are some of the key players operating in the packaged IC component inspector market globally.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.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:
Profilometer Market Trends, and Forecast By 2025

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Profilometer is a device or instrument that is used for measuring the surface profile being used for quantifying the roughness of the surface. Vertical resolution of the surface that is the resolution between the high pint and low point is usually measured at the nanometer level by providing lateral resolutions through profilometers.It consists of two main parts namely detector and sample stage. The detector helps in determination of points present on the sample whereas the stage is used for allowing movement at the time of measurement.Nowadays it is being used for both static as well as dynamic topography. The global market for profilometer has been segmented on the basis of type, application and geography. Contact and non-contact are two main types based on which the global market for profilometer has been segmented.Obtain Report Details:Building materials, metals, consumer goods, oil & mines, pharmaceutical, semiconductor and biotechnology among others form the various application areas based on which the global market for profilometer has been segmented. Global profilometer market based on geography has been segmented into Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, Latin America, Middle East and Africa.High lateral resolution by the usage of profilometer has formed a major factor that has driven the market for profilometer globally. It also does not require any modelling and can be used directly that further increases its global usage. Moreover, a better resolution along with high speed and reliability has also acted as some other drivers to boost the demand for this market.Surface resolution topography and accuracy is expected to be some other deriving factors for profilometer market. In addition to this, vertical measurement also does not require a scanning mechanism along with vertical calibration that is based on the laser source wavelength that has also positively impacted the market for profilometers.Both MEMS vibrations and on-flight measurement problems are solved with the help of profilometers further contributing to the demand of this market. It is also the flexibility and ruggedness of certain profilometers that has led to its incorporation in industrial processes as well.With all these factors there are also certain restraints that affects the overall demand. One such factor being the inaccuracy in resolutions when the surface features are same as size of the stylus.Another factor being the difficulties related to finding flaws that are of the same size as the roughness of the surface. Laser profilometers are expected to provide growth opportunities for this market where the surface can be measured without the need to physically touch the surface profile.Geographically, it is North America that forms a major region contributing to the overall growth of this market followed by Europe. Demand for technological advancement in the surface analysis to be used across different verticals has been a driving factor for this market in these regions.Asia Pacific contributes to being another major region that has accelerated the demand for profilometers further forming one of the fastest growing region globally. China, Japan and Korea among others are expected to be some of the major regions contributing to the growth in Asia Pacific.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Profilometer Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.It is also the growing demand for reliable and accurate data that has pushed the demand for this market in Asia Pacific region. Moreover, the need for lateral resolution that does not make changes on the surface has also acted as another major driver for this region.Some of the major players operating in the Profilometer market include KLA-Tencor Corporation (The U.S.), Bruker Nano Surfaces (The U.S.), Mahr (Germany), Jenoptik (Germany), Alicona (Europe), Cyber Technologies (Germany), Nanovea (The U.S.), Taylor Hobson Ltd. (U.K.), Zygo Corporation (The U.S.),Tokyo Seimitsu Co. Ltd. (Japan), Mitutoyo Corporation (Japan) and 4D Technology Corporation (The U.S.) among others.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.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:
High Reliability Semiconductors Market Technological breakthroughs By 2025

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Semiconductor are made up of materials that has resistance and electrical conductivity coming within the range between that of a conductor and an insulator. Materials such as silicon or germanium among others are used for making semiconductors as it has poor connectivity in low temperatures and is steadily improved after addition of certain substances.State of semiconductors changes after electricity is passed, transforming it from conductive and non-conductive to reflective and non-reflective. Semiconductors also has the capability to increase the conductivity of the materials along with rise in temperature or current or voltage.High reliability semiconductors has the ability to function under extreme conditions along a specified a period of time. The global market for high reliability semiconductors has been segmented on the basis of type, application and geography.Obtain Report Details:Based on different types the global market has been segmented into discrete and analog. Aerospace & defense, medical and communications among others form the various application areas based on which the global market for high reliability semiconductors market has been segmented.High reliability semiconductor market globally on the basis of geography has been segmented into North America, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Europe and Middle East and Africa.It is the high duration along with probability of giving failure free performance across different conditions forms a major driver that has resulted in the rise in demand for this market globally. Application wise implementation of discrete high reliability semiconductors has also been another major factor that has led to the increase in applications along with providing huge growth prospects in future as well.Controlled resistance level in semiconductors has helped in its implementation across specific applications by performing the intended function under specified intervals and stated conditions. All these factors has helped the high reliability semiconductors market to grow globally.High reliability semiconductors also has growing space applications that has the capability to operate at higher voltages and temperatures providing better performance. Considering the following factors that act as some major drivers for the market, there are also some restraints that restricts the demand for this market globally.It is the high costs associated with the application of these semiconductors that act as a major restraint for this market. It is also the technical and programmatic challenges that affects the insertion of these semiconductors that has negative impact on the desired reliability act as another crucial reason restraining the demand for high reliability semiconductors market.Opportunities across high end technologically advanced devices along with high-current/high-voltage configurations will further provide growth opportunities for the market in coming years.Geographically, it is North America that forms one of the major market for high reliability semiconductor market globally with U.S., Canada and Mexico being some of the major regions that are contributing to the growth in this market.Technologically advanced applications such as space and aerospace & defense has contributed to being one of the major reason for the growth of this market in this region. Asia Pacific region has been one of the fastest growing regions with China and Japan being some of the major players that has contributed to the growth of this market.Presence of large number of equipment and semiconductor manufacturers has been a major factor that has led to the rise in demand for high reliability semiconductor in Asia Pacific region.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the High Reliability Semiconductors Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.The market for high reliability semiconductor is highly consolidated with competitors coming up with technologically advanced products for competing globally across highly advanced application areas.Some of the major players that are operating in the global high reliability semiconductor market are Microsemi (The U.S.), e2v (U.K.), Infineon Technologies (Germany), Skyworks Inc. (The U.S.), Semtech (The U.S.), TT Electronics (UK) and EG Electronics (Sweden) among others.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.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:
Leather Dyes Market is Globally expected to witness a significant growth with CAGR of ~5.0 % between 2016 and 2023

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The Global Leather Dyes Market is expected to witness a significant growth with CAGR of ~5.0 % between 2016 and 2023.Leather dye used to improve the look, shine, and increase durability of leather product and available an extensive range of shades such as black leather dyes, brown leather dyes, red leather dyes and more suitable for dyeing, most types of leather available at economical prices. Various manufacturing company offers a wide range of dyes to improve the leather appearance and brilliancy. Leather dyeing generally includes the use of spirit or alcohol-based leather dyes where alcohol rapidly gets absorbed into moistened leather.Furthermore, the growing leather industry on account of developing domestic as well as commercial market particularly in Asia-Pacific and Europe region has enhanced the global leather dyes market over the forecasted period. The key drivers for the growth of leather dye are the increasing demand of leather apparels, footwear, and automotive industry. However, strict environmental regulations may restrain the leather dye market over the course of the forecast period.Get a Sample report atGeographically, Asia Pacific region is the largest market of leather dyes due to demand in leather industry particularly in China region followed by India, and Japan. Rising demand for leather industry due to increasing consumption of leather products in the India, Bangladesh, Taiwan, and South Korea has made Asia Pacific largest consumer of the global leather dyes market followed by increasing in the consumption of leather dyes market in Europe region. Furthermore, the third largest market of leather dyes is North America region followed by Latin America and Middle East. Latin America witnessed favoring growth of Leather dyes market due to various application such as natural leather, synthetic leather.The global leather dyes market is majorly segmented on the basis of types, application, and region.Firstly, based on types, global leather dye market is segmented into direct dyes, acid dyes, basic dyes, mordant dyes, pre-metalled dyes, sulphur dyes and others (Reactive Dyes etc). Secondly, based on application of leather dyes the market is segmented into natural leather and synthetic leather, and finally based on region the global leather dyes market is divided into North America, Europe, APAC, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa.Key players profiled in the global leather dyes market include Lanxess AG (Germany) BASF SE (Germany) Clariant International Ltd. (Switzerland) Colorex Chemical Co., Inc. (US) The Dow Chemical Company (US) Krishna Industries (India) Kolor Jet Chemical Pvt. Ltd. (India) J. K. Colors (India) Prima Chemicals (India) Synthesia, a.s (Europe)Browse complete report atGeographic AnalysisThe report covers brief analysis of geographical region such as:North America US CanadaEurope Germany France Italy Netherlands U.K. Rest of EuropeAPAC China India Japan Rest of Asia-PacificRoW South America Middle East AfricaThe report about Global Leather Dyes Market by Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with detail analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts and key opinion leaders to gain a deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives a clear picture of the current market scenario which includes past and estimated future market size in terms of value and volume, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report further provides detail information about strategies used by top key players in the industry. It also gives a broad study about different market segments and regions.Get a Discount atStudy Objectives of Leather Dyes Market: To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast for the next 7 years of the various segments and sub-segments of the Global Leather Dyes Market To understand the supply and demand dynamics including supply and consumption concentration mapping To provide region level market analysis and future outlook for North America, Europe, Asia, and Rest of the World (ROW) and their countries To provide competitor positioning of the market To provide company profiling of major players in the market along with their production and capacity To provide regional trade analysis To evaluate historical market trends, patents and technologies, and current government regulatory requirements that are relevant to the marketTABLE OF CONTENTS1 Executive Summary2 Scope of The Report2.1 Market Definition2.2 Scope of The Study2.2.1 Research Objectives2.2.2 Assumptions & Limitations2.3 Markets Structure3 Market Research Methodology3.1 Research Process3.2 Secondary Research3.3 Primary Research3.4 Forecast Model4 Market Landscape4.1 Five Forces Analysis4.1.1 Threat of New Entrants4.1.2 Bargaining power of buyers4.1.3 Threat of substitutes4.1.4 Segment rivalry4.2 Value Chain/Supply Chain of Global Leather Dye Market5 Industry Overview of Global Leather Dye Market5.1 Introduction5.2 Growth Drivers5.3 Impact analysis5.4 Market Challenges5.5 Impact analysis6 Market Trends6.1 Introduction6.2 Growth Trends6.3 Impact analysis7. Global Leather Dye Market by Region8. Global Leather Dye Market by Type (direct dyes, acid dyes, basic dyes, mordant dyes, pre-metalled dyes, sulphur dyes and others)9. Global Leather Dye Market by Application (natural leather, synthetic leather)10. Competitive Landscape11. Company Profiles11.1 Lanxess AG11.1.1 Company Overview11.1.2 Product/Business Segment Overview11.1.3 Financial Updates11.1.4 Key Developments11.2 BASF SE11.2.1 Company Overview11.2.2 Product/Business Segment Overview11.2.3 Financial Updates11.2.4 Key Developments11.3 Clariant International Ltd.11.3.1 Company Overview11.3.2 Product/Business Segment Overview11.3.3 Financial Updates11.3.4 Key Developments11.4 Colorex Chemical Co., Inc.11.4.1 Company Overview11.4.2 Product/Business Segment Overview11.4.3 Financial Updates11.4.4 Key Developments11.5 The Dow Chemical Company11.5.1 Company Overview11.5.2 Product/Business Segment Overview11.5.3 Financial Updates11.5.4 Key Developments11.6 Krishna Industries11.6.1 Company Overview11.6.2 Product/Business Segment Overview11.6.3 Financial Updates11.6.4 Key Developments11.7 Kolor Jet Chemical Pvt. Ltd.11.7.1 Company Overview11.7.2 Product/Business Segment Overview11.7.3 Financial Updates11.7.4 Key Developments11.8 J. K. Colors11.8.1 Company Overview11.8.2 Product/Business Segment Overview11.8.3 Financial Updates11.8.4 Key Developments11.9 Prima Chemicals11.8.1 Company Overview11.9.2 Product/Business Segment Overview11.9.3 Financial Updates11.9.4 Key Developments11.10 Synthesia, a.s11.10.1 Company Overview11.10.2 Product/Business Segment Overview11.10.3 Financial Updates11.10.4 Key Developments12 ConclusionAt 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 AnandP: +1 646 845 9312W:
Global LED Market Segmentation, Application, Technology & Market Analysis Research Report 2025

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TheInsightPartners.com added Global Light Emitting Diode Market Research Report 2017-2025 to its research database.The Insight Partners, Global Light Emitting Diode Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the Light Emitting Diode industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global Light Emitting Diode market with detailed market segmentation by product/application and geography. The global Light Emitting Diode market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the Light Emitting Diode players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.Request Sample Copy atThe report provides a detailed overview of the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global Light Emitting Diode market based on product and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall Light Emitting Diode market with respect to five major regions, namely; North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South America (SAM), which is later sub-segmented by respective countries and segments. The report evaluates market dynamics effecting the market during the forecast period i.e., drivers, restraints, opportunities, and future trend and provides exhaustive PEST analysis for all five regions.View Complete Report atAlso, key Light Emitting Diode market players influencing the market are profiled in the study along with their SWOT analysis and market strategies. The report also focuses on leading industry players with information such as company profiles, products and services offered, financial information of last 3 years, key development in past five years.List of Key Company Profiles Cree, Inc. Epistar Corp. Nichia Corporation OSRAM Light AG Siemens AG. Koninklijke Philips N.V. Lumileds Lighting General Electric Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Bridgelux, Inc. SemiLEDS Corporation Seoul Semiconductors Co., Ltd. Toyoda Gosei Co., Ltd.Place a Direct Purchase Order atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@theinsightpartners.comAbout Us:The Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Technology, Media, and Telecommunication industries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Global Cutting Tool Blade Market Report Demand, Supply and Forecast 2022

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ReportsWeb.com has announced the addition of the Global Cutting Tool Blade Market Professional Survey Report 2017 The report focuses on global major leading players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification.This report studies Cutting Tool Blade in Global market, especially in North America, China, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan and India, with production, revenue, consumption, import and export in these regions, from 2012 to 2016, and forecast to 2022.This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringNorth American CarbideKennametal FoundationISCARIngersoll Cutting ToolsSandvikKometLovejoy ToolSecoTyrolitFor more information about this report atBy types, the market can be split intoCarbideCBNCeramicOtherBy Application, the market can be split intoMillingDrillingTurningRotaryOtherBy Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North AmericaChinaEuropeSoutheast AsiaJapanIndiaRequest a sample copy atTable of Content1 Industry Overview of Cutting Tool Blade2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Cutting Tool Blade3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Cutting Tool Blade4 Global Cutting Tool Blade Overall Market Overview5 Cutting Tool Blade Regional Market Analysis6 Global 2011-2017E Cutting Tool Blade Segment Market Analysis (by Type)7 Global 2011-2017E Cutting Tool Blade Segment Market Analysis (by Application)8 Major Manufacturers Analysis of Cutting Tool Blade8.1 North American Carbide8.1.1 Company Profile8.1.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.1.2.1 Product A8.1.2.2 Product B8.1.3 North American Carbide 2016 Cutting Tool Blade Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.1.4 North American Carbide 2016 Cutting Tool Blade Business Region Distribution Analysis8.2 Kennametal Foundation8.2.1 Company Profile8.2.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.2.2.1 Product A8.2.2.2 Product B8.2.3 Kennametal Foundation 2016 Cutting Tool Blade Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.2.4 Kennametal Foundation 2016 Cutting Tool Blade Business Region Distribution Analysis8.3 ISCAR8.3.1 Company Profile8.3.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.3.2.1 Product A8.3.2.2 Product B8.3.3 ISCAR 2016 Cutting Tool Blade Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.3.4 ISCAR 2016 Cutting Tool Blade Business Region Distribution AnalysisDiscount on report purchase at9 Development Trend of Analysis of Cutting Tool Blade Market10 Cutting Tool Blade Marketing Type Analysis11 Consumers Analysis of Cutting Tool Blade12 Conclusion of the Global Cutting Tool Blade Market Professional Survey Report 2017Purchase Complete Report atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.Pune:505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Fingerprint Sensors Global Market Trend, Research Approach, Data Analysis and Forecast to 2022

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The Global Fingerprint sensors market is valued at $5.5 billion in 2014 with CAGR of 17.53% and is expected to reach $20.03 billion by 2022. The most important factors driving the market are electronic devices such as laptops, PC's, tablets, mobiles, Increase in demand for Fingerprint Sensors in Security checks in airports, organizations. On the other side, the factors such as lack of awareness on security rudiments and complexity of smart phone, can restrain the growth of fingerprint sensors market.For more information about this report:Global Fingerprint sensors markets are mainly segmented by Technology, by Material, by Type, by Application and by Geography. Based on Technology, market is segmented into Optical Sensors, Ultrasound Sensors, Thermal Sensors and Capacitive Sensors. Based on Material, market is classified into Quartz, Optical Prism, Capacitive, Ultrasonic, Sapphire (Coating Material), Adhesives. Based on Type, markets are categorized into Area Sensors and Swipe Sensors. Based on Application, Fingerprint sensors market are segmented into Healthcare, Smart Homes, Mobile Applications, Government, Commercial Security, Military, Defense & Aerospace, Travel & Migration. Fingerprint sensors market, by geography is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World.The keyplayers in the Fingerprint sensors market include, Infineon, Technologies AG (Germany), IrScan, Synaptics (U.S.), Idex ASA, 3M Cogent, Inc., Cyber-SIGN, Interlink Electronics, Fingerprint Cards AB, Ekey Biometric Systems.Request Sample Copy atWhat our report offers:- Market share assessments for the regional and country level segments- Market share analysis of the top industry players- Strategic recommendations for the new entrants- Market forecasts for a minimum of 8 years of all the mentioned segments, sub segments and the regional markets- Market Trends (Drivers, Constraints, Opportunities, Threats, Challenges, Investment Opportunities, and recommendations)- Strategic recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimations- Competitive landscaping mapping the key common trends- Company profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent developments- Supply chain trends mapping the latest technological advancements1 Executive Summary2 Preface3 Market Trend Analysis4 Porters Five Force Analysis5 Global Fingerprint Sensor Market, By Technology6 Global Fingerprint Sensor Market, By Material7 Global Fingerprint Sensor Market, By Type8 Global Fingerprint Sensor Market, By Application9 Global Fingerprint Sensor Market, By Geography10 Key Developments11 Company Profiling11.1 Infineon Technologies AG11.2 IrScan11.3 Synaptics11.4 Idex ASA11.5 3M Cogent, Inc.11.6 Cyber-SIGN11.7 Interlink Electronics11.8 Fingerprint Cards AB11.9 Ekey Biometric SystemsInquire before Buying atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Fluorochemicals Global Market Key Developments, Outlook, Analysis & Forecast to 2022

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The Global Fluorochemicals Market accounted for $17.9 billion in 2014 and is poised to reach $27.6 billion by 2022 while growing at a CAGR of 5.6% from 2014 to 2022. The factors that are contributing to growth of the market are increase in technological innovation and increase in automobile production. The key driver of the market is there are fewer competitors in fluorochemicals market in developing nations. However factors such as growth in aluminium industry gave opportunity for the market to grow.For more information about this report:Fluorochemicals Market is segmented by product, by application and by geography. Depending on the various products, the market is categorized into Fluoropolymers, Fluorocarbons, Fluorosurfactants,Fluororepellants and Inorganic fluorides. Based on application, the market is classified into Air-conditioning, Aluminum Production, Blowing Agents, Firefighting and Refrigeration. Based on geography, market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World. China is the largest and one of the fastest growing markets for fluorochemicals. Significant mergers & acquisitions, collaborations, and joint ventures are the industry trends that are playing a major role for the market growth.The key players in the Fluorochemicals Market include 3M Advanced Materials, Arkema SA, Asahi Glass Company Ltd., DuPont de Nemours & Co., Dongyue Group Ltd., Halocarbon Products Corp., Honeywell International Inc., Mitsui Chemicals Inc., Pelchem SOC Ltd. and Solvay SA.Request Sample Copy atWhat our report offers:- Market share assessments for the regional and country level segments- Market share analysis of the top industry players- Strategic recommendations for the new entrants- Market forecasts for a minimum of 8 years of all the mentioned segments, sub segments and the regional markets- Market Trends (Drivers, Constraints, Opportunities, Threats, Challenges, Investment Opportunities, and recommendations)- Strategic recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimations- Competitive landscaping mapping the key common trends- Company profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent developments- Supply chain trends mapping the latest technological advancements1 Executive Summary2 Preface3 Market Trend Analysis4 Porters Five Force Analysis5 Global Fluorochemicals Market, By Product6 Global Fluorochemicals Market, By Application7 Global Fluorochemicals Market, By Geography8 Key Developments9 Company Profiling9.1 3M Advanced Materials9.2 Arkema SA9.3 Asahi Glass Company Ltd.9.4 DuPont de Nemours & Co.9.5 Dongyue Group Ltd.9.6 Halocarbon Products Corp.9.7 Honeywell International, Inc.9.8 Mitsui Chemicals, Inc.9.9 Pelchem SOC Ltd.9.10 Solvay SAInquire before Buying atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Applicant Tracking Systems Market Growing Steadily with Improving Technology

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An applicant tracking system (ATS) is an application software that enables the electronic handling of recruitment needs. These systems can be accessed online by enterprises at different levels depending on the company needs, allowing companies to collate and analyze job applicant data. An Applicant tracking system is also known as candidate management system, the software is used by enterprises to recruit employees more efficiently. ATS can also be used to post job openings on a corporate website or job board for screening resumes as well as generating interview requests to deserving candidates through e-mail. Individual applicant tracking, automated resume ranking, pre-screening questions, response tracking, multilingual capabilities requisition tracking, and customized input forms are some of the features included within the software.Firstly, information present within the database is used for screening candidates; subsequently, applicant testing, scheduling interviews, checking references, managing the hiring process, and completing paperwork also comes under this process. The global market for applicant tracking systems has been segmented on the basis of deployment model, end user, and geography. Based on deployment model, the market has been segmented into cloud and on-premises. Market segmentation based on end user includes healthcare, automotive, retail, and government among others.On the basis of geography, the global applicant tracking systems market has been segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa.Obtain Report Details @The key benefits of applicant tracking systems are increase in efficiency along with saving time that helps in sorting applicant data, automating the whole procedure, and freeing up time that can be spent elsewhere. In addition, it is the reduction of recruitment related costs, improving overall cost per hire, along with improvement in internal mobility within an organization that are key factors that have also positively driven the market. Furthermore, it also provides companies with a database for just in time recruitment of candidates to draw from as and when needs arise.Moreover, the talent intelligence through these applicant tracking systems allows making informed decisions especially for recruitment in critically skilled positions. With all these drivers, presence of certain restraints has a negative impact on the overall market demand. It is seen that applicant tracking systems look only for resumes that meet the exact position requirements, thereby sidelining the borderline candidates which at times reduces the total number of candidates. Moreover, automated systems cannot be completely reliable and may at times reject even the deserving candidates. Along with this, sometimes this software may limit the information provided by applicants as a result of character restricted application fields. This may lead to elimination of a perfectly suitable candidate for the desired position. Considering all these factors, rise in demand for skill based professionals for defined job roles is likely to provide various opportunities for this market in the next few years.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Applicant Tracking Systems Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this market.Geographically, North America and Europe have been the key regions driving the market demand for applicant tracking systems globally. Faster and timely access to desired applicant related data along with the dearth of job specific candidates has been a few major drivers for this market. Asia Pacific is one of the fastest growing markets in terms of application with China, India, and South Korea being key countries driving the market. It is seen that growth in automation and digitization along with high demand for saving company time and costs towards a particular candidate has been driving this market in Asia Pacific.Some of the key players operating in the global applicant tracking systems market include Taleo Corp. (U.S.), Jobvite (U.S.), International Business Machines Corporation (U.S.), iCIMS Inc. (U.S.), ADP LLC (U.S.) and SAP SuccessFactors Corp. (U.S.) 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. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who us e 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, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports thrive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Massive Open Online Course Market Growing with Innovative Industrial Applications

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Massive open online courses are distant learning courses which can be accessed over the internet by interested people. They cover a wide range of topics, can be accessed by an unlimited number of participants, and often provide certificates from recognized universities upon completion. Massive open online courses generally provide a variety of course material such as reading material, filmed lectures, and assignments. Some of them also offer interactive forums for students, lecturers, and other stakeholders. Distant learning previously referred to correspondence courses where the student interacted with the educational institution by post. However, this model witnessed a high attrition rate with only a few people completing the entire course.With the rising acceptance of the internet, distant learning became online-based, leading to the invention of massive open online courses which were introduced around 2006 and their name coined in 2008 by University of Prince Edward Islands Dave Cormier. Massive open online courses gained popularity around 2012. The market comprises different types of organizations including massive open online course providers, educational universities, venture capitalists, and non-profit organizations (such as the National Science Foundation and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). Venture capitalists active in the massive open online course market include Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and New Enterprise Associates. Several premier universities are also associated with these courses such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and Harvard University.Obtain Report Details @The market for massive open online courses is primarily driven by the growing need for online executive programs for working individuals, additional skills among professionals, competitiveness in a job role, and professional training in various subjects. To cater to these needs, several players in the massive open online course market are currently offering executive programs for professionals. The fee can range from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars depending on the course undertaken, motivating the global market.Additionally, the growing penetration of the internet has been leading to better awareness regarding these courses. Furthermore, the rising cost of the traditional mode of education coupled with the presence of reliable online training courses are some of the other factors positively impacting the market for massive open online courses. However, concerns regarding the acceptability of certificates from massive open online courses in the industry and other educational institutes have been restraining the market to some extent. Taking into consideration the growing number of subjects covered by massive open online courses and their ease of access, the market is estimated to foresee numerous growth opportunities during the forecast period.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Massive Open Online Course Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this marketThe global market for massive open online courses has been segmented on the basis of stream into the following categories: business management, science, humanities, computer science & programming, and engineering. In terms of region, the market has been distributed over North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, South America, and Middle East & Africa (MEA). North America was the leading market in 2016 followed by Europe and Asia Pacific and is predicted to retain its position during the forecast period.Key companies in the massive open online courses market include Coursera (U.S.), edX, Inc. (U.S.), Instructure, Inc. (U.S.), Udacity, Inc. (U.S.), iversity Learning Solutions GmbH (Germany), and WizIQ (India).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. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who us e 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, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports thrive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
MES Software Market Growing with Innovative Industrial Applications

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Manufacturing execution system also known as MES is a computerized control system that is used for managing, tracking and monitoring the work-in-progress or process on a factory floor documenting the raw material transformation to finished goods. Information provided by MES helps the decision makers to understand conditions on the plant floor for optimizing production output. It tracks all the real time manufacturing information that includes receiving minute data from robots, machine, support services and employees controlling multiple elements of the production process.MES combines multiple functional areas such as management of product life cycle, scheduling of resources, order execution and dispatch, analysis of production along with monitoring of overall equipment effectiveness. Although these systems are primarily used for operating as standalone systems, they are also increasingly being integrated with enterprise resource planning software suites to improve production and reduce total cycle time to produce an order. This integration allows factory managers to ensure timely delivery of quality products in a cost-effective manner.These are especially important for the regulated industries where documentation and proof related to processes, events or actions may be required. The global market for MES software market has been segmented into deployment type, offering, end use industry and geography among others. Based on deployment type, this market has been segmented into on-premises, on-demand and hybrid. This market has been further segmented on the basis of offering that includes software and services. Different end use industries are also considered under the scope of this report comprising of food & beverages, pharmaceutical and life sciences, oil & gas, chemical, energy & power, pulp & paper, automotive, aerospace & defense and water & waste water management among others.Obtain Report Details @The global manufacturing execution system software market based on geography has been segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Middle East and Africa.Reducing scrap and waste time, increasing uptime along with lowered inventory costs making the process more cost effective has been some of the primary reasons that has positively driven the market demand for global MES market. With MES, costs are recorded in real-time from the production floor. Management teams use this data for evaluation of unprofitable business models as well as pricing new work enabling companies to increase productivity across its production facilities. Storage of inventory surplus by companies costs a huge amount of money besides the extra cost incurred through transportation, storing and monitoring of finished goods. MES improves the efficiency of the facility by accurately recording production, usage and personnel time by maintaining precision further saving huge costs for the money.All these have acted as important drivers for this market boosting the overall demand. Along with this, there are also certain restraints associated with the implementation of this MES software. One such factor being the business transformational change associated with implementation of MES in an organization. Discrepancies regarding participation of all stakeholders within the company also acts as another major restraint for this market. Although there are different drivers and restraints still new opportunities in the cloud based MES is likely to grow in the next few years.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the MES Software Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this marketNorth America followed by Europe has been some major regions contributing to the growth of this market geographically. Cost effectiveness along with tracking of real time data especially in the process industries such as waste water management has been some of the major factors contributing to the growth of this market. Asia Pacific is expected to grow the fastest among all other regions with China, India and Japan being some of the major countries. Automation, saving inventory time along with timely delivery of products to manage costs has been a few key factors to promote growth in Asia Pacific region.ABB Ltd. (Switzerland), Rockwell Automation (U.S.), Siemens AG (Germany), Emerson Electric Co. (The U.S.), SAP SE (Germany), Werum It Solutions GmbH (Germany), Honeywell International, Inc. (U.S.), Schneider Electric SE (France), Dassault Systemes (France) and General Electric Company (U.S.) are a few key companies that are present in the market and contributed to the overall growth globally.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. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who us e 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, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports thrive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Mobile Middleware Market to be Driven by Upgradation of Technologies

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Mobile middleware are software solutions used for connecting different types of systems, programs, and applications in a mobile phone. Mobile middleware is similar to most middleware and aims at hiding the complexities of the mobile environment. It also allows for better development of mobile application, better integration of mobile computing, and faster device to device interaction. Mobile middleware solutions aid in connecting devices to hardware, in both types of mobile development types, namely native and HTML. This allows developers to reduce redundancy as the same back end logic can be reapplied for multiple mobile devices, without the need to develop back ends for each separate device.Mobile middleware offers different forms of transparencies to hide the complexities of mobile environments. This includes transparencies such as location, allowing different applications to exchange data from diverse locations, operating systems, and transport protocol among others. To function effectively, mobile middleware utilizes services such as messaging, resource discovery, transaction, storage services, and directory. The mobile environment has several critical environments, such as disparate platforms, limited bandwidths and constrained memory among others, which are simplified and made easier through mobile middleware. Owing to the rising demand for mobile middleware, several vendors of such solutions are offering development services to their customers.Obtain Report Details @The market for mobile middleware is primarily being driven by the growing volume of mobile applications. Most companies, plying trade in the service industry, are developing mobile applications for their company, owing to the proven effectiveness of application based marketing, leading to growing demand for mobile applications globally. Such demand for applications has been promoting the demand for mobile middleware solutions and services. Additionally, growing demand for mobile applications for the workforce and increasing usage of mobile phones have been leading to growing demand for business user workforce applications.Such applications offer the user with high mobility options, coupled with faster turnaround time and security. Hence, there is a huge growth in demand for such applications. This in turn has been promoting the market for mobile middleware. Furthermore, the growing demand for integration of enterprise application across mobile devices, coupled with presence of diverse mobile platforms and devices has also been positively impacting the market for mobile middleware, globally. However, concerns related to security and compatibility has been restraining the growth of the market to some extent. Considering the growing demand for integration platform as a service and increasing demand for business to business integration, the market for mobile middleware is expected to offer several growth opportunities during the forecast period.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Mobile Middleware Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this marketOn the basis of architecture, the market for mobile middleware has been segmented into software and services. The software segment has been further segmented into application management, mobile application development platform, device management and others. The services segment is further segmented into development services, consulting services, and training services. By end use verticals, the market has been segmented into banking, financial services & insurance (BFSI), healthcare, retail, telecommunications, utilities and others. The market for mobile middleware has been segmented on the basis region into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, South America, and Middle East & Africa (MEA). North America was the dominant market in 2016, followed by Europe and Asia Pacific.There are a large number of companies who are active in the mobile middleware market, and who follow different strategies for growth and maintaining its competitiveness. Major companies in the mobile middleware market are IBM Corporation (The U.S.), Microsoft Corporation (The U.S.), Oracle Corporation (The U.S.), Hewlett-Packard Company (The U.S.), TIBCO Software, Inc. (The U.S.), Unisys Corporation (The U.S.), Fujitsu, Ltd. (Japan), SAP SE (Germany), Software AG (Germany), and Open Text Corporation (Canada) among various 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. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who us e 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, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports thrive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Motion Controllers Market Healthy with Impressive Rate of Adoption

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Motion Controllers control the velocity and position of machines. These controllers can be implemented with the help of both analog and digital computers. A motion controller comprises of load, prime mover, sensors and controlling machine for proper functioning of prime mover and load. Moreover, it is used to accomplish speed accuracy, increased position, fast reaction time, smooth movements, cost reduction, integrated automation, improved efficiency and consistency, elimination of hazards and better diagnosis and troubleshooting among others. These devices incorporate high force magnet materials, precise dimensional tolerance and innovative design machines. Motion controllers are widely used in printing, packaging, textile, assembly industries, semiconductor production and many other automation systems.Obtain Report Details @The key driving factors for motion controllers market are increasing venture by manufacturing companies and rising concern for industrial safety. Moreover, immense developments of automation market along with rapid globalization have collectively increased the demand for huge production capacity within limited time frame. Thus there has been a surge in implementation of automation systems in industries worldwide. Different geographical drivers are also accountable for the growth of this market. In addition, demand from developing countries, such as India, China and Brazil are expected to create opportunities for motion controllers market in the future. However, high manufacturing cost and lack of skilled workers are hindering the growth of the market. This challenge has to be addressed by manufacturers in order to ensure efficient applications of motion controllers.Global motion controllers market can be broadly classified on the basis of technology, application and geography. By technology, the market for motion controllers has been broadly segmented into computerized numerical control and general motion control. Usage of these controllers is much simpler in general motion control machines compared to computerized numerical control machines. The market can be subdivided by application into automotive, machinery manufacturing, logistics, aerospace and defense, electronics and semiconductor, food and beverage, medical, paper and printing, oil and gas and energy. Machinery manufacturing, logistics and electronics and semiconductor are the major sectors which are expected to grow at a significant rate during the forecast period from 2015 to 2021. The major reason is attributed to potential demand for process automation and industrial safety in these sectors. By geography, the global market for motion controllers has been classified into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World.Get accurate market forecast and analysis on the Motion Controllers Market. Request a sample to stay abreast on the key trends impacting this marketIn the present scenario, the market for motion controllers is dominated by Asia Pacific in terms of revenue, followed by North America and Europe. The major factor responsible for potential development of this market in Asia Pacific is huge adoption of these devices coupled with rapid technological advancement. However, North America and Europe is anticipated to grow at a significant rate in the future, primarily due to huge investment by manufacturing industries along with increase in industrialization.Some of the major players in this market are Schneider Electric (France), Siemens AG (Germany), Parker Hannifin Corp. (U.S.), Yaskawa Electric Corp. (Japan), ABB Ltd. (Switzerland), Moog Inc. (U.S.), Bosh Rexroth AG (Germany), Altra Industrial Motion Corporation (U.S.), Dover Motion Systems (U.S.) and Rockwell Automation (U.S.).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. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who us e 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, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports thrive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Photoelectric Sensors Market Healthy with Impressive Rate of Adoption

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Photoelectric sensors are used to detect the size, shape, color, distance, absence or presence of a target entity. Photoelectric sensors integrate a receiver and a light transmitter. The sensor emits light through the transmitter to the target which is then reflected, and the light beam is received by the photoelectric receiver which activates the sensor output. Photoelectric sensors are a type of position sensor that uses light emitting diodes as the light source. One significant feature of photoelectric sensors is that it detects non-metal objects, apart from functioning over long sensing distances. The optical components present in photoelectric sensors are used for remote sensing whereas the electronic components are enclosed in a control panel in a different place.The market is primarily driven due to the high reliability and easy installation of the retro reflective photoelectric sensors. The retro-reflective photoelectric sensors provide high performance for object detection even with misaligned, small reflectors, heavy soiling or long range. Industrial automation is also primarily driving the growth of photoelectric sensors market globally. The photoelectric sensors are widely used in packaging industries for detection of barcode label on mount, detection of double fed containers and detection of bottles without label among others. Moreover, the photoelectric sensors in parking facilities are used for the detection of the car positioning at multi-level car parking.Obtain Report Details @The photoelectric sensors market is facing challenges due to lack of sensing capability. The sensors when used at a short range, it becomes difficult to set the sensitivity control operating point. Moreover, the photoelectric beam is also affected by dust, smoke and fog, depending on the placement, sensitivity, frequency and brightness. Such factors negatively affected the market attractiveness of photoelectric sensors at global level. Smart photoelectric sensors are identified as important opportunity in the global photoelectric sensors market. Introduction of smart photoelectric sensors is expected to boost the growth of photoelectric sensors market in future years.Based on technology, the market is segregated into retro-reflective, diffuse and through beam. As of 2015, in terms of revenue, photoelectric sensors using retro-reflective technology held the largest share. The retro-reflective photoelectric sensor used with a polarized filter helps in eliminating false signals which occur when the sensor faces shiny target. Furthermore, the retro-reflective sensor is easy to set up and install compared to most of the other sensors. It also consumes less time to install as it houses a single sensor wired and installed. Due to these factors, the retro-reflective photoelectric sensors are more in demand compared to diffuse and through beam photoelectric sensors.This 181-page report gives readers a comprehensive overview of the Photoelectric Sensors Market. Browse to unlock the hidden opportunities in this marketIn terms of types, global photoelectric sensors market is segregated into proximity photoelectric sensor, fiber optic photoelectric sensor and others. As of 2015, in terms of revenue, proximity photoelectric sensor held the largest share. Wide application scope and comparatively low cost are two of the factors driving the application penetration of proximity photoelectric sensors globally.By application, the market is segmented into parking facilities, elevators, building automation, semiconductor devices, packaging machines and others. As of 2015, in terms of revenue, parking facilities held the largest share. Rising demand for safety, process efficiency and precision in sensing has fuelled the application growth of photoelectric sensors in different industry verticals.Based on geography, the photoelectric sensor market is segregated into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World. The Europe accounted for the highest market revenue share in 2015. During the forecast period, it is expected to hold highest regional market share. Increasing demand of industrial automation is the primary driving factor in this region.Major industry participants include. Rockwell Automation Inc. (U.S),`Keyence Corporation (Japan), Avago Corporation (Singapore), Panasonic Corporation (Japan), Omron Corporation (Japan), Balluff Inc. (U.S), Schneider Electric SE (France), Baumer Group (Switzerland), Sick AG (Germany), Eaton Corporation PLC (Ireland), Autonics Corporation (South Korea), IFM Electronic Ltd. (Germany) 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. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who us e 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, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports thrive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
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WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration's goals for renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, released late Monday, may have looked dry. To trade lawyers, they were fighting words.

The 17-page document the administration put out was admittedly hard to digest, even for trade lawyers. Because NAFTA is so huge -- trade among the United States, Canada and Mexico was $1.1 trillion in 2016 -- the negotiating goals had to cover a lot of ground, too.

But disguised in the dry, sanitized language of trade agreements, there was plenty of drama. Four points in particular seem destined to generate conflict with Canada and Mexico, the U.S.'s largest export markets.

SCRAPPING DISPUTE RESOLUTION PANEL

The administration proposed getting rid of NAFTA's Chapter 19 dispute settlement mechanism, which has long been a thorn in the U.S.-Canada relationship. Such a move could result in a lot more tit-for-tat trade actions and potentially disrupt business between the countries.

When a U.S. industry believes that a Canadian or Mexican competitor is gaming the rules of trade by receiving unfair subsidies or selling its products in other countries at ultra-low prices, it can appeal to a U.S. international trade court to put extra taxes, called anti-dumping or countervailing duties, on those products. But Chapter 19 allows a foreign country, like Canada, to appeal this decision before a panel made up of officials from both countries.

In practice, having Chapter 19 has meant there are a lot fewer trade cases among the U.S., Canada and Mexico, because there's also a chance they will be referred to this panel and dismissed. As research by Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, shows, 9.2 percent of U.S. imports from China are covered by these so-called anti-dumping and countervailing duties, compared with 2.7 percent of imports from the rest of the world, and only 1.3 percent of U.S. imports from NAFTA countries.

But some U.S. industries, like the lumber industry, have argued against the Chapter 19 dispute settlement mechanism, claiming that it prevents the U.S. from fully enforcing its own trade laws. In 1993, Canada won a victory on this panel that reversed a decision by the U.S. trade court to impose duties on lumber.

"If you take that away, you could see a lot more anti-dumping and countervailing duty cases against Canada and Mexico, and that's why I would expect to see Canada and Mexico push against this," said Bown.

On Tuesday, Canadian ambassador to the U.S. David McNaughton said in a speech in Edmonton that Canada would be willing to discuss whether the dispute mechanism needs to be "improved or modernized.... But there needs to be some kind of a dispute resolution mechanism. It's part of the agreement."

REMOVING EXEMPTION FROM U.S. SAFEGUARDS

The United States can impose broad barriers, like tariffs or quotas, to help a U.S. industry that is "seriously injured" under a section of the 1974 U.S. trade law known as Section 201-Global Safeguards. But under the terms of NAFTA, Canada and Mexico are always excluded from those penalties. That means that when the Bush administration imposed broad tariffs on steel imports in 2002, for example, the measures didn't affect the other countries of North America.

In its negotiating goals released Monday night, the administration proposed scrapping that exemption. That means that Canada and Mexico could become ensnared if the administration decides to do something to, for example, protect the U.S. solar industry, a safeguard case it's currently considering.

For obvious reasons, scrapping this exception for Canada and Mexico seems like to generate their opposition. Speaking on Mexican television Tuesday, Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo expressed concern about the United States getting rid of this provision. "This will all have to be subject to the three sides, being in agreement in the process," he said, according to Reuters.

ELIMINATING BARRIERS FOR AGRICULTURE

In its negotiating goals, the administration proposed getting rid of "non-tariff barriers to U.S. agricultural exports including discriminatory barriers, restrictive administration of tariff rate quotas, other unjustified measures that unfairly limit access to markets for U.S. goods, such as cross subsidization, price discrimination, and price undercutting."

Sound scintillating? No? Well, experts say that this jumble of trade jargon is actually pointed at a heated dispute the United States has with Canada over products including dairy. U.S. farmers and their representatives argue that Canada has been unfairly protecting its dairy market, hurting U.S. interests in the process. This provision in the NAFTA goals would do away with the protections Canada is still able to maintain on the market, opening it up to American competition.

This provision is a little different than the first two, says Bown of Peterson. Here, the United States is actually proposing removing barriers to trade, whereas in the provisions about Chapter 19 and global safeguards, they are asking for what he calls a "less-free free trade agreement." Regardless, the Canadian dairy industry is likely to fight fiercely against them.

ADDING LABOR, ENVIRONMENTAL PROVISIONS

The administration's NAFTA goals contain several provisions on labor and the environment that trade experts say are very general versions of what was negotiated in the Trans Pacific Partnership - including the right for workers to form unions, the abolition of slave and child labor, and commitments to international agreements for the protection of endangered species. For the first time, a new NAFTA would make these provisions part of a core trade agreement and enforceable through trade action.

Mexico, Canada and the United States agreed generally to these principles before, as part of the TPP, a deal that Trump officially withdrew from on his first Monday in office. But when Canada and Mexico agreed to these terms, they were also receiving concessions from the nine other countries that were involved in the TPP negotiations, not just the United States. It's not clear whether Mexico, which has the most work to do to meet these requirements, will oppose them now that they are receiving less in return.

-- Ana Swanson, The Washington Post
Warner Bros. Pictures

Critic Marc Mohan runs down the best flicks of the week, from epic action to intimate drama

A scene from the Warner Bros. Pictures action thriller "Dunkirk," a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

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'Dunkirk' in 70mm

Director Christopher Nolan's first foray into actual history, chronicling the epic evacuation of British troops from the titular beach in 1940, has been getting great reviews not only for its inventive storytelling but for its epic visual sweep. It's also the first major studio movie shot in eye-popping 70mm since Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight." As such, any true cinephile will want to see it projected in that format, which is only possible in two Oregon theaters. One of them is a historical landmark; the other sits in the middle of an open-air shopping mall. Your call. (Opens Thursday, July 20, Hollywood Theatre, Bridgeport Village)

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'A Ghost Story'

If a cast of thousands spread across the English Channel isn't your cup of tea, how about an intimate (near) two-hander concerned with profound stuff like death, grief and the vastness of time? Director David Lowery reunites with the stars of his breakthrough film, "Ain't Them Bodies Saints," for the story of a woman (Rooney Mara) mourning her dead husband (Casey Affleck, often sheet-clad). His attempts to console her are confounded by his increasing separation from the here and now. (Opens Friday, July 21, Cinema 21)

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Marc Mohan | Special to The Oregonian

'Angels of Sin'

The Northwest Film Center's "Classic French Cinema" series continues this week with a pair of gems. Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le Samourai," screening Sunday, is always a treat on the big screen, but the real find is the 1943 first feature from director Robert Bresson, originally titled "Les anges du peche." It's conventional compared to Bresson's later, inimitable masterworks, but its rarity  never released on U.S. DVD or Blu-ray, unavailable via streaming services  makes this 35mm screening one not to miss. (Saturday, July 22, Northwest Film Center)

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'Moka'

In this modest but effective French thriller, a grieving mother (Emmanuelle Devos) tries to track down the hit-and-run driver who killed her teenage son. Thinking she's found the responsible Mercedes, she insinuates herself into the lives of its owners, a beautician (Nathalie Baye) and her physical trainer boyfriend (David Clavel). Things, of course, are not entirely as they seem in this cool, briskly plotted film that wouldn't be out of place in the filmography of the "French Hitchcock," Claude Chabrol. (Opens Friday, July 21, Living Room Theater)

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OMSI Science Fiction Film Festival

It's easy to forget that the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry's Empirical Theater has one of the biggest screens in town, and they don't use it just for showing documentaries about polar bears or volcanoes. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!) For the next two weeks, OMSI's annual science fiction film fest will take full advantage, featuring titles from the familiar ("Inception," "The Fifth Element") to the relatively obscure (1972's "Stalker," Sean Connery in "Zardoz"). (July 21-Aug. 5, OMSI, check omsi.edu for full schedule)

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'The 4th'

This low-budget indie comedy has about as much ambition and discipline as its main character, a hapless slacker trying to arrange an Independence Day backyard barbecue. His travels and travails take him all over Los Angeles and put him in contact with a range of eccentric, annoying folks. Actor-writer-director Andre Hyland's first feature behind the camera, which was (mostly) shot in four days and premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, doesn't have much more to offer than shaggy charm, but sometimes that's enough to warrant 80 minutes in an air-conditioned theater. (Opens Friday, July 21, Clinton Street Theater)
Multnomah County District Attorney Rod Underhill may be 100 percent correct in concluding that a police accountability measure negotiated by the city last year could jeopardize the ability to prosecute police officers who shoot someone.

He may be appropriately cautious in advising that internal-affairs investigators hold off on interviewing officers who use deadly force until criminal investigators and a grand jury weigh possible charges in the shooting first.

But Underhill's suggestion to essentially put criminal considerations first shortchanges the police accountability practices that this weary community has been promised. That's unacceptable. The city should instead look to devise, negotiate and, if necessary, litigate a solution that allows Portland Police to do what many other law enforcement agencies already do - gather on-scene accounts from officers who use deadly force to examine whether employees acted appropriately according to bureau training and policies.

As The Oregonian/OregonLive's Maxine Bernstein reported, getting such immediate statements from officers has been a key reform sought by the federal justice department and other police accountability advocates. And it seemed that the city had finally scored a win last year when Mayor Charlie Hales negotiated a new contract with the police union that eliminated the so-called "48-hour rule" that granted officers two days before being asked to give internal affairs investigators a statement.

But about four months ago, Underhill sent a memo to city and police officials that warned against requiring an officer to give a statement to personnel investigators. He cited a 1984 Oregon Supreme Court opinion that found the Oregon Constitution's protection against self-incrimination requires granting someone who is compelled to testify broad immunity from prosecution. While that case centered on requiring testimony from a witness in a burglary case, Underhill argues that the same immunity standard applies for an officer compelled to give a statement to administrative internal-affairs investigators. Even though the investigation is separate from the criminal inquiry, information can still leak from one to the other.

But there are agencies around the country that successfully compel statements as part of an administrative inquiry that does not infringe on their officers' constitutional rights. And Underhill's own chief deputy district attorney told The Oregonian/OregonLive Editorial Board in February 2016 that he believed "a carefully walled off internal affairs statement, even if compelled, would not impair a criminal prosecution."

Clearly, the city needs more information before adopting a policy that fundamentally betrays its promise to the public. Mayor Ted Wheeler has already said he is talking with Underhill's office, as well as city attorneys and lawyers from the state and federal justice departments to work through the conflict. That's a good first step. Additionally, he should direct staff to review how other jurisdictions manage dueling investigations to maintain both the fundamentals of accountability and the officer's constitutional rights.

No one wants an officer who criminally shoots someone to escape prosecution. But the public should bear in mind that an enduring culture of accountability comes through the administrative actions that the bureau takes each day to train, evaluate, correct and discipline officers -- not through the exceedingly rare interventions by the criminal justice system. In Oregon, grand juries almost never bring criminal charges against police officers in use of force cases. There's a recognition of the difficulty involved in making split-second decisions on behalf of the public's safety. Convictions, as national experience shows, are far rarer. Portland citizens would be better served by ensuring that the police bureau has the policies it needs to hold employees accountable for maintaining professional standards through administrative means rather than pinning their hopes on criminal charges.

Wheeler should also fast-track development of a program to outfit police officers with body cameras, with a goal of rolling out their use by next year. While body cameras are not a panacea, they can provide a supplemental - or, if necessary, a replacement - account of an incident in which a police officer used force.

It's unfortunate that Underhill, an elected official, didn't think to join the public conversation a lot sooner, considering the high-profile discussions on the topic for years among federal justice officials, police commanders, past and current mayors and police reform advocates. He can help rectify that failure by arranging a forum with Wheeler in which they can share the legal concerns and policy considerations directly with the public.

The Oregonian/OregonLive Editorial Board

Oregonian editorials

Editorials reflect the collective opinion of The Oregonian/OregonLive editorial board, which operates independently of the newsroom.

Members of the editorial board are Laura Gunderson, Helen Jung, Mark Katches and John Maher.

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If you have questions about the opinion section, contact Laura Gunderson, editorial and commentary editor, at 503-221-8378 or lgunderson@oregonian.com.

Editorial Agenda 2017

Boost student success

Get Oregon's financial house in order

Help our homeless

Honor our diverse values

Make Portland a city that works

Expand access to public records

________________________

Read more about the editorial board's priorities for Oregon.
LAS VEGAS -- Armed assault and lawful protest were the opposing scenarios presented to a federal jury hearing the retrial in Las Vegas of four men who bore assault-style weapons during a standoff that stopped government agents from rounding up Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's cattle in April 2014.

Acting U.S. Attorney Steven Myhre displayed photos and told jurors during opening statements on Monday that evidence will show the defendants used what he called "the working end of a rifle barrel" to bend the law to their will, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

"These four defendants got on a bridge, armed with semi-automatic rifles, and threatened to shoot law enforcement officers who stood below them in a wash," Myhre said as he urged the jurors to focus on the conspiracy, assault on a federal agent, weapon and other charges against the defendants.

Defense attorney Richard Tanasi, representing Idaho resident Steven Stewart, countered that the defendants were just individuals protesting the U.S. government.

"This case is about standing up for what you believe in. Nothing more, nothing less," Tanasi said.

The defense openings represented a condensed version of statements that attorneys gave in February, at the onset of a trial that resulted in a jury finding two co-defendants guilty in April of some charges, but failing to reach verdicts for Scott Drexler, Richard Lovelien, Eric Parker and Stewart.

Rulings since then by Chief U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro have barred the defense from referencing constitutional rights to freely assemble and to bear arms.

Defense attorneys are also barred from mentioning alleged misconduct or excessive force by law enforcement.

Those arguments represented the core of the defense case in the first trial, as lawyers said their clients came from other states to Bunkerville, Nevada, after viewing online postings depicting law enforcement officers using stun guns and police dogs to control angry protesters and Bundy family members.

Defense attorney Todd Leventhal, representing Drexler, told the jury on Monday that his client "saw images that shocked his conscience" and traveled from Idaho to Nevada because he believes "no man is above the law, badge or not."

Attorney Shawn Perez, who represents Lovelien, noted that "not a shot was fired, not a bottle was thrown, not a rock was thrown" during the standoff, and that "nobody was injured, and everyone went home."

Myhre accused the four men of conspiring with Bundy to thwart the federal government's roundup of roughly 1,000 cows from public land.

The cattle impoundment operation followed a decades-long dispute over grazing rights that pitted Cliven Bundy against the Bureau of Land Management.

Both sides on Monday characterized the grazing dispute as peripheral to the trial.

The men are charged with conspiracy, extortion, threats, assault, obstruction of justice, and weapons counts. If convicted of all counts, they face a mandatory minimum sentence of 57 years in prison.

Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan, and two other defendants are due for trial later this year. Six others, including two other Bundy sons, are slated for trial next year.

-- The Associated Press
The nursery in Amy Fabbrini and Eric Ziegler's home is filled with unread children's books and unworn baby clothes. A Winnie the Pooh blanket lies untouched inside a crib where a child has never slept.

For nearly four years, the Redmond couple has been fighting to prove to the state of Oregon that they are intellectually capable of raising their children. The Department of Human Services has removed both of their boys, saying the parents are too mentally limited to be good parents.

Fabbrini, 31, and Ziegler, 38, lost custody of their older son, Christopher, shortly after he was born. Five months ago, the state took their second child, newborn Hunter, directly from the hospital. Both are now in foster care.

"I love kids, I was raised around kids, my mom was a preschool teacher for 20-plus years, and so I've always been around kids," Fabbrini said. "That's my passion. I love to do things with kids, and that's what I want to do in the future, something that has to do with kids."

No abuse or neglect has been found, but each parent has a degree of limited cognitive abilities. Rather than build a network of support around them, the state child welfare agency has moved to terminate the couple's parental rights and make the boys available for adoption.

It's impossible to know the full story when child welfare officials are unable to comment, but the case has left the couple and their advocates heartbroken.

The case lays bare fundamental questions about what makes a good parent and who, ultimately, gets to decide when someone's not good enough. And it strikes at the heart of the stark choices child welfare workers face daily: should a child be removed or is there some middle ground?

For now, the divide is clear. Fabbrini's father lines up against the couple. A state legislator is advocating for them. The parents themselves are struggling against a system that feels impersonal, unyielding and inscrutable.

"They are saying they are intellectually incapable without any guidelines to go by," said Sherrene Hagenbach, a former volunteer with the state agency who oversaw visits with the couple and Christopher from last June through August.

Hagenbach is a professional mediator and a board member of Healthy Families of the High Desert. After she told state caseworkers she thought the couple was capable of raising Christopher, she recalls, she was told her volunteer services were no longer needed.

She's spent the past year advocating for Fabbrini and Ziegler.

"They're saying that this foster care provider is better for the child because she can provide more financially, provide better education, things like that," Hagenbach said. "If we're going to get on that train, Bill Gates should take my children. There's always somebody better than us, so it's a very dangerous position to be in."

The state Department of Human Services says it cannot comment on cases because of confidentiality concerns, but some of its reasoning is spelled out in court filings.

According to documents provided by the couple, psychological evaluations tested Fabbrini's IQ at about 72, placing her in the "extremely low to borderline range of intelligence," and Ziegler's about 66, placing him in the "mild range of intellectual disability." The average IQ is between 90 and 110.

Fabbrini formerly worked as a grocery clerk. Ziegler worked as a carpet layer, he said, but now receives Social Security benefits for his mental disability.

"I have a learning disability, but it's very, very mild," Ziegler said. He understands that he learns more slowly than some, but says "everybody learns at their pace."

Neither currently works, but they have steady housing: a three-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot home owned by Ziegler's parents, who live out of state. Ziegler has a driver's license. Both have standard high school diplomas. And seven years ago, after a divorce, Fabbrini was granted shared custody of twin boys she had with her ex-husband.

But things changed when Christopher arrived  as a total surprise  on Sept. 9, 2013.

Fabbrini said she didn't know she was pregnant.

"Here and there I have kidney issues so I just thought I was having kidney issues, that's what I associated the pain with," she said. "I was trying to go to sleep and trying to get comfortable ... and I felt this weird pain down there."

That was Christopher, who was born at Ziegler's home weighing 7.4 pounds. The couple called for an ambulance, and a hospital evaluation determined both mother and son were healthy.

Fabbrini at the time was living at her father's home with the twins, then age 6, but often spending the night with Ziegler. Her father, Raymond Fabbrini, says he urged her to put Christopher up for adoption.

Raymond Fabbrini, 74, is a gruff man who has strong feelings about Amy's abilities. "She doesn't have the instincts to be a mother," he said.

He said he and his wife provided most of the parenting for the twins. His wife died of Alzheimer's a week before Christopher's birth.

He said his daughter had been primarily home schooled and he expressed frustration with her, unabashedly calling her a lazy child.

"Me and Amy were never close," he said. "She got me mad so many times. She wouldn't do nothing."

Ziegler ended up taking Christopher home but Raymond Fabbrini said within days members of his family alerted the state to concerns.

According to child welfare records provided by the couple, Ziegler "has been sleeping with the baby on the floor and almost rolled over on him. There were also reports that Eric is easily frustrated and often forgets to feed his dog."

Ziegler says he was lying next to his son while feeding him. The dog (which he still has) is well-fed, perhaps even too plump.

According to a court appeal describing the case, the state put Christopher in foster care because both parents had "limited cognitive abilities that interfere with (their) ability to safely parent the child."

Since then, at the direction of child welfare workers, the couple said they've taken classes on parenting, first aid, CPR and nutrition through the Women, Infants and Children agency, the nonprofit MountainStar, Healthy Families of the High Desert and more.

They had supervised visits, but Christopher remained in foster care.

Over several in-person and phone interviews with The Oregonian/OregonLive, they seemed like capable and caring adults  frustrated and confused by the state's intervention, but no more so than any parent would be in their situation.

"We've just done everything and more than what they've asked us to," Fabbrini said.

"It doesn't seem like it's good enough for them," Ziegler added. "They're saying, 'Who would parent Christopher better, the foster parents or the parents?' is basically what they're going on."

Fabbrini and Zielger now live together. The twins Fabbrini had with her ex-husband are now living with their father.

Earlier this year, Fabbrini gave birth to another son  this time, no surprise. The nursery room was ready when Hunter was born Feb. 16, 2017, but they would never bring him home. The state took custody of the baby while Fabbrini was still in the hospital.

Fabbrini's aunt, Lenora Turner, serves as a state-approved chaperone for the couple's visits with Hunter.

"I would describe her (Fabbrini) as a strong person, because she's going through all this and most of the family turned their back on her," Turner said. "She is a strong young lady, determined, and I've always seen that in her. When she had something in mind she was determined to make it happen."

She says Fabbrini and Ziegler have loving visits with Hunter.

"I honestly don't understand why they can't have their children," Turner said. "I go to the grocery store and I see other people with their children and they're standing up in the grocery cart... and I think, how come they get to keep their children? How do they decide whose child they're going to take and whose child can stay?"

  

In reports of concerns about the couple's parenting skills, a MountainStar worker recalled having to prompt them to have Christopher wash his hands after using the toilet and to apply sunscreen to all of his skin rather than just his face. Fabbrini and Ziegler's attorneys argue these weren't sufficient reasons to keep them from their son.

"This is a case that just simply presents this question to the court, and that is: What level of disability denies human beings the right to raise a child. There's no smoking gun evidence of abuse," Fabbrini's attorney argued during a June 2016 hearing.

In December 2015, Ziegler's lawyer filed an unsuccessful motion to return Christopher to his parents, arguing there was no current threat of serious loss or injury to him.

"A cognitively impaired parent can still parent," attorney Aron Perez-Selsky said. "Their rights cannot be terminated simply because they suffer from cognitive impairment, so long as they are able to put together a plan for how they're going to safely care for their kids with the support of people in the community."

Across the country, a national study estimates that somewhere between 40 percent and 80 percent of parents with intellectual disabilities lose their parental rights. Susan Yuan is the former associate director of the Center on Disability and Community Inclusion at University of Vermont. She's now president of The Association for Successful Parenting, which provides parenting assessments for parents with intellectual disabilities.

"They (case workers) have very little experience of people with intellectual disabilities, and because all their orientation is for the safety of the child, they err on the side of overprotecting the child without realizing that the parent can do it," Yuan said. "It's coming from a good place, but they need more exposure to people with disabilities."

She said there are many myths about parents with intellectual disabilities, including the idea that IQ is an important factor in parenting.

"Research literature has found that the IQ really doesn't correlate with parenting until the IQ is below 50," she said. "A parent of any IQ, a parent with a 150 IQ, can be a bad parent. ... I would say that if the child can be safe and loved in their own family, that this is appropriate parenting and you can put other opportunities in place."

  

In 2013, the advocacy group Disability Rights Oregon worked on legislation that would have barred the state from deeming a parent unfit based solely on a parent's illness or disability, including intellectual disability.

But the bill didn't pass out of a House committee.

Oregon Sen. Tim Knopp, a Bend Republican, has had several meetings with Fabbrini and Ziegler, who live in his district.

"My impression of them is that they were just like any other couple, and they were trying to be successful in life, just like anyone else would be, and they wanted to be together as a family," Knopp said. "I didn't see any issues when I met with them that would automatically disqualify them from being good parents."

He said he would "absolutely" support a change to the law that would prevent a parent's disability alone from being the basis for placing a child in foster care.

"The state has a responsibility to help parents reunite with their children, and if there are issues that are keeping them from doing that, especially for people with disabilities, I believe that as a state, we should be supporting them and trying to help them stay together as families," Knopp said. "In a case where there is no specific allegation of abuse or neglect, I think the state should be looking to be supportive of uniting families and not sending kids into foster care."

-- Samantha Swindler

@editorswindler / 503-294-4031

sswindler@oregonian.com

Please join the conversation on our Facebook page: http://facebook.com/theoregonian
Donald Trump,Vladimir Putin

President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany on July 7, 2017.

(Evan Vucci / AP)

After his much-publicized, two-and a quarter-hour meeting early this month with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Germany, President Donald Trump met informally with the Russian leader for an additional hour later the same day.

The second meeting, unreported at the time, took place at a dinner for G20 leaders, a senior administration official said. Halfway through the meal, Trump left his own seat to occupy a chair next to Putin. Trump was alone, and Putin was attended only by his official interpreter.

The encounter underscores the extent to which Trump was eager throughout the summit to cultivate a friendship with Putin. During last year's campaign, Trump spoke admiringly of Putin and at times seemed captivated by him.

Meeting each other face-to-face for the first time in Hamburg, the two presidents seemed to have a chemistry in their more formal bilateral session, evidenced by the fact that it dragged on for more than two hours.

But Trump's newly-disclosed conversation with Putin at the G20 dinner is likely to stoke further criticism, including perhaps from some fellow Republicans in Congress, that he is too cozy with the leader of a major U.S. adversary.

The only version of the conversation provided to White House aides was that given by Trump himself, the official said. Reporters traveling with the White House were not informed, and there was no formal readout of the chat.

The administration official spoke on condition of anonymity to confirm the session, first reported Monday by Ian Bremmer, president of the New York-based Eurasia Group, in a newsletter to group clients. Bremmer said in a telephone interview that he was told by two participants who witnessed it at the dinner, which was attended only by leaders attending the summit and some of their spouses.

Leaders who reported the meeting to him, Bremmer said, were "bemused, non-plussed , befuddled" by the animated conversation, held in full view - but not listening distance - of others present.

Putin's aide provided the only Russian-English interpretation, the official said, because Trump's designated dinner companion for the evening was Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and the president has brought only a Japanese-English interpreter.

The formal Putin-Trump meeting earlier in the day was attended only by the leaders and interpreters, along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Scheduled for only 35 minutes, it ran well over the time scheduled for it.

But following official statements on what transpired, there was widespread confusion over whether Trump agreed, as Putin later said, to accept the Kremlin's denial of any wrongdoing regarding interference in last years election.

Trump said he twice asked Putin if the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia had meddled in the race were true, and Putin twice denied it, so he moved on to other subjects of importance to the bilateral relationship, including Syria.

One senior European official whose head of government was at the meeting said that it was not unusual for leaders to circulate or "withdraw to a corner" in such private gatherings.

"Part of the rationale is the flurry of bilateral contacts that happen," the official said. "I don't find it a sensation," he said of the lengthy dinner chat, although "maybe Trump and Putin are a little different" than other attendees.

(c) 2017, Karen Deyoung and Philip Rucker wrote this story.
Joe Biden is returning to Portland.

The former U.S. vice president will land at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on November 30 as part of his "American Promise Tour." He will be talking politics and public service while plugging his forthcoming memoir, "Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship and Purpose."

Tickets to the event likely will go fast. Biden, who's been in the public eye for more than 40 years, has become America's "Uncle Joe" for reasons both good and bad.

The Scranton, Pennsylvania, native is smart and funny and committed to his country. He also flamed out during the 1988 presidential campaign in the face of plagiarism charges, and he's earned a reputation for being "handsy" with women. He's suffered gutting personal tragedies and soaring professional victories.

All of which is why he remains popular. He comes across as a real person, not a robotic career politician issuing preprogrammed sound bites. He's 74 years old and a repeat presidential bridesmaid, but some polling shows him beating President Donald Trump in a prospective 2020 election showdown. Biden, who came to Portland in 2014 and caused a stir when he unexpectedly dropped into the Salt & Straw ice-cream shop, has offered no indication that he will run for office again.

"Promise Me, Dad" is about Biden's experiences serving in President Barack Obama's administration while his son, Beau, was undergoing treatment for cancer. The title refers to a letter Beau wrote to his father in which he said, "Promise me, Dad. Give me your word that no matter what happens, you're going to be all right." Beau, who was the attorney general of Delaware, died in May 2015. (Such a personally painful loss was all too familiar to the vice president. In 1972, his first wife and year-old daughter Naomi died in a car crash, just weeks after his election to the U.S. Senate.)

"I have always been fortunate to have an incredible support system around me, and I understand how many people in this country go through far worse than I have, with far less support," Biden has said about why he decided to write a memoir. "I hope my own story will strike a chord with other Americans who have walked the same path I have."

Tickets for the show at Schnitzer Hall range from $25 to $325.

-- Douglas Perry
Just two years ago, Microsoft cast its Wilsonville factory as the harbinger of a new era in American technology manufacturing.

The tech giant stamped, "Manufactured in Portland, OR, USA" on each Surface Hub it made there. It invited The New York Times and Fast Company magazine to tour the plant in 2015, then hired more than 100 people to make the enormous, $22,000 touch-screen computer.

But last week Microsoft summoned its Wilsonville employees to an early-morning meeting and announced it will close the factory and lay off 124 employees - nearly everyone at the site - plus dozens of contract workers.

Panos Panay, the vice president in charge of the Surface product group, traveled from corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington, to tell the staff that Microsoft was moving production to the same place it makes all other Surface products.

Though workers present say he didn't disclose the location, Microsoft has previously said it makes its other Surface computers in China.

The company hasn't explained, in public or to its Wilsonville employees, why it gave up on domestic manufacturing so quickly and didn't respond to repeated inquiries for comment. But the only thing surprising about Microsoft's decision is that it tried to make its computers in the U.S. in the first place.

"Domestic manufacturing is difficult because costs are high and qualified engineers are scarce," wrote Mitsuru Igami, a Yale economist, in an email.

Even as President Donald Trump heralds "Made in America" week, high-tech manufacturing remains an endangered species across the United States. Oregon has lost more than 14,000 electronics manufacturing jobs since 2001, according to state data, more than a quarter of the total job base.

Microsoft is just the latest to go, following an exodus by Tektronix, InFocus, Hewlett-Packard and many others that used to employ substantial numbers of Oregon factory workers.

Originally, tech companies went overseas in search of low labor costs. And that's still a major pull, according to Igami. But eventually a critical mass of manufacturers arrived and brought the supply chain with them. Component parts, industrial supplies and other production essentials are now more readily available in China and Vietnam than they are in the Willamette Valley.

Microsoft may have thought it was doing something different with the Surface Hub, a niche product that sold for ten times the price of a laptop. It designed the jumbo, touch-screen computer for conference rooms and command centers. The company apparently concluded that it could be economical to make the high-cost, low-volume computer in Oregon.

"We looked at the economics of East Asia and electronics manufacturing," Microsoft vice president Michael Angiulo told Fast Company in a fawning 2015 article that heaped praise on the Surface Hub and Microsoft's Wilsonville factory.

"When you go through the math, (offshoring) doesn't pencil out," Angiulo said. "It favors things that are small and easy to ship, where the development processes and tools are a commodity. The machines that it takes to do that lamination? Those only exist in Wilsonville. There's one set of them, and we designed them."

Surface Hub production was plagued from the start, though. Microsoft delayed manufacturing twice, pushing back the launch by six months, and raised the price on each model by $2,000.

It's not clear what caused those problems, or if they factored into Microsoft's decision to send the work overseas. Microsoft continues to market the Surface Hub and has limited competition in the market.

The decline in domestic tech manufacturing appears to have eased somewhat in recent years, in both Oregon and nationally. Washington County continues to be Intel's largest and most advanced manufacturing site in the world, in part because semiconductor production is heavily automated and labor is a relatively small portion of the total manufacturing cost.

Nike, meanwhile, has hinted repeatedly that it plans to use advanced technology to augment low-cost manual labor in Asia and do more manufacturing in the U.S.

Josh Lehner, an economist for the state of Oregon, said domestic manufacturing does best when it adds value to a finished product, often in a middle stage between raw materials and final assembly. And, he said, rising labor costs in Asia, coupled with falling manufacturing wages in the U.S., have helped stem the outflow of American factory jobs.

"Those are only going to point toward better production value in the U.S.," Lehner said. "That relative, comparative loss is probably over for now."

Still, it's far more common for companies like Microsoft to export factory jobs than to bring them back. The Wilsonville employees say Microsoft offered them severance, which varied by their level in the organization, and offered a handful of workers design jobs at the company headquarters in Redmond.

"Re-shoring" stories like the tale Microsoft peddled in 2015 are little more than public relations fakery, said Igami, the Yale economist. He called it "lip services or window-dressing to please politicians and the general public."

And Igami said the current political push in Washington is doing little to change the situation. He suggests Americans should be more open to "geeks and foreigners," and embrace science and engineering. He said it will take time and fundamental changes to reverse the loss of domestic production work.

"Developing a manufacturing base is a long-term thing (takes a decade or two)," Igami said. "The U.S. presidency is only four or eight years, so presidential tweets can't reverse the economic fundamentals of offshoring."

-- Mike Rogoway; twitter: @rogoway; 503-294-7699
We live in the age of Brexit and the time of Trump. Around the globe, electoral politics are driven by rising tides of nationalism and isolationism. International relations are riven by border walls and travel bans. Yet, at the same time, tens of millions of people are moving across borders and migrating around the world. Some simply seek a better livelihood. Others desperately flee threats to their very lives. New Zealand itself is a migrant nation. From the earliest Maori voyagers to later Pakeha colonisers and beyond, Aotearoa is populated by settlers. Spend an hour with Julianne Hickey (Director of Caritas Aoteara New Zealand) as she reflects on global migration, Kiwi immigration policies, as well as the biblical obligation to welcome the stranger.

Julianne Hickey is Director of the Catholic social justice agency Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand. With degrees in economics and organisational psychology, she has a background in organisational and business management that includes government policy advice. Before joining Caritas, Julianne was an active volunteer for CAFODa Caritas organisation for England and Wales. She led the monitoring of the Zimbabwean Presidential elections for the Movement for Democratic Change. And she helped organise an inter-racial Catholic student organisation for South Africa.

Date Thursday, 27 July 2017 Time 6:30pm - 8:00pm Audience Alumni,All University,Public Event Category Humanities Event Type Public Lecture

Campus Wellington Department Theology Location Metropolitan Cathedral of the Sacred Heart

40 Hill Street, Thorndon, Wellington Cost Free Contact Name Centre for Theology and Public Issues Wellington Contact Phone 64 4 385 7400 Contact Email ctpi-wellington@otago.ac.nz Website http://www.otago.ac.nz/ctpi/ctpi-wellington/welcomingstrangers.html

Save this event
Goose Creek, SC (29445)

Today

Partly cloudy skies. High 79F. Winds SW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies early will become overcast later during the night. Low 53F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph.
Last month's flood caused major damage to the Jefferson Middle School pool -- and insurance is likely to cover only a fraction of the sizable cost of repairs, Midland Public Schools Superintendent Michael Sharrow said.

Sharrow told the MPS Board of Education on Monday night that after the June 22-23 flood, large cracks in the pool's floor, drains and tiles were discovered. The flood also destroyed pump room equipment. Repairs could cost between $200,000 and $300,000, and insurance would cover only $25,000 of that cost, he said.

"I've said about the middle school pools ... when they die, they're probably done," Sharrow said. "That pool could very well be done."

Sharrow and Assistant Superintendent Robert Cooper said district officials will investigate the insurance company's assessment before making a final decision.

Also at Monday's meeting, the board approved purchases to upgrade the district's radio communication system, continuing an upgrade to digital from analog. The $40,600 purchase from Anderson Radio of Bay City includes nearly $17,000 for an analog and digital repeater to replace the repeater at Midland High School that was struck by lightning several years ago; nearly $15,000 for 20 portable radios, 15 of which will be distributed to the maintenance and grounds department and five of which will go to technology departments; and $8,700 for 10 digital radios, nine of which will be installed on buses. The other will serve as a base station.

Cooper said the district aims to eventually switch all buses to digital radios, which would allow for real-time GPS to track the vehicles.

He added that district officials plan to apply for a grant in the fall to cover at least part of the costs for a further upgrade.

"I think we really need to have that," said board member Brad Blasy. "We need to get these as quickly as we can."

The board also approved a resolution supporting The Dow Chemical Co.'s request to close a portion of South Saginaw Road. Sharrow, who wrote a Midland Daily News opinion column in April supporting the move, noted the longstanding ties between the company and MPS, and the resolution called Dow a "tremendous ally, supporter and champion" of Midland schools.

Dow says the plan, which would mean the closure of about one mile of South Saginaw Road between Mark Putnam and Salzburg roads, would unify its properties and is part of its "growth agenda."

The resolution noted the closure would mean "minor inconveniences" for local residents.

Board member Mary Fredell said she appreciated that a mention of such inconveniences was included, and said she is concerned about access for emergency vehicles to the property and about "additional disruption to residential areas." Board member Patrick Frazee said the move, if approved by Midland City Council, would likely be a "huge relief" to Dow because of potential security issues.

Also Monday, the MPS board approved the purchase of a 2018 Food Transit Van for the district's maintenance department at a cost of $31,420.

Sharrow also told board members that the district is studying its approach to foreign languages, and is considering adding Mandarin to the choice of languages offered. He said that if Mandarin is added as an option, instruction would begin in elementary grades. Sharrow noted after the meeting that interest in French and German has been dropping while interest in Spanish has been growing strongly.

The goal would be to implement changes in the 2018-19 school year.

The superintendent provided a construction update, noting that contractor Barton Malow has increased its local project management team for the numerous projects under way this summer. Sharrow said Barton Malow is "pretty confident" the projects scheduled for completion before school begins Sept. 5 will be done on time. He added that the new Central Park Elementary School is nearly ready, with furniture continuing to arrive.

"We could open today," he said.

Sharrow also told board members that the district's opening day activities for staff on Aug. 29 will feature nationally known speaker Jamie Vollmer, author of the book "Schools Can't Do It Alone."

The former CEO of the Great Midwestern Ice Cream Co., Vollmer was once a harsh critic of public education but now has as his primary goal to "help educators and their allies remove the obstacles to progress and create schools that unfold the full potential of every child," according to his website.
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The Normal Town Council on Monday will consider an ordinance for the 2022 property tax levy estimated to be $13,381,652, which is the same as last year's levy.
BLOOMINGTON  Two former employees of Meadows Mennonite Retirement Community near Chenoa and a third person not associated with Meadows are under investigation after the third person allegedly posted unauthorized pictures and video of six residents on social media.

Two of the six pictures were "inappropriate," Meadows CEO Jay Biere told The Pantagraph on Wednesday. According to an Illinois Department of Public Health statement, the posts included partial nudity.

Biere said any posting on social media without residents' permission is wrong.

"This is completely and totally unacceptable and does not represent Meadows and its values," Biere said. "This is a criminal case and we are fully cooperating with the McLean County Sheriff's Department during its investigation."

McLean County Sheriff Jon Sandage confirmed that an investigation is ongoing.

Biere said a boyfriend of a former Meadows' certified nursing assistant posted the pictures on social media.

"As soon as we became aware of what happened in March, we reported immediately to the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) and the McLean County Sheriff's Department and we notified families of the residents whose pictures were posted," Biere said.

IDPH has fined Meadows $25,000 for allegedly failing to protect the residents and failing to report the unauthorized pictures after it became aware of the matter. But Biere said Meadows reported as soon as it became aware of what happened, and it has terminated the employment of two workers suspected to be involved in the matter.

"We are contesting this fine with the Illinois Department of Public Health and have requested a hearing," Biere said.

"The staff members at Meadows are committed to excellence and compassionate care; it is sad when allegations arise suggesting several individuals chose to act contrary to those values."

"Each week, our employees spend thousands of hours providing compassionate quality care to our residents. ... These allegations of dysfunctional behavior will not overshadow the amazing good work that occurs every day within this community," added the CEO.

Meadows is a 159-bed skilled, intermediate and shelter care facility located at 24588 Church St., rural Chenoa.

The alleged violation of the state Nursing Home Act was among 22 violations by nursing homes statewide, IDPH said in a news release. IDPH releases a list of nursing home alleged violations and fines each quarter.

Other Pantagraph-area facilities cited were Morton Terrace H&R Center, a skilled and intermediate care facility at 191 E. Queenwood Road, Morton, and Washington Christian Village, a skilled care facility at 1201 Newcastle Road, Washington.

Morton Terrace was fined $25,000 for allegedly failing to provide prompt medical care for a resident with a worsening lack of blood flow to a leg, contributing to the resident's death. The facility has requested a hearing.

Washington Christian was fined $50,000 for failing to properly administer a resident's medications, resulting in emergent hospitalization. The facility requested a hearing and paid $27,776.50.
STREATOR  A teenage employee of a Streator trucking company has been killed in a workplace accident.

Livingston County Coroner Danny Watson said Hunter Wolfe, 17, of Streator, was killed while collecting product samples from a rail car parked on a track in South Streator. Wolfe was an employee of Luckey Transfer LLC of Streator.

Hunter had climbed the rail car to gain access to the load and somehow got too close to the high tension power lines that run along the tracks, Watson said. He was found by fellow employees who were also working at the site.

An autopsy was performed Tuesday. The official cause of death is pending toxicology reports, Watson said.

The Streator Police Department, Streator Fire Department, AMT Ambulance, Livingston County Sheriffs Department, Com Ed, OSHA and officials from Luckey Transfer are cooperating with the investigation, Watson said.

Officials with Luckey Transfer did not return calls requesting comment.
With apologies to TV fans of the early 1970s, if you can't pay the fine, don't do the crime.

That's the upshot of impound fees lodged against drivers who are arrested for behind-the-wheel offenses. But impound fees  which can bring a lot of dollars into city hall checkbooks  must be paid regardless of whether the arrestee is, in fact, convicted of a crime.

A pair of Sunday stories by Edith Brady-Lunny revealed that, in Normal, about $877,000 was collected in impound fees between 2014 and 2016. In Bloomington, impound fees of $400 per vehicle have added almost $950,000 to city coffers in the past three years.

An additional $235,000 was collected by the city from the sale of unclaimed autos. Vehicles impounded in Chenoa and Gridley brought about $41,000 for Chenoa and $5,100 for Gridley, which uses the money for vehicle maintenance and equipment upgrades.

A state law allows police agencies to collect up to $500 from a driver in return for release of a vehicle driven during an alleged criminal or traffic offense. But Bloomington defense lawyer Robert Carter believes judges, and not police, should exercise that authority.

"The impound fees are a way for city, towns and villages to feed their budgets with money they did not earn. It's a windfall to cities at the expense of citizens," Carter said in one of the articles.

In Normal, impound fees help cover the town's cost of enforcing the law, particularly in alcohol-related cases, said Police Chief Rick Bleichner.

In small communities, as Chenoa Police Chief Travis Cornwell put it succinctly, "Any revenue is always helpful to a small town."

But cities aren't the only beneficiaries. Since most agencies don't tow-and-stow impounded vehicles, offenders also have to pay a private party (like a tow service) for the additional cost of towing the vehicle and storing it until the fees are paid.

Not every agency follows the practice: McLean County Sheriff Jon Sandage, for instance, doesn't see the sense of imposing a fee on someone who already can't pay the fine. Chenoa and Gridley officers no longer have discretion as to which offender gets which treatment.

Still, impound fees are not the only ones in which fines are tagged for specific uses. In 2007, the state legislature considered adding $5 to the cost of a marriage license, with the increase raising $900,000 a year to help local agencies fight domestic violence.

The idea of finding additional revenue from fines or licenses isn't a new one and it's unlikely to change. As with any bill, the small print explains the additional charges.

And as long as your name is on the bill, it's yours to pay.
AWC, AF&PA Support House Passage of Ozone Bill The Ozone Standards Implementation Act of 2017 (H.R. 806), which now moves to the United States Senate for consideration, prevents a rushed implementation of the 2015 ozone Nation Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). July 19, 2017 - American Wood Council (AWC) President and CEO Robert Glowinski and American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) President and CEO Donna Harman issued the following statements following United States House of Representatives passage of the Ozone Standards Implementation Act of 2017 (H.R. 806). The legislation, which now moves to the United States Senate for consideration, prevents a rushed implementation of the 2015 ozone Nation Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). Robert Glowinski, President and CEO, AWC: This bill provides a practical approach for implementing the ozone NAAQS by allowing the 2008 rule to be fully implemented and its impacts determined before EPA considers new thresholds. It also recognizes ongoing state efforts to improve air quality through a reasonable implementation schedule. The bill's permitting relief and other reforms are also a key step toward air standards that balance environmental protection and economic development. AWC thanks Congressman Pete Olson and the lead sponsors for their leadership on H.R. 806. Donna Harman, President and CEO, AF&PA: Our industry has helped to make our air cleaner by investing billions of dollars while producing products essential for everyday life. The bipartisan Ozone Standards Implementation Act creates a more sensible timeline for reviewing the NAAQS standards. This common-sense approach allows air quality improvements to move forward while promoting job creation and economic growth in America. The Senate should waste no time in passing a bill that will also support global competitiveness for the forest products industry. Background on H.R. 806: Adjusts the NAAQS review cycle to 10 years, establishing a more realistic review cycle;

Sets a 10-year implementation schedule for the 2015 ozone NAAQS to provide states with time to complete work on implementing the 2008 ozone standard; and

Requires the Environmental Protection Agency to issue implementation guidance concurrent with any NAAQS revision. About AWC The American Wood Council (AWC) is the voice of North American wood products manufacturing, representing over 75 percent of an industry that provides approximately 400,000 men and women with family-wage jobs. To learn more, please visit: www.awc.org. About AF&PA The American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) serves to advance a sustainable U.S. pulp, paper, packaging, tissue and wood products manufacturing industry through fact-based public policy and marketplace advocacy. Visit AF&PA online at: www.afandpa.org SOURCE: American Forest & Paper Association
"I have a feeling that you're really going to like your new substitute teacher," a man announced to a classroom full of students at Walter Reed Middle school in Hollywood. Then in walked Lady Gaga, wearing her serious business frames and finest of pantsuits. The kids lost their minds, going in for some very pure hugs and putting their hands on their hearts in just a very sweet gentle way. Bless. Gaga made the appearance in partnership with Staples, who she is working with for their Staples for Students program, which brings school supplies to underserved classrooms.

"I want kids to love themselves fearlessly," she explains as an adorable parade of children tell her what they want to be when they grow up. "Not having materials at school is a real problem, that puts a child at a deficit. Before we fix that problem, we need to acknowledge that problem." We close on a classroom talent show, and the whole thing is very much "You are Lisa Simpson."

Watch below...










The Scottish government has proposed the introduction of gender-neutral bathrooms in all schools, proving once again that American government is way behind the times. The law would come in the form of an update to a 1967 law which mandates that all schools in the country have separate restrooms for boys and girls, in an attempt by the government to address "gender issues."

"The School Premises Regulations do not prescribe standards for accessible sanitary facilities for persons with a disability or refer to unisex toilets that could address gender issues," reads the proposal, which also addresses other minimum requirements that all Scottish schools must fulfill if passed. "Therefore, the Regulation needs to be updated and simplified to meet current expectations."

"Schools have found that gender neutral private cubicles with open washing spaces reduce bullying and graffiti," Equality Network spokesman James Morton remarked. "Therefore, gender neutral toilets are safer for all young people. They are particularly beneficial for transgender young people because otherwise transgender pupils often fear going to the toilet so much that they refuse to drink liquids during the day and experience dehydration."

Despite inevitable criticism from those who believe that unisex restrooms will encourage sexual activity among students, the government seems to understand the need for transgender and non-binary students to feel safe and validated in restrooms.

Photo via Getty

[h/t: The Scotsman]


Last week Patently Apple posted a report titled "Australia proposed new Laws Compelling Companies like Facebook & Apple to Provide Access to Encrypted Messages." Days later, Australia's Prime Minister spoke about the encryption problem with the Australian press as noted in the video in our report. Now we're learning that Apple has flown in top executives to lobby Turnbull government on encryption laws. It sounds like a showdown is on the horizon.

This is the second time this month that Apple has flown executives into Australia to lobby the government according to a Sydney publication. Apple executives met with Attorney-General George Brandis and senior staff in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's office on Tuesday to discuss the company's concerns about the legal changes, which could see tech companies compelled to provide access to locked phones and third party messaging applications.

Apple has argued in the meetings that as a starting point it does not want the updated laws to block tech companies from using encryption on their devices, nor for companies to have to provide decryption keys to allow access to secure communications.

The company has argued that if it is compelled to provide a software "back door" into its phones to help law enforcement agencies catch criminals and terrorists, this would reduce the security for all users. It also says it has provided significant assistance to police agencies engaged in investigations, when asked.

Australia's proposed laws will be modeled on those introduced in Britain about a year ago and the government says it will update and enhance the obligations on tech companies that make phones and secure messaging applications such as WhatsApp to provide assistance to police and spy agencies when requested, subject to a warrant.

Last week, Senator Brandis said the government would work with companies such as Apple to facilitate greater access to secure communications but warned that "we'll also ensure that the appropriate legal powers, if need be, as a last resort, coercive powers of the kind that recently were introduced into the United Kingdom under the Investigatory Powers Act...are available to Australian intelligence and law enforcement authorities as well".

Mr Turnbull has said tech companies such as Apple and Facebook "have to face up to their responsibility. They can't just wash their hands of it and say: 'It's got nothing to do with us'."

At the G20 he played a key role in drafting a section of the leaders' final statement on encryption that emphasised the law had to apply online, just as it did elsewhere.

The paragraph promised, in part, that "in line with the expectations of our peoples, we also encourage collaboration with industry to provide lawful and non-arbitrary access to available information where access is necessary for the protection of national security against terrorist threats."

There's a new video out this morning on this very topic with speakers Mike Phelan AFP Commissioner, the Australian Prime Minister and Senator Brandis. Phelan revealed that 55-60% of communication is now encrypted up from a few years ago when it sat at just 3%. It's at a point that is putting civilians and investigations at risk which can't be tolerated by law enforcement.

If governments think that tech companies are just going to throw down their swords and comply, they're dreaming. Governments will have to pass the law and then make dramatic moves against tech leaders such as Apple in order to set the tone for the new law. Polite pow-wows won't cut it.

Now that we've heard the view points from Australian authorities, expect Apple's CEO Tim Cook to fire back strongly and perhaps even make a political statement on the issue during one of Apple's product keynotes scheduled for September and later this fall. So stay tuned because this battle has a long road ahead.

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Yesterday Patently Apple posted a report titled "Qualcomm's CEO in Video Interview Attempts to Downplay their War with Apple." Today the drama continues. Back in May Qualcomm sued Apple's iPhone suppliers for withholding royalty payments and today Apple's suppliers Hon Hai, Wistron, Compal Electronics and Pegatron have fired back with an antitrust lawsuit against Qualcomm alleging that the company has violated two sections of the U.S. based Sherman Act.

Theodore J. Boutrous, a lawyer for the four companies, said in a statement that "Qualcomm has confirmed publicly that this lawsuit against our clients is intended to make a point about Apple and punish our clients for working with Apple. The companies are bringing their own claims and defenses against Qualcomm."

Reuters further noted that "Much of the language in the contractors' allegations mirror Apple's objections to Qualcomm's business model. A senior Apple official confirmed that the company is helping to fund the contractors' legal defense as part of an indemnification agreement among the firms. Apple has also formally joined the contractor case as a defendant.

The lost license revenue from Apple has been a hit to Qualcomm's sales. Analysts expect $5.2 billion in revenue for the June quarter, down from $6 billion a year earlier."

So what did Apple think of the conciliatory tone set by Qualcomm's CEO the other day? Obviously not much.

Update: Qualcomm has just launched another lawsuit against Apple in Munich, Germany. For more details, see the full report by FOSS Patents here.

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Apple  Qualcomm Battle History

The battle between Apple and Qualcomm has been raging since the year began and we've covered major developments as noted in the 11 reports below.

Jan 17, 2017: The U.S. Fair Trade Commission Sues Qualcomm for Forcing Apple to use its Chips in iDevices

Jan 20, 2017 - Apple Sues Qualcomm for $1 Billion Claiming Unfair Exclusionary Tactics and Charging Excessive Royalties

Jan 22, 2017: Apple's Full lawsuit against Qualcomm Comes to Light Revealing Secret Licensing Agreements and more

Jan 25, 2017: Apple takes their War against Qualcomm to Beijing China

Jan 25, 2017: While Qualcomm is Guilty of Gouging Asian Smartphone OEMs, the Chip Maker Believes that Apple is the Problem

March 02, 2017: Apple has launched a new Lawsuit against Qualcomm in the U.K.

April 11, 2017: Qualcomm Fires Back at Apple with Counterclaims Lawsuit Claiming Breach of Contract and more

April 28, 2017: Qualcomm Lowers Q3 Fiscal 2017 Guidance due to Apple Holding back Royalty Payments

May 03, 2017: Qualcomm Plans Retaliation against Apple and ask the International Trade Commission to Stop iPhone Sales

May 12, 2017 - The FTC Responds to Qualcomm's Motion to dismiss their case about Monopoly Power, Samsung & Intel File Amicus Briefs

May 17, 2017: New Court Filing Details Qualcomm Suing Apple's iPhone Suppliers for withholding Royalty Payments

June 20, 2017: Apple has asked the Court to Stop Qualcomm's Double Dipping 'No License, No Chips' Market Tactic

July 6, 2017: Qualcomm Files another Patent Infringement Complaint against Apple with International Trade Commission
Yesterday Patently Apple posted a report titled "Samsung Reportedly to Play a Minor Role in Apple's iPhone 9 Processor Business in 2018." Today we get a glimpse into why Apple has agreed to have Samsung enter their supply chain as a minor supplier of processors for their 2018 iPhone.

It's being reported today that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is expanding the number of suppliers of equipment for its 7nm process in a bid to maintain an ecosystem pricing balance, according to industry sources.

Applied Materials, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron, Hitachi High Technologies and Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment (AMEC) are all being included in TSMC's supplier list for its 7nm process, the sources indicated. Of the companies, Tokyo Electron and Lam are expected to receive most demand from TSMC, the sources said.

AMEC is the only China-based fab toolmaker selected by TSMC for the foundry's 7nm process. AMEC will be the major etching equipment supplier of the foundry looking to ramp up production of 7nm chips in 2018, the sources noted.

According to TSMC's plan, the foundry's first-generation 7nm process will be ready for volume production in 2018. The second generation of TSMC's 7nm process, which will adopt extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology, will arrive a year later in 2019.

Samsung appears to have the leap on TSMC in respect to EUV lithography technology. According to today's supply chain report, "TSMC's rival Samsung has disclosed its first-generation 7nm process will use EUV and is slated for launch in 2018." This may explain why Apple was willing to sign on with Samsung as a minor supplier. Apple may choose to test out Samsung's new chips with EUV technology to witness its strengths and better prepare for the 2019 iPhone using TSMC processors using EUV.

Extreme Ultraviolet technology is to provide higher performance at lower costs. The shift to 7nm and 5nm over the next few years will greatly enhance AI and mixed reality capabilities.

Even though Samsung will get the leap on TSMC in respect to EUV, TSMC has stated on several occasions that their "7-nano chips are superior to Samsung Electronics' chips in PPA index that indicates Power, Performance, and Area."

The move by Samsung to win a foot back in the door with Apple was also to make up for the loss of some of Qualcomm's 7nm business to TSMC.

TSMC is confident in its first-generation 7nm process, dubbed N7, according to industry observers. TSMC has started to adopt deep UV (DUV) tools before EUV equipment becomes mature for production and therefore the N7 will still be competitive, the observers said.

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It's being reported in South Korea today that Samsung Electronics has released the English-language version of the Bixby voice assistant in the United States market. American users of Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus models can start using Bixby's voice service immediately by updating the application to the latest software version.

Voice capabilities for Bixby can be activated by pushing a dedicated button on the side of the phone or by simply saying "Hi, Bixby."

The artificial intelligence (AI) assistant's voice capabilities are now available in Korean and English on the Galaxy S8. Korean users can also enjoy the English variant of Bixby after changing their language settings to English.

Today's announcement will likely mean that Samsung will be able to unveil the next-gen Galaxy Note 8 on August 23 with Bixby ready to be activated.

Rhee In-jong, head of Samsung's R&D for software and services went on record by stating, "At Samsung, we are dedicated to creating the best possible user experience for our customers. That's why we designed Bixby with its intelligent interface to allow you to do more things with your phone. We want to offer a truly multimodal experience, so users can interact with their phones in many different ways. And as the Bixby ecosystem grows, it will use its completeness, context awareness and cognitive tolerance to evolve from a smartphone interface to the interface for your life."

Samsung expects Bixby will be a strong competitor to Apple's Siri, Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa. Thanks to its deep-learning technology, Bixby will learn users' speaking habits as well as other information to provide them with accurate voice assistance, according to Samsung.

Samsung said Bixby will be fully integrated across core Samsung apps, so users can do almost anything with their voice, including multi-step and cross-app requests.

In addition, support for additional native and third-party apps will be available via Bixby Labs, which includes select applications that offer preliminary integration with Bixby.

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I am currently hosting a Mormon Matters Retreat and one of my favorite parts is when we give time for each attendee to introduce themselves and share some of their story, their relationship with Mormonism, what they are currently struggling with and what they hope to get out of the experience. I am always humbled and honored to be witness to such deep and profound vulnerability among people who are just getting to know each other and yet who are willing to risk emotional safety to seek for healing, growth, community, validation and understanding.

The following are quotes I collected as many spoke

I share to be able to give better understanding of the spectrum we have within our midsts in Mormon communities. From those who are actively engaged in their religious traditions, to those who have left for different spiritual paths, to those who are uncomfortable with any spiritual language. We make room for all at these events. And Im never tired of hearing the stories. Each one so profound so tender so human. I hope we can all continue to learn by bearing each others burdens and learning how to hold space for the experience that is different from our own. May you tap into some of the wisdom, pain, and shared intimacy that Ive been able to experience.

Mormons dont just believe in individual progression we believe in communal progression Gospel Doctrine Teacher

I love being on the edge of the inside, where I can still make a difference.

We should be committed to lifting the human race

It got to the point where we just stopped talking about many things (mixed-faith marriage attendee)

When other people could testify of their God just as vehemently as I could of mine it started me thinking about things differently. (speaking of their missionary experience)

Twice this year Ive had to find a substitute to teach my class because I could not support the teachings. (Relief Society Instructor)

I love my church and I love my people and I just dont know where to go from here

I found that the more I immersed myself into other religions and cultural traditions  the better I understood my own.

I crave water  whether it comes from yoga or Jesus I want to be led to and help lead others to water.

Im not sure my faith journey has ever started. I always wanted to be right or survive or avoid depression I think my faith journey is just now starting

Working with Mormons though the pain of the dark underbelly of Mormonism has been a converting force for me. Bishopric Member

Mormonism pushes me to engage with my community and I really enjoy that

Weve lost our moral imagination (in regards to correlation)

I was raised by a perfectionistic mother. I was never good enough for my parents, for my church, for my God. When I didnt get answers, it meant I was broken.

Im very frustrated with past and current leadership who didnt foresee today. Now they tell us to ignore their own information. Weve been left to ourselves.

Ive learned its not safe to share my thoughts and feelings with more traditionally believing members.

Mormonism was a haven for my parents who came from abusive and alcoholic backgrounds.

I didnt plan much for my future because I figured the Second Coming was around the corner

Im going to put back in my basket only what resonates

I thought I was the only human that felt this way and was still going to church

If we could become acquainted with the humanity of our leaders, instead of putting them up on artificial pedestals we would be so much kinder to each other.

The blows to my faith included being asked to financially support Prop 8, the church essays, and the November 2015 LGBT policy. We want to stay. Weve made a lot of investment. Its our tribe. Its our family. But the blows are heavy.

I have a believing husband and believing kids. I act the part and its a struggleMy own kids dont know where Im at.

My spiritual experiences were like God saying youre going to need this in the years to come

You do all the right things, and check all the boxes. When it all blows up I had to ask, Why am I trying so hard?'

My biggest struggle is wondering why cant we just tell the truth?

Deconstructing church history is really difficult when it is also my family history. (descendent of Hyrum Smiths polygamy)

The most difficult thing about my journey is that I go to church and none of my kids go with me.

Some of my best friendships have come from e being willing to reach out to those Ive offended somehow  and being willing to learn from them.

Because I love Mormonism Im always wanting to make this work and looking for ways to make it work.

Things dont turn out the way you plan

My Mormon story was beautiful. I loved my growing up experience and now its hard because I have this love and also all this new learning that doesnt fit. The pieces dont always fit.

I feel like Im unschooling.

Of course we were studying we love the gospel. My mind keeps getting blown open and Im grateful.

It started to feel like I was selling my own authenticity short.

Learning how to think vs being told what to think this is what transformed my spirituality.

The church was a lifeline for our family  Im the product of a system that helped our dysfunctional ancestry.

Church was a haven for me from an abusive step-parent.

Im grateful for Heavenly Parents that allow us our own journeys.

We dont know how to love and be real with each other when our language changes

Theres so much that I love that Im taking things slowly. And carefully treading my way. Trying to be mindful and careful. Im okay if this is something Im unraveling for the rest of my life.

It makes it more difficult and traumatic to transition we all my ancestors crossed the plains choosing this faith.

Sometimes I want to go back to the safe place of my innocence.

Im back and forth about the harm and good that my children glean from the church.

Being worried about my kids is what makes this journey so much harder.

I believe in a bounty of love.

Until we can make room at the Mormon table for all of these thoughts/feelings/experiences to have a seat, we will be lacking as a faith community.

Natasha Helfer Parker, LCMFT, CST can be reached at natashaparker.org and runs an online practice, Symmetry Solutions, which focuses on helping families and individuals with faith concerns, sexuality and mental health. She hosts the Mormon Mental Health and Mormon Sex Info Podcasts, writes a regular column for Sunstone Magazine and is the current president of the Mormon Mental Health Association. She has over 20 years of experience working with primarily an LDS/Mormon clientele.
Patna: Former Chief Minister of Bihar and the leader of the Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) Jitan Ram Manjhi on Wednesday lashed out at Chief Minister Nitish Kumar saying to save his chair, the Janata Dal  U leader had compromised with his so-called 'Zero Tolerance' policy against corruption.

"Nitish Kumar has clearly compromised with his Zero Tolerance policy otherwise either he would have demanded resignation of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader and Deputy Chief Minister Tejaswi Yadav or he had sacked him immediately after Yadav was charged by the CBI and the ED," Manjhi said.

The former CM went on to say that the current war of rhetoric between the RJD and the JD-U leaders was merely a show to fool the public.

"Neither Nitish Kumar is going to sack Tejaswi Yadav nor Tejaswi Yadav will ever resign. This is all a drama so both Nitish Kumar and Tejaswi Yadav keep their chairs and continue to enjoy the power. It is evident that the two parties have come to terms to help each other out while continuing to show that Nitish Kumar still believed in zero tolerance against corruption," Manjhi said.

The HAM leader, who once was staunch Nitish crony, said that the Chief Minister knows full well that the CBI or the office of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) does not file cases against anyone until it has solid proof of some wrongdoing.

"First, he (Nitish Kumar) orders removal of Yadav's nameplate from a government function to show his disdain for corruption but the next day, he hobnobs with him for hours after the Cabinet meeting. Who he is trying to fool?" Manjhi asked.
Patna: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Sushil Kumar Modi on Wednesday said that the entire government bureaucracy and the police department in Bihar had split into two camps  one with allegiance to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar while the other loyal to the Lalu camp thus bringing developmental works to a screeching halt while also creating a favorable atmosphere for the criminals.

"The two camps want to run the government based on their own ideologies as a result of which the public of Bihar is suffering on a daily basis.

Modi also accused Kumar of compromising with corruption and inaction.

"He held a closed-door meeting with Deputy Chief Minister on charges of corruption filed by the CBI against Tejaswi Yadav. He needs to tell the public what did he talk with Tejaswi Yadav and whether he has decided to compromise with corruption. Does he still believe in his zero-tolerance policy against corruption or has he decided to give in to save his own chair?" the former Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar said.

The BJP leader also took aim at the Congress Party saying it was no surprise that the Congress was coming out as the biggest supporter of Lalu Prasad Yadav, Tejaswi Yadav, and other members of their family who have been charged of corruption by the CBI.

"When Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh are the heroes of the Congress in spite of ED and CBI raids on his properties, it is only natural they also support Lalu and others who also remain accused in corruption cases," he said.

Modi also taunted the Yadav family for not taking him to the court saying the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief had threatened to file a case of slander against him almost ten days ago but hasn't followed up on his threats.

"I am still waiting to be sued by Lalu Prasad Yadav and his son Tejaswi Yadav," he said.
Rohani Says Tehran Will Respond 'Appropriately' To New U.S. Sanctions

07/19/17

Source: RFE/RL

Iranian President Hassan Rohani says that Tehran would "respond appropriately" to new U.S. sanctions while reiterating that his country remained committed to its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. "The Islamic Republic of Iran will always stick to its international commitments," Rohani said at a July 19 cabinet meeting, according to a text posted on the government's website.



JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Deal) on a rough road

(frontpage of Iranian daily Aseman Abi)



Rohani spoke a day after the United States announced sanctions against 18 individuals and entities connected with Iran's ballistic-missile program and other military activities.



The new sanctions were imposed a after Washington certified that Iran was complying with the 2015 deal, which imposed limits on Tehran nuclear actitivities in exchange for sanctions relief.



The deal does not require the United States to lift sanctions that are not related to Iran's nuclear activities, but Rohani said some of the U.S. actions are against the "spirit" of the accord.



"We shall resist these plans and actions," he said.



"One of the plots of the Americans is to act in such a way that would make Iran say that it is not following its commitments.... I think the Americans will fail as we will always respect our international commitments," Rohani asserted.







President Hassan Rohani at his cabinet meeting in Tehran on July 19

(photo by Islamic Republic News Agency)

On July 18, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused U.S. President Donald Trump's administration of trying to "poison the atmosphere" by imposing new sanctions despite the certfcation of Iran's compliance with the deal.

The White House contends that it is Iran that is breaching the spirit of the deal through its actions, including tests of missiles that Washington says can carry nuclear warheads.



U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said on July 18 that the United States "will continue to aggressively target Iran's malign activity, including their ongoing state support of terrorism, ballistic-missile program, and human rights abuses."



With reporting by AFP and Reuters
Pro-Rouhani Journalist Tortured by Iran's Revolutionary Guard Acquitted of Anti-State Charges

07/19/17

Source: Center for Human Rights in Iran

More than two years after his arrest and torture by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), reformist journalist Farzad Pourmoradi, a supporter of President Hassan Rouhani, has been acquitted of the charges laid against him. In a post on his Facebook page on July 12, 2017, Pourmoradi said he had been acquitted of "propaganda against the state," "assembly and collusion against national security" and "insulting state officials."



Reformist journalist Farzad Pourmoradi



"I will never forget the time [during my interrogation] when my head was shaved and my hands and feet were in chains and I was being forced to say things the interrogators' wanted," he wrote.

"But of course their plan failed," he added. "I had nothing to tell them other than my support for Rouhani's government and reforms. I knew there must be independent judges who understand what's going on and would acquit me."

In his Facebook post Pourmoardi said he was "only found guilty of 'disturbing public order' and fined 1.5 million tomans ($460 USD), but I won't have to pay anything after calculating the time I served in detention."

The former editor-in-chief of the Kermanshah Post, Pourmoradi was arrested by the IRGC's Intelligence Organization in Kermanshah, northwestern Iran, on January 3, 2016 and held for 46 days before being released on bail.

He previously worked as a journalist for several other news sites, including the semi-official Iranian Labor News Agency (ILNA) and later became the administrator for the "Kalagh (Raven) News" channel on the Telegram messaging and social media network. The website's name sarcastically refers to religious hardliners in Iran who are often referred to as ravens because of their alleged "sneaky" character.

At his trial on December 5, 2016, Pourmoradi's lawyer, Shahab Tajari, presented his defense by noting that the indictment against Pourmoradi was vague, faulty and did not mention whom he had allegedly insulted.

"During the interrogations he was initially accused of having contacts with some unknown websites and questioned about the Kalagh News channel," a source close to Pourmoradi told the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) in December 2016.

"But later he was accused of being an agent of the West in Kermanshah and humiliated and threatened under interrogation for long periods," added the source, who requested anonymity for security reasons. "Once he lost consciousness during the interrogation, fell down and was moved to his solitary cell by his handlers."
'Positive Signs' Seen by Supporters of British-Iranian Woman Jailed in Tehran

07/19/17

By Michael Lipin and Hooman Bakhtiar, VOA



Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe with her daughter Gabriella

WASHINGTON - A British opposition lawmaker campaigning for the release of a British-Iranian woman jailed in Iran for more than a year has welcomed signs that the British government is trying harder to free her.



In an interview with VOA's Persian Service, lawmaker Tulip Siddiq said she was pleased that the government held a parliamentary debate Tuesday on the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Siddiq spoke to VOA via Skype video from outside Parliament shortly after the debate concluded.



Siddiq asked British Minister for the Middle East Alistair Burt why the government has not explicitly called on Tehran to release 38-year-old Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a London-based charity worker who lived in the opposition Parliament member's district.



Burt responded by saying the government is "taking the matter very seriously," Siddiq said, and assured the chamber that British authorities were fully aware of the living conditions Zaghari-Ratcliffe has faced at Tehran's Evin prison.



Iranian authorities detained Zaghari-Ratcliffe at Tehran's international airport in April 2016, as she was about to return home to Britain with her daughter after a visit to relatives in Iran.



An Iranian court sentenced Zaghari-Ratcliffe in September to five years in prison for undisclosed security offenses - a sentence upheld by Iran's Supreme Court in April. British media have said she is accused of plotting to overthrow the Iranian government.



Zaghari-Ratcliffe's British husband, Richard Ratcliffe, who also has campaigned for his wife's release, has said Iranian authorities kept her in solitary confinement in Evin prison for almost nine months last year, before transferring her to a cell with other women in late December.





Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe with husband Richard Ratcliffe and daughter Gabriella



Siddiq said she was "especially heartened" that lawmakers of Britain's ruling Conservative Party urged the government to do more for Zaghari-Ratcliffe during Tuesday's debate - calling that a "positive step."



In a statement earlier this year, Britain's Foreign Office said Prime Minister Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson both had raised Zaghari-Ratcliffe's case with their counterparts in Iran, and "continue to press the Iranians for access and for due process to be followed." It also said London was ready to help bring home Zaghari-Ratcliffe's three-year-old daughter, Gabriella, "if requested." The infant has been staying with Zaghari-Ratcliffe's parents in Tehran since her mother was detained.



No British diplomats have been able to visit Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Iranian custody. British law does not automatically grant consular protection to citizens with dual nationality who are detained in countries such as Iran.



A group of 45 foreign diplomats visited Evin prison on July 5 in a tour organized by the Iranian judiciary, which said they were "amazed" by the comfortable living conditions they saw. But exiled Iranian Nobel Peace Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi said the tour excluded areas where Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other prisoners sentenced for security offenses were being held, prompting her to denounce the diplomats' visit as "state-choreographed" in a letter to the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in Iran, Asma Jahangir.



Siddiq said the foreign diplomats asked to see Zaghari-Ratcliffe during their prison visit two weeks ago, but they were denied access. The Parliament member said this account was relayed to her by British minister Burt.



"The minister's explanation to me was that when (the diplomats) were offered a chance to go to the prison and look around, they did not feel they could refuse," Siddiq said.



Richard Ratcliffe, who has spoken to his wife by telephone several times in recent weeks, said on Tuesday she was in "very low" spirits. He called on the British government to "finally call for the release of Nazanin and other British citizens who are being held without due cause."



Siddiq said two other British citizens with dual Iranian nationality also are detained in Iran: Kamal Foroughi and Roya Nobakht.



This report was produced in collaboration with VOA's Persian Service.



About the author: Michael covers international news for VOA on the web, radio and TV, specializing in the Middle East and East Asia Pacific. Follow him on Twitter @Michael_Lipin
The Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, has clarified that government is not pulling out of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme.



This clarification was necessitated after President Akufo-Addo responded to a question asked him during his maiden Meet the Press encounter held on 18th July 2017 at the Flagstaff House, where he mentioned "there is no question of the IMF programme being extended. It is coming to an end next year with the budget that we are going to prepare."



However this seems to have been misconstrued.



In a statement from the Finance Ministry, "The government will like to reiterate and clarify the Presidents statement at the first Meet the Press held on 18th July, 2017 where he mentioned that Ghana wouldnt enter a new deal with the IMF beyond the current programme. In response to a question, the President stated that theres no question of the IMF programme being extended. It is coming to an end next year with the budget that we are going to prepare. This statement has unfortunately been misrepresented by some sections of the media."



"The government will like to clarify that, Ghana will complete the IMF programme through our budget cycle of January 2018 through December 2018 as stated by the President. The 2018 budget will therefore be the last budget under the current IMF program. After the completion of the program at the end of the budget cycle in December 2018, government will not extend it. The Presidents remarks should, therefore, not be interpreted to mean that government is pulling out of the IMF programme. On the contrary, government will continue with and complete the IMF program through the budget cycle of January 2018 through December 2018."







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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President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has set up a 100 million dollar package to fund the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Plan (NEIP).



The plan is an initiative of the Akufo-Addo government which is aimed at supporting young entrepreneurs grow their businesses.



Speaking at the launch of the plan in Accra on Thursday, the President announced a $10 million seed capital for the fund.



Akufo-Addo said he is confident the project will help address the major unemployment issue in the country.



Let me introduce you to the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Plan. This is the flagship initiative which will be the primary vehicle for providing an integrated national support for startups and small businesses. Despite the severe constraints of our public finances, which have resulted from years of mismanagement and corruption, Government has contributed US$10 million as seed money for the Plan. It is the intention that this seed money should be leveraged to raise money from private sources and public organizations to the tune of US$100 million to fund its programmes, he added.



He observed the greatest problem of Ghana is widespread unemployment and lack of jobs.



Every year, more young people join in the dispiriting search for jobs. I have come face to face with the desperation that is engendered by the lack of jobs. I have spoken about it often. I have even come to accept that it is this lack of jobs that has led to the phenomenon of so many people looking to government for jobs, which appears to be dampening our traditional entrepreneurial spirit, he added.



The President however noted that the fact that unemployment is a worldwide phenomenon does not make Ghanas national and personal situation any easier to endure.



It does not lessen the heartbreak of parents who watch their children go through the frustration of joblessness year after dispiriting year. In 2015, some 4,500 young Ghanaians arrived in Italy, after undertaking the horrendous Mediterranean crossing that we all see on television. I am determined that we change the economic conditions in our country for the better, to ensure that young people see it as a place of opportunities, instead of the place from which they flee at the peril of their lives. We need to do all within our power to create an entrepreneurial climate, to enable our young people come up with creative ideas that can be developed into businesses, he added.



Akufo-Addo said that NEIP will enable new businesses to emerge and give them the space to grow by receiving financing and business development services, to secure markets during the critical formative years, and to tap into a wide supply chain and network during their growth years, helping to create jobs at a widely distributed, national level.

Source: citifmonline.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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Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS), Prince Billy Anaglate has reiterated the need for government to procure modern firefighting equipment for the service.



According to Mr. Anaglate, the services response to emergencies and the skills demonstrated on fire grounds depend on logistics available.



He said, firemen go through hell to fight fires above fifth floor of high-rise buildings due to the lack of a modern equipment that can go beyond and reach as far as twenty floors.



It is important that we get modern firefighting equipment that can take us above twenty floors when the unexpected happens. However, the one that is only up to the fifth floor is what we have now, he revealed.



Mr. Anaglates comments follow the challenges firefighters had to face in dealing with a fire incident on the tenth floor of Job 600, a building that serves as offices for Members of Parliament.



According to reports, firemen had to use the stairs when they got to the fifth floor because the turntable ladder could not reach the tenth floor where the fire was.



However, Mr. Anaglate said, despite the challenges with logistics, his men were still up to the task in dealing with the fires because it is their responsibility to do so in any situation.

Source: ghanaweb.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 mother of the late Major of the Ghana Army who was lynched in Denkyira-Obuasi has received his masters degree certificate on his behalf.



The mother is seen in a Facebook post circulating holding his masters degree and posing for the cameras with some students of the Leicester University.



Major Mahama, an officer of the 5th Infantry Battalion, is said to have been on his daily jogging routine on Monday [May 29, 2017], when some angry youth of the town attacked him, allegedly on suspicion of being an armed robber.



The Police subsequently arrested over fifty suspects who had fled the town to other regions in the country.

The court earlier ordered the police to relocate seventeen-year-old boy, Ebenezer Asamoah, one of the suspects to a borstal home when he is remanded until the police are able to establish that he is eighteen.

Source: adomonline.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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Some aggrieved staff of the Electoral Commission (EC) have petitioned the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and Chief Justice Sophia Akuffo to impeach Mrs. Charlotte Osei - EC Chairperson.



The concerned staff of the EC highlighted some acts of misconduct on the part of Mrs. Charlotte Osei since her appointment as EC Chairperson.



In the 27point petition cited by Peacefmonline.com, Counsel for the concerned EC staff, Maxwell Opoku Agyeman, a renowned private legal practitioner, addressed their concerns in accordance with Article 146(3) of the constitution and prayed President Nana Akufo-Addo to "forward same to Her Ladyship, the Chief Justice for possible impeachment process".



The petitioners described the EC Boss as being "administratively inept" and lacking "managerial experience or capacity and knowledge of corporate governance structures and regulatory compliance".



They also cited breaches of some provisions of the 1992 Constitution by the EC Boss regarding her office, conduct and duties.



"Madam Charlotte Osei, the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission on 30th June, 2015 assumed office as Article 71 appointee whiles still holding office as a Board Member of Ghana Re Insurance, a public company contrary to Article 44(4) of the 1992 constitution. When the issue was raised, the PRO of Ghana Re confirmed that she only resigned on December 5th, 2015. This means that whiles holding office as the Chairperson of the Commission she was still a Board Member of Ghana Re Insurance. Mrs. Charlotte Osei was appointed as Chairperson of Electoral Commission of Ghana while holding office as Chairperson of the National Commission of Civic Education contrary to the 1992 constitution. In fact, it was announced at her swearing-in ceremony by the former President that he received her resignation from NCCE on 29th June 2017 before the swearing in.



"Following her appointment as EC Chair, Mrs. Charlotte compromised the independence and neutrality of the Commission by arranging for 2015 V8 Land Cruiser with registration WR 2291-15 from the office of the President for use as official vehicle without going through the procurement process or recourse to the Commission. The political posture of the Chairperson prior to the conduct of the 2016 general election nearly pushed Ghana to the precipices. But for the action of technical and competent staff of the Commission, she could have plunged this country to civil war", portions of the petition read.



They further indicted the EC Boss, stating emphatically that her neutrality has been compromised.



"As part of compromising her independence and neutrality, Mrs. Charlotte Osei claimed that the Electoral Commission has been allocated a new building for use as office complex without the approval of the Commission. The 7-member Commission has not at any point in time formally requested for any office allocation since the Commission sees nothing wrong with the current office. With the Chairperson's insatiable demand of affluence and flamboyance, she unilaterally awarded a contract to the tune of GHS 3.9 MILLION for demarcation and partitioning of the said office complex without recourse to the Commission. She claimed she sought approval from the Public Procurement Authority but strangely enough, the contract sum is higher than PPA's approved level".



She is also said to have been "engaging in cronyism by awarding a contracts to the tune of $14,310,961 (United State Dollars) to her cronies for the construction of Pre-fabricated District offices without recourse to the Commission. The value of these contracts is in excess of the approved threshold by the Public Procurement Authority. One of the contractors by name Messrs Contracts & Cads Limited is related to Mrs. Charlotte Osei. Upon receipt of advance mobilization under the approval of the Chairperson, the company has failed to meet the contract terms. Notwithstanding the clear breach of the contractual terms, the company has requested for additional payment which the Chairperson has approved. The Director of Finance has stopped the payment of this request. This accounts for one of the reasons of the Chairperson's disaffection for the Director of Finance.



"The Commission procured grant from USAID as part of the support of the 2016 general election. This facility was signed by the then Minister of Finance. By Article 175 of the 1992 constitution and in line with Section 5 of the Financial Administration Act, 2003 (Act 654), these grants constitute Public Funds. As part of the implementation of this grant, the Chairperson, Mrs. Charlotte Osei, without the Commission's approval unilaterally recruited Personal Assistant and a Communication Officer and paid them $1500 and $2,500 (United States Dollars) respectively. This was done without clearance from the Ministry of Finance".



Mrs. Charlotte Osei is further accused of having a very poor human relations not befitting of any leader in public space.



"She has no respect for the organizational structure of the Commission", hence bringing the EC's image into disrepute; the petitioners stressed.



Confirmed!



In a related development, Peacefmonline sources at the Flagstaff House say the Office of the President has now received the petition.



Earlier, sources at the presidency said though they had heard of such a petition in the media, they had not received it as yet.



But Communications Director at the Presidency, Eugene Arhin, now confirms the petition has been received.



Investigation?



Legal experts have told Peacefmonline that if a prima facie case is established against the Chairperson, a full-scale investigation could be launched into the stated misconduct.



The report presented to the president after the investigations into the petition must be binding on him.



If the committee recommends removal, as happened in the case of Loretta Lamptey, the president will have no choice but to sanction it.





Petition

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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The only real reason to watch Shark Tank on Channel Ten is to see so-called entrepreneurs who genuinely believe that their absurd, unmarketable, harebrained schemes deserve hundreds of thousands of dollars in venture capital.

Some of you might be in it for the stories of hardscrabble Aussie battlers getting their genius idea off the ground. Thats your prerogative. Im in it for the absolute horrorshows.

Last nights bizarre pitch was an absolute pearler in that genre. The Shark Tank panel where confronted with Kim Macraes concept for a learning program called iKiFit, which is some kind of weird dance? Involving an orange stick?

After an entirely baffling presentation, which Macrae says encourages kids to do all those movements our ancestors did  chopping, rowing, kayaking, surfing, he drops an absolute clanger: he wants an investment of $250k for a 10% stake in the business. Which, I stress, involves children dancing around with an orange stick.

Is someone selling a stick? #SharkTankAU  Shannon (@shanfoster27) July 18, 2017

I must say, I really do love it when they have pitches from people who are certifiably bonkers #SharkTankAU #ikifit  Chris Silvini (@ChrisSilvini) July 18, 2017

Yes but its a stick with special powers!! #SharkTankAU pic.twitter.com/ma5QAiUxmx  Katie Maree (@ricekat79) July 18, 2017

The judges werent entirely keen on the concept (dancing around with a stick) or the amount of money Macrae was asking for (again, $250,000).

Kims invested $800k in iKiFit, do you think hes on the right track or made a huge mistake? #SharkTankAU pic.twitter.com/R9GT0tDgbW  #SharkTankAU (@sharktankau) July 18, 2017

Dr Glen Richards, one of the show hosts, said that he felt subtly uncomfortable at the weird stick dance he was forced to watch

That felt really awkward. It felt confining, it felt uncomfortable, and I was really disturbed by that, says fellow host Steve Baxter.

Subtly uncomfortable, awkward and disturbed are all excellent words to come up when youre discussing childrens physical education.

Im glad youre happy, because thats an amazing amount of money for something thats got no traction and probably no prospect of traction, says Baxter, after learning that Macrae has literally put $800,000 into this business idea.

I strongly urge you to watch the full episode over at Tenplay if you have not already. My lord.

Source: Ten.

Photo: Ten.
Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges says the lack of information available about the death of Australian woman Justine Damond is frustrating, as the investigation into her shooting by police officer Mohamed Noor continues.

Speaking at a press conference a short time ago, Hodges said as a community, as a people, we struggle to absorb the weight of this tragedy  the needless death of Justine Damond.

She quickly corrected that statement, saying it was not yet clear if her death was needless, but reiterated that the Minnesota Department of Public Safetys Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) would make that determination.

As the BCA is a state organisation, Hodges said the city did not have access to certain information regarding the investigation.

Regarding Officer Noor, Hodges said I wish that he could make a statement.

We cant compel him by law, but I wish that he would make that statement.

Officer Noors lawyer had previously released a statement to the media, saying he takes these events very seriously because, for him, being a police officer is a calling, and that we would like to say more, and will in the future.

For the moment, Hodges says there are big questions left that we still have, and that we hope to have answers [for] soon.

Why did Officer Noor draw and fire his gun? What happened from the time the officers arrived on the scene to when she was pronounced dead? Why dont we have footage from body cameras  why were they not activated? We all want answers to those questions.

Damond had called 911 after hearing what she believed to be a disturbance in an alley behind her home. Multiple sources with knowledge of the incident say that after Officers Noor and Matthew Harrity arrived at the scene, Damond spoke to Harrity on the drivers side of the squad car.

At some point, Officer Noor shot through the drivers side door, hitting Damond in the abdomen. She was pronounced dead shortly after.

Well keep you posted as more information becomes available.

Source: 9 News / CNN.
If there ever comes a time that you are terrorising children, you should probably re-examine the righteousness of your cause. If, say, whatever weird ideological crusade you are on has led you to dump a severed pigs head at a school, it might be the perfect time for some quiet reflection on what the fuck you are doing.

This advice is particularly pertinent to the two young men currently being sought after by Queensland Police Service for depositing a pigs heads in an Aldi cooler bag with a swastika painted on it at the Islamic College of Brisbane.

Source: Islamic College of Brisbane.

The two men (read: complete fucking dickheads) left their fucked little gift at the P-12 schools front gates at 11:23 last night, letting both themselves and a part of their number plate get captured by security cameras in a very genius-like fashion.

Professor Ray Barrett from the college says that police are confident theyll be able to catch the dumbasses involved (not his words) shortly:

The police have been very swift and thorough. Theyre checking DNA to crosscheck to see whether the DNA might be linked to other incidents.

In a Facebook post, acting chair of the college Ali Kadri said that blame lies with those drumming up hate against Islam:

Someone left a pigs head in a backpack with a swastika at Islamic College of Brisbane this morning. Police is at it and we have a good footage of the car and the perpetrators. Queensland polices response to this hate crime is phenomenal and we dont believe there is any threat to safety of staff and kids. Right wing extremists including some politicians and shock jock who demonise Islamic schools are responsible for this.

If you dont want to look at a pic of a pigs head, I would urge you to stop scrolling at exactly this point.

Source: Islamic College of Brisbane.

Here is a tip: dont do this.

QPS are asking anyone with information to give them a bell on 131 444.

Source: ABC.

Photo: Islamic College of Brisbane.
Look, the stand-alone Han Solo flick hasnt exactly had the best run of late. Between fired directors, concerns over the performance of leading man Alden Ehrenreich, and a mysterious no-show at Disneys huge D23 conference, theres been scarce little good news to go around.

But shit, the film still has Donald Glover as Hans old mate Lando Calrissian, and newly-installed director Ron Howard has just provided us with the first blessed glimpse of the interstellar smuggler. Thats worth getting excited about.

The films new don posted a cheeky Instagram update from the set, and Glover can clearly be seen on one of his monitors. Is the image small? Sure. But it still counts, and it is our solemn duty to provide you with any and all updates on Glovers already-excellent career.

lining up a shot today from my directors monitor A post shared by RealRonHoward (@realronhoward) on Jul 18, 2017 at 2:44pm PDT

If youll allow us to take a bit of a zoom:

His pose suggests either a pensive moment aboard the Millennium Falcon, or maybe hes just pulling up one of his boots. Were excited either way.

The film is poised for a US release date of May 25, 2018  if the film escapes even more production dramas.

Source: Ron Howard / Instagram.

Photo: Monica Schipper / Getty.
This Thursday, Jan. 12, 2017, photo shows a sign on a Chipotle restaurant. Chipotle says it temporarily shut down a restaurant in Virginia, on Monday, July 17, 2017, after becoming aware of reports of illnesses. The chain says itAos working to understand the cause, but that the reported symptoms are consistent with norovirus. The company says it plans to reopen the location in Sterling, Va., after a Aucomplete sanitizationAu later on Tuesday, July 18, and that its food is safe to eat. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
FILE - In this June 26, 2016, file photo, paramedics rush a stabbing victim to an ambulance after violence erupted during a white nationalist group's rally outside the state Capitol in Sacramento, Calif. The Sacramento County District Attorney's Office said Tuesday, July 18, 2017, that two people are being charged for alleged assault with a deadly weapon and participating in a riot. Other arrests are expected from the eight-month long investigation conducted by the California Highway Patrol. (AP Photo/Steven Styles, File)
PHOTOS: Petoskey celebrates Veterans Day 2022

Petoskey's American Legion taught local elementary students how to fold the flag during the Veterans Day ceremony on Friday, Nov. 11 in Pennsylvania Park.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission's ninth straight annual toll increase, approved by its board Tuesday, helps pay for turnpike operations, plus the highway's $500 million annual capital budget and $450 million for mass transit systems, including SEPTA.

But the 6 percent hike  and the 27 percent more the turnpike commission expects annually in the years ahead  will likely drive more users away, making it tougher to meet the highway's revenue targets, warns municipal bond analyst Eric Kazatsky of Bloomberg Market Intelligence.

Car and truck traffic on the Pennsylvania Turnpike rose just 0.3 percent over the last year, far below the Federal Highway Administration's national average of 1.79 percent, Kazatsky noted in a report to clients.

The commission's own "assumptions for traffic growth on the Pennsylvania Turnpike may be overly optimistic," he added. "While the tollway's traffic has increased an average of 0.43 percent a year since since 2004, it projects a growth rate of 1.26 percent" to make its required payments  or three times the recent yearly traffic increase.

Despite the shortfall, Moody's Investors Service on June 29 assigned a "stable" A2 rating on new sales of Pennsylvania Turnpike refunding bonds, noting the state Motor License Fund must pay bondholders if the turnpike has trouble raising the money from tolls.

"We are fine with the 1.26 percent long-term traffic growth rate projection," turnpike spokesman Carl DeFebo told me. "Other toll roads have projected traffic growth patterns at this same level, according to Fitch Ratings." He noted the Turnpike Authority has had no trouble selling its bonds, "so I don't think investors are concerned."

Of course, drivers may have a different feeling. The authority expects annual increases through 2044, not only to pay for maintenance and subsidize mass transit, but also to pay interest on more than $11 billion in toll-revenue bonds financing previous payments for road maintenance and mass transit. "Annual toll rate increases will be needed to fund increasing debt service levels," DeFebo said.

Will drivers cooperate? The turnpike faces competition from free interstate highways, including I-80, which crosses the northern part of the state, and such roads as I-78 and I-81. Those free roads have attracted a string of giant warehouse districts, where companies including Amazon and Walmart have set up fulfillment centers that can receive imports and ship deliveries to mid-Atlantic customers without having to pay full-length turnpike tolls.

Ron Rotondaro, of Collingdale, says rising turnpike tolls taught him to seek out free alternate highways for motorcycle weekends in Gettysburg, Jim Thorpe, and other towns north and west. He takes the free Blue Route (I-476) until it runs into the turnpike's Northeast Extension, then takes the second exit to Quakertown and a short jog to I-78. From there, "I take (Pennsylvania) 33 to go north to I-80," or "I head west on I-78 to get to I-81; I take any number of roads off I-78" to reach Bloomsburg.

Pennsylvania's past efforts to toll more interstates have been frustrated by the Federal Highway Administration, which can prevent states from tolling additional highways because the federal gas tax supports interstate maintenance. Road advocates complain, however, that the federal gas tax, frozen at 18.4 cents a gallon since the early 1990s, has not kept pace with highway repair and replacement expenses.

One busy freeway where drivers are paying tolls for the first time is the $396 million replacement road for the I-95 toll bridge on the Delaware River. While the current bridge has been run as a free road, the replacement bridge now rising to its north will be tolled electronically, with cars photographed and bills mailed to drivers who don't have E-ZPass.

Also on Tuesday, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority priced $650 million in revenue bonds (Series 2017-B). Loop Capital Markets LLC said investors agreed to purchase the issue at a yield of 2.01 percent, with a 5 percent coupon in 2025  that's a spread of 30 basis points over top-rated municipal bonds  with higher yields for later maturities. The relatively tight spread is "well within expected range," and a sign of the New Jersey Turnpike's long-term fiscal stability, analyst Kazatsky told me.

"Unlike [Pennsylvania], New Jersey Turnpike traffic growth assumptions appear more realistic," Kazatsky wrote in a separate report. New Jersey will more likely meet its projected annual ridership growth target of a little more than 1 percent a year, he noted, pointing out the state's most recent toll increases didn't noticeably push traffic to other roads.

Unlike in Pennsylvania, a slow-growing state where local drivers compose a large share of the toll traffic, in New Jersey, "40 percent of [turnpike] revenue is coming from out-of-state users, helping insulate the turnpike" from New Jersey's local economy, Kazatsky concluded.
Comcast Corp.-owned Telemundo 62's free phone bank events are staffed with local lawyers who take questions from immigrants on deportation. The next event is Thursday. Read more

With President Trump's tough stance on immigration and advocacy of a border wall, the Spanish-language network Telemundo  part of the Comcast Corp. media empire  is holding telethon-like phone-in shows to offer Mexicans and other Latinos free legal advice, opening a new area of competition with its rival Univision.

The 90-minute phone banks, staffed with local immigration lawyers, confidentially connect with local Telemundo62's audience of Latinos clustered in pockets around the Philadelphia area.

"I would say it's anxiety and uncertainty," Ines Ferre, consumer reporter for Telemundo62, the national network's Philadelphia affiliate, said Tuesday. "The people who legalize themselves, they are trying to do that."

In the past, immigrants called the Telemundo62 consumer line mostly about bills. Now, they often ask about federal crackdowns, what papers to carry, or how to help a family member.

Telemundo62 held its first phone-in bank  like a telethon but without the fund-raising aspect  in February, with six lawyers answering calls. They were swamped. A second telethon was held in May. This Thursday, Telemundo62 will hold its third phone-in bank between 5 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. with 20 lawyers.

Telemundo62, available both on an over-the-air TV station and through pay TV, says there have been so many calls to the phone-in shows that the phone number will not be released before the event.

Immigrants will have to tune in to Telemundo62 around 5 p.m. to get the phone number, Telemundo62 officials said on Tuesday. The informational phone bank is held during the Telemundo62 newscast. Ferre periodically checks with the lawyers who are taking the calls during the news show, but the conversations are not broadcast on television, she said.

Telemundo affiliates in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Dallas, Chicago, Phoenix, Tucson, and Denver also have hosted televised or live-streamed informational phone banks, the network says.

Sarah Caruso, an immigration lawyer in Moorestown, participated in the February phone bank and will do so again on Thursday. "When we were testing the phone lines, there were people already on them wanting to talk," she said.

With Obama, immigration authorities focused on removing criminals, recent illegal immigrants, and those with previous removal orders, said Kimberly Tomczak, a lawyer with the Center City law firm Gian-Grasso, Tomczak, & Hufe P.C., which specializes in immigration law.

"The shift we are seeing under Trump, and that leads to anxiety, is that there are no clear priorities [for removal], which makes everyone a priority," Tomczak said.

Telemundo62's big local competitor is Univision 65, the affiliate of the other major Spanish-language network. The Philadelphia Univision affiliate has not hosted recent immigration phone banks. But it has held phone banks on health care, the station says.

Univision has historically been the No. 1 Spanish-language network, but Telemundo has significantly closed the audience gap over the last two years.

Univision's affiliate in New York, WXTV, held a phone bank on July 14 with the Catholic Charities and New York Office for New Americans on general immigration questions, a network spokeswoman said. The New York station also is hosting this week a three-day phone bank this Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday with Hispanic Federation and the New York State Office for New Americans on the naturalization process.
Job seekers gather inside the Burlington County jobs fair featuring health-care companies at the Kennedy Center in Willingboro, NJ. Read more

For recent graduate Kelle-Shae Bryson, 22, it was a way to "get my foot in the door" of a potential future employer.

And after she made the rounds of the companies lined up at the health-care jobs fair at Willingboro's Kennedy Center on Tuesday, the biology major concluded: "It's not as intimidating as I thought it would be."

There were job openings for nurses, nurse's aides, technicians, and other health-care and related professionals.

For Jenna Jordan, a talent acquisition consultant at Virtua, the fair was an opportunity to meet "people we think would be a great fit for our company." Virtua, she said, expected to hire at least a few people from the fair. The company had job openings for a number of positions, including nurses, patient care technicians, medical assistants, and food service workers.

Virtua was among 19 health-care companies, most of them local, whose tables and representatives lined a room at the Kennedy Center.

"It's a great selection of companies and a very nice setup," said Bryson, a Willingboro resident and Rutgers-New Brunswick graduate. "A lot of them said there are opportunities to advance, so that was good to hear."

By late morning, a couple of dozen applicants had come through.

The Burlington County Board of Chosen Freeholders along with the Burlington County Workforce Development Institute jointly hosted the fair.

The recent closing of the Mount Laurel Center for Rehabilitation and Healthcare in part motivated the arranging of the career fair, said John Miller, director of Rowan College at Burlington County's Career Services, which is part of the Burlington County Workforce Development Institute. About 323 people lost their jobs when the troubled Mount Laurel nursing home lost Medicare and Medicaid accreditation and shut down.

Health-care jobs make up 17.6 percent of the workforce in Camden County, 9.6 percent of the workforce in Burlington County, and 10.5 percent of the workforce in Gloucester County, according to 2015 Census data, the most recent available. In New Jersey, it is expected that more than 85,000 jobs in the industry will be added between 2014 and 2024, according to a report published earlier this year by the Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

Company representatives at the fair accepted resumes and chatted one-on-one with job-seekers. Among the companies at the fair was SunMED Medical Systems, a provider of medical equipment. The company was looking for people interested in full-time customer service positions.

Christin Roselli, human resources specialist at SunMED, said Tuesday was her second time representing SunMED at a career fair at the Kennedy Center. The company hired two or three people after the previous fair, she said.

"We get a variety of applicants" at the career fairs, she said. "I display the positions that we have available and give them an idea of what we're looking for."

Among the companies present were Bancroft, CareOne, Patient First, and Star Pediatrics.

Miller, the career services director at Rowan College at Burlington County, said the next career fair will be in October, focusing on transportation jobs.
Alejandra, 27, speaks English proficiently. She lived in Tijuana, then in San Diego, but was deported back to Mexico. She was diagnosed with colon cancer. Like so many of the women working in the brothels, she does not receive medical care and instead self-medicates. Read more

One afternoon not long ago, Ada Trillo, an Elkins Park mother of two, found herself fleeing a Juarez, Mexico, brothel ahead of cartel members chasing her with guns.

It seems fitting that her new exhibition at Twenty-Two Gallery  the culmination of three years photographing the bleak and unnaturally brief lives of prostitutes in this border town  is called "How did I get here?"

Trillo was raised in Juarez, but didn't learn about the plight of sex workers until 2015. Since then, she has paid for seven or eight trips there, photographing more than 100 women over three years  long enough to get to know the women, to watch them be destroyed by drugs or fall victim to gang violence. As women went missing, girls as young as 15 arrived to take their place.

Trillo, 41, is a painter. This is her first photography exhibition. All proceeds will go to the Coalition Against Trafficking Women, an international relief organization, and the Mother Antonia Center of the Oblate Sisters of the Most Holy Redeemers, a center run by nuns who work with women fleeing the brothels.

She spoke with us about her work and her hopes for redemption.

What drove you to do this work?

It happened kind of by chance. I wanted to do a work about immigration, to show the trajectory of the immigrants as they are trying to cross into the United States. But none of the coyotes, the smugglers, agreed. And even if they would, the journey is done during the night, so a quality picture would require a flash. I would be basically exposing the people I wanted to help. Then I got a lead: Do you want to go the brothels? They took me to this part of town I wasn't familiar with, and I was shocked. So I kept going for three years.

What shocked you about it?

There was a woman, Mariana. I didn't expect a sex worker to look like her. Her arms are covered with heroin marks, and these started getting infected because she used whatever needles she could get her hands on. She's been told if she doesn't stop, they will need to remove her arms. This was not what I pictured when I heard "sex worker." When I saw this, I said, "This is important."

As I started investigating, I realized people all over the world have similar circumstances. I went to do photography in Kensington, and it was horrendous. I was almost raped. And I saw things I've never seen before: a sex worker that was pregnant, with heroin marks in her neck. That I saw in Philadelphia. This is a global problem.

How did you get access to the brothel?

There was a group of three. Maria Lourdes Aguero, a former sex worker, introduced me to the women and talked to the gangs, to the cartel, and she basically told them I'm an artist, that I'm not a reporter. Otherwise it was impossible. Then, I went with a social worker, Blanca Cerceda, who was affiliated with the nuns who help them. She recorded the stories. We had 15 minutes for each photograph. We paid them the same amount a john would, about $7 to $10. Even though we offered to pay them for a half-hour or 45 minutes, they didn't want to stay. They were scared the other girls might steal their steady clients.

What was the most difficult part of this work?

What's difficult is to see that they keep digging deeper into the hole. One girl, in the first photograph I took, her face looks healthy. But she kept losing weight. The last time I saw her was six months ago. You can see she's lost a tremendous amount of weight, and that's because she started using crack.

In another photo, a woman is jumping on the bed. She was high on heroin. But she was coming down. Then she started sobering up really quickly, and she started telling us that her son was shot in the neck. That's the thing with the drugs: Coming down, they return to reality, and they don't like it. Not only that, the side effects of withdrawal without proper treatment are horrendous. One girl, Bonita, started dealing. She consumed all the drugs, so they killed her.

So, how did they get there?

The majority come from different parts of Mexico, trying to migrate to the United States. Some get stuck there. Many start at 15. Claudia was a runaway. She was repeatedly raped from age 6 until she was 13, when she ran away. Another woman, her uncle owned the brothel where she works. Another one, her mom is a sex worker, and she put her to work I think at the age of 13 or 15.

What do you hope to accomplish here?

My immediate hope is to fund another room or two in the safe house that the nuns have. They only have three rooms. The other donations are going to an organization that works with trafficked children. My hope? I want people to be aware so they can help, with whatever resources they might have.

And for the women, I want to give them respect. Claudia loved this picture because she had gotten new sneakers. She was really happy posing for us. Even when she was on top of the bed, the sneakers had to be part of the picture.

Did you ever feel you were in danger?

I was interviewing and photographing a girl that was high on crack. She got very aggressive with me, so I said, "OK, I'm finished. I'm not going to use your pictures." Now, my relationship with many of the girls is really good. If I'm in a brothel and photographing, they will come during their break so I can take their picture. She came over one day. I said, "Look, here's 70 pesos, but I can't take your picture. We had a bad experience." She got angry, and she told the cartel I was a reporter. They threw us out and said, "They're coming with guns. Get out now!" I left part of my equipment there.

It can be dangerous, but if I get the work I need, it's worth it.
(Left to right:) Kishia Nixon, Tamilla Woodard, Terence Anthony, Michele Volansky, Olivia Matlin, Steven Wright, Anna Barnett, and Ross Beschler hard at work on Anthonys play The House of the Negro Insane at the PlayPenn New Play Development Conference. Read more

The scene is a barely finished room in the basement of the Drake. Hot, close. A fan is running.

Ten people sit around a table, working hard, very hard, bringing to life Los Angeles playwright Terence Anthony's play The House of the Negro Insane.

If it's midsummer, this must be PlayPenn.

Selected from more than 800 applicants, six promising "conference playwrights" from across the country have brought their plays to Philadelphia for workshops with teams of actors, directors, dramaturges, and stage managers, all assembled by PlayPenn. In addition to Anthony, this year's winners are Brent Askari of Portland, Maine; Christine Evans, an Australian playwright now in Washington, D.C.; C.A. Johnson of Queens, N.Y.; Carter W. Lewis of St. Louis, Mo.; and Jonathan Norton of Dallas, Texas.

PlayPenn's playwrights get three intensive weeks to develop their plays. They started last week, stage the first of two public readings this week, go back to the drawing board to work and sweat some more, and do a second round of readings next week.

It's an excellent value for theater lovers, a peek at exciting plays of the future. And for the teams developing the plays, the perspiration is part of the inspiration.

There was plenty of drama  in the script and in the room  at Thursday's workshop for Anthony's play.

"We are all here for the play, to figure out where the play wants to go," director Tamilla Woodard said to the group. "What's the story the play is most interested in telling?  You are really, really, really our collaborators."

During a break, Anthony said: "It's just amazing to be in a room with so many smart people. I'm learning so much so fast."

"I know a lot of writers who have been at PlayPenn and a lot more who want to be at PlayPenn," he said. "A few of my friends are jealous."

House gets its first-round reading at 8 p.m. Thursday. The setting is the Taft State Hospital for the Negro Insane, established in 1934 in Taft, Okla., and one of seven such hospitals in a shameful network throughout the country. Anthony learned of it, and got the idea for the play, while reading Rebecca Skloot's book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

"One of the people in that book was sent to such a place as a teenager," Anthony said, "and she died there. I started doing research, and the more I did, the more connections I saw between these hospitals, the race situation, and today's prison-industrial complex and the incarceration of African American men."

The team read through the play beginning to end, took a break, then began discussion.

Steven Wright plays Attius Grimes. Incarcerated for more than a decade, Attius works in the hospital's wood shop making coffins. He has been castrated, which is considered to be one of the institution's "successful treatments."

Wright talked out loud to the workshop team about his character: "I feel I have no place in the world. At one time, back in the Jazz Age, I was living the life, but now, I've been subjected to so many of these 'therapies,' and I'm wary, scared."

Then it was Woodard's turn to observe. "Everyone seems to be drawn to Attius," she said. "What is it about him? What draws these other people, such different people, to him?"

The youngest character in Anthony's play is Madeleine, played by Jaden Moore. "She's sheltered, has seen only a piece of the world," Moore told the group. "She lost a piece of herself somewhere. She's been told she 'has the devil in her,' and she believes this story of herself."

Woodard interjects: "Let's find the damage. What was her trouble, so much that her people could not keep her and had to send her here? Let's work on that feeling of rising panic."

The group turned frequently to the playwright for reaction, clarification, and background. He discussed the historical setting: "These places were basically dumping grounds for black folks, with very poor conditions and a lot of shuffling of inmates from crowded facilities to newer ones."

Two days later, Anthony said by phone that he was energized: "I was up late again last night doing rewrites. We had another rehearsal today and worked through the previous day's work. It's like trying to collect water out of a river  a lot of ideas and things you want to change are in motion, and then you change some things and more things come up."

Woodard, a professional director in New York, said she was "overjoyed" to be invited to PlayPenn this summer. "I want to seize those scraps of backstory that emerge from the dialogue, and challenge these wonderful actors to tease them out, see where they lead."

What's her goal? "That by the time of the first reading on Thursday, we are halfway to answering the questions we want to answer, and that Terence is hopeful and encouraged."

Being at PlayPenn does not guarantee a play will go on to performances throughout the country  but it has a pretty good success rate, with more than 60 percent of "graduates" going into production.

Anthony said that, at the moment, "nothing is set in stone" for The House of the Negro Insane. "But I definitely am hoping to come out of PlayPenn with momentum."

First round of conference readings at PlayPenn. All readings at the Louis Bluver Theatre at the Drake, 341 Hicks Street. Free, but attendees should register at playpenn.org/calendar. July 18, 5 p.m.: Galilee by Christine Evans; 8 p.m.: Hard Cell by Brent Askari. July 19, 5 p.m.: Thirst by C.A. Johnson; 8 p.m.: penny candy by Jonathan Norton. July 20, 5 p.m.: With by Carter Louis; 8 p.m.: House of the Negro Insane by Terence Anthony. Second-round readings July 27-30. Information: 215-242-2813, playpenn.org.
With his enormous mouth, cheerful eyes and frantic way of talking, Kermit always seemed like a cheerful frog.

But Kermit's personality appeared to change in recent years. At least that's how Cheryl Henson, the daughter of Kermit's creator Jim Henson, saw it.

So last October, Kermit's longtime puppeteer, Steve Whitmire, was fired from Muppets Studio. After months of silence, last week he posted a blog item critical of the decision, calling it a "drastic action" that left him devastated.

In response, Cheryl Henson reportedly took to Facebook to criticize Whitmire's version of the beloved frog. Whitmire, who took over the role when Jim Henson died in 1990, "performed Kermit as a bitter, angry, depressed victim," she said.

"Steve's performance of Kermit has strayed far away from my father's good hearted, compassionate leader of the Muppets," Henson wrote. "Worst of all," she added, in the past few years "he has not been funny or fun."

Perhaps Kermit did seem a little dour lately, albeit all played for laughs.

On a 2011 appearance on Ellen, for example, Whitmire's Kermit complained that he "is often mistaken for a green fire hydrant" and bemoaned his relationship with Miss Piggy. With his misery seeking company, he appealed the studio audience, "Maybe some of your audience has actually dated a pig."

Finally, when Ellen kissed the little green Muppet on the lips, he excitedly asked if he had turned into a prince. Upon realizing he remained a frog, he sighed.

"Oh, well."

But it all simply seemed like part of the Kermit bit. The audience ate it up, laughing throughout the segment.

The 2015 ABC reboot of the The Muppets, meant to be a more "adult" portrayal of the fuzzy gang, was a different story. The show received a middling 62 out of 100 score on Metacritic, a website that aggregates television reviews. Many of the reviews pointed to an angry or depressed tone to the characters, specifically in Kermit and Miss Piggy, who break up in the pilot.

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Molly Eichel wrote that the show's darker tone drained "the Muppets of the warmth and love that made them so lovely in the first place."

Slate's Willa Paskin wrote, "The Muppet who comes off worst is Kermit, who spends his days sneakily managing Piggy's moods, working up the nerve to disobey her, a mild-mannered middle manager. His voice, previously so adorable, began to sound to me mealy and weak, like the vocal equivalent of pleated khakis."

Uproxx's Alan Sepinwall wrote, "making Kermit into a petulant frog who can't believe he still has to deal with his ex every day alters too much of what made him one of Henson's most special creations . . . If this is the 'real' Kermit, then I'd rather go back to watching him act."

The show was canceled after one season.

While it's unclear what creative role Whitmire played in the show  he was not credited as a writer  it is clear is that critics didn't like this new Kermit.

Even with the failure of a fairly high-profile network television program, the termination of Whitmire had gone relatively unnoticed by the general public until last week when he published the blog post about his firing. It came a few days after his replacement, Matt Vogel, was announced as the new voice of Kermit.

"I want all of you who love the Muppets to know that I would never consider abandoning Kermit or any of the others because to do so would be to forsake the assignment entrusted to me by Jim Henson, my friend and mentor, but even more, my hero," Whitmire wrote, describing the Muppets as "a calling, an urgent, undeniable, impossible to resist way of life."

He said he suggested "multiple remedies to the company's two stated issues, which had never been mentioned to me prior to that phone call."

But days later, Disney executives gave the New York Times a more detailed account behind the decision.

Debbie McClellan, head of the Muppets Studio, a division of Disney, told the Times that Whitmire displayed "repeated unacceptable business conduct over a period of many years."

Some of Henson's family members told the Times they agreed with the decision to replace Whitmire.

"He played brinkmanship very aggressively in contract negotiations," Lisa Henson, president of the Jim Henson Company, and Jim Henson's daughter, told the Times, adding that Whitmire staunchly opposed casting an understudy for Kermit.

Brian Henson, the company's chairman and Jim Henson's son, said that Whitmire "would send emails and letters attacking everyone, attacking the writing and attacking the director."

The dispute over the recasting of the famous amphibian drew the attention of many journalists and commentators, including shock-jock Howard Stern.

On Tuesday, Stern gave what he called "sensible advice."

"Anybody who wants to be a puppeteer for a living," Stern said, "the odds of you actually creating a money-generating career are next to nothing."

"Now he's trying to debate the merits of the character," he added. "Do not lose that job under any circumstances."
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Region 3, which includes a large Philadelphia office, could lose the most employees of the agency's 10 regional operations through recently announced buyout offers, according to figures obtained by the Inquirer and Daily News.

Region 3 covers Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C. But the region's biggest office by far is in Philadelphia.

The EPA is targeting a maximum of 159 workers for buyouts and early retirements in Region 3, or nearly one-fifth of its approximately 795 employees, according to the numbers supplied by union officials representing EPA employees. Of that number, 136 would come from the Philadelphia office. Buyouts, which also are being offered to non-union employees, are voluntary, so it's not clear just how much the effort will reduce staff.



EPA officials say the buyouts are part of the Trump administration's general plan to shrink government, but there is no hard minimum or maximum number. Mike Flynn, the EPA's acting deputy administrator, sent an email to employees Wednesday explaining that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget approved the offer for early retirements and buyouts. But he stressed that the decision to accept is voluntary and that the offer closes Tuesday.

"This is a very personal decision and employees are urged to carefully consider the information provided and their personal situation prior to deciding," Flynn said.

Among the biggest buyout targets are scientists, such as environmental protection specialists, environmental engineers, and general physical scientists. But lawyers, secretaries, and other job classifications are also on the list.

"I found out over the past week," said Gary Morton, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 3631, the union representing Region 3 employees. "It's worse than expected."

Morton said the impact of the buyout is difficult to gauge since employees are still mulling their options and the agency is restructuring in many areas. The most senior employees, those with 30 years of service, can get up to $25,000 as part of the buyout.

"This tells me the agency is looking to retire its higher-graded, most knowledgeable employees and replace them with new employees," Morton said.

The buyouts, part of the 2017 fiscal year, are separate from any proposed budget cuts to the agency for the 2018 fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1. This week, the House Appropriations Committee approved a bill that would cut the EPA's budget to $7.5 billion for 2018  about $500 million less than President Trump's original proposal calling for a $2.6 billion cut. The bill includes money to pay for buyouts.

Morton said the buyouts could both eliminate the most experienced talent and force state governments  also facing budget cuts  to take on more environmental protection duties.
In the early days of an investigation that would span more than three decades, the man now charged with raping and killing a 14-year-old Bucks County girl in 1984 gave police conflicting accounts of when he had last seen her, a detective testified Wednesday .

George F. Shaw, 56, of Geneva, Fla., at first told Terry J. Lachman, then a Bensalem Township police detective, that he last saw Barbara Rowan about 4:30 p.m. Aug. 3, the date on which prosecutors say she was killed, Lachman said on the witness stand on the second day of Shaw's nonjury trial in Bucks County Court.

Shaw later revised that to 5:30, said Lachman, and then 6. Lachman said he interviewed Shaw on Aug. 7, 1984.

Shaw told him that on Aug. 3 the girl "was outside his apartment when he pulled up from dropping his wife off at work, and that Barbara began playing with his daughter," who was a toddler at the time, Lachman testified. Shaw said that Rowan had been at his apartment several times and that she wanted to baby-sit his daughter.

Another witness, Hayes Leroy Biggs, 48, whose sister lived in an apartment above the Shaws, also said he saw Rowan at Shaw's apartment late that afternoon.

He testified that he arrived at the building around 4:10 p.m. and spoke with Rowan. As he and his sister were leaving around 6:30 p.m., he could hear Rowan and the Shaw toddler laughing and playing, he said.

Shaw was charged in October 2015 after a grand jury investigation. Providing key testimony, Robert Sanders, 53, of Willow Grove, told the grand jury that he had been in Shaw's apartment when Rowan was killed and that the two men had put her body in the trunk of Shaw's car.

Sanders, who pleaded guilty in February to obstructing the long investigation and awaits sentencing, is expected to testify.

On Tuesday, the first day of testimony, Robert and Patricia Rowan each recalled on the witness stand the day their only child went missing, and their frantic search for her by foot and car.

In emotional testimony, Robert Rowan recounted identifying his daughter's remains after they were discovered in a wooded area. "Just a skeleton," he said. "Your only child."

Shaw has maintained his innocence. "He didn't do it. It wasn't him," his attorney, Louis Busico, said after Tuesday's proceedings. "This young girl sadly and horrifically was killed by someone else."
The cremated remains of Phillip Clay were returned to Philadelphia, where his fellow Korean adoptees and friends held a memorial service on July 19, 2017. Read more

A cardboard box about the size of a microwave left South Korea last Thursday, red "fragile" stickers affixed to its sides.

The box traveled to Kailua, Hawaii, and stayed for a few days before being flown to Dallas. Around 1 a.m. Wednesday, the box landed in Philadelphia. And just before 8:30 a.m., a man carried it into the Hampton Inn on Bartram Avenue near the airport and placed it on a chair in the Franklin Room, a nondescript conference space just past the continental breakfast area.

He opened the box slowly and pulled out some bubble wrap, revealing a smaller white box packed in, tight. Inside that box was a white cloth bag and inside that bag a gilded ceramic urn. The man placed it inside a crown of blue and white flowers on a glass table.

Phillip Clay was home.

"In death, Phillip Clay did what he couldn't do in life," said the man, John Compton. "He entered the U.S. legally."

Clay was just 8 when a Philadelphia couple adopted him in 1983 from Eunpyeong Orphanage in South Korea. As an adult, he struggled with mental illness. He had repeated run-ins with the law and was a notorious bicycle thief. In 2012, he was deported back to South Korea because of his criminal record. He knew no one there and decades earlier had lost the language.

Clay hung on for five years.

"It was really, really hard for him to find a sustainable life for him over there," said Compton, an adviser with the Global Overseas Adoptees Link.

On May 21, Clay jumped from the 14th floor of an apartment building in Ilsan. A memorial service was held there for the 42-year-old shortly afterward.

A little more than a dozen people came to Clay's memorial at the airport hotel Wednesday morning. Most were fellow adoptees and adoption-reform advocates. City Councilman David Oh gave some remarks. Almost none of the mourners, besides Compton, had met Clay. But they knew his situation all too well. Many recited poems and lyrics from songs.

When Clay came to the United States, adoption and immigration were separate processes, something of which many parents and their children were unaware. Before 2000, citizenship was not granted automatically for adoptees.

"I was born in 1957 and I came here when I was 8," said Stefanie Blandon, who dabbed a tissue on her tears after Clay's memorial. "I was naturalized when I was 12, but it was something I took for granted." She had driven down from New York City.

An estimated 30,000 adoptees lack citizenship because of the disconnected processes, according to the Adoptee Rights Campaign, known as ARC. The group is pressing Congress to grant citizenship to all adoptees regardless of when they came here. Many advocates believe that had Clay been a citizen, he could still be alive in the U.S. today, even if he were in prison or a mental health facility.

"That number is staggering," said Anne Montgomery, a Philadelphia advocate for the Adoptee Rights Campaign who attended Wednesday morning's service. "It is unfortunate that we have to come together [over his death] to highlight this issue."

Clay's story was covered by the New York Times and news outlets in South Korea. TV Chosun had a crew following Clay's ashes on the 6,900-mile journey.

Compton had met Clay in South Korea after he was deported and tried to help him. He recalled picking him up from prison and driving hours back to Seoul. They bought cigarettes and Egg McMuffins and argued about which technology giant was better, Apple or Samsung.

"I appreciate you all coming here to pay respects," Compton told those gathered, "and to welcome him home."

Clay's adoptive parents did not attend the memorial. When it was over and the room cleared out, Compton said he would place the urn back in the box, gather up the flowers, and deliver Clay's remains to his family.
Investigators probing the death of an Australian woman who was fatally shot by Minneapolis police officers over the weekend said Tuesday that the officers were "startled by a loud sound" near their patrol car right before the shooting.

The two officers were driving through an alley near the home of Justine Damond, 40, after she called 911 late Saturday to report a possible assault, according to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), the state agency investigating the shooting. The officer who was driving the patrol car told investigators that right after the loud noise, Damond approached the car on his side. The officer who was in the passenger seat then fatally shot Damond through the driver's side window, according to investigators.

The information released Tuesday marked the first account from one of the officers about what happened at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday in the upscale Minneapolis neighborhood, and it came as relatives of Damond have sharply criticized law enforcement officials for not revealing more about the shooting.

State investigators on Tuesday identified the officer who shot Damond as Mohamed Noor, who joined the department in 2015, and said the officer driving was Matthew Harrity, who joined the force last year. Both officers were placed on standard administrative leave after the shooting.

According to investigators, they spoke with Harrity on Tuesday and got his account of the shooting. Noor has declined to be interviewed by BCA agents, the bureau said in a statement, adding that Noor's attorney did not say "when, if ever, an interview would be possible." State officials said they could not compel Noor to speak with investigators.

Thomas Plunkett, an attorney representing Noor, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Harrity told investigators that Noor shot Damond through the open driver's side car window. After the shooting, both officers got out of the car to give Damond medical attention, investigators said.

Authorities said no weapon was found at the scene of the shooting, but they found a cellphone near Damond.

Relatives say Damond had called 911 on Saturday night to report what she thought was a sexual assault near her home. Officials say Noor and Harrity responded to the call just before 11:30 p.m. What happened in Damond's final moments has been shrouded in mystery for three days, but about 20 minutes after the 911 call, she was dead, killed by a single gunshot to her abdomen.

Investigators confirmed Tuesday that they have not found any video or audio that captured the shooting. Both officers were wearing body cameras, but the cameras were not turned on until after the shooting, investigators said, though they did not say why. The squad car camera also was not turned on, the BCA said.

A Minneapolis police spokesman declined to comment Tuesday about whether the officers were being investigated for potentially violating departmental policy regarding the body cameras. This policy requires officers to manually activate the devices before any use of force and, if that does not take place, the cameras must be "activated as soon as it is safe to do so."

The shooting has drawn international attention and been decried as a nightmare in Damond's home country of Australia. Her relatives have pleaded for any information about what happened before she was shot and killed, saying they were "desperate for information."

"Our hearts are broken and we are utterly devastated by the loss of Justine," Don Damond, her fiance, said Monday at a news briefing in Minneapolis. He said that understanding her last moments "would be a small comfort as we grieve this tragedy."

After Noor was identified in multiple media reports as a Somali American police officer on the force, some in the Twin Cities' Somali community began to worry about possible backlash.

"They fear this will be just another event used to create animosity toward the Somali community," said Mohamud Noor, executive director at the Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota. (The two men are not related.)

In a statement released Monday, the officer's attorney said Noor, who came to the United States at a young age, "takes these events very seriously because, for him, being a police officer is a calling."

"He joined the police force to serve the community and to protect the people he serves," Plunkett said. "Officer Noor is a caring person with a family he loves and he empathizes with the loss others are experiencing. The current environment for police is difficult, but Officer Noor accepts this as part of his calling."

Noor currently has had three complaints filed against him with the city's Office of Police Conduct Review, two of which are still open. The other complaint did not result in any disciplinary action, and any records regarding complaints are not made public unless an officer is disciplined.

He is also the subject of a lawsuit filed one day before Damond's death. In that case, a woman is accusing Noor and two other Minneapolis police officers of forcing their way into her house, violently detaining her and taking her to a hospital against her will. The woman had called 911 multiple times and, at some point, was ordered to be involuntarily taken to the hospital and to be placed on a mental health hold, according to the complaint. The lawsuit, which is seeking $50,000 in damages, was filed in Minnesota's Fourth Judicial District Court on Friday.

Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges said she had asked state investigators to release information as quickly as possible in the case.

"We all want answers," Hodges said during a briefing late Tuesday. "We all want to see justice done."

Hodges said that even with the new details released Tuesday night, it was "frustrating to have some of the picture but not all of it," adding that officials could not compel Noor to speak to state investigators.

"There are big questions left that we still have and that we hope to have answered soon," Hodges said. "Why did Officer Noor draw and fire his gun? What happened from the time the officers arrived on the scene to when she was pronounced dead? Why don't we have footage from body cameras? Why were they not activated? We all want answers to those questions."

Janee Harteau, the Minneapolis police chief, has called Damond's shooting "a tragic death" and said she felt the same uncertainty reverberating through the community.

"I also want to assure you that I understand why so many people have so many questions at this point," Harteau said in a statement Monday. "I have many of the same questions and that is why we immediately asked for an external and independent investigation into the officer-involved shooting death."

The shooting has prompted far more questions than answers. Damond's fiance said she was calling in "what she believed was an active sexual assault occurring nearby."

According to the Minneapolis Police Department's policies, video recording systems in police cars are activated by a "trigger event"  including the activation of the squad car lights  but otherwise have to be activated manually. Body cameras, meanwhile, must be manually activated "when safe to do so" during certain activities like traffic stops, suspicious stops, searches and any contact involving criminal activity as well as before uses of force.

Harrity told investigators that an unidentified young white man was biking in the area before the shooting and saw them both try to give medical aid to Damond, the BCA said. Agents are hoping to speak to him and anyone else who might have seen what happened.

The Washington Post's Emily Sohn in Minneapolis and Kristine Phillips and Katie Mettler in Washington contributed to this report.
New Jersey Attorney General Chris Porrino announces the arrests of an Essex County doctor and 17 alleged members of a drug ring Read more

NEWARK, N.J.  An Essex County doctor and 17 alleged members of an Atlantic County drug ring  including a well-known former Margate lifeguard fired last year for shoplifting at a Wawa store  have been arrested for selling tens of thousands of pills that the doctor prescribed to them, authorities said.

Craig Gialanella, 53, of North Caldwell, an internist in private practice, was arrested Monday and charged with second-degree distribution of narcotics, New Jersey Attorney General Christopher Porrino announced Wednesday. Gialanella is accused of prescribing the opioid painkiller oxycodone as well as alprazolam, an antianxiety drug also known as Xanax.

Among those charged is former Margate firefighter and beach patrol member Ashton Funk, a perennial rowing champ for the Shore town in the summer lifeguard races. Funk, 35, of Northfield, lost both jobs last year after shoplifting $7.98 worth of items at the Wawa, including a bag of sunflower seeds and a Gatorade. Funk maintained that the incident was a misunderstanding.

The arrests are not connected to a separate federal investigation of prescription fraud allegedly involving firefighters and other municipal employees in several Shore towns, according to the Attorney General's Office.

At least one of the others named in the state probe, Ted Gogol, 37, is a Margate firefighter, Mayor Mike Becker said.

Becker also said he did not believe the attorney general's drug bust was related to the FBI probe, which has brought subpoenas to Margate, Ventnor, and Atlantic City.

"This is an opiate investigation from Essex County," Becker said. "The other is a federal fraud investigation."

Most of the alleged members of the drug ring have been charged with either second- or third-degree distribution of narcotics or conspiracy to distribute narcotics. Three are accused of leading the drug ring: Mary Connolly, 54; Lauren Connolly, 28; and Douglas Patterson, 53, all of Egg Harbor Township. Patterson is Mary Connolly's former husband and Lauren Connolly is Mary Connolly's daughter.

Authorities believe Patterson at one point lived near Gialanella, possibly sparking the relationship between the two, though Porrino said he "can't speak specifically as to how they initially got together."

Patterson introduced Mary Connolly and others to Gialanella, authorities said.

The arrests stemmed from an investigation by the Attorney General's Prescription Fraud Investigation Strike Team. The investigation began in December after an Atlantic County pharmacist reported that Patterson and others were obtaining large quantities of opiates from Gialanella, authorities said.

Gialanella allegedly charged the defendants $50 to $100 for "office visits," and would prescribe 90 to 180 tablets of oxycodone and 90 alprazolam tablets. Authorities said the doctor would write from two to five prescriptions for each drug to a single patient every 30 days.

Authorities said Gialanella prescribed more than 350,000 oxycodone pills between January 2014 and May 2017, though it was not clear exactly how many were illegally prescribed.

Gialanella is the sixth doctor since 2014 that the Prescription Fraud Investigation Strike Team has charged with illegally distributing opiates. The number of pills prescribed by Gialanella was "on the high end" compared with the other doctors charged, authorities said.

"We are not going to tolerate drug dealers in white coats," Porrino said.

The Attorney General's Office also said Wednesday that 1,022 people died from drug overdoses in the state in the first six months of 2016, primarily from opiates. Of those deaths, 594 involved heroin, 394 involved fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, and 177 involved oxycodone. Total drug overdoses were up 41 percent compared with the first six months of 2015.

The investigation into Gialanella is continuing, as he is suspected of illegally prescribing oxycodone to individuals in other counties, according to authorities. His medical license has been suspended.

"We will continue our work on this front and many other fronts in response to this crisis," Porrino said.

The others charged are: Danielle Grainger, 33, of Linwood; William Warren, 51, of Egg Harbor Township; Francis Clemson, 53, of Ocean View; Beatriz Oquendo, 34, of Pleasantville; Amanda Blomdahl, 37, of Somers Point; Kevin Reid, 47, of Ventnor; David Blocker, 49, of Galloway; Joseph Green, 39, of Atlantic City; Christopher Perez, 34, of Mays Landing; John Hager, 39, of Deptford; and two of Mary Connolly's sons, Robert, 31, and Michael Jr., 33, both of Galloway.
File photo of one of the infamous Atlantic City Boardwalk Cats. Read more

A advocacy group is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and convictions of three men in the slayings of three Atlantic City Boardwalk cats in March.

Atlantic City police have posted surveillance photos of the suspects on their Facebook page.

Alley Cat Allies, a national cat advocacy group, is offering the reward.

The three cats from the Boardwalk Cats Project were found slain on March 22.

"We are devastated about the loss of these cats, and we're doing everything we can to find out who is behind this cruelty," Alley Cats Allies posted. "The Boardwalk Cats are important not only to us, but the entire Atlantic City community  including residents, tourists, and leaders."

Alley Cat Allies has managed the infamous colony since 2000 through a city-supported trap-neuter-release program. It is one of the better known feral cat success stories in the area. The felines even survived the floods of Hurricane Irene and Sandy.

"Animal cruelty must be taken seriously, and the guilty parties should be punished to the full extent of the law," said Becky Robinson, president and founder of Alley Cat Allies.

Police ask anyone with information to contact the Criminal Investigations Unit at 609-347-5766 or text to tip411 (847411). Begin your text with ACPD.
FILE / Democratic PA Rep. Chris Rabb, a freshman from Philadelphia outside his Germantown Ave office. Read more

Halfway through his first legislative year, State Rep. Chris Rabb is experiencing real frustration tempered by some guarded hope.

"If you're not frustrated, you're not paying attention," he says.

Frustration is understandable. He's a member of a Republican-controlled House, a freshman in the minority party.

But the Northwest Philly Democrat, who represents Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy, and parts of West Oak Lane, also says he has found reasons for future optimism.

"There are pockets of new, maverick Republicans who seem open to talking about what we all share in common  and, as a student of history, I take the long view."

Rabb's a rarity in Harrisburg and Philly, both for his hope and his profile.

He's a Chicago native with two Ivy League degrees, an entrepreneur and an author with congressional and White House experience.

In last year's primary, he beat an incumbent Democrat backed by Mayor Kenney, Gov. Wolf, and former Gov. Ed Rendell. So he's got an independent streak.

When he first took office, he told me the legislative system "seems set up to fail," with little bipartisan cooperation or even sharing of resources or data.

This week, we talked again, for this, the second of four planned quarterly reports on Rabb's freshman year.

What's been most disappointing?

"Being sent home without passing a budget. That's enraging. That's our constitutional responsibility, a responsibility we're abdicating."

He joined other Philadelphia Democrats on Tuesday at Independence Hall to call on GOP House Speaker Mike Turzai to get his house in order or, more precisely, order his House back into session.

As you may know, your legislature is nearly three weeks late in doing the one thing it's supposed do: Pass an annual balanced state budget.

A $32 billion spending plan was enacted (Rabb voted for it because of increases for education, and "it's the best we could get"), but there's no agreement among Republican leaders on paying for it.

"They don't see eye to eye on how to mismanage funds," quips Rabb. "What kind of gaming? How much liquor? How much should we mortgage our future with borrowing? These are poverty taxes supported by not all but a critical mass of Republicans."

And, he says, "Democrats [outnumbered, 121-82, in the House] are forced to twiddle our thumbs and wait to see what bad ideas they'll bring us."

Rabb, 47, father of two young sons, pushes issues most Republicans oppose: hiking the minimum wage, election reforms, requiring reporting of lost or stolen guns, making Pennsylvania a "sanctuary state." He knows working these issues is playing long ball.

But meanwhile, he got an amendment into a bill likely to become law that would give taxpayers an option to contribute to pediatric cancer research through a check-off box on state income tax filings. The original bill called for $5. Rabb's amendment removes the $5 cap so taxpayers can give what they want.

A "small thing," he says, but one of which he's proud.

He's the prime sponsor of House legislation, mirroring a Senate bill with bipartisan backing, to create a trust fund to help children with a parent in prison.

And he's reaching across the aisle on fiscal issues.

He's working on a House subcommittee examining tax structure. And he's part of a new bipartisan "Fiscal Rescue Caucus" seeking, in nonpartisan ways, to address the state's fiscal woes.

Caucus cofounder, fellow freshman Rep. Frank Ryan (R., Lebanon), is a CPA and a retired Marine colonel. Ryan tells me he and Rabb "are philosophically miles apart, but he's become a great friend."

So when I ask Rabb if the promise of possibility through building relationships outweighs the frustration, he pauses and says, "Ask me next year if we're still here with just 82 Dems, and a Republican governor."
Acting Philadelphia District Attorney Kathleen Martin on Wednesday dropped her candidacy for interim district attorney, throwing her support to a veteran prosecutor.

Martin asked the Common Pleas Court Board of Judges, gathered in a City Hall courtroom for private presentations from the candidates, to support John Delaney.

Delaney, a deputy district attorney in charge of the Trial Division, has been a prosecutor in the city for 35 years.

Martin, in a copy of remarks obtained by the Inquirer and Daily News, said she hoped to "minimize any further disruptions in the office."

"I can certainly tell you that John and I sometimes disagree on ideological issues but there is never a moment that John does not put intelligent thought and the best interests of the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office first," Martin told the judges.

Martin joined the office in November 2015 as then-District Attorney Seth Williams' chief of staff. She took over the office after he resigned in June, just before pleading guilty in a federal corruption case.

Delaney, after speaking to the judges, said he told them he was best-qualified to lead the staff in redeeming the office in the eyes of the public.

"The acts of one person do not in any way affect anyone in this place or how we do our jobs," Delaney said. "We don't need someone coming in from the outside to 'save us' or to 'right the ship.' "

The Board of Judges will vote Thursday for an interim district attorney to finish the last 5 months of Williams' second term.

Martin was barraged with questions as she entered and left the courtroom by a Black Lives Matter activist and a journalist seeking information about a police shooting last month that left a man dead.

Former District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham ignored heckling from the Black Lives Matter activist as she walked into her interview. The Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP on Sunday urged the judges to not support Abraham, based on her 18-year record as district attorney.

Fourteen candidates applied last week for the interim post. Thirteen gave five-minute presentations Wednesday. One, retired Judge Paul Panepinto, was out of the country.

Seventy-one of the 88 Common Pleas Court judges attended Wednesday's meeting, clapping politely at the end of each presentation.

A candidate needs to win a majority of the vote to win the post. The Board of Judges bylaws say that if no candidate wins a majority in the first vote, the three receiving the most votes will be placed into a runoff for a second vote. If no candidate wins a majority in the second vote, the two who received the most votes will be placed into another runoff for a third vote.

The 10 other candidates are Joe Khan, who ran for district attorney in the May Democratic primary election; retired Judges Ben Lerner and William Manfredi; Senior Judge D. Webster Keogh; five former prosecutors, Kelley Hodge, Robert A. Rovner, Curtis Douglas, Arlene Fisk, and James Berardinelli; and longtime defense attorney Leon Aristotle Williams.
Although Philadelphia spends $60 million a year on antiviolence programs, homicides are up 21 percent over last year and aggravated assaults with a gun are up by more than 4 percent, according to police.

"It's totally unacceptable," Councilman Kenyatta Johnson said. "If you're spending $60 million and shootings are increasing and homicides are increasing, then something is wrong with the strategies."

On Tuesday, Mayor Kenney announced the establishment of the Office of Violence Prevention, which will gauge the effectiveness of the dozens of existing antiviolence programs in the city that receive a portion of the $60 million in city funding. Individual evaluations of programs have been conducted before, but this is the first citywide and coordinated evaluation, according to mayoral spokeswoman Lauren Hitt.

"We felt the need to assess whether all that money was being spent well and whether we were measuring the outcome of our investments," Hitt said.

The new office is also charged with researching the latest trends and innovations in violence prevention, and it will serve as an umbrella for all other city-run violence-prevention programs. Similar initiatives are already in place in New Orleans and New York, Hitt said.

Johnson, who applauded Kenney for forming the office, said he's glad it will look at violence-prevention strategies from a coordinated perspective in a city where oftentimes "the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing."

He said he hopes agencies on the ground not currently receiving city funding might have the opportunity to obtain funding under the new office and he hopes those research groups that do receive funding but never set their feet on the ground are reevaluated.

"I know for a fact you have some hardworking antiviolence activists out on a daily basis who don't have a chance at funding  and you have organizations that are great at analysis, but they're not actually out in the community touching people," he said. "Let's make sure we're being effective and intentional with our strategies of reducing gun violence."

Kenney appointed Shondell Revell, 48, who most recently served as the executive director of the city's Youth Violence Reduction Partnership, as the executive director of the new office. Revell, who will be supported by four staffers, said his office will reach out to antiviolence groups currently receiving city funding and to the communities they serve.

"This office doesn't believe that throwing money at violence prevention is the answer," Revell said. "We have to do a really complete evaluation of the programs in the community. A program can be great, but if the community doesn't gravitate to it, it won't be effective at all."

The announcement of the creation of the office comes less than three weeks after Inquirer and Daily News columnist Helen Ubinas called for the city to hold antiviolence programs accountable, but Hitt said plans for the office had been in motion since January.

According to police, 1,222 cases of aggravated assault with a gun had been reported in Philadelphia as of July 16, up from 1,169 at the same time last year. As of July 17, the city had marked 169 homicides this year, up from 140 at the same time last year.
U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) wants that dark cloud hanging over him  allegations that he accepted bribes from a wealthy Miami friend  to go away, instead of allowing a jury to decide his fate.

In court filings on Tuesday, attorneys for both men cited a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision and more recent lower court decisions in other cases, saying the charges should be dismissed because the legal scope of federal bribery has significantly narrowed.

The most recent decision came last week in an appellate ruling that reversed the corruption conviction of former New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. The panel of three judges concluded the jury was given instructions contrary to the high court's 2016 decision.

The panel also concluded that federal prosecutors had sufficient evidence to prove corruption and money laundering, remanding the case back to the lower court. Manhattan prosecutors have said they plan to retry Silver, according to the New York Times.

The Supreme Court case centered on the conduct of former Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, who were convicted in a corruption case alleging that they accepted gifts from a Virginia businessman who sought political favors.

In reversing the lower courts, the Supreme Court said, "There is no doubt that this case is distasteful; it may be worse than that. But our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns. It is instead with the broader legal implications of the government's boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute."

In New Jersey, Melendez and Florida ophthalmologist Salomon Melgen, charged in the 2015 indictment, had previously requested a dismissal citing the McDonnell case. Their efforts in lower courts were unsuccessful, and the Supreme Court in March rejected a petition to take up the case.

It appeared to be the last blow to their hopes of having key evidence tossed and charges dismissed. It also cleared the way for the trial scheduled for September. It was unclear whether Tuesday's filing could delay those proceedings.

Among the charges, Menendez is accused of using his influence as a senator to set up meetings with government officials to help Melgen resolve a Medicare dispute and advance Melgen's financial interests.

According to the indictment, Menendez accepted lavish gifts from his friend, such as a Paris vacation that included a flight on a private jet and a stay in a posh hotel. The indictment also alleges that Menendez received large political donations from Melgen.

Melgen was convicted in April on multiple counts of Medicare fraud in Florida. That case is separate from the counts he faces in the Menendez indictment.

Both men have pleaded not guilty in the New Jersey case.

Calls to the offices of Menendez, Melgen, and the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia were not returned.
House Republicans, lead by Speaker Mike Turza (R., Allegheny), are insisting on raising new dollars through a mix of gambling expansion, liquor privatization and borrowing  but no tax hikes. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) Read more

HARRISBURG  As the state's budget impasse drags on, House Republican leaders appear to be emerging as the holdouts in talks.

Top legislative Democrats said Tuesday that House GOP leaders presented a counterproposal Tuesday that doesn't contain many of the items that had been under consideration just days ago.

Specifically, they said Republicans have retreated from talks over finding reliable sources of revenue as part of a package to pay for the nearly $32 billion spending plan the legislature passed hours before the July 1 start of the new fiscal year. Instead, they're back to insisting on raising new dollars solely through a mix of borrowing, gambling expansion, liquor privatization, and onetime revenue sources.

"Now there are no recurring revenues," Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (D., Allegheny) said of the House Republican proposal, calling it a drastic drop from the roughly $300 million in recurring revenue discussed in talks as recently as last week. "I view that as a retreat from where they were previously."

Costa and House Minority Leader Frank Dermody (D., Allegheny) said four out of the five parties involved in budget negotiations have been close to an agreement on the revenue package, but that House Republicans have refused to sign off on it.

Tuesday's setback, Costa said, could soon leave Gov. Wolf with little choice but to start cutting spending to bring the budget into balance.

Pennsylvania's Constitution requires a balanced budget. Without a revenue package, the budget remains out of balance, raising questions about whether the state can legally spend money.

State Treasurer Joe Torsella, a Democrat, warned last week that if legislators don't quickly approve a responsible revenue package, the state could run out of money to pay its bills as soon as next month.

Two sources familiar with negotiations attributed the latest setback in talks to House Speaker Mike Turzai's taking a lead role in negotiations.

They said Turzai (R., Allegheny), a fiscal conservative who's seriously considering a run for governor, abruptly shifted the House Republican position this week, rejecting any tax hikes to deal with the state's fiscal problems. One of the items under consideration in budget talks has been reinstating a gross receipts tax on natural gas sales, which would be paid by households that use natural gas.

Other options have included tax increases for basic cable, telephone, and electric service.

"At the eleventh hour, he decided there should be a different way for how to pay for the budget," said one of the sources, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly. "He wants more borrowing, more gaming, and more liquor [privatization]. All I can say is, that conversation was very different from where we were last week."

In an interview with reporters late Tuesday afternoon, Turzai pushed back on the notion that he's shifted course. He said that the House passed numerous proposals months ago to raise new money  and that none of them included tax increases.

"The House as a body has passed expanded gaming and wine and spirits [privatization] legislation that provides significant revenue for a budget," said Turzai, later adding: "We've been talking about a no-tax increase budget since April."

Adding to the uncertainty Tuesday, Senate Republican leaders, after a lengthy meeting with House Republicans, sent rank-and-file senators home. They had called members back to the Capitol in hopes of closing a deal this week.

Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman (R., Centre) said his chamber will spend the next few days vetting the House GOP proposal.

"I'm not giving up," Corman said. "That's why we're here."

Though he said he expects the Senate will be called back into session by Monday, if not sooner, he was careful not to commit to any aspect in the House Republican proposal.

Costa said next week could provide a turning point.

"I think by then if we're not at a place where it looks like there's movement, then I think there may be some tough choices that have to be made by us and by the administration going forward," he said.

Dermody put it this way: "There is going to be pain if this doesn't happen. There are significant programs that will not be funded."
Anna Corbin of Hanover and her sons in Washington, D.C. Read more

Congressional Republicans' plans to repeal and replace  or even just repeal  Obamacare may be on hold for now, but four Pennsylvania mothers of chronically ill and seriously disabled children said Tuesday they can't afford to let up on their efforts to preserve the public program that pays for their children's care.

As guests of the Pennsylvania Health Access Network (PHAN), a statewide health consumer advocacy group, the women spoke out about what cuts to Medicaid  a part of virtually all the GOP's proposals  would do to working families like theirs. Although Medicaid is most often thought of as a health-care provider for the poor, it also funds care for people with severe conditions that would not be fully covered by private insurance.

For Marlee Stefanelli, 39, of South Abington, Medicaid helps pay for 5-year-old son Matthew's 24-hour blood-sugar monitoring device, which makes it possible for the boy to go to school. The special device monitors Matthew, who has Type 1 diabetes, and sets off an alarm that lets teachers know if his blood sugar levels become unstable.

Stefanelli, who has a mental health therapy practice with her husband, said private insurance would not cover the cost of the device.

"This device is vital," Stefanelli said. "It's life-changing for us."

Anna Corbin, 38, of Hanover, said sons Jackson, 11, and Henry, 9, both have Noonan syndrome. The genetic disorder prevents normal development in various parts of the body.

Earlier in her sons' lives, Corbin said, the family did not know they could get help from Medicaid. Despite private insurance, they could not afford all the care their boys needed. They ran up $42,000 in credit card debt.

"We were ready to lose our home," said Corbin, who cares for her sons full time. Her husband works in insurance.

Janeen Moser, 36, of Norriton said her daughter Midhuri was born with trisomy 18, a rare developmental disability that requires the child to use a feeding tube and heart monitor and to receive oxygen. Moser said her daughter's care includes 12 specialists, five therapists, and several nurses.

Moser is a teacher and works in human resources. She and her husband also operate a landscaping business. Without Medicaid, Moser said, they would not be able to pay for all of Midhuri's care.

"Medicaid is for people like us, and I never would have thought that," Moser said.

Today, Midhuri is a happy child who enjoys school.

For Casey Dye, 41, of Monroeville, Medicaid helped pay for her daughter's therapy for severe speech and hearing delays. Chessie, 8, likely would be unable to communicate and might not have been able to go to school without the therapy.

Dye works full time as a nurse, but the family's private insurance did not cover the full bill.

The mothers have tried to reach out to Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) to get him to back continued Medicaid support without success.

Stefanelli said that she was one of several women who received an audience with the senator but that they could not change his mind about replacing the Obama-era Affordable Care Act.

Toomey said he opposed abortion, she said. "If he was really pro-life, he would be fighting for everyone to have health care," Stefanelli said.

Medicaid has been a consistent target in all Republican proposals on health care, said PHAN's director, Antoinette Kraus. Those proposed cuts prompted the four women to speak up.

"There's just a lot of uncertainty," Kraus said. "We have to be vigilant."
Hoping to avoid a humiliating political defeat, President Trump on Wednesday demanded that Republican senators resume their efforts to approve a plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, insisting that lawmakers are "very close."

A day after the GOP strategy to roll back the ACA appeared dead, Trump invited Republican senators to lunch at the White House and challenged them to work out an agreement even if it means remaining in Washington through their summer recess next month. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) had previously announced that the recess would be delayed by two weeks.

"People should not leave town unless we have a health insurance plan, unless we give our people great health care," Trump said at the beginning of the lunch. "We're close, very close. . . . We have to hammer this out and get it done."

The president's effort to resurrect negotiations came a day after he declared that it was time to give up on the contentious process to overturn President Barack Obama's signature legislative achievement and "let Obamacare fail."

With Sen. Dean Heller (R., Nev.), a key vote who has wavered on the GOP's repeal proposal, sitting to his right, Trump touted what he said were benefits of the plan  including the repeal of the individual mandate, expanded coverage options and getting rid of "burdensome taxes."

The president appeared to issue a veiled threat that he would campaign against Republicans who stood in his way.

"He wants to remain a senator, doesn't he?" Trump said with a laugh of Heller, who also chuckled. "I think the people of your state appreciate what you're going to do."

Trump added: "Any senator voting against starting debate is telling the American people you're fine with Obamacare." But the current health-care law, approved in 2010, has "failed," Trump declared. "It's gone."

The effort by Senate Republicans to undo Obamacare has been fraught with internal divisions and apparent discord between the White House and GOP leaders. With little room for error, McConnell abruptly switched course Monday after several Republicans announced they would block efforts to vote on a replacement bill that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would leave up to 22 million more Americans without health insurance.

Instead, McConnell announced plans to vote early next week on a straight repeal of the law with a two-year delay that would give Congress more time to work out a replacement plan. But that strategy was short-lived as at least three GOP members said they would oppose that course of action, enough to block it.

Trump, who had invited Republican leaders to a health-care strategy dinner Monday night, was apparently blindsided by the opposition from some conservative members, including Sens. Mike Lee (R., Utah) and Jerry Moran (R., Kan.).

Trump, as he has done numerous times in recent weeks, reminded the lawmakers that Republicans had campaigned against the ACA for years and their supporters are counting on them to make good on their promises.

"I'm ready to act," Trump said. "I have my pen in hand. I'm sitting in that office. I have pen in hand. You've never had that before. For seven years, you've had the easy route  we repeal, we replace, but he (Obama) never signs it. I'm signing it. So it's a little different."

Everything is happening so fast  or at least that's how it feels trying to follow politics these days. You've seen the headlines about President Trump and his policies  but what do they mean for Philadelphia? What does that mean for you? We've launched a newsletter to explore just that. You can sign up to get the weekly Trumpadelphia newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday.
WASHINGTON  President Trump has decided to end the CIA's covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.

The program was a central plank of a policy begun by the Obama administration in 2013 to put pressure on Assad to step aside, but even its backers have questioned its efficacy since Russia deployed forces in Syria two years later.

Officials said the phasing out of the secret program reflects Trump's interest in finding ways to work with Russia, which saw the anti-Assad program as an assault on its interests. The shuttering of the program is also an acknowledgment of Washington's limited leverage and desire to remove Assad from power.

Just three months ago, after the United States accused Assad of using chemical weapons, Trump launched retaliatory airstrikes against a Syrian air base. At the time, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, said that "in no way do we see peace in that area with Assad at the head of the Syrian government."

Officials said Trump made the decision to scrap the CIA program nearly a month ago, after an Oval Office meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser H.R. McMaster ahead of a July 7 meeting in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Spokesmen for the National Security Council and the CIA declined to comment.

After the Trump-Putin meeting, the United States and Russia announced an agreement to back a new cease-fire in southwest Syria, along the Jordanian border, where many of the CIA-backed rebels have long operated. Trump described the limited cease-fire deal as one of the benefits of a constructive working relationship with Moscow.

The move to end the secret program to arm the anti-Assad rebels was not a condition of the cease-fire negotiations, which were already well underway, said U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the secret program.

Trump's dealings with Russia have been under heavy scrutiny because of the investigations into the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 election. The decision on the CIA-backed rebels will be welcomed by Moscow, which focused its firepower on those fighters after it intervened in Syria in 2015.

Some current and former officials who support the program cast the move as a major concession.

"This is a momentous decision," said a current official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a covert program. "Putin won in Syria."

With the end of the CIA program, U.S. involvement in Syria now consists of a vigorous air campaign against the Islamic State and a Pentagon-run train-and-equip program in support of the largely Kurdish rebel force that is advancing on Islamic State strongholds in Raqqa and along the Euphrates River valley. The Trump administration's long-term strategy, following the defeat of the Islamic State, appears to be focused on stitching together a series of regional cease-fire deals among the U.S.-backed rebels, the Syrian government and Russia.

Some analysts said the decision was likely to empower more radical groups inside Syria and damage the credibility of the United States.Some analysts said the decision to end the program was likely to empower more radical groups inside Syria and damage the credibility of the United States.

"We are falling into a Russian trap," said Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, who focuses on the Syrian resistance. "We are making the moderate resistance more and more vulnerable. . . . We are really cutting them off at the neck."

Others said it was recognition of Assad's entrenched position in Syria.

"It's probably a nod to reality," said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama administration official and director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

U.S. intelligence officials say battlefield gains by rebels in 2015 prompted Russia's direct military intervention on the side of the Assad regime. Some U.S. officials and their allies in the region urged President Barack Obama to respond by providing the rebels with advanced antiaircraft weapons so they could better defend themselves. But Obama balked, citing concerns about the United States getting pulled into a conflict with Russia.

Senior U.S. officials said that the covert program would be phased out over a period of months. It is also possible that some of the support could be redirected to other missions, such as fighting the Islamic State or making sure that the rebels can still defend themselves from attacks.

"This is a force that we can't afford to completely abandon," Goldenberg said. "If they are ending the aid to the rebels altogether, then that is a huge strategic mistake."

U.S. officials said the decision had the backing of Jordan, where some of the rebels were trained, and appeared to be part of a larger Trump administration strategy to focus on negotiating limited cease-fire deals with the Russians.

Earlier this month, five days into the first cease-fire in southwest Syria, Trump indicated that another agreement was under discussion with Moscow. "We are working on the second cease-fire in a very rough part of Syria," Trump said. "If we get that and a few more, all of a sudden we are going to have no bullets being fired in Syria."

One big potential risk of shutting down the CIA program is that the United States may lose its ability to block other countries, such as Turkey and Persian Gulf allies, from funneling more sophisticated weapons  including man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS  to anti-Assad rebels, including more radical groups.

Toward the end of the Obama administration, some officials advocated ending the CIA program, arguing that the rebels would be ineffective without a major escalation in U.S. support. But the program still had the support of a majority of top Obama advisers, who argued that the United States couldn't abandon its allies on the ground and give up on the moderate opposition because of the damage that it would do to U.S. standing in the region.

Even those who were skeptical about the program's long-term value, viewed it as a key bargaining chip that could be used to wring concessions from Moscow in negotiations over Syria's future.

"People began thinking about ending the program, but it was not something you'd do for free," said a former White House official. "To give [the program] away without getting anything in return would be foolish."

Everything is happening so fast  or at least that's how it feels trying to follow politics these days. You've seen the headlines about President Trump and his policies  but what do they mean for Philadelphia? What does that mean for you? We've launched a newsletter to explore just that. You can sign up to get the weekly Trumpadelphia newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday.
The state board that oversees Philadelphia's finances unanimously approved the city's five-year plan Tuesday.

While raising concerns about low fund balances and future labor contracts, Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority (PICA) board members followed the authority staff's recommendation that the five-year plan be approved.

"The City's revenue projections have consistently been outperformed by actual collections in recent years," PICA staff wrote in its 43-page report. "PICA feels confident that the City and its consultant are effectively monitoring tax performance in a way that will allow adjustment to changes in economic growth."

The Kenney administration is projecting $4.41 billion in total general fund revenues for fiscal 2018, which began July 1. The city expects to spend $4.44 billion and use leftover funds from the prior year to close the gap and end with a $75.5 million fund balance.

PICA staff said in the report that while the projections indicate a positive fund balance the next five years, there are some factors that could negatively impact the fund. Among those factors, according to PICA staff:

The possibility of labor costs exceeding the $200 million the administration set aside.

Rising pension costs.

Increase in employee health-care costs.

Business income and receipts tax (BIRT) volatility.

PICA board member Michael A. Karp said there is good chance another recession will hit within the next five years that could impact the five-year plan. He chided the city for not doing more to save.

"These are the good years. We are in the peak of good economic times, before the recession comes, and yet there's no savings," Karp said. "We have a break-even budget, which hopes that nothing will go wrong."

Karp, who voted to approve the plan, said that the current fund balance estimate  $75 million for fiscal year 2018  is not nearly enough to cover one week of city spending.

City Finance Director Rob Dubow said that this is the first plan that has two sets of reserves  $200 million for labor costs and an additional $270 million for potential state and federal budget cuts.

"We're better covered than we've been in previous plans," Dubow said.

PICA warned that the $200 million reserve for labor costs might not be enough to cover the three major contracts that the city is negotiating. Contracts with the city's white-collar labor union, AFSCME District Council 47; Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police; and the Firefighters' and Paramedics' Union Local 22 all expired June 30.

PICA estimated that if all unions receive the same salary increases as AFSCME District Council 33, which settled a new contract last year that included an additional 2 percent wage increase in years four and five of the plan, the city would be on the hook for $354 million or more.

The new sweetened-beverage tax also received some criticism. PICA staff said there is financial risk associated with the $92 million revenue estimate for the beverage tax.

"In particular, there is uncertainty related to the size of the tax base, the impact of the tax on consumption, and the rate of enforcement," the staff wrote, noting that in the first six months of the tax, the city lowered its initial projection of $46 million to $39.7 million. City officials said the slow start was due to the transition implementing the tax and "seasonality," meaning that people consume more soda during the summer months and during the November and December holiday season.

During Tuesday's meeting, Dubow said the city still expects to make the $92 million mark.

The School District's $395 million teacher contract also came up during PICA's budget discussions. There is no clear plan to fund the contract. PICA pointed out that the two potential remedies for funding the school contract are either through the state legislature or the city.

"We're going to push for a solution that makes sense for the city, for the state, and for the School District," Dubow said. He didn't say what that solution might be.



Tuesday was also PICA's annual meeting, in which the board selects its officers.

Kevin Vaughan remains chairman of the board. Alan Kessler was appointed vice chair and Karp was appointed secretary and treasurer. The other two board members are former Lt. Gov. James F. Cawley and Tina Byles Williams, who was the Philadelphia Pension Board's chief investment officer from 1990 to 1994. She later founded Fiduciary Investment Solutions.
HARRISBURG  June is always a tense month in the state Capitol, a time when the workload is crushing, patience runs thin, and tempers sometimes flare.

Usually, those scraps blow over quickly.

But one of the state's most conservative lawmakers, Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R., Butler), is now saying that an "unhinged" and "crimson-faced" Philadelphia lawmaker  whom his office later identified as Democratic State Rep. Brian Sims  threw papers at him and berated him after a hearing last month on emotionally charged legislation involving "sanctuary cities."

In a video Metcalfe distributed Wednesday, he does not identify the Philadelphia lawmaker by name. But he said that after the hearing  during which he told colleagues that supporting the bill should be easy for "any patriotic American"  the Philadelphia legislator threw the papers. Metcalfe includes footage of that scene.

The Philadelphia lawmaker, Metcalfe said, then went to Metcalfe's office and told his secretary that she worked for a "bigot."

"When I later passed by him on the House floor, he called me an ignorant, racist bigot," Metcalfe said on the video, called "The Metcalfe Minute," which his office distributes regularly to constituents, supporters, and others.

"This is just another example of blatant, liberal intolerance by the radical left who would rather support lawless, illegal aliens instead of protecting American citizens," Metcalfe says. "We must continue to defeat the left, defeat unruly progressive mobs, and defeat all other enemies of liberty."

Sims, the first openly gay representative to be elected to the state legislature, declined to be interviewed.

But his office did not deny the exchange with Metcalfe. And in a statement, Sims said Metcalfe can "belittle me for being gay, treat Democrats, especially those from Philadelphia, with contempt and disrespect, and advocate for right-wing legislation that is antithetical to the values of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. But I would not allow him to question my patriotism or the patriotism of my Democratic colleagues, who include active and retired members of the military."

Sims added that he remained silent during Metcalfe's "tirade" during the committee hearing, but "as a Democrat and a Philadelphian, I cannot in good conscience back down from a bully or sit idly by when my colleagues, friends, and neighbors are bullied."

Metcalfe did not respond to a request for an interview.

The sanctuary cities bill would, among other things, withhold state funds from cities like Philadelphia that have policies against cooperating with federal authorities in detaining undocumented immigrants.

Metcalfe and Sims have a history  and it's not a good one.

In 2013, Metcalfe tried to prevent Sims from speaking on the House floor about two U.S. Supreme Court rulings that bolstered same-sex marriage.

In an interview with NewsWorks/WHYY at the time, Metcalfe said that he did not believe anyone should be allowed to make comments on the House floor that "ultimately were just open rebellion against what the word of God has said, what God has said, and just open rebellion against God's law."

Sims then asked his colleagues on the House floor to formally reprimand Metcalfe for those comments.

"It is my understanding of the rules of this body that I could never call another member a bigot, a homophobe or a racist, nor would I," Sims said at the time. "But I do ask that this body recognize that the language used against me as a member does not live up to the standards set by this body."

Metcalfe was not censured, after the chamber decided that it did not have authority to police comments made off the House floor.
David Wildstein, left, who admitted being the mastermind of the 2013 George Washington Bridge lane-closing, said Gov. Christie was aware of the scheme. Read more

Seeing the admitted mastermind of the Bridgegate scandal get off with probation might have been easier to swallow if the architect of the bullying culture that spawned the sophomoric plot received some punishment. But Gov. Christie skated free as well.

David Wildstein, who described his job at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey as being Christie's enforcer, was sentenced last week to three years of probation for planning the mysterious lane closings four years ago on the George Washington Bridge. Children were stuck in school buses and lives endangered with emergency vehicles snarled in traffic.

Wildstein escaped with a wrist slap, instead of a maximum sentence of 27 months in prison, because his testimony led to the convictions of Bridget Anne Kelly, who had been a top aide to Christie, and Bill Baroni, the former deputy executive director of the Port Authority.

Wildstein's cooperation may have aided federal prosecutors get two convictions, but it doesn't sit well to see him get away with plotting the scheme to punish a New Jersey mayor who refused to endorse Christie's presidential campaign. Wildstein also must do 500 hours of community service and pay $20,000 in fines and restitution.

Wildstein said Christie was aware of the plan to snarl traffic. He said he and Baroni told Christie what was happening and the governor laughed. Christie denied that and disputed Wildstein's assertion that they were high school friends. But it's hard to believe Wildstein would launch the political dirty trick without the governor's knowledge.

Christie appointed Wildstein to his $150,000-a-year job at the Port Authority. The job had no job description. Wildstein said all he wanted to do was serve the "one constituent" that mattered. He said the Christie administration was obsessed with power and revenge, which was what Bridgegate was all about.

Even if Christie was not aware of the scheme, the fact that Wildstein felt emboldened to orchestrate such an abuse of power illustrates the culture emanating from the governor's office. Christie's tenure will be remembered for his listing enemies and verbally abusing critics.

Christie got into a shouting match with a Rutgers law student at a town hall meeting, calling him an "idiot." At a press conference marking the second anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, Christie told a former Asbury Park councilman to "sit down and shut up."

Christie's staff uploaded video of the exchanges on YouTube, as if the arrogant displays showed his leadership. Being a bully is not governing. Christie's historically low poll numbers show New Jerseyans are tired of him. It didn't help to see photos of him relaxing on a state beach closed to regular citizens. Too bad stronger ties to Bridgegate couldn't be made to hasten his departure from office.
Vincent Flores, 17, a rising senior at Sterling High School, concentrates on his sutures as he uses a pig foot to practice. Read more

On a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of their summer vacation, a group of high school students passed around a recently dissected brain in a lab at the Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine in Stratford.

"OK, so who has the brain?" Katie Shirley, a second-year medical student, asked the group.

One student raised his hand.

"Now, where would you find the auditory cortex?" Shirley asked.

As the students identified the lobes and examined the folds of the brain, Matthew Tribble, also a second-year medical student, explained that the teens were doing the same anatomy lab given to first-year students in medical school.

The 25 student participants are part of Rowan R.A.I.S.E., a six-week mini-med program that began July 10 at the medical school. Mini-med programs allow high school students to experience medical school years before they apply.

The free program is funded through a $40,000 grant from the Kal and Lucille Rudman Foundation.

"I've always wanted to go into medicine, and I saw the opportunity," said Christopher Jones, 17, a rising senior at Sterling High School from Stratford. "This is right around the corner from my house, and I just figured this would be a good opportunity to get exposed to it before I head to college."

Tribble, a program coordinator for Rowan R.A.I.S.E., said: "It's really doing a complete med school immersion. There'll be some lectures to support it, but mainly they're going to do a lot of critical thinking on their own, arriving at what's wrong with the patients."

"They'll get the whole  experience here, as if they're in school," he added.

The program's name stands for Recognizing Achievement and Inspiring Student Excellence. This year it drew students from nine area high schools who have shown an interest in medicine.

"This is the first time I've ever done a summer program," said Vincent Flores, 17, of Stratford. "I've always wanted to be a doctor of some sort, and recently I decided that I want to become a dentist."

"I'm most excited for the hands-on dissections and actually looking at things," said Mary Renner, also 17, of Sicklerville. "You can read something 10 million times, but until you actually see it in front of you, that's what makes a difference."

Each week of the program focuses on a different bodily system. Students will also participate in their own research project, hear from faculty at the school, and go on field trips to the Mutter Museum and Rowan University's main campus in Glassboro.

Lucille Rudman calls the program "comprehensive and intensive."

Through their foundation, she and her husband support other mini-med programs in Philadelphia. Rudman said the program with Rowan is their "first foray into New Jersey," where the couple live.

At Drexel University's College of Medicine, the Rudman Foundation sponsors Mini-Med Discovery Days. The free program for students from Masterman and Central High schools allows students to shadow doctors.

It also has provided more than $500,000 in college scholarships to students from Olney Charter High School and Kensington Health Sciences High School who have completed the Health Tech Mentorship program at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children.

"Not all the youngsters wind up being doctors, but hopefully the training that they get there [will] inspire them to go into careers involving medicine," Lucille Rudman said of the programs.
Retired family physician Jay Brock, of Fredericksburg, Va., joins other protesters against the Republican health-care bill outside the Capitol Hill office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday. Read more

Letting ACA fail would break law

At some point in the future, Congress may successfully repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (No repeal; no replace," Wednesday). For the time being, however, the ACA is the law of the land, and millions of Americans depend on it for their very lives.

In January, President Trump swore on the Bible to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution." Article 2 of the Constitution states that the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." As long as the ACA is the law, President Trump must support and preserve the ACA. His statement that he will "let Obamacare fail" is unacceptable and will result in pain and suffering for millions. Allowing it to fail is also a violation of his oath of office.

 Bernard A. Mason, M.D., Philadelphia, bamasonmd@gmail.com

Time to put politics aside

I am a proud independent voter. After attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed, our clueless president's strategy is to "let Obamacare fail." This is appalling. Letting the health-care system fail means that millions of Americans will be affected in a negative way.

I hope there are enough decent human beings in Congress to realize that the politics of letting Obamacare fail is disgraceful. It's time for legislators to put politics aside and ensure that the health-care system does not fail. The sideshow of killing Obamacare is over; it's time to get to work. People need affordable health care more then the insurance industry and the wealthy need tax cuts.

I support cutting taxes, but I do not support the tax cuts that have been proposed with the Republican health-care reforms. The Republicans need to find their tax cuts elsewhere.

Basic health care is a human right, and the political battles around it are a national disgrace.

 Kevin Martin, Kennett Square, kmart1944@gmail.com

GOP blocked fixes for years

The commentary, "Both parties to blame for health-care mess" (Wednesday) said: "The only saving grace for Republicans is that if and when those exchanges fall into a deep decline, they will still be able to assign some of the blame to Democrats for their original sin in passing Obamacare."

That's about the only possible way any blame can be assigned to Democrats. They passed the Affordable Care Act in the first place. Fixes aren't hard, but with the House in Republican hands since 2011 and the Senate since 2015, no legislative fixes have been possible. President Barack Obama could do some things through executive orders, but Republicans needed to put country over party to pass ACA fixes and they refused to do that.

Democrats have made it clear that small fixes are needed and that the ACA can be fixed, but President Trump has made it clear that he intends to sabotage the ACA and deny health care to tens of millions of citizens who have done nothing wrong. That would that lead to many preventable, unnecessary deaths.

 Richmond L Gardner, Horsham

Schools not the best spots for art

I share the city controller's concern about Philadelphia School District artwork stored away without proper accountability ("Controller: Why don't Philly kids deserve art?" Tuesday), but my experience tells me that it is not advisable to display art in the schools.

In the 1970s, I was student-teaching at an all-girls high school. One day, the school's life-size statue of the Venus de Milo was found decapitated. The head was subsequently mailed to the principal. I remember thinking the incident was hilarious, but my view was not widely shared among the faculty.

My high school used to have a statue of St. Francis de Sales in the main entrance. One morning, it was noted that St. Francis had lost four of the five fingers on the hand he had raised in blessing. I'll leave it to the reader's imagination to figure out which finger St. Francis retained.

Displaying artwork in a school is not such a good idea. There's a reason the Museum of Art has an army of guards deployed throughout the facility.

 Mike Egan, Plymouth Meeting, mchlegan@gmail.com

Focus on teaching art

As a student at Woodrow Wilson Junior High School from 1960 to 1962, we students were never allowed to enter the school through the front door or enter the beautiful lobby. Since that's where the art was hung, I never encountered the works mentioned in the article. In fact, the prevailing view at the school from my young perspective seemed to be that the art was much too valuable to expose it to teenagers.

I applaud the sentiment of returning the art to the students, but let's focus on how we can keep art in the classroom and make the arts relevant to our children's future. Displaying the works is fine, but it comes nowhere close to the value of teaching art in the classroom.

 Barry Lurie, Bala Cynwyd, barrylurie@comcast.net
Three woman carried Jewish Pride at the Chicago Dyke March and were asked to leave because the Star of David might be a trigger for those offended by it. Read more

Amber Hikes knows that Philadelphia's LGBT community has many identities: black, white, Asian, Hispanic; Jewish, Christian, Muslim; foreign-born, American-born.

So how can one flag represent all these identities? Better yet: What does the ideal LGBT flag look like?

Hikes, a black queer woman and Philadelphia's LGBT affairs director, last month officially added black and brown stripes atop the city's pride flag  making Philadelphia the first city to do so  to recognize people of color who had long felt excluded.

As debate flared in another city, Chicago, about whether it's appropriate to to include a Jewish star on the LGBT flag, Hikes spoke this week of why it's important for the flag to embrace multitudes.

"The ideal rainbow flag is the one that represents you and your identity, whatever that may be," said Hikes, who has batted away criticism that Philly's new design is unnecessary or singles out people of color.

[Your responses: White privilege is why there's resistance to changing the LGBT flag]

Chicago's controversy started last month when organizers of that city's Dyke March kicked out three people carrying LGBT flags emblazoned with Jewish stars. The organizers said the flags were a "trigger" that would offend those who associated the Star of David with the Israeli flag. The march's politics are pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist. Critics accused the organizers of being anti-Semitic.

Gretchen R. Hammond, the Windy City Times reporter who broke the story, said this week she had been transferred to the newspaper's sales department after she was threatened by Dyke March officials and accused of betraying the LGBT community with the piece.

Gilbert Baker, a San Francisco artist, intended for all LGBT people to be included when he created the pride flag in 1978. It originally had eight colors but was reduced to six: red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, blue for serenity, and violet for the human spirit.

Philadelphia's pride flag changed after many people of color reported feeling unwelcome and discriminated against at bars and nonprofits in the Gayborhood. It came as no surprise  at least to people who aren't white  when the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations concluded racism has existed in the Gayborhood for decades.

Hikes views the new flag as a way to start conversations about race and identity, particularly with white people who have not experienced the same disparate treatment as people of color  and may be reluctant to believe it exists.

"It doesn't make it less real just because you haven't experienced it," she said. "And that's what's so important."

The city has also required bar owners and nonprofits to undergo training on fair business practices and implicit bias, and Hikes said more conversations will be needed.

Philly's new pride flag created some backlash: Some people suggested there should be a white stripe, and the New York Post declared that the flag had divided Philadelphia's gay community.

But many others welcomed the change. Hikes has received calls from city officials in Los Angeles, New York City, and Atlanta wanting to use the flag. One gay rights group reached out wanting to carry it in a pride march next month  in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Three years ago, Chris and Markela Sourovelis saw their American Dream turn into an American Nightmare. After police officers arrested their youngest son for selling $40 of drugs without their knowledge, police returned to seize their home and evict them.

The Sourovelises had no warning or ability to contest eviction. In order to return to their home, prosecutors in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office forced them to sign an agreement permanently banning their son from their home and waiving their rights to challenge the DA's actions in court.

Philadelphia sought to take the Sourovelises' home through a legal process called civil-forfeiture, which allows law enforcement officials to take, keep, and sell property they believe is connected to a crime  even if they know that its owners have done nothing wrong. To fight back, the Sourovelises teamed up with the Institute for Justice and other Philadelphia property owners and filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the city's use of civil forfeiture.

After a court refused to dismiss the lawsuit, Philadelphia agreed to stop two of the city's most outrageous practices. First, Philadelphia's police and prosecutors have stopped seizing homes without warning. Now, they have to prove to a court that there is an emergency requiring immediate action and that there are no less drastic ways to protect the public. As a result of this requirement, Philadelphia's practice of evicting people without notice has ground to a halt. And it should have  the practice was flagrantly unconstitutional, as the U.S. Supreme Court recognized nearly a quarter century ago.

Second, the city stopped imposing unfair conditions on people trying to fight their forfeiture cases. It can no longer force people to give up their constitutional rights and kick out family members. Philadelphia homeowners will no longer have to choose between their home and their family.

Recently, Gov. Wolf signed a forfeiture bill extending the first of these reforms to the rest of the state.

The bill includes other beneficial but limited-reforms. Before, if police suspected property was tied to a crime, the government only had to prove it by a "preponderance of the evidence"  which is effectively proving that it was more likely tied to a crime than not (e.g., "50 percent, plus one"). Meanwhile, owners had to prove they did not know about or consent to any unlawful use of their property.

In other words, until the reform passed, Pennsylvanians were guilty until proven innocent.

The reform bill raises Pennsylvania's standard of proof and shifts the burden of proof from property owners to the government, which is where it belongs. In addition, the bill includes new transparency requirements and new protections for property owners acquitted of a crime.

However, serious problems with Pennsylvania's forfeiture laws remain.

As Wolf lamented, even after signing the bill, property owners can still lose their property without being convicted of  or even charged with  a crime. Worse still, Pennsylvania law enforcement, including in Philadelphia, can use 100 percent of forfeiture proceeds to pad their budgets and salaries. This direct and powerful financial incentive has lured law enforcement away from the impartial pursuit of justice.

That is why, despite Pennsylvania's new forfeiture reforms, the Institute for Justice continues to litigate its class action challenging these practices. As long as forfeiture proceeds can fund Pennsylvania law enforcement's salaries and other benefits, forfeiture will continue to be out of control.

Milad Emam is an attorney at the Institute for Justice, which is representing the Sourovelises in the class-action lawsuit against Philadelphia. memam@ij.org
The animation above has 24 frames, and the star is only blocked by one of them. Amanda Zangari, who participated in the observations, told me that this is not the only successful observation, and that it's the shortest chord. In other words, the team got multiple tracks of the star behind MU69, some of which blotted out the star for longer than this observation did. The resulting data that will be superior for constraining the size and shape of MU69 than a single observation would have been.

The observations would not have been possible without the support and assistance of Argentinians. From the team's press release:
A new Mars orbiter

Another winner in the House's NASA budget proposal is a new telecommunications and reconnaissance orbiter for Mars.

NASA's current Mars orbiter fleet is aging. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey spacecraft were launched 12 and 16 years ago, respectively. In addition to their roles as science missions, the two spacecraft serve as crucial telecommunications relays for landers and rovers. Furthermore, the high-resolution camera aboard MRO helps plan rover traverses and scouts for future landing sites.

That includes human missions. Even SpaceX is among those relying on MRO to look for suitable places to land.

The White House's 2018 NASA budget request included just $2.9 million for future Mars missions, increasing to $179 million by 2022hardly enough to develop, build and launch a new Mars orbiter in five years. The House budget proposal bumps that 2018 amount up to $62 million, and requires NASA to launch a new Mars orbiter in 2022.

California Congressman Ami Bera brought up the aging Mars orbiter fleet during the hearing, asking whether MRO would still be able to support the Mars 2020 rover mission.

NASA planetary science director Jim Green did not directly mention a new orbiter in his answer. Instead, he pointed to the ability of other orbiters to assist MRO, including those operated by the European Space Agency.

Mars 2020 project scientist Ken Farley then noted there are are more than 20 cameras on the rover, which create a "very large demand" for data downlink.

"As you point out, MRO is an aging asset," Farley said. "But as Dr. Green pointed out, there are contingency plans to get us the data volume we need."

Sample return

One of the major features of the Mars 2020 rover is its ability to collect surface samples and store them for a future mission that would pick them up for return to Earth. At the moment, however, no such mission is planned, and NASA's current planetary science budget lacks the funding to support a sample returneven with the modest House increase.

"Are we going to bring [the samples] back?" asked Dana Rohrabacher, a House representative from Southern California, during the hearing.

"Our intention would be, indeed [...] that we would plan on bringing samples back from Mars," replied Jim Green, the director of NASA's planetary science division.

"The reason I ask that is that it seems to me rather silly to think that if we can't bring back rocks, that we're going to bring back people," Rohrabacher said. "Certainly if we aren't comfortable with the idea that we can bring back rocks, we should be focusing on getting that done before we talk about bringing people back."

The task of marking up NASA's budget now falls to the Senate. Any substantive differences will need to be reconciled before the budget goes back to President Trump for a signature.

As in most years, that process could be swept up in larger budget battles, but regardless of the outcome, NASA's planetary science division is enjoying support from both Congress and the White House. Will that support continue, and will the agency be able to capitalize on the momentum?

"We live in a time where we've spent spacecraft to explore the Moon, all eight planets, Pluto, several asteroids, and comets, and just last week, NASA's Juno spacecraft provided us with an amazing view of Jupiter's mysterious Great Red Spot," said Representative Bera.

"These missions are incredibly important, because it allows us to be a part of something bigger," he said.
The Rock School has a certain reputation: The kids call the school Pirouettes R Us,  says director Bo Spassoff. But although its become most well-known for producing technically dazzling dancers, The Rock also has another side. For many students, its a lifelong second home. Case in point: Three of the most prominent Rock alumniBeckanne Sisk, Christine Shevchenko and Esteban Hernandezwill return to the their old stomping grounds this Friday to perform in a special gala benefit celebrating the schools 50th anniversary. For fun, we asked Spassoff what these dancers were like as kids.

Beckanne Sisk, Ballet West soloist



She came to the school at 13she was a wobbly colt. Wet spaghetti! A little over four years later she joined Ballet West and has had a Cinderella story there. Beckanne still comes back for the Rock Summer program to stay in shape and perform, and shes a shining example for students. She always has a ready smile for everyone. Breaking Pointe recently spent a day here filming with Beckanne and her friend; that should air this summer.

Esteban Hernandez, Royal Ballet School student



While he could be a handful at times, hes become a mature and very intelligent young man. And hes a spectacular dancer. Hes going to be the first Mexican to graduate from the Royal Ballet School, and then will join the corps of San Francisco Ballet this fall.

Christine Shevchenko, American Ballet Theatre corps member

Christine was local and lived with her mother. Even at 8 years old she was disciplined and unstinting in her work ethic, and that never changed. She became the first American-trained dancer in 24 years to win a gold medal at the Moscow International Ballet CompetitionNatalia Osipova won bronze that year. Christine is amazingly strong technically and has exquisite artistry, but shes also always polite and kind. Shes proof that you can be successful in ballet and be a delightful, caring person at the same time.
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Coming out at the same time as news broke that President Trump had a second, undisclosed and private hour long meeting with President Vladimir Putin to which he did not invite an English translator, the Trump White House announced that the President nominated Jon Huntsman as Ambassador to Russia.

They spelled his name wrong, in case you were wondering if there was anything this White House could pull off without error or a modicum of competency.

President Donald J. Trump today announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key positions in his Administration:

Governor John Huntsman Jr. of Utah to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Russian Federation. Governor Jon Huntsman has had a distinguished career as a politician, diplomat, and businessman. He currently serves as Chairman of both the Atlantic Council, a premier foreign policy think tank, and the Huntsman Cancer Foundation. His robust record of public service includes service as U.S. Ambassador to China and to Singapore, Deputy United States Trade Representative, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Trade Development. He was also twice elected Governor of Utah. In the private sector he is a director on numerous corporate boards including Hilton, Chevron, Ford Motor Company, and Caterpillar. He and his wife Mary Kaye are the parents of seven children.

Sure, its just a misspelling on top of RUSSIA news on the hour that a second, private, undisclosed meeting with Putin came out. Its not a big deal in and of itself. Its the totality of the incompetence coupled with the utter spit in our countrys eye  the inability to conduct themselves in a way that does not humiliate the U.S.A.  that this misspelling represents. It is evidence, when taken as a very small part of a much larger systemic pattern of incompetence, that Republicans who criticized President Obama over the way he sat at his desk really have no standards. Zero. Zero expectations or standards for their own white, Russian puppet.

Its beginning to look as if the Trump White House are deliberately trolling us to see how much we will tolerate before we finally say enough. And by we, I mean Republicans in Congress.

Congressional Republicans seemingly endless tolerance for Trump humiliating our country and putting our national security in peril is truly amazing.

It is only sad that when Republicans finally decided to tolerate something, it would be an attack on this country from their own president.

This is a double fail on behalf of a White House that has proven that Republicans do not actually love America more than they love power. It would be nice if they could pull one thing off without an error that says, We dont know what were doing and worse, we dont care!

Some will say this is petty, and in the face of all of the fail, it is. But things like this actually matter quite a bit in diplomacy and if these people were remotely competent, we could afford to care about small things like how Trump sits at his desk and whether his people can manage to pull of the most basic requirements of public relations.

We should not be so eager for them to pull something off that we are prepared to clap for them when they spell a name correctly both times. They are in the White House, leading the free world. There are expectations.
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New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie tried to defend Donald Trump Jr. and Donald Trump, but when he was pressed by MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, it showed why no one would go on television to defend Trump.

Video:

Christie tried to defend the Trumps when Wallace pointed out that he didnt know if a crime wasnt committed. Christie replied, You only know what you know. Wallace shot back that Trump doesnt know that a crime wasnt committed. Christie said that Trump knows that he didnt collude. Wallace came back with, We dont know about that. Wallace asked Christie if Trump had ever lied. Christie answered, Well, he has never lied to me.

Christie was asked if a campaign finance violation occurred, and he gave a terrible answer, Im not saying nothing happened. I am not saying something happened because you know why? I wasnt in the meeting.

Anyone who goes on television to defend Trump is going to get stuck trying to defend Trumps indefensible Russia scandal. During the 2016 campaign, Christie talked tough about being a former prosecutor and locking Hillary Clinton up, but he was steamrolled by Wallace. Christie got obliterated, and his the smoldering ashes of what was left of his political life are a reminder that defending Donald Trump will not end well for any Republican.
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By Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON (Reuters)  Republican efforts to overhaul or repeal Obamacare collapsed in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, dealing a sharp setback to President Donald Trump and the Republican Partys seven-year quest to kill former President Barack Obamas signature healthcare law.

The disarray in the Republican-controlled Senate rattled financial markets as it cast doubt on the chances of getting Trumps other domestic policy priorities, such as tax reform, through a divided Congress.

Trump said he was disappointed by the failure and suggested he might let the insurance markets created under Obamacare go under and then try to work with Democrats on a rescue.

Were probably in that position where well just let Obamacare fail, Trump told reporters at the White House. We will let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us.

U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell had announced a vote on a straight repeal of Obamacare, which would take effect in two years, after it became clear on Monday night that he did not have enough support to pass an overhaul of the healthcare law.

But the new approach unraveled within hours. Moderate Republican Senators Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska quickly announced they would not back repeal. With Democrats united in opposition, Republicans can only afford to lose two votes to pass the measure in the Senate, where they have a slim 52-48 majority.

I do not think that its going to be constructive to repeal a law that at this point is so interwoven within our healthcare system and then hope that over the next two years we will come up with some kind of replacement, Collins told reporters.

Obamacare has boosted the number of Americans with health insurance through mandates on individuals and employers, and income-based subsidies. About 20 million Americans gained insurance coverage through the law.

Republican senators debated over lunch on Tuesday whether to go ahead with the repeal vote, which McConnell said afterward would occur in the very near future.

This has been a very, very challenging experience for all of us, McConnell said, adding that the chamber needed to move on to issues like tax reform and a spending package to bolster the countrys infrastructure.

As the healthcare bill collapsed in the Senate, leaders in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives unveiled a budget plan putting a proposed tax code overhaul on the same partisan procedural path that led to the anti-Obamacare initiatives chaotic downfall.

Republicans had hoped to finish with healthcare before an upcoming August recess so they could tackle a wide-ranging rewrite of the U.S. tax code in September. Separate talks on taxes appear unlikely to reach Trumps pledge to reduce the corporate tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent.

But their failure exposed the sharp divide within Republicans own ranks, with moderates concerned the healthcare bills Medicaid cuts would take insurance away from millions of low-income Americans while conservatives backed the cuts and wanted even more dramatic changes to Obamacare.

The U.S. dollar stumbled to a 10-month low against a basket of currencies and U.S. Treasury yields fell after the fresh setback to the healthcare bill raised investors doubts about Trumps ability to enact tax cuts and infrastructure spending. Reaction in the stock market was muted, and analysts said the expectation for business-friendly legislation out of Washington is all but priced out of the stock market.

The healthcare hurdle pushes everything in Trumps agenda to 2018, said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities in New York.

CONGRESS NEEDS TO STEP UP

Trump vowed that the healthcare effort was not dead. In an early morning Twitter message, he said, We were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans. Most Republicans were loyal, terrific & worked really hard. We will return!

Trump had pushed hard to get a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare through the U.S. House of Representatives in May and celebrated the victory with lawmakers on the White House lawn. But with polls showing the Republican bill was unpopular, he later called it mean and did little to convince Republican senators to get a deal. Vice President Mike Pence said Trump had supported the move to vote on a straight repeal of Obamacare.

Inaction is not an option, Pence said at the National Retail Federation Conference in Washington. Congress needs to step up, Congress needs to do their job, and Congress needs to do their job now.

In crafting a replacement, Republicans ran up against Obamacares growing popularity. A Washington Post-ABC News poll published on Sunday showed Americans preferred it over the Republican alternative by a 2-1 margin.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer urged Republicans to start over and work with Democrats. Democratic Senator Patty Murray, the leading Democrat on the Senate health committee, said in an interview with Reuters that a bipartisan effort could help stabilize insurance markets.

She said a bipartisan effort to fund cost-sharing subsidies that help cover premiums, deductibles and other medical expenses for about 7 million people who purchase health insurance on the individual market would send a strong message to the market and create some stabilization that is much needed.

Within hours of the bills failure, Republican U.S. Senate Health Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander said he will set hearings in the next few weeks on how to stabilize the individual insurance markets.

Orrin Hatch, the Republican chair of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, said on the Senate floor that the failure could mean Congress will have to bail out insurance markets probably before the end of 2017.

Shelving the current bill means that insurers again face uncertainty about whether the administration will cut off funding for the subsidies that make Obamacare individual plans affordable, putting 2018 coverage and long-term planning at risk.

For hospitals, the move relieves the near-term pressure of massive Medicaid reform, but the long-term plan for federal spending for states Medicaid expansion is now murky.

The American Medical Association, which represents doctors, called on Congress to start a bipartisan effort and to stabilize the individual health insurance marketplace.

(Writing by John Whitesides; Additional reporting by Caroline Humer in New York and Ginger Gibson, Richard Cowan, Patricia Zengerle in Washington; Editing by Mary Milliken and Leslie Adler)
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After Ian Bremmer said that Trump and Putin held a second private meeting at the G-20, the White House finally confirmed that a meeting involving just Trump, Putin, and a translator happened.

Video of Bremmer on Charlie Rose:

Here is the White House confirming the meeting:

White House confirms Trump & Putin met a second time at the G-20. @ianbremmer says it lasted an hour and only other was a Putin translator.  Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) July 18, 2017

Bremmer replied that Trump had no intention of ever disclosing that the meeting happened:

Trump Administration had no intention of disclosing second hour long meeting w Putin. https://t.co/clLKa6PwQK  ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) July 18, 2017

The question becomes what were Trump and Putin discussing for an hour? They were alone, with no one, but a Putin translator with them, so what were they talking about that is so secretive that the White House was trying to keep the American people from ever finding out? Trump met with Putin for nearly four hours at the G 20, and there is no public record or transcript of any of their conversations.

Donald Trump is either the dumbest or the most self-destructive person on the planet. Trump will never learn that there is nothing a president does will stay secret for very long.

IF Trump is innocent of the allegations that he colluded with Russia during the 2016 election, he shouldnt be sneaking around holding private meetings with Putin.

Donald Trump is acting like a guilty man, and a day that began with the fallout from the collapse of his health care bill is ending as so many previous days of his presidency have, with all eyes focused on the Russia scandal.
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Instead of letting Obamacare die as Trump suggested, Senate Republicans have defied Trump and announced that they would be holding hearings on how to stabilize the insurance marketplace.

Here is the statement from HELP committee chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN):

What you are seeing is Senate Republicans beginning to lay the groundwork for the bipartisan legislation that will make Obamacare stronger.

Sen. Alexanders announcement is interesting because it came hours after Trump said, Ive been saying that  Mike, I think youll agree  for a long time. Let Obamacare fail. It will be a lot easier. And I think were probably in that position where well just let Obamacare fail.

Obama told Democrats not to bail out Republicans on health care as he was leaving office, and Democrats take his advice. Trump tells Republicans to let Obamacare die, so they schedule hearings to work on policies to strengthen the marketplace.

Barack Obama was a president who had real influence with his congressional caucuses. Donald Trump has no sway with Republicans. In fact, they are ignoring what he says and are doing the opposite.

Republicans are planning for the stand alone repeal bill to fail and to begin work on bipartisan legislation. After falling flat on their faces, Republicans will do what they always should have done, and work with Democrats on healthcare.
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Donald Trump has called all of the Senate Republicans to the White House on Wednesday for lunch because a man who knows nothing about healthcare is going to try to negotiate his own health care bill.

Politico reported, But White House officials personally asked for more time to try to reach a deal, according to sources familiar with the matter, and McConnell scheduled the vote for next week. Though the mood was sour in the GOP caucus on Tuesday and some Republicans are shifting away from the partisan repeal approach, Trump is still trying for a deal. He believes he can get an agreement to move forward by twisting arms and negotiating himself, those sources said.

A president who doesnt seem to know where is half of the time is going to negotiate a deal with Republican Senators for to pass legislation that many of them dont want to touch with a 100-foot pole.

The problem is that Donald Trump knows less than nothing about health care policy. He is not a policy expert. He is not well versed in what the Republican health care bill contains. In other words, Trump is going to make a deal on a bill that he knows nothing about.

It would be inaccurate to suggest that Trump is going to damage his credibility with this meeting because he has no credibility. Trump also has no political capital, and the Senators have no reason to make a deal with him.

The lunch will be a total farce that will demonstrate that the idea that Trump can make political deals is a fantasy created by Donald Trump.
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As Trump literally made things up about voter fraud by claiming that people came up to him and told him things, MSNBC debunked everything that Trump was saying with a single on screen graphic.

Video of Trump making false claims about voting irregularities:

Trump says people have told him of "voter irregularitiesin some cases having to do with very large numbers of people in certain states" pic.twitter.com/FypOe3nvOR  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) July 19, 2017

Here is what was on the screen for MSNBC viewers:

What MSNBC did above is exactly what every network should be doing when they cover Trump. The President cant be allowed to lie to the American people live on television. There is no voter fraud. The purpose of Trumps election integrity commission is to carry out a campaign of national voter suppression through federal legislation.

Trump could not make it through his opening remarks to his commission without lying about voter fraud. Donald Trump is still angry that he lost the popular vote, so he is out to rig the electorate in 2020 to make sure that he wins. MSNBC did the right thing, but not allowing Trumps voter suppression effort to be glossed over. This sort of real time fact checking is the way to prevent Trumps lies from taking root.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters)  A top U.S. Republican trade lawmaker on Wednesday questioned the Trump administrations plans to renegotiate a trade deal with U.S. ally South Korea, as well as the White Houses focus on bilateral trade deals.

I was a little surprised by the announcement on Korea by the president, mainly because that agreements worked well for us, Representative Kevin Brady told Reuters in an interview.

The U.S. Trade Representatives office notified South Korea last week of its intent to negotiate amendments to the pact, calling for talks to start in August. Republican President Donald Trump said in April he planned to renegotiate or terminate what he called a horrible trade deal.

Since the pact, known as KORUS, went into effect in 2012, the U.S. trade deficit with South Korea has more than doubled to nearly $28 billion last year.

Brady, who chairs the trade- and tax-focused Ways and Means Committee in the House of Representatives, said the United States should be aggressively stepping into the Asia-Pacific market.

Thats not an easy task if youre going to go at trade country-by-country  This is a question of, do we want American trade values in the world or do we want Chinas trade values? Brady said.

Three days after taking office in January, Trump officially withdrew the United States from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, keeping an election campaign promise and emphasizing a preference for bilateral trade deals.

Some critics of that move have said it opened a trade policy vacuum in Asia that China would move to fill.

Clearly, this administration believes it can achieve more in the bilaterals. They deserve an opportunity to prove thats the case, Brady said. I think regional agreements, multilateral, work because you can set standards across a broad number of countries.

(Reporting by Kevin Drawbaugh; Editing by Frances Kerry)
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WASHINGTON (Reuters)  The top Democrat on the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee said on Wednesday it was deeply troubling that President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Germany this month for talks not attended by any U.S. national security officials.

These two isolated leaders on the world stage making common cause in a way that is not been witnessed by any of our national security officials  thats deeply troubling, Representative Adam Schiff said in an interview with CNN.

A White House official said on Tuesday Trump and Putin had a previously undisclosed conversation during a dinner for G20 leaders at a summit in Germany.

(Reporting by Washington Newsroom; Editing by David Alexander)
Charleston, SC (29403)

Today

Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy this afternoon. High 76F. Winds SW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low 54F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph.
Jeanne Licari and William Schmidt, two Rochester artists whose works will be featured at the Charter House's upcoming art exhibit, "Impressions of Nature," work in different media.

Licari is a painter. Schmidt is a photographer. Both describe lives in which the desire to create art has been a near-constant impulse, even when work and family life took over and forced them to put their art on a back burner. Both also reached moments in their lives when they were able to devote themselves to their art more completely.

The open house is set for 4:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday at Charter House's Parkside Gallery. Refreshments will be provided, and the Dolce Wind Trio is the featured musical group. The event is free and open to the public.

For Licari, the moment of liberation came when she took early retirement as a Mayo Clinic medical technologist in the late 1990s. As a student, Licari had majored in medical technology at the University of Minnesota. Yet even while pursuing a medical career and raising a family, Licari found time to nurture her art. Eventually she reached a a make-or-break moment as an artist.

"I thought if I didn't develop my art, I would really regret it. So I took early retirement from Mayo Clinic and then really started an intensive study of art," Licari said.

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For Schmidt, his moment came in 2000 when his wife gave him a digital camera. Schmidt had served apprenticeships in both Germany and Chicago as a young man. But he eventually found that the demands of photography, particularly before the advent of digital cameras, proved to be incompatible with those of family life. So he left photography and got a "real job" at IBM.

"Even when I wasn't doing it, I would think about an image or read books on photography," Schmidt said. "I always had the dream that someday I would be able to get back into it."

When he started out, Schmidt came to realize that professional studio photography could "consume your whole life." It wasn't just taking the image, but processing it in a way that got the tones just right. Advances in digital photography not only eliminated the messy processing part, it created crisper images.

"You can do so much more stuff. The quality of the images is so much better," Schmidt said.

Licari's early retirement allowed her to take workshops and to study under artists from across the country. Two of the most influential artists to shape her approach to painting were David Leffel of Taos, N.M., and Joe Paquet of St. Paul.

From those extensive studies, Licari, a oil painter, developed a style uniquely her own.

"Each one has given me tools for creating art, not in their style, but my own," Licari said. "I feel blessed to have been influenced by them."

Both artists have had their work displayed extensively in other exhibits. Schmidt said gallery work and shows like the one at Charter House are important for artists, because, much like preparing for a recital, it forces an artist to sharpen and hone one's skills. The more such opportunities exist for artists, the more vibrant Rochester will become as an arts culture, he said.

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"If we ever expect to grow in Rochester, we need more opportunities," Schmidt said.

The exhibition will run until the end of September.
ALBERT LEA  When Mayo Clinic vice president Dr. Bobbie Gostout emerged from the back room to address the Freeborn County Board, she was greeted by a homemade sign that said, "We like our ice cream and inpatient care in Albert Lea" held aloft by Minnesota Nurses Association's Jay Armstrong .

That frosty reception set the tone Tuesday morning at a packed public meeting where Mayo's honesty and communication skills were repeatedly challenged by citizens and public officials. It's the latest example of opposition coalescing against Mayo's plan to shift many inpatient services  such as ICU, inpatient surgeries and childbirth  from Albert Lea to Austin.

"With the way this has (gone), how can we trust Mayo going forward?" Freeborn County Board Chairman Jim Nelson asked Gostout, prompting cheers from the crowd.

Gostout addressed the criticism and issues head-on with a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation and a 25-minute question-and-answer session with the county board. She acknowledged  and apologized for  Mayo's communication deficiencies, telling the crowd that the lack of transparency was "to get our strategy together" in order to "avoid disruption."

Under the radar

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An internal Mayo committee unanimously approved the "optimization" plan May 8 to address ongoing challenges for administrating rural health care; it's unclear who served on that committee. However, its decision wasn't shared with the public until June 12 . There was no prior discussion with or disclosure to Freeborn County officials, Albert Lea's city council or school board, or public health representatives, among others.

"It's clear to me that we lost an opportunity to communicate so that you understood the problem (facing rural health care)," said Gostout, who leads Mayo Clinic Health System. "That missed opportunity really did put you in a bad position  and for that I'm genuinely sorry. Our intent was not to keep you in the dark, but to avoid disruption."

"The premise of the entire optimization effort is solving the problems of rural health care," she said "We didn't design or invite those problems of rural health care. We wish they didn't exist, but they do."

Financial challenges

Mayo officials told 700-plus citizens June 29 at a public forum that the combined Austin and Albert Lea campuses have lost nearly $13 million in the last two years. Gostout says a 50 percent drop in hospitalizations since 1998 and just six patients being admitted for overnight stays, on average, are among the many financial challenges forcing Mayo to change its service model.

Gostout has faced criticism since that forum after comparing driving to Austin for inpatient health care to going out for ice cream; she declined comment Tuesday when asked about that analogy.

However, she says Mayo's remains committed to serving the 500 daily outpatient visits in Albert Lea  and new projections now suggest "at least the same number of medical providers" will be employed in Albert Lea after the changes, attempting to assuage community fears about job loss.

Some people have said "there are winners and losers and the feeling is that Albert Lea is a loser in this (plan)," Gostout said. "Outpatient surgery is the future. That's where things are going and we're positioning you for strength."

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Apology not accepted

Mayo's apology and data-based reasoning rang hollow to skeptical commissioners, who highlighted that Mayo's plans will create a three-county vacuum along the Iowa-Minnesota border, where people will lack easy access to inpatient hospital services once Mayo's optimization plan moves forward. Some have also claimed Albert Lea would become the largest Minnesota city  at 18,000-plus  without a full-service hospital.

"Let's face it: It was not a committee, it was a cabal," said Commissioner Dan Belshan of Mayo's planning process. His request for a six-month moratorium to gather more information and feedback was rejected by Gostout, which means all the services will be transitioned by late 2019 or early 2020.

Commissioner Christopher Shoff expressed similar frustrations.

"You talk about public engagement and it's a little too late for that," Shoff said. "You made the decision on May 8 and it wasn't really disclosed until the Minnesota Nurses Association found out and you held a hastily called press conference the next day."

Gostout acknowledged Mayo's communication problems exist throughout southeast Minnesota campuses before promising to work to close that gap. Those issues have caught the attention of Rep. Tim Walz, who is running for Minnesota governor. His staff spent Monday in Albert Lea gathering information on the growing dispute.

Walz said Tuesday he's shared his concerns directly with Mayo officials about the lack of community engagement.

"The overwhelming feedback I received from local folks is that Mayo failed to engage with the community on this issue," Walz said.

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'Save Our Hospital'

The Freeborn County Board unanimously approved a resolution Tuesday to support the "Save Our Hospital" committee that's formed since Mayo's June 12 announcement. Shoff was elected to serve on the SOH leadership committee, which meets weekly and has around 2,000 supporters on Facebook .

The Albert Lea School Board unanimously approved a similar resolution at its Monday meeting, noting that an acute-care, full-service hospital is critical for recruiting and retaining staff members.

During a short media availability following her presentation, Gostout reaffirmed Mayo's transition plan remains on track despite the opposition and criticism. Her ensuing departure from Albert Lea didn't sit well with citizens, who shared their thoughts with commissioners for another hour.

"Mayo came here late, they gave us their slide presentation, they were too busy to listen, and left," said 87-year-old Paul Overgaard, a former three-term state representative . "Nuts to that."
WABASHA  The Wabasha County Board approved a new salary Tuesday for County Attorney Karrie Kelly who had appealed her original salary for 2017.

Kelly's new salary for 2017 is $96,600. Her 2016 salary was $92,000. The county board of commissioners originally had approved a salary of $93,850, a 2 percent increase over 2016.

Kelly is one of two elected officials who appealed their salary increases for 2017. Wabasha County Auditor/Treasurer Denise Anderson also appealed her 2 percent increase from $71,000 in 2016 to $73,200, which was approved last November. Anderson's appeal is still before the courts.

Even winning the appeal -- which Kelly did in a ruling by District Court Judge Joseph Chase that was handed down on May 26 -- is no guarantee of a salary increase. The appeal process simply advises the county that its determination in setting the salary was unreasonable, and orders the county to reconsider.

In Kelly's case, the county reconsidered her 2 percent increase and gave her the 5 percent increase she originally requested.

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Defending its salary positions in the appeal process has cost Wabasha County nearly $30,000 as of June 1, with more court time likely once Anderson's case is decided within the next few weeks.

The county has specifically spent $16,204 on Kelly's appeal of her salary, and $10,467 on Anderson's appeal, said County Administrator Michael Plante. The county has spent an additional $2,024 on miscellaneous costs such as filings, postage, research, and meals and mileage for county officials to travel to court hearings.

"I am definitely glad it is over," Kelly said of the salary and appeal process. Mending the relationship she has with the county administrator and county board is the next big step, she said, especially after reaching out to the board several times during the process to settle, and being rebuffed by the outside council.

"I had really hoped once the ruling came down on my case, they'd settle with (Anderson), but that doesn't look like the case," she said.

The elected officials with the county have a different salary determination process than the unelected officials. Unelected officials are part of a grid and receive step increases and cost of living increases. The elected officials are asked to make a case for their salary before the board of commissioners each year in a process that Kelly called "acrimonious."

Kelly said that process boils down to researching a number then trying to prove why the employee deserves that amount. In her own case, she noted that county attorneys in similar-sized counties with a similar amount of experience are making $110,000 or more in Minnesota.

Rather than discuss this in an open meeting, Kelly said she'd rather just sit with the board and administration and talk.

"My biggest gripe is I want to sit down and have a conversation with them, and they won't do that," she said.
LITTLE FALLS  A Winona native is one of the top competitors in the country in the National Guard Best Warrior contest.

Staff Sgt. Daniel Sebo, 28, who recently moved from Winona to Savage, has been with the Guard for almost nine years. A medic and instructor with the 2nd Battalion, 175th Regiment Regional Training Institute, Sebo represented the state and Region 4 in this week's competition, held over five days at Camp Ripley in Little Falls. He is one 15 competitors there; the results of the competition are expected Friday.

"To be at the national level is a complete honor  to be competing against them is a complete privilege," Sebo said on Tuesday while preparing for his turn in one piece of the competition, the stress fire course.

The competition includes events that test soldiers both physically and mentally, including everything from crawling through the mud under netting, weaving over and under wooden obstacles, and undergoing combat simulations.

The competition involves soldiers from across the U.S. and its territories. This year marks the first time that the Minnesota National Guard has hosted the competition. What made it even more significant was that Sebo would be the sole soldier representing the state and Region 4.

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"This competition will test the soldiers' ability to perform tasks that are vital to our ability to fight and win our nation's wars," said Command Sgt. Maj. Douglas Wortham, senior enlisted advisor for the Minnesota National Guard. "We will push them to their limits to test their endurance, strength and resilience  qualities that our soldiers must possess to be successful."

The competition identifies the top soldier (junior enlisted) and non-commissioned officer (NCO) to represent the National Guard in the All-Army Best Warrior Competition in October.

Prepared for anything

The physically taxing obstacles offer a true test of endurance. Sebo tackled one obstacle course and event after another, including the confidence course.

What many would consider grueling, Sebo ran through the woods on dirt paths with razor-sharp focus on his goal to finish each obstacle as accurately and quickly as possible. Even diving into deep mud pits, he continued to push himself further along the course.

Wortham believed that the biggest challenge for participants would be the inability to know what events were planned for them ahead of time.

"They don't know what's coming next," he said. "All that they know is that they've got to have all their equipment with them and be prepared for anything. I think that's the hardest part  that mental aspect of not knowing what they're walking into next until they walk upon it."

Another unique aspect of the contest is that competitors don't know where they stand among their rivals as they compete. Each competitor simply has to focus on their main objective: finish and compete with every they've got.

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'We're proud of him'

"Of course, we're pulling for Staff Sgt. Sebo," Wortham said. "We want him to win. Regardless, having one of our competitors win at the regional level and having the opportunity to compete here at the national level is just a great accomplishment for us, and we're proud of him."

Sabo has received a number of honors and awards during his time in the National Guard. He was an honor graduate of the Army Basic Instructors Course and an honor graduate for the 68W Combat Medic/Healthcare Specialist course at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas, in 2009. He received the Distinguished Leadership Award during the Warrior Leader Course 2013 at Camp Williams, Utah. And he was the runner-up Non Commissioned Officer of the Year for the Minnesota National Guard in 2016.

Sabo is a 2013 graduate of Winona State University, with a bachelor of science in cardiopulmonary rehabilitation. He received a master's degree in public health at Concordia University in Nebraska.

When asked how he was feeling from the pressure of competition, laughed and said he was ready for more.

"Thankfully I'm not exhausted yet," he said. "But I'm looking forward to what's next."
ST. PAUL  A judge restored funding Wednesday for Minnesota's legislative branch, ruling that Gov. Mark Dayton's veto of the Legislature's operating budget was an unconstitutional violation of separation of powers.

Budgets for the House and Senate became a victim in a fight between the Democratic governor and Republican-controlled Legislature over the scope of tax cuts. Dayton used a line-item veto to remove its $130 million budget in May, trying to call lawmakers back to St. Paul to slim down a $650 million tax bill he signed and remove other provisions such as a rulemaking ban on issuing driver's licenses to immigrants living in the state illegally.

But the Legislature sued. Ramsey County Judge John Guthmann ruled Wednesday that Dayton clearly overstepped the bounds of a line-item veto by effectively eliminating another branch of government, declaring that veto "null and void."

"The court concludes that the Governor's vetoes violated the Separations of Powers clause ... because they both nullified a branch of government and refashioned the line-item veto tool to secure the repeal or modification of policy legislation unrelated to the vetoed appropriation," he wrote.

Sen. Dave Senjem, R-Rochester, saw the news while on vacation in central Norway. In a phone interview, Senjem said he was not surprised the judge sided with the Legislature. He said he hopes the governor decides not to appeal the ruling.

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"I'm hopeful this is it. Let's call this parade through the court system off and get on with business. We work a lot better if we don't have this fence between us," Senjem said.

But Wednesday afternoon, Dayton released a statement saying he will appeal this decision to the Minnesota Supreme Court.

"It is unfortunate that Republican legislative leaders are using this ruling to avoid completing their work by correcting their serious errors in the last Legislative session," Dayton said.

He added his line-item veto was aimed at achieving "sound fiscal integrity" in the state. He added, "I will continue to fight for fiscally sound budgets and policies that benefit all Minnesotans."

Rep. Tina Liebling, DFL-Rochester, said it was "really unfortunate" the governor chose to line-item veto the Legislature's funding instead of vetoing the tax bill. But she said she is also disappointed that the court ruling doesn't address legislative Republicans' decision to put language in a state government budget bill defunding the Minnesota Department of Revenue if Dayton failed to sign the tax bill.

"It's really unfortunate that the Legislature's coercion of the governor was not also considered in this, and I don't know why the governor's lawyers did not bring that forward," Liebling said. "I think that piece is completely illegitimate and also unconstitutional, and we need a declaration on that because everyone needs to know what the rules of the road are going forward."

Prior to the judge's ruling, the two sides had agreed to temporarily fund the Legislature through September as the lawsuit progressed.

Top Republicans welcomed the ruling, noting that Dayton's veto caused uncertainty for hundreds of lawmakers and staffers.

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"We are happy with the court's decision. The bottom line is that Minnesotans won today," House Speaker Kurt Daudt said. "I would ask the governor to accept the court's decision and not appeal."
At a press conference early yesterday evening Minneapolis authorities provided the the first account of the shooting of pajama clad Justine Damond by Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor in the alley behind Damonds home in southwest Minneapolis. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is investigating Ms. Damonds death. The account is based on the BCAs interview of Noors partner, Officer Matthew Harrity. Noor himself isnt talking, at least not yet.

Harrity and Noor are the only two known witnesses to the shooting. Noor killed Ms. Damond with one or more shots to Damonds abdomen from his seat on the passenger side of the squad car across the drivers side and out the open window of toward which Ms. Damond approached. The Star Tribune summarizes Harritys version of events in three short paragraphs:

Police officers Matthew Harrity and Mohamed Noor eased their patrol vehicle into the alley of the quiet south Minneapolis neighborhood late Saturday, the squads lights off as they responded to a report of a possible assault. Near the end of the alley, a loud sound startled Harrity. A moment later, Justine Damond, the woman who had called 911, approached the drivers side of the squad car. Suddenly a surprise burst of gunfire blasted past Harrity as Noor fired through the squads open window, striking Damond in the abdomen. The two officers began lifesaving efforts, but within 20 minutes Damond was dead.

In other words, yesterdays press conference explained nothing. Perhaps the most illuminating fact related was Noors silence.

Noor is one of nine Somali police officers on Minneapoliss force. He was the first to patrol Minneapoliss Fifth Precinct, which includes the peaceful southwest Minneapolis neighborhood where Ms. Damond lived. (He is not, contrary to what I wrote earlier, the first Somali officer on the force.)

The Star Tribune story is short on information because so little has been made public. The story nevertheless provides a glimpse of Minneapoliss political culture, of which the paper itself is a critical component, and which in its own way explains a lot:

State Rep. Ilhan Omar, the nations first Somali-American lawmaker, issued a statement urging the change of what she called a police culture that causes deaths like Damonds. The current officer training program indoctrinates individuals of all races into a system that teaches them to act first, think later, and justify with fear, she said. The shooting came just weeks after the acquittal of ex-St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez in the fatal shooting of Philando Castile, and nearly two years after Jamar Clark was shot and killed during a scuffle with two Minneapolis police officers who were not charged. Widespread protests followed the deaths of both men, who were black. When [Mayor Betsy] Hodges was asked if race played a role in her demands for immediacy and transparency in the Damond investigation, Hodges said it wasnt about her personal feelings but about the importance of communication. Ive learned a lot of lessons, almost two years ago, going through the experience of Jamar Clark, she said. While Hodges expressed her desire that Noor would offer a statement on what happened that night, [Assistant Police Chief Medaria] Arradondo said he would not cast judgment. It is his right, Arradondo said. He has legal representation and I want to respect his right for that.

What a crew:

Betsy Hodges is Minneapoliss mayor. She is the compleat left-wing idiot. She gave the most recent state of the city speech at a local mosque. In her speech Hodges said the city must embrace the discomfort of transformation.

Ilhan Omar is Minnesotas first Somali state legislator. I wrote about her in the City Journal column The curious case of Ilhan Omar. Her curious case  its still curious.

Medaria Arradondo is Minneapolis Assistant Police Chief. Arradondo alludes to Noors right against compelled self-incrimination. Arradondo serves in a position of authority over Noor. Casting judgment is a part of Arradondos job description. While Noor has the right to remain silent, citizens have every right to draw inferences from his silence as they seek to puzzle out what happened.

UPDATE: As a commenter points out, the UKs Guardian has a more comprehensive and detailed article here.
Andrew Stuttaford at NRO informs us that a statue of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marxs writing partner and and benefactor, has been erected in Manchester, England. The Manchester Evening News gushes:

Iconic socialist thinker, Friedrich Engels has returned to Manchester[,] 150 years after he left. As part of the Manchester International Festival, a statue will be officially unveiled of the German writer, in Tony Wilson Place, this Sunday.

Tony Wilson, by the way, was a record label and night club owner. He is credited with discovering the Sex Pistols, an experience he described as nothing short of an epiphany.

How Engels would feel about a statue honoring him in Tony Wilson Place is anyones guess.

The statue of Engels has been imported from Ukraine. How the Ukrainians feel about the statue, and the man, is clear. They despise him, which is why they have no further use for the statute. The only surprise is that they didnt smash it.

As Stuttaford reminds us, the Marxist Soviet regime committed genocide in Ukraine. The British Labour Party turned a blind eye. One Labour minister even defended the work camps as part of a remarkable economic experiment.

But does Engels bear any responsibility for the butchery of Stalins Soviet Union? Defenders of erecting a monument in Manchester say, of course, that he doesnt.

But Engels words say otherwise. Citing a compilation by Giles Udy, author of Labour and the Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left, Stuttaford presents the following statements by the iconic socialist thinker:

[S]uch offensive, vulgar, democratic arguments! To denigrate violence as something to be rejected, when we all know that in the end nothing can be achieved without violence! This is our calling, that we shall become the templars of this Grail, gird the sword round our loins for its sake and stake our lives joyfully in the last, holy war which will be followed by the thousand-year reign of freedom.

Also:

We discovered that in connection with these figures the German national simpletons and money-grubbers of the Frankfurt parliamentary swamp always counted as Germans the Polish Jews as well, although this dirtiest of all races, neither by its jargon nor by its descent, but at most only through its lust for profit, could have any relation of kinship with Frankfurt.

Between the anti-Semitism, the talk of a holy war, and the millenarian nonsense, it sounds like, today, Engels might be ISISs benefactor.

Indeed, Engels was an open supporter of terrorism:

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.

Finally, this remark has special poignancy for Ukrainians:

General war will] wipe out all these trash nations [a harsh, but reasonably accurate translation of Volkerabfalle, the term Engels used] down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.

It is no accident, as Marxists like to say, that Marxism produced genocide. It is no accident that portions of the contemporary left find Marx and Engels iconic.
NEWARK  A tip from an Atlantic County pharmacist kicked off an investigation into a drug ring that illegally distributed tens of thousands of oxycodone pills and prescription drugs in the county, officials said.

New Jersey Attorney General Christopher Porrino announced Wednesday the charges against Dr. Craig Gialanella, 53, of North Caldwell, Essex County, who is accused of fraudulently prescribing oxycodone pain pills and the anti-anxiety drug alprazolam, sold under brand name Xanax, to members of a drug ring in exchange for cash.

Porrino also announced drug-distribution charges against 16 people, including alleged drug-ring leaders Mary Connolly, 54, of Egg Harbor Township; Connollys ex-husband, Douglas Patterson, 53, of Egg Harbor Township; and her daughter, Lauren Connolly, 28, of Egg Harbor Township.

The remaining defendants, including Mary Connollys son, Robert Connolly, 31, of Galloway Township, were charged with second- or third-degree distribution of narcotics or conspiracy to distribute narcotics.

Michael Connolly Jr., 33, of Galloway Township, another son of Mary Connolly, was charged with third-degree obtaining narcotics by fraud.

The investigation, called Operation Oxy Highway and led by the Attorney Generals Prescription Fraud Investigation Strike Team and the Division of Criminal Justice Gangs & Organized Crime Bureau, began in December after an Atlantic County pharmacist, whom authorities did not identify, reported residents were using Gialanella  whose office is more than 100 miles away  to get large quantities of opiates.

From Jan. 1 to Dec. 7 last year, Gialanella issued 413 prescriptions for about 50,000 30-milligram oxycodone tablets in the names of 30 people in the Atlantic County area, including for the alleged members of the drug ring, the statement said.

The red flag that caused this doctor to be reported was a pharmacist who was paying attention to prescribing activity that looked strange, Porrino said.

According to the pharmacist, Patterson used several dates of birth on oxycodone prescriptions to allegedly avoid detection by the New Jersey Prescription Monitoring Program and limits on quantities of the drugs. The prescriptions were often issued in the same name with a different date of birth, the statement said.

Officials allege Patterson introduced Mary Connolly and others to Gialanella and would require a share of the pills the patients received from Gialanellas prescriptions.

Porrino said during the Wednesday press conference the evidence found through the investigation showed Gialanella received cash payments for visits and that, in certain cases, he was receiving insurance or Medicaid payments as well.

The visits lasted only a few minutes and did not involve any type of examination or testing, the statement said.

Gialanella allegedly charged patients $50 to $100 for an office visit, during which he would write prescriptions for 90 or 180 30-milligram oxycodone tablets and 90 2-milligram alprazolam tablets.

Officials allege he would write two to five prescriptions for each drug for a single patient every 30 days, frequently leaving the date of birth blank. The ring allegedly sold the 30-milligram oxycodone tablets, known as blues, for $18 to $25 per pill and the alprazolam pills, known as zannies, for $5, the statement said.

Authorities said Lauren Connolly allegedly participated in the drug ring as an intermediary between Mary Connolly, Patterson and street-level distributors, and as a street-level distributor, too.

Mary and Lauren Connolly were captured on surveillance allegedly engaging in hand-to-hand drug transactions after filling prescriptions for oxycodone.

The investigation remains ongoing, said authorities, who believe Gialanella could have been illegally prescribing oxycodone to people in other counties as well.

Gialanella wrote prescriptions for more than 350,000 30-milligram oxycodone tablets between January 2014 and May 2017, which would total $7 million if each pill were sold for $20, the statement said.

We are coming for you, and we will find you if you are breaking the rules and youre trying to put some extra cash in your pocket by illegally writing prescriptions. Were going to get you. Were going to arrest you, Porrino said during the press conference.

Margate Fire Chief Anthony Tabasso said Wednesday that one of those charged in the ring, Theodore Gogol, 37, of Margate, is an active member of the Margate City Fire Department and has been suspended without pay. Also charged was Ashton Funk, 35, of Northfield, a former Margate firefighter who lost his job in 2015 after a shoplifting charge.

Gogol was hired as a firefighter May 1, 2013, and has never been written up for a major infraction, Tabasso said. He added he had a meeting with Gogol on Wednesday that he said was mostly positive, but he refused to comment further.

Hes a great fireman, and he is good at what he does, Tabasso said. This is a total shock to all of us.

The others charged with distribution of narcotics and/or conspiracy to distribute narcotics are Danielle Grainger, 33, of Linwood; William Warren, 51, of Egg Harbor Township; Francis Clemson, 53, of Ocean View; Beatriz Oquendo, 34, of Pleasantville; Amanda Blomdahl, 37, of Somers Point; Kevin Reid, 47, of Ventnor; David Blocker, 49, of Galloway Township; Joseph Green, 39, of Atlantic City; Christopher Perez, 34, of Mays Landing; and John Hager, 39, of Deptford.

The state investigation team has charged six doctors, including Gialanella, since 2014 with illegally distributing opiates, including two doctors charged with strict liability for overdose deaths.

Meanwhile, this week, authorities also confirmed a separate federal investigation into local public employees health benefits. Officials in Margate, Ventnor and Atlantic City said they received subpoenas asking for information on the topic.

Staff Writer Nanette LoBiondo Galloway contributed to this report.
LONGPORT - Police here issued a warning for residents to lock their cars following several car burglaries, including one involving a juvenile involved in a pursuit that ended Pleasantville and injured a bystander.

A 2017 GMC Yukon was stolen from the driveway of a residence on the 100 block of S. 21st Avenue in Longport between 1-5 a.m. Saturday, July 15. According to Public Information Officer Ray Burgan, multiple vehicles in the area were also burglarized during the same time frame.

Onstar tracking system located the Yukon on Baltic Avenue in Atlantic City, which was police discovered unoccupied.

Later that afternoon, following a pursuit, the Pleasantville Police department apprehended a juvenile male from Atlantic City driving a stolen vehicle out of Ventnor.

According to Pleasantville Police, the 17-year-old male led police on a chase through Pleasantville and Atlantic City in a stolen car before striking a pedestrian and crashing into two parked cars and a police car.

Pleasantville police officers were alerted to a stolen vehicle from Ventnor at 3:21 p.m. Saturday by using an automated license plate reader, Capt. Matthew Hartman said.

Pleasantville Ptl. Juan Morillo attempted to stop the stolen vehicle at Stenton Place and Main Street, but the driver fled to Route 30 and headed toward Atlantic City.

Police said several unidentified men ran from the vehicle at North Michigan Avenue near Horace J. Bryant Jr. Drive. Those men have not been located, Hartman said. The suspect attempted to drive away from the scene but also struck another parked car and a Pleasantville police car.

The chase continued to the 1400 block of Atlantic Avenue, where the driver struck a woman who was exiting a parked car on the street. Police said she was taken to AtlantiCare Regional Medical Centers City Campus with non-life-threatening injuries.

Inside the vehicle were items from the stolen Yukon of Longport in addition to multiple items from the burglarized vehicles, Burgan said. Longport charges are pending and the investigation is ongoing.

In all recent car burglaries, the victimized cars were left unlocked and with keys in the vehicle. All residents and visitors to the shore communities are reminded to lock their vehicles, Burgan said.

The 17-year-old, who was not identified because of his age, was taken into custody without incident. He is currently being held in the Harborfields Juvenile Detention Center in Egg Harbor City.

Police said he is facing multiple charges from Pleasantville and Atlantic City police.
PLEASANTVILLE  Atlantic County Prosecutor Damon G. Tyner met with 30 residents and police officers Tuesday in Pleasantville, the city with Atlantic Countys fifth-highest crime rate.

The crimes that plague Pleasantville and Atlantic City had their origins in the other parts of the county, said Tyner, who became prosecutor March 15.

Tyner, Mayor Jessie Tweedle Sr., Police Chief Sean Riggin and county Sheriff Frank X. Balles made conversation and ate pizza at Johnny Ds, 44 N. Main St.

Tyner said he will conduct other meetings in other communities to meet the public he serves.

Communication is the key, he said. You have to have an established relationship and become part of the community.

Nearby, John Douris, 62, Johnny Ds owner, ran back and forth, filling up the pizza trays as fast as everyone could eat it.

We have never had a problem (with crime) in my store, he said.

Douris began running his Main Street restaurant 21 years ago.

Pleasantville gets a bad rap, he said. It has for a long time.

Douris turned and pointed to the eating booths placed along the sidewalk that borders his store and North Main Street. He said his customers sit there to enjoy their dinners while others walk up and down the sidewalk.

Its getting better, he said. Crime is going down.

He suggested Pleasantville might get a boost as Atlantic City bounces back from the 2014 casino closings and attracts new industries and businesses.

Its a wonderful place, he said of Pleasantville.

Cars rolled up and down Main Street and walkers followed along the sidewalks at a slower pace.

Nearby, the Main at City Center complex of four retail and housing apartment buildings are nearing completion. Farther south on Main Street, La Cosecha grocery store and Mambo Cafe restaurant have been successful for the past few years.

Pleasantville is changing. The once majority White population has given way to blacks, who are now passing on to a growing Hispanic population.

The community is more diverse, said Lt. Vaughn Howse of the way that many nationalities now make up Pleasantville.

But the crime rate  actually the perception of a high crime rate  has remained.

One problem, heroin, is just as bad or even worse in the rest of the county than it is in Pleasantville, Howse said.

But the city is basically safe, he said.

The bad guys go after the bad guys, he said. I wouldnt tell my mother not to come here.

Crime numbers are improving, Riggin said.

Over the past two years, crime has dropped in Pleasantville, Riggin said earlier Tuesday in his office. Crime has been going down.

The numbers of robberies, burglaries, auto thefts and thefts are all down more than 25 percent since 2008, according to City-Data.com.

For example, from 2008 to 2015, robberies dropped from 80 to 62, burglaries dropped from 262-158, thefts dropped from 446 to 213, and auto thefts dropped from 53-32, according to City-Data.

Murders have ranged from a high of eight in 2012 to none in 2013 and in between during the other years.

Crime is cyclical, Riggin said.

According to the New Jersey State Police Uniform Crime Index for 2015, the last year statistics are available, Pleasantville had a 561 crime index. Pleasantville trailed Atlantic City (3,622), Hamilton Township (1,088), Egg Harbor Township (804), and Galloway Township (717).

Tuesdays meeting gave Riggin and his crew a chance to meet the public.

It puts us face-to-face, Riggin said.

Riggin is trying to get people to be concerned about the type of crime they are most likely to be involved in.

For example, Riggin said, seniors are worried about violent crimes. Perception will affect your life.

But there was only one recent senior burglary, he said, and the last violent crime against a senior citizen was many years before that.

Fraud, he said, they should be worried about fraud.

However, they arent, he said.

In 2016, Riggin created violent crime, street crime and intelligence units and changed the general focus of the force.

The crime rate continued to drop, he said.

David Bowman, a past member of the citys Planning Board, said he moved in 1984 to East Floral Avenue. He says its still a safe place to live.

Its getting much better, said Pete Payne of Ryon Avenue.

Earlier this year, the mayor began meeting with Pleasantville businesses to hear their concerns, including safety.

We have a good relationship with the community, Tweedle said. We are all trying to protect our citizens. You can never give up.
Oakcrest High School graduate Tiffany Valiante likely did not take her own life in July 2015 when she was fatally struck by an NJ Transit train in Galloway Township, according to an independent report by Louise Houseman, a former investigator for the Atlantic County Medical Examiner.

It is highly unlikely this very accomplished, 18-year-old female athlete walked barefoot, alone in the woods, without her cellphone, over stones and brush, in the dark, along 1.5 miles of isolated railroad tracks, on a hot summer night, for a total of nearly 4 miles in order to commit suicide, Houseman wrote in her report.

The report was included in an amended civil complaint filed Tuesday in Atlantic County Superior Court.

The spokesman for the Office of the Attorney General, which oversees the state Medical Examiners Office, could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Last week, attorney Paul DAmato filed a suit on behalf of Valiantes parents, Dianne and Stephen Valiante, seeking to reopen the investigation into Tiffany Valiantes death. The suit does not name a defendant, just several Does.

DAmato said the complaint can be amended in the future to name specific people but gives the plaintiffs the opportunity to follow up on more leads, including possible suspects, some of whom were never interviewed by police.

Dianne Valiante, who on Wednesday visited an elaborate shrine erected in her daughters memory near the site of her death, declined to discuss the case.

Tiffany Valiante, of Hamilton Township, was killed July 12, 2015, when she allegedly walked in front of a train traveling 80 mph near Prague Avenue in Galloway after leaving her cousins graduation party. Her death was ruled a suicide by the state Medical Examiners Office less than 48 hours after Valiante was killed, although the train engineer wasnt interviewed until July 18. Valiantes parents have been fighting that ruling.

There are enough unanswered questions, false statements, conflicting accounts regarding this fatality, and incomplete investigative information, as well as extremely important evidence that was discovered since the night of Tiffanys death, which leads me to the conclusion that the death certificate should be amended from suicide to undetermined, Houseman wrote.

The Valiantes first filed a lawsuit in 2016 against the state Attorney Generals Office, the state Medical Examiners Office and its southern regional branch.

The new lawsuit, filed July 10, alleges kidnapping, murder and destruction of evidence. In addition to Housemans report, the amended complaint included an affidavit from a forensic pathologist regarding the manner-of-death finding.

The Valiantes believe their daughters death was not a suicide but that she was the victim of a conspiracy to inflict bodily harm, violently abducted on the night of July 12, 2015, and subsequently murdered by the defendants while attempting to flee her imprisonment, the complaint states.

Houseman notes Valiantes deep fear of the dark in her reasoning of why Valiantes death may not have been suicide. In addition, Valiantes shoes and headband were found miles from the scene of the crash, but her feet showed no signs of abrasions although she would have had to walk barefoot through rough terrain, Houseman notes in her report.

Since her death, Tiffany Valiantes family has been pushing for Justice for Tiffany Valiante, a grass-roots campaign that includes a hotline to call with any information. Signs are posted around the county advertising the hotline, and Facebook and Twitter have accounts for the group.

Valiante, who was 6 feet, 2 inches tall, planned to attend Mercy College, where she was to play volleyball. No drugs or alcohol were found in her system after the crash.
Disappointing fireworks

The 4th of July fireworks display at one of the casinos was disappointing to say the least. It was good while it lasted, but it only lasted a little over 10 minutes by my watch.

One poor man running up a little late to the Boardwalk asked me Is it over? I had to tell him yes. My wife, Debbie, and I had a wonderful meal so it was no loss, but many drove long distances for this sham.

I dont know if it was corporate cost cutting or a mishap, but the casino owes the community another fireworks display. This is not free per se. Casinos make money from advertising a fireworks show and everyone deserves a real one. It should consider Labor Day and shoot for 20 minutes.

Chad Parlett

Egg Harbor Township

Doesnt trust Mazzeo

I am tired of Assemblyman Vince Mazzeo trying to rewrite history to cover up his voting record.

Mazzeo cosponsored the bill for the takeover of Atlantic City that allowed Gov. Chris Christie to lay off police officers and firefighters. Mazzeo supported the bipartisan agreement in the Democratic dispute that stalled budget approval, shutting down state government and putting thousands of employees out of work. Now Mazzeo is putting out press releases and tweets saying he is going to fix the things he broke.

As a local, registered Democrat, I am very disappointed that Mazzeo doesnt represent me or my family. Actions always speak louder than words. I dont trust anything he says or tweets now.

Chris Hutton

Somers Point

Election integrity effort poses a few dangers

President Trump has said that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election, causing him to lose the popular vote. So he has come up with a panel to stop alleged voter fraud, which is actually another GOP voter suppression scheme.

Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach have been named to head the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The commission is asking states for voter roll data, including the last four digits of registered voters Social Security numbers, as long as its permitted under state law.

The issues are: Such a large database of voter information would be ripe for hacking from criminals and foreign governments; a voter panel request coupled with another letter from the Justice Department detailing information about how and when voters are removed from voting rolls looks a lot like intimidation; the panel could cherry pick from incomplete data the best way to suppress voting even more.

Ten states and Washington, D.C., have refused to comply with the panels request for voter data. The New Jersey director of the Division of Elections announced that the state would provide only publicly available data that adheres to the appropriate legal process for information requests.

Russian hackers targeted voter systems in thirty-nine states during the 2016 presidential election. That should motivate people to vote rather than bullied to abstain by Trump tactics.

Nick Reina

Milmay
Theme Pavilions Focus on Market Momentum and Opportunities

TAIPEI, Taiwan, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Taiwan is the world's largest consumer of semiconductor materials for the seventh consecutive year, bringing new opportunities in this increasingly critical sector. SEMICON Taiwan (13-15 September), held at Taipei's Nangang Exhibition Center, will feature over 1,700 booths and 700 exhibitors, and more than 45,000 attendees from the global electronics manufacturing supply chain. This year, in addition to the much-anticipated Executive Summit, themed "Transformation: A Key to Solution," 27 international forums will be held, exploring major issues. Speakers from TSMC, UMC, Powerchip, NVIDIA, Micron and Amkor will share their insights on trends and strategies of the next-generation electronics industry.

According to the SEMI Material Market Data Report, Taiwan's semiconductor materials consumption was US$9.8 billion in 2016  the world's largest. Global semiconductor manufacturing equipment billings reached US$13.1 billion in Q1 2017, exceeding the record quarterly high set in Q3 2000. These figures signal that application drivers will continue to drive the development of a supply chain feeding their manufacturing processes, equipment and materials.

"As SEMICON Taiwan celebrates its 22nd year, the exhibition area will be expanded to closely align with the four major trends of applications in the market, which include Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Manufacturing, Smart Transportation, and Smart Medtech," said Terry Tsao, president of SEMI Taiwan. "This year, SEMICON Taiwan aims to increasingly connect the entire manufacturing ecosystem vertically and horizontally. In addition, it will provide an overview of market trends and leading technologies in the industry, with forums and business matching activities which will enable collaboration and new opportunities."

Theme Pavilions and Region Pavilions Focus on Opportunities

In addition to the eight customary theme pavilions, five new pavilions are featured this year, and to promote cross-border collaboration, eight regional pavilions are offered. The 21 pavilions include:

Theme Pavilions New Theme Pavilions Regional Pavilions  Automated Optical Inspection (AOI)  Circular Economy  Cross-Strait  Chemical Mechanical Planarization (CMP)  Compound Semiconductor  German  High-Tech Facility  Flexible Hybrid Electronics/Micro-LED  Holland High-Tech  Materials  Laser  Korean  Precision Machinery  Opto Semiconductor  Kyushu (Japan)  Secondary Market

 Okinawa (Japan)  Smart Manufacturing & Automation

 Silicon Europe  Taiwan Localization

 Singapore

Co-located with SEMICON Taiwan 2017, the SiP Global Summit will discuss three key system-in-package topics:

Package Innovation in Automotive

3D IC, 3D interconnection for AI and High-end Computing

Innovative Embedded Substrate and Fan-Out Technology to Enable 3D-SiP Devices

Participants will share trends on 2.5D/3D IC technologies, and the evolution and challenges of embedded technologies and wafer level packaging.

This is the first year that the International Test Conference (ITC) will be co-located with SEMICON Taiwan 2017, also marking the first time that ITC is held in Asia. The conference will focus on the rapid growth of emerging applications like IoT and automotive electronics, and how testing technologies are challenged by rapid advancements of manufacturing processes, 3D stacking and SiP.

For more information about SEMICON Taiwan 2017, please visit www.semicontaiwan.org or follow us on Facebook.

About SEMI

SEMI connects nearly 2,000 member companies and 250,000 professionals worldwide annually to advance the technology and business of electronics manufacturing. SEMI members are responsible for the innovations in materials, design, equipment, software, and services that enable smarter, faster, more powerful, and more affordable electronic products. Since 1970, SEMI has built connections that have helped its members grow, create new markets, and address common industry challenges together. SEMI maintains offices in Bangalore, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Grenoble, Hsinchu, Seoul, Shanghai, Silicon Valley (Milpitas, Calif.), Singapore, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. For more information, visit www.semi.org and follow SEMI on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Logo - http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/469944/Semi_Logo.jpg

Logo - http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/537183/SEMI_Semicon_Taiwan_Logo.jpg

Related Links

http://www.semi.org



SOURCE SEMI
Healthcare provision to residents in care homes across England is often 'erratic and inequitable', a major three-year study led by the University of Hertfordshire, funded by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), has found.

(Photo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/537399/University_of_Hertfordshire.jpg )



The Optimal study found a narrow focus by NHS decision makers on care homes as a drain on resources, rather than as a solution, can result in short-term interventions that compromise relationships between NHS and care home staff, and affect care home staff confidence in being able to meet residents' health needs.

The study, involving seven UK universities, analysed the impact of different approaches by the NHS in providing healthcare to people living in care homes across England and identified several examples of successful partnership working between NHS and care homes.

However it concluded that high quality healthcare provision to care homes can only be achieved nationwide if close collaboration between the NHS and care homes becomes part of the 'landscape of care'. This means ensuring, through targeted investment, that visiting healthcare professionals and care home staff are given the opportunity to work closely together to identify, plan and implement care protocols.

Other key findings

Care homes rely on the NHS for access to medical and specialist care. As many as 27 different NHS services can visit to provide care and treatment for residents.

Access to healthcare for care home residents was highly unpredictable. While one care home could receive a significant amount of NHS support, for example through visits from nurse specialists and therapists, residents in another care home could struggle to see a GP.

The best results were achieved when healthcare professionals working with care homes on a regular, ongoing basis were linked in with other NHS services as part of a wider network of expertise. This created naturally occurring opportunities to meet and discuss care, and nurtured a mutual appreciation of the challenges both NHS and care home staff face. It also reduced demand on stretched urgent and emergency care services, and increased staff confidence around decisions not to admit a resident to hospital or to discharge patients from hospitals earlier.

Researchers found NHS initiatives that 'threw money' at care homes to achieve minimum standards of care without any meaningful interactions with care home staff - for example paying certain GP practices more money to work with care homes - were unlikely to work.

Where the same amount of money was used to provide ongoing support and to enable NHS and care home staff to work together more closely, the investment delivered positive outcomes, the study said.

Seventy per cent of people living in UK care homes have dementia, which complicates healthcare provision. Some health services struggle to deal with this complexity and many NHS staff reported how difficult they found visiting care home residents with dementia, especially when they had no ready access to specialist dementia services from elsewhere in the NHS.

The study revealed examples of residents being admitted to A&E departments if care home staff needed a psychiatric opinion, putting further pressure on hospital wards. In contrast, when visiting nurses from a care home specialist team were linked to other NHS services they were able to involve, and work with, specialist services and hospital admissions were avoided.

"Care homes integral to health and social care system"

Lead author Professor Claire Goodman from the University of Hertfordshire's Centre for Research in Primary and Community Care, said: "It is essential that residents in care homes - some of the oldest and frailest in society - have access to healthcare that is equitable and equivalent to those received by older people living at home.

"The Optimal study shows what needs to be in place for this to happen and found many examples of effective integrated working. Across England, however, access to healthcare for care home residents continues to be highly unpredictable."

Goodman, who is also a NIHR Senior Investigator, continued: "There is an unrelentingly negative narrative in the public consciousness around bad care in care homes. Yet with 460,000 people living in UK care homes, occupying three times the number of NHS hospital beds, care homes should be seen as an integral and important part of the health and social care system.

"Just as we talk about 'improving' and 'outstanding' schools, we need to develop a positive vision for what a good care home looks like and the Optimal study has sought to support this. If we see care homes as part of the landscape of care - as a solution not a problem - then we have a real opportunity to get the delivery of healthcare in care homes right.

"Our study has shown that the provision of healthcare services to care homes is likely to be most effective when NHS services have time to learn how to work with care homes and value the work. Access to expertise in dementia care is important for both NHS and care home staff, as is ongoing GP involvement."

"When the NHS views a care home as a valued partner then there is a greater willingness to work together to solve problems and a culture of blame recedes. When healthcare for care homes is co-ordinated and recognised as important by the NHS then residents benefit and there is a much more appropriate use of hospital services."

The three-year study, funded by NIHR, involved seven UK partner universities - the University of Hertfordshire (lead), University of Nottingham, University of Surrey, Brunel University, Kings College London, University College London and City, University of London.

The full Optimal study report: Optimal NHS service delivery to care homes: a realist evaluation of the features and mechanisms that support effective working for the continuing care of older people in residential settings can be accessed here.

Notes to Editors

Funding Acknowledgement:

The Optimal project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research [HS&DR Project: 11/1021/02

Department of Health Disclaimer:

The views and opinions expressed therein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the HS&DR, NIHR, NHS or the Department of Health.

About the University of Hertfordshire:

The University's vision is to be internationally renowned as the UK's leading business-facing university. It is innovative and enterprising and challenges individuals and organisations to excel.

The University of Hertfordshire is one of the region's largest employers with over 2,700 staff and a turnover of over 238 million.

With a student community of over 24,600 including more than 3,800 overseas students, the University has a global network of over 210,000 alumni.

It is also one of the top 150 universities in the world under 50 years old, according to the Times Higher Education 150 under 50 rankings 2017.

For more information, please visit http://www.herts.ac.uk

The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR): improving the health and wealth of the nation through research. Established by the Department of Health, the NIHR:

funds high quality research to improve health

trains and supports health researchers

provides world-class research facilities

works with the life sciences industry and charities to benefit all

involves patients and the public at every step

For further information, visit the NIHR website (http://www.nihr.ac.uk).

The NIHR Dissemination Centre have put together a Themed Review on care homes (available from 5th July) - http://www.dc.nihr.ac.uk/themed-reviews/advancing-care.htm.

SOURCE University of Hertfordshire
LIVERPOOL, England, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

The world's biggest international business festival hosted in Liverpool has facilitated 250 million worth of business deals, according to new research.

The economic windfall has been provided thanks to the biennial International Business Festival, staged in 2014 and 2016, which has attracted 31,000 visitors from 98 countries, with large delegations from China, the US and India.

In 2016 the festival welcomed over 25,000 delegates from around the world, putting on a schedule of inspiring events.

The festival is aimed at small and medium-sized companies, particularly those eyeing overseas trade, with 30 per cent of previous delegates reporting that they were actively exporting or exploring the opportunity of exporting to new international markets.

A total of 103 international delegations made up of 639 unique delegates visited the 2016 festival, with nearly a quarter (23%) of these coming from China.

Figures were revealed in an independent analysis published with a year to go before Liverpool hosts the 2018 International Business Festival.

Next year's event is already in full swing and organisers predict that the total value of deals over the three festivals will reach 1bn, boosted by the trade and investment from the 2018 event.

The upbeat forecast came as they unveiled details of the 2018 festival, which will be held over nine days in June next year at the international conference centre.

Organisers are promising a stellar line-up of inspirational speakers, including heads of government, royalty and business leaders to be announced in the coming months. Lead sponsor HSBC, have already committed to supporting the 2018 Festival.

Each day will focus on a different high-growth business sector, including global economics, future transport, creative industries, manufacturing and life sciences.

A new innovation hub will showcase the latest business trends; a "festival incubator" will offer expert advice to expanding firms and there will be a wide range of cutting-edge conferences. Taking to the "blueskies stage" will be world-renowned industry experts, influencers and innovators.

Max Steinberg, chair of the 2018 International Business Festival, said: "The Chinese business community is a critical audience for the 2018 International Business Festival. The Chinese and UK business communities have a long history of collaboration and cross-border development. Our festival will provide a strong opportunity for start-ups, SMEs and larger corporations to develop import/export partnerships and generate new business. In 2016, 23 percent of companies participating were headquartered in China; many saw great value in their attendance."



Amanda Murphy, Head of Commercial Banking for HSBC UK, said: "SMEs are the lifeblood of the UK economy and for many there is an appetite to grow their business through

exporting. For those worrying about having a lack of exporting experience the International Business Festival brings SMEs together with experts to explore opportunities. We're looking forward to joining the UK's most exciting young businesses eager to discover the international markets available to them."

Lise Bertelsen, Executive Director at China-Britain Business Council, said: "Involvement in the 2014 and 2016 Festivals was very useful to the China-Britain Business Council, enabling us to connect to companies new to the China market, as well as giving us visibility with a wide range of stakeholders. Both festivals offered opportunities to present CBBC and the China market, as well as allowing us to reach a broad network of UK businesses. Given the continued growth and development of the festivals, CBBC looks forward to being part of the 2018 International Business Festival."

Businesses have testified to the export gains achieved by attending the festival.

Brian Wilkins of Abbey Group said: "We secured a 20m boost through the Festival and significantly advanced our global profile"

Michelle Billington of Foot in the door films said: "We estimate deals agreed at the festival will bring investment of between 2 to 30m over the next 3 - 5 years."

The festival will be held between 12-18 June. For further information please visit www.internationalbusinessfestival.com

Notes to Editors

About International Business Festival

The International Business Festival is the world's biggest business event. Hosted every two years in its home city of Liverpool, the festival captures the dynamism and diversity of the global marketplace. The goal is to give businesses the space, support and expertise they need to make connections, do deals and realise their potential. The International Business Festival is co-funded by the City of Liverpool and the UK government through the Liverpool City Region combined authority single investment fund.

internationalbusinessfestival.com | @thebusinessfest

Independent research analysis conducted by SG Lingard.

For more information about the 2018 International Business Festival please visit http://internationalbusinessfestival.com/

SOURCE 2018 International Business Festival
LIVERPOOL, England, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

The world's biggest international business festival hosted in Liverpool has facilitated 250 million worth of business deals, according to new research.

The economic windfall has been provided thanks to the biennial International Business Festival, staged in 2014 and 2016, which has attracted 31,000 visitors from 98 countries, with large delegations from India, the US and China.

In 2016 the festival welcomed over 25,000 delegates from around the world, putting on a schedule of inspiring events.

The festival is aimed at small and medium-sized companies, particularly those eyeing overseas trade, with 30 per cent of previous delegates reporting that they were actively exporting or exploring the opportunity of exporting to new international markets.

A total of 103 international delegations made up of 639 unique delegates visited the 2016 festival, with 9% of these coming from India.

Figures were revealed in an independent analysis published with a year to go before Liverpool hosts the 2018 International Business Festival.

Next year's event is already in full swing and organisers predict that the total value of deals over the three festivals will reach 1bn, boosted by the trade and investment from the 2018 event.

The upbeat forecast came as they unveiled details of the 2018 festival, which will be held over nine days in June next year at the international conference centre.

Organisers are promising a stellar line-up of inspirational speakers, including heads of government, royalty and business leaders to be announced in the coming months. Lead sponsor HSBC, have already committed to supporting the 2018 Festival.

Each day will focus on a different high-growth business sector, including global economics, future transport, creative industries, manufacturing and life sciences.

A new innovation hub will showcase the latest business trends; a "festival incubator" will offer expert advice to expanding firms and there will be a wide range of cutting-edge conferences. Taking to the "blueskies stage" will be world-renowned industry experts, influencers and innovators.

Max Steinberg, chair of the 2018 International Business Festival, said: "The Indian business community is a critical audience for the 2018 International Business Festival. As close trade partners, the Indian and UK business communities have a long histbory of collaboration. Our festival will provide a strong opportunity for start-ups, SMEs and larger corporations to develop import/export partnerships and generate new business. In 2016, nine percent of companies participating were headquartered in India; many saw great value in their attendance."

Amanda Murphy, Head of Commercial Banking for HSBC UK, said: "SMEs are the lifeblood of the UK economy and for many there is an appetite to grow their business through

exporting. For those worrying about having a lack of exporting experience the International Business Festival brings SMEs together with experts to explore opportunities. We're looking forward to joining the UK's most exciting young businesses eager to discover the international markets available to them."

Richard Heald OBE, CEO of the UK India British Business Council, said: "The 2014 and 2016 Festivals were tremendous in raising the profile of the UK India Business Council and, critically, in connecting us to new clients and partners. The quality of the events, exhibitions, and networking were fantastic, and we learned a huge amount about the international business drivers of companies from all across the world. The Festival continues to innovate and respond to business needs, and we are really looking forward to being part of the 2018 Festival which is shaping up to be the best yet."

Businesses have testified to the export gains achieved by attending the festival.

Brian Wilkins of Abbey Group said: "We secured a 20m boost through the Festival and significantly advanced our global profile"

Michelle Billington of Foot in the door films said: "We estimate deals agreed at the festival will bring investment of between 2 to 30m over the next 3 - 5 years."

The festival will be held between 12-18 June. For further information please visit www.internationalbusinessfestival.com

Notes to Editors

About International Business Festival

The International Business Festival is the world's biggest business event. Hosted every two years in its home city of Liverpool, the festival captures the dynamism and diversity of the global marketplace. The goal is to give businesses the space, support and expertise they need to make connections, do deals and realise their potential. The International Business Festival is co-funded by the City of Liverpool and the UK government through the Liverpool City Region combined authority single investment fund.

internationalbusinessfestival.com | @thebusinessfest

Independent research analysis conducted by SG Lingard.

For more information about the 2018 International Business Festival please visit http://internationalbusinessfestival.com/

SOURCE 2018 International Business Festival
NORWALK, Conn., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- 365 Data Centers, a leading provider of reliable data center services across the U.S., today announced an expanded partnership with ManagedWay to add new points-of-presence (PoPs) in Tampa, Nashville, Chicago, and Buffalo. ManagedWay is a Detroit-based provider of cloud hosting and networking solutions that had an existing PoP in 365 Data Centers' facility in Southfield, Michigan. The expanded partnership, with PoPs in five of 365 Data Centers' facilities, enables 365 Data Centers and ManagedWay to better support enterprises with their colocation and cloud requirements.

"ManagedWay and 365 Data Centers share a strategic focus to provide best-in-class service for customers in tier two markets," said Bob DeSantis, CEO of 365 Data Centers. "We are thrilled to provide our customers with access to ManagedWay's cloud services in Nashville, Buffalo, Chicago, and Tampa."

"The team at 365 Data Centers went above and beyond to enable this expansion," said Robert Sanders, President and CEO of ManagedWay. "As a result, we can offer our customers low latency services and expanded interconnectivity options."

About 365 Data Centers

365 Data Centers is the leading data center solutions provider for cloud, content, carriers and enterprises in tier 2 markets. We operate 8 U.S. data centers and help hundreds of businesses to improve user experience, reduce cost and speed innovation by leveraging our secure, carrier-neutral and reliable edge colocation services. With 100% uptime and industry compliance, 365 ensures that mission-critical application infrastructure is highly available and conveniently accessible. 365 is a privately held company based in Norwalk, Connecticut. For more information, visit http://365datacenters.com.

About Managed Way:

ManagedWay is an industry leader in cloud computing, fiber optic internet and colocation services with multiple data centers in Troy MI (Metro Detroit) and Byron Center MI (Grand Rapids). The company is SOC 2 Type II compliant, operating highly secure, scalable and redundant data centers. ManagedWay is recognized for its unparalleled 'Support Shield' that promises on-site IT professionals on a 24/7/365 basis to ensure "IT peace of mind." ManagedWay provides high bandwidth Internet services via hundreds of miles of fiber optic cable.

SOURCE 365 Data Centers

Related Links

http://www.365main.com


TAMPA, Fla., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- AACSB International (The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business), the world's largest business education alliance, announces its board of directors for the 201718 fiscal year.

Founded in 1916, AACSB International (AACSB) is a global association of leaders in education and business, dedicated to supporting educators, students, and business. Through accreditation, research, thought leadership, professional development, and advocacy services, AACSB works in partnership with over 1,500 organizations in over 90 countries and territories. With more than 785 business schools accredited worldwide, AACSB sets the highest quality standard in business education and is governed by an international board of directors.

"As a volunteer-driven association, AACSB brings together experts in both academia and business," said Thomas R. Robinson, president and CEO of AACSB. "We believe in the power of the collective strength and connected wisdom. I am pleased to welcome the 201718 board of directors. I look forward to seeing how each member can offer clear and actionable insight on the constantly changing business education landscape and how AACSB can continue to serve as the industry-wide global 'connector.' "

Starting July 1, 2017, the following prominent business education and business professionals from institutions around the world will serve on the 201718 AACSB Board of Directors:

Board of Directors Leadership

Soumitra Dutta , Cornell University ( United States ) as chair

, ( ) as chair Caryn L. Beck-Dudley , Santa Clara University ( United States ) as vice chair-chair elect

, ( ) as vice chair-chair elect John A. Elliott , University of Connecticut ( United States ) as secretary-treasurer

, ( ) as secretary-treasurer Santiago Iniguez de Onzono, IE University ( Spain ) as immediate past chair

) as immediate past chair Thomas R. Robinson , AACSB International ( United States ) as president and chief executive officer

Board Members With Terms Expiring 2018

Michael J. Arena , General Motors Corporation ( United States )

, General Motors Corporation ( ) Jean-Michel Blanquer , ESSEC Business School ( France )

, ESSEC Business School ( ) Stephanie Mattox Bryant , Missouri State University ( United States )

, Missouri State University ( ) Amy Hillman , Arizona State University ( United States )

, ( ) Erika Hayes James , Emory University ( United States )

, ( ) Eli Jones , Texas A&M University ( United States )

, ( ) Jane F. Mutchler , Purdue University Northwest ( United States )

, Northwest ( ) Enase Felicia Okonedo , Lagos Business School ( Nigeria )

, Lagos Business School ( ) Francois Ortalo-Magne, London Business School (UK)

(UK) Jerry Tomberlin , Carleton University ( Canada )

, ( ) Lin Zhou , Shanghai Jiao Tong University ( China )

Board Members With Terms Expiring 2019

Tracey Golden , Deloitte LLP ( United States )

, Deloitte LLP ( ) Jikyeong Kang, Asian Institute of Management ( Philippines )

) Idalene Kesner , Indiana University, Bloomington / Indianapolis ( United States )

, / ( ) Terry S. Maness , Baylor University ( United States )

, ( ) Mark Taylor , Washington University in St. Louis ( United States )

, in ( ) Philip Vergauwen , Maastricht University ( The Netherlands )

Board Members With Terms Expiring 2020

Nancy A. Bagranoff , University of Richmond ( United States )

, ( ) Frank Bostyn, NEOMA Business School ( France )

) Natalya Delcoure , Texas A&M University-Kingsville ( United States )

, ( ) Gerard George , Singapore Management University ( Singapore )

, ( ) Linda U. Hadley , Columbus State University ( United States )

, ( ) Eric F. Rodriguez, Universidad de los Andes ( Colombia )

) Eric R. Spangenberg , University of California, Irvine (California)

, Nick van Dam , McKinsey & Company ( United States )

For more information on AACSB International governance, visit aacsb.edu/about/governance.

About AACSB International

As the world's largest business education alliance, AACSB International (AACSB) connects educators, students, and business to achieve a common goal: to create the next generation of great leaders. Synonymous with the highest standards of excellence since 1916, AACSB provides quality assurance, business education intelligence, and professional development services to over 1,500 member organizations and more than 785 accredited business schools worldwide. With its global headquarters in Tampa, Florida, USA; Europe, Middle East, and Africa headquarters in Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore, AACSB's mission is to foster engagement, accelerate innovation, and amplify impact in business education. For more information, visit aacsb.edu.

SOURCE AACSB International

Related Links

http://aacsb.edu


"Retirement planning can sometimes leave people anxious, confused or even paralyzed," said Debra Whitman, Executive Vice President and Chief Public Policy Officer, AARP. "This campaign will break down retirement savings into easy, actionable steps for all Americans."

A recent survey conducted by AARP revealed that Americans are getting the most out of every dollar in many areas in their life, with 92 percent engaging in money-saving hacks, such as comparison shopping, couponing, and signing up for customer reward programs. However, fewer Americans have taken this penchant for saving and applied it to their retirement. For example, only about a quarter have completed easy retirement savings strategies such as increasing their annual contributions to their retirement savings by even one percent or rolling over any old employer-sponsored retirement plans. And nearly three out of 10 Americans are essentially leaving free money on the table by not contributing enough to their employer-sponsored retirement plan to maximize company match.**

The creative strategy for the PSAs was informed by the insight that Americans are resourceful when it comes to getting the most out of every dollar in their day-to-day life, but often fail to demonstrate that same confidence when it came to getting the most out of their retirement savings.

"For people who find their retirement savings so complicated that they can't see how to have additional impact, this campaign will serve as a 'cheerleader,'" said Gary Resch, Executive Creative Director, FCB. "The creative asserts that they've already cleared far trickier financial hurdles in their life, and that they're more than equipped to handle this one."

Taking an encouraging and empowering tone, the PSAs celebrate financial milestones and successes these savvy consumers have already acedfrom home ownership and vacation planning, to financing a child's educationand urge them to apply that same financial know-how and gusto to get on track with their retirement savings with tips from AceYourRetirement.org.

To inspire people to take action, AceYourRetirement.org breaks down the retirement savings process into easy, actionable steps. After answering a few questions about their savings and goals, each user will receive a personalized Action Plan that highlights three practical next steps. The recommendations cover a wide range of topics, such as how to get the most out of a workplace retirement plan, how to turn a hobby into a source of income during retirement, or how to have a conversation with family members about getting on the same financial page.

"Though saving for retirement can seem intimidating, this campaign can help people recognize just how financially savvy they can be," said Lisa Sherman, President and CEO of the Ad Council. "We are thrilled to partner with AARP and FCB New York to help people better their financial futures."

The new creative will run in donated time and space, per the Ad Council's model. They are available in TV, radio, print, outdoor and digital formats nationwide.

To receive your personalized retirement savings action plan, visit AceYourRetirement.org.

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.

The Ad Council

The Ad Council is a nonprofit organization with a rich history of marshaling volunteer talent from the advertising and media industries to deliver crucial messages to the American public. Having produced literally thousands of PSA campaigns addressing the most pressing social issues of the day, the Ad Council has effected, and continues to effect, tremendous positive change by raising awareness, inspiring action and saving lives. To learn more about the Ad Council and its campaigns, visit AdCouncil.org, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or view our PSAs on YouTube.

FCB

FCB (Foote, Cone & Belding) is a global, fully integrated marketing communications company with a heritage of creativity and success dating from 1873. Based on a deeply developed understanding of diversified local markets and global cultures, FCB focuses on significantly changing consumer behavior to the benefit of its clients, its people and society. With more than 8,000 people in 109 operations in 80 countries, the company is part of the Interpublic Group of Companies (NYSE: IPG). Learn more at www.FCB.com and follow us on Twitter and Instagram (@FCBglobal) and Facebook (FCB Global).

DATA SOURCES:

*NIRS analysis of 2013 Survey of Consumer Finance; http://www.nirsonline.org/storage/nirs/documents/RSC%202015/final_rsc_2015.pdf

**AARP/Ad Council survey, 2017. The study was conducted online in GfK's Omnibus using the web-enabled "KnowledgePanel," a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the US general population, not just the online population. The study consisted of 1,507 nationally representative interviews conducted between June 2-4. 2017 among adults aged 40-59, with a household income of $40k-$99k who are currently employed/not retired. The margin of error is +/-2.5 percentage points.

SOURCE Ad Council
DALLAS, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The American Board of Trial Advocates, a non-partisan national association of experienced trial lawyers and judges, opposes the direct personal attacks made by Rep. Darrell Issa, Chairman of the Intellectual Property Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, about U.S. District Judge J. Rodney Gilstrap. ABOTA is dedicated to the preservation of a fair and impartial judiciary and the right to trial by jury. State and federal judges are accountable to the law, not to special interests or political pressure.

Recently, Rep. Issa criticized a recent ruling of Judge Gilstrap, District Judge for the United States Court of the Eastern District of Texas, calling his conduct "reprehensible" and insinuating the decision was motivated by a personal bias to local community interests rather than the law. Regrettably, Rep. Issa's criticism extended beyond a challenge of the legal precedent to a personal attack on Judge Gilstrap and his integrity as a jurist.

"One of our primary purposes is the preservation of the independence of the judiciary," said F. Dulin Kelly, ABOTA National President. "The judicial canons preclude judges from responding to public criticism of their rulings and when a member of the judiciary has been publicly criticized, our ABOTA protocol requires us to evaluate the criticism and determine whether a response on behalf of the judge or court is appropriate."

ABOTA is an organization consisting of an equal balance of plaintiff and defense lawyers. The Texas statewide chapter, known as TEX-ABOTA, is made up of 16 local chapters and serves as a consolidated voice of more than 1,300 members. Ann Hennis, TEX-ABOTA President, said the statements about Judge Gilstrap are contrary to the organization's ideals of disagreeing with respect, seeking a common ground, and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States.

Mr. Kelly added that with members of all political persuasions and both sides of the bar, ABOTA and TEX-ABOTA strongly decry this effort to politicize and denigrate any individual jurist.

In a formal statement posted on ABOTA.org, Mr. Kelly said:

"We reject the attempt to denounce our judges into foregoing their obligation to use their best judgment, devoid of influence, in an appropriate ruling. Whether you agree with isolated decisions or do not, political influence on our Courts is to be opposed.

When our elected representatives choose to issue personal attacks and name calling on any individual judge, demeaning the personal integrity of the jurist, the effect is to undermine the very principles of our liberty and government. Politics have no place in our courts. We believe judges should be selected in a manner that assures well-trained, qualified, experienced, independent and neutral judges. Political attacks that impugn a judge's character have no legitimate role in the legislative framework. It weakens a critical, co-equal branch of our constitutional government. If we are to remain a nation of laws, we must have independent and neutral judges who will apply the law fairly and impartially. To utilize a personal attack against an individual jurist for the purpose of a political agenda diminishes the authority of our system of justice."

Preserving the quality and independence of the judiciary has been a hallmark of ABOTA's efforts for decades, and the organization believes that confidence in the nation's judicial system is profoundly important. More on this topic can be found in the ABOTA white paper, "Preserving a Fair, Impartial and Independent Judiciary," available at ABOTA.org.

About the American Board of Trial Advocates

Founded in 1958, ABOTA is a national association of experienced trial lawyers and judges. ABOTA and its members are dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the civil jury trial right provided by the Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. ABOTA membership consists of more than 7,600 lawyers  equally balanced between plaintiff and defense  and judges spread among 97 chapters in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

For more information:

Brian Tyson

(214) 871-7523

[email protected]

SOURCE American Board of Trial Advocates

Related Links

http://www.abota.org


NEW YORK, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Algomizer, a public company traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE: ALMO) and specializing in the online marketing field, signed an agreement and completed the acquisition of Linkury Ltd., provider of software monetization solutions, and its subsidiaries. Algomizer completed the acquisition for $ 11M plus options, to hold Linkury's entire capital stock.

To finance the transaction, Algomizer signed investment agreements of approximately $ 11M with leading investors, including the Yedioth Internet Group (which has invested in Algomizer before), institutional bodies, a Canadian fund and private Israeli and American investors.

Linkury operates in the online advertising industry, through a group of companies which have developed online software in various fields, including video (NROLL), automated, programmatic RTB (Real-Time Bidding) systems, virtual reality, safe web surfing for children, automated bots and e-commerce on Facebook.

In 2016, Linkury's revenues totaled $ 20M and its net profit $ 3.5M, and it expects a substantial revenues growth in 2017.

Linkury's area of business is synergetic to Algomizer's. In Linkury, Algomizer sees an immediate and future growth engine which will allow it to expand its offering to customers, through both organic growth and further such mergers.

Linkury's CEO and founder, Netanel Namdar, will retain his position. He voted his confidence in Algomizer and its future success by choosing to receive a substantial part of the proceeds from selling his shares in Linkury in Algomizer shares, thereby becoming an Algomizer shareholder.

Noam Band, CEO of Algomizer, said: "We are proud of the Linkury acquisition and we believe it will yield fruit in the very near future. At Linkury, we found an amazing team who succeeded in rapidly converting a company, which operated in the extinct toolbar area, into an advanced company with sustainable products and a strong grip in areas such as RTB, video, Facebook bots and security. The company maintains high profitability and an annual growth of millions, amazingly without having raised any funds from external investors since its establishment. On top of our solutions for Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, we will be able to offer the market and our customers these solutions, and we expect the acquisition to significantly accelerate Algomizer's growth and increase its sales".

Band added, "We thank the first-class investors who were reached through the Shrem-Zilberman Group's excellent work, for their vote of confidence in Algomizer's strategy and their investment of $ 11M, which enabled the acquisition".

Contact information:

[email protected]

+1-888-508-6010

www.algomizer.com

SOURCE Algomizer

Related Links

http://www.algomizer.com


HOUSTON, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- alliantgroup, a leading tax consultancy and the nation's premier provider of specialty tax services, is expanding the firm's STEM scholarship program to include students throughout the State of Texas.

The program offers five $10,000 scholarships for the fall semester of 2017 to students pursuing a career in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) related fields. The program is available to recent high school students.

"When we first announced the program, the intent was to encourage our youth to once again take an interest in STEM-based education," said alliantgroup CEO, Dhaval Jadav. "STEM-oriented fields are truly the future of our economy, yet study after study shows that the U.S. is suffering from a serious shortage in the number of people entering the workforce with a strong STEM skillset. It's a disturbing trend for not only the economy, but for the future of our country."

"Considering the importance of STEM-based skills to employers now and in the future, we decided to change the program to focus more on steering students toward STEM related degrees at an earlier age," said Jadav. "As such, we have expanded and shifted the program to high school students throughout the state."

To be eligible for the scholarship, students need to maintain a cumulative GPA of 3.0. To apply, candidates need to create a short (30-120 second) video discussing how their passion for STEM has fueled their educational goals.

"I encourage all high school students that are interested in a career in STEM to apply for these scholarships," said Jadav.

alliantgroup is a leading tax consultancy committed to helping U.S. businesses and their CPA advisors identify and properly claim all available federal and state tax incentives. To date, we have helped over 20,000 U.S. businesses claim over $5 billion in government-sponsored credits, incentives and deductions. alliantgroup is headquartered in Houston, Texas and has offices in New York, Boston, Chicago, Orlando, Irvine, Sacramento, Indianapolis and Washington, D.C. For more information on alliantgroup and our services, please visit us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Media Contact

David Rosen

alliantgroup

713-350-3167

[email protected]

SOURCE alliantgroup

Related Links

https://www.alliantgroup.com


KINGSPORT, Tenn., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Alpha Natural Resources (ANR, Inc.) announced today that it has entered into an Asset Purchase Agreement with Lexington Coal Company (LCC) to convey real and personal properties located in Kentucky, Illinois, Tennessee and West Virginia. The conveyance will include approximately 280 permits, substantial reclamation equipment, ongoing royalty payments associated with these properties and 100 million tons of reserves. While the specific economic terms were not disclosed, LCC will receive approximately $204 million in cash at the time of closing and $112 million in installment payments to assist in the fulfillment of bonding, reclamation, water treatment and other obligations associated with the conveyed properties and permits.

Alpha CEO David Stetson called the agreement a significant transaction for all stakeholders of the Central Appalachian coal producer. "LCC has a decade-long history of reclaiming properties in a diligent and environmentally responsible manner," said Stetson, "and Alpha is providing LCC with adequate resources to meet its obligations to the communities in which the properties are located."

Alpha established a dedicated management team to oversee its idle and non-active properties after emerging from bankruptcy and that team will take senior leadership positions in LCC at the time of closing. Stetson added, "The seamless transition of this management team, which knows the properties and permits and has a demonstrated track record of success, coupled with the conveyance of infrastructure and capital, will enable LCC to dedicate resources to accelerate the reclamation of the properties with less contingent exposure for the states."

In addition to accelerating reclamation compared to current plans, the transaction with LCC will eliminate all remaining self-bonds in West Virginia. Prior to emerging from bankruptcy in July 2016, Alpha had approximately $250 million in self-bonding outstanding. Alpha and West Virginia regulators have worked to reduce that exposure by more than $100 million over the past year. This transaction with LCC allows Alpha's self-bonds in West Virginia to be replaced nine years ahead of schedule.

The closing is subject to various contingencies, including Alpha obtaining financing and entering into agreements with various state and federal regulatory agencies on the transfer of the permits. After closing, Alpha will continue to operate 19 mines and 9 prep plants in West Virginia, and the company still expects to produce 14 million tons of metallurgical and thermal coal in 2017. The parties expect to close during the third quarter of 2017.

About Alpha Natural Resources

Alpha Natural Resources has affiliate mining operations in West Virginia and Kentucky, and supplies metallurgical coal to the steel industry and thermal coal to generate power. Alpha has offices in Kingsport, Tennessee, and Julian, West Virginia, which support approximately 20 active mining operations. Alpha is committed to being a leader in mine safety and an environmental steward in the communities where its affiliates operate. For more information, visit Alpha's website (www.alphanr.com).

SOURCE Alpha Natural Resources

Related Links

http://alphanr.com


WALTHAM, Mass., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Insurer ratings services A.M. Best and Standard & Poor's have affirmed their financial strength ratings for Delaware Life Insurance Company and Delaware Life Insurance Company of New York (collectively, "Delaware Life").

A.M. Best affirmed its Delaware Life financial strength rating of "A- (Excellent)" and issuer credit rating of "a- (Excellent)." The outlook for all ratings is "Stable." A.M. Best has maintained the "A-" rating since October 2013 and increased its outlook to "Stable" in November 2014.1

Standard & Poor's affirmed a financial strength rating of "BBB+ (Stable)," which it first issued to Delaware Life in April 2016.2

A.M. Best

The A.M. Best report cited "...Delaware Life's strong level of risk-adjusted capitalization, generally positive operating earnings trends, improving business profile and the strides it has made over the past two years to become a writer of fixed indexed annuity products, expanding its distribution channels and managing its large acquired blocks of variable annuities, traditional fixed annuities and life insurance."

In addition, the ratings agency report said, "The group's business profile is improving, as it shifts ... to marketing multi-year guaranteed annuities and fixed indexed annuity products. The ratings recognize an effective enterprise risk management program..."

The complete text of A.M. Best's release may be found at:

https://www.delawarelife.com/shortcut/AMBestPressRelease

Standard & Poor's

Standard & Poor's said its "Stable" financial strength rating for Delaware Life is based on:

Very strong capital and earnings expected to be maintained

Moderate risk position due to significant variable annuity book

Improved net income generation expected in 2017 and 2018

Adequate financial flexibility

The "Stable" outlook, the agency said, reflects its expectation that "Delaware Life will maintain very strong capital and earnings and adequate enterprise risk management. We expect the company to ... continue to demonstrate that it has not taken any undue credit or asset-liability management risk with its investment portfolio; and maintain liquidity that supports the ratings."

The complete text of Standard & Poor's release may be found at:

https://www.delawarelife.com/shortcut/RatingsDirectAnalysis

About Delaware Life Insurance Company

Delaware Life, through its insurance subsidiaries, is a leading provider of annuity and life insurance products in the United States, managing approximately $38 billion of in-force annuity and life insurance policies as of March 31, 2017. The Company was established in August 2013, in connection with the purchase by Delaware Life Holdings, LLC of the domestic U.S. annuity business and certain individual life and corporate markets insurance businesses of Sun Life Financial Inc.

Delaware Life Insurance Company is authorized to transact business in all states except New York, as well as in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Delaware Life Insurance Company of New York is authorized to transact business in New York and Rhode Island. Both companies are members of the Delaware Life group of companies. Each company is responsible for its own financial condition and contractual obligations.

1. A.M. Best A- (Excellent) is 4th out of 13 possible ratings.

2. Standard & Poor's BBB+ (Stable) is 8th out of 21 possible ratings.

DLPC 0888 07/17 EXP 07/18

SOURCE Delaware Life

Related Links

http://www.delawarelife.com


HOUSTON, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- American Gilsonite Company (the "Company" or "AGC"), the world's principal commercial miner and processor of uintaite, the unique mineral marketed under its trademark name "Gilsonite," today announced that it will post audited financial results for the full year ended December 31, 2016, as well as financial and operating results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2017 and second quarter ended June 30, 2017, to the Company's Intralinks site on Thursday, August 10, 2017.

Holders of the Company's Subordinated Notes and holders of the Company's common stock who have executed the Stockholders Agreement can request access to the Company's Intralinks site by contacting Peter Hill by email at [email protected] or by phone at 212-521-4800.

About American Gilsonite Company (www.americangilsonite.com)

AGC operates as an industrial minerals company and is the world's primary miner and processor of uintaite, a variety of asphaltite, a specialty hydrocarbon which AGC markets to industrial customers under its registered trademark name "Gilsonite". Gilsonite is a glossy, black, solid naturally occurring hydrocarbon similar in appearance to hard asphalt and is believed to be found in commercial quantities only in the Uinta Basin in northeastern Utah. Because of its unique chemical and physical properties, Gilsonite has been used in more than 160 products. The Company sells its products to customers in four primary markets: (i) oil and gas, (ii) inks and paints, (iii) foundry and (iv) asphalt. AGC is headquartered in Houston, Texas.

Contact

Peter Hill

Kekst and Company

212-521-4800

[email protected]

SOURCE American Gilsonite Company

Related Links

http://www.americangilsonite.com


SAN DIEGO, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Medical Marijuana, Inc. (MJNA) is the first publicly traded cannabis company in the United States. Its subsidiary HempMeds Brasil today announced that the Company's hemp cannabidiol (CBD) oil product Real Scientific Hemp Oil [RSHO] has been prescribed by doctors in the country for the treatment of patients suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Psoriasis.

This marks the first time that Brazilian doctors prescribe RSHO to specifically help patients suffering from the debilitating effects of either of these two diseases. This comes two years after HempMeds Brasil became the first company to offer legal medicinal cannabis products to patients in the country.

"The Brazilian government has once again shown that the health and well-being of their people is something they are interested in sustaining by continuing to give them access to CBD hemp oil products for patients suffering from conditions with no known cure or limited treatment options," said Dr. Stuart Titus, Chief Executive Officer of Medical Marijuana, Inc. "ALS is a deliberating condition that to this day has no treatments available and Psoriasis is a vastly common condition that affects millions and we are excited about the future for CBD-based products to enter clinical trials for these two conditions."

According to the World Health Organization's Global Report on Psoriasis, the number of people worldwide with Psoriasis is increasing, with around 125 million people affected worldwide, or about 2% to 3% of the worldwide population. In Brazil alone, it is estimated that more than 2 million people have the disease and more than 7.5 million in the United States. According to Transparency Market Research, the global market for treatment of Psoriasis was worth $7.8 billion in 2015 and is projected to grow to $12.1 billion by 2024.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease or motor neurone disease (MND), is a specific disease that causes the death of neurons which control voluntary muscles. It is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. The disease affects an estimated 30,000 in the US and over 450,000 worldwide with no known cure available to date.

About HempMeds Brasil

HempMeds Brasil currently has three cannabis products approved for importation into Brazil as a prescription medication for multiple conditions including; Epilepsy, Parkinson's, Chronic Pain, Psoriasis, Cancer, Alzheimer's, Diabetes, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Multiple Sclerosis and Migraines. The company had the first-ever cannabis product allowed for import into Brazil and its products are currently subsidized by the Brazilian government, under their health care system, for all three medical indications listed above. HempMeds Brasil is working on additional approvals for multiple indications.

About Medical Marijuana, Inc.

Our mission is to be the premier cannabis and hemp industry innovators, leveraging our team of professionals to source, evaluate and purchase value-added companies and products, while allowing them to keep their integrity and entrepreneurial spirit. We strive to create awareness within our industry, develop environmentally-friendly, economically sustainable businesses, while increasing shareholder value. For details on Medical Marijuana, Inc.'s portfolio and investment companies, visit www.medicalmarijuanainc.com.

Shareholders are also encouraged to visit the Medical Marijuana, Inc. Shop for discounted products.

FORWARD-LOOKING DISCLAIMER AND DISCLOSURES.

This press release may contain certain forward-looking statements and information, as defined within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and is subject to the Safe Harbor created by those sections. This material contains statements about expected future events and/or financial results that are forward-looking in nature and subject to risks and uncertainties. Such forward-looking statements by definition involve risks, uncertainties. The statements in this press release have not been evaluated by the FDA and are not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any disease. The Company does not sell or distribute any products that are in violation of the United States Controlled Substances Act. The Company does sell and distribute hemp-based products.

CONTACT:

Public Relations Contact:

Andrew Hard

Chief Executive Officer

CMW Media

P: 888-829- 0070

[email protected]

www.cmwmedia.com



SOURCE Medical Marijuana, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.medicalmarijuanainc.com


NEW YORK, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Finn Partners announced today the appointments of Anastasia Lopez as partner, head of integration, and Kevin Jenkins, partner, integrated marketing. The newly appointed positions will leverage their track records of integrated marketing expertise to further Finn Partners' mission of providing strategic thinking and tangible results to its client roster.

(Pictured L to R: Anastasia Lopez, Partner, Head of Integration, and Kevin Jenkins, Partner, Integrated Marketing.

In their new roles, Lopez and Jenkins will work across several areas within the Finn Partners network to enhance the agency's innovative marketing and creative expertise  represented by a global, 100-person team, as well as the agency's deep and pervasive roots in earned media. Anastasia and Kevin will jointly report to Noah Finn, managing partner, digital and creative, and Anastasia will also report to Alicia Young, managing partner, consumer strategies.

"Creating programs that advance the business objectives of our clients through a strategic, cross-discipline approach is the number one priority at Finn Partners," says Noah Finn. "Bringing Anastasia and Kevin on board is part of our overall strategy to offer truly integrative solutions that drive success for our clients. Their marketing communications experience with marquee brands across numerous sectors will further our ability to develop and deliver campaigns that connect with the interests of consumers, globally."

Prior to joining Finn Partners, Lopez served as Vice President and Director of Social Media at Padilla. Lopez's client work at Padilla and previous agencies includes P&G, Diageo, Rioja, Taco Bell, Allstate, Aflac, Capital One, MasterCard, McKinsey, Merck GSK, Target, Coppertone, Land O'Lakes, and numerous national commodities boards. Her expertise spans the marketing communications spectrum and includes public relations, social media, digital marketing and advertising.

Jenkins joined Finn Partners from Capital One where he spent the past 17+ years working in a variety of marketing, sales and product management roles. During his tenure, there, he oversaw a redesign of their website and guided the implementation of the company's mobile app to innovate and reach consumers at every touchpoint.

Both Lopez and Jenkins will work out of the New York office and assist global clients throughout the Finn Partners network.

About Finn Partners

Founded in 2011 on the core principles of innovation and collaborative partnership, Finn Partners has tripled in size in just five years, becoming one of the fastest growing independent public relations agencies in the world. The full-service marketing and communications company's record setting pace is a result of organic growth and integrating new companies and new people into the Finn Partners world through a common philosophy. Finn Partners' mantra, Work Hard, Play Nice, infuses internal and external relationships, resulting in amazing work and an all-inclusive environment. With 540 professionals, Finn Partners provides its clients with global access and capabilities in the U.S., Europe and Asia, in addition to PROI Worldwide. Headquartered in New York, Finn Partners' other offices are located in: Chicago, Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, Jerusalem, London, Los Angeles, Munich, Nashville, Paris, Portland, San Francisco, Singapore and Washington D.C. Find us at finnpartners.com and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @finnpartners.

Contact:

[email protected]

212.715.1600

SOURCE Finn Partners
STOCKHOLM, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Second quarter

Net sales increased by 8% to SEK 19,387 M (17,894), with organic growth of 2% (4) and acquired growth of 2% (4)

(17,894), with organic growth of 2% (4) and acquired growth of 2% (4) Good growth was shown by EMEA, Americas, Global Technologies and Entrance Systems and negative growth by Asia Pacific

Contracts have been signed for the acquisition of five companies with expected combined annual sales of about SEK 900 M

Operating income (EBIT) increased by 7% to SEK 3,114 M (2,910). The operating margin was 16.1% (16.3)

(2,910). The operating margin was 16.1% (16.3) Net income amounted to SEK 2 ,179 M (2,026)

,179 M (2,026) Earnings per share increased by 8% and amounted to SEK 1 .96 (1.82)

.96 (1.82) Operating cash flow increased by 2% to SEK 2,575 M (2,519).

Sales and income



Second quarter

First half-year

















2016 2017  2016 2017  Sales, SEK M 17,894 19,387 8% 33,785 37,529 11% Of which:











Organic growth[1] 602 344 2% 1,002 1,366 4% Acquisitions 593 451 2% 1,083 900 3% Exchange-rate effects[1] -383 698 4% -633 1,478 4% Operating income (EBIT), SEK M 2,910 3,114 7% 5,321 5,901 11% Operating margin (EBIT), % 16.3% 16.1%

15.7% 15.7%

Income before tax, SEK M 2,729 2,944 8% 4,938 5,537 12% Net income, SEK M 2,026 2,179 8% 3,664 4,097 12% Operating cash flow, SEK M 2,519 2,575 2% 3,017 3,399 13% Earnings per share (EPS), SEK 1.82 1.96 8% 3.30 3.69 12%

[1] The sales components Organic growth and Exchange-rate effects have been restated for the first half-year of 2016. No effect on sales figures.

Comments by the President and CEO

"The second quarter was another good quarter for ASSA ABLOY," says Johan Molin, President and CEO. Organic growth was 2% because of the fewer working days resulting from Easter during the quarter. This means that we have an organic growth of 4% for the first half-year. Sales in North America continued to develop well. In Europe the underlying demand is good but we have not seen any appreciable improvement. Sales in China fell once again, and disappointingly they also continued to decrease in Brazil and in the Middle East.

"Entrance Systems, Global Technologies and Americas all produced 3% organic growth, while EMEA grew by 2%. However, Asia Pacific showed negative growth because of weak demand in China."

"It is pleasing to see that our investments in software solutions to support architects and others who specify door solutions are leading to more inquiries and increased sales. It is also very gratifying that we are launching so many new and exciting products, primarily electronic and digital solutions. One example is a new smart handle for inner doors which provides full RFID compatibility and can be installed and integrated cost-effectively with virtually all access control systems on the market, but can also be used as a freestanding unit."

"During the quarter contracts were signed for the acquisition of five companies, including Arjo, a leading supplier of physical and digital identity solutions for national ID documents. The company strengthens our present offering of secure identity solutions and offers complementary growth opportunities."

"Operating income for the quarter increased by 7% and amounted to SEK 3,114 M, with an operating margin of 16.1% (16.3). The margin increased in EMEA and Entrance Systems divisions and remained stable for Americas and Global Technologies, but as expected Asia Pacific was weak. The operating cash flow improved by 2%."

"My judgment is that the global economic trend has improved to some degree compared with last year. On most markets in North and South America and in parts of Europe there is a positive trend, but on some markets, chiefly in Asia and the Middle East, the trend is weak. However, our strategy of expanding our market presence, even on the emerging markets, remains unchanged. We are also continuing our investments in new products, especially in the growth area of electromechanics."

Further information can be obtained from:

Johan Molin,

President and CEO

Tel: +46-8-506-485-42

Carolina Dybeck Happe

Chief Financial Officer

Tel: +46-8-506-485-72

ASSA ABLOY is holding an analysts' meeting at 10.00 today at Operaterrassen in Stockholm, Sweden.

The analysts' meeting can also be followed on the Internet at www.assaabloy.com.

It is possible to submit questions by telephone on: +46-8-5055-6476, +44-203-364-5371 or +1-877-679-2993.

This is information that ASSA ABLOY AB is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation and the Securities Markets Act. The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact persons set out above, at 08.00 CEST on 19 July 2017.

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

http://news.cision.com/assa-abloy/r/another-good-quarter-for-assa-abloy,c2313532

The following files are available for download:

http://mb.cision.com/Main/7333/2313532/702095.pdf The full report (PDF)

SOURCE ASSA ABLOY

Related Links

http://www.assaabloy.com


ATHENS, Tenn., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Athens Bancshares Corporation (OTC QX: AFCB) today announced that its Board of Directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.05 per outstanding share of common stock. The dividend will be paid on or about August 15, 2017 to stockholders of record as of the close of business on July 31, 2017.

Athens Bancshares Corporation is the parent holding company of Athens Federal Community Bank, National Association, a FDIC-insured national bank organized in 1934. The Bank is headquartered in Athens, Tennessee and provides financial services to individuals, families and businesses through its ten offices located in southeast Tennessee.

SOURCE Athens Bancshares Corporation
NEW YORK, July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The smart city market moving towards 2018

Back in 2001 I initiated the very first smart city event in Australia. In all some 75 representatives of Australian local councils gathered in Brighton-Le-Sands in Sydney.

Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03963948/Australia-Smart-Cities.html

The focus of that event was the broadbanding of local communities around the country. This was seen by the local councils as one of the most important elements needed to create a smart city.



Nothing much has changed since then. Now, more than 15 years later, broadband  in this case the NBN  is still very high on the agenda of local councils. Most council areas are now seeing an improvement in broadband access, but those who are unlucky enough to get only the fibre-to-the-node version will continue to have a broadband headache for the next decade or so, until that old technology is finally replaced with a proper fibre-based network.



Strategic developments

In the meantime, however, the smart city discussion has moved on, and over the last two years in particular the discussion has become far more sophisticated.

Apart from digital infrastructure a range of other issues has come to the fore: climate change/sustainability, smart energy, transport/mobility, affordable housing, healthcare, education, migration and refugees. All of these issues are, first and foremost, felt in the cities and local communities around the country.



But there is a massive disconnect since most of the policies in relation to the above are formulated by politicians in Canberra, where partisan politics, indecisiveness and conflicting strategies are the norm. If one party develops a new policy according to a political perspective, the other party will object and even abolish whatever has been done when it comes into power. Communication, energy and climate change are prime examples of a total failure of policy-making at a federal level.



The funding structure for cities is another key problem area; 85% of the national taxes are flowing into the coffers of the federal government, 13% is going to the states, with a meagre 2% ending up with the cities. However, as mentioned, it is in the cities that all of those national, and indeed international, developments are coming together.



A lack of leadership, partly at federal and state level but also at a local council level, has led to what we have coined 'death by pilot'. Millions of dollars have been largely wasted in small-scale pilots and projects, initiated by visionary and willing people who lack the support of solid strategy and leadership from the top. Most of these projects were successful, but in the absence of any ongoing strategic plan they were simply mothballed or terminated.



None of these projects received the financial support to scale them up.



The smartest cities

However, over the last two years we have seen a major change. The leading smart cities in Australia, and indeed around the world, now have strategic plans in place; they have leadership support from the mayor (in relation to politics and communication with citizens and local businesses); and they have a smart council in place that works across silos under the leadership of the CEO/General Manager.



Out of the 500+ local councils in Australia only a handful have either reached that strategic stage or are close to it. These include Adelaide, Bendigo, Canberra, Newcastle, Lake Macquarie, Ipswich, Sunshine Coast and Moreton Bay.



Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are also very much in favour of smart city strategies, but it is far more difficult for metropolitan cities, especially when they consist of a large number of individual local councils, to create a holistic smart city strategy. Sydney is trying to at least partly overcome this by means of the



Greater Sydney Commission, which is in fact making significant progress in this direction.



Furthermore, around the country, there certainly are also a number of runners-up who have started smart city projects and who at a minimum understand that they will have to develop a strategic plan, and they have sound potential to grow into full-blown smart city strategies.



From the above it can be seen that it is the mid-tier cities that fit into the smart city sweet spot. It is much easier for these cities to develop holistic plans and strategies and engage effectively with their citizens.



Federal support

While there are serious problems with some the federal policy as mentioned above, at the same time one of the most successful policies launched by the current government has been its National Smart City Plan launched in 2016. It now has three City Deals on the table  Townsville, Launceston and Western City  as well as a Smart Communities and Suburbs program, with start-up or seeding money for councils that are providing strategically sound smart city plans and projects. It also has a program in place to assist local councils that still have to embark on a strategic mission toward smart cities.



While the money element is important, the fact that the federal government has shown leadership and put smart cities on the table has resulted in nearly all the local councils around the country starting their own discussions in relation to their own smart city journey.



The most important policy assistance the government can give is to solve the inflexible procurement and investment models under which cities are forced to operate. These work entirely against holistic strategies and collaboration models. It will be interesting to see if different funding models developed e.g. by Ipswich and Bendigo will provide positive examples on how we can proceed from here.



Collaboration is the key

During 2016 and 2017 I took the initiative to develop a collaboration model for smart cities. It is clear that cities on their own will not be able to develop smart cities. This requires business models and funding that will have to be supported by private industry, as well as being strongly supported by the RandD and university community  the latter especially in relation to standards, interoperability, data analytics, cyber security and privacy issues.



Furthermore there has to be effective collaboration between all three levels of government; this is also something strongly supported in the National Smart City Plan (and a key element of the City Deals). Under the umbrella of the Australian Smart Communities Association (ASCA) I have developed a Smart City Industry Board (30 companies), an RandD Group (12 universities), and organised the inaugural Smart City Mayors Meeting under the leadership of the Lord Mayor of Adelaide. The eight leading smart cities in Australia have also begun to investigate collaboration between themselves; the aim here is to learn from each other, share information and investigate joint projects.



Last but not least, I have started with a plan to establish state-based platforms between the state governments and the leading smart communities and cities in each state to develop state-based policies and projects to push the movement deeper into the communities. ASCA itself has a strong membership base among local councils and Regional Development Australia organisations (RDAs). They are ideally positioned to stimulate collaboration.



Citizens are left, right and centre in any smart city

All of the above needs to be in place to enable a structural and strategic approach, but in the end the reason we want to build smart cities is to create better communities that are connected and empowered to participate in the digital society and economy; to create a community where people are happy and where they can see improvements to their lifestyle and to the liveability of their suburb, neighbourhood, community, town and city.



With the abovementioned structures in place cities are the right platform to allow empowered citizens to lead and participate in what their smart community should look like, to co-develop projects, and in general to create in-depth and ongoing engagement between local government and the citizens, as well as between citizens themselves. Smart cities based on innovation and collaboration are also going to provide the jobs of the future, which will mainly be based on efficient and effective SMEs and professional people.



The reality, however, is that without a smart council in place it is impossible to build a smart city that moves beyond the 'death by pilot' syndrome.



Building smart cities and communities will take decades. In fact, the process will never end  it will be ongoing. So it is never too late to start. However the early leaders will benefit from their foresight. People will increasingly base their decision about where they want to live and work on the issues that cities need to solve. These will be the flourishing cities of the future, so it is important that all cities and communities start on this journey and discuss how they would like their community to look in 5, 10 or 20 years' time.



The collaborative structures that are now in place, in combination with the initiatives from the federal government, will see real advances for the smart city movement in 2018.



International collaboration

In parallel, I have also started on international collaboration. The eight leading cities in Australia have joined the Global Smart City and Community Coalition (GSC3). This alliance is bringing together cities all over the world that are working on similar projects, facing similar issues, or seeing similar opportunities. The aim is to launch collaborative projects on an international basis, which will help those involved to learn from each other, to share insights and outcomes, and even to develop joint projects where certain elements are tested in one city and others in another city.



All of these developments and all of the major initiatives that are currently taking place in Australia are covered in this report.

Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03963948/Australia-Smart-Cities.html



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LONDON, July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --



INTRODUCTION

B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA), an important biomarker of the B-cells, has emerged as a promising therapeutic target for the treatment of multiple myeloma and other hematological malignancies. The antigen is universally expressed on the surface of multiple myeloma cells.



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The research focus shifted towards BCMA targeted therapies in 2004, when the role of BCMA was first indicated in the progression of multiple myeloma. It is the second most common type (13%) of all hematological malignancies. The disease proves to be fatal due to serious complications associated with it and the frequent events of re-occurrence of illness. The widespread presence of multiple myeloma and other related B-cell malignancies demands confident diagnosis and treatments. Hence, there is an immediate need for effective therapies for proper medical care.



Currently, researchers are actively involved in developing three major types of immunotherapies (classified by product class) targeting BCMA; these are chimeric antigen receptor T-cells (CAR-T cells), bispecific antibodies and antibody drug conjugates (ADCs). Several biopharmaceutical companies have been active in this area since last few years while others have recently stepped in.



A number of strategic partnerships have also been inked between various stakeholders to advance R&D activities in this domain. Results of preclinical and clinical studies have demonstrated the potential benefits of this class of therapies; the major highlight being their attractive safety profile. As more molecules undergo clinical validation and eventually get commercialized, we believe the overall interest will continue to rise. In fact, our promising outlook is backed by a strong belief that this novel class of therapies is likely to cater to the current unmet need where the existing treatment modalities are not efficient. The upside could be higher; however, it depends on a favorable market environment, reimbursement practices and regulatory regimes.



SCOPE OF THE REPORT

The "BCMA Targeted Therapies, 2017-2030" report features an extensive study on the current market landscape of B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA) targeted therapies and offers a comprehensive discussion on the future potential of this market. With no commercial products, the market is still in its infancy. However, industry experts have pinned significant hopes on the novel technologies being developed by start-ups / small companies and the research being conducted at academic institutes.



The prime target indication of these novel molecules is B-cell malignancies, specifically multiple myeloma. BCMA-specific therapies are anticipated to emerge as viable treatment options for such indications. Post initial research on such therapies, many players have entered into collaborations with other stakeholders to fund the clinical and commercial development of their products. Some clinical stage products that have emerged out of such collaborations include bb2121 (bluebird bio / Celgene) and BCMA-CART (Novartis / Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania).



The pipeline currently comprises of 23 molecules that are under development for the treatment of a variety of B-cell malignancies. One of the key objectives of this report was to understand the evolution of the current market and to quantify the opportunities laid down by the innovative BCMA targeted programs of both small and big pharma companies.



Among other elements, the report provides information on the following:

- The current state of the market with respect to key players, phase of development of pipeline products (both clinical and preclinical / discovery) and the type of molecules.

- Comprehensive profiles highlighting clinical trial details such as dosage regimens, key preclinical / clinical findings, and future market opportunity for the clinical stage BCMA targeted therapies.

- Comparative analysis of the design of clinical trials being conducted for therapies in clinical stages of development.

- Various investments and grants received by companies focused in this area supporting their R&D activities.

- Partnerships that recently been inked amongst different stakeholders, covering product development / commercialization agreements, research collaborations, license agreements and acquisitions.



The study provides a detailed market forecast and opportunity analysis for the period between 2017 and 2030. The research, analysis and insights presented in this report are backed by deep understanding of key insights gathered from a variety of sources. To account for future uncertainties and add robustness to our model, we have provided three scenarios of our market forecast, namely the conservative, base and optimistic scenarios. All actual figures have been sourced and analyzed from publicly available information forums. All financial figures mentioned in this report are in USD, unless otherwise specified.



RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

For most of our projects, we conduct extensive secondary research as well as interviews with experts in the area (academia, industry, medical practice and other associations) to solicit their opinions on emerging trends in the market. This is primarily useful for us to draw out our own opinion on how the market may evolve across different regions and sub-segments. Wherever possible, the available data has been checked for accuracy from multiple sources of information.



The secondary sources of information include

- Annual reports

- Investor presentations

- SEC filings

- Industry databases

- News releases from company websites

- Government policy documents

- Industry analysts' views



While the focus has been on forecasting the market over the coming ten years, the report also provides our independent view on various non-commercial trends emerging in the industry. This opinion is solely based on our knowledge, research and understanding of the relevant market gathered from various sources of information.



CHAPTER OUTLINES

Chapter 2 provides an executive summary of the insights captured in our research. It offers a high level view on the current state of the BCMA targeted therapies market and its likely evolution.



Chapter 3 provides a general introduction to BCMA, highlighting its expression profile, role in progression of multiple myeloma and mechanism of action. In this section, we have talked about the current research landscape of the human BCMA and its emergence for the treatment of multiple myeloma. Further, we have briefly discussed the molecules (bispecific antibodies, ADCs and CAR-T cells) that are being exploited for the development of BCMA-specific drug candidates.



Chapter 4 provides a comprehensive overview of the current landscape of the BCMA targeted therapies market. It includes information on the drug candidates that are currently in different stages of development (both clinical and preclinical / discovery). It presents a detailed analysis of the pipeline on the basis of current phase of development, type of molecules and key players involved in this space. We have also provided details on additional parameters (such as associated domains and transfection methods) being utilized for the development of T-cell based BCMA-specific therapies. In addition, the chapter includes an overview on the developer landscape based on the size and the activity of the industry / non-industry players and a geographical representation mapping the presence of various organizations involved in the clinical development of candidates in this field.



Chapter 5 presents detailed profiles of the BCMA targeted therapies in clinical phases of development (phase I/II and phase I). Each profile covers information on drug specifications, mechanism of action, dosage regimen, technology overview, manufacturing details, key preclinical / clinical findings and collaborations. In addition, we have also provided a comparative analysis on the design of clinical trials being conducted for several molecules, highlighting the study goals of the trials, primary and secondary endpoints being evaluated and the interim trial results.



Chapter 6 presents details on the investments and grants received by companies working on the development of BCMA targeted therapies. The analysis highlights the growing interest of the venture capital community and other strategic investors in this market.

Chapter 7 features an elaborate discussion on the collaborations and partnerships that have been inked amongst players in this market. We have also discussed the various partnership models that have been implemented, highlighting the most common forms of deals / agreements prevalent in this domain.



Chapter 8 provides a comprehensive market forecast, highlighting the future potential of the market till 2030. It includes future sales projections of the molecules in clinical stages of development (phase I/II and phase I). The sales potential and growth opportunity is based on the target patient populations, existing / likely future competition, likely adoption rates, the type of molecule and likely price points.



Chapter 9 summarizes the overall report and provides a recap of the key takeaways from the study. It also presents our independent opinion on the future of BCMA targeted therapies market based on the research and analysis described in previous chapters.



Chapter 10 is an appendix, which provides tabulated data and numbers for all the figures provided in the report.



Chapter 11 is an appendix, which provides the list of companies and organizations mentioned in the report.



EXAMPLE HIGHLIGHTS

1. BCMA is an important antigen that is expressed during B-cell development in almost 60%-70% of the multiple myeloma cases. During the course of our research, we identified over 20 therapies targeting BCMA that are currently in different stages of development. Of these, 26% are already undergoing clinical validation.

2. CAR-T therapies (constituting 44% of the development pipeline) are the most common anti-BCMA therapies, followed by bispecific antibodies (26%) and ADCs (13%). Multiple myeloma remains the prime focus of drug developers in this space. However, efforts are also being made to develop these therapies for the treatment of other B-cell malignancies such as leukemia and lymphoma.

3. We have provided a comparative analysis of the design of clinical trials being conducted for therapies in clinical stages of development. This primarily includes comparisons on the basis of study goals, primary and secondary endpoints being evaluated and the interim trial results.

4. The current market landscape features contributions from big pharmaceutical companies and small to mid-sized players. Established pharmaceutical players engaged in this space include (in alphabetical order) Amgen, bluebird bio, Boehringer Ingelheim, Celgene, GSK, Juno Therapeutics, Novartis and Pfizer. Small firms / start-ups and mid-sized firms that are actively investing in this market include (in alphabetical order) Affimed, Alexo Therapeutics, Cellectis, Five Prime Therapeutics, Heidelberg Pharma (a subsidiary of WILEX), Kite Pharma, Poseida Therapeutics (spun out of Transposagen Biopharmaceuticals), Sutro Biopharma and Triumvira Immunologics.

5. Prominent academic players that are involved in this space include (in alphabetical order) the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania, California Institute for Biomedical Research, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre (MSKCC), National Cancer Institute (NCI), Southwest Hospital (China) and The Scripps Research Institute.

6. We came across over 25 collaborations covering product development / commercialization agreements, product licensing agreements, technology licensing, acquisitions and research collaborations. Among these, development / commercialization agreements (52%) have been the most popular, followed by licensing agreements (26%).

7. Overall, we expect the field to witness considerable success in the long term. In fact, we expect six such therapies to be made commercially available in different geographies in the coming decade. Post the launch of the first wave of products, we predict the market to grow at an annualized rate of 98% till 2030.



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SAN DIEGO, July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Beer Institute, representing brewers of all sizes, as well as beer importers and industry suppliers, awarded William "Bill" Coors, Director Emeritus and Technical Advisor at MillerCoors, with the 2017 Jeff Becker Beer Industry Service Award for his lifetime of dedication to the beer industry and America's beer drinkers.

Pete Coors, nephew of Bill Coors and Vice-Chairman of the Board at Molson Coors, accepted the award on his behalf at the Beer Institute's Annual Membership Meeting, which was held in San Diego, California.

"Bill's innovation and commitment to bettering the lives of people around him have earned him the respect and admiration from professionals across the beer industry," said Jim McGreevy, president and CEO of the Beer Institute. "From his work designing the modern recyclable two-piece aluminum can to his long serving commitment to the company founded by his grandfather, Bill has changed the way that we enjoy beer, and today continues to contribute to MillerCoors through his technical expertise."

"Jeff Becker was a personal friend of mine, and I want to thank the Beer Institute for honoring me with this award in the name of a good man," said Bill Coors. "Having spent seven-plus decades in the industry has given me intimate knowledge of the hard work that goes into making beer, and it's easy to understand why it's the most popular alcohol beverage in the country. From the workers on the brewery floors to the delivery truck drivers, I am proud to have spent my entire professional career part of a field responsible for employing tens of thousands of Americans."

Bill Coors is the senior employee at Coors with 76 years of service where he shaped how the world drinks beer and other beverages. In the 1950s, he played a major role in the development of the aluminum can, which today is the standard in the beverage industry. He also is credited with the introduction of light, pilsner beers and the development of a proprietary, sterile-fill packaging technology that enables MillerCoors to provide consumers with brewery-fresh, packaged draft beers.

Born August 11, 1916, the grandson of Adolph Coors, Bill spent four years at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, before entering Princeton University where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering in 1938 and a graduate degree in 1939.

Bill Coors has been involved with numerous civic, educational and business organizations throughout his career. Some of his more recent associations include president of Adolph Coors Foundation; past chairman of Colorado Outward Bound School; and a member of the boards of trustees of Denver University, Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Denver Art Museum Foundation and Boy's and Girl's Club of Denver Foundation. In addition, he is founding/lifetime trustee of Colorado University President's Leadership Class and trustee emeritus of Colorado School of Mines.

The Beer Institute is a national trade association for the American brewing industry, representing brewers of all sizes, as well as beer importers and industry suppliers. First founded in 1862 as the U.S. Brewers Association, the Beer Institute is committed today to the development of sound public policy and to the values of civic duty and personal responsibility. For additional updates from the Beer Institute, visit our website, follow @BeerInstitute on Twitter, like the Beer Institute on Facebook, and follow the Beer Institute on Instagram.

SOURCE Beer Institute

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PLEASANT HILL, Calif., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Black Angus Steakhouse's Pleasant Hill location is temporarily closed after an electrical fire early Wednesday morning.

At about 2:49 a.m., a small electrical fire broke out in the restaurant located at 3195 N. Main Street in Pleasant Hill. The fire was contained quickly and no one was injured.

Damage was contained to the exterior of the building. The restaurant will be closed temporarily for repairs.

"We have all the necessary repair measures in place and a dedicated team working around the clock to ensure the restaurant is back up and running as soon as possible," said John Blake, Vice President of Operations, Black Angus Steakhouse. "We're extremely thankful to the local firefighters for responding quickly and for expertly containing the situation."

Surrounding Black Angus Steak locations that will be open during this period are:

Brentwood, 2355 Sand Creek Road.

Dublin, 4814 Dublin Blvd.

Vallejo, 124 Plaza Drive.

The company apologizes for any inconvenience and looks forward to welcoming guests back shortly.

For more information on Black Angus Steakhouse, please visit www.BlackAngus.com.

About Black Angus Steakhouse

Black Angus Steakhouse has been mastering its craft since it was founded in Washington in 1964. Headquartered in Los Angeles, Black Angus has 44 locations across California, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, Alaska and Hawaii. The restaurants pay homage to its Western cattle rancher roots, but offer the finest Certified Angus Beef and USDA Choice steaks and burgers, in addition to seafood, salads, sides and desserts for the entire family. The Bulls Eye Bar serves a robust menu of craft beer, wine and hand-crafted cocktails. More information is available online at blackangus.com or follow Black Angus on Facebook or Twitter @BASteakhouse.

Media Contact:

Jill Fox

JCUTLER media group

[email protected]

323-969-9904

SOURCE Black Angus Steakhouse

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NEW YORK, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- BLACK ENTERPRISE marks 45 years of listing America's largest black companies with the publication's May/June 2017 issue of the BE 100s, universally recognized as the most authoritative analysis and annual ranking of the nation's top grossing black-owned companies. The BE 100s ranks America's largest black-owned companies, including automobile dealers, banks, asset managers, investment banks, and private equity firms.

In our 45th Annual Report on Black Business under the theme, "Evolution," our editors found scores of BE 100 CEOs who have remodeled their companies for opportunity and expansion. In fact, scalability has been the foundation of growth for the billion-dollar revenue leaderstechnology integrator World Wide Technology Inc. with $9.3 billion in revenues and workforce solution juggernaut ACT-1, which generated over $2 billion in revenues.

When BLACK ENTERPRISE first compiled its "Top 100" in 1973, combined sales for the 100 component companies totaled $473 million. Results of the 2017 report show that the Top 100 collectively grossed more than $27 billion in 2016, a $3 billion increase in revenue over the previous year.

In addition to the BE 100s listings, the package also features profiles of the chief executives of the 2017 BLACK ENTERPRISE Companies of the Year:

Company of the Year: Powers & Sons Construction Co. Inc., Gary, IN; CEO, Mamon Powers Jr.

Auto Dealer of the Year: National Automotive Management L.L.C., Hamilton, NJ; CEO, Jessie Armstead.

Financial Company of the Year: CastleOak Securities, New York, NY; CEO, David R Jones.

"The BE 100sthe nation's largest black businessescontinue to be the standard bearers for all American enterprises, demonstrating that sustained business growth comes when ideation and innovation is wedded to execution and excellence," says BLACK ENTERPRISE Senior SVP/Chief Content Officer Derek T. Dingle. "As such, most exhibit elasticity, capability, technological adaptability and branding power in a seesaw economic recovery and hyper-competitive business environment."

In developing the rankings for 2017, BE Research collected surveys from hundreds of companies as well as information from government agencies, professional organizations, industry associations, business information services, entrepreneurs, and corporations. The information included total revenues for calendar year 2016; a detailed description of business activities; historical ownership data; and confirmation that the entity is at least 51% black-owned, or that blacks own at least 51% of the controlling shares if the company is publicly traded. The May/June 2017 issue of BLACK ENTERPRISEcomplete BE 100s rankings, full eligibility criteria, and company overviews -is on newsstands today.

Also included in the issue is BE's listing of the 50 Top Companies for Supplier Diversity. The companies singled out represent the leaders in procurement spending and partnership with minority firms. The complete report, including methodology and selection criteria, is available in the May/June 2017 issue of BLACK ENTERPRISE magazine.

BLACK ENTERPRISE is also marking the 45th anniversary of the BE 100s by socializing some of the most exciting moments with the hashtag #45DaysofBE100s.

BLACK ENTERPRISE, your ultimate source for wealth creation, is the premier business, investing, and wealth-building resource for African Americans. Since 1970, BE has provided essential business information and advice to professionals, corporate executives, entrepreneurs, and decision makers. Every month, BLACK ENTERPRISE magazine provides 6 million readers with information on entrepreneurship, careers, and financial management. A multimedia company, BLACK ENTERPRISE produces television programming, business and lifestyle events, web content and digital media. BLACK ENTERPRISE is the definitive source of information for and about African American business markets and leaders, and the authority on black business news and trends.

SOURCE BLACK ENTERPRISE
BURLINGAME, Calif., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The California Society of CPAs (CalCPA.org) is now more than 44,000 members strong. It continues to be the largest state association for certified public accountants in the nation.

Kathy Johnson, CalCPA chair, credits the membership record to the Society's efforts to provide services that benefit both members and their clients and its efforts to recruit accounting students.

"Through our chapters and our campus outreach programs, we continually strive to acquaint accounting students with the advantages of being part of an association that works on behalf of the profession's best interests," Johnson said. "We have governmental programs that advocate on behalf of our members and their clients before the state legislator and regulatory bodies.

"We also offer a wealth of services, including networking events, educational programs and print and online publications designed to improve member knowledge and skills."

Johnson, who is CalCPA chair for 2017-18, said that the Society is particularly focusing on acquainting minorities with the accounting profession. "The majority of Californians are members of minority groups. If our profession is to continue to grow, we must attract more young people of diverse backgrounds and help them have successful careers as CPAs."

Through its 14 chapters, CalCPA each year awards more than $200,000 in scholarships to college students throughout the state. The Society also has student ambassadors on 44 college campuses. These ambassadors host programs that provide accounting and business students with information on the benefits of becoming a CPA.

CalCPA has 13 categories of membership, ranging from student to lifetime members, who have been CalCPA members for 40 years. The Society recently began offering membership to financial professionals who have never been CPAs.

More than 130 accounting firms in the state have all their CPA staff enrolled in CalCPA.

About CalCPA

Headquartered in Burlingame, California, the California Society of Certified Public Accountants (CalCPA.org) is the nation's largest state accounting organization and the largest CPA association in California. It serves more than 44,000 members in public practice, private industry, education and government. Through CalCPA Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, CalCPA members provide financial literacy programs to high schools and community groups.

SOURCE California Society of CPAs

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Stock Market Symbols

GIB (NYSE)

GIB.A (TSX)

www.cgi.com/newsroom

Services to help bolster aviation, missile and calibration materiel readiness to optimize joint warfighter capabilities

FAIRFAX, VA, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ - CGI (NYSE: GIB) (TSX: GIB.A) announced that it has been awarded several contracts totalling US$92.5M from the U.S. Army to provide varying degrees of support across four separate Aviation and Missile Command (AMCOM) programs. Each of the contracts was awarded to CGI as part of a subcontracting team to the incumbent prime contractor and each are five years in length if all option years were to be exercised.

AMCOM develops and delivers responsive aviation, missile and calibration materiel readiness to the U.S. Army in order to optimize joint warfighter capabilities at the point of need. As a Life Cycle Management Command, AMCOM is dedicated to providing integrated engineering, logistics and contracting to more than 90 major aviation and missile systems throughout their lifecycles, which accounts for roughly half the systems in the U.S. Army.

The contract awards are spread over four different programs within AMCOM:

In conjunction with its partners, CGI will provide the Precision Fires Rocket and Missile Systems (PFRMS) Project Office with acquisition process and software development support. Specifically, CGI has been tasked to provide continued services for the Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) Precision Guided Munitions acquisition and programmatic process. CGI will also support the acquisition process and software development for MLRS launchers as well as the MLRS documentation configuration management process.

CGI will continue to assist the AMCOM Logistics Center (ALC) with Reliability Improvement through Failure Identification and Reporting (RIMFIRE) process support. The RIMFIRE process is a closed-loop system designed to identify and track root equipment failure causes, determine candidates for corrective action and verify the effectiveness of corrective actions. Successful identification and correction of design errors, manufacturing defects, improper maintenance and early wear can help improve equipment reliability.

In continuing a long-standing engagement with the Utility Helicopter Project Management Office (UHPMO), CGI will ensure successful execution of UHPMO acquisition initiatives for the U.S. Army's UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter program. As part of its solution, CGI will help enable various mission requirements including ongoing research and development, production, sustainment, modifications, retrofit, Foreign Military Sales (FMS), modernization and recapitalization programs in support of the Army's UH-60 fleet.

CGI will provide configuration, data management, status accounting, and standardization services for AMCOM's Research, Development and Engineering Center's (RDEC) Technical Data Management Division (TDMD) in direct support of AMCOM's weapon systems and soldiers. As part of the team, CGI will help ensure that TDMD's technical data is accurate for both configuration management of weapon systems and procurement actions, thereby benefitting the soldier in the field.

"We are honoured to once again be chosen to support the U.S. Army through our continued engagement with these critical AMCOM programs that directly support the warfighter," said Tim Hurlebaus, President, CGI Federal. "CGI has the subject matter expertise and contract experience to deliver unique insight into these AMCOM programs and processes. Our proven track record demonstrates that our members have time and time again provided both the Army and our teaming partners with responsive and cost-effective services and solutions."



About CGI Federal

CGI Federal Inc. is a wholly-owned U.S. operating subsidiary of CGI Group Inc., dedicated to partnering with federal agencies to provide solutions for defense, civilian, healthcare and intelligence missions. Founded in 1976, CGI Group Inc. is the fifth largest independent information technology and business process services firm in the world. Approximately 70,000 professionals serve thousands of global clients from offices and delivery centers across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific, leveraging a comprehensive portfolio of services including high-end business and IT consulting, systems integration, application development and maintenance, infrastructure management as well as 150 IP-based services and solutions. With annual revenue in excess of C$10 billion and an order backlog exceeding C$20 billion, CGI shares are listed on the TSX (GIB.A) and the NYSE (GIB). Website: www.cgi.com.



Forward-Looking Statements

All statements in this press release that do not directly and exclusively relate to historical facts constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of that term in Section 27A of the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and are "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities laws. These statements and this information represent CGI's intentions, plans, expectations and beliefs, and are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, of which many are beyond the control of the Company. These factors could cause actual results to differ materially from such forward-looking statements or forward-looking information. These factors include but are not restricted to: the timing and size of new contracts; acquisitions and other corporate developments; the ability to attract and retain qualified members; market competition in the rapidly evolving IT industry; general economic and business conditions; foreign exchange and other risks identified in the press release, in CGI's annual and quarterly Management's Discussion and Analysis ("MD&A"), in CGI's Annual Report, in CGI's Annual Report on Form 40-F filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (filed on EDGAR at www.sec.gov), and in the Company's Annual Information Form filed with the Canadian securities authorities (filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com), as well as assumptions regarding the foregoing. The words "believe," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "anticipate," "foresee," "plan," and similar expressions and variations thereof, identify certain of such forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, which speak only as of the date on which they are made. In particular, statements relating to future performance are forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. CGI disclaims any intention or obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements or on this forward-looking information.



SOURCE CGI Group Inc.

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CHICAGO, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Throughout most of 2008, Chicagoans found nothing new in their city leaders' attempts to improve the town's financial situation; but on December 1, headlines jolted them out of their routines. The media suddenly announced that the City had a winning bid for a parking meter concession. While Chicagoland was left struggling to discover that the City was even considering parking meter privatization, and before citizens had appropriate time to process the idea  which had never been done in the United States  the measure was hustled through government channels and approved on December 4, 2008. Furthermore, Chicagoans had to begin opening their wallets to pay their parking fees by January 1, 2009.

The Chicago Parking Meter Concession of 2008 - Front Cover The Chicago Parking Meter Concession of 2008 - Back Cover

"I was stunned," says Author Michael Condon. "Why did Chicago City leaders choose a private parking meter concession to fatten the City's coffers, and, more importantly, how was it possible for such a deal to go from first major public announcement to approved in only three days?" As a result, Condon began research on his book, The Chicago Parking Meter Concession of 2008. Here he gathers the necessary and occasionally elusive details on privatization in general, and Chicago's parking meter concession in particular, through newspaper articles, transcripts, reports, and other key documents. "All available public information about the City's parking meter situation is conveniently pulled together in one place, which other sources don't do," he notes. In addition, Condon's work explores the repercussions of having kept the deal seemingly shrouded in secrecy and then sprinting it into action. According to Condon, "There have been financial issues, multiple investigations, re-negotiations, and even a major lawsuit."

Condon hopes the book's examination of the lessons this nearly unprecedented event unlocks for policy makers, city leaders, financiers, lawyers, scholars, and ordinary citizens will allow it to serve as a cautionary tale. Chicagoans cannot afford to allow such circumstances to unfold again, and other cities would be well-advised to learn from Chicago's quick adoption of parking meter privatization.

Michael E. Condon was raised in Chicago. He holds a B.A. from Western Illinois University, an M.A. from American Public University, and an M.Ed. from the American College of Education. Chicago's parking meter deal inspired him to write this book.

Available on Amazon ( www.amazon.com/dp/1941478409 ) and Barnes&Noble.com

Media Contact:

Lise Marinelli

Windy City Publishers

[email protected]

(888) 673-7126

SOURCE: Michael Condon

SOURCE Michael Condon
"We didn't get justice for Raiden on the criminal side, but we finally have justice in this case," said Steve Saechao, Raiden's father. "We never received an apology and the driver was never held accountable and that has left a hole in our hearts. But we can finally start to close this chapter and begin the long process of healing."

On December 17, 2013 on Highway 80 in Rocklin, Steve was driving his 9-month-old son Raiden home when traffic backed up, bringing his car to a complete stop. That's when a vehicle driven by a Sacramento Police Officer slammed into the Saechao car without braking, at 63 m.p.h. The police officer had his children in the car at the time of the crash. The City of Sacramento initially denied that the officer was on the clock and working for the City at the time of the crash, but later accepted liability.

"The police officer rear ended a car not because he was in pursuit but because he was distracted or simply not paying attention," said Attorney John Demas of the Demas Law Group, representing the Saechao Family. "As a community, we hold police officers to higher standard, and his negligence caused a family to suffer a profound and permanent loss."

Baby Raiden, who was properly secured in a rear-facing car seat, suffered serious head injuries at the scene, which was incredibly traumatic for his father and first responders to witness. Raiden survived five days in the hospital, passing away right before Christmas. Making this loss even more tragic for the family, Raiden was considered their "miracle child." The Saechaos endured multiple miscarriages and the death of a newborn due to a rare genetic condition before welcoming healthy and happy Raiden into their lives.

"He was our miracle baby after three pregnancies, and he was perfect," said Steve. "He didn't take away all the pain, but he gave us hope. His eyes and his smile lit up our lives. Then in a split second, because of distracted driving, he was taken away from us."

"I don't have the words to describe the pain and suffering we've endured for more than three years," said Chrystal Saechao, Raiden's mother. "Life can be very, very tough and I had no choice but to get myself back up, to get out of bed and fight for Raiden. We had to prove that our son had value and that he meant something, because criminal charges were never filed and no one seemed to care that a baby was tragically taken from us."

The Placer County District Attorney declined to file criminal charges against the police officer who caused the fatal crash. From there, the matter went to civil court (Superior Court of The State of California, City of Sacramento vs. Saechao Family Case #34-2014-00167131) where attorneys for the City of Sacramento repeatedly tried to deny the officer was on the clock. After a three-year court battle and the start of the civil trial, the City of Sacramento agreed to pay a record-setting $9.75 million settlement.

"With the settlement, the City acknowledged that police officers who are trained in protecting the safety and well being of people can and should be held accountable when their reckless and careless behavior causes injury to those they are supposed to protect," said Demas.

The Saechao Family plans to donate a portion of the settlement to raise awareness about the danger of distracted driving and cell phone use behind the wheel.

"If we can share Raiden's story and his tragic death with others, especially teenagers who are texting and driving, maybe we can save a life out there," said Steve. "Maybe there is a chance that we can prevent another family from suffering like we are."

Demas Law Group

The Demas Law Group is a leading Sacramento law firm handling a broad range of plaintiff personal injury and wrongful death cases throughout California, including the record Sacramento County settlement in the Tortured Teen Case. Founder John Demas has been selected as a northern California Super Lawyer for several years, an honor reserved for just 5% of attorneys and 1% of plaintiff personal injury lawyers and has been recognized as one of the top 100 attorneys in Northern California and one of the top 25 attorneys in Sacramento. He also is a member of the prestigious American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA). For more information, please visit www.demaslawgroup.com.

Contact: John Demas, [email protected], 916-444-0100

SOURCE Demas Law Group, P.C.

Related Links

http://www.demaslawgroup.com


EAGAN, Minn., July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- ConvergeOne, a leading IT services provider of collaboration and technology solutions, today announced that it has acquired Annese & Associates, Inc., a Cisco Gold Certified Partner and IT thought leader based in New York. Effective immediately, Annese is now Annese, a ConvergeOne Company. This acquisition solidifies ConvergeOne's position as a leading provider of Collaboration and IT enabled Solutions in the market today.

"This acquisition is an ideal addition to ConvergeOne and represents a natural progression in our ongoing strategy to develop and grow customer relationships by providing comprehensive solutions, services, and support," said John A. McKenna Jr., chairman and CEO, ConvergeOne. "ConvergeOne shares Annese's focus and commitment to deliver outcomes-based solutions for our customers. As a Cisco Gold Partner, the Annese team brings additional Cisco solutions and service capabilities in enterprise networking, security, collaboration, and cloud, backed by four decades of experience and expertise. This acquisition enables us to increase our presence in the northeastern United States and advance our leadership position as a single-source provider of multivendor technologies, support, and services."

ConvergeOne serves as a trusted advisor to more than 5,700 customers, including 52 percent of the Fortune 100 and 40 percent of the Fortune 500 customers across the healthcare, finance, manufacturing, education, and energy industries. ConvergeOne's deep technical expertise and end-to-end service capabilities differentiate the company from other IT service providers. Through existing relationships with more than 200 leading and next generation technology partners, ConvergeOne provides leading, multivendor solutions and services that solve customers' business challenges regardless of their existing infrastructure.

Growth through acquisition is an integral part of ConvergeOne's long-term business strategy to develop a comprehensive portfolio that provides one of the broadest and deepest solution offerings in the industry. Since 2005, ConvergeOne has successfully acquired and integrated 12 companies.

With the acquisition, Ray Apy will continue to lead Annese as senior vice president of Annese, a ConvergeOne Company, reporting to Paul Maier, president and CEO, Solutions, ConvergeOne.

"At Annese, our focus has always been on the longevity of our business and doing right by our employees," Apy said. "As part of a much larger company, this acquisition will provide our employees with unparalleled professional growth and development opportunities. Through ConvergeOne's broad reach and manufacturer portfolio, our customers will gain more flexibility coupled with the same great customer service approach they've come to expect from Annese."

About Annese & Associates, Inc.

Annese & Associates Inc. is a technology solutions provider backed by four decades of expertise and relationships, with a continual focus on innovation. Annese has built their business on making connections and their reputation on customer excellence. Guided by their services methodology, Annese designs an end-to-end IT experience, implementing the tools of today and designing for the emerging technologies of tomorrow. At Annese, our connections extend beyond devices and networks; we connect people to people and bring ideas to action.

About ConvergeOne

Founded in 1993, ConvergeOne is a leading global IT service provider of collaboration and technology solutions for large and medium enterprise with decades of experience assisting customers to transform their digital infrastructure and realize a return on investment. Over 5,700 enterprise and mid-market customers trust ConvergeOne with collaboration, enterprise networking, data center, cloud and security solutions to achieve business outcomes. Our investments in Cloud infrastructure and managed services provide transformational opportunities for customers to achieve financial and operational benefits with leading technologies. Uniquely positioned, ConvergeOne has partnerships with more than 200 global industry leaders, including Avaya, Cisco, IBM, Genesys and Microsoft to customize specific business outcomes. We deliver solutions with a full life cycle approach including strategy, design and implementation with professional, managed, cloud and support services. ConvergeOne holds more than 1,700 technical certifications across hundreds of engineers throughout North America including three Network Operations Centers.

About Clearlake Capital Group, L.P.

Clearlake Capital Group, L.P. is a leading private investment firm founded in 2006. With a sector-focused approach, the firm seeks to partner with world-class management teams by providing patient, long-term capital to dynamic businesses that can benefit from Clearlake's operational improvement approach, O.P.S. The firm's core target sectors are software and technology-enabled services; industrials and energy; and consumer. Clearlake currently has over $4 billion of assets under management and its senior investment principals have led or co-led over 90 investments. More information is available at www.clearlake.com.

Media Contact:

Scott Clark, Vice President, Marketing, ConvergeOne

651.393.3957

[email protected]

For Clearlake:

Owen Blicksilver Public Relations, Inc.

Kristin Celauro

732-264-1131

[email protected]



Jennifer Hurson

845-507-0571

[email protected]

SOURCE ConvergeOne

Related Links

http://www.convergeone.com


NEW YORK, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Como (www.como.com), a global leader in cloud-based customer engagement solutions, has expanded its product offering with the launch of Como Sense Express, which gets businesses set up fast with personalized loyalty programs, a branded mobile app, and actionable data and BI.

The POS-integrated product is an entry-level version of the full Como Sense customer engagement and loyalty platform, which is proven to deliver results including a 48% increase in monthly purchase frequency.

Como empowers small and midsize chains to maximize revenue per customer and business growth with Como Sense, the end-to-end customer engagement solution inside your POS. Burger King and Quiznos are some of the major chains in Comos client portfolio

"Until now, restaurant owners and small retailers have found it difficult to run their own loyalty program. They typically employ outdated stamp cards or generic points programs that reveal little about their loyal customers. They are impeded from using smarter, deeper loyalty solutions by implementation requirements, service costs, and lack of skilled staff," says Yair Holtzer, Como cofounder and head of Como US office, which officially launched its operations a short time ago.

"With Como Sense Express, we have eliminated those barriers by integrating with the business' POS provider. Now, small brick-and-mortar chains can finally establish an effective two-way relationship with their customers while running a data-driven loyalty program with proven ROI," adds Holtzer.

The new product is based on the same technology as the full Como Sense solution, which is used by hundreds of businesses including Burger King and Quiznos, but with increased ease of use and affordability. "The best thing about Como Sense Express is that business owners can continue working with their current POS provider, since that provider will set up the solution and furnish ongoing support," says Holtzer.

To that end, Como has integrated with leading POS providers such as NCR, Revel Systems, MICROS, POSitouch, and others that will offer Como Sense and Como Sense Express to their customers. To date, Como is the leading company in POS integrations across the globe with more than 75 integrations.

Come meet us at our booth at the RSPA RetailNOW 2017 conference, Aug 6-9 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

About Como

Como empowers small and midsize chains to maximize revenue per customer and business growth with Como Sense, the end-to-end customer engagement solution inside your POS. Our Swiss Army knife of tools enables businesses to engage customers personally through multiple channels, and offer loyalty programs that bring them back. Como Sense integrates with POS software to create a cloud-based solution where all the tools work together: a branded mobile app, connectivity with any third-party services, and deep business insights as well as the means to act on them with relevant marketing programs and incentives. Burger King, Quiznos, and Conway are some of the major chains in Como's client portfolio. Our global partner network includes POS companies such as Revel Systems, MICROS, MicroSale, and PAR. Como has been pioneering customer engagement technology in the cloud since 2005. For more information, visit www.como.com.

Contact:

Roy Goldenberg, Communications Manager

(972)73-208-7073

[email protected]

SOURCE Como

Related Links

http://www.como.com


WASHINGTON, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The Corporate Whistleblower Center says, "We are urging a physician or healthcare manager to call us anytime at 866-714-6466 if they can prove a hospital is improperly providing incentives to medical doctors for referring patients to a hospital. The incentives may range from paying a physician's rent, paying the doctor for consulting fees, or any other scheme to encourage the doctor to admit more patients to a hospital or healthcare facility. Recently a whistleblower received $9.2 million dollars for this exact type of information." http://CorporateWhistleblower.Com

Medical Doctor

About the recent whistleblower settlement: In June-2017 the US Department of Justice announced a Los Angeles based healthcare provider agreed to pay $42 million to settle allegations that they violated the False Claims Act by engaging in improper financial relationships with referring physicians. The settlement resolves allegations that the defendants submitted false claims to the Medicare and MediCal Programs for services rendered to patients referred by physicians with whom the defendants had improper financial relationships. These relationships took the form of (1) arrangements under which the defendants allegedly paid above-market rates to rent office space in physicians' offices, and (2) marketing arrangements that allegedly provided undue benefit to physicians' practices.

According to the Corporate Whistleblower Center, "Our invitation to medical doctors or to healthcare managers to call us about potential substantial whistleblower rewards is not only focused on hospitals providing kickbacks to physicians for increased admissions. We are also extremely interested about drug companies, medical device makers, radiology groups, orthopedic groups, blood testing labs, cardiology groups, rehab centers, or dialysis centers providing improper incentives to medical doctors in exchange for patients.

"Simply put, we are talking about kickbacks to medical doctors and if you have specific proof of these types of practices please call us anytime at 800-714-0303. Why sit on a potentially winning lotto ticket without ever knowing what it might have been worth?" http://CorporateWhistleblower.Com

Simple rules for a whistleblower from the Corporate Whistleblower: Do not go to the government first if you are a major whistleblower. The Corporate Whistleblower Center says, "Major whistleblowers frequently go to the government thinking they will help. It's a huge mistake. Do not go to the news media with your whistleblower information. Public revelation of a whistleblower's information could destroy any prospect for a reward. Do not try to force a company or individual to come clean Stark anti-kickback laws. Come to us first, tell us what type of information you have, and if we think it's sufficient, we will help find the right law firms to assist in advancing your information."

The Corporate Whistleblower Center wants to emphasize there are high quality whistleblowers in every state including California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Washington or Alaska.

The Corporate Whistleblower Center is the premier advocate for whistleblowers in the United States. Unlike any group in the US, they can assist a potential whistleblower with packaging their information and providing the whistleblower with access to the most accomplished whistleblower attorneys in the nation. For more information, potential whistleblowers can contact the Corporate Whistleblower Center at 866-714-6466 or visit http://CorporateWhistleblower.Com.

For attribution please refer to the June 2017 Department of Justice press release on this matter: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/los-angeles-hospital-agrees-pay-42-million-settle-alleged-false-claims-act-violations-arising

Media Contact:

Thomas Martin

866-714-6466

[email protected]

SOURCE Corporate Whistleblower Center

Related Links

http://CorporateWhistleblower.Com


By PTI: (Eds: repeating after correcting figure)

By Shirish B Pradhan

Kathmandu, Jul 19 (PTI) Three Indians and four Nepalese nationals were arrested today for trying to smuggle 30 kg of hashish to India from central Nepals Makawanpur district, police said.

The seven, carrying bags filled with the contraband, were arrested from a hotel during a raid by security personnel in the district headquarters of Makawanpur, about 110 km south of the national capital Kathmandu, said Raju Aryal, Senior Superintendent of Police.

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Some 30 kg of hashish, a vehicle bearing an Indian registration number, six mobile phones and Rs 33,000 Indian currency were seized from them.

The hashish was being smuggled to India from Kathmandu.

They said the arrested have been handed to the District Police Office along with the confiscated materials for further investigation. PTI MRJ/SBP ABH AKJ MRJ

--- ENDS ---
MOUNT PROSPECT, Ill., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Crestwood Associates, an award-winning Microsoft Dynamics and Acumatica Gold Partner, has achieved the prestigious 2017/2018 Inner Circle for Microsoft Dynamics. Membership in this elite group is based on sales achievements that rank Crestwood Associates in the top one percent of Microsoft partners worldwide. Inner Circle members have performed to a high standard of excellence by delivering critical solutions that help organizations succeed.

"Each year we recognize Microsoft Dynamics partners from around the world for delivering innovation and driving unsurpassed customer success," said Ron Huddleston, CVP, One Commercial Partner. "Our Inner Circle members are chosen based on their capabilities as an organization, whether that's creating IP, developing solutions, or having an industry leading focus on digital transformation. Microsoft is honored to recognize Crestwood Associates for their achievements this past year, their dedication to their customers, and their innovation with Microsoft technologies."

Crestwood Associates is dedicated to supplying valuable solutions that help customers achieve a competitive advantage. Through their close relationship with the teams at Microsoft, Crestwood maintains strong expertise throughout the Microsoft stack to provide innovative solutions, robust services and unparalleled value to their customers.

"We are honored and so proud of our team for earning membership in the Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle," said Brian McGuckin, Partner and Co-owner of Crestwood Associates. "We have been providing Microsoft Dynamics solutions to our clients for almost 20 years. It feels great to consistently be recognized by Microsoft and to be among the best of the best."

Crestwood leverages innovative technology, specialized expertise, and strategic partnerships to fuel the growth and transformation of organizations across the United States. As a top Microsoft, Acumatica and Greentree partner, Crestwood provides a comprehensive portfolio of ERP and CRM solutions. Crestwood is also a Microsoft Tier 1 Cloud Solutions Provider, offering its clients the flexibility to choose the best deployment approach for their business whether that is on-premises, hosted in our private cloud, via Azure, or a hybrid approach.

About Crestwood

Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Mount Prospect, Illinois, Crestwood Associates is a premier Gold Certified Microsoft Dynamics Partner and 10-time Presidents Club Award Winner. Crestwood delivers a variety of business solutions, including: Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics SL, Microsoft Dynamics CRM (now called Dynamics 365), Acumatica Cloud ERP, and Greentree applications.

As a Tier 1 Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider, Gold Certified Microsoft Partner, Greentree and Acumatica US Partner of the Year, Crestwood represents some of the most trusted accounting, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM) technologies available in the market. With over 19 years of award-winning experience, Crestwood serves clients across the country from its headquarters in Mount Prospect, Illinois and its five additional locations, including the newest office serving the Miami area.

From accounting and financial reporting, to CRM, manufacturing, distribution, payroll and human resources, Crestwood Associates provides the tools and quality services that help businesses perform above and beyond the competition. The Crestwood team is comprised of over 45 certified professionals who provide in-depth industry experience and functional expertise.

Photo(s):

https://www.prlog.org/12653226

Press release distributed by PRLog

SOURCE Crestwood Associates LLC

Related Links

http://www.crestwood.com/


SAN FRANCISCO, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- CrowdFlower, the essential human-in-the-loop platform for data science and machine learning teams, today announced three new artificial intelligence industry experts  Robert Munro, Monica Rogati, and Adrian Weller  have joined CrowdFlower to help guide the company's future strategy. Robert Munro joins CrowdFlower as VP of Machine Learning where his focus will be helping organizations effectively apply AI to their business. Monica Rogati and Adrian Weller have joined CrowdFlower's Scientific Advisory Board where their focus will be advising on the developing science of artificial intelligence and providing input to the company's technology and product strategy.

CrowdFlower solves the two biggest barriers to the broad adoption of machine learning by businesses. The first problem is insufficient training data. Machine learning algorithms have powerful potential just like a five year old child attending kindergarten. That child has limited effectiveness unless closely supervised in the real world outside the classroom. CrowdFlower's platform creates high quality large scale customized training data from raw unstructured image or text data that becomes the lesson plan for the model to learn. The second problem is how to gracefully handle the fail states of machine learning models. CrowdFlower's approach is like the teacher who tests the students so they can focus the learning where the student is failing and not where they are already succeeding. The machine learning model handles the high confidence cases, and human intelligence is applied to the low confidence cases. This iterative approach allows you to start getting the benefits of machine learning sooner, while continuously improving the performance of the model.

"We are delighted to be able to bring such deep technical AI talent into our company," said Robin Bordoli, CEO at CrowdFlower. "Robert, Monica and Adrian will help us extend our leadership position in making AI work for businesses large and small. We are excited to be in a position to help guide our customers on this journey  whether that is through consulting or by helping them build the training data and the machine learning models they need to make the AI implementation work in the real world."

Robert Munro joins CrowdFlower from Amazon where he was Principal Product Manager for Amazon AI products leading the development for their first Natural Language Processing services in the Deep Learning team. He is an expert in combining Human and Machine Intelligence in the areas of Text, Speech, Image and Video Processing, with experience in founding AI companies and leading Machine Learning teams. He has worked in many diverse environments, from Sierra Leone, Haiti and the Amazon, to London, Sydney and Silicon Valley, in organizations ranging from startups to the United Nations. He has a PhD in computational linguistics from Stanford University, published more than 50 papers, received 10 patents, and is a regular speaker about machine learning and artificial intelligence.

"I am delighted to join CrowdFlower to help enterprises harness the power of AI to transform their business," said Robert Munro, VP Machine Learning at CrowdFlower. "I've experienced the power of the CrowdFlower platform as a customer so I know first hand how essential it is to making AI work. I look forward to working with Robin and the executive team to extend our leadership in the nascent but essential category of human-in-the-loop for machine learning."

Monica Rogati is a data science and AI advisor working with dozens of companies, from stealth startups to S&P 500 companies. Before becoming an independent advisor, she was Jawbone's VP of Data, where she led a team of top data scientists and engineers that developed intelligent data products. Prior to Jawbone, she was one of the early members of the LinkedIn data science team, where she developed some of LinkedIn's key data products for matching jobs to passive candidates, discovering people you may know, and recommending groups you may like. She has a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon with a focus on applied machine learning and was named a Big Data All-Star by Fortune Magazine.

Adrian Weller is a senior research fellow in the Machine Learning Group at the University of Cambridge. His current research focus is on scalable, reliable, interpretable and fair algorithms. He is also an executive fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence where he leads their project on Trust and Transparency, and a faculty fellow at the Alan Turing Institute for data science where he leads their project on fairness, transparency and privacy. He is broadly interested in artificial intelligence, its commercial applications and its societal implications. He has a PhD in computer science from Columbia University and an MA in mathematics from Cambridge.

About CrowdFlower

CrowdFlower is the essential human-in-the-loop AI platform for data science and machine learning teams. The CrowdFlower software platform trains, tests, and tunes machine learning models to make AI work in the real world. CrowdFlower's technology and expertise supports a wide range of use cases including autonomous vehicles, intelligent personal assistants, medical image labeling, consumer product identification, content categorization, customer support ticket classification, social data insight, CRM data enrichment, product categorization, and search relevance.



Headquartered in the Mission District in San Francisco and backed by Canvas Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Industry Ventures, Microsoft Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, CrowdFlower serves Fortune 500 and fast-growing data-driven organizations across a wide variety of industries. For more information, visit www.crowdflower.com.

SOURCE CrowdFlower

Related Links

http://crowdflower.com


LONDON, July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --



INTRODUCTION

Deep learning is a novel machine learning technique that can be used to generate relevant insights from large volumes of data. The term Deep Learning was coined in 2006 by Geoffrey Hinton to refer to algorithms that enable computers to analyze objects and text in videos and images. Fundamentally, deep learning algorithms are designed to analyze and use large volumes of data to improve the capabilities of machines. Companies, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, IBM and Netflix, are already using deep learning algorithms to analyze users' activities and make customized suggestions and recommendations based on individual preferences. Today, in many ways, deep learning algorithms have enabled computers to see, read and write. In light of recent advances, the error rate associated with machines being able to analyze and interpret medical images has come down to 6%, which, some research groups claim, is even better than humans.





Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4805990/







The applications of the technology are being explored across a variety of areas. Specifically in healthcare, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Precision Medicine Initiative of 2015 have widely endorsed the value of medical data in healthcare. Owing to several such initiatives, medical big data is expected to grow approximately 50-fold to reach 25,000 petabytes by 2020. Since 80% of this is unstructured, it is difficult to generate valuable / meaningful insights using conventional data mining techniques. In such cases, deep learning has emerged as a novel solution. Lead identification and optimization in drug discovery, support in patient recruitment for clinical trials, medical image analysis, biomarker identification, drug efficacy analysis, drug adherence evaluation, sequencing data analysis, virtual screening, molecule profiling, metabolomic data analysis, EMR analysis and medical device data evaluation are examples of applications where deep learning based solutions are being explored.



The likely benefits associated with the use of deep learning based solutions in the above mentioned areas is estimated to be worth multi billion dollars. There are well-known references where deep learning models have accelerated the drug discovery process and provided solutions to precision medicine. With potential applications in drug repurposing and preclinical research, deep learning in drug discovery is likely to have great opportunity. In diagnostics, an increase in the speed of diagnosis is likely to have a profound impact in regions with large patient to physician ratios. The implementation of such solutions is anticipated to increase the efficiency of physicians providing a certain amount of relief to the overly-burdened global healthcare system.



SCOPE OF THE REPORT

The "Deep Learning: Drug Discovery and Diagnostics Market, 2017-2035" report examines the current landscape and future outlook of the growing market of deep learning solutions within the healthcare domain. Primarily driven by the big data revolution, deep learning algorithms have emerged as a novel solution to generate relevant insights from medical data. This continuing shift towards digitalization of healthcare system has been backed by a number of initiatives taken by the government, and has also sparked the interest of several industry / non-industry players. The involvement of global technology companies and their increasing collaborations with research institutes and hospitals are indicative of the research intensity in this field. At the same time, the pharma giants have been highly active in adopting the digital models. Companies such as AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Novartis continue to evaluate the digital health initiatives across drug discovery, clinical trial management and medical diagnosis. Some notable examples of such digital health initiatives include GSK and Pfizer's collaboration with Apple for the use of the latter's research kit in clinical trials, Biogen's partnership with Fitbit for using smart wearables in clinical trial management, and Teva Pharmaceuticals' partnership with American Well to use Smart Inhalers for patients with asthma and COPD.



Backed by funding from several Venture Capital firms and strategic investors, deep learning has emerged as one of the most widely explored initiatives within digital healthcare. The current generation of deep learning models are flexible and have the ability to evolve and become more efficient over time. Despite being a relatively novel field of research, these models have already demonstrated significant potential in the healthcare industry.



One of the key objectives of this study was to identify the various deep learning solutions that are currently available / being developed to cater to unmet medical needs, and also evaluate the future prospects of deep learning within the healthcare industry. These solutions are anticipated to open up significant opportunities in the field of drug discovery and diagnostics as the healthcare industry gradually shifts towards digital solutions. In addition to other elements, the study covers the following:



- The current status of the market with respect to key players, specific applications and the therapeutic areas in which these solutions can be applied.

- The various initiatives that are being undertaken by technology giants, such as IBM, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Samsung. The presence of these stakeholders signifies the opportunity and the impact that these solutions are likely to have in the near future. Specifically, we have presented a comparative analysis of the deep learning solutions developed by IBM and Google.

- Detailed profiles of some of the established, as well as emerging players in the industry, highlighting key technology features, primary applications and other relevant information.

- The impact of venture capital funding in this area. It is important to mention that since the industry has witnessed the emergence of several start-ups, funding is a key enabler that is likely to drive both innovation and product development in the coming years.

- An elaborate valuation analysis of companies that are involved in applying deep learning in drug discovery and diagnostics. We built a multi-variable dependent valuation model to estimate the current valuation of a number of companies focused in this domain.

- Future growth opportunities and likely impact of deep learning in the drug discovery and diagnostics domains. The forecast model, backed by robust secondary research and credible inputs from primary research, was primarily based on the likely time-saving and its associated cost-saving opportunity to the healthcare system.



For the purpose of the study, we invited over 100 stakeholders to participate in a survey to solicit their opinions on upcoming opportunities and challenges that must be considered for a more inclusive growth. Our opinions and insights presented in this study were influenced by discussions conducted with several key players in this domain. The report features detailed transcripts of interviews held with Mausumi Acharya (CEO, Advenio Technosys), Carla Leibowitz (Head of Strategy and Marketing, Arterys) and Deekshith Marla (CTO, Arya.ai).



RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Most of the data presented in this report has been gathered via secondary and primary research. We have also conducted interviews with experts in the area (academia, industry, medical practice and other associations) to solicit their opinions on emerging trends in the market. This is primarily useful for us to draw out our own opinion on how the market will evolve across different regions and technology segments. Where possible, the available data has been checked for accuracy from multiple sources of information.



The secondary sources of information include

- Annual reports

- Investor presentations

- SEC filings

- Industry databases

- News releases from company websites

- Government policy documents

- Other analyst's opinion reports



While the focus has been on forecasting the market over the coming two decades, the report also provides our independent view on various non-commercial trends emerging in the industry. This opinion is solely based on our knowledge, research and understanding of the relevant market gathered from various secondary and primary sources of information.



CHAPTER OUTLINES

Chapter 2 provides an executive summary of the report. It offers a high level view on where the deep learning market for drug discovery and diagnostics is headed in the long term.



Chapter 3 is an introductory chapter that presents details on the digital revolution in the medical industry. It elaborates on the growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, such as deep learning algorithms, along with a discussion on their potential applications in solving some of the key challenges faced by the healthcare industry. The chapter also gives an overview on the rise of big data and its role in providing personalized and evidence based care to patients.



Chapter 4 includes information on close to 100 companies that are evaluating potential applications of their proprietary deep learning solutions in the healthcare industry. The classification system used for these solutions was based on their application areas. These include drug discovery, diagnostics, clinical trial management and drug adherence programs. In addition, we have highlighted specific geographical pockets that we identified as innovation hubs in this sector.



Chapter 5 provides detailed profiles of some of the key stakeholders in this space with detailed information on their technologies, funding, collaborations and partnerships, intellectual capital, awards and recognition and activity on social media.



Chapter 6 presents a case study on two technology giants in this field, namely IBM and Google. It provides a detailed description of the initiatives being undertaken by these companies to explore the applications of deep learning in the medical field. In addition, the chapter provides a comparison of the two companies based on their respective deep learning expertise, and partnerships and acquisitions.



Chapter 7 provides information on the various investments that have been made into this industry. Our analysis revealed interesting insights on the growing interest of venture capitalists and other stakeholders in this market. In addition, we identified some of the key investors in this market.



Chapter 8 presents detailed projections related to the growth of the deep learning industry in healthcare from 2017 to 2035. To quantify the opportunity for deep learning in the drug discovery space, we have provided optimistic and conservative forecast scenarios, along with our base forecast to account for the uncertainties associated with the adoption of these technologies. The insights presented in this chapter are backed by data from close to 50 countries and highlights the opportunity for deep learning companies in diagnostics within the same regions.



Chapter 9 features a comprehensive valuation analysis of the companies that are developing deep learning solutions for applications in drug discovery and diagnostics. The chapter provides insights based on a multi-variable dependent valuation model. The model is based on the future potential of the companies' technologies, their current popularity, funding received, year of establishment and the employed workforce in these companies.



Chapter 10 presents the opinions expressed by selected key opinion leaders on the applications and challenges associated with deep learning in the healthcare sector. The chapter provides key takeaways from presentations and videos of these experts, highlighting the future opportunity for these models within the healthcare industry.



Chapter 11 summarizes the overall report. In this chapter, we provide a recap of the key takeaways and our independent opinion based on the research and analysis described in the previous chapters.



Chapter 12 is a collection of interview transcripts of the discussions held with key stakeholders in this market. We have presented the details of our discussions with Mausumi Acharya (CEO, Advenio Technosys), Carla Leibowitz (Head of Strategy and Marketing, Arterys), and Deekshith Marla (CTO, Arya.ai).



Chapter 13 is an appendix, which provides tabulated data and numbers for all the figures in the report. In addition, the chapter includes a detailed analysis of the survey conducted with several companies to estimate the opportunity for deep learning in drug discovery and diagnostics.



Chapter 14 is an appendix, which provides the list of companies and organizations mentioned in the report.



EXAMPLE HIGHLIGHTS

1. During our research, we identified close to 100 industry / non-industry players that are exploring their proprietary deep learning based technologies in drug discovery and diagnostics. A majority of these companies (61%) were founded post 2010. In fact, between 2013 and 2016 alone, the industry saw the emergence of 50 startups in this field.

2. More than 55% of the companies working in this space are applying their deep learning models for diagnostic purposes. Of these, 78% of the companies offer solutions for medical imaging analysis. Notable examples include (in alphabetical order) Arterys, AvalonAI, Bay Labs, Behold.ai, Butterfly Network, CAMELOT biomedical systems, Cyrcadia Health, Enlitic, iCarbonX, Lunit and Zebra Medical Vision.

3. On the other hand, close to 35% of the companies engaged in this domain are focused on applying deep learning models in drug discovery. 57% of these companies provide deep learning powered drug discovery platforms. Examples of players in this segment include (in alphabetical order) Atomwise, Benevolent.ai, BERG Health, Cloud Pharmaceuticals, Cyclica, Hummingbird Bioscience, InSilico Medicine, Mind the Byte, Molplex Pharmaceutical, nference, Numedii, Numerate, Standigm, twoXAR, Verge Genomics, Vium and SparkBeyond.

4. In addition, there are companies that are focused in applying deep learning in both drug discovery as well as diagnostics. Examples of such companies include (in alphabetical order) 23andMe, Appistry, Deep Genomics, Desktop Genetics, Globavir Biosciences, Google, IBM, SolveBio and Wuxi NextCODE.

5. During the last three years, heavy investments have been made in this domain. Of the overall amount invested in last 10 years (USD 1.8 billion), USD 1.6 billion was invested into deep learning initiatives in and after 2014. There are several recent examples. iCarbonX raised USD 214 million in three funding rounds (January 2016, April 2016 and July 2016), Flatiron Health received USD 175 million in Series C funding (January 2016), LAM Therapeutics witnessed funding of USD 40 million (February 2016), and Human Longevity closed a Series B funding round amounting to USD 220 million (April 2016)..

6. In the drug discovery segment, the deep learning solutions have shown to significantly reduce the cost and time spent in bringing a drug to the market. Taking a drug from discovery stage to the market is known to cost up to USD 2.5 billion and takes, on an average, close to 12 years. Deep learning models are likely to save as much as 50% of this cost and save a significant amount of time. By 2035, we have predicted annual cost savings of over USD 100 billion for the global healthcare system.

7. The adoption of deep learning models in diagnostics is also likely to provide several cost and time saving opportunities. According to our estimates, by 2035, deep learning solutions can result in annual savings of over USD 35 billion in the diagnostics segment alone. The activity is likely to be relatively more prominent in the high income countries in the near term. However, in the long term, the low radiologist to patient ratio in middle income countries is likely to provide ample growth opportunities in these countries.

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PITTSBURGH, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Deka Lash, known for its upscale brand that specializes only in eyelash extensions and eyelash-related products, announced the opening of its newest retail studio in Redondo Beach, California.

Outside of the Deka Lash Redondo Beach Studio at the Redondo Shores Shopping Center

Jeff Kenney owns and operates the Redondo Beach location. "Being a part of Deka Lash is more than just owning a franchise, it is being a part of something I believe in," Jeff says. "Having great relationships with the people you work with who are equally as passionate about the same core values is why I joined the team. Oh, and we also provide a world class service that blends both health and beauty."

Redondo Beach marks the first studio in California for the successful eyelash studio franchise. When asked about the decision to open a Deka Lash near the coast, "I love the LA area, so being able to have a business in Redondo Beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean is everything I could have hoped for," Jeff replied. "There are many eyelash extension salons in LA, but most don't actually focus on maintaining healthy lashes. At Deka Lash, the health of our clients' lashes and eyes is just as important as the beauty of them. I know when someone comes into our studio they are going to leave with great lashes, and even more importantly, a great experience."

CEO Michael Blair commented on the studio opening, "Deka Lash is leading the way in Eyelash Extensions. As one of the fastest growing eyelash franchise concepts, we are constantly innovating our technique and improving the customer experience. As a result, Deka Lash's popularity continues to spread because of the incredible transformations that happen in our studios," said Michael. "In addition to enhancing our customer's beauty, clients walk out of our studio doors each day with more confidence than ever."

Deka Lash provides semi-permanent eyelash extensions featuring a unique in-studio experience, online booking and extended hours including weekend appointments. Deka Lash's highly trained staff of licensed estheticians take their time to ensure quality applications, allowing customers to feel relaxed, not rushed.

About Deka Lash

The business was founded in 2011 by Jennifer and Michael Blair, with the vision to create everyday confidence through beautiful lashes. Deka Lash Studios are retail salons that apply semi-permanent custom eyelash extensions to the clients' own lashes, providing a variety of looks and styles. The company has awarded over 75 franchise licenses in 13 states.

For additional information, visit dekalash.com.

Contact:

Director of Brand Strategy and Marketing

Greg Forsythe

(724) 949-0833

[email protected]

SOURCE Deka Lash

Related Links

http://dekalash.com


VINEYARD, Utah, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Dynamic Blending Specialists has been recognized as the 2017 Independent Cosmetic Manufacturers and Distributors (ICMAD) Association's "Innovative Company of the Year."

President of Dynamic Blending Specialists, Jordan Erskine, was delighted to accept the award: "Winning this award is such an honor for Dynamic Blending. It's amazing to see our innovative business model be recognized for this prestigious award."

Dynamic Blending

On July 10, 2017, Dynamic Blending Specialists was among 12 companies celebrated for creativity, entrepreneurship, and charitable giving at the 2017 Cosmetic Innovator of the Year (CITY) Awards, hosted in Las Vegas, Nevada at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. The CITY Awards represent the pinnacle honor in the independent beauty industry, celebrating the efforts of independent manufacturers to innovate, strengthen, and evolve all aspects of the independent beauty business.

Held in conjunction with Cosmoprof North America, ICMAD President and CEO, Pam Busiek, stated, "ICMAD has proudly recognized and honored the exceptional achievements of personal care and beauty industry professionals for over twenty years during the CITY Awards ceremony. This year's winners are exemplary representatives of our industry's creative entrepreneurs who have accomplished remarkable feats this past year, and we are thrilled to celebrate and publicize their reputable work."

Photos from the 2017 CITY Awards can be found on ICMAD's Facebook page.

Dynamic Blending Specialists was awarded Innovative Company of the Year following a review of industry experts and leaders like Ian Ginsberg, the President of C.O. Bigelow; Dr. Brooke Carlson, Professor at Fashion Institute of Technology; Ron Robinson, Founder & CEO of BeautyStat.com; Jerome Berard, Principal at Berard & Associates; Jana Richele, CMO at Berard & Associates; Maria Corbiscello, President of STUDIO MC2; and Lara Eurdolian, Editor at Pretty Connected.

2017 CITY Innovative Company of the Year Award winner Dynamic Blending Specialists is the only full-service turnkey manufacturing solution that works with businesses of all shapes and sizes. Offering a low minimum order quantity of 1,000 units, while other companies scoff at orders under 50,000, DBS firmly believes that every company deserves the chance to become the next big name in the cosmetics and beauty industry, regardless of their current size and quantity needs. Dynamic Blending Specialists collaborate with their clients every step of the way on their journey to cosmetic product creation. The DBS team of expert cosmetic chemists are leaders in the industry for skin care, hair care, body care, men's grooming, natural/organic products, oral care and more.

To learn more about Dynamic Blending Specialists, please contact:

Josh Lujan, V.P. of Sales & Marketing

523 East 1750 North, Ste. 100

Vineyard, UT 84057

Office: 844-822-1665

[email protected]

www.dynamicblending.com

About Cast Iron Content:

Cast Iron Content specializes in creating effective content that clearly delivers your brand's message, defining the value your business was founded on. Newsletters, email campaigns, website copy, editing, SEO, and more  if it involves the written word and your brand's unique story, contact Cast Iron Content.

Related Images

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image2.jpg

image3.jpg

Related Video

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SOURCE Dynamic Blending

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HIGH POINT, N.C., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- For seven weeks beginning today July, 19, 2017 Dynamic International Airways, will operate roundtrip charter flights between Ontario and Nanchang, China. This new air service will run between Ontario International Airport (ONT) and Nanchang Changbei International Airport (KHN) with an intermediate stop in Anchorage, Alaska (ANC).

Nanchang is the capital city of Jiangxi province, which is located in southeastern China. As noted on the airport's website in June, Alan D. Wapner, President of the Ontario International Airport Authority, said that he welcomed Dynamic International Airways and commended the carrier for creating an important link between Ontario and one of China's thriving economic, political and cultural centers.

"The demand for air service between the Los Angeles area and China grows seemingly by the day and we are heartened by Dynamic International Airways' move to Ontario. We will welcome visitors from Nanchang with open arms," Wapner said. "The summer charter flights will serve as a great audition for Ontario as we continue to demonstrate the high value our airport provides for international as well as domestic service," Wapner added.

Dynamic International Airways' operated service to and from Nanchang out of Los Angeles International Airport.

"Dynamic International Airways is dedicated to providing our passengers comfortable, low-cost, long-haul travel with the highest standards for customer service," said Chief Executive Officer Paul Kraus. "We are confident ONT will add nicely to the enjoyable customer experience we strive to deliver with each and every flight."

According to Ontario International Airport, the twice-weekly roundtrips will depart KHN Saturday and Tuesday with a stop-over in Anchorage, AK, (ANC) where passengers and crew will be processed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers and the aircraft will be re-fueled. After passengers re-board, the aircraft will continue to ONT arriving at 9:05 p.m. (PDT).

Return service departing ONT Sunday and Wednesday at 7:35 a.m. (PDT) will likewise pass through Anchorage for refueling.

Dynamic International Airways will operate Boeing 767-300ER aircraft configured to accommodate 235 passengers with 21 lie-flat business class seats and 214 economy class seats.

Dynamic International Airways' service between Ontario and Nanchang is scheduled through August 30.

About Dynamic Intl. Airways

Dynamic International Airways provides excellent, comfortable, low cost, long haul, point-to-point air service. The airline is headquartered in North Carolina and offers service from airports in New York, Guyana, Guayaquil, Saipan, Changchun, Nanchang and Ontario, CA with its fleet of B767 wide body aircrafts.

SOURCE Dynamic International Airways
STOCKHOLM, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- During the second quarter Electrolux improved its operating income by close to 25%, achieving an operating margin of 6.2%. Profitability increased in most of our business areas. This was driven by continued focus on improving product mix through active portfolio management, and increased cost efficiency within our operations. Cash flow continued to be strong, further strengthening our balance sheet.

In EMEA, our premium brands continued to gain market share driven by the built-in kitchen segment. The launch of the new AEG products is ongoing, with strong market impact. We are very pleased that operating margins continue at a high sustained level, reaching 6.2% in the quarter.

The European appliance market remains solid, with demand growth in several markets in Western and Eastern Europe, while the UK and the Middle East and Africa continue to be weak. We expect the total European market to be positive and confirm our outlook of around 1% growth in 2017.

In our operations in North America, we continued the strong operational performance, improving the mix by focusing on our most competitive products and increasing productivity and cost efficiency. This contributed to achieving an operating margin of 8.4% despite continued price pressure and lower sales volumes under private labels.

With a good trend during the first half of the year, the market for appliances in North America remains strong and we see the favorable macro environment continuing to support demand. We therefore increase our outlook for the North American market and now expect the market to grow by 3-4% in 2017.

The operations in Latin America faced another quarter with tough market conditions although there were signs of a slow recovery. Market volumes in Brazil, Argentina and Chile improved slightly but the macro and political uncertainty in Brazil remains. Actions to improve the profitability of our business are progressing according to plan. The operations in Asia Pacific, Home Care & SDA and Professional Products all showed strong improvement in earnings compared to the second quarter 2016.

We expect the organic sales contribution from volume, price and mix for the full year to be slightly positive, as a result of the supportive market environment, strong mix performance and successful product launches, offsetting continued price pressure. Our efforts to drive cost efficiency continue and we now expect to deliver a net cost efficiency of SEK 2.3bn for the full year of 2017. Price developments in the commodity markets have been neutral on balance, and we confirm our expected negative impact from raw-material costs of SEK 1.4bn for the full year.

In early July we announced the agreement to acquire Best, a European manufacturer of innovative and well-designed kitchen hoods. The acquisition enables Electrolux to further drive long-term profitable growth in the built-in-kitchen segment in EMEA. The deal is expected to close within the next quarter and will be our fourth this year, highlighting our ambition to broaden Electrolux product offering and expand in new profitable markets and segments.

During the quarter we have also updated our strategic framework, connecting our business model and path to profitable growth to a clear and revised company Purpose  Shape living for the better. We will achieve this by reinventing taste, care and wellbeing experiences for more enjoyable and sustainable living around the world. This will set the direction for Electrolux for years to come.

For further information, contact Daniel Frykholm, Electrolux Press Hotline, +46-8-657-65-07 or Merton Kaplan, Investor Relations, +46-8-738-70-06.

This information is information that AB Electrolux is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation and the Securities Markets Act. The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact person set out above, at 0800 CET on July 19, 2017.

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

http://news.cision.com/electrolux/r/electrolux-president-and-ceo-jonas-samuelson-s-comments-on-the-results-for-the-second-quarter-2017,c2313411

The following files are available for download:

SOURCE Electrolux
WAKEFIELD, England, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The newest version of Schedule it's exclusive scheduling software has been released after two years of continued development. The scheduling software now focuses on helping the modern-day business with issues around remote working, multiple device support and access from any location, as well as making scheduling quicker and easier than ever before with a new streamlined interface.

The newest version of Schedule its exclusive scheduling software has been released. The newest Schedule it makes scheduling quicker and easier than ever before with a new streamlined interface.

These changes have been optimised after feedback from many key clients in many business sectors to give great benefits in terms of time or cost savings all around employee and resource scheduling.

The program can be deployed to improve efficiency and productivity throughout many aspects of a business from employee planning, client activity tracking, room booking and equipment management.

Mark Ballance, director of Schedule it Ltd says, "With the immediate cost savings most businesses see when introducing a scheduling software solution, many are now choosing these as an alternative for additional staff and other resources. By simply utilising your current resources better, substantial savings can be seen."

It is no wonder, that Schedule it has already become a choice for more than 3,500 clients including international giants such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Shell Lubricants, Fujitsu-siemens, BAE Systems, O2, NHS Trusts, Siemens Power Generation, Siemens Enterprise Communications, Qualcomm, and L-3 Communications.

You can try free of charge the latest versions of the desktop and online scheduling applications and immediately appreciate the benefits by visiting their website: http://www.scheduleit.co.uk

Contact: Mark Ballance

Schedule it Ltd, Wakefield, United Kingdom, July 2017

Telephone: UK: +44 (0) 845 869 8972

Email: [email protected]

Web: http://www.scheduleit.co.uk

SOURCE Schedule it Ltd

Related Links

http://www.scheduleit.co.uk


Abex ADBHD1369 is equipped with OE-style green coat stripes, which provide consistent performance both out of the box and throughout the life of the pad. This green coat is a proprietary, engineered material that is applied to the friction surface to aid the initial effectiveness of the brake friction material. Additionally, these pads also come with a mechanical retention system that supports the friction material from shearing from the back plate. Abex ADBHD1369 also comes with a complete installation hardware kit and meets global ISO performance and wear standards. It also conforms to 2025 copper-free requirements of less than 0.05 percent by weight, with no copper added to this advanced OE-quality formulation.

In addition to these features, ABEX ADBHD1369 also comes complete with new, reengineered packaging containing eye-catching graphics and design. The new packaging was constructed to offer better protection to the product, which could reduce damage often incurred during shipping.

"As more fleets begin to purchase air disc brakes, we have seen an increased demand for our products, namely Abex ADBHD1369," said Bill Nunnery, vice president, Commercial Vehicles and Business Development, Federal-Mogul Motorparts. "In addition to being manufactured in the U.S. at our Glasgow facility, which has the highest level of quality certification available to friction manufacturers, these brakes also feature an OE-quality formulation for enhanced stopping power with extended disc pad and rotor life."

To learn more about the Abex brand and for more information on its air disc brakes, please visit www.FMheavydutyparts.com or contact your local Federal-Mogul Motorparts representative.

About Federal-Mogul

Federal-Mogul LLC is a leading global supplier of products and services to the world's manufacturers and servicers of vehicles and equipment in the automotive, light, medium and heavy-duty commercial, marine, rail, aerospace, power generation and industrial markets. The company's products and services enable improved fuel economy, reduced emissions and enhanced vehicle safety.

Federal-Mogul operates two independent business divisions, each with a chief executive officer reporting to Federal-Mogul's Board of Directors.

Federal-Mogul Motorparts sells and distributes a broad portfolio of products through more than 20 of the world's most recognized brands in the global vehicle aftermarket, while also serving original equipment vehicle manufacturers with products including braking, wipers and a range of chassis components. The company's aftermarket brands include ANCO wipers; Beck/Arnley premium OE quality parts and fluids; BERU* ignition systems; Champion lighting, spark plugs, wipers and filters; Interfil filters; AE, Fel-Pro, FP Diesel, Goetze, Glyco, Nural, Payen and Sealed Power engine products; MOOG chassis components; and Ferodo, Jurid and Wagner brake products and lighting.

Federal-Mogul Powertrain designs and manufactures original equipment powertrain components and systems protection products for automotive, heavy-duty, industrial and transport applications.

Federal-Mogul was founded in Detroit in 1899 and maintains its worldwide headquarters in Southfield, Michigan. The company employs nearly 53,000 in 24 countries. For more information, please visit www.FMMotorparts.com.

*BERU is a registered trademark of BorgWarner Ludwigsburg GmbH

CONTACT:

Karen Shulhan (Federal-Mogul Motorparts)  248.354.4383

[email protected]

Drew Shippy (Pinnacle Media)  330.688.3500

[email protected]

SOURCE Federal-Mogul Motorparts

Related Links

https://www.fmmotorparts.com


FORT WORTH, Texas, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Board certified plastic surgeon Dr. Emily J. Kirby, medical director of Kirby Plastic Surgery in Fort Worth, was recently selected to serve as a consultant for the global pharmaceutical manufacturer Allergan, Inc. (maker of BOTOX, Juvederm fillers, Natrelle breast implants, and many other top cosmetic medical products) as a member of the Plastic and Regenerative Medicine Advisory Board.

She and other leading surgeons from around the United States were invited to serve on the Advisory Board, which met on June 3, 2017 in Denver, Colorado to discuss current and future goals for research, patient care, and growth in the field of aesthetic and reconstructive medicine. At the meeting, Dr. Kirby offered her perspectives on topics such as the development of new cosmetic products and technologies as well as how plastic surgeons and Allergan can collaborate to improve patient care and options in regenerative medicine.

Dr. Kirby comments on being selected to serve on the Allergan Advisory Board: "By serving on the board, I can actively foster growth and innovation in aesthetic technology, products, and procedures, thus helping ensure we can continue to offer patients the safest, most effective treatments now and into the future. It is an honor to serve in this role and be on the cutting edge of the plastic surgery field."

About Dr. Kirby, Award-Winning Fort Worth Plastic Surgeon and Allergan Black Diamond Provider

Dr. Kirby is board certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery and a member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, the Association of Women Surgeons, and the American Society of Maxillofacial Surgeons, as well as several state and regional medical societies.

Since opening Kirby Plastic Surgery in 2011, Dr. Kirby has received 13 Patient's Choice Awards from Vitals and has been named a 4x Top Doctor by Fort Worth Magazine (2014 to 2017). In 2016, she was selected as a Texas Monthly Super Doctor "Texas Rising Star," and recently was named a Top Doctor by 360 West Magazine for 2017. She is also on the Healthgrades Honor Roll, and is among the top 10% of RealSelf Top Doctors.

In addition to Dr. Kirby's position on the Allergan Advisory Board, Kirby Plastic Surgery was recently awarded Black Diamond Status, an honor given to Allergan providers who demonstrate the highest level of skill and expertise as well as a high patient volume for BOTOX, Juvederm, Kybella, and Allergan breast implant procedures. Only the top 1% of Allergan providers nationwide carry this status.

Dr. Kirby attributes her success to her patient-centered approach as well as the skill and professionalism of her staff: "My patients' health, happiness, and well-being has always been my priority as a plastic surgeon and medical provider, and I founded Kirby Plastic Surgery on the principle that our patients' needs always come first. I am proud to have an immensely talented, dedicated staff who share this visionit is thanks to them that our patients know they will receive the utmost in care as well as the beautiful outcomes they are seeking."

About Kirby Plastic Surgery: Dr. Emily J. Kirby is a board certified plastic surgeon specializing in aesthetic and reconstructive procedures as well as non-surgical treatments. Her practice is located at 7250 Hawkins View Drive, Suite 412, Fort Worth, TX 76132. For more information, visit kirbyplasticsurgery.com or read some of Dr. Emily Kirby's reviews.





Media Contact: Randol Kirby, 817.292.4200

SOURCE Kirby Plastic Surgery

Related Links

http://www.kirbyplasticsurgery.com


By PTI: Kathmandu, Jul 19 (PTI) Seven persons, including four Indians, were arrested today for possessing 30 kg of hashish in Nepals Makwanpur district, police said.

A team of Hetauda Armed Police Force (APF) arrested the four Indians and three Nepalis during a raid on a hotel in Hetauda, a sub-metropolitan city in southern Nepals Makwanpur district, about 90 kilometres from the capital Kathmandu.

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The 30 kg of hashish was packed in Dhading district in 30 separate plastic wraps when the APF team caught them with the contraband, Kathmandu Post reported.

The police said they have also confiscated one vehicle with Indian registration number, 6 mobile phones and 33,000 Indian rupees from the arrested persons.

They said the arrested have been handed to the District Police Office along with the confiscated materials for further action. PTI MRJ AKJ MRJ

--- ENDS ---
LONDON, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- This report analyzes the worldwide markets for Quantum Cryptography in US$ Million.



The report provides separate comprehensive analytics for the US, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of World. Annual estimates and forecasts are provided for the period 2016 through 2024. Market data and analytics are derived from primary and secondary research. Company profiles are primarily based on public domain information including company URLs.





Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/131240/







The report profiles 27 companies including many key and niche players such as

- ID Quantique SA

- MagiQ Technologies, Inc.

- Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp.

- Nucrypt LLC

- Oki Electric Industry Company Ltd.





Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/131240/



QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHY MCP-1812 A GLOBAL STRATEGIC BUSINESS REPORT CONTENTS



I. INTRODUCTION, METHODOLOGY & PRODUCT DEFINITIONS

Study Reliability and Reporting Limitations

Disclaimers

Data Interpretation & Reporting Level

Quantitative Techniques & Analytics

Product Definitions and Scope of Study





II. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY





1. INDUSTRY OVERVIEW

Secure Communications - Defining the Need for Cryptography

Quantum Cryptography Offers Highly Protected Communications

A Pictorial Illustration of Quantum Cryptography:

Will the future be Quantum-driven?

Quantum Networks Bypass Hacking and Become Secure

Adoption in End-use Sector

Table 1: Global Quantum Encryption Market by End-Use Segment (2020 & 2030): Percentage Breakdown of Sales Revenues for Large-Scale Enterprises (including Banks); Research Institutions, Government Agencies & Defence Establishments; Small Scale Enterprises & Public Utilities; and Others (includes corresponding Graph/Chart)

Adoption in Regional Markets

Regional Initiatives in Quantum Cryptography Field

Competitive Scenario

Key Players in the Quantum Cryptography Market





2. MAJOR GROWTH DRIVERS, TRENDS & ISSUES

Growing Popularity of Crypto Cloud Computing System

Quantum Cryptography Driven by BYOD Policy Implementation

Researchers Striving to Overcome Limitations in Terrestrial QKD networks

Satellite QKD Networks to Complement Terrestrial QKD Networks

China Launches the World's First Quantum Satellite

Moving Beyond Point-to-Point Communications - An Important Step to Improve Commercialization Prospects

Quantum Access Network with Improved APDs to Enable Quantum Cryptography for Multiple Users

Threat of Cyber Crime Buoys Demand for Quantum Cryptography Solutions in Government Agencies

Growing Use of Cyber Security Solutions in Public Utilities

Demand for Cyber Security in Defense Sector on the Rise

Business Enterprises Drive Demand for QC-based Secure Communication Systems

Table 2: Global Market for IT Security Products by End-Use Application (2020 & 2030): Percentage Breakdown of Sales Revenues for End-point Security, Identity Authentication & Access Management, Internet Security, Messaging Security, Network Security, and Others (includes corresponding Graph/Chart)

Financial Services - A Key End Use Market for Information Security Solutions

Table 3: Leading Targets of Fraud (2016): Percentage Breakdown of Number of Breaches by Type of Asset (includes corresponding Graph/Chart)

Factors Affecting Implementation of Cyber Security Solutions by Enterprises Worldwide - Ranked in Order of Influence

Securing Internet Transaction: An Opportune Application Area for Quantum Cryptography

Quantum Cryptography to Secure Mobile Transactions

Table 4: World M-Payment Market (In US$ Million): 2016, 2018, and 2020 (includes corresponding Graph/Chart)

Strong Need for QKD Systems Compatibility with Existing Telecom Networks

New Protocol to Bring Quantum Cryptography to Mobile Telecommunications

Table 5: Worldwide Mobile Data Traffic by Device Type (2016 & 2018) - Percentage Share Breakdown of Monthly Data Traffic Volume for Laptops, Non-Smartphones, Smartphones, Tablets, and Others (includes corresponding Graph/Chart)

Table 6: Worldwide Mobile Data Traffic by Application (2016 & 2018) - Percentage Share Breakdown of Monthly Data Traffic Volume for Video, Data, File Sharing, and M2M, (includes corresponding Graph/Chart)

Quantum Cryptography Finds Application in Securing Data for Electric Grids

Relativistic Quantum Cryptography to Ensure Secure Bit Commitment

Refinement of Photon Detectors Essential for Widespread Adoption

Researchers Identify Alternative Method to Sidestep Technical Flaw in Photon Detectors

Advanced Secure Communications through Improved Single- Photon Emitter

High Cost of Infrastructure and Hardware: A Cause of Concern

Dire Need for Established Standards





3. QUANTUM COMPUTERS - A MAJOR THREAT

Advent of Quantum Computers and Ensuing Security Breaches

Involvement of Governments and Technology Companies

Skepticism Persists .

Software Development Efforts Gear Up

Corporate and Regional Initiatives towards Quantum Computing

Quantum Computing Poses Serious Threat to Encryption

Extent of Threat

Quantum Computing Driving Conventional Cryptography to Obsolescence

Time Frame for Quantum Computers to Become a Reality

Urgent Need for Post-Quantum Cryptography

Opportunities Abound Despite Risks

Increasing Interest among Cryptographers towards Post Quantum Cryptography

Google Initializes Post Quantum Cryptography Experiment





4. CRYPTOGRAPHY - A PRELUDE

Cryptosystems

A Symmetric Cryptosystem

Unconditionally Secure or Perfect Cryptosystem

How Does One-Time Pad Works?

One-Time Pad Cryptosystem: The Hurdles

Classical Cryptography

Private Key Cryptography System

Public Key Cryptography System

How Does Public-Key Cryptography Works?

Public-key Cryptosystems in Common Use

RSA Cryptosystem

ElGamal Cryptosystem

Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems

McEliece Cryptosystem

Limitations in Public-key Cryptosystems Led to the Emergence of Quantum Cryptography





5. QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHY - AN OVERVIEW

A Prelude

Quantum Theory

Quantum Mechanics in Cryptography

Quantum Cryptography and the Quantum Key Distribution (QKD)

Classical Cryptography Vs. Quantum Cryptography

Quantum Cryptography: An Evolution Scan

Global Premiere for Quantum Cryptography in 2004

Uncertainty

Entanglement

Quantum Cryptographic Procedure

A Pictorial Representation of Polarization Readings

Quantum Key Distribution: A Primer

Key QKD Protocols

Data Transmitting Process

Data Receiving/Recovering Process

Quantum Key Distribution with "BB84" Protocol

Pictorial Representation of Quantum Bit (or Qubit) Polarization Matching for "BB84" Protocol for Transmitting and Receiving Process

Ekert 91 Protocol for QKD

Quantum Key Distribution with "B92" Protocol

Pictorial Representation of Quantum Bit-Polarization Matching for "B92" Scheme's Transmitting Side

Pictorial Representation of Quantum Bit-Polarization Matching for "B92" Scheme's Receiving Side

SARG04 Protocol for QKD

Continuum Based

Coherent One Way Protocol

Major Steps Involved in QKD Process

Raw Key Extraction

Error Estimation

Key Reconciliation

Privacy Amplification

Position-based Quantum Cryptography: A Review

What is the Bounded- and noisy-quantum-storage model?

Applications

QC for Secure Financial Transactions

Secure Voting

Smart Power Grid





6. RESEARCH/INNOVATIONS IN QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHY

Research of Satellite-based Quantum Encryption for Longer Distances

Waterloo Quantum Space Project Receives Canadian Government Support

Newer Innovations Enable Fast and Secure Quantum Cryptography

One-way Quantum Steering to Drive Quantum Cryptography





7. RECENT INDUSTRY ACTIVITY

SK Telecom Enters Agreement with Nokia for Quantum Cryptography

Quintessence Labs Receives Additional Capital Investment from Westpac Group

ID Quantique SA announces partnership with China Quantum Technologies

SK Telecom Invests in ID Quantique

Nokia Acquires Alcatel-Lucent

KPN Implements End-to-end Quantum Key Distribution (QKD)

Acronis Partners with ID Quantique





8. PRODUCT LAUNCHES

SK Telecom Announces Successful Testing of Advanced Quantum Repeater

BT and Toshiba Launches UK's First Quantum Security Showcase

ZTE Launches the World's First OTN-based Quantum Encryption Transport Solution

KEYMILE Launches the New Encryption Card

Alibaba releases Quantum Cryptography Communication product





9. FOCUS ON SELECT GLOBAL MARKET PARTICIPANTS

ID Quantique SA (Switzerland)

MagiQ Technologies, Inc. (USA)

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (Japan)

Nucrypt LLC (USA)

Oki Electric Industry Company Ltd (Japan)

QuintessenceLabs, Inc. (Australia)

Raytheon BBN Technologies (USA)

SeQureNet SarL (Italy)

SK Telecom (Korea)

Toshiba Corp. (Japan)

Universal Quantum Devices (Canada)

10. GLOBAL MARKET PERSPECTIVE

Table 7: World Recent Past, Current & Future Analysis for Quantum Cryptography by Geographic Region - US, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of World Markets Independently Analyzed with Annual Sales Figures in US$ Million for Years 2016 through 2024 (includes corresponding Graph/Chart)

Table 8: World 14-Year Perspective for Quantum Cryptography by Geographic Region - Percentage Breakdown of Dollar Sales for US, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of World Markets for Years 2017 & 2024 (includes corresponding Graph/Chart)





III. MARKET





1. THE UNITED STATES

A.Market Analysis

Battelle Sets Up the First Commercial QKD System in the US

Strategic Corporate Development

Select Key Players

B.Market Analytics

Table 9: The US Recent Past, Current & Future Analysis for Quantum Cryptography Market Analyzed with Annual Sales Figures in US$ Million for Years 2016 through 2024 (includes corresponding Graph/Chart)





2. EUROPE

A.Market Analysis

Russia Ties up with India to Provide QKD Technology for Blocking Hackers

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) Technology Facilitates Transmission of Quantum Key from Air to Ground

Strategic Corporate Developments

Product Launch

Select Key Players

B.Market Analytics

Table 10: Europe Recent Past, Current & Future Analysis for Quantum Cryptography Market Analyzed with Annual Sales Figures in US$ Million for Years 2016 through 2024 (includes corresponding Graph/Chart)





3. ASIA-PACIFIC

A.Market Analysis

Chinese Scientists Build the World's First Quantum Satellite Network

North Korea and South Korea Race for QC Commercialization for Military Communication Advantage

Strategic Corporate Developments

Product Launches

Select Key Players

B.Market Analytics

Table 11: Asia-Pacific Recent Past, Current & Future Analysis for Quantum Cryptography Market Analyzed with Annual Sales Figures in US$ Million for Years 2016 through 2024 (includes corresponding Graph/Chart)





4. REST OF WORLD

A.Market Analysis

Canada

Select Key Player

B.Market Analytics

Table 12: Rest of World Recent Past, Current & Future Analysis for Quantum Cryptography Market Analyzed with Annual Sales Figures in US$ Million for Years 2016 through 2024 (includes corresponding Graph/Chart)





IV. COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

Total Companies Profiled: 27 (including Divisions/Subsidiaries - 28) The United States (6) Canada (1) Japan (7) Europe (5) - Germany (1) - The United Kingdom (2) - Rest of Europe (2) Asia-Pacific (Excluding Japan) (9)

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CHICAGO, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Grainger (NYSE: GWW) today reported results for the 2017 second quarter ended June 30, 2017. Sales of $2.6 billion increased 2 percent versus $2.6 billion in the second quarter of 2016. There were 64 selling days in the 2017 second quarter, the same as the 2016 second quarter. Net earnings for the quarter of $98 million were down 43 percent versus $173 million in 2016. Earnings per share of $1.67 declined 40 percent versus $2.79 in 2016.

"The second quarter was in line with our expectations, as we saw continued volume growth from our strategic pricing initiatives in the United States. We remain on schedule to roll out web prices on our entire assortment on Aug. 1," said Chief Executive Officer DG Macpherson. "Outside the United States, we took aggressive action to streamline our portfolio and focus on profitable businesses, as we announced the wind-down of the business in Colombia and previously announced the closing of 59 branches in Canada this year. Based on our confidence from what we are seeing, we are reiterating our guidance for the year," Macpherson concluded.

The company reiterated its 2017 sales and earnings per share guidance of sales growth of 1 to 4 percent and adjusted earnings per share of $10.00 to $11.30. The company's previous 2017 guidance was communicated on April 18, 2017.

Ron Jadin, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer announced today that he will be retiring at year-end. Jadin joined Grainger in 1998 and has served in various financial roles including as CFO since 2008. The company and the Board of Directors thank Jadin for his many contributions during his tenure. An external search has been launched to identify his successor.

The second quarter contained the following restructuring items:



Three Months Ended June 30,

2017 2016 % Diluted earnings per share reported $ 1.67 $ 2.79 (40)% Pretax adjustments:





Branch gains (United States) (0.23) (0.25)

Restructuring (United States) 0.23 0.10

Restructuring (Canada) 0.35 0.13

Inventory reserve adjustment (Canada)

0.16

Restructuring (Other Businesses) 0.71



Restructuring (Unallocated expense)

0.15

Total pre-tax adjustments 1.06 0.29

Tax effect (1) 0.01 (0.08)

Discrete tax item

(0.11)

Total, net of tax 1.07 0.10

Diluted earnings per share adjusted $ 2.74 $ 2.89 (5)%



(1) The tax impact of adjustments is calculated based on the income tax rate in each applicable jurisdiction, subject to deductibility limitations and the company's ability to realize the associated text benefits.

In the U.S. segment, gains from the sale of assets were essentially offset by restructuring costs. The Canadian business announced plans to close 59 branches in 2017 as part of restructuring to return to profitable growth. The company also announced the wind-down of its business in Colombia. In total, the restructuring items represented $1.07 per share in charges. Excluding restructuring, net earnings decreased 10 percent and earnings per share decreased 5 percent.

Company

Sales increased 2 percent in the 2017 second quarter versus the prior year, driven by an increase of 7 percentage points from volume, partially offset by declines of 3 percentage points in price, 1 percentage point from foreign exchange and 1 percentage point from the timing of the Easter holiday.

Company operating earnings of $232 million for the 2017 second quarter declined 24 percent versus $306 million in the 2016 quarter. The decline was driven primarily by charges from the company's restructuring costs. Excluding restructuring in both years, operating earnings were down 9 percent.

The company has two reportable business segments, the United States and Canada, which represented approximately 80 percent of company sales for the quarter. The remaining businesses, which include the single channel online businesses, are included in Other Businesses and are not reportable segments.

United States

Sales for the U.S. segment were up 1 percent versus the 2016 second quarter. The increase was driven by a 5 percentage point increase from volume and 1 percentage point from intercompany sales, partially offset by a 4 percentage point decline in price and a 1 percentage point decline from the timing of the Easter holiday. Sales to customers in the Retail and Natural Resources end markets led the sales performance in the quarter.

Operating earnings for the U.S. segment declined 11 percent in the quarter driven by lower gross profit and higher operating expenses. Gross profit margins for the quarter declined 1.3 percentage points driven by the strategic price initiatives. In the 2017 second quarter, operating expenses were up 4 percent, which included a $13 million benefit from the gain on sale of branches and $14 million of restructuring charges.

Canada

Second quarter 2017 sales for the Canada segment decreased 3 percent in U.S. dollars and increased 2 percent in local currency. The 2 percent increase consisted of 2 percentage points from volume and a 2 percentage point benefit from the favorable comparison related to the Alberta wildfires in 2016, partially offset by 1 percentage point from lower price and a 1 percentage point decline from the timing of the Easter holiday.

The business in Canada posted a $28 million operating loss in the 2017 second quarter versus a $28 million operating loss in the prior year. Current year performance was primarily driven by improved gross margin offset by lower sales and restructuring charges. The gross profit margin in Canada increased 4.1 percentage points versus the prior year largely due to a favorable comparison related to an inventory reserve adjustment in the prior year. Operating expenses increased 8 percent. The 2017 second quarter contained $20 million of restructuring charges related to facility and headcount reductions.

Other Businesses

Sales for the Other Businesses increased 11 percent versus the prior year, consisting of 14 percentage points of growth from volume and price, partially offset by a 3 percentage point decline from foreign exchange, primarily attributable to weakness in the British pound. The performance was driven by 23 percent sales growth for the single channel online businesses.

The Other Businesses posted an operating loss of $14 million in the 2017 second quarter versus $30 million of operating earnings in the prior year. This performance included the charges from the wind-down of the business in Colombia and was partially offset by strong results from Zoro in the United States and MonotaRO in Japan. Excluding restructuring, operating earnings for the Other Businesses were $27 million.

Other

Other income and expense was a net expense of $25 million in the 2017 second quarter versus a net expense of $23 million in the 2016 second quarter. This increase was primarily due to interest expense from the additional debt the company issued in May 2017 and expected losses from the company's investments in clean energy. For the quarter, the effective tax rate in 2017 was 48.4 percent versus 36.6 percent in 2016. The increase is primarily due to the wind-down of the business in Colombia. The company is currently projecting an effective tax rate of 35.0 to 36.0 percent for the year 2017.

Cash Flow

Operating cash flow was $191 million in the 2017 second quarter versus $182 million in the 2016 second quarter. The company used the cash generated during the quarter and proceeds from the debt offering to invest in the business, pay down short-term debt and return cash to shareholders through share repurchase and dividends. Capital expenditures were $52 million in the 2017 second quarter versus $54 million in the second quarter of 2016. In the 2017 second quarter, Grainger returned $234 million to shareholders through $80 million in dividends and $154 million to buy back 780,000 shares of stock.

Year-to-Date

For the six months ended June 30, 2017, sales of $5.2 billion increased 2 percent versus $5.1 billion in the six months ended June 30, 2016. There were 128 selling days in the first six months of both years. Net earnings decreased 24 percent to $273 million versus $359 million in the first half of 2016. Earnings per share for the six months decreased 20 percent to $4.61 versus $5.77 in the first half of 2016.

The first six months contained the following restructuring items:



Six Months Ended June 30,

2017 2016 % Diluted earnings per share reported $ 4.61 $ 5.77 (20)% Pretax adjustments:





Branch gains (United States) (0.39) (0.25)

Restructuring (United States) 0.28 0.36

Restructuring (Canada) 0.37 0.18

Inventory reserve adjustment (Canada)

0.16

Restructuring (Other Businesses) 0.70



Restructuring (Unallocated expense)

0.15

Total pre-tax adjustments 0.96 0.60

Tax effect (1) 0.05 (0.19)

Discrete tax item

(0.11)

Total, net of tax 1.01 0.30

Diluted earnings per share adjusted $ 5.62 $ 6.07 (7)%



(1) The tax impact of adjustments is calculated based on the income tax rate in each applicable jurisdiction, subject to deductibility limitations and the company's ability to realize the associated text benefits.

Excluding the items noted in the table, net earnings declined 12 percent and earnings per share declined 7 percent.

Webcast

Grainger will conduct a live conference call and webcast at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on July 19, 2017, to discuss the second quarter. The webcast will be hosted by DG Macpherson and Ron Jadin and can be accessed at www.grainger.com/investor. For those unable to participate in the live event, a webcast replay will be available for 90 days at www.grainger.com/investor.

W.W. Grainger, Inc., with 2016 sales of $10.1 billion, is North America's leading broad line supplier of maintenance, repair and operating products, with operations also in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Visit www.grainger.com/investor to view information about the company, including a supplement regarding 2017 second quarter results. The Grainger website also includes more information through our Fact Book and Corporate Social Responsibility report.

Safe Harbor Statement

All statements in this communication, other than those relating to historical facts, are "forward-looking statements." These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to a number of assumptions, risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control, which could cause actual results to differ materially from such statements. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements about future strategic plans and future financial and operating results. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations include, among others: higher product costs or other expenses; a major loss of customers; loss or disruption of source of supply; increased competitive pricing pressures; failure to develop or implement new technologies; the implementation, timing and success of our strategic pricing initiatives; the outcome of pending and future litigation or governmental or regulatory proceedings, including with respect to wage and hour, anti-bribery and corruption, environmental, advertising, privacy and cybersecurity matters; investigations, inquiries, audits and changes in laws and regulations; disruption of information technology or data security systems; general industry or market conditions; general global economic conditions; currency exchange rate fluctuations; market volatility; commodity price volatility; labor shortages; facilities disruptions or shutdowns; higher fuel costs or disruptions in transportation services; natural and other catastrophes; unanticipated weather conditions; loss of key members of management; our ability to operate, integrate and leverage acquired businesses; changes in credit ratings; changes in effective tax rates and other factors which can be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent periodic reports filed on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q, which are available on our Investor Relations website. Forward-looking statements are given only as of the date of this communication and we disclaim any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF EARNINGS (Unaudited) (In thousands, except for per share amounts)



Three Months Ended June 30,

Six Months Ended June 30,

2017

2016

2017

2016 Net sales $ 2,615,269



$ 2,563,668



$ 5,156,398



$ 5,070,206

Cost of merchandise sold 1,575,313



1,523,609



3,097,250



2,985,094

Gross profit 1,039,956



1,040,059



2,059,148



2,085,112

Warehousing, marketing and administrative expenses 807,891



734,470



1,531,595



1,462,431

Operating earnings 232,065



305,589



527,553



622,681

Other income (expense):













Interest income 465



162



658



327

Interest expense (19,905)



(16,806)



(36,884)



(30,531)

Loss from equity method investment (6,121)



(5,427)



(14,495)



(11,815)

Other non-operating income and (expense) 692



(538)



1,037



(98)

Total other income (expense) (24,869)



(22,609)



(49,684)



(42,117)

Earnings before income taxes 207,196



282,980



477,869



580,564

Income taxes 100,237



103,535



188,057



209,475

Net earnings 106,959



179,445



289,812



371,089

Net earnings attributable to noncontrolling interest 9,038



6,769



17,147



11,700

Net earnings attributable to W.W. Grainger, Inc. $ 97,921



$ 172,676



$ 272,665



$ 359,389

Earnings per share -Basic $ 1.68



$ 2.81



$ 4.64



$ 5.81

-Diluted $ 1.67



$ 2.79



$ 4.61



$ 5.77

Average number of shares outstanding -Basic 58,013



60,891



58,363



61,279

-Diluted 58,287



61,302



58,741



61,700

















Diluted Earnings Per Share













Net earnings as reported $ 97,921



$ 172,676



$ 272,665



$ 359,389

Earnings allocated to participating securities (643)



(1,539)



(2,125)



(3,280)

Net earnings available to common shareholders $ 97,278



$ 171,137



$ 270,540



$ 356,109

Weighted average shares adjusted for dilutive securities 58,287



61,302



58,741



61,700

Diluted earnings per share $ 1.67



$ 2.79



$ 4.61



$ 5.77



SEGMENT RESULTS (Unaudited) (In thousands of dollars)



Three Months Ended June 30,

Six Months Ended June 30,

2017

2016

2017

2016 Sales













United States $ 1,999,153



$ 1,978,542



$ 3,952,597



$ 3,944,809

Canada 189,113



194,418



375,254



373,189

Other Businesses 526,560



474,166



1,023,967



919,500

Intersegment sales (99,557)



(83,458)



(195,420)



(167,292)

Net sales to external customers $ 2,615,269



$ 2,563,668



$ 5,156,398



$ 5,070,206

















Operating earnings













United States $ 312,289



$ 348,938



$ 624,759



$ 680,795

Canada (27,727)



(27,741)



(44,456)



(40,088)

Other Businesses (14,222)



29,724



17,285



51,508

Unallocated expense (38,275)



(45,332)



(70,035)



(69,534)

Operating earnings $ 232,065



$ 305,589



$ 527,553



$ 622,681

















Company operating margin 8.9 %

11.9 %

10.2 %

12.3 % ROIC* for Company







21.9 %

25.0 % ROIC* for United States







40.0 %

43.2 % ROIC* for Canada







(16.4) %

(13.5) %



















*The GAAP financial statements are the source for all amounts used in the Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) calculation. ROIC is calculated using operating earnings divided by net working assets (a 3-point average for the year). Net working assets are working assets minus working liabilities defined as follows: working assets equal total assets less cash equivalents (3-point average of $66.9 million), deferred taxes, and investments in unconsolidated entities, plus the LIFO reserve (3-point average of $381.7 million). Working liabilities are the sum of trade payables, accrued compensation and benefits, accrued contributions to employees' profit sharing plans, and accrued expenses.

CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS (Unaudited) Preliminary (In thousands of dollars)

Assets June 30, 2017

December 31, 2016 Cash and cash equivalents $ 275,065



$ 274,146

Accounts receivable  net 1,369,626



1,223,096

Inventories 1,397,804



1,406,470

Prepaid expenses and other assets 143,852



116,517

Total current assets 3,186,347



3,020,229

Property, buildings and equipment  net 1,392,196



1,420,891

Deferred income taxes 79,264



64,775

Goodwill 536,580



527,150

Intangibles  net 592,473



586,126

Other assets 75,021



75,136

Total assets $ 5,861,881



$ 5,694,307

Liabilities and Shareholders' Equity





Short-term debt (1) $ 129,066



$ 386,140

Current maturities of long-term debt 29,232



19,966

Trade accounts payable 692,689



650,092

Accrued compensation and benefits 197,073



212,525

Accrued contributions to employees' profit sharing plans 48,905



54,948

Accrued expenses 291,225



290,207

Income taxes payable 22,387



15,059

Total current liabilities 1,410,577



1,628,937

Long-term debt (1) 2,267,872



1,840,946

Deferred income taxes and tax uncertainties 135,270



126,101

Employment-related and other non-current liabilities 199,965



192,555

Shareholders' equity (2) 1,848,197



1,905,768

Total liabilities and shareholders' equity $ 5,861,881



$ 5,694,307







(1) Long-term debt increased $427 million primarily due to the issuance of $400 million of Senior Notes in May 2017, with proceeds used primarily to repay short-term debt and repurchase stock. (2) Common stock outstanding as of June 30, 2017 was 57,690,673 compared with 58,804,314 shares at December 31, 2016, primarily due to share repurchases.

CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOWS (Unaudited) Preliminary (In thousands of dollars)



Six Months Ended June 30,

2017

2016 Cash flows from operating activities:





Net earnings $ 289,812



$ 371,089

Provision for losses on accounts receivable 12,769



8,282

Deferred income taxes and tax uncertainties (7,339)



4,565

Depreciation and amortization 128,195



113,496

Net losses (gains) from sales of assets and non-cash charges 12,537



(15,564)

Stock-based compensation 20,030



21,135

Losses from equity method investment 14,495



11,815

Change in operating assets and liabilities  net of business acquisitions:





Accounts receivable (136,844)



(98,394)

Inventories 29,936



8,733

Prepaid expenses and other assets (24,232)



(6,143)

Trade accounts payable 36,817



43,338

Other current liabilities (18,989)



(112,256)

Current income taxes payable 6,360



(1,368)

Accrued employment-related benefits cost 3,655



3,877

Other  net 4,976



(9,512)

Net cash provided by operating activities 372,178



343,093

Cash flows from investing activities:





Additions to property, buildings and equipment (131,147)



(105,717)

Proceeds from sales of assets 69,758



43,119

Equity method investment (13,300)



(10,340)

Other  net (146)



(597)

Net cash used in investing activities (74,835)



(73,535)

Cash flows from financing activities:





Net (decrease) increase in commercial paper (269,841)



19,888

Borrowings under lines of credit 30,374



18,501

Payments against lines of credit (18,036)



(19,306)

Net increase of long-term debt 407,873



263,303

Proceeds from stock options exercised 27,064



26,191

Excess tax benefits from stock-based compensation 



9,770

Payments for employee taxes withheld from stock awards (16,719)



(16,704)

Purchase of treasury stock (313,562)



(412,647)

Cash dividends paid (151,637)



(147,480)

Net cash used in financing activities (304,484)



(258,484)

Exchange rate effect on cash and cash equivalents 8,060



14,787

Net change in cash and cash equivalents 919



25,861

Cash and cash equivalents at beginning of year 274,146



290,136

Cash and cash equivalents at end of period $ 275,065



$ 315,997



SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION - CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF EARNINGS

RECONCILIATION OF GAAP TO NON-GAAP FINANCIAL MEASURES (Unaudited)

(In thousands of dollars)

The company supplemented the reporting of financial information determined under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) with certain non-GAAP financial measures, which the company refers to as "adjusted" measures, including adjusted operating earnings, adjusted segment operating earnings, adjusted net earnings and adjusted diluted earnings per share. Adjusted measures exclude items that may not be indicative of core operating results. The company believes that these non-GAAP measures provide meaningful information to assist shareholders in understanding financial results and assessing prospects for future performance. Management believes adjusted operating earnings, adjusted net earnings and adjusted diluted earnings per share are important indicators of operations because they exclude items that may not be indicative of our core operating results, and provide a better baseline for analyzing trends in our underlying businesses. Because non-GAAP financial measures are not standardized, it may not be possible to compare these financial measures with other companies' non-GAAP financial measures having the same or similar names. These adjusted financial measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for reported results. These non-GAAP financial measures reflect an additional way of viewing aspects of operations that, when viewed with GAAP results, provide a more complete understanding of the business. The company strongly encourages investors and shareholders to review company financial statements and publicly-filed reports in their entirety and not to rely on any single financial measure.

The reconciliations provided below reconcile the non-GAAP financial measures adjusted net earnings, adjusted diluted earnings per share, adjusted operating earnings and adjusted segment operating earnings with GAAP financial measures:



Three Months Ended June 30,



Six Months Ended June 30,



2017

2016 %

2017

2016 % Operating earnings reported $ 232,065



$ 305,589

(24)%

$ 527,553



$ 622,681

(15)% Branch gains (United States) (13,438)



(15,376)





(22,826)



(15,380)



Restructuring (United States) 13,541



6,024





16,607



22,435



Restructuring (Canada) 20,485



8,055





21,572



11,132



Inventory reserve adjustment (Canada)





9,847











9,847



Restructuring (Other Businesses) 41,510











41,510









Restructuring (Unallocated expense)





8,947











8,947



Subtotal 62,098



17,497





56,863



36,981



Operating earnings adjusted $ 294,163



$ 323,086

(9)%

$ 584,416



$ 659,662

(11)%

SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION - CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF EARNINGS RECONCILIATION OF GAAP TO NON-GAAP FINANCIAL MEASURES (Unaudited) (In thousands of dollars)



Three Months Ended June 30,



Six Months Ended June 30,



2017

2016 %

2017

2016 % Segment operating earnings adjusted

















United States 312,392



339,586





618,540



687,850



Canada (7,242)



(9,839)





(22,884)



(19,109)



Other Businesses 27,288



29,724





58,795



51,508



Unallocated expense (38,275)



(36,385)





(70,035)



(60,587)



Segment operating earnings adjusted $ 294,163



$ 323,086

(9)%

$ 584,416



$ 659,662

(11)%



















Company operating margin adjusted 11.2 %

12.6 %



11.3 %

13.0 %

ROIC* for Company









24.3 %

26.5 %

ROIC* for United States









39.6 %

43.6 %

ROIC* for Canada









(8.4) %

(6.3) %













































Three Months Ended June 30,



Six Months Ended June 30,



2017

2016 %

2017

2016 % Net earnings reported $ 97,921



$ 172,676

(43)%

$ 272,665



$ 359,389

(24)% Branch gains (United States) (8,419)



(9,622)





(14,300)



(9,625)



Restructuring (United States) 11,161



3,770





13,081



14,040



Restructuring (Canada) 16,498



5,922





17,301



8,184



Inventory reserve adjustment (Canada)





7,240











7,240



Restructuring (Other Businesses) 43,969











43,969









Restructuring (Unallocated expense)





5,599











5,599



Discrete tax item





(7,075)











(7,075)



Subtotal 63,209



5,834





60,051



18,363



Net earnings adjusted $ 161,130



$ 178,510

(10)%

$ 332,716



$ 377,752

(12)%



















Diluted earnings per share reported $ 1.67



$ 2.79

(40)%

$ 4.61



$ 5.77

(20)% Pretax adjustments:

















Branch gains (United States) (0.23)



(0.25)





(0.39)



(0.25)



Restructuring (United States) 0.23



0.10





0.28



0.36



Restructuring (Canada) 0.35



0.13





0.37



0.18



Inventory reserve adjustment (Canada)





0.16











0.16



Restructuring (Other Businesses) 0.71











0.70









Restructuring (Unallocated expense)





0.15











0.15



Total pretax adjustments 1.06



0.29





0.96



0.60



Tax effect (1) 0.01



(0.08)





0.05



(0.19)



Discrete tax item





(0.11)











(0.11)



Total, net of tax 1.07



0.10





1.01



0.30



Diluted earnings per share adjusted $ 2.74



$ 2.89

(5)%

$ 5.62



$ 6.07

(7)%





















(1) The tax impact of adjustments is calculated based on the income tax rate in each applicable jurisdiction, subject to deductibility limitations and the company's ability to realize the associated text benefits.

SOURCE W.W. Grainger, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.grainger.com


SAN FRANCISCO and TEL AVIV, Israel, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- GuardiCore, a leader in internal data center and cloud security, today announced it would unveil a significant vulnerability affecting all recent VMware vSphere versions including 6.5, 6.0, 5.5 and provide mitigation at the upcoming Black Hat USA 2017.

In his session entitled, Escalating Insider Threats Using VMware's API, scheduled for July 27, 9:00 AM, Ofri Ziv, Head of GuardiCore Labs, will unveil a vulnerability in the VMware vSphere platform, today's number one data center virtualization solution. A malicious actor can break the security model of host-guest isolation - crucial for compliance and defense - and gain root privileges on guest machines. As part of his session, Ziv will demo the attack and show how this vulnerability can be mitigated. GuardiCore Labs reported the issue to VMware on May 27, 2017 and a security advisory will be released by VMware after the Black Hat session.

"Today's dynamic and virtualized environments present evolving security challenges and demand strict attention to policy and infrastructure management," said Ziv. "Through the VMware example, we hope to shed light on the continued importance of monitoring and enforcing privileges in the modern data center."

GuardiCore Labs is a global cyber security research team that conducts in-depth research and analysis, providing the security industry with actionable insights into the latest and most advanced threats facing data centers and clouds. GuardiCore Labs delivers cutting-edge breach detection and response methodologies to help GuardiCore customers continually enhance their security posture to protect critical business applications and infrastructure. GuardiCore Labs' recent, high-profile threat discoveries include the Bondnet botnet used to mine different cryptocurrencies, a variant of the MongoDB ransomware attack targeting MySQL databases, the Trojan.sysscan malware and the Infection Monkey that was presented at Black Hat 2016.

About GuardiCore

GuardiCore is an innovator in internal data center and cloud security focused on delivering more accurate and effective ways to stop advanced threats through real-time breach detection and response. Developed by the top cyber security experts in their field, GuardiCore is changing the way organizations are fighting cyber attacks in their data centers. For more information, visit www.guardicore.com.

CONTACT:

Cinthia Portugal

Guyer Group

[email protected]

206.619.8183

SOURCE GuardiCore

Related Links

http://www.guardicore.com


SEATTLE, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- HaloSource, Inc., (LON: HALO) a global leader in clean water technology, today detailed plans to accelerate its presence in the global drinking water filtration market as the company inks a significant distribution deal and secures a round of strategic financing.

James Thompson, HaloSource's CEO, said that move is a logical extension for the company, long-known for its innovative technological solutions for delivering best-in-class protection from common drinking water contaminants.

"Since our founding, we've been building an extensive technology portfolio of ways to treat water, powering some of the world's foremost brands in household drinking water devices on an OEM basis," Thompson said. "We are excited about our ability to use this wealth of knowledge to introduce new technologies and consumer products into the drinking water device market  a market worth billions. We have innovated in a way that no other company has, and now we will capitalize on those innovations to offer our own unique, proprietary products."

The Seattle-based company, known for its proprietary HaloPure technology that removes bacteria and viruses from drinking water, is also in the final stages of commercializing a technology for removing heavy metals, including lead. It recently closed its latest round of financing from a group of well-recognized institutional investors including Invesco, Hargreave Hale, and Woodford Investment Management along with Italian manufacturing partner Chematek.

In addition, the company announced that it has finalized a five-year distribution agreement with Shanghai-based JiuBan Industrial Co., a Chinese e-commerce company, to market HaloSource's new astreaTM line of water-filtration products including water bottles, water pitchers and replacement cartridges. HaloSource is expected to earn more than $10 million in revenue with this distribution deal in China, a location where the water filtration products market is growing at more than 30 percent annually.

According to Kent Johnson, managing partner of Alexander Hutton Venture Partners  as well as one of the first HaloSource investors and a current board member  HaloSource's water-purification technology is available at a time of great need.

"When we began testing HaloSource's ability to provide safe and cost-effective drinking water 15 years ago, we knew it had great potential," Johnson said. "Now the crisis around drinking water has come to the fore, and HaloSource stands ready with an immediately executable solution.

"In a way, HaloSource had to wait for the market conditions to evolve," Johnson added. "It shows the value of the company's perseverance."

HaloSource's first two entrants in the market this year a water pitcher and water bottle marketed under the astreaTM brand  will use patented technology that removes 99.9 percent of bacteria and viruses, as well as heavy metals, to ensure that the water is safe to drink. Thompson, who assumed the role of CEO after 12 years with the company as CFO and business development leader, says the new funding will be used exclusively to drive the company's go-to-market strategy for the astreaTM line, using a variety of channels both on and off-line.

"We believe that we have a perfect alignment of technology-driven products and consumer need in a world where people are drinking more water for health reasons, but worry about the continued deterioration of water quality. The awareness of the issue grows every day," Thompson said.

About HaloSource

HaloSource, Inc. innovates and integrates technologies to deliver clean drinking water solutions to partners with trusted brands around the world. Since the company's origin in 1999, creating positive social impact has been the foundation of the HaloSource business, with the mission to solve complex clean water challenges. The water filtration company is considered a key innovator in the residential drinking water market, supplying cutting-edge proprietary technology to household appliance makers and suppliers. HaloSource solutions span across all market segments, providing adaptable water purification and adsorption solutions that range from entry-level gravity filters to high-end pressurized systems. The company's patented technology is used to serve clean, safe drinking water to more than 10 million people globally.

Contact:

Annie Alley

206-443-9357

Firmani + Associates Inc.

[email protected]

SOURCE HaloSource, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.halosource.com


First Champion Announced "I am pleased to announce that our first HCR ManorCare Champion of Caring is Lorna Downer, a certified nursing assistant (CNA) at ManorCare Health Services in New Providence, New Jersey," said Steve Cavanaugh, executive vice president and chief operating officer. "I congratulate and thank her for exhibiting the true spirit of caring that defines our company." Lorna has been a CNA at ManorCare  New Providence for 34 years. After many hard years of caring and supporting siblings as a surrogate mother in her native Jamaica, Lorna found her health care calling soon after arriving in America and training to become a CNA.

Over her long tenure with our company, co-workers have recognized her dependability, energy and compassion. Patients and families have recognized her positive attitude, ever-present smile, and the sense of security and comfort she affords them. She has had to endure personal hardships, but at no time did she waiver or change in the way she went about her calling as a hardworking, dedicated caregiver. She has served as a stellar role model for the young individuals starting their health care careers and aspiring to be quality caregivers.

Lorna was chosen from among seven finalists, each representing one of HCR ManorCare's operating divisions. Each of the finalists had already distinguished her- or himself by being chosen a Divisional Champion of Caring from among thousands of employees. The six other finalists:





Michael Arthur , Dietary Aide, Heartland of Westerville, Ohio RC



, Dietary Aide, Heartland of RC Tanya Beaver , Home Health Aide, Heartland Hospice of Kenosha, Wisconsin



, Home Health Aide, Heartland Hospice of Agnes Dabb, Nurse Supervisor, ManorCare Nursing and Rehab Center  Kingsford, Michigan



Renita Horne , Activities Assistant, ManorCare Health Services  Ruxton, Maryland



, Activities Assistant, ManorCare Health Services  Oralia (Sonia) Rodriguez , Housekeeping Aide, ManorCare Health Services  Elk Grove Village, Illinois



, Housekeeping Aide, ManorCare Health Services  Griselda Ruiz , Resident Caregiver/Med Tech, Arden Courts of Austin, Texas

Each of our finalists had the qualities we were looking for in an HCR ManorCare Champion of Caring. We congratulate Lorna, our HCR ManorCare Champion of Caring, and also her peer finalists. All are winners.

The HCR ManorCare health care family comprises locations that are leading providers of short-term, post-acute services and long-term care. More than 50,000 caregivers nationwide provide quality care for patients and residents through a network of nearly 500 skilled nursing and rehabilitation centers, memory care communities, outpatient rehabilitation clinics, and hospice and home health care agencies. These locations operate primarily under the respected Heartland, ManorCare Health Services and Arden Courts names.

SOURCE HCR ManorCare
"After an extensive review of our U.S. importation organizations, and as a result of the evolution of the U.S. market, we are excited to partner with U.S. Beverage in our strategy to build our extensive portfolio of specialty international brands," said Mr. Lopez-Portillo. "HEINEKEN has partnered with U.S.B. in part for a number of years and has proven itself as a builder of premium brands throughout the United States. We are quite confident and excited that our partnership will provide national growth in the important U.S. market."

Justin Fisch, Vice President- General Manager for USB added, "We are honored to continue our relationship with HEINEKEN Americas Export and their superb team of managers. We are very excited by the opportunity to take these extraordinary brands to new levels of success in the United States."

The transition will begin immediately and include various specialty brands from HEINEKEN Americas Export.

All responsibilities for sales, marketing and distribution will be handled by USB in partnership with HEINEKEN Americas Export.

About HEINEKEN

HEINEKEN is the world's most international brewer. It is the leading developer and marketer of premium beer and cider brands. Led by the Heineken brand, the Group has a powerful portfolio of more than 250 international, regional, local and specialty beers and ciders. We are committed to innovation, long-term brand investment, disciplined sales execution and focused cost management. Through "Brewing a Better World", sustainability is embedded in the business and delivers value for all stakeholders. HEINEKEN has a well-balanced geographic footprint with leadership positions in both developed and developing markets. We employ over 73,500 employees and operate more than 165 breweries, malteries, cider plants and other production facilities in more than 70 countries. Heineken N.V. and Heineken Holding N.V. shares trade on the Euronext in Amsterdam. Prices for the ordinary shares may be accessed on Bloomberg under the symbols HEIA NA and HEIO NA and on Reuters under HEIN.AS and HEIO.AS. HEINEKEN has two sponsored level 1 American Depositary Receipt (ADR) programmes: Heineken N.V. (OTCQX: HEINY) and Heineken Holding N.V. (OTCQX: HKHHY). Most recent information is available on HEINEKEN's website: ww.theHEINEKENcompany.com and follow us on Twitter via @HEINEKENCorp.

About United States Beverage

United States Beverage (USB) is a premium craft and imported beer sales and marketing company located in Stamford, Connecticut. USB provides a national distribution network for a portfolio of premium beverage brands. 2017 commemorates United States Beverage's 20th anniversary. www.unitedstatesbeverage.com

SOURCE United States Beverage
PITTSBURGH, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Hello Neighbor, a mentorship program for post-resettlement refugees in the U.S., is proud to announce it has secured funding from USA for UNHCR and The Heinz Endowments. The combined $130,000 in funding will be used to run Hello Neighbor's pilot mentorship program that officially launched in June 2017.

"After spending 15 years working in nonprofits and international development, I'm thankful for the opportunity to help the refugee community in my hometown with this new organization," said Hello Neighbor founder Sloane Davidson. "The financial support of both USA for UNHCR and The Heinz Endowments, just months into the launch of Hello Neighbor, is an exciting moment as we work to better the refugee experience in Pittsburgh."

Hello Neighbor supports refugees in their new lives by building community through mentoring with American families to highlight cultural similarities. The four-month pilot program currently hosts 25 refugee families from six countries (Myanmar, Bhutan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria) with 25 American mentor families of varying backgrounds in the Pittsburgh area.

"Hello Neighbor offers Americans the opportunity to connect with refugees as friends and neighbors to share meals, assist with driving lessons, and joyfully celebrate life moments like birthday and graduations. USA for UNHCR is proud to support Hello Neighbor in our shared mission to give refugees the hope they deserve, restore their dignity, and help them rebuild their lives," said Anne-Marie Grey, Executive Director and CEO of USA for UNHCR.

USA for UNHCR partners domestically with organizations like Hello Neighbor to help address needs of refugees and asylum-seekers in the United States. The educational resources and programming, mentor training, and community engagement facilitated by Hello Neighbor complement USA for UNHCR's mandate to help and protect refugees and people displaced by violence, conflict and persecution.

The Heinz Endowments, one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the United States, uses the Pittsburgh region as a laboratory for the development of solutions to challenges national in scope. The funding awarded to Hello Neighbor is part of The Heinz Endowments' commitment to youth and education in the region.

"Hello Neighbor is exactly the type of program we are pleased to support in the Pittsburgh region," said Carmen Anderson, Director of Equity and Social Justice of The Heinz Endowments. "With over 86 refugee and American children under the age of 18 involved in the pilot program, we know that Hello Neighbor is creating community through mentorship in a unique and creative way that can have long-term implications on these families."

Funding from USA for UNHCR and The Heinz Endowments will also support a signature Refugee Advocacy Certificate which provides training for mentors on the global refugee crisis. Mentees can receive additional financial support through Hello Neighbor's Refugee Assistance Fund to access educational and economic empowerment opportunities. Hello Neighbor also maintains a National Database of Refugee and Immigration Assistance Agencies, which was highlighted by The New York Times.

About Hello Neighbor

Founded in 2017, Hello Neighbor is a mentorship program that matches American and refugee families to support refugees in becoming self-sufficient and successful in their new lives. The four-month program encourages mentor and mentee families to spend time together individually, but also a cohort with a series of events and activities throughout Pittsburgh. Mentors have access to a Refugee Advocacy Certificate as part of their completion in the program and mentees can receive funds for educational and skill training programs through the Refugee Assistance Fund. To learn more about Hello Neighbor, visit the website at www.helloneighbor.io and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

About Sloane Davidson

Sloane Davidson is the Founder and CEO of Hello Neighbor, a mentoring program based in Pittsburgh that supports refugees by matching them with dedicated neighbors to guide and support them. An active philanthropist and advocate, Sloane has raised more than $3 million for nonprofits. She currently sits on the Council for the Women's Philanthropy Institute at the Lilly School of Philanthropy at Indiana University and Resolve Network, a microfinance NGO in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She was named a top influencer at the 2010 Clinton Global Initiative, "Top Women to Follow" on Twitter by Forbes and named to the Dell #Inspire 100  a list of leading influencers who use technology to empower and inspire others. Follow Sloane on Twitter.

About USA for UNHCR

USA for UNHCR helps and protects refugees and people displaced by violence, conflict and persecution. It supports UNHCR  the UN Refugee Agency  and its partners in providing lifesaving essentials including shelter, water, food, safety and protection worldwide. Through education, advocacy and fundraising in the United States, USA for UNHCR helps refugees survive, recover and build a better future. Established by concerned American citizens, USA for UNHCR is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, headquartered in Washington, D.C. Learn more at UNrefugees.org.

About The Heinz Endowments

The Heinz Endowments is based in Pittsburgh, where we use our region as a laboratory for the development of solutions to challenges that are national in scope. The Heinz Endowments is devoted to the mission of helping our region prosper as a vibrant center of creativity, learning, and social, economic and environmental sustainability. Core to our work is the vision of a just community where all are included and where everyone who calls southwestern Pennsylvania home has a real and meaningful opportunity to thrive. Learn more at Heinz.org.

Media Contact:

Tara Parsell

Geben Communication

[email protected]

SOURCE Hello Neighbor

Related Links

http://www.helloneighbor.io


WASHINGTON, July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following is a statement by Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa on the White House's release of its "Summary of Objectives for the NAFTA Renegotiation" last night.

"I am disappointed that the latest version of the administration's goals for a NAFTA replacement is not more specific. The very general outline that the USTR posted on its website suggests that the Trump trade reform team is still undecided about what new trade policy model will replace the old NAFTA and its expansion in other bad deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

"While I agree with the President that NAFTA has been a disaster for American manufacturing and workers, I don't see anything in these USTR guidelines for renegotiation that point towards the dramatic overhaul that NAFTA needs. For example, while we agree with the administration that a modernized NAFTA must include new chapters that protect labor rights and prohibit currency manipulation, we are concerned, based on these new negotiating objectives, that the USTR won't take strong and specific language to the table when the talks start a month from now.

"This outline raises more questions than it answers about U.S. priorities going into NAFTA renegotiation. The priorities for the Teamsters, our U.S. and Canadian members alike, include removing the worst provisions, like the outdated and controversial 'investor-state dispute settlement' regime in the investment chapter, the government procurement provisions that undermine Buy American, and the cross-border trucking provisions that threaten highway safety. I will work with the USTR in support of this 'fair trade' agenda and a new NAFTA that is superior to the TPP and finally works for American manufacturers and workers."

Founded in 1903, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters represents 1.4 million hardworking men and women throughout the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. Visit www.teamster.org for more information. Follow us on Twitter @Teamsters and "like" us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/teamsters.

Contact:

Ted Gotsch, (202) 624-6911

[email protected]

SOURCE International Brotherhood of Teamsters

Related Links

http://www.teamster.org


MEXICO CITY, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Hoteles City Express, S.A.B. de C.V. ("Hoteles City" or "the Company") (BMV: HCITY), announced the opening of City Express Junior Puebla Angelopolis, City Express Altamira and an expansion of the existing City Express Merida hotel, reaching 127 hotels in operation and more than 14,200 available rooms.

City Express Junior Puebla Angelopolis has 122 available rooms and was developed under a co-owned scheme. Hoteles City Express reinforces its brand presence in the region with this new opening, the sixth property the Company has in the city of Puebla - a location with solid economic fundamentals and significant potential for demand growth.

City Express Altamira has 127 available rooms and was developed under a co-owned scheme. This hotel will benefit from economic activity flowing from new investments in the region due to energy reforms.

Finally, the expansion of City Express Merida  also a co-owned property - represents an increase of 42 additional rooms to the existing 130 rooms. This expansion aims to take advantage of economic growth in the city, which is also a major tourist drawcard.

About Hoteles City Express:

Hoteles City Express is the leading and fastest-growing limited-service hotel chain in Mexico in terms of number of hotels, number of rooms, geographic presence, market share and revenues. Founded in 2002, Hoteles City Express specializes in offering high-quality, comfortable and safe lodging at affordable prices via a limited-service hotel chain geared mainly towards domestic business travelers. With 127 hotels in operation located throughout Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia and Chile, Hoteles City Express operates five distinct brands: City Express, City Express Plus, City Express Suites, City Express Junior and City Centro to serve different segments of its target market. In June 2013, Hoteles City Express completed its IPO and began trading on the Mexican Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "HCITY"; furthermore, on October 8, 2014, Hoteles City Express completed a follow on with the aim of accelerating its growth in new hotels in coming years.

For further information, please visit our website: https://cityexpress.com/en/investors/

SOURCE Hoteles City Express, S.A.B. de C.V.

Related Links

https://www.cityexpress.com


By PTI: By Shirish B Pradhan

Kathmandu, Jul 19 (PTI) Four Indians and three Nepalese nationals were arrested today for smuggling 30 kg of hashish from central Nepals Makawanpur district, police said.

The seven, carrying bags filled with the contraband, were arrested from a hotel during a raid by security personnel in the district headquarters of Makawanpur, about 110 km south of the national capital Kathmandu, said Raju Aryal, Senior Superintendent of Police.

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Some 30 kg of hashish, a vehicle bearing an Indian registration number, six mobile phones and Rs 33,000 Indian currency were seized from them.

They said the arrested have been handed to the District Police Office along with the confiscated materials for further investigation. PTI MRJ/SBP ABH AKJ MRJ

--- ENDS ---
Hydro One and Avista combined create a top 20 North American utility focused on regulated transmission as well as electricity and natural gas local distribution

Highlights:

Establishes one of North America's largest regulated utilities with over C$32.2 billion ( US$25.4 billion ) in assets and a leader in electricity transmission and distribution as well as natural gas local distribution businesses

largest regulated utilities with over ( ) in assets and a leader in electricity transmission and distribution as well as natural gas local distribution businesses Expands into complementary and diversified regulated assets, inclusive of natural gas local distribution

The transaction will be accretive to earnings per share in the mid-single digits in the first full year of operation

Provides Hydro One with a significant and stable increase to earnings and cash flow underpinned by fully regulated utility operations jurisdictions with constructive regulatory mechanisms

A long-term intention of continuing Hydro One's dividend payout of 70-80 per cent of earnings

Avista shareholders receive US$53 in cash per common share, a 24% premium as of market close on July 18, 2017

in cash per common share, a 24% premium as of market close on Both Hydro One and Avista to maintain healthy balance sheets as well as strong investment-grade credit ratings

Hydro One's acquisition financing strategy involves the issuance of C$1.4 billion of Hydro One common equity and US$2.6 billion of Hydro One debt

of Hydro One common equity and of Hydro One debt Hydro One has concurrently executed a bought deal of C$1.4 billion of contingent convertible debentures represented by instalment receipts to satisfy the equity component of the acquisition financing strategy

of contingent convertible debentures represented by instalment receipts to satisfy the equity component of the acquisition financing strategy Hydro One and Avista customer rates will not be impacted by any of the costs associated with the transaction

Efficiencies through enhanced scale, innovation, shared IT systems and increased purchasing power provides cost savings for customers and better customer service, complementing both organization's commitment to excellence

Avista preserves corporate identity including its headquarters; customers, employees, communities and shareholders all benefit from new partnership

No workforce reductions are anticipated as a result of this transaction for either Hydro One or Avista

TORONTO and SPOKANE, WA, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ - Hydro One Limited ("Hydro One") (TSX: H) and Avista Corporation ("Avista") (NYSE: AVA) today jointly announced a definitive merger agreement ("Agreement") under which Hydro One will acquire Avista for C$67 (US$53) per share in a C$6.7 billion (US$5.3 billion) all-cash transaction. Together, Hydro One and Avista will create a North American leader in regulated electricity and natural gas business with over C$32.2 billion (US$25.4 billion) in combined assets. The transaction brings together two industry-leading regulated utilities with over 230 years of collective operational experience as well as shared corporate cultures and values. The combined entity will safely and reliably serve more than two million retail and industrial customers and hold assets throughout North America including Ontario, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.

"This marks a proud moment for Canadian champions as we grow our business into a North American leader," said Mayo Schmidt, President and CEO, Hydro One Limited. "This transaction demonstrates the power and value of the transition into an investor-owned utility, by allowing for healthy expansion into new lines of regulated utility business and new jurisdictions, such as the U.S. Pacific Northwest which is experiencing customer and economic growth."

"With a focus on operational excellence and building our earnings streams, we are positioned for long-term, sustainable growth," said Schmidt. "We are further accomplishing this goal by bringing together two companies with shared cultures and industry expertise to create a North American regulated utility leader. This combination means greater scale, diversity and financial flexibility."

Hydro One has a uniquely strong track record consolidating electricity utilities. Since the IPO, Hydro One has also delivered on cost savings and efficiencies for shareholders and customers. Through the company's energy conservation programs, Hydro One has helped customers and municipalities save 700 GWh year-to-date.

"Since our initial public offering, we have significantly enhanced our current operations while exploring opportunities that extend and diversify our regulated assets," said Schmidt. "We constantly seek to deliver exceptional value to shareholders, customers, and the communities we serve through stable, increasing regulated returns, exceptional service, and community engagement."

This strategic combination demonstrates the value of consolidation by bringing together two highly complementary platforms to create one of North America's largest regulated utilities, meaningfully enhancing both shareholder and customer value. In addition, over time, non-headcount efficiencies will be realized through collaboration and sharing of best practices on IT, innovation and supply chain purchasing, all of which will further enhance cost savings. No workforce reductions are anticipated as a result of this transaction for either Avista or Hydro One.

Avista Corporation Chairman, President and CEO Scott Morris said, "For Avista, the decision to team up with Hydro One at a time of strength and growth represents a win for our customers, employees, shareholders and the communities we serve. Through this agreement, we have a unique opportunity to secure a partnership that allows us to continue to define and control, to a significant degree, future operations and opportunities in a consolidating industry landscape for the benefit of our customers. In Hydro One, we believe we've found a partner that allows us to preserve our identity and our proud legacy, while also preparing us for the future. We look forward to joining forces with Hydro One and its dynamic team."

Following completion of the transaction, Avista will maintain its existing corporate headquarters in Spokane and will continue to operate as a standalone utility in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. Its management team and employees will remain in place and it will operate with its own Board of Directors representing the interests of the Pacific Northwest and the communities it serves. The combined company's headquarters will be based in Toronto.

Avista employees and retirees will see a continuation of the company essentially as it is today. Customers of both companies will continue to be provided with safe, reliable and high quality energy. Hydro One and Avista customer rates will not be impacted by any of the costs associated with the transaction. The communities Avista serves will continue to benefit from the important philanthropy and economic development that Avista provides.

"In fact," Morris said, "Hydro One is committed to doing even more  nearly doubling Avista's current levels of community support."

"This is the coming together of two highly respected and reputable companies steeped in history and shared commitment to the communities they serve. Both teams also share a common vision and a dedication to serving customers safely and reliably every day," said Schmidt.

"The strength of the combined company enables the accelerated deployment of innovation programs and infrastructure upgrades for the benefit of customers while continuing to deliver on shareholder expectations for consistent, healthy, financial performance. Together, we will deliver even more possibilities for the shareholders, customers, employees, and communities we have the privilege of serving," said Schmidt.

The transaction was unanimously approved by the Boards of Directors of both companies and is expected to close in the second half of 2018, subject to Avista common shareholder approval and certain regulatory and government approvals and clearances, including approval by the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, the Public Utility Commission of Oregon, the Idaho Public Utilities Commission, the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, the Public Service Commission of the State of Montana, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, clearance by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and compliance with applicable requirements under the U.S. Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended, and the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Advisors

Moelis & Company LLC is acting as exclusive financial advisor to Hydro One. BofA Merrill Lynch is acting as exclusive financial advisor to Avista. Bracewell LLP is acting as legal advisor to Hydro One. Kirkland & Ellis is acting as legal advisor to Avista.

Investment Community Teleconference and Webcast to Discuss Transaction

Hydro One and Avista management teams will host a teleconference with the investment community on July 19, 2017 at 4:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, a webcast of which will be available at www.HydroOne.com/Investors. Members of the financial community wishing to ask questions during the call should dial 1-855-716-2690 prior to the scheduled start time and request access to Hydro One acquisition of Avista teleconference, conference ID 57965580 (international callers may dial 1-440-996-5689). Media and other interested parties are welcome to participate on a listen-only basis. A webcast of the teleconference will be available at the same link following the call.

Press Conference

Hydro One and Avista will host a joint media availability on July 19, 2017 at 5:30pm Eastern Time at 483 Bay St, Toronto, ON. Members of the media not able to attend should dial (855) 716-2690 (toll-free) or (440) 996-5689 (international) 10 minutes prior to the scheduled start time and request access to the Hydro One acquisition of Avista teleconference, conference ID 58264301. Helpful keypad commands include *0 for operator assistance and *6 to self-mute/unmute. Please note that video footage of the availability will be available following the news conference for interested media.

Note: Please see attached backgrounder for additional details on the terms of the transaction and the combined companies.

About Hydro One Limited

We are Ontario's largest electricity transmission and distribution provider with more than 1.3 million valued customers, C$25 billion in assets and annual revenues of over C$6.5 billion. Our team of 5,500 skilled and dedicated employees proudly and safely serves suburban, rural and remote communities across Ontario through our 30,000 circuit km high-voltage transmission and 123,000 circuit km primary distribution networks. Hydro One is committed to the communities we serve, and has been rated as the top utility in Canada for its corporate citizenship, sustainability, and diversity initiatives. We are one of only four utility companies in Canada to achieve the Sustainable Energy Company designation from the Canadian Electrical Association. We also provide advanced broadband telecommunications services on a wholesale basis utilizing our extensive fibre optic network. Hydro One Limited's common shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: H). For more information about everything Hydro One, please visit www.HydroOne.com.

About Avista Corporation

Avista Corporation is an energy company involved in the production, transmission and distribution of energy as well as other energy-related businesses. Avista Utilities is our operating division that provides electric service to 379,000 customers and natural gas to 342,000 customers. Its service territory covers 30,000 square miles in eastern Washington, northern Idaho and parts of southern and eastern Oregon, with a population of 1.6 million. Alaska Energy and Resources Company is an Avista subsidiary that provides retail electric service in the city and borough of Juneau, Alaska, through its subsidiary Alaska Electric Light and Power Company. Avista stock is traded under the ticker symbol "AVA." For more information about Avista, please visit www.myAvista.com.

Forward-Looking Information

This communication contains "forward-looking statements" and "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws of the U.S. and Canada, respectively. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements about beliefs, expectations, estimates, projections, goals, forecasts, assumptions, risks and uncertainties, are forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information are often characterized by the use of words such as "believes," "estimates," "expects," "projects," "may," "intends," "plans," "anticipates," "pro forma," "predicts," "seeks," "could," "would," "will," "can," "continue" or "potential" and the negative of these terms or other comparable or similar terminology or expressions. The forward-looking statements and forward-looking information in this communication include, without limitation, statements relating to Hydro One's proposed merger transaction with Avista and expectations regarding timing and benefits thereof, earnings per share accretion, increases in regulated assets and earnings, financing intentions, strength of credit metrics, scale and diversification, capital expenditures, rate base growth, industry and geographic trends and forecasts, financing plans, stakeholder commitments, stockholder and regulatory approvals, and the completion of the proposed merger transaction. These statements reflect Hydro One and Avista's management's current beliefs and are based on information currently available to the management teams. Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information involve significant risk, uncertainties and assumptions. Certain factors or assumptions have been applied in drawing the conclusions contained in the forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. Hydro One and Avista caution readers that a number of factors could cause actual results, performance or achievement to differ materially from the results discussed or implied in the forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. Important factors that could cause actual results, performance and results to differ materially from those indicated by any such forward-looking statements and forward-looking information include risks and uncertainties relating to the following: (i) the risk that Avista may be unable to obtain shareholder approval for the proposed merger transaction or that Hydro One or Avista may be unable to obtain governmental and regulatory approvals required for the proposed merger transaction, or may be unable to obtain those approvals on favorable terms; (ii) the risk that the required shareholder, governmental or regulatory approvals may delay the proposed merger transaction; (iii) the risk that a condition to the closing of the proposed merger transaction may not be satisfied or the merger agreement may be terminated prior to closing; (iv) the timing to consummate the proposed transaction; (v) disruption from the proposed merger transaction making it more difficult to maintain relationships with customers, employees, regulators or suppliers; (vi) risks associated with the loss and ongoing replacement of key personnel; (vii) the diversion of management time and attention on the transaction; (viii) general worldwide economic conditions and related uncertainties; (ix) the effect and timing of changes in laws or in governmental regulations (including environmental and tax laws and regulations); * the risk that financing necessary to fund the proposed merger transaction may not be obtained or may be more difficult and costly to obtain than anticipated; (xi) the impact of acquisition-related expenses; (xii) the ability to maintain an investment grade credit rating; (xiii) the ability to maintain dividend payout ratios; and (xiv) other factors discussed or referred to in the "Risk Factors" section of Hydro One's most recent annual management's discussion and analysis of financial results filed with securities regulators in Canada and available under Hydro One's profile at www.sedar.com. The foregoing list is not exhaustive and other unknown or unpredictable factors could also have a material adverse effect on the performance or results of Hydro One or Avista. Additional risks and uncertainties will be discussed in the proxy statement and other materials that Avista will file with the SEC in connection with the proposed merger transaction, or in material Hydro One will file with securities regulatory authorities in Canada. There can be no assurance that the proposed merger transaction will be completed, or if it is completed, that it will close within the anticipated time period or that the expected benefits of the proposed merger transaction will be realized. These factors should be considered carefully and undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, and actual outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expressed, implied or forecasted in these forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. For additional information with respect to certain of the risks or factors, reference should be made to Hydro One's continuous disclosure materials filed from time to time with Canadian securities regulatory authorities, available at www.sedar.com and Avista's filings with the SEC available at www.sec.gov. Except as required by law, each of Hydro One and Avista disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Backgrounder

Strong Value Proposition

Strong fundamentals: Hydro One maintains a healthy balance sheet as well as a strong investment-grade credit rating. This provides an attractive dividend yield and earnings accretion, as well as significant and stable increases in earnings and cash flow underpinned by fully regulated utility operations with constructive regulatory mechanisms. The acquisition provides additional support to Hydro One's growing dividend, and its 70-80 per cent targeted dividend payout ratio will remain unchanged upon completion of the transaction.

Hydro One maintains a healthy balance sheet as well as a strong investment-grade credit rating. This provides an attractive dividend yield and earnings accretion, as well as significant and stable increases in earnings and cash flow underpinned by fully regulated utility operations with constructive regulatory mechanisms. The acquisition provides additional support to Hydro One's growing dividend, and its 70-80 per cent targeted dividend payout ratio will remain unchanged upon completion of the transaction. Expansion to new markets: The transaction enables expansion into new jurisdictions for Hydro One outside of Ontario , including Washington , Oregon , Montana , Idaho and Alaska , which are experiencing customer growth. Operations in regulatory jurisdictions with constructive regulatory mechanisms and higher allowed returns on equity and more favourable capital structures than provided by Hydro One's current regulatory jurisdiction will complement existing business operations. Benefits include a stable commercial structure, including a growing revenue base and stable, strong, forward-looking returns on equity in a regulated business.

The transaction enables expansion into new jurisdictions for Hydro One outside of , including , , , and , which are experiencing customer growth. Operations in regulatory jurisdictions with constructive regulatory mechanisms and higher allowed returns on equity and more favourable capital structures than provided by Hydro One's current regulatory jurisdiction will complement existing business operations. Benefits include a stable commercial structure, including a growing revenue base and stable, strong, forward-looking returns on equity in a regulated business. Focused on diversification and innovation: The combined company will have a growing low-risk natural gas LDC network, and exposure to renewable energy, including biomass and wind. There is a deep-rooted innovation culture with a strong record of technology incubation and successful investments.

The combined company will have a growing low-risk natural gas LDC network, and exposure to renewable energy, including biomass and wind. There is a deep-rooted innovation culture with a strong record of technology incubation and successful investments. Strategic growth platforms: This extends Hydro One's core transmission and distribution business and introduces a diverse asset mix of power generation coupled with new commercial capabilities in low-risk gas distribution. Efficiencies through enhanced scale, innovation, shared IT systems and increased purchasing power provides cost savings and better customer service complementing both organizations' commitment to excellence.

This extends Hydro One's core transmission and distribution business and introduces a diverse asset mix of power generation coupled with new commercial capabilities in low-risk gas distribution. Efficiencies through enhanced scale, innovation, shared IT systems and increased purchasing power provides cost savings and better customer service complementing both organizations' commitment to excellence. Community investment and shared values : Hydro One and Avista have a shared culture and values, as well as a strong dedication to their respective communities, which will enable a seamless integration. Both companies take their responsibility to be good corporate citizens and community partners very seriously, and this transaction will preserve and increase the philanthropy and economic development in the communities they serve.

: Hydro One and Avista have a shared culture and values, as well as a strong dedication to their respective communities, which will enable a seamless integration. Both companies take their responsibility to be good corporate citizens and community partners very seriously, and this transaction will preserve and increase the philanthropy and economic development in the communities they serve. Similar business models: Both companies have a similar approach to operations. The companies share a strong commitment to safety, respect for the environment, and the importance of engaging stakeholders in operations.

A Leading North American Power Utility

The acquisition of Avista by Hydro One will create a leader in the North American power transmission and distribution utility sector with exposure to a mix of regulated power generation. Both companies are principally regulated utilities with complementary assets together with uniquely common cultures and values, including commitments to safety, customer service, innovation and investment in communities served.

The combined company will have over C$32.2 billion of assets while transmitting and distributing electricity and gas power safely and reliably to more than two million customers across portions of Ontario, Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska -- a service territory with a geography larger than the country of France. Following closing of the Acquisition, Hydro One will have approximately C$32.2 billion in assets and a consolidated regulatory rate base of C$22.6 billion, strengthening its position as one of the top 20 North American regulated utilities. The combination will further reinforce Hydro One as one of the top 20 investor owned regulated utilities in North America.

The Acquisition creates geographic, economic and regulatory diversity while enhancing Hydro One's asset base with the addition of complementary regulated natural gas distribution.

The enhanced scale resulting from the Acquisition will enable Hydro One to accelerate transformation of the combined power systems through more efficient investments in grid modernization, distributed generation, electrification of transportation and adoption of emerging technologies. The combination of two pure play regulated power transmission and distribution utilities with exposure to a mix of regulated generation also enables sharing of leading practices to drive enhancements to productivity and efficiency, while sharing R&D costs, leveraging innovation investments and the joint deployment of emerging technologies, all of which are expected to benefit ratepayers and shareholders.

Leadership, Governance and Market Listings

Upon closing of the transaction, which is expected to occur in the second half of 2018, Avista's successful management team will remain in place and it will operate with its own Board of Directors.

Avista will have a Board of nine directors consisting of five members designated by Hydro One, including Mayo Schmidt, and four members designated by Avista, including Scott Morris, the CEO of Avista. Scott Morris will be the Chair of the Board of Avista post-merger.

On closing, Avista's common stock will be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) while Hydro One's common shares will continue to be listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). The combined company will be operated from Ontario.

Financing and Additional Transaction Details

Hydro One financing plan is designed to maintain a strong investment grade balance sheet following completion of the Acquisition, and its pure play regulated utility profile will remain intact with approximately 99 per cent in regulated earnings.

Hydro One will finance the transaction through a combination of medium and long-term borrowings amounting to approximately C$3.4 billion together with C$1.4 billion contingent convertible debentures represented by instalment receipts, which will form the permanent equity component of the financing plan upon conversion at closing of the transaction.

Terms of the Transaction

Under the terms of the all-cash transaction, which has been unanimously approved by the Board of Directors of both companies, Avista shareholders will receive US$53 per common share, representing a 24 per cent premium to Avista's share price on July 18, 2017. Closing of the acquisition is expected by second half of 2018 subject to required approvals as discussed below.

The transaction will be accretive to earnings per share in the mid-single digits in the first full year of operation. Further, the Acquisition provides additional support to Hydro One's growing dividend, and its 70-80 per cent targeted dividend payout ratio will remain unchanged upon completion of the transaction.

The Acquisition enhances Hydro One position as a leading North American pure-play regulated power utility principally involved in electricity transmission and distribution with a legacy of having successfully consolidated approximately 90 separate electricity utilities with sensitivity and respect for the customers and communities it serves and strong partnerships with the numerous employees which have joined its team.

The closing of the Acquisition, which is expected to occur by the second half of 2018, is subject to Avista common shareholder approval and certain regulatory and government approvals, including approval by the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, the Public Utility Commission of Oregon, the Idaho Public Utilities Commission, the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, the Public Service Commission of the State of Montana, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, clearance by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and compliance with applicable requirements under the U.S. Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended, and the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Additional information About the Acquisition and Where to Find it

This communication may be deemed to be solicitation material in respect of the proposed merger transaction. [Avista Corporation ("Avista")] intends to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") and mail to its shareholders a proxy statement in connection with the proposed merger transaction and this communication is not a substitute for the proxy statement or any other document that Avista may send to its shareholders in connection with the proposed merger transaction. THE INVESTORS AND SECURITY HOLDERS OF AVISTA ARE URGED TO READ THE PROXY STATEMENT AND OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE, BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION about Avista, Hydro One and the proposed merger transaction. Investors and security holders will be able to obtain these materials (when they are available) and other documents filed with the SEC free of charge at the SEC's website, www.sec.gov. In addition, a copy of Avista's proxy statement (when it becomes available) may be obtained free of charge upon request by contacting Avista Corporation, 1411 East Mission Avenue, PO Box 3727, Spokane WA. 99220-3727. Avista's filings with the SEC are also available on Avista's website at: www.myavista.com. Investors and security holders may also read and copy any reports, statements and other information filed by Avista with the SEC, at the SEC public reference room at 100 F Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20549. Please call the SEC at 1-800-SEC-0330 or visit the SEC's website for further information on its public reference room.

Participants in the Solicitation of Proxies

This communication is not a solicitation of proxies in connection with the proposed merger transaction. However, Avista, Hydro One and certain of their respective directors, executive officers and other persons may be deemed under SEC rules to be participants in the solicitation of Avista shareholder proxies in respect of the proposed merger transaction. Information about Hydro One directors and executive officers is available in Hydro One's management information circular, filed with Canadian securities regulators on March 23, 2017, in connection with its 2017 annual meeting of shareholders and is available on its website at www.HydroOne.com and also under its profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Information regarding Avista's directors and executive officers is available in Avista's proxy statement filed with the SEC on March 31, 2017 in connection with its 2017 annual meeting of shareholders, and its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2016 filed with the SEC on February 22, 2017, each of which may be obtained from the sources indicated in Additional Information and Where to Find It. Other information regarding persons who may be deemed participants in the proxy solicitation and a description of their direct and indirect interests (which may be different than those of Avista's investors and security holders), by security holdings or otherwise, will be contained in the proxy statement and other relevant materials filed or to be filed with the SEC when they become available.

Timing and Approvals

The closing of the Acquisition, which is expected to occur in the second half of 2018, is subject to Avista common shareholder approval and certain regulatory and government approvals and clearances, including approval by the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, the Public Utility Commission of Oregon, the Idaho Public Utilities Commission, the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, the Public Service Commission of the State of Montana, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, clearance by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and compliance with applicable requirements under the U.S. Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended, and the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Hydro One intends to work diligently with Avista to productively engage with state and federal regulators and file and process the required regulatory applications in order to close the proposed merger transaction as promptly as possible. Hydro One and Avista both have histories of successfully executing regulated utility acquisitions and working constructively through the associated regulatory processes to achieve fair, balanced and timely approvals.

SOURCE Hydro One Limited

Related Links

http://www.hydroone.com


PLANO, Texas, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, today announced that i3 Broadband, a regional provider of fiber optic internet services, chose Huawei to enhance its deployment of services to residential homes and multi-dwelling units (MDUs) in the Champaign-Urbana and the greater Peoria areas. Huawei's highly-scalable, end-to-end broadband solutions will allow i3 Broadband to bring more dynamic services to its existing users, and in particular save both time and money when installing connections for future MDU customers.

Driven by a surge in multifamily residential building construction as well as increased customer demand for faster broadband speeds, the desire for reliable and responsive internet, HD TV and voice services for MDUs has never been greater. Recognizing this need, i3 Broadband partnered with Huawei, whose GPON, NG-PON and D-CCAP technologies deliver gigabit bandwidth to MDUs at unprecedented prices and operational performance.

"i3 Broadband strives to offer ultra-high speed internet to apartment owners to support the needs of the landlords and tenants. From a recently released survey in Broadband Communities, 87 percent of respondents said technology plays an important role in keeping renters satisfied. Providing a faster go-to-market strategy for this important segment will benefit i3 Broadband, Huawei and our customers," said Michael Whitaker, vice president of sales and business development at i3 Broadband. Whitaker also noted there is a large opportunity to collaborate with Home Owner Associations to provide fiber optic internet, HD TV and phone services to specific areas in Champaign-Urbana and Peoria.

Key to Huawei's success in winning i3 Broadband's business was its ability to offer future-proof solutions. Unlike competitors, many of who must forklift and replace physical hardware when confronted with merger challenges or legacy network migration issues, Huawei's offerings can be seamlessly upgraded via software for both efficiency and cost savings. Huawei was also chosen for its dedication to deploying best-in-class solutions and its renowned R&D staff, which together will further allow i3 Broadband to focus on expanding optimal services to more customers.

"The goal of i3 Broadband is to reduce cost, create value and continue to offer high-quality internet, HD TV and voice services to residential and business customers," said Dan Kennedy, COO of i3 Broadband. "As i3 Broadband continues to expand its all fiber, ultra-high speed network to more locations within the communities we serve, i3 Broadband is excited to be using Huawei MDU products, as their next-generation solutions will allow i3 Broadband to quickly acquire new MDU customers and speed our market delivery."

"With MDUs representing the fastest-growing broadband access segment, Huawei is thrilled to have partnered with i3 Broadband for the opportunity to improve services for this key customer base," said Bill Gerski, vice president of sales at Huawei USA. "Fueled by a desire for constant innovation, we look forward to our continued work with i3 Broadband to consistently deliver the best broadband services to the Champaign-Urbana and the greater Peoria communities."

About i3 Broadband

i3 Broadband provides TV, voice and internet services through a 100 percent fiber optic network in the greater Peoria, Champaign and Urbana, Illinois, markets. For more information, visit www.i3broadband.com or call (877) 976-0711.

About Huawei

Huawei is a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. Our aim is to enrich life and improve efficiency through a better connected world, acting as a responsible corporate citizen, innovative enabler for the information society, and collaborative contributor to the industry. Driven by customer-centric innovation and open partnerships, Huawei has established an end-to-end ICT solutions portfolio that gives customers competitive advantages in telecom and enterprise networks, devices and cloud computing. Huawei's 170,000 employees worldwide are committed to creating maximum value for telecom operators, enterprises and consumers. Our innovative ICT solutions, products and services are used in more than 170 countries and regions, serving over one-third of the world's population. Founded in 1987, Huawei is a private company fully owned by its employees.

For more information, please visit Huawei online at www.huawei.com or follow us on:

http://www.linkedin.com/company/Huawei

http://www.twitter.com/Huawei

http://www.facebook.com/Huawei

http://www.google.com/+Huawei

http://www.youtube.com/Huawei

Media contacts:

i3 Broadband

Chelsea Peck

(309) 670-9900

[email protected]

Huawei

Rachel Landis

(617) 692-0526

[email protected]

SOURCE Huawei

Related Links

http://www.huawei.com


SAN FRANCISCO, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Intersolar and ees North America 2017, the solar and energy storage industries' premier events dedicated to the North American market, concluded its 10th annual event in San Francisco last week.

Attendees and exhibitors were optimistic, as they engaged in meaningful conversations about the best approaches for sustained market success, despite a year of industry consolidation and trade policy uncertainty. Exhibitors described Intersolar and ees North America 2017 as ideal for generating leads, closing business deals and building lasting relationships. More than 15,000 solar and energy storage professionals from 87 countries attended the events

"We're continuously impressed with the high-quality attendees we meet while exhibiting at Intersolar North America each year," said Denise Hugo, director of marketing at Array Technologies. "The solar tracker industry is a growth sector within the expanding solar landscape, we're glad to be able to connect with our fellow leaders in San Francisco each July.

"For Pick My Solar, Intersolar North America provides an unparalleled opportunity to meet with leaders in every sector of our industry in a great venue," added Kyle Cherrick, head of business development at Pick My Solar. "That's why so many big deals get done during Intersolar; it acts as a marketplace that features key players and fosters connections across the entire industry. We love the event and are already looking forward to next year."

A variety of exhibitors also used the exhibitions as a platform to launch new productscompanies showcased new racking and mounting products, inverters, solar panels, storage systems and other products.

"Intersolar North America 2017 proved to be a tremendous trade show for Solaria  providing a great forum for reaching our customers, partners and prospects in an energetic atmosphere," said Solaria CEO Suvi Sharma, which showcased its new highly efficient module. " There's keen interest in our new product, and being able to display it for the many solar professionals attending Intersolar provided us with phenomenal return on investment."

During the Intersolar/ees North America exhibitions, companies ranging from established industry leaders to promising startups have displayed the technologies that promise to continue to reduce the cost of solar and storage solutions. Once again, the Powerhouse Pavilion, hosted by Powerhouse, the world's only incubator and accelerator dedicated to solar that collects the most ingenious intelligent energy startups and entrepreneurial ventures, was in the spotlight. This year, 12 companies participated in the Pavilion, including UtilityAPI. Elena Lucas, co-founder and board director at UtilityAPI, also spoke alongside leading renewable energy leaders and policymakers during the Opening Ceremony's keynote session, where she provided an entrepreneur's perspective on the industry. During her remarks, she stressed the importance of networking events and seizing opportunities only Intersolar/ees North America can present.



"Intersolar is the place to be," Lucas said during her keynote session. "This is where you can network and meet the people who are ready to take action to reduce the soft costs of solar."



Intersolar and ees North America organizers are dedicated to offering innovative events and networking opportunities year after year. The 2017 events were no exception, connecting exhibitors and leading industry organizations in unique special events. In particular, the WRISE and Shine! networking breakfast, organized by the Women of Renewable Industries and Sustainable Energy (WRISE), was a well-received and bustling event advocating gender equality in the solar and energy storage industries.



"We were thrilled to see so much support and interest," said Kristen Graf, executive director of WRISE. "The informal networking breakfast at Intersolar offered a great opportunity to build on the enthusiasm around our broader scope and new brand. With such a great response we are already looking forward to growing relationships and having an even larger presence at Intersolar in coming years."



Section 201 Hot Policy Discussions

Both Intersolar and ees North America are known for covering the latest technological and political developments affecting the solar and energy storage industries. This year was no exception with the Section 201 trade petition hovering as the "elephant in the room." This was a leading topic among conversations and conference sessions, with a lively debate surrounding expected outcomes and impacts of the decision, especially during the four-part Intersolar Finance Symposium, new to this year's event.



More than 220 speakers participated Intersolar/ees North America conference sessions, which covered a variety of topics ranging from energy storage technologies, applications and project case studies; PV plant design and monitoring; smart renewable energy; and financing solutions for solar and energy storage projects.



The 2018 Intersolar and ees North America exhibitions and conferences will take place in San Francisco on July 9-12, 2018. Exhibitors interested in having a footprint at next year's events can contact Jim Callihan at [email protected].



For more information on Intersolar and ees North America please visit www.intersolar.us or www.ees-northamerica.com



SOURCE Intersolar North America

Related Links

http://www.intersolar.us


TORONTO, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Intronix Technologies will be launching "Myoguide DOC", a comprehensive software package designed to help clinicians who inject Botulinum Toxins, such as Botox, Dysport and Xeomin to manage their patient's spasticity and pain.

Myoguide DOC is a unique, graphics-based, software package designed for clinicians managing patients with pain and spasticity. Clinicians can document patient history, treatment, treatment plans, generate reports, as well as, add and track spasticity, capability, and pain index scores.

MyoguideDOC Patient Management Software

Clinicians can mark where they inject on anatomical graphics. They can also attach specific details as part of the medical record. The complete patient injection history can be reviewed at any time, using displayed coloured markers. Patient assessment indexes can be transferred to a tablet for patients to fill out.

Clinicians have the ability to easily view and update patients' demographics, treatment history, and outcome assessments. There is also an ability to access all graphics for integration into communications. Lab results and other documents can be added to the patient records for a more comprehensive picture of the patient's history.

Powerful "at a glance" insights into patients' progress are available using the graphics based system. Myoguide DOC includes built-in graphics series defining a variety of spasticity syndromes. There is also the capability to build customized anatomical graphic series, for clinically defined protocols, pertinent to each office.

"We believe Myoguide DOC is an essential tool for continuous patient management, treatment records at a glance, patient outcome tracking, and report writing. Myoguide DOC will provide precision injection documentation and treatment outcome tracking. We are very fortunate for the opportunity to contribute another element to help clinicians who are treating patients, with or without injection guidance. Clinicians using Myoguide DOC, will have an easier time seeing how patients are progressing," says Dr. Evan Friedman, President of Intronix Technologies".

Myoguide DOC is a robust solution designed for medical practitioners looking to substantially eliminate paper from their practices. DOC can redefine patient care by offering tools with flexibility and scalability for doctor driven workflow that can lead to improved patient care and increased productivity. This simply could not happen in the old paper-based world.

Intronix Technologies Corp. (http://www.intronixtech.com) is known for producing Myoguide Injection Guidance System, which has breakthrough technology that gives practitioners a superior way to deliver targeted injections, by using the patient's muscle signals to provide ongoing visual and audio feedback, during the needle insertion, to help find focal areas responsible for pain and spasticity.

"We are always pushing to innovate and build a better tools. Promoting and supporting innovation in the healthcare software sector is essential to improving patient and community care," said Dr. Evan Friedman. "We will continue working with healthcare providers with vision and integrity, to increase the adoption of Intronix electronic medical records and other technologies, so we can all benefit from a more efficient health care delivery system."

We will be showcasing Myoguide DOC at the American Association of Neuromuscular & Electrodiagnostic Medicine (AANEM) meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, September 13-16, 2017: Booth #416. We will also be at the American Association of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (AAPM&R) Annual Assembly at the Colorado Convention Center, in Denver, from October 11-15, 2017: Booth #229.

About Intronix Technologies Corporation

Located just outside Toronto, Ontario, Intronix Technologies designs and produces progressive portable medical devices for neuromuscular diagnostics and treatment delivery. Its innovative Myoguide Injection Guidance System provides technology that results in a better patient experience. Intronix Technologies is known for its exceptional equipment and comprehensive customer-support programs. For additional information about Intronix, please refer to www.intronixtech.com

Contact:

Dr. Evan Friedman

President, Intronix Technologies Corporation

+01-905-951-3361

[email protected]

SOURCE Intronix Technologies

Related Links

http://www.intronixtech.com


HOUSTON, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Inviting Muslims to Christ: A Clear Path to Salvation, authored by Randall L Ireland, takes readers inside the Foundational Beliefs of the Quran. The book presents the major beliefs of Islam and Christianity including:

Pillars of Islam

Pillars of Iman/Faith

Jesus in the Quran

Islamic Monotheism

Christian Monotheism

Prayers of Declaration and Freedom

This book presents the Good News with respect and clarity;and explanations of Muslim beliefs that will assist in understanding the foundations of both Christianity and Islam

The book presents the Good News from the Christian New Testament: referred to in Islam as the Injeel in the Quran, with respect and clarity. The book presents the basic beliefs of Islam and Christianity that will assist in understanding the foundations of Christianity and Islam.

A Kirkus Review of the book notes: "A comparative study of Christianity and Islam that seeks to spell out terms of reconciliation between the two religions. When Ireland (Christianity's Invitation from Jesus to Islam, 2016) was a Protestant seminarian in 2000, he became fascinated by the theological connections between the Christian and Muslim faiths. He discovered many similarities and points of intersection, particularly in the religions' authoritative scriptures. However, he also noted a considerable doctrinal divide, and that their interpretations of the conditions for salvation are mutually exclusive. For example, Christians venerate Jesus as the son of God and accept his combination of humanity and divinity. However, although the Quran repeatedly references Jesus and recognizes his status as a major prophet, it denies that he was more than a mere man. Ireland carefully reviews relevant passages in the Bible to present a remarkably concise snapshot of Christian theology. He provides a synoptic overview of the faith's essential message, the Trinitarian conception of God, and an accessible interpretation of the Holy Spirit. Likewise, he explores the fundamental tenets of Judaism, as Christianity was historically connected to it and all three of the major monotheistic traditions are Abrahamic. The author also examines the Quran and adumbrates its foundational beliefs, which simply contradict the Bible's claim to ultimate authority.

Although Ireland calls for mutual respect and tolerance between the two religionsand reciprocal forgiveness for historical sins committed by zealots on either side his deepest purpose is to describe and recommend the Christian view of salvation, which he says was made possible by Jesus' ministry, martyrdom and resurrection. The author's command of the relevant scriptural material and scholarly commentaries is extraordinary, and this study functions as a handy reference guide for readers looking to compare the Bible and the Quran, point by point."

About Randall Ireland

Randall is a retired hospice chaplain and author. The focus of his research is Islamic Theology. He has taught Comparative World Religions at the University of Phoenix as well as other presentations. He recently completed his fifth year as a substitute high school teacher  just keeping life interesting!

Inviting Muslims to Christ: A Clear Path to Salvation

ISBN Hard Cover 978-0-692-84921-7

ISBN Soft Cover 978-0-692-81648-6

ISBN e-book 978-0-692-8165-09

6 x 9

243 pages

Facebook: www.facebook.com/InvitingMuslimstoChrist

Amazon: www.amazon.com/Inviting-Muslims-Christ-Quotations-Commentary/dp/0692816488

MEDIA CONTACT:

Randall Ireland

281-304-2895 Office, 951-213-7272 Mobile

[email protected]

SOURCE Randall Ireland
SAO PAULO, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Itau Unibanco Holding S.A. (B3: ITUB4 and ITUB3 andNYSE: ITUB) is pleased to invite you to participate in our conference calls about the 2017 - 2nd quarter result.

To join the event on the internet, please visit: www.itau.com.br/investor-relations. The audio webcast works with Internet Explorer 9 or above and the new versions of Chrome, Firefox and mobile devices (IOS 8, or superior, and Android 3.0, or superior).

In order to better serve our investors and shareholders, as of this quarter, we will request the identification of those who join our conference calls on the internet.

Time

English

09:00 AM (EDT)

10:00 AM (Brasilia Time)

(1-866) 262 - 4553 (toll free from USA)

(55-11) 2820 - 4001 or (55-11) 3193 - 1001 (in Brazil)

(1-412) 317 - 6029 (other countries)

Portuguese

10:30 AM (EDT)

11:30 AM (Brasilia Time)

(55-11) 2820 - 4001

(55-11) 3193 - 1001



Presentation

Candido Bracher

Executive President and CEO (Chief Executive Officer)

Caio Ibrahim David

Executive Vice President, CFO (Chief Financial Officer) and CRO (Chief Risk Officer)

Macelo Kopel

Investor Relations Officer



The conference calls will also be archived in audio format on the same website. To access an audio replay of the conference calls, which will be available until August 8, 2017, dial (55 11) 3193-1012 or (55 11) 2820-4012. Access codes: 2886528# (call in Portuguese) and 4283325# (call in English). On the morning of the conference call, the slide presentation will be available for viewing and downloading. If you have any questions, please contact Mrs. Doris Pompeuat GlobalRI, at (55 11) 5042-6700 or [email protected].

Access code: Itau Unibanco

www.itau.com.br/investor-relations

SOURCE Itau Unibanco Holding S.A.

Related Links

http://www.itau.com.br/investor-relations


SALT LAKE CITY, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Ivanti today announced it has been named one of this year's "Top Ten Support Websites" by The Association of Support Professionals (ASP), which recognizes companies who provide a great online self-service experience to their customers. This year marks the third consecutive time the company has been included on the list, having previously won under the LANDESK brand.

Ivanti was honored in the medium-sized company division, which includes companies with revenues between $100 million to $1 billion. This recognition continues the company's momentum and rapid growth following its rebranding as Ivanti in early 2017.

"At Ivanti, we work hard to ease the IT workload for organizations by automating and securing the digital workplace. Our support site is a key asset and plays a vital role in empowering our customers to manage their IT tasks," said Steve Daly, CEO of Ivanti. "We are truly honored and grateful to be receiving this award for the third year in a row. It's humbling to be continuously recognized by respected organizations such as ASP."

As Ivanti further extends its offering into global markets, it has worked diligently to ensure all international customers receive the same superior service by expanding its support site. Ivanti maintains its noteworthy community support and customer portal that empowers customers to resolve any problems while developing additional capabilities for its increasingly global user base. This award underscores Ivanti's success in continuing its high-caliber service in the midst of bolstering its mobile-optimized site.

The top ten winners were selected by a panel composed of 90 judges with aptitude and competence in web support design and implementation. The judges evaluated candidates for the award using a scoring system based on 25 performance criteria. The decision process included overall usability, search implementation, interactive features, community engagement and site development strategy, to name a few.

To learn more about Ivanti, visit: www.ivanti.com. You can find additional information about Ivanti's support community by visiting: https://community.ivanti.com/welcome.

About Ivanti

Ivanti is IT evolved. By integrating and automating critical IT tasks, Ivanti is helping IT organizations successfully automate and secure the digital workplace. For more than three decades, Ivanti has helped IT professionals address security threats, manage devices and optimize their user experience. From traditional PCs, to mobile devices, virtual machines and the data center, Ivanti helps discover and manage IT assets wherever they are located, improving IT service delivery and reducing risk. Ivanti also ensures that supply chain and warehouse teams are effectively leveraging the most up-to-date technology to improve productivity throughout their operation. Ivanti is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, and has offices all over the world. For more information, visit www.ivanti.com.

Copyright  2017, Ivanti. All rights reserved.

Contacts

Helen Carroll

Ivanti

+44 1344 407005

[email protected]

Amberly Asay

Method Communications

+1 801-461-9776

[email protected]

SOURCE Ivanti

Related Links

http://www.ivanti.com


SEATTLE and LOS ANGELES, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Jean Kasem, widow of legendary radio DJ and pop culture icon Casey Kasem, has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington state, accusing three of her late husband's adult children from a prior relationship 40 years ago, of conspiring to seize control of Casey through a "homicidal guardianship scam." The suit alleges that the adult children  Kerri, Mike and Julie Kasem, along with Julie's husband and their attorney Troy Martin  chemically restrained Casey Kasem and then caused his death to go after Casey and Jean's financial assets.

Also named as a defendant is Catholic Health Initiatives, one of the nation's largest healthcare systems, which owns and operates the facility where Kasem died.

Casey Kasem was "pronounced" dead at 3:23 am, June 15, 2014, at St. Anthony Hospital in Gig Harbor, Washington. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, Seattle, seeks damages for, among other things, "the conscious pain, suffering, anxiety and fear of impending death experienced by Casey Kasem."

The complaint alleges that Casey Kasem was criminally separated from his legal family of 35 years against his will and subjected to a forced, isolated hospital entrapment. It asserts that Kasem's adult children, using a fraudulent Durable Power of Attorney, made a series of rapid, unilateral decisions to terminate his life, completely ignoring his wife's desperate pleas and without any authorization by Washington State Judge Jennifer Irvine Forbes.

According to the complaint, Jean Kasem's husband was forcibly taken by his 44-year-old daughter Kerri to St. Anthony on June 1, 2014 for an "independent medical evaluation." St. Anthony hospital's examining physician, attended by Casey's personal physician, Dr. Donald Sharman, cleared Casey to be returned to the care he was receiving at home. St. Anthony Hospital's examining physician stated in his written medical report, "His {Casey Kasem's} current care plan and management in his current home has been appropriate today. Dr. Sharman's recommendations and availability have been excellent and timely."

The evaluation concluded at around 6:00 pm on June 1, but Casey was not returned home to his wife as intended. Instead, the complaint alleges that Kerri Kasem's attorney contacted St. Anthony Hospital's examining physician and fabricated an excuse for an "overnight observation," which was not authorized by Judge Forbes. As a result, Casey was held against his will at St. Anthony Hospital.

On June 2, 2014, Judge Forbes read St. Anthony Hospital's examining physician's report and found "no compelling argument from the doctor in the report that he {Casey} needed to stay in the hospital." She then authorized that Casey be immediately returned home to his wife.

Concurrently, Dr. Sharman and Jean Kasem called St. Anthony and were informed by the attending physician that, "Casey Kasem's medical evaluation had concluded and his overnight observation went well, he is discharged and you can come pick him up."

That afternoon when Jean, Dr. Sharman, Casey's private nurse and one of Jean's attorneys arrived at St. Anthony Hospital with medical transport to pick Casey up and bring him back home, they were stalled for hours by hospital staff.

According to the complaint, St. Anthony Hospital's attending physician, who previously told Dr. Sharman and Jean Kasem that "Casey was discharged," reversed himself, saying Casey would not be discharged. He also could not explain to Dr. Sharman and Jean why Casey needed to remain in the hospital. Kerri Kasem's attorney then screamed, " Casey is not leaving the hospital period !" From that day forward, Dr. Sharman, along with Casey's private nurse, Jean, her attorneys and Liberty Kasem were all banned from St. Anthony.

Less than a week after "seizing control of Casey" and having shockingly informed Jean and Liberty that they had "already begun the process" of withdrawing and withholding all of Casey's hydration, nutrition and proactive medical care, his adult children and hospital personnel would only permit Jean and Liberty five minutes with Casey to say goodbye, while forcing his life to end. A hospital nurse had to pry Casey's fingers off of his wife's arm as he would not let go of her. Jean and Liberty were escorted out of Casey's room and then asked to leave the hospital chapel, where they had gone to pray.

Jean and Liberty never saw Casey alive again.

"The truth about my husband's homicide is so disturbing to confront but I am compelled to seek justice," Jean Kasem said. "After an exhaustive forensic investigation following Casey's death and autopsy, there was no other choice but to bring this lawsuit. The facts unambiguously point to defendants' deceit, self-dealing and fraud, which demand to be exposed. I have taken this action for my daughter Liberty and for my husband of 35 years, as I'm certain Casey would have done the same for me. I pray the justice we seek is quick and thoroughly delivered, not only for us, but for all of the vulnerable and elderly who are subjected to the same predatory and abusive conduct by those who are anxious for them to die for illicit and immediate financial gain".

Alleged pattern of extreme harassment and false claims by defendants

The lawsuit accuses the defendants of engaging in a racketeering scheme and wire fraud as part of their guardianship scam, using a pattern of extreme harassment by falsely and repeatedly summoning the Los Angeles Police Department and Adult Protective Services to call on Jean and Casey's Los Angeles house, purportedly to uncover "abuse," which was never found. Jean Kasem asserts it was an orchestrated ruse designed to take control of Casey's person and go after their joint assets.

The complaint states, "Agency after agency in both California and Washington State, investigated the numerous false reports made by the defendants and never found any evidence of the defendants' fraudulent allegations. It was clear that the defendants were misusing these public services as a form of extreme harassment, media exploitation and prejudicial publicity against Plaintiff {Jean Kasem} and her family, for their Homicidal Guardianship scheme of Casey Kasem."

The same scam had been attempted by defendants in California four months earlier, which was "denied for no good cause" and subsequently "denied with prejudice" on January 14, 2014 by Judge Lesley Green. It was attempted again in the month preceding Casey's death, while he was living in Washington, this time misusing Washington State's Adult Protective Services and the state's Sheriff's Department. Once again, no evidence was found to substantiate the defendants' allegations.

A year earlier in 2013, Casey's adult children attempted to seize control of him through using a fraudulent Durable Power of Attorney document, allegedly signed in a UPS store on Hollywood Blvd. on November 11, 2007, while Casey was under duress and undue influence, recovering from surgery and without any legal representation, the complaint asserts.

The complaint alleges that Kerri, Mike and Julie Kasem, along with Julie's husband, Jamil Anis Aboulhosn, then actively kept their 2007 DPA in secrecy for six years before surfacing and filing a fraudulent petition for guardianship of Casey. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lesley Green, found "no good cause" to grant them a guardianship, as Casey was found to be receiving "excellent care" from his wife.

According to the complaint, one month prior to Casey's death, defendants increased their harassment of Jean and Casey's family, by falsely reporting him as a missing person, launching a nationwide manhunt and media frenzy, when Casey was in fact, safely and peacefully at home, with his wife and daughter Liberty, in Washington State.

On June 1, 2014, defendants had forcibly removed Casey against his will and out of county to a distant hospital  instead of a medical facility a block away from where he was living  for a "supposed evaluation" that could have been accommodated by a doctor making a house call, the complaint alleges.



The complaint states this was another ruse, to rip Casey away from his wife and daughter, leaving them both traumatized.

The lawsuit asserts that St. Anthony chose to execute defendants' illegal, unilateral decision by swiftly starving Casey to death for immediate financial gain. This action directly contravened Catholic Health Initiative's protocol stating that, "A Catholic health care institution will not honor an Advance Directive or DPA that is contrary to Catholic teaching and may never condone or participate in any way, which does not meet with their Bishops' ethical and moral standards."

According to the complaint, a letter from Washington State Attorney General Robert Ferguson on June 4, 2014, indicated that the state's Adult Protective Services concluded that Jean Kasem was providing "impressive care" for her husband Casey and closing its investigation  10 days later, Casey was dead.

"The homicidal guardianship scam perpetrated by the defendants is an inter-state federal crime and under federal jurisdiction," Jean said. "His truth is marching on."

Background on Casey and Jean Kasem

Casey Kasem was the golden-voiced DJ whose narration powered the radio countdown show "American Top 40" for decades, attracting millions of fans around the world.

In fact, Casey set the standard for all countdown shows with his legendary weekly program, regaling listeners with personal stories behind "long-distance dedications," as well as trivia about songs and artists, and memorably signing off each week with his famous, "Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars." Three years after his death, Casey's trademark voice is still heard around the world through syndicated radio broadcasts of his programs.

Jean & Casey were married in 1980, they had a daughter and named her Liberty. They did everything together. For 35 years, they would open and read countless letters that were mailed in from around the world for the long distance dedications.

An Army veteran, Casey was selected to be the "Voice of America" and "Armed Forces Radio," a talented voice-over actor, with over 2,000 cartoons, which helped lay the foundation for his broadcasting career  perhaps most enduringly known as the good-hearted Shaggy on the Scooby Doo mysteries cartoon series for nearly 50 years.

A beloved American treasure, Casey Kasem is one of the best-known radio and TV host of the twentieth century and became the youngest member ever inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters' Radio Hall of Fame.

Jean Kasem played the effervescent character of Loretta Tortelli on the smash NBC TV series "Cheers." In its record-breaking 11 years on network television, Jean also starred in its spin-off "The Tortellis," hailed by many critics as ahead of its time. Jean made numerous other appearances, co-starring on classics such as "Ghostbusters," episodic television shows; she also has done substantial voice-over work in her acting career. She also holds a dozen U.S. patents related to the design and construction of baby cribs.



Casey Kasem has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Billboard magazine honored him with its first-ever life time achievement award. Billboard presented both his countdown shows with Network/Syndicated Programs of the Year Awards, an honor he's received many times. Casey was honored with the first Radio Icon Award in 2003.

Besides their work on TV and radio, they also were concerned social and political activists fighting for humanitarian causes. Their interests ranged from vegetarianism and anti-smoking campaigns to anti-nuclear peace marches and aid for the homeless  not to mention fighting stereotyping in the media. Since 1981, they co-hosted with Jerry Lewis on the annual Muscular Dystrophy Association Labor Day Telethon.

Casey and Jean both had the belief that they could do more. Their message to each individual is that every person can make a difference  then get involved. They set the example themselves.

Contact: Matt Baum, [email protected]

SOURCE Jean Kasem
NEW YORK, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Jerrick Media Holdings, Inc., (OTCQB: JMDA) (the "Company" or "Jerrick"), a social media and digital technology company, announced today that it has added 6 new social publishing communities to Vocal, a premier long-form social publishing network. The Vocal platform now supports a total of 18 community websites. Jerrick plans to further add over 50 niche community sites by year end 2017 as it launches its SaaS offering later this year.

Vocal is a social publishing hub engineered for creation and discovery, spanning verticals in food, music, science fiction, the workplace, pop culture and many more. Connecting original content with communities passionate about the topics, Vocal's proprietary, algorithmic engine capitalizes on the power of specific and dedicated audiences, promoting maximum SEO exposure and monetization capabilities. Math determines which verticals are added to the Vocal publishing platform. New communities are objectively and quantitatively derived in response to voices (interest levels) within the rapidly growing Vocal community and the growing trends of the content community at large.

Jerrick's 6 new sites include:

Families: Family relationships in all their complicated glory.

Gamers: For people who love gaming.

01: Your source for all things tech.

Petlife: For people who love pets.

Poets: The beauty and power of poetry.

Wheel: For anyone that drives a car.

Following three years of developing the proprietary, patent-pending Vocal platform and developing a profitable, arbitrage-based business model that creates a win-win for Jerrick, its partners and creative writers publishing on its platform, Vocal was released for the first time on November 30, 2016. The Dashboard statistics below illustrate the accelerating growth of creative content writers (bloggers) and audience (unique visitors):

March 31, 2017 June 30, 2017 Verticals (Web Communities) 12 12 Avg. Unique Visitors per Month 1.07 million 2.26 million Avg. Page Views per Month 1.77 million 3.03 million Total Bloggers Signed Up 3,031 11,507 Average # of Submissions /Day 25 83 Average # of Published Articles /Day 20 62

"In the brief period since Vocal's introduction, our business model is building a growing base of enthusiastic content creators within each community, which, in turn, has attracted a fast expanding community of visitors. The growth rate we have experienced was accomplished without a material marketing effort, which we intend to initiate during the current quarter, once Vocal version 2.0 is released in its entirety," Jeremy Frommer, CEO and Co-founder of Jerrick commented. "With the release of a number of revenue modules that will be announced over the coming weeks, we believe we have created a highly effective medium for advertisers and brands to efficiently reach the most appropriate audience for their goods and services within our growing list of community sites. Further supporting advertising ROI, our analytics provide precise feedback on advertising spending. We are receiving a good level of early interest from advertisers and expect revenues to scale in 2017 and achieve profitable growth in 2018."

The complete list of Vocal community sites:

Culture: Potent

Arts + Entertainment: Beat, Gamers, Geeks, Poets

Food + Drink: Proof, Feast

Health + Wellness: Longevity

Home + Travel: Wander, Wheel

Business + Education: Journal

News + Politics: The Swamp

Science + Tech: 01, Omni

Love + Relationships: Filthy, Humans

Lifestyle: Families, Petlife

For more information, visit https://vocal.media/

About Jerrick

Jerrick is a technology group focused on the development of digital communities, marketing branded digital content, and e-commerce opportunities. Core to Jerrick's unique capabilities is Vocal, a proprietary technology and content distribution platform, programmed to deliver a robust long-form, digital publishing platform organized into highly engaged niche-communities capable of hosting all forms of rich media content. Vocal maximizes scalability, speed, simplicity, and adaptability to create an unparalleled user experience - algorithmically designed to bridge media-rich long-form creative content with effective monetization. Each niche-community site is overseen by a dedicated team and culture, whose primary focus is on revenue conversion of all published material via digital arbitrage. All content is meant to challenge, inspire, and enlighten. For more information please visit https://jerrick.media.

Forward-Looking Statements

Any statements that are not historical facts and that express, or involve discussions as to, expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, indicated through the use of words or phrases such as "will likely result," "are expected to," "will continue," "is anticipated," "estimated," "intends," "plans," "believes" and "projects") may be forward-looking and may involve estimates and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. We caution that the factors described herein could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in any forward-looking statements we make and that investors should not place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements. Further, any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which such statement is made, and we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which such statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of anticipated or unanticipated events or circumstances. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for us to predict all of such factors. Further, we cannot assess the impact of each such factor on our results of operations or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements. This press release is qualified in its entirety by the cautionary statements and risk factor disclosure contained in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings.



Investor Relations:

Natasha Sydor

Jerrick Media

+1-201-258-3770

[email protected]



SOURCE Jerrick Media Holdings, Inc.
JERSEY CITY, N.J., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Jersey City Urby, the cantilevered skyscraper on the Hudson River waterfront, today announced a partnership with direct-to-consumer luxury mattress company Leesa. Recognized for its social impact program, Leesa donates one mattress for every ten they sell as part of their One-Ten program. The partnership underscores Jersey City Urby's commitment to collaboration with like-minded brands to offer programming that redefines the residential rental experience.

As a result of the partnership, Jersey City Urby residents can attend The Dream Dinner Series, a rotation of monthly dinner parties to be held in different locations within the building. In collaboration with Leesa, each event will be hosted by a notable guest speaker who will lead a thoughtful discussion on a topic they are passionate about. David Wolfe, Leesa's Co-Founder and CEO, will kick off the event on July 19th with a conversation centered on the life-changing experience of building a business for profit and purpose.

Additionally, Leesa will be outfitting the rooms of influencers residing at Urby. The first will be Jersey City Urby's Scientist-in-Residence, Paul Hoffman, CEO of the Liberty Science Center. He will be provided a mattress as a means of exploring the future of mattress innovation and sleep technology. Wrestler Helen Maroulis will be next, and will also host an upcoming Dream Dinner. Artists, athletes and influencers alike will have the opportunity to receive a Leesa mattress and host or attend a Dream Dinner moving forward.

"We're thrilled to partner with Leesa to offer Jersey City Urby residents unique experiences that aren't typical of today's rental developments," said David Barry, President of Ironstate Development. "Collaborating with Leesa was a natural fit for Urby, as our brands share similar values when it comes to community building and the championing of sustainable living."

As a way of providing inspiration and dream sharing within the community, a Dream Wall will live in Urby's lobby. Residents and guests will be encouraged to write down their dreams and contribute to an interactive piece of art onsite as well as share through social channels using hashtag, #dreamwall.

"At Leesa, we measure our success as much by our impact on the world as by our sales and profits. When forming strategic partnerships, we look for like-minded brands that approach life and business in a way that resonates with us and our consumers," said David Wolfe, Leesa Sleep's CEO. "We feel we have accomplished that with Urbya company that shares our core values and appreciation for the intertwined nature of work, play, health and wellness, community and social impact."

Jersey City Urby residents will receive special pricing for Leesa mattresses, as well as the opportunity to try the mattresses in the building's model units.

About Jersey City Urby

At 713 feet in height, Jersey City Urby is the tallest residential tower in New Jersey. The 69-story building features 762 apartments and is located just off the Hudson River waterfront, directly across from Manhattan. Jersey City Urby is co-developed by Ironstate Development and Roseland Residential Trust, a subsidiary of Mack-Cali Realty Corporation.

The Urby concept is a complete re-think of the residential rental-housing concept that is design driven, tailored to fit every neighborhood and developed with the needs of the contemporary urban renter in mind. Urby is conceptualized by Ironstate Development, the real estate firm behind the development of the Standard East Village, Chiltern Firehouse in London and W Hotel in Hoboken; and Concrete, the Amsterdam-based architecture and design firm responsible for the architecture and interiors of citizenM Hotels around the world.

Communal spaces are integral to each Urby and are designed to foster natural opportunities for residents to interact. They include: a fully equipped gym offering regular classes, from cardio to strength training to yoga and barre; heated outdoor pool and deck that will host sunset events, meditation and more; a communal kitchen for cooking demonstrations, tastings and talks; and the Urby Creative Lab, a space for residents to participate in interior design workshops, flower arranging, homemade apothecary and other classes.

The Jersey City location is the second of a planned series of Urby developments set to open in other cities. The first Urby opened in 2016 in Staten Island and a new location will open this summer in Harrison, New Jersey.

About Leesa Sleep, LLC

Based in Virginia Beach, Va., Leesa is a direct-to-consumer online luxury mattress company that offers 100 percent American-made mattresses delivered directly to consumers' doors. From its start, Leesa has measured its own success not just by the bottom line, but by the company's overall social impact. To date, Leesa's One-Ten program has provided more than 15,000 new mattresses to those in need. Leesa offers a 100-night risk-free trial, free shipping, and no-hassle returns. The company currently offers free shipping to the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Canada. For more information visit www.leesa.com.

SOURCE Jersey City Urby
The nine-judge bench would deal with the issue of right to privacy. The matter challenging the Aadhaar scheme would then be referred back to a smaller bench of the Supreme Court.

By India Today Web Desk: The Supreme Court has started hearing arguments on the contentious issue of whether right to privacy is a fundamental right under the Constitution, a key question linked to the Aadhaar debate.

A nine-bench bench, headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar, is listening to the arguments. The bench also comprises Justices J Chelameswar, S A Bobde, R K Agrawal, Rohinton Fali Nariman, Abhay Manohar Sapre, D Y Chandrachud, Sanjay Kishan Kaul and S Abdul Nazeer.

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The Supreme Court on Tuesday said that the nine-judge bench would deal with the issue of right to privacy. The matter challenging the Aadhaar scheme would then be referred back to a smaller bench, the court said.

THE TWO PAST VERDICTS ON RIGHT TO PRIVACY

A five-judge Constitution bench headed by the Chief Justice, which was to deal with the pleas challenging the validity of the Aadhaar scheme and the right to privacy attached to it, was faced with two past verdicts in 1950 and 1962 that held that right to privacy was not a fundamental right.

"During the course of the hearing today, it seems that it has become essential for us to determine whether there is any fundamental right of privacy under the Constitution," the Supreme Court said on Tuesday.

"The determination of this question will essentially entail whether the decision recorded by this court in M P Sharma and Ors vs. Satish Chandra, District Magistrate, Delhi and Ors. (of 1950) by an eight judge Constitution bench, and also, in Kharak Singh vs. the State of UP and Ors. (of 1962) by a six-judge Constitution bench, that there is no such fundamental right, is the correct expression of the constitutional position," it said in its order.

The nine-judge bench's ruling on the right to privacy debate will have a bearing on the larger debate surrounding government pushing the 12-digit Aadhaar scheme across the country.

(Inputs from PTI)

ALSO READ:

Can Aadhaar make you a tax defaulter?

No Aadhaar, no banking and threat to privacy: Do you have a choice?

Does right to privacy include right to be forgotten? Delhi HC asks Google

ALSO WATCH: How to link Aadhaar with your PAN card

--- ENDS ---
DUBLIN, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Allergan plc (NYSE: AGN) today announced that Joseph H. Boccuzi has been appointed to its Board of Directors, effective immediately. Mr. Boccuzi recently retired as a Partner in the Global Life Sciences, Board and Chief Executive Officer Practices at Spencer Stuart, following 24 years of service with the global executive search and leadership consulting firm.

"Talented people give Allergan an edge as we continue to build our Bold culture and drive long-term sustainable growth," said Brent Saunders, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Allergan. "Joe Boccuzi has a long track record of identifying great life sciences leaders globally and successfully matching board-level and executive talent with companies to drive long-term value."

"Our Board believes that one of its key roles is to oversee development of organizational capabilities, and to focus on talent management. Joe Boccuzi's unique insights, leadership skills and experience are additive and complementary to the diverse mix of professional experiences of our board of directors," said Chris Coughlin, Lead Independent Director. "I welcome Joe to our board and look forward to his contributions as we work together to advance the interests of Allergan shareholders."

"I was drawn to the Allergan board by its adroit, forward-thinking and dynamic leadership team and Board of Directors. It is an exciting time to join Allergan, and I look forward to helping the Company achieve its full potential for shareholders and society," said Boccuzi.

Mr. Boccuzi retired from Spencer Stuart in December 2016, after 24 years of service, where he played a central role in establishing and building the firm's Life Sciences Practice. He served in positions of increasing responsibility within Spencer Stuart, most recently as a Partner in the firm's Global Life Sciences, Board and Chief Executive Officer Practices.

Prior to joining Spencer Stuart, Mr. Boccuzi worked in executive search, venture capital and corporate management roles. He served as a consultant with Paul R. Ray & Company, an executive search firm. Prior to that, he worked as a Financial Advisor for Merrill Lynch. Mr. Boccuzi also held several leadership positions at National Patent Development Corporation, a venture capital firm specializing in medical technology and investment throughout the U.S. and worldwide. While there, he managed four medical startup operations serving as chief operating officer, board member and adviser to the board of directors. Prior to that, Mr. Boccuzi worked in sales for Xerox Corporation.

About Allergan plc

Allergan plc (NYSE: AGN), headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, is a bold, global pharmaceutical company and a leader in a new industry model  Growth Pharma. Allergan is focused on developing, manufacturing and commercializing branded pharmaceutical, device, biologic, surgical and regenerative medicine products for patients around the world.

Allergan markets a portfolio of leading brands and best-in-class products for the central nervous system, eye care, medical aesthetics and dermatology, gastroenterology, women's health, urology and anti-infective therapeutic categories.

Allergan is an industry leader in Open Science, a model of research and development, which defines our approach to identifying and developing game-changing ideas and innovation for better patient care. With this approach, Allergan has built one of the broadest development pipelines in the pharmaceutical industry with 70+ mid-to-late stage pipeline programs currently in development.

Allergan's success is powered by our more than 18,000 global colleagues' commitment to being Bold for Life. Together, we build bridges, power ideas, act fast and drive results for our customers and patients around the world by always doing what is right.

With commercial operations in approximately 100 countries, Allergan is committed to working with physicians, healthcare providers and patients to deliver innovative and meaningful treatments that help people around the world live longer, healthier lives every day.

For more information, visit Allergan's website at www.Allergan.com.

Forward-Looking Statement

Statements contained in this press release that refer to future events or other non-historical facts are forward-looking statements that reflect Allergan's current perspective on existing trends and information as of the date of this release. Actual results may differ materially from Allergan's current expectations depending upon a number of factors affecting Allergan's business. These factors include, among others, the difficulty of predicting the timing or outcome of FDA approvals or actions, if any; the impact of competitive products and pricing; market acceptance of and continued demand for Allergan's products; difficulties or delays in manufacturing; and other risks and uncertainties detailed in Allergan's periodic public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to Allergan's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016 and Allergan's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the period ended March 31, 2017. Except as expressly required by law, Allergan disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

CONTACTS:

Allergan:

Investors:

Daphne Karydas

(862) 261-8006

Media:

Mark Marmur

(862) 261-7558

SOURCE Allergan plc

Related Links

http://www.allergan.com


Mr. Johnston also acts as a neutral accountant, expert witness and consultant in mergers and acquisition disputes, including working capital adjustments and earn-outs.

In addition to his professional responsibilities, Mr. Johnston serves on the board of trustees for the not-for-profit National Institute of Trial Advocacy, the nation's leading provider of legal advocacy skills training. Josh is committed to the Dallas community, having worked with the North Texas Business Council for the Arts and the Dallas Children's Theater.

Before joining Ankura, Mr. Johnston was a managing director of Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP for more than fifteen years, where he served clients as an expert witness, neutral accountant, investigator and bankruptcy accountant. Mr. Johnston also assisted audit clients as a fraud specialist. He started his career as an auditor with Arthur Anderson where he served start-ups and large public clients.

Ankura Co-President Philip Daddona stated, "Josh's rich forensic accounting and expert witness experience greatly expands our ability to assist clients across multiple industries, including oil and gas, banking and consumer products. His philanthropic and charitable work aligns with our firm's focus on giving back to our communities. Josh's strength of character, expertise and relationships will help us continue to build our firm in the near term, and well into the future."

Mr. Johnston said, "Ankura already has a market leading reputation in forensics and accounting advisory in addition to adjacencies that complement my practices, such as restructuring and compliance. The firm is clearly committed to bringing together best-in-class professionals to be a part of a collaborative, values-focused approach to bring the best solutions to our clients and I am excited to be here."

About Ankura Consulting

Ankura Consulting, an independent business advisory and expert services firm, is defined by a culture of collaboration and focused on delivering unrivaled depths of knowledge to clients addressing important opportunities and critical choices every day. Our Investigations & Accounting Advisory, Litigation & Disputes, Regulatory & Contractual Compliance, Risk, Resilience & Geopolitical, and Turnaround & Restructuring professionals are proven cross-disciplinary and cross-industry experts who create the diverse and dynamic solutions required to navigate today's complicated world. At Ankura, we know that collaboration drives results.

SOURCE Ankura Consulting

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http://www.ankuraconsulting.com


ALBANY, New York, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

According to a new market report published by Transparency Market Research, "Juice Concentrate Market (By Type - Fruit Juice Concentrates and Vegetable Juice Concentrates, By Form - Clear Concentrate, Frozen Concentrate and Powdered Concentrate, By Distribution Channel - Online and Offline, By Offline Distribution Channel - Super Markets & Hyper Markets, Departmental Stores and Others, By Application - Beverages, Soups and Sauces, Dairy Products, Bakery Products, Confectionery Products and Others,) - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast, 2017 - 2025" was valued in terms of revenue at USD 89.56 billion in 2016 and is anticipated to reach USD 117.89 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 3.4% from 2017 to 2025.

This report takes into consideration all the information related to the growth of this market globally. It includes various trends being followed within this market that may impact its growth along with the driving and restraining factors to have an impact over the market size as a whole. Juice concentrate is more of a condensed form of liquid achieved through heating the normal juices of fruits or vegetables. These condensed form of juices has huge utilities and are used across different industries for providing the desired flavor and taste without artificial methods. One of the major utilities associated with these juice concentrates would be its longer shelf life than usual juices as well as the cost-effectiveness associated with it. However, it is the growth application of these concentrates across beverages along with rising consumer awareness about its benefits that has formed some of the major drivers for this market.

Browse Research Report: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/juice-concentrates-market.html

Based on type, vegetable juice concentrate and fruit juice concentrate has formed the two major divisions to be considered under the scope of this report. For 2016, it is seen that the fruit juice concentrate holds a larger market share than vegetable juice concentrates. Fruit juice concentrates have applications across different food and beverages items such as curds, ice-creams etc. that has been a major driver to boost this particular segment.

On the basis of form, this market has been segmented into clear concentrate, frozen concentrate and powdered concentrate. This market was mostly dominated by clear concentrate followed by powdered concentrate. Health benefits through extraction of important ingredients from the solvent along with powdered natural concentrate allowing easy applications across beverages and soups among other areas have been a few crucial factors to boost the demand for this segment.

By distribution channel, this market includes online distribution channel and offline distribution channel. For 2016, offline is expected to be a larger segment as compared to online that is expected to grow immensely during the next few years. The offline segment comprises of hyper markets & super markets and departmental stores among others. The rising availability along with structured way of observing things for purchase has also lead to the offline segment and super & hyper markets being the largest segment for this market.

Get Sample PDF Report Brochure: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=23600

The application segment for this market consists of beverages, soups & sauces, bakery products, dairy products, confectionery products and others. For 2016, beverages has formed the largest segment for this market for 2016. Vast applications of juice concentrates resulting in giving customers their desired flavor and tastes has been a few major factors leading to beverages forming the largest segment for this market. Dairy products and bakery products have been a few other key segments for this market.

By geography, the juice concentrate market is segmented into Europe, Asia Pacific, North America, Middle East & Africa and Latin America. Based on revenue, Europe has formed the largest market followed by North America. Asia Pacific has monitored on the fastest growth among all other regions and is expected to grow tremendously in the next few years as well. Rise in awareness regarding the utilities and benefits of these juice concentrates along with convenience associated with the beverage products made from the juice concentrates has helped the market to grow in these regions.

Some of the leading players in the global Juice Concentrate market are Archer Daniels Midland Co. (U.S.), Ingredion Incorporated (U.S.), Dohler Company (Germany), SkyPeople Fruit Juice Inc. (China), AGRANA Group (Austria), Diana Food (France), Sunopta Inc. (Canada), SVZ International B.V. (Netherlands), Kanegrade Limited (UK) and The Ciatti Company (U.S.) among others. The stiff competition between the different companies catering to this market segment puts more focus on the quality of concentrates available allowing an edge to a few companies as compared to its competitors. This markets is highly fragmented with companies working exclusively on differentiating its products through taste or flavor.

Browse Research Press Release: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/juice-concentrates-market.htm

The global Juice Concentrate market has been segmented as follows:

Juice Concentrate Market, by Type:

Fruit Juice Concentrate

Vegetable Juice Concentrate

Juice Concentrate Market, by Form:

Clear Concentrate

Frozen Concentrate

Powdered Concentrate

Juice Concentrate Market, by Distribution Channel:

Online Distribution Channel

Offline Distribution Channel Super Markets & Hyper Markets Departmental Stores Others



Juice Concentrate Market, by Application:

Beverages

Soups & Sauces

Bakery Products

Dairy Products

Confectionery Products

Others

Juice Concentrate Market, by Geography:

North America U.S. Canada Rest Of North America

Europe The U.K Germany France Italy Rest of Europe

Asia Pacific China India Japan Rest of Asia Pacific

Middle East and Africa (MEA) UAE South Africa Rest of MEA

and (MEA) Latin America Brazil Rest of Latin America



Browse Other Market Research Reports:

Global Juice Market : http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/juice-market.html



http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/juice-market.html Cold Pressed Juice Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/cold-pressed-juice-market.htm

About TMR

Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The company's exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMR's experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.

TMR's 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.



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SOURCE Transparency Market Research
SUPERIOR, Colo., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Key Equipment Finance, one of the nation's largest bank-held equipment finance companies and an affiliate of KeyCorp (NYSE: KEY), today announced it has provided financing for 16 community solar projects across Massachusetts for Clean Energy Collective (CEC), the nation's leading community solar solutions provider, and ENGIE, a global energy developer focusing on responsible growth and the challenges of the energy transition to a low-carbon economy.

Using financing from Key Equipment Finance, CEC and ENGIE will own and operate the community solar projects and sell the energy to utilities, creating savings on electric bills for the commercial, municipal, nonprofit and residential customers. The combined CEC and ENGIE projects are adding 22.1 megawatts of clean capacity, which is equivalent to fully offsetting energy for 3,700 residential homes.

"ENGIE and CEC are industry leaders using Key Equipment Finance's financing solutions to bring a broad expansion of community solar to customers across Massachusetts," said Luis Gutierrez, vice president of energy finance for Key Equipment Finance's Energy Solutions team, which provides leases tailored to the energy market. "Customized financing plays a vital role in bringing the benefits of community solar to more customers, which contributes to Key's broader sustainability goals."

The 16 community solar projects in Massachusetts are constructed and interconnected, and will serve customers in the Eversource and National Grid utility territories. They include solar arrays in the towns of Sutton, Williamsburg, Orange, Goshen, Phillipston, Uxbridge, West Bridgewater, Kingston, North Adams, Clarksburg, and Wareham. The economic benefits of these projects will be seen for years to come  including decades of property tax payments in each of the project towns, millions of dollars of construction investment through utilizing local electricians and other contracted specialists to maintain the arrays and the long-term savings, which area businesses and residential customers will receive throughout the duration of the community solar program.

"Key Equipment Finance's partnership has allowed CEC to bring its RooflessSolar community solar options to more Massachusetts customers, giving them greater choice in how they meet their power needs," said Tom Sweeney, CEC's president of renewables. "Funding community solar projects can be a very complicated and capital-intensive process, and we are proud to be collaborating with Key Equipment Finance and ENGIE to 'uncomplicate' clean energy access and sustain the growing energy movement in Massachusetts."

The 25-year lifespan of the systems will produce solar energy output equivalent to reducing 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide, planting 1.5 million trees or eliminating 1.1 billion miles of driving.

"Community solar projects enable anyone, including businesses, nonprofits, public entities, residents and even renters to 'go green' and save money with nothing on their roof or property," said Vikram Kulkarni, vice president, ENGIE renewables. "This collaborative project adds much needed renewable energy to the grid while providing the serving utilities with reliable power; ultimately contributing to a lower-carbon future."

To learn more about solar financing solutions, visit www.keyequipmentfinance.com/partner/solar_financing.

About Key Equipment Finance

Key Equipment Finance has been in the equipment finance business for 44 years and is one of the largest bank-based equipment finance providers in the U.S. The company provides tailored equipment lease and finance solutions for commercial clients and government entities. Through its manufacturer and vendor alliances unit, equipment finance programs are developed for manufacturers, distributors and resellers.

Key Equipment Finance's specialty finance group includes a specialty finance lending team, which provides structured facilities to various sectors of the specialty finance market, and a lease capital markets team to support corporations looking to optimize risk and revenue. Headquartered outside Denver, Colorado, Key Equipment Finance manages approximately $12 billion in assets and originates more than $4.5 billion of equipment financing annually. For more information, visit http://www.keyequipmentfinance.com.

About KeyCorp

KeyCorp's roots trace back 190 years to Albany, New York. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, Key is one of the nation's largest bank-based financial services companies, with assets of approximately $134.5 billion at March 31, 2017.

Key provides deposit, lending, cash management, insurance, and investment services to individuals and businesses in 15 states under the name KeyBank National Association through a network of more than 1,200 branches and more than 1,500 ATMs. Key also provides a broad range of sophisticated corporate and investment banking products, such as merger and acquisition advice, public and private debt and equity, syndications and derivatives to middle market companies in selected industries throughout the United States under the KeyBanc Capital Markets trade name. For more information, visit https://www.key.com/. KeyBank is Member FDIC.

About Clean Energy Collective

Clean Energy Collective (CEC) is the nation's leading developer of community solar solutions. CEC pioneered the model of delivering clean power-generation through medium-scale solar PV facilities accessible to all utility customers. Since establishing the country's first community-owned solar array near El Jebel, Colorado in 2010, CEC has built or has under development more than 175 RooflessSolar projects with 32 utility partners across 17 states, serving thousands of customers, and representing more than 400 MW of community solar capacity. CEC is also the leading provider of community solar software and services to the utility, development and financial industries through its Community Solar Platform. Visit www.cleanenergyco.com for more information.

About ENGIE

With its North American headquarters in Houston, ENGIE manages a range of energy businesses in the United States and Canada, including electricity generation and cogeneration, natural gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) distribution and sales, retail energy sales, and comprehensive services to help customers run their facilities more efficiently and optimize energy use and expense. Nearly 100 percent of the company's power generation portfolio produces no carbon emissions or very few. Nationally, ENGIE is the third-largest non-residential retail electricity supplier, serving customers in 14 markets. Serving nearly 90,000 accounts with innovative products and services. Globally, the company is present in 70 countries and employs 153,090 people, including 1,000 researchers in 11 R&D centers. For more information, please visit www.engie-na.com, @ENGIENorthAm, and www.engie.com.

SOURCE Key Equipment Finance

Related Links

http://www.keyequipmentfinance.com


In a PSA launching July 19 th , amfAR supporter Charli XCX will share key statistics about the status of the epidemic among the younger generation. View the full PSA at KiehlsNYC on YouTube .

"Nearly 40,000 people were diagnosed with HIV in the U.S. in 2015, and more than 40 percent were under the age of 30," said amfAR CEO Kevin Robert Frost. "We need to do a much better job of reaching young people in ways that empower them to make good decisions regarding the risks of HIV, particularly since 50 percent of HIV-positive young people don't know they're infected and can unknowingly pass the virus on to others."

Kiehl's LifeRide for amfAR is helping to advance the "Countdown to a Cure for AIDS", amfAR's research initiative aimed at developing the scientific basis of a cure by 2020. The proceeds from the 2017 Kiehl's LifeRide for amfAR will fund a specific grant to aid the research of Dr. Daniela Fera. Dr. Fera is the recipient of one of amfAR's Mathilde Krim Fellowships, which support bright young scientists seeking innovative solutions to HIV/AIDS. She is reengineering HIV proteins so that they lose their protective shield and elicit a more effective response from the immune system. Her project could advance the search for both a vaccine and a cure. Dr. Fera is an accomplished scientist and teacher who has won several awards for her work in structural biology during her postdoctoral training at Boston Children's Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

Inspired by a Kiehl's icon, the motorcycle, its spirit of adventure and philanthropic heritage, Kiehl's LifeRide for amfAR took its first ride in 2010.

The eighth annual LifeRide continues the brand's mission to heighten awareness and raise funds for amfAR, and will ride from Minneapolis to Nashville over 8 days, July 31-Aug. 7, 2017.

Rallying with the public at nine store stops along the route, Kiehl's will donate a total of $100,000 over the course of the ride. At each stop, the public can meet the riders, social media influencers, learn more about amfAR and contribute to the non-profit. For a schedule of these events, visit www.kiehls.com/liferide2017

At the conclusion of this year's ride, Kiehl's LifeRide for amfAR will have ridden more than 11,500 miles since 2010, and raised more than $1.7 million, funding nine cure-related research projects.

Chris Salgardo, President, Kiehl's USA and amfAR's Kevin Robert Frost will lead this year's riders:

Ian Bohen, actor, Teen Wolf

JR Bourne, actor, Somewhere Between

Anthony Carrino, co-host, Kitchen Cousins

Gilles Marini, actor, Switched at Birth

Tyler Posey, actor, Teen Wolf

Grant Reynolds, host/producer, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Luke Wessman, tattoo artist, Miami/NY Ink

Key partners for the ride include Cadillac, global airline Delta, and Hedon helmets.

#THECUREISINOURHANDS

Even if they're not on this year's ride route, Kiehl's customers and amfAR supporters nationwide can still join LifeRide and the fight against HIV/AIDS:

Share a selfie with a heart made from your hands , tag @Kiehls, @amfAR and hashtag #LifeRide8. Kiehl's will donate $1 for every Instagram post, up to $25,000 , to amfAR to help fund a cure for HIV/AIDS.

, tag @Kiehls, @amfAR and hashtag #LifeRide8. Kiehl's will donate for every Instagram post, up to , to amfAR to help fund a cure for HIV/AIDS. Share the amfAR PSA featuring CharliXCX! Help continue the conversation about HIV/AIDS and amfAR's work to find a cure.

Help continue the conversation about HIV/AIDS and amfAR's work to find a cure. Limited Edition Ultimate Strength Hand Salve benefits amfAR: 100% of purchase price from the sale of this product, up to $25,000 , will benefit amfAR. The Limited Edition Ultimate Strength Hand Salve will be available for $28.50 at all Kiehl's retail stores, Kiehls.com and specialty store partners nationwide.

100% of purchase price from the sale of this product, up to , will benefit amfAR. The Limited Edition Ultimate Strength Hand Salve will be available for at all Kiehl's retail stores, Kiehls.com and specialty store partners nationwide. Donate in-store. All Kiehl's retail stores nationwide will be accepting donations for amfAR. To find your closest store, please visit the store locator on Kiehls.com.

Together, from all of these elements, and with the help of our friends, customers and riders, by the end of the eight annual LifeRide for amfAR, Kiehl's will have raised more than $150,000 in 2017, and more than $1,700,000 in total or amfAR via motorcycle rides and event donations since 2010. Join us on LifeRidehelp amfAR make AIDS history.

To find out more about LifeRide, obtain a schedule of events, or get involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS, please visit www.kiehls.com/liferide2017

#LifeRide8 #Kiehls #TheCureIsInOurHands

Like @KiehlsUS on Facebook

Tweet @Kiehls and @KiehlsPrez on Twitter

Tag @Kiehls on Instagram

Snap @kiehls on Snapchat

Subscribe to @KiehlsNYC on YouTube

Press Contact: Rachael Kelley

Phone: 917-606-2757

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Kiehl's Since 1851

Related Links

http://www.kiehls.com


LONDON, July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- INTRODUCTION

Drug delivery systems optimized to provide flexibility in dosing regimen, reduce the number of hospital visits, decrease dependence on healthcare professionals and enhance adherence to the therapeutic regimen have become the preferred choice of drug administration. The large scale adoption of prefilled syringes, the first ready-to-use injection device to be marketed, demonstrated the growing interest in the concept of such convenient drug delivery systems. In addition, several pen-injectors and autoinjectors have witnessed an impressive growth in the recent past. However, these hand-held devices are only capable of administering drugs with dosing volume close to 1 ml. With over 900 biologics being developed (most of these are highly viscous and are required to be delivered in volumes greater than 1 ml), there is a growing demand for self-administration devices than can overcome this unmet need.



Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4719478/



Large volume wearable injectors, an advanced version of the existing self-injection devices, are expected to gather interest from a wide customer base. In fact, there are a number of such injectors commercially available for delivery of insulin. OmniPod, from Insulet Corporation, is a very well-known device that has generated significant year-on-year revenue growth. However, it is worth highlighting that till date only one large volume wearable injector (SmartDose Electronic Wearable Injector) has been approved for administration of a non-insulin biologic. Despite the uncertainties related to the device development and approval, many companies are investing their time, money and resources to develop these novel devices. In addition to the publically known programs, pharma companies have many undisclosed programs that are likely to provide the necessary growth impetus in the long term.



It is worth noting that the VC community has demonstrated significant interest in funding projects related to such wearable injectors. These investments are expected to drive further innovation and lead to the introduction of novel device candidates in the industry. Quite recently, in January 2017, scPharmaceuticals closed a series B investment round worth USD 45.6 million. The company intends to use the funding to bring Furoscix and the sc2Wear Infusor to the market in the US. Earlier, in July 2016, SteadyMed Therapeutics raised USD 32 million in a private placement round financed by Deerfield Capital Management, Federated Investors and OrbiMed. In September 2015, CeQur completed a USD 100 million Venture (Series C) financing round, which was led by Woodford Investment Management, Arthurian Life Sciences, Endeavour Vision, VI Partners and Schroders.



Several partnerships have also been inked in this domain in the last few years. Most of these are focused on the development / commercialization of a variety of wearable injectors. Such partnerships are important for technological integration, supply of devices and also facilitate the conduct of clinical trials related to drug-device combination products. We believe that the device developers will continue to strive to introduce unique and user-friendly features into their proprietary range of devices. The upgradation of existing devices to more competent / next generation devices will serve as a key driver of immediate near-term growth.



SCOPE OF THE REPORT

The "Large Volume Wearable Injectors Market (3rd Edition), 2017-2027" report features an extensive study of the current landscape and the likely future evolution of this category of drug delivery devices over the next ten years. With the increasing incidence of chronic and lifestyle-related diseases across the globe, the demand for efficient drug delivery systems is growing at a rapid pace. In order to simplify the process of drug delivery, eliminate costs and reduce the incidence of needlestick injuries, the pharmaceutical industry has shifted its focus towards the development of self-injection devices for parenteral drugs / therapies. This report specifically lays emphasis on the emergence of such patient-centric, convenient, cost-effective and user-friendly wearable injectors that are capable of administering large volumes of a drug subcutaneously in a home-care setting.



It is worth noting that the concept behind such injectors is being widely employed for the delivery of insulin. Over 15 such unique series of injectors (excluding variants) have already entered the market. On the other hand, there is only one large volume wearable injector (mentioned above) approved for the administration of a non-insulin biologic in the US. However, with a variety of biologics under investigation, we believe that device developers have a significant opportunity waiting to be tapped. The field is likely to pick up momentum in the next few years. In fact, an increase in the partnerships and investment activities demonstrate that the market is geared towards significant growth in the mid to long term.



One of the key objectives outlined for the study was to evaluate the future potential of the ongoing development programs of both big and small firms. Amongst other elements, the report elaborates on the following areas:



- An overview of the current market landscape in terms of the key players involved, development status of pipeline products (marketed / under development), type of dose (bolus / continuous / both), usability (disposable / reusable) and key indications.

- Detailed profiles of large volume wearable devices that are being developed for the delivery of biologics (including insulin), highlighting their key features, current status of development, recent developments and associated collaborations.

- An exhaustive review of over 300 biologics, which are potential candidates for delivery using large volume wearable injectors. The molecules / therapies have been categorized into most-likely, likely and less-likely candidates for administration using large volume wearable injectors. This categorization is based on various parameters including recommended volume, route of administration, frequency of the dose, standard / weight based dose and the chronicity of target indication.

- Comprehensive case studies on drugs that are being evaluated for delivery via large volume wearable injectors, highlighting their specifications, mechanisms of action, current status of development, sales, respective dosages and any other recent developments.

- An illustrative grid representation of the devices based on the category of device (insulin / non-insulin biologic), type of dose and type of device (infusion pump / patch pump). In addition, the report includes an insightful 2 X 2 matrix analysis, highlighting the positioning of the devices based on product competitiveness and supplier power.

- A discussion on the key drivers and challenges, in terms of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT), which are likely to impact the future growth of this upcoming area.



The study provides a detailed market forecast and opportunity analysis for the period between 2017 and 2027. The research, analysis and insights presented in this report include potential sales of the drug-device combinations that are being evaluated and are anticipated to enter the market in the next few years. To add robustness to our model, we have provided three market forecast scenarios, namely the conservative, base and optimistic scenarios. It is worth noting that, although the market of insulin delivery devices is relatively more mature, we have included a high-level opportunity analysis on the large volume wearable injectors being developed for delivery of insulin as well.



Our opinions and insights presented in this study were influenced by discussions conducted with several experts in this area. Specifically, we solicited the opinions of senior representatives including Menachem Zucker (VP and Chief Scientist, Elcam Medical), Michael Hooven (CEO, Enable Injections), Ben Moga (President, Ratio Drug Delivery), Pieter Muntendam (President and CEO, scPharmaceuticals), Graham Reynolds, (VP and GM, Biologics, West Pharmaceutical Services) and Tiffany H. Burke (Director, Global Communications, West Pharmaceutical Services). All actual figures have been sourced and analyzed from publicly available information forums and primary research discussions. The financial figures mentioned in this report are in USD, unless otherwise specified.



RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Most of the data presented in this report has been gathered via secondary and primary research. For all our projects, we conduct interviews with experts in the area (academia, industry, medical practice and other associations) to solicit their opinions on emerging trends in the market. This is primarily useful for us to draw out our own opinion on how the market will evolve across different regions and technology segments. Where possible, the available data has been checked for accuracy from multiple sources of information. The secondary sources of information include



- Annual reports

- Investor presentations

- SEC filings

- Industry databases

- News releases from company websites

- Government policy documents

- Industry analysts' views



While the focus has been on forecasting the market over the coming ten years, the report also provides our independent view on various non-commercial trends emerging in the industry. This opinion is solely based on our knowledge, research and understanding of the relevant market gathered from various secondary and primary sources of information.



CHAPTER OUTLINES

Chapter 2 provides an executive summary of the insights captured in our research. The summary offers a high level view on the likely evolution of the large volume wearable injectors market.



Chapter 3 provides a general introduction to the market and highlights the growing demand for self-administration injection devices. The chapter lays emphasis on the need for such devices driven by the rising incidence of chronic diseases and emergency cases reported per day. Subsequently, it covers the different types of self-injection devices available in the market, highlighting their advantages. This section also features a brief discussion on the concerns related to needlestick injuries and emphasizes the growing preference for safe and easy-to-use devices.



Chapter 4 presents two separate lists of the large volume wearable injectors for insulin and the other biologics. In addition, the chapter includes a detailed analysis of both these lists based on the products' status of development, device category (infusion pump / patch pump), type of dose (bolus / continuous) and the capacity of each device. Specifically for insulin delivery devices, we have identified whether the device is equipped with continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) monitoring or not.



Chapter 5 presents key takeaways from the market landscape of this emerging field. It features a comparison of product competitiveness and supplier power of each device in the form of a 2 x 2 matrix. In addition, the chapter includes a grid based representation of devices based on the target indication, status of development, type of dose (continuous / bolus / both) and type of device (patch pump / infusion pump). The chapter also provides an analysis of the patents granted / filed in this space over the last three years.



Chapter 6 presents detailed profiles on the large volume wearable injectors being developed for biologics / drugs other than insulin. The profiles include information about the developer of the device, device specifications and features, advantages, current status of development and related collaborations. We have presented such insights on 10 devices capable of delivering large dosage volumes.



Chapter 7 is focused on the devices developed / being developed for the administration of insulin. It presents information on diabetes, the most popular target indication, including information on its epidemiology and the evolution of insulin-delivery systems. Additionally, it includes detailed profiles on some of the large volume wearable devices developed / being developed for the delivery of insulin. Each profile covers information on the device developer, device specifications, advantages and the associated developments. The chapter also includes a social media analysis highlighting the popularity of these devices in the industry.



Chapter 8 provides detailed case studies on the drugs / therapies that are currently being evaluated with the devices mentioned in chapter 4. Each case study includes drug / therapy specifications, respective mechanisms of action, current status of development, information on the sales of each product, dosage and recent developments.



Chapter 9 presents a list of candidates (marketed / pipeline) that have the potential to be administered using large volume wearable injectors in the future. The likelihood of delivery of a molecule was estimated based on the volume of dose, mode of administration, frequency of administration, standard / weight-based dose and the chronicity of the target indication.



Chapter 10 provides projections of the future opportunity of the large volume wearable injectors market for biologics till 2027. It highlights the market size of such injectors (in terms of value) and the number of units that are likely to be sold within the forecast time period. We have clearly laid out the forecast methodology along with the key assumptions that were taken into consideration for estimating the market size.



Chapter 11 includes comprehensive profiles of the key companies that are active in this market. We have profiled companies (presented in an alphabetical order) developing devices for administration of insulin / other biologics. Each company profile includes a company overview, details on its financial performance, product portfolio and collaborations.



Chapter 12 provides a SWOT analysis, highlighting strategic insights on major factors that have contributed to the growth of the market, while highlighting the weaknesses and threats that are likely to have an impact on its future.



Chapter 13 summarizes the overall report and provides a recap of the key takeaways from the study. It also presents our independent opinion on the future of large volume wearable injectors market based on the research and analysis described in the previous chapters.



Chapter 14 is a collection of interview transcripts of the discussions held with key stakeholders in this market. In this chapter, we have presented the insights provided to us by Menachem Zucker (VP and Chief Scientist, Elcam Medical), Michael Hooven (CEO, Enable Injections), Ben Moga (President, Ratio Drug Delivery), Pieter Muntendam (President and CEO, scPharmaceuticals), Graham Reynolds, (VP and GM, Biologics, West Pharmaceutical Services) and Tiffany H. Burke (Director, Global Communications, West Pharmaceutical Services).



Chapter 15 is an appendix, which provides tabulated data and numbers for all the figures presented in the report.



Chapter 16 is an appendix, which provides a list of companies and organizations mentioned in this report.



EXAMPLE HIGHLIGHTS

1. There are over 50 different large volume wearable injectors (including variants) that are either commercialized or are under development. Of these, around 60% are for delivery of insulin and the rest are for delivery of other biologics. Of the devices being developed for delivery of non-insulin biologics, SmartDose Electronic Wearable Injector (by West Pharmaceutical Services) has already received approval by the USFDA for delivery of Repatha.

2. There are several other known references of drug-device combinations that are being evaluated in clinical studies; examples include SteadyMed Therapeutics' PatchPump (with Treprostinil and Ketorolac), NeuroDerm's CRONO ND (with NDO612 and NDO712), Roche's Single-use injection device (with Herceptin) and scPharmaceuticals's scWear Infusor (with Ceftriaxone and Furosemide).

3. The commercially available insulin-based large volume wearable injectors can accommodate volumes of up to 5 ml. OmniPod, from Insulet Corporation, is a very well-known device that has generated significant year-on-year revenue growth. However, with improved design, several devices with capacity of holding up to 20 ml drug are being developed for delivery of biologics. In fact, over 50% of the devices that we identified for administration of non-insulin biologics have the capability of carrying 5-20 ml drug while 16% of these devices can hold over 20 ml drug.

4. Our analysis suggests that close to 100 biologics (marketed / under development) are suited for delivery via large volume wearable injectors and are likely to be evaluated in different drug-device combinations in the near future. These biologics (full list available in the main report) are designed for treatment of chronic conditions, which require frequent dosing, and are not currently available in suitable self-administration systems. We believe that some of these drugs, if tested and approved with large volume wearable injectors, are likely to make a substantial contribution to the market's evolution in the mid-long term.

5. Innovation in the field is primarily being driven by start-ups / small companies; examples of firms working for delivery of non-insulin biologics include (in alphabetical order) Elcam Drug Delivery Systems, Enable Injections, NeuroDerm, scPharmaceuticals, Sensile Medical. Notable examples of start-ups that have taken initiatives for delivery of insulin include Cellnovo, CeQur, Debiotech, PicoSulin, SOOIL and ViCentra. In addition, a number of large companies are making notable contribution in this field; prominent players include Becton Dickinson, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Roche and West Pharmaceutical Services.

6. Several other companies engaged in this domain have reported positive clinical outcomes of their drug-device combinations. scPharmaceuticals is expecting the commercial launch of its two product candidates for the drugs furosemide and cephalosporin in 2017 / 18. In addition, Neuroderm and SteadyMed Therapeutics are also hopeful of making their products commercially available in the near future. At the same time, insulin delivery devices, such as OmniPod, are now also being explored for the delivery of non-insulin drugs, such as the gonadotropin-releasing hormone developed by Ferring Pharmaceuticals.

7. The overall market for large volume wearable injectors is likely to grow at an aggressive rate of over 150%. We believe that OmniPod will continue to lead the market for insulin delivery. However, majority of the growth is likely to come from drug-device combinations under trials for non-insulin biologics. In our base scenario, we have predicted that the annual sales volume of such devices could be over 40 million units by 2027.

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"The Trace is a five-star trail that attracts more than 300,000 visitors from around the world," said Keith Laughlin, RTC president. "Clearly, the public showed overwhelming support for their love of this treasured community resource, and we are pleased to honor it as part of the Hall of Fame."

The Trace spans the St. Tammany Parish, connecting the Northshore communities of Covington, Abita Springs, Mandeville and Lacombe. Key attractions along the trail include the historic H.J. Smith and Sons General Store and Museum, famed Abita Brewpub and Mystery House, cultural Dew Drop Jazz and Social Hall, peaceful Lake Pontchartrain, and the expansive 2,800-acre Fontainebleau State Park and Big Branch Marsh National Wildlife Refuge. While the trail currently ends at the Slidell-Carollo trailhead, plans exist to continue the Trace to downtown Slidell at Heritage Park.

"With a bountiful heritage unique to St. Tammany, the Trace connects the diversity of our community with endless benefits," says Patricia Brister, St. Tammany Parish president. "The Trace provides a multitude of spots for beautiful views of woods and wetlands, transportation access across the region, wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation, historical preservation, resiliency, sporting events and other community gatherings. We could not be more proud of this award and for the incredible honor of being inducted into the Rail-Trail Hall of Fame."

The trail is a source of community unity with sporting events such as the Tour de Cure, the Mad Hatter 5k, the Thin Mint Sprint and the Louisiana Bicycle Festival. The Tammany Trace Trailhead on Koop Drive in Mandeville also houses Kids Konnection, an accessible playground that welcomes as many as 103,000 visitors per year, improving inclusivity and access in the region.

As the largest trails organization in America, RTC started recognizing Hall of Fame winners in 2007. The two runner-up trails this year include Colorado's Rio Grande Trail and Nevada's Historic Railroad Trail. More information about the Rail-Trail Hall of Fame can be found on RTC's website.

Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, a nonprofit organization with more than 160,000 members and supporters, is the nation's largest trails organization dedicated to connecting people and communities by creating a nationwide network of public trails, many from former rail lines. RTC has field offices in Florida, Ohio, California and Pennsylvania. Connect with RTC at railstotrails.org and @railstotrails on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

CONTACT:

Patricia Brooks, 202.351.1757, [email protected]

SOURCE Rails-to-Trails Conservancy

Related Links

http://www.railstotrails.org


VANCOUVER, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ - Mason Resources Corp. (TSX:MNR  "Mason Resources" or the "Company") announces that its board of directors has today adopted a shareholder rights plan (the "Rights Plan").

The Rights Plan has been adopted to ensure, to the extent possible, that all shareholders of the Company are treated fairly and equally in connection with any take-over bid or other acquisition of control of the Company. The Rights Plan has not been adopted in response to any specific take-over bid or other proposal to acquire control of Mason Resources and Mason Resources is not aware of any such pending or contemplated proposals.

At the close of business today, one right will be issued and attached to each outstanding common share of Mason Resources. The rights will automatically attach to the common shares with no further action required by shareholders. A right will also automatically attach to each common share of Mason Resources issued hereafter.

Subject to the terms of the Rights Plan and to certain exceptions provided therein, the rights will become exercisable in the event that any person, together with its affiliates, associates and joint actors, acquires or announces its intention to acquire 20% or more of the Company's outstanding common shares without complying with the "Permitted Bid" provisions of the Rights Plan or in circumstances where the application of the Rights Plan is waived in accordance with its terms. The "Permitted Bid" provisions prevent the dilutive effects of the Rights Plan from operating if a take-over bid is made to all holders of common shares of the Company (other than the bidder) by way of a take-over bid circular that remains open for acceptance for a minimum of 105 days and satisfies certain other conditions that align with Canadian take-over bid rules. In circumstances where a take-over bid does not comply with the requirements of the Rights Plan or where the application of the Rights Plan is not waived in accordance with its terms, the rights holders (other than the acquiring person and its affiliates, associates and joint actors) will be entitled to purchase additional common shares of the Company at a significant discount to the market price.

The Rights Plan has been conditionally accepted by the Toronto Stock Exchange subject to ratification and confirmation by the shareholders of the Company within six months of its effective date. The Company intends to recommend that shareholders ratify and confirm the Rights Plan at a special meeting of shareholders to be held in 2017. If ratified and confirmed by shareholders, the Rights Plan will remain in effect until the close of business on the date of Mason Resources' annual meeting of shareholders in 2020. If the Rights Plan is not ratified and confirmed by shareholders within six months it, together with the outstanding rights, will terminate and be of no further force and effect.

A copy of the Rights Plan agreement will be made available under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

ABOUT MASON RESOURCES CORP.

Mason Resources Corp. is a well-funded Canadian company focused on copper exploration and development in the U.S.A. The Company's key asset is its 100% owned Ann Mason Project  an extensive, prospective land package located in the Yerington District of Nevada. The Ann Mason Project hosts two copper-molybdenum porphyry deposits, Ann Mason and Blue Hill, as well as numerous earlier-stage or untested priority targets. The Ann Mason deposit is currently at a PEA level and is among the largest undeveloped copper porphyry resources in Canada/U.S.A. The excellent infrastructure, year-round access, strong community support and clear permitting process are all factors that contribute to making Yerington, Nevada one of the best mining jurisdictions in the world. Mason also holds a 100% interest in the Lordsburg property, an exciting earlier-stage copper-gold porphyry project, located within an historic mining district in New Mexico.

Mason's strong financial position and high-quality asset portfolio provide it with a solid foundation and flexibility for growth, by advancing development of Ann Mason towards Pre-Feasibility, introducing one or more strategic development partners, exploring high priority targets or considering strategic acquisitions. More information on Mason Resources can be found at www.MasonResources.com.

This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws.

Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to ratification of the Rights Plan at a meeting of shareholders to be held within six months of the effective date of the Rights Plan; completion of a Pre-Feasibility Study on the Ann Mason Project; potential development of the Ann Mason Project; plans for future exploration programs; anticipated business activities; corporate strategies; and future financial performance.

While the Company has based these forward-looking statements on its expectations about future events as at the date that such statements were prepared, the statements are not a guarantee of the Company's future performance and are based on numerous assumptions regarding present and future business strategies, local and global economic conditions and the environment in which Mason Resources will operate in the future, including the price of copper, gold, silver and molybdenum. Uncertainties and factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed or implied by forward-looking statements and information include, amongst others, unanticipated costs, expenses or liabilities; discrepancies between actual and anticipated production, mineral resources and metallurgical recoveries; the size, grade and continuity of deposits not being interpreted correctly from exploration results; the results of preliminary test work not being indicative of the results of future test work; fluctuations in commodity prices and demand; changing foreign exchange rates; actions by government authorities; the availability of funding on reasonable terms; the impact of changes in interpretation to or changes in enforcement of, laws, regulations and government practices, including laws, regulations and government practices with respect to mining, foreign investment, royalties and taxation; the terms and timing of obtaining necessary environmental and other government approvals, consents and permits; the availability and cost of necessary items such as power, water, skilled labour, transportation and appropriate smelting and refining arrangements; and misjudgements in the course of preparing forward-looking statements. In addition, there are also known and unknown risk factors which may cause the actual results, performances or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements and information. Such factors include, among others, risks related to international operations, including legal and political risk; risks associated with changes in the attitudes of governments to foreign investment; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined; inability to upgrade Inferred mineral resources to Indicated or Measured mineral resources; inability to convert mineral resources to mineral reserves; conclusions of economic evaluations; future prices of copper, gold, silver and molybdenum; failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; accidents, labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry; delays in obtaining government approvals, permits or licences or financing or in the completion of development or construction activities; environmental risks; title disputes; limitations on insurance coverage; as well as those factors discussed in the Company's continuous disclosure documents available at www.sedar.com. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Company is under no obligation to update or alter any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable securities laws.

SOURCE Mason Resources
RALEIGH, N.C., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Master's Programs Guide (www.mastersprogramsguide.com), a premier website providing comprehensive information for individuals considering graduate school, has published a ranking of the 50 Best Online Master of Education Degree Programs 2017 (http://www.mastersprogramsguide.com/rankings/best-online-master-of-education/).

This ranking only gave consideration to programs accredited by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC), or the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (or CAEP, the newest accrediting agency, which is a merger of the first two councils). Examining sources available to the public such as U.S. News and World Report, the CAEP website, and the college websites themselves, Master's Programs Guide has ascertained a list of schools with excellent online Master of Education degree programs based on two factors: 1) Program affordability; and 2) How inclusive the school's program is in terms of what future educators need to be successful.

Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, took the first place in this ranking, followed by Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, in second place, and University of Houston in Houston, Texas, in third place.

All schools in the ranking, listed in alphabetical order:

Arizona State University - Tempe, Arizona

Auburn University - Auburn, Alabama

Ball State University - Muncie, Indiana

Central Michigan University - Mount Pleasant, Michigan

Clemson University - Clemson, South Carolina

College of St. Scholastica - Duluth, Minnesota

East Carolina University - Greenville, North Carolina

Emporia State University - Emporia, Kansas

Florida State University - Tallahassee, Florida

George Washington University - District of Columbia

Georgia State University - Atlanta, Georgia

Graceland University - Lamoni, Iowa

Indiana University Bloomington - Bloomington, Indiana

Lamar University - Beaumont, Texas

Michigan State University - East Lansing, Michigan

NC State University - Raleigh, North Carolina

New York Institute of Technology - Manhattan, New York

Northern Illinois University - DeKalb, Illinois

Ohio University - Athens, Ohio

Penn State University - University Park, Pennsylvania

Pittsburg State University - Pittsburg, Kansas

Purdue University - West Lafayette, Indiana

Robert Morris University - Moon Township, Pennsylvania

Sam Houston State University - Huntsville, Texas

San Diego State University - San Diego, California

St. John's University - Queens, New York

Stony Brook University (SUNY) - Stony Brook, New York

University at Albany (SUNY) - Albany, New York

University at Buffalo (SUNY) - Buffalo, New York

University of Alabama at Birmingham - Birmingham, Alabama

University of Arkansas - Fayetteville, Arkansas

University of Cincinnati - Cincinnati, Ohio

University of Dayton - Dayton, Ohio

University of Florida - Gainesville, Florida

University of Georgia - Athens, Georgia

University of Houston - Houston, Texas

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - Champaign, Illinois

University of Iowa - Iowa City, Iowa

University of Massachusetts Lowell - Lowell, Massachusetts

University of Mississippi - Oxford, Mississippi

University of Nebraska at Kearney - Kearney, Nebraska

University of Nebraska-Lincoln - Lincoln, Nebraska

University of North Carolina at Greensboro - Greensboro, North Carolina

University of North Texas - Denton, Texas

University of San Diego - San Diego, California

University of South Carolina - Columbia, South Carolina

University of South Florida - Tampa, Florida

University of St. Francis - Joliet, Illinois

William Carey University - Hattiesburg, Mississippi

Wright State University - Dayton, Ohio

Kacey Reynolds Schedler, site editor, says, "Many current teachers want to advance by developing a specific skill or specialization within the education field. An online master of education degree is probably the best way to do that. Most online programs encourage students who are already teaching to integrate what they learn into the classroom. Teachers enrolled in online programs receive the benefit of practicing what they are learning in real-time, without having to put their careers and family needs on hold. This ranking is intended to help current educators make an informed choice about continuing education in the most efficient way, so they can get started in the program of their choice as soon as possible."

Master's Programs Guide (www.mastersprogramsguide.com) independently produces publications and rankings in order to help you find the best Master's degree programs to meet your goals.

Contact:

Kacey Reynolds Schedler, editor

Master's Programs Guide

(919) 801-1781

[email protected]

SOURCE Master's Programs Guide

Related Links

http://www.mastersprogramsguide.com


With more than 400 guests in attendance, the event raised more than $1 milliona new milestoneto support MCW's Young Leaders, Community Development, and Oral Health Care programs in the United States, Africa, and around the world.

"We thank the attendees at this year's gala celebration who demonstrated their generosity and their support for MCW, its programs, and the young people who have made such meaningful impacts in communities throughout the world," said Eddie Bergman, Co-founder and President of the Board of Directors of MCW. Commenting on MCW's young leaders, Bergman added "their intelligence, compassion, and strength never fail to inspire, and we at MCW will continue our work to help these young leaders achieve their vision."

Bergman also took time to acknowledge the presence of Mayor David Dinkins, the 106th Mayor of New York City and an Honorary Chair at this year's gala.

Liz Claman, anchor at FOX Business Network, welcomed guests, and Ali Velshi, anchor and business correspondent at NBC News, served as the event's Master of Ceremonies. The night included updates on MCW's programs, as well as a silent auction and a special musical performance by Freddie Kimmel and Kate Loprest.

The following honorees were presented with awards during the event:

The MCW Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Dr. Emil Kikwilu, Professor and Former Dean, MUHAS Dental School, Tanzania. Dr. Kikwilu was critical in the establishment of the MCW-MUHAS infrastructure upgrade in 2009. His commitment to MCW's mission through his support during the installation of dental operatories and chairs, X-ray machines, sterilizers, compressors, dental instruments, new cabinetry, and sterilization centers was critical in the success of the dental school upgrade.

"Our dental school was the only dental school in Tanzania and we had equipment that had not been renewed in many yearsto the point where the training almost crumbled," Dr. Kikwilu said. "Luckily enough, Miracle Corners came to the rescue. They managed through the mobilization of donors and development partners to refurbish the school and it is now beautiful like any other school in the world."

Dr. Kikwilu's award was presented by Dr. Marion Bergman, Director, Health Care Projects, MCW; John Spencer, President of DCI International; and Dr. Anne Eiting Klamar, President and CEO of Midmark Corporation.

The MCW Community Partnership Award was presented to Anthony Dalessio, Long Island Managing Partner, KPMG LLP. "One of KPMG's core values is giving back to the communities in which we live and work," said Dalessio. "Helping youth make a difference by enabling change in their communities around the world is a great way to pay it forward. It aligns perfectly with KPMG's values and makes the world a better place for all."

KPMG is one of the world's leading professional services firms and provides innovative business solutions and audits, tax, and advisory services to many of the world's largest and most prestigious organizations. Dalessio was instrumental in MCW's partnership with KPMG for the "KPMG Family for Literacy" program in 2011 at MCW's community center in Chanyanya, Zambia (MC-Zambia). The program provides children from low-income families with their own new booksand in many cases, their very first book. The partnership expanded in 2013 when KPMG's Zambia office visited MC-Zambia's center once again to distribute holiday cards and books to students from the Chanyanya basic and community schools.

The award was presented by Stanley Bergman, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Henry Schein, Inc. and Steven Paladino, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer of Henry Schein, Inc. The company has been a strong supporter of MCW since its inception through Henry Schein Cares, the company's global corporate social responsibility program.

Mayor Dinkins concluded the night by saying "People who do good things should be applauded and acknowledgedthe main reason is so that others can try to emulate that which has been done."

Photos from the event can be viewed on Facebook.

About MCW

MCW (Miracle Corners of the World) is a non-profit organization founded in 1999 with the vision that communities throughout the world achieve greater levels of education, improved health and increased economic security and a mission to address communities' pressing needs by empowering current leaders and readying leaders of tomorrow. Based in New York, with partner organizations in Africa (Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia), MCW offers the following three core programs: the Young Leaders Program, Community Development, and Oral Healthcare, as well as Partner Programs, including Human Rights and Pediatric AIDS Treatment for Africa (PATA) projects. For more information on MCW, please visit: www.mcwglobal.org.

SOURCE MCW (Miracle Corners of the World)

Related Links

http://mcwglobal.org


An NIA special court today convicted Bengaluru resident Abid Khan in what was the National Investigation Agency's second-ever ISIS-related conviction.

By Kamaljit Kaur Sandhu: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) today won a conviction in the case of Bengaluru resident Abid Khan who joined an organisation that worked to further the ideology of the Islamic State (ISIS).

Khan was found guilty by an NIA Special Court in Shimla in what is the agency's second ISIS-related conviction ever. Khan will be sentenced on July 21.

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According to the NIA, Abid Khan was arrested after he joined Junood-Ul-Khilafa-Fil-Hind, an organisation that works to spread the ideology of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an international proscribed Jihadi terrorist organisation that aims to establish a caliphate.

A Bengaluru resident, Khan last year converted to Christianity and, after obtaining passport in March 2016, he went to Colombo, Srilanka for about one month. Khan then took shelter at a church in Kullu, Himachal Pradesh. During this period he remained in contact with his handlers through various social media platforms.

The NIA filed a chargesheet against him in June this year invoking sections 120B and 201 of the Indian Penal Code, sections 18, 18B, 20, 38 and 39 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, and sections 4 and 5 of the Explosive Substances Act.

This was the NIA's second ISIS-related conviction. In April this year Azhar-ul-Islam (24) from Jammu and Kashmir and Mohammed Farhan Shaikh (25) from Maharashtra, were handed seven-year jail sentences in what the NIA's first ISIS related conviction.

ALSO READ | The black shroud in Kashmir marks presence of ISIS in Valley

ALSO READ | US Air Force veteran gets 35 years for trying to join Islamic State

--- ENDS ---
TORONTO, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ - Canaccord Genuity Group Inc. (TSX: CF) is scheduled to release its first quarter results and supplementary financial information on Wednesday, August 2, 2017 after TSX market close. Interested investors, the media and other stakeholders may review the earnings release and supplementary financial information at www.canaccordgenuitygroup.com .

QUARTERLY CONFERENCE CALL AND WEBCAST:

Interested parties are invited to listen to Canaccord Genuity's first quarter results conference call, via live webcast or a toll free number. The conference call is scheduled for Thursday, August 3, 2017 at 5:00 a.m. Pacific time, 8:00 a.m. Eastern time, 1:00 p.m. UK time, 8:00 p.m. China Standard Time, and 10:00 p.m. Australia EST. During the call, senior executives will comment on the results and respond to questions from analysts and institutional investors.

The conference call may be accessed live and archived on a listen-only basis at: http://www.canaccordgenuitygroup.com/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/Events.aspx

Analysts and institutional investors can call in via telephone at:

647-427-7450 (within Toronto )

) 1-888-231-8191 (toll free outside Toronto )

) 0-800-051-7107 (toll free from the United Kingdom )

) 0-800-91-7449 (Toll free from France )

) 10-800-714-1191 (toll free from Northern China )

) 10-800-140-1195 (toll free from Southern China )

) 1-800-287-011 (toll free from Australia )

) 800-017-8071 (toll free from United Arab Emirates )

Please ask to participate in the Canaccord Genuity Group Inc. Q1/18 results call. If a passcode is requested, please use 22448817.

A replay of the conference call will be made available from approximately two hours after the live call on August 3, 2017, until September 17, 2017 at 416-849-0833 or 1-855-859-2056 by entering passcode 22448817 followed by the (#) key.

ABOUT CANACCORD GENUITY GROUP INC.:

Through its principal subsidiaries, Canaccord Genuity Group Inc. (the "Company") is a leading independent, full-service financial services firm, with operations in two principal segments of the securities industry: wealth management and capital markets. Since its establishment in 1950, the Company has been driven by an unwavering commitment to building lasting client relationships. We achieve this by generating value for our individual, institutional and corporate clients through comprehensive investment solutions, brokerage services and investment banking services. The Company has offices in 10 countries worldwide, including Wealth Management offices located in Canada, the UK, Guernsey, Jersey, the Isle of Man and Australia. Canaccord Genuity, the international capital markets division, operates in Canada, the US, the UK, France, Ireland, Hong Kong, China, Australia and Dubai. To us there are no foreign markets.TM

Canaccord Genuity Group Inc. is publicly traded under the symbol CF on the TSX.

SOURCE Canaccord Genuity Group Inc.

Related Links

http://www.canaccord.com


FORT MYERS, Fla., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Morgan & Morgan, the nation's largest plaintiffs' firm, is thrilled to announce that its attorneys Craig Stevens and John Dill scored a major $1,650,000 verdict in a landmark victory against tobacco company R.J. Reynolds this week, ending an eight year long battle for justice.

Stevens and Dill represented client John Maloney in his fight for justice on behalf of his late wife, Carolyn. Mr. Maloney lost his wife 14 years ago to lung cancer as a result of her lifelong addiction to R.J. Reynolds' tobacco products, and has fought ever since to hold the tobacco giant liable for her death.

This case has special significance, because it is part of the "Engle Progeny" litigation. After the Florida Supreme Court decertified a class action lawsuit filed by pediatrician Howard Engle for injuries suffered due to smoking, thousands of former class members were able to file individual lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers for their injuries and losses.

Mrs. Maloney was one of those former class members and this suit was the first of the "Engle" cases to be won in the jurisdiction.

The jury found that R.J. Reynolds, committed negligence, sold a defective and inherently dangerous product along with fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud and was part of a 50 year conspiracy that put consumers' health at grave risk. Jurors also found that the company's actions ultimately were the cause of Carolyn Maloney's addiction and death, and awarded the client a $1.65 million jury verdict as a result.

Additionally, because Stevens and Dill beat the expired Proposal for Settlement, R.J. Reynolds will have to pay attorney fees and costs  which could add up to over $1M  on behalf of Morgan & Morgan's client.

This verdict is a satisfying conclusion to the long fight for justice against the tobacco giant. Despite the set-back of a mistrial in 2016, Morgan & Morgan's attorneys kept up the fight and retried the case this year, because they knew Mr. Maloney deserved better  something no other firm would be willing to do for their client.

In the end, Stevens' and Dill's devotion to their client was well rewarded. Although victories against Big Tobacco are exceedingly difficult, and few firms score verdicts when faced against these deep-pocketed tobacco companies and their vast legal teams, Morgan & Morgan won against the odds and obtained a just verdict for Mr. Maloney.

"I spent 8 years fighting this case for Mr. Maloney," said Stevens. "We went through two jury trials to finally get justice."

"We are very pleased that the jury did the right thing," said Dill. "It was a long battle, but worth every second. Our client had the love of his life taken from him because of corporate greed. Justice is sweet."

The case is John Maloney, as PR of the Estate of Carolyn Maloney vs. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., case number 07-CA-015578, in the Circuit Court of the Twentieth Judicial Circuit of the State of Florida.

ABOUT MORGAN & MORGAN

Morgan & Morgan, a national plaintiff's law firm fighting for the people, not the powerful, has recovered more than $4 billion for more than 200,000 clients. The firm has more than 350 attorneys in about 40 offices in 11 states. With the support of nearly 2,000 employees, the firm's attorneys represent clients in a wide range of practice areas  from personal injury, workers' compensation, and medical malpractice cases to labor and employment, mesothelioma, and product liability lawsuits to national mass torts and class actions.

For more information, contact:

Karine Lim / Erika Nedwell

Morgan & Morgan, P.A

[email protected] / [email protected]

212-738-6265 / 212-738-6254

SOURCE Morgan & Morgan

Related Links

https://www.forthepeople.com


XinRong Medical Group has recently appointed Mr. Stephen Ooi as a member of the board of directors.

BEIJING, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Mr. Stephen Ooi has had more than 36 year of work experience in the Medical Device industry. Before assuming his current position as Independent Director at XinRong Medical Group, he worked as the Asia Pacific President in Zimmer company (NYSE:ZMH) for 12 years, where he directly managed businesses generating in aggregate more than USD1bn in annual revenue. Mr. Ooi's career spanned more than 30 years at Zimmer, which he joined in 1986. Previously at Zimmer, he was the Vice President of Asia in 1992 and then served as Vice President, Australasia (Asia Pacific excluding Japan) in 2001. He was promoted to the position of President, Asia Pacific Region in 2002 and reported directly to the CEO and President of the Company. He was also a member of the Corporate Senior Management Operating Committee and a Section 16 officer of the Company. Mr. Ooi retired from the Company on December 31, 2016. Prior to Zimmer, Mr. Ooi worked at Johnson & Johnson. Mr. Ooi received his MBA from the National University of Singapore in 1992.

"The opportunities for XinRong Medical in the China market and beyond are exciting. Strong Leadership and strategic focus to win the hearts of customers through strong customer service and quality products are keys to success. The passion of the leadership team in XinRong is clearly palpable and it is my honor and privilege to be given the opportunity to work with the team. It's an exciting time, and with Blackstone's support, we have the right ingredients to be successful in China. I look forward to working with the team," said, Mr. Stephen Ooi, Independent Director of XinRong Medical Group.

"The Chinese Orthopedic market has become one of the world's largest orthopedic markets driven by an aging population, increasing disease prevalence, improving treatment rate and growing affordability. We believe our foremost responsibility is to provide surgeons and patients with products and services that are of the highest quality. We are excited to have Stephen Ooi join the XinRong Medical team. With his rich industry experience and passion in managing talent, we look forward to working closely with Stephen in continuing to grow XinRong Medical as an industry leader," added Ms. Christine (Yu) Zhang, XinRong Medical Group's CEO.

About XinRong Medical Group

XinRong Medical Group, a leader in medical technology, is dedicated to increasing patient affordability and providing the most advanced solutions for surgeons such that they can deliver the best patient care. XinRong Medical offers innovative solutions in orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery, reconstructive surgery, and minimally invasive therapy.

Established in 2000 in Jiangsu Province, China, XinRong Medical was one of the first companies in China cleared by SFDA to manufacture Orthopedic Implants. In 2014, the Company received a strategic investment from The Blackstone Group (NYSE: BX).

For additional information about XinRong Medical, please refer to our website www.XRBest.Com, or contact us directly at +86-512-58100828 or [email protected].

SOURCE XinRong Medical

Related Links

http://www.xrbest.com/


LONDON, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Blockchain research and development pioneer nChain announces it will provide technical support to build on Bitcoin Unlimited's client software, and explore further collaboration to help the bitcoin network scale.

To solve bitcoin's current capacity problem, both nChain and BU share the vision to lift the artificial 1MB block size limit, enable larger blocks, and achieve significant on-chain scaling of the bitcoin network. Other proposed solutions, such as Segregated Witness (or SegWit 2x), merely defer the capacity problem. With increased scalability via larger blocks, the network can power faster transactions and enterprise-level capabilities  cementing bitcoin's place as the dominant cryptocurrency.

Unlike Bitcoin Core, the BU client software is designed for larger block sizes. To further accelerate support for BU's vision of a scaled network, nChain will build on the BU client software and further address the needs of bitcoin miners. nChain's development team will contribute its staff and processes to strengthen the BU software with (1) rigorous software testing and quality assurance - including a Secure Software Development Life Cycle, and comprehensive testing that includes unit and regression testing, as well as performance, loading and explorative testing; (2) thorough software documentation; (3) strong software support; and (4) detailed project management.

On July 24 and 25, 2017, teams from nChain and BU will meet for a workshop in Vancouver, Canada to discuss technical improvements to the BU software. nChain will also explore additional ways to use its innovations and expertise to collaborate with BU, and to jointly support on-chain scaling of the bitcoin network.

nChain's Chief Executive Officer Stefan Matthews comments:

"nChain's mission is to enable exponential growth of the bitcoin cryptocurrency and the bitcoin network for everyone's benefit. We have confidence that the BU client software provides a solid foundation for this mission, and are pleased to provide our expertise and resources to improve the software. This will open a future of massive on-chain scaling where everyone, especially miners, reaps financial rewards, as the value of bitcoin dramatically increases."

Andrew Stone, Lead Developer of Bitcoin Unlimited, remarks:

"I am excited to work with the nChain team to make Bitcoin Unlimited a stronger, more useful client. Bitcoin Unlimited already has significant support as an alternative to Bitcoin Core, but better software will only enhance its role as the foundation to a faster, more powerful network -- the network that the bitcoin community has always envisioned."

Providing technical expertise for BU software is the first among many steps nChain intends to take to support the broader bitcoin community. Mr. Matthews observes:

"Bitcoin has reached a critical juncture, and its community has become highly polarized. It's time to remember we're all on this bitcoin journey together, and there is more than enough opportunity for everyone to succeed. While reasonable minds may disagree on how network growth should occur, let's not artificially divide the community. Instead, let's find more ways to collaborate and foster 'coopetition' to achieve a rewarding bitcoin future for all."

In addition to its support of BU, nChain is researching and developing tools, protocols and applications to support blockchain growth worldwide. This includes a software development kit to enable programmers to develop applications on the bitcoin blockchain, solutions for scalability of the bitcoin blockchain, inventions to improve security, on-chain scripting for smart contracts and a decentralised trading platform that uses autonomous agents.

ABOUT NCHAIN: nChain is the global leader in research and development of blockchain technologies. Its mission is to enable massive growth of the bitcoin network and dramatic increase in the value of bitcoin for everyone's benefit. The nChain Group of companies has grown to a team of in excess of 60 world-class scientific research, engineering and other professionals primarily based in London, United Kingdom and Vancouver, Canada.

NOTES TO EDITORS

CONTACT: For media enquiries, please email [email protected]





or contact Infinite Global at:





Kelsey Eidbo (Infinite Global, US/ASIA)

415.732.7804





Matthew Gilleard (Infinite Global, EMEA)

+44 (0)207 269 1430

SOURCE nChain
TOKYO and SAN FRANCISCO, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Kentik, the leader in network traffic intelligence, today announced it has signed a reseller agreement with Net One Systems, the leading Japan-based cloud infrastructure integrator. The agreement enables Net One Systems to resell Kentik Detect, the industry's only SaaS platform that turns network traffic data into real-time intelligence for both technical and business operations.

As global business becomes increasingly digital, the network has never been more critical to the top and bottom line. If the network goes down, revenue, data, security, employee productivity, and customer satisfaction can all go down with it. At the same time, the flow of traffic across the network can reveal highly valuable technical and business opportunities. With Kentik, organizations leverage their network traffic data to build and run secure, high-performance networks, but also to drive better business decisions and gain a competitive advantage in the market.

"The partnership between Net One Systems and Kentik gives Japanese service providers and enterprises access to rich, actionable network visibility that organizations around the world need right now," said Fumihiko Shinoura, Chief Marketing Officer of Net One Systems. "With its next-generation architecture, coupled with proven successes and strong interest in Japan, Kentik has the solution for Japan's network visibility needs."

Net One Systems advises hundreds of carriers, service providers and enterprises on network integrations to create the most optimal architecture for its customers. As a reseller of Kentik Detect, Net One Systems will extend to its customers the platform's powerful capabilities of turning network data  NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, BGP, and performance metrics  into valuable real-time intelligence for digital operations.

"Net One Systems has a great reputation in the industry, known for representing vendor suppliers that are at the front of the technology curve," said Jim Frey, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Kentik. "As Kentik is in rapid growth mode, we know our partnership with Net One Systems will enable us to address the specific needs of the Japan marketplace, for language, culture, and local presence as we work together to bring greater network traffic intelligence to the region."

To learn more about the partnership, meet representatives of the two companies at the annual Japan Network Operators Group conference (JANOG 40) in Koriyama, Japan from July 26 - 28, 2017.

ABOUT NET ONE SYSTEMS

Net One Systems Co., Ltd. provides "cloud system [fusion of private cloud and public cloud]" that securely supports business applications used by customers. For that purpose, Net One Systems constantly identify the latest technological trends in the world, verify and realize the combination, and also deliver the know-how of utilization by actually practicing it within our company. Information can be found at http://www.netone.co.jp/english.

ABOUT KENTIK

Kentik is the network traffic intelligence company. When nearly everything critical to a modern business crosses the wire, the network doesn't just serve the business, it sees the business. Kentik turns your network traffic - billions of digital footprints - into real-time intelligence for both business and technical operations. Network operators, engineers, and security teams use Kentik to manage and optimize the performance, security, and potential of their networks and their business. The company was founded by network and big data technologists and executives from companies such as Akamai, CloudFlare, YouTube, and Netflix, with decades of experience in operations, architecture, and distributed systems. Kentik is headquartered in San Francisco. Visit www.kentik.com or follow @KentikInc on Twitter.

SOURCE Kentik

Related Links

https://www.kentik.com


NEW YORK, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Neuberger Berman, a private, independent, employee-owned investment manager, announced an addition to its China equity capabilities with portfolio manager Bin Yu joining the firm.

Mr. Yu brings with him a team of four research analysts, all from CloudRidge Capital, an investment management firm he founded in 2014. The team will continue to manage their current strategy as a private fund with offerings to expand based on Neuberger Berman clients' needs. The team is located in Hong Kong and Beijing.

Mr. Yu and team bring strong local expertise and experience in the China equity marketsboth with local listed A-shares and Hong Kong listed H-sharesas well as a track record of outperformance. Their long-term, high conviction, value oriented investment approach is grounded in fundamental research and looks to capitalize on sustainable trends.

Prior to CloudRidge, Mr. Yu spent more than five years with the China Investment Corporation, where he was head of the $10 billion global equity team and a senior portfolio manager co-managing three multi-billion portfolios: equity long short, long-only global equity and equity special situations. Prior to that, he was with Eagle Capital Management in New York for four years, where he helped manage a $7 billion long-only U.S. equity portfolio for institutional investors. After attending Peking University, he earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Physics from Brandeis University and a Master of Philosophy in Management Science from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

"I'm excited to join Neuberger Berman as Chinese equities become increasingly integrated in global investors' portfolios," said Mr. Yu. "My team and I have worked to build our institutional investment process and record, and as we approach our three-year anniversary we look forward to joining a firm with the depth and resources of Neuberger Berman."

Joseph Amato, President and Chief Investment Officer, Equities, at Neuberger Berman said, "We are excited about extending our investment capabilities in Chinaa large and increasingly important equity market. Bin's long-term, high conviction, value oriented investment approach is grounded in fundamental research and we expect him to be a great fit in the Neuberger Berman culture."

About Neuberger Berman

Neuberger Berman, founded in 1939, is a private, independent, employee-owned investment manager. The firm manages equities, fixed income, private equity and hedge fund portfolios for institutions and advisors worldwide. With offices in 19 countries, Neuberger Berman's team is approximately 1,900 professionals, as of June 30, 2017. The company was named the #1 firm in Pensions & Investments 2016 Best Places to Work in Money Management survey (among those with 1,000 employees or more). Tenured, stable and long-term in focus, the firm fosters an investment culture of fundamental research and independent thinking. It manages $271 billion in client assets as of June 30, 2017. For more information, please visit our website at www.nb.com.

All information is as of June 30, 2017 unless otherwise indicated and is subject to change without notice. Firm data, including employee and assets under management figures, reflects collective data for the various affiliated investment advisers that are subsidiaries of Neuberger Berman Group LLC. Firm history/timeline includes the history of all firm subsidiaries, including predecessor entities and acquisitions.

This material is being issued on a limited basis through various global subsidiaries and affiliates of Neuberger Berman Group LLC. Please visit www.nb.com/disclosure-global-communications for the specific entities and jurisdictional limitations and restrictions.

The "Neuberger Berman" name and logo are registered service marks of Neuberger Berman Group LLC.

 2017 Neuberger Berman Group LLC. All rights reserved.

SOURCE Neuberger Berman

Related Links

http://www.nb.com


DALLAS, July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- NexPoint Residential Trust, Inc., ("NXRT" or the "Company"), (NYSE: NXRT) today announced that the Company is scheduled to host a conference call on Tuesday, August 1, 2017 at 11:00 a.m. ET (10:00 am CT), to discuss second quarter 2017 financial results.

The conference call can be accessed live over the phone by dialing (888) 855-5838 or, for international callers, (719) 325-2351, and using passcode Conference ID: 8781957. A live audio webcast of the call will be available online at the Company's website, http://www.nexpointliving.com (under "Investor Relations"). An online replay will be available shortly after the call on the Company's website and continue to be available for 60 days.

A replay of the conference call will also be available through Tuesday, August 8, 2017, by dialing (888) 203-1112 or, for international callers, (719) 457-0820 and entering passcode 8781957.

The Company plans to issue a press release with second quarter 2017 financial results before market open on Tuesday, August 1, 2017.

About NexPoint Residential Trust, Inc.

NexPoint Residential Trust, Inc. is a publicly traded REIT, with its shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "NXRT," primarily focused on acquiring, owning and operating well-located middle-income multifamily properties with "value-add" potential in large cities and suburban submarkets of large cities, primarily in the Southeastern and Southwestern United States. NXRT is externally advised by NexPoint Real Estate Advisors, L.P., an affiliate of Highland Capital Management, L.P., a leading global alternative asset manager and an SEC-registered investment adviser. More information about NXRT is available at http://www.nexpointliving.com.

For Further Information:

Investor Relations

Marilynn Meek

212-827-3773

SOURCE NexPoint Residential Trust, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.nexpointliving.com


CLEVELAND, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Business Volunteers Unlimited (BVU) works with businesses year-round to engage their employees in meaningful volunteer service. On Friday, July 14, 2017 nearly 400 business volunteers contributed over 1,100 hours to local nonprofits as part of BVU's "Summer of Service" event. Volunteers trimmed, pulled, and painted their way to a fun-filled day.

Projects included:

Dominion volunteers move invasive weeds at The Nature Center at Shaker Lakes during the Business Volunteers Unlimited "Summer of Service" event on July 14, 2017.

Sprucing up inner-city neighborhood farms for the Cleveland Botanical Garden's Green Corps'

Beautifying the Regional Transit Authority (RTA) red line by picking up trash and cutting back overgrowth

Painting and cleaning at the Children's Museum of Cleveland

Picking up litter at the Cleveland Metroparks Lakefront Reservation

Assembling picnic tables, planting and installing flowerboxes at Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry's 2100 Lakeside Men's Shelter

BVU coordinates a "Summer of Service" volunteer event for employees at local businesses to promote engagement and commitment to our region. Sponsored by Cargill, The Shelly Company, and the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD), this year marks BVU's 11th annual "Summer of Service".

Photos from throughout the day can be viewed here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bvu/albums/72157683475005284

"Cargill Deicing Technology's strives to be good corporate citizen and help enrich the communities we live in. Our values match the good work done by BVU and we are a proud participant and sponsor of BVU's Summer of Service," said Amanda Knaus, Sales Account Manager  Deicing Technology, Cargill.

This year's participating businesses included: Athersys, Calfee, Cargill, Dominion East Ohio, KeyBank, Lincoln Electric, NEORSD, Oswald, the Shelly Company, and Skoda Minotti.

Volunteer projects were completed at the following nonprofits:

Alliance for the Great Lakes

Children's Museum of Cleveland

Cleveland Botanical Garden's Buckeye and Midtown Learning Farm

Cleveland Metoparks (5 locations)

Doan Brook Partnership

Jennings Center for Older Adults

Judson at University Circle

Lake Erie Nature & Science Center

Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry's 2100 Lakeside Men's Shelter

Nature Center at Shaker Lakes

Ronald McDonald House

Regional Transit Authority

About BVU

BVU engages businesses, employers and members of the community in productive and rewarding leadership and volunteer activities. By leveraging their involvement, BVU strengthens the leadership and expands the capacity of hundreds of nonprofits, while enabling businesses and employers to build strategic, powerful and enduring relationships with the community. Visit www.BVUvolunteers.org for more information.

SOURCE Business Volunteers Unlimited (BVU)

Related Links

http://www.BVUvolunteers.org


MILWAUKEE, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Less than four percent of the federal government's total funding for cancer research is dedicated to childhood cancer, inspiring Northwestern Mutual to announce today that it will provide $150,000 to support childhood cancer researchers nationwide. The company will provide $60,000 to fund 12 grants in support of Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation's (ALSF) Pediatric Oncology Student Training (POST) Program. The grants are being awarded through the Northwestern Mutual Foundation's Childhood Cancer Program. Northwestern Mutual is also funding $90,000 for medical researchers to purchase essential lab and research equipment at 16 hospitals and universities nationwide.

ALSF's POST Program is designed for undergraduate, graduate and medical students who are interested in pursuing careers in pediatric oncology research. It aims to expose students to the field of pediatric oncology research, help develop practical research skills, provide hands-on research experience and encourage continued research in the field post-graduation. POST students provide researchers critical assistance to help advance their research.

"More than 10,000 kids in the U.S. were diagnosed with cancer last year and the causes of most childhood cancers are unknown, so it's critical we do our part to find a cure," said Eric Christophersen, president of the Northwestern Mutual Foundation. "Northwestern Mutual is proud to have such an impactful and passionate partner in Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation, and we're looking forward to continuing our shared mission of eradicating childhood cancer."

The 12 POST Program grant recipients include:

Brandon Diessner , University of Minnesota (Minneapolis , Minnesota )

, , ) Brandon Wummer , University of Florida ( Gainesville, Florida )

, ( ) Connor Farnham , University of Colorado Denver ( Aurora, Colorado )

, ( ) Emily Crawford , Dana-Farber Cancer Institute ( Boston, Massachusetts )

, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute ( ) Emily Haussler , Washington University School of Medicine ( St. Louis, Missouri )

, School of Medicine ( ) Paula Jeon , University of Michigan (Ann Arbor , Michigan )

, , ) Shilpa Nataraj , University of California, San Diego ( San Diego, California )

, ( ) Siddharth Gorantla , Baylor College of Medicine ( Houston, Texas )

, ( ) Tu Dinh , University of California San Francisco ( San Francisco, California )

, ( ) Tyler Galvelis , The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia ( Philadelphia, Pennsylvania )

, The Children's Hospital of ( ) Yannan (Jennifer) Wang , Augusta University ( Augusta, Georgia )

, University ( ) Yohanna Georgis , Dana-Farber Cancer Institute ( Boston, Massachusetts )

The organizations receiving lab and research equipment include:

Albany Medical Center Children's Hospital Dartmouth Hitchcock Pediatric Oncology Clinic Arnold Palmer Children's Hospital Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital Blank Children's Hospital Nationwide Children's Hospital Children's Hospital of Philadelphia University of California San Diego Children's Hospital of Wisconsin * University of Florida Children's Mercy Hospital University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health Comer Children's Hospital Washington University/St. Louis Children's Hospital * Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Weill Cornell Medical

Northwestern Mutual's Childhood Cancer Program gives all kids the chance to live life to the fullest by accelerating the search for pediatric cancer cures and providing family and survivor support. The Childhood Cancer Program raises awareness and funds through its nonprofit partners, including ALSF and other family support nonprofits across the country. Since launching its Childhood Cancer Program in 2012, Northwestern Mutual has contributed more than $15 million to the cause and has funded more than 165,000 hours of research.

*Indicates multiple equipment grants awarded to the organization.

About Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation

Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF) emerged from the front yard lemonade stand of cancer patient Alexandra "Alex" Scott (1996-2004). In 2000, 4-year-old Alex announced that she wanted to hold a lemonade stand to raise money to help find a cure for all children with cancer. Since Alex held that first stand, the Foundation bearing her name has evolved into a national fundraising movement, complete with thousands of supporters across the country carrying on her legacy of hope. To date, Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation, a registered 501(c)3 charity, has raised more than $140 million toward fulfilling Alex's dream of finding a cure, funding over 690 pediatric cancer research projects nationally. For more information on Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation, visit AlexsLemonade.org.

About Northwestern Mutual Foundation

The mission of the Northwestern Mutual Foundation is to improve the lives of children and families in need. The Foundation has given more than $300 million since its inception in 1992 and is designed to create lasting impact in the communities where the company's employees and financial representatives live and work. We accomplish this by combining financial support, volunteerism, thought leadership and convening community partners to deliver the best outcomes. Our efforts are focused nationally on curing childhood cancer, and locally on education, neighborhoods and making our hometown of Milwaukee a great destination.

About Northwestern Mutual

Northwestern Mutual has been helping families and businesses achieve financial security for 160 years. Through a distinctive, whole-picture planning approach including both insurance and investments, we empower people to be financially confident so they can live life differently. We combine the expertise of our financial professionals with a personalized digital experience to help our clients navigate their financial lives every day. With $250.4 billion in assets, $28.2 billion in revenues, and more than $1.6 trillion worth of life insurance protection in force, Northwestern Mutual delivers financial security to more than 4.4 million people who rely on us for life, disability income and long-term care insurance, annuities, brokerage and advisory services, trust services, and discretionary portfolio management solutions. The company holds more than $100 billion of client assets as a part of its wealth management company and investment services. Northwestern Mutual ranks 97 on the 2017 FORTUNE 500 and is recognized by FORTUNE as one of the "World's Most Admired" life insurance companies in 2017.

Northwestern Mutual is the marketing name for The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company (NM), Milwaukee, WI (life and disability insurance, annuities, and life insurance with long-term care benefits) and its subsidiaries. Northwestern Mutual and its subsidiaries offer a comprehensive approach to financial security solutions including: life insurance, long-term care insurance, disability income insurance, annuities, life insurance with long-term care benefits, investment products, and advisory products and services. Subsidiaries include Northwestern Mutual Investment Services, LLC (NMIS) (securities), broker-dealer, registered investment adviser, member FINRA and SIPC; the Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company (NMWMC) (fiduciary and fee-based financial planning services), federal savings bank; and Northwestern Long Term Care Insurance Company (NLTC) (long-term care insurance).

SOURCE Northwestern Mutual

Related Links

http://www.northwesternmutual.com


ROCHESTER, N.Y., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- New York State Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie and Assemblymember Harry Bronson visited the Northeast Regional Council of Carpenters' (NRCC) Rochester Training Facility (21 Jetview Drive, Rochester, NY) on Tuesday, July 18th.

During the tour, Speaker Heastie and Assemblymember Bronson met with 10 NRCC Representatives and 20 students in the Eastern Millwrights Council Apprentice program to learn more about the NRCC's apprenticeship program and the Council's efforts to recruit and hire more women and minority carpenters.

"The New York State Assembly Majority strongly supports the Northeast Regional Council of Carpenters and backs their mission to diversify its workforce," said Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. "Our conference has passed numerous pieces of legislation to level the playing field for minority and women-owned businesses, as well as legislation to ensure that those contractors and subcontractors who are debarred on the federal level under the Davis-Bacon Act for wage payment violations are unable to bid on state public work contracts. Today's visit assures me that this industry is on the right path and that the Assembly Majority will continue to be a partner in its success."

"I thank the carpenters for taking time out of their day to highlight this fantastic facility," said Assemblymember Harry Bronson. "This training facility will offer the next generation of carpenters the skills they need to compete in tomorrow's environment." Bronson continued, "I would also like to thank the Speaker for his leadership on the passage of legislation that ensures contractors and subcontractors who are debarred on the federal level under the Davis-Bacon Act for wage payment violations, are unable to bid on state public work contracts and also the passage of legislation that defines what is a "public work" in New York state. Both pieces of legislation, that I authored, will ensure that our hardworking men and women in the trades can earn a good middle-class income for their families and protect taxpayers from contractors who have violated the law."

The New York State Legislature recently passed A8514/S6790, an Act to amend labor and general municipal law as it relates to reciprocity of debarments imposed under the federal Davis-Bacon Act. The bill, which now needs approval from the Governor, states that any contractor debarred by the U.S. Department of Labor for violations of the Davis-Bacon Act cannot work on New York State public works projects. The public works definition bill (A5498/S2975) passed the Assembly in June by a large majority (116-28). It would create a statutory definition of public work. Currently, the definition has been left to court interpretation and this legislation would ensure that any construction project receiving a public subsidy would have to pay workers a fair wage.

"We were so pleased to welcome State Speaker Heastie and Assemblyman Bronson to our Rochester Training Facility, so they could view our new Facility and learn more about the steps our Council is taking to attract women and minorities to the field of carpentry," said David Haines, Northwest New York Regional Manager. "The Northeast Carpenters has a strong relationship with the State Assembly and have been pleased to work with them on the recent debarment bill and public work definition bill that will help our carpenters to receive good pay and benefits from law abiding companies in New York."

Work was completed on the NRCC's new 45,000 square feet training center in Rochester in Spring 2017. The facility has four classrooms with A/V equipment and a new state-of-the-art welding training space. The total cost of the project was $2.3 million. To read more about the new Rochester Training Center and view videos and photos from the April 28, 2017 open house, please read about it in The Digital Carpenter: www.northeastcarpenters.org/digitalcarpenter.

About the NRCC

The Northeast Regional Council of Carpenters (NRCC) represents nearly 40,000 hardworking men and women in Delaware and New Jersey and portions of Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania. NRCC is one of the largest trade unions on the East Coast. The NRCC equips professional men and women carpenters with the skills, training and quality workmanship that are demanded in today's construction industry. For more information on NRCC, please visit our website: www.northeastcarpenters.org; Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NortheastRegionalCouncilofCarpenters; or Twitter: https://twitter.com/nrccarpenters.

SOURCE Northeast Regional Council of Carpenters (NRCC)

Related Links

http://www.northeastcarpenters.org


By PTI: New Delhi, Jul 18 (PTI) A section of Air India employees today staged protest against the governments decision to privatise the national carrier, saying they were always ready for turnaround of the airline.

Around 300 employees, associated with the Air Corporations Employees Union (ACEU), gathered outside the Air India office near the Indira Gandhi International airport here.

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They chanted slogans opposing the decision taken by the Union Cabinet last month approving disinvestment of Air India.

The ACEU is the biggest union of Air India employees and represents nearly 8,000 of the total 24,000 staff members. It is a grouping of non-technical staff of the airline.

"We appeal to the government of India not to go for privatisation and disinvestment of Air India. We are always ready to turnaround Air India," the ACEU said in its statement.

The union also plans to hold similar protests in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Chennai later this month, according to a union member. PTI JC SMJ

--- ENDS ---
LONDON, July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Synopsis

Timetric's 'Personal Accident and Health Insurance in China, Key Trends and Opportunities to 2020' report provides detailed analysis of the market trends, drivers, challenges in the Chinese personal accident and health insurance segment.





Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4089265/





It provides key performance indicators such as written premium, incurred loss, loss ratio, commissions and expenses, combined ratio, total assets, total investment income and retentions during the review period (20112015) and forecast period (20152020).



The report also analyzes distribution channels operating in the segment, gives a comprehensive overview of the Chinese economy and demographics, and provides detailed information on the competitive landscape in the country.



The report brings together Timetric's research, modeling and analysis expertise, giving insurers access to information on segment dynamics and competitive advantages, and profiles of insurers operating in the country. The report also includes details of insurance regulations, and recent changes in the regulatory structure.



Summary

Timetric's 'Personal Accident and Health Insurance in China, Key Trends and Opportunities to 2020' report provides in-depth market analysis, information and insights into the Chinese personal accident and health insurance segment, including:



- The Chinese personal accident and health insurance segment's growth prospects by insurance category



- Key trends, drivers and challenges for the personal accident and health insurance segment



- A comprehensive overview of the Chinese economy and demographics



- The various distribution channels in the Chinese personal accident and health insurance segment



- Details of the competitive landscape in the personal accident and health insurance segment in China



- Details of regulatory policy applicable to the Chinese insurance industry



Scope

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the personal accident and health insurance segment in China:



- It provides historical values for the Chinese personal accident and health insurance segment for the report's 20112015 review period, and projected figures for the 20152020 forecast period.



- It offers a detailed analysis of the key categories in the Chinese personal accident and health insurance segment, and market forecasts to 2020.



- It profiles the top personal accident and health insurance companies in China, and outlines the key regulations affecting them.



Reasons To Buy

- Make strategic business decisions using in-depth historic and forecast market data related to the Chinese personal accident and health insurance segment, and each category within it.



- Understand the demand-side dynamics, key market trends and growth opportunities in the Chinese personal accident and health insurance segment.



- Assess the competitive dynamics in the personal accident and health insurance segment.



- Identify growth opportunities and market dynamics in key product categories.



- Gain insights into key regulations governing the Chinese insurance industry, and their impact on companies and the industry's future.



Key Highlights

- In January 2017, the Chinese government issued a medical reform plan for the period 20162020, as a part of the 13th Five-Year Plan, with emphasis on insurance reforms and improvements.



- In January 2016, the Chinese government introduced a tax benefit health insurance plan, with an objective to expand commercial health insurance. In June 2016, the China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) permitted 12 insurers to offer tax-deductible health schemes



- In April 2016, Alibaba Health Information Technology formed a joint venture with China Taiping to establish online health insurance, with registered capital of CNY1.0 billion (US$154 million).



- The Chinese state council issued a circular in October 2016, promulgating a series of regulations regarding critical illness insurance to cover more urban and rural residents.



- At the end of 2016, China overtook Japan to become the world's second-largest insurance market, after the US.





Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4089265/



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

http://www.reportbuyer.com



For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +44 208 816 85 48

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

Related Links

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MEXICO CITY, July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Petroleos Mexicanos ("Pemex") today announced the final results for its previously announced cash tender offers (the "Offers") to purchase any and all of its outstanding notes set forth in the table below (collectively, the "Existing Securities"), made pursuant to the offer to purchase (the "Offer to Purchase") and the related letter of transmittal and notice of guaranteed delivery sent to holders of the Existing Securities, each dated July 11, 2017 (collectively, the "Offer Documents").

Tender Offers' Results

As of 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on July 18, 2017 (the "Expiration Date"), the principal amounts of Existing Securities of each series outstanding and validly tendered are as set forth in the table below.

Series of Securities CUSIPs Aggregate Principal Amount

Outstanding Prior to Offers Aggregate Principal Amount

Validly Tendered (1) 5.750% Notes due March 1, 2018 706451BS9 - 70645JBD3 -

70645KBD0 U.S. $1,758,330,000 U.S. $919,417,000 3.500% Notes

due July 18, 2018 71654QBJ0 - 71656LAS0 - 71656MAS8 U.S. $1,000,000,000 U.S. $644,024,000 3.125% Notes

due January 23, 2019 71654QBQ4 - 71656LAW1 - 71656MAW9 U.S. $500,000,000 U.S. $171,832,000

(1) Not including aggregate principal amounts of Existing Securities tendered pursuant to the guaranteed delivery procedures described in the Offer Documents, for which delivery of Existing Securities must be made by 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on July 20, 2017.

Additionally, $1,660,000 aggregate principal amount of its outstanding 5.750% Notes due March 1, 2018, $6,401,000 aggregate principal amount of its outstanding 3.500% Notes due July 18, 2018 and $606,000 aggregate principal amount of its outstanding 3.125% Notes due January 23, 2019 were tendered pursuant to the guaranteed delivery procedures described in the Offer Documents.

Pemex has accepted for purchase all Existing Securities validly tendered at or prior to the Expiration Date. Holders whose Existing Securities have been accepted for purchase will also receive interest accrued but unpaid on their Existing Securities accepted for purchase to, but excluding, the expected Settlement Date (as defined below). Under no circumstances will any interest be payable because of any delay in the transmission of funds to holders by The Depository Trust Company. Pemex will not accept any further tenders.

Satisfaction of Financing Condition

On July 18, 2017, Pemex issued (i) U.S. $2,500,000,000 reopening aggregate principal amount of its 6.500% Notes due 2027 and (ii) U.S. $2,500,000,000 reopening aggregate principal amount of its 6.750% Bonds due 2047 in a concurrent offering. As a result, pursuant to the terms and conditions described in the Offer to Purchase, the Financing Condition (as defined therein) has been satisfied.

Settlement

Payment for the Existing Securities validly tendered is expected to be made, subject to the terms and conditions of the Offer to Purchase, on July 21, 2017 (the "Settlement Date"). Payment for the Existing Securities validly tendered pursuant to the guaranteed delivery procedures described in the Offer Documents is also expected to be made, subject to the terms and conditions of the Offer to Purchase, on July 21, 2017.

Further Information

D. F. King & Co., Inc., has been appointed as the information agent for the Offers. Banks and brokers call: +12122695550. All others call: 866-342-4881 (U.S. toll-free) or +1-212-269-5550 (international). Email: [email protected] Copies of the Offer to Purchase and the related letter of transmittal and notice of guaranteed delivery are available at www.dfking.com/pemex.

Pemex has retained BBVA Securities Inc., HSBC Securities (USA) Inc., J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and Santander Investment Securities Inc. to act as Dealer Managers in connection with the Offers. Questions regarding the Offers may be directed to BBVA Securities Inc. at + 1 212-728-2446 or [email protected], HSBC Securities (USA) Inc. at 888HSBC4LM (U.S. toll-free), +12125255552 (international) or [email protected], J.P. Morgan Securities LLC at (866) 846-2874 (U.S. toll-free) or (212) 834-7279 (U.S. collect) and Santander Investment Securities Inc. at (855) 404-3636 (U.S. toll-free), (212) 940-1442 (U.S. collect) or [email protected].

This press release is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. The Offers are being made solely through the Offer to Purchase and the related letter of transmittal and notice of guaranteed delivery, and only to such persons and in such jurisdictions as are permitted under applicable law.

SOURCE Petroleos Mexicanos
BRISBANE, Calif., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Pramata, the customer relationship operations company, today announced the hiring of Craig Doud as chief operating officer to lead customer success and bolster the company's expanding market presence. He will be responsible for all customer operations, implementation, support and customer success. Doud will be based out of Pramata's Brisbane office.

"Craig's role as chief operating officer embodies what is of utmost importance to us at Pramata  the customer. He brings a hyper focus on the processes that customer success is built upon to our team," said Praful Saklani, CEO and Founder of Pramata. "As Pramata continues to expand and grow the client base, this role has become more important than ever. Craig will play a pivotal part in helping us innovate and succeed with customers and prospects."

Before Pramata, Doud spent five years with IBM as the director of customer success and services after his employer, Emptoris, was acquired by the company in 2012. At Emptoris, he served as vice president of customer loyalty and APAC where he developed and drove strategies across marketing, sales, product and customer success to grow customer lifetime value and sales and develop new markets.

Doud also has years of experience working in management and sales positions at Zyme Solutions as the vice president of new markets and E2open as the vice president of sales consulting. Doud received an MS in Operations Research at the University of Texas at Austin and completed his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering at California State University-Fullerton.

"Pramata solves complex business problems for large enterprises, helping customers make sense of contract agreements and uncover millions in hidden revenue," said Doud. "Leveraging innovative technology, backed by strong partnerships with Salesforce.com and DocuSign, we are poised to generate tremendous value for our customers and enterprises around the world."

Doud's hire adds to the deep executive bench of Pramata's executive team, with the additions of Chief Technology Officer Pedram Abrari, Vice President of Strategy Solutions Lloyd Alexander and newly promoted Chief Product Officer Justin Schweisberger. He is joining the team during a period of growth and momentum for the company, with Pramata solidifying five new partnerships, including the recent announcement of agreements with AIM Consulting, Experis and Frazier & Deeter.

To learn more about what Pramata can do for your enterprise visit: www.pramata.com/request-a-demo.

About Pramata

Headquartered in Brisbane, Calif. with offices in Kansas City and Bangalore, Pramata provides customer digitization solutions to Fortune 500 companies that increase revenue and profits while reducing leakage and regulatory risk. For more information, visit www.pramata.com.

Media Contact

Elise Chambers

Bateman Group for Pramata

Phone: (415) 636-5408

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Pramata

Related Links

http://www.pramata.com


WASHINGTON, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Pratt & Whitney, a division of United Technologies Corp. (NYSE: UTX), is displaying its PurePower Geared Turbofan on Capitol Hill today, the revolutionary new engine platform that is more fuel and cost efficient. This new engine program has proven to be extraordinarily popular around the world with more than 8,000 engines on order, including options and unannounced orders, driving continued U.S. leadership in technology-led manufacturing, U.S. exports, and growing U.S. jobs and investment.

The engine will be on display on South Capitol Street between C and D Streets SE from 10:00 a.m. through 5:00 p.m. All are welcome to visit.

"The Geared Turbofan, with its revolutionary design, is the future of aviation, and is a great example of U.S. manufacturing leadership," said Pratt & Whitney President Bob Leduc. "Pratt & Whitney expects to hire 25,000 people by 2026, helping to ensure that we meet production targets and maintenance standards, and we will continue to invest in our facilities and supply chain  a majority of which is spent in the United States, while growing U.S. exports. This is the beginning of the next great age in aircraft propulsion, and the GTF engine is in its first years of a 30+ year program."

Of the company's $770 million in supply chain spend to support the GTF engine program over the course of 2016, 78 percent, or $600 million, was spent in the United States, supporting local economies and job creation.

In addition, Pratt & Whitney is investing $1.3 billion in upgrading and updating its manufacturing and service centers to meet the demands of the new program, including a $400+ million expansion of the company's two Connecticut facilities, $451 million expansion of its Columbus, GA, facility, and opening a new facility in Lansing, MI, to produce fan blades.

The company is currently seeking people for 500+ jobs in the United States, and expects to hire 25,000 people by 2026. Please visit www.utc.com/careers for job openings. Pratt & Whitney is proud to be an equal opportunity employer.

In order to develop talent to support the GTF engine and other programs well into the future, Pratt & Whitney works closely with universities as well as technical and community colleges worldwide to train and inspire the next generation of engineers, scientists and advanced manufacturing professionals. These efforts include contributing $125,000 to the Goodwin College Certified Production Technician Manufacturing program in Pratt & Whitney's hometown of East Hartford, CT; investing more than $4.5 million to construct one of the most advanced additive manufacturing laboratories in the nation at the University of Connecticut; designing the advanced technology curriculum with Palm Beach State College  and hiring graduates of the program at Pratt & Whitney's Palm Beach facility; creating a network of Pratt & Whitney Centers of Excellence in universities focused on technical research projects, giving students access to state-of-the-art equipment and hands-on experience prior to graduation. Other programs include collaborations with the York County Community College in Maine, University of North Texas-Arlington, Columbus State University, and Columbus Technical College in Georgia.

Pratt & Whitney invested 20 years and $10 billion in developing the revolutionary GTF engine. The engine, which has been in service for a year and has passed its first 200,000 flight hours, reduced fuel burn by 16%, emissions by 50% and noise by 75%.

The 16% fuel performance step-change offered by the GTF is the result of 48 new technologies and a fundamental shift in design architecture. That innovative design allows the fans to spin at a different speed than the turbine, and results in a 75% smaller noise footprint. Each GTF-powered airplane can annually save approximately $1 million in fuel and impact 500,000 fewer airport neighbors with noise from takeoffs and landings. This improves the quality of life for airport communities, and offers new economic benefits to airports seeking to extend their operating day without undue disruption to the surrounding communities.

About Pratt & Whitney

Pratt & Whitney, a division of United Technologies Corp., is a world leader in the design, manufacture and service of aircraft engines and auxiliary power units. United Technologies Corp., based in Farmington, Connecticut, provides high-technology systems and services to the building and aerospace industries. To learn more about UTC, visit its website at www.utc.com, or follow the company on Twitter: @UTC.

This press release contains forward-looking statements concerning future business opportunities. Actual results may differ materially from those projected as a result of certain risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to changes in levels of demand in the aerospace industry, in levels of air travel, and in the number of aircraft to be built; challenges in the design, development, production support, performance and realization of the anticipated benefits of advanced technologies; as well as other risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those detailed from time to time in United Technologies Corp.'s Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Pratt & Whitney

+1 (860) 565-9600

[email protected]

SOURCE Pratt & Whitney

Related Links

http://www.pratt-whitney.com


(Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/537242/PolyU_Professor_Timothy_Tong.jpg )



In response to the HKSAR Government's call for supporting the Nation's Belt and Road Initiative and to prepare our students to tap the opportunities under this initiative, PolyU has embarked on a number of measures to enhance the engagement with the Belt and Road countries. Apart from being the local university which has admitted the largest number of students from those countries, PolyU has also been organizing many exchange activities for students.

The Service-Learning trip to Kyrgzstan is part of the credit-bearing SOAR (Serving heart, Open-mindedness, Aspiration, Responsibility) Youth Leadership Programme (2016-2017), organised jointly by PolyU's Global Youth Leadership Institute and Peking University. The programme requires students to complete designated leadership courses and to learn more about ethnicity and harmony, social responsibility and global perspectives by visiting and engaging in service-learning in countries along the Belt and Road.

In the Service-Learning trip, President Tong joined the students in performing eye checking and vision screening services for some 500 children and teenagers in Tokmok, a city with rich cultural heritage located in the ancient Silk Road.

President Tong said, "Not only did the service-learning trip benefit the local community, it benefits our students by igniting their sense of social responsibility, and enables them to understand the social issues, explore a different culture and widen their international outlook. This, in turn, has helped open up their minds and enhance their competitiveness."

To foster collaboration with universities in the Belt and Road countries, PolyU also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan on 19 July. The strengthened ties will result in more academic exchange, research collaboration, student and staff exchange, and enhanced collaboration within the network of the University Alliance of the Silk Road.

President Tong said, "We are delighted to develop a closer relationship with the Nazarbayev University. I am confident that this collaboration will form a foundation of a long-term and mutually beneficial partnership between the two universities, which also opens doors to more exchange and learning opportunities along the Belt and Road."

A Belt and Road Forum was organized by PolyU in Beijing in conjunction with Ming Xi Foundation on 15 July to promote cultural exchange among the youth from Hong Kong, Chinese Mainland and the Silk Road countries. The event is one of the celebratory activities for PolyU's 80th anniversary. More than 130 participants, including entrepreneurs, government officials and students from the "Silk Road International Summer School", attended the Forum and exchange their views on the challenges of globalization and youth engagement along the Belt and Road countries.

Press Contact:

Ms Winnie Lam, Division Head (Public Affairs),

Communications and Public Affairs Office

Telephone : +(852)-2766-6377, +(852)-9739-0807

Email : [email protected]



SOURCE The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU)
DUBLIN, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Ready to Assemble (RTA) Furniture Market in Europe 2017-2021" report has been added to Research and Markets' offering.

The ready to assemble furniture market in Europe to grow at a CAGR of 4.25% during the period 2017-2021.

The report, Ready to Assemble (RTA) Furniture Market in Europe 2017-2021, 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.

One trend in the market is surge in innovative product designs. With shifting consumer needs to more innovative and trendy product designs, RTA furniture manufacturers are also coming up with new and trendy designs to cater to different customer needs. With advances in technology, these competitors are enabled to produce multifunctional and durable products, which also help them to maintain their competitive edge.

According to the report, one driver in the market is economical cost and quick furnishings of RTA furniture. With many consumers shifting homes and moving out of cities frequently, the problem of moving furniture has become a major challenge. RTA furniture is portable and has quick furnishing capabilities. Hence, it is easy to move. Moreover, it is relatively cheaper than permanent furniture, which, in turn, help them to save money. It is considered that European furniture manufacturers are popular globally due to their varied creativity in trendy designs.

Further, the report states that one challenge in the market is uncertainty in costs of raw material used for RTA furniture. In the present market scenario in Europe, RTA furniture manufacturers are experiencing uncertain fluctuations in their profit margins. This is due to the fluctuating cost of raw material and intense competition among market players. Due to low establishment costs, an influx of local players has been observed in recent times. The presence of local players leads to price wars among registered market competitors, which force global competitors to reduce the prices of their products, which reduces their profit margins.

Key vendors

Dorel Industries

Inter IKEA Systems

Tvilum

Other prominent vendors

Alphason

Decorative Panels Furniture

MEUBLES Demeyere

FLEXA

Rohr-Bush

Steinhoff International

SBA

Key Topics Covered:

PART 01: Executive summary

PART 02: Scope of the report

PART 03: Research Methodology

PART 04: Introduction

PART 05: Market landscape

PART 06: Market segmentation by product

PART 07: Market segmentation by distribution channel

PART 08: Geographical segmentation

PART 09: Decision framework

PART 10: Drivers and challenges

PART 11: Market trends

PART 12: Key competitor analysis

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/wjb2nz/ready_to_assemble

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


Registration for the George Washington Patriot Run is now open. To register, please visit mountvernon.org/patriotrun . Race registration is $50 and includes admission to Mount Vernon, a race t-shirt, and a finisher medal. Please note that all spectators looking to access the finish line on the grounds of Mount Vernon will be required to purchase a spectator ticket for a special discounted price of $10. This ticket provides the spectator access to the grounds and activities at Mount Vernon. A special free children's "Fun Run" will be held near the finish line (registration required). Parents of children (11 and under) running in the "Fun Run" must purchase spectator tickets.

Free bus transportation will be provided to all runners and their guests from a designated parking location starting at 5:30 a.m. Parking will not be permitted at Mount Vernon. The last bus will depart for the start line at 7 a.m. Return transportation to the satellite parking lot from Mount Vernon will be provided until 12 p.m.

For the participants' safety, strollers and animals are prohibited on the course. Registration fees are non-refundable. Please visit mountvernon.org/patriotrun for more details.

SOURCE George Washington's Mount Vernon

Related Links

http://www.mountvernon.org


DUBAI, UAE and ARMONK, N.Y., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today that IBM's consulting organization, Global Business Services (GBS), was ranked first for Mindshare and Quality and also named the most recommended consulting organization in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in 2017. This was based on findings in the "Perceptions of Consulting in the GCC in 2017" report by Source Global Research, a leading research and strategy firm for the global management consulting industry.

The report assesses the reputation of consulting firms from a client stand point and reveals the top-ranked organizations in the region on four categories: mindshare, quality, value, and most recommended. The 2017 report evaluates the perception of consulting firms in the GCC based on 600 survey responses and bases the ranking on four evaluation criteria: quality, value, recommendation, and attributes. The GCC consists of six Middle Eastern countriesSaudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman.

"As the number of consultancy firms continues to rise every day across the globe, it is increasingly difficult for businesses to keep their edge and continue to differentiate themselves from the rest," says Alison Huntington, Head of Client & Brand Insights, Source Global Research. "Despite such a challenge, IBM continues to remain at the top of clients' minds in this region for its quality and the value it brings to the industry."

"Today's organizations are continuously trying to find ways to keep pace with business demands and asking how to succeed in the rapidly changing digital landscape," says Amr Refaat, General Manager, IBM Middle East and Pakistan. "This is where our consultants can answer their most pressing questions. IBM's consulting leadership is the result of our investments and strategy to help resolve our customers' most critical challenges, and our commitment to deliver innovation."

IBM GBS was recently named globally as the industry's top producer of thought leadership for the sixth time in a White Space Report by Source Global Research. According to the report, IBM-produced thought leadership leads all 25 major global consulting firms in appealing to individuals, making them want to read a piece of content and then continue reading past the introduction.

For more information on the Source Global Research's "Perceptions of Consulting in the GCC in 2017" report, visit http://www.sourceglobalresearch.com/report/3041/perceptions-of-consulting-in-the-gcc-in-2017 (subscription required).

About IBM Global Business Services

For more information, visit http://www.ibm.com/services/gbs

About Source Global Research

Source Global Research (Source) is the leading research and strategy firm for the global management consulting industry. Set up in 2007 and with offices in London and Dubai, Source serves both consulting firms and their clients with expert analysis, research and reporting. Source draw not only on our extensive in-house experience, but also on the breadth of our relationships with both suppliers and buyers. All of our work is underpinned by our core values of intelligence, integrity, efficiency and transparency.

Source was founded by Fiona Czerniawska. Fiona is one of the world's leading experts on the consulting industry. She has written numerous books on the industry including: The Intelligent Client and The Economist books, Business Consulting: A Guide to How it Works and How to Make it Work and Buying Professional Services.

For further information, please visit: www.sourceglobalresearch.com.

Contact(s)

Katie Leasor

IBM Global External Relations

1 (212) 671-9356

[email protected]

Lina El Desouky

IBM Media Relations

External Relations Leader, IBM Middle East and Pakistan

+971 54 307 2694

[email protected]

SOURCE IBM

Related Links

http://www.ibm.com


MENLO PARK, Calif., July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Robert Half International Inc. (NYSE symbol: RHI) today announced it expects to release second-quarter 2017 earnings results on Tuesday, July 25, at approximately 4:15 p.m. EDT. Robert Half management will conduct a conference call at 5 p.m. EDT on July 25, following the release. The dial-in number is 877-814-0475 (+1-706-643-9224 outside the United States). It is recommended that participants dial in five minutes before the call begins. The password to access the call is "Robert Half." A taped recording of this call will be available for replay beginning at approximately 8 p.m. EDT on July 25 and ending at 11:59 p.m. EDT on August 25. The dial-in number for the replay is 855-859-2056 (+1-404-537-3406 outside the United States). To access the replay, enter conference ID# 47079505. The conference call also will be archived in audio format on the company's website at www.roberthalf.com.

Founded in 1948, Robert Half is the world's first and largest specialized staffing firm and a recognized leader in professional consulting and staffing services. The company's specialized staffing divisions include Accountemps, Robert Half Finance & Accounting and Robert Half Management Resources, for temporary, full-time and senior-level project professionals, respectively, in the fields of accounting and finance; OfficeTeam, for highly skilled administrative support professionals; Robert Half Technology, for project and full-time technology professionals; Robert Half Legal, for project and full-time staffing of lawyers, paralegals and legal support personnel; and The Creative Group, for interactive, design, marketing, advertising and public relations professionals. Robert Half also is the parent company of Protiviti, a global consulting firm that provides clients with consulting solutions in finance, technology, operations, data, analytics, governance, risk and internal audit.

Robert Half has staffing and consulting operations in more than 400 locations worldwide.

SOURCE Robert Half

Related Links

http://www.roberthalf.com


Amid the ongoing tensions between India and China, a Gujarat-based company has announced to give away Indian-made phones to its dealers and associates in protests.

By Bijin Jose: In the wake of the growing tensions between India and China following the recent Doklam standoff, several people across the country have raised their voices in protest. A Gujarat-based company has chosen to protest in a unique way.

The company has asked its dealers and associates to boycott their Chinese phones and promised them Indian phones instead to its 400 dealers.

advertisement

A poster used by the company on its Facebook profile stated that the only way to protest against Chinese incursion was to stop using Chinese phones.

The company has also requested its dealers not to buy any phones made in China. The firm has announced to give away Intex S1 and Karbonn K95 phones which are made in India.

In the poster, the business emphatically stated that it was the duty of the citizens towards the Indian Army guarding the borders.

"China has been provoking India frequently of late. If we want to fight them, we need to target their economy by not buying Chinese products. This is why we have decided to give away Indian-made phones to our dealers who are using Chinese phones. Every citizen should come forward and boycott Chinese products," Managing Director of Rudra TMX, Nikhil Gupta told Divya Bhaskar.

Facebook posted uploaded by the firm. Facebook posted uploaded by the firm.

Meanwhile, China has reportedly moved 'tens of thousands of tonnes' of military vehicles and equipment to Tibet under the pretext of two defence exercises held on the plateau in recent weeks.

Also Read:

Now, China moves tonnes of military equipment to Tibet. Should India be scared?

India's response to Doklam more reasonable than China's: Ex-White House official to India Today

Beijing does not fear war: Is China gearing for battle over Doklam standoff?

ALSO WATCH | India to invite heads of ASEAN countries for Republic Day parade 2018. Should China worry?

--- ENDS ---
The five-year grant was recently awarded to Daniel A. Peterson , Ph.D., director of the university's Center for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, and Robert Marr , Ph.D., Chicago Medical School associate professor of neuroscience, for the study "Reprogramming Cell Fate for Repair," a collaboration with co-principal investigators Oliver Brustle, M.D., and Martin Schwarz, Ph.D., at the University of Bonn in Germany.

"Our new reprogramming technology allows us to try to make neurons wherever they're needed in the brain for repair and we're having some success," Dr. Peterson said. "What we're still trying to figure out is how to make enough of them and how to make them connect with the existing circuit."

Brain and Spinal Cord Repair

Neurons in the brain and spinal cord are long-lived cells that are not replaced when damaged or lost. Recent advances in stem cell biology make it possible to introduce developmental genes into mature cells and direct them to change their fate by becoming a different type of cell. The study will use gene therapy approaches to directly reprogram rodent and human progenitor cells, which descend from stem cells to become neurons, and then evaluate the extent to which these newly engineered neurons connect with the rest of the brain. The findings could lead to new therapies for neurological injury and disease such as stroke, spinal cord injury, and traumatic brain injury (TBI)  a long-term focus of the project.

At present, there are few options to repair neurons lost through injuries such as stroke or TBI or neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's diseases, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control, an estimated 1.7 million people per year suffer a TBI, many of whom incur permanent disability as a result. Mild TBI is one of the most common neurologic disorders accounting for approximately 90 percent of all brain injuries sustained. Such injuries are a common occurrence in athletes. Sport-related concussions number an estimated 2 to 4 million annually in the U.S.

Dr. Peterson's team, which has also included researchers at DePaul University in Chicago, is investigating neuronal loss in an animal model of mild TBI with the goal of applying the reprogramming approach to replace lost neurons and restore function.

Collaboration with University of Bonn

The NIH award to Dr. Peterson originated from his successful proposal for the Fulbright Senior Scholar Award, which supported his year as a visiting professor at the University of Bonn, Germany. His work with researchers there led to innovations and initial data that helped form the direction of a continued collaboration and the framework for the NIH grant. The sabbatical year yielded two scientific publications, including co-authorship on a paper in Nature Communications entitled " Whole-brain 3D mapping of human neural transplant innervation " .

"Programs like the Fulbright Scholar Program and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES) sponsored by the U.S. Department of State are important for maintaining important connections and realizing the value of international cooperation," Dr. Peterson said. "I hope our grant through NIH further supports those international ties. We have more in common than divides us."

In Germany, Dr. Peterson worked closely with Drs. Brustle and Schwarz, leading experts in stem cell biology and neural circuitry, respectively. Dr. Brustle is also director of the University of Bonn's Institute of Reconstructive Neurobiology, part of the university's Life & Brain Center, its translation hub and a key contributor to translational science in the German State of North Rhine Westphalia. The IRN participates in a number of national and European research consortia, including the 7 FP project Neurostemcellrepair, the Horizon 2020 project COSYN and several consortia of the Innovative Medicines Initiative.

"This NIH award and the Fulbright Award-supported sabbatical that established the collaborative project, is a wonderful example of how government investment can help scientists extend their research in new directions," said Ronald Kaplan, Ph.D., RFU executive vice president for research. "The grant will support new discoveries by Dr. Peterson and his team with one goal in mind: improved health and well-being."

About Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science

Formed in 1912 as the Chicago Hospital-College of Medicine, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science is a national leader in interprofessional medical and healthcare education and biomedical research. RFU includes the Chicago Medical School, School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, College of Health Professions, Dr. William M. Scholl College of Podiatric Medicine and College of Pharmacy. More than 18,000 RFU degreed alumni are active throughout the United States and around the world. Learn more at rosalindfranklin.edu.

Office of Marketing and Communications

phone: 847.454.6497

email: [email protected]

SOURCE Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science

Related Links

https://rosalindfranklin.edu


LOS ANGELES, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Claery and Hammond, LLP, a local Southern California law firm  along with thousands of other sponsors, spectators, and volunteers  helped the philanthropic organization, San Diego Pride, create the largest several-day philanthropic economic event in the city's history. It is estimated that the San Diego 2017 Pride events propelled the city's local economy to record-breaking high levels, even exceeding San Diego's epic Comic-Con event. Early estimates suggest that the event brought in $11 million in revenue to the city's businesses, and that the event fostered more than $95,000 in additional sales tax revenue. San Diego Pride's board is calling this year's event a monumental success. Although the San Diego Pride celebration has come and gone, its impact on the local economy, as well as the impact on the organization's philanthropic causes, will continue to be present.

This year's San Diego pride was a very peaceful event, despite some initial concerns of possible extreme protests, repugnant actions, clashes and even arrests. The parade, which took place on Saturday, July 15, 2017, had an increase of approximately 30,000 attendees over last year's astonishing 200,000 attendees. Moreover, contingents participating in the event also rose an incredible 50%. The sponsorship continues to increase in diversity, with organizations ranging from law firms such as Claery and Hammond to national organizations like CBS radio stations, and even international companies like Colgate.

San Diego Pride released an official statement saying a record 230,000 people watched 253 entrants, including Claery and Hammond, make their way through Hillcrest and into Balboa Park. The celebration had no notable upsetting incidents. One officer was injured in an unrelated event on Sunday at Studio 819 Hotel in Hillcrest.

The organization says Interfaith and The San Diego Convention Center were only a few of the new groups to join in the parade. The first night of the Music Festival welcomed 30,000 people. That's as many as the total amount of people who attended last year's entire multi-day event. Many of the ticket options had sold out, including the limited VIP packages. Organizers say this year's theme, "Allied in Action: United for Justice," may have contributed to its success.

Chloe Janda, Public Relations Manager for San Diego Pride, released a statement on Sunday, July 16, 2017, "This weekend has already seen over 200,000 people descend on Hillcrest to send a message of unity." R&B legends En Vogue, recent dance-chart topper Tinashe, and Grammy-award winner Estelle headlined the weekend at the music festival to an enthusiastic crowd of more than 30,000 people. The masses also enjoyed over 100 other artists over 4 stages. In Hillcrest, an artistic neighborhood in San Diego, the night life was alive and energized. A line formed around the block and into an alley for its "Pride Massive" musical event.

San Diego Pride has had consistent historic success. A historic study by the San Diego State University Center for Hospitality and Tourism Research released 3 years ago found that the multi-day event made a $10.9 million economic impact. "This study reveals that San Diego Pride is an important cultural celebration as well as an economic driver that supports jobs, tourism and local businesses," said San Diego's Mayor at a press conference. "SDSU's economic impact report shows that even though other cities may have their own celebrations, San Diego remains a premier destination when it comes to Pride festivities." San Diego Pride attracted 2,000 international visitors, and over 48% of them stayed an average of 2.5 nights in a hotel (at $170 per night). It's estimated that 10,900 hotel room nights were sold to Pride attendees, and the city earned $95,000 in additional sales tax revenue.

For more information regarding Claery and Hammond, visit http://www.claerygreen.com. For more information regarding San Diego Pride visit https://sdpride.org

For more information, contact Skyler Samp at [email protected]

SOURCE Claery & Hammond, LLP

Related Links

http://www.claerygreen.com


BOCA RATON, Fla., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Seeman Holtz Property & Casualty, Inc. is pleased to announce the acquisition of Behrooz Meimand Insurance Services, headquartered in Los Angeles, CA. Serving all of California, Nevada and Texas for over 35 years, Behrooz Meimand and team have been offering the right combination of personal and commercial insurance to their high net worth customers. The addition of Meimand will add a solid book of quality client relationships to the Seeman Holtz portfolio. Seeman Holtz continues their Southern California expansion with a robust pipeline of high value acquisitions in the area.

Seeman Holtz Property & Casualty, Inc. remains focused on targeting high-quality independent agencies for geographic expansion and continued growth. With the addition of Behrooz Meimand Insurance Services, Seeman Holtz Property & Casualty, Inc. will continue to reach new and current clients by helping them protect their most important valuables with not only the right insurance, but with the right service for each client. SHP&C offers:

Private Client

Homeowner's Policy

Automobile Insurance

Renter's Policy

Umbrella Coverage

Commercial and Employee Coverage

Personal Liability Coverage

Marshal Seeman, President of Seeman Holtz Property & Casualty stated, "We are extremely happy to have the talents of the professionals at Meimand join our team." Eric Holtz, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, commented, "Behrooz has built a solid book with a heavy emphasis on relationships which fits perfectly with our business model." Brett Williams, Vice President added, "Not only is Meimand a high quality agency, they have been wonderful people to work with."

About Our Company: The Seeman Holtz family of companies provides comprehensive financial and insurance advice to clients across the country.

Contact: Eric Holtz

Seeman Holtz Property & Casualty

844.255.6639

[email protected]

SOURCE Seeman Holtz Property & Casualty, Inc.
NEW YORK, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors of Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. ("Chipotle" or the "Company") (NYSE: CMG). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at [email protected] or 888-476-6529, ext. 9980.

The investigation concerns whether Chipotle and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices.

[Click here to join a class action]

On July 18, 2017, media outlets reported that Chipotle had closed a restaurant in Sterling, Virginia due to a suspected norovirus outbreak. According to Business Insider, citing information from iwaspoisoned.com, a website on which consumers document suspected incidents of foodborne illness, at least 13 customers fell ill after eating at the Chipotle restaurant in question between July 14 and July 15.

On this news, Chipotle's share price fell $17.02, or 4.34%, to close at $374.98 on July 18, 2017.

The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Florida, and Los Angeles, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

[email protected]

SOURCE Pomerantz LLP

Related Links

http://www.pomerantzlaw.com


ROCKVILLE, Md., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Global motherboard shipment volume totaled 114.5 million units in 2016, representing a 12.2% decline year-on-year, as the majority of motherboard makers were struggling with their inventory levels during the year, according to Worldwide Motherboard Forecast, 2017 - 2021, a report recently released by Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute. Fueled by the new CPU rollouts, it is anticipated that the global motherboard shipment decline will slow down in 2017 and the industry will have a more sustained pickup in growth, starting from the second quarter of 2017.

These and other key insights are featured in Worldwide Motherboard Forecast, 2017-2021.

Total demand and shipments are segmented by regions in terms of:

Taiwan

China

Other Asian Countries

North America

Western Europe

More information about the report is available at

https://www.marketresearch.com/Market-Intelligence-Consulting-Institute-v3289/Worldwide-Motherboard-Forecast-10912664/

About Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute

Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute, headquartered in Taipei and with a research network spanning across Asia, is ideally positioned to provide the intelligence, insight, and unique perspective necessary for our clients to make winning decisions. In a dynamic ICT environment filled with global perspectives, MIC's insightful regional research uncovers nascent trends and untapped opportunities.

Recommended Research Reports:

Development of Micro-LED Technology

Challenges and Opportunities of the Electronics Manufacturing Industry in India

Smart Car: Patent Analysis and Vendors' Strategies

Development of the IC Industry for Wearable Devices in 2016

The Taiwanese WLAN Industry, 3Q 2016

About MarketResearch.com

MarketResearch.com is the leading provider of global market intelligence products and services. With research reports from more than 720 top consulting and advisory firms, MarketResearch.com offers instant online access to the world's most extensive database of expert insights on global industries, companies, products, and trends. Moreover, MarketResearch.com's Research Specialists have in-depth knowledge of the publishers and the various types of reports in their respective industries and are ready to provide research assistance.

Press Contact:

Corinne Gangloff

+1 440.684.9600

[email protected]

SOURCE MarketResearch.com

Related Links

http://www.marketresearch.com


NEW YORK, July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- SLS Management, LLC today sent a letter to the Board of Directors of Abercrombie & Fitch Co. In the letter, SLS outlines actionable steps for the Board of Directors to undertake to maximize value for the shareholders.

The full text of the letter from SLS Management, LLC follows:

July 18, 2017

Board of Directors

Abercrombie & Fitch Co.

6301 Fitch Path

New Albany, OH 43054

To the Board of Directors of Abercrombie & Fitch Co.:

As you are aware, we have been a long-term investor in Abercrombie & Fitch Co. ("Abercrombie" or the "Company"). Despite Mr. Martinez's assurance in the Company's press release on July 10, 2017 that the company is taking "aggressive action", we do not believe the Board has been or is currently being aggressive enough. With an expected average cash position of nearly $500M, other assets worth as much as $300M, and a market capitalization down to around $600M, we believe that there is substantial opportunity for the Board and management team to reverse years of underperformance and create significant shareholder value.

We sent a letter to the Board on April 12, 2017 suggesting an "aggressive" plan of action to enhance shareholder value. We did not hear back. We subsequently spoke to the CEO and COO on June 13, 2017 and recommended that the Company contemplate outlining a clear Plan B for value creation as a standalone company should merger discussions terminate. We were told that no such parallel effort was being sought. This was confirmed on July 10, 2017 with a failed sales process and no "aggressive" announcement regarding actionable plans to create shareholder value. This resulted in Abercrombie's stock being down 21% and trading over 40% of its float in a single day. The stock has continued to trade lower.

Management continues to promise a better second half and according to press reports the Board turned down offers which were around $13.50 per share, or around 45% higher than where the stock is today. To us, this suggests a deep internal confidence in Abercrombie. Given these factors, the ample cash cushion and substantial non-core assets, you should therefore be aggressively buying back stock and reducing the share count at these levels. Yet, there is no substantial, share-reducing buyback.

Capital allocation, whether it involves investing in existing operations, making acquisitions or returning cash to shareholders in the form of dividends or buybacks, is a paramount responsibility of every CEO and Board. William Thorndike in the acclaimed book The Outsiders describes the value creation decisions of Henry Singleton, the former CEO of Teledyne who pioneered alternating between dividends and large tenders depending on the lifecycle and valuation of the company. According to Thorndike, "Singleton believed buying stock at attractive prices was self-catalyzing, analogous to coiling a spring that at some future point would surge forward to realize full value, generating exceptional returns in the process."

We welcome Abercrombie's commitment to shareholder returns; however, there is a time in every company's life for buybacks and a time for dividends. With the stock trading at current valuations and a margin of safety from the value of non-core assets, this is the time for buybacks. We highly recommend a change to Abercrombie's capital allocation strategy that will drive a significant increase in shareholder value. We are outlining two options. Option A is a large one-time buyback in conjunction with a reduction in your dividend. Option B is a monetization of assets comprising a substantial portion of Abercrombie's current valuation that Wall Street analysts and investors are giving you no credit for.

Option A

Initiate a Dutch tender to buy back $200M of Abercrombie stock. At current prices this represents over 30% of shares outstanding

of Abercrombie stock. At current prices this represents over 30% of shares outstanding Reduce the dividend to $0.18 per year or around a 2% dividend yield

With the dividend yield approaching 9%, it is clear that investors do not own Abercrombie for its stable yield. Indeed, market participants are likely indicating that they expect the dividend to be cut. While we believe that Abercrombie's dividend is sustainable given management's capital expenditure budget, which is well below depreciation expense, and normalization of working-capital outflows in fiscal 2017, this is a unique time to switch strategies and be a material buyer of your stock. A repurchase of almost 30% of Abercrombie's shares would be an important illustration of management's confidence in the turnaround and the attractiveness of the stock at current prices. The cash used would be returned in just over 4 years through the reduction of your dividend, which saves $46M per year.

We fully recognize that retail is suffering, especially at malls due to a number of factors including an over-stored position that exceeds demand and the competitive threat of e-commerce. This dutch tender would leave the Company with a pro forma cash balance of $220M. Given seasonal working capital swings and the substantial reduction in your cash outlays for the dividend, we would expect Abercrombie to be at the Board's target cash balances within one year. Our confidence is augmented by the fact that even in poor operating years such as fiscal 2016 and 2017, free cash flow would easily cover the new $9M dividend and start growing your cash balance. Indeed, management has guided to improving trends as we move through 2017. Given this, and the margin of safety from your non-core assets, we believe that Abercrombie has a unique opportunity to acquire a substantial amount of its shares at discounted levels without adding meaningful pressure to operations, leverage, or cash flow.

Option B

As an alternative to the tender and dividend reduction detailed above, the Company could maintain the dividend and its cash buffer, and monetize Abercrombie's non-core assets and use the proceeds to repurchase shares. The Company has a substantial set of assets on its balance sheet that we believe are worth $205M to $310M or 43-66% of the Company's enterprise value at current prices. These non-core assets include: (i) Home Campus & Distribution Centers and (ii) the overfunded Rabbi Trust.

Abercrombie owns its 650K+ square foot home campus on 501 acres in New Albany, Ohio. Based on Colliers data on recent comparable office transactions in Columbus, we believe the headquarters and land are worth $100-150M if the company executed a sale-leaseback or mortgaged the property. A $100-150M valuation for the headquarters and land with a 60% LTV mortgage at 5.0% would only add $3-5M of interest expense, but would enable the company to buy back 10-14% of shares outstanding. Abercrombie could also enter into a sale-leaseback on its two one million square foot state-of-the-art distribution centers built for $176M. We estimate this would lead to $80-120M of proceeds, and enable the company to buy back an additional 13-19% of shares outstanding, with additional rent of only $6.5-8.0M per year. Put simply, these two actions would monetize $175M of non-core assets worth 37% of Abercrombie's current enterprise value and add $12M, or less than 1% to your operating expense base of $2BN.

We recognize that the Board may take comfort in its safety-net of non-core assets. However, with the stock trading at levels not seen in 17 years and at a valuation of 2.5x consensus EBITDA, the value of these non-core assets now comprise a significant portion of the company's enterprise value.

Regardless of which of the above options the Board decides to pursue, we believe the Company should work to unwind the overfunded Rabbi Trust, which sits in Other Assets on the balance sheet and is a legacy of the Jefferies era. Based on our conversations with management, the trust is $25-40M overfunded and could be unwound, providing an additional source of liquidity for the company.

Let's hypothetically illustrate how significant the opportunities on balance sheet are. If you were to execute Option A, Option B and liquidate the Rabbi Trust, the Company could buy back roughly 65% of its shares and save $37M per year ($12M cost of Option A and B and $49M savings from dividend reduction).

We have proposed two actionable plans. Either of these two options should be enacted immediately. If you are right and the back half of the year is a turning point, a significant value enhancing opportunity will disappear.

We look forward to discussing these important matters.

Very truly yours,

Scott Swid

SOURCE SLS Management, LLC
NEW YORK, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Smart Source LLC, owned and operated by print industry veteran and visionary, Tom D'Agostino Jr., is recognized by PSDA, a leading print industry organization, in a variety of categories most notably taking the #1 spot as top Commercial Print Distributor. The recognition features the top PSDA member distributors that reported the highest dollar volume in the commercial print category for 2016. PSDA classifies commercial print items as marketing pieces, catalogs, brochures, presentation folder, binders, letterhead, envelopes and business cards.

Smart Source LLC, independently owned and operated by Tom D'Agostino Jr., has a solid reputation of integrity and reliability by providing best in class services for clients across all vertical markets. This is accomplished by combining consulting services with industry leading sourcing technology accessing a network of vendors worldwide. The Smart Source method streamlines process, reduces obsolescence and increases productivity, allowing clients to document significant savings and ROI. Smart Source also takes its services beyond print management with leading divisions in healthcare and critical communications.

"We have quickly become one of the fastest growing print management, BPO and technology companies in the industry," explains Tom D'Agostino Jr., Founder and CEO of Smart Source LLC. "We are not just print industry experts, we are consultants, working as an extension of our clients to bring them to the next level of success."

PSDA also recognized Smart Source as the #3 distributor of Promotional Products for 2016, #2 seller of Direct Mail services, #1 seller to the hospitality market and the #2 seller to the healthcare market.

"Our success is rooted in our exceptional team, from company leaders to sales executives, client service representatives to operational managers and of course our ever growing network of suppliers," continues Tom D'Agostino Jr.

In the past two years, Smart Source LLC has more than doubled annual sales. Founded in 2003 by Tom D'Agostino Jr. whose background in print started with the family business, Smart Source LLC, has more than 27 locations across the country and 300 employees. The company has headquarters in New York City and Atlanta Georgia.

About Smart Source

Smart Source is a premier Brand Management BPO and Technology provider dedicated to delivering global communication and marketing solutions to a diverse network of clients ranging from healthcare to finance, retail to hospitality and manufacturing. Smart Source offers a full suite of solutions including creative services, media and internet marketing, e-technology software, print management, supply chain management, promotional products, fulfillment management, kitting and distribution. www.smartsourcellc.com

SOURCE Smart Source LLC

Related Links

http://www.smartsourcellc.com


Delivers Optimal Image Quality, Exceptional Performance at Low Power, for Both Prosumers and Consumers

SUNNYVALE, Calif., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Socionext Inc., a leading provider of SoC-based imaging solutions, today announced the availability of its 360-degree spherical camera design solutions powered by the Milbeaut series of image signal processors.

The Socionext lineup includes two types of cameras to meet the growing and expanding needs for 360-degree camera applications. The prosumer model is based on the company's SC2000 high-performance processor, which is capable of real-time image stitching of 4K images. The consumer model, a collaborative product with Cypress Semiconductor Corporation and ImmerVision, is designed to work with the MBG967 IoT series processor. Each of the solutions comes with reference board design information and a software development kit. Equipment manufacturers can easily develop high-performance spherical cameras tailored for each of their unique applications.

SC2000 for Prosumers

The SC2000 is designed for high performance cameras, which require high-speed processing of vast amount of image data. Incorporating Socionext's proprietary image processing algorithm, it consumes less than 2W of power in typical operating conditions. Users can connect up to four cameras to the SC2000 and the chip can perform real-time stitching of video images, for 4K/30fps output. A 360-degree spherical camera built with the SC2000 is an optimum solution for applications such as high-end action cameras and drones. It also delivers the perfect spherical images for video conference systems, as well as for theaters and sporting events.

View image of the configuration example of spherical camera with SC2000

View image of the generation of spherical image by stitching

MBG967 for Consumers

The need to shoot 360-degree images in real time is expected to grow rapidly, with applications such as live streaming of virtual reality video. To meet the requirements, Socionext has collaborated with Cypress Semiconductor Corporation and ImmerVision and developed an attachment camera that connects to smartphones and other mobile devices.

"EZ-USB CX3" bridge chip conforms to USB3.0 and USB 2.0 and supports USB video class (UVC), providing connection that enables the high-definition, high-speed image capturing. ImmerVision's patented panomorph optics technology and software realize the functionality that allows shooting of high quality 360-degree images even with compact cameras. With these advanced technologies from the partners, Socionext has started delivery of the 360-degree camera solution with the Milbeaut IoT series processor, the MBG967, which can handle inputs from two cameras simultaneously. The first offering of the solutions is a reference design with two 16M-pixel cameras mounted on 8cm x 8cm board. Socionext will expand the lineup to meet various resolution and frame rate requirements.

For more information about CX-3 bridge chip, visit: http://www.cypress.com/cx3

View image of the USB camera configuration with MBG967

View image of the reference design board

About Cypress

Cypress is a leader in advanced embedded system solutions for the world's most innovative automotive, industrial, home automation and appliances, consumer electronics and medical products. Cypress' programmable systems-on-chip, general-purpose microcontrollers, analog ICs, wireless and USB-based connectivity solutions and reliable, high-performance memories help engineers design differentiated products and get them to market first. Cypress is committed to providing customers with support and engineering resources that enable innovators and out-of-the-box thinkers to disrupt markets and create new product categories. To learn more, go to www.cypress.com.

About ImmerVision Inc.

Leading innovation in 360-degree panoramic imaging, ImmerVision licenses its patented panomorph optical and software technology to global lens producers, product manufacturers and software developers. Panomorph lenses are the only ones that can be adapted to any camera, any sensor, and any consumer, commercial and government market. ImmerVision Enables is the recognized standard for 360-degree solutions and applications. www.immervisionenables.com

About Socionext Inc.

Socionext is a new, innovative enterprise that designs, develops and delivers System-on-Chip products to customers worldwide. The company is focused on imaging, networking, computing and other dynamic technologies that drive today's leading-edge applications. Socionext combines world-class expertise, experience, and an extensive IP portfolio to provide exceptional solutions and ensure a better quality of experience for customers. Founded in 2015, Socionext Inc. is headquartered in Yokohama, and has offices in Japan, Asia, United States and Europe to lead its product development and sales activities.

For product information, visit the company's website at http:/socionextus.com, e-mail [email protected] or call 1-844-680-3453. For company news and updates, connect with us on Twitter (https://www.twitter.com/socionextus) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/socionextus)

Company and product names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Information provided in this press release is accurate at time of publication and subject to change without advance notice.

SOURCE Socionext Inc.

Related Links

http://www.socionextus.com


Phase one of the initiative, a $10-million-dollar effort to bring SNHU's online, competency-based bachelor's and associate degrees to refugees and others affected by displacement, was made possible by a group of anonymous donors.

"The refugee crisis will require concerted social, legal, and political action, but education holds the key to an alternative future of possibility," said Paul LeBlanc, president, SNHU. "At SNHU, we believe education is a fundamental human right, that's why we want to bring our degrees to some of the most underserved populations in the world."



SNHU has piloted its work with refugees in Rwanda, nearly 7,000 miles away from its Manchester, New Hampshire, campus. The program is offered at two sites in Rwanda, one in the Kiziba Refugee Camp where all students are refugee learners, and one in the capital city Kigali, where a substantial number of students are refugees. Collectively, the campuses enroll more than 500 students. This summer the first cohort of refugee students graduated with associate degrees from the Kiziba campus. All of the graduates are engaged in internships outside of the camp and are now working on their bachelor's degrees.



"We're giving refugees hope for the future, the tools to rebuild their lives, and a transformational opportunity," said Chrystina Russell, who leads the refugee learning initiative at SNHU. "Over the next five years, we will scale our work to many other locations, many of which are ready and eager to begin tomorrow."

In Rwanda, SNHU partners with Kepler, a nonprofit organization, to deliver competency-based degrees through a blended learning delivery model that offers in-person instruction and academic and employment support. The University will form similar partnerships with other organizations as it looks to expand into other countries. Phase one of the project will include sites in East Africa and the Middle East. SNHU will partner with the UN High Commission on Refugees, the Connected Learning in Crisis Consortium, SOLVE at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the American University of Beirut.

The initiative will also be guided by an advisory board with diverse backgrounds and experiences, including former U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan; Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Deborah Berke; and Director of Refugee Studies at the University of Oxford, Alexander Betts.

"Education remains the greatest source of hope and opportunity for people on the far margins of society," said Arne Duncan, advisory board member of the SNHU refugee initiative, and former U.S. Secretary of Education. "SNHU's work in the camps brings education to some of the most desperate and poorly served people in the world today."





Over the next two years, SNHU will begin programming at four new sites around the world. SNHU is also exploring ways to support the refugee population in Manchester, and is partnering with the YWCA NH to expand services locally.

SOURCE Southern New Hampshire University

Related Links

http://snhu.edu


WICHITA, Kan., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, Inc. [NYSE: SPR] will release its second quarter 2017 financial results at 6:30 a.m. Central Time Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2017.

Spirit AeroSystems President and Chief Executive Officer Tom Gentile will be joined by Spirit's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Sanjay Kapoor on a conference call presentation to securities analysts about second quarter 2017 results and company outlook at 10 a.m. Central Time.

That presentation will be broadcast online. It will include charts and a question-and-answer session. The company's news release detailing the results will also be available. The live audio stream and slide presentation can be accessed Aug. 2, 2017, at http://investor.spiritaero.com/.

Individuals are urged to check the website in advance to ensure their computers are configured for the audio stream and slide presentation.

About Spirit AeroSystems, Inc.

Spirit AeroSystems designs and builds aerostructures for both commercial and defense customers. With headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, Spirit operates sites in the U.S., U.K., France and Malaysia. The company's core products include fuselages, pylons, nacelles and wing components for the world's premier aircraft. Spirit AeroSystems focuses on affordable, innovative composite and aluminum manufacturing solutions to support customers around the globe. More information is available at www.SpiritAero.com.

SOURCE Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.spiritaero.com/


Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain broke diplomatic relations with Qatar in early June largely over their allegations that it supports terrorist and extremist groups a charge Qatar rejects. They initially made 13 demands, which Qatar also dismissed.

By AP: Four Arab nations that cut ties with Qatar have urged the tiny Gulf nation to commit to six principles on combating extremism and terrorism and negotiate a plan with specific measures to implement them a step that could pave the way for an early resolution of the crisis.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain broke diplomatic relations with Qatar in early June largely over their allegations that it supports terrorist and extremist groups a charge Qatar rejects. They initially made 13 demands, which Qatar also dismissed.

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Saudi Arabia's UN Ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi told a briefing for a group of UN correspondents that the four nations are now committed to the six principles agreed to by their foreign ministers at a meeting in Cairo on July 5, and hope Qatar will support them as well.

The principles include commitments to combat extremism and terrorism, prevent financing and safe havens for such groups, and suspend all acts of provocation and speeches inciting hatred or violence.

Al-Mouallimi said the four-nation quartet thinks it "should be easy for the Qataris to accept" the six principles.

He stressed that implementation and monitoring must be "essential components," and "there will be no compromise when it comes to principles."

But he said both sides can talk about details of "the tactics" and "the tools" to implement them "and that's where we can have discussion and compromise."

CURBING TIES WITH IRAN

The Saudi ambassador explained that the initial 13 points included some principles and some tools to achieve compliance.

Mixed in the 13 points were what Western nations might see as fair demands, such as cracking down on support for extremists and curbing ties with Iran, and tougher-to-swallow calls to shut down the Al-Jazeera television network one of Qatar's best-known brands and kick out troops from NATO member Turkey, which has a base in Qatar.

Al-Mouallimi stressed that stopping incitement to violence is essential, but he said closing Al-Jazeera might not be necessary.

"If the only way to achieve that is by closing down Al- Jazeera, fine," he said. "If we can achieve that without closing down Al-Jazeera, that's also fine. The important thing is the objective and the principle involved."

UAE Minister of State for International Cooperation Reem Al Hashimy said all the countries involved have strong relations with the United States "and we believe that the Americans have a very constructive and a very important role to play in hopefully creating a peaceful resolution to this current crisis."

MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING

President Donald Trump has sided strongly with Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the dispute, publicly backing their contention that Qatar is a supporter of Islamic militant groups and a destabilizing force in the Middle East.

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently concluded several days of shuttle diplomacy and sealed a deal to intensify Qatar's counter-terrorism efforts.

The memorandum of understanding signed by the US and Qatar lays out steps Qatar can take to bolster its fight against terrorism and address shortfalls in policing terrorism funding.

Al Hashimy called the MOU "an excellent step."

"We'd like to see more of that," she said. "We'd like to see stronger measures taken and stronger commitment made to address that." Al Hashimy said "at this stage the ball is in Qatar's court." "We're looking for a serious change in behavior, serious measures," she said. "No more talk."

Qatar has further escalated the situation by encouraging Turkey's military presence, Al Hashimy said.

"We do not want to see a military escalation of any kind," she said. "We hope to be able to resolve this internally and among ourselves with the assistance of strong mediation, whether it's from the US or the Kuwaitis."

QATAR'S FUTURE LIES WITH ITS NEIGHBOURS

Al-Mouallimi stressed that Qatar's future lies with its neighbours not with "faraway places," a clear reference to Turkey and Iran which are supporting Doha.

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"Our Turkish brothers need to recognize that the era of covert and to some extent unwanted intervention in the Arab world has long gone," he said. "If Turkey wants to play a constructive role they are welcome to do so, but trying to find the role through military bases or military intervention would not be productive, and would not fare well for Turkey's reputation in the Arab world."

Diplomats from the four countries who attended the briefing said there have been discussions about possible next steps.

UAE Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh said that "if Qatar is unwilling to accept core principles around what defines terrorism or extremism in our region, it will be very difficult" for it to remain in the Gulf Cooperation Council with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain.

"So it may be a parting of ways for a little while in order to work things out," she said.

Al-Mouallimi said the quartet briefed the 10 elected Security Council members yesterday and hopes to meet the permanent members as well.

There are no plans to take the dispute to the UN's most powerful body, he said, but "if we develop the conviction that that is a necessary move forward, then we will do so."

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Also Read:

US, Qatar sign agreement on combating terrorism financing

Arab states angry as Qatar rejects their demands for ending the crisis

--- ENDS ---
FREMONT, Calif., July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Tailored Brands, Inc. (NYSE: TLRD) announced that its board of directors recently became a Full Board Member of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD). Joining NACD underscores Tailored Brands' commitment to the highest standards of corporate governance and exemplary board leadership.

NACD Full Board Member companies range from Fortune 50 corporations to small- and mid-cap companies, as well as private entities and nonprofit organizations. Through their membership, these boards join a diverse director community and have the opportunity to gain proprietary insights about current and emerging governance issues and to participate in NACD's world-class director education programs.

"By joining NACD, Tailored Brands is poised to enhance the skills of its directors and to prepare the boardroom for future challenges," said Peter Gleason, president and CEO of NACD. "NACD is privileged to serve as Tailored Brands' source for leading governance practices."

"We are honored to join the distinguished and diverse group of directors who comprise NACD's membership," said Tailored Brands Chairman Dinesh Lathi. "The resources, insights, and connections NACD offers will be valuable assets for our company."

Acting as the "voice of the director," NACD speaks on behalf of its members with regulators, institutional investors, and influential stakeholders, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, among others, on matters of crucial importance to directors.

In joining this collective director voice, Tailored Brands' board of directors shows a commitment to the highest standards in boardroom leadership, as well as to increasing investor confidence in their professionalism. A listing of the Tailored Brands board members is available at http://ir.tailoredbrands.com/board-of-directors.

A sample of NACD's Full Board Member companies is available at www.nacdonline.org/Members.

About NACD

The National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) is the recognized authority focused on advancing exemplary board leadership and establishing leading boardroom practices. Informed by more than 35 years of experience, NACD delivers insights and resources that more than 17,000 corporate director members rely upon to make sound strategic decisions and confidently confront complex business challenges. NACD provides world-class director education programs, national peer exchange forums, and proprietary research to promote director professionalism, ultimately enhancing the economic sustainability of the enterprise and bolstering stakeholder confidence. Fostering collaboration among directors, investors, and governance stakeholders, NACD is shaping the future of board leadership. To learn more about NACD, visit www.NACDonline.org. To become an NACD member, contact [email protected], or call 202-775-0509.

About Tailored Brands, Inc.

Tailored Brands, Inc. is a leading authority on helping men dress for work, special occasions and everyday life. We serve our customers through an expansive omni-channel network that includes over 1,600 locations in the U.S. and Canada as well as our branded e-commerce websites. Our brands include Men's Wearhouse, Jos. A. Bank, Joseph Abboud, Moores Clothing for Men and K&G. We also operate an international corporate apparel and workwear group consisting of Dimensions, Alexandra and Yaffy in the United Kingdom and Twin Hill in the United States.

For additional information on Tailored Brands, please visit the Company's websites at www.tailoredbrands.com, www.menswearhouse.com, www.josbank.com, www.josephabboud.com, www.mooresclothing.com, www.kgstores.com, www.mwcleaners.com, www.dimensions.co.uk, www.alexandra.co.uk, and www.twinhill.com.

Contact:

Investor Relations

(281) 776-7575

[email protected]

Julie MacMedan, VP, Investor Relations

Tailored Brands, Inc.

SOURCE Tailored Brands, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.tailoredbrands.com


Highly regarded industry leader becomes Principal and Land Practice Leader

RALEIGH, NC, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ - John Linderman, Avison Young Principal and Managing Director of the company's North Carolina region, announced today that highly regarded commercial real estate industry leader Tara Kreider has joined the company in Raleigh.

Effective immediately, Kreider becomes a Principal of Avison Young and Land Practice Leader on Raleigh-Durham's capital markets team. She will focus on building a regional land sales team and practice, as well as mentoring up-and-coming land and investment sales specialists, and recruiting top talent. She will also continue to advise new and existing individual, corporate and institutional clients  including investors, developers and asset managers  on acquisitions, dispositions and other creative land and investment solutions.

Kreider brings to Avison Young 10 years of commercial real estate industry experience and more than 25 years of marketing and business development experience, most recently as a senior vice-president with TradeMark Properties in Raleigh where she specialized in land and investment sales. While with TradeMark Properties, she was a multiple winner of the firm's Advisor of the Year Award and a consistent top producer.

"We are pleased to welcome Tara to our Raleigh-Durham group as a Principal," comments Linderman. "Tara has enjoyed exceptional success in our market, helping clients buy and sell land and buildings throughout the Triangle area. She has earned tremendous respect and appreciation from clients and colleagues with her knowledge, work ethic and creative attitude."

Linderman continues: "Over the past decade, Tara has established herself as an industry leader in the Triangle commercial real estate market. She brings a high-energy, can-do attitude to every situation. She will be a tremendous asset for our clients and company as we grow our land sales practice and recruit the next generation of land and investment sales specialists in Raleigh-Durham."

Before joining TradeMark Properties, Kreider was a broker with Byrd Commercial in Raleigh, where she also specialized in land and investment sales. Before then, she operated her own consulting company for 11 years and held progressively senior marketing and development positions with marketing firms and non-profit organizations in Raleigh and Washington, DC.

"I'm thrilled to join Avison Young as a Principal and become part of the company's collaborative culture," says Kreider. "Avison Young's Principal-led business model and client-centric approach to every transaction attracted me to the company. The firm's dedication to sustainable development and community service were also especially appealing. I'm excited to help our firm continue to execute its ongoing aggressive global expansion strategy as we build a land sales team and practice in the Triangle area. Ultimately, these efforts will lead to more sustainable development and long-term business opportunities for our clients."

Kreider is active in the industry as a member of Triangle Commercial Real Estate Women (TCREW) and the Urban Land Institute (ULI). She is currently in her third term as an appointed member of the Wake County Planning Board and previously served on the Wake County Board of Adjustment. Kreider holds a Bachelor of Arts in political science and economics from the University of Pittsburgh and is a member of its alumni association.

Avison Young opened its first offices in North Carolina in October 2012 in Raleigh and Chapel Hill when the company acquired Raleigh-based Thomas Linderman Graham Inc. Avison Young opened its Charlotte office in May 2013.

Over the past nine years, Avison Young has grown from 11 to 80 offices and from 300 to more than 2,400 real estate professionals in Canada, the U.S., Mexico and Europe.

Avison Young is the world's fastest-growing commercial real estate services firm. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Avison Young is a collaborative, global firm owned and operated by its principals. Founded in 1978, the company comprises 2,400 real estate professionals in 80 offices, providing value-added, client-centric investment sales, leasing, advisory, management, financing and mortgage placement services to owners and occupiers of office, retail, industrial, multi-family and hospitality properties.

For further information/comment/photos:

Sherry Quan , Principal, Global Director of Communications & Media Relations, Avison Young: 604.647.5098 ; cell: 604.726.0959

, Principal, Global Director of Communications & Media Relations, Avison Young: ; cell: John Linderman , Principal and Managing Director, North Carolina , Avison Young: 919.420.1559

, Principal and Managing Director, , Avison Young: Tara Kreider , Principal and Land Practice Leader, Raleigh , Avison Young : 919.719.8189

, Principal and Land Practice Leader, , : Stacy Farmer , Vice-President, Marketing, Raleigh , Avison Young : 919.420.1588

, Vice-President, Marketing, , : Mark Rose , Chair and CEO, Avison Young : 416.673.4028

, Chair and CEO, : Earl Webb , President, U.S. Operations, Avison Young: 312.957.7610

www.avisonyoung.com

Avison Young was a winner of Canada's Best Managed Companies program in 2011 and requalified in 2017 to maintain its status as a Best Managed Gold Standard company.

Follow Avison Young on Twitter:

For industry news, press releases and market reports: www.twitter.com/avisonyoung

For Avison Young listings and deals: www.twitter.com/AYListingsDeals

Follow Avison Young Bloggers: http://blog.avisonyoung.com

Follow Avison Young on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/avison-young-commercial-real-estate

Follow Avison Young on YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/AvisonYoungRE

Follow Avison Young on Instagram: www.instagram.com/avison_young_global

Editors/Reporters:

Please click on link to view and download photo of Tara Kreider:

http://www.avisonyoung.com/sites/default/files/content-files/Media_Room/Temp/Tara_Kreider.jpg

SOURCE Avison Young Commercial Real Estate (BC)

Related Links

www.avisonyoung.com


LINCOLN, R.I., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Teamster Local 251 members have won an agreement for a new contract at Twin River Casino after a 41.5 hour strike from Friday afternoon through Sunday morning.

Teamster members unanimously authorized a strike when Twin River demanded a contract that imposed health care cuts and eliminated workers' job security.

On Tuesday evening, Local 251 and Twin River negotiators reached a tentative agreement on a new three-year contract that secures and improves workers' health benefits. The agreement needs member ratification.

The agreement delivered three percent annual wage increases for non-tipped employees and improvements on the benefits previously imposed by Twin River. Twin River also dropped its demands for contract changes that would give management the right to lay off all parking valets and subcontract their jobs to a non-union operator.

"My job security is everything to me," said Cory Almeida. "It took a strike to protect our jobs, and we were ready to do it." Other union workers honored Teamster picket lines.

Local 251 members credited public support and solidarity between unions for delivering the breakthrough in Tuesday's negotiations that led to a tentative agreement.

"We're hitting a tipping point," said Local 251 Principal Officer Matt Taibi. "Rhode Islanders see growing inequality, healthcare cuts, and the loss of good jobs. They see that corporate greed and corporate politicians are hurting working families.

"People are not buying the tired, old arguments about unions. Unions aren't the problem. We're the solution," Taibi said. "The showdown at Twin River shows that corporate greed is a losing bet."



Contact:

Matthew Maini, (401) 434-0454

SOURCE Teamsters Local 251
LONDON, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, TGI Fridays, Oracle and Mastercard announced the launch of Bar Tab at their Leicester Square location. Bar Tab is a new function within Mastercard's Qkr! payment app that allows consumers to set up, manage and pay bar tabs using their smartphones. The application will be integrated into Oracle Hospitality's restaurant management platform and Masterpass, the digital payment service. After today's initial debut, TGI Fridays plans to deploy the app to 80 additional locations in the UK by the end of 2017.

Customers can easily manage their tab through a designated four-digit PIN that connects orders in the restaurant management software to the Qkr! payment account. This means customers can easily manage the rounds that they are in with friends and split the bill. There is no need to hand over a payment card to bar staff, and no need to use a card machine.

"We're always looking for ways to improve the unique Fridays experience for our guests," said Jeremy Dunderdale, Head of Business Solutions, TGI Fridays UK. "With Bar Tab, we're able to offer our diners the freedom to settle their bills on-demand, with this quicker and more convenient payment platform. Enabling self-service payments also allows our team members to focus on engaging guests in more meaningful ways  which is what we're all about at Fridays."

Betty DeVita, Chief Commercial Officer for Mastercard Labs, said: "Nobody wants to hand over their card to a bartender. Your card should be with you at all times, so it's natural for people to leave a pub without having closed their tab. This is a common problem we wanted to solve through Qkr! For bar staff themselves, we have removed the headache of card storage and admin."

"Oracle Hospitality's restaurant management platform allows the food and beverage industry to innovate by creating a single view of operations," said Dale Grant, Senior Vice President Food and Beverage Oracle Hospitality. "With Oracle Hospitality solutions at the core, restaurants and bars can easily integrate additional solutions like Mastercard's Qkr payments platform to reinvent their customer experience. By implementing Bar Tab, TGI Fridays can now offer its customers a quicker, more convenient experience that empowers staff to provide more welcoming bar experiences while reducing the number of unpaid tabs at the end of the night."

About Oracle Hospitality

Oracle Hospitality develops hardware and software solutions that work together to help produce tailored guest service for hotels and F&B establishments. By addressing every facet of the business, Oracle Hospitality solutions help optimize operations across the board to deliver the speed, agility and efficiency required to meet customers' unique needs.

About Oracle

The Oracle Cloud offers complete SaaS application suites for ERP, HCM and CX, plus best-in-class database Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from data centers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), please visit us at oracle.com.

About Mastercard

Mastercard (NYSE: MA), www.mastercard.com, is a technology company in the global payments industry. We operate the world's fastest payments processing network, connecting consumers, financial institutions, merchants, governments and businesses in more than 210 countries and territories. Mastercard products and solutions make everyday commerce activities  such as shopping, travelling, running a business and managing finances  easier, more secure and more efficient for everyone. Follow us on Twitter @MastercardUKBiz, join the discussion on the Beyond the Transaction Blog and subscribe for the latest news on the Engagement Bureau.

About TGI Fridays

TGI Fridays offers authentic, contemporary, and full-flavoured American food, signature cocktails, and a lively, personalised experience. With a continually evolving menu overseen by award-winning executive chef Terry McDowell, it's the perfect stop for free-poured, personalised cocktails served by Fridays Master Bartenders, a quick tasty bite, or a longer dinner with friends. Fridays opened its first UK restaurant in Birmingham in March 1986. There are now 80 Fridays open in the UK.

For more information visit www.tgifridays.co.uk or www.fridays.com. Like us on Facebook , follow us on Twitter, or visit our YouTube channel.

Trademarks

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

SOURCE Oracle

Related Links

http://www.oracle.com


LONDON, July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The Cards and Payments Industry in the UAE: Emerging trends and opportunities to 2020



Summary

Cash remained the predominant payment instrument during the review-period (2012-16e), accounting for 87.3% of the country's payment transaction volume in 2016. This was primarily because consumers in the UAE see cash as a quicker and safer payment option, over which they have more control. However, card payments are gradually increasing, supported by government financial inclusion programs, promotional campaigns by financial institutions, and the adoption of EMV and contactless technology.



Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4198115/



Improving financial inclusion has driven the adoption of debit cards in the UAE. The government introduced the Wage Protection System (WPS) in January 2009, requiring all wage payments to be made through a bank, bureau de change, or other authorized financial institution. All institutions registered with the Ministry of Labor come under the purview of the WPS. As of October 2015 there were 4.6 million foreign workers registered with the Ministry of Labor, of which 3.5 million were enrolled in the WPS. In a similar initiative, the Emirates Identity Authority collaborated with Al Hilal Bank in September 2014 to allow Emirati residents to use national ID cards to withdraw cash from ATMs.



UAE's immigrant population accounted for 88.4% of the resident population in 2015 according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Many expatriate workers use prepaid cards to remit funds to their home countries. The government's WPS has resulted in a number of companies in the UAE using prepaid cards for payroll purposes. In May 2013, Emirates NBD subsidiary Network International launched prepaid cards to enable companies to pay wages to blue-collar workers. Similarly, in February 2016 UnionPay International collaborated with banks in the UAE to issue a prepaid salary card. These cards are compliant with the WPS, and enable banks in the UAE to offer wage payments to workers.



E-commerce registered significant growth, rising from US$2.6bn (AED9.7bn) in 2012 to US$6.3bn (AED23.1bn) in 2016, at a review-period compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.2%. This growth was mainly supported by the use of smartphones and tablets, improving internet connectivity, and government initiatives aimed at encouraging a digital lifestyle in the UAE. The variety of products and services and the convenience of online shopping have driven Emirati consumers to adopt e-commerce, while the development of technology has enabled merchants to sell products online.



The report "The Cards and Payments Industry in the UAE: Emerging trends and opportunities to 2020" provides top-level market analysis, information and insights into the UAE cards and payments industry, including -

- Current and forecast values for each market in the UAE cards and payments industry, including debit, credit, and charge cards.

- Detailed insights into payment instruments including cheques, cash, and payment cards. It also, includes an overview of the country's key alternative payment instruments.

- E-commerce market analysis and payment methods.

- Analysis of various market drivers and regulations governing the UAE cards and payments industry.

- Detailed analysis of strategies adopted by banks and other institutions to market debit, credit, and charge cards.



Companies mentioned in this report: Emirates NBD, Dubai Islamic Bank, Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank, Emirates Islamic Bank, National Bank of Abu Dhabi, Commercial Bank of Dubai, National Bank of Fujairah, National Bank of Umm Al Quwain, Sharjah Islamic Bank, United Arab Bank, United National Bank, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, Mashreq Bank, RAKBANK, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Diners Club.



Scope

- To capitalize on the rising adoption of alternative payment solutions among UAE residents, Samsung collaborated with a number of banks and payment networks to launch its Samsung Pay m-payment service in April 2017. It allows users to conduct payments across all form of terminals, including magnetic stripe, EMV, and NFC. In January 2017, UnionPay collaborated with Mashreq Bank to introduce its host card emulation- and tokenization-based m-payment service QuickPass. Users can pay using their UnionPay QuickPass chip card or mobile QuickPass-enabled smartphones and wearable devices at contactless POS terminals. In August 2016, telecommunications company Etisalat launched Etisalat Wallet, a mobile wallet that allows consumers to pay for utility bills, parking tickets, and the purchase of goods and services from participating domestic and international retailers, as well as topping up Etisalat mobile phone credit.

- To promote card-based payments in the UAE, Mashreq Bank and security solutions provider Oberthur Technologies (OT) introduced an instant card issuance service in April 2017. Using OT's solution, Mashreq Bank can promptly issue personalized payment cards to its consumers at the time of opening an account. The service is currently installed at 35 Mashreq Bank branches in both the UAE and Qatar, helping drive the issuance of more than 40 debit and credit card products. Reducing the amount of time it takes to issue payment cards has resulted in increased cards in circulation in the country.

- To transform the UAE into a digitized society, 16 equity partner banks - National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB), Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank (ADIB), Mashreq Bank, Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB), Commercial Bank of Dubai (CBD), RAKBANK, United National Bank (UNB), Al Hilal Bank, Sharjah Islamic Bank (SIB), Al Masraf, Bank of Sharjah, Invest Bank, United Arab Bank (UAB), National Bank of Fujairah (NBF), and National Bank of Umm Al Quwain (NBQ) - officially launched the Emirates Digital Wallet platform in May 2017. The app is designed to provide a convenient and efficient payment system to UAE residents. It is regulated by the central bank and developed under the supervision of the UAE Banks Federation - a body that aims to promote and improve the UAE's banking sector. The move is anticipated to reduce dependency on cash and provide the population with access to financial services including payments and fund transfers using mobile phones.



Reasons to buy

- Make strategic business decisions, using top-level historic and forecast market data, related to the UAE cards and payments industry and each market within it.

- Understand the key market trends and growth opportunities in the UAE cards and payments industry.

- Assess the competitive dynamics in the UAE cards and payments industry.

- Gain insights into marketing strategies used for various card types in the UAE.

Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4198115/



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

http://www.reportbuyer.com



For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +44 208 816 85 48

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

Related Links

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AURORA, Ill., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Heartland Blood Centers  Versiti, is very excited to have 14 student workers participating in Heartland's life-saving mission who are learning all facets of the blood industry. End game, a student run blood drive to save lives in their community. Drive planning includes project management, budgeting, marketing, communications, recruitment and drawing of blood.

As a blood recipient, Justin Poythress, a Heartland student worker, knows firsthand the importance of blood donation. During his senior year of high school, he contracted E-coli, which developed into Hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS). This condition caused his body to abnormally destroy his red blood cells as he went from being a normal, healthy 18 year-old to being bedridden in the ICU. Thankfully, Justin has recovered fully and says, "I thank God for my friends, family, my doctors, and especially the anonymous blood donors who I will never be able to thank in person. Helping with the student blood drive is a way to give back to the community for the volunteers who gave blood so I could live."

The drive theme is The Carnival That Saves Lives and will take place on Wednesday, July 26th at Heartland's Aurora donor center at 1200 N. Highland Avenue. This drive could not come at a better time, as last week Heartland Blood Centers issued a critical appeal for blood donors when inventory levels reached a dangerously low point.

Amy Smith, Director of Donor Recruitment for Heartland Blood Centers says, " We are inspired by the young people in this year's student worker program and their commitment to saving lives and we invite the community to support them with a life-saving blood donation."

Student blood donors, 17-21 years old, also have an opportunity to win one of (5) $1,000 scholarships through August 31th, 2017 when they enter Heartland's Students Saving Lives Summer Scholarship program. Each student who enters must make a successful blood donation however, they can have unlimited entries from anyone that donates on their behalf.

Heartland Blood Centers will extend hours on July 26th at the Aurora location from 7:00 am  7:00 pm. All donors will receive a special edition carnival themed t-shirt, a Target gift card along with food, games and raffles. For full scholarship program details, or to schedule an appointment, call 1.800.786.4483; go online at www.heartlandbc.org or text APPT to 444-999.

SOURCE Heartland Blood Centers
During its cross-country journey, hundreds of people will be able to witness this unique project and actively participate, capturing their feelings through drawings. Adults will be able to express how they feel through messages, which will also become part of the wall. Additionally, Curacao will offer free painting workshops for local families and children in six different cities. These will be led by renowned Latino artists, including Roberto Rico in Las Vegas and Luis Del Valle in Washington, D.C. Wall viewing and workshops will take place at the following locations and times:

July 18 th , from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. , at the Curacao store in Las Vegas, Nevada (Meadows Mall, 4300 Meadows Ln Suite, Las Vegas, NV 89107).

, from , at the store in (Meadows Mall, 4300 Meadows Ln Suite, 89107). July 19 th , from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. , at the Curacao store in Phoenix, Arizona (Desert Sky Mall, 7815 W Thomas Rd., Phoenix, AZ 85033).

, from , at the store in (Desert Sky Mall, 7815 W Thomas Rd., 85033). July 22 nd , from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. , in Dallas, Texas , at the Garibaldi Bazaar (9334 E R L Thornton Fwy., Dallas, TX 75228).

, from , in , at the Garibaldi Bazaar (9334 E R L Thornton Fwy., 75228). July 26 th , from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. , in Chicago, Illinois , at the Discount Mega Mall in Little Village (3051 W 26 th St., Chicago, IL 60623).

, from , in , at the Discount Mega Mall in Little Village (3051 W 26 St., 60623). July 29 th , from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. , in Elizabeth, New Jersey (456 North Broad St, Elizabeth, NJ 07208).

, from , in (456 North Broad St, 07208). August 4 th, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. , in Washington D.C. by the White House.

"The goal of this wall is to make it clear that despite the current anti-immigrant environment, the Latino community is stronger than ever, and that it's only through love, respect, and tolerance that we can keep moving towards a society of greater justice and solidarity," stated Teylez Perez, Curacao's vice president of marketing and advertising. "This wall is a testimony to the daily experiences and concerns of our community, and that's how we want to show it to the politicians in Washington."

After its tour of the country, the "Mi Voz Cuenta" ("My Voice Matters") wall is expected to have around 5,000 drawings. It will reach Washington, D.C. on August 2nd, where it will visit different landmarks in the city, including the National Mall and Memorial Parks, the headquarters of UnidosUS (formerly National Council of La Raza), and the Latin American Youth Center. At these stops, the entire community will have the opportunity to take part in the wall via their drawings, in an environment of creativity.

Lastly, on August 4th, the unity of the Latino community will be celebrated at an event held in the areas around the White House. This will include a painting workshop led by Luis Del Valle and the presentation of a book to the city's elected officials. The book will feature the drawings of "Mi Voz Cuenta" ("My Voice Matters"), and will be presented as a symbol of the hope and optimism of the immigrant community.

Follow all the stops that Curacao's "Mi Voz Cuenta" ("My Voice Matters") truck makes throughout the country at www.facebook.com/CuracaoUSA.

About the "Mi Voz Cuenta" ("My Voice Matters") Wall: United, we are stronger

In these times of uncertainty for so many immigrants, the Curacao Company, with its community platform Curacao Contigo (#CuracaoContigo), aims to send a message of support to the community with a wall that showcases drawings done by children from all over the country. With these drawings, children can express their feelings about their roots, their culture, and current immigration policies, bearing witness to the strength of the Hispanic community and reminding politicians of the need for responsible governing. The first phase of the "Mi Voz Cuenta" ("My Voice Matters") initiative took place in Los Angeles and will continue in other cities that have a significant Hispanic community, including Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C. #MiVozCuenta.

SOURCE Curacao
Mr. Chiruit Isarangkun Na Ayuthaya , President of TCEB said that "TCEB is a governmental organisation that was established with the mission to promote and develop the capabilities of the Thai MICE industry that government gives great importance as a key service industry for businesses that helps to drive Thai economy. TCEB therefore has the direct duty of developing every aspect of the MICE industry, from considering the needs of the market, the strengths and weaknesses of the country, the problems within the country, and to find ways to overcome those issues, as well as developing every area related to MICE, which is the appropriate role of the public sector."

The economic problems of ASEAN countries have many facets, including high household debts, a shortage of working-age population, and the movement towards an aging society. As a result, the way to overcome these obstacles is to adjust both the people and the policies of the country, including Thailand 4.0, or setting the target industries of the country to create growth. Therefore, the MICE industry role should take more parts in developing the country.

From statistics over the last 10 years, Thailand has received approximately 150 billion baht of revenue from the MICE industry, both domestic and international, created approximately 164,000 jobs, and gained around 10.5 billion baht of revenue from taxation. Furthermore, in 2016, the International Congress and Convention Association, or ICCA, placed Thailand as having hosted 174 meetings, ranking Thailand 24th, an improvement from 27th in 2015, with Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Pattaya ranking higher than the previous year as well. In terms of exhibitions, the Global Association of the Exhibition Industry, or UFI, ranked Thailand the number 1 among ASEAN nations in terms of exhibition space sold over the past 5 years (2011-2015). In terms of general exhibition space, Thailand ranked in the top 5 ASEAN countries. Additionally, Thailand has a total of 256,984 metres squared of exhibition space across 9 exhibition centres in Bangkok and other important MICE cities.

"To build MICE into a key sector in developing the country, therefore, requires the use of 4 directions for enhancing the MICE industry to create more stability. These include: 1. Growing in parallel with the development of the country, which focuses on keeping the current market and finding new markets by placing MICE in parallel with the development of the country's economy, pulling the MICE industry into other target industries, such as those covered by Thailand 4.0, as well as into special economic areas. 2. Growing in a high potential market, focusing on the regions that have high growth and strong connection with the development of Thailand's economy, such as ASEAN, Greater Mekong Subregion, East Asia/South Asia and Australia/New Zealand. 3. Growing with equality, by increasing the opportunities for the MICE industry growth in provinces that have potential, such as Chiang Mai, Khon Kaen, Pattaya/Chonburi and Songkhla. 4. Growing strongly, which involves the development of the internal system to meet the needs of the market, developing the organisation and regulations to better support the industry in the future."

From these directions, 5 QUICK WIN strategies were stated to drive the MICE industry. These include: 1. Promote, support, push and enhance the country to become a Global Leader by proceeding with important projects, such as the development and enhancement of the MICE industry through project "Thailand MICE Venue Standard" / to promote and support Thai MICE operators to gain certification of standards from international organisations such as "Certified Exhibition Management" programme and "Certified Meetings Professional" programme / to attend at least 8-10 international trade shows and road shows in target regions, such as ASEAN, Europe, America and Middle East a year.

2. Be the leader in developing the MICE industry for both the public and private sectors, which focuses on integrating the public and private sectors, including important projects such as cooperating with MICE operators in the private sector to bring in more world-class events into Thailand such as SITE Global Conference 2019 / Thailand MICE United campaign to facilitate cooperation between partnered agencies to offer goods and services for MICE travelers / setting up sub-committee to coordinate with government agencies to facilitate convenience for goods and services trade for the MICE industry, whose main mission is to study and set a direction to solve the current problems and obstacles faced by operators so they will be able to do business in the MICE industry more conveniently in Thailand.

3. Distributing economic development to other regions through the MICE industry, which focuses on raising MICE as a platform for income creation in the area, such as Empowering Thailand Exhibition (EMTEX), promoting the Thai exhibition industry in the regions to develop the economy and enhancing MICE cities through the creation of new exhibitions, distributing business and improving events by expanding from Bangkok to other regions. These events will focus on creating events for target industries in accordance with Thailand 4.0, including the agriculture, biology, and energy, and in the main MICE cities and special economic areas / MICE City project to study and build strategic information on MICE cities and other high potential areas to ensure high quality development for the areas / MICE City Summit project to create a platform for sharing for TCEB and MICE cities to gather opinions and exchange knowledge and experiences for all those in the MICE industry.

4. Drive for the use of innovations and building MICE Intelligence to support and enhance the competitive capabilities, focusing on creating SMART MICE business, increasing modernity, sustainability and creativity to help to create better experiences and more interest in MICE events / MICE Intelligence & MICE Innovation programme that will gather information, analyse market directions and help develop business plans for operators in the private sector to improve competitive capabilities.

5. Improving TCEB as an organisation with Good Governance, such as setting up TCEB information centre to share information and improve public perception towards the organization's role as a government agency that demonstrates good governance in action.

"It is expected that in the 2017 budget year, there will be a total of 27.1 million MICE travellers in Thailand, generating revenue of 155 billion baht, separated into 1,109,000 international MICE visitors, generating revenue of 101 billion baht, and 26 million domestic MICE travellers, generating 54 billion baht in revenue. Additionally, we will be able to meet the target of driving the MICE industry to be a key player in creating prosperity, distributing income to the regions through the MICE industry, and creating strength and sustainability for the economy of the country," Mr. Chiruit said in conclusion.

In 2017, Thailand is preparing to host of several important international conferences, such as 2017 PCMA Global Professional Conference -- Asia Pacific, between 28th-31st August in Bangkok, UIA's Associations Roundtable Asia-Pacific 2017, between 21st-22nd September in Chiang Mai, IT&CM Asia & CTW Asia Pacific 2017, 26th - 28th September in Bangkok, which is an important trade show for Asia that Thailand will be hosting for the 16th time, SIGGRAPH Asia 2017, between 27th - 30th November in Bangkok, which is a world-class seminar and exhibition on computer graphics and animation. Additionally, in 2019, Thailand has won the rights to host other global events such as SITE Global Conference 2019, which is the international conference of organisations in incentive business.

For further information, please contact: Corporate Communications Division, Thailand Convention and Exhibition Bureau (Public Organization)

Ms Arisara Thanuplang Tel: +66 2 694 6095 Email: [email protected]

Mr. Karun Wararatchai Tel: +66 2 694 6179 Email: [email protected]

Ms. Paniyada Mulalin Tel: +66 2 694 6091 Email: [email protected]

a publicist Tel: 0 2101 6860

Ms. Arpaporn (A) 089 788 4868, Ms. Thittaya (Jang) 094 323 5641, Mr. Sorasak (Earth) 089 406 5544

SOURCE Thailand Convention and Exhibition Bureau (TCEB)

Related Links

http://www.tceb.or.th


LEBANON, N.J., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The Rotolo Law Firm announces attorneys Steven J. Karch and E. Carr Cornog, III ("Woody") as partners and the Firm name change to Rotolo Karch Law.

Victor A. Rotolo, founder of The Rotolo Law Firm, announces that Steven J. Karch and E. Carr Cornog, III ("Woody") have become partners to the Lebanon, New Jersey-based Firm coincident with the Firm's name change to Rotolo Karch Law.

"Both Steve and Woody have been effective and instrumental members of our team since they joined the Firm," said Mr. Rotolo, adding, "I admire Steve's skills as both a litigator and a mediator and Woody's abilities in handling cases on behalf of both defendants and plaintiffs; both attorneys are dedicated to pursuing just and fair outcomes for our clients." The partnership reaffirms the Firm's commitment to proactively protect the rights and best interests of its clients.

Mr. Karch joined the Firm in April 2013, focusing his practice primarily in the areas of Family Law and Civil Litigation. In addition to his trial experience, Mr. Karch is certified in Family Law mediation.

"It is an honor to be named partner," said Mr. Karch. "I am excited about working with Victor and Woody not only to maintain but to build upon the Firm's reputation that was achieved as a result of years of proactively representing its clients' needs."

Mr. Karch is a 2002 graduate of Rutgers University School of Law-Newark. Before law school, he attended Wilkes University where he received Bachelor of Arts degrees in both History and Political Science in 1992. Between his undergraduate work and law school, Mr. Karch was employed in the financial services field.

As a law school student, Mr. Karch volunteered with Warren County (New Jersey) Legal Services in Belvidere, New Jersey. Upon receiving his J.D., he held a clerkship with the Hon. Amy O'Connor, J.S.C., Superior Court, Chancery Division  Family Part in Warren County, and thereafter worked with a Phillipsburg, New Jersey law firm before joining the Rotolo team.

Mr. Cornog joined the Firm in 1999 and focuses primarily on cases involving product liability, general liability, auto negligence, claims against public entities, commercial fraud and inter-business disputes.

Mr. Cornog received his J.D. from Rutgers University School of Law-Newark in 1998. Before that, he attended Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where he earned a B.A. in English in 1993.

"I am honored to be a part of this partnership and eager to carry on the traditions of this Firm in serving our clients," Mr. Cornog stated.

Both partners are admitted to practice in New Jersey courts and the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.

"This reorganization and renaming of our Firm strengthens our commitment to the philosophy upon which the Firm was built," noted Mr. Rotolo. "Steve and Woody share a strong allegiance to upholding our standards of quality. Together with our dedicated and knowledgeable legal team and support staff, we will continue to make our clients our top priority and employ tactics and cost-effective strategies in our pursuit of just verdicts on their behalf."

Rotolo Karch Law will continue to provide legal services to clients in the areas of Divorce and Family Law, Personal Injury, Criminal Defense, Civil Litigation, Motor Vehicle Violations, and Alternative Dispute Resolution. The Firm is located at 502 U.S. 22, Lebanon, NJ, conveniently accessible by clients from the surrounding communities within Hunterdon, Warren and Somerset counties. To learn more about the Firm or to contact one of the attorneys, visit the Firm's website at www.rotolokarchlaw.com.

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SOURCE The Rotolo Law Firm

Related Links

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BEIJING, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- EasyStack, the leading Open Source cloud computing solutions provider in China, announced a series of product innovations to drive Open Source cloud adoption and to support enterprise digital transformation at the 2017 China Open Source Industry Summit in Beijing.

The new products include: ESCould AI, the world's first Open Source AI cloud platform that supports GPU/FPGA; China's first enterprise-class container Linux; ESCloud+, an open source PaaS Platform; ESCaaS, a cloud as a service platform; and ESCloud Express for data centers in small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

This announcement is a major testament to EasyStack's investment in technology since it raised the largest single round of funding in Open Source sector in China January 2017. "Having gone through two technology cycles centered around the hardware and software business, we are transitioning to a period where the new generation of enterprise-class software is now centered on Open Source technologies. This is the Golden Age for the global Open Source industry," says Chen Xilun, Founder and CEO of EasyStack. "Since its establishment in 2014, EasyStack has acquired over 200 enterprise customer users in a short period of three years, while successfully raising Series C in January this year. Today's announcement continues to push the boundary on Open Source cloud computing when applied to industry specific scenarios in AI, with a view to further support Chinese enterprises in their digital transformation journey."

1. EasyStack unveiled the world's first OpenStack AI cloud platform that supports GPU/FPGA

To meet the fast growing demand for big data and AI from industry users, EasyStack launched the world's first OpenStack AI cloud platform that supports both GPU and FPGA heterogeneous computing, making EasyStack the first company of the world to have a real open source AI cloud platform.

At the Summit, EasyStack also announced that its OpenStack AI cloud platform ESCould AI had received R&D funding support from the Leading Edge Reserve Program administered by the Administrative Committee of Zhongguancun Science Park.

2. Easystack announced China's first enterprise-class container Linux

EasyStack also officially announced the EasyStack Container Linux, making it the first company in China to offer Container Linux -based products, indicating that EasyStack has entered the Linux field for the first time after the OpenStack and kubernetes open source technologies.

According to sources, EasyStack is also the first professional open source company in China to feature an OpenStack + Kubernetes product line. A gold member of OpenStack Foundation, and the first Chinese open source cloud corporate member of Linux Foundation, EasyStack also joined Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Open Container Initiative, two major open standards organizations for containers, to actively help corporate users adopt open source cloud platforms.

The first container for cloud native applications in China, the EasyStack Container Linux, tailor-made for enterprise-class containers, is modular, lighter and more stable, reliable, secure and flexible than traditional Linux products. And EasyStack's system engineering team has made full use of the efficiency advantage of the underlying hardware by reducing the operating system's consumption of the host layer's resources through kernel level system optimization and light weighting.

3. EasyStack launched the open source PaaS platform ESCloud+ to reshape the software infrastructure

Based on the open source IaaS platform ESCloud, EasyStack also announced the open source PaaS platform ESCloud+ at the Summit to reshape the software infrastructure.

It was disclosed that the ESCloud+ is designed for application development and deployment to help corporate users who have already deployed a ESCloud platform to quickly expand their PaaS layer capabilities. By merging the infrastructure layer with the platform service layer to break the traditional management boundaries to achieve centralized orchestration, authorization and management of resources and services, the ESCloud+, which mainly offers big data service, database service and container orchestration service, among others, can support traditional application architecture or new generation micro service application architecture to accelerate the enterprises' innovation and growth.

4. EasyStack launched open source industry cloud platform ESCaaS to push application boundaries

To further push the open source cloud application boundary, EasyStack also announced the open source industry cloud platform ESCaaS. Based on OpenStack architecture, the EasyStack open source industry cloud platform ESCaaS has added a range of industry cloud functionalities based on private clouds: for example flexible billing policies to support industry clouds' complex billing scenarios, sophisticated organizational structure to match industry clouds' application scenarios, bare metal resource management achieving combined usage of virtual and real resources and a central monitoring platform.

The industry clouds support the IT systems of brick-and-mortar enterprises based on private clouds and transition from the original Client/Server architecture to Cloud/Mobile internet architecture, in a process from closed loop, closed source and closed technology systems to ecological, open source and open technology systems.

5. Reflective of cloud computing minimalism, EasyStack announced

In an effort to help SMBs build cloud platforms more easily and efficiently to acquire cloud applications to achieve successful digital transformation, EasyStack launched the express edition open source cloud platform ESCloud Express (EasyStack Cloud) which has been validated by Global 500 companies.

With maximized functionality and minimized design, ESCloud Express embodies cloud platform minimalism. Originated from core ESCloud components validated by Global 500 companies, ESCloud Express has a reliable architecture, simultaneously delivers software and hardware, automates operation and maintenance graphics and enables small and medium scale enterprise-class private clouds to be ready at the quickest time possible. And applications are easily acquired with a click on the ESCloud Express whose software is designed native to the cloud and which supports all types of hardware architecture.

In addition, EasyStack also announced the cloud application operation platform EasyStack AppCenter to provide all enterprise users with critical application options from PaaS to SaaS.

For more information about EasyStack, visit: http://www.easystack.io

SOURCE EasyStack

Related Links

http://www.easystack.io/


Atif's father Abdul Khalek had filed the case with Akbar Shah Police Station on Tuesday afternoon.

By Sahidul Hasan Khokon: Four days after the possible murder of an Indian student Atif Sheikh in Chittagong, Bangladesh, police today arrested one of Atif's classmate as suspect in the case.

Atif's father Abdul Khalek had filed the case with Akbar Shah Police Station on Tuesday afternoon.

Suspect Niraj Guru is a student of the 24th batch of a private medical college in Chittagong (USTC).

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Akbar Shah Police Station Inspector (Investigation) Zakir Hossain Bhuiyan said, "Niraj was produced in the court where the police will seek his remand for questioning."

"Khalek has kept eight people in the list of suspects, without accusing one specific person," said Officer-in-Charge Mohammad Alamgir.

The suspects includes a youth named Wilson Singh, who was rescued from the house after he was found wounded. Three other Indian students and two Bangladeshi students, including the resident of the house, Niraj and his wife are suspects too.

Atif and Wilson were taken to the hospital by Niraj.

Atif was declared dead by the Chittagong Medical College Hospital after he and Singh were admitted to the hospital. A sharp weapon was used to kill Atif and the incident happened on the fifth floor of a 6-storey building on Abdul Hamid Road under Akbar Shah Police Station on Friday night.

The deceased Atif was a resident of Manipur.

Also read:

Bangladesh: Case filed over the Indian student's suspected murder

--- ENDS ---
SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Epidemiologists conducting national precision medicine initiatives focused on gathering clinical research data on genetic variation among East and South Asian populations now have access to Thermo Fisher Scientific's Applied Biosystems Axiom Asia Precision Medicine Research Array. This new genotyping tool contains more than 750,000 biomarkers associated with both common and rare diseases for clinical research studies.

Complexity of analysis and costs associated with whole genome sequencing continue to challenge genomic centers involved in genotyping samples for epidemiology studies. Axiom Asia Precision Medicine Research Array helps overcome this barrier by delivering answers in a timely manner and within budget. The array is available at a low cost per sample with no minimum sample commitment.

Markers on the array were selected for highest genomic coverage, and more than 100,000 gene variants were carefully chosen for having pathogenic effect specifically in East Asian and South Asian populations from broadly referenced public databases, including: ClinVar, NHGRI-GWAS catalog, CPIC, PharmaGKB and PharmaADME. Axiom Asia Precision Medicine Array offers the capability to collect data on lung cancer, diabetes, heart disease, genetic risk profiling, immune response, and pharmacogenomics research. The array also offers the flexibility to add 50,000 custom markers.

Asian countries have made advances in establishing country-specific national initiatives to study common and rare inherited diseases and identify the underlying genetic risk factors in local ethnic populations. Several of these programs, including those in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, are now powered by Axiom custom arrays tailored with the goal of combining genomic and clinical research data with phenotypic information to understand the genetics of common diseases and to determine how drugs affect people.

"Thermo Fisher Scientific has forged partnerships with several large biobank initiatives in Asia, helping advance research in precision medicine in these countries," said Dr. Laurent Bellon, vice president and general manager of Microarrays at Thermo Fisher. "Axiom Asia Precision Medicine Research Array now offers the research community in all of Asia the ability to drive scientific insights into a variety of rare and common diseases in the local populations by leveraging our deep technical expertise, bioinformatics solutions and portfolio of products - from sample management, to data analysis software."

Powered by the Axiom Genotyping Solution, the results from Axiom Asia Precision Medicine Research Array are fully compatible with existing genomic cohort data. Axiom Genotyping Solution includes both pre-designed and custom arrays. Many of the world's largest population genetic epidemiology projects have chosen Axiom biobank array for their genotyping studies. In Asia, Axiom Biobank Array is now used by the Korean NIH Biobank, Tohoku Medical Mega Biobank in Japan and China Kadoorie Biobank for performing large scale epidemiology studies.

To have one of our Axiom biobank specialists provide more information about Axiom Asia Precision Medicine Research Array, visit http://www.thermofisher.com/axiombiobank.html.

For research use only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.

About Thermo Fisher Scientific

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is the world leader in serving science, with revenues of $18 billion and more than 55,000 employees globally. Our mission is to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. We help our customers accelerate life sciences research, solve complex analytical challenges, improve patient diagnostics and increase laboratory productivity. Through our premier brands  Thermo Scientific, Applied Biosystems, Invitrogen, Fisher Scientific and Unity Lab Services  we offer an unmatched combination of innovative technologies, purchasing convenience and comprehensive support. For more information, please visit www.thermofisher.com.

Media Contact Information:

Mauricio Minotta

Thermo Fisher Scientific

+1 760 929 2456

[email protected]

SOURCE Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.

Related Links

http://www.thermofisher.com


AUSTIN, Texas, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- In conjunction with the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation and Navy Reserve Officer Matthew Previts, U.S. Money Reserve announced today its participation in a special event to honor three of only five remaining USS Arizona survivors during a long-awaited visit to Washington, D.C., from July 19th through July 23rd. The trip marks the first visit to the nation's capital for Ken Potts (Coxswain), Donald Stratton (Seaman, First Class), and Lauren Bruner (Fire Controlman, Third Class). In particular, Stratton and Bruner have been working to secure proper recognition and a posthumous award for Joe Georgethe sailor who saved six lives aboard the sinking USS Arizona, including their own, during the attack on Pearl Harbor over 75 years ago.

"This is a monumental visit for our nation, with a strongly patriotic purpose," said retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Frank Thorp, president and CEO of the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation. "We are honored to host the USS Arizona survivors on their mission to secure recognition for the late Joe Georgethe USS Vestal sailor who saved the lives of six men on that day that lives in infamy."

Though George, a boatswain's mate second class, was ordered to cut the rope that would detach his Vestal from the sinking Arizona, he went against orders and instead threw a weighted heaving line from the Vestal to the Arizonaa decision that would ultimately save six lives that day. Unidentified for his brave efforts for most of his life, George was finally revealed as the 'unknown savior' nearly 50 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He passed away in 1996 and has never been officially recognized for his heroic actions.

"Though the men George saved never had the chance to thank him in person, they continue to push for official recognition for the man who saved them," said Previts, who has been working closely with the survivors, all now in their 90s, to help them achieve their mission. "When I learned they had never visited our great nation's capital before, I knew we had to make the trip happen. It took the survivors nearly 50 years to find George, and now I want to help make their mission of recognizing him a success."

To honor the USS Arizona survivors for their service and dedication, U.S. Money Reservein partnership with the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundationwill present each of the three survivors, along with George's daughter, Joe Ann Taylor, with a commemorative 5 oz. Pearl Harbor Silver Coin. This pure silver, government-issued coin was minted in limited quantities exclusively by U.S. Money Reserve to honor the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

The presentation of the coins will take place on Thursday, July 20th, at 8:30am EST at the World War II Memorial in D.C.

Hosea Perkins, retired U.S. Army Staff Sergeant (18th Airborne Corp., Desert Storm veteran), and Ramon Rodriguez, U.S. Army Reserve Master Sergeant (First Cavalry Division, Iraqi Freedom veteran), both directors of sales at U.S. Money Reserve, will present the coins on behalf of U.S Money Reserve and the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation.

"We feel truly honored and humbled to present the USS Arizona survivors a token of our gratitude during their first visit to the nation's capital," said Philip N. Diehl, president of U.S. Money Reserve.

"The Pearl Harbor coin program has brought so much joy to our company in so many ways," added Angela Koch, CEO of U.S. Money Reserve. "These opportunities to honor our veterans who sacrificed the most on that infamous day in history are among the most cherished."

Since the launch of its Pearl Harbor coin series last year, U.S. Money Reserve has partnered with the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation to donate a portion of the proceeds from every Pearl Harbor Coin sold to help raise a Lone Sailor Statue at Pearl Harbor. The statue, proposed to be constructed with metal from the USS Arizona, is expected to be completed later this year.

While in Washington, D.C., the survivors will pay their respects to fellow soldiers of service buried at Arlington National Cemetery. They also plan to visit the nation's most iconic monuments in the D.C. area. Previts, a special duty information professional and intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, has coordinated the survivors' first visit to the nation's capital and is responsible for the itinerary while visiting D.C.

Also present at the coin presentation will be Andy Abel, host of The Coin Vault and grandson of WWII veteran and noted coin industry figure, Leon Hendrickson. Abel's respect for veterans and strong connection to coins makes this a special event to support.

For more information or to speak with company leadership at U.S. Money Reserve, please contact Christol Farris at 512-568-9991 or [email protected] or Lacy Rushin at [email protected] or visit www.usmoneyreserve.com .

About U.S. Money Reserve

U.S. Money Reserve is one of the nation's largest private distributors of U.S. government-issued gold, silver, and platinum products.

Founded in 2001, U.S. Money Reserve has grown into one of the world's largest private distributors of U.S. and foreign government-issued gold, silver, and platinum legal tender products. Hundreds of thousands of clients across the country rely on U.S. Money Reserve to diversify their assets with physical precious metals, primarily in the form of U.S. gold and silver coins.

U.S. Money Reserve's uniquely trained team includes coin research and numismatic professionals equipped with market knowledge to find products for precious metals buyers at every level. U.S. Money Reserve goes above the industry standard to provide superior customer service, with the goal of establishing a long-term relationship with each and every one of its customers. U.S. Money Reserve is based in Austin, Texas. Like them on Facebook, connect on LinkedIn, and follow on Twitter @USMoneyReserve.

About the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation

Conveniently located on Pennsylvania Avenue  halfway between the White House and the Capitol, the United States Navy Memorial provides a living tribute to Navy people and a place for them to gather and celebrate their service. The outdoor plaza features a "Granite Sea" map of the world, towering masts with signal flags, fountain pools and waterfalls and The Lone Sailor Statue.

Adjacent to the plaza is the Naval Heritage Center, where visitors can find educational displays about the contributions of the men and women of the Sea Services (Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine). Also housed in the Naval Heritage Center is the Navy Log  the online place for Navy people to stay connected with each other, celebrate their service and preserve the memories of their service. There, Navy veterans can build a record of their service online. Call (202) 737-2300 or visit www.navymemorial.org for more information.

Contact: Christol Farris

[email protected]

512-568-9991

Lacy Rushin

[email protected]

512-228-8563

SOURCE U.S. Money Reserve

Related Links

http://www.usmoneyreserve.com


TOKYO and SAN FRANCISCO, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Kentik, the leader in network traffic intelligence, today announced KDDI Corporation, a Fortune Global 500 company and one of Asia's largest telecommunications / Internet service providers, has deployed its solution, Kentik Detect, for real-time network operations and planning efficiencies. With Kentik, KDDI gains the ability to make faster operational decisions and frees up engineering teams to spend more time on business innovation.

Telecommunications operators invest billions of dollars on their networks each year to maintain and enhance their service offerings and remain competitive. As part of that investment, network planning is a business-critical function that can significantly increase a telecom operator's ability to meet customer expectations, capitalize on new market opportunities, and ultimately drive profits. Rich network data is a key part of effective planning and can inform operators in determining when to launch new services and how to find more cost-efficient ways to deliver higher performance to customers. Yet, most telecom operators struggle to take advantage of their massive streams of network telemetry data.

"At KDDI, we strive to be continuously innovative across our entire organization. However, for our network engineers, that ability was previously held back by the amount of time the team was spending on tracking down answers about our network. Given the sheer scale and complexity of our network and the amount of data it generates, network planning analyses often took days to compile," said Toru Maruta, general manager of the IP Network Dept. at KDDI. "Using Kentik Detect, our team can now access a rich dataset that offers valuable insights about our network within seconds. Kentik gives us the answers we need to build a better network."

One of the most distinguishing aspects of Kentik Detect that caught KDDI's attention is the solution's powerful, intuitive visualization of complex data. Using the Kentik solution, KDDI's network engineers can easily pivot between visualizations to get multi-dimensional analyses of their network in real time.

"For the world's leading telecommunications operators likes KDDI, being able to derive value from their own rich network data is a competitive advantage," said Avi Freedman, co-founder and CEO of Kentik. "Organizations that use the fastest, most comprehensive data analytics will drive revenue and performance, and can turn their data into powerful insights that drive better business decisions for them and for their customers. KDDI is one of our fastest-moving customers, and we look forward to our continued partnership as they roll out additional services enabled by network traffic intelligence from their Kentik platform."

Unlike traditional appliance-based network monitoring tools, Kentik's software-as-a-service (SaaS) big data network traffic intelligence platform is highly scalable, flexible and fast. With Kentik, telecommunications providers, ISPs, enterprises, and web companies can improve operations, optimize capacity, resolve anomalies, automate DDoS defense, and protect applications and service performance.

To learn more about how KDDI is using Kentik, visit the two companies at the annual Japan Network Operators Group conference (JANOG 40) in Koriyama, Japan from July 26 - 28, 2017.

ABOUT KDDI

KDDI Corporation is a leading Japanese telecommunications and a Global Fortune 500 company. Serving 40 million domestic mobile subscribers, KDDI provides a diverse portfolio consisting of managed networks, data centers, cloud, security and system integration. Visit http://global.kddi.com.

ABOUT KENTIK

Kentik is the network traffic intelligence company. When nearly everything critical to a modern business crosses a wire, the network doesn't just serve the business, it sees the business. Kentik turns your network traffic - billions of digital footprints - into real-time intelligence for both business and technical operations. Network operators, engineers, and security teams use Kentik to manage and optimize the performance, security, and potential of their networks and their business. The company was founded by network and big data technologists and executives from companies such as Akamai, CloudFlare, YouTube, and Netflix, with decades of experience in operations, architecture, and distributed systems. Kentik is headquartered in San Francisco. Visit www.kentik.com or follow @KentikInc on Twitter.

SOURCE Kentik

Related Links

https://www.kentik.com


Innovative subscription-based service makes planting trees simple and accessible for Americans

CALGARY, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ - Now available to Americans, TreeEra has launched a subscription-based model that is dedicated to reducing the carbon footprint. The Canadian-based start-up makes the process of planting trees easy, affordable and accessible. Now planting trees in Black Hills, South Dakota, TreeEra enters the United States market at a crucial time to help combat climate change.

Every 48 hours the planet loses a forest the size of New York. Aware of the impacts of climate change and the lack of accessible options, co-founders Ryan Heal and Michael Bernard Fitzgerald created TreeEra, a way for people to join a community, based on an unique subscription platform that makes tree-planting easy and complements a sustainable lifestyle.

The TreeEra platform allows members to community-fund the planting of trees with a low payment of $12 per month for 100 trees annually or $20 per month for 200 trees annually. Working in partnership with leading tree-planting company Brinkman & Associates in Black Hills, South Dakota, TreeEra subscribers can trust that contributions are putting trees in the ground and making a global difference.

"We wanted to build a community around positive and simple action, and planting trees seemed like the perfect place to start," states co-founder Michael Bernard Fitzgerald. "For the price of a drop-in workout, or a few coffees, individuals can start to make a measureable impact. One tree does an incredible amount of good, like providing enough oxygen for a family of four to breathe."

Since launching in Canada, TreeEra has planted over 12,000 trees. These trees will offset nearly one ton of carbon each, providing enough oxygen for 48,000 people.

TreeEra has entered the retail market in the United States with the launch of the 5-Tree Package, an embroidered patch program that plants five trees for each patch sold. Available in select stores across United States, the patch costs $15 and provides an easy alternative for those who want to demonstrate and show support in the battle against climate change. Retailers include: Road Trip (Lake Arrowhead, CA) and Field House (Beverly, MA).

To become a part of the movement, please visit: https://treeera.com/ or follow TreeEra on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

About TreeEra

Co-founded by Ryan Heal and Michael Bernard Fitzgerald, TreeEra sprouted on the grounds between a belief in climate change and a lack of knowing how to help. Based in Calgary, Alberta, TreeEra's community helps combat climate change by planting trees in a convenient, affordable and simple way. Trees are planted via Brinkman & Associates in both Kamloops, British Columbia and Black Hills, South Dakota.

SOURCE TreeEra
ST. HELENA, Calif., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Trinchero Family Estates (TFE) has transitioned all of its energy use to Deep Green 100% renewable energy across all of its facilities in Napa County, CA. The move by the organization to convert all electric power across all aspects of the business represents an important commitment to clean energy by the Napa Valley's largest wine company. The size and scale of Trinchero's operations and the investment required for the transition establish TFE as a leader in renewable energy among Napa Valley wineries.

TFE has partnered with MCE to transition all of its 28 facilities and vineyards in the Napa Valley to 'Deep Green 100% renewable energy'. TFE's investment ensures that all of its usage is matched to vendors that are completely green and thus renewable. TFE's investment complements an ongoing update to its production facilities at Main Street in St. Helena. President and CEO Bob Torkelson commented, "Trinchero Family Estates is proud to be an early adopter for larger wineries in transitioning to clean energy. Our investment supports our sustainability objectives and our commitment to contribute to the community and work productively with our neighbors toward a shared future."

As a family-owned winery in the Napa Valley for over 65 years, Trinchero Family Estates has a history of investment in the community and its residents. Accordingly, half of the premiums that TFE invests is used by MCE to fund the development of local renewable energy projects, further benefitting the local community. MCE CEO Dawn Weisz commented on TFE's investment, saying, "We admire the leadership demonstrated by TFE, setting a great example for other businesses to support clean, 100% California renewable energy, which in turn will fund local projects and jobs. The collective impact from all electricity use at TFE's Napa County operations will reduce over 1,200 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which is the EPA equivalent of the carbon sequestered by over 1,175 acres of U.S. forests annually."

MCE provides clean power to multiple counties in California and currently serves over 90% of winery customers in Napa. TFE's transition to clean energy complements a variety of environmental programs that are embedded in its business practices and include certifications for sustainably farmed vineyards, a California Green Medal-Sustainable Winegrowing Business Leadership Award, California Wine Institute Certified Sustainable Winegrowing and Napa County Green business certifications.

About Trinchero Family Estates

Trinchero Family Estates is wholly owned and operated by the Trinchero family, Napa Valley vintners since 1948. The TFE portfolio includes more than 40 brands including Sutter Home, Menage a Trois, Trinchero Napa Valley, Napa Cellars, Folie a Deux, Terra d'Oro, SeaGlass, and the number one alcohol-removed wine, Fre. TFE also markets and sells a stable of notable brands including Joel Gott Wines, Charles & Charles, Taken Wine Co., and Bandit. TFE's import portfolio includes Angove Wines from Australia; Dona Paula Wines from Argentina; Carmen Wines from Chile; and a spirits portfolio that includes Amador Whiskey Co and Cruz Tequila. Visit www.tfewines.com to learn more.

About MCE

MCE is a not-for-profit, public electricity provider that gives customers the choice of having 50% to 100% of their electricity supplied from clean, renewable sources such as solar, wind, bioenergy, geothermal, and hydroelectric at competitive rates. MCE provides service to 255,000 California customers in Marin County, Napa County, and the cities of Benicia, El Cerrito, Lafayette, Richmond, San Pablo, and Walnut Creek. By choosing MCE, customers help support new in-state and local renewable energy projects and jobs. For more information about MCE, visit mceCleanEnergy.org

SOURCE Trinchero Family Estates

Related Links

http://www.tfewines.com


SAN FRANCISCO, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Union Bank today announced it has received $1.1 million in program funds from The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) of San Francisco to provide matching grants to low- and moderate-income, first-time home buyers. The bank received $1 million in Workforce Initiative Subsidy for Homeownership (WISH) Program funds and $100,000 in Individual Development and Empowerment Account (IDEA) Program funds. This is the seventh year that the bank has received WISH and IDEA program funds.

"We are pleased that the FHLB of San Francisco has for the seventh consecutive year entrusted us with both WISH and IDEA program funding," said Julius Robinson, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility. "Home ownership is critical to building economically strong communities and we look forward to working with our community partners to assist more qualified recipients achieve the dream of home ownership."

The WISH and IDEA first-time homebuyer programs offer eligible low- and moderate-income households 3-to-1 matching grants of up to $15,000 for the purchase of a home. The funds can be applied to the home buyer's down payment or closing costs. WISH grants are targeted to working families and individuals who are ready to make the transition from renting to owning. The WISH funds can complement or supplement a number of local, state, and federal homeownership programs and initiatives. IDEA grants are targeted to homebuyers who have been saving for the purchase of their first home through an Individual Development Account (IDA) or participating in their local housing authority's Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) homeownership program or in a lease-to-own program administered by a government entity or nonprofit organization.

Union Bank will provide this year's matching grants to qualified homebuyers in California. The funds will be available for home buyers with loans in escrow between April 1, 2017 and July 31, 2018.

Last year, the bank provided 67 WISH matching grants for a total of $986,825.

For more information about the WISH and IDEA programs, please send your inquiry to [email protected].

About MUFG Union Bank, N.A.

MUFG Union Bank, N.A., is a full-service bank with offices across the United States. We provide a wide spectrum of corporate, commercial and retail banking and wealth management solutions to meet the needs of customers. We also offer an extensive portfolio of value-added solutions for customers, including investment banking, personal and corporate trust, global custody, transaction banking, capital markets, and other services. With assets of $116.1 billion, as of March 31, 2017, MUFG Union Bank has strong capital reserves, credit ratings and capital ratios relative to peer banks. MUFG Union Bank is a proud member of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (NYSE: MTU), one of the world's largest financial organizations with total assets of approximately 303.3 trillion (JPY) or $2.7 trillion (USD), as of March 31, 2017. The corporate headquarters (principal executive office) for MUFG Americas Holdings Corporation, which is the financial holding company that holds MUFG Union Bank, N.A., is in New York City. The main banking office of MUFG Union Bank, N.A. is in San Francisco, California.

1 Exchange rate of 1 USD=112.19 (JPY) as of March 31, 2017

SOURCE MUFG Union Bank, N.A.

Related Links

http://www.unionbank.com


NEW YORK, July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- United States water pumps market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 5%, in value terms, during 2017-2026, on the back of growing demand from water treatment, oil & gas, power and other industries. Hydraulic fracturing is used for drilling oil wells, which uses water pumps for pumping fluids, and with US government commissioning new wells near Texas demand for water pumps from oil & gas sector is expected to grow in the coming years. Power sector uses pumps for flooding cooling towers and boilers. Consequently, power sector in the US is also a major demand generator for water pumps.





Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p04998277/United-States-Water-Pumps-Market-By-Type-By-Application-Competition-Forecast-Opportunities.html







According to "United States Water Pumps Market, By Type, By Application, Competition Forecast & Opportunities, 2012-2026", major players operating in the United States water pumps market include companies such as Flowserve Corporation, Xylem Inc., Sulzer Limited, Gardner Denver Inc., PSG Dover, ITT Corporation, SPX Corporation, Watson Marlow, IDEX Corporation, Standex International Corporation, etc. "United States Water Pumps Market, By Type, By Application, Competition Forecast & Opportunities, 2012-2026" report elaborates following aspects related to US water pumps market:



- United States Water Pumps Market Size, Share & Forecast

- Segmental Analysis  By Type (Positive Displacement & Centrifugal), By Application (Oil & Gas, Water Treatment, Power & Others)

- Changing Market Trends & Emerging Opportunities

- Competitive Landscape & Strategic Recommendations



Why You Should Buy This Report?



- To gain an in-depth understanding of US water pumps market

- To identify the on-going trends and anticipated growth in the forecast period

- To help industry consultants, water pump manufacturers, vendors and dealers align their market-centric strategies

- To obtain research based business decisions and add weight to presentations and marketing material

- To gain competitive knowledge of leading market players

- To avail 10% customization in the report without any extra charges and get research data or trends added in the report as per the buyer's specific needs



Report Methodology



The information contained in this report is based upon both primary and secondary sources. Primary research included interviews with water pump manufacturers, distributors and industry experts. Secondary research included an exhaustive search of relevant publications like company annual reports, financial reports and other proprietary databases.



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WASHINGTON, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On July 26, 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in employment, transportation, public accommodations, commercial facilities, telecommunications, and state and local government services.

This graphic looks at the age and gender of the U.S. population reporting a disability. The Data from the American Community Survey shows that ambulatory disability, or serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs, is the most common for males and females 75 years and over.

This Facts for Features provides a demographic snapshot of the U.S. population with a disability and examines various services available to them. The statistics come from various Census Bureau censuses and surveys, covering differing periods of time.

Population Distribution

56.7 million

The number of people in the United States with a disability in 2010, representing 19.0 percent of the civilian noninstitutionalized population. People with a disability have a physical or mental impairment that affects one or more major life activities, such as walking, bathing, dressing, eating, preparing meals, doing errands alone or doing housework. A disability can occur at birth or at any point in a person's life.

Source: Americans With Disabilities: 2010

www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2012/demo/p70-131.pdfht

15.7 million

The number of people age 65 and older with at least one disability, according to data collected from 2008 to 2012, which makes up 39.0 percent of the population in this age group. Of this group, two-thirds had difficulty in walking or climbing stairs. The second-most cited disability was difficulty with independent living, such as visiting a doctor's office or shopping.

Source: Older Americans With a Disability: 2008-2012

www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2014/acs/acs-29.pdf

19.4%

The percentage of the civilian noninstitutionalized population in West Virginia in 2015 with a disability  the highest rate of any state in the nation. Utah, at 9.9 percent, had the lowest rate.

Source: 2015 American Community Survey, Table S1810 http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_1YR/GCT1810.US01PR



28.7%

The percentage of the civilian noninstitutionalized population in Pike County, Ky., in 2015 with a disability  among the highest rate in the nation for counties with populations of 65,000 or more. Kendall County, Ill., at 4.9 percent, had among the lowest rate.

Source: 2015 American Community Survey, Table S1810 http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_1YR/GCT1810.US05PR

22.4%

The percentage of the civilian noninstitutionalized population in Flint, Mich., in 2015 with a disability  among the highest rate in the nation among places with populations of 65,000 or more. Fishers, Ind., at 3.5 percent, had among the lowest rate. A place is a city, town, village or borough, either legally incorporated or not.

Source: 2015 American Community Survey, Table GCT1810

http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_1YR/GCT1810.US13PR

Services for Those With Disabilities

2,833

The number of business establishments providing special needs transportation in 2012, up 20.7 percent from 2,347 in 2007. Such businesses may use specially equipped vehicles to provide passenger transportation. These businesses employed 61,605 people in 2012 and generated revenues of $3.5 billion. Employment was up 24.0 percent and revenues increased 27.7 percent since 2007.

Source: 2012 and 2007 Comparative Economic Census Geographic Area Series (NAICS 485991)

http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ECN/2012_US/48A2//naics~485991

14,060

The number of business establishments that provided pet care (except veterinary services) in 2012. These businesses generated revenues of $3.4 billion. Among these businesses are those that train assistance dogs.

Source: 2012 and 2007 Comparative Economic Census Geographic Area Series (NAICS 812910)

http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ECN/2012_US/81A2//naics~812910

25,964

The number of business establishments primarily providing services for the elderly and persons with disabilities in 2012. These establishments provided for the welfare of these individuals in such areas as day care, nonmedical home care or homemaker services, social activities, group support and companionship. These businesses employed 901,359 workers and generated $34.1 billion in revenues. In 2015, these businesses generated $40.7 billion in revenues.

Sources:

2012 Comparative-Economic Census Geographic Area Series (NAICS 624120)

http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ECN/2012_US/62A2//naics~62412

2015 Service Annual Survey (NAICS 624120)

www.census.gov/services/index.html, Table 2

7,832

The number of business establishments providing vocational rehabilitation services in 2012. These businesses employed 312,659 people and generated revenues of $12.4 billion. In 2007, there were 7,631 such establishments, employing 303,713 people and producing revenues of $11.5 billion. These businesses provide job counseling, job training and work experience to people with disabilities.

Source: 2012 and 2007 Comparative Economic Census Geographic Area Series (NAICS 624310)

http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ECN/2012_US/62A2//naics~624310

2,344

The number of business establishments providing translation and interpretation services in 2012. These businesses employed 24,926 people and generated revenues of $4.2 billion. In 2007, there were 1,975 such establishments, employing 14,546 people and producing revenues of $1.9 billion. Among these businesses are those that provide sign language services.

Source: 2012 and 2007 Comparative Economic Census Geographic Area Series (NAICS 541930)

http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ECN/2012_US/54A2//naics~541930

3,597

The number of business establishments providing home health equipment rental in 2012, down 4.4 percent from 3,762 in 2007. Such businesses rent home-type health and invalid equipment, such as wheelchairs, hospital beds, oxygen tanks, etc. These businesses employed 33,935 people in 2012 and generated revenues of $5.4 billion. Employment was up 2.8 percent while revenues decreased 7.8 percent since 2007.

Source: 2012 and 2007 Comparative Economic Census Geographic Area Series (NAICS 532291)

http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ECN/2012_US/53A2//naics~532291

Specific Disabilities

Note: All statistics in this section come from the 2015 American Community Survey, measuring the civilian noninstitutionalized population. http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_1YR/S1810

10.8 million

The number of people age 18 and older in 2015 who reported being deaf or having significant difficulty hearing. Among the population age 65 and older, 6.9 million reported being deaf or having significant difficulty hearing.

6.8 million

The number of people age 18 and older in 2015 who had serious difficulty seeing even when wearing glasses. Among people age 65 and older, 3.0 million had serious difficulty seeing.

20.6 million

The number of people age 18 and older in 2015 who had serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs. Among people age 65 and older, 10.5 million had serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs.

12.9 million

The number of people age 18 and older in 2015 who had serious difficulty concentrating, remembering or making decisions due to a physical, mental or emotional condition. Among people age 65 and older, 4.2 million had serious difficulty concentrating, remembering or making decisions.

14.2 million

The number of people age 18 and older in 2015 who had difficulty doing errands alone, such as visiting a doctor's office or shopping, due to a physical, mental or emotional condition. Among people age 65 and older, 6.9 million had difficulty doing errands alone.

7.5 million

The number of people age 18 and older in 2015 who had difficulty dressing or bathing. Among people age 65 and older, 3.8 million had difficulty dressing or bathing.

Older People With a Disability



Note: The source for this section is Older Americans With a Disability: 2008-2012, which presents statistics from the 2008-2012 American Community Survey.

25.4%

The percentage of the population age 85 and older with a disability among the population age 65 and older.

More Than One-Third

The proportion of people age 85 and older with a disability who lived alone, is about one-fourth of those aged 65 to 74.

54.4%

The percentage of the older population who had not graduated from high school and had a disability, twice the rate of those with a bachelor's degree or higher (26.0 percent).

12.6%

The percentage of older Americans living in a household with a disability living in poverty, compared with 7.2 percent of the older household population without a disability.

Earnings

$21,572

The median earnings in the past 12 months for people with a disability. This is 69.0 percent of the median earnings, $31,872, for those without a disability. (Both figures pertain to the civilian, noninstitutionalized population age 16 and older, with earnings in the past 12 months.)

Source: 2015 American Community Survey, Table B18140

http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_1YR/B18140

Mobility

Note: The source for the statistics in this section is Desire to Move and Residential Mobility: 2010-2011, which come from the Survey of Income and Program Participation.

12.5%

The percentage of householders with a disability who desired to move to another residence, higher than the corresponding figure of 8.2 percent for those without a disability. Those with mental disabilities were the most likely to desire to move (20.6 percent).

17.3%

The percentage of householders with a disability who desired to move to another residence and actually did so over a one-year period.

9.3%

The percentage of all householders with a disability who moved to another residence over a one-year period.

The following is a list of observances typically covered by the Census Bureau's Facts for Features series:

African-American History Month (February) Anniversary of Americans with Disabilities Act (July 26) Super Bowl (1st Sunday in February) Back to School (August) Valentine's Day (Feb. 14) Labor Day (1st Monday in September) Women's History Month (March) Grandparents Day (1st Sunday after Labor Day) Irish-American Heritage Month (March)/ Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15-Oct. 15) St. Patrick's Day (March 17) Unmarried and Single Americans Week (3rd week of September) Earth Day (April 22)

Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month (May) Halloween (Oct. 31) Older Americans Month (May) American Indian/Alaska Native Heritage Month (November) Mother's Day (2nd Sunday in May)

Hurricane Season Begins (June 1) Veterans Day (Nov. 11) Father's Day (3rd Sunday in June) Thanksgiving Day (4th Thursday in November) The Fourth of July (July 4) The Holiday Season (December)

Editor's note: The preceding data were collected from a variety of sources and may be subject to sampling variability and other sources of error. Facts for Features are customarily released about two months before an observance in order to accommodate magazine production timelines.

Graphic | JPG | PDF |

Amy Newcomb

Public Information Office

301-763-3030 / [email protected]

census.gov

Connect with us on Social media

SOURCE U.S. Census Bureau

Related Links

http://www.census.gov


(Photo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/537212/Jidoka.jpg )



With more than 17,000 employees, UST Global is accelerating the transformation of organizations worldwide towards the Digital Economy. Thanks to this alliance, hundreds of UST Global customers will have access to one of the most competitive and advanced Enterprise RPA solutions.

Robotic Process Automation, also known as RPA, is one of the most relevant technologies for the digital transformation of business processes, with a market size that will reach 2,9 Billion USD in 2021 according to Forrester Research. Experts agree in its huge potential for business transformation as it allows automating repetitive processes without modifying existing systems. RPA applies "software robots" to use programs and applications imitating human actions. One of its main benefit is to reduce human intervention in repetitive tasks so that people can dedicate their efforts to higher added value activities, improving efficiency and productivity in business operations.

By reaching this strategic agreement, UST Global will now be able to offer all their clients the Jidoka platform for process robotization. This platform provides a complete RPA infrastructure that offers the most rigorous enterprise management and scalability standards.

"With our commitment to technology as a driver of change, we believe that Robotic Process Automation solutions are an essential tool to support the transition to more competitive and intelligent organizations," says Jose Luis Rivero, Director of Digital Solutions & Consulting Services at UST Global. He adds, "Our alliance with Jidoka adds value to the portfolio of solutions we provide to promote digital transformation in organizations."

"We are confident that the core capabilities of our Enterprise RPA platform, along with the knowledge and proximity to the market of a leading company like UST Global, will help more companies to take full advantage of the transformative power of process automation," adds Victor Ayllon, CEO of Jidoka.

About Jidoka

Developed by Novayre, Jidoka is the leading RPA technology solution in the Spanish-speaking market. Large companies from key economic sectors in more than 10 countries utilize Jidoka software robots to automate their front and back office processes, with an advanced enterprise level robot operations and orchestration platform, freeing people of tedious and repetitive tasks.

SOURCE Jidoka
CHICAGO, July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Veltex Corporation -- OTC Markets symbol (VLXC)  Veltex Corporation (VLXC) today announced results from the Company's 2017 Annual Meeting of Shareholders held in Scottsdale, Arizona on April 24th, 2017 at the Hilton DoubleTree Resort. Veltex reported that the members of its Board of Directors were once again re-elected by substantial margins.

The Board of Directors is also pleased to announce the unanimous reappointment of Mr. James "Jim" Jacob, of Palm Springs California, as President and Chief Executive Officer.

Stephen G. Macklem was reappointed by the Board as Veltex's Chief Financial Officer and also as corporate Secretary / Treasurer by unanimous vote.

The final audited vote count was as follows:

Stephen G. Macklem votes cast FOR director were 31,581,287 or 98.2% and 584,185 votes WITHHELD, along with no non-broker votes.

Robert E. Fletcher votes cast FOR director were 31,114,291 or 96.7% and 1,383,541 votes WITHHELD along with no non-broker votes.

Andreas Mauritzson votes cast FOR director were 31,114,287 or 96.7% and 1,051,185 votes WITHHELD along with no non-broker votes.

James Jacob votes cast FOR director were 31,014,291 or 96.4% and 1,151,181 votes WITHHELD along with no non-broker votes.

R. Preston Roberts votes cast FOR director were 30,583,787 or 95% and 1,581,685 votes WITHHELD along with no non-broker votes.

Kenneth J. Demaree votes cast FOR director were 30,583,783 or 95% and 1,581,689 votes WITHHELD along with no non-broker votes.

The votes to ratify the Board decision to select Sassetti LLC as independent registered public accounts for fiscal year 2017 had 31,729,338 votes cast FOR or 98.6% and 329,132 votes cast AGAINST and 107,002 votes ABSTAIN.

No shareholder resolutions were presented at the meeting.

The Corporation, in one of the enforcement efforts of the legal judgement[s] currently in place, reports that the result to collect in the State of Nevada have been highly successful. In Federal Court in Las Vegas Nevada, case No. 16-14910-mkn, one judgment debtor has settled with the estate, of which Veltex Corporation holds more than 99%. The debtor will pay $300,000 and the estate may proceed to enforce the collection on a $2,000,000 outstanding contract currently in place. Veltex Corporation will be paid over a three year period on an annual basis by the United States Trustee, who will remain fiduciary of the estate. These results arise out of, in part, the approximately $153,000,000 in outstanding legal enforcement judgements currently on the books in Veltex Corporation vs Javeed Matin et al case 2:10-cv-01746-ABC-PJW in which 22 individual and corporate defendants, in the United States and Canada, are jointly and severally liable.

Veltex reported that the company's balance sheet now reflects more that $153 million dollars in judgments and interest in favor of Veltex Corporation along with $2,935,896 of net operating loss carry forwards at the end of the first quarter 2017. Veltex has continuously sought the advice of foremost legal and accounting firms to enforce, protect and expand upon these potential valuable assets.

Veltex Corporation, incorporated in Utah September 17, 1987, is a public holding corporation which maintains its corporate headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. The company's common shares trade OTC Markets under the symbol VLXC.

Safe Harbor Statement

Certain of the above statements contained in this press release are forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Such forward-looking statements are within the meaning of that term in Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Readers are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, and that actual results may differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. This press release includes forward-looking statements intended to qualify for the safe harbor from liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements generally can be identified by phrases such as Veltex or its management "believes," "expects," "anticipates," "foresees," "forecasts," "estimates" or other words or phrases of similar import. Similarly, statements herein that describe Veltex's business strategy, outlook, objectives, plans, intentions or goals also are forward-looking statements. All such forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements.

SOURCE Veltex Corporation

Related Links

http://www.veltex.com


The trailer of Bareilly Ki Barfi is out and promises a joyride through Bareilly.

By India Today Web Desk: The trailer of Bareilly Ki Barfi is out. The film stars Ayushmann Khurrana, Kriti Sanon and Rajkummar Rao in the lead roles and promises a joyride through the lanes of Bareilly.

The trailer takes off from the first poster of the film that had Kriti Sanon's character Bitti covering her face with a book, Bareilly Ki Barfi.

I cant believe what i've just read!!??#BareillyKiBarfi Just cant wait for you to read it..Here's a glimpse???????@Ashwinyiyer @junochopra pic.twitter.com/yRVDOpTvnQ- BITTI (@kritisanon) July 18, 2017

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The trailer gives an insight into the character played by Kriti, a small-town girl who embraces big dreams, break dances, watches English movies and doesn't shy away from talking about her virginity.

Bitti embarks on a journey to find the author of the book Bareilly Ki Barfi, after it strikes a chord with her and she begins believing that the author is the only person who understands her. And that he would make for her perfect groom.

Ayushmann Khurrana essays the role of the love struck Chirag Dubey who is madly in love with Bitti. Chirag owns a printing press, and therefore, knows the author of Bareilly Ki Barfi, Pritam Vidrohi. Chirag tries his best to make Bitti fall for him as he asks Pritam to break her heart so he could mend it. And in the process, Bitti would fall in love with Chirag once Pritam broke her heart.

Rajkummar Rao plays Pritam Vidrohi, a character that has left us wondering as to what his profession is. Vidrohi, the author of Bareilly Ki Barfi, is seen selling sarees in the film.

Bareilly Ki Barfi is directed by Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari and is scheduled to release on August 18 this year.

Ayushmann, Kriti and Rajkummar shared the trailer of their film on Twitter.

Watch the trailer here:

ALSO READ: Sushant drops major hint about relationship with Kriti, 5 couples who should make it official now

ALSO READ: Magazine calls Sushant and Kriti 'lovebirds'. This is how he responded

ALSO WATCH: Movie Review of Raabta, starring Sushant Singh Rajput and Kriti Sanon

--- ENDS ---
ATLANTA, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Veristor Systems, Inc., a leading provider of transformative business technology solutions, today announced the latest installment of its Expert Tech Summit series: Cybersecurity from the Experts - A C-Level Approach to Tackling Enterprise Security Challenges. The one-day event, to be held on August 17 in Duluth, Ga., will feature a panel of top security leaders who are actively managing enterprise cybersecurity efforts.

"Cybersecurity poses one of the most real and complex challenges for today's IT operations," said Jackie Groark, Director, Security/CISO, Veristor. "Our Cybersecurity Tech Summit will address some of the biggest cybersecurity challenges organizations face today and provide practical insight for creating strategies and processes that will help deliver the protection organizations require."

During the event, leading industry experts and senior corporate security leaders will share best practices and lessons learned while establishing the leadership, direction and technical response for their IT cybersecurity organization's strategies to combat real-world security threats.

Expert speakers include:

Tom Kellermann , CEO, Strategic Cyber Ventures, a renowned published expert on cyber-intelligence and former member of the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44 th President

, CEO, Strategic Cyber Ventures, a renowned published expert on cyber-intelligence and former member of the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44 President Ed Cabrera , Chief Cybersecurity Officer for Trend Micro and former CISO for the Secret Service

, Chief Cybersecurity Officer for Trend Micro and former CISO for the Secret Service Michael Morgan , Vice President Enterprise Crisis Management, New York Life Insurance Company

, Vice President Enterprise Crisis Management, New York Life Insurance Company Paul Braxton , Director Cybersecurity Operations, ICE/NYSE and Founder of the Institute of Cyber Threat Management and securitydatascience.org.

, Director Cybersecurity Operations, ICE/NYSE and Founder of the Institute of Cyber Threat Management and securitydatascience.org. Paige Needling , President & CEO Needling Worldwide, LLC and frequent speaker at ISACA, ISSA and IIA

, President & CEO Needling Worldwide, LLC and frequent speaker at ISACA, ISSA and IIA Jackie Groark , Director, Security/CISO, Veristor and former IT Security Director, Threat Management and Intelligence for Southern Company

The event, to be hosted at the Veristor Corporate office at 4850 River Green Parkway in Duluth, is sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Trend Micro. It will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on August 17.

Seating is limited. To register, visit: http://info.veristor.com/cybersecurity-conference/

About Veristor Systems, Inc.

A leading provider of transformative business technology solutions, Veristor helps its customers accelerate the time-to-value for the software, infrastructure and systems they deploy. We do this by harnessing deep expertise in today's most advanced data center, security, networking, hybrid cloud, and big data technologies and guiding businesses to the right solutions for their most pressing challenges. And with a full suite of design, deployment, support, and managed service offerings, we work shoulder-to-shoulder with our customers at every step of their technology journey to make technology truly work for them. IT's just who we are. Learn more at veristor.com.

SOURCE Veristor Systems, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.veristor.com


MIAMISBURG, Ohio, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Verso Corporation (NYSE: VRS) today announced plans to permanently shut down the No. 3 paper machine and associated equipment at its Androscoggin Mill in Jay, Maine, reducing annual coated paper production capacity at the mill by approximately 200,000 tons. The shutdown will be effective August 1 and is expected to be complete by the end of the third quarter of 2017. The No. 3 paper machine and a recovery boiler and digester that support it were idled in January of this year in response to declining customer demand that resulted in more coated paper capacity than could be filled. Most products made on the No. 3 paper machine were transitioned to lower-cost machines in other Verso mills.

"Verso is leaving no stone unturned in our efforts to move the company toward sustained profitability in a market where customer demand for our graphic paper products continues to decline," said Verso Chief Executive Officer B. Christopher DiSantis. "Consistently matching the supply of our graphic paper products with customer demand for them, dramatically reducing our costs and rapidly diversifying our product portfolio into growing markets are essential keys to Verso's future success, and we're relentlessly pursuing all three across the company. Although the footprint of the Androscoggin Mill is getting smaller, we continue to take steps to position the facility as a leading producer for the growing specialty papers market."

The permanent shutdown of the No. 3 paper machine and associated equipment will impact approximately 120 employees at the Androscoggin Mill. Employees affected by the shutdown will receive severance in accordance with Verso's severance policy and Maine state law. Verso's Human Resources team will immediately begin scheduling individual meetings with these employees to provide support and detailed information on severance and related issues.

"While permanently closing this capacity is the right strategic decision for Verso as a whole, we are mindful of the effects this action will have on the people at the Androscoggin Mill who are directly affected, and we are committed to treating them with fairness, dignity and respect during this difficult time," DiSantis said. "On behalf of the entire Verso team, I want to express our sincere thanks and appreciation to them for their dedicated service and many contributions to the mill and to our company."

About Verso

Verso Corporation is the turn-to company for those looking to successfully navigate the complexities of paper sourcing and performance. The leading North American producer of printing and specialty papers and pulp, Verso provides insightful solutions that help drive improved customer efficiency, productivity, brand awareness and business results. Verso's long-standing reputation for quality and reliability is directly tied to our vision to be a company with passion that is respected and trusted by all. Verso's passion is rooted in ethical business practices that demand safe workplaces for our employees and sustainable wood sourcing for our products. This passion, combined with our flexible manufacturing capabilities and an unmatched commitment to product performance, delivery and service, make Verso a preferred choice among commercial printers, paper merchants and brokers, converters, publishers and other end users. For more information, visit us online at versoco.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

In this press release, all statements that are not purely historical facts are 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. Forward-looking statements may be identified by the words "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "project," "plan," "estimate," "intend" and other similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are based on currently available business, economic, financial and other information and reflect management's current beliefs, expectations and views with respect to future developments and their potential effects on Verso and include the statement regarding the expected timing of completion for the shutdown of the No. 3 paper machine and associated equipment at the Androscoggin Mill. Actual results could vary materially depending on risks and uncertainties that may affect Verso and its business. For a discussion of such risks and uncertainties, please refer to Verso's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Verso assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement made in this press release to reflect subsequent events or circumstances or actual outcomes.

SOURCE Verso Corporation

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http://versoco.com


BIRMINGHAM, Ala., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Vulcan Materials Company (NYSE:VMC) will host its second quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday, August 2 at 10:00 a.m. CT (11:00 a.m. ET). Financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2017 will be released before the NYSE market opens on August 2.

The Company invites investors and other interested parties to listen to the live webcast of the conference call at www.vulcanmaterials.com. To participate by phone, call 866-564-2842 approximately 10 minutes before the scheduled start. For international calls, the number is 323-794-2130. The conference ID is 4834215.

A replay of the webcast will be available approximately two hours after the call at the Company's website.

Vulcan Materials Company, a member of the S&P 500 index, is the nation's largest producer of construction aggregates, and a major producer of other construction materials. For additional information about Vulcan, go to www.vulcanmaterials.com.

SOURCE Vulcan Materials Company

Related Links

http://www.vulcanmaterials.com


WASHINGTON, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today, the National Association of Specialty Pharmacy (NASP) announced the addition of three new healthcare veterans to its governing board of directors, welcoming senior executives from Walgreens, Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca. In addition to their new responsibilities representing the interests of over 1,500 corporate and individual NASP members nationwide, Ed Kaleta serves as Walgreens Vice President of Federal Government Relations and U.S. Public Policy; Tolga Tanguler serves as Pfizer Inc.'s Regional President of North America for Rare Disease; and Blaine Squires, RPh serves as AstraZeneca's Executive Director.

"The National Association of Specialty Pharmacy is excited to add leadership representation from three influential players in our industry: Walgreens, Pfizer and AstraZeneca," said Sheila Arquette, Executive Director of NASP. "Ed Kaleta, Tolga Tanguler, and Blaine Squires are three experienced, accomplished and seasoned industry veterans, tasked with elevating the practice of specialty pharmacy, promoting the education and certification of pharmacists, and advocating for public policies that ensure patients have appropriate access to specialty medications on behalf of NASP's multi-stakeholder membership. These three remarkable leaders will be instrumental in helping to ensure patients receive the high-quality, high-touch patient care and support services that are critical to optimally managing and living with complex, life-altering, and often life-threatening diseases. And what's more, that these patients can seek the care they need from the specialty pharmacy of their choosing."

"It's an honor to serve on the board of an organization dedicated to helping our communities deal with the most devastating of diseases," said Kaleta, Walgreens Vice President of Federal Government Relations & U.S. Public Policy. "I believe our pharmacies and pharmacists are the best at what they do, and are vital to the provision and sustainability of healthcare for America. We must ensure that lawmakers understand and recognize their value so that our patients receive the therapy and resources they need to be well."

"I am honored to be elected to the board of the NASP," said Tolga Tanguler, Regional President, North America, Pfizer Rare Disease. "I am certain it will provide new opportunities to partner with other industry leaders to raise the standards of patient engagement and ensure access to treatment options for rare disease patients who often do not have other alternatives."

"Being part of the NASP team is a tangible way for me to connect my professional work to the broader impact of pharmacy across patient, industry and advocacy arenas," said AstraZeneca Executive Director Blaine Squires, RPh. "I will support the NASP efforts to continue this important work with positive and significant outcomes."

About Specialty Pharmacy

Specialty pharmacy provides medications to treat patients with serious, chronic, rare, progressive, or debilitating disease (or fatal if left untreated or undertreated). Examples of these illnesses include cancer, hepatitis C, infectious disease, infertility, Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis, Cystic Fibrosis, organ transplantation, human growth hormone deficiencies, hemophilia, and other bleeding disorders. According to the Drug Channels Institute and other sources, specialty pharmacy drugs will represent 44% of the U.S. drug spend by the year 2020.

About Edward Kaleta: Walgreens, Vice President of Federal Government Relations & U.S. Public Policy

Kaleta leads the federal lobbying and public policy activities for Walgreens, one of the nation's largest drugstore chains. Walgreens operates 8,175 drugstores with a presence in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, along with its omnichannel business, Walgreens.com. Walgreens Specialty Pharmacy provides patients who have chronic, complex and rare health conditions with easy access to their specialty and traditional medications and comprehensive support, including everything from helping patients with medication adherence and therapies to connecting patients with financial assistance programs and providing refill reminder and automatic refill services. Prior to Walgreens, Kaleta served as the Director of the Washington Office for Humana, where he was responsible for navigating the company through the historic health reform legislative effort, as well as tripling the size of Humana's Political Action Committee (PAC). Kaleta's experience also includes serving as Caterpillar's Washington Manager of Governmental Affairs, and as the Chairman and co-founder of the Employers' Coalition on Medicare, a coalition of over 60 companies and organizations that helped ensure favorable employer provisions and final passage of H.R. 1, the Medicare Prescription Drug and Modernization Act of 2003. Kaleta is also a founding member of CCPM, the Coalition for Competitive Pharmaceutical Markets, a coalition which helped provide better access to safe and effective generic pharmaceuticals. The University of Richmond graduate began his career at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He spent over six years in various capacities including Congressional and Public Affairs, ChamberBiz, and the Office of the COO. Kaleta currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Business Government Relations Group and Illinois Group.

About Tolga Tanguler: Pfizer Inc., Regional President, North America for Rare Diseases

Tolga leads an organization of more than 200 colleagues across marketing, sales, access, medical and corporate affairs and a portfolio of 6 assets to ensure they are focused on one objective: to transform patients' lives. A key focus is to ensure that the engagement and experience of rare disease patients and their families are at the forefront of all programs; while ensuring the organization is prepared for the next phase of scientific breakthroughs, including gene therapy. Tolga has more than 15 years of experience in the global pharmaceutical industry, including leadership roles in both developed markets such as the US, Japan and the Nordics and emerging economies including Africa/Middle East and Latin America. Most recently, Tolga was the Vice President, Global Marketing for ELIQUIS. Throughout these various assignments, the organizations led by Tolga were recognized for their rapid growth performance, as well as their strong culture that led to a significant improvement in colleague engagement. Tolga has Bachelor of Science degrees in Economics & Finance from University of Istanbul, and a Masters of Business Administration in Marketing and Supply Chain from Michigan State University. He also has a Post Graduate Degree in Marketing from the University of California. Tolga was recently appointed as a member of the Board of Directors of NASP.

About Blaine Squires, RPh: AstraZeneca, Executive Director

Squires leads AstraZeneca teams that oversee Field Reimbursement Managers, AZ's internal HUB, AZ Access360, as well as all affordability programs including AZ&ME, commercial co-pay programs, and global product donations. He has worked across the healthcare industry from retail pharmacy, home infusion and currently in the pharmaceutical industry, performing a wide range of roles from clinical management of specialty pharmaceuticals, to sales and reimbursement. Squires is known and respected for innovative and strategic thinking around process, with a focus on patient outcomes and therapeutic impact. His pharmaceutical career has included roles at Johnson & Johnson, Genentech, and now AstraZeneca, as well as clinical and business development roles with Apria, Coram Healthcare, as well as several start-up pharmacy companies. Squires received his Bachelor of Pharmacy degree from The University of Texas, Austin and is a licensed pharmacist in the state of Texas.

About National Association of Specialty Pharmacy (NASP)

NASP was founded in 2012 and is the only national trade association representing all stakeholders in the specialty pharmacy industry. The core mission of NASP is to provide educational programs to pharmacists and other healthcare professionals, and to promote specialty pharmacist certification for specialty pharmacy professionals. NASP also serves as an advocate for public policies that ensure patients have appropriate access to specialty medications in tandem with critical services. In addition to providing medications to severely ill patients, specialty pharmacy also focuses on support programs and services to ensure patients realize the maximum clinical benefit from their medication, therapies and services, working to ease the treatment burden for patients, families and caregivers as they work to manage these tough conditions.

NASP President Rebecca Shanahan recently wrote a letter calling on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to curb these below-cost reimbursements to specially pharmacies by PBMs, clarify Medicare definitions, and promote accurate and responsible reimbursement. She also authored an Op-Ed for The Hill, calling on Congress to protect seniors and taxpayers from these unwarranted fees. For more information, visit www.naspnet.org.

Media Contact: Maureen Shanahan | [email protected]

SOURCE National Association of Specialty Pharmacy

Related Links

http://www.naspnet.org


SAN MATEO, Calif., July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- In preparation for back-to-school season, Wonder Workshop announced today that Scholastic Book Fairs, a division of Scholastic, the world's largest publisher and distributor of children's books, will feature two of its Dash & Dot robots in the company's 2017-2018 Scholastic Dollars Catalog, a collection of books, furniture, software and other merchandise that schools can purchase with proceeds from their school book fair. Designed to teach students coding, creative problem solving, and robotics, Dash & Dot are used in more than 12,000 elementary classrooms worldwide and are also featured in the fast-growing Wonder League Robotics Competition, where students design solutions to real-world science and technology challenges by programming and building extensions for the robots.

"Dash & Dot are on a mission to inspire all children to become creators through exploring and pursuing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education. Our collaboration with Scholastic Book Fairs expands access to a fun and engaging onramp to coding and STEM to millions of students," said Vikas Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Wonder Workshop. "Scholastic is a well-respected, mission-oriented company, and we're excited to pair Dash & Dot with their curriculum resources to support teachers as they explore the wonders of robotics and project based learning."

Dash & Dot robots bring the creativity and critical thinking of coding to life for students. The programmable robots nurture students' exploration of STEM principles through activities and language they can understand. With a magic mix of robust hardware and sophisticated software, students as young as five years old can discover a world of learning and fun via lovable robots that encourage problem-solving by exploring the possibilities programming creates.

"Scholastic Book Fairs provides schools and libraries with books and educational materials that foster a lifelong love of learning in students," said Lou Ann Justus, Executive Director of the Scholastic Dollars Catalog. "Our collaboration with Wonder Workshop reflects the growing demand from educators for practical, thoughtful resources that expand access to computer science and provide hands-on creative experiences for young children."

About Wonder Workshop

Based in San Mateo, CA, Wonder Workshop was founded in 2012 by Vikas Gupta, Saurabh Gupta and Mikal Greaves, inventors, designers, programmers and parents with the mission to make coding a new creative tool that is accessible for children from age five and beyond. Wonder Workshop launched Dash & Dot in December 2014 and within its first month, delivered more than $3.5M in robots to 37 countries. Dash & Dot are award-winning, hands-on learning tools that teach K-5 students creative problem solving, coding and robotics. Designed for teachers to use alongside classroom-tested, state standards-aligned curriculum built by fellow educators, Dash & Dot encourage interest in STEM fields at formative ages and across gender lines. The company has currently raised $15.9 million in funding from Madrona Venture Group, CRV, WI Harper, Google Ventures, Bright Success Capital, Maven Ventures, Vikas Gupta, Reza Hussein and Jeff Schox. For more information, visit http://www.makewonder.com.

SOURCE Wonder Workshop

Related Links

http://www.makewonder.com


HOUSTON, July 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- W&T Offshore, Inc. (NYSE: WTI) announced today that it will release its second quarter 2017 financial and operational results after the market closes on Thursday, August 3, 2017. In conjunction with the release, the Company has scheduled a conference call, which will also be broadcast live over the Internet, on Friday, August 4 at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time (9:00 a.m. Central Time).

By Phone: Dial 1-412-902-0030 at least 10 minutes before the call. A telephone replay will be available through August 11, 2017 by dialing 1-201-612-7415 and using the passcode 13666117.



By Webcast: Visit the Investor Relations page of W&T's website at www.wtoffshore.com under "Presentations." A replay will be available shortly after the call.

About W&T Offshore

W&T Offshore, Inc. is an independent oil and natural gas producer with operations offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and has grown through acquisitions, exploration and development. The Company currently has working interests in approximately 52 fields in federal and state waters (50 producing and two fields capable of producing) and has under lease approximately 750,000 gross acres, including approximately 490,000 gross acres on the Gulf of Mexico Shelf and approximately 260,000 gross acres in the deepwater. A majority of the Company's daily production is derived from wells it operates. For more information on W&T Offshore, please visit the Company's website at www.wtoffshore.com

CONTACT: Lisa Elliott Danny Gibbons

Dennard Lascar Associates SVP & CFO

[email protected] [email protected]

713-529-6600 713-624-7326

SOURCE W&T Offshore, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.wtoffshore.com


"I'm thrilled about this new opportunity," said Daniele. "I've always had a love for nonprofits and I'm passionate about continuing that work with New American Funding ." Daniele is a 30-year veteran of the mortgage industry , who spent the past 17 years at Fannie Mae; most recently as a Senior Deputy Director, managing nonprofit relationships and developing strategic plans with Fannie's lending partners.

Initially, Daniele will launch New American Funding's community lending program with select nonprofits in California, Washington, and Arizona but will expand it to every state where the mortgage lender is licensed. The goal is to help first-time homebuyers become sustainable homeowners and to provide borrowers with options to refinance their home.

"This is going to have a tremendous impact," said Daniele. "It equips nonprofits with greater access to a broader suite of loan products, which helps them remain viable, all the while empowering them to better serve their communities."

"This is an ideal union so we're extremely excited to have Zeeda as part of New American Funding's management team," said COO Christy Bunce. "Her industry knowledge and extensive background working with nonprofits will help us shape our Community Lending Division and is in direct alignment with our vision to expand to new levels."

Daniele is from Southern California, where she's active in the community serving on the boards of several nonprofits. In her new position, she'll be based at company headquarters in Orange County.

About New American Funding

New American Funding is a national mortgage banker licensed in 48 states with approximately 130 branch locations that offer a variety of home loan options including: Conventional, FHA, Cash Out, Fixed Rate and Adjustable Rate Mortgages, VA, HARP 2.0, Jumbo, and Reverse Mortgages. The company is a Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae Direct Seller/Servicer, FHA Direct Endorsement, and VA Automatic mortgage lender.

SOURCE New American Funding

Related Links

http://www.newamericanfunding.com


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Fedora Update Notification

FEDORA-2017-b8bb4b86e2

2017-07-18 19:26:12.549660

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Name : php

Product : Fedora 26

Version : 7.1.7

Release : 1.fc26

URL : http://www.php.net/

Summary : PHP scripting language for creating dynamic web sites

Description :

PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. PHP attempts to make it

easy for developers to write dynamically generated web pages. PHP also

offers built-in database integration for several commercial and

non-commercial database management systems, so writing a

database-enabled webpage with PHP is fairly simple. The most common

use of PHP coding is probably as a replacement for CGI scripts.



The php package contains the module (often referred to as mod_php)

which adds support for the PHP language to Apache HTTP Server.



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Update Information:



**PHP version 7.1.7** (06 Jul 2017) **Core:** * Fixed bug php#74738 (Multiple

[PATH=] and [HOST=] sections not properly parsed). (Manuel Mausz) * Fixed bug

php#74658 (Undefined constants in array properties result in broken

properties).

(Laruence) * Fixed misparsing of abstract unix domain socket names. (Sara) *

Fixed bug php#74603 (PHP INI Parsing Stack Buffer Overflow Vulnerability).

(Stas) * Fixed bug php#74101, bug php#74614 (Unserialize Heap Use-After-Free

(READ: 1) in zval_get_type). (Nikita) * Fixed bug php#74111 (Heap buffer

overread (READ: 1) finish_nested_data from unserialize). (Nikita) * Fixed bug

php#74819 (wddx_deserialize() heap out-of-bound read via php_parse_date()).

(Derick) **Date:** * Fixed bug php#74639 (implement clone for DatePeriod and

DateInterval). (andrewnester) **DOM:** * Fixed bug php#69373 (References to

deleted XPath query results). (ttoohey) **Intl:** * Fixed bug php#73473

(Stack

Buffer Overflow in msgfmt_parse_message). (libnex) * Fixed bug php#74705 (Wrong

reflection on Collator::getSortKey and collator_get_sort_key). (Tyson Andre,

Remi) **Mbstring:** * Add oniguruma upstream fix (CVE-2017-9224,

CVE-2017-9226, CVE-2017-9227, CVE-2017-9228, CVE-2017-9229) (Remi, Mamoru

TASAKA) **Opcache:** * Fixed bug php#74663 (Segfault with

opcache.memory_protect and validate_timestamp). (Laruence) * Revert

opcache.enable_cli to default disabled. (Nikita) **OpenSSL:** * Fixed bug

php#74720 (pkcs7_en/decrypt does not work if \x1a is used in content). (Anatol)

* Fixed bug php#74651 (negative-size-param (-1) in memcpy in

zif_openssl_seal()). (Stas) **Reflection:** * Fixed bug php#74673 (Segfault

when cast Reflection object to string with undefined constant). (Laruence)

**SPL:** * Fixed bug php#74478 (null coalescing operator failing with

SplFixedArray). (jhdxr) **FTP:** * Fixed bug php#74598 (ftp:// wrapper ignores

context arg). (Sara) **PHAR:** * Fixed bug php#74386 (Phar::__construct

reflection incorrect). (villfa) **SOAP** * Fixed bug php#74679 (Incorrect

conversion array with WSDL_CACHE_MEMORY). (Dmitry) **Streams:** * Fixed bug

php#74556 (stream_socket_get_name() returns '\0'). (Sara)

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This update can be installed with the "dnf" update program. Use

su -c 'dnf upgrade php' 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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The deceased, identified as Vidisha Ved Baruah (30), was a noted personality in the TV industry and hosted many stage shows as well in Mumbai and other cities.

By Ajay Kumar: A TV host and radio jockey from Assam who resided in Mumbai allegedly committed suicide in an upscale residential colony in Gurugram on Monday evening, police said.

The deceased, identified as Vidisha Ved Baruah (30), was a noted personality in the TV industry and hosted many stage shows as well in Mumbai and other cities. Police said she had come from Mumbai to Gurugram just a day earlier on Sunday with an intention to settle here. Her husband Mitish Baruah was in Mumbai at the time of the incident. Deepak Saharan, DCP (East), Gurugram, told Mail Today that she was found hanging from the ceiling fan of an accommodation she had rented recently.

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"Her father suspected something was wrong as she did not take calls. He approached Gurugram police and gave us her address" Saharan said.

"Her father said in his complaint that Vidisha and Mitish had a love marriage a year ago, but thereafter, they often indulged in quarrels. He feels another quarrel might have prompted her to take the extreme step," Saharan said.

Also read: Four months of Captain's government: 129 farmers commit suicide in 120 days

Also read: Controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik's passport revoked

--- ENDS ---
Paris, July 14 : US President Donald Trump on Friday attended the annual Bastille Day parade here as the guest of honour Trump, who arrived in Paris on Thursday along with his wife Melania, watched the parade from the official gallery at the Place de la Concorde where they were greeted by French First Lady Brigitte Macron, reports Efe news.

President Emmanuel Macron arrived at the gallery later, having travelled down the iconic Champs-Elysees avenue in an open-top military jeep accompanied by his Chief of Defence staff, General Pierre de Villiers.

Flanked by Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and Minister of Defence Florence Parly, the newly elected head of state then stood at attention as the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, was played.

Macron and Trump exchanged words and a handshake -- their meeting, which was organiCed following an invitation from the French leader, was being closely watched by the global media.

Groups of US Army personnel were to take part in the military parade in a gesture that marks the centenary since American troops joined the Allied Powers which included France and the British Empire in their efforts to defeat the belligerents of what became known as the Great War.

Added to this were six US F-16 fighter jets and two F-22s, which staged a fly-over in the path of nine French Air Force Alpha jets.

The parade was due to last two hours and involved 3,720 soldiers, 149 vehicles, 62 motorbikes, 241 mounted soldiers, 63 planes and 29 helicopters.

The Trumps were due to return to Washington shortly after the parade finished.

There was a high security presence across the French capital while the official acts were underway.

Bastille Day celebrations in the southern city of Nice were last year hit by a terror attack that killed 86 people.
Bigg Boss Telugu contestant Mumaith Khan has come under the scanner for drug racket involving Telugu artists.

By India Today Web Desk: Bigg Boss Telugu contestant Mumaith Khan is the latest to come under the scanner of Special Investigation Team (SIT) regarding the drug racket involving Telugu artists. Mumaith is currenly in the Bigg Boss Telugu house, and since she cannot come out till she's evicted, she'll reportedly be served the legal notice inside the house.

According to a The New Indian Express report, the SIT wasn't able to locate Mumaith when they had served notices to other celebrities on July 12 and 13. On July 14, Mumaith who's also a popular Bollywood item girl, took to social media to deny her involvement saying she was yet to receive a summon.

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Notices have been already sent to Tollywood artists like Puri Jagannadh, Ravi Teja, Charmme Kaur, cinematographer Shyam K Naidu, art director Chinna N Dharmarao, P Subbaraju, P Navdeep, Tarun Kumar, A Tanish, according to reports.

Mumaith has acted in Telugu, Hindi, Tamil and Kannada language films.

Also read: Bigg Boss Telugu: Jr NTR says he has watched 'few minutes' of an episode where Salman Khan was hosting

Also read: Junior NTR's Telugu Bigg Boss is the most expensive show ever in Telugu television

--- ENDS ---
New Delhi, July 14 : Ten critically endangered vulture species in the world, including three from India, are set to get the highest degree of protection, according to conservationists.

India, ahead of the international talks in October, has proposed that it would play a leading role in efforts to conserve nature's scavengers, convention organisers said on Friday.

Three of the nine species of vultures in India -- oriental white-backed, slender-billed and long-billed -- are on the brink of extinction.

The Bombay Natural History Society with the assistance of British charity Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is breeding them in captivity.

Ten vulture species, including some critically endangered ones, have been proposed for listing for the highest degree of protection, the United Nations Environment Programme said.

Currently, they are classified as 'Critically Endangered' or 'Endangered' on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of species threatened with extinction.

It said that Iran, at a meeting of the convention's scientific body to decide on the wildlife species to be proposed for listing, recommended the Indian gazelle or chinkara for listing.

The meeting concluded in Bonn on Thursday.

More than 120 countries will gather in Manila in Philippines for the 12th Session of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals or CMS COP12 from October 23-28 to address a range of issues facing the world's endangered wildlife.

A high number of proposals for greater protection under the convention have been tabled for negotiation, including very well-known species such as the chimpanzee, giraffe, leopard, lions and the whale shark.

Countries convening in Manila will also seek to avert a total collapse of vultures in Africa, through a multi-species plan aimed at promoting countries to take urgent action on the ground to conserve these cornerstone species that are critical for providing essential ecosystem services for human health.

Threats such as lead poisoning, underwater noise, unsustainable tourism and renewable energy conflicts with animals will also be at the centre of the intergovernmental negotiations, the UNEP said.

"The particularly high number of animals proposed for protection under the convention is a worrying sign of the decline of international wildlife across the board," an official statement quoting convention Executive Secretary Bradnee Chambers said.

He said urgent action is needed to ensure the survival of these species and CMS COP12 will be a major opportunity for governments collectively to decide how they can cooperate on a way forward.

The Przewalski's horse, a relic from the Ice Age, is the only remaining successor of the wild horse. Fewer than 400 animals live in the wild.

The Gobi bear, cousin of the brown bear and the only bear living in a desert, and the African wild ass, the most endangered equid in the world, may be granted better protection at COP12.

Illegal killing of birds threatens populations between Europe and Africa and an intergovernmental task force working over the last three years has made good progress and the model is proposed to be replicated in Asia, the convention organisers said.
Gurugram, July 14 : The Haryana government has decided to provide 24-hour power supply to Gurugram district from August 15 onwards, for which a blueprint has already been prepared, an official said on Friday.

Public Works (Buildings and Roads) Minister Rao Narbir, who was visiting villages in Badshahpur Assembly constituency, disclosed this and added that Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar would make an announcement to this effect on the occasion of Independence Day.

He also said that the Gurugram railway station would be modernised and the Dhankot-Gurugram railway station would be upgraded to international level with all modern facilities on the pattern of the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi.

The minister said that the foundation stone of the nearly 5-km-long Badshahpur elevated highway would be laid before August 15. After its construction, commuters would be able to travel from Rajiv Chowk to Sohna in just about 18 minutes.

The minister launched various developmental projects in different villages on Friday, including streets in Khandsa village at a cost of Rs 2.84 crore, roads in Jhanjhrola village at a cost of about Rs 79 lakh, roads, and boundary wall of a cemetery, community centre in Mandkola village at a cost of about Rs 95 lakh, and other development work in Harsaru village at a cost of Rs 1.21 crore.
New Delhi, July 14 : A delegation led by Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee (DPCC) President Ajay Maken on Friday met Lieutenant Governor (LG) Anil Baijal and urged him not to evict any more street vendors in the city.

Maken proposed to the Lt. Governor that Rs 600 crore could be collected in taxes by giving vending licence to over five lakh street vendors in the city, an official statement said.

The DPCC President alleged that the Delhi government was harassing street vendors and corruption running into crores of rupees was taking place in the name of eviction.

The delegation, which included members of the National Association of Street Vendors of India, Street Vendors Associations of Delhi and senior Congress leaders, also submitted a memorandum to the Lt. Governor on "harassment" being faced by the street vendors.

Maken requested Baijal to reinstate nearly 15,000 street vendors, who had been evicted from 17 different areas of Delhi in June and urged him to intervene in the eviction process to save the livelihood of lakhs of street vendors.

The senior Congress leader later said the Lt. Governor had assured that he would take appropriate action in the matter.
Washington, July 15 : A June 2016 meeting involving Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer who allegedly had compromising information about former presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, was attending by at least eight people, the media reported.

The revelation came after Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist who once served in the Soviet army, confirmed on Friday to The Washington Post that he was present at the meeting on June 9, 2016.

So far acknowledged in attendance: Donald Trump Jr.; the President's son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner; former campaign chairman Paul.J. Manafort; Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya; Akhmetshin; and publicist Rob Goldstone, who helped set up the meeting.

A source familiar with the circumstances told CNN there were at least two other people in the room as well, a translator and a representative of the Russian family who had asked Goldstone to set up the meeting. The source did not provide the names.

On Friday, Akhmetshin told The Washington Post that he was on his own in New York when he got a phone call from Veselnitskaya.

The two then met for lunch at restaurant near Trump Tower.

Akhmetshin, who holds dual US-Russian citizenship, said that the lawyer initially sought his advice on what to say at the meeting before finally asking him to join her for the discussion with the oldest son of then-candidate Donald Trump.

"I was literally the only person wearing jeans and T-shirt" at the meeting, Akhmetshin told the daily.

Regarding the substance, Akhmetshin said that in the course of her work for clients, Veselnitskaya had discovered that a US hedge fund which "seemed linked to the (Democratic National Committee)" was operating in violation of Russian tax and securities law.

He adds that Veselnitskaya "left a document behind" after the meeting with Donald Trump Jr.

Akhmetshin assured that his only connection with government service was the two years he spent in the Soviet army as a young conscript in a unit whose responsibilities included counterintelligence "I never worked for the Russian government. I served as a soldier, for two years, like tens of millions of Russian young men who were drafted. I am proud of my military service. At no time have I ever worked for Russian government or any of its agencies. I was not an intelligence officer. Never," he told The Washington Post.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump Jr. released an email chain relating to the conversation he had with Veselnitskaya.

The emails show that Trump Jr. agreed to meet with someone who was a "Russian government attorney" about "very high level and sensitive information" that would "incriminate" Clinton, reports CNN.

Veselnitskaya has denied she had provided any such information.
New Delhi, July 15 : Manish Malhotra will be bringing the curtain down on the India Couture Week (ICW) 2017, and many expect the show to be high on Bollywood glamour. The ace designer takes pride in the fact that he is the first to introduce the concept of showstoppers in Indian fashion, something for which he was initially criticised.

And he is absolutely unapologetic about the element of glamour that he infuses in his clothes.

"I was the first designer to introduce the concept of showstoppers to Indian fashion. Although I got criticised for it back then, it has become a trend for most designer showcases now. This tradition will prevail at my next show as well and we will reveal the showstoppers soon," Malhotra told IANS when asked if the audience will get to see another "high on Bollywood show" at the fashion gala.

"I am unapologetic about the element of glamour in my clothes. I love that I am able to bring some element of fantasy to a bride's special day and that is the creative foundation of my collections," added the designer, who has created ensembles for celebrities like Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Reese Witherspoon.

He says he chooses to look at the element of glamour as keenly as every other detail in his outfits.

"It is intrinsic to each of my designs and is part of the DNA of the label. Over the years, I have seen that my clients for bridal couture want to wear outfits that reflect their confident personalities while also staying true to their traditions.

"I have always maintained that my clothes are designed to complement the wearer's personality. Hence, a touch of playfulness to a couture outfit brings out its versatility and can be worn at an event, be it in Mumbai or Milan," he said.

His forthcoming show on July 30 at the conclusion of the week-long event will reflect the gradually changing design language of the label. From his signature glamour coming together with intricate craftsmanship and the confluence of traditional and western silhouettes, the collection looks at bridal couture through a global lens.

Talking more about his line, he said: "Over the last couple of years, my collections have come to mirror the personality of the women for whom they have been designed. Keeping this in mind, my upcoming collection will marry traditional Indian details with more versatile and contemporary silhouettes for the modern woman and man."

With his fourth finale at ICW, does the feeling of taking care of the final show still gives him goosebumps?

"The Manish Malhotra label is now 12 years old and, even today, every new collection showcase brings with it the same level of eagerness and excitement that it did in my first ever show.

"For someone who is only focused on his work, this feeling is indescribable, but also most rewarding. Every collection denotes the culmination of a creative journey as well as the beginning of a new design language," he said.

The designer is known for weaving traditional Indian colours, craftsmanship, textures and embroidery together to create glamorous ensembles.

He thinks that the fusion of Indian and western silhouettes is influencing today's designing.

"It is helping us create a fashion language that is so distinctly Indian. Where else in the world would you see a traditional outfit being so effortlessly paired with modern accents to create a brand new sartorial culture?"

"From pairing a cropped blouse with a sari to a lehenga reminiscent of the flapper-era and wearing tunics with cigarette pants, Indian couture presents such a beautiful array of choices for the modern and global citizen," he said.

The fashion week will take place at Taj Palace hotel here.

(Nivedita can be contacted at nivedita.s@ians.in)
New York, July 15 : In a step towards making robots more suitable for daily chores, researchers have developed a new technology that enables machines to make sense of 3D objects in a richer and more human-like way.

Beside helping it recognise something, the new technology also helps robots fill in the blind spots in its field of vision, to reconstruct the parts it cannot see.

"That has the potential to be invaluable in a lot of robotic applications," said Ben Burchfiel from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

A robot that clears dishes off a table, for example, must be able to adapt to an enormous variety of bowls, platters and plates in different sizes and shapes, left in disarray on a cluttered surface.

Humans can glance at a new object and intuitively know what it is, whether it is right side up, upside down or sideways, in full view or partially obscured by other objects.

Even when an object is partially hidden, we mentally fill in the parts we cannot see.

The robot perception algorithm that Burchfiel and George Konidaris from Brown University developed and can simultaneously guess what a new object is, and how it is oriented, without examining it from multiple angles first.

It can also "imagine" any parts that are out of view, the researchers said.

A robot with this technology would not need to see every side of a teapot, for example, to know that it probably has a handle, a lid and a spout, and whether it is sitting upright or off-kilter on the stove.

The researchers said their approach, which was presented at the 2017 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, makes fewer mistakes and is three times faster than the best current methods.

The researchers trained their algorithm on a dataset of roughly 4,000 complete 3D scans of common household objects -- an assortment of bathtubs, beds, chairs, desks, dressers, monitors, nightstands, sofas, tables and toilets.

Each 3D scan was converted into tens of thousands of little cubes, or voxels, stacked on top of each other like LEGO blocks to make them easier to process.

The algorithm learned categories of objects by combing through examples of each one and figuring out how they vary and how they stay the same, using a version of a technique called probabilistic principal component analysis, the researchers said.
Bhubaneswar, July 16 : With heavy rains triggering flash floods in parts of Rayagada and Kalahandi districts, the Odisha government on Sunday sought the help of the army and the air force to rescue the marooned persons and urged the Centre to provide four helicopters to intensify relief and rescue operations.

After holding an emergency meeting here with officials, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik said due to continuous downpour the water level of Nagabali and Kalyani rivers had risen and many places of Kalyansinghpur block in Rayagada district and Kalahandi district were inundated.

The state government sought the help of the army and the Indian Air Force to evacuate the marooned villagers. The IAF choppers will be used in Kalyansinghpur block, where people are trapped on rooftops of submerged houses.

The Chief Minister said while the situation is being closely monitored by senior officials, the Odisha Disaster Rapid Action Force, Central Reserve Police Force and fire services units have been rushed to expedite rescue operations.

"With prompt response we have been able to rescue most people affected by flash floods in Nagabali and Kalyani rivers in Raygada district," tweeted Patnaik.

Several bridges, including a railway overbridge, were washed away in the floods caused by incessant rains in the two districts. Besides, major roads were damaged by floodwaters.

"We are closely monitoring the situation. We are trying to evacuate the stranded people as several areas have been cut off and people have taken shelter on rooftops," said Special Relief Commissioner Bishnupada Sethi.

Bhubaneswar Meteorological Department Director Sarat Sahu said a low pressure area had formed over northwest Bay of Bengal off north Odisha.

The system is likely to further intensify into depression, causing heavy rain in several parts of the state, he added.
New Delhi, July 16 : The Indian Air Force has kept four Mi-17 helicopters ready for rescue and relief operations in Odisha where heavy rains triggered flash floods in parts of Rayagada and Kalahandi districts, a defence statement said on Sunday.

"Four helicopters are on standby awaiting weather clearance," said the Defence Ministry in the statement.

The Odisha government sought the help of the army and the air force to rescue the marooned persons and urged the Central government to provide four helicopters to intensify relief and rescue operations.

Several bridges, including a railway overbridge, were washed away in the floods caused by incessant rains in the two districts. Besides, major roads were damaged by floodwaters.

The Defence Ministry said that since it is not possible to rescue them through boat by Orissa Disaster Rapid Action Force and fire services, the assistance of Indian Air Force is required for rescue and airdrop of relief material in the affected areas of Rayagada district.

"Four helicopters have been requisitioned. State Emergency Operation Center in Special Relief Commissioner Office is tracking the situation closely," the statement said.
Washington, July 17 : The US Secret Service (USSS) is pushing back on Donald Trump's attorney's remarks that there was nothing questionable going on at a meeting between the President's eldest son a Russian lawyer.

On Sunday, the President's attorney Jay Sekulow told ABC News: "Well, I wonder why the Secret Service, if this was nefarious, why the Secret Service allowed these people in?...The President had Secret Service protection at that point, and that raised a question with me."

After Sekulow's comments aired on ABC, the Secret Service responded that it would not have checked out the participants of the meeting because Donald Trump Jr. was not under their protection at the time of the meeting last June.

"Donald Trump Jr. was not a protectee of the USSS in June 2016," the agency told CNN in a statement on Sunday evening.

"Thus we would not have screened anyone he was meeting with at that time."

The meeting, which took place in Trump Tower in New York City, involved Trump Jr., the President's son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, publicist Rob Goldstone, Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin and at least two other people, sources familiar with the meeting told CNN.

The meeting has drawn widespread scrutiny since The New York Times first reported about its existence last week.

In the wake of the Times' report, Trump Jr. posted a series of emails on Twitter between himself and Goldstone, an acquaintance who pointed to the Russia attorney as the source of potentially damaging information on Hillary Clinton as "part of Russia and its government's support for Trump", reports CNN.

The President has maintained having no knowledge of the meeting.

On Sunday night, Sekulow told CNN that Trump did not know about the meeting, saying: "The President was not engaged in this, was not aware of it."
Bhubaneswar, July 17 : Even as Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Monday said the flood situation in Rayagada and Kalahandi districts of Odisha is improving, the Met Office warned of likely heavy rains in the next 24 hours in the state.

The Meteorological Centre in Bhubaneswar said a well-marked low-pressure area has been formed over the north-west and west-central Bay of Bengal as well as the coastal areas of Odisha and north Andhra Pradesh, which is likely to intensify into a depression during the next 24 hours.

"Heavy to very heavy rains at a few places with extremely heavy rains at one or two places in south Odisha districts and heavy to very heavy rains at one or two places in north districts is likely during 24 hours," said a weather bulletin.

Issuing a Local Cautionary Signal Number Three warning for all ports in Odisha, the Met Office said strong gusty surface winds from north-easterly direction with speeds reaching 45-55 km per hour and gusting up to 65 kmph are likely to prevail along and off the Odisha coast.

It advised fishermen not to venture into the sea since the conditions there would be rough to very rough.

Meanwhile, Indian Air Force choppers were pressed into rescue and relief operations in Kalyansinghpur block, where people are trapped on rooftops of submerged houses.

The Rayagada district administration started serving cooked food to those sheltered in schools.

It also declared closure of schools and colleges for three days in Kalyansinghpur block in view of the flood situation.

As many as 10 health camps are functioning in Rayagada block and five medical teams providing their services at all relief camps.

"Closely monitoring flood situation; every effort being made to reach the affected with food, medicines and supplies. Air sorties in full swing," tweeted the Chief Minister.

Several roads and bridges have been damaged in the floods.

An East Coast Railway release said train services were severely affected on the Rayagada-Titlagarh section as a bridge between Theruvali and Singapur was washed away.

Health Minister Pratap Jena held a review meeting with officials and directed them to ensure the flood-affected people were taken care of.
Congress hit back at the BJP and called this a nervous gimmick by the ruling party.

By Pooja Shali: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) targeted the Congress today over a document meant for the Parliament session. BJP alleged the Congress strategy was to stall the proceedings of the session by raising a series of controversial issue.

India Today accessed a 30-page document that lists a series of key issues ranging from mob violence to farmer deaths and Pakistan aggression on border.

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"This is the dossier of disruption. PM Modi spoke against violence over cow vigilante thrice, yet Congress wants to bring up Junaid / Akhlaq issues to stall Parliament. These were tragic incidents and are condemnable but why use them against Parliament proceedings," said BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra.

Patra added, "Why is Ayub Pandith lynching not highlighted. Why have Pakistan attacks been mentioned only as reference and not as priority?"

BJP also tried to corner the Opposition asking why are party workers protesting against a film supposedly based on Indira Gandhi.

The Congress hit back at the BJP and called this a nervous gimmick by the ruling party. The party accepted that this document was for internal circulation to discuss amongst party leaders about issues to be raised in the session, if required.

However, responding to Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala, Patra retaliated claiming, "The devil lies in the details. Communal polarisation is the only issue for them, why avoid other issues that the government is keen to discuss during the session?"

ALSO READ | Minorities and mosquitoes: Congress's 40-page dossier reveals its Parliament plans

GST means 'Going Stronger Together', says PM Modi on Day 1 of Parliament session

ALSO WATCH | Samajwadi and Congress party members demand raise in salaries amidst chaos in Parliament

--- ENDS ---
New Delhi, July 17 : Praising India's role as the largest contributor to UN peacekeeping operations, especially in Africa, the US on Monday said the designation of New Delhi as Washington's major defence partner further underscores the importance of the two nations as net security providers in the global arena.

US Charge d'Affaires MaryKay Carlson, speaking at a welcome reception to mark US-India Peacekeeping Cooperation in Africa, said both the US and India share an abiding commitment to their partnerships with African nations, and "we are proud to be working together to build security capacity on the continent of Africa", according to a US Embassy press release.

On India's role in peacekeeping in Africa, she said: "Over the past 50 years, no country has contributed more to UN peacekeeping. Over 180,000 Indian troops have served in 48 of the UN's 69 peacekeeping missions - a higher proportion than any other country - with many of these missions having been in sub-Saharan Africa."

On the "transformation of the US-India bilateral relationship into a global partnership", Carlson said: "From countering terrorism and protecting the global commons to exploring space and expanding trade, the US and India are working together not only for the benefit of our two nations' citizens but also to improve lives across the globe."

"The designation this year of India as a Major Defense Partner of the United States further underscores the importance of our two nations as net security providers in the global arena," she said, adding that the US-India Peacekeeping Cooperation in Africa is "a great example of what we are doing together".

Referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Washington visit, she said: "Three weeks ago, President Trump and Prime Minister Modi reaffirmed in Washington that our 'close partnership' is 'central to peace and stability'. The bold vision articulated by the two leaders - 'Prosperity through Partnership' - serves as the guiding principle for every aspect of our cooperation.

"Today we commemorate another chapter in US-Indian cooperation, by working together with our African partners to build and enhance UN peacekeeping capacity," she said, adding that the goal of this training programme, now in its second year, is to build capacity at a time when the need for well-trained peacekeepers is more critical than ever, according to the release.
New Delhi, July 17 : Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi will hold a 'Kisan Aakrosh' rally in Rajasthan's Banswara district on Wednesday as a part of his visits to all poll-bound BJP-ruled states.

The rally will take place at Guru Govind Singh College Ground in Banswara, the Congress said on Monday.

He will raise issues pertaining to farmers' distress and farm loan waivers at the rally.

After Rajasthan, Gandhi is scheduled to hold rallies in other Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, said the statement.
Mumbai, July 17 : As many as 287 of the total 288 legislators in Maharashtra and one BJP Rajya Sabha MP voted in the Presidential elections on Monday, an official said.

Kshitij H. Thakur, the Bahujan Vikas Agdhadi MLA from Nala Sopara in Palghar, is presently abroad and hence could not vote.

Bharatiya Janata Party MP Sanjay Kakade voted in Mumbai, while all other 48 Lok Sabha and 18 Rajya Sabha members cast their votes in New Delhi where the Parliament session got underway on Monday.

Earlier on Monday morning, polling began on a brisk note and continued throughout the day at the assembly building amid tight security.

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, his Cabinet colleagues, senior BJP leader and former Minister Eknath Khadse, Leader of Opposition Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil and former Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan, Nationalist Congress Party leaders Ajit Pawar and Jayant Patil were among those who cast their votes.

Besides, two NCP legislators, who are currently lodged in jail on corruption-related offences, were given special permission by the courts to exercise their franchise.

The contest is between National Democratic Alliance nominee Ram Nath Kovind and opposition candidate and former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar.

The results will be announced on July 20.
Canberra, July 18 : Australia will create a new super-ministry modelled after the UK Home Office to oversee all its domestic national security agencies, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced on Tuesday.

The Home Affairs ministry, to be headed by incumbent Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, will manage security agencies including police and intelligence, reports the BBC.

Turnbull described it as the most significant reform of national security arrangements "in more than 40 years".

"The new portfolio will be similar to the United Kingdom's Home Office arrangement, a federation, if you will, of border and security agencies," he told the media.

"Let me be quite clear, this is not a US-style Department of Homeland Security."

In explaining the distinction, Turnbull said each agency will "retain their current statutory independence", the BBC reported.

The portfolio will oversee major agencies including the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Border Force.

Turnbull said the new ministry will allow Australia to better respond to future security threats.

"We cannot take an 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' approach to security arrangements," he said.

"Not least because our adversaries are agile and nimble, constantly adapting and evolving to defeat our defences. We need more enduring and better integrated arrangements."

He said he expects the ministry overhaul to be completed by July 2018.

On Monday, Turnbull announced the Australian military would be given broad new powers to respond to domestic terrorist attacks.
New Delhi, July 18 : The Lok Sabha on Tuesday witnessed acrimonious scenes over several issues, including farmers' plight and incidents involving cow vigilantes, forcing the Speaker to adjourn the House for the day.

Earlier, the House was adjourned soon after it met in the morning, on the second day of the monsoon session.

Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge wanted to raise the plight of farmers but Speaker Sumitra Mahajan did not allow the issue to be discussed during the Question Hour.

"Please raise your issues during Zero Hour," Mahajan said.

But the Congress, the Left, RJD and TMC members were on their feet. They started shouting slogans against the government and trooped near the Speaker's podium holding placards in their hands.

RJD member Jay Prakash Narayan Yadav was heard raising the issue of misuse of central agencies to target political opponents.

Amid the noisy scenes, Mahajan adjourned the House till 12 noon.

The scene was no different when the House met again, with the opposition members rushing towards the Speaker's podium to interrupt the proceeding.

Some members were holding placards that read: "Gau mata to bahana hai, karz maafi se dhyan hatana hai" and "Vijay Mallya ko bhagaya, kisano ko rulaya."

BJP members from Karnataka, who earlier held a protest near Mahatma Gandhi's statue in Parliament House complex, were also seen holding placards.

They wanted to raise the issue of DIG (Prisons) D. Roopa, who was transferred by the Congress government in Karnataka after her expose on AIADMK leader V.S. Sasikala being provided special facilities and services inside Bengaluru prison.

Amid the noisy scenes, the government introduced three bills.

The bills introduced were the Requisitioning and Acquisition of Immovable Property (Amendment) Bill, 2017, the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (Amendment) Bill, 2017 and the Indian Institute of Petroleum and Energy Bill, 2017.

After the bills were introduced, Mahajan adjourned the House for the day.
Mumbai, July 18 : Actor Varun Dhawan has apologised for his "Nepotism rocks" act at the IIFA Awards in New Jersey, that created a stir over social media last week.

Varun, son of veteran filmmaker David Dhawan, along with filmmaker Karan Johar and actor Saif Ali Khan, sparked the controversy over the nepotism debate at the awards gala. Later, all three of them received flak on social media with twitteraties calling their act "disappointing".

"I express my apology and regret... I am extremely sorry if I have offended or hurt anyone with that act," Varun tweeted on Tuesday.

Karan and Saif, who were hosting the gala, revisited the much-talked about nepotism issue that started in Bollywood when actress Kangana Ranaut branded Karan as a "flagbearer of nepotism" on his chat show "Koffee With Karan".

When Varun joined the two actors on stage at the Metlife Stadium to receive the Best Performance in a Comic Role for "Dishoom", Saif joked that the actor had made it big in the industry because of his father.

"You are here because of your papa," Saif quipped.

Varun said: "And you're here because of your mummy (veteran actress Sharmila Tagore)."

Karan then promptly added: "I am here because of my papa (late filmmaker Yash Johar)."

They then said in unison: "Nepotism rocks".

Later on, a string of criticism followed over Twitter, describing what the personalities said was unfunny and joking about Kangana in her absence was unfair.
Shimla, July 18 : Massive protests continued in Himachal Pradesh on Tuesday over the gang rape and murder of a schoolgirl in Shimla district. The family of the victim suspect that the 'real culprits', who belong to high-profile families, have gotten away 'scot-free'.

Last week, the state government agreed to recommend a CBI probe into the case.

"Earlier we were told that the accused belonged to high-profile families and they were on the run," the victim's eldest sister told reporters in Kotkhai town.

Suddenly police arrested six people and four of them were labourers -- two belonging to Uttarakhand and two from Nepal, she said.

"We are demanding justice for our sister. Our protests will continue till the real culprits are apprehended," she added.

Police say the 16-year-old girl was offered a lift in a vehicle by the accused on July 4 when she was returning home from school. On the way, the accused raped and murdered her in a nearby forest. Her body was found two days later, police said.

The arrested persons are prime accused Rajinder Singh, who offered her the lift, Ashish Chauhan, Subhash Bisht, Deepak Kumar, Surat Singh and Lokjan.

The police said that the prime accused had developed a familiarity with the victim, named Gudia or a child, as he offered her lifts twice earlier.

The victim's father questioned the delay in handing over the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

"We were told that the case has been handed over to the CBI. But no CBI official has so far started investigation in the case," he said.

He also expressed apprehensions over the involvement of the arrested Nepalese in the case.

"The Nepalese normally disappear after committing crime. Why they preferred to stay (at the crime spot) for days together. It seems police are shielding the main accused and they have arrested others to cover-up the case," he added.

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 people belonging to 25 panchayats gathered at Kotkhai, 54 km from the state capital, and staged a protest, demanding justice for the victim. Similar protests were also held in the state capital, which saw a large attendance of college students.

Sensing the growing public outrage, the state government on July 14 agreed to recommend a CBI probe into the case.

"Keeping in view the sensitivity in the gang rape and murder case and to remove all doubts, if any, the government has decided to refer the matter to the CBI," an official statement quoted Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh as saying.
New Delhi, July 18 : BSP chief Mayawati on Tuesday accused the BJP of practising "caste- and religion-based politics for political gains" and alleged that its members had prevented her from raising in the Rajya Sabha the issue of atrocities on Dalits and minorities.

"The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) is practising caste- and religion-based politics for political gains from the day it came to power (in May 2014). Such environment is in extreme in BJP-ruled states," the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader wrote in a letter to Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari in which she also said that she was resigning from the Upper House.

The letter was released to the media after she met Ansari and handed over her resignation from the upper house.

"When I had begun speaking about the atrocities against Dalits, members of the ruling party (BJP) started interrupting and disturbing me. If I cannot speak for the rights of the Dalits, then I have no right to continue as a member of the Rajya Sabha," the former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and Dalit leader said.

"Downheartedly, I am taking the decision to resign from the Rajya Sabha. I have dedicated my life for the uplift of the poor, Dalits, tribes, backwards, Muslims, and other minorities groups."

She said BJP ministers created nuisance by raising their voice and shouting slogans in the house in order to disturb her while she was speaking on the important issue of atrocities against Dalits.

"Instead of pacifying the members of the ruling party, the Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha asked me to curtail my speech, citing it was exceeding the time limit of three minutes," Mayawati said in her letter.

Mayawati was speaking in the Rajya Sabha about anti-Dalit violence in Uttar Pradesh's Saharanpur district, when Deputy Chairman P.J. Kurien asked her to cut short her speech.

The BSP leader apprised the Deputy Chairman that there was no time limit mentioned in the rule book of Parliament and that she could not speak anything in her three-minute speech due to disturbances.

In her letter, Mayawati also mentioned that when Kurien sought to stop her, she said: "If I am not allowed to talk, if I cannot represent the section of society I belong to, if I am not allowed to put across my views on atrocities on Dalits, then there is no point in staying in the house. I will resign."

Kurien did not allow her to speak further on the issue.

She also apprised the Rajya Sabha Chairman that she had resigned as Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister in 2003 after serving for 15 months, as she could not accept interference of the BJP ideology in the then coalition government.
New York, July 19 : The ride-sharing company Uber was sued on Tuesday by disability rights groups for discriminating passengers with mobility disability in New York City.

In the proposed class-action complaint, Uber was accused of violating New York City Human Rights Law because 99.9 per cent of its more than 58,000 vehicles in the city are unusable by people in wheelchairs, Xinhua reported.

"Uber purports to have some accessible vehicles in its fleet, but passengers attempting to use Uber's accessible service face extended wait times, or are still denied access to the service altogether," the complaint said.

The 31-page lawsuit was filed in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan by Disability Rights Advocates, a national nonprofit legal center, on behalf of advocacy groups and individuals including the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled, Taxis for All Campaign, Disabled in Action of Metropolitan New York, Valerie Joseph, and Gabriela Amari.

The case followed earlier lawsuits by civil rights groups in Chicago and Washington D.C. accusing Uber of failing to provide access to those in wheelchairs.

Uber said in a statement that its "technology has expanded access to reliable transportation options for all riders, including those with disabilities and has enabled people with disabilities to earn income in new ways."

"While there is certainly more work to be done, we will continue advocating for a solution that offers affordable, reliable transportation to those who need a wheelchair accessible vehicle," the company said in an email.

In August 2016, Uber NYC launched a pilot to provide UberX WAV to riders in wheelchair with the goal of expanding service over time. The company said it currently has nearly 200 WAV (wheelchair access vehicles) in New York City.
San Francisco/Beijing, July 19 : To help expand China's self-driving technology, Microsoft has decided to join leading Internet search provider Baidu to take the technical development and adoption of autonomous driving worldwide.

As a member of the Apollo alliance, Microsoft will provide global scale for Apollo outside of China with the Microsoft Azure Cloud.

Announced by Baidu in April this year, Apollo is an open platform that provides a comprehensive, secure and reliable solution that supports all major features and functions of an autonomous vehicle.

"We're excited to partner with Baidu to take a giant step in helping automotive manufacturers and suppliers fully realise the promise of autonomous driving," Kevin Dallas, corporate vice president, Microsoft, said in a statement late on Tuesday.

As part of the partnership, Baidu and Microsoft plan to explore opportunities to deliver connected vehicle solutions and unique customer experiences that aim to digitally transform the autonomous driving industry.

"By applying our global cloud AI, machine learning, and deep neural network capabilities to that data, we can accelerate the work already being done to make autonomous vehicles safer," Dallas added.

According to a McKinsey research, up to 15 per cent of new cars sold in 2030 will be fully autonomous.

"We are excited to have Microsoft as part of the Apollo alliance. Our goal with Apollo is to provide an open and powerful platform to the automotive industry to further the goal of autonomous vehicles," said Baidu President Ya-Qin Zhang.

"By using Azure, our partners outside of China will have access to a trustworthy and secure public cloud, enabling them to focus on innovating instead of building their own cloud-based infrastructure," he added.

More than 50 partners from a wide range of sectors have joined the Apollo alliance, including global navigation and mapping service provider TomTom, tier-one suppliers Bosch and Continental, and Southeast Asia's leading ride-hailing platform Grab.

Microsoft has already been working with leaders in the automotive industry to help manufacturers ingest huge volumes of sensor and usage data from connected vehicles and apply that data to deliver actionable intelligence.

Companies like BMW, Ford, Renault-Nissan, Toyota and Volvo are all using or have announced plans to adopt Microsoft's intelligent cloud technology to help with services like driver assist, predictive maintenance and voice-controlled media.
Speaking in Lok Sabha today, Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav claimed to have knowledge of China burying nuclear weapons in Pakistan with the aim of attacking India.

By India Today Web Desk: Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav today claimed knowledge of China joining hands with Pakistan to attack India. Yadav, a known China hawk and a former defence minister, also said that the Narendra Modi government must reverse its position on Tibet and should support its independence.

Speaking in the Lok Sabha, Mulayam Singh Yadav said that he has received information that China has buried nuclear weapons in an area inside Pakistan and plans to use these weapons to target India. Indian intelligence agencies "would know better", the SP leader hastened to add.

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Yadav's comments came against the backdrop of the ongoing military standoff in Doklam where for nearly a month now, soldiers from the Indian and Chinese armies have been engaged in an eyeball-to-eyeball face off.

Yadav went on to denounce China as India's "biggest opponent" and said that India today is "facing a big danger" from Beijing.

"China is India's biggest opponent. What has the government done? In Kashmir, the Chinese army has allied with the Pakistan army," Yadav said. "I have been cautioning the central government for years. China has joined hands with Pakistan. It has made full preparation to attack India."

In a reference to the Dokalam standoff, Mulayam added that it was India's responsibility to protect Bhutan. China is trying to capture Sikkhim and Bhutan and Beijing's preparation to do that are on in full swing, Yadavn went on to say.

India has a responsibility to protect Bhutan and Tibet, Yadav also said, adding that India made a mistake by recognising Tibet as part of China. The Modi government must change India's position on Tibet and must support its independence, Yadav added.

(With inputs from PTI)

ALSO READ | Now, China moves tonnes of military equipment to Tibet. Should India be scared?

ALSO READ | Beijing does not fear war: Is China gearing for battle over Doklam standoff?

ALSO WATCH | India has shown considerable maturity to China's provocations: Ex-Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran

--- ENDS ---
Islamabad, July 19 : With China and the US mired in their own issues, India and Pakistan must have a dialogue to de-escalate escalating tensions along the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir, a leading Pakistani newspaper said on Wednesday.

"Ultimately, the Pakistan-India conundrum will have to be addressed by the two countries themselves. Dialogue is the only path that the two sides ought to consider," the Dawn said in an editorial.

It said the casualties on the Pakistani side due to Indian firing and shelling "suggest a disproportionate escalation in violence by India".

It quoted Pakistani Director General of Military Operations Maj Gen Sahir Mirza as warning his Indian counterpart that Pakistan could consider choking Indian security forces' supply lines across the Line of Control (LoC).

"The unusual Pakistani warning is likely an attempt to signal to India that it has drifted perilously close to red lines in the range of violence that has become a worrying norm along the LoC this year."

The Dawn accused Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of looking to blame external factors for the continuing unrest in Jammu and Kashmir.

"The sensible approach would be for high-level political and diplomatic contact between the two countries," it said.

"It is apparent that the overall poor state of the bilateral relationship has allowed security problems to fester.

"A bold political statement between the two countries could go some way towards ending the recent cycle of violence and help put the two sides back on the path to dialogue."
Shimla, July 19 : In a twist to the sensational gang-rape and murder of a schoolgirl in Himachal Pradesh, the prime suspect allegedly murdered a fellow accused in the case in the police lock-up on Wednesday, the police said.

Rajinder Singh allegedly killed Surat Singh, a Nepalese, by smashing his head on the floor, a police official here told IANS.

He said what caused Rajinder Singh to kill Surat Singh is yet to be ascertained.

"Both of them had a scuffle over some issue and Surat got grievous head injuries. He was taken to a nearby hospital where he was declared dead," the police official added.

As the incident in Kotkhai police lock-up, around 54 km from the state capital, came to light, a large number of locals gathered and forcibly entered the police station, assaulting police personnel for their lapses in the killing of one of the six accused of the girl's gangrape and murder.

The mob ransacked the police station and didn't allow critically injured policemen to be taken to a hospital for treatment.

Massive protests continued in Shimla district since the murder of a schoolgirl.

The family of the girl suspect that the "real culprits", who it says belong to high-profile families, have gotten away scot-free.

Last week, the state government agreed to recommend a CBI probe into the case.

"Earlier, we were told that the accused belonged to high-profile families and they were on the run," the girl's eldest sister told reporters in Kotkhai town.

Suddenly, the police arrested six persons, four of whom were labourers -- two from Uttarakhand and two from Nepal, she said.

"We are demanding justice for our sister. Our protests will continue till the real culprits are apprehended," she added.

The police say the 16-year-old girl was offered a lift in a vehicle by the accused on July 4 when she was returning home from school. On the way, they raped and murdered her in a nearby forest. Her body was found two days later.

The arrested persons are prime accused Rajinder Singh, who offered her the lift, Ashish Chauhan, Subhash Bisht, Deepak Kumar, Surat Singh and Lokjan.

The police said that the prime accused had developed a familiarity with the victim, as he offered her lifts twice earlier.

The victim's father questioned the delay in handing over the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

"We were told that the case has been handed over to the CBI. But no CBI official has so far started investigation in the case," he said.
Islamabad, July 19 : Pakistan on Wednesday summoned the Indian Deputy High Commissioner and lodged a formal protest over the death of two civilians in what it said was firing by Indian troops across the LoC a day earlier.

The civilians, including a woman, were killed on Tuesday in firing by Indian forces in Barho and Tandar sectors, a Foreign Office statement said.

The statement said six other persons were injured in the Indian firing.

The Indian diplomat was summoned by the Director General of the South Asia Division at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mohammad Faisal, who "condemned the unprovoked ceasefire violations," a Ministry statement said.

"The deliberate targeting of civilians is indeed deplorable and contrary to human dignity and international human rights and humanitarian laws," it added.

The Indian side was urged to respect the ceasefire agreement of 2003. The LoC divides Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
Los Angeles, July 19 : A video of a female street vendor violently arrested in California has triggered anger on social media.

When a motorcycle officer arrested Juanita Mendez-Medrano, 52, she was selling flowers and Hawaiian-style leis without a permit to people attending the Perris High School graduation ceremony on the evening of June 6, Xinhua news agency reported.

The video footage of the conflict between Mendez-Medrano and the officer was later posted on Twitter, triggering uproar.

According to the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, the video did not capture the officer's efforts to convince Mendez-Medrano to remove her stall.

"During periods of traffic congestion, our officers saw numerous street vendors walking into traffic to sell products to people. Due to the obvious traffic safety concerns, our officers contacted multiple street vendors found to be vending without a permit," said a statement.

But a witness said the vendors were not creating unsafe conditions by walking into traffic.

Authorities said that unlike other vendors, Mendez-Medrano refused to allow the officer to issue her a citation. She refused to provide her name and tried to walk away. An officer then attempted to arrest the woman.

"Why do you do this to us?" Medrano can be heard yelling in Spanish to the officer in the video. "We're living our life."

The cellphone video has prompted controversy on Twitter and other social medias.

"Honestly, watching this puts a hole in my chest. Instead of arresting drug dealers, gangbangers, he's arresting a lady selling flowers," wrote Twitter user Jent.

"I'm saddened by the brutality for the poor woman selling flowers. She should be compensated for her extremely traumatic treatment," wrote Facebook user Felix Cortes.

Some voices, however, supported the police action.
New Delhi, July 19 : Describing China as a "bigger threat to India than Pakistan", Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday sought the government's response on the military stand-off at Doklam.

Speaking in the Lok Sabha, the former Defence Minister also accused China of conspiring against India and urged the government to openly support the independence of Tibet and ban Chinese products in the country.

"China is a bigger threat to India than Pakistan. Pakistan cannot do anything to India. I have been saying this since the last 20 years. Now, it's clear that China is conspiring against us. In Kashmir, China is supporting Pakistan even with arms and ammunition. This should be strongly protested," Mulayam Yadav said during Zero Hour.

Mulayam Yadav's remarks came after the opposition parties staged a walk out of the Lok Sabha demanding immediate discussion on the issue of farmers' plight.

The SP leader said that the Chinese army and their weapons have been seen in Kashmir. China is even constructing a road in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

"We should diplomatically protest it. Pakistan with China has adopted a strategy to infiltrate Kashmir, which is very dangerous," he said.

Yadav said that India has accepted China's authority on Tibet, which was a "blunder".

"Now, India should openly support Tibet for its independence. India should also help Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama as much as it can. This will be a befitting reply to China," he said.

The veteran leader also demanded a "ban on Chinese products in India in the nation's interest".

"If China continues to help Pakistan and interferes in Kashmir, India should ban Chinese products. If need be, we should have a rethink on diplomatic relations," Yadav said.

He also demanded a complete review of India's relations with China.

The stand-off between the armies of India and China in the Doklam plateau in the Sikkim sector has led to strain in diplomatic ties, with the Chinese state-run media openly talking of war.

The government last week briefed the leaders of political parties and assured them that the issue will be resolved diplomatically.
Beijing, July 19 : The head of China's top religious affairs regulator said Communist Party members should not seek value and faith in religion and those who persist must be punished.

"Party members should not have religious beliefs, which is a red line for all members A Party members should be firm Marxist atheists, obey Party rules and stick to the Party's faith A they are not allowed to seek value and belief in religion," Wang Zuoan, director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs, was quoted as saying by the Global Times on Wednesday.

Wang made the comments in an article released in the Qiushi Journal, the flagship magazine of the Communist Party of China's Central Committee.

Officials who have religious faith should be persuaded to give it up and those who resist would be punished by the Party, Wang wrote.

He added that Party members were also forbidden from supporting or getting involved in religious affairs in the name of developing the economy or diversifying culture.

"It is important that Wang constantly reminds Party members not to have religious beliefs. Some people who claim to be scholars support religious beliefs in the Party, which has undermined the Party's values based on dialectical materialism," party official Zhu Weiqun told the Global Times.

Wang also stressed the need for a firm political direction in managing religious affairs.

"Some foreign forces have used religion to infiltrate China, and extremism and illegal religious activities are spreading in some places, which have threatened national security and social stability," Wang added.

"Guiding religions to suit to China's development is a core policy to solve China's religious problems," added Su Wei, another Communist Party official.
New Delhi, July 19 : Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad on Wednesday attacked the government over incidents of lynching in the name of cow protection, alleging that those attacking Dalits and minorities were getting protection from the ruling BJP.

Azad was taking part in a discussion in the Rajya Sabha on the issue of mob lynching on the pretext of cow protection.

"The cases of mob lynching in the name of protecting cow have gone up across the country in the last three years. Those involved in lynchings are getting protection from the ruling party people," Azad said.

He said such incidents had created an atmosphere of "fear, terror, loot and arson" in the country.

The Leader of Opposition in the Upper House slammed the government for the growing number of incidents and questioned if it was "happening in understanding with" the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

He reminded the House that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Rajnath Singh had spoken against such killings, but the "opposition feels that these incidents are happening in understanding with the ruling party".

He asked if it was happening because of an infighting in the "parivaar", an obvious reference to the pro-Hindutva parties.

Azad also urged the BJP not to vitiate the atmosphere in the country in the name of caste or religion.

"For the unity and integrity of the country, every member of the opposition is ready to shed his blood.

"Stop doing vote bank politics," Azad said, adding that it was only strengthening external forces who were trying to break the country.

"If we have to fight our own people, then how we can fight with external forces?"
Mumbai, July 19 : Positive global cues, coupled with inflows of foreign funds and healthy buying in healthcare, metal and banking stocks, lifted the Indian equity markets on Wednesday -- a day after they suffered steepest fall of the current fiscal.

The wider Nifty of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) closed just a point behind the 9,900-mark. It closed at 9,899.60 points -- higher by 72.45 points, or 0.74 per cent -- from its previous session's close.

The 30-scrip Sensitive Index (Sensex) of the BSE, which opened at 31,882.80 points, closed at 31,955.35 points -- up 244.36 points, or 0.77 per cent, from the previous close at 31,710.99 points.

The Sensex touched a high of 31,978.89 points and a low of 31,793.72 points during intra-day trade.

The BSE market breadth was bullish with 1,717 advances and 985 declines.

In terms of the broader markets, the BSE mid-cap index rose by 1.01 per cent and the small-cap index by 0.99 per cent.

"Markets rallied higher on Wednesday after the sharp correction seen on Tuesday. Upmove in the frontline indices was triggered by gains in ITC, TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) and Reliance Industries," Deepak Jasani, Head of Retail Research, HDFC Securities, told IANS.

"The rally came on the back of positive global cues. Asian shares edged higher as optimism on China's economy underpinned Asian shares and commodities. European indices like FTSE 100, CAC 40 and DAX traded higher," Jasani added.

On the currency front, the rupee strengthened by nine paise to 64.29 to a US dollar from its previous close at 64.38.

In investments, provisional data with the exchanges showed that foreign institutional investors (FIIs) purchased scrip worth Rs 1,046.65 crore, while domestic institutional investors (DIIs) divested stocks worth Rs 12.48 crore.

"Indian equity benchmarks gained most in over a week led by drug makers and telecom companies. The benchmarks have climbed to multiple fresh peaks this year as domestic and foreign investors bet on strong economic growth and improving sentiment on earnings results," said Dhruv Desai, Director and Chief Operating Officer of Tradebulls.

"All major indices, namely BSE IT, consumer durables, Teck, healthcare, metals, oil and gas ended in green."

Sector-wise, the S&P BSE healthcare index augmented by 262.68 points, the metal index by 235.07 points and the banking index by 171.92 points.

Major Sensex gainers on Wednesday were: Bharti Airtel, up 3.21 per cent at Rs 421.35; Coal India, up 2.66 per cent at Rs 255.05; ITC, up 2.42 per cent at Rs 291.50; Dr. Reddy's Lab, up 2.01 per cent at Rs 2,770.25; and TCS, up 1.88 per cent at Rs 2,450.45.

Major Sensex losers were: Infosys, down 0.56 per cent at Rs 979.90; Hero MotoCorp, down 0.49 per cent at Rs 3,766.90; Hindustan Unilever, down 0.46 per cent at Rs 1,152.90; Adani Ports, down 0.26 per cent at Rs 380.60; and HDFC, down 0.19 per cent at Rs 1,650.
Mumbai, July 19 : After actor Varun Dhawan, filmmaker Karan Johar on Wednesday apologised for his "nepotism rocks" act at the IIFA Awards in New Jersey that created a stir on social media last week.

Karan, the son of late filmmaker Yash Johar, along with actors Varun and Saif Ali Khan, took a jibe at actress Kangana Ranaut by bringing up the nepotism debate at the awards gala.

Later, they received flak on social media with Twitteraties calling their act "disappointing".

While Varun apologised for the act on Twitter on Tuesday, Karan said that he also feels that it's talent that rocks and not nepotism.

"Of course, I don't believe that 'nepotism rocks'. Of course, I believe that only talent rocks. If anything that rocks, it's your talent, hard work and conviction. It's the energy you bring to your job," Karan said in an interview with NDTV news channel.

"What we said was meant to be a joke, which I think has been misplaced, misunderstood and I think it went wrong. I regret it," he added.

Karan also said that it was entirely his idea.

"The idea of that joke was entirely mine, so I take onus of the idea of what we said. And I think we went a bit too far with the Kangana mention," Karan said.

Karan and Saif, who were hosting the gala, revisited the much-talked about nepotism issue that started in Bollywood when Kangana branded Karan as a "flagbearer of nepotism" on his chat show "Koffee With Karan" earlier this year.

"No matter what I say or feel about my issues with what Kangana said on my talk show 'Koffee With Karan', I think I was raised to be a dignified, a chivalrous and a decent person. That's the upbringing that I was given and I feel that I failed on those accounts," Karan said.

"I felt that no matter what my thoughts or personal issues are on this, I should not have repeatedly brought that up. For that, I'm deeply regretful," he added.

When Varun joined the two celebrities on stage at the Metlife Stadium to receive the Best Performance in a Comic Role for "Dishoom", Saif joked that the actor had made it big in the industry because of his father.

"You are here because of your papa," Saif quipped.

Varun said: "And you're here because of your mummy (veteran actress Sharmila Tagore)."

Karan then promptly added: "I am here because of my papa (late filmmaker Yash Johar)."

They then said in unison: "Nepotism rocks."

While addressing the charge of nepotism, Karan said: "I want to once and for all say and close this chapter after this and subsequently I will not speak about nepotism nor Kangana because it would be distasteful for her and it would be ungraceful at my end, which I've already been.

"Nepotism is easy access, nobody can deny that, but what you do with that access is what moulds you into a professional."
Jammu, July 19 : An Army JCO injured in Pakistani shelling on the Line of Control died on Wednesday, while Indian and Pakistani troops again exchanged shelling and firing in Jammu region, official sources said.

Junior Commissioned Officer Shashi Kumar was injured in the Nowshera sector on the Line of Control on Tuesday and was undergoing treatment at a hospital, where he passed away.

"The Pakistan Army indulged in unprovoked and indiscriminate firing with small arms, automatics and mortars from 8.45 a.m. in Bhimber Gali Sector (in Poonch district) along the LoC, to which the Indian Army retaliated effectively," Defence Ministry spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Manish Mehta said here.

Two Indian Army soldiers were killed in the LoC shelling and firing in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday.

Defence sources said the Pakistan Army had been violating bilateral ceasefire agreement with impunity in the last three days.
The massive deployment of military might is in northern Tibet, but it will take only six to seven hours for the troops to move to China's side of Nathu La in the Sikkim section.

By Ananth Krishnan: China has moved "tens of thousands of tonnes" of military vehicles and equipment to Tibet, likely under the garb of two defence exercises held on the plateau in recent weeks but perhaps aimed at muscle-flexing amid the Doklam stand-off, said reports today.

The massive beefing up of logistics was not near the Sikkim border but in northern Tibet, near Xinjiang in the west. Beijing can, however, rapidly deploy its logistics to the border through its vast road and rail network in Tibet, with the expressway now extending from Lhasa all the way to Yadong, on China's side of Nathu La in the Sikkim section. The 700 km distance can be covered in six to seven hours.

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"The vast haul was transported to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command - which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India," the PLA Daily, official newspaper of the military, was quoted as saying by the South China Morning Post.

The report said the project "took place late last month" and "involved hardware being moved simultaneously by road and rail from across the entire region".

WHAT IS THE PLA UP TO?

The PLA Daily did not say if the logistics movement was for the two exercises. On July 3, State media reported on drills involving a new battle tank, while this past weekend, a live-fire drill and testing of anti-aircraft guns was held on the plateau by a mountain brigade responsible for frontier combat operations.

Ni Lexiong, a Shanghai-based military commentator, told the South China Morning Post the movement was "likely related to the stand-off and could have been designed to bring India to the negotiating table."

"Diplomatic talks must be backed by military preparation," he was quoted as saying.

"The PLA wanted to demonstrate it could easily overpower its Indian counterparts," added military commentator Zhou Chenming to the paper.

Wang Dehua, a South Asia strategic expert, told the paper that "military operations are all about logistics" and at present "there is much better logistics support to the Tibet region."

"China is also different from [how it was in] 1962", Wang was quoted as saying, noting that in 1962, "logistics difficulties contributed to [China] pulling back and declaring a unilateral ceasefire."

Now, he added, the PLA can "easily transport troops and supplies to the frontline, thanks to the much improved infrastructure including the Qinghai-Tibet railway and other new roads connecting the plateau to the rest part of China."

Also read: India-US-Japan's Malabar naval exercise is a message gift-wrapped for China

Also read: India to develop missiles that can hit all of China even from southern bases

Also read: UK doctors find 27 contact lenses stuck in 67-year-old woman's eye

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Also watch: India has shown considerable maturity to China's provocations: Ex-Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran

--- ENDS ---
Banswara (Rajasthan), July 19 : Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday came down heavily on the Modi and Rajasthan governments over farmers' issues.

Addressing a "Kisan Aakrosh Rally" at the College Ground here, Gandhi said the BJP governments had neglected the pain and suffering of farmers.

"Today (Wednesday) in the Lok Sabha we wanted to speak on farmers' issues, we wanted to speak only for 10-15 minutes... The Prime Minister was there, other ministers were there, but no one was ready to give us even a minute.

"Parliament can be opened at midnight for the sake of Goods and Services Tax but for farmers even one minute cannot be granted," he said.

Gandhi met family members of some of the farmers who committed suicide.

He said Prime Minister Narendra Modi had in 2014 made two promises -- to support the cause of farmers and provide two crore jobs. Neither has been fulfilled, the Congress leader said.

"I met lakhs of farmers in Uttar Pradesh and told the government that farmers are sad, they are in pain. It is because of farmers that the country is known... They toil daily and that is why India is known the world over," he said.

"We demanded loan waiver (for farmers) and right price for their produce.

"Our governments in Punjab and Karnataka did this. They waived off loans of farmers," he said, adding that it was only because of pressure from the Congress party that the government in Uttar Pradesh waived off farm loans.

He assured the farmers that the Congress would continue to fight for their cause.

"Wherever and whenever you want me to come to Rajasthan, I am ready. We will put pressure and see to it that your loans are waived off. We are not in the government but will do whatever possible."

On GST, he said that small traders and businessmen were suffering.

"We said give some time to implement it in a proper way. But Modiji wanted to show the world and the US President that India had passed GST."

He stressed that only 50 big businessmen were benefiting because of Modi.

Sachin Pilot, the Rajasthan state president of the Congress, and Ashok Gehlot, former Chief Minister, also spoke on the occasion.
Canberra, July 19 : Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Wednesday said his government will be demanding answers from US authorities about the killing of an Australian woman by police in Minneapolis city at the weekend.

On Saturday night, Australian Justine Damond, 40, was shot and killed by Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor after she called 911 for assistance in relation to a suspected assault near her home, Xinhua news agency reported.

She was unarmed and approached the police vehicle in her pyjamas. On Wednesday, speaking on Australian television, Turnbull said the government would pursue answers after something "clearly" went "tragically wrong".

"We are seeking answers to this, this is a shocking killing. It's inexplicable and out hearts go out to her family," Turnbull told the Nine Network.

"How can a woman out in the street in her pyjamas seeking assistance from the police be shot like that? It is a shocking killing and yes, we are demanding answers on behalf of her family. It's a truly tragic killing in Minneapolis."

Turnbull's demands came after it was revealed that the officer who shot Damond had only been with the local police force for two years and there were also previous complaints about his service.

Around 300 of Damond's friends and family members attended a silent vigil at Freshwater Beach in Sydney. Damond's fiance Don said that her family had been given "almost no additional information regarding what happened" after police arrived.

"We've lost the dearest of people and we're desperate for information," he said in Minneapolis.
New Delhi, July 19 : The Delhi government on Wednesday issued an advisory reminding people not to buy the sharp synthetic kite flying thread known as "Chinese Manjha" to protect birds and prevent fatal accidents.

The advisory said there shall be a "complete ban" in the national capital on the sale, production, supply and use of "Chinese Manjha" and any other kite-flying thread made sharp by lacing them with glass, metal or any sharp materials.

"Kite flying shall be permissible only with cotton thread, free from any sharp/metallic/glass components," the advisory said.

The "Chinese Manjha" is so sharp that it is known to slash flying birds and even cause fatal accidents to two-wheeler drivers.

Lt. Governor Anil Baijal had in January approved a Delhi government proposal to ban "Chinese Manjha" and similar lethal kite-flying material.

People can register complaints if they see the ban on "Chinese Manjha" being violated on Helpline numbers 2396 2825 (Divisional Commissioner), 98719 63535 (Chief Wildlife Warden), 1266 (Commissioner, North and South Delhi Municipal Corporation) and 155303 (Commissioner, East Delhi Municipal Corporation) and 100 (Delhi Police).
Mumbai, July 19 : Actor Ayushmann Khurrana, who played a sperm donor in his debut film "Vicky Donor", wants to experiment more with roles.

During the trailer launch of his forthcoming film "Bareilly Ki Barfi" here on Wednesday, he was asked if he wants to change his image of a "good boy".

He responded by saying: "Yes, I am open to doing experimental roles. In this film 'Bareilly Ki Barfi', I am playing a small town boy who is very bullish by nature. In this film, I also dance madly in some scenes like what we do at our friends' weddings."

"And then I have also worked in Sriram Raghavan's upcoming film. That character is very different from all the roles that I have played in films so far... so yes, I think the image is changing."

Asked about refusing to act in the sequel to "Happy Bhaag Jayegi", he said: "I was shooting with Sriram and, therefore, said no to that film. As an actor, we have certain limitation of dates and all... so, we cannot do everything at the same time. But that film is also interesting."

Also featuring Rajkummar Rao and Kriti Sanon, "Bareilly Ki Barfi" is set to release on August 18.
United Nations, July 19 : The four Arab nations leading a boycott of Qatar are no longer insisting that it comply with a list of 13 demands they tabled last month and instead have asked Doha to commit to six principles on combating extremism and negotiate a plan with specific measures to implement them for an early resolution of the crisis.

Diplomats from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Egypt told reporters at the UN that they were no longer insisting that Qatar comply with the 13 demands and now wanted it to accept six broad principles, BBC reported.

The Arab quartet broke diplomatic relations with Qatar in early June largely over their allegations that it supports terrorist and extremist groups -- a charge Qatar rejected.

Saudi Arabia's UN Ambassador Abdallah Al Mouallimi told a briefing for a group of UN correspondents that the four nations are now committed to the six principles agreed to by their Foreign Ministers at a meeting in Cairo on July 5, and that these "should be easy for the Qataris to accept".

The principles were combating terrorism and extremism, denying financing and safe havens to terrorist groups, stopping incitement to hatred and violence, and refraining from interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, according to reports.

Mouallimi stressed that there would be "no compromise" on the principles, but added that both sides would be able to discuss how to implement them.

The list of 13 demands handed to Qatar on June 22 included shutting down the Al Jazeera news network, closing a Turkish military base, cutting ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and downgrading relations with Iran.

Mouallimi said closing Al Jazeera might not be necessary but stopping incitement to violence and hate speech was essential. There was no immediate comment from Qatar over the announcement.

UAE Permanent Representative Lana Nusseibeh warned that if Qatar was "unwilling to accept core principles around what defines terrorism or extremism in our region, it will be very difficult" for it to remain in the Gulf Co-operation Council.

Qatar had acknowledged providing assistance to Islamist groups designated as terrorist organisations by some of its neighbours, notably the Muslim Brotherhood. But it denied aiding jihadist groups linked to Al Qaeda or Islamic State (IS).
Islamabad, July 19 : The US Embassy here announced the provision of over 50 "world class" Fido X3 explosive device detectors to the Pakistan Army on Wednesday, local media reported.

The Fido -- a hand-held device allowing Pakistani soldiers to determine in less than 10 seconds if an item contains explosive material -- was delivered to the army by the US Embassy's Office of the Defence Representative Pakistan (ODRP), Dawn reported, citing an embassy release.

The new Fido devices are part of an ongoing $128 million initiative funded by the US government to help the Pakistani Army counter illegal explosives.

"These Fidos will be added to those previously provided to the Pakistan Army currently used in various counter-terrorism operations throughout the country," the statement said.

ODRP chief Brigadier General Kenneth Ekman said the "advanced system improves on previous versions used to great effect by the Pakistan Army".

He added: "A primary way to stop a bomb is to catch the bomb maker or attacker before he puts the device in position. Keeping explosives out of the wrong hands helps everyone."

A counter-explosive assistance programme undertaken by both countries includes provision of armoured vehicles, bomb disposal robots, training, and the construction of a laboratory for the detailed analysis of explosive samples, the US Embassy release said.

"The US and Pakistan are also partners in a programme to support amputees," it added.

This partnership will provide specialised medical equipment and training to allow the army medical technicians to manufacture prosthetic limbs to help improve the quality of an amputee's life.

Brigadier General Ekman also highlighted a partnership between the US and Pakistan Army in ongoing efforts at combating terrorism, particularly in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, the handout read.
Shimla, July 19 : In a twist to the sensational gang-rape and murder of a schoolgirl in Himachal Pradesh, the prime suspect allegedly murdered a fellow accused in the case in the police lock-up on Wednesday, the police said.

This led to arson attack by mobs who were demanding justice for the 16-year-old victim, whose body was found in the forests in Kotkhai town in Shimla district on July 6. The opposition BJP called a state-wide protest on Thursday.

Prime accused in the gang-rape and murder of the young girl, Rajinder Singh, allegedly killed Suraj Singh, a 29-year-old Nepali, by smashing his head on the floor, a police official here told IANS.

He said what caused Rajinder Singh to kill Suraj Singh is yet to be ascertained.

"Both of them had a scuffle over some issue and Suraj got grievous head injuries. He was taken to a nearby hospital where he was declared dead," the police official added.

The cause for altercation is believed to be revelations to the police by Suraj who put the entire blame for the gang-rape and killing of the girl on Rajinder.

As the incident in Kotkhai police lock-up, around 54 km from the state capital, came to light, a large number of locals gathered and forcibly entered the police station, assaulting police personnel for their lapses in the killing of one of the six accused in the lock-up.

The mob ransacked the police station and did not allow the critically injured policemen to be taken to hospital for treatment. It also burnt three police vehicles.

Police fired two rounds into the air and resorted to baton-charge to disperse the crowd.

Massive protests continued in Shimla district since the rape and murder of the schoolgirl.

Last week, the state government agreed to recommend a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the case. But the investigating agency is yet to take over the case.

Expressing concern over the murder of the rape suspect in the lock-up, Governor Acharya Devvrat asked a report on the episode from the government.

Director General of Police Somesh Goyal, who was summoned by the Governor, apprised him about the developments in the case.

Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh, who was out of the state capital, cancelled his tour and rushed to Shimla to oversee the developments in the state, which is scheduled to go to the polls in November.

"The state government had earlier formed Special Investigation team and later I personally wrote a letter to the Prime Minister to get CBI inquiry conducted in this case," said a statement quoting the Chief Minister.

In another development, the government on Wednesday pleaded with the state high court, which has taken cognizance of the rape and murder of the girl, to order a CBI investigation into the case.

During the course of hearing, Advocate General Sharwan Dogra assured the court that the police were investigating the case but demanded the matter should be handed over to the CBI to get justice to the victim.

The girl's family has been expressing doubts and suspicions about the police investigation.

"Earlier, we were told that the accused belonged to high-profile families and they were on the run," the girl's eldest sister told reporters in Kotkhai town.

Suddenly, the police arrested six persons, four of whom were labourers -- two from Uttarakhand and two from Nepal, she said.

"We are demanding justice for our sister. Our protests will continue till the real culprits are apprehended," she added.

Police say the 16-year-old girl was offered a lift in a vehicle by the accused on July 4 when she was returning home from school. On the way, they raped and murdered her in a nearby forest. Her naked body with injury marks was found two days later.

The arrested persons are prime accused Rajinder Singh, who offered her the lift, Ashish Chauhan, Subhash Bisht, Deepak Kumar, Suraj Singh and Lokjan.

The police said that the prime accused Rajinder Singh had developed a familiarity with the girl as he had offered her lifts twice earlier.

The victim's father questioned the delay in handing over the case to the CBI.

"We were told that the case has been handed over to the CBI. But no CBI official has so far started investigation in the case," he said.

Shimla's member of Parliament Virender Kashyap demanded imposition of President's rule in view of complete failure of law and order in the state.

A delegation of members of Parliament representing the state, led by Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda, called on Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh in Delhi and requested him to direct the state to maintain law and order situation.
New Delhi, July 19 : The Delhi High Court on Wednesday issued notice to Congress leader Sajjan Kumar on a plea filed by SIT, probing the 1984 anti-Sikh riots cases, against anticipatory bail granted to him.

Justice I.S. Mehta, while hearing a Special Investigation Team's plea to cancel Sajjan Kumar's bail, sought his response by November 10, the next date of hearing in the case.

The SIT had moved the High Court on January 25 against trial court's order of December 21, 2016 granting anticipatory bail to the Congress leader in a case related to the 1984 riots.

Additional Solicitor General Sanjay Jain, appearing for SIT, which recently took up the case, had earlier told the court that investigation was going on in the case but Sajjan Kumar was not cooperating and that his custodial interrogation was vital.

The trial court had given anticipatory bail to Sajjan Kumar, accused of instigating a mob to kill two Sikhs in Janakpuri in west Delhi on November 1, 1984 and another the next day at Vikaspuri, also in west Delhi.

Gurcharan Singh, who was badly burnt in the attack, remained bed-ridden for 29 years before dying three years ago.

Nearly 3,000 Sikhs were killed, mostly in Delhi, in riots that followed the 1984 assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards.

Some Congress politicians, Sajjan Kumar included, have been accused of leading the killer mobs. They have denied the allegations.
Jaipur, July 19 : Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi, who was in Rajasthan to address a rally in Banswara, also visited the state capital on Tuesday to meet his relatives here.

Gandhi called on Katju family in the city's C-Scheme area . The Katjus are related to the Nehru-Gandhi family.

"He spent about 40-45 minutes with the family before leaving for Delhi at around 6 p.m," a Congress functionary told IANS.

"Whenever he is in Jaipur, he tries to meet the family," he said.

Not many, including the media, were aware of his programme, and as soon as the word spread, several journalists and some Congress workers gathered near the house where the Katju's stay.

While coming out of the house, Gandhi told the media: "As I said at the rally in Banswara, we will exert pressure on the state government to waive off farmers' loans and work for the welfare of farmers."

Some Congress workers shouted slogans hailing him and the party, while others were busy photographing Gandhi on their phones.
Tehran, July 19 : Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Wednesday denounced the new sanctions imposed by the US on Tehran as incompatible with the logic and spirit of the nuclear agreement signed with six major powers in July 2015.

At a government meeting, Rouhani criticised Washington saying Iran is fulfilling the terms of the nuclear deal, while the US administration is imposing sanctions under different pretexts, Efe news reported.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the new sanctions were damaging already frayed Tehran-Washington ties. "It violates the spirit of the deal. We will see whether it violates the letter of the deal, and we will act accordingly," said Zarif.

He said that Tehran will respond to the new sanctions with reciprocal measures.

The US government announced on Tuesday the latest sanctions against 18 Iranian individuals and entities by freezing their assets and prohibiting them from engaging in transactions with Americans.

The measure was adopted a day after Trump's administration told Congress that Iran continues to meet the terms of the nuclear deal, signed in 2015, to limit its nuclear programme. Rouhani said his country is set to announce an appropriate response.

He said Washington is currently conspiring to have Iran abandon its commitments but such a move will never succeed. He stressed that his country had always fulfilled and will continue to fulfill its commitments.

Rouhani added that Washington takes such steps because it is concerned about Iran's good relations with Europe and Asia.

The Iranian government declared that Washington took this action due to "its failure to persuade its European allies into withdrawing from the nuclear deal", according to Iran's news agency IRNA.

Tehran urged Donald Trump to lift the sanctions to comply with the terms of the 2015 nuclear agreement. The Iranian authorities said that in retaliation for Washington's move they would impose sanctions on US individuals and bodies acting against the Iranian people.
By PTI: By K J M Varma

Beijing, Jul 19 (PTI) In a controversial move, Chinas ruling Communist Party has directed its nearly 90 million members to shun religion for maintaining party unity, warning that religious belief is a "redline" for the cadres and those who resist would be punished.

The head of Chinas top religious affairs regulator said that party members should not seek value and faith in religion and those who have religious beliefs should be persuaded to give them up.

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Experts said the direction is meant to maintain party unity, the official media reported today.

"Party members should not have religious beliefs, which is a redline for all members...Party members should be firm Marxist atheists, obey party rules and stick to the partys faith...they are not allowed to seek value and belief in religion," Wang Zuoan, director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) wrote in an article released in the Qiushi Journal on Saturday, the flagship magazine of the CPC Central Committee.

Officials who have religious faith should be persuaded to give it up, and those who resist would be punished by the party organisation, Wang wrote.

The order came as the CPC, which has about 88.76 million members, geared up to hold its 19th Congress expected to be in October this year in which President Xi Jinping who heads the party and the military is likely to get elected for another five-year term.

Wang said the party members are also forbidden from supporting or getting involved in religious affairs in the name of developing the economy or diversifying culture.

Elaborating on the new order by the party, Zhu Weiqun, chairman of the Ethnic and Religious Committee of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference, said "It is important that Wang constantly reminds Party members not to have religious beliefs. Some people who claim to be scholars support religious beliefs in the party, which has undermined the partys values based on dialectical materialism."

"Once the partys values are damaged, party unity as well as the partys basic policy to regulate religions would be sabotaged," Zhu told state-run Global Times.

Wang also stressed the need for a firm political direction in managing religious affairs.

"We should guide religious groups and individuals with socialist core values and excellent traditional Chinese culture to dig into their doctrines to find parts that are beneficial to social harmony and development," Wang said.

Apparently referring to the fast-spreading Christianity in China, which Beijing apprehends posed a major threat as it could emerge as a force like in previously socialist countries like Poland to overthrow Communist Party rule, Wang said foreign forces are "infiltrating" into China in the name of religion.

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China also has over 20 million Muslims. Xinjiang where the Turkik speaking Uygur Muslims are a majority is in turmoil as Uygurs were restive about the increasing settlements of majority Hans from other provinces.

Next to Buddhism, Christianity is regarded as the fastest growing religion in Communist China.

Unofficial estimates say China has over 65 million Christians including Catholics, Protestants as well as other church groups.

The ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) has tenuous ties with Rome apprehending political impact of the rapid growth of Christianity as it could become a movement in later years challenging the CPC?s power base.

According to reports, a number of Chinese Christians were involved in preaching Christianity in Muslim countries.

Two Chinese nationals, accused of being involved in preaching in Pakistan, were killed allegedly by Islamic State militants in the restive Baluchistan province.

Recent reports spoke of backchannel contacts between Beijing and Vatican to establish diplomatic ties which broke off in 1951, two years after CPC came to power.

"Some foreign forces have used religion to infiltrate China, and extremism and illegal religious activities are spreading in some places, which have threatened national security and social stability," Wang added.

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"Guiding religions to suit to Chinas development is a core policy to solve Chinas religious problems. The moves evolve with traditional Chinese values over years and meet the demand of socialist development," said Su Wei, a professor at the Party School of the CPC Chongqing Committee.

Some foreign forces have used religions, including Christianity and Islam, two non-local religions, to deliberately spread their political views in China, Su said, adding that some religious doctrines shall be adjusted to match Chinese ethics and customs.

Su also noted that the regulation banning party members from having religious beliefs would be permanent, but may involve more work in Northwest Chinas Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Gansu Province as well as Southwest Chinas Tibet Autonomous Region. PTI KJV PMS AKJ PMS

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New Delhi, July 19 : Fugitive diamond merchant Jatin Mehta, who allegedly owes Indian banks Rs 7,000 crore, is not bankrupt as his wife recently transferred Rs 1.86 crore to a Swiss account in Zurich, and the Mehtas own a jewellery company in Britain, according to a report.

India Legal, a politico-legal weekly, claimed in its latest edition that it has obtained "proof" that the Swiss account of Mehta's wife, Sonia, is "very much active".

"On June 28, Sonia Jatin Mehta applied for a bank to telegraphically transfer 3,98,603.85 Singapore dollars, worth approximately Rs 1.86 crore, from her Far Eastern Bank Account No: 4333 666 7444 in Singapore to an account in Bank Vontobel AG, Gotthardstrasse 43, Zurich, Switzerland," the weekly claimed.

Mehta, the magazine said, also owns a company in the United Kingdom called the Diamond Distribution Company that was incorporated on August 1, 2016.

Mehta, the promoter of Winsome Diamonds, which owes Indian banks a whopping Rs 7,000 crore, has listed his address with the Registrar of Companies in the UK as 1 Bell Street, 2nd Floor, London, England, it said.

In list of those declared wilful defaulters by banks, Winsome Diamonds is ranked No.2. -- just a rung below liquor baron Vijay Mallya who has a cumulative outstanding of Rs 9,000 crore.

Mehta and wife have also fled the country and taken citizenship in St Kitts and Nevis, with which India has no extradition treaty. They gave up their Indian citizenship in 2013-2014. The government of the dual-island nation in the Caribbean has a "citizenship by investment" programme which has attracted several foreign nationals from across the world to the tax haven.

The magazine said the couple is currently based in Dubai and London but travel widely between Singapore, London, Europe and the US and maintain Swiss bank accounts.

Mehta's Winsome Group attracted trouble with repayment of bank loans in March 2013. In October that year, the company and its promoter were declared wilful defaulters and the loans declared as non-performing assets.

The CBI took up the case in 2014.

Mehta also has political connections. His son, Suraj, is married to Krupa, the daughter of the brother of Gautam Adani, known to be close to senior BJP leaders.
Riyadh, July 19 : Saudi police have detained a young woman who appeared in a video walking through a historic area in the north of the country with "indecent clothes" provoking a controversy from people who say she flagrantly violated the kingdom's conservative Islamic dress code.

The woman, whose name was not given, was detained by police in Riyadh on Tuesday. Col. Fawaz al-Maiman told Saudi television that the girl admitted to having visited, along with her guardian, the historic area of Ashkir, located about 200 km northwest of Riyadh, Efe news reported.

In the video, the young woman dressed in a short skirt and a short-sleeved T-shirt can be seen walking without the company of any male in an archaeological zone and in the desert. The Colonel assured that, in her confession, the woman said that the video was published without her knowledge.

The case had been referred to the Attorney General after the judicial authority had access to the video, according to media.

Saudi Arabia's committee for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice on Monday called for the trial of the young woman in the video dressed "without regard" to the principles of the Islamic religion and the customs of the ultraconservative kingdom.

In Saudi Arabia, women cannot drive or travel outside the country without a family member or guardian, among other restrictions that greatly limit their participation in social life and in the public sphere.

Ibrahim al-Munayif, a Saudi writer with more than 41,000 followers on Twitter, wrote on his official account that allowing people to disobey the law leads to chaos.

"Just like we call on people to respect the laws of countries they travel to, people must also respect the laws of this country," he wrote.

Others defended her by posting images from US President Donald Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia in May during which First Lady Melania Trump and his daughter Ivanka, though modestly dressed in higher necklines and longer sleeves, shunned wearing a head cover or the abaya.
New Delhi, July 19 : Budget passenger carrier IndiGo on Wednesday revoked the ban on flying TDP MP J.C. Diwakar Reddy on its flights after he expressed regret over an incident of unruly behaviour committed last month.

Following IndiGo's decision, all major domestic airlines -- Air India, Jet Airways, IndiGo, SpiceJet and Vistara -- also revoked the ban.

On its part, IndiGo said: "Senior IndiGo officials today met Honourable Member of Parliament Diwakar Reddy, at a lunch hosted by senior Member of Parliament Y.S. Chaudhary, to resolve the issue of Honourable Member Diwakar Reddy's ban on IndiGo flights."

"The issue is amicably resolved between the two and IndiGo has decided to lift the said ban with immediate effect and Reddy is withdrawing the case he has filed."

The airline added that it has informed the Federation of Indian Airlines (FIA) about its decision.

In a similar incident in March, Shiv Sena MP Ravindra Gaikwad was accused of assaulting an Air India staff, following which several airlines banned him from flying on their planes till he apologised.

Gaikwad later submitted a letter to the Aviation Minister to express 'regret', after which AI revoked the ban, followed by the Federation of Indian Airlines and other private airlines also lifting the ban.

Following the Gaikwad incident, the Civil Aviation Ministry released the draft rules for a national 'no-fly list' that would ban unruly passengers from domestic air travel.

Under the proposed rules, airlines can impose a travel ban on an unruly passenger in the time range of three months to two years or beyond depending upon the level of misbehaviour.

Current rules only allow airlines to refuse boarding or off-loading of a passenger whose behaviour is deemed as unruly or disruptive to the safety of flight operations.
New Delhi, July 19 : Leaders in Parliament, irrespective of political affiliations, extended their support to a draft bill against lynching here on Wednesday, and urged the Prime Minister to get it passed.

The draft bill against lynching, Manav Suraksha Kanoon (MASUKA), defines the words 'lyching' and 'mob' and also talks about the measures that should be taken, including making it a non-bailable offence, to curb the crime.

The bill was prepared by 'National Campaign Against Mob Lynching' -- a committe of social activists and student leaders -- of which social activist Tehseen Poonawalla is a core member.

Speaking on the occasion, Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh said that the Sangh Parivar's line of thought is responsible for the recent lynchings and that it works in "a two-faced manner".

"On one side, they are (Sangh) saying that lynchings in the name of cow protection is wrong, while Praveen Togadia asks for training for Gau Rakshaks so that they can 'correct' people who kill cows," Singh said.

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said that the government has failed to take up the issue. "Lynchings are rampant and are happening with impunity. I hope the government, Prime Minister and Home Minister will adopt it (Bill) or come up with a law of their own."

Leaders said that lynchings happen not just in the name of cow, but against Dalits, Muslims, Africans and even Hindus.

A pledge to not remain mute spectators to lynching and not allow lynchings was also taken at the 100-people strong gathering.

Other leaders who were present included former Union Law Minister Salman Khurshid, Aam Aadmi Party leader Sanjay Singh, and CPI-M MP M.B. Rajesh.
Ranchi, July 19 : Four Maoist guerrillas were arrested here while an arms cache was seized in Jharkhand's Palamu district on Wednesday, the state police said.

The arrested Maoists, belonging to the People's Liberation Front of India (PLFI), were responsible for attacking a closed mine and setting three vehicles on fire under Ormanjhi police station jurisdiction here on July 11, a police officer said.

Three revolvers, a scooty, mobile phones, and other things were seized from the arrested Maoists.

In another development, a huge cache of arms and explosives has been recovered from Saliya forest area of Palamu district.

In a joint operation, the state police and the Central Reserve Police Force recovered five hand grenades, 550 cartridges of SLR, 13 cartridges of 9mm pistol, three backpacks, 187 caps used in making hand grenades, and other items of daily use.

Maoist guerrillas are active in 18 of the 24 districts of the state.
Ankara, July 19 : Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim reshuffled his Cabinet on Wednesday replacing 11 ministers in the 27-member government Cabinet.

The announcement was made following an unscheduled meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Xinhua news agency reported. Ministers of Interior, Economy and Foreign Affairs as well as deputy Prime Minister for Economy were among the 15 ministers who kept their positions.

In the new Cabinet list, Bekir Bozdag, Mehmet Simsek, Fikri Isik, Recep Akdag and Hakan Cavusoglu were named as deputy Prime Ministers. Among them four were newly appointed.

A Cabinet reshuffle had been widely expected since May, when Erdogan resumed his leadership of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) following the April 16 constitutional referendum granting him sweeping new powers.

Erdogan led the AKP for 13 years starting in 2001. He had to step aside as the party chief when he became President in August 2014 because of a legal requirement for Presidents to be politically neutral.
Patna, July 19 : A leader of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was murdered and his body thrown into a well in Bihar's Gopalganj district, police said on Wednesday.

Krishna Shahi, who was head of the BJP's Commercial Cell in Bihar, had been missing since late Tuesday night when he failed to return home after attending a social function.

His body was recovered from a well in Manjha village under Phulwaria Police Station in Gopalganj, a district police official Mohd. Imtiaz Ahmad said.

Police have detained for interrogation a man and five women, after the family members of Shahi suspected their involvement in the murder.

Gopalganj Superintendent of Police Ravi Ranjan Kumar said police had launched an investigation into Shahi's murder.

Angry over the killing, Shahi's supporters attacked the house of suspected accused Aditya Rai, but police managed to control the situation.

The BJP leaders here termed the murder of Shahi a result of complete failure of law and order in the state.
New Delhi, July 19 : As many as 95 terrorists were eliminated in Jammu and Kashmir between January and July 9, while this figure was 150 for 2016, the Rajya Sabha was informed on Wednesday.

As many as 38 security personnel and 12 civilians were also killed during this period in the Valley that witnessed 172 terror incidents, Union Minister of State for Home Hansraj Gangaram Ahir said in a written reply.

Ahir said 150 terrorists -- the highest since 2011 -- were neutralised in 2016 in Jammu and Kashmir which faced 322 terror incidents in which 82 security men and 15 civilians were killed.

In 2015, 108 terrorists were killed during clashes with security forces at different places, while 39 security personnel and 17 civilians also lost their lives in 208 terror incidents.

In 2014, 110 terrorists were killed in different shootouts in the Valley, which witnessed 222 incidents of terrorist violence and killing of 47 security personnel and 28 civilians.

In 2013, 67 terrorists were neutralised while 53 security personnel and 15 civilians were killed in 170 terror-related incidents.

In 2012, 72 terrorists were killed, apart from 15 security personnel and a similar number of civilians in 220 violent attacks.

In 2011, 100 terrorists were killed, apart from 33 security personnel and 31 civilians in 340 terror incidents.

Citing the report, the Minister said that from July 2014 to June 2017, there was a reduction in Maoist violence in the country by 22.25 per cent (3,999 to 3,109) compared with the preceding three years (July 2011 to June 2014) and an increase of 78 per cent (228 to 406) in killing of Maoists compared with the preceding three years.
Bengaluru, July 19 : Global clients of software major Wipro Ltd were looking to spend more on technology this year despite volatile economic environment, said Chairman Azim Premji on Wednesday.

"Our clients are looking to spend more on technology this year as technology is becoming a major differentiator," Premji told the shareholders at the company's 71st Annual General Meeting (AGM) for fiscal 2016-17 here.

Asserting that the economic prospects of the countries where the IT major exported its software services and product were better, he said global political uncertainties weighed heavy on business sentiment over the last two years, impacting the IT industry.

"Though we continue to see a volatile economic environment, the economic prospects of the main countries we export to are better," he said at the AGM, held in the company's sprawling campus here.

The pervasive change of IT business has become more evident over the year in line with the drastic change in the expectations and experiences of consumers and business models.

"And digital is the central element driving this change. We believe that IT services companies are key to deliver digital to enterprises," said Premji.

Though optimistic about the business outlook in fiscal 2017-18, he, however, admitted that the company's success would depend on its ability to redefine and align itself with the new global paradigm and the disruptive developments in the industry.

He also said that in "the light of new initiatives and the prospects of end-to-end transformation, we felt that this journey calls for a new brand identity".

The company introduced a new brand identity with a new logo in May to win over more clients.

"Our brand identity is a visual expression of what we do and mean f or our clients. It is energised by our values, which are our core and beacon, the bedrock of our culture. Our values connect and resonate with the new identity," he had said while unveiling the new logo.

The new logo, having dots in four circles, represents the way company connects with its clients in terms of technology and domain expertise, applying insights across industries and delivering end-to-end services.

"We have also invested significantly in our organic and inorganic business to transform our offerings to service the new requirements of customers," added Premji.

The company also created social, environmental, intellectual and human value by investing in employee skilling, products and services.
Islamabad, July 19 : At least four members of a family of ethnic Hazaras, part of the Shia Muslim minority, were killed and another was injured on Wednesday in Pakistan's Mastung area, officials said.

The attack took place around 6.30 a.m. when unidentified assailants opened fire on a vehicle in which the victims were travelling, some 40 km from Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province, city police spokesperson Sajad Hussain said.

Police said it was a sectarian attack against the Hazara Shia minority.

The attackers fled the site and were yet to be identified.

Sectarian attacks, especially against Shias, who account for 20 per cent of the Pakistani population, are relatively common in the country, despite a general dip in the number of terror incidents since 2014.
In what is likely to stoke further unrest in Darjeeling, which continues to be tense in the wake of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha agitation for a separate Gorkhaland, a community hall was set ablaze in Kurseong. GJM has denied being involved in the act.

By Manogya Loiwal : In what is likely to stoke further unrest in Darjeeling district, which continues to be tense in the wake of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) agitation for a separate homeland, a community hall was set ablaze in Kurseong area of the district.

The Rajeshwari Community Hall, which was set ablaze in Kurseong, was the only hall that was used by all communities, including the Bengali community in the hills.

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The GJM has denied any involvement in this, claiming that the act was carried out by those with influential political connections to fan communal trouble.

The police are investigating the matter.

WHEN WAS THE HALL CONSTRUCTED

The community hall was constructed in 1930 and has been used for several purposes, including Durga Puja celebrations. The charred remains of the hall have been collected and will be sent for forensic test.

Meanwhile, another tourist lodge in Kurseong was also ransacked but this time the locals chased and caught hold of the miscreants.

Police have reached the spot for further investigation.

(WITH INPUTS FROM KAYES ANSARI IN DARJEELING)

Also read | Darjeeling unrest: Hill parties to fast unto death from July 15 for Gorkhaland

Also read | Gorkhaland stir: Darjeeling simmers again as 3 protesters killed; Army redeployed

ALSO WATCH VIDEO

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Rome, July 19 : Saudi Arabian Police have interviewed and released a model who sparked a furore when a video of her bare-headed and wearing an 'indecent' miniskirt were posted to Snapchat, the Saudi government said on Wednesday.

The woman, who has been named in media reports as Khulood, told police the video was posted on Snapchat without her knowledge, the Saudi Ministry of Culture said in a statement.

She was released without charge and the case has been closed by the prosecutor, according to the statement.

The news came soon after Italian junior Culture Minister Dorina Bianchi launched a petition on change.org calling for Khulood's release.

Bianchi described as "courageous" Khulood's stroll around an historic fort in Ushayqir wearing a miniskirt and cropped top which was initially shared on Snapchat at the weekend.

Ushayqir, about 155 km north of the capital Riyadh, in Najd province, is one of the most conservative regions in Saudi Arabia and is the cradle of Wahhabism - the austere form of Sunni Islam practised by the Saudi royal family and religious establishment.

The video of Khulood sparked heated debate among Saudis on social media.

Some Saudi Twitter users called for Khulood's arrest for breaking the country's strict dress code that requires women to wear full-length robes known as 'abayas' in public as well as a headscarf if they are Muslim.

But other Saudi Twitter users praised Khulood and insisted she should be allowed to wear what she wanted.
Darjeeling, July 19 : The colonial era Raj Rajeswari hall, burnt down on Wednesday by alleged pro-Gorkhaland activists, was a heritage structure in the heart of northern West Bengal's Kurseong town that was graced through the decades by stalwarts from various fields including iconic freedom fighter Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.

Steeped in history, the nearly-century-old building functioned as the community centre of the dwindling Bengali population in the hill town over the years, hosting cultural and religious events and marriages and other social gatherings.

The building, primarily made of wood, stone and concrete, was virtually razed to ashes within two hours after the wooden roof was set on fire at around 12.30 a.m. on Wednesday, a management committee member said.

"At around 12.30 am on Wednesday, a group of unidentified arsonists poured kerosene on the roof of the community centre and set it ablaze. The fire spread in a matter of minutes as the roof was made of highly inflammable pine wood. A large portion of the building was literally turned to ashes before the fire brigade could arrive," trustee board member Sovan De told IANS.

The arson took place on the 35th day of the GJM sponsored indefinite shutdown demanding a separate state of Gorkhaland to be curved out of the north Bengal hills.

De said it was a mystery how the arsonists entered the campus as both the gates of the community centre were locked.

The hall, built in 1930, was a part of local history and the proud venue of the oldest Durga Puja in the region that celebrated its centenary last year.

In June last year, a part of the hall was damaged in an accidental fire.

De said the hall was always seen as a symbol of harmony among the different communities and ethnic groups.

"Though the community centre was primarily for the Bengalis, it has often been used as a temporary shelter during any natural calamity in the hills. People across different communities including Bengalis and Nepalese have taken shelter together for years.

"It is also significant that the building was never attacked during the earlier phases of Gorkhaland agitation," he said.

Referring to the frequent incidents of vandalism in the Darjeeling hills for the past one month, De said it was never the culture of the local communities to resort to such violence.

"The Gorkhaland movement is going on for years now but I have never seen the locals resorting to such violence in the region with such precision. Since the renewed agitation of Gorkhaland, several places have been burnt down efficiently by a handful of people. It seems there are outsiders involved in these attacks who are trained in such vandalism," he added.

Reports of attack and torching of state properties have become a regular phenomena during the last one month of the agitation.
Sanaa, July 19 : At least 20 civilians including women and children died in an air strike on the city of Taiz in southern Yemen, the UN said on Wednesday, condemning the attack.

"Injuries have also been reported with a number also taken to nearby hospitals for treatment," the UN refugee agency UNHCR said in a statement.

UNHCR said it was "deeply shocked and saddened" by the attack and the reported casualties.

The civilians killed in the attack were refugees fleeing embattled Mawza district in Taiz governorate aboard a packed vehicle and were understood to be from the same family, UNHCR said.

"A peaceful political solution to resolve the conflict in Yemen is urgently needed to end civilian suffering," UNHCR stated.

The air strike is believed to have been carried out on Tuesday by war planes from the Saudi-led coalition, according to Sabaa news agency, which is controlled by Yemen's Shia Houthi rebels.

Coalition warplanes also flattened three buildings in the village of al-Atira in Taiz province, according to Sabaa.

The coalition has since March 2015 been targeting Houthi rebels fighting pro-government forces in Yemen in the country's deadly civil war and international rights groups accuse it of bombing civilian gatherings, markets, hospitals and residential areas across the country.

The war has been mired in stalemate for most of the last two years, with more than 10,000 civilians killed and several million left homeless.
New Delhi, July 19 : Leaders of different political parties on Wednesday extended their support to a draft bill against lynching prepared by a civil society organisation and urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to get it passed in the ongoing Monsoon Session of parliament.

The Manav Suraksha Kanoon (MASUKA), which defines the words 'lynching' and 'mob' and lists the measures that should be taken, including making it a non-bailable offence, to curb the crime, was prepared by 'National Campaign Against Mob Lynching' -- a committee of social activists and student leaders -- of which social activist Tehseen Poonawalla is a core member.

Speaking to media, senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh said that the Sangh Parivar's line of thought is responsible for the recent lynchings and that it works in "a two-faced manner".

"On one side, they are (Sangh) saying that lynchings in the name of cow protection is wrong, while (VHP leader) Praveen Togadia asks for training for Gau Rakshaks so that they can 'correct' people who kill cows," he said. "They're playing it together."

The Congress leader said that Sangh and its 150-odd organisations plant seeds of hatred seeds in the minds of children at a very early age and now with fake news and social media, this has increased fivefold.

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said that the government has failed to take up the issue. "Lynchings are rampant and are happening with impunity. I hope the government, Prime Minister and Home Minister will adopt it (Bill) or come up with a law of their own."

Leaders said that lynchings happen not just in the name of cow, but against Dalits, Muslims, Africans and even Hindus.

A pledge to not remain mute spectators to lynching and not allow lynchings was also taken at the 100-people strong gathering.

Poonawalla said that the government is trying to make lynching a Hindu-Muslim issue and added that it goes beyond it.

"We condemn the lynching of Ayub Pandith as we do the lynching of Junaid or Pehlu Khan. Today it's minorities, tomorrow it would be women for the clothes they wear or transgenders," he said.

Poonawalla told IANS that if the government does not take up the Bill in the current session, then "10,000 people with their cattle and victims will go and stay at the PM's residence".

"Not at Jantar Mantar, but at the PM's house as it's the only safe place in the country," he said.

CPI-M MP M.B. Rajesh told IANS that even though the situation is not as grave in Kerala as in other parts of the country, he'll take up the issue with the Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

DMK MP T.K.S Elangovan said that "states run by BJP are supporting mobs who violate laws and take law into their hands".

"In Tamil Nadu there is no law against eating beef or cow, but even there people carrying bovines were attacked," he said.

On being asked why there is need of a special law against lynching, former Union Minister Salman Khurshid said that it is needed when existing laws are not effective and in case of special circumstances and problems that pose.

"We have passed special laws in the past for protecting women, children, Dalits and Tribals," he said.

Social activist Shehzad Poonawalla, Aam Aadmi Party leader Sanjay Singh and RJD leader Manoj Jha were also present at the function.
New Delhi, July 19 : Reacting to the BJP charge that its documents on cow vigilantes was aimed at dividing the country, the Congress on Wednesday accused the ruling party of spreading false news and challenged the government to a parliamentary debate on issues of national interest.

The BJP earlier said that the 32-page Congress dossier on cow vigilante lynchings and attacks on Dalits and other issues is a "dossier of disruption" aimed at dividing the country on communal lines and disrupting the ongoing Parliament session.

"The BJP, by sending fake papers to some editors, are busy spreading false news," Congress spokesperson Randeeep Singh Surjewala hit back and said the Congress document was prepared by the Research Department of the All India Congress Committee.

"An internal Congress document has reached the media, about issues facing the nation and it needs to be talked in Parliament to hold the government accountable for its mistakes and misdeeds," AICC Research Department head Rajeev Gowda said.

"If the BJP has the guts, let them come to the floor of the house and debate. Let them come and tell us how they are going to defend their sorry record of incompetence and governance failure," he added.

"We are not here to disrupt; we are here to hold the government accountable," the Congress leader said.

Gowda said issues like inability to roll out the Goods and Services Tax through proper implementation, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act scheme wages, failures in education sector, farmers' distress and their suicides, border stand-off with China, Kashmir, mob lynchings, communal and caste violence, would be raised in Parliament.

"These are issues that have been burning the nation between the last session and the present one. That is exactly what we are going to hold up. We are going to hold up a mirror to the government and show their incompetence, their hidden hands which are encouraging mobs to go out and attack the Dalits and minorities and others. This is something we are going to expose on the floor of the house," the Congress leader added.
New Delhi, July 19 : Congress MP Jyotiraditya Scindia on Wednesday hit out at the Narendra Modi government for the increasing farmers suicides in the country and criticised Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh for being "insensitive" to killing of six farmers by police in Madhya Pradesh's Mandsaur.

Participating in a discussion on agrarian crisis in Lok Sabha, Scindia said: "Farmers are forced to throw tomatoes, onions, potatoes on road as they cannot get (a good) price. Crop insurance scheme has failed. Private companies are benefitted. After GST, prices of DAP (Diammonium phosphate fertliser), tractor, farming equipment have increased."

"While Chief Economic Adviser arvind Subramanian said that farmers must get Rs 7,000 per quintal of Tur (pigeon pea), they are getting just Rs 5,050. There is huge discrepancies in reports and implementation," he said.

Referring to the Mandsaur incident, he called Centre and Madhya Pradesh government "insensitive" towards farmers.

"While Prime Minister tweets when anything happens, he did not make a single tweet on Mandsaur. Agriculture Minister did not bother to go to Mandsaur. Instead, he chose to do Yoga with Baba Ramdev," he said.

He said 65 farmers in Madhya Pradesh had committed suicide including 11 in Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan's Sihor district after the Mandsaur incident.

He demanded criminal cases should be filed against those responsible for Mandsaur firing.

Party's chief whip in Lok Sabha, Scindia, said the farmers could not see "a ray of hope" due to anti-farmers policies of the government.

"When the government is supposed protect farmers, it is firing bullets at farmers. It has put over 700 farmers behind the bar. How can we there is democracy in the country? " he said.

When Scindia said agriculture growth rate had gone down in BJP government's tenure and farmers were not getting Minimum Support Price as promised before election, Radha Mohan Singh interrupted, saying: "We had promised 50 percent above the input cost. Even we are trying to double farmers' income."

Rural Development Minister Narendra Singh Tomar said that Congress tried to mislead farmers in case of Mandsaur issue.

"If we look at farmers' issues through political lens, there will be chaos," he added.

BJP member Virendra Singh 'Mast' said that loan waivers was not a permanent solution to problems faced by peasants and asked for a special session of Parliament to discuss various issues concerning Indian farmers.

He got support from Speaker Sumitra Mahajan, who said the suggestion was "good".
The police has started an investigation to find if there is any conspiracy at play behind the Darjeeling unrest.

By Manogya Loiwal : In what could lead to an enormous breakthrough in to the Gorkhaland agitation, the police has laid hands on data that suggests that leaders van-guarding the movement could have stirred the storm the wrong way.

Prior to the protests, senior Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) leaders made several phone calls in Assam, Jammu and Kashmir and even Nepal.

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The police has started an investigation to find if there is any conspiracy at play behind the Darjeeling unrest.

A preliminary report from the investigation has already been submitted at Nabanna, the West Bengal Secretariat.

Numerous calls were made to Assam, J-K and Nepal on July 8, same day as the cabinet meet that was convened to take stock of the unrest in the Darjeeling hills.

GJM Assistant General Secretary Binoy Tamang also made a call to Nepal on May 7, a month prior to the unrest.

According to reports, GJM President Bimal Gurung also made several calls to Assam during May.

Immediately before the situation flared up in Darjeeling, frequent calls were made to Assam by several Morcha leaders.

On June 6 and 7, two days before the situation in the hills deteriorated, GJM General Secretary Roshan Giri made calls to Jammu and Kashmir.

WHAT IS HAPPENING?

The police is primarily trying to find if the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha leadership is seeking help or advise from militants groups in Assam.

But what prompted the police to investigate the case on this angle?

In year 2014, two members of a militant group were arrested with arms from an area along the Assam border. During interrogation the arrested person Ganesh Chetri claimed that he was supplying arms to a person named Bijoy Tulung in Kurseong.

Immediately after the Assam Police informed the West Bengal Police about this testimony. It was found that the Bijoy Tulung in question is the elder brother of Sanjay Tulung, who is a member of the Gorkha Territorial Administration (GTA).

The state government also recently submitted an affidavit in the Calcutta High Court stating that Maoists have entered in to the country from the neighboring country and are planning to target high ranking government officials in Darjeeling.

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Sharkwater arrives in Florida Conservation is the preservation of human life on earth and that above all else is worth fighting for

Fins Attached is pleased to name the vessel Sharkwater, to honor the late filmmaker, Rob Stewart. Fins Attached has partnering with the Sharkwater Team to finish the filming of Sharkwater Extinction.

Sharkwater is a 134 foot vessel that was originally built in Japan and used by Japanese fisheries, but now has been repurposed for the good of our oceans through the marine research and conservation mission of Fins Attached. Sharkwater will be a host to many different professions within the field. Scientists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), marine science students, and documentary crews will have the opportunity to conduct fieldwork, and to achieve the objectives of Fins Attached. Scientists and film crews have already reached out to Fins Attached to be able to use Sharkwater over the next 12 months.

Gaining its own research expedition vessel will allow the nonprofit to expand its mission. Fins Attached works toward saving marine animal life, sharks in particular. Shark populations are on the decline, and in some species, by over 95%. As Rob Stewart always said, saving our oceans is saving us. Stated Alex Antoniou, Fins Attached founder. Being able to support research, conversation, and education of the apex predators of the sea is what Sharkwater is all about, Antoniou continued.

The Sharkwater team is proud to be a part of the Sharkwater research vessel and we know Rob Stewart was thrilled to have been involved in this significant initiative. Its imperative we support the oceans and all its creatures and this boat will provide an excellent resource for researchers, scientists, and conservation groups for years to come, began Brian and Sandy Stewart. A giant thank you to Alexand his organization Fins Attached for making this happen. As Rob said, Conservation is the preservation of human life on earth and that above all else is worth fighting for, concluded Brian.

Sharkwater will conduct over 25 expeditions a year with various groups and donors. Sponsorships are available. Individuals and companies can sponsor areas of the ship, such as the Dive Deck Operations, the Lounge and Dinning area, and Individual Guest Cabins. All sponsors will be recognized during the christening event as well as onboard recognition throughout the year, and through the Fins Attached communication channels. Additionally, sponsorships are tax deductible. Contact info(at)finsattached(dot)org to become a sponsor.

If the public would like to learn more about marine conservation, visit finsattached.org. If you would like to donate towards saving sharks and our oceans, please visit http://www.gofundme.com/Sharkwater. If the media is interested in attending the christening in Florida, or for interviews, or would like further information please, contact Fins Attached, info(at)finsattached(dot)org, or (719) 499-9117.
Jobs in the health care field, including registered nurses and surgical technologists, are in demand. Another hot job is recruiter. Companies are looking for individuals with human resource backgrounds to help in searches for applicants.

A recent story on National Public Radios Marketplace took a quick look at some of the ramifications of having a low unemployment economy. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) June report indicated that with unemployment around 4.4%, the economy is considered to be near full employment. NPR referenced Dr. Andrew Champerlain, chief economist at Glassdoor Economic Research, who explained that certain occupations are experiencing difficulties in filling jobs with qualified candidates, and as a result are raising salaries to attract applicants. https://www.marketplace.org/2017/07/07/economy/here-are-hot-jobs-this-low-unemployment-economy

Robert Morris University Illinois has a history of providing education programs that are based upon career-focused and experiential curricula, meeting the changing demands of an evolving economy.

Jobs that the BLS considers to be in demand right now include registered nurse, software engineer, data scientists  these are careers that are in need of workers. Another hot job is recruiter. Companies are looking for individuals with Business/Human Resource degrees and experience to help them in their searches for appropriate applicants.

Robert Morris University Illinois recently announced that its Bachelor of Science in Nursing program received an additional accreditation by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, a national accreditation agency officially recognized by the U.S. Secretary of Education. The University's fall cohort for the BSN degree begins on September 25, 2017 and applications are being accepted through August 1. Other programs offered by RMUs College of Nursing and Health Studies include surgical technology and medical assisting.

A growing concentration in the RMU School of Business Administration is human resources, which provides networking and job experiences through membership in the Society for Human Resource Management. The RMU Institute of Technology and Media offers programs in networking, cloud computing, database and several other concentrations.

All RMU students must complete at least one internship in their major in order to graduate. This requirement gives students relevant experience within their fields of study. Additionally, they learn about real world decision-making, develop critical thinking and improve communication with knowledgeable employees, supervisors and clients.

As an accredited, not-for-profit, baccalaureate and graduate degree granting institution, RMU has a graduation rate far above the national average. The main campus is located in downtown Chicago at State and Congress, and branch campuses are located in suburban Chicago and central Illinois.

The fall quarter begins on September 25. The RMU website at http://www.robertmorris.edu provides additional information on all programs and campus locations. Applications for admission can be made online. To speak to a counselor, call 800-762-5960 and ask for admissions.
Charlee Bankston releases a blazing debut single "Numbers" Originally from Chicago,IL, by way Dallas,TX; he displays his lyrical prowess and uncanny word play with "Numbers." Numbers will serve as the first release from forthcoming EP titled "Just The Beginning." The second single from the forth coming EP will be "Coolin". This video will filmed on the 15th July in Chicago,IL.

You can follow Charlee Bankston via his social media:

Facebook: CharleeBankston

Twitter: CharleeBankston

Instagram: CharleeBankston

http://www.charleebankston.com
MetaMoJi ClassRoom is an application for mobile and Windows devices, designed to help educators manage everything from single student sessions through to full classes and seminars. ClassRoom has traditionally been used by tutors, schools and universities but has started to gain traction with corporate education teams. In February 2017 Fujitsu FSAS Corporation, a system integrator within the Fujitsu Group, began using MetaMoJi ClassRoom for group training.

The "Minato Mirai Innovation & Future Center" of Fujitsu FSAS is in the Minato Mirai district of Yokohama and was opened in 2013 for training and co-creation. From the location, you can see the Bay Bridge, the Ferris Wheel and the sea at Yokohama. The center has become extremely popular, with many visitors participating in seminars each year.

A two day "facilitation training" course is being held at the venue to cultivate skills in effectively running internal meetings. It is held for employees three years after joining, with a maximum class size of 20 people. The attendees include employees of affiliated companies in addition to Fujitsu FSAS's nationwide bases.

Moving Away From PC's, Whiteboards & Paper

Each attendee uses an ARROWS Tab device which is used by docking with a keyboard. During the lecture, training materials are delivered to students directly on their devices via MetaMoJi ClassRoom. Typically, educational institutions use MetaMoJi ClassRoom on tablets and focus on utilizing their touch screen capabilities, but in this corporate training keyboards are actively used.

A projector is configured per student group, with the device of one of the students connected to it. It is important that the instructor can see the groups progress and comment by watching the projected screen, but equally important that it can be seen by other groups. Hiroaki Morita, a member of the Human Resources Development Division and lecturer of this training said, "Although we divide the class into smaller groups, the quality of practical training has clearly improved over time. This is because you can improve the level of training received by allowing all groups to see each others progress."

MetaMoJi ClassRoom was introduced during an initiative to replace old training PCs with ARROWS Tab devices in 2016. Mr. Naoki Uchida, manager of the Human Resources Development Department said: "We used to perform the training using traditional methods such as whiteboards and sticky notes. We decided to use ICT more during training at the same time as introducing a handheld device. The ability to digitally represent physical hardware such as whiteboards and sticky notes without losing the functionality is a key reason for deciding to use MetaMoJi ClassRoom."

Security & Cost Reductions

Prior to the introduction, there were concerns about security, whether printed materials might be easier to use, and that the time required for the training could increase due to the introduction of an application. The concerns of security were addressed by installing all applications on internal infrastructure and having a wireless network dedicated for the training and allowing access to MetaMoJi ClassRoom.

There was a concern that printed material and a pen are easier to use. I typically prepared a printed booklet and gave it to each applicant, but few people would take them home after the training. Participants can now download the PDF of the materials after the training. Said Ms. Uchida. Removing the use of paper through digitization was not an original goal, but a result of using MetaMoJi ClassRoom is that our use of paper has decreased. It also reduces the cost of ordering printed booklets from external contractors and reduces the risk of losing confidential materials.

Ms. Uchida continued, There is a further cost reduction as we are no longer using paper pads and lots of sticky notes. Instructors no longer need to clean up all the paper and sticky notes after a training session, and the time spent cleaning the whiteboard in each room is now gone. The time spent leaving rooms ready for the next visitors after each training session is reduced."

Concerns of students needing time for additional training in the ClassRoom application were also resolved. Time was allocated on day 1 to explain how to operate the application and the training session is still completed in the same number of hours as before. The time spent on training for ClassRoom is offset by not needing to write information onto the whiteboard, to erase it all, or to add and remove sticky notes. The training still proceeds at the same tempo.

Encouraging Individuality During Training

Mr. Morito said Using MetaMoJi ClassRoom, it is easy to organize the training plan as you can express your ideas easily and visually, and share with all participants. As a result, the discussion has become more animated and it has become possible to discuss the training content more deeply. It is possible to create colorful and easy-to-understand digital artifacts using ClassRoom, compared to using whiteboards and paper. The fact that the screen can be projected on to a large screen in addition to being displayed on each students device makes it easier to coordinate what each group is working on.

One of the goals of introducing more ICT into the training was to develop a training style that allowed participants to act as individuals. Regarding this, Mr. Morita said, "When using MetaMoJi ClassRoom, constraints such as sharing pens and standing in front of the white board are removed. More opinions can be gathered from each student as they can explain at their own pace and approach answers in their own style, rather than being dictated to use whiteboards and sticky notes with fixed layouts and space. Using ClassRoom, it is easier for each student to demonstrate their own personality.

The Future For ClassRoom And Fujitsu FSAS

Another effect of using the MetaMoJi ClassRoom application is that an internal practice has developed. "In the past, everyone stood writing around the whiteboard. Now we are collaborating with our Seattle office visually, in real-time, using MetaMoJi ClassRoom. It is close to having a real meeting in the same location..

Currently, only the "Facilitation training" uses MetaMoJi ClassRoom, but Mr. Uchida and Mr. Morito are already planning to extend its use to other training courses. Mr. Morito said, In addition to collective training, I also plan to work on training by connecting to remote areas and networks. This would make more use of the feature to monitor the screen of one or more participants side by side on the instructor's screen

More Information

If you would like to try MetaMoJi Classroom please visit http://business.metamoji.com/classroom and apply for a free trial. Our team will work with you to help you achieve your educational goals.
With PowerSchool Registration, we are able to significantly reduce data entry errors and experience substantial cost savings by eliminating the paper-based process we previously had in place.

Middletown Township School District (NJ) is transitioning from a paper-based method to PowerSchool Registration, an online enrollment solution, for the families and school staff of the 10,000 students it serves. The online solution will augment the districts PowerSchool Student Information System (SIS), streamlining school operations to improve efficiency from enrollment to graduation.

It became imperative to make the registration process more efficient for families when enrolling students in school each year, stated Susan Calabro, Student information Systems Manager at Middletown Township School District. With PowerSchool Registration, we are able to significantly reduce data entry errors and experience substantial cost savings by eliminating the paper-based process we previously had in place.

Using PowerSchool Registration, families who have more than one child in the district can snap data from one student to another. SmartForm technology, an intuitive tool built into the solution, collects relevant data based on previously entered information and selections (grade, activities, medical history, etc.). The data submitted by families is reviewed, polished, and formatted to meet district policies and then delivered into the PowerSchool SIS, giving school administrators and educators accurate and up-to-date records for students on the first day of school.

To be able to see our projected enrollment numbers prior to the start of the school year is invaluable, stated Calabro. Having the appropriate information in a timely manner allows us to allocate our resources accordingly. We can look at the projected enrollment numbers and ensure we are meeting the needs of all our students.

About Middletown Township School District

The Middletown Township Public School District of Monmouth County is located in the beautiful coastal region of central New Jersey. It is bound by the Navesink River to the South, Raritan Bay to the North, and the Atlantic Ocean coastline to the East. Middletown is one historically and culturally rich community of 42 square miles with twelve neighborhood elementary schools, three middle schools and two large, comprehensive high schools. With approximately 9,800 students, Middletown is the largest K-12 school system in Monmouth County and one of the largest in the state.

About PowerSchool Group LLC

PowerSchool is the leading K-12 education technology provider of solutions that improve the education experience for 100 million students, teachers, and parents in over 70 countries around the world. We provide the industrys first Unified Classroom experience, empowering teachers with best-in-class, secure, and compliant online solutions, including student information systems, learning management and classroom collaboration, assessment, analytics, behavior, and special education case management. We streamline school office and administration operations with online solutions for student registration, school choice, and finance/HR/ERP. We drive student growth through digital classroom capabilities and engage families through real-time communications across any device. Visit https://www.powerschool.com/ to learn more.
Continuing its rapid expansion, OfficePro, Inc. proudly announces its partnership with Yorktel, one of the nations leading UC and video managed services providers. This is a notable enhancement to Yorktels Professional Services, which will now include not only system design and implementation, but post-implementation user support that maximizes the ROI on a companys technology investments.

Our customers need more than just access to the technology, said Vishal Brown, Senior Vice President of Professional Services at Yorktel. They need post-integration help with user adoption. In many cases, companies are investing significant resources into upgraded technologies, but need help addressing the people side of their technology planning.

Customers engage Yorktel for post-installation, hands-on, expert training of software, AV hardware, and telecommunication platforms and equipment. Clients receive customized training through knowledgeable, experienced instructors on almost any software or technology, regardless of its newness or uniqueness.

In addition to customizable training, customers can implement Hypercare  convenient, white-glove level support that continues after formal training concludes. For companies in technological transition, Hypercare ensures the training sticks by providing continuous in-person support from a trainer who not only knows how to use the new technology, but is skilled in teaching it to others. OfficePro President, Aaron Udler, stated, Your IT staff arent trainers. When youre dealing with new technology, we understand that you want a patient, knowledgeable teacher whos happy to answer every question and provide deskside support for as long as it takes.

Trainers maintain a customer service mindset, as opposed to the troubleshooting, highly technical mindset of a companys internal IT department. A skilled trainer can even address employee pushback or confusion and re-teach aspects of the training if necessary, providing useful data to supervisors and executives regarding employee strengths and revealing areas where further support is needed. In addition, on-site support eliminates the frustration and inefficiency of contacting remote, third-party tech hotlines and makes employees feel more positive about embracing change. Call it a win-win.

This level of in-depth customer-focused service could not be achieved without the partnership of OfficePro and Yorktel. We look forward to a successful, ongoing relationship.

About OfficePro, Inc.

OfficePro, Inc. (http://www.officeproinc.com) has over 30 years experience in end-user training. Since their origins in 1984, they have adapted their training to cater to almost every technology in the industry. OfficePro employs a variety of training methods, including on-site ILT (instructor-led training), vILT (virtual instructor-led training), Hypercare services, and other supplemental services. OfficePro consistently practices adaptability and innovation, evolving at the speed of technology so they can provide the most efficient and comprehensive service. These central values are the hard-learned result of decades of training for over one million clients in the government, private, and public sectors.

Follow OfficePro on Facebook: officeproinc

Contact: Erica Dhawan, Director of Marketing

About Yorktel

Yorktel (http://www.yorktel.com) is a leading global provider of video collaboration, UC and managed services for large enterprise and federal government customers. Founded in 1985 and with offices throughout the US, EMEA and Japan, Yorktel enables customers to successfully integrate video into their operations  from video conferencing to streaming, video event production, to digital signage. Yorktel designs, integrates and manages enterprise-wide video communications solutions. For more information, visit Yorktel online at http://www.yorktel.com or email knowmore(at)yorktel.com.

Follow Yorktel on Twitter: @yorktelcorp

Contact: Samantha Osowski, Senior VP of Marketing
Spinal Simplicity Logo

Spinal Simplicity, a medical device company developing innovative solutions to treat complex spinal and orthopedic problems, announces Richard Grant has agreed to serve as an Advisor and will join the Companys Board of Managers.

Richard Grant brings a wealth of experience to Spinal Simplicity as an accomplished medical device executive with over 30 years in the spinal and orthopedic medical industries. As President, CEO and Co-Founder of Breakaway Imaging, LLC, Mr. Grant successfully developed new imaging technology (the O-Arm), incorporating 2-D (fluoroscopy) and 3-D (CT) imaging, in a mobile platform optimized for orthopedic and spinal surgeries. Mr. Grant orchestrated the sale of Breakaway Imaging, LLC to Medtronic, Inc. in June 2007.

Mr. Grant also has extensive experience with early-stage medical device companies as evidenced by his work as President and CEO of TheraCell, Inc., in Northridge, CA, specializing in stem cell harvesting and processing for orthopedic applications, and, as President of Bonovo Orthopedics in Phoenix, AZ, a US-based company that manufactures and distributes spine and orthopedic instrumentation and implants in China. Mr. Grant currently serves on the Board of Directors of two medical device companies, an orthopedic bracing company and an ortho-biologic company, while also serving as the Chairman of the Board of a company specializing in computer-assisted total knee solutions. Notably, Mr. Grant also served on the Board of Directors of Excelsius Surgical (sold to Globus Medical), Nocimed (partnering with Nuvasive), and Angstrom Medica (sold to Pioneer Surgical).

Todd Moseley, CEO of Spinal Simplicity, applauded Mr. Grants significant industry experience stating, Rich is an admired executive in the spine and orthopedic medical device world. Spinal Simplicity will benefit mightily from Richs knowledge and experience navigating early-stage companies from initial innovation to becoming market leaders. Our Company will have the unique advantage of calling upon Richs experience as we bring the Minuteman G3-R to the minimally-invasive spine market to enhance posterior supplemental fixation and fusion, as well as to introduce our ground-breaking Wolffs Law plating technology to the spinal and orthopedic extremities market.

Mr. Grant agreed that this is an extraordinary time for Spinal Simplicity, As the Company experiences the positive responses being lauded by physicians to its revolutionary technology, it becomes more and more evident that the spinal and orthopedic markets are ready for innovative medical devices. The time is ripe to get the word out about the innovation being unveiled by Spinal Simplicity.

Spinal Simplicitys Minuteman family of sterile-packed, posterior, non-pedicle supplemental fusion and fixation devices for use in the non-cervical spine (T1-S1) provides an alternative to traditional fixation, such as pedicle screws. The Minuteman family of devices consists of a plating system intended for supplemental fusion in patients with degenerative disc disease, spondylolisthesis, trauma and tumor.

About Spinal Simplicity

Spinal Simplicity, LLC, headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas, is dedicated to the creation of simple solutions for the treatment of complex spinal and orthopedic problems. Spinal Simplicity has regulatory clearance for the Minuteman system in the US, Europe, and Canada. Our vision is to be the leader in innovative, simplified surgical solutions, while delivering uncompromising quality. For more information, please visit http://www.spinalsimplicity.com.
Wydler Brothers Real Estate is pleased to announce three internal advancements. Kathleen Wilks has been promoted to President/Chief Marketing Officer; Rob Seaver has been promoted to Director of Innovation & Technology; and Lisa Tippins has been promoted to Vice President of Brokerage Operations in the Wydler Brothers Maryland office.

Kathleen has been a fundamental part of the companys expansion since her arrival nearly 3 years ago, putting her stamp on nearly every aspect of the brokerage starting with rebranding the company, launching a new website, creating agent-specific marketing programs, expanding their social media presence, organizing all special events and now increased involvement with agent recruiting. She has engrained herself into the fabric that holds Wydler Brothers Real Estate together, truly embodying the team as family model. Her unique outlook on marketing coupled with her natural leadership abilities make her more than suitable to fill the role of President in the coming years and push the Wydler Brothers' brand to a new frontier.

Rob has now been with the Wydler Brothers Real Estate for 4 wonderful years. After his graduation from Virginia Commonwealth University and his experience as a freelance PR professional in New York City, Rob has gone above and beyond providing Wydler Brothers Real Estate with his extensive graphic design work and thorough technological assistance and creativity. Wydler Brothers looks forward to Robs continued effort to utilize new systems for improving and streamlining the companys internal and external operations.

Lisa Tippins has been the Director of Client Services and Compliance in the Chevy Chase office of Wydler Brothers for the past three years. She has thrived in this position due to her attention to detail and articulate communication style, ensuring that clients and customers have smooth transactions from start to finish. Wydler Brothers is excited to see how Lisa will further shape the day-to-day functions of the brokerage in ways that promote long-term growth and quality assurance.

Wydler Brothers Real Estate is a successful brokerage founded by brothers, Hans and Steve Wydler. The brokerage specializes in fine homes and condominiums throughout the greater DC metro area. With close to $1.25 billion in sales since their inception, they were recognized as the most Innovative Realtor in America by Inman News, the leading trade publication that focuses on residential real estate. Through a combination of smart people, cutting-edge technology, and a community-knowledge approach, Wydler Brothers Real Estate is committed to delivering the highest level of service to clients and providing the best marketing and technical support to their agents.

For more information, contact Kathleen Wilks at Wydler Brothers at 202-276-0638 or Kathleen(at)wydlerbrothers(dot)com or visit http://www.wydlerbrothers.com
Patrick Kolzow named Managing Director of DHJJ "It is truly an honor to be named the Managing Director of a firm with outstanding core values and a history of success."

DHJJ Certified Public Accountants and Business Advisors announces Patrick Kolzow, CPA, as its new Managing Director. Kolzow takes the firms leadership role after Tom Jordan, CPA, steps down from Managing Director after 25 years in the position.

After 25 years of being the managing director of DHJJ, its very reassuring to have the next managing director be a person of character and experience who will continue the firms values, including its culture and client service, Jordan said. For those who wonder, I am not retiring and this will give me an opportunity to continue to serve my clients and explore other opportunities within the firm.

Kolzow has over 20 years of public accounting experience and serves a wide variety of industries, helping clients develop successful tax and business strategies. He has been with DHJJ for over 10 years and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting from the University of Missouri and a Masters in Taxation from DePaul University.

It is truly an honor to be named the Managing Director of a firm with outstanding core values and a history of success, Kolzow said. This is an exciting time for me to take on this leadership role and build on the foundation that Carmen (DiGiovine), Frank (Hnilo), Tom (Jordan), Tim (Johnson), and all of our principals have built. I look forward to the firms continued growth and dedication to our clients and employees.

About DHJJ Certified Public Accountants and Business Advisors

DHJJ exists to help clients reach their goals by making astute and well informed financial and management decisions. The firm was formed in 1974, and in the years since has grown to include over 75 team members who share a commitment to helping all clients fulfill their financial potential. With offices in the original location of Naperville, Illinois and in St. Charles, Illinois, DHJJ offers a complete range of tax, assurance, accounting, business advisory, and financial advisory services to businesses and individuals in the Chicago area and across the Midwest. For information, visit http://www.dhjj.com.
The union is protesting for the second day now, demanding that the university roll back its decision to fail over 2,000 students in B. Com (programme).

The figures provided by DUSU, however, have been called dubious by the university's examination branch.

By Mail Today Bureau: Threatening to escalate the ongoing protests in Delhi University's North campus, the Delhi University Students' Union has decided to take the altercation to the vice-chancellor's doorstep.

The union is protesting for the second day now, demanding that the university roll back its decision to fail over 2,000 students in B. Com (programme).

DU failed nearly 500 students in the B. Com (programme) of fifth semester in practical and theory exam. Over 200 students could not clear the third year examination owing to lack of clarity on marks needed for clearing practical and theory exams separately.

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The figures provided by DUSU, however, have been called dubious by the university's examination branch.

"We have not failed 2,000 students in the practical exam. Nearly 300 students have failed to secure the required marks to qualify the practical exam," said a senior official from the varsity's examination branch. Students and principals have claimed that the new passing criterion was not intimidated to colleges such as Kamala Nehru, Ambedkar, Satyawati and Shaheed Bhagat Singh. Citing lack of communication from varsity officials, principals expressed helplessness.

"There was no official communication from the university regarding the new passing criteria. Students were unaware of the marks required to qualify the practical exam and were not even told that they have failed," Kalpana Bhakuni, principal of Kamala Nehru College told Mail Today.

Also read: Delhi University's solution for high cut-offs: An all-India entrance test

Also read: Cut-off system to be scrapped? DU mulls new process with minimum admission scores, entrance exam

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Ace Laboratories, Inc. (http://www.Acelabseattle.com) today announced that Colonel Dallas Hack (Ret.), MD, MPH will join the company in a co-appointment as its Medical Director and member of the Scientific Advisory Board. In addition, Army Reservist Lt. Colonel William Killgore, PhD. has also been appointed to the Scientific Advisory Board. Both are innovators in advancing the understanding and treatment of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).

Dr. Hacks distinguished military medical career included Army command surgeon advancing to faculty Instructor at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He was promoted to the Director of the US Army Combat Casualty Care Research Program and the Chair, Joint Program Committee 6 (Combat Casualty Care). Dr. Hack also served as the Senior Medical Advisor to the Principal Assistant, Research and Technology, US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC) from 2014 to 2015. His military honors include the Bronze Star, two Legions of Merit, and seven Meritorious Service Medals. He was also inducted as a Distinguished Member of the Military Order of Medical Merit.

As the Director of the US Army Casualty Care research program, Dr. Hack coauthored the 2013 National Research Action Plan to address Mental Health and Traumatic Brain Injury in Service members and Veterans, and oversaw a portfolio of over 650 projects directed at TBI.

Dr. William Killgore is a 15-year army veteran with extensive experience directing clinical and scientific research in neurological repair and performance enhancement. He was formerly a researcher at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring MD. He is currently Professor and Director of the Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) Lab, Department of Psychiatry, at the University of Arizona, and retains a faculty appointment as Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School.

As a Principal Investigator, Dr. Killgore has been awarded more than $15 million in research funding by the Department of Defense to develop methods for accelerating recovery from mild traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. He has presented over 400 abstracts and presentations at scientific conferences and has published over 160 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. His research on the military use of caffeine was recently profiled in the press, including a feature in Wired magazine.

Chip Jacob, CEO of Ace Laboratories, adds, Dr. Hack and Dr. Killgore bring vast experience in brain injury and disease as well as health needs of our service members. Theyre valuable additions to accelerate our clinical research and development from pharmacology to in-patient trials.

About Ace Laboratories, Inc., Seattle

Ace Laboratories is focused on enhancing human health via the application of its proprietary technology to unlock the therapeutic potential of resveratrol. The companys lead product candidate, AIC-101, is a pharmaceutical formulation of Resveratrol delivered in a lozenge. Ace plans to investigate AIC-101 in vascular and inflammatory indications such as Alzheimers disease and Mild to Moderate Traumatic Brain Injury/Concussion.

AIC-101 is a pharmaceutical formulation of Resveratrol, a natural polyphenol found in red wine. The resveratrol molecule captured public interest in 2006 after a landmark study showed that it improved the health-span of rodents. In the decades since, a number of human clinical trials have demonstrated that resveratrol has potential to be helpful to patients with vascular and Alzheimers diseases, amongst other conditions associated with aging. However, the molecules large-scale potential has been constrained to date by poor oral bioavailability and dose-limiting gastrointestinal side effects. The Companys management believes that its proprietary technology, AIC-101, may effectively address these limitations.

Ace Laboratories is led by an experienced team including Chief Executive Officer Chip Jacob, Chief Technology Officer Otis Blanchard, Chairman Daniel Wilds, and Corporate Secretary Jim Johnston. The group brings together more than a hundred years of collective drug development experience and successful working history.

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. All statements other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements, which are often indicated by terms such as anticipate, believe, could, estimate, expect, goal, intend, look forward to, may, plan, potential, predict, project, should, will, would and similar expressions and variations thereof. Forward-looking statements are based on managements beliefs and assumptions and on information available to management only as of the date of this press release. Ace Laboratories actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements for many reasons, including, without limitation, risks associated with funding, product commercialization and commercial operations, unproven preclinical and clinical development activities, regulatory oversight, intellectual property claims, competitive developments, litigation, and the risks, uncertainties and other factors. Given these risks, uncertainties and other factors, you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, and the company assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

Media Contact:

Chip Jacob

CEO

Ace Laboratories, Inc.

info(at)acelabseattle.com
COCM is honored to partner with Glen Oaks Community College. We are excited about the potential of the Colleges first housing community and how it can serve to enhance the lives and success of their students, said Alton Irwin, Chief Marketing Officer.

COCM is once again expanding its portfolio of on-campus managed housing with the addition of new campus partner, Glen Oaks Community College in Centreville, Michigan. The COCM portfolio expands to 35 campuses and more than 29,000 beds with this partnership.

COCMs partnership with Glen Oaks Community College (GOCC) is a shared governance arrangement, for a new residential community of 108 beds. It will be a three-story building, consisting of two- and four-suite units that share a kitchen, living areas and two bathrooms. The new housing, being built by Frederick Construction, is scheduled to open in August 2017. The new residence life community is to be named the David H. and Patricia A. Devier Student Suites, in honor of President David Devier, who has been instrumental in the planning of the community and bringing it to fruition.

COCM is honored to partner with Glen Oaks Community College. We are excited about the potential of the Colleges first housing community and how it can serve to enhance the lives and success of their students, said Alton Irwin, COCM Chief Marketing Officer.

COCM is a group of student housing professionals focused on helping their partners leverage campus housing to enhance student recruitment and retention, as well as student satisfaction and success. They provide one-of-a-kind management solutions for one-of-a-kind campuses. Headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, COCM provides management services for over 29,522 beds at 35 campuses. For more information about COCM, please visit cocm.com and studenthousingmatters.com.
Trinity Consultants, Inc. (Trinity), an international environmental, heath, and safety (EHS) consulting firm that specializes in industrial air quality issues, announces that it has acquired Argent Consulting Services (ACS) of Houston, Texas. ACS is a consulting firm with a focus on air quality, process safety management (PSM), and EHS information management. ACS was founded in 1993 and is led by founder Greg Haunschild, PE, and Adam Jackson, both of whom will remain with the firm.

Shishir Mohan, Trinitys Gulf Region Managing Director, commented on the transaction, ACS has been a respected competitor locally for many years so we are pleased to be joining forces with them to serve Gulf Coast area clients. Their skills complement Trinitys, enhancing our capabilities to assist clients in the demanding Houston market. The merger also creates additional career growth opportunities for staff from both organizations.

ACS founder Greg Haunschild noted, This merger is a fantastic opportunity for the ACS staff and for our clients. Merging with Trinity, a company that is so well regarded for its technical expertise and business management, will be an exciting next step in the evolution of the firm that was founded to maximize our clients profitability by reducing their compliance burden.

Trinity and ACS will maintain their current Houston office locations for the near term, with plans to consolidate space sometime within the next year.

Background on Trinity Consultants

Founded in 1974 in Dallas, Texas, Trinity operates in locations across the U.S. and in Canada, the U.K., China, and the Middle East. Trinity assists industrial facilities with regulatory EHS permitting and compliance, specializing in air quality permitting and compliance management. In addition to EHS consulting, Trinitys divisions provide environmental modeling software (BREEZE), implement technology solutions for EHS information management (T3), provide professional EHS training, support engineering and EHS staffing needs (Trispyrian Resources), and assist life sciences companies with occupational health science and toxicology (SafeBridge Consultants).

Background on Argent Consulting Services

Argent Consulting Services (ACS) specializes in supporting industrial companies with environmental compliance, coupling expert consultants with smart technology to do so. In addition to air quality and water permitting, ACS assist clients with reducing environmental risks and liabilities through environmental due diligence support, auditing, and enforcement assistance. ACS also consults on RMP/PSM compliance, environmental information management, and ISO 14001 environmental management systems.
International photographic artist Betsy McCue of San Diego-based La Vida Creations announces the launch of her Kickstarter campaign (http://www.betsypassport.com). She is currently traveling internationally on sabbatical with We Roam, a travel-while-working program, along with a small group of hand-chosen entrepreneurs and remote workers. Her new, expanded body of work she is developing on this trip will include fine art, editorial, and documentary photography, as well as a written and visual journal of her travels and experiences that can be followed via her blog (http://www.vidapassport.com) and Instagram (http://www.instagram.com/vidapassport). McCue is a veteran photographer of 12 years who is known for her documentary-style storytelling imagery that captures the raw beauty of organic moments in their natural environment.

Betsy McCue will be traveling to several cities throughout Europe, moving to a new city each month. This will allow her to experience each location as a local would, rather than as a tourist. She will be telling the stories of small businesses through editorial photography, as well as writing, during her journey. At the same time, she will be creating and marketing her fine art travel photography inspired by, and captured during, her travels. She began her journey July 3 in Prague, Czech Republic. She will move to Berlin, Germany for the month of August, followed by Split, Croatia in September. She plans to continue her journey for an additional three months, which would add Belgrade (Serbia), Lisbon (Portugal), and Rabbat (Morocco) to her upcoming destinations. Betsy McCue is available for commissioned writing and photography during her sabbatical.

Her Kickstarter campaign can be found at http://www.betsypassport.com and is currently underway, ending August 10, 2017. The goal is to raise $14,000. Offering a range of investment levels, backers will be rewarded with a variety of photographic artwork including fine art prints, personally commissioned imagery, and coffee table art books to be fulfilled upon her return to the States.

About Artist Betsy McCue:

Betsy McCue is a professional photographer living and working in San Diego, California and beyond. She founded her studio, La Vida Creations, with her late-husband, Jeff McCue, in 2004. Jeff unexpectedly passed away from a brain aneurysm July 22, 2016. Betsy McCue is going on an international sabbatical to create a body of work to reflect her new voice as a young widow and artist. This portfolio will include fine art, editorial, and commercial photography in her signature documentary-style, as well as writing. Betsy McCue is taking La Vida Creations in a new direction, while paying homage to the history of the studio. Her portfolio can be viewed at http://www.lavidacreations.com. She can also be reached at betsy(at)lavidacreations.com.

Contact Information:

Telephone: 1-619-857-3717

Email Address: betsy(at)lavidacreations.com
LJT & Associates Inc. of Columbia, Maryland announced that on May 26, 2017 the company transitioned its ownership to an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Mr. Robert Conrad, President & CEO said, The employees of LJT now own 100% of the company.

Mr. Conrad shared that Leon John Tasheiko was the original founder and principal owner of the company. When Leon passed away in November of 2013 his ownership in LJT passed to his wife Sandra. In 2015 Sandra asked the Board of Directors to find a way for her to divest her ownership in LJT while allowing the company culture and management team to continue.

These conditions ultimately led LJT to Menke and Associates, Inc., a firm specializing in Employee Stock Ownership Plans. Some 23,000 companies have adopted ESOPs since they became legal in 1974, according to Phil DeDominicis, the ESOP consultant at Menke who assisted the company in establishing the plan. Establishing the ESOP allowed the company to transfer ownership from the LJT owners to its employees while ensuring the company and culture continue to move forward.

Mr. Conrad believes the ESOP will enhance the companys ability to continue to recruit and retain the best and brightest employees and encourage further employee involvement in areas such as productivity improvement and enhanced customer service. The plan, will increase the employee stake in the company, provide long-term retirement benefits, and incentive to increase value to our customers.

LJT & Associates, Inc. is a premier engineering services provider delivering advanced technical and program management solutions, information technology, systems engineering, launch operations support, hardware/software development, telecommunications, facility services, and scientific support to federal and civil customers.
Were excited for Tim Ballard to be our keynote speaker this year. Hes made such a profound impact on so many lives. It truly is a privilege for us to have him share his experience and passion with the eFORCE community.

Sex trafficking is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world. Nearly two million children worldwide live as sex slaves.

Good people dont know how vast this problem is, said Tim Ballard, Founder and CEO of Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.).

Ballard will be the keynote speaker at this years eFORCE Users Conference. He has spent over a decade working as a Special Agent for the Department of Homeland Security where he was assigned to the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and deployed as an undercover operative for the U.S. Child Sex Tourism Jump Team. He has worked undercover in the United States and in multiple foreign countries to infiltrate child trafficking organizations, and has successfully dismantled dozens of these organizations and rescued countless children from sex slavery.

O.U.R. is a non-profit operation that leads the charge in rescuing children from sex trafficking all over the world, putting offenders behind bars and offering victims the aftercare they need to lead lives that are as healthy and productive as possible.

According to the organizations brochure, major news outlets have recognized O.U.R. for successful missions and their impact on children, their effectiveness working with local governments, and for rendering trafficking rings inoperative after missions have been completed.

Undercover rescue missions are carried out by jump teams made of former law enforcement officers, U.S. Navy SEALS, CIA operatives, military veterans and medical professionals.

In the past three years, O.U.R. has rescued 693 victims and helped arrest more than 300 traffickers across the globe. Both of those numbers continue to grow each year.

One of the keys to O.U.R.s success has been its joint collaboration with foreign and local government agencies.

When were in a foreign country, we work with the foreign government. We go in the front door, said Ballard.

The organization commits crucial resources to the governments in which they operate, providing updated technology and valuable training for identifying and catching traffickers.

After we complete a mission, the local government has a working model for addressing sex slavery and sex tourism to continue actions on their own, stated the companys brochure.

In reference to the mission he has undertaken, Ballard said, Its funny, because we all read history and we think, Oh, I would  have risen up, I would have fought, I would have been an abolitionist,' And I tell them, No, you wouldnt have. If you would have, youd be doing that right now. You know trafficking exists, youve heard of it, but you dont want to look.

Ballard has also been featured on many national news outlets to discuss his efforts to combat child trafficking. He has appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, The Meredith Vieira Show, CBS Nightly News, ABC Nightline, CNN Headline News, MSNBC, The Glenn Beck Program, as well as many local news shows.

Were excited for Tim Ballard to be our keynote speaker this year, said eFORCE CEO, Cory Bowers. Hes made such a profound impact on so many lives. It truly is a privilege for us to have him share his experience and passion with the eFORCE community.

About eFORCE Software

eFORCE Software is a tenured public safety software provider that offers flexible, state-of-the art, web-based solutions in a hosted or locally installed environment. Hundreds of customers enjoy the benefits of eFORCEs proven, leading-edge technologies, which range from small hosted campus police departments to an entire country. For additional information, visit https://www.eforcesoftware.com.
Movoto Real Estate "The best industry to be in is the one hit hardest, said Chu.

Real Estate Broker Mark Chu fell victim to the economic crisis of 2008. Along with many families across the country, Chu found himself without a business and a home.

I read a quote that said wealth is created during times of recession, not economic boom. The best industry to be in is the one hit hardest, said Chu. Thats when I decided to shift my business to real estate.

The real estate market had been turned on its head. Chu founded Big Realty in Fresno and focused his efforts on growing a successful brokerage during difficult times.

I focused my business on short sales in 2008 and sold over 100 short sales in two years. I spent my time researching bank-owned properties and preparing myself to enter that segment of the market. I listed my first bank-owned property in 2010 and sold over 100 bank-owned properties each year, said Chu. Eventually, we grew Big Realty to be one of the largest independent brands in Fresno.

Personally, Chu set goals for himself as well. My plan was simple: work really hard and buy as much real estate as possible. My goal was to own 10 rental properties by the time the foreclosure crisis ended. I currently own 19 and will continue to buy.

Chu merged Big Realty with Movoto Real Estate in 2016 after meeting with the Movoto leadership team. Chu was ready to take his team to the next level and saw opportunity with Movotos technology leadership, and world-class team.

I needed to shift my business to include more technology and lead systems. I know we made the right decision. The proof is in the numbers and we are just getting started.

Chus portfolio consists of numerous accolades, including recognition as one of the top 50 Asian American Real Estate professionals in the nation, a top ten Real Estate Agent in Fresno, and incoming President of NAHREP of Fresno.

About Movoto

Movoto Real Estate was founded on a simple principle: Selling and buying real estate is too complicated. Thats why Movoto has dedicated over a decade to simplifying it. From humble beginnings as a three-person startup in 2005, the company has grown to become the second largest online real estate brokerage in the US and the only one licensed in all 50 states.

With the backing of Recruit Holdings Co. Ltd., owner of the largest real estate portal in Japan, Movoto has developed a network of over 3,500 real estate agents. Movoto was selected four years in a row for Inc. Magazines 500|5000 fastest growing private companies. Over 26,000 clients have trusted Movoto agents with buying or selling their home and over 60 million people search for homes on Movoto each year. Learn more at movoto.com.
The results are outlined in a study that reviews a broad spectrum of airport funding sources to cover the higher cost of biofuel, as well as biofuel supply chain infrastructure investments. The study, published today, was conducted by CWR and SkyNRG, in partnership with the Port.

The information contained in this study will help us take the next steps toward our goal of making the biofuel available, cost-effective and practical for all airlines at Sea-Tac, said Port of Seattle Commissioner John Creighton. It wouldnt have been possible to get to this point without the momentum provided by our partners, industry leaders and community innovators.

The two biggest challenges facing broader adoption of sustainable aviation fuel at Sea-Tac are the higher cost compared with petroleum jet fuel, and the constraints imposed by state and federal regulations on use of airport funds.

The report, titled Innovative Funding for Sustainable Aviation Fuel at U.S. Airports: Explored at Seattle-Tacoma International, reveals the financial tools available to U.S. airports, and outlines legal constraints and financial impacts of each tool. The report found that no single tool could generate enough funding to cover the higher cost of biofuel, and recommended combining a number of funding tools.

Until we reach fossil-price parity, we need co-funding mechanisms to close the price gap between conventional jet fuel and sustainable aviation biofuels. Sea-Tac demonstrates that airports can play a key role in helping to find the right partners to cover the premium and accelerate the transition to secure a sustainable future for the aviation industry, said Theye Veen, Chief Financial Officer of SkyNRG.

We congratulate Sea-Tac on its leadership in showing that airport authorities are critical to the success of the aviation biofuel industry, said Adam Klauber, Director of CWRs Sustainable Aviation program. Weve proven that there are viable funding mechanisms for the widespread uptake of sustainable aviation fuel at Sea-Tac, and we hope that the study provides tools and ideas for other ambitious airports to consider in their sustainability initiatives.

AltAir Fuels, based in California, is the only facility in the world regularly producing aviation biofuels. The Port, as an economic development engine, is seeking ways to help grow the market. This initiative is one solution in the Ports quest to find sustainable solutions that improve the health of our environment and community. Other Port successes include emissions reduction achieved by providing pre-heated and cooled air to aircraft parked at gates, use of electric ground support equipment, and conversion to green vehicles.

Download the report here.

About Seattle-Tacoma International Airport

Operated by the Port of Seattle, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA, KSEA) is ranked as the ninth busiest U.S. airport, serving nearly 45.7 million passengers and more than 366,000 metric tons of air cargo in 2016. With a regional economic impact of more than $16.3 billion in business revenue, Sea-Tac generates 171,796 jobs (109,924 direct jobs) representing over $2.8 billion in direct earnings and more than $565 million in state and local taxes. Twenty-four airlines serve 81 non-stop domestic and 24 international destinations.

About Carbon War Room

Carbon War Room (CWR) was founded in 2009 as a global nonprofit by Sir Richard Branson and a group of like-minded entrepreneurs. It intervenes in markets to accelerate the adoption of business solutions that reduce carbon emissions at gigaton scale. In 2014, CWR merged with and now operates as part of Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). RMI engages businesses, communities, institutions, and entrepreneurs to transform global energy use to create a clean, prosperous, and secure low-carbon future. RMI has offices in Basalt and Boulder, Colorado; New York City; Washington, D.C.; and Beijing.

About SkyNRG

SkyNRG is the global market leader for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), having supplied over 25 airlines on all continents worldwide. SkyNRG sources, blends and distributes SAF, guarantees sustainability throughout the supply chain and helps to co-fund the premium. At the same time, SkyNRG focuses on developing regional supply chains that offer a real sustainable and affordable alternative to fossil fuels. SkyNRG has its operations RSB certified and is structurally advised by an independent Sustainability Board in which WWF International, European Climate Foundation, University of Groningen and Solidaridad Network hold a seat.

Press contact: Merel Laroy, SkyNRG, merel(at)skynrg(dot)com
The Van Cleve Seafood Co.'s famous 200 year old Blue Crab Pie recipe makes Oprah's "O" list! We are so honored to have been sought out and now featured on Oprah Winfreys list of favorite things! Its every food entrepreneurs dream, this is the Oscar of the food industry added Monica Van Cleve-Talbert.

The Van Cleve Seafood Co., an all female and family owned Virginia gourmet food company specializing in decadent seafood products, announces that their famous Chesapeake Blue Crab Pie is featured on the coveted O List of Oprahs Favorite Things in the August issue out on news stands now.

Owners Shelly Van Cleve and her two daughters, Allie Van Cleve-Cushing and Monica Van Cleve-Talbert have been making their Blue Crab Pie for over 30 years and introduced it to customers back in 2000. The family recipe is 200 years old featuring Blue crabmeat, decadent cheeses, and coastal seasonings all baked in a flakey, buttery crust. Our blue pies are made the exact same way today as they were 200 years ago, by hand and with a lot of love, added daughter Alexandra Van Cleve-Cushing.

The Van Cleves Chesapeake Blue Crab Pie has come a long way since introducing it to customers 17 years ago. The Virginias Finest awarded pie can now be found in hundreds of grocery stores along the East Coast, featured in gourmet catalogs and was even served on the menu of the Virginia Governors mansion two years ago. We are so honored to have been sought out and now featured on Oprah Winfreys list of favorite things! Its every food entrepreneurs dream, this is the Oscar of the food industry, added Monica Van Cleve-Talbert.

The Oprah's Favorite Things list premiered in O, The Oprah Magazine in 2002 and is celebrated by consumers, brands and industry insiders alike. Oprah Winfrey has been sharing her list of favorites items and products since the 1990s.

To purchase The Van Cleve Seafood Co.s Chesapeake Blue Crab Pie, visit http://www.VanCleveSeafood.com

ABOUT THE VAN CLEVE SEAFOOD CO.

For three generations the Van Cleve family has passionately made it their mission to share their one-of-a-kind Crab Pie with seafood lovers. The beloved dish became the main menu item in the familys restaurant and crab shack, where the Van Cleve mother-double daughter team served the Crab Pie and other gourmet seafood favorites to many loyal patrons garnering national media attention from prestigious publications and media outlets. They only served the best of the best and people drove for miles for their #1, fat, heavy male crabs and famous Blue Crab Pie. It wasnt long before word got out about Van Cleve gals exceptional crab fares and they affectionately became known regionally as the Girls with Crabs."

In 2013, The Van Cleve family decided to refocus their efforts beyond the single restaurant and made it their mission to get Van Cleve gourmet favorites on supermarket shelves. With passion, persistence and national exposure on Supermarket Superstar, a Lifetime TV series hosted by Stacy Keibler, the Van Cleve Crab Pie was introduced to America!

Today, The Van Cleve Seafood Company has grown from a small family-owned restaurant to a nationally known gourmet seafood company whose beloved dishes, sauces and spices can be packaged and delivered to every American front door and beyond.
Radiation Therapy in Mesothelioma Treatment As experience has increased, it now appears that RT, particularly with IMRT, is both feasible and effective.

A newly published article by the chairman of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Mount Sinai Medical School in New York suggests that radiotherapy for mesothelioma is now both feasible and effective. Surviving Mesothelioma has more on the article. Click here to read it now.

According to Dr. Kenneth Rosenzweig, the radiation toxicities seen in earlier mesothelioma studies have been greatly diminished by increasing experience and targeted treatment technology like intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT).

As experience has increased, it now appears that RT, particularly with IMRT, is both feasible and effective, writes Dr. Rosenzweig in the Annals of Translational Medicine.

The article also suggests that IMRT may be safer for the growing number of pleural mesothelioma patients who opt for lung-sparing mesothelioma surgery since IMRT makes it easier to avoid irradiating healthy tissue.

While this article points out some of the benefits of radiation therapy for mesothelioma, it is important to note that these benefits are primarily seen in centers that offer IMRT and that have the most experience with pleural mesothelioma, says Alex Strauss, Managing Editor for Surviving Mesothelioma.

To read more about Dr. Rosenzweigs article, including some the history of radiation therapy in the treatment of mesothelioma, see IMRT Feasible and Effective for Pleural Mesothelioma, now available on the Surviving Mesothelioma website.

Rosenzweig, K, Malignant pleural mesothelioma: adjuvant therapy with radiation therapy, June 2017, Annals of Translational Medicine, pp. 242, http://atm.amegroups.com/article/view/15265/html

For more than a decade, Surviving Mesothelioma has brought readers the most important and ground-breaking news on the causes, diagnosis and treatment of mesothelioma. All Surviving Mesothelioma news is gathered and reported directly from the peer-reviewed medical literature. Written for patients and their loved ones, Surviving Mesothelioma news helps families make more informed decisions.
By PTI: Chennai, Jul 19 (PTI) AIADMK (Amma) Deputy General Secretary T T V Dhinakaran today dismissed allegations of special treatment for his aunt and party chief V K Sasikala in prison, asserting that she was being treated as per rules.

In his first reaction since the allegations surfaced, Dhinakaran rubbished claims of payment of bribe for the alleged special treatment.

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Speaking to reporters here, he said such allegations were false, adding "we have not even met the DGP (Karnataka)."

He said the Supreme Court had only awarded simple imprisonment to Sasikala. Hence, permission to wear personal clothing (rather than one meant for convicts) was as per rules and jail manual and similar to treatment accorded to other prison inmates, he claimed.

Seeking to explain further, Dhinakaran said when he was recently incarcerated in Tihar jail, he had a fan, a television and newspapers and these were given as per norms with the permission of authorities.

He said some television channels were making false claims in this regard by airing some visuals, adding that his party would be forced to initiate defamation proceedings against them.

"Our enemies" are seeking to politicise allegations made by a Karnataka official and jail inmates are "being unnecessarily dragged" into the controversy, he said.

Quoting a Tamil proverb that says people who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear, he said no irregularities happened at the prison.

He said he a proper inquiry would be held into the matter, adding that "Congress party is not our coalition partner."

On Karnataka BJP staging a protest on the issue, Dhinakaran said it was simply state politics with the ruling Congress party.

BJPs Karnataka unit today slammed the Karnataka government over transfer of DIG (Prisons) D Roopa after she brought to light the alleged special treatment meted out Sasikala.

Dhinakaran said, he will meet Sasikala at the Parappana Agrahara Central Jail tomorrow.

Yesterday, AIADMK (Amma) Karnataka unit secretary V Pugazhenthi had dismissed allegations of Sasikala being accorded special treatment in the jail. He had said the only thing that she was provided in the prison was a bench to lie down and that too on a written request.

The Karnataka government has appointed retired IAS officer Vinay Kumar to probe the alleged special treatment meted out to Sasikala and other "erroneous" practises in the jail.

He was appointed after Roopa, shunted out as DIG (Prisons) on Monday, highlighted in a report the alleged special privileges given to Sasikala and others inside the Parapana Agrahara Central Jail.

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The government had asked DGP (Prisons) H N Sathyanarayana Rao to go on compulsory leave after both officers sparred over the report in public.

The government also shifted Bengaluru central jail chief superintendent Krishna Kumar, who had also been blamed in the report by Roopa for alleged illegal activities in the prison.

In a report submitted on July 12 to Rao, Roopa had said there was "talk" that Rs two crore had exchanged hands to give preferential treatment to Sasikala and there were allegations against him too.

Rao had rubbished the charges as "absolutely false, baseless and wild." PTI VGN BN BSA

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Micross is pleased to announce the promotion of Jeffrey Weiss to the position of Director of Sales. Jeffrey is charged with leading the national internal & external sales teams, inclusive of the independent rep network in developing new key opportunities to drive sales & revenue objectives while continuing to serve Micross customers throughout the U.S.

Jeffrey joined Micross in 2015 with the acquisition of Minco Technology Labs. LLC. His initial role at Micross was Memory Products Manager and more recently, held a Strategic Account Manager (SAM) role with national responsibility for major Aerospace & Defense accounts such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.

Prior to joining Micross, Jeffrey has had ~ 25 years-experience in the semiconductor industry. He held the position of Vice President of Sales at Minco, together with executive sales management roles at Cypress Semiconductor & Texas Instruments. Jeffrey has extensive experience in the development and management of internal sales teams and field sales operations. Jeffrey holds a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

We are confident that Jeffreys combination of industry and sales experience will be instrumental in driving further demand for Micross product and service solutions nationwide, stated Richard Kingdon, CEO of Micross. We are delighted to have Jeffrey join our Executive Team as we continue to expand the companys capabilities & provide differentiated value to current and new customers.

About Micross

Micross is the one-source, one-solution provider of Bare Die & Wafers, Advanced Interconnect Technology, Custom Packaging & Assembly, Component Modification Services, Electrical & Environmental Testing and Hi-Rel Products to manufacturers and users of semiconductor devices. In business for more than 35 years, our comprehensive array of high-reliability capabilities serve the global Defense, Space, Medical, Industrial and Fabless Semiconductor markets. Micross possesses the sourcing, packaging, assembly, test and logistics expertise needed to support an application throughout its entire program cycle. For additional information, visit http://www.micross.com

Micross Contact Information:

Valerie Thomas, Corporate Marketing Manager

Valerie.thomas(at)micross.com
CMake tests a candidate prior to the 3.9 release. CMake consumed more than 900 commits from around 80 members of the development community, since the last release happened in April 2017.

Kitware officially completed the release cycle for CMake 3.9, which developers can now download. CMake consumed more than 900 commits from around 80 members of the development community, since the last release happened in April 2017.

Numerous commits sought to relax constraints that affect parallel compilation with the Ninja generator. The relaxed constraints improve build times. Other commits targeted object libraries, which CMake can now install, import and export. These commits signaled the first steps of an iterative process that strives to make object libraries first-class citizens in CMake.

The release of version 3.8 previously made the CUDA programming language a first-class citizen in CMake. For the release of version 3.9, the CUDA_PTX_COMPILATION target property qualified CUDA to support PTX files in CMake and ship them as part of an application or a developer package. With this property, developers can perform just-in-time compilations of CUDA projects. Also for CUDA, the Visual Studio generator deepened support. Kitware elaborated on these and other particulars of CMake 3.9 on its blog.

CMake is an open-source software solution that suits cross-platform development. The development community has already initiated activity on the next major release (version 3.10). To install CMake, please visit its download page. For information on support for the software solution, contact kitware(at)kitware(dot)com.

About Kitware

Kitware is an advanced technology, research and open-source solutions provider for research facilities, government institutions and corporations worldwide. Founded in 1998, Kitware specializes in research and development in the areas of HPC and visualization, medical imaging, computer vision, data and analytics and quality software process. Among its services, Kitware offers consulting and support for high-quality software solutions. Kitware is headquartered in Clifton Park, NY, with offices in Carrboro, NC; Santa Fe, NM; and Lyon, France. More information can be found on kitware.com.
This simulation will bring providers into the home in a real-time interaction with the patient, the in-person caregiver and the virtual medical provider. Our hope is that this combination approach will significantly benefit our patients.

Trinity Health will soon be testing the capabilities of an initiative that combines home visits by secondary caregivers with the innovative internet capabilities of Glass Enterprise Edition (Glass), and the advanced video technologies of swyMed, a provider of video telemedicine technologies. The program will help Trinity Health determine how the technologies might be used to increase access to primary care physicians and advance people-centered care.

The clinical simulation of the technologies will take place at the Loyola University Health System in Maywood, Illinois, where the organizations are hoping to create a solution that could potentially help address challenges including future physician shortages predicted by the Association of American Medical Colleges.

These innovative technologies have the potential to better leverage the skills and expertise of our physicians and secondary providers  such as medical and nursing students  in order to increase access to primary care for people in our communities, said Capers Harper, manager, Virtual Medicine, Loyola University Health System. "This simulation will bring providers into the home in a real-time interaction with the patient, the in-person caregiver and the virtual medical provider. Our hope is that this combination approach will significantly benefit our patients."

Glass is a very small computer with a transparent display that clips onto glasses or industry frames. It brings information into your field of view so you dont have to switch focus between what youre doing with your hands and the content you need to see to do your job. swyMed offers video telehealth solutions. The combination makes it possible for secondary providers to do assessments of recently released and chronic care patients  in real time and in the comfort of the patient's home  without the burden of having to hold a video camera or a tablet.

When the clinical simulation begins, it will engage some of Loyola University Health System's former patients as volunteers, and connect them with the visiting secondary providers, namely medical, nursing and pharmacy students previously trained within the health system. These students, overseen by nurse leaders or practicing physicians, will bring the technologies directly to patients during their high-tech/high-touch home visits. They will also serve as a meaningful link between the patient and their physician.

"There is no doubt the technologies are very exciting, but it's the promise of being able to provide improved access to better, more people-centered care that is most energizing to those of us working in Trinity Health's Innovation Program," said Anna Marie Butrie, VP, Innovation, for Trinity Health. "This project combines old-fashioned house calls and high-technology to help patients thrive."

It will also provide valuable experience to future full-time medical professionals.

"Caring for patients in their own homes is rewarding and educational for students in the healthcare industry," Harper said. "It helps them relate and empathize with patients and ensures that care transitions are smooth and medications are taken correctly. This could improve the chance of positive outcomes for patients with complicated health histories.

The clinical simulation will start in late summer and Trinity Health will determine further implementations based on its examination of results.

About Trinity Health

Trinity Health is one of the largest multi-institutional Catholic health care delivery systems in the nation, serving diverse communities that include more than 30 million people across 22 states. Trinity Health includes 93 hospitals, as well as 120 continuing care programs that include PACE, senior living facilities, and home care and hospice services. Its continuing care programs provide nearly 2.5 million visits annually. Based in Livonia, Mich., and with annual operating revenues of $16.3 billion and assets of $23.4 billion, the organization returns almost $1 billion to its communities annually in the form of charity care and other community benefit programs. Trinity Health employs about 131,000 colleagues, including 5,300 employed physicians. Committed to those who are poor and underserved in its communities, Trinity Health is known for its focus on the country's aging population. As a single, unified ministry, the organization is the innovator of Senior Emergency Departments, the largest not-for-profit provider of home health care services  ranked by number of visits  in the nation, as well as the nations leading provider of PACE (Program of All Inclusive Care for the Elderly) based on the number of available programs. For more information, visit http://www.trinity-health.org. You can also follow @TrinityHealthMI on Twitter.
Team Symmetry The Trailblaze Challenge was an incredible experience! It was so much more than a 28.3-mile hike  it was a life-changing journey.

Symmetry Financial Group staff members participated in the Trailblaze Challenge hosted by Make-A-Wish Central and Western North Carolina on May 20th, 2017. The Symmetry Team raised over $28,000 in donations for the nonprofit organization during the one day event.

The Trailblaze Challenge is an endurance event to benefit Make-A-Wish Central and Western North Carolina. Make-A-Wish provides training sessions and workout plans to participants to prepare them to hike 28.3 miles in one day. The purpose of the event was to raise funds to help children in the community with life-threatening medical conditions.

The Trailblaze Challenge was an incredible experience! It was so much more than a 28.3-mile hike  it was a life-changing journey. We reflected on the wishes we were able to help fulfill as we shared Make-A-Wish stories and encouraged each other to push through our mental and physical exhaustion, said Jason Dockery, Director of Marketing at Symmetry Financial Group. Thank you to all who assisted us in reaching our goal for this wonderful adventure. I would also like to give a special thanks to our Symmetry Family  we couldnt have completed this challenge without your support.

The Symmetry Team raised $28,594 in gifts and donations; each hiker on the team met or exceeded their fundraising goals. The funds raised by Symmetry will be used to make over 300 wishes come true.

Symmetry Financial Group is a life insurance company headquartered in Asheville, N.C. Symmetry was established to help protect families and individuals from the unexpected. Symmetry agents offer one-on-one consultations with clients so they can match each family with the best life insurance policy to fit their needs. Visit http://www.sfglife.com/ to learn more.
In the UT System, like everywhere else, what you take determines what you make.

Graduates from University of Texas System institutions out earn other bachelors degree holders not just in Texas but across the nation, a new study shows, demonstrating that a University of Texas education is a worthwhile investment in the future.

The studyMajor Matters Most: The Economic Value of Bachelors Degrees from The University of Texas Systemfound that three years after completing college a graduate from a University of Texas System (UT System) institution has median earnings of $39,600, which is more than all Texas workers with a bachelors degree ($36,800), and all workers nationally with a bachelors degree ($34,000).

This study is the result of a unique partnership between the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (Georgetown Center) and the UT System to explore earnings patterns of UT graduates and understand the economic impact of a degree. In 2014, the UT System became the first system of higher education in the nation to offer salary and debt statistics of students up to a decade after they graduate with undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees. The information is offered through an innovative tool called seekUT, which provides data on salaries and debt of alumni by institution and degree.

While the new study found UT institution bachelors degree holders earn almost twice as much as similarly-aged Texas high school-educated workers and more than other bachelors degree holders within Texas and across the United States, it also highlighted that earnings vary widely, primarily because of choice in major. For example, graduates with degrees in architecture and engineering typically earn over 50 percent more than the median for all bachelors degree holders.

In the UT System, like everywhere else, what you take determines what you make, said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown Center and lead author of the report.

Stephanie Bond Huie, UT Systems vice chancellor for strategic initiatives, said the UT System has long been focused on helping young adults make informed decisions about their education and plan for their financial future.

Our mission in creating seekUT was to provide students and their families with critical information that can help them make important decisions that will affect the rest of their lives. Leveraging this data so new and prospective students can learn from the choices of students who have gone before them not only demonstrates accountability and transparency, but also shows the value of investing in higher education, Huie said. Now, the Georgetown Center has helped us answer even more questions with this dataand identify vital areas of focus for higher education leadership.

Key findings of the study include:



Choice of major helps narrow the earnings gap between low-income and high-income students. Both low- and high-income students who attend the same colleges and have the same majors have similar earnings after graduation.

UT institution Pell Grant recipients, on average, earn 80 percent more than similarly-aged workers in Texas with only a high school diploma and 44 percent more than those with only an associates degree.

A key factor in explaining the $6,000 wage gap between white and Latino UT System institution graduates is access to particular occupations after college. Seventeen percent of Latinos who majored in architecture and engineering end up working in blue-collar occupations compared to 8 percent of their white peers.

Women initially out earn men in majors dominated by women (health, psychology and social work, humanities and liberal arts), but fall behind men three years after graduation. This initial female wage advantage holds for similarly aged workers in Texas generally. However, the wage advantage disappears when women reach their 30s.

Career guidance and efforts to ensure that all students can complete bachelor's degrees will increase equity and opportunity and make sure higher education in the UT System remains a viable pathway to the middle class, said Megan L. Fasules, research economist at the Georgetown Center and co-author of the report.

The UT System was able to obtain salary data on UT institution graduates through a unique collaboration with the Texas Workforce Commission that tracked students up to a decade post-graduation. Last year, the UT System and the United States Census Bureau signed a 10-year partnership agreement that will provide both organizations a more comprehensive picture of degree attainment and how it impacts labor market outcomes, allowing the UT System to track students moving not just around Texas but across the country.

To view the full report, visit http://cew.georgetown.edu/UTSystem.

The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce is an independent, nonprofit research and policy institute that studies the link between individual goals, education and training curricula, and career pathways. The Georgetown Center is affiliated with the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. For more information, visit: cew.georgetown.edu. Follow us on Twitter @GeorgetownCEW, on Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Educating students, providing care for patients, conducting groundbreaking basic, applied and clinical research, and serving the needs of Texans and the nation for more than 130 years, The University of Texas System is one of the largest public university systems in the United States. With 14 institutions and an enrollment of more than 228,000 students, the UT System confers more than one-third of the states undergraduate degrees, educates approximately two-thirds of the states health care professionals annually and accounts for almost 70 percent of all research funds awarded to public institutions in Texas. The UT Systems operating budget for FY 2017 is $17.9 billion, including $3 billion in sponsored programs funded by federal, state, local and private sources. With more than 20,000 faculty  including Nobel laureates and many members of the National Academies  and nearly 80,000 health care professionals, researchers, student advisors and support staff, the UT System is one of the largest employers in the state.
Rebel Aqualung Diver Watch We want to inspire a bold and creative lifestyle, so that you express your individuality, setting yourself apart from the rest.

The Lakein family of Rebel Watch company continues a legacy of time by expanding their range of timepieces with the unrelenting Rebel Aqualung Diver watch.

Swiss made, superior quality, domed sapphire crystal front with AR coating & a sapphire crystal back are some of the distinguished characteristics of the new watch. Made for the bold and creative, the watch will feature internal rotating bezel, 300m water resistance, 316l stainless steel case and Swiss Superluminova.

Rebel , founded by Shneur and Reuven Lakein is a luxury watch manufacturing company, based in Brooklyn, New York. As Shneur Lakein emphasizes, We want to inspire a bold and creative lifestyle, so that you express your individuality, setting yourself apart from the rest.

To raise funds for the production and promotion of their new line of timepieces, Rebel, Is launching an interesting campaign on Kickstarter. Generous perks and very appealing discounts will be offered to potential backers. Sharing the campaign with their Social Media networks is an additional way for backers to show their support.

Further information on the interesting campaign and the company is available at http://www.rebeltime.com

About

Rebel Time Co. is a Brooklyn, New York, luxury watch manufacturing company. Based on their familys tradition, they deliver the quality of their craftsmans legacy through their impeccable watches. http://www.rebeltime.com
Texas lawmaker, Will Hartnett, joins FFHL Board of Trustees

The Franciscan Foundation for the Holy Land (FFHL), an organization dedicated to safeguarding the Christian presence in the Holy Land, is pleased to announce former Texas lawmaker Will Hartnett has recently joined their Board of Trustees.

Hartnett served in the Texas House of Representatives from 1991 to 2013, including 14 years as Chairman or Vice-Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. He also served on the Appropriations, Ways and Means, and Transportation Committees. During his legislative career, Hartnett received numerous awards, including the 2011 Ten Best Legislators award from Texas Monthly, which called him the epitome of fairness. Hartnett authored 159 bills which became law, and received widespread recognition for his authorship and support of pro-life legislation.

Hartnett graduated as Valedictorian of his class at Cistercian Prep School in Irving, Texas, and went on to graduate cum laude from Harvard University in 1978. He received his law degree from the University of Texas, and was admitted to the Texas Bar in 1981. He has been a partner at the Hartnett Law Firm since 1988, where he works alongside his father, several siblings and a niece. He is board certified in Estate Planning and Probate Law, is a Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, and has been listed in The Best Lawyers in America since 2003.

He and his wife Tammy have three sons, and the family has made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with FFHL President Fr. Peter Vasko, OFM. In 2006, Hartnett was awarded the Pope Leo XIII Gold Cross of Honor from the Custos of the Holy Land in recognition of this great love for the Holy Land and philanthropic efforts towards its support.

Founded in 1994, the FFHL is a worldwide ecumenical organization, based in the USA, operating under the auspices of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land. The principal purpose of the FFHL is to help stem the Christian exodus from the Holy Land by providing programs and projects that will serve as incentives for Christians to remain, as well as safeguarding the basic human rights of the Christian Palestinian minority living in the Holy Land. It is proud to be a Charity Navigator four star charity.

For more information about the FFHL, visit their website at http://www.ffhl.org, or contact Stephanie Engelman via email at media(at)ffhl(dot)org or by phone at 1-855-372-0580.
Being a part of the Best & Brightest and hearing what other firms are doing to improve their work environment and culture has helped TransTech be an even better place to work.

TransTech IT Staffing, a technical staffing firm dedicated to finding and placing top talent with companies in the Chicagoland area, was named one of the 101 winners of Chicagos Best and Brightest Companies to Work For by the National Association for Business Resources (NABR). This is the third consecutive year that TransTechs commitment to employee engagement and innovative human resources practices has earned recognition on this list.

Winners of Chicagos Best and Brightest award stand out in their delivery of exceptional human resources across such measurements as: compensation; benefits; employee enrichment; engagement and retention; education and development; recruitment; selection and orientation; achievement and recognition; work-life balance; community initiatives; and strategic company performance.

Each company is evaluated by an independent research firm for the above measurements based upon their size as a small business (0-100 employees), medium business (101  300), or large business (301+). This gives an accurate measurement of each companys achievement compared to businesses of comparable size.

We have always considered our team to be the driving force behind our success as one of the most effective technical staffing firms in the Chicago area, said Mary Davenport, President and CEO of TransTech IT Staffing. That is why our culture is designed with employees career development, engagement, and work-life balance in mind. Their high performance deserve only the best.

This years winners of Chicagos Best and Brightest Companies to Work For attended a luncheon hosted by NABR on Monday, July 17, 2017 at the Chicago Marriott Southwest at Burr Ridge. Members of the TransTech team networked with other award winners, accepted the award, and competed for one of 13 elite awards for each of the measurement category.

Being a part of the Best & Brightest and hearing what other firms are doing to improve their work environment and culture has helped TransTech be an even better place to work, said Cindy Conroy, Sales Administrator at TransTech.

To learn more about TransTech IT Staffings numerous awards, visit our awards page.

About TransTech IT Staffing

TransTech IT Staffing is a high-touch IT staffing firm that provides exceptional contract, contract-to-hire, and direct hire recruiting services since opening their doors in Itasca, IL in 1990. TransTech is WBE certified and serves national clientele of Fortune 500 companies as a Tier One vendor, delivering premium talent for vital projects. TransTech has been awarded Inaveros Best of Staffing Talent and Client Award and Chicagos Best and Brightest Companies to Work For numerous times, reaffirming their expertise among their peers and other business leaders.
For more than thirty years, Smith has worked with customers around the world to develop solutions for their supply chain challenges and deliver them the highest-quality product.

Smith, a global distributor of electronic components and semiconductors, today announces the opening of its sales office in Beijing, PRC. This office  the companys eighth in Asia  will broaden the companys reach in a region that is vital to Smiths customer support and the global electronics market as a whole.

The electronics industry is one of Beijings foremost, from mobile products like phones and tablets to computers and the components that go into them. Beijing is also one of PRCs main automotive manufacturing hotspots. The technologically focused culture of the city makes it a prime location for Smith to expand to support the many local customers operating there.

Beijing is right in the midst of one of Asias prime tech centers, with many major players in electronics manufacturing and distribution calling the city home, said Edan Eun, General Manager of the Beijing location. Our new office will provide Smith a local home base to operate agilely and work closely to meet customers needs for complex support.

Close interaction with customers continues to motivate Smiths expansion, with shifts in electronics supply chain dynamics over the last few years making it vital for distributors to offer multifaceted service beyond sourcing.

For more than thirty years, Smith has worked with customers around the world to develop solutions for their supply chain challenges and deliver them the highest-quality product, said Marc Barnhill, Chief Trading Officer of Smith. We look forward to seeing how our new Beijing office will help local customers succeed.

About Smith

Founded in 1984, Smith sources, manages, and distributes the electronic components that go into everything from mobile phones and computers to appliances and directional drilling systems. In 16 cities around the world, from Silicon Valley to Seoul, Smiths 475 employees communicate in 36 different languages and buy and sell components 24 hours per day. Smith is always moving: helping manufacturers navigate market shifts; customizing supply chain solutions; testing components using cutting-edge technology. With testing and logistics hubs in Houston, Hong Kong, and Amsterdam, Smiths processes focus on critical issues, from quality management to counterfeit prevention and environmental safety. Smiths operations, purchasing, and sales worldwide are seamlessly integrated with the companys global IT infrastructure, Saleschain, offering real-time inventory and logistics visibility anywhere in the world. Smith is the leading independent distributor of electronic components and ranks number 11 among all global distributors. Smiths Intelligent Distribution model adapts to ever-changing demands by providing seamless global electronics sourcing and logistics, regardless of distribution channel or locale. For more information, please visit https://www.smithweb.com, or, to reach a Smith representative 24 hours a day, please call +1 713.430.3000.

For more information, contact:

Margo Evans

Smith, VP of Marketing

+1 713.430.3966

mevans(at)nfsmith(dot)com
Medic-CE is committed to providing agencies with the virtual tools and workflow processes that assign, track and administer protocol exams and certificates to keep agencies in compliance.

Medic-CE, a Career Step company and leading provider of accredited online continuing education for Emergency Medical Services (EMS) professionals, will exhibit and sponsor this years Diversity Breakfast at the Fire-Rescue International 2017 Conference and Expo in Charlotte, North Carolina, July 27 through 29. The online continuing education company is launching its fully-integrated online platform designed to deliver the most up-to-date education, training and information in live virtual classrooms and self-paced courses.

Medic-CE is committed to providing agencies with the virtual tools and workflow processes that assign, track and administer protocol exams and certificates to keep agencies in compliance, said Judson Smith, Medic-CEs Vice President of Continuing Education. We are excited to be the only education company currently offering a robust, EMS-specific learning platform and we look forward to sharing this message at the conference.

At this years event, Medic-CEs representatives will provide information and answer questions on its powerful learning platform. The platform is designed to meet the specific needs of an agency: those that want to deliver their own courses with their own instructors can do so virtually, and those that want to use Medic-CE's library of over 250 hours of VILT programs and self-paced courses have the tools they need as well.

Medic-CE continuing education library of coursesboth self-paced and live, instructor-ledare accepted by the National Registry of EMTs (NREMT) and at the state level and are accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Pre-Hospital Continuing Education. The companys VILT training is also built to meet the core National Continued Competency Program (NCCP) requirements for the national component as outlined by the NREMT.

FRI 2017 will bring together the leaders in fire and emergency medical services, from experts presenting in conference sessions to the latest technology available in the exhibit hall to networking events like the Medic-CE sponsored Diversity Breakfast, said Andrew Steward, Medic-CEs Director of Continuing Education. As an emergency responder myself, I know there is a significant need for high-quality, convenient training, and we are excited to integrate our VILT training courses into the Medic-CE platform because it enables EMS professionals to complete both their live instructor-led courses and self-paced refresher training requirements in one place.

Medic-CE began in 2006 by providing easy-to-use, self-paced EMS and firefighter refresher training. The goal was to provide affordable continuing education that better fit with the busy schedules of first responders. Career Step acquired the company in 2016 with the vision of creating an even more efficient and powerful learning experience.

For more information about Medic-CEs industry-leading training, please stop by booth 1442 or attend this years Diversity Breakfast at the 2017 IAFC FRI Conference or visit Medic-CE.com.

About Medic-CE

Medic-CE, a Career Step company, provides accredited online continuing education for EMS and firefighting professionals. Founded in 2006, the company currently serves over 75,000 learners and 200 fire/EMS/ambulance agencies. More than 200 hours of continuing education are available through the companys powerful learning management system. The company also offers the Code3 CME Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT) Solution and the option for agencies to add their own in-house continuing education and instructor-led courses to its sophisticated and robust learning platform. More information is available at Medic-CE.com or 1-877-458-9498.
Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said they were concerned about any 'escalation of tensions' which could lead to 'miscalculation' and 'misjudgement'.

By Geeta Mohan: Even as the India-China border stand-off continues, New Delhi discussed the current tensions with visiting Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop on Tuesday during her meetings with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, Finance and Defence Minister Arun Jaitley. The issue also came up during her interaction with Prime Minister Narendra Modi later in the evening.

Understanding the fact that this is 'a long-term dispute', the Australian foreign minister explained her country's position saying, "territorial disputes should be resolved peacefully between the claimant countries". Comparing the border dispute to what many countries face in the disputed waters with China, she said, "In case of maritime disputes, it should be subject to UNCLOS. Likewise, with land disputes, these should be resolved peacefully between competing claimants. And we urge countries to do that."

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Australia is concerned about any 'escalation of tensions' which could lead to 'miscalculation' and 'misjudgement', she said.

GROWING AGGRESSION OF CHINA

Speaking at 'The Second Indo-Pacific Oration' organised by the Australian High Commission in New Delhi and the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Bishop reiterated the concerns the world community has in the 'rule-based order' being distorted alluding to the growing aggression of Beijing in the South China Sea waters. "Rules-based order is reflected and upheld in the Indo-Pacific. The rules-based order allows states to work peacefully and resolve disputes peacefully. Increasingly, this order is coming under threat," she added.

This outreach by the Indian government comes as a first after China engaged diplomats of various countries in Beijing to apprise them of what is happening at the India-Bhutan-China tri-junction.

ENGAGING FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS

A former White House official Joshua White expressed concern over the development saying, "China is good at shaping narrative". Adding, "we have seen China exhibit a certain kind of behaviour in the South China Sea where it creates facts on the ground, in water in that case, and slowly begins to change the status quo. So, it would not be terribly surprising if China were to do something similar in this case and it is worrisome."

Even as India has begun engaging foreign governments over the crisis, China continues with its hard stance on the issue continuing its demand of 'withdrawal of Indian troops' and as reported in the PLA Daily on Wednesday, China has moved 'tens of thousands of tonnes of military equipment' to Tibet. Yet another move to show military preparedness in case of escalation.

Also read: Now, China moves tonnes of military equipment to Tibet. Should India be scared?

Also read: India building strategic roads near Sino-India border: MHA

Also read: Anti-China protest: Gujarat firm to give away 'Made in India' phones to its 400 dealers

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE

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The kitchen in the Donatello model reflects the upscale finishes of K. Hovnanian Homes in Heatherfield Heatherfield is attracting families and professionals because of its location near transportation and highly rated schools.

Less than a dozen new homes remain for sale at K. Hovnanian Homes popular Heatherfield community in Naperville.

The neighborhoods luxury single-family designs boast 2,833 to 4,897 square feet of living space, making them large enough for households of all sizes. Eight floor plans are available, including a ranch with three bedrooms and 2-1/2 baths. The two-story designs come with four or five bedrooms and 2-1/2 to 5-1/2 baths. Prices here start from the $640s, and are subject to change.

In addition to homes that can be built from the ground up, K. Hovnanian Homes is offering Quick Move-In Homes at Heatherfield. These residences feature many of todays most sought-after finishes, hand-picked and coordinated by K. Hovnanian Homes professional design team. Since Quick Move-In Homes are already under construction, they can be ready for delivery in as little as 45 days.

According to Andy Konovodoff, president of K. Hovnanian Developments of Illinois, Inc., Heatherfield has been attractive to families and professionals because of its location near transportation and highly rated schools.

In fact, Naperville placed #1 for 2017 Cities with the Best Public Schools in America according to the Niche.com website. Niche.com ranks cities based on each schools state test scores, graduation rates, SAT/ACT scores, teacher quality, and student and parent reviews.

Beyond the schools, Naperville also was named the #12 2017 Best Places To Live In America and Niche.com gave the city an A+ Overall Niche Grade. The rankings provide a comprehensive assessment of the overall livability of an area. This grade takes into account several key factors of a location, including the quality of local schools, crime rates, housing trends, employment statistics, and access to amenities in an attempt to measure the overall quality of an area.

Heatherfield, specifically, benefits from a location on 75th Street, approximately five miles from either Interstate 355 or the downtown Naperville Metra station. As a result, the community has been a favorite among commuters who travel to Chicago or any of the regions employment hubs as well as those who work in the Naperville area.

In addition to its convenience, Naperville also has a quaint downtown district with restaurants galore, local shops and national retailers, and the Naperville Riverwalka walking path that winds along the DuPage River. Centennial Beach and Central Park provide opportunities for outdoor recreation for all ages.

Within the Heatherfield neighborhood, K. Hovnanian Homes are designed to blend into the surrounding existing communities and feature classic architecture and Midwestern style.

Elegance is everywhere inside. Designer kitchens boast todays most popular finishes such as granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, ceramic tile backsplashes, and 42-inch upper cabinets. Decorative crown moulding enhances formal areas like the dining room. And each owners suite has a spa bath that exudes luxury with ceramic tile flooring, a raised vanity and cultured marble sinks.

Hardwood flooring is a must have for todays homebuyers, so K. Hovnanian Homes includes it throughout the foyer, kitchen and powder room. Wainscot and chair rail in the dining room add a sense of distinction. Oak railings on the staircase create a grand first impression and Nest thermostats keep the house comfortable.

Many homes also feature a signature HovHuba computer nook thats the perfect place to plug in and do homework, look up a recipe for dinner, or pay bills.

To view K. Hovnanian homes at Heatherfield, visit the communitys sales center at 895 Heatherfield Circle, at the corner of 75th Street and Naper Boulevard. For more information, call (630) 445-8217 or log onto http://www.khov.com/Heatherfield.

Models are open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.

About Hovnanian Enterprises, Inc.

Hovnanian Enterprises, Inc., founded in 1959 by Kevork S. Hovnanian, is headquartered in Red Bank, New Jersey. The Company is one of the nations largest homebuilders with operations in Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington, D.C. and West Virginia. The Companys homes are marketed and sold under the trade names K. Hovnanian Homes, Brighton Homes and Parkwood Builders. As the developer of K. Hovnanians Four Seasons communities, the Company is also one of the nations largest builders of active lifestyle communities.

Additional information on Hovnanian Enterprises, Inc., including a summary investment profile and the Companys 2016 annual report, can be accessed through the Investor Relations section of the Hovnanian Enterprises website at http://www.khov.com. To be added to Hovnanian's investor e-mail list, please send an e-mail to IR@khov.com or sign up at http://www.khov.com.
Best in Biz Awards logo

Best in Biz Awards, the only independent business awards program judged each year by prominent editors and reporters from a wide spectrum of top-tier publications, announced today the first set of judges in its 7th annual North American awards program. The 26 judges announced today are all returning from last years Best in Biz Awards judging panel.

Best in Biz Awards uniqueness stems, in part, from the composition of its judging panels. Only writers, journalists, and contributors to business, consumer, financial, trade and technology publications, as well as broadcast outlets and analyst firms, are invited to serve as judges each year. Structured this way, Best in Biz Awards judging panel can best leverage the expertise, experience and objectivity of its influential and independent members to determine award winners.

The 26 judges so far confirmed to participate in the Best in Biz Awards 2017 panel include:

1. AdWeek, Angela Natividad

2. Associated Press, Kim Cook

3. Atlanta Tribune, Kamille D. Whittaker

4. Bismarck Tribune, Kat Bryant

5. Business News Daily, Nicole Fallon

6. Chip Design Magazine, Dave Bursky

7. CIO Dive, Naomi Eide

8. Consumer Affairs, Mark Huffman

9. ECT News Network, Jack Germain

10. Entrepreneur, Linda Lacina

11. eWeek Channel Insider, Frank Ohlhorst

12. Forbes, Hugh McIntyre

13. Freelance, Kevin Casey

14. Healthcare Innovation News, Mari Edlin

15. Inc., Douglas Cantor

16. Investment Advisor Magazine, Melanie Waddell

17. King Features Syndicate, Dale Dauten

18. L.A. Biz, Annlee Ellingson

19. Lab Reviews, Jonathan Roubini

20. NerdWallet.com, Ellen Cannon

21. Rockstar Finance, J. Money

22. Security Products Magazine, Ralph C. Jensen

23. Tech-Gaming, Robert Allen

24. Tripwire, Joe Pettit

25. Wired, Christopher Null

26. WLRN, Gina Jordan

Short biographies of the initial 2017 judges can be found on the Best in Biz Awards website at: http://www.bestinbizawards.com/2017-judges.

Additional judges returning from other years panel will be confirmed in the next weeks. As in prior years, the full judging panel will be officially revealed during the late entry period (August  September). Judging in Best in Biz Awards 2017 will take place in October and early November, with the judges scoring tabulated to determine winners for each category. Winners will be announced on November 29, 2017.

Entries in Best in Biz Awards 2017 are being accepted until the regular entry deadline on July 28 and the late entry deadline on September 29, 2017, in 65 categories, including Company of the Year, Fastest-Growing Company, Most Innovative Company, Most Customer Friendly Company, Best Place to Work, Executive Team, Technology Department, Executive of the Year, Finance Executive, Enterprise Product, Consumer Service, Most Innovative Product  Healthcare, Best New Product  SMB, Product Line, App, PR Campaign, Event and Website of the Year.

About Best in Biz Awards

Since 2011, Best in Biz Awards, Inc. has made its mark as the only independent business awards program judged each year by a whos who of prominent reporters and editors from top-tier publications. From Aflac to YMCA, past winners in Best in Biz Awards span the spectrum, from blue-chip companies that form the bedrock of the world economy to Shark Tank participants, mom-and-pop shops, and some of the most innovative start-ups. Best in Biz Awards honors are conferred in two separate programs: North America and International, and in 65 categories, including company, team, executive, product, and PR and media. Entries in the 7th annual Best in Biz Awards are currently being accepted until the final deadline on September 29, 2017. http://www.bestinbizawards.com
Our management team spent a great deal of time evaluating potential acquirers, and we are confident that we have an outstanding partner in Gamut."

JPW Industries, Inc, a Tenex Capital Management portfolio company headquartered in La Vergne, TN, today announced it has reached an agreement to be acquired by funds managed by Gamut Capital Management of New York. The transaction is expected to be finalized by year end according to Robert Romano, JPW Industries CEO.

JPW is a leading global designer, marketer and distributor of branded metalworking and woodworking equipment and specialty shop tools sold under the JET, Powermatic, Wilton, Edwards and Promac brand names. The company has operations in six countries and sells through a network of distributor partners in markets worldwide.

Gamut Capital Management is a private equity firm with $1 billion of committed capital for investment. It focuses on making investments in middle-market companies, enabling them to operate as stand-alone, independent businesses.

Romano stated: Our management team spent a great deal of time evaluating potential acquirers, and we are confident that we have an outstanding partner in Gamut. The Gamut founders have a great track record, as well as vast experience with industrial companies like JPW. Most important, they have the willingness and capability to provide the resources to help us achieve our ambitious goals.

Stan Parker, Founding Partner of Gamut, said, JPW has set the standard for quality, reliability, innovation and service across a broad range of applications and end users. We are delighted to partner with JPW and its strong management team to accelerate its development.

Romano emphasized that JPWs name and management and operations will stay in place. All operations, including warehouse, parts support, customer service and technical service will remain in their current LaVergne, Tennessee and Albert Lea, Minnesota locations.

About JPW Industries, Inc.

Headquartered in La Vergne, Tennessee, JPW Industries, Inc. manufactures and markets a wide range of machinery and equipment under the JET, Powermatic, Wilton, Edwards and Promac brands. In addition to its La Vergne headquarters, the company has operations in Switzerland, Germany, Russia, France, Taiwan, and China. It sells through a vast network of distributor partners worldwide. Visit JPW Industries at http://www.jpwindustries.com, JET Tools at http://www.jettools.com, Powermatic at http://www.powermatic.com, Wilton at http://www.wiltontools.com, Edwards at http://www.edwardsironworkers.com and Promac at http://www.promac.ch.

About Gamut Capital Management

Gamut Capital Management is a New York-based private investment firm managing $1 billion in assets focused on the middle market. Gamut was founded in 2015 by Stan Parker and Jordan Zaken who have over 35 years of combined private equity investing experience. Gamuts senior deal professionals have executed investments in over 30 companies in North America and Europe. To learn more, please visit http://www.gamutcapital.com.

For additional information, contact:

Robert Varzino

SVP Marketing and Internet

JPW Industries

615-287-5870

bvarzino(at)jpwindustries(dot)com
Rob Abernethy

Sterling Administration is proud to announce that Rob Abernethy has joined the team as Sales Director, leading our new business development effort in Dallas, Texas.

Rob joins Sterling with a successful background in healthcare consultative sales in Texas at Cigna, Humana and United Healthcare. At Sterling, he will be charged with new business development of Sterlings HSA, HRA, FSA, POP and COBRA and Compliance products, primarily through benefits brokers in the Dallas  Ft. Worth region.

Cora Tellez, Sterlings President and CEO says, On behalf of the Sterling Family, I am thrilled to welcome Rob to the team.

Rob lives in the Dallas - Fort Worth area with his family.

About Sterling Administration

Sterling Administration is an independent administrator for HSAs, HRAs, FSAs, POPs and COBRA. Additionally, Sterling offers expert compliance services for ERISA Wrap, Form 5500 Filing, non-discrimination testing, and requirements under the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (PPACA); it also offers an online benefits enrollment platform in English and Spanish.

Sterling was named a national Best Place to Work by Business Insurance Magazine in 2014. Sterlings office culture promotes health and wellness, reinforced by daily walks and stretching, led by CEO Cora Tellez. Sterling is based in Oakland, California with remote staff nationwide. Visit Sterling online at http://www.sterlingadministration.com. Visit our YouTube channel for quick instructional videos, and now available - get Sterling's free mobile app for iOS and Android.
Patti Ibert poses with a recent donation made by the employees of Cypress Bayou Casino Hotel. Our employees wanted to come together to support our community and we are proud to be able to make this donation.

Employees at Cypress Bayou Casino Hotel presented a large donation to the Emergency Aid Center, for United Way of South Louisiana. The needs of the center have never been greater and employees came together at two recent employee functions to donate non-perishable items to help relieve the strain on the EACs resources.

With the children out of school and the current economy, the needs of families are great, said Director Patti Ibert at Emergency Aid Center. I have never seen the pantry so bare, Ibert continued. The center is the only food bank in West St. Mary Parish.

Our employees wanted to come together to support our community and we are proud to be able to make this donation, Linda Neezey, Manager of Human Resources at Cypress Bayou Casino Hotel.

Though local organizations, businesses, and private citizens are still donating, there is still a great need. The center located at 106 Commercial Street, Franklin accepts donations most days of the week, however, as Ibert stated, we also accept personal hygiene items. For more information on the Emergency Aid Center, call (337) 828-0921.

Cypress Bayou Casino Hotel and the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana are proud contributors to several local charities and nonprofits for the greater common good of the people of Acadiana.

About Cypress Bayou Casino Hotel

Cypress Bayou Casino Hotel is located in Charenton, Louisiana off of US Highway 90 and features nearly 1,000 of the newest, most in-demand slots and more than 30 tables including Blackjack, Mini-Baccarat, Mississippi Stud, and 3-Card Poker just to name a few. You can also enjoy dining in one of the five unique venues or stay the night in the new state-of-the-art 102-room hotel.

Phone 1-800-234-4386 for more information, or visit the website at http://www.cypressbayou.com
Dr. Karen Johnson, Dentist in Upper St. Clair, PA Completes Training at The Pankey Institute

Karen L. Johnson, D.D.S., a practicing dentist in Upper St. Clair, PA, recently attended The Pankey Institute in Key Biscayne, FL where she continues to refine her dental care through advanced education. During the five-day course, Dr. Johnson studied the determinants of occlusion, or a patients bite. She also received detailed guidance on restorative treatment planning and procedures, allowing her to better blend form and function for her patients.

As she strives to achieve excellence to provide her patients with the best possible level of care, Dr. Johnson returns to Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania where she focuses on restorative dentistry. She graduated from University of Michigan Dental School and now practices at South Hills Dental Arts.

Dr. Johnson and her team at South Hills Dental Arts, Drs. Steven Crandall and Kathy Lopez, are dedicated to offering the latest restorative dentistry and occlusion therapy using modern technology. To help them achieve their goal, they enroll in numerous CE courses each year. The doctors at South Hills Dental Arts follow the Pankey Institute philosophy that form follows function, which means that restoring proper dental function is of primary importance when developing patient treatment plans.

Founded in 1970, The Pankey Institute is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to helping dental professionals master advanced technical skills, improve behavioral skills, and nurture a positive philosophy towards life and practice. It was the first institute of its kind and remains among the most prestigious in the world, attracting dentists from more than 40 nations. Over 21,000 dentists, dental laboratory technicians and specialists have attended its courses and now serve millions of patients worldwide.

Patients in need of restorative dentistry or occlusal therapy are encouraged to receive treatment from a Pankey Institute-trained dentist in Upper St. Clair, PA. Dr. Johnson and her team offer leading restoration services using the latest treatment and technology at South Hills Dental Arts. To schedule an appointment, patients are encouraged to call the Upper St. Clair South Hills Dental Arts location at 412-833-6166.

About the Practice

South Hills Dental Arts offers individualized dental care to patients in the Upper St. Clair, PA and Pittsburgh, PA areas. Dr. Steven Crandall, Dr. Karen Johnson and Dr. Kathy Lopez offer experienced dental implant, TMJ, and Invisalign treatments along with a wide variety of other services at their two office locations. The entire team at South Hills Dental Arts, understand the importance of learning the most cutting-edge treatment techniques to ensure each patient receives effective and comfortable treatment. To learn more about Dr. Crandall, Dr. Johnson and Dr. Lopez or the services they offer, please visit their website at http://www.southhillsdentalarts.com. To schedule an appointment at their Upper St. Clair office call 412-833-6166 or 412-922-9292 for the Ingram Crafton office location in Pittsburgh, PA.
Today minority, woman-owned strategic communication firm, Impact Consulting Enterprises, together with the Newark Regional Business Partnership welcomed local business leaders, entrepreneurs, and trade association members for Lets Do Lunch! at Nico Kitchen + Bar in downtown Newark. More than 100 gathered for the quarterly networking event, which included raffle prizes and a stellar lunch prepared by the noted chef Andrew Watterson.

Co-sponsored by Impact Consulting Enterprises, Saul Ewing, LLP and NJ Advance Media, with support from the Commerce & Industry Association of New Jersey, Lets Do Lunch drew a diverse set of business executives and go-getters from various industries. Local businesses and nonprofits, such as Redds Biergarten and the Greater Newark Convention and Visitors Bureau, were also present to make new contacts at the high-powered networking event.

The best business deals happen over lunch, so we jumped at the opportunity to co-sponsor this amazing event, said Cheryl McCants, NRBP board member and president and CEO of Impact Consulting Enterprises, a strategic communication firm. Impact is committed to helping businesses grow by telling their untold stories. Business lunches are always great opportunities to discuss goals, set strategy, and identify those untold stories.

Prizes at the sold-out event included Uber travel vouchers, complimentary tickets to upcoming NRBP events, a free consultation with Impact Consulting Enterprises and more. Attendees also enjoyed succinct words of wisdom from representatives of the sponsor and supporter organizations, and a private dining experience in one of the citys premier venues. The Impact Consulting team and other NRBP Ambassadors were on hand to make introductions and facilitate connections, smoothing the process.

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Media can view and select photos from the event here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4pkjvbh8r5vmvxc/AAA5eQgmpRsACUL-g7Dr92mta?dl=0

About Impact Consulting Enterprises

Impact Consulting Enterprises is a minority woman-owned strategic communications, marketing and public relations firm founded in 1989 by business strategist and communication professional, Cheryl McCants. We tell stories. Individuals, corporations, small businesses, non-profit organizations and public agencies partner with Impact to tell their untold stories to women, millennials, African Americans, Latinos and Asians. Clients choose us so that their customers and stakeholders feel good about where they are and better about where they are going. We add the pop of color that helps businesses grow.
Woodcraft seeks franchisees who have a strong business background and a basic understanding of woodworking and the tools it requires. We hope it inspires potential franchisees to inquire about the Woodcraft franchise opportunity.

Twenty years ago Woodcraft Supply launched its first franchise operation in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Since that opening Woodcraft has grown to a total of 76 stores, in 36 states, of which 68 are franchise operations. This success story has been chronicled in the Summer 2017 issue of Franchising Today, a national publication featuring franchise opportunities.

Woodcraft is pleased to have its franchise program profiled in Franchising Today,' Gary Lombard, vice president of retail and franchising development, said. We hope it inspires potential franchisees to inquire about the Woodcraft franchise opportunity. We are always looking to expand.

In Building On Success Lombard shares what makes the Woodcraft retail operation successful and what differentiates it from other franchise operations. Woodcraft offers franchisees a complete system that helps them with every detail, from site selection and development to hiring quality staff and marketing support, Lombard said. And once a new franchise store is operational, we provide ongoing support through regional field consultants and the retail support staff.

Woodcraft prefers that franchisees have a strong business background, as well as an interest in woodworking and a basic understanding of the tools Woodcraft sells. Retail store employees also need to have woodworking experience so they will be able to give customers practical advice to make their woodworking experience better.

We want to be known as the information source for woodworking within our marketplace. We can achieve that only by the people we hire in our stores, the classes we teach in our stores, and the huge amount of online content that we offer, Lombard said.

To read Build on Success, visit http://www.franchising-today.com/sections/profiles/225-woodcraft-franchise-llc.

For more information about Woodcraft Franchise Retail Opportunities, email WoodcraftFranchise(at)Woodcraft(dot)com or visit WoodcraftFranchise.com.

Woodcraft was founded in 1928 in a one-room shop in Boston, Massachusetts. The business initially sold new and rebuilt industrial woodworking machinery to professional cabinetmakers and to schools. Over the years, Woodcraft has evolved into a business that provides high quality woodworking tools and supplies through its franchise stores nationwide, a monthly catalog and woodcraft.com.
Global law firm Greenberg Traurig, LLPs Bill Gausewitz will speak at the 28th Annual Association of California Insurers (ACIC) General Counsel Seminar in San Diego, July 27. His session, A Law Looks at Forty: How Has the APA Delivered on Its Promises? takes place at 1:15 p.m. in the Crystal Ballroom.

The seminar is an educational event for insurance professionals  particularly in the legal community  that offers the insight and information they need for their businesses. Taking place at the U.S. Grant Hotel, the event features panels on blockchain technology, social host liability, attorney-client privilege for in-house counsel, and working with judges. The full agenda can be seen here.

Gausewitz is a shareholder in the firms Sacramento office. He has more than 20 years of experience drafting and backing California state legislation and serving in a number of positions within the Legislature, including the U.S. House of Representatives, the California State Assembly (Republican Caucus), and the California State Senate (Republican Policy Office). Gausewitz earned an M.A. (1981), J.D. (1979), and B.A. (1976) from the University of California, Los Angeles.

About Greenberg Traurigs Government Law & Policy Practice

Greenberg Traurigs Government Law & Policy Practice combines the capabilities of its Federal Practice in Washington D.C. with its state and local practices across the country. The firms national team of governmental affairs professionals and attorneys spans major political and commercial capitals throughout the United States, including: Albany, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, Sacramento, Tallahassee, Washington, D.C. Most recently, Greenberg Traurig was named Law Firm of the Year for Government Relations by the U.S. News-Best Lawyers 2014 edition of Best Law Firms. The practice also received the most first-tier Government Relations rankings in the U.S.

About Greenberg Traurigs Insurance Regulatory & Transactions Practice

Greenberg Traurigs Insurance Regulatory & Transactions Group brings together lawyers from its national and international offices with experience in a broad variety of complementary disciplines  including insurance regulatory, tax, corporate finance and securities, securitization and structured finance, litigation, health care, and governmental affairs  to support clients from all segments of the insurance industry. The group provides tailored legal services designed to meet the varied needs of our clients in the areas of insurance regulation, legislative and public policy advocacy, life and health insurance, property and casualty insurance, premium finance, securitization and derivatives, and insurance litigation.

About Greenberg Traurig, LLP

Greenberg Traurig, LLP (GTLaw) has more than 2,000 attorneys in 38 offices in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East and is celebrating its 50th anniversary. One firm worldwide, GTLaw has been recognized for its philanthropic giving, was named the largest firm in the U.S. by Law360 in 2017, and among the Top 20 on the 2016 Am Law Global 100. Web: http://www.gtlaw.com Twitter: @GT_Law.
Apstra Operating System (AOS) With TED as a strategic partner we are confident that Apstra customers in Japan will be able to quickly meet their critical business objectives and increase their business velocity as they address IoT, machine learning and digital transformation.

Apstra, Inc., the pioneer in vendor-agnostic Intent-Based Networking has entered into a distribution agreement with Tokyo Electron Device (TED) to address the growing demand for Intent-Based Networking. CIOs today require data center network agility, increased availability and improved ROI as they ask their network engineers to deliver more, for less, and faster. Apstra has delivered the first and only vendor-agnostic, closed-loop, fully intent-based networking platform to answer this challenge. The Apstra Operating System (AOS) is generally available and the company is partnering with top system integrators, distributors and value-added solutions providers around the globe to address hyperscale and enterprise companies, and service providers.

"Apstra, Inc. is honored to partner with Tokyo Electron Device (TED), a value-added market leader in quality, dependability and customer satisfaction, said Mansour Karam, CEO and Founder of Apstra. Japan is an important and strategic market to Apstra and TED has the industry knowledge, superior technical expertise and a track record of delivering the most innovative, strategic infrastructure offerings to ensure our customers are well-served. With TED as a strategic partner we are confident that Apstra customers in Japan will be able to quickly meet their critical business objectives and increase their business velocity as they address IoT, machine learning and digital transformation.

Tokyo Electron Device (TED) is pleased to enter into a distribution agreement with Apstra Inc. to deliver their innovative vendor-agnostic Intent-Based Networking solutions to the Japanese market. TED has tremendous reach within Japan and will distribute the Apstra Operating System (AOS) to data center operators, service providers, and other targeted customer segments to decrease network outages and the total cost of operating a data center network, said Akihiro Kamikogawa, President of CN Company Tokyo Electron Device.

According to Gartner, By 2020, 10% of enterprises will use intent-driven network design and operation tools (an increase from 0% today), reducing their network outages by 65%. [1] Gartner also reported that I&O leaders responsible for planning, sourcing and managing network infrastructure should: Set a strategy to look beyond just refresh cycles when making networking purchases, as products that increase network agility and/or improve network availability can provide positive ROI regardless of whether a refresh is required. Allocate future networking budget for IBNS, using improved network uptime as the funding driver. [2]

Apstra was recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor for Enterprise Networking and a full Intent-Based Networking System(IBNS).

About Apstra Operating System (AOS):

AOS automatically prevents and repairs network outages for dramatically improved infrastructure uptime. It operates a network as one system massively improving infrastructure agility while reducing operational expenses. AOS distributed data store is a repository of all intent, configuration, and telemetry state, hence acts as a single source of truth for your network. Its self-documenting nature streamlines compliance tasks. AOS is device-agnostic and works across all major vendors as well as open alternatives.

[1] Gartner 2017 Strategic Roadmap for Networking, 28 April 2017 ID: G00324263

[2] Gartner Cool Vendors in Enterprise Networking, 2017 ID: G00326666

About Tokyo Electron Device (TED) CN Company:

Tokyo Electron Device (TED) is a technical trading firm with a trading business function that provides semiconductor products and IT solutions as well as a development business function that performs commissioned designing and the development of own-brand products. The CN Company has marketing functions to catch the worlds most advanced technology quickly and handles storage, network and security products widely and it provides it as a business solution in the cloud era. We consistently provide optimal solutions for customers from installation to support. For more information, visit: http://cn.teldevice.co.jp/company_english/about_us

About Apstra, Inc.:

Apstra is the pioneer in vendor-agnostic Intent-Based Networking to enable a Self-Operating Network, a network that configures itself, fixes itself and defends itself. The company is redefining network operations and economics to make the network a CIOs most valuable asset to address business velocity. The Apstra Operating System (AOS) provides the only vendor-agnostic, intent-based, closed-loop command and control system delivering agility and massive TCO savings through automation of network operations. Apstra is based in Menlo Park, California and is privately funded.

For Tokyo Electron Device Limited Corporate Communications Department:

Yoichiro Hotta

hotta.y(at)teldevice.co.jp

Rie Taira

taira.r(at)teldevice.co.jp

For Apstra:

Mari Mineta Clapp

mari(at)apstra.com

@MariMinetaClapp

+1 (408) 398-6433

Apstra Blog
By Manogya Loiwal : With both India and China refusing to back off from Doklam area in Bhutan, the stand-off between the two armies is nowhere near its end. In an exclusive interview with India Today, former Chief of Army Staff if the Indian Army General Shankar Roychowdhury spoke at length on the India-China border standoff, Indian Army deploying women officers in combat operations and the Gorkhaland unrest. Here is an exert from the interview:

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ON THE NEED TO BE PREPARED:

The threat from China has been there since 1962 and we continue to face it, this is not new. I have been talking about the two-and-half front - one is Pakistan, the other is China and the remaining 'half' is within the country. It is a compulsion and we have to be prepared, and at the maximum level now. If someone interferes in your area of vital interest, it is time to take a stand. In 1962, we were rushed up and told to stop China. People died, there was huge loss. We need to be prepared now.

ON DOKLAM STANDOFF:

Chinese presence in the north of Siliguri corridor is a strategic threat to India. China wants to construct a road from Chumbi Valley in Tibet to the Indian border. China making roads in the Doklam area is no less than impinging on our vital interest. With Bhutan objecting to it and speaking to China over the issue, we lend a helping hand to Bhutan. We established our military presence to stop China, which resulted in the standoff.

ON INFANTRY:

To the best of my knowledge, the Indian Army is not deploying women officers in combat operations. I think the reasons continue to be the same as we had 20 years ago. I am still opposed to women officers in arms which are in direct contact like artillery or infantry. They can be in support arms. Their inclusion in combat operations will be resisted because I would not like the women officers being captured by the enemy and mistreated.

ON GORKHALAND UNREST:

Gorkhaland is a very sensitive area because it is adjacent to Nepal. The internal situation of Nepal will reflect in north Bengal, which cannot be ignored. The border is guarded by Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) and there should not be any infiltration. The Gorkhaland issue is now moving into the plains as well and has to be dealt politically.

ALSO READ | Beijing does not fear war: Is China gearing for battle over Doklam standoff?

Doklam standoff: India raises China tension with visiting Australian foreign minister

Doklam standoff: Why China wants India to stop defending Bhutan

Gorkhaland stir: West Bengal Police digs who all GJM leaders called while Darjeeling burned

ALSO WATCH | China threatens again over Doklam stand-off, demands India's immediate withdrawal

--- ENDS ---

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Wall Centre Dental, a leading practice that offers dental implants and other treatments, now offers consultations for All-on-4 implant supported dentures, without requiring a referral. Permanent dentures in Vancouver, BC, are a good option for patients who have all or most of their teeth and are looking for an alternative to traditional dentures.

Patients who have lost all of the teeth on their upper and/or lower arches now have a convenient and reliable alternative to traditional dentures. All-on-4 dental implants are designed to replace entire arches, just like traditional dentures, but they are not removable. They are secured tightly in place by a few implants that are strategically placed in the jaw to deliver maximum strength and stability to the attached appliance. Permanent dentures in Vancouver, BC, eliminate the worry that often comes when traditional implant pastes and adhesives fail. With the All-on-4 system, there is no need to worry about the teeth falling out at inopportune and embarrassing times.

Another benefit of full-arch replacements is that they help the jaw to maintain its density and shape. Each implant stimulates bone growth around it and reduces degradation that inevitably occurs when the jaw bone is not stimulated. Traditional dentures do not provide this benefit because they sit on top of the gums and do not provide stimulation to the bone in any way. For this reason and others, traditional dentures need to be adjusted over time to ensure an accurate fit as the shape of the jaw bone and gum tissue change. All-on-4 full-arch replacement solutions fit well for many years and do not need to be adjusted frequently like traditional dentures. Additionally, since they are not removable, they do not need to be removed nightly for cleaning purposes and should be brushed and flossed just like natural teeth.

Patients who would like to experience the reliability, convenience and overall stability that dental implants can provide when attached to permanent dentures in Vancouver, BC, are encouraged to schedule an All-on-4 consultation with Drs. Roshan, Tehrani or Reskovich by calling Wall Centre Dental.

About the Practice

Wall Centre Dental provides personalized dental care for patients in Vancouver, BC. Dr. Parviz Roshan is an implant and cosmetic dentist and Fellow of the International Congress of Oral Implantologists. Dr. Roshan, who has practiced dentistry since 2003, graduated from the University of Jondishapour and University of Toronto, one of the oldest and most respected dental educational centers. Deeply committed to continuing education, Dr. Roshan has advanced training in Laser Dentistry, IV Conscious Sedation, Neuromuscular and Cosmetic Dentistry. As a certified Chao Pinhole Surgical Technique provider, Dr. Roshan is proud to be at the forefront of a revolutionary new approach to repairing gum recession. To learn more about the dental services available at Wall Centre Dental, please visit http://www.wallcentre-dental.com or call 604-879-3333 to schedule a consultation with Dr. Roshan.
Ron Huddleston, corporate vice president, One Commercial Partner, Microsoft Corp with Christian Morin and the Inspire Award for Canadian Partner of the Year "Genetec is a prime example of the expertise and innovation we see in our Microsoft partner community to deliver transformative solutions."

Genetec Inc. (Genetec), a leading provider of open architecture security and public safety solutions today announced it has won the 2017 Microsoft Public Safety and National Security Award as well as the Canada Partner of the Year Award. Recognizing its successes in the public-sector, Genetec was also selected as a finalist in the Microsoft CityNext award.

The award winners and finalists were selected from more than 2,800 nominations collected from 115 countries worldwide based on their commitment to customers, their solutions impact on the market and exemplary use of Microsoft technologies. Award winners and finalists from around the world were recognized at Microsoft Inspire that took place on July 913, 2017, in Washington, D.C.

Using Microsoft Azure, Genetec has developed solutions that are designed to build ties between the public and private sector, and encourage community-driven solutions that enhance public safety and livability. Used successfully in many cities around the world, including Detroit, MI, Atlanta, GA and Campinas in Brazil, Genetec solutions powered by Azure allow members of a community to participate and work towards common goals such as public safety, economic growth and operational efficiency.

From the beginning, Microsoft and Genetec have shared a similar vision of the Cloud and its ability to deliver significant innovation such as big data analytics and machine learning. Today, the cloud is the foundation that enables enterprise, small and medium size businesses, educational institutions, and entire cities to build safe, resilient, and vibrant communities, said Christian Morin, vice president of cloud services at Genetec Inc.

Ron Huddleston, corporate vice president, One Commercial Partner, Microsoft Corp. We are honored to recognize Genetec as the Canada Partner of the Year, and with the Microsoft Public Safety and National Security awards. Genetec is a prime example of the expertise and innovation we see in our Microsoft partner community to deliver transformative solutions.

About Genetec

Genetec develops open-architecture software, hardware and cloud-based services for the physical security and public safety industry. Its flagship product, Security Center, unifies IP-based access control, video surveillance and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) into one platform. A global innovator since 1997, Genetec is headquartered in Montreal, Canada, and serves enterprise and government organizations via an integrated network of resellers, certified channel partners, integrators and consultants in over 80 countries. Genetec was founded on the principle of innovation and remains at the forefront of emerging technologies that unify IP physical security systems. For more information about Genetec, visit: http://www.genetec.com

 2017 Genetec. Genetec is a trademark of Genetec Inc., and may be registered or pending registration in several jurisdictions. Other trademarks used in this document may be trademarks of the manufacturers or vendors of the respective products. Genetec and the Genetec logo are trademarks of Genetec Inc., and may be registered or pending registration in several jurisdictions. Other trademarks used in this document may be trademarks of the manufacturers or vendors of the respective product
HMP, a leader in healthcare content and continuing medical education events, announced today that its Wound Certification Prep Course (WCPC) will be offered in Singapore in October, through a partnership with Changi General Hospital.

Taking place October 5-6, 2017, the course will be led by Greg Patterson, MD, FACS, CWS, Medical Director, General and Vascular Surgery, Bariatric and Metabolic Surgery, Archbold Center for Wound Management and Hyperbaric Medicine, Thomasville, Georgia. The twenty-five nurses and physicians participating will spend two days reviewing stages of wound healing and various topical therapeutic interventions in preparation for sitting for either the Certified Wound Care Associate (CWCA), Certified Wound Specialist (CWS), or Certified Wound Specialist Physician (CWSP) board examinations that will be offered on October 7.

Expanding our medical education portfolio globally marks a significant milestone for our company, as well as our wound care division, said Jeff Hennessy, chairman and CEO, HMP. This is the first step in the expansion of this program internationally and we look forward to continuing to build an understanding of each market we enter to ensure we deliver relevant value and exceptional education in order to help health care professionals around the world improve patient care.

The WCPC Singapore offering marks a progression of HMPs continued focus on expanding its portfolio globally. Earlier this year, the company announced the launch of EMS World Americas, a new educational and networking opportunity for EMS professionals in Latin America that will take place September 21-24 in Bogota, Colombia.

As the only review course recommended by the American Board of Wound Management Foundation (ABWM), WCPC is the industry-leading preparation course providing a comprehensive review of wound management for those interested in preparing for wound certification board exams, recertifying, or gaining a more advanced understanding of wound care.

We are very pleased to be working with HMP to offer standardized wound care education and certification preparation to our team treating patients with chronic wounds, said Dr. Steven Kum, Vascular Surgeon at Changi General Hospital. Certification will not only benefit the professional growth of our practitioners and clinicians, but ultimately the rehabilitation of our patients.

To learn more about the Wound Certification Prep Course, please visit woundprepcourse.com.

About HMP

HMP is a multi-channel leader in health care meetings, content, and education, with a mission to improve patient care. The company produces accredited continuing medical education events and clinically relevant, evidence-based journals for the health care community across a range of therapeutic areas. Its brands include Consultant, the monthly, award-winning journal relied upon by primary care practitioners, Psych Congress, the largest, independent mental health meeting in the U.S., EMS World Expo, North America's largest EMS, EMT and paramedic event, and the Symposium on Advanced Wound Care (SAWC), the largest wound care meeting in the world. For more information, visit hmpholdings.com.

About Changi General Hospital

Changi General Hospital (CGH) is an award-winning public hospital with over 1,000 beds caring for a community of 1.4 million people in eastern Singapore. CGH offers a comprehensive range of medical specialties and services, helmed by a highly experienced and skilled team of healthcare professionals who consistently deliver excellent health outcomes and care for patients.
North-West Collge This award illustrates the hard work and dedication of our Team Members at North-West College. We extend special congratulations to all of our NWC Team Members in Long Beach and Santa Ana.

North-West College (NWC) is pleased to announce that not one, but two, of its campuses have been recognized with the prestigious "School of Distinction Award by the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges (ACCSC). North-West College, Long Beach and North-West College, Santa Ana have both earned this esteemed award.

The award is given to ACCSC-accredited institutions that have demonstrated a commitment to meeting the expectations and rigors of accreditation as well as a commitment to delivering quality educational programs.

"All of us at North-West College take pride in achieving this coveted award," Chief Strategy Officer Serjik Kesachekian shared. "It's a noteworthy accomplishment and an honor to be recognized by ACCSC. It illustrates the hard work and dedication of our Team Members at both the Campus Support Center and at the campus level. We extend special congratulations to all of our NWC Team Members in Long Beach and Santa Ana."

School of Distinction accolades will be given out at ACCSC's 2017 Professional Development Conference to be held September 25-27 in Reston, Virginia. The award will be personally presented to North-West College by ACCSC Executive Director, Dr. Michale McComis, who was also a keynote speaker and honored guest at SEC's own Professional Development Conference, held this past May.

To learn more about North-West College or NWC's health care training programs, please contact Nancy Aguillon at NancyA(at)success(dot)edu.

About North-West College

Founded in 1966, North-West College has been committed to training individuals to enter and advance in the health care field for more than 50 years. A leader in allied health education, the College offers a dozen different health care programs at seven campus locations throughout Southern California. Accredited by the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges (ACCSC) and approved by the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE), North-West College offers a supportive educational environment for those ready to start a health care career. To date, the College has graduated more than 45,000 studentsindividuals who have gone on to raise the standard of excellence at health care organizations of all types.

For more information about North-West College and its programs, visit http://www.nw.edu.
Attendees enjoyed the unique perspective on the success of North American AM regarding cost and increased efficiency. We are excited to add our insight and knowledge to the collective expertise found at LiM and are thrilled about this years robust attendance. Due to its success, we look forward to possibly expanding our role at future events.

The Laser Institute of America (LIA) presented its 90 minute session, AM: Trends in North America, on Wednesday, June 28, 2017 at the International Congress Center in Munich, Germany. The session was part of the Additive Manufacturing subconference of Lasers in Manufacturing (LiM) 2017 at the World of Photonics Congress Lasers in Manufacturing event, held from June 26-29, 2017 and organized by the German Scientific Laser Society (WLT).

Lasers in Manufacturing (LiM) is a scientific conference focusing on the latest trends in laser materials processing for industrial applications. LiM prides itself as a comprehensive international forum for researchers and experts in laser-based manufacturing. World of Photonics Congress meets biannually, uniting the scientific elite to gather information in the realm of photonics research. The event covers all aspects of research from application-based topics, to the latest applications in industry and medicine. World of Photonics Congress also offers conferences and practice-oriented application panels.

LIA shares in the World of Photonics Congresss mission of providing laser professionals with valuable events that present and discuss innovative insights with the laser community. The new 90-minute session specifically focused on North American additive manufacturing bolstered the body of knowledge in industry research at the global LiM gathering.

LIA was honored to collaborate with World of Photonics Congress on this years inaugural North American additive manufacturing event, said Jim Naugle, LIAs Marketing Director. We are excited to add our insight and knowledge to the collective expertise found at LiM and are thrilled about this years robust attendance. Due to its success, we look forward to possibly expanding our role at future events.

Attendees enjoyed the unique perspective on the success of North American AM regarding cost and increased efficiency. Keynote speaker David Ott of the Global Humanitarian Lab (GHL) discussed 3D printings impact on humanitarian efforts in the private, academic, and scientific sectors, while addressing communities affected by disasters globally. Author Rob Martinsen, CTO of nLight, presented breaking solutions in AM. Additional featured speakers included author William Herbert, Director of Corporate Development for Carpenter Technologies, and Yannick Lafue, Business Developer for Aeronautics Defense and Oil & Gas at IREPA LASER.

The World of Photonics Congress included sessions on macro processing, micro processing, additive manufacturing, as well as award ceremonies, lectures and specialty technology sessions.

For more information on upcoming LIA events and conferences, including ICALEO 2017 and LAM/LME 2018, visit https://www.lia.org/conferences.

About LIA

The Laser Institute of America (LIA) is the professional society for laser applications and safety serving the industrial, educational, medical, research and government communities throughout the world since 1968. http://www.lia.org, 13501 Ingenuity Drive, Ste 128, Orlando, FL 32826, +1.407.380.1553.
Since December 2000, Sober.com has been the leading online directory and community site for those seeking reliable treatment information for alcoholism and substance abuse. Were thrilled to have a treatment provider of the caliber of Seasons in Malibu join us as a Preferred Provider, said Dr. Harold Jonas, President and founder of Sober.com. Past News Releases RSS Sober Network Inc. Announces its...

Addiction Technology Provider Sober...

Former Addict Turned Tech...

Sober.com, the leading online directory and community site since 2000 for people seeking reliable treatment information for alcoholism and substance abuse, today announced the World Class addiction treatment provider, Seasons in Malibu, is now a Preferred Provider. The dual-diagnosis drug rehab and addiction treatment center treats addictions such as alcoholism, opiate addiction, cocaine addiction and prescription drug abuse. As the premier online resource helping the public find the best treatments, care and information for alcoholism and substance abuse, being a Preferred Provider on Sober.com allows Seasons in Malibu to substantially reach more people seeking treatment for drug and alcohol addiction for themselves, friends or loved ones.

Were thrilled to have a treatment provider of the caliber of Seasons in Malibu join us as a Preferred Provider, said Dr. Harold Jonas, President and founder of Sober.com. It will allow more people who are struggling with alcoholism and substance abuse the opportunity to access their World Class addiction treatments. Sober.coms Preferred Provider Program weeds out non-certified programs and simultaneously helps support the new laws against illegal advertising. We are the first in the nation to do so.

About Seasons in Malibu

California-based Seasons in Malibu was founded on the idea to create a rehabilitation center that not only helped people in addiction but actually improved the state of addiction treatment resources for everyone. Seasons brings together the best minds and resources to create something truly new, better, and at the leading edge in the treatment of addiction and its co-occurring disorders. Seasons recovery program has been full or near full since its inception, taking people in from across North America and the rest of the world and helping them and their families address, understand, and manage the disease of addiction. Seasons conducts studies of outcome, creating new tools to assess families, patients, and their aftercare, and synthesizes the latest understanding of systems and network science into the treatment of addiction. In client surveys, more than 95% of Seasons clients say they would recommend Seasons in Malibu to a friend or loved one. Visit https://seasonsmalibu.com for more information.

About Sober.com

Since December 2000, Sober.com has been the leading online directory and community site for those seeking reliable treatment information for alcoholism and substance abuse. As a premier online resource, the site provides high quality education, information and help to the public. Designed to be easily used by addicts, as well as their family, friends or loved ones, Sober.com is the starting point to find the best treatment and care as well as information on financial and clinical topics. As the pioneer in providing online addiction and recovery services information, Sober.com remains as the most reputable, succinct, comprehensive and user-friendly site for anyone who needs quick access to treatment programs, detoxification centers, halfway houses, sober houses and an array of other addiction treatment services and programs. Get Sober. Stay Sober. For more information contact Myrin New at 561-295-3204, or visit https://www.sober.com/
Heritage Woods of Benton, a Gardant affordable assisted living community is hosting an Aloha Luau Luncheon from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Aug. 15.

The community, which is located at 1305 Bailey Lane in Benton, Illinois, serves older adults of all incomes, including those on Medicaid, who need some help to maintain their independence.

The lunch menu will include Hawaiian chicken, meatballs and coleslaw. Tropical fruit platters and island-themed carved watermelons will also be on display.

Guests will have a chance to win a Hawaiian-themed door prize.

Tours will be available.

For more information, call 618-439-9431.

The Heritage Woods of Benton affordable assisted living community combines residential apartment home living with the availability of personal assistance, help with medications and a variety of convenience and support services.

We provide a wonderful alternative to a nursing home or to struggling alone at home, says Heritage Woods Administrator Diane Simpson.

Residents live in private apartments that they furnish and decorate to their tastes. Each of the studio and one-bedroom floor plans includes a kitchenette, spacious bathroom with shower and grab bars, individually controlled heating and air conditioning, and an emergency alert system.

Certified nursing assistants, working under the direction of a licensed nurse, are on-duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Meals, housekeeping and laundry are among the included services.

Residents also benefit from all of the opportunities that are available to socialize with friends and neighbors and participate in activities and special programs, says SImpson.

Heritage Woods of Benton is the only community in Franklin County that is certified to operate through the Illinois Supportive Living program. The affordable assisted living community is managed by Gardant Management Solutions, of Bradley, Illinois.

Gardant is the largest provider of assisted living in Illinois and the 12th largest provider in the country.

Our focus is to provide the residents of Heritage Woods of Benton with the love, compassion and dignity they deserve and the help and assistance they need, says Rod Burkett, CEO of Gardant. Our emphasis is on helping each resident achieve and maintain as much independence as possible for as long as possible.

Communities managed by Gardant Management Solutions include the Prairie Living affordable assisted living community in Carbondale and the Cambridge House affordable assisted living communities in the St. Louis Metro East area.

Gardant also manages the Heritage Woods affordable assisted living communities in Centralia, Flora, McLeansboro and Mt. Vernon, Illinois.

For more information about Gardant Management Solutions, the assisted living, senior living and memory care communities Gardant manages, and the companys management, development and consulting services, visit http://www.gardant.com or call 1-877-882-1495 toll-free.
Advertising Agency, id8, designs rebrand for City of Canton in Georgia "Our new brand showcases the unique community we are and gives our residents and businesses something to rally behind," said Angela Thompson, Communications & Outreach Director for the City of Canton.

The City of Canton in north metro Atlanta has updated its brand identity with the help of advertising agency id8, Cantons marketing department, and residents of Canton. The new messaging and images highlight Cantons unique mountain landscape, its vibrant business and arts sectors, and the Etowah River, which flows through the city. In the logo, a bright blue line representing the Etowah River runs through bold green letters that spell Canton, signifying themes of connectivity, community and nature.

New key messages include: Canton: A Destination for Everyone, Consider Yourself Invited, and You Belong Here. Images showcase residents kayaking at Hickory Log Creek Reservoir, attending festivals and shopping downtown, among other activities.

"Our new brand showcases the unique community we are and gives our residents and businesses something to rally behind. We are proud of Canton and now we have a brand to help share our story. id8 has been the perfect partner for us and we are thankful they took the time to listen and hear what we value every step of the way, said Angela Thompson, Communications & Outreach Director for the City of Canton.

id8 completed a rigorous process to develop Cantons new image. It conducted 25 individual leadership interviews, 40 location interviews, a stakeholder workshop, a community focus group, netnography research & ESRI tapestry segmentation report and an online survey that received more than 450 responses from Canton residents, employees, business owners and visitors.

id8 has some unique connections and experiences that made it a prime candidate to lead the redesign. The companys art director, Julie Cofer, is a longtime resident of Canton. Plus, id8 has completed similar successful initiatives for Marietta Square, the City of Kennesaw, and Cobb County.

What makes this project unique from most city branding projects is that the residents really helped to shape the branding and messaging. No one knows Canton better than the people who live there so we wanted to leverage their thoughts and ideas as much as possible. It was important to us that Cantons new brand reflect the people and businesses that reside there, said Kriston Sellier, President of id8.

Canton is located 40 miles north of Atlanta in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Cherokee County. The city is home to around 25,469 residents according to the U.S. Census, and has experienced tremendous growth in the last decade, both in population and development.

City leaders have led numerous key economic development initiatives meant to drive and manage that growth, such as the redevelopment of its downtown and a variety of mixed-use projects that prioritize work/life balance and parks and recreation. City branding can play a significant role in attracting the right kind of businesses and residents to spur economic growth and development.

About id8

id8 is a full-service boutique advertising agency located in north metro Atlanta on the Marietta Square. id8 offers numerous marketing services including branding, print design, marketing strategy, packaging design, website design, advertising, social media, and copywriting. id8 has won numerous awards for its work including a SEED Award, GDUSA Graphic Design Awards, and American Graphic Design and Advertising Awards. For more information, visit http://www.id8agency.com. Follow id8 on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.
One of the greatest feelings is knowing that we, as individuals, can make a difference

The Mark Shaw Agency, a privately managed insurance provision and financial planning firm headquartered in Wetumpka, Alabama, is leading a charity drive in cooperation with the Elmore County Food Pantry that aims to provide healthy food to families in the area facing food insecurity.

The Elmore County Food Pantry (ECFP) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring all residents in the region have consistent access to wholesome meals. At present, nearly 11,000 residents of the Elmore County community live below the national poverty live and require nourishment assistance. ECFP provides nearly 30,000 pounds of food monthly to more than 1,000 of these residents.

One of the greatest feelings is knowing that we, as individuals, can make a difference, states Mark Shaw, executive director and founder of the Mark Shaw Agency.

Efforts to gather community support for the Elmore County Food Bank are presently concentrated on social media and email channels, as the Mark Shaw Agency team builds connections with local community leaders and policy makers. Going forward, Shaw anticipates more exposure for the charity drive after the release of a new article scheduled to appear in Our Hometown, a monthly online local interest magazine produced by the Mark Shaw Agency: http://www.markshawagency.com/Our-Hometown-Magazine_39.

For just over a year, the Mark Shaw Agency has been a regional affiliate of Agents of Change, an interstate charity assistance network that supports charities like the Elmore County Food Bank. As ongoing members of this group, Shaw and his team plan to select and working with additional charitable organizations operating in the Wetumpka area at the rate of one every 90 days.

For those who would like to learn more about the local charity event to provide support to the Elmore County Food Bank as they work to feed hungry families in the area, the following page has been made available by the Mark Shaw Agency: http://www.markshawagency.com/No-One-Nowhere-At-No-Time-Should-Go-Hungry-_18_community_cause. As new charity drives are sponsored by the Mark Shaw Agency in the future, more information will be provided on the agencys Community Causes page: http://www.markshawagency.com/community-cause.

About The Mark Shaw Agency

As a Personal Finance Representative and Elmore County native, agency owner Mark Shaw knows many local families. His knowledge and understanding of the people in his community ensures that Mark Shaw Agency clients are provided with an outstanding level of service. Mark and his team look forward to helping families protect the things that are most important - family, home, car and more. The Mark Shaw Agency also offers clients a preparation strategy for achieving their financial goals. To contact an expert at the Mark Shaw Agency, visit http://www.markshawagency.com/ or call 334-567-2246.
WQA Business Excellence designation is a validation of all the work we do here to ensure that people can obtain the best water for themselves and their families...

The Water Quality Association (WQA) has recognized Multipure for its dedication and commitment within the water treatment industry, honoring the company for Business Excellence.

As a representative organization of the interests and best practices of the water treatment industry, WQA created its Business Excellence program to differentiate those companies who best represent and uphold the values and high standards of the Association. Signifying its Business Excellence members with a distinctive gold-trimmed WQA logo, this honor requires companies to meet the following qualifications:

1. Be a WQA Member company in good standing

2. Sell one or more WQA Certified Products

3. Have at least one WQA Certified Professional on staff

Multipure President Zachary Rice takes pride in Multipures achievement, stating, Multipure has been dedicated to the advancement and production of industry-leading point-of-use water treatment for over 45 years. Our products superior performance is third-party tested and certified, and our Vice President of Marketing, Kenton Jones, is a WQA Certified Water Specialist, affording Multipure an excellent authority on the water industry as a whole. WQA Business Excellence designation is a validation of all the work we do here to ensure that people can obtain the best water for themselves and their families, and it is important that customers can easily identify the work we do above-and-beyond in the advancement of water quality.

With water quality issues popping up across the country, theres never been a greater need for our industry, said WQA Executive Director Pauli Undesser. This distinction helps showcase participants expertise and sets them apart within the marketplace.

WQA is a not-for-profit trade association representing the residential, commercial, and industrial water treatment industry. Since 1959, the WQA Gold Seal certification program has been certifying products that contribute to the safe consumption of water. The WQA Gold Seal program is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the Standards Council of Canada (SCC).

Founded in 1970, Multipure is an industry leader in the manufacture and distribution of drinking water systems and compressed solid carbon block filters. Headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada, Multipure employs over 200 people, and is committed to being a company that provides the people of the world with the best quality drinking water at an affordable price. Multipure is a member of the Water Quality Association and the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, and the Better Business Bureau.
The CIA programme began in 2013 as part of efforts by the administration of then-President Barack Obama to overthrow Assad, but produced little success.

By Reuters: The Trump administration has decided to halt the CIA's covert programme to equip and train certain rebel groups fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, two US officials said, a move sought by Assad ally Russia.

The US decision, said one of the officials, is part of an effort by the administration to improve relations with Russia, which along with Iranian-supported groups has largely succeeded in preserving Assad's government in the six-year-civil war.

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The CIA programme began in 2013 as part of efforts by the administration of then-President Barack Obama to overthrow Assad, but produced little success, said the officials, both of whom are familiar with the program and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Washington Post was first to report the programme's suspension on Wednesday. White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders declined to comment on the topic at the White House briefing.

The CIA also declined to comment.

The decision was made with National Security Adviser HR McMaster and CIA Director Mike Pompeo after they consulted with lower ranking officials and before Trump's July 7 meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Germany. It was not part of US-Russian negotiations on a ceasefire in southwestern Syria, the two officials said.

SIGNAL TO PUTIN

One of the officials said the United States was not making a major concession, given Assad's grip on power, although not on all of Syria, "but it's a signal to Putin that the administration wants to improve ties to Russia."

Trump is under intense scrutiny by Congress and a special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether Trump's campaign had ties to the activity. Russia has denied US intelligence agencies' allegations of Moscow meddling, and Trump has denied collusion between his campaign and Russians.

A downside of the CIA programme, one of the officials said, is that some armed and trained rebels defected to Islamic State and other radical groups, and some members of the previous administration favored abandoning the program.

US MIGHT FOCUS ON FIGHT AGAINST ISIS

Before assuming office in January, Trump suggested he could end support for Free Syrian Army groups and give priority to the fight against Islamic State.

A separate effort by the US military effort to train, arm and support other Syrian rebel groups with air strikes and other actions will continue, the officials said.

However, aside from air strikes after the Syrian military launched a chemical weapons attack, the Trump administration has not increased military support from the limits set by the Obama administration.

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Also read: US keeps Pakistan on list of countries providing safe haven to terrorists

Also read: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin had second undisclosed meeting at G20: White House

Also read: Arab nations urge Qatar to accept 6 principles to combat extremism, terrorism

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Our agency wants to ensure that special needs children have the same quality of life that all children should have

Sharer & Associates Inc., a New Jersey based firm that provides insurance assistance, financial consulting, and related services to communities in the Forked River area, is announcing a regional charity drive to raise support for the Elks Therapeutic Bike program and generate donations to gift one local special needs student with a therapeutic mobility cycle.

The therapeutic cycle, called an AmTryke, is a modified tricycle engineered by Ambucs (American Business Club) to provide mobility and independence to special needs children. During this charity event, one such cycle will be gifted to a local special needs student, while additional resources will be donated to support the ongoing efforts of the Elks Therapeutic Bike program.

Our agency wants to ensure that special needs children have the same quality of life that all children should have, says Donn Sharer, co-owner of Sharer & Associates. Sharers partner, Bob Considine, is equally enthusiastic about the charity event. These very special tricycles are therapeutic in that they build the childs skills and endurance and help some very special riders feel the freedom of riding a tricycle, explains Considine.

To help raise community support for the event, Sharer and Considine are mobilizing the resources of their firm to connect with local families, civic leaders, and educators utilizing a series of online social media and email tools. Further publicity for the event is anticipated pending the release of a cover story detailing the event scheduled for release in the newest edition of the Sharer & Associates online magazine Our Hometown:

http://www.sharerandassociates.com/Our-Hometown-Magazine_39.

Sharer and Considine are long time members of an interstate charity support coalition called Agents of Change. As proud affiliates of this group, the Sharer & Associates team selects and works with new regional charitable causes on a bimonthly basis.

Those who wish to learn more about the AmTryke mobility cycle charity event are encouraged by Sharer and Considine to visit the following page and get involved: http://www.sharerandassociates.com/Providing-a-Special-Tricycle-to-a-Deserving-Child_20_community_cause. A comprehensive list of all charity drives hosted by Sharer & Associates can be bookmarked on the firms Community Causes page: http://www.sharerandassociates.com/community-cause.

About Sharer & Associates

As Personal Finance Representatives in Forked River and in Millstone Township, agency owners Donn Sharer and Bob Considine know many local families. Their knowledge and understanding of the people in the community ensures that clients of Sharer & Associates are provided with an outstanding level of service. Donn and Bob look forward to helping families protect the things that are most important - family, home, car and more. Sharer & Associates also offers clients a preparation strategy for achieving their financial goals. To contact an expert at Sharer & Associates, visit http://www.sharerandassociates.com/ or call (732) 446-4919 or (609) 971-8300.
The Shootout event was a rousing success, and were honored to have worked with an organization that takes the support of New York area veterans so seriously,

The Zabbia Insurance Agency, an insurance services and financial consultation firm with offices headquartered in Nassau County, is announcing the success of a charity event hosted in conjunction with the Shootout For Soldiers organization to raise community support for area veteran programs

The Shootout for Soldiers organization hosts a day-long lacrosse event that brings in participants from all over the region. Funds raised during this event are used to give a voice to local veterans and help engage the community on issues that matter to military families, and helps build bridges of understanding and empathy between military and civilian communities.

The Shootout event was a rousing success, and were honored to have worked with an organization that takes the support of New York area veterans so seriously, said Robert Zabbia, founder and executive director of the Zabbia Insurance Agency.

In an effort to amplify the reach of the Shootout For Soldiers event, Zabbia and his team built an online information sharing nexus over social media and email to help keep regional supporters informed. A full length article posted in the firms online magazine Our Hometown was also instrumental in helping to draw in community support: http://www.zabbiaagency.com/Our-Hometown-Magazine_39.

The original funding goal of the Shootout For Soldiers was $50,000, but the organization raised more than $100,000 to benefit local veterans. As members of the Agents of Change charity support network, the Zabbia Insurance Agency plans to work in support of more regional charities over the months to come.

Support for the Shootout For Soldiers organization is still coming in, and the Zabbia Insurance Agency has made the following page available for those seeking information or who would still like to donate to the event: http://www.zabbiaagency.com/Playing-Lacrosse-For-A-Greater-Cause_19_community_cause. As the Zabbia Insurance Agency launches more charity events in the future, details will be provided on the firms frequently updated Community Causes roster: http://www.zabbiaagency.com/community-cause.

About Zabbia Insurance Agency

As a Personal Finance Representative in Nassau County for nearly 20 years, agency owner Robert Zabbia knows many local families. His knowledge and understanding of the people in his community ensures that clients of Zabbia Insurance Agency are provided with an outstanding level of service. Robert and his team look forward to helping families protect the things that are most important - family, home, car and more. Zabbia Insurance also offers clients a preparation strategy for achieving their financial goals. To contact an expert at Zabbia Insurance Agency, visit http://www.zabbiaagency.com/ or call (516) 799-6900.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer and National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton confirmed that Trump and Putin spoke at a dinner for world leaders and their spouses at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

By AP: President Donald Trump had another, previously undisclosed conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit in Germany this month.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer and National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton confirmed that Trump and Putin spoke at a dinner for world leaders and their spouses at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

The conversation came hours after Trump and Putin's first official face-to-face meeting on July 7, which was originally scheduled to last just half an hour but stretched on for more than two.

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The two world leaders were also captured on video shaking hands and exchanging a few words after they arrived at the G-20 summit of industrialized and developing nations earlier that day.

Anton would not specify the duration of the conversation. But he said the discussion was casual and should not be characterized as a "meeting" or even a less formal, but official, "pull-aside."

"A conversation over dessert should not be characterized as a meeting," he said.

The dinner, hosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was open only to world leaders and their spouses, as well as one translator per couple, according to a senior White House official who described the event on condition of anonymity despite the president's criticism of unnamed sources.

The official stressed that Trump spoke with many leaders over the course of the dinner and said he spoke briefly with Putin, who was seated next to first lady Melania Trump, as the event was concluding.

Trump spoke with Putin using Russia's translator, since the American translator did not speak Russian.

But Ian Bremmer, who said he spoke with two people who attended the dinner, said that Trump and Putin spoke for nearly an hour while sitting among the other world leaders and their spouses at the dinner.

Bremmer is a foreign affairs columnist and the president of the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm.

Press didn't know you spent an hour during dinner in 1-1 discussion w Putin (& his translator). Other G20 leaders found it...unusual. https://t.co/w3QIyJbMbp- ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) July 19, 2017

Attendees described the meeting as startling, said Bremmer, who was told Trump was very animated as he spoke with Putin, often using his hands to gesture.

Trump defended the dinner in a pair of angry tweets late Tuesday that noted the dinner had been on his public schedule.

"Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is 'sick.' All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!" he wrote.

A few minutes later he added: "The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!"

Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

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Trump and Putin's relationship has been under scrutiny since the election campaign, when Trump repeatedly praised Putin as a strong leader and publicly encouraged him to hack then-rival Hillary Clinton's emails. Trump aides have since said he was joking.

U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election in order to help Trump. Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on their findings and dismissed investigations into potential collusion between his campaign and Moscow as a "witch hunt.

Also Read:

Modi at G20: Counter-terrorism, economic growth on PM's agenda

As Modi, Xi Jinping meet at G20 Summit, Rahul Gandhi asks why PM silent on China

G20 Summit: Trump waves to Modi, walks up to him for an 'impromptu' chat

WATCH | What happens when Donald Trump gets a WhatsApp message from PM Modi

--- ENDS ---
News

From Bulgaria

Gas System Operators, ICGB Sign MoU on Vertical Gas Corridor

The Vertical Gas Corridor should allow the necessary infrastructure to be put in place, so that natural gas could allow gas to be transported from transit countries via Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary to Europe, as well as a reverse flow

AUTHOR: publics.bg

Signing of the MoU in Bucharest

 Bulgarian Ministry of Energy



Gas transmission grid operators of Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary and Romania, along with project company ICGB which is responsible for the construction of the Greece-Bulgaria gas interconnector (IGB), signed today a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the realization of the Vertical Gas Corridor. The MoU was signed during a meeting in Bucharest, Romania, attended by representatives of Bulgartransgaz EAD (Bulgaria), DESFA S.A. (Greece), FGSZ LTD (Hungary), SNTGN TRANSGAZ S.A. (Romania), and ICGB AD, the Bulgarian Ministry of Energy said in a press release.

In September 2016 the energy ministries of these countries signed the memorandum for the realisation of the Vertical Gas Corridor  a project which should allow the necessary infrastructure to be put in place, so that natural gas could allow gas to be transported from transit countries via Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary to Europe, as well as a reverse flow.

The project will link the gas transmission systems of the involved countries and is among the Projects of Common Interest (PCIs) of the European Union. The project is estimated at EUR 560 m, with half the costs to be covered with EU funding.

According to the Bulgarian Ministry of Energy the IGB is has a strategic for the entire project and this is why ICGB was included in the MoU signing in Bucharest.
Explainer: Stimulus package is a package of tax rebates and incentives by governments to stimulate the economy and save their country from a financial crisis.

The idea behind a stimulus package is to provide tax rebates and boost spending, as spending will increase demand, which will also increase employment rate which in turn increases income and hence boosts spending. This cycle continues until the economy recovers from collapse.

Addressing journalists at his maiden media encounter President Akufo-Addo confirmed that 80 companies will soon receive the stimulus package.

The asempa budget also provided the fifty million dollar stimulus package for the revival of distressed industries and companies. At the end of June 2017, 285 applications had been received. So far one hundred and eighteen have been screened in which eighty have been adjourned eligible for various stimulus packages.

In addition to governments contribution an amount of twenty million dollars is being ear marked by local financial institutions as part of the stimulus package this will definitely help in the revival of our industrial sector under the minister for trade and industry Alan Kyeremanteng, he added.

Most private sector businesses have earlier demanded that the government made the package available by end of June 2017.
This was disclosed by the Minister of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, Professor Frimpong Boateng.

He was speaking at a media briefing ahead of a training workshop for small scale miners and journalists on proper mining methods.

He explained that the ban will ensure that the use of mercury is reduced which will also decrease the level of contamination of water resources in the country.

Importation is under the Ministry of Trade but inspection at the ports is done by the EPA, but we do not want to say we are not going to allow mercury to come into the country when we have not discussed all the issues with the Ministry of Trade.

We have started discussions already and I do not things are going to take too long and things have become a little bit easier because Ghana has signed onto the Minamata protocol. This is a protocol that bans the use of mercury in the countries that have signed the agreement, he added.

Before the fight against galamsey started the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) had been complaining about the huge financial investments it has been making for the purification of the polluted water resources.

But the fight against illegal mining has reduced to the turbidity levels of the water. This means they are spending fewer amounts of money in treating the polluted water.

Professor Frimpong Boateng said he was optimistic the country will save more if the ban is enforced.
In a lengthy write up she titled, "For bleaching idiots," Nwachi said that she sees women who bleach as failures in life, and her feelings only get worse when it comes to men who bleach.

ALSO READ: Melanin movement fights back against colourism

She went on to describe them in colourful terms such as "dumb as a wall," adding that they have low self-esteem.

Read her post below:
A 14-year-old girl was electrocuted while taking a bath. She had taken an extension cord inside the bathroom to charge her phone and according to reports she touched the frayed extension while still being in the bath tub.

By India Today Web Desk: "When you use (an) extension cord so you can plug your phone in while you're in the bath."

This was the last message a 14-year-old girl sent to her friend before she was electrocuted while taking a bath.

Madison Coe thought of charging her phone while taking a bath so she used an extension cord but was careful enough to keep the power cords on a towel. She clicked a photo of it and sent it to friend with a caption.

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According to a police investigation, she was electrocuted while in the bathtub at her father's home in New Mexico. However, it was not because of her phone. Madison's Samsung 6s Edge had not fallen into the tub or even had any exposure to water. She had taken precautions to keep the cords dry.

Photo: Facebook@Lovington Leader

Investigation say she might have touched the frayed extension cord while still in the bath tub. The extension cord was connected to a "non-GFCI, non grounded" bathroom wall outlet, as reported by CNN. According to police, the phone adapter cord had been disconnected from the extension cord by the time of the incident.

Madison's family has released the text and photo to raise awareness and prevent similar accidents.

Friends and family are posting on social media about this incident to warn about the danger of texting in the tub, and how water and electricity do not go well together at all.

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This follows a request by the prosecution that their continuous stay in police cells was making it difficult to have access to them.

The prosecutor, George Amega told the court that the 19 had been placed in different police stations in Accra.

READ ALSO: 13 suspects discharged

He further indicated that the duplicate docket of the case has been sent to the Attorney Generals department for advice.

The case has since been adjourned to August 3, 2017.

The 19 have been facing charges of murder and abetment of murder after their arrest for the killing of the military officer.
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MSNBC's Nicole Wallace read portions of emails between Trump Jr. and music producer Rob Goldstone, who helped arrange a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, and several Russians with ties to the Kremlin.

In the emails, Trump Jr. is told that the meeting would provide damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian effort to elect Trump. But Christie suggested Trump Jr. deserves a pass for agreeing to it because of his inexperience.

"The recipient of the information, Donald Trump Jr., who I know very well, is by no means a sophisticated political actor," Christie said. 'This is a guy who loves his father and got involved in politics because his father got involved, but I don't think Don would have gotten involved at that level any other time."

Wallace then asked the governor: "Can you agree that this is bungled collusion?"

"No I don't, because I dont know who Goldstone is, Christie replied, adding that it could be considered "bungled collusion" if Goldstone had worked for the Russian government and "actually knew what he was talking about."

An increasingly exasperated Wallace fired back:

"So for you the discrepancy is whether or not Goldstones information was good, not whether or not the son of an American candidate for president agreed to receive oppo from a hostile foreign power?"

Christie was a prominent Trump surrogate at the time of the 2016 meeting, and was with Trump at Trump Tower during the time of the meeting, though he denied knowledge of it.

Wallace then criticized Trump for defending the meeting and asserting that no collusion took place, to which Christie replied, "That's our guy," and "I'm proud he is the president."

And when Wallace called Trump's credibility into question, Christie continued his defense:

"He's never lied to me. So I can only judge it based on that," he said.
The decision comes just more than three months after Trump ordered the

"It also fits a broader pattern," Price said. 'The White House appears content to kowtow to Moscow on any number of fronts  including in Syria, where, with each passing day, this administration appears to harbor fewer objections to the continued rule of Bashar al-Assad, a murderous dictator who continues to slaughter his own people."
The previously undisclosed conversation between the two leaders was first revealed Tuesday by Ian Bremmer, the president of the geopolitical risk firm Eurasia Group.

The White House confirmed various media reports that Putin and Trump spoke for nearly an hour at the G-20 Couples' Dinner, shortly after the two held a formal meeting with their respective secretaries of state that lasted over two hours.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Trump's formal meeting with Putin took so long that first lady Melania Trump was sent in "to see if she could get us out of there." Putin and Trump also spoke briefly at a meet-and-greet earlier in the summit.

Bremmer told Charlie Rose on Tuesday that "the first thing" he thought of when he heard about the previously undisclosed conversation was Jeff Sessions' interactions with Russias ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, in which, he said, Sessions "was having these meetings with Kislyak that weren't 'meetings.'" He added: "They were in broader meetings, but they're pull-asides, so you don't really need to talk about it, but it turns out that's where they're conducting business. That's kind of what this sounds like.

"But given the extraordinary focus and attention that everything involving Putin and Trump has had ... you have an hour that evening that no one's even heard of," Bremmer continued, adding that Putin was "clearly" Trumps "best personal relationship" with a world leader.

"Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesn't care," Bremmer told The New York Times. "They were flummoxed, they were confused, and they were startled."

Democratic Sen. Chris Coons told CNN on Tuesday that a source told him Trump got up from his seat at the dinner table, went over to Putin, and spoke with him for nearly an hour. Melania Trump was sitting next to Putin at dinner, according to video footage.

Trump was joined only by Putin's translator, the White House said. The two leaders also were said to have left at about the same time after dinner. There is no government record of the conversation.

Following the news of the meeting, the White House issued a statement saying "all the leaders circulated throughout the room and spoke with one another freely."

The White House also noted that because each seated couple was afforded one translator, and Trump's translator happened to speak Japanese and not Russian, Trump was forced to rely on Putin's translator.

"There was no 'second meeting' between President Trump and President Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner," the White House's statement continued. "The insinuation that the White House has tried to 'hide' a second meeting is false, malicious, and absurd."

News of the additional conversation came one week after Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. released an email chain showing he agreed to meet privately at Trump Tower last year with a person described as a "Russian government attorney" to obtain compromising information on Hillary Clinton.

The Trump Tower meeting has attracted sharp scrutiny as Trump Jr.'s statements about its purpose have evolved since The Times disclosed its existence on July 8.

Trump Jr. said in an initial statement to The Times that the meeting was a "short introductory" one and that he and a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, "primarily discussed" an adoption program that Putin cut off in retaliation for the 2012 Magnitsky Act, a US law that blacklisted Russians suspected of human-rights abuses.

Trump Jr. did not disclose the presence of Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, a translator named Anatoli Samachornov, or Irakly Kaveladze, the vice president of a major development company, at the meeting. And it is unclear why a discussion of Russia's adoption policy would have required the presence of Kaveladze, who is based in Los Angeles.

Trump's outside legal counsel initially said Trump had been unaware of the meeting.
The meeting took place at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, after the two leaders met for nearly two hours in a highly publicized formal meeting.

News of the second conversation, which occurred at a private, couples-only dinner, reignited concerns about Trump's relationship with Russia.

"Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is 'sick,'" Trump tweeted. "All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!"

He tweeted seven minutes later: "The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!"

However, as several journalists pointed out, the existence of the private dinner was never in question. Coverage of the conversation focused on its unusual length and the fact that there is no government record of it. Trump did not use an American translator during the interaction, instead relying on Putin's.

Ian Bremmer, the president of the geopolitical-risk firm Eurasia Group, said other attendees were shocked by the conversation.

"Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesn't care," Bremmer told The New York Times. "They were flummoxed, they were confused, and they were startled."

The White House released a statement saying that "all the leaders circulated throughout the room and spoke with one another freely."
After the bill was sunk by opposition from the conservative and moderate wings of the Republican Party, Trump complained that Paul had gone out of his way to publicize his discontent with the bill, and he derided the senator's TV appearances as unnecessary grandstanding, according to a New York Times report. Paul was not at the dinner.

Trump said that while it was one thing to vote against the bill, it was another to "go on all of the Sunday shows and complain about it," according to The Times.

Paul responded on "Good Morning America" on Wednesday, defending his relationship with the president and holding firm on his rejection of the bill, which would have repealed and replaced the Affordable Care Act, the law better known as Obamacare.

"I think the president and I have a good relationship  I've been one of his strongest defenders. I will continue to defend him against mainstream-media attacks," Paul said. "But on issues of substance like healthcare, he knows where I'm coming from. ... I was at the first tea parties saying that Obamacare was a mistake and we should repeal it."

The bill fell apart on Monday night when two GOP senators  Jerry Moran of Kansas and Mike Lee of Utah  joined Paul and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine in rejecting it, tipping the scales against its passage.

Paul has long supported a full repeal of the ACA and advocates repealing the law before negotiating legislation to replace it.

When Trump tweeted on Monday that the Senate should repeal now and replace later, Paul implied he had helped persuade the president to change his mind on the issue, tweeting that he and Trump had discussed a "clean repeal now!"

Paul emphasized during his Wednesday interview that he and the president agreed that Republicans should abandon Obamacare.

"I agree with the president: Obamacare's a disaster, but it's the Democrats' creation, and all the problems of its unraveling belong to Democrats," Paul said, arguing that any Republican bill that wouldn't fully repeal the ACA would leave the GOP with the blame for the law's failure.

This isn't the first time Paul has drawn Trump's ire for his position on healthcare. In March, amid House Republicans' negotiation of their ACA replacement bill, the president called out Paul on Twitter after the senator criticized it as "Obamacare Lite."

"I feel sure that my friend @RandPaul will come along with the new and great health care program because he knows Obamacare is a disaster!" Trump tweeted.

Paul said at the time that he felt "emboldened" by the president's pressure and criticism.

"I don't feel isolated by this. I actually feel emboldened," Paul told Politico at the time, arguing that the tweet signaled the White House was open to negotiating with proponents of a clean repeal of the ACA.

Paul and Trump began their relationship on rocky footing during the 2016 presidential primaries. After the first Republican debate in August 2015, Trump called Paul "truly weird" and criticized his performance.

"Truly weird Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky reminds me of a spoiled brat without a properly functioning brain," Trump tweeted. "He was terrible at DEBATE!"

Paul struck back at Trump, calling him a "fake conservative."
At the end of that month, the two sides exchanged rocket fire, which Turkey says killed 11 YPG fighters. In early July, Turkey deployed troops to the Kurdish-held border in northwest Syria, which the YPG commander called "a declaration of war."

YPG and Turkish-backed rebels  who the YPG call mercenaries  clashed in northwest Syria on Monday, Reuters reported. The YPG said it killed three Turkish-backed rebels and wounded four more.

Turkey views the YPG as a terrorist group and extension of the PKK, which has been trying to set up its own Kurdish state within Turkey for decades. And the US has placed itself right between the two sides.

Turkey is the third-largest purchaser of US weapons, and in early May, the US began supplying weapons to the YPG to help in the coalition's fight against ISIS.

The latter move has angered Turkey even more than the US's unwillingness to extradite

Stein added that "the US is partly to blame" for increased tensions between Turkey and YPG, but, he said, "all sides have blood on their hands in this thing."

he Pentagon is running its own show," and the US State Department doesn't appear to be checking its decisions.

"We are concerned [about increased tensions between Turkey and YPG] but doing everything we can to defuse the situation," Marine Corps Maj.

The US probably won't leave northwest Syria for a while, and its presence will help deter fighting between the two sides.
Starting Wednesday, NBC News will produce the show, which is called "Stay Tuned," twice a day for Snapchat's 166 million users. Each edition will cover the biggest news stories of the day and be a crisp two to three minutes in length.

As the first daily video series to air on Snapchat, "Stay Tuned" is the latest development in parent Snap Inc.'s nascent efforts to become a destination for exclusive shows. The company hopes to air up to three shows per day by the end of the year.

"Stay Tuned" also represents an increased focus for Snap on the specific genre of news, according to the company's head of original content, Sean Mills.

Our ambition is very much that when something happens in the world or theres a news event, that our audience would turn to Snapchat increasingly to get that news," Mills told Business Insider during a recent interview.

Reinventing the news for Snapchat

Since the beginning of 2015, Snapchat's Discover section has been home to a hand-picked and ever-expanding list of publishers, from The Washington Post to The Daily Mail. These outlets show often-repurposed stories and videos in their channels that are tailored for Snapchat's vertical video format and swipe-heavy interface.

A team of in-house editors at Snapchat also pulls together videos and photos willingly submitted by users for stories around breaking news events like elections and terrorist attacks. These so-called "Our Stories" live next to stories from outside publishers in Snapchat's Discover section.

With "Stay Tuned," NBC News will get prime real estate in the newer "Shows" section of Snapchat, which has already been home to other NBC-owned shows like "The Voice" and E! News' "The Rundown." NBCUniversal invested a whopping $500 million in Snap's initial public offering.

Interest in doing a news show on Snapchat came after NBC reporters used the app to cover the 2016 US presidential election, according to NBC head of digital Nick Ascheim. The network's staffers started sharing videos from their personal accounts that would occasionally be picked up in one of Snapchat's Our Stories and get "unbelievable amounts of traffic," he said.

We wanted to do a news program that really felt like news as opposed to dumbing down for a different audience," Ascheim told BI. "And that was very much in line with what Snap wanted.

A big part of Snapchat's draw for content partners and advertisers is its highly engaged, young audience. The average Snapchat user opens the app 18 times per day and 75% of daily show viewers are between the ages of 13 and 24, according to the company.

For NBC, that represents an opportunity to reach a highly sought-after demographic. A dedicated team of 30 NBC reporters and editors will produce the show and air breaking news updates throughout the day if a big enough story breaks.

Its an audience that we want to reach and we want to understand better," Ascheim said.

A source of inspiration for both partners was "Good Luck America," a politics show produced by Snap and hosted by the company's head of news and former CNN reporter, Peter Hamby. Since the 2016 presidential election, the show's viewership has grown by 53% in its second season and now averages over 5 million unique viewers per episode.

And while Snapchat's Discover section has been criticized for often looking like the digital equivalent of the tabloid rack at a grocery store, "Good Luck America" episodes cover issues like immigration, gun violence, and the decline of American manufacturing.

"The truth is that when we talk about Snapchat being a camera company, we talk about it being a lense into the world," said Snap original content chief Sean Mills. "We feel a sense of responsibility that lense applies into all facets of peoples lives. When we first did news coverage, I think it was a surprise to a lot of us. Now its become very expected."

Snap's partnership with NBC on "Stay Tuned" is an indefinite commitment, according to Mills. NBC will sell ads for the show and Snap will take a share of the revenue. Snap's internal production team will continue to help NBC develop the show and work on best practices for shooting and editing.

Were not thinking about it in terms of seasons," he said.

Developing a sense of trust

Snap's decision to go head-first into news comes as Facebook is preparing to unveil its own slate of original shows. Serious news coverage is one area that Facebook is shying away from with its first slate of shows, according to people familiar with the matter.

And while Facebook has been heavily criticized for its role in spreading fake news and misinformation in recent months, Snap has managed to largely avoid the issue. When asked why, Mills credited the company's approach of only working with select publishers.
A father murdered his Israeli Christian daughter after the family found that the 17-year-old was in a relationship with a Muslim man.

By India Today Web Desk: An Israeli Christian from central Israeli town of Ramle has been charged with killing his teenage daughter who was in a relationship with a Muslim man. Father Sami Karra allegedly murdered his 17-year-old daughter Henriette.

Sami objected to Henriette being in love with a Muslim guy who was serving prison time, according to Haaretz. According to the news portal, the dead Israeli Christian planned to convert to Islam for the man she loved.

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Henriette's mother Aliham told police that her husband felt humiliated by Henriette's behaviour which tarnished the "family's honour".

VIOLENCE AGAINST HER BY FAMILY

Henriette's family repeatedly tried to get her to end their relationship. After she left home because of the incessant violence against her, she was killed on June 13, two weeks after she abandoned her home.

Henriette had to hide from her family in several paces, including at the home of her Muslim boyfriend's mother. When Henriette's family threatened the boyfriend's mother, Henriette had to leave that place too.

A week before the murder, Henriette filed a complaint against her mother. In another incident, police was called after her father was allegedly beating and threatening her.

THE KILLING

Henriette was killed after she told one of her relatives that she is converting to Islam. The relative gave Henriette's father a call and told him of her plans.

The indictment alleges that the father then decided to murder her.

She was found dead in the kitchen of her parent's home with stab wounds to the neck.

"Just like I sat in prison [in the past] I will sit in prison my whole life, I don't care."

Haaretz reports that Sami has a long criminal record, with his last conviction taking place in 2004 for crimes that include intimidation, property violations and drug dealing and possession.

Also Read || Pakistani man kills sister, niece in honour killing ||

Also Read || Suspected honour killing victim Ilavarasan's case closed; CB-CID calls it suicide ||

--- ENDS ---
The Chief Magistrate, Mrs Abiona Richard, ordered the remand pending the receipt of legal advice from the Directorate of Public Prosecution (DPP).

She, thereafter, adjourned the matter till Aug. 17 for mention.

The Prosecutor, Insp. Sunday Ogunremi, told the court that Gabriel, Bello, Adefolarin and others now at large, conspired to engage in armed robbery.

Ogunremi said Gabriel and Bello on June 6 at about 1:30 pm while armed with guns and other dangerous weapons attacked one Sarah Ondua and dispossessed her of N4,000 cash.

One Samsung cell phone valued at N45, 000 and one Nokia cell phone valued at N30,000 was also snatched from her, he said.

He alleged that the duo also robbed one Opeyemi Odushina of an Apple cell phone valued at N80, 000 and a Nokia S2 phone valued at N45, 000.

The attack was said to have been committed on June 6 at about 1:30pm at Olugbode Street, Odo-Ona, Alakia, Ibadan, Ogunremi said.
One of her friends, Maria Mark Msheila, posted a photo of the beautiful John on her Twitter handle and also listed the names of the other women kidnapped by the insurgents who had ambushed the convoy along the Damboa Road, about 31 kilometers from Maiduguri, the state capital, on June 20, 2017.

It was gathered that the militant Islamist sect had attacked the convoy comprising of operatives of the Nigerian Army and the Police escorting the women who were going for a function and after a shootout, abducted the women, killing some travelers including a soldier and a police officer.

This is what Msheila posted on her Twitter handle:

"This is Awa (Sarah). She's among the 10 women abducted by Boko Haram. Can't still believe it. Please pray for them."

However, when the news first broke out, the police and Military authorities denied that the incident happened, claiming that the reports were false.

But the sect reacted a few days later by releasing a video showing the kidnapped women who begged the government to come to their aid by rescuing them from the dreaded sect.
The accused, 19, whose residential address was not given, is facing trial on a two-count charge of burglary and stealing.

The prosecutor, Sgt. Oladejo Balogun, said that the accused committed the offences on July 14 at the Transformation Baptist Church, Baruwa Ologolo in Lekki, Lagos.

He said that the accused broke into the apartment of Mr Gbone Michael and stole the items.

Balogun said that the stolen items included a Visafone worth N3,000, a Nokia phone worth N4,000, a HP digital camera valued at N15,000 and a wristwatch worth N10,000.

According to the prosecutor, the offences contravene Section 307 (b) and 287 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015.

The accused, however, pleaded not guilty.

Magistrate Olabisi Kusanu admitted him to bail in the sum of N50,000 with one surety in like sum.
Njoku, who resides at No. 26, Agowa St., Bariga area of Lagos, is standing trial on a two-count charge bordering on fraud and unlawful possession of counterfeit currencies.

The Police Prosecutor, Nosa Uhumwangho, told the court that Njoku committed the offences in January 2017 at Oshodi area of the state.

He alleged that the accused, with intent to defraud, presented himself as being capable of producing Nigeria and Benin Republic currencies.

The prosecutor said that the accused claimed he was capable of producing N1,000 notes and 200 pieces of N500 notes.

Uhumwangho said that the accused also claimed he could produce 100 pieces of N200 notes, 100 CFA notes and 10 CFA coins from pieces of papers or other materials in a chemical substance.

He alleged that the accused was in possession of counterfeit currencies suspected to be unlawfully obtained.

According to the prosecutor, the offences contravened Sections 316 (a) and 329 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015.

The accused, however, pleaded not guilty to the charge preferred against him by the police.

The Magistrate, Mr Wahab Balogun, granted him bail in the sum of N1million, with two sureties in like sum.

Balogun said that the sureties must show an affidavit of means, produce evidence of means, adding that one of the sureties must be a blood relation and should have their addresses verified.
The trio, Olamiju Olanrewaju, 45; Segun Adenuga, 33; and Tokunbo Aileru, 35, are standing trial on a two-count charge of conspiracy and stealing.

The Prosecutor, Insp Sunday Fatola, told the court that Olanrewaju, Adenuga and Aileru as well as others still at large, committed the offences in April at Bodija area of Ibadan.

Fatola said that Olanrewaju and his accomplices stole N8million belonging to one Adamu Auwal.

According to him, Olanrewaju posed as Auwal and went to a customer care centre of one of networks and did a SIM swap sometimes in April at Bodija, Ibadan.

The prosecutor said that Olanrewaju was able to present accurate information matching Auwals to effect the swap.

Through the SIM swap, Olanrewaju was able to withdraw N8 million from Auwals bank account using a fake National Identity Card.

After some weeks, Olanrewaju went back to the networks call centre and presented another SIM card for swap with a different name, Akeem Yusuf, and was apprehended and handed over to the police, said Fatola

The prosecutor told the court that Olanrewaju had been hacking into bank accounts of unsuspecting members of the public and withdrawing huge sums of money with forged particulars of bank account holders.

He said that the offences committed contravened Sections 383 and 516 and was punishable under Section 390 (9) of the Criminal Code Cap 38, Vol. II Laws of Oyo State, 2000.

The accused persons, however, pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The Chief Magistrate, Mr Abdulateef Adebisi, granted the accused bail in the sum of N1 million each with two sureties in like sum.
According to the commands spokesperson, ASP Olarinde Famous-Cole, police received a distress call from the Chief Security Officer of a new generation bank located in the area which they responded to.

The caller said hoodlums were trying to take laws into their hands by setting the bank ablaze following the shooting of a tank driver by a policeman attached to the bank during an altercation.

Operatives of the command including the Area Commander,Apapa, the Rapid Response Squad, and other security agents quickly rushed to the scene to take charge of the situation.

The State Commissioner of Police, Mr Fatai Owoseni, was also present at the scene of the incident.

If not for the quick intervention of the Police, the hoodlums would have wrecked more havoc as they destroyed private properties and valuables.

A mob had gathered in front of the bank demanding that the trigger-happy policeman be released to them, but the bank refused, leading to the arson and further attack on another banks branch located on Wharf Road.

The fire at the banks was put out by the police and other security agencies as the tanker driver, identified as Azeez was rushed immediately to the hospital for treatment, he said.

Famous-Cole, however, said the driver was confirmed dead on arrival at the hospital.

He said:Contrary to reports making the rounds, only one tanker driver was shot.

The policeman has been arrested and will be charged to court immediately, the 18 suspected hoodlums also arrested are also undergoing investigations.

The command would like to address the members of the public on impunity and jungle justice in the state.

We are no longer going to tolerate the act of lawlessness and impunity by members of the public.
The Nation reports that the three policemen had arrested the suspect on Sunday, July 17, 2017, in the Bariga area and after a search, they reportedly found two Automated Teller Machine [ATM] cards on him and accused him of stealing one of the cards.

They reportedly took the man to the station and handcuffed him to a generator at a corner on the premises after he could not pay them a certain amount of money they had demanded to free himself.

It was learned that a Divisional Police Officer [DPO] who was on a routine inspection at the station discovered the dehumanizing act on the victim and ordered the three officers should be arrested and detained.

A police source who spoke on the incident said:

They [policemen] arrested the suspect for being in possession of two ATM cards, one of which does not belong to him. While trying to interrogate him, they became overzealous and handcuffed him to the generator.

It was the DPO who caught them. They are facing necessary disciplinary action, the source said.

In reacting to the act of brutality, CP Owoseni said the policemen would be sanctioned to serve as a deterrent to others.

The attention of the command has been drawn to the conduct of the policemen. They have been identified and are being taken through the normal disciplinary process.

In view of the desire by the IGP to sanitize the force, the three policemen involved in the act are being tried and adequate disciplinary actions would be taken against them at the end of the trial.

The policemen had arrested a man for committing an offence along Bariga road. They took him to the station where he was handcuffed to a generator.

The Command frowns at any case of misconduct by any of its men. Policemen are advised to operate within the ambit of their guidelines. Anyone found wanting in the discharge of his duty would be made to face the wrath of the law.

People who feel their rights have been trampled on should approach the various platforms for compliant and desist from self- help.
By PTI: Gurgaon, Jul 19 (PTI) Australias foreign minister today briefed students here about various educational exchange opportunities available in her country.

"Australia is the second most popular destination in the world for international students and last year there were 70,000 enrolments from India for students to study in our universities, in our institutions and we have some of the best in the world," Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said.

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She said that though technological adaptability is a must in this day and age time but an individuals ability to communicate should not be taken away by machines.

"This is a time of unprecedented change and we see technological advancements disrupting the way we live, the way we communicate and the way we work.

"At a time when we see an increase in robotics, automation and artificial intelligence, technological adaptability is a must but an individuals ability to communicate should not be taken away by machines," Bishop said in an interaction with students.

Bishop is on a two-day visit to India during which she called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and also met her Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj to take forward bilateral engagement on defence and security issues.

She made the comments on the importance of "communication skills" while addressing students on the subject Careers of future at the Shiv Nadar School here.

"We can see that the jobs and careers of the future are going to be very different. A decade later, at least 65 per cent of students today will end up working in an industry which has not even been thought of. So the challenge before the education system is to prepare students for a future which is quite unknown," she said. PTI GJS KUN

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The case was reported to the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) in charge of Ilasan Division, Lekki, Eti-Osa, SP Onyinye Onwuamaegbu by the management of Shoprite Stores in Eti-Osa.

Daily Post reports that Onwuamaegbu ordered Inspector Orukotan Lonikola to arrest the accused.

However, during the investigations, the accused was unable to give an account of the missing sum.

She was arraigned before an Igbosere Magistrate Court, on a two-count charge of felony to wit and stealing.

The court heard in charge No: J/38/2017 that the accused committed the alleged offence between 1 April and 31 May 2017 at Shoprite Stores, Eti-Osa during working hours.

Police prosecutor, Esther Adesulu informed the court that the accused had betrayed the trust the management of Shoprite had in her as a salesgirl and stole the sum of N535, 956,000 instead of remitting said amount into her employers account.

She added that the management at Shoprite Stores uncovered the fraud following an auditing exercise on the account.

The offence committed is punishable under section 411 and 287 of the Criminal Laws of Lagos State, 2015.

The accused pleaded not guilty to the allegations levelled against her and was granted bail by Magistrate O.O Owunmi, in the sum of N300,000 with two sureties in like sum.
The outbreak has potentially infected 336 people, four of whom have died.

Confirmed cases include 33 visitors to a recent trade expo in Nairobi.

Mailu announced the closure of the Jacaranda and San Valencia hotels, which had supplied food to venues where cholera was reported.

The ministry has cancelled medical certificates for food handlers and ordered the Nairobi county health authorities to undertake fresh medical examinations.

The government has also ordered the inspection of all hotels and food venues, and prohibited them from outsourcing food in the capital.

Others areas of Kenya have also been affected by the cholera outbreak.

The potentially deadly bacterial infection displays symptoms similar to food poisoning.

A person could become infected by consuming contaminated water or food.

Kenya has seen several cholera outbreaks in the past months.
Daily Sun reports that Aisha is currently in London with the President in the Abuja House, London, after returning to Nigeria few weeks ago.

It was also reported that a very competent presidency source said that Aisha is currently with President Buhari in London.

The source said: Aisha visited the President two weeks ago and is currently with the President.

The source added: Keeping the arrival date of the President secret is because of noise and exposure.

It is not possible for a wife not to see her husband. The information is bandied around by people trying to tarnish the image of the First Lady.

The source, it was further reported, also dismissed insinuations that President Buhari is suffering from memory loss, saying the President is responding to treatment.
The Speaker, Mr. Yakubu Dogara, said the figure indicates the extent of collapse in the country's power sector, which he said must be fixed urgently.

Dogara stated this in Abuja on Tuesday, July 19, at the opening of a public hearing on three power sector-related bills by the House Committee on Power.

He said the House will work closely with the executive to find solutions to the problems of the sector, with a focus on renewable energy.

The bills are:

1. A Bill for an Act to Provide for the Utilisation, Sustainability and Adequate Supply of Renewable Energy for Electricity and Heat Generation and for other Related Matters.

2. A Bill for an Act to Amend the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, Metre Reading, Billing and Cash Collection and Credit Management for Electricity Supplies and Regulations to Address Matters Relating to Outstanding Liability of Electric Bills in Rented Apartments.

3. A Bill for an Act to Amend the Electric Power Sector Reform Act to Re-position the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission for Effective Service Delivery and for Related Matters.

ALSO READ: Dogara condemns calls for Nigerias separation

Dogara said the Federal Government must focus on renewable energy to solve Nigeria's power problems as it is a largely untapped source of power.
The Spokesman of the commission, Mr Wilson Uwujaren, who disclosed this in a statement, said the commissions Acting Chairman, Mr Ibrahim Magu, performed the inauguration ceremony in Abuja.

Media reports had said that the suspension of the NFIU, an arm of the EFCC, was due to Nigerias failure to provide a legal framework to make the unit independent.

According to reports, the group is also worried by the constant leaking of sensitive intelligence to the Nigerian media, contrary to global best practices the country signed up for.

Nigeria was said to have been given till January 2018 to grant autonomy to the NFIU or risk expulsion from the Egmont Group, which would cut the country off the international financial intelligence loop.

The Egmont Group is a global body of 154 financial intelligence units (FIUs) which serves as a platform for members to share expertise and financial intelligence to combat international money laundering and terrorist financing.

The NFIU is charged with tackling money laundering and monitoring financial flows, a task made easy by its membership of the Egmont Group.

The inauguration of the EFCC committee came hours after the Senate resolved to pass a legislation that would make the unit independent of the EFCC.

Uwujaren said the committee is charged with making recommendations with respect to the funding of the NFIU operations and developing career path for its staff.

It is also mandated to develop protocol for the protection of information and confidentiality, specifically as regards the status of STR information and information deriving from international exchange.

According to him, the committees mandate also include developing procedure for processing of information held by the NFIU either deriving from STR or from international exchange for legitimate purposes.

Magu was said to have charged the committee to take a holistic look at the mandate and operations of the NFIU to enable it to evolve proposals to reposition the agency for greater efficiency.

Magu noted that membership of the Egmont Group is critical to Nigerias effort to tackle money laundering, and monitor financial flows within and outside the country.

He, therefore, urged the committee to, among others, address the concern of the Egmont Group by providing the necessary frameworks needed to coordinate the process of amending section 1(2)(c) of the EFCC Act, to expressly reflect NFIU as an autonomous unit under the commission.

According to him, this is to provide the legal basis or clarity on its operational independence from the EFCC.

The EFCC spokesman said the committee has as its Chairman, Dr Abdullahi Shehu, a former Director-General of the Inter-Governmental Action Against Money Laundering in West Africa (GIABA).

Members of the committee were drawn from law enforcement, financial and regulatory agencies, including the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) and the Central Bank of Nigeria.

Responding, Shehu expressed delight at the opportunity given to them to serve the country.
The Executive Chairman of the service, Mr Tunde Fowler, made the projection while defending the 2017 budget of the service before the Senate Committee on Finance on Tuesday in Abuja.

Fowler said the budget was aimed at increasing VAT and other non-oil revenue.

He said that VAT was meant to increase from an actual of N828 billion to a budget of N1.8 trillion, which is over 125 per cent increase.

The Service, in realisation of this responsibility and challenges of doing manual collection, has automated VAT collection for the critical sectors of the economy, notably telecommunications, airlines and financial institutions, he said.

Fowler said that the service had proposed to achieve the tax revenue target as derived from the 2016-2018 Medium Term Revenue Framework (MTRF) for 2017, amounting to a total of N4.89 trillion.

On budget parameter, Fowler said that the 2017 projected cost of collection of N153 billion was higher than the 2016 approval estimate which stood at N144 billion.

The figure, he said, represented a cost of collection increase of 6.63 per cent on overall projected non-oil revenue, including VAT, stamp duties and levy.

On the revenue projections performance for the period January to June 2017, the FIRS boss said that the analysis showed that the service had recorded an increase of N224 billion.

He said this represented an overall increase of 14 per cent in 2017, compared with collection performance for the corresponding period in 2016.

We have achieved 72.93 per cent of our half year target of N2.44 trillion for 2017 as against 74.2 per cent of N2.1 trillion for the corresponding period in 2016.

The chairman may note that we attained this collection performance despite several challenges.

We have continued to vigorously pursue our strategies internally, while improving collaboration with relevant stakeholders to boost our collection.

The strategies put in place are on course and progressively yielding fruits. We are hopeful, therefore, that the efforts being made will translate to significant tax yields before the end of 2017, he said.

The Chairman Senate Committee on Finance, Sen. John Enoh, spoke on the need for the FIRS to work to achieve the approved target.

He said, with a deficit of over N2 trillion, if the service failed to meet its target, it would impact negatively on the implementation of the 2017 budget.
According to reports, the violence was due to a communal clash that broke out between Kadara youths and youths from a Fulani community in the region.

Kadara youths had reportedly been involved in the lynching of a Fulani man on July 11.

The Kadara community had claimed that the Fulani man killed in the community was a known criminal who had been terrorising residents in the area.

In the early hours of Sunday, a group of Fulani youths reigned terror on a village at Ugwan Uka as vengeance for the killing of their kinsman.

Five of the youths identified as part of the mob that killed the Fulani man were some of the casualties of the attack.

A reprisal attack staged by youths from the Kadara community resulted in more deaths as they attacked Fulani settlements, also destroying properties in the process.

The reprisal attacks between the two communities resulted in the death of 37 people in total, including a seven-month-old baby, while many others sustained varying degrees of injuries.

While confirming the death of 37 people, the Kaduna state Commissioner of Police, Agyole Abeh, condemned the attacks.

He said, "I wish to reiterate here that this form of unprovoked attack is not just callous but barbaric. It must be condemned by well-meaning citizens of the state because as that part of the state is beginning to enjoy relative peace and calm, such peace has been dislocated and we're doing everything possible to ensure that it does not escalate.
This is coming following the release of N1billion to Local Government Councils in the state after the state received the Paris Club loan refund of N5.1billion.

In a recent statement, the state Commissioner for Finance, Alhaji Demola Banu said the beneficiary institutions are Kwara State College of Education, Ilorin, Kwara State College of Education, Oro, Kwara State College of Education (Special), Lafiagi, College of Arabic and Islamic Legal Studies, Ilorin, Kwara State School of Midwifery, Ilorin and Oke-ode as well as Kwara State College of Health Technology, Offa.

The state government's intervention fund for tertiary institutions was approved by Governor Ahmed in 2016 as a palliative.

Banu further said the balance of N185, 252, 996 represents the third quarterly payment of subvention to the institutions, stressing that the final instalment of N378,426,018 will be paid as additional funds become available.

ALSO READ: Kwara Governor releases N1b to local govts for salary arrears

He also clarified that the N312.1millon will go towards paying salary arrears accrued at the tertiary institutions due to drop in allocations in 2016 as the institutions are currently up to date in the payment of monthly salaries.
Bigg Boss 10 contestant Bani Judge and Yuvraj Thakur are having a blast in Phuket.

Bani J and Yuvraj Thakur are currently vacationing in Phuket. Picture courtesy: Instagram/banij

By India Today Web Desk: Bigg Boss 10 contestant and reality star Bani Judge is dating TV actor Yuvraj Thakur and the couple are currently holidaying in Phuket.

Bani posted a pic of theirs on Instagram where Bani is laughing while Yuvraj is smiling cutely. She captioned it, "Homeostasis #thaithai #endorphinhighmuch #lifehighmuch #allday #allthelifting #allthesoreness #allthelaughs #allthesmiles."

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The couple has taken some time off from their busy schedule to spend some quality time with each other.

The couple is very much in love as they keep sharing pictures of themselves hanging out together, on various social media sites. And their posts are very adorable.

Bani will soon be making her debut on fiction TV. She will be playing the role of Queen Olympias, Alexander The Great's mother, in Porus.

Also read: This picture of Bani J with boyfriend Yuvraj Thakur is all kinds of adorable

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Confirming this on Wednesday, July 19, 2017, the governor said that N919 million of the money is meant for the eight local government councils.

In a statement by his Chief Press Secretary, Daniel Iworiso-Markson, the governor made the confirmation in Yenagoa when he played host to labour leaders in the state.

Dickson directed the State Commissioner for Finance, Mr Maxwell Ebibai, to immediately release the money to enable the councils carry out their obligations, especially to clear some outstanding salaries of workers.

The governor, however, warned that the money for the local government councils should be properly utilised and must not be shared by the few to enrich themselves.

I have directed that the money should be transferred to them latest tomorrow (Thursday).

As for this money, let me make it clear that is not for them to share and chop.

It is not free money, so those who will be celebrating that money has come to be shared will be disappointed.

One of the greatest problems we have in this state is the fact that people always think that any money that comes is free money for them to share and chop.

They dont want the state to be developing leaders after leaders, year after year.

Twenty years after the creation of the state, it is now we are building good schools and health institutions, the governor was quoted as saying.

While thanking the labour leaders for their support and understanding with state government, the governor said the refund from the federal government was in line with his administrations open policy on public finance since 2012.

Mr Jonathan Obuebite, the State Commissioner for Information and Orientation, told journalists after the interactive session between the governor and the labour leaders, that part of the money would be used to clear backlog of salaries.

I am happy to announce that after a peaceful meeting, it was resolved that government will use part of the fund to pay one and a half month salary and pensioners are also going to be paid, he said.
According to reports, the government officials at the post-basic school set up by the UNICEF at the IDP camp in Maiduguri denied local media entry to cover the visit and interaction of Malala with the students on Tuesday, July 18, 2017.

The officials reportedly asked the reporters, representing various media organisations to leave, stressing that they were not invited to cover the event.

We have arrangements; only foreign media are permitted entry, we do not need local media, they said.
Oyebade said 23 out the 28 suspects have been charged to court.

He disclosed this in an interview with Southern City News in Umuahia, the State capital, on Tuesday, July 18.

The police boss attributed the decline in the number of kidnap cases in the state to the community policing strategy of the command.

He said the police have maintained a constant interaction with the residents in the state at different levels - engaging traditional institutions, principals and proprietors of private schools, bankers, markets unions and the eminent people's forum.

Oyebade said, "Whatever we are doing is to ensure the safety of lives and property in the state because we cannot compromise the fundamental human rights of Abia residents.

"When we talk of the relevance of Aba in this context, we must know that Aba is the Japan of Africa for now. Businesses are thriving there and people are coming from all over the country and abroad to invest in Aba.

"We cannot but continue to update our strategies to ensure that Aba and even Abia as a whole is safe for economic activities to thrive.

"We want to thank members of the public for better cooperation so far; we kept receiving better response from members of the public.

"Information has been coming and we have been using such information to the best of our ability to nip heinous crimes in the bud and we are going to be more responsible and accountable to members of the public."

Incessant kidnapping has become one of the major security challenges in Nigeria today.

ALSO READ: How kidnappers are using Keke Napep to abduct Nigerians

The declining economic situation in the country has worsened this, as more young men and women resort to crimes - with kidnapping and internet fraud being the most seemingly lucrative of them all.

According to the Police, at least more than two cases of kidnap cases are recorded across the country daily.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Malala met with some selected students of the post-basic school set up by the UNICEF at the camp in Maiduguri on Tuesday.

Rashida Muhammad, who was among the few students selected to meet with Malala, said she was excited and motivated by the visit.

Our meeting with Malala is insightful and encouraging. She encouraged me to study hard so that one day I shall be like her.

At the heat of insurgents attacks, I stopped going to school. I am now back in school with the support of government.

I feel elated, Malala gave me courage to put in my best in studies, Rashida said.

Another student, Falmata Alhaji-Dungas, also expressed delight at Malalas visit to the school.

Falmata said she learnt from the visit to be patient and committed to her studies.

We spoke through an interpreter but I understood that she wanted us to study hard in order to succeed, she said.

NAN reports that Malala, who was accompanied to the school by UNICEF officials, also met with Gov. Kashim Shettima behind closed doors.
According to reports, the mob set the bank on fire after the management failed to release the security officer who was hiding inside the bank to them.

The Sterling Bank building on Wharf Road was also set ablaze, leading to banks in the area shutting down and evacuating their staff.

Reports about what really happened are unclear at the time of filing the story, but trouble had reportedly started around 10am over the indiscriminate parking of trailers by the drivers.

After the police officer reportedly killed the drivers, he was chased by the mob into Diamond Bank.

The mob of over a hundred, mostly colleagues of the dead drivers, reportedly carried disused tires to set the bank on fire, targeting several computer sets, units of air conditioners, and ATM counters.

There have been conflicting reports about the number of people killed by the policeman with eyewitnesses claiming three drivers, while others have said it was only one driver that was killed.
Berating Yusuf's conduct, the National Publicity Secretary, Health and Managed Care Association of Nigeria (HMCAN), Mr. Lekan Ewenla, said that the Professor should not have been appointed to head the agency in the first place.

The Minister of Health, Isaac Adewole, suspended Yusuf on Friday, July 14, following allegations of corruption against him.

Speaking to Punch in Lagos on Tuesday, July 18, Ewenla said Yusuf does not understand the operations and the regulatory functions of the scheme.

He said, "Before now, a lot of petitions had been written about the attitude and conduct of the scheme since the Executive Secretary took over last year. He was going to distort the operations of the NHIS for the public sector.

"He ran NHIS like his private enterprise. He didnt have the power to award contracts worth more than N2.5m but because there was no governing council, he went beyond that figure.

"Many of the issues were not clear to him. He was going to remove HMOs and focus on paying hospitals instead of regulating the scheme."

According to him, the NHIS itself is facing fundamental operational problems, more so for the fact that other top officials of the agency have been accused of corruption.

Proffering solutions to the anomalies, Ewenla said the Federal Government must not let the NHIS manage the scheme's funds anymore.

He advised the government to establish a National Health Commission and create the National Health Fund.

ALSO READ: Embattled NHIS boss reportedly disobey suspension order

Ewenla also wants health insurance to be made compulsory for all.

He added, "Government needs to take health sector appointments off the political radar. Do interviews with experts on the field and listen to professional recommendations before you choose a head.

"Every executive secretary at the agency has been removed because of corruption.

"When they are appointed, they forget their regulatory role and want to take over the fund because it is a lot of money. In Yusuf's case, he misinterpreted his role."

Controversies have trailed Yusuf's suspension as the NHIS boss claimed that his suspension was a witch hunt because he refused to grant monetary requests to Adewole.

But Adewole, whose ministry supervises the NHIS, insisted that he suspended Yusuf to allow uninterrupted investigations into the fraud allegations against him.

The House of Representatives, which is siding with Yusuf, has summoned Adewole but in the meantime, the minister was ordered to recall the NHIS boss.
Alhaji Tokunbo Korodo, the Chairman in South-West Zone of the union, made the denial in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos.

Korodo said he was able to confirm that none his members was killed from the report by a delegate sent from the union secretariat to Apapa to find out if any of the union members was involved in the lawlessness.

He said: none of our members is involved; they are busy with the normal loading activities in different tank farms.

The shooting incident involved drivers of articulated vehicles and those involved in the lawlessness were not PTD members.

Mr Tayo Aboyeji, the Zonal Public Relations Officer in PTD, said the fracas involved some drivers of articulated vehicles and the police, but not their members.

According to Aboyeji, our members are not involved in any act of criminality or lawlessness in the area.

Our members are in their depots loading their trucks with the intention of transporting them to various locations across the country.

None of our members was shot by police; they are in their various tank farms loading petroleum products.

NAN reports that on Wednesday, a mob reportedly set two banks in Apapa, Lagos, on fire after a policeman attached to a Diamond Bank branch on Burma Road, allegedly shot and killed some trailer drivers.

According to reports, the mob also set ablaze a Sterling Bank branch on Wharf Road.

It was gathered that the policemen attached to the banks had allegedly accused the trailer drivers of indiscriminate parking in front of the banks
Osinbajo, in a statement issued by Mr Laolu Akande, his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, in Abuja on Wednesday, sympathised with the families of the abducted women.

He directed Nigerias military and intelligence agencies to take all necessary steps, including coordinating with international partners to rescue the abducted women.

He also enjoined them to ensure further strengthening of security in and around Borno State.

The Buhari presidency assures that the ongoing efforts of security agencies, including the establishment of additional military and police bases in parts of the country, as well as the improved intelligence gathering will continue."

Osinbajo noted with delight some of the recent significant breakthroughs in combating kidnapping and banditry in the country.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that Boko Haram militant group on Monday released a video of 10 women abducted from a police convoy along Maiduguri Damboa road in June.

Militants reportedly have attacked a convoy conveying the corpse of a police woman for burial in Damboa.
In a statement by Laolu Akande, the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity (Office of the Vice-President), Osinbajo condemned the killing of innocent people in the clashes.

The statement said further that Osinbajo vowed that no effort would be spared in identifying and bringing the perpetrators of the dastardly acts, against innocent Nigerians to justice no matter how long or hard it might take.

According to him, the security challenges in Southern Kaduna which has led to the needless deaths is a source of concern for the Federal government and indeed all well-meaning Nigerians

He, however, commended the prompt response and efforts of the state government and those of the security agencies which contained the situation and restored peace.

Nigerians in the area and everywhere in the country have a right to live in peace, and the Federal Government considers this its sacred duty in ensuring such expectation.

ALSO READ: Osinbajo condemns abduction of women in Borno

We will not relent and wont be deterred in our pursuit of securing the lives and property of all Nigerians, everywhere and in every part of this nation.

In the end, we will not only secure the peace all around, but we shall enforce justice for the victims and all of those that are affected.

Osinbajo also commiserated with families of the victims, the government and people of Kaduna State and wished the injured victims speedy recovery.
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad today demanded resignation of Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar over his remarks on beef in the legislative assembly.

By India Today Web Desk: The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) today demanded resignation of Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar over his remarks regarding beef consumption.

VHP leader Dr Surendra Jain said that Parrikar was spoiling the image of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The criticism comes after Parrikar said in the Legislative Assembly on Tuesday that there will be no shortage of beef in Goa and that if needed it could take help from neighbouring state Karnataka.

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In his scathing tweet VHP leader Jain asked that has the BJP become Beef Joy Party? adding that Parrikar should resign soon to wash the face of BJP.

In a series of tweets, Jain asked if the CM was unaware about the law prohibiting the slaughtering of cows in Karnataka and Goa.

On Tuesday, while speaking at the Legislative Assembly, Parrikar added that production of 2,000 kilograms of beef is done every day from Goa Meat Complex, the only legal abattoir in Ponda state.

Parrikar was slammed by Congress soon after. Congress leader Rajiv Shukla asked if he was drunk and added that it was ironical.

Also Read:

Parrikar's beef: Caught between factions, Goa CM can't take position on the ban

Also Watch: VHP slams Goa CM Parrikar over beef remark, demands resignation

--- ENDS ---
The chairman of the group, Mr Omoniyi Ilesanmi, who addressed newsmen on the sidelines of the protest, said they are out to ensure the government does not divert the released Paris Refund for other use.

It would be recalled that the Osun state government through a statement yesterday, July 18, 2017, confirmed payment of second tranche of Paris Refund to the state and promised judicious distribution of the fund.

Meanwhile the chairman representing the Triangular Group of Pensioners in the state, Prince Rotimi Adelugba has raised alarm over the splinter motive of the Ilesanmi-led group.

In a statement, Adelugba accused the group of being sponsored by the opposition in the state to paint the present administration in a bad light; a situation he said is capable of breaching public peace.

His statement read, "Right before the state government announced precisely how much it received from the federal government as second tranche of the Paris Refund; we were intimated on the series of meeting held by Ilesanmi's group and other operatives of the opposition.

"As much as we support the right of our colleagues to express their constitutional guaranteed right of freedom of speech and expression, we take an exception to their collaboration with politicians in the state thereby giving their protest a political undertone.

"We are calling on the security agencies in the state to be on the lookout for well-armed miscreant who have been embedded with Ilesanmi's group with the aim of destabilizing the peace we enjoy in the state of Osun."

On the payment of pensions and gratuity, Adelugba pleaded with his colleagues to come to the negotiating table like over 30,000 members of the Nigerian Union of Pensioners have done rather than going on the streets with the sole aim of embarrassing the government and not engaging it.

"If resolution of the issue at hand is their intention, they will be on the negotiating table and not the streets, but we are certain their intention is otherwise. The government have been open to us. I recall, Osun was the first state to publish how it spent the first tranche of the Paris refund.
In a statement by his media office on Tuesday, July 18, 2017, Uba described the news as untrue adding that his ideologies are constant.

The fact that senator is Andy Ubas good friend and ally does not translate to leaving the APC for PDP, the statement said.

Senator Uba is not a come and go politician, his ideology is constant, good governance is of the essence and that is what he has found in the APC.

ALSO READ: Court clears Andy Uba of alleged certificate forgery

The speculation about Senator Uba moving back to the PDP simply because the Makarfi faction won its case at the supreme court as being speculated is false and should be disregarded.

Let us add the fact that the APC remains the only political party that is positioned to salvage Anambra state from the misery, mismanagement and under-development situations in which she has unfortunately found herself, why then should a star studded aspirant like senator Uba leave such a platform, the statement added.

Senator Uba had expressed optimism that he would defeat at the poll in November.
Governor Abdulaziz Yariof Zamfara state let the cat out of the bag during the joint APC National Working Committee (NWC) and APC Governors meeting in Abuja on Wednesday, July 19, 2017.

Yari who doubles as the chairman, Nigerian Governors Forum said President Buharis illness has delayed the APC national convention.

We have been on this matter of convention but you know that as a party, the ruling party, the president is the leader of this party, Yari began.

Before getting to the convention, there is some kind of process - the national working committee (NWC) - must agree on the time and at the same time, we have to adopt the report submitted by NWC to the larger NEC members which the president must be in attendance as a leader of the party and you know the situation of our president.

We have been fixing time but because of his illness we are unable to hold the meeting but we have to put a kind of process in place, so that we can at least a mid-term convention, it is not an elective convention. These congresses that is going to commence on July 29 is to come for this convention to fill some vacancies taken in the executive sides, those that died or went for other appointment.

ALSO READ: Yari urges Muslims to pray for Buhari

This has nothing to do with PDP. This convention has no connection with the PDP convention.

We have agreed collectively that we are going to meet with acting president. Acting president should understand that that he is acting in capacity of the president of the country as well as the vice-president. Tomorrow he is going to perform the function of vice-president as chairman of NEC and the entire issue of security, economy, administration lies on him. So we cannot take him as an easy man to deal with. It's two in one.

Therefore, the committee is in place as we are talking today we reinstate that we going to create room for other issues and the issue of convention," he added.

Yari described APCs loss in the Osun-West bye election as a wakeup call for the party.

We discussed the election of Osun which we really know what happened, the media and everyone in the party, we know what happened, it was APC, APC. PDP doesn't have muscle to win the election and we are on top of the situation. It is a wake-up call on dealing on things like that in the future," he added.

Highlights of the meeting was the naming of the ten-man committee on restructuring.

Members of the committee include, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai (Kaduna); Rauf Aregbesola (Osun); Abdullahi Umar Ganduje (Kano), Simon Lalong (Plateau); Ibikunle Amosun (Ogun), Former Edo state governor, Prof. Oserheimen Osunbor.

Others are APC national organising secretary; Osita Izunaso; APC national publicity secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, Fatima Balla and Senator Olubunmi Adetunmbi.

In his remarks, APC spokesman, Bolaji Abdullahi noted that committee would articulate the meaning of restructuring according to the APC.

When we talk about a committee on restructuring, what we are talking about is a committee that will articulate what APC means by restructuring because we have realized that over a couple of days now or weeks.

When people use the word restructuring we don't know if we are talking about the same thing and people have gone about saying APC promised restructuring.
The Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), Mr Emeka Ononamadu, disclosed this when he addressed political stakeholders in Enugu on Wednesday.

Ononamadu said that the figure comprised 32,166 male and 31,796 females across the states 17 council area registration centres.

He said that the commission had approved the creation of eight additional registration centres in order to address the challenge of accessing the CVR registration centres in some council areas.

According to him, in spite of the approved additional centres, there are still complaints relating to accessing the centres from people living in difficult terrains in the state.

On this, we are hopeful that INEC headquarters will respond positively also.

The REC said that the CVR had been hitch-free in terms of security, except in few areas in Igbo-eze North council area where security operatives accompany registration officers.

We will give out dedicated telephone lines as well as e-mail addresses for complaints that will arise in the second quarter of the CVR.

Ononamadu informed the stakeholders that the Permanent Voter Cards (PVC) of those who registered in the first quarter would be ready for collection in the third quarter.

He noted that the ongoing first quarter CVR would end on July 20, while the second quarter would commence on July 31 throughout the registration centres and the additional ones.

The printing of the CVR Register for claims and objections begins on Friday, July 21.
While briefing the press on Tuesday, July 18 at the command headquarters in Ikeja, the Lagos Commissioner of Police, Fatai Owoseni said the police are working and are committed to reuniting the students with their parents.

The Police CP said, I want to tell you that the children are fine. We will continue to intensify efforts with a view to ensuring that the children are reunited with their parents."

The six students who are still in captivity are Peter Jonah, Isiaq Rahmon, Adebayo George, Judah Agbausi, Pelumi Philips and Farouq Yusuf.

Commending the parents for their support and understanding, Owoseni assured them of the return of their children.

I want us to continue with the understanding that the main objective of all of us is to successfully reunite these children with their parents. With your support and prayers, the children will be reunited with their parents.

Meanwhile, the militant had reportedly collected a total sum of N31 Million to release the students but refused to grant them freedom.

ALSO READ: The full story of how Militants kidnap six students
Calais is a springboard for migrants attempting to cross the Channel to Britain, normally by stowing away on trucks that board ferries.

Prosecutors said they had no record of a previous attempt to reach Britain in a private aircraft.

"It is the first time that the Boulogne prosecutor's office has been called in to investigate an attempt to smuggle migrants by air," the prosecutors' office in Boulogne, near Calais, said.

The plane was still on the ground and the pilot was at the controls although the migrants had not boarded when the arrests took place.

The pilot and the people smugglers remain in custody and could face charges of "helping undocumented foreigners as part of an organised group".

"We do not yet have a full profile of the pilot. Investigators are waiting for British authorities to send information," the prosecutor's office added.

A spokesman said the Albanian mother and her child had "disappeared" after they were sent to hospital for checks.
And an aggressive push by the White House on its toughest demands could reduce Washington's ability to achieve a successful outcome.

"If the US pushes Mexico too hard, they might make it impossible to reach an agreement," Antonio Ortiz-Mena, former head of economic affairs at the Embassy of Mexico in Washington, told AFP.

The three nations are due to start the talks next month on the 1994 pact that President Donald Trump once called "the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere."

In the negotiating goals released Monday, the White House said it will focus on reducing its bilateral trade deficits with each of its neighbors.

But Canada and Mexico already face bigger trade deficits as a share of their economies than the United States. Last year, the US trade deficit amounted to 2.5 percent of GDP, but Mexico's was 2.6 percent and Canada's 3.3 percent.

And economists say there is little that governments can do to make an impact on the deficit in any case.

It is true the US trade balance with Mexico became a deficit under NAFTA -- swinging from a $1.7 billion surplus in 1993 to a $55.6 billion deficit in 2016 -- but total trade with Canada and Mexico more than tripled, reaching $1.2 trillion by last year.

"I think this issue has been managed from a more emotional than an analytical perspective," said Ortiz-Mena. "It's very difficult to 'force' or 'compel' Mexico to buy more American goods."

Obvious sticking points

With a presidential election coming in July 2018, Mexico may have severely limited room to give the Trump team what it wants.

"I think you're looking at a three-to-four month period of active negotiations before things get really dicey for Mexico's current government," said Scott Miller, a trade policy expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Also in July of next year, the US administration's fast-track trade negotiating authority -- which requires Congress to approve or reject trade deals without changes -- will expire. It can be renewed, but it adds additional pressure to the talks.

Among the obvious sticking points in the talks is Washington's desire to eliminate an infrequently used dispute resolution process under which a NAFTA panel can overrule individual countries' decisions on dumping and unfair subsidies.

"I think it would be very difficult for Canada and Mexico to accept this," Ortiz-Mena said.

Another tall order is toughening origin rules for manufactured goods that benefit from duty-free trade -- crucial to the US auto industry's supply chain but a concern to Trump's "America First" trade policy.

Doable, given reciprocity

"There are always deal breakers in any negotiation," Miller said, and while the negotiating goals are quite general, there are issues that could become such deal breakers depending on how they are handled.

Still, economists say the talks present the opportunity for much needed upgrades to the existing trade framework, including provisions for e-commerce and commitments on labor rights that are currently only part of NAFTA side agreements.

And environmental provisions that could be added are "orders of magnitude superior to what is in NAFTA today," said Jeffrey Schott of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

The negotiating objectives published Monday are at least a workable basis for negotiations to begin, Ortiz-Mena said.
By PTI: (Eds: Updating toll)

Karachi, Jul 19 (PTI) Unidentified gunmen today opened fire on a vehicle carrying minority Shias near Pakistans restive Balochistan province, killing at least five persons, police said.

The incident took place in the town of Mastung, about 75 kilometers south of Quetta, when gunmen riding a motorcycle targeted their car en route to Karachi. The assailants escaped after carrying out the attack, Geo TV reported.

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"The indiscriminate firing killed four family members of the Hazara Shiite community, including a woman. Later, the driver succumbed to his injuries in the hospital," police official Muhammad Ishaq said.

Police and other Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) personnel reached the site and started an investigation into the incident.

However, no group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Balochistan Chief Minister Sanaullah Khan Zehri has strongly condemned the incident and grieved over the loss of precious lives. He has asked the police officials to prepare a report of the incident and bring the culprits behind the bars.

This is not the first time that the Hazara Shia Muslim community has been targeted by extremist outfits in Balochistan and in the last few years hundreds have been killed in either suicide bomb attacks, planted bomb blasts or target killings.

Official reports say that they have been around 1200 incidents of violence against the Hazara community in the last 15 years.

In March, an explosion targeting a convoy of the security forces occurred on Saryab Road. Four people were injured including three Frontier Corps personnel and a passer-by.

On May 12, a suicide bomb blast targeting the convoy of a senior politician in Balochistan killed at least 26 people and wounded 30 others. The blast in Mastung struck a vehicle carrying Senate Deputy Chairman Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Haideri, shortly after Friday prayers. PTI AMS/CORR AKJ AMS

--- ENDS ---
The announcement came amid swirling controversy and multiple investigations into allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow to win the 2016 election.

Huntsman, 57, previously served as US ambassador to China and Singapore.

If confirmed by the US Senate, Huntsman would venture to Moscow for a job that will be particularly high-profile as a special counsel in Washington probes the ever-growing Russia scandal plaguing the White House.

As a candidate, Trump criticized Huntsman, a fluent Mandarin speaker, for letting China do "a major number on the US" during his time in Beijing under former president Barack Obama.

Huntsman spent less than two years in that post before launching a failed bid to secure the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

A two-time governor of the state of Utah, Huntsman currently serves as chairman of the Atlantic Council, a foreign policy think tank, as is a director on a number of corporate boards, including Caterpillar, Chevron, Ford Motor Company and Hilton.

The father-of-seven initially endorsed Trump for president last year, but later called on him to drop out following the release of a 2005 recording in which the former reality TV star used vulgar language to brag about groping women.

A moderate Republican, he was George Bush Sr's ambassador to Singapore from 1992-93 -- becoming the youngest American to hold the post of ambassador in more than 100 years.

He served as a deputy trade representative under George W. Bush's administration from 2001-2003 where he helped negotiate several pacts with China.

He then resigned to run for governor of Utah, a heavily Mormon state with which he shares religious ties, winning with 78 percent of the vote when he stood a second time.

Former president Barack Obama reached across party lines to name Huntsman his ambassador to China in 2009, a position he held until 2011, when he left to launch a presidential run against his former boss.

The Trump administration has been besieged by allegations that the president's closest advisors colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.

Trump's eldest son Donald Jr recently released emails showing he held a meeting during the campaign with Kremlin-connected figures, hoping to get dirt on his dad's election rival Hillary Clinton.

The controversy grew Tuesday after the White House revealed the US leader had an additional, previously undisclosed chat with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at this month's G20 summit in Hamburg, raising questions about what the pair talked about, who was present and why the meeting was not previously mentioned.
A source in Israel's National Security Council said on condition of anonymity Tuesday that "Germany has put off the MOU signing for the time being," without providing further details.

That followed the arrest of several people in recent days on suspicion of offences including bribery and money laundering around the deal to buy the Dolphin submarines from German industrial giant ThyssenKrupp.

One of the main suspects is reportedly close to becoming a state witness.

Those detained include former navy commander Eliezer Marom, former deputy head of Israel's National Security Council Avriel Bar Yosef and the local representative for ThyssenKrupp, Miki Ganor.

David Shimron, a relative of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his family lawyer who also represents ThyssenKrupp in Israel, was taken for questioning but later released.

On Monday, Israeli media reported that Ganor, who along with Bar Yosef is still in custody, was close to becoming a state witness.

Daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot, which first reported that the MOU signing had been delayed, said Germany had added a clause allowing it to back out of the deal if it was found to have been reached through corruption.

Israeli officials said Germany had not backed out of the deal but was waiting to see the outcome of the investigation, Yediot Aharonot reported.

German officials had no immediate comment.

In February, Israel's justice ministry said it had launched an investigation into the affair, stressing that Netanyahu himself was not a suspect in the case.

Netanyahu is being investigated separately, reportedly over allegations he and his wife accepted improper gifts from Israeli businessman and Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan.

The Israeli premier is also being investigated over suspicions he sought a secret deal with Amnon Moses, publisher of Israel's top-selling newspaper Yediot Aharonot.
The incident occurred two days before a referendum on a proposed Muslim cemetery in a small town outside the city, but was not publicly disclosed to avoid influencing the outcome of the vote.

The proposed cemetery was rejected Sunday by a vote of 19 to 16.

A police patrol was dispatched to the mosque to keep the peace after the package arrived, Quebec police spokesman David Poitras said.

"The investigators are in continuous communication with mosque officials to identify the whereabouts of the people who sent the package and to determine whether a crime was committed," he said.

Quebec Prime Minister Philippe Couillard condemned the incident as a "cowardly act" targeting Quebec's Muslims. "Nobody deserves to be treated like this," he said.

A Canadian student with white supremacist views opened fire January 29 on worshippers at evening prayer in the mosque, killing six.
After three hours of tense debate and more than two years in the making, the senators approved the proposal by voting separately on each measure.

Abortion of any type has been strictly outlawed in Chile since the final days of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in 1989, and under current law is punishable by up to five years in prison.

Prior to that, for more than 50 years, Chile permitted abortion if the mother's life was in danger or if the fetus was not viable.

The abortion measures still need approval by the Chamber of Deputies to be signed into law by Bachelet, a physician who returned to office in March 2014 after serving as Chile's first woman president from 2006 to 2010.
Further north along the coast in Croatia, where a dozen wildfires had also broken out on Sunday in the villages surrounding a popular tourist destination of Split, the situation was returning to normal, officials said.

"We expect a firefighting plane that has arrived from Ukraine to join in... Fires could be localised and put under control during the day," Montenegrin local firefighting chief Zoran Babic told local media.

Montenegro sought international help two days ago to battle the flames which broke out late Sunday. Swiss and Bulgarian helicopters and a waterbombing plane from Israel were expected to arrive later Wednesday.

The fires on the Lustica peninsula had forced the evacuation of more than a hundred campers and threatened the neighbouring towns of Tivat, Herceg Novi and Kotor.

At least 15 fires were active throughout the small Balkans country, the interior ministry said.

Apart from five fires in Lustica and a few villages, fires broke out overnight near the towns of Cetinje, Niksic and the capital Podgorica, a statement said.

The situation was meanwhile rapidly improving in Croatia, officials said.

"We cannot say that (fires in Split region) are extinguished but they have been localised," the head of the firefighters in Split, Ivan Kovacevic, said late Tuesday, adding there was no danger for people and buildings.

According to Croatia's firefighting commander Slavko Tucakovic, the fires were possibly caused by sparks on power lines due to the heat, but a probe was launched to establish the exact cause.
Senators backed a first reading of the bill by 229 votes to 106, meaning the text will now be handed to the lower house, the National Assembly, for debate in October.

The new laws -- a campaign pledge of President Emmanuel Macron -- will replace a state of emergency imposed after the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead.

Under the state of emergency, authorities have the power to place people under house arrest, order house searches and ban public gatherings without the prior approval of a judge.

The measures were extended for a sixth time on July 6.

Some of them will become permanent under the proposed law, a move rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say is draconian.

Interior Minister Gerard Collomb defended the bill, saying it was necessary to combat the "ever present" terror threat.
The row between Macron and General Pierre De Villiers blew up last week when the chief of staff told a parliamentary committee he would not allow the armed forces to be "screwed" by the government's plans to slash 850 million euros ($980 million) from this year's budget.

Macron, 39, slapped down the 60-year-old, five-star general, telling army top brass at their annual summer party "I am the boss" and that he deeply regretted that the budget dispute had been dragged into the "public sphere".

In a newspaper interview at the weekend, Macron added that if there was a difference of opinion, "it is the chief of the defence staff who will change his position".

De Villiers, who had been in the job for three years, said he felt he had no choice but to stand down.

"I no longer feel able to ensure the sustainability of the model of the armed forces that I think is necessary to guarantee the protection of France and the French people," he said in a statement.

At a weekly cabinet meeting the president hailed de Villiers for his "remarkable service" and promised to hike the defence budget again in 2018, government spokesman Christophe Castaner said.

De Villiers is seen as one of the finest officers of his generation.

He is well-liked by the rank and file and said he believed it was his duty to inform politicians of his "reservations".

In a Facebook "letter to a young recruit" last week he appeared to take aim at Macron, saying: "As everyone has their shortcomings, no one should be blindly followed."

Humiliation

The row has provoked a debate about whether Macron had humiliated his military chief or whether he had no choice but to exert his authority just two months into his presidency.

A former head of the French air force, General Vincent Lanata, told L'Express news weekly on Tuesday he was "very shocked" by Macron's "rant" at De Villiers.

The crisis was exacerbated by its timing, coming in the week of the July 14 Bastille Day military parade, where US President Donald Trump was the guest of honour.

During the parade, Macron rode down the Champs-Elysees avenue in an open-topped military vehicle, standing side-by-side with a grim-faced De Villiers as Trump looked on.

The cuts to defence spending were seen by some in the military as a betrayal by Macron given his strong show of support for the military.

In his first foreign visit after taking office, he visited French troops engaged in counter-terrorism operations in the West African country of Mali.

The cuts are part of a 4.5-billion-euro reduction in public spending that Macron's centrist government has promised to bring down the budget deficit, as demanded by the European Union.

During his election campaign Macron pledged to boost defence spending to 2.0 percent of gross domestic product by 2025, in line with NATO targets.

Far-right leader Marine Le Pen, whom Macron beat in the presidential run-off, said the French military had lost "a man of huge value" in de Villiers and claimed his resignation showed "the very serious abuses and worrying limits" of Macron's leadership.

Damien Abad, a member of the opposition Republicans, who sits on the parliamentary defence committee, blamed Macron's "excessive authoritarianism" in a tweet.

The leader of the hard-left France Unbowed, Jean-Luc Melenchon, was also sharply critical, noting that de Villers' budget remarks to parliament had been made behind closed doors and that he was duty bound to "respond frankly".

Nuclear-armed France and Britain are the biggest military powers in the European Union.

French forces are engaged in military strikes against Islamic State jihadists in Syria and Iraq and 4,000 French soldiers are involved in efforts to stop the spread of extremism in African countries including Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad.
Standing outside his damaged house in the west of the city, Manaf Yunes looked on as a worker removed rubble from a balcony.

"I don't have any money because I haven't been paid for three years. I had to borrow to be able to begin renovating," the 57-year-old former official said.

On July 10, the authorities announced they had defeated IS in Mosul after a nine-month campaign that unleashed destruction of almost unimaginable dimensions on the ancient city.

According to a preliminary assessment, it will cost more than $1 billion just to restore basic services such as running water, electricity, schooling and medical care to all of Mosul, said Lise Grande of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Iraq.

The western sector was the hardest hit.

"The levels of destruction we are seeing are the worst in Iraq. Western Mosul represents one of the largest and most complex stabilisation challenges the UN has faced," Grande told AFP.

West Mosul has been eviscerated, its buildings half collapsed or shattered, craters in the road sprouting tangles of misshapen and broken water pipes.

Restoring basic services

According to Abdel Sattar Habbo of the local municipality, more than 90 percent of west Mosul's infrastructure and public services was destroyed.

And the figure for private property is nearly as high, at 70 percent.

He put the cost of the damage at several billion dollars, and said between three and four months would be needed just to "stabilise" the west of the city.

By that he meant bringing back on line -- even partly -- necessities including water, power and public services to enable "a return to life".

"Based on preliminary assessments, we estimate that $470 million is needed to help restore the main electricity, water and sewage grids and rehabilitate key public facilities including hospitals, schools and houses in the most heavily damaged neighbourhoods in western Mosul," said the UNDP's Grande.

In the old town, where the jihadists battled to the last in the final hours of the most ferocious clashes, "almost one-third of the housing stock is most likely severely damaged or completely destroyed", the UN wrote in a recent report.

Erfan Ali, head of the UN Human Settlements Programme in Iraq, told AFP that despite the destruction, the medical sector was already on the mend.

"Some major hospitals... have been almost completely destroyed," he said, while others were "completely looted and burned" when Mosul was under IS occupation.

"However, the health sector is gradually recovering, and almost half of the hospitals are currently working, which means in most cases that some floors have been rehabilitated," he said.

Laying new pipes

In the east of the city a semblance of normal life has resumed, with crowded streets and shops and restaurants again open for business.

And in west Mosul, despite the widespread destruction, hesitant steps are already being taken to bring the area back to life.

As rubble is removed, workmen from the municipality lay new pipes in trenches dug in roadways to repair the sewerage system.

While they await the beginning of major reconstruction projects, residents of battered Mosul must do what they can to cope.

For electricity they rely on neighbourhood generators, and water is supplied by tank trucks or NGOs.

Aid groups have given out "construction kits" of wooden planking, plywood panels and tarpaulins to nearly 12,700 families, said Melany Markham, spokesperson in Iraq for the Norwegian Refugee Council.

Outside Manaf Yunes's house in the west of the city, there are now bags of cement and stacks of breeze blocks.

The front of his home bears the scars of war. A booby-trapped vehicle exploded outside the building, blowing in its windows and destroying part of the balcony.

A wooden board now covers a large hole in his bathroom wall.
The two are Philippe Japiot, former chairman of the French naval dockyards unit DCNI, and Jean-Paul Perrier, former chief executive of the French defence and electronics giant Thales, they said.

The two, interviewed in May, have both been indicted for corruption, one of the sources said.

Japiot has additionally been indicted for "abuse of social assets" and Perrier for "complicity in the abuse of social assets," one of the sources said.

The investigation was launched in 2010 in response to a complaint by Malaysian rights group Suaram.

It centres on allegations that the French submarine maker paid commission of more than 114 million euros ($132 million) to a purported shell company linked to Abdul Razak Baginda, a former close associate of Prime Minister Najib Razak.

Najib was defence minister when the $1.1-billion deal for two Scorpene-class submarines was sealed.

From 2001 to 2007, Japiot headed the DCNI, the international branch of France's centuries-old naval shipbuilding operations, which changed its name last month from DCNS to Naval Group.

The French state holds just under two-thirds of Naval Group, and Thales slightly more than a third.

Two other people are under investigation in France in the same case: Dominique Castellan, also a former DCNI president, and Bernard Baiocco, former president of Thales International Asia.

All four deny any wrongdoing and the Malaysian government has said the contract was free of corruption.
The Appeals Criminal Court in the city of Sale, near the capital Rabat, handed down the sentences ranging from two years to life in imprisonment to the defendants, the official Moroccan news agency MAP reported.

Eight among the defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment, Moroccan news portal Hespress said.

The rulings could be appealed.

The case dates back to November 2010 when clashes erupted between anti-government protesters and Moroccan police, who were trying to clear a camp the demonstrators had set up in the desert near the southern city of Laayoune, demanding social justice.

At the time, authorities accused some of the protesters of being separatists and backing the Polisario Front independence movement in Western Sahara, a disputed territory mostly controlled by Morocco.

In 2013, a military court heard the case and later gave varying jail terms to the accused amid an outcry from rights groups.

In December 2016, the case was handed over to the Appeals Criminal Court.

The row over Western Sahara began in 1975 with Moroccos takeover of the region after Spains withdrawal.

The Polisario Front, which is backed by Moroccos regional rival Algeria, demands a referendum for mineral-rich Western Saharas self-determination.
By PTI: Karachi, Jul 19 (PTI) At least four members of a Shiite family were killed today and one another injured when unidentified gunmen opened fire on their vehicle near Pakistans restive Balochistan province, police said.

The incident took place in the town of Mastung, about 75 kilometers south of Quetta, when gunmen riding a motorcycle targeted their car en route to Karachi. The assailants escaped unhurt after carrying out the attack, Geo TV reported.

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The police and rescue teams reached the area and started an investigation into the incident. The injured were shifted to a hospital in Quetta.

A woman was among the four family members killed on the spot while one other was injured. They were all from the same family, it said.

However, no group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Balochistan Chief Minister Sanaullah Khan Zehri has strongly condemned the incident and grieved over the loss of precious lives. He has asked the police officials to prepare a report of the incident and bring the culprits behind the bars.

In March, an explosion targeting a convoy of the security forces occurred on Saryab Road. Four people were injured including three Frontier Corps personnel and a passer-by.

On May 12, a suicide bomb blast targeting the convoy of a senior politician in Balochistan killed at least 26 people and wounded 30 others. The blast in Mastung struck a vehicle carrying Senate Deputy Chairman Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Haideri, shortly after Friday prayers. PTI AMS AKJ AMS

--- ENDS ---
The government of leftist President Tabare Vazquez announced the commercialization of pot last week.

Little information has been given, however, on the 16 pharmacies selected to start offering the drug to Uruguay's 3.4 million residents.

The government didn't work out deals with the big pharmacy chains that cover the country.

Sales won't be on a walk-in basis, however.

Under the legislation set by the state agency regulating the marijuana market, people have to register to buy pot in pharmacies. Only registered residents can do so -- preventing drug tourism.

So far 4,959 people have signed on, most of them in the 30 to 44 age group, according to government figures.

The pharmacy sales form the last of three phases set out under the 2013 law.

Under the early phases of the 2013 law, more than 6,948 people have registered to grow weed at home, and 63 smokers' clubs have been authorized.

Only two companies were authorized to produce marijuana for pharmacies -- under military protection, and with no public access.

The state Institute for the Regulation and Control of Cannabis (IRCC) has authorized the sale of two types of marijuana, to be sold in five-gram packets.

On Monday, the National Drugs Council tweeted an image of what the packages would look like: blue-and-white sealed sachets that look something like condom packets.

An "Alfa I" package contains "Alfa I variety cannabis hybrid with Indica predominant." Another sort has "Beta I variety cannabis" with Sativa. The levels of THC -- the psychotropic constituent in cannabis -- are given on the outside, for consumer information.

The packets also bear a "Warnings" section about the risks of consuming marijuana and recommendations on how to do it more safely.

The packets are being retailed at $6.60 each, according to the IRCCA.
Gordhan joined a growing number of activists in the ruling African National Congress (ANC) along with anti-apartheid veterans and business leaders who have appealed for Zuma to leave office.

Gordhan was seen as a bulwark against corruption until he was sacked in March in a government reshuffle that triggered unprecedented criticism from senior ANC figures including Zuma's deputy Cyril Ramaphosa.

"I think the president should move aside and let somebody take over this country and reset the course," Gordhan said in a debate to commemorate Nelson Mandela Day.

Gordhan remains widely popular among many South Africans but is not seen as a potential presidential candidate.

Zuma has been engulfed by graft scandals and has faced several humiliating court rulings while grappling with record unemployment and a sluggish economy.

On August 8, parliament will vote on a motion of no confidence in Zuma, which he is likely to survive due to the ANC's majority.

Opposition parties have campaigned to have the vote conducted by secret ballot to encourage disaffected ANC lawmakers to vote against him.

The Constitutional Court has directed the parliament Speaker, Zuma-loyalist Baleka Mbete, to make a ruling on the matter before the vote.

Zuma, 74, is due to step down as head of the ANC party in December, and as president ahead of the 2019 general election.
Ordering the asset freeze, Judge Sergio Moro said, was in response to the charge that Lula accepted a bribe of a luxury beachside apartment and $1.1 million in cash from one of Brazil's biggest construction companies, OAS.

Moro put the value of Lula's assets in property and bank accounts as $4.3 million, according to court papers released Wednesday.

They comprised three apartments, a plot of land, two vehicles and two accounts holding more than the equivalent of $190,000 in cash.

Lula was a week ago given a nine-and-a-half-year sentence after his conviction.

The 71-year-old has portrayed the judicial blow as an attempt to keep him out of the running for the presidency.

One of the most popular Brazilian leaders of modern times, Lula held power from 2003 to 2010, the maximum two consecutive terms permitted by the constitution.

His protegee and fellow Workers Party member, Dilma Rousseff, then took the reins, winning two elections. But she was impeached and ousted last year for fiddling government accounts to hide liabilities.

Her vice president from another party, Michel Temer, has taken over. But he, too, is accused of taking bribes, as have several of his ministers who have resigned.

Lula had been leading in voter intention polls up to his conviction. He has vowed to "be criss-crossing the country" to win support for his bid to return as president in the October 2018 elections.
The verdict in the case, which has been closely followed by human rights campaigners, was delivered at dawn by the Court of Appeals in Sale near Rabat, the official news agency MAP reported.

Morocco and the Algeria-backed Polisario Front independence movement have accused each other of provoking the deadly clashes between police and Sahrawi protesters at a camp for displaced people in Gdeim Izik in November 2010.

In 2013 a military court sentenced the 25 defendants to jail terms ranging from 20 years to life imprisonment.

International rights groups condemned that trial as "unfair" and in July the Court of Cassation ordered a civilian court to examine the case.

Morocco says Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony mostly controlled by Rabat, is an integral part of the kingdom.

The Polisario Front demands a referendum on self-determination for the territory.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch this week issued a joint plea for the Moroccan authorities to ensure the verdict in the trial was not based on confessions or statements "obtained under torture or other ill-treatment during police interrogations".

The NGO Action by Christians for the Abolition of Torture has criticised what it called an "unfair trial" that took into account "confessions signed under torture".

In May the defendants and their lawyers announced they would no longer attend the trial, alleging "irregularities".
"The European Union is the only association of countries in the world that conditions the relations with Israel... in every area on political conditions," he said in a recording heard by AFP.

"It's crazy, it's absolutely crazy," he added.

Brussels has repeatedly condemned Israel's building of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and its crackdown on civil society groups critical of the government.

Netanyahu cited China, Russia and India as countries who do business with "innovation giant Israel" and "don't care about political issues."

"Europe has to decide whether it wants to live and thrive or if it wants to shrivel and disappear," he told the prime ministers of the so-called Visegrad group -- Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

"Don't undermine that one Western country that defends European values and European interests and prevents another mass migration to Europe."

Netanyahu toned down his rhetoric in official comments after the meeting, describing the EU's criticism of Israel as an "anomaly".

He made the remarks on the second of a three-day visit to Budapest, the first such trip by an Israeli leader since the fall of communism in 1989.

Observers say Israel is seeking closer ties with EU nations that can help defend its interests in international forums.

"With their backing, it will be harder for the EU to pass resolutions critical of Israel," Middle East expert Peter Lintl said.

'Patriot' pair

At the news conference, Netanyahu praised the Visegrad group -- whose nationalist stances are also a growing thorn in Brussels' side -- for supporting Israel "on several occasions" at EU meetings.

The Israeli premier has found a particularly willing ally in his Hungarian counterpart Victor Orban.

Both men are right-wingers enamoured of US President Donald Trump and with a disdain for the left-leaning liberal global order bankrolled, as they see it, by the likes of Jewish US billionaire George Soros.

They also both insist on their countries' right to defend themselves against perceived outside threats.

Israel has blocked off its border to Syria, where regime forces fight a US-led alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters.

Netanyahu said Israel had repeatedly carried out strikes against Iranian convoys transporting weapons in Syria destined for the Jewish state's arch-enemy Hezbollah.

"When we see them doing this, we take military action against them. We've been doing this dozens and dozens of times," he said.

Orban, a virulent opponent of Muslim immigration who has been in power since 2010, hailed Netanyahu as a "patriot".

"We share Israel's notion of protecting external borders," said the populist strongman who has erected fences on Hungary's southern EU frontiers as part of hardline measures against asylum-seekers.

"If Europe does not cooperate with Israel, it is punishing itself," Orban added.

Netanyahu's trip comes at a sensitive time for Orban, who is under fire at home over his running battle against Budapest-born Soros.

Many in Hungary's 100,000-strong Jewish population -- one Europe's largest -- have accused Orban of encouraging anti-Semitism to stave off growing support for the far-right.

They decried as "poisonous" a recent government poster campaign attacking Soros over his alleged support for mass immigration.

Some of the posters were daubed in anti-Semitic graffiti.

Orban has stressed that the campaign was about Soros's political views and that Hungary has " zero tolerance" toward anti-Semitism.

"It is possible to argue over the aims of the campaign, but for me, it became unacceptable because of one thing: the Jews in Hungary have started to be afraid," Andras Heisel, who heads Hungary's largest Jewish organisation, said at an event attended by Netanyahu and Orban at Budapest's Great Synagogue on Wednesday evening.
But General Paul Selva, who is vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of the Staff, testified he wasn't confident North Korea has the capacity to strike the United States with any degree of accuracy.

"I do agree in principle with the assessment that the North Koreans are moving quickly to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capability," Selva told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"What the experts tell me is that the North Koreans have yet to demonstrate the capacity to do the guidance and control that would be required," he added, referring to the ability of the North Koreans to steer a warhead toward a specific target.
He also threatened to move towards halting Poland's voting rights in the 28-nation bloc further down the line -- a so-called "nuclear option" that the EU has never invoked.

Thousands of protesters have rallied in Polish cities over the reforms by the governing Law and Justice party (PiS) that would give parliament powers over the selection of judges.

"These laws considerably increase the systemic threat to the rule of law in Poland," Timmermans said after a high-level meeting in Brussels.

"Collectively, they would abolish any remaining judicial independence and put the judiciary under full political control of the government."

In Warsaw, the Polish foreign ministry issued a statement lashing the EU's response as "unfounded and unjustified" as well as "premature" given that the legislative process was still underway.

The head of PiS, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said judicial reform was purely an affair of the Polish state.

"The issues that we are dealing with are the exclusive competence of the state," he said on the public news channel TVP Info, referring to Timmermans' statement as "an abuse, an act of a political nature".

East-West split

The clash underscores a growing rift between Brussels and eastern member states where populist and increasingly authoritarian governments are pushing for greater sovereignty, particularly over migration.

The EU first warned Poland in early 2016 over reforms of the constitutional court by the PiS after it won elections the previous year.

The European Commission said in a statement that it "urges the Polish authorities to put the new laws on hold" and that it would "swiftly prepare infringement procedures for breach of EU law" against Warsaw to be discussed next week.

EU states can be taken to the bloc's highest court and eventually given stiff fines for such breaches.

But Timmermans added that "we are very close to triggering Article 7" -- the bloc's never-before used "nuclear option" that can halt a country's right to vote in EU meetings.

Poland would, however, likely escape such a measure as it would be vetoed by its ally Hungary.

Timmermans also spoke out against the intimidation of journalists who have been critical of the Polish government, adding: "In darkness, democracy dies".

Rights group Amnesty International said the EU's Article 7 threat was a "positive step".

The latest of the Polish reforms -- a draft law giving the justice minister power to make appointments to the supreme court -- triggered angry exchanges in the Polish parliament late Tuesday.

Kaczynski said opponents of the plan "murdered" his brother Lech Kaczynski, the then-president of Poland, who was killed in a jet crash in Russia in 2010.

Surprise compromise

On Sunday, thousands rallied in Warsaw and other cities against reforms endorsed last week by parliament and more protests took place Tuesday in Warsaw.

The first of those laws stipulates that from now on the parliament will choose the members of the National Council of the Judiciary, which oversees the selection of judges and is meant to protect the independence of the courts.

The second bill states that the justice minister will name the chief justices of Poland's common courts.

Both texts need only to be signed by President Andrzej Duda, who is closely allied with the PiS, to become law.

But Duda, in a surprise move on Tuesday, warned he would not approve the supreme court reform unless lawmakers amended the bill on the judiciary council to ensure the PiS would not have complete control over its composition.

Relations between Warsaw and Brussels have been steadily deteriorating in recent months.

Poland made a failed bid to scupper the re-election of European Council president Donald Tusk, a former Polish premier and bitter foe of the Kaczynskis.
That spat was high on the agenda at Monday's talks in Washington between Thomas Shannon, the US State Department's No. 3, and Russia's deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov.

The Kremlin has demanded Washington restore diplomatic access to two compounds in the states of New York and Maryland, which the Obama administration restricted in December following initial suspicions of Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.

"The conversation was tough, forthright, and deliberate, reflecting both parties' commitment to a resolution," the State Department said of Monday's talks. "The United States and Russia seek a long-term solution that would address areas of bilateral concern that have strained the relationship."

"The talks reflected a spirit of goodwill, but it is clear that more work needs to be done."

The meeting, which lasted three hours, had originally been scheduled for June, but Moscow had canceled it over new US sanctions linked to the conflict in Ukraine.

After the meeting Ryabkov, asked by journalists if the issue of the diplomatic compounds had been resolved, replied: "Almost, almost."

The development came as the White House it was nominating former Utah governor Jon Huntsman as ambassador to Russia.

Huntsman previously served as US ambassador to Singapore and China.

In December then president Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats for suspected spying and ordered the residential complexes shut down.

When President Vladimir Putin and US counterpart Donald Trump met for the first time at the G20 summit in Hamburg this month, the Kremlin strongman raised the question of the diplomatic sites "quite unambiguously," Russian spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Putin had initially abstained from evening the score of the diplomatic row, awaiting the Trump administration's response.

But hopes that the US president would follow up on campaign pledges to boost relations have fizzled as the White House struggles to contain the snowballing scandal over possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Makhosi Khoza, who is known as a fierce critic of Zuma and of corruption within the party, had reported threats saying she only had 21 days left to live.

It is not known who was behind the threats.

A security assessment confirmed the existence of a threat and parliament would work with police to protect Khoza, eNCA quoted a parliamentary statement as saying.

The threats did not dissuade Khoza from again criticising Zuma, Nelson Mandela Day, when South Africa marked the birthday of its late first democratic president.

She called Zuma a dishonourable and disgraceful leader and urged him to step down.

A string of corruption scandals involving Zuma has divided the ANC and made its support plunge.

The party suffered its heaviest defeat so far in the August 2016 local elections, when it lost its majorities in two major cities, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth.
Bloomsbury is planning to publish new books about The Boy Who Lived in October this year.

By India Today Web Desk: Back in 2007, when the last Harry Potter book came out, Potterheads across the globe were saddened by the end of the book series. But then we got to read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child last year, and the magic continued.

This year, things seem to be getting better with two new Harry Potter books scheduled to be released in October!

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As fans celebrate the 20th anniversary of the book series, Bloomsbury, the British publishing house, has announced a pair of books to take you back to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Also Read: The new, illustrated versions of Harry Potter and Hermione are inspired by muggles--not Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson

Harry Potter: A History of Magic - The Book of the Exhibition is slated to be a book with original drafts of the Potter books by JK Rowling, along with a detailed discussion of all the subjects taught at Hogwarts. This book is also tied up with the exhibition at the British Library, which features potions, herbology and care of magical creatures.

Picture courtesy: Instagram/xavierboldu

The second title, Harry Potter: A Journey Through a History of Magic, will explore the character histories, spells and curses, and creatures in the original book series. According to Fortune magazine, both books will be released simultaneously on October 20, 2017, and Bloomsbury also plans to publish digital copies on the Pottermore website on the same date.

Picture courtesy: Instagram/v.bookish Picture courtesy: Instagram/v.bookish

Also Read: ICSE introduces Harry Potter, Tintin, Asterix into English syllabus. Wow!

The sad news is that neither of the books are written by JK Rowling herself. They're clearly more linked to the British Library's exhibition marking the 20th anniversary.

And yet, fans are sure to lap the new supplementary titles up, just like they did with The Cursed Child. After all, which Pottermaniac would want the magic of Hogwarts to fade away?

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Kevin and Karen Urick are touring the Quad-Cities one meal at a time for the column Dinner for Two. The Geneseo couple love everything about food. They grow food, travel the world for food, enjoy eating all styles of food and look forward to sharing their passion with readers! The column will appear periodically in the Life section. If you know of a place you want them to review, email them at quadcitiesrestaurants@gmail.com.

Joes Place, 110 E. 22nd Ave., Coal Valley, IL, 309-799-1400

Driving along busy Route 6 through Coal Valley, it is easy to assume it is the business district. However, if you turn up the hill on 1st Avenue at the small sign that says business, you will arrive at Joes Place across from the city park. It is a wonderful local place in the QCA. We thank the reader that suggested we go here, since it is not on our driving path, and is advertised by word of mouth. The unassuming sign on this 120-year-old building that simply states Joes Place, and owners, Joe and Lori Gotthard, welcome you to experience the excellent food within.

Joe is a natural chef, the kind that got into the business because he loves to cook. He does everything the old fashioned way. Along with his assistant, Chris Barnes, he cuts each steak when it is ordered, hand forms the hamburgers, makes all the soups from scratch and slow roasts his prime rib. You always can tell when a chef/owner loves what they do. Joe had worked for many fine dining establishments throughout the QCA before driving by this struggling place in 2005 with his co-owner and wife, Lori, who simply said lets buy this place. Joe agreed, as long as he managed the kitchen and his wife became the boss. Lori runs the front of the restaurant greeting customers, overseeing the bar and keeping Joe in line. It is a natural partnership that capitalizes on what each of them do best.

Joes Place is known for prime rib. He brought in his experiences at several Quad-Cities restaurants including OMelias, Bens Gourmet House and Hunters when he opened his own place. You can get chicken livers (topped with onions, peppers and mushrooms), frog legs (either fried or sauteed), broasted chicken, hand cut steaks, Iowa chops, catfish, swai, yellow fin tuna, reubens, turkey reubens, 1/2 pound hamburgers and more. It's a surprising menu that is simply born of a love for food cooked as it should be.

Dinner is served Tuesday through Saturday starting at 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday nights feature prime rib, with a salad bar and white rolls, in addition to the regular menu. The meat preparation begins with a rub of Lawrys Season Salt (no need to go to Chicago), pepper and fresh garlic. Slow roasted for 4 hours at 250 degrees, it is served fork tender. Knowing there was more food ahead we ordered the small 11 oz size. Served with creamy horseradish sauce, au jus and a baked potato with sour cream, it is Midwest heaven. The salad bar is reminiscent of an old time supper club. Homemade salads, complete with the requisite pickled beets and homemade soups. The night we were there it was New England clam chowder with the unique addition of carrots. Joe makes all of his soups and we are anxious to return and try his chicken noodle, goulash, hamburger or ham and bean.

Our waitress, Trish, really enjoys their fish that is served either blackened, grilled or fried. They have catfish whole or filets, salmon, swai, tilapia, yellow fin tuna, shrimp or frog legs. Frog legs is one of the specialties that diners come to Joes Place for, something that is not always found on a menu. The chicken livers topped with onions, peppers and mushrooms looked tempting, but spying the Iowa chop on the menu we could not resist. There is nothing like an Iowa chop cooked to perfection. The 16 ounce, 1 1/2 thick cut chop was grilled, and the juices flowed when we cut into it. It was cooked all the way through, and we really enjoyed the crust you can only get when cooked over an open flame.

Joes is also known for their broasted (fried) chicken. The chicken is marinated, lightly breaded and cooked in a broaster/fryer, a sealed pressure cooker that renders the chicken exceptionally moist, not greasy. The four pieces of chicken and seasoned fries were a deal for $12.95. Joe tries to get out to every table and wants to make sure every patron is enjoying their meal, or he will make it right.

Loris favorite are the 1/2 pound burgers. You can choose between cheeseburgers, bacon cheeseburgers and patty melts in addition to 12 other sandwiches. All of the hamburgers are hand pressed to retain their moisture. This would be a great place for a hamburger and beer. You can get a large draft beer for $2, or a selection of domestic or specialty beers. The full bar and wine by the glass gives everyone a choice.

In addition to their restaurant, Joe runs a thriving catering business. He can deliver and set up his grills on the spot for any function. St. Patricks Day is their biggest day of the year. This year, Joe cooked more than 500 lbs of corned beef, simmering the potatoes, cabbage and carrots in the flavorful meat broth. We have marked the date on our calendar for next year.

There are nightly specials that include tacos on Tuesday, broasted chicken or spaghetti on Wednesdays or an open faced pork sandwich on Thursdays. Every third Tuesday of the month they have a taco bar from 5 to 8 p.m. They are open for lunch on Tuesday-Saturday starting at 11 a.m. The noon special comes with a dessert and changes daily. If you want to know what is on the menu for that day give them a call.

Breakfast is a big part of Joes on Saturday and Sundays. Served from 7:30 to 11 a.m. on Saturdays and 8 a.m. to noon on Sundays. The menu includes eggs with sausage, bacon, ham, steak or country fried steak. Omelets, french toast, pancakes, egg sandwiches and biscuits and gravy.

Joes Place is a great find, and we look forward to returning to explore more of the menu. If you have not been here, and are hungry for food cooked the old fashioned way, this is the place to go.

He said: I am a beef guy. The prime rib was great, but that broasted chicken was so moist that I would order it again. It reminded me of the Henny Penny chicken of days gone by. The beet pickles, homemade soup and salad bar were great start to a fabulous meal.

She said: This place will now be on my driving path. I love the unassuming atmosphere and the food that tastes like the care that went into it. The grilled Iowa chop was my favorite, and I look forward to returning to have their fish.
CHICAGO (AP)  Chicago Police are asking for the public to help them find a man who shot and killed a 60-year-old Marine veteran on the city's West Side over the weekend.

Police say the shooting happened just before 5 a.m. on Saturday on the 400 block of North Kedzie Avenue. Robert Sharpe was walking when a man, armed with a handgun, demanded his wallet.

When Sharpe refused, the man shot him.

Police say the man was seen heading east on Franklin Boulevard. He's described as a black man with a medium complexion, 5-foot-10 to 6 feet tall. He was last seen wearing dark clothing and a white half-mask with red on it and was carrying a chrome-plated revolver.

Anyone with information, please call detectives at 312-744-8261.
CHICAGO (AP)  A man accused in the 2014 death of a Southern Illinois University student has entered a not guilty plea on the charges.

Gaege Bethune of Eldorado was arraigned Tuesday in Jackson County Court on first-degree murder charges in the death of Pravin Varughes.

The special prosecutor alleges Bethune committed robbery and battery of the 19-year-old Varughese. His body was found in a wooded area in Carbondale, five days after he was reported missing.

The 22-year-old Bethune was arrested last week, three years after the victim's mother challenged original findings that her son died accidentally from exposure to the cold.

Although authorities concluded at the time there was no evidence of foul play, Lovely Varughese said a private autopsy quickly identified multiple, clear injuries to her son's head and face.
By PTI: New Delhi, Jul 19 (PTI) HMD Global, which holds the rights to Nokia brand name, today said its chief executive officer Arto Nummela will leave the company with immediate effect.

While HMD did not state the reason for the sudden departure, it said "through mutual agreement between Chief Executive Officer Arto Nummela and the HMD Global Board of Directors, Arto Nummela will leave HMD with immediate effect".

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Florian Seiche, who is currently serving as President, will take over the additional responsibility as acting CEO, the Finnish firm said in a statement.

Seiche had been co-leading HMD Global as President since the start of the company.

"Arto Nummela has played a key role in the creation of the HMD Global operation, building the team and launching our first products," HMD Global Oy Chairman of the Board Sam Chin said.

HMD had acquired the manufacturing and distribution assets of the former Nokia phone business from Microsoft last year.

Earlier this year, HMD revived Nokias classic 3310 feature phone and is looking at bringing in more such devices as it aims to tap into growth markets like India and countries in Africa. PTI SR SBT

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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!
Global mining conglomerate Rio Tinto says AutoHaulthe US$518 million automation of its Western Australia Pilbara iron ore heavy-haul rail networkis progressing well, with about 20% of all train-miles now operating in autonomous mode, albeit with on board locomotive engineers managing certain safety and reliability systems.

Improvements to system performance continue, and reports suggest that Rio Tinto anticipates 100% of its network will be fully driverless by the end of 2018. Rio Tinto says that, when completed and fully operational, AutoHaul will be the worlds first fully-autonomous, heavy-haul, long-distance freight railroad.

Rio Tinto first floated the concept in 2008, but has previously reported a number of delays in implementing the technology. The company is investing in automation and other improvements to its heavy-haul lines in the Pilbara so that it can increase capacity without the need to purchase additional rolling stock.

AutoHaul is part of Rio Tintos Mine of the Future project, launched in 2008. The project also includes autonomous trucks and drilling. Testing of AutoHaul started in 2014, and throughout 2015, AutoHaul-fitted locomotives were tested on the network to evaluate onboard systems, signaling, safety mechanisms and communications with the Rio Tinto operations center in Perth. The center enables all the companys mines, ports and rail systems to be operated from a single location.

Ansaldo STS* won a US$294.7 million contract for development and delivery of AutoHauls automated train management system in 2012. The contract included supply of a vital safety server for safe and flexible management of train movements and an on-board driving module. The system utilizes existing wayside infrastructure installed under a contract awarded under RAFA (Rio Tinto-Ansaldo STS Framework Agreement) in 2010. Rio Tinto has also invested in updated locomotive control systems that allow the introduction of ECP (electronically controlled pneumatic) braking. Ansaldo STS was awarded a US$48.16 million contract under RAFA in July 2012 to outfit the railroads GE Transportation locomotives.

Releasing its second quarter production results, the Rio Tinto says its Pilbara iron ore shipments reached 77.7 million tons in the second quarter, despite being impacted by an increase in its track maintenance program following poor weather in the first quarter.

Total volumes for 2017 are forecast to reach around 330 million tons, which takes into consideration first-half production and the additional track maintenance.

* While 51% owned by Hitachi Group, Ansaldo STS remains an independent company, listed on the Milan Stock Exchange. The CEO is Andy Barr. The Chairman is Alistair Dormer, who is also Group CEO of Hitachi Rail.
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Disabled convict Mamayev released from jail

MOSCOW, July 19 (RAPSI, Diana Gutsul) - Moscows Timiryazevsky District Court ruled on Wednesday that Anton Mamayev, a disabled and wheelchair-bound man who had been sentenced to 4.5 years in prison for armed robbery, should be released from jail.

Mamayev's detention was changed to travel restrictions.

On Monday, the court received medical examination results of Mamayev submitted by the Federal Penitentiary Service. According to the medical report, he is suffering from an illness included in the list of diseases that prevent serving of punishment.

Earlier, Russias High Commissioner for Human Rights Tatiana Moskalkova visited Mamayev in a hospital. According to the ombudsman, Mamayev is suffering from a complex of serious including Spinal Muscular Atrophy. She filed a petition with the Moscow City Court seeking release Anton Mamayev and a request with the Federal Penitentiary Service to speed up his medical examination.

In late June, Moscows Timiryazevsky District Court found Mamayev and his alleged accomplice Vasily Seroshtanov guilty of robbery with the use of force. Mamayev received 4.5 years in prison, Seroshtanov was sentenced to 3 years in prison.

According to the Moscow City Court, the lower courts judge during delivering the judgment took into consideration nature and level of public danger of the committed crime qualified as serious, identity of the defendants and their role in the crime, presence of mitigating circumstances or absence of aggravating circumstances, and gave them sentence within sanctions prescribed by the law. The Timiryazevsky District Courts ruling reads that the court took into account that Mamayevs illness is not included in the list of diseases approved by the order of the Health Ministry and the Justice Ministry.

Defense lawyers have filed an appeal against the sentence and a motion demanding to release Mamayev from jail. The date for hearing an appeal against the sentence has not been set yet.
Federation Council approves ratification of Convention on seizure of proceeds from crime

MOSCOW, July 19 (RAPSI)  The Federation Council on Wednesday approved the ratification of the Council of Europe Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds from Crime and on the Financing of Terrorism, the statement of Russias upper house of parliament reads.

The State Duma Committee ratified the Convention on July 14.

On June 26, President Vladimir Putin submitted the Convention to the lower house of Russian parliament for ratification.

The Convention was signed on behalf of the Russian Federation on January 26, 2009, in Strasbourg.

Ratification of the Convention will enhance the efficiency of Russias cooperation with other countries in anti-money laundering and combating the financing of international terrorism and provide additional features for development of international cooperation of competent authorities in laundering, search, seizure and confiscation of the proceeds from crime, an explanatory note to the document reads.




Fans were disappointed that Dangal was not in the list of nominations for the IIFA Awards 2017.

By India Today Web Desk: Cinelovers were shocked when Aamir Khan's Dangal did not make it to the list of the IIFA 2017 nominations. Dangal not only received rave reviews from critics, but also went on to become the highest grossing Indian film in cinematic history. Naturally, fans were shocked at the snub and expressed their disappointment on social media.

However, the organisers have clarified that it was the makers of Dangal who did not send in an entry. Andre Timmins, the Director of Wizcraft International, told IANS, "So basically, in IIFA, forms are sent to various production houses. They fill those forms up and send it back to us. Those forms are then put out to the industry for voting and from there it becomes a nomination. Dangal has not sent their entry in."

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He added, "We would love Dangal to be a part of it. I think it's a movie that's broken all records. We love Aamir Khan and the two little girls. They did a great job. But unfortunately, they didn't send their entry in. We feel sad."

The IIFA Awards were held at the MetLife Stadium in New York last week. While Neerja took home the award for Best Film, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury won Best Director for his hard-hitting courtroom drama, Pink. Udta Punjab actors Shahid Kapoor and Alia Bhatt won the awards for Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively.

ALSO SEE: Dangal's China run ends, Aamir Khan gets a moving tribute

ALSO READ: Chinese President Xi Jinping is all praise for Aamir Khan's Dangal

ALSO WATCH Dangal review: Aamir Khan surpasses all expectations with this fabulous film

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American presidents don't traditionally require a fixer or chaperone when they travel to Europe. But Emmanuel Macron, gauging most of the allies' perception of Donald Trump as an unwise and untruthful US President, concluded he could use a hand. Hence, Macron's leap into calling Trump a friend.
Americans should have been surprised that the French broadly approved President Emmanuel Macrons invitation to President Donald Trump as guest of honor for the July 14 Bastille Day celebration.

Unlike what was seen at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, there were no widespread protests against Trump.

Dont the French disdain Trump, and arent they incredulous that the supposedly great American democracy could have elected him?

As a sheer political calculation, wasnt Macron taking a large, unnecessary risk in the invitation? Of damaging his support in public opinion and even among his majority in parliament?

Wasnt Macron also splitting from the European consensus at the G-20 that made Trump persona non grata?

There was of course a ready-made reason for the invitation: the 100-year anniversary of Americas entry into World War I on the side of France and Britain against Germany. Furthermore, American military personnel were invited to march in the annual martial display down the Avenue des Champs-Elysees that remains a staple of French patriotic feeling.

Macron made a heartfelt speech emphasizing the Franco-American alliance and the strong affinities between the two nations. Trumps presence was a sign of a friendship across the ages.

He thanked the United States for a choice it made 100 years ago.

President Charles de Gaulle, by contrast, always expressed gratitude for Americas crucial aid but added pointedly that it took three years for American forces to arrive in WWI, in 1917, and five years in World War II, June 1944, D-Day.

What was Macron up to?

Quickly-written editorials said that Macron wanted a reset of his initially stormy personal relationship with Trump.

Considerably more was involved than that, however. Macron has already shown that he thinks strategically and geopolitically. He has a classic European sense of the long term: that countries and peoples operate with long memories built of turning points in their experience.

Macron, as a French leader, has a Gaullist sense of the importance of history in global politics and of national political cultures in relations between states. He is the anti-Trump. International relations is not simply about winning and losing, about getting the best deals today. Macron has an idea of France in her historic special role as a permanent counter-example to American can-do impatience.

In short, this was more than Macron trying to make up with Trump. He was representing not only himself and his government -- the French president was also representing France and its historic relationship with Europes crucial ally in global affairs.

By inviting Trump to the Bastille Day ceremonies and making a great show of courtesy and respect, Macron was legitimizing Trump, who is, whatever his unsavory character, the president of the United States of America.

Macron was, as the Chinese say, giving Trump face.

Once again France is Europes diplomatic leader, with Macron setting an intelligent, realistic example for Europeans in general. Trump is the American president and, as Americans say, deal with it. Europeans must respect what the American electoral system has wrought.

In a small way -- the comparison is overblown but instructive -- Macrons legitimation of Trump recalled two greater historical moments. First, de Gaulles legitimation of a rehabilitated West Germany (the 1963 Elysee Treaty of Friendship signed with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer). Second, President Francois Mitterrands legitimation of German unification in 1990, which occurred despite his initial worries and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatchers strong opposition.

In all three cases, France is playing its part. Macrons invitation to Trump, de Gaulle would have said, is France behaving like France.

At the same time, Macron is setting up another Gaullist or Mitterrand-style strategic policy: keeping the United States at a distance. Friendship and alliance with the United States need not mean subservience to U.S. foreign policy. An independent French and European foreign policy is good for Europe and, if only Washington will act with geopolitical rational sense, good for the United States as well.
Chinese government leaders, subtle masters of propaganda, seem to have discovered a Sun Tzu formula for taming dissent on the Internet: The best strategy may not be to confront critics directly, but to lull or distract them with a tide of good news.

This intriguing argument is suggested by a recent article in the American Political Science Review titled How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument. With complex data, it supports a simple thesis about life in the Internet age: Arguing the facts often doesnt work; frequently, confrontation just makes people resist harder.

The study analyzes China, but its implications are relevant for America in the age of Donald Trump. As I noted in a column last August, Trumps supporters sometimes seem impervious to fact-based argument. Trumps base has mostly stayed loyal since his inauguration, despite his lack of legislative achievements and his impulsive, arguably unethical actions. Why is this so? Read on.

The Chinese case examines the same conundrum explored by Christopher Graves, an Ogilvy Public Relations executive-turned-behavioral scientist. He summed up the limitations of factual argument in an October 2016 article in Harvard Business Review, When Saying Something Nice Is the Only Way to Change Someones Mind. Thats a lesson Trump critics havent learned. Trump makes inflammatory statements, opponents howl in outrage, and his core supporters applaud. The impasse continues.

Lets get back to China. That country presents an Internet puzzle that was examined by Gary King of Harvard University, Jennifer Pan of Stanford University and Margaret Roberts of the University of California at San Diego. (Their work was highlighted for me by Eileen Donahoe of Stanford.) The paradox is that China probably has the most prolific social-media activity in the world, but its authoritarian government also fears opposition. So how does Beijing maintain control?

The three American researchers wanted to test the widely held theory that the Chinese government mobilizes an army of more than a million Internet commentators to combat criticism of the regime. This supposed cadre of thought police is often described as Fifty Cent, because analysts thought they were paid a small amount for every post that endorsed the party line and rebutted foreign critics.

To test how the system actually worked, the researchers studied a cache of 43,797 Fifty Cent posts that was leaked in 2014 from the Internet Propaganda Office of Zhanggong district in Jiangxi province in southeast China. Nearly all were from people who worked at government agencies (and there was no evidence they were paid anything, let alone 50 cents a post). Their missives spiked sharply on anniversaries of protests and other days when there might be public dissent, making clear they were well-organized.

The surprise was that the posts werent argumentative. Instead, they were bland party pabulum. About 80 percent of the posts were cheerleading about government activities, 14 percent were non-argumentative praise or suggestions, and almost none were outright attacks. Other Internet samples yielded similar findings.

The Chinese precept, concluded the American researchers, was do not engage on controversial issues. Only when there was a danger of collective action would the government intervene directly. It was as if the party propagandists were adapting the famous admonition of Sun Tzu, the revered sixth-century B.C. strategist: The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

The researchers offered a concluding thought thats relevant in this era, when information operations have become a domain of covert action (as demonstrated by the Russian governments hacking of the 2016 election) as well as domestic control: Letting an argument die, or changing the subject, usually works much better than picking an argument and getting someones back up.

What happens when we ignore this precept and attack our political adversaries head-on? The 2016 election and its aftermath may be an object lesson. Evidence of wrongdoing may seem overwhelming if it confirms your preexisting beliefs, but not if it challenges those core biases. Graves cited this backfire effect, as explained in a 2011 essay by journalist David McRaney: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.

The lesson of this social-science research? If a political narrative is repeated often enough, backed by a chorus of cheerleaders, its very hard to rebut directly. Quiet persuasion may be more effective than shouting; the gradual accretion of facts may have more impact than a barrage. To quote Sun Tzu again: The rule is, not to besiege walled cities if it can possibly be avoided.
In May 1944, Chinese Nationalist and U.S. Army troops converged on the city of Myitkyina, one of the last remaining obstacles to the opening of the Burma Road. Intelligence indicated that the Japanese garrison defending Myitkyina numbered no more than 1,000 soldiers, but the actual number was three times that amount. The American-Kachin Rangers, consisting of U.S. special operators from the Office of Strategic Services and indigenous Kachin tribesmen, prowled ahead of the conventional units to collect information and wreak havoc behind Japanese lines. Ranger reports on Japanese troop movements enabled Chinese and U.S. infantry to trounce the Japanese on the ground, and Allied bombers to plaster them from the air. A U.S. infantry officer observed that without the assistance and support of the Kachins, we would have been licked before we even got started. Myitkyina fell in August, and a few months later supplies were flowing up the Burma Road to China.

As one of the first U.S. special operations outfits, the American-Kachin Rangers exhibited many of the traits that would account for the successes and popularity of special operations forces in decades to come. By forging ties with the local population, a few Americans enlisted the help of local warriors who knew the physical and cultural terrain better than the enemy. The low American profile kept the Rangers from attracting the attention a U.S. infantry unit would attract. Emphasis on stealth and speed enabled the Rangers to sneak up on the enemy to slit throats and demolish bridges.

In the 75 years since the creation of the United States first special operations forces, the achievements of those forces have built up popular confidence in their capabilities to such an extent that their success is often taken for granted. The recounting of their numerous triumphs, however, can easily obscure the historical reality that their tribulations have often been as numerous. The Burma campaign of World War II is a case in point. Five of the first six special operations teams sent into Burma disappeared or were destroyed. Only the team sent into the Kachin territories found a sympathetic population that refused to betray it to the Japanese authorities.

To ignore the tribulations is to risk endangerment of todays troops and missions. Before putting special operators in harms way, the makers of policy and strategy must give great thought to the factors that determine tactical and strategic outcomes. No foolproof methodology exists, but powerful insights are to be found by studying the history of U.S. special operations forces.

The Trump administration has inherited a world in which threats fester amid failed states and rogue regimes. Averse to large wars of occupation like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House seeks other ways to contain and counter these threats. One of the most attractive options is the support of insurgent groups, a mission for which special operations forces are preeminently qualified.

It is tempting to presume that the talents of U.S. advisers will determine whether the insurgency prevails. High confidence in the clout of U.S. special operators has figured in some of the most notable disappointments in U.S.-backed resistance operations, such as the insertion of agents into North Vietnam in the mid-1960s and the Syrian rebel training program of 20142015 that fielded only a handful of fighters at a cost of $580 million. In truth, the United States ability to support resistance organizations, whether in Nazi-occupied France or in modern-day Yemen, has depended primarily on the quality and quantity of insurgents and counterinsurgents. Where the counterinsurgents held a firm military and political grip on the population, would-be insurgents and interloping foreigners seldom stood a chance of organizing a popular rebellion.

Successful resistance groups, such as the Kachins in World War II and the North Koreans of Hwanghae province in the Korean War, have almost invariably enjoyed strong indigenous leadership and a sympathetic local population. They have, moreover, possessed a realistic vision for a viable postwar government and society. As the Bush administration learned in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Obama administration relearned in Libya, destroying the old order is much easier than replacing it with a durable new order.

With anti-American extremists and criminals now running loose on every continent, another valuable special operations capability is the surgical strike, whereby special operations forces raid a predetermined location, usually for the purpose of apprehending miscreants. U.S. special operators honed their surgical strike skills in the infernos of Iraq and Afghanistan and employed them more recently on a reduced scale in such places as Yemen, Somalia, and Syria. Through surgical strikes, U.S. special operations units have captured or killed thousands of enemy leaders, obtained hard drives full of incriminating information, and freed hostages. In the future, the surgical strikers could be summoned to seize the nuclear facilities of rogue regimes or cut the fiber-optic cables of hostile powers.

Eliminating enemy personnel on an industrial scale is a potent weapon in counterinsurgency. Popular mythology notwithstanding, effective counterinsurgency requires not only protecting the local population but also defeating enemy combatants. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States was most effective when the surgical strikes of special operations forces supplemented the counterinsurgency operations of conventional forces. While Americans of all political stripes have vowed that the country will never again wage a large-scale counterinsurgency war, the United States has a habit of fighting wars it had previously foresworn.

Owing to the United States recurrent wariness of committing its own forces abroad, it strives to empower friendly nations to combat terrorism, insurgency, illicit trafficking, and other scourges that imperil U.S. interests. Since the Kennedy era, special operations forces have helped partner countries increase their security capabilities, most often through training and education. The historical records of those efforts reveal enormous variations in effectivenessand patterns that recommend certain courses of action over others.

Because special operations forces are relatively small, they cannot train large numbers of people for long periods of time. They can train substantial numbers for short durations, but short-term training has consistently failed to inculcate the skills and attitudes that an effective fighting force needs. A poignant example is Mali, whose military crumbled in 2012 following years of intermittent U.S. training. That experience convinced Admiral William McRaven, then-commander of Special Operations Command (SOCOM), to shift from short and episodic training to long and persistent training.

If training is to be long and persistent, the recipients must necessarily be small in number. An alluring option is the focusing of training on a nations elite forces. The small size of elite units, however, usually imposes severe constraints on their strategic impact. They may be able to conduct surgical strikes, but they cannot deny an enemy access to territory or people. If U.S. interests demand that an ally rapidly boost its internal security, then the United States will need to build capacity in a broader set of security forces and institutionswhich will likely require the participation of U.S. conventional forces and civilian agencies.

In Yemen, the Obama administration pursued a strategy of surgical counterterrorism, while ignoring recommendations from U.S. special operators to train larger Yemeni forces for counterinsurgency. You cannot hold the jungle back with a weed whacker, the senior special operator in the country protested in vain. The strategy ended in disaster, as insurgents consolidated control in the hinterlands and then overran the central government in September 2014, dismantling Yemens security services and driving U.S. military and intelligence personnel out of the country.

U.S. special operations forces have made optimal use of small numbers when concentrating personnel at central institutions of training and education. In this way, a handful of Americans can influence the numerous officers who come through the institutions and at stages in their careers when they are still open to new ideas. The approach requires several decades to reach its maximum effect, because it takes that long for the students to rise into senior leadership positions. Centralized, long-term training and education programs were vital to the biggest special operations success in building partner capacity, Colombia.

Special operations forces, like conventional forces and the nonmilitary instruments of diplomacy and aid, are only as good as the strategies and policies in whose services they are employed. Strategists and policymakers must understand the capabilities of these and all other instruments of national power, as well as the strategic environment where actions will be orchestrated. They must, in addition, understand the capacity of the instrumentsespecially the special operations forces, given the recent remark from SOCOM commander General Tony Thomas that the nation is now using special operations forces at unsustainable levels. With the demand for special operations forces exceeding the supply, the new administration must determine where scarce special operations personnel can best be employed, and where other U.S. and allied capabilities can most profitably shoulder the burden.
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Agencies monitoring the situation said that no unusual movement has been made by the Chinese at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) for the last couple of months. They say China is only issuing war threats through its media only to pressure India.

By Manjeet Negi: India has denied the Chinese claims that the latter has moved "tens of thousands of tonnes" of military vehicles and equipment to Tibet in the recent weeks.

Agencies monitoring the situation said that no unusual movement has been made by the Chinese at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) for the last couple of months. They say China is only issuing war threats through its media only to pressure India.

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Reports had said today that China had moved "tens of thousands of tonnes" of military vehicles and equipment to Tibet, likely under the garb of two defence exercises held on the plateau in recent weeks. They perhaps were aimed at muscle-flexing amid the Doklam stand-off. The report said the project "took place late last month" and "involved hardware being moved simultaneously by road and rail from across the entire region".

"The vast haul was transported to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command - which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India," the PLA Daily, official newspaper of the military, was quoted as saying by the South China Morning Post.

However, according to the Indian agencies no such movement has taken place in the last couple of months. They said China has deployed about 15 divisions, or 50,000 troops, on the Indo-China border (LAC 3488 km). China has five operational air fields in Tibet. Its other five landing strips cannot be functional due to the lack of operational capabilities, they said.

The recent exercise by China, as claimed, in Tibet was about two months old. It was held in early part of June. Videos were released to put psychological pressure on India, the Indian agencies said.

China has deployed about five divisions in the Xinjiang area across north of Jammu and Kashmir.

The Indian agencies said we need not worry at all. The Chinese western command can be far from effective as India has deployed about 13 divisions facing LAC. The situation is not as critical as China is trying to make out of it.

In Doklam area, if war like situation erupts, that ratio will be 1:9 - China needs nine soldiers for every Indian personnel because we are in a dominating position.

As far as number of troops is concerned, India outnumbers China. Since 2009, China has been doing continuous exercise in Tibet to mobilise infrastructure there.

India is also monitoring the situation in Tsangpo area, opposite to Mount Kailash. In Arunachal Pradesh, this area is along Brahmputra river. China has constructed 11 bridges in this area. India's only concern is about 250 km border in this area. But the Chinese have not made any movement in this area.

Also read:

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Beijing does not fear war: Is China gearing for battle over Doklam standoff?

Now, China moves military equipment to Tibet. Should India be scared?

India-US-Japan's Malabar naval exercise is a message gift-wrapped for China

India to develop missiles that can hit all of China even from southern bases

This time is different: China's answer to Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar on border row

Also watch: China's public statements on border situation a sign of bullying?

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The Integrated Headquarters of the Ministry of Defence has asked all wings of the Army to come with suggestions for roles for women officers by July 31, 2017.

By Sudhi Ranjan Sen: The Indian Army is considering to deploy woman officers in combat roles especially in counter insurgency operations in Jammu and Kashmir and in the North East where women have been used as shield by the militants to disrupt counter terror operations.

The Integrated Headquarters of the Ministry of Defence has asked all wings of the Army to come up with suggestions for roles for women officers by July 31, 2017.

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The Army has been asked to look at areas where woman officers can be deployed and Integrated HQ Of MOD specifically talks about deploying women in Counter Insurgency operations. Instead of depending on Mahila Police Battalions (as with paramilitary forces) in CI ops for crowd control, the Army is now considering to have its own woman troops.

Chief of Army Staff General Bipin Rawat, who had earlier said that he was considering opening more avenues for women officers in the Indian Army, will be given the possible options.

At present there about 1500 women officers in Indian Army and they are deployed in support arms like the Judge Advocate General (JAG), Signals Corps and Army Supply Corps, and Education Corps Education and Medical Corps.

The doors to all male Indian Army was thrown open to women in the year 1993 when 1800 women candidates applied for just 50 vacancies and the number of woman candidates have grown steadily since then.

"Women officers can surely be deployed as Quarter Masters or Adjutants - the lynch pin - in Infantry battalions, there is a huge shortfall of officers in the Indian Army," a senior serving officer of Indian Army who didn't want to be identified told India Today.

As against a sanctioned strength of about 14- 18 officers for every infantry battalion there are only 8-10 officers available. As a result training and men-officer relation, crucial for war fighting, has been suffering. The Indian Army has shortfall of about 8000 officers.

The Indian Air Force has already allowed women pilots to fly fighters jets. The first batch of fighters pilots are undergoing their training. Earlier , women pilots of the IAF were only allowed to fly helicopters and transport aircraft.

The Indian Navy too has woman officers however the woman officers are not deployed onboard warships because warships don't have separate living quarters for women. Woman officers in Indian Navy are deployed for warship design, air traffic control and other non-combat duties.

Also read:

Indian Army to open up combat positions for women, says General Bipin Rawat

Women to be inducted as military police jawans first, says Army Chief Bipin Rawat

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Indian Army to open up combat positions for women, says General Bipin Rawat

India's first female fighter pilots pave way for more women in combat

Exclusive: Indian Air Force raising combat force to guard airbases

FROM THE MAGAZINE: Marching proud

WATCH: Indian Army to allow women in combat roles?

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When you look at the nutrition label for a Coco Cola can, youll see grams of macronutrients per serving, as well as percentage of your daily 
'Ordinary laws are insufficient to deal with the problem as they offer no deterrent'

'This draft will send a perfect message among the people that though there are solutions, lawmakers refuse them'

Senior SC advocate Sanjay Hegde tells Amit Agnihotri why the draft Masuka law is necessary.

Existing laws are insufficient to curb mob lynching and people convicted of such crimes should get life imprisonment, senior Supreme Court advocate Sanjay Hegde, who has worked on a new draft bill, the Manav Suraksha Kanoon (Masuka), tells Amit Agnihotri.

You have been instrumental in drafting a new law to curb mob lynching. What made you do this?

This is a private citizen's attempt to handle the whole aspect of lynching as there are several loopholes in the existing laws.

The draft law aims to punish the perpetrators and instigators of such incidents, provide compensation and speedy justice to the victims and fix accountability of those in administrative positions, who allow such incidents to happen.

For instance, policemen in an area. There is no reason why lynching cannot be prosecuted under current Indian law. Murder in any form, whether by a lone killer or a seething mob, falls within under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code.

But why a new law?

We have laws to deal with cases of lynching with obscure causes like in case of a thief caught by people or a woman declared a witch by the locals.

But over the past few years, an organised identity-based lynching is happening, especially in urban areas.

Ordinary laws are insufficient to deal with the problem as they offer no deterrent. It is seen that the administrative machinery tries to dilute the charges during court proceedings. Hence, we needed to suggest a solution for this social problem.

But doesn't this initiative lack legal sanctity?

Yes.

The purpose of the draft law is to provide a legal model before the people who can cite the document and goad our parliamentarians and legislators in state assemblies to pass adequate laws to deal with the problem.

This document allied with public pressure can force lawmakers to act. Lawmakers can't get away by saying that the existing laws are sufficient to deal with the issue and there is no need for a new one.

We will tell them that if this draft is acceptable, please act on it and if it is unacceptable, then please tell us why.

Are there any international contexts to what you are doing?

The United States tried to pass a law against discrimination and lynching called the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, 1918, for 50 years but could not do so as the states, especially the southern ones resisted it.

Finally, the US Senate apologised through a legislative resolution in 2005 that it had failed to pass such a law.

We don't want things to come to such a pass in India. This draft will send a perfect message among the people that though there are solutions, lawmakers refuse them. A similar initiative was the anti-corruption Lokpal Act where the people pushed Parliament to act.

Do you suspect there are political forces behind lynching incidents?

We would like to keep the draft non-political. Lynching is, in fact the street majoritarianisms contempt or defiance of law. In recent years, this has grown through help from social media, TV studios and public speeches.

We have introduced some provisions to deal with this aspect but have ensured that the basic freedom of speech is not affected. For instance, if there is a demonstrable link between an incident and an inciting speech, it can be handled by the draft law.

The 2012 Nirbhaya rape and murder case protests were political but led to changes in the criminal law. Similarly pro-Lokpal protests were political as well but saw no changes in the anti-corruption law.

In 2013, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act expanded the definition of rape and criminalised sexual relations with girls below 18 while adding sections against acid attacks, voyeurism, stalking and other forms sexual assault or harassment.

We want a proliferation of debate on the issue. Any law will have shortcomings as new situations emerge.

Can you give us a glimpse into some specifics from the draft?

The draft bill criminalises indirect incitement of mobs through vilification. Punishment is a maximum of life imprisonment for the crime, once prosecuted.

Police officers and district magistrates, who wilfully fail to prevent such incidents, shall be punished with imprisonment, which may extend to one year, or with fine, or both.

The draft bill includes a provision that will hold the local station house officer responsible for any lynching that take place in his/her jurisdiction, subject to a time-bound judicial probe to ascertain whether the events were truly out of their control.

Will it involve people who assist the offenders?

Yes. Punishment for giving financial aid for the commission of lynching includes those who knowingly spend or supply any money to support an act, which is an offence under this bill.

Existing laws do not look at the factors leading to the lynching such as campaigns and demonisation.

How will the guilty be punished?

The draft bill proposes designated special courts to hear lynching cases, like those set up under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012. This should help ensure speedy justice and demonstrate the intent of the law to prevent any problems.

It will include provisions for rehabilitation of victims families through mandatory payment of compensation by state governments, rather than leave this to the benevolence of local governments.

Fines collected from those convicted under Masuka will also be distributed to the families. Compensation for the victims will have to be devised by state governments and we have suggested parameters to work them out.

A number of witness protection provisions are to be included that will help ensure that witnesses to the lynchings are not afraid to speak out, as is proving to be the case in the recent Ballabhgarh incident.

The police and the courts will have to protect the identities of witnesses, and there will be punishment for leaking of this information.

Videographic evidence of survivors statements would act as evidence under this proposal. In such cases of lynching, the explicit form of mobocracy, often, survivors live to tell the tale and their statements should be taken as evidence and the same has been prescribed.

IMAGE: Muslims in Haryana stage a protest against mob lynchings. Photograph: PTI Photo.
An angry mob went on rampage in Shimla, ransacking a police station and pelting policemen with stones after a Nepalese labourer, held in connection with the shocking Kotkhai rape and murder case was allegedly killed in the lock-up by another accused, officials said.

The Himachal Pradesh high court handed over the investigation into the gang rape and murder case and also the custodial death of the accused to the Central Bureau of Investigation.

According to police officials, on Tuesday night Nepalese citizen Suraj had a heated argument with Rajendra, who was also arrested in connection with the same case.

Rajendra allegedly banged Suraj's head against a wall, leading to his death, a police official said.

IG (Southern range) Z H Zaidi said that Suraj had narrated the entire sequence leading to the rape incident and named Rajendra as the main accused.

Angered by the killing in the lock-up, a mob attacked the Kotkhai police station, setting ablaze vehicles and hurling stones, in which at least four policemen, including an ASP, were injured.

Furious protestors also blocked the Hatkoti-Theog and the Hindustan-Tibet highways for hours due to which hundreds of people were stranded.

The police faced a tough time even in shifting the injured to a hospital. After much effort, three of the injured policemen were admitted to a local hospital while one critically injured was referred to the Indira Gandhi Medical College in Shimla.

A recommendation for a judicial probe into the custodial death had been made, an official said.

A division bench of the high court consisting of acting chief justice Sanjay Karol and justice Sandeep Sharma directed the CBI to constitute a three member SIT, headed by an officer not below the rank of SP, along with two DSPs, and start investigations.

The court also asked the state police to hand over the entire record of the case to the CBI and also took on record the affidavits filed by the Director General of Police Somesh Goel, who was present in the court.

The state government had earlier moved the high court seeking that the CBI be directed to take over the investigations.

Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh had also written a letter to the prime minister in this regard.

The state government had decided to get the case referred to the CBI for investigation following public outcry against the inquiry by the police.

People had taken to streets last week and there were allegations about attempts to shelter some influential persons involved in the heinous crime and that the six accused held in the case were not the main accused.

To keep the situation under control, additional police force was rushed to Kotkhai, as the authorities feared the killing would trigger outrage.

The Kotkhai rape and murder case took place on July 4 and had led to protests and anger. Even the role of the police came in for much criticism.

A girl, student of class X, was raped and murdered in the Kotkhai area of Shimla district after she took a lift in a vehicle allegedly driven by Rajendra, according to the police.

The victim's body was recovered from the nearby Halila forest two days later.

Six persons, including Suraj and Rajendra, were arrested in connection with the case.

Governor Acharya Devvrat has also asked the state government to give a report within two days and also summoned the DGP.

In a letter addressed to the chief secretary, Devvrat said that the alleged rape and murder of the minor girl was a serious matter which had angered people across the state.

'Various organisations have submitted representations demanding stringent punishment to the culprits and the police must take effective steps to restore the confidence of the people,' the letter said.

Meanwhile, the chief minister, who was on a visit to Mandi, said that Suraj was not the main accused and he was hit by another accused on his genitals and the matter is being investigated.

Bharatiya Janata Party MPs from the state -- JP Nadda, Shanta Kumar, Anurag Thakur and Ram Swaroop along with state party chief Satpal Singh Satti called on Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and expressed concern over the worsening law and order situation in Himachal Pradesh and demanded dismissal of the state government.

The party has called for a 'bandh' in Shimla and said it will stage demonstrations on July 21.

IMAGE: Irate mob set ablaze a police vehicle at Kotkhai near Shimla on Wednesday following alleged murder of a suspect lodged in jail by another co-accused in the 16-yr-old girls rape-and murder case. Photograph: PTI Photo
The issue of lynchings resonated in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday where the Opposition alleged involvement of 'some members' of Bharatiya Janata Party and Sangh Parivar in these incidents even as the government said communal colour should not be given to such violence; while in the Lok Sabha, the Opposition accused the government of not being sensitive towards farmers' issues.

Rajya Sabha

As the House took up a discussion on the mob lynching issue, Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said the government is equally concerned about the criminal incidents and everyone should speak in one voice to fight against 'such destructive forces'.

The Centre condemns such incidents, Naqvi said, adding the states should take stringent legal action against those involved.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had also made this clear during the All Party meeting recently, he added during the debate on 'situation arising out of the reported increase in the incidents of lynching and atrocities on minorities and Dalits across the country'.

He alleged that it's a 'conspiracy' that some are trying to 'defame' the government and divert its agenda in the name of such incidents as they think they could level corruption charges on the government in the last three years.

Initiating the debate, Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad attacked the government, saying the rise in these incidents was spreading the message of fear.

"Earlier it was done at individual level. You may not like it, all lynching is done by some members of the ruling party and Sangh Parivar," he alleged.

It is done with a basic understanding and hence no arrests been made in the incidents that happened so far.

"They should have been jailed. Even I can identify hundreds. They are known to the media," the Congress leader said.

Insisting that no Opposition party benefits from these incidents, he said but "one political party, the ruling party is benefiting. This is done for political harvest."

Urging the government to take the matter seriously, Azad said, "This nation belongs to all. Your responsibility is more. You have to take the lead. We can help in creating an atmosphere. If you spoil the atmosphere..."

He urged the ruling party to give up 'vote politics' and work towards making the country strong within to fight the external issues.

"This is not a religious battle. This is not Hindu-Muslim fight. This is everyone's fight for humanity. When our home is weak, how can we fight the external forces...Our house has always been strong. Don't break the house for votes," he said.

Azad said not a single place is safe, from Jammu and Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

"Lynchings are reported from all over. Such incidents are happening for the first time. This used to happen during the medieval age, not even during British times," he said.

He expressed sadness over the 'disturbing trend' that no one comes forward to save a person being lynched.

He, however, praised some sections of the media for continuing to report these incidents fearlessly.

Urging the Opposition to unite and speak with one voice in its fight against the destructive forces, Naqvi said: "Please don't give communal angle to these incidents. If you give, you are helping them..."

"We should together defeat and isolate the destructive forces. We should speak in one voice. ...Please speak truth on this issue," said Naqvi, who is also minister of state for parliamentary affairs.

Asserting that the government will not allow any 'destructive forces' to dominate the development agenda, Naqvi said, "We do not wish any destructive forces to affect the government's development agenda and the country's culture."

He added, "The policy of our government and the party is clear that we will not allow any destructive agenda to dominate on our development agenda."

It would be misunderstanding on the part of 'destructive forces' to think that by 'fabricating the issues', they can divert the attention, Naqvi said. "Then it would be nothing but Mungeri Lal ke Haseen Sapne (day dreaming)," he said.

"This is a conspiracy. Anyone could be doing it. I am not taking any party names. I don't want to get into it."

Stating that lynching incidents were reported in the previous government regime too, the minister said: "Whether lynching incidents happened before or now, strict legal action should be initiated against those involved."

Refuting the Opposition charge that no action was taken against those involved in lynching incidents, he gave details of arrests made in Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharasthra in the last six months.

Samajwadi Party leader Naresh Agrawal said the government should bring a 'stringent law' to curb the lynching incidents.

He added that while the prime minister had made a statement that strict action should be taken against those taking lives in the name of gau rakshaks (cow protection), on the other hand, Goa chief minister made a contradictory statement.

"You are having God's name on lips and knives in your pockets," he said.

He suggested that the prime minister should call a meeting of all the chief ministers and direct them to take strict action against those indulging in lynching.

He said there have been killings in the name of religion and caste which is damaging India's image.

The SP leader also attacked the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh over setting up of 'anti-romeo' squads, saying "You are converting the state into Saudi Arabia".

He alleged that the UP government had failed in maintaining law and order as there have been several cases of rape in the state.

IMAGE: CPI-M's Sitaram Yechury in Rajya Sabha.



Communist Party of India-Marxist leader Sitaram Yechury cited the cases of lynchings that took place over the last two years and demanded that the central government ban cow vigilante groups and moral policing groups, which he described as 'private armies'.

The fight against vigilante groups is necessary to maintain constitutional order, he said.

During his speech, he referred to Sardar Patel's comments while banning Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, mentioned Hitler's remarks on nationalism and also invoked Rabindranath Tagore.

He also cited Bhagvat Gita, saying it says all humans are equal.

The right of equality, granted under the Constitution, is 'being questioned and severely trampled upon through these incidents of lynching', he noted.

The CPI-M leader charged that it is 'Hindutava nationalism' that is giving sustenance to these groups. He stressed on stopping the cult of violence being spread.

"This is not the 'Bharat Mata' I know," he said, adding that his 'Bharat Mata' has place for people of all religions.

Yechury questioned why only the slogan 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai' is considered patriotic. "Was Bhagat Singh, who gave 'Inquilab zindabad' slogan, not patriotic?"

Yechury also referred to articles and editorials in foreign publications criticising these incidents and said, "This is your international standing today".

He said these lynching incidents are not isolated incidents of law and order but part of ideology that seeks to undermine constitution.

"Ban all these cow vigilante groups, ban anti-romeo groups," Yechury said as he rued that beef has become a parameter for religious identification.

IMAGE: Bahujan Samaj party's Satish Chandra Mishra.



Highlighting that the country is a major beef exporter, he asked, "Will you tell me what I should eat and not eat...?"

Trinamool Congress leader Derek O'Brien referred to the prime minister's comment against kiling people in the name of cow-protection and said, "Empty words and generic comments will not work. Name the group. Name the individual. We are deeply suspicious."

O'Brien said the real term should be 'cow terrorism' and not cow vigilantism.

Not only the minorities and Dalits are being targeted, but even the powerful media houses and opposition parties are also being targeted, he said.

"We will not be cowed down to your political terrorism and polictical vendetta," said O'Brien while citing various cases like 'Sarada scam' in which some of his party colleagues are facing allegations.

The TMC leader charged that the government is also engaged in financial and tax terrorism.

O'Brien, whose party is in power in West Bengal, alleged that fake pictures were being ciruclated on social media by a BJP leader during the recent violence in the state.

"But polarisation will never happen in West Bengal," he added.

Concluding his speech, he appealed to all Opposition parties to join hands to fight BJP. "We will get GST - 'Growing Strong Together'.

Lok Sabha

In the Lok Sabha, the Opposition demanded loan waiver, better minimum support price and criminal cases against those responsible for death of farmers during agitation in Madhya Pradesh recently.

Initiating a discussion on the 'agrarian situation in the country', Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia said the condition of farmers has deteriorated and the number of suicides have increased under the present government.

"This government is not sensitive towards the issues of farmers. Prime Minister Narendra Modi immediately tweets at global disasters but he has not tweeted anything on the killings of farmers in Mandsaur," he said.

He said even the Agriculture Minister has not visited Mandsaur 'as he was busy doing yoga with Ramdev baba'.

He said farmers are facing problems and are in a state of despondency, not only in Madhya Pradesh but in other states too, including Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra.

"This despondency is there in every nook and corner of the country," he said.

He said the government is talking about smart cities and building high rise buildings but those will not stand with weak foundation.

IMAGE: Congress' Jyotiraditya Scindia in Lok Sabha.



Scindia said that in its election manifesto, the BJP had promised to double farmers' income and implementation of Swaminathan recommendations, but they are not doing anything.

"Today's reality is that farmers' are suffocating. Two hands are required to suffocate a person and here one hand is increasing input cost like power and fertiliser and other one is no increase in minimum support price (MSP)," he said.

In the last three years, he said, agriculture sector has recorded a growth of only 1.7 per cent while during the last three years of the UPA regime, the growth rate was 3.6 per cent.

Intervening, Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh said Scindia) was 'misleading the House'.

He said in 2016-17, the sector grew by 4.9 per cent. The government has promised to reduce the input cost of farmers, Singh said.

Scindia said after implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST), prices of fertiliser, tractor and equipment have increased.

Diesel prices during the United Progressive Alliance regime was low even when the global crude oil prices were $125 per barrel, he said adding during this government oil prices have down to $55 per barrel but diesel prices in the domestic market is high.

In countries like Pakistan and Sri Lanka, diesel prices are lower than that of India, he added.

"In whose pockets, these high taxes are going? This is 'suit boot ki sarkar'," the Congress leader said.

Today farmers are forced to throw their tomatoes, onion and potatoes on roads, he said, adding soon milk would also be spread on roads.

He also said that prices of several agri produce like grapes, groundnut and cotton have declined significantly.

"Only 60 per cent farmers gets MSP and 40 per cent are forced to sell their produce at below MSP. Middlemen are enjoying," Scindia said.

He said the Prime Minister promised that after demonetisation, people would not stand in queues, but in vegetable mandis, one can see long queues of farmers.

He also alleged that government is not settling payments of farmers under the Fasal Bima Yojna.

During UPA's regime, Rs 72,000 crore worth of farm loan was waived and now also states like Karnataka and Punjab have waived loans of 22 crore and 10 crore farmers respectively, he said.

"Today, this government is saying that we will not waive farm loans," he said and asked, "if farmers are not demanding loan waiver, then why they are committing suicide?"

He placed five demands with the government which include farm loan waiver, minimum support price as per the recommendations of Swaminathan committee and criminal cases against those responsible for killing of farmers in Mandsaur.

He also asked the government to resolve issues related to Fasal Bima Yojna and irregularities in mandis.

"The Prime Minister says that everything is fine in the country but people here are lynched in the name of cow vigilantism," Scindia said.

This government came to power with the support of farmers's votes but now they are suppressing them, he said.

Referring the recent agitation in Mandsaur district of Madhya Pradesh in which six people were killed, he said, 'when the farmers approach the government with their problems, they are sprayed with bullets'.

Farmers were killed and they were also put behind bars and during such times, no minister visited the state, he said.

Blaming Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan for the plight of farmers in the state, Scindia criticised him, saying during the recent agitation, he sat on fast instead of addressing the grievances of the protesters.

He said farmers were called to Bhopal, all the way from Mandsaur, and it was conveyed to them that they would get compensation only when the chief minister ends his fast.

Intervening, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said whatever the Congress leader is alleging, he should authenticate all that before the House. Otherwise, those remarks should be expunged, he urged the chair.

IMAGE: Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh.



Scindia, while attacking the ruling side, claimed that one of members had once described Nathuram Godse as a 'patriot'. A minister had said that removal of Mahatma Gandhi's picture from the KVIC calender and printing Prime Minister Narendra Modi's picture has helped in pushing sales, he added.

Vijendra Singh (BJP) demanded for a special session of Parliament to discuss all the issues related with farmers.

Intervening, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said, "One day, I would orgainse such session...we are politicians. We know about the issues of farmers."

Singh also suggested ways to help farmers get better prices of perishable items.

He said such produce can be supplied to defence and para military forces.

Talking about the MS Swaminathan report, he said, "Swaminathan is not a Bramha (God). As a farmer, I too have not agreed to all his recommendations. Farm loan waiver is not a permanent solution. We need to find ways so that farmers can not become indebted."

Kalyan Banerjee (TMC) said that farmer killing and suicides have become a national issue today.

"Of all suicides in India, 11.2 per cent are farmers suicide," Banerjee said.

As per the data of the national crime bureau, in the last three years, farmer suicide has increased in states like Maharashtra, Telengana, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

He said bankruptcy and indebtedness are the most largest reasons for farmers suicides.

"Farmers rights has to be considered in a respected manner. It is a serious and emotional issue," he added.

Bhartruhari Mahtab (Biju Janata Dal) asked the agriculture minister to look at three main issues - Fasal Bima Yojna, MSP mechanism and loans given by financial and non-financial institutions.

"There is an unrest through out the country...promises made for farmers should be fulfilled," he said, adding farmers are feeling cheated and betrayed after demonetisation.
Chief of Air Staff B S Dhanoa on Tuesday flew a sortie in a Rafale fighter jet from a French airbase to gain first-hand experience of the aircraft, 36 of which are being procured for the Indian Air Force.

Dhanoa is a on a four-day visit to France to ramp up cooperation between the air forces of the two countries in a range of areas.

He flew the fighter at the Saint-Dizier airbase -- a prominent installation of the French air force, an IAF official said.

India is procuring the Rafale multi-role fighter jets from French aviation major Dassault under a Euro 7.87 billion (approx Rs 59,000 crore) deal inked in September last year

Air Chief Marshal Dhanoa will also take stock of progress in their supply.

The fighter jets are capable of carrying nuclear weapons and will be equipped with the latest missiles that will give the IAF greater "potency" over arch-rival Pakistan.

The Rafale combat aircraft will come with various India- specific modifications including Israeli helmet mounted displays, radar warning receivers and low band jammers, among others.

The Inter-Governmental Agreement for the supply of the jets was signed in September last year, 16 months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced India's plans to buy 36 Rafale aircraft in fly-away condition.

According to the deal, the delivery of the jets will start in 36 months and will be completed in 67 months from the date the contract is inked.

Photographs: Indian Air Force
United States President Donald Trump had a second undisclosed meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of G20 summit in Germany early this month, according to media reports.

The White House has confirmed that the two leaders spoke during the G20 dinner, but said it is incorrect to describe it as the second meeting.

"There was no "second meeting" between President Trump and President Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner. The insinuation that the White House has tried to "hide" a second meeting is false, malicious and absurd," the White House said on Tuesday after various media reports came about the second meeting.

The meeting lasted for about an hour and was in addition to the two and half hour meeting the two leaders had as part of the structured dialogue, the media reports claimed.

"It is not merely perfectly normal, it is part of a President's duties, to interact with world leaders. Throughout the G20 and in all his other foreign engagements, President Trump has demonstrated American leadership by representing our interests and values on the world stage," the White House said in support of the meeting.

The White House said during the night of the G20 summit, there was, first, a concert for all the leaders in the new Hamburg opera house. The leaders were all photographed by the press in before going inside.

Later that night, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosted a dinner for leaders and spouses only, and the German government set the seating arrangements, it said.

The concert and dinner were publicly announced on both the President's schedule and the G20 schedule, with the clear understanding that all visiting leaders would be present, it added.

"At the dinner, President Trump was seated between Mrs Abe, wife of the Prime Minister of Japan, and Mrs Macri, wife of the President of Argentina. Mrs Trump was seated next to President Putin," the White House said.

During the course of the dinner, all the leaders circulated throughout the room and spoke with one another freely, the White House explained.

"President Trump spoke with many leaders during the course of the evening. As the dinner was concluding, President Trump went over to Mrs Trump, where he spoke briefly with President Putin," it said.

"Each couple was allowed one translator. The American translator accompanying President Trump spoke Japanese. When President Trump spoke to President Putin, the two leaders used the Russian translator, since the American translator did not speak Russian," the White House said.

Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, said the absence of American translator in the meeting was breach of national security protocol.

"Never in my life as a political scientist have I seen two countries, major countries, with a constellation of national interests that are as dissonant, while the two leaders seem to be doing everything possible to make nice and be close to each other," he told Bloomberg in an interview.

The New York Times said the meeting raises new questions about Trump-Putin relationship.

"The intimate dinner conversation, of which there is no official US government record, because no American official other than the president was involved, is the latest to raise eyebrows. Foreign leaders who witnessed it later commented privately on the oddity of an American president flaunting such a close rapport with his Russian counterpart," the daily reported.

"Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the US, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesn't care," Bremmer was quoted as saying by The New York Times.

Bremmer said he heard directly from attendees.

"They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled," he said.

But in a series of two tweets, Trump slammed the media.

"Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany," Trump said.

"Press knew about it. The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!" Trump said in another tweet.
A derogatory remark by senior Samajwadi Party leader Naresh Agrawal in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday linking names of Hindu gods with alcohol sparked an uproar forcing two adjournments and triggering demands for his apology.

The remark by Agrawal was expunged by the chair even as it came for a strong condemnation from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party members.

The BJP members demanded an apology, saying the comment had hurt religious feelings of a majority of people and that it also was a form of 'lynching'.

Agrawal made the remark while participating in a short duration debate on 'rising incidents of lynching and atrocities on minorities and Dalits across the country'.

After two adjournments, when the House re-assembled, Agrawal apologised, saying he did not intend to hurt the sentiments of anyone.

"If someone has been been hurt, I express my regret," the SP member said.

Later, Deputy Chairman P J Kurien ruled that part of Agrawal's remarks had been expunged and asked the media to guard against using these.

Earlier, while taking strong objection to the words used by Agrawal, Leader of the House and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said: "He (Agrawal) has linked up each of the Hindu Gods with brands (varieties) of alcohol. If he had said this outside, he would have been liable to prosecution.

"You have not realised the gravity of what you have said. Do you have the audacity to say about other Gods?"

Seeking an apology, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said, "He cannot hurt the sentiments of the majority people who are Hindus. He cannot hold the House to ransom."

BJP member Bhupender Yadav said, "In this House, no member should hurt the feelings of others. This is also lynching."

The ruling party members were on their feet demanding apology and shouted slogans 'Bhagwan ka apman nahi chalega (disrespect to Gods will not be tolerated)'.

Kurien, who missed the remark as he was busy speaking to a member, said he will check the records and expunge the comment.

"I have called for records. I will check and expunge the comment if any derogatory remarks are made," he said.

Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi requested the Chair to adjourn the House till the records were checked. The House was then adjourned for 10 minutes.

As soon as the House re-assembled at 3.21 pm, both the Treasury and the Opposition members were on their feet and traded barbs.

Trying to bring the House to order, the deputy chairman said, "I have gone through the records. It is per se derogatory and hurting the sentiments of majority community... I have expunged these remarks...He should not have made the remarks..."

However, the uproar continued with Agrawal reiterating that cowsheds are run by Agrawal community and 'if my statement has hurt members, I withdraw it'.

But the BJP members continued to demand apology from him.

The deputy chairman intervened, saying he had already 'disapproved' of and 'condemned' the remark and urged the members to not to fight on the issue.

The remarks were 'hurting' members sentiments and 'it is not on record', Kurien said.

He urged Agrawal to express regret and react to the situation to bring the House to order.

Agrawal said, "Lynching is a major issue..." To this, Kurien insisted that he should express regret.

Communist Party of India-Marxist leader Sitaram Yechury tried to intervene, saying the matter should be allowed to rest.

"Naresh Agrawal has said something offensive. you (chair) have gone on record condemning that. It is my appeal that let the House function," Yechury said.

However, the ruling party members were adamant on Agrawal tendering apology.

Ananth Kumar said, "He has not insulted a single person. He has insulted a community."

Amid slogans like "Bhagwan ka apman nahi chalega (insult to the God will not be allowed)", "Sri Ram ka apman nahi chalega (insult to Ram will not be allowed)" and "Apne devo ka apman, nahi sahega Hindustan (India will not tolerate insult to its deities)."

Ram Gopal Yadav, another party leader of the SP, said Agrawal will not tender apology even if the entire session has to function like this.

Naresh Gujral (Shiromani Akali Dal) suggested sending the issue to the Privileges Committee of the Rajya Sabha for a decision on it.

Anand Sharma (Congress) said the Gods belong to all and not only to the ruling party members. He said the ruling party should not become the 'custodians of God'.

He said last year, during the JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) agitation, a cabinet minister had made certain 'derogatory' remarks against Goddess Durga and refused to apologise.

He said the issue pertained to faith of all and urged for a solution to it.

However, the ruling party members continued to raise slogans and the Chair adjourned the House till 4 pm.

When house re-convened, Ananth Kumar again condemned Agrawal's remark and said he should apologise.

He said the government wants the House to function and the SP member should not make it a prestige issue.

Ram Gopal Yadav then referred to Anand Sharma's comment about a cabinet minister making 'derogatory' remarks against Goddess Durga last year.

Yadav said if the cabinet minister has apologised, then Agrawal will also apologise. "There cannot be double standards," he added.

Agrawal then expressed regret and said in his entire political career, he has never hurt sentiments of any caste and religion.

The SP leader said he has never made any personal allegations as well.

Earlier, IT and Law Minister Ravi Shanker Prasad said that Agrawal's comment was not correct and that the SP leader should express regret.

After Kurien's ruling about expunging the remarks, Congress leader Anand Sharma said it should be ensured that these comments do not surface on the social media and passions are not inflamed.

Prasad said he would convey this to the authorities concerned.

At the same time, he said the character of social media has changed and 'we will have to collectively ensure that this does not spread' on the social media.

IMAGE: Samajwadi Party member Naresh Agarwal speaks in the Rajya Sabha in New Delhi on Wednesday. Photograph: PTI Photo
The report said India continues to experience attacks by 'Pakistan-based terrorists'.

The United States on Wednesday listed Pakistan among the nations and regions providing 'safe havens' to terrorists, saying terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed continued to operate, train, organise and fundraise inside the country.

In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the State Department said that Mumbai attack

mastermind and United Nations-designated terrorist Hafiz Saeed continued to address large rallies, although in February 2017 Pakistan proscribed him under relevant provisions of Anti-Terrorism Act.

'Although LeT is banned in Pakistan, LeT's wings Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation were able to openly engage in fundraising, including in the capital,' it said.

'LeT's chief Saeed continued to address large rallies, although in February 2017, Pakistan proscribed him under relevant provisions of Schedule Four of the Anti-Terrorism Act, thus severely restricting his freedom of movement,' it noted.

The 2015 ban on media coverage of Saeed, JuD, and FiF continued and was generally followed by broadcast and print media, it said.

It said Pakistan did not take substantial action against the Afghan Taliban or Haqqani, or substantially limit their ability to threaten US interests in Afghanistan, although Pakistan supported efforts to bring both groups into an Afghan-led peace process.

'Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in 2016, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan,' the report said.

India, it said continued to experience attacks, 'including by Maoist insurgents and Pakistan-based terrorists'.

Indian authorities continued to blame Pakistan for cross-border attacks in Jammu and Kashmir, it said.

'In January, India experienced a terrorist attack against an Indian military facility in Pathankot, Punjab, which was blamed by authorities on JeM. Over the course of 2016, the government of India sought to deepen counterterrorism cooperation and information sharing with the United States,' the State Department said.

The Indian government continued to closely monitor the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like Islamic State and Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), which made threats against India in their terrorist propaganda. A number of individuals were arrested for IS-affiliated recruitment and attack plotting within India, the report said.

In a separate chapter, the State Department listed Pakistan as one of the safe havens of terrorism.

The State Department said that numerous terrorist groups, including the Haqqani Network (HQN), the LeT and JeM continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2016.

According to the State Department, the Pakistani government did not publicly reverse its December 2015 declaration that neither JuD nor FiF is banned in Pakistan, despite their listing under UN sanctions regimes, although in January 2017, Pakistan placed both organisations 'under observation' pursuant to Schedule Two of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

While not a ban, keeping the outfits under observation allows the government to closely scrutinise the activities of both organisations.

On November 11, Pakistan's National Counter-terrorism Authority published its own list of banned organisations that placed JuD in a separate section for groups that are 'under observation' but not banned.

Pakistan continued military operations to eradicate terrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, although their impact on all terrorist groups was uneven, it said.

In its report to the Congress, the State Department said in 2016, India and the United States pledged to strengthen cooperation against terrorist threats from groups including Al Qaeda, the ISIS, JeM, LeT and D-Company (Dawood Ibrahim's group), including through greater collaboration on designations at the UN.

Indian and US leaders directed officials to identify new areas of collaboration through the July US-India Counterterrorism Joint Working Group, applauded finalisation of a bilateral arrangement to facilitate the sharing of terrorism screening information, and called upon Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of terrorist attacks against India to justice, the report said.

The United States and India worked together to designate JeM leader Maulana Masood Azhar, although the listing was blocked in the UN 1267 Committee, the State Department said.

Other areas mentioned in the report as safe havens are Afghanistan, Somalia, the Trans-Sahara, Sulu/Sulawesi Seas Littoral, Southern Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Columbia and Venezuela.

Meanwhile, sources in New Delhi said that the US listing of Pakistan among the nations and regions providing safe havens to terrorists is a 'vindication' of India's long-standing position on the menace of cross-border terrorism in its region.
Suddenly the sands are shifting and even friends are acting strange, notes Aditi Phadnis..

In a Delhi suburb, owners of a restaurant called Yummy Bhutan (where, by the way, you can get 'very tasty Chinese food') could be echoing China's sentiments.

Yummy Bhutan is exactly how China is looking at Bhutan. And India has made it quite clear that it doesn't like it.

To misquote Princess Diana ('There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded'), there are three in the Doklam standoff -- India, Bhutan and China.

The postures are such that South Asia has been plunged into acute anxiety and tension. Worse, there are indications that the Great Game is being played out again.

Like all tensions, it began with boundary and land: 14 countries have land borders with China -- Russia, Mongolia, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, India, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Because of its colonial history, China had territorial disputes with all of them. It has settled its land boundaries with all its neighbours -- barring India and Bhutan.

So what do the disputes involve?

With Bhutan, it is a matter of 764 sq km of territory.

Beijing claims 495 sq km of territory in the Jakurlung and Pasamlung Valleys in north-central Bhutan and another 269 sq km in western Bhutan, comprising the Doklam Plateau.

Doklam Plateau abuts the Chumbi Valley, which, like Tawang on Bhutan's eastern border, has enormous strategic significance for China, Bhutan as well as India.

If China gets hold of this territory, the military advantage in India's Northeast might as well be lost to China.

But that's not all.

The understanding between Bhutan and India is that their border disputes are to be settled together, not piecemeal as there is an intrinsic strategic linkage between the two in the Chumbi Valley.

By annexing the Doklam sector, the Chinese People's Liberation Army will widen the eastern shoulder of the Chumbi Valley and with the road extension, achieve significant operational and logistical flexibility for a military strike through the Chumbi Valley towards the Siliguri corridor.

Bhutan is China's only neighbour that Beijing does not have official diplomatic relations with.

This suits India fine.

In 1949, Bhutan signed the Treaty of Perpetual Peace and Friendship with India, under which it agreed 'to be guided by the advice of the Government of India in regard to its external relations'.

This has underwritten India's advisory role in Bhutan's foreign policy making, including relations with China.

The India-Bhutan Friendship Treaty, which replaced the 1949 Treaty, in 2007, does not require Thimphu to be guided by Indian advice on foreign policy matters.

It only requires them to 'cooperate closely... on issues relating to their national interests'.

China views India's treatment of Bhutan as a 'protectorate' abhorrent.

But there are legitimate reasons for Bhutan's fear of China.

It watched with silent horror the crushing of the Tibet uprising in 1959, the punishment meted out to followers of Buddhism and the vigorous implementation of a classless society in China.

Bhutan has its own ruling elite. Its monastic estates, and estates belonging to the handful of nobility -- the Drukpa -- were worked by tenured serfs and slaves.

Socialism, much less Communism, does not come naturally to it. And it has just about managed to cope with a refugee problem: With the Nepalese for instance.

It certainly does not want hordes of Tibetan refugees to come streaming into Bhutan.

Like all other countries, Bhutan is changing.

Guided democracy introduced in 2008 has put down shallow roots. But because of this, there are people who question Bhutan's almost blind allegiance to India and argue that third country domination in Sino-Bhutan relations (such as they are) is not desirable.

The signals of the changes were first out there for everyone to see when Jigmi Thinley, Bhutan's first prime minister, met then Chinese premier Wen Jiabao on the sidelines of the climate summit at Rio de Janeiro in Brazil in June 2013.

India was kept out of the loop.

An official People's Republic of China release quoted Thinley as saying Bhutan wished 'to forge formal diplomatic ties with China as soon as possible.'

China responded with a statement that it was ready to settle the border issue with Bhutan.

After initial consternation, India's response was ruthless and swift -- and very visible.

Loans were held back and vehicle imports from India to Bhutan were stopped.

Kerosene and LPG subsidies were held back.

All this only strengthened China's resolve to do something about the situation.

Phunchok Stobdan, former ambassador and expert on Asian affairs, says the tension in Doklam should be seen in a wider perspective.

"A solution to this would be back-channel talks," he says. "I don't see any real threat of a war. India should increasingly look to strengthen its borders, especially make sure that there is no incursion into Siliguri."

But the bellicosity of the Chinese official media and its bureaucracy seems calculated to escalate tensions.

Says former Indian ambassador to China Nirupama Rao, "The dispute in the Doklam area is known. It is not a new phenomenon. But China's road construction is a deliberate move to trigger a response from Bhutan and from India."

"Through its actions, China seeks to impose its own definition of the tri-junction point of the boundary between Bhutan, China and India (Sikkim). The move has serious security ramifications for both Bhutan and India's defence interests."

Most professional diplomats counsel prudence, ironically, when for the first time under Narendra Modi India has somewhat ostentatiously tried to demonstrate that it can stand up to China (remember the toothache remark when President Xi Jinping visited Gujarat in 2014?).

On the other hand, almost all experts say that the standoff in Doklam is not a one-off event.

Says R S Kalha, former foreign service officer and China expert, "In my experience of dealing with the Chinese for over 15 years, including leading the Indian side for the crucial boundary sub group, I have never experienced that the Chinese PLA takes steps without approval."

So what are India and China going to do?

Already there are signs that both sides are stepping back from the brink.

A statement by a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman says the Mansarovar Yatra of Indian pilgrims, which was halted because of action 'of India soldiers on Chinese soil', could be reconsidered via another route.

The Indian foreign office is imploring journalists, experts and anyone who will listen that bellicosity and aggression will achieve nothing: Professionals are on the job of defusing tensions and they should be allowed to do their work unhindered.

But this is not a WWF match where the outcome is known to everyone.

Suddenly the sands are shifting and even friends are acting strange.

Ancient words of wisdom might work best here: 'When in doubt, don't.'
Bereaved families tell Rediff.com's Prasanna D Zore how they are coping with their personal tragedies after terrorists gunned down seven tourists from Gujarat and Maharashtra on July 10 in Kashmir.

Photographs and video: Hitesh Harisinghani/Rediff.com

Seven tourists were killed on July 10 when terrorists attacked a bus at Bantegoo in Kashmir's Anantnag district.

They were on their way from Srinagar to Katra.

Mostly from Maharashtra and Gujarat, these tourists had embarked from Gujarat on July 2 and visited Shrinathji, Ajmer Sharif, the Golden Temple, the Wagah border by July 8, when they reached Baltal.

From there they visited the holy cave of Lord Amarnath on July 8, and after a brief detour in Srinagar, were headed to Katra, so that they could visit Vaishnodevi and then move on to Shimla, Kulu-Manali before returning home by July 22.

But the terrorist attack on July 10 cut short their plans.

Rediff.com's Prasanna D Zore and Hitesh Harisinghani visited five bereaved families.

We could not visit the family of Ratan Jinabhai Patel from Daman and Ushaben Sonkar from Dahanu, Maharashtra, for the former's family had left for Surat for some work and the latter's family was in Nashik to immerse Ushaben's ashes in the Godavari river, considered as the Ganga of the Deccan.

***

'My mother was quite happy about the way their tour was shaping up'

IMAGE: Pinal Prajapati's father has recovered from a severe paralytic stroke and now that his mother Champaben is no more, his wife will have to take care of his father and 18-month-old baby as he leaves early morning and comes late night from his job at Vapi, some 50 km from his home in Valsad's Gandevi village

"On the day of the attack, when I called my mother I could not reach her," says a misty-eyed Pinal Prajapati.

His mother Champaben was among the seven tourists killed by terrorists on July 10.

Champaben is survived by Pinal, her husband who recovered from a severe bout of paralysis just a year ago, a daughter, and Pinal's wife and son.

His sister, who lives in Navsari, was fortunate to speak with her that evening, an hour or so before the bus was targetted.

"When my sister tried later in the evening, around 7 pm, on my uncle's number, my mother told her they were all fine and were on their way to Katra from Srinagar," Pinal says.

State Reserve Police Force and Gujarat police troopers stood guard outside the Prajapatis' modest house in Gandevi, a small town, about 20 odd kilometres from Navsari.

The Prajapatis, ten members of whose extended family had gone on this tour, could not speak regularly with Champaben because of the network problem in Jammu and Kashmir.

At 8.30 pm when Pinal was watching the news he realised what had happened.

His aunt, who stays next door, told him that a bus had been attacked by terrorists.

He informed his aunt that his sister spoke to his mother earlier that day and that could not be his mother's bus as they were on their way to Katra.

"At midnight, my uncle called me from Vapi and informed that the bus in which my mother was travelling was attacked."

Pinal did not believe his uncle.

Reality struck much later at 2 am when the Gandevi police knocked at his door. They inquired if any person from his house had gone to Amarnath.

"At that time, to know about my mother, I called my mama (mother's brother) who was with her and asked him. He told me my mother was hit and died on the spot. He said he was coming to Surat with her body the next day."

After hearing about the tragedy Pinal called his sister and brother-in-law.

"This was the first time my mother, mama and mami went for the Amarnath Yatra," he adds.

Pinal last spoke to his mother on July 5 when they were at the Wagah border.

"She was quite happy about the way their tour was shaping up. I dropped my mother at the Chikhali bus stop on the national highway," he says sadly.

"I only wish that terrorism should be uprooted from Kashmir and I am sure this government will definitely take strong measures after this incident to finish them off," says Pinal.

***

'These terrorists should be shot at sight'

IMAGE: Suresh Patel and his younger brother work as conservancy staff for the Valsad Nagarpalika. Suresh's wife, fourth from left, works as a domestic help to help supplement the family's income.

This was Laxmiben Patel's 15th visit to the holy Amarnath cave.

Being a cook has its advantage and being a good cook raises your demand among tour operators so much that they prefer you over others each time they arrange a journey like this.

For Laxmiben her 15th visit to the holy shrine turned out to be her last one.

"My mother was a very good cook and pilgrims loved her cuisine. She did this for almost 15 to 20 years and must have been to Amarnath almost 15 times," her son Sureshbhai recalls.

Like Pinal, Sureshbhai too was unlucky when it came to speaking with his mother. But his son Ajay, whose birthday it was on July 5, called Laxmiben to seek her blessings.

"I could not speak with my mother; my son spoke with her on his birthday on July 5. She wished him well," Sureshbhai, an employee of the Valsad Nagarpalilka, says.

IMAGE: In a dimly lit room inside the Patel household, Laxmiben's mortal remains are kept inside a steel utensil for people to pay their last respects before the ashes are consigned to eternity.

When he saw the news about the terrorist attack on the night of July 10 he was scared.

The family of another lady, who had accompanied to help his mother on this tour, came to his house after hearing the news.

Then he got a list on WhatsApp which had the names of his mother and her assistant among the dead.

Later that night, a police picket was posted outside his house.

"Media people came visiting. The next morning the media as well as the police control room confirmed that while my mother had died, the lady accompanying her was seriously injured and recovering in an ICU there," says Sureshbhai about his mother's loss.

"I felt very weak and could not believe that my mother was no more. I did not believe it," he emphasises to overcome his shock.

A bereaved Sureshbhai has just one plea to the government: "I request the government to strengthen security at such pilgrimage places where terrorist attacks are expected."

"They should clog all the entry and exit routes of these terrorists and they should be shot at sight," he adds sternly.

He then softens his voice as he says, "Many people who cannot afford to pay for such pilgrimages save money for years together. They undergo hardships so that they can go on their pilgrimage. They go there to see the face of God; God is there in our home too, but still they go there because of the purity of that place. Then why should such people face the bullets of terrorists?"

Sureshbhai, who heartily praised Salim Sheikh, the bus driver, for driving speedily despite heavy firing from automatic weapons, says, "If these terrorists have the guts then they should come and fight our soldiers; they shouldn't act in a cowardly manner and kill the old and pilgrims."

"If they don't have the guts to face our soldiers they should wear their wives' bangles and sit at home."

***

'If your mother is not alive today, she will never come back'

IMAGE: While Surekhaben is no more, Jigar Patel and his family are anxious to know about his mother's last moments before the terrorists' bullets killed her.

When I saw the news on TV I tried to call my mother, but nobody answered the call. Then I called tour manager Yogesh Prajapati at 10 pm who informed that my mother had been hit by a bullet and taken to the hospital. He said, he will call me as soon as he had any information about her condition. When I called him again at 2 am he confirmed to me that my mother was no more," says Jigar Patel in one breath outside his family home in Udwada, Gujarat.

His mother Surekhaben was among those who died in the terrorist attack.

"Why do terrorists kill innocents and old people? Those who go to bow before God? Why don't they try their strength against somebody who is equally strong?" he asks, echoing Sureshbhai.

"I have no idea if security lapses led to this attack. I tried to speak with three people in our area who were in the same bus. But they are so depressed and scared that they are in no position to talk to us about the attack."

IMAGE: Jigar, with the Rs 10 lakh compensation cheque issued by the Gujarat government, says the money means nothing to them.

"Keep your mother on one side and money on the other. Who will you choose?" he asks.

Jigar prays that the tragedy his family suffered should not visit anybody else's doorstep.

"Terrorists should be dealt with in the language they understand, the language they speak. Order not one, but five surgical strikes but finish these terrorists once and for all," he fumes.

"Till the time these terrorists are not finished, my mother's soul will not rest in peace. The whole world must be united and lead a fight to finish against terrorists," he adds.

Jigar's shock becomes visible when he reveals that he spoke to his mother about 30 minutes before terrorists fired bullets at the bus.

"She spoke with me, my wife and my son. She said she was enjoying the tour and they were heading to Katra that night. She was so happy and content that night," he says remembering his last conversation with Surekhaben.

Ask him about the compensation that the Gujarat and central governments have announced, and he says, "Keep your mother on one side and money on the other. Who will you choose? Obviously, your mother. Money means nothing: I have it today, won't have it tomorrow, earn it again the next day. If your mother is not alive today, she will never come back."

***

'And then my father left for his final journey'

IMAGE: Though his wife survived the terrorist attack, Ratilal Patel wasn't so fortunate.

Ratilal's nephew Ramesh Patel and his wife, who were seated next to them, survived the attack.

When Ratilal Jinabhai Patel's last rites were being performed on July 11, his wife, who was also hit by bullets in the July 10 attack, stood beside her husband's body at their ancestral home in Vadoli, Valsad.

Later that evening when the bereaved came back home after conducting Ratilal's last rites, his wife was admitted to a hospital in Vapi.

The next day she was operated upon to remove bullet shrapnel still lodged in her hand.

"My mother is in shock and we have not discussed what happened that night," Santosh, Ratilal's son, tells Rediff.com on July 12.

On the night of the attack, around 10 pm, one of his uncle called to inform him that a bus full of Amarnath Yatris had been attacked by terrorists in Kashmir.

When they saw the number of the bus flashing on news channels the family knew it was the same bus in which his father and mother were travelling.

When they called the phones of his father, mother and two relatives who were with them, nobody answered their call.

"We desperately called my parents on their numbers, but nobody answered the calls. I didn't even know if they were alive or dead," Santosh recalls the harrowing time the Patel family had that night.

When the media visited their home at 6 am he knew something was wrong.

The day before the attack Santosh spoke with his parents when they had finished the Amarnath Yatra.

"My father told me they would be staying that night there (Baltal) and start their journey the next morning."

"And then my father left for his final journey," says Santosh.

***

'My mother is Modi's mother too; he will punish the killers of his mother'

IMAGE: It was not just Nirmalaben's body that was riddled with bullets, says Neetu Singh Thakur, her daughter; even her belongings stored in the bus's boot were in tatters.

Neetu Singh, Nirmala Thakur's daughter, was left with no doubt her mother's bus was attacked by terrorists on July 10 when she saw the bus on TV.

"I recognised the bus the moment I saw it because I had gone to drop my mother at Udwada on July 2 when they started their journey," says Singh, who was at her mother's house in Maharashtra's Dahanu on July 13.

Nirmalaben wanted to meet her daughter on her way to this 20-day tour so she had travelled to Udwada, her pick up point, from Dahanu.

A week after she dropped her mother on that ill-fated bus in Udwada, Singh heard about the terrorist attack on television.

Singh called Pallaviben, who was also travelling on the same bus, the person who had booked her mother on the tour.

"When we called Pallaviben that night she said my mother was alive but injured and so we could not talk to her. But if my mother was alive, if she had even an iota of life in her, she would have made sure to call us and inform us about her condition. I know my mother well," says Singh.

Her brother Pradip had left for Nashik that morning to immerse her mother's mortal remains in the Godavari.

The next morning, television channels flashed Nirmalaben's name among those who had died in the attack and the Thakurs' worst fears had come true.

IMAGE: Nirmalaben's daughter-in-law shows the bullet-riddled jacket she had bought as a gift for Neetu Singh Thakur's son.

Singh wants this terrorist attack to be avenged.

"I know I have lost my mother, but have full faith in my brother Narendrabhai that he will not spare even a single terrorist. He will hunt them out and finish them off," she says.

"My mother is his mother too. He will punish the killers of his mother," Singh adds.

"Lakhs of faithful are going for the Amarnath Yatra. I would request him to provide more security to them so that they can bow before God without fears of terrorists."
By PTI: New Delhi, Jul 19 (PTI) The government is hopeful that a new model regarding the use of biofuels and developed through indigenous technology would emerge in the coming days, Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said today.

During the Question Hour in Rajya Sabha, the Petroleum and Natural Gas minister said that efforts were being made by Indian scientists regarding the use of biofuels.

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As per the existing policy, ethanol for ethanol blended petrol (EBP) programme is procured from the molasses route by the public sector oil marketing companies.

Ethanol production through molasses in the country for in 2016-17 is estimated to be 220 crore litres, he said.

"This ethanol/alcohol is used in the potable liquor sector, chemical sector and EBP programme. In the current ethanol supply year, oil PSUs have executed agreements for the supply of 78.7 crore litres of ethanol," he said. PTI ADS ARC

--- ENDS ---
Title Third Report submitted by Georgia pursuant to Article 25, paragraph 2 of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities

Publication Date 12 July 2017

Country Georgia

Citation / Document Symbol ACFC/SR/III(2017)002

Cite as Council of Europe: Secretariat of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, Third Report submitted by Georgia pursuant to Article 25, paragraph 2 of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, 12 July 2017, ACFC/SR/III(2017)002, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f078d4.html [accessed 12 November 2022]

Comments (Received on 12 July 2017)
Russia: Jehovah's Witnesses now banned

Publisher Forum 18 Author Victoria Arnold Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as Forum 18, Russia: Jehovah's Witnesses now banned, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f0b5f4.html [accessed 12 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.

Russia's Supreme Court has upheld liquidation of all Jehovah's Witness organisations as "extremist". If they exercise freedom of religion and belief, all Jehovah's Witnesses can now be criminally prosecuted. A Jehovah's Witness conscientious objector has also been ordered to work with nuclear weapons.
How jobs can help Niger win the war against Boko Haram

Publisher IRIN Author Obi Anyadike Publication Date 17 July 2017 Cite as IRIN, How jobs can help Niger win the war against Boko Haram, 17 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f0be91.html [accessed 12 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.

Demobilising ex-combatants as part of a peace deal is hard to do at the best of times. But increasingly - from Kenya to Somalia - it's being tried in the middle of ongoing anti-insurgency conflicts, which adds a whole new level of complication.

Disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration - DDR as it's known - is about reducing the risk of violence reigniting by incentivising peace. A stake in the system is seen as the glue to hold post-conflict deals together.

But reality is often messier. Reintegration is hard, especially when economies are dominated by informal business. The vocational training typically offered churns out thousands of carpenters, when cash and therapy seems a better bet.

Former communities have often been displaced, fragmented, and traumatised by conflict, making reinsertion all the harder.

But increasingly DDR is being employed when there's no peace to keep. It's seen as a useful component in countering violent extremism (CVE) programming, which prioritises conventional development goals rather than the drones and special forces more often associated with the "war on terror".

As such, DDR is now more political than it's ever been. Amnesty schemes and the promise of grants and support to surrendering fighters are used as a way to thin opponents' ranks just as much as regular military operations.

There are other concerns. What is the legal framework to distinguish DDR from plain detention? What are the qualification criteria and human rights safeguards? More broadly still are basic questions over "whether or not the necessary doctrine, resources, finances, and partnerships are in place to deliver effective programming," researchers James Cockayne and Siobhan O'Neil note.

A home-grown initiative

Regardless of the challenges, the Sahelian country of Niger is giving it a go. Since 2015 it has suffered attacks from the jihadist group Boko Haram, effortlessly crossing the border with its giant southern neighbour Nigeria to raid and recruit.

In December last year, the government of Niger launched a deradicalisation and reintegration programme for Boko Haram fighters who quit the battlefield. "We will guarantee them security. We will avoid imprisonment," Interior Minister Mohamed Bazoun said when he announced the initiative in the southern town of Diffa. "We will instruct them and teach them a number of activities."

This home-grown initiative has been enthusiastically taken up by Diffa Governor Mahaman Lawaly Dan Dano, who has enlisted the University of Diffa to provide advice and help build community buy-in for "the repantis", or "the repentant", as they are known.

Currently, more than 150 people are in the programme, including fighters' "wives" and 28 young boys. They were originally kept in Diffa town, but conditions were so poor there was an escape attempt and the group has since been moved west to Goudoumaria, a two-hour drive away, to a camp originally built for refugees.

Their circumstances are now a good deal better. There is water. They are fed regularly, and they even have a small infirmary. But there is not yet any psychosocial support, vocational training, nor are there any classes for the children.

"The main problem for the young people may be boredom, lack of learning and recreation opportunities," said the head of the UN children's fund (UNICEF), Viviane Van Steirteghem, who recently visited the camp.

Much yet to do

"The programme is not definitively built," explained Boukari Kassoum, head of the Peace and Development Unit at the University of Diffa. "But it's good that it has begun."

Steirteghem said 12 fully equipped EU-funded vocational training centres will be built in each of Diffa's municipalities, an investment in a deprived region where the first schools didn't arrive until the late 1990s.

A related DDR programme involves the gradual release of some 80 minors captured on both sides of the border and held in detention in the capital, Niamey. They're being returned to so-called "transit and orientation centres" in Diffa, from where they're being returned to their families, with periodic checks made by the authorities.

Steirteghem was guarded over providing further details. "For Niger, this is all relatively new, and extremely sensitive," she told IRIN.

Part of the problem revolves around community acceptance.

Rado Moustapha is the mayor of Goudoumaria, a man you would expect to have a degree of engagement with the deradicalisation programme. But when IRIN visited, he stressed that he was yet to pay a call on the repantis camp, just six kilometres out of town. He clearly regarded the initiative as driven by the ministry of internal affairs and foisted upon Goudoumaria from above.

"I don't know what advantage we will get from it," he told IRIN. For Moustapha, Boko Haram are simply killers. "We don't know what they want - they just slaughter. It's the wrong interpretation of Islam. It's like a revolution by people not brought up correctly who didn't listen to their parents."

Niger versus Nigeria

Southeastern Niger is a Kanuri region, the same ethnic group that in Nigeria form the bulk of Boko Haram. Before the insurgency began in 2009, Mohamed Yusuf, the founder of the group, and his successor, Abubaker Shekau, were familiar figures in Diffa.

But nobody IRIN spoke to believed that affinity for Boko Haram's ideological message - the rejection of Westernisation - amounted to any real reason for recruitment.

Niger is a conservative Islamic country. According to a 2013 Afrobarometer survey, 67 percent of Nigeriens would like to see Sharia adopted in the constitution. But that is a reflection of a yearning for a more just society, an Overseas Development Institute study found.

Multiparty democracy is not rejected: at issue is the system's failings, its seeming privileging of the rich and disempowerment of the poor in Niger.

Akasser al-Fazaz of the NGO SOS-Civisme-Niger is adamant that the factors that have encouraged violent extremism in Nigeria are absent in Niger.

"Political authority in Nigeria is ineffective," he said. "Nigeria is a federation, but Niger is a unitary state and can respond quickly [to threats]. We have laws that forbid hate speech, and the media is regulated."

The motivation, therefore, behind Nigerien youth joining Boko Haram is seen almost exclusively as economic. Diffa is a marginalised region, made poorer still by drought in 2010 and 2011, followed by flooding in 2012 and 2013 that hit the main cash crop: bell peppers. Insecurity has reduced production still further.

Burdens

"The perception is that people went looking for money," said Kassoum of the University of Diffa. The youth that joined Boko Haram came back with booty, encouraging others to join. Boko Haram then shut the door "and didn't allow anybody back", except as gunmen ready to fight.

The government's counter-insurgency strategy has been a heavy burden. It has cleared communities from the islands in Lake Chad and along the Komadugu Gana River, the border with Nigeria, adding to the toll of 157,000 displaced people.

Aboubaker Issa, a youth leader in Diffa, believes priorities are back to front when it comes to the repantis.

"First, the government should meet those communities that lost everything, living under trees: Meet those people, comfort them, and bring them back to their houses, give them means to resettle," he told IRIN. "After that, the government can turn to the ex-combatants and help them come back to their communities."

Beyond vocational training, it's real jobs people want.

The needs are so dire, "that if the government persists to say that it will integrate Boko Haram members, there isn't a youth that will stay here," said Issa. "They will all join [to benefit from the reintegration package]."

The model that Diffa youth have in mind is the peace deal struck between the government and Tuareg rebels in the north that ended a 2007-2008 insurgency. In response to Tuareg demands for greater inclusion, jobs were provided to ex-fighters.

For Steirteghem, the circumstances of a peace deal and orthodox DDR are very different from the current situation - where an entire region needs support.

"The government and its the partners are attempting to ensure that there is some kind of equity in opportunity provided to the youth - for those coming back from Boko Haram and the youth that stayed and didn't go."

With additional reporting from Aboubacar Sidi
Lebanon: Thousands at risk as Arsal security operation looms

Publisher Amnesty International Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as Amnesty International, Lebanon: Thousands at risk as Arsal security operation looms, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f0c994.html [accessed 12 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 a statement by Lebanon's Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri announcing an imminent security operation in the outskirts of the town of Arsal, in northeast Lebanon,Lynn Maalouf, Middle-East Director of Research for Amnesty International said:

"It is of utmost importance for the Lebanese army and other sides involved in the fighting in Arsal to prioritize the protection of Lebanese residents as well as Syrian refugees in the area. They must refrain from using lethal force except when it is unavoidable for self-defence or defence of others against threats of death and serious injury. Thousands of lives are on the line.

"Syrian refugees in Arsal are living in extremely harsh conditions in packed tented settlements. The Lebanese army must ensure that the operation is carried out in a manner that protects the right to life and other human rights. Use of explosive weapons in these circumstances would be contrary to Lebanon's obligations under international law and likely to lead to arbitrary deaths.

"The Lebanese army must facilitate the safe evacuation of residents from Arsal and allow unimpeded access for aid organizations and emergency medical services into the town. It must ensure that anyone detained in the operation is treated in accordance with international human rights law and standards."

Background:

In August 2014, fierce clashes erupted in Arsal between the Lebanese army and armed groups including the group calling itself Islamic State (IS) and Jabhat Al Nusra after 36 Lebanese security personnel were abducted. As a result of the clashes 489 people were reportedly wounded and at least 59 people including 15 Arsal local residents and 44 Syrians were killed.

Lebanese border areas come under regular fire from Syria, where the armed group calling itself Islamic State (IS) continues to hold Lebanese soldiers and security officials that its forces abducted from Lebanon in 2014.

Copyright notice:  Copyright Amnesty International
Despite some improvements, food security remains dire in Syria  UN agencies

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as UN News Service, Despite some improvements, food security remains dire in Syria  UN agencies, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f0db34.html [accessed 12 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.

In spite of improvements in wheat production in war-torn Syria  about 12 per cent more than last year's record low  the overall food security situation remains far worse than before the conflict, the United Nations food security and emergency food relief agencies have said.

According to UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), total wheat production estimates for 2017 stand at 1.8 million tonnes, in part due to an improved security situation. The estimate is, however, less than half of the pre-conflict ten-year average.

The small improvement in the availability of food for Syrians is promising, but the needs remain high and more must be done to provide food for families affected by the crisis, said Jakob Kern, WFP Country Director in Syria, said in a joint news release from the two UN agencies.

With the evolving security situation, more farmers are expected to have access to cultivate their land again. Now is the time to step up our support, as agriculture is more important than ever for the livelihoods of many, added Adam Yao, Acting FAO Representative in the country.

The improvements are also in part due to better rains which have increased water flows and water levels in many reservoirs, benefiting crops like wheat and barley, however high cost or unavailability of inputs, such as seeds and fertilizer, and the destruction of irrigation and storage infrastructure have added to the already complicated challenges before food growers.

Furthermore, opening of some supply routes have allowed trade to slowly recover but in many parts such as in eastern Aleppo, where the entire infrastructure and markets were devastated, the recovery has been at a very slow pace.

In the news release, the two UN agencies also noted that humanitarian access to some besieged areas has improved compared to last year but access to some places such as Deir-ez-Zor and Raqqa remain severely constrained.

Across the country, food prices continue to remain at record highs and an estimated 6.9 million Syrians are still food insecure and an additional 5.6 million people are likely to become food insecure without the regular food assistance they receive every month, they added.

The information provided by the UN agencies was gathered during their latest Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission (CFSAM), which visited Syria in May, this year. This is the fourth food security mission to the country since the onset of the crisis and each mission provides an impartial and balanced assessment of the agricultural and food security situation.
UN agency seeks $421 to support alternatives for refugees, migrants crossing to Europe

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as UN News Service, UN agency seeks $421 to support alternatives for refugees, migrants crossing to Europe, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f0e884.html [accessed 12 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

The United Nations refugee agency today appealed for about $421.2 million to help improve protection of refugees and migrants crossing the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea, and to back European countries working to assist asylum seekers.

"We need to provide meaningful and viable alternatives to these movements or the deaths and the suffering will continue to mount," said the Special Envoy to the Central Mediterranean Situation at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees' (UNHCR), Vincent Cochetel.

In the first six months of this year, at least 2,171 refugees and migrants died or went missing in the Central Mediterranean.

The funds would be used to raise awareness of the risks of irregular migration, support law enforcement mechanisms, address human trafficking, and ensure humanitarian assistance to those rescued at sea, among others.

The latest appeal incorporates earlier requests, and complements activities of other organizations, UNHCR said.

Concerns about Italy's save and rescue operations

With thousands of refugees and migrants being pulled from the Mediterranean Sea each week, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) today warned that Italy's proposed code of conduct for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) carrying out search and rescue operations could put many lives at risk, especially those of children.

The code would limit the movement and operations of NGO rescue vessels in the Central Mediterranean, giving priority to law enforcement and security objectives, and inadvertently prevent lifesaving work to save children from drowning, the UN agency said.

UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Justin Forsyth said while Italy should be applauded for its efforts to save refugees and migrants, restrictions on sea rescues is not a solution

"The rest of the EU and international community more broadly must step up to help Italy, by supporting rescue missions, allowing boats to disembark and doing the right thing for children uprooted," he said.
UN rights expert warns torture routinely used against Sri Lankan security suspects

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as UN News Service, UN rights expert warns torture routinely used against Sri Lankan security suspects, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f0ee64.html [accessed 12 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.

Concluding a five-day visit to Sri Lanka, a United Nations independent human right expert today noted "routine and endemic" use of torture against people detained on national security grounds.

"The Tamil community has borne the brunt of the State's well-oiled torture apparatus," said Ben Emmerson, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, adding that the law is used disproportionately against the minority group.

During his visit between 10 and 14 July to assess the progress Sri Lanka has achieved in its law, policies and practice in the fight against terrorism since the end of its internal armed conflict, Mr. Emmerson heard first-hand accounts of brutal torture.

"These included beatings with sticks, stress positions, asphyxiation using plastic bags drenched in kerosene, pulling out of fingernails, insertion of needles beneath the fingernails, various forms of water torture, suspension for several hours by the thumbs, and mutilation of the genitals."

Mr. Emmerson said 80 per cent of all suspects arrested under the anti-terror legislation in late 2016 had reported torture and other physical ill-treatment.

The expert specifically pointed to the situation of a dozen prisoners who have been detained without trial for more than 10 years under the anti-terror act, and 70 others for more than five years.

"These staggering figures are a stain on Sri Lanka's reputation," the expert noted, urging immediate release of the 81 suspects and announcing a dialogue with the government on the shape of proposed draft legislation which is due to replace the act.

Although recognizing that Sri Lanka had faced "tremendous security challenges" in recent years, the expert emphasized that progress towards reform, justice and human rights was at a "virtual standstill" despite Government promises.

The Special Rapporteur did welcome small signs of progress, but said failing to deliver justice and reform risked prolonging grievances and even reigniting the conflict.

"The Government has committed itself to ending the culture of impunity, ensuring accountability, peace and justice, achieving lasting reconciliation and preventing further human rights abuses" he said, pointing to the steps set out in a Human Rights Council resolution.

A comprehensive report with his findings and recommendations based on the experts visit will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council.

Special Rapporteurs and independent experts are appointed by the Geneva-based Human Rights Council to examine and report back on a specific human rights theme or a country situation. The positions are honorary and the experts are not UN staff, nor are they paid for their work.
Senior IndiGo officials today met Diwakar Reddy, at a lunch hosted by senior Member of Parliament YS Chaudhary, to resolve the issue of Diwakar Reddy's ban on IndiGo flights.

By India Today Web Desk: National carrier Air India and budget passenger carrier IndiGo today said they have decided to revoke the ban on flying TDP MP JC Diwakar Reddy on its flights.

A flying ban was imposed by Air India, Jet Airways, IndiGo, SpiceJet, GoAir, Vistara and AirAsia India on the Anantpur MLA after he created ruckus and pushed an airline staffer after he was denied boarding by IndiGo for being late.

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"Senior IndiGo officials today met Honourable Member of Parliament Diwakar Reddy, at a lunch hosted by senior Member of Parliament YS Chaudhary, to resolve the issue of Honourable Member Diwakar Reddy's ban on IndiGo flights," the airline said in a statement.

"The issue is amicably resolved between the two and IndiGo has decided to lift the said ban with immediate effect and Reddy is withdrawing the case he has filed."

Earlier last month, JC Diwakar Reddy had wrecked a havoc at Vizag airport after he was denied a boarding pass on late arrival. He not only assaulted Indigo employees but also vandalised the airport in rage.

Reddy was scheduled to fly on IndiGo flight 6E-608, which departs from Visakhapatnam at 8.10 am, to Hyderabad. But he reached just 28 minutes before the scheduled departure, according to the airline. As per norms laid out by the aviation regulator, airlines close check-in counters for all domestic fights 45 minutes prior to departure.

A video obtained by India Today shows Reddy throwing a printer at the airport. In a separate video he is seen pushing an airline staff.

The political leader had earlier too created a ruckus in October 2016 in a similar incident where he arrived late at Vijayawada Airport.

Earlier this year, Shiv Sena MP Ravindra Gaikwad was temporarily banned by airlines from flying after he assaulted an Air India staffer, triggering a major controversy.

Also read:

TDP MP Diwakar Reddy who bullied Indigo staff at Vizag flies off to France for holiday

Denied boarding pass for being late, TDP MP Diwakar Reddy creates ruckus at Visakhapatnam airport

After IndiGo, 6 more airlines impose flying ban on TDP MP Diwakar Reddy

Vizag airport row: Aviation minister Raju orders probe day after TDP MP Diwakar Reddy creates ruckus

Privatisation of Air India: How does it impact you?

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Haiti has chance to solidify stability before UN mission's drawdown, Security Council told

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as UN News Service, Haiti has chance to solidify stability before UN mission's drawdown, Security Council told, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f0f2d4.html [accessed 12 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.

With three months left before the current United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti transitions to a smaller one, a UN envoy stressed today that the Caribbean country faces the "window of opportunity" to solidify stability, following recent elections.

"Haiti has remained on the path of stabilization and democratic consolidation," the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Sandra Honore, told the UN Security Council today.

"Looking ahead, for the country to make full use of the window of opportunity that emerged following the electoral process, additional measures will be needed to consolidate the security and stabilization gains of the past few years, create greater social and political cohesion and truly reinforce State institutions so that they can meet the needs of the Haitian people," the Special Representative added.

Ms. Honore noted that political space has opened up for the new Government to start addressing the many challenges facing the country, using this unique opportunity to tackle the root causes of instability, poverty, exclusion and impunity.

"Since then, initial steps aimed at overcoming longstanding problems in the areas of governance, rule of law and socio-economic development have been taken," she said.

Those steps include a flagship development programme, the "caravan of change" in five of Haiti's 10 departments, and the launch of legislative review to improve the investment climate, reinforce governance structures and restore State institutions.

However, it is "troubling" that the third branch of power - the judiciary - has not been brought to full functioning, she said, urging that key positions must be filled without further delay.

The senior UN official also repeated her calls to modernize the penal system: "Without a properly functioning justice system, the Haitian National Police cannot effectively deliver security for all Haitian citizens and the domestic and international investments in the national police force will not develop to their full potential."

She underscored the vital importance of inclusive national dialogue to forge a common vision for progress and articulate an institutional reform agenda.

"Ultimately, Haiti's security, political, social and development agenda can only be shaped by the national authorities and the Haitian people themselves; and the responsibility for the further consolidation of the stabilization gains rests with the Haitian people," Ms. Honore said, adding that donor support can complement Haitian-led efforts where needed.

In April, the Council decided in resolution 2350 (2017) that the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) would close on 15 October, transitioning to a smaller follow-up peacekeeping mission known by its acronym MINUJUSTH.

The new mission back Government efforts to strengthen rule-of-law institutions, further develop and support the Haitian National Police and engage in human rights monitoring, reporting and analysis.
Media freedom NGOs and professional organisations ask Polish defence minister to drop complaint against journalist

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Media freedom NGOs and professional organisations ask Polish defence minister to drop complaint against journalist, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f0f884.html [accessed 12 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and European Magazine Media Association (EMMA), European Newspaper Publishers' Association (ENPA), the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF), Freedom house, Global Editors Network (GEN), Index on Censorship, International Press Institute (IPI), South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO) have written to Polish defence minister Antoni Macierewicz urging him to withdraw his criminal complaint against Tomasz Piatek, the author of a new book about the minister's alleged network of questionable Russian contacts.





An investigative reporter for the independent newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, Piatek is facing a possible two to three-year jail sentence in a case that is being prepared by military prosecutors and could be heard by a military court.





The military bureau of the Polish prosecutor-general's office announced on 11 July that it had received a complaint from Macierewicz accusing Piatek of "using force or threats against a public official" and "public insults or humiliation of a constitutional body" in connection with the book, published in late June.





In a joint open letter to the defence minister on 18 July 2017, RSF and other organisations call on him to immediately withdraw these proceedings against Piatek.





The result of 18 months of research, the book, entitled Macierewicz and His Secrets , describes the minister's alleged political and financial ties with persons close to the Kremlin, to the Russian intelligence services and to Russian criminal organizations.





The minister's complaint is based on three criminal code provisions: article 244, under which "using force or threats against a public official" is punishable by up to three years in prison; article 226, under which "public insults or humiliation of a constitutional body" is punishable by up to two years in prison; and article 231, under which public officials are protected in connection with both their official functions and their private affairs.





In a Gazeta Wyborcza article, Piatek has rejected all of the charges made in the complaint, pointing out that the minister has not accused him of lies or defamation and has not denied any of the book's claims. He also said that it would be absurd to subject a civilian to military justice.





"Subjecting a civilian to military justice and threatening him with a prison sentence is a form of intimidation that constitutes a grave threat to media freedom and to all those who criticize the authorities", said Pauline Ades-Mevel, the head of RSF's European Union and Balkans desk. "We call on European institutions to unreservedly condemn these proceedings against a journalist and to ask the minister to withdraw them."





"The Defence Ministry's request to open this case marks an intensification of the hostile approach to the media this government has taken since it won elections in October 2015, said Nate Schenkkan, Nations in Transit Project Director at Freedom House. The government consistently shows hostility to the media's rightful role in acquiring and disseminating information of public interest."





RSF has been condemning violations of media freedom and pluralism in Poland ever since the ultra-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party was elected nearly two years ago and embarked on a series of very controversial reforms.





Poland is ranked 54th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2017 World Press Freedom Index, seven places lower than in the 2016 index, in which it suffered a spectacular 29-place fall.
RSF calls for Bahraini journalist's conviction to be overturned

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, RSF calls for Bahraini journalist's conviction to be overturned, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f0fd94.html [accessed 12 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) urges the Bahraini authorities to overturn journalist Nazeeha Saeed's conviction on a charge of working illegally, which has been upheld on appeal. RSF also calls on the authorities to stop violating media freedom.

A Manama appeal court today confirmed the fine of 1,000 dinars (2,320 euros) that a lower court imposed on Saeed on 24 May for working as a correspondent for foreign media without authorization. She used to be the Bahrain correspondent of two French media outlets, France 24 and Radio Monte-Carlo Doualiya.





The information ministry brought the charge against her a year ago after refusing to renew her press accreditation for the first time in 12 years. She was also banned from leaving the country without explanation.





Her lawyer, Hameed al Mullah, told RSF that the appeal court's decision was a "mistake." He said the court failed to take account of the fact that his client had kept working only while awaiting official notification of the decision not to renew her accreditation and that she had therefore committed no offence.





He now plans to file an appeal with Bahrain's court of cassation but the court may not agree to hear it.





"The Kingdom of Bahrain must immediately quash Nazeeha Saeed's conviction and allow her to resume working freely as a journalist again," said Alexandra El Khazen, the head of RSF's Middle East desk. "The Bahraini authorities must also cease their repeated attacks on the media."





Saeed is part of the international #FightImpunity campaign that RSF launched in November 2015 with the aim of putting pressure on governments to prosecute those responsible for crimes of violence against journalists.





For years, Saeed has been fighting for justice for the 13 hours of torture and humiliation to which she was subjected by women police officers in Rifa'a police station in 2011, after covering pro-democracy demonstrations in Manama.

The justice ministry decided in November 2015 that there was not enough evidence to prosecute those responsible for torturing Saeed. RSF condemned this decision at the time.





Saeed is the only correspondent to have been prosecuted for working without a permit, but last year the authorities refused to renew the accreditation of at least five Bahraini journalists working for international media such as Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, France 24 and Reuters.





According to RSF's tally, 14 journalists and citizen-journalists are currently detained in Bahrain just for covering sensitive subjects. For fear of being overthrown, the regime has been censoring dissent and cracking down on dissident journalists since 2011. The crackdown intensified again in 2016 and the last independent newspaper, Al Wasat, was closed arbitrarily a month ago.





Bahrain is ranked 164th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2017 World Press Freedom Index.
Journalist held incommunicado for past week in South Sudan

Publisher Reporters Without Borders Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as Reporters Without Borders, Journalist held incommunicado for past week in South Sudan, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f10434.html [accessed 12 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for the immediate release of Adil Faris Mayat, the head of South Sudan's state-owned national TV broadcaster, SSBC, who has been held incommunicado since 10 July.

Mayat has just completed a week in detention without being able to speak to his family or lawyer, who have not been able to obtain any information about his state of health or the conditions in which he is being held. No charges have been brought against him.

National security officers arrested him one day after SSBC failed to provide live coverage of a speech that President Salva Kiir gave to mark the sixth anniversary of the country's independence, although Mayat attributed this failure to technical problems.





Kiir has been South Sudan's president - and an RSF "press freedom predator" - since 2011.





"We call for this journalist's immediate release," said Clea Kahn-Sriber, the head of RSF's Africa desk. "Frequent arbitrary measures of this kind by the security services and the accompanying impunity are killing media freedom in South Sudan and are holding back a return to peace and national reconciliation."





After South Sudan obtained independence in 2011, a civil war broke out in 2013 and the ensuing political and security crisis has not spared the media. News outlets have been suspended, newspaper issues have been seized, and journalists have been detained arbitrarily, tortured, harassed, forced to censor themselves or forced to flee abroad.





South Sudan has fallen 20 places in RSF's World Press Freedom Index since 2015 and is now ranked 145th out of 180 countries.





More information about South Sudan here.
Georgia: The ICC must address the ongoing impact on victims of the 2008 conflict crimes

Publisher International Federation for Human Rights Publication Date 17 July 2017 Cite as International Federation for Human Rights, Georgia: The ICC must address the ongoing impact on victims of the 2008 conflict crimes, 17 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f11074.html [accessed 12 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

After a mission conducted by FIDH and its member organisation Human Rights Center (HRIDC) from 26 June to 4 July 2017 in Georgia, our organisations express deep concern at the on-going impact of international crimes committed in 2008 on victims and affected communities in Georgia. Mission delegates met with 45 persons in 10 villages close to the Administrative Boundary Line (ABL) between Georgia and South Ossetia and one IDP settlement, where victims of crimes committed during the 2008 war continue to live in vulnerable economic and social conditions and in a highly volatile security situation and expressed strong request for genuine justice and reparations for the harm that they had suffered.

"I want peace and that perpetrators of the crimes be punished. (...) After nine years, I do not expect anything from national authorities. () Our hopes rely on Fatou Bensouda", explained G. K., living in Dvani village, to FIDH-HRIDC delegates.

It is estimated that hundreds of civilians were killed during the 2008 conflict between Georgia and Russia, and up to 21,300 people were forcibly displaced from their homes [1]. Furthermore, victims also suffered from other war crimes and crimes against humanity, such as the destruction of property and pillage. To date, these victims continue to experience the psycho-social and economic consequences of the harm they suffered. Very few have received any form of psycho-social assistance from the State. Many of those spoken with relayed how they lost their land as a result of the imposition of the ABL and now have greatly reduced incomes. Others stated that they continue to live in fear, given that the ABL shifts every so often, encroaching further and further into Georgian territory. An occurrence that greatly restricts their freedom and makes them fearful of abductions by the South Ossetian de facto authorities.

"If I was allowed to, I would be ready to go back, start from scratch and would even live in the cemetery where my deceased son is buried" explained G. G., living in Berbuki IDP settlement since December 2008, to FIDH-HRIDC delegates.

The ever-changing ABL renders the situation for conflict affected populations particularly insecure, given the important number of 'kidnappings' by Russian and South Ossetian security forces of ethnic Georgians, alleged to have "illegally crossed the borderline". The majority of these cases concern ethnic Georgians pasturing or harvesting their land close to the ABL, which is not always clearly marked or fenced. The State Security of Georgia registered 327 illegal detentions in 2016 and 504 in 2015. However, it is important to bear in mind that these cases are probably under-reported given the lack of means to adequately document them [2]. The majority of detained persons spend at least one week in detention in South Ossetia, and are only released after the payment of a 'fine' by family members. FIDH and HRIDC strongly condemn the restrictions on the freedom of movement of Georgians who have been living near the ABL for generations and also call upon the de facto South Ossetian authorities to respect the due process rights of detained persons.

Footnotes

[1] See Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, September 2009: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/30_09_09_iiffmgc_report.pdf; and http://www.opendata.ge/en/request/17568

[2] See Public Defender of Georgia Report on  The Human Rights Situation of the Conflict-Affected Population in Georgia , 2016, page 41.
Chile must take the first step to defend women's rights

Publisher International Federation for Human Rights Publication Date 17 July 2017 Cite as International Federation for Human Rights, Chile must take the first step to defend women's rights , 17 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f11794.html [accessed 12 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

The FIDH and its member organization in Chile, the Observatorio Ciudadano, call Chilean senators to resolutely support in today's debate at the plenary session of the Senate of the Republic, the bill that regulates the decriminalization of abortion for three reasons, as a first step towards guaranteeing women's rights in Chile in accordance with the recommendations and decisions issued by the United Nations and Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

The lengthy debates on the bill during its Reading at the National Congress and the wording adopted in the legislative working groups, give rise to serious concerns about the actual enforcement of this law, as there were big changes and new requirements introduced that move away from the initial terms of the bill. Nevertheless, the fact that abortion will be allowed, at least in the three extreme cases considered, constitutes progress. They are: if mother's life is at risk, if there's letal inviability of the fetus and if the pregnancy is a result of rape.

Furthermore, it is essential that the Parliament, as a body, sends an unequivocal and direct signal to the Chilean and International Community that it is committed to the defence of women's rights and that it rejects the alterations made to the intial bill that was submitted by Bachelet's government. Changes as the one brought by conservative and religious lobbies about extending the conscientious objection clause to any member of a medical team when it should only apply to medical doctors while being strictly regulated, deviates the law from its intended top priority, the fundamental need to guarantee women free access to sexual and reproductive health services.

As pointed out during the FIDH mission to Chile in January of this year, criminalizing abortion in Chile constitutes a serious breach of women's sexual and reproductive rights, which ought to be promoted and protected by the Chilean state as it must be done with any human right. In fact, criminalization carries serious risks to the health and lives of women and girls who choose abortion, in particular, when they cannot avail themselves of the resources and the information required to get safe legal abortions. In addition, they run the risk of being reported by doctors and medical staff and of being faced with criminal prosecution which particularly undermines women who are poor, young, migrant or indigenous.

The FIDH trusts that the adoption of this bill will be supported by other measures such as Chile's ratification of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the main legal instrument related to women's rights. Chile signed it on 1989 and still waits from ratification since 2001. The enforcement of this Protocol would allow individuals to apply directly to the CEDAW monitoring committee in case of serious or systematic violations in Chile of the obligations contained by the treaty.
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.
Libya: UN rights arm sounds alarm for safety of prisoners at imminent risk of torture

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as UN News Service, Libya: UN rights arm sounds alarm for safety of prisoners at imminent risk of torture, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f12b34.html [accessed 12 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

The United Nations human rights arm today voiced deep concern for the safety of individuals taken prisoner by members of the Libyan army after recent fighting in Benghazi, noting that they may be at imminent risk of torture and even summary execution.

"Our concern is based on reports suggesting the involvement of the Special Forces, a unit aligned with the LNA [Libyan National Army], and in particular their field commander, Mahmoud al-Werfalli, in torturing detainees and summarily executing at least 10 captured men," Liz Throssell, a spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), told journalists at a media briefing in Geneva today.

"We urge the LNA to ensure there is a full, impartial investigation into these allegations and also call on the group to suspend Mr. al-Werfalli from his duties as a Special Forces field commander pending the conclusion of such an investigation," she added.

According to OHCHR, on multiple occasions, there have been videos circulating on social media which allegedly show Mr. al-Werfalli executing kneeling men, or ordering them shot.

The latest video, which was posted on social media this month, seems to shows LNA fighters kicking and taunting prisoners, while Mr. al-Werfalli is apparently heard accusing two men who have their hands tied behind their backs of belonging to terrorist groups, added the OHCHR spokesperson.

"The fight against terrorism cannot be used to justify summary executions or other grave violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law," she stressed.

Also at the briefing, Ms. Throssell stated that, in March, the LNA announced investigations into alleged rights abuses but added that it has not shared any information regarding the status of the inquiries.
Children increasingly targeted for murder, rape in Central African Republic  UNICEF

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as UN News Service, Children increasingly targeted for murder, rape in Central African Republic  UNICEF, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f12ff4.html [accessed 12 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.

Renewed fighting in the Central African Republic (CAR) is increasingly targeting children, while there are concerns that the humanitarian needs in the country could escalate to levels not seen since the crisis four years ago, United Nations humanitarian officials today said.

Months of renewed fighting have led to an "increasing number of violent acts" targeting the youngest population, including murders, abductions, rape and recruitment into armed groups, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said.

Christine Muhigana, UNICEF Representative in CAR warned that "armed groups and parties to the conflict must cease these flagrant violations of children's rights and make every effort to keep children safe."

The exact numbers of attacks on children is unknown because fighting prevents humanitarian access to many areas, the UN agency said, but "is almost certain to be much higher than officially reported figures."

In addition to brutal crimes, the intensified violence is preventing children from going to school or even getting basic vaccines.

In the southern areas of CAR, the fighting is driving people to flee into remote areas of northern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where they are nearly out of reach of the humanitarian community.

As of the end of June, some 103,000 CAR refugees were registered in the DRC, said William Spindler, spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

"Refugees are staying everywhere they can - in churches, in buildings used as schools, in the only health centre, or sleeping in the open. People desperately need more healthcare, food and shelter," Mr. Spindler told journalists in Geneva about the situation in Ndu, which is barely more than a village.

Also today, the UN's top humanitarian official expressed extreme concern about the upsurge in fighting since the start of the year, and warned that it puts at risk the gains made since 2015.

"If we do not act now and keep the faith, we will see increasing need and even greater vulnerability of already weakened people. We risk seeing even greater stress on the capacities of humanitarian actors and funding mechanisms," said the UN Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Stephen O'Brien.

Speaking to reporters in Bangui on the last of his three-day visit, Mr. O'Brien urged the international community to sustain its efforts for the sake of CAR's people and the future of the country.

The continued deterioration has led the humanitarian community to revise its Humanitarian Response Plan, which now requires $497 million, but is only 24 per cent funded, he said.
Not the time for a 'blame game,' urges UN Special Advisor on Cyprus

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as UN News Service, Not the time for a 'blame game,' urges UN Special Advisor on Cyprus, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f13874.html [accessed 12 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.

Speaking to the media following his briefing to the United Nations Security Council, the Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Cyprus, Espen Barth Eide, urged all sides to work collectively and to build on the achievements thus far.

Not the time to engage in a blame game. There is more than enough of that going around, said Mr. Eide, speaking to the media at a press stakeout.

We have to admit that there was a collective failure at stitching together a deal in Crans-Montana, he added, noting the location of the most recent talks.

Recalling UN efforts there, including those by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Mr. Eide said that only once all issues on the table are settled, could it be said that a deal concerning the island has been reached.

In his remarks, the Special Adviser also highlighted that the UN would always remain available and at the disposal of the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders to facilitate the process and noted that the talks are led by the leaders and owned by them.

Referring to the Secretary-General's report concerning Cyprus, Mr. Eide said: We hope [the leaders] will not jump to conclusions [and that] they reflect seriously on what can be done now, after the Conference on Cyprus failed.

Given a number of developments in and around the island, it is crucial that the reflection is done in the spirit of understand and comprise, rather than by exasperating the differences, he stated

Speaking prior to Mr. Eide, Liu Jieyi, the Ambassador and Permanent Representative of China to the UN and the Chair of the Security Council for the month of July, announced that the Council members expressed their intention to renew the mandate of the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus for a further period of six months.

[The members also] urged the sides to sustain their commitment to a settlement [on the island] and maintain the gains achieved and reflect on the best way to re-start the process, he said.

In addition to Ambassador Liu and Mr. Eide, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Cyprus, Elizabeth Spehar, also spoke at the stakeout, expressing her appreciation to the Security Council for its support.
The measures signaled that the administration of President Donald Trump was seeking to put more pressure on Iran while keeping in place an agreement between Tehran and six world powers to curb its nuclear program in return for lifting international oil and financial sanctions.

A ballistic missile is launched and tested in an undisclosed location in Iran on March 9, 2016. Photo: Reuters

By Reuters: The United States slapped new economic sanctions against Iran on Tuesday over its ballistic missile program and said Tehran's "malign activities" in the Middle East undercut any "positive contributions" coming from the 2015 Iran nuclear accord.

The measures signaled that the administration of President Donald Trump was seeking to put more pressure on Iran while keeping in place an agreement between Tehran and six world powers to curb its nuclear program in return for lifting international oil and financial sanctions.

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The US government said it was targeting 18 entities and people for supporting what is said was "illicit Iranian actors or transnational criminal activity."

Those sanctioned had backed Iran's military or Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps by developing drones and military equipment, producing and maintaining boats, and procuring electronic components, it said. Others had "orchestrated the theft of US and Western software programs" sold to Iran's government, the Treasury Department said.

"The United States remains deeply concerned about Iran's malign activities across the Middle East which undermine regional stability, security, and prosperity," the State Department said in a statement.

It said the activities "undercut whatever 'positive contributions' to regional and international peace and security were intended to emerge" from the nuclear agreement.

On Monday, the Trump administration said Iran was complying with the nuclear agreement but it was also in default of the spirit of the accord and Washington would look for ways to strengthen it.

It was the second time Trump certified Iranian compliance with the agreement since he took office in January, despite having described it as "the worst deal ever" during his 2016 presidential campaign, criticizing then-President Barack Obama whose administration negotiated the accord.

"Even as we continue to work to prevent Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon, we cannot look away while Iran threatens our country and our allies in ways beyond their nuclear threat," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters on Tuesday.

POISON THE ATMOSPHERE

The statement listed Iranian support for groups including Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas movement, the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Iran condemned Washington's sanctions announcement as "contemptible and worthless".

Iran "will reciprocate the move by imposing sanctions on a number of American natural and legal persons who have taken steps against the Iranian people and other Muslim nations in the region," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told CBS News the sanctions "poison the atmosphere" and violate the "spirit" of the nuclear agreement.

"We will look at it and see whether it violates the letter of the deal. And we will act accordingly," he said.

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The Trump administration is reviewing policy on Iran, not only looking at Tehran's compliance with the nuclear deal but also its behavior in the region which Washington says undermines US interests in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon.

Trump's reservations about the nuclear deal held up the White House's announcement on compliance, a US official said. In the end, Trump agreed reluctantly to recertify the agreement after being advised repeatedly by his top national security aides to do so, another senior US official said.

Behind the scenes, advisers argued that there was no alternative but to recertify the deal for now because the past sanctions regime the United States had with European allies against Iran is no longer in place and unilateral sanctions are not as effective as multilateral ones.

The State Department also called on the Iranian government to release US citizens Baquer Namazi, Siamak Namazi, Xiyue Wang and other "unjustly detained US citizens" and said it was deeply concerned about reports of their declining health.

"Iran should immediately release all of these US citizens on humanitarian grounds," the State Department said.

--- ENDS ---
UN and partners call for nearly $24 million in emergency aid for the Congo's Pool region

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as UN News Service, UN and partners call for nearly $24 million in emergency aid for the Congo's Pool region, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f13cb4.html [accessed 12 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.

United Nations, the Republic of Congo's Government and humanitarian partners today appealed for $23.7 million to aid Congolese in the area of southern Brazzaville known as the Pool, where fighting and insecurity has displaced one out of every three people.

The most pressing humanitarian needs are related to food security, nutrition, living conditions, and access to basic health services, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in the announcement.

People in the Pool are also vulnerable to attacks, threats, sexual violence, loss or family separation, OCHA said, stressing the need for protection.

The requested funding  which was made by national authorities, the UN and 16 aid partners  would provide emergency humanitarian aid to 138,000 people for the next six months.

Since the time that the violence began in April of last year, more than half of the families in the Pool are hungry, with up to 20 per cent of children under five acutely malnourished.

Access to health care, education and any market products is limited, OCHA said. Facilities for people who are displaced are virtually non-existent.
UNESCO chief calls for probe into killing of Honduran video journalist in Mexico

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as UN News Service, UNESCO chief calls for probe into killing of Honduran video journalist in Mexico, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f141e4.html [accessed 12 November 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

The head of the United Nations agency tasked with defending press freedom today called for an investigation into the recent murder of a Honduran journalist in Mexico.

"I condemn the murder of Edwin Rivera Paz," Irina Bokova, the Director-General of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), said in a statement, referring to an incident that took place on 9 July in Acayucan, a town in the state of Veracruz.

"I call for a thorough investigation into this crime. Freedom of expression and freedom of information in the region will remain threatened as long as impunity is allowed to prevail for crimes against journalists and media workers," she added.

Rivera Paz is reported to have sought refuge in Mexico after the killing in January this year of Igor Padilla, the director and producer of a programme he had worked for at Honduran national television broadcaster HCH.

His name will be added to UNESCO's dedicated webpage commemorating the lives of journalists killed in the line of duty.
Kenyan journalist threatened and assaulted

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 8 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Kenyan journalist threatened and assaulted, 8 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bda4.html [accessed 12 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.

June 8, 2017 6:11 PM ET

A young Kenyan listens to the news on the radio in this March 2013 file photo (Reuters/Joseph Okanga)

New York, June 8, 2017  Kenyan authorities should credibly investigate and swiftly bring to justice those responsible for attacking and threatening Emmanuel Namisi, a broadcast journalist for the Royal Media group, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Namisi told CPJ that men he identified as bodyguards of Kenneth Lusaka, governor of the western Kenyan county of Bungoma, threatened him and assaulted him at a Bungoma club on the night of June 5. He said the men were angry at a story he had written alleging they played a role in the death of a woman at a political rally three nights prior.

"One of the bodyguards came to me and asked why I was doing this story," Namisi told CPJ. "Then they came and started to abuse me."

Namisi told CPJ that the bodyguards accused him of "spoiling" their image, and told him he "should be very careful," reminding him that he was a civilian, and that they were police. Namisi told CPJ that the assault dislocated his leg, for which he sought medical treatment.

"Kenyan security officials should credibly investigate the assault on Royal Media journalist Emmanuel Namisi and to show definitively that no one is above the law," CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Angela Quintal said from Durban, South Africa. "When attacks on journalists are met with impunity, all journalists are more at risk."

Lusaka did not answer CPJ's repeated phone calls seeking comment. He told the daily Kenyan newspaper The Star that he was "told about the incident and felt very bad."

"I don't condone physical violence, I don't know what exactly provoked that, but I have cautioned all my staff against such behavior," he told The Star.

Contacted by CPJ by phone, a Bungoma police officer who did not give his name said that he would discuss the case only in person, at the Bungoma police station.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Kyrgyzstan investigates journalist for incitement after he criticizes ethnic slurs

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 9 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Kyrgyzstan investigates journalist for incitement after he criticizes ethnic slurs, 9 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bdb4.html [accessed 12 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.

June 9, 2017 2:35 PM ET

Photo courtesy of Ulugbek Babakulov

New York, June 9, 2017  Kyrgyz authorities should drop a criminal investigation into independent journalist Ulugbek Babakulov, allow him to work freely, and cease blocking access to a news website that published his writing, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Security officials are investigating Babakulov on suspicion of "inciting inter-ethnic hatred," Kyrgyz and regional media reported today.

The country's State National Security Committee (GKNB) investigation into the journalist followed the publication of a May 23 article he wrote for the Moscow-based, regional news website Fergana, in which he analyzed Kyrgyz-language social media posts and concluded that they incited hatred against the country's ethnic Uzbek minority, used ethnic slurs, and urged the "slaughter" of ethnic Uzbeks. Since then, Babakulov received death threats, members of parliament urged the government to strip him of his citizenship, and state and pro-government media labeled him an "instigator of ethnic hatred" and an "enemy of Kyrgyzstan," CPJ documented at the time.

Fergana editor Daniil Kislov told CPJ that Kyrgyzstan blocked access to Fergana today. The news website was included on leading Kyrgyz internet service provider Megaline's list of websites it blocks when CPJ accessed the list today. The company cited a district court order dated today as the justification for the censorship.

"Investigating Ulugbek Babakulov for inciting ethnic hatred because he criticized those who he said incited ethnic hatred is an outrage," CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova said. "Lawmakers and pro-government media have tried to smear Babakulov as a traitor and villain for warning about the dangers of nationalism. We call on Kyrgyzstan to cease harassing the journalist immediately and to restore access to his outlet, the website Fergana."

Three days ago, the GKNB launched investigations into at least six social media users who posted negative comments about ethnic Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan. One of those social media users was arrested today, according to press reports.

"Ulugbek is a journalist who reported about social media posts. He did not write them himself. Charging him with inciting hatred is absurd. He was doing his job and was doing it well," Fergana's Kislov told CPJ.

"The authorities cannot solve the problem of nationalism...and so they decided to make a scapegoat out of me," Babakulov told the independent news website Zanoza, to which he has contributed, in a June 1 interview.

The charge of inciting ethnic hatred carries a maximum sentence of seven years in prison, according to Kyrgyzstan's criminal code.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Pakistani journalist threatened, hit by car

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 13 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Pakistani journalist threatened, hit by car, 13 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bdc4.html [accessed 12 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.

June 13, 2017 4:02 PM ET

Journalists protest the killing of their colleagues at a demonstration in Islamabad, Pakistan, April 7, 2014. (Reuters/Faisal Mahmood)

New York, June 13, 2017  Pakistani police and prosecutors should credibly investigate death threats and a possible attempt on the life of Express Tribune journalist Rana Tanveer and should bring the perpetrators to justice, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Tanveer told CPJ that a car ran into him at high speed as he traveled by motorbike on a small road in Lahore on June 9, breaking his leg, and that he believed the incident to have been a deliberate attempt on his life. On May 30, the journalist, who has written extensively about religious minorities in Pakistan, awoke to find his home in Lahore had been vandalized with messages calling him a supporter of the Ahmadi sect of Islam and calling for his death. Tanveer told CPJ that he left his home as a precaution and reported the incident to police, but that they did not open a First Information Report, which is necessary for investigations to take place.

Tanveer told CPJ that he has received several threats over the years, both at his workplace and home. Roughly three months ago, Tanveer said, an unidentified caller phoned his landlord and told him that he should stop renting to the journalist because he was "an enemy of Islam." In 2013, he said, he received a threatening letter at his office, and the following year he received several threatening phone calls in reponse to his reporting. Tanveer said that he reported the incidents to police, but that they took no action. Police did open an investigation to determine who ran into him while he was on his motorbike, Tanveer said.

"It's outrageous that police failed to act when Rana Tanveer reported threats to his life," said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. "We call on authorities to swiftly bring to justice those responsible for vandalizing Tanveer's home."

Police in Lahore did not respond to CPJ's phone calls and emails seeking comment.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Hamas detains Palestinian journalist in Gaza

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 14 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Hamas detains Palestinian journalist in Gaza, 14 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bdda.html [accessed 12 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.

June 14, 2017 4:21 PM ET

Hamas security forces patrol the Shatti refugee camp in Gaza City, March 8, 2015. (Reuters/Mohammed Salem)

New York, June 14, 2017  Palestinian authorities in the Gaza Strip should immediately release Fouad Jaradeh, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Jaradeh, a reporter for Palestine TV, the official Palestinian Authority broadcaster based in the West Bank, was detained June 8 in Gaza City by authorities from the territory's Hamas-led government, according to news reports.

According to the London-based newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, officers from Hamas' Internal Security Branch raided Jaradeh's home the evening of June 8 and confiscated his computer and mobile phone before arresting him. Nabhan Khraishi, the communications officer for the Palestinian Journalists' Syndicate, told CPJ that Hamas security officials charged Jaradeh with "communicating with Ramallah," a reference to the Palestinian Authority, which is controlled by Hamas' rival party, Fatah, and is based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Khraishi said the journalists' detention was renewed for 15 days today. The Mada Center, a Palestinian press freedom group, said in an emailed statement that the journalist is detained at Qasr al-Hakem, an Interior Security Branch facility.

As a correspondent for Palestine TV in Gaza, Jaradeh's work spanned a range of issues, ranging from interviews with locals about how the isolated territory's deteriorating economy affected their day-to-day lives to conversations with past neighbors of deceased Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Hamas representatives did not immediately reply to an email from CPJ seeking comment.

"Fouad Jaradeh's arrest illustrates the pressure that Palestinian journalists face from all sides," CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour said from Washington, D.C. "Hamas authorities should release Fouad Jaradeh immediately and should not deny Palestinians in the West Bank the right to receive news from Gaza."

Hamas has cracked down on media outlets before. In 2013, Hamas shuttered the bureaus of the Saudi-funded broadcaster Al-Arabia and the Palestinian news agency Maan News. In 2011, Hamas security forces attacked the bureaus of several international outlets. Palestinian journalists have also faced pressure from the Israeli government and settlers, as well as the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Palestinian Authority security forces attacked a Roya TV television crew covering a protest in Ramallah in March, and Israeli security forces attacked several journalists covering a Jerusalem protest in May. That same month, an Israeli settler shot AP photographer Majdi Mohammed when he opened fire on demonstrators blocking a road outside Nablus.

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Pakistani journalist murdered in Haripur

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 15 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Pakistani journalist murdered in Haripur, 15 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bde8.html [accessed 12 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.

June 15, 2017 4:33 PM ET

Journalists demonstrate in front of the parliament building in Islamabad, January 28, 2013. (Reuters/Faisal Mahmood)

June 15, 2017, New York  Pakistani authorities should swiftly and credibly investigate the murder of Bakhsheesh Elahi and swiftly bring all those responsible to justice, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Elahi, the Haripur bureau chief for the daily newspaper K2, was fatally shot in Haripur, about 80km (50 miles) north of Islamabad, on June 11, according to police, news reports, and his employer.

Elahi was on his way to work when unknown assailants on a motorcycle shot him repeatedly, Shuraiz Khan, of the Haripur police department, told CPJ. The Pakistani daily newspaper Dawn reported that Elahi sustained bullets to his head, neck, and chest. The journalist was alone when he was killed, and no one else was injured, Khan said, adding that he could not give any details regarding potential motives or suspects in an ongoing investigation.

"We call on Pakistani authorities to leave no stone unturned in their investigation into the murder of K2 journalist Bakhseesh Elahi, and to consider his journalism as a possible motive," CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney said. "Pakistani authorities should show that journalists cannot be killed with impunity."

A K2 journalist who gave his name only as Zakirullah told CPJ that Elahi, as the Haripur bureau chief, covered general news, and that he was unaware of any particular story that might have provoked his murder. He said that journalists were in danger in Pakistan, but that he could not speculate as to the killers' motives. Elahi had worked at K2 for only one month before his murder, and was a reporter for the Aaj media group's Haripur bureau before joining K2, Dawn reported.

Pakistan is one of the deadliest countries for journalists, with 33 murdered there in direct retaliation for their work since 1992, according to CPJ research.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Journalist missing in eastern Ukraine

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 16 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Journalist missing in eastern Ukraine, 16 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bdfa.html [accessed 12 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.

June 16, 2017 12:53 PM ET

A pro-Russian separatist inspects a building damaged in fighting with Ukrainian security forces in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, on February 23, 2017. (Reuters/Alexander Ermochenko)

New York, June 16, 2017  Authorities in eastern Ukraine should do everything possible to locate freelance journalist Stanyslav Aseyev, who has been missing from his home in the city of Donetsk since June 3, according to news reports and his employer.

Aseyev contributed on a freelance basis to the Ukrainian service of the U.S.-government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty under the pseudonym Stanyslav Vasin, RFE/RL representatives told CPJ. He had been expected to visit his mother on June 3 and was due to file his next dispatch for RFE/RL the same day, but did neither, according to press reports. Friends and relatives who looked for him at his apartment that day reported that the door appeared to have been forced, and that a laptop computer was missing.

A friend of Aseyev's, former Ukrainian lawmaker Yegor Firsov, first reported Aseyev's disappearance on his Facebook page, and said he had information through unofficial sources in Ukraine's conflict-ridden east that the journalist was detained by pro-Russia separatists from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR). Separatists have made no statements to confirm or deny this claim.

An unnamed source with the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU, by its Ukrainian acronym) told the independent Ukrainian television station Hromadske that the SBU was trying to locate the journalist, and added, "We know, more or less, where" he is detained. Yesterday, Firsov told RFE/RL that Aseyev's mother had stopped responding to phone calls, raising concerns about her wellbeing.

"We call on Ukrainian authorities to employ all resources at their disposal to find and ensure the safety of Stanyslav Aseyev (Vasin)," CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova said. "All parties to the conflict in east Ukraine should respect the vital role journalists play in bringing the news to the public."

In addition to RFE/RL, Aseyev has contributed to a number of Ukrainian publications, including the independent online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, the weekly magazine Ukrainski Tyzhden, and the analytical newspaper Dzerkalo Tyzhnya, all based in the capital, Kiev.

He covered daily life in the east of the country, writing under the penname Stanyslav Vasin because of the risk of reporting for western or western Ukrainian publications from areas of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed separatists. At least five journalists and two media workers have been killed on the job in Ukraine's east since fighting between Ukrainian security forces and pro-Russia rebels began in 2014.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Three journalists charged with defamation in Myanmar

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 19 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Three journalists charged with defamation in Myanmar, 19 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4be1c.html [accessed 12 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.

June 19, 2017 12:55 PM ET

A monk reads the newspaper in Yangon, Myanmar, in this November 9, 2015 file photo. (Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun)

Bangkok, June 19, 2017  Authorities in Myanmar should immediately drop all criminal proceedings against three journalists charged with defamation and should strike all criminal defamation laws from the books, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Htay Lwin, an administrator in the central Myanmar village of Maehla Taung, filed a complaint with police against Tin Shwe, editor of the MGY Journal, Zar Zar San, a reporter for the daily newspaper Democracy Today, and Phyupwint Nayche, a reporter for the Myanmar Times, under Section 66(d) of Myanmar's Telecommunications Law, which criminalizes using the internet to defame people, the journalists told reporters on June 15, after they learned of the charges. Kyaw Soe, a police official, told the U.S.-government-funded Radio Free Asia that the reporters are charged with posting "incorrect information" to social media in late May regarding a government road project.

"Authorities in Myanmar should throw out the criminal charges against journalists Zar Zar San, Phyupwint Nayche, and Htay Lwin without delay," said Shawn Crispin, CPJ's senior Southeast Asia representative. "The increased use of section 66(d) of Myanmar's Telecommunication Law is quickly reversing significant recent improvements to the press-freedom landscape in the country. It should be scrapped, and all pending charges under its provisions should be dropped."

Several journalists face up to three years in prison under the law. Kyaw Min Swe, editor of The Voice newspaper, has been held in pre-trial detention since June 2 on charges filed under the law by a military official for an opinion column that satirized a pro-military propaganda film. The author of the column, Ko Kyaw Zwa Naing, who writes under the pen name British Ko Ko Maung, was released from detention and cleared of the charges on June 16 because he had not posted the article online, according to news reports. Editor Kyaw Min Swe was denied bail, the reports said.

In November 2016, authorities detained Than Htut Aung, chief executive of Eleven Media Group, and Wai Phyo, chief editor of the group's Daily Eleven newspaper, under Article 66(d) on charges stemming from an opinion piece alleging high-level government corruption.

The two reporters were held in pretrial detention for 54 days before being released on bail. Than Htut Aung suffered a heart attack while in custody, according to media reports. Their trial continues.

On June 8, a senior Ministry of Information official told a visiting CPJ delegation that legislation would soon be introduced to remove criminal penalties under the law. The CPJ delegation raised a list of anti-press laws that CPJ believes should be repealed amended.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
By India Today Web Desk: Kamal Haasan and Bigg Boss Tamil is involved in yet another controversy, as K Krishnaswamy, leader of Puthiya Tamizhagam has threatened to file a Rs 100 crore defamation case against the actor and the channel for what a contestant said during the show.

One of the contestants, Gayathri Raghuram used the word cheri (which mean slum dweller) for a co-contestant, which received a lot of criticism from the viewers.

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Politician K Krishnaswamy wants Kamal Haasan to apologise for Gayathri's comment. While talking to The Times Of India, the politician said, "In the show, there was a conversation between two contestants. One of them called the other as 'cheri' (slum dweller). It is a public platform, and millions of people are watching it. We are sure that it is definitely a prepared script. The channel cannot say it was a mistake. They are creating an imbalance in the society and hurting one particular section of the society."

He also added, "But the actor did not even condemn it or talk about this in the show despite many people raising this issue. So we demanded that he and the channel owners publicly apologise for it. We waited for two days and they have not even considered our request. So we have decided to go ahead with a 100 crore defamation case against the actor and the channel."

Earlier we had reported that a complaint was filed against actor Kamal Haasan by Hindu Makkal Katchi--a nationalistic Hindu party in Tamil Nadu-- for hosting Bigg Boss Tamil, as the show is against Tamil culture.

Also read: Fringe group demands Kamal Haasan's arrest for hosting Bigg Boss Tamil

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Azerbaijan sentences journalist to seven years in prison

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 20 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Azerbaijan sentences journalist to seven years in prison, 20 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4be221.html [accessed 12 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.

June 20, 2017 5:09 PM ET

A man sits on a parapet in Baku in June 2016. A court in the Azerbaijani capital sentenced a journalist to seven years in jail. (Reuters/Maxim Shemetov)

New York, June 20, 2017  Azerbaijani authorities should immediately release Fikret Faramazoglu, chief editor of the news website Journalistic Research Center, from prison and investigate the journalist's claims that he was severely beaten in custody, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Faramazoglu was sentenced on June 14 to seven years in prison for extortion and banned from working as a journalist for two years after serving his prison term, according to media reports.

Faramazoglu was detained on June 30 last year for allegedly receiving a large amount of money from a restaurant owner whom authorities claimed the journalist extorted, pro-government local media reported at the time. Faramazoglu denied in court that it is his signature on a police report stating that 3,000 manats (US$1,700) was found in his pocket. The journalist told the court he and his family were on a trip when the first incident of alleged extortion took place and requested that he be allowed to call witnesses. The judge denied his request. The judge also dismissed Faramazoglu's request for authorities to investigate the beating, according to reports.

"We condemn the jailing of Fikret Faramazoglu and call on Azerbaijani authorities to release him without delay," said CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova. "Authorities should thoroughly investigate claims that Faramazoglu was beaten in jail and ensure that those responsible be punished to the full extent of the law."

The journalist's lawyer, Elchin Sadygov, told CPJ that the arrest came soon after Faramazoglu reported that restaurants were allegedly operating as brothels under the protection of law-enforcement agencies. Sadygov told media following the Baku court's verdict that he thinks the case was retaliation for Faramazoglu's reporting. Sadygov said Faramazoglu will appeal the verdict.

Faramazoglu's wife Faiga Nusrati told CPJ in December last year that her husband told her he was beaten so severely while in detention that he lost several teeth.

Faramazoglu has previously endured politically motivated prosecution and harassment in retaliation for his critical reporting on government corruption. CPJ documented how in 2006 Faramazoglu, then chief editor of the Baku-based opposition weekly 24 Saat, was found guilty of libel and sentenced to a one-year suspended prison term in retaliation for his reporting on alleged corruption in Azerbaijani law enforcement.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Dutch journalists abducted in Colombia

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 20 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Dutch journalists abducted in Colombia, 20 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4be32d5.html [accessed 12 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.

June 20, 2017 12:01 PM ET

A soldier destroys chemicals used in the production of cocaine in Ragondalia, in the remote Colombian state of Norte de Santander, November 22, 2006. Dutch journalists Derk Johannes Bolt and Eugenio Ernest Marie Follender were abducted in the state, police said yesterday.

Bogota, Colombia, June 20, 2017  The Committee to Protect Journalists today called for the immediate release of two Dutch journalists who were abducted while reporting from a lawless region of northeastern Colombia.

Derk Johannes Bolt, 62, and Eugenio Ernest Marie Follender, 58, were abducted yesterday, according to a statement from Colombian police circulated among journalists on Whatsapp. The office of the Colombia Human Rights Ombudsman confirmed the abductions on its Twitter account, but said the two were detained on June 17.

"We call on those holding journalists Derk Johannes Bolt and Eugenio Ernest Marie Follender to release them immediately," Carlos Lauria, CPJ's program director and senior program coordinator for the Americas, said from New York. "Colombian authorities should do their utmost to locate the journalists and bring them to safety, and all sides in the Colombian civil conflict must respect the internationally recognized status of journalists as civilians."

The police statement and a report from the Colombian weekly Semana attributed the kidnapping to the National Liberation Army, or ELN, a Marxist rebel group involved in a more than 50 year conflict with the Colombian state.

The kidnappings took place near the village of El Tarra in Norte de Santander state, which lies along the border with Venezuela and is home to the ELN, which is estimated to have about 1,500 fighters. The area is also home to drug-trafficking groups, according to the police statement.

The Colombian organization Foundation for Freedom of the Press (FLIP, by its Spanish acronym) wrote on Twitter that there were reports that the ELN could be behind the kidnapping, but cautioned that the information had not been confirmed.

On one of its official Twitter accounts, the ELN said it was "investigating to help clear up the case," according to news reports. When the BBC asked an ELN spokesman about the kidnappings he responded: "There is nothing to say."

Broadcast journalist Bolt and camera operator Follender work for the Dutch TV program "Spoorloos," which traces the whereabouts of relatives. They were in the region attempting to track down the biological mother of a Colombian child adopted in The Netherlands, according to news reports.

Police said a unit specialized in abductions has been dispatched to the region. In a statement, the Colombian army also said that it had sent soldiers to the area to search for the two journalists.

Last year, ELN rebels in Norte de Santander abducted Spanish-Colombian journalist Salud Hernandez-Mora as well as two Colombian reporters. They were freed unharmed after about a week in captivity.

Colombia's larger rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, signed a peace treaty last year to end its 52-year insurgency, and is currently disarming its 7,000 fighters. Peace talks with the ELN, which were launched in February, have since stalled, according to news reports.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Editor of Moroccan news website harassed

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 20 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Editor of Moroccan news website harassed, 20 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4be4c.html [accessed 12 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.

June 20, 2017 10:50 AM ET

A protester in Rabat holds a sign saying "Freedom and Dignity," June 11, 2017. (AP/Mosa'ab Elshamy)

New York, June 20, 2017  Moroccan authorities should cease harassing Hamid al-Mahdaoui, the editor of the news website Badil, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Moroccan Interior Minister Abdelouafi Laftit has filed a criminal defamation complaint against al-Mahdaoui, and the editor says he was questioned for six hours last week regarding a video the website published.

Laftit's lawyer, Mohamed Karrout, yesterday told reporters that the minister filed the complaint in response to a May 22 article alleging corruption, published while the minister was visiting northern Morocco's Rif region, the epicenter of protests since fishmonger Mohsen Fikri was crushed to death in a garbage truck trying to recover fish the police had confiscated from him in October 2016.

On June 14, police delivered a summons to al-Mahdaoui's home calling him for questioning, without indicating the subject of the interrogation, he wrote on Facebook. Two days later, the editor was questioned for six hours about videos he released after anti-corruption activist Nasser al-Zafzefi interrupted a Friday sermon in a mosque in the northern city of al-Hoceima, al-Mahdaoui said in a video statement. In the videos, al-Mahdaoui criticized the preacher for referring to the protests as "sedition" and criticized Moroccan officials for the crackdown against the protests.

"Defamation should never be a criminal matter, and no one should be interrogated for six hours for expressing an opinion," CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour said from Geneva, Switzerland. "We call on Moroccan authorities to cease harassing Hamid al-Mahdaoui, and to ensure he is able to do his job without interference."

Al-Mahdaoui says he has faced escalating difficulties for his coverage of the protests. On May 23, he said in a video published to YouTube that unknown individuals tried to hack Badil's database. In a June 4 video, the editor said people had threatened to kill him for the website's coverage of protests in the Rif region.

In August 2015, a court fined the journalist and ordered the website to cease publishing for three months after al-Mahdaoui was convicted of criminal defamation, CPJ reported at the time.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This text has been updated to correct that Mohamed Karrout is Moroccan Interior Minister Abdelouafi Laftit's lawyer.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Iraqi fixer and French journalist killed in Mosul

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 20 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Iraqi fixer and French journalist killed in Mosul, 20 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4be5c.html [accessed 12 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.

June 20, 2017 5:54 PM ET

Journalists take cover as a car bomb explodes in Mosul, May 16, 2017. (Reuters/Danish Siddiqui)

Beirut, June 20, 2017  French cameraman Stephan Villeneuve and Iraqi fixer Bakhtiyar Haddad were killed in an explosion that also injured French journalists Veronique Robert and Samuel Forey as they covered Iraqi soldiers' efforts to retake control of the old city of Mosul yesterday, according to news reports and the French journalists' employers.

The journalists were embedded with elite Iraqi soldiers, traveling on foot through Mosul when an improvised explosive device exploded, news reports said. Alex Kay Potter  a nurse who was on the initial treatment team and who acts as director of communications for Global Response Management (GRM), an international nonprofit that provides medical care on the frontlines of conflicts  told CPJ that Haddad, Forey, Villeneuve, and Robert were initially treated at a trauma stabilization point run by GRM and Iraqi Special Operations Forces. Villeneuve, Robert, and Forey were then transported to a nearby military medical facility for further treatment, Potter said. Kurdish broadcasters Rudaw and Kurdistan 24 reported that Haddad died of his injuries soon after the explosion.

Villeneuve, Robert, and Forey were subsequently flown to a medical facility in Al-Qayyara, some 76 kilometers (47 miles) south of Mosul, and then to Baghdad for further treatment. Villeneuve died of his injuries hours later, according to news reports and the Metro Center for Journalists' Rights, a northern Iraqi press freedom group. Forey's injuries were less serious, Le Figaro reported.

"The deaths of Stephan Villeneuve and Bakhtiyar Haddad and the injuries sustained by Veronique Robert and Samuel Forey testify to the enormous risks journalists take to bring the news from Iraq," CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour said from Geneva. "Iraqi and foreign journalists daily show immense courage and determination to bring vital information to the world."

Haddad had worked as a translator and fixer for French journalists in northern Iraq for more than a decade. Villeneuve and Robert were on assignment for the production company #5bisProduction, filming a report for the public broadcaster France 2. Forey is a freelance journalist who has regularly contributed to Le Figaro and the cultural magazine Telerama, among other media outlets.

Haddad's left hand was hit by a sniper's bullet while he reported from the western Iraqi city of Fallujah on June 23, 2016, according to Liberation and a post Villeneuve, an experienced conflict journalist himself, wrote on Facebook. U.S. soldiers detained Haddad alongside French photographer Corentin Fleury on suspicion of collaborating with Iraqi guerrillas on November 8, 2004, according to Liberation. He was released on December 5, Liberation reported.

More journalists have been killed in Iraq than in any other country since CPJ first began keeping records in 1992.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Spyware targeted Mexican journalists and activists

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 20 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Spyware targeted Mexican journalists and activists, 20 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4be6c.html [accessed 12 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.

June 20, 2017 6:17 PM ET

Mexican investigative journalist Carmen Aristegui speaks to reporters in Mexico City, June 19, 2017. (AP/Eduardo Verdugo)

Mexico City, June 20, 2017  Attempts to spy on Mexican journalists and human rights activists by infiltrating their mobile devices with spyware threaten press freedom in the country, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. A report released in Mexico City yesterday by the press freedom group Article 19 and open internet researchers R3D and the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab documented the attempts.

Journalists, human rights defenders, and anti-corruption activists were targeted by sophisticated spyware capable of accessing their contacts, emails, and other sensitive information stored on their mobile phones, the report found. The software was also capable of recording keystrokes on the devices and of effectively turning the devices' microphones into a listening device, according to the three groups.

"The surveillance of journalists threatens press freedom in Mexico, and potentially the safety of their sources for sensitive stories," Carlos Lauria, CPJ's program director and senior program coordinator for the Americas, said from New York. "The Mexican government should credibly investigate this intrusion and make the results of that investigation public."

Targets received text messages to their mobile phones that contained seemingly credible warnings about, among other things, the wellbeing of family members. The recipients were invited to follow a link to an empty web page that sent the spyware to their phones, where it could operate undetected.

Among the targets were investigative journalists Carmen Aristegui and Carlos Loret de Mola, the director of the human rights group Centro PRODh, and the director of the think tank IMCO, the report found. Families were also targeted: The researchers found that Aristegui's 16-year-old son received the "phishing" text messages, as did the wife of IMCO director Juan Pardenas.

Citizen Lab identified the spyware as Pegasus, a program developed by Israeli company NSO Group as a digital tool to combat terrorism and organized crime. According to news reports, the NSO Group sells Pegasus only to governments. NSO did not respond to CPJ's phone calls seeking comment.

Carmen Aristegui and her investigative team in 2014 reported that the president's wife had bought a mansion in Mexico City from a contractor with ties to the government. Carlos Loret de Mola investigated alleged extrajudicial executions by Federal Police in the town of Tanhuato, roughly 430 kilometers (267 miles) northwest of the capital. Centro PRODh, meanwhile, provided legal support to the families of 43 students who disappeared in Guerrero state in 2014, whereas IMCO has in recent years been a strong proponent of federal anti-corruption legislation, The New York Times reported yesterday. According to the report, the targets of the spyware received most of the phishing text messages while they were investigating or supporting issues that directly involved government institutions.

Citizen Lab stressed that the software cannot be traced back to its original senders and that there was no conclusive evidence as to who was behind the cyberattacks.

Mexico's federal government denies it spied on the journalists or activists. A spokesperson for President Enrique Pena Nieto referred CPJ to the government's statement to The New York Times, in which it "categorically denie[d] that any of its members engages in surveillance or communications operations against defenders of human rights, journalists, anti-corruption activists or any other person without prior judicial authorization."

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Newspaper editor interrogated in Uganda

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 21 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Newspaper editor interrogated in Uganda, 21 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4be813.html [accessed 12 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.

June 21, 2017 4:54 PM ET

Ugandans read a copy of the newspaper Red Pepper in Kampala, in this February 25, 2014, file photo. (AP/Rebecca Vassie)

Nairobi, June 21, 2017  Ugandan authorities should cease investigation and intimidation of privately-owned daily newspaper Red Pepper editor Ben Byarabaha and four other publications, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

On June 15, Uganda's Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) summoned Byarabaha in relation to an article in Red Pepper on the health of Uganda's Inspector General of Police Kale Kayihura, according to documents seen by CPJ. Authorities alleged that the article was intended to "disturb the peace, quiet, and privacy" of Kayihura.

"Summoning editor Ben Byarabaha to endure hours of interrogation has a chilling effect on the Ugandan press," CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Angela Quintal said from New York. "Ugandan journalists should be permitted to report freely on government officers whose well-being is a matter of public interest."

Byarabaha told CPJ that he was interrogated for five hours by the Media Crimes Unit when he appeared at the CID headquarters in Kampala yesterday. He has been ordered to appear again on June 27 to answer to allegations of "offensive communication." Byarabaha said that the police had further questioned him on his sources for the story but he did not reveal them.

CID spokesperson Vincent Ssekate said five publications are under investigation for similar allegations, according to a report. Ssekate did not respond to CPJ's phone calls for comment. Emmanuel Mbonimpa, the assistant commissioner of Uganda's Media Crimes Unit, did not name the four other media outlets, telling the CPJ that information was "confidential."

Section 25 of Uganda's Computer Misuse Act defines offensive communication as the use of electronic communication to "disturb the peace, quiet or right of privacy of any person". By writing about Kayihura's health, Mbonimpa told CPJ, Red Pepper had "offended" and infringed on his privacy, regardless of Kayihura''s role as a public servant.

Haruna Kanaabi, executive secretary of the Independent Media Council, told CPJ that the investigations may push Ugandan journalists to "live in fear that, if you write about public officials, you will be charged."

This is not the first time the government has used allegations of offensive communication to silence critical voices. In April, a university lecturer was arrested after criticizing Ugandan First Lady Janet Museveni on social media.

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Palestinian Authority censors at least 11 news websites

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 21 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Palestinian Authority censors at least 11 news websites, 21 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4be911.html [accessed 12 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.

June 21, 2017 1:02 PM ET

In this November 2010 file photo, a man uses a computer in an internet cafe in the West Bank town of Bethlehem (AP/Nasser Shiyoukhi)

New York, June 21, 2017  The Palestinian Authority should cease blocking access to news websites in the West Bank, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. The Palestinian Authority's attorney general, Ahmad Barrak, on June 15 ordered internet service providers to block access to at least 11 news websites, according to news reports.

Nabhan Khraishi, communications officer for the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, told CPJ that the syndicate was investigating reports that as many as 22 news websites had in fact been blocked. Khraishi said the syndicate planned to file a formal complaint with the prosecutor's office regarding the censorship.

The censored websites include Palestine Now, Palestine Today, the Shehab News Agency, Amameh, Amad, the Palestine News Network, the Palestinian Information Center, Karama Press, Fateh Voice, the Palestine Press News Agency, and Firas Press. Khraishi said all of the blocked websites are either affiliated with Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, or with Mohammad Dahlan, the exiled former head of security in the Gaza Strip who was in 2011 expelled from the Fatah movement that dominates the Palestinian Authority. The attorney general's office in the West Bank city of Ramallah and employees of the websites were not available for comment.

"Palestinian journalists and readers should not bear the brunt of politicians' disputes," CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour said. "We call on the Palestinian Authority to cease censoring news websites, to allow readers in the West Bank unimpeded access to news and information and to let Palestinians form their own opinions."

The Mada Center, a Palestinian press freedom group, quoted employees from the Shehab News Agency and Amad as saying that authorities did not notify them that their websites would be censored. Both agencies learned of the order when they complained to their internet service providers. A follow-up report from Maan News Agency quoted an unnamed senior Palestinian official as saying that the websites were banned because of pending criminal cases against them, and for spreading "false news."

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Angolan journalists charged with crimes against state

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 23 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Angolan journalists charged with crimes against state, 23 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bea11.html [accessed 12 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.

June 23, 2017 3:29 PM ET

In this November 4, 2014, file photo, editor Rafael Marques de Morais smiles on a visit to Johannesburg, South Africa. (AP/Simon Allison)

New York, June 23, 2017  Angolan authorities should immediately drop all charges against journalists Rafael Marques de Morais and Mariano Bras Lourenco, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Marques de Morais, who runs the anticorruption website Maka Angola, and Bras Lourenco, of the weekly newspaper O Crime, face charges of "outrage to a body of sovereignty and injury against public authority," under Angola's Law on Crimes against State Security, Maka Angola reported on June 21. The charge  which, according to media reports, carries a maximum sentence of six years in prison  stems from an October 2016 Maka Angola article, republished in O Crime that alleged the attorney general illegally acquired land, according to legal documents seen by CPJ.

"The Angolan attorney general's use of state security legislation to charge journalists who published allegations of his wrongdoing is an absolute outrage, even for a government with little tolerance for dissent," said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Angela Quintal. "Rafael Marques de Morais and Mariano Bras Lourenco are not threats to Angola's national security. The state should immediately drop all charges against them and should cease threatening them with prison for reporting on issues of public interest."

The state filed the "outrage to a body of sovereignty" charges on May 12, 2017, on behalf of Angolan Attorney General Joao Maria de Sousa and Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, but Marques de Morais and Bras Lourenco learned of them only on June 20, according to media reports. This gave the accused only five days to prepare for a hearing at which a judge is expected to decide whether to bring the case to trial, Marques de Morais told CPJ.

Marques de Morais told CPJ that the "outrage to a body of sovereignty" charges were "a brush for everything when they want to hold a journalist."

According to legal documents seen by CPJ, Attorney General Joao Maria de Sousa also brought criminal defamation, "injury," and "abuse of freedom of the press" charges against Marques de Morais individually.

"The intention is to close the newspaper [O Crime]," Bras Lourenco told CPJ in an email. "They plan to demand compensation that the newspaper cannot pay, [so that] this time, it declares bankruptcy."

Marques de Morais and Bras Lourenco were charged with insult laws and interrogated over the same article in 2016, CPJ reported at the time.

CPJ's calls to the office of the Angolan presidency and attorney general went unanswered.

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Independent journalist detained in eastern Cuba

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 23 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Independent journalist detained in eastern Cuba, 23 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4beb13.html [accessed 12 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.

June 23, 2017 5:12 PM ET

A cafeteria in Baracoa, Guantanamo. Security forces detained a journalist from the Cuban province and confiscated work equipment. (AFP/Yamil Lage)

New York, June 23, 2017  Cuban authorities should immediately release independent journalist Manuel Alejandro Leon Velazquez and return his equipment, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. State security forces and Interior Ministry officials detained Leon Velazquez around 4 p.m. yesterday in the eastern province of Guantanamo, according to his news website Diario de Cuba and the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Press.

The journalist's neighbor, Isael Poveda, told Diario de Cuba that he saw authorities arrive at Leon Velazquez's home with an order to confiscate "counter-revolutionary" equipment. According to Poveda, who is an opposition activist, police arrested Leon Velazquez and took a computer, a Sony camera, a copy of the Cuban constitution, and work documents from the journalist's home. CPJ was unable to determine what documents were confiscated.

"Independent journalists in Cuba should be able to work without the constant threat of arbitrary detention," said CPJ Senior Program Coordinator for the Americas Carlos Lauria. "Cuban authorities should release Manuel Alejandro Leon Velazquez and return his equipment immediately."

Leon Velazquez covers general news in Guantanamo and other eastern Cuban states for the independent news website Diario de Cuba. Normando Hernandez, director of the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Press, told CPJ today the organization is aware of the case, and has spoken with Leon Velazquez's editor, who confirmed the arrest.

Leon Velazquez has been detained on several occasions, including in October 2016 while reporting on the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew, and in February 2017, when police detained him for two hours at a checkpoint on the border between Guantanamo and Santiago de Cuba province, Diario de Cuba reported.

A September 2016 CPJ special report on press freedom in Cuba found that independent journalists there continue to face the threat of arbitrary detention, and that vague and outdated laws and limitations on internet access continue to slow progress on press freedom.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Indian state assembly sentences two editors to prison for defamation

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 23 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Indian state assembly sentences two editors to prison for defamation, 23 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bec13.html [accessed 12 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.

June 23, 2017 1:53 PM ET

A man walks in front of the seat of the Karnataka state legislature in Bangalore, India, April 2, 2017. (AP/Aijaz Rahi)

New Delhi, June 23, 2017  The elected assembly of India's Karnataka state should revoke one-year jail sentences it imposed on two editors in Bangalore, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

The assembly on June 21 sentenced Ravi Belagere, editor of Hi Bangalore, a Kannada-language weekly tabloid, and Anil Raju, editor of the Yelahanka Voice daily newspaper, to one year in prison and fines of 10,000 Indian rupees (U.S.$155) each for articles the assembly said defamed two of its members, according to media reports. BM Nagaraj and SR Vishwanath, two members of the assembly, had filed complaints before the legislative privileges committee against the two journalists, arguing that articles the editors had published defamed them. Neither Belagere nor Raju have been arrested, according to press reports.

"Even after coming before the committee and apologizing, Anil Raju continued to publish defamatory articles with mocking pictures," The News Minute website quoted the committee order as saying.

"It's ridiculous that a journalist should go to jail for mocking a politician," CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Steven Butler said from Washington, D.C. "We call on the Karnataka state assembly to reverse the sentences it imposed on Ravi Belagere and Anil Raju immediately and should cease abusing press freedom."

CPJ's repeated calls and messages to Belagere and Raju seeking comment went unanswered.

Indian constitutional expert Subash Kashyap explained to The Indian Express newspaper that state assemblies have sentencing authority in "breach of privilege" cases  those which the assemblies deem to obstruct their functioning or show contempt of the assembly, its committees, or its members.

"The [state assembly's] Privileges Committee submitted a report to the House which unanimously passed a resolution accepting the committee's recommendation. So the question of my individual opinion doesn't arise," KB Koliwad, speaker of the assembly, told CPJ when asked whether a jail term was excessive punishment for defamation.

The Karnataka assembly's decision follows a precedent set the Tamil Nadu state legislature. In 1987, the assembly passed a resolution sentencing S. Balasubramanian, editor of Ananda Vikattin, a popular Tamil-language weekly, to three months' in prison for publishing provocative cartoons of legislators. In protest, journalists in Madras  now called Chennai  boycotted the state assembly for a day, according to the newspaper India Today.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
In a letter posted on Twitter, actor Kamal Haasan urged his fans and Tamil Nadu residents to publicly question the Palaniswami-led government in the state. Earlier in the day, Haasan attracted criticism from Palaniswami for alleging that corruption existed within the state government.

In a letter posted on Twitter, Kamal Haasan urged the people of Tamil Nadu to publicly question the state government (File photo)

By India Today Web Desk: Actor and prominent Tamil cinema personality Kamal Haasan continued his face off with the Tamil Nadu government today, posting a letter on Twitter in which he asked his "fans and the discerning people of TN" to come out and openly question the E Palainiswami-led government.

Hasan came under fire today after alleging that the Tamil Nadu governemnt is corrupt, a statement that drew sharp responses from CM E Palaniswami and other state ministers.

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Through the day, ministers criticised Haasan, with CM Palaniswami saying that the actor "does not know politics". "He is into acting... does not know about politics. After he comes to politics and says (such) things, we will give a proper response," Palaniswami said.

Finance Minister D Jaykaumar questioned why Haasan had not made such allegations when late chief minister J Jayalalithaa was alive. Jayakumar also asked Haasan to avoid making "generalised statements".

In response to his corruption charge, Municipal Administration Minister S.P. Velumani challenged Kamal Haasan to prove existence of corruption in the government, and also asked the actor if he was ready to share the details of taxes paid by him for his films.

Haasan hit back on Wednesday night, posting a letter on Twitter saying that he has always commented on political affairs. Haasan noted that he was part of the anti-Hindi protests in the past and said that he had become one with the political fraternity long back.

Haasan went on to urge "all those who are following me and those who are focusing on the welfare of the state (to) please come forward to voice your questions." He added that it is the duty of every responsible citizen to question the government on corruption and its capabilities.

Haasan also said that instead of sending letters, which can be thrown away, people should use social media to question the government. The government will not be able to do much if a large number of people start questioning it, Haasan went on to indicate.

"How many can be arrested? One, two, a lakh? Where will they put us all up? Tamil Nadu doesn't even have a big enough jail to hold that capacity," Haasan said before talking about how corruption exists within the film industry as well. " Every sector will face corruption and in my industry too there is corruption and I will expose it."

The actor added that he would also cite the corrupt practices relating to his movie field.

He alleged that barring few like him, others in the movie world are keeping silent to the corrupt drama enacted in the name of giving tax exemption certificates.

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(With inputs from Akshaya Nath in Chennai, IANS)

ALSO READ | AIADMK ministers launch scathing attack on Kamal Haasan, take jibe at his personal life

ALSO READ | GST: Kamal Haasan thanks Rajinikanth for asking Tamil Nadu government to rethink double tax on movie tickets

ALSO WATCH | Kamal Haasan backs Panneerselvam, says he has proved his mettle till now

--- ENDS ---
Vietnamese blogger stripped of citizenship, deported

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 26 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Vietnamese blogger stripped of citizenship, deported, 26 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bed13.html [accessed 12 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.

June 26, 2017 3:56 PM ET

Pham Minh Hoang speaks to reporters in the Paris suburb of Le Kremlin-Bicetre, June 25, 2017. (AFP/Jacques Demarthon)

New York, June 26, 2017  Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang should restore blogger Pham Minh Hoang's citizenship and should allow him to reside and work freely in the country, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Hoang told The Associated Press that police officers burst into his house the night of June 23, took him to a detention center, and forced him on a plane to Paris the following day. Hoang, a university math teacher and blogger associated with the California-based Viet Tan opposition group, holds French citizenship.

According to Deutsche Presse-agentur, President Quang revoked Hoang's Vietnamese citizenship on May 17, but according to Reuters, Hoang learned of the decision only on June 1, from the French consul-general. The blogger unsuccessfully attempted to appeal the decision and to remain in Vietnam, according to media reports. Hoang told the AP that when he refused deportation, officials reminded him that his wife and daughter were still living in Vietnam.

"Stripping Pham Minh Hoang of his Vietnamese citizenship and forcing him to leave the country are exceptionally cruel responses to dissent," said Steven Butler, CPJ's Asia program coordinator. "Vietnam should allow Hoang to return home to his family and should cease trying to silence voices it does not want heard."

Hoang told the AP that he will continue his political activism from France, though he hopes he will be able to return to Vietnam.

Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang last week said the decision to revoke Hoang's citizenship was justified because it was "conducted in accordance with the provisions of Vietnamese law," Reuters reported. Vietnam's Foreign Ministry and Vietnam's Embassy to the United States did not respond to CPJ's requests for comment.

Police arrested Hoang in 2010 and charged him with attempting to overthrow the government, citing 33 articles he had written under his pen name, Phan Kien Quoc, in which he criticized one-party rule, alleged corruption, environmental degradation, and Chinese influence. He was initially sentenced to three years in prison, but was released in January 2012 to serve three years under house arrest, having spent 17 months in prison, in recognition of his cooperation with authorities and renunciation of the Viet Tan. According to media reports the blogger did not stop publishing.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Myanmar detains three journalists who reported on outlawed group

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 27 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Myanmar detains three journalists who reported on outlawed group, 27 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bee13.html [accessed 12 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.

June 27, 2017 3:45 PM ET

Irrawaddy reporter Thein Zaw, seen in this undated picture, is detained with two other journalists in Myanmar's Shan state. (Steve Tickner)

Washington D.C., June 27, 2017  Myanmar authorities should immediately release three journalists arrested in northern Shan state yesterday on accusations of unlawful association after they covered an event organized by an armed ethnic group that is banned by authorities, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Myanmar's military arrested Aye Naing and Pyae Phone Naing from the Democratic Voice of Burma news agency, and Thein Zaw, a reporter for The Irrawaddy media group, according to the Office of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. The journalists were arrested alongside four other people as they returned from covering a drug-burning ceremony arranged by the Ta'ang Liberation Army, an outlawed armed ethnic group, according to reports. The event was held as part of the U.N.'s International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, according to reports.

The military plans to charge the journalists under the 1908 Unlawful Associations Act, according to Zaw Htay, a spokesperson for the president's office who cited an unnamed military official. Zaw Htay told Reuters the journalists are detained by the military but will be transferred to police custody. If convicted, they could face up to three years in prison.

"Aye Niang, Pyae Phone Naing, and Thein Zaw should be immediately freed and allowed to carry on with their work as journalists," said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Steven Butler. "Using the archaic Unlawful Associations Act to incarcerate journalists is an affront to democracy in Myanmar."

Editors from the Democratic Voice of Burma and The Irrawaddy said they had lost contact with their reporters and did not know where they were being held. "We are worried for the safety of our journalists," Khin Maung Soe, a multimedia editor for the Democratic Voice of Burma, told reporters.

CPJ has campaigned for a repeal of the Unlawful Associations Act, which has long been used by Myanmar's military to restrict reporters' activities. The law criminalizes contact with groups deemed to pose a threat to national security and in the past was used to prevent contact with media groups operating in exile.

In October 2014, CPJ documented how the act was used to justify the detention of Aung Kyaw Naing, a journalist popularly known as Par Gyi who was accused of belonging to an insurgent group while covering hostilities near the township of Kyaikmayaw. Par Gyi was later shot and killed in military custody. Two soldiers were acquitted of his death during a secret military trial, according to reports. During a mission to the Myanmar capital of Naypyidaw earlier this month, a delegation of CPJ representatives met Niang's widow, Than Dar, who says she continues to press for justice.

CPJ also pressed the government in meetings in Naypyidaw for a swift repeal of section 66(d) of the Telecommunications Act, which has been used to imprison journalists without trial under vaguely defined defamation charges.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Pakistani journalist taken from home in Balochistan

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 28 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Pakistani journalist taken from home in Balochistan, 28 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bef13.html [accessed 12 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.

June 28, 2017 4:35 PM ET

In this November 29, 2008, file photo, a member of the Frontier Corps paramilitary group surveys a street in Khar, Pakistan. (AP/Emilio Morenatti)

New York, June 28, 2017  Authorities in Pakistan should do everything in their power to ensure the swift release of Zafar Achakzai, a journalist for the newspaper Daily Qudrat, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Men in civilian clothes on June 25 took Achakzai, a senior reporter at the Urdu-language newspaper Daily Qudrat, from his home in Quetta, in Pakistan's restive western province of Balochistan, according to local media and Naimat Achakzai, who is the editor of Daily Qudrat and Zafar's father. Naimat Achakzai told CPJ that the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force organized by the federal government, told him it had initially detained the journalist, but that they had subsequently refused to provide any further information. CPJ was unable to find contact information for the Frontier Corps.

In an emailed statement, the Pakistan Press Foundation cited local unnamed journalists as saying the Frontier Corps had detained the journalist for comments he posted on social media criticizing security agencies their handling of the arrest of a provincial lawmaker on charges he struck and killed a police officer with his car and did not stop. Naimat Achakzai likewise told CPJ that he believed his son had been detained for his activity on social media.

"It has been nearly four days since Pakistani journalist Zafar Achakzai was taken from his home in Balochistan," CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Steven Butler said from Washington, D.C. "Particularly given how dangerous the area is for journalists, we call on Pakistani authorities to do everything in their power to ensure he is released without delay or harm."

Balochistan has long been the site of high political and ethnic tension. Unidentified assailants fatally shot Muhammad Jan, Daily Qudrat's correspondent in Qalat, Balochistan, in January, according to press reports.

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Kyrgyzstan holds three trials in one day against independent outlet

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 29 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Kyrgyzstan holds three trials in one day against independent outlet, 29 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bf013.html [accessed 12 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.

June 29, 2017 5:56 PM ET

Supporters of detained opposition politician Omurbek Tekebayev protest in the Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek, in February. A media group that reported on comments by Tekebayev is facing five separate charges of insulting the president. (AFP/Vyacheslav Oseledko)

New York, June 29, 2017  Kyrgyzstan should drop all charges against the independent media organization ProMedia and its co-founder, Naryn Idinov, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. A Bishkek district court held three separate hearings today into charges of insult made against ProMedia, which runs the independent online news agency Zanoza, and Idinov who edits and writes for Zanoza, according to media reports.

The prosecutor-general filed five complaints earlier this year accusing ProMedia and Idinov of insulting the president in articles published on Zanoza between October 2015 and March 2017, according to reports. Prosecutors are demanding "moral compensation" of 27 million som (US$392,000) in total from ProMedia, including 9 million som from Idinov, the journalist told CPJ. On March 14, the courts ordered bank accounts for ProMedia to be frozen and on March 15 a lien was put on Idinov's Bishkek apartment, according to reports. Idinov is also under a travel ban.

All three hearings were adjourned until tomorrow, Idinov told CPJ. A fourth hearing is due to be held tomorrow against ProMedia and Idinov in a different district court and a fifth case, also on insult charges, is scheduled to be heard on July 3.

"Scheduling three separate court cases for one news outlet on the same day is harassment. The crackdown on ProMedia, Zanoza, and Naryn Idinov should stop immediately," CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova said. "We call on Kyrgyz authorities to drop the charges, release all assets, and lift the travel ban against Idinov. Journalists in Kyrgyzstan must be allowed to work without fear of reprisal."

In between hearings today, Idinov told CPJ that he believes the cases are politically motivated. "Three different trials were held from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. today, with three different judges and we were the only defendant." Idinov said that they expect a guilty verdict will be handed down.

A copy of the prosecutors' files viewed by CPJ cites the following Zanoza articles as allegedly insulting the president:

A February 2017 report on comments that opposition leader Omurbek Tekebayev made, alleging that President Almazbek Atambayev is corrupt.

An October 2015 article that quoted former President Askar Akayev, in which he alleged that Atambayev was involved in corruption.

An October 2015 article that questioned Atambayev's lavish lifestyle.

Two March 2017 articles that criticized the February arrest of Tekebayev.

A March 2017 news report in which former parliament member Cholpon Jakupova criticized Atambayev's attacks on journalists.

An earlier court ruling ordered that all the cited articles be blocked on Zanoza, according to Idinov.

Tekebayev, the leader of the opposition Ata Meken party, was seen as a strong contender in October's elections when Atambayev is due to stand down as president. Authorities jailed Tekebayev in February, according to reports.

As well as the legal action against ProMedia, CPJ has documented in recent months how Atambayev verbally assaulted the media; charges have been brought against other critical journalists and outlets, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL); and authorities ignored a U.N. order to release imprisoned journalist Azimjon Askarov, who is serving a life sentence.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Mexican journalist says he was attacked, threatened by police

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 29 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Mexican journalist says he was attacked, threatened by police, 29 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bf115.html [accessed 12 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.

June 29, 2017 6:20 PM ET

In this file photo, municipal police block a street in Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico, January 17, 2017. (Reuters/Victor Ruiz Garcia)

Mexico City, June 29, 2017  Mexican authorities should swiftly and credibly investigate the alleged assault of journalist Ruben Pat, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Pat, the co-founder of the online news resource Semanario Playa News, told CPJ that police beat him, detained him overnight, and threatened him for his reporting.

Pat, 41, told CPJ that municipal police in Playa del Carmen, in the southern state of Quintana Roo, signaled for him to pull his motorcycle over as he left a meeting with other journalists at around 1:30 a.m. on June 25. When the journalist complied, police handcuffed him and violently pushed him into the patrol car, he said.

"They pulled a T-shirt over my head and started kicking me while driving around," Pat told CPJ. "At least one of them repeatedly punched me in the face."

Pat said that police continued beating him as they drove around for roughly 40 minutes, threatening him. "They told me to stop publishing articles about a local police chief, and that I knew what would be coming to me if I didn't."

Municipal police did not respond to several requests by CPJ for comment over telephone and social media today.

"Mexican state and federal authorities should investigate serious allegations that police beat and threatened journalist Ruben Pat, and ensure that he can do his work without fear of reprisal," Alex Ellerbeck, senior research associate for the Americas at CPJ, said from New York. "The only way to protect journalists in Mexico is to combat the rampant impunity that allows journalists to be attacked with no consequences for the perpetrators."

Pat said the policemen eventually stopped at the main local police station, at approximately 2:00 a.m., and that he was then jailed for several hours in a holding cell with roughly two dozen other people, before he was allowed to make a phone call. At approximately 6:00 a.m., a family member ensured his release by paying a fine to a judge present at the station, but Pat told CPJ that he was never told on which charges he had been held: "I have not been given any document telling me why I was arrested or why they kept me in jail."

Pat said the police officers were angry about a short article he had published on May 30, in which he reported on several banners members of a criminal syndicate allegedly hung around Playa del Carmen accusing the local police chief of having "sold" Playa del Carmen to a rival criminal gang.

The journalist told CPJ that the attack left him with cuts and bruises on his torso and face, and that he now suffers from headaches and blurry vision. He also said that he fears for his safety and that of his family: "I have hardly left my home since it happened. Police cars have been driving past my house the last few days. I am afraid to leave. I'm also worried that I don't have the money to pay for medical treatment."

Pat said that he reported the attack to the Quintana Roo state authorities and to the Federal Mechanism for Protection of Journalists and Human Rights Defenders, which implements security measures for reporters who suffer violence and threats, and that he plans to report the attack to the Federal Special Prosecutor for Attention to Crimes against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE) this week.

Pat co-founded Semanario Playa News eight months ago with two other reporters as a news portal on social media. He told CPJ that he had been a reporter for different media outlets in Quintana Roo for 13 years, until he decided he wanted to start his own news outlet. Although Playa News is now available only on Facebook, he hopes to turn it into a stand-alone news website. Playa News mostly covers crime, accidents, and local politics in the municipalities of Solidaridad, to which Playa del Carmen belongs, and Benito Juarez, which includes the city of Cancun. Both Playa del Carmen and Cancun are popular tourist destinations.

Mexico is on a par with Iraq as the two most deadly countries in the world for journalists in 2017. According to CPJ research, at least four journalists have been murdered in Mexico this year in direct retaliation for their work, including well-known reporters Miroslava Breach and Javier Valdez Cardenas. CPJ is investigating the motives for the murder of El Politico reporter Ricardo Monlui Cabrera in March.

Attacks on the press are a common occurrence in Quintana Roo as well. On May 29, Carlos Barrios, a reporter for the Playa del Carmen-based magazine Aspectos, was assaulted and threatened by an unknown assailant, who also threatened his editor, Eduardo Rascon.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Guatemalan journalist faces threats, intimidation

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 30 June 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Guatemalan journalist faces threats, intimidation, 30 June 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bf30.html [accessed 12 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.

June 30, 2017 2:29 PM ET

Guatemalans remember those killed in the country's 36-year civil conflict in Guatemala City, February 25, 2016. (Reuters/Josue Decavele)

New York, June 30, 2017  Guatemalan authorities should thoroughly investigate the threats against journalist Marielos Monzon, an investigative reporter and contributor to the newspaper Prensa Libre, and should ensure her safety, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

On June 26, Monzon submitted a formal complaint to the Special Prosecutor's Office for Crimes against Journalists in response to her inclusion on a list of people alleged to have been involved in "terrorist" crimes during Guatemala's 36-year internal conflict that recently circulated widely on social media, according to news reports. The document was also shared with people alleged to be members of organized crime groups, according to the press freedom organization CERIGUA.

"We are alarmed by this attempt to intimidate journalists into censoring themselves," said CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney. "The Guatemalan government should conduct a thorough investigation into the dangerous threats against Marielos Monzon and should redouble its efforts to ensure journalists can do their work safely."

On June 11, the daily newspaper elPeriodico reported that a lawyer affiliated with the Foundation Against Terrorism, a right-wing group linked to retired military generals, had told her clients, including alleged drug traffickers and others alleged to have ties to organized crime, that the people on the list were responsible for criminal proceedings and extradition cases brought against them. In her June 13 column in the Prensa Librenewspaper, Monzon called these actions an "incitement to violence that puts those of us who appear on the list in serious danger."

"I feel like I'm in a situation of imminent risk right now," Monzon told CPJ. "Not only in terms of my life, but it is also a violation of freedom of expression. It's a campaign of slander and defamation to remove my credibility and get me to be quiet."

Julio Paredes, an official with the Special Prosecutor's Office for Crimes against Journalists, told CPJ the office had requested police protection for Monzon and had opened an investigation.

Monzon told CPJ she first learned about the list in December 2011, when businessman Theodore Plocharski filed a complaint seeking to indict 52 individuals for a series of "terrorist" actions during the Guatemalan civil war, which ended in 1996. The document accuses the 52 people named of participating in serious crimes, including kidnapping, torture, and murder.

Monzon's name appeared next to her alleged guerrilla pseudonym, "Tania." The list includes two other columnists, as well as human rights activists and political figures, according to reports.

Monzon denied the allegations. She told CPJ that many of the events cited in the document occurred in the late 1970s or early 1980s, when she was just a few years old or before she was even born.

Monzon has worked as a journalist for more than two decades, covering human rights issues including war crimes, corruption, and impunity.

Political polarization and increasingly powerful organized crime groups have left many Guatemalan journalists fearful for their safety and afraid to report on sensitive issues, according to CPJ research.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Kenya seeks to restrict political commentary on social media ahead of elections

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 5 July 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Kenya seeks to restrict political commentary on social media ahead of elections, 5 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bf44.html [accessed 12 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.

July 5, 2017 4:27 PM ET

A vendor sells badges of Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta, left, and his deputy William Ruto in May. Kenya is seeking to restrict commentary on social media ahead of the August elections. (AFP/Simon Maina)

Nairobi, July 5, 2017  Kenyan authorities should ensure that proposed social media guidelines do not prevent journalists from reporting critically or close the space for public debate ahead of general elections due to take place August 8, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Two government bodies  the Communications Authority, which has regulatory oversight in broadcasting and telecommunications, and the National Cohesion and Integration Commission, which promotes national unity  are reviewing the results of a public consultation on draft guidelines that they proposed to prevent the spread of inflammatory content and hate speech on messaging and social media platforms.

A copy of the proposed guidelines, viewed by CPJ, warns social media users and bloggers against using inflammatory language, hate speech, or ethnic contempt. The vaguely worded proposal says that broadcasters will be held accountable for all content aired on their platforms and requires social media users to be "polite, truthful and respectful" and to adopt a "civilized" tone when posting political content. Social media users must seek government approval of potentially inflammatory political content 24 hours before posting items, according to the proposed guidelines.

After the results of the public consultation are reviewed, the Communications Authority can approve the proposal without parliamentary approval, according to legal experts with whom CPJ spoke and the 2010 consumer protection regulations.

"The guidelines as currently drafted could constrict the Kenyan press from reporting and commenting freely on political events," said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Angela Quintal in New York. "With elections scheduled to take place in August, we urge authorities to ensure that journalists are free to share news and opinion across all platforms without fear of reprisal."

The proposal refers to prosecution for hate speech under the National Cohesion and Integration Act, which allows for punishments of up to 1 million Kenyan shillings (US$9,600), and for publishing "inciting material" under the penal code, which carries prison terms of up to three years in prison and or a 5 million Kenyan shillings fine.

Under the guidelines, the Communication Authority will resolve complaints in broadcasting and telecommunications, and the National Cohesion and Integration Commission will investigate and bring up for prosecution cases against individuals and political parties.

Faith Waigwa, vice-president of the Law Society of Kenya, told CPJ that although the guidelines do not carry the same weight as parliamentary legislation, they are used by the courts to help interpret and apply existing laws.

Linus Kaikai, chairman of the Kenya Editors Guild, told CPJ, "We are very concerned when a blanket declaration is made because it can affect the work of legitimate, self-regulating media."

The proposals, which were first circulated June 21, come ahead of Kenya's general election in August. A commission set up to investigate the violence surrounding Kenya's elections in 2007 was told by the ministry of information that some radio stations aired inflammatory content. A study by the BBC World Service Trust cited international reports from January 2008 as saying that some local media were "responsible for fanning ethnic hatred and fueling violence."

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Chinese journalist arrested on charges of revealing state secrets

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 6 July 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Chinese journalist arrested on charges of revealing state secrets, 6 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bf56.html [accessed 12 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.

July 6, 2017 3:34 PM ET

A policeman tells a photographer not take pictures, in Beijing, May 12, 2017. (Reuters/Thomas Peter)

Washington, D.C., July 6, 2017  Chinese authorities should drop all charges and immediately free Yang Xiuqiong, a contributor to the banned human rights news website 64 Tianwang, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Police in Mianyang city, Sichuan province, arrested Yang on June 23 and charged the journalist with "illegally providing state secrets overseas," according to news reports and a 64 Tianwang volunteer, whose name CPJ is withholding for fear they might face retaliation. Yang, who has been detained by police several times in the past, was arrested after authorities charged her in the same criminal case as that of Huang Qi, the founder and publisher of the site, who was arrested on November 28, 2016.

The arrest came as Chinese authorities stepped up their campaign against the site and its contributors. A court on July 4 rejected 64 Tianwang contributor Wang Shurong's appeal of a six-year sentence for "picking quarrels and provoking troubles," according to press reports. Another 64 Tianwang volunteer, Chen Tianmao, was also arrested late last year and charged alongside Huang Qi on charges of providing state secrets. Lian Huanli, also a volunteer for the website, has been missing since May, according to media reports.

"The arrest of Yang Xiuqiong is yet another escalation of China's war against free expression and news reporting in the country," said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Steven Butler. "Yang and fellow journalists from the 64 Tianwang news website must be freed immediately, with all charges dropped."

The website is no longer functioning. The last tweet from the website's Twitter account was posted on October 24, 2016.

Chinese police have detained Yang at least twice before, including for reporting on protests at the September 2016 G-20 summit in Hangzhou, according to reports.

64 Tianwang began as a missing-persons search website and later evolved into a news website site that covered protests, allegations of government corruption and abuse of power, police brutality, and the detention of writers and activists.

China is the world's second worst jailer of journalists, according to CPJ research. At the end of 2016, when CPJ last conducted its annual census of journalists jailed around the world, China imprisoned 38 journalists, including 64 Tianwang founder Huang Qi.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Italian police arrest Ukrainian man accused of killing photojournalist

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 6 July 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Italian police arrest Ukrainian man accused of killing photojournalist, 6 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bf66.html [accessed 12 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.

July 6, 2017 6:55 PM ET

Andrea Rocchelli's passport is photographed on May 25, 2014, the day after his death. (AFP)

New York, July 6, 2017  Italian authorities should fully investigate and prosecute all those responsible for the 2014 death of Italian photojournalist Andrea Rocchelli in Ukraine, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Italian police on June 30 arrested Vitaly Markiv, a dual Italian-Ukrainian citizen, on charges of murdering Rocchelli, Italian and Ukrainian media reported. In a July 4 hearing, prosecutors charged Markiv with premeditated murder. According to Italian and Russian media reports, Markiv exercised his right to remain silent.

Rocchelli, founder and photojournalist of Cesare photo agency, was on assignment near the city of Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine when he, his Ukrainian fixer, Andrei Mironov, and French photojournalist William Roguellon were caught in fighting between the Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian separatists on May 24, 2014, CPJ reported at the time. Russian and Ukrainian officials each blamed the other side for killing Rocchelli and Mironov.

According to Italian media, prosecutors in Pavia, Rocchelli's hometown, began investigating the killing in 2016 after studying footage from Rocchelli's camera at the insistence of the journalist's parents. They also took the testimony of Rocchelli's colleague, Roguellon, who was wounded in the same attack, and other Italian journalists who have frequently traveled to the area in Ukraine where Rocchelli was killed to investigate his death.

Italian investigators concluded that soldiers from the Ukrainian National Guard under Markiv's command targeted the three men knowing they were journalists, and in December 2016 obtained a warrant for his arrest, according to media reports. Police arrested Markiv when he arrived at Bologna airport for his first trip to Italy since Rocchelli's death, the reports said.

"We call on Italian authorities to conduct a thorough investigation into all those responsible for the death of photojournalist Andrea Rocchelli in Ukraine," CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney said. "Ukrainian authorities should fully cooperate with their Italian counterparts and send a signal that reporters cannot be killed with impunity."

In a July 1 statement, the Ukrainian National Guard expressed "concern" over Markiv's arrest. The same day, Ukraine's deputy prosecutor-general, Yevgenii Yenin, wrote on his personal Facebook page that his office was "surprised" by Markiv's arrest, and that it had requested additional information from Italian police.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Algerian journalist jailed pending trial for 'espionage'

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 7 July 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Algerian journalist jailed pending trial for 'espionage', 7 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bf74.html [accessed 12 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.

July 7, 2017 4:09 PM ET

In this file photograph, police detain a protester during a March 6, 2014, demonstration in Algiers against Algerian President Abdulaziz Bouteflika's decision to run for a fourth term. (Reuters/Ramzi Boudina)

New York, July 7, 2017  Algerian authorities should immediately release independent journalist and fixer Said Chitour and should drop all charges against him, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Prosecutors charged Chitour  who has worked as a fixer and a journalist for the BBC, France 24, and the Washington Post, among others  with espionage for "leaking classified documents" to foreign diplomats, according to news reports. Police arrested him at Algiers International Airport on June 5 as he returned from Spain, according to media reports, but his arrest was not made public until after July 3, when diplomats from an unspecified country told journalists about it at a dinner organized by the U.S. Embassy in Algiers, according to the same media reports.

Mohand Tahar, Chitour's brother, told journalists that the Chitour denied the charges against him, and that Algerian security forces had summoned Chitour at least twice before and questioned him about his work with foreign journalists. Chitour knew that he "was on the [authorities'] radar," Tahar told journalists.

Neither Algerian Interior Ministry press officials nor diplomats at the Algerian Embassy to the United States immediately responded to CPJ's emails and phone calls requesting comment.

"Said Chitour's arrest on espionage charges appears to be an attempt to keep information about Algeria out of the international press," CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney said. "We call on Algerian authorities to release Chitour, drop all charges against him, and to cease harassing and threatening journalists for their work."

Chitour's lawyer, Khaled Bourayou, told the Algerian news website Tout sur l'Algerie that Chitour did not leak any documents to foreign officials, and in any case did not have access to the kind of documents described in the relevant Algerian legislation. Bourayou did not respond to CPJ's repeated requests for further information.

Chitour is jailed in Algiers' El-Harrach Prison, pending trial before the Dar El Beida Court, media reports said. The media reports did not say whether a date had been set for his trial.

In January, Algerian authorities arrested Marzoug Touati, an editor for the news website Al-Hogra, and held him in administrative detention on charges of "talking to the agents of a foreign power with the intention of causing harm to Algeria's army, diplomatic relations, and financial interests," according to media reports.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
By PTI: Ghaziabad, Jul 18 (PTI) The district administration has deployed three Quick Response Teams and a company of Provincial Armed Constabulary to provide security for Kanwar Yatra which will culminate at a temple here in a few days.

The QRT and PAC teams have been deployed at the ancient Dudheshwar Nath temple where the devotees of Lord Shiva will pay their obeisance by offering Ganga Jal on the occasion of Maha ShivRatri on July 21, police said.

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Senior Superintendent of Police HN Singh told PTI that the two QRT teams comprise four commandos each.

One team will work under the supervision of city SP and another will patrol in rural area under the aegis of SP (rural area).

Policemen are keeping tight vigil on the movements in the area by donning the attire of Kanwarias so that no anti- social element infiltrates in the caravan of pilgrims, Singh said.

Keeping in view the past experiences when petty conflicts between Kanwarias and locals took ugly turns, camera fitted drones will be deployed to avoid such incidents, the SSP added. PTI COR ARK ZMN ARK

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Somalia: Puntland journalist jailed after criticizing president

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 7 July 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Somalia: Puntland journalist jailed after criticizing president, 7 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bf84.html [accessed 12 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.

July 7, 2017 6:12 PM ET

Puntland President Abdiweli Mohamed Ali gives his acceptance speech in Garowe, January 14, 2014. (Reuters)

Nairobi, July 7, 2017  Authorities in Puntland should immediately release journalist Ahmed Ali Kilwe, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Security forces in Garowe, the administrative capital of the semi-autonomous region of Somalia, have detained Ahmed, the founder of the news website Puntlandone.com, since July 2, according to media reports.

Media reports and three journalists who cover Puntland who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation said they believed Ahmed's arrest was linked to a June 23 Facebook post that Ahmed wrote criticizing the president of Puntland and his use of public funds. In a statement published today, the press freedom group Media Association of Puntland said that senior Puntland officials had told them that counterterrorism police detained Ahmed on the orders of President Abdiweli Ali for "posting articles impertinent to the Puntland president."

"Ahmed Ali Kilwe's detention without charge sends a terrifying message to journalists in Puntland," said CPJ's Africa Program coordinator, Angela Quintal, in New York. "Authorities should release Ahmed without further delay, and should allow him and all journalists to work without fear of reprisal."

Ahmed was initially held at a prison at a police checkpoint near Garowe, Omar Mohamed, of Media Association of Puntland, told CPJ. Security forces also use the facility to jail suspected members of the armed group Al-Shabaab, Omar said. In an email, MAP Secretary General Fatima Mohamed Mohamud today said that Ahmed had since been moved to Puntland Central Prison.

General Director of Puntland's Ministry of Information Mowlid Abukar Abkey did not respond to CPJ's repeated phone calls and text messages seeking comment. Vice Minister of Information Abdirizak Omar Ismail told CPJ that he was committed to protecting journalists, but that he could not speak about Ahmed's specific case because he knew nothing about it. CPJ could not reach the president's office for comment.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Two journalists killed in Iraq

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 7 July 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Two journalists killed in Iraq, 7 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bf95.html [accessed 12 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.

July 7, 2017 5:58 PM ET

An Iraqi soldier looks for cover after a grenade explosion in the old city of Mosul, July 4, 2017. (Reuters/Ahmed Jadallah)

New York, July 7, 2017  Snipers from the Islamic State group today killed Iraqi journalists Sudad Faris and Harb Hazza al-Duleimi as they covered Iraqi soldiers' push to retake a village near Mosul, according to the channel and news reports.

Faris, a cameraman for Salaheddin TV, and Al-Duleimi, a reporter for the broadcaster Hona Salaheddin, were trapped in a building alongside Samarra TV reporter Mustafa al-Wahadi and Iraqi security forces when fighters from the Islamic State group launched a counteroffensive to retake the village of Imam Gharbi, south of Mosul, a spokesman for Salaheddin TV told CPJ. Al-Duleimi and Faris were hit immediately, he said. Al-Wahadi fled with security forces to a nearby building, where they remained trapped for more than 12 hours before Iraqi soldiers and allied militias could rescue them, he said.

The bodies of Al-Duleimi and Faris were still in the village, the spokesman said, because it was too dangerous to remove them with snipers still active in the village.

"Sudad Faris and Harb Hazza al-Duleimi's deaths are a tragic reminder of the immense risks journalists take covering the conflict in Iraq," CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney said. "Every day, Iraqi journalists show incredible courage in their commitment to bring the news to their country and the world."

More journalists have been killed in Iraq than in any other country since CPJ first began keeping records in 1992.

CPJ has published safety advisories for journalists covering the Mosul offensive.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Palestinian security forces arrest TV journalist in West Bank

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 10 July 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Palestinian security forces arrest TV journalist in West Bank, 10 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bfaa.html [accessed 12 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.

July 10, 2017 5:10 PM ET

Host Raji Al-Hams (R) listens to Hamas official Salah al-Bardweel at the studio of Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV in Gaza City, October 27, 2015. (Reuters/Mohammed Salem)

Beirut, July 10, 2017  The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by the arrest of TV journalist Ahmad Fathi al-Khatib. Palestinian intelligence officers arrested al-Khatib, a cameraman for news channel Al-Aqsa TV, from his home in Beitunia, just west of Ramallah, on July 1, according to his employer and news reports.

Al-Khatib's attorney, Mohannad Karajah, told CPJ that Al-Khatib had been charged with collecting and receiving illegal donations. Karajah told CPJ that the charge sheet did not specify on whose behalf he allegedly collected donations, but Al-Aqsa TV is affiliated with Hamas, the main political rival of Fatah, the dominant group in the Palestinian Authority. Karajah said that Palestinian security forces had detained and charged the journalist on the same charge two years ago, but that a court had acquitted him.

"The case for which he is being investigated is the same case for which he was tried before," Karajah told CPJ. "We have requested bail. We do not know whether the court will agree to release him, but under Palestinian law, a person cannot be tried for the same offence more than once."

The Palestinian Authority's Interior Ministry did not immediately answer CPJ's phone calls or emails seeking further information.

"Absent evidence of a crime, Palestinian security forces should release Ahmad Fathi al-Khatib immediately and cease interfering with his ability to do his job." CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney said from New York.

Al-Khatib's wife, Irsal Shrouf, told CPJ that Al-Khatib's jailers prevented Karajah from visiting the journalist in jail on July 7, and that she was certain her husband was arrested for his work for Al-Aqsa.

According to Shrouf, Israeli forces arrested Al-Khatib at Zatara checkpoint, southern Nablus, on July 6, 2014, and placed him under administrative detention, which allowed him to be held without charge. An Israeli court extended his administrative detention three times, and Al-Khatib was released from prison only in June 2015, because his administrative detention could not be further extended. The Palestinian intelligence service, which works closely with Israeli security services, subsequently arrested him on charges of collecting and receiving money from an illegal organization, but a court in Ramallah acquitted him of that charge in September 2016.

The journalist's re-arrest on the same charge comes amid renewed attempts by the Palestinian Authority to crack down on media affiliated with Hamas. In late June, the Palestinian Authority blocked access to at least 11 news websites suspected of being affiliated with either Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, or with Mohammad Dahlan, the exiled former head of security in the Gaza Strip who was in 2011 expelled from Fatah, according to media reports.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Sudanese journalist fined after reporting on trial

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 10 July 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Sudanese journalist fined after reporting on trial, 10 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bfba.html [accessed 12 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.

July 10, 2017 4:04 PM ET

A Sudanese journalist in Khartoum holds a sign reading "Yes to freedom of expression" in this file photo from June 2012. (Reuters/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah)

New York, July 10, 2017  Sudanese authorities should drop all charges against Al-Taghyeer columnist Amal Habbani, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

A court in the capital Khartoum today sentenced Habbani, a columnist for the news website, to pay a fine of 10,000 Sudanese pounds (roughly U.S. $1430) or to serve four months in prison on the charge of "obstructing a police officer from doing his job," according to news reports. Habbani told Agence France Press that the sentence was "unfair," and that she would appeal. She said she would not pay the fine, even if that meant going to prison.

The charges stem from a November 10, 2016, incident when National Security Forces detained Habbani, independent journalist Reem Abbas, and activist Mohamed Orwa for two hours as they attempted to cover the trial of a human rights organization accused of " publishing false reports" and espionage, according to news reports. A NSF officer confiscated Habbani's phone, which he said she was using to take photos during the court session, and slapped her when she protested her detention, according tonews reports. Habbani, Abbas, and Orwa denied taking pictures in the courtroom, the reports said.

"Sudanese authorities have a history of harassing Amal Habbani because of her work as journalist," said CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney. "We call on prosecutors to stop pursuing her and to let her work freely."

Sudanese authorities have sought to intimidate or silence Habbani for years. In September 2013, police arrested her at a funeral and detained her for days, without contact with the outside world, after the website reported critically on the police's response to protests in Khartoum. In May of that year, authorities prevented her from traveling, without explanation, according to Al-Taghyeer. In 2012, Sudan's National Intelligence and Security Service instructed the management of her former employer, the daily newspaper Al-Jarida, to ban her from writing, CPJ reported at the time.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
TV journalist detained in Somaliland

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 10 July 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, TV journalist detained in Somaliland, 10 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bfca.html [accessed 12 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.

July 10, 2017 6:39 PM ET

In this May 16, 2015, file photo, a printer prepares materials to commemorate the anniversary of Somaliland's declaration of independence from Somalia. (Reuters/Feisal Omar)

Nairobi, July 10, 2017  Authorities in Somaliland should immediately release TV journalist Omar Ali Hassan Serbiya, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Security officers arrested Omar when he arrived at Hargeisa on July 8, the administrative capital of the semi-autonomous republic, his employer told CPJ.

The journalist was on his way to visit his family in Somaliland on holiday from his work as a producer for Goobjoog Media, which is based in the Somali capital Mogadishu, when security forces arrested him at the airport, Goobjoog Media director Hassan Mohamud told CPJ. Since his arrest, Omar has been held without charge at anundisclosed location and his family has been unable to reach him, according to the Human Rights Centre in Somaliland. Authorities had said that they would charge Omar in court today but failed to do so, Yahye Mohamed, the executive director of the Somaliland Journalist Association (SOLJA), told CPJ.

Yasin Mohamud, Somaliland's interior minister, told CPJ that the arrest was linked to views Omar expressed on the internet, on social media, and elsewhere that threatened the "security and stability" of Somaliland. SOLJA said that the posts in question touched on the sovereignty of Somaliland, which declared itself independent from Somalia in 1991. While Somaliland has its own government, its independence is not internationally recognized.

"Somaliland's detention of TV journalist Omar Ali Hassan Serbiya for his views displays a grave disregard for the basic principles of free expression," said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Angela Quintal. "We call on authorities in Somaliland to release Omar immediately, and to allow the media to report freely, without fear of reprisal."

Yasin told CPJ that Omar was merely being interviewed by security personnel, and that the journalist would be released tomorrow.

Somaliland Chief Justice Adam Haji Ali, however, told CPJ that he expected the government to bring charges tomorrow. The Somaliland constitution requires authorities to charge or release suspects within 48 hours of their arrest.

Yahye, of SOLJA, told CPJ that Omar's arrest was the latest in a string of government actions aimed at restricting the working environment for journalists. Authorities detained Horseed Media journalist Mohamed Dirir without charge from May 24 to June 24 for asking a critical question at a news conference, according to media reports.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Armed men beat Iraqi journalist in Erbil

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 11 July 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Armed men beat Iraqi journalist in Erbil, 11 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bfd4.html [accessed 12 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.

July 11, 2017 2:58 PM ET

Ibrahim Abbas recovers after five men beat him in Erbil on July 10, 2017. (Aso Abbas)

Beirut, July 11, 2017  Authorities in northern Iraq should conduct a thorough and credible investigation into the beating of journalist Ibrahim Abbas and should bring all those responsible to justice, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Five armed men assaulted Abbas in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil yesterday, according to the journalist, news reports, and the Kurdish human rights organization 17 Shubat for Human Rights.

Abbas told CPJ that he was on his way home yesterday evening when two cars stopped the taxi he was in. Five masked, armed men dressed in black and holding electric cables got out of the cars and dragged him out of the taxi, he said. When he fell down, they started beating him on the legs, arms, and head while shouting at him in the Kurdish Badini dialect, "We are Barzani's family," in an apparent reference to Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) President Massoud Barzani, Abbas said. Witnesses to the beating pleaded with Abbas' attackers to stop, and one of them eventually drove the journalist to the Erbil East Emergency Hospital, Abbas told CPJ.

A video published on Facebook by 17 Shubat for Human Rights and pictures Abbas published on Facebook show that he sustained injuries on his arms, legs, and head.

"The Kurdish government in northern Iraq wants to be seen in the eyes of the international community as a champion of a free press," CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney said from New York. "For that reason alone it has to publicly condemn this brutal assault on Ibrahim Abbas and prosecute all those responsible to the full extent of the law."

Spokesmen for the KRG and Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) did not return CPJ's emails, phone calls, or Facebook messages seeking comment.

Abbas was a press aide to Barzani and his nephew, Nechirvan Barzani, the prime minister of the KRG, and was the editor of Rubar Weekly, which is affiliated with the KDP, before he left the party in June 2016. He has been critical of the party in his writing for his blog, several media outlets, and social media since.

Abbas on July 1 published on Facebook screenshots ostensibly showing messages between KDP social media manager Saro Qadir and KDP-affiliated journalists calling for legal action against nongovernmental organizations, pro-opposition media outlets, and journalists. On July 8, he published on Facebook an audio recording purportedly featuring Qadir urging pro-KDP journalists to avoid writing negatively about Iran. Independent Kurdish media outlets, including The Kurdistan Post and Snur Media, picked up the recordings and screenshots.

Qadir told CPJ that he had no information about the case or any connection to it. In an email, he did not respond to questions about the the screenshots and audio recordings.

Abbas told CPJ that he believed that the publication of this material was the reason behind last night's assault. He added that someone reported his Facebook account on July 9, leading the website to close the account until he successfully appealed.

Kurdish security forces detained the journalist on May 3 after he published two videos criticizing the Barzani family and the KDP, according to news reports and 17 Shubat for Human Rights. He said he was released on the orders of President Barzani himself.

Abbas has accused Barzani loyalists of harassing and threatening him repeatedly since he left the party last year, according to news reports, 17 Shubat for Human Rights and Abbas. In a May 5 interview with the independent Kurdish TV channel NRT, Abbas said, "My salary was cut, my house was invaded, my reputation was tarnished, my life was embittered. They don't let you move. You can't change your party and work for another one. They say you will betray them. You are a traitor."

EDITOR'S NOTE: The eighth paragraph has been updated with Saro Qadir's response.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Jordan refuses Egyptian journalist entry

Publisher Committee to Protect Journalists Publication Date 11 July 2017 Cite as Committee to Protect Journalists, Jordan refuses Egyptian journalist entry, 11 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f4bfe4.html [accessed 12 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.

July 11, 2017 2:12 PM ET

In this 2001 file photo, Jordanian men read a newspaper in a cafe in Amman. (Reuters/Ali Jarekji)

New York, July 11, 2017  Jordanian authorities should lift any restrictions on Egyptian Journalist Wael Mamdouh's ability to travel to the country, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Immigration officers at Amman's Queen Alia International Airport yesterday denied Mamdouh entry to Jordan, where he was planning to attend a digital storytelling workshop organized by Jordan's Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), according to a statement by the group and news reports.

Mamdouh, deputy editor of the investigative unit in the Egyptian daily newspaper Al-Masry al-Youm, flew back to Cairo earlier today after spending a night at the airport, according to the reports.

"Preventing foreign journalists from attending media workshops is petty and at odds with Jordan's commitments to press freedom," said CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney. "We call on Jordanian immigration authorities to lift any restrictions on Wael Mamdouh's ability to enter the country immediately."

ARIJ Executive Director Rana Sabbagh said in the statement that the group had obtained "official clearance for all Arab and Jordanian participants," and that official did not provide any reason for denying Mamdouh entry.

The Jordanian Ministry of Interior did not immediately respond to CPJ's emails requesting comment.

Mamdouh has previously worked with ARIJ on investigative reports on military affairs in Egypt. He also reported on arms smuggling in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, and on conditions in a notorious maximum-security prison on the outskirts of Cairo for Al-Masry al-Youm. Jordanian and Egyptian security agencies work closely together.

During a 2016 CPJ mission to Jordan, officials renewed the government's commitments to press freedom and expressed willingness to work with the parliament to reform restrictive laws governing the press.

Copyright notice:  Committee to Protect Journalists. All rights reserved. Articles may be reproduced only with permission from CPJ.
Cite as

UN Committee Against Torture (CAT), List of issues prior to the submission of the 2nd periodic report of Namibia (CAT/C/NAM/2) : Committee against Torture, 43rd session, 2-20 November 2009, 25 January 2010, CAT/C/NAM/Q/2, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f5b8b4.html [accessed 12 November 2022]
Myanmar: Proposed changes to Telecommunications Law fail to protect free expression

Publisher Article 19 Publication Date 13 July 2017 Cite as Article 19, Myanmar: Proposed changes to Telecommunications Law fail to protect free expression, 13 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f64204.html [accessed 12 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 finds that the recently proposed revisions to the Myanmar Telecommunications Law, which is regularly used against those expressing their views or reporting online, fail to address some of the fundamental problems of the law. The proposal published in the parliamentary gazette falls far short of the requirements of international standards, and is not enough to ensure the law protects freedom of expression in Myanmar. We urge the Myanmar government to take concrete steps toward improving the situation for freedom of expression in the country by abolishing Article 66(d) of the law in its entirety.

Article 66(d) has been used on numerous occasions since the NLD government took power in 2016, and has most recently been used to charge two journalists from the Voice Daily. The law provides for a prison term of up to three years for those convicted of the offence. In January 2017, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, recorded over forty cases where the provision was used to punish individuals for Facebook posts that were critical of the government and military. She observed that most of these persons were prosecuted for "merely speaking their minds."

Since State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi announced the planned revision to the law at a press conference on 6 July 2017, proposed amendments have been published in the parliamentary gazette. ARTICLE 19's initial legal review of the amendments finds them to be insufficient, and that they would fail to address some of the fundamental problems with the law.

Article 66(d)

The proposed revision to Article 66(d) will not bring an end to the threat of criminal sanctions for legitimate expression, and it will not bring an end to the use of Article 66(d) as an instrument of political oppression.

The proposals would maintain criminal sanctions for those "defaming" or "disturbing" any person using a telecommunications network. The term "disturbing" is worryingly vague, and can easily be interpreted in a broad and arbitrary fashion. Under international law, provisions that restrict freedom of expression must be clearly and narrowly defined. Equally, under international standards, all criminal defamation laws are considered a disproportionate restriction of freedom of expression.[1]

Many of those prosecuted under the law since its enactment, including activists and journalists, have been charged for expression that was considered defamatory. The proposed amendments, which retain criminal defamation as an offence, therefore clearly fail to address concerns by national and international civil society on its use to target critics, particularly by the military.

The proposed revision to Article 66(d) remains incompatible with international laws on freedom of expression, and ARTICLE 19 once again urges its abolition.

Article 80

Proposed amendments to Article 80 also do not go far enough in addressing the problems in the law. We acknowledge that the proposed modifications to Article 80 to allow bail for those charged under 66(d) could marginally improve the situation of defendants and reduce lengthy pre-trial detention. However, the changes remain insufficient, as while bail may be granted in some cases, prison sentences of up to three years can still be handed down to those exercising their right to free speech.

In March 2017, the UN Human Rights Council adopted Resolution 34/22 on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, which specifically noted the increasing use of criminal defamation laws to target free expression online and offline in Myanmar. The resolution, which was adopted unanimously, highlighted Article 66(d) of the Telecommunications Law as one of several laws in urgent need of legislative reform. This responds to long-standing concerns raised by the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, and reflects the recommendations of her most recent report.

ARTICLE 19 also remains concerned that Myanmar has failed to ratify major international human rights treaties that protect the right to freedom of expression, including the ICCPR.

The failure of the current government to undertake necessary legislative reforms to fully protect the right to freedom of expression in the country, such as the repeal of Article 66(d), is a worrying signal of its lack of commitment to protecting this essential right.

ARTICLE 19 reiterates the recommendations we presented in our March 2017 legal analysis, which found the law contained "onerous provisions which have been used to severely limit freedom of expression and freedom of the media". We urge the Government and the Parliament of Myanmar to proceed with a complete revision of the law in order to bring it into compliance with international laws on freedom of expression, and address the worsening situation for freedom of expression and press freedom in Myanmar.

[1] ARTICLE 19's updated Principles on Freedom of Expression and Protection of Reputation can be accessed here: https://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/38641/en/defining-defamation:-principles-on-freedom-of-expression-and-protection-of-reputation

Picture: The main corridor in the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, Naypyidaw, Myanmar.

Copyright notice: Copyright ARTICLE 19
Ukraine: Drop government proposals that restrict NGO activity

Publisher Article 19 Publication Date 13 July 2017 Cite as Article 19, Ukraine: Drop government proposals that restrict NGO activity, 13 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f647d4.html [accessed 12 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 calls upon the Ukrainian Parliament to reject a proposed legislation tabled by President Petro Poroshenko, which would oblige civil society organisations and individuals working for them, to submit detailed financial reports on funds received from international donors. The bill would significantly curtail civil society's ability to operate in the country.

"Transparency of civil society is essential; however, these are disproportionate means for ensuring accountability", said Katie Morris, Head of Europe and Central Asia at ARTICLE 19.

"NGOs already comply with tax regulations in order to operate and publish annual reports on their work. This law would undermine the independence of NGOs and could be used to restrict organisations that are critical of the government. Publishing the list of third parties could be a threat to those people, especially human rights defenders working in the field."

On 10 July, President Poroshenko's administration introduced two bills to the parliament: Bill No. 6674 "On Amendments to the Tax Code of Ukraine for providing public information on financing of the activities of civil society organizations and the use of international technical assistance"[1] and Bill No. 6675 "On amending certain legislative acts concerning public information openness for the society the financing of the activities of civil society organizations and the use of international technical assistance"[2] .

Together, the bills would introduce a complex new form of financial reporting for civil society organisations and freelancers, working with them, imposing heavy snactions for those failing to comply. NGOs with an annual budget exceeding 463 200 UAH (15 550 EUR) would be required to publicly disclose a list of the 10 highest paid employees, and a list of donors. They would also be required to disclose information on any third parties - for example consultants - if an individual was paid more than 77 200 UAH (2 600 EUR) throughout the year. Freelancers cooperating with NGOs, registered as individual entrepreneurs, would have to report on funds received directly from donors and to include a list of donors.

"The proposed legislation is part of worrying trend across Europe and Central Asia, whereby authoritarian-minded politicians and leaders are looking to restrict civil society activity through unjustifiable legislation" Morris added. "The Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly stated their commitment to reform; however, this legislation would pose a real set back to Ukraine's further democratic development."

Since Russia's adoption of its restrictive 'foreign agents' law in 2012, similar legislation aimed at stigmatising civil society and placing unreasonable restrictions on their operations is being replicated across the region. In June 2017, the Hungarian parliament passed legislation obliging NGOs receiving foreign funds to register as "foreign-funded", and to apply this label to all their publications. In Poland, the parliament is currently working on a bill which would centralise all state funds available to civil society and introduce an opaque grants award procedure. An NGO law adopted in 2015 in Kazakhstan imposes additional, unnecessary reporting on civil society organisations, introducing heavy fines or possible suspension in the case of providing "incorrect" information.

ARTICLE 19 calls on the Ukrainian authorities to repeal the bill on 'ensuring transparency of information on the financing of the activities of NGOs and use of international technical aid' which violates Ukraine's international commitments to respect the right of freedom of expression and association.

[1] http://w1.c1.rada.gov.ua/pls/zweb2/webproc4_1?pf3511=62214

[2] http://w1.c1.rada.gov.ua/pls/zweb2/webproc4_1?pf3511=62215

Copyright notice: Copyright ARTICLE 19
Kanwariyas carrying the national flag is a recent phenomenon. Most of them are doing so for the first time, though some said they have been doing so for the past three years.

By Kumar Shakti Shekhar: While kawariyas have been a common sight for time immemorial during the holy month of Shrawan, a rare sight awaits anyone who happens to travel on the Delhi-Haridwar highway. Besides the saffron flags (bhagwa pataka), the whole route is also full of national flags.

Initially, one would confuse whether it is a religious pilgrimage or some rehearsal for the forthcoming 70th Independence Day celebrations because the entire route is dotted with national flags.

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The highway is generally painted in saffron. Millions of kawariyas wear saffron dress. Tents are covered in saffron. All vehicles like the chariots, motor bikes, bicycles, cars and tractors are also decorated with saffron clothes and flags.

TRICOLOUR MINGLES WITH SAFFRON FLAGS

But the national flags stand out and they attract the attention of any passerby due to the white and green colours and the Ashok Chakra on them. Along with the saffron flags, the kawariyas also carry the tricolour.

Tricolours are found waving atop all types of vehicles. They are also hoisted on the huge tents erected for the pilgrims to take shelter and rest along the 225-km road.

Looking at the demand for them, national flags of all sizes are being sold on both sides of the road. They are selling like hot cakes.

Carrying the national flag is a recent phenomenon. Most of the kawariyas are carrying it for the first time, though some said they have been doing so for the past three years.

One such group was from Ballabhgarh in Haryana. They were returning after their pilgrimage to Haridwar. They were carrying water from the river Ganges in Har ki Pauri in Haridwar. They will pour it on the Shivling in their village temple in order to propitiate Lord Shiva.

Photo: Kumar Shakti Shekhar.

Loud music was blaring from speakers atop their tractor converted into a chariot. A generator set was also placed on the rath to play DJ and run fans. The chariot was decorated with idols, statues and saffron flags. But it prominently displayed the tricolour.

A kawariya Suresh Kumar said, "It is our national flag. We take pride in it. Why should anyone say that we are trying to mix religion with nationalism or politics? We do not support BJP. We bought the flags on the way. No one gave it for free."

At a time when nationalism is on the rise, does this new phenomenon have anything to do with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat?

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CONGRESS BLAMES RSS

Congress' national spokesperson Manish Tewari went a step further than that. Talking to India Today, he said, "It is an attempt by certain elements to merge religion into nationalistic endeavour. It goes to the heart of RSS' project of wanting to turn India into a one-religion nation."

He said, "Pilgrims carrying national flag is news to me. It must be a recent phenomenon."

The Congress leader added that the tradition of carrying kawars had been continuing from time immemorial. Millions have been participating in the pilgrimage every year. Everybody has a right to carry the national flag and practice the faith in a manner they deemed appropriate, he said.

Photo: Kumar Shakti Shekhar.

Tewari did not deny that all those pilgrims carrying the national flag were BJP supporters. Some may even be supporting Congress. But in most of the cases, the people consciously did it and felt proud in carrying the saffron flag and the tricolour together, he added.

However, he said, "While there is no ban on carrying the national flag, an attempt to equate religion with nationalism was the crassest form of fascism."

BJP WELCOMES THE NEW TREND

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But BJP has a different take on this new phenomenon. It welcomed the new trend.

The ruling party's national spokesperson Shahnawaz Hussain said, "This is a form of nationalism. Carrying the national flag along religious ones is a matter of pride. The tricolour is hoisted atop the tents in which Haj pilgrims stay."

He said the deepening of the feeling of nationalism along faith was a welcome sign.

While there is no evidence to connect BJP or RSS, the ruling party has reasons to feel upbeat over the new trend. Nationalism is generally associated with support to the BJP. Congress and other opposition parties have one more reason to worry about.

Also read | Uttar Pradesh ups security for Kanwar Yatra after Amarnath attack

Also read | Adityanath: No vulgar songs during kanwar yatra, gambling improper on Diwali

Also watch | All pilgrims going to Kanwar Yatra will be taken care of: Yogi Adityanath

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Vietnam: Media must have full access to meetings of the National Assembly

Publisher Article 19 Publication Date 18 July 2017 Cite as Article 19, Vietnam: Media must have full access to meetings of the National Assembly, 18 July 2017, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/596f65e24.html [accessed 12 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 announcement that reporters in Vietnam will only be barred from the majority of meetings of the National Assembly's Standing Committee. The decision runs counter international human rights standards on the right to information, and should be immediately reversed to restore transparency in Vietnam's parliamentary process.

On 13 July 2017, the legislature's General Secretary Nguyen Hanh Phuc announced that, "Starting from [that day], reporters will only be allowed to attend the first five minutes of each meeting". Instead of following the full meetings, journalists will be given press releases at the end of the meeting detailing what was discussed. This is supposedly to enable members of the Standing Committee to discuss "sensitive" topics more openly and in-depth without fear of leaking "national secrets".

According to domestic media, who were only informed of the ban that day, even though a press release was issued after the 13 July meeting, it did not cover either the detailed content of the discussion or opinions of specific members of the Committee. The press release has also not been published on the Committee's official website.

Replacing the access of independent media to parliamentary sessions with parliament-issued press releases removes the ability of journalists to hold representatives accountable to the public. It also has an obvious negative impact on unbiased flows of information.

Under international human rights standards, journalists should be afforded maximum access to parliaments in order to report on the legislative process and the work of elected representatives. This is required as part of the rights to freedom of expression and information (Article 19) and the right to participate in public affairs (Article 25) of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Vietnam is a party.

ARTICLE 19 urges the Standing Committee of the National Assembly of Vietnam to withdraw this groundless decision. Furthermore, information in detail regarding the meetings of the Standing Committee which journalists have been barred from, as well as the National Assembly at large, should be made accessible and available on all official channels.

Copyright notice: Copyright ARTICLE 19
Karan Johar expressed his regret for the controversial act at IIFA 2017 and said that he went too far with the mention of Kangana Ranaut.

By India Today Web Desk: Karan Johar has come under a lot of fire in the last few days for his nepotism barbs at Kangana Ranaut at the recently held IIFA Awards in New York. Karan, along with Saif Ali Khan and Varun Dhawan, chanted "Nepotism rocks" on stage, a thinly-veiled dig at Kangana Ranaut and her comment on the filmmaker, calling him the "flagbearer of nepotism".

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The act faced a lot of backlash from Twitteratti, who slammed the trio for "attacking" Kangana in her absence. After Varun Dhawan took to Twitter to apologise for the tasteless act, Karan Johar has apologised in an interview with NDTV.

"This is something that I need to say and to clarify. Of course, I do not believe that nepotism rocks. Of course, I believe that only talent and hard work rocks," he said. The Ae Dil Hai Mushkil director added, "What we said was meant to be a joke, and I think it was misplaced, misunderstood and I think it went wrong. I regret it. The idea of that joke was entirely mine, so I take total onus. I think we went a bit far with the Kangana mention."

Karan added that he had been "ungraceful" and failed the upbringing he was given. "No matter what I feel about what Kangana said on my talk show, I feel that I was raised to be a dignified, chivalrous and decent person. That's the upbringing that I was given, and I feel that I failed on those accounts. No matter what my thoughts or personal issues on this, I should not have repeatedly brought up this issue. So for that, I am deeply regretful," he said.

He said that it was "deeply disturbing" that they were being trolled, because their intention was "never to hurt anyone." KJo said that they wanted to poke fun at themselves, but the joke horribly backfired. However, he added that it is the last he would be talking on the subject of nepotism and Kangana because he did not want to be "disrespectful" to her.

The controversy began when Varun Dhawan came up on the IIFA 2017 stage to receive the Best Performance in a Comic Role award for Dishoom. Host of the evening, Saif Ali Khan, joked that the actor had made it big in the industry because of his father, director David Dhawan.

Varun replied, "And you're here because of your mummy (veteran actress Sharmila Tagore)."

Karan chimed in, "I am here because of my papa (late filmmaker Yash Johar)."

The trio then said in unison, "Nepotism rocks".

ALSO READ: Varun Dhawan apologises for IIFA 2017 nepotism barb at Kangana

ALSO READ: I am done with Kangana Ranaut playing the woman and victim card, says Karan Johar

ALSO WATCH: Karan lashes out at Kangana, asks her to leave Bollywood if it's that bad

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Body cameras for the Mooresville Police Department have arrived. Find out when they will be used.
The MoS for Home said that steps including strengthening of operational grid with enhanced human intelligence are being taken to prevent such situations.

By Kamaljit Kaur Sandhu: The regular appearance of terrorists at funerals of fellow terrorists killed in counter-terror operations has become a matter of concern for the central government.

The Home Ministry told Parliament on Wednesday that "Centre is seized of the matter." Minister of State (MoS) for Home Hansraj Gangaram Ahir in a reply to parliamentarian Rajkumar Dhoot, said, "As per the report of state government, a few instances of militants making brief appearance in large gathering of funeral of militants have been observed. In these instances, the militants after making brief appearances disappear, taking advantage of a large gathering. In order to prevent such activities of militants, numerous steps have been taken including strengthening of operational grid with enhanced human intelligence and use of technical intelligence grid. Further, the intensity of counter insurgency operations has been increased resulting in neutralising of several militants."

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In Kashmir, militants openly daring the security forces by giving gun salutes to killed colleagues is a new headache, reminiscent of the 1990's, where terrorists appeared in a similar fashion during funeral. Sources in the intelligence agencies, however, say the appearances are aimed to recruit more misguided youth into terror mould.

GOVERNMENT CANNOT AFFORD ACTION IN SUCH SITUATIONS

A senior Army officer conceded that terrorists were appearing on regular basis at funeral sites. "Earlier the militants would stay away in the upper reaches (of mountain), far away from population. But now militants' appearance in funerals is almost a regular feature."

With the civilian crowd of 3000-4000 present at such sites, both Army and police believe it will be a tactical mistake to go after terrorists in the crowd. "Any encounter or crossfire in midst of the crowd could result in huge civilian casualty," the officer revealed.

A senior officer from Jammu and Kashmir Police feels that the government cannot afford "action" in such locations, which could potentially lead to loss of civilian lives, which could later become cause of further resentment.

Though a spate of counter-terror operations have resulted in neutralising more than 100 terrorist in the Valley so far this year, but as an officer said, "It is not terrorism, but alienation of people that needs to be addressed by the state government."

Also read: Kashmir: Militants give gun salute to slain associate at funeral in Kulgam

Also read: New challenge for forces in Kashmir: Gun wielding terrorists paying tribute to slain militants

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Lalu, who heads the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), tweeted from his handle, @laluprasadrjd: "Spoke with Mayawati Ji in (sic) length. Offered & requested her to be Rajyasabha MP frm Bihar to fight against atrocities & divisive agenda of BJP."

By India Today Web Desk: Amid tension and division within the Opposition, Lalu Prasad has offered to consolidate Dalit votes by making a significant gesture: offer Mayawati a Rajya Sabha seat from Bihar, a day after the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief resigned in protest after she was not allowed to speak in the House.

Lalu, who heads the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), tweeted from his handle, @laluprasadrjd: "Spoke with Mayawati Ji in (sic) length. Offered & requested her to be Rajyasabha MP frm Bihar to fight against atrocities & divisive agenda of BJP."

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WHEN AN ANGRY MAYAWATI WALKED OUT OF RAJYA SABHA

On Tuesday, after she was not allowed to raise the atrocities against Dalits in Rajya Sabha, Mayawati tendered her three-page resignation, accusing the ruling BJP and Rajya Sabha chair of not allowing her to raise the issue. Her current term will end in April next year and her party, with just 18 MLAs in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly, is not in a position to send her back to Rajya Sabha.

"Today would be remembered as a black day in the history when a highly respected Dalit leader was not allowed to raise the voice of poor in the Rajya Sabha," Lalu said on Tuesday, reacting to Mayawati's resignation.

"If Mayawati wishes, we will send her to Rajya Sabha from Bihar," the RJD president whose party has 80 MLAs in 243-member Bihar Legislative Assembly said. "We are with her," he said.

"Chanakya had said that an assembly (of people) where a person is not allowed to speak through the force of brute majority is no assembly," he said.

Lalu's offer to Mayawati is a part of the RJD supremo's ongoing efforts to stitch a united Opposition front to take on the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. However, the presidential election and the Goods and Services Tax (GST) rollout have divided the Opposition, with various parties having their own positions.

Lalu's support to Mayawati is also being seen as a part of his efforts to bring her and Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav together. He has invited the two leaders to the RJD's August 27 rally in Patna.

ALSO READ:

Posture war: Mayawati resignation likely to be rejected on technical grounds and she knows it

Parliament Monsoon Session: PM Modi walks to Opposition benches, greets Sonia Gandhi WATCH: When a red-faced Mayawati walked out of Rajya Sabha before resigning

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Former Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) President Sam Rainsy, who has been forced to live in exile since 2015 in the face of questionable defamation charges, spoke with reporter Vuthy Huot of Radio Free Asias Khmer Service from France Wednesday to discuss a second amendment to Cambodias Law on Political Parties, which effectively cuts ties between him and the opposition party ahead of national elections in 2018.



RFA: Recently you met with a number of senior officials of the CNRP in Hong Kong and some of your colleagues said it was the last meeting with you prior to implementation of the amended law, so as to avoid any possible legal challenges. How will you help the CNRP while at the same time avoid any legal problems for the party that could lead to a five-year suspension of operations or dissolution?



Sam Rainsy: I will continue my activities. Even if Im a normal citizen, I still have the rights and freedom to express my ideas by not having to tie myself to any political party. As a Khmer citizen, I will continue to talk about the truth, to reveal the trutheither concerning the past, our history, the present truth, or any future progress that concerns me and Cambodian citizens as a whole. I will continue raising such concerns, along with my hopes as a patriot and lover of justice.



These two amendments are targeting me because they are afraid that if I continue to lead the CNRP  or work together with the CNRP, the party will remain strong and I would maintain my influence. Such amendments illustrate the fear and panic within the CPP, and of [Prime Minister] Hun Sen personally.



Our country is currently facing many great challenges. [The government] should have spent time creating proper laws so that justice can be granted to our citizens. They should have spent time considering how to better serve our society. However, they only know how to think about causing troubles for Sam Rainsy, because they know that I pose great danger to their dictatorship. Sam Rainsy dares to speak the truth and dares to protect the voices of the many victims in Cambodia, who are experiencing tremendous suffering under the present regime.



RFA: Before returning to Paris recently, we learnt that you went to meet with CNRP lawmakers and senior officials to discuss a number of issues. Can you tell us what the purpose of the meeting was? And what are your thoughts about the fact that your colleagues today wrote a joint letter requesting [King Norodom Sihamoni] to intervene by refusing to approve the amendment?



Sam Rainsy: [The meeting] concerned expressing mutual regards, contacts, beliefs and trustregardless of how the situation has changed. Our minds and commitments remain unchanged. We will continue our work. Either separately or individually, we will continue upholding honesty and integrity along with our fellow citizens. We all are well aware that even if [the government] wants to terminate my influence or reduce my influence, or end my political life, they can only attempt to do so. No one can end my political career as long as Im still alive, I continue to draw breath, or I still have the energy, health, freedom and means. I will use everything I have to rescue the nation through any means possible.



I believe that what my former colleagues have done by bringing this issue to the King is the right thing to do. We have followed the monarch for many years, even since during the reign of our former King Norodom Sihanouk, as they have always promoted unity, reconciliation, and peace within Khmer society to keep the Khmer nation thriving and prosperous. These are the intentions of our former King, the present King, and [the CNRP].



But the intentions from the other side are completely different. They want to wage waror at least a war of minds. They want to bring accusations against one another and attack one another. This is because our present leader [Hun Sen] used to be a military commander for the Khmer Rouge regime. For those with a dictatorial mindset like the Khmer Rouge, this is how they want to live, because their power can only be preserved in an environment of war  As long as the former Khmer Rouge leaders remain in power, the Khmer people will never enjoy happiness; they will endure endless troubles and animosity against one another for the rest of time.



RFA: What is your reaction to the second amendment to the Law on Political Partiesin particular with regard to the controversial clause  which states that no political parties shall carry out any activities that openly or tacitly agree or conspire with a person convicted of a felony or misdemeanor to carry out any activities for political gain or in the interest of its party. Any party found violating this clause will be subject to a five-year suspension or dissolution, and many have said it could be employed by the ruling party as a pretext to dissolve the CNRP or to terminate its operations for a period of five years if it does not openly reject involvement with you.



Sam Rainsy: What is most crucial is not that I am supporting the CNRP, but I am supporting the cause of rescuing the nation  Any party fearing that Sam Rainsys words may be used as a pretext to dissolve it may declare that those words are my sole responsibility.



RFA: So the CNRP may issue a letter once the law is enforced saying that, from then on, it rejects involvement in what is said by Sam Rainsy?



Sam Rainsy: It may declare in principle from the very beginning that the only individuals allowed to speak on behalf of the party are its leaders, permanent committee members, and spokesperson, etc. But as for other individuals, their comments are their own, and such individuals must be held solely responsible. As Ive said earlier, I will speak about the issues facing our country. If I see any party doing wellsay the CPP may one day awaken and rectify themselves through good deedsI will commend it. And if I see them continue to do so, I will continue to commend them. In such a situation, if the CPP doesnt issue a rejection of [my commendation], the CPP itself would also be subject to dissolution.



RFA: Regarding your wife, Tioulong Saumura, she is also a lawmaker from the CNRP and a senior official of the party. How will you manage your marriage despite your status as a criminal convict? Once this new law comes into effect, how will you manage your relationship so that it wont cause trouble for the CNRP?



Sam Rainsy: Respect for human rights must distinguish between political affairs and private life. Only the Khmer Rouge sent its agents to spy and cause trouble against its own citizens [based on family relationships]  My wife is still my wife, and I remain her husband. We maintain our private lives just like other families. If this law is promulgated so that I will have to divorce my wife, I will never follow it  I will continue leading a political life as much as I possibly can. I will never let them use [my marriage] as an excuse to cause trouble against those who share a similar conscience as me and who are struggling to rescue the nation.



Translated by Sovannarith Keo.
The widow of late Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has been taken on an enforced "vacation" by state security police in the southwestern province of Yunnan, as rights activists held memorials for the dissident a week after his death.



Liu Xia, who has been under continual police guard and house arrest since her husband's Nobel award was announced in , is now "on vacation" along with her brother Liu Hui, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy in China said in a statement on .



Both are incommunicado, and have been unable to make direct contact with friends and relatives in Beijing, it said, citing sources close to the family.



Their enforced disappearance coincides with the traditional Chinese memorials made one week after a person's death, which were observed in secret by activists in mainland China, and more openly in the former British colony of Hong Kong.



Activists visited beaches and shorelines, making offerings in memory of the burial of Liu's ashes in an urn at sea in defiance of attempts by Chinese officials to prevent democracy and rights activists from making a shrine to him after death.



Event organizers the Freedom for Liu Xiaobo Action Group called on supporters around the world to hold memorials on the seventh day of Lius death.



Activists used candles, flowers, portraits of Liu and empty chairs as a focus for their offerings, in a reference to the empty chair that represented him at the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize awards ceremony in Oslo.



But most of Liu's supporters in China were unable to join in, Beijing-based activist Hu Jia told RFA, adding that he is under constant surveillance by the state security police.



"They pull over wherever I pull over, and if I get out of the car, they follow me," Hu said. "I have been under house arrest since June 27 to stop me going to Shenyang."



Police block dissidents

When he died, Liu was receiving treatment for late-stage liver cancer at the No. 1 China Medical University Hospital in the northeastern city of Shenyang, but was under close police guard at all times, and was denied visits from all but a select few family members.



"But whether they are stopping me from going to the seashore, or whether they were stopping me from going to Shenyang makes very little difference, I still can't go anywhere," Hu said.



"Of course I want to commemorate him, so as I am a Buddhist, I lit some incense for him at the shrine in my home, and I hope he attains to the Pure Land," Hu said.



Hu said he was unable to confirm reports that Liu Xia is in Yunnan under police guard.



But he said security police are currently guarding Liu's former residence in Dalian, and keeping journalists at bay with a "military cordon" around the area.



The couple's Beijing home is under similar lockdown, he said.



A Beijing academic who asked to remain anonymous said she had been warned off participating in the event.



"They didn't want me to take part, because they are thinking about the overall reaction of the population," she said. "They want to snuff it out before it even takes hold."



Tight surveillance and censorship

In the southern province of Guangdong, rights activist Jia Pin said he was unable to leave his home, which is currently under police guard.



"I took an empty chair, and placed a photograph of Liu Xiaobo on it, and I read out a few words I had prepared," Jia said. "Then I made the three-finger gesture [for resistance, freedom and hope] which Liu Xiaobo invented."



"Then I posted photos online to commemorate him," he said.



Zhejiang-based rights activist and close friend of Liu Xiaobo's Wen Kejian, indicated that he is also under close surveillance.



"It's not convenient for me to talk about anything specific right now, OK?" Wen said when contacted by RFA on .



Outside mainland China, where ruling Chinese Communist Party censors operated real-time censorship of Liu-related images on social media, supporters posted photos of empty chairs by the seashore to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.



Germany-based dissident author Liao Yiwu, one of the Freedom for Liu Xiaobo Action Group organizers, said many activists there had marked the memorial day in a number of different ways.



"I will commemorate Liu Xiaobo at home, with about a dozen friends," Liao said. "I will recite Charter 08, which we wrote together, the parts about there being no moral giants in a democracy. Other friends will be reading out his poems."



"Other people have been holding a vigil outside the Chinese embassy since his death, and have been chased away by embassy staff," he said.



Current affairs commentator Chen Pokong said Liu had "died in the cruelest possible way, witnessing the revival of Nazism in the form of a corrupt Chinese elite."



"Liu Xiaobo's death made no waves in China," Chen wrote in a commentary aired by RFA's Mandarin Service. "The Chinese Communist Party had succeeded in blocking all news of him."



"Domestic media didn't show the questions asked by foreign journalists of the foreign ministry spokesman, which shows you ... just how much the party fears the name of Liu Xiaobo."



Reported by Wong Lok-to for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by Qiao Long for the Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
North Korean hostesses wait for customers at the entrance to a North Korean restaurant in China's border city of Dandong, in a file photo.

North Korea authorities have set strict conditions for citizens chosen to be overseas workers in an attempt to reduce the number of defectors after a group of 13 restaurant workers in China did not return home last year, sources familiar with the situation said.

Only residents of the capital Pyongyang are now qualified for recruitment, while people from rural areas are no longer being considered, they said.

The authorities are specifically selecting Pyongyang residents that have good family backgrounds and children who live in the country, sources said.

North Koreas External Construction Bureau downsized recruitment for dispatch work in Russia starting this May, a source from the Russian port city of Vladivostok told RFAs Korean Service. They have stopped recruiting from rural areas, and they are only open to recruiting Pyongyang residents.

North Koreans dispatched to Russia usually work as loggers or construction workers, said the source who declined to be named.

There is a lot of construction work going on in Vladivostok, so North Korean construction workers are the main source of generating foreign currency for the regime of leader Kim Jong Un, he said.

The isolated country has exported workers to Russia, China, and places farther afield such as the Middle East and Africa for years, but requires them to remit much of their earnings to the North Korean government, which is believed to use the cash to fund its illicit weapons programs.

Some workers have used the opportunity to try to defect to the Norths enemy South Korea.

In April 2016, a North Korean restaurant in the eastern Chinese port city of Ningbo made international headlines when 13 staff members escaped to South Korea to seek asyluma mass defection that Pyongyang condemned as a hideous abduction by Seouls agents.

The strict conditions for selecting overseas workers, which limit open recruitment to Pyongyang residents only, have caused the number of North Korean workers in our company to drop to 500 from 2,000, the source in Vladivostok said.

A Russian labor staffing agency usually dispatches the workers to the company where they receive a monthly salary of U.S. $250-$300, he said.

Even if the workers find a job with higher pay, they are supposed to return most of their earnings to the [ruling] Workers Party of North Korea, he said, adding that his companys internal policy specifies that it must transfer 70 percent of North Korean workers salaries to the government, while the employees keep the rest.

But the workers have nothing left to spend after they use their earnings to cover their room and board, the source said.

Even if they have some money left over, it is not enough to send to their families in North Korea or even to buy some drinks or cigarettes, he said.

Forced to provide slave labor

A source from Khabarovsk, a city on the Amur River in southeastern Russia, told RFA that authorities are keeping a close eye on citizens it sends abroad to work.

They recently established a reporting system for each work group and team, said the source who requested anonymity. Even the workers dining hours and dining halls are being closely watched.

Three North Korean workers attempted to escape from a local construction site in early June, but they were soon captured and sent back to North Korea, he said. Once they were back home, they said they had tried to defect because they had not been able to send any money to their families for more than three years since they had been dispatched overseas, the source said.

A North Korean defector who escaped from a worksite in Russia and now lives in South Korea suggested that authorities will likely have problems trying to recruit people to work abroad given the difficulties of working in Russia.

North Korean workers in Russia are forced to provide slave labor in [Russias] worsening work environment, he said. If there are strict conditions for selecting overseas workers, they should be facing difficulties with recruiting workers.

Reported by Jieun Kim for RFAs Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
Kyaw Min Swe (C), editor-in-chief of the independent Myanmar newspaper The Voice Daily, leaves Bahan township court after his sixth bail hearing in Yangon, June 7, 2017.

A group of Myanmar reporters filed charges on Wednesday against an army sergeant and police officer in Yangon for violating a law protecting citizens privacy and security, amid growing concerns about the state of freedom of the press and freedom of expression in Myanmar.

Myanmars Committee for the Protection of Journalists has accused Corporal Soe Myint Aung from the Yangon Division Military Headquarters of illegally stalking them by taking their photos outside a courthouse in the citys Bahan township on June 30 during a bail hearing for an editor of an independent newspaper who is being detained on defamation charges.

The journalists were showing their support for Kyaw Min Swe, chief editor of The Voice Daily, who is charged with defamation of the military under a widely challenged section of the countrys Telecommunications Law.

They also filed charges under the countrys Law Protecting the Privacy and Security of Citizens against Bahan township police officer Aye Min Thein for not taking their complaint.

That corporal was stalking us and taking photos, said Tharlon Zaung Htet, a amember of Myanmars Committee for the Protection of Journalists.

When we filed a case against him at a police station, those at the station responded that he hadnt broken any law, he said. Actually, it is not polices responsibility to determine this because they do not have the right to decide if someone is guilty or not.

At the time, police also failed to take statements from the journalists and did not ask them for evidence, Tharlon Zaung Htet said.

Thats why we have also filed a case against the police officer, he said.

A judge will decide on Thursday whether to accept the charges against the sergeant and police officer.

Kyaw Min Swe and the papers satire columnist Kyaw Zwa Naing, who goes by the pen name British Ko Maung, were detained on June 2 and charged with defamation under Section 66(d) of the Telecommunications Law after the armed forces complained about a piece they had published that mocked a military propaganda film.

On June 16, the same court released Kyaw Zwa Naing after Kyaw Min Swe testified that he was solely responsible for posting on social media the article that allegedly insulted the armed forces.

Myanmar journalists and rights groups have called for the repeal of Section 66(d) which prohibits the use of the telecom network to defame people and carries a jail sentence of up to three years and a fine for those found guilty of violating it.

They say that government and military officials are increasingly using the section to silence their critics, thereby threatening freedom of the press.

The court has rejected Kyaw Min Swes bail requests seven times.

ASEAN weighs in

In a related development, a group of lawmakers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on Wednesday called for the government to immediately release three Myanmar journalists arrested in June in northern Shan state and repeal Section 66(d).

ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) issued the call a day after an unexpected court appearance by the journalists at which their scheduled hearing date was postponed.

The three journalistsLawi Weng of the online journal The Irrawaddy and Aye Nai and Pyae Phone Aung of the Democratic Voice of Burmawere arrested by the military on June 26 for covering an illegal drug-burning event by the Taang National Liberation Army (TNLA), an ethnic armed group that has been involved in hostilities with the Myanmar army.

The journalists have been charged under Section 17(1) of the colonial-era Unlawful Associations Act for being involved with an unlawful organization. They face up to three years in prison if convicted.

The APHR said the continued use of the law along with the use of Section 66(d) of the Telecommunications Act by those in power to target media critical of the government or military have raised concerns about the state of press freedom in Myanmar and highlighted the need for legislative reform.

Myanmar authorities must immediately release and drop all charges against these dedicated journalists, who have been targeted on flimsy pretexts for simply doing their jobs, said APHR chairman Charles Santiago, a member of the Malaysian parliament, in the statement.

The clear abuse of existing statutes in this case demonstrates the need for quick action to repeal or amend all laws that have been used to arrest journalists and others for exercising their right to free expression, he said.

The journalists next court date, which was scheduled for Friday, has been postponed to July 28.

The ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) government of de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi is considering amendments to Section 66(d), including allowing bail for those charged and eliminating the ability of third parties to file complaints.

This law is overly broad and wide open to abuse, APHR Vice Chairperson Eva Kusuma Sundari, a lawmaker from Indonesia, said in the statement. We are glad to hear that the NLD government is considering amending it, and we urge them to pursue a full repeal of Section 66(d). Its continued use represents a clear attempt to stifle criticism of the government.

We hope that Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD will live up to the promises that got them elected: building an open, tolerant Myanmar that respects fundamental democratic freedoms, she said. Freedom of the press is a core component of sustainable democracy, supporting the promotion of transparency, accountability, and the welfare of the people.



Reported by Zarni Htun for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
Lt. Gen. Manas Kongpaen (right) and a fellow defendant arrive for their arraignment at the Bangkok Criminal Court, Nov. 13, 2015.

A Thai court convicted and sentenced a former three-star general and 61 other defendants Wednesday in Thailands largest human trafficking case, which stemmed from the discovery of graves of Rohingya Muslims and Bangladeshis near the Malaysian border in 2015.

It took 13 hours for a panel of judges at the Bangkok Criminal Court to read out a 500-page verdict and sentences for all 102 defendants, who were tried together on various charges related to involvement in a transnational human smuggling ring. Forty of the defendants were acquitted, court officials said.

Former Army Lt. Gen. Manas Kongpaen was among high-profile defendants and ex-officials who were found guilty. He was sentenced to 27 years for trafficking Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladeshis as part of a crime syndicate that was exposed through the unearthing of a mass grave in the jungle in southern Songkhla province.

Manas, who held a key post in maintaining security in Thailands southern border region and preventing illegal migration there, participated in the smuggling of Rohingya and other undocumented people, the court found.

The defendant number 54 [Manas], instead of pushing back or denying entry to those Rohingya migrants, cooperated with the human traffickers, unduly taking benefits from the trafficking ring, a judge ruled.

The discovery of the graves of 32 migrants led Thai authorities to launch a crackdown on illegal immigration and seal its maritime borders to boats smuggling in people from Bangladesh and Myanmar. This, in turn, caused a regional migration crisis that saw thousands of desperate Rohingya and Bangladeshis come ashore in nearby Indonesia and Malaysia in May 2015.

Manas conviction was based on evidence that he had received a kickback from trafficking kingpin Pajjuban Aungkachotephan, (alias Ko Tong), a former chief executive of the southern Thai municipality of Satun and businessman who was also convicted on Wednesday.

Ko Tong, or Big Brother Tong, owned resorts on the island of Lipe, and was accused of receiving trafficked persons and sending them to Malaysia.

Banjong Pongpol (alias Ko Jong), a former official in Padang Besar, a sub-district in Songkhla, facilitated their transfer to relatives in Malaysia or Myanmar after a fee of between 30,000 ($892) and 150,000 baht ($4,465) was paid, the court found. Many who were unable to pay the fee were tortured or killed, court officials said.

The two were sentenced to 78 and 79 years, respectively, but the court reduced their terms to the maximum 50 years stipulated under Thai law. Soe Naing (alias Anwar), a Rohingya man identified as the chief trafficker, was sentenced to 94 years, but this was reduced to 50 years.

Four policemen were also convicted. An army captain who served as an aide to Manas was acquitted.

Depending on their acts, each of the 102 defendants was subject to any of 16 charges ranging from being a member of international crime syndicate, to involvement in human trafficking, ransom, slavery, killing and rape.

Conviction on the crime syndicate charge carries a sentence of four to 15 years and a maximum fine of 300,000 baht (U.S. $8,927). Human trafficking charges carry a sentence of up to 15 years and a fine of up to 1 million baht ($29,759). Thai law calls for double punishment for government officials who are found guilty.

Reporters were not allowed inside the court room because of the number of defendants, but monitored the proceedings on closed-circuit television in nearby rooms.

No one is above the law

Wednesdays verdict and sentences mark a milestone in Thailands efforts to eradicate human trafficking, and puts an end to impunity for Thai officials, Sunai Phasuk of Human Rights Watch told BenarNews, , an RFA-affiliated online news service.

Todays verdict is a major step in efforts to combat human trafficking in Thailand, now that we see the convictions of a senior army general, local politicians, influential tycoons and others complicit in trafficking of Rohingya, Sunai said.

This should send a strong message that regardless of their status and affiliation, no one is above the law. Impunity of trafficking gangs is now being stripped off. This is the biggest case so far, but not the only case of human trafficking in Thailand. The government must leave no stone unturned, Sunai added.

Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha asked people to not blame the military despite the conviction of Manas.

There are many people in this human trafficking network, Prayuth told reporters, according to the Reuters news agency. Dont group all soldiers in the country as one.

A long way to go

Arraignments in the case began in November 2015, but not without controversy, and the trial opened in March 2016. Lead police investigator Maj. Gen. Paween Pongsirin resigned just days before the arraignments began, and sought asylum in Australia a month later after claiming that influential people in the government had ordered him to stop the probe.

Another human rights group, Fortify Rights, called on the government to ensure that those responsible be held accountable.

This may be the end of an important and unprecedented trial, but its been a rocky road, and its not case-closed for survivors of human trafficking here, Fortify Rights Executive Director Amy Smith said in a press release issued on the eve of the sentencings in Bangkok.

Thailand has a long way to go to ensure justice for thousands who were exploited, tortured, and killed by human traffickers during the last several years.

Sunai, of Human Rights Watch, expressed concern for the migrants.

On the other side of the coin, the plight of Rohingya continued after they were rescued. Apart from punishing the perpetrators, there needs to be measures to protect and assist the victims, Sunai said.

Rohingya now either live in hiding or end up in squalid indefinite immigration lockup in Thailand, as the government does not allow them to get access to refugee status determination by the United Nations refugee agency.

Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.
Ethnic Uyghur students detained in Egypt for deportation to China are being held by the countrys national intelligence service, according to an activist, as a human rights group said the agencys involvement is a clear indication that Beijing had ordered the roundup.



More than 200 Uyghurs, many of them religious students at Cairos Al-Azhar Islamic University, have been detained since July 4, rounded up in restaurants or at their homes, with others seized at airports as they tried to flee to safer countries, sources told RFAs Uyghur Service in earlier reports.



Dozens of Uyghurs are believed to have already been deported home to China, where rights groups say they face a serious risk of arbitrary detention and torture.



Media reports have quoted officials as denying that Egyptian authorities were targeting Uyghurs and saying that those arrested were brought in for alleged irregularities in their residency papers, but Uyghur exile groups and students say the detentions were ordered by China on allegations that they had joined extremist organizations.



Earlier this week, a Uyghur activist student based in Egypt told RFA on condition of anonymity that he had discovered around 50 Uyghur students detained at 14 police stations over the weekend, including in several districts in Cairo and Alexandria.



While speaking with a ranking police officer at the Nozha station in Cairo on Sunday, he was told that the detainees shouldnt worry about anything because Egypt and Chinas foreign ministries were discussing how to handle this issue, and that they wouldnt be deported to China, but to a third country in the worst case scenario.



But after smuggling a cellphone to the detained Uyghurs there, the activist said he received a call from one of the students the following day who said the group was being handcuffed and told that they were going to be deported to China.



A lawyer who spoke with police at Nozha station on Monday was told that the students would be taken to the Chinese embassy to be photographed, and students told the activist by phone that they would be deported after they were handed over to the Chinese embassy, he said.



On Tuesday, the activist told RFA that he had learned that Egypts General Intelligence Directorate (GID), also known as the Mukhabarat, had ordered the detention of the Uyghur students and is currently holding them in an undisclosed location.



This isnt the regional, but the national intelligence service, he said.



Police confirmed that the original order to detain and deport Uyghur students came from [the GID].



On Wednesday, the activist said that at least 73 Uyghur students were currently being held at the headquarters of the GID in Cairo, while reports said that all of the students were being transferred to the capitals notorious Tora Prison complex for interrogation by Chinese officials.



When contacted by RFA, an official at the Chinese embassy in Cairo, who refused to give her name and title, said she was unaware of any arrests of Uyghur students by the Egyptian authorities.



An image by cartoonist Rebel Pepper depicts Chinese President Xi Jinping's influence over Egypt. Credit: RFA Chinese involvement



Husein Bayun, a representative of London-based rights group Amnesty International in Tunisia, told RFA Tuesday that it was extremely uncommon for the GID to issue such an order.



That is a sign of the level of Chinese involvement in this, because the [GID] in Egypt would usually not handle these types of cases at all, he said.



The even bigger problem with the situation right now is that, so far, there is absolutely zero transparency from the Egyptian government, so lawyers on the ground there are unable to contact detained students.



Bayun noted that the Egyptian government has yet to comment on the number of people arrested, where they were arrested and held, whether they will be forcibly repatriated to China, and what the grounds for their arrest were.



Looking at Egypt and Chinas past records of human rights violations during detentions, its extremely worrying when we dont know the situation of the detained students, he said.



As a signatory to the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and according to international law, Egypt cannot deport the students to China because of the threats they face at home, Bayun said.



As we already know, the students that were deported to China are now serving 15-year sentences  for allegedly inciting radicalism, which is a ridiculous charge, he said.



So basically, many of the people who could be deported back to China would face risk of torture, would face the risk of extremely long prison sentences and completely unfair trials.



Open letter



Also on Tuesday, the Tucson, Arizona-based Middle East Studies Association (MESA) published an open letter to Egypts President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry condemning the detention and deportation of Uyghur students from the country.



We understand that many Uyghur students in Cairo who have not been detained are currently in hiding, fearing for their personal safety, the letter said.



For international students to confront such fear, uncertainty, and physical insecurity despite having committed no crimes and having valid residence or tourist visas is extremely alarming, and especially so given that the Egyptian government is apparently doing nothing to protect them.



MESA stressed that Egypt is in violation of its role as a party to the U.N. Convention against Torture by deporting the students to China, where it said they are highly likely to face detention and torture as members of a persecuted minority there, and urged the leaders to provide them with protection.



We call on the Egyptian government to immediately halt arrests and deportations of Uyghur students studying in Egypt, as well as family members who may be accompanying them, and to allow all Uyghur students with valid visas to continue their studies in Egypt undisturbed, the group said.



We further call on the Egyptian government to speak out against attempts by the Government of the Peoples Republic of China to coerce these students to return to China and to threaten their family members who are still in China.



The ruling Chinese Communist Party blames some Uyghurs for a string of violent attacks and clashes in China in recent years, but critics say the government has exaggerated the threat from the ethnic group, and that repressive domestic policies are responsible for violence that has left hundreds dead since 2009.



China regularly conducts strike hard campaigns in Xinjiang, including police raids on Uyghur households, restrictions on Islamic practices, and curbs on the culture and language of the Uyghur people, including videos and other material.



Reported by Jilil Kashgary for RFAs Uyghur Service. Translated by Alim Seytoff. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
By PTI: By M Zulqernain

Lahore, Jul 19 (PTI) Lower and higher courts in Pakistan came to a standstill today as lawyers across the country held protests demanding Prime Minister Nawaz Sharifs resignation after a probe recommended filing a graft case against him and his family.

The protests were called by Pakistans top lawyers associations, including the Pakistan Bar Council (PBC) and the Supreme Court Bar Association.

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The courts, where protests were organised, did not hear any case. The Supreme Court, however, continued with its proceedings, including hearing the Panama Papers leaks case.

The Lahore High Court was also paralysed by a partial strike by the lawyers.

The organisations have urged Sharif to "honourably" resign as he has "lost the moral and legal authority" to continue in his office after a joint investigation team (JIT) report accused him and his family of evading tax by setting up offshore companies to purchase high-end properties in London.

Bar council Vice Chairman Ahsan Bhoon said the lawyer community has expressed solidarity with the Supreme Court and asked Sharif to step down.

"We haverequested the Supreme Court to take the Panama Papers case to its logical end and disqualify the prime minister and other public office-holders declared guilty of corruption in the JIT report."

He said the bar councils have also sought the resignation of Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and the prime ministers son-in-law Muhammad Safdar.

"The JIT report has proved that the prime minster and his family members have been involved in corruption," he said, adding that the apex court should refer the case to the National Accountability Bureau for a reference against the Sharif family as recommended by the JIT.

He claimed the evidence collected by the JIT was enough to disqualify Sharif.

Sharif has dismissed the JIT report as a "bundle of baseless allegations" and refused to quit. "The people of Pakistan have elected me and only they can remove me from this post."

The scandal, nonetheless, threatens Sharifs position. If the Supreme Court finds him guilty of corruption he will have to resign, throwing the country into turmoil. PTI MZ ABH AKJ ABH

--- ENDS ---
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Virginia has named a new president.

Richmond native Jeff Ricketts takes over the position following former president C. Burke Kings promotion to oversee the insurance giants large group business segment across the country, the company said Wednesday.

Since joining the company in 1984, Ricketts has held positions in sales and account management, covering all market segments from individual to large group, according to a news release. Over the past nine years, he worked as regional vice president of sales.

King was promoted to his new position in May, but kept the title of president in the insurers Virginia market until now. King, who had joined Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Virginia in 1992, had been named president of Virginias dominant health insurer in 2008.

Ricketts attended J.R. Tucker High School in Henrico County and graduated from James Madison University with a bachelors in business administration in management and management information systems.

Virginia has always been my home and it is one of Anthems most important and exciting markets, having grown to more than 3 million members statewide, Ricketts said in a statement.
While some houses can be built in four to six months, a home in North Richmond will be completed in just five days this week as construction is done around the clock.

The 1,500-square-foot house, at 22 King St. in the Southern Barton Heights neighborhood, is set to be completed Friday.

A U.S. military veteran is expected to buy the house through project:HOMES, a local nonprofit homebuilder. This house, like most from the organization, will sell for about $150,000.

To get the one-story house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms completed on Friday, work is being performed 24 hours a day.

The work is split into three eight-hour shifts: from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.; 3 to 11 p.m.; and 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.

Its a fascinating exercise in logistics to coordinate all of the tasks in a finite time period, said Marion Cake, director of neighborhood revitalization for project:HOMES.

Work began Monday morning with the foundation and the framing. By Tuesday morning, the house was completely framed and most of the roof installed. Work continued on the siding and electrical parts of the house.

A large spotlight is used to help workers continue the project through the night.

The bulk of the building is being completed by hired contractors. Employees of project:HOMES also help work on-site, including Kim Jordan, the construction project manager and site supervisor.

Philip Morris USA, the tobacco unit of Henrico County-based Altria Group Inc., is allowing 19 engineering interns to work at the site. They created timelines and budgets, set workers time slots and are making sure everything stays on schedule.

At least two interns are on-site during each shift.

This is the second year that Philip Morris USA interns have worked on the rapid house-building project. Last summer, however, a storm delayed the building process of another house, forcing the completion to take seven days instead of the goal of five days.

To prevent that from happening this week, the interns focused on rainproofing the house on Monday, allowing work to continue even if it rains. They also created a contingency plan in case it rained before the house was rainproofed.

Another obstacle was keeping the project costs under budget, said Jim Dawson, an associate staff engineer for Philip Morris USA who is overseeing the construction project with the interns.

(The interns) had a budget they had to stick to for each stage of the process, Dawson said. The interns began working on the project more than a month ago.

When they got quotes back from certain contractors that were above what they were budgeted for, they had to have a hard conversation with (the contractors) to negotiate and to try to get it under budget, he said. I dont think any of the interns really felt comfortable with (negotiating), but at the end of the day they got it done.

So far, the project is under budget, according to Dawson.

But the budget for building a house in five days costs more than one (for a home) that is built in four months, said Cake with project:HOMES.

The project helps the interns gain one-of-a-kind work experience and helps a deserving family purchase an affordable home, Cake said.

The partnership enables (project:HOMES) to continue our mission of neighborhood revitalization through the production of affordable housing, Cake said. It gives Philip Morris USA an opportunity for an engineering challenge where they figure out how to do what takes four months in 120 hours.

Philip Morris USA provided grant support and employee volunteers for the project.

Houses sponsored through project:HOMES are available to buyers with incomes at or below 80 percent of the area median income. The house on King Street is the sixth home built by the organization in the Barton Heights area.

The organization provides a buyers-assistance grant to help offset down payment and closing costs for first-time homebuyers. If buyers remain in the house for more than 10 years, the grant is forgiven and buyers do not have to pay it back.

The grant is offered as an incentive for neighborhood stability, Cake said. As home values in a neighborhood increase, project:HOMES focus shifts away from simply persuading people to move into an area, he said.

We can come and build something that will last for generations, Cake said. The houses define the neighborhood for years to come.

As a result, project:HOMES houses exceed builder grade and meet or exceed energy-efficiency standards.

Project:HOMES, funded by public and private grants and donations, has built 138 homes in central Virginia since 2000. The nonprofit organization also repairs and winterizes homes.
A significant number of college graduates are mal-employed, or working jobs that dont require college degrees  a trend that needs to be studied and considered when shaping higher education strategies in Virginia, the leader of the states economic development agency said Tuesday.

Almost nobody is looking at this in any depth, Stephen Moret, president and chief executive officer of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, said during a presentation to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.

Moret presented national numbers, drawn from an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Labor data, indicating that while unemployment rates are lower for college graduates, about 31 percent of college graduates since the recession have been working in jobs that dont require college degrees.

Although Moret didnt have data specific to Virginia, he said the trend is likely similar in the state, if slightly better.

I think there would be great value in doing some research to better understand that population in Virginia, he told SCHEV, a 13-member board that makes higher education public policy recommendations to the governor and General Assembly.

Moret serves as a member of SCHEV. A former secretary of economic development in Louisiana, he started Jan. 1 as president and CEO at VEDP, amid an overhaul of the agency.

Moret noted that the problem of mal-employment may be getting worse, nationally, citing other research showing that the proportion of people with bachelors degrees working in jobs that dont require a college degree  such as food service, bartending and clerical work  has increased since 1986.

He suggested there may be many reasons for the trend, among them a lack of awareness among students about the types of skills needed to obtain employment in higher-paying careers.

One (reason) is that many college students havent really prepared for a successful launch into the labor market, he said.

We can argue that colleges should be doing more to help students prepare for that, he said.

Another factor may be that, with an abundance of college graduates in the labor market, more employers have been using a four-year degree as a screening mechanism even for jobs that dont require one, he said.

Also, research suggests that a significant number of students finish college without the critical thinking and communication skills that employers seek.

Moret stressed that Virginias higher education system is overall an incredibly positive story, which economic developers can use to attract employers to the state.

One of the things that really attracted me to this role in Virginia was thinking about the incredible asset that we have with our higher education system in the commonwealth of Virginia, he said. I can certainly tell you it is one of the most common selling points that we use at VEDP.

However, in one study of site consultants  professionals who help businesses choose locations  Virginia did not rank in the top 10 for workforce development programs. Georgia and Louisiana were the top-ranked states, specifically because of programs that tailor workforce development to the needs of growing industries.

The states that typically rank at the top have customized, turnkey workforce recruitment and training solutions for new and expanding projects, he said.
The Richmond areas newest craft brewery is planning its grand opening next week, promising unconventional beers served with a touch of outdoorsy, Scandinavian elan.

Vasen Brewing Co. plans to open to the public at noon July 29 in the redeveloped HandCraft building at 3331 W. Moore St., in Richmond.

Vasen joins a batch of craft beverage makers that have turned the Scotts Addition area into a destination for fans of beer, spirits and cider.

Were excited to see what the neighborhood is transforming into, said Joey Darragh, who co-founded the brewery with his cousin, Tony Giordano.

The 17,000-square-foot brewery has a 4,000-square-foot taproom, including a patio. The first beers to be served include an American pale saison, a dubbel, a smoked farmhouse ale, a passion fruit saison and a sour saison.

Were going to be focusing more on Belgian-inspired ales, Darragh said. We are taking these traditional recipes and tweaking them, and creating hybrid beers, whether thats combining a Belgian yeast with a German brewing style, or taking Belgian beer and using either American or Australian hops.

So we are really trying not so much to defy convention, but to take the beers that we love and try to re-invent them, he said.

The brewery has a fermentation laboratory for testing various yeast strains, which the brewers plan to collect from natural sites in the region. We want to culture our own yeast, said Nathan Winters, Vasens marketing and environmental director. We will have a lot of our own house strains.

For now, the brewery is planning limited distribution of its beers in kegs to restaurants. It plans to install a canning line in about six months to distribute beer to retail stores.

Both in their early 30s, Darragh and Giordano grew up in Northern Virginia and came to Richmond to open the brewery after first pursuing careers elsewhere. Giordano worked for Boulder Beer Co. in Colorado, where he honed his skills as a brewer, and Darragh worked as an engineer for electric automobile maker Tesla Motors.

Growing up, we had always talked about doing some sort of business together, Darragh said.

The cousins started making plans to turn their brewery dreams into a reality in 2014. As part of the planning, they took a trip to Europe to visit classic, old-world brewing regions in Belgium, Germany and England.

Because of their Scandinavian roots, we capped the trip with a visit to Sweden, Darragh said. We went around and tried to soak up as much of the culture as we could. We searched out things that we thought might resonate as part of the brewery.

A friend in Sweden suggested the name Vasen. It means your inner essence, Darragh said. In some cases, it can mean a spirit animal.

In the taproom, a mural by local artist Emily Herr depicts a caribou in a wilderness setting, symbolizing the Scandinavian family heritage of Darragh and Giordano. Another decorative piece at the center of the taproom is a massive, man-made boulder, which doubles as seating and represents the co-founders plan to emphasize and support outdoor lifestyles and environmental preservation.

Vasen is planning to support several nonprofits such as Blue Sky Fund, which provides outdoor adventure programs for urban youth, and RVAMore, a volunteer program that builds nature trails, said Winters, who previously worked for Oskar Blues Brewery in Colorado. The brewery also plans to donate 1 percent of its sales to 1 Percent for the Planet, a nonprofit that supports environmental causes.
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An on-duty officer with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries says he was denied service at a McDonalds restaurant in Henrico County because of his profession, prompting the owner to take what was described as appropriate action to resolve the situation.

Scott Naff, a 25-year law enforcement veteran, was apparently not given his food after he paid for it because the employee in the drive-thru allegedly refused to serve police. The event was first broadcast online late Thursday through the officers wife, whose Facebook post had received more than 2,000 comments and 3,500 shares by Monday.

The officer said Tuesday that he was not able to talk about the incident, but his wife spoke on his behalf.

Cathy Naff, the officers wife, said the post was initially meant to be shared among a group of supportive friends, and she had no idea it would garner such attention.

Freda Thornton, the franchise owner, said in a statement Tuesday that her restaurants are dedicated to serving all customers, including all authority figures who protect our wildlife and natural resources.

We regret this situation as it goes against our standards of providing a welcoming experience to everyone, and we have taken the appropriate action to resolve this situation, Thornton said in the statement.

A spokeswoman declined to specify what actions were taken or provide further comment.

Cathy Naff said in her original Facebook post that her husband was on break about 7 p.m. Thursday when he pulled into the McDonalds drive-thru at 8210 Brook Road. After ordering his food, Cathy Naff said, the employee told him, I aint serving no police, and closed the service window.

Her husband was served several minutes later by another employee, Cathy Naff said, but she said she was shocked to learn of the encounter. The couple notified the McDonalds corporate office and the franchise owner of what transpired, she said.

When asked whether McDonalds actions were satisfactory, Cathy Naff said there is no satisfaction in seeing someone lose a job. She added that the issue could likely be prevented from recurring through adequate customer training practices.
A clogged toilet in a first-floor restroom at McGuire Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Richmond caused a backup and subsequent leak of contaminated water on Monday that spilled into a basement area where medical instruments are sterilized, a spokesman said.

The affected area was evacuated immediately as hospital safety personnel worked to determine the cause of the spill, spokesman Patrick Gordon said in an email release. The area was secured to minimize the impact on the space and employees, he said.

Areas for patients were not affected by the incident.

Gordon said a foreign object was flushed down one of the toilets, which caused the backup and subsequent leakage.

Jennifer Marshall, the local American Federation of Government Employees union president, said there were two breaks in major sewage lines on the first-floor restroom near the veteran pharmacy service.

Sewage spilled on HVAC units, pipes, walls and carpeting in the basement, according to a report by Todd Woessner, the safety and health officer for the union.

They just put out a message saying it was an isolated area, but it is not an isolated area, Marshall said. I think theyre trying to minimize it. ... A lot of employees are exposed.

Marshall, a Department of Veterans Affairs employee who has an office in the hospital, said she took photos showing tarps covering the hospital equipment and signage marking high-risk areas. At one point, she said, there was feces running down the walls.

Gordon said cleanup and restoration efforts began immediately and that crews of remediation professionals and industrial hygienists are working around the clock to restore the area.

The medical center will have an independent third-party hygienist certify the area is safe to resume sterile processing when the cleanup and repair is complete, Gordon said. We anticipate the repair and inspections to be complete within a three-week time frame.

The affected area is known as a sterile processing area, where Gordon said medical instruments are sterilized before being used in patient medical procedures.

Marshall said raw sewage spilled from the first-floor bathroom into the sterile processing area.

(It) had to be completely shut down because it was completely covered in feces, she said.

On Tuesday, the day after the spill, The Joint Commission  an independent, nonprofit organization that certifies 21,000 health care facilities and programs in the U.S.  was conducting a review of the hospital. Gordon said it was immediately notified of the incident.

We have kept them informed throughout the process, and they have expressed understanding and appreciation for our transparency and remediation efforts, Gordon said.

Marshall said she alerted members in her union of her concerns and reported complaints to Secretary of Veterans Affairs David J. Shulkin.

She said she asked that the hospital tear down the affected walls, ceilings and insulation to ensure the area is fully sterile.

They were just going to do a moisture test, Marshall said. Its ridiculous.

Im just trying to keep them honest, she said.

Gordon also said the hospital is contacting veterans whose procedures may be affected by the incident and are providing appropriate access to surgical care.

The safety of veterans and our staff remain our top priority, he said.
Employees of A.P. Hill Elementary School in Petersburg broke the rules on state accountability tests for the second time in eight years, an internal investigation has found.

The division announced Wednesday that several employees have been fired 37 days after the Virginia Department of Education reached out over reports of testing irregularities.

I am very disheartened by these actions. Its very unfortunate, School Board member Atiba Muse said.

The findings throw into jeopardy the schools hard-won status as one of only two Petersburg City Public Schools that meet the states full standards of accreditation, at a time when Superintendent Marcus J. Newsome is fighting to rally morale among division staff and students.

Spokeswoman Leigh Ann McKelway would not say exactly what happened, how many employees were fired or why the information could not be released.

The issues involved allegations that students received inappropriate assistance while taking state tests, said state Department of Education spokesman Charles Pyle.

The investigation is in its closing stages, Pyle said. Weve been supporting the division on the ground in the process.

Muse deferred questions about details of the investigation and specific board actions to School Board Chairman Ken Pritchett, who did not respond to multiple interview requests.

Messages left for A.P. Hill Principal Kori Reddick and Assistant Principal Stacie Parham were not returned. McKelway said they were still employed by the school system.

Divisions typically investigate themselves when concerns are raised and then report their findings to the state. In this instance, state workers helped conduct interviews on the ground, Pyle said.

Its still a division-led investigation, he said.

In 2009, the state conducted its own probe of the school, because complaints in that case included an allegation that the divisions central office had failed to act on concerns about testing improprieties.

Investigators concluded that up to a dozen students in that instance had been improperly excluded from on-time or make-up testing.

They did not find evidence to support that Petersburg central office staff had been involved in excluding students from taking tests.

Virginia Standards of Learning tests are given in reading and math for third-, fourth- and fifth-graders. Fifth-graders also take SOL tests in history and science.

This years incident likely will mean the state will withhold the schools accreditation.

A.P. Hill Elementary students will not be asked to retake the tests. Students also will not likely receive score reports for several spring tests because the integrity of the test results cannot be determined, according to a news release from the school division.
By PTI: says dont give communal colour (Eds: Updates with quotes of more members) New Delhi, July 19 (PTI) The issue of lynchings today resonated in the Rajya Sabha where the Opposition alleged involvement of "some members" of BJP and Sangh Parivar in these incidents even as the government said communal colour should not be given to such violence. As the House took up a discussion on the issue, Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said the government is equally concerned about the criminal incidents and everyone should speak in one voice to fight against "such destructive forces". The Centre condemns such incidents, Naqvi said, adding the states should take stringent legal action against those involved. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had also made this clear during the All Party meeting recently, he added during the debate on situation arising out of the reported increase in the incidents of lynching and atrocities on minorities and dalits across the country. He alleged that its a "conspiracy" that some are trying to "defame" the government and divert its agenda in the name of such incidents as they think they could level corruption charges on the government in the last three years. Initiating the debate, Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad attacked the government, saying the rise in these incidents was spreading the message of fear. "Earlier it was done at individual level. You may not like it, all lynching is done by some members of the ruling party and Sangh Parivar," he alleged. It is done with a basic understanding and hence no arrests been made in the incidents that happened so far. "They should have been jailed. Even I can identify hundreds. They are known to the media," the Congress leader said. Insisting that no Opposition party benefits from these incidents, he said but "one political party, the ruling party is benefiting. This is done for political harvest." Urging the government to take the matter seriously, Azad said, "This nation belongs to all. Your responsibility is more. You have to take the lead. We can help in creating an atmosphere. If you spoil the atmosphere..." He urged the ruling party to give up "vote politics" and work towards making the country strong within to fight the external issues. "This is not a religious battle. This is not Hindu-Muslim fight. This is everyones fight for humanity. When our home is weak, how can we fight the external forces...Our house has always been strong. Dont break the house for votes," he said. Azad said not a single place is safe, from Jammu and Kashmir to Kanyakumari. "Lynchings are reported from all over. Such incidents are happening for the first time. This used to happen during the medieval age, not even during British times," he said. He expressed sadness over the "disturbing trend" that no one comes forward to save a person being lynched. He, however, praised some sections of the media for continuing to report these incidents fearlessly. Urging the Opposition to unite and speak with one voice in its fight against the destructive forces, Naqvi said: "Please dont give communal angle to these incidents. If you give, you are helping them..." "We should together defeat and isolate the destructive forces. We should speak in one voice. ...Please speak truth on this issue," said Naqvi, who is also Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs. Asserting that the government will not allow any "destructive forces" to dominate the development agenda, Naqvi said, "We do not wish any destructive forces to affect the governments development agenda and the countrys culture." He added, "The policy of our government and the party is clear that we will not allow any destructive agenda to dominate on our development agenda." It would be misunderstanding on the part of "destructive forces" to think that by "fabricating the issues", they can divert the attention, Naqvi said. "Then it would be nothing but "Mungeri Lal ke Haseen Sapne (day dreaming)," he said. "This is a conspiracy. Anyone could be doing it. I am not taking any party names. I dont want to get into it." Stating that lynching incidents were reported in the previous government regime too, the Minister said: "Whether lynching incidents happened before or now, strict legal action should be initiated against those involved." Refuting the Opposition charge that no action was taken against those involved in lynching incidents, he gave details of arrests made in Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharasthra in the last six months.

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SP leader Naresh Agrawal said the government should bring a "stringent law" to curb the lynching incidents. He added that while the Prime Minister had made a statement that strict action should be taken against those taking lives in the name of Gau rakshaks (cow protection), on the other hand, Goa Chief Minister made a contradictory statement. "You are having Gods name on lips and knives in your pockets," he said. He suggested that the Prime Minister should call a meeting of all the Chief Ministers and direct them to take strict action against those indulging in lynching.

He said there have been killings in the name of religion and caste which is damaging Indias image.

The SP leader also attacked the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh over setting up of anti-romeo squads, saying "You are converting the state into Saudi Arabia".

He alleged that the UP government had failed in maintaining law and order as there have been several cases of rape in the state. CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury cited the cases of lynchings that took place over the last two years and demanded that the central government ban cow vigilante groups and moral policing groups, which he described as "private armies".

The fight against vigilante groups is necessary to maintain constitutional order, he said. During his speech, he referred to Sardar Patels comments while banning RSS, mentioned Hitlers remarks on nationalism and also invoked Rabindranath Tagore. He also cited Bhagvat Gita, saying it says all humans are equal. The right of equality, granted under the Constitution, is "being questioned and severely trampled upon through these incidents of lynching," he noted. The CPI(M) leader charged that it is "Hindutava nationalism" that is giving sustenance to these groups. He stressed on stopping the cult of violence being spread. "This is not the Bharat Mata I know," he said, adding that his Bharat Mata has place for people of all religions.

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Yechury questioned why only the slogan Bharat Mata Ki Jai is considered patriotic. "Was Bhagat Singh, who gave Inquilab zindabad slogan, not patriotic?"

Yechury also referred to articles and editorials in foreign publications criticising these incidents and said "This is your international standing today".

He said these lynching incidents are not isolated incidents of law and order but part of ideology that seeks to undermine constitution.

"Ban all these cow vigilante groups, ban anti-romeo groups" Yechury said as he rued that beef has become a parameter for religious identification. Highlighting that the country is a major beef exporter, he asked, "Will you tell me what I should eat and not eat...?" Trinamool Congress leader Derek OBrien referred to the Prime Ministers comment against kiling people in the name of cow-protection and said, "Empty words and generic comments will not work. Name the group. Name the individual. We are deeply suspicious."

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OBrien said the real term should be "cow terrorism" and not cow vigilantism. Not only the minorities and dalits are being targeted, but even the powerful media houses and opposition parties are also being targeted, he said.

"We will not be cowed down to your political terrorism and polictical vendetta," said OBrien while citing various cases like Sarada scam in which some of his party colleagues are facing allegations.

The TMC leader charged that the government is also engaged in financial and tax terrorism.

OBrien, whose party is in power in West Bengal, alleged that fake pictures were being ciruclated on social media by a BJP leader during the recent violence in the state.

"But polarisation will never happen in West Bengal," he added.

Concluding his speech, he appealed to all Opposition parties to join hands to fight BJP. "We will get GST - "Growing Strong Together". PTI LUX MJH AKK

--- ENDS ---
A Mexican national who thought he had 22 pounds of cocaine in his car in January while police pursued him on Interstate 85 at speeds of over 100 mph was sentenced to 6 years in prison on Wednesday.

Andres Garcia-Angelito, 26, pleaded guilty in April to attempted possession with the intent to distribute powder cocaine. Sentencing guidelines called for a term of 63 to 78 months. U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne imposed the stiffest penalty, telling Garcia-Angelito through an interpreter that his crime required serious punishment.

While Garcia-Angelito believed he was carrying cocaine, it was harmless material, kilogram bricks of which were tossed out of the car as he sped down the highway.

Lab tests months after the chase showed the illegal load he was supposed to be transporting  and that was intercepted by police days earlier  was 11 pounds of cocaine and 11 pounds of fentanyl, a powerful and potentially deadly synthetic opioid that can be absorbed through the skin.

Court papers show the case began on Jan. 11 at an undisclosed location in Texas where police pulled over a vehicle for following a tractor-trailer too closely. A drug dog alerted to the possible presence of drugs and the car was searched, leading to the discovery of what was initially believed to be 10 kilograms of cocaine.

The unidentified driver cooperated with authorities and said he was headed to Virginia to deliver it. The person in California who dispatched him with the drugs was to let him know who would receive the load once he reached Virginia.

Authorities replaced the real drugs with a fake load and allowed the man to continue driving to Virginia under the surveillance of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

On Jan. 13, the man delivered the drugs to Garcia-Angelito and his girlfriend, Jessica Sanchez, 21, of Atlanta, in the parking lot of the Family Dollar Store on Washington Street in Petersburg. Garcia-Angelito admitted that earlier that day, he called the unidentified person in California for instructions on where to make the pickup.

Garcia-Angelito and Sanchez traveled from Georgia to Colonial Heights to pick up the drugs. He was seen taking a bag that was in the trunk of the deliverymans car and placing it in his blue, two-door Honda Civic.

As Garcia-Angelito backed out of his parking space, authorities attempted to stop him. He drove off at high speed onto I-85 heading south. Several fake one-kilogram packages of drugs were seen being tossed from the car. He was finally stopped in Brunswick County, and he and Sanchez were arrested.

Sanchez, who pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, was sentenced to 12 months in June.

Garcia-Angelitos lawyer, Mary E. Maguire, asked for a term of five years. He did not realize what he was picking up that day was supposed to be fentanyl and not powder cocaine.

Olivia L. Norman, an assistant U.S. attorney, asked for a term of imprisonment at the high end of the guideline range, arguing that the danger posed by a drug like fentanyl warranted a tough punishment.

If someone comes into casual contact with it, they could die, she told Payne.

She noted that the defendants were tossing what they thought were drugs out onto the highway.

If that actually had been fentanyl, people could have died, Norman said. He should know what he is picking up and be responsible for the decision he has made, she said.

Given a chance to speak before being sentenced, Garcia-Angelito, who faces deportation once his prison sentence is over, told Payne through an interpreter that I am sorry; I regret the crime.
The Richmond School Board on Monday quietly parted ways with the divisions director of human resources and superintendents chief of staff with 45 days remaining until the start of school.

Board Chairwoman Dawn Page declined to say why the decisions were made and added that she hoped the departure of Tamica Epps, who oversaw human resources, would not harm the divisions ability to fill 108 vacant teaching positions before school begins.

Were fully confident in (interim Superintendent Tommy Kranzs) abilities to do what needs to be done, Page said.

The actions involving the divisions senior leaders were included among dozens of human resources moves on a list that required a single vote of approval.

Kranz said he recommended the board take action on Epps and Candice Hunter, who came to the division in November 2014 as former Superintendent Dana Beddens chief of staff.

I made a decision to go in a different direction with those positions, Kranz said.

He would not elaborate.

New superintendents often prefer to pick their own chief of staff.

Bedden stepped down June 30, two years before his contract initially was slated to expire.

The board negotiated his early exit and has not yet explained its decision publicly beyond citing differences of opinion.

Page endorsed a letter touting Beddens accomplishments, but the board forfeited the right to criticize him publicly in an agreement that also guaranteed him nearly $250,000 in severance and leave payments.

At a $237,579 base salary, Bedden made about $50,000 more a year than his predecessor and was the highest-paid schools chief in city history.

Hunter made $112,953 in the 2016-17 fiscal year, according to salary figures for the division provided to the Times-Dispatch.

Kranz said Epps, who joined Richmond Public Schools just over a year ago, made about $110,000 annually.

Both Hunter and Epps were present for part of Mondays meeting but left early. Neither immediately responded to emailed requests for comment.

It was unclear whether either received messages sent to their division email addresses or whether their departures were effective immediately.

A request for the list of personnel actions taken Monday was not granted Wednesday.

The division is negotiating a potentially decadelong agreement with the Virginia Board of Education that the state deemed necessary after a comprehensive review of the system found challenges across the board.

That review awarded low marks to the human resources division, and Kranz told the board on Monday that state officials are focused on ensuring qualified teachers staff division classrooms.

Starting our school year with a shortage of qualified teachers in front of our students obviously puts those students at a disadvantage, Kranz said.

There were 47 teaching positions open when the 2016-2017 school year began, according to school division spokeswoman Kenita Bowers, who objected to the idea that 108 vacancies out of nearly 2,000 teaching positions represents a critical shortage.

Its not a major shortage, Bowers said. Were making offers every day.

There are about another 100 additional vacancies across support staff and administrative positions, Kranz said Monday.

Bowers declined to say whether Richmond historically has had difficulties filling teaching positions so close to the start of school, after other systems had made offers to high-quality applicants.

People are always searching for jobs; they relocate, they move, their life circumstances change, Bowers said.

Beddens chief academic officer, Andrea Kane, left the division last month to accept the top job at Queen Annes County Public Schools in Maryland.
Fredericksburg police are looking for a moped rider who is suspected of stabbing another man in a road rage incident Tuesday afternoon.

The victim, who suffered a non-life-threatening injury, told police he got into an argument with the other driver shortly before 1 p.m., while waiting to turn left from State Route 3 onto Huntington Hills Lane, which is across from the Westwood Shopping Center, according to a release from the Fredericksburg Police Department.

The man said the moped rider followed him onto Huntington Hills Lane, where he stopped his vehicle and approached the moped. He told police that's when the man pulled a knife and stabbed him, then left.

The victim was treated at Mary Washington Hospital.

The suspect is described as a thin white man in his mid-50s with short gray hair, a scruffy gray-colored beard and a dark tattoo on his left forearm, according to police. He was wearing a dark blue tank top, dark blue cargo shorts and a blue open-faced helmet.

The victim described the moped as medium blue with a milk cart strapped to its back.

The victim said a woman was riding with the man on the moped. He said she had long blonde hair and was wearing a white or light-gray tank top and cut-off jean shorts. She may have had a dark tattoo on her left thigh.
In a 1981 debate before the Virginia Manufacturers Association in Williamsburg, Chuck Robb laid waste to Republican claims that he was squishy on issues, crisply listing what he was for and against. Even his opponent, Marshall Coleman, who years later would become a regular at Robbs Christmas party, seemed impressed.

Sixteen years on, Democrat Don Beyer signaled his candidacy really was in trouble when he used an appearance with Jim Gilmore before the Virginia Bar Association at The Greenbrier resort in West Virginia to offer his own version of the Republicans car-tax rollback  after weeks of attacking the Gilmore scheme for what it turned out to be: balky and very expensive.

In 2005, Republican Jerry Kilgore, at a chamber of commerce debate with Tim Kaine in Fairfax County, raised doubts about his anti-abortion credentials when he became tongue-tied on a simple question: Would he sign into law legislation banning abortion in Virginia if the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade? He dismissed it as a hypothetical.

In a Virginia gubernatorial campaign, debates can matter. They can change the trajectory of a race by altering perceptions, raising  or lowering  expectations, or redirecting the narrative.

The 2017 campaign, depending whether you ask a Democrat or Republican, demands all three.

And whether that happens could depend on questions put to Ed Gillespie and Ralph Northam by moderator Judy Woodruff of PBS NewsHour at their first debate Saturday morning at The Homestead in Bath County. The audience  again  will be the worthies of the VBA.

Democrat Northam and Republican Gillespie will do their darndest to stick with a script. They want to minimize risk  and the potential for damage. And they will do so relying on rhetorical flourishes, stagecraft and data that have been tested to provoke a predictable response.

In other words, the debate can be a setting in which Gillespie and Northam are their least authentic. But when trapped on a platform for an hour or so, with their utterances live-streamed and reported in real time on social media, with the cocked gun that is the timers stopwatch pointed at their heads, even the most disciplined candidates can become undisciplined.

For Gillespie that will be fully tested on the topic he has artfully avoided: Donald Trump.

Gillespie has yet to say publicly whether he supports the president, where he differs with him and how Gillespie reconciles his Establishment brand of Republicanism with Trumps populist-authoritarian version. No issue currently brings this into sharper focus than health care and the GOPs failure to agree on an alternative to Obamacare.

The implosion Tuesday in the U.S. Senate of Republicans latest repeal effort means that health care will remain a front-burner issue in the gubernatorial campaign  and not just as a massive external event that is the latest measure of the nationalization of Virginia politics.

Inertia in Washington, D.C., compounds uncertainty in Richmond, where divided government denied Terry McAuliffe a Medicaid-financed expansion of Obamacare that would have meant billions of dollars for the state. That could have established a higher minimum handout under Medicaid, should it be overhauled.

Now Virginia faces the possibility of receiving fewer dollars than it currently collects  and at a time when the cost to the state of providing health care for the poor is the fastest-growing item in its budget.

But Gillespie needs to say more about health care and not just as a measure of his attitude toward Trump, with whom he seemed to cozy up ever so slightly Monday after months of avoiding him. Gillespie said  in TV news tape circulated by Northams staff  that Virginia needs a GOP governor to work with the Trump White House.

Health care also is a yardstick of Gillespies familiarity with the nuts and bolts of Virginia government, an entity about which he knows comparatively little having made his name and fortune as a D.C. insider. Democrat McAuliffe, of course, has a similar resume and was similarly unfamiliar with the state bureaucracy. And it cost him time and momentum.

Northam, who, as a legislator-turned-lieutenant governor knows his way around the state Capitol, knows, too, that nothing makes Gillespie squirm quite like regular, frequent and nonstop references to Trump, usually paired with health care.

Since the primary in mid-June, Northams campaign has been pretty much one note, with his more robust presence on social media seemingly Trump-centric.

His handlers get testy over suggestions  increasingly echoed by Republicans  that Northam talks about Trump to the exclusion of state-specific issues. They counter that Northam has had roll-outs on a dozen issues, including  on Tuesday  ways to revive the long-sputtering rural economy.

But before Northam, a physician, did that, he sought to capitalize on the GOPs embarrassment in the Senate by proposing a bipartisan state study on health care costs, with a focus on the use of federal dollars. Theres no way Northam gives up the Trump card  not in a state Trump lost and where his unpopularity is increasing.

Linking Gillespie to Trump also is a way for Northam to divert attention from his own difficulties, most notably, a muddled position on twin natural-gas pipelines that would slice across Virginias mountainous western spine. Northam seems incapable of an Im-for-it or Im-against-it answer.

The projects are a divisive issue within the Democratic Party. McAuliffe favors them as a source of jobs and cheap energy. Environmentalists oppose them as a scar on the landscape that would promote further dependence on pollution-producing carbon fuel.

Northam wants to be seen as friends of both McAuliffe, who can pump green into Northams depleted treasury, and greens who are among the most enthusiastic Democratic voters.

The debate Saturday is a chance for Northam to say whose friendship counts most.

But someone has to ask.
By PTI: Panaji, Jul 19 (PTI) The 50-year-old man arrested for desecrating religious symbols, including holy crosses, in Goa was indoctrinated against idol worship allegedly by a group of Israeli inmates when he was lodged in a prison here, Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar told the legislative assembly today.

According to police, Francis Pereira, a taxi operator arrested last week, has "confessed" to desecrating 113 religious symbols including holy crosses, in Goa in the last 14 years.

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"When he was serving a three-year jail term at Aguada prison in an attempt to murder case, he had met a group of Israeli inmates who told him that idols should not be worshipped as there are souls trapped in them," Parrikar said.

He was responding to a calling attention motion by the opposition on a series of incidents of defilement of religious symbols in Goa, some of which took place in the last fortnight.

When he was released from jail, the first thing Pereira did was to break the altar at his house, the CM said, quoting from what he said was his "confessional" statement given to the police.

Parrikar said the accused told the police that "Osama bin Laden (Al-Qaeda founder), Saddam Hussain (former Iraqi president and Veerappan (sandalwood smuggler) were his role models".

Opposition members, however, suspected there could be more than one person involved in the crime.

The chief minister said the accused was operating alone and "his mission was to free souls trapped in religious statues".

"He was the lone operator but we are not ruling out the involvement of more people."

The accused, he said, would move around in his taxi with a hammer weighing 5 kg and used it to break religious structures.

Parrikar said Pereira once tried to break a statue of Maratha warrior king Shivaji Maharaj, installed in Farmagudi, a village 30 km from his place, but failed in his attempt.

The chief minister said the police have booked him under various IPC sections, including 153 (A) - which deals with promoting enmity between different groups. PTI RPS NM RSY ARK SK ARK

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A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
A man who was injured after getting in a collision while on his moped in June died this month, police said.

Harold Buck Douglas Blankenship Sr., 66, of Roanoke, was driving his moped on June 16 when he collided with a 1985 Ford LTD at the intersection of 13th and Dale Avenue Southeast shortly after 6 p.m., police spokesman Scott Leamon said. Blankenship was wearing a helmet. He was issued a summons for disregarding a stop sign, Leamon said.

Blankenship was taken to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. He was treated and released. Leamon said he later checked back into the hospital and died a day later, on July 3.
ROCKY MOUNT  After months of debate about where to locate a new Glade Hill fire station, the Franklin County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to stick with the original site chosen for the station.

The location of the new station was hotly debated as questions of economic development were introduced to the public safety issue.

When the county purchased two parcels of land along Virginia 40 and Turtle Hill Road last summer, it moved the station closer to the Southlake area, which has long been viewed as an area ripe for development.

Developer Ron Willard and nearby Smith Mountain Lake homeowners associations argued that, since the station was already headed in that direction, the county should choose a site within the Union Hall village center identified by the county. Willard suggested the station locate in his planned Southlake Towne Center.

But volunteers with the fire department preferred the Turtle Hill site.

Per the direction of the board, County Administrator Brent Robertson sent a letter to the developer asking for specific information about the site within the town center Willard was offering and the cost. Supervisors said last month they needed that information before they could solicit a site analysis comparing the Southlake site with the Turtle Hill site.

In a written response, Willard continued to advocate for a site within the village center, in or outside of his town center.

He mentioned a proffer attached to the Southlake project in which the original developer agreed to provide the county with a free parcel of land for fire and rescue services in the rear of the town center.

We are happy to honor this proffer, even though it has expired, in an effort to foster goodwill in the community, he wrote.

But board members were unsatisfied with the response, as Willard did not directly answer Robertsons questions about identifying a specific lot within the town center or providing an estimated cost for 4 acres of land.

Willard also questioned in the letter why the county needed four acres of land, saying he felt theyd need less.

This, to me, is not an answer to our questions, said Chairman Cline Brubaker.

Boone District Supervisor Ronnie Thompson said the decision was an easy one, given that Willard didnt answer their questions and the county had already spent just over $26,000 on the Turtle Hill site.

Union Hall District Supervisor Tommy Cundiff said he appreciated the patience everyone had shown throughout the process and was glad to have had the discussion. But, he said, its time to move ahead with the project.

Cundiff made the motion to select the Turtle Hill site, and the five other supervisors present agreed.

Finances

Finance Director Vincent Copenhaver gave supervisors an overview of how the county fared in the fiscal year that ended June 30.

The county garnered a $1 million surplus in revenue, attributed largely to increases in personal property tax and local sales tax revenues. Some money set aside for expenditures was also unused, though that number is still in flux.

The surplus and leftover moneys will go into the countys fund balance, but they could be drawn upon for one-time expenses that didnt make it into this years budget.

The fund balance money could go toward a number of items, such as replacement of playground equipment, startup money for Jamison Mill Park, technology projects, and body cameras for the sheriffs office, among other things. The school district could also request the $444,138 in local funds not used last year be returned.

Copenhaver said county staff would bring a recommendation to the board of how best to use that extra money in the coming months.
Deschutes Brewerys Street Pub, held Saturday in downtown Roanoke, tapped 28 more kegs than it did last year, resulting in the largest street pub to date.

Oregon-based Deschutes kicked 269 kegs on Saturday for the estimated 25,000 people who attended. Thats about 26,000 pints of beer. In the process, the event raised about $67,000 for four Roanoke Valley nonprofits.

The amount raised is down somewhat from last years $81,000, which went to nine different nonprofits.

A company spokesman said that is because this year some of the funds went to operating costs for the street pub as opposed to last year, when all of it went to charity.

This is Deschutes third year in hosting street pubs, which the company takes to different cities across the U.S. to market its beers and raise money for charities.

There will be five this year. Aside from the Roanoke stop, Deschutes Street Pub visited Cincinnati in June and heads to Milwaukee, Portland, Oregon and Sacramento in July, September and October.

It returned to Roanoke due to the Star Citys special relationship with the brewery. Last year, Deschutes announced it would make Roanoke the home for its East Coast brewery. It is expected to begin building in 2019 and start brewing in 2021.

The company also is opening a taproom in downtown Roanoke in August at 315 Market St. S.E., at the corner of Market and Church Avenue.

Deschutes marketing manager Joey Pleich, who oversees the street pub, said he was again blown away by the response from so many people at the event, which featured a 400-foot-long pop-up bar, live music and a gathering of local food trucks stretched across South Jefferson Street and Elmwood Park.

Last year, the street pub in Roanoke hit a record for the number of kegs tapped, now broken.

This years funds went to local nonprofits Roanoke Outside Foundation, Bradley Free Clinic, Pathfinders for Greenways and the Blue Ridge Land Conservancy.
Mathrubhumi has implemented the "First day of period" leave policy effective immediately. The policy will soon be implemented in its online and print ventures too.

By India Today Web Desk: Malayalam media giant, Mathrubhumi has now decided to announce 'First Day of Period' leave for its employees. Earlier this month, Mumbai based digital media company Culture Machine had announced the 'First Day of Period' leave policy.

The leave policy will come into place immediately. The company's Joint Managing Director MV Shreyams Kumar was quoted as saying that the additional leave will be granted to its women employees which will "not be counted under sick leave or casual leave". As many as 75 out of the 320 employees with Matrubhumi channel are women. The policy that is implemented only in Mathrubhumi TV will soon be extended to online and print verticals as well.

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"When this other firm came forward with the idea, we felt that it was a very good and practical practice to adopt. And so the decision was taken. The first day of period leave will be an additional leave for the women employees and will not be considered as casual leave or sick leave. We took the decision not because any employee asked for it, but felt that it should be granted," the MD said

Culture Machine started a petition to implement the "First day of period leave" policy across all companies in the country. They have also started an online petition which has garnered around 28k supporters till now.

The period leave is granted to female employees in Japan, South Korea and Indonesia but is a fairly new concept for India. Many women have mixed feelings about the issue.

FYI || Do women deserve menstrual leaves, or is it too much to ask for? ||

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The Town of Vinton is planning to kick start a search for proposals to redevelop the long-vacant, former Vinton Motor Co. site found in its downtown.

The 1.4-acre property that sits along Washington Avenue and Pollard Street has been dormant since the family-owned car dealership closed its doors in 2008 after 77 years of service.

The town has been working with the landowner to assess the sites potential and shape ideas for its future.

I do think there is a good opportunity there, said Assistant Town Manager Pete Peters, pointing to the lots prominent location on a high-traffic corridor and the towns recent success with projects like the residential revamp of the old Roland E. Cook Elementary School.

Weve got a lot of momentum in Vinton, said Peters, who heads the towns economic development efforts.

On Tuesday, the town council gave its blessing to an agreement that will allow it to start collecting redevelopment proposals through a structured, request-for-proposals process.

Under the agreement, Vinton will hold an option to purchase the property for the next two years. The move will give the town a legal stake in the site  a requirement to move forward with an RFP process  and equip it with standing to weigh in on any development offers received.

The town has no plans to buy the land outright of its own accord, Peters said, though it could end up executing its option and then reselling the site to a buyer if needed to help facilitate a deal.

The town and the landowner, Billy Vinyard, would both have to sign off on a sale for it to happen while the agreement is in effect.

Vinton leaders feel the site could be ripe for a project such as a mixed-use development or even a hotel. The options will be clearer after the RFP process starts attracting responses.

Under the contract approved Tuesday, Vinton will also get to use the sites large parking lot for public parking.

The added space, located about a block away from the farmers market, will be particularly useful during large downtown events, officials said.

The town will pay an annual fee of $5,000 to control the parking lot. Peters said that was consistent with market rates.

The town council signed off on the agreement by a 4-1 vote. Vice Mayor Matt Hare dissented after noting that the parking contract didnt spell out what should happen if a request to hold a fair or other event in the parking lot is received.

Hare worried the omission could spur confusion or conflict down the road. Other council members said the town had a track record of being able to work with property owners when such requests arise.

A start date for the request for proposals wasnt immediately set Tuesday night, but Peters said the town plans to get it underway quickly, once all the paperwork is in place.
RICHMOND  A state judge who was barred from presiding in his home district after complaints surfaced that he sexually harassed courtroom clerks and made crude remarks has been reinstated to the 11th Judicial District but will not be allowed to sit on the bench in the district.

After being assigned to preside in a number of other districts across the state during his 14-month exile from the 11th District, Judge Robert Beasley Jr., who has apologized for his behavior, officially returned July 5 on instructions from the office of Chief Justice Donald Lemons of the Virginia Supreme Court.

But 11th District Chief Judge Mayo Gravatt, after meeting with Beasley, has limited Beasleys duties to presiding over mental commitment hearings at three hospitals within the district. He will not sit on the bench  at least for now  in general district courts in Petersburg or the counties of Powhatan, Dinwiddie, Amelia and Nottoway, which make up the 11th District.

In an interview this week, Gravatt said Beasleys services are not needed on the bench because the current caseload in those localities can be handled sufficiently and expeditiously by the two existing judges  himself and Judge Ray Lupold.

We didnt need another judge, Gravatt said, adding that a third judge in the district would leave us underutilized.

Instead, Gravatt has assigned Beasley to preside over mental commitment hearings  also known as temporary detention order hearings, which are for people who may require involuntary hospitalization for psychiatric treatment  at Central State Hospital, Southside Regional Medical Center and Poplar Springs Hospital in the Tri-Cities area.

That has always been a district court function as well, [and] its a fairly busy job with three institutions in the 11th, Gravatt said. Mental commitment cases typically have been handled by special justices  local attorneys who are appointed by the court and authorized to hear certain mental health commitment matters.

In addition to hearing mental commitment cases three days a week, Beasley has been assigned to hear civil and criminal matters two days a week in Suffolk General District Court in Virginias 5th Judicial District, Gravatt said. Beasley will sit in the 5th District at least through Oct. 30, according to a July 10 order signed by Lemons.

In ordering Beasley back to the 11th District, the Virginia Supreme Court did not specify what duties he should be assigned. That was left to the discretion of Gravatt as the 11th Districts chief judge.

Beasleys return has left a number of 11th District courtroom clerks who said the judge had harassed them feeling uneasy and fearful of reprisals if he eventually is reinstated to the bench in their localities. Gravatt acknowledged that its possible that Beasley could return to the bench at some future point.

Gravatt said Beasleys current assignment continues for the time being  until conditions change or something [else] changes.

At least one of the clerks said she recently hired an attorney as a precaution.

Beasley has declined to comment in the past, and he did not respond Tuesday to several messages seeking comment by email or through his former attorney.

Beasley came under intense scrutiny last year after it was disclosed that he had been suspended for 10 weeks in late 2015 and early 2016 for allegations of inappropriate conduct.

He was eventually reinstated on Feb. 2, 2016, after writing letters of apology the previous month to clerks in Amelia, Powhatan and Dinwiddie, where he began sitting as a judge on Dec. 1, 2014. In the letters, Beasley apologized for my offensive conduct and statements over the past year, which he described as inexcusable.

My actions towards you were inappropriate on both a personal and professional level and for that I am truly sorry, Beasley wrote. It will not happen again.

The complaints against the judge include his telling crude sexual jokes and making sexual remarks inside and outside the courtroom. He was also accused of emailing images to employees and posting pictures in clerks offices that convey sexual innuendos, sources have previously said.

Beasley is also alleged to have made repeated statements about court employees jobs, suggesting they would be terminated if he were elevated to the position of chief judge.

The clerks have said that Beasleys conduct and statements created a hostile work environment that made them uncomfortable and concerned about their continued employment.

In early March 2016, the Virginia Supreme Courts chief justice ordered Beasley to begin serving outside his home district, and through a series of subsequent orders Beasley was assigned to various judicial districts in Virginia that were shorthanded or needed temporary assistance.

It is my understanding that he had done well in these districts that he had been sent to, Gravatt said. I did not go to monitor [Beasley], but there may have been some monitoring that Im not directly privy to.

The complaints against Beasley were reviewed in December 2015 by Virginias Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission, which investigates allegations of judicial misconduct, but the body apparently took no official action against the judge. All commission matters are confidential unless the panel files a formal complaint against a judge in the Supreme Court of Virginia or, pursuant to law, reports information to the General Assembly when the judge is being considered for re-election by the legislature.

In the spring of 2016, two of the most powerful members of the Virginia Senate threatened to initiate impeachment proceedings against Beasley, but House Speaker Bill Howell, R-Stafford, quashed the move. He said that although Beasleys behavior was unbecoming and inappropriate, it did not substantiate an impeachment charge.

Beasley has roughly three years and four months remaining on his six-year term, which ends in December 2020. He was elected by the General Assembly in September 2014 and began work that December. Beasley filled the 11th Districts third general district court position, created in 2014.

Gravatt will retire in January 2020 after reaching 73, the mandatory retirement age for state judges. That could create an opening for Beasley if the General Assembly doesnt elect someone to specifically fill Gravatts vacancy.

Then-House of Delegates Courts Chairman Dave Albo, R-Fairfax, suggested to the Richmond Times-Dispatch last year that Beasley would have a heck of a time getting reappointed when his term expires.
A district court in Chandigarh has rejected the plea for abortion of a 26 -week pregnancy of a 10-year -old who was repeatedly raped by her uncle. Doctors fear for her health.

By India Today Web Desk: Reports of a district court in Chandigarh denying permission for medical termination of pregnancy to a 10-year-old girl has sparked debates. The girl is in her 26th week of pregnancy.

The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act allows for termination of pregnancy upto 20 weeks only. The pregnant woman requires the medical advice of one doctor to terminate the pregnancy upto 12 weeks and permission of two doctors upto 20 weeks.

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According to a report, the 10-year-old was repeatedly raped by her maternal uncle.

Her case is a rare one as doctors haven't seen girls at such a tender age getting pregnant. The doctors have expressed their concern over the effects this pregnancy will have on the girl.

The pelvic muscle is not fully developed at such age and thus both vaginal delivery and c-section will be dangerous for the girl.

Although, the MTP Act doesn't allow for termination of pregnancy after 20 weeks special provisions in case the fetus could prove to be fatal to the mother are included in the Act.

The act was originally introduced to prevent sex-based abortions but pregnant minor girls often turn out to be scapegoats for preventing illegal abortions.

This is not the first case of its type in India. In May this year, a 10-year old girl from Rohtak was faced with the same challenge. The court left the decision with the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences which decided to terminate the pregnancy.

In 2015, the Supreme Court of India allowed for the termination of pregnancy of a 14-year old rape victim who was in the 25th week of her pregnancy.

An amendment to the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act was introduced in the parliament in 2006. The amendment recommended increasing the time period for termination of pregnancies from 20 weeks to 24 weeks.

The amendment was aimed at empowering women with decisions about their pregnancies. The bill was again submitted to the cabinet for approval in 2017 but was returned by the PMO in May 2017. Instead the PMO asked the Ministry of Health to strengthen the existing MTP and Pre-Conception Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act.

FYI || 3 women kidnap, force-feed and rape 23-year-old man for 3 days ||

FYI || Supreme Court denies pregnant woman permission to abort foetus with brain defect ||

FYI || Her body, her right: Women have the right to decide on pregnancy, SC judge says ||

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Anyone looking for another reason not to leave life-and-death issues to the state need look no further than the conflict between the British government and the parents of 11-month-old Charlie Gard.

Governments, including the British courts and the European court of human rights have refused to allow Charlies parents to take him to the U.S. for what they believe is life-saving treatment. In what many will regard as a cynical decision, UK judge Nicholas Francis gave Charlies parents just two days to present new evidence as to why their son should receive experimental treatment. A final decision will be handed down in a hearing on Thursday.

Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital where Charlie is on a ventilator, his brain reportedly damaged from a rare genetic condition, argue that he should be removed from life support and allowed to die. President Trump has offered help. Pope Francis also supports the parents right to determine what is best for their child.

Charlies parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, believe an experimental treatment known as nucleoside therapy might work on their son. British doctors say it wont improve the childs quality of life. They want him to die. Apparently thats OK with the state-run National Health Service (NHS), which is always looking for ways to cut costs.

The parents have raised enough money to take Charlie to America for treatment. Wouldnt most parents do all they could for their child, especially one so young who is helpless and at the mercy of adults? I know I would for my grandson, who is also named Charlie.

Judges, bureaucrats and politicians should not be allowed to make such a decision, but the growing power of the state is increasingly assuming the power to determine who is fit to live and who should die  and to quote Scrooge from Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol, decrease the surplus population. Who, or what, can stop them, assuming a majority want to?

When the state is allowed to assign value to a human life, the unwanted, the inconvenient, the sick, the elderly and the handicapped are all at risk. Seeing lives as less than valuable, or of no value, will bring us to the point where only the fit and healthy are allowed to live. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote in 1921, The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective. The Nazis took this thinking to its most inhumane level with horrific results.

At a Monday hearing, Judge Francis said new and powerful evidence submitted by the parents and their attorney could overturn previous rulings. That would be good, but the larger question is why does a court get to decide what health care is best for a child? That should be the parents privilege and responsibility.

MPs in Britain have introduced a bill to parliament, which would decriminalize abortion by repealing a law that dates back to Victorian times. How short a step is it from the complete devaluation of the unborn to infanticide, to euthanasia and finally and inevitably a full embrace of eugenics?

It was University of Chicago professor of biology, Dr. Leon Kass, who issued this stern warning: We have paid some high prices for the technological conquest of nature, but none so high as the intellectual and spiritual costs of seeing nature as mere material for our manipulation, exploitation and transformation. With the powers of biological engineering gathering, there will be splendid new opportunities for similar degradation of our view of man. ... If we come to see ourselves as meat, then meat we shall become.

Charlie Gard is not meat. He and his parents should be allowed to come to America. As long as hope lives, so does Charlie.

Thomas is a columnist for the Tribune Content Agency.
The dossier also includes instances of what the Congress calls "cultural fascism" by referring to frequent incidents of mob lynchings in the name of cow protection.

By Poulomi Saha: Politics over a 40-page dossier prepared by the Congress to corner the Narendra Modi government over mob lynching and other incidents of violence targeting Dalits and minorities threatens to dominate the ongoing monsoon session of Parliament.

High-level sources have told India Today that the powerful All India Congress Committee's research department has prepared the dossier to disrupt Parliament by focusing on "minorities and mosquitoes", the latter referring to the increasing instances of the Zika virus that gripped Gujarat a few months ago.

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The dossier also includes instances of what the Congress calls "cultural fascism" in the country by referring to frequent incidents of mob lynchings in the name of cow protection, and the imposition of a right-wing agenda in education and other spheres of India's social life. But the party is now wary of raising the issue in the wake of recent hooliganism by party cadres during the promotion of Madhur Bhandarkar's film 'Indu Sarkar', which chronicles the Emergency imposed by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

While the Congress wasn't keen to admit that an internal document had reached the media, it later acceded its authenticity and said it was for internal consumption.

Defending the distribution of the document among its party leaders, senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal said, "So, what does the BJP want to say? That we should not raise issues or should not prepare dossiers for internal consumption?"

Another Congress leader KV Thomas said the dossier was prepared following discussions with party president Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi. He said the issues in it will be brought up in Parliament. "There are so many issues that we want to raise, they have been brought together," he said.

The Congress also claimed the document was not printed by the party and hence, not its property. "We decide our strategy on a daily basis. The BJP can circulate whatever it wants," a senior Congress leader said.

WHAT ABOUT CHINA, GST, ASKS BJP

While the Congress claims the dossier was prepared for "internal consumption" of its party leaders to prepare for the party's strategy during the monsoon session of Parliament, the ruling BJP has attacked the document for its silence on the border standoff with China or the Goods and Services Tax (GST) rollout.

Calling the dossier a "dossier of disruption", the BJP alleges the document that calls for the disruption of Parliament proceedings and a conspiracy to draw the people's attention away from the agenda of development it represents.

"PM Modi spoke thrice on Gau Rakshaks, and yet the Congress wants to bring up Junaid and Akhlaq issues to stall Parliament. These were tragic incidents but why use them to disrupt Parliament?" asked BJP national spokesperson Sambit Patra.

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The BJP also claims the Congress's refusal to corner the government on the China issue stems out of the fear of being cornered due to Rahul Gandhi's meeting with the Chinese ambassador, which the Congress had earlier denied.

Also read: Massive turnout at the Delhi Congress Protest against GST

Also read: Parliament LIVE: Mob lynching, farmer suicides rock Rajya Sabha

ALSO WATCH | Samajwadi and Congress party members demand raise in salaries amidst chaos in Parliament

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By PTI: Eds: Changing a word in intro

Kohima, Jul 19 (PTI) For T R Zeliang, the chief ministers chair in Nagaland has come under unusual circumstances -- not once but twice.

The rebel Nagaland Peoples Front leader today became the chief minister of the northeastern state five months after he was compelled to step down from the chair following public uproar.

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This is the second time 65-year-old Zeliang, present chairman of the ruling Democratic Alliance of Nagaland, was sworn in as chief minister in the third term of the NPF-led DAN government in Nagaland.

Zeliang, who had been Minister for Planning and Coordination in the Democratic Alliance of Nagaland (DAN) III ministry, had become the chief minister for the first time when he succeeded Neiphiu Rio in May, 2014, following Rios election to the Lok Sabha.

This February, he was forced to step down as chief minister following public agitation against the government for reservation of 33 per cent of seats for women in the election to urban local bodies.

Shurhozelie Liezietsu had replaced Zeliang. In these five months, Zeliang was the finance advisor to Chief Minister Liezietsu.

He revolted against Liezietsu on July 8 last claiming the support of a majority of the NPF and Independent MLAs and subsequently in a letter to Governor P B Acharya staked claim to form a new NPF government.

Zeliang joined active politics as president of District Youth Congress (I) in 1976. He had been involved in state politics for nearly four decades and served as a minister in various governments in the state.

Zeliang contested state Assembly elections for the first time in 1982 as an Independent and again in 1987 as an NNDP candidate from 6-Tening constituency in Peren district. He was unsuccessful both times. He then won from Tening four times in a row beginning with the elections in 1989 as a candidate of the Naga Peoples Council and subsequently in 1993, 1998 and 2003 as a candidate of the Indian National Congress. He served as Minister of State for Information and Tourism during 1989-90 and as Minister of State for Relief & Rehabilitation from 1994 to 1998. During 1998-2003, he was the Minister for Environment and Forests and Geology and Mining under S C Jamir government.

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In 2003, Zeliang and six Congress MLAs formed the Nagaland Congress after defecting from the Indian National Congress only to merge with the Neiphiu Rio-led Naga Peoples Front.

From 2004 to 2008, he was a Rajya Sabha MP from Nagaland.

Returning to state politics in 2008, he won from 7-Peren Constituency and was appointed Minister for Planning, Animal Husbandry and Parliamentary Affairs under Chief Minister Rio.

He won the Assembly elections again in 2013 from the same constituency and was appointed Minister for Planning & Coordination, Evaluation & Geology and Mining. Zeliang was born at Mbaupungwa village in Peren district in 1952. A Zeliang Naga, he matriculated from Don Bosco High School in Dibrugarh, Assam and holds a BA degree from Kohima Arts College. PTI NBS MM MD ZMN ZMN

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By PTI: Kohima, Jul 19 (PTI) The Naga Peoples Front (NPF) today alleged that Nagaland Governor P B Acharya had played a partisan role in installing the T R Zeliang government in the state.

"The haste with which he has acted favouring the RSS- friendly dispensation should be a wake up call for the Naga people...," said a release issued by NPF Media and Press Bureau here.

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"It was very clear that the governor who was a decorated RSS pracharak...with a single agenda but he could not effectively fulfill his mission so long as the BJP was riding piggy back on the NPF," it alleged.

"By aligning with the BJP all these years and playing host to the saffron party, the NPF was successful in containing the agenda of the BJP in Nagaland," it said.

They alleged that the BJP seemed to be buoyed by the Assam and Manipur victories and planned to repeat "another Arunachal experiment in Nagaland".

It said the Nagaland governor owed an explanation to the people and his conscience about what "extenuating circumstances prompted him to support legislators sans party set up this time round when he did exactly the opposite in 2015".

"Or has he forgotten that in 2015 he did not entertain the NPF dissidents plea to dismiss the then so-called minority government of TR Zeliang who then had the sanction and mandate of the party set up?" it asked.

It claimed the day after the NPF severed ties with the BJP, the governor dismissed the NPF-led government.

On a day of fast-moving political developments, T R Zeliang was today sworn in as the new chief minister replacing Shurhozelie Liezietsu who was sacked by Governor P B Acharya.

But within hours, the NPF expelled Zeliang for six years for "anti-party activities", indicating the political turmoil was far from over.

"He was adamant and has already planned to dismantle the NPF party," NPF working presidents Huska Yepthomi and Apong Pongener said.

They claimed the decision was taken to keep peace in the party.

Zeliang, however, was unfazed saying he would continue to remain the NPF leader in the House.

"The expulsion from the party does not affect the membership inside the House," he said. PTI NBS RG AAR

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By PTI: By Shirish B Pradhan

Kathmandu, Jul 19 (PTI) Nepal and China have launched a programme to offer free training to up to 200 tourism entrepreneurs in Mandarin to attract more foreign visitors from China.

Chinese ambassador to Nepal Yu Hong today inaugurated a new batch of tourism entrepreneurs who will be trained in the Chinese language in Kathmandu.

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A group of 40 people, consisting of tour operators and tourism entrepreneurs, will be trained during the six-month programme.

The classes being run at the initiative of the Chinese embassy will not only help to promote Chinese tourists in Nepal, but it will also strengthen people-to-people relations between Nepal and China, Yu said.

The classes will be provided at free of cost.

More than one billion Chinese tourists visited foreign countries between 2013-2016 and Nepal can tap the opportunity by training its tour operators in Chinese language, she said.

Nepal could generate USD 22 billion every year if the country can attract one million Chinese tourists, she added.

Nepal currently attracts 125,000 Chinese tourists annually and the number has been increasing steadily. Nepal is the third-largest country after India and Sri Lanka to receive Chinese tourists.

"We are aiming to train 200 tour operators and travel trade entrepreneurs in Chinese language within the next five years, with the objective to promoting Chinese tourists into Nepal, said Maniraj Lamichhane, director at Nepal Tourism Board. PTI SBP ABH AKJ ABH

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A SUPERMARKET has been found guilty of allowing unsafe working conditions which resulted in a worker's death.

Frozen food giant Iceland was as convicted on one count of failing to protect employees from harm and one of failing to protect non-employees in relation to the death of Tony Hopkins in 2013.

Mr Hopkins (58), of Silsden in West Yorkshire, fell to his death in 2013 while working at the Iceland branch on Sycamore Road, Eastwood.

Jurors took five hours and 15 minutes to unanimously find the firm guilty on both counts after a two-week trial.

Prosecutor Mr Nicholas de la Poer identified 11 steps the company might reasonably have taken to make the store safe for staff, all of which it failed to put in place.

Mr Hopkins was maintaining air conditioning units in the shops roof space on October 28, 2013, when he fell through a false ceiling.

The D&E Filtration employee landed on the back of his head, dying at Rotherham Hospital around one hour later.

The court did not immediately set a date for sentencing.
The 6th edition of the Forevemark Forum, held by Forevermark, the diamond brand from the De Beers Group of Companies, was held from 11 to 13 July 2017 in Kolkata. This years theme was Inspire. Innovate. Illuminate; and over 30,000 Forevermark diamonds and 1500 designs were on display, says a press note from the company.

Speaking on the occasion, Stephen Lussier, CEO Forevermark, said, It is a matter of great pride for us to have all our partners here at the 6th Annual Forevermark Forum. This year we inscribed the two millionth Forevermark diamond at our lab in Surat which is a true testament to our growth in India. At Forevermark, the Forum reinstates our commitment to our partners by the offering among the worlds most beautiful diamonds at a single venue.

Sachin Jain, President, Forevermark India, stated,The Forevermark Forum has emerged as the premier platform to stay connected and be informed in the world of diamonds today. Jewellers for whom the diamond business is important and significant, look forward to it as an event to key into their calendar. This is because they have seen over the years that we focus on new retail innovations, the latest technology and consumer insights to help them leverage their business.

Over the years, the Forevermark Forum has evolved into a unique platform for prominent sight holders, manufacturers and leading jewellers from across the country  to shed light on consumer and design trends, conduct business, network, share perspectives and discover the latest innovations.



Aruna Gaitonde, Editor-in-Chief of Asian Bureau, Rough & Polished




Lucara Diamonds 1,109-carat Lesedi La Rona diamond, which was recovered in Botswana two years ago, will have to be cut after it failed to sell at a Sotheby's auction last year, according to media reports.

Reuters quoted company chief executive William Lamb as saying that it was unlikely Lucara can sell the stone for its desired price and polishing the Lesedi itself was risky.

The company expected $70 million during the auction, but bidding ended at around $61 million.

Reuters reports that the cutting of the worlds second largest diamond was not the ending that company chief executive William Lamb wanted.

"It's only the second stone recovered in the history of humanity over 1,000 carats. Why would you want to polish it?," he was quoted as saying.

"The stone in the rough form contains untold potential...As soon as you polish it into one solution, everything else is gone."

Rare Diamond House managing director Oded Mansori was also quoted as saying that it would be a mistake for Lucara to hold onto the massive rough diamond, as several players including Gem Diamonds and Petra had recently found large precious rocks.



Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished




Two large rough diamonds found in Yakutia

19 july 2017 News

On July 18, a very large rough diamond weighing almost 110 carats was recovered at the Processing Plant No. 3 of ALROSAs Mirny Mining and Processing Division. Two days earlier, a 75-carat rough diamond was recovered at the Processing Plant No. 14 of Aikhal Mining and Processing Division. These large rough diamonds became presents for two anniversaries celebrated by the Company  60 years of the diamond mining industry and 25 years of ALROSA.

Both rough diamonds are initially estimated as gem-quality. They are octahedron crystals with small inclusions, one of them with a straw-yellow tint.

In just a few days, diamonds will arrive to ALROSAs Diamond Sorting Center, where they will be studied thoroughly and each of them will receive a special passport. By ALROSAs tradition, the facts of recovery of large diamonds may be given names. The Company will consider this issue in the short run.




Amtrak

A report submitted to Congress on July 17 says restored Gulf Coast Amtrak service would expand travel markets; improve access to jobs, education and healthcare; reduce vehicular congestion and provide support for disaster and emergency response during coastal storm events.

The Gulf Coast Working Group (GCWG) report identifies two routes as preferred options and includes the restoration of service between New Orleans, La., and Orlando, Fla., via long-distance train for one daily round trip, and New Orleans and Mobile, Ala., via state-supported train for one daily round trip. The GCWG is chaired by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and consists of members from the Southern Rail Commission (SRC), CSX, Amtrak, state departments of transportation and various other local stakeholders. Hurricane Katrina caused significant damage along the corridor in 2005 and Amtrak service east of New Orleans was suspended.

The report estimates that a total of $112.6 million in track and station improvements, in addition to $5 million in project planning, would be required to support ongoing service on the two preferred routes. The report notes that Positive Train Control estimates and needs have not been determined along the entire route, which could significantly increase the restoration costs.

The report also notes that the investments recommended for passenger rail service restoration between New Orleans and Orlando, Fla., would benefit the freight operations along the corridor, as well. The reports states the improvements recommended to be made include additional yard bypass tracks, improvements to passing sidings, the addition of higher speed turnouts to existing siding tracks and upgrades to miter rails on moveable bridges.

We are encouraged that FRA has found that rail service can begin quickly and at a reasonable cost. The SRC is grateful for the unified political and grassroots support the restoration of Gulf Coast passenger rail service has received from mayors to governors to the gulf souths Congressional delegation, said Greg White, chairman of the SRC. Continued investments in our national passenger rail system are vital as our society becomes increasingly mobile and we look for ways to improve access to skilled workers, jobs, and new opportunities for economic development. The SRC is committed to ensuring the Gulf Coast region of our country is not left out.

Norfolk Southern and CSX submitted letters that do not fully support the report. NS expressed concern that the New Orleans terminal, while recognized in the report as an operationally complicated portion of the proposed route, was not studied to determine the impact on transcontinental freight service. NS also pointed out that other Class 1 carriers that have a stake in the New Orleans TerminalUnion Pacific, BNSF, Canadian National and Kansas City Southernwere not participants in the study and adding passenger service to the region would impact their traffic.

CSXs letter said its dissent from the GCWG findings is because the report fails to adequately portray the real challenges associated with initiating the proposed new passenger service.

A separate study commissioned by CSX found improvements of $2.3 billion would be required to accommodate added passenger rail service, but the improvements may not allow for an 80 percent on-time performance at all stations. The GCWG states in its report that it could not validate the results of the study, as it did not have a full understanding of how the proposal was developed.

The GCWG report says one of the next steps in the restoration process will include verifying with all stakeholders what improvements will be needed, including PTC requirements.

The GCWG report concludes, .during the next 30 years the Gulf Coast and Florida megaregions populations are expected to increase by 10 million and 13.8 million, respectively. For the region to harness this projected population growth, it needs a multi-modal transportation system that provides transportation alternatives.
Campbell Soup Company (CPB) said that it reaffirmed its previous full-year guidance for fiscal 2017. For the year, Campbell continues to expect net sales to change by -1 to 0 percent; adjusted Earnings Before Interest and Taxes or EBIT to increase by 2 to 4 percent; and adjusted Earnings Per Share to increase by 3 to 5 percent, or $3.04 to $3.09 per share. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect the company to report earnings of $3.05 per share for fiscal year 2017. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items.



Campbell plans to provide fiscal 2018 guidance for net sales, adjusted EBIT and adjusted EPS when it reports fourth-quarter fiscal 2017 results on August 31, 2017.

Campbell expects to reach approximately $310 million in annual cost savings by the end of fiscal 2017. The company also continues to expect its current cost savings initiatives to deliver $450 million, or approximately 6 percent of sales, in annual savings by the end of fiscal 2020. This cost savings goal is incremental to the company's ongoing supply chain productivity program. Campbell expects an adjusted gross margin of approximately 38 percent for fiscal 2017, and expects to generate approximately $1.25 billion in cash flow from operations in fiscal 2017.

Campbell reiterated its long-term targets for organic sales and earnings. The company targets long-term organic sales growth of 1 to 3 percent. Excluding currency translation, the company is targeting adjusted EBIT growth of 4 to 6 percent and adjusted EPS growth of 5 to 7 percent.

Campbell Soup Company, led by President and Chief Executive Officer Denise Morrison, will meet with investors today to discuss Campbell's strategic imperatives.

Management will provide an overview of Campbell's plans for its three divisions for the upcoming fiscal year, as well as review the company's cost savings initiatives and plans to reinvest in the .

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
By PTI: Thiruvananthapuram, Jul 19 (PTI) The Kerala government today decided to construct an airport at Kottayam districts Cheruvally estate to provide air connectivity to pilgrims visiting the Lord Ayyappa hill shrine at Sabarimala.

The 2,263 acre Cheruvally estate of the Harrisons Plantations is located at Kanjirapally, about 48 km from Sabarimala.

The government had entrusted a four-member committee headed by Additional Chief Secretary P H Kurian to identify a suitable land for the airport, a long felt need of lakhs of pilgrims, who throng the shrine annually.

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The committee had recommended Cheruvally estate, which was accepted by the state cabinet that met today, a government release said.

The ownership of the estate, adjacent to two national highways, which is disputed, is said to belong to the Believers Church.

Lakhs of devotees visit the shrine during the three-month long pilgrimage season between November and January every year.

The temple is situated in the mountain ranges of the Western Ghats in Pathanamthitta district.

The number of pilgrims visiting the temple has gone up in recent years and an airport is an alternate to reduce traffic congestion during the festival season, the release said.

The state government had in February 2016 accorded in principle sanction to construct the greenfield Sabarimala airport.

Earlier, there was a proposal to set up an airport at Aranmula, but following stiff resistance from environmental groups, the LDF government had last year cancelled all orders related to the project, including the grant of in-principle sanction.

The project, promoted by KGS Group, had run into trouble after it was mooted nearly eight years ago with environment groups and people in the area claiming that it would cause environmental hazards. PTI UD BN ANB ANB

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US President Donald Trump has nominated veteran diplomat and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Jr as the United States' next Ambassador to Russia.

"Huntsman has had a distinguished career as a politician, diplomat, and businessman," the White House said Tuesday announcing Trump's intention to nominate him to a post that is critical in the sensitive US-Russia diplomatic relations.

A center-right conservative Republican, Huntsman currently serves as Chairman of both the Atlantic Council, a prominent foreign policy think tank, and the Huntsman Cancer Foundation.

Huntsman has been part of every presidential administration since Ronald Reagan.

During his distinguished career as diplomat, Huntsman had served as the US Ambassador to China and Singapore.

After resigning as Deputy United States Trade Representative in the George Bush administration, Huntsman entered . He was elected as Republican Governor in 2004, and re-elected four years later.

Huntsman quit the post in 2009 when President Barack Obama nominated him to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to China.

Huntsman also has a history of briefly running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2011.

In the private sector, he is Director on a number of corporate boards including Hilton, Chevron, Ford Motor Company, and Caterpillar.

The 57 year-old father of seven children describes himself as a part time rock n' roller on his Twitter profile. Huntsman and his wife Mary Kaye have an adopted daughter, Asha from the western Indian state of Gujarat, whom he is raising in Hindu faith.

Monday, the White House also had announced the President's decision to nominate personnel to a few other key administration posts.

Hester Maria Peirce of Ohio will be nominated as a Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Rostin Behnam of New Jersey will be named a Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Peter Henry Barlerin of Colorado is to become US Ambassador to Cameroon.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Political News
Canadian stocks are looking for direction Wednesday morning amid a lack of catalysts these dog days of summer.

With the corporate news flow slowing to a trickle, traders will be keeping an eye on commodities prices and political turmoil in the U.S.

Crude oil prices have surged higher in July due to a weak U.S. dollar and talk of OPEC capping Nigerian and Libyan output.

WTI light sweet crude oil was up 15 cents at $46.56 a barrel this morning, staying well away from June's yearly lows near $42.

The Energy Information Administration is out with the government's weekly U.S. inventories report this morning at around 10:30 am ET.

Gold was down $2 at $1239 an ounce, having raced higher by about $30 this month.

The loonie has soared to a yearly peak versus the U.S. dollar, weighing on exporters over the past few weeks.

Kinder Morgan Canada (KML.TO) releases its first earnings report today since going public. Shares have moved below the energy company's $17 IPO price from back in May.

Chorus Aviation (CHR.TO) announced today agreements by Chorus Aviation Capital's subsidiaries to acquire two Embraer 190 aircraft.

Clairvest Group Inc. (CVG.TO) will sell CRS to Sunbelt Rentals, the North American of Ashtead Group, for C$275 million plus a potential earn out.

In economic news, Canada's manufacturing sales increased for the third consecutive month, up 1.1% to $54.6 billion in May. The gain was mainly attributable to higher sales in the transportation equipment and chemical manufacturing industries, Stats Canada said.

The TSX Composite Index was down 15.19 points, or 0.10 percent, to 15,149.57 yesterday.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Market Analysis
The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), which is the largest public pension fund in the U.S., is considering to make direct investments in private companies.

CalPers, which has current investments are worth $327.77 billion, currently has $25.9 billion invested in private equity, through funds based across the globe. It would be for the first time that such a fund has committed to run its own direct investment strategy, which seems to be a logical step as it would help fund to stop paying the fees to private equity fund managers for both management and performance.

CalPERS Chief Investment Officer Ted Eliopoulos said although he would recommend the fund to "explore setting up a separate vehicle" for direct investments it would take as long as 20 years.

Eliopoulos also said that CalPERS should focus on opportunities that do not compete with its current private equity investments, such as owning companies for longer than 10 years and investing in and life science companies.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Hydro One Limited (H.TO) and Avista Corp. (AVA) announced a merger agreement under which Hydro One will acquire Avista for C$67 per share in a C$6.7 billion all-cash transaction. The deal was unanimously approved by the Boards of both companies and is expected to close in the second half of 2018. No workforce reductions are anticipated as a result of the transaction for either Avista or Hydro One. The companies noted that the deal establishes one of North America's largest regulated utilities with over C$32.2 billion in assets.

Hydro One will finance the transaction through a combination of medium and long-term borrowings amounting to approximately C$3.4 billion together with C$1.4 billion contingent convertible debentures represented by instalment receipts, which will form the permanent equity component of the financing plan upon conversion at closing of the transaction. The transaction will be accretive to earnings per share in the mid-single digits in the first full year of operation. The acquisition provides additional support to Hydro One's dividend, and its 70-80 percent targeted dividend payout ratio will remain unchanged upon completion of the transaction.

Following completion of the transaction, Avista will maintain its existing corporate headquarters in Spokane and will continue to operate as a standalone utility in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. Its management team and employees will remain in place and it will operate with its own Board representing the interests of the Pacific Northwest and the communities it serves. The combined company's headquarters will be based in Toronto.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Editors Pick

United Airlines Holdings Inc. is giving pilots a 5 percent pay raise as promised during a pandemic cost-reduction deal, reports said. The pay hike is months ahead of schedule following the airline's return to profitability and positive outlook. The news came as the airline is struggling to come to terms on a new contract with its pilots' union, The Air Line Pilots Association or ALPA.

Elon Musk, in his first meeting with Twitter staff following the acquisition, warned that the social media platform could file for bankruptcy next year, reports said. The news comes as more and more key employees are leaving Twitter following the recent mass layoff. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said its watching Twitter with deep concern after the company's top privacy and compliance officer

Deutsche Telekom AG reported Thursday significantly higher profit in its third quarter with improved revenues. Further, the German telecom major lifted its dividend, and also raised fiscal 2022 guidance for the third time in the current financial year. Meanwhile, the shares were losing around 3 percent in the morning trading in Germany.
(Agencia CMA Latam) - The Brazilian president Michel Temer, who is under investigation for corruption and struggling to remain in office, has little strength to press for changes in Social Security laws. That, in turn, may lead the House of Representatives to block the pension system reform bill later this year, according to experts interviewed by Agencia CMA.

"At this very moment, Temer's administration is struggling to survive," said political scientist Andr? C?sar, from Hold Assessoria, a consultancy in Bras?lia. "He spends the energy and the resources he has to remain in office."

Temer was formally charged with passive corruption at the end of last month after an audio recording of an informal late-night meeting between him and JBS's owner Joesley Batista went public in May.

During the conversation, the president points a former aide as someone who would help Batista to interfere in a legal dispute between JBS and Petrobras.

If the Brazilian House of Representatives and the Supreme Court endorse the charges against Temer, he will have to step down and face a trial. The president, however, is pulling strings to avoid that scenario.

Last week, a report from Sergio Zveiter, the congressman in charge of guiding the House of Representatives vote on Temer's corruption charge, said that lawmakers should allow the President to be accused and trialed for corruption.

Temer's allies, however, replaced 17 of the 66 members of the committee that would vote on the report and managed to change that guidance. Now, the report says that lawmakers should dismiss the charges. A final House vote on the matter is pending. The Brazilian Congress is currently in recess and will resume its activities only in August.

Lawmakers support for the President hardly emanates from his approval ratings. The most recent survey, from Datafolha, showed that only 7% of Brazilians view the current administration positively.

Rather, Temer's control over Congress relies on his ability to unlock federal money to fund lawmakers projects. In June, when the political scandal involving the Brazilian president was the central topic in financial and Congress, Temer authorized the release of R$ 2 billion to pay for those projects.

The amount was three times higher than the R$ 653 million released in June 2016 and way more generous than in the first five months of 2017. From January to April, Temer authorized R$ 13 million in funds for those projects. In May alone, however, the amount rose to R$ 89 million.

Experts, however, believe that Temer could run out of ammo to increase his support in Congress, as new charges against him may still emerge, and pressure builds for lawmakers to vote on the pension system reform bill, which is currently sitting idle in the House of Representatives floor.

C?sar, from Hold Assessoria, said that "the pensions [reform bill] is no more" because it lost consistency amid the political crisis.

The government had initially proposed to raise the minimum retirement age in Brazil to 65 years. Current rules allow workers to retire earlier if they pay social security taxes for at least 30 years.

However, Temer's cabinet had to accept a less aggressive bill in exchange for increased lawmakers support. The current version features different minimum retirement ages for rural workers (60 years), women (62 years) and men (65 years), and higher retirement payments for workers than originally proposed.

The pension reform bill needs support from 308 of 513 representatives in a two-round vote to move to the Senate.

David Fleischer, a professor of political science at the University of Bras?lia, sees little chance of the pension reform bill moving forward in Congress before a House vote on charges against Temer.

"As long as the charges are not dismissed, the government will focus on that. Social Security [reform] is in the freezer, and the danger to the government is the possibility of new facts to emerge," he added.

Experts believe that Temer could be hit by new allegations from Eduardo Cunha, the former House of Representatives speaker who is in jail for corruption, and L?cio Funaro, a financial trader linked to Cunha.

"They are two people very close to the PMDB [Temer's political party] and Temer and may know very harmful new facts. The problem is that apparently every week these facts emerge," Fleischer noted.

Rafael Cortez, a political scientist at the economic and financial consultancy Tend?ncias, said that the pension reform bill mays still pass in Congress, but warned that the clock is ticking.

"We are still in the area of possible changes in the social security issue, whether in a scenario in which Temer remains in office or an eventual presidential transition with [House Speaker] Rodrigo Maia as president," he said.

However, "in both cases, time runs contrary to the reform approval. The window of opportunities for reforms is closing, and in both scenarios, the reform is only feasible with changes in the content proposed by the government. Even before the crisis, Temer's administration no longer had the support of three-fifths [of the House representatives]", Cortez added.

The delay in the House vote regarding the corruption charge against the president, according to Cortez, makes it almost impossible to change the reform bill precisely because of the possibility of new adverse facts against Temer, for representatives would be defending "a presidential term engulfed in low popularity and corruption scandals."

"Will the government have the resources to reach this final stage? We believe not," Andr? C?sar says. "This bill is getting more expensive."

by Agencia CMA Latam

For comments and feedback: editorial@rttnews.com

Economic News

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A sound evidence base informs clinical practice.

Nurses pay attention to what makes patients feel better, says Tammie Conley, who worked as a community and acute care nurse before her studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. However, she adds, We need a sound evidence base. Why do we often automatically raise the head of the bed for patients? What data do we have to support that? We need data to show that what were doing is effective. Research connects the dots for nurses.

That works both ways, she adds: Nurses can quickly apply evidence-based research to improve care at the bedside. Only 1 percent of nurses have PhDs now, but the more researchers we have, the faster it will happen.

Conley is focusing on public health and studying the toxic effects of long-term stress. Shes studying treatments for chronic hypertension in Haitian migrants working under harsh conditions in sugar cane fields in the Dominican Republic.

If we can successfully implement a project in a population that is so vulnerable and resource-poor, surely that can be done in the United States, with underserved and migrant communities here. But public health is undervalued. Nursing school was all about acute care. I used to ask my students as a nurse educator, What are we planning for? And the students would reply, We are planning for discharge from the time of admission. But I would say, We are planning to prevent readmission. What goes on in our communities can be an important piece that were missing. 
By PTI: Panaji, Jul 19 (PTI) Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar today said that the new police stations would be created in the state in a phased manner considering the crime statistics of the area.

"There has been a demand to have more police stations. We will study the crime details in each of the area and will decide on having police stations there," Parrikar said responding to a question on the floor of the House today.

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A fortnight long assembly session began yesterday.

Parrikar said the creation of police stations would be done in a phased manner.

"Step one would be to create police station within existing police station building. Second step will be to have a required manpower for that," said Parrikar, who is also holding home portfolio in the state cabinet.

The chief minister said the process to identify the lands to set up new police stations has also begun at various places.

"The comprehensive discussion on this issue is on. Police department has given the list of requirements for police stations," he said.

Responding to a question by MGP MLA Dipak Pauskar, Parrikar said he would be holding a joint meeting of police, transport and mining departments to ensure smooth plying of the trucks once iron ore export season starts, post monsoon. PTI RPS RMT

--- ENDS ---
Slamming the CM, Modi asked whether he still stands with zero tolerance on corruption policy or has he compromised with it to save his government.

Sushil Modi asked Nitish Kumar whether he still stands with zero tolerance on corruption policy or has he compromised with it to save his government.

By Rohit Kumar Singh: Taking a jibe at Chief Minister Nitish Kumar over Deputy CM Tejashwi Yadav's alleged involved in corruption case, BJP leader Sushil Modi today questioned if the CM is convinced with Tejashwi's response in the 35-minute-long closed door meeting.

Modi said that when the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which conducted raids at RashtriyaBJP leader Sushil Modi today questioned if the CM is convinced with Tejashwi's response Janata Dal (RJD) supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav's house for almost 10 hours on July 7, is still not satisfied with Tejashwi's response, how is Nitish Kumar satisfied with the clarification in the 35-minute-long meeting.

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"Tejashwi met Nitish Kumar after 11 days of CBI raids conducted at his residence. Despite questioning Tejashwi for 10 hours, CBI is not satisfied, how is Nitish convinced with the deputy CM's response?" questioned Sushil Modi, BJP leader.

Slamming the CM, Modi asked whether he still stands with zero tolerance on corruption policy or has he compromised with it to save his government.

"Has Nitish Kumar given up on his intentions to sack Tejashwi from his cabinet despite corruption charges leveled on him? Nitish had asked Tejashwi to come clean on the allegations leveled against him in the people's court and not before him," said Modi.

The Janata Dal United -JD(U)-, on the other hand, has stepped up pressure on Tejashwi to prove his innocence despite his meeting with the Bihar CM. Nitish's party has maintained that the deputy CM must come clean on charges slapped on him.

"The allegations that have been leveled on Tejashwi has nothing to do with the government but is related to the party therefore, JD(U) wants answers from Tejashwi," said JD(U) spokesperson Neeraj Kumar.

ALSO READ | Tejashwi was owner of 26 properties at age 26, Sushil Modi alleges

Revealed: What Tejashwi Yadav told Nitish Kumar in their 45-minute meeting behind closed doors

In veiled attack, Sushil Modi compares Tejashwi Yadav to Nirbhaya rapist

ALSO WATCH | Benami assets scam: Bihar gathbandhan on shaky ground?

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: New Delhi, Jul 19 (PTI) The issue of killings in the name of cow protection reverberated in the Rajya Sabha today with the opposition creating noisy scenes after government said the states have all the powers to deal with such incidents and there was no need to change the existing law.

Samajwadi Party members came into the Well and raised slogans expressing dissatisfaction over the governments reply to questions regarding the steps taken by the Centre to stop such lynchings.

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This led to brief adjournment of the House for 10 minutes during Question Hour, after Chairman Hamid Ansari urged members to allow other members to raise their questions.

Minister of State for Home affairs Hansraj Gangaram Ahir said the states have the power to act against those behind such incidents while outrightly rejecting charges by SP member Naresh Agrawal that BJP men were behind such lynchings.

The Minister said the Union Home Ministry has already issued an advisory to all states for immediately registering FIRs in such cases and asked them to take action and arrest the culprits involved in such violent incidents.

He also said the Prime Minister has already spoken against such killings in the name of cow protection which will not be tolerated.

"I dont think there is a need to bring changes in the law," he said when asked by Congress member Digvijaya Singh if the government intended to bring changes in the existing law to curb such violence.

Ahir said 24 states and five union territories in the country have banned cow slaughter and only states of Arunachal Pradesh, Kerala, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland, besides UT of Lakshwadeep have not imposed any such ban.

The Minister informed that the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) does not maintain separate data on cases of lynchings as only cases related to communal and religious tensions are recorded.

"For the first time, NCRB has started recording lynching incidents since 2014. In 2014, more such cases happened in states like Kerala, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, while in 2015 there were more incidents in states of Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

"In 2016, more such incidents took place in states of Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Kerala, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. Except a state or two which are BJP-ruled, other states are non-BJP ruled," he said.

"It is not correct that BJP people are involved in this," he said, as he rejected the opposition charge.

Ahir also said that all states have acted against the culprits behind such killings and have sent complete information to the Centre, except West Bengal, on the action taken and added that the Centre is not going away from its duty.

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"In Haryana, four people have been arrested, while three have been held in West Bengal, 30 persons in Jharkhand and four have been held in Maharashtra," he said, adding all states have acted and no culprits are roaming free.

"If anyone is not arrested, we will ask the states to take action...The Centre is not running away from fulfilling its duty and have asked states to send complete reports," Ahir said.

Raising the issue, Agrawal asked whether the Centre was aware of the killings that have taken place in the country in the name of cow vigilantism and sought the details of such incidents.

"Police and Public order are state subjects uinder the Seventh Schedule to the Constitution of India. The responsibilities to maintain law and order, protection of life and property rests primarily with the respective state governments.

"The state governments are competent to deal with such offences under the provisions of law. NCRB does not maintain data on lynching in the name of cow vigilantism," he said in a written reply.

Agrawal, however, said it was a matter of privilege as the Minister had provided wrong information that the NCRB does not maintain data on lynchings in name of cow vigilantism.

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Majid Memon (NCP) said Indias image internationally was being affected and said people abroad think that India is a country without the rule of law and because of communal disharmony and religious hatred is created.

He asked what the government was doing to stop these incidents as the Prime Ministers words have not stopped them and mere registration of FIR was not enough.

TMC member Sukhendu Shekhar Roy asked why was the NCRB not maintaining separate data on lynchings in name of cow protection.

As members expressed dissatisfaction over the Ministers reply, the SP members entered the Well saying they have not received an answer to their question and protested raising slogans like "killings in the name of cow protectionism will not be allowed". PTI SKC ARC

--- ENDS ---
An India Today investigation has uncovered how auctions of onions were rigged in Madhya Pradesh to sell trainloads of them to private players at scandalously low prices.

By Amit Kumar Chaudhary: As multilayered as the veggie itself, almost an entire food-supply chain in Madhya Pradesh appears to be involved in rigging state-run auctions of onions, selling trainloads of them to private traders at scandalously low prices, an India Today investigation has found.

The pink pungent bulb isn't just a staple but a national bellwether that has scarred several governments in the past.

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For Madhya Pradesh's public distribution system though, it's lessons not learned.

An incisive probe by India Today's investigative team discovered how the state's food-supply chain was involved in what appears to be a systemic loot of onions from government purchase yards.

In 2016-17, Madhya Pradesh produced 32 lakh metric tons of the vegetable, official data shows.

Last month, farmers erupted in angry protests after prices of their bumper crop crashed.

Shaken by their violent agitation, chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan's government picked up more than nine lakh tons of onions at a higher MSP of Rs 8 a kilo.

AUCTION RIGGED

Ideally, the produce should have been auctioned off to traders at highest possible rates. But it was not, India Today's investigation has found.

Instead, bureaucrats at the helm were found to be choreographing bidding processes to the advantage of a handful of merchants in exchange for hefty bribes.

The fountainhead of this mammoth scam stood right in the middle of the state capital of Bhopal.

At the city's Prayavas Bhawan, India Today's undercover reporter walked into the headquarters of state's civil supplies department, the MPSCSC.

Its general manager, Shrikant Soni, agreed to undersell trainloads of onions for fat bribes.

"Bidding will be managed. That's what I am saying. I can manage it at Shajapur, Maksi and Shujalpur (mandis)," Soni insisted.

He guaranteed that the final bid would not exceed 10 paisas over the floor price of Rs 2 a kilo.

"I'll fix it at Rs 2.10. Let's see how easily it can be managed at Rs 2.10," Soni said.

Soni, who initially sought between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 4 lakh to manipulate the auction, raised his demand by a lakh more for him to be able to "fix" local officials on the ground.

"I have to share something with them (mandi officials). I'll talk to them how it can be managed," he said. "I'll get it done in 5 (lakh rupees))."

WELL-OILED SCAM

The racket appeared to be well-oiled, with dummy traders put up as bidders across different mandis.

They were apparently briefed beforehand not to bid over pre-set prices or reject the produce outright to fail competitive sale.

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Authentic big wholesalers were kept back from the auction venues, the investigation found.

"Wholesale traders wanting trainloads are dealt with separately. They are told no auction for trainloads is happening," Soni revealed. "This is all about the system. That's how it's managed."

At Ujjain's large Chiman Ganj Mandi, nodal officer Om Prakash Singh was seen brokering deals as a middleman for traders looking for onions cheap at twice the price.

He was admitted to orchestrating auctions.

"I'll get it (the auction fixed) at Rs 2.15," he promised. "It's my job to ensure that you don't pay anyone else."

Om Prakash Singh then took India Today's undercover reporter to a local warehouse.

"There was a lot of business last year. We spiked the figure of actual damage in records by two to five percent," he disclosed. "All of that was auctioned off between Rs 2 and Rs 2.50. The prices came down later to Rs 1.5 to Re 1."

The stink of corruption, the investigation observed, enveloped large parts of Madhya Pradesh.

At the Shajapur mandi, the network's undercover journalist met its secretary Virendra Arya in his office.

Arya quickly played the tout, calling in a merchant to participate in a potential bidding.

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The trader, Navrattan Jain, struck the deal at a pre-set price of Rs 250 per quintal. He fixed his commission at Rs 2.50 a kilo.

When probed about his cut, Arya jotted down Rs 5 on the palm of India Today's reporter.

"It's Rs 5 a quintal not per sack," he explained.

INDIA TODAY IMPACT

After the sting was aired, the Madhya Pradesh government came into action and suspended Srikant Soni, general manager of Madhya Pradesh State Civil Supplies Corporation Limited (MPSCSC).

ALSO READ | Red alert: Tomatoes have become new onions, prices soar upto 700 per cent

ALSO READ | Freshly procured onion worth over Rs 600 crore rotting in open in Madhya Pradesh

ALSO READ | No country for farmers: In headlong rush towards development, Indian farmers fall through the cracks

WATCH | Operation Onion: Tears for Madhya Pradesh farmers, millions for scamsters who rigged auctions

--- ENDS ---
Now lets see. As some of you probably already know; Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi has strongly rejected calls from some members of the public to cap the number of terms for the holder of the Prime Minister position.

In light of the governments decision to appoint a new Head of State, some members of the public  including Parliamentarians  have suggested that the government seriously consider placing a term limit on the Prime Ministership as well.

The idea is that Prime Minister Tuilaepa, who has held the position since 1998, has been there for too long and its perhaps time for him to go too.

But when his thoughts were sought, Tuilaepa obviously didnt want to hear it.

The Members of Parliament are not even thinking about that, he said. Not even close. That is far from their thoughts.

Heres an interesting thought. Has our Prime Minister suddenly become an expert in reading peoples thoughts? How would he know what they are thinking? And how does he know that the issue is far from their thoughts? Has he suddenly become a mind reader?

In any case, when pressed about the issue, Tuilaepa demanded to know why the line of questioning was being pursued when his position was not even being debated.

Its not my appointment thats up for discussion, he said.

Why drag the Prime Ministership into this when the Prime Ministers seat is not even the subject of the matter?

Well he is correct that his position is not under scrutiny.

But the simple is that since he is the Prime Minister lording over a government that has just singlehandedly changed the way the most sacred position holder on the land is chosen, it would be interesting to know how he would react if he was in the shoes of the Head of State who had served two terms and suddenly found that he would soon be replaced.

We say this reminding ourselves of the good old saying that we should do unto others as we would have others do unto us. Which means that if Tuilaepa has enjoyed nearly 20 years of unquestionable power as Prime Minister, what did he find so irritating about the outgoing holder of the Head of State that his government would feel duty-bound to change the Constitution to allow what is unfolding before us today?

We are not opposed to changes. Changes are sometimes warranted. In fact they are needed. But these changes must be rational and consistent with what people need.

Sad to say, far too many changes we have witnessed over the years is at the whim of a government thats wanting to create a new legacy for themselves, ignoring what is right, sacred and decent.

The irony of ironies is that after all that, the Prime Minister goes on in his next breath to defend the sacredness of the decision behind the new appointment. Asked about claims that Samoa has lost the sacredness of the selection of the Head of State, Tuilaepa said: The most sacred thing to do is to follow the law.... our laws.

What laws is he talking about? Whats so sacred about laws they keep changing depending on whichever side of the bed they wake up on?

Last week, the lone voice of opposition in Parliament, Olo Fiti Vaai, said the only way to restore the sacredness of position is for it to be brought back to Parliament for a vote as opposed to the H.R.P.P. having the only say.

But in typical Tuilaepa fashion, he said the call reflects how stupid he (Olo) is.

Why did they run for office, when they are unable to make hard decisions? Tuilaepa said. Because his comments clearly indicate that he is unable to make a decision. Yet they are respective representatives of the constituencies who voice concerns on behalf of the constituents. His comments are very childish.

Another important aspect is that the decision is in accordance with the Constitution. What other sacredness is talking about? The most sacred thing to do is to follow the law, our laws.

Come to think of it, Olo has a point.

Although the reality of the decision being different is highly unlikely given H.R.P.Ps total dominance in terms of numbers, an appointment made in Parliament will still be considered a more representative decision as opposed to a decision made at the Petesa Hall down the road or in Cabinets meeting room.

Folks its the thought that counts.

And whether there are three or 50 non-members of the H.R.P.P. in the House, the Head of State is an appointment for all Samoans, not just for H.R.P.P. supporters and members.

What do you think?

Write and share your thoughts with us!

Have a wonderful Wednesday Samoa, God bless!
Samoa is not only known for its beautiful scenery but also its friendly people and that is why school teachers Rachael Carson and Celia Costelloe from New Zealand keep coming back.

Two years ago, the women visited our country and fell in love with Samoa.

This time, they brought with them a group of school kids from New Zealand for a tour on the islands.

The Samoa Observer approached Rachael and Celia yesterday while they were touring the Samoa Cultural Village at the Samoa Tourism Authority compound.

They were living the hot and humid weather.

Were travelling with the school groups and weve got them organized running around town at the moment, they said.

Weve been here before but the students havent so were going to Leulumoega and were going to spend a few days there.

So after lunch we will be visiting Paul VI College at Leulumoega.

Social Studies teacher Celia, 53, from Dillmanstown, West Coast said the main reason why she brought the kids here was to give them an opportunity to experience the Samoan culture.

Its a cultural experience for the kids because you know we live so close in New Zealand so its good for them to come here and experience the culture and they are experiencing this life big time.

We love the lifestyle and the culture.

We will also do some touristy things as well, you know we got ten days here and we plan to go to Lalomanu, maybe spend two to three nights there; you know so the kids can learn about the tsunami and things like that so its quite interesting.

I actually like Samoa just like the way it is now and we like the people and the food also.

Both teachers enjoy eating chopsuey, luau (taro leaves and coconut cream) especially oka as Rachael described the taste of this Samoan dish as Yum.

She added Im planning to come back on October and Im not going to bring students with me next time maybe just friends and this will be my third time.

English teacher Rachael Carson, 43 from Ranfurly, New Zealand said that she loves and admires the Samoan culture as well, the sea especially the people.

I think my best memory back then of Samoa is its people and the schools; the school kids are so good.

You know back then we stayed with one of the families at Lalolmanu and they were very kind to us.

Samoan peoples personalities are very friendly, laid back, easygoing, helpful, and very accommodating and nothings a problem.

Nothings changed, well the airport is different now but its still a beautiful building and it looks really nice.
The Police have re-opened their investigation into a defunct company, Pure Pacifika, also known as Local Partners and Associates.

The decision was confirmed by Acting Assistant Police Commissioner, Salaa Sale Salaa, during an interview with the Samoa Observer.

This time its on allegations of falsifying government documents, he said.

The Police launched their investigation last week."

This follows an official criminal complaint filed by an Associate Minister with regards to the business licenses which the company used for operation.

Salaa said its too early to discuss the details of the complaint.

This is a very sensitive matter and the Police will be exploring all options, he said.

We will most likely seek the Attorney Generals expertise and assistance upon completion of the investigation, which I know will take some time.

The defunct company was involved in a nonu juice export business which promoted exports to China.

According to Salaa, this is not the first time the Police have investigated the said company.

The alleged criminal activity occurred several years back.

Asked about the statute of limitations, Salaa explained that for this case can still be investigated given that it first started around April 2013.

For now, I cannot really say anything about it."

The Police are investigating the case and we will bring in the suspect(s) for questioning.'

If there was a crime committed here, the Police will follow through with the proper procedure.

It was not possible to obtain a comment from the officials involved in the company. Phone calls and questions sent to their emails were not responded to at press time.
Compiled by Joyetter Luamanu

The lawsuit against Court of Appeal Judge, Justice Robert Llyod Fisher, brought by lawyer, Leuluaialii Olinda Woodroffe, has been thrown out by the Supreme Court.

The decision was delivered by Justice Mata Tuatagaloa on 30 June, 2017.

Sua Hellene Wallwork represented Justice Fisher in the hearing where Leuluaialii cited hurt and humiliation in her statement of claim.

The Office of the Attorney General is the second respondent. Leuluaialii accuses them of being responsible for the actions of Justice Fisher.

In delivering her decision, Justice Tuatagaloa ruled that the doctrine of judiciary immunity applies to the first defendant therefore the claims against the first defendants is struck out.

It then naturally follows that the claims also fail against the second defendant who is only named as a party because of the first defendant.

If Im wrong, the claims against the second defendant is nevertheless struck out because under the law, the second defendant is wrongfully brought in as a party to these proceedings.

In any event, the statement of claim is struck out in its entirety and I will fully cover that in my written decision.

The following is Justice Tuatagaloas decision:

JUDGEMENT OF JUSTICE TUATAGALOA

Proceedings:

1. On 04 August 2016 the plaintiff filed a Statement of Claim dated the same date against the above-named defendants.

2. On 22 September 2016 a Motion to Strike Out proceedings against both defendants dated 02 September 2016 was filed.

3. The plaintiff filed a notice of opposition to the motion to strike out on 19 October 2016.

4. These proceedings are concerned with this Motion to Strike Out.

Background:

1. I have taken the background to these proceedings from the pleadings and the transcript of what transpired before the Court of Appeal on 15 February 2016.

2. The Plaintiff represented a woman named Kirita Maria Kolotita Pune (Mrs Pune) in several land claims brought by Mrs Pune. One of these claims was heard in 2013 and the Chief Justice issued what is referred to as an interim decision on 15 July 2014 which consisted of two paragraphs.

3. A full written decision with reasons by the Chief Justice was at the time of the appeal on 15 February 2016 before the Court of Appeal presided over by Justice Fisher as President and two others, remained outstanding.

4. The Plaintiff since she was instructed as Counsel in 2014 had been following up with the Ministry of Justice and His Honour Chief Justice for the full written decision. As a result the Plaintiff filed for leave to appeal to the Court of Appeal; this file is recorded as CA16/15 and subject of the proceedings. As mentioned before there were other land claims by Mrs Pune in which another was also before the Court of Appeal and this file is recorded as CA14/15.

5. The two land matters (CA14/15 and CA16/15) have Mrs Pune as plaintiff/appellant but the defendants or respondents (as I understand) were different. The two matters were heard and dealt with separately in the February 2016 sitting of the Court of Appeal.

6. The Plaintiff appeared as Counsel for the appellant before the Court of Appeal on 15 February 2016 in regards to CA16/15. The following were the cause of the comments by the first defendant:

(i) The Plaintiff appeared without a current practicing certificate.

(ii) There was no record of appeal or the record of appeal was incomplete. Instead of filing the record of appeal for CA16/15, the plaintiff filed the record of appeal in the CA14/15 appeal file and explained only when in Court that the same record was to be used for the CA16/15 appeal. The CA14/15 appeal file was not before the Court of Appeal that morning although it was the same appellant the respondents for the two matters were different.

(iii) The application for special leave to appeal in relation to Constitutional matters was not filed until the last working day before the hearing [electronic form] and on the morning of the hearing [hard copy].

(iv) The persistent failure of the Plaintiff to follow proper procedures according to the Court of Appeal Practice Direction issued in May 2011.

7. It was what the first defendant, Justice Fisher said to the plaintiff that resulted in her bringing these proceedings. It is the suggestion or being called incompetent that the plaintiff takes great offense to.

8. The plaintiff claimed that the first defendant in open court consistently made criticisms of the plaintiff which in her opinion were high handed, unfair, unfounded, incorrect, gratuitous, inappropriate, abusive and made with a contumelious disregard of the plaintiff.

Statement of Claim:

1. The Plaintiff pleads two causes of action:

(i) Breach of Article 78 of the Constitution; and

(ii) Breach of Article 7 of the Constitution.

2. The plaintiff for each cause of action claims:

(a) A declaration that the first defendants actions breached the Constitution;

(b) General damages for hurt and humiliation of $1million;

(c) Exemplary damages of $1million;

(d) Costs.

The Grounds of the Strike Out:

1. I understand the defendants motion to strike out relies on the following:

(i) The proceedings against the first defendant are barred by the doctrine of judicial immunity (see Tafililupetiamalie v Attorney General [2015] WSSC 62 (30 June 2015))

(ii) The Statement of Claim does not disclose a maintainable cause of action as:

(a) The facts pleaded cannot amount to a breach of a justiciable right; and

(b) The facts pleaded cannot give rise to a constitutional remedy.

(iii) The Statement of Claim is an abuse of process for the following reasons:

(a) The purpose of the proceedings is not to vindicate any right recognizable in law but the ulterior motive is to divert attention away from the way in which the plaintiff had conducted a case before the Court of Appeal; and

(b) The proceedings are emotionally motivated, scandalous, fanciful, without substance, and a waste of the Courts time.

(iv) The second defendant is wrongfully named as a party pursuant to the Government Proceedings Act 1974.

Strike out jurisdiction and approach to strike out application:

1. There are two sources of the Courts jurisdiction for striking out a statement of claim which discloses no cause of action that is tenable in law[1]. These are (i) the Courts inherent jurisdiction, and (ii) Rule 70 of the Supreme Court (Civil Procedure) Rules 1980. The motion to strike out is brought under both the inherent jurisdiction and Rule 70.

2. The approach which has been followed by the Samoan Courts when dealing with a motion to strike out a statement of claim as disclosing no reasonable cause of action is now well settled:

(a) A strike out application is dealt with on the footing that the pleaded facts can be proved;

(b) The causes of action must be so clearly untenable they cannot possibly succeed;

(c) It has been the practice of the Court with application to strike out, for the Court to take into account the contents of all relevant documents in the proceedings and not just the pleadings.

(d) The fact that an application raises difficult issues or questions of law and requires extensive argument does not exclude jurisdiction.

3. I am conscious that a litigants constitutional right of access to the court is not to be lightly denied, unless his or her claim is so plainly untenable that it cannot possibly succeed or be cured by amendment, is doomed to fail.

Discussion:

Judicial Immunity

1. The threshold issue is whether the proceedings or claim by the plaintiff against the first defendant is barred by the doctrine of judicial immunity.

2. The First Defendant is the President of the Samoa Court of Appeal, the highest Court of the land. The alleged behaviour of the First Defendant of what he said was said in the sitting of the Court of Appeal in February 2016 when they presided over a matter in which the appellant was represented by the plaintiff. In other words what the first defendant said was when he was discharging his judicial function as one of the presiding judges of the Court of Appeal.

3. The doctrine of judicial immunity was extensively covered by the Honourable Chief Justice in Tafililupetiamalie v Attorney General[2] in which case the plaintiff (Mrs Woodroffe) was counsel for the plaintiff. The Chief Justice at [47] relied on the judgments of Lord Denning in Sirros v Moore[3] and Lord Bridge in Re McC (A Minor)[4] and held that judicial immunity from liability in a civil suit for damages applies to Judges of superior courts and to Judges of inferior courts of record which immunity the Chief Justice held to also apply to Judges and Assessors of the Lands and Titles Court. The case of Tafililupetiamalie is the leading authority in this country on the issue of judicial immunity.

4. This may be the first case where a Judge of the Court of Appeal has been sued in this country but the issue of judicial immunity is not new. It is also not a developing area of the law as the doctrine which affords the protection of judges from being sued is said by Lord Denning in Sirros to have existed since 1613.

5. The authorities cited by both Counsels is very clear that the doctrine of judicial immunity is not there for the enjoyment of the judge alone, but is there for the protection of the public, it is to maintain public confidence in the judicial system. The plaintiff refers to the judgment of the Honourable Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias in Attorney General v Chapman [5] where she was one of two dissenting judges. Her Honours main ground for dissenting is that she believed there should be liability of the state for what Chapman was put through. The majority found that the removal of judicial immunity would influence a Judges ability to maintain independence in dealing with all cases rather than the Judge having to worry about what the consequences might be, whether there is a lawsuit against a judge personally or what statements should be made thereby affecting how their decisions should be made in Court. Its those public policy reasons that trumped the Bill of Rights arguments that were put forward by Her Honour, Chief Justice Elias.

6. The authorities referred to by the plaintiff in her submissions all apply or rule in favour of the judicial immunity. Every jurisdiction that the authorities referred to Attorney General v Chapman [6](NZ), Taylor v Canada (Attorney General)[7](Canada) and Sirros v Moore[8](England) have applied or ruled in favour of judicial immunity. The case of Tafililupetiamalie has not departed from any of the above authorities on the doctrine of judicial immunity.

7. Lord Denning refers to where judicial immunity does not apply where conduct of Judges are akin to criminal conduct such as a judge accepting bribery or there is corruption or have perverted the course of justice the judge can be punished by the criminal courts.[9] The test is, so long as the Judge is discharging judicial functions the judicial immunity applies.

8. The first defendant, Honourable Justice Fischer as President of the Court of Appeal was presiding over the matter to which the plaintiff was counsel for the appellant. The transcript of the proceedings before their Honours of the Court of Appeal dated 19 May 2017 to which the plaintiffs claim originates from records what was said by the first defendant to the plaintiff appearing as counsel for the appellant. The first defendants reference to incompetence of counsel was due to frustrations of the first defendant of the way the plaintiff handled this appeal. The plaintiff acknowledged the frustrations of the Court of Appeal for any short forms of the appeal (p7 of transcript). Late filing of submissions, no record or incomplete record of appeal in the file to be heard; no memorandum filed to inform the court that the record of appeal is the same as that filed for another matter (CA14/15) of the same appellant or at least make another set for this appeal file (CA16/15), appearing without a current practicing certificate and then to top it off were some technical issues that the first defendant identified and faced by the plaintiff as counsel for the appellant triggered the comments by the first defendant. The first defendants comments to the plaintiff of instructing competent counsel was made in relation to these technical issues and the way forward to help progress the appellants matter.

9. The remarks, comments or reprimand of the Plaintiff by the First Defendant were made in the course of discharging his judicial duties. They were not made with any malice or ill will against the plaintiff or any of those things the Plaintiff says in her statement of claim. Certainly, His Honours comments and conduct were nowhere near conduct referred to by Lord Denning in [25] above. The doctrine of judicial immunity applies to the First Defendant.

10. The plaintiff fails the threshold issue of judicial immunity and the strike out application succeeds against the First Defendant.

11. Since the Second Defendant as a party only exists, or is sued because of the First Defendant it only there follows that if the matter is struck out against the First Defendant, the Second Defendant as a party becomes non-existent.

12. If I am wrong, the claim against the Second Defendant will be struck out on the basis that it is the wrong party to be named or brought into these proceedings.

Attorney General wrongly named as Second Defendant

1. The plaintiff in her submissions sues the Attorney General on behalf of the Government of Samoa as the employer of the First Defendant.

2. The Government Proceedings Act 1974 (GPA) provides for civil liabilities and rights of Government and its officers and for civil proceedings by and against the Government. A Judge or other judicial officer is not an officer under GPA. An officer is defined to include any servant of the Government and includes a Minister of the Government.

3. The method of making the Government a party is provided for by section 9 which in this case does not apply because a Judge is not an officer of Government. So clearly the Attorney General pursuant to the Government Proceedings Act 1974 is wrongfully named as Second Defendant.

4. The Judiciary is a separate arm of the State which includes the Legislative and the Executive. The Constitution by Article 83(f) further affirmed that a Judge or any other judicial officer is not an officer or public servant.

5. Although, the statement of claim is struck out I still wish to address the causes of action raised by the plaintiff.

Breach of Article 78 of Constitution

1. Article 78 is the Oath that must be taken by a Judge of the Court of Appeal before presiding as a Judge. Such oath must be taken before His Highness, the Head of State. The oath to be taken by Judges of the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal (Third Schedule of Constitution):

I.........., swear by Almighty God that I will well and truly serve the Independent State of Samoa in accordance with the Constitution and the law; and I will do right to all manner of people, without fear or favour, affection or ill will. So help me God.

2. The Plaintiff claims that the First Defendants behaviour of unfounded, incorrect, unfair and abusive comments towards her had resulted in a breach of Article 78 by failure to do right to all manner of people, without fear or favour, affection or ill will. The First Defendant had also breached Article 78 by failing to deal with her impartially. The Plaintiff therefore claims that the First Defendant in breaching his Oath has abandoned the protection afforded to him by the doctrine of judicial immunity.

3. The plaintiff in her oral submissions asks the Court to look outside the box and take Article 78 to mean that if a Judge does not comply with the Oath, results to a breach of Article 78 and therefore, also amounts to a constitutional remedy set out under the Constitution.

4. The Constitution of Samoa is based upon the separation of powers under the headings legislative, executive and judicial. Article 3 of Constitution refers to the State as including Head of State, Cabinet and Parliament; it does not include the Judiciary. The Constitution provides for the independence of the Judiciary, security of tenure of the Judges and administration of the judiciary.

5. The constitutional rights are provided for under Part II of the Constitution (Articles 315) which if breached then constitutional remedies will follow. Article 78 is administrative and/or procedural part of the Constitution that deals with the judiciary.

6. Article 78 does not give rise to a justiciable right or to a right guarantee under Article 9.

7. The Plaintiff asks the court to think outside the box. This would result in the Court making implications on Article 78 that are not there. Article 78 is simply the Oath to be taken or administered by a Judge of the Supreme or Appeal Court. It does not go any further than that. The Court of Appeal in Samoa Party v Attorney General[10] at [11] on implication expounded as follows:

Implications are not devised by the judiciary they exist in the text and structure of the Constitution and are revealed or uncovered by judicial exegesis. No implication can be drawn from the Constitution which is not based on the actual terms of the Constitution or on its structure. However as an implication will be applied in a particular case to a specific factual situation, it may be expressed in terms related to that situation (my emphasis).

8. Just because a Judge makes comments adversely about counsel or party to a proceeding, that does not mean they become impartial. This was the case, the Court of Appeal (which includes the First Defendant) despite the comments the Plaintiff takes issue to made directive in favour of the appellant represented by the plaintiff which directive resulted in the issuing of a full written decision by the Chief Justice. The court also reiterates paragraphs [27] and [28] above.

9. This cause of action is untenable and would be struck out.

Breach of Article 7 of Constitution

1. Article 7 is freedom from inhuman treatment, that is, No person shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The plaintiff claims that the comments made or the vilification of her by the First Defendant had resulted in the breach of Article 7.

2. According to the Plaintiff the criticisms of her by the First Defendant amounted to degrading treatment as it grossly humiliated the plaintiff before others and that, the criticisms aroused in the plaintiff feelings of fear, anguish and inferiority capable of debasing the plaintiff. The plaintiff refers to the case of Nnamdi v Attorney General[11] where the right under Article 7 was breached.

3. Counsel for the defendants submitted that the treatment claimed by the plaintiff to be a breach of Article 7 makes a mockery of Article 7. The two cases[12] where Article 7 was considered in this jurisdiction were of criminal nature where those involved were in custody of the police. Counsel submitted that to trigger protection against torture, inhumane and degrading treatment provided under Article 7, the harm suffered must attend a minimum level of severity. Counsel refers the court to an Article by the Minnesota Law School[13] on torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The article refers to sources of international law that prohibit torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

4. The international law referred to by the article refers to such treatment on prisoners of war and those in international armed conflicts where such treatment causes great suffering or serious injury to body or health but does not include pain and suffering arising only from inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

5. Article 7 to my knowledge applies to rights of those who are held in custody by the police. Certainly in this country Article 7 has been applied in two cases which one of them the plaintiff refers to of Nnamdi v Attorney General[14] which case involved a Nigerian immigrant who was held in custody by the police. His treatment by the police was found to be a breach of his rights under Article 7; Police v Sale[15] was about the admissibility of the cautioned statement by the defendant. The defendant whilst waiting to be interviewed by the police was placed in a small room for some time and before being interviewed was told to strip naked in the presence of police officers. Such action or behaviour by the police was raised by the presiding judge to amount to a breach of Article 7.

6. The reprimanding of the Plaintiff by the First Defendant was not intentional to cause any severe harm or suffering nor made with any malice or ill will but were made for the lapses in the way the appeal was presented by the Plaintiff and the persistent failure to follow proper procedures according to the Court of Appeal Practice Direction 2011. Any humiliation the Plaintiff suffered falls way below what is considered or protected by Article 7.

7. This cause of action is also so untenable and would be struck out.

Conclusion:

1. For the foregoing reasons:

(i) The doctrine of judicial immunity applies to the First Defendant and the claim against the First Defendant is struck out.

(ii) The claim against the Second Defendant fails as the claim is struck out against the First Defendant. If not it is nevertheless struck out as under the law it is the wrong party to be named.

2. In any event the whole statement of claim is struck out in its entirety.

3. Costs to the defendants. Memorandum of costs to be filed within 7 days from the date the written decision is made available.
The Congress-led Opposition cornered the Modi government over issues of mob lynching and farmers loan leading to repeated disruptions in both Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha.

By India Today Web Desk: After a high-voltage drama on Tuesday which saw an angry Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati resigning from Rajya Sabha, more fireworks were witnessed in Parliament today.

The Congress-led Opposition cornered the Modi government over issues of mob lynching and farmers loan leading to repeated disruptions in both Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha.

HERE ARE LATEST UPDATES:

It is sad to hear that no once came forward to save Junaid, the teenager who was lynched on a train near Delhi: Ghulab Nabi Azad.

We heard such incident used to happen during British rule. People are being targetted on the name of cow protection: Ghulab Nabi Azad.

In the last one year, numerous cases of mob lynching have been reported. Jharkhand has been in news in particular. The state has become epicenter of mob lynching and loot: Ghulam Nabi Azad in Rajya Sabha.



India's biggest foe is China: Mulayam Singh.

Mulayam Singh in Lok Sabha: China is trying to capture Sikkim and Bhutan. Their preparation is in full swing and we have to accept it. India should support Dalai Lama as much as it can.

Congress leader Digvijaya singh during question hour in Rajya sabha on mob lynching demanded change in CrPC, IPC for tough law.

SP's Naresh Agrawal demands salary hike, says our salary is lesser than our secretaries.

Lok Sabha adjourned till 12 noon after uproar by Opposition.

Delhi: Congress protests in front of Gandhi statue at Parliament complex demanding special package for flood-affected Northeastern states. pic.twitter.com/vYYKiSArTu ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) to raise issue of CBI raids on party chief Lalu Yadav and family. Party leader Jai Prakash Narayan gives notice in Lok Sabha.

CPM General secretary Sitaram Yechury given Adjournment Motion Notice in Rajya Sabha and demand to discussion on communal polarisation and violence in the name of cow protection.

Meeting of Congress MPs begin to decide their strategy in Parliament.

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Posture war: Mayawati resignation likely to be rejected on technical grounds and she knows it

Parliament Monsoon Session: PM Modi walks to Opposition benches, greets Sonia Gandhi

WATCH: When a red-faced Mayawati walked out of Rajya Sabha before resigning

--- ENDS ---
Farmers in the villages need incentives so they can develop their farms and in return give back to their families and communities. Such incentives include funding and technical expertise.

So says Saena Mulitalo Penaia, of Tuanai.

He spoke to the Village Voice team, reflecting on the Samoa Industry Development Initiative at Hotel Elisa at Sogi.

The 72-year-old said he is a farmer himself and he has been enjoying every bit of money hes made from it.

According to Saena, the most important thing about this initiative is that the funding for farmers from the New Zealand government is already here.

The funds are already there and what were looking at now is how soon this initiative is going to be implemented, he said.

The funds given by New Zealand targets the development of the koko (Samoan cocoa) and that is what I see as the main focus of this programme.

Mind you, a lot of farmers from different parts of the country are facing this problem where they are planting koko but it doesnt develop well and that is why I think that there should be a move where we should form a committee for koko farmers from all over Samoa.

Saena also said that a National Committee must be formed with representatives of different communities in Samoa.

In this way, whatever each community needs, their representative will give it in to this initiative.

That is why were supporting this initiative because we already have monetary help meaning we can actually execute our plans.

Saena advised for every farmer to be honest with implementing this initiative because this is a huge help from the government of Samoa and New Zealand.

Be honest with your work; you know in taking care of your plantation of koko because there is no use for you to just collect the funds to make it work and in the end we just throw it away just like that.

Lets no work with that Samoan mentality of when the project is done, you instantly disregard your likings for this initiative.

We should have the heart to keep on doing this and make use of the koko because another goal here is for the quality of the koko Samoa to go back to how it was in 1960.

That is another good thing about this; is to bringing back families and their strong work ethic and at the same time for them, working knowingly what they are trying to get from the work that they are doing because they know they have the funds to rely on.

It really is an opportunity to work with certainty and you will get the funding you need and that is why Im thankful that this initiative might be a start for others but for me, Ive had my time to enjoy the money I have earned from my own koko.

I encourage every farmer to pursue this. A lazy person will always be a lazy person but for those who are hardworking, you can have the chance to taste the sweetness of your own work.

Most of you dont want to dirty yourselves from doing this kind of work but I tell you, this is where we can increase our choice of free eating; ufi, bananas and other crops.

He added The markets have changed; competitions have increased; I mean look at the price for niu that other people are selling; its four tala a niu.

So understand the importance of being a farmer and get back into it.
You can take a man from the village but you can never completely remove the village from a man.

In the case of 66-year-old Seumanu Tili, of Vaiusu and Tapatapao, he has returned to the place he loves.

This is my home, he told the Village Voice. My wife and I live with our kids in New Zealand. Ive always wanted to come back. So here I am home and safe.

Seumanu said New Zealand is great for developing his family.

But home is where his heart has always been.

The simple life here is what Ive been dreaming of coming back to.

I retired from my work in New Zealand so I got nothing else to do. So here I am at home. Im only here for a few months and I dont want to waste any time.

When the Village Voice caught up with Seumanu, he was working the plantation. The land is 5 acres.

This land belongs to my father and this is where we used to live, he recalled.

Every time I visit Samoa, I come and live here alone because our land is important to me.

I came last year in November when I first retired from my job and Im back here again. I love it.

The father says there is nothing more beautiful than the simple life of Samoa.

We have everything we need and most importantly we dont need money every time, he said.

I still remember that my father owned the largest plantation around here. Everyone came and asked for food from his crops.

We dont need money to survive, the land provides us everything.

To be honest I love working at the plantation. That is also why you have found me here.

Its a lot easier for me nowadays. If this was the olden times we would be working up the land about 100 meters from here.

We didnt have cars and most of the villagers walked but lucky my dad and I rode the horse.

Seumanu is also happy to avoid the cold in New Zealand.

Its freezing over there but I love the weather here. This is one of the reasons why Ive come back.

Looking around Samoa today, he notes that there have been many changes.

But he doesnt care much about the structures.

All that matters to him is that he is back in his country where his heart will always belong.
Farming and agriculture is essential to the development of Samoa.

It is important because it provides food and jobs for our people considering the current state of our economy.

Forty-seven year old Ionatana Molia of Seesee and Fagalii is a farmer who knows how valuable his plantation is.

Mr. Molia proudly told Village Voice that he is a farmer; basically for taro, koko (Samoan cocoa) and coffee.

This is my own ten acres of land; its filled with the work of my own hands, Mr. Molia said.

Everything on here pays for what my family needs especially my youngest sons education.

Mr. Molia has 12 children and all have families of their own now except for his youngest son.

All our crops here; is what we survive on; taro, koko and coffee.

A lot of people have always wondered how I make coffee.

Well to me its best to practice it on your own rather than explaining it.

You just pick the coffee beans off the coffee tree, put the beans in a bucket and fill it with water, drain the beans, husk the shells, roast them and then deliver it to different shops.

It may sound easy but its a lot harder when you actually do it.

I even have a huge plantation of koko Samoa.

These are the things that I sell to earn a living; they are all good products but to me, coffee is the only thing that I consider a slow-mover or slow moving product because a lot of people dont know about it not because of the price; I mean its only $10 for a package.

But I still love it because the idea of planting and developing coffee was something Ive learned from other farmers.

Thats why I resigned from work three months ago because I know there are more ways to earn a living from our plantations.

Also with this lifestyle, it helps improve the local land and reduces the familys dependency on food from stores and provides them with local food instead.

If you want to order koko and local coffee from Ionatana Molia, please contact him on 7273479.
The outgoing Head of State, His Highness Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Efi, has delivered his final address to the nation.

His Highness recorded his farewell message at TV3 Taufusi where he acknowledged the country for their support during the past 10 years.

His Highness Tui Atuas reign ends on Friday when Samoa will welcome the new Head of State, His Highness Tuimalealiifano Sualauvi Vaaletoa II.

His Highness Tui Atuas address is published in full in tomorrows Samoa Observer.
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (AP)  Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai has visited dozens of young women in northeastern Nigeria, where she spoke out for the many girls abducted under Boko Haram's deadly insurgency.

The 20-year-old Pakistani activist tells The Associated Press she is excited by the courage of the young women who are undaunted by Boko Haram as they pursue an education amid one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

Yousafzai on Tuesday called for Nigeria's government to ensure the freedom of the many people who remain in Boko Haram captivity.

She met Monday with the more than 100 Chibok schoolgirls who have been freed after being seized in a mass abduction more than three years ago. She says she shares their joy but is concerned that they haven't been fully reunited with their families.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  The Minneapolis police officer who shot and killed an Australian woman in an alley shortly after she called 911 to report a possible crime is a young Somali-American and father who felt called to work in law enforcement after getting a college degree in business.

Mohamed Noor, 32, joined the police force two years ago and is among more Somalis hired in recent years as the department continues its efforts to diversify. To those in Minnesota's Somali community, the largest in the United States, he was seen as a role model, and his hiring was celebrated.

"Among police, he was one of the good guys," said Suud Olat, a refugee advocate and interpreter.

But Noor is now on paid administrative leave as authorities investigate why he shot and killed 40-year-old Justine Damond, a meditation teacher and bride-to-be. Damond's fiance said she called 911 on Saturday night about what she believed was an active sexual assault. She was reportedly standing outside the driver's side of a squad car when she was shot in the abdomen by Noor, who fired from the passenger seat.

Authorities have released no details about what led Noor to shoot Damond, whose maiden name was Justine Ruszczyk. She had begun using her fiance's last name ahead of their August wedding.

No weapon was found at the scene. Noor and the other officer did not turn on their body cameras, and authorities have said squad video did not capture the shooting.

Noor's attorney, Tom Plunkett, released a statement Monday saying that Noor extends his condolences to the family and others affected by Damond's death. The statement said Noor came to the U.S. at a young age and is thankful to have had many opportunities.

"He takes these events very seriously because, for him, being a police officer is a calling," the statement said. "He joined the police force to serve the community and to protect the people he serves."

The statement described Noor as "a caring person with a family he loves, and he empathizes with the loss others are experiencing."

Plunkett did not reply to a request for an interview Tuesday. Authorities released no additional information about the case.

Noor joined the police department in March 2015, and his assignment to a Minneapolis neighborhood was publicized by city leaders and the Somali community. Mayor Betsy Hodges recognized him in a Facebook post last year, noting that his arrival in the 5th Precinct was celebrated. Hodges posted pictures from a community event to welcome Noor. She called it "a wonderful sign of building trust and community policing at work."

A city newsletter said hundreds of people attended that event. The newsletter said Noor has a degree in economics and business administration from Augsburg College. Before becoming a police officer, he worked in commercial and residential property management in Minneapolis and in the St. Louis area.

But Noor's short time on the force has not been without blemish.

Records from the city's Office of Police Conduct Review show he has had three complaints against him. Two are pending, and the third was dismissed without discipline. Under state law, details of open cases and cases that result in no discipline are not released.

Noor was also sued earlier this year after a May 25 incident in which he and other officers took a woman to the hospital for an apparent mental health crisis. The lawsuit claims Noor and other officers violated the woman's rights when they entered her home without permission and Noor grabbed her wrist and upper arm. The lawsuit, which is pending, said Noor relaxed his grip when the woman said she had a previous shoulder injury.

Noor also battled for custody of his son, born in 2010. According to family court records, Noor and his son's mother met in college and never legally married. They split up when the boy was 3, but the two continued to share responsibilities and  as best they could  time.

Noor's job as a police officer did not give him a consistent work schedule, but he said in court documents that he made every effort to be with his son when he wasn't working. In 2015, the boy's mother tried to take him to New Jersey, and the legal battle over custody intensified. Noor said in an affidavit that his son was important to him and he did not want the boy to move.

An evaluator in the case observed Noor had a warm, loving relationship with his son and was patient as the two built Legos together.

In the end, the court sided with Noor, determining it was in the boy's best interest to be in Minnesota, where he had spent his whole life and was surrounded by extended family and the larger Somali community.

Many Somali community members who spoke to The Associated Press were mourning over Damond's death, but the talk at local coffee shops turned to confusion and conflicting feelings about Noor's involvement. Some said that it felt like the whole community was being judged, as hateful speech circulated on social media.

"While we were mourning the death of this beautiful woman who was getting married next month, and talking about her, we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of it," said Abdirizak Bihi, a Somali community advocate in Minneapolis.

Mohamud Noor, a community advocate who is not related to Officer Noor, said the officer should be treated just like any other in this situation.

Having Somali police officers is important to the community, and the officers are emulated by many, said Noor, who has met the officer but does not know him well.

Olat agreed.

"That's very important. Me, myself, I would love to see a Somali police officer pull me over, ask me what's wrong with my car," he said. "That makes us feel like we're home, and we're Americans."
Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Taisi Efi

Final Speech as Head of State of Samoa,

Tuaefu, 19 July 2017





Samoa: Today, Filifilia and I stand before you, to greet you on this new morning in our lives. It is also a new morning in the history of Samoa. We salute you for the great honour that you have done us throughout the last ten years. We pay tribute to the many people who have helped make our journey as Head of State a privilege; one we can never repay nor will ever forget.

We wish to open by giving special thanks to the Prime Minister, Cabinet and Parliament for the privilege of serving Samoa and her government as Head of State. We have received countless blessings from this opportunity; an opportunity we will treasure for the rest of our lives.

If you will indulge us this one last time, we would like to share this final message with you. The theme of our message is: Afai ou te le manatua oe, ia pipii ae lou laulaufaiva i lou gutu: If I forget you o Jerusalem, let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth. This theme comes from Psalms 137, verses 5 and 6. Samoa, you, your customs, traditions, values and verities, are our Jerusalem.

It is in God that we entrust our love and our prayers for you; that you may live beyond us, through our children, and their children; that they may love you and protect you as we do, as our parents did, as their parents did.

Before leaving Samoa on my way to Rome, I sought permission to have audience with Pope Benedict. He had retired from office by that time. Despite this, I wanted to meet him because the gesture of his retirement taught me a lesson about humility in leadership.

When we arrived in Rome we received response that the Vatican Curia had reservations about our request. The Archbishop felt that if an audience was granted this would create a precedent and they would be bombarded with requests. It was decided therefore that Pope Benedicts secretary would greet and share with us, and in turn be able to relay our conversation back to Pope Benedict. When we met with the secretary, I asked him to relay two things to Pope Benedict: First, that whenever I travel I carry with me at all times his encyclical God is love. Second, that the message of the manner of his retirement was his greatest legacy. The secretary Archbishop smiled and said: You will make his day.

Pope Benedict spent the last part of his life praying for the Church and for all of humanity. He also used the opportunity to continue to contribute to biblical and theological scholarship. We find inspiration in his example.

God gave us ten of the most productive years of our lives. He gave us the opportunity to contribute to the development of our Samoan indigenous reference, and in the course of this exposed us to some of the most stimulating conversations weve ever had. We have been truly blessed. In this new morning we hope to continue this work and these conversations, and to share especially with our young.

In this role we have had opportunity to not only learn from some of the best minds of our nation, but also from some of the youngest. The poignant innocence and wonder of children can literally take your breath away.

The many children we met over the last ten years taught us time and again that God speaks to and through everyone, no matter how old. As the biblical text says: Your sons and daughters shall prophesy (Joel 2: 28).

The role, duty and responsibility of the Head of State is not that different to the role, duty and responsibility of a parent, a guardian, or a caregiver. Theirs is to warn and to advise against potential harms and dangers; to support and celebrate well-earned achievements; and to build strong foundations from the best of the past for the present and the future.

Our Constitution, like the Constitutions of many other great nations, is a gift to us from God and from our forebears.

Their sweat, blood and tears are written within each word, each clause, preamble and article. We must tread ever so carefully when we embark on changing even one word of it.

Our political system has changed considerably since the birth of our Constitution. So too have our cultural institutions. In fact, most of these changes have occurred over the last 26 years. A significant driver of these changes is neoliberal economic reform. While change is inevitable, and it is indeed true that no society will remain exactly the same for all time.

It is not true that any kind of change is beyond our control. God has given us the will and the intelligence to be able to discern when change is good and when it is not. God has given us the tools to help us know what to hold onto and what to let go; when and where. But that is not an exercise we can do individually. Nor is it something that we can do without prayer and spiritual guidance.

Holding onto our spiritual and cultural inheritance is a sacred duty enshrined in our Constitution. The transparency principle in our Parliamentary democratic processes can protect against corruption, but only if we fully appreciate the practical costs to individual members or interest groups if they were to go against majority rule.

Samoa, as a supporter of democracy and human rights, you must ensure that we support our parliamentarians to have the full protection of not only the wisdoms of democracy but also the wisdoms of our faasamoa.

Before ending we wish to say a word of thanks to some special people, whose love and support was invaluable during our tenure.

To Tutuila ad Manua: We thank Governor Lolo and Cyndy Moliga; we thank Lieutenant Governor Lemanu Mauga and the dearly remembered Poha, their governments, and the people of American Samoa. We thank you for your love and support. Notwithstanding the political separation, we are one people. Our relationship underlines the saying: o uo i aso uma a o le uso i aso vale.

We thank the many public servants who gave so much to us over the years.

We recognize the love and support of our lotoifale staff: the CEO of the Ministry of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Agafili Shem Leo, and his staff; the former Police Special Response Unit (now Tactical Operations Section); the Commissioner of Corrections Services, Susuga Taito Edward Winterstein; ADCs Papalii Talamesi Fitisemanu, Soloi Iosefo Tuimaunei and Fasavalu Ernest Betham; we thank Luamanuvae Pueata Patu and the pou at Vailele; also Leituala Ben Matalavea, our private medical doctor; and finally to our Head of State office staff: to Ulugia Mareko Tulouna (our Private Secretary) and to all of our beautiful staff, thank you to you and your families for your faithful service.

We acknowledge the support of the former Attorney General Tuatagaloa Aumua Ming Leunga Wai, and his successor Lemalu Hermann Retzlaff.

To the staff of our Samoa High Commissions and Consul General offices in New Zealand, Australia, Belgium, Japan, and USA, we thank you sincerely for all you did for us.

If we have failed to mention anyone, please forgive us. Please know that we are forever grateful and that God has not forgotten your love and kindness.

May God bless you all and your children.

Samoa, if we have caused wrong or offended anyone at any-time, please forgive us. In the wisdom of our forebears: E leai se faiva e asa ma le maumau (Even with the greatest of desire there can never be no fishing free of error). For whatever lapses you may have seen during our tenure, we humbly apologise and seek for your forgiveness.

We end with warm congratulations and best wishes to our successors, His Highness Tuimalealiifano and Her Highness, Masiofo Leinafo. May God give you both the wisdom and the strength to carry this sacred duty and privilege on behalf of Samoa.

May God bless the people of Samoa, especially all those who selflessly shared with us their gifts of service and time. Both have enrichened our lives and our work, and have allowed us to give our very best for Samoa. For all this we are so deeply grateful.

There is a Samoan saying, e le se timu na to, o le ua e afua mai Manua: it is not rain which falls but tears of love from Manua. The story is part of our Samoan indigenous heritage, it speaks with the fullness of love. It is a story that carries the divinity of love, for rain not only fertilizes the earth that feeds us and keeps the air that we breathe clean, but it also soothes and renews.

Samoa, remember us in your prayers as we will always remember you in ours. For if, as the Psalmist says, we should ever forget you, may our tongues stick to the roofs of our mouths. Soifua.
A mother is fighting for her life at the Motootua Hospital after her husband allegedly stabbed her on the chest multiple times in public.

Whats worse is that the alleged stabbing happened while their children looked on is sheer horror in broad daylight.

The incident was confirmed by Acting Assistant Police Commissioner, Salaa Moananu Salaa, yesterday.

He told the Samoa Observer the stabbing occurred on Monday morning at Fugalei.

I can confirm that we have started our investigation, he said.

The couple is from one of the villages within the Faleata District.

Salaa said the woman is in a critical condition at the hospital.

It was not possible to obtain a comment from the hospital about her condition last night.

But Salaa said the incident has left people who saw it in shock.

At this stage, the cause of the incident is not known, he said.

I can tell you the stabbing occurred at one of the roads at Fugalei going to the back at Tropicana Night Club next to S.M.I Company.

According to some witnesses who were there, the man was doing all of this in front of his children.

Bystanders and Good Samaritans rushed to the womans aid and took her to the hospital.

Salaa said it was the hospital who informed them about the stabbing.

We received a call at around 8.30am requesting for some officers to come to the hospital with regards to a woman who was stabbed there, he said.

The Ministry responded and up until now, we are continuing our investigation.

In the meantime, the accused has been arrested and charged.

He is remanded in custody until his Court appearance scheduled for 31 July in the Supreme Court.

The victim and the accused are both 34.
Potentially dangerous stem cell treatments are being marketed on a website the federal government established to help patients find experimental therapies, according to a prominent professor of bioethics.

ClinicalTrials.gov is run by the National Institutes of Health to give a comprehensive list of all registered clinical studies around the world. But the site, mandated by an act of Congress, doesnt properly vet these studies for legitimacy, said Leigh Turner, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics.

Turner described what he called serious abuses of the site in an article to be published Wednesday in the journal Regenerative Medicine. The paper will be available online at https://bit.ly/2uZl7XR (free registration is required).

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Among the websites questionable listings are those from companies charging for experimental stem cell treatments  including 11 where the fees arent even disclosed, Turner said. Most legitimate clinical trials dont charge patients for experimental treatment, he and other experts have said.

In addition, some studies marketed on the website dont follow proper ethical and scientific procedures. Therapies can be hyped beyond what the scientific evidence supports, and some patients selected for participation actually dont qualify for the treatment.

To stop such abuses, the NIH needs to perform more extensive checks of the clinical trials it lists, Turner said. And that effort would require money.

You probably need human beings putting actual eyeballs on these studies and making sure if they are complying with federal law, Turner said.

For example, in some cases cash-poor companies with promising treatments are allowed to charge patients to recover costs, he explained. But they arent allowed to make a profit on it. These exceptions are granted by the Food and Drug Administration, which authorizes clinical trials in the United States.

ClinicalTrials.gov is meant to provide a central place of reference for the vast numbers of clinical trials offered. The portal allows users to easily search for clinical trials by the therapy used, disease to be treated, location of treatment and other criteria.

The results can be daunting in their abundance, leaving patients with many choices but little to guide them on determining which therapies might be most appropriate for them. A keyword search for active clinical trials involving stem cells turned up more than 1,800 results Tuesday, and on the same day, the site listed nearly 200,000 trials for all medical conditions.

Currently, its up to patients and their caregivers to conduct their own research to verify whether a study is legitimate, Turner said.

Misplaced trust?

Over the years, stem cell scientists have voiced concerns about ClinicalTrials.gov. Because the website is operated by a federal health agency, its widely viewed as a trusted place for information. Companies that use the site as a marketing tool feed off that trust, Turner said.

One such company was recently the subject of considerable news media scrutiny after clinicians independent from the business published a study documenting that three of its patients suffered severe vision loss after paying $5,000 per person for stem cell interventions that were supposed to treat their age-related macular degeneration, his new article said.

At least one of the blinded patients reportedly learned of the company from a listing on ClinicalTrials.gov.

On Tuesday, the NIH issued a statement saying it agrees that patients should know the risks and benefits before participating in a clinical trial, and that it provides resources to help them do so.

We continue to evaluate ways to improve our outreach and engagement with stakeholders, including making our resources more prominently available and easier to digest, the agency said.

We added a prominent disclaimer on the (ClinicalTrials.gov) homepage in March 2017 stating that, Listing of a study on this site does not reflect endorsement by the National Institutes of Health. Talk with a trusted healthcare professional before volunteering for a study, the NIH said.

Go to j.mp/nihstem for more of the agencys information on stem cell clinical trials.

At the University of Southern California, medical researcher Katja Reuter said she hadnt been aware of the extent of the problem, but agreed with Turners messaging after reading his new paper.

The success or the usefulness of ClinicalTrials.gov depend on whether investigators and sponsors make a diligent effort to submit complete and accurate information. It was not intended as a system where the NIH and other groups that are involved have full oversight over the information, said Reuter, an assistant professor of clinical preventive medicine at USCs Keck School of Medicine.

In defense of the NIH, they have no capacity to really look at the information in detail. Its not possible, she said. They dont have the resources. And they make it very clear that its the responsibility of the sponsor and investigator to provide that information.

Reuter also said patients interested in any of these therapies should talk them over with a trusted health-care professional.

Shes tackling a different problem in clinical trials: recruiting enough patients so they can be conducted. Some clinical trials fail because of a lack of patients, meaning that potentially valuable new treatments never get a chance.

Patients on their own

Clinicaltrials.gov was created under the 1997 Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act. The law mandates listing of all registered clinical trials, whether conducted by public agencies or private companies. The intent was to give patients and health care professionals a single point to find potential therapies.

The need for more oversight is especially great for stem cell therapies because of the great expectations for this relatively new branch of medicine. Stem cell therapy has great potential to cure diseases and injuries not now effectively treated, and this potential is slowly being demonstrated in regulated clinical trials.

However, a vast number of unregulated treatments  some legitimate and some not  are being offered by doctors and clinics around the world. Discerning whats legitimate and whats dubious can be extremely complex for people not familiar with the science.

 Unapproved stem cell therapies multiply

Stem cell offerings proliferate

In a study published in June 2016, Turner and UC Davis stem cell researcher Paul Knoepfler documented at least 351 companies that advertise unauthorized stem cell treatments at their clinics. While many of the therapies offered may be beneficial, others can be harmful.

California had 113 of these clinics, the most of any state, the study found. And Southern California was the epicenter. Beverly Hills had the most of any city in the country, with 18 such clinics.

As an example of this marketing push to patients, Turner linked on Twitter to a job advertisement for a stem cell sales representative.

Are you a motivational speaker? the ad began. Are you interested in educating the public about a new and exciting field of medicine? Do you have experience as a sales professional?

This job is for a proven salesperson/public speaker/clinic rep who has charisma and charm, who can connect with and educate older clientele, doctors and nurses, the ad continued. The ideal candidate is a quick learner, passionate about helping people and financially driven.

This job involves 2 days per week in the clinic, educating and teaching prospective patients about Stem Cell Therapy and then getting them to commit and buy this amazing treatment. (Capitalization style as in the ad). Each sale earns a 1%, 3% or 5% commission.

Toward the end, the ad stated that applicants, must have a verifiable history of sales and either public speaking or motivational speaking.

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

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By PTI: standoff: Report

By K J M Varma

Beijing, Jul 19 (PTI) The Chinese Army moved tens of thousands of tonnes of military vehicles and hardware into the remote mountainous Tibet region after the standoff with Indian troops in the Dokalam area in the Sikkim sector, the mouthpiece of the PLA said today.

The vast haul was transported to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command ? which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India, reported the PLA Daily, the official mouthpiece of Chinese military.

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The move took place late last month and involved hardware being moved simultaneously by road and rail from across the entire region, the report said.

Chinas state-run media has stepped up its rhetoric against India in recent weeks but there was no way to confirm the veracity of such claims.

Early this week, state-run CCTV had broadcast Peoples Liberation Army troops taking part in heavy military exercises using live ammunition on the Tibetan plateau.

The location was not far from the disputed Dokalam area where Chinese and Indian troops are locked in a standoff, the Hong-Kong based South China Morning Post reported.

The PLA Daily report, however, did not say whether the movement of the military equipment was to support the exercise or for other reasons.

Wang Dehua, an expert on South Asia studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, said the scale of the troop and equipment movement showed how much easier it is for China to defend its western borders.

"Military operations are all about logistics," he said. "Now there is much better logistics support to the Tibet region."

Chinese and Indian soldiers have been locked in a face- off in the Dokalam area of the Sikkim sector for over a month after Indian troops stopped the Chinese army from building a road in the disputed area.

China claimed that they were constructing the road within their territory and has been demanding immediate pull-out of the Indian troops from the disputed Dokalam plateau.

New Delhi has expressed concern over the road building, apprehending that it may allow Chinese troops to cut Indias access to its northeastern states.

India has conveyed to the Chinese government that the road construction would represent a significant change of status quo with serious security implications for it.

Doka La is the Indian name for the region which Bhutan recognises as Dokalam, while China claims it as part of its Donglang region.

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Of the 3,488-km-long India-China border from Jammu and Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, a 220-km section falls in Sikkim. PTI KJV PMS AKJ PMS

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A genetic technology developed by the University of California to fight malaria will be extended to other mosquito-borne diseases threatening the United States, under a $14.9 million federal grant.

The technology, called gene drive or active genetics, was developed at UC San Diego. It was shown to work on mosquitoes in a collaboration between UC San Diego and UC Irvine scientists.

Gene drive is now being studied for use in India under a $70 million grant from a philanthropic foundation there.

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UC Riverside joins UC San Diego and UC Irvine in the new effort, using the same technology. Its led by UCRs Omar Akbari and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Under the grant, gene drive will be studied for defenses against Zika, chikungunya, dengue and yellow fever, all carried by various mosquito species.

UC San Diego scientists Ethan Bier and Valentino Gantz were the first to demonstrate a working gene drive system in insects, using fruit flies. They used the hot genetic editing technology known as CRISPR to engineer a self-replicating gene.

They teamed up with Anthony James at UC Irvine to make the system work in mosquitoes.

Gene drive enables man-made genes to be pushed into a population. The genes copy themselves from one chromosome in a pair to the other, so the offspring of a gene drive-equipped mosquito and one without it will inherit two of the genes.

Theoretically, such self-propagating genes could rapidly come to dominate a population. But questions remain whether it will work in nature  the mosquitoes have only been tested in tightly sealed labs  and whether the technology might present any dangers.

Bier said its more likely that the technology wouldnt work in the wild because theres a potential for genetic resistance to develop. However, since the gene drive isnt aimed at harming the mosquito, the mosquitoes shouldnt experience strong evolutionary pressure to develop resistance.

The project under study for India, financed by Indias Tata family, equips mosquitoes with a gene that makes them resistant to the malaria parasite. The mosquitoes would not be harmed, but would be unable to pass the parasite to people.

Called the Tata Institute for Genetics and Society, the project is working with scientists from India to determine the best way to deploy the technology and meet any safety concerns.

UC San Diegos effort will include a project to assess public concerns regarding the use of gene drives in the United States. It will be led by Cinnamon Bloss, an assistant professor at UC San Diegos School of Medicine.

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:

7:25 a.m. July 20: This article was updated with additional details.

This article was originally published at 11:25 a.m. July 19.
Cubic Corp. said Tuesday that it has acquired Deltenna Ltd., a small wireless technology firm that is expected to help Cubic deliver faster, cost-effective communications to its military training customers using 4G LTE technology

The purchase price for Deltenna was not disclosed. More details about the transaction are expected to be released during the Cubics upcoming earnings conference call in early August.

Founded in 2002, Deltenna specializes in rugged 4G LTE communications gear used by public safety and first responders. It designs compact LTE base stations, broadband range extenders for areas of poor coverage and light, rugged antennas tailored for rapid deployment.

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Cubic aims to tap Deltennas technology in its defense training and tactical military communications businesses.

The long-time San Diego company is a market leader in sophisticated training systems for soldiers, pilots and sailors  including mock battle training. It also provides tactical data links, radios, receivers, antennas and other technology for military communications.

With commanders demanding faster data sharing in the field, Deltenna enhances Cubics ability to serve up information to defense customers using low cost LTE  especially during training exercises.

The addition of Deltenna aligns very well with Cubics culture of innovation and we are pleased to welcome Deltenna to our Cubic family, said Bradley Feldmann, Cubics chief executive, in a statement. With Deltenna, we will strengthen our capability of developing and integrating products that will change the way our military forces communicate, train and operate.

Based in the United Kingdom, Deltanna has fewer than 10 employees, said a Cubic spokeswoman. It has 10 patents issued or pending and will be integrated as part of Cubic Defense UK operations.

Cubic has two main businesses. In addition to military training/communications division, it also is a top supplier of fare management/smart card technology used by large public transit bus, train and subway operators globally. Customers include mass transit providers in London, New York, Chicago, Sydney and San Francisco.

Cubics shares ended trading Tuesday down 50 cents at $47 on the New York Stock Exchange.

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Twitter:@TechDiego

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San Diegos Brain Corp, the maker of self-driving technology used in supermarket floor cleaning robots, said Wednesday that it has raised $114 million in a third round of venture capital funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund.

The deal is the largest single amount of venture money raised by a San Diego start-up so far this year, and highlights the potential that investors see in artificial intelligence and robotics technologies.

Qualcomm Ventures, which was Brain Corps original backer, also participated in the funding round. Founded in 2009, Brian Corp was housed inside Qualcomms research lab for several years. The wireless technology giant maintains a seat on Brain Corps board of directors.

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Brain Corp said its plans to port its BrainOS technology  which combines low cost sensors with hardware and software to control robots -- onto Qualcomms Snapdragon mobile platform to power a new generation of consumer robots that will be able to clean, sort and do other functions around homes and offices.

For now, Brain Corps main product is EMMA, which stands for Enabling Mobile Machine Automation. Tested in Jimbos groceries around San Diego and introduced last year at the Industrial Sanitary Supply Trade Show in Chicago, EMMA enables robots to clean floors in large buildings, such as big box retailers, schools and airports.

EMMA robots resemble industrial-sized scooters. Brain Corp has loaded EMMA with sensors, cameras, 4G LTE connectivity and algorithms that allow it to learn its route around a store while avoiding boxes, people and other obstacles that pop up along the way.

Brain is developing truly ground-breaking technology that transforms manually operated machines into autonomous robots, said Masayoshi Son, chief executive of SoftBank Group Corp. Brains team is at the forefront of creating the future and a more convenient way of life through technology. We are confident in their success and look forward to seeing them realize their vision.

The company has previously raised about $11 million and has a staff of around 40 workers, including 15 Ph.Ds. The centerpiece of Brain Corps technology is its proprietary operating system that integrates with off-the-shelf hardware and sensors to provide a low cost brain for robots.

BrainOS includes computer vision and artificial intelligence libraries to speed up robots abilities to learn their environment, even in a cluttered retail store or industrial building.

The company is partnering with makers of manually operated industrial floor clearing machines to embed its BrainOS artificial intelligence technology into their cleaners. It sells the technology as a subscription service.

At Brain, we believe tomorrows robots will be intelligent autonomous machines that take care of us, said Brian Corp Chief Executive Eugene Izhikevich. Such robots will be as commonplace as computers and mobile phones are today. This funding will allow us to accelerate our mission, and we look forward to collaborating with the SoftBank Vision Fund as a long-term strategic partner.

Qualcomm Executive Chairman Paul Jacobs said Brain Corps EMMA technology is already improving performance and reducing costs, generating real benefits for their customers and real

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Twitter:@TechDiego

760-529-4973
Two Carlsbad council members face a possible showdown next year for the right to represent the newly drawn district where they both reside.

Cori Schumacher, elected to her first four-year term in 2016, could run against four-term Councilman Mark Packard in 2018 in the citys first-ever district election, under a staggered election schedule the council unanimously approved last week.

The schedule allows the two council members whose four-year terms are about to expire  Packard and Michael Schumacher (no relation to Cori)  to run for re-election next year in the districts where they live.

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The fairest choice was  to allow both incumbents to run on equal terms, Cori Schumacher said Friday.

Packard and Cori Schumacher both live in District 1, Councilman Keith Blackburn lives in District 2, and Michael Schumacher lives in District 3. None of the current council members live in District 4.

The changes leave Cori Schumacher with a key choice: She could seek a four-year term in District 1 in 2018, or choose to finish the two years of her original term as an at-large council member.

If she decides to wait, or loses and chooses to run again in 2020, she would have to move to a district where a seat is open that year.

No existing council member have said whether they plan to run again.

Several cities and school districts across North County are in the process of moving from at-large elections to district elections, in which each council member represents only a specific portion of the city, the result of a legal challenge to at-large elections. In cities like Carlsbad, the change could bring a shake-up to voting districts with multiple incumbents or that have no incumbent.

Oceanside has a similar situation in its district No. 1, which generally covers the citys northwestern quadrant., where council members Chuck Lowery and Esther Sanchez both live.

However, Sanchez, who has served on the Oceanside council since 2000, has said she intends to run for the San Diego County Board of Supervisors in 2018. Like Schumacher, she was elected to her current term in 2016, so she could continue to serve as an at-large representative until the 2020 elections.

Carlsbad chose its four election districts after considering more than a dozen maps, each with different boundaries. The chosen layout, with boundaries selected by a team of two Carlsbad residents using guidelines set by the citys consultants, is largely stratified from north to south and gives each voting district a piece of the coast.

Each representative will have a good selection of the community, Blackburn said last week before the council voted 4-1 for the districts map.

Schumacher cast the only vote against the map, saying her preference was one with boundaries that would put all of the residents living on the coast into a single district.

The northwestern district of Carlsbad that Schumacher and Packard live in, No. 1, includes the citys oldest neighborhoods  the Village, the Barrio and Old Carlsbad. Most of the proposed maps included that area in a single district, and residents and council members alike generally agreed that those neighborhoods should not be split.

If Cori Shumacher runs and wins in 2018, Carlsbad would be short one council member, and the council could either appoint someone or hold a special election to fill the open seat.

Carlsbad, Oceanside and Vista all will hold their first district elections in 2018. Vistas incumbents all live in different districts. All three cities will continue to elect their mayors at-large.

Oceanside has proposed staggering its election so that districts 1 and 2 hold elections in 2018 and districts 3 and 4 in 2020. The schedule is expected to be approved at the councils July 25 meeting.

Carlsbad, Oceanside and Vista launched the formation of their voting districts after each received a letter from Malibu-based attorney Kevin Schenkman, who alleges that at-large voting systems disenfranchise Latino voters and violate the California Voting Rights Act.

The few jurisdictions that have fought Schenkman have lost or withdrawn their cases, most after spending millions of dollars in court fees.

philip.diehl@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @phildiehl
The owners of two homes in northern Escondido that sustained flooding damage during two storms this past winter have filed a lawsuit blaming a nearby development project and the city for combined damages estimated at between $100,000 and $150,000.

The lawsuit contends that the city failed to maintain a storm drain system near Vista Avenue and that a holding pond  created by developer KB Homes to store water while the company builds 40 homes just to the east of the street  overflowed twice during heavy rains.

We are claiming that both the City of Escondido and KB Homes are responsible for the flooding, said attorney Evan Walker, who specializes in flood litigation and is representing owners Ellen Erwetz and Ruben Cruz Sr.

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KB Homes declined comment this week, saying it would be improper to do so since litigation is pending. City officials said they have not yet been served with the lawsuit and therefore cant comment on something they havent seen.

In March, KB Homes issued a written statement denying any fault in the flooding.

Walker, the plaintiffs attorney, said Escondido had not properly maintained the drainage system in the area and that the breach of the developers holding pond was witnessed by one of his clients and later by an Escondido Fire Department captain.

A report on the incident filed by Escondido Fire Capt. Derek Chapman confirmed that runoff from the excessive rain breached the holding pond and flooded three homes.

In a March interview, however, Chapman wasnt nearly as conclusive. He said some of the water came from the holding pond but more came from the sky.

Ill discuss only facts as I saw them, he said at the time. Look, there was too much rain. The water overflowed, and it came into the back yards.

The more serious flooding incident happened Feb. 27 when more than four inches of rain fell on Escondido in less than one day.

The Erwetz property sustained damages of $70,000 to $100,000 while the Cruz property sustained damages of roughly half that, Walker said.

Both homes have have since been repaired.

Claims filed by both homeowners against the city were rejected without comment earlier this year. The claim filed by Cruz stated simply: Drain plugged and house is flooded, need help!

In its March statement, KB Homes said the problem was caused by another neighbor who filled in a drainage channel which serves the area. This compromised the water management systems capacity and caused flooding during the recent record rainfall.

As the drainage channel is not located on our property, we do not have the authority to address the issue without permission from the homeowner, company spokeswoman Susan Martin said in the statement. We have notified the neighboring property owner and their counsel of the drainage issues and have even offered to shoulder the costs of restoring the drainage channel to its prior and intended condition.

Martin said this week the company stands by its earlier statement.

Walker said discovery has not yet begun in the case which was filed in Vista Superior Court on July 10.

jharry.jones@sduniontribune.com; 760/529-4931; Twitter: @jharryjones
The Poway City Council agreed this week to start the process of switching to district elections, though council members made clear they dont like having their hand forced.

Since Poway incorporated in 1980, it has chosen its council members through at-large elections  a system that many say has served the city well, but that Malibu attorney Kevin Shenkman says violates Californias Voting Rights Act.

Under the coming changes, the city will be divided into four separate districts, which will each elect a representative to serve on the panel. The mayors position will remain an at-large job.

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Poway  like many other cities across the region and the state  is making the switch after receiving a demand letter from Shenkman, asserting at-large elections are at odds with state law and have left minorities under-represented in local government.

Shenkman pointed out nearly 15 percent of Poways population is Latino, but that over the years there has been only one Latino council candidate, who failed to get elected.

Experts have said the city would likely spend millions of dollars if they tried to fight a voting-rights lawsuit and that it would probably lose. No city in California has prevailed in such a suit, and the city of Palmdale was ordered to pay more than $4.5 million in a similar case brought by Shenkman.

I really hate that the city is being told to do this by someone who doesnt live in Poway, by someone who probably cant even pronounce the word Poway, Councilman Dave Grosch said Tuesday night.

Councilman John Mullin, echoing an earlier statement made by Mayor Steve Vaus, said Weve gone through denial, weve gone through anger, and now weve gone to acceptance.We have no illusions that this will lead to better government for our city. Im very proud of the job we do as we are now constituted.

I get it, added Council Member Barry Leonard. I hate it but I get it,

Over the next 45 days, four more public hearings will be held in Poway on the new election system, and at the final two, the council will discuss and finalize the boundaries of the new proposed districts. The process will be completed at a special meeting on Aug. 31.

Four of the five existing council members live in what is generally considered north Poway. The fifth member, Grosch, lives in central Poway.

Over the decades there has been a feeling in the city that southern Poway, which has more of a working class demographic, has been under-represented and some have expressed hope that will change with the new district requirements.

Given the small minority population in the city, however, Poway could have difficulty trying to create one district that has a clear Latino majority, which is typically the goal of voting-rights cases.

jharry.jones@sduniontribune.com; 760/529-4931; Twitter: @jharryjones
A dispute over ocean views in Del Mar that has simmered since the 1990s heated up again this week when a condo owner demanded that the trees and shrubbery at the edge of a nearby 5.8-acre lot be trimmed every four months instead of twice a year.

I just want to protect my little piece of heaven here, Shirli Weiss said told the Del Mar City Council on Monday.

Weiss, who bought her condominium in 2014, is making another foray in a battle that other owners in the Del Mar Woods condominium complex have fought for more than 25 years.

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The complex is just west of Camino Del Mar and south of Del Mar Heights Road, on land that hugs a beachfront parcel owned by Torrey Pacific Development Co., whose principals are members of the Staver family.

The property has several eucalyptus trees along its northern boundary and along Stratford Court to the east.

Weiss filed a complaint under the citys trees, scenic views and sunlight ordinance on Aug. 30, 2016, saying her view should be restored to what it was when she bought her $1 million condo a year earlier.

At the time, she said, she could see waves breaking on the beach, a white water view. But when the trees grow back between bi-annual trimmings she loses the best part of her view for several months out of the year.

The scenic view has been repeatedly obstructed, Weiss said. Properties are bought and sold in Del Mar based on only even a sliver of an ocean view.

The Del Mar Planning Commission denied her request in April, and Weiss appealed to the City Council. On Monday, the council denied the appeal on a 2-2 vote, with Mayor Terry Sinnott absent.

Councilwoman Ellie Haviland, who supported the denial, said the property owners have made a reasonable effort to satisfy Weiss complaint, and that to require additional trimming would be excessive.

The Staver family has owned the seaside parcel since 1950. The late Ralph Staver served on the Del Mar City Council, and his wife, Marian, was a granddaughter of the Chandler family that owned the Los Angeles Times.

The property is still used by more than 40 of the couples descendants. The land originally had just a few eucalyptus trees on it, and the Stavers planted more as a screen along the northern boundary when the nearby condominiums were built in the 1970s.

On Monday, Tom Staver  Ralph and Marians son  said the fast-growing trees were once 40 feet tall at the edge of the property, but are now trimmed to 20 feet or less every six months. He said the trees are gradually being replaced by slower-growing trees that will mature at about 20 feet tall.

Christopher Garrett, an attorney for the Stavers, said a total of 37 complaints have been filed over the trees since 2003, and all have been resolved through negotiations and the familys voluntary agreement to trim the trees twice a year.

If you grant the appeal you will be setting a new level  of restrictions, Garrett said.

All of the complaints were filed by individual condominium owners  not the Del Mar Woods homeowners association, said Joe Valenti, who managed the complex until earlier this year.

Seven residents first filed a complaint in 2003, saying they had worked unsuccessfully with the property owner for more than 10 years, seeking to have the trees removed.

A group of 28 Del Mar Woods residents filed complaints again in 2012, but many of those were resolved through negotiations. By 2015, that number had been whittled to seven, Garrett said, and all have since been resolved.

philip.diehl@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @phildiehl
Mexican authorities say the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has instituted heightened security measures for laptops and tablets on U.S.-bound flights from the country.

Mexicos Transportation Department said in a statement that the measures took effect starting Wednesday for electronics larger than a cellphone.

It recommends passengers carry as few of those devices as possible in carry-on bags and advises that such electronics must undergo separate security checks without cases or covers.

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In March, U.S. authorities banned cabin electronics on departing flights from 10 airports in the Middle East over concerns that extremists could hide bombs inside laptops. Earlier this month, carriers in Jordan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey announced that they had been exempted from the ban after they had satisfied U.S. security concerns.

On June 28, before those announcements, the Department of Homeland Security released a plan to implement enhanced security measures for all commercial flights to the United States.

These measures, both seen and unseen, include enhanced screening of passengers and electronic devices as well as heightened security standards for aircraft and airports, it said in a statement.

It said those measures would apply to 105 countries, 208 airports, 180 airlines and an average of 2,100 daily flights, but it did not specify which ones.

The statement said the DHS and the Transportation Security Administration would work with aviation stakeholders over the coming weeks and months to ensure these enhanced security measures are fully implemented. Those stakeholders who fail to adopt these requirements with certain time frames run the risk of additional security restrictions being imposed.

The DHS did not respond to inquiries Wednesday.

Perry Flint, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Assn. trade group, said the airline industry is working with regulators to minimize disruption and inconvenience to passengers resulting from these enhanced security measures.

In the meantime, Flint said, we urge passengers to follow the advice of airlines and security regulators regarding when to arrive at the airport.

Times staff writer Alexa DAngelo contributed to this report.

ALSO

Here are some of the unintended consequences of an electronics ban

U.S.-Mexico border braces for its own Carmageddon with big shutdown

No new laptop bans, but air travelers to the U.S. will face tighter screening all over the globe

Trumps travel ban has hit refugees. Heres what that means for those hoping for sanctuary in the U.S.

UPDATES:

2:25 p.m.: This article was updated with additional background information.

This article was originally published at 7:15 a.m.
AIR has earned Rs 10 crore from selling of ad slots at a premium price before and after PM Modi's 'Mann ki Baat'.

By India Today Web Desk: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's monthly radio address 'Mann Ki Baat' has translated into a revenue of about Rs 10 crore for the All India Radio (AIR).

During the last financial years, the national public radio broadcaster earned Rs 4.78 crore in 2015-16 and Rs 5.19 crore from 2016-17 as revenue from airing the hit radio show to which millions tune in to listen.

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Minister of Information and Broadcasting Rajyavardhan Rathore said this in a written reply in the Lok Sabha today.

The revenue for radio, which reaches about 99 percent of India's population, comes from higher advertising rates. Modi's address to the nation through the radio is pre-decided on a fixed Sunday morning every month. A number of brands want themselves on air just before and after Modi's speech which attracts millions of listeners.

Launched on October 3, 2014, Modi addresses the nation every month in 'Mann Ki Baat' programme.

Designed as a personal one-one-one talk to the people of the nation, the prime minister has been raising several issues of national and social importance in his radio address. In January 2015, the radio show had a very special co-speaker - the then US President Barack Obama.

To make it a two-way process as part of participatory governance, PM Modi has been asking his listeners as to what on what topic do they want him to speak on. He shares his thoughts on a variety of themes and issues suggested by the people through the Narendra Modi and MyGov websites and apps.

Minister Rajyavardhan Rathore said the regional version of 'Mann ki Baat' is also broadcast in 18 languages and 33 dialects on the same day after the completion of the original broadcast.

Besides, the minister said the English and the Sanskrit versions are also broadcast by the AIR.

Rathore said the 'Mann Ki Baat' is disseminated on transmitters for domestic audience and through the internet and shortwave (SW) transmitters for global listeners.

Also read:

GST means 'Going Stronger Together', says PM Modi on Day 1 of Parliament's Monsoon Session

You can't present PM Narendra Modi with a flower bouquet from now. Here's what you can

Also watch:

Modi-Shah's CBI parrot cages scam-tainted Lalu, Kejri. Mamata next?

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Jim Kanno, who spent what should have been his final high school years confined to a World War II-era internment camp but went on to become one of Americas first Japanese American mayors as an early-day politician in Orange County, has died at the age of 91.

Stripped of his freedom and forced to live behind barbed wire in an Arizona relocation camp, Kanno burned with indignity but ultimately chose to work to unite rather than separate people, family and friends said. In 1957  years after the war  he helped turn the farmland of central Orange County into a new city named Fountain Valley and then became the young towns first mayor.

Kanno, who died July 15 in Santa Ana after a fall, was among more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in the West who were assigned to internment camps  often no more than makeshift barracks hurriedly erected in the remote corners of California and Nevada. Families such as his were often split up in the process.

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One day, he was standing up in civics class to argue for our rights under the Constitution. A month later, Dad was incarcerated and his parents had to walk away from their farm, his son Dave said. He was shocked that in a democracy, something like that could happen.

The government sent Kannos father to New Mexico, while he, an older brother and their mother were transported to the Poston Relocation Center in southwest Arizona, an area so remote that officials never bothered to erect guard towers to watch for escapees. After a year, Kanno contracted valley fever and was taken to Michigan for treatment because medical services for Japanese Americans in the West were restricted.

Eighteen months later, he finally returned to what was left of his family home.

I dont think he held a grudge, but the anger stayed, his son said. And it was not a go out and shoot someone anger. It was not a go out and do something crazy anger. But it compelled him to do something to teach the story.

The familys neighbors in Orange County had continued to manage their farm and turned over the next crop to them so they could sustain living expenses, Kannos wife, Frances, recalled.

The generosity struck a chord, and Kannos family began helping other Japanese American families buy farmland and settle in the wide open landscape of what would become Fountain Valley.

The push to incorporate Fountain Valley was largely a defensive move by Kanno and other farmers to stall developers and speculators from buying up farmland on the cheap. Kanno then ran for the new citys inaugural city council in 1957 and was the top vote-getter, and thereby its mayor.

He knew folks needed a way to protect themselves, and he decided the best way would be to incorporate, to create a city, his son said.

Kannos election briefly became international news, and he was interviewed on Voice of America and other programming broadcast abroad. While it was routinely reported that Kanno had become the first Japanese American mayor in the U.S., that claim is difficult to confirm.

During his term on the council, Kanno helped lead the early push for the creation of Mile Square Park, now a sprawling regional park that was built on a naval landing field. Kanno stepped down from the council in 1963. He later served as chairman of the Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange Countys Japanese American Council and routinely spoke about his internment camp experiences at local schools.

Born Dec. 22, 1925, in an unincorporated area of Orange County then known as Greenville, Kanno was a track star at Santa Ana High School until he was sent to the relocation camp. He earned his high school diploma in the camp and later attended Marquette University before earning a degree in agricultural engineering at UCLA. In 1999, students at Santa Ana High School invited him to march with them during graduation ceremonies.

Dave Kanno recalled his father offering sobering advice when he decided to run for class president in the seventh grade.

As the only Japanese kid in a new school, my father reminded me that theres a lot of people out there who will call you names. Dont be disappointed if you dont win.

I told him: Im the only Japanese kid in school and everyone knows that, and thats the reason I will win. And I did, he added. He was constantly trying to look out for us. Any of us.

John Collins, Fountain Valleys current mayor, recalled being sworn in to office by Kanno in 2007  the year the city marked its 50th birthday.

He basically laid out the city to make sure there was order and that the residential areas were here, with the commercial areas and agricultural areas over there. Everything had its place, and he got us out of a lot of difficulty that other cities experienced because they didnt have a general plan.

Collins said he continued to meet Kanno for breakfast over the years.

There are those who just worry for themselves, yet he talked and talked about taking care of people, making sure everyone felt safe and comfortable, he said.

In addition to his wife and elder son, Kanno is survived by his children Beth, Stephanie and Conrad; and six grandchildren.

anh.do@latimes.com

Twitter: @newsterrier
Local groups opposed to the closure of a popular gateway into Griffith Park revived their legal fight Tuesday, filing a new lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles.

Earlier this year, the city stopped allowing pedestrians through the Beachwood Drive gate, which was a busy route for hikers and tourists trying to snap photos of the Hollywood sign.

The decision came in the aftermath of a lawsuit by Sunset Ranch Hollywood Stables, which had complained that the city was funneling thousands of hikers onto an access road leading to its horseback riding facility, blocking its business and putting pedestrians in danger.

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Closing the gate was welcomed by some Beachwood Canyon homeowners who had complained about traffic, fire hazards and other risks from the crush of tourists hiking up Beachwood Drive to the Hollyridge Trail.

But it quickly drew fire from other Angelenos  including some Beachwood Canyon residents  who argued that it was improperly curbing public access to a public park.

The Friends of Griffith Park, the Los Feliz Oaks Homeowners Assn. and the Griffith J. Griffith Charitable Trust sought to intervene in the case, saying that L.A. had other ways to adhere to a court order and protect Sunset Ranch without blocking access at Beachwood Drive.

In June, they were dealt a setback when Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Feffer rejected their attempt to jump into the Sunset Ranch case, saying it would cause logistical problems. But Feffer pointed out that the Griffith Park groups could file a separate lawsuit.

The new suit accuses the city of violating city and state laws when it reached a settlement deal with Sunset Ranch Hollywood Stables.

The outright unlawful settlement undermined public access, burdened other neighborhoods with added traffic and noise without proper review, and amounted to an illegal gift to a private company, the groups contend in the suit.

It makes it much harder for people in that neighborhood to access the park, and it was done without any kind of public process. Thats not how we do things, said attorney and former state Assemblyman Mike Gatto, who is representing the groups. To say were going to close off this major access point to the park ... that flies in the face of what Griffith Park is supposed to be.

Rob Wilcox, a spokesman for City Atty. Mike Feuer, said he had not seen the new complaint against the city as of midday Tuesday.

At a June hearing, Deputy City Atty. Michael Kaplan said that the city had closed the gate to prevent deadly accidents between hikers and vehicles on the winding road to Sunset Ranch and added that there were other ways to access Griffith Park and the Hollyridge Trail.

emily.alpert@latimes.com

Twitter: @LATimesEmily

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The conspiracy case against an alleged mistress of drug kingpin Joaquin El Chapo Guzman will be tried in Washington, D.C., according to a grand jury indictment filed Monday.

Lucero Guadalupe Sanchez Lopez, 28, has been in federal custody in San Diego since being arrested June 21 at the Cross Border Xpress, a secure passage connecting Tijuanas airport to San Diego. She was arrested on a charge of conspiracy to distribute more than 5 kilograms of cocaine  an allegation stemming from a U.S. investigation into Guzmans Sinaloa drug cartel.

The investigation is based in part on wiretaps intercepted by U.S. federal agents in Arizona, according to the complaint filed in San Diego. Rather than try the case here, it has been refiled and will be prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justices Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section in Washington, D.C., said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joshua Mellor in San Diego.

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On Tuesday, Sanchez pleaded not guilty to the conspiracy charge in the Washington, D.C., indictment during a hearing in San Diego. A hearing has been set for July 27 to transfer her custody as well.

Sanchez, a former legislator in the Mexico state of Sinaloa and long rumored to be Guzmans girlfriend, is accused of facilitating communications between the drug lord and the upper and lower echelons of his cartel. Specifically, she is accused in the complaint of coordinating the flow of illicit money to the cartel via text messages.

According to the investigation, she told a cartel member who was cooperating with U.S. agents that she was Guzmans girlfriend and that she was with him when he escaped from a Mexican police raid on Feb. 16, 2014, fleeing into a tunnel under a bathtub.

Sanchez is also under investigation in Mexico, charged with using a false ID to visit Guzman in the Altiplano prison outside Mexico City in 2014. Sanchez has publicly claimed that the woman on the prisons surveillance camera is not her, and also denied reports of being romantically involved with Guzman.

After her arrest in San Diego last month, her Mexican lawyer told The San Diego Union-Tribune that she had come to the U.S.  not knowing that the State Department had canceled her visa  to explore some kind of asylum for her and her family.

However, that was never mentioned by attorneys in court in San Diego. Prosecutors said in an earlier court hearing that after she was apprehended at the Cross Border Xpress, she tried to run back into Mexico to escape arrest. U.S. Customs and Border Protection had to tackle her to stop her from fleeing, Mellor told the judge.

A San Diego federal judge denied her request for bond last month.

While her case will proceed in the District of Columbia, Guzmans will be continuing in a Brooklyn federal courtroom, where he is being prosecuted on allegations of running a massive drug operation. He was extradited from Mexico in January.

kristina.davis@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @kristinadavis

ALSO

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San Diego may soon become the largest city in the nation to pass a law requiring city contractors and consultants to pay employees equally regardless of gender or ethnicity.

The goal of the new legislation, which the City Council may consider before its August recess, is to help close persistent pay gaps for women and minorities performing the same work as white men.

The median annual salary for a male full-time worker in California is $50,359, compared to $42,486 for a female, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by the National Partnership for Women and Families.

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The analysis also found that for every $1 earned by white men, black women make 64 cents and Latinas make 44 cents.

Federal and state laws already require equal pay, but San Diego Councilman Chris Ward said this week that its important for the city to play a role in enforcing those laws.

Taking this extra step allows the city to be a partner in enforcing laws already on the books, Ward said. If more cities and entities are serious about how they can make a contribution to the fair pay environment, collectively we will be able to move the needle significantly and reduce the disparity in wages.

Ward said the city is in a particularly strong position to make a difference as the No. 1 employer of contractors and consultants in the region. Annual city contracts typically exceed $600 million per year.

Under the proposed law, contractors working with the city would be required to certify that they pay employees equally regardless of gender or ethnicity, and notify their employees of such a policy in writing.

The law would also require city officials to educate each contractor about the new city policy and existing state and federal laws requiring equal pay for equal work.

Ward said the new law would come with minimal costs because its requirements could be easily accomplished by existing staff in the citys Purchasing & Contracting Department.

Ward also said it wouldnt be onerous on businesses because the requirements would be relatively modest. However, he said hed support exemptions for businesses with small numbers of employees or with low-value city contracts, suggesting $100,000 might be a good threshold.

We have worked really closely with the mayors office and purchasing and contracting to make sure this isnt going to adversely affect businesses, particularly small businesses, Ward said.

The law is expected to establish a series of escalating fines for violations.

But Ward said hed like city staff to have discretion to adjust fines based on whether a violation was intentional or an oversight, the level of egregiousness and whether the contractor is willing to take corrective measures.

Chronic offenders could be disqualified from seeking future city contracts.

Ward stressed that the California Pay Act, which became law in 2015, allows employers to justify wage differentials based on many factors including experience, education, performance and background.

But that law, which strengthened existing state laws, is considered among the toughest in the nation.

It shifted the burden of proof to employers and bans retaliation against employees who discuss their salaries. It also outlaws differential pay for substantially similar work, unlike previous laws that required females to have precisely the same job as a male counterpart.

The San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce hasnt taken a position on the proposed law, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

The San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation said the law could have regional benefits.

Local companies and research institutes are leading the way in scientific breakthrough and technology  this should be no different as it relates to the equal treatment of employees, said Nikia Clarke, the corporations vice president for economic development.

The Center on Policy Initiatives, a local think tank focused on boosting wages, strongly supports the proposed law.

Its a good move for the city to make because the gender pay gap is a very serious problem throughout the country, said Kyra Greene, the centers executive director. It contributes to the high rates of poverty we see in women and children.

The City Councils Rules Committee unanimously agreed in April to forward the legislation, once fully written, to the full council for approval.

The only concern raised was the potential to drown in paperwork many San Diego small businesses and nonprofits who do business with the city. City contractors already must comply with the citys 2005 living wage law.

Ward said this week that hes lobbying for the council to consider the new law before its summer recess begins on Aug. 4.

San Francisco and San Jose have adopted similar laws, and so have Albuquerque and Tempe, Ariz.

When that was brought to my attention, I realized quickly that San Diego could emulate that and become the largest city in the country if this was enacted, Ward said.

david.garrick@sduniontribune.com (619) 269-8906 Twitter:@UTDavidGarrick
Rep. Susan Davis and three other House members have been sued for displaying a rainbow flag in the hallways outside of their Capitol Hill offices.

The plaintiff: Chris Sevier, an attorney who has an ongoing campaign against same-sex marriage and has also unsuccessfully sued states for the right to marry a laptop computer, to make a point about rulings on same-sex marriage.

Besides Davis of San Diego, Sevier also sued Reps. Alan Lowenthal of Long Beach, Don Beyer of Virginia and Earl Blumenauer of Oregon. All are Democrats.

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Seviers 38-page complaint asks the federal District Court in the District of Columbia to determine that homosexuality and other forms of self-asserted sex-based identity narratives are a religion, and that the colorful banners are a religious symbol for the homosexual denomination. He is seeking to force the members of Congress to remove the flags.

Hes asking for $1 in damages. House Counsel will represent the defendants

Davis, who was served with the lawsuit this week, said the flag outside her office isnt going anywhere and that the legal action only encourages her to double-down on her support for equal rights for members of the LGBTQ community.

Word of the lawsuit has brought defenders to her side, Davis said.

The amazing response weve gotten has been overwhelmingly supportive, she said.

She was served as San Diegos gay pride parade and festival came to a close. While the annual event includes picnics, parties, and gatherings around the city, most of it is concentrated in Hillcrest and Balboa Park in Davis district.

I think weve come so far, and anybody who experiences Pride in San Diego, which was just this weekend, realizes that in San Diego, that this is the happiest day of the year, she said.

The flag outside of her office has been up since March 2015, and some other members who have heard of the lawsuit have asked where they too can get a flag to display outside of their own office, Davis said.

In addition to the rainbow flag hanging from a pole, Davis office also displays the U.S. and California flags.

Lowenthal said that his flag was desecrated earlier this year, but he received overwhelming support in response.

It is a symbol of both how far we have come on equality for all Americans and how far we still have to go. It is a symbol of love, of peace, and diversity, he wrote in a post on Facebook.

I will fight this hateful attempt to silence equality and justice. We have come too far to allow the voices of bigotry and hate to win, he continued.

Besides demanding that the flags be removed from the hallways, Sevier also asked the court to overturn Supreme Court rulings that ended a prohibition against sodomy and federal policies that only recognized opposite-sex marriages, as well as Obergefell V. Hodges, the 2015 ruling that found that same-sex couples have a fundamental right to marry.

Further, he said the members who displayed the flag should be removed from office.

The Defendants know or should know that they are advancing a threat to Democracy...to the point that they are unfit to hold office and should be removed for cause for representing an internalized danger to National Security interests, he said.

While Sevier wants the flags removed, he said, as an alternative members of Congress could display flags for polygamists, zoophiles, heterosexuals, and machinists. The latter is a person who prefer is attracted to inanimate objects, and, as Servier explains in his complaint, includes himself.

Those other groups, however, do not seem to have their own flag.

He has sued in several states for the right to marry an inanimate object.

Yet, the county clerks continue to issue him and his preferred souse a marriage license for reasons that are arbitrary, Sevier wrote in his complaint.

While the rainbow flag is nearly universally not considered a religious symbol, displays of faith have been permitted on government properties. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that religious images, including the Ten Commandments, are allowable because they serve a secular purpose alongside the religious connotations they carry.

Twitter: @jptstewart

joshua.stewart@sduniontribune.com

(619) 293-1841
The man who was bitten by a San Diego police dog for at least 30 seconds while handcuffed last week plans to sue the department on allegations of excessive force, his lawyer said Tuesday morning.

A video of the encounter, which quickly went viral, shows 26-year-old Karond Cheatum, without a shirt on, intermittently screaming as an officer works to pull his canine off the mans arm.

To me, that part of the interaction, regardless of what occurred before, was excessive force, attorney Dante Pride said. Hes in custody, hes on the ground, hes not a threat to anybody, and yet the dog is still on him, shaking him.

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Cheatum faces a number of charges in connection with the July 9 incident, including robbery, making criminal threats and vandalism. His arraignment is Friday.

The lawsuit wont be filed until his criminal case has been resolved, Pride said.

Three days after the incident officials said the officer and the canine adhered to the departments policy during the arrest.

San Diego police Lt. Scott Wahl acknowledged then that while footage of dog bites can be graphic in nature, canines are extremely effective at deescalating situations and preventing elevated use of force.

The altercation erupted after a number of people called 911 about a man, later identified as Cheatum, behaving erratically on A Street near Sixth Avenue about 4 p.m., San Diego police said.

Witnesses told dispatchers that he was running in and out of traffic, jumping on cars and trying to pull stop signs from the ground. Cheatum was also accused of jumping through the window of a cab and stealing an iPad inside and threatening bystanders to fight.

When the canine officer arrived, police said Cheatum started moving toward him, threatening to fight. The officer repeatedly told the man to stop, or the dog would be released.

When the canine bit Cheatum, he immediately surrendered.

Unlike most departments in the county, San Diego police canine officers are not taught to use a verbal command to get a dog to release a bitten suspect. Instead, they use a physical release that department officials say can take time to employ.

The technique is intended to minimize the chance of a second bite, which can be a liability for a department.

Shane Harris, president of the National Action Network, a civil rights organization, questioned any policy that allows a man who is subdued and handcuffed to remain in the jaws of a canine.

In a letter to police, City Council president Myrtle Cole has asked the department to provide more information about its canine policy to the councils Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods subcommittee.

She also requested the number of canine bites that have occurred in the last five years, how many of those bites had resulted in a lawsuit or settlement and how much the city paid in any settlements.

The footage is concerning to me and the communities I represent, she wrote.

Twitter: @LAWinkley

(619) 293-1546

lyndsay.winkley@sduniontribune.com
By PTI: Hyderabad, Jul 19 (PTI) A pregnant woman died of swine flu and another person is undergoing treatment for the H1N1 virus at a government hospital here, a health official said today.

The woman (aged around 36 years), who hails from Kumram Bheem district of Telangana, succumbed yesterday evening at the state-run Gandhi hospital, he said.

One senior citizen, who tested positive for the virus, and four suspected patients are undergoing treatment at the hospital, he said.

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According to a swine flu bulletin issued by the state government on July 11, 22 people died due to swine flu and other complications till July 11 since August, 2016.

It said 11,564 samples were tested during the period and that 1,544 of them tested positive for the virus.

Sufficient stock of medicines and testing kits were available at different hospitals in the state, the bulletin added. PTI SJR NRB

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Lifeguard and former interim San Diego City Council member Ed Harris sued the city on Tuesday, alleging he is being retaliated against for raising questions about a new policy for responding to water-related rescues.

The 8-page complaint, which seeks to forestall any disciplinary action against Harris, accuses the fire chief of cherry-picking emergency-response data to justify increases to the Fire-Rescue Department budget.

For more than a year, City of San Diego Fire Chief Brian Fennessy has been purposefully and recklessly manipulating public-safety data and procedures in order to rationalize an expansion of the fire departments personnel and a corresponding increase in its annual budget, the lawsuit states.

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According to the complaint, Harris has been targeted for reprimand or discipline three times in recent months, since Harris and others raised questions about a new policy that directs water emergency calls through a wider emergency-dispatch system.

The lawsuit also accuses city officials of violating the Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights Act when it refused to provide information about its threat of disciplinary action against Harris.

Chief Fennessy is a bully and does not like his decisions being questioned, no matter how much they put the publics safety and well-being at risk, the complaint said. The only thing that [Harris] has done wrong  has been to stand up to a bully.

The San Diego Fire-Rescue Department did not respond to a request for comment, and the City Attorneys Office said it is reviewing the complaint.

Late last year, San Diego Fire-Rescue officials issued a memo ordering the police departments central dispatch to transfer 911 calls for flood and river rescues to the fire department. Such calls previously were routed to lifeguards, who oversee the team trained in water rescues.

Officials said the policy change was a way to improve response times, which slowed earlier in the year when the lifeguard call center was inundated with calls due to severe weather and flooding.

Lifeguard dispatch center is not capable, nor do they have the technology to handle or manage that volume, Fennessy said in an interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune earlier this year. That meant people were waiting for service with flood waters rising.

The lawsuit claims Harris has been targeted for unwarranted discipline since speaking up. The first allegation involved inappropriate conduct with two department colleagues and was rescinded in December without explanation, the lawsuit alleges.

Twice this year the department initiated fact-finding inquiries against Harris, with the first being closed without explanation and the second stalling when the city did not provide requested documentation, said Harriss lawyer, attorney Cory Briggs.

The first two instances had allegations  talking unprofessionally to two lifeguards, leaking info to the press  but went nowhere after we asked for specifics, Briggs said. We maintain that those allegations were a subterfuge for retaliation.

The third instance, still pending, is over interference with the Toyota contract, but they cannot tell us what the interference is, Briggs added, referring to a deal the city has with the automaker. For that reason, we think the third is also a subterfuge for retaliation.

Harris works as a sergeant in the citys lifeguard service and also helps lead the union that represents lifeguards. In 2014, he was appointed to the San Diego City Council, where he served eight months representing District 2.

Last year Harris finished third in the San Diego mayoral race with 19 percent of the vote.

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jeff.mcdonald@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1708 @sdutMcDonald
Rep. Duncan Hunters campaign treasury saw a significant uptick in spending on attorneys over the past three months amid an ongoing criminal probe of his political spending.

His latest campaign reports show he spent $153,000 on attorneys fees and incurred another $114,000 in debt to law firms from April to June. That compares to $80,000 in legal fees for the previous 10 months.

Hunter, R-Alpine, is under investigation for expenditures of political contributions on his personal life. Federal law does not allow use of campaign funds for personal benefit, to protect against contributors such as defense contractors from having undue influence on someone like Hunter, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee.

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Hunter has reimbursed his campaign more than $60,000 in personal, mistaken or undocumented expenses since the Federal Election Commission and The San Diego Union-Tribune began examining his financial disclosures in April 2016. Expenses Hunter has reimbursed include video games, dance recitals, oral surgery, private school tuition, a garage door and unspecified items at a Coronado surf shop.

A new spending report filed July 15 with the FEC shows the Hunter campaign raised $155,625 and spent $236,820 during the reporting period, covering April 1 to June 30. At the end of the most recent filing period, the campaign reported having $617,575 in cash on hand.

Hunters office did not respond to questions about the legal fees. He has denied any involvement in criminal activity. He told Politico he did not personally make any of the charges in question and attributed the spending to mistakes that were inadvertent and unintentional.

His latest campaign reports show payments to seven law firms, four of those appearing on financial disclosures for the first time.

Federal campaigns are allowed to pay legal fees incurred in any proceeding involving allegations concerning the candidates campaign activities or duties as a federal officeholder. Campaigns can pay for legal fees incurred by the candidate, staff or even outside consultants if they are accused of violating federal election laws or regulations.

Hunters previous reports have shown payments to three law firms: Berke Farah LLP, a political law firm in Washington, D.C.; Christopher Amolsch, a criminal defense lawyer in Alexandria, Virginia; and Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky and Popeo PC, a firm with offices San Diego that handles a variety of legal issues, including criminal defense.

During the most recent reporting period, Hunters campaign paid $46,976 to Berke Farah, $7,500 to Amolsch, and $4,065 to Mintz Levin, the report shows. It also reported $4,065 in debt to Mintz Levin.

The latest report also shows payments to four law firms that had never before appeared on Hunters disclosures.

The campaign reported paying $10,000 to Higgs Fletcher & Mack LLP in San Diego. It also reported $10,000 in debt to the firm.

Higgs Fletcher handles a variety of cases, including criminal defense, according to the firms website. The firms criminal law attorneys include former prosecutors for The Department of Justice and the U.S. Marine Corps. Higgs Fletchers criminal group is led by Paul J. Pfingst, the San Diego County District Attorney from 1995 to 2003.

Hunters campaign paid $55,533 to Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky PLLC in Warrenton, Virginia, the report shows. It reported another $57,056 in debt to the firm.

Holtzman Vogels legal services include a particular focus on compliance with the Federal Election Campaign Act, the Ethics in Government Act, the Lobbying Disclosure Act, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and the Internal Revenue Code, as well as analogous state law and Congressional rules, according to the firms website. It has been recognized as one of the top political law firms in the county.

The campaign reported paying $28,787 to Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek in San Diego. It reported another $33,292 in debt to the firm.

Seltzer Caplan McMahon provides a variety of legal services, including specialized criminal defense such as preventing or limiting prosecution in grand jury proceedings, according to the firms website.

The firms criminal defense attorneys include Gregory A. Vega, a former U.S. Attorney and one of the lawyers who released a statement on Hunters behalf in March, following the House Ethics Committees announcement that it was holding off on its probe of Hunters campaign spending at the request of the Department of Justice.

Hunters campaign reported $10,000 in debt, but no payments, to Wiley Rein LLP in Washington, D.C.

Wiley Reins practice areas include a white collar defense & government investigations team that was ranked by U.S. News & World Report among the best white collar groups in Washington, D.C., according to the firms website.

In addition to legal expenses, the campaigns most recent spending reports show various charges at bars and restaurants, including two charges totaling $1,481 for food/beverages at Sage at Aria, an upscale restaurant and bar at the Aria Resort and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. Both expenses were paid March 6.

Representatives for Hunter did not respond to the Union-Tribunes questions about the official or campaign-related purpose of the spending at the restaurant  or why the expense was incurred in the first quarter of the year but reported on the disclosure report for the second quarter.

The campaign did not report receiving any contributions on March 6. It received two contributions March 8  $1,000 from Lockheed Martin Employees PAC and $2,500 from T-Mobile PAC.

The campaign reported receiving seven contributions March 10, reports show. The contributions included $1,000 contributions from Sierra Nevada PAC, Investment Company Institute PAC and Anthem PAC.

The Michigan Sugar Company Growers PAC contributed $1,500 on March 10 and The Allied Pilots Association PAC gave $2,500, according to the reports. General Dynamics made two contributions totaling $4,000.

The most recent spending report shows the campaign continued to patronize Alpine Tobacco Company, spending $31 on food/beverages there April 21. Hunters campaign has spent hundreds of dollars on food and beverages there this year.

Hunters office did not answer the Union-Tribunes questions about the reason for the $31 charge at the cigar 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 July 15 financial disclosure report does not show any payments to Hunters wife and long-time campaign manager, Margaret Hunter. Hunter said at a town hall meeting in March that the campaign had stopped paying Margaret her $3,000-per-month consulting fee. Reports show the campaigns last payment to Margaret Hunter was on Feb. 27.

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
Bipartisanship may be on life support in Washington, D.C., but Gov. Jerry Browns relentless arm-twisting and lobbying earned him eight Republican votes and a major political victory Monday night when both the state Assembly and Senate approved a 10-year extension of Californias cap-and-trade program, which was set to expire in 2020. The program allows polluters to buy and sell emissions credits, using market forces to discourage production of the greenhouse gases contributing to global warming. Brown won more than two-thirds support in both houses of the Legislature, insulating the measure from a potential legal challenge arguing the law was akin to a tax increase and thus required a two-thirds vote. His success means California will continue to be a global leader in promoting an aggressive response to the perils of a warming planet.

Now the governor must focus on a more immediate problem: Californias housing crisis. On Monday, Brown, Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said they would finalize a package of housing bills after the Legislature reconvenes in late August. Their statement indicated Brown could sign a $3 billion general obligation bond proposal to fund subsidized housing  after previously calling the approach ineffective. Assemblyman Richard Bloom, D-Santa Monica, linked the governors change of heart to his effort to round up votes for the cap-and-trade legislation.

As Brown noted last year, lower regulations and more stock are the best ways to lower housing costs because subsidies benefit only very small numbers of people. With Californias $500,000 median cost of a home now twice the national cost, any housing package approved by the Legislature has to include sweeping regulatory relief to speed up construction.

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A bill by state Sen. Scott Weiner, D-San Francisco, is a good start; it would streamline approval of multifamily housing projects in areas where local governments have not added enough housing units to satisfy their regional housing needs. But if lawmakers truly want to reduce the misery caused by high housing costs, much more must be done to make it easier to add all types of housing stock.

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

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Senate Republicans efforts to kill the Affordable Care Act collapsed suddenly this week after seven years of criticism. The defection of several moderates signaled the end. Saying its wrong to roll back the law before enacting a good replacement plan, West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito tweeted, I did not come to Washington to hurt people.

So what now? Despite President Donald Trumps campaign promise of insurance for everybody, he said Tuesday his new plan is to let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us.

But if the law fails, that will be terrible for too many Americans. While the ACA has worked out fairly well in California and some other states, it is struggling badly in the one-third of U.S. counties (serving one-fifth of Obamacare enrollees) that have only one company providing coverage options on health insurance exchanges. Even though exchange policies often have high premiums and deductibles, the ACA has left many insurers struggling to break even. Humana announced in February that it would stop participating in all state exchanges next year, leaving 11 state markets. Other insurers may follow suit. This is why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said last week that if Obamacare could not be replaced, it must be fixed.

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McConnell should accept the offer of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, to have bipartisan talks on shoring up the ACA. The Trump administration, which has broad discretion in enforcing the law, should also act. Americans need Congress and the president to rise to the occasion.

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion
A sad sight to see for Comic-Con visitors

Have you driven down 17th Street between State Route 94 and Imperial Avenue? Wow. The homeless have established a residential tent community on these four blocks.

The tents are two deep on the sidewalk throughout the whole block. The people were all over and I had to swerve around several to get down the street. How is this Americas Finest City?

This is the San Diego we will present to the thousands of visitors to Comic-Con. How is this allowed? I dont have a solution, but it did not appear to me these people wanted to take advantage of the homeless services. They looked very happy and comfortable. This was very eye-opening to me. I feel this is a huge embarrassment to the City of San Diego.

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Lori MacKenzie

Scripps Ranch

Homeless suing city only benefits lawyers

Reading San Diego sued over citing, arrests of homeless (July 18) regarding the city being sued for citing the homeless for obstructing public sidewalks, I am curious how many of those cited actually pay the fine. A pretty good guess would be zero percent. So why bother? It does give an attorney with nothing better to do a sense of accomplishment.

As a solution worth considering, how about leasing the vacant military buildings west of the airport along Harbor Drive to be used to house the homeless? This would be less costly than some of the recent suggestions. Maybe that is not such a good idea as an attorney would sue the city for the homeless having to endure the airport noise.

Bill Shannon

Mission Hills

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Orenthal O.J. Simpson could be getting out of prison.

You read that right.

Simpson has been behind bars for years, not for the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in Los Angeles for which he was acquitted, but for armed robbery and assault with a weapon in Nevada in 2007. Now its looking like he might finally walk free.

Heres what you need to know.

Why is Simpson in prison?

Simpson has been locked up for more than eight years following a botched attempt to retrieve sports memorabilia. The 70-year-old former college and professional football player is being held at Lovelock Correctional Facility in Lovelock, Nevada.

Back in 2008, he and co-defendant Clarence Stewart were found guilty on 12 charges after a confrontation in a hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Prosecutors said Simpson used guns, threats and force to take photographs and other memorabilia from two individuals. He claimed it all belonged to him.

How is parole determined?

The Nevada Board of Parole Commissioners will supply a parole board panel of four commissioners. They will consider factors such as prior convictions and the effect the crime had on the victims as well as Simpsons conduct in prison, participation in programs or educational activities and work history.

Theres also an 11-category risk assessment for judging what risk Simpson might pose to the public.

The Associated Press outlines the assessment and his odds here. It concludes that his final tally will be 3 points, which means the board would consider him a low risk. Scores of 6 to 11 are considered medium risk, with scores of 12 or more considered high risk. In other words, the Juice could be loose.

What are the possible outcomes?

If the hearing goes in his favor, Simpson would be eligible for parole on Oct. 1. If parole is denied, a rehearing date would be set by the panel. If its granted, the panel would set release and supervision conditions and the case would be referred to the Nevada Division of Parole and Probation.

Simpson is otherwise currently set to be released from prison in 2022.

The panel for the hearing will consist of four members, a majority of the seven-member board. An unanimous decision would end debate, but if the panel is not unanimous, additional board members would be contacted and asked to weigh in until there are four votes to determine his parole one way or another.

When and where is the hearing?

It will take place at 10 a.m. PST on Thursday at the parole board office in Carson City, Nevada. It is open to the public. Testimony could come from Simpson, Simpsons lawyers, Simpsons victims and one family member or supporter of Simpson.

How can we all watch it?

Many news outlets plan to live stream the hearing. Here are just a few links to consider.

https://www.cbssports.com/video/player/live

https://www.abcnews.com/live

https://www.facebook.com/News3LasVegas/

Coverage on television can be found on ESPN and NBC.

The hearing is highly anticipated by the public, and many people are already discussing his parole chances.

Read the fact sheet from the Nevada Board of Parole Commissioners here.

Email: abby.hamblin@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @abbyhamblin
They are not happy about it, but Poway City Council members unanimously agreed Tuesday night to begin holding elections for council seats by districts.

Over the next 90 days a series of five public meetings will be held, leading to the expected final adoption of a district map on Oct. 3. The map will be in place for the November 2018 election, although which districts will be involved will need to be determined. The mayor will continue to be elected at large.

The council was responding to a June 2 letter from attorney Kevin Shenkman threatening to sue the city. He claims that its system of electing the four city councilmembers at-large violates the California Voting Rights Law because it dilutes the ability of Latinos (a protected class) to elect candidates of their choice or otherwise influence the outcome of Poways elections. His letter to the city notes that 15.7 percent of Poways population is Latino. The contrast between the significant Latino population of the electorate and the complete historical absence of Latinos to be elected to the City Council is telling, Shenkman wrote.

Cities, counties and school districts across the state, including the Poway Unified School District, have received similar letters from Shenkman.

Fighting Shenkman in court would be a fruitless and expensive proposition, City Attorney Morgan Foley advised the council in a report. Twenty-seven governmental agencies have so far unsuccessfully challenged Shenkman, Foley wrote, resulting in the payment of $14.78 million to the plaintiffs attorneys. The amount does not include the time and money spent by the governmental agencies in their challenges.

If the City Council chooses to maintain its at-large elections and defend the threatened lawsuit the cost and attorneys fees would likely exceed $1,000,000, Foley wrote.

Poway has already retained the services of a special attorney and demographer to shepherd the city through the by-district election process. The attorney, John Ramirez, told the council the state has provided for a 90-day safe harbor period to comply with the by-district demand without facing further legal pressures. Ramirez agreed with Councilman John Mullin that the state was forcing the changes by mandate, but that the city should not count on being reimbursed for expenses related to the change.

Ramirez also said the question of whether to switch from at-large to by-district council elections cannot be decided by city voters.

I get it, Councilman Barry Leonard said. I hate it, but I get it. The deck is stacked. We have to roll over to these bullies, and the states behind them.

I really hate being told to do this, Councilman Dave Grosch said. He called Shenkman someone who doesnt live in Poway and probably cant pronounce Poway. This pisses me off.

I have no illusions this will lead to better governance in the city, Mullin declared.

After reviewing Shenkmans letter in a June 20 closed session, the council asked staff to prepare a resolution of intention to create and implement by-district elections. That resolution was approved 5-0 Tuesday night. It includes a timeline calling for public hearings at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 1; 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 8; 6 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 18 and 7 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 31. The first two hearings will solicit public comments on how the map should be drawn and how the by-district elections should be phased in. One or more draft maps would be the subject of the Aug. 18 and Aug. 31 meetings, with the adoption of a resolution to select the final map also set for Sept. 19. Final adoption of a map would be on Oct. 3.

Demographer Douglas Johnson and his staff will draw the proposed districts after the first two public hearings and, together with any maps prepared by members of the public, present all qualifying maps to the council. The consultant will charge approximately $42,000 for the work. Special legal counsel fees are expected to add another $40,000 to the cost, Foley estimated.

A potential challenge to those drawing the maps is that three of the four current councilmembers - Mullin, Leonard and Jim Cunningham - live fairly close to each other, in North Poway. Mullin, Grosch and Mayor Steve Vaus are up for re-election in November 2018.

Email: editor@pomeradonews.com

UPDATES:

On Wednesday, City Clerk Nancy Neufeld e-mailed a letter to country club owner Michael Schlesinger asking that he pay $350,000 to the city to cover projected costs associated with the Nov. 7 election. The letter requests that payment be made by Friday, July 27.
City, county, and Cal Fire officials and other groups made some tentative progress when they met to brainstorm possible solutions to the dangerous parking mess along state Route 67 in Ramona, near an unofficial trail that leads to Mt. Woodsons iconic Potato Chip Rock.

Authorities say hundreds of cars line the busy road on weekends and holidays, with hikers sometimes darting across four lanes of traffic trying to access the trail  endangering drivers and pedestrians.

As roughly 30 people gathered last Thursday to discuss the problem at a meeting hosted by Supervisor Dianne Jacob, a representative of a couple that owns 84 acres near the highway suggested a deal.

A parking lot could be built on part of the land in exchange for the rights to develop the rest of the property, broker Jeff Gan said.

Gan said he represents Jerry and Gina Taylor, whose land is adjacent to county-owned property near the trail. No details of how the deal might come together were mentioned, but Jacob said she and county staff would like to the tour the property soon.

Afterward she said she thought the meeting had gone well.

No solutions at this time, but we have some options we didnt have before the meeting, Jacob said. I think there are some promising possibilities, particularly with the private property. That was new information.

For decades, the paved access road to the top of Mt. Woodson has seen a lot of foot traffic from people looking for a quick way up the mountain  rather than a longer hike along the official trail that starts at Lake Poway.

Cars parking along the highway have been a problem since at least the 1980s, but in recent years, Instagram and Facebook photos showing hikers standing on Potato Chip Rock  a thin outcropping of stone near the top of Mt. Woodson  has led to an explosion in popularity at the trail.

On some days well over 100 cars can be found parked along the shoulders of the highway, as traffic speeds by at 55 to 65 miles per hour.

Authorities say its a recipe for disaster.

Ive been a paramedic for 37 years and pedestrians struck at those speeds, well, it is a gruesome sight, said Glen Morgan, president of the Ramona Trails Association and a captain with the Oceanside Fire Department, who attended last Thursdays meeting.

Its not a matter of if but when a pedestrian is going to get struck there, he said.

The meeting marked the first time that stakeholders such as the Ramona Community Planning Group, Caltrans, the cities of Poway and San Diego, the county parks department, and Cal Fire sat down to hammer out ideas.

Brian Albright, the countys director of Parks and Recreation, said an immediate but temporary solution might be to build a small parking lot  for no more than 20 cars  on county-owned land near the Mt. Woodson Cal Fire station.

The county owns more land in the area, but the rest is being used as a landing site for Cal Fire helicopters. We dont want to impact that operation, Albright said.

A representative of the Ramona planning group, which has been studying the issue for months, had suggested building a 177-car parking lot on the county land, not realizing the fire helicopter used it.

Cal Fire representatives said the current parking mess has already impacted them because the driveway to their station enters the highway not far from the trail head. Sometimes the stations driveway is blocked by parked cars and often it is used by vehicles turning around during their search for a space.

Our response times are higher because of the problem, one firefighter said.

Firefighters are also tired of hikers  many of them visitors to the San Diego area  knocking on the stations door looking for directions or for the nearest public bathroom.

Jason Graham, a CHP Officer based in Ramona, said one of the biggest problems is people wanting to park along the highway, driving past an open spot, then backing up to get back to the opening as other cars come speeding toward them.

There are still many things that will need to come together before any sort of parking lot is built, including who would pay for its construction and maintain it.

Another question is would the access road  which is not an official trail and is unmarked except by handmade sign  ever become an official trail and, if it did, what governmental agency would be responsible for its upkeep.

Jacob and everyone at the meeting seemed to agree on two things. Something has to be done before a tragedy occurs, and closing the trail is not a good solution because it is so well used.

Casey Lynch of the Ramona Planning Group said shutting down the trail would only make things worse because of the public outcry it would cause, adding that many people hike the road daily for exercise.

J. Harry Jones writes for The San Diego Union-Tribune.
COLLEGE COMPOSITION BY THE NUMBERS 92: Pages college freshmen write on average in an academic year 146: Pages college seniors write on average in an academic year 73%: Employers who want colleges to place more emphasis on teaching effective oral and written communication 26%: Employers who think college graduates are very well-prepared as writers 37%: Employers who think graduates are not well-prepared as writers SOURCES: The National Survey of Student Engagement, 2008; Association of American Colleges and Universities surveys, 2006 and 2008

University of California San Diego Provost Don Wayne was reading a student essay recently when he stumbled over the expression LOL.

I can never remember what it stands for, said Wayne, who began teaching composition to college students in 1969.

He jotted a note in the margin about the inappropriateness of colloquialisms and abbreviations in academic prose and added it to his growing list of frustrations about student composition.

For decades, the quality of student writing has been one of the most common complaints  and debates  on college campuses.

Professors have long lamented that students can't spell and that their sentences are riddled with grammatical errors. Some complain about the writing being too informal, disorganized or inarticulate.

Technology and the prevalence of texting and social networking have led Internet terms such as LOL (laughing out loud) to creep into academic writing.

Is college writing actually getting worse?

Or has it always been, to put it diplomatically, unpolished?

There's vast disagreement, and it's impossible to say who is right. Standardized tests provide a snapshot of writing ability before students enter college, but there is no national test for college graduates.

There is one thing college professors, and employers, agree on: There is plenty of room for improvement.

Only 26 percent of employers believe college graduates are very well-prepared writers, according to a 2008 survey commissioned by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

When I talk to faculty colleagues  it doesn't matter if they're at elite universities or community colleges  they all say students don't write well, said Terrel Rhodes, the association's vice president for quality, curriculum and assessment.

I think you can go back to the 19th century and you can find faculty members at that time despairing over student writing.

Even college professors who believe students are competent writers have seen their share of problems.

Richard Finn, who teaches two of the writing classes required for all undergraduates at San Diego State University, said mistakes range from misplaced apostrophes to poor sentence structure. Finn estimates that 85 percent of students can write, but the remainder struggle with some fundamental concepts.

They'll start a sentence with one idea and then shift to another idea midsentence, Finn said. It doesn't quite work.

Another problem that sometimes surprises professors is students' reliance on computer spell-checking programs, which don't catch improper word use.

Karen Kenyon, who teaches creative writing at MiraCosta College, said she most commonly sees students mix up its and it's.

The informality of writing is a growing concern for some professors, including Martha Stoddard Holmes, who teaches writing at Cal State San Marcos.

Occasionally, I've seen someone using the number 4 for the word 'for,'  Stoddard Holmes said. I remind students that they're not really thinking about their audience. I think I'm a nice person, but I'm still their professor.

Some speculate that the informal language stems from the relaxed writing style of texting and e-mailing. Finn said some SDSU professors remind students not to insert emoticons  those pesky smiley or frowny faces  into papers.

Matthew Herbst, who teaches history at UCSD, has written instructions into his syllabus regarding proper e-mail correspondence.

Sometimes they'll e-mail, 'Hey, I need help with my midterm,'  Herbst said. When they don't sign their name, I'll write, 'Dear sexygirl@hotmail,' or whatever their e-mail address is. Can you imagine writing a letter and not signing your name? Or calling someone and not identifying yourself?

Herbst acknowledges he's a stickler, but said he is trying to teach students proper protocol for the working world.

Aside from mechanics and form, professors say there is a huge range in the quality of students' persuasive writing  that is, their ability to articulate a position and support it with evidence.

In general terms, students are coming in with good writing ability, but not an ability to support an argument, said Glen McClish, chairman of the rhetoric and writing department at SDSU.

SDSU undergraduates are required to take at least two or three writing courses, depending on their ability. They learn basic concepts in these courses, McClish said, but then instruction devoted to composition drops off.

As we've increased enrollment, class sizes have gotten larger, and so there are fewer assignments, McClish said. Students write very little in their writing career here. And if they're not writing, their writing skills erode.

Another reason why some professors believe writing ability has suffered is that more students are attending college than ever before. That means there are more unprepared students, including many whose native language is not English.

At SDSU, the percentage of freshmen who are not proficient in writing is 37 percent, up from 27 percent five years ago.

Instruction plays a role, too. Some professors who don't teach basic composition believe it's not their responsibility to teach grammar and mechanics.

There are those who claim writing is a skill and lower-level technicians should be teaching that skill, said Wayne, the UCSD provost. They'll simply grade a paper down if it's not written grammatically.

Some say students know the basics but are not doing enough proofreading.

We have very good students, but sometimes they have very poor study or work skills, said Herbst, who directs a core sequence of courses at UCSD. They think they can get away with skating by.

Margo Wilding, director of the writing center at the University of San Diego, said she believes the quality of students' writing is directly linked to how much time they've spent reading good writing.

I ask my creative writing students about what they've read over the summer, and I'm shocked when they say they've read no novels, no poems, Wilding said. They're watching TV or movies or playing video games.

Campuses are addressing writing instruction in different ways.

At Cal State San Marcos, every undergraduate course must assign a minimum of 2,500 words of writing. The campus also has created a program that has evaluated thousands of student papers to help professors improve instruction.

At USD, students have access to hourlong private tutoring sessions at the writing center. UCSD undergraduates are required to take at least two quarters of writing instruction, which are periodically reviewed.

The key is not giving up, said SDSU's McClish.

Becoming a good writer is a lifetime job, he said. I'm still working on my writing. I don't think you can learn to write well over the course of one course, or even in a college career.

Eleanor Yang Su: (619) 542-4564; eleanor.su@uniontrib.com
Members of an Arizona family that raised a 7-year-old girl abducted from California as a toddler say its not uncommon in their Gypsy culture for families to take care of children born to other couples.

The man who acted as a father to the child legally named Amber Nicklas says his family took excellent care of the girl they called Sandra.

We are guilty of loving a child, Peter Gutierrez said during a sometimes tearful interview with The Associated Press on Monday. Thats how I feel in my heart, and it hurts. I want my baby back.

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Gutierrez said he had nothing to do with the girls abduction in California. He and his father, Bill John, described how the girl came to live in Arizona.

They said Ambers biological grandmother brought her to Phoenix, said her name was Sandra, and asked Gutierrezs wife to watch her for a short time while the grandmother looked for work.

Its a typical arrangement for Gypsy acquaintances, they said, and parents never leave their children in the care of non-Gypsy families.

A week became a month, then two months, and the woman never came back for her granddaughter, John said. After about eight months, the grandmother called and told the purported mother shed have to keep the baby because the girl had been abducted.

The familys attorney, John Blischak, clarified that the family didnt know it was a criminal abduction, but assumed that shed been legally taken away from a biological mother who was addicted to drugs.

We dont blame her. She wanted a better life for her, John said.

Gutierrez and John said the family never knew the biological aunts who allegedly orchestrated Ambers abduction from her foster parents at a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant outside Los Angeles on Sept. 21, 2003.

Authorities last week took Amber from the central Phoenix home and palm-reading business where shed been living with Gutierrez, his wife, Shirley Frank, and their two biological children - a 20-year-old man and a four-month old girl.

Were just a loving family, Gutierrez said. Thats why we took her in and loved her and raised her as our own, because in our culture thats what we do.

Investigators said the couple kept Amber out of school in an attempt to hide her, and when police arrived, Frank tried to hide the girl in a bathroom shower under a pile of clothes and towels.

The family disputed the account given by authorities, saying the girl was never hidden from police. They said she didnt go to school because they didnt have the documents needed to enroll her.

The girl was scared but quiet as about a dozen police officers milled around the home, Gutierrez said. She didnt cry and she cooperated when officers asked to take her footprint to match it with one on her birth certificate.

She was quiet, she was very scared, he said. She sat by me and she clung to her Barney. Thats her security toy shes had all her life.

Gutierrez said the girl was bright for her age and he tried to teach her numbers and the ABCs.

He said she was just like any other young girl - she loved YouTube and pop superstar Justin Bieber. And he hopes to someday get legal custody of her, but he knows thats a long shot.

She loved us, and we loved her too, he said, fighting tears. Its very hard to say because I feel like I lost my daughter.

The couple have not been charged with a crime, though authorities say its possible they could face charges of keeping her out of school.

Officials say shes now living with an undisclosed foster family in California, knows her real name and is undergoing therapy to cope with the trauma of leaving the only family she remembers.

Investigators were trying to discover how Amber wound up in Arizona. They were expected to present the case to prosecutors by early next week, Los Angeles County sheriffs Capt. Patrick Maxwell said Monday.

They have not been able to contact the original foster parents, Maxwell said. The whereabouts of the girls biological mother and father also are unclear.

The two biological aunts spent time in juvenile camp for the abduction. Maxwell said the motive for the abduction remained under investigation.

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Associated Press writer Robert Jablon in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
After the new president is sworn-in on July 25, Pranab Mukherjee will move to 10, Rajaji Marg in Lutyens' Delhi, which was also the residence of former president APJ Abdul Kalam.

Pranab Mukherjee will shift to his residence at Rajaji Marg on July 25. Photo: PTI.

By India Today Web Desk: The results of the presidential election, which saw a face-off between BJP candidate Ram Nath Kovind and Opposition nominee Meira Kumar, are set to be declared on Thursday.

As a new president, either Ram Nath Kovind or Meira Kumar, gets ready to occupy Rashtrapati Bhavan, outgoing-president Pranab Mukherjee will move to his new residence.

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After the new president is sworn-in on July 25, Pranab Mukherjee will shift to 10, Rajaji Marg in Lutyens' Delhi--this was also the residence of former president APJ Abdul Kalam till his death.

After a stay at the palatial Rashtrapati Bhavan, Pranab's new address is a sprawling 11,776 square feet house which has a library and an attached reading space.

Pranab Mukherjee takes a walk through the Mughal Garden at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Photo: PTI

Given Pranab Mukherjee's love for books, additional space is being made so that his large collection of books can be accommodated at his new house.

WHAT ELSE WILL PRANAB GET?

Pranab Mukherjee will get a lifetime monthly pension of Rs 1.5 lakh. The increase in pension came after the President's salary was increased from Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 5 lakh per month. Following the salary revision under the Seventh Pay Commission, the government realised that a cabinet secretary was drawing more salary than the President.

Under the President's Emoulments and Pension (Amendment) Act, 2008, Pranab Mukherjee is entitled to free travel anywhere in India, accompanied by a person, by the "highest class, by air, rail, or steamer".

When President Pranab Mukherjee met then Delhi CM-designate Arvind Kejriwal at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Photo: PTI.

Pranab Mukherjee, who rode in a bullet-proof Mercedes as President, will be entitled to a car for lifetime and staff expenses of Rs 60,000 a year.

His secretarial staff will comprise a private secretary, an additional private secretary, a personal assistant and two peons.

Pranab Mukherjee will also get two telephones--one for internet and broadband connectivity--and a mobile phone with all-India roaming facility, besides free medical attendance and treatment.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan with Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Photo: PTI.

ALSO READ:

Before Ram Nath Kovind vs Meira Kumar, a look at biggest, closest victory margins in presidential elections

Why only Ram Nath Kovind, Meira Kumar are in race to Raisina Hill: The story of Presidential Elections since 1952

Pranab Mukherjee: When mob lynchings become uncontrollable, we must ask are we vigilant enough

ALSO WATCH: PM Modi gets emotional, says Pranab Da has guided him like a father figure

--- ENDS ---

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SAO PAULO (AP)  Brazils president, government ministers, state governors, health agents and members of the armed forces Friday visited schools throughout the country to involve students in the nationwide campaign to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito that spreads the Zika virus.

President Dilma Rousseff was on hand at a school in the city of Juazeiro, in the impoverished northeastern region thats the epicenter of Brazils Zika virus outbreak.

The Health Ministry said on its website that schools in Brasilia, in the countrys 26 state capitals and in 115 other cities would be visited.

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The ministry said that the objective is to raise the awareness of students of the importance of eliminating the breeding ground of the mosquito that also transmits dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

Rousseff told students in Juazeiro that Aedes aegypti is something that has to worry all of us, the president, the governor ... and every one of the pupils here.

The mosquito lives largely inside homes and can lay eggs in even a bottle-caps worth of stagnant water. The dishes beneath potted plants are a favorite spot, as are abandoned tires, bird feeders and even the little puddles of rainwater that collect in the folds of plastic tarps.

The Education Ministry said nearly 190,000 basic education schools, universities and vocational training centers were to be visited on Friday.

Zikas immediate effects are mild, consisting mostly of a moderate fever and a rash, and only a fifth of those afflicted notice any symptoms.

But Brazilian authorities also say they have detected a spike in cases of microcephaly, a condition that leaves infants with unusually small heads and can result in brain damage and numerous developmental and health problems. The link between Zika and microcephaly remains unproven.

Since October, 5,280 suspected cases of microcephaly have been reported, Brazils Health Ministry said on Friday. Of those, 508 cases had been confirmed and 837 discarded. Of the confirmed cases, 41 have been connected to Zika.
Animal rights advocates urged the California Horse Racing Board on Thursday to investigate why more horses have died at the Del Mar Racetrack this season than in recent years.

A handful of advocates, including former Assemblywoman Lori Saldana, attended the boards monthly meeting held at the Surfside Race Place at the Del Mar fairgrounds to press the agency for action. They said too many horses are dying after injuries while racing or training at the seaside facility.

We are out here today to ask the board to investigate the reasons for these breakdowns, these injuries and these deaths, Saldana said.

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The board did not commit to conducting a study, but said its already taking steps to prevent the injuries, including adding more personnel to inspect horses and tightening blood screening standards to make sure horses are healthy enough to race.

So far this year, the number of horses that have been injured and euthanized at the track is far higher than in recent years. The Del Mar Racetracks summer season ends its 39-day run on Labor Day, Sept. 5.

According to the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, 16 horses have died at the track this summer, six while racing and 10 while training. Thats compared to nine horses that died last summer (six while training, three while racing) and 11 that died during the 2014 summer racing season (three while training and eight while racing.)

Counting only the horses that died while racing, Del Mar has seen 2.89 deaths per 1,000 starts this year. Nationwide there were about 1.69 deaths per 1,000 starts in 2015, a 14 percent drop from the previous years rate of 1.89, according to an analysis released in March by The Jockey Club, a thoroughbred industry group. The 2015 numbers marked the lowest fatality rate since the organization started analyzing the data in 2009.

Del Mar Thoroughbred Club President Joe Harper said Thursday the racetrack will increase its efforts to reduce deaths next summer.

Im in this business because I love animals. I love horses and believe me when one is injured, we all feel it, Harper said. And like animal rights folks, we want to find out what we can do to help prevent or at least slow down some of these injuries.

Over the years, the club has funded studies on racing deaths but found no definitive answers and no single cause, Harper said.

Theres no commonality, Harper said. What we see is a vulnerability more than anything else in the morning. Remember, you have over 2,000 horses (training). Its so many horses out there that thats where youre going to see your injuries. And the fact is, we have no control over who goes out there. We have control over who goes out there in the afternoon (to race), so well scratch a horse we feel is not sound.

Other steps the racetrack will be taking next summer is pushing back Opening Day a few days (to July 19) to give horses more time to adjust to the track, Harper said. The club will also do additional blood work on horses before and after races to make sure the animals are healthy enough to race.

California Horse Racing Board Executive Director Rick Baedeker said the racetrack and the board had each added one additional veterinarian at Del Mar to examine horses before and after each race.

Animal rights advocates said theyre not convinced the state board and racetrack officials are doing everything they can to stop the injuries.

You need to do more, said Martha Sullivan, an activist who frequently pickets outside the racetrack. I appreciate that your intentions are good but very frankly, its not working. And you need to do something different and you need to do something more.

Cliff Goodrich, former president of the Santa Anita racetrack, said fatal injuries may be impossible to eliminate from racing, but that officials are doing what they can.

Goodness knows in society there are problems that are unsolvable; this may be one of them, Goodrich said. To insinuate that (the board) is not trying (to solve the problem) is out of bounds. We will continue to try, we will never be perfect but goodness knows its not for a lack of trying.

edward.sifuentes@sduniontribune.com

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The Obama administration is pressing its case for reforming the countrys home loan industry while preserving the fixed-rate, 30-year mortgages distinctive to the American housing market.

U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan spoke at a mortgage conference in Raleigh on Tuesday. Industry leaders are talking about reforming the way the countrys banks and other lenders do business, and how mortgage loans are collected into securities and sold to investors.

Donovan says President Barack Obamas plan to overhaul the countrys housing finance system includes winding down government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which taxpayers bailed out with $187 billion in 2008. They made bad bets in buying mortgages from lenders, guaranteeing them against default and selling them to investors.

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A U.S. Senate committee takes up housing finance reform Thursday.
BANGKOK (AP)  Thailands military-dominated interim legislature on Friday held its first meeting since it was appointed by the junta following a coup more than two months ago.

The 197-member National Legislative Assembly will enact laws and nominate the interim prime minister, who will then choose Cabinet members. Its appointment last month was part of the juntas roadmap to return Thailand to elected democracy, expected to take place by October 2015.

The junta, officially called the National Council for Peace and Order, has granted itself what amounts to supreme power over political developments in the interim constitution it drafted. The junta is scheduled to appoint another council in October to work with a constitution drafting committee for a permanent charter by July next year.

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The dominance of active and retired military officers in the legislative body reinforces the armys hold on power in the run-up to the 2015 polls.

In their inaugural meeting, the assembly members, including more than 100 with military and police ranks, voted unanimously to elect former Harvard-educated Supreme Court Judge Pornpetch Wichitcholchai as their president.

Junta leader Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha says the May 22 bloodless coup that ousted a 3-year-old elected government was necessary to restore order after six months of anti-government protests and political turmoil left at least 28 people dead and paralyzed state institutions.
The results for the race to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, in which NDA candidate Ram Nath Kovind has a clear edge, will be out by 5 PM.

By India Today Web Desk: The results of presidential election, for which close to 99 percent MPs and MLAs had voted on Monday, will be declared tomorrow. A simple mathematical calculation shows that National Democratic Alliance (NDA) candidate Ram Nath Kovind is all set to win against Opposition's pick Meira Kumar.

Counting of ballot papers will begin at 11 AM at Room Number 62 on the first floor of the Parliament House. Ballot boxes, collected from all states across India, has been kept in a strong room inside the House.

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The results for the race to the Rashtrapati Bhavan will be out officially by 5 PM.

32 polling stations including the one in Parliament House were set up in various states. A total number of 4,896 electors, 4,120 MLAs and 776 elected MPs, were eligible to cast their ballot.

Incumbent Pranab Mukherjee's term is ending on July 24 and the India's 14th president will take oath the next day.

HOW THE COUNTING HAPPENS

Counting of votes will be held under the supervision of the Lok Sabha secretary general Anoop Mishra, who is also the Returning Officer.

The counting staff will begin their task by removing invalid ballots. Some votes may become invalid if the lawmaker didn't cast it in the prescribed format. A principle of proportional representation is followed under which the elector has to mark preferences against the names of the candidates. Marking of the first preference is compulsory.

The ballot box of the Parliament House would be the first one to be opened, and then, the ballot boxes received from states would be counted on alphabetical basis.

The votes would be counted on four separate tables and would have 8 rounds of counting.

HOW IS THE WINNER SELECTED

Presidential election is held in accordance with the system of proportional representation by means of a single transferable vote. While the value of an MLA's vote depends on the population of the state he or she belongs to, the value of an MP's vote remains the same at 708.

At the end of any round of counting, if one candidate gets more than more than 50 percent of the total votes polled then he is declared the winner.

HOW AIRTHMETIC IS IN KOVIND'S FAVOUR

The total value of votes of the electoral college (comprising elected MLAs and MPs) is 10,98,903. With the backing of NDA, the Dalit leader and former Bihar Governor Ram Nath Kovind is set to cross the halfway-mark and get more than 60 per cent votes.

Besides parties belonging to the NDA, Janata Dal-United (JD-U), Biju Janata Dal, Telengana Rashtra Samithi in Telangana, different factions of AIADMK, and the YSR Congress (1.53 per cent) also had announced their backing for Kovind.

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Congress-led Opposition parties have a little over 35 per cent share in the electoral college. Independents and other smaller parties, who have not made their choice known, have two per cent.

If elected, Ram Nath Kovind will be the second Dalit President of India after KR Narayanan.

Also read:

Voting in presidential election ends, result on July 20: All you need to know

Foreign media on presidential poll: India set to crown candidate with Hindu nationalist roots as next President

Presidential election voters: 71 per cent crorepati, a third with criminal cases, 451 women

Samajwadi Party a divided house again. This time over choice of presidential nominee

Also watch:

How Meira became Opposition's presidential pick against Kovind

--- ENDS ---
By India Today Web Desk: While other B-Towners flew down to New York to be a part of the recently held IIFA Awards, Priyanka Chopra decided to give the award show a miss. Priyanka flew back to India for the promotions of her Marathi production, Kaay Re Rascalaa, and then took off for a vacation with her loved ones to bring in her 35th birthday.

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Although Priyanka insisted that she did not attend IIFA 2017 because she wanted to take a break from her hectic schedule and celebrate her birthday with her family and friends, a report in Mumbai Mirror says that she gave it a miss due to remuneration issues.

Apparently, the Bajirao Mastani actor was approached in January to perform at IIFA this year as well as host a segment of the event. However, talks fizzled out when the organisers failed to offer her enough money. What really peeved the desi girl was the fact that "a male superstar" was paid an astronomical figure to just show up at the event.

Rumour has it that the male superstar in question is Salman Khan. At the IIFA press conference in New York, the actor had said, "I don't receive awards, I just perform on stage. If they want me for such a bad performance that they are paying me for it, I'm more than happy."

On the work front, Priyanka Chopra has signed two Hollywood films after Baywatch - A Kid Like Jake and Isn't It Romantic? Speculation is rife that she will play Amrita Pritam in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Sahir Ludhianvi biopic. However, the actor has not confirmed being a part of any Bollywood film as of now.

PHOTOS: Priyanka Chopra rings in 35th birthday with family at an exotic location

ALSO READ: Priyanka Chopra was asked a dirty question about her Baywatch guys and she handled it like a boss

ALSO WATCH: I wanted to be seen as a modern actor, says Priyanka Chopra

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: Cuttack, Jul 19 (PTI) The Orissa High Court today asked the state government to restrict the quantum of reservation for SC, ST and OBC or Special Categories in employment and education to 50 per cent.

Quashing the Socially and Economically Backward Classes (SEBC) Act of 2008, which was notified by the Odisha government in February, 2009 for a 27-per cent reservation for the OBC category, a division bench of the high court said the quantum of reservation should not exceed 50 per cent.

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The ruling assumes significance since the state government, through the SEBC Act, had provided a 65.75-per cent reservation, including 16.25 for the SC category and 22.50 per cent for the ST category in both employment and education.

The impugned Act was earlier quashed by the State Administrative Tribunal (SAT) in December, 2013 while disposing of a batch of petitions filed by some general category candidates, who were aspirants for the posts of assistant section officers (ASOs).

The state government had, however, challenged the SAT ruling in the high court, justifying the reservation quantum on the basis of the Justice Ram Nandan Prasad Committee report.

The high court, however, observed that the said report was already quashed by a court of law.

Upholding the SAT ruling, the high court said the tribunal, after taking note of the observations of the apex court in the case of Indra Sawhney and M Nagraj and other authoritative pronouncements, came to the conclusion that the decision of the state government was not in accordance with law, and accordingly, struck down the Act of 2008 and also directed the state to modify the notification.

In view of this, the division bench of Justices Kumari Sanju Panda and S N Prasad, in their judgment delivered last month (a copy of which was made available today), had said it would not interfere with the December, 2013 order of the tribunal. PTI CORR AAM RG RC

--- ENDS ---
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For more about Gay Haubners life in the North Country, read the other chapters in her serialized memoir. The Post will publish a new segment each week.

Summer after third grade was spud games in the street, wandering by myself along Congdon Creek, trips to the neighborhood library and occasionally after much begging, to the awesome Carnegie Library downtown, where thousands of books basked in the golden light from the glass dome, reflected back by a floor of pale yellow glass bricks.

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A few weeks before school started, my mother, my sister, and I made our annual shopping trip to Minneapolis, the big city, staying downtown at the Radisson or the Dyckman Hotel. On one of these trips the elevator doors at the Dyckman opened to reveal my Aberdeen grandmother, dolled up in a jaunty hat, a fox stole, and too much rouge. We were astonished to see her: grandma had left Duluth three weeks before, but was in no hurry to return to the charms of South Dakota and had settled in at the Dyckman indefinitely without telling us.

We had two main shopping destinations: Daytons, which was scented with eucalyptus and had rackety but thrilling wooden escalators (escalators were unknown in Duluth) and the dull as dishwater Donaldsons, the other big department store. These trips were never on a weekend, as stores were closed on Sundays.

I wasnt interested in clothes unless they were Barbie-sized. My mother loved clothes; she would sigh when I came down to breakfast in a flowered shirt and plaid skirt and send me back upstairs to puzzle out what a suitable combination might be. Lani and I played hide-and-seek in the racks of dresses in Daytons Girls Department while my mother searched for appropriate school clothes that were also on sale in August. Before moving on to Better Ladies or Shoes to do her own shopping, my mom would send my sister and me off to wait for her in Daytons Toy Department. Once riding the wooden escalator up to Toys, Lani clutched my hand so hard and looked so unhappy that I was certain she had to poop. An enormous man in faded blue jeans jeans and plaid flannel shirt had followed us up three flights of escalators, positioning himself directly behind my six-year-old sister and rubbing her buttocks all the way. We didnt say a word to my mother. A few months later, when my mom dumped me in the toy department at Goldfines so she could look at carpet samples in peace, a man snuck up and began fondling me as I stared pop-eyed and slack-jawed at the extensive display of Barbie outfits. I sidled away to the baby doll section and didnt report that incident either: it seemed too shameful, like Lani and I had done something wrong. Pedophiles must have come out in droves to toy departments the weeks before Christmas, waiting for parents to drop off new victims.

I loved the exotic eating adventures Minneapolis offered. We lunched at Daytons Skyroom, perched loftily on the eighth floor with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the modest downtown and the Mississippi River. The Skyroom was the most lady-like restaurant imaginable and to me the height of sophistication. I dont think I ever saw a grown man there. Glamorous models strolled through the restaurant, stopping at each table and displaying cards identifying the designer. There was a separate childrens menu, with each dish named after a nursery rhyme character; fitting, as it was all nursery food, with no flavoring, not even salt, food that you could swallow without chewing. I always had the Little Boy Blue, creamed chicken on mashed potatoes. It was delicious. The Skyroom also had that heaven on wheels, a dessert trolley. We were allowed one dessert to split; my sister and I would fight over whether to get chocolate cake or apple pie until my embarrassed mother would pick something else entirely (Not the rice pudding! Not the rice pudding!), which we would sulkily share.

When the department stores closed we dined on bland corn, starchy chicken with almonds and piles of white rice (the only Chinese food my picky eater sister would tolerate) and almost too sweet almond cookies at the Nankin restaurant, and then returned to our hotel room with a big bag of warm caramel corn to snack on while we reveled in the wonder of four TV channels.

The next morning, we ate breakfast at the Forum, an art deco cafeteria. My mom doted on their fried corn meal mush, a dish whose appeal escaped me. We did a bit more shopping at Daytons or Donaldsons or at Harolds, a snooty upper end dress shop, where Lani and I were strictly forbidden to tear through the racks. We waited while my mom tried on clothes, sprawling on tastefully upholstered armchairs and kicking each other. We then got back on the train and consolidated our few purchases into one or two shopping bags so my father wouldnt be able to tell how much we bought. It was never all that much.

It is one of the pleasantest things about childhood, going back to the same places and doing the same things, year after year, as if the world would never change. It didnt seem possible that all that could disappear: the wooden escalators at Daytons, the little silver domed dishes scattered about our white clothed table at the Nankin, the Forums black and silver mirrored paneling and the pleasure of resting my chin on the cafeteria tray as I pushed it along the endless railing and never once being allowed to get one of the gleaming sundae glasses brimming with cubes of Jello and topped with a dab of whipped cream (We have Jello at home.). But theyre all gone now.

***

We would make another trip to Minneapolis, usually with my father, in early December. This trip was not as strictly choreographed as our fall visits. We drove, instead of taking the train, always beseeching dad to stop at Tobies in Hinckley for cinnamon rolls the size of our heads. My father hated interrupting the trip; he liked to travel straight through, fueled by chain-smoking Old Golds. Once a decade we got a single cinnamon roll to share (always eaten in the car). Mostly we sped past the crimson and white Tobies sign, whining Tobies! Tobies! until requested to shut up. In Minneapolis my father would go to a Vikings game, or take us to the Cinerama where I gave myself a headache trying to look out of the opposite sides of my eyes to take in the enormous movie screen. Wed stay at the Ambassador Motel, a glass-domed two-story building that enclosed a huge indoor amoeba-shaped pool ringed with dozens of half dead palm trees. The air inside was steamy, with the slightest tang of tropical mildew beneath the pucker of chlorine. The pool was ridiculously overheated; swimming in an indoor pool, especially when you could see snow landing on the glass roof above, was pure luxury. Lani and I would spend as long as possible in the hot greenish water, until we were scooped out before our bodies melted into primordial soup.

Our chief destination in Minneapolis on those trips was Daytons Winter Wonderland in their seventh floor auditorium. We had Santas in Duluth, sad specimens ringing bells on the street, or somebodys drunk dad in a fake beard and red suit giving away crappy gifts at the Elks Club Christmas party. Daytons Santas were naturally endowed, with fluffy white beards, and they didnt smell. The ordeal of waiting to sit on Santas lap was transformed into a thrilling trip to the North Pole. Who wouldnt stand for hours in a slow, snaking line, when surrounded by acres of enchantment: set against sparkling snowy hills were dozens of miniature mechanized elves, hammering and sawing away in the toy workshop, hitching Rudolf to the sleigh, and packing wrapped gifts in bags. And there was Mrs. Santa in her kitchen, pulling a tray of gingerbread men out of the oven again and again. We were a polite if closely packed line of moms and kids, at least half of whom would be squirming the other way, in desperate need of a bathroom (I told you to go before!). Finally we would reach Santas inner chamber, where my sister and I, in matching coats, were hoisted onto Santas lap; a sadder but wiser photographer quickly snapped our photo in the millisecond before my sister started screaming. I had to quickly convey to Santa the importance of receiving every single item in my exhaustive list, before being handed a Made in China plastic trinket, and herded offstage to where my mom was ordering Christmas cards.

Imagine my horror when in 1964 we arrived at Daytons to find that Santa had been shunted into a corner of the Toy Department and the auditorium had been taken over by the Dickens London Towne. Gone were the elves, replaced by life-sized automatons of Dickens characters, in scenes that faithfully reproduced 19th century London, complete with antiques sent over by the crate from England. Grown-ups oohed and aahed over the elaborate Victorian dresses and hairdos, Lani and I yawned and hit each other. All I knew of Dickens was Mr. Magoos Christmas Carol. But over the years, Dickens London Towne grew on me, its insane attention to detail and authenticity luring me in, and I was saddened when Daytons finally realized they didnt need to spend millions of dollars to get people to come to the store to buy Christmas gifts. Dickens London Towne was no more.
Workplace Giving and Matching Gifts

Workplace Giving

Support Save the Children through a Workplace Giving campaign  an easy and efficient way for employees to make a tax-deductible donation. Save the Children participates in employer-sponsored payroll deduction campaigns and can also help your business create a customized online donation page to support employee giving. Our Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) number is 12085. If you don't see Save the Children in your local listing, you can write us in. Save the Childrens Tax ID Number (EIN) is 06-0726487. We are also a charity member of Global Impact, YourCause, GlobalGiving, United Way and Benevity. If you have any questions about donating to Save the Children through your company's workplace giving campaign, or if you would like to learn more about the tools and resources we can provide, please email corporate@savechildren.org.

Matching Gift Programs

Thanks to the generosity of Save the Children's corporate and foundation supporters, employees can sometimes double or even triple their donations to Save the Children through a Matching Gift program. Matching Gift donations support our mission and are used to give children in the United States and around the world what every child deserves -- a healthy start, the opportunity to learn and protection from harm when disaster strikes.

Companies and foundations use various procedures by which employees can request matching gifts: online forms, payroll deductions or paper forms. If you are not sure if your company matches gifts, please be sure to check our matching gift database. If you do not see your employer in the drop down menu, please contact your company's human resources department to research your options. If your company uses a matching gift form, please complete the employee portion of the form and send it to matchgifts@savechildren.org or mail any paper forms to: Save The Children, Attn: Matching Gifts, 501 Kings Hwy E, Fairfield, CT 06825.
Pune, India -- (SBWIRE) -- 07/19/2017 -- The Display Cabinets Market 2017 examines the performance of the Display Cabinets market, enclosing an in-depth judgment of the Display Cabinets market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Display Cabinets market in the present as well as the future prospects from various angles in detail.



The Global Display Cabinets Market 2017 report includes Display Cabinets industry volume, market Share, market Trends, Display Cabinets Growth aspects, a wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis, manufacturing capacity, Display Cabinets Price during the Forecast period from 2017 to 2022.



To Get Sample Report Click Here: https://market.biz/report/global-display-cabinets-market-2017/66842/#inquiry



Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global Display Cabinets Market 2017:



1 IKEA

2 Displays2go

3 ISA Italy

4 Metalfrio Solutions

5 Daikin Industries

6 Beverage-Air

7 United Technologies Corporation

8 Hussmann

9 Dover Corporation

10 Sanden

11 Illinois Tool Works



Display Cabinets Market Analysis: By Product



Vertical-Front Open

Horizontal-Top Open

Others (Hybrid/Semi-Vertical)



Display Cabinets Market Analysis: By Application



Bakery

Supermarket

Exhibition Hall

Others



At the beginning, the report covers the top Display Cabinets manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on topographical regions.



Further, the Display Cabinets report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Display Cabinets industry, Display Cabinets industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Display Cabinets Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.



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The Display Cabinets research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Display Cabinets market revenue worldwide.



Finally, Display Cabinets market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.



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Market.Biz is designed to provide the best and most penetrating research required to all commercial, industrial and profit-making ventures in any sector of online business. We take pride in our ability to satisfy the market research needs of both domestic and international businesses. read more- https://market.biz/about/



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1. Global Refrigerated Display Cabinets Market 2017 - https://market.biz/report/global-refrigerated-display-cabinets-market-2017/107966/
Valley Cottage, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 07/19/2017 -- Macadamia nut was introduced in the early 1960s to the Kenyan highlands from Australia. Macadamia is a member of the family Proteaceae, native to Australia. Australia and Hawaii are the major producing areas of macadamia with others including eastern and southern Africa, and Central and Latin America. Several species of macadamia exist in Australia but only two species such as M. tetraphylla and Macadamia integrifolia and their hybrids are grown commercially. Production of macadamia nuts in Australia is mainly in eastern shore of Australia (northern New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland). Currently, Hawaii is the largest producer of global macadamia, accounting for around 70 percent of total macadamia production worldwide followed by Australia, around 22 percent, rest is produced by other countries including Malawi, South Africa, Kenya, Guatemala, Mexico, California, Costa Rica, Brazil, New Zealand and China.



Tree nuts include almond, cashew, hazelnut, pistachio, walnut, macadamia, and pecan. Currently, macadamia accounts for around only one percent among all the tree nuts available across the globe. Almond nut dominates the nut segment, accounting for around 34 percent. Increasing health claims for macadamia have witnessed a surge in recent years, which if succeeded is expected to increase the consumption of macadamia nuts among consumers.



Request Report Sample@ http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-1304



Global Macadamia Market Segmentation:



On the basis of application the global macadamia market is broadly segmented into food industry, and cosmetics industry. In food industry macadamia is widely used in confectionaries including chocolate bar, chocolate covered candy, ice cream and other baking products. In cosmetics industry it is used in shampoos, sunscreens, soaps and others.



Geographically, global macadamia market is segmented into North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Japan and Middle East & Africa. Currently, North America and Western Europe account for major market share for macadamia however, Asia Pacific excluding Japan is expected to grow significantly in the forecasted years.



Global Macadamia Market Dynamics:



Owing to increasing variety of applications of macadamia, various workshop are taking places in order to increase the international trade for macadamia and since capitalise the growing demand for macadamia. Adoption of macadamia in chocolate and ice cream among consumers is expected to drive the demand for global macadamia in the near future. The biggest restraint for macadamia market is increasing crop losses due to immature nuts and moldy / rotten nuts. The crop losses due to these type of nuts accounts for around 50 percent of the total macadamia wastage globally. Thereby, reducing inclination of crop growers for macadamia and thus, hampering the market growth.



There is a high opportunity to increase the market share of macadamia in terms of revenue across countries such as Mexico, China, South Africa and others. Companies are investing in these countries through promotional activities in order to increase the footprint of macadamia worldwide.



Visit For TOC@ http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-1304



Global Macadamia Market Key Players:



Some of the key players operating in the global macadamia market are Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corp., Hamakua Macadamia Nut Company, MacFarms, Wondaree Macadamias, NAMBUCCA MACNUTS Pty Ltd, Golden Macadamias, Royal Macadamia (Pty) Ltd., Kenya Nut Company Ltd. and MWT Foods Australia.
New York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 07/19/2017 -- Talc is a mineral composed of hydrated magnesium silicate and is an important industrial and commercial mineral. It has broad applications as an industrial mineral due to its resistance to heat, electricity and acids and oil and grease adsorption. Talc has extensive commercial use because of its luster, softness, purity, fragrance retention, softness and whiteness. It is the softest known mineral and has a rating of 1 on the Mohs hardness scale. It can be scratched by a fingernail and is also sectile that means it can be cut by a knife. It has a specific gravity of 2.5 -2.8 and has clear luster. Talc is slightly soluble in dilute mineral acids and insoluble in water. It is a metamorphic mineral and occurs due to metamorphism of magnesium minerals such as olivine, amphibole, serpentine and pyroxene in presence of water and carbon dioxide. Talc is a tri-octahedral layered mineral and has a similar structure to that of pyrophyllite.



To access full report @http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/talc-market.asp



Talc can be used as an ingredient in paints, roofing materials, ceramics, insecticides, rubber, talcum powder and insecticides among others. It is also used by the cosmetics industry, pulp and paper industry and food industry. Talc is often used to manufacture laboratory countertops and electrical switchboards due to its resistance to heat, acids and electricity. It is used by the cosmetic industry as a lubricant and as a filler by the pulp and paper industry. Talc is extensively used to make astringent baby powders that prevent rashes covered by a diaper. Talc is used by the pharmaceutical industry as a glidant (a substance that is added to powder to improve its flow ability) and by the food industry as an additive. In the European Union the additive number is E553b. In medicine, talc is used as a pluerodesis agent to prevent pneumothorax or recurrent pleural effusion. Talc is also an effective dispersing agent and anti caking agent and helps fertilizer plants and animal feeds to function efficiently and can be used for fertilizers.



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The paper and pulp industry remains the largest global end market for talc and is the key driving factor for the talc Industry. The automotive industry, ceramics industry and the paint and coatings industry are the other major consumers of talc. The use of talc as a filler in the paper industry is declining today but the use of talc for the manufacture of under the hood automotive parts is substantially increasing that has further lead to surge in demand for talc by the automotive industry.



Asia Pacific is the largest market for talc with China, India, Japan, Bhutan, and South Korea being the key markets in this region. The Indian talc industry is the world's third largest and continues to grow due to increase in domestic consumption. North America and Europe are other regions with a substantial market share of talc. Austria, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Macedonia, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Sweden and United Kingdom are the major consumers of talc in Europe.



To view TOC of this report is available upon request @ http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/4609



Some of the major companies dominating the talc market are Imerys talc, Mondo Minerals, Golcha Group, American Talc, IMI FABI, Nippon Talc, Minerals Technologies Inc, the Jai Group, Aihai Talc, Behai Talc, Shuiquan Talc, Xin Talc, Haumei Talc, Guiguang Talc and Xin Talc among others. Imerys talc is the world's leading producer of talc followed by Mondo Minerals.



Key geographies evaluated in this report are:



North America

U.S

Canada

Europe

France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK

Eastern Europe

CIS

APAC

China

India

Japan

Australia

Others

Latin America

Argentina

Brazil

Others

Key features of this report



Drivers, restraints, and challenges shaping the Talc market dynamics

Latest innovations and key events in the industry

Analysis of business strategies of the top players

Talc market estimates and forecasts(2015 -2021)



About Persistence Market Research

Persistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.



To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.



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KINGSTREE, S.C.  At least three new businesses are planning to move into Williamsburg County soon.

Jim Moore, executive director of the Williamsburg County Economic Development Board, said Starcyl Cylinders, United Phosphorous Incorporated and Louis Hornick SC have plans for starting locations in Williamsburg County which could bring about 300 new jobs in the area within the next 2.5 years.

Moore gave a report Tuesday to the Williamsburg County Council.

Starcyl Cylinders, which develops pneumatic and hydraulic cylinders and presses, will open a location in the spec building in Hemingway. Moore said the company will create 25 new jobs that will include welding, metal working, assembly and fabrication.

United Phosphorus Incorporated is an Indian company, Moore said.

They are in the agricultural products field. Theyre in the top five of their industry in the world, Moore said. In fact, theyre going to be making liquid pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, things like that right here in our facility.

UPI will operate out of the former Firestone facility on Eastland Avenue in Kingstree. This location will be the companys first United States manufacturing operation.

I think one of the exciting things about it, theyre going to start what they call a distribution center, County Supervisor Stanley S. Pasley said. In August is when they plan to begin that process. Theyre going to be utilizing the proximity of the port thats here to allow them to bring goods in and repackage and be a distribution center.

About 100 new jobs will be created in Williamsburg County at UPI.

And theyre going to be utilizing more warehouse space in that facility right off the bat, Moore said. And those jobs will be getting created very soon; packaging and warehousing operations.

People who have those skills, and those who may have worked in the facility when it was Firestone, should be able to apply and have the right skillset to work there again, Moore said.

Louis Hornick SC is a new textile company. The operation will initially create blinds and curtains for institutional use such as in hospitals, schools and hospitality. The company will be housed at the spec building in the Industrial Park in Kingstree and will, hopefully, be in operation in September, Moore said.

Over 100 jobs are expected to be created at Louis Hornick SC in Kingstree.

Once again, weve got some more textile-related jobs coming into the county which I think will be well-suited to the skillsets that many of our folks have, Moore said. Some of the older members of our workforce who were employed in the past in the textile industry are going to be able to put those skills to use.

A number of Williamsburg Countys existing industries are in the process of creating new jobs, too, Moore said.

And we are working with all of these folks and with folks from SC Works to put together a series of meetings around the county so that we will be able to get the word out, Moore said.

Meetings for companies to meet with potential employees are still in the planning stages, Moore.
The Congress president attacked the Centre for not allowing discussions on farmers' issues in Parliament while addressing a rally in Rajasthan.

Rahul Gandhi at the farmers' rally in Banswara in Rajasthan.

By India Today Web Desk: Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi today came down heavily on the Centre while addressing a farmers' rally in Banswara district of Rajasthan.

"We had suggested the Narendra Modi government to not pass Goods and Services Tax (GST) in a hurry but they did not listen," said Rahul Gandhi.

The Congress vice-president said that big traders, who can employ 10 accountants, will have no problems with GST but small traders will suffer.

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He said Congress governments in Punjab and Karnataka waived farmers' loans. "The BJP government waived farmers' loans in Uttar Pradesh out of fear for Congress," Rahul Gandhi said.

He said that Congress wanted to raise farmers' issues in Parliament today but was not allowed to speak. This happened even as the Prime Minister was present in Parliament, he said.

"GST ke liye raat 12 baje Parliament khola jaata hai, lekin kisaano ke liye ek minute baat nahi karne dete (For GST, Parliament is opened at midnight but farmer issues are seldom allowed to be raised in the House)," said Rahul Gandhi.

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Jaitley on farm loan waiver: States should generate funds from own resources

ALSO WATCH: Samajwadi and Congress party members demand raise in salaries amidst chaos in Parliament

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KINGSTREE, S.C.  The Pee Dee Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse is looking for volunteers in Williamsburg County.

The coalition relies on volunteers to work in community education, materials distribution, resource procurement, fundraising and administrative support. Training is available to those volunteers who wish to provide support and advocacy services to victims and their families.

According to Freda Cox, the Williamsburg County coordinator, the site has three staff members who work diligently but leave after 5 p.m. The coalition depends on volunteers to serve by answering calls from the hospital, police and sheriffs departments.

It's the volunteers who are the lifeblood of a community organization like ours," Cox said. "Volunteers contribute their time to seeing victims and working on special projects.

Pee Dee Coalition counselor Teavis Young said sometimes volunteers work with victims at night by going to hospitals and being a shoulder they can lean on.

"It is our hope to get more volunteers in Williamsburg County where we have so many cases of domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse," said Kathy Andrews, volunteer coordinator for Williamsburg County. "The county has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the poorest counties in the state, and sometimes that can contribute to problems in the household.

According to Andrews, volunteers can serve by distributing Pee Dee Coalition flyers, train to work with victims and participate in projects such as Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October.

The Pee Dee Coalition is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the reduction of domestic violence, sexual assault, family violence and child abuse.

For more information on how to become a volunteer, email Kandrews@peedeecoalition.org or call the Williamsburg County office at 843-374-5026.
Arguing for the right to privacy in the Supreme Court today, senior counsel Gopal Subramanium said that Constitution intrinsically guarantees the right to citizens.

By Anusha Soni: The fundamental ideas of liberty, freedom and democracy cannot exist without the right to privacy. The Preamble to the Indian Constitution intrinsically guarantees a right to privacy. These were the arguments advanced by senior counsel Gopal Subramanium arguing for the right to privacy in the Supreme Court today.

A nine-judge bench of Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar, heard arguments on the much-debated question on whether right to privacy is fundamental right or not. The question is key to the larger debate on government pushing for Aadhaar in the country.

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In a persuasive argument substantiating how right to privacy is a fundamental right, Subramanium argued that the key words of 'sovereign, republic, democratic' mentioned in the Preamble do entail a sense of privacy.

PRIVACY A BROADER CONCEPT

He argued that privacy is a broader concept and data sharing is only one aspect of privacy. Privacy is about the freedom of thought, conscience and individual autonomy and none of the fundamental rights can be exercised without assuming a certain sense of privacy, said Gopal Subramanium.

Subramanian argued that state is under an affirmative obligation to protect the fundamental rights. He argued that liberty existed prior to the Constitutional era and the law has merely recognised its existence. Liberty, which is fundamental to democracy and citizens, cannot exist without privacy, said Gopal Subramanium.

Soli Sorabjee, arguing for the petitioners, also said that privacy is not explicitly laid out in Constitution but that doesn't mean the right doesn't exist. He argued that the freedom for press has been derived from Article 19 and similarly right to privacy can be derived broadly.

ALSO READ:

No Aadhaar, no banking and threat to privacy: Do you have a choice?

Aadhaar data of 130 millions, bank account details leaked from govt websites: Report

Relief to Centre on Aadhaar, Supreme Court refuses to stay its notifications

ALSO WATCH: How to link Aadhaar with your PAN card

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: (Eds: Correcting year of verdict in paras 13 and 15)

New Delhi, Jul 19 (PTI) Right to privacy cannot be an absolute right and the State may have some power to put reasonable restriction, the Supreme Court said today while examining the issue whether it can be declared as a fundamental right under the Constitution.

A nine-judge Constitution bench, headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar, also asked the Centre and others to assist it about the "contours" and ambit of test on which the width and scope of right to privacy and its infringement, if any, by the State would be tested.

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The bench then referred to the apex court judgement, criminalising gay sex and said if right to privacy was construed in its widest sense, then the verdict in the Naz Foundation case "would become vulnerable".

The NGO, Naz Foundation, has been fighting a legal battle for decriminalising consensual unnatural sex including lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders.

During the day-long hearing, the bench, also comprising Justices J Chelameswar, S A Bobde, R K Agrawal, Rohinton Fali Nariman, Abhay Manohar Sapre, D Y Chandrachud, Sanjay Kishan Kaul and S Abdul Nazeer, said, "Right to privacy is an amorphous right and not absolute. It is only a small sub-sect of liberty."

It then gave illustrations including that giving birth to offsprings might fall under right to privacy and the parents could not say that the government did not have the power to direct sending every child to schools.

It also referred to issue of data protection and said that its ambit was "much wider" than right to privacy and "cataloguing the contents of privacy" has the danger of limiting the right itself.

"We live in an age of big data and the state is entitled to regulate the data whether it is for the purpose of regulating crime, taxation or other activities... Right to privacy cannot be so absolute that it prevents the State from legislating or regulating it," the bench said.

If a bank has sought personal details for disbursing loans then it could not be said to be an infringement of right to privacy, it said, adding that the issues like ones sexual orientation and the bedroom details were covered under right to privacy.

Senior advocate Gopal Subramanium, appearing for one of the petitioners, initiated the arguments and said right to privacy was an "inalienable" and "inherent" to the most important fundamental right which the right to liberty.

He said the right to liberty, which also included right to privacy, was a pre-existing "natural right" which the Constitution acknowledged and guaranteed to the citizens in case of infringements by the State.

"Liberty is the fundamental value of our Constitution. Life and liberty are natural existing rights which our Constitution acknowledges and guarantees. How can liberty be at all experienced without privacy?," he asked.

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Subramanium, at the outset, referred to apex court verdicts to highlight the process of interpretation of fundamental rights by it and assailed the two judgements delivered in M P Sharma and Kharak Singh cases by an eight- judge and six judge benches in 1954 and 1963 respectively in which it was held that right to privacy was not a fundamental right.

The issue of right to privacy as a fundamental right was deliberated upon by the court in the two cases.

"It is submitted that the decision in the 1954 and 1963 cases, to the extent they interpret fundamental rights on a distinctive basis (as recognised in the A K Gopalan case of 1950) are no longer good law.

"In view of the fact that the A K Gopalan case stands overruled in the R C Cooper case (of 1970), it follows a fortiori (from a stronger argument) that neither of the above decisions are effective."

He assailed the M P Sharma verdict which had held that right to privacy was not a fundamental right, saying that the M P Sharma case was not "an authority for the proposition that there is no fundamental right to privacy in the Constitution".

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He argued that right to privacy is inherent to the right to liberty and the Constitution "mediates" between the citizens and the State and the concept of privacy is "embedded in liberty as well as honour of a person".

He then referred to the Preamble and Article 14 (equality before law), 19 (freedom of speech and expression) and 21 (protection of life and liberty) of the Constitution to contend that right to privacy was intrinsic to these "inalienable" fundamental rights also.

The counsel assailed the contention of Attorney General K K Venugopal that right to privacy was a "common law right" and not the fundamental one and said it "went much beyond the common law" as it was inherently attached to the basic rights of life and liberty.

"Right to privacy invariably means the inviolability of the person. The expression person includes the body as well as the inviolate personality and the privacy really is intended to indicate the realm of inviolable sanctuary that most of us sense in our beings.

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"It refers to spatial sanctity, freedom in decisional autonomy, informational privacy as well as the ability to freely develop ones personality and exercise discretion and judgement," he said.

Former Attorney General Soli Sorabjee, appearing in support of privacy right, went much beyond and said even if the Constitution did not "explicitly" provide this right, it could be deduced as had been done in the case of freedom of press.

He referred to Article 19 and said it dealt with the freedom of speech and expression and the apex court deduced the media right from it.

Another senior advocate Shyam Divan also said privacy right was a fundamental right according to the "golden triangle" rule that comprised Article 14, 19 and 21.

"As recognised by an unbroken line of decisions of this court since 1975, right to privacy is protected under Part III of the Constitution. This court has recognised several unenumerated rights as facets of Article 21.

"Similarly, right to privacy has also been recognised as flowing from Article 21," he said.

He said that right to privacy extends to several aspects, including body integrity, personal autonomy, right to be left alone, informational self-determination and protection from State surveillance.

The bench, at one point, stopped Divan from raising issues relating to Aadhaar that that government could not force citizens to give biometric details and asked him to focus on the privacy issue alone.

When the bench asked whether privacy right could be absolute and the government could put some restriction or not, he said that the aspect of privacy might be determined on a case-to-case basis.

"In a technologically dynamic society it is imperative to keep dimensions of right to privacy flexible to adapt and adjust with the new scenarios," he said, adding many of the fundamental rights "cannot be enjoyed to the fullest in the absence of right to privacy".

He further referred to the fact that India is a signatory to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and now to say that right to privacy is a common law right only will be a "regressive" step.

He said the recognition of "fundamental right to privacy" is consistent with international norms and has been recognised internationally as a human right and is protected in almost all liberal democracies.

Another senior advocate Arvind Dutta also submitted that right to privacy should be treated as a fundamental right.

The argument will continue tomorrow and that attorney general is likely to put the governments view across. PTI ABA MNL SJK RKS SC

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The nine-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court said that there is a need to define privacy after senior counsel Gopal Subramanium argued that fundamental ideas of liberty and freedom cannot exist without a right to privacy.

The Supreme Court today saw much debate on right to privacy.

By India Today Web Desk: The nine-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court hearing the right to privacy debate today said that there is a need to define privacy and every aspect of liberty is not privacy.

The Chief Justice-headed Constitution bench's observation came after senior counsel Gopal Subramanimum argued that fundamental ideas of liberty and freedom cannot exist without the right to privacy.

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"One can argue that even sexual orientations are about right to privacy," the Supreme Court said, adding that privacy is an amorphous right.

HERE IS ALL YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE HEARING ON RIGHT TO PRIVACY IN THE COURT TODAY: The nine-judge bench said there is a "need to clarify whether privacy is protected under Right to Life, Freedom of Expression or Right to Equality (Article 21, Article 19 or Article 14)" of the Constitution. "Every aspect of liberty is not privacy. One cannot have an exhaustive list of what constitutes privacy. The Constituent Assembly could not have imagined the idea of social media," the apex court said. Earlier, senior counsel Gopal Subramanium arguing for right to privacy said that the Preamble to the Constitution intrinsically guarantees the right. He said that liberty, which is fundamental to a democracy, cannot exist without privacy. Arguing for right to privacy, which is linked to the big debate on Aadhaar and the government's push for it, Subramanium said the words 'sovereign', 'republic', 'democratic' mentioned in the Preamble do entail a sense of privacy. He argued that privacy is a broader concept and data sharing is only one aspect of privacy. Subramanium said that privacy is also about freedom of thought and individual autonomy. None of the fundamental rights can be exercised without assuming a certain sense of privacy, he argued. Gopal Subramanium argued that liberty existed prior to the Constitutional era and the law has merely recognised its existence. Liberty, which is fundamental to democracy, cannot exist without privacy, said Gopal Subramanium. Soli Sorabjee, who argued for petitioners, said that privacy is not explicitly laid out in Constitution but that doesn't mean the right doesn't exist.

ALSO READ:

Aadhaar data of 130 millions, bank account details leaked from govt websites: Report

No Aadhaar, no banking and threat to privacy: Do you have a choice?

Aadhaar verification boosts user confidence on matrimonial sites: Survey

ALSO WATCH: How 4 cows - Bholi, Bhuri, Kamla, Shanti - got their Aadhaar IDs

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Branching out from Shanghai, its regular base, SkySea Cruise Line will sail seasonally from Xiamen, Qingdao, Shenzhen and Taiwan's Keelung. More than 10 destination ports in four countries will be visited throughout the year, catering to the markets of eastern, southern and northern China as well as Taiwan.

Ken Muskat, ceo of SkySea Cruise Line, announced the bevy of developments at a news conference Wednesday morning in Shanghai.

Being able to operate from five seasonal homeports is a great indication that SkySea Golden Era has been well-received by Chinese cruise guests, Muskat said. And with a number of sailings from Keelung aimed mainly at Taiwanese, it is a 'solid step forward in the implementation of the greater China strategy of local cruise brands,' he added.

Next year SkySea will also visit Vietnam for the first time, calling at Halong Bay, Da Nang and other ports. New destinations in Japan and the Philippines introduced this year, such as Sasebo, Okinawa, Manila and Boracay, will continue to be offered.

With the increase in overnight and late-night stays, the line is rolling out new themed evening excursions and activities called 'SkySea Nights.'

Even some short sailings of three or four nights will offer overnight calls. In Okinawa, for example, this gives SkySea passengers time to stroll around Naha the first day, and then take excursions to Okinawa Aquarium and Shuri Castle the following day.

More than 10 cruises will schedule ports stays until 10 p.m. or later. So, in a place like Kagoshima, passengers will have time to climb the hill overlooking the city for a spectacular night view.

Plus, SkySea will continue to promote 'Cruise+' sea and land programs on its repositioning cruises to accommodate the growing number of passengers from central and western China. These six voyages will feature themes and special activities with the opportunity to extend the vacation on land.

Bookings for 2018 open Aug. 8. Through year's end, travelers can take advantage of early bird discounts.
The BMC clarified that it was a routine check which they conduct throughout Mumbai, and the official who served notice to Lilly Mendosa was not even aware who was staying there.

By Mayuresh Ganapatye: A day after BMC served notice to Lilly Mendosa, who is the mother of RJ Malishka, after breeding spots for mosquitoes were found at her Bandra Pali Hill road house, questions have been raised over timing of the notice.

The BMC clarified that it was a routine check which they conduct throughout Mumbai, and the official who served notice to Lilly Mendosa was not even aware who was staying there.

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"Linkage of this notice to political issue is not good. Our local officials were conducting routine check of societies. We have served notice to some Agwal on first floor of same building where Lilly Mendosa stays. So we have not sent notice only to Ms Mendosa alone," said Rajan Narignekar, head of pesticides department.

BMC has started taking serious preventive measures against Dengue, malaria and other diseases caused by mosquitoes. So far BMC has sent notices to 8,744 people in which 432 people have appeared in front of metropolitan magistrate. So far BMC has recovered fine of Rs 20,04,600.

"Notice to Lilly Mendosa was served under 381B. Now metropolitan magistrate will send summons to her for hearing and there metropolitan magistrate will decide the amount of fine. It's upto her to accept her offense in front of metropolitan magistrate or not. In such offense fine range is from Rs 2000 to Rs 10,000 but that magistrate will decide," said Rajan Narignekar.

RJ Malishka had come up with a video which talked about Mumbai rains and BMC, but the video did not go down well with Shiv Sena, who has been ruling BMC since last 25 years, and which has asked the BMC Commissioner to file a Rs 500 crore defamation suit against Pvt FM channel which created this video.

"Our corporators have asked BMC to take legal action against Radio Channel. That video is an insult to BMC and its workers who work day and night to keep Mumbai on track. Shiv Sena or BMC is not at all targeting Malishka and notice sent to her about dengue mosquitoes was part of routine check. Why can't you people appreciate the work of BMC," said Kishori Pendenakar, Shiv Sena corporator.

While Shiv Sena is criticising Malishka for her video on BMC, its alliance partner, BJP, on the other hand came to her rescue.

BJP Mumbai chief Ashish Shelar tweeted and appreciated Malishka's efforts to express Mumbai's problem. In a tweet Shelar wrote, "It is Brave of Malishka to come out of comfort zone and apply her creativity to express Mumbai's problem."

Neither RJ Malishka or her mother Lilly Mendosa were available to comments.

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It has been seen in recent past that those who raised their voice against BMC would always face some action. First it was comedian actor Kapil Sharma and now RJ Malishka.

BMC might say that it is not targeting anyone, but their actions speak something else.

Watch:

BMC issues notice to popular Radio Jockey Malishka for breeding mosquitoes

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The South Korean shipbuilder claimed that the ISSS is the first of its kind in the global shipbuilding industry, with the solution forecast to cut annual operating cost by 6%.

The solution standardises ways of navigation varying depending on levels of skills and experiences of navigators, collects and analyses real-time information on navigations, and thus will play a role in enhancing efficiency and safety of ships.

HHI pointed out that with IMO introducing the e-Navigation, a strategy to bring about increased safety of navigation in commercial shipping through better organization of data on ships by 2019, the demand for smart ships is expected to grow further.

HHI developed a smart ship technology system for the first time in 2011 and has applied the system to about 300 ships it delivered so far.

In May this year, the Korean yard signed a memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia shipowner Bahri on establishing a partnership in the smart ship sector.

Luis Benito, innovation, strategy and research director, marine and offshore at Lloyds Register (LR), commented: HHIs technology seeks to align with delivering the key benefits we believe the maritime industry will most benefit from through the adoption of connected, digital and autonomous technologies as the next generation of shipping embraces digitalization.

According to Clarkson Research, about 6,500 ships are to be ordered globally for the next five years. Considering the global shipbuilding market share HHI takes up now, ISSS is to be installed on approximately 700 ships for the comparable time period, Benito added.
By PTI: Bengaluru, Jul 19 (PTI) The BJP today slammed the Karnataka government over the transfer of DIG (Prisons) D Roopa after she brought to light the alleged special treatment meted out to AIADMK (Amma) leader V K Sasikala in the central jail here.

The partys state unit staged a protest here against the transfer and accused the state government of favouring corrupt officials.

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BJPs state unit chief B S Yeddyurappa accused the government of siding with corrupt jail officials by shunting out an "honest and upright" officer who had exposed alleged irregularities at the Parapana Agrahara central jail here.

"By transferring an honest and upright police official (Roopa)... the Siddaramaiah government has sided with corrupt jail officials. It is clear, and people should understand it," Yeddyurappa told reporters.

He demanded that Roopa should be reinstated with immediate effect.

The government had on Monday transferred Roopa and asked DGP (Prisons) H N Sathyanarayana Rao to go on compulsory leave after they sparred over a report on the allegations in public.

In her report, Roopa had alleged that Rs 2 crore had exchanged hands to provide special facilities to Sasikala and dragged Rao into the bribery charge, saying there was a "talk" that he was also a beneficiary.

The report and her transfer have raised a political storm in the state.

Yeddyurappa said there was no room for honest officers like Roopa in Siddaramaiahs government.He urged the government to take action against guilty police officials involved in jail irregularities.

Addressing BJP protesters earlier, he highlighted the governments "failure" to arrest killers of RSS activist SharathMadiwala in Dakshina Kannada district.

Former Deputy Chief Minister R Ashok demanded protection for honest officers. PTI BDN RA BN ASV ZMN ASV

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Press Release

July 19, 2017 CHIZ LAUDS SIGNING OF LAW TO MONITOR CASINOS UNDER AMLA After intense scrutiny from both chambers of Congress and the President himself, a legislation that will put casinos within the ambit of the Anti-Money Laundering Act is now a law, according to Sen. Chiz Escudero, who has been in the forefront of including the gaming industry under the coverage of AMLA. Republic Act No. 10927, which amended Republic Act No. 9160 or the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2001, was signed by President Rodrigo Roa Duterte on July 14, 2017. The law secured the approval of the Chief Executive shortly before the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) flew to Colombo, Sri Lanka for the Annual Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) Meeting and Forum on Technical Assistance, which will be held until July 21. "I would like to thank the President for signing this into law right in time for the APG meeting. Now that we have already complied with the guidelines, we are hopeful that the country will no longer be put in the blacklist," Escudero said. "AMLC was able to update the APG during their annual meeting in Sri Lanka that we have already passed the law. But according to them, the APG will still be monitoring the country until the law is already in force," the veteran lawmaker added. Escudero, chairman of the Senate Committee on Banks, Financial Institutions and Currencies, has long been urging the Senate to pass the amendments to AMLA in order to meet the deadline imposed by the APG. During its plenary meeting in September 2016, the APG decided to give the Philippines until June 2017 to pass the required legislation. Escudero said he had high hopes that the inclusion of casinos under the AMLA coverage, as recommended by the global anti-money laundering watchdog Financial Action Task Force (FATF), is enough for the country to avoid its potential blacklisting. In 2013, even after the enactment of RA No. 10365, which further strengthened the anti-money laundering drive and removed the country from the FATF's list of vulnerable jurisdictions, casinos were still not covered by AMLA. The blacklist, Escudero reiterated, will put the Philippines under stringent financial monitoring and affect remittances from overseas Filipino workers (OFWs). Last year, Escudero said the country "barely escaped" the FATF blacklist after hackers stole $81 million from the account of Bangladesh Bank in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and was then diverted to four fake bank accounts in the Philippines. According to Escudero, under RA 10927, casinos, including internet and ship-based casinos, with respect to their casino cash transactions related to their gaming operations, shall be considered as "covered persons." A single casino cash transaction involving an amount in excess of P5 million or its equivalent in any other currency will be considered as a "covered transaction." The law also authorizes the Court of Appeals to issue a 20-day freeze order on monetary instruments and property which is in any way related to unlawful activity. During the 20-day period, the CA will conduct a summary hearing to determine whether to lift or modify the freeze order, or to extend its effectivity. The total period of the freeze order, however, shall not exceed six months.
Press Release

July 19, 2017 From bomb, bomb bomb to build, build build

Extending aid more important than extending ML - Recto A prolonged Martial Law in Mindanao should be accompanied with massive reconstruction of "homes, livelihood and public works" destroyed by the fighting in Marawi City, Senate President Pro-Tempore Ralph Recto said. "Whether we extend Martial Law or not, what is present in either scenario is the need to rebuild Marawi," Recto said. In Recto's view, more important than a proclamation extending the period of a Mindanao-wide Martial Law is a program extending sustained aid to the affected communities. "Mas importante ang Marshall Plan para sa Marawi kaysa sa Martial Law for the whole island," Recto said, referring to the massive American aid to rebuild Europe after World War II which has been the template for rehabilitating economies razed by strife. "Martial Law, especially one that is limited in scope and safeguarded by guarantees, can be used to destroy the enemy. But in rebuilding lives, you'll be needing another tool," he said. "You need a rifle butt to knock down a barn door. But you need a hammer to build one," he added. "After the smoke has settled, we should carpet bomb Marawi with aid, help and resources. The rebuilding will be done the same way destruction was wrought: house to house, block by block," Recto said. Recto said he favors the imposition of a Congress-sanctioned Martial Law "limited to directly affected areas and with a shorter expiry date." He urged Malacanang to draft a "detailed and budgeted" Marawi reconstruction plan and make it one of the centerpieces of President Duterte's second State of the Nation Address on July 24. "This should be the accompanying measure of the Martial Law declaration. Without it, the government might be accused of lacking a post-conflict strategy," Recto said. So that reconstruction can begin soon, blueprints should have been drafted by now, Recto said. "Pre-construction activities can begin, such as needs assessment. Before we can build, build, build, we should brainstorm first. And then with a plan to guide us, we can then bid, bid, bid," Recto said. Recto said there are billions of pesos in unspent Calamity Fund waiting to be tapped to bring relief to displaced civilians and rehabilitate areas and commerce destroyed by fighting between government troops and terrorists. In fact, some of the "calamity funds" are supposed to have been released in the beginning of the year to the five agencies tagged under the 2017 national budget as recipients of "Quick Response Fund" (QRF). The latter, Recto said, serves as a standby emergency fund which a recipient agency can immediately use to respond to a natural or manmade calamity. The P6 billion QRF is separate from the National Disaster and Risk Reduction and Management Fund, the Calamity Fund's official name, which has been appropriated P15.755 billion this year. "There is a war being waged on two fronts: the military one and the humanitarian one. If we are airlifting troops to the frontlines, we must transport help to the civilians in the rear," Recto said. The senator also urged Malacanang to identify this early a "rehabilitation point person" for Marawi City. There must already be some planning at this stage and maybe some preparatory activities so that when the smoke has cleared, the development people must be ready to move in, Recto said.
The three-day affair started on Tuesday and the significance of it can be gauged from the presence of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat.

By Siddhartha Rai: In what seems to be an attempt to send a strong message in the Valley, the RSS is holding one of its annual meetings in Jammu.

The three-day affair started on Tuesday and the significance of it can be gauged from the presence of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat along with his karyavaahs and sarkaryawahh Bhaiyaji Joshi.

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While RSS workers denied any major decision could come out of the meeting as it was one of the "routine" post Sangh Shiksha Varg meets that are usually held in July every year, the venue is simply telling!

'CLOSED DOOR EVENT'

"No resolution is passed in these meetings that happen every year after the completion of the Sangh Shiksha Varg or the yearly training session," said an RSS functionary. He added that the affair was behind closed doors and not open to prying eyes of the media. "No one is allowed inside," he added.

The meet is attended by the prant pracharaks (state-level pracharaks) and kshetra pracharaks (regional level pracharaks).

Sources added that these functionaries would be presenting the report card of the training exercise from across India. Another significant thing on the agenda is to review the growth and expansion of the sangh across India and to strategise on further expansion of the organisation.

Ved Mandir, where the meeting is underway has been put under a cloud of tight security. RSS national executive member Indresh Kumar is supposed to be point person for this meeting. Kumar is the de facto head of the Muslim Rashtriya Manch (MRM), which the RSS calls a forum of nationalist minded Muslims and of which Kumar is only the guiding light.

Also read: RSS body says immigrants to blame for Noida housing society violence, wants CBI probe

Also read: Prophet Muhammad said eating beef is wrong: When RSS leader Indresh Kumar preached Islam

Also read: RSS affiliate wants sports ministry to cancel BCCI's contract with Chinese firm Oppo

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Saif Ali Khan has joined Varun Dhawan and filmmaker Karan Johar in apologising to Kangana Ranaut after their Nepotism Rocks act at the IIFA awards this year.

By Siddharth Husain: Saif Ali Khan is the latest in the list of actors who have apologised for their 'nepotism rocks' act at the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) awards this year. The incident took place on July 15, when Varun Dhawan joined Saif and filmmaker Karan Johar on the IIFA stage and took several potshots and Kangana Ranaut. The incident brought the infamous Karan Johar vs Kangana Ranaut nepotism fight back in the spotlight.

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Saif Ali Khan's apology comes after Varun Dhawan's tweet and Karan Johar's clarification on the same.

Speaking to India Today Television, Saif Ali Khan said that he has apologised to Kangana Ranaut over a text message and that he regrets being a part of the joke.

Saif said that the joke was unintentional, but it was scripted and that Kangana understood his position when he messaged her to apologise.

WHAT WAS 'THE JOKE'?

On July 15, during the IIFA awards, Varun Dhawan joined hosts Saif Ali Khan and Karan Johar on stage to receive his trophy for the Best Performance in A Comic Role. Saif joked that Dhawan had made it big in the industry because of his father, filmmaker David Dhawan.

"You are here because of your papa," Saif quipped.

Varun said, "And you're here because of your mummy (veteran actress Sharmila Tagore)."

Karan promptly added, "I am here because of my papa (late filmmaker Yash Johar)."

They then said in unison, "Nepotism rocks". What unfolded on stage after that was even worse. The trio broke into the song Bole Choodiyaan Bole Kangana, and soon Karan said, "Yeh Kangana bahut bolti hai."

Once the incident made its way to social media, there was an explosion. Over tweet after tweet and post after post, people went on to criticise Karan Johar, Varun Dhawan and Saif Ali Khan for their crass 'nepotism rocks' act.

APOLOGIES FROM VARUN AND KARAN

Varun Dhawan was the first among the trio to tweet out an apology. The actor wrote, "I express my apology and regret... I am extremely sorry if I have offended or hurt anyone with that act (sic)."

A clarification from Karan Johar followed. In an interview this morning, Karan said how he has been 'ungraceful' to Kangana.

"This is something that I need to say and to clarify. Of course, I do not believe that nepotism rocks. Of course, I believe that only talent and hard work rocks. What we said was meant to be a joke, and I think it was misplaced, misunderstood and I think it went wrong. I regret it. The idea of that joke was entirely mine, so I take total onus. I think we went a bit far with the Kangana mention," said Karan.

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BEING SHARMILA TAGORE'S SON DID HELP SAIF INITIALLY

Apart from messaging Kangana, Saif told India Today Television that has not spoken to either Karan Johar or Varun Dhawan. On the issues between Johar and Ranaut, Saif said it was a personal matter between the two.

Nepotism is a major topic that definitely needs to be debated, Saif also said. He admitted that being the son of Sharmila Tagore did help him to find work easily in the beginning of his career, but said that he would not have survived in the industry for so long had he not had any talent.

ALSO READ: What happened since Nepotism Rocks barb at Kangana Ranaut at IIFA 2017 ALSO READ: KJo regrets chanting 'Nepotism Rocks' at IIFA 2017, says he has been ungraceful to Kangana

ALSO READ: Varun Dhawan apologises for nepotism barb at Kangana at IIFA 2017

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ALSO WATCH: KJo lashes out at Kangana, asks her to leave Bollywood if it was so bad

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The search for the missing 70-year-old owner of a Marin County oyster farm who went missing in Tomales Bay on Tuesday was called off on Wednesday, an official said.

Charles Tod Friend, an owner of the Tomales Bay Oyster Co. in Marshall, vanished about 3:15 p.m. Tuesday after embarking on a short motorboat trip his employees said hes made a million times.

Rescue crews had combed every rock and stone, in an attempt to find Friend, said Lt. Doug Pittman of the Marin County Sheriffs Office. The search was suspended around 4:30 p.m., he said.

We are all in shock; cant believe this is real, Sean OBrien, an assistant manager at the Tomales Bay Oyster Co. told The Chronicle on Wednesday.

Friend was last seen leaving a public boat launch at Nicks Cove in Marshall. He was heading for a dock about 3 miles south when he disappeared, OBrien said.

Its very usual for him to go there, OBrien said of the trip Friend was taking when he went missing.

A group of boaters who know Friend were out on the bay and reported seeing his empty vessel spinning in circles, Pittman said.

Investigators believe Friend, who was not wearing a life jacket, fell off of his boat about 400 yards from the shoreline, though it remains unclear what caused him to fall.

On Wednesday, officials from the Coast Guard, the Marin County Fire Department, the Marin County Sheriffs Office, at least 50 search-and-rescue volunteers, and family members and others who know Friend were out looking for him.

The San Francisco Police Department dispatched to the scene a marine unit and a 47-foot boat equipped to search underwater, Pittman said.

Marina Andriola Watchorn, one of the owners of the Hog Island Oyster Co., said her 32-year-old son, who lives in Santa Rosa, texted her Wednesday morning that he was joining the search efforts.

Hes a very experienced waterman, Andriola Watchorn said of Friend. Hes a real man of the land and of the sea.

Friend took over ownership of Tomales Bay Oyster Co. in 2009. He began his oyster farming career in 1989 when he worked for the Hog Island Oyster Co. During his nine-year tenure there, he developed a close bond with Watchorns son, Gianni Watchorn.

Gianni Watchorn said he combed the shoreline for hours Wednesday searching.

Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @SarRavani
MARIPOSA  Gold Countrys southernmost town, a collection of old saloons and bygone buildings that now peddle mostly ice cream and local wine to tourists, stood nearly empty Wednesday as a raging wildfire just west of Yosemite forced thousands to flee.

Flames from the fast-moving Detwiler Fire were tearing across a grassy ridgeline just above the 1850s-era community, burning homes as it charred some 48,000 acres of foothills to the north and leaving residents and visitors anxious about the fate of historical Mariposa.

This is not good. This is not good, said Charlotte Allen, as she took in the frightening sight of thick smoke passing by the Miners Inn, where she worked the front desk and was yet to evacuate. We always get fires, but never this close.

Firefighters, aided by about 20 helicopters and planes, were waging a fevered battle to keep the blaze from pushing into the 2,000-person city. Already 29 structures had burned, but another 4,000 homes and businesses remained in the fires path, authorities said.

Im praying and hopeful theyll contain it before it gets into town, said Deb Harwood, who just two weeks ago retired to the foothills from the Bay Area.

Harwood was forced to flee her new mobile home in Mariposa this week and was staying at an evacuation center 45 miles away in Oakhurst. Several who left their homes because of the fire went to Oakhurst after the evacuation center in Mariposa had to be evacuated.

Meanwhile, as far away as Yosemite Valley, lights flickered on and off as the inferno barreled across power lines and roads 30 miles west of the park. Smoke clouded views of popular Half Dome and El Capitan while portions of Highway 49 and Highway 140, a primary route to Yosemite, were shut down. All park sights and services, however, remained open.

The past few weeks have brought hot, dry weather to the Sierra foothills, often in the triple digits, which has combined with erratic winds in recent days to fuel the Detwiler Fire. The heat is not expected to let up, with temperatures forecast to warm slightly in coming days.

The blaze, which began Sunday several miles north of Mariposa, is another mark of Californias late but extraordinarily busy peak fire season. While a wet winter left hills and valleys much moister than normal this year, once they dried out, a bumper crop of grass and brush emerged as easy prey for fire, particularly at lower, hotter spots like Mariposa.

Also, the Mariposa area is ground zero of the states tree mortality epidemic. Tens of millions of trees have died because of the recent drought and a bark beetle infestation in the central and southern Sierra, a die-off that authorities fear only intensifies fire.

About 186,000 acres have burned across California this year, according to state and federal figures  about 50 percent more than this time last year and nearly double the five-year average. The Detwiler Fire ranks among the biggest so far, and with fire officials estimating just 7 percent containment Wednesday, the potential for growth remains high. The cause remains under investigation.

Late Tuesday, Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in Mariposa County, which will help get more money and manpower to the area. About 2,200 firefighters were battling the blaze Wednesday afternoon, with the foremost goal of halting its southerly push.

Its backing slowly down a hill and there are multiple fire engines and strike teams in there to keep the fire from reaching Mariposa itself, said Jordan Motta, spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Its just all hands on deck right now.

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.

Motta said the strong show of force by firefighters appeared to have slowed if not stopped the fires forward momentum, at least for the time being.

Janet Kirkland, 72, another evacuee, was most concerned about her 20-year-old African gray parrot named Rookie. She had time to pack up her two dogs, but the bird remained at her house, which she was not optimistic about.

Ive resigned myself to the fact that I may not have a home to come back to, she said.

Evan Sernoffsky, Sarah Ravani and Kurtis Alexander are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com, sravani@sfchronicle.com and kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky, @SarRavani and @kurtisalexander
State officials, health insurers and consumer advocates are breathing a tentative, temporary sigh of relief after the GOP campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act collapsed Tuesday due to lack of Republican support.

Still, many worry that the lingering instability the Trump administration has already injected into the insurance market could continue, making it difficult for insurers and consumers to predict health insurance costs in the near future.

While its good news that repeal and replace and repeal and delay for the moment have failed, the bad news is that the president and his administration have been hard at work undermining the ACA in the meantime, said state Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones.

President Trump on Tuesday continued encouraging the failure of the ACA, tweeting, As I have always said, let Obamacare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan.

Even before congressional repeal proposals were introduced this spring, the White House had been chipping away at the ACA. It loosened enforcement of the health laws requirement to buy insurance. That requirement causes health costs to be spread more widely because more people, and healthier people, buy insurance. The administration has also threatened to end a critical stream of federal funding, known as cost-sharing subsidies, that helps insurance companies pay for care for millions of low-income Americans. These provisions continue to face an uncertain future and remain a chief concern among state health officials and insurance companies.

Those two things are largely outside the control of California regulators, and both of them could cause premiums to increase or insurers to leave the market, said Cynthia Cox, a health policy researcher at the Kaiser Family Foundation. The political uncertainty has already done some damage.

The federal government spends $7 billion a year on the cost-sharing subsidies nationwide, and $750 million of it goes to help about 680,000 low-income Californians cover co-payments and deductibles. A lawsuit challenging the legality of the payments is on hold before a federal appeals court. The outcome is largely in the hands of the Trump administration, which has the power to continue or halt the payments. The administration is continuing the payments month-to-month but has not clarified its long-term plans. That makes it more difficult for insurers to set rates for insurance plans, or to decide whether they want to continue selling on exchanges including Covered California, which were created by the ACA and are heavily used by people relying on cost-sharing subsidies.

Were pleased it appears the ACA will continue to be the law of the land, but there remains a lot of uncertainty about what may happen next and whether funding will be there, said Gary Cohen, vice president of government affairs for Blue Shield of California, the largest health insurer on Covered California. So this is not a time for cheering or high-fives.

Even California, which has generally maintained a more stable individual insurance market than other states, may not be immune to the consequences other states are facing, such as insurers withdrawing from the exchange, Jones said. It wouldnt be the first time, however: UnitedHealthcare withdrew last year from Covered California and a number of other state exchanges, citing high costs.

Were going to see significant rate increases in California, Jones said. I also think theres the possibility that health insurers will reduce in part, if not entirely, the counties theyre selling in.

Jones declined to specify which counties insurers may pull out of. Currently, all California counties have at least two insurers offering plans through Covered California, the state exchange where low-income residents who receive ACA federal subsidies can buy insurance plans.

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Covered California plans to make 2018 rates public on Aug. 1. The agency is, for the first time, negotiating with insurers to establish two sets of rates  one that includes the cost-sharing subsidies, and one that does not.

This decision is based on the ongoing federal uncertainty around the repeal and replacement attempts of the Affordable Care Act and the dramatic potential impacts such uncertainty has on the rates and on California consumers, Covered California said in a statement Tuesday. A spokeswoman declined to comment further.

Tuesday marked the apparent end of the months-long push by congressional Republicans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. The House passed a repeal bill in May, but the Senate failed to garner enough support to bring its version of the legislation to a floor vote. On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pushed for action on a previous repeal bill the Senate passed in 2015, but fell short of the GOP votes needed to bring that measure to consideration.

Lanhee Chen, a health policy research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said he is disappointed the Senate bill failed because it would have been an improvement over the status quo under the ACA. Rising premiums and limitations on choice around mandated benefits still need to be addressed, he said.

Whether they do get addressed is an open question now because the repeal effort, in the short run at least, has failed, Chen said. I hope those get addressed at some point.

Catherine Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cho@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @Cat_Ho
The idea of a universal basic income  monthly cash payments from the government to every individual, working or not, with no strings attached  is gaining traction, thanks in part to endorsements from Silicon Valley celebs.

Some see it as a way to compensate for the traditional jobs with benefits that will be wiped out by robotics, artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles, globalization and the gig economy. Others see it as a way to reduce income inequality or to create a more efficient, less stigmatizing safety net than our current mishmash of welfare benefits.

I think ultimately we will have to have some kind of universal basic income, I dont think we are going to have a choice, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February.

In a commencement speech at Harvard University in May, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things. And in a July 4 blog post, Zuckerberg praised Alaskas Permanent Fund Dividend, the nearest thing to universal income in this or any country. Since 1982, Alaska has been distributing some of its oil revenue as an annual payment, ranging from about $1,000 to $3,000, to every resident including children.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and Y Combinator president Sam Altman have all said its worth exploring. Y Combinators nonprofit research lab started a basic income pilot with fewer than 100 people in Oakland last fall with the goal of gathering information to structure a larger research proposal, its director, Elizabeth Rhodes, said.

The concept has been around, with different names and in different countries, for centuries, said Karl Widerquist, co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network.

It enjoyed a wave of U.S. popularity in the 1910s and 20s and again in the 60s and 70s when it was championed by free-market economist Milton Friedman, Martin Luther King and, for a while, Richard Nixon.

It resurfaced again after the 2008 financial crisis, when soaring unemployment and corporate bailouts focused attention on the 99 percent. The concept picked up steam in recent years as studies started predicting widespread unemployment because of automation.

Basic income has fans across the political spectrum, but for very different reasons. Libertarian backers would replace all or most welfare programs with a monthly cash payment as a way to prevent poverty, reduce government bureaucracy and let people decide for themselves how to use the money.

Paul Marotta/Getty Images

By contrast, those left of center like the idea of using (basic income) as a supplement to the existing safety net, said Natalie Foster, co-chairwoman of the Economic Security Project, a two-year fund devoted to researching and promoting the idea of unconditional cash.

In a utopian version, the money would sit alongside existing programs and go to every man, woman and child, Foster said. But if you made it enough to keep people above poverty  $1,000 a month is a popular number  it starts to add up to a very significant portion of the GDP, Foster said.

Thats why some proposals would reduce or eliminate payments to children or to adults over 65 if they are getting Social Security and Medicare. Some would limit the benefits going to high-income people, either directly or indirectly by raising their tax.

In the simple model, everyone in the lower half (of the income distribution) would be a net beneficiary, everyone in the upper half would be net payers, Widerquist said.

Charles Murray, a libertarian political scientist with the American Enterprise Institute, has proposed a basic income plan that would replace all transfer payments including welfare, food stamps, housing subsidies, the earned income tax credit, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It would also eliminate farm subsidies and corporate welfare.

In exchange, each American older than 21 would get a monthly payment totaling $13,000 a year, of which $3,000 would go to health insurance. After $30,000 in earned income, a graduated tax would reimburse some of the grant until it dropped to $6,500 at $60,000 in income. However, the grant would never drop below $6,500 to compensate for the loss of Social Security and Medicare.

Murray admitted that many seniors get more than $6,500 worth of benefits a year from those two programs, which is why it would have to be phased in.

What Im proposing would actually be cheaper than the current system, Murray said. It would give adults a living income and liberate people who are tied to a job or welfare program in a particular city because they cant risk leaving to pursue a new opportunity.

KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty Images

Andy Stern, a senior fellow at the Economic Security Project, has proposed a left-of-center plan that would give every adult 18 to 64 a monthly cash payment of $1,000. It would replace welfare programs such as food stamps, the earned income tax credit, unemployment and Supplemental Security Income. But it would keep Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security disability.

He figures the plan would cost about $1.75 trillion a year. Ending welfare programs would save about a third of that. Another third could come from ending the tax deduction for mortgage interest and other write-offs. The remaining third could come from new sources such as a tax on carbon emissions or financial transactions.

Stern would not reduce payments to the rich or raise their taxes because that would bring back the problem he is trying to eliminate  determining who is worthy and unworthy to receive benefits. But many of the tax increases he envisions would have a disproportionate effect on higher-income people, he said.

Some opponents of guaranteed income say it will encourage laziness. Proponents say the current system discourages work by taking away some benefits as income goes up.

Zipcar founder Robin Chase, now a speaker and author, said universal income would encourage and reward important work that does not get monetized, such as child care and volunteer work. It would also spur business creation. I had the luxury of taking risks because I had a husband who had a full-time job with health care. A majority of the population cannot take any risks in pursuing innovation or higher-value, non-remunerative things.

Some believe the answer to income inequality and automation is not guaranteed income but a guaranteed job. Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, has said the federal government should provide a job with benefits to anyone who wants one and cant get one. A job guarantee could simultaneously lower un- and underemployment while providing critically needed labor in fields ranging from infrastructure to education to child and elder care, Bernstein, who was an economist in President Barack Obamas administration, wrote in the American Prospect.

Jason Furman, who chaired Obamas Council of Economic Advisers, doesnt like guaranteed jobs or guaranteed income. Furman, now a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, said universal income suffers from three problems.

One is that its very hard to make the numbers add up. To get to (incomes) like $12,000, you need huge increases in taxes. Two, there are a lot of benefits to targeting. You only get unemployment if you dont have a job and are looking for a new job. If anything, I might toughen the work search requirement to receive unemployment.

Finally, he said, I believe there is no reason that people cant be employed in the future. We have thousands of years of experience of technological progress not leading to mass unemployment. He pointed out that technologically advanced countries do not have higher unemployment rates than those that are less advanced.

We should put more effort into how to create jobs and prepare people for jobs in the future, he said. Universal basic income is giving up on work and giving up on people. Im not prepared to do that.

Kathleen Pender is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: kpender@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kathpender
Dev Bootcamps decision to shut down effective Dec. 8 comes at a time of transition in the coding camp industry.

The San Francisco company launched the nations first in-person, short-term, intensive coding camp in 2012. The boot camp industry grew rapidly as demand for programmers exploded, but jobs got somewhat harder to land as competition increased and tech companies scaled back their hiring. The industry itself has grown a great deal, about 10 times since 2012, said Liz Eggleston, whose website Course Report tracks coding camps.

In mid-2014, Dev was acquired by Kaplan, a large, privately held for-profit education provider. Kaplan helped Dev become the first coding camp to get licensed in California, a complicated undertaking some competitors resisted. Dev currently operates coding boot camps in six cities and has more than 3,000 graduates.

So it came as a shock last week when Dev announced that its final cohort would start Monday and graduate in December.

Brant Ward/The Chronicle

Since launching in 2012, weve been striving to find a viable business model that would enable us to further our vision of high-quality, immersive coding training that is broadly accessible to a diverse population, while also covering the critical day-to-day costs of running our campuses. Ultimately, we have been unable to find a sustainable model that doesnt compromise on one of those fronts, the company said.

Dev has promised its 285 currently enrolled students they will get the same experience as past students.

The decision to wind down was made by Dev Bootcamp leadership and supported by Kaplan, Dev spokesman Christopher Nishimura said in an email. Kaplan will continue to operate Metis, a smaller boot camp for data science training.

Devs impending shutdown is reflective of a difficult period in the boot camp industry, said Shawn Drost, co-founder of Hack Reactor, another San Francisco coding camp.

Today there are 94 full-time, in-person coding boot camps in 74 U.S. cities and Canada, according to Eggleston. In 2017, we expect 22,814 graduates. Since boot camps launched in 2012, we estimate about 57,000 graduates in total, she said.

Increased competition has brought consolidation. Some coding academies such as Hack Reactors parent ReactorCore and Galvanize have bought competitors.

Others have been purchased by major for-profit education companies, which have struggled under Obama-era regulations designed to crack down on those whose students get federal financial aid but fail to land jobs. President Trumps education secretary, Betsy DeVos, plans to put those regulations on hold. (Because coding camps are not accredited, their students are not eligible for federal aid or loans except for a very small pilot project.)

Capella Education bought DevMountain and San Franciscos Hackbright Academy. University of Phoenix parent Apollo Education bought a controlling interest in the Iron Yard Academy. Strayer Education bought the New York Code + Design Academy.

There is a fear of missing out, said Jake Schwartz, CEO of General Assembly, a coding camp company with campuses in 18 cities worldwide. For-profit postsecondary education is in trouble, even in the Trump era. They bought these boot camps as a hedge.

When Kaplan acquired Dev, I was totally freaked out. Kaplan was big, professional, Schwarz said. But he soon realized it was employing a lot of old-school tactics. (Devs) business model did not evolve at all. It continued teaching these immersive coding courses in a few cities.

General Assembly has expanded way beyond coding. It has online, offline, full-time and part-time courses in programming and other subjects including user experience design, data science and digital marketing. It is also partnering with companies to help them radically re-skill their employees, Schwarz said.

Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The Chronicle

The industry is also facing pressure from Trilogy Education, a fast-growing company that offers coding camps through universities or their continuing education programs, including UC Berkeley Extension.

Meanwhile, a free coding school started in Paris, called 42, opened in Fremont a year ago and has 522 students enrolled (though not all attend regularly). It doesnt compete directly with coding camps because its designed to be a three- to five-year college-level program without teachers or classrooms. Students learn by doing projects, usually in small groups.

Dev Bootcamp had two choices, Drost said. One was to raise its fees and academic standards. Dev was not known as the standout academic champions, they simply were not gunning for that reputation, he said. Devs tuition for an 18-week program in San Francisco is about $14,000. Hack Reactor charges $17,780 for its 12-week program.

The other option was to lower academic standards to increase enrollment. They didnt want to go that route. They couldnt find a business that works to achieve their vision of being a high-quality school.

Drost admitted that its getting harder for boot camp graduates to get jobs. Hack Reactors placement rate dropped a couple of percentage points in the past year, he said.

Travis Lawrence, who borrowed from family and friends to attend Devs San Francisco program in 2013, called it an excellent career move. It took him about three months to get a job with a now-defunct company called 50Cubes. He quickly realized that he probably could have learned as much about coding studying at home for three months, but would have missed the community of people, the quest for knowledge that excites you every day. If I were to make the decision again, I absolutely would, said Lawrence, now a front-end developer at Tumblr.

It took Danielle Hassid about five months to get a job with Grio App Studio after completing Devs program in September, but she also considered it a great experience. I was a mathematics major, education minor. This was by far the most beautiful learning environment I was ever in. Nobody had an ego. The environment was really supportive and encouraged diversity in technology and also having an openness about what you dont know. Dev taught her to learn faster and learn better.

Its weakness, she said, was placement. Every three weeks a new cohort would graduate. Thats a lot of (grads) to place. About one-fourth of the 30 people in her cohort are still looking for work, Hassid said.

Kathleen Pender is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: kpender@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kathpender
The apple tree in the backyard of our bungalow in the outer, outer Excelsior bore fruit this week. This is made unusual not only by the fact that it is mid-July but also because Aunt Dorla and my son Aidan only planted it three years ago, and did so during one of the longest droughts in California history.

Apples remind me of the day that we first landed on the moon: July 20, 1969. We were on vacation, out in Yaphank, which was the rural part of Long Island at the time. The Zeltmanns were there, and they had a small black-and-white television. We had been following the mission since the Saturn V rocket took off on the 16th. That Sunday afternoon, we all crowded around, watching a simulation of a little capsule dropping onto another orb.

Forty-eight years later, it is hard to describe the awe of the moment, but at the time, there seemed nothing greater than that, after thousands of years of humans looking at the moon in the sky, there was a man about to set foot on it.

Nurse Vivian prayed a rosary throughout the descent because she feared that the satellite was nothing but dust and that the lunar module would sink far below the surface. However, with the words, Houston, Tranquility Base. The Eagle has landed, we knew that all was good. We got into the old green Montego and drove 60 miles back to Ozone Park so that we could watch the first moon walk in color.

Two items went astray that day: As we arrived back in Queens, Nurse Vivian said, Kevin, I forgot that it was your birthday! We dont have a cake. And in the grand scheme of things, an 11th birthday was of significantly less note. But the Carvel ice cream store was closed. Nurse Vivian searched the cupboard, but, alas, no Duncan Hines cake mix. No chocolate chips. Only a bowl of apples left on the table from the week before. My father, Pop, used to say that the way you could tell the difference between the shanty Irish and the lace-curtain Irish was that the lace-curtain Irish had fruit on the table, even when no one in the house was sick. So even though we didnt have a couch in the living room, we had a vessel full of apples.

Nurse Vivian improvised. She tossed a stick of butter into the freezer. (Her secret strategy, unlike popular practice, was to roll the frozen butter with her wooden pin, and it melted into the softest crust an Irishman ever tasted.) She sat watching the coverage, peeling apple after apple. She laid out wax paper on the dining room table, sifted flour, and rolled a pie crust. She filled that dough with apples, cinnamon and nutmeg, and put it in the oven just as Neil Armstrong opened up the door and stuck his leg out. A moment later, he placed his foot onto the soil with the historic words, Thats one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

At least that is what I, the budding grammar nerd, heard, and it bothered me. He had left out the a in front of man, to indicate that this was one step for this particular Navy pilot, but that it had a larger meaning for everybody on this planet.

Turns out that I wasnt the only one bothered by the lack of an indefinite article. Armstrong himself insisted that he had stated the a but no one could hear it because of his Wapakoneta, Ohio, accent. I totally get that. With the remnants of my Queens accent, people insist that they cannot hear the R when I say New Yawk. Pop, also a Queens native, would say, The R is silent, like the P in ocean bathing.

For almost 50 years, computer programmers, linguists and communication scientists have searched for that a, finally noting that there was a 35-millisecond bump of sound between the for and the man that would have been too brief for human ears to hear.

The missing indefinite article, like the missing birthday cake, wasnt really as important as the intent.

What mattered was that Armstrong envisioned that this moment be shared with the family of humanity. What mattered even more was that an hour later, while we watched Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin plant a flag on that brave new world, the lights in the living room went out. I turned around, and there was Nurse Vivian, lime-green oven mitts holding a pie with a candle in it, letting me know that as history rolled out on that waxing crescent, the birthday of one little boy from Queens still mattered.

Kevin Fisher-Paulsons column appears Wednesdays in Datebook. Email: datebook@sfchronicle.com
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Marshawn Lynch is a man of many roles nowadays. Oakland Ambassador. Newly acquired Raider. Wilderness survival expert (kind of). World traveler. Benevolent community organizer. Now, it looks we can add restaurateur to the list.

According to KTVU, Beast Mode is taking over beloved Emeryville soul food restaurant, Scends, once the restaurants owner Cassie Nickelson retires next month.

For the uninitiated, Scends is a casual soul food/Southern food spot on the border of Oakland and Emeryville. The kitchen doles out crispy fried catfish, fresh oysters and prawns as easily as it does red beans and rice and fried chicken.

So how did Beast Mode get involved with the project?

The 80-year-old Nickelson told KTVU that about two decades ago, she was running a catering business out of her apartment in Oakland. Lynch lived nearby and hed be come buy her 75-cent hamburgers and 25-cent fries.

The liquor license for the restaurant has yet to change hands, so for now, Lynch is not yet an official owner. When the deal comes to fruition, itll be his first public foray into the Bay Area restaurant world, but not his first into the realm of all things food.

Last year, the running back launched his own line of namesake candy bars called Beast Mode. (the chocolate bars come in three flavors: smores, peanut butter and chocolate mint cookie.

Word right now is the menu will stay pretty much the same at Scends, based around seafood (fried catfish, tilapia, oysters, prawns) fried chicken and sandwiches. Undoubtedly there will be some cosmetic changes to the space to reflect Lynchs presence, but Nickelson said at this point she isnt sure what exactly those might entail.

Lynchs choice to reportedly take the place over once Nickelson steps down just highlights the superstars commitment to investing in the East Bay, specifically Oakland, because remember, as he said in Twitter post addressing his decision to come out of retirement for the Raiders: Im really from Oakland doe like really really really from from Oakland...

Welcome to the Bay Area restaurant world, Beast Mode.

Scends: 3627 San Pablo Ave

Justin Phillips is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @JustMrPhillips
WASHINGTON  Republicans in Congress may be faced with working with Democrats to improve the Affordable Care Act after a last-ditch plan  to repeal the law with no replacement  ended in failure Tuesday.

The question is whether theyll take the opportunity, or leave the exchange markets alone under the assumption that they will collapse and Democrats will take the blame.

Whether either party, and its voters, would allow bipartisan governing in todays deeply polarized climate remains to be seen. But Republicans may find they have little choice following the embarrassing failure to fulfill their marquee campaign promise to repeal the health care law.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat and chief architect of the Affordable Care Act, offered Democratic help. Acknowledging that the law, commonly referred to as Obamacare, needs to be updated, she urged the Trump administration and the GOP Congress to stop threatening to withhold vital payments to insurers to cover high-cost patients and other actions that have destabilized some insurance markets.

We would have been working with them from day one, Pelosi said in an interview Tuesday. Call it something else, name the provision something else, save face, get yourself a victory, but protect the American people.

Among the fixes a bipartisan effort could address are high premiums in the exchange markets for individual policies, especially for middle-class people, and lack of competition among insurers in rural areas. But for his part, President Trump on Tuesday showed no interest in working with Democrats.

His plan now is to let Obamacare fail, he said. It will be a lot easier. ... We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We'll let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us."

Republicans on Capitol Hill seemed to reject the strategy as suicidal, openly admitting that their party now owns health care after their plan to replace the health care law ended in tatters Monday night and they failed to coalesce around a follow-up plan to simply repeal the current law with no replacement.

It was in our court. This was our responsibility, said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. Asked what Republicans intend to do now, Johnson said, I dont know what the strategy is. We need to move pretty quickly.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who helped kill the Senate bill, urged a new bipartisan approach. Republicans have to admit that there are some things in the Affordable Care Act they like, she said. Democrats have to admit that there are parts of the act that are broken. And then build consensus.

But getting Republicans to work with Democrats on the effort would seem to require a wholesale change in the partys long-standing approach to governance.

Republicans have eschewed bipartisanship since the 1990s, when Republican firebrand Newt Gingrich became House speaker by arguing that GOP moderation had kept the party out of power for decades. Later adopting the so-called Hastert Rule in the House, under former Speaker Dennis Hastert, Republicans have sought to pass legislation only with Republican votes.

When Republicans assumed full control of Washington in January, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., quickly embarked on a GOP-only approach on health care, using a special budget procedure that would allow Republicans to pass legislation with a bare majority vote. Taking partisan tactics to a new extreme, he even angered some of his own caucus by ignoring the committee process and writing the health care legislation in secret out of his own office.

After the first version of his legislation failed to reach the Senate floor last month, McConnell framed the idea of working with Democrats as a threat, telling his members that if the GOP-only approach fails, they would have to negotiate with the other party.

Democrats also face risks in bipartisanship. Working with Republicans would mean fixing the current law instead of moving toward the single-payer, Medicare-for-all approach that many liberals have now embraced. Helping Republicans would also mean rescuing the GOP from its current political donnybrook and perhaps sacrificing health care, at least in part, as a political issue in the 2018 election.

For Republicans, repairing the Affordable Care Act might require additional federal spending, an anathema to many in the party. Democrats also insist that Republicans give up on their effort to slash Medicaid and eliminate the Affordable Care Acts taxes on the health care industry and wealthy people.

And it would mean the GOP not only abandoning their seven-year vow to repeal the law, but embracing what many Republicans continue to describe as the nightmare of Obamacare.

Rep. Darrell Issa, a San Diego County Republican who narrowly won re-election last year, rejected that idea.

I would assume more propping up of a failing bill would be bipartisan, but real reforms, I havent seen any initiatives yet, Issa said. Asked if he would work with Democrats, Issa said, Sure, but I dont see the Democrats interest in spending less federal money.

Issa is among seven California Republicans representing districts that swung Democratic in last years presidential election. All 14 California House Republicans voted for a House version of the repeal-and-replace health care legislation, considered a high-risk vote in a state where the law is popular and its repeal would cause an estimated 4.5 million Californians to lose their insurance.

Half my constituents wanted an outright repeal and the other half includes people from keep-it-the-same to go to single-payer, Issa said, referring to a government run program. So I dont think there was a question but that I was going to please some and disappoint others in almost anything I did.

A handful of moderate Democrats in the New Democrat Coalition, including Rep. Ami Bera, a physician representing Sacramento, floated several proposals earlier this month with the aim of drawing at least a handful of moderate Republicans to begin work on a bipartisan approach. The group has Pelosis approval.

The need for Congress to act is becoming increasingly urgent, Bera said.

Insurance companies have been asked to submit two sets of rates, depending on whether the GOP legislation passes or the current law remains in place. Covered California, the states insurance market exchange, has not been able to release its policy rates, he said, because they dont know whats going to happen to the individual market. So thats not sustainable.

More and more counties nationwide face the prospect this fall of having no insurers offering policies on the exchanges, Bera said. So start there, where I think even Republicans understand weve got to have stabilization in the individual market, he said.

Bera said a collapse of the exchanges would be bad for both parties.

I look at this as a doctor, he said. Its not good for patients if the health care system collapses. ... I think we shoot ourselves in the foot as Democrats if we dont step up now and say here are things that we think we ought to fix in the individual market.

Carolyn Lochhead is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: clochhead@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carolynlochhead
Anda bhurji is so easy to make, and so versatile, that it goes with everything.

By Shreya Goswami: Eggs, milk, salt and pepper, and oil--that's all one ever needs to make scrambled eggs or anda bhurji. No wonder this easy-peasy and scrumptious dish is universally popular, and not just as a breakfast option.

Ask any student or busy professional, and they'll tell you what a boon scrambled eggs are. They deliver the perfect punch of protein, and go with everything from flour to rice, and veggies to cheese and meat.

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If you're looking for a quick and yummy snack or meal, you can never go wrong with scrambled eggs. But do you think that scrambled eggs get boring after a while? Stop right there!

Also Read: Mumbai's 'Eggs Kejriwal' tops New York's top food items list

There's so much you can do with this versatile dish that you could never be bored with it. Here are some of our favourite ways to have scrambled eggs.

1. On Toast

Classic, healthy, and easy to carry--scrambled eggs on toast can be jazzed up with spices, chopped veggies and bacon. If you want to stay simple, just add some chopped coriander leaves and lemon juice on top.

Picture courtesy: Pinterest/COOKTORIA {Tania Sheff}

2. Tacos

Make yourself a meal to indulge in, or offer it to your friends at that party you're throwing. Just get some tortillas or taco shells, and stuff them a large batch of spicy scrambled eggs, along with some toppings.

Picture courtesy: Pinterest/Danae

3. Roll

If you like dancing to desi tunes more, just get some rotis and stuff them with scrambled eggs and chutney to make the most delicious rolls. Even if you're too lazy to make a sabji or curry, you can always rely on homemade scrambled egg rolls.

Picture courtesy: Pinterest/lifemadesimplebakes.com

4. Sandwich

Making wholesome sandwiches just got so much easier! Just stuff them with scrambled eggs and cheese, add some quickly-cooked minced meat or sausages in you're non-vegetarian, and you'll never go back to cutting veggies to make sandwiches.

Picture courtesy: Pinterest/damndelicious.net

Also Read: 6 ice cream sundaes you can whip up in 5 minutes

5. Avocado Halves

This one is for the health freaks out there, who don't want to rely on carbs to make their scrambled eggs sing. Scoop out the avocado pits and stuff them with scrambled eggs, and there you have it. You could also stuff boiled egg whites with scrambled eggs to elevate the taste of that simple treat.

Picture courtesy: Pinterest/The Kitchn

6. Lasagna

Yes, you could layer pasta sheets, scrambled eggs and cheese to make quick and simple lasagnas at home! Forget minced meat and don't hassle over cutting veggies. This Italian dish becomes much simpler with a bowl full of scrambled eggs.

Picture courtesy: Pinterest/I Breathe I'm Hungry Picture courtesy: Pinterest/I Breathe I'm Hungry

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7. Pizza

When scrambled eggs and pizza meat, you can really get a party on! Scrambled eggs might just be the easiest pizza topping out there, and it's no less delicious than a pepperoni pizza. And guess what? You can also make some mini-pizzas for a party with scrambled eggs!

Picture courtesy: Pinterest/The Girl Who Ate Everything

8. Fried Rice

So you've got boiled rice, and you're too lazy or tired to make a sabji to go with it? Just make some scrambled eggs, and add the rice to turn it into fried rice. You can even add other easy-to-cook ingredients like spring onions and peas.

Picture courtesy: Pinterest/wallflowergirl.co.uk

9. Egg Maggi

If Maggi is your go-to dish for all occasions, trust scrambled eggs to elevate its flavours and make it more wholesome. These two easy-to-make dishes can merge together to make a very happy and tasty meal, any day!

Picture courtesy: Pinterest/My Food Story

Are you convinced that learning how to make scrambled eggs can make your life simpler than ever? Just check out the easiest scrambled eggs recipe we have here for you, and get cooking.

Also Read: 5 South Indian ingredients you must know all about

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Ingredients:

4 eggs

1/4 cup milk

Salt and pepper, as required

Oil, to cook

Method:

1. Beat the eggs, milk, salt and pepper in a bowl till they blend together, Beat a little further to make them airy.

2. Heat oil in a non-stick pan, and pour the egg mix into it.

3. When the egg mix starts setting, pull it gently or stir it to make soft chunks.

4. Cook the eggs to the consistency you like--runny or well done--and take them off the heat. Always serve scrambled eggs hot or warm.

--- ENDS ---
After his much-publicized, two-and-a-quarter-hour meeting early this month with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Germany, President Donald Trump chatted informally with the Russian leader for up to an additional hour later the same day.

The second meeting, undisclosed at the time, took place at a dinner for G-20 leaders, a senior administration official said. At some point during the meal, Trump left his own seat to occupy a chair next to Putin. Trump approached alone, and Putin was attended only by his official interpreter.

In a statement issued Tuesday night after published reports of the conversation, the White House said that "there was no 'second meeting' between Trump and Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner. The insinuation that the White House has tried to 'hide' a second meeting," it said, "is false, malicious and absurd."

"All the leaders" circulated around the room throughout the dinner, and "President Trump spoke with many leaders," the statement said. "As the dinner was concluding," it said, Trump spoke "briefly" with Putin, who was seated next to first lady Melania Trump.

The dinner conversation with Putin was first reported Monday by Ian Bremmer, president of the New York-based Eurasia Group, in a newsletter to group clients. Bremmer said the meeting began "halfway in" to the meal and lasted "roughly an hour." The senior official said it began with the dessert course, but did not comment on its length.

Pool reporters covering Trump noted that his and Putin's motorcades were among the last to leave the event, departing within minutes of each other just before midnight.

The encounter appeared to underscore the extent to which Trump was eager throughout the summit to cultivate a friendship with Putin. During last year's campaign, he spoke admiringly of the Russian leader and at times seemed captivated by him.

Meeting each other face-to-face for the first time at the Hamburg summit, the two presidents seemed to have a chemistry in their more formal bilateral session, evidenced by the fact that, despite being scheduled for 35 minutes, it continued for more than two hours.

But Trump's newly revealed conversation with Putin at the G-20 dinner is likely to stoke criticism, including perhaps from some fellow Republicans in Congress, that he is too cozy with the leader of a major U.S. adversary.

Putin's aide provided the only Russian-English interpretation, the White House statement said, because the president was seated next to the wife of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. "Each couple was allowed one translator," it said. "The American translator accompanying President Trump spoke Japanese."

The only version of the conversation provided to White House aides was that given by Trump himself, said the administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity before the White House statement was issued. Reporters traveling with the White House were not informed during the trip, and there was no formal readout of the chat.

The official Trump-Putin meeting, earlier in the day, led to confusion over whether Trump agreed, as Putin later implied, to accept the Kremlin's denial of any wrongdoing regarding interference in last year's election.

That meeting was attended by the leaders and their two interpreters, along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Tillerson later said Trump twice asked Putin if the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia had meddled in the race were true, and Putin twice denied it, so they moved on to other subjects of importance to the bilateral relationship, including Syria.

Russia's activities during the election, along with allegations that members of Trump's campaign may have coordinated with Kremlin attempts to tilt the race in Trump's direction, are the subject of investigations in Congress and by a special counsel.

In Trump's own account of the formal meeting, he repeated earlier comments that another country might have been responsible for cyber-interference in the election. "I'm not saying it wasn't Russia. What I'm saying is that we have to protect ourselves no matter who it is," he told reporters on Air Force One as he returned from a visit to France last week.

"You know, China is very good at this," Trump said. "I hate to say it, North Korea is very good at this."

Trump also said that Putin was unlikely to have preferred him over Hillary Clinton as president, since his goals include taking international energy business away from Russia and building up the U.S. military.

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.

The dinner at the G-20, held July 7-8, occurred hours after Trump and Putin's lengthy formal meeting. Leaders and their spouses were invited to a musical performance at Hamburg's riverside concert venue, followed by an intimate dinner in which they were seated next to the spouse of one of their counterparts, rather than their own. First lady Melania Trump was seated next to Putin.

Trump, who is among the newest world leaders in the G-20, remained at the dinner for the entire night. He was among the last to leave - after the host, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, had already departed. Pool reporters with the president saw Putin's motorcade leave at 11:50 p.m., followed shortly by Trump, who departed the concert hall at 11:54 p.m.

Leaders who witnessed the meeting were "bemused, nonplussed, befuddled" by the animated conversation, held in full view - but apparently not within listening distance - of others present, Bremmer said in a telephone conversation. He said he spoke with two participants at the dinner.

One senior European official whose head of government was there played down the attention the Trump-Putin chat garnered, saying that it was not unusual for leaders to circulate or "withdraw to a corner" at such private gatherings.

"Part of the rationale is the flurry of bilateral contacts that happen," the official said. "I don't find it a sensation," he said of the lengthy dinner chat, although "maybe Trump and Putin are a little different" from other attendees.

The administration official said there was nothing unusual in a meeting with no aides present, noting that Trump met alone with French President Emmanuel Macron when he visited Paris last week. He also held a one-on-one session, with no aides present, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi when Modi visited the White House late last month, the official said.

---

The Washington Post's Abby Phillip contributed to this report.
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Despite there being more than two dozen surveillance cameras at the top of Twin Peaks, crime at the popular San Francisco tourist attraction continues to increase, hitting a troubling pitch over the weekend with the murder of a 71-year-old photographer.

One problem is the cameras near the overlooks main parking lot are not intended to prevent or help solve crimes targeting sightseers inside the city park. Instead, the equipment was set up to protect one of San Franciscos most vital telecommunication hubs, at the top of the famous Christmas Tree Point lookout where Edward French  a local film scout  was shot dead during a robbery on Sunday.

Its not clear if Frenchs slaying was captured on video from the nearby red brick building, but some city officials are no longer satisfied with merely hoping the cameras catch criminal activity on the hill.

San Francisco Supervisor Norman Yee, who represents District Seven, which includes part of Twin Peaks, is seeking funds in the latest city budget for additional security cameras at the overlook to cut down on the hundreds of auto burglaries a year in the park and to help prevent another tragedy like Frenchs killing.

The budget went before the Board of Supervisors for a first reading on Tuesday.

I think that crime at Twin Peaks is something that the whole city needs to pay attention to, Yee said Tuesday. The locals up there understand that its not as safe as it used to be and you have to be careful.

Locals may well understand the growing risks on Twin Peaks, but with a consistent stream of tourists seeking the hilltops breathtaking views, criminals have a wealth of fresh targets every day.

Property crimes at Twin Peaks have gone up 34 percent in the first half of the year compared with the same period in 2016, according to the San Francisco Police Departments crime statistics.

Most of those crimes are vehicle break-ins, 247 this year. There have also been several armed robberies in the past two years, including one this month. And before French was killed, two people were slain at Twin Peaks on Valentines Day 2016 in a high-profile early-morning triple shooting.

Richard Contreras, 27, has pleaded not guilty to the killings and his case is set for a preliminary hearing in early August.

For the most part the crimes go unsolved, and police and city officials hope Frenchs killing doesnt see a similar fate.

It illustrates my sense that its a priority to get these security cameras up there, Yee said of Sundays killing. It reinforces it even more.

The dozens of cameras currently in place are crucial for monitoring the transmission building and its radio towers, which transmit signals for the police, fire department and other city agencies.

Yee said hes asked for $45,000 in the budget to go to the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department specifically for cameras on Twin Peaks dedicated to the parking lot and roads.

Once we approve the budget, I will urge Rec and Park to expedite this as quick as possible, he 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.

In the meantime, city police have a fixed patrol monitoring Twin Peaks while investigators work to identify Frenchs killers.

Police said French was approached by a young man and woman shortly before 8 a.m. on Sunday as he took photos in the parking lot.

Witnesses reported hearing a single gunshot before the suspects ran to a dark gray Honda Accord and fled the scene with the victims camera, said Officer Robert Rueca, a San Francisco police spokesman.

A jogger found French bleeding in the parking lot and performed CPR, but he later died at San Francisco General Hospital.

Despite having descriptions of suspects and their vehicle, Rueca said it hasnt been determined if any of the attack was captured by cameras on the nearby building. Additional cameras on the summit, though, would be welcomed by the department, he said.

Anything that is going to assist us in catching people who are committing crimes  and more importantly will stop crime from occurring altogether  we completely support that, Rueca said.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@

sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky
By PTI: Mumbai, Jul 19 (PTI) The Shiv Sena corporators have demanded that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) file a defamation suit against a popular radio jockey and a local FM channel for allegedly making fun of the civic body in a video over the bad condition of city roads.

The BMC has also issued a notice to RJ Malishka, working with a private FM channel in Mumbai, after mosquitoes were found breeding at her house in suburban Bandra.

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Yuva Sena members and corporators Sadanand Sarvankar and Amey Ghole, in a joint letter to the BMC Commissioner Ajoy Mehta yesterday, demanded that a Rs 500 crore defamation suit be filed against the channel.

"The radio channel and its RJ Malishka have knowingly targeted the BMC to tarnish its image for problems that are not under its jurisdiction," Sarvankar alleged while talking to PTI.

"Everyone knows that the maintenance and supervision of the big roads like Eastern Express Highway and Western Express Highway is the responsibility of the state government agencies. But the RJ, in her video, has portrayed that the BMC is responsible for all the potholes (on the citys roads)," he said.

He alleged that the video has not only maligned the image of Mumbai and the BMC, but has also shaken the confidence of thousands of BMC employees who work hard to keep the city free from water-logging during the rains.

Another corporator, Amey Ghole, said the BMC chief has assured them of appropriate steps over the issue.

"We hope that the BMCs legal department will swing into action," Ghole said.

RJ Malishka was featured in a 1.23-minute-long video footage, titled Mumbai tula BMC var bharosa nai ka (Mumbai, dont you have faith in BMC) in Marathi and uploaded on YouTube. In the footage, she purportedly poked fun at the bad state of roads filled with potholes in the city as well as the delays in suburban train schedules.

She is purportedly seen taking a dig at the BMC and other authorities over the issues related to the problems of traffic jams during the rains.

The BMC, meanwhile, has served a notice to the RJ alleging that mosquitoes were found to be breeding at her flat in Pali Hill area of Bandra.

"We have served a notice to RJ Malishka under section 381-B of the Mumbai Municipal Corporation (MMC) Act for the mosquito breeding at her house on the 6th floor of a building at Pali Naka in Bandra," a BMC official said.

"During a routine inspection, our team found Aedes mosquitoes breeding in a clay bowl kept under a pot as well as indoor breeding in the pots of plants," he said.

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The notice has been served to the RJs mother.

The RJ could not be reached for her comments on the issue.

Mumbai BJP president Ashish Shelar, however, termed the civic bodys action to serve notice to the RJ as "unfair."

"Completely unfair that authorities turn up at @mymalishkas house and find faults. Spoke to BMC Commissioner & ward officers to bring peace," Shelar tweeted.

Congress MLA Nitesh Rane said he stands behind the RJ, who is like a sister to him. PTI APM GK NM GK RAX

--- ENDS ---
WASHINGTON  With a friend in the White House and their party in control of both chambers of Congress, House Republicans have embarked on their most ambitious effort yet to change the way water flows in California.

Legislation that the House sent to the Senate last week outlines a bold effort to build big new dams and shift water from fish, birds and other wildlife to farms in the San Joaquin Valley.

The legislation would dry up long stretches of the states second-longest river, the San Joaquin, and end efforts to restore its obliterated salmon runs. It would downgrade the water rights of the wildlife refuges that make up the last patches of Californias interior wetlands.

The bill would speed reviews of five big dam projects in the state, long stalled because of their enormous cost and low water yields. It would drain more water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, override the Endangered Species Act and shift Californias control over its water to the federal government by preempting the states authority to protect fish.

Its a controversial bill for certain groups, but here in the valley its not controversial, said Ryan Jacobsen, a grape farmer south of Fresno and executive director for the Fresno County Farm Bureau. This is the bill we need.

Jacobsen called Fresno County the epicenter of the states recent record drought, which significantly reduced water deliveries to farms and cut many farmers off entirely.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. David Valadao, a Republican from Hanford (Kings County), and backed by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, is the latest and most ambitious iteration of an effort begun six years ago by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare. Until this years record rains ended the states five-year dry spell, the push was billed as drought legislation. Now its called the Gaining Responsibility on Water, or Grow, Act.

There is no reason  absolutely no reason  we should prioritize potential benefits to fish over real benefits to families, McCarthy said during the House debate last week.

The bill passed the House on a mostly party-line vote, without public hearings, and drew swift opposition from Gov. Jerry Brown, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, and Attorney General Xavier Becerra, all Democrats. The fishing industry and environmentalists also oppose it.

The biggest stumbling block to past Republican efforts on water diversion was a White House veto threat, but with a Republican now in the White House, that barrier no longer exists. Although Feinstein and Harris could filibuster a stand-alone Senate version, Republicans could work around that by attaching the legislation, whole or in pieces, to any of a slew of unrelated, must-pass bills  from an increase in the federal debt ceiling to appropriations needed to keep the government open.

This is the most brazen water grab bill weve seen since at least the mid-1990s, said John McManus, head of the Golden Gate Salmon Association, a fisheries group.

What it boils down to, he said, is the backers of this bill, a small number of people in the western San Joaquin Valley, are saying, To heck with it, were simply going to manage the Central Valleys rivers and the delta as nothing more than a canal to move Northern California water to us, and we really dont care about keeping the ecosystem alive anymore. Its too much of a bother.

Jacobsen of the Farm Bureau said it comes down to keeping farmers in business.

Were obviously trying to make our exports more reliable, simply to preserve our livelihoods down here, he said. I do not believe this bill will have any detriment whatsoever on the salmon and overall fisheries in the delta. Theyve taken our water over the last decade and have shown no difference when it comes to species revival.

The legislation would make major changes to the operation of Californias giant plumbing system, which takes water from rivers to provide it to people. Reverting to a more 20th century approach, it would prioritize water for farms and cities by rolling back efforts to compensate for the damage caused to fish and wildlife.

But to do so, the bill would preempt California water law by forbidding the state to exercise its duty under state law to protect the public trust, including the environment. In a letter opposing the bill, Becerra said the bill violates California sovereignty.

The bill would also renew dam-building in California by speeding reviews of projects that have been stalled for years because of their multibillion-dollar price tags and, by U.S. Bureau of Reclamation estimates, limited ability to provide new water. Among the most popular are a project to raise Shasta Dam in Shasta County; build a dam behind a dam on the San Joaquin River at Temperance Flat, north of Fresno; and dam a dry valley near Colusa to capture Sacramento River water in a project called Sites Reservoir.

The dam section largely mimics a bill sponsored by Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Elk Grove (Sacramento County), that passed the House last month, and puts the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which builds and operates dams, in charge of environmental permitting, overriding the role now played by fish and wildlife agencies.

The legislation would also increase pumping from the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta, reverting to pumping limits of more than two decades ago that led to severe fish declines. It would override Endangered Species Act protections for fish.

More than a third of the 134-page bill is devoted to gutting an effort to restore the San Joaquin River. The San Joaquin was dammed in 1942 just north of Fresno. Friant Dam is a keystone of the states water system, allowing cities and farms to thrive along the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, but it dried up 60 miles of the river, destroying what had been the nations largest population of spring-run chinook salmon.

The restoration program, authorized by legislation Feinstein pushed through Congress in 2006 to implement a landmark court settlement, is an effort to work with farmers to re-establish fragments of the rivers original floodplain and recharge aquifers, as well as restore native fish, said Rene Henery, California science director for Trout Unlimited, a conservation group.

The House bill would ban the reintroduction of salmon, and permanently dry up 60 miles of the river, said Doug Obegi, a water lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which brought the original lawsuit to restore flows below the dam.

Jacobsen said restoring salmon to the river has absolutely no chance of working given the warming climate, and that the objective is the replacement of the currently proposed salmon fishery with a warm-water fishery.

Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle

Critics said that translates to a trickle of water to keep bass alive but the end of hopes to revive what they call a living river. From a biological standpoint, theres absolutely no reason salmon cant live there if the river were allowed to be restored, Henery said.

The legislation also weakens water rights for wildlife refuges in the valley, putting them behind farmers in drought years instead of on an equal footing. The state and federal wildlife refuges, along with some privately owned waterfowl tracts for duck hunters, are managed much like farms, contracting water deliveries from the Central Valley Project, Californias vast system of federal dams and canals. The bill would cut in half the money available to refuges to buy water.

San Joaquin Valley refuges are the largest block of remaining wetlands in the West, and about all thats left of habitat for migratory birds on the Pacific Flyway and the plants and animals that once lived on the vast seasonal wetlands that covered the valley before the Gold Rush, said Ric Ortega, general manager of the Grasslands Water District in Merced County, the agency that provides water to wildlife refuges in the state.

If you can think of an animal, its out here  everything from river otters to minks, as well as endangered species such as the Western pond turtle, Ortega said. All the raptors, songbirds, waterfowl, shorebirds, its a pretty remarkable public trust that weve been able to hold onto. But this type of legislation could really issue a death blow.

Jeff Volberg, director of water law and policy for the California Waterfowl Association, a conservation group, said he has tried to get the attention of lawmakers about the importance of the refuges, but there just isnt sympathy in Congress in this particular delegation.

In December, Feinstein struck a deal with McCarthy to loosen water restrictions on farmers, attaching the measure to a popular water infrastructure bill that passed around midnight on the final day of the last Congress. Feinstein described the deal as a way to forestall bigger demands from valley Republicans.

Jacobsen said last years bill was only a first, short-term step.

This region can no longer sit by and stand there as legislative inaction cripples our industry, he said, adding that its now up to Feinstein and Harris now to show us your plan.

Feinstein and Harris said the legislation doesnt even come close to an agriculture-environmental balance and promised to fight it in the Senate.

Carolyn Lochhead is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: clochhead@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carolynlochhead

To read the bill

Online: To read the bill, go to http://bit.ly/2t9kE4k
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Although Elle Magazine just hosted its fourth Women in Tech dinner at Wayfare Tavern, editor Robbie Myers isnt ready to rest on her laurels for lauding female entrepreneurs.

Theres so much written about the bro culture in tech, Myers said. While more women are getting their businesses funded, that number remains relatively small and the needle has yet to really move in the percentage of women holding leadership roles. Sadly, people remain surprised that levels of sexual harassment and hostility toward women remain fairly consistent.

This years Power List honored Piraye Yurttas Beim (Celmatixfounder-CEO); Kimberly Bryant (Black Girls Code founder); Belinda Johnson (Airbnb chief business affairs and legal officer); Jess Lee (partner, Sequoia Capital); Fei-Fei Li (chief scientist at Google Cloud Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning and director of Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Lab); Maria Renz (Amazon VP); Jessica Richman (uBiome founder-CEO); and Shiza Shahid (Now Ventures co-founder).

Lee, Sequoias first female investing partner in the U.S., rose up the ranks as an associate product manager at Google under Marissa Mayer. But it was her engineering background, and fashion passion, that led her to Polyvore, where she became CEO.

Part of the reason I transitioned to venture capital is the funding ratio just trickles down to founders and engineers. It wasnt always easy to raise money for Polyvore, so I wanted to change that ratio, Lee said. What I love most about venture is partnering with founders for the long term. Based on all my Polyvore experiences, good and bad, I can help pay it forward to the next generation.

Bryant, a former electrical engineer in biotech manufacturing, was inspired to found Black Girls Code, an Oakland nonprofit, when her daughter expressed an interest in computer programing.

As a woman of color in a male-dominated industry, Bryant understood that career path required not only STEM education but also inner strength.

It was very difficult but also challenging in terms of learning about grit, resilience, leadership and fighting against the odds to thrive in an industry that doesnt see you as the norm, she said. Conversations about diversity and inclusion, and making steps to improve that, are much more common now. So thats progress. But work still remains to address the issues that drive inequity in tech.

Bryant has faith that the girls she trains today are the generation that will experience a level workplace playing field where theyll successfully compete with their peers.

Yet she only needs to look at her daughter, 18-year-old Kai Morton, who just graduated from Bishop ODowd High School. This summer shes modeling and working as a Black Girls Code program assistant.

After college, said Kai, beaming, I want to be CEO of my own tech company.

Picture perfect: In 2010 as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was creating its 75th anniversary tribute book, 75 years of Looking Forward, a decision had to be made for the tomes cover image  a choice between a Warhol or a work by Leslie Shows, a San Francisco Art Institute grad and a recipient of the museums vaunted SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) Art Award.

And we chose Leslie, a 2006 SECA honoree, recalled SFMOMA curator Janet Bishop during the recent 50th anniversary event. It signified our commitment to Bay Area artists and what is special about SFMOMA. These groundbreaking SECA artists become part of sustained engagement with the museum.

The 2017 honorees (Alicia McCarthy, Liam Everett, Sean McFarland, Lindsey White, K.r.m. Mooney) were feted at SFMOMAs inaugural 3x1 Summer Smash soiree  a free-range gallery roam around the museum punctuated by a McCalls Catering buffet and viewing of the SECA show (co-curated by Erin OToole amid five galleries) and two exhibition openers, Noguchis Playscapes and Soundtracks.

Founded in 1967, SECA provides society members with studio tours to discover the vast array of contemporary stylings  from Abstract to Mission School  being created by Bay Area artists.

SECA ensures were not only out looking, thinking and being with the art thats created in our community, said SECA co-curator Jenny Gheith. But it also provides an opportunity for SFMOMA to strengthen our relationship with artists we admire.

That admiration continued later at Uno Dos Tacos, where the artists were toasted with margaritas at a post-party jointly hosted by their representative galleries: Altman Siegel, Berggruen and Casemore Kirkeby.

Theres such a strong feeling of community among San Francisco galleries, artists and SFMOMA, enthused Gretchen Berggruen. So we decided to continue the SECA party and celebrate that joyful spirit we share.

Catherine Bigelow is The San Francisco Chronicles society correspondent. Email: missbigelow@sfgate.com Instagram: @missbigelow
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The thrill of art in print guides San Franciscos second annual Art Book Fair, opening Friday, July 21, at the Minnesota Street Project. Its a chance for more than 100 publishers from the Bay Area and across the United States to come together and showcase artists books and catalogs, and monographs of artists works that might not be seen otherwise.

The second annual Art Book Fair is the result of a three-way collaboration between the Minnesota Street Project and two local publishers: Colpas Luca Antonucci and David Kasprzak, and Park Lifes Jamie Alexander and Derek Song.

The San Francisco fair was inspired by similar book fairs in Los Angeles and New York.

We are looking to provide an event, a venue and a market for the great independent art publishing in the Bay Area, Alexander says. Its kind of a gathering where everybody can get together and show off their wares.

Carlos Valladares/Courtesy of the artist. Photos by Korey Luna.

With the fair so new to the city, theres a surfeit of ways its organizers can explore where it will go in the coming years. Eager to replicate the success of last years Art Book Fair, the focus is on making this years fair more robust, with more special programming and a heavier international and LGBTQ presence.

On that note, whats sure to be one of the weekends biggest highlights is a panel discussion on Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community, a new art book published by Ammo Books. The panelists include John Chaich, co-editor of the book, and four other featured Bay Area artists: Jai Andrew Carrillo, James Gobel, Ramekon OArwisters and Angie Wilson.

Chaich and the artists will discuss the 192-page book, which spotlights 30 contemporary queer artists working in the mediums of fiber art and textiles, and craft traditions such as crochet, knitting and quilting. It is the companion book of the exhibition of the same name, which was held at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York in 2014.

Chaichs vision for the book, he says, was to make something that could live as comfortably at an art school library as it could at Urban Outfitters, with broad appeal to academic and non-specialized readers.

We really wanted the book design to give you the experience of a studio visit, he says.

He says he appreciates events like the Art Book Fair where the work of queer artists can be seen in such a public, intimate setting.

I think the place of art-book fairs in a digital age really speaks to an audiences hunger for the tactile, finely crafted object, he says. We have instant access to hundreds of images online at any given hour, but a book encourages us to slow down, focus and appreciate the thoughtfulness of lines, language and how those work together.

After the talk, OArwisters will lead a Crochet Jam.

Carlos Valladares/Courtesy of John Chaich

OArwisters, whose art explores his identity as a black queer man coming of age in the Jim Crow South, has struggled to find a place in traditional galleries for nearly 25 years. Thats one reason why events like the Art Book Fair and art books like Queer Threads hold such importance  and subversive potential.

I had to ask myself, What do I really want from these  mostly white male  museum curators? OArwisters says. They dont really see my experience; they see the icon of the black male. So I felt, instead of me going to others, why dont I do it for and with others?

That was the genesis of not only his artworks appearance in Queer Threads, but also Crochet Jam, a collaborative art-making event he started in 2012 in honor of his grandmother, with whom hed spend hours quilting quietly and calmly. The rules are simple: You crochet for hours at a time. Dont know how to crochet? No problem; OArwisters and others will help teach you.

This calm, relaxing and peaceful atmosphere was just what a confused little black queer boy needed when the world outside was often negative, hostile and unforgiving, he says in an interview with Danny Orendorff in the book. Its his own unique way of giving love and artistic consciousness back to a world that refused (and still refuses) people like him.

I feel very empowered, he says on the Crochet Jam. It makes liberation a form of art.

Carlos Valladares/John Chaich

San Francisco Art Book Fair: Preview 6 to 10 p.m. Friday, July 21; fair, 11a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, July 22; 11 to 5 p.m. Sunday, July 23. 1275 Minnesota St., S.F. For a complete list of exhibitors and other information, go to www.sfartbookfair.com

S.F. Art Book Fair highlights

Queer Threads panel discussion and book signing. 1 p.m. Saturday, July 22, in The Lounge.

Crochet Jam, led by Ramekon OArwisters. 2 to 3 p.m. Saturday, July 22, in the Minnesota Grove.

Lonnie Holley and Chris Johanson have collaborated on a unique zine, which will be on sale at the Paulson Fontaine Press table.

Tamara Shopsin will perform Swingin Salami, a performance piece involving salami, sandwiches and other eats. 3 to 4 p.m. Saturday, July 22, in the Media Room.

For a complete list of exhibitors and other information, go to www.sfartbookfair.com
A San Jose police officer has been cleared in an investigation into the fatal shooting of a fleeing murder suspect in 2015, the second fatal officer-involved shooting in as many days, officials said.

Forty-year-old Richard Jacquez was killed by police on Aug. 17, 2015, four days after allegedly raiding a business complex and fatally shooting 38-year-old Christopher Wrenn in the course of a robbery, according to a report from the Santa Clara County district attorneys office.

Wrenn was shot while trying to flee the robbery, a slaying that was recorded by surveillance cameras in the complex, police said.

The night he was killed, Jacquez was seen getting into a Honda Accord driven by a woman whom police believed he intended to kill because she knew too much about the robbery, prosecutors wrote.

Jacquez led officers on a high-speed chase, according to police. He eventually tried to run from police on foot, and although Officer Jacob Morris tried to subdue him by hitting him with his car, the attempt proved unsuccessful, with Jacquez getting back up and continuing to run, police told prosecutors.

Morris shot Jacquez five times, believing Jacquez intended to take people hostage in a nearby house, according to the report. Police initially reported that Jacquez reached for his waistband, but that claim did not come from Morris and was later retracted, prosecutors said.

Officers had been informed that Jacquez was armed, and only discovered he was not after he had been shot, prosecutors wrote.

Morris was found to have acted lawfully because he feared for his life and the lives of people in nearby homes, Deputy District Attorney Lance Daugherty wrote.

A day before Jacquez was killed, two San Jose police officers shot and killed Matthew Castillo, allegedly Jacquezs associate in the Aug. 13 robbery, a shooting which the district attorneys office determined to be lawful earlier this year.

Jacquezs shooting was the departments fourth officer-involved shooting in nine days. In 2016, two lawsuits were filed against the city of San Jose over the shooting.

The San Jose Police Department has also come under scrutiny in 2017 for a rash of officer-involved shootings of mentally ill people and was criticized by the Department of Justice for alleged substandard accounting practices in a June audit.

Filipa Ioannou is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: fioannou@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @obioannoukenobi
The massive wildfire burning west of Yosemite was causing intermittent power outages at the park and obscuring views on Wednesday, but all sights and services remained opened.

Park spokesman Scott Gediman said many restaurants and hotels in Yosemite Valley were operating on electrical generators after seeing the lights flicker, mostly Tuesday night, as power lines either burned or were shut off for the fire fight.
A 17-year-old boy was arrested in connection with two shootings in San Francisco, one a fatal shooting Saturday of a teenager in the Bayview neighborhood, and another that left a man wounded last week, officials said Wednesday.

The suspect, whose name was not released because he is a juvenile, was taken into custody Tuesday on the 1500 block of Geneva Avenue in the Crocker-Amazon neighborhood and charged with attempted murder and murder for the two shootings, according to police.
MARIPOSA  Gold Countrys southernmost town, a collection of old saloons and bygone buildings that now peddle mostly ice cream and local wine to tourists, stood nearly empty Wednesday as a raging wildfire just west of Yosemite forced thousands to flee.

Flames from the fast-moving Detwiler Fire were tearing across a grassy ridgeline just above the 1850s-era community, burning homes as it charred some 48,000 acres of foothills to the north and leaving residents and visitors anxious about the fate of historical Mariposa.

This is not good. This is not good, said Charlotte Allen, as she took in the frightening sight of thick smoke passing by the Miners Inn, where she worked the front desk and was yet to evacuate. We always get fires, but never this close.

Firefighters, aided by about 20 helicopters and planes, were waging a fevered battle to keep the blaze from pushing into the 2,000-person city. Already 29 structures had burned, but another 4,000 homes and businesses remained in the fires path, authorities said.

Im praying and hopeful theyll contain it before it gets into town, said Deb Harwood, who just two weeks ago retired to the foothills from the Bay Area.

Harwood was forced to flee her new mobile home in Mariposa this week and was staying at an evacuation center 45 miles away in Oakhurst. Several who left their homes because of the fire went to Oakhurst after the evacuation center in Mariposa had to be evacuated.

Meanwhile, as far away as Yosemite Valley, lights flickered on and off as the inferno barreled across power lines and roads 30 miles west of the park. Smoke clouded views of popular Half Dome and El Capitan while portions of Highway 49 and Highway 140, a primary route to Yosemite, were shut down. All park sights and services, however, remained open.

The past few weeks have brought hot, dry weather to the Sierra foothills, often in the triple digits, which has combined with erratic winds in recent days to fuel the Detwiler Fire. The heat is not expected to let up, with temperatures forecast to warm slightly in coming days.

The blaze, which began Sunday several miles north of Mariposa, is another mark of Californias late but extraordinarily busy peak fire season. While a wet winter left hills and valleys much moister than normal this year, once they dried out, a bumper crop of grass and brush emerged as easy prey for fire, particularly at lower, hotter spots like Mariposa.

Also, the Mariposa area is ground zero of the states tree mortality epidemic. Tens of millions of trees have died because of the recent drought and a bark beetle infestation in the central and southern Sierra, a die-off that authorities fear only intensifies fire.

About 186,000 acres have burned across California this year, according to state and federal figures  about 50 percent more than this time last year and nearly double the five-year average. The Detwiler Fire ranks among the biggest so far, and with fire officials estimating just 7 percent containment Wednesday, the potential for growth remains high. The cause remains under investigation.

Late Tuesday, Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in Mariposa County, which will help get more money and manpower to the area. About 2,200 firefighters were battling the blaze Wednesday afternoon, with the foremost goal of halting its southerly push.

Its backing slowly down a hill and there are multiple fire engines and strike teams in there to keep the fire from reaching Mariposa itself, said Jordan Motta, spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Its just all hands on deck right now.

Motta said the strong show of force by firefighters appeared to have slowed if not stopped the fires forward momentum, at least for the time being.

Janet Kirkland, 72, another evacuee, was most concerned about her 20-year-old African gray parrot named Rookie. She had time to pack up her two dogs, but the bird remained at her house, which she was not optimistic about.

Ive resigned myself to the fact that I may not have a home to come back to, she said.

Evan Sernoffsky, Sarah Ravani and Kurtis Alexander are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com, sravani@sfchronicle.com and kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky, @SarRavani and @kurtisalexander
In 1946, Carlos Bulosan documented the gritty lives of Filipino migrant workers in California in his autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart.

Since that time, there have been a wealth of books about California farmworkers, from Steinbecks iconic Grapes of Wrath to Peter Matthiesens Sal Si Puedes, published at the height of the Delano grape strike, to Matthew Garcias recent From the Jaws of Victory, with revelations from an excavation of United Farm Workers archives.

Yet aside from Bulosans groundbreaking work seven decades ago, the stories have been told by outsiders  albeit excellent journalists and observers  not by farmworkers themselves.

Two new books, Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture, edited by Gabriel Thompson, and In the Fields of the North/ En los campos del norte, by David Bacon, change that pattern.

They come at a crucial time: One third of the nations agricultural workers, about 800,000 people, are in California. Though the crops they harvest yield $47 billion dollars annually, their average annual income is $14,000. They face chronic arthritis from stoop labor, pesticide poisoning and heat stroke.

Today, 70 percent of the farm workers were born in Mexico, and many travel with their families and fellow villagers from Oaxaca, Michoacan and Guerrero. They speak Mixteco, Triqui and 20 other indigenous languages; many dont know Spanish at all. We are the invisible of the invisible, Fausto Sanchez, a Mixteco, told Thompson. Sanchez worked the onion fields and orange groves and is now an advocate with California Rural Legal Assistance living in Arvin, a whisper of a town south of Bakersfield where Steinbeck once did research.

Thompsons book, a collection of 17 oral histories, is part of the innovative Voice of Witness series. An award-winning journalist, Thompson is the author of Americas Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century.

Roberto Valdez, a 48-year-old farmworker who lives in a trailer with his family in Thermal, in Riverside County, took cell phone videos in the scorching fields after his teenage son almost died from heatstroke. No one comes out here, no one knows what we go through, he says.

Valdez became an advocate for safe conditions, even testifying before the state Legislature: The hands that you see are the hands that harvest the lemons you use to make the lemonade you are now drinking. The strawberries that your children eat, we cut them. Were dying out there in the fields.

Valdezs testimony and videos helped win the passage of regulations protecting workers from extreme heat. But, as Thompson notes, widespread violations  and death in the fields  continue.

Rosario Pelayo, a 77-year-old great-grandmother of 21 from Calexico, proudly shows Thompson a photo that appeared in El Malcriado, the UFW newspaper, when she was arrested during the grape strike in 1974. There were days when the only thing we had out on the picket lines was a bottle of water and one taco. And I still havent lost the spirit.

She recounts facing Teamsters who menaced picketers with tire irons, chains and pruning shears. Yet she was one of the workers who was ousted from the UFW convention when she sought a seat on the executive board.

Though Pelayo harbors some resentment, she still feels proud of the UFWs accomplishments. I saw so many injustices in the field. They used to treat the farmworkers as if they were slaves. We didnt get breaks. There were no bathrooms in the fields. We needed a union and to get it we had to fight with all our hearts.

Thompson notes that, thanks to the UFW, California still has the only law in the country that protects the right of farmworkers to unionize, the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 1975.

Bacons comprehensive bilingual volume also includes oral histories, as well as analytical essays and hundreds of black-and-white photos. A former union organizer, Bacon is the author of The Children of NAFTA and Illegal People, and his photos have been exhibited in the U.S., Mexico and Europe. Bacon describes his work as not objective but partisan, documenting social reality is part of the movement for social change.

Ironically, despite using a more diverse array of documentation, Bacon may have chosen a more challenging path. As photographer Teju Cole asserts, Photography is particularly treacherous when it comes to righting wrongs because it is so good at recording appearances. ... Its not about taking something that belongs to someone else and making it serve you, but rather about recognizing that history is brutal and unfinished and finding some way, within that recognition, to serve the dispossessed.

The poignant photographs in Bacons collection meet that call. Avoiding both sensationalism and sentimentality, the photos reveal not only the workers desperate poverty, but also the dignity of their toil and their consuming effort to provide a better life for their children.

The inside look at the migrants informal housing is deeply disturbing. We see families crammed in tiny trailers and dilapidated plywood shacks, covered by tarps or sin techo (without a roof) hastily thrown up in orchards or fields. The growers allow them to stay in exchange for protecting the crops. Clusters of shacks outside city limits lack sewage, electricity and water treatment, forcing the residents to buy bottled water for drinking and cooking. They bathe in irrigation ditches, polluted by runoff of pesticides and fertilizers.

Bacons photos are most captivating when he focuses on peoples faces and calloused hands as they prune vines, cut lettuce and sort strawberries. In accompanying captions, they remember precisely how many buckets of jalapenos, blueberries or tomatoes they picked, how much they weighed and how much they earned per bucket.

Bacon also captures moments that brighten the lives of the workers. Raymundo Guzman, a trilingual rapper in baggy shorts and unlaced sneakers, entertains from a makeshift stage in a labor camp. Mothers embroider intricate designs on blouses for their daughters to wear when they perform traditional dances at fiestas. Bright-eyed Mixtec children show off their drawings and sing with their teachers in Migrant Head Start. And workers march under banners reading Respect, and United Without Borders as they renew the arduous effort of union organizing.

Both Bacon and Thompson bring us one step closer to Bulosans masterful novel, providing not just an intimate, but an insider look, at the lives of Californias farmworkers.

Elaine Elinson, coauthor of Wherever Theres a Fight, represented the United Farm Workers in Europe during the grape strike and boycott. Email: books@sfchronicle.com

Chasing the Harvest

Migrant Workers in California Agriculture

Edited by Gabriel Thompson

(Verso; 320 pages; $24.95 paperback)

In the Fields of the North/En los campos del norte

By David Bacon

(University of California Press; 450 pages; $34.95 paperback)
At some point during my familys move from Texas to Virginia, the thought crossed my mind that I should have set fire to all our belongings rather than wrestle them into another moving truck.

This Is Where You Belong: Finding Home Wherever You Are, by Melody Warnick
One of the co-accused,Suraj Singh in the Shimla gangrape, who was under police remand,was on Tuesday night found dead inside a Kotkhai police station lock-up.

By Manjeet Sehgal: In a new twist to the infamous Shimla gangrape case, one of the co-accused, Suraj Singh, 29, who was under police remand, was on Tuesday night found dead inside a Kotkhai police station lock-up, police sources told India Today.

"The co-accused Raju,who is of Nepalese origin was found dead inside the cell. Preliminary reports suggest that that the prime accused Rajinder Singh alias Raju attacked him. Investigations are on," said SP Shimla D W Negi.

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The incident took place around midnight. Police said the accused Raju caught Suraj from his private part and hit him on the floor. There was a scuffle between Raju and Suraj on Tuesday night.

The guard on duty heard noises and rushed to the spot and found Suraj Singh in an unconscious state inside his cell.

The police claimed that all six accused were lodged in separate cells. It is still not known how the accused Rajinder managed to enter the cell where Suraj was lodged.

Chief Minister Virghadra Singh has ordered administrative action against the police officials who were on duty. He said all police officials posted in Kotkhai police station including the SHO have been shifted.

"The co-accused in the case was hit on his private part by the accused. Action is being taken against the police officials or de-relection of duty. Suraj Singh had told the police that he did not rape the victim. We will not spare anybody and have already ordered a CBI probe," Virbhadra Singh told reporters in Mandi.

The custodial death of the accused has angered the locals who have accused the police of handling the case ineptly. The locals gheraoed the police station after the incident.

The gang rape victim, a school student, was reported missing on July 4. The all six accused gang raped the victim and later killed her and dumped the body in a forest on July 6.

The police has been accused of shielding the main accused. The state government had ordered a CBI probe into the incident which rocked the state.

Also Read:

Woman gangraped for hours in Gurgaon in moving car, dumped in Greater Noida, FIR registered

Gurugram: Woman gangraped in auto, 6-month-old daughter killed

WATCH | Delhi shocker: Nepalese woman jumps off building after gang rape

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Soon Houstonians might be able to get their fill of one of the country's favorite burgers.

California chain In-N-Out, long rumored to be coming to the Houston area, has purchased land at 8373 Westheimer Road, according to Harris County real estate records. That address currently houses a Workforce Solutions location and backs up to the Dunvale Walmart Supercenter.

PREVIOUS: In-N-Out Burger coming to Houston but where?

On Wednesday afternoon a spokesperson for the chain confirmed they now owned property in Houston, but that everything is in the early planning stages.

Story continues below...

"While it's true that we have purchased property in Houston as a potential future restaurant, we are still evaluating our opportunities there and are in the very, very early stages of that process," said Carl Arena, vice president of development with In-N-Out Burger. "I anticipate it will be more than a year before any further progress develops.

"Although we look forward to the possibility of future opportunities in Houston it would be extremely premature to speculate when or even if we will open a restaurant there," Arena said. "I'm sorry we can't be more specific at this time, we don't want to mislead your readers."

A user on the Houston Architecture Info Forum first posted information late Tuesday that In-N-Out Burger had the purchased the land, which is about halfway between the West Loop and Beltway 8. It appears the purchase was made in late May.

SHE'S A RICH GIRL: In-N-Out Burger heiress Lynsi Snyder turns 35, becomes a billionaire overnight

This news was previously teased in February at a CBRE real estate firm panel discussion on the Houston real estate market. At the time the Houston Chronicle reported that the chain was finalizing the purchase of its first site for a Houston location.

Jazz Hamilton, first vice president in the retail division at CBRE, said that the chain doesn't waste anytime building once they have a site picked out.

"You'll see them come in quietly," Hamilton said. "All of a sudden, they'll start building all at once."

In-N-Out Burger currently has 35 locations in the state of Texas, mostly in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and in Austin and San Antonio and points adjacent. There are also locations in Waco and Killeen.
Elon Musk tamped down expectations about SpaceXs new rocket designed to carry private citizens into space, saying whoever chooses to be among the first passengers will need to be brave.

The Falcon Heavy, a rocket with two extra boosters attached and a total of 27 engines that must fire simultaneously, will have enormous stresses and has been difficult to test on the ground, CEO Musk said Wednesday in Washington.

He jokingly urged attendees of a conference on the International Space Station to watch the first attempted launch.

Its guaranteed to be exciting, he said. When asked whether the risks would make potential customers pause before signing up for a flight, he said: I want to make sure we set expectations accordingly.

SpaceX has an ambitious agenda for the cosmos in coming years. The company began taking deposits from private citizens for a trip around the moon on the Falcon Heavy rocket. And it is working with NASA to carry astronauts to the International Space Station. But the company has only transported cargo so far, and Musk said shifting to carrying passengers is a huge step up.

Getting certified to carry NASA astronauts has been a challenge for SpaceX, as there is a much higher bar than transporting hardware for the agency, Musk said. He called NASAs oversight for humans really tough, but justified because of the potential risks.

Its the right motivation, he said.

SpaceX and NASA are now working through some small technical bones of contention for certification to carry passengers, he said. Meanwhile, the . Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates commercial space flight separately from NASA, hasnt set certification standards for carrying private citizens for hire.

The company continues its attempts to reuse more of its rockets and launch equipment, a more efficient approach that has been the biggest innovation in space flight in recent years, Musk said.

SpaceX has successfully landed its rocket boosters and used them again. Its now quite close to being able to reuse the fairing that clamps over the rockets payload, a relatively lightweight aerodynamic cover, he said.

The fairing costs $5 million to $6 million. Imagine we have a pallet of cash worth $6 million falling through the sky, Musk said he has told his staff. Would we try to catch it? I say we do.

He didnt provide details about how the fairing would be captured.

Musks talk on Wednesday was to an overwhelmingly friendly audience of scientists as eager as he is to explore space. Topics ranged from how his project to build tunnels to stem the Los Angeles regions traffic congestion might help colonize Mars to the health risks of traveling beyond Earths atmosphere.

He downplayed the potential for human conflict on Mars, calling it pretty open territory where competing entities could find plenty of room without challenging each others claims. After praising NASA and noting it stood to get increased federal funding, he drew applause.

The billionaire entrepreneur said development of the Falcon Heavy had been much tougher than he imagined. By adding two additional boosters to each side of a rocket, it added to the vibrations, created stresses to the main rocket, and was difficult to test without an actual launch.

There is a lot of risk associated with Falcon Heavy, a real good chance that that vehicle doesnt make it to orbit, he said. Im saying full disclosure here, man.

Government reviews have echoed some of his concerns. The Government Accountability Office found this year that SpaceX and Boeing Co. must contend with potential safety hazards that may postpone approvals for transporting astronauts until 2019. A U.S. contract with Russia for transportation to the space station expires that year.

Alan Levin is a Bloomberg writer. Email: alevin24@bloomberg.net
Veeva Systems Inc., a target of lawsuits over hiring away employees from rivals in life sciences cloud computing, is now trying to turn the tables.

In a complaint filed in Alameda County Superior Court, Veeva seeks to liberate itself and other employers from restrictions on hiring from competitors based in other states.

Veeva operates at the intersection of two of the fields that attract some of the best tech talent: cloud software and life sciences. It went public almost four years ago at $20 per share, raising $300 million. The stock closed Tuesday at $63.08, giving the company a market value of almost $9 billion.

While California is one of just a handful of states where noncompetition agreements cant be enforced as a matter of policy, employees whose company headquarters are based elsewhere can still be blocked by their contracts from taking new jobs in the state.

In announcing its suit against three companies that have sought court orders to block ex-employees from joining Veeva or allegedly threatened litigation  Medidata Solutions Inc., Quintiles IMS Inc. and Sparta Systems Inc.  Veeva said its taking a stand to end a practice it views as anticompetitive.

Veeva is asking a court to declare that its a violation of Californias unfair competition law for any employer that does business in the state to try to block its workers, regardless of where they live, from going to work for a rival based in the state.

Employees should have the right to move freely between jobs, advance their careers and improve their lives without fear of being sued by their former employers, Veeva CEO Peter Gassner said in a statement. Many companies outside California take advantage of that fact that noncompetes are banned and freely hire from California companies, yet require their employees to sign agreements that do not allow them to work for California companies.

Medidata, based in New York City, said it supports and respects the rights of workers to build their careers, but it sued Veeva in January over the defection of five employees, challenging the Pleasanton companys illegal targeting and unfair use of our trade secrets.

Medidata will not tolerate the misappropriation of its intellectual property, it said.

Representatives of Quintiles IMS and Sparta Systems didnt immediately respond to email messages seeking comment on Veevas complaint.

Typically, a noncompete agreement  which many job candidates in the tech world have to sign as a condition of employment  bars them from working on rival products for a set period of time, say a year, after leaving their current employer.

Supporters say they help protect trade secrets and other confidential information and prevent rapid turnover at companies that have made big investments to train employees. Critics say they suppress wages and stifle innovation and economic growth.

Peter Blumberg and Sarah McBride are Bloomberg writers. Email: pblumberg1@bloomberg.net, smcbride24@bloomberg.net
Sarah Ravani / The Chronicle / Sarah Ravani / The Chronicle

A woman accused of kidnapping a baby from her fathers parked car in San Franciscos South of Market neighborhood will not face charges, prosecutors said.

The infants father told police Sunday that the child was taken from his car parked on Sherman Street when he was preparing a bottle for the baby nearby.
Dublin officials are facing a potential legal challenge to the way school board members are elected from a Southern California attorney who specializes in bringing such cases against government bodies in the state.

The attorney, Kevin Shenkman, has filed lawsuits against several cities and school districts claiming they are violating nonwhite residents rights by electing City Council and school board members on a citywide basis rather than by district. Last month, he targeted Dublin and its school board election system.

Dublins at-large voting system is racially polarized, resulting in minority vote dilution, a violation of the California Voting Rights Act, Shenkman wrote in a letter to Dublin officials on behalf of a client, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. The group advocates for Latino voting rights.

Given the historical lack of Latino representation on the City Council in the context of racially polarized elections, we urge Dublin (Unified School District) to voluntarily change its at-large system of electing council members, or face a lawsuit, Shenkman said.

The school board has scheduled a special meeting Monday to decide what to do.

The board, in collaboration with legal counsel who has worked with districts around the state on this issue, is reviewing the request, according to a statement the district released Tuesday. The board will gather information and act in the best interest of the school community.

The 2010 census found that 44 percent of Dublins 46,000 residents were white, 26 percent were Asian, 14 percent were Latino, and 9 percent were black. All five current school board members are white.

Shenkman prevailed in 2013 in a similar challenge to the elections process in Palmdale (Los Angeles County). Since then, most school districts and cities challenged by Shenkman have voluntarily decided to switch to district elections.

If the Dublin board decides to change the system, it would have to decide how to divide the city into districts. The new system would first be used in 2018, when two of the school boards five seats are up for election.

Shenkman is going after other Bay Area cities. The Fremont City Council just converted to district elections after being threatened with a lawsuit by Shenkman, and the attorney sent letters to the Santa Rosa City Council and school board last week promising legal action if they dont switch.

The San Francisco school board, like those in Dublin and Santa Rosa, has an at-large election process, which Shenkman said Tuesday was news to him.

As progressive as theyve been on election issues, it surprises me, he said.

Not all at-large systems violate the law, Shenkman said. Any challenge would require an in-depth analysis, comparing demographics of each precinct and election results, he said.

Its difficult to say, Shenkman said. Im not really that familiar with San Francisco school elections.

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker
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"Hunger Games" star Jennifer Lawrence vomited during a Broadway adaptation of George Orwell's "1984," but she says it was not the harrowing torture scene that made her toss her cookies.

The actress' stomach problems were first reported by Page Six.

The play's upsetting staging has reportedly caused audience members to faint, although until Monday night, no one apparently has thrown up.

Those who have read "1984," are well aware of a nausea-inducing scene involving a cage and a rat.

According to a Page Six source, "Midway through the show, Jennifer Lawrence bolted from her seat. Several people saw her getting sick in the lobby. The ushers were very helpful and courteous in helping her out."

The site quoted a friend of Lawrence, who said the visceral staging had nothing to do with the actress' stomach distress. "She caught the stomach flu from her nephews," the source said.

It's not the first time Lawrence has publicly puked.

At a Guy Oseary-Madonna party in 2014, she got sick and threw up on a porch.

She told Seth Meyers: "I was in such bad condition, and I look behind me while I'm puking, and Miley Cyrus is there like, 'Get it together.'"
Northern California might not be as well-known for its cinematography like its Southern California counterpart, but that doesnt mean it hasnt had its fair share of movie magic.

Since 2000, San Francisco and its neighboring cities have been the preferred site to base numerous well-known films and shows. 13 Reasons Why, Silicon Valley and Steve Jobs are just some of the top shows and films that were recently based and shot around the Bay Area.
How would you react if you saw the fin of a great white shark pop up in the ocean next to you?

Francesca Nash was pretty calm when a juvenile great white approached her paddleboard Saturday at Santa Claus Beach in Carpinteria (Santa Barbara County).

Nash said she and her friend Rose Lebow had just passed the shore break when the curious shark came to check them out. She started taking video as the shark swam back and forth between the two paddleboarders.

Nash studies marine science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, so she said she was "thrilled at the opportunity to witness a great white shark" up close.

While the shark was a juvenile, it certainly wasn't small. Nash estimates the great white was between and 10 and 12 feet long.

"It was a bit shaking to see the shark so close to where all the children were and where surf camp was taking place, but it is clear that the sharks are not interested in the people and are minding their own business, eating the stingrays in the area."

The video shows the great white swimming around the paddleboarders for about a minute, before it goes on its way. Nash hypothesized the shark was likely in the area looking for food. The beach's location isn't far from the Channel Islands, a national marine sanctuary with abundant prey for great whites, and Carpinteria is also home to a harbor seal preserve.

Carpinteria is also close to a location that researchers recently identified as a nursery for great white sharks, making it a hotspot for shark activity and sightings.

Shark sightings  and attacks  have been on the rise in recent months. The city of Santa Cruz instituted a four-day ban on entering a three-mile stretch of water on July 11 after a great white shark attacked a kayaker.

Chris Lowe, a professor of marine biology at CSU Long Beach and director of the school's shark lab, told SFGATE in May that the rise in shark sightings can be attributed in part to increased environmental protections. Populations of other marine animals, like otters and sea lions, have been thriving, which has given sharks more prey to feed on. That could in turn be contributing to a growth in the shark population.

For those worried about shark attacks, Lowe reminds people that the ocean is sharks' natural home. "We have unfettered access to the ocean," he said. "Humans have forgotten how to share habitats with wild animals, and they have to be re-educated."

Nash echoes Lowe's sentiment, saying, "I think it is important now, as their presence is increasing, that locals and visitors develop a healthy relationship with the ocean and sharks," Nash said. "I think it is experiences like this that help to demonstrate they are peaceful creatures of the ocean."
Zeitgeist Films/The Washington Post

Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story is a documentary about a working Hollywood couple who contributed immeasurably to many Hollywood films. Especially in the case of Harold, you already know their work. Youve seen it and enjoyed it. You just never knew who was responsible.

Harold Michelson was a storyboard artist and later a production designer. As a storyboard artist, he would take the script and imagine it in visual terms, shot by shot. He would then give these storyboards to the director, who, if he was smart, would just put on film the movie as Harold imagined it.
Locals in Shimla, angry over what they believe to be police ineptness, today ransacked the Kotkhai police station where one of the suspects in a minor's gangrape and murder died last night in custody.

By Manjeet Sehgal: Police in Kotkhai today came under attack from locals following the custodial death of one of the six men detained in the Shimla gangrape and murder case. The Himalayan hill station of Shimla has been rocked by protests ever ever since a minor schoolgirl was found raped and murdered on July 6.

Tuesday's night custodial death has seemingly made the situation worse in Shimla, with protesters pelting stones at police personnel, injuring two jawans. Protesters also set ablaze the Kotkhai police station, where the suspects in the gangrape and murder case are lodged.

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Locals chanting 'We want justice,' managed to enter the police station and even set fire to police records. However, police personnel managed to prevent major damage from taking place and had to fire shots in the air to disperse the mob.

29-year-old Suraj Singh's death in police custody also sparked protests in other parts of Shimla, including Theog and Fagu where the crowd blocked the roads. Traffic remained paralysed at many places including Dhali,Kufri, Fagu, Theog and Kotkhai after the incident.

Police have said that Suraj died after attacked by Rajinder Singh, the prime suspect in the minor's gangrape and murder. However, it remains unclear how Rajinder managed to enter Suraj's jail cell, as all the suspects were lodged in separate quarters.

Angry locals have accused the police of shielding the guilty with protesters saying that they believe Suraj's custodial death to be part of a larger game being played by the police to save the actual perpetrators behind the dasterdly gangrape and murder.

Meanwhile the Governor Acharya Dev Vrat on Wednesday summoned Himachal Pradesh Director General of Police Somesh Goyal and asked him to submit a detailed report on the custodial death within two days.

Under attack from the Opposition, Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh today cut short his Mandi tour and returned to the state capital to take stock of the situation.

Following last night's incident, Singh also suspended a few police officials, including the Station House Office of Kotkhai police station, which is located 60 kilometers from Shimla city.

The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has called for a shutdown in Himachal Pradesh on Thursday to protest the gangrape and murder, and the custodial death.

ALSO READ | Shimla rape outrage: How Himachal, other states fare in crime against women

ALSO WATCH | Our press reports every incident of rape so it becomes 'top of the mind': Maneka Gandhi

--- ENDS ---
Carlos Valladares/Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The Fool Killer, Servando Gonzalezs dreamy and haunting 1965 film, plays Sunday, July 23, in a rare 16mm print at the Pacific Film Archive.

A boy (Edward Albert) leaves his abusive parents to journey across the post-Civil War South. In the backwoods, he meets a wandering ex-soldier (Anthony Perkins) who becomes his best friend and a surrogate big brother, but who may also be the titular ax-murderer. Like his best-known role  Norman Bates in Psycho  youre never sure where Perkins character stands. All at once, he plays a cashmere-sweater-wearing Pied Piper, a warm bare-backed hunk and a disturbed veteran out of a Salinger story.
MIAMI  Prosecutors in Florida believe a 10-year-old boy who died with the painkiller fentanyl in his system is among the states youngest victims of the opioid crisis.

Preliminary toxicology tests show Alton Banks had fentanyl in his system when he collapsed and died at his home on June 23, the Miami Herald reported. Health officials say fentanyl and other synthetic forms of the drug are so powerful that just a speck breathed in or absorbed through the skin can be fatal.

Thats what investigators believe happened to Alton.

The fifth-grader started vomiting after coming home from an outing at the neighborhood pool. He was found unconscious that evening and rushed to the hospital where he was declared dead.

Investigators said theres no evidence he came into contact with the drug at home. They think he may have been exposed to it at the pool or on his walk home in Miamis Overtown community, which has been hard hit by the opioid epidemic.

State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle spoke publicly about the case because of its unusual nature and the need for tips to find out how Alton came into contact with the drug.

He was out playing, like we want all our children to do, Rundle said. Were anxiously hoping that someone comes forward to help us solve this horrific death.

Fentanyl is so powerful that some police departments have warned officers about even touching the drug. Last year, three police dogs in Broward County got sick after sniffing the drug during a federal raid, officials said.

Nearly 300 overdose deaths last year involved variants of fentanyl, according to the Miami-Dade Medical Examiners Office. Statewide, fentanyl and its analogs killed 853 people in the first half of 2016. Of those, only nine were under age 18.
The Electoral College is good for democracy and regulation of political campaign financing is generally bad, one expert on election laws told a judicial conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. Another speaker, equally expert, said the opposite.

Organizers of the panel on law and politics at the annual conference of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals were evidently looking for a diversity of viewpoints, and got what they were looking for.

The Electoral College has been criticized as antidemocratic for deciding two of the past five presidential elections in favor of candidates, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, who both lost the nationwide popular vote. But Bradley Smith, a law professor at Capital University in Ohio and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, said the institution serves as a useful corrective.

Considering the enormous political power wielded in heavily populated areas on both coasts, Smith said, I dont think its the worst thing in the world that all these folks in flyover country, who have their two senators (in each state), have a little extra influence.

As for regulation, Smith  author of the 2001 book Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform  said laws requiring disclosure of campaign contributions provide little useful information to the public. He endorsed the Supreme Courts 2010 Citizens United ruling that allowed corporations and unions, as a matter of free speech, to make unlimited political donations.

Contrary views came from Richard Hasen, a UC Irvine election law professor whose 2016 book, Plutocrats United, attacked the Supreme Court ruling.

Were at a very dangerous point in our democracy, Hasen said, with more campaign spending, less disclosure, and a proliferation of voter-identification laws aimed at reducing minority turnout. The Electoral College, he said, is in tension with one person, one vote.

The third panelist, Ann Ravel, a former Federal Election Commission chairwoman who will start work as a UC Berkeley law professor in September, agreed with Hasen that disclosure of campaign contributions makes a big difference to the public and does not interfere with free expression.

Ravel, also former chairwoman of the California Fair Political Practices Commission, said she was particularly concerned with high-tech micro-targeting of voting populations, aimed at lowering their turnout with fabricated campaign ads and fake news spread by bots.

But Smith said voter participation was suffering because campaigns are now centralized, in part because you have so many laws.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko
ATCHISON, Kan.  In eight decades since Amelia Earharts ill-fated flight around the globe, residents of her Kansas hometown have grown used to renowned historians and armchair researchers claiming to have finally solved the mystery of her disappearance.

Every year about this time, something gets stirred up, said Allen Reavis, the mayor of Atchison, a riverside city of about 11,000 people where Earhart spent much of her childhood. We find a piece of a plane or we have a new theory. I think the overwhelming response is, Oh, here we go again.

And so it was again this month, when a television documentary claimed to have cracked the case with a photograph purporting to show Earhart in the Marshall Islands after her disappearance.

As with previous theories, people here analyzed the claims and watched as the worlds attention refocused on Atchisons most famous former resident. And as before, they were unsurprised when other historians cast doubt on the new version of events.

In Atchison, residents adore Earhart and are eager to share their own guesses about what happened after her last radio transmission over the Pacific in 1937. But they also embrace the debate and celebrate the uncertainty. After all, a firm and final conclusion might diminish the attention bestowed on Earhart and, by extension, on this city, which has wrapped its identity in hers.

Me, personally, I hope we never know for sure, said Jacque Pregont, who leads the local Chamber of Commerce and coordinates the annual Amelia Earhart Festival. The event drew thousands of people to Atchison over the weekend, just ahead of what would have been her 120th birthday, on July 24. She was an adventurer, Pregont said. And its almost a perfect ending  isnt it  that there is no ending.

The competing theories  crashed in the ocean; marooned on an atoll; captured by the Japanese; returned to the United States with a new identity  surrounding Earharts disappearance have become part of her legacy.

We cut it off right in the middle, said Chris Taylor, a former newspaper editor here and the longtime director of the county historical society. Its like if youre watching a really good movie and you just stop and your mind puts together the rest of the story.

Passing generations have not eroded Atchisons pride in Earhart. The aviators face is embedded in the city logo, and the Amelia Earhart Memorial Bridge crosses the Missouri River leading into town. Also bearing her name: Atchisons airport, a local highway and a museum at her birthplace on North Terrace Street.

Earhart grew up during Atchisons heyday, but subsequent decades brought floods, a drop in population and, more recently, the beginnings of a downtown revival.

Lewis and Clark camped on these hills during their westward expedition, and the city that sprouted later served as a hub along the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway. Today, the steep, brick-paved residential streets remain lined with stately homes dating to Atchisons glory years, though some have fallen into disrepair. This city has also been home to a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member, three Kansas governors and a U.S. senator, but most everyone agrees that Earhart is the most notable export.

On Saturday, residents spoke with pride as they told tourists that Earhart was more than just a record-setting pilot, but also a social worker, writer and a feminist decades ahead of her time. At the Earhart Birthplace Museum, volunteers recited details about the aviators former home  the wallpaper is nearly identical to when she lived there, and the woodwork untouched  and pointed to a collection of books offering disparate conclusions about her fate.

Ann Shaneyfelt, the museums chairwoman, said it was policy not to favor one conclusion over another. We say, Heres a theory, heres a theory, heres a theory, said Shaneyfelt, herself a pilot.

She, too, said she did not especially want a definitive answer, because that mystique is still why people are talking so much about her.

Of course, others yearn for finality. Some among them: a few remaining Atchison residents old enough to recall glimpsing Earhart when they were children.

Bob Handke, a corn and soybean farmer, was displaying his own plane Saturday at the Amelia Earhart Airport, just a few yards from the hangar holding the last intact Lockheed Electra L-10E, the type of plane that Earhart flew in her attempt to circumnavigate the Equator.

Handke, 90, said he remembered watching Earhart parade down Commercial Street when she came home to Atchison in 1935. It would be nice to know what really, really happened to her, he said.

Josephine Hildman, 89, also remembered Earharts trip to Atchison that year. Hildman said the aviator walked into her familys chili restaurant, placed a to-go order and asked Hildman, then about 8 years old, about school and her interests.

I was impressed with her, Hildman said Saturday, especially because she wore pants at a time when most women favored dresses.

Hildman said she watched the recent documentary hoping for irrefutable proof about what happened to Earhart. The community needs certainty, Hildman said, and Earhart deserves a proper burial.

But the documentary left her unconvinced, and still the mystery persists.

Mitch Smith is a New York Times writer.
MINNEAPOLIS  The Minneapolis police officer who shot and killed an Australian woman in an alley shortly after she called 911 to report a possible crime is a young Somali-American and father who felt called to work in law enforcement after getting a college degree in business.

Mohamed Noor, 32, joined the police force two years ago and is among more Somalis hired in recent years as the department continues its efforts to diversify. To those in Minnesotas Somali community, the largest in the United States, he was seen as a role model, and his hiring was celebrated.

Among police, he was one of the good guys, said Suud Olat, a refugee advocate and interpreter.

But Noor is now on paid administrative leave as authorities investigate why he shot and killed 40-year-old Justine Damond, a meditation teacher and bride-to-be. Damonds fiance said she called 911 on Saturday night about what she believed was an active sexual assault. She was reportedly standing outside the drivers side of a squad car when she was shot in the abdomen by Noor, who fired from the passenger seat.

Authorities have released no details about what led Noor to shoot Damond, whose maiden name was Justine Ruszczyk. She had begun using her fiances last name ahead of their August wedding.

No weapon was found at the scene. Noor and the other officer did not turn on their body cameras, and authorities have said squad video did not capture the shooting.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in an interview Wednesday with Australias Today show, joined the chorus demanding answers about what happened.

How can a woman out in the street in her pajamas seeking assistance from police be shot like that? It is a shocking killing, Turnbull said.

Noors attorney, Tom Plunkett, released a statement Monday saying that Noor extends his condolences to the family and others affected by Damonds death. The statement said Noor came to the United States at a young age and is thankful to have had many opportunities.

He takes these events very seriously because, for him, being a police officer is a calling, the statement said. He joined the police force to serve the community and to protect the people he serves.

But Noors short time on the force has not been without blemish.

Records from the citys Office of Police Conduct Review show he has had three complaints against him. Two are pending, and the third was dismissed without discipline. Under state law, details of open cases and cases that result in no discipline are not released.

Amy Forliti is an Associated Press writer.
WASHINGTON  Revelations that a Russian developers representative was the eighth attendee at a Trump Tower campaign meeting arranged by President Trumps eldest son prompted a new round of castigation on Tuesday from Democrats. It also brought word that the special counsel investigating possible Trump campaign ties to Russia wants more information about the sit-down.

Officials from the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller reached out over the weekend to a lawyer for Ike Kaveladze, who also goes by the name Irakly Kaveladze, attorney Scott Balber told the Associated Press. Kaveladze works for a Russian developer who once partnered with Trump to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow.

Balbers comments are the first public indication that Mueller is probing the June 2016 gathering in Trumps namesake New York City skyscraper.

In emails, Trump Jr. enthusiastically agreed to the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others after he was promised dirt on his fathers rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton. He has since denied such material ever turned up.

Kaveladze works for Emin and Aras Agalarov and was there to represent them, according to Balber, who is serving as legal counsel for both Kavaladze and the Agalarovs. The father and son, who worked with Trump on the pageant in 2013, were named in the emails that promised damaging information on Clinton.

Balber cast Kaveladze as a minor player in the meeting, saying he had no idea what the subject of the meeting was until an hour before and doesnt remember saying anything other than his name during the discussion. Balber said Kaveladze believed he was attending the meeting to translate for Veselnitskaya, but the attorney brought her own interpreter.

Veselnitskaya said the meeting focused on U.S.-Russian adoption policies and a sanctions law. She has denied working for the Russian government.

Democratic lawmakers, skeptical of that account, repeated their concerns on Tuesday.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his panel wanted to talk to the meetings attendees.

I doubt if this individual who had a history of setting up thousands of fake accounts in Delaware was really there to talk about Russian adoptions, Warner said.

Warner appeared to be referring to a 2000 New York Times story that identified Kaveladze as running a company cited in a Government Accountability Office report for laundering $1.4 billion in wealthy foreigners funds via U.S. banks using thousands of Delaware corporations.

Former Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, who ordered the GAO report, called Kaveladze the poster child of using hidden ownership of American shell corporations to launder money.

Balber disputed that characterization, noting that no criminal charges were filed in the case.

The meeting was also attended by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign Chairman Paul Manafort, music publicist Rob Goldstone and Rinat Akhmetshin, a prominent Russian American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer. Trump Jr. scheduled the gathering after Goldstone, a British publicist for Emin Agalarov, said the elder Agalarov had met with a Russian prosecutor who offered to provide the campaign with damaging information about Clinton.

Balber denied such a meeting ever took place and said he didnt know why Goldstone made the assertion. He said Goldstone stopped working for Emin Agalarov in January for reasons unrelated to last years meeting.

In an online profile, Kaveladze lists himself as a vice president of Russia-based Crocus Group, Aras Agalarovs firm, and says in a separate LinkedIn profile that he handled tax preparation for the company.

He holds a masters degree in business administration from the University of New Haven in Connecticut, according to those profiles. His most recent U.S. address appears to be in Huntington Beach (Orange County), although several websites he maintains say he is based in Moscow. He didnt respond to multiple attempts to reach him through his online sites.

Stephen Braun and Julie Pace are Associated Press writers.
Himachal Pradesh is in a better position than compared to most of the other states across India with less reported cases of atrocities and incidents of crime against women.

By Kamaljit Kaur Sandhu: Shimla, capital of Himachal Pradesh continues simmer in protests against the rape and murder of a minor girl whose body was found in isolated woods in Kotkhai tehsil's Halaila village.

The outrage resulted in protest spilling out on roads prompting people to demand CBI probe into the gangrape and murder case.

The MHA data, however, show that Himachal Pradesh is in a better position than compared to most of the other states across India with less reported cases of atrocities and incidents of crime and rape against women.

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As per MHA, Himachal Pradesh crimes against women including rape stood at 1,490 in 2013, 1,534 in 2014 and 1,300 in 2015.

The lowest incidents recorded in any state has been Sikkim. The north eastern states barring Assam have overall recorded lowest number of such incidents against women which includes states of Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Manipur.

UTTAR PRADESH RECORDS MOST CASES

The worst has been Uttar Pradesh which recorded 32,590 in 2013, 38,578 in 2014 and 31,3711 in 2015 as per records shared by the ministry with the Parliament.

While there was hullabaloo over BJP lawmaker Roopa Ganguly's controversial remarks about the safety of women in West Bengal has also fared badly.

The state is in the second position when it came to crimes against women. West Bengal recorded 30,414 crimes against women in 2013, 39,341 in 2014 and 34,403 in 2015.

In 2014, West Bengal beat Uttar Pradesh to be the rape capital of the country. Other states which fared badly are Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh.

Attacking the Mamata Banerjee government on the law and order situation in the state, Ganguly on Friday said, "Send their (Trinamool workers) wives and daughters to Bengal. If they are able to survive there for 15 days without getting raped, then tell me."

DELHI CONTINUES TO BE RAPE CAPITAL

Delhi maintained its position of "rape capital" with maximum number of rapes in the Union Territory, beating 22 other states and 6 Union Territories.

Delhi recorded 12,925 incidents of violence, crime, rape and atrocity; 12,925 in 2013, 15,336 in 2014 and 17,223 in 2015. The cumulative figures, however, are shameful. It is 31,1097 in 2013, 34,0826 in 2014 and 33,1649 in 2015.

While MHA says that law and order is a state subject, the nodal ministry also said that the ministry has issued several advisories from time to time, last being in May 2015 on crime against women which was sent to all states and Union Territories.

The advisory has directed the states to conduct a thorough investigation against those accused who have been chargesheeted.

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It asked the state enforcement to file chargesheet within three months of the incident without compromising on quality of investigation. It has demanded speedy investigation in cases of rape and murder.

Also Read:

Delhi: Man posing as coach rapes minor national-level Kabaddi player

Freedom fighter Bal Gangadhar Tilak's great-grandson booked for rape

Maharashtra BJP leader, accused of raping woman in moving bus, arrested

WATCH| Our press reports every incident of rape so it becomes 'top of the mind': Maneka Gandhi

--- ENDS ---
BANGASSOU, Central African Republic  Bullet-riddled roofs line the boulevard of death in Central African Republics southeastern town of Bangassou, where almost everyone who enters is seen as an enemy.

The city, spared sectarian bloodshed until May, now has more than 2,000 Muslim residents forced to take refuge at the local cathedral after attacks by the mostly Christian anti-Balaka militia.

More than 300 people have been killed and 100,000 displaced since May as violence that began in 2013 moves into the impoverished countrys central and southeastern regions, prompting warnings of a national conflict roaring back to life.

In Bangassou alone, more than 150 people have died in fighting between militias and U.N. peacekeeping forces.

We were driven out by force. We have lost our parents, our homes and all of our belongings, said Djamal Haddine Mahamat-Salle, secretary-general of the organization representing the towns displaced Muslims. Its been two and a half months since weve been here, blocked without the ability to even go beyond 100 meters.

Many said their departure from the cathedral could mean death.

The anti-Balaka are everywhere. And as soon as you risk leaving, they will demand ransom, said Zarah Mahamat.

On a visit to Bangassou this week, U.N. humanitarian chief Stephen OBrien insisted that the United Nations is there to help, and he warned of the growing violence.

Hippolyte Marboua is an Associated Press writer.
By India Today Web Desk: Seldom does Sridevi go wrong with her fashion choices, particularly for public events. There have been times, however, when the actress has emerged out of the airport looking like an absolute diva. Here's proof: Sridevi looks nothing less than a goddess in this one-piece dress

That's the reason lesser mortals like us thought Sridevi is mostly dressed for world domination--a reverie that was just recently shattered by Srivedi & Co's appearance at Mumbai airport.

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So, Sridevi showed up at the airport with husband Boney Kapoor and daughters Jhanavi and Khushi Kapoor. While the others were dressed, well, normally (for the lack of a more normal word), Sridevi herself was dressed in a brown velvet sweat-suit--just what you wear to bed in peak winter.

Photo: Yogen Shah

Velvet does not let your skin breathe--it's a world-known fact--which is why, it's a preferred form of clothing in the cold months of December and January in North-India. Not only did Sridevi wear velvet in the muggy month of July in the muggy city of Mumbai, she also wore a yellow-grey printed stole with it, and BLACK lace shoes. Black, with brown, velvet. Really?

Photo: Yogen Shah

Just looking at Sridevi's heavy outfit is making us feel warm, and quite frankly, a little claustrophobic. At this point, the only logical explanation we can think of behind this outfit is Sridevi's health--maybe she was too unwell to dress up, and was feeling chilly in the rains.

Photo: Yogen Shah

In that case, we hope you feel better, Sridevi.

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Apart from Rs 1.5 lakh per month salary, the monthly constituency allowance of the MLAs has also been increased from Rs 2 crore to Rs 6 crore.

The announcement regarding salary hike of MLAs was made by CM Palaniswami in the Assembly. (File Photo/PTI)

By Pramod Madhav: Tamil Nadu MLAs today approved a 100 per cent salary hike for themselves. The MLAs would now get a monthly salary of Rs 1.5 lakh, a massive hike from their previous salary of Rs 55,000 per month.

The announcement regarding salary hike was made by CM E Palaniswami in the state Assembly today.

The generous hike in salary that the Tamil Nadu MLAs have gifted themselves has come at a time when farmers of the state are protesting demanding loan waiver.

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Dozens of farmers from Tamil Nadu are protesting at Delhi's Jantar Mantar for months now demanding a Rs 40,000 crore drought relief package, farm loan waiver and setting up of the Cauvery Management Board by the Centre.

"Its just another way to hold those MLAs together. Why else do you think he decided to announce it on the last day? Back in 2011, Jayalalitha denied to do so claiming that the state's financial conditions are bad. Now its even worse as we are 5 lakh crore in debt," stated DMK MLA J Anbazagan.

He also put forth the point that the move only shows that AIADMK is only worried about its MLAs. "Farmers are protesting semi-nude in Delhi. The government is not ready to waive-off their loans but CM had agreed for the MLA salary. You yourself decode the message," laughed Anbazagan.

During the course of the protest, the farmers have turned to increasingly desperate measures to direct attention to their issues.

They have shaved their heads and half their moustaches, kept mice and snakes in their mouths, conducted mock funerals, flogged themselves and even carried skulls which they claimed were of farmers who had committed suicide due to debt pressure.

TRB Raja, son of former minister TR Balu and a sitting MLA also questioned the time of such an announcement. "I would rather prefer the farmers celebrating with such hikes than myself," he said.

MPs DEMAND HIKE IN PAY PACKAGE TOO

Moments before Palaniswami announced the salary hike for state MLAs, a similar demand was put forth by Samajwadi Party's Rajya Sabha MP Naresh Agrawal.

"Our salary is lesser than our secretaries," Naresh Agrawal said amid chaotic scenes in the Rajya Sabha.

Senior Congress leader Anand Sharma also echoed similar sentiments while demanding a pay hike for MPs.

CTC OF AN MP IN FIGURES

On an average leaving aside the allowances, an MP gets a total fixed sum of Rs 1,40,000 per month and annual fixed salary is Rs 16,80,000.

If allowances are factored in taking average, it comes over Rs 1,51,800 per month and Rs 18,22,000 annually.

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Total cost to country of an MP stands at Rs 2,91,800 per month and Rs 35,02,000 per annum.

CATEGORY FROM TO Basic increased Rs 8,000 Rs 30,000 Compensatory allowance increased Rs 7,000 Rs 10,000 Telephone allowance increased Rs 5,000 Rs 7,500 Constituency allowance increased Rs 10,000 Rs 25,000 Consolidated allowance increased Rs 2,500 Rs 5000 Vehicle allowance increased Rs 20,000 Rs 25,000 Postal allowance shall remain the same as 2,500.

About a month ago, the entire state transport corporation came to a standstill as transportation workers protested for the release of provident fund, pension fund, housing loan, cooperative society loan that were deducted from their salary for the past six years which amounted approximately Rs 5,000 crore. The state government claimed that it did not have money, again to everyone's surprise and released Rs 1,400 crore after a great deal of bargaining.

After watching such developments the state's people are not that happy with CM's announcement. "I toil myself in this hot sun managing traffic but I can't even imagine such a hike in my dreams," claimed a traffic constable on duty near Secretariat as he heard the news standing sole witness to the voice of the people of Tamil Nadu.

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ALSO READ:

On third day of protest, Tamil Nadu farmers tie self in chains

PM Modi watching? Once an MP always a burden: CTC of our legislators

Hike in salaries of MPs under government consideration

BJP distances itself from MPs' salary hike row

WATCH: Tamil Nadu MLAs get 100% salary hike, while the debt-hit farmers from state continue their protest

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BANGKOK  A court in Thailand on Wednesday convicted scores of defendants accused of organizing a human-trafficking ring that enslaved hundreds of people, dozens of whom were found buried in a mass grave near a secret jungle camp in which they had been imprisoned, tortured and held for ransom.

The 102 defendants, including a Thai general, police officers and smugglers from Bangladesh, Myanmar and Thailand, were arrested in 2015 after 36 bodies were found in shallow graves near the border with Malaysia. The discovery led to efforts to dismantle a multimillion-dollar smuggling enterprise, and the traffickers soon abandoned their human chattel in jungle camps or in crowded vessels adrift in the Andaman Sea.

Investigators said the victims were from Bangladesh or Myanmar  many of them Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority  and had paid smugglers to help them find work in Thailand. Instead, they became slaves in Thailands lucrative fishing fleet, authorities said.

Judges at the Criminal Court in Bangkok held a lengthy session Wednesday to announce the verdicts, and many relatives of the defendants were crying as the verdicts were read aloud. In doing so, the judges quoted the testimony of witnesses who had described harrowing transnational journeys of deprivation.

Victims said they had been smuggled from Bangladesh and Myanmar in cramped boats with little food and water. After arriving in Thailand, they were packed into trucks and marched to camps high in the forested mountains of Songkla province. There, they were imprisoned and made to call their families and beg for ransoms of around $3,000. Some said they had been raped.

When discovering the jungle camp in 2015, Thai police described finding bamboo cages, watchtowers and a torture room.

Under pressure from the United States and Europe to crack down on human trafficking, the junta that came to power in a coup in 2014 made a display of prosecuting members of the ring, including a high-ranking officer in the Thai Army, Lt. Gen. Manas Kongpan.

Kongpan was convicted Wednesday of trafficking and of committing an organized transnational crime.

The chief of the junta, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, responded to the news by saying the military should not be blamed for the actions of one officer.

There are many people in this human-trafficking network, he told reporters. Dont group all soldiers in the country as one.

Ultimately, 103 people pleaded not guilty to a bevy of charges that included human trafficking. One defendant died while in custody.

Ryn Jirenuwat and Russell Goldman are New York Times writers.
However, within 12 hours of the meeting, JD-U has renewed its attack on the deputy CM demanding answers from him on corruption charges leveled against him.

By Rohit Kumar Singh: Bihar's Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav, who is facing charges of corruption and amassing "benami" properties in Delhi and Patna, had a 45 minute meeting with Chief Minister Nitish Kumar yesterday, first since an FIR was lodged against him on 5th July by the CBI. After the meeting, it was speculated that the rift between JD-U and RJD ended and that Tejashwi had got a lifeline. However, within 12 hours of the meeting, JD-U has renewed its attack on the deputy CM demanding answers from him on corruption charges leveled against him.

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"The meeting with Nitish Kumar was not political in nature and therefore as a party JD-U is still wanting answers to the queries we had on corruption charges leveled on Tejashwi Yadav which he has not provided yet," said Ajay Alok, JD-U spokesperson.

Taking a dig at RJD chief Lalu Prasad and Tejashwi, JD-U spokesperson Ajay Alok asserted that corruption was never an issue in the common minimum programme of the grand alliance govt in Bihar.

"Our policy on corruption is clear and there is not an inch deviation in our stand on Tejashwi to come out with point by point rebuttal to allegations leveled on him. We cannot compromise with corruption and also it was not there in the common minimum programme that we will do corruption. Bihar still needs answers from Lalu's son," said Alok.

On the other hand, BJP has attacked Nitish Kumar maintaining that despite meeting Tejashwi and by not acting against him, CM has let himself down and showed that his policy of zero tolerance on corruption was a farce.

"Why is Nitish Kumar silent and not opening his mouth? He should take action against Tejashwi. The delay in acting against Lalu's son shows that his zero tolerance policy on corruption is a drama," commented Nand Kishore Yadav, BJP leader.

READ ALSO:

Revealed: What Tejashwi Yadav told Nitish Kumar in their 45-minute meeting behind closed doors

Bihar political crisis postponed? Nitish Kumar gives more time to Tejashwi Yadav

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ALSO WATCH THE VIDEO:

Lalu Yadav after CBI raids: Ready to be hanged, but will crush Modi, Amit Shah's ego

--- ENDS ---
BCN13)

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT (BCN)

A United Airlines flight headed to Washington Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia, from San Francisco International Airport rerouted back to SFO this morning because of a mechanical issue.

United Flight 408 departed from SFO at 7:30 a.m. and returned to the airport around 8:30 a.m., according to airport spokesman Doug Yakel.

The Boeing 777 had 269 passengers and a crew of 11.

Airline officials said around 10:30 a.m. that a different plane will be used to take those passengers to their destination.

Information about the nature of the mechanical issue that caused the plane to reroute back to SFO was not immediately available.
Nitish Kumar held a closed-door meeting with his deputy Tejashwi Yadav, who is facing corruption charges. The Bihar CM was reportedly not convinced with Tejashwi's arguments.

By Sujeet Jha: The political crisis in Bihar is far from over. While the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) camp believed that the fire within the Mahagathbandhan has been doused after Deputy CM Tejashwi Yadav met CM Nitish Kumar on Tuesday, sources within the Janata Dal United say the CM was not convinced with the clarification Lalu's son gave.

During the 45-minute-long closed door meeting with Nitish, Tejashwi reiterated that the corruption allegations levelled against him were false and a part of a larger political conspiracy.

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WHAT HAPPENED BEHIND THE CLOSED DOORS

Tejashwi claimed that he was being falsely framed by the CBI in the disproportionate assets case. The deputy CM said he would approach the court for quashing of the case along with anticipatory bail.

However, Nitish appeared far from impressed with Tejashwi's arguments. He also refused to meet or speak to any party leader after his meeting with Tejashwi.

Sources said Nitish told Tejashwi that the CBI has filed a case against him after a detailed probe and that he owes an answer to the people of Bihar.

Nitish also reminded Tejashwi of the promise of a corruption-free governance made to the people of Bihar when Mahagathbandhan was formed a couple of years ago.

TEJASHWI FLIES TO DELHI

Amid the uncertainty, Tejashwi is likely to rush to Delhi to seek legal advice.

The JD(U) has repeatedly asked the RJD to come clean on the allegations against Tejashwi with facts and not "display arrogance" of having 80 MLAs in the Bihar Assembly.

The JD(U) has 71 MLAs and the Congress 27 while the BJP, which is the main opposition in the House, has 53.

ALSO READ:

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Lalu should shun his stubbornness on Tejashwi to save alliance with Nitish, warns JDU

WATCH: Lalu Yadav after CBI raids: Ready to be hanged, but will crush Modi, Amit Shah's ego

--- ENDS ---
TR Zeliang has been asked by Governor Acharya to prove majority on or before July 22.

By India Today Web Desk: After Shurhozelie Liezietsu failed to appear for a floor test in the Assembly today, TR Zeliang was appointed as the new chief minister of Nagaland by Governor PB Acharya.

Governor Acharya has invited Zeliang to be sworn-in as CM today at 3:00 pm. He has been asked to prove majority on or before July 22.

Earlier, in a dramatic twist to the long-running political uncertainty in Nagaland, Liezietsu failed to appear for a floor test in the Assembly.

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The floor test was needed after the Gauhati High Court dismissed his plea to stay the governor's directive to him to seek a trust vote.

Governor Acharya later directed Speaker Imtiwapang to summon an emergent special session of the state Assembly at 9.30 am for the chief minister, who was facing a rebellion from his party MLAs, to seek the confidence vote.

VOTE OF CONFIDENCE

Governor Acharya had on July 11 and July 13 directed Liezietsu, who is facing rebellion by 43 ruling Naga Peoples Front MLAs led by former chief minister T R Zeliang demanding change of leadership in the present house of 59, to seek vote of confidence on or before July 15.

Zeliang, who was forced out of office in February following large scale protests over holding of urban local bodies election with 33 per cent reservation for women, had staked claim to form the government saying he had majority support in the House.

Four BJP legislators and Nagaland BJP president Visasolie Lhoungu called on the governor on Tuesday and submitted a letter supporting T R Zeliang.

BJP is a pre-poll alliance partner of the Naga People's Front and a constituent of the Democratic Aalliance of Nagaland (DAN) government in the state.

Also read: Nagaland CM Shurhozelie Liezietsu fails to turn up to face Assembly floor test

Also read: Nagaland crisis: Former CM Zeliang stakes claim to form government, rushes to meet PM Modi

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Ishqbaaz actress Amarpali Gupta is not bothered by the leaked pics and says monsoon is bringing more fun in their marriage.

By India Today Web Desk: Ishqbaaz actress and new mother Amarpali Gupta is currently in news over her leaked PDA pics with Bhagyavidhaata actor Yash Sinha, that have become viral on web. But she's least bothered about that. In fact the actress is thanking monsoons for bringing a lot of love in her married life.

The actress these days is spending a lot of time with hubby in the rains and says that she doesn't mind romancing her husband any time as he's so hot.

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"Why do I need to justify the PDA pics with my husband. I don't mind romancing him any time. And Monsoon is the most romentic season so I'm quite enjoying my time with my husband. This monsoon has brought a lot of fun in my marriage. Yash is so hot and I'm lucky he is my husband," the actress said.

Amrapali Gupta and Yash Sinha got married in 2012. They have a year old son.

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By PTI: Hindu Gods

(EDs:Adds details)

New Delhi, Jul 19 (PTI) A derogatory remark by a senior Samajwadi Party (SP) leader in the Rajya Sabha today linking names of Hindu gods with alcohol sparked an uproar forcing two adjournments and triggering demands for his apology.

The remark by Naresh Agrawal was expunged by the Chair even as it came for a strong condemnation from the ruling BJP members.

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The BJP members demanded an apology, saying the comment had hurt religious feelings of a majority of people and that it also was a form of "lynching".

Agrawal made the remark while participating in a short duration debate on rising incidents of lynching and atrocities on minorities and dalits across the country. After two adjournments, when the House re-assembled, Agrawal apologised, saying he did not intend to hurt the sentiments of anyone.

"If someone has been been hurt, I express my regret," the SP member said. Later, Deputy Chairman P J Kurien ruled that part of Agrawals remarks had been expunged and asked the media to guard against using these.

Earlier, while taking strong objection to the words used by Agrawal, Leader of the House and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said: "He (Agrawal) has linked up each of the Hindu Gods with brands (varieties) of alcohol. If he had said this outside, he would have been liable to prosecution.

"You have not realised the gravity of what you have said. Do you have the audacity to say about other Gods?"

Seeking an apology, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said, "He cannot hurt the sentiments of the majority people who are Hindus. He cannot hold the House to ransom." BJP member Bhupender Yadav said, "In this House, no member should hurt the feelings of others. This is also lynching." The ruling party members were on their feet demanding apology and shouted slogans Bhagwan ka apman nahi chalega (disrespect to Gods will not be tolerated). Kurien, who missed the remark as he was busy speaking to a member, said he will check the records and expunge the comment. "I have called for records. I will check and expunge the comment if any derogatory remarks are made," he said. Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi requested the Chair to adjourn the House till the records were checked. The House was then adjourned for 10 minutes. As soon as the House re-assembled at 1521 hours, both the Treasury and the Opposition members were on their feet and traded barbs. Trying to bring the House to order, the Deputy Chairman said, "I have gone through the records. It is per se derogatory and hurting the sentiments of majority community... I have expunged these remarks...He should not have made the remarks..." However, the uproar continued with Agrawal reiterating that cowsheds are run by Agrawal community and "if my statement has hurt members, I withdraw it." But the BJP members continued to demand apology from him.

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The Deputy Chairman intervened, saying he had already "disapproved" of and "condemned" the remark and urged the members to not to fight on the issue. The remarks were "hurting" members sentiments and "it is not on record", Kurien said.

He urged Agrawal to express regret and react to the situation to bring the House to order. Agrawal said, "Lynching is a major issue..."

To this, Kurien insisted that he should express regret. CPI-M leader Sitaram Yechury tried to intervene, saying the matter should be allowed to rest. "Naresh Agrawal has said something offensive. you (Chair) have gone on record condemning that. It is my appeal that let the House function," Yechury said. However, the ruling party members were adamant on Agrawal tendering apology.

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Ananth Kumar said, "He has not insulted a single person. He has insulted a community."

Amid slogans like "Bhagwan ka apman nahi chalega (insult to the God will not be allowed)", "Sri Ram ka apman nahi chalega (insult to Ram will not be allowed)" and "Apne devo ka apman nahi sahega Hindustan (India will not tolerate insult to its deities)." Ram Gopal Yadav, another party leader of the SP, said Agrawal will not tender apology even if the entire session has to function like this.

Naresh Gujral (SAD) suggested sending the issue to the Privileges Committee of the Rajya Sabha for a decision on it.

Anand Sharma (Cong) said the Gods belong to all and not only to the ruling party members. He said the ruling party should not become the "custodians of God". He said last year, during the JNU agitation, a Cabinet Minister had made certain "derogatory" remarks against Goddess Durga and refused to apologise.

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He said the issue pertained to faith of all and urged for a solution to it. However, the ruling party members continued to raise slogans and the Chair adjourned the House till 4 pm. When house re-convened, Ananth Kumar again condemned Agrawals remark and said he should apologise.

He said the government wants the House to function and the SP member should not make it a prestige issue. Ram Gopal Yadav then referred to Anand Sharmas comment about a Cabinet minister making "derogatory" remarks against Goddess Durga last year.

Yadav said if the Cabinet minister has apologised, then Agrawal will also apologise. "There cannot be double standards," he added. Agrawal then expressed regret and said in his entire political career, he has never hurt sentiments of any caste and religion. The SP leader said he has never made any personal allegations as well.

Earlier, IT and Law Minister Ravi Shanker Prasad said that Agrawals comment was not correct and that the SP leader should express regret. After Kuriens ruling about expunging the remarks, Congress leader Anand Sharma said it should be ensured that these comments do not surface on the social media and passions are not inflamed. Prasad said he would convey this to the authorities concerned. At the same time, he said the character of social media has changed and "we will have to collectively ensure that this does not spread" on the social media. PTI LUX NAM MJH AKK GSN GSN

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: By Lalit K Jha

Washington, Jul 19 (PTI) The US today said Iran continues to be the worlds leading state sponsor of terrorism along with Sudan and Syria.

All the three countries have been on this list of the US for the past several decades.

Iran was designated as State Sponsor of terrorism in 1984 and Sudan in 1993. Syria was designated as State Sponsor of terrorism way back in 1979.

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In its annual report to the Congress, the State Department alleged that the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad continued its political and military support to a variety of terrorist groups affecting the stability of the region as the Syrian conflict entered its sixth year.

The regime continued to provide political and weapons support to Hizballah and continued to allow Iran to rearm the terrorist organisation, it said.

The Assad regime?s relationship with Hizballah and Iran grew stronger in 2016 as the regime became more reliant on external actors to militarily fight the Syrian opposition, it said.

Iran, the report alleged, continued its terrorist-related activity in 2016, including support for Hizballah, Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza, and various groups in Syria, Iraq, and throughout the Middle East.

Iran used the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) to implement foreign policy goals, provide cover for intelligence operations, and create instability in the Middle East, it alleged.

According to the State Department, in 2016, Iran supported various Iraqi Shia terrorist groups, including Kata?ib Hizballah, as part of an effort to fight ISIS in Iraq and bolster the Assad regime in Syria.

Iran has historically provided weapons, training, and funding to Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, including Palestine Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, the report alleged.

The report indicated that Sudan, which was designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 1993 due to concerns about support to international terrorist groups, including the Abu Nidal Organization, Palestine Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Hizballah, could be taken off the lust.

"Notwithstanding this history, countering terrorism is today a national security priority for Sudan, and Sudan is a cooperative partner of the United States on counterterrorism, despite its continued presence on the State Sponsors of Terrorism List," the State Department said.

"Sudan takes seriously the threat posed by ISIS, and in September 2016, the US government acknowledged the Government of Sudan?s significant efforts to counter the ISIS and other terrorist groups and to prevent their movement into and through Sudan. Earlier, in June 2016, a senior US official praised Sudan for its counterterrorism efforts as well,? the report said.

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To designate a country as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, the Secretary of State must determine that the government of that country has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism.

Once a country is designated, it remains a State Sponsor of Terrorism until the designation is rescinded in accordance with statutory criteria.

A wide range of sanctions are imposed as a result of a State Sponsor of Terrorism designation, including a ban on arms-related exports and sales; controls over exports of dual-use items, prohibitions on economic assistance; and imposition of miscellaneous financial and other restrictions. PTI LKJ NSA

--- ENDS ---
In the joint statement, Modi and Trump had asserted that the terrorist safe havens should be rooted out from every part of the world.

By Santosh Chaubey: For the first time, the US has directly termed Pakistan a safe haven for terrorists in its annual 'Country Reports on Terrorism' released by the US State Department. The report analysing terror activities in 2016 says various terrorist groups including Afghan Taliban, Haqqani Network, LeT and JeM continue to operate from Pakistan-based safe havens.

The line taken by the US in its annual authoritative report, a first, is a clear extension from the joint statement issued after the summit between US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the latter's US visit in June this year.

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In the joint statement, Modi and Trump had asserted that the terrorist safe havens should be rooted out from every part of the world. The joint statement mentioned Pakistan thrice and called on Pakistan to ensure that its territory isn't used to launch terrorist attacks on other countries, and to "expeditiously bring to justice the perpetrators of the 26/11 Mumbai, Pathankot, and other cross-border terrorist attacks perpetrated by Pakistan-based groups."

When seen in comparison to Modi-Obama joint statements, it was a clear departure.

The three joint statements after Modi-Obama summits in September 2014, January 2015 and June 2016 mentioned routine themes like expediting trials in the Mumbai and Pathankot attacks and cracking down on terror outfits including Al-Qaeda, ISIS, JeM, LeT, they stopped short of calling these terror groups as even Pakistan-based, let along calling Pakistan directly a safe haven for terrorists, even if Pakistan indeed is a terror state.

The optics that was missing due to diplomatic hesitations got its first clear shot that hesitations were going away in Modi-Trump joint statement. The joint statement, coupled with the US declaring Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin as a global terrorist, went miles ahead when it specifically wrote "cross-border terrorist attacks perpetrated by Pakistan-based groups". It was a clear indication of US' toughening line on Pakistan on support of terror infrastructure in country.

And if we see more tough measures by the US on Pakistan in future, we should not be surprised. Ted Poe, an influential US Congressman and a Republican, has introduced a bill in the US House of Representatives to declare "Pakistan state sponsor of terrorism" citing its pro-terror activities like harbouring Osama bin Laden or many other terror groups. Ted Poe is the chairman of the important "House Subcommittee on Terrorism".

This is not the first time that Ted Poe has brought a legislation for approval on declaring Pakistan a terror state. In September 2016, after the cowardly Uri attack by Pakistan based JeM terrorists on September 18 that killed 17 sleeping Indian soldiers, Ted Poe had introduced "the Pakistan State Sponsor of Terrorism Designation Act" calling Pakistan "an untrustworthy ally". And it is not just Ted Poe. There are many other influential Congressmen and politicians who have been voicing to declare Pakistan a terror state or to curb down military aid to the country.

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Add to it the well known hostility of Donald Trump, who is a Republican Party politician like Ted Poe, towards Pakistan and writing on the wall is becoming clear now. In Past, Trump has described Pakistan with terms like 'Pakistan is not our friend' and "when it will apologize for providing safe sanctuary to Osama Bin Laden". In May, when, during his first Presidential foreign tour, Trump had named India as a terror victim along with China, Russia, Australia, European, African and South American countries, while ignoring any Pakistan mention altogether in his first overseas speech, it was a clear message that Pakistan was fast losing its credibility in Washington's strategic circles.

In fact, in its 'Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community' report released in May, the US Government had blamed Pakistan for deteriorating India-Pakistan ties batting for India's growing intolerance over Pakistan's state-sponsored terrorism and in April, Gen HR McMaster, the US National Security Advisor, who was in Pakistan, had bluntly told Pakistan to stop using terror as state policy.

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ALSO READ:

US keeps Pakistan on list of countries providing safe haven to terrorists

How Pakistan is trying to escalate tensions between India, China using fake news

--- ENDS ---
By India Today Web Desk: The Donald Trump administration has retained Pakistan's name in its list of nations which provide "safe havens" to terrorists and blamed Pak-based terror outfits like LeT and JeM for conducting attacks against India.

The US Department of State has said that terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) continue to operate, train, organise and fundraise inside Pakistan.

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In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the State Department said that Pakistani military and security forces undertook operations against groups that conducted attacks within Pakistan such as Tehrik-eTaliban Pakistan.

"Pakistan did not take substantial action against the Afghan Taliban or Haqqani, or substantially limit their ability to threaten US interests in Afghanistan, although Pakistan supported efforts to bring both groups into an Afghan-led peace process," the State Department said.

"Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in 2016, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan," the report said.

PAK-BASED TERRORISTS ATTACK INDIA

India, it said continued to experience attacks, "including by Maoist insurgents and Pakistan-based terrorists". Indian authorities continued to blame Pakistan for cross-border attacks in Jammu and Kashmir, it said.

"In January, India experienced a terrorist attack against an Indian military facility in Pathankot, Punjab, which was blamed by authorities on JeM. Over the course of 2016, the Government of India sought to deepen counter-terrorism cooperation and information sharing with the United States," the State Department said.

The Indian government continued to closely monitor the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), which made threats against India in their terrorist propaganda. A number of individuals were arrested for ISIS-affiliated recruitment and attack plotting within India, the report said.

In a separate chapter, the State Department listed Pakistan as one of the safe havens of terrorism.

The State Department said that numerous terrorist groups, including the Haqqani Network (HQN), the LeT and JeM continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2016.

"Although LeT is banned in Pakistan, LeT's wings Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FiF) were able to openly engage in fundraising, including in the capital," it said.

HAFIZ SAEED

"LeT's chief Hafiz Saeed (a UN-designated terrorist) continued to address large rallies, although in February 2017, Pakistan proscribed him under relevant provisions of Schedule Four of the Anti-Terrorism Act, thus severely restricting his freedom of movement," it noted.

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The 2015 ban on media coverage of Saeed, JuD, and FiF continued and was generally followed by broadcast and print media, it said.

According to the State Department, the Pakistani government did not publicly reverse its December 2015 declaration that neither JuD nor FiF is banned in Pakistan, despite their listing under UN sanctions regimes, although in January 2017, Pakistan placed both organisations "under observation" pursuant to Schedule Two of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

While not a ban, keeping the outfits under observation allows the government to closely scrutinise the activities of both organisations.

On November 11, Pakistan's National Counter-terrorism Authority published its own list of banned organisations that placed JuD in a separate section for groups that are "under observation" but not banned.

Pakistan continued military operations to eradicate terrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, although their impact on all terrorist groups was uneven, it said.

In its report to the Congress, the State Department said in 2016, India and the United States pledged to strengthen cooperation against terrorist threats from groups including al-Qaeda, the ISIS, JeM, LeT and D-Company (Dawood Ibrahim's group), including through greater collaboration on designations at the UN.

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Indian and US leaders directed officials to identify new areas of collaboration through the July US-India Counter-terrorism Joint Working Group, applauded finalisation of a bilateral arrangement to facilitate the sharing of terrorism screening information, and called upon Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of terrorist attacks against India to justice, the report said.

The United States and India worked together to designate JeM leader Maulana Masood Azhar, although the listing was blocked in the UN 1267 Committee, the State Department said.

Other areas mentioned in the report as safe havens are Afghanistan, Somalia, the Trans-Sahara, Sulu/Sulawesi Seas Littoral, Southern Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Columbia and Venezuela.

(PTI inputs)

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Reserve the right to retaliate: India gets tough on Pakistan over LoC firings

Pakistan targets schools near LoC in Jammu, students escape death

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By PTI: Panaji, Jul 19 (PTI) Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar today informed the House that all the water treatment plants would be integrated with each other to avoid water shortage in the coastal state.

Parrikar said integration of the plants will solve the problem to a great extent.

"We are working towards integrating all the water treatment plants in the state. An officer of chief engineer rank has been asked to submit the proposal to integrate all these plants," Parrikar informed the assembly session.

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He said the issue of water shortage is largely due to power outages and state government was working towards providing dedicated electricity cable to these plants.

"There are three plants in Assnora village itself but they are not connected with each other due to which when there is power outage at one plant. It affects the water supply. If the plants are integrated they will act as back up in case there is outage at any of the plant," he said. PTI RPS RMT

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The robbers molested the woman on gunpoint and snatched her purse containing Rs 1,500 cash, a couple of credit cards, debit card and other valuable documents.

By Ajay Kumar: With heavy police deployment on all major intersections, highway robbers of Gurugram have come up with a new strategy to rob commuters on flyovers. The latest incident was reported with an MNC executive on Monday night at IFFCO Chowk flyover.

After seeing a female passenger travelling alone in an autorickshaw, two robbers followed her from Shankar Chowk on motorcycles and waited for the right opportunity. When the auto reached IFFCO Chowk, its driver took the flyover as the service lane was jammed due to kanwariyas.

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The robbers took the opportunity and intercepted her as soon as the auto took the flyover. As per the complaint registered with DLF Phase 2 police station, the robbers molested the woman on gunpoint and snatched her purse containing Rs 1,500 cash, a couple of credit cards, debit card and other valuable documents.

Gurugram police have deployed most of its personnel along the Delhi-Gurugram expressway and all major intersections to provide security to kanwariyas. The robbers seemed to have exactly capitalised on the situation as flyovers have no security.

"The kanwariyas are taking the service lanes and therefore, the entire concentration of Gurugram police is on them," said Manish Sehgal, ACP, Gurugram police. He added that it could be possible that robbers took advantage of it. "We have asked the highway operator to provide CCTV footage at the time of incident to identify the accused," he said. The victim is working with an MNC in Cyber City and was on her way to her Jalvayu Vihar residence in Sector 31.

Also read: Delhi: Man posing as coach rapes minor national-level Kabaddi player

Also read: Freedom fighter Bal Gangadhar Tilak's great-grandson booked for rape

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A projected drawing of four Japanese immigrants setting foot in turn-of-the-century San Francisco greets you when you walk into the Lucie Stern Theatre for The Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga. It comes from the shows source material, one of the first manga ever published in the U.S., drawn with light lines and limited palette  muted brown, yellow and orange, the faintest hint of pink.

Yet with just those spare tools, author and illustrator Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama conjures a quartet of distinct personalities. Ones surly. Anothers all mischief. A third brims over with conceit. A final leans away, more diffident than the rest. Yet in their individuality, they all swagger  a particularly American quality, yet one our storytellers have too long denied Asian American characters.

Occasionally, Min Kahngs warmhearted musical, now in a TheatreWorks world premiere and seen Tuesday, July 18, betrays too much awareness of its own stereotype-countering aims. Late in the show, as Henry (James Seol)  a stand-in for Kiyama himself  has completed a set of comics that will become The Four Immigrants, his friend Charlie (Hansel Tan) offers a remark that would have been better left unsaid: Think about the generations to come who might see one of these strips and know that their ancestors  we werent just a nameless, voiceless mob.

But we dont need a line like that only because the rest of the show, under the whimsical direction of Leslie Martinson, makes the point so forcefully. Each actor finds a playground in his characters quirks. Seols Henry is so absorbed in his art that he marshals a kind of impish power from always having one foot in another world, and Seols clear, melodic tone (a standout among many middling singing voices) makes drama out of a love for the San Mateo hills he tenderly paints.

Phil Wong excels as aspiring shopkeeper Frank, whos simple of mind but rich of heart. Its as though you can see his actors mind working, imagining the thousands of details of the scene around him and making interesting choices about every one of them  the myriad perceived social faux pas from which he can mousily recoil; a begrimed stove to scrub as a so-called schoolboy, a derogatory term for a Japanese domestic servant; the leagues of possibility, the grandeur he sees in a simple shop window.

To Kahngs swashbuckling, jazzy score, played by a six-person live band, Dottie Lester-Whites choreography reveals the immigrant characters as the true engine of American might. Arms churn and piston. Heels click jauntily. Legs throttle toward the towers of the Ferry Building or the Palace of Fine Arts (both of which are depicted in the original manga, first published in 1931).

But perhaps most magical is the panoply of ways Martinson incorporates Kiyamas artwork. She doesnt simply parade static panels across the stage for performers to act in front of. They can reach in and grab props, cut-outs with thick outlines that might have been drawn by a giant felt-tip marker, and the panels might reach back. Projections, by Katherine Freer, swoop images in from different directions, moving along with the characters and creating the feel of a flip book.

As characters galumph through the decades, Kahng doesnt let the myth of the American Dream go unquestioned, even as one of the men, Fred (Sean Fenton), attains some measure of it. The Four Immigrants even achieves something radical, reframing and broadening what success can mean. Its not just making a name for yourself in the land of plenty; it can also mean realizing its time to go home, wherever that may be.

Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicles theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak

The Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga: Written by Min Kahng. Directed by Leslie Martinson. Through Aug. 6. Two and a half hours. $40-$100, subject to change. Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. (650) 463-1960. www.theatreworks.org

To see the shows rehearsal: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9seY-1bv-Hw
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Nine-year-old Jude Sparks was playing with his brother in the New Mexican desert when he tripped and landed beside a massive skull.

"I didn't know what it was," Sparks, now aged 10, told El Paso ABC affiliate KVIA. "I just knew it wasn't usual."

Sparks later found out he stumbled upon an archaeological treasure: a mostly intact stegomastodon skull.

At the time of the discovery, neither Sparks nor his parents, who were biking nearby, recognized the skeletal remains of the million-year-old creature preserved in the desert sands of Las Cruces.

Sparks' parents took a photo of the skull, presuming it belonged to an elephant, and went to work googling. When their internet search provided no definitive answers, they emailed Peter Houde, a biology professor at New Mexico State University (NMSU).

A day after Sparks' fortuitous stumble, Houde headed out with the family to take a closer look and confirmed that the skull "is really very unusual to find," he revealed in an interview with the New York Times.

According to the newspaper, prehistoric fossils usually break down after exposure to the elements, but the Sparks were fortunate to have discovered the skull just after strong rains made it visible to the naked eye.

"Erosion is a paleontologist's best friend," Spencer Lucas, curator of paleontology at the new Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, explained to National Geographic.

This May, after months devoted to securing funding and planning, the Sparks family and a university team excavated the nearly 2,000-pound fossil. Houde estimates the skull to be about 1.2-million-years-old. He believes it is one of only hundreds of stegomastodon fossils unearthed globally.

"This may be only the second complete skull found in New Mexico," the biologist explained in the university's statement.

Although its name might suggest otherwise, stegomastodons are not dinosaurs. The elephant-like creature walked the earth in the last million years or so, reports the Times, and dinosaurs died close to 66 million years ago.

Sparks told the Times that he went through a fossil phase in his earlier years, and discovering the skull has reinvigorated his interest in archaeology. Nonetheless, it hasn't given him much credit with friends on the playground.

"Most of them didn't even believe me," Jude told KVIA.

Houde, however, doesn't encourage citizen scientists to take to the desert in search of fossils.

"When people find out about these things, they might be tempted to go out there and see what they might find themselves," Houde said in the university press release. "To be quite honest, all these fossils from this area are radioactive and especially for children, not something you would want in your home."

Read Michelle Robertsons latest stories and send her news tips at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com.
YANGON, Myanmar  In the old, military-ruled Myanmar, it would not have been a surprising scene: three journalists, bound together in chains, raising shackled hands in unison and speaking out against their repressive government.

But this moment, captured on video by a local news organization, the Democratic Voice of Burma, was not from another era. It was recorded Tuesday, and it underscores how little has changed in the Southeast Asian country since former Nobel Peace Prize laureate and longtime opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyis party won elections a year and a half ago.

Just look at these chains. This is what we get for being journalists, said Lawi Weng, one of three reporters detained by the military on June 26 for covering a drug-burning ceremony organized by an ethnic rebel group in the northeast.

How can we say this is democracy? Weng asked before entering a police van headed back to jail after a brief court hearing in Shan states Hsipaw township.

The reporters each face three years in prison for violating the nations Unlawful Associations Act, which was designed to punish people who associate with or assist illegal groups  in this case, the Taang National Liberation Army, one of more than a dozen small rebel armies that control patches of territory in the north and east. The rebels burned a cache of narcotics to mark the United Nations International Day Against Drug Abuse.

Members of various rebel groups, along with their sympathizers and some aid workers, have been prosecuted under the Unlawful Associations Act. But rarely, if ever, have journalists  many of whom travel regularly to zones controlled by the Taang and other insurgent groups.

Its unclear why these journalists were singled out. Suu Kyis government, which is struggling to broker a nationwide cease-fire with the countrys rebel armies, simply says they broke the law and should have informed security forces before visiting a conflict zone.

The arrests, combined with the prosecution of critics who have spoken out against the nations military and civilian authorities, have surprised many who thought Suu Kyis rise would herald a new era of freedom of expression.

Suu Kyi spent nearly 15 years under house arrest during the nations long era of military rule, and she was praised worldwide for leading the struggle for democracy. Although her administration is officially in charge, the military still wields most power.

Shawn Crispin, Southeast Asia representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said Suu Kyis administration continues to use antiquated laws to threaten and imprison journalists.

Reporters are still being targeted for reprisals and imprisoned for their reporting, Crispin said. Frankly, thats not what we thought an Aung San Suu Kyi-led government would condone or promote. Its been massively disappointing.

The New York-based press freedom group, which has called for the reporters to be released, had hoped the administration would prioritize amending or scrapping these draconian provisions, Crispin said. To our dismay, theyve chosen to use them to suppress criticism instead.

Esther Htusan and Todd Pitman are Associated Press writers.
MOSUL, Iraq  For one Iraqi lieutenant, the fight against the Islamic State group in Mosul has been a slow, methodical quest for revenge. For three years, he has hunted for two Islamic State militants from his village who he believes killed his father. Along the way, he has shot to death detained militants after interrogating them, he acknowledges unapologetically.

And if he catches either of the men he is searching for, the lieutenant vows he will inflict on him a slow death and hang his body from a post in the village after forcing him to reveal where his fathers body is buried.

That sort of thirst for vengeance in the wake of military victories is fueling extrajudicial killings of suspected Islamic State members at the hands of Iraqi security forces in and around Mosul. Videos that emerged last week showed troops in Mosul taking captured Islamic State suspects and throwing them one by one off a high wall next to the Tigris River, then shooting their bodies below.

Speaking to the Associated Press, four Iraqi officers from three different branches of the military and security forces openly admitted that their troops killed unarmed and captured Islamic State suspects, and they defended the practice. They, like the lieutenant, spoke on condition of anonymity because they acknowledged such practices were against international law, but all those interviewed by AP said they believed the fight against the Islamic State should be exempt from such rules of war because militant rule in Iraq was so cruel.

However, the killings risk tipping Iraq back into the cycles of violence that have plagued the country for over a decade, according to Belkis Wille, Iraq researcher with Human Rights Watch. The Islamic State group was able to attract recruits in the past because of peoples anger over abuses, including arbitrary detentions, torture and extrajudicial killings, she said.

If abuses continue, all youre going to see is (that) young Sunni Arab men are going to want to join whatever the next extremist group looks like, she said. Despite the militarys vows not to tolerate it, she said no soldier or commander has been held accountable for any killings.

The bloodshed reflects the deeply personal nature of the fight against the Islamic State. When the militants overran Mosul and large parts of northern and western Iraq in 2014, they specifically targeted members of the military and security forces and their families for brutal atrocities. Near Tirkrit, Islamic State massacred about 1,700 captured military recruits and buried them in mass graves that have been uncovered since. Hundreds of policemen and soldiers in Mosul are believed to have been killed after the takeover.

Susannah George is an Associated Press writer.
It has never been a particularly well-kept secret that Israel has conducted clandestine air strikes in Syrian territory over recent years. But this week, Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to not only admit that these strikes had occurred, but that they had occurred dozens of times.

The Israeli prime minister made this admission accidentally  all thanks to a hot mic.

Netanyahus remarks came during a meeting with Eastern European leaders in Budapest on Wednesday. Although the meeting occurred behind closed doors, the Israeli leaders microphone remained on and his voice was transmitted to headphones given to reporters earlier.

Speaking to the leaders of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, Netanyahu said Israel had specifically targeted Iranian weapons shipments to the Lebanese militia Hezbollah in Syria, where Hezbollah is helping bolster Syrian President Bashar Assads forces in the ongoing civil war.

We blocked the border not only in Egypt but in the Golan Heights, he said, according to an account from Haaretz newspaper. We built the wall because there was a problem with ISIS and Iran trying to build a terror front there. I told (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, when we see them transferring weapons to Hezbollah, we will hurt them. We did it dozens of times. ISIS is an alternative acronym for the Islamic State militant group.

Its not quite the first time that Israel has acknowledged carrying out military actions in Syria. In late June, Israel announced that it had struck three Syrian army targets in the Golan Heights after errant fire landed in Israeli-controlled territory.

In April, the Jerusalem Post newspaper reported that an Israeli air strike had hit buildings being used to store weapons for Hezbollah near Damascus International Airport. That evening, Israel said it was forced to deploy its Patriot missile defense system to intercept an incoming projectile from Syria  an apparent attempt at retaliation.

But, generally, Israel has declined to talk about such actions. Despite the countrys long-standing animosity with the Syrian government and a tense border in the Golan Heights, Israel has tried to keep itself out of Syrian affairs.

Adam Taylor is a Washington Post writer.
1 Church abuse: A report released Tuesday found that at least 547 former members of Germanys most storied Catholic choir for boys were physically or sexually abused, the latest revelation in a case that has roiled the Domspatzen choir in Regensburg, led for many years by the brother of Pope Benedict XVI, Georg Ratzinger. The abuse was carried out by priests and teachers at the prestigious choir in southeast Germany, according to a lawyer, Ulrich Weber, who was tasked with carrying out an independent investigation. All told, he discovered 500 cases of physical abuse and 67 cases of sexual abuse.

2 Embezzlement case: A Vatican tribunal rejected attempts by two former executives of the popes childrens hospital to dismiss an embezzlement case, asserting Tuesday it could prosecute them on charges they diverted nearly $578,000 in hospital donations to renovate a top cardinals penthouse. Lawyers for former hospital president Giuseppe Profiti and ex-treasurer Massimo Spina argued that the Vatican court had no jurisdiction to prosecute activities of a hospital foundation that was located in Italy, not the Vatican. But tribunal president Judge Paolo Papanti-Pelletier rejected the motion as the trial opened.
If Curtis Boyd lives by one professional mantra, its this: Unless a woman has full autonomy over her body, she lacks full citizenship and lives instead as a second-class citizen.

The controversial and celebrated abortion provider explains this thoughtfully on a hot, dry Fourth of July day in his Albuquerque office. A wiry man of 80 years, Boyd wears a gray surgical gown and says he's working the holiday because the type of procedure that his clinic, Southwestern Women's Options, is known for requires multiple days.

The clinic sits near I-25 on Lomas Boulevard, a crowded east-west thoroughfare on the edge of downtown Albuquerque. Across the street looms a pink billboard paid for by the group Prolife Across America. "Save the babies, heartbeat 18 days," pleads the text. An infant's chubby face peers out at passersby, a reminder of the ire against Southwestern Women's Options even on days when no protesters show up.

Boyd speaks softly with a twinge of an accent that betrays the small east Texas town where he grew up. He sits on a leather chair in a corner room, away from where he and four other doctors perform surgical procedures.

A bookshelf includes dry medical encyclopedias and clinical contraception manuals, political titles and books that indicate his profession.

Boyd is a Christian; he says his spiritual background informs his work. Early in life, he was ordained as a Baptist minister. After medical school and residency, he became a Unitarian Universalist. In his medical practice, he chose to support women.

"Our role is to help her make a decision in the grace of God that she can live with," Boyd tells SFR and NM Political Report in a rare, in-depth interview.

His work performing abortions stretches to the pre-Roe v. Wade days of the late 1960s, when he practiced illegally in the unwelcoming confines of small-town and big-city Texas. Pressure, real and perceived, from the law drove him away and into liberal Santa Fe, where a more tolerant citizenry welcomed his work in 1972, just a year before the Supreme Court granted abortion as a fundamental right.

Boyd soon repoened a clinic in Dallas and in 1985, opened an additional clinic in Albuquerque. The Santa Fe location closed in 1993.

Dr. Curtis Boyd, circa 1990, provided abortion services in Santa Fe between the 70s and 90s. He now runs clinics in Albuquerque and Dallas. (Edward Vidinghoff, Palace of the Governors Photo Archives)

Boyd isnt a typical abortion provider. Since 2010, his Albuquerque clinic has offered abortions for women during the third trimester of pregnancy, a procedure performed at only a handful of other clinics nationwide.

His practice draws an intense, emotional response from the anti-abortion community, making Southwestern Women's Options one of the most scrutinized abortion clinics in the country and New Mexico ground zero in the abortion wars.

Despite a failed Albuquerque citywide ballot initiative in 2013 that would have banned abortions after 20 weeks of gestation, two of the architects of that effort say they're focusing anew on shutting down Boyd's clinic. A yearslong legislative effort to limit abortion access shows no signs of abating, despite repeated failures to pass a bill for the governor's signature.

Last year, a controversial congressional subcommittee scrutinized Southwestern Women's Options amid a deeper dive into fetal tissue donation and research practices throughout the country. The investigation led to a lawsuit against the clinic over fetal tissue donation to the University of New Mexico and a request for a criminal investigation by state Attorney General Hector Balderas. The third-year AG, a Democrat, took up the case, and his office says an investigation is still ongoing.

All this comes as the national Democratic Party flirts with softening its support for abortion rights and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who many view as the key swing vote generally in favor of abortion rights, is rumored to consider retirement.

Boyd, who is nearing the end of his career, knows this. "We have a long struggle ahead of us," he says.

Boyd began performing abortions in 1968, five years before the landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion throughout the nation.

At the time, he was providing the service in his hometown of Athens, Texas. With each procedure, he risked jail time and his medical license.

His patients came primarily through referrals from a network of clergy that had assembled an underground railroad of sorts to clinics willing to perform abortions before it was legalthe Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion.

Among its members was Carl Boaz, at the time an assistant minister at First Presbyterian Church in Richardson, Texas. In an interview, he says he always supported "a woman's right to decide what she should do with her body."

The Rev. Carl Boaz was an early member of the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion. (courtesy of the Rev. Carl Boaz)

Boaz also heard horror stories about women who suffered after abortions at unsafe places in the 1960s.

"They had no one to talk to who really gave a damn about who they were as a child of God," Boaz says. "So it was important for me to provide a context that was non-judgmental, that was open to dealing with whatever emotions were prevalent."

Boyd signed on as one of the group's doctors. The ministers needed the help; they often weren't familiar with basic medical information about abortions.

Word spread quickly about Boyd's Athens practice. Boaz believes Boyd and others weren't discreet enoughthough caution may have not been enough to prevent the coming crackdown. As Boyd tells it, clients drove to his clinic in Volkswagen carssymbols of the hippie counterculture. That was more than enough to draw attention from authorities, especially in a small Texas town of fewer than 10,000 people.

Soon, Boyd noticed police cars sitting outside his clinic.

"I think they believed I was dealing in drugs," he says.

On the advice of one of his nurses, Boyd moved his practice to Dallas, where the big-city atmosphere might be more accommodating to his profession.

He didn't find it to be much different. After all, the Dallas district attorney, Henry Wade, became the defendant in the lawsuit that would eventually lead to the 1973 Supreme Court decision that shaped modern abortion access in the United States. Sometimes, Boyd grew paranoid when he saw a police car.

He set his sights on New Mexico, where the state allowed women to seek abortions for psychiatric reasons. While more lenient than Texas, Boyd still saw the law as demeaning: Women were essentially forced to tell a psychiatrist they were depressed and suicidal to have any chance of getting a legal abortion.

"They shouldn't have to do that; it's sort of humiliating," Boyd says. "But at least it was legal."

He opened a clinic near Atalaya Mountain on Santa Fe's east side. The city, he says, had "new-age draw" where "all the hip people were." To him, it was "the mecca."

"No one harassed me," he says. "We did our work."

At the time, the Roe v. Wade case headed to the Supreme Court. President Nixon had just appointed four conservatives to the high court, tilting its balance to the right. Boyd thought the case was doomed.

But the court ruled in favor of abortion rights, 7-2. One of Nixon's new appointees, Justice Harry Blackmun, even wrote the majority opinion, ruling, among other things, that states could not ban abortions up until the point that a fetus has a good chance of surviving outside the womb.

Today, that point differs according to a hospital's resources, but it generally occurs around 24 weeks or more of pregnancy.

Federal law allows states to ban abortion procedures that take place beyond then. Forty-three states currently ban abortions at some point in the pregnancy, except in cases when the woman's life or health is in danger, according to the Guttmacher Institute. New Mexico is among the seven states, plus Washington, DC, that have no restrictions.

Boyd says he was "astounded" by the court's decision on Roe v. Wade.

"My nurse and my assistant, we just shouted, we were embracing each other, and I said, 'Oh, thank God almighty, it's over,'" he says.

But the buoyancy of the court victory didn't last. In the decades since, Boyd has dealt with protesters picketing his office, chaining themselves to his surgical tables in protest, and hurling constant death threats at him and his colleagues.

"For me, the worst has been since abortion was legalized," he says.

Boyd insists that federal law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and the US Marshals Service have been more willing to help clinics against threats of violence under Democratic administrations. "We had names to call, telephone numbers to call [of federal authorities] if we had any problem," he says.

As soon as Donald Trump became president, Boyd says that stopped again. "As always, it's politics," he says.

The faith community is as heavily divided on the abortion issue as the political community. Bud and Tara Shaver, a Christian couple who describe their strong-willed advocacy against abortion as a calling from God, represent the face of Boyd's opposition, an ever-present foil.

A billboard reminds drivers where the anti-abortion group Prolife Across America stands. (Andy Lyman )

The couple met at a Bible college, got married and moved to Arizona. Ten years ago, they made it their lives' work to end abortion. The pledge came in a prayer on the drive back home from a Christian music festival. Tara had just visited a booth for Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust, an anti-abortion group known for using public displays of large signs of bloody fetuses as a protest tactic to bear witness to what it calls the "sin of abortion."

Before reading a pamphlet from Survivors, Tara says the abortion issue never really registered with her or her husband.

Of Survivors, she says, "their whole focus is kind of recruiting people who were born after 1973 and really casting the vision that if you were born after that time, you survived abortion."

The Shavers are among those born after Roe v. Wade was decided, and for them, the mission was clear. They moved to Wichita, Kansas, to organize against George Tiller, a doctor who performed abortions through the third trimester of gestation. They joined Operation Rescue, another controversial group that uses protest tactics similar to Survivors.

In 2009, a man named Scott Roeder shot Tiller to death as Tiller attended a Wichita church service. Operation Rescue denounced the murder and denied Roeder was a member of the group. Investigators found the phone number of Operation Rescue's then-senior policy advisor, Cheryl Sullenger, on a piece of paper in Roeder's car.

The Southwestern Womens Options clinic in Albuquerque isnt always this quiet. (Courtesy Google, DigitalGlobe)

Sullenger, now the groups senior vice president, has her own past controversies. She served two years in prison in the late 80s and early 90s after pleading guilty to conspiracy for her involvement in the botched 1987 bombing of a California abortion clinic.

Tara defends Operation Rescue for "always denouncing violence" and protesting Tiller's practice for 10 years in a way that focused on "peaceful, legal action." "It's just kind of the scapegoat," she tells SFR and NM Political Report. "People want to look at some organization or someone to blame."

Boyd describes Tiller as a dear friend with whom he had worked for years. At the time of Tiller's death, the National Abortion Federation encouraged clinics already practicing second-trimester abortions to expand into third-trimester abortions. Boyd helped establish the federation, a trade association of sorts for abortion providers. His wife, Glenna Halvorson-Boyd, once served as its president.

"Glenna and I got together one evening," Boyd says. "We had just been looking at each other, thinking about the same thing. We said, 'We need to do this. We need to carry on this work that George was doing.'"

They soon hired two doctors who had worked with Tiller and specialized in the practice to come and work in their Albuquerque clinic.

As this happened, the Shavers came to New Mexico with the goal of shutting down Boyd's newly expanded practice. The couple allied with Fr. Stephen Imbarrato, a priest and then-director of Project Defending Life, and have since pushed a variety of anti-abortion efforts and causes. In 2013, they worked on a ballot initiative in Albuquerque that would have banned abortions after 20 weeks of gestation. Voters rejected it by a 10-point margin.

The Shavers now work with Abortion Free New Mexico, which focuses on using tactics outlined in a 2014 Operation Rescue manual that include undercover work to "bring accountability" to abortion.

The Shavers see no difference between abortions performed earlier and later in a pregnancy; they say both are equally wrong. Their decision to focus on the latter is a political one.

"Late-term abortion is something we can use to kind of get people to think more clearly and scientifically and logically about what actually happens in an abortion procedure," Tara says.

Public support for these types of abortions varies. A Marist poll from 2014, for example, showed that six in 10 respondents favored banning abortions after 20 weeks. But a STAT News and Harvard University poll last year found the same number of respondents favored access to abortion after 24 weeks in cases of fetal anomalies like microcephaly, a birth defect.

Boyd says he sees patients "who are dying if they do not get the abortion, women who have severe congenital defects."

Boyd gave a rare interview, dressed in his scrubs and working on the July 4 holiday. (Andy Lyman)

Women dont have late-term abortions for frivolous reasons, he says. They dont just get up one morning and say, Im tired of this pregnancy. Ill call Dr. Boyd and get an abortion. They go through an ethical decision-making process. Theyre trying to figure out, What is best for me, for my family, the children I have, the children I hope to have, for society?

These types of abortions are indeed rare. The most recent statistics from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show procedures that happen after 20 weeks of gestation account for just 1.3 percent of all abortions in the United States. (The CDC reported roughly 700,000 abortions total for 2012, the year studied). More than 91 percent of abortions happen in the first 13 weeks of gestation, while more than 65 percent happen in the first eight weeks.

Pregnancies last around 38 to 40 weeks on average. The second trimester ends around week 28 of the pregnancy. The third trimester lasts until birth.

Southwestern Women's Options advertises that it provides abortions for women through the 28th week of pregnancy. Any woman past 28 weeks of gestation seeking an abortion is admitted for procedures on a "case-by-case" basis, according to the clinic's website.

Boyd calls performing such procedures a privilege and "a powerful experience." Sometimes, his patients ask him to bless them and the fetus, which he does readily.

Because so few clinics opt to practice third-trimester abortions, Boyd's clinic draws patients from outside New Mexico. Boyd attributes this to the lack of services available elsewhere. "I know our reputation," he says.

So when he's asked about what he thinks when he hears Albuquerque described as "the late-term abortion capital of the nation"a term the Shavers take credit for coiningBoyd responds wryly.

"A great sense of pride," he says.

The comment is tongue-in-cheek, but Boyd again gets serious defending what he describes as the dire importance of his work. New Mexico should be proud that it has a more open stance on women's reproductive rights than most states, he argues.

"I value the pregnancy," Boyd says. "The pregnant woman values the pregnancy. That's not the point. She has to make that decision that, 'My life and health might be at risk.' Or, she may have to think, 'I have a severely damaged baby and I need to take action to end this pregnancy. I'm not going to subject my family to this.'"

Regardless of the local anti-abortion groups, Boyd says he's found New Mexico to be supportive of women's reproductive rightsmuch more so than, say, Texas, where he says he experiences more protests and hostility at his Dallas clinic.

"New Mexico has strong women's coalitions," he says, including groups like Young Women United and local chapters of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, the National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Joan Lamunyon Sanford, who heads the New Mexico Religious Coalition, traces her advocacy on the issue to being raised by independent-minded parents and brought up in the Methodist Church. Like Boaz, she says her advocacy for abortion rights boils down to economic, racial and social justice. Even if abortion becomes illegal, the privileged will have access to it if they want.

"It's a common thread across faith traditions that we're called to care for the people who live among the margins," Lamunyon Sanford says. "Our abortion funding is a call to access."

Yet resistance is strong where it exists. A handful of protesters flock to the Albuquerque clinic on a regular basis. Santa Fe lost its lone surgical abortion provider when she retired in 2011, although the city's Planned Parenthood clinic offers misoprostol, sometimes known as the "abortion pill." A few protesters can occasionally be seen outside its St. Michael's Drive office.

Each year, the state Legislature hears a slew of bills to limit abortion access, among them a ban on all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Those proposals, which feature impassioned testimony from both sides of the debate every year during the committee process, have never made it to the governor's desk. Some did, however, pass the state House of Representatives multiple times when Republicans controlled the chamber in 2015 and 2016.

Gov. Susana Martinez, now in her last year-and-a-half in office, signaled her support for the measures. And US Rep. Steve Pearce, the only Republican to so far announce a run for governor in 2018, has been vocal in his advocacy against abortion rights throughout his 13 years in Congress. Earlier this spring, Pearce joined Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who chaired the Select Panel on Infant Rights, in a small rally against UNM's fetal tissue research practices.

Boyd would not comment directly on the lawsuit and attorney general's investigation into his clinic regarding fetal tissue donation. In the lawsuit, a former patient alleges the clinic donated her fetal tissue without her consent. In legal filings, Boyd's attorneys argue that the clinic's fetal tissue donation is done with proper consent.

Near the end of a lengthy interview in his Albuquerque office, another anecdote comes to Boyd's mind. It's from Justice Anthony Kennedy's 5-4 decision in the Supreme Court in 2007, upholding 2003's Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Though he acknowledged no reliable data to back it up, Kennedy wrote that it seemed proper to assume that some women "come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained."

"The philosophical question you have to ask Justice Kennedy: Does she get to regret her decision, or does she get to regret your decision that you're forcing on her?" Boyd asks. "Where do you think the greater regret will lie, if she even has regret?"

He argues that the abortion debate comes down to a notion that has flowed through it like water for decades: choice.

"I don't really advocate for anyone to have an abortion," he says. "I advocate for the right for the woman to decide for herself whether she will continue that pregnancy or not."



When Does Life Begin?

Among the major disagreements in the abortion debate is when life begins. Dr. Curtis Boyd explains that different schoolsbiology, religion, law and philosophylead to different answers. The problem, says Boyd, a family medicine doctor who performs abortions, is that people often confuse and conflate the different disciplines.

"Biological life begins at conception," he says. "In fact the sperm is alive and the egg is alive before they unite. When they unite, they're still alive, but now they're developing in a different station. That's biological."

The beginning of life is interpreted in different ways in different cultures. But in our culture, personhood "has always" begun at birth, Boyd emphasizes, and this has been the basis legally as well.

"Birth is when you take a breath of life," he says. "You're born when you leave the woman's body and take a breath of life. Then you have achieved personhood."

That concept is even biblical, Boyd explains, describing the belief that ensoulment occurs with the first breath outside of the womb. The Rev. Carl Boaz, an ally of Boyd, also cites God breathing life into Adam as the beginning of humanity.

Anti-abortion activist Bud Shaver begins with the biological explanation.

"If you can scientifically say that abortion does take the life of a human being, then you can morally say that it is wrong to take the life of an innocent human being, therefore abortion is wrong," he says. "Then you can have your moral foundation."

Shaver describes Boyd bringing his religious beliefs into his practice as "an emotional manipulation of spirituality."

Boyd, however, argues that such a vision against abortion access is "somewhat lacking in Christian generosity and compassion."

"For me, you can value pregnancy and you can value the women simultaneously, and you can respectfully bring that pregnancy to an end, still valuing the fetus and respecting the fetus," Boyd says. "And we do that every day."

This story was reported in collaboration with the NM Political Report, where Joey Peters is a staff writer.





Santa Fe Reporter
A company that operates adult-themed stores in New Mexico and Texas is trying to open up shop at 1494 Cerrillos Road, formerly the location of Mu Du Noodles. But no one with the business would agree to tell SFR exactly what kind of shop.

Harris News Inc., whose address is in Dallas, owns three adult-themed businesses in AlbuquerqueAdult Video, Viewpoint Adult Video and Big Eyeand at least one in Dallas. It obtained a deed to the former restaurant property near the intersection of Cerrillos and Second Street on April 18.

The company is affiliated with Arcade News, an adult store located further south at 2821 Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe. Customers at Arcade News can purchase womens lingerie, a wide assort of lubricants and sex toys, adult-themed media and tickets to private viewing booths.

On our recent visit, a woman who identified herself as the store manager told SFR she was in contact with workers at the 1494 Cerrillos location, where we stopped first, but said any questions about its operations would have to be directed to the workers there.

I have two words for you: Free advertising, the woman cryptically tells SFR. Ive heard a lot of funny rumors about whats opening up there. Im not involved with it.

Mu Du shut its doors after 23 years last August, but neighbors say the kitchen equipment didnt leave the building until this summer. In recent weeks, the building appeared to be under renovation, and packages of womens sexy-time clothes could be seen sitting on racks inside. A man wearing a sleeveless shirt inside the shop shook his head and laughed when asked about the possibility of an adult bookstore opening at the location, and declined to take more questions.

SFR couldnt reach Abram Deleon, whom state records identify as Harris News registered agent, or John A Coil, its director.

City officials dont have much information about the shop either.

Were hearing a lot of rumors about that property, and I need some confirmation because Im getting calls from city councilors asking whats going on, Land Use Department Director Lisa Martinez tells SFR.

Mike Purdy, the director of the citys inspections and enforcement division, writes in an email that an employee of Harris News named Joe Canales told him the business would be be a womens clothing store. Some neighbors say that men at the location described it an adult bookstore. City records show no one has sought a certificate of occupancy or a business license, both of which would be required for a new business.

Since last Friday, after visits from reporters, city officials and neighbors, somebody hung a T-shirt on the front door of the building that can be seen through a plate of glass. BAH FUCKING HUMBUG, the shirt reads.

That kind of attitude worries Peter Olson, who lives about a block away from the business. He says workers have removed a railing and chipped away one of the concrete steps in front of the business so that a ramp could be connected between the back of a moving truck and the front door, where he observed workers hauling kitchen equipment out of the building.

Olson believes the apparent plan to open an adult-themed store within 1,000 feet of a district zoned for residential use as well as near to two youth-centered entities (the Santa Fe Indian School and Youthworks!) and a city parkviolates city rules for sexually oriented businesses.

To me [it] sends a message these people either dont care about that or are trying to do something sneaky, Olson tells SFR. It causes me to wonder how far will they go pushing the limits on this.

In the past, Harris News has pushed limits in similar ways.

In 1998, the company filed a federal lawsuit against the New Mexico city Sunland Park to prevent the town from shutting down its business there. Officials said that Adult Video, which straddled the Texas-New Mexico border, sat too close to a residential area.

The parties settled and the store agreed to limit its advertising. But the town later took renewed legal action, this time in a state court, after Adult Video provided nude dancing on its premises and displayed a truck with the words Adult Video in its parking lot, which was located in El Paso.

A district court agreed that Harris News had broken its obligations and granted the towns injunction ordering the closure of Adult Video, but a decision by the Court of Appeals in 2005 reversed that order. The New Mexico Supreme Court upheld that ruling.

Across the country, similar businesses have launched aggressive legal fights in federal court to undermine local ordinances.

Cities often dont want adult bookstores in their neighborhoods or even their cities, but unfortunately for them, they cant just ban them because of the First Amendment, says Stephen G Peters, an attorney in El Paso who represented Harris News against Sunland Park in state court. The city council members, theyre not usually First Amendment specialists, and the rules are pretty complexand so often the ordinances that are seeking to restrict sexually oriented businesess often overreach. And the remedy for that is usually a lawsuit under the federal civil rights act.

Adult Video remains at the same location in Sunland Park today.

Santa Fe Reporter
Theres a trope about old, small-town doctors who answer the phone at two in the morning and work well into their 70s tending to pregnant mothers, croupy babies and workplace mishaps. In New Mexico, it rings true.

For the past two years, the state has led the nation in the percentage of doctors age 60 or older. It's not even close. The Association of American Medical Colleges says almost 36 percent of the state's doctors are in that category. New Mexico beats the national average by more than 20 percent. When the AAMC's next glimpse at the physician workforce is released this fall, the state will find out if it's found a cure for a systemic problem in the medical community.

From health care systems to medical schools to small towns, New Mexico has been trying to retain older doctors long enough to recruit younger ones. An aging population of doctors has to treat an aging general population that needs more medical providers, and states are competing against one another for a limited pool of docs. That's a particularly acute challenge in rural states.

"It certainly seems that physicians in rural communities don't wish to retire, in many cases, until they can find their replacement," says Dr. Richard Larson, the executive vice chancellor at New Mexico's only public medical school. "For most doctors, medicine is a calling. And they really don't want to let their community down."

The University of New Mexico's Health Sciences Center, where Larson works, has a nationally recognized family and community medicine program. But the school enrolled 102 students in its latest class and graduated just 88. Many of those graduates will leave the state.

Larson and his colleagues work hard to come up with innovative solutions to attract and keep younger doctors in New Mexico. That starts with residencies. New doctors are much more open to moving to a small town if they've already worked in one. In Hobbs, the university worked with the JF Maddox Foundation to build simple homes for medical residents. Within a year, Larson tells SFR, three new primary care providers were in town.

One of the biggest challenges is combating the loneliness that can come from being one of a handful of doctors in a smaller town. Larson says working with a community to provide a social network for doctors and spouses is a must for retaining younger medical providers.

Yet, the University of New Mexico can only churn out so many doctors. At some point, the state needs to find a way to attract younger physicians from elsewhere. That job falls to health care systems, and Presbyterian Medical Group is the state's largest.

"The problem is not that we have too many older doctors, it's that we don't have enough younger doctors. Older doctors are OK," Dr. David Arredondo, executive medical director for Presbyterian, tells SFR.

While the numbers aren't as striking when it comes to doctors under age 40, New Mexico ranks near the bottom of the AAMC physician workforce survey. Just 13.7 percent of the state's physicians are on the fairer side of 40. Only seven states have a lower rate.

To get younger doctors here, Presbyterian leans on the state's climate, culture and outdoor opportunities. It also sells its network of hospitals, an insurance program and a medical group. "Most physicians now are seeking employment within a health care system, which is different than it used to be," he says. Medicine has gotten more complex, and having a support system in place can be a big factor in where a doctor decides to practice.

But Arredondo says he's always competing for a piece of a pie that just isn't big enough. "This country does not train enough physicians to meet its needs," he says.

Dr. George Mychaskiw, an osteopath and anesthesiologist, is the founding dean of the Burrell College of Osteopathic Medicine in Las Cruces. The private medical college isn't technically a part of New Mexico State University, though its students are often affiliated with NMSU. He says the age of New Mexico's physician population is one of the first things he learned about the state.

"The old doctors are part of the baby boom generation themselves. The number of elderly people in the US is exploding," he tells SFR from his office. "You have this perfect storm of older people entering the health care system at a time when older doctors are retiring."

At the same time, he says, more effective geriatric care means the medical community keeps people alive longer. There's a ballooning need for medical care at a time when the country seems least prepared for it.

Mychaskiw says the college, which began its first classes last year, made a point of identifying an underserved border community in which to locate. Las Cruces, and New Mexico in general, fit the bill.

The college, which awards degrees after a four-year program and follows that up with internships and residencies, plans to enroll 162 students each year. It graduates its first class in 2020. It's a step in the right direction, but it comes at a time when New Mexico needs to make a leap.

"You could put 10 medical schools in the area," says Mychaskiw, "and it still wouldn't be enough."



This article has been updated to correct the name of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Santa Fe Reporter
Massive cover-up at City Hall

Actually, it's kind of on City Hall. A mural on the outside of the seat of city government, called "Spiritual Warrior Within," was stuccoed over by contractors who were working on project to restucco all of City Hall. The city says miscommunication between several departments, boards and commissions is to blame, but the mural may be permanently lostor turn into an expensive restoration project.

Dunn gonna run

State Land Commissioner Aubrey Dunn is going to take another shot at Congress. Dunn announced yesterday that he'll pass up the chance for reelection to his current post to instead

being vacated by Steve Pearce. He's the second Republican into the race, after Alamogordo Rep. Yvette Herrell. So far, four Democrats have announced a run, though all announced before Pearce made his decision and none have held elected office before.

Whistleblowers say state silenced them

Three women who filed a lawsuit against Presbyterian Healthcare Services for underpayment of taxes say they raised the issue with their bosses at a state agency two years ago, only to be silenced. The women work at the Office of the Superintendent of Insurance and say they identified issues with the insurer in 2015. They

under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, which lets private individuals prosecute government waste cases, but also lets the attorney general intervene, which Hector Balderas did last week.

A deeper story

New Mexico in Depth continues its post-mortem examination of the behavioral health care crisis that began in 2013, when the Martinez administration accused 15 providers of Medicaid fraud, froze payments to them and forced many out of business. Its most recent look at the mess examines how the state took three years to investigate a Las Cruces business that had a letter from state prosecutors explaining it had already self-reported billing problems and been

that covered the vast majority of the payments in question.

Feds officially pass on charges for Boyd officers

Though it was

, the Department of Justice has now made it official: Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez

for killing homeless camper James Boyd in 2014. The bar for those charges, which involves a determination that the APD officers willfully deprived Boyd of his civil rights, is one of the hardest to meet for prosecutors.

State board grills UNM over new hospital

The hospital at the University of New Mexico's Health Sciences Center is old, overcrowded and, despite being the only place in the state that can treat certain conditions or traumatic injuries, had to turn away 1,000 people last year. The Health Sciences Center has been trying for years to build a new facility on land it owns, with money it already has, but Gov. Martinez has been

. The State Board of Finance shelved the plan five years ago and spent three hours debating its merits yesterday. No vote is scheduled. The plan can't move forward without it.

Truck stop drama

The latest public meeting for a proposed truck stop at the I-25/Highway 14 interchange featured as much hissing and screeching as, well, a truck stop itself. Angry residents of the Turquoise Trail and Rancho Viejo developments say the 24/7 business has

. The land Pilot Flying J wants to buy is generally zoned for commercial use, thought the county would have to approve modifications.

How unique is the Lobo?

A federal spending plan for the US Department of the Interior would require

of the Mexican gray wolf to determine if it is a distinct subspecies. If it isn't, protections for the wolf could be weakened or removed. Supporters say it's a responsible approach, which wolf advocates say it's a thinly veiled plan to stop wolf reintroduction in its tracks.

Thanks for reading! The Word reminds you that there's a certain length after which jean shorts are no longer acceptable.

Subscribe to the Morning Word at sfreporter.com/signup

Santa Fe Reporter
(Adds investor comment, details on outlook, updates shares)

Fletcher Building has taken the unusual step of dumping its chief executive, Mark Adamson, who leaves immediately with the loss of share options and other incentives as the company slashed its full-year earnings guidance and flagged an impairment against Australian assets. The stock dropped 8.4 percent to a 16-month low of $7.41.

Typically major companies allow underperforming executives to manage their departure, publicly at least, with euphemisms such as leaving to pursue other options or to spend more time with family, but in Adamson's case chairman Ralph Norris said the board deemed it the right time for new leadership.

Operating earnings in the year ended June 30 were about $525 million, down from $682 million in 2016 and below the $610 million-to-$650 million range the company gave in March, when its slashed earlier guidance by about 15 percent because of problems with two major construction projects. Today it said losses at those projects, which it hasn't identified, would be larger than expected and also announced a $220 million impairment against its Iplex Australia and Tradelink business units.

"Investors were dissatisfied and this has been enough to warrant a quick exit," said Rickey Ward, New Zealand equities manager at JBWere New Zealand. "Credibility and confidence were severely dented by these downgrades."

In a Q&A section of its statement, Fletcher said the downgrade and impairments had no material impact on the company's outlook for 2018 and the performance of the stock, which was likely to be punished today, would depend on how much credibility the market gave that outlook statement, Ward said. Taking a balanced view, three of Fletcher's divisions "have performed admirably well".

Trading in the building products, international, distribution and residential and land development divisions, as well as three of the four business units in the construction division (Infrastructure, Higgins and South Pacific) were in line with the companys expectations, previously provided at the time of the interim results on Feb. 22, the company said today.

Fletcher remained "well within its banking covenants and expects to continue to do so". The ratio of net debt to net debt plus equity is expected to be about 36 percent at the end of the 2017 year, and the ratio of net debt to ebitda to be about 2.7 times, it said. Any decision on dividend payments would be made "at the time the board approves the annual audited results."

On a conference call in March to announce the earlier downgrade, Adamson had said he "took full responsibility for the current situation" which led to the downgrade just four weeks after the company affirmed its full-year forecast at the release of its interim results.

Today he said he was "disappointed to finish my tenure on the back of a challenging result in the construction division, however I am proud of what has been achieved over the last five years  most notably the turnaround of Formica, double-digit earnings growth in distribution, our acquisition of Higgins and the significant progress in our residential development division.

Investors have speculated that Meridian Energy chief executive Mark Binns may be in line for the top job at Fletcher after announcing he would step down at the end of the year. He had been Fletcher's original Christchurch rebuild czar before being tapped for Meridian's top job almost six years ago.

"A lot of people have been mentioning his name," Wards said. "Whether it is because he is well liked or is a good performer - I've never come across a person who dislikes him. I'm inclined to think it is because he's a good performer."

Binns told BusinessDesk he declined to comment on the rumours.

Adamson would receive "his contractual entitlements" on departure, the company said. "All of his share options will lapse and he will forfeit all shares in the Companys long term incentive scheme. No short term incentive will be paid in respect of FY17."

The company named Francisco Irazusta as interim CEO starting on Monday. He is currently CEO of Fletcher's international division and will lead the company while it embarks on a search for a permanent replacement for Adamson.

The company said as work had continued on major projects in its Building + Interiors business "it has become apparent that losses in B+I will exceed those previously estimated."

"It is very disappointing to see further losses being reported in our B+I business, particularly when the vast majority of the remaining Fletcher Building business units have performed so well during the year," Norris said. In addition, a review of the carrying value of its business units had led to an impairment of Iplex Australia and Tradelink.

"While we do see progress in these business units the board felt it was prudent to recognise that the near to medium term estimates of profitability in each business are not aligned with current carrying values, Norris said.

The company has scheduled a conference call for analysts and investors for 11am New Zealand time.

(BusinessDesk)

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London Stock Exchange-listed IP Group's decision to invest A$200 million over 10 years in commercialising scientific innovations from universities Down Under validates the business model of ASX-listed tech incubator Powerhouse Ventures, says its new chairman Russell Yardley.

Powerhouse has a portfolio of 19 companies developing intellectual property spun out of New Zealand research institutions with a combined enterprise value of about $112 million, including CropLogic, an agricultural technology company that published a prospectus this month to raise A$8 million and list on the ASX.

But Christchurch-based Powerhouse, which counts Canterbury Development Corp (CDC) as its biggest shareholder, has faced the wrong kind of publicity recently, with the departure of former chairman Blair Bryant after it became public that he failed to disclose his bankruptcy in the US in 2007. Due diligence by Powerhouse's board didn't uncover the omission and Yardley says the board has since changed its appointment processes.

Yardley, who was appointed chair last month, has been on a charm offensive with the message that it was a one-off blip. His boardroom roles include being chairman of the National Collaboration Tools and Resources project (Nectar), an Australian government funded body based at Melbourne University that provides "an online infrastructure that supports researchers to connect with colleagues in Australia and around the world," along with Nectar Virtual Labs and Nectar Cloud. He is also chair of ASX-listed cyber-security firm Tesserent.

"Powerhouse is in a pretty exciting place. Our mantra is to find great science, build great companies," he says. "Powerhouse needs to win the confidence of the investment community."

Not every investment will be a winner - that's the nature of early-stage investments, he said. When it hits on a winner it would look to sell down its holding, ideally in about two years. It sold a 1.5 percent stake in Christchurch-based gas analysis firm Syft Technologies in May for $996,900, after making a $99,000 investment in 2013. But that doesn't mean it is like a private equity firm, Yardley said.

"They (PE firms) are there for as long as it takes to get above their IRR (internal rate of return)," he said. "That's not our mission. We're looking at universities to build great companies. We can stay there for a long ride. If you think you're on a unicorn you don't sell out."

In May, the UK's IP Group signed an agreement with eight Australian universities plus Auckland University to invest at least A$200 million over 10 years in finding and developing companies involved in disruptive innovation in fields such as digital medicine, new medical therapies and quantum computing. Yardley said the fund "does pretty much what Powerhouse does. I think IP Group coming to Australia validates the Powerhouse model."

Powerhouse shares last traded on the ASX this week at 64 Australian cents, a 40 percent decline from the A$1.07 price in its initial public offering that raised A$10.2 million last October.

Yardley said the company needs to set up a process to raise capital every year, with the next funding round likely to be "approaching A$20 million. We want to build a substantial company to invest in New Zealand science."

It is the largest of three technology incubators that get operational funding, pre-incubation grants, and repayable loans for startups they co-fund through government innovation funding agency Callaghan Innovation. It has investment managers assigned to each New Zealand university and aims to make five-to-10 new investments a year through what it calls a "patient capital investment model". Patient capital is also the mantra of IP Group.

Callaghan has said its relationship with the company "remains unchanged" with the departure of Blair Bryant. Powerhouse is holding its July board meeting in Auckland and will hold the August meeting in Christchurch, where Yardley says he will be sitting down with shareholder CDC.

"They tell me they are comfortable" with their investment, he says.

(BusinessDesk receives funding from Callaghan Innovation to assist coverage of the commercialisation of innovation)

(BusinessDesk)

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Fletcher Building chief executive Mark Adamson has stepped down, with Francisco Irazusta named as interim replacement, and chairman Ralph Norris says the board deemed it the right time for new leadership. The announcement came with a profit warning and a $220 million impairment.

The profit downgrade follows a 15 percent cut to guidance to full-year earnings in March as a result of overruns at two major construction projects. Today, the Auckland-based company said operating earnings were about $525 million in the year ended June 30, down from its earlier guidance of $610 million to $650 million. Its results would include an impairment "of up to $220 million" against its Iplex Australia and Tradelink business units.

The company said as work had continued on major projects in its Building + Interiors business "it has become apparent that losses in B+I will exceed those previously estimated."

"It is very disappointing to see further losses being reported in our B+I business, particularly when the vast majority of the remaining Fletcher Building business units have performed so well during the year," Norris said. In addition, a review of the carrying value of its business units had led to an impairment of Iplex Australia and Tradelink.

"While we do see progress in these business units the board felt it was prudent to recognise that the near to medium term estimates of profitability in each business are not aligned with current carrying values, Norris said.

The company has scheduled a conference call for analysts and investors for 11am New Zealand time. Irazusta, currently CEO of Fletcher's international division, would lead the company starting on Monday while it embarks on a search for a permanent replacement for Adamson.

"I am disappointed to finish my tenure on the back of a challenging result in the construction division, however I am proud of what has been achieved over the last five years  most notably the turnaround of Formica, double-digit earnings growth in distribution, our acquisition of Higgins and the significant progress in our residential development division, Adamson said in the statement.

Fletcher shares last traded at $8.09 and have declined 12 percent in the past 12 months while the NZX 50 Index gained 8.1 percent.

(BusinessDesk)

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Dr. Tashni-Ann Dubroy Named HBCU Female President of the Year

Fresh from her victory as the recently appointed Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Howard University, Dr. Tashni-Ann Dubroy, (currently President of Shaw University), has been awarded Female President of the Year by the HBCU Digest.

"I am greatly humbled and honored to be receiving this award," says Dr. Dubroy, "and I offer my sincerest gratitude to the HBCU Digest and its Founding Editor, Mr. Jarrett Carter, as well as the awards committee."

From her arrival in the USA as a 17-year old immigrant from Jamaica to her current position at Shaw as one of the countrys youngest college leaders, Dr. Dubroys career in academia has been on a consistent and shining ascent. Her personal story is a lesson in dedication, persistence and a fierce will to overcome adversity.

My mother left Jamaica when I was thirteen years old, Dr. Dubroy explains. She said Ill see you in two weeks. Im going to the USA to make a better life for our family. I didnt see her for two years. My childhood was quite unique,and even though my parents didnt have a college education, once they realized that they could spark a hunger in me for excellence and a can-do spirit, they knew I would take flight. It was a blessing to have parents who believed in me."

Appointed as Shaws President in August 2015, Dr. Dubroy helped to revitalize her Alma Maters campus operations, budget performance and enrollment. She is credited with the university's first enrollment increase in six years, and the closing of a $4 million fundraising gap, including $630,000 - the single largest total ever raised at an alumni event.

Dr. Dubroy's emphasis on fiscal conservatism and process optimization helped the university to develop several key campus initiatives, including the termination of the three-year salary reduction program, investments in long-deferred facility projects and the establishment of recruitment bolstering initiatives.

"We are proud of her energetic, inclusive and refreshing leadership, says Shaws

Board Chairman Dr. Joe Bell,and the manner in which she led our institution to surpass goals in student enrollment, fundraising and cost control. We wish her all the best in the next phase of her professional journey.

I thank the Shaw University Board of Trustees for their faith in me,who once interviewed a 34-year-old young woman who had no experiential proof that she could do the job says Dr. Dubroy, ...but who walked into the interview, with a bold vision in a navy pants suit, some pearls and a Jamaican accent and they hired me!

Dr. Dubroy has received numerous honors for her innovative leadership at Shaw University including the 2017 CEO of the Year by the Triangle Business Journal, the 2016 Presidential Medal of Excellence by Kingsborough Community College, and is the first recipient of the 2016 Spirit of Excellence in Higher Education award by the Movement of Youth organization. She will take up her new position at Howard University in October 2017.

Many of the students we serve at Shaw University are facing some of the same challenges that I faced as a student, she comments. We fight every single day to make a difference in their lives, to ease the adversities they encounter in pursuit of a college education. I am proud to be counted among other university leaders who are committed gladiators in higher education. I also want to acknowledge the dedication and vision of my fellow women presidents, who are equally deserving of this accolade.

Dr. Dubroy began her career as a Research Scientist at BASF, the world's largest chemical company. She quickly ascended to the position of global technology analyst, and after two years was appointed to serve as chemical procurement manager, where she managed a strategic sourcing budget of $35 million.

Dr. Dubroy earned her Ph.D. in Physical Organic Chemistry from North Carolina State University in 2007 and holds a Masters of Business Administration from Rutgers University in New Jersey.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The latest centenarian to grab the Advance spotlight is Helen Krause, who was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917, the same day in the same borough and the same year as silver screen stars Lena Horne and Susan Hayward.

The former Helen Pontus was raised in Greenpoint, one of Brooklyn's hottest newly revamped neighborhoods, and attended grade school and high school in that community.

During World War II, Helen joined the work force in a Westinghouse defense plant to support the war effort.

On May 5, 1946, she married Edward Krause and during the late 1950s and early 1960s she was a staffer in the Cushman's Bakery chain in Brooklyn.

Years later, she worked for Chase Manhattan Bank in the Big Apple until her retirement.

She's the mom of three sons, Edward, Richard and George, three daughters-in-law, numerous grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great grandchildren, and a slew of nieces and nephews.



Helen celebrated her 100th birthday on June 28 at a party hosted at Island Shores, the Midland Beach facility she's called home since last year.



Another celebration came on July 2nd at Brooklyn's Rex Manor attended by family members and friends who came from as far away as North Carolina, Texas and California. In attendance were Helen's "younger sisters," Laura, 95, of Brooklyn and Claire, 91, of Texas.

Happy 100th birthday, Helen!
STATEN ISLAND, NY -- Sundog Theatre has welcomed four new members to its Board of Directors, increasing its total membership to 10.

Newly approved were Kelly Augustine, Bronwyn Fugate, Holly Olivieri, and Amanda Straniere.

They join Sundog's executive director, Susan Fenley; its board chair Jason Walters; Kara Criscitiello, an attorney; Marjorie Hack; treasurer Jonathan Lipschitz of Victory State Bank, and architect Pablo Vengoechea.

"Having the expertise of these new board members, in addition to the professionals already on the board, is a major asset for Sundog," said Executive Director Susan Fenley. "As we grow even more in the educational arena and explore new theatrical productions and possibly a permanent venue, our increased board gives us a decided advantage."

Kelly Augustine grew up on Staten Island. She holds a master of arts in teaching and a bachelor of arts degree in psychology, English (minor), both earned at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. She taught in that state for two years before returning to Staten Island, where she's been a second-grade special education teacher at PS 29 since 2006. She has been involved in Integrated Collaborative Team Teaching at the school since August 2007, and has also supervised an after-school homework program since 2010. Kelly has a 4-year-old daughter.

Bronwyn Fugate is also a native Staten Islander. She earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in theatre from The Boston Conservatory in Massachusetts, and a master's degree in special education from Touro College in New York. She is a teacher in the theater department at Curtis High School, and also serves as a special education English and global history teacher at the school. Bronwyn directed and choreographed the school's after-school drama program for seven years, mounting 11 full-length musicals - among them "Hair," "Rent," and "In the Heights. She has a 2-year-old son.

Holly Olivieri: This native Staten Islander graduated from Farmingdale State University Agricultural and Technical College of New York with an associate degree in ornamental horticulture. She worked as an award-winning floral designer and gift shop manager at Wiesner Bros. Nursery on Staten Island for 28 years before moving on to real estate. She has worked full-time as a broker for 12 years, the last two as owner and broker of Holly's Staten Island Buzz Realty, Inc. Her company is based in St. George.

Amanda Straniere is another native Staten Islander. Amanda earned a bachelor of arts degree in English (minor, psychology) from Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and a master of arts in Studies in Fiction from the University of East Anglia (Norwich, England). She is currently pursuing a master's degree in public administration at Baruch College in New York. Amanda worked at the Borough President's Office of Tourism & Cultural Affairs for seven years before moving to the Staten Island Museum in 2013 as a community campaign coordinator. Since 2016, she has been development manager at the Museum. She has a 2-year-old daughter.

ABOUT SUNDOG THEATRE

Formed in 2002, Sundog Theatre has been presenting original and contemporary theatre for 15 years. The arts company is unique on Staten Island in that it also presents culturally-based school programming rooted in theater, visual arts, dance, music and literacy. Programs are offered to students in kindergarten through high school in New York City's public and private schools as well as community-based organizations. In addition, Sundog Theatre offers year-round acting classes for children ages 6 to 14, a summer theater camp for kids 10 to 17, and it tours productions for young audiences throughout the year.

Among the thought-provoking theatre the company has staged are favorites like The Fantasticks, Roar of the Greasepaint..., Blood Brothers, Charlotte's Web, and A Christmas Carol. Its original productions have included My Mariners, about retired sailors at Snug Harbor on Staten Island; Once Upon a Mime, an original, full-length show without words; If You Could See: The Alice Austen Story, about Staten Island's pioneering female photographer; Meucci's Message, about Staten Islander Antonio Meucci's invention of the telephone, and Sundog's signature series, its annual Scenes from the Staten Island Ferry.

For more information, visit www.SundogTheatre.org or call 718-816-5453.
CITY HALL -- Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis wants to know how much taxpayers are spending on Mayor Bill de Blasio travel outside the five boroughs.

"It's unconscionable that the mayor is traveling so much when things are so bad," Malliotakis (R-East Shore/Brooklyn) said on the steps of City Hall Wednesday.

The presumptive Republican nominee for mayor said she filed a formal Freedom of Information Law, or FOIL, request Tuesday asking for the total cost of the trips after de Blasio went to Germany days after a police officer was killed.

My issue is that this mayor has chosen to travel during the worst possible times," Malliotakis said. "He has totally neglected his responsibility as mayor of the city of New York."

COST TO TAXPAYERS?

Malliotakis asked for the cost to city taxpayers for the trips including security provided by the NYPD, as well as lodging, meals and transportation for de Blasio, his staff and the police detail.

She asked for the total cost of 21 trips outside the city de Blasio has taken since he got into office 2014.

The mayor's gone to cities in Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Iowa, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Florida, Vermont and Puerto Rico. He's also been to Italy multiple times, and has visited the the United Kingdom, France and Israel.

SECURITY CONCERNS

The request went to the NYPD and mayor's office.

The NYPD didn't immediately comment, but has previously declined to provide the cost of the Germany trip, citing security concerns. (Still, the NYPD and city have provided the cost of security for Trump Tower since President Donald Trump was elected.)

Asked about Malliotakis' request and whether the city would provide the trip costs, de Blasio also cited security.

"Everything is based on the same standard for the last three and a half years with the NYPD and I entirely respect the judgment of the NYPD in how they provide information related to security and what they choose not to provide," de Blasio said at an unrelated event in Queens on Wednesday. "There's a reason for that and I respect that reason."

Malliotakis said she doesn't want to jeopardize the safety of de Blasio or the police serving him -- and doesn't want to know the number of personnel assigned. She just wants the cost.

"We certainly don't want to put the mayor or NYPD at risk," she said.

Malliotakis filed her candidacy for mayor at the end of April, but few Staten Islanders know who she is.

Fifty-nine percent of borough voters said they haven't heard enough about Malliotakis to say whether their opinion of her was favorable or not, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released in May.

Thirty-five percent of Islanders polled said they had favorable opinions of her, while just 5 percent of them had unfavorable opinions. Malliotakis has been in office on Staten Island for six years.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- While the developer of the New York Wheel faces a large hiccup after firing its builder, and must find a suitable company to complete the $580 million project, Borough President James Oddo and Councilwoman Debi Rose are optimistic the tourist attraction -- which is expected to create jobs and infuse Staten Island with tourism dollars -- will be completed.

The NY Wheel's developer, Rich Marin, severed ties with builder Mammoet-Starneth LLC after the two companies found themselves in court, battling over a project that was months late, with delays costing millions of dollars.

Now, the Wheel must find a new builder to finish the job of constructing the 630-foot observation wheel with views of Manhattan.

A NY Wheel spokesperson told the Advance last week, "The developer is committed to completing the New York Wheel," and Oddo and Rose believe it.

Kept in the loop during the project's steps, both said the firing was not a surprise.

"It's unfortunate," Oddo told the Advance. "I think it was a necessary step."

PROGRESS SO FAR

So far, a parking garage has been built for the Wheel, and although work continues on portions of it, sections are open and used daily for parking in St. George.

Construction on a terminal building is under way.

The enormous legs that will hold up the Wheel were built in Italy, but a flaw in the parts kept them from being used, while four pedestals have been erected, on which the Wheel legs will sit.

Given the amount of work and money already invested, Oddo gets the strong sense that the partners are even more adamant about completing the monstrous Wheel, expected to attract thousands of tourists daily.

"They are confident that an entity exists and is quite capable," he said.

While Mammoet-Starneth LLC was selected as the builder, there were other companies under consideration, even as the market for building a 630-foot-tall observation wheel is quite small and the options for choosing builders limited.

While naysayers have been quick to assume the firing amounts to an end of the project, the borough president is optimistic that not only it will be built, but not too far behind schedule of a spring 2018 opening date.

EMPIRE OUTLETS

The Empire Outlets, an upscale outlet mall with a hotel, are being built on one side of the Richmond County Bank Ballpark that houses the Staten Island Yankees, with the Wheel on the other, and will have a "synergy" that both Rose and Oddo want.

The outlets previously delayed their opening to coincide with the Wheel's opening, and will have to open without its counterpart.

"I am disappointed because these projects were sold in tandem and I thought that they had great value in working together and opening at the same time," Rose told the Advance. "However, the same 2 million tourists will still come over on the ferry boat."

With the project in the councilwoman's North Shore district, she had a large role in getting City Council approval through the land use process.

NORTH SHORE PROMISES

With those previously agreed upon, Rose is confident they'll remain.

"All of the things that I negotiated are still on track," she said. "The things that should have happened, have, and the ones going forward ... are still viable."

She is "really optimistic" the Wheel will be completed after being given a guarantee from developer Rich Marin, who is "in fact having conservations with another builder" to complete the project.

Running for re-election for a third term, Rose is being challenged by two Democrats and a Conservative/Republican candidate.

One Democrat, Kamillah Hanks, attacked Rose when news of the Wheel's delay broke.

In an email sent to supporters, Hanks wrote "Debi Rose is Asleep at the Wheel!"

"Staten Island's biggest development in history has been delayed indefinitely!" the email states. "Where is Debi Rose? As the Council's Deputy Majority Leader she has done little to ensure that City's $580 million investment remains on schedule."

Asked about elected officials' roles in the Wheel's construction, Oddo scoffed.

"It's nonsense" to say any public official has a role in a development agreement between two private entities, he said.

Rose said, "This is just another indication of the misinformation and the lack of knowledge that my opponent possesses about city projects ... This is about a private entity and a development project that I had nothing to do with."

Going through city land use procedure, the City Council follows the lead of the councilmember whose district the development is in. With Rose's backing, the City Council voted to approve the project.

NO ROLE IN NEGOTIATIONS



But neither Rose nor Oddo nor any other elected official has a role in the negotiations between the developer and builder -- other than being kept abreast of the situation.

Both expect the Wheel will do what its proponents expect it to do.

"I believe in its value to this corridor, to reclaiming the waterfront and incentivizing future investment," Oddo said.

Acknowledging "Clearly it's a setback for [the developer] because we're talking much more money," Rose said. "At this point they have to get it done. The will is there. They want to complete it."
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Bridge Preparatory Charter School for Creative Thinkers, the long-envisioned borough-wide school for dyslexic children, has cleared the first step in its application process in Albany.

The State Education Department has accepted Bridge Prep's "letter of intent," clearing the school to proceed with its plans and the next round in the charter application process.

"While there's still work to do before we receive the charter allowing the school to open, the acceptance of the letter of intent shows that we are committed, competitive, and building steam," said Borough President James Oddo, who has championed the idea for the school.

He said his team of Tim Castanza, project director, and his community education liaisons Rose Kerr and Laura Timoney, who are working with a committee of educators, parents and professionals, will now submit a full application to the state Board of Regents in August.

"The amazing Tim Castanza and the fabulous working group he has built, along with my education team, Rose Kerr and Laura Timoney, continue to spend a great deal of time and effort on making this school, which began as simply a dream, into reality," Oddo said.

If approved, Bridge Prep will be open for the 2018-2019 school year, serving approximately 36 students in Grade 2 and 36 students in Grade 3, adding a grade each year. Class size will be limited to serve no more than 12 students.

The school has the support of the Community Education Council (CEC), as well as the Staten Island Federation of PTAs, along with borough elected officials.

According to CEC President Michael Reilly, Bridge Prep would be the first and only public charter school in New York State, and one of a handful in the United States, designed to meet the needs of students with dyslexia and language-based learning difficulties.

Bridge Prep's opening on Staten Island would also provide students the opportunity to be educated in their own community.

An estimated 10,000 Staten Island students, from kindergarten through high school, have dyslexia. Advocates -- and parents of dyslexics -- some who are themselves dyslexic -- say with proper services that start at an early age, their children can go on to succeed in school, and go on to college.

"It makes no sense. We're supposed to be helping children learn, but instead we frustrate them with learning," said Miguel Rodriguez, president of the Staten Island Federation of PTAs. "It's like a vicious cycle; the more we wait, the more these kids fall behind. That's not what we want."
Page Content

Mr. Chairman,





Ladies and gentlemen





I bring you greetings from Sint Maarten one of the 4 autonomous countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.





Each of the four countries wholeheartedly embraces the Agenda 2030 and has its own political reality and therefore faces its own peculiar challenges, but we all share the belief that the key to success in attaining the SDGs lies in our willingness to form partnerships at the national, regional and international levels.





We have just presented our Voluntary National Review to the United Nations, which outlines the steps we have taken in implementing the SDGs.





St. Maarten, shares a 37 square miles island with a Territorial Collectivity of the Republic of France, and obviously has the biggest challenge in ensuring the achievement of the 17 SDGs identified in the 2030 Agenda.





For us sustainability has a very unique meaning; we have to keep improving the quality of life for all our citizens while functioning under the core principles of open government, integrity, accountability, transparency, sustainable development, social inclusion, and equality.





Tourism the main pillar of our economy, accounts for some 80 per cent of all economic activities.





Using the Millennium Acceleration Framework, St. Maarten has introduced measures to combat poverty and hunger.





Our latest National Household Budget Survey estimated that the average household in St. Maarten spent approximately US$44,700 in 2015.





More than double the amount a decade earlier.





We have been working closely with the PAHO, the W.H.O. and the Caribbean Public Health Agency to improve health care policies and services.





A National Health Insurance scheme is now being developed while a brand new hospital is also on the books.





We offer compulsory education and lifelong learning and we are improving our vocational and tertiary education levels to meet the growing demands for skilled labor.





We are working diligently on affordable housing, to provide especially for our young professionals.





The UNDP office provides support to the St. Maarten government in integrating the SDGs into our National Development Plan and policies that are now being drafted.





I can assure you, of our unwavering commitment to achieving the SDGs for the well-being of our people.





We stand ready to continue this important work in the future, and to report our further progress to the international community.





On behalf of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, I wish each one of you much success in the implementation of your prioritized goals in the coming years.





I thank you.
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A contender for the coveted Defence Department top job says the government needs to quickly detail a case for creating a super-size Home Affairs department before the opposition destroys the idea.

Executive director at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute Peter Jennings, touted as one of the main figures who could replace Dennis Richardson at the helm of Defence, said the government had to outline how and why it will radically overhaul Australia's security, police and intelligence agencies.

"I don't think that the case has been as compelling as it could have been," he said.

Doug Dingwall brings you the story here.

Teachers paid $1 million in compensation annually
Police are calling for witnesses to a carjacking and series of attempted robberies in Canberra's southern suburbs on Monday night.

Investigators want to speak with anyone who has information or security camera footage from the July 17 incidents in Mawson, Wanniassa, Calwell and Gordon.

Canberra police said a man entered the Liquor Land store in Mawson about 5.10pm on Monday night, threatening staff with a knife and making demands for cash. A staff member refused to hand over money from the cash register before a short struggle took place.

The man left the store and drove away with another man in a silver Subaru Liberty.

Shortly after, two men approached a staff member outside the Domino's Pizza at Erindale shops in Wanniassa about 5.30pm, threatening the employee and demanding his wallet and keys. They followed the staff member to the back of the shop and demanded cash.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The High Court overturned Cardinal George Pell's conviction for historic child sex offences in a judgment handed down April 7, 2020. In a unanimous decision all seven High Court judges found Victoria's Court of Appeal should not have upheld Pell's conviction It found the evidence could not support a guilty verdict.



Cardinal George Pell will keep his honorary role at AFL club Richmond as he faces sex offence charges.

Cardinal George Pell. Credit:AP

Tigers chief executive Brendon Gale has released a statement, confirming Cardinal Pell still has strong links to the club.

Pell signed with the Tigers in the late '50s, but did not play for them in the then-VFL before he joined the priesthood.
High energy costs will underpin a drive by the new owner of Arrium to generate its own power at its sites, where possible.

British industrialist Sanjeev Gupta outlined some more of his hopes for the Arrium group of businesses during a visit to the sprawling OneSteel plant at Laverton North in Melbourne's west on Wednesday, where he met management, mingled with staff in high-viz gear in the cafeteria and toured the plant.

Mr Gupta, who has closely followed the political debate in Australia about energy, said Australian energy costs were "very high" and could act as a deterrent.

But he said his business planned to make investments to produce as much of its own energy as possible.
There was something else aside from Anne Ward's decades of commercial law and financial services experience that helped her land a spot on the board of accounting software company MYOB.

MYOB was specifically searching for a woman to join its entirely male board as it prepared to list on the ASX in 2015.

"Being the only woman wasn't a big issue," says Ward.

"I have been in that position before. I was intrigued by the offer as I had not worked in the technology industry before. I was told that's not what the board was looking for, they already had tech expertise. They were looking for the hard skills I had."
An Audi commercial that aired in theatres and online in China is drawing ire for comparing women to used cars - another bump in the road for the German automaker, which once enjoyed nearly limitless growth in the country.

The advertisement opens in a pastoral setting, with a bride and a groom about to take their vows. But the mother of the groom frantically interrupts, rushing up the aisle to "inspect" her would-be daughter-in-law.

With a stare, the woman proceeds to pinch the bride's nose, pull back the bride's ear and then examine the inside of the bride's mouth.

"What are you doing?!" the horrified groom asks in Mandarin, as he pulls his mother away.
Tim Pierotti, who once ran a consumer hedge fund for "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli, said he had already lost faith in his boss by the end of 2012.

Then a letter from Shkreli came to his home, addressed to his wife.

"Your husband has stolen $US1.6 million from me," it read.

"Your pathetic excuse of a husband," the letter added, "needs to get a real job that does not depend on fraud to succeed."
The jokes started as soon as the media alert landed in inboxes at lunchtime on Tuesday.

Greens senator Larissa Waters would make an "important announcement" at 1.30pm - the exact same wording as Scott Ludlam's career-ending "important announcement" the Friday before. Surely lightning couldn't strike twice, could it? Then again, the wags noted, Waters was born in Canada ... ha ha ha.

But the guffaws turned to sheer amazement when the senator fronted cameras outside Queensland Parliament House in Brisbane. With her baby daughter and partner watching on, Waters fought back tears as she apologised that after checking her situation in the wake of the Ludlam snafu, she had learned she was an unwitting dual citizen, too.

Section 44 of the Constitution had struck again.
Malcolm Turnbull's unwise description of himself in London as a "very strong Elizabethan" was just a turn of phrase (no doubt fine-tuned with his speech-writers beforehand), which was called into play to deal with the dilemma of how republican political leaders should carry themselves when dealing with their monarchs.

In this case, how a republican Australian prime minister, who led the Yes campaign in 1999 and is endlessly described as an "avowed" or "fervent" republican, should carry himself in his dealings with the British Queen who is also the Australian head of state. Like other republicans, especially leaders, they always risk being seen as unenthusiastic if they are calm and considered in their utterings and demeanour but fawning and hypocritical if they are seen to be too enthusiastic.

Nevertheless, Turnbull will now be remembered for his use of this phrase just as the monarchist Sir Robert Menzies is often held up to ridicule (mindlessly according to Allan Martin, his biographer) for his gushing address to the Queen during her 1963 royal tour to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Canberra. To express his admiration for the Queen, Menzies famously quoted the lines from Thomas Ford's poem "There is a Lady Sweet and Kind" which read "I did but see her passing by and yet I love her till I die". Turnbull now will be lampooned just as Menzies has been.

Turnbull's situation is an example of a real and common dilemma. Remember that all nine Australian political leaders are now declared republicans. Though the state and territory chief ministers face the same dilemma less frequently, they still do so regularly during royal visits of various kinds. It may be personally easy but it can be politically difficult.
Jabiru, Northern Territory: Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for a minimum of 65,000 years, a team of archaeologists has established - 18,000 years longer than had been proved previously and at least 5000 years longer than had been speculated by the most optimistic researchers.

The world-first finding, which follows years of archaeological digging in an ancient camp-site beneath a sandstone rock shelter within the Jabiluka mining lease in Kakadu, Northern Territory, drastically alters the known history of the trek out of Africa by modern humans, according to the leader of the international team of archaeologists, associate professor Chris Clarkson of the University of Queensland.

The findings, which are already causing intense interest in archaeological circles across the world, have been peer reviewed by internationally recognised scientists and are published this week in the world's most prestigious science journal, Nature.

Among the trove of discoveries are the world's oldest stone axes with polished and sharpened edges, proving that the earliest Australians were among the most sophisticated tool-makers of their time: no other culture had such axes for another 20,000 years.
Apple's top privacy executives have flown out to Australia twice in the past month to lobby the Turnbull government over looming changes to laws that govern access to encrypted messages.

The global technology giant, which is on track to become the world's first trillion-dollar company, met with Attorney-General George Brandis and senior staff in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's office on Tuesday to discuss the company's concerns about the legal changes, which could see tech companies compelled to provide access to locked phones and third party messaging applications.

Apple has argued in the meetings that as a starting point it does not want the updated laws to block tech companies from using encryption on their devices, nor for companies to have to provide decryption keys to allow access to secure communications.
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton is confident the Manus Island detention centre will close in October, despite only 70 refugees having been processed for resettlement.

Mr Dutton, who will soon take responsibility for a newly announced super portfolio overseeing Australia's domestic security, said he would close the centre "tomorrow" but was at the mercy of an American timetable.

An agreement was struck between Australia and the United States in the dying days of the Obama administration to resettle up to 1250 of the asylum seekers detained on the island.
One of the candidates vying to be the next West Australian senator for the Liberal Party has described supporters of refugee-friendly policies as "a bunch of cockroaches" swarming all over his former electorate.

Michael Sutherland, the former Speaker in the WA parliament who lost his inner city seat in March, made the comments at a Liberal Party event in Sydney last month.

He is one of the five men revealed to be vying in this weekend's pre-selection for the Senate vacancy created by the retirement of Liberal Chris Back. Born in South Africa, Mr Sutherland has refused to provide proof he has relinquished his dual-citizenship, despite two Greens senators resigning in the past week after it emerged they were citizens of other countries.

Speaking at a panel discussion on how the Liberals can combat anti-fracking campaign groups, Mr Sutherland said such activists had overrun his former electorate of Mount Lawley.
Dodgy sprinklers, aggressive profiteering and a lack of regulation were highlighted in evidence to a Senate inquiry investigating non-conforming building products in Sydney on Wednesday.

A Senate inquiry has been told of the potentially tragic consequences of Australia's lax building laws, with experts warning it is only a matter of time before a Grenfell Tower-style tragedy unfolds locally.

The second day of the inquiry comes a month after the deadly London tower block fire took 79 lives

Grenfell Tower after the blaze. Credit:PA

The inquiry heard there are up to 2500 buildings in NSW and thousands in Victoria at risk of defective cladding similar to that which is being blamed for turning the Grenfell Tower block in London into a towering inferno.

Scott Williams, the chief executive of Fire Protection Association of Australia, told the inquiry that buildings in Sydney and Melbourne shorter than 25 metres were at even greater risk because they were not required to have sprinkler systems monitored by local fire services.

"You go and introduce to that flammable cladding and you have the most vulnerable building in Australia," he said.
Tony Abbott has revealed he was advised against the creation of a new British-style Home Affairs ministry when he was prime minister and implied his successor Malcolm Turnbull should produce any new advice supporting the "massive bureaucratic change".

Mr Abbott, who has just returned from a week-long holiday in Croatia, took to the airwaves on Wednesday to criticise the creation of the super-ministry, which won't be in operation until next year.

In an interview with 2GB's Ben Fordham, Mr Abbott said the same idea was put to his government but officials advised against it.

"The advice back then was that we didn't need the kind of massive bureaucratic change which it seems the prime minister has in mind," he said.
There are certain firsts every toddler goes through: first words, first successful trip to the loo.

But, if you're a toddler whose life's destiny as a state representative has already been determined by an archaic governance structure based on birth right, there's another first you probably need to master sometime between your terrible twos and thundering threes: first handshake with a member of a foreign delegation.

Princess Charlotte, two, got hers out of the way upon arrival in Germany on Wednesday.

The royal toddler, who is fourth in line to the British throne, fronted up to Berlin Tegel airport with her parents, Prince William and Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, and older brother, Prince George.
The pelvic mesh scandal that has left an unknown number of Australian women with serious, permanent injuries has exposed a health system "asleep at the wheel", a leading consumer health group will tell a Senate inquiry.

The scandal shows how the health system silences and blames victims, Victoria's Health Issues Centre chief executive Danny Vadasz said in a submission to the mesh inquiry, which holds its first hearing in Melbourne on August 3.

A selection of pelvic mesh devices cleared for release in Australia and overseas for use in women.

"The Senate inquiry has limited itself by just looking at certain aspects of this tragedy but I have already suggested a Royal Commission is necessary," Mr Vadasz told Fairfax Media on Wednesday.

In a scathing submission after more than 2200 women responded to a survey from the centre, Mr Vadasz said the mesh scandal exposes how the burden of proof is left with "the people who've suffered in the first place", while regulators often remain in denial.
A man has been charged with attempted murder after allegedly shooting another man in the stomach and knee before leading police on a wild chase through Toowoomba, west of Brisbane.

The 20-year-old alleged victim was rushed to hospital with serious but not life-threatening injuries and was expected to undergo surgery to have at least one of the bullets removed on Wednesday.

The victim was allegedly shot with two different guns about 1am before the pair drove off. Credit:Nine News / Twitter

The incident sparked a manhunt for two men who had been speaking to the man outside his Curzon Street home before he was shot, about 1am on Wednesday.

The victim was allegedly shot with two different guns before the pair drove off.
Warning: Graphic image

Muslim schoolchildren were targeted in an early-morning attack in Brisbane's south on Wednesday, when a bag featuring a swastika and containing a severed pig's head was left at a school's front gate.

Islamic College of Brisbane staff removed the bag before students arrived at the school in outer suburb Karawatha, acting school chairman Ali Kadri said, but staff and students had been left shaken.

"They're worried because, while it's a minor thing, there are really young kids who go to that school, because it goes from Prep to year 12," he said.
The Queensland government should reform the state's tax system to create a more competitive business environment, according to a report.

It is among 10 recommendations in the Queensland Productivity Commission's draft report into the state's manufacturing sector, due to be released on Thursday.

The Queensland Productivity Commission has made 10 recommendations after reviewing the state's manufacturing sector. Credit:Glenn Hunt

Queensland relies on payroll tax, transfer duties, insurance taxes, gambling duties and land tax on the unimproved value of land.

The commission said competition between states led to complex tax structures that could "create distortions", leading to people making decisions that take advantage of concessions.
Queensland Rail has trained 28 of the 200 new train drivers it needs to restore reliability to the beleaguered operator.

But Deputy Premier and Transport Minister Jackie Trad announced in budget estimates that external recruitment would open next month for drivers without prior QR experience.

Queensland Rail is yet to open recruitment for drivers externally who have no prior experience with the operator. Credit:Jorge Branco

The Citytrain Response Unit's latest report reveals 28 drivers had been trained and 107 selected out of a target of 200.

Seventy-seven guards had been trained and 263 selected, out of a target of 200.
Selling her home to pay for a new business idea is radical, but Jules Brooke didn't think twice.

"I knew this platform was the exact solution that small businesses were searching for. You only live once, and I had to do it," Brooke says.

Jules Brooke sold her Victorian home to create her venture, Handle Your Own PR.

Her platform, Handle Your Own PR, equips small business owners with the resources to handle their own PR. It's a concept Brooke has been teaching SMEs in workshops and podcasts since 2009.

But she saw an opportunity to take the service a step further by empowering SMEs to handle the entire process on one platform. She partnered with an IT expert, sold her Victorian home and the pair poured $100,000 into the platform build, which launched a few weeks ago.
Other pricey eateries will surely join them as technology disrupts the restaurant sector and food consumption. Food-ordering apps and the several food delivery services are helping restaurants service a much larger market at lower cost.

I considered this after noticing more celebrity chefs partnering with ride-sharing services, such as UberEats, to deliver their restaurant's food to a mass market.

Will you still visit a fancy restaurant if it offers takeaway food delivered to your door?

Some high-end restaurants are even outsourcing food preparation to third parties in industrial kitchens across capital cities. Effectively, they license intellectual property: brand, menu, recipes and cooking techniques, and let others do the cooking.

Virtual restaurant brands are emerging. Well-known chefs could one day lend their celebrity status to an online brand that has no physical storefront. The food might be cooked miles away from the restaurant for which the chef is best known, by another company.

It's creative destruction in action: potentially killing off a lower-growth business (a long-established restaurant) and reinvesting funds into a technology-driven restaurant that has higher growth prospects. I hope our leading restaurateurs pull it off.

Risks are huge. Upmarket restaurants that cater for the home-delivery market, using internal kitchen resources, risks damaging their in-store experience. Some restaurants are seemingly taking longer than ever to cook food because more of it is going to couriers for delivery.

Their kitchens were designed for in-store patrons and perhaps a small, local takeaway market. The business is now exposed to a larger customer base area through technology and cannot keep up with takeaway and home-delivery demand without compromising their in-store customer experience.
The brother of alleged Bourke Street killer Dimitrious "Jimmy" Gargasoulas has appeared in court, accused of entering a woman's home and assaulting her.

Angelo Gargasoulas, 26, appeared briefly before Melbourne Magistrates Court on Wednesday, charged with unlawful assault with a weapon, unlawful assault and two counts each of entering a building with the intent to assault a person and intentionally damaging property.

Angelo Gargasoulas (seen here in March) is the brother of accused Bourke Street killer Dimitrious Gargasoulas. Credit:Penny Stephens

He also faces single charges of possessing the drug ice and possessing a controlled weapon.

Charge sheets allege that last Saturday, Mr Gargasoulas entered a home in Carlton and assaulted a woman.
Were you one of the many Melburnians stunned by a mysterious white flash of light on Wednesday morning? Was it a bird, was it a plane? Well no, but turns out it was caused by a bird.

Many residents in Melbourne's west spotted the flash but had no idea what had just happened.

"Something lit up the sky just in a fairly localised area, but there was a very white light," Paul, from Wollert, told radio station 3AW.

"It was just below the tree lines so I couldn't see the source of the light."
A Melbourne man has handed himself in to police after allegedly drowning his partner while they were both in the bath.

Murat Davsanoglu, 42, faced Melbourne Magistrates' Court on Wednesday, charged with the murder of young mother Ozlem Karakoc, 34.

Dandenong mother Ozlem Karakoc was found dead inside a house in Lalor.

According to court documents, homicide detectives were contacted on Monday night by a solicitor who said Mr Davsanoglu wanted to hand himself in after police issued a missing persons alert for the pair earlier the same day.

Mr Davsanoglu told investigators the two had a suicide pact, and he attended Ms Karakoc's home at Dandenong on Friday night, where the two got into the bath together.
Fears are held for a Melbourne hiker who has yet to return from a trek on a dangerous track in British Columbia.

Sophie Dowsley, 34, and Canadian boyfriend Greg Tiffin, 44, have not been seen since their hiking day trip to Statlu Lake on July 8.

Melbourne woman Sophie Dowsley, 34 and Greg Tiffin, 44, are missing in Canada.

Investigators believe the couple were last seen on Saturday at a business in Harrison Hot Springs.

However, when they didn't show up for work on Monday, authorities were called.
Bangkok: A Thai army general has been sentenced to 27 years' jail after a trial marred by allegations of intimidation of witnesses, interpreters and even police.

Lieutenant-General Manas Kongpaen was among 62 people out of a total of 103 defendants found guilty after a trial that began in 2015.

General Manas had been responsible for migrants who entered Thailand illegally when military officers, politicians, police and businesspeople were accused of involvement in a modern-day slave trade across Thailand.

The arrests came after mass graves were discovered in southern Thailand, where mainly Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar's western Rakhine state were held in shocking conditions in holding camps before being smuggled over the border into Malaysia.
Minneapolis: Justine Damond was the kind of woman who'd rescue ducks in distress  and humans.

Three weeks ago, she was climbing into a storm drain, to rescue a bunch of ducklings near her home on the city's Southside. And late on Saturday night she went into the alley behind her home  to see if she could help a woman in distress.

By chance, the duck rescue occurred outside the home of a photojournalist  who cheerfully recorded it all on video. But there is nothing cheerful in a recording of the 911 call made by the 40-year-old Australian, before she went into the alley  and to her death, by the hand of one of the cops dispatched in response to her call.

Time-stamped at 11.27pm, the transcript is a mesmerising read because, unlike the duck rescue, it reveals a good natured person doing what she does  but nothing of the horrible consequences of her call.
The project will take 18 months to construct--- Agreement with Synergy annulled.



PHILIPSBURG:--- The Minister of VROMI has made some headway in getting a waste to energy plant on St. Maarten which would probably eliminate the fires at the dumpsite and also decrease the size of the hill on Pond Island. The Minister announced on Wednesday that he signed an MOU (memorandum of understanding) with a company to deal with the garbage situation on St. Maarten. In a separate interview with SMN News Minister Emmanuel said that some 17/18 companies submitted proposals to the Department of VROMI but only four of them really mentioned the landfill (dump) in their proposals in terms of remediating and taking care of the landfill. The Minister said the landfill was his main concern, therefore, the other companies were eliminated. Of the four that remained, he said at least three of them wanted government to make a financial contribution which he also did not agree with since the company that is awarded the project will make their monies back to the sale of energy to GEBE, and by selling recycled materials overseas. The Minister said he agreed to give the company a power purchase agreement for the energy they generate. Minister Emmanuel said while negotiating the agreement Enviro-green is the only company that gave government a favorable cost at which they will sell the energy they produce. Besides that, he said Enviro-green have waste to energy plants that are active, one he said is in Canada and the other in the Philippines. These two companies handle similar types of garbage that is generated in tropical countries. The Minister said these factors are very important to him thus he chose to sign an MOU with Enviro-green. Emmanuel said its been three months now he has been in negotiation with the Canadian company but kept things quiet until an agreement was reached. At the moment Enviro-green is busy reviewing the concession while evaluating the landfill as it is right now.

The Minister of VROMI said the current Prime Minister William Marlin had an agreement with Synergy but that agreement was annulled at no cost to government. He made clear that he did not re-invent the wheels on this project since he used the same attorney that Synergy used and that attorney managed to annul the agreement and worked on the MOU for Envirogreen and the Government of St. Maarten. He reminded with Synergy also would not have cost government any monies. Emmanuel said that government used the same lawyers to execute the project which would not cost government nor GEBE any money. Asked how soon Enviro-green would start the project, the Minister said that Envirogreen is currently reviewing the concession and the power purchase agreement. Asked how long it would take Enviro-green to construct the waste to energy plant in St. Maarten and the location where the plant will be constructed. The Minister said Envirogreen promised to have the plant constructed and operational within 18 months and that plant will be constructed on Pond Island where government had reserved 12,000 square meters of land for the construction of a waste to energy plant.

Minister Emmanuel made clear that this company will have to do everything according to the laws of St. Maarten, he said they will have to establish a company on St. Maarten and pay their dues like every other company while they would also have to employ people on St. Maarten. He said that while Enviro-green promised to bring the hill to some 16 meters while government gave room to up to 21 meters. The Minister said that while managing the landfill Enviro-green will be removing copper and all other materials that have value from the landfill which they will sell overseas.
CETECOM expands its service portfolio with Bluetooth testing in Germany

Posted by Publisher Telecommunication

PresseBox)  Summary: In order to be able to offer our customers a broad service portfolio from a single source, CETECOM is expanding its service portfolio with Bluetooth testing at our location in Essen, Germany.

July 18, 2017 / Essen, Germany ? The German Accreditation Body (DAkkS) has officially accredited CETECOM to carry out Bluetooth tests our location in Essen, Germany. With this new accreditation, CETECOM is expanding its testing capacities in the field of radio technologies in order to provide our customers with test and certification services from a single source.

The expansion of our services covers the following scopes:

? Bluetooth Profile Specification PTS 7.0.0

? Bluetooth Low Energy RF PHY including standards RF-PHY.TS/4.0/4.1/4.2

? Bluetooth RF specifications 2.0/2.1+EDR/3.0/3.0+HS/4.0/4.1/4.2/

Similarly, from Q4 2017 on, we will also be able to perform Bluetooth tests according to the official Bluetooth standard 5.0.

With this expansion, CETECOM is now offering Bluetooth tests for our customers at two locations. In addition to its location in Essen, CETECOM Korea is also accredited for carrying out Bluetooth test services.

In addition, the CETECOM is an officially accredited Bluetooth Qualification Test Facilities (BQTF) of the Bluetooth SIG with a recognized Bluetooth Qualification Expert (BQE).

More information about CETECOM?s test and certification services can be found here.

For over twenty years, CETECOM has been renowned as an independent provider for test and certification services. With test labs in Europe, North America and Asia, CETECOM provides consulting, testing and certification for wireless technologies such as Cellular, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, RFID, NFC, WPT and Radar. We furthermore perform a wide range of testing in the areas of EMC, Radio, OTA, SAR, field trials, electrical safety and acoustics.

Contact CETECOM Email: contact@cetecom.com

Website: www.cetecom.com
MEF Tackles Defining and Orchestrating SD-WAN Managed Services

LOS ANGELES, CA  (Marketwired)  07/19/17  , the driving force enabling agile, assured, and orchestrated Third Network services, is extending its work to standardize SD-WAN managed services. MEF is defining SD-WAN service terminology, components, and implementations in the context of MEFs . This work will ensure consistency of performance, policy, and security of SD-WAN services orchestrated across multiple provider networks, leveraging open LSO APIs.

Businesses are demanding WAN flexibility to control costs as they migrate applications to the cloud and see SD-WAN as an option to address this, said Pascal Menezes, CTO, MEF. To meet these demands and remain competitive, service providers are looking to integrate SD-WAN into a portfolio of orchestrated services delivered in a seamless, automated fashion. MEF is uniquely positioned to bring together managed service providers (MSPs), orchestration experts, and SD-WAN vendors to address this challenge and accelerate SD-WAN managed service deployments on behalf of the enterprises.

Key MEF SD-WAN initiatives and deliverables include:

MEFs established OpenCS (Open Connectivity Services) SD-WAN Project currently is focused on providing use cases and business requirements to ensure that open standard LSO APIs can enable orchestration of SD-WAN managed services across multi-provider and multi-vendor implementations. The MEF community has agreed on the first six major SD-WAN managed services use cases to advance this groundbreaking work. The OpenCS SD-WAN project also will deliver a rich set of LSO APIs to enable consistent SD-WAN assurance, application performance, and security policies, which include telemetry data feeding back into LSO analytic platforms for various AI automated use cases.

The OpenCS SD-WAN project is led by Riverbed and VeloCloud Networks with contributions thus far from Amartus, Cox, Fujitsu Network Communications, GBI, Huawei, and Nokia/Nuage. Silver Peak and Versa Networks recently have joined as MEF members to contribute to the SD-WAN work as well.

MEFs OpenCS SD-WAN project is empowering the service provider community with vendor-neutral models for optimally delivering applications over real world software-defined infrastructure, said Joe Ruffles, Global Standards Architect, Riverbed.

Our OpenCS SD-WAN project will enable integration of managed SD-WAN services in multi-service environments with seamless interoperability between different orchestrated services, said Tim Van Herck, Sr. Director of Technical Marketing, VeloCloud Networks. This will further accelerate deployment by providers and adoption by enterprise clients.

As a new MEF member, we are pleased to actively contribute to the OpenCS SD-WAN project and fully support content and communications intended to raise awareness and accelerate managed SD-WAN service deployments, said Nav Chander, Sr. Director, Service Provider Marketing, Silver Peak. Were proud to be a part of MEF and its growing membership to facilitate industry dialogue and collectively address service provider implementation issues surrounding managed SD-WAN services.

Versa is excited to join MEFs OpenCS SD-WAN Project and work with fellow vendors and providers to accelerate onboarding of SD-WAN solutions into providers portfolios, develop standards-based interoperability and increase market adoption of managed SD-WAN services around the world, said Dogu Narin, Sr. Director of Product Management, Versa Networks.

MEF recently created the SD-WAN Market Education Project to explain MEFs position on SD-WAN and how it aligns with other initiatives focused on orchestrated Layer 1-7 services enabled by LSO APIs. Educational materials will include white papers, webinars, workshops, and use cases.

. MEF today released a groundbreaking white paper that introduces SD-WAN functions, terminology, and service components; explains how the components fit within the LSO Reference Architecture; and provides SD-WAN managed services use cases.

MEFs new SD-WAN work will address implementation challenges and accelerate SD-WAN services deployments by creating a common vernacular and service architecture, which have not existed up to this point, said Ralph Santitoro, principal author of MEFs SD-WAN white paper, MEF Distinguished Fellow, and Head of SDN/NFV Solutions Practice delivering SD-WAN managed services at Fujitsu. Ceragon, NEC/Netcracker, Nokia, RAD, Riverbed, Silver Peak, VeloCloud, and MEFs CTO also contributed to the paper.

.

MEF will host a webinar at 11am US ET on 9 August 2017 that will discuss SD-WAN managed service market drivers and business benefits and describe how MEFs work addresses operational challenges to accelerate service delivery.

SD-WAN will be one of the hottest topics covered during Proof of Concept demonstrations, workshops, sessions, and keynotes at the global networking event to be held November 13-16 at the Loews Sapphire Falls Resort in Orlando, Florida.

An industry association of 210+ member companies, MEF is enabling service providers to create a global ecosystem of networks that deliver agile, assured, and orchestrated services for the digital economy and hyper-connected world. These services provide an on-demand, cloud-centric experience with user and application-directed control over network resources and service capabilities. They are delivered over automated, virtualized, and interconnected networks powered by LSO, SDN, and NFV. MEF produces globally adopted service specifications, LSO frameworks, open LSO APIs, reference implementations, and certification programs. MEF currently is developing open LSO APIs for orchestrating standardized wavelength, Carrier Ethernet, IP, SD-WAN, and Layer 4-7 services across multiple provider networks. For more information: .

Kevin Perez-Allen

Witz Communications for MEF

+1.510.748.8200
In an Evil Internet Minute, 656,393 is Lost to Cybercrime, Reveals RiskIQ

London, UK, 19 July, 2017  With cybercriminals costing the global economy 345 billion last year alone[1], Digital threat management leader RiskIQ has examined the growing volume of malicious activity on the Internet to reveal the inaugural Evil Internet Minute. In a single evil internet minute, close to 656,393 is lost to cybercrime and 1,080 people fall victim. Despite businesses best efforts to guard against external cyber threats, spending up to 109,942[2] in 60 seconds, bad actors continue to proliferate online.

Colin Verrall, VP EMEA, RiskIQ comments, As the Internet and its community continues to grow at pace, some people have been trying to make the vast numbers associated with it more accessible by framing them in the context of an Internet Minute. As the same growth applies to cybercrime, similarly, we have framed malicious Internet activity, leveraging the latest research as well as our own intelligence to define the darker happenings across the web in 60 seconds.

The threats are complex with tactics ranging from malware to phishing, and intentions including monetary gain, inflicting large scale reputational damage or perhaps even to entertain. Cyber criminals continue to find success deploying tactics from 818 pieces of unique malware, 1214 ransomware attacks and over 100,000 phishing emails in just one evil internet minute.

RiskIQs research has also uncovered additional malicious activity, ranging from blacklisted mobile apps to malvertising:

 New blacklisted mobile apps: 0.3 per minute

 New phishing pages: 100 per minute

 Malvertising: 14.5 incidents per minute

 Pirate content: 4,300 people globally exposed to malware from content theft sites per minute

Colin Verrall, VP EMEA, RiskIQ comments, Sophisticated cyber criminals continue to expand their digital armoury, lurking behind more online activity than we might expect. Websites, emails, mobile apps, online videos or even digital advertisements; all have become regular methods of entry for malicious online activity. The digital footprint of a business is always larger than perceived and with such happenings, control is often relinquished. It is crucial then for organisations to be aware of their entire digital footprint and make it a priority to close any critical security gaps. It is only way to adequately secure a business, its employees and customers.

For the Evil Internet Minute infographic, please click here: https://we.tl/wWhWvG4HE5.

[1] Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report 2017

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevemorgan/2016/03/09/worldwide-cybersecurity-spending-increasing-to-170-billion-by-2020/#397cfbcf6832
Rashid bin Abdullah Al Khalifa, Minister of the Interior of Bahrain, met with Trump officials to discuss the dispute with Qatar and Iranian meddling throughout the region. Part of an official visit to the United States, the series of meetings included a conference at the Pentagon with Defense Secretary James Mattis, where they discussed defense cooperation and arms sales to Bahrain.

Wholeheartedly greeting the historical and strategic ties between the two countries, the U.S. Secretary of Defense was enthusiastic about the visit. He expressed appreciation for the role that Bahrain plays in the region, and condemned the Iranian influence in Bahrain and Irans attempts to disturb security in the Kingdom. Mattis also gave his sincere condolences to the families of the policemen who have died in the line of duty.

The military attache of the Bahrain Embassy also attended the meetings in Washington. Last spring, the Trump administration told Congress to pursue a $5 billion sale of 19 F-16s to Bahrain. This action lifted a freeze on the deal initiated by former President Obama, last September. The State Department originally notified Congress of the sale, but President Barack Obamas administration pulled back due to several concerns.

The Bahraini minister also met with acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Andrew McCabe and other intelligence officials. The steps that the Interior Ministry has taken to modernize its security procedures and reinforce security cooperation, as well as exchange expertise across the countries counter-terrorism departments were outlined by Rashid.

He also met with members of Congress, including the House Speaker and Congressman Paul Ryan. The group committed their support of Bahrain, and its steps to confront the Iranian threat.

Rashid and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly also discussed the need to boost information exchanges between the two countries during this visit to the U.S. Secretary Kelly and Sheikh Rashed spoke about the need to increase information sharing between the Department and Ministry of Interior and Secretary Kelly offered his support to work with Bahrain in the fight against terrorism, said the DHS in a statement.

President Trump has labeled Iran as an exporter of terrorism and fundamentalism, and has additionally been outspoken about supporting the regions stand against Iran.
In the midterm elections, evangelical Christians across the nation reconfirmed their allegiance to conservative candidates and causes, while Catholic voters once again showed how closely divided they are  even on abortion.
India has the second highest number of adults planning to migrate to other countries with the US, Canada and the UK among the most favoured destinations, according to a report by the UN migration agency.

The UN migration agency, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), in its report Measuring Global Migration Potential 2010-2015, which analyses peoples migration intentions globally for the period 20102015, noted that globally 1.3 per cent of the adult population or 66 million people said they were planning to migrate permanently within the next 12 months.

The most popular destination for those planning to migrate is the US followed by the UK, Saudi Arabia, France, Canada, Germany and South Africa. Half of those planning to migrate live in just 20 countries, led by Nigeria and followed by India, Congo, Sudan, Bangladesh and China.

At 4.8 million people, India has the highest number of adults planning and preparing to migrate  3.5 million people who are planning and 1.3 million who are preparing. For Nigeria, the number stands at 5.1 million people, Congo 4.1 million, and China and Bangladesh at 2.7 million each.

Canada plans to bring in 300,000 immigrants this year, maintaining the same target as in 2016.

The findings by IOMs Global Migration Data Centre (GMDAC) shows that less than half a per cent of adults worldwide or 23 million people are actively making preparations to migrate abroad. One in three adults surveyed plans to migrate to a developing country.

West Africa, South Asia and North Africa are the regions with the largest migration potential. The study is based on international survey data by the Gallup World Poll.

This unique global survey provides an important insight into peoples migration intentions and the profile of those most likely to migrate, said IOM Director General William Lacy Swing.

The share of the adult population planning to migrate abroad has increased moderately at the global level but more rapidly in certain regions. Adults planning and preparing to migrate are more likely to be male, young, single, living in urban areas and more likely to have completed at least secondary education.

Improving our understanding of peoples migration intentions could be useful for a range of different policy purposes. It could help policymakers plan for migration, understand better migration pressures, as well as highlighting potential migration trends where alternative sources of migration data are scarce, it said.

The report, however, added that it is important to note that measuring potential migration is not the same as measuring actual migration. There are many reasons why a migration plan may never be realised including policy restrictions, lack of resources or a change of heart.

IOM Director General Swing added that the new study illuminates one trend that has been emerging for some time, which he explained was the wide range of countries, both rich and poor, that are attracting migrants.

India is a migration superpower

India has a long history of migration. More than a century ago, large numbers of Indian migrants  many of them involuntary ones  moved to Africa, the Caribbean and within the Indian subcontinent itself. Some of the top destinations of Indian migrants in more recent decades include Persian Gulf countries, North America and Europe. Here are some facts about India and migration.

1) India is the top source of international migrants, with one-in-twenty migrants worldwide born in India. As of 2015, 15.6 million people born in India were living in other countries. India has been among the worlds top origin countries of migrants since the United Nations started tracking migrant origins in 1990. The number of international Indian migrants has more than doubled over the past 25 years, growing about twice as fast as the worlds total migrant population.

2) Nearly half of Indias migrants are in just three countries: the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and the United States. About 3.5 million Indians live in the UAE, the top destination country for Indian migrants. Over the past two decades, millions of Indians have migrated there to find employment as laborers. Pakistan has the second-largest number of migrants, with 2 million.

3) Almost 2 million more live in the U.S., making up the countrys third-largest immigrant group. Among Indian Americans, nearly nine-in-ten were born in India. As a whole, Indian Americans are among the highest educated and have some of the highest income among racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. From 2006 to 2015, a total of 323,746 immigrants from India landed in Canada.

4) Only about 1% of Indias birth population lives outside of the country, a similar emigration rate to that of the U.S. At more than 1 billion, Indias population is the second-largest in the world behind China. Consequently, it would take tens of millions more people to leave India before its emigration rate reached the worlds 3% average.

5) About $69 billion was sent by Indian migrants to family and friends in India in 2015, amounting to roughly 3% of the countrys gross domestic product, according to the World Bank estimates. Most of the money comes from Indians living in Persian Gulf countries as well as the U.S., the UK and Canada. India has been the worlds top recipient of migrant remittances since 2008, when it overtook China on this measure.

6) Religious minorities make up a larger share of Indias international migrant population than they do among the nations domestic population, according to 2010 Pew Research Center estimates. For example, about 19% of the Indian international migrant population was Christian, compared with only 3% of the population in India. Similarly, an estimated 27% of the Indian international migrant population was Muslim, compared with 14% of the population in India. The reverse is true for Hindus: Only 45% of Indias international migrant population was Hindu, compared with 80% of the population in India.
Guest Commentary

By Stewart Muir

B.C.s forestry, energy and mining industries are the economic foundation of our province, yesterday, today and tomorrow. They are essential to job creation in every B.C. community. Families have been working in the resource economy for generations and they will continue to for generations to come, taking pride in the work they do.

Its rewarding, high-technology work that builds strong families and communities. Two out of every three dollars in B.C. are generated in the resource regions but spent throughout the province's economy. And this may come as a surprise, but more than half of new natural resource jobs are located in the Lower Mainland.

These jobs pay the highest of any industry and are more likely to be full time. This is surely linked to the fact that jobs in resource-producing regions have up to six times the GDP impact than the average British Columbia job.

In addition to jobs, our natural resources help to pay local taxes for communities that need them, and fund critical services we rely on like healthcare and education.

B.C. companies work hard to meet federal and provincial environmental standards, knowing that it pays to innovate and exceed standards and be a world leader. And when we make mistakeseveryone doeswe choose to learn and improve.

B.C. has a proud history of environmentalism that provides the foundation for responsible resource development. B.C.s resource economy helps drive the development of world-leading environmental best practices and investments in clean tech innovations. When we export our cleaner BC resources, such as LNG, we can help other countries reduce their unhealthy practices that damage the global environment.

Developing British Columbias natural resources can be a risky business. It has taken many years to develop a safety culture and there is still much work to do. It requires many partnerships among British Columbias workers, unions, communities, regulators and companies to keep us safe and to work to make us safer. And when there are mistakes, we need to continue to learn and improve. These are values that have always been recognized by elected leaders no matter their particular perspectives.

B.C.s natural resources have shaped where we live in the province with towns that were built around a mill, port, smelter, or river.

B.C.s resource economy creates jobs and skills training opportunities in rural areas through specific resource projects.

Building these projects pumped $108 billion into the economy over the past two decades, second only to housing in capital investment terms. Thousands of new businesses were incorporated as a result.

British Columbia has an important role in Canada as the gateway for resource exports to growing parts of the world. B.C. also has important cultural links to Asia and South Asia that we can capitalize on for everyones benefit.

Being the Pacific gateway means our resource and transportation sectors are completely linked. They need each other to thrive. Having the ability to export our resource products to both North American and Asian markets means that we can always get the best prices for our Canadian products.

Although other parts of economy can struggle in competitive global markets, when it comes to resources British Columbia has a lot of unique advantages. The continuing diversification of resource-based product lines comes at a time when responsibly produced commodities are in greater demand than they have ever been in the history of humanity.

There are many challenges to developing natural resources successfully. As we celebrate B.C. Day, it is impossible to imagine our success as a province without the daily contributions made by resources and resource people.

Stewart Muir is Executive Director of Resource Works, a non-profit society that aims to bring fact-based information to the public discourse about the natural resource sector in BC.
By Victor Ing,

Special to The Post

Canada has experienced ongoing labour shortages for many years causing more employers to hire foreign workers to meet their business needs.

The growth of Canada's foreign worker program has led to the introduction, in recent years, of strict compliance measures for employers in all aspects of Canada's immigration delivery system with Service Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).

Failure to comply with the terms and conditions of the work permit application process can lead to serious consequences for employers.

The application process for employers seeking to hire foreign workers can only be described as onerous.

The general process for an employer to bring a foreign worker to Canada is by obtaining a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) from Service Canada.

A few years ago, this process only required an employer to complete a five-page application form without an application fee.

Today there is a $1000 employer application fee (for each foreign worker) and two separate application forms  the 11-page LMIA application form and the 10-page Transition Plan.

An employer must declare that they will comply with 18 individual obligations regarding the job offer to the foreign worker. Failure to comply with any of these 18 specific terms or conditions can result in an employer being non-compliant and bring about serious penalties.

In addition to the 18 specific obligations that an employer must commit to in the LMIA application form, there is a general declaration which must be agreed to directly above the signature of the employer with the following condition:

"I commit to hire the worker(s) covered by this application on a full-time basis as per the terms of the job offer described in this application and in the LMIA letter and annex upon issuance of the work permit and/or permanent resident visa(s)."

An employer must commit to honouring all of the terms and conditions of the job offer set out in the advertisements, job offer letter and LMIA documentation.

The consequences for failing to comply with all of the specific provisions of the job offer can result in the loss of all foreign workers, having the company publicly blacklisted for a period of 2 years, being prohibited from applying for foreign workers for 2 years, up to a $50,000 fine and up to 2 years in jail.

Yes, failure to do what you say you are going to do can result in jail time for an employer.

Your company can become the subject of a compliance audit based upon a history of previous non-compliance, being randomly selected or based upon a reason to suspect non-compliance such as a complaint from a member of the public or any federal, provincial or territorial government agency.

Obviously, an unhappy worker who is not being employed in accordance with the terms of their job offer is a prime candidate to make a complaint against their employer.

If you are selected for a compliance audit, it is your responsibility to demonstrate that your company has been compliant for ALL foreign workers and must be able to provide all relevant documentation for the previous six years.

What if you discover that you have breached a term or condition? How can you self correct? Service Canada, IRCC and CBSA will take into consideration the circumstances which led to non-compliance as well as the efforts made by an employer to self correct the breach of a term or condition.

If there has been a change made to the terms of employment by an HR Manager, and you, as the company owner learn of this, then remedying the breach - such as back payment of wages - will go a long way in leading to a favourable outcome.

But even where an employer may voluntarily remedy a breach of a term or condition of employment, if this comes to the attention of government officials, you can expect to be audited more frequently.

The shortage of workers for many businesses has driven employers to turn to Canada's foreign worker program. Employing foreign workers may be essential to your company's business objectives but the process has significant responsibilities for employers. Be sure that you and your senior management and human resources team are all completely familiar with all aspects of the LMIA and work permit application process. And be sure to "do what you say that you are going to do" for all of your foreign workers!a

Victor Ing is a lawyer of Sas & Ing Immigration Law Centre. He provides a full range of immigration services.

For more information go to www.canadian-visa-lawyer.com or email [email protected].
Everything you need to know about No. 20 Notre Dame's game vs. Army Saturday in Philadelphia

Here's everything you need to know about Saturday's college football matchup between No. 20 Notre Dame and Navy. Kickoff is noon
The former U.S. administration believed that the agreement would encourage moderation in the regimes actions and behavior, but instead Tehran has demonstrated that reform is not their aim. They have been busy improving its ballistic missile system and meddling in the Middle East, particularly Yemen, Iraq, and Syria.

Moderation was ploy by Iran to influence the international community into giving them concessions, but Iran gave little in return. During the negotiations, human rights issues were not addressed, and rights violations continue under the the regime. Execution numbers have risen, and political prisoners continue to be imprisoned for speaking out against the regime. Repression of religion persists, as well as many personal freedoms, like how someone must dress and think, have been relentlessly maintained during the moderate presidency of Rouhani.

Meanwhile, a divide and power struggles are occurring within the regime, as hard-liners fight Rouhanis plan of increasing foreign engagement and investment.

Partnering with North Korea, ballistic missile research goes on unabated under Rouhanis tenure, which has seen a repressive crackdown on activists, artists, academics, journalists, and anyone who has been accused of having ties to the West. Recently, there have been several arrests of dual citizens and American citizens, who have been accused of being threats to Irans national security.

Irans regional actions after the nuclear deal include their support of Assad in Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The U.S. has been encouraged by various leaders to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization. Considering the IRGCs financial entanglement in Irans economy, this may hit Iran in its pocketbook, and bring the regime to the bargaining table. However, Iran calls the attempts to blacklist the IRGC a violation of the nuclear agreement.

As noted during the Arab-Islamic summit with US President Donald Trump, Iran was excluded, and many nations are standing firm to isolate the regime. The question is, Whats next? A democratic alternative to the current regime is what is needed, and there is one, waiting in the wings.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) is made of Iranians from all walks of life. It is a peaceful movement, focused on regime change to create a democratic and non-nuclear Iran. Several members of the international community have encouraged the U.S. to embrace the NCRI as the alternative to the current regime. In fact, on July 1st, 2017, the NCRI held its Free Iran gathering in Paris, where tens of thousands gathered, including members of the international community, to support this movement for leadership change in Iran. NCRI President-elect Maryam Rajavi praised the international community for rejecting the JCPOAs strategy of appeasement and affirmed the NCRIs commitment to replacing Irans religious dictatorship. The Iranian people are suffering the most under the regime, she noted, because of its repressive tactics and the economic choices thats left a large portion of the population struggling.

It should be clear after 38 years of clerical rule in Iran, that stability in the Middle East requires its removal, and any real change needs a democratic alternative.
To confront the regimes dictatorship as the main source of regional crises and instability, the sanctions are a necessary measure but they need to be coupled by designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist entity and expelling it from the Middle East region.

According to an article published on July 18th, by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), The IRGC serves as the guarantee to preserve the entirety of the religious fascism ruling Iran and is the main entity responsible for domestic suppression, the export of terrorism and extremism, and obtaining weapons of mass destruction, namely nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

A majority of the populace of Iran, and of the surrounding region, demand that the IRGC be designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and that it be expelled specifically from Syria and Iraq. This designation is a prerequisite to ending conflict and crisis in the Middle East.

Two years after the nuclear agreement between the Iranian regime and world powers, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA), it is apparent that the concessions provided to the Iranian regime have allowed it to continue its suppressive policies at home, intensify its meddling in the region, and pursue the expansion and testing of ballistic missiles in defiance of the UN Security Council resolutions. Meanwhile,the Iranian peoples welfare has not improved over the past two years. The assets that were unfrozen as par too the nuclear deal have been used for repression at home and the meddling activities in Iraq, Syrian, and Yemen.

Regarding the regime, a firm approach is the only correct policy. Iran is known as the worlds most active state sponsor of terrorism and extremism.

On July 1st in Paris a major gathering of the Iranian resistance drew tens of thousands of supporters, both from the Iranian diaspora and from the international community. High level officials from the US, the UK and the EU, as well from Saudi Arabia spoke in support of the aspirations of the Iranian people and the growing resistance movement.
Georgetown, SC (29440)

Today

Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy this afternoon. High near 75F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy early followed by cloudy skies overnight. Low near 55F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph.
Hootie & the Blowfish members Darius Rucker, Jim Sonefeld, Dean Felber and Mark Bryan created an endowment that ensures their foundation will last into perpetuity, providing financial support to charitable initiatives throughout South Carolina and beyond.
The United States will continue to use sanctions to target those who lend support to Irans destabilizing behavior and above all, the United States will never allow the regime in Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, said the State Department, adding that it will cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to continue the monitoring and verifying Irans nuclear commitments.

The statement said it considers Irans ballistic missile testing a direct defiance of UN Resolution 2231. It said the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JPCOA) expects full implementation by its participants, which will positively contribute to regional and international peace and security.

The State Department strongly condemned Irans regional behavior, in reference to the crisis in Yemen, saying its continuous support to Houthi insurgents inside the country is prolonging the Yemen conflict.

According to the statement, Tehrans regime is providing Houthis with advanced weaponry that threatens freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and has been used to attack Saudi Arabia. The State Department also blamed Iran for its support of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and maintaining a steadfast support for the Assad regime, despite Assads atrocities against his own people.

The statement demanded the immediate release of US citizens Baquer Namazi, Siamak Namazi, and Xiyue Wang, and all other unjustly detained in Iran, and expressed Washingtons concern about reports of the declining health of the Namazis, Wang, and other detained US citizens. Iran should immediately release all of these US citizens on humanitarian grounds, declared the State Department.

Over a decade ago, Robert Levinson, a US citizen, disappeared from Irans Kish Island and, according to the statement, Iran committed to cooperating with the United States in bringing him home. Iran was asked to fulfill this commitment. The United States remains unwavering in its efforts to return Bob to his family. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has offered a $5 million reward for any information that could lead to Bobs safe return.

Washingtons statement also condemned the Irans human rights record, including its denial of freedom of religion and other human rights and freedoms. Notably, arbitrary arrest and detention of members of religious minorities and political activists, is common as is the use of torture and other forms of abuse in detention.
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Algiers, July 19, 2017 (SPS) - The ambassadors of South Africa and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) to Algiers welcomed Tuesday Algerias unfailing support to the principles of self-determination, of the struggle of peoples for freedom and independence and the rejection of any form of occupation.

Speaking at the Forum of El Moujahid newspaper, organized on the occasion of the celebration of the world day of historic leader Nelson Mandela, South African ambassador to Algiers Denis Thoko Zani Dlomo welcomed Algerias important support to South Africa in its struggle for the decline of the Apartheid regime and to late leader Nelson Mandela who received a military training in Algeria during the two countries common struggle against colonialism.

The relations between our two countries are historically rooted, affirmed the diplomat, adding that the struggle led by the Algerians and South Africans is a reference of political understanding and a basis of excellent diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Concerning the peoples right to self-determination, the South African ambassador underlined Nelson Mandelas inalienable position who affirmed, just after the declined of the Apartheid regime in South Africa that the liberation of South Africa cant be complete without the liberation of the Palestinian and Sahrawi peoples, pointing out the duty of solidarity with the oppressed peoples.

SADR ambassador to Algiers Becheraya Hamudi Bayune underlined the heroic deeds of the African leader considered as the symbol of struggle and peaceful co-existence between peoples, pointing out his heroic position in the recognition of the Sahrawi Republic during his presidential term, despite the fact that he was under great pressure, making from South Africa the first defender of the Sahrawi cause in the international forums, after Algeria which is known for its inalienable positions for the peoples struggling for freedom and independence.SPS

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After his much-publicized, two-and-a-quarter-hour meeting early this month with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Germany, President Donald Trump chatted informally with the Russian leader for up to an additional hour later the same day.

The second meeting, undisclosed at the time, took place at a dinner for G-20 leaders, a senior administration official said. At some point during the meal, Trump left his own seat to occupy a chair next to Putin. Trump approached alone, and Putin was attended only by his official interpreter.

In a statement issued Tuesday night after published reports of the conversation, the White House said that "there was no 'second meeting' between Trump and Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner. The insinuation that the White House has tried to 'hide' a second meeting," it said, "is false, malicious and absurd."

"All the leaders" circulated around the room throughout the dinner, and "President Trump spoke with many leaders," the statement said. "As the dinner was concluding," it said, Trump spoke "briefly" with Putin, who was seated next to first lady Melania Trump.

The dinner conversation with Putin was first reported Monday by Ian Bremmer, president of the New York-based Eurasia Group, in a newsletter to group clients. Bremmer said the meeting began "halfway in" to the meal and lasted "roughly an hour." The senior official said it began with the dessert course, but did not comment on its length.

Pool reporters covering Trump noted that his and Putin's motorcades were among the last to leave the event, departing within minutes of each other just before midnight.

The encounter appeared to underscore the extent to which Trump was eager throughout the summit to cultivate a friendship with Putin. During last year's campaign, he spoke admiringly of the Russian leader and at times seemed captivated by him.

Meeting each other face-to-face for the first time at the Hamburg summit, the two presidents seemed to have a chemistry in their more formal bilateral session, evidenced by the fact that, despite being scheduled for 35 minutes, it continued for more than two hours.

But Trump's newly revealed conversation with Putin at the G-20 dinner is likely to stoke criticism, including perhaps from some fellow Republicans in Congress, that he is too cozy with the leader of a major U.S. adversary.

Putin's aide provided the only Russian-English interpretation, the White House statement said, because the president was seated next to the wife of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. "Each couple was allowed one translator," it said. "The American translator accompanying President Trump spoke Japanese."

The only version of the conversation provided to White House aides was that given by Trump himself, said the administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity before the White House statement was issued. Reporters traveling with the White House were not informed during the trip, and there was no formal readout of the chat.

The official Trump-Putin meeting, earlier in the day, led to confusion over whether Trump agreed, as Putin later implied, to accept the Kremlin's denial of any wrongdoing regarding interference in last year's election.

That meeting was attended by the leaders and their two interpreters, along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Tillerson later said Trump twice asked Putin if the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia had meddled in the race were true, and Putin twice denied it, so they moved on to other subjects of importance to the bilateral relationship, including Syria.

Russia's activities during the election, along with allegations that members of Trump's campaign may have coordinated with Kremlin attempts to tilt the race in Trump's direction, are the subject of investigations in Congress and by a special counsel.

In Trump's own account of the formal meeting, he repeated earlier comments that another country might have been responsible for cyber-interference in the election. "I'm not saying it wasn't Russia. What I'm saying is that we have to protect ourselves no matter who it is," he told reporters on Air Force One as he returned from a visit to France last week.

"You know, China is very good at this," Trump said. "I hate to say it, North Korea is very good at this."

Trump also said that Putin was unlikely to have preferred him over Hillary Clinton as president, since his goals include taking international energy business away from Russia and building up the U.S. military.

The dinner at the G-20, held July 7-8, occurred hours after Trump and Putin's lengthy formal meeting. Leaders and their spouses were invited to a musical performance at Hamburg's riverside concert venue, followed by an intimate dinner in which they were seated next to the spouse of one of their counterparts, rather than their own. First lady Melania Trump was seated next to Putin.

Trump, who is among the newest world leaders in the G-20, remained at the dinner for the entire night. He was among the last to leave - after the host, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, had already departed. Pool reporters with the president saw Putin's motorcade leave at 11:50 p.m., followed shortly by Trump, who departed the concert hall at 11:54 p.m.

Leaders who witnessed the meeting were "bemused, nonplussed, befuddled" by the animated conversation, held in full view - but apparently not within listening distance - of others present, Bremmer said in a telephone conversation. He said he spoke with two participants at the dinner.

One senior European official whose head of government was there played down the attention the Trump-Putin chat garnered, saying that it was not unusual for leaders to circulate or "withdraw to a corner" at such private gatherings.

"Part of the rationale is the flurry of bilateral contacts that happen," the official said. "I don't find it a sensation," he said of the lengthy dinner chat, although "maybe Trump and Putin are a little different" from other attendees.

The administration official said there was nothing unusual in a meeting with no aides present, noting that Trump met alone with French President Emmanuel Macron when he visited Paris last week. He also held a one-on-one session, with no aides present, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi when Modi visited the White House late last month, the official said.

---

The Washington Post's Abby Phillip contributed to this report.
I n a lecture in Cambridge a few months back, Lord (Mervyn) King, the former Governor of the Bank of England, observed that the way the regulation of banks had developed since the financial crash had produced a system which was far too complex.

A lot of what had been produced should be scrapped he said because it demanded far too much detail.

The focus should instead be on two things which he believed would maximise the chances of such a crisis not happening again. First, the regulation should ensure that banks had sufficient equity to provide them with an adequate cushion against the losses they would inevitably incur in a downturn. Second, the system should be reconfigured so that the authorities could always provide the banks with the liquidity they would need in a crisis.

To this end he suggested that, in good times, banks be required to lodge a sufficient proportion of their high- quality assets with the Bank of England. These would then be instantly available to use as collateral when the Bank was called on to provide those troubled banks with the emergency funding they would need in a crisis when their normal sources of money dried up.

The Bank of England would be pawnbroker of last resort.

But the system as a whole remains a long way short of what King regards as fit for purpose, and this is becoming an issue now because there are increasing murmurs in the City that the country is heading for a credit crunch.

They are alarmed at the anecdotal evidence from private-equity companies suggesting that the banks have become much less willing to provide funding for deals. There is growing concern too that a drop in second-hand car prices  caused either by recession of just a swing in fashion away from diesel and towards electric vehicles  could leave the firms which provide car-leasing finance badly exposed.

These and other concerns about the growth in credit generally prompted the Bank of England three weeks ago to announce that it would raise the capital buffer which UK banks have to set aside against losses.

That might be regarded as a prudent step in some circles but in others it has been dismissed as largely cosmetic. The problem  as highlighted in a letter to the Financial Times by a clutch of concerned investors and pension fund trustees  is that much of what banks call capital and use in their calculation of capital buffers is little more than a figment of their accountants rich imagination. It would not be there when needed.

As the letter explained, the accounting numbers used by banks include shareholder capital and retained earnings which are genuinely loss absorbing, but also count estimates of capital accumulated from anticipated profits and the theoretical gains on assets held in banks trading books, both of which are likely to melt away when things get difficult. To add insult to injury the capital number reported by bank makes no provision either for foreseeable loan losses.

Put all these things together and you get the bizarre situation where a bank earning high margins on a risky loan book which is highly likely to go sour will look better capitalised than it actually is and than its more prudent peers.

We are surely some way short of Kings ideal that banks should have adequate capital to cover losses, when we do not even know how much of the capital they claim to have would genuinely be available in a crisis.

The other issue is property. Banks in the UK dont really lend much to businesses anymore; they are far more interested in lending on property  usually second hand. This  as Lord (Adair) Turner, the former head of the Financial Services Authority, warned again this week at a seminar organised by the think-tank New City Agenda  is almost guaranteed to mean property prices are chased too high in a boom and, as night follows day, the banks then come unstuck when prices fall. Typically they then panic and try to pull in their loans. This then turns what should have been a mild downturn into a crash.

Last time this happened in the financial crisis, commercial property prices dropped 42% in two years, most of the former building societies went bust and RBS and Lloyds/HBOS had to be rescued by the taxpayer.

Turner thinks the regulator should make lending on property more expensive through the capital backing required for the loans so the banks would do less of it. But the Property Industry Alliance, with the blessing of the Bank of England, has been working on an alternative approach. It provided an update of its ideas last week.

The origins of this project can be found in a 2014 report, A Vision for Real Estate Financing in the UK, which explored ways to reduce the risk to financial stability posed by the commercial property cycle. The report published last week put flesh on one of its key ideas that long-term benchmarks should be developed which would make it much easier to judge how todays commercial property prices compared with historic norms.

In this way it should be possible to see whether current values were in line with, or beginning to deviate seriously from, long-term sustainable trends, or even getting to levels where, historically, crashes have taken place.

In this way it would help the industry, banks and regulators understand where they were in the cycle and hopefully stop them chasing prices too high.

It seems a sound idea but it has still, of course, to be taken on by the industry. And it will then take further time to get it embedded into risk management processes so it could be used to restrain a gung-ho bonus-chasing chief executive.

Given the strains which are already apparent in the property market, it will be interesting to see whether the industry gets there in time.
B HP Billiton will take a $546 million (420 million) hit to cover the cost of strikes at its Escondida copper mine in Chile.

The mining giant, still reeling from the fallout from the Samarco dam collapse in Brazil, today said that while iron-ore production rose 4% in the last year, copper fell by 16%.

That was because of industrial action at Escondida and unplanned maintenance work at Olympic Dam in South Australia.

Activist hedge fund Elliott is putting pressure on the mining company to sell or spin off its oil business.

BHP today said it intended to increase activity in the US oil and shale-gas fields that Elliott wants to see sold.

The New York hedge fund wants a sweeping overhaul of the worlds largest-listed miner after criticising the billions of dollars spent on acquisitions and share buybacks.

BHP and joint-venture partner Vale are facing a $44 billion civil lawsuit from the Brazil dam disaster.

Brazil prosecutors said in May: Preliminary studies show the human, economic and socio-environmental impacts of the collapse of the dam are, at least, equivalent to those verified in the Gulf of Mexico [BP oil spill].
A London start-up which insures Deliveroo riders has swallowed a 1.2 million investment amid concerns about rights of workers in the so-called gig economy.

Zego, which is run by an ex-Deliveroo executive, has received 1.23 million in seed funding from investors led by LocalGlobe, the venture capital firm run by Saul and Robin Klein.

The company launched last year, providing pay-as-you-go insurance cover to scooter drivers for companies such as Deliveroo, UberEATS, and Amazon.

Zego has an app that tracks when those workers are on shift and then automatically debits their account so they only pay insurance when they work rather than forking out for hefty annual premiums.

The firm has also just launched an insurance product for car drivers, which is underwritten by Aviva.

The funds raised will be spent on increasing the workforce, specifically in software development.

It comes a week after the Taylor Review into employment practices, which honed in on the gig economy.

The report, commissioned by Theresa May, called for more rights for workers who use apps such as Deliveroo, which does not class riders as employees.

Zegos chief executive and co-founder Harry Franks, who was global head of procurement at Deliveroo, said insurance is not fit for purpose.

We can help people have adequate insurance while theyre working and therefore they dont get boxed into being a full-time worker or being a subcontractor, Franks said.
R eckitts sale of its Frenchs mustard division to McCormick will bring much-welcome fee trouserings for Morgan Stanley and Robey Warshaw.

As Goldman Sachs reduced investment banking numbers hinted yesterday, multi-billion dollar deals in London have been thin on the ground as investors fret about the outlook for the UK.

Offers that have come in have often failed, McCormicks bid last year for Premier Foods being a case in point.

But this latest effort from the US spices group seems generous, valuing the target at 25 times its underlying profit compared with Reckitts broader multiple of 20. Thats nearly twice as high as the valuation McCormick was offering Premier and makes it unsurprising Unilever and Hormel chose to walk away.

Thats not to say Reckitt has made up for the mistake of buying baby milk maker Mead, a potentially destructive pivot away from its supposed focus on over-the-counter medicines.

But its a good deal nonetheless.

Incidentally, McCormick might have felt it could afford the luxury of a bigger price today having dodged a bullet with Premier. It was rebuffed at 65p a share last year.

Today, having hit 55p in October, the Kipling cakemaker is floundering at 40p. An exceedingly close escape.
R eckitt Benckiser boss Rakesh Kapoors overhaul of the consumer goods giant took another major step forward on Wednesday as he sold off its food business to US spice-maker McCormick for $4.2 billion (3.2 billion).

Reckitt agreed the sale just over three months after it launched a review of the maker of Franks Red Hot sauces, which also sells around 160 million bottles of Frenchs mustard a year.

The move will allow the Durex-to-Dettol manufacturer to focus on its health and hygiene arm and Mead Johnson, the baby formula firm it paid $17.9 billion for this year.

Schwartz spices firm McCormick is understood to have beat a host of rivals, including Unilever, Spam owner Hormel Foods and Pinnacle Foods, with its bid. McCormicks move comes after its attempted a takeover of Premier Foods last year.

The sale by the FTSE 100 firm also helps the company pay off debt following the Mead deal.

Kapoor, who said the sale marks another step towards transforming Reckitt Benckiser into a global leader in consumer health and hygiene, is hoping to boost sales after a tough period for the Nurofen manufacturer.

It has been hurt by a scandal in South Korea, where the former boss of its division was sentenced in January to seven years in prison over the sale of a toxic product linked to almost 100 deaths.

The company has also seen its latest Scholl footwear innovation fail to take off, while Kapoor also had to make a recent climbdown amid protests over his own pay.

The price tag was higher than the City expected, sending the shares up 116.55p to 7929p.

Shore Capital analyst Darren Shirley said: Reckitt is achieving a very attractive valuation for a North American food business, in our view. James Edwardes Jones of RBC Capital Markets added it feels to us like a very high price. Reckitt was advised on the deal by Morgan Stanley and Robey Warshaw.

The food businesss operations are solely in America, where it employs 450 staff, mainly in Missouri. Baltimore-based McCormicks chief executive Lawrence Kurzius said the acquisition enables his business to become a one-stop shop for condiment, spice and seasoning needs.

RB Foods focus on creating products with simple, high-quality ingredients makes it a perfect match for McCormick as we continue to capitalise on the growing consumer interest in healthy, flavourful eating, he added.

McCormick was advised by Credit Suisse and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. The US sauces and condiments market is worth around $21 billion a year, according to research by IBISWorld.

Elsewhere in the consumer market, GlaxoSmithKline is said to be selling its Horlicks bedtime drinks brand in the UK but retaining it in India, where it is sold as an energy drink.
A number of international businesses are continuing to increase the size of their London offices despite Brexit jitters, with property investor Blackstone on Wednesday revealing its trophy building overlooking the Thames has just become fully-let.

The landlord said Japanese beauty firm Shiseido Group- behind cosmetic brands such as NARS -has agreed to take the remaining 23,400 square feet at its Adelphi block by the Strand.

Property agent Lewis Craig advised Shiseido which will consolidate its London offices into a larger one that provides extra space for future growth.

It means 270,000 square feet of deals have been agreed at the property in the last eight months.

Music streaming firm Spotify has upsized to move there, while other new tenants include The Economist.

Ed Hodgson, director for Blackstone Property Management, told the Standard: "Contrary to perceived anxiety caused by political uncertainty, the volume and tenant profile of recent lettings at the Adelphi demonstrates a sustained appetite for premium office space in central London."

Cushman & Wakefield and Knight Frank advised Blackstone.
T he real crisis facing the BBC has been all over the news these past 24 hours. That crisis is not the predictable fury on the front pages about the big salaries for their stars but the earnings report on the business pages from Netflix, the internet TV service which announced yesterday that it had more than 100 million subscribers, and was going to spend over 4.5 billion a year on original programming to service them  a sum of money larger than the BBCs entire income from the licence fee. Its not just Netflix. Amazon and Apple are now deploying huge budgets to produce new content. The shows that increasingly Britain talks about  from Game of Thrones to The Crown  are not being made by Britains national broadcaster.

Thats not to say the BBC doesnt have serious questions to answer about pay. How can a public-service organisation that should be promoting gender equality justify its top male stars earning much more than their female stars? Is Chris Evans really worth four times more than Strictlys Claudia Winkleman? Then there is the size of the salaries. The BBC says it is in an international market for top talent, and some of its people have recently left to join the likes of Spotify and Apple. That competition may be true of its real stars but do you really need to pay Stephen Nolan (exactly, who?) 450,000 a year? And being on the BBC gives performers and presenters an audience that allows them to earn a lot extra in appearance fees and publishing spin-offs. We need to see much more evidence that the BBC management really are managing their 1 billion talent bill.

The BBC complains that commercial broadcasters are not subject to this kind of scrutiny and transparency. But it cant have it both ways. It is a public organisation funded by taxpayers (or what the BBC calls licence fee payers), guaranteed an annual income regardless of the quality of the product it produces  a uniquely privileged position that every director-general from Lord Reith onwards has fought successfully to defend. It has asked to be insulated from commercial pressures in the future, securing the recent parliamentary statute that requires British viewers of iPlayer to cough up 147 a year to watch it, which is double what it costs to sign up to Netflix or Amazon Prime.

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National identity

The price it pays for being shielded from commercial competition that other broadcasters such as ITV and Sky face is that it has to justify how taxpayers money is spent. Yet everyone who has ever worked at the BBC complains that streamlined and efficient are not words you would apply to the Corporation.

This newspaper is a fan of the BBC. We believe it adds to the richness of our culture, and helps make places such as London and Manchester centres of creative industry. At a time when our society is becoming more atomised, our public broadcaster helps sustain our national identity. Some 14 million citizens  almost a quarter of the population  watched the concert in Manchester in response to the terror attack there. While there are legitimate concerns about some of the lazy assumptions behind the BBCs news coverage, its broadcasting is far less partisan than that you now see in the US.

Our real concern is that the BBC has locked itself into a funding model that will condemn it to a slow but certain decline. The Corporation plans to commission more independent productions and focus on British content. But if it wants to remain central to our national life and fulfil its mission to inform, educate and entertain a new generation, some radical thinking is required about its future financing. For while west London will be chattering tonight about the relative salaries of John Humphrys and Mishal Husain, its the TV takeover from the US West Coast that we should really be worrying about.
I ndictments dont get much more damning. The annual report on prisons issued to Parliament yesterday by the chief inspector of prisons is littered with terms such as dire, dangerous, appalled and, time and again, it refers to the rampant violence across the prison estate fuelled by drugs and staff shortages. Its author, Peter Clarke, is a former head of counter-terrorism at Scotland Yard and so not a man prone to sensationalism. But amazingly, its not the language that is the most damning aspect. Its the way the report so closely echoes the one Mr Clarke submitted a year before. The one in which he pronounced prisons as unacceptably violent and dangerous places.

And yet here we are, one year on and the situation  astoundingly  is even worse. Just look at the evidence: the 26,000 assaults that occurred around jails last year, up 27 per cent from the year before. Look at the 225kg of drugs and 13,000 mobile phones the Ministry of Justice has admitted got confiscated during 2016. Then, most tragically of all, consider the 119 suicides that were committed in bleak, lonely cells last year  thats 29 more than the year before and the most since records began in 1978. That is a repulsive figure, especially given the 40,161 self-harm incidents that went along with it.

Londons prisons, unsurprisingly, fare particularly badly  rampant drug issues, unmanageable mental health problems, an ageing prison population and a fall (in real terms) in staff salaries, making recruitment and retention hugely challenging, create pretty much the perfect storm. No wonder HMPs Brixton and Pentonville were branded unsafe by Her Majestys Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP) this June  Pentonville, dont forget, was where six people died last year including Jamal Mahmoud, an inmate who was stabbed to death in October 2016. As for Feltham, Londons gang-ridden prison for 15- to 21-year-olds, it was criticised by HMIP because violence had risen and boys and young men spent too long locked in their cells.

No escaping the collage of custodial chaos, then. But how did we get here? For years now, penal reform groups and pretty much every prison governor worth their salt have been warning that this crisis was going to happen. Theyve been explaining  in very clear, very patient terms  that unless the all-time-high prison population is drastically reduced, unless prison governors are granted more autonomy (both budgetary and operational), unless there is a co-ordinated national strategy to deal with the psychoactive substances (NPS) that are causing so much of the violence and have been linked to 79 prisoner deaths since June 2013  our prisons will descend into chaos.

A sustained coherent strategy from a justice secretary who understands prisons (Ken Clarke, for one) could feasibly have saved the day. Sadly, we got the opposite: five justice secretaries in the past seven years, each determined to make their mark with a radical approach (thereby soaking up scarce resources) while at the same time ignoring the clamour for fewer custodial sentences so that governors can focus on rehabilitation rather than lifes basics: food, medication, stopping murders. HMP Wandsworth exemplifies the population problem. Its Certified Normal Accommodation (how many prisoners can be safely accommodated) is 943  and yet this warehouse of woe must squeeze in 1,603 prisoners every night.

Its a poignant example because, just last year, the then Justice Secretary Michael Gove chose Wandsworth to be one of the Governments new reform prisons. At a stroke, Wandsworths governor Ian Bickers could decide how to spend his prison budget and whether to opt out of national contracts. His new-found operational freedom also covered key functions like education and partnerships providing prison work, and he implemented innovative schemes such as getting prisoners to help run the prison. But the experiment was short-lived. Little more than a year later, Wandsworth was stripped of its reform status and its governor given a more senior position.

Chances are, all six reform prisons will end up the same way, spelling the death of yet one more radical new initiative. In the meantime it is prison staff who keep on running the show. Yes, those same staff who last year had to deal with those 40,000 incidents of self-harm, who fear what theyre going to see every time they open a cell inspection hatch; the staff who bear the brunt of prisoners frustration, who collectively sustained 6,844 assaults last year, a 385 increase on the year before.

We hardly hear about these prison staff. Why? Because unlike the nurses who do such a magnificent job in our hospitals or the firefighters who, during the Grenfell Tower tragedy, reminded us what phenomenal heroes they are, prison staff work with the disenfranchised and they do so behind mighty forbidding walls. They are invisible. Whats more, theirs is a confusing role  on the one hand caring, on the other, disciplinary. They will never be loved like our nurses and firefighters. But prison staff are still normal working folk who face immense challenges the moment they enter their workplace every day. Spare them a thought.

Not that staff and prisoners are the only victims of the current prisons crisis. We, the public, are too. Practically every one of those prisoners enduring squalid, filthy, disgusting conditions, as Mr Clarke puts it, is going to get released some time soon. They are going to rejoin us as citizens, walking down the same pavements, living in the same blocks of flats. No wonder the chief inspector sounded so frustrated when talking to the BBC about the lost opportunity prisons represent. Because hes bang on. Prisons are our one chance to cut crime and the 15billion it costs taxpayers every year. And thats precisely why the Government must heed every word of his annual report.

Jon Herbert Scott is a former prison governor. His book, Trouble on the Wing, is available on Amazon.
T ime flies. I first moved to London exactly 15 years ago  and looking back on it, those first few months in the city werent easy. I had no money and did some strange jobs, including a stint as an audio-typist for a Nigerian psychiatrist, which didnt go well. Not only was I useless at typing but I could barely understand a word of what the heavily accented doctor was mumbling into his tape recorder.

A friend of mine took pity on me, and told me about a great job she thought would be perfect. She was looking after young children in a nursery, and the managers were looking for an extra pair of hands. It would be loads of fun, she said  you get to play with toddlers all day, which sounded perfect to me.

So one morning I called into the daycare centre where my mate was working, and asked to see the manager about the vacancy. Ill never forget the look of disgust on the managers face when she saw I was a man  she took my CV without a smile, and didnt even say shed be in touch. Needless to say I never heard back, and that was the end of my budding childcare career.

It turns out that my experience wasnt unusual. Fewer than two per cent of all staff working in nurseries or creches in the UK are men  thanks to what one academic calls a quiet conspiracy to keep blokes out of childcare.

This matters. As a recent report put it: Male carers have much to offer, including acting as positive role models for boys  especially from families where the father is absent.

No wonder 98 per cent of female nursery workers say they would like to have male colleagues, while almost 80 per cent of the public report that they would like to see more men working in childcare.

Its depressing that this vast gender imbalance in childcare has remained, even as traditional preconceptions of boy jobs and girl jobs have broken down (except in Theresa Mays house). After all, more than half of all mothers in Britain with pre-school children now have a paid job, while fathers are spending much more time on childcare.

As one expert puts it: Society has moved on, men are more actively engaged in caring for their children; yet the early childhood workforce seems stuck in the Seventies family model.

It doesnt have to be like this. In Denmark, there are tough targets for gender equality  and its normal for men to be working in childcare. Our government needs to follow the Danes lead, and fast.

But the great thing about the modern world is that we dont have to wait around for politicians to act  we can roll up our sleeves and make change happen ourselves.

Thats why Im opening a new Second Home workspace in London Fields this autumn  which is going to include an OFSTED-accredited creche with as close to a 50:50 male-female staff ratio as possible. Weve partnered with an organisation called Manny and Me to make it happen, who are doing a brilliant job of getting more guys into childcare.

Our ambition isnt just to make life easier for working parents by having childcare in the building  its to show that early years education ought to be a profession for both men and women. This wont just be good for children but for society as a whole. Who knows, maybe Ill even be able to work a few shifts at my creche. Ive only been waiting 15 years for the opportunity.

Creativity adds meaning to our lives

Its time we admitted that theres more to life than money and its time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB  general well-being.

I was working as an adviser to David Cameron when he said those words  following in a long line of people from John Maynard Keynes to Bobby Kennedy whove pointed out that government policies should be designed to promote well-being and happiness.

Today that argument gets even stronger, with the publication of an excellent parliamentary report entitled Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing, which shows how art can boost well-being, and help meet some of the big social challenges we face in health, loneliness and mental health. A great example in the report is Southwark Councils art and craft programme for mothers in mental distress, which led to a 77 per cent reduction in depression and 86 per cent fall in stress.

As the artist Grayson Perry says: Art, like science and religion, helps us make meaning from our lives, and to make meaning is to make us feel better. Quite right, too.
Q ueen Anne, the subject of Helen Edmundsons new play at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, is usually thought of as the epitome of dullness. Sarah Churchill, Annes one-time best friend, claimed she was so boring that spending time with her was worse than being imprisoned in a dungeon.

Annes life was overshadowed by tragedy. Her 17 pregnancies ended either in failure or produced heart-rendingly short- lived children. A much-loved son died shortly after his 11th birthday. With most of her other babies, she suffered miscarriages cruelly late in pregnancy.

Anne lived in politically turbulent times. In 1688 this supposedly dutiful daughter had helped to drive her father, James II, from his throne. As Edmundsons play shows, Annes private life equally tumultuous.

Anne was devoted to her husband, Prince George of Denmark, yet Annes obsessive friendship with her outspoken lady-in-waiting Sarah Churchill provided richer emotional fulfilment. In passionate letters Anne swore eternal love for this spirited woman. Sarah was happily married to an army officer named John Churchill, but the correspondence prompts the question whether Annes feelings for her favourite were erotically charged.

When Anne became Queen in 1702 Churchill was given command of her army and won a succession of spectacular victories against France. As he gained glory, his wifes relationship with Anne became increasingly rancorous. Disappointed that her political influence was not greater, Sarah stopped showing Anne affection, and Anne ceased to find pleasure in her company.

Rather than blaming her abominable behaviour for the estrangement, Sarah preferred to think the Queen had been infatuated with another lady-in waiting named Abigail Masham and worked to publicise her belief that the Queen was involved in a lesbian relationship. She circulated rhymes alluding to Annes dalliance with her slut of state. The shocking things Sarah alleged resulted in total rupture.

After Sarah tried to blackmail the Queen by threatening to publish her letters, Anne severed all contact and dismissed Sarahs husband from his military command. The end of Annes reign in 1714 found the couple in continental exile, plotting the Queens overthrow.

Queen Anne may have lacked glamour but the perception that she was uninspiring has been largely shaped by Sarah Churchills vicious memoirs. In fact, Annes life, notable for personal tragedies, power struggles and even sexual scandal, was a gift for a biographer.

Anne Somersets Queen Anne: the Politics of Passion, is published by HarperCollins, 9.99.
1 . After Tuesdays launch party for Eater London, dinner with Marina OLoughlin (who naturally didnt attend) at Brawn. Rosemary-scented juices around chubby lamb chops almost stopped the pouring rain.

2. Transportation to the late Seventies in all but menu and discursive wine list at Albertine in Shepherds Bush, started by Allegra McEvedys mum Sarah, now co-owned by Allegra. Hummus wouldnt have come with smoked harissa then.

3. The awayday gang of four lunching at the 18th-century Mash Inn near High Wycombe agree that sirloin steak (pictured) makes best use of the wood-fired grill.

4. Scrutinising carefully Catherine Deneuve  born two years before me  in The Midwife at Curzon Mayfair ahead of my birthday eve dinner at The Wolseley, which began with croustade of quail eggs.

5. Another steak  build me up buttercup  at my sister Beths Hampstead pub The Wells, looking so beguiling perched high in leafy streets.
A nurse at a specialist London hospital repeatedly stole drugs intended for sick children, a court heard.

Philippa Brown, 31, raided the stocks of cyclizine at Evelina Childrens Hospital, using her swipe card and PIN number to get into the secure medicine cabinets, it was alleged.

Cyclizine is commonly used to treat vomiting and dizziness but can also be used to give a feeling of euphoria, said prosecutor William Gatward.

At some point staff at the hospital became aware that certain drugs are short  the amount the computer says is not the same as when they count the numbers up. The theory is that Brown, over the course of several months, was using her card to take the drugs out.

He told a jury at Inner London crown court that Brown, a clinical nurse specialist in gastroenterology at the hospital, part of the Guys and St Thomas NHS Trust, was linked to 739 suspect withdrawals from computerised medicine cabinets between May 2015 and January last year.

Staff began to notice when they requested a dose of cyclizine but found that the cabinet had unexpectedly run out. The court heard that some of the suspicious withdrawals under Browns name were cancelled but drugs could still have been removed because the drawers were opened. Mr Gatward also said some of the transactions using Browns PIN number happened when she was on holiday or off sick.

Her swipe card, user number and PIN number are entered on these occasions, and if it is not her then it is some other person obviously doing this with her assistance, he alleged.

Her swipe card was used in different parts of the hospital where Ms Brown doesnt work. She was in a position of power, people know and trust her, and she used that not to benefit patients but in a way that put the hospital at risk, by taking medication without authorisation.

Brown, of Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, has problems with her own digestive system and needs to be connected to a device feeding her nutrients for 12 hours a day. She did not answer police questions when arrested and denies one charge of fraud by abuse of position. The trial continues.
A teenage boy has died after being hit by a police car while being pursued by officers in Wimbledon.

The police watchdog has launched a probe into the crash after the boy, 16, died in hospital on Monday.

He had been fighting for his life after the collision on Trinity Road, which happened in the early hours of Sunday morning.

The teenager was riding a moped with two other boys along South Park Road when it hit a police car at a crossroads at around 2.15am.

Police said the moped collided with the side of the police car as both vehicles crossed the junction at the same time.

The three boys and the moped were being tracked by a police helicopter overhead after reports it had been involved in an attempted robbery earlier in the day.

Police cars also swarmed below to chase the moped, which had been reported lost or stolen to police on July 12.

The Met have not yet confirmed whether the police car involved in the crash was one of the vehicles chasing the moped.

After the crash, police seized two large knives from the boys.

The other moped riders, two boys aged 16 and 15, were also rushed to a south London hospital. The 16-year-old remains in a stable condition.

The boy aged 15 was released from hospital and arrested on suspicion of taking and driving away, failing to stop, possession of an offensive weapon and attempted robbery. He remains in custody at a south London police station.

All three teenagers, including the boy who died, were arrested at the scene.

The Directorate of Professional Standards was informed and the crash was referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which is carrying out an independent investigation.

It comes after a spate of moped-related crime across the capital with mounting concern over safety.

In many cases, offenders have ridden stolen mopeds along busy pavements, putting pedestrians in danger, to grab phones from their owners.

Earlier this week it was revealed police had busted one of London's most prolofic moped gangs.
T his is the terrifying moment a gang of thieves on mopeds robbed a Porsche driver at knifepoint in broad daylight in south-east London.

Shocking footage showed the gang of four, on two bikes, pulling up beside the car before one of them threatened the driver with a blade.

One of the pillion passengers pointed the knife towards the victim, a man in his 30s, as he sat in traffic in Lewisham.

His accomplices appeared to make threats towards him as the incident unfolded in Ladywell Road on July 6.

Shocking: The Porsche driver was waiting in traffic when the thugs approached him in south east London

The man was robbed of his watch in the terrifying attack at about 6.30pm, police said.

Both mopeds then turned around and sped off in the opposite direction.

The victim was not injured in the attack, Scotland Yard has confirmed.

No arrests have been made.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Lewisham CID via 101 or tweet information to @MetCC.

Alternatively, call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
H undreds of protesters demanding justice for Grenfell Tower victims marched to Kensington town hall on Wednesday ahead of the first full council meeting since the disaster.

Hordes of people including masked demonstrators holding banners blocked the street outside the west London building as councillors began the meeting.

Chants of "murderers", "blood on their hands" and "no justice, no peace" could be heard as well as boos when the new council leader was elected. Heightened security had been deployed outside the town hall with guards and barriers.

The meeting saw Elizabeth Campbell formally elected as its new leader and a new chief executive appointed after the two senior staff members resigned following mounting public pressure.

The protest on Wednesday evening comes after more than 1,500 people signed a petition for the entire leadership of Kensington and Chelsea Council to resign, which will be debated at the meeting.

The council has been heavily criticised in the wake of the disaster, with London Mayor Sadiq Khan blasting members for an incompetent response.

At least 80 people are believed to have been killed when a devastating fire broke out at Grenfell Tower on June 14.

Anger: Protesters at the rally on Wednesday evening.

Michael Bradley, 49, of the Justice for Grenfell campaign, said: "I think most people think that the council completely failed the residents.

"We were warning for years that the block was dangerous. Then the disaster happened and it seemed the council was totally paralysed.

"There's no reason why if you live in a council house you should die of the privilege."

Protesters held banners outside of the town hall.

Members of the Stand Up to Racism organisation and the Socialist Worker group joined protesters, carrying signs saying Tory councillors had "blood on their hands".

Desiree Cranenburgh, 59, used to work at the creche on the estate at Grenfell Tower. One of the supply workers who worked at the creche is believed to have died at the fire.

She told the Standard: "We know the families through their children at the creche.

Campaigners wearing masks and holding placards. / Getty Images

"When I look at Grenfell Tower I would think of the children looking out the windows to wave at you. I can't bear to look at it the way it is now.

"Someone along the line has to hold their hands up and take responsibility for it. You go from sorrow to anger."

Members of the council had planned to meet in June, but the meeting descended into chaos when it was scrapped as journalists entered the room.

Kensington and Chelsea council had opted to exclude the media and the public, citing allowing the public to enter would likely result in disorder.

In Wednesdays meeting, Elizabeth Campbell is expected to be formally elected as the new council leader after the local Conservative group nominated her earlier this month, while the new chief executive will also be appointed.

Several motions proposed by councillors in response to the Grenfell tragedy last month are also set to be discussed, including a call to urge the Government to grant undocumented residents a permanent right to remain in the UK.

In the wake of the blaze, hordes of protesters stormed the Kensington council building while a separate march also demanding justice for Grenfell took demonstrators to Downing Street.
T he new leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council was heckled as she promised survivors of the Grenfell Tower disaster she would regain their trust at a public meeting.

Elizabeth Campbell was booed by survivors and residents who shouted why should we listen to you? as she delivered her first speech as council leader.

The Tory councillor was sworn in at a full council meeting  the first since the Grenfell tower blaze  at the town hall on Wednesday evening.

But the meeting was overshadowed by protests outside, with hundreds of demonstrators chanting Justice for Grenfell and murderers as the meeting began.

Protesters with placards and banners demonstrate outside Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall / Getty Images Europe

At least 80 people are believed to have been killed when a devastating fire broke out at Grenfell Tower on June 14.

Ms Campbell apologised to victims and promised to "change the culture" of the administration during her first speech as leader.

She said: "I'm deeply sorry for the grief and trauma you are suffering. I'm deeply sorry that we did not do more to help you when you needed us most.

"We need to do so much more and work even harder to support and work for you.

Turning towards victims in the public gallery, she added: "The next step is to find you the survivors a permanent new home. We are talking to each and every one of you who has lost a home.

"I'm sorry that this has taken so long and that so many of you are still in hotels and that is not where you want to be."

She went on: "We need to change and change fundamentally if we are ever to regain the trust of you, our community. As a council we've long been proud of our connections with the local community.

"The tragedy of Grenfell has demonstrated to me that this is false pride."

Protest takes place outside Kensington Town Hall ahead of council meeting

Kensington and Chelsea council has been heavily criticised by victims of the blaze, with London Mayor Sadiq Khan blasting members for an incompetent response.

Survivors have claimed the council failed to offer support and housing quick enough in the aftermath of the fire.

More than 1,500 people have signed a petition for the entire leadership of Kensington and Chelsea Council to resign, which will be debated at the meeting.

Labour councillor Robert Atkinson dismissed the new leader as "part of the old regime" and accused the council of "social cleansing".

He said: Nothing that ruling Conservative group says tonight can convince the people you know what you're doing or even care.

"From now on this council must do things with its residents and not to or for them.

Kensington and Chelsea council had opted to exclude the media and the public, citing allowing the public to enter would likely result in disorder.

Former leader Nicholas Paget-Brown resigned soon after amid increasing pressure from politicians and residents.

Several motions proposed by councillors in response to the Grenfell tragedy last month are also set to be discussed, including a call to urge the Government to grant undocumented residents a permanent right to remain in the UK.
N ot one of Londons 20,000 empty homes was seized by town halls last year despite the housing crisis.

Official figures showed that the number of properties taken back into use in 2016 was the lowest for more than a decade.

Kensington and Chelsea  scene of the Grenfell Tower fire which left more than 160 families homeless  had the highest number of empty dwellings, at 1,399, of any London borough.

Yet it made just one application to bring an empty property back into use since 2006, the year Empty Dwelling Management Orders (EDMOs) were introduced.

Overall, 208 applications were made across the UK, of which 137 were granted. The number of applications country-wide peaked at 41 in 2012 but has fallen to an average of less than 20 a year since then.

Across England, only nine seizure applications for long-term vacant homes were made last year, although government data shows there were more than 200,000 long-term vacant properties.

Only seven London boroughs have made applications in the 11 years since legislation allowed them to. In London, there were 53 applications over 11 years, of which 19 were granted.

The only boroughs to have made applications were Lewisham, Bromley, Hounslow, Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham, Havering and Barking and Dagenham.

Department for Communities figures showed 20,000 homes were empty for more than six months last year.

Lucy Pendleton, director of James Pendleton estate agent, which analysed the figures, said: This is a disgraceful waste of powers given to councils to help solve the housing crisis.

Its even more disturbing to find that applications have dropped to zero in London, where the high cost of living and severe, long-standing imbalance between supply and demand makes these powers even more urgent.

The boroughs claimed the figures did not reflect the true number of empty homes brought back into use as since 2011 EDMOs have only been used for properties that have been empty for two years and become magnets for vandalism and squatters.

Instead, town halls rely on other measures such as grants to bring homes up to a lettable standard and increasing council tax on empty properties.

Sir Steve Bullock, London Councils executive member for housing, said: Councils are in the front line of addressing the housing crisis gripping our city and, each year, bring hundreds of homes back into use across the capital by more effective means.

EDMOs are notoriously difficult for councils to obtain and are only available for restricted circumstances so these figures do not accurately reflect the good work councils are undertaking.

Kensington and Chelsea council said its figures include short-term empty properties like those for sale or being refurbished.

Camden brought back 70 homes into use through other methods between April and December 2015.
[July 19, 2017] Intronix Technologies' Myoguide DOC Software Launch: Pain and Spasticity Management At a GLANCE!

TORONTO, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Intronix Technologies will be launching "Myoguide DOC", a comprehensive software package designed to help clinicians who inject Botulinum Toxins, such as Botox, Dysport and Xeomin to manage their patient's spasticity and pain. Myoguide DOC is a unique, graphics-based, software package designed for clinicians managing patients with pain and spasticity. Clinicians can document patient history, treatment, treatment plans, generate reports, as well as, add and track spasticity, capability, and pain index scores. Clinicians can mark where they inject on anatomical graphics. They can also attach specific details as part of the medical record. The complete patient injection history can be reviewed at any time, using displayed coloured markers. Patient assessment indexes can be transferred to a tablet for patients to fill out. Clinicians have the ability to easily view and update patients' demographics, treatment history, and outcome assessments. There is also an ability to access all graphics for integration into communications. Lab results and other documents can be added to the patient records for a more comprehensive picture of the patient's history. Powerful "at a glance" insights into patients' progress are available using the graphics based system. Myoguide DOC includes built-in graphics series defining a variety of spasticity syndromes. There is also the capability to build customized anatomical graphic series, for clinically defined protocols, pertinent to each office. "We believe Myoguide DOC is an essential tool for continuous patient management, treatment records at a glance, patient outcome tracking, and report writing. Myoguide DOC will provide precision injection documentation and treatment oucome tracking. We are very fortunate for the opportunity to contribute another element to help clinicians who are treating patients, with or without injection guidance. Clinicians using Myoguide DOC, will have an easier time seeing how patients are progressing," says Dr. Evan Friedman, President of Intronix Technologies".



Myoguide DOC is a robust solution designed for medical practitioners looking to substantially eliminate paper from their practices. DOC can redefine patient care by offering tools with flexibility and scalability for doctor driven workflow that can lead to improved patient care and increased productivity. This simply could not happen in the old paper-based world. Intronix Technologies Corp. (http://www.intronixtech.com) is known for producing Myoguide Injection Guidance System, which has breakthrough technology that gives practitioners a superior way to deliver targeted injections, by using the patient's muscle signals to provide ongoing visual and audio feedback, during the needle insertion, to help find focal areas responsible for pain and spasticity.

"We are always pushing to innovate and build a better tools. Promoting and supporting innovation in the healthcare software sector is essential to improving patient and community care," said Dr. Evan Friedman. "We will continue working with healthcare providers with vision and integrity, to increase the adoption of Intronix electronic medical records and other technologies, so we can all benefit from a more efficient health care delivery system." We will be showcasing Myoguide DOC at the American Association of Neuromuscular & Electrodiagnostic Medicine (AANEM) meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, September 13-16, 2017: Booth #416. We will also be at the American Association of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (AAPM&R) Annual Assembly at the Colorado Convention Center, in Denver, from October 11-15, 2017: Booth #229. About Intronix Technologies Corporation Located just outside Toronto, Ontario, Intronix Technologies designs and produces progressive portable medical devices for neuromuscular diagnostics and treatment delivery. Its innovative Myoguide Injection Guidance System provides technology that results in a better patient experience. Intronix Technologies is known for its exceptional equipment and comprehensive customer-support programs. For additional information about Intronix, please refer to www.intronixtech.com Contact:

Dr. Evan Friedman

President, Intronix Technologies Corporation

+01-905-951-3361

[email protected] View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/intronix-technologies-myoguide-doc-software-launch-pain-and-spasticity-management-at-a-glance-300490587.html SOURCE Intronix Technologies

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A cafe owner has spoken of her devastation after water caused massive damage to her property when flash floods hit west London.

The capital was battered by a huge storm on Tuesday night, with the area around Ruislip Manor station particularly badly hit by downpours.

Ibadete Uberoi said her coffee shop, Mia Cafe, has suffered thousands of pounds worth of damage after water cascaded into it overnight.

She said she will be out of business for about two weeks, with upward of 10,000 needing to be spent on getting the property back into shape.

Mia Cafe owner Ibi Uberoi

Ms Uberoi spent Wednesday morning sweeping water out of the shop after levels rose to thigh height, destroying the floor and a number of electrical items, including four fridges.

She told the Standard: Its very bad, basically everything is broken in the shop. I had to clear it this morning.

Ruislip Manor flooded

I am in a state of shock, I dont know where my head is. I have been in the shop for two years and this has happened three times.

"The water was up to thigh height, it half filled the fridges.

The flooding caused significant damage to the cafe (Ibadete Uberoi ) / Ibadete Uberoi

Last year it was like my god, and now this. Most of the electrics in the cafe are broken. I didnt sleep last night."

There is a dip in a hill near the station, which is why the area is so frequently struck by flooding, she said.

She said the cafe suffered similar damage during floods last year.

Meanwhile, dramatic images emerged on Wednesday showing the flooded station and cars outside submerged in water.

A spokeswoman for Hillingdon Council said: "We are working with London Underground to reduce the risk to the station and commercial premises."
T he parents of Charlie Gard today received fresh hope today in their fight to save their baby after all three were granted American citizenship by the US Congress.

One US politician said the offer of lawful permanent residence meant Charlie, who has brain damage from a rare genetic defect, can come to the US for world class medical care.

However it is understood that the 11-month-old still cannot be removed from Great Ormond Street hospital (GOSH) without the permission of the UK courts despite the US move.

Whitehall sources said the visa offer would make no difference as he is not allowed to travel to the US under an existing court direction.

Mr Justice Francis, the High Court judge who has been hearing appeals by Chariies parents Connie Yates and Chris Gard for him to be offered an experimental therapy by a US doctor, has to be informed of any plans to move him from GOSH.

The parents of Charlie Gard have been granted US citizenship

The hospital today said it was aware of the visa offer but said it was a matter for the courts to decide.

It is understood that permanent residency would in effect be similar to Charlie holding dual citizenship, but UK law still applies.

The appropriations committee of the House of Representatives last night passed an amendment entitling each to an immigrant visa ... for adjustment of status to lawful permanent residence.

Republican congressman Kevin Yoder tweeted: [The committee] voted today to give lawful permanent residence to #CharlieGard so he can come to the US for world class medical care.

Fellow congressman Jeff Fortenberry tweeted: We just passed amendment that grants permanent resident status to #CharlieGard and family so Charlie can get the medical treatment he needs.

This comes ahead of further court hearings expected at the end of this week, and a ruling on Charlies future care next week.

US neurologist Dr Michio Hirano flew back to New York last night after discussing the possible use of nucleoside therapy to treat Charlie with GOSH medics.

The treatment is said to offer a 10 per cent chance of success but has never been used effectively to treat Charlies type of structural brain damage.

Dr Hirano, from the Columbia University Medical Center, told the High Court last week there was a small but significant chance of improvement.

Court proceedings have been running for months after GOSH applied to withdraw treatment and allow Charlie to die with dignity.

Doctors believe he is blind and deaf and unable to move. But last week his parents released a picture where he appeared to be loooking at a toy.

Ms Yates said last night that Charlie was set to undergo more tests. She added: Our gorgeous baby boy is still stable. We are at his bedside and feel satisfied he is not suffering or in any pain.

As Charlies loving parents, we are doing the right thing for our son in exploring all treatment options.
P iers Morgan has been slammed by senior media figures in the UK after he tweeted the salaries of the BBCs highest earners before they were due to be released.

It was the first time the publicly-funded broadcaster has revealed how much its top presenters and actors are paid, with speculation rife in the build-up to Wednesdays announcement.

Media outlets were issued the report in advance of its official publication, however, Good Morning Britain host Piers took to Twitter just after 10am to reveal Chris Evans as the highest-paid BBC star on more than 2 million per year.

He added that Gary Lineker is the second highest paid (1.75-1.79 million), while Claudia Winkleman is the highest paid woman (450,000-499,000).

Revealed: The top five highest paid BBC stars

Morgan, who has been the editor of the Daily Mirror and News of the World, went on to highlight all the key findings from the report in five further tweets.

When questioned about the breach, he said it was a scoop.

Janine Gibson, editor in Chief of Buzzfeed UK, wrote: Well I suppose you may or may not think the BBC News staff are overpaid but at least they understand the word embargo.

Morgan dismissed her, saying: I understand the word scoop better.

Ian Prior, digital editor of the Guardian, added: Breaking embargoes is being that repulsive brat who sneakily unwraps his presents on December 23. Scoop my arse.

Beth Rigby, a senior political correspondent for Sky News, said Morgan was utterly disgraceful.

She added: Morgan breaks an embargo that dozens of journos honour and calls it a scoop. Funny guy. And a bit of a joke.

But the TV host fired back: Oh settle down, petal. I just scooped you. Be better next time.

He later added: Why dont you stop whining and start reporting?

Alastair Stewart, of ITV News, tweeted: Breaking an embargo, with stuff we've all been sitting on for hours, is not a 'scoop', it is naff, delusional & unprofessional.

But Morgan was quick to respond by saying: You snooze, you lose mate.

Following the salary reveal, BBC director-general Tony Hall said it needed to go further and faster on issues of gender and diversity.

BBC Breakfast host Naga Munchetty was paid between 150,000 and 199,999 but co-presenter Dan Walker took home between 200,000 and 249,999.

Radio 4 Today show presenter Mishal Husains pay packet of 200,000 to 249,999 was dwarfed by that of her co-host John Humphrys, who also presents Mastermind.

He earned between 600,000 and 649,999.

Overall, about two thirds of the 96 top-earners were men, sparking the gender pay gap row.
T he Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, already shattered by their visit to a Nazi concentration camp in Poland, paid their respects at Berlin's memorial to the Holocaust today.

William and Kate went to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a huge sculpture evoking a graveyard in the centre of the German capital.

The royal couple walked through the memorial after touring an underground museum which tells the story of the extermination of six million Jews.

They studied displays depicting families forced into ghettos, slave labour, concentration camps and death marches and met a German Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, where 1.1 million perished.

Leon Schwarzbaum, 96, told them about life in the concentration camp, where his parents were killed, and showed them pictures of his lost family.

The royal couple visited Berlin's Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe. / Getty Images

"That's me at four years old with my family and my mother and father, all dead. Killed at Auschwitz," he said.

Mr Schwarzbaum, who was born in Hamburg but emigrated to Poland before the war, spent two years at Auschwitz from the age of 21, working as a runner for the camp commander, his pace and strength perhaps saving his life.

William and Kate asked him numerous questions about his time there.

William and Kate walking through the memorial. / AFP/Getty Images

He showed them pictures of the bunks crammed into each hut. Kate asked him: "How many people slept in each bunk?"

"Six, six, and six, he replied, pointing to a row of three bunks.

He told the couple about the smell of burning bodies pervading the camp from the crematorium. "This was the chimney," he said, showing them a picture. "You could smell the chimney throughout the whole camp. It was a terrible smell."

Kate Middleton and Prince William visit former Nazi camp in Poland 1 /16 Kate Middleton and Prince William visit former Nazi camp in Poland Prince William and Kate at the museum of former German Nazi concentration camp Stutthof in Poland. REUTERS The mood appeared sombre as they were given a tour. REUTERS Prince William and Kate are shown piles of shows of those who were killed in the camp. Kensington Palace William and Kate talk to Holocaust survivors. REUTERS The pair were sombre as they listened to survivors' recollections. REUTERS The royal couple talking with former prisoners. Getty Images Their visit is part of a five-day tour of Germany and Poland. Getty Images Camo Stutthof us near the town of Sztutowo, 30 kilometers east of the city of Gdansk, Poland. AP William and Kate walk through the site of the camp with the director of Stutthof Museum, Piotr Tarnowski. Kensington Palace William and Kate were shown around the museum. REUTERS William and Kate met with Marek, Maria and Czesaw, all former Stutthof prisoners who spoke about their experiences at the camp. The royal pair visited the camp during a five-day tour of Poland and Germany. Getty Images

The frail survivor, who was liberated by American troops while on a death march near Berlin, lived in the US after the war but returned to settle in Berlin. He said it had taken him a long time to begin to talk about his dreadful experiences but he had started giving talks about 10 years ago in an effort to educate young people.

"I didn't speak for a long time after the war, he said. "Ten years ago. Very late."

"That's a very brave thing to do," Kate told him."Did it feel good to talk about your experience?" the duchess asked him.

"I see that young people want to know what was done at that time," he said.

William asked him about his thoughts on the Nazis now after all these years.

He replied: "They destroyed my life. I wanted to study but I couldn't study because the universities had been closed and the schools had closed. They took my jewellery and everything, my family."

The Duke and Duchess, who admitted that their visit to Stutthof concentration camp on Tuesday had been "shattering" thanked him for talking to them.

They emerged from the underground museum into the sunshine and walked through the memorial, designed by American architect Peter Eisenman and opened in May 2005 to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

The 4.7 acre memorial site is covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae" in rows. Each slab is 7ft 10 in long and they vary in height from 7.9 in to 15ft 5in.
R oyal ambassadors Prince George and Princess Charlotte were back on parade today as they headed for Germany on the latest leg of the familys Brexit charm offensive.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their children walked hand-in-hand at Warsaw military airport in Poland as they boarded a private jet bound for Berlin.

George, who turns four on Saturday, had appeared shy when the family arrived in Poland earlier this week. Today he strode confidently across the runway with his parents.

He even tugged at his fathers hand as the duke said goodbye to waiting dignitaries, appearing eager to board the aircraft.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with Prince George and Princess Charlotte leave Warsaw / PA

Charlotte, two, also seemed impatient and pulled at Kates hand in an attempt to join her brother as he made his way up on to the jet.

Prince George and Princess Charlotte arrive in Berlin 1 /16 Prince George and Princess Charlotte arrive in Berlin The Royals disembark their plane at Tegel airport in Berlin after travelling from Warsaw, Poland EPA Princess Charlotte was carrying a posy of flowers EPA A tired Prince George at Tegel Airport in Berlin Getty Images The Duchess of Cambridge pats her son's head as they get off the plane in Berlin AFP/Getty Images Princess Charlotte was carrying a posy of flowers Reuters The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrive at Tegel airport in Berlin with their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte REUTERS The Royals disembark their plane at Tegel airport in Berlin after travelling from Warsaw, Poland REUTERS The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrive at Tegel airport in Berlin with their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte REUTERS The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrive at Tegel airport in Berlin with their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte AFP/Getty Images The Royals disembark the plane in Berlin after travelling from Poland PA The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with Prince George and Princess Charlotte leave Warsaw PA Princess Charlotte arrives at Berlin's Tegel airport

George appeared tired as he arrived at Tegel Airport in Berlin with his parents, while Charlotte carried a small posy of flowers.

The children have spent most of the trip away from the public gaze.

In Poland, they stayed at Belweder palace in Warsaw as guests of President Andrzej Duda while their parents carried out official functions.

A tired Prince George at Tegel Airport in Berlin / Getty Images

The trip, taken at the request of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, is being framed as another Brexit diplomacy tour, helping to maintain and strengthen the UKs relations with Europe as it leaves the European Union.

The Cambridges were due to arrive in Germany at Berlin military airport today. Chancellor Angela Merkel was then set to hold a private meeting with William and Kate in the capital.

William first met the German leader during a trip to Dusseldorf last year. Afterwards William and Kate were due to visit the Brandenburg Gate, a symbol of German unification, and the citys Holocaust museum.

The Royals disembark their plane at Tegel airport in Berlin after travelling from Warsaw, Poland / REUTERS

Tomorrow the pair will renew their sporting rivalry when they visit the city of Heidelberg, twinned with Cambridge.

The duke and duchess will take to the waters of the River Neckar to cox opposing rowing teams in a race, with crews drawn from both cities.

The final day will see the duke and duchess visit Germanys second-largest city, Hamburg. The five-day visit is inevitably being viewed in the context of Brexit and the soft power influence of the royal family.

While its members will have scant, if any, impact on negotiations between the two sides, Foreign Office mandarins believe such trips at least help jog memories about the close ties that must endure once the UK departs. @theroyaleditor
P resident Trump today condemned reports of a second previously undisclosed meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit as sick and dishonest.

He attacked media revelations of an one-hour dinner meeting amid accusations he was cozying up with Mr Putin as his administration is being probed for possible ties with Russian meddling in the US election.

The conversation, confirmed by the White House, happened during a G-20 dinner for world leaders, hours after the US and Russian presidents held a formal meeting on the sidelines of the summit in Hamburg earlier this month.

At some point during the meal, Mr Trump is said to have left his own seat to sit next to Mr Putin, who was placed next to First Lady Melania Trump.

According to the Washington Post, Mr Trump was alone, while his Russian counterpart had a translator with him.

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times said the meeting went on for an hour.

Angered by the reports, Mr Trump tweeted: Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is sick. All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!

He added: The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!

The White House claimed in a statement that it was only a brief conversation, adding: The insinuation that the White House has tried to hide a second meeting is false, malicious and absurd. It is not merely perfectly normal, it is part of a presidents duties, to interact with world leaders.

Their conversation was only acknowledged by the White House after it was publicly revealed by Ian Bremmer, the president of the international consulting firm Eurasia Group.

The Washington Post said the president had distorted the US media reports, saying they were about a secret dinner when the conversation was described as undisclosed.

Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesnt care, Mr Bremmer told the New York Times.

Mr Bremner said the conversation started halfway into the meal and went on roughly an hour.

He told the Post that other leaders were bemused, nonplussed, befuddled by the animated chat.
T he Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had extended discussions with Europe's 'Iron lady' Angela Merkel in Berlin.

The couple arrived at the German Chancellery were Ms Merkel, who dominates the European stage, was waiting for them wearing turquoise jacket, cream trousers and flat black shoes.

William and Kate were also given an instant German lesson as they visited the Brandenburg Gate in front of a crowd of about 2,000 people.

Flanked by security the beaming royal couple shook hands with Ms Merkel as a European flag fluttered in the background.

Kate Middleton and Prince William visit former Nazi camp in Poland 1 /16 Kate Middleton and Prince William visit former Nazi camp in Poland Prince William and Kate at the museum of former German Nazi concentration camp Stutthof in Poland. REUTERS The mood appeared sombre as they were given a tour. REUTERS Prince William and Kate are shown piles of shows of those who were killed in the camp. Kensington Palace William and Kate talk to Holocaust survivors. REUTERS The pair were sombre as they listened to survivors' recollections. REUTERS The royal couple talking with former prisoners. Getty Images Their visit is part of a five-day tour of Germany and Poland. Getty Images Camo Stutthof us near the town of Sztutowo, 30 kilometers east of the city of Gdansk, Poland. AP William and Kate walk through the site of the camp with the director of Stutthof Museum, Piotr Tarnowski. Kensington Palace William and Kate were shown around the museum. REUTERS William and Kate met with Marek, Maria and Czesaw, all former Stutthof prisoners who spoke about their experiences at the camp. The royal pair visited the camp during a five-day tour of Poland and Germany. Getty Images

Kate and Wills  who were both wearing blue, which is seen as representative of unity and solidarity in the EU - are said to be turning up their charm offensive during the visit to Germany.

Welcoming Kate, Ms Merkel asked if she spoke German to which smiling Kate replied: "No, no. Sorry."

The trio then stood for pictures on a red carpet before Kate ushered William to stand between herself and Merkel for a final pose.

They then headed inside the building for a private lunch.

Prince George looks shy on Berlin arrival

The couple brought Prince George and Princess Charlotte along on the trip, which has widely been viewed as a diplomacy visit to maintain EU relations pre-Brexit.

The pair met with Merkel for an hour in what Palace aids said was an "extended discussion" and "lunch."

The family are making the trip at the request of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. They kicked off the tour in Warsaw on Monday.

The Duchess of Cambridge also had an instant German lesson today as she and Prince William visited Berlins iconic landmark, the Brandenburg Gate.

A crowd of around 2,000 gathered in the city centre, just yards from where the Berlin Wall used to stand.

Among them was a woman who spoke fluent English with a slight German accent.

She said my English was very good, said Tracey Spagatner, 49. I said, Yes, well, I am English.

Ms Spagatner, a security guard who has lived in Germany for 36 years, added: She said, My German is a bit rusty. How do you say, What is your name? in German? I said, Wie heien Sie, or Wie heit du?

Ten seconds later the duchess was talking to 15-year-old Sina Hennig from Stuttgart.

Sina said: She said that she had just learned a new phrase - Ich heie Catherine. It was very good!

The couple spent nearly 20 minutes at the Gate, where they were greeted by the mayor of Berlin Michael Muller and his daughter Nina.

Among the throng of people was a German television crew whose reporter had dressed up in a guardsmans uniform, complete with bearskin helmet.

I am trying to attract her attention, said Daniel Boschmann of breakfast channel Sat.1. I wanted to make her feel at home.

Gesturing at his scarlet tunic, he added: Is it nearly like the original, or is it an obvious fake?

Its all plastic, you know. I'm sweating my arse off, to be honest.
[July 19, 2017] Kiehl's 8th Annual LifeRide for amfAR Calls Attention to Rise of HIV Diagnoses in Young People

NEW YORK, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Since 2010, Kiehl's Since 1851, the venerable New York-based purveyor of fine quality skin and hair care, has used a fleet of motorcycles to make noise for AIDS awareness. This year, for its eighth annual Kiehl's LifeRide for amfAR (July 31-Aug. 7, 2017), Kiehl's and amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, are focusing their messaging on the rise of HIV diagnoses in young people. In a PSA launching July 19th, amfAR supporter Charli XCX will share key statistics about the status of the epidemic among the younger generation. View the full PSA at KiehlsNYC on YouTube. "Nearly 40,000 people were diagnosed with HIV in the U.S. in 2015, and more than 40 percent were under the age of 30," said amfAR CEO Kevin Robert Frost. "We need to do a much better job of reaching young people in ways that empower them to make good decisions regarding the risks of HIV, particularly since 50 percent of HIV-positive young people don't know they're infected and can unknowingly pass the virus on to others." Kiehl's LifeRide for amfAR is helping to advance the "Countdown to a Cure for AIDS", amfAR's research initiative aimed at developing the scientific basis of a cure by 2020. The proceeds from the 2017 Kiehl's LifeRide for amfAR will fund a specific grant to aid the research of Dr. Daniela Fera. Dr. Fera is the recipient of one of amfAR's Mathilde Krim Fellowships, which support bright young scientists seeking innovative solutions to HIV/AIDS. She is reengineering HIV proteins so that they lose their protective shield and elicit a more effective response from the immune system. Her project could advance the search for both a vaccine and a cure. Dr. Fera is an accomplished scientist and teacher who has won several awards for her work in structural biology during her postdoctoral training at Boston Children's Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Inspired by a Kiehl's icon, the motorcycle, its spirit of adventure and philanthropic heritage, Kiehl's LifeRide for amfAR took its first ride in 2010. The eighth annual LifeRide contines the brand's mission to heighten awareness and raise funds for amfAR, and will ride from Minneapolis to Nashville over 8 days, July 31-Aug. 7, 2017.



Rallying with the public at nine store stops along the route, Kiehl's will donate a total of $100,000 over the course of the ride. At each stop, the public can meet the riders, social media influencers, learn more about amfAR and contribute to the non-profit. For a schedule of these events, visit www.kiehls.com/liferide2017 At the conclusion of this year's ride, Kiehl's LifeRide for amfAR will have ridden more than 11,500 miles since 2010, and raised more than $1.7 million, funding nine cure-related research projects.

Chris Salgardo, President, Kiehl's USA and amfAR's Kevin Robert Frost will lead this year's riders: Ian Bohen, actor, Teen Wolf

JR Bourne, actor, Somewhere Between

Anthony Carrino, co-host, Kitchen Cousins

Gilles Marini, actor, Switched at Birth

Tyler Posey, actor, Teen Wolf

Grant Reynolds, host/producer, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Luke Wessman, tattoo artist, Miami/NY Ink Key partners for the ride include Cadillac, global airline Delta, and Hedon helmets. #THECUREISINOURHANDS Even if they're not on this year's ride route, Kiehl's customers and amfAR supporters nationwide can still join LifeRide and the fight against HIV/AIDS: Share a selfie with a heart made from your hands , tag @Kiehls, @amfAR and hashtag #LifeRide8. Kiehl's will donate $1 for every Instagram post, up to $25,000 , to amfAR to help fund a cure for HIV/AIDS.

, tag @Kiehls, @amfAR and hashtag #LifeRide8. Kiehl's will donate for every Instagram post, up to , to amfAR to help fund a cure for HIV/AIDS. Share the amfAR PSA featuring CharliXCX! Help continue the conversation about HIV/AIDS and amfAR's work to find a cure.

Help continue the conversation about HIV/AIDS and amfAR's work to find a cure. Limited Edition Ultimate Strength Hand Salve benefits amfAR: 100% of purchase price from the sale of this product, up to $25,000 , will benefit amfAR. The Limited Edition Ultimate Strength Hand Salve will be available for $28.50 at all Kiehl's retail stores, Kiehls.com and specialty store partners nationwide.

100% of purchase price from the sale of this product, up to , will benefit amfAR. The Limited Edition Ultimate Strength Hand Salve will be available for at all Kiehl's retail stores, Kiehls.com and specialty store partners nationwide. Donate in-store. All Kiehl's retail stores nationwide will be accepting donations for amfAR. To find your closest store, please visit the store locator on Kiehls.com. Together, from all of these elements, and with the help of our friends, customers and riders, by the end of the eight annual LifeRide for amfAR, Kiehl's will have raised more than $150,000 in 2017, and more than $1,700,000 in total or amfAR via motorcycle rides and event donations since 2010. Join us on LifeRidehelp amfAR make AIDS history. To find out more about LifeRide, obtain a schedule of events, or get involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS, please visit www.kiehls.com/liferide2017 #LifeRide8 #Kiehls #TheCureIsInOurHands Like @KiehlsUS on Facebook

Tweet @Kiehls and @KiehlsPrez on Twitter

Tag @Kiehls on Instagram

Snap @kiehls on Snapchat

Subscribe to @KiehlsNYC on YouTube Press Contact: Rachael Kelley

Phone: 917-606-2757

Email: [email protected] View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kiehls-8th-annual-liferide-for-amfar-calls-attention-to-rise-of-hiv-diagnoses-in-young-people-300490248.html SOURCE Kiehl's Since 1851

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[July 19, 2017] Solid State Designs To Emerge In High Resolution LiDARs

BOSTON, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Autonomous vehicles require high resolution sensing in order to recognize and locate potential hazards and prevent collisions with them. Most carmakers are pursuing a multi-sensor strategy making use of the strengths of camera, RADAR and LiDAR sensors. However, current LiDARs use mechanical scanning methods that add cost, size and weight to the sensor module. The Strategy Analytics report, "Solid State Designs To Emerge In High Resolution LiDARs For Autonomous Vehicles", comments on the latest developments that use solid state designs to bring about more affordable and more compact LiDAR sensors. Click here for the report: http://bit.ly/2uCxBaq A number of strategies being used to generate solid state designs include Optical Phased Arrays, MEMS micro-mirror modules, Flash laser and Liquid Crystal Waveguide beam steering technologies. Other technologies being used to enhance sensor performance include Frequency Modulation, "Optical RADAR", Silicon Photomultipliers and tunable lasers. The ind of sensor module being developed will be compact and vendors claim could be priced at $250 each or lower. The restricted Field of View will mean that the first deployments will be a forward-facing single sensor for semi-autonomous driving applications, such as highway cruise control, and a four-corner sensor configuration, to enable 360-degree sensing for fully-autonomous vehicles.



Another result of these new LiDAR developments is the emergence of new players in automotive, including start-up and Internet companies, such as Waymo (Google), with their own autonomous vehicle developments. A number of investments and partnerships have also occurred. Kevin Mak, Senior Analyst at the Automotive Practice of Strategy Analytics, said, "Such development and investment would be worthwhile, given that the size of the high resolution LiDAR market will reach $1.6B by 2024. To put this into perspective, the market value for low resolution LiDARs for emergency braking systems in 2016 was only $157M." About Strategy Analytics

Strategy Analytics, Inc. provides the competitive edge with advisory services, consulting and actionable market intelligence for emerging technology, mobile and wireless, digital consumer and automotive electronics companies. With offices in North America, Europe and Asia, Strategy Analytics delivers insights for enterprise success. www.StrategyAnalytics.com US Contact: Ed Sanchez, +1 617 614 0717, [email protected]

European Contact: Kevin Mak, +44(0) 1908 423 644, [email protected]

China Contact: Kevin Li, +86 186 0110 3697, [email protected] View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/solid-state-designs-to-emerge-in-high-resolution-lidars-300490802.html SOURCE Strategy Analytics

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GERING  The first bioblitz to be held at the Wildcat Hills State Recreation Area was a huge success for all involved. Citizen scientists volunteered their time to help identify 141 species of plants, animals and insects during the July 7-8 event.

Citizen scientists took surveys of the area over the course of 24 hours to assist in expanding the scientific knowledge of the Wildcat Hills.

Amber Schiltz, of the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, said she was thrilled by the turnout.

I hope as we continue to have this event every year, that number grows, she said. It was a lot more people than weve had at Oliver Reservoir.

At the start of the event, Schiltz knew things were going to turn out well.

Right at the beginning of the event a six-lined racer ran right into the nature center, she said. That was exciting to see such a beautiful lizard and the kids were excited to see one up close.

A six-lined racerunner is a small lizard species that can move at speeds up to 18 miles per hour. They often dart for cover when approached and are wary of anything bigger than it.

During the event, other animals, large and small, from bighorn sheep to hummingbirds, were spotted. Some volunteers camped out and had the opportunity to sit and listen to the sound of howling coyotes into the night.

Those who made the hike found seven bighorn sheep.

One highlight for Schiltz was the nearly 40 blooming wildflower species found, attesting to the large biodiversity of the area.

Although Schiltz didnt observe any species she didnt think would be there, she found it odd no chickadees were seen and few bluebirds.

This is a great time for them and theyre usually found in abundance at Wildcat Hills, she said. Sometimes, during these species inventory events, you learn just as much from what you dont see as from what you do find.

The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and the Bird Conservancy have teamed up to present bioblitzes in the past, but this was the first based at the newly renovated and expanded Wildcat Hills Nature Center. The event was funded by the Nebraska Environmental Trust.

After the success of the first event, Schiltz said she hopes to make it an annual event. There will be another Bioblitz event at Chadron State Park in late September.

To view all the observances from the event, visit the following website http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/wildcat-hills-bioblitz-2017.
GERING  Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts was in Gering for Oregon Trail Days, but stopped to talk with the media about some of his concerns with state government.

One of the main concerns on everyones mind is the state of the economy and the states revenue shortfall that caused a budget shortfall of just over a billion dollars.

Revenues coming in below the forecast demonstrate the prudence of our sustaining vetoes with the legislature, Ricketts said. We have to control spending and see where that takes us. Ive emphasized to my cabinet we need to continue monitoring expenses and exercise expense control.

He pointed out there are positive signs in the economy with beef trade with China opening up, so prices are recovering.

Agriculture is about 20 percent of our state gross domestic product, Ricketts said. Thats the strength of what we do. Its the agribusiness types of industries well have success in attracting, like biochemical and renewables.

Ricketts also addressed the recent policing procedure controversy that resulted in the dismissal of the head of the Nebraska State Patrol.

The public should feel confident our state troopers are doing a wonderful job protecting people because theyre committed to public safety, he said. This review was about the internal process of how the patrol handles investigations surrounding the use of force. Colonel Rice wasnt meeting my expectations for how those procedures should be followed.

He said hes received a lot of positive feedback from people thanking him for being decisive and taking the steps necessary to assure the state patrol is above reproach.

It goes by so fast, is how the governor reacted to State Senator John Stinners run for re-reelection. Weve worked together on a lot of issues with the Appropriations Committee and have a lot of work ahead of us even with this current budget. Im sure Ill be spending a lot of quality time with him in the near future depending on what happens with our revenues over the next year-and-a-half.

This was Ricketts second visit to the community for Oregon Trail Days, and he said he always has a good time.

I always like coming out for Oregon Trail Days, he said. There are tons of people and its a great tradition. Its a big family event thats lots of fun.
Dr. Coleen Stice usually performs surgery on humans, but this week she had an entirely different type of patient  a bald eagle.

Stice, an Omaha plastic and reconstructive surgeon, lent her skills to help the injured bird, found this spring with a mysterious head wound.

The eagle was discovered on the ground south of Syracuse, Nebraska, in May and brought to Fontenelle Forests Rehabilitation Center near Elmwood, Nebraska where its now being cared for.

Raptor experts were baffled over what caused the strange mark on the birds head, a spot that should be covered with white feathers.

But Stice solved the mystery.

She examined the bird about a week ago at the rehabilitation center and determined the wound was caused by a burn  possibly by an electrical wire while flying. On Sunday she removed the scab during a 30-minute procedure in the surgery suite at Henry Doorly Zoo & Aquariums Center for Conservation and Research.

The zoos veterinarian intern anesthetized the eagle. He and Dr. Stice were assisted by zoo veterinary technicians.

Betsy Finch, rehabilitation manager at the center, said the plan is for Stice to attempt a skin graft on the eagle in a couple weeks; healthy skin will be removed from elsewhere on the bird and attached to its head.

If the graft is successful, the bird would have feathers on its head again, which would be an essential step for it to be released into the wild. Without feathers the bird would suffer dangerous sunburn.

Stice is out of town and was unavailable for comment.

But her husband, Bob Wells, said she is glad she could help the bird. Wells said his wife grew up in Montana and has always had a love for wildlife.

She doesnt like to see an animal suffer, he said.

He said Stice, who is affiliated with CHI Health, learned about the ailing eagle by reading news reports on Facebook. The medical care she provided was volunteer.

Both Wells and Stice volunteer at Fontenelle Forest, and he is vice president of the Audubon Society of Omaha.

He said Stice has provided limited medical assistance to animals in past year, but nothing as extensive as surgery. This was the first time she has ever worked on an eagle, he said.

Finch, with the rehabilitation center, previously told The World-Herald the eagle was weak and underfed when first brought to the center this spring.

But she said Tuesday that the bird is gaining weight and doing better.

My worry is getting this bird back to health, she said.
RALEIGH  Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed a bill that would change the way local governments issue public notices and referred to the measure as an attack on newspapers. It was Coopers eighth veto this year.

In his veto message, Cooper, a Democrat, said the Republican-led General Assembly used the levers of big government to attack important institutions in our state who may disagree with them from time to time.

The bill went through significant changes before reaching his desk.

House Bill 205 originally adjusted workers compensation benefits for prison inmates injured while working for the state. Cooper said he would have supported the first version of the bill.

As it moved through the legislature, amendments were added requiring newspapers to treat their carriers as employees. The guy you see hawking papers in town or tossing a newspaper in your driveway almost certainly is an independent contractor, because its too expensive for publishers to hire him and offer health insurance and other benefits.

In the form that passed, H.B. 205 would change the amount of money government bodies have to pay news publications for legal notices, as required by law. It also sets new circulation requirements for newspapers used for government advertising.

The bill specifically allows government bodies in Guilford County to publish legal notices and surplus sale ads for the public on their own websites, provided theyre easily accessible. The county may post legal ads on its own website in exchange for a fee to supplement teacher salaries and other county needs.

The Guilford County exception was introduced as an amendment by Sen. Trudy Wade, a Republican from the county.

The governor expressed concern that legislators were purposefully trying to punish North Carolina newspapers, whose editorial boards have often been critical of Republican actions in recent years.

Unfortunately, this legislation is another example of that misguided philosophy meant to specifically threaten and harm the media, the release stated. Legislation that enacts retribution on the media threatens a free and open press, which is fundamental to our democracy.

Wade hit back with a statement of her own. Gov. Coopers veto of bipartisan legislation eliminating special carve-outs for the newspaper industry makes it clear his (No. 1) priority is brown-nosing those who cover him.

The N.C. Press Associations executive director, Phil Lucey, told Carolina Journal his organization supported the governors veto and the publics right to know.

The newspaper industry group had called the provision classifying newspaper carriers as employees a job killer. A NCPA statement in June took a harsher view after the final version of the bill was passed.

The late-night wrangling to make this bill pass should shock any citizen who believes in representative democracy and is a perfect example of lawmaking at its worst, the statement read. There is only one winner here, and thats the senator who sponsored the bill and forced this issue at all cost.

John Robinson, a former editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, told Carolina Journal that print ads may not be the cheapest way for governments to inform the public, but it supports local journalism.

Robinson took issue with Wades amendment.

What I dont like is that a Guilford County legislator who has quarreled with the newspaper has singled out Guilford County for her law, Robinson said. It appears unfair to newspapers here  one of which said it would cause [it] to go out of business  and seems personal.

Indeed, the front-page headline last week in the weekly Jamestown News of Guilford County read, Trudy Wades bill will close Jamestown News. Governors veto is our last hope.
Moran Township Board Considers Concept of Green Burials for Gros Cap Cemetery The Moran Township Board of Trustees took a look at a proposal to allow green burials at the Western Cemetery in Brevort sometime in the...

New Preserve on Marquette Island Remembers Nature Lover Kathy Bricker A new nature preserve on Marquette Island not only protects the land, plants, and animals there, but also recognizes the memory and legacy of Kathy...
Implementing a construction project for a new Bucharest metro main route linking the city's North Station to the Henri Coanda Airport that is partially funded by Japan was discussed on Wednesday by Romania's Foreign Minister Teodor Melescanu and senior official with Japan's Foreign Ministry Nobuo Kishi, according to Romania's Foreign Affairs Ministry (MAE).

Melescanu welcomed visiting Kishi at the MAE main offices in Bucharest on Wednesday.

MAE quotes Melescanu as having underscored Romania's special attention attached to boosting ties with Japan by consolidating high-level dialogue and expanding bilateral economic cooperation.

Melescanu also pointed to the presence of Japanese companies in Romania, while voicing hope that new Japanese investment will be drawn to Romania by the country's attractive economic environment characterised by solid growth, friendly taxation and a highly qualified workforce. He mentioned the existing opportunities for economic cooperation in the areas of IT, automotive industry, agriculture and tourism.

Senior official Kishi pointed to a rising trend in cooperation between Japan and Romania over the past years, which is reflected in Japan being the largest Asian investor in Romania.

The two officials discussed the implementation of a construction project for a new Bucharest metro main route linking the city's North Station to the Henri Coanda Airport that is partially funded by Japan. Melescanu underscored the determination of Bucharest administration officials to complete the project, mentioning as proof to the point the passage on July 13 of a governmental decision concerning expropriations via the new route, says MAE.

Mention was made of the substance and potentials of bilateral cooperation between Romania and Japan in areas such as research, science and technology illustrated by the presence of Japanese professor Kazuo Tanaka as scientific director on board of the Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) project at Magurele, in Romania.

Both officials voiced a shared wish for cooperation to be developed between the two countries in education, culture and interpersonal exchanges. Melescanu voiced a special interest in the current temporary visa exemptions for Romanian nationals travelling to Japan becoming permanent.

The meeting also provided an opportunity for an exchange of opinions on the latest developments in international current affairs, with emphasis on security in Eastern Asia and Eastern Europe, the future of the European Union and Brexit.

Kishi was on working visit to Romania, scheduled to also call on President Klaus Iohannis and Prime Minister Mihai Tudose. This was his second such visit, after a previous one in December 2013.
Marshall City Band to perform concert

MARSHALL -- The Marshall City Band will perform a concert this Friday evening on the Clark County Courthouse lawn at 8 p.m. under the direction of Blake Reynolds.

The concert will include Florentiner March, An American Scene Overture, Broadway Show-Stoppers Overture, The Trombone King, Highlights from Harry Potter, Folk Legend, The Gladiator March, Highlights from Carousel, Castle Gap, Novena, Sol Y Sombra and conclude with The Star-Spangled Banner.

Band concerts are free and open to the public. Concerts are held each Friday evening through Aug. 11 on the Clark County Courthouse lawn. The First United Methodist Church will host refreshments at this weeks concert. Ice cream socials are held each week in conjunction with many of the band concerts sponsored by area organizations throughout the summer. The Lions Club will also be present in the antique popcorn wagon.

To keep up-to-date on band activities, visit the Marshall City Band on Facebook.

Historical society to host pie and ice cream fundraiser

HUTSONVILLE -- The Hutsonville Historical Society will be hosting a pie and ice cream social with a concert by the Angela Lily Trio. The event will be on Saturday at the historic Hutson Cabins.

Pie and ice cream will be served at 6 p.m., with the concert beginning at 6:30 p.m. Attendees should bring a lawn chair. A free-will donation is requested as this is a fundraiser for maintenance needs at the Hutson Cabins.

For more information, contact Cindi Jeane at cindijeane@yahoo.com.

Lake Land College Adult Ed offers free welding classes

MARSHALL -- Lake Land Colleges Adult Education is offering free welding classes in Marshall, Pana and Sullivan for the fall semester.

Orientation will be held the first night of class as follows:

Eastern Region Center at the Forsythe Center, 224 S. Sixth St., Marshall  Aug. 7 and 14 at 5 p.m.

Western Region Center, 600 E. First Street, Pana  Aug. 7 and 17 at 5 p.m.

Sullivan High School, 725 N. Main St.  Aug. 1 and 8 at 5 p.m.

For more information, contact Adult Education at 217-238-8292 or email adulteducation@lakelandcollege.edu.

ERBA extends deadline for scholarship program

CHARLESTON -- The Embarras River Basin Agency, Inc. (ERBA), in cooperation with the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) through the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG), will have scholarships available for income eligible individuals who want to attend college this fall.

ERBA serves the following nine counties: Clark, Coles, Crawford, Cumberland, Douglas, Edgar, Jasper, Lawrence and Richland. A limited number of $500 scholarships will be awarded to eligible applicants in each of these counties.

To be eligible for consideration, applicants must be attending an Illinois college, university or community college as a full-time student this fall, have at least a C average, and must meet CSBG income guidelines. All interested individuals are encouraged to apply.

You may pick up an application at the local ERBA office in the county which you reside and schedule an appointment to return your completed application before July 28, 2017.

For more information, contact Taneya Higginbotham, field worker, Coles County ERBA, at 217-345-4840.
Prime Minister Mihai Tudose stated on Tuesday that in the upcoming months, significant foreign investors are to come to Romania, "heavy names, with very large investments."

"In the next months, I tell you that we will have and you will have many pleasant surprises and very good things in respect to large investments that are to come to Romania. Heavy names, big names with very large investments," Mihai Tudose told Realitatea TV private broadcaster, at the end of a working meeting with representatives of the tourism employer's association, held in Mamaia Black Sea resort.

When asked whether or not he is talking about investors from the UK, the PM answered: "Big names, heavy names with very large investments, not only from the UK, but from all over the European continent and (...) even from across the Atlantic."

agerpres.
Romania's Foreign Ministry (MAE) is condemning the proclamation on July 18 by separatists in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region of a self-styled new state called "Little Russia", according to a MAE statement released on Wednesday.

"The action is flagrantly violating the rules of international law, while breaching Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial unity," says MAE.

MAE adds that Romania is a firm supporter of the implementation of the Minsk Accords, urging the parties to implement the accords, which it calls the only viable and recognised framework allowing for a political resolution of the conflict in Donbas.

MAE also says that Romania is reiterating the need for Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity to be respected within the country's internationally-recognised borders.

Pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday proclaimed a new state there called Malorossiya, or Little Russia, according to the DPA news agency.

DPA reports that a separatist rebellion erupted in Ukraine's two eastern-most regions, Donetsk and Luhansk, three years ago when Kiev ousted its pro-Russian president amid mass protests calling for closer ties with the West.

About 10,000 people have been killed in the conflict, according to estimates by the United Nations. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which independently monitors the fighting, has called on both sides to end the bloodshed.
An armored personnel carrier (APC) sank in the Danube river during the Saber Guardian multinational exercise carried out in Romania, Defence Ministry officials told agerpres. on Wednesday.

According to the cited source, the Land Forces' fighting vehicle went down offshore Bordusani, Ialomita County.
Lincoln Industries announced Wednesday that a Minnesota subsidiary will take on its name.

The company said in a news release that DS Manufacturing, a wholly owned subsidiary in Pine Island, Minnesota, will now be known as Lincoln Industries.

Lincoln Industries said the change will help strengthen its brand and position as the nations leading supplier of exhaust tubes.

Changing the name of DS Manufacturing to Lincoln Industries will allow us to present a unified company image and unambiguous brand identity to our customers, vendors and, most importantly, our people, Lincoln Industries CEO and Chairman Marc LeBaron said in the release.

Lincoln Industries, which has its headquarters and main manufacturing plant at 600 W. E St., bought DS Manufacturing in April 2015 for an undisclosed price. The Minnesota company had 80 employees at the time, but has since added more than 30 workers.
FRONTENAC  Desco has reached an agreement with nearby homeowners on its plans to redevelop the former site of the Shriners Hospital for Children in Frontenac.

An attorney read the details of the agreement between the developer and the Frontenac Woods subdivision immediately to the west of the site during a public hearing at the Board of Aldermen meeting Tuesday night.

The $90 million project includes a three-story retail and office center, two restaurants and a fitness center. The general plan is to complement and not compete with Plaza Frontenac, although there will be shared access roads.

Several Frontenac Woods residents originally opposed the fitness center, particularly the plan for 24-hour operation, and made their views known at recent Planning and Zoning Commission hearings. But an agreement was developed and offered into the record Tuesday night. No other speakers were heard.

The agreement limits operating hours to 4 a.m to 11 p.m., and covers lighting, parking, controlled access to the subdivision, signage and other aspects designed to protect Frontenac Woods from intrusion.

The hospital moved from 2001 South Lindbergh to a smaller facility at 4400 Clayton Avenue in St. Louis in 2015. The building will be razed. The Frontenac site has always had residential zoning; the hospital operated under a conditional use permit. A new one-way entrance from Lindbergh may be added, because of the proximity of St. Joseph's Academy to the south.

The proposal will next go before aldermen as a proposed ordinance. Desco will also ask for property tax abatement or other incentives, but details are not yet known.
How hip is your higher-power station?

According to one poll taken on Twitter, the Archdiocese of St. Louis is totes the hippest.

In the third annual "Archdiocese of Hip" contest concocted by author Tommy Tighe, our congregations beat out three other contenders: Los Angeles, Detroit and Halifax-Yarmouth, Ohio. (Yes, that Halifax-Yarmouth.)

More than 700 souls went on Twitter this week to cast their votes, and St. Louis picked up a whopping 64 percent of the vote, easily outdistancing second-place Halifax-Yarmouth. (Yes, that Halifax-Yarmouth.)

The St. Louis entry didn't pull any punches in staking a claim for the title, offering this Twitter entry when the contest began:

While the blurbs touting the candidates were quite succinct, our description managed to mention that we are known as "The Rome of the West" and that "lots of cool Catholics live here."

In the two previous polls, Portland, Ore., and Denver have been the winners.

Tighe operates a blog called "The Catholic Hipster" and populates Twitter as @theghissilent. He also wrote the "Catholic Hipster's Handbook," which is subtitled: "Rediscovering Cool Saints, Forgotten Prayers, and Other Weird But Sacred Stuff."
A stand-up comedian from Belarus  and a University of Missouri-St. Louis graduate  dropped some shocking material on the audience of a Russian talent search show.

According to a story in the "UMSL Daily," Pasha Zalutski hushed his crowd when during a routine about getting stopped at subway security checkpoints, he threw out the line:

"You gotta carry yourself right. Especially when youre gay. Which I am."

Palutski made his comments on "Otkryti Mikrofon," a show on Russian television similar to "Last Comic Standing."

Steve Walentik, a marketing specialist at UMSL wrote in the story: "There was momentary silence, and the camera panned to (a judge), whose jaw had dropped. She let out a low groan and began clapping her hands together slowly."

While the routine would raise few eyebrows on U.S. television, Russia in 2013 passed laws making it illegal to promote gay lifestyles.

Zalutski, 35, graduated from UMSL in 2003 with a degree in communications. Then he lived in Los Angeles, Houston and New York before returning to Russia in 2013.
Back in 1964, the always modest Jerry Lee Lewis titled an album recorded in front of 10,000 screaming fans in Alabama The Greatest Live Show on Earth.

Saturday, Jason D. Williams will do his level best to match The Killers classic show at the Zoo Bar -- and hes likely to pull it off.

A pumpin piano wildman, Williams channels -- and covers -- Jerry Lee along with the great country boogie-woogie pianist Moon Mullican and blues pianist Memphis Slim, delivering country, blues, boogie-woogie and, above all, rock n roll.

And hes not at all ashamed at being tagged the second coming of Lewis, or a throwback to when pianos ruled rock n roll -- Ive always welcomed the comparisons, my influences were some of the greatest entertainers ever to be seen, he says on his website.

Williams cut his rock n roll teeth playing with (literal) rockabilly giant Sleepy LaBeef before moving to Memphis and going solo in the '80s. He cut an album for major label RCA, made some discs for the revived Sun Records -- where Jerry Lee recorded in the 50s -- and has been consistently recording and touring for the last couple of decades.

His most recent album, 2014s Hillbillies and Holy Rollers, finds him putting his stamp on the likes of Joe Elys Fingernails (I keep my fingernails long so they click when I play the piano), the boogie-woogie classic House of Blue Lights and You Win Again, which sounds far different than the version Jerry Lee did in the 70s.

Williams has never disappointed live. And you wont come closer to real rock n roll than at the Zoo on Saturday.

Tickets for Williams 6 p.m. show are $17 in advance, $22 day of show. Advance tickets are available at zoobar.com.

Paul McCartney to play Omaha

Paul McCartney is returning to Nebraska almost three years to the date that he delivered a three-hour, never-took-a-drink performance at Pinnacle Bank Arena.

This time, McCartney is playing Omahas CenturyLink Center Sunday night on his One on One Tour that has run, off and on, for over a year and taken the indefatigable Beatle to Europe, Japan and around the U.S.

McCartney, who turned 75 last month, appears to still be playing shows that run about three hours -- setlists for his recent American shows list 38 to 40 songs a night. And, like at his Pinnacle show, those sets include Beatles songs and solo material, including Wings tunes.

A midweek check at Ticketmaster found tickets still available for Sundays show. Theyre not cheap -- the lowest price offered was $165 plus fees.

It would be interesting to know how many Lincolnites make the trip to catch Sir Paul in Omaha. Im guessing that most of the 12,000 plus who packed PBA got their McCartney fix in 2014 and wont be taking in the Omaha show.

A quick aside -- Sundays concert is another confirmation of the notion that artists will play both Lincoln and Omaha arenas, sometimes within a few months as will be the case when Tim McGraw and Faith Hill play the CenturyLink Center in September after having played PBA in May, and sometimes on new tours a year or two apart, a la McCartney.

McCartneys show comes early in a big run of CenturyLink Center concerts. Friday, Nickelback will perform at the Omaha arena. Lady Antebellum is set for an Aug. 4 show there and Shawn Mendes will play the next night. Green Day is slated for an Aug. 12 show, Coldplay on Aug. 14 and Lady Gaga on Aug. 19.
Growing up in the Southwest, a tortilla was a thin flatbread used to wrap around grilled meat and make tacos. I was in my 30s before I visited Barcelona, Spain, and was served a Spanish tortilla  a completely different dish  and I fell in love instantly.

A Spanish tortilla is something like an incredibly tasty frittata made from sliced potatoes, vegetables and usually a flavorful cured meat, like Spanish chorizo or sausage. The tortilla is served hot or cold, cut into wedges  small pieces for an appetizer, or larger ones for a main dish. Its perfect at room temperature for picnics, warm for a lazy Sunday supper, or chilled in the fridge, for an easy-to-graze protein-filled snack.

I was surprised to discover how many calories were packed into one serving of this Spanish favorite. I decided to give it a little makeover by making three changes. First, given the current trendiness of trading out potatoes for cauliflower, I couldnt help but wonder if this swap would hold up for my beloved Spanish tortilla.

The answer is yes. The trick is to cut the cauliflower head into thin planks (chunky florets that fall away can be used for another recipe). Steam the planks in a covered shallow saute pan with a little bit of water just for a few minutes to tenderize, and the cauliflower planks can be layered into the tortilla just as you would use cooked potato slices.

The second change was in the egg batter itself: I used reduced fat milk instead of the full fat version (or cream, depending on the recipe), and removed yolks from half the eggs, leaving the tortilla decidedly yellow enough and eggy, not egg whitey.

Lastly, I used reduced-fat soy chorizo, which gives a ton of flavor for a fraction of the fat and calories of the regular version. (Its fresh chorizo, which is Mexican, not Spanish, but it works beautifully.) Surprisingly, you can buy this at many regular grocery stores, but if not, substitute reduced fat Italian sausage for a nice, if different, flavor.

The combination of shredded zucchini and onion, cooked until tender and sweet, made the body of the tortilla both tasty and nutritious. The result is an inexpensive, quick dish loaded with protein and veggies.
ST. LOUIS  A home health care worker from St. Louis County was sentenced Wednesday to nearly four years in prison for defrauding elderly people in the area, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

DeJanay Noldon, 27, worked as a certified nurse's assistant caregiver at a Webster Groves company that provides home health care for the elderly, prosecutors said. She used a nursing home resident's personal information to open lines of credit that she used to pay her own bills, make purchases in stores and online and pay bills for relatives and friends, prosecutors said.

She also tried to loot the resident's savings, they said.

In all, Noldon victimized 13 elderly people and six financial institutions, creating a loss of roughly $30,000, prosecutors said.

Noldon pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in March to one count each of mail fraud and identity theft. She was sentenced Wednesday to 45 months in prison.

A mug shot of Noldon was not immediately available.
WASHINGTON  Sen. Claire McCaskill said Wednesday that she would be willing to put the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act on the negotiating table in a bipartisan attempt to fix the legislation.

Her declaration, which also came with regrets that the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 with only Democratic votes, highlighted another day of hyperactive rhetoric and legislative inaction on one of the central 2016 campaign promises of President Donald Trump and Republicans in control of the House and Senate.

The president again met Wednesday with Republican senators, including Roy Blunt of Missouri, and urged them to come up with a repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act before their August recess. Democrats repeated a call for a more collaborative and open process to fix, not rescind, the controversial law.

Under mounting evidence that Republicans lack the votes necessary to repeal and replace or perhaps even repeal without a specific replacement, Blunt urged the Senate to go to regular order  including hearings and bipartisan debate  to fix the troubled law.

McCaskill, D-Mo., said she was uncertain how many of the 47 other Democrats and independents in the Senate agreed with her on potentially replacing the individual mandate with an automatic enrollment in health care that would allow for an opt-out.

But she said she was willing to put the mandate  a central tenet of the Affordable Care Act and a non-negotiable cornerstone of the law to many Democrats  on the table for negotiations that could include discussions about ways to shore up the individual marketplaces that are shrinking or collapsing in some states.

McCaskill said she believed replacing the mandate with an opt-out philosophy could increase participation among younger people, helping to shore up the markets.

I think there are people who are deciding to not get insurance (and paying fines) that might not realize how inexpensive it can be for them because of the subsidies they are entitled to, she said, referring to the law in place now.

That is one of the things I think we should look at, McCaskill said. We should have hearings. We need to look at all these ideas, and ask questions about them, and hear from health care experts. All of us are hearing from health care experts, but we are hearing them one on one and the American public is not hearing it.

Blunt told reporters that the Senate needed to have a vote to see where it stood on the latest Republican idea  and then move to regular order in the Senate if that vote fails, as expected.

After Republican senators had lunch Wednesday with Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate would take up next week a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and give itself two years to replace it. McConnell also stressed that bill would be open to all amendments.

It is pretty obvious we have had difficulty in getting 50 votes to proceed, McConnell said.

At the lunch, Trump sat next to Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., a not-so-subtle reminder of one of the many story lines coursing underneath the health care debate.

A dark-money Super PAC affiliated with Trump ran attack ads last month against Heller for holding out on full support of GOP repeal and replacement. Heller is considered one of the most vulnerable Senate Republicans up for re-election next year in a state that has been trending Democratic.

Those attack ads angered some Republicans in Congress, who saw it as undermining the GOPs attempt to hold onto the Senate in 2018. Trump upped the ante Wednesday as he patted Heller on the arm and said the Nevadan wants to remain a senator, doesnt he? Heller laughed, uncomfortably.

That unusual scene of political theater was just one element of a web of circumstances and choices that have dogged the GOP efforts to follow through on seven years of campaign promises to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

Beyond Congressional Budget Office scores that show millions could lose insurance on the various versions of the Senate bill that have surfaced so far, there are other factors that have created this impasse:

 From its inception, the Affordable Care Act has been a law with a Capitol D  meaning only Democrats voted for it in 2010. Although Republicans were able to amend parts of the act before passage, it has always been a highly partisan piece of legislation.

Republicans have approached its repeal and replacement similarly. The House passed its repeal and replacement without a single Democratic vote, and Republicans have proceeded under a 50-vote strategy in the Senate.

McCaskill said Wednesday that had all been a mistake, including its original passage with just Democratic votes.

Because it needed bipartisanship for the country, she said. It is very hard to do reforms in a system that is as complicated as health care if you begin it by pointing fingers based on a political party. And that is what has happened.

 Trumps slumping job-approval ratings  37 percent in the latest Gallup Poll  do nothing to dissuade Democrats, who have opposed every GOP initiative, or Republicans, who are trying to fulfill campaign promises. But Trump seems undeterred and in opportune moments, as he did with Heller, he has used the bully pulpit to publicly cajole fellow Republicans in ways rarely seen before.

 McConnell appointed 13 men to write the blueprint of the Senates version of health care reform. Some of the efforts biggest GOP critics have been women, such as Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who are worried about cuts to Medicaid, the bills impact on rural citizens, and the effect on efforts to respond to the opioid abuse crisis. The choice of 13 men to come up with the initial draft not only created a bad image for Republicans as they tried to sell their plan to the whole public, it created discord inside the GOP caucus about how the bill was being written.

It was a mistake for Mitch McConnell to not use (GOP womens) talents in this effort, and I think the fact that he tried to pick this group of 13 men to do this probably was the beginning of the grumbling that we are now hearing from inside his caucus about how this whole thing has developed over time, McCaskill said.

 The 2018 election is coming into view. McCaskill is among 10 Democratic senators facing re-election in states Trump won last year, and so she and they are likely to put more on the table in bipartisan negotiations, if they ever happen.

By contrast, only a handful of Republicans  chief among them Heller and Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona  are thought to face difficult battles to re-election in 2018.

 Finally, there is what might be called the lightning struck effect. Republicans have passed repeal and replace laws in the past, always with the knowledge they would be vetoed by President Barack Obama, a Democrat. Now, they have a president who is willing to sign what they pass, but they have no coherent bill around which to rally.

I didnt expect Donald Trump to win, Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said at a town hall in Harrisburg, Pa., last week. I think most of my colleagues didnt. So we didnt expect to be in this situation.
More Nebraska students have applied for federal aid to attend college in the upcoming academic year following a rule change which extended the submission period.

Under the old process, families could begin the Free Application for Financial Student Aid -- better known as FAFSA -- in January using their prior years tax return.

In 2015, the Obama administration changed the process for the 2017-18 school year, opening the application process in October and allowing families to use their most recently completed tax return to apply for federal aid, known as prior-prior year tax information.

The change resulted in a 6 percent increase nationally in FAFSA filings as of June 30, according to the U.S. Department of Education, reversing a four-year decline in the number of completed applications.

An increasing number of Nebraska families are among the 14 million U.S. students taking advantage of the rule change, according to data from the Education Department.

In a report published by the National College Access Network examining the number of FAFSA filings submitted for the 2017-18 school year, 15,033 Nebraska students had submitted an application as of June 30, marking an 11 percent increase over the previous year.

More than 14,000 of those applications have been completed as of June 30, the Education Department said, a 12 percent jump from the previous years figure.

Les Monroe, director of college planning at EducationQuest, said extending the application period allows families to be better consumers of higher education by receiving more information about the cost of attending college.

EducationQuest, a nonprofit with a mission to improve access to higher education in Nebraska, began meeting with students last fall to discuss applying for college and filling out the FAFSA with tax information sitting on the dresser, Monroe said, rather than waiting until January to make its annual tour of Southeast Nebraska high schools.

Under the old timeline, many families wouldnt start filling out the FAFSA until March or April after sending their tax return to the IRS, potentially leaving students with only a month or two to finish the application and wait for a financial aid letter from a prospective college.

The new rules give students an additional 5 or 6 months to apply for federal aid and shop around for the right financial aid package by sending their FAFSA information to more institutions.

With more time to make a decision, I wouldnt be surprised if students are putting more colleges down so they can do more research and make more informed decisions and good, solid college choices, Monroe said.

On average, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln processes some 19,000 FAFSA forms each year, according to Justin Chase Brown, the director of scholarships and financial aid, including 6,000 from first-year students.

Not all of those students who send their financial information to UNL will choose to attend school in Lincoln, Brown cautioned, but the university has surpassed the number of FAFSA filings it normally processes.

At this point, we have exceeded that average amount, but it could be that our applicants this year are frontloaded within the application year and are simply applying earlier, which is what we wanted, he said in an email.

State colleges are also reporting receiving more federal financial aid applications.

* Wayne State College has processed nearly 2,986 FAFSAs this year compared to 2,336 last year.

* Chadron State College reports 1,426 federal financial aid applications this year compared to 1,159 last year.

* Federal financial aid applications to Peru State Colleges are up from 1,076 for 2016-17 to 1,382 this year.

Nebraska Wesleyan University, a private liberal arts institution, has processed 9 percent more FAFSA forms this year over last, including a 19 percent jump in applications completed by first-year students.

Tom Oschner, NWU director of scholarships and financial aid, attributed the increase to the change in the application process and requirements.

Its giving students a lot more time to weigh their options and figure out whats best for them academically, socially and financially over a less compressed timeframe, Oschner said.
To mark the current heat wave, we call your attention to two recent articles in major publications that paint disturbing  in one case, apocalyptic  pictures of changes that could be wrought by global warming by the end of this century. Things could be worse, and will be.

Yes, there were heat waves before climate change became an issue, and yes, weather is not climate. And yes, its hard to believe something thats happening so slowly and will cost us money. Very few of us will be around by centurys end and have other more urgent problems.

And yet when we read in the journal Science that theres a 90 percent chance that By the late 21st century, the poorest third of counties are projected to experience damages between 2 and 20 percent of county income under business-as-usual emissions, it does get your attention.

A team of scholars analyzed climate and economic data from every American county and modeled them by various estimates of how much hotter the climate will be by 2100. We are really sure the South is going to get hammered, Solomon Hsiang of the University of California told The Atlantic. The South is really, really negatively affected by climate change, much more so than the North.

On their map, Missouri is part of the southern tier of states where climate change will reduce harvests and productivity and increase energy costs. It will impose the equivalent of a 20 percent tax on incomes.

Yet the article in Science is practically Pollyannish when compared with 7,000 words in the July 9 edition of New York Magazine by journalist David Wallace-Wells. Because the internet loves scary stuff, it quickly went viral. One critic called it extinction porn.

What Wallace-Wells did was interview climate experts and ask: How bad could it get? What if instead of the 4-degree Celsius (7.2-degree Fahrenheit) rise in average global temperatures that the current trajectory predicts, its twice that much? What is the worst-case scenario?

It is, I promise you, worse than you think, is his answer. He goes on to say, No matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. ... Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

Bad things could cascade, turning into cataclysmic things. Mosquitoes and malaria would affect 5 billion people. Drought and water wars would become the norm. The permafrost could melt, emitting megatons of trapped methane along with germs and viruses frozen for centuries. It gets worse.

Or, the world could wake up and find a technological solution. This makes a few days of 102-degree heat seem not quite so bad.
A day after the Supreme Court (SC) pointedly inquired about Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's money trail, the premier's counsel reiterated that his client had presented details of all his assets to the joint investigation team (JIT) that was mandated to probe allegations of money laundering against the Sharif family.

Senior counsel Khawaja Harris on Wednesday told the three-member apex bench, headed by Justice Ejaz Afzal and comprising Justice Sheikh Azmat Saeed and Justice Ijazul Ahsan, that the prime minister had provided details of all assets and sources of income in the form of tax returns.

We will take a decision after looking at all the evidence, Justice Ejaz Afzal told Harris as he completed his arguments before the bench. Bring the [money trail] record and the discussion on the documents will end.

Ishaq Dars lawyer begins arguments

Have you also brought a Qatari letter with you? Justice Azmat Saeed asked Finance Minister Ishaq Dar's lawyer as he began his arguments before the bench.

The lawyer's defence bore similarities to the arguments presented by Harris, as he told the court that the JIT had exceeded its mandate. An objection to the JITs report was included in the documents submitted to the apex court on Dars behalf on Monday.

If you have a lot of objections, you should go to the trial court, Justice Azmat Saeed remarked.

Sharif family's foreign properties

During his arguments on Wednesday morning, Harris said that according to the laws of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), "an individual cannot be held accountable for the properties and assets that are in the name of his wife and children." He added that the PM's relatives had also not concealed any assets.

In reference to the judges' observation that the PM had remained evasive in answering the questions put forward by the JIT, Harris responded that the team had not inquired about any other properties, maintaining that his client had not concealed any assets, nor did he own any benami properties.

The real question is where did the money for [the Sharif familys] properties in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and London come from?Justice Ijazul Ahsan remarked. We have not yet received an answer to this fundamental question.

The judges told the lawyer that Chapter Four (Gulf Steel Mills/Gifts) of the JITs report contains dangerous documents and talks about the trust deed of the four Avenfield flats in Londons Park Lane neighbourhood, executed between Maryam Nawaz and Hussain Nawaz in February 2006, which was declared false by the JIT in its report over.

Harris told the bench that the PM, when asked about the trust deed by the JIT, had acknowledged that he was aware of the settlement, but did not know the details. He added that his client can only be held accountable for the properties under his name, maintaining that the PM has no connection to the London flats.

Are there any records available with Hassan and Hussain Nawaz that can prove that the PM does not have any connection with the London flats? asked Justice Ejaz Afzal.

If Hussain is the beneficial owner of the flats, then proof for the same should be provided, he remarked, noting that in the documents received by the court, Maryam Nawaz is shown as the beneficial owner.

The connection between the PM and the London flats is based on speculation. There are no documents available to prove this, the lawyer said.

Why do you keep insisting that all the records are available? Justice Ijazul Ahsan asked the lawyer, directing him to show the documents relating to the agreement signed with Minerva Financial Services Limited  the holding company for Nescoll Limited and Nielson Enterprises Limited, the owners of the four London flats  to ascertain who signed them.

"Where is the money trail?"

During Tuesday's hearing, the apex bench had asked about the PM's money trail, saying, "We've been waiting for it since day one." The prime minister and his family members had remained evasive in answering the questions put forward by the JIT, added the judges.

The bench had reminded the PM's lawyer that the onus of establishing a money trail after claiming ownership of the Avenfield flats was on the Sharif family, adding that the money trail of the flats "remained shrouded in mystery  even to this day."

The apex bench had also asked the counsel point-blank whether the judges should form their own opinion over the concealment of facts by his client or refer the matter to an accountability court.

Harris had argued that the JIT had exceeded its mandate by recommending the SC to reopen 15 cases against his client. He also questioned the authenticity of the documents obtained from the UK and the UAE that were included in the JIT's report.

The bench had resumed the Panamagate case on Monday, nearly three months after ordering the formation of a JIT to investigate the allegations of money laundering against the Sharif family.

Presenting his statement before the bench on Monday, Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf's (PTI) lead counsel Naeem Bokhari had requested that PM Nawaz Sharif should be asked to come to the court for questioning. During his arguments, Bokhari highlighted several findings of the JIT report that he said "incriminate" the Sharif family.
State Minister for Information Technology Anusha Rehman on Wednesday said there are severe allegations against Chairman of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) Wajid Zia that he has privately hired his cousins law firm in Britain to probe Panama Papers case.

Speaking to journalists outside the Supreme Court, the minister claimed that the law firm approached by the JIT is defunct. That company has not done anything in the past one year.

The question is that who will give clarification regarding these allegations. JIT chairman must come forawrd and give reply now, she added.

She further mentioned that 49,000 pounds have been allegedly paid to a private company on the basis of mutual assistance. A clarification is also needed on this.

Anusha Rahman asked: Will another JIT be formed to probe these allegations against the Panama JIT.

She further remarked that Muhammad Nawaz Sharif will remain the Prime Minister of Pakistan even after 2018 and 2023 general elections.
The justifications and the contradictions in statements have become characteristic of Qatars statements. Qatar admitted that it was compelled to join the Arab Coalition to restore legitimacy in Yemen, in a clear and implicit admission that it was from the very beginning, against the legitimacy coalition in Yemen.

These remarks were made by the Qatari Minister of State for Defense Affairs, Khalid bin Mohammed al-Attiyah in an interview with Turkey's TRT World.

The details were published by the official Qatar News Agency. Al-Attiyah also pointed out that the Qatari forces did not participate in the operations inside Yemen, and that it was only confined to the Saudi-Yemeni border.

This statement reinforces the announcement made by the leadership of the Coalition of the Legitimacy in Yemen, which decided to end Qatars alliance due to its practices that promote terrorism and support its organizations in Yemen as well as its connections and dealings with the Houthi militias in Yemen.

Why didnt Qatar show a stronger initiative in Yemen? Its limited involvement with almost 1,000 individuals on the Saudi border was symbolic and not serious in eliminating its terrorist allies inside Yemen.

This proves conclusively that it was financing and supporting them publicly and secretly through its charitable associations and its internationally-wanted mediators.

The Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, became aware of the quirks of Doha immediately after the antiterrorism countries boycotted Qatar.

The coalition ended the participation of Qatar in hope that it will put an end its illegal actions.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Supreme Court says the Trump administration can strictly enforce its ban on refugees, but is leaving in place a weakened travel ban that includes grandparents among relatives who can help visitors from six mostly Muslim countries get into the U.S.

The justices acted Wednesday on the administration's appeal of a federal judge's ruling last week. U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson ordered the government to allow in refugees formally working with a resettlement agency in the United States. Watson also vastly expanded the family relations that refugees and visitors can use to get into the country.

The high court blocked Watson's order as it applies to refugees for now, but not the expanded list of relatives. The justices said the federal appeals court in San Francisco should now consider the appeal. It's not clear how quickly that will happen.

In the meantime, though, up to 24,000 refugees who already have been assigned to a charity or religious organization in the U.S. will not be able to use that connection to get into the country.

"This ruling jeopardizes the safety of thousands of people across the world including vulnerable families fleeing war and violence," said Naureen Shah, Amnesty International USA's senior director of campaigns.

That part of the court's ruling was a victory for President Donald Trump, who rolled out a first ban on travelers and refugees after just a week in office, prompting a legal fight that has raged ever since.

But the Supreme Court also denied the administration's request to clarify its ruling last month that allowed the administration to partially reinstate a 90-day ban on visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and a 120-day ban on refugees from anywhere in the world.

The court's ruling exempted a large swath of refugees and travelers with a "bona fide relationship" with a person or an entity in the U.S. The justices did not define those relationships but said they could include a close relative, a job offer or admission to a college or university.

Watson's order added grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins to a list that already included a parent, spouse, fiance, son, daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law or sibling in the U.S. The expanded list of relatives remains in effect, and the State Department already has instructed diplomats to use the broader list when considering visa applicants from the six countries.

Hawaii Attorney General Doug Chin said the court's order Wednesday "confirms we were right to say that the Trump administration over-reached in trying to unilaterally keep families apart from each other."

Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas would have blocked Watson's order in its entirety. Those same three justices said last month they would have allowed the Trump travel ban to take full effect.

The travel ban already is on the court's calendar for October, though the 90-day pause will have expired by then.
Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Chris Finlayson has hit back at Tauranga Moana iwi over their protests against the Hauraki Collective settlement.

A spokesperson for the minister says as far back as 2004, the Waitangi Tribunal confirmed Hauraki iwi have customary interests in Tauranga Moana, particularly in the Katikati-Te Puna area.

Several weeks ago the government was accused of entering into a secret deal with iwi of Hauraki, says the spokesperson.

That is wrong. There is no secret deal. Ngai Te Rangi has been advised of this fact repeatedly.

An overlapping claims process between iwi of Hauraki and Tauranga Moana iwi (including Ngai Te Rangi) has been ongoing since 2012. The parties have agreed a range of matters including recognising the interests of Hauraki iwi in the Tauranga Moana Framework by adding a fifth iwi seat to the Tauranga Moana Governance Group.

Proposed arrangements for the Tauranga Moana Governance Group (part of the Tauranga Moana Framework) provide for four seats for Tauranga Moana iwi, one seat for iwi of Hauraki (and any other iwi with recognised interests in the Tauranga Moana catchment) and five seats for local government.

No date has been confirmed for the signing of a deed of redress with Pare Hauraki as negotiations are ongoing. The intention is to sign the Pare Hauraki Collective Redress Deed when negotiations are closed.

On Sunday, local iwi protested the Crowns negotiations with the Hauraki Collective by marching across the Wairoa Bridge  an act that resulted in the bridge being closed for a short period of time.

Tauranga MP and Transport Minister Simon Bridges says people have a democratic right to protest peacefully.

Its clearly something local iwi feel strongly about. In regard to it being on a state highway, it was good that the protest was on a weekend so less working traffic was disrupted, but the closing of such roads should be used very sparingly."

NZTA provided traffic management for the protest, while the decision to close the highway completely was made by police.
Calle San Miguel in Torremolinos is one of the best-known streets on the Costa del Sol, and it has become the focal point of the town, especially for those visiting for the first time.

Formerly open to traffic, it was pedestrianised in 1971 and has since become a popular shopping destination for the thousands of tourists who visit Torremolinos every year.

It has long been famed for cheap cigarettes, jewellery, leather goods and souvenirs and, although the shops have changed with the times, it is still a street of much commercial activity.

During the 1960s and 70s, Torremolinos became extremely chic and Calle San Miguel acquired the ambience of Carnaby Street. This was a period when certain fashions were only available in either London, or the trendy boutiques found in Calle San Miguel and its surrounding passageways.

Calle San Miguel in the 70s / SUR

However, Calle San Miguel has not always been the thriving centre of commercial activity, for it was once a narrow residential street whose ramshackle houses and hidden patios were destroyed for the tourist invasion of the late 1950s.

The tower

The Torre de los Molinos (Pimentel Tower), which still commands the end of Calle San Miguel, was the site of the first stable settlement in the town. The San Miguel church, which has recently been completely refurbished, sits at the bottom of the street, next to the tower. The original chapel was erected in 1718, although the present church was built on the same site in 1896.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Plaza San Miguel was the main artistic centre of Torremolinos and several noted painters had their studios in the square. Pablo Picassos aunt, who was born in Torremolinos in 1863, lived in a small dwelling that sat on the corner of Calle Casa Blanca and Calle San Miguel.

At this time, Calle San Miguel was a winding cobbled street that was lined with the typical whitewashed houses with red tiled roofs, and this was pretty much how it stayed until the 1950s.

The first tourists

The arrival of the 1950s brought the first tourists and this is when things began to change, although not at the hands of developers, but under the intuition of the residents.

Some of the locals turned their one-room homes into shops selling candy, cigarettes and chewing gum and this was the beginning of the bustling commercial scene the street is famous for today.

Calle San Miguel in the 30s or 40s. / SUR

Towards the end of the 1950s, the street had changed considerably, although it still had a time-worn ambience. The 1960s was to be the decade in which Calle San Miguel changed the most and the arrival of the film stars, artists, beatniks and hippies pinned the street firmly on the map.

The small alleyways that lead off Calle San Miguel are now filled with boutiques and shops selling anything from fine porcelain and replica pistols to flamenco dresses.

In the 1960s and 70s, these passageways were crammed with drinking bars and bustling with tourists and expat residents who partied until sunrise.

Bohemian attitudes

The legendary Dutch pianist Pia Beck owned the famous Blue Note Bar, which was situated in the Pasaje Begona (now Pasaje Gil Vicente).

This popular basement clubs centrepiece was a grand piano, on which Pia would entertain her clients. She also had a resident quartet made up of musicians she brought over from Holland; although the line-up would change constantly, for it is said that Pia rarely paid her musicians.

Other popular drinking haunts were El Refugio, Whisky a go-go, Bossanova, Au rendez-vous, Serafino and The Duke of Wellington. Most of these venues were frequented by the ever-increasing expatriate population of Torremolinos, many of whom shocked the locals with their bohemian attitudes, and the fact that they had no desire, or necessity, to work.

It was during this time that the permissive attitudes and lifestyles of Torremolinos began to make headlines. Spain was still under an extremely devout Catholic dictatorship and the provincial and local authorities had come under increasing pressure to do something about the situation.

Torremolinos was branded a scandalous place where drugs and homosexuality were commonplace, a town where foreigners from around the world came in search of free love and debauchery.

In June 1971, the police tried to the end the intemperance, but although the clampdown was harsh, it did little to stop the nightly carousing that took place in the maze of tiny passageways that lead from Calle San Miguel. The night clubs and bars are now distant memories and the bohemian revellers and expats have moved on, although some who remember the street during its heydays still reminisce with great affection.

Of course, Calle San Miguel did not just cater for the uproarious foreign element. There are several old Spanish establishments in the street, like El Toro and Quitapenas, which are still offering their wares to tourists and locals today.

One of the most famous during the 1960s through to the 80s, Quitapenas is a typical Andalusian tavern that was originally situated close to the tobacconist. Quitapenas - the name is derived from the fact that it took away the sorrows of the muleteers thanks to its popular Malaga wines - moved to its new home at the bottom of Calle San Miguel in the 1980s.

The tobacco shop is still in its original position, although the tiny whitewashed building that once housed it was destroyed during renovation work in the 1970s.

There was once a lumber yard on the opposite side, where the train line used to cross the street. A few metres along from where the old lumber yard was once located is Bodega Guerola, which clings to the corner of Calle de las Mercedes. This is another nostalgic old tavern, founded in 1962, that is still open today. The interior is delightfully decorated with wrought iron grills, rustic ornamentation and plenty of wood, much the same as it was in the 60s.

Calle San Miguel has continued to change over the years and any signs of the streets rowdy nightlife have long since been erased, although a few of the old restaurants and bars give a hint of what the street was once like. Today the street is lined with commercial outlets selling the same tacky souvenirs and flamenco dresses, yet it is still the most famous, and most visited, street on the Costa del Sol.

San Miguel will continue attracting tourists for many years to come, although the postcard image is the one we remember with fondness.
Tarifa, in the province of Cadiz, is the southernmost town of the European continent. It is located at the narrowest point of the Strait of Gibraltar, at the southern tip of the Costa de la Luz. Europe and Africa do not come so close together anywhere else. Morocco is only 14 kilometres away and can be

Africa, close enough to touch. / M. Worner.

reached by ferry several times a day from Tarifa. To this day, Tarifa is one of the most important links between Europe and Africa. On clear days, the Mirador El Estrecho, a car park with a kiosk located on the N-340 between Algeciras and Tarifa, offers spectacular views of the African coast and the Rif mountains.

Historical background

According to archaeological finds in the area, we know that Tarifa was founded by the Phoenicians at the beginning of the first millennium BC. The city was settled by the Romans from the 1st century BC, and was then called Tingentera. In 710, it was conquered under the leadership of the Berber Tarifa Ibn Malik, to which its name is probably due. The castle was built by its Moorish rulers around 960. It is interesting to note that the word tariff was derived from Tarifa, as the town on the waterway raised tariffs from the passing ships. It was not until 1292 that Tarifa was taken from the Moors by the Catholic King Sancho IV of Castile and Leon; battles were fought over it until 1344.

A surfer's paradise

Tarifa is an internationally known and popular mecca for wind and kite surfers, similar to Hawaii or the Canary Islands. In the evenings, the suntanned watersports enthusiasts meet in the pubs and tapas bars, and later on they move on to the beach clubs. Diving is also a popular sport in Tarifa and the rocks of San Bartolo attract many climbers.

Tarifa is interesting not only for athletes, but also because of its location and surroundings. With its maze of narrow streets and romantic squares, the Moorish-influenced town is already an attraction in itself. Tarifas old town was declared a protected cultural space in 2003, as large parts of the original structure and medieval walls are preserved. The town is dotted with historical sites. Coming from the N-340, head straight to the only entrance to the old town - the Puerta de Jerez. The Mudejar-style gate is marked with the date of the re-conquest of the city: 21 September, 1292.

The well-preserved castle Castillo de Guzman, built by the Moors, has survived several battles. A visit is worthwhile if only for the views of the harbour, the sea and the old town. The castle also has a church, the Iglesia de Santa Maria which dates from the 14th century. The lighthouse of Tarifa and Santa Catalina Castle are located on the small island of Isla de las Palomas, which is accessible by road.

Breathtaking sunsets, extensive sandy beaches and dunes are the essence of the Spanish Atlantic coast. One of the several beaches in Tarifa, known as Playa Chica, stretches in front of the Isla de las Palomas, right along the western part of the old town. To the north, you can find the Playa de los Lances, and when you follow the N-340 westwards, you will find the beautiful beaches of Torre de la Pena, Valdevaqueros and Bolonia.

Dolphina and whales

The Strait of Gibraltar, where the waters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic meet, has developed a unique eco-system. Up to seven different species of marine mammal can be found here which is why a trip on board of one of the whale watching companies boats is highly recommended. You can observe dolphins, pilot whales, fin whales and sperm whales, and also tuna fish and turtles.

Plaza La Paz in the old part of Tarifa. / M. W

From July to the beginning of September you may even be lucky enough to come across killer whales, which enter the Strait of Gibraltar in search of tuna. The fascinating environment of the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean and the Atlantic flow together and two continents meet, makes such a trip a special experience.

Bolonia and Baelo Claudia

About 17 kilometres northwest of Tarifa lies the charming village of Bolonia, located in the bay of the same name. The bay of Bolonia has an almost four kilometre long, fairly broad and sandy beach and is also known for its 30-metre-high and 200-metre-wide sand dune, which is located at the farthest end of the beach. The outstanding scenery offers a great environment for walking along the beach.

Since 2001, the Bolonia dune has been a protected natural monument because of its ecological importance. Due to the strong wind of the Levant, however, the dune continues to migrate into the interior of the country, displacing the pine trees growing there.

On your way towards the dune and already on the outskirts of the village, you will come across on your right hand side the ruins of the Roman town of Baelo Claudia - one of the best-preserved Roman settlements in Spain. It has been excavated with the help of the European Union. Since 1917 excavations have been carried out here. The visitors centre will give you detailed information about the finds from the site. The settlement was founded in the 2nd century BC and the Romans built up a large industry to process all the fish they caught, mostly tuna, and developed the famous garum sauce which recently has been recreated by some gourmet restaurants. The whole Roman Empire was supplied with fish products that came from Baelo Claudia.

In addition to the remains of the garum factory on the beach, you can also visit the well preserved Roman theatre, one of the original three aqueducts and the basilica, which houses a statue of Emperor Trajan. Dont miss the thermal baths with their sophisticated heating system and the temple of Isis.

Historians are of the opinion that the greater part of Baelo Claudia is still hiding under the surface of the large hill which rises from the back of the site.

After numerous earthquakes in the region at the end of the second century, the Romans left the city. It was taken by the Moors in 711 when they started to conquer the Iberian Peninsula.
The Malaga provincial court has sentenced the ex-mayor of Casares, Juan Sanchez, to eight and a half years in prison for several criminal offences all related to corrupt practice while he was at the helm of the town hall. Sanchez, who was also president of the Western Costa del Sols Mancomunidad de Municipios, has been found guilty of embezzlement, contracting fraud, corrupt practice, accepting bribes and money-laundering.

Juan Sanchez A cornerstone of the far-left coalition for three decades Juan Sanchez was one of the provinces most important members of the Communist Party which he joined when he was 18. He then represented the left-wing coalition Izquierda Unida after it was founded and was elected mayor of Casares in the first elections after the Transition to democracy at the age of 24. He occupied the post almost uninterruptedly for three decades, only being beaten by the GIL group in 1995. After regaining his office in 2000 he was mayor for another decade until he resigned to devote his time exclusively to his role as president of the Mancomunidad, the authority to which eleven Costa del Sol towns belong. Soon after his arrest in 2012 Sanchez was suspended from his party.

The case, known as Caso Majestic during its investigation, has also resulted in prison sentences of eight years for business owner Frank Robert Mani, six months for Sanchezs wife Maria Luisa Calvente, and a fine for lawyer Rafael Duarte, who was an external advisor to Casares town hall at the time of the offences, before going on to head the caretaking committee at Marbella town hall after that council was dissolved in the Malaya case.

The court sentence concludes that over different periods from 1979 onwards - and more specifically between 2000 and 2006 - Sanchez and Mani made several corrupt deals. These led to the modification of the local urban planning regulations to the benefit of the companies that formed part of the Majestic group, owned by Mani, in exchange for financial rewards for Sanchez.

The sentence refers to three deals which caused losses of several hundred thousand euros to the town hall coffers as well as increasing the volume of construction allowed on land owned by Majestic or changing the status of other land where building was previously prohibited.

The court found that Robert Mani gave Sanchez several sums of money whose amounts have not been specified exactly but were never less than 286,200 euros, according to the sentence.

The funds received by the then mayor and his wife were laundered through investments in three companies which had no real business activity but were set up exclusively to be able to transfer the funds. The shares in the companies were obtained in such a way, said the sentence, that it was difficult to identify their true owner.

The then mayor also laundered part of the money received through the purchase of ten winning ONCE lottery tickets in October 2005. In this way he managed to put 165,000 euros into legal circulation.

Sanchez was arrested on 14 May 2012 and remanded in custody until he paid bail of 200,000 euros three days later.

The investigation linked the Majestic group with a criminal organisation from Eastern Europe known as Kremlyoskaya, which settled on the Costa del Sol at the beginning of this century. The two individuals identified as being the ringleaders of the organisation escaped before they could be arrested.
ABINGDON, Va.  Its not your average art class.

During the opening of Paint Your Own at Paper Moon Studio, several young mothers sat around an art table, painting canvases as they chatted and laughed.

I get to chitchat and have adult conversation. I am having fun, said Missy Kalb, who spent her morning finding her inner artist.

Lindsey Holderfield, owner of the Abingdon studio and indoor play space, introduced her Paint Your Own studio after tying for first place in the 2017 Washington County Business Challenge this spring. The $5,000 she received from the challenge made it possible for her to purchase art supplies and hire new part-time assistants to kick-start the program.

I want to offer programming that will work for both local people and visitors, said Holderfield, who designed the program for people to drop in and paint as a group, a family or an individual. This is a program that works for the entire family.

The business owner welcomes even bridal showers and birthday parties.

I like it because its a great way to meet other stay-at-home or work-from-home moms. Its a good no-pressure way to have a creative moment, said Amber Amburgey, who works at home as a freelance designer.

This is taking adult coloring to a whole new level, added Christine Webb of Abingdon, as she concentrated on filling in color between lines.

She chose to paint a pre-drawn design of a town.

I like to pretend that its Abingdon, and heres our little church, and theres the Barter Theatre, said Webb, as she rolled her paint brush in acrylic paints.

I love the idea you can come and paint a picture thats already drawn. Its not as intimidating as creating something from scratch, said Webb.

Participants take away far more than just the artwork.

Its such a fun way to spend time with people. Its really different than going to a movie or to dinner, said Holderfield. If youre creating something together, theres a lot of time for conversation and a good way to spend quality time with people.

Everyone is an artist at Paper Moon Studio. The best part is absolutely no experience with a paintbrush is necessary.

Visitors can enjoy the relaxed ambience as they unleash their creativity. The hardest thing to do may be choosing from a variety of paints to bring the canvas alive.

Studio artists are on hand to offer moral support and guidance for people who dont think of themselves as crafty or artsy and dont feel comfortable doing a painting on their own. We can help with color mixing and suggestions and take the decision-making stress away, Holderfield said. And we do all the clean up, too.

Participants choose to paint on canvases that have been pre-drawn by artists, a unique feature among many art studios.

I knew I didnt want to order supplies made in China and resell them. Drawing our own designs is a little more labor intensive, but I think its worth it, said the business owner.

Artists also can paint decorative wood items, including letters, frames, ornaments, birdhouses and pallet wood signs. Buying local is important to the studio owner, who purchases the pallet signs handmade in Meadowview from 100 percent reclaimed wood. The remaining wood craft items are ordered from Statesville, North Carolina.

What starts out as a colorless canvas board winds up something totally different.

All of our canvases were similar in terms of what we started with, but now theyre so different, said Amburgey, as she inspected her painting at a distance. Being able to choose the colors is a built-in personalization. You can make it your own.

There are dozens of designs from which to choose, including local landmarks like the Martha Washington Inn, Arts Depot, Barter Theatre, Virginia Creeper Trail and the Tavern Restaurant. Some designs are kid-friendly for younger artists.

What a nice add-on event for a young family who visits here to ride on the Virginia Creeper Trail, said Holderfield.

California resident Leslye Smith tried out the studio for the first time last week while visiting her mother in town. Smith, who grew up in Abingdon, loved the idea of painting Abingdon landmarks that are familiar to her.

Its really cool for local people who may want to paint something specific to their home, but also it offers opportunities for visitors to make a special souvenir from their trip to Southwest Virginia, said Holderfield.

The quick-drying projects are painted with acrylic paints and can be taken home the same day they are made.

I think Im going to hang my painting in the kids play room at home, said Kalb. It will inspire us when we do art at home.
EMORY, Va.  Prospective students can earn and save money in their search for the right college fit as part of the Virginia Private College Week from July 24-29, hosted by the Council of Independent Colleges in Virginia (CICV) and Emory & Henry College.

The E&H Admissions Office offers student-led campus tours and information sessions during the weeklong celebration of the 24 participating private colleges and universities in Virginia. The event allows students and families to learn more about the admissions process, academics, campus life and the power of a private, liberal arts college education.

Visiting campuses in person is one of the most important steps in the college search process, explains Robert Lambeth, president of CICV. I encourage parents to explore which college will be the best fit for their son or daughter, and I want to reassure them that a quality education at a Virginia private college is affordable and within reach.

High school students can earn scholarship money by visiting colleges, participating in college fairs, receiving good grades and other extracurricular activities through E&Hs partnership with Raise.me. Starting July 1, the summer of a students ninth-grade year, and ending on Dec. 1 of the students 12th-grade year, students enter accomplishments toward scholarship funds to Emory & Henry. Raise.Me is for first-year students entering college for the first time. A student can earn up to $1,500 over their high school career for E&H College visits, or $375 scholarship per visit annually.

In addition to earning Raise.me scholarship funds for E&H, students who visit at least three CICV institutions during the week receive three application fee waivers. Students may use these waivers to apply to other Virginia Private Colleges.

Virginia Private College Week provides prospective students an opportunity to visit many of the outstanding, private colleges in Virginia, said Mary Bolt, Interim Director of First-Year Admissions at Emory & Henry College.We are excited to welcome you and your families to our campus to experience first-hand the uniqueness of Emory & Henry.

Students may add E&H to their college list, and choose a session at 9 a.m. or 2 p.m. on Monday through Friday, or schedule a Saturday morning session at 9 a.m. Families can schedule their visit by filling out a personalized form at www.ehc.edu/pcw.

For more information about CICV and Virginia Private College Week, including the full list of participating colleges, visit www.vaprivatecolleges.org.
MEADOWVIEW, Va.  While touring the campus of Virginia Tech during last weeks orientation for new students, Nicole Eisert was quickly reminded of how far she has come in such a short amount of time.

The teen, who graduated from Patrick Henry High School this spring, will enroll in the colleges Agricultural Technology Program, an associate degree program, before transferring into a four-year program at the school.

Based on her academics and involvement in Future Farmers of America, commonly known as FFA, Eisert has won several scholarships that will open the door to her college education.

She recently won a $250 scholarship at the 2017 Bristol Steer and Heifer Show where she showed livestock.

During Awards Day at Patrick Henry High School this spring, Eisert received the Josey Baker Scholarship for $1,000 to attend Virginia Tech.

Through the national FFA organization, she was awarded the John Deere/Meade Tractor scholarship for $2,000.

Last month, Eisert received a Virginia State FFA degree after completing requirements based on her involvement with FFA throughout high school, work and agriculture experience, community service, leadership skills and academics.

And thats not all.

Most recently, the teen was awarded $1,225 from the Curtis Mays Scholarship through the Agricultural Technology Program at Virginia Tech, and shes been notified she will receive a $1,000 scholarship from the Washington County Farm Bureau Federation.

Its a huge honor to receive this help. I honestly didnt know how I would pay for college without the help from scholarships and financial aid, said Eisert.

College-bound

The words, You can be anything you want to be, spoken by a high school teacher and mentor, resonate with the 17-year-old as she prepares to leave her home in Meadowview and engage in the life of a college student.

Eiserts story is no different than other agriculture students who are college-bound this fall, except that her interest in agriculture sprouted a little later than for most young farmers.

Eisert and her family moved from California to Southwest Virginia when she was only 6.

The little girl from the city who had never seen a cow, much less halter-trained one, would eventually learn to love farm life and to recognize the importance of agriculture in our daily lives.

In ninth grade, Eisert took a horticulture class taught by Aaron Scyphers, who encouraged the teen to join Future Farmers of America, more commonly referred to as FFA.

FFA has opened my eyes to so many career opportunities agriculture has to offer, she said.

I started to look at agriculture in a different way. Throughout elementary and middle school, I never thought agriculture would be the way I would go.

I mean, who would have thought a girl from the city would wind up in an agriculture field? Its really awesome.

When Eisert was a sophomore, she became the FFA reporter for her school. Her junior year, she assumed the responsibilities of treasurer, and by her senior year, she was serving as president.

During high school, Eiserts education in agriculture began to blossom. As a longtime member of FFA, she gained skills in livestock judging, soil preparation, horticulture, agriculture and, most importantly, leadership.

By the time she was a senior, Eisert knew she wanted to pursue a career in agriculture but lacked the resources to attend college.

With the guidance and support of Scyphers and his wife, Sarah Scyphers, who teaches agriculture at Holston High School, Eisert received several scholarships that will pave the way.

Were proud of Nicole for wanting to pursue a career in agriculture, said her high school agriculture teacher. Shes been a leader in our FFA chapter since she was a freshman in high school.

Scyphers said its a growing concern that fewer young people are choosing agriculture for careers.

The percentage of the population thats in production of agriculture is decreasing every year while the demand for food continues to increase. If we dont have enough young folks going into agriculture, eventually those numbers will get further and further apart, said Scyphers.

Sarah and I encourage our students to study all phases of agriculture because its important for the future of the country  and really for the entire world.
In Bristol, Virginia, nearly half of all households struggle with poverty.

About 20 percent of these people fall below the federal poverty line and receive assistance. Another 25 percent quietly struggle day in and day out to purchase food, care for their children and get necessary medical treatment.

You likely know some of these people. Theyre child care providers, mechanics, retail workers, store clerks and office assistants. This might apply to the family next door.

It might apply to you.

The United Way calls such individuals and families the ALICE population, those who are asset limited, income constrained and employed. Unlike households that fall under the federal poverty line, and thus qualify for governmental aid or social service programs, those in the ALICE population have jobs. They earn enough to squeak above the governments definition of poverty.

But they still earn less than what the basic cost of living requires, rendering them virtually invisible to the system, according to a new United Way report.

The ALICE Report, released today for the state of Virginia, shows that more than 39 percent of Virginia households faced financial hardships in 2015. That figure, according to United Way, paints a more complete picture than the 11 percent of Virginia households that fall under the federal poverty mark.

Of Bristols 7,700 households, one-quarter are designated by the United Way as part of the ALICE population. In Washington County, 14 percent of 22,673 households are officially in poverty. Another 29 percent are ALICE homes.

Travis Staton, president and CEO of the United Way of Southwest Virginia, said such folks are the forgotten middle of those in need, because while they dont meet federal requirements, theyre not out of the woods as far as being able to make it.

It basically boils down to: They dont earn enough to support the necessities of what the cost of living is in their community, Staton said.

He wants to be clear: Its not that ALICE individuals and families are simply unable to afford smart phones or premium TV packages, which they cant. These people struggle each month to make basic ends meet. To pay their mortgages. To attempt to save for a rainy day. To buy their children the most basic of school supplies.

The ALICE report lists four primary reasons why Virginia has so many individuals stuck in this no mans land of poverty.

First, low wage jobs dominate local economies. More than 57 percent of all jobs in Virginia pay less than $20 per hour, with most paying between $10 and $15, according to the report.

If you earn $15 an hour, you make $30,000 in a year. A family of four with two children pre-school-aged or younger needs to make at least $51,864 a year, the report states, and that is the bare-minimum budget, without room for savings, emergencies or pleasure.

Second, the basic cost of living is more than most of the states jobs can support. The average annual household survival budget for a Virginia family of four, with the same family makeup as above, is $61,068, significantly more than double the U.S. family poverty level of $24,250.

Third, the Great Recession of 2008 worsened economic conditions for ALICE households, and job opportunities have not returned to 2007 levels since.

Finally, public and private assistance helps but doesnt provide financial stability. The income of ALICE and poverty-level households in Virginia is supplemented with $12.2 billion in government, nonprofit and health care resources, according to the United Way. Even if those benefits are distributed evenly and allocated according to need, there is still a 35 percent unfilled gap for all households to meet the ALICE threshold for economic survival.

DeVonne Phipps is executive director of Bristol Faith in Action, a network of 85 churches that serve those in financial need. Phipps said one of the most concerning aspects of the ALICE community is that theyre not visible.

They look like theyre gainfully employed, theyre consistent with bringing in income in the household, and yet they just cannot get ahead, Phipps said. They are a car repair [away] from disaster.

Phipps said the Bristol area is seeing a few troubling trends that speak to the United Ways findings.

The first is job loss. Phipps said her organization is seeing a lot of people in Bristol who are experiencing first-time job loss. They still have to pay their bills and mortgages, so to be unemployed for the first time throws them into a real panic.

Some people dont lose their jobs, but their hours get cut back.

These people were likely already stretched thin, Phipps said, and all of a sudden theyre making half of what they needed. Then a car breaks down, or a medical emergency strikes, and a new carburetor or a steep copay is devastating.

The next thing you know, theyre in a true financial crisis, she said.

According to the ALICE report, after the recession, there was a wide variation in the recovery of jobs across the state. Since then, the greatest gains have been made in Blacksburg, Charlottesville, Harrisonburg, Northern Virginia, Richmond and Winchester.

The Lynchburg metro area has had the least recovery, and Hampton Roads, Roanoke and Bristol have also not regained all jobs lost since the height of the recession.

There are just not a lot of job opportunities in Bristol that are what we would consider gainful employment, Phipps said. There are plenty of minimum wage jobs, but youre not going to get across that poverty line if all we have to offer are minimum wage jobs.

The United Way of Southwest Virginia is trying to tackle these problems. Staton said United Way knows it cant magically reduce the cost of living or create hundreds of high-paying jobs. So first, its trying to help people become financially literate.

The organization is in the process of creating two financial stability centers. One will serve Carroll County, Grayson County and the city of Galax. A three-year contract has been awarded to Virginia Tech Universitys extension office to operate the center.

The other center will be in Richlands in collaboration with the Southwest Virginia Workforce Development Board, he said.

Staton said the goal of the centers will be to teach financial planning, debt management and offer credit counseling. The centers are on track to open January 2018.

He also noted that efforts to bring higher-paying jobs are important. For example, Staton commended the efforts of Gov. Terry McAuliffe and the GO Virginia program, which is working to create state financial incentives and other assistance to encourage collaboration on private-sector growth and job creation by business, education and government in the commonwealth.

As for Phipps, she would like to see more community building. Specifically, she mentioned connecting people who have found success in life with ALICE families and individuals to create strong relationships and mentorship roles.

She also noted that donations have been down at Bristol Faith in Action.

Its going to take this community to lift up our poor, she said.
MariaDB last week announced the availability of MariaDB TX 2.0, a fully functional open source transactional database solution for modern application development and enterprise use cases.

MariaDB TX offers a comprehensive package of technology and services, including feature-rich new releases of MariaDB Server and MariaDB MaxScale, which close the functional gap between open source and proprietary offerings. It is part of a MariaDBs larger effort to offer complete solutions to support specific workload needs, whether transactional, analytical or developer-focused.

The TX 2.0 release meets business technology needs for increased agility, scalability and security. It provides developers with an open and extensible database solution that lets them develop many different types of applications easily.

This release introduces JSON support and the MyRocks storage engine (alpha).

It also offers data masking to protect sensitive data, and result set limiting for denial-of-service protection, noted MariaDB spokesperson Shane Johnson.

This ensures queries that would return too much data and impact database service/availability are blocked, he told LinuxInsider.

Multiple Options

MariaDB is one of several companies targeting business customers database requirements for online transaction processing and data analytics.

The question of suitability mainly relates to whether an organization prefers open source to proprietary solutions like Oracle DB, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQ, observed Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

Server or open source alternatives, including MariaDB, Postgres and MySQL, all have their strong and weak points, he told LinuxInsider, but MariaDB appears to be attracting more developers and growing more quickly than other open source DB projects.

That success is due in part to the strength of MariaDBs core features, as well as the companys development of complementary enterprise solutions like MariaDB MaxScale and MariaDB ColumnStore, King added.

Key Ingredients

The JSON support and the addition of Data Masking and Result Set Limiting for enhanced security are the two essential improvements that make MariaDB TX 2.0 worth considering, according to the company. They encompass the broadest range of new and existing use cases.

JSON is the emerging standard for developers building Web, mobile and IoT applications. However, NoSQL databases built to support JSON are too functionally limited to support the majority of enterprise use cases, MariaDB said.

Relational databases tend to be too slow to provide complete JSON support, the company noted. MariaDB TX 2.0 adds a comprehensive set of 24 JSON functions to take advantage of the increased flexibility and speed JSON provides. It combines the reliability and security that comes with using a relational database.

The proliferation of ever-more-sophisticated cyberthreats demands ongoing investment in database security, but open source vendors have fallen short of delivering solutions that provide robust, enterprise-grade security, according to MariaDB.

MariaDB TX 2.0 adds new security enhancements that previously were available only in proprietary offerings. For example, MariaDB data masking hides sensitive data before returning query results. This protects data that is classified as personally identifiable, personally sensitive or commercially sensitive  common requirements for HIPAA/PCI compliance.

The result set limiting feature prevents denial-of-service attacks. It specifies a maximum number or rows or data that can be returned in a query, prepared statement or stored procedure to prevent service interruptions.

Performance Boost

Another developer-centered feature is the introduction of beta support for Facebooks MyRocks technology. MyRocks is a transactional storage engine optimized for flash storage. Applications built on MariaDB TX 2.0 can utilize MyRocks for better compression, faster replication and data loading.

SQL Compatibility with Common Table Expressions and Window Functions enhance query functionality. These include common table expressions and window functions.

Common table expressions make complex queries easier to read and easier to maintain by breaking queries down into simpler building blocks. Window functions eliminate expensive subqueries and self-joins. This makes queries easier to read and improves overall query performance.

A gap has existed between the high-cost functionality of proprietary databases and the affordable, modern architectures of open source databases, said Roger Bodamer, chief product officer at MariaDB.

MariaDB TX 2.0 eliminates this tradeoff by delivering an open source, extensible database that is built on top of decades of engineering investment. With its many new features, including support for MyRocks, JSON and data masking, MariaDB is now the most functionally rich open source database solution available, he maintained.

Transactional Differences

MariaDB TX is a general-purpose database solution for transactional or operational workloads in the traditional sense. In other words, it processes many queries accessing a little bit of the data, noted MariaDBs Johnson. Unlike NoSQL databases, it supports multi-statement transactions and full ACID guarantees.

However, while it is a relational database, MariaDB supports JSON via SQL functions, and different storage engines support different data models, he said. For example, MariaDB AX, our data warehouse/analytical database, extends MariaDB TX with ColumnStore, a distributed columnar storage engine engineered for analytical workloads  fewer queries accessing a lot of the data.

Users can deploy the database on bare-metal servers, virtual machines, containers, and public or private cloud infrastructure. It is available in AWS and Microsoft Azure, and is the most widely deployed database on OpenStack, he said, citing a recent survey.

Pricing Structure

MariaDB is well suited to cloud infrastructure, both in terms of technology and in pricing, according to Johnson. The enterprise subscription for MariaDB TX includes licensing and support.

It is priced per database instance or node, and is available with or without clustering support.

Driving Factors

I think the popularity of MariaDB comes from our commitment to both community members and enterprise customers. We believe in open source and in collaborating with the community, and together, we are able to innovate much faster than traditional vendors, Johnson said.

MariaDBs feature set is geared toward enterprise customers.

In the first quarter of this year, OutboundEngine issued more than 600,000 social posts for its SMB customers.

As our business continues to grow, MariaDB provides us with the high availability and scalability needed to manage an increasing amount of data, said Darin Sleyster, senior database administrator at OutboundEngine. We are excited about new features like Result Set Limiting and Dynamic Server Configuration that can help prevent production outages and keep our business running smoothly.

Winning Path

The MariaDB project is an interesting example of what can happen when the wrong people take over an open source project, said PundITs King. In this case, Oracles 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsoft put MySQL (along with Suns other SW assets) into the pocket of the worlds biggest commercial DB vendor.

That caused more than a little strife among MySQL developers and supporters, many of whom began considering alternatives. That included the founders of MySQL, who eventually launched MariaDB, he said.

The company leveraged its deep experience in database technologies and open source community-building. The result has been considerable success in attracting supporters, noted King. Among them are the European Investment Bank, which earlier this month announced 25million euros in funding for MariaDB.
President Donald Trump aims to save taxpayers US$1 trillion over the next 10 years with a little help from Americas high-tech industry.

Our goal is to lead a sweeping transformation of the federal governments technology that will deliver dramatically better services for citizens, the president said Monday at a roundtable session of the American Technology Council, composed of the leaders of 18 U.S. tech firms including Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.

Were embracing big change, bold thinking and outsider perspectives to transform government and make it the way it should be, and at far less cost, he declared.

Outdated federal IT is a big problem, the president acknowledged, but were going to be working on it and were going to solve the problem, and up to a trillion dollars in savings for taxpayers over the next 10 years. Over a trillion.

Although savings from upgrading federal IT could be substantial, the $1 trillion number may be overly optimistic.

The presidents estimate of $1 trillion in savings over a decade sounds like it was made up in the fly, Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, told TechNewsWorld.

The president also told participants in the roundtable discussion that his administration is fixing airport systems, upgrading Defense Department and Veterans Administration systems for seamless transfer of information between the agencies, and working diligently on immigration so tech companies can get the foreign workers they need to continue to innovate.

Wheres the Money?

The president last month signed an executive order calling for modernization of federal IT.

The modernization plan required by that order isnt due until August, so well have to wait for that to learn what, specifically, modernization entails, said Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

It will be months, if not years, from there before we can assess whether its actually being implemented effectively, he told TechNewsWorld.

The focus of the order is on upgrading antiquated federal hardware and software. That will require money  money that appears to be absent from the presidents budget.

If youre talking about an IT overhaul of the federal government, I didnt see a comprehensive plan in any of the budget documents that I went through, said Chris Bronk, an assistant professor in the College of Technology at the University of Houston.

An IT overhaul also would require leaders, which seem to be missing at the moment.

Youre not going to get results from big changes if you dont have federal executives with a mandate to make the changes, Bronk told TechNewsWorld.

The Trump administration is just slow at bringing people into federal jobs, he pointed out. We dont even have a federal CIO yet. Without a federal CIO, how can you have a federal modernization strategy?

Shared Services

The executive order also calls for moving to shared IT infrastructure and cloud services, a process started by the Obama administration.

Moving to shared infrastructure and cloud services entails up-front costs, but has the potential to save the government a decent amount of change in the long run by exploiting economies of scale  and by scaling better as the demands of individual agencies change  as well as making it easier to harden federal systems against cyberattack, Catos Sanchez noted.

Sweeping changes in federal IT have been proposed before, but they tend to lose steam quickly.

Consider that the government maintains a massive underground facility where federal employee records are still maintained on paper after decades of failed efforts at a digital transition, Sanchez observed.

You have all the usual hurdles of sweeping technology changes in large institutions coupled with the red tape  some of it there for sound reasons, like avoiding corruption or ensuring the privacy of citizens sensitive data  that makes federal procurement a slower and more cumbersome process than most businesses have to deal with, he added.

Archaic hardware and software is just part of the problem.

There is no central buyer of IT solutions and services. That means individual institutions, agencies and groups negotiate with vendors they choose, explained Pund-ITs King.

That tends to make systems costlier and more complex than necessary, and stymies integration efforts, he continued. Unless those issues are also targeted by the presidents plan, its hoped-for benefits will be difficult or impossible to achieve.

Closing Industry-Government Divide

The presidents attempt to give the nations tech industry a bigger role in transforming federal IT has promise, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

Past administrations have told the tech industry, we want your guidance,' he told TechNewsWorld. This is the first time Ive seen a president say, Our IT infrastructure is out of date. Its the first time Ive seen the whole IT discussion go all the way to the president.

Whats more, a government-industry partnership could help close the virtual divide between the sectors.

We hope that divide closes, because its important they cooperate, McGregor said.

Drawing on insights from Silicon Valley  something the previous administration also tried to emphasize  could yield real gains if theres the will and focus to follow through on a transformative approach, Catos Sanchez added.

However, it could also easily become an excuse for annual photo ops with tech celebrities, which doesnt yield anything concrete, he acknowledged.

Ill hope for the former, said Sanchez, but I wont be shocked if we get the latter.
Avnet last week unveiled a beta version of Ask Avnet, an automated virtual assistant that combines artificial intelligence with on-demand access to industry experts.

Ask Avnet targets engineers, designers, hobbyists, makers and purchasing specialists across the electronics supply chain  which includes the product manufacturing chain, said Kevin Yapp, senior vice president for digital transformation at Avnet.

Ask Avnet gathers information from the companys Web-based ecosystem  including Avnet.com, element14.com and Hackster.io  and soon will include access to Avnets MakerSource.io and PremierFarnell.com properties.

Ask Avnet leverages AI to help anticipate a users next move and provide the best answer, rather than listing all possible answers.

How Ask Avnet Works

Ask Avnet aims to shorten the amount of time it takes for Avnet customers to access information, Yapp told TechNewsWorld.

Avnet customers who already are familiar with an Avnet property, such as hackster.io or element14, will discover more parts or components or choices within Avnet  with a simple click, he pointed out.

Initially, users interact with an automated assistant for fast answers to everyday questions. They are connected to the appropriate Avnet expert when necessary.

Ask Avnet works on both desktops and mobile devices. However, during the beta phase, the focus is on desktops.

Full support for mobile devices will be available when we make the tool open to all visitors across our Web properties later this fall, he said.

Going With the Flow

Avnet isnt the first to do this, remarked Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

Microsofts doing something, and so are other companies, where the digital assistant is really targeted towards the application or the area of expertise that theyre looking for, he told TechNewsWorld.

That said, this is the way to provide better customer service, reduce costs associated with professional labor, and reduce the number of questions people come up with, McGregor pointed out.

The use of AI and machine learning in the enterprise is likely to increase is one way businesses can increase their competitiveness and thus is likely to increase, ABI Research has predicted.

However, Ask Avnet is more of a limited response system, and weve had those for some time, noted Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

You could do what theyre demonstrating with scripts, for the most part, and an old expert system, he told TechNewsWorld. This is clearly just an early test of concept, but the true AI doesnt appear to exist yet.

Ask Avnet Benefits

Its likely that product developers who use Ask Avnet eventually will get higher-quality advice more quickly, Enderle said. Once the AI truly kicks in, the experts become largely virtual, with escalation to people decreasing over time as the AI learns from the interaction.

Combining the ability of a digital assistant with a virtual database to target specific customers in specific areas such as engineering has so many benefits, McGregor said. The system can continue to learn and evolve with all the information thats going into it.

Avnet is gunning for B2B companies, Yapp said.

The Specter of Google, Apple and Microsoft

Ask Avnet is more like Google Voice, Microsofts Cortana or Siri than it is like IBM Watson, Yapp said.

The global enterprise market for voice recognition technologies will grow from US$44 billion in 2016 to $79 billion in 2021, according to BCC Research.

Ask Avnet does not have voice capability, which raises the question whether enterprises might turn to Google, Apple or Microsoft, whose assistants combine AI with machine learning and voice.

You do want to add voice, Tirias McGregor said, but, a lot of times when dealing with engineers, you may need to bring up visual information as well.
The Caregiver Education Group will hear from Dr. Julie Masters, chair of the Department of Gerontology at the University of Nebraska campuses in Omaha and Lincoln, at its 1:30 p.m. meeting Tuesday (July 25) in Room 155 at Saint Paul United Methodist Church, 1144 M St.

Masters will discuss "appreciating the future now," and how the care a caregiver receives now will impact his or her health in the future. Masters' presentation is considered useful information for all caregivers, family members, pastors/church members, friends, and neighbors as well as professional care providers.

Time for discussion and sharing will follow the presentation. Jen Wolf-Wubbels of Southlake Village, a member of the Lincoln Caregiver Education Group, brings treats to each monthly meeting.

Upcoming presentations for the Caregiver Education Group:

Aug. 22: "Keeping Your Home Safe," by Kelly Sears, Homestead Rehabilitation Center

Sept. 26: "Meaningful Moments," by Tamara Gereauher, High Plains Alzheimers Special Care Center; and "ElderCare Resource Handbook," by Dana Rothfuss, Care Consultants for the Aging

Oct. 24: "Types, Symptoms, & Treatment of Dementia," by Dr. Robert Arias

Nov. 28: "Wills & Final Wishes," by Christine Vanderford, Vanderford Law, and Bryan Block, Butherus, Maser & Love

Dec. 12: Holiday Party, Dining Room at 1:30 p.m.

The Lincoln Caregivers Education Group page on Facebook will keep caregivers updated on events of interest to caregivers/older persons. Becca Henry and Christine Vanderford, members of the Lincoln Caregiver Education Group, share helpful information for caregivers regularly.

Also, visit the Nebraska Caregiver Coalition page, the Nebraska Special Needs Ministry Network page, the Nebraska Lifespan Respite Network page on Facebook for additional information.
There has been some recent speculation that Samsung Galaxy S8 sales have stalled and is less successful than the Galaxy S7, its predecessor.

Upon launch, critics raved about the Galaxy S8, praising its massive Infinity Display and powerful internals, though also not without criticizing Samsung for some pretty suspect design decisions, such as the fingerprint placed close to the camera. Still, the phone was off to a great start, breaking preorder records for the company.

A week ago, report came out suggesting the Galaxy S8 was no longer surpassing Galaxy S7 sales. Those reports claimed that the flagship was lagging behind. The claims surprised many, although given the Galaxy S8's higher price point, it's not tally impossible.

Is The Galaxy S8 Lagging Behind The Galaxy S7?

But Samsung's mobile division chief has now refuted the claims. During a visit to Taiwan last week, Samsung mobile business president DJ Koh confirmed that the Galaxy S8 continues to outsell the Galaxy S7. What's more, combined Galaxy S8 sales are actually 15 percent higher than the Galaxy S7 based on the same number of days they've spent in the smartphone market.

Koh didn't provide any concrete sales numbers, however, but did say he's expecting sales performance of the two handsets to be maintained throughout the latter half of 2017. Koh also revealed recently that Samsung will announce the Galaxy Note 8 in August and release it sometime in September.

Samsung Galaxy Note 8

The Note 8 will be the direct successor to the ill-fated Note 7, poised to become the company's most powerful handset thus far. Rumors suggest the phone will have 6 GB of RAM and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chip, among other things.

The release of the Note 8, however, will likely affect Galaxy S8 sales, as the Note lineup of phone is usually seen as the more powerful of the two main handsets Samsung releases each year.

Other Galaxy Note 8 rumors point to a fingerprint scanner at the back of the device, which some users might not grow to like. Details about the phone remain slim, however, which is pretty unusual for a phone that's expected to be unveiled next month. Some claim it'll cost more than $1,000, which if true, definitely means Samsung will dress this phone up with the most premium specs.

The Note 8 is expected to compete with Apple's 10th-anniversary iPhone, tentatively named the iPhone 8, which rumors say will sport a bezel-less OLED screen. As usual, however, take all rumors with a grain of salt.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
A cow in Alabama was found positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease. The U.S. Department of Agriculture revealed on Tuesday, July 18 that the 11-year-old animal had atypical L-type of BSE.

The animal died after it was delivered to a livestock market in Alabama. Lab results, which were later confirmed by the USDA laboratory in Ames, Iowa, showed the animal had atypical BSE

Classical BSE And Atypical BSE

Classical BSE has been associated to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, a degenerative brain disorder that leads to dementia and eventually death.

Classical BSE may occur when cows are fed with products that contain spinal and brain tissues from other bovine animals. As a precaution, the United States banned the use of these feeds in cattle in 1997.

Unlike classical BSE, atypical cases of BSE are not transmitted through infected feed. Atypical BSE is also believed to arise spontaneously in cattle herds affecting older animals that are at least 8 years old. Atypical BSE is also rare. It is considered as a sporadic disease, which means it occurs singly or in scattered instances.

"Unlike typical BSE, cases of atypical BSE, according to [UK Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee] (SEAC), may have risen spontaneously (although transmission through feed or the environment cannot be ruled out). Recently reported French surveillance data support this theory that unlike typical BSE, atypical BSE appears to represent sporadic disease," the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.

New BSE Case Does Not Pose Human Threat

The USDA assured that the animal did not pose risk to food supply or the human health. The cow never entered slaughter channels. Authorities said they are already working to address the issue.

"The Commissioner of Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries, John McMillan, confirmed that the department is working with USDA officials to address a positive test for atypical bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in an eleven-year old Alabama beef cow, " the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries said in a statement.

Fifth Case Of Mad Cow Disease In The United States

The animal is the fifth case of BSE detected in the United States. Of these five cases, four were atypical.

The only classical BSE was of the 2003 case of an animal found at a Washington farm that was brought from Canada and born prior to the ban on use of cattle feed that contain brain or spinal tissue.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
President Trump's attorney, Jay Sekulow, seems to be an adherent of the just-yell-louder-school of legal argumentation.

That tactic was on vivid display again Sunday, as the blustering lawyer made the full round of talk shows. It might have been the most striking part of Sekulow's performance, but it wasn't the most ominous.

He combines obstreperousness ("I'm going to answer your question, I am, and you're going to let me answer it," he lectured/interrupted Fox News's Chris Wallace) with obfuscatory legal jargon ("I'm not in privity of contract, as we say, with the party that's responsible for the actual payment of the bill").

Sekulow compulsively redirects ("I wonder why the Secret Service, if this was nefarious, why the Secret Service allowed these people in," he told ABC's Jonathan Karl). The Secret Service said later in the day that Donald Trump Jr. wasn't under protection at that time. Sekulow is internally inconsistent ("I mean, opposition research in campaigns happens all the time," he told CBS' John Dickerson, just after noting that Trump Jr. had said that "if he had to do it all over again, there are things he would do differently").

So watching a Sekulow performance, it is tempting simply to ask: Why is this man shouting?

The better question is: What is this man shouting? Because if you turn down the volume and pay attention to Sekulow's words, you can deduce the disturbing outlines of where the president's legal team may be heading. He signaled the expansion of the Trump team's assault on former FBI director James Comey and, in turn, on the legitimacy of special counsel Robert Mueller.

This is worrisome, because it lays the foundation for firing Mueller and/or issuing pardons and declaring, "Case closed."

Thus, when Wallace asked Sekulow whether the Trump team's repeated denials of dealings with Russia were now "suspect," it triggered this disquisition:

"I think it's important to put the framework here. How did we end up with a special counsel? ... Comey had a series of meetings with the president of the United States. In those meetings, he took notes. He put them on his government computer, put them in his government desk, and when he was terminated from [that] position, which you would acknowledge that the president had the authority to do, he gave them to a friend of his to leak to the press ... to get a special counsel."

In this retelling, Mueller is the fruit of the poisonous tree planted by Comey. Therefore, Mueller's appointment is illegitimate and he should go -- and with him the investigation.

"So the basis upon which this entire special counsel investigation is taking place is based on what? Illegally leaked information that was a conversation of the president of the United States with the then-FBI director," Sekulow told NBC's Chuck Todd. "And I think that raises very serious legal issues as to the scope and nature of what really can take place."

Does it? In his previous round of Sunday shows, Sekulow muddied the waters by claiming that Comey had violated attorney-client privilege in revealing his conversations with Trump. As Wallace explained Sunday, this assertion was incoherent, since Comey was not acting in any way as Trump's lawyer.

Sekulow's pivot to executive privilege is scarcely more convincing. Perhaps Trump could have asserted privilege to bar Comey from testifying before Congress, especially before the firing. That's different from claiming that Comey's decision as a private citizen to reveal information about his conversations with the president was "illegal," even if Comey proceeded through the distasteful cutout of a memo leaked by a friend. If such disclosures were against the law, every administration veteran who wrote a tell-all book would be in jail.

Another strand of Sekulow's argument involves the notion that the memo was essentially government property, not Comey's to decide to convert to his own use, even if the information contained in it is unclassified. Irony alert: This argument requires concluding that Comey took something of value from the U.S. government, while asserting that the Trump campaign did not solicit anything of value from the Russian government. On the Lawfare blog, Timothy Edgar and Susan Hennessey assess the argument that Comey's action violated the conversion statute as "cutout."

Even if it weren't, what would be the relevance? Comey's alleged crime wouldn't make Mueller's appointment void or voidable. A leak of classified information that is intended to trigger a criminal investigation doesn't make the ensuing investigation improper.

But watch that space. I suspect -- and fear -- that we haven't heard the last of this bogus argument.
President Donald Trump has been widely criticized for his use of Twitter to communicate with the public. I wish to encourage him to continue tweeting, as he deems appropriate. His tweets clearly inform us about:

* his thought processes (often incoherent and changing)

* his ego (much bigger than his hands)

* his integrity (lies and misleading statements are an almost daily occurrence)

* his abilities to analyze complex problems and be wary of unintended consequences (seemingly nonexistent)

* his priorities (do we emphasize John Podestas emails or North Korea?)

* his intelligence (he appears to be as dumb as a post)

* and his concern for our country and the American people (his main concern is for himself, secondly for his family members and evidently very little for the welfare of the American public or for our republics standing in the western world).

While I and many others are frightened by his actions and embarrassed for our country, transparency and openness are essential. With his tweets, we at least have a window into his soul, and the view is not pretty.

Roger Kirby, Lincoln
"Dialogue and negotiation in Venezuela, found at the Paris Forum for Peace, three friends: the governments of France, Argentina and the Republic of Colombia," said the president... | Read More
The city appears to be putting the proverbial cart before the horse. Or in this case, the city administration is making all the street changes necessary to close 17th Street before the City Council signs off on it.

The decision to close 17th Street for several blocks through campus, and the $80,352 appraised price the University of Nebraska will pay to buy the vacated street hasnt reached the council agenda.

But this week, work began on the UNL City Campus street project. That work includes converting North 16th Street between Q and X from one-way southbound to two-way.

The city will also be adding bike lanes to North 16th, and on Vine Street from 16th Street to Antelope Valley Parkway at a cost of about $360,000. UNL will pay half.

The news release on the work said UNL wanted to get the work finished before demolition work on Cather and Pound residence halls begins in early August and before students begin arriving for the fall semester.

They are also getting it done before the City Council has weighed in on closing 17th Street.

The news release said the changes to 16th Street coordinate with UNLs plan, pending City Council approval, to close 17th Street to through traffic between S and Vine streets.

However the city administration says the 16th and 17th street projects, from a traffic standpoint, are independent.

The changes will make 16th Street more convenient and safer for cars, bikes and pedestrians, regardless of whether 17th Street gets vacated or not, said Jon Carlson, an aide to Mayor Chris Beutler.

The projects may be physically independent, but there is a clear interdependent relationship. The council decision on closing and selling 17th will be an official afterthought, with little room to say no.

Lots of criminals on the Fourth

The July 4 holiday makes criminals of many Lincoln residents. It is against the law for people to explode any firework that goes onto any street, or sidewalk ... or onto neighboring lawns, Police Chief Jeff Bliemeister pointed out to the City Council recently.

So if council Chairman Roy Christensen shot off fireworks that landed in a neighbors yard, he would have just committed a misdemeanor, Bliemeister said.

Around the Fourth of July holiday, City Council members get calls from constituents upset with the fireworks being set off in their neighborhoods.

But there is not much that can be done.

Fourth of July fireworks are a cultural phenomena. Im not sure we could police our way out of it, Bliemeister told the council this week.

Police could write misdemeanor citations all day and night and still wouldnt put a dent in the activities.

When a large segment of the population breaks the law, its hard for police to try to respond, he said.

Driver gets no money from city

The city is not going to pay out any money to the insurance company of a man who drove his car into wet concrete, near the intersection of 48th and Old Cheney, at a street construction project this summer.

The claim, submitted by the man's insurance company, was denied for two reasons.

First, if there was any liability, the entity responsible would be the construction company doing the street work, according to attorney Elizabeth Elliott, who handles claims for the city.

Secondly, Elliott doesn't believe anyone is liable because the cone placement met national standards for spacing and distance.

The council approved denying the claim at this week's meeting.

The picture of another car stuck in the wet cement at the Old Cheney Road construction site made it around the world via social media and news reports. This particular claim was from the insurance company of a different car owner, but the circumstances were quite similar.

New fire station plans move forward

The city is moving forward on plans to build four new fire stations, including one joint fire-police station.

Recently the city purchased land at 4405 S. 84th St., a bit south of 84th and Pioneers, for one of the fire stations.

That's the third land purchase, which means the city is looking for land for just one remaining station -- in northeast Lincoln.

The city previously purchased land at 4421 N. 24th St. for one station and at 6601 Pine Lake Road for a combination police and fire station.

The city has also picked the construction company that will build the four stations. Hausmann Construction, a local company, was the top choice for the construction manager at-risk contract for the four stations by a selection committee created for the bid process. And Mayor Chris Beutler agreed with their recommendation, according to Rick Hoppe, chief of staff to Beutler.

City voters agreed to add a quarter-cent to the city sales tax for three years to pay for construction of the four stations and to put in a new 911 radio system. That additional city sales tax raises about $1 million a month.
RACINE COUNTY  As of Tuesday, the county has received reports of more than 600 private properties that were damaged by flooding last week, according to David Maack, the countys emergency management coordinator.

In addition, public infrastructure damage and initial emergency response resulted in more than $3.9 million in expenses, according to initial estimates from Maack.

Its going to take some time to assess everything completely, he said.

Multiple municipal buildings and roads suffered damage from the heavy rain that fell July 11-12.

In addition to significant damage in the Burlington area, Maack said: The Village of Union Grove got hit fairly hard ... the village itself incurred some damage to roadways and other infrastructure.

Roads remain

underwater

Town of Burlington Police Chief Michael Sevick said because of the flooding of Hoosier Creek  which flows into the Fox River  Hoosier Creek Road, Brever Road and Wheatland Road remained underwater as of Tuesday afternoon and were impassable.

Theres still a number of homes that were affected, Sevick said. Its going to be a substantial amount of time before we know what the total damage is.

Sevick said there is no timeline for when those roads will be open because its going to take time for the water to drain out of the nearby fields.

The City of Burlington and the Town of Burlington, Maack said, have been sending out damage assessment teams to identify damage to homes and costs.

As you can imagine, thats a rather large undertaking, Maack said.

Individuals use shelter

According to City of Burlington officials, water in the Fox River has fallen about a foot, to 10.6 feet deep. The Fox went from about 8 feet on July 9 to a record 16.15 feet on July 12. The previous record was 13.5 feet, set in 2008.

Samaritans Purse, a North Carolina-based international relief organization, is deploying a disaster response team, along with a tractor-trailer stocked with tools and emergency supplies, to southeastern Wisconsin.

Life Bridge Church, based in Burlington, is assisting residents with cleanup, concentrating its efforts on homeowners located by Riverside Park.

According to the Wisconsin Emergency Management, the American Red Cross emergency shelter at Burlington High School, 400 McCanna Parkway, hosted three people on Sunday night.

Laurie Vander Jagt, disaster public affairs volunteer for the Red Cross, said they were able to find housing for those who stayed in the shelter, but nonetheless it was crucial to have that safety net for residents.

It was important, in terms of people didnt have a place to go, Vander Jagt said. A lot takes place in the immediate aftermath, and were happy to provide a safe place for them to stay.

Victims are urged to report damage reports by calling 211 or toll-free at 866-211-3380.
State Senate Republicans have announced a plan to end the 18-day standoff over the states overdue budget, but its not clear if the proposal will satisfy Assembly Republicans, who have starkly different views on how to pay for roads.

The 2017-19 state spending plan released Tuesday provides the most detailed look at where Senate Republicans stand on unresolved areas of the budget, such as taxes and funding for schools, roads and bridges.

The plan would have the state take on more than $700 million in new borrowing to fund road and bridge projects. It would repeal the states prevailing, or minimum, wage requirement for workers on public construction projects.

The plan would make more families eligible for the private school voucher program outside Milwaukee and Racine. It proposes repealing the state personal property tax but abandons Gov. Scott Walkers plan for an income tax cut.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said the proposal puts the onus back on Assembly Republicans in budget talks. Fitzgerald, Walker and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, are set to meet Wednesday.

While Tuesdays proposal is intended to restart budget discussions, Fitzgerald acknowledged, even as he unveiled it, that hes not sure if the Senate could pass the measure as-is.

Im not going to make that prediction that I have the votes right now, Fitzgerald said.

Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke, R-Kaukauna, said the Senate plan contained few new proposals, but a wide gap remains on transportation funding, the main issue holding up the budgets passage. Still, Assembly GOP leaders said the plans arrival is good news.

Its good to see Senate Republicans have solidified their positions and are ready to come back to the table, Assembly Republican leaders, including Vos, said in a statement.

Walkers spokesman Tom Evenson also tweeted Tuesday that the governor welcomes the initiative by the state Senate to move the process forward while keeping his priorities largely intact on K-12 education funding, property tax relief, and transportation. The governor will continue to champion income tax relief.

Sen. Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton, blamed Walker for the budget delay. He said past governors have stepped up to resolve budget disagreements, but Walker so far has failed to do so.

This is the fault of the governor, Erpenbach said. He needs to come back to Madison and do his job.

Lawmakers and Walker already missed a July 1 deadline to enact the next two-year state budget. The previous budget continues into the new fiscal year until a new one is enacted.

K-12 education

The budget proposal includes K-12 school proposals that have largely been negotiated with Assembly Republican leaders, including increasing the number of families eligible for a taxpayer-funded voucher to attend a private school, Fitzgerald said.

Families who earn 220 percent of the federal poverty level will now be eligible to receive a school voucher to attend a school participating in the statewide voucher program. Currently, the income limit is set at 185 percent.

That means a family of four with a combined income of $53,826 would be eligible to receive a voucher. Previously, Senate Republicans had opposed a push to increase the income limits to 300 percent of the federal poverty limit  which would match the limits for families in the separate Milwaukee and Racine voucher programs.

Assembly Republicans said they are committed to increasing the limit to 300 percent despite Fitzgeralds promise the position in his budget proposal was backed by the Assembly GOP caucus.

The budget also eliminates Walkers proposal to require school districts to force employees to pay at least 12 percent of health care costs to receive a proposed funding increase in Walkers budget. Instead, districts would be required to report employee benefit and salary information to the Department of Administration, whose officials would report that information to the budget-writing committee.

School districts ability to ask residents to raise their property taxes to fund school projects would be limited under the budget proposal, too. Districts would be allowed to seek a referendum twice a year during regularly scheduled elections only, instead of being allowed to call a special election to ask voters to raise taxes.

The Senate Republican plan also nearly eliminates Walkers proposed $20 million increase in aid for rural schools, and increases the amount of money school districts that spend less on each student than the state average can raise in property taxes.

The budget also decreases funding for summer school programs in the Milwaukee School District from the amount Walker proposed in his budget. Funding for grants districts could apply for to implement mental health programs also would increase from what Walker proposed, under the Senate Republicans budget.

Transportation relies

on borrowing

On transportation funding  where the gap between Assembly and Senate GOP leaders appears greatest  Fitzgerald said his plan would avoid delays to major highway projects, in part with $712 million in new borrowing.

Assembly Republicans have said they wont support new road borrowing without a plan to pay for it. Senate Republicans and Gov. Scott Walker have resisted proposals to provide more revenue for roads and bridges.

The Senate GOP plan uses most of its extra borrowing to fund massive freeway projects in southeast Wisconsin, including on U.S. Interstate 94 near Milwaukee. It also would repeal the prevailing wage requirement for state-funded projects, as Walker proposed. Two years ago, Walker and lawmakers repealed prevailing wage for projects funded by local governments.

The Senate plan would eliminate 200 state Department of Transportation staff positions and end DOT studies of possible future highway expansions, including one for the Madison Beltline.

Fitzgerald said the plan does not move the state closer to collecting highway tolls, a step state leaders had weighed heavily in recent months.

Tax cuts on personal property, not on income

The Senate plan includes several key tax changes, including eliminating the states personal property tax and alternative minimum tax.

It excludes Walkers proposal for a state income tax cut, which would cut the tax rates of the two bottom income brackets.

Another Walker proposal that doesnt make the Senate plan is a sales tax holiday for two days in August for school supplies, which would cost the state about $22 million in revenue.
Zac Evans was taken to jail for speeding Monday as he rushed his wife, Bridget, to a Rapides Parish hospital to give birth. He's upset because his arrest caused him to miss his child's birth.
The wife of a man fatally struck by an unmarked Baton Rouge police car on Florida Street last month is suing the Police Department and the officer who was driving the car.

Ketravia Clark claims in the wrongful death lawsuit that Cpl. Frederick Thornton was negligent in the June 27 crash near the intersection of Acadian Thruway that killed Phillip Clark, 42, of Doyline. He is the father of her young child.

Thornton, an eight-year veteran of the police force, is on paid administrative leave while the accident investigation continues.

+5 Baton Rouge Police release name of officer who fatally struck 42-year-old man Tuesday Baton Rouge police on Thursday released the name of the officer who was driving an unmarked 

He was on duty at the time of the crash but was not responding to a call, a Baton Rouge police spokesman has said.

Sgt. L'Jean McKneely, the spokesman, has not said how fast Thornton was driving at the time of the incident but said speed will be an element of the probe.

The suit, filed last week, has been assigned to state District Judge William Morvant.
New Orleans Police Department Homicide investigators are attempting to locate two people of interest in the shooting death of 16-year-old boy on June 27 in Gentilly.

According to a NOPD press release, the men are not wanted, but detectives believe they have information regarding the homicide.

Police said Kimani Williams was shot by two men while walking near Paris Avenue and Lafreniere Street. The men allegedly pulled out handguns and shot Williams multiple times.

Officers were called after 5 p.m. Williams died at an area hospital.

The NOPD asks anyone who know the men's locations or identities to call Homicide Detective Tanisha Sykes at 504-658-5300 or CrimeStoppers at 504-822-1111.
One of the most visible members of East Baton Rouge Parish Superintendent Warren Drakes senior cabinet is leaving for a job with a prominent nonprofit in Baton Rouge best known for its work recruiting charter schools to the capital city.

Adonica Duggan, chief of communications and public relations for the parish school system, plans to stay on until Aug. 11, just after the start of the 2017-18 school year.

She is the second key Drake lieutenant to resign in the past two months, following the surprise departure of Deputy Superintendent Michelle Clayton in May. Both Duggan and Clayton worked for Drake for years, starting when he was superintendent of the Zachary school district.

In an email Tuesday, Duggan said shes taking a job with the nonprofit New Schools for Baton Rouge. New Schools, formed in 2012, has raised millions to recruit and financially support several prominent charter schools.

I am excited about the opportunity to have a wider impact on a number of types of schools, and look forward to partnering with EBRPSS to increase opportunities for access to quality education in our community, Duggan said.

New Schools promotion of charter schools  public schools run by private organizations  has provoked occasional arguments with the parish school system, where many see charter schools as competition that takes money from traditional public schools. Relations, though, have improved over the past years as the school system has approved charters for three New Schools recruits.

In her resignation July 5 letter, Duggan tells Drake how much she enjoyed working under your tremendous leadership.

I am extremely proud to have spent the last 14 years of my career in public education, Duggan wrote. I have done so because of a deep and abiding belief that the only way to impact the future of our community is to start with providing quality educational options for every child regardless of income, race or neighborhood.

In an interview, Drake said Duggan told him she was thinking of leaving about 10 days before submitting her resignation. The superintendent said he doesnt want people to stay with him if they are unhappy and that they should follow career opportunities that come along.

Five of my former employees in Zachary have gone on to be superintendents elsewhere, he said.

Clayton, who was viewed by many as a potential successor to Drake, took a job in June with Baton Rouge-based online charter school University View Academy, formerly Louisiana Connections Academy. She is serving as their associate superintendent of innovation and as interim principal for kindergarten through eighth grades.

Drake said of Duggan that he will miss the wide range of talents to an often tough, demanding position.

Shes done a very good job, Drake said.

Drake said he didnt probe with Duggan why shes leaving, but noted that East Baton Rouge Parish is bigger than Zachary, and theres more politics to navigate.

Drake said hes not worried about finding Duggans replacement: My forte is finding good people.
WASHINGTON  As the latest U.S. Senate plan for repealing the Affordable Care Act unraveled on Tuesday, Gov. John Bel Edwards joined 10 other governors on Tuesday to call for a bipartisan approach to overhauling the nation's health care system.

"The best next step is for both parties to come together and do what we can all agree on: fix our unstable insurance markets," said Edwards, a Democrat, in a statement released as part of a bipartisan push as the latest proposal  repealing "Obamacare" with out a replacement plan  was being discussed among lawmakers. "Going forward, it is critically important that governors are brought to the table to provide input, and we stand ready to work with lawmakers in an open, bipartisan way to provide better insurance for all Americans."

In addition to Edwards, who expanded Medicaid in Louisiana under the Affordable Care Act shortly after taking office last year, Govs. John Kasich, R-Ohio; Steve Bullock, D-Montana; Brian Sandoval, R-Nevada; Phil Scott, R-Vermont; John Hickenlooper, D-Colorado; Charles Baker, R-Massachusetts; Tom Wolf, D-Pennsylvania; Larry Hogan, R-Maryland; Bill Walker, I-Alaska; and Terry McAuliffe, D-Virginia; signed onto the statement and called on the U.S. Senate to reject the third attempt at a health care overhaul, this time a straight-up repeal of "Obamacare."

"This could leave millions of Americans without coverage," the governors said in their joint statement.

Later that afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Donald Trump both acknowledged the latest GOP health care plan wouldn't have the votes to pass after rank-and-file Republican senators said they would deny the votes to move forward.

Nonetheless, McConnell, R-Kentucky, insisted he would move forward with a vote on his measure to repeal the law, effective in two years, with a promise to work  along with Democrats  to replace it in the meantime.

The vote to will take place early next week, McConnell announced late Tuesday. It appears doomed to fail, but GOP leaders want to put lawmakers on record on the issue and move on.

At least one of Louisiana's senators says he will agree to the now largely symbolic push from McConnell for a repeal-only bill.

"I will vote in favor of repealing Obamacare. We can work out the details on the replacement later," said U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, R-Madisonville.

U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, who has pitched his own health care overhaul legislation that he continued to tout throughout the day Tuesday, hasn't said how he will vote next week, but previously called a repeal-only option a non-starter. His spokesman didn't respond to The Advocate's request for comment Tuesday afternoon. In an interview with Fox Business after McConnell acknowledged that the repeal didn't have the votes to pass, Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, said that he hoped Democrats would "come to the table" to help forge a path forward.

At the White House, Trump appeared to recognize defeat, at least for the moment, while insisting he bore none of the blame.

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"I think we're probably in that position where we'll just let Obamacare fail," the president said. "We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you that the Republicans are not going to own it. We'll let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us and they're going to say, 'How do we fix it?'"

Despite the current law's problems, most health care experts do not believe it is at immediate risk of outright failure, and Democratic cooperation to adjust the law is far from assured.

Nor does it appear likely that Republicans can escape owning the problems with the law and the health care system overall, now that they control the House, Senate and White House, partly on the strength of campaigning against the law.

"They seem to have this notion that they can be a majority party, and have control of the White House, and not be responsible for bringing down the health care system," said Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, of Illinois. "It doesn't work that way."

Asked how he would justify the GOP's failure on health care to voters, McConnell responded: "Well, we have a new Supreme Court justice"  suggesting inaction on health care would be forgiven because of that success along with some regulatory roll-backs.

As the day began Tuesday, McConnell was hunting for votes to open debate on a revived version of legislation Congress sent to Obama's desk in 2015 that would have repealed major portions of Obamacare, with a two-year delay built in. He had turned to that approach after getting stunned Monday night by defections by Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas on a repeal-and-replace bill.

Many Republicans support the repeal-only approach, and they questioned how senators who voted for the legislation two years ago could oppose it now.

"We're going to find out if there's hypocrisy in the United States Senate in the next few days I'm afraid," said Sen. David Perdue, R-Georgia.

But for others, the implications were too severe now that the bill could actually become law with a Republican president in the White House ready to sign it. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that more than 30 million people would lose insurance over a decade under the legislation.

Three Republican women  U.S. Sens. Susan Collins, of Maine, Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, and Shelley Moore Capito, of West Virginia  ultimately delivered the death blow on Tuesday. Collins voted against the legislation in 2015 while Murkowski and Capito both supported it.

Murkowski told reporters Tuesday that repealing the Affordable Care Act without the promise of a replacement would cause uncertainty and chaos.

"To just say repeal and 'Trust us, we're going to fix it in a couple of years,' that's not going to provide comfort to the anxiety that a lot of Alaskan families are feeling right now," she said.

Said Capito: "I did not come to Washington to hurt people."

What's next? Go back to the committee room and work on a bipartisan basis "in a way that the public feels that we are really working toward their best interests," Murkowski said. "It's where we should have started. ... And yes, this is hard."

Sure enough, later in the day health committee chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee announced he planned hearings on the issue in the next few weeks, a step Senate Republicans have not taken to date.

The GOP's struggles over the latest measures came down to differences between moderates who feared the implications of a full-blown repeal, and conservatives who wanted nothing less. Speaker Paul Ryan managed to bridge those divides in the House in May, barely passing a bill that would have eliminated the coverage mandates and tax hikes in the Affordable Care Act, while unwinding the Medicaid expansion and removing insurance coverage for millions.

But the GOP bills polled poorly, and Trump never tried to sell them to the country. Meanwhile, Obama's law grew steadily more popular in polls, and Republicans learned anew that a benefit, once given, is hard to take away.

Advocate Capitol news bureau writer Elizabeth Crisp and Associated Press writers Erica Werner, Alan Fram, Stephen Ohlemacher, Richard Lardner and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.
State officials said Wednesday they expect to get an one-year extension in their overhaul of criminal background checks for at least 16,000 employees of licensed childcare centers.

The new rules stem from a 2014 federal law.

They are supposed to be in place by Sept. 30.

But Jenna Conway, assistant state superintendent for early childhood education, said the state has sought, and expects to get from the federal government, a one-year extension to implement the requirements.

Under current rules, individual directors of childcare centers and Head Start leaders are responsible for their employees undergoing criminal background checks. The federal law will put the state Department of Education in charge of overseeing the checks, and makes those reviews more comprehensive.

The reviews will include fingerprint searches with the FBI as well as checks with the National Sex Offender Registry, Louisiana Sex Offender Registry and the Louisiana Child Abuse and Neglect Registry.

In addition, job applicants will face background checks in previous states where they worked.

Once employees are cleared for work, approval would be good for five years. Those certifications are open ended now.

State lands $10 million federal grant for preschool classes Louisiana is getting $10 million from the federal government to improve preschool programs f

The rules apply to licensed childcare centers regardless of whether they get federal dollars and anyone who takes public funds for child care assistance.

They cover staff, volunteers and contractors who work at the centers and individuals who work or live at registered home-based providers.

Others include employees of public schools that operate early learning centers, teacher preparation programs and students and Louisiana Department of Health workers who provide services to children.

"This is a pretty significant change in how this works," Conway told the Early Childhood Care and Education Advisory Council.

The council advises the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, which is set to tackle the issue during its Aug. 15-16 meeting.

The state department won authority to oversee criminal background checks through a 2017 state law sponsored by state Rep. Alan Seabaugh, R-Shreveport.

The federal law is aimed at ensuring that adults working with children have not committed violent crimes, child abuse or sexual offenses.

"The intent obviously to keep all the kids safe," Conway said. "This is not optional. And there are sanctions involved if states do not follow this rule very carefully."

The state gets about $80 million per year in federal early childcare grants.

Tax credits have led to better child care, federal funds for Louisiana, advocates say While state tax credits are under scrutiny amid budget problems, child care advocates said 

Council members praised the aim of the law but complained about some of the details, including costs.

Each application for a criminal background check will cost $88-$93, including a $15 administrative fee for the state Department of Education, $26 to do a Louisiana criminal history check, $12 for the FBI to do a federal criminal history review and $15 per state to review activities in previous residencies.

Melanie Bronfin, a member of the council, said Congress needs to know the impact the law is having on Louisiana child care operators.

"I think the law is an excellent thing," Bronfin said. "It is just the way it is being implemented. It is an unfunded mandate."

Bronfin is executive director of the Louisiana Policy Institute for Children in New Orleans.

Applications for criminal background checks will begin March 1, 2018.

State officials also plan webinars, information sessions around the state and a conference hosted by the Child Care Association of Louisiana to get the word out between August and November.
Gov. John Bel Edwards says he's not a proponent of shifting toward a single-payer health system "right now," as the nation's leaders continue to mull changes to the federal health care laws.

"I'm not going to say never  that's a long time," Edwards said when asked about the "Medicare for All" movement during his monthly call-in radio show. "I don't support it today."

Democrats have been increasingly embracing the Medicare for All single-payer proposal that was championed by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the 2016 presidential campaign, as Republicans, including President Donald Trump, struggle to reach an agreement on their own effort to repeal and replace the federal Affordable Care Act.

The U.S. Senate has faced repeated roadblocks in recent weeks as various proposals have unraveled from defections.

"I think you've got some states that are trying to experiment with it to see what that would look like and whether it would work," Edwards said of the single-payer model that has won traction in the more left-leaning corners of his party. "Going to a single-payer system certainly has some advantages, I suspect, but that's not where I am at right now."

Edwards said he prefers that lawmakers work to "refine" the current system in place and has called on all sides to come together to work toward a bipartisan approach to help stabilize insurance markets and draw down costs. He and 10 other governors signed onto a bipartisan statement urging Congress to come together to reach a bipartisan solution.

"The one thing that has been absent from all the legislation in Congress is anything that actually lowers the cost of health care," Edwards said.

The position puts Edwards, Louisiana's only statewide elected Democrat and the only Democratic governor in the Deep South, in line with the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party and the party's leaders in Congress.

As Republicans have worked to dismantle the health care system put into place under President Barack Obama, a mix of health care activists and high-profile progressive Democrats have increasingly been talking up Medicare for All as an alternative that they say could gain traction.

Medicare is the countrys main health insurance program for people who are 65 or older. It's widely popular, and during his campaign for president, Trump repeatedly pledged that Medicare wouldn't be cut under him.

Under Medicare for All, the single-payer system would be extended to cover everyone.

"Our job today is to do everything possible to defeat this terrible legislation, which will harm so many people," Sanders said during a rally in Kentucky earlier this month. "Our job tomorrow is to join every other major country on earth and guarantee health care for all as a right not a privilege through a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program."

The idea also has drawn support from U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

"As for me, I'm not a proponent of the single-payer system," Edwards again stressed in his radio show.

Edwards fielded several calls during his hour-long show about health care. He said he thinks that major issues with the ACA are linked to private insurance and exchanges.

"I think everybody agrees that system needs to be fixed," Edwards said.

But he touted Medicaid expansion, which he implemented through the Affordable Care Act shortly after taking office last year, among the successes.

More than 425,000 people have been added to the state's Medicaid rolls in the past year through the expansion.

"We were very careful in how we expanded in Louisiana," Edwards said.

Hours before Edwards' remarks, Trump hosted Republican senators for a luncheon at the White House, including Louisiana U.S. Sens. John Kennedy and Bill Cassidy, for another round of discussions on the attempted health care overhaul.

"I don't think we should leave town unless we have a health insurance plan unless we can give our people great health care," Trump told the room. "We're close. We're very close."

Just a day earlier, Trump appeared to have abandoned the push after the latest attempt unraveled, saying that Republicans should "let Obamacare fail" and then act.
The New York Times editorial board recently praised a package of criminal justice bills passed in Louisiana, lauding it as one of the most ambitious reform packages in the country.

In the opinion piece, the editorial board wrote that the package  a set of 10 new laws projected to reduce the states prison population by 10 percent over the next decade  would have been remarkable coming from any state. Its historic coming from Louisiana.

The editorial board noted that Louisiana has long held the undesired title of the nations incarceration capital. The savings the state will generate for no longer housing as many inmates is projected to be $262 million, of which 70 percent has been obligated for programs to rehabilitate offenders and support victims.

Most significantly, the package of bills aims to overhaul sentencing in the state criminal codes. The package will reduce mandatory minimums, trim sentences and give some inmates access to parole eligibility sooner. It creates a medical furlough program, which allows the sickest inmates to temporarily receive treatment off site, and be eligible for Medicaid, which saves the state on medical costs. The package overhauls drug sentencing, allowing lighter sentences based on weights, and streamlines the state's many incongruous theft penalties. One bill in the package will limit how often juvenile offenders can receive life without parole sentences.

The measure also expands prison alternatives, like drug court, and expand safety nets for people getting out of jail and returning to their communities, by reducing their financial burdens and helping them have better access to jobs. Another bill will help improve the way victims are notified when offenders have parole hearings or are released.

Its encouraging that in a state with a heavily Republican Legislature and a new Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, who made the package central to his candidacy, the changes passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities, the New York Times editorial board wrote.

The opinion piece also blasted U.S Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his retrograde mind-set on criminal justice. The editorial board wrote that instead of locking more people up for longer periods, as Sessions has steered the Justice Department to do, more states should seek to reduce prison populations and increase public safety.

(E)vidence is the enemy of hard-liners like Mr. Sessions, who rely on sensationalized anecdotes and easily exploited fears to push counterproductive policies, the editorial board wrote. Meanwhile, Louisiana is following a growing number of states in applying an empirical, data-based approach.

Edwards signed the new criminal justice bills into law last month.

Read the full New York Times editorial here. To see a breakdown of each criminal justice bill in the package, click here.

Advocate staff reporter Rebekah Allen contributed to this report.
A year ago, East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore had taken a quick business trip to Boston and was at church on Sunday morning when his phone started buzzing with text messages.

They were chaotic, saying one officer was down, multiple officers were shot, six officers were killed.

By the time he was able to scramble a charter back to Baton Rouge, the district attorney learned that three officers were assassinated and three others injured before gunman Gavin Long had been killed.

He remembered those travails during the process of preparing an in-depth report on the shootings and then appearing at memorials last weekend.

But if Baton Rouge suffered so dramatically, there are nevertheless reasons for optimism, in part because of the way the community  riven by officers shooting Alton Sterling last July 5  came together in dealing with tragedy. Any time you have an officer-involved shooting, it can be difficult for a community, Moore said, but people put aside their differences in a time of troubles.

Weeks later, disastrous flooding compelled the community to come together once again. In August 2016, there were no murders in East Baton Rouge Parish.

Thats not the norm, obviously. Moore told the Press Club of Baton Rouge on Monday that the law enforcement community is working on the recent uptick in killings, including more domestic violence incidents.

Challenges, though, abound  including the division between officers and the community.

Moore is a strong supporter of the BRAVE initiative that targeted young gang offenders in some inner-city neighborhoods, where a small minority has terrorized others. We cant do this without the support of the community, he said.

BRAVE has worked, although future funding for the effort is problematic: We have seen that group murders are still on the decline, Moore said, but if you ever take your foot off that, it will come right back.

He said law enforcement is looking for ways to use BRAVE methods to target the drug trade, often the source of deadly encounters, but domestic violence is also a scourge: about 20 victims a week are asking his office to drop charges against abusers, for various reasons.

Moore has been one of the foremost advocates of better treatment for substance abuse and mental illness that clogs the parish prison.

He said a MacArthur Foundation grant will pay some of the cost of hiring a jail administrator who can help steer to other options those who can be safely released. A former staffer in the New Orleans Public Defenders Office has been hired with a similar grant to work in the city jail there.

Moore said local officials, including Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome and acting chief administrative officer Jim Llorens, are working on a funding package for the diversion program, but the first hire was delayed because an early candidate for the position backed out.

And after all, where do police take the mentally disturbed who must be arrested? Moore backed a millage to create a Bridge Center for these cases, but the Dec. 10 tax proposition failed by a small margin.

It makes no financial sense to have the jail overcrowded, forcing the parish to spend $8 million to $10 million on housing prisoners elsewhere, when alternative treatment of some offenders would be more useful, Moore said.

Still, resources are at a premium. He said both Baton Rouge police and the Sheriffs Office have fewer officers than they would like, even as killings have increased. We are not happy about where we are with the numbers, Moore said.

Louisiana, he added, is at the top of every list of the drivers of crime.

Stephanie Desselle: Retiring after more than 20 years at the Council for a Better Louisiana, she has made an indelible mark on state policy, particularly in education, but also through her role in growing the Leadership Louisiana program. Experience suggests that she will continue to make suggestions even if no longer on the CABL staff.

Email Lanny Keller at lkeller@theadvocate.com.
New Orleans City Councilwoman LaToya Cantrell announced her mayoral candidacy months ago, but unlike her best-known rivals, former Civil District Court Judge Michael Bagneris and former Municipal Court Judge Desiree Charbonnet, she never held a big public unveiling.

Better late than never. With qualifying finally in the books and the field set, Cantrell appeared at the New Orleans Jazz Market in Central City Tuesday night for what was billed as a platform event, but which functioned as a belated introduction to a campaign that's already well underway.

As with the other events, people-watching was part of the process. Among the notable attendees in the full and festive crowd was state Sen. and Louisiana Democratic Party chair Karen Carter Peterson, who had floated a possible run of her own earlier this month. The two posed for photos afterwards, and while Peterson didn't offer a formal endorsement, she said that "when friends do big things, true friends show up."

Thematically, Cantrell's lengthy speech focused on the reality, also addressed by her rivals in their announcements, that that the city's successes haven't solved all its problems or benefited all residents equally.

"We are a world class city, but if feels like we live in a third world country," Cantrell quoted an unnamed resident saying.

She offered a few crowd-pleasing specifics, including a vow to suspend traffic cameras pending a study on whether they increase safety in addition to providing a stream of revenue. Cantrell suggested the fines are particularly tough on poor and working class people.

She promised a crackdown on litter, an unspecified policy to ease the property tax burden on "struggling families," merit raises for city employees and an anti-crime strategy centered on community policing.

Cantrell also said she'd create an Office of Youth and Family Services to coordinate and enhance disparate public sector programs (when she said that there shouldn't be "children in the neutral ground shaking cans," she meant that funding for extra-curricular opportunities should be stronger, not that she'd outlaw the practice, she said afterward).

As Charbonnet did when she announced in May, Cantrell offered some implicit contrasts between the two women vying to become the city's first female mayor.

While Charbonnet had stressed her family's generational local roots, Cantrell, a California native who attended Xavier University and never left, talked of finding her "soul" in New Orleans. Charbonnet, who hit the gender angle hard, entered to the hit "Girl on Fire," but Cantrell invited fully dressed-out Mardi Gras Indians on the stage and basically shrugged off the idea of becoming the first woman mayor. Charbonnet's announcement focused on her background as municipal court judge, and Cantrell's leaned heavily on her history as a neighborhood advocate in Broadmoor.

The speech, punctuated by a lively delivery heavy with frequent ad-libs, also hinted at a contrast in personality. While all but admitting that Charbonnet may be smoother and more polished, Cantrell owned what she described as her "passion."

"I've even been described like a dog on a bone," she said. "Believe me, I'm going to continue hunting for that bone."
BILOXI, Miss. (AP)  A group of Gulf Coast leaders has recommended that Amtrak restore a passenger train route that goes through the Gulf Coast.

The Gulf Coast Working Group in a report issued Monday night recommended Congress consider two routes  a New Orleans to Orlando, Florida daily round trip route and a New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama daily round trip.

Can't see video below? Click here.

Louisiana, Mobile and Mississippi would have to come up with the money for the Mobile route.

"This report makes clear the need to restore passenger rail service along the Gulf Coast and provides a path to get us there," said U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, who helped create the working group Congress approved as part of the FAST Act in 2015. "While there's lots of work ahead, this service will not only help us meet the future transportation needs of the region but could also be a boon for tourism and the local economy."

The Working Group used information for the Federal Railroad Administration, Amtrak, the Southern Rail Commission, CSX (the owner of the tracks the trains would run on) and communities along the route.

"This encouraging study shows that passenger rail service could be restored along the Coast quickly and at a reasonable cost," said Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi, and a supporter of the project. "Completion of this report is an important step in the process, and it brings us closer to delivering the numerous benefits of passenger rail to the entire Gulf Coast region."

According to a release from Wicker's office, it would take about $117.6 million to restart the service. In Mississippi, it would stop in Bay St. Louis, Gulfport, Biloxi and Pascagoula on the Coast. Even if the federal government comes up with the money to launch and operate the passenger service, there are many details to be worked out by Amtrak, CSX and the cities on the route, the report notes.

Wicker has said both he and fellow Mississippi Republican Sen. Thad Cochran support the project. The route through the Coast is backed by the city officials and a large crowd of people turned out last year to see a test run of the service.

The Coast has had several passenger routes over the decades. The last was the Sunset Limited that went from Miami to Los Angeles with stops on the Mississippi Coast. That service ended after Hurricane Katrina hit.
A Gowrie woman who was charged after police allegedly found the drug ice stashed in her hairbrush swore and hurled a cup of water at a magistrate after she was refused bail in court.

Tracey Organ, 38, lashed out at Magistrate Peter Morrison when she faced the ACT Magistrates Court, charged with drug offences and possessing stolen property, on Wednesday.

"F--- you. You hear me?" she shouted at Mr Morrison.

She stood up and pitched the plastic cup towards the magistrate before Corrections officers restrained her.

"You don't know shit, dog," Ms Organ yelled before she was led back down to the cells.
Former Greens senators Larissa Waters and Scott Ludlam could be on the hook for $3 million in parliamentary salaries  a debt their party leader thinks should be waived.

Richard Di Natale said Mr Ludlam and Ms Waters, who resigned from the Senate within days of each other after being found to be dual-citizens, and therefore ineligible to stand for Parliament under the constitution, had "already paid a pretty high price" and should not have to pay back money earned since their elections.

Mr Ludlam, who was elected in 2007, is estimated to have earned $1.6 million during his time in Parliament. Ms Waters, who won a Queensland Senate spot in 2011, is estimated to have earned $1.2 million before stepping down on Tuesday.

Senator Di Natale, still reeling from losing his two deputy co-leaders and scrambling to reassure a shocked and disappointed membership party processes will improve, said he believed Ms Waters and Mr Ludlam should receive the same treatment Special Minister of State Scott Ryan afforded former Family First senator Bob Day, and be granted a waiver.
Since he graduated from high school three years ago, Paul Nguyen has done about 1000 hours of paid work and 6000 hours of volunteer work at youth centres and councils.

He has a TAFE certificate in social and community services and everyone he works for tells him he is doing very well.

Paul Nguyen has been unable to find a full-time job for nearly two years. Credit:Wolter Peeters

But Mr Nguyen has been unable to find a full-time job for nearly two years.

"I've applied for over a hundred jobs, just anywhere and everywhere," said Mr Nguyen, 20, who lives in Guildford.
Christopher Daunt put a semi-automatic pistol to the head of his mate and fellow drug dealer, Christopher Robertson, and accused him of being a police officer in the moments before he was repeatedly hit with a hammer and killed in a North Lambton home in March, 2015.

"You're either a copper or you're trying to rip me off and I'm gonna kill you," Mr Daunt said, according to the account Robertson gave police when he finally confessed to the killing more than a year later.

Chris Daunt was last seen in April, 2015. His body was found at Seahampton in June, 2016. His mate Christopher Robertson was charged with his murder.

Mr Daunt was "highly agitated" about a drug deal he was due to make in Sydney and paranoid that Robertson was setting him up when he pulled the gun and threatened Robertson in a North Lambton home about 6.45pm on March 29.

A few moments earlier the pair had smoked amphetamines together and, according to Robertson, he had told Mr Daunt he no longer wanted to supply drugs for him.
Cabinet expansion: 13 ministries for Congress, Maoist Centre to get 9

A meeting of top leaders of the ruling coalitionNepali Congress and CPN (Maoist Centre)on Tuesday finalised the number of ministries for them and other parties.
Angry family members grieving for an Indigenous father who died in custody have marched on Parliament, accusing authorities of telling divergent stories and shackling him while on life support.

Eric Whittaker, 35, was held on remand in Parklea prison late last month before he sustained head injuries.

Diane Whittaker (centre) is comforted by Daisy Fernando (right). Both are aunts of Eric Whittaker who died in custody. Credit:Kate Geraghty

According to his family, Corrective Services NSW said he had fallen in a yard, whereas police said it was in an office.

The Kamilaroi man, a father of five from Walgett in the state's west, died in hospital on July 4 when his life support was turned off.
A Brisbane man who has spent 44 years legally blind  yet cycled thousands of kilometres across Australia  believes an Australian will create a bionic eye in his lifetime.

And he is encouraging all Australians to play a role in bringing the invention to the market.

Blind brothers Lorin (left) and Dean Nicholson at a rest stop in New South Wales as they pedalled from Perth to Sydney in 2010. Credit:Graham Tidy GGT

Lorin Nicholson, 48, makes most of us feel like underachievers.

Born in Wollongong and schooled in Tamworth, Mr Nicholson makes his living from motivational speeches, telling businesses and students how his blindness became a virtue for adventure.
A 20-year-old man is in hospital after he was kneecapped and shot in the stomach, apparently with two different guns, outside his Toowoomba home.

Police are hunting two men who drove off after seemingly trying to drag the man into their car, then shooting him, about 1am on Wednesday.

Police are investigating the scene of a shooting in Toowoomba. Credit:Nine News / Twitter

Toowoomba police Detective Inspector David Isherwood said the victim had been living at the home on Curzon Street, Rangeville, temporarily and knew the men.

"It would appear that they were trying to drag him to the car prior to the shooting incident," he said.
Australia's fictional on-screen expert on all things infrastructure and "nation building" has weighed in on Brisbane's Cross River Rail, and it's not good news.

Comedic luminary Rob Sitch plays permanently frustrated Nation Building Authority head Tony Woodward on the ABC's hit comedy Utopia, which has been lauded for its depressingly accurate portrayal of the public service.

Rob Sitch, who stars in Utopia alongside Kitty Flanagan and Celia Pacquola, said Cross River Rail was "like the poster child project of Australia".

In the first two seasons he was regularly called upon to hose down enthusiasm for hyped but completely unfeasible projects such as the Very Fast Train.

On Wednesday morning, he gave a dire prognosis for Queensland's biggest proposed infrastructure project, the $5.4 billion Cross River Rail.
This is probably not the security droid we're looking for.

The egg-shaped robot, known as the K5 Autonomous Data Machine, drew sympathy and jeers on Monday after it stumbled down a set of steps and into a fountain at Washington Harbour, an office and retail complex in the Georgetown neighbourhood in Washington, D.C. The photos were widely shared.

Stairs proved to be the K5's nemesis. Credit:Twitter: @bilalfarooqui

The robot is 1.5 metres tall, weighs 136 kilograms and can travel up to 5 kilometres per hour. It bears a passing resemblance to R2-D2 or perhaps a Dalek.

The K5's pop-culture cousin is clearly RoboCop. It is equipped with, among other things, thermal imaging, automatic license plate recognition and a video camera. Knightscope, the California-based maker of the robot, said its machines can be "an additional set of intelligent eyes and ears" for security and law enforcement. Its clients include data centres, hospitals and shopping malls.
A woman found dead in the shower at a Melbourne city buck's party was an Australian soldier.

The Australian Defence Force on Wednesday confirmed the 20-year-old woman from Western Australia was a member of the army.

But questions remain about how she came to meet the 11-man buck's group, who had booked out a room on the 10th floor of CBD hotel Oaks on Market.

It is believed the woman, who was wearing a black long-sleeved top, blue denim shorts and white runners, returned to the hotel room with the men on Saturday night. Several members of the group had been partying at a King Street nightclub.
Transurban has been asked to prove that the West Gate Tunnel's controversial off-ramps into Melbourne's city centre need to be built at all.

And at the first day of hearings into the impacts of the $5.5 billion project, VicRoads was granted secrecy over evidence it will give  because of what it says are "national security" concerns over the West Gate Bridge.

An artist's impression of the Footscray Road elevated freeway section of the West Gate Tunnel. Credit:Victorian government

A preliminary review of the proposal by Planning Minister Richard Wynne's hand-picked experts, released on Wednesday, queried fundamental aspects of the project.

The tollroad includes a connection to Dynon Road in West Melbourne, which has raised serious concerns from residents and Melbourne City Council over traffic flooding local streets.
Two children have been pricked by hidden syringe needles in a supermarket in Melbourne's north-west in an act police described as "malicious".

Victoria Police are investigating two separate incidents at the Coles supermarket on Pascoe Vale Road in Broadmeadows on Monday.

The first incident happened at 1.30pm when a child was pricked by a syringe that was hidden under a rail believed to near the deli section.

Another was pricked about an hour later, which led to the discovery of the syringe by the child's mother.
A senior V/Line manager who was paid an annual salary of more than half a million dollars, despite refusing to provide his resume, is alleged by Victoria's anti-corruption watchdog to have also profited from a $2.2 million training scam.

The Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission claims Alan Clifford, former general manager of rolling stock at V/Line used his senior position with Victoria's state-owned regional rail operator to involve his partner Nicola Spiers in the scam.

Alan Clifford, former general manager rolling stock at V/Line, gave evidence to IBAC's Investigation Lansdowne on Wednesday. Credit:Adam Carey

Covert footage presented by IBAC on Wednesday showed Mr Clifford joking about the prospect of his partner being jailed over the alleged scam, telling her it wouldn't be too bad for her because prisoners got to wear pink jumpsuits.

Mr Clifford was initially hired as a consultant at V/Line in September 2014 following a "captain's pick" by then-chief executive Theo Taifalos, the IBAC investigation heard.
The brother of wanted WA man Shawn Newton has begged for his brother to hand himself into police in a powerful video message.

For the past several days Homicide Detectives have been searching for Shawn Adam Newton, 42, in connection to the death of Perth mother-of-three, Rebecca Jane Gascoigne, 35.

Police found Ms Gascoigne's body in a Mitsubishi Lancer being driven on the Cedric Street on-ramp at around 12.35am on Saturday morning.

The driver of the Mitsubishi Lancer, a 49-year-old man, has been helping police with their inquiries.
All in the same vote

To make the third phase of local polls a success, big parties should go to the interior of Province 2
"Taser, Taser, Taser", Australian Federal Police can be heard shouting at a man who refuses to leave a plane that was forced to return to Perth on Tuesday night because of his disruptive behaviour.

Qantas put out a statement on Wednesday morning claiming flight QF652 set for Brisbane returned to Perth about an hour into the trip because a seemingly drunk man repeatedly failed to follow crew instructions.

The passenger was removed from the plane in Perth and met by waiting Australian Federal Police.

A 38-year-old Queensland man appeared at Perth's Magistrates Court on Wednesday and is facing charges relating to assaulting aircrew and obstructing police.
Jakarta: The Indonesian government has banned Islamic organisation Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, claiming it needs to safeguard the existence of the nation's pluralist state ideology Pancasila and the 1945 Constitution.

Hizbut Tahrir, which keeps its membership numbers secret, is opposed to democracy and campaigns peacefully for a global caliphate governed by Sharia law.

Indonesian Muslims shout "Allahu Akbar' (God is great) during a rally to denounce the decree in Jakarta on Tuesday. Credit:AP

The ban comes a week after Indonesian President Joko Widodo issued a regulation that gave the government the power to disband a mass organisation it considers threatens the unity of the country without going through the court process.

Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, which has already announced it would challenge the new government regulation in the Constitutional Court, said it would mount a separate legal challenge to the ban.
Jakarta: Alfred Sitorus is a self-appointed footpath warrior.

Every Friday afternoon he and other members of the Koalisi Pejalan Kaki (Coalition of Pedestrians) pound the pavements of Jakarta defending walkers' rights.

A motorcyclist rests on his bike as another passes him on a footpath in Jakarta on Tuesday. Credit:Tatan Syuflana

Jakarta's footpaths are infamously ambushed by motorcycles, street food vendors, piles of concrete, electricians repairing cables and poles. Anyone who wants to use sidewalks to actually walk are often sidelined.

A Stanford University study recently found Indonesians walked the least number of steps in the world - just 3513 a day - compared to the almost 7000 daily steps taken by the energetic citizens of the planet's most active country, Hong Kong.
Seoul: North Korea carries out public executions on river banks and at school grounds and marketplaces for charges such as stealing copper from factory machines, distributing media from South Korea and prostitution, a report issued Wednesday said.

The report, by a Seoul-based non-government group, said the often extra-judicial decisions for public executions are frequently influenced by "bad" family background or a government campaign to discourage certain behaviour.

People walk past a TV screen showing an image of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Tokyo. Credit:AP

The report is part of an ambitious project by the Transitional Justice Working Group to map sites of mass killings and mass burials in North Korea so that - one day - evidence can be collected and the regime can be held accountable for what the group describes as crimes against humanity.

"Victim testimony was often given a limited place in previous hearings, like those on the former Yugoslavia and on the Holocaust," said Sarah Son, one of the authors of the mapping report. "But location-based data provides a bigger picture on patterns of abuse within a country."
Washington: For seven years, Republicans have vowed to "repeal and replace" Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act, widely dubbed Obamacare.

But President Donald Trump has now taken to Twitter to demand that they settle for just repealing, and worry about the rest later.

His outburst came after two more Republican senators declared on Monday night that they would oppose the Senate Republican bill.

The announcement by Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas left their leaders at least two votes short of the number needed to begin debate on their bill to dismantle Mr Obama's signature domestic policy achievement. Two other Republican senators, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Susan Collins of Maine, had already said they would not support a procedural step to begin debate.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and British Prime Minister Theresa May in London last week. Credit:AAP It literally used to be half the government  known in the 17th and 18th centuries as the Southern Department, the opposite number to the Northern Department which later became the Foreign Office. Gradually, bits and pieces of domestic governance calved into their own departments. The Home Office is what's left over. British Home Secretary Amber Rudd with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in London last week. Credit:AAP Though the modern focus on anti-terrorism makes sense out of linking domestic intelligence to national policing, the connection to immigration is "much more tenuous", McCrae says. Immigration is basically a big "transactional processing" operation.

Despite public perception that it's a security operation, it's almost entirely not that. Former Conservative minister for immigration Damian Green compared it to a supermarket chain in terms of size, with the impossible job of trying to keep 99.5 per cent of its customers happy while arresting the other 0.5 per cent. A crisis a day: Baroness Lynne Featherstone, former UK Home Office minister. Credit:UK Government Green, in an extended interview for the IfG, said the Home Office was essentially "a department for saying 'no'". "It's what any interior ministry is, you know: 'We want to stop you committing crime, we want to stop you from coming in if you're an illegal immigrant, you know, we want to stop you from behaving in a disorderly fashion on a Saturday night', that sort of [thing] and so ministers get like that. UK's Jack Straw was told to forget "blue sky thinking" as Home Secretary. Credit:AP

"... you'll realise that whatever you want to liberalise, the Home Office will always have an argument for why it's a bad idea, because somebody will exploit it to commit a crime or do something anti-social. "I think it's inherent in the system; interior ministries will always be slightly antipathetic to other parts of the government machine". Many former Home Office ministers say it was a magnet for emergencies and scandals  some internally generated, some external. Baroness Featherstone, when asked about unexpected events or crises that affected her work, said it happened "every morning, really". Labour's Liam Byrne, the Home Office's former minister for police and counter-terrorism, said "the Home Office is basically Britain's risk management business". On his first day in the office, Tony Blair's first Home Secretary Jack Straw was told to forget blue-sky thinking  his permanent secretary told him the only thing likely to fall from the sky was trouble.

"At any moment in this department an Exocet [missile] will come out of nowhere and land just there and you have to deal with it because this is the Home Office." And Liberal Democrat Jeremy Browne, minister of state for crime prevention, said the department had a "slightly discouraged and quite a defensive mindset" where "success constituted getting to the end of the week without being blamed for anything". He also complained that this one department generated about a third of all government legislation, which meant long hours in parliamentary committees. If Australia had copied the Home Office five years ago, it would have modelled itself on a department with an oversight role over national police forces, the domestic security service MI5, and an independent UK Border Agency. But the latter was a bureaucratic disaster, and Prime Minister Theresa May, then home secretary, was forced to bring immigration and border services back in-house under her direct control, after a scandal involving the secret relaxation of passport checks and a backlog of more than 300,000 asylum and immigration cases.

Before that, in 2006, prisons and probation responsibilities were carved off the Home Office into a new Justice Ministry after another scandal involving violent foreign prisoners being freed into the community rather than deported. Nevertheless, despite this gradual trend of slimming down, the Home Office is one of the most powerful places in government and home secretary is one of the three big jobs in Cabinet. "Whoever is in that role has got to be a senior politician who can command authority," McCrae says. It is now second only to the Treasury in power and influence. This helps attract the best and brightest of the civil service, McCrae says. But he says the history of government department mergers in the UK suggests that policy-driven mergers rarely work out.

"The case for designing the Home Office and putting all these thing together in policy terms is probably more of the moment, with the combination of the terror threat, policing and immigration," he says. But it's not a good idea to combine policy areas just because they sound good in a speech together. "Be very sceptical about changes to government that try to bring areas together or try to split them apart for some policy logic reason. They seldom actually work. "The really successful mergers are all driven by operational necessity not policy reasons." Finally, don't expect any benefit from the merger to appear overnight.
Arson attack on ward members home in Tikapur

An unknown gang set fire to the house of ward member of Lamkichuha Municipality-3 in the district on Tuesday night. However, no one was injured in the fire as Ward member Prem Bahadur Chaudhary and his family members were sleeping in an adjacent house.
Baidya, Chand and Bhattarai couldnt justify party split: Dahal

CPN (Maoist Centre) Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal has said that there is no alternative to unification of the revolutionary forces, saying that none of the leaders who deserted the Maoists party could justify the reason for the split.
Controversial DSP Das suspended

The Ministry of Home Affairs has suspended DSP Sanjeeb Sharma Das, whose name was recommended for promotion, from his post on Wednesday.
Local veteran John Hince of Earl Graham Post 159 has been elected as the state commander of the Department of Texas American Legion and will now preside over all posts in the state.

The Bryan resident is aiming to attract the next generation of service members to the patriotic organization that was chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1919.

"Too many people see this veterans' organization as an old man at a bar with a drink in his hand and a cigar in the other," Hince said. "I want to change that perception."

Hince and his wife, Gerry, have been active with the local post for the past 12 years, and both have held various positions of leadership in the organization. Hince has served as district commander and division commander and in 2015 was vice commander for the state.

The Vietnam War veteran was chosen to serve as leader of the Texas chapter during the 99th annual convention Sunday in Killeen. Hince said he believes people trust that he cares about the American Legion and about veterans.

"I don't try to be something I'm not," said Hince, who served in the Army four years. "You go into each election knowing you might lose, so my ego isn't tied into it. ... I also have a great post here in Bryan to come back to, and I can contribute to that.

"There were people who didn't support me [in the election] but are my friends of mine, and we still have that good relationship," he said.

Hince campaigned across the state for 10 months before his election, saying he wanted people to recognize him and to trust him as someone who could faithfully serve as the face of the organization. Among his priorities is bridging the gap between veterans who served in the Korean and Vietnam wars and veterans who have been in combat recently.

Using leftover budget funds preserved by last year's commander, Hince will be putting his new vice commander, Phil Westerman, in charge of creating a task force to recruit more young veterans and female service members. Hince also said the American Legion has the potential to do more outreach to charities and children's organizations, and he would like a more prominent social media presence.

"I don't pretend to be an expert on that, but I know we need it, and I want a webmaster who can do it," he said.

Mitchell Craddock, who served as the president of the Texas A&M Student Veterans Association this past school year, said not many local student veterans are Legion members. Those who are, he said, are in their late 30s.

"There is a generational gap," he said. "I have a feeling what the American Legion needs to do in order to recruit the generations going to school is to look into organizations such as Team Red, White, & Blue, groups that are currently doing things like hosting 5Ks or running with Silkies marches. ... I think it would be beneficial to replicate the vision of [Team RWB], getting younger members by marketing to them correctly. A lot of these younger groups are on Facebook and Twitter."

Hince said he will be traveling across the state for the next year, and his presence will be significantly reduced in Bryan, though he still plans to serve on the Legion honor guard for area veteran funerals as often as he can. Bryan Post 159 also recently elected Hince as a local officer despite knowing he might win the state election, and Hince said he hopes to be in Bryan for at least six months out of the year spent as commander.

He stressed that he will be traveling alongside his wife, who retired as a colonel after 31 years in the Army.

"Full disclosure: Gerry is my partner traveling with me," Hince said. "A lot of commanders have aides. ... Gerry is my partner who will some day have leadership positions above Post 159. I wouldn't call her my aide, because she is much more than that; my pedigree has nothing on hers. She set her life aside to live here in Texas [with me], and who could be more caring to do so?"

John McKinny served as state commander in 2015-2016, with Hince as his vice commander. The former commander said Hince has always been willing to travel whenever and wherever he is needed and has unwavering loyalty to the American Legion.

"I've worked with a lot of folks in my life," McKinny said. "And he is one of the most dedicated Legionnaires I've ever worked with... He is a man of integrity, dedication, and I am amazed by him."

McKinny has faith that Hince will complete his mission to attract new members.

"I'm proud of him, and he'll do a good job," he said. "He has good ideas to create new membership."
A Caldwell woman has been sentenced to four years in prison for confronting a man with a gun in the Seven Star Missionary Baptist Church in March 2015, officials said.

Burleson County jurors convicted Beverly Dean Jones, 54, on Thursday of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after less than an hour of deliberation. She was sentenced Friday.

Authorities arrested Jones on March 8, 2015, after she threatened to kill a man with a firearm while he was in church.

According to a press release from the Burleson County District Attorney's Office, the subsequent investigation revealed Jones had made harassing phone calls and sent threats to the man, resulting in her being given multiple criminal trespass warnings.

Because of the deadly weapon used in the offense, Jones will be required to serve at least half of her sentence before being eligible for parole.

Erica Morgan, who represented the state alongside Joan Scroggins, said in a statement that "no one has the right to harm another person or make someone feel unsafe. Ms. Jones threatened another's life just to make herself feel powerful." Morgan also praised jurors for sending the message that "bullies will not be tolerated."

Julie Renken, Burleson County District Attorney, said in a statement that she was "proud of everyone involved for looking past gender biases to seek justice for a domestic violence victim, regardless of gender."

Donnie Andreski, Jones's attorney, said he had no comment on the case's outcome.
In introducing the plan for teacher pay increases approved by the College Station school board Tuesday night, the district's superintendent told trustees that salary bumps aren't as simple as politicians in Austin make them out to be.

"One of the things that is frustrating for me as a superintendent and school leaders in public schools in Texas is the notion put forth by the governor that we are not using our money adequately and that we can just carve out $1,000 for teacher raises," Clark Ealy, the district's superintendent, told the board.

Trustees approved a new teacher pay scale and an across-the-board pay raise of 1.5 percent for all employees.

Teachers next school year will earn 1.5 to 3 percent more depending on their experience level. Now, new hires with no experience will make $42,500, up from $41,200 last year, and teachers with at least 26 years of experience will make $59,337, up from $57,729.

At the meeting's close, Ealy's own salary received a 1.5 percent bump, amounting to a raise of nearly $3,000.

Ealy said administrators realized this year that an analysis of teacher compensation had not been done in the district in about 10 years. Administrators worked with the Teacher Association of School Boards to develop a compensation plan that is competitive with peer districts.

In formulating the plan, CSISD chief financial officer Mike Martindale said the district considered schools of comparable size in the state, including the Bryan school district and Georgetown school district.

The proposed increases were passed unanimously and without comment from board members.

"I'm very proud of the work that this administrative team has done under the leadership that this school board has provided in taking care of our most valuable resource," Ealy said.

The raise was approved on the first day of a special session in the Texas Legislature, where Gov. Gregg Abbott has called for $1,000 teacher pay raises among other public education agenda items.

Heading into the special session, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick announced last week a plan to give longtime teachers and retirees bonuses. In unveiling the plan, he said schools have enough money to pay teachers better but prioritize their funding poorly.

Bryan school district officials say they will postpone their discussion of teacher pay raises until they are more certain what mandates are coming out of Austin this summer.

At Monday's Bryan school board meeting, Tim Rocka, the district's deputy superintendent of human resources, said he and other administrators normally would have presented a proposal for a teacher pay increase around July.

"And we are very concerned that we may do something and the state require us to then do something different," Rocka told the board Monday.

The district's teacher salary pay scale current ranges from $41,500 for new teachers with no experience to $50,875 for teachers with 20 years of experience.

The board is expected to look at revising this pay scale next month, but on Monday, they approved a 3 percent raise for employees in non-teaching roles, including secretaries, bus drivers and cafeteria staff.

Rocka said the raise is necessary to keep the district competitive with other comparable job markets, adding that the raises will not cost the district much relative to teacher pay increases.

"We need them, and we want what's best for them and our students," said Ruthie Waller, a Bryan trustee. "I wish it could be more, but we have to show that we appreciate them."
Texas A&M University has ranked among the 2018 Fiske Guide to Colleges' list of best schools for the money and was the only public college in the state to be recognized.

Compiled by former New York Times education editor Edward B. Fiske, the more than three-decade-old guide focuses on providing resources to students and their parents looking to make a cost-conscious decision on what university they should attend.

Rice University was the only other institution in the state to make the list, alongside A&M's Southeastern Conference peers the University of Florida and the University of Missouri.
The intersection of Old Reliance Road and Earl Rudder Freeway in Bryan will be closed for about five hours this morning.

Bryan police will be conducting accident reconstruction at the location of a fatal motorcycle accident that occurred July 8. To do so, they will need to close the northbound feeder road off Texas 6 and all lanes of Old Reliance Road. The reconstruction will begin at 7 a.m., and last till about noon.

Motorists are encouraged to use the entrance and exit ramps to the highway before and after Old Reliance Road. Traffic can enter Texas 6 northbound near Sam Rayburn Middle School and exit at Texas 21. The road to Rudder High School near Austins Colony and its bypass also will be closed in the morning.
Texas A&Ms outgoing Provost and Executive Vice President Karan Watson has been removed from her position after an internal audit found significant conflict of interest issues tied to business dealings her spouse had with the university, according to documents obtained by The Eagle.

The investigation is likely to trigger sweeping changes throughout A&M System universities and agencies by prohibiting spouses and close family members of senior administrators from doing business with the System.

Over the last seven years since Karan Watson took over as provost, Nancy Watson  owner of a conflict resolution company in Bryan-College Station  was paid $438,733 by the university for training services. The audit highlighted the $9,838 she was paid by the provosts office and the $105,767 from the Office for Diversity, which reports to the provost.

Though the inquiry found the arrangement violated the A&M Systems ethics policy and cited five areas in which the provost failed to comply with the code of conduct, it did not find any evidence that she pressured or tried to influence staff to hire her spouse, according to a six-page document from the auditor, which answers to the A&M System Board of Regents.

The action taken by President Michael K. Young was in response to a whistleblowers complaint made in May, marking the third grievance accusing the Watsons of similar possible ethics violations connected to Nancy Watsons business  the Center for Change and Conflict Resolution. Young sent the complaint the same day it was filed to the auditor's office, A&M officials said.

Karan Watson said Wednesday that she was surprised when she learned about Youngs decision. She said believes she was not afforded due process in this matter and denied a meaningful opportunity to respond to the allegations in the report.

She said she disagreed with the findings and "can only speculate as to the motives of those persons who prompted this action.

(We) have endeavored to avoid the appearance of any such violations, Watson wrote, adding that she regularly reported her relationship with Nancy Watson on her annual disclosure form. That also was noted in the audit.

Through a university spokesperson, Young declined to comment on Watson's remarks.

An senior administrator at A&M said prior to Young receiving the whistleblower complaint, he was not aware of Nancy Watson's business.

Watson, who announced her retirement last August and was given a farewell party at the close of the semester in May, had opted to stay on until her replacement arrived.

A month ago, Carol A. Fierke, dean of the Rackham Graduate School and vice provost for academic affairs in graduate studies at the University of Michigan, was hired as provost and was expected to take over in mid-October. However, Young said in an email to top administrators this morning that Fierke will start Sept. 1. The email did not address the situation with Watson.

Douglas Palmer, professor of educational psychology in the College of Education and Human Development, will serve as interim provost until Fierke arrives. He recently served as interim chief operating officer over Texas A&M University at Galveston and previously was dean of the College of Education and Human Development at A&M from 2006 until 2015.

Faculty Senate Speaker Angie Hill Price, an associate professor of manufacturing and mechanical engineering technology, said she could not comment on Watsons removal, but did say she and her colleagues are looking forward to working with interim Provost Palmer and future Provost Fierke in advancing the mission of the university.

Karan Watson, who was hired at A&M 34 years ago, will remain on faculty. She holds the position of regents professor in the departments of electrical and computer engineering, and computer science and engineering. She said she has been in a relationship with Nancy Watson for 32 years and that they were married in California in 2008. Gay marriage was not recognized in Texas until a June 2015 Supreme Court ruling, which required all 50 states to legalize same-sex unions.

Previous complaints

The role of provost is among the most high-profile of the university administration  described recently as second in charge for the university by Young. It serves as the chief academic officer with responsibilities including the management of the universitys academic mission, the planning, budgeting, supervising and reviewing educational programs, and acts as a point of contact for outside institutions including accreditation agencies, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the Texas Legislature and others.

In fiscal year 2011  under then-President R. Bowen Loftin  and in the fall of 2014  under interim President Mark Hussey  two similar complaints were filed. Both resulted in auditors suggesting the university ask for requests for proposals to draw in more vendors offering similar services from which the university could choose.

Karan Watson said Wednesday that neither she nor her wife were made aware of the previous two investigations.

Nancy Watsons business was selected from among two other vendors and awarded $20,000 per year for a five-year period. Following the second complaint, the university entered into an agreement with a total of six vendors, including the Center for Change and Conflict Resolution, for services set to expire January 2018. This replaced the previous agreement.

The Center for Change and Conflict Resolution is the only vendor of the six to be used by the university in the past three years.

Although auditors reported that employees interviewed throughout several departments  the report didnt specify how many  said their selection of Nancy Watsons business was based on positive past experience or recommendations, there still remained the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Karan Watson said she believes the reports analysis to be misleading. She said the majority of the Office of Diversitys 56 payments to the Center for Change and Conflict Resolution pre-dated Dr. Nancy Watsons appointment as a member of the staff and noted the list of preferred vendors for the university is managed by Jerry Strawser, executive vice president of finance and operations.

In addition to her role as a vendor, Nancy Watson also works part-time on staff in the Office of Diversity as director of climate enhancement initiatives and was promoted earlier this year to a separate part-time faculty position  clinical associate professor.

In the report, auditors said Nancy Watsons staff position with the Office of Diversity was of particular concern given that her university duties overlapped with the services provided by her company.

She is in a position to encourage departments to obtain the type of training provided by her business, which creates a conflict with the proper discharge of her official duties, auditors wrote in the report. Serving as both a vendor and an employee in the same subject matter areas is ill-advised and creates an unavoidable conflict of interest.

The auditors noted Nancy Watsons staff position was approved by the president of the university, but that they could not find documentation immediately available that showed Watsons faculty position was similarly cleared of nepotism concerns.

Karan Watson said conflict of interest allegation between Nancy Watsons staff role and her external capacity through her business to be simply a subjective belief unsupported by any actual evidence.

Although the report alleges a conflict of interest, the report does not describe how Dr. Nancy Watsons business interest substantially conflicted with the discharge of her or (my) official duties and responsibilities, a requirement of the TAMU policy, Watson said.

Concern was also expressed over the fact that a link to the Center for Change and Conflict Resolutions website is posted on Nancy Watsons official Texas A&M web page; auditors suggested its removal.

Both women told auditors Karan Watson made it a point to recuse herself from matters dealing with Nancy Watson or her business.

Auditors said in the report that Karan Watson told them complaints generally occur after her relationship with Nancy is discussed at any time of public event. A reception recognizing Watsons years of service as provost was held April 28, during which Watson told auditors she had spoken about their relationship.

Perception of conflict

Moving forward, the auditors recommended university officials should determine if the services provided by Nancy should be provided by her as an employee or as a vendor, as they believe it is not appropriate for her to serve in both roles.

As for Karan Watson, the auditors found she should have made a greater effort to ensure the perception of a conflict of interest was mitigated.

Operating in part under the assumption that everyone knew about their relationship does not adequately address the conflict of interest created when someone in Karans position is married to a vendor to whom the university has paid a considerable amount of money, auditors wrote in the report.

Karan Watson said she took issue with this finding and said she believes she and her wife took more than the steps required or expected by TAMU to ensure transparency and full disclosure.

She said A&M policy does not require more and that it is unclear what more (I) should have done beyond disclosing (our) relationship and recusing (myself) from all matters associated with Dr. Nancy Watson and the center.

The auditors report states that they expect to see a policy presented to the A&M System Board of Regents expanding upon the 2015 Texas State law prohibiting state agencies from contracting with a business owned by the CEO of an institution or a member of their family. The proposal would be for the system to extend the prohibition to include senior administrators, preventing what unfolded under Watson from happening.

Watson announced last August that she intended to step down from her role as provost at the end of May 2017. In a university statement at the time, Young thanked Watson for her many years of remarkable service to the university and said she has been critical to the current era of unprecedented excellence and opportunity for Texas A&M.

Watson was appointed as A&Ms first female provost and executive vice president in March 2011 after serving in the interim role since July 2009 and as associate provost and dean of faculties between 2002 and 2008.

In addition to her responsibilities as provost, she served in numerous leadership roles over the years including as interim vice president and associate provost for diversity, associate dean for academic affairs in the College of Engineering and a member of the faculty senate.

The Texas Tech University graduate first joined the Texas A&M faculty in 1983 at the age of 26 as a member of the College of Engineering.
Achyut Wagle holds PhD in economics and is currently a professor at the Kathmandu University School of Management. He is an econo-political analyst, writing for The Kathmandu Post for many years.
Making a return to our two favourite summer locations, Mount Maunganui and Nelson in early January 2023, we've got whiff of the first release lineup and me oh my, yes boy
Final decision on constituency delimitation commission tomorrow

The government has said the formation of 'Election Constituency Delimitation Commission' meant for determining election constituencies for the purpose of election to the members of the Federal Parliament and members of the State Assemblies has reached the final phase.
The Virginia Dare was surrounded on all sides.

One enemy vessel was festooned with a flag whose demand was to Surrender the Booty while a skeleton on another boat served as a threatening figurehead.

Three-year-old Fisher Schenker was among passengers and crew who defended the Virginia Dare from the onslaught of water balloons, hoses and other aquatic ordnance.

The fourth and final day of the Smith Mountain Lake Pirate Days wrapped up Sunday with events such as the Virginia Dare pirate battle near Hales Ford Bridge in Moneta.

In its fifth year, the celebratory activities of Pirate Days were large-scale, such as a pirate ball last Thursday evening at Mangos Bar & Grill that kicked off the long weekend, or as small as businesses giving out pirate booty in the form of candy or even pirate-themed Band-Aids.

As green beer and corned beef are hallmarks of any St. Patricks Day celebration, Pirate Days has its own thematic expression, according to Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Vicki Gardner.

The trappings of marauders of old included an abundance of Jolly Rogers, scarves and tri-cornered hats.

Scheduled activities at various businesses around the lake this year included a costume contest, a scavenger hunt and pirate battles such as the one near Hales Ford Bridge Sunday. Last year one of the marinas stole the mother of the owner of another marina and held her at ransom, Gardner said.

The origins of Pirate Days began as a pirate-themed family event at Gardners lakeside home. After mentioning the activity one day during a chamber committee meeting, a person suggested it would be a good idea to do around Smith Mountain Lake.

Businesses come up with their own pirate-themed activity, while the chamber facilitates Pirate Days.

Now were five years into it, and I think its a raving success, Gardner said.

The open sides of the Virginia Dares upper level gave little protection against the bursts of water from passing boats Sunday. Buckets of water, meanwhile, stood ready for reloading water guns.

Even Virginia Dare Capt. Bill Morando left the bridge from time to time to defend the ship with a well-aimed blast of water.

The boats getting a free washing today, said Virginia Dare office manager Amanda Smith.

Among the ships passengers were longtime friends Gloria Darling and Ann Bowden. Sunday was the first time in about 10 years that the two had seen each other.

This is fun, a dripping Darling said before adding, I didnt want to get wet because we were going out.

Its only water. It will dry, she later remarked.

Pirate Days appeals to any age group, Gardner said.

Every time you pick up the paper you see one disaster after another, she said. Isnt it nice to have escapism? To have people turn into pirates for a day or a weekend  to let the world go by and say argghh.

As Virginia Dare headed back to harbor Sunday, a final taunt came from its chief antagonist: the Capt. Party boat, based in Roanoke.

You can run but you cant hide, taunted a modern buccaneer.

Sherese A. Gore reports for The News & Advance
NORWALK  Dick Booth, a longtime Norwalk resident who served the city and participated in numerous volunteer organizations, died Wednesday morning. He was 95.

Booth had suffered a stroke Friday, said his daughter, Lorene Bora.

He was quite a fixture in Norwalk for close to 60 years, Bora said. He was interested in everything and everybody. He had a very curious mind. Anybody he met, he wanted to get to know them and ask them questions. He was very engaged in life.

Booth was a World War II veteran. Over the years, he was Scoutmaster of Boy Scout Troop 19, served as president of the Norwalk Historical Society, sat on the boards of the Norwalk United Methodist Church and Fairfield County Computer Users Group, and chaired the citys Fair Rent Commission.

First appointed to commission in May 1985, Booth was elected its chairman in 1995. In that year, he presided over a multipart public hearing on Dreamy Hollow Cooperative Apartments complaint over rising rents.

Sonja Devitt, Norwalks director of human relations and fair rent at the time, said Booth applied his conscientiousness and thoroughness to what she described as a precedent-setting case.

He paid such close attention to detail, Devitt said. He was an incredibly fair person. He wanted to be sure that the Fair Rent Commission was fair and that we didnt omit anything.

The commission concluded, among other things, the ground lease was heavily one-sided in favor of the property owner, that buildings had been allowed to severely deteriorate and that the rent on the ground lease was excessive. Although the property owner appealed the ruling, a settlement was later reached which allowed the residents to purchase their units, Devitt said.

Booth served as Scoutmaster for Boy Scout Troop 19 from 1964 to 1966 and later as commissioner of the Sasqua District of Boy Scouts.

As a board member of the Norwalk Historical Society and later its president, Booth brought the citys history to life in everything from its bicentennial celebration to day-to-day volunteering.

They did a lot at the Mill Hill complex, Bora said of her parents work there. They spent many Sunday afternoons staffing it and keeping it open and giving tours.

Booths passion for Norwalks history lives on in walking maps created for the NorWALKER program. Many of the walking maps contain neighborhood histories prepared by him.

Without his contributions to the narratives, I dont know if we would be able to have compiled such detail so quickly, said Kaitlin Latham, health education associate at the Norwalk Health Department.

Booth was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., on July 17, 1922, the son of immigrants from Scotland. After graduating high school, he worked as a repairperson for Pitney Bowes before serving in the U.S. Army Air Forces in the South Pacific during World War II.

After the war, he moved to Connecticut where he received a degree in business administration from the University of Bridgeport and returned to Pitney Bowes where he worked 49 years in marketing, marketing research, training and customer service.

Booth had his hobbies, as well. They included riding his Triumph motorcycle into his early 80s, traveling the world with his wife, Elizabeth, and collecting computers.

Most people his age were afraid of them and he was just very interested and wondering how they work, Lorene Bora said.

Bora said her father remained active after moving to Atria Senior Living in Darien in August.

He is survived by daughter, Lorene (Booth) Bora, of Darien, and sons Richard Booth Jr., of Shorewood, Wisc., and David Booth, of New Milford, as well as five grandchildren and two great grandchildren. He is predeceased by his wife, Elizabeth.

Booths funeral will take place July 29 at a morning time that has yet to be determined, at Magner Funeral Home in Norwalk.
Weve all savored being in the zone: creative thoughts flow from brain to fingertips, timelessness, perhaps even an experience of euphoria. This elevated state of consciousness is the secret behind many outstanding athletes, daredevils, artists and entrepreneurs. It has a name -- flow -- given to it by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

You can harness the power of flow.

Entrepreneurs trying to break the status quo need to be better than average. Innovations and breakthroughs arent exclusively the result of hard work and hustle, especially as machines and computers take over monotonous tasks. Entrepreneurs need creativity to excel and develop new technologies.

Sixty percent of CEOs polled by IBM ranked creativity as the most important leadership quality. Entrepreneurs seeking flow must have the right environment and lifestyle habits but there are nootropics (aka cognitive enhancers) that can change the biochemistry of our brain to achieve flow more easily.

Related: The Happiest People Know Their 'Flow State.' What's Yours?

Increase creativity, output and performance.

Since Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi labeled and analyzed flow states, it has become a hot topic for performance enhancement.

As Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheals book, Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work shows, high performance individuals are using flow enhancing techniques across the board. These mental states are the objective of high performers from Sergey Brin and Google executives to elite special forces.

The benefits of achieving flow states are manifold. Military researchers found that flow states can increase learning ability up to 230 percent in novice snipers. McKinsey researchers studied top executives for 10 years and found they were five times more productive in flow states.

Imagine working on a business venture with five times the productivity and the ability to learn new materials 230 percent quicker than your competition. That alone would make flow states advantageous, but the true benefit is for creativity.

In 2013, phase one of the Red Bull Hacking Creativity Project started as a joint effort between MIT Media Lab, a group of TED fellows and other flow experts to better understand creativity and flow states.

In late 2016, after reviewing more than 30,000 research papers and interviewing hundreds of subject-matter experts, the project reached two conclusions. First, creativity is essential for solving complex problems. Second, creativity is less of a skill and more of a state of mind: i.e: a flow state.

Oliver Braithwaite, founder of the private tuition company Stars & Catz Teacher Network, said: Many of our students are executives who wish to take up a musical instrument to take their minds off work, de-stress and be creative. In part, what theyre seeking is actually a state of flow, where all other thoughts are suspended, stress drops away and creativity kicks in. Personally, as both an entrepreneur and a musician, Im aware that my most creative and effective work comes when enjoyment, creativity and focus coexist. Thats how Id define being in flow.

Related: How to Achieve a State of Total Concentration

Nootropic interventions to achieve flow.

If flow states were easy to achieve, wed all be using them nonstop. There are environmental, psychological and emotional factors that affect to our ability to achieve flow regularly.

As new evidence and technologies come online, we better understand the neurochemistry of flow states and how to achieve it, including through supplements. Steven Kotler, author and flow researcher, recounted a simple flow hack using many commonly found techniques.

20 - 25 minute jog to release endorphins.

A cup of coffee -- caffeine for brain chemicals called dopamine and norepinephrine.

Marijuana -- THC provides a chemical called anandamide used for lateral thinking.

According to Kotler, this essentially mimics the neurochemistry of a flow states. It isnt sustainable, but it is a quick hack into this mental space (assuming you live in a part of the world where THC is legal).

Related: Mexico Joins Canada In Making Cannabis Legal, Leaving the US Far Behind in Marijuana Policy.

Aside from this clearly defined formula, there are a host of other substances utilized for creativity and achieving flow.

Entheogens hacking flow.

The term entheogen refers to psychoactive compounds, including LSD, psilocybin and mescaline, among others. Literally meaning generating the divine within, these compounds have been used in traditional cultures for thousands of years.

Even though many are illegal in the western world, entheogens like LSD and psilocybin are experiencing a resurgence of interest and research. Before these substances were made illegal, researcher James Fadiman conducted experiments using entheogens to enhance problem solving.

Within the experiment, 27 individuals (including engineers, mathematicians, architects, and engineer-physicists) were told to bring a problem they had been struggling with for months. Using small doses of mescaline, 44 percent of the cohort found breakthrough solutions (including patents and tangible technologies).

Entheogenic compounds have gone unstudied for decades, but the newfound interest is already bearing fruit. A brain imaging study conducted at Imperial College London by Dr. Carhart-Harris suggests regions of the brain associated with creativity are affected under the influence of entheogenic compounds.

From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, top executives are microdosing psychedelics to produce flow states, hack creativity, and produce breakthrough innovations. While these compounds are still illegal, there is some hope that will change over time.

Related: Tim Ferriss: If You're Not Happy With What You Have, You Might Never Be Happy

Self experimentation and individuality.

The drawback to nootropics and cognitive enhancers is the lack of scientific evidence and minefield of snake oil salesman. Many of the purported smart drugs are no more useful than the placebo effect while others come with unnecessary side effects.

Self experimentation becomes key for entrepreneurs trying to enhance flow states and creativity. When I visited the Peak Brain Institute in Los Angeles to perform a QEEG brain map, we found a synthetic nootropic called phenylpiracetam enhanced brain waves associated with flow states. Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Hill confirmed the cognitive boost providing empirical evidence this smart drug works for me.

Finding nootropic concoctions to achieve flow states need not be scary, risky or challenging. For risk averse beginners, simply taking L-theanine (an amino acid found in green tea) with your morning cup of coffee can increase alpha brain waves, which are associated with flow states.

Related: 3 Surprising Ways to Unlock Your Creativity

Entrepreneurs serve the world by creating useful innovations and technology. To solve global problems, entrepreneurs must be able to achieve more creative flow states and do so more consistently.

Through nootropic supplementation and innovative technologies, we can now achieve flow more readily to create more value and wealth in our businesses.

Related:



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This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com


STAMFORD  A Norwalk man accused of the 2014 killing of his girlfriend in her Dreamy Hollow apartment rejected a plea deal of 30 years in prison Wednesday and could face up to 60 years if convicted.

Bertony Thompson, 46, of 41 Wolfpit Ave., was charged with murder in relation to the September 2014 slaying of his longtime companion, Jacalyn Silverman, 62.

The state offered Thompson a 30-year prison sentence in exchange for a guilty plea. Clad in an orange prison jumpsuit in Stamford Superior Court, Thompson stood next to his lawyer, Alan Williams, who told the court that his client declined the states offer.

Ive received a written document from my client stating that he declines the offer and he wishes to go to trial," Williams said.

Judge Richard Comerford expressed surprise.

The court has made an offer of disposition which until just recently we thought it was seen favorably by the lawyer and his client, Comerford said.

Thompson clearly answered "yes" as Comerford asked if he understood that he is charged with murder and the maximum penalty is 60 years.

The offer I made is 30 years," Comerford said. Based upon discussion with your attorney and careful consideration you don't wish to take advantage of the offer, correct?

Thompson answered affirmatively.

Comerford withdrew the courts offer and indicated that once it was withdrawn, there would be no turning back.

I will not resurrect my offer, Comerford said.

Assistant State's Attorney Paul Ferencek said that a trial will likely take place in early November.

By rejecting this offer, its to be understood that its not going to be made again, Ferencek said.

Silverman's brother and daughter were in the courtroom and declined comment on the developments. The said only that they make it a point to attend every court appearance.

Thompson has been held on $1 million bond since his Sept. 12, 2014 arrest.

According to court documents, Norwalk police received a call for assistance the night of Sept. 10 from a man who said his cousin called him to say he received a disturbing text message from his son, Thompson, which read, Please bring my body home.

Since Thompson's father lives in North Carolina, the man said he drove over to Thompson's home in an attempt to make contact with him, but was unable to reach him or his girlfriend, Silverman.

At that point, the man contacted the Norwalk police, who responded to Silverman's Dreamy Hollow condo at 10:40 p.m.

When officers were unable to make contact with the condos residents, firefighters assisted officers in forcing their way in through a kitchen window.

Police found Thompson lying on a bed in the second floor bedroom, breathing but unresponsive. Next to him, on the left side of the bed, was Silverman, who police say was not breathing.

Silverman was determined to be deceased at 11:15 p.m.

Police say the room did not show any signs of a struggle and that the room was not in disarray. A partial bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey and an empty beer bottle were found on Thompson's side of the bed.

Medical examiners ruled Silvermans cause of death to be asphyxiation. Police said the manner of death was homicide.

An autopsy later revealed hemorrhaging, a fractured hyoid bone, as well as fractured ribs, which police say are signs of strangulation.

Thompson was taken to Norwalk Hospital for treatment and was later interviewed by police at his bedside. He was said to have had scratches on his neck and was "very intoxicated" and may have had other substances in his system when he was admitted.

When officers spoke with Thompson, he said, We got into a tussle over his drinking problem. He went on to say the two became physical and said, "I grabbed her around the neck and I pushed her."

Thompson said he then went downstairs and continued to drink before coming back upstairs and lying down next to Silverman. He told police he knew Silverman was dead when he looked at her.
Food grains meant for quake-hit areas rot in warehouses

Rice and pulses meant to be distributed in the earthquake-affected areas in Chumbanubri and Dharche rural municipalities of Gorkha have started to rot in warehouses.
NORWALK  The Norwalk Board of Education is poised to appoint Yvette Goorevitch as the public school districts new chief of specialized learning and student services Saturday during a specially scheduled afternoon meeting.

The meeting, which is open to the public, is at 1 p.m. in the Nautilus Room on the second floor of the Maritime Aquarium.

If hired, Goorevitch would bring roughly 40 years of experience to the position that oversees the districts special education programs and services.

The hiring would come in a time of critical importance for the district that has been looking to turn around its special education offerings. Various issues with the special education department have been identified in the past several years, most recently outlined in a 2015 Capitol Region Education Council (CREC) Report.

The districts former chief of special education, Lynn Toper, took the reins in July 2016. She was charged with the task of turning the department around and promised a failure is not an option work ethic.

Though Toper used the CREC report as a road map for the departments future, the high hopes of her tenure never fully materialized. Toper went on partial leave in October after an unexpected family illness before she tendered her full resignation Dec. 7.

A national search was conducted to find an optimal replacement. Though many candidates were undoubtedly considered, Goorevitch is the first and only known candidate to be placed before the board for appointment.

Goorevitch has served as the director of special and alternative education for the New Rochelle, N.Y., school district for the past 25 years. Before that she served for 12 years in special education for the New York City Department of Education. She began her career as a special education teacher in New York City.

Norwalk Public Schools officials who met with Goorevtich during a series of closed-door meetings at City Hall in late June said they were very impressed by the candidate.

Board of Education Chairman Mike Lyons said at the time that he was taken by Goorevitchs extensive experience with a socioeconomically similar city to Norwalk and thats shes encountered the same problems with special education there that have long been problems in Norwalk.

Others were fond of Goorevitchs proven long-term commitment to a school district, with hopes that she may be able to make a similar commitment to Norwalk.

A bio of Goorevitch released by Norwalk Public Schools called her a seasoned instructional leader and astute financial manager.

Goorevitch was named the 2016 New York Council of Administrators of Special Education Special Education Administrator of the year, an award that recognizes an individual who has demonstrated outstanding leadership and accomplishment for the benefit of students with disabilities.

She was also recognized by the Hudson Valley Special Education Parent Center and Westchester Institute for Human Development for her work with parents.

Goorevitch earned a master of science in special education and a master of education in supervision and administration in special education from Teachers College at Columbia University. She also completed advanced Ed.D degree coursework there. Goorevitch also holds a bachelor of science in psychology from Brooklyn College.

KSchultz@thehour.com; 203-842-2567; @kevinedschultz
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NORWALK  The city has welcomed a new nonprofit with the grand opening of Connecticut Radio Information Systems newest office at the Gate Lodge in Mathews Park.

Lou Mirando, outreach coordinator for CRIS, said the new facility is the nonprofits fifth broadcast station and will serve southern Fairfield County, offering 24/7 broadcasts of local and national print publications for people who are visually impaired or unable to read due to other disabilities.

We do that by having volunteers reading newspapers and magazines 24/7, Mirando said. For our listeners, we get special radios so they can pick up our signal ... Weve gotten local people already volunteering to read and record programing, and our big push is the reading of local newspapers so that people who are homebound or in nursing homes or assisted living facilities can stay in contact with the outside world. We do that by reading the newspapers, obituaries, shopping adds in local newspapers.

CRIS headquarters are located in Windsor, with locations in Danbury, West Haven, Norwich and, now, Norwalk.

CRIS was founded 39 years ago, and is the states only radio-reading service. Volunteers for CRIS read articles published in local newspapers and the New York Times Metro Edition, which are recorded and streamed over Internet-connected devices. CIS has more than 300 volunteers across the state, who provide on-air voice talent, audio editing and broadcast production.

Norwalk Mayor Harry Rilling praised CRIS Monday for providing specially tuned radios at no charge to its listeners. He added that he was impressed with the organizations service to children, in which audio versions of classroom materials and childrens magazines for children unable to read due to learning disabilities.

More Information For more information or to download a volunteer application, visit www.crisradio.org, email info@crisradio.org, or call 860-527-8000. See More Collapse

Adding service in lower Fairfield County is an important milestone for CRIS Radio, said Paul A. Young, chairman of CRIS board of directors.

In addition to broadcasting newspaper and magazine articles, CRIS also custom records classroom materials for teachers to best meet the needs of their students with reading disabilities. The CRISKids Audio Library offers more than 900 classroom titles, including 17 childrens magazines, also recorded by CRIS volunteers.

CRIS also offers CRIS en Espanol and CRISAccess, featuring Spanish-language newspapers and magazines and audible tours for museums. The nonprofit also streams audio versions of English and Spanish-language newspapers and magazines to each patient room at Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center, and audio versions of childrens magazines to each patient room at Connecticut Childrens Medical Center. CRIS has also partnered with Norwalk-area nursing homes to ensure radios are accessible, and the organization offers audio versions of World War I historical records and documents in collaboration with the Connecticut State Library and IDEAL Group.

CRIS recordings are available through specially tuned broadcast or Internet radios, online with a free CRIS Radio app downloaded onto smartphones or other mobile devices, computers connected to the Internet, toll-free through the CRIS Telephone Reader, or on demand at www.crisradio.org. The subscription is $30 annually for unlimited access.

Mirando said the station will officially begin broadcasting in the Norwalk area by the end of the month.

kkrasselt@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2563; @kaitlynkrasselt
WILTON  After months of debate, developer Jim Fieber announced Wednesday that he would withdraw the controversial application that would have seen his property at 183 Ridgefield Road changed from a residential zone to the now nonexistent age restricted overlay district.

Casey Healy, a lawyer who represents Fieber, announced the decision in a letter to Town Planner Bob Nerney, the Planning Commission and First Selectman Lynne Vanderslice.

The application had previously been scheduled for discussion at the upcoming Planning and Zoning Commission meeting on Monday, July 24.

Since the application proposed changing the zoning for 183 Ridgefield Road to the age restricted overlay district (AROD), which no longer exists after the regulation was rescinded by the Planning and Zoning Commission two weeks ago, Healy explained that the moving forward with proposal was pointless.

Attorney [Ira] Bloom further stated on the record that if the applicant were to proceed with the application, it would be denied. Accordingly, as attorney for 183 Ridgefield Road LLC, I hereby withdraw the above-referenced application, wrote Healy.

Nothing in this letter is intended to or should be construed to waive any claims arising out of the Commissions or its agents failure to publish notice that complied with Connecticut law, Healy added.

While the withdrawal is a setback for Fieber, he is still holding onto hope that an age-restricted development is still a possibility.

On the same day that he withdrew his zone change application, Fieber submitted another application to the Planning and Zoning Commission to have an amended age restricted overlay district regulation put back into place.

The proposal puts forward some modifications to the original regulation, which was rescinded by the town after it learned of an error with the timing of their required public notice.

Healy wrote in the new application that, based on the input from nearby residents, the new AROD proposal would limit development on Ridgefield to between Danbury Road and the intersection of Ridgefield and Drum Hill roads.

The proposal would also increase the minimum acreage requirement from three to five acres; decrease the maximum development density from three to two units per acre for Ridgefield Road and Westport Road developments; require a minimum building setback of 100 feet from any state-designated scenic road; and decrease the maximum allowable site coverage from 40 percent to 30 percent.

Though Fiebers latest application leaves the future wide open for 183 Ridgefield Road, opposition to age-restricted developments along Ridgefield Road still remains.

Vicki Mavis, one of the oppositions most vocal leaders, still has a pending application seeking a moratorium on age-restricted developments in Wilton, as well as having Ridgefield Road removed entirely from consideration for such developments.

In the past, Fieber pointed out that there was always a possibility that he wouldnt develop the site. However, he also acknowledged that he has other plans in the works in the event that the age-restricted development falls through.

In a March interview with the Villager, Fieber said he was also considering either a five-house subdivision for the parcel of land or a 66-unit affordable housing complex should the age-restricted development fall through.

ptomlinson@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2570; Twitter: @Tomlinson_PE
The Nebraska State Blanket Shoot was held July 15-16 at Liberty Range, home of the Lower Loup Muzzle Loaders of Dannebrog.

A total of 21 of the top black powder shooters in Nebraska participated.

The term blanket shoot originated during the fur trade era. During the annual mountain rendezvous of the 1840s, mountain men and fur traders would challenge each other in shooting matches. Each person would lay a prize on a trade blanket. As the shoot progressed the best shot took his choice of prize and so on down the line.

The prize blanket on last weekends shoot held various prizes, from an old bench-held meat grinder to handmade knives, beaded bags, powder, patches and round balls, as well as various books.

The range officers overseeing the event were Roger Fisher of Grand Island and Will Bisland of Cozad.

The next event at Liberty Range, 2 miles north and  east of the Dannebrog elevator or 2 miles east of the grain bins on Eighth Avenue off of Hwy 11, will be Aug. 17-21. Camping and demonstrations will be provided by club members. For more information, contact Roger Grim of Dannebrog at (308) 226-2578, Fred Lueking of Grand Island at (308) 384-6709 or any club member.
As part of his 2017 Farm Bill Listening Tour, Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb., will host August listening sessions in Broken Bow, Beatrice and South Sioux City.

The Farm Bill Listening Tour provides 3rd District constituents an opportunity to visit with Smith, ask questions and share their thoughts on the future of agriculture policy. Nebraska Director of Agriculture Greg Ibach will also join the discussions.

Sound agriculture policies are a crucial part of ensuring farmers and ranchers have the resources they need to succeed, Smith said. As Congress prepares to draft a new Farm Bill, I look forward to receiving direct input from 3rd District producers. Getting these policies right will help producers overcome challenges they face and ensure the 3rd District remains the top-producing agriculture district in the country.

The Broken Bow Farm Bill Listening Session will be from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. on Aug. 1 at the Cobblestone Hotel & Suites, 2750 S. 27th Ave.

The Beatrice session will be from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. on Aug. 3 at the Homestead National Monument Education Center, 8523 W. State Highway 4.

The South Sioux City session will be from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. on Aug. 23 at City Hall, 1615 First Ave.

Information about the Farm Bill Listening Tour is also available on Smiths website at AdrianSmith.house.gov/FarmBillTour. For questions about these events, contact Smiths Grand Island office at (308) 384-3900.
COLUMBUS  The price of copper has been inching up slightly in 2017, and so have copper thefts.

Copper theft, done specifically to pick up a small amount of cash quickly, is especially harmful because of the safety risks it creates when the metal is taken from electric utility property, such as substations and power poles. The risk can cause fires, explosions, power outages, electric shock or even loss of life.

In the past week, Nebraska Public Power District has seen a significant jump in thefts of copper from its locked substations. Individuals have entered several substations illegally and have taken grounds, typically an eight-inch copper rod used to direct stray current to the ground and minimize equipment damage. There is no way to know by looking at the ground rod and wiring whether it is carrying electricity or not at any given time.

We are asking the public to be our eyes and ears and be on the lookout for the potential theft of copper wiring from transmission poles and substations across the state, said NPPD Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Tom Kent.

The substations targeted are located in rural areas as opposed to those located in communities. Stealing copper or other metals from substations or electric facilities is a crime.

Kent explained that copper theft is a significant safety issue for the thieves, but it can also potentially cause harm to members of the public and utility workers. Copper thefts can cause power outages that can be inconvenient for customers and costly to businesses.

NPPD urges anyone who sees suspicious activity at electric substations to contact a local law enforcement agency with a description of the individuals and vehicles involved.

Kent emphasized that individuals should not try to apprehend the intruders.

He also stressed that NPPDs service vehicles are well-marked with bright orange bumpers. Other utilities serving specific areas have wording or logos on their vehicles identifying them as an electric utility, too.

The public should alert local law enforcement of any vehicles that are not identified as being from a utility and activities that appear to be unusual, or individuals that appear to be acting suspicious around electric facilities including power line poles, Kent said.

NPPD works with law enforcement agencies across the state to make them aware of the signs of potential copper theft and their personal safety when investigating these thefts. Some of the signs of copper theft to watch for include:

 Loose or broken wires

 Broken utility pole attachments

 Open gates at unattended substations or holes in the security fence

 Burn marks on utility equipment

 Electrical arcing
Gas stations refuse to purchase petrol, diesel

Kathmandu-based private petrol pump operators refused to purchase petroleum products from Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC) on Tuesday, citing delays in upward revision in compensation for losses inflicted by shrinkage of petrol and diesel.
The Central District Health Department is a testament to how a little government funding can help an agency do a lot of good.

In the departments annual report to the city of Grand Island and Hall, Hamilton and Merrick counties this month, Health Director Teresa Anderson noted that just 8 percent of its annual budget for the current year came from its government support and the percentage is expected to be the same for the upcoming fiscal years $3.9 million budget.

Thats down considerably from the 16 percent of its budget that came from government support in 2010.

It was just 8 percent because we continued to build on those city/county funds, use them and leverage those funds to bring in additional dollars in different areas, Anderson said.

The city and Hall County each will provide the Health Department $110,706. Merrick County will contribute $27,686.

In these tough economic times with city and county governments having to look for every place they can cut spending, its excellent for the City Council and the county boards to be able to see how much bang theyre getting for their bucks. Theyre making it possible for the Central District Health Department to continue to operate, but theyre not having to provide most of its funding.

The department provides its three counties a wide variety of services, from immunizations and health clinics to education, research, and water testing.

It also administers the federal Women, Infants and Children nutrition program that provides resources to help young children, nursing mothers and pregnant women access healthy foods.

Anderson said the WIC program benefits local grocery stores as $1.3 million worth of WIC vouchers have been redeemed locally so far this fiscal year. It also keeps children healthy, reducing health care expenses.

About half of the Health Departments total budget goes to personnel expenses. Since 2011, the department has steadily increased its staff, so its personnel expenses have increased from $1.3 million in 2011 to $2.3 million this year.

In 2011-12, the Health Department received $746,537 in federal grants and $399,591 in state grants. For the 2017-18 budget, it expects to receive $1,034,536 in federal grants and $431,838 in state grants.

When the department presented its annual report to city and county officials, Anderson told them how important their partnership is.

She said they realize that each city and county has many important ways it could spend its taxpayers money. So they make sure they stretch their government funding as far as it will go and show the departments value to the taxpayers.

We are very pleased to have you as our partners, Anderson said. We could not survive without the partnerships we have in this room.
Lawmakers concerned by ADBLs behaviour

Lawmakers on Tuesday expressed concern at the involvement of Agricultural Development Bank Limited (ADBL) in misappropriating funds while selling land.
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Linkedin EDITORIAL (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 08:10 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a95669a 4 Editorial #Editorial,#SetyaNovanto,setya-novanto,DPR,#DPR,house-of-representatives,e-ID,eID-graft-case,#eIDgraftcase,KPK,#KPK,corruption-eradication-commission Free

The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) has finally named the House of Representatives Speaker Setya Novanto a suspect after several months investigating his alleged role in embezzling Rp 2.3 trillion (US$172 million) in state funds allocated for electronic ID (e-ID) card procurement.

This is indeed a display of steel-like firmness on the part of the antigraft body as it has been under constant political pressure from vengeful House politicians flexing their muscles through an inquiry into alleged procedural flaws by the KPK in conducting its tasks. The inquiry involves members of parties in the ruling coalition such as the Golkar Party, which Setya currently chairs, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), to which President Joko Jokowi Widodo belongs, NasDem, Hanura and the United Development Party (PPP).

The inquiry has sparked public outrage as it is regarded as a means to justify revision of the KPK Law, which would eventually strip the anticorruption commission of some of its authority, which has helped it ensnare previous untouchables.

Declaring Setya a suspect is likely to exacerbate the adversarial relationship between the KPK and the House. Whatever the risk, however, the KPK has reached the point of no return. The noisy political maneuvering should not distract the KPKs efforts to build a case that would convince the Corruption Courts panel of judges to rule in its favor.

Naming Setya a graft suspect is already an achievement for the KPK, but bringing him to court is another matter. As Golkar leader and House speaker, Setya plays a key role in facilitating state policy-making and we can therefore safely assume that he is part of the inner circle of President Jokowi, along with all the privileges he enjoys, whether we like it or not. Moreover, Golkar under Setya is the first party to have announced support for Jokowis reelection in 2019.

With all the powers at his disposal, Setya may challenge the KPKs move in court, just as the then sole candidate for National Police chief Budi Gunawan and former tax office chief Hadi Purnomo slipped through the KPKs net. In their respective pretrial hearings it was declared that the KPKs decisions to name Budi and Hadi graft suspects were illegitimate.

Although the pretrial decisions did not cancel out any act of corruption, until now the KPK has not resumed its probes into the two high-profile cases.

We do hope the KPK is well prepared for the legal measures Setya could take to survive. Given his allegedly pivotal role, Setya could lead the KPK to other players. If Setya was a big fish, there are even bigger fish the KPK can catch.

The e-ID card scandal is yet another illustration of how rent-seeking practices operate. Politicians, with the help of government officials, certainly profit, but it is difficult to deny that they commit the practices to help their respective parties cover their whopping operational costs.

It would be a major breakthrough if the KPK could find a link between the ill-gotten money and political parties.
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Linkedin Devina Heriyanto (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 08:31 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a95679d 1 Opinion setya-novanto,#SetyaNovanto,eID-graft-case,#eIDgraftcase,house-of-representatives,#DPR,DPR,House-speaker,GolkarParty,#GolkarParty,Golkar,Donald-Trump,Freeport-Indonesia,q-a,#PostScript Free

On Monday, the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) named House of Representatives Speaker Setya Novanto a suspect in a case of alleged embezzlement involving an electronic identity card (e-ID) program. The e-ID case sparked has public outrage since it is apparently the largest example of corruption ever investigated in the country, reportedly costing the state Rp 2.3 trillion (US$172.8 million) and implicating dozens of House members.

"The KPK names SN, a House member for the 2009 to 2014 session, as the new suspect in the case," KPK chairman Agus Rahardjo said, referring to Setya by his initials.

The surprise is not that he was implicated, but rather that Setya was actually named a suspect. Setya is no stranger to high-profile graft cases. Since 1999, he has been linked to various cases that have forced him to appear frequently for questioning at the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) headquarters.

Setya Novantos involvement was mentioned as early as 2013 by Nazaruddin, during a hearing in which he was a whistleblower.

What is the e-ID case?

The e-ID graft case refers to the alleged embezzlement involving a massive mark-up of costs for the procurement of e-ID cards, a program rolled out during the administration of then president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in 2010.

As opposed to normal paper and ink cards, the e-ID cards also have chips that contain each citizens basic information. They were being introduced as an effort to integrate citizens data and information for banking, taxation and other civil purposes. The e-ID cards are also aimed at solving population registration issues that have for years been hampered by hard-to-fix problems, such as a person having more than one ID, or fake IDs.

It was alleged during the first hearing of the graft case on March 9 that nearly half of the Rp 5.9 trillion (US$441 million) budged for the e-ID cards was embezzled by government officials, lawmakers and businesspeople.

Before the case was revealed, people had complained about difficulties in obtaining e-ID cards despite the government continuously pushing citizens to register for them. Many complained they had to wait for a long time before they could get a card. Among the issues hampering the e-ID card distribution was a shortage of blank biometric cards.

The KPKs indictment in March alleged that as many as 37 lawmakers of Commission II, which oversees home affairs, received portions of the embezzled funds in return for helping to get the budget approved.

So far, the KPK has named four individuals suspects in the e-ID case: two senior officials at the Home Ministry, Irman and Sugiharto, a member of the House of Representatives, Miryam S. Haryani, and businessman Andi Agustinus aka Andi Narogong.

What is Setyas role in the e-ID graft case?

Setyas alleged role in the case was revealed in an indictment read out at a hearing at the Jakarta Corruption Court related to former Home Ministry officials Irman and Sugiharto.

The documents claim that Setya, who was a Golkar Party chairman when the case occurred, allegedly helped Andi secure the Houses approval to disburse Rp 5.9 trillion from the state budget for the project between 2010 and 2013. In return, Setya allegedly received Rp 574 billion.

Setya allegedly held a key role in arranging the money distribution among involved lawmakers. According to KPK chairman Agus Rahardjo, Setya was also involved in planning and procuring items for the project.

However, on previous occasions, Setya has claimed he was innocent of any misdeeds, claiming the allegations were simply rumors.

How will this affect his position in Golkar and the House?

In March, after the indictment, Golkar advisory board chief Aburizal Bakrie called for unity in the party and requested that another an extraordinary national congress (Munaslub) not be held to find Setyas replacement.

Under Setyas leadership, Golkar had just finished consolidating after a long leadership dispute between Agung Laksono and Aburizal. Tycoon Aburizal has usually taken an opposing political stance to Agung and Setya.

In May, Golkar Party executive chief Nurdin Halid once again made assurances that another Munaslub would not take place.

After Setya was named a suspect, House Deputy Speaker Fadli Zon said he would initiate a leadership meeting to discuss Setyas position.

Antigraft campaigners called on Setya to step down from his post. It is important for him to leave his post in order to ensure that he will not abuse his power to disrupt the KPKs investigation, Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) researcher Donal Fariz said. As a House Speaker, Setya will have control over the Houses efforts to push its inquiry into the KPK.

In May, Setya has called on lawmakers to accelerate the establishment of an inquiry team amid a rift among House factions.

Five of the 10 political factions at the House of Representatives have called on Setya to resign from his post after being named suspect.

According to the Legislative Institutions (MD3) Law, the Golkar Party, which is led by Setya, has the final say on whether to replace Setya.

How significant is Setya in Indonesias politics?

Setya has been known as a supporter of Jokowis administration since he was sworn in as Golkars chairman last year. The party previously supported Gerindra Party chairman Prabowo Subianto, Jokowis rival during the 2014 presidential election.

With the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), Golkar secures a majority for Jokowi in the legislature. Golkar has even reaffirmed its support for Jokowis re-election bid in 2019, which the President desperately needs since his partys champion, then incumbent Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama, lost Jakartas gubernatorial election.

Setya is not only helpful for Jokowi in Senayan, he also serves as a link to United States President Donald Trump. Setyas appearance in a Trump campaign event in September 2015 sparked controversy and raised questions about ethical conduct, but proved to be useful once Trump was elected president  against all odds.

Jokowi reportedly asked for Setyas help to contact the new American leader. Setya initially had planned to attend Trumps inauguration. The New York Times reported that Setya requested a meeting before the inauguration to discuss a possible business deal.

One possibility is that was about PT Freeport Indonesia, as Trump has enlisted the companys top shareholder Carl Icahn as his special adviser on business regulations. Setya was allegedly involved in a backroom deal in 2015 regarding Freeports contract extension.
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Linkedin Ethenia Novianty Windaningrum (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 14:28 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a9804f0 3 Opinion vacancy,discrimination,workforce,productivity,career Free

Have you seen any job advertisements in Indonesia with age limitations? From the governmental organizations, private companies, to startups, many vacancies set a maximum age threshold or age range of the applicants.

Maybe many Indonesians think that there is nothing wrong with this practice. Before studying and working in Denmark, I had never considered age limitation to be odd, but I do now.

When you hear discrimination, what appears in your mind? Is it gender, ethnicity, religion, social background, age, or all of those? Sadly, in Indonesian culture, age discrimination is not yet considered a serious matter; issues of ethnicity and religion are much more of a hot topic  especially recently. Furthermore, it seems like Indonesian society has a default expectation that peoples lives are based on stages with a specific age range; e.g. fresh graduates of bachelor degree should be 21-24, marriage age for women should be at 20-30, etc.

Should this social expectation and status define us as members of society? Will you, a 30-year old man, be able to restart life by applying as a new management trainee for a specific company in Indonesia? Or will you, a 35-year old female entrepreneur, be able to become a new entry-level civil servant and apply for a job in an Indonesian governmental organization? Most likely you wont, according to the companys regulations, unless you are applying through a special track.

These regulations have affected many people, without us realizing, let alone questioning such phenomena. My friend who applied for a job was rejected as he was a bit too old for the position. This is heartbreaking. Many people in Indonesia might think there is no possibility for a career-jump due to age limitations and have to be stuck in a job they no longer want anymore.

This does not always have to be the case. Denmark, a socialist and low-hierarchical country in northern Europe, is ranked as one of the worlds happiest countries.

In Denmark, I noticed that when I applied for any job, I never read any maximum age threshold in the vacancies. Why? Because first and foremost, age doesnt really matter, at the end of the day it is a matter of competence and attitudes.

Second, putting age limitations explicitly exudes discriminatory preference, which is against the societys core belief that everyone should have equal opportunities.

Third, there are many people who just started their bachelor degree education, for example, at 25 or even older. They might continue to a Masters degree straight away, or taking care of babies, travel or volunteer abroad, and do other things with their life before starting the desired job.

So there can be fresh graduates who are 30 years old. People can do what they like, fulfilling their own calling, and society wouldnt mind or judge. In my university summer course, two classmates were over 35; one of them was around 65, and both were still enthusiastic!

Age limitations should only apply for a minimum threshold.

For example, when you apply as a cashier in a supermarket, you should be mature enough not only to understand the technical aspects but also how to handle customers.

I have seen many elderly men working as cashiers in supermarkets in Denmark. Many bus drivers who also old, even more than 60. Being old should not cost you a job as long as you are still capable of fulfilling the job description.

Could age discrimination be a thing in Indonesia? What are the reasons for not hiring candidates who are older than the age limits according to the companys regulations? The reasons might be complex and again, related to the societys values and systems.

Of course, every employer has a certain expectation, but isnt it rude and doesnt it sound discriminatory to mention this age limitation in the job advert? Whats more important is, didnt they consider to be more open-minded by giving a chance for older candidates to improve their lives or push the restart button?

Everybody deserves a life-changing opportunity when they have worked hard enough.

***

The writer is a Masters graduate from Aarhus University, Denmark who has lived and worked in Denmark for three years.

---------------

We are looking for information, opinions, and in-depth analysis from experts or scholars in a variety of fields. We choose articles based on facts or opinions about general news, as well as quality analysis and commentary about Indonesia or international events. Send your piece to community@jakpost.com.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.

Topics : vacancy discrimination workforce productivity career
The coastal people of Rembang, Central Java, are known for their long history of shipbuilding expertise. The recent discovery of a vessel in the village of Punjulharjo in Rembang district, estimated to date back to the 7th century, serves as archeological evidence.

The old kingdoms with strong naval forces in Java always had flourishing shipbuilding ports in the northern coastal areas, from the Singasari period to the Majapahit Empire, the Demak Sultanate and to the rule of Islamic Mataram.

During the Dutch colonial era, shipyards supported the movement of cargo as well as Dutch troops in their control of Indonesia. Back then, many wooden freighters and warships with cannon were produced in Rembang.

Later, during the Japanese occupation, the Japanese troops forced Rembang shipyards to build hundreds of wooden vessels with diesel engines. Some 44,000 workers toiled away to meet the orders.

The Rembang shipyards have moved from Lasem to Sarang in the same regency. Today, hundreds of shipbuilders continue to produce wooden ships, each costing up to Rp 2 billion (US$150,257), depending on the size. With fishing equipment, the price can reach Rp 5 billion.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 20:06 1941 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a990c0e 1 Politics Golkar,GolkarParty,KPK,corruption,corruption-eradication,e-ID,#e-ID,Markus-Nari,graft-suspect Free

The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) has named former House of Representatives lawmaker Markus Nari of the Golkar Party a suspect in the multi-trillion-rupiah e-ID graft case.

His alleged role was to smoothen the deliberation of the e-ID project, including the marking up of its budget, at the House. In return, Markus allegedly received Rp 4 billion (US$300,000) from Irman, KPK spokesman Febri Diansyah said at a media briefing on Wednesday afternoon.

He was referring to one of two former Home Ministry officials currently standing trial in the case at the Jakarta Corruption Court.

The KPK has charged Markus under articles 3 or 2 (1) of the 2001 Corruption Eradication Law, which carry a maximum punishment of 20 years imprisonment and a Rp 1 billion fine.

(Read also: KPK names Setya Novanto suspect in e-ID graft)

Markus is the latest suspect to be named in the e-ID case, just two days after the KPK named House Speaker Setya Novanto a suspect in the same case.

Setya, who is also the Golkar Party chairman, is accused of playing a key role in planning a scheme to embezzle Rp 5.9 trillion from for the e-ID project.

Markus was previously named a suspect for perjury and alleged attempts to obstruct the KPK investigation into the e-ID graft case, which caused Rp 2.3 trillion in state losses. (kuk/ebf)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 15:10 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a983501 1 City balloon-seller,explosion,injury Free

A gas canister exploded in front of the Bina Insani elementary school in Cipondoh, Tangerang, Banten, wounding a man and several children on Wednesday morning.

The canister was reportedly used for filling balloons by a vendor before it went off at 8 a.m.

The incident severely injured the balloon seller and bystanders, including several Bina Insani students. The victims were rushed to the Usada Insani and Mulya hospitals in Cipondoh.

"It has been confirmed that there are no fatalities. However, the balloon seller is suffering from severe injuries and is currently hospitalized, said Cipondoh Police chief Comr. Bayu Suseno, as quoted by kompas.com on Wednesday.

He added that police were currently listing the injured students as well as other wounded bystanders. Meanwhile, the Bina Insani school suspended classes for the day. (agn)
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Linkedin Viriya P. Singgih (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 18:17 1941 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a98c633 1 Business energy-and-mineral-resources-ministry,counterterrorism,energy-assets,terrorist-attack Free

The Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry has teamed up with the National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) to protect the countrys energy assets from terrorist attack.

Under an agreement between both parties, the BNPT will undertake preventive measures to guarantee the security of all activities in the sector. In addition, they will also exchange data and information.

All this time, counterterrorism measures have been dominated by the hard approach. Now, we have started to undertake a soft approach to identifying and anticipating the problem as early as possible. Well, prevention is better than cure, BNPT chief Suhardi Alius said on Tuesday after signing the agreement at the ministrys office.

He added that such preventive measures were crucial as terrorists often targeted public places, including bus terminals and train stations, as well as vital facilities, such as oil refineries and depots.

Read also: Eradicating terrorism must be comprehensive: BNPT

Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Ignasius Jonan has welcomed the deal, saying that such counterterrorism measures ought to be implemented in the upstream oil and gas sector to ensure smooth exploration and exploitation activities.

The BNPT can also train one or two persons at each of our work units so that they can be prepared for a force majeure event, Jonan said. (lnd)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 12:12 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a975d55 4 Business ExxonMobil,east-natuna,gas-block,Natuna-Gas-Consortium,withdrawal Free

The Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry has announced that ExxonMobil has withdrawn itself from the Natuna Gas Consortium after studying the results of a feasibility study conducted on the block by the consortiums members.

The other two consortium members are state-owned energy company Pertamina and Thailands PTT EP.

The withdrawal is based on its own calculation. We will summon Exxon next week, said the ministrys Oil and Gas Director General I Gusti Nyoman Wiratmaja in Jakarta, as reported by tempo.co on Wednesday.

Exxons vice president of public and government affairs Erwin Maryoto confirmed the withdrawal. We are still committed to operating and finding business opportunities in Indonesia, said Erwin, without elaborating on the reasons for the withdrawal.

Exxon was a concession holder of the East Natuna Block together with Natuna D-Alpha in 1980, but Pertamina took over control of the block in 2008.

Meanwhile, Pertamina upstream director Syamsu Alam stressed that the results of the feasibility study would be handed over to the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry to be used as a reference for managing the block, particularly for deciding on incentives for the contractors.

Based on the basic reference of the gross split scheme, the contractors will get 45 percent of the benefits of gas exploration, but they may get more after considering various issues, including the investment needed for exploration and exploitation.

The East Natuna block, formerly known as D-Alpha, is located in the province of Riau Islands. With total proven reserves of 46 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas, it is one of the largest gas reserves in Asia. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 14:14 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a97f539 1 City bullying,Gunadarma-University Free

The family of a 19-year-old student at a private university, whose bullying was captured in a recent video that went viral, has demanded that the university take action against the perpetrators. The victimized student is autistic.

The student's father, Mansur, 67, said that he would file a police report if Gunadarma University failed to take measures against those involved in the bullying incident.

"Insya Allah [God willing], we will file a police report," he said at his house in Ciganjur, South Jakarta, on Tuesday, as quoted by kompas.com.

The bullying had been taking place for around a year, said the student's mother, Elis Sukarsih, 57, since her son enrolled at the Information and Technology Department at Gunadarma University in Depok, West Java. She said that her son had opened up to his family about the problem only after the video went viral.

"He's mocked, taunted and his bag and laptop were taken away from him," Mansur added.

Mansur said that the perpetrators had even knocked over his sons motorcycle in the campus parking lot.

The campus administration has investigated the bullying incident, including soliciting information from the three perpetrators, identified only by their initials AA, PDP and YLL. All three are classmates of their victim.

Two of the perpetrators have met with their victim to apologize, but Mansur said that Gunadarma administrators needed to take action against them.

Gunadarma deputy rector Irwan Bastian said that the university needed time to gather more information before deciding on any punishment against students involved in the incident. (fac)
Missing man found dead after 5 days

Chiranjeevi Poudel of Likhu Village Council-2 in Ramechhap district, who had gone missing for the past five days, was found dead in a nearby jungle on Wednesday.
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Linkedin Margareth S. Aritonang (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 22:45 1941 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a993983 1 Politics Golkar,GolkarParty,setya-novanto,e-ID,#e-ID,corruption-case,corruption,graft,graft-suspect Free

Young Golkar politicians have called on party chairman Setya Novanto to resign from his post as the House of Representatives speaker because of his new status as a suspect in the e-ID corruption case.

Golkars Youth Wing (AMPG) chairman Ahmad Doli Kurnia said Setyas status as a corruption suspect would affect the working performance of the House and President Joko Jokowi Widodo's administration and burden the image of the legislative body as well.

We are calling on Setya to give up his speaker post. His resignation will show his support for the Jokowi-Jusuf Kalla administration, Doli said on Wednesday.

He was also worried Setya would misuse the House, as the countrys top legislative body, for the sake of his own interests, including to help himself escape from the legal process.

Its very possible that [Setya] can misuse the legislative body to protect his individual interest, Doli said.

(Read also: Another Golkar lawmaker named e-ID graft suspect)

The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) named Setya a suspect in the e-ID graft case on Tuesday, accusing him of playing a key role in the mega-scandal that allegedly caused Rp 2.3 trillion (US$172.81 million) in state losses.

Several factions at the House have urged Setya to resign so that he could focus on dealing with the case without interrupting the Houses agenda. He has refused to resign so far as he has maintained he is innocent.

Another AMPG member, Samsul Hidayat, said Setyas reluctance to resign would burden the image of both the party and the government, particularly in relation to the nations agenda to eradicate corruption. (foy/ebf)
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Linkedin Safrin La Batu and Nurul Fitri Ramadhani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 11:03 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a95b279 1 National HTI,Pancasila,NKRI,Perppu,Law-and-Human-Rights-Ministry,democracy,Islamic-caliphate,#Perppu Free

The government has disbanded Muslim hard-line group Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) for conducting activities that contradict state ideology Pancasila and the principle of a unitary state of the republic of Indonesia.

The Law and Human Rights Ministry officially revoked HTI's status as a legal entity on Wednesday. The move was taken following the issuance of a regulation in lieu of law (Perppu) on mass organizations.

The Perppu has sparked concerns over potential violations of the right to assemble as it grants the government the power to disband mass groups without due process.

Read also: Dems side with opposition against Perppu on mass groups

"With the revocation of its legal status, we declared that the HTI is disbanded, in accordance with Article 80A of the Perppu," the ministry's legal administration director-general, Freddy Harris, told reporters.

Although the HTI mentioned Pancasila as its ideology in its statute (AD/ART), facts show that its activities are not in line with Pancasila, he said.

"It acts against its own AD/ART. Our decision to revoke its legal status is based on extensive consideration, long examination and input from relevant institutions," Freddy said.

Read also: HTI turns to MK to annul Perppu on mass organizations

The ministry issued the HTI a permit in July 2014. Since then, the group has reportedly promoted the establishment of a caliphate, which contradicts Pancasila.

Freddy said the HTI could take legal measures against the move if it so wished. (bbs)
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Linkedin Tama Salim (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 19:00 1941 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a98ec2d 1 World Jokowi,jokowidodo,Joko-Widodo,interpreters,G20-meeting,G-20,Germany Free

Only a few select people have witnessed the steady rise of President Joko Jokowi Widodo, a budding global leader known mostly for his domestic policies.

He has eased into his role as a world leader since he was inaugurated three years ago, especially following his confident performance at the G20 meeting in Germany a few weeks back.

It is Jokowis interpreters from the Foreign Ministry, who are tasked to accompany the President at international events, who are fortunate enough to see his increasingly confident performance.

For Dimas Muhammad, 25, Jokowis "trademark flair for straightforward and effective communication" has not only set the President apart from other world leaders who dabble in verbosity, but also helps him as an interpreter in transmitting the countrys leader's messages.

Dimas, who was appointed to be a presidential interpreter in September 2016, recounts one of his most memorable experiences with the President that also debunks the stereotype about his English being terrible.

During a meeting with a foreign dignitary [at Bogor Palace], there was a moment when the figure was at a loss for words and wanted to say something to a particular effect in English, Dimas told The Jakarta Post earlier this week.

President Jokowi, whose English was presumably suspect, saved the day by [coming up with the right expression]. Right then and there I knew for sure the President was more than what meets the eye."

Meanwhile, Mochammad Iqbal Sirie, 33, who became Jokowi's interpreter at the time of his inauguration and served until February this year, recounted his busy days with the President going abroad to attend various international conferences and meetings.

"Normally during leaders' coffee break, lunch or dinner receptions, we often have to struggle our way through to accompany the leaders for an informal talk or even formal bilateral meetings. We don't usually have time for a proper meal, so water, biscuits and breath mints are essential," Iqbal said recently.

Iqbal, now the third secretary at the Indonesian Mission to the United Kingdom, declared that his most memorable experience as an interpreter was during the 2015 meeting between President Jokowi and former United States president Barrack Obama at the Oval Office in Washington DC.

I never thought of being able to enter a room I always see in Hollywood movies," he said. (ebf)
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Linkedin Safrin La Batu and Nurul Fitri Ramadhani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 15:30 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a983c51 1 Politics disbandment,HTI,Hizbut-Tahrir-Indonesia,#Hizbut-Tahrir-Indonesia,Perppu,mass-organizations Free

Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) has condemned the governments decision to revoke the Muslim organizations legal status, calling it an arbitrary act.

Speaking to The Jakarta Post right after the government announced the move on Wednesday, HTI spokesman Ismail Yusanto said the group had never received a warning letter.

According to Article 62 of the 2017 Regulation in Lieu of Law (Perppu) on Mass Organizations, the government should issue a warning letter and terminate activities of an organization before revoking its status as a legal entity.

The government has violated its own regulation. According to the Perppu, we should be subject to administrative sanctions first, not immediate disbandment, Ismail said.

(Read also: Indonesia disbands Islamic group Hizbut Tahrir)

The Law and Human Rights Ministry announced earlier that it had revoked HTIs legal entity status because the group had conducted activities opposed to Pancasila, the state ideology.

Even though HTI had stated in its statutes and rules of association that it adopted Pancasila values, the group had advocated the establishment of a caliphate, reflecting an ideology that was not in line with Pancasila, the ministry said.

The governments move to issue the Perppu has been criticized, because it allows the ministry to disband any mass organization deemed to oppose Pancasila without court approval, which some have called a setback for democracy, since the government could curtail the freedom of association and expression.

The HTI is the first organization to be affected by the Perppu.

We won't remain silent. Well fight back through a legal process, Ismail said, adding that the group had not yet decided what kind of legal process it would take, as it would first examine the government's decision. (ebf)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 16:00 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a98544f 1 Politics MK,Constitutional-Court,#ConstitutionalCourt,#Constitutional-Court,MK-judges,MK-justices,Arief-Hidayat Free

The Constitutional Court rejected on Wednesday a judicial review petition to challenge several articles in a 2011 law that regulate the term of office for the courts justices, including its chief and deputy chief justice.

Reading out its ruling in a hearing presided over by chief justice Arief Hidayat, the court said it could not find any legal basis to grant the judicial review request filed by the plaintiff  the University of Indonesias Center for Strategic Studies (CSS UI).

The panel of judges cannot find any relevance between the centers expertise and its purpose in submitting such a plea. The court does not find any loss related to the plaintiffs constitutional rights [that could be a reason for submitting the petition], said Arief, reading out the courts ruling.

Represented by five of its members, the CSS UI filed the judicial review request in August last year to challenge articles regarding the court justices term of office. They claimed it should be lifetime.

The 2011 Constitutional Court Law stipulates that justices serve for five years with the possibility of being reelected for another five years. A Constitutional Court chief justice and his or her deputy serve two-and-a-half-year terms.

The CSS UI argued that the 2011 Constitutional Court Law was discriminatory because as a profession, justice did not recognize the length of service. Supreme Court justices serve until the age of 70, it pointed out. (kuk/ebf)
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Linkedin Farida Susanty (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 23:19 1941 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a995141 1 Business KAI,state-capital-injection,LRT,Greater-Jakarta Free

State-owned railway operator PT Kereta Api Indonesia (KAI) has finally secured a Rp 2 trillion (US$150.2 million) capital injection (PMN) from the state to fund the construction of a light rail transit (LRT) system in Greater Jakarta.

On Wednesday evening, the House of Representatives approved of the additional injection to be sourced from the 2017 revised budget, as well as the reallocation of a similar type of funds the firm obtained in 2015 for the LRT project.

Earlier, the latter was allocated for KAIs trans-Sumatra railway project.

[Now] we can start processing [the loan] from the banks, so the project wont stop, KAI president director Edi Sukmoro said after the meeting.

To fund the Rp 27.5 trillion project, the railway firm required an estimated Rp 9 trillion in equity from the state to allow it access to a Rp 18.5 trillion syndicated loan from the banks.

With the newly approved injection, it has so far gained Rp 4 trillion in equity. Furthermore, it has obtained another Rp 1.4 trillion from the capital injection funneled into state-owned construction firm PT Adhi Karya, which is building the LRT.

The LRT construction is set to run in two phases. The first phase will cover a track from Bogor, West Java, to Jakarta spanning 43.3 kilometers across Cibubur-Cawang, Bekasi Timur-Cawang and Cawang-Dukuh Atas. This initial phase is expected to be complete in 2019.

Meanwhile, the second phase will go through a 38.5-kilometer-long track from Cibubur-Bogor, Dukuh Atas-Palmerah-Senayan to Palmerah-Grogol. (lnd)
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Linkedin Haeril Halim and Nurul Fitri Ramadhani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 17:27 1941 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a987e28 1 National #KPK,#KPKInquiry,#SetyaNovanto,setya-novanto,#Jokowi,Jokowi,e-ID,#e-ID Free

Against the backdrop of the latest Corruption Eradication Commission's (KPK) move in naming House of Representatives Speaker Setya Novanto a suspect in the high-profile e-ID graft case, President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo reiterated his support for the anticorruption campaign.

Jokowi said he believed that the antigraft body was on the right track.

"We believe the KPK has worked in line with its authority," Jokowi said in response to media questions on Wednesday.

However, he refused to comment further on Setya to avoid creating the impression that he was intervening amid an ongoing spat between the KPK and lawmakers that surfaced after the KPK launched an investigation into the procurement of e-ID cards in which dozens of politicians have been implemented.

Setya, the chairman of the Golkar Party, the second-biggest party in the government coalition, allegedly played a key role in the case, which caused Rp 2.3 trillion (US$172.7 million) in state losses.

House deputy speakers Fadli Zon and Fahri Hamzah recently blasted the naming of Setya as a suspect, claiming it was politically motivated and done in retaliation for the Houses move to open an inquiry into the KPK.

Being declared a suspect has not cost Setya his speakership post. According to the law, Setya should be removed from his post only if he is found guilty by a court of law.

Speculation is rife that Setyas case may result in Golkar withdrawing its support for the government, even though Golkar executives have several times emphasized that Golkar would stay in the progovernment coalition. (ipa)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 17:29 1941 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a988b2f 4 National LAPAN,west-sumatra,rocket Free

The National Institute of Aeronautics and Space (Lapan) will investigate an unidentified object that fell from the sky in Agam regency, West Sumatra, a local Lapan official has said.

We will send the object to Lapans space science center in Bandung, West Java, in order to identify the object, which is suspected to be part of a rocket fuel tank, Agam regency Lapan official Syafrijon was quoted as saying by Antara.

Local people previously reported that a spherical object had fallen out of the sky on Tuesday morning and landed on a road. They said an explosion followed.

The local Lapan office handed the object over to the police to be examined.

Previously in September last year, residents of Sumenep, East Java, reported seeing an object fall from the sky. No casualties were reported in the incident. (kuk/dmr)
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Linkedin Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post) Yogyakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 10:07 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a9593c5 1 Business Asia-Pacific-deposit-insurances-meeting,LPS,Yogyakarta Free

Indonesias Deposit Insurance Corporation (LPS) is holding the 15th regional meeting of Asia Pacific deposit insurers in Yogyakarta.

LPS chairman Halim Alamsyah said 70 participants from 30 countries attended the meeting, which runs from Monday to Thursday, to discuss current issues faced by deposit insurance providers in the region.

"Over the past 10 years, deposit insurance coverage in Asia Pacific has grown to an average US$100,000 per bank account. That is the second-highest in the world, after the North American region," Halim said in Yogyakarta on Tuesday.

That meant the average income in the Asia Pacific region had risen significantly and the deposit insurers in the region had become more mindful of the possibility of a crisis, he said.

"Some countries had strengthened their deposit insurances role. The Korean Deposit Insurance Corporation (KDIC), for example, could investigate a troubled bank without asking for permission from the financial services authority," he said.

Established in 2004, the LPS has amassed Rp 79.3 trillion (US$5.96 billion) in funds as of April, up 8.68 percent from the same month last year.

The funds are sourced from premiums paid by banks.

As of May, it has handled 79 troubled banks and paid out Rp 1.2 trillion in claims to bank costumers. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 18:15 1941 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a98b72b 1 Politics MK,Constitutional-Court,#ConstitutionalCourt,#Constitutional-Court,KPK,corruption,lawyers,advocates,ICW,Indonesia-Corruption-Watch,Arief-Hidayat,OC-Kaligis Free

The Constitutional Court (MK) rejected on Wednesday a judicial review request filed by a lawyer seeking immunity for lawyers from investigation by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).

In a hearing presided over by chief justice Arief Hidayat on Wednesday, the MK dismissed the challenge made by plaintiff Tonin Tachta Singarimbun to an article in the 2002 KPK Law, which allows the antigraft body to probe law enforcement officers.

The challenge made by the plaintiff is not justified in law, said Arief as he read out the verdict.

Tonin filed a judicial review request in August last year to exclude lawyers from the categorization of law enforcement officers. He claimed a lawyer could not be counted as a state body.

Tonin further argued that lawyers could not be categorized as law enforcers because they did not have any power to investigate or to prosecute.

Last year, watchdog Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) released a report saying 11 lawyers had allegedly been involved in corruption cases.

One of most outstanding cases was when the KPK named senior lawyer O.C. Kaligis as a graft suspect in July 2015. He was accused of having bribed judges at Medan State Administrative Court to secure the case of his client, former North Sumatra governor Gatot Pudjo Nugroho. The court sentenced Kaligis to five-and-a-half-years imprisonment.

The Supreme Court increased Kaligis punishment to 10 years in prison after it rejected his appeal in August last year. (kuk/ebf)
NPC vice-chairman stresses on actions to transform SDGs into reality

National Planning Commission (NPC) vice-chairman Min Bahadur Shrestha has delivered Nepals national statement at the plenary meeting of the 2017 High-Level Political Forum being held at the United Nations Headquarters from 10 to 19 July 2017.
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Linkedin Stefani Ribka (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 15:56 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a984902 1 Business one-map-policy,DarminNasution,BIG-Geospatial-Information-Agency Free

The government is currently developing its One Map" policy  designed to integrate comprehensive political and economic information, including spatial conditions from all regions across the archipelago -, but Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution said on Wednesday that the progress was very slow.

This was particularly caused by the reluctance of regional heads to support the program and the huge scale of the work, Darmin said.

Theres progress but very slow because apparently the borders between villages and regencies were mostly drawn by hand so we need to go down to the field and check them ourselves, he said during a hearing with the House of Representatives budget committee.

He added that the findings in the field had to be discussed with regional heads for further verification.

The program is being processed by the Geospatial Information Agency (BIG). With the One Big Map, it is expected that the government and other parties will have comprehensive and detailed information about the country and its people.

All government institutions submitted their existing thematic maps to BIG by July, 2016 for gradual verification and integration.

BIG expected to finish integrating the map of Kalimantan last year, Sumatra and Sulawesi this year, Maluku and Papua in 2018 and Java, Bali and Nusa Tenggara in 2019. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 12:28 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a979d8e 1 City Telegram,ahok,murder Free

The discovery of a plot to assassinate former Jakarta governor Basuki Ahok Thajaja Purnama in a monitored conversation was one of the government's reasons for blocking web access to the chat application Telegram, an official has said.

The Communications and Information Ministrys director general of Informatics, Semuel Abrijani Pangerapan, said the conversation on Telegram revealed that the murder was planned to be carried by bombing a car and religious site on Dec. 23, 2015.

"We got the data from [the National Polices Densus 88 counterterrorism squad]. Densus knows the details of the plan," Semuel said on Tuesday, as quoted by kompas.com.

The ministry also claimed that an attack against police officers at the Falatehan mosque in South Jakarta on June 30 had been planned through Telegram.

"Since 2015, [terrorists] have used Telegram to communicate. Only two of all the revealed cases were not planned through Telegram," Semuel said.

The ministry has blocked 11 of Telegram's domain name servers (DNS) on July 14, while the mobile application can still be accessed. (Cal)

Topics : Telegram ahok murder
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Linkedin Ruslan Sangadji (The Jakarta Post) Palu  Wed, July 19, 2017 18:25 1941 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a98d828 1 National Palu,central-sulawesi,Tadulako,Tadulako-University,deradicalization,Pancasila,terrorism Free

Tadulako University in Palu, Central Sulawesi, in cooperation with the Home Ministry, has launched a deradicalization studies center as part of a government program to fight terrorism.

We have established the Center for Deradicalization Development and Socio-Academics, which is led by Rahmat Bakri, said rector Muhammad Basir in Palu on Monday.

The center is part of the central governments program to develop deradicalization studies at the university level. Tadulako University is one of 63 universities nationwide participating in the program.

There were two other universities that signed an agreement with the ministry [to establish a deradicalization center], namely Hasanuddin University [in Makassar, South Sulawesi] and Halu Oleo University [in Kendari, Southeast Sulawesi], Basir said.

Read also: All returnees from Syria required to join deradicalization program

The center will play a strategic role in promoting national unity and promoting the national ideology of Pancasila. Leaders of all student organizations are required to pass a training session at the center. As young leaders, they must have good character and promote tolerance, he said. (bbs)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 20:15 1941 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a991b72 1 City Textile-Museum,collection Free

The collection of the Textile Museum in Tanah Abang, West Jakarta, has grown to comprise 2,500 pieces of traditional cloth, turning the site into one of the favorite places in the capital for women, an official says.

The head of the Textile Museum's service unit, Sari Permana, said that the collection included various traditional cloths like batik, tenun (woven fabric), songket (gold-threaded woven fabric), sasaringan of South Kalimantan and tapis of Lampung.

Tourists, particularly foreign ones, are keen to see the traditional cloth collection, said Sari as quote by beritajakarta.com on Wednesday.

She said that the number of visitors in 2015 totaled 60,086, while in the following year it increased to 61,192.

This year, by June, the number of visitors reached 34,876, she added. (agn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 20:00 1941 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a9900b2 1 City fake-products,raids,lighter Free

Thousands of fake Tokai lighters have been seized at a storehouse on Jl. Pluit Karang Karya, Pluit, North Jakarta.

The lighters failed to meet Indonesian National Standards (SNI) and could explode at any time, Penjaringan Police chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Bismo Teguh said on Wednesday.

The case came to light after the Tokai brand owner reported finding counterfeit lighters on the market, said Bismo. He said that after investigating the matter, the police identified and arrested the warehouse owner, identified only as HS.

The police seized 353,000 lighters bearing the Tokai brand that had been imported from China.

Bismo also said HS started distributing the counterfeit lighters within and outside Java one month ago.

He sold the lighters for between Rp 70,000 (US$ 5.25) and Rp 75,000 per box, similar to the price of the original lighters, kompas.com reported. (agn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 12:53 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a97a698 1 Politics politics,setya-novanto,Hizbut-Tahrir-Indonesia,trump Free

These are some of the developments we're watching right now.

A 'robust' meeting: US President Donald Trump and Russia's President Vladimir Putin shake hands during a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7. (AFP/Saul Loeb)

Barely recovering from a crisis that was sparked by his sons meeting with a Russian lawyer at the Trump Tower last year, United States President Donald Trump faces another backlash from a revelation that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin had an additional, previously undisclosed chat at this month's G20 summit in Hamburg.

Disgraced: House of Representatives Speaker Setya Novanto gives a press statement on the Corruption Eradication Commission's (KPK) decision to name him a graft suspect, in a press conference at the House complex in Senayan, Central Jakarta, on Tuesday. (Antara/M.Agung Rajasa)

Were also following the developments on the fate of House of Representatives Speaker Setya Novanto after the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) named him a suspect in the electronic ID card (e-ID) graft case. President Joko Jokowi Widodo this morning backed the antigraft bodys move against Setya, saying it had followed the rules and procedures.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 17:51 1941 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a98aa6c 1 City weapon,East-Jakarta,confiscation,arrest Free

The police have arrested nine people for carrying sharp weapons in East Jakarta.

East Jakarta Police chief Sr. Comr. Andry Wibowo said on Wednesday that the Rajawali task force caught the people during a patrol to rid the area of gangs, motorcycle road races and other street crimes late Saturday evening.

The task force was formed to fight street crime.

During the operation, we caught youth carrying sharp weapons intended for criminal activities, Andry said as quoted by wartakota.tribunnews.com.

The team members checked groups of youth in their patrol area and found weapons on nine of them. They were aged between 16 and 30.

The police also seized five unregistered motorcycles, seven mobile phones and a wallet, Andry said.

The nine people are currently in custody at the East Jakarta Police headquarters for investigation. (agn)
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, July 20 2017

A trade mission team is ready to visit South Africa and Nigeria on July 20 to 26 in a bid to expand trade with the non-traditional markets, which have large populations and high growth rates.

Both South Africa and Nigeria are gateways to access the larger African market, said Trade Minister Enggartiasto Enggar Lukita in a press statement released on Wednesday.

South Africa is key to access members of SACU [Southern African Customs Union] while Nigeria is a gateway to Ecowas [Economic Community of West African States].

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, July 20 2017

The family of a 19-year-old student at a private university, whose bullying was captured on a recent video that went viral, has demanded that the university take action against the perpetrators. The victimized student is autistic.

The students father, Mansur, 67, said that he would file a police report if Gunadarma University failed to take measures against those involved in the bullying.

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 13:39 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a97c7a3 1 News Garuda-Indonesia,Tourism-Ministry-Pesona-Indonesia,tourism-ministry-wonderful-Indonesia,Banyuwangi Free

National flag carrier Garuda Indonesia will launch a direct flight route from Jakarta to Banyuwangi starting August, following the news of NAM Air, a subsidiary of Sriwijaya Air, which opened a new route to Blimbingsari Airport in Banyuwangi on July 16.

Garuda's new route is hoped to be able to increase the number of tourist visits to the eastern side of Java Island and make it easier for people who live around Banyuwangi such as Situbondo, Jember, Bondowoso and West Bali to travel to Jakarta.

Banyuwangi itself is a booming market. According to the data by East Java Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM), Banyuwangi takes the third spot for investment realization in East Java.

Read also: Banyuwangi's must-visit tourist attractions

In 2016, 60,000 overseas tourists and two million local tourists visited Banyuwangi.

The availability of Jakarta  Banyuwangi route will increase tourism, business, and peoples mobility to be faster in order to improve the local economy, said tourism minister Arief Yahya.

With the new route, passengers dont have to make a transit in Surabaya anymore, told Garuda Indonesia president director Pahala N. Mansury.

Meanwhile, the Surabaya  Banyuwangi route has been improving quite well, Even though there are two lights serving the Surabaya  Banyuwangi route every day, the average occupancy rate is at 80 percent, added Pahala. (asw)
NRA chief refutes slow progress claims

NRA Chief Executive Govind Raj Pokharel has claimed the post-earthquake reconstruction drive is not as slow as projected.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 17:05 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a987369 1 News Tourism-Ministry-Pesona-Indonesia,tourism-ministry-wonderful-Indonesia,Arief-Yahya,borobudur,Borobudur-Temple Free

Tourism Minister Arief Yahya has recently launched Borobudur International Festival (BIF) 2017 in Sapta Pesona building in Central Jakarta.

The event is set to be held on July 28-30 in Magelang, Central Java.

Congratulations to Central Java and GenPi [Indonesian Charms Generation] Jateng, the #PesonaBIF hashtag was among the trending topic list in Indonesia, said Arief during his opening remark.

The launching event was opened with a performance of Gambang Semarang dance accompanied by gamelan music.

Read also: Six glamping sites in Indonesia for adventure seekers

The performance, choreography and music were all great, so did the fashion; worthy to be performed in front of President Joko Widodo and international audience, Arief praised the opening dance.

The 4th BIF will feature 13 events, of which eight are cultural events.

In addition to cultural performances from various regions in the country, the event will also host museum and archaeological exhibition and a familiarization (fam) trip to Borobudur Temple and tourist villages around the temple.

Read also: Klatens unique pottery technique spins on

Foreign participants from Japan, China and India are also set to take part in the festival.

Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo who attended the launching event said that he expected the event to be able encourage other regions to come up with similar events.

A few days ago Solo hosted a batik carnival; similar events were also held in Pekalongan and Batang. Hopefully these events can boost tourism and encourage participation from the public to improve their local economy, said Ganjar. (kes)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, July 19, 2017 16:07 1942 4065a5a8898c7cc661d4adf97a985d00 1 News Tourism-Ministry-Pesona-Indonesia,tourism-ministry-wonderful-Indonesia,Banyuwangi,mount-ijen Free

A trail running event is set to take place in Bumi Blambangan in Banyuwangi, East Java, on July 23.

Participants of the Banyuwangi Ijen Green Run 2017 will run through coffee, clove and pine plantations, forest, river, rice fields and villages, as well as exploring the famous Ijen volcano complex.

Runners are going to pass through slopes, uphill tracks, plantations, mahogany forest and rice fields and cross the river with Mount Ijen as the background, said Banyuwangi Regent Abdullah Azwar Anas.

Read also: Ijen crater to have cable car

The event, which will begin at 6 a.m., will be divided into three categories (5 kilometers, 15 km ad 27 km) with Jambu rest area in Tamansari village as the starting point.

Up to 467 runners from across the archipelago and outside the country, such as Germany, Thailand and Kenya, reportedly have registered online for the event. One of them is Miss Southeast Asia Tourism Ambassador 2016, Dikna Faradiba, who earned four titles at the Miss Tourism International 2016 pageant.

Read also: Photo: Blue streak

I'm familiar with Banyuwangi and Ijen; Ive gone up to the Blue Fire numerous times, hence Im recommending everyone to take part in Banyuwangi Ijen Green Run 2017, said Tourism Minister Arief Yahya who himself is from Banyuwangi.

Arief also encouraged the public to promote the event online using hashtag #PesonaIjenGreenRun.

Prior to Mt. Ijen, similar events had been held in other mountains, such as Tambora, Rinjani, Bromo and Semeru. (kes)
One missing, two injured as truck plunges into Marshyangdi

A person has been missing in Marshyangdi River after a cargo truck fell off the road at Syange of Taghring, Marshyangdi Rural Municipality-4 in Lamjung district on Wednesday.
Pretty Little Liars star Troian Bellisario has told of her struggle with mental health issues in an open letter.

The 31-year-old US actress wrote that she, at one point, was convinced by a voice inside her head to eat just 300 calories a day, in addition to coping with her fears of disappointing her friends or colleagues.

Posted in Lena Dunhams Lenny Letter , Bellisario said that she struggles to take care of herself and that she relies on other people to tell her to do so.

Troian Bellisario (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

Describing shooting the first episode of teen drama series Pretty Little Liars when she was 24, she said she had worried she would appear a diva and a horrible actor because her feet went numb as they shot a scene outside in Canada in December while in summer clothing.

She said she feared she would be yelled at by someone for delaying production, adding that she wondered why she needed the permission of a stranger to take care of myself.

Comparing that incident with a recent one, Bellisario wrote that she felt a similar coldness creeping into her body while swimming in a lake, but instead of getting out of the water, she pushed on to swim further with her friend because of a voice in her head.

Bellisario wrote: That voice, that familiar voice in the back of my skull that tells me it cares.

Wherever you go. I go. (Thanks for the amazing by @dylzenvision & @kristenhager ) A post shared by Troian Bellisario (@sleepinthegardn) on Jun 18, 2017 at 1:55pm PDT

It cares if I demand things of a production, it cares if I quit

early,

if I fail. It is a voice I know intimately; it is my greatest and best of enemies.

I know what that voice will say if I stop. I know the trouble Ill be in.

She said that her biggest challenge is trying to work out which of her inner voices

is

speaking to her  her body voice or her illness.

Bellisario wrote: There is a part of my brain that defies logic. Once, it completely convinced me I should live off 300 calories a day, and at some point, it told me even that was too much.

That part of my brain is my disease, and there was a time when it had absolute authority over me. It almost killed me, and you can see that even though I have lived in recovery for ten years now, it still finds loads of fun, insidious ways to thwart me to this day.

Bellisario, who is married to Suits star Patrick J Adams, added: It was a difficult journey finding my way back to health. Through hard introspection, intense medical and mental care, a supportive family, friends, and a patient and loving partner, I survived, which is rare.

The actress said she is determined to not just survive that part of her life, but create in rebellion, although she still sometimes has to confront her mental health issues.

Bellisario said that writing her independent semi-autobiographical movie Feed, in which she also starred along with Harry Potter actor Tom Felton, helped her to channel that voice into a story and out of myself.

She said she hopes that Feed can have a positive impact on those with similar issues, adding: So with all the courage I can muster, I give it to you, I give it to that one person, in hopes that it could make them feel enough.
A man dressed as Jesus Christ at an LGBTQ Pride parade in Seoul, South Korea, has captured the imagination of people across the world.

Stood in front of Christian protesters, who bore a sign declaring: Homosexuality is

sin

! Return to Jesus!, Robert Evans held a sign which said simply: Im cool with it in rainbow colours.

(Rachel Stine)

I wanted the message to be simple, positive, and contrary to the protesters and at the same time I wanted to be proudly supporting the equal human rights and acceptance of my many close friends, said Evans, 27, who is an American photographer from Atlanta, Georgia but has lived in South Koreas capital for four years.

Evans is

heterosexual

,

but says he experienced what it felt like to be discriminated against when he first went to Seouls Pride event two years ago.

(Rachel Stine)

Walking amongst them and feeling their (the protesters) pure hatred directed right at me as if I was gay was an unforgettable moment, he said. It was such a visceral experience that I was literally moved to tears.

The hate was tangible and intense and as a straight western male I had never felt anything like it.

Since that experience, Evans says he has developed close friendships in the LGBTQ community in Seoul  and this inspired him to do something more when this years pride came about.

(Rachel Stine)

The only protesters that are there are Christians and they always preach a hate-filled interpretation of the teachings of Jesus, said Evans, who isnt religious.

Since I have some resemblance to the classic representation of Jesus, I figured it would be meaningful to present an alternative interpretation.

Korea still has a long way to go in terms of rights and acceptance but Im glad to see and be a part of the small steps it is making in the right direction.

Every year Pride gets bigger, the protests get smaller, and the long road towards equality gets a little bit shorter.

The picture which was widely shared on Reddit and Twitter of Evans in his outfit was captured by Rachel Stine , a blogger who helps North Korean refugees and lives in Seoul.

According to Evans

friends the response at the Pride event was warm too.

Once we got inside the event people immediately began to congregate around him, said Evans friend Simon Clarke, a 32-year-old Australian writer working in Korea. Polite lines formed with people wanting photos.

It began to almost feel like a piece of performance art.

Clarke pointed out that Evans took a risk wearing the costume to the event as the Immigration Control Act in South Korea states: No foreigner sojourning in the Republic of Korea shall engage in any political activity.
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Raped, pregnant and banished, 11-yr-old struggles for justice

One morning in December last year, Ramala (name changed) of Yaku village in Bhojpur was cooking meal at home, a responsibility that the 11-year-old had to shoulder quite often as her parents would go to the fields to work. Her three-year-old brother had gone out to play.
Binod Ghimire covers parliamentary affairs and human rights for The Kathmandu Post. Since joining the Post in 2010, he has reported primarily on social issues, focusing on education and transitional justice.
Rs1.7 billion sought for 3rd phase vote

The Election Commission has demanded Rs1.7 billion for holding the third phase of local elections in Province 2 on September 18.
Ruling parties, RJP-N meet underway

A meeting between agitating Rastriya Janata party-Nepal (RJP-N) and ruling coalitionNepali Congress and CPN (Maoist Centre)  is underway at the Prime Ministers residence in Baluwatar.
Subcommittee formed to probe NOC land deal

The parliamentary Finance Committee on Tuesday formed a sub-committee to probe a land deal by Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC) for possible fraud.
Two persons electrocuted

Two villagers died and another was injured in an electric shock in Gokul Ganga Rural Municipality-5 in Ramechhap on Monday evening.
Several public meetings this week in Watertown

Here's a look at who's meeting this week and what they'll be discussing.
It's our annual Labour Weekend tradition ...The Sound 'Hall Of Fame' Countdown... Where we honor the greatest 500 songs of all time as voted by you.
With a major plot of hers being women's dependence on an advantageous marriage to secure social standing and economic security, Jane Austen's works can strike a chord with readers in patriarchial societies still prevalent across the world. But this response might be not only a misreading but a grave misrepresentation of someone who is not only English's first great woman writer but great beyond any gender qualifiers.

The fame of Jane Austen, whose 200th death anniversary falls on Tuesday, rests on her half a dozen major works all published in the last half dozen years of her all too short life (1775-1817) of which nearly two-thirds was spent writing.

But the six  from Sense and Sensibility (published anonymously 1811) to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (both published posthumously in 1818) and Pride and Prejudice (1813) especially  have gone on to become popular among general readers, writers and literary critics and mass media with many small and big screen adaptations of her works.

And a range of writers have gone to pen the continuing/alternate adventures of her characters like Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse and others.

A clergyman's daughter who began writing from her teenage years, Austen was not only a stylistic writer of what is termed comedies of manners or say, romances with a social undertext, but one who eloquently but obliquely pitched for women's education and emancipation.

Not averse to parodying contemporary genres and stressing more dialogue than her contemporaries, her inimitable method was a blend of sarcastic irony  verging towards the biting, realism, and psychological depth in her characters.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," is the well-known opening line of Pride and Prejudice. But then it goes on: "However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters."

Not only an early votary of what became the Feminist movement, Austen was also, according to a new reassessment of her work and thought, a serious, radical, and even subversive.

She was, says Oxford Professor Helena Kelly, aware of what was going on and not afraid to deal with touchy contemporary political and religious issues, including colonialism and its odious component of slavery, poverty, the Church's role in society  at a time when they were not issues for public discussion in her time of Regency England (late 18th/early 19th century Britain)  least by a woman.

And Austen was not in awe of even royalty. Asked to write a historical romance about the German Saxe-Coburg dynasty (whose fate would entwine with the British crown when its Prince Albert married Queen Victoria), she replied: "I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life, and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter."

Invited by the Prince Regent (the future King George IV) to dedicate a book to him, she did so with the most sarcastic way possible: Emma is dedicated to him "by his Royal Highness's Permission, most respectfully dedicated by his Royal Highness's dutiful and obedient human servant".

Though Austen had her detractors like Charlotte Bronte, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain, they were outnumbered by her admirers like Sir Walter Scott, Anthony Trollope, Virginia Woolf, who called her the first truly great female author and the first good English author to have a distinctly feminine writing style, while Rex Stout, the creator of Nero Wolfe and a man who said he previously believed men did everything better, deemed her the greatest English writer ever.

Her portrait on the new British 10 pound note is a tribute enough to a writer whose contribution was only recognised near her life's end.
India's proposal at the World Trade Organisation to negotiate a trade facilitation pact in services has received a mixed response from member countries, Parliament was informed today.

In February, India had circulated the draft legal text on the Trade Facilitation in Services Agreement (TFS) at the WTO.

Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the proposal has been discussed at the relevant services bodies of the WTO.

The proposal provides a framework to address various impediments to trade in services in a comprehensive and holistic manner, she said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha.

India's proposal received a mixed response from the WTO members. Some members appreciated India's proposal as being comprehensive in scope and well balanced.

However, several developed and developing country members expressed concern on the scope and content of the draft agreement, she said.

However, she added that the proposal has imparted the much needed momentum to the discussion on services and India has urged members to engage constructively on this initiative.

Replying to a separate question, Sitharaman said an association of pharmaceutical manufacturers of America has asked US Trade Representative to continue to keep India on its Priority Watch List in the Special 301 Report.

The Special 301 Report issued by the US is a unilateral measure to create pressure on countries to enhance IPR (intellectual property rights) protection beyond the WTO rules.

Under the WTO regime, any dispute between two countries needs to be referred to the dispute settlement body and unilateral actions are not tenable under this regime, she added.

Special 301 is an extra territorial application of the domestic law of a country, which is inconsistent with the established norms of the WTO, the minister said.
As many as 47 Amarnath pilgrims lost their lives due to a terror attack, accidents and health reasons in a span of 18 days, an official said on Tuesday.

"Between June 29 and July 16, 19 pilgrims died due to medical reasons and 20 were killed in accidents. On July 10, eight pilgrims were killed in a terror attack on their bus," said Umang Narula, the CEO of the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board (SASB).

Till today, the board had spent Rs.14,66,975 on transportation and Rs.1,34,75,000 towards ex-gratia payments, he added.

Narula said a decision had been taken to enhance the amount of ex-gratia relief to the next of the kin of those killed in the terror attack in south Kashmir's Anantnag district.

The CEO had earlier ensured that the cost of sending the mortal remains of the terror attack victims by air to their respective home towns was borne by the board.

In 37 cases, the board had also borne the cost of providing an escort with the coffin of the attack victim.

Sixteen pilgrims were killed on July 16 in a bus accident near Banihal, said Narula.

The mortal remains of the deceased, along with the escorting attendants, were sent to their respective home towns yesterday by Air India and Indigo flights.

Besides the attendants, who were selected from among the pilgrims, Jammu and Kashmir Police personnel had also been deputed to accompany the dead bodies, he added.

"The mortal remains of 12 yatris were transported by air to the nearest airports in Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh," said the CEO.

The coffins of three pilgrims were transported in ambulances to Sikar (Rajasthan), Panipat (Haryana) and RS Pura (Jammu), he added.

The mortal remains of one female pilgrim, Chaya Devi, the wife of Vijay Chourasiya Singh and a native of Bihar, was kept in a mortuary at Jammu as her husband and son, both of whom had received injuries in the Ramsoo road accident, were still undergoing medical treatment at Jammu, said Narula.
The first Boeing 747 Air India trial flight landed at the Srinagar international airport on Wednesday.

"The trial flight was operated for the first time by Air India," an airport official said.

Air India will operate Boeing 747 flights from Srinagar to Saudi Arabia from July 25 to ferry Hajj pilgrims.

A total of 8,100 Hajj pilgrims will be performing the pilgrimage this year from Jammu and Kashmir. Some 840 pilgrims will fly each day from Srinagar to Saudi Arabia.
'A city is a place where there is no need to wait for the next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again- Margaret Mead.

Conveying a rich cultural and historical heritage, Bongaon assimilates a harmonious union of all castes, creeds and religions. It is one of those towns in India taking important part in export and import of both goods and cultural elements. Situated in North 24 Parganas, West Bengal, it is a border town almost touching Bangladesh.

Petrapole, the largest land port in Asia, is a part of this border. The trains that used to pass through Petrapole to Bangladesh, which had stopped for a period of time, had begun again named Maitri Express. NH-34 also passes through Bongaon.

In accordance to communication with Bangladesh, it is like the route of transit. During the partition of Bengal movement, Bongaon played an essential role and was highly affected by the language movement of Bangladesh in 1971. Moreover, the most striking feature of all, Bongaon celebrates Independence Day both on 15 and 18 August. Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay, who penned Pather Pachali, Ichamati and Aranyak,was born in Bongaon. Dinabandhu Mitra, a famous playwright, who wrote Nildarpan,was also a part of this town.

Talking about another luminary, Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay, the founder of the Mohenjo-Daro civilisation was also brought up in Bongaon. In due course, this place has been changed, modernised and many tourist attractions like Manishangan, Nildarpan Bhaban, Hanging Setu, Manosa Temple are established here but the eye-soothing greenery still prevails.

Besides, an artificial forest Parmadan, widely known as a popular picnic spot has come up which is famous for its resident wild animals. On the other hand, a very old Nilkuthi stands like a dome of visible existence of the British regimes tyranny over nil or indigo farmers. At Petrapole, military parade like that of Wagah border, Punjab, goes on with splendor which is an irresistible attraction to the visitors.

Durga puja, the quintessence of religion and cultural dogma which accelerates the emotions of well-being, is celebrated with unparalleled pomp and gaiety. During this festival, Bongaon wears the garment of elusive beauty.

The Durga Puja of Bongaon is as famous as that of Kolkata, only with a more lingering sense of traditional proponents.

Thus, Bongaon is a beautiful, peaceful town which has enthralled and is still enthralling the minds of its citizens with its pleasures and mesmerising beauty. It might not be an exotic place, but it highlights the spirit of bygone ages.

(Coordinator, Class VIII, Bongaon High School)
Psychological thriller "Berlin Syndrome", from Australian writer-director Cate Shortland, starring Teresa Palmer, is slated to hit Indian screens on July 28.

Based on Melanie Joosten's book "Berlin Syndrome", Shortland's film was written by Shaun Grant, who co-wrote Justin Kurzel's "Snowtown".

"Berlin Syndrome" is a cautionary tale about love and the desperate measures people go to get it and keep it. It's essentially a very dark love story that explores obsession and the loneliness that can be found both in a foreign city full of strangers and in an apartment shared by two people."

Talking about the India release, distributor, producer and director Ashwani Sharma, Impact Films, said in a statement: "'Berlin Syndrome' is from the festival circuit. It is a very hard hitting film which lingered on my mind the first time I watched it. The Indian audience now has an appetite for a wider variety of films. While we have western blockbusters and studio-led films, indie too is creating its space gradually."

The title of the film has reference to the term "Stockholm Syndrome", a condition that causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their captors as a survival strategy during captivity.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Wednesday briefed the BJP parliamentary party on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the US and Israel while Finance Minister Arun Jaitley briefed them on the GST and said that prices of goods have come down four-eight per cent since the roll-out.

Sushma Swaraj briefed the MPs about the reception accorded to Modi by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"The reception given to the Prime Minister in US and Israel was unprecedented. No Indian Prime Minister was given such warm welcome," a BJP leader quoted Sushma Swaraj as saying during her address at the BJP parliamentary party meeting attended by Prime Minister Modi.

Speaking on GST, Jaitley said that implementation of the pan-India indirect tax regime was a win-win situation for all.

"With roll-out of GST the country's market has been integrated. Inspector Raj is over. The tax burden on the masses has gone down," he said.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said Jaitley told the BJP MPs that more than one crore firms would be migrating to the new tax regime against 80 lakh companies earlier.

Sources said that Kumar also urged the party MPs to remain in Delhi on August 5, the day the Vice President's election is being held.

August 5 is a Saturday and most MPs return to their parliamentary constituencies during the weekend.

Ananth Kumar later requested the opposition parties to let Parliament function, saying the government is ready for positive discussion on every issue in both the Houses.

"We hope that both the Houses of Parliament function properly," Kumar said after the Bharatiya Jananta Party's parliamentary party meeting.

"I request the opposition parties to have positive discussion in both the Houses, and the government is ready to debate and discuss all the issues," the BJP leader said.

The Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha were adjourned on Tuesday after the opposition leaders created a ruckus on several issues, including mob lynching, atrocities on Dalits and farmers suicides.

Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati had on Tuesday resigned from the Rajya Sabha alleging that she was not allowed to speak on the atrocities on Dalits in Uttar Pradesh's Shahranpur district.
Samajwadi Party leader and former Defence Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday claimed that China was ready to attack India in collaboration with Pakistan and asked the government to reverse its stand on the Tibet issue and support its independence.

Raising the matter in the Lok Sabha against the backdrop of tension between India and China, he asked the government to inform Parliament what it has done to meet any likely challenge from the neighbouring country.

"India is today facing a big danger from China. I have been cautioning the central government for years. China has joined hands with Pakistan. It has made full preparation to attack India.

"China is India's biggest opponent. What has the government done? In Kashmir, the Chinese army has allied with the Pak army," Yadav, known for his tough stand on China, said during the Zero Hour.

He also claimed that China had buried nuclear weapons in Pakistan to target India, adding that Indian intelligence agencies "would know better".

Yadav said India's stand on Tibet, a reference to its acceptance that the region was part of China, was a "mistake" and the time has come to support its independence as it had been a traditional buffer between the two big nations.

"China is our enemy, not Pakistan. Pakistan can do us no damage," he said.

It was India's responsibility to protect Bhutan and China was eyeing Nepal, he said.

He also spoke against massive amounts of Chinese goods finding a market in India.
A team of Enforcement Directorate is in London to submit the chargesheet against liquor baron Vijay Mallya in a step to seek his extradition, an official said on Wednesday.

The ED move is part of its ongoing probe against Mallya for defaulting on over Rs.8,000 crore bank loans.

The two-member ED team, including a legal advisor, left for London on Monday for a two-day visit and was expected to return by Thursday, the ED official said.

The official said the ED team has reached London to submit a 5,500-page chargesheet and some documents against Vijay Mallya before the Crown Prosecution Office, which is fighting the case of Mallya's extradition.

He added that the legal advisor accompanying a Joint Director-level ED official will assist the agency to strategise legal steps to deal with the British arbitrators in London.

The ED officials said the chargesheet has details on the money trail, how Mallya diverted funds from Rs 900 crore loan received from IDBI Bank to group entities in India and several other countries via numerous shell companies.

The ED team is accompanied by the officials of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) which is also probing the IDBI loan default case.

Mallya fled to Britain in March 2016 after being pursued for recovery of Rs 8,191 crore owed to a consortium of 17 Indian banks by his now defunct Kingfisher Airlines. He was arrested and granted bail in London on April 18 by the Scotland Yard on an extradition warrant.

The Indian government had in February this year, handed over to British authorities a formal request for Mallya's extradition, saying it had a legitimate case against him on charges of financial irregularities and loan default.

Meanwhile, the ED official said the agency will be writing to six countries to get information on financial dealings of Mallya to probe the alleged illegal laundering of over Rs 1,300 crore he had made through 13 shell companies in the US, Ireland, Mauritius and France.
The Indian and Pakistani armies again engaged each other in heavy shelling and exchange of fire along the Line of Control (LoC) in Poonch district of Jammu region on Wednesday, an officer said.

"The Pakistan Army initiated unprovoked and indiscriminate firing of small arms, automatics and mortars from 8.45 a.m. onwards in Bhimber Gali sector along the LoC," Defence Ministry spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Manish Mehta said here.

"The Indian Army is retaliating strongly and effectively," he said.

Two Indian Army soldiers were killed by the Pakistani side in shelling and firing at Indian positions at the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir.

Defence sources said the Pakistan Army had been violating the bilateral ceasefire agreement with impunity during the last three days.
Pakistan is committed to resolve all issues with India, including Kashmir, through talks, Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua said on Wednesday.

Janjua's remarks came during her meeting with Islamabad- based Heads of Missions of the European Union Member States, according to Foreign Office.

She reaffirmed Pakistan's commitment to dialogue with India for the resolution of all outstanding issues, including Kashmir issue.

She accused India of human rights violations in Kashmir.

The Foreign Secretary also briefed the EU representatives on the evolving peace and security situation in the region and highlighted Pakistan s efforts for pursuing the objectives of a peaceful neighbourhood.
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

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South Korea is attracting Indian tourists with the promise of helping them experience the heritage of the country that shares historical connection with India.

Unraveling the historical connection with India, Korea Tourism Organisation Director, Jong Sool Kwon said princess Suriratna from Ayodhya went to South Korea more than 2,000 years ago and married Korean King Suro and became Queen Heo.

About 22 per cent Koreans are decedents of Princess from Ayodhya, India. Koreans feel very much connected to Indians, he told reporters on Wednesday.

Kwon said South Korea is fast evolving and is attracting Indians at a large scale. The education system in Korea is world's second best after Finland, he claimed.

He outlined the various benefits of experiencing Korea and said Korea has a lot to offer to the people. He explained the theme of Korean tourism, which is Imagine Your Korea.

In order to bring South Korea closer to the hearts of the youngsters in the tricity, Korea Tourism Organisation is organising a quiz competition for school students and winners would get a free trip to South Korea for six days.

The five per cent Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Korea comes from tourism. "South Korea is the safest country in the World. South Korea is safer than other countries in the world," Kwon said.
Few world politicians are as admired as Frances President Emmanuel Macron is at the moment. The 39-year-old  Frances youngest leader since Napoleon  is hailed as Europes saviour, someone who not only managed to defeat both far-left and farright opponents at home but also in the process slayed the demons of populism and racism stalking the European continent.

His bold programme of economic reforms at home is described as a model for others to follow. His bold global leadership is equally admired. Only last week, Macron hosted the US President and the German Chancellor, and both looked as though they hoped some of the shine of Frances head of state would rub onto them as well.

Earnest looks, sharply-tailored suits, the ability to say the right thing and a knack for flirtatious winks to media photographers, Emmanuel Macron is the poster boy of a modern leader, the man who has others eating out of his palm. But just as Macronmania reaches new heights, a strong dose of caution is recommended.

For the reality is that although President Macron should clearly be counted as one of todays most astute politicians, his phenomenal rise to power is mostly explainable by a mixture of luck and special circumstances, and should not obscure the fact that his style of government still amounts to a monumental gamble which could fail, with grave consequences for all of Europe.

Ultimately, few of those who pretend to be walking on water do so for long. Macrons supporters like to portray him as a revolutionary, a man hellbent on upending Frances establishment by dragging it into the 21st century. But the reality is that he is very much a product of the same establishment he claims to dismantle.

Like most of Frances leaders, he went through the grandes ecoles, the highly-selective elite educational establishments which operate outside the mainstream university system as sausage manufacturers for Frances ruling class. And like all people in his bracket, he was helped in his career by guanxi, which works in France in an identical way to China: earn someones trust and friendship, land a little job in the private office of a grandee and, bingo, a ministerial portfolio and effortless fame.

Before becoming president, Macron held no elected office and fought for no competitive position; in this respect, the only politician with an identical political path is none other than Donald Trump. Yet, had it not been for an extraordinary set of circumstances  all of which were beyond his control and none of his doing  Macron would have still failed to become president.

He benefited from the fact that the incumbent French head of state was so unpopular that he was persuaded not to stand, that Frances left-wing voters were split between two candidates, that the centre-right Gaullists were led by an elderly patrician figure embroiled in a personal financial scandal and, finally, that the leader of Frances far-right movement drew enough votes to weaken other candidates but never had any chance of winning.

In short, what ultimately propelled Macron to the Elysee Palace was the sort of political upheaval which happens only once in generations. And even then, just a handful of votes separated him from his nearest rival in the first round of the French presidential elections; had 60,000 ballots out of 36 million votes cast gone the other way, nobody would be speaking about Emmanuel Macron today.

Of course, in politics luck counts for a great deal, and nothing succeeds more than success, so nobody can begrudge Macron for being the right man at the right time and in the right spot. Still, its worth remembering that his actual electoral support is nowhere near as impressive as it currently appears.

And its also worth recalling that his phenomenal reputation outside France is largely based on lack of knowledge about Frances domestic scene. Had a rich kid with an exclusive education become British leader at a young age, most people around the world would put it down to pure favouritism; David Cameron, Britains premier until last year, was never allowed to forget his similar past.

But when Macron rose to power in exactly the same way, almost everyone outside France put it down to his brilliance. And had a British or, say, Australian leader entertained Trump with a military parade, lavish dinners and lots of hugs, the worlds English-speaking, leftleaning media would have been outraged.

But when the French President did precisely that last week, none other than Britains Guardian newspaper hailed Macron as a genius in diplomacy, a man who showed elegance and discretion in handling Trump. Macron would be well advised not to allow such flattery to go to his head, for it wont last long after the novelty effect wears off.

But it will be the Presidents domestic policy choices which could come back to haunt him. Macron had the option of using his presidency to forge a new political consensus between the left and the right in France; he could have done this through the simple expedient of capturing the presidency, but not forming his own party.

Instead, he could not resist the temptation of capturing as much power as possible by establishing his own political movement and by ensuring that this won control over Parliament. Yet that was not in order to ensure that his legislation got through; rather, it was to emasculate Parliament altogether.

All his measures since the parliamentary elections last month consist of marginalising lawmakers; Parliament was asked to provide the government with full powers to change labour legislation by decree, and Macron also announced his intention to change the electoral system to one of proportional representation, a move which, if implemented, will ensure that far-right movements will have a bigger presence in the National Assembly, but will also result in the creation of a legislature which is so paralysed as to be irrelevant.

Completing this picture is Macrons penchant to rule as an elected monarch. The first president in modern France not to have had any experience of the military loves nothing better than parades, salutes and marches; I am your boss, he admonished some of Frances top army generals after they had the temerity of complaining before a parliamentary committee that the newly-elected President has gone back on his pledge to invest in the countrys defences by cutting Frances military budget.

Macron also enjoys entertaining both visiting heads of state and lawmakers in the sumptuous surroundings of Palace of Versailles, the gilded spectacular surroundings built by Louis XIV, Frances Sun King, just outside Paris. Unlike Nicolas Sarkozy, another recent French president, Macron does not wear bling.

But he certainly likes to be surrounded by official bling, and plenty of it. There is a serious meaning to this method, which the French media has already dubbed as the Jupiterian presidency, after Jupiter, the king of gods in Roman mythology.

Macron has rightly concluded that the French may be republican, but respect only leaders who act as monarchs. So, unlike his immediate predecessor Francois Hollande who famously described himself as normal and ended up with abnormally low ratings, Macron is determined to talk to the French from the height of Olympus.

There is also a justification for trying to ram through economic and social reform from above. For, as General Charles de Gaulle, Frances wartime leader, memorably put it about half a century ago, How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese? The French actually have more than 1,000 various cheeses, so Macrons impulse to rule with an iron fist makes some sense.

Still, this approach remains dangerous. For there is no consensus for the reforms which the President proposes to introduce, and no political class invested in its success. If the measures produce the expected outcome and France flourishes, Macron would be hailed as a second General de Gaulle.

But the moment the reforms appear to flounder, he will find himself alone; the downside of personalising power to such an extent is that responsibility ends up with only one person. The god Jupiter can retreat into the clouds; Macron cannot. All of those who believe in Europes future should hope for Macrons success, for what happens in France is key to the rest of the continent. Yet hope is no substitute for reason. And any reasonable analysis of France indicates that Macron is engaged in a dangerous gamble, for very high stakes.

(The Straits Times/ANN)
Venezuela is in crisis. The government of President Nicolas Maduro has been jolted to its foundations in Sundays referendum, however symbolic. More than 7.1 million people have rejected the Governments plan to rewrite the Constitution as also Maduros plans for the 30 July election of an assembly that would remake the countrys political system.

The President is palpably fighting a losing battle against his political opponents, and most importantly the people. The opposition has conveyed a pregnant message with its leader, Freddy Guevara, announcing to the country that it is time for zero hour. In the immediate perspective, this will entail an escalation in street protests and a 24-hour national strike later this week.

Beyond the agitprop, the opposition-controlled National Assembly has emitted a critical signal of intent ~ to name new members of the countrys Supreme Court, a move that will almost certainly lead to a confrontation with Maduro, whose ruling Socialist Party controls the judiciary.

A constitutional crisis is imminent with the legislature set to confront the fragile executive and its loyal judiciary. It is a measure of the crisis that has been building up that the Presidents allies have urged the assembly to impose what they call executive branch authority over the few remaining institutions that are beyond the control of Venezuelas ruling Socialist Party.

The political convulsions have resulted in casualties in terms of human life no less. More than three months of opposition protests have left at least 93 people dead and 1,500 wounded.

More than 500 protesters and opponents of the government have been jailed. Another Latin American country showcases a fierce struggle between the people and a brittle government. Sundays opposition vote was suitably robust, but not as overwhelming as the oppositions 7.7m vote-performance in the 2015 legislative elections and the 7.5m votes that brought Maduro to power in 2013.

Opposition leaders have attributed the decline to the fact that only 2,000 polling stations had been set up in a symbolic exercise that the government had described as illegitimate. Nonethess, the outcome renders the outlook in Venezuela direly uncertain. The result is bound to impinge on the response of the comity of nations which is likely to go against Maduros planned election on 30 July.

The message conveyed by Sundays exercise will almost certainly erode his credibility as Head of State in a beleaguered country. Overall, this vote makes it difficult for the government to proceed as planned.

The President is hardly in a position to set the terms of engagement and the international community may well be emboldened to reject the agenda of the government in Caracas.

Virtually every voter answered yes as the electorate rejected the move to rewrite the Constitution. President Maduro has his back to the wall.
A total of five people, including four civilians and a policeman, were killed on Tuesday in an attack by the IS militants at a village near Iraq's northern city of Kirkuk.

The extremists early in the morning stormed the village of Chragh near the town of Debis, some 40 km west of Kirkuk, and shot dead a policeman, the cleric of the local mosque and three civilians, Xinhua reported.

The attackers had fled before Iraqi security forces arrived at the village, a source said.

Iraqi security forces have liberated Iraq's second largest city of Mosul, but the rural areas near the town of Hawijah in west of Kirkuk, the town of Tal Afar in west of Mosul, the sprawling rugged area in the eastern part of Salahudin province and the areas near the border with neighbouring Syria are still under IS control.

On July 10, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi formally declared the liberation of Mosul from IS after nearly nine months of fierce fighting to dislodge the extremist militants from their last major stronghold in Iraq.
Australia on Wednesday released the first series of data and maps of the Indian Ocean seabed that the search teams scoured to locate the MH370, a Malaysia Airlines aircraft that disappeared in 2014 with 239 people onboard.

Australia, which coordinated the search operation, along with China and Malaysia had focused on a lonely stretch of the Indian Ocean where experts believed the plane might have crashed, Efe news reported.

Geoscience Australia (GA), a government agency that carries out geoscientific research, drew the maps with the help of bathymetric data or topography of the selected marine area, and an underwater search was subsequently carried out over an area of 120,000 square kilometres.

Data from the second phase of the search will be released in mid-2018, GA said in a statement.

Between 10 and 15 per cent of the seabed was analysed with this technology, said Stuart Minchin, Chief of Geoscience Australia's environmental geoscience division. He said the data is unique owing to the remote location of the area examined.

Data from the first phase show in great detail high crests, underwater volcanoes, enormous ridges and deep fault valleys across the remote ocean.

The data can contribute to a greater understanding of the geology of the seabed and throw light on the complexity of the processes that occur there, Minchin added.

MH370 disappeared from the radars on March 8, 2014, around 40 minutes after taking off from Kuala Lumpur and enroute to Beijing, when someone turned off the communication systems and changed the plane's route, according to the official investigation.

Malaysia, Australia and China called off the unsuccessful search, that cost an estimated $135 million, in January this year.

So far, parts of the plane have been recovered from beaches in the French island of Reunion, Mozambique, Mauritius, South Africa and the Pemba Island (Zanzibar).
China has moved tens of thousands of tonnes of military vehicles and equipment into Tibet amid a continuing stand-off between Chinese and Indian troops in Doklam in the Sikkim sector of the border.

The hardware was moved simultaneously by road and rail from across the entire region in late June, a report in the PLA Daily run by the Chinese Army said.

The report comes as the Chinese Army held a live-fire drill last week in Tibet, which borders India.

According to the Chinese media report, the drill was conducted not far from Doklam, which is at the tri-junction of India, China and Bhutan.

The PLA report did not say if the military supply was linked to the drill in Tibet.

"The vast haul was transported to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command, which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India," the South China Morning Post quoted the PLA Daily as saying.

"Diplomatic talks must be backed by military preparation," Ni Lexiong, a Shanghai-based military commentator, was quoted as saying by the Post.

Wang Dehua, an expert on South Asia studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, said the scale of the troop and equipment movement showed how much easier it now was for China to defend its western borders.

"Military operations are all about logistics," he said. "Now there is much better logistics support to the Tibet region."

Now, the military can "easily transport troops and supplies to the frontline, thanks to the much-improved infrastructure including the Qinghai-Tibet railway and other new roads connecting the plateau to the rest part of China", Wang said.

There is no let-up in the tensions between India and China over the stand-off in Doklam. China has adopted a tough stand over the issue and has been issuing warnings to India every other day.

The state-run Chinese media has even warned of war with India.

The borders of India, Bhutan and China meet at Doklam, which holds a strategic importance to all three.

China calls Doklam its own, but India and Bhutan call it Bhutanese territory.

India, a close ally of Bhutan, stopped the Chinese Army from building a road in Doklam in June, leading to the face-off between New Delhi and Beijing.

Now, both armies are eyeball-to-eyeball at Doklam. India says it wants to resolve the issue diplomatically.

But China says it won't talk to India unless New Delhi withdraws troops from Doklam.


Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang has said economic cooperation between China and the US holds out a promising future thanks to Beijing's long-term economic development trend and market potential.

"Cooperation is the only right choice for our two countries. The giant ship of China-US economic and trade relations is sailing on the right course," Xinhua news agency quoted Wang as saying on Tuesday at a China-US business luncheon ahead of the first China-US Comprehensive Economic Dialogue.

China has been pushing forward economic restructuring and adhering to reform and opening-up in its economic development. These efforts have yielded tremendous progress over the past decades, said Wang.

The contribution of China's consumption to economic growth jumped to 77 per cent in the first quarter of this year, up from 47 per cent in 2013, he noted.

The long-term certainty of China's development and progress offers the most important external environment for foreign businesses in the country, said the Vice Premier.

As China is upgrading its economy, Wang said, there is far greater complementarity than competition between the world's two largest economies. "The two countries have seen the space for cooperation expanded rather than narrowed."

In order to address trade imbalances, Wang called on the US to relax its outdated regulations on export control, stressing that as the Chinese economy climbs higher on the value chain, there is huge market potential for US exports of advanced technologies.

In his speech, Wang also stressed the importance of cooperation between the Chinese and US business communities.

"Your long-standing support and active participation have helped to create an atmosphere in favour of cooperation rather than confrontation for China-US business ties and have contributed to the China-US economic relationship as it stands today," Wang said.

Wang is scheduled to co-chair the first China-US Comprehensive Economic Dialogue together with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. It is one of four major dialogue mechanisms the two sides established in April.
The US President Donald Trump met with service members on Tuesday as the Pentagon was still working on a new Afghanistan strategy.

"I've heard plenty of ideas from a lot of people, but I want to hear it from people on the ground," Xinhua quoted Trump as saying.

"We've been there for now close to 17 years, and I want to find out why we've been there for 17 years, how it's going, and what we should do in terms of additional ideas," Trump added.

For months, the Pentagon had been working on a new Afghanistan strategy and Trump along with and his national security team were scheduled to meet this week to discuss US strategy for Afghanistan.

A key part of the new Afghanistan strategy would be setting new US troop levels in Afghanistan.

Former US President Barack Obama had planned to reduce the current number of 9,800 in Afghanistan to some 5,500 by the end of 2015 and withdraw all troops by the end of 2016 when his presidency came to an end.

However, given the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, the Obama administration repeatedly postponed the withdrawal.

Currently, there are about 8,400 US troops and another 5,000 forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on the ground in Afghanistan to train and assist the Afghan forces against the Taliban, and conduct counter-terrorism missions.

The prospect of new US troop levels in Afghanistan came at a time when senior US officials warned of dire security situation in Afghanistan.




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Organisation: Uganda

Electricity Transmission Company Limited (UETCL)

Duty Station: Kampala, Uganda

Reports to: Principal

Projects Engineer

About US:

Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Limited (UETCL) is responsible

for bulk purchase of electricity from the generating companies and selling the

electricity in bulk to the distribution companies throughout Uganda. UETCL is

also responsible for all exports and imports of electricity to Uganda. UETCL

envisions: To become a leading strategic business partner in the transmission

and Single Buyer Business and to support sustainable energy development in

Uganda.

Job Summary: The Projects

Engineer  Electrical will render support in the management and supervision of

the execution of power transmission plans to meet the future demand in line

with company objectives.



Responsibilities: Key Duties andResponsibilities:



Works Supervision: Engineering Design, Procurement &Works Supervision:

o Manages all project activities from

detailed design to successful commissioning of power transmission lines and

substations in fulfillment of company objectives and strategies.

o Actively participate with Planning and Investments department to;

o Prepare

conceptual designs, bills of quantities, cost-benefit analysis and tender

documentation for the design, manufacture, testing, supply, construction,

installation and commissioning of transmission substations and lines in

accordance to engineering standards and procurement guidelines.

o Carry

out system studies to identify network constraints and recommend optimum solutions

to meet existing and future power demands.

o Identify

optimal substation sites and line routes and provide technical support in the

acquisition of right-of-way.

o Prepare/review

design calculations, specifications, drawings of transmission line and substation

power systems, equipment, earthing, protection, control and communication

systems in liaison with end-user departments.

Render

technical support during the bidding process in the coordination of bid

clarification, pre-bid site visits, bid evaluation, and pre-award meetings, and

preparation of draft contracts. Rendertechnical support during the bidding process in the coordination of bidclarification, pre-bid site visits, bid evaluation, and pre-award meetings, andpreparation of draft contracts.

Prepare project implementation and

procurement plans and track the implementation.

Coordinate the project kick-off and site

handover.

Keenly review detailed engineering

designs, drawings and technical specifications of transmission lines and

substations prepared by contractors and their suppliers.

Ensure conformity of designs, drawings,

manufacturing processes, and installations to specified engineering

standards and best engineering practices.

Review contractors method statements and

procedures for quality assurance.

Work closely with user departments,

witness, review and sign-off factory/laboratory/site acceptance tests of

equipment, material and works.

Supervise, monitor and report on the progress

and quality of equipment, material and works and recommend corrective

actions wherever necessary inclusive of coordination of network switching

operations.

Verify Consultants and Contractors

interim and final invoices against agreed project milestones and

deliverables.

Review and advise on change proposals and

ensure validity of contract amendments.

Review commissioning protocol and

coordinate the inspection and commissioning tests of completed

installations and works and subsequent UETCLs takeover of operationally

accepted facilities with verified as-built documentation and operation

& maintenance manuals.

Monitor the operational performance of

installed facilities during Defects Liability Period and ensure that

identified snags are rectified by the contractor.

Monitor and ensure effective coordination

between UETCL, Consultants, Contractors, Financiers, and all other project

stakeholders to attain execution of the contract scope within approved

budget and timelines.

Ensure compliance to safety, social,

health and environment regulations and project-specific requirements.

Identify, Monitor and assess project risks

and execute necessary mitigation measures.

Preparation of reports for different

stakeholders.

Perform any other duties as may be

assigned from time to time.



Experience: Qualifications, Skills andExperience:

The ideal applicant for the Projects

Engineer  Electrical job placement should hold a University Degree in Electrical Engineering.

Professional

registration with relevant body.

A

minimum of six (6) years of professional working experience in power

system projects.

Possess

good project management skills.

Comprehensive

knowledge of Industrial & SHE regulations.

Previous

experience in managing multi-lateral financed projects.

Prior

experience in PPDA and donor-funded procurement guidelines and reporting

practises.

Computer

literacy in Ms Projects or similar project scheduling and

monitoring tool.

Hold

a clean and valid National Driving Permit.

Analytical

skills, Interpersonal skills, Supervisory skills, Report writing skills.

Ability

to withstand stressful work situations and have willingness to work

long hours outside the normal hours.

Be

a person of high integrity, must be highly motivated, innovative and a

committed team player.

Willingness

to travel extensively and be away from duty station for extended

periods.

How to Apply:

All candidates are strongly encouraged to send their applications

enclosing photocopies of academic qualification certificates and testimonials

along with their curriculum vitae indicating contact postal address, daytime

contact telephone, fax or e-mail and giving three (3) referees to:

The Manager,

Human Resource and Administration

Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Limited

P.O. Box 7625

Kampala. Uganda

st July 2017

Deadline: 21July 2017



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For more of the latest jobs, please visit https://www.theugandanjobline.com orfind us on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/UgandanJobline




A cabinet proposal in June, okaying Air India's strategic divestment, has become a major bane for employees' unions of the national carrier. Five of the seven Air India employee unions have formed a joint front to stage protests against the proposal to privatise the national carrier.

"We protested outside Air India's office in Terminal-3 on Tuesday. More than 500 employees, both staff and contract workers, had joined the demonstartions," said J.B. Kadian, union leader, AI Air Corporation Employees Union, among the largest employee union in the airline.

According to Kadian, the unions have already written separate letters to the Planning Commission and to Civil Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju requesting a more 'humane' view towards employees in case of privatisation.

"Five of the unions, including AI Employee's Union, United Air India Officer's Association, AI Service Engineers Association and Air India Cabin Crew Association have formed a joint forum of All Air India Employees for both technical and non-technical staff," said Kadian.

He said that the joint forum would bring demonstrations closer to Parliament, if the government goes ahead with the privatisation plans for the airline.

A secretarial panel, comprising ministry of civil aviation, tourism, department of investment and Public Asset Management and finance secretary are considering various options by which the debt-laden national carrier could be divested.

After two initial meetings, this group of secretaries have asked Air India to draw up a list of its immovable assets first by July 30.

All expenses related to the airline is being scrutinised to cut corners. Plans to lease eight Boeing wide-bodied aircrafts to add routes to far east and Europe, has also been put on hold, informed an Air India official in-charge of flight operations.

An Air India official, related to human resource functioning in the airline, said that there are no VRS plans that are yet in the offing for employees. "I think the chairman had adequately stressed in yesterday's mail and even before that all licensed staffers (pilots, cabin crew, aircraft engineers) need not worry about their continuity with the airline," said this official.

On Tuesday, Air India Chairman Ashwani Lohani addressed a mail to all Air India employees seeking their cooperation for a fruitful privatisation process for the survival of the 64-year old airline.

Meanwhile, union leaders said that they are keeping a close eye on Parliament affairs related to Air India's privatisation.

"Any offers for voluntary retirement is not acceptable to us, as Air India was burdened with this Rs 50,000 crore debt due to wrong civil aviation and business policies. Not due to employees," said Parag Azgaonkar, president of Air India Employee's Union, which is the second largest union of Air India employees.
In India, there may have been a slowdown in residential demand, but the overall real estate sector continues to attract huge investments, particularly in the commercial real estate market and the affordable housing segment. Investors buoyed by reforms like the implementation of Real Estate Regulations Act (RERA), the government's housing for all initiative and bottlenecks for Real Estate Investments Trusts (REITs) also being removed have been increasing their exposure to the market.

The total investment in the real estate sector topped Rs 16,000 crore in the first six months of 2017, which is highest ever for the first half in any year, data shows.

Between January-June, private equity investors pumped in Rs 16,008 crore in India's realty market. The sector attracted investments worth Rs 15,601 crore in the same period last year, according to real estate consulting firm JLL India.

Big bang policy reforms, economic and political stability, liberalisation of the FDI policy and the resultant improvement in the investment community's sentiment are some of the factors working in Indian real estate's favour, said Shobhit Agarwal, managing directorcapital markets, JLL India.

Between 2014 to the first half of 2017, the realty sector saw debt and equity investments worth over Rs 98,000 crore. In comparison, Rs 95,000 crore was invested over 2003-2013.

Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), Brookfield Asset Management, Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and the Blackstone Group among others have been among the top investors in the real estate market here, over the last few years.

Affordable housing projects, new malls and shopping centres, logistics parks, warehouses and prime office space is attracting these investors to India. Through REITs, some of these commercial realty assets could also be monetised in the future, which could also make investments attractive.

On Tuesday, for instance, International Finance Corp announced it would invest over $1 billion in creating green buildings.

In April this year, CPPIB formed a strategic investment platform with The Phoenix Mills to develop its own and operate retail-led mixed use developments across the country. The pension fund will initially have a 30 per cent stake, investing about Rs 725 crore. Overall, it plans to invest Rs 1,600 crore in multiple tranches to raise its stake in the platform to 49 per cent.

Separately, private equity firm KKR & Co recently invested about Rs 1,000 crore in three real estate projects, which included a township project in Bengaluru and an affordable housing project in Gurugram.

GST, RERA, REITs, the Benami Property Act and constant focus on affordable housing will lead to the sector evolving into a more mature, consolidated and highly transparent industry. This is expected to attract further private equity from abroad, said JLL's Agarwal.

Real estate consulting firm CBRE has estimated that India's real estate market is expected to see investments worth $7 billion in 2017, which would further increase to $10 billion by 2020.
The earliest recordings of 'right to privacy' in Indian jurisprudence were in the late 1800s when a local British court upheld privacy of a pardanashin woman to access her balcony without the fear of the neighborhood gaze. The jurisprudence has evolved ever since and the right to privacy was read into Article 21 of our Constitution by the Supreme Court as an integral part of personal liberty. Like most freedom, we took it for granted, until last year our government told us that privacy is not a fundamental right after all.

That privacy is not a fundamental right was first told to us by the Supreme Court in the year 1954. An eight-judge bench in M.P. Sharma v. Satish Chandra case, while dealing with the power to search and seize documents from the Dalmia Group, dismissed the existence of a right to privacy on the basis that the makers of Constitution had not envisaged a fundamental right to privacy similar to the 4th Amendment in the U.S.

Our desire for a private life made a comeback after nine years before a six-judge bench of the Supreme Court in the case of Kharak Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh, only to be rejected again. Kharak Singh, an alleged dacoit, was subjected to surveillance and secret picketing of the house, visits at nights, periodical inquiries and verification of movements. The Supreme Court refused to budge and held that there is no fundamental right to privacy but went on to strike down the provision which allowed night visits for violation of personal liberty. The silver lining was Justice Subba Raos dissent, wherein he said even though the Constitution did not declare the right to privacy to be a fundamental right, it was still an essential ingredient of personal liberty. He went on to say "nothing is more deleterious to a man's physical happiness and health than a calculated interference with his privacy," thereby recording the existence of this right in our post-independence jurisprudence.

Twelve long years later, the Supreme Court, albeit a smaller three-judge bench, when faced with a similar factual matrix in Gobind v. State of Madhya Pradesh, upheld the existence of a fundamental right to privacy under Article 21. However, the right was not absolute and could be interfered with by a procedure established by law. Though Gobind lost, privacy won for the first time!

Privacy jurisprudence was further strengthened in the post-liberalisation era. In the case of the infamous gangster from Bangalore, "Auto Shanker" (R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu), the Supreme Court dealt with a conflict between the freedom of press and the right to privacy and held that the latter had acquired a Constitutional status. A couple of year later in the PUCL case, the court questioned the telephone tapping of prominent politicians and asked the government to comply with strict guidelines for tapping telephonic conversations. The provisions under the Telegraph Act, 1885, and Information Technology Act, 2000, that deals with interception are based on the guidelines issued by the Supreme Court in the PUCL case.

By this time, privacy had assumed an inherent role in our fundamental rights jurisprudence that helped us lead a dignified life without fearing surveillance. It never faced such a strong challenge in the last 54 years of its existence as it is currently facing before the nine-judge bench which is looking into whether the decisions in M.P. Sharma and Kharak Singh are good law.

So, what happens if tomorrow we are told that the right to privacy is not a fundamental right? The right to privacy will lose its status amongst the Golden Trinity of Article 14 (Equality), Article 19 (Fundamental Rights) and Article 21 (Right to Life). These rights can only be taken away from us by a just and reasonable law, which is the paramount protection that our Constitution offers us. If privacy is not a fundamental right, this intrinsic right can be taken away by our legal system. In the Aadhaar era, where our right to life and liberty is liked to our identity in the form of Aadhaar, the consequences could be disconcerting, to say the least.

(Nikhil Narendran is a partner at Trilegal. The views expressed here are personal and not of the firm)
The Karnataka government's move to constitute a panel to design the state flag and study its legal sanctity has triggered a row, pitching the national and regional identities against each other. While the 'Kannada flag' with its vibrant red and yellow hues has been a symbol of unity among the Kannadigas since the 1960s, the timing of such a proposal from the Congress government is being perceived with skepticism as the state is due for the assembly polls in early 2018.

While the Kannada enthusiasts and scholars have welcomed the decision to constitute a nine-member committee comprising senior bureaucrats, litterateurs and academicians to give a final shape to the long-pending demand, the BJP has cried foul over the divisive agenda of the ruling Congress and dubbed it as a political gimmick.

The union home ministry clarified that there was no provision in the Constitution for a separate flag for any state and the tricolour is the only flag for India. We are one nation, one flag. Legally, there is no provision either for providing or prohibiting a separate flag for any state, asserted the ministry, adding that no other state, except Jammu and Kashmir (which is accorded special status under Article 370 of the Constitution), has a state flag in the country. Karnataka has a flag which represents only its people and not the government. The state flag is not used during national ceremonies like Independence Day or Republic Day, but only during the foundation day of the state, the ministry added.

A state that is steeped in caste-politics, now seems to be now steering towards identify politics, as the BJP is hoping to cash in on Hindutva politics, while the Congress is invoking the Kannada identity ahead of the 2018 polls.

Chief Minisiter Siddaramaiah said there was nothing unconstitutional about having a state flag. It is wrong to say it is a poll gimmick as we have no polls this year. Karnataka already has an official state anthem (Bharata Jananiya Tanujaate, written by Kuvempu) and what is wrong in having a state flag, he said, adding that a state flag would not undermine the national flag nor disturb the unity and integrity of the country.

The national flag will always fly higher than the state flag, he assured.

Interestingly, the BJP which is opposing the move, had also mooted a similar proposal to hoist the Kannada flag atop all government buildings on the state formation day in 2012. However, the plan was dropped after a PIL was filed, challenging the decision. A separate flag would undermine the sanctity of the national flag, reasoned the BJP government, while dropping the idea.

Pro-Kannada organisations feel that a state flag is a symbol that can unite all Kannadigas to fight against forces that undermine Kannada language and culture.

A closer look at the history of the state tells you that Karnataka, that emerged during the linguistic reorganisation in 1956, was an amalgamation of Mumbai Karnataka, Hyderabad Karnataka, part of Madras and Old Mysore regions, had witnessed movements to revive Kannada and unite the Kannadigas in the border districts.

The nagging interstate water disputes (Cauvery, Krishna and Mahadayi) and the border disputes with its neighbouring states (Kerala, Maharashtra) have kept the pro-Kannada groups on their toes. The growing cosmopolitan culture, IT boom and the influx of migrant population in the state capital too have become triggers for clashes between locals and 'outsiders'. The recent protests against the Centre's 'imposition of Hindi' at Metro stations is one such example. However, the Siddaramaiah government's recent initiatives of making nada geetha (state anthem) and Kannada compulsory in schools, compelling multiplexes to screen Kananda movies and honouring lawyers who argue cases in Kannada and reservation in state civil services for Kannada medium students have made the Kannada activists happy. Nonetheless, the opposition feels it is all an election gimmick to consolidate the votes by invoking regional identity.

The Centre's fear that such moves breed separatist aspirations is not misplaced either. Recently, the Uttar Karnataka Horata Samiti was formed to agitate for separate statehood for the 13 districts of Mumbai-Karnataka and Hyderabad-Karnataka regions, alleging gross neglect of the North Karnataka region. In 2012, Suvarna Soudhaa replica of Vidhana Soudhawas built and a second High Court at Dharward was set up, to send out a strong message that Belgaum is an integral part of Karnataka. However, a coterie of politicians from the Bombay-Karnataka region are known to be in favour of carving a separate state.

The Karnataka flag

For decades, this vibrant red and yellow flag has defined the Kannada pride, fluttering atop homes and office buildings, adorning flag posts in every locality and waving out out of decorated autorickshaws, buses and bikes on Kannada Rajothsava (foundation day) or during the pro-Kannada agitations.

The Kannada flag is a symbol of unity of Kannadigas, and its hues red of the vermilion and yellow of turmeric, signifying auspiciousness.

The current version of the flag was designed by Ma Ramamurthy, a journalist and writer who floated the Karnataka Samyuktha Ranga in 1962 along A.N.Krishna Rao and a few like-minded activists, to fight for Kannada causes.

In 1960s, the growing cosmopolitan culture in Bengaluru posed a challenge to the Kannada language as theatres patronised non-Kannada films, and migrants from neighbouring Tamil Nadu used to hoist the DMK flag outside their homes in Bengaluru. The Kannada activists resented this and used bring down those flags. It was then that Ramamurthy came up with the red-yellow flag.

While, the political partyKannada Pakshafounded by Ramamurthy to protect the interests of Kannadigas and Karnataka fizzled out, the flag remains as a unifying symbol of Kannadigas.
We keep hearing about flaws in evaluation, re-evaluation requests across the country across different school and college examination boards. This is an area that is much talked about, but as far as addressing such evaluation issues is concerned, not much has happened. Off late, digital evaluation is expected to usher in a change in the overall examination system in the country as students are bound to benefit from the transparency it offers.

Bengaluru-based firm, Merit Trac has been working in this field and has tied up with many universities and boards to work towards bringing in digitisation in the evaluation system. Though digitisation of multiple choice examinations has been practised for quite sometime, it is being extended even to descriptive exams as well.

Digitisation of evaluation for both entrance and term exams is called 'Onscreen Marking' and is beneficial to students as well as the University, explained Gopal Devanahalli, CEO of Merit Trac and senior vice president at Manipal Global Education. It improves the speed of the declaration of the results as answer scripts can be evaluated online by evaluators as they do not need to be physically sent to the locations where evaluators are present. It also reduces errors in marking as technology identifies any discrepancies (scoring a question for more than the total possible etc.) The university is also able to monitor the quality of the evaluation better. Also, requests for re-totaling, re-evaluation etc can be addressed very quickly.

Under the onscreen marking system, the answer scripts are first scanned within the institutions premise and then a secure transfer of electronic scripts to the data centre takes place. Marking software hosted at the data centre is used and the scripts are made available to evaluators through the Internet in a secure mode. Interestingly, the evaluator then evaluates the answer scripts on screen and marked scripts are then converted to PDF form with annotations with supervisor controls through workflow. The result is published followed by instant readiness for subsequent evaluations when needed. Currently, Merit Trac is working with the Mumbai University, Manipal University and the Kerala Technical University to digitise their evaluation process.

Prof. Vrishali Bhat, controller of examinations at the T.A. Pai Management Institute in Manipal, is of the view that even in the traditional classroom mode of learning, digitisation of evaluation can offer multiple tangible benefits.

The entire examination can be conducted in an asynchronous manner bridging the physical gap between the institute, faculty and the student. This also allows innovation in both the kind of questions asked as well as the nature of responses that can be elicited from the students. The results can be conveyed quickly and there can be easy preservation of records from a regulatory stand. This also lends itself to mining of the results which in turn can provide greater insights in designing more effective teaching learning environment, Bhat told THE WEEK.
150 French Jews leaving the rising anti-Semitism and fears of Islamist terrorism arrived in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, 24 Tammuz, to begin new lives in Israel, on a special aliyah flight sponsored by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ).

The olim ranged in age from one-month-old to 77-years-old. Among them were two families spanning three generations, while 77 of the new immigrants were children. Also among the new arrivals was Eva Saban, the sister-in-law of Philippe Braham, who was murdered in the Hyper Cacher supermarket terror attack.

We have been wanting to make aliyah for a while, but after the terror attack at the Hyper Cacher we were left with no doubts. We are living in fear, Saban said. Our children go to an Orthodox school and as they leave the building they remove the kippah from their head. We no longer are sure of what we would like to do next, but we are confident that this is the right move for our children, and we pray to G-d it will all work out.

Many of the families said they also were moving to Israel in the hopes of providing their children with a better and safer future. About 80 percent of the olim, who come from Paris suburbs with large Muslim populations, said they lived in a state of tension and even persecution. Many of these new immigrants are from lower-middle class backgrounds, and will require the kind of extra assistance in aliyah and absorption the IFCJ provides.

The olim plan to settle throughout Israel, including in Netanya, Ashdod, Ariel, Hadera, Haifa, Jerusalem, Modiin Illit, Raanana, and Tel Aviv, though most will live in Ashdod and Netanya. Todays olim will join 1,248 other French-Jewish immigrants who have moved to Israel with the IFCJs help since the organization began spearheading its own independent aliyah activities in late 2014. By years end, the IFCJ expects to bring 5,000 olim to Israel from 15 countries where Jews are threatened by anti-Semitism, terrorism, or economic hardship.

Aliyah has always been and is still a determining factor in Israeli society. The olim coming on aliyah from France have experienced some terrible incidents of hatred directed at them for one reason only  simply because they are Jewish, said Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, President of the IFCJ.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
In the accompanying video we hear and see police arguing with Yisrael Harel, who led a group onto Har Habayis on Wednesday, 25 Tammuz, explaining to them in detail the events that occurred surrounding the liberation of the holy site by the IDF in 1967.

Born in Romania, Yehuda Harel was ten when he arrived in Israel together with his family in 1948. He served in the IDF and was founder of Nekuda Magazine which he edited for 15 years. He was also a founder of the Yesha Council, heading it until 1995. He is a recipient of the Lion of Zion Lifetime Achievement Award from the Moskowitz Foundation and continues activities on behalf of a greater Eretz Yisrael.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
A huge fire is burning out of control in Montenegro, in two locations in the south and north of the country.

Following a request for assistance received by the Foreign Ministrys Status Center from the NATO Control Center in Brussels, the director of the State Center, Herzl Edri, initiated and offered assistance to the Montenegrin through Ambassador Alona Fischer, who was also trained in Montenegro.

Upon receipt of an official letter requesting assistance from the Montenegrin and the decision of Foreign Ministry Director-General Yuval Rotem, the Director of the Situation Center initiated a process of coordination with the relevant bodies, the IDF, the Prime Ministers Office, Air Force planes to carry equipment and aid teams.

A government spokesman adds, We attach great importance to international cooperation and mutual assistance between the countries in this channel.

The State of Israel sends aid teams to join the work of the aid teams of Bulgaria and Ukraine. The first plane will leave tonight (Wednesday, 25 Tammuz) and the others tomorrow.

The Israeli Embassy in Belgrade was instructed to accept the aid delegation on the ground.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Goldman Sachs suffered its worst quarter on record for commodities since the end of 2015

Goldman Sachs suffered its worst quarter on record for commodities over the three months to June  but the US bank is still set to squirrel away around 10billion for its staff this year.

Fixed income, currencies and commodities revenues at the firm came in at around 890million over the quarter, a like-for-like drop of 40 per cent, and the division's worst three months since the end of 2015.

Goldman put the poor performance down to calm stock markets which led to low volatility and a lack of client interest.

The firm's bond rout is even worse than that of peers Citigroup, Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase, which have reported bond trading declines of 6 per cent to 19 per cent following historically high levels of volatility.

Finance boss Martin Chavez told analysts its commodity arm suffered its worst quarter since it listed as a public company.

'We are a market leader in commodities, but it was a challenging environment on multiple fronts,' Chavez said. He declined to provide a specific value on what the firm lost on commodity trading.

Although a fall in Goldman's fixed income department was largely expected, analysts said the bank may have to do more to adjust to new market dynamics.

Despite this poor performance, Goldman has already set aside 5billion to pay for its staff over the first half of the year.

If the pot was as big in the second half of the year, the firm's 34,100 staff would share 10billion between them, which works out at more than 293,000 per employee.

As a whole, Goldman's income came in at around 1.4billion in the second quarter, down from the 1.7billion reported in the first three months of 2017 and only slightly higher than the amount it reported for the same quarter last year.

Meanwhile earnings per share came in at 3.03, compared with analyst estimates of around 2.60. This is also up from 2.85 in the second quarter of 2016.
The boss of Dulux paint owner AkzoNobel announced he is quitting with immediate effect for health reasons, less than two months after finally fighting off a takeover move by an American predator.

Ton Buchner, who joined the Dutch company in 2012, is being replaced as chief executive by Thierry Vanlancker, who was head of specialty chemicals at AkzoNobel.

Buchners decision comes after months of fending off an aggressive takeover approach by US rival PPG, which was supported by one of Akzo's own major shareholders, hedge fund Elliott Advisors.

Stepping down: Ton Buchner, who joined the Dutch company in 2012, has quit the AzkoNobel, the Dutch parent company of paint maker Dulux

PPG eventually dropped its pursuit in June after three months in which AkzoNobel rebuffed 18.1billion, 19.3billion and 22.5billion offers.

But two weeks ago Elliott Advisors upped its stake in Dulux and launched a fresh bid to oust the paint maker's chairman.

The American fund, which is Azko's largest investor with a 9.5 per cent stake, said it had filed a second lawsuit seeking an extraordinary general meeting for shareholders to vote on the removal of Antony Burgmans.

Elliott's first attempt to force a shareholder meeting to discuss Burgmans's dismissal was rejected by Amsterdam's Enterprise Chamber in a preliminary ruling in May.

Buchner today said about his decision to step down: For me this was an extraordinarily difficult decision to make but my focus must now be on my health.

Last month Buchner said he was committed to creating more jobs in the UK and that AkzoNobel would pursue its own growth strategy, seeking to tap into its key research and development facilities in Gateshead.

Antony Burgmans, chairman of AkzoNobel's supervisory board, said: It is with great regret that Ton is stepping down due to health reasons.

He has been an outstanding leader for AkzoNobel, transforming the company and setting it up for future success. His focus on delivering for our customers and operational excellence has driven profitability to record levels, increasing returns to shareholders.
Three years ago, Dawn Smith fell down the stairs at home and was left disabled. Due to osteoporosis, the 73-year-old widow shattered bones in her feet, ankles and legs, and spent six months in a wheelchair.

She now walks with a stick and is confined to the ground floor of her three-bedroom London home, where shes turned the living room into a makeshift bedroom.

Dawn is desperate to use her pension for urgent home renovations that would mean she no longer has to sleep on a reclining chair, or rely on her daughter to help her wash by the sink.

But like millions of retirees, her life savings are locked into a pension annuity that she cannot access.

Hopes dashed: Dawn Smith, pictured with daughter Tracey, fell down the stairs at her London home shattering bones in her feet, ankles and legs

Her only option is to keep collecting her 113.53 monthly income  the guaranteed lifetime payout from the 29,000 annuity that she and her late husband David purchased with their life savings before he died of cancer in 2009.

Dawn has had her hopes of cashing in her annuity raised and dashed twice, in what her family describe as a double betrayal.

Two years ago, the Treasury announced that savers would be able sell back annuities to insurance companies from April 2017.

But the plans were shelved in October last year, causing crushing disappointment for pensioners such as Dawn, who felt a cash lump sum would be so much more valuable than a small monthly income for life.

Dawn then pleaded with her pension firm, Aviva, to let her cash in her annuity pot  which she was told is worth 17,913  to carry out the renovations. It refused, but instead offered her two years annuity income upfront, or 4,105, in lieu of the 113 monthly instalments.

The proposition, seen by Money Mail, was the first known offer of its kind.

But several weeks later, Aviva pulled the deal, saying it should never have been offered because it breached tax rules and its own company rules.

Aviva told Money Mail: This offer was made in error, and we are looking into the circumstances surrounding this.

It has now offered her 500 for the inconvenience she suffered.

Dawns case shows exactly why Money Mails Unlock Our Pensions campaign is calling on pension firms, the Government and City regulators to find a way to help savers stuck with annuity contracts they dont want.

In 2015, the Government scrapped a rule that effectively forced most over-55s with stock market-linked pension savings to buy annuities on retirement.

But the same freedom to spend your life savings as you want was not afforded to the five million people who had already locked in to lifetime annuity deals.

Dawn, of West London, says she is now at a loss as to how she can fund the repairs to her home.

Describing her treatment as disgusting, she says: Being able to cash in even 10,000 of my annuity would make a great deal of difference to my life.

There should be an exception to the rules if you suddenly need the money for medical reasons.

Dawns daughter Tracey Smith, 43, who lives with her mother and her eight-year-old daughter so she can care for Dawn full-time, says: This has been very stressful for my mum. First she was let down by the Government, and now this.

Dawn and David took out a joint annuity policy, which pays out to a spouse on death, using their entire life savings of 29,000 in 2003. David was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2006, a year after retiring as a lorry driver, and died in 2009 aged 65.

Dawn with her late husband David in May 2015 on their ruby wedding anniversary

When the Government announced plans to let savers cash in, Dawn had hoped to use the pension to fund a 5,000 walk-in bath and a 40,000 house extension with a downstairs bedroom and bathroom.

My husband never would have taken out an annuity if he had known we could never get it out if we needed it, she says.

Ministers claimed that letting pensioners sell their incomes for lump sums would put them at risk of poor-value payouts.

Writing to Dawn, Aviva warns it could cause financial detriment to customers and would not be in their best interests.

But Dawn says: I feel patronised by the suggestion that I cannot handle my own money.

Aviva said tax rules prevent it from offering two years worth of payments upfront.

Its earlier letter to Dawn had said: Due to your extenuating circumstances, [we] wanted to do something to help, especially as your council is not willing to pay for the home adaptations.

The result of our meetings with other managers is that they have agreed to offer you a lump sum of two years worth of payments. This would mean you would not receive payments for two years.

However, Aviva later referred Money Mail to HMRCs Pension Tax Manual, which states that an annuity contract must be paid at least once a year, whether in advance or in arrears.

Aviva accepts that it could offer one year of payouts to Dawn up front, but is not willing to do so.

As well as the 500 gesture, it has offered to pay the costs of independent financial advice to help her find a solution.

l.eccles@dailymail.co.uk
The state pension age will rise to 68 between 2037 and 2039, affecting everyone aged 46 or under now.

The Government decision jettisons existing legislation which anticipated the increase to 68 happening far later, between 2044 and 2046. However, it was widely expected since it merely accepts the recommendation of an official report issued in March.

The move is bound to disappoint those having to wait longer to retire. But while it has sparked an outcry among detractors, it has also attracted support from some financial experts who say it makes the state pension fair and affordable.

We look at why the Government has decided to increase the state pension age, and round up the views for and against below.

State pension age: Rises are meant to take account of everyone living longer and keep the system affordable

When will you be able to retire?

The state pension age is already rising for many older people, and now changes are spreading to younger generations.

At present, it's still 65 for men, but the age at which women qualify for the state pension is in the process of rising from 60 to 65 by November 2018, with the exact date depending on the month you were born.

Between October 2018 and October 2020, both men and women's state pension age will increase to 66. And between 2026 and 2028, it will rise again to 67.

The rise to 68 just announced by the Government will happen between 2037 and 2039, after it accepted the recommendation of ex-Confederation of British Industry boss John Cridland, who carried out an official review of future state pension age increases.

HOW MUCH IS THE STATE PENSION? The basic state pension is 122.30 a week. It is topped up by additional state pension entitlements - S2P and Serps - accrued during working years. That two-tier system has changed for people retiring since 6 April 2016, when it was replaced by a new 'flat rate' state pension. This is worth 159.55 a week. However, people who have contracted out of S2P and Serps over the years get less than this. Workers needed to have 30 years of qualifying National Insurance contributions to get the old state pension, but they now need to have 35 years of contributions to get the new flat rate state pension. But even if you paid in full for a whole 35 years, if you contracted out for some years on top of that it might still reduce what you get. Everyone gets the option of deferring their state pension to get more in their later years. You can check your NI record here.

The changes to the state pension age are aimed at bringing women's state pension age into line with men's, and taking account of everyone living longer. Read more in our guide here.

Why is the hike to 68 being brought forward?

Officially the rise to 68 was meant to happen between 2044 and 2046, but this timetable has been under review for some time amid growing concern about whether the state pension is affordable.

Ideas have been floated lately about means testing the state pension, or scrapping it entirely for the rich, to ensure it can continue for those who need it most.

The Government has pointed out that latest projections from the Office for National Statistics show the number of people over state pension age in the UK is expected to grow by a third between 2017 and 2042, from 12.4million in 2017 to 16.9million in 2042.

However, its decision on the state pension age arrives a day after a new report suggested massive gains in life expectancy over recent decades are grinding to a halt.

The new timetable for an increase to 68 will affect everyone born between 6 April 1970 and 5 April 1978 - everyone older is covered by previous announcements or has already retired.

'Those affected by this proposed timetable will on average still receive more state pension over their lifetime than generations before them,' said the Government.

'When the modern state pension was introduced in 1948, a 65-year-old could expect to spend 13.5 years in receipt of it  23 per cent of their adult life.

'This has been increasing ever since. In 2017, a 65-year-old can now expect to live for another 22.8 years, or 33.6 per cent of their adult life.'

'Failing to act now in light of compelling evidence of demographic pressures would be irresponsible and place an unfair burden on younger generations.

'Keeping the state pension age at 66 would cost over 250billion more than the governments preferred timetable by 2045/46.'

What do experts on the elderly say?

'The Government is picking the pockets of everyone in their late forties and younger, despite there being no objective case in Age UKs view to support it at this point in time,' said Caroline Abrahams from the charity.

'Indeed, it is astonishing that this is being announced the day after new authoritative research suggested that the long term improvement in life expectancy is stalling.

'For people in midlife and younger their state pension may seem a lifetime away but the fact is that the change announced today will have a real impact on them later in life.

'Meanwhile, Age UK remains very concerned about the situation of millions of people in their sixties today who are unable to work because of ill health, caring or unemployment, who are having to wait longer for their state pension than they had reasonably hoped and expected and who are being thrown back on a benefits regime that was not really designed for them, or forced to draw down savings put away to see them through their retirement.'

Dr Anna Dixon, chief executive of the Centre for Ageing Better, said: 'If people are to work for longer, urgent action is needed from Government and employers to make the labour market fit for purpose.

'Currently older workers are not properly supported at work, and there is a rapid fall in employment rates over the age of 50, with a marked increase in perceived job insecurity.

'By the year before people reach state pension age, over half are not working and there are one million people aged 50 to 64 who would like to work but are not, most having left due to poor health, redundancy, or caring responsibilities.

'Employers must introduce flexible working arrangements that allow people to balance these pressures.

'Inequalities in life expectancy and healthy life expectancy mean that many people will find it impossible to work until state pension age, and without additional support or mitigating policies from Government will face financial difficulties and hardship in later years.'

What do pension experts say?

'This proposal will affect more than seven million people in their late 30s and 40s  the sandwich generation,' said Graham Vidler, director of external affairs at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association.

'This group are also those most at risk of inadequate private saving  they have not had the same access to final salary pension schemes as their parents and are too old to enjoy the full benefits of automatic enrolment that their children will see.

'We call on the Government to follow up on one of Cridlands other recommendations and provide access to "Midlife Financial MOTs". This will help those people who need to work longer before they receive their state pension to make smarter financial choices to boost their savings.'

Jamie Smith-Thompson, managing director of pension advice specialist Portafina, said: 'On the one hand this doesnt come as a surprise. In an ageing society, the government needs to set limits on what it is able to pay out on retirement.

'However, we sympathise with those people who feel anger at this latest change. They have probably been paying National Insurance contributions for a number of years only to find they need to work longer for a benefit that was promised at an earlier age.

'It would be illegal to change the same type of rules in a final salary pension. The fact that the government is constantly changing the rules seems very unjust.'

Patrick Connolly, certified financial planner at Chase de Vere, said: 'While todays announcement which accelerates the time scale for the State pension age to increase from 67 to 68 will be unpopular, it should come as no surprise.

'State pensions are being put under severe pressure as an ageing population means there will be more people claiming it and comparatively less people paying taxes to meet these claims.

'At the same time, increasing longevity will mean higher government costs in other areas such as healthcare and social services.

'For the state pension to remain viable either the state pension age will need to continue rising in line with life expectancy increases, state pension benefits need to be cut or the state pension becomes a means-tested benefit which isnt universally available. None of these are particularly attractive options.'

Andrew Tully, pensions technical director at Retirement Advantage, said: 'Costs for funding the state pension are predicted to rocket, so it is no surprise some tough choices needed to be made.

'Bringing forward the increase in state pension age by just a few years saves government 74billion.

'Despite all the changes to state pension age currently taking place, our research shows people are still hard-wired to a retirement age of 65, even though that is highly likely to be before their state pension age.

WHEN WILL YOU GET A STATE PENSION? The age at which women qualify for the state pension is in the process of rising from 60 to 65 by November 2018, with the exact date depending on the month you were born. Between October 2018 and October 2020, both men and women's state pension age will increase to 66. And between 2026 and 2028, it will rise again to 67. Read more here in our guide detailing the month by month changes.

'For many people the state pension will be the bedrock of their retirement income, so it is crucial the government learn lessons from recent experience and ensure future changes are clearly and widely communicated.

Steven Cameron, pensions director at Aegon, said: 'Its ironic that the Government is proceeding with an accelerated increase in the state pension age days after statistics show improvements in life expectancy may be levelling off, meaning this increase may be less justified on affordability grounds.

'A blanket increase in state pension age will be particularly concerning for those who through health concerns, job pressures or lack of employment opportunity simply cant keep working into their late 60s.

'Requiring everyone to wait till an ever increasing age to draw a state pension is inflexible and increasingly out of sync with private pensions which can be taken from as early as age 55.'

Ed Monk, associate director for personal investing at Fidelity International, said: 'No one will rejoice at the thought of waiting longer for their state pension but the truth is that such changes are necessary if the current system is to be made sustainable.

'The population is growing, ageing and living for longer and accelerating the rise in the state pension age is just making us walk faster up a path which we were already on.

'We should not be too pessimistic about retiring later. Being 68 years old in 2037 will not be the same as being 68 in 1948, when the modern state pension was introduced. In general were becoming healthier and more active in later life and so better able to cope with working longer.

'Having said that, the Government is right to identify the problems faced by workers in more physical jobs, and to encourage changes in the jobs market to help them cope with later retirement.

'By telling everyone now about this change, we do have a clear pathway as to when future generations should expect to retire.

'If you are around the age of 25, you can expect to retire at 70, if youre 35 then it will likely be 69 and if youre 45 then its going to be 68. This effectively gives the nation a clear expectation of where the state pension age is going for decades to come.'
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By Larry Penner

Problems with both NYCT system-wide subway and LIRR signals at Penn Station require decisive action today, not tommorow.

The MTA must reprogram the $695 million Metro North East Bronx Penn Station Access, the $1.7 billion Second Avenue Subway Phase 2, and the $1.9 billion LIRR Main Line Third Track to help fund upgrading NYCT Subway System Signals. This would provide well over $3 billion as a down payment against $20 billion needed to bring NYCT Subway System Signals up to a state of good repair.

All three canceled projects can be funded out of the next MTA Five-Year Capital Plan for 2020-2024. This still provides ample time for both Metro North East Bronx Penn Station Access and LIRR Main Line Third Track project completions to coincide with LIRR East Side Access to Grand Central Terminal by December 2023 or 2024.

Governor Andrew Cuomo also needs to come up with the outstanding balance of $5.8 billion that he still owes toward the $8.3 billion shortfall to fully fund the $32 billion 2015-2019 MTA Five Year Capital Plan. The MTA cant afford to wait until 2018 or 2019 for both $5.8 billion and additional $1 billion recently pledged by Cuomo in response to the ongoing subway and LIRR Penn Station crises.

In June 2016, the United States Department of Transportation Federal Transit Administration provided $432 million in Superstorm Sandy funding to the MTA for repairs to the East River Tunnel, including signal upgrades. As of today, no funds have been spent. The MTA and LIRR have yet to complete negotiations with Amtrak for initiation of this work.

Larry Penner, of Great Neck, is a transportation historian and advocate who previously worked 31 years for the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Transit Administration.
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With rumors circulating that SUNY Polytechnic Institute is looking to sell Kiernan Plaza in Albany, the head of the school's real estate arm confirmed Wednesday that an appraisal has been done but that there is no current plan to sell the historic property, the former Union Station.

"We're not at that point yet," Robert Megna, president of Fuller Road Management Corp., the entity that owns SUNY Poly's real estate, told the Times Union.

SUNY Poly acquired Kiernan Plaza in 2013 for $3 million after having been awarded a $4 million grant from the state to turn the vacant building into a "smart cities" hub that would attract major employers and high-tech tenants like IBM. The remaining $1 million in state funding was earmarked for renovations.

The building, constructed in 1900 and located along Broadway, used to welcome 100 trains a day to downtown Albany.

Promising $26 million in private investment, SUNY Poly renamed the building the Smart Cities Technology Innovation Center and landed the credit union SEFCU and the civil engineering firm CHA as its anchor tenants.

There have been rumors that SEFCU, which made Kiernan Plaza its official headquarters location, was interested in buying Kiernan Plaza from Fuller Road Management. The smart cities initiative does not appear to have ever achieved its potential.

Others have said that SUNY Poly has been looking to pare its real estate holdings as it focuses on its core research and development and educational mission. The school faces a budget crisis that requires it to restructure its debt and cut its operating budget by $10 million.

The cost-cutting, part of a plan put into place by interim president Bahgat Sammakia, resulted in the layoff of 38 workers last week.

And last month, Fuller Road Management sold off a microelectronics manufacturing lab in Canandaigua for $2.75 million to a North Carolina startup that will use the facility as its main production facility.

Megna, who did not say how much Kiernan Plaza was appraised for, said that other SUNY Poly facilities not located on its main Albany campus have also been appraised as part of an overall plan by the state to assess the school's holdings.

Megna was put in place to lead Fuller Road Management and its sister entity, Fort Schuyler Management Corp., in the wake of the arrest and resignation last fall of SUNY Poly founder Alain Kaloyeros.

Kaloyeros has been accused of being part of an alleged bid-rigging scheme along with several upstate developers and a former aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

All of the defendants have maintained their innocence as they await trial.

Megna did not rule out a sale of Kiernan Plaza, but he said if Fuller Road were to put the building on the market, it would be done through a formal RFP, or request-for-proposals, process that would give potential interested parties a fair chance to bid on the building.

In the case of the Canandaigua lab, no RFP was held because the school was approached out of the blue and the Fuller Road Management board determined that the $2.75 million offer was the best it could do.

Megna said that would not be the case with Kiernan Plaza.

"We would go through a regular RFP process," Megna said. "That's a valuable asset. Right now, there are no plans to do anything."

Kiernan Plaza got its name in 1989 after the death of Peter Kiernan, who as president of Norstar Bank had moved his bank from Guilderland to Union Station earlier in the decade. After a series of bank mergers, the building ultimately became used by Bank of America, which vacated it about 10 years ago, paving the way ultimately for SUNY Poly to purchase it and promise downtown revitalization.
ALBANY  The basic intent of the state's new paid family leave program is simple: If you need to take time off  be it for pregnancy, emergency child care or a family member's illness  New York will for up to 12 weeks provide for a weekly payment of a portion of the salary you would otherwise be earning.

But as with all things state government, the final regulations for the program, released Wednesday, are riddled with complexities. Workers will be eligible to join the program  identified by Gov. Andrew Cuomo as one of his "legacy" accomplishments  at the beginning of January.

Here's what you need to know before then:

So I get to take time off from work, but I still get paid?

Well, yes. But there are restrictions. Broadly, you are entitled to paid leave benefits if you give birth or adopt a child; are taking care of a family member (think physical care, assisting with daily life or emotional support); or if you are left in a lurch because a spouse, child or parent is called away to active duty in the military.

In the case of a pregnancy or adoption, there are some different rules. You get up to a year from the date of the birth to take paid leave. For example, if you give birth in November, you have until the following November to take leave.

What's more, your spouse can separately take up the maximum allowable time of leave as well. In other words, one parent could spend eight weeks on leave and the other could spend another eight weeks on leave, for a total of 16 weeks with the newborn or adopted child.

Also, it's worth noting that this isn't just about getting paid while away from work. It's also about ensuring that you have job protection while away from work.

One of those situations applies to me. Can I take leave right away?

While the regulations were formally adopted on Wednesday, the program does not begin in full until Jan. 1. You can't take your paid leave until after that date.

Once the program is active, you'll have to provide your employer with adequate notice of a plan to take part in the paid family leave program. You'll have to give at least 30 days advance notice if the leave is foreseeable (example: you're having a baby). If you don't give the adequate notice for a foreseeable situation, you could have your family leave claim partially denied for up to 30 days from the date the notice is given.

If 30 days advance notice isn't practicable, you have to let your employer know that you want to take leave as soon as possible.

How much paid time off do I get?

This is going to be increased over four years. In 2018, you can take up to eight weeks. In 2019 and 2020, you get 10 weeks. In 2021 and after, the maximum allowable paid leave time is 12 weeks.

If you opt to take leave on a daily basis instead of weekly, if you work at least five days per week you'd get a maximum of 60 days of leave per year.

How much will you pay? Paid family leave will be funded through a deduction taken from all New York workers' paychecks. This is how much the average worker will pay. Income: $67,908 annually ($1,306 weekly) Paid leave deduction $86 annually ($1.65 weekly)

How much would I be earning?

Again, this will be stepped up over time. In 2018, you would earn 50 percent of your average weekly wage. In 2019, you would earn 55 percent. In 2020, it's 60 percent. And in 2021 and after, you would be entitled to 67 percent of your average weekly wage.

And if you're opting for daily leave, the daily rate would be your average weekly wage divided by the average number of days per week you work.

Nothing is free in this world. So what's the catch?

This is set up to be paid for by employees, not employers. Costs will vary.

The bottom line: The maximum employee contribution for coverage beginning Jan. 1 is 0.126 percent. If you earn less than the statewide average weekly salary, your calculation is based on whatever that number is. If you earn the statewide average weekly salary or above that amount, you would use the statewide average in your calculation.

So, with that number set at $1,305.92, your average weekly contribution would be $1.65.

One other thing: If your employer takes more in employee contributions than the annual premium bill, the employer is supposed to return the difference.

You said paid leave doesn't begin until Jan. 1, but I started seeing a reduction in my paycheck this month. What gives?

The regulations may have been adopted today, but employers were given the option to start deducting the employee contributions beginning July 1.

I'm not currently employed. But if I get hired by Jan. 1, can I start taking paid family leave.

Not quite. employees who work 20 or more hours per week don't become eligible to take paid family leave until they have worked at least 26 consecutive work weeks before the first full day of leave begins.

If you work less than 20 hours per week, you're eligible for paid leave after 175 days on the job.

What if I don't want to take part in the program?

You can file a waiver if you work 20 or more hours per week but not 26 consecutive weeks, or if you work less than 20 hours per week but not 175 days over a one-year period.

Great. I've still got questions, though.

That's fair. The regulations themselves are very thick. You can read them here if you really want.

Or you can call the state's Paid Family Leave Helpline at 844-337-6303. Hours of operation are Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

mhamilton@timesunion.com  518-454-5449  @matt_hamilton10
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ALBANY  One of the state's biggest corruption cases will be tried in two parts.

Jury selection is slated to begin Jan. 8 in the trial of Joseph Percoco, a longtime confidant of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and three other defendants facing charges related to alleged bribes paid to Percoco and his wife, who was not charged, by construction and energy executives with business before the state. Jury selection is set for May 15 in the trial of former SUNY Polytechnic Institute founding President and CEO Alain Kaloyeros and development executives, who face charges related to alleged corruption involving the Buffalo Billion and upstate nanotechnology development initiatives.

All eight defendants were charged in the same federal complaint, brought by then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in September 2016. They have all pleaded not guilty.

Two men, Syracuse developers Steven Aiello and Joseph Gerardi, will be defendants in both trials.

A ninth person in the case, longtime Cuomo-connected lobbyist Todd Howe, pleaded guilty to numerous felony charges and is cooperating with prosecutors.

Multiple parties in the case had asked to have the trial split in two. A trial originally was supposed to begin on Oct. 30 of this year.

Evidence in the case is copious, with prosecutors producing millions of pages.

Cuomo, who positioned upstate development as a centerpiece of his gubernatorial legacy, has said he has "zero tolerance for abuse of the public trust from anyone."

"If anything, a friend should be held to an even higher standard," he said last September when the men were charged. "Like my father before me, I believe public integrity is paramount. This sort of breach, if true, should be and will be punished."

Two trials won't be the end of the story for one of the defendants. Kaloyeros and Albany developer Joseph Nicolla face state bid-rigging charges.

Though the men were hit with a criminal complaint last September, they have not been indicted. Consequently, no trial date has been set in that case.

mhamilton@timesunion.com  518-454-5449  @matt_hamilton10
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NASSAU  The town has asked the Rensselaer County Legislature to set limits for the discharge of 1,4-dioxane, a potential carcinogen, into local waterways in response to the contaminant being found in treated water from the Dewey Loeffel site, Supervisor David Fleming said Wednesday.

Town officials have been seeking to have the release of the chemical from the federally supervised water treatment facility at Dewey Loeffel halted until the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets a discharge limit for it. The water is flowing into the Valatie Kill. This creek flows through Rensselaer and Columbia counties.
ALBANY  Whoever said that you cant tax sunshine hasnt lived in New York.

While the Cuomo administration and legislators often tout the states ongoing efforts to develop renewable energy, approximately 300 towns, villages and school districts have essentially said no to solar farms by passing laws or resolutions that would impose taxes on them. The prospect of those taxes all but kills any chance that developers would build new solar farms that can offer cheap, clean power to both businesses and homeowners, those in the industry contend.

No one would go there, said Dennis Phayre, business development director at EnterSolar, said of the communities that want to tax the farms.

EnterSolar is a leading developer of these enterprises, which take advantage of numerous state and federal programs to make solar farms worthwhile.

In the Capital Region, EnterSolar has worked with Stewarts stores to build a dedicated solar farm in Halfmoon that has lowered energy costs.

New York state presents a patchwork of where solar farms may or may not make sense due to the taxes.

State law provides a property tax exemption for solar farms, but the law also allows communities to opt out of the exemption.

The Hudson Falls school district as well as village and town have opted out as has the town of Schagiticoke. The Fort Ann, Granville and Salem schools have also opted out as has the village of Argyle and towns of Easton and Cambridge.

Municipalities and schools typically want to tax the solar facilities because they want the money and may not think the tax break is fair.

Before adopting a tax exemption for wind and solar farms, school boards must evaluate the impact that the tax exemption or tax agreement would have on the rest of the taxpayers in their community. In many cases, property tax exemptions for one group or industry lead to a shifting of the tax burden to other taxpayers, the New York State School Boards Association said regarding the exemptions.

Tax exemptions means a loss of tax revenue for municipalities, something many of them cannot currently afford, said Barbara Van Epps, deputy director of the New York State Conference of Mayors. She added that some municipalities may also want to work out payment in lieu of taxes, or PILOT, in which solar developers make some contribution other than property taxes.

The taxing communities and school systems, according to state tax data, are largely in rural sections of the state with relatively few in suburban or downstate areas.

The taxes have sparked at least one high profile lawsuit, in which Cornell University is suing the town of Seneca in Ontario County over taxes the town imposed on a university-funded solar farm built there.

It came as a surprise, Merrill Kramer, the lawyer representing Cornell, said of the tax assessment.

The town maintains that because the solar farm was built by a private company, it should be taxable, even though the university is tax exempt.

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The town also contends that the solar panels are real estate rather than non-taxable personal property, said Kramer.

According to his and others interpretation of the law, a homeowner in Seneca, or Hudson Falls, Cambridge or any other taxing community could install a solar panel on his or her home and end up with a larger tax bill.

I could be penalized for having a solar panel on my roof, said Phayre.

That unpredictability is one reason he said that New York lags behind New Jersey, Massachusetts and other states in the pace at which solar power is being developed.

There is a great deal of uncertainty and its a problem, Phayre said.
Glens Falls Hospital has been awarded the lion's share of $28.7 million in state funding allocated to the Capital Region for projects intended to transform medical facilities.

The funds are part of $491 million in state grants to health care organizations announced Tuesday by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. They are intended to help medical institutions adapt to changes called for by state reforms aimed at reducing unnecessary hospital admissions, especially among Medicaid recipients.

Glens Falls Hospital has been awarded nearly $20 million to construct so-called "medical village. The complex will combine a new emergency department with outpatient medical and behavioral health services at the same location, with the aim of funneling patients who do not require high-cost emergency care to the appropriate level of service, such as primary care or outpatient detox, Glens Falls Hospital President & CEO Dianne Shugrue said.

The grant is the largest in the hospitals history, she said. Glens Falls Hospital was unsuccessful in its last four attempts to secure state project grants. Administrators have worked to sway state officials of the vital role the hospital plays as a medical provider in the Adirondacks, where people travel long distances to seek care.

We are thankful, humbled, thrilled, Shugrue said. To be selected with that amount of financial support really speaks to the high quality health care that this organization and this medical staff provides, as well as the importance of health care in this community.

There is no strict timeline for the medical village project, Shugrue said, but hospital officials will need to move fast to spend the grant money within three years as required. Preliminary plans call for the creation of a new medical pavilion housing the emergency department and the destruction of some of the older buildings on the hospitals campus.

Services other than the emergency room  which will be open 24/7 -- are expected initially to be available from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., with hours changing as demand dictates, Shugrue said.

Another four Capital Region projects will share in nearly $9 million in grants. They include:

Baptist Health Nursing and Rehabilitation Center: $1.6 million for improvements to provide bariatric nursing home care.

Equinox, Inc.: $2 million for a clinic that integrates primary care, behavioral health services and a pharmacy.

Hoosick Falls Health Center: $2.9 million for infrastructure and computer system improvements to improve resident safety and efficiency.

Upper Hudson Planned Parenthood: $2.2 million in infrastructure and computer system improvements to improve operational efficiencies.

The trade association for nursing homes and other long-term care facilities criticized the allocation of state funds, saying nonprofits that provide care to the elderly received only "a sliver" of the grant monies. A rise in the population of seniors demands a stronger state commitment to those services, said James W. Clyne Jr., president of Latham-based LeadingAge NY.
Growing up, Danielle Agami wanted to be a doctor, not a dancer. She was fascinated by biology and the inner workings of the human body. But then something happened that upset her well-laid plans: She saw Batsheva Dance Company performing "Decadance," a selection of excerpts from the work of the troupe's artistic director, Ohad Naharin.

"I looked at them on stage and I said to myself, this is what I want to do," the Israeli-born Agami recalled in a recent interview.

She auditioned for and was accepted into Batsheva's Young Ensemble, and three years later began dancing with the main company, eventually becoming Naharin's rehearsal director. But, after eight years of working with the man she calls "the most important person in dance in the last 20 years," she left not only Batsheva but also her native country.

Today, Agami has her own company, the Los Angelesbased AteNine (formerly Ate9 Dance Company). And, in a way, the 32-year-old choreographer is still pursuing her initial passiondoing "research," as she calls it, into the way the body functions and what it can do. Her primary tool for this work is Gaga, Naharin's innovative method of connecting conscious movement with unconscious, or intuitive, ways of moving.

More Information If you go When: 8:15 p.m. Wednesday through July 29; 2:15 p.m. July 29 and 30 Where: Jacob's Pillow, 358 George Carter Road, Becket, Mass. Tickets: $25, $35, $45 Info: (413) 243-0745 or http://www.jacobspillow.org Also at the Pillow next week: Ballet Hispanico, with a program of works fusing classical, Latin and contemporary dance. See More Collapse

"There's a physical pleasure that comes from Gaga, versus a lot of other methods that make you ignore pain," Agami explained. "Instead of fighting for certain things your body can't do, you find many more things your body can do."

Next week in the Doris Duke Theatre at Jacob's Pillow, AteNine performs two works, "Exhibit b" and "vickie." Commissioned in 2015 by the dance organization White Bird, for an evening of work by Israeli choreographers, "Exhibit b" explores what daily life is like in an environment where unrest and violence are constants.

"It's about how it is to grow up in conflict, to survive conflict, to thrive in conflict, and the drama it adds to one's life," Agami said. The work, for eight dancers, is set to a score by Omid Walizadeh that fuses hip-hop and Iranian music.

Made this year, "vickie" is a collaboration with percussionist Glenn Kotchke of Wilco. As with all Agami's work, it draws on each dancer's unique personality and physical presence.

"I don't just make dance, I try to make dancers," Agami said. "Just as much as I welcome the audience to feel and see things, I dedicate myself to how the dancers grow and express themselves." It's a legacy from Naharin, who once described her as "the ultimate example of what I often say about dancers I work withthat they are my teachers."

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Of Naharin, Agami says, "I have my own vision, my own taste, my own timing, my own movement, but I know everything he taught me is inside me." Her first stop after leaving Batsheva was New York City, where she headed up Gaga USA, teaching the movement language to American dancers and companies. Transplanting to Seattle, she founded AteNine in 2012, and a year later moved south to Los Angeles, where she quickly became a player in the city's burgeoning alternative dance scene, with the evocative evening-length works "Sally meets Stu" and "Mouth to Mouth." In 2014, the Los Angeles Times dubbed her "choreography's It girl."

"LA is not a dance city yet, but it's much better than it was five years ago," she said. "This is a city where people want to make [things], to move, to change."

As for her company's name, it comes from an old middle-school joke: Why was six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine.

"We work so hard, we're so serious, and there's so much effort around dance," Agami said. "The name of the company was one thing I could laugh about."

Tresca Weinstein is a frequent contributor to the Times Union.
THE ISSUE:

Judges have limited authority to hold suspects without bail, even when they may pose a threat to a community.

THE STAKES:

Any change in state law must include adequate funding for indigent defense.

More Information To comment: tuletters@timesunion.com or at http://blog.timesunion.com/opinion See More Collapse

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Prosecutors and probation officials who believe people accused of crimes pose a threat to society often recommend they be held without bail. Depending on the crime, though, judges in New York courts aren't supposed to comply.

New York judges are bound by state criminal procedure law, which generally requires that bail be set if a judge does not see evidence that the suspect might flee rather than show up again in court. Some jurists get around this, though, by imposing an unofficial preventive detention. They might "conclude" that the penalty for the crime is so severe that it's reasonable to assume the defendant may skip town. Or they might keep a potentially dangerous suspect off the streets by setting outrageously high bail.

For suspects who are poor, just coming up with even reasonable bail money can yield a punishment in itself  punishment, that is, without the benefit of a trial. Some accused people end up staying behind bars for weeks or months, even though they might never be convicted. It can result in the loss of a job and a family's income. An accused youth might miss weeks of school, ending chances for graduation.

Consider the heartbreaking case of Kalief Browder of the Bronx. At 16 he was accused of trying to steal a backpack. He maintained his innocence and rejected plea deals, but for want of $3,000 bail he remained in Rikers Island, the New York City jail, for nearly three years, mostly in solitary confinement. Finally, his case was dropped and he was released. Two years later, he took his own life.

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A different problem with New York's bail law was underscored by a recent tragedy in Albany. A career criminal with more than a dozen prior convictions, including four state prison stints, appeared before City Court Judge Gary Stiglmeier. The county Probation Department urged that he be held without bail. But he had shown up for previous court dates and wasn't considered a flight risk, so the judge, following the law, didn't hold him. A few weeks later, the defendant was charged with a fatal stabbing.

The case has brought renewed calls to change state law, making it more like federal statutes that allow judges to hold defendants based on their perceived danger to the community. State lawmakers in 1970 rejected this notion, but as the Albany case shows, it's an issue worth revisiting.

Such a change, however, must be coupled with a commitment to ensure all defendants have adequate legal representation at any appearance before a judge. Legislators and Gov. Andrew Cuomo this year agreed to fund improvements to New York's public defense system; that needs to be fully implemented before judicial discretion on bail is expanded.

When a defendant languishes in a jail cell for no good reason, justice is not served. When a clearly dangerous person is let loose on the streets, public safety is threatened. Surely New York lawmakers can find the proper balance between these vital interests.
The people of Roscrea are being asked to show their solidarity for a young local boy who suffers from a severe condition, by supporting a new Calendar - the proceeds of which go to his rehabilitation.

Billy Goulding from Towra, Shinrone, became ill at the age of two and now has Transvers Myelitis, which has left him paralysed from the neck down. Billy loves tractors and so the shoot was set around tractors.

Billy is now 5 years old and is a happy little boy who loves to spend his time following tractors and combine harvesters in the car with his parents watching them work in the fields, said organiser Marguerite Ryan.

Friday's launch night of Billy's Tractor Calendar Girls, included special guests Miss Ireland Niamh Kennedy and Martin Bennett (One Day Single in aid of Billy's Recovery Fund).

The purpose of the night was to launch the calendar to raise fund for Billy's ongoing long term rehabilitation needs which cannot be facilitated in Ireland. Billy has to travel to London regularly for his rehab sessions and care.

The idea of the calendar came from Billy's HSA assistant Ann Marie Maher and a very successful idea and night came to fruition thanks to sponsorship from local businesses.

The ladies who modelled for the naked calendar jumped at the opportunity. All the photos were taken in a very tasteful manner, and the clever photography of Tom Doherty of Nenagh and his professional approach meant you wouldn't notice that some models were actually wearing clothes behind the props.

Calendars will be on sale in local shops or contact Billy's Mum Eileen on Facebook, Billy Recovery Story, and Billy also has a Go Fund Me page where donations can be made.

Also on the night, Martin Bennett played his song dedicated to Billy, One Day. This will be released in a few weeks on Apple ITunes to download and all proceeds will be given to Billy's Recovery Fund.

Master of Ceremonies for the evening was Marguerite Ryan, Roscrea, who thanked supporters and followers of Billy.

Music was provided by Nivard Coonan, and food and facilities were provided free of charge from Racket Hall.
Tipperary jockey Ana OBrien is recovering in hospital following a serious fall at the Killarney races on Tuesday evening.

The youngest daughter of champion trainer Aidan OBrien was riding Druids Cross who slipped up over two furlongs out in the second contest on the card in the 6.20pm which was a flat event.

Medical reports state that OBrien suffered a fractured C1 vertebra in her neck and T6 in her back as well as fractured cheek bones. The talented jockey also underwent a brain scan which came back clear.

She was attended to at the scene by medical staff before being airlifted by the Irish Coast Guard air ambulance to Cork University Hospital.



Three-year-old Druids Cross was fatally injured in the accident.

Turf club chief medical officer Dr Adrian McGoldrick was among those who attended O'Brien, and he told Press Association Sport: "Ana's brain scan is clear."

"She has a fractured C1 vertebra in her neck and T6 in her back. Both will have an MRI scan tomorrow to assess further. She has fractured cheek bones bilaterally.

Dr McGoldrick added he believed OBrien would require a recovery period between three to four months.

"Aidan and AnneMarie (O'Brien) would like to thank the superb work provided to Ana by the Order Of Malta, racecourse doctors, veterinary team and ground staff led by Val O'Connell (clerk of the course). Also the Air Medical Crew and the amazing staff at CUH."
[July 19, 2017] CCEEB Honors the University of California's Climate Action Leadership with the 2017 Pat Brown Award

California business, labor, and public leaders gathered on Tuesday to honor the University of California as this year's Edmund G. "Pat" Brown Award Recipient. The California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance (CCEEB) recognized the University of California for elevating pragmatic climate change solutions that enable and empower the state of California's environmental leadership and economic growth. UC President Janet Napolitano accepted the Pat Brown Award on the behalf of the University of California at CCEEB's annual policy conference on July 18, 2017 in Olympic Valley, CA (News - Alert). In her remarks, President Napolitano said, "I am thrilled that the ongoing efforts of UC faculty, researchers, students and staff to protect the environment are being recognized through the Pat Brown Award. California has shown that we don't have to choose between environmental stewardship and economic vitality. As California's public research university, UC is at the forefront of research innovation and operational reforms that thoughtfully balance these priorities." The University of California has been deeply engaged in research and scholarship around climate change for decades, and has accelerated its efforts under President Napolitano. In 2013, UC committed to reach operational carbon neutrality by 2025. By 2016, it had made the largest purchase of solar energy ever by a U.S. university - 80 megawatts - enough solar energy for 27,000 homes. As a public research university, the University of California tackles climate action on multiple fronts - undertaking basic and applied research, teaching, public service, changing its operations, investing in climate solutions, and being a model of positive chang.



"It is no secret that the state of California relies on the work of the University of California for developing and implementing environmental policies and regulations," explains CCEEB President Gerald Secundy. "Look at each campus; you'll see world-class research and ideas being developed by UC faculty, students, and staff. California businesses are able to leverage this innovation in cleaner technologies and best practices, just like state and local agencies learn from the University's forward policy thinking." The University of California is not only a leader here in the state, but also internationally. In 2015, a group of 50 UC academics and researchers organized a Carbon and Climate Neutrality Summit and produced the path-breaking report, Bending the Curve: Ten scalable solutions for carbon neutrality and climate stability. This report became a key part of the California state delegation's messaging and contribution at the Paris climate agreement negotiations.

"The University of California's leadership exemplifies the partnership between the University and the State of California that the late Governor Pat Brown and UC President Clark Kerr envisioned half a century ago," says Wally McGuire, CCEEB Chairman. About the University of California The University of California is the world's leading public research university system. With 10 campuses, 5 medical centers, 3 national labs and a network of agricultural and natural research centers, the UC system includes more than 265,000 students and 1.8 million alumni living all around the world. UC is California's third largest employer and boasts over 190,000 faculty and researchers, many highly-distinguished in their fields. About the Edmund G. "Pat" Brown Award The Edmund G. "Pat" Brown Award is named after the late Governor Edmund G. Brown, the CCEEB's founding Chairman. The award honors individuals whose achievements best exemplify CCEEB's mission of environmental and economic balance. Previous recipients include State Water Resources Control Board Chair Felicia Marcus, State Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols, State Senator Fran Pavley, the late Tom Graff of the Environmental Defense Fund, the Walt Disney (News - Alert) Company, and Governor Schwarzenegger with Speaker Fabian Nunez and pro Tem Don Perata. About CCEEB The California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance (CCEEB) was founded in 1973 as a not-for-profit and nonpartisan coalition of business, labor, and public leaders that advances strategies for a sound economy and a healthy environment. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170719005941/en/

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[July 19, 2017] LGC Capital / AfriAg Partner, South Africa's House of Hemp, Launches New Website

MONTREAL and CAPE TOWN, South Africa, July 19, 2017 /CNW Telbec/ - LGC Capital Ltd. (TSXV: QBA) ("LGC" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that our South African JV Partner, House of Hemp, has launched a new and updated website. The website provides insight into the depth, experience and capabilities of House of Hemp and its Founder, Dr. Thandeka Ruth Kunene. http://houseofhemp.co.za/ According to the website, House of Hemp is South Africa's one-stop authority on all things hemp and cannabis. Based in Block D of the Dube Tradeport's Agrizone Complex featuring 40,000 m2 of secure, temperature-regulated and humidity-controlled greenhouse under glass, with refrigerated pack houses, laboratories and offices. This complex is the most eco-friendly and high-tech facility in Africa where House of Hemp is ramping up R&D for high-CBD medicinal cannabis. Although medical cannabis is its newest and largest focus, House of Hemp started as an importer and reseller of hemp products, which remains a key element of its business: hempseed oil, hemp protein powder and de-hulled seeds. Dr. Thandeka Ruth Kunene earned an engineering degree in South Africa before moving to London to get her MBA from Richmond University. She then returned to South Africa to become the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Cape Town. For several years, Dr. Kunene worked for UNIDO and the Commonwealth Secretariat, served as a member of the Advisory Board at Global Hemp Group Inc. and was instrumental in creating two of the industry's most important industry groups: The National Hemp Foundation and The Global Natural Fibre Forum. She was equally driven to promote entrepreneurship among black women along with alleviating poverty and environmental damagethrough the use of natural fibers. Her main focus was hemp because of its incredible versatility.



In 1998, she combined these two visions, founding House of Hemp in Johannesburg. House of Hemp is now a member of the National Hemp Foundation (NHF) and has served as the convener of the NHF's Human Resource Development Group (in the first phase). House of Hemp is currently the coordinator of the NHF's Private Sector Working Group. Licensed in 2010, House of Hemp became the first private company to be awarded an exclusive permit from the Departments of Agriculture and Health to legally cultivate and process hemp in South Africa. Because House of Hemp wanted to reliably expand into the budding industrial market, the company sought an exclusive permit from the Departments of Agriculture and Health to not only import hemp, but also to legally cultivate and process it in South Africa. In 2010, House of Hemp became the first private company to be awarded such a permit.

As well as supplying hemp fibres and oils, House of Hemp conducts research and supplies by-products like tow, biomass, dust and seedcake. These have enormous promise as sustainable replacement materials in all kinds of industries globally. In 2015, in partnership with the South African Departments of Agriculture and Health, the University of the Free State and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), House of Hemp began conducting research into medical cannabis. The focus is on CBD strains, which are cultivated and processed at Dube Agrizone in our 40,000 m2 of greenhouse space.

About LGC Capital LGC Capital Ltd. is a Canadian incorporated public company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV: QBA). LGC Capital's objective is to become a diversified business group with core business divisions that provide shareholders with exposure to a diverse range of businesses, products and services, many of which have some exposure to high growth Cuban business opportunities and some that have no exposure to Cuba at all. LGC Capital now plans to enter into the agricultural space in southern Africa through its new joint venture with AfriAg. About AfriAg AfriAg (Pty) Ltd is a global agriculture and agri-logistics specialist, and provides crop growing and logistics solutions, food marketing and bespoke distribution services, by road, air and sea, to many major food retailing and wholesale corporations around the world. AfriAg (Pty) Ltd is 40% owned by London listed AfriAg Global PLC. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This press release may contain forward-looking statements with respect to LGC Capital Ltd. ("LGC"), its Joint Venture with AfriAg, its investment in House of Hemp, and LGC's operations, strategy, investments, financial performance and condition. These statements generally can be identified by use of forward-looking words such as "may", "will", "expect", "estimate", "anticipate", "intends", "believe" or "continue" or the negative thereof or similar variations. The actual results and performance of LGC, the Joint Venture with AfriAg and the investment in House of Hemp could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. Such statements are qualified in their entirety by the inherent risks and uncertainties surrounding future expectations. Some important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations include, among other things, general economic and market factors, competition, changes in government regulation and the factors described under "Risk Factors and Risk Management" in LGC's Management's Discussion and Analysis for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2016, as filed on SEDAR (www.sedar.com). The cautionary statements qualify all forward-looking statements attributable to LGC, the Joint Venture, and persons acting on their respective behalfs. Unless otherwise stated, all forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this press release and LGC has no obligation to update such statements, except to the extent required by applicable securities laws. Caution Regarding Press Releases

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Service Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. SOURCE LGC Capital Ltd

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[July 19, 2017] Net One Systems and Kentik Partner to Bring Network Traffic Intelligence to Japan

TOKYO and SAN FRANCISCO, July 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Kentik, the leader in network traffic intelligence, today announced it has signed a reseller agreement with Net One Systems, the leading Japan-based cloud infrastructure integrator. The agreement enables Net One Systems to resell Kentik Detect, the industry's only SaaS platform that turns network traffic data into real-time intelligence for both technical and business operations. As global business becomes increasingly digital, the network has never been more critical to the top and bottom line. If the network goes down, revenue, data, security, employee productivity, and customer satisfaction can all go down with it. At the same time, the flow of traffic across the network can reveal highly valuable technical and business opportunities. With Kentik, organizations leverage their network traffic data to build and run secure, high-performance networks, but also to drive better business decisions and gain a competitive advantage in the market. "The partnership between Net One Systems and Kentik gives Japanese service providers and enterprises access to rich, actionable network visibility that organizations around the world need right now," said Fumihiko Shinoura, Chief Marketing Officer of Net One Systems. "With its next-generation architecture, coupled with proven successes and strong interest in Japan, Kentik has the solution for Japan's network visibility needs." Net One Systems advises hundreds of carriers, service providers and enterprises on network integrations to create the most opimal architecture for its customers. As a reseller of Kentik Detect, Net One Systems will extend to its customers the platform's powerful capabilities of turning network data  NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, BGP, and performance metrics  into valuable real-time intelligence for digital operations.



"Net One Systems has a great reputation in the industry, known for representing vendor suppliers that are at the front of the technology curve," said Jim Frey, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Kentik. "As Kentik is in rapid growth mode, we know our partnership with Net One Systems will enable us to address the specific needs of the Japan marketplace, for language, culture, and local presence as we work together to bring greater network traffic intelligence to the region." To learn more about the partnership, meet representatives of the two companies at the annual Japan Network Operators Group conference (JANOG 40) in Koriyama, Japan from July 26 - 28, 2017.

ABOUT NET ONE SYSTEMS

Net One Systems Co., Ltd. provides "cloud system [fusion of private cloud and public cloud]" that securely supports business applications used by customers. For that purpose, Net One Systems constantly identify the latest technological trends in the world, verify and realize the combination, and also deliver the know-how of utilization by actually practicing it within our company. Information can be found at http://www.netone.co.jp/english. ABOUT KENTIK

Kentik is the network traffic intelligence company. When nearly everything critical to a modern business crosses the wire, the network doesn't just serve the business, it sees the business. Kentik turns your network traffic - billions of digital footprints - into real-time intelligence for both business and technical operations. Network operators, engineers, and security teams use Kentik to manage and optimize the performance, security, and potential of their networks and their business. The company was founded by network and big data technologists and executives from companies such as Akamai, CloudFlare, YouTube, and Netflix, with decades of experience in operations, architecture, and distributed systems. Kentik is headquartered in San Francisco. Visit www.kentik.com or follow @KentikInc on Twitter. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/net-one-systems-and-kentik-partner-to-bring-network-traffic-intelligence-to-japan-300488301.html SOURCE Kentik

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BLUE APRON HOLDINGS INVESTOR ALERT: Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP Encourages Investors Who Suffered Losses Exceeding $100,000 Investing in Blue Apron Holdings, Inc. to Contact The Firm

Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP, a leading national securities law firm, is investigating potential securities fraud at Blue Apron Holdings, Inc. ("Blue Apron" or the "Company") (NYSE:APRN).

The investigation focuses on whether the Company and its executives violated federal securities laws regarding statements made relating to the Company's Initial Public Offering (the "IPO"). Specifically, on June 29, 2017, Blue Apron conducted its IPO, raising approximately $300 million by selling 30 million shares at $10.00 per share.

In less than a month since the Company's IPO, shares of Blue Apron have declined nearly 40% from its $10.00 IPO price, causing harm to investors.

If you invested in Blue Apron stock or options and would like to discuss your legal rights, click here: www.faruqilaw.com/APRN. There is no cost or obligation to you.







You can also contact us by calling Richard Gonnello toll free at 877-247-4292 or at 212-983-9330 or by sending an e-mail to [email protected].

Attorney Advertising. The law firm responsible for this advertisement is Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP (www.faruqilaw.com). Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome with respect to any future matter. We welcome the opportunity to discuss your particular case. All communications will be treated in a confidential manner.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170718006457/en/
[July 18, 2017] SpendEdge Analyzes the Importance of Procurement Automation in the Supply Chain

The last two decades have witnessed a phenomenal change in the supply chain due to procurement automation technologies and supply chain management solutions. The adoption of this supply chain management technology has transformed many processes such as sourcing, procuring and invoicing with various new-age automation technologies such as procure-to-pay, source-to-settle processes, e-procurement, and contract management. This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170718006245/en/ SpendEdge helps organizations of all sizes achieve procurement excellence. (Graphic: Business Wire) In their latest analysis, procurement market intelligence firm SpendEdge examined the advantages and challenges of adopting procurement automation in a blog titled, "Trending Now - Automation in Procurement".



"The adoption of automation in procurement has enabled supply chain professionals to focus on tasks that add value to the process, shorten process cycles and enhance efficiency. Big data helps the organizations to gain insight on the factors that drive procurement automation," said SpendEdge procurement analysts. Get in touch with SpendEdge for more insights

Various organizations have already started adopting procurement automation at several levels throughout the supply chain to drive effectiveness and achieve greater efficiency. The adoption of procurement automation helps management to identify cost savings opportunities and thereby drive profitability. It also helps in streamlining processes, freeing up employee time and dedicating their human resources to critical business areas. Many organizations have realized the benefits associated with the adoption of procurement automation but the technological growth in the global supply chain falls at a very basic level. This gap will be met by the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR), and will facilitate a smooth transition and acceptance of procurement automation. Read more: https://www.spendedge.com/blogs/trending-now-automation-procurement More information on the latest procurement trends and how leading organizations across numerous industries are benefiting from procurement intelligence can be found using resources from SpendEdge. These resources are compiled from SpendEdge's team of 500+ procurement solutions experts. About SpendEdge SpendEdge shares your passion for driving sourcing and procurement excellence. We are a preferred market intelligence partner for Fortune 500 firms and other leading companies across industries. Our strength lies in delivering actionable insights that help sourcing and procurement professionals get the right information in the right format, without any unnecessary frills. For more information on SpendEdge's services, please contact us. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170718006245/en/

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[July 18, 2017] Hans E. Bishop to Join Agilent's Board of Directors

Agilent Technologies (News - Alert), Inc. (NYSE: A) today announced that Hans E. Bishop, CEO of Juno Therapeutics, has been elected to its board of directors. Bishop co-founded Juno Therapeutics, a Seattle-based biopharmaceutical company, in 2013. As president and CEO, Bishop leads Juno as it develops cellular immunotherapies used in cancer treatment. Under his leadership, the company went public in 2014 and has since entered into a number of collaborations, delivering on key advances in cellular immunotherapies for cancer treatment. "Hans is an accomplished leader and extremely skilled at crafting strategic vision, building teams and new businesses," said Mike McMullen, Agilent's president and CEO. "He is well-known as a change agent, who knows how to make things happen. His strong experience, and expertise, especially in cancer immunotherapies and the broader bio-pharmaceutical markets, will be extremely valuable as Agilent continues to grow globally." "Hans is an outstanding addition to our board," said Koh Boon Hwee, Agilent chairman. "His talent, background an thoughtful personal style are very well suited to our company. He understands the needs of our customers, and will provide an important perspective with new insights into our markets. I am pleased to welcome him to the board."



Bishop has held a range of executive positions in the pharmaceutical industry, including as COO at Dendreon, which launched the first cellular immunotherapy for prostate cancer. Before that, he was president of Specialty Medicine at Bayer Healthcare. He also served as the global commercial head for Chiron Corp. Bishop previously served on the board of Avanir Pharmaceuticals. He graduated from Brunel University, U.K. with a BS in Chemistry.

"I have long admired Agilent's scientific solutions, as well as its strong customer focus and stellar reputation for integrity. I have tremendous respect for Mike, Boon Hwee and the other board members, and I am eager to begin working with them at this exciting time in the company's growth," Bishop said. About Agilent Technologies Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) is a global leader in life sciences, diagnostics and applied chemical markets. With more than 50 years of insight and innovation, Agilent instruments, software, services, solutions, and people provide trusted answers to its customers' most challenging questions. The company generated revenues of $4.20 billion in fiscal 2016 and employs about 13,000 people worldwide. Information about Agilent is available at www.agilent.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170718006466/en/

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[July 19, 2017] RECO encourages Ontarians to submit feedback on government's proposal to prohibit "double ending"

TORONTO, July 19, 2017 /CNW/ - The Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO) is encouraging Ontarians to take part in the provincial government's public consultation on proposed changes to the rules for multiple representation. This is the first phase of two in the government's commitment to modernize the rules for real estate professionals in the province. The public is invited to submit feedback on the government's proposal to prohibit real estate agents from "double ending" real estate deals, before the July 24 deadline. Double ending is a form of multiple representation where the same salesperson represents both the buyer and the seller. "The public consultation is a welcomed opportunity for buyers and sellers across Ontario to offer their perspective and ideas on how to strengthen consumer protection in the province's real estate sector," said Joseph Richer, RECO Registrar. As the regulator and consumer protection body for real estate in Ontario, RECO's mandate is to protect the public interest through a fair, safe and informed marketplace. In January 2017, RECO submitted recommendations to govrnment on how to enhance the rules around multiple representation so that consumer protection is strengthened. RECO recommended that the Ontario government revise the rules to:



Prevent or prohibit conflict of interest situations;

Eliminate or drastically reduce the financial benefits of acting unethically;

Ensure consumers are provided with clear, consistent information regarding the nature of their relationship with their representative, and the services they'll provide; and

Provide RECO with appropriate tools and penalties to respond to consumer harm. "Today's consumers are demanding more transparency in real estate transactions, which, for most of us, are the biggest financial transactions of our lives," said Richer. "This public consultation is a key first step in increasing trust and transparency. We encourage Ontarians to submit their feedback, before the consultation period ends." RECO says that ideally consumer harm should be prevented from occurring at all, but when harm does occur it's important that misbehaviour is punished appropriately.

"We also support the government's proposal to increase penalties for breaking the rules," said Richer. "RECO welcomes additional tools to punish and discourage misbehaviour." This could include higher fines, disgorgement (where the broker or salesperson would have to pay back some or all of the commission that they earned), and giving RECO discipline panels the power to suspend or revoke registrations more promptly, as opposed to the current process, which can be lengthy and cumbersome. Today, real estate professionals who break the rules may be fined up to $50,000 or be kicked out of the business. Phase one of the government's review of real estate rules may be read here. Phase two will encompass a broader review and it is scheduled to begin in spring 2018. About RECO: The Real Estate Council of Ontario regulates real estate professionals in the province on behalf of the Ontario government by enforcing the Real Estate and Business Brokers Act, 2002 (REBBA). We protect the public interest through a fair, safe and informed marketplace. RECO holds registered brokers and salespersons to professional standards, protects the public interest, and enhances consumer confidence in the real estate profession. In addition, RECO strives to educate consumers to ensure they understand the benefits of a regulated real estate sector. For more information, visit www.reco.on.ca. SOURCE Real Estate Council of Ontario

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
Construction company, police talk speeding enforcement on I-435 OVERLAND PARK, Kan. - Overland Park police and the Kansas Highway Patrol plan to ramp up their presence along the construction zone on I-435 involved in a crash earlier this week. Clarkson Construction, the company in charge of the project, is also urging motorists to slow down in the wake of the wreck.

The Golden Ghetto commute just got slower in order to save the lives of our friends who have to commute to JoCo jobs. Checkit:
Celebrate Local Wonder Women Of Tech

Over 100 women will converge in KC for a weekend of coding and camaraderie This coming weekend, Kansas City will host over 100 women coders from around the Midwest for an immersive, two-day workshop. The second annual workshop Django Girls is an international non-profit organization that is organized locally by Kansas City Women in Technology.

Fear Kansas City Homecoming

Driver crashes stolen pickup into living room of home near 102nd and Blue Ridge KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Police in Kansas City are searching for the person who stole a truck and crashed it into a home near 102nd and Blue Ridge Wednesday morning. FOX 4's John Pepitone spoke with a resident who was in his bedroom when the truck crashed into his living room.

Local Hotness

Cooling centers open as heat wave bears down on Kansas City Cooling centers will open their doors across the Kansas City metro area to help people escape the brunt of the heat wave that is targeting the region the rest of the week. With the Kansas City area under an excessive heat warning through Saturday evening, the YMCA of Greater Kansas City announced that all of its locations are available to those needing to cool down.

Cruel Summer For JoCo Wedding Season

Shawnee bridal shop burglarized one block from gas station that has been robbed twice in past week SHAWNEE, Kan. -- Police are investigating an overnight break-in along Shawnee Mission Parkway. This is now the third area break-in police responded to within the last two weeks. The most recent happened at Laura's Couture Collection around 3 a.m. Police arrived to find the back door forced open.

Show-Me Secret Cash

Greitens' nonprofit gives $250K to right-to-work PAC Republican Gov. Eric Greitens' nonprofit has donated $250,000 to a political action committee created to help stave off efforts by labor unions to repeal Missouri's right-to-work law. The source of the money given Monday to Missourians for Worker Freedom is unknown, The Kansas City Star reported.

A Lesson In Golden Ghetto Money

Could A Johnson County Provision Sink The Whole Kansas School Funding Formula? If you weren't paying really close attention to the oral arguments in the Gannon v. Kansas school funding case before the Kansas Supreme Court on Tuesday, you probably missed a little question from Justice Dan Biles about a provision of the new school funding formula that exclusively benefits two Johnson County districts.

Kansas City Doggie Park Party

West Terrace Off-Leash Dog Park to open July 29 Downtown KC is about to become the home of Kansas City's newest off-leash dog park at West Terrace Park, 750 Pennsylvania, and you are invited to join in the fun! You are and your pup(s) are invited to join KC Parks for grand opening Yappy Hour beginning at 4 p.m.

Right now we celebrateas we gather some of the most important local news links of the moment. Checkit:And this is thefor right now . . .
We are disappointed that Auditor Galloway and Senator Schaaf have not produced the public records that MAF (Missouri Alliance for Freedom) requested, said Eddie Greim of the Kansas City-based Graves Garrett law firm. We always prefer to avoid litigation if possible, but we are confident that MAF will succeed and its right to review the requested public documents will be vindicated.

GOP-leaning group files open records lawsuit against Missouri auditor, senator JEFFERSON CITY * A Republican-leaning nonprofit is suing Missouri State Auditor Nicole Galloway and a senator from St. Joseph over alleged violations of the state's open records law. In two lawsuits filed in Cole County Circuit Court, Missouri Alliance for Freedom is alleging that Galloway, a Democrat, has not turned over emails that are public records under the Sunshine Law.

Local newsmaker legal action . . .The Kansas City-based group says it favors limited government, which means citizens must be able to access public documents to oversee what the government is doing.
American Jazz Museum officials said Wednesday that they still owe vendors $150,000 for the jazz festival held in May, but they are working hard to raise the money to pay those bills. "We will correct the mistakes made from the festival and continue forward with this important programming for Kansas City," museum executive director Cheptoo Kositany-Buckner told the City Council's Finance and Government Committee.
"Bottom line, a lot of white families that will send their kids to well-regarded K-8 charters dont want to enroll them in majority black high schools, which most KCPS neighborhood schools are.





Thats a problem when the research shows socioeconomically diverse schools close the achievement gap fastest"

Here's an important examination of a local conundrum with no quick fix given a longstanding dilemma that has confronted Kansas City for more than a generation whilst inspiring a great many locals to opt out of public education and/or City limits altogether.Take a look:Moneyline . . .Lots of great info in this piece that still doesn't put us anywhere closer to a solution.You decide . . .
Saying he was tired of waiting for legislators to end Missouri's pariah status as the only state without a prescription drug-monitoring program, Gov. Eric Greitens created one by executive order on Monday. He directed the Department of Health and Senior Services to build a database to track prescriptions and purchases of controlled substances, including opioids.
Kansas City Highway Fire Redux

Flames erupted once again on Kansas City-area interstate Flames erupted once again on a Kansas City-area interstate. It started exactly one week ago when a semi caught on fire at Interstate 435 and Quivira Road. Then later that day, a crash involving two semis and several cars killed five people near Bonner Springs.

Kansas City Crash Double Trouble

Woman involved in massive I-435 crash Monday says she was hit twice A total of five vehicles were involved in that crash.

City Hall Exit Interview

In swan song, departing innovation official Kate Garman reflects on tenure with KCMO Editor's note: Kate Garman is the KCMO innovation analyst but will be departing this week for a new opportunity in Seattle. She wrote the following piece reflecting on her time with the city. I've had a desk at Kansas City Hall now for three years.

Sound Of KCMO Summer Reflection

Police Want To Talk To These Beautiful Ladies Amid Investigation Of Ugly Crime Spree

OPPD asking for help to identify suspects in two beauty store theft cases OPPD asking for help to identify suspects in two beauty store theft cases Authorities believed the same two women hit both the Overland Park location and the St. Joseph, Mo. location. The Overland Park Police Department is asking for help to identify two women suspected of stealing from two beauty stores in two separate cities.

Advice For The End Of The World

Where can I catch a glimpse of the 2017 total solar eclipse in Kansas, Missouri? KANSAS CITY, Mo. - The eclipse is coming! Parts of Missouri and Kansas are in the direct path of the phenomenon, and it's causing quite a boom in tourism. Hotels along the route are already selling out as people gear up to watch the first eclipse to pass over the state of Missouri in 148 years.

Royals Fanboy Frustration Grows

Dayton Moore's last two offseasons have been a spectacular disaster From 2013-2015, the Kansas City Royals were one of the best teams in the American League and averaged 90 wins a season. With many of the same core players since 2016, the Royals are averaging 81 wins per season. 81 wins certainly isn't terrible!

hotness inspires this quick look at all the important Kansas City mainstream media links for this Tuesday evening comprised mostly of car crashes and local guv propaganda. Dive right in . . .And this is thefor right now . . .
Dubai has been selected to be a regional hub for city data for the Mena and South Asia (Menasa) region at the UN headquarters in New York City, enabling the Emirate to drive progress towards the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.



Discussions are already underway between the World Council on City Data (WCCD) and a number of other cities across different continents, including Johannesburg (South Africa), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Los Angeles (USA), Makati (Philippines), Rotterdam (Netherlands), and Minna (Nigeria), with the United Nations acknowledging the complimentary role that cities and local communities have to play.



The General Secretariat of The Executive Council will now start to define its responsibilities as the Local Data Hub of the Menasa region, and is expected to play a key role in the promotion of the initiative, as it aims to get other cities in the region involved. It will also provide a platform for engagement and participation from a growing network of cities in the region, directly demonstrate yearly progress made against the United Nations goals for sustainable development on the city and local level.



In addition enable a portfolio of local and regional data portals, analytics, and reports to engage stakeholders and help accelerate progress, also serve as a dedicated platform for city-to-city learning and solutions transfer across metropolitan, national and global contexts, with the rapidly-growing network of WCCD certified cities.



Abdulla Abdul Rahman Al Shaibani, secretary general of the Executive Council of Dubai, pointed to the importance of the agreement between Dubai and the WCCD, under the umbrella of the United Nations, which confirms its position as it works to create a sustainable environment for future generations in Dubai and around the world.



Data is essential for the improvement of core city functions, and future visions, which is why global benchmarks are also necessary. As cities look to become smarter and more sustainable moving forward, and in line with Dubais sustainability ambitions, the success of Dubai Plan 2021 is based on a holistic and studied approach, which uses data to benchmark and inform its future, Al Shaibani said.



In March, Dubai hosted the Global Cities Summit in partnership with the WCCD, and with the participation of a number of a global and regional leaders and experts, from over 50 cities across five different continents, culminating in the adoption of the Dubai Declaration 2017, which established a framework for city data as the universal language driving forward three critically important agendas for 2030, including a commitment to inclusive cities, smart nations and a sustainable planet. Dubai will now ensure that this is followed through as Local Data Hub.



Dubai being chosen as Menasas Local Data Hub supports the UAEs commitments to achieve the Sustainable Development Agenda by 2030. We believe that this is only possible through close coordination with the UAE National Committee on SDGs, and the Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Authority  something we have ensured, as we ensure complete harmonization of our efforts, Al Shaibani concluded.



Dubai has adopted the concept of sustainability as a central pillar in its future plans, as it seeks to ensure a prosperous future for its future generations. It also makes up one of the key components of Dubai Plan 2021, which aims to engrain the core concept of sustainability as crucial to continued economic growth, and is highly reliant on complex data that is analyzed through Qarar, which ensures that information and data is immediately provided to decision makers, members of the Executive Council and sectoral committees, in order to make decisions and recommendations accurately during their regular meetings to improve government work at all stages and at all levels. This includes key performance indicators such as the Pulse report.



Dubai also earned the ISO 37120 Platinum Designation international standard in 2017, which is considered the first of its kind in the world that is tailored for cities, and includes 100 indicators spread over various fields and sectors, such as economic, social and urban development, along with the environment, water, health, government administration and many others.



The Local 2030 Data Hubs project will utilize high calibre city data to inform and drive local progress towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Executive Office of the United Nations Secretary-General (EOSG) and the World Council on City Data (WCCD) are leading this innovative initiative. - TradeArabia News Service
Cyprus-based Medochemie, a pharmaceutical company, seeks to invest 20 million ($23.06 million) to launch a factory in Egypt, said a senior official of Industrial Development Authority (IDA).



Medochemie, established in 1976 in Cyprus, has nine pharmaceutical plants in Cyprus, as well as a factory in the Netherlands and three factories in Vietnam.



The company expressed an interest to expand in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region through the establishment of a new plant in Egypt depending on local employment, Ahmed Abdel Razek, head of IDA, was quoted as saying in a Daily News Egypt report.



The new factory will be set up on an area of 10,000 sq m, it said.



Razek explained that the required area is in one of the industrial areas near the ports and the Suez Canal axis, where the company aims to export its entire production to the parent company in Cyprus.



IDA and Medochemie agreed to nominate a number of industrial zones and offer them to the company suitable for the establishment of the project, with the preparation of the company for an integrated study of the project in the next few days, added the report.
Iran and Iraq have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to set up joint industrial zones, said a report.



Irans Minister for Industry, Mining and Trade, Mohammadreza Nematzadeh and Iraqi Minister for Industry and Minerals Mohammed Shia Al Sudani signed the agreement on earlier this week, added the Iraq Business News report.



Al Sudani said that the future of Iraq is to increase private sector cooperation between the two countries.
Qatar spent billions of dollars in support of specific individuals and organisations, including those linked to Al Qaeda, Dr Anwar bin Mohammed Gargash, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, has said.



Dr Gargash made the remarks during his speech, on Monday, at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London, said a Wam news agency report.



Speaking on the "UAE View of the GCC Crisis: What Happened and What Happens Next?" he said that the UAE was concerned about Qatar right from the early 1990s.



"The UAE identified the threat of Islamist and jihadist extremism early on, in the 1980s, when we took steps to curb it," he added, stressing the necessity to "shut down state support for extremism, jihadism and terrorism across the Arab world."



He indicated that the current crisis is not principally about Iran, though the country will try to benefit from Qatars behaviour.



"This is instead, first and foremost, about the support Qatar offered to the cause of jihadism across the Middle East, and for specific individuals and organisations, including some linked to Al Qaeda," he said.



He also said the UAE seeks a permanent solution, not a prolonging of the crisis. "But we do have an issue of trust. Over the last two decades, bilateral pressure on Qatar has not yielded results.



"Diplomacy remains our only path. We said, early on, that we would not escalate beyond what we consider sovereign measures granted to us by international law. If we succeed in changing their behaviour, it will make all our futures safer," he concluded.


The US has imposed new sanctions on Iran over its missile and military-related activities in the Middle East hours after it maintained the international nuclear agreement with Tehran, a report said.



The US is imposing sanctions on 18 Iranian individuals and entities over their suspected support to Iran's ballistic missile programme and Iranian revolutionary guard, the State Department declared on Tuesday, reported Wam, the Emirates official news agency.



In a daily briefing, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert stated the US was still "deeply" concerned about "Iran's malign activities across the Middle East, which is undermining regional stability, security, and prosperity."



The US state department went on to say that Iran had continued its support to the Syrian regime, despite the atrocities committed by Bashar al-Assad against his people, and to the Houthi rebels in Yemen by providing them with advanced weapons, who were threatening navigation in the Red Sea and attacking the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, thus prolonging the struggle in Yemen.



The US spokesperson mentioned that Iran's continued support to terrorist groups, including Hezbollah and Hamas, would threaten the stability in the Middle East.



She noted that Iran continued to test and develop ballistic missiles, in defiance of the UN Security Council resolution No. 2231. Iran's support to heinous activities threatens "positive contributions" towards regional and international peace and security, she added.



"The administration is continuing to conduct a full review of the US policy towards Iran, including reconsidering the nuclear agreement, as well as the threats posed by Tehran to world security," Nauert remarked.
Saudi Arabia's National Transformation Program (NTP) 2020 has approved 13 initiatives submitted by the Saudi Commission for Tourism & National Heritage (SCTH) with a budget of over SR26 billion ($6.93 billion), the commission has said.



This amount will be allocated to tourism and national heritage projects and initiatives implemented through SCTH and its partners in the public and private sectors.



While 18 million people visited the kingdom in 2016, most of them came for pilgrimage. SCTH plans to promote the kingdom's travel and tourism sector to foreign and domestic tourists. The kingdom has a large number of interesting archaeological sites, pristine beaches, monuments, and a range of other holiday destinations.



Tourism in Saudi Arabia is expected to generate around 1.2 million jobs for Saudis in the period until 2030. The tourism sector has been earmarked by the government as a key driver for growth in the Kingdoms Vision 2030 economic diversification strategy.



Meanwhile, SCTH is currently working on the implementation of its Tourism Marketing Council initiative, which includes establishment of a regulatory entity in partnership with the private sector to manage and develop a range of products, activities and marketing services to support the tourism industry and its events, it said.



Director of the Tourism Marketing Council Initiative, Fuad Al Shabrami, said: The Tourism Marketing Council will finance its operations by approving a tourist fee for each night that is levied directly by hotels for the interest of the council to use it in the product development and advancing integrated tourism experience. This will contribute creatively to reducing the expenses of SCTH for marketing activities."



SCTH has also announced the establishment of the Joint Tourism Marketing Program, which has achieved development and marketing objectives through the principle of partnership and integration between SCTH and its partners that are engaged in the kingdom's tourism industry.



The National Transformation Program 2020 is one of the first steps towards embodying "Vision 2030" of the kingdom as an approach and roadmap for the kingdom's economic and development programme. It also draws the general policies, guidelines, targets and special requirements to become an example at various levels.



The new initiatives of SCTH fall under the first phase of the National Transportation Program 2020, which is currently being implemented in partnership between the Economic and Development Affairs Council and 18 public administrations. It includes 755 initiatives in various social, economic and development areas that are expected to contribute to the Kingdom's access to the digital age, as well as to promote public-private partnerships, jobs creation and increasing national income.



SCTH has also recently unveiled plans to develop a high-quality brand of Saudi handicrafts through the establishment of Saudi Handicraft Company.



This was approved by the Council of Ministers under the initiatives of the NTP, in an effort to develop and market Saudi handicraft products on the national and international levels.



Meanwhile, SCTH spokesman Mohammad Al-Nashmi was quoted as saying the commission has launched six major initiatives to stimulate the travel and tourism industry.



Al-Nashmi pointed out that $2.64 billion has been allocated for these projects in the 2017 budget.



The projects include: The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Programme for taking care of national culture and heritage; The Long Live Saudi Arabia Programme; the development of Okaz city in Taif; the Kingdom as a Muslim destination initiative; the development of integrated tourism destinations; and the Kafalah programme to finance commercial establishments for tourism projects. -TradeArabia News Service




Search News Archive : Fast Travel News Promotion Via Search, Social Media + Email Follow Us On : COX & KINGS ROLLS OUT GRAND MONSOON SALE ON DOMESTIC DESTINATIONS Industry: Tours

Cox and Kings,introduced extraordinary Monsoon travel offers, for example, free evenings on various moment and tailor-made travel bundles to different residential goals making rainstorm travel reasonable more than ever.



(TRAVPR.COM) INDIA - July 19th, 2017 - Mumbai: Cox and Kings, a leading leisure and education travel group with operations in 22 countries, has introduced special monsoon travel offers such as free nights on different instant and tailor-made travel packages to various domestic destinations making monsoon travel inexpensive like never before. In some packages you just have to pay the GST!



The sale offers full stay free on 2D/1N packages to Nashik, Shirdi, Aurangabad, Mahabaleshwar and Daman. The travellers will have to pay only the tax amount which is Rs. 99 for these holidays. On instant packages to Jaipur, Udaipur, Kodaikanal, Kumarakom and Wayanad; travellers will have to pay for only for one night stay and one night is offered free. On individual packages to Goa, Kashmir, Ladakh, Ooty- Kodaikanal, Mysore-Coorg-Bangalore, Nepal, Kerala, Andaman, North-East and Bhutan; 2 nights free stay is offered. The free nights offer is valid only till 30th September 2017.



In another exciting offer, the travellers can book a 3-night luxury stay at The Ultimate Travelling Camp for Rs 89,999 to get 5 freebies such as return airfare to Delhi-Leh-Delhi, additional 4 nights stay in a Leh hotel, meals with a private butler service, lunch at Nimmu House in Leh and a walk around the heritage parts of Leh town.



The sale also announces a promotional offer in which a few lucky winners stand a chance to meet Salman Khan in person. The Salman Khan fans can pick from any one of the TUBELIGHT packages to Manali, Shimla-Manali or Ladakh.



The exclusive travel offerings such as Getaway Goddess (women tours) and Trip 360 (adventure tours) widen the range of holidays even further for discerning monsoon travellers.



Here're the details of some of the interesting packages, for reference.



FULL STAY FREE (YOU ONLY PAY RS. 99* GST PER PERSON PER NIGHT)



Instant Nasik

02 Days / 01 Night

Ex - Nashik

Price 1,099/-* PP

Price 0000/-*



Instant Shirdi

02 Days / 01 Night

Ex - Shirdi

Price 1,099/-* PP

Price 0000/-*



Instant Aurangabad

02 Days / 01 Night

Ex - Aurangabad

Price 1,099/-* PP

Price 0000/-*



Instant Mahabaleshwar

02 Days / 01 Night

Ex - Mahabaleshwar

Price 1,099/-* PP

Price 0000/-*



Instant Daman

02 Days / 01 Night

Ex - Daman

Price 1,099/-* PP

Price 0000/-*



01 NIGHT FREE



Instant Jaipur

03 Days / 02 Nights

Ex - Jaipur

Price 2,249/-* PP

Offer Price 1,149/-*



Instant Udaipur

03 Days / 02 Nights

Ex - Udaipur

Price 2,499/-* PP

Offer Price 1,249/-*



Instant Kodaikanal

03 Days / 02 Nights

Ex - Kodaikanal

Price 3,599/-* PP

Offer Price 1,799/-*



Instant Kumarakom

03 Days / 02 Nights

Ex - Kumarakom

Price 4,599/-* PP

Offer Price 2,299/-*



Instant Wayanad

03 Days / 02 Nights

Ex - Wayanad

Price 5,449/-* PP

Offer Price 2,749/-*



02 NIGHT FREE



Enchanting Kerala (Ex - Kochi)

06D / 05N

Visit Kochi, Munnar, Thekkady & Alleppey

Price Starting from 16,699/- PP

Offer Price 9,999/-*



HIGHLIGHTS- Visit St. Francis Church, The Jewish Synagogue and Mattancherry Palace

Enjoy a visit to the Tea Museum, Rose Garden and Mattupetty Lake in Munnar

Spice plantation tour at Thekkady

Cruise on Backwaters

Goa Dhamka

05 Days / 04 Nights

Ex - Goa

Price Starting from 9,999/-* PP

Offer Price 4,999/-*



HIGHLIGHTS- Visit Churches of Old Goa and Boat Cruise on the Mandovi River.

Visit Calangute and Vagator beach aa

Laze around the white sandy beaches in Goa.

Ladakh - Roof of The World With Pangong

06 Days / 05 Nights

Ex - Leh

Price Starting from 19,349 per person

Offer Price 11,699/-*



HIGHLIGHTS- Explore Shey Palace, the 15th century summer palace and monastery of Leh's royal family. aa

Discover the 800 year old gompa Thiksey. aa

Visit Hemis Monastery - the largest and wealthiest gompa in Ladakh. aa

The Monastery of Alchi is famous for its 1000 year old wall paintings.

Nilgiri Picturesque Hills

(Ooty & Kodaikanal)

06 Days / 05 Nights

Ex - Coimbatore

Price Starting from 19,949/- PP

Offer Price 11,999/-*



HIGHLIGHTS- Excursion to Coonoor. aa

Visit the Pillar Rocks, Coaker's walk and the magnificent Bear-Shola falls.

Pearl of East

06 Days / 05 Nights

Ex - Bhubaneshwar

Price Starting from 21,649/- PP

Offer Price 12,999/-*



HIGHLIGHTS- Visit the famous Jagannath Temple. aa

Visit Sun Temple in Konark. aa

Enjoy an excursion to Chilka Lake.

Bhutan - Himalayan Kingdom

06 Days / 05 Nights

Ex - Paro

Price Starting from 23,349/- PP

Offer Price 13,999/-*



HIGHLIGHTS- Explore Thimpu on a city tour. aa

Visit the most popular spiritual heritage sites in Paro. aa

Enjoy a visit to Dochu La Pass.

Best of Kashmir

06 Days / 05 Nights

Ex - Srinagar

Price Starting from 16,649/- PP

Offer Price 9,999/-*



HIGHLIGHTS- Enjoy a Romantic Shikara Ride on Dal Lake. aa

Enjoy a sightseeing tour of Srinagar. aa

Discover the Awantipura Ruins, built here in the 9th century namely, dedicated to Lord Vishnu.

Enchanting Nepal

06 Days / 05 Nights

Ex - Kathmandu

Price Starting from 15,899/- PP

Offer Price 9,599/-*



HIGHLIGHTS- Enjoy a city tour of Kathmandu aa

Explore the city of Pokhara



*All prices are as per Ex-Hubs based on twin sharing per person basis. Tour price includes Hotel Accommodation, Sightseeing, Cox & Kings Tour Manager Services (for group tours only), Meals (as per itinerary), Transportation (for Tailor Made Tours only). All rates are valid for travel to end on or before 30th September 2017.



To book your dream package, call us on 1800 120 0660 or SMS BD to 5757567. For more information log on to www.coxandkings.com.



ABOUT COX & KINGS LTD: (BSE: 533144 | NSE: COX&KINGS)



Cox & Kings Ltd. (C&K') is a leading leisure and education travel group with operations in 22 countries across four continents. It is one of the most experienced travel companies in the world, having been in operation since 1758. Headquartered in India, C&K has over the last three decades transformed itself into a diversified, multinational travel conglomerate with a focus on the new-age global consumer.



C&K operates in three key verticals; Leisure, Education, Hybrid Hotels.



Leisure-India is best known by the ubiquitous Cox & Kings brand in India, where we are an integrated travel enterprise, offering the best and widest range of travel options to individuals, groups and businesses in the fastest growing major economy in the world. www.coxandkings.com



Leisure-International operates in multiple countries, mainly under the Cox & Kings brand, with a greater focus on premium-end travel. www.coxandkings.co.uk



Education operates under the brand names PGL and NST, among others. PGL and NST are market leaders in experiential learning in the UK and we intend to take these brands across the world; we have recently entered the Australian market. www.pgl.co.uk, www.nstgroup.co.uk



Meininger currently operates more than 8,500 beds across 17 hotels in 11 European cities. The unique hybrid concept of Meininger combines the service and comfort of a hotel with the uncomplicated nature of a hostel; top locations, high-quality amenities, flexible room structure and reasonable prices. www.meininger-hotels.com



Cox & Kings is one of the founding members of the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) and also a member of premier industry associations across the world. Over the years the company has won many awards which stand testimony to its excellence in service.



In 2016, it won Hospitality India Travel Award for Best Domestic Tour Operator and Best Experiential Travel Company. Cox & Kings Trade Fairs was recognized as Champions of ChinaPlas for 2016, fourth time in a row. In 2017, continuing with its winning legacy, Cox & Kings won the coveted SATTE Awards and Travel and Lifestyle Leadership Award for Best Outbound Tour Operator. Cox & Kings has also been a consistent winner at the World Travel Awards since years. The title of Asia's Leading Luxury Tour Operator was bagged for the 3rd consecutive time, India's Leading Tour Operator for the 4th time and India's Leading Travel Agency for the 5th consecutive time in 2017.



For further media details, contact:

Thomas C. Thottathil

Cox & Kings Ltd.

Head - Corporate Communications

T: +91-22-22709100

E: thomasct@coxandkings.com ### Please contact the person or company listed above for information regarding the content of this press release. TravPR.com are not the issuers of this press release and are not responsible for the accuracy of the content. Share Release :



CONTACT INFORMATION Name: Thomas C. Thottathil Company: Cox & Kings Ltd. Phone: +91-22-22709100 Email: thomasct@coxandkings.com Web: PRESS RELEASE TAGS
Awarded re-accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums



(TRAVPR.COM) USA - July 19th, 2017 - Salinas, CA, July 19, 2017 - The Monterey Museum of Art is proud to announce that it has once again been honored with the highest degree of national recognition from the American Alliance of Museums.

In a July 5, 2017 letter to museum director Stuart Chase, the Alliance announced that the Monterey Museum of Art has been granted re-accreditation -- recognition that the museum continues to meet National Standards and Best Practices for U.S. Museum.

"Accredited museums are a community of institutions that have chosen to hold themselves publicly accountable to excellence," said Laura L. Lott, Alliance president and CEO. "Accreditation is clearly a significant achievement, of which both the institutions and the communities they serve can be extremely proud."

As the new leader of The Monterey Museum of Art, Im very proud to work with our Board and staff to produce programs, exhibitions and build collections that meet national standards reflected by this re-accreditation, said Stuart Chase, Executive Director Monterey Museum of Art. We are truly one of the finest American regional art museums in the nation.

Among an estimated 33,000 museums in the United States, only about 1,000 are currently accredited. The Monterey Museum of Art is the only accredited art museum between San Jose and Santa Barbara.

Accreditation signifies excellence to the museum community, to governments, funders, outside agencies, and to the museum-going public. The Monterey Museum of Art initially received accreditation in 1976, but all museums must undergo a re-accreditation review at least every 10 years to maintain accredited status.

"The Board of Trustees is pleased to receive news of the Museum's re-accreditation from AAM," said Board President Kim Negri. "We look forward to continuing to guide the Museum and support our new Executive Director, Stuart Chase, in our mission of expanding a passion for the visual arts and inspiring appreciation of California art, past, present and future."

The Monterey Museum of Art is located at 559 Pacific Street, across from historic Colton Hall, and is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, and Thursday through Sunday. The Museum is closed Tuesday and Wednesday. The Museum also has a second venue, at 720 Via Mirada, for special exhibitions.

Admission is $10 per adult, with no admission charge for students (18 and younger) and active military with identification, and members.

Call 831-372-5477, visit the website online at montereyart.org, or send an email to info@montereyart.org for additional information.

Contact:

Marci Bracco Cain

Chatterbox PR

Salinas, CA 93901

(831) 747-7455

http://www.montereyart.org/

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Chandigarh, July 18

A local court today dismissed an application of the city police for the abortion of a 10-year-old girl, who became pregnant after being raped for seven months allegedly by her maternal uncle.

The plea was rejected by the court on the grounds of health and risk to the life of the victim. Two gynaecologists from the GMCH, Sector 32, submitted their report before the court.

The Judge had sought the report from the doctors after the police moved the plea on Saturday. A native of Nepal, Kul Bahadur, was arrested in this connection a few days ago. It was alleged that he raped his niece seven to eight times at a house in a village falling under the Sector 39 police station area. He used to live in the neighbourhood.

The victim reported the matter to her mother after she started having pain in the abdomen.  TNS
Chandigarh, July 18

Just about three months from now, the Chandigarh international airport will take off in a new direction. From October 29, the city is all set to be connected to Bangkok with the public sector airlines, Air India, announcing the launch of its flight to Thailands capital, known for ornate shrines and vibrant street life.

The developments took place during the hearing of a petition filed by the Mohali Industries Association against the non-operation of the Chandigarh international airport. In its statement filed before the Punjab and Haryana High Court today, Air India state manager GS Tomar said: Air India proposes to commence operations on the Chandigarh-Bangkok route from October 29, 2017, with the new A-320 Neo aircraft on four-flights-a-week basis.

Taking note of the assertion, the Bench of Justice SS Saron and Justice Avneesh Jhingan asked the airline to plan its flight schedule in a manner that would prevent limited watch hours at the airport from posing a problem.

The Bench was also informed that the airline was awaiting clearance from the Ministry of Home Affairs for launching of hub and spoke flights for other international destinations from Chandigarh. At the same time, Air India said the airline had no immediate plan to launch an Amritsar-Toronto flight.

The assertion came almost 10 months after the Chandigarh-Bangkok flight by Air India was first announced. The flight was to start in April, but was deferred. The Division Bench headed by Justice SS Saron had also asked Air India to submit its status report on restarting the Amritsar-Birmingham flight by July 18.  TNS
Arun Joshi

Arun Joshi

THE escalating tension and killing exchange of fire at the Line of Control that divides Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan is nothing but a lose-all proposition. No one gains from these clashes which have become a regular feature since 2008  five years after the armies of India and Pakistan were able to seal a historic ceasefire agreement on the borders. It was to cease hostile activities on the LoC that had resulted in action and loss of lives until 2003.

As the things stand today, soldiers and civilians from both sides have been killed. Hundreds of people have fled border villages as their homes and fields receive the raining mortar shells and gunfire. Schools have been shut. A tragedy of unknown proportions was averted on July 18 when the Army, police and civil administration evacuated more than 200 children from schools. They were trapped because of unrelenting shelling by Pakistani troops in Nowshera villages in the Rajouri district of Jammu and Kashmir. Nobody would have owned the tragedy that was, fortunately, averted by the administration's timely action. India would have claimed that its villages were shelled by Pakistan and the latter would have made a counter-claim that it was retaliating to unprovoked fire from the Indian side. Both sides accuse each other of opening unprovoked fire and claim they only retaliate. If the two sides are to be believed, neither side initiates gunfire. However, this is not a fact.

Human tragedies on the two sides have become a recurrent feature. The answer to the evolving critical situation is not what generals of the Pakistani army say that they would teach India a lesson with their retaliation.

The Pakistan army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa has spent most of his time in visiting the LoC and urging his troops there to target Indian villages and posts in the garb of retaliation to the unprovoked firing by Indian troops. The Pakistan army has counted many instances when the shelling by the Indian Army left their soldiers and civilians dead. The brunt of the shelling is felt the most by the border population. The rhetorical assertions of the Home Minister Rajnath Singh, when he said, We will not count bullets at borders, are not true. That strategy has not paid off. It has only escalated tensions. India has to buy the ammunition, while ammunition is doled out to Pakistan by the United States.

Looking at Pakistan army's geo-political designs, the fact that is that it has a vested interest in escalation of the tension at the LoC. There are multiple goals that it wants to achieve by this violent mindset. The escalating tensions on the LoC immediately bring international attention to the Kashmir issue. This is an old tool with Rawalpindi to bring pressure on India to resolve the Kashmir issue. This is also used to sabotage the peace talks between Delhi and Islamabad and has been witnessed since the times of the Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral in the 1990s. Whenever a step is taken for bilateral talks or meeting of the Indian and Pakistani leaders on the sidelines of international summits, Pakistani guns boom on the LoC.

Apart from that, Pakistan has an all-time interest in keeping the LoC volatile  for it pushes terrorists to the Indian side to replenish the militant cadre in Jammu and Kashmir. This gives a psychological boost to the existing cadre of militants since it delivers a message that Pakistan is backing them with men and war machines in their fight against the Indian troops. The Indian Army has to prevent that and act against the armed infiltrators who come through ravines, rivers, forests, and mountainous passes. Intruders have both the traditional and the new routes at their disposal. because of the tough terrain through which the LoC passes. The advantage of topography for the militants is a definite disadvantage for the Indian Army. Each and every inch of the 740-km LoC cannot be secured even if all of the Indian Army is deployed along the dividing line. Even the best of devices and technology cannot beat inclement weather and the hostile terrain to gain an advantage over the intruders. Ultimately it is test of soldiers' physical and psychological strength that helps them detect the intruders. Neutralising highly motivated and trained terrorists is not an easy task.

Pakistan has diverted most of them from its western borders with Afghanistan and hardened them with arms training in the rugged mountains. They wreak havoc on the LoC. Also, they get the benefit of cover fire from Pakistani troops. This leaves the Indian Army with no option but to retaliate with twin objectives of neutralising intruding terrorists and silencing the guns of Pakistani troops. The culture of flag meetings in defusing tensions has almost vanished. Now the Director General of Military Operations talk on the hotline and there are diametrically opposite versions circulated to media after that. Indians claim that Pakistan army has been warned against the misadventure, while the Pakistanis say they have told India that enough is enough.

The best course is to pick up pieces of the ceasefire agreement, which has been shred into pieces as of now, to rebuild peace. Such clashes serve no purpose. Pakistan should know that it cannot alter the geography nor can it sustain militancy in the Valley for long. India should recall 2004 when the ceasefire was most effective and the infiltration was reduced to a trickle. It doesn't require knowledge of rocket science to do so. It requires will to restore peace. A war-like situation serves no ones interests.





ajoshi57@gmail.com
KC Singh

KC Singh

INTERNATIONAL relations since US President Donald Trumps assumption of office, in the words of Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland, have got curiouser and curiouser. The G20 summit at Hamburg saw huge street protests against globalisation as Trump cut a lonely furrow, isolated from the mainstream of the pro-climate, pro-globalisation majority of principal global economies. Among the protesters was the mayor of New York. Someone on Twitter quipped that had Arvind Kejriwal, Chief Minister of Delhi, joined him, a number of television anchors, who are self-appointed purveyors of nationalism, would have lost their minds.

The division between nations globally today, according to The Economist, is no longer merely between the developing and the developed world; it is between globalists and nationalists. Actually, countries like India and China may be a bit of both, led by nationalist leaders rooting for free trade while protesting the developed worlds restrictions on free movement of workers and non-tariff barriers. India and China are now pro-Paris climate accord, having in the past insisted that historical polluters amongst developed nations held primary responsibility to mitigate climate change. This role reversal is peculiar as the US, the biggest global economy, rejects it even as a huge chunk of Antarctica is about to detach and float free.

Against this churning, where old alliances are tested and new partnerships transactional, and as yet fragile, a pandemic of corruption cases or tax enquiries in multiple nations has broken out, putting even formerly revered political leaders in the dock and upturning democratic polity. On July 10, a Pakistani joint investigation team, which included two members from the army, submitted a damning report, based on Panama Papers revelations, linking the progeny of PM Nawaz Sharif to illicit wealth abroad. The Pakistan Supreme Court is to determine culpability.

Two days later, a Brazilian judge pronounced former President LI Lula de Silva guilty of corruption in awarding contracts after a three-and-a-half-year-old operation, Lava Jato, which is now turning its attention to the serving President Michel Tener. Lula was the co-founder of BRICS and a charismatic international figure who campaigned alongside India, Germany and Japan, through the G4 grouping, for the reform and expansion of the UN Security Council.

Separately, as the retired shaper of contemporary Malaysia, Dr Mahathir Mohamad (92) began rallying opposition against his own former ruling party, the government opened investigation into big losses in the early 1990s, when Mahathir was PM, in Central Banks foreign exchange trades. In Israel, PM Benjamin Netanyahu came under renewed scrutiny over bribery charges in the German submarine deal, in which his nominee to head the National Security Council and his personal attorney is impugned.

In India, crucial opposition figures are being similarly pilloried. Lalu Yadav, the presiding deity of the RJD, and crucial to restricting the BJP in Bihar in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, finds the tax authorities rummaging through every contract awarded decades ago when he was Minister for Railways.

The favoured treatment to former Jayalalithaa associate and current claimant to the AIADMK leadership, Sasikala, ignores the question: when have politicians in India, even in jail, been treated as common criminals? The fight, in fact, is over the control of the orphaned party. Would the BJP obtain control through pliant surrogates, considering AIADMKs huge numbers in both Houses of Parliament, or the Congress by earning Sasikalas goodwill?

Meanwhile, the Bofors case is being reopened, unceremoniously closed when the union government under the Congress did not appeal a negative verdict by the Delhi High Court. The selective use of the tax authorities to hound political rivals is not merely a third world malaise. At least, six US Presidents since Franklin D Roosevelt allegedly used the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department to pursue real and imagined enemies. David Burnham in A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics and IRS writes: It appears that President FD Roosevelt may have been the champion abuser. In 1934, an indictment of billionaire Andrew Mellon for tax fraud fell through, but apparently FDR made peace with him in exchange for Mellon donating his vast art collection to the national museum. It is doubtful if the Modi government would settle for less than political emasculation of their principal opponents and their politically active family members.

In the meanwhile, Indian diplomacy confronts a vastly changing geo-political environment. Much diplomatic work over Modis first three years needs reassessment. Post-Brexit Europe is trying to cope with Trump-Putin cosiness and Trumps endorsement of an initiative by Poland and Croatia to align the 3 Seas nations, stretching from the Baltic in the north to the Adriatic and Black Seas in the south. These former Soviet satellites, or breakaway parts of the USSR that are, or can be, EU members, create a ribbon between Germany and Russia. The idea appeals to Russia as it gives it a strategic barrier with NATO, which is at the core of Russian objection to Ukraine tilting westwards.

Interestingly, the Chinese have merrily tied their OBOR initiative to this emerging bloc calling it the 16+1 initiative. This provides India space to work with Germany and France to counter this Chinese egress into the heart of Europe. Trump has promised US LNG to Poland via a new terminal on the Baltic while encouraging Croatia to open a facility on the Adriatic for the same. This pits the US against Russia which has for long used its gas supply to this region to manipulate them politically and via them build EU dependence on Russian gas.

The lesson for South Block was best imparted by the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland advising: Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. To get somewhere, the Queen surmised, you must run at least twice as fast. Contrariwise, the Minister for External Affairs and her two worthy deputies continue promising incredulous relatives that their missing kin, last seen in Mosul long ago, have been carted away by a retreating and rapidly decimating ISIS to another jail. To end, as this piece began, it is indeed curiouser and curiouser.





The writer is a former Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs
Bhanu P Lohumi

Tribune News Service

Kotkhai (Shimla), July 19

An irate mob went on a rampage today, ransacking the police station in Kotkhai (60 km from Shimla) and setting it afire after one of the six accused of the rape-murder of a 16-year-old girl died in police custody late last night.

Angry locals marched to the police station after a Nepalese labourer, Suraj, died in police custody late on Tuesday. Some of them forcibly entered the premises and assaulted policemen.

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The mob ransacked the police station and set the furniture, uniform, computers and other items afire. A large quantity of seized liquor was destroyed. The police fired into the air, but the mob pelted them with stones, forcing the cops to run for cover.

Two policemen  Vijay and Ashok  sustained serious head injuries and were taken to the Indira Gandhi Medical College. ASP Bhajan Dev Negi, who tried to intervene, was also targeted with stones, while an ASI was roughed up. Later, the mob marched to the nearby Kokunala village and set three police vehicles afire.

Crowds also blocked the national highway at Theog, Fagu, Dhalli and Mashobra. Additional police force was rushed in from Shimla even as the government shifted the entire staff of the Kotkhai police station.

Video by Amit Kanwar

The remaining four accused in Kotkhai police custody were shifted to an unknown location. The fifth is currently in custody of the Shimla police. IGP (Southern Range) ZH Zaidi said around midnight, co-accused Rajender, alias Raju, had an altercation with Suraj over his statement to the police in which he reportedly pinned the blame on Raju.

Raju allegedly attacked Suraj, hitting his head against the wall. Suraj was taken to the hospital where he was declared brought dead. Raju is an orchard manager and the driver of the pickup van in which the minor had taken a lift.

Meanwhile, the Himachal Pradesh High Court today directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to constitute a three-member special investigation team to probe the case. Headed by an SP, the remaining members would be DSP-rank officers.

The order came on a plea by the state government urging the court to direct the CBI to take over the investigation.

The court directed the Chief Secretary to independently investigate the matter and take action against erring officials. He has been directed to file a compliance report within two weeks.

The body of the victim was found in the forest area of Kotkhai on July 6.

(With inputs by Vijay Arora)
Partibha Chauhan

Tribune News Service

Shimla, July 14

The Himachal Pradesh Government on Friday ordered a CBI probe into the rape and murder case of a minor girl, after irate residents refused to buy the theory that the case has been solved with the arrest of six youth.

As soon as Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh returned from the Kullu tour, he took stock of the situation and ordered the CBI inquiry.

Angry mob today gheraoed Theog police station under whose jurisdiction the area falls demanded arrest of the "real culprits".

Also read: Six arrested for rape, murder of Kotkhai girl

Girl raped, strangled in Kotkhai: Report

The mob went on a rampage damaging vehicles of the Shimla SP, Theog SDM and Theog SHO who have been gheraoed inside the police station.

The locals also blocked traffic on the NH-22 and demanded an assurance from the Chief Minister or the Chief Secretary of handing over the case to the CBI.

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Locals, numbering thousands also raised slogans against the government for shielding the "real culprits", who were allegedly "well connected".

The police claim of solving the case has being questioned with too many missing links in the story involving disappearance, rape and killing of the 16-year-old girl. Tension griped the area as the mob threatens to set the police station on fire. The SDM and the SP refused to come out of the police station fearing public fury.

Meanwhile, IG Zahur Zaidi, who was heading the case, proceeded on a leave today.

Shimla SP D W Negi was also roughed up by the mob.

A huge mob has gathered outside Ripon Hospital in Shimla where five of the rape accused are being brought for medical.

The accused is yet to be brought, but the mob is ready to lynch and thrash them.

Huge police force is deployed outside the hospital to avert law and order problem.
Pratibha Chauhan and Bhanu P Lohumi

Tribune News Service

Shimla, July 19

Following alleged murder of a suspect lodged in jail by another co-accused in the Kotkhai rape-cum-murder case late on Tuesday night, a mob ransacked Kotkhai police station and subsequently set it on fire during a violent protest that started on Wednesday morning.

The main suspect, Rajender Singh (32), alias Raju (driver of a pick-up van), in the rape and murder of a minor, allegedly killed another suspect in the case, Suraj Singh (29), by smashing his head on the floor in Kotkhai jail late Tuesday night, according to jail authorities.

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Raju, along with three other accused, was subsequently shifted to an undisclosed location by the police after the incident around midnight.

The body of Suraj, killed by Raju, has been sent to Indira Gandhi Medical College for post-mortem from Kotkhai.

Suraj, a Nepalese labourer, was one of the suspects in the case.





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The police said both the accused had a scuffle over some issue late Tuesday night.



Suraj had reportedly given the sequence of the crime to the police and blamed the pick-up van driver Raju for the entire incident, following which both had a fight late last night and Raju allegedly banged Surajs head on the floor, which proved fatal for him, the police said.

Suraj was immediately rushed to the hospital, where doctors declared him brought dead, they said.

The incident has put the police in a tight spot, who were already facing public wrath for the past one week for alleged tardy progress in the investigations.

Also, the murder of one of the accused in police custody by another accused has put a question mark on the functioning of the police, who have no explanation as to why both of them were kept in the same lock-up.

In Delhi, BJP MPs from Himachal Pradesh led by Union Health Minister JP Nadda met Home Minister Rajanth Singh to seek justice in the rape-cum-murder case.

Meanwhile, tension mounted at Kotkhai following the murder of the suspect. Angry mob forcibly entered into the police station and beat up the police personnel.

Video by Amit Kanwar

They ransacked the police station as the police staff posted there ran to save their lives.

The police have cordoned off the lock-up where the remaining four accused are lodged.

Mob goes on rampage

The mob set up ablaze a laptop, documents, uniforms and name plates of police personnel, besides the confiscated drugs like opium and liquor bottles inside the police station.

The agitated mob alleged that none of the confiscated material was sealed and it was lying in the open.

Three pick-up vehicles of police that are used to ferry personnel were set afire at Koku Nullah, 2 km from the police station, by a mob.

More police contingents were rushed to Kotkhai to bring the situation under control.

While struggling to control the situation, the police fired in the air to disperse the mob gathered outside the police station.

Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh, who is on a tour to Paddar in Mandi, said: The Nepalese labourer was not the main accused. The CM said: The private parts of Suraj were hit by another accused also lodged in the same cell.

Director General of Police Somesh Goyal and Shimla SP DW Negi appeared before the Himachal Pradesh High Court.

The court ordered the CBI to constitute a Special Investigation Team (SIT) headed by an SP-rank officer to take over the investigation in the case.

It asked the SIT constituted by the state police to hand over entire case record to the CBI team.

Himachal Governor Acharya Devvrat, too, has sought a report on the case-related developments from the government in two days.

Angry protests are also being held in Dhalli, Theog and Mashobra after the news of the death of the accused spread.

Meanwhile, a protest was also held at The Mall in Shimla, where CPM, a former mayor and Nagrik Sabha demanded resignation of the Chief Minister and sacking of DGP Somesh Goyal in connection with alleged mishandling and cover-up in the rape-cum-murder case.

On July 4, a 16-year-old school girl was raped and murder in Kothkai. The body was found after two days in a jungle in the area. Police have arrested six persons in the case.
Bhanu P Lohumi

Tribune News Service

Kotkhai (Shimla), July 19

Residents of Kotkhai, who had cordoned off a police station after the custodial death of an accused in the brutal rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl at Kotkhai, today threatened to boycott the upcoming Assembly polls.

When the accused are not safe in police custody, what would happen to the general public, said Neelam, a senior citizen. We are afraid of sending our daughters to study or for work. Why should we elect our representatives when our daughters are not safe, the accused are murdered in police custody and statements are changed, she questioned.

The protestors threatened to boycott the polls if the investigations were not handed over to the CBI immediately and justice was given to the victim. We want peace to return to the apple belt, said Satish Hemta, a local.

He said the incident had shamed the state and the cops were trying to hush-up the case and now the evidences were being destroyed.

He said the villagers were not ready to believe the story of the police. We want to know where are the suspects whose photographs were uploaded on the Chief Ministers Facebook page. How come everything changed overnight and poor Nepalese and Pauri Garhwal labourers were framed in the case, he said.

However, the case also provided a chance to the locals to settle their personal scores with the police. Kamla, an elderly woman, who threw a stone on a constable, said she could only hit the constable once, adding he needed more thrashing. This is the same guy who wrote false statements in the divorce case of my son and daughter-in-law and spoilt our case, she added.

A few youths were on the frontline eyeing a chance to settle their scores. Pointing to a policeman, one of the agitators said: He was the one who nabbed us last month.

Irate mob ransacks police station
Pratibha Chauhan

Tribune News Service

Shimla, July 19

Taking a serious note of the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl from Kotkhai, Governor Acharya Devvrat today sought report from the state government within two days on the action being taken to bring the culprits to book.

Even as Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh cut short his Mandi visit to return to the state capital in view of the latest developments, Raj Bhawan sought a detailed reply and summoned Director General of Police Somesh Goyal to get the details of the investigation and action taken.

With the nature of the crime being very sensitive, public belief and sentiment have been hurt. Such steps should be taken which will help restore the faith of the people and help in bringing the situation under control, the letter read. The Governor also conveyed his concern over the death of one of the suspects in the police custody which has made the case even more serious and sensitive.

The Governor said representatives of various sections of society met him, expressing concern and seeking his intervention in this matter. The government should take stern action immediately and take steps to check the resentment arising out of this crime so that peoples faith in the law and order is restored, the Governor said.

Chief Parliamentary Secretary Rohit Thakur, who is also the local MLA from Jubbal-Kotkhai, demanded a judicial inquiry by the human rights commission into the rape and murder of the girl. The custodial death of an accused in the police lock-up at Kotkhai is a major blow to the ongoing probe, he said.

Thakur went to the extent of urging the Chief Minister not to hesitate to take tough action against officials.

Congress president Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu also expressed concern over the death of a suspect and urged the CM to ensure that there was no laxity in the investigation. The BJP is playing politics and despite the CM writing to the Centre to hand over the case to CBI, there had been no response so far, he said.
Amir Karim Tantray

Tribune News Service

Nowshera, July 19

It was no less than a miracle for 217 students, trapped in several schools in the Nowshera sector on Line of Control (LoC) on Tuesday, to come home alive.

Their faces spoke of the ordeal they went through as Pakistani army shelled the area, leaving them trapped in their schools for hours together.

Fear still runs deep among the survivors and is visible on their faces. Most of them are unable to explain how they managed to come out alive as the Pakistan army rained shells on the area.

Parents of the trapped children were unaware of their ordeal till they were rescued and reunited with their families.

Students of Government High School, Bhawani, were trapped inside the school for four hours, while students at Sehar school were trapped for over six hours. At Kadali school, a teacher rescued 11 students by taking them to an underground bunker in the village and kept them there for the night.

One of the survivors, Anu Bhardwaj, 15, a Class X student of Government High School, Bhawani, and a resident of Jhangar village, said: We were around 50 students in a classroom when firing and shelling started. Our teachers directed us not to step outside the class as shells were landing nearby and splinters could have hit anybody. Everybody was scared, Anu told The Tribune.

Anu along with her family has been living in a relief camp set up at Government Higher Secondary School (Boys), Nowshera, since May 12 this year, when the Pakistani army resorted to unprovoked ceasefire violation.

As a precautionary measure, the administration had in May this year evacuated people to safer places. Around 3,500 people are, however, still living in migrant camps in the Nowshera sector. I am happy to be back but we were horrified, Anu said.

All schools in the Nowshera sector were closed by the administration in May and classes were being run in relief camps till the government ordered summer vacation for all schools falling under the summer zone.

As the summer vacation ended and schools reopened on July 17, the administration decided to open the schools near the Line of Control as well.

It was a bit calm in this sector in the past couple of weeks. We decided to open the schools near the LoC, but the experiment failed as within a couple of days of reopening the schools, the Pakistani army resorted to heavy shelling, said Shahid Iqbal Choudhary, Deputy Commissioner, Rajouri.

While the rescue operation ended around 9.30 pm on Tuesday, the district administration today ordered closure of 75 schools along the LoC in Rajouri for an indefinite period.

Rajouri DC inspects relief camps, villages

Jammu, July 19

Deputy Commissioner Rajouri Shahid Iqbal Choudhary today visited various villages affected by border shelling. He also inspected damaged schools and reviewed arrangements at relief camps.

As many as 3,411 persons belonging to 852 families are residing in five relief camps in view of repeated ceasefire violations. Three more buildings have been earmarked as relief camps.

Shelling was reported from different areas of Manjakote today. At least 10-12 shells landed on the premises of primary schools at Kalotra and Kotedhara in Manjakote. However, no shelling was reported in the Nowshera subdivision. The DC said the district administration would construct 100 bunkers in Nowshera.

Migrants at various relief camps in Nowshera have been provided ration, firewood, generator sets, medical facilities, potable drinking water and other basic amenities. Arrangements have also been made to hold classes for students in camps. The students of Government Higher Secondary Schools in Nowshera have been shifted to nearby Degree College.

Meanwhile, an immediate assistance of Rs 10,000 each was sanctioned for three persons, Sanjeev Kumar, Mulkh Raj and Santosh Sharma, who were injured in shelling. TNS
Srinagar, July 18

A soldier on duty allegedly shot dead a Major in cold blood after the officer scolded him for using a cellphone at a forward post in north Kashmirs Uri sector.

Major Shikhar Thapa, attached to 8 Rashtriya Rifles and posted at Buchar post in Kamalkote, was shot late on Monday near the Line of Control, hours after a soldier was injured in ceasefire violation by Pakistan in the sector.

ALSO READ: Its hard to believe, says Majors father

Major Thapa originally belonged to 71 Armoured Regiment but had been attached to 8 RR unit in Uri for nearly a year.

Amid hostility along the LoC, the officer found the jawan using a phone while on duty. The officer warned him and tried to confiscate the phone. In the process, its screen broke leading to an argument, a source said.

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The jawan shot the officer in the back multiple times with his AK-47, killing him on the spot. The jawan was overpowered. A probe has been ordered and a police case registered.

Since the start of militancy in Jammu and Kashmir, dozens of soldiers have committed suicide or have been killed by their colleagues. Fratricidal killings are believed to be due to "high level of stress".

This is the first major fratricide incident in Kashmir in three years. In 2014, a soldier from the Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry in Poonch shot two of his colleagues before turning the gun on himself.

In March 2014, a solider of 13 Rashtriya Rifles shot five of his sleeping colleagues before ending his life in the Manasbal area of central Kashmir.  TNS
Shyam Sood

Rajouri, July 19

A civilian was injured when the Pakistan army resorted to heavy shelling along the Line of Control for the four consecutive day today, even as a soldier succumbed to his injuries a day after he was wounded in ceasefire violation.

Subedar Shashi Kumar, injured in mortar shelling on a forward post in Nowshera sector yesterday, succumbed to his injuries at the Army hospital in Udhampur.

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A resident of Himachal Pradesh, he was airlifted to the Command Hospital in Udhampur for specialised treatment, but died around 8 am. After putting in 28 years of service, Kumar was scheduled to retire next month.

The Pakistan army resorted to heavy mortar shelling and small/automatic weapon fire around 9 am in the Balakot sector as also in Poonch and Manjakot sectors. Ahmed Raza, 32, a resident of Sandote, Balakot, was injured in the shelling.

Unprovoked shelling has crippled normal life in the border villages. On Tuesday, the Pakistan army targeted Indian forward posts and villages along the LoC in Mendhar, Balakot (Poonch), Manjakot and Nowshera (Rajouri). Sepoy Jaspreet Singh from Moga was killed in the Kalsian area in Nowshera sector yesterday.
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 18

Chinas shrill pitch over the Doklam crisis got sharper today with Beijing stating that foreign diplomats in Beijing are shocked at the illegal trespass by the Indian Army into Chinese territory. Chinas state-controlled media went one step further and threatened confrontation in not just Doklam, but also in other areas along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar today briefed a parliamentary panel on the Doklam crisis. According to sources, the FS pointed out that China always does this on the border, but is unusually aggressive this time. He said there was no chance of India getting pushed into armed action in Doklam. However, he reiterated that this was a particularly sensitive situation.

The Chinese foreign ministry, however, refused to confirm whether a closed-door briefing was indeed held recently to update foreign missions on the Doklam crisis. However, it was blunt in its assessment of the situation and said, Since the illegal trespass by Indian border personnel, many foreign diplomats in China felt shocked about this and (wanted) to confirm whether it was true.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said they were in close communication with the foreign missions based in Beijing. The Chinese side maintains close communication with foreign diplomatic missions on the issues they are interested, Kang said in a briefing.

To a question if Chinas patience was wearing thin over the Doklam standoff with India, Kang said the facts in this case were very clear. He also pointed out that the Sikkim section of the India-China boundary was mutually recognised by the two sides. This time, Indian border personnel illegally trespassed into the Chinese territory, he said.
New Delhi, July 19

Samajwadi Party leader and former Defence Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday claimed that China was ready to attack India in collaboration with Pakistan and asked the government to reverse its stand on the Tibet issue and support its independence.

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Raising the matter in the Lok Sabha against the backdrop of tension between India and China, he asked the government to inform Parliament what it has done to meet any likely challenge from the neighbouring country.

India is today facing a big danger from China. I have been cautioning the central government for years. China has joined hands with Pakistan. It has made full preparation to attack India.

China is Indias biggest opponent. What has the government done? In Kashmir, the Chinese army has allied with the Pak army, Yadav, known for his tough stand on China, said during the Zero Hour.

He also claimed that China had buried nuclear weapons in Pakistan to target India, adding that Indian intelligence agencies would know better.

Yadav said Indias stand on Tibet, a reference to its acceptance that the region was part of China, was a mistake and the time has come to support its independence as it had been a traditional buffer between the two big nations.

China is our enemy, not Pakistan. Pakistan can do us no damage, he said.

It was Indias responsibility to protect Bhutan and China was eyeing Nepal, he said.

He also spoke against massive amounts of Chinese goods finding a market in India. PTI
Satya Prakash

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 18

A panel headed by former Chief Justice of India RM Lodha, which has been overseeing the functioning of the Medical Council of India (MCI), will no longer be doing so as the Supreme Court today allowed the government to replace it with a new panel of five eminent doctors.

Set up by the SC on May 2, 2016, the oversight panel under Justice Lodha was to function for a year or till a suitable mechanism was put in place to substitute it. The government had proposed names of five eminent doctors to replace it. A five-judge Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice of India JS Khehar gave liberty to the government to replace any one in the new panel with another if the person wished to be relieved.

However, the Bench, also comprising Justices J Chelameswar, RK Agrawal, DY Chandrachud and S Abdul Nazeer, wanted to be sure that the doctors suggested to be on the panel to replace the Lodha panel had time to take up the new responsibility. The Bench passed the order after Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar said their consent had already been obtained.

Many private medical colleges wanted the term of Lodha panel to be extended. On behalf of certain private medical colleges, senior counsel Kapil Sibal told the Bench yesterday that no alternative mechanism had been put in place by the Centre to replace the oversight panel.

Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, representing Hamdard Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, had said the tenure of the Lodha panel be extended for a year or until the government put in place a proper mechanism to streamline MCI functioning.

The Centre had told the Bench it had put in place an alternative mechanism and there was no need for the oversight panel headed by Justice Lodha to continue. The MCI said the directions of the Constitution Bench that had set up the oversight panel were based on certain material that could not be controverted at that time.
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 19

Opposition lawmakers in the Rajya Sabha came together today to seek better pay.

Supported by Congress leader Anand Sharma, Samajwadi Party MP Naresh Agarwal, who later in the day also found himself in the middle of a controversy, courtesy comments on God and alcohol, initiated the pitch for a pay hike for parliamentarians during Zero Hour.

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According to Agarwal, MLAs in some states were drawing close to Rs 3 lakh per month, but how much are we getting? Ask MPs whether they can run their households in Rs 50,000 a month.

We are not beggars. Look at the difference between salaries of the chairman of a standing committee (an MP) and its additional secretary. The propaganda in the media is that we are enjoying everything for free, but the fact is that our salaries are less than our secretaries, he said.

Indian parliamentarians are the worst-paid in the world, said former Union minister Sharma. According to him, nowhere in the world do MPs have to face as much dishonour, insult and torture as in India.

We are not asking for alms... how much more will we be insulted? The allegation against us is we can ourselves increase our pays and perks My request is, please establish some other mechanism as in the case of other democracies in the world. The fact is either MPs can be representatives of the people or those with money, he said.

Agarwal added: If journalists and judiciary will stop asking for better salaries, we will also stop. Why is it a problem if we get a hike? We are demanding what we deserve under the 7th Pay Commission.

What MPs are getting

Rs 50,000 per month salary

Rs 2,000 daily allowance for each day of residence on duty

Rs 45,000 per month as constituency allowance

Rs 45,000 per month as official expense allowance

Air/rail travel, accommodation, telephone, medical, water and electricity

We are not beggars

We are not beggars... the propaganda in the media is that we are enjoying everything for free, but the fact is that our salaries are less than our secretaries. Naresh Agarwal, Samajwadi party MP
Simran Sodhi

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 19

China has moved tonnes of military hardware into regions of Tibet, close to the point of the Doklam standoff, according to reports put out by the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Army today.

While sources in the Indian establishment were quick to shoot down these reports, their veracity remains a matter of debate.

According to the PLA Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese military, China has moved vast amounts of military equipment to a region south of the Kunlun Mountains in northern Tibet by the Western Theatre Command, which oversees the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and handles border issues with India.

The report ups the ante on the India-China standoff. The state-run Chinese media has been regularly running articles warning India of the dire consequences of this illegal trespass.

The PLA report added that the move took place late last month and involved hardware being moved simultaneously by road and rail from across the entire region.

National Security Adviser Ajit Doval will be travelling to Beijing next week to attend a BRICS meet. Sources said this would present an opportunity for India to take up the matter with China to discuss steps for de-escalation. Sources also point out that it is difficult to read the Chinese mind and how Dovals visit pans out will be carefully watched.

The India-China standoff in Doklam is nearly a month old now with both sides refusing to step down from their stated positions. China has asked India to withdraw its troops from the area as a pre-condition for any meaningful dialogue to begin. India, however, has run a more cautious line and has argued that this is a situation which calls for dialogue and that differences should not be allowed to become disputes.

China ready to attack India, says Mulayam
Satya Prakash

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 19

The Supreme Court today said if it were to declare right to privacy a fundamental right, the ruling would impact curative petitions seeking to de-criminalise homosexuality in India.

A nine-Judge Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice of India JS Khehar, which is reviewing the SCs verdicts that said citizens didnt have a fundamental right to privacy under the Constitution, posed questions about possible outcomes, if right to privacy was declared a fundamental right.

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The Bench, which wanted to be clear about the contours of the right to privacy, said such a right cant be absolute and the state could make laws to restrict it.

Marriage, procreation are facets of privacy sexual orientation is also about privacy. If we say there is a fundamental right to privacy, our judgment in Naz Foundation becomes vulnerable, said Justice DY Chandrachud, who is part of the nine-Judge Constitution Bench.

Naz Foundation, an NGO working for homosexuals, had challenged the constitutional validity of IPC Section 377 that criminalises homosexual acts and prescribes a maximum punishment of 10-year imprisonment.

In July 2009, the Delhi HC had legalised homosexual acts between consenting adults in private by reading down Section 377 IPC. However, in December, 2013, the SC reversed the 2009 verdict of the Delhi HC and re-criminalised gay sex. In January 2014, the SC dismissed the Centre's petition seeking review of its verdict that made gay sex an offence again. Currently, the SC is seized of a curative petition  the last legal recourse available to a litigant  on the issue.

Besides the homosexuality case, the verdict of the nine-Judge Constitution Bench will also impact the outcome of the petitions challenging WhatsApp's policy on sharing of users' data with other companies  an issue pending before a five-Judge Constitution Bench.

A three-Judge Bench would separately decide the fate of petitions challenging the law on Aadhaar on the basis of the verdict of the nine-Judge Bench on the right to privacy.

Justice Chandrachud also posed questions on data protection in the age of social media, saying social media wasn't there when the Constitution was made.

Earlier, on behalf of petitioners senior counsel Gopal Subramanium, Soli Sorabji, Shyam Divan and Arvind Datar pitched for declaring the right to privacy a fundamental right, saying it was implicit in various provisions in Part-III of the Constitution that deals with fundamental rights.

They said rather than being a part of personal liberty, the right to privacy was liberty itself. Instead of defining it, the court could say what all was covered under it. However, they said there need not be an exhaustive list of areas covered under the right to privacy. Agreeing with the proposition, Justice Chandrachud said it will be "extraordinarily dangerous" to give an exhaustive catalogue of what constituted privacy.
Shiv Kumar

Tribune News Service

Mumbai, July 19

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has served a notice to the family of a radio jockey accusing her of breeding mosquitoes after she was featured in a YouTube video making fun of the civic bodys preparedness for monsoon.

BMC officials said the pesticides department has issued notices to Lily Mendonsa, mother of RJ Malishka, after mosquitoes were found breeding at her house located at Pali Hill in Bandra. The notices were issued to Mendonsa and another person after mosquitoes were found breeding in their houses, an civic body official said.

According to Ward Officer Sharad Ughade, BMC officials inspected 6th floor flat of the Mendonsas and found Aedes mosquitoes breeding in a clay pot inside the flat. Subsequently, the notice was issued to the family, he said.

As per the rules, recipients of the notice will have to appear before the metropolitan magistrate who will impose a fine.

The raid by BMC officials came after 93.5 Red FM posted a YouTube video featuring Malishka titled Mumbai Tula BMC var Bharosa nai ka? (Mumbai, dont you have faith on BMC?). The video was shared multiple times and Ashish Shelar, chief of the Mumbai BJP unit, commended the RJ for the clip drawing the ire of the Shiv Sena that controls the civic body.
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 19

The Punjab Government is all set to approach the Union Government for the waiver of crop loan of commercial banks.

The issue will figure in tomorrows meeting between Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh and Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.

The state government will press the Centre to waive the crop loan debt of about Rs 6,000 crore of commercial banks.

A senior state government functionary said apart from the crop loan of the commercial banks, about Rs 3,600 crore of crop loan was outstanding against small and marginal farmers with the cooperative banks.

The Congress government is in a tight spot with the Opposition parties accusing it of misleading farmers over the farm debt waiver scheme.

The Chief Minister is also expected to take up with Jaitley the issue of settlement of Rs 31,000 Cash Credit Limit-related debt to ease the states financial burden.

Apart from demanding that out of the total debt, the interest component of Rs 18,500 crore should be waived, the state has also been raising the issue that a higher rate of interest is being levied on the amount.

The Chief Minister is also slated to speak to Jaitley on GST exemption on langar (community kitchen) and prasad that is distributed at various religious places.

Cong in tight spot amid oppn clamour
Parvesh Sharma

Tribune News Service

Sangrur, July 19

Farmers in Sangrur and Barnala are compelled to borrow money at higher rates of interest from private moneylenders to meet their crop sowing expenses as cooperative societies in both districts have stopped releasing crop loans.

Sources said under Sangrur Central Cooperative Bank, there were a total of 296 cooperative societies, formed to help farmers by extending timely crop loans to prevent their exploitation by private moneylenders.

But officials in these societies said almost a month ago, their senior authorities had told them not to release fresh crop loans.

"On an average, a farmer spends around Rs. 20,000 per acre to sow paddy. But in the absence of crop loans from societies, which charge around 7 per cent rate of interest, we are forced to borrow money at 15-18 per cent from private moneylenders," claimed Dharminder Pashore, Lehragaga block president, BKU Ugraha.

Ramit Singhal, Chief Manager, Sangrur Central Cooperative Bank, confirmed that they were unable to release loans to farmers as the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) had not released the required money.

"We have written to our seniors to take up the matter with NABARD to resolve the issue at the earliest," he said.

NABARD refuses to advance money

Chandigarh: Punjab State Cooperative Bank, which gets re-finance from NABARD, has defaulted on the payment of loan to it. The bank got a re-finance of Rs 2,500 crore for the last crop cycle. As most of the farmers did not repay their loan hoping for a waiver, the money was not returned to NABARD. The latter thus refused to advance loan to the bank. As the system goes, NABARD gives loan to the bank, which further gives loan to 20 district cooperative banks for distribution to primary agriculture cooperative societies. tns
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 19

Aam Aadmi Party MP Bhagwant Mann today irked several MPs when he stood with his back towards the chair of the Speaker while talking to HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar in the House.

After intervening briefly in the debate on the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIIT) Bill, which the House later passed, Mann walked across the Well to the Treasury benches to say something to Javadekar, who was piloting the legislation as Education Minister.

Perched in the Well of the Lok Sabha, Mann virtually leaned on the Ministers chair with his back to the presiding officer, Deputy Speaker M Thambidurai at that time.

MPs from across sections in the House quickly voiced their displeasure at Manns action prompting him to rectify his mistake.

The Sangrur MP, however, decided to occupy the seat next to Javadekar, reserved for governments topmost ministers and next to the seat of Home Minister Rajnath Singh. He did not leave until he had finished what he had to say even as Javadekar looked visibly embarrassed and was seen nudging the Punjab MP to return to his seat.

Mann has often courted controversies in Parliament and was last in news for being asked to stay away from the House until a parliamentary panel decided on the merits of a video he had posted revealing security check points, entries and work procedures of Parliament.
Moga, July 19

The body of Sepoy Jaspreet Singh, who was killed in Pakistani firing in the Naushera sector of Jammu and Kashmir, was consigned to flames with state honours at his native Talwandi Mallian village in Dharamkot subdivision of Moga today.

Jaspreet (24) was killed during a ceasefire violation by the Pakistan Army in Rajouri district on Tuesday night. He belonged to the 8 Sikh Light Infantry Regiment and was attached with the Rashtriya Rifles at the time of his death.

State Congress president Sunil Jakhar, local MLAs Kaka Sukhjit Singh Lohgarh, Darshan Singh Brar, Harjot Kamal, District Magistrate Dilraj Singh Sandhawalia, SSP Raj Jit Singh Hundal, besides civil and military officials paid floral tributes to the martyr. Jaspreets father Sarwan Singh lit the pyre.

Earlier, a pall of gloom descended on Talwandi Mallian vllage when Jaspreets body was brought there. His younger brother Kuldeep Singh said Jaspreet was planning to come home on July 29.  TNS

Rs 10 lakh, job for martyrs kin

Chandigarh: Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh on Wednesday announced Rs 10 lakh compensation for the family and a police job for the younger brother of martyr Jaspreet Singh. An official spokesperson said the CM had sanctioned Rs 5 lakh as battle casualty compensation and another Rs 5 lakh as general compensation to the family of the martyr, along with a job for his younger brother in the state police. Jaspreet, a native of Moga, is survived by two brothers and two sisters. The spokesperson said besides Rs 10 lakh (ex gratia and payment in lieu of a plot), Rs 25,000 had been given to the family for the cremation of the martyr. tns
By Moses Ndhaye:

The Inter-Religious council has asked government to invest revenues in long lasting substantive sectors of the economy.

The Formers principal Judge James Ogola also the chairperson of the Elders Forum says, it will not be beneficial to the country if government fails to allocate the revenues from the oil resource in sectors which benefits the majority of the population.

He says sectors such as health are crucial for the countrys development and also helps the community to live in dignified conditions.

Ogola made the remarks while addressing religious leaders at a National dialogue on the governance of the extractive industry in Uganda Organized by the inter-religious council and the Elders forum.
Tribune News Service

Ludhiana, July 19

Punjab Congress president Sunil Jakhar on Wednesday said if required, the government would not hesitate in taking the help of the CBI or the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to crack the murder case of pastor Sultan Masih.

Speaking to the media while on his way to meet the deceaseds family, Jakhar said the bike-borne assailants who killed the pastor would be nabbed soon. He said attack on religious leaders was a deep conspiracy to destabilise Punjab. But we will not let that happen. The government is committed to serve people and ensure peace in the state, he said.

If need arises we can even ask the Union Governments help in maintaining law and order in the state, he said.

Jakhar assured the family that justice would be delivered soon.

The incident, meanwhile, has led to unrest among the Christian community. On Saturday night, two bike-borne assailants had shot Masih while he was talking on the phone outside the church in Peerubanda Mohalla.

The police have already formed a four-member Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the killing.

The state Congress chief said the police had been given the authority to probe the case from all angles.
Ruchika M. Khanna

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 19



SAD chief Sukhbir Singh Badal on Wednesday said that the party would provide legal aid to Akali and BJP workers who have been allegedly implicated in false cases by the Congress.

Badal said: The political vendetta against the Akali Dal and BJP workers has been unleashed by the ruling Congress, which is using the police as their private force to take on political rivals.

Speaking to The Tribune, after presiding over a meeting of Shiromani Akali Dal's core committee, Badal said that beginning July 25, he would visit all 117 constituencies and meet workers, who were allegedly implicated in false cases by the Congress.

He said: We will provide legal aid to the workers at the district and state level.



He said that the SAD would also take up the issue of imposition of the Goods and Services Tax on langars with the Government of India and demand its rollback.

He said that the Akalis have condemned the imposition of the GST on goods and services used in religious institutions.



He said: The decision to take up the GST issue politically with the BJP was taken by at the core committee meeting.

The meeting was chaired by party patriarch Parkash Singh Badal and party president Sukhbir Singh Badal.

Besides former minister Tota Singh, MP Ranjit Singh Brahmpura, Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa and Prem Singh Chandumajra, all other committee members attended the meeting.



The Satluj Yamuna Link (SYL) issue was also discussed in the meeting.

Parkash Singh Badal, during the meeting, is learnt to have reiterated the SADs stand that they would not allow river waters to be flown out from Punjab.



The committee also discussed the strategy to be adopted in the state once the Congress government decides to go ahead and impose new taxes in Punjab.
AT the Playgoers' Club, Lord Islington, the Under Secretary of State for India, emphasised the fact that the British Empire is fighting for freedom and self-government in the present war. These were the principles, he said, which they intended to extend and advance to those countries within the Empire which were in process of constitutional development. The Under Secretary went on expressly to say that he had India particularly in his mind in this connection. The final object to be attained in India, he observed, was similar to that which had been achieved in the Dominions, and it might be anticipated that in the Government of Indian in the direction of constitutional reform which would, with consistence, lay firm the foundations of a system that in due course of time would reach self-government.
Tribune News Service

Dehradun, July 19

The efforts of successive governments to project Uttarakhand as a favourable destination for 100 per cent foreign direct investment (FDI) in the state has yielded only one investment proposal from a Chinese textiles company.

During the tenure of the previous Congress government several business representatives and ambassadors of various countries had visited the state. There were talks of Boeing investing in the state, followed by countries such as Thailand and Singapore.

They came, saw and never returned. After showing an initial interest, their proposals never materialised.

In 2015, officials of the state had held talks with Airbus, which was interested in setting up a manufacturing facility at Sitarganj and wanted 100 acres of land to set up the facility. Similarly, after beverage giant Coca Cola encountered hurdles in setting up a bottling plant in Vikas Nagar, the government had tried to compensate it by offering a proposal at Sitarganj, but it too never came back.

As of now, Boeing and Coca Cola have dropped their plans to invest anywhere in India. The entire process of attracting the FDI takes a year to fructify. There is gestation period for several months, said Additional Secretary (Industries) R Rajesh Kumar.

The only investment (Rs 600 crore) that has been made is by a Chinese textile company, YOYOGO, at Sitarganj.

Next month, we will go to China again to hold talks regarding a Rs 1000-crore investment proposal from a private company, followed by a trip to South Korea. We are still pursuing investment proposals with Thailand, said Kumar.

Thailand that had shown interest in investing in pharmaceutical industry last year had not officially come up with the proposals.

We need to properly follow up these proposals, otherwise these will not materialise. We have to compete with other states as well. I think the urban sector is the area that can be explored for FDIs, said Uttarakhand Government spokesperson and Urban Development Minister Madan Kaushik.

The state offers a conducive environment for investors like world-class infrastructure at Sitarganj.
Bangkok, July 19

A Thai court found dozens of people guilty of human trafficking offences on Wednesday in a mass trial exploring links between corrupt officials, including a senior army general, and the grim but lucrative trade in Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants.

Thailands junta launched a crackdown in May 2015 on a network funnelling desperate migrants through southern Thailand and onto Malaysia, holding some for ransom in jungle camps.

It unspooled a crisis across Southeast Asia as gangmasters abandoned their human cargo in the camps where hundreds died from starvation and malaria, and at sea in overcrowded boats which were then ping ponged between Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian waters.

Rights groups long accused officials of ignoringand even orchestratingthe trade in humans through Thailands southern provinces.

The area was the crucial link in a criminal trail that stretched from Myanmar to Malaysia.

The crackdown revealed a lattice of military, police, local political and mafia figures acting as traffickers, agents and logistics men, all soaking up cash from some of Asias poorest and most vulnerable migrants.

On Wednesday judges at Bangkok Criminal Court began delivering a stream of verdicts for the 102 defendants. One other accused died while on remand.

The offences include human trafficking, ransom and murder. All deny the charges.

Media were barred from the court itself, relying instead on an audio relay of the complex proceedings.

Judges placed heavy reporting restrictions on much of the testimony, citing national security concerns. But the case has still lifted the lid on the power networks dominating southern Thailand.

Army Lieutenant-General Manas Kongpan, a top figure in the security apparatus covering the south, is the highest- ranking official on trial.

In 2013 he was promoted to head the Internal Security Command (ISOC) for the south. Current junta leader Prayut Chan-O-Cha was army chief at the time.

Another well-connected alleged kingpin is Pajjuban Aungkachotephan, better known as Ko Tong or Big Brother Tong.

Police accused him of using private Andaman Sea islands, close to tourist spots such as Koh Lipe, to shift boatloads of migrants to the mainland, where they were packed into lorries and taken to the fetid camps straddling the Malaysia border.

An army captain, four ranking police officers, a nurse and several officials, including the mayor of Pedang Besar in Satun province, are also among the accused.

By the lunch break a drip feed of 38 defendants had been convicted for a range of offences including human trafficking and slavery.

Among them were guards at the jungle camps where migrants were held, including a Rohingya man who acted as an interpreter, and a string of local officials.  AFP
Washington, July 19

The US on Wednesday listed Pakistan among the nations and regions providing "safe havens" to terrorists, saying terror groups like the LeT and JeM continue to operate, train, organise and fundraise inside the country in 2016.

In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the State Department said Pakistani military and security forces undertook operations against groups that conducted attacks within Pakistan such as Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan.

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"Pakistan did not take substantial action against the Afghan Taliban or Haqqani, or substantially limit their ability to threaten US interests in Afghanistan, although Pakistan supported efforts to bring both groups into an Afghan-led peace process," the State Department said.

"Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups, such as Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in 2016, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan," the report said.

India, it said, continued to experience attacks, "including by Maoist insurgents and Pakistan-based terrorists".

Indian authorities continued to blame Pakistan for cross-border attacks in Jammu and Kashmir, it said.

"In January, India experienced a terrorist attack against an Indian military facility in Pathankot, Punjab, which was blamed by authorities on JeM. Over the course of 2016, the Government of India sought to deepen counterterrorism cooperation and information sharing with the United States," the State Department said.

The Indian government continued to closely monitor the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), which made threats against India in their terrorist propaganda. A number of individuals were arrested for ISIS-affiliated recruitment and attack plotting within India, the report said.

In a separate chapter, the State Department listed Pakistan as one of the safe havens of terrorism.

The State Department said numerous terrorist groups, including the Haqqani Network (HQN), the LeT and JeM, continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2016.

Lashkar wings openly engaged in fundraising

"Although LeT is banned in Pakistan, LeT's wings Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FiF) were able to openly engage in fundraising, including in the capital," it said.

"LeT's chief Hafiz Saeed (a UN-designated terrorist) continued to address large rallies, although in February 2017, Pakistan proscribed him under relevant provisions of Schedule Four of the Anti-Terrorism Act, thus severely restricting his freedom of movement," it noted.

The 2015 ban on media coverage of Saeed, JuD, and FiF continued and was generally followed by broadcast and print media, it said.

According to the State Department, the Pakistani government did not publicly reverse its December 2015 declaration that neither JuD nor FiF is banned in Pakistan, despite their listing under UN sanctions regimes, although in January 2017, Pakistan placed both organisations "under observation" pursuant to Schedule Two of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

While not a ban, keeping the outfits under observation allows the government to closely scrutinise the activities of both organisations.

On November 11, Pakistan's National Counterterrorism Authority published its own list of banned organisations that placed JuD in a separate section for groups that are "under observation" but not banned.

Pakistan continued military operations to eradicate terrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, although their impact on all terrorist groups was uneven, it said.

In its report to the Congress, the State Department said in 2016, India and the United States pledged to strengthen cooperation against terrorist threats from groups, including al-Qaeda, the ISIS, JeM, LeT and D-Company (Dawood Ibrahim's group), including through greater collaboration on designations at the UN.

Indian and US leaders directed officials to identify new areas of collaboration through the July US-India Counterterrorism Joint Working Group, applauded finalisation of a bilateral arrangement to facilitate the sharing of terrorism screening information, and called upon Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of terrorist attacks against India to justice, the report said.

The United States and India worked together to designate JeM leader Maulana Masood Azhar, although the listing was blocked in the UN 1267 Committee, the State Department said.

Other areas mentioned in the report as safe havens are Afghanistan, Somalia, the Trans-Sahara, Sulu/Sulawesi Seas Littoral, Southern Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Columbia and Venezuela.  PTI
Washington, July 19

US President Donald Trump had a second undisclosed meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of G20 summit in Germany early this month, the White House confirmed on Wednesday, raising new questions about their relationship.

After his much-publicised two-and-a-quarter-hour meeting on July 7 with Russian President Putin in Hamburg, President Trump chatted informally with the Russian leader for up to an additional hour later the same day, the Washington Post reported.

The second meeting, undisclosed at the time, took place at a dinner for G-20 leaders, a senior administration official said.

During the meal, Trump left his own seat to occupy a chair next to Putin. Trump approached alone, and Putin was attended only by his official interpreter, the report said.

In a statement issued last night after the US media published reports of the second conversation, the White House said that there was no second meeting between President Trump and President Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner.

The insinuation that the White House has tried to hide a second meeting, it said, is false, malicious and absurd.

All the leaders circulated around the room throughout the dinner, and President Trump spoke with many leaders, the statement said. As the dinner was concluding, it said, Trump spoke briefly with Putin, who was seated next to first lady Melania Trump.

Each couple was allowed one translator. The American translator accompanying President Trump spoke Japanese. When President Trump spoke to President Putin, the two leaders used the Russian translator, since the American translator did not speak Russian, the White House said.

The two leaders relationship is under intense scrutiny amid allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign during the US presidential polls.

US intelligence believe Russia helped Trump in last years presidential election, something denied by Moscow.

Trump has rejected any collusion.

Trump also said that Putin was unlikely to have preferred him over Hillary Clinton as president, since his goals include taking international energy business away from Russia and building up the US military.

The dinner encounter appeared to underscore the extent to which Trump was eager throughout the summit to cultivate a friendship with Putin. During last years election campaign, he spoke admiringly of the Russian leader and at times seemed captivated by him, the Post noted.

The New York Times said the undisclosed Trump-Putin meeting raises new questions about their relationship.

The intimate dinner conversation, of which there is no official US government record, because no American official other than the president was involved, is the latest to raise eyebrows. Foreign leaders who witnessed it later commented privately on the oddity of an American president flaunting such a close rapport with his Russian counterpart, the daily commented.

The dinner conversation with Putin was first reported on Monday by Ian Bremmer, president of the New York-based Eurasia Group, in a newsletter to group clients.

The absence of American translator in the meeting was breach of national security protocol, he said.

Never in my life as a political scientist have I seen two countries  major countries  with a constellation of national interests that are as dissonant, while the two leaders seem to be doing everything possible to make nice and be close to each other, Bremmer told Bloomberg.

Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the US, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesnt care, Bremmer was quoted as saying by The New York Times.

Bremmer said he heard directly from attendees.

They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled, he said.

But in a series of two tweets, Trump slammed the media.

Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is sick. All G20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany, the US president said.

Press knew about it. The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister! Trump said in another tweet. PTI
Washington, July 19

US President Donald Trump will nominate Jon Huntsman, an envoy to China under former Democratic President Barack Obama, as US ambassador to Russia, the White House said on Tuesday.

The job, all the more high-profile because of allegations that Russia meddled in the 2016 US presidential election, requires confirmation by the US Senate.

If confirmed, Huntsman, who has long been expected to be Trumps pick for the job, will head to Moscow as the US Congress and a special counsel investigate Russias role in the 2016 presidential election and allegations that Trumps campaign had ties to Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied the interference, and Trump has said there was no collusion with Moscow.

Huntsman, a former Utah Governor, was US ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011. He has served in the administrations of five US presidents and was a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Trump has said he wants to improve relations with Russia.

The Republican president met with Putin in Germany at the gathering of G20 leaders there earlier this month and officials said he raised the issue of Russian meddling in the election before moving on to other issues such as the war in Syria.

Reports in March that Huntsman would get the Moscow envoy post were greeted with mixed reviews in Moscow, with one politician saying he was not a dove and the Kremlin saying it would welcome anyone who was a convinced proponent of establishing a dialogue with Russia. Reuters
By Samuel Ssebuliba and Ritah Kemigisa:

The ministry of lands has come out to clarify on the proposed constitutional amendment in respect to private acquisition.

Under the constitutional amendment bill that is before parliaments legal affairs committee, government is considering emending article 26 to allow faster acquisition private land for development.

Speaking to media today lands minister Betty Amongi said the state already has power to acquire land under the land acquisition Act of 1965, but what has been lacking is expediting the process.

He said that under this new bill, all gazetted corridors will be compensated, but disagreements will be settled in courts of law to allow the project continue uninterrupted by injunctions.

in another related story..

The proposed land amendment bill that has been tabled before parliament is an indicator that the land commission instituted to probe land matters has not been given enough time to make its investigations.

This is according to the opposition Democratic Party.

Speaking to journalists earlier today the acting secretary General Gerald Siranda said before tabling this bill, the land commission should have been allowed to first make its final report and also make its recommendations in regards to the land question.

Siranda says its possible the president is not happy with the operations of the commission since its attacking his people but he insists the commission should be given more time to finish its work.

Last year President Yoweri Museveni appointed a commission of inquiry headed by Justice Catherine Bamugemereire to probe land matters in the country.
Berlin, July 19

Prince William and his wife Kate embarked today on a three-day visit to Germany billed as a charm offensive by local media as Britain begins thorny Brexit talks in earnest. William, who is second in line to the British throne, and Kate touched down in Berlin from Poland accompanied by their young children George and Charlotte.

The first stop for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge was at luncheon at the giant modern office complex of Chancellor Angela Merkel, widely considered the European Unions most powerful leader. German media said the long-planned visit was auspiciously timed as the negotiations on Britain leaving the EU get under way in fits and starts. National broadsheet Sueddeutsche Zeitung called the young family Her Majestys Secret Weapon and the German tour a diplomatic mission with the enthusiastic backing of the Foreign Office.

They know better than anyone else on the island that the image of the United Kingdom on the continent is not the best at the moment, it said. What could you do in this situation to indicate to your neighbours that Britain is of course a stable nation? Obviously, you send in the royals.

News website Spiegel Online called the visit a charm offensive. The royals represent a kind of common sense that this hard ideological government of the Tories seems to have completely lost at the moment, its commentator Thomas Huetlin said.

Conservative daily Die Welt called the royal visit to Germany a kind of rescue mission a year after the fateful Brexit referendum which stunned the remaining 27 EU member states.

William and Kate are in Germany with their children to lighten the mood, it wrote.

In Poland, the royal couple met freedom icon and Nobel peace laureate Lech Walesa and visited a former Nazi German concentration camp.

While in Berlin, William and Kate will greet the public at Brandenburg Gate, the landmark symbol of German unity, and view the sprawling Holocaust Memorial in the heart of the capital before meeting President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at his urban palace.  AFP
After a seven-year hiatus, Frontier Airlines announced Tuesday that it is returning to Tulsa International Airport next spring.

The news comes as part of a nationwide announcement that includes 21 new destinations for Frontiers network. The companys Low Fares Done Right brand provides ultra-low airfares combined with a national network that will offer more than 1,000 routes by the summer of 2018.

Frontier discontinued service in Tulsa in April 2010 when it offered flights only to Denver, said Stephanie Chester, community relations manager for the Tulsa Airports Improvement Trust.

The carriers reintroduction to Tulsa International Airport (TUL) will include nonstop service to Denver (DEN), Orlando (MCO) and San Diego (SAN).

Denver ranks as the second most popular destination for Tulsa travelers, with more than 400 passengers traveling between the cities each day. Orlando and San Diego are also both top destinations with growing passenger demand.

Frontiers announcement aligns with our regional strategy to expand nonstop service options available from Tulsa International, Jeff Stava, chair of the Tulsa Airports Improvement Trust, said in a statement. Their decision to include Tulsa in their national expansion demonstrates the strength of the Tulsa market and will serve as a catalyst for additional economic activity in our region.

Mark VanLoh, Tulsa International Airport CEO, said in a statement that we look forward to welcoming Frontier and the added connectivity that their arrival will provide to our travelers.

Frontiers commitment to first-class service and low fares combined with their expanded network will be an asset boosting the efficiency of our businesses and the quality of life of our area residents, he continued.

Frontiers flights will increase from 19 to 21 the number of nonstop destinations served at TIA. Fares and schedules are expected to be available this fall, in time for summer 2018 travel.

The decision by Frontier Airlines to return to Tulsa after more than seven years away is a significant sign of our regions rebirth, Brien Thorstenberg, senior vice president of economic development for the Tulsa Regional Chamber, said in a statement. As a region, we are on the upswing, and that is being noticed around the country.

And good news begets good news. New transit options in the near term will likely draw even more options in the longer term, which is a win for all of us.

Thorstenberg continued: We at the Tulsa Regional Chamber are extremely pleased that Frontier Airlines will once again fly through Tulsa. Their return to our airport will further expand the nonstop flight options for our local business travelers. Those outside our region will also find it even easier to visit for work or play. We welcome Frontier back and we appreciate their vote of confidence in our city and region.

The airline also announced it will return to Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City. Tulsa and Oklahoma City were part of 21 new destinations and 85 new routes the company announced on Tuesday, according to a national report.
OKLAHOMA CITY  Gov. Mary Fallin, who leads the state with the highest female incarceration rate in the nation, on Tuesday outlined for a national forum the financial and emotional costs of the problem.

Fallin was the keynote speaker at Women Unshackled: The First National Forum Focused on Policy Solutions to Female Incarceration in Washington. It was sponsored by the Brennan Center and the Coalition for Public Safety.

The female prison population is growing faster than any other group, but the issue does not get the attention it deserves, said Holly Harris, Justice Action Network executive director.

Fallin acknowledged her state has work to do. Oklahoma has the dubious honor of having the highest incarceration rate of women in the nation, she said. That is not something I am proud of.

Some 83 percent of female prison admissions in Oklahoma are for nonviolent offenses, and the vast majority of women going to prison are involved in drug-related crimes, Fallin said.

She said the nation has had an attitude of locking up drug offenders, but in her experience, that doesnt always work.

Forty-two percent of women in Oklahoma prisons have a drug-related conviction, she said, while 69 percent have an actively managed mental health issue, compared to 44 percent of men.

The state has relied on diversion programs, re-entry programs, drug courts, mental health courts and other programs to keep families together and help women get treatment and avoid prison and recidivism, Fallin said.

She highlighted the successes of Women in Recovery, a Tulsa-based outpatient program that helps women facing prison for drug offenses.

A large number of women in prison are themselves victims of crime, such as domestic violence, sexual assault or child abuse, Fallin said.

In addition, children who have a parent who is incarcerated are five times more likely to enter the criminal justice system, she said.

The states prison population will grow by an estimated 25 percent in the next few years, which will require three new prisons at a cost of $2 billion, Fallin said. She said she believes that the cycle of incarceration can be broken. So that is why I fight the fight, she said.
Tulsa police have arrested a transient man on allegations that he lured at least two transient women into secluded areas and raped them.

Michael Charles Dickson, 37, allegedly raped a 31-year-old woman and a 25-year-old woman on separate occasions after promising them methamphetamine.

Dickson and the 31-year-old woman were together at a downtown church about July 12, according to a probable cause affidavit. He allegedly promised her meth if she would follow him to a grassy area near a highway overpass, possibly in the 1200 block of South Elgin Avenue.

The victim stated that when she realized that the defendant (Dickson) was not going to produce any drugs, she turned around to leave and the defendant grabbed her by the back of her pants and told her to take off her clothing before raping her, police state in the affidavit.

The woman reported the alleged assault to a security guard, who then reported it to police.

The 25-year-old woman came forward July 17 and told police that Dickson had raped her in April, according to the affidavit.

The woman, who was staying at a homeless shelter downtown, was near a bridge west of the shelter when Dickson told her that he knew where she could get some methamphetamine, according to the affidavit.

The defendant took her by the hand and led her to a grassy, tree-lined area and raped her, the document says.

The woman told officers she did not report the rape sooner because she was afraid of Dickson.

Both woman told police they were fearful of Dickson because of his size. Dickson is 5-foot-9 and weighs 235 pounds, according to jail records.

A third woman, age 36, told police that Dickson punched her in the face in early July.

She reported that following a brief intimate sexual encounter with Dickson, she allowed him to stay at her residence but asked him to leave after four days, investigators said.

Police state in the affidavit that an argument ensued and that Dickson hit the woman twice. He reportedly fled the residence before police arrived.

Investigators said Dickson admitted to police that he punched the woman.

Dickson also admitted to having consensual sex with the 31-year-old woman but denied that he had raped her, according to the affidavit.

Dickson denied any sexual contact with the 25-year-old woman, investigators said.

Dickson was arrested Monday and booked into the Tulsa Jail on two complaints of first-degree rape, a complaint of domestic assault and battery, and on an outstanding warrant from Oklahoma County, according to court and jail records. He is being held without bond.
Officer Betty Shelbys resignation has been accepted, with her final date of work at the Tulsa Police Department coming Aug. 3.

The TPD released her resignation letter Wednesday morning in response to an open records request from the Tulsa World.

This is to notify you of my resignation from the Tulsa Police Department effective August 3, 2017, Shelby wrote.

The letter is addressed to Chief Chuck Jordan, dated July 14 and signed Betty Shelby.

Maj. Eric Dalgleish signed the letter, handwriting in that her notice is accepted with satisfactory separation.

Shelby was a patrol officer when she fatally shot Terence Crutcher, who was unarmed, on a north Tulsa street on Sept. 16. She was suspended from her job until a jury acquitted her of first-degree manslaughter May 17.

On July 14, Shelby released a statement saying that with a heavy heart she had decided to resign.

Since being reinstated, I have found that sitting behind a desk, isolated from all of my fellow officers and the citizens of Tulsa, is just not for me, Shelby wrote.

In comments the day after the verdict of not guilty in Shelbys case, Jordan told reporters that her job status was under evaluation.

The next day in a news release, Jordan said Shelby, pursuant to the jury verdict, would return to duty but not in a patrol capacity.

She had been on unpaid administrative leave since she was charged on Sept. 22.
BROKEN ARROW  City councilors trying to head off a potential casino in Broken Arrow discussed a draft resolution Tuesday evening affirming their opposition to gaming at a proposed restaurant near the Creek Turnpike.

About 40 attended the meeting, which included nearly 20 minutes of discussion about the Muscogee (Creek) Nation land allotment south of the turnpike and west of South 129th East Avenue.

The Kialegee Tribal Town, one of the autonomous groups that comprise the Creek Nation, has attempted to provide gaming oversight at the Red Creek site. However, Creek Nation and, subsequently, Broken Arrow officials dont believe the group has jurisdiction over the land.

The development would include a restaurant and bar concept, called The Embers Grille, and potentially the Red Creek Casino.

City Attorney Beth Anne Childs gave attendees an update on her conversations with Creek Nation and Red Creek representatives.

She also floated revisions to the draft resolution, including adding a blanket objection to gaming inside Broken Arrow city limits, requesting the state attorney general investigate the situation, requesting the tribe to address any illegal gaming, and tasking a city official with writing a letter to the National Indian Gaming Commission concerning the Kialegee Tribal Town providing gaming oversight at the location.

As written, the draft resolution also would authorize the city manager to take all actions reasonably necessary to stop illegal gaming on this tract of land.

The council will consider a final resolution Aug. 1.

After that portion of the meeting concluded, about a dozen people left the council chambers. Though only one person signed up to address the council, at least one other wanted to talk but didnt register in time.

Zane Anderson, a lifelong Broken Arrow resident who attended the meeting and lives about a mile from the Red Creek site, said after seeing casinos impact on people, he doesnt think there should be any in Broken Arrow.

The casinos continue to grow larger and larger, and the bank accounts of those going to the casinos get smaller and smaller until ultimately, you have individuals that are bankrupt and in debt, he said.

He also noted the situation is similar to the abandoned Red Clay Casino project that was proposed years ago nearby. The project was halted by a legal injunction in 2012 and was never continued.

The Tulsa World has reported the new project includes a similar cast of officials and organizations as the old casino project, including the Kialegee Tribal Town and some Red Creek officials.

The council meeting came after months of back-and-forth between Red Creek representatives, city officials and citizens and representatives of the Creek Nation about the potential  and viability  of gaming at the facility.

The council resolution was drafted in response to rumors about the site seeking Class II gaming in the future, which the city and Creek Nation believe would be illegal.

Recently, Red Creek officials and representatives have made moves that city and Creek Nation officials say indicate gaming at the site is more than just a possibility, as officials have previously indicated.

Those actions include posting online job listings for the Red Creek Casino and seeking employees with casino experience.

Red Creek LLC principal Luis Figueredo has said the job postings merely amount to officials doing their due diligence in case the facility ever transitions to hosting gaming.

Penny Coleman, attorney for the Kialegee Tribal Town, confirmed the group has sent a 120-day letter of intent to issue a gaming license to the National Indian Gaming Commission for the Broken Arrow site and has received a preliminary response that indicated the commission was still concerned about the viability of gaming at the site.

Theres a lot of things being said, and we wanted to make clear that were not planning on doing anything illegal. Were looking at going through all the proper processes, Coleman said.

She said she will send a report to the commission in mid-August that she hopes will add credibility to the Kialegees stake to provide gaming oversight on that land.

The report includes an ethnohistorical report that discusses the tribal towns place within Creek society, as well as an interpretation of pertinent treaties.

In a statement released Monday, Coleman also noted that prior land judgments issued by the National Indian Gaming Commission negating the Kialegee claim to provide oversight at the abandoned Red Clay site in Broken Arrow are not binding and involve circumstances, which are distinguishable from the present one.

In response to Tuesday nights council meeting, Coleman said she hopes city officials will work with Red Creek representatives, but that she doesnt believe they have any jurisdiction to take action against them.

We want to be a good neighbor, she said. We want to work with them.

The Embers Grille is scheduled to open in August, although a representative from Oklahomas ABLE Commission said Tuesday its liquor license application was pending. Officials submitted the application May 24.
LVIV, Ukraine  During a routine morale, welfare and recreation trip, deployed citizen-soldiers of 1st Battalion, 279th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team found themselves in a dangerous situation that put their military and civilian training to good use.

We were about to head back to base when we saw smoke coming from down the street, so we decided to investigate, said Sgt. Matthew Odom of Norman, Oklahoma, a soldier assigned to Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 279th Infantry Regiment, 45th IBCT.

The smoke came from an apartment building that had caught fire on Sunday.

Odom, along with fellow Thunderbirds Sgt. Nelson Deese, Spc. Vincent Humerickhouse, Spc. Kellar Jackson, Spc. Aaron Moore and Pfc. Kevin Polk, rushed into the burning building and evacuated the third floor before local firefighters arrived.

We kept asking if there was anyone still in the building, and finally we found someone who spoke English who said that there was, Odom said. Sgt. Deese and I just gave each other a look; it was like we knew what the other was thinking and we just stormed in.

Instinctively, we all just ran inside and started getting people out, said Jackson, a native of Watonga, Oklahoma. There was a lot of smoke. It was chaotic and intense.

According to Jackson, the language barrier made the situation even more difficult.

Deese, who serves as a volunteer firefighter in his community of Crowder, Oklahoma, said his training as a firefighter and infantryman just kicked in.

We were knocking on doors and windows trying to get peoples attention, Deese said. They were definitely not aware of the fire.

Once firefighters arrived on scene, Deese made sure his fellow soldiers were safely outside the burning building before he pitched in to help the firefighters, unrolling their hose and helping them move their equipment upstairs.

I feel like most soldiers, especially infantrymen, we run to the fight, Deese said. Not a single hesitation.

Soldiers with the Oklahoma Army National Guards 279th are deployed to Ukraine in support of the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine, an international coalition dedicated to building the training capacity of the Ukrainian army.

Im proud of the actions these soldiers took to ensure the safety of others, said Lt. Col. Bruce Lambeth, commander of the 279th. They are true examples of Oklahomans upholding the Oklahoma standard; in this case, looking after their global neighbors while serving their state and country abroad here in Ukraine.
Nine News boss Darren Wick has taken aim at Sunday Night with a Facebook post after it reported on the 2009 death of Bob Chappell on a yacht in Sandy Bay, and grandmother Sue Neill-Frasers upcoming appeal.

Sunday Night investigation on 7 is the SAME story 60 MINUTES Australia did in 2014  thats THREE YEARS AGO for our numerically challenged colleagues at 7, he wrote.

Switch over to Ninja Warrior on 9. At least, those guys are just suspended, not suspending the truth.

Last year  we hit rock bottom and everyone was taking shots at us, he said.

But now enough is enough.

Reporter Laura Sparkes also took aim:

No explosive new evidence on Sue Neill-Fraser case on Sunday Night. We covered it all on @60Mins story 3 yrs ago.https://t.co/UDEaRwLM9o  Laura Sparkes (@LauraSparkes9) July 16, 2017

Sunday Night featured interviews with Sue Neill-Frasers family and reported a new witness has come forward revealing private conversations with Meaghan Vass, while the latter has been called to testify at Neill-Frasers upcoming appeal.

A Seven spokesperson said, The story itself had moved on since other media trawled over it years ago. The key development being a new witness with supportive details of another person on the boat. This witness forming part of a landmark court case under new right to appeal legislation in Tasmania.

Via: News Corp
Home Secretary Amber Rudd meets with Syrian family who were resettled in Lambeth Palace in 2016.  Chris Clements

The British government is committed to deepening its year-old refugee community sponsorship scheme, promising extra funding for integration training and support at a roadshow this week to encourage more participation from local groups.

The plan enables community groups including charities, faith groups, churches and businesses to take a lead role supporting resettled refugees. It has had a modest start, with 53 refugees welcomed to date by 10 groups under the Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme (VPRS) for Syrian refugees.

To encourage more local organisations to join, Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced this week additional support; 1 million will be provided over two years to train groups signing up. The Home Office will invite bids from organisations with expertise to deliver the training.

Integration is easier when theres community support, Ms. Rudd said Monday at an event at Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterburys London residence.

Integration is easier when theres community support

The Government wanted to ensure that the programme was sufficiently robust before expanding it. It also stressed that families that have gone through traumatic experiences require special care and have complex needs.

It is essential that the Home Office carefully assesses every sponsoring organisation, Ms. Rudd added. Its essential that we make sure that potential sponsors have a credible plan, which is backed up by relevant experience, so that each and every family gets the best possible chance to rebuild their lives in the UK.

Resettlement is a tangible response to those needing protection and a means of international burden-sharing in the face of the largest ever global displacement crisis. It offers the most vulnerable refugees an opportunity to restart their lives in safety and dignity.

But demand is enormous. For 2018, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, estimates global resettlement needs are close to 1.2 million people. In 2016, UNHCR submissions of resettlement reached a 20-year high, with 125,800 refugees departing to rebuild their lives.

Britains VPRS aims to resettle 20,000 Syrians by 2020, by when the Government has also pledged to accept another 3,000 children and their families from the Middle East; the latter would also be eligible for inclusion in the community programme. UNHCR has asked the government to lift these numbers to at least 10,000 refugees a year.

My hope for the future is that its going to considerably bigger, Paul Morrison, Director of Resettlement, Asylum Support and Integration at the Home Office, said of the sponsorship programme. Weve taken the deliberate view that we dont want to go too quick. We want it to work. We want it to be something that lasts for a long time.

The Lambeth Palace event was also attended by a Canadian delegation headed by Ahmed D. Hussen, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. He said private groups had been invaluable partners in helping to integrate new arrivals in Canada.

"We want it to be something that lasts for a long time.

Canadas community sponsorship scheme started in 1979 in response to the exodus of so-called boat people from Vietnam following the IndoChina conflicts. To date, Canadian communities and citizens have sponsored almost 288,000 refugees. Recently, Canada has resettled 40,081 refugees under its Syrian resettlement initiative.

One rural town particularly engaged in the community programme is Brockville, Ontario, which has pledged to take 50 Syrians. Being involved has been one of the most impactful moments that I have experienced, the towns mayor, David Henderson, told an earlier meeting in Kingston upon Thames. My God, you come out of it with a good feeling.

He stressed that given the towns aging demographics, the newcomers had added vitality and diversity to the community, as well as professional skills. Over time, they more than pay their own way in new tax receipts, he said.

While resettlement is a life-changing experience, it can be extremely challenging. Refugees are often resettled to countries where the society, language and culture are completely new.

Those present at the meetings in Britain, who had been through the process of sponsoring refugees, stressed that the demands of sponsoring in the UK were not light.

Sponsoring requires an established network or group, with different expertise, to help with complex questions around housing, education, health and welfare benefits as well as offering emotional support. Finding suitable accommodation is especially tricky in Britain. The Syrians also require access to an Arabic speaker, at least initially. And as a starting point, sponsoring groups need to raise 4,500 per adult refugee.

Sponsor groups are matched with a refugee family and support them from their moment of arrival to self-sufficiency. Overall, approval can take six months, sometimes longer.

Alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the early sponsors in Britain was the Salvation Army. Major Nick Coke, their Refugee Coordinator, said his organisation had sponsored a family in Merton, London, and had drawn on wide networks including local churches, mosques and synagogues as well as individuals like home tutors, who lent time for free. So many doors have opened in our community, he said.

So many doors have opened in our community

For Major Coke, a recent high point was when the daughter of the refugee family had sung in a choir at the Royal Albert Hall; just months earlier, she had been scratching a living from a roundabout in Lebanon.

The roadshow, hosted by the Good Faith Partnership, Social Finance, the Home Office, Canada, churches, faith groups and civil organisations, is moving to Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham and Aberystwyth.

Lambeth Palace was the first group to be approved to receive a Syrian family under the scheme. That family has already become part of the Palaces fabric but will soon move to new accommodation. Family members joked with visitors this week, telling them that they hope their next home is also a palace.
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is deeply shocked and saddened at reports of the deaths and injuries of a number of internally displaced persons in an aerial attack on the embattled Mawza district in Yemens Taizz governorate.

The incident was reported on Tuesday afternoon and the number of civilian casualties are still being verified with initial reports pointing to at least 20 deaths, including that of women and children. Most of those killed are believed to be from the same family. Injuries have also been reported with a number also taken to nearby hospitals for treatment.

The people killed in the incident were reported to have been displaced to Mawza from nearby Al Mokha district, also in Taizz governorate and which is also experiencing intensified hostilities.

Testament to the complex and grave situation for civilians and those seeking safety in Yemen, a large number of internally displaced people (IDPs) in Yemen are displaced within their own governorate. More than half a million people, 27 per cent of Yemens IDPs originate from Taizz and yet the governorate is also host to 15 per cent of Yemens IDPs, or some 303,672 individuals.

There are two million internally displaced people in Yemen who have fled elsewhere across Yemen since the beginning of the conflict, but continue to be exposed to danger as the conflict has affected all of Yemens mainland governorates.

This latest incident once again demonstrates the extreme dangers facing civilians in Yemen, particularly those attempting to flee violence, as they disproportionately bear the brunt of conflict.

It also illustrates the difficulties in the delivery of humanitarian protection and assistance in Yemen. Amid prevailing security and safety conditions, UNHCRs assistance for IDPs has reached the Mawza area.

UNHCR, as the lead agency for protection under the coordinated humanitarian response in Yemen, has been appealing to parties to the conflict to ensure their utmost in the protection of civilians and the mitigation of suffering.

A peaceful political solution to resolve the conflict in Yemen is urgently needed to end civilian suffering.

Media Contacts:
As part of West Lothian Councils ambitious schools programme, Collective Architecture, in collaboration with consultants Scott Bennett Associates and EDP Consulting Engineers, has delivered a new purpose built extension at Toronto Primary School in Livingston.



The proposed expansion and development of the schools facilities has maintained the unique physical character and immediacy of the schools grounds and green avenues whilst reinforcing the internal pedestrian street. The existing classrooms are formed around central sunroom clusters, with the central spine knitting together each level and activity zone. The proposed development interlocks with this inner street and in turn provide a new DDA compliant, accessible main entrance to the school.



The development comprises of a new monolithic textured precast concrete Games Hall that opens to the school playing fields. The textured concrete band is punctured only at high level by way of a sandblasted pattern across Reglit apertures, conveying the pattern of the surrounding tree lined avenue. The concrete wraps the entire base of the proposed extension, except for the new Main Entrance to the school, which is over-clad in Vitreous Enamel, signifying the schools branding colour.



The new inner street, which extends the existing corridor, comprises of the new Main Office, Head Teacher Office and Assistant Head Teacher Office, as well as Janitors Office, Changing Facilities and accessible access to the existing Nursery. The inner street leads from the previous main entrance to the school all the way to the new concrete clad Games Hall, which continues internally. The single storey extension does not touch the double height Games Hall internally, instead this rule is broken by a large glass canopy that separates the concrete cladding to that of the single storey extensions sedum green roof.



Extensive external landscaping and a re-routed vehicular and pedestrian entrance, provide a fully accessible new school entrance, which acts as the heart of the new development.



The project also features an external lighting scheme to further enhance the pedestrian spaces and display the bold development in the evening, amidst the tree lined avenue.
Graven worked collaboratively with Registers of Scotland (RoS) to design and deliver their new Platform at St Vincent Plaza, Glasgow (17,294 sq ft)  a smart working environment to support the organisations digital transformation programme, relocating staff from their previous Glasgow and Edinburgh offices without impacting on the delivery and quality of their public service.



The project is conceived not as an office but as a physical platform that creates a physical focal point for the staff and public with the space, equipment, tools and software to support the process of digital transformation being carried out by Registers of Scotland



The design concept centres around physical and graphical means of defining ownership of land, with both constructed forms and cartographic marks being points of reference in the definition of the varied work settings.



In this way the space is thought of as an elevated portion of landscape that becomes divided into plots and terrains, with an underlying layout based on the Ell, the historical Scottish unit of land measurement and a material palette inspired by the colours and textures of Scottish rural and urban, modern and traditional landscapes.



Ross Hunter said The Client has a clear long term vision of how they will work and that is very much informed by their Agile principles developed through their IT and digital processes. PAS 3000 supports that thinking.



RoS recognises that old style waterfall management of projects can be cumbersome and detrimental to fast and flexible processes, and encouraged us to move very quickly towards a minimum viable solution they to invest focus and energy in refining that solution so far as we could in the timescale and budget.



So, in spite of a brief that was relatively high level in terms of detail and metrics, Graven was able to use its experience to speculate options and solutions that could quickly be tested then either discarded or refined.



It created a really positive and energising atmosphere in the project team  with lots of space for creativity and pragmatism, without the dead hand of Excel hovering over every decision.



Gravens creative, solutions-based, approach to drive practical benefits and implement SMART working principles was facilitated by the British Standards (BSI) PAS 3000 Code of Practice, which came into effect in 2015.



Andy Lake, Author of PAS 3000 Code of Practice for Smart Working commented on the design and implementation of the new offices at St Vincents Plaza I think it is terrific  one of the most appealing and high quality offices for new ways of working that Ive seen and I hope Graven get to do many more of them.






(July 19, 2017)  This summer was the first time that Brianna Diaz has ever travelled outside of the United States. The first-gen student flew alone for 20 hours across the Atlantic Ocean to Johannesburg, South Africa, preparing for a six-week trip as a recipient of the U.S. Department of States Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship.

The Gilman program allows American students to study or intern abroad and gain proficiency in diverse languages and cultures.

My first impression was noticing how similar life in Johannesburg is to San Antonio, said Diaz, an Honors College student and UTSA Top Scholar. The city is very developed, and I noticed families are very close.

Diaz spent her first two days in the program with the program director and 15 other students touring Johannesburg. They visited museums and Nelson Mandelas home, and learned about the history of South Africa and apartheid. Then they traveled 350 miles southeast to Durban, South Africa, where they stayed with host families. Diaz lived with a mom whose adult children have moved out of the home.

She helped me a lot. She encouraged me to explore the city and embrace this once in a lifetime opportunity, Diaz said.

During most of the trip, Diaz focused on school practicums. She spent half of her time in an inner city primary school and the other half at a secondary school in a township where she noticed vast differences. She noticed that the inner city school had more teachers and smaller class sizes. It also offered clubs for students and its students were demographically more diverse. In contrast, the township school didnt have enough desks for its students and its science laboratory was barely functioning. Diaz said the differences revert back to the apartheid.

During apartheid, whites were in the cities so thats where the resources were invested.

She said all the students carried a positive attitude about school, something American students often take for granted.

The students were so eager to learn and go to school, Diaz said. They were super obedient to their teachers.

Diaz also visited non-governmental organizations to see how they improve student success in the South African education system. Her favorite was called TREE, Training and Resources in Early Education, which works in rural areas where residents dont have access to early childhood development classes. Members of TREE are training community members to teach these classes.

Overall, Diaz said observing how South Africans celebrate their diversity was the greatest learning experience.

We paint ourselves as a melting pot, but after seeing the diversity in South Africa, I see that we still have a lot of work to do in American cultures, said Diaz.

Back at UTSA, the Gilman scholar plans to host a panel to share her personal study abroad experiences with first-generation students like herself.

My experiences were so amazing. I loved every second of the program. Making connections with people I never thought Id meet - learning more about a person and sharing things about myself and helping them learn too it was really fun and I want other UTSA students to have the same experiences, Diaz said. Im so grateful I am able to use all the resources UTSA has provided to me so I can come back and share this with other Roadrunners.

UTSA is ranked among the top 400 universities in the world and among the top 100 in the nation, according to Times Higher Education.
Whitney Lytle educates the community about archaeology.

(July 19, 2017) -- Meet Whitney Lytle. In addition to her fieldwork and research, Lytle is educating the community about archaeology in her role as the Legacy Program Coordinator at the UTSA Center for Archaeological Research (CAR).

Lytle says her true love is archaeology, and she enjoys sharing her passion for it through archaeological outreach activities for children and adults.

Since she joined UTSA in Fall 2010, she has worked tirelessly to increase CAR's outreach with expanded community education opportunities.

Lytle gives tours of CAR, teaches students about archaeology in the Legacy Programs education room and even assists students with mock digs.

Shes also a familiar face at local elementary, middle and high schools, where she gives presentations about Texas cultural heritage, attends career days and leads archaeological clubs at schools. At many of these meetings, students get to examine and analyze artifacts representing different cultures, just as a professional archaeologist would.

I teach younger students the importance of respecting and preserving the history of ancient cultures, lessons that can be applied to respecting their peers and everyone they meet, said Lytle.

Her job has allowed her to meet amazing young people over the years and Lytle said several of those students have gone on to study archaeology in college.

One of those students, Makayla Rodriguez, has fallen in love with archaeology and expanded her knowledge of the field with Lytle since 2011. The high school junior has attended Legacy camps, volunteered with CAR and will intern with Lytle next year.

When Lytle isnt with youth, shes studying archaeology. The UTSA staffer is currently a doctoral candidate working with Associate Professor Kathryn Brown in the UTSA Department of Anthropology on research that focuses on the Maya regions of Central America.

Her doctoral work has taken her to Belize, where shes done fieldwork at the site of Xunantunich to study the ritual space of ancestor shrines from the pre-classic to late classic period Maya. She says the lessons shes learned in the field have also enhanced her programming for youth.

With the unique perspective of a staff member and a student, Lytle says that shes proud of UTSAs commitment to community outreach.

At CAR, we share our expertise about cultural heritage with the community so they can learn from the past to understand the present, said Lytle. That dedication is unique to UTSA and is demonstrated through all the community outreach programs we provide.
UW Students Receive PBK Awards at Undergraduate Research Day

Three University of Wyoming students were honored for demonstrating excellence in research during the 2017 Wyoming Undergraduate Research Day at UW.

Anne Chenchar, of Cheyenne, and Sydney Stein, from Laramie, were co-recipients of the Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) Award for Excellence in the Liberal Arts. The award recognizes projects within the liberal arts that showcase excellence in nonvocational, nonprofessional or nontechnical studies. Chenchar and Stein received $500 prizes as part of the award.

Jasper Hunt, of Laramie, won the PBK Award for Integrative Excellence in the Liberal Arts, along with a $1,000 prize. Award-winning projects in this category must articulate the interfaces between science and the human condition in a nuanced way that shows understanding and not simply consideration.

Phi Beta Kappa is an honorary that recognizes scholarly attainment of the liberal arts and the sciences, says Rachel Watson, a UW Department of Molecular Biology associate academic professional lecturer and PBK member. Our award categories very much embody this.

The awards are made possible by an endowment in honor of Louise A. Lee Johnson, who participated in the chartering of UWs chapter in 1940.

Chenchar, a senior majoring in microbiology and physiology, presented Magic Use in Roman Sexual Performance. She worked with her faculty mentor, Laura DeLozier, a senior lecturer in the UW Department of Modern and Classical Languages, to focus her research on the use of magical practices to treat infertility in ancient Roman society. Chenchar also examined magical use through spells and potions, as well as the social aspects of magical use to increase sexual performance.

Stein, a recent UW graduate who majored in communication, with minors in gender and womens studies, and the Honors Program, investigated the intertwining origin stories in the television show How I Met Your Mother. Her research project, titled The Blue French Horn: Intertwining Origin Stories in How I Met Your Mother, shows that two origin stories can occur at the same time without compromising the integrity of another. Stein collaborated with Leah LeFebvre, an assistant professor in the UW Department of Communication and Journalism.

Hunt, a junior majoring in psychology, with minors in philosophy and disability studies, examined the relationship between personality and writing. He and his faculty mentor, Robin Barry, an assistant professor in the UW Department of Psychology, studied personality questionnaires and short writing samples (fewer than 50 words in many cases) from 86 cohabiting couples. Even though the writing samples were brief, Hunt and Barry found weak-to-moderate correlations between personality and writing style.

Hunt says his research project, titled How Telling is Author Voice? Further Associations Between Personality and Writing, demonstrates that writing analysis can be remarkably accurate in determining things about a person -- things that the person wasnt even writing about.

Watson, who headed the awards selection committee, says 250 students submitted brief videos of their work to be considered for the awards. The committee members selected nine finalists from the video submissions. After attending the finalists presentations during Undergraduate Research Day, the committee members chose this years award recipients.

Annes display was a bold example of the liberal arts, and Sydneys was a very in-depth analysis, Watson says. Quite honestly, Jasper won the integrated category in a landslide victory. His project was a nuanced intertwining of analysis and a beautiful statement on the human condition.

This year, 491 UW and Wyoming community college students presented their research projects at Undergraduate Research Day. The event recognizes and celebrates the accomplishments of undergraduate student researchers.

Chenchar says her undergraduate research experience at UW has been varied, ranging from the sciences to the liberal arts. She experienced a new way of researching in preparing her Undergraduate Research Day project.

I learned how to use translated, ancient primary sources and scholarly works written on a similar topic to aid in my findings, Chenchar says. I believe that this experience with liberal arts research has made me a more competent researcher, by allowing me to learn new avenues to research and find material outside of the sciences.

Stein describes her research experience as absolutely fabulous. She credits her faculty mentor for guiding her through the research process and not only helping her produce a professional paper, but also submit and present the paper at the Rocky Mountain Communication Association 2017 Conference.

The one-on-one research experience with Dr. LeFebvre helped shape my education and show me what its like to work in an academic setting, Stein says.

Hunt cites his research experience with helping him to grow academically and personally.

I truly cannot recommend undergraduate research highly enough, Hunt says. To anyone who shares the burning hunger for knowledge that I feel, take that first step. Ask a professor if you can work in their lab. You will not regret it.

For more information about PBK at UW, visit www.uwyo.edu/pbk.


The Nevada Childhood Cancer Foundation(NCCF) will hold its 21st Annual Camp Cartwheel Summer Camp at Torino Ranch for critically ill children and their siblings. The event, created and managed by the Nevada Childhood Cancer Foundation, is a 24-hour, medically supervised, outdoor and overnight camp experience for children diagnosed with cancer, or other life- threatening illnesses.

Camp Cartwheel has hosted more than 2,600 children since its inception in 1996 and celebrates 21 Years Of Hope this year.

Camp Cartwheel offers critically ill children and their siblings, fun-filled days of swimming, hiking, arts and crafts, canoeing, outdoor games, rock wall climbing and more. It is a time for the children to forget about hospitals, clinics and diseases, to have fun with brothers and sisters and enjoy being a kid again. Camp Cartwheel has grown to two four-day camp sessions to accommodate local children suffering from chronic and critical illnesses.

Children attending Camp Cartwheel are given a cost-free camp experience thanks to generous donations from Brett Torino and local businesses, community leaders, caring individuals and other generous supporters. Camp Cartwheels 2017 major sponsors are: the Brett Torino Foundation, PENTA Building Group, Hogs & Heifers Saloon, Dunkin Donuts, Terra West Property Management, Southern Highlands Charitable Foundation, McCarthy Building Companies and NPFMA (Nevada Professional Facility Managers Association).

NCCF is a non-profit organization which serves critically ill children of Southern Nevada. The foundations missing is to work side by side with the medical community to provide financial, psychological and educational support services and programs to families of all children diagnosed with a life-threatening illness such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, sickle cell, renal, blood, and immunologic diseases, as well as to provide healing arts to adults touched by cancer.
You know you are in the right profession when you find yourself thinking, Oh good! on Sunday nights as you anticipate coming into work on Monday morning.

When I was a little girl, I used to love our family trips to Barnes and Noble. Little by little, I formed a small library in my room, filled with classics like Jane Eyre and Mansfield Park. I would often take my books out and look at them happily, and then organize them in various ways to find a particularly eye-drawing arrangement.

I had a wonderful idea when I began working for the La Crosse County Library about a year ago. I created a list of books that I wanted to read, planning to mark each book after finishing it. Then I could look over my list from time to time to see all the great books I have read. I anticipated feeling really good about myself.

Only when I actually looked at my list, this good feeling rarely came. Most books on my list remained unread and unmarked.

I realized that, since working at the library, my world of literature expanded to a new vastness and curiosity as thousands of books I have never heard of passed through my hands. I decided to make another list of books that I had read in since working at the library and found that it was much longer than I had expected.

As John Lennon once wrote, Life is what happens to you when youre busy making other plans.

Sometimes I think it is easy to miss the defining pieces of who we actually are because we are caught up trying to be what we think we should be. Though most of the books I read were not a piece of classic literature, I understand the world a little better because of every single book. The best literature, I think, opens our hearts to raw truth in a way that leaves us with a sharpened understanding of the world and humanity  of love, evil, life and hope.

Here are some of my favorites from this past year:

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, is a rich and vivid story about a young boy who grows up longing for the undivided approval and affections of his father. Hosseinis story brought my own heart into new understanding of the Afghan people and what it was like to live in Afghanistan, before and after the rise of the Taliban regime. I loved this book because I began to understand another culture  the beauty of a people that I have known little of, other than war.

Call the Midwife, by Jennifer Worth is a memoir about a young nurse who immerses herself in the slums of Londons east end in the 1950s. Initially shocked by the impropriety and lack of hygiene of the area, Worths mind and compassion are ignited as she begins to get to know her patients. This book is also the first of a trilogy that is the inspiration for the fabulous BBC television series with the same title.

If you are interested in organizing your home life, I highly recommend At Home with Madame Chic, by blogger Jennifer Scott. Be inspired to simplify life, and at the same time making every moment special, including those moments of washing the dishes and choosing what to wear for the day. After reading this book, I actually decluttered my apartment and got rid of half my wardrobe! Scotts practical advice focuses on topics such as minimizing and decluttering, hosting company and even simplifying beauty.

All three of these books are available through the La Crosse County Library, located in Onalaska, Holmen, West Salem, Campbell and Bangor. Or, request them online by visiting our website at lacrossecountylibrary.org.

My challenge to you is this: take a minute to think about and write down all that you have read in the past year. Be proud of what you have accomplished. We would love to hear about your favorites as well. The La Crosse County Library Facebook Page is a great place to share recommendations. We are looking forward to your suggestions.


Following eight years of planning, HELP of Southern Nevadas Shannon West Homeless Youth Center (SWHYC) officially opened on Friday, July 14, in honor of Wests 50th birthday. The new 37,000 square-foot Shannon West Homeless Youth Center is located directly behind HELP of Southern Nevadas main offices on E. Flamingo Rd. (Pictured: Shannon West family).

The Welcome Home ceremony, attended by Assemblyman Tyrone Thompson, Senator Mark Manendo, Assemblywoman Brittney Miller, representatives from the offices of Senator Dean Heller, representatives from the offices of U.S. Representative Ruben Kihuen, representatives from the offices of Congresswoman Dina Titus and more than 250 guests, marked the start of positive change for the community through HELPs work with local homeless youth.

President and CEO of HELP of Southern Nevada Fuilala Riley, Senior Vice President Community Development Manager of Bank of America Jerrie Merritt, Senior Vice President of Bank of Nevada, Shannon Wests father Major General (Retired) Tom West and Clark County Commissioner District E Chris Giunchigliani were speakers. Also in attendance were some of the youth who are moving into the new center. Immediately following the ceremony, guests were invited to tour the new facility.

Nevada was ranked No. 1 in the nation for the rate of homeless youth living unsheltered on the streets, according to the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development 2016 Annual Homeless Assessment Report. During the 2015-2016 school year, there were more than 14,000 homeless students enrolled in Clark County schools. The new center will continue to positively impact homelessness in southern Nevada.

The three-story facility, at capacity, houses up to 166 youth ages 16 to 24, more than doubling the amount of youth housed at the last center located at 1417 N. Las Vegas Blvd. In addition to a computer lab, the center has a multi-purpose room and TV room on each floor, which also allows a space for life skills and indirect services and trainings in separate group settings for the youth. There are 160 bunk beds that will house four youth to a room with a total of 40 basic rooms in the facility as well as an additional six step-up rooms that will house one youth each in a studio apartment setting. These step-up rooms will allow stabilized homeless youth the opportunity to transition from the center into living more independently.

The new center is the first time that all four governments  Clack County, City of Henderson, City of Las Vegas and City of North Las Vegas  have all come together to support a project of this caliber. In addition to the four local governments, the facility was also brought together by Engelstad Family Foundation, Nevada Womens Philanthropy, Bank of America and U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development. Development and Construction of the new Shannon West Homeless Youth Center was led by Nevada HAND and HAND Construction.

On Monday, July 17, the youth officially moved into the facility and were graciously greeted with a lavish catered dinner, complete with fruit-infused water and carving stations, prepared and served by T-Mobile Arena and Levy Cares. As many of the youth take turns in helping to prepare the meals at the center, the volunteers serving and waiting on the youth hand-and-foot was a warm welcome for the residents of the new youth center.
Tourists are seen at the Lady Thien Hau Temple in HCMCs District 5

Therefore, when taking a pilgrimage tour to sacred destinations in the city, foreign tourists should not miss a chance to explore the hidden charms of renowned pagodas where worshippers can learn more about colorful religious beliefs as well as stories attached to the spiritual life of locals.

Thien Hau Pagoda, Jade Emperor Pagoda and Mariamman Temple are three outstanding venues worthwhile for a visit.

Built in the mid-18th century by a group of Chinese immigrants, Thien Hau Pagoda in HCMCs District 5 might be recommended as the first stop for tourists on their pilgrimage journey in the city.

Located at 710 Nguyen Trai Street in Cholon area where many Vietnamese of Chinese descent reside, the Lady Thien Hau Temple is regarded as one of the oldest and most famous Chinese-style pagodas in the city.

The temple is dedicated to Thien Hau, a traditional Chinese goddess who is believed to have miraculous ability to rescue fishermen and seafarers who are stranded at the sea.

Upon arrival at the temple for the first time, visitors may be captivated by the typical Chinese architectural style and the tranquil ambiance.

Earlier, during the migration of Chinese from mainland China to Vietnam in the 17th century, the Chinese prayed to Thien Hau for her magic power to guide them, and upon safe landing they collected money to build the temple as an expression of gratitude by Chinese immigrants for her protection during their initial trip to Saigon by sea.

Despite the ups and downs of history, the sacred site has remained a common home for the Chinese community living away from their homeland to practice religious beliefs and share difficulties in life.

The annual Lady Thien Hau Temple festival falls on the 23rd day of the third lunar month on the occasion of the Ladys birthday anniversary.

The 257-year-old pagoda recognized as a National Architectural Heritage site in 1993 plays an indispensable part in cultural life of the Chinese community in Cholon area, where worshippers pay their tribute to the Lady and pray for a happy life, good luck and good health.

Meanwhile, the Jade Emperor Pagoda on Mai Thi Luu Street in HCMCs District 1 is a worthwhile venue for tourists thanks to its ancient architectural features.

According to the website of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (vietnamtourism.com), the 2,300-square-meter pagoda where the Jade Emperor is worshipped was built in 1892 by a Chinese man identified as Luu Minh to pray for luck in his business.

The 125-year-old pagoda houses a number of intricate sculptures and woodcarvings. The pagoda was renamed Phuoc Hai in 1984 but local residents always call it the Jade Emperor pagoda.

After more than one century in existence, the holy place on July 18 attracts a large number of pilgrims from many parts of the country flocking to the pagoda to burn incense and pray for blessings, especially on the 9th day of the first lunar month every year in commemoration of the birth anniversary of the Jade Emperor.

Especially, the pagoda has become increasingly appealing to local and international tourists as former U.S. President Barack Obama paid a visit to the site on the occassion of his official visit to the country last year.

More interestingly, foreign travelers can feel a bit regretful without dropping at the Indian goddess temple called Mariamman Temple at 45 Truong Dinh Street in HCMCs District 3.

The main goddess of this temple is the Hindu goddess Mariamman, originally known as an ancient village goddess giving blessings on fertility and rain.

Built in the late 19th century by a group of Indian traders who moved to HCMC to do business, the temple now serves as a holy worshipping place for the Hindu religion, but attracting more and more Saigonese non-Hindus who believe in the magic power of Mariamman.

Also in District 1, there are two other Hindu temples, namely Sri Thendayutthapani Temple and Sunbramaniar Temple, enriching the citys cultural diversity. The temples are open to visitors from 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily and every Friday holds a ritual from morning to late evening.
The end of the Cat Linh-Hadong railway section

Three agreements

MoT is the first specialised state management agency to give feedback on the Hanoi Peoples Committees latest proposal regarding investment plans for the metro railway projects.

In particular, MoT agrees with Hanois undertaking to diversify investment capital for the three metro lines with the estimated investment capital of $15 billion, that are listed amongst the priority investments from now until 2025. These include the Noi Bai-Nam Thang Long section of Metro Line 2 (18 kilometres) and Thuong Dinh-Ring Road 2.5-Buoi (7km), the Van Cao-Hoa Lac section of Metro Line 5 (38.4km), and the Nhon-Troi-Dang Phuong section of Metro Line 3.

According to the Hanoi People's Committees report, the investment demand for metro lines in the city is around $40 billion.

With such enormous investment resources, MoT agrees that apart from ODA loans, it is necessary to mobilise more capital from other sources following the the public private partnership (PPP) mechanism, MoT Deputy Minister Nguyen Hong Truong shared.

Previously, at the end of June 2017, the Hanoi Peoples Committee has reported to the prime minister on the implementation of metro line projects in Hanoi, and proposed investment plans, solutions, and implementation mechanisms.

According to the Hanoi Transportation Development Plan approved by the prime minister in 2016, the city will build ten metro lines with the total length of 417.8km, with 75.5km underground.

Regarding Hanois proposal requesting the government to report to the National Assembly for authorisation to decide on the investment policy of the projects, in order to hasten the implementation progress. MoT supports the proposal.

MoT also agreed to Hanois proposal requesting the prime minister to consider establishing a national steering committee for metro railway construction.

Concerns with suspended projects

MoT also has a number of recommendations regarding the massive investment scale, complicated technology, and large clearance area of the metro railways projects.

In particular, regarding Hanois proposal to implement land acquisition and compensation in advance, based on the approved detailed plan, MoT warned that because a projects actual scale and route may differ from the plan premature implementation may create problems, resulting in complaints and potentially lawsuits.

Additionally, on-going metro railway projects highlight technical complexities and require a long period of investment preparation and implementation, therefore acquiring land too early would create difficulties for land management agencies and generate bad publicity for the projects, potentially halting progress.

If Hanois proposal for land acquisition and compensation passes, MoT recommends carrying out further, more detailed studies to minimise complications and creating a plan to manage the cleared land fund efficiently during the project implementation period, Truong added.

Regarding the authorisation to designate investors to implement projects under the PPP mechanism for investment preparation, land clearance, and construction, MoT states that designating investors prior to project approval will make it difficult to guarantee objectivity during the planning and approval process, as well as to guarantee the capacity of investors.

It is important to realise that domestic enterprises have yet to fully understand the complexity of metro line projects, thus making it difficult to ensure their competitiveness in the investor selection process, MoT warned.

Domestic and foreign investors registered to invest in Hanoi metro line projects: Vingroup JSC

Xuan Thanh Corporation

Lung Lo 5 JSC and Mosmetrostroy (Russia)

Tan Hoang Minh Company Ltd.

LICOGI Corporation and MIK Group Vietnam Company Ltd.

LOTTE Group (South Korea)

Vietnam seeks further Japanese support for important transport projects Vietnam is seeking the Japanese government's support for important transport projects, including the North-South Expressway, North-South High-Speed Railway, metro lines, and Long Thanh International Airport.

Japan wants to invest in metro lines in HCM City Japanese businesses are keen to share experience, transfer technology and invest in the construction of metro line 3A and a trade centre at the central station of metro line No 1 in HCM City.
VPBank aims to serve more small- and medium-sized business customers with the new loan from IFC

According to the loan agreement, IFC can convert the loan to VPBanks common shares within two years. The loan, which can be extended for two additional years, will help VPBank expand its lending scope in the small- and medium-sized enterprises segment, which is the banks strategic customer segment.

IFCs long-term financing will support VPBank, as well as the development of the Vietnamese private sector, said Lam Bao Quang, acting country manager for IFC Vietnam, Cambodia and Lao PDR.

He added that IFC is pleased to work with VPBank to further improve its operations, governance, and risk management in the future.

Meanwhile, VPBank CEO Nguyen Duc Vinh said that if converted into shares, this loan would also contribute to the banks chartered capital to meet Basel II capital requirements.

In 2016 and early 2017, IFC also provided VPBank with a five-year financial package of $158 million and trade guarantee lines of up to $50 million. The bank intends to boost its business activities in micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises, especially those owned by women, as well as international trade opportunities.
The fires near Split, Croatia's second city and a popular tourist destination, have been brought under control. (Photo: AFP/STR)

About a dozen wildfires had broken out late Sunday in the villages surrounding Split, a popular tourist destination, but firefighters managed to control the blaze on the outskirts of Croatia's second largest city.

Late Monday the fire spread to the suburbs of Split where a shopping centre had to be evacuated and several cars were burned.

The city waste dump caught fire, while the town was covered with thick black smoke, but the blaze was put under control overnight.

"It seems that the worst is behind us ... Split has been saved," mayor Andro Krstulovic Opara told HRT state-run television.

Local media reports however said some parts of Split were without electricity or water on Tuesday as Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic arrived to take stock of the situation.

According to initial estimates some 4,500 hectares (11,120 acres) of land, mostly pine forests, bushes and olive groves, were destroyed. Houses were burned but there were no casualties.

In neighbouring Montenegro, where the forest fires forced the evacuation of more than a hundred campers on the Lustica peninsula, the situation was slightly better Tuesday.

Fires however were still active in several municipalities further inland but were all under control, an interior ministry statement said.

The cause of the fires in the two countries at the height of the summer tourist season is still not known.

In Italy, authorities said a blaze in a pine forest at a popular park outside Rome, now under control, was deliberately set and that a suspect has been arrested.

But fires continue burn in southern Italy in parts of the Calabria region and in the outskirts of Naples where one person died on Monday after falling off his roof where he went to look at how the forest fire was progressing not far from his home.

Winds, high temperatures and dry conditions prompted fires to break out the past several days in southern France and the Mediterranean island of Corsica.

More than 450 firefighters were still battling a forest fire at Castagniera, north of Nice, which has destroyed some 100 hectares but appears not to be spreading further, authorities said.

On Monday fire swept through around 200 hectares of scrubland near Bonifacio in southern Corsica.

On Europe's Atlantic coast nearly 1,400 firefighters supported by water-bombing planes and helicopters have battled three major blazes in northern Portugal since Sunday.

Civil protection authorities say firefighters have managed to mostly bring the fires under control and the weather on Tuesday was cooperating as temperatures dropped from 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) to 30C.

Last month Portugal battled a giant fire in the central region that raged for five days, killing 64 people and injuring more than 250, with many trapped in their cars by the flames.

Following the tragedy, experts said Portugal is likely to see more massive forest fires because the country is highly exposed to global warming's climate-altering impacts.
The La Crosse Interstate Fair has an all new act locked in for this week, assuming he doesnt escape first.

Guinness record-winning escape artist and Harry Houdini tribute Mario Manzini will be busting loose from his straitjacket Friday at 5 and 7 p.m. and Saturday at 2, 5:30 and 7 p.m. during a series family-friendly shows at the La Crosse County Fair Grounds Speedway in West Salem.

The appearance is a first for the fair, which has never before had an escape artist, according to fair organizer Marla Stello.

This is something totally different, she said. We hope theyll enjoy it.

Stello, who is a big fan of illusion and magic, said she is looking forward to the performance.

Before the main events, Manzini will be holding a publicity stunt Thursday at noon, when hell attempt an escape from La Crosse County Sheriff Steve Helgesons handcuffs. The stunt will give Manzini a chance to prove his escapes are more than smoke and mirrors.

For the skeptics, Manzini regularly invites audience members to come up and tie him into his straitjacket or secure his ropes.

Manzini is looking forward to his first La Crosse appearance.

I like doing a lot of fairs and festivals because Im right in the audience, he said.

Manzini got his start when he was barely more than a toddler, after he learned about the infamous Harry Houdini.

He was fascinated by Houdinis daring feats and pledged that one day he too would be a world famous escape artist.

I made up my mind when I was 4 years old, Manzini said. I wanted to do that.

Manzinis entry into what he calls escapology began at home, when he started having his parents tie him up.

I got out and he tied me again and I got out, he said. I carried a piece of rope with me everywhere I went. The older I got the tighter they would make it.

As he got older the knots grew bigger, stronger and tighter, and he got better at escaping them.

Eventually, he moved up to handcuffs and straitjackets.

At age 16, Manzini got his first big break. While visiting Times Square in New York with a friend he walked into Huberts Freaks and Fleas and pitched his talent to then-manager Charlie Lucas.

Thats where Houdini started performing when he was 18 years old, he said.

So he tied me up and I got out. He got a cop to come down and put handcuffs on he and I got out, Manzini said. So, he hired me right there.

Manzini now tours the world performing at hundreds of fairs, festivals and performing arts centers each year.

Its not every day you see somebody in handcuffs or a straitjacket, he said. I love entertaining people, it brings a smile to their face and they can forget their problems.

He said its also a chance for kids to learn about the art of escape and to get involved.
Of all Chinese inventions, the history of silk ( si) is perhaps the oldest. Traces of silk fabric have been found among remains from around 1300 B.C. The use of silk in China possibly goes back even much earlier. Its said that until the second century B.C., silk remained an article known only to the Chinese.

A Chinese encyclopedia written in the 16th century describes ancient Chinese technology. This great work of literature was written by cosmologist Song Yingxing (), who presented readers with many wonderful and superb ancient Chinese inventions! In volume 7, we learn through pictures and text about silk, that invention of ancient times that so typifies the Chinese way of life.

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How did the East and West establish trade?

During the second century, there was an event of great importance to the East and the West alike. Fierce tribes of nomads called the Huns ( Xiongnu) were constantly attacking China (these tribes were later driven west by China and may have been the Huns who invaded Europe).

To deal with the conflicts, the Chinese emperor in the year 138 B.C. sent forth a diplomatic mission, headed by Zhang Qian (). The mission sought to cross the arid wastes of Central Asia ( Xiya) to find and make an alliance with a certain friendly tribe there, who could be an ally to help defeat the Huns.

But soon after leaving China, Zhang Qian and his men were captured by those very Huns and held as prisoners. Not until 12 years later did Zhang manage to return to the Chinese capital.

Though Zhangs diplomatic mission was a failure, his experiences gave the Chinese their first accurate knowledge of the expanses of Central Asia, and with that experience, years later, the Chinese launched a series of military campaigns to break the power of the Huns, and brought Central Asia under Chinese rule. Across the deserts of Central Asia, Chinese victories helped establish a series of garrisons.

Well before the birth of Jesus, these garrisons became the beginning of a trade route that linked China to the West  thus, the Silk Road was born. It crossed Turkmenistan ( Tukuman), passed through Persia, and reached the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

From there, ships could continue the journey to Rome. Thus were Rome and China, then the two most powerful empires in the world, linked together by trade.

The Silk Road

The most important product that was sent to Rome from China over this route was silk. Because of its high value and lightweight, silk was the ideal product for caravans making the extremely long journey. Much silk was transported over this route. Hence, it became known as the Silk Road ( Si lu).

In return for the silk, the Roman Empire sent China precious stones, wool, asbestos, and glass. Yet none of these products could compare in value to the precious silk. Woven into a semi-transparent gauze, silk became the fashion among the Roman ladies. (Derk Bodde from University of Pennsylvania: Chinas Gifts to the West, 1942)

After the collapse of Rome in A.D. 476, the silk trade continued with Byzantium (Constantinople), the leading center of European civilization in the Middle Ages. During this time, Europeans still had no clear idea of how silk was produced.

In the middle of the sixth century, the Byzantine emperor sent some monks eastward to learn the secrets of silk and silk making. They carried back with them precious silkworm eggs. From these eggs descended the countless millions of silkworms that have since spread throughout Europe. Today, most European silk is made in Italy and France.

This is how silk spread from the East to the West. Today, people use a lot of artificial, man-made, or cheap plastic imitations instead of natural things. Is humankind going forward? Or backward? Perhaps Lao Zis () teachings give us the answer:

 Man follows the Earth

 The Earth follows Heaven

 Heaven follows the Tao

 The Tao follows what is natural

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When Richard Horne first made his way onto the screen in Twin Peaks: The Return, he seemed like one cool cat who could easily pick up a beautiful lady or two at the Bang Bang Bar. The cigarette! The indifferent stare! Those beautifully sculptured cheekbones! Swoon. But in typical Lynchian fashion, Richard went from alluring to troubling in the blink of the eye  he chokes a young woman vying for his attention at the bar, and in subsequent episodes, reveals even more violent, Frank Boothian urges that include running over a boy with his car while drugged out, seemingly killing the woman who witnessed him do it, and then attacking and robbing his grandmother in perhaps the most disturbing Peaks scene in recent memory. (Hello Johnny, how are you todayhello Johnny, how are you today)

Despite this nightmarish on-screen portrayal, Vulture decided to call up Australian actor Eamon Farren  who, thank goodness for this writer, is a very amiable and polite young man  to discuss embodying evil, Richards motivations, and what its like to shoot such violent scenes.

Hey, Eamon. Im emotionally scarred by episode ten but excited to talk to you nonetheless.

Hi, Devon. [Laughs.] How cool. Thanks, me too.

How does it feel being so feared of by the entire Twin Peaks community?

I think its pretty cool and its a bit of an honor. I had a feeling when we were making this thing that this would hopefully be the reaction that we got, and I think Lynch and I have achieved what we wanted to so far.

Before we dissect your character a little bit, can you tell me how you became involved with the show? Did you have a previous relationship with David?

I was doing a play in Australia called The Present, which I did with Cate Blanchett on Broadway early last year. We were in Sydney for the first run. We were almost at the end of our season and it was a Wednesday between shows. I got a message on my phone from my agent telling me to call her immediately. When I called her, she sounded a little bit confused, but said she got a message from Lynchs camp to ask if I was available and interested, and if so, there was a part for me in Twin Peaks. It was a pretty cool call to get! I said yes straight away, obviously. As for a previous relationship, Id done a movie with his daughter, Jennifer Lynch, a few years ago called Chained with Vincent DOnofrio. I never asked him, but Im assuming he saw that film and kept me in his mind.

So you didnt have to audition at all? Thats nice.

Just the call. It was one of the most bizarre and wonderful happenstances in my life. Every now and then hopefully something like that happens in peoples careers and I was really, really happy to get that call.

Did David give you any indication as to who youd be playing before you came to the States?

I got nothing, in true Lynch form, which is what I love. I had a very quick phone call with him. He called me at home in Australia on a Sunday a week before I left to come. He asked if I had any questions and I said, Yeah, I have a bunch of questions, can I ask who Im playing? He said, No buddy, not really. Come over here and come into this cool forest and make a cool thing with cool people. So thats all I had. I jumped on a plane the morning after we closed The Present and I arrived in Seattle and started shooting. With the whole thing, because we only get scenes only on the day of, I threw myself into it not really knowing anything. That was a really cool way to work  I turned up. I had brief chats with Lynch about little things not really to do with the character, it was more about each other and sharing a laugh. I got a sense of Richard from the writing. Its all on the page, really. Thats the great thing about Lynch. The writing is so particular. I didnt have a lot of go on except in the moment on the day, and that was a really great experience, to throw yourself in and find yourself in the moment. We usually only did one or two takes for each scene. If theres anyone youre going to trust in the world, its going to be David Lynch.

When you finally found out how violent and inherently evil your character was, did it give you pause as to whether you wanted to be the face of pure Lynchian horror? Especially since Richard has mostly been violent towards women so far?

I recognize the violence towards women especially and his actions  it didnt give me pause, but I was aware of the actions and what was being put into the world. But I was all-in with this project and this character simply because I think to be part of this Twin Peaks family and legacy is such a privilege. But also theres something that Lynch does that creates character, tension, and circumstance thats valid and necessary for the story. Obviously the scenes and the actions that Richard does that weve seen already in the show are brutal and horrible, but I feel like to show that in its full, for want of a better word, glory  ironically, glory  is really important because that sets off what needs to be set off in the story. So, no pause from me. I just wanted to do the best job I could to represent that kind of person and that kind of action truthfully, so we can hate his actions and even, if you want, hate him as much as you should.

What would you say is the prime motivator for Richards disturbing behavior? It seemed after the scene you shared with Balthazar Gettys drug dealer in a previous episode, Richard was sent off by being called a kid in particular.

Theres a lot that motivates his character. Lynch and I talked a bit about that, and Lynch also trusted me with making my own decisions about where it came from. He didnt share specifically where he thought it came from, and that was a fun bit as well  because it adds to that horror to viewers. We shouldnt know where exactly this stuff comes from. Were just presented with this full person in trauma or rage or hurt or all of the above, or maybe just pure, bad evil. I know exactly where I think it comes from, but I think its important to keep it to myself, specifically because Lynch would want it that way, but also because it gives the chance for every single person who encounters Richard to wonder and have their own version of what theyre seeing. Its truly more scary to not really know where it comes from specifically. Thats what adds to the horror to Richard.

Do you see him as a competent villain, or rather one thats plagued by impulses and rash decisions? How do you read him?

He has to be someone that is impulsive and rash and full of rage and full of trauma, whether that be his own trauma or other peoples trauma, whatever it is. Therefore, the impulses and the rash decisions make him very unpredictable. Thats where his terrifying elements come from  hes so unpredictable and no one could be safe in the presence of this guy. I dont even know if he has knowledge of where he could go next or what he could do next. Thats truly horrific. If we ever encounter people who give us fear in our life, the unpredictability is what strikes the fear. Understanding and knowledge of some other person gives you some comfort or at least some other understanding of where theyre coming from. Thats whats great about what Lynch did for me. He didnt give me the time as an actor to try and figure out a very specific and acknowledged backstory or reasons why. The why isnt really the important question, its what and how and where hes going to go to next. Thats what makes him a Lynchian villain.

For scenes where violence is depicted onscreen  like Richard choking his grandmother and another girl at a bar  as opposed to offscreen where we can use our imagination, what direction does David give you when youre filming? Are your mannerisms very carefully laid out ahead of time, or are you given range to experiment with something in the moment to get more fearful reactions?

Lynch lays it out in the script. Almost everything that we see is in the script, as far as the physical actions. There were a few things that I threw up to David that he either really ran with or didnt. As I said, we usually do only one or two takes, so I felt the trust from him to know that we could explore what was within the page. I also really respected that if it didnt work, we would make adjustments. Physically, what Lynch did with Richard was to show you just enough violence to really hit home that this was a physical threat, but then pepper it with off-screen stuff to really keep the imagination alive as well. With those two in tandem, its more terrifying than your average villain that you meet in the world. We can see his physical threat sometimes, and then were left to our imagination with others. Thats how Lynch creates true terror  we have enough to go by that we recognize, but we also then have the space to imbue him with the horrors that we can find within ourselves or our imaginations.

How do get into the mindset for when you film particularly unpleasant scenes?

My own preparation for the day is to search for the truthfulness in that moment, and the physical violence has to ring true. I have to lean into that and go there. But the most important thing is that I got to work with some incredible actresses opposite me. Trust is a big thing on set when you have those moments. Everyone that was working on those scenes, either with a violent moment or any other moment, everyone wanted to be there and wanted to tell the story. I was very lucky to have worked with women who really trusted me and I trusted them. They gave as much as they could in that performance and gave me the permission. And then Lynch gave us the permission to lean into those moments. Its essential to be ready yourself, but you cant do it unless youre working with very confident and trusting actors.

For the grandmother scene in particular in episode ten, obviously that was a pretty intense and physical moment. Lynch was warning us to portray that in a way that was truthful and scary, and I was amazed at the crew and the actors in the scene to give each other permission to do it. To be safe always, but to go there. Thats what makes the magic in those scenes.

After you film those scenes, do you feel emotionally drained?

I hope I never brush those moments off, because theyre moments  if you lean into them and if you find the truth in them, it would be horrible to be able to brush them off. As an actor, I never like to carry anything with me. Its my job to lean in and tell the truth and find those moments. The great thing about the set, too, is that the mood was always jovial but committed. It was very easy to enjoy the making of it as opposed to getting lost in any unnecessary character hangovers. I like work as an actor where the work is very important, but its also very important to realize, as Lynch said to me, that were working on a cool thing. You should never forget that. The work can only be elevated when everyone enjoys what they do and enjoys each other. And David made sure to set that all up.

After that grandmother scene in particular, I was so emotionally drained that I immediately texted my grandma and was like, Hey Mimi, just checking in to say hi

Yeah, I think theres something definitely wrong with you if you watch that scene and you dont want to call your grandma. [Laughs.] Its terrifying and horrific. I would be quite worried about you, Devon, if you felt any different. My grandparents have already passed away, so I felt a little but able to not have that moment afterwards. But if my grandma was still alive, Id pay the international toll to make sure she was okay.

What do you make of the theory that Richard is the child of Audrey and Evil Cooper?

I would never make any assumptions, Devon. Ever. [Laughs.]

What have you found most enjoyable throughout your newbie Twin Peaks experience?

When I walked on that set, what was really amazing for an actor, especially a young actor, to walk into was the family that Lynch carries through and had carried through his whole career. That crew that was working on that show was all extremely talented and had mostly worked with Lynch for 30 or more years. There was a real understanding between every single member of that crew about how he works, and they all want to be there because they love working with Lynch. It was lovely to walk on set and meet all of those people and immediately feel like youre part of that legacy, which is a generous thing to encounter as an actor on an established crew. But to meet Lynch, who I had been a massive fan of his work for my entire life, was incredible. People like to say dont meet your heroes, but for me, this is one time when I was more than happy to meet my hero. He was generous and funny and smart and taught me a lot. He gave me an opportunity that expanded myself not as an actor, but as a person in the world. Everything we shot I was always amazed at how innovative and simple at the same time some things can be. The camera techniques that give you that visceral feel of what its like to watch a Lynch project. The effects and the way that they shoot stuff feels like a throwback to old filmmaking. Thats what hes done with this show  it feels nostalgic and feels ahead of us.

People cant tell this from our conversation, but youre Australian and have a lovely accent. Did you model your accent for Richard after anyone or anything in particular?

I didnt model Richards voice off anyone in particular. As an actor, I like to be specific with accent work, and this may sound like a cop-out answer, but when I read his words on the script it came naturally. Richard has a lilting quality to the way he speaks. He wasnt so much of an American accent, but it was the tone of his voice that I wanted to work out. Coupled with the way he speaks and coupled with what he does, I think that conversation of duality is fun to play with.

Whats the hardest word to say in an American accent?

I cant speak for every Australian actor, but I think the hardest thing to remember about the American accent is the r sound. You have to lean into the rs, but then sometimes you get caught up in leaning too much into rs and you sound like a Jamaican guy hybrid. [Laughs.] Its the rs that you need to watch out for.
Plenty of characters faced difficult decisions in Sundays Game of Thrones season premiere, but its safe to say that no one had it shittier than Samwell Tarly. Sent south from the Wall by Jon Snow to dig up intel on the White Walkers in the vast libraries of the Citadel, Sam discovers that maester training mostly consists of lugging around books, ladling out soup, and emptying poop from chamber pots. But is Sam the Slayer, the guy who killed a White Walker, gonna let some crusty academics and even crustier medieval toilets stand in his way? Vulture spoke with actor John Bradley to find out.

Before we tackle the big issues, Ive got to ask: What was in those bedpans?

Well, if you want to re-create human feces onscreen, the best thing to do is to use soaking-wet fruitcake and mold it into the shape of turds. The thing about wet fruitcake is, when you see it for the first time at 6:30 in the morning, its fresh. But when you get to 5 in the afternoon and youve been shooting all day, and the wet fruitcake has been in the water and under the hot lights all day, it starts to become only slightly less unpleasant than the real thing.

I recently found out, because our producer Bryan Cogman reminded me on Twitter, that while I was shooting that sequence on my own over five days, the rest of the cast were at the Emmys! They were on the red carpet in L.A. while I was on my own in Belfast, dry-heaving and pretending to scrape shit out of the bedpan. The balance is a little bit off here.

Youre like Sam, sacrificing for the greater good.

Yeah, though I was even less happy about it than Sam seemed to be. I totally forgot they were even there! I think they tried to make me forget, and not notice this kind of injustice writ large. [Laughs.]

But no, I needed to be able to shoot that sequence. It was so fragmented in those little five-second shots, so I didnt get a sense of the overall shape until I saw it all edited together, but I knew it was going to be something special. Its something that was never quite done on Game of Thrones. Wed never done an edited montage like that. Its a comic set piece with such a different kind of flavor that it took people by surprise. I love the fact that we are able to take risks, because we do abandon the formula and introduce new elements and styles to it.

I think thats why people keep coming back. Even after six seasons and 60 hours of TV, you never know quite what to expect. That could be a character dying or a pivotal plot development, or just a funny little montage they werent expecting. Theres so much scope to surprise people, and its something that Game of Thrones mines very thoroughly, and always has.

I get the sense that between shooting and press, your schedule is only marginally less busy than Sams.

Yeah, but its actually great we get to spend time talking about this, because were all so proud of the episode.

Why do you say that?

I think its the strongest premiere weve ever done, in that it was a very functional episode that did all those plot-based, functional things that a first episode should do  it reestablished where everybody was, everybodys psychology, gave everybody a great geographical point on the map as to where they are in the story, and where theyve been and where theyre heading  but it didnt feel like exposition for the sake of exposition. Youre being fed information, but in a way thats seamless and organic. It did its job in a very effortless, stylish, and entertaining way.

When I think about [the bedpan] sequence, it comes from what Im saying about how its functional. The first time we see Sam, hes being put through abject misery compared to how elated he was when he first arrived at the Citadel at the end of season six. Hes so disenchanted with it all, realizing that after all the time hes invested in the Wall all these years, hes now away from everybody, and hes not going to be able to do his bit and help Jon Snow in the Great War. He thought he was going to go there and be around people who, like him, love knowledge and how it can be applied for the common good. But you just find people looking for an easy life, who arent as concerned about changing the course or standing tall and helping people who fighting for the cause. For them, its knowledge for knowledges sake. So Sam is restless and angry and feels hes letting Jon down. The scene makes you believe all that. Its a very functional scene at establishing his psychology and his motives going into this season, but it does it in a very entertaining and, hopefully, very funny way.

I do want to point out that Sam doesnt let any of this stop him. When hes denied access to the books about the White Walkers, he steals them. It reminded me of how he took his fathers sword, or how he helped Gilly escape Crasters Keep, or how he killed the White Walker. When his back is to the wall, hell do what it takes.

Hes one of those people whose heart is strong, and sometimes his head will get in the way. In those moments where he wants to act but he has time to think, its, Remember, your father told you from day one youre a coward. Who do you think you are, trying to do these great things? You wont be able to do them because youre worthless and youll never have any impact on anything. When hes allowed to think, he cant act. But when he acts on impulse, like when he kills the White Walker or when he takes Gilly with him, he does it because he has an enormous heart and he doesnt have time to remember all the psychological baggage. He forgets, momentarily, how brave he is.

Sam breaks the rules for the right reasons. He has contempt for rules and regulations when they get in the way of good being done. We saw that in the Nights Watch, when he comes back from killing the White Walker and they dont believe him, and then they try to sexually assault Gilly and beat him half to death for sticking up for her. He feels that in the Citadel as well. The books in the restricted area could help Jon Snow in the fight against the army of the dead, so its a race against time. Why cant I have access to them? Is it just because someone wrote down one day that I cant have access to them? Thats when you see that hes willing to bend the rules to do whats right, not necessarily in terms of legality, but in terms whats right morally. Ive really come to admire that.

Im glad were talking about this particular issue, because I just ranked the shows major characters from most good to most evil. Sam was at the top, so now I feel vindicated!

Well, there is darkness in Sam, as there is in every character. Sam has had a life of abuse and neglect, and hes carried these emotional scars within him the whole time. Its so beautiful that after the childhood he had and the way the world kicked him around, he still has it in his heart to do good things for other people. Many people who had his childhood and the abuse he suffered would feel that they dont owe anything to the world. The fact that he comes out to help, that he wants to fight this battle alongside Jon Snow in his own unique way with books and academia as a part of the army that nobody else can fulfill, its so much to his credit that hes not completely selfish. The fact that he wants to do so much good really puts him head and shoulders above everybody else.

Im on the record as agreeing.

Thank you, man!
Beulah Koale, Meaghan Rath, and Ian Anthony Dale. Photo: CBS

After the high-profile exits of former stars Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park amid salary disputes, Hawaii Five-O has found three new lead actors. CBS announced today that Ian Anthony Dale, Meaghan Rath, and Beulah Koale are taking lead roles in the procedural as it heads into its eighth season. Dale has played Parks character Konos husband Adam Noshimuri on Five-O since season two, and his character will now join the rest of the crew, as Kono disappeared into a sex-trafficking operation at the end of the last season. Rath will play Tani Rey, a police-academy dropout whos recruited into the squad. Koale will play Junior Reigns, a former Navy SEAL who takes up a job with the Five-O. Park and Kim reportedly left the series after CBS offered them salary increases but not equal pay with their white co-stars. By bringing on Dale, Rath, and Koale, CBS has addressed some of the criticism of Five-Os lack of diversity after Park and Graces departure, though details of the new cast members pay have not been revealed.
You don't want to miss this! @KeeganMKey brings back "Luther" to help us understand how Obama is feeling after six months of President Trump pic.twitter.com/Br5sWz6yAu  The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) July 19, 2017

Though President Obama has been mostly missing from public life since leaving office earlier this year, the cool-headed politicians unspoken rage can still be channelled at all times by Keegan-Michael Key. Resurrecting one of his most famous Key & Peele characters Luther, Obamas anger translator, the actor interpreted what the former commander-in-chief was really thinking when he spoke out against the recent Republican-backed health-care plan on Facebook. Needless to say, Luther was less interested in calling for an end to partisan politics, and much more into screaming about hypocritical double standards.
Putin. Photo: NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images

In the latest example that Hollywood and the U.S. government are even more similar than assumed, major studios are reportedly concerned with Russian interference. According to The Hollywood Reporter, two upcoming films opted not to feature Russian President Vladimir Putin as a character despite his relevance to their stories over concerns that Russia could hack their respective studios in retaliation. Foxs Red Sparrow, which stars Jennifer Lawrence as a Russian spy turned double agent for the CIA, removed Putin from the film despite his key role in the book that the film was adapted from. As an even further precaution, the studio is said to be using encrypted scripts throughout production. EuropaCorps Kursk, an upcoming film about a Russian submarine that sank in the Barents Sea in 2000, will also no longer feature Putin, though he also shows up in the book that film is based on.

Sources tell THR that omitting Putin from these films were creative choices also meant to deter Russian protesters from hacking the studios, as the U.S. government speculated was the case when North Korea was allegedly involved in the 2014 Sony hack in response to that countrys portrayal of Kim Jong-un in The Interview. For a studio to release a movie about Putin that makes him look like a fool would be suicide, a studio security firm tells THR. Thats a certain way to be targeted [for retaliation]. But while Putin might be excluded from films, Hollywood isnt walking away from Russia; THR reports that at least one writer conducted secret meetings in Moscow with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev about the potential for a film about his life. One Hollywood manager says to expect the movies to mirror the headlines for the foreseeable future: Everything will be Russia for the next four years. Just dont include the man in charge.
While organizing his personal archives, former Walt Disney imagineer Tom K. Morris stumbled upon a note scrawled on Mickey Mouse letterhead. The list, which reads like a bars 80s-night playlist, catalogues the songs he used while attempting to bring synchronized audio onboard Space Mountain, Disneylands intergalactic indoor roller coaster, in 1985.

Disney theme-park attractions already had sound and music at the time, but the audio never fully matched with the actual ride movement  a process thats commonplace today. Because of this, Morris posted the note to Twitter rather innocuously, not expecting much reaction from his 1985 experiment. But Disney fanatics have begun freaking out about the Space Mountain mixtape, turning the track listing into a Spotify playlist, syncing the songs to YouTube ride-through videos of the attraction, and even plugging in on the ride to experience the pitch-black coaster in its full glory.

Following that reaction, Morris, who was shocked he still had some original tapes, uploaded the audio from his test runs online  meaning that, yes, your favorite childhood ride has a lost 80s pop-rock soundtrack you can now enjoy on your next trip to Disneyland.

The song list  dubbed Space Morris by fans  includes a bevy of up-tempo 80s jams (Turning Japanese by the Vapors, We Got the Beat by the Go-Gos, Devos Whip It) that the former imagineer tried matching to Space Mountains unique ride profile, which starts with three consecutive suspense-building lifts before whooshing through the starry sky.

The task of syncing audio to the ride, which could vary up to five seconds due to temperature, time of day, and even newness of wheels, was somewhat Herculean. Working on and off for the better part of a year to match each song with the coasters milestone points, Morris, who lived in Orange County at the time, would stop by Disneyland Park before or after work to note average ride times and test out songs before making adjustments on his 4-track cassette-tape mixer back home. I knew some of the [staff], and they would just let me in because they thought it was cool, he says. It was so low-tech and I was not an audio engineer so I had to learn this myself, but I was pretty good at timing.

The haunting vocals of B-52s Party Out of Bounds/Private Idaho worked better than others on the playlist while speeding through Space Mountains abyss, but the brassy Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl), by flash-in-the-pan British New Wave band Haircut 100, proved perfect due to its lickety-split tempo. (The original cassette audio was layered onto a ride-through video and is, guaranteed, the trippiest thing youll see all day.)

The only other song to work seamlessly was a dramatic section of the John Williamspenned soundtrack to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, which along with the Haircut 100 version was demonstrated for multiple Disney executives. Rock and roll  believe it or not  in 1985 at Disney was controversial, said Morris, explaining the choice. E.T. was family- friendly, people could relate because it was like flying through space.

The coaster plunges its guests into darkness on a wind-whipped ride that feels much faster than the 30 mph its actually moving. As such, it demands audio that heightens the riders senses and exaggerates the coasters speed. The ambient soundtrack on Space Mountain plays to its interplanetary nature, but Morriss version  particularly with regards to Haircut 100  improves upon it. Groovy guitar riffs make passing through tunnels of pulsating lights more thrilling, as does winding down in a final burst of light amid staccato horns. There is also more ride to enjoy this way. Instead of Space Mountains first minute acting as a setup for the journey, with Morriss accompaniment, its already begun by the time you enter its star-specked dome.

Space Morris came close to becoming a reality, but the higher-ups ultimately didnt proceed with the now-accessible funked-out experience. The ride was popular on its own, and the tech simply wasnt there at the time to support onboard audio, properly rigged vehicles, nor to even demo it properly, as Morris had to use an audio splitter, headphones, and a cassette Walkman with the volume cranked all the way up to battle the noise of the ride.

The 80s dream would have died there, but his vision of a ride accompanied by guitar licks and high-energy rock would be realized soon thereafter. Though Morris went on to work closely with Disneyland Paris, he successfully re-pitched his idea when a new Disney park was being opened Stateside. That ride? Its none other than the Aerosmith-themed Rock n Roller Coaster, which remains wildly popular at Disneys Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World to this day.
Photo: STX Entertainment

If you go in expecting an uneven (to be generous) script, you wont be disappointed by one of the sci-fi events of the year: Luc Bessons daft, virtuosic epic Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, based on a much-loved series of French comic books. Its what happens when an artist with an unfettered visual imagination gets hold of the latest computer technology and goes all-out, budget be damned. He choreographs teeming, high-speed ballets of actors and bizarro creatures and sci-fi gizmos, any minute of which features more cinematic magic than the last four Star Wars movies combined.

The plot? Fuzzy, but the opening is ingenious. It charts the evolution over centuries of a space city, to which evermore immense/squiggly/aesthetically upending (to earthlings) alien emissaries arrive and shake hands (or the mystifying cultural equivalent) with their human hosts. That city of a thousand planets is called Kyrian, and its where knowledge and culture are shared among as many species. Its also where our male and female heroes, federal agents, are summoned to investigate some sort of anomaly  I forget what it is exactly, apart from a McGuffin.

The heroes dont have much chemistry but sure are purty. Dane DeHaan plays Valerian, who supposedly has nine years of space swashbuckling under his swash (or buckle) but looks about 19. The bags beneath his blue eyes give him a worldly air and hes a cutie, but his voice is in the Keanu Reeves dead zone, and Valerians alleged horn-dog tendencies dont come through. His partner is Laureline, played Cara Delevingne. The jurys out on whether Delevingne can act, and lines like, My heart will belong to a man who will erase his playlist dont make her job easier. But she has the right attitude (tart, amused), and Bessons camera loves her. Besson loves bodies in general, in iridescent colors and varieties of shapes  thin and spindly, fat and jiggly, all of them in constant, harmonious motion. His gaze is a mixture of fetishistic and childlike. Those fetishes seem almost pre-sexual.

Hes in his element in the second sequence, on a beach on a planet called Mul, where a stringy, elongated female with luminous skin gazes in joy at a doglike creature that shakes off gems like water droplets. This idyllic existence (the design suggests a pipe dream of ancient Egypt) is disturbed by giant spaceships that darken the sky  what looks like an invasion but turns out to be a rain of downed vessels from a war raging above.

It might as well be an invasion, though: It destroys the planet. But the young female weve been following sends her life force or over-spirit or something across the galaxy and into the body of Valerian.

Dang, the plot is hard to follow. Besson runs an insanely successful movie factory out of his studio in the Paris suburbs, but theres not enough quality control over scripts  particularly his own. The comic-book series that fired his imagination has clean, straightforward narratives, even when the protagonists are hurtling back and forth in time. But in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, you never know quite what the characters are doing and why.

The remedy? Let it go, let it go. Ogle sequences that are instant classics. Early on, Valerian materializes in a virtual tourist bazaar with virtual shops that stretch into the horizon, leaping in and out of dimensions as he strives to catch  someone  and attempts to elude  someone else. A huge dog-beast launches itself onto the agents flying bus and smashes its way and nearly swallows everyone  until the vehicle jumps into hyperspace and the creature plummets toward the ground with a look that would make Wile E. Coyote whimper in sympathy. The movie wasnt shot in 3-D, but the retrofitting is gorgeous, with a dizzying number of planes on which a dizzying number of events unfold: Spring for the glasses and gasp as Valerian runs straight through a wall, tumbles into space, and jets past innumerable hives of activity on innumerable levels.

In a sequence thats essentially a long digression from the main plot, Rihanna (as a shape-shifter) does a cabaret act while metamorphosing into different characters with different costumes and hairstyles  pig-tailed schoolgirl, twitch-and-slink Liza Minnelli vamp, and more. The magic disappears when she has to speak (and worse, act) but as the movie goes on, it can use a few guest stars. (A preening Ethan Hawke plays the showman who has enslaved poor Rihanna.) A child with a Japanese Teletubbie-like face is a treat, but the most entertaining aliens are called the Doghan Daguis, a trio of furry, fast-talking quasi-ducks who act as information brokers and finish one anothers sentences. Maybe its time to remake Howard the Duck. Or not.

I worry that people will minimize Bessons achievement because of his herky-jerky script, but Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is more than the sum of its effects. Marvel movies might have better dialogue (waves of screenwriters see to that), but the designs and effects feel as if theyve been generated by a committee. As a mogul, Besson doesnt worry about pleasing his corporate masters. He and his visual effects supervisor, Scott Stokdyk, can expend all their energy on topping themselves and making each other laugh. The movie is like a wave that makes you want to yell, Cowabunga!
Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight. Photo: Warner Bros. Entertainment

We are republishing this ranking now that the writer has (safely) seen Tenet in a private theater in New Jersey.

Hold up! Before you go any further, know this: Christopher Nolan is an exceptional filmmaker who has made many great movies, despite the fact that he only has 11 features to his name. As a result, any ranking of his films is bound to wind up with at least a couple of amazing titles near the bottom; thats the kind of problem most directors wish they could have. So lets take a look back over his career and figure out which of the directors films were the masterpieces, and which ones were merely near-masterpieces. Yes, this is something of a dangerous endeavor, given the fervency with which Nolans work is debated  by both his obsessive fans and his quite vocal detractors. Anyway, here they are.

11. Following

Nolans ultra-low-budget 1998 directorial debut was cobbled together while he was working full-time, using available light and cheap film stock. It does feel very much like a student effort: ambitious, awkward, bursting with ideas but often downright amateurish. Still, you can see the talent, and there are lots of fascinating elements here that would reemerge later: a nonlinear narrative, manipulative characters, a twist ending, the human psyche represented in material form. And the irony at the movies center  about a man who robs people to make them better appreciate their lives  is pure Nolan. (Also, the lead thiefs name is Cobb, the same as the head thief in Inception). Anybody interested in the directors films should check this one out. But its technical limitations, combined with Nolans own inexperience, make it one of his weaker works.

10. Insomnia

This adaptation of the 1997 Norwegian crime thriller  about a troubled cop with a past who, while investigating a murder in small-town Alaska, accidentally kills his partner and then tries to cover up his crime  showed that the director could go from making low-budget indies to successful studio projects. (He has said that in many ways this was the most important stepping-stone in his career, because it allowed him to ease into big-budget filmmaking.) Insomnia is impressive in many regards: Al Pacino is effectively haunted as the lead, and Robin Williams, at the time eagerly trying to shed his image as a cloying funnyman, is appropriately creepy and pathetic as the suspected murderer. Plus, theres loads of atmosphere. But the movie is also, at times, dreadfully dull. The somnambulant mood may be partly intentional, but its also wearying.

Nolan followed up the runaway worldwide success of The Dark Knight with a look at Batman brought low, his back broken by Bane (Tom Hardy) and thrown in a pit-prison where hes forced to watch Gotham destroyed from afar. And yes, it was a huge hit, but how could it have been anything other than a disappointment after something like The Dark Knight?

That said, this one doesnt get enough credit for how effectively it captures the heros feeling of helplessness  as the citys bridges and buildings are leveled, its people pitted against one another, the very fabric of society ripped asunder. For anyone whos been following Bruce Waynes efforts to try and make Gotham a better place, this is all quite heartbreaking to watch. Theres plenty of great stuff here, from Anne Hathaways jaded, sassy Catwoman to some eye-popping action sequences. It might be the most epic of Nolans three Batman entries. Until Dunkirk, it was his one film that could be called a war movie. But at times it seems as if the director has bitten off more than he can chew, as he wrestles with effectively trying to convey the villains evil plan. Plus, in order to truly show the breakdown of society, and the existential threat this represents, Nolan needs to condemn the people of Gotham a bit  but he pulls back, settling instead on vagaries.

8. Batman Begins

It didnt seem at all likely that Christopher Nolan would be the one to reinvent the modern superhero movie; his forte seemed to be mind-fuck thrillers, not action spectacles, and this was before young, newish directors were regularly handed billion-dollar franchises. But his take on Batman (immeasurably aided by Christian Bale, still the most talented actor ever to play the Caped Crusader) was both brilliant and deceptively simple: Batman had always been the relatable superhero  the one who didnt have magic powers, just money, vengeance, and will  so why not give us a Batman grounded in something resembling reality? Some will point to this movie as the beginning of turning everything into a dark, gritty reboot, but Nolans model borrowed the DNA of Richard Donners original Superman, with its matter-of-fact, ground-level approach to capes-and-tights derring-do. Bruce Waynes transformation into the Dark Knight is presented with uncommon psychological realism, set in motion by a somewhat-plausible series of events that explain how he became such a determined, effective fighter. The film only really falters in its last act, with a somewhat underwhelming final action set piece. Oh, and Katie Holmes seems strangely miscast as Bruce Waynes love interest/moral North Star.

There are parts of Tenet that feel like they were crafted as a direct response to those who criticized Inception for being too exposition-heavy. You can almost hear Nolan yelling, Okay, wise guy, how do you like it when I dont explain things? Nolans most oblique film to date  a sprawling, ornate action thriller in which the heroes can invert their passage through time so that they experience car chases and fights and all sorts of other things in reverse  is also one of his most ambitious, and, weirdly, one of his lightest. Were told early on in the film that we shouldnt try to understand it, but that we should feel it; thats pretty solid advice. Not unlike The Big Sleep, or The Parallax View, Tenet is a movie built out of brilliant, often beautiful setpieces whose overall placement in the broader puzzle is not always clear. (It would have been so much fun to go back to the theater over and over again in non-pandemic times to experience it again and to pick apart the timeline and the story  because you just know Nolans got some big chart somewhere that explains it all. Ugh.) Thats not to suggest, however, that the film is frivolous or meaningless. The idea that our future selves can hold sway over our present-day selves is an adorably Nolan-esque notion that plays out across pictures like Memento, Interstellar, and Inception. And how wonderful it is to see a filmmaker tackle a big modern genre movie in such challenging fashion  and on such a massive scale. Maybe some will call it a flop, but if it is, its the kind of flop that only Christopher Nolan could have made.

6. Memento

An absolutely ingenious thriller: The story, told in reverse, of a man whos been trying to avenge his wifes death; but his mind cant form memories, and he forgets who, where, and what he is within minutes, so he has to tattoo his clues on his body in order not to forget them. Its an ideal marriage of structure and subject matter, as the nature of the storytelling ensures that we in the audience never really know what has happened before any given scene, which mimics the protagonists existential haze. This put Nolan on the map with its release in 2000, and is still considered his masterpiece by many fans. Does it lose some luster once youve figured it out? Not quite, though nothing can match that electrifying first viewing.

Consider this for a second: Nolan made a movie about high-tech thieves who break into peoples dreams and steal hidden ideas from them, but this time they are asked to secretly plant an idea in a persons head, so they go into that persons dream, but in order to hide their actions they have to go several dreams down, so they have to create a dream inside the guys dream so they can go into the next dream, then do it again, but they cant go too far down the dream levels because if they do theyll be stuck in a dream forever and their brains will melt, and also each level of a dream happens at a different speed, so that five minutes in the real world is an hour in dream time, and things slow down even further the deeper you go within the dreams, but anything that happens in one dream can affect the dream in the next level. Now consider this: Inception was beloved by millions and made $825 million worldwide. Fact: Christopher Nolan knows how to tell a goddamn story.

One of the saddest, loneliest space epics ever made, Nolans expansive sci-fi film  about Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway traveling through a wormhole to another part of the universe in an effort to find a new home for humanity  was divisive when it came out, but its slowly being acknowledged as one of his best works. Its certainly his most earnest movie, and maybe the mixture of eye-popping special effects, gee-whiz scientific phenomena, environmental dystopia, and unabashed sentiment was too much for some to take, as if 2001: A Space Odyssey had been hijacked by someones therapy session. At heart, this is a story about parents and children, about the fear of letting go, about the need to reconcile your dreams with the needs of your loved ones. At the same time, its a movie about survival  how planetary survival and species survival and individual survival often conflict with one another. The way Nolan ties these concepts together in a narrative that mixes heavy-duty scientific theories with nutty sci-fi invention can be jarring. But open yourself up to it, and Interstellar becomes one of the most emotionally overwhelming things youll ever see.

3. The Prestige

Nolans sole literary adaptation  based on Christopher Priests 1995 novel  also features his most subtle, complex characters. As dueling magicians in turn of the century London, Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale are both charming and sinister in their obsessions with one another. Maybe thats why, unlike so many other films that rely on puzzle-like structures and big twists, The Prestige continues to work so well on repeat viewings; if anything, it improves and gains depth the more you watch it. Its also a dazzling magic trick in its own right, with an intricate plot that keeps doubling back on itself and throwing red herrings at us. As in so many Nolan pictures, the movies structure and its effect on the viewer echo the characters own psychological journeys. Nolan understands something about his audience: He lays out everything we need to figure out whats happening, but its all just a bit too macabre for us to put two and two together. So we wait  until that incredibly disturbing, final image. (Aaand then a ridiculous Thom Yorke song plays over the end credits, but the less said about that, the better.)

2. The Dark Knight

If nothing else, this is one of the most influential movies of our time  the entire DC Universe of superhero tentpoles has basically been built around its success. But none of its imitators have come close to matching the sweep and power of Nolans second Batman entry, which is really a gangster epic masquerading as a superhero flick. And at the center of it all is one of the great performances of the decade, with the late Heath Ledgers wild, disturbing, charismatic turn as the Joker making a perfect foil for Christian Bales stolid, wounded, tormented Batman. With a story that could easily have made for three separate movies (and maybe should have) and each insane set piece topped by the next one, this is the rare comic-book film that earns the obsessive quality of its fandom. Thats also because Nolan doesnt shy away from tackling philosophical, moral, and political issues: When Batman turns all of Gothams cell phones into a citywide sonar system, is he essentially confirming Bush-era surveillance tactics? Or is he simply debasing himself and betraying his own ideals  essentially falling into the Jokers trap? If so, what do we make of the fact that he succeeds? But wait, does he even succeed, or is it the people of Gotham who redeem him by refusing to blow each other up? Nearly a decade after its release, you can still go down any number of rabbit holes thinking about The Dark Knight. There are very few movies  in any genre  about which you can say that.

An astonishing war movie, and perhaps the culmination of Nolans various experiments in editing and structure. In retelling the British evacuation of France in 1940  the result of an early, disastrous defeat against the Nazis  the director intercuts three narrative timelines of differing lengths, which leads to some surprising twists and turns in the story. But perhaps more importantly, its a film that shows Nolan willing to let go a little bit  to trust his audience to get what hes doing without his having to resort to lots of exposition and dialogue. In the process, it does away with many of the cliches of the war genre: no strategy meetings, no scenes of people explaining what were fighting for, etc. Instead, its tight, terse, and tense from its opening frame to its last. For what its worth  and somewhat ironically  it might also be the most hopeful picture Nolan has ever made.
The following editorial appeared in the July 9 Mankato Free Press:

Agriculture is and always has been a foundation of Minnesotas economy.

Thanks to a new law that is the first of its kind in the country, theres a better chance agriculture will be a key part of the states future.

The law helps younger farmers get access to farmland. It provides tax credits to landowners who sell or rent land or farm equipment to them. Iowa and Nebraska offer similar tax credit programs for land rental, but Minnesota will be the first state to also allow the credits on land sales, according to the Star Tribune.

Anyone who has lived in a rural area is well aware of how tough it is to start out in farming but knows how key it is that young farmers keep entering the field, so to speak. In south-central Minnesota census numbers reveal the average age of farmers is mid-50s, with Le Sueur County farmers average age at 57.3. Only 4 percent of operators are less than 35 years old.

If young farmers arent filling the boots of older farmers, the economy of this region as well as the state as a whole is threatened. Without a lot of equity to get started, newcomers to farming find bank loans are tricky to obtain. Land owners understandably dont want to lose money when they rent or sell. The new law should help give landowners an incentive to rent land to beginners. Lots of land is going to change hands as more farmers retire or die. (Landowners dont qualify for tax credits if they sell or rent to family members.)

The state ag department already has other beginning farmer assistance available, such as a web tool to link farmers to farmland, a directory of data and programs available, and a Farm Business Management Scholarship Program. All of those measures are important to offer the support young farmers need, along with new methods such as this fresh law that continue to look at whats necessary to maintain a healthy farm economy.

Young farmers are the future of agriculture in this state. Making sure they dont run into insurmountable obstacles now and down the road are important to keeping agriculture strong.
Xcel Energy customers in Wisconsin should soon see a refund on their electricity bills, though they still face possible rate increase in the coming year.

Wisconsin regulators on Thursday ordered the utility to refund about $9.4 million in excess revenues collected in 2016 through a one-time bill credit to be delivered later this year.

Xcel says the over-collection resulted primarily because demand did not meet projections that failed to predict the slump in frac sand mining and declining residential electricity use. Natural gas prices were also 6 percent below forecast, according to the companys filing.

In a break with past practice, the Public Service Commission adopted a proposal by Commissioner Mike Huebsch of West Salem to calculate a different refund rate for each customer class rather than a flat rate.

The exact amount of the credit has yet to be determined, but the PSC estimates it would be about 1.446 cents per kilowatt hour for residential customers based on the customers usage in the month of the refund. That works out to roughly $11.

The PSC authorizes investor-owned utilities to collect a set amount of money for the fuel required to generate a kilowatt-hour of electricity. If the amount collected exceeds the actual fuel costs by more than 2 percent, state law requires the utility to refund that money with interest. Likewise, if actual costs exceed forecasts, utilities are allowed to pass along a surcharge to customers.

Xcel had proposed to spread the 2016 refund over 12 months to mitigate the impact of its proposed 2018 rate increase, but the three-member PSC has generally favored issuing one-time refunds as soon as possible, arguing it is more transparent.

The Citizens Utility Board, a non-profit group representing ratepayer interests, and the Wisconsin Industrial Energy Group both supported the one-time summer refund.

Xcel has asked the PSC to approve a $24.7 million increase in electric revenues in 2018, and an additional $12 million in natural gas. If approved, the company estimates that will translate into roughly $6 per month more on the average residential electric bill and $5.30 more on the average monthly gas bill.

The PSC will consider that request this fall. The schedule includes a public hearing in La Crosse, though no date has been set.

Xcel serves about 257,000 electricity and 112,000 natural gas customers in Wisconsin. According to PSC data, the average residential electricity bill is about $100 per month, third highest among the states largest investor-owned utilities, which range from about $95.50 to $117.
Three elected McLennan County officials and 33 other county employees were approved for raises Tuesday after commissioners reviewed requests for the upcoming fiscal years budget.

One of the elected officials didnt even ask for the pay hike.

County commissioners worked through 55 requested raises for individual employees, which would have added a total of more than $165,000 to the budget. Commissioners approved about $85,000 in raises.

Raises

The three elected leaders who will receive raises in the upcoming fiscal year include Precinct 5 Justice of the Peace Fernando Villarreal, Precinct 3 Constable David Maler and Precinct 4 Constable Stan Hickey.

Villarreals salary will go from $54,931 to $57,431. Both constables salaries will be bumped to $45,367, which is the amount Precinct 5 Constable Freddie Cantu makes. Malers salary for 2017 was set at $41,921, and Hickeys was at $37,425.

Hickey did not request an increase, but he was making less money than his deputy, and his pay was not in line with other constables, Precinct 4 Commissioner Ben Perry said.

County commissioners still have a few raise requests to consider, including two from department heads. Human Resources Director Amanda Talbert requested a $2,578.36 raise, which would increase her salary to $86,502. Mental Health Court Services Coordinator Tessa Slovak is requesting a $7,023.55 increase in pay, which would move her salary to $62,217.

Commissioners are set to vote next week on the proposed tax rate for fiscal year 2018. They plan to file a proposed budget with the county clerks office the same day, which will be posted on the countys website for public review.

Commissioners are scheduled to vote to adopt the budget and tax rate Aug. 22. The fiscal year starts Oct. 1.

Law enforcement

Commissioners agreed to requests for 10 new personnel positions from the sheriff. Three of the positions are for jailers, and three are for booking tech assistants for the county jail.

On the sheriffs office side, commissioners approved two new corporal investigators, a deputy lieutenant, and a shift from part-time to full-time for an evidence technician position.

Last year, the county added new positions to the county jail in an effort to comply with Texas Commission on Jail Standards recommendations. McLennan County Sheriffs Office Capt. Ricky Armstrong said the requests for fiscal year 2018 are a continuation of the effort to meet the jail recommendations.

The sheriffs office is implementing the recommendations in phases to ease the burden on the county budget, Armstrong said.

If we dont address this now were going to face compliance issues or were going to see them next year at budget, Perry said.

Countywide, requests for new positions total more than $890,000. Commissioners have approved $662,000 in new positions so far.

Rural animals

Commissioners also agreed Tuesday to continue funding the Animal Birth Control Clinic, with $19,000 for the upcoming fiscal year.

Executive director Carrie Kuehl said with the money last year, the clinic was able to focus efforts on semi-rural and rural parts of the county. With the countys portion, the organization was able to spay or neuter 385 animals, Kuehl said.

Thats a lot of bang for your buck, she said.

Gina Ford, with the clinic, said the funding went straight to medical expenses. They used other funds to increase marketing to help promote the program.

We went through the funds in 22 weeks, she said. We think that always shows a lot of merit to the demand thats out there as well as the need.

Perry said having spayed and neutered 385 animals means there are at least another 1,000 animals the shelter isnt trying to find homes for.

Nothing is final in the budget until the official document is approved.

Budget discussions continue at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Commissioners Courtroom on the first floor of the McLennan County Courthouse.
A small flame flies into the air from the ground and then all of a sudden a huge burst of light fills the sky above. It is a mixture of reds and blues, and then a second one pops into view and it is a beautiful gold color and almost looks like a willow tree with its long, flowing branches coming out from the center.

I dont know what it is about fireworks, but they have this amazing ability to stop people in their tracks, get people to look up from their phones and watch the beauty above.

On the Fourth of July, fireworks are a perfect exclamation point to a fun weekend full of backyard barbecues and outdoor fun.

Even so, when I watch fireworks, it means a lot more than just something cool to look at. A sense of pride beams from my face as I watch fireworks because they represent everything it means to be an American.

The idea of watching fireworks on the Fourth of July began even before the signing of the Declaration of Independence when John Adams wrote a letter to Abigail Adams on July 3, 1776 that said the Fourth of July should be celebrated with pomp and parade, with shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.

Adams recognized that the signing of the Declaration of Independence should be an event that was celebrated by Americans for many years to come.

The following year on the Fourth of July, fireworks were put on display in Philadelphia to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

I think fireworks represent the American ideal. The idea that all human beings should have a right to have their own thoughts and ideas, to have freedom.

In its most simple form, the idea of freedom is a powerful one. It is just like a firework. When you release freedom and light it, it eventually bursts and expands for everyone to experience, but if you leave it laying in the box unlit, it just sits there in the dark, waiting for someone to light it.

The idea of freedom is a very special idea, one that not everyone in this world gets to experience. People are persecuted every day for their ideas across the globe, some are even here in America.

Freedom is a beautiful thing, but sometimes it gets convoluted to mean something that we as a country too often stands for. Sometimes people think freedom means you can say whatever you want, whenever you want.

While it is true that we can say whatever we want, whenever we want, words still hurt. Words can cut flesh and can shape lives.

Stopping word violence is something that we as Americans need to stand and fight against. The first settlers in America were fleeing religious persecution and every one of us is here today because our ancestors felt compelled to leave our home county for a similar reason. It was for these reasons and many more that America was shaped the way it is today.

I think this is why our forefathers wanted to make a big deal out of Independence Day. So that more than 200 years later, we would still remember that our neighbors, no matter what their religious or political views are, can still be our neighbors and friends. We can still be cordial and have a good time with them. We can all still watch fireworks under the same stars.
WAVERLY  Waverlys water tower should lose a familiar face, if all goes as planned over the next couple months.

City council members approved last week the repainting of the water tower located near 148th Street and Amberly Road. The decision means the Viking adorning the structure will soon bid farewell to the city.

Replacing the Viking will be the citys new logo, a leafy tree accompanied by the slogan, A Great Place to Grow.

WW Sandblasting received the go-ahead for the paint job and expects to complete the task by the end of August, according to the change order. The company sandblasted and repainted the towers interior earlier this year.

The council approved the project at a cost of $77,160, bringing the total cost for all of the tower work to $235,540.

The tree will be on both sides of the tower, painted green on a white background.

Council member Joe Dalton said he was pleased with how the tower looked after recent work.

Ill tell you what, since they power washed the outside, it looks a lot better, Dalton said.

The whole tower will likely be painted entirely white, though the legs and underside may be a darker color.

In other business, the council tabled a decision on entering into an interlocal agreement with the Nebras-ka Community Energy Alliance (NCEA).

The NCEAs aim is to help communities secure technology that reduce pollution, save energy and reduce costs. The organization formed in 2014.

Executive Director Anne McCollister spoke at the meeting.

The reason a municipality should join the NCEA is its the only statewide organization that is putting statewide infrastructure to promote and enable electrified transportation in Nebraska, she said.

The NCEA writes grants to help cities lease-to-buy electric vehicles through federal grants, as well as work to cheaply install electric car charging stations.

The group has helped communities like Ashland install charging stations, she said.

If youre interested in participating in really what is the modernization of transportation in the Mid-west, she said. Its where were all going.

The organization requires a one-time $1,000 fee for membership. That fee is reimbursable once the organization reaches its goal or if it were to fold.

McCollister said the communities can get more done together through the organization than by themselves. As of the meeting, Bellevue, Central City, Gothenburg, Holdrege, Lexington, Nebraska City, Seward, South Sioux City and Wayne had all signed agreements.

McCollister said Waverlys location along Highway 6 and I-80 could make it an ideal spot for a charging station.

Putting a station in the city could meet skepticism from the public, McCollister said, but she expects the stations to pay off.

Youll probably get a lot of people who will put an elbow in the rubs, she said. Youll have to endure some laughing, but its coming.

Mayor Mike Werner said he supports moving toward more renewable forms of energy. The city could play a role in promoting cleaner vehicles.

We should participate in this, he said. We should have an electric car.

He said if the city were to purchase an electric vehicle, office staff would bring it to public events to promote alternative energy.

City Attorney Mark Fahleson expressed concern with language in the agreement that was unclear as to whether the NCEA could require members to cough up more funds as they deem necessary.

Im worried about the board saying we need 20 grand for the project from Waverly, Fahleson said.

McCollister said she wouldnt expect a board composed of city administrators and other officials to ask for money on a whim.

Fahleson was also concerned that the agreement wasnt clear on how communities can withdraw from the agreement.

The council tabled a decision until the July 25 meeting.
By Scott Plummer

When one hears the name Breitling, it conjures up images of luxury and fine design. The Swiss manufacturer of precision chronographs is well known for their line of aviators watches and cockpit clocks. They have also demonstrated a great commitment to vintage aviation as well, sponsoring several aerial demonstration teams, and even the restoration of a graceful Lockheed Super Constellation. They have also supported the restoration and flight of a legendary DC-3 airliner as well, and that aircraft is the focus of this article.

Now registered in Switzerland as HB-IRJ, the aircraft is a rare survivor, being an authentic DC-3A airliner, rather than a far more common military C-47 derivative. American Airlines ordered the aircraft back in 1939, receiving her on March 12th, 1940 as NC25658 and bearing the name Flagship Cleveland. WWII soon intervened, of course, and the aircraft flew with the US Army between April 4th, 1942 and April 1st, 1944. She then returned to regular American Airlines use. Trans Texas Airways took ownership of the DC-3 in February, 1949, operating her until the late 1960s. The venerable transport then joined Provincetown-Boston Airlines in 1971, flying as a short-haul commuter until the carrier folded in the late 1980s. The aircraft bounced between a number of different charter lines in the years that followed until Francisco Agullo bought her in 2008. The aircraft received a major overhaul in Opa-Locka, Florida. The Swiss-based Super Constellation Flyers Association began operating the DC-3A in 2009 and have flown her, under the Breitling flag, ever since.

The magnificent Breitling DC-3 is currently embarked on a round-the-world flight. Starting out from Geneva, Switzerland in March, the legendary aircraft began its ambitious endeavor slowly heading east, stopping in dozens of countries along the way. The final destination for the grand tour is currently scheduled to occur during mid-September at the Breitling-Sion Air Show in Sion, Switzerland. As of writing, the aircraft is already well over 70% of its way around the globe, and currently sitting in Dallas, Texas. Regular WarbirdsNews contributor, Scott Plummer, caught up with the beautiful aircraft a couple of weeks ago when it stopped at the Lyon Air Museum in Santa Ana, California. This article is filled with his images from that stop, and the following words describe his experience.

On July 14th, the Breitling DC-3 landed at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California where it visited the Lyon Air Museum. A small group of invited local media were allowed to see this historic aircraft up close, take a flight and interview her crew. Captain Francisco Agullo, owner and chief pilot for the round-the-world flight took time out of his busy schedule to give WarbirdsNews a plane-side interview about the reasons for the tour and the aircrafts history (see video interview).

As part of the Breitling DC-3 visit, the aircraft departed John Wayne Airport for a scheduled, 30-minute promotion flight over Orange County so residents could see this historic aircraft in action.

The Breitling DC-3 will soon make its way to the largest aviation event held in the United States, EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2017 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where this aircraft will be on static display.

Breitlings commitment to aviation is well known in Orange County, due to its sponsorship of the Breitling Huntington Beach Air Show, coming this September 29  October 1, and the North American tour of the Breitling Jet Team. The Breitling Jet Team, with its fleet of seven L-39C ex-military trainers, has an enviable reputation for their performances, and is the only civilian jet aerobatics team of its kind in the world. They concluded their most visit to the USA last November, with a final performance in Orange County before returning to Europe where they are at present.

Look for the Breitling DC-3 on display at the 2017 EAA AirVenture Oshkosh this July 24-30th.

Many thanks to Scott Plummer for bringing us this article, along with his marvelous photography! To see more of Scotts video and photography work, please click HERE.
My father-in-law is losing his health insurance, Pam told me. She stopped to chat as we perused the booths at the Stockholm Art Fair.

Stockholm, population 66, has one of the best art fairs in western Wisconsin. Judging by the license plates, the fair is high on the list for Minnesotans too.

The 44th annual fair was held on the grounds of the city park overlooking Lake Pepin, the widest spot in the Mississippi River. Over 100 artists were eager to share their health care stories and sell their creations. There were few bugs. Weather was warm, but not too hot. Colors were everywhere.

The air smelled of fresh roasted nuts, gyro meat and kettle corn. Organic beef, wood-fired locally sourced pizza and maple ice cream kept hunger at bay.

Talented regional musicians kept folks entertained as neighbors sat on straw bales under a tent. Many shared treasures and pointed out favorite artists.

Under the surface, though, folks worried. My conversations were almost exclusively about health care.

Pam told me how a local health plan, La Crosse-based Health Tradition is quitting the federal marketplace Healthcare.gov next year. Others shared how loved ones recently received letters from Anthem or Health Tradition dropping coverage next year.

Recently, Wisbusiness.com reported roughly 23,000 will be affected by the pull out of Anthem and Health Tradition. Insurers blame the uncertainty in federal operations, rules and guidance including cost sharing reduction subsidies. This statement translates into: as Congress debates cutting help to people who need it, companies realize they may not have the customers to make a plan work.

In the insurance world, the larger the pool, the lower the risk. But if folks dont have help buying insurance and younger people get cheaper plans, the folks that are left  sicker and older  end up with more expensive plans and, maybe, none at all.

The Affordable Care Act is not perfect. But it was carefully balanced to share the risk  the basic element of keeping health care affordable for all.

Many artists and musicians are self-employed. The Affordable Care Act and Healthcare.gov created a way for self-employed and small business owners to buy health coverage. Many artists I spoke with are older, coming to the profession later in life. Many of us over fifty have pre-existing conditions and need regular health care.

Artists expressed concerns about the limited health coverage available in Buffalo and Pepin counties. These counties recently joined the dubious ranks of counties with only one health plan under the Healthcare.gov marketplace. Because of federal uncertainty, five counties, including La Crosse, are down to only one provider next year under the marketplace.

Farmers feared losing health coverage or changing long-standing relationships with providers.

The fear of losing health care is stressful  I heard and felt it as conversation after conversation shifted to health insurance.

As I watched the vibrantly dressed people soaking in the imaginative art, I thought about how experiencing the art fair provided a balm for our stressful lives.

Gazing at the pottery I nearly bumped into a retired physician and his wife. He also saw the attraction people found to art as a way to heal our stressed world. He shared his experiences over the years.

When I ask How are you? what do you think is the number one complaint I get? he asked.

Patients say to me Im stressed, Doctor. When I open up the hood and look inside, I see stress.

Art brings beauty. It softens the heart, the doctor shared. The art fair helps make it better.

I watched men in florescent orange with camo, a woman in sheer black lace with her back covered in tattoos and another in a brightly colored African Dashiki.

People came together creating their own art among all the wares for sale. In all of this diversity was a beautiful harmony.

Somehow, we must take this approach to health care. A plan unique for each person. Respecting our own individuality and needs. Also, in harmony with others. Sharing the risk. Working for all.
RENTS in Waterford are now spiralling out of control, with costs 16.2% higher than they were in the same period last year  and...
... but you will need to show proof of jab get into bars STUDENTS heading to college in September will not have to be vaccinated...
A former Malaysian airline pilot jailed for 13 years over the rape of a woman in her Perth home in the 1990s is appealing his sentence.

Alfred Gerard Eravelly, 50, was convicted last month over the 1996 sex attack.

Alfred Gerard Eravelly was jailed for 13 years.

He entered the victim's Scarborough home in the early hours of March 9, 1996 by cutting the fly screen of her en suite bathroom window.

He tied her up with rope, blindfolded her and sexually assaulted her, leaving behind DNA that was later analysed and which led to his arrest 20 years later.
At the invitation of the Chairman of Pakistan's Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), Mr. Tariq Mahmoud Pasha, World Customs Organization (WCO) Secretary General Kunio Mikuriya visited Islamabad, Pakistan on 18 and 19 July 2017. He was briefed on progress made on Customs reform and met with political leaders to discuss ways to strengthen the cooperation between Pakistan and the WCO .

Secretary General Mikuriya was received by the Minister of Finance, Senator Mohammad Ishaq Dar, and a wide range of topics were discussed during their meeting. Dr. Mikuriya stressed the importance of Customs in border control, ensuring connectivity at borders while combating illicit trade and terrorism. This function of securing and facilitating trade, through the appropriate deployment of Customs enforcement at borders, boosts revenue collection. He also addressed the question of increasing Pakistan's participation and visibility in the WCO, given its interest in the Organizations agenda of strengthening regional connectivity through transit, information sharing, and use of technology and e-commerce. The Minister of Finance concurred with Dr. Mikuriya on the recent rise in Customs interest and the need for improved transit and trade with neighbouring countries, and to establish an effective communication channel with the WCO.

Dr. Mikuriya also met with Pakistan's Minister of Commerce, Mr. Khurram Dastgir Khan, and discussed a range of issues including the implementation of the WTO Agreement on Trade Facilitation, countering undervaluation, and a Single Window concept. The Minister of Commerce agreed that strong cooperation between Customs and the Ministry of Commerce would be critical for enhancing economic development.

FBR's senior management team, led by the Minister of State and Special Assistant to the Prime Minister for Revenue, Mr. Haroon Akhtar Khan, welcomed Secretary General Mikuriya to deliberations on Pakistan Customs' reform initiatives, including the Web-Based One Customs system (WeBOC).

During a meeting at FBR Headquarters, the Special Assistant to the Prime Minister for Revenue touched upon integrity issues. Dr. Mikuriya acknowledged the progress made and underway by Pakistan Customs in many areas, including a Single Window, the use of API/PNR and non-intrusive inspection technology for security purposes, and a transit system. The FBR endorsed Dr. Mikuriya's suggestion that greater engagement by Pakistan in standard setting and sharing of practices would benefit the global Customs community.

In the margins of his official engagements, Secretary General Mikuriya also planted a tree in front of FBR Headquarters to commemorate his visit.
Wisconsins environmental protection agency has agreed to reconsider whether to let a Georgia investment company fill Monroe County wetlands for a frac sand processing site.

The Department of Natural Resources issued a letter Wednesday granting Clean Wisconsins petition for a contested case hearing on a permit allowing Meteor Timber to fill 16 acres of wetlands for its proposed $65 million processing and loading facility.

Clean Wisconsin asked the agency to review its decision, saying it would be the single largest destruction of Wisconsin wetlands for an industrial sand project.

The environmental advocacy group argues that destroying the pristine forested wetlands  home to several rare and endangered species  would open the door to the destruction of more rare wetlands. The agency acknowledged the permit approval may lead to increased applications to fill rare, sensitive and valuable wetland plant communities.

The DNR agreed to consider whether it had sufficient information to grant the permit, whether the project will have significant negative environmental impacts and whether it represents the least harmful alternative.

Meteor has proposed to restore and preserve more than 640 acres of other land  including more than 296 acres of existing wetlands  near the the 752-acre site between Warrens and Millston, which would serve two nearby mines on land the company acquired in 2014 when it purchased nearly 50,000 acres of Wisconsin forest.

However, the DNR determined those mitigation efforts are not likely to fully compensate for what it calls permanent and irreversible secondary impacts from activity on the site and may not compensate for the direct loss of 13.4 acres of exceptional quality white pine and red maple swamp, which is considered an imperiled habitat.

In a written statement, Meteor project manager Chris Mathis said the companys mitigation plan goes above and beyond others and represents one of the largest wetland restoration efforts in state history.

The DNR gave our application thorough and extensive review, and we are confident the approved permit fully conforms to the law because of the significant net environmental benefit our project will provide to the state, Mathis said. We respect the DNRs decision to schedule a hearing, and will continue to cooperate with the agency as we have done from the start.

Similar to a court trial, a contested case hearing is typically overseen by an administrative law judge and offers interested parties an opportunity to present evidence and cross-examine witnesses.

A hearing date has not been scheduled.

Clean Wisconsin, along with the Ho-Chunk Nation, also filed court challenges to the permit, though both cases were dropped because of procedural errors. Midwest Environmental Advocates plans to act as an intervenor in the contested case hearing on behalf of the tribe.

Evan Feinauer, staff attorney for Clean Wisconsin, said he was pleased the agency granted the hearing as well as a temporary ban on Meteor filling any wetlands.

Regulators and opponents both questioned the projects overall public benefit, given the drop in demand for sand since domestic fracking peaked in 2014.

An economic analysis by a Pennsylvania consultant said the location would allow Meteor to efficiently ship trainloads of sand directly to oil fields in Texas, which have become some of the nations most productive. The company expects to ship about 1.5 million tons of processed sand each year using the adjacent Union Pacific rail line and has said it cannot find another location on the line to accommodate such a large plant.

Meteor has also said permitting its project is the only way to prevent much of the site from being clear cut.

About three-quarters of the land is owned by the A&K Alexander Cranberry Co., which was cited in 2013 by the Environmental Protection Agency for illegally filling 5.6 acres of wetlands. The current owner said if he is unable to sell the land logging would be his only way to pay back a $321,470 loan he took out to settle the case.

Meteor has yet to secure wetland permits from the Army Corps of Engineers, which is expected to make a decision this summer.
I love my country. Ive fought for my country. My brothers and sisters have died for this country. I want to continue to serve my country.

I am a heavy-equipment operator, happily and dutifully building new infrastructure for Wisconsin communities.

My concern is, and has been, what state legislators are proposing in a full repeal of the states longstanding prevailing wage law. This is the law that protects Wisconsin workers from low-wage-paying, out-of-state contractors who will be free to pay their workers substandard wages in the interest of undercutting Wisconsin contractors and effectively stealing jobs here. And guess what? Its working.

Last legislative session our elected leaders in Madison partially repealed prevailing wage for municipal-funded projects, which went into effect this January. Since then, a state review of projects to-date found there has been a more than 53 percent increase in out-of-state contractors securing Wisconsin work. Those are Wisconsin jobs being lost, Wisconsin tax dollars leaving the state and hard-working Wisconsin families being hurt. You dont have to be a political wonk to understand how and who this hurts  Wisconsin workers.

Why as a proud veteran am I involved? Many of us veterans are drawn especially to two lines of work after our service  law enforcement and construction. Ive chosen construction because I want to continue to serve my country in a meaningful way but lacked the necessary skills to make the transition. Thanks to many of the construction trades in Wisconsin they have specifically designed apprenticeship programs for veterans to provide them the necessary training and skills to transition into the construction industry.

This is important because not only do I ultimately secure a family-supporting job  I have a wife and two little ones  but Wisconsin benefits by having a highly skilled workforce that builds high-quality projects. No need to go back and fix stuff built by low-paid, low-skilled workers trucked in from out of state.

What many Republicans in Madison are proposing makes no sense at best and is frankly an insult to workers and their employers who will obviously lose Wisconsin projects. The infantry trained me to react to contact in many different ways. The type of contact Madison is proposing with getting rid of the prevailing wage law is a negative attack on the working class. They need to rethink this strategy and leave the builders of this state alone. Maybe some self-reflection is in order; didnt these very legislators proposing to cut my pay just vote an increase in their own per-diem and pay?

I have tried to avoid politics for most of my life, but this particular issue has truly struck a chord with me and Im not alone. Many veterans simply want to settle down with their families, work hard and enjoy their communities because, you could say, it is our turn. In a lot of sad cases that transition (when unsuccessful) leads to a disturbing number of veterans taking their own lives. But the false prophets leading Wisconsin profess to care about veterans, create jobs and build a stronger economy then pass laws that do precisely the opposite.

We know what its like to fight for what we believe in. Angering thousands of Wisconsin veterans and robbing them of millions of dollars in lost wages (Midwest Economic Policy Institute study) is a problem and you can rest assured that we will not sit idly by and watch this happen. Maybe the time has come when veterans get more involved in politics and take away jobs from those sitting in power. Maybe it is time for this Airborne Ranger to put his Ranger tab back on the outside of a suit, holster a briefcase and take a fighting position as a elected official.

Just a thought.
WSU on Honor Roll as Great College to Work For

July 19, 2017

OGDEN, Utah  According to a survey commissioned by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Weber State University is one of 18, similarly sized institutions nationwide that made the 2017 Great Colleges to Work For Honor Roll.

The results, released this week in The Chronicles 10th annual report on The Academic Workplace, are based on an employee survey conducted at 232 colleges and universities nationwide.

In all, only 79 of the 232 institutions achieved Great College to Work For recognition for specific best practices and policies. The 42 universities of any size, including Weber State, that received the additional Honor Roll distinction had high employee marks in multiple categories.

Results are reported for small, medium and large institutions with Weber State included among large universities of 10,000 or more students.

This is WSUs third year of participation and first year to make the Honor Roll. Based on responses from faculty and staff, the university was recognized in nine of 12 possible categories  up from five last year. In addition to last years categories, Weber State was commended for Professional/Career-Development Programs, Respect & Appreciation, Teaching Environment, Tenure Clarity & Process,

Professional/Career-Development Programs

Employees are given the opportunity to develop skills and understand requirements to advance in their careers.

Respect and Appreciation

Employees are regularly recognized for their contributions.

Teaching Environment

Faculty members say the institution recognizes innovative and high-quality teaching.

Tenure Clarity & Process (4-year colleges only):

Faculty members say requirements for tenure are clear.

Collaborative Governance

Faculty members are appropriately involved in decisions related to academic programs.

Confidence in Senior Leadership

Leaders have the necessary knowledge, skills and experience for institutional success.

Facilities, Workspaces & Security

Facilities meet employees needs; the campus appearance is pleasing, and the institution takes steps to provide a secure environment.

Job Satisfaction

There is an overall sense that the job is meaningful to the employee and the institution.

Work/Life Balance

University policies give employees the flexibility to manage their lives on the job and at home.

Weber State is thrilled to be included on The Chronicle of Higher Educations Honor Roll, said WSU President Charles A. Wight. When it comes to being a Great College to Work For, the credit belongs to our excellent faculty and staff, who contribute to a great environment every day.

The survey is one of the largest workplace recognition programs in the country and recognizes the colleges that get top ratings from their employees on workforce practices and policies.

Ten years in, the Great Colleges to Work For distinction is well-known by academic jobseekers as a sign that an institutions employees are valued and given opportunities for growth even when they face financial constraints, said Liz McMillen, editor of The Chronicle. Any college or university thats on the list is showing they emphasize valuable assets: their faculty and staff.

To administer the survey and analyze the results, The Chronicle used ModernThink LLC, a strategic human capital consulting firm that has conducted numerous Best Places to Work programs, surveying hundreds of thousands of employees nationwide. The Great Colleges survey included a two-part assessment process: a survey administered to faculty, administrators and salaried staff (the ModernThink Higher Education Insight Survey) and an institutional audit that captured demographics and workplace policies and practices. The primary factor in deciding whether an institution received a Great College to Work For recognition was the employee feedback.

It is indeed an accolade to be on the Honor Roll as a Great College to Work For, said Cherrie Nelson, WSU Human Resources assistant vice president. Thanks goes to our faculty and staff who have been making dreams happen since 1889.

To view the results of the survey, visit chronicle.com/AW17.

Visit weber.edu/wsutoday for more news about Weber State University.
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Jul. 19, 2017 | PADUCAH, KY

By West Kentucky Star Staff Jul. 19, 2017 | 08:57 AM | PADUCAH, KY

It's official. Paducah is getting its first Five Guys, and several other well known restaurants on the same tract of land.



A new development is under construction called Sanders Corner, on the site of the former El Chico Restaurant on Hinkleville Road in Paducah.



Quattro Development LLC of Oak Brook, Illinois has created the new 9,800 square foot retail space, according to a news release by Kentucky Oaks Mall. Tenants will include Qdoba, Jimmy Johns and Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Qdoba is owned by parent company, Jack In The Box, and Paducah currently has one Jimmy John's location near the Hannon Shopping Plaza in Midtown.



This is the first Five Guys in the Paducah/Cape Girardeau/Carbondale region. The closest other locations are in Clarksville, Tennessee, Evansville, Indiana- Owensboro, and St. Louis.



The Qdoba is being developed by Tony Page (the original owner/operator of El Chico), who currently operates the Qdoba in Murray. Jay Page will own and operate the Jimmy Johns mall location, according to a news release by JJ's of Kentucky, LLC.



Lease negotiations are underway with a fourth tenant, says the mall, with a popular national name in food service. It remains to be seen if the fourth unnamed tenant will be a highly rumored stand alone Starbucks. Currently a Starbucks location is inside the mall adjacent to the new development.



The new eateries will open for business in early 2018, according to the release.




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By Bill Hughes

Jul. 18, 2017 | PADUCAH, KY

By Bill Hughes Jul. 18, 2017 | 12:26 PM | PADUCAH, KY

The McCracken County Sheriff's Department is hoping they can replace their guns without having to ask the county for money.



Chief Deputy Mike Turnbow told West Kentucky Star their 40-caliber Glock pistols have been in use by officers since October 2007, and like any mechanical device the possibility of malfunction increases with age. Turnbow said most agencies try to replace their weapons every 10-12 years, and several others in the area are doing it now.



The Law Enforcement Protection Grant does not use taxpayer money - it comes from proceeds of the state's sale of firearms seized by law enforcement agencies during arrests or investigations. The fund is used exclusively to help agencies purchase Tasers, body cameras, body armor, firearms or ammunition.



"State Police, as a matter of fact, is in the process of rotating their weapons out and going to 9mm, and we're doing the same thing. The grant is requesting to replace our 40-caliber with 9mm," Turnbow said.



He said the night sights on the current guns have been dimming slowly from the day they were made, and need replacement now. Plus, Glock recommends rebuilding the weapon and replacing magazines (three per officer) after 10 years. The cost for all of this is within $125 of getting a new weapon, so Turnbow said it doesn't make fiscal sense not to get brand new pistols.



Plus, the grant would cover the cost of new guns, but rebuilding and replacing parts on the old ones would have to come out of the county budget.



The department is changing to 9mm guns for practical reasons, too. Not only are State Police converting to 9mm, Lexington Police and the FBI are too, after reviewing ballistics tests and other specs. Since the Sheriff's Department buys ammunition at a state contract price, keeping pace with those agencies will ensure that the ammo they need is available at a discount.



Turnbow said, "With State Police and Lexington Metro going to 9mm, 40-caliber may not be on the state contract price anymore. If it is not on the state contract price, a case of ammo is probably gonna go up $150-$200."



If the grant is approved, the agency would buy the guns from Kiesler Police Supply, the authorized Glock dealer to law enforcement agencies in our area. They would give a trade-in value for the 40-caliber weapons, which would eventually be sold to other distributors for re-sale.
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Jul. 18, 2017 | DIXON SPRINGS, IL

By West Kentucky Star Staff Jul. 18, 2017 | 05:47 PM | DIXON SPRINGS, IL

A southern Illinois sheriff is asking for help solving a couple of theft cases.



Pope County Sheriff Jerry Suits says he went to a Dixon Springs home on July 7 and spoke to the owners, who said someone had entered their new pole barn and taken items valued around $15,000. Those items included a new 60-inch Bad Boy zero-turn mower and a black 6-1/2 x 10-foot trailer with a wooden floor and gate. Other items taken were an air compressor, chain saws, weed eaters, blowers, several electric or battery-operated drills and saws, hand tools, motorcycle helmets, and clothing.



So far, the investigation has revealed that a black Jeep with a chrome grill was seen in the area before and after the burglary.



Sheriff Suits also says a coin collection and diamond bracelet have also been stolen from a Pope County home within the last few weeks. They are valued around $3,000.



Anyone with information about either of these crimes should call the Sheriff's Department at 618-683-4321. Tips will be kept confidential.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Jul. 18, 2017 | 08:07 PM | FRANKFORT, KY

Kentucky State Treasurer Allison Ball returned $4,922.00 worth of unclaimed property to the Marshall County Board of Education on Tuesday morning.

I am a big believer in property rights, Treasurer Ball said in a statement. One of my favorite things to do in government is to return peoples property back to them. Im thankful my office is able to play a role in returning money to this organization.

The proactive initiative searches for unclaimed property in three key areas: local government, schools, and charities. That money can go a long way in helping charities around the Commonwealth.

We are very grateful that Treasurer Ball took the time and effort to seek these funds out for us, Marshall County Superintendent Trent Lovett said in a statement. Its always great for a school system to receive more funding, especially when it is unexpected. The money returned to us will be put to good use here to further the education of students in Marshall County.

The Kentucky State Treasurer administers Kentuckys Unclaimed Property Fund. Unclaimed property generally consists of payroll checks, unclaimed safety deposit boxes, old life insurance policies, stocks, or vendor checks that have remained unclaimed by their owners after several years.

Since Treasurer Ball has taken office, the Unclaimed Property Division has been working on proactively seeking schools, local governments, and charities in the state that have unclaimed property. This first quarter alone, the division was able to proactively return a total $264,809.39 across the Commonwealth.

Proactively reaching out to schools, local governments, and charities has been a priority of mine since taking office, Treasurer Ball shared. Its important to make sure these groups are aware that they have unclaimed property and we get it returned quickly. These institutions are essential to local communities and any bit of money we can return to them can go a long way in strengthening the local economy.

In total, Treasurer Ball has returned over $5.9 million dollars of unclaimed property during the first quarter of 2017 and over $30 million since she took office.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Jul. 18, 2017 | 07:50 PM | FRANKFORT, KY

Gov. Matt Bevin today appointed Richard Todd Cooper as Judge-Executive of Ballard County.

Cooper, of Barlow, has most recently served as Deputy Judge-Executive and was previously the Ballard County Sheriff from 1995 to 2015. He is a 1984 graduate of Ballard Memorial High School, a 1986 graduate of Paducah Community College, and a 1988 graduate of the University of Louisvillewith a bachelor's degree in history.

Prior to joining the Ballard County Sheriff's Office in 1990 as a special deputy, Cooper worked for several years as a residential carpenter. He attended the Department of Criminal Justice Training Academy at Eastern Kentucky University, where he graduated in 1992.

"I would like to thank Gov. Bevin for the opportunity to continue serving the citizens of Ballard County by appointing me as the new Judge-Executive," said Cooper. "I am excited about the future of our community and want to thank the Lord for His goodness."
By West Kentucky Star Staff Jul. 18, 2017 | 09:57 PM | MAYFIELD, KY

A Graves County woman was arrested Tuesday night on drug and gun charges.

Graves County Sheriff Dewayne Redmon said the Drug Division executed a search warrant at a home in the 600 block of Wilferd Street in Mayfield, and arrested 64-year-old Ginger Dees. Redmon said deputies found approximately 1.5 ounces of methamphetamine, 5.5 grams of crack cocaine and numerous bottles of prescription medication inside Dees' home.

Deputies also found a handgun, electronic digital scales, a small amount of marijuana and some cash believed to be proceeds of illegal drug sales that had been taking place at the home.

Dees was lodged in the Graves County Jail on charges of firearm enhanced trafficking in meth, firearm enhanced trafficking in cocaine, firearm enhanced trafficking in controlled substance, possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a handgun by a convicted felon.
50TH ANNIVERSARY OBSERVANCE OF COLLISION AND CRASH OF PIEDMONT FLIGHT 22

SPECIAL COMMEMORATIVE OBSERVANCE 11:30AM JULY 19 IN FRONT OF THE HISTORIC COURTHOUSE

On July 19, 1967 at 12:01pm Piedmont Airlines Flight 22, a Boeing 727, and a Cessna 310 were involved in a midair collision over Hendersonville, NC. All occupants of Flight 22, including 74 passengers and five crew members, along with the three occupants of the Cessna were killed. The Cessna disintegrated in the air and the Boeing 727 crashed in a wooded area between Interstate 26 and Camp Pinewood. Hundreds of people witnessed the collision and crash.

The rescue squad, county fire departments, police, sheriffs deputies and medical personnel responded immediately. The fire was extinguished within 30 minutes and Rescue Squad members began the grim task of searching the dense smoke-filled woods for survivors. It quickly became apparent that there were none. The Henderson County Rescue Squad let the recovery efforts with assistance from over 400 volunteers from throughout North Carolina and South Carolina.

It was through the first responders sacrifice and dedication to service that Henderson County was able to recover. Federal officials gave high praise to the responding Fire and Law Enforcement departments and the Rescue Squad for their organization and professionalism. The Henderson County Rescue Squad received commendations from the US Senate, Piedmont Airlines, the US Department of Transportation and the Governor for the Volunteers bravery during the disaster.

The Henderson County Heritage Museum, in conjunction with the Henderson County Rescue Squad, will conduct a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the crash on Wednesday, July 19, 2017 at 11:30am in front of the Historic Courthouse in downtown Hendersonville. The public is invited to attend this free event. Speakers will honor the 82 lives lost in the crash and also honor the emergency response from Henderson County and Western North Carolina. Paul Houle, author of The Crash of Piedmont Airlines Flight 22: Completing the Record of the 1967 Midair Collision near Hendersonville, North Carolina, will also speak about the crash and the improvements made in airline safety as a result. There will also be a display of historic photos from the event, video accounts from eye witnesses and a piece of fused metal from the crash.

According to Mark Shepherd, Captain, Henderson County Rescue Squad, This was one of the largest disasters ever to hit Western North Carolina. It also caused one of the largest emergency responses in area history.

CITY PLANS SPECIAL REMEMBRANCE

The city of Hendersonville has proclaimed July 19, 2017 as Flight 22 Day of Remembrance to mark the 50th anniversary of the mid-air collision that claimed 82 lives.

The City Council adopted the resolution during their Thursday meeting to commemorate the 50th anniversary of one of the most disastrous days in North Carolina aviation history.

At 12:01 p.m. on July 19, 1967, a mid-air collision over the skies of Hendersonville as Piedmont Flight 22, a Boeing 727 carrying 79 men, women and children, enroute from the Asheville-Hendersonville to Roanoke, Virginia, collided with a private Cessna 310B carrying one crew member and two passengers, tragically resulting in the loss of 82 lives, the resolution reads.

Countless local unsung heroes  our local law enforcement officers, paramedics, doctors, nurses and countless volunteer firefighters and others throughout our region  risked their own personal safety and served days upon days to provide whatever assistance they could.

Remembrances continue to linger in the minds of family members, friends, residents, those who witnessed, and those who assisted with the tragic event here that day.

The city is encouraging residents, Henderson County government and its other municipalities to fly American flags at half-staff beginning July 17 and continuing through sunset July 19 in honor and remembrance of those lives lost.
Marko Arnautovic is set to join West Ham after the Hammers agreed a fee, reported to be around 24m, with Stoke for the Austrian forward.

West Ham have been pushing to sign the muscular 28-year-old all summer, but have already seen two bids rejected by Stoke.

However, now, the former FC Twente, Internazionale and Werder Bremen attacker is headed for east London.

Arnautovic joined Stoke, from Bremen, four years ago, netting 22 goals in 125 Premier League games with the Potters.

The Austrian will now follow Joe Hart to London Stadium, after the Man City keeper agreed a one-year loan deal with the Hammers.

Despite finishing 11th in the table last season, West Ham fans will be hoping for a more consistent 2017/18, with manager Slaven Bilic no doubt hoping his new recruits can kickstart the clubs fortunes.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 19/07/2017 (1942 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On the side of a building, a washed-out, painted advertisement is barely visible. Its a faded relic from the past, hidden in plain sight, until slowly the details of the ad deepen and re-form, bringing it back to life.

Thats what experiential artist Craig Winslow makes happen with Light Capsules, a project hes bringing to Winnipeg for a one-night art installation on Saturday, July 29.

JUSTIN SAMANSKI-LANGILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS One of the old Exchange District murals that will be illuminated and profiled in the upcoming Light Capsules project.

The faded signs are canvases for Winslow, who uses modern technology and archival photos to temporarily restore them to their former glory.

The result is a window into a piece of history thats slowly fading away.

The event, called Painted in Light, is being organized with the help of Matt Cohen, a local creative director and the driving force behind a website dedicated to documenting the citys fading painted advertisements, also known as ghost signs.

This is going to be one of the most ambitious Light Capsules installations Ive ever done, said Winslow from his home in Portland, Ore.

Im used to doing one, maybe two installations in a night, but this is going to be five in one night. Theyre going to see their city come back to life as it was before.

JON DUENAS PHOTO Artist Craig Winslow in front of a ghost sign in Portland, OR

The five signs Winslow plans to temporarily restore with large-scale projection mapping are within walking distance from one another in the Exchange District, which has one of the highest concentrations of ghost signs in North America.

All five signs will be illuminated at the same time and a crew of roughly 20 people will come together to pull off the event, which is free and runs from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.

The Travelling Sign Painters, a Winnipeg-based group that still practices the dying art form of painted advertisements, will be on the Forth rooftop patio showcasing the techniques used on the original signs.

Ive heard Winnipeg has kept a lot of these old signs in pretty good shape, said Winslow. In many places theyve been destroyed or painted over, whereas smaller cities seem to have these goldmines and a lot of them are still around.

SUPPLIED - previous art installation done by Portland-based experiential artist Craig Winslow.

The project, which Winslow has been working on for more than a year, all started when he saw a fading painted advertisement on the side of an old building. Once the idea came to him, he couldnt get it out of his head.

He was eventually able to pursue the project full-time when he landed a one-year dream job with the Adobe Creative Residency program.

Over the past year Winslow has taken Light Capsules across the United States and to London, U.K. This will be his first installation in Canada.

The event will be a unique opportunity for people to see the Exchange District as it was a hundred years ago, said Cohen, whos been documenting the citys ghost signs for a number of years.

JUSTIN SAMANSKI-LANGILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Matt Cohen poses in front of one of the building murals which will feature in several roof top events highlighting the citys faded Ghost Signs. Cohen is organizing the event, which takes place July 29 and features large scale projections by Portland artist Craig Winslow.

Itll be really interesting, said Cohen. Youll see the layers of the sign peeled back over the years. People will be able to experience the Exchange (District) in an entirely new way.

Cohen has given a TED Talk about the citys ghost signs, which he first became interested in when he was the president of the Advertising Association of Winnipeg.

They tell a really specific story about Winnipeg, he continued. They give a history of advertising and business in Winnipeg. Theyre also temporal and fading and it gives people the chance to see what life was like 100 years ago. In a generation or two they wont be able to.

Unless a restoration project is undertaken to restore the signs theyll continue to fade away, eventually disappearing completely.

But, for at least one night, Winslow plans to resurrect them, offering the city a glimpse into its past.

Locations of the signs for the art installation are:

 165 McDermot Ave.  sign one: James Porter and Company. Sign two: L. Galpern Candy Co.

 281 McDermot Ave.  sign three: Stobart, Sons and Company / Christie Grant Company.

 185 Bannatyne Ave.  sign four: Essex Packers. Sign five: Robinson & Webber.

ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca

SUPPLIED 185 Bannatyne - site for one of the building murals which will feature in several roof top events highlighting the city's faded "Ghost Signs." Cohen is organizing the event, which takes place July 29 and features large scale projections by Portland artist Craig Winslow.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 19/07/2017 (1942 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Senior managers with the City of Winnipeg will receive almost double the salary increase of thousands of lower-paid civic workers thanks to an arbitration ruling.

The 739 workers represented by the Winnipeg Association of Public Service Officers have been awarded an 8.2 per cent increase over 50 months, retroactive to Oct. 2015.

The amount is higher than the 4.5 per cent contract over 50 months for the 4,600 workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees. City councillors unanimously approved that contract Wednesday.

WAYNE GLOWACKI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Mayor Brian Bowman claims a lobbyist registry will curb 'old-school politics' at Winnipeg City Hall.

This stresses why negotiated settlements are always preferred, Mayor Brian Bowman said shortly after he heard the results of the arbitration.

Were pleased it is settled.

WAPSO president Michael Robinson said in a statement that we are very pleased with the general wage increase awarded by the board and very pleased that Schedule J, which is essentially scab language, is gone.

Unfortunately, the issue of whether the overtime provisions in the agreement violate the Employment Standards Code remains an open question.

Kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 19/07/2017 (1942 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg city council unanimously agreed to seek $182 million from the federal government to replace crumbling and potholed regional roads.

Mayor Brian Bowman said the city will formally ask the provincial government to send a letter to Ottawa outlining the request.

This is a no-brainer, Bowman said after the vote Wednesday. There is no new money here from the province. There is no new money from our budget. It is simply asking for the province to send a letter to the federal government.

JEN DOERKSEN / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES The city will ask the province to send a letter to the federal government requesting $182 million to replace crumbling and potholed roads in Winnipeg.

Bowman said if Ottawa hands over the cash, the city would divide it over the next six years to top up its regular road-renewal budget. Next year, the city plans to spend $105 million to redo roads.

Its absolutely a lot of money, he said. If the challenge is getting too much road construction, I think that is a good challenge.

Representatives from both the Manitoba Heavy Construction Association and CAA Manitoba had urged councillors to approve the motion.

Liz Kulyk, corporate manager of government and community relations for CAA Manitoba, said Winnipeggers want a smooth and safe commute.

MHCA president Chris Lorenc said good roads can move goods easier and lead to economic prosperity.

Meanwhile, the city will look at the status of six major road and bridge projects that are in the planning stages.

Coun. Devi Sharma, who seconded the motion by public works chairman Coun. Marty Morantz (Charleswood-Tuxedo-Whyte Ridge), said she was worried a report to executive policy committee last week appeared to say the projects  including the Chief Peguis Trail extension  were far behind.

Sharma (Old Kildonan) said the Chief Peguis project had an open house last month, and it will be firmly budgeted by November.

Its important to reaffirm our priorities, she said. We dont want to put major capital projects on the back burner.

The motion will go to the public works committee and the bureaucracy will be asked to prepare a report for city council within 60 days.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 19/07/2017 (1942 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs elected Chief Arlen Dumas from Pukatawagan as grand chief Wednesday.

Chiefs representing over 150,000 people, more than 12 per cent of Manitobas population, had issued a statement in the morning saying to expect a definitive decision on the first ballot, despite a crowded field of five candidates, who were seeking to replace Derek Nepinak.

Normally, the election is a process that takes two or three ballots.

JESSICA BURTNICK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Mathias Colomb Cree Nation Chief Arlen Dumas was elected grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Wednesday.

About an hour after the first ballot, however, chiefs started texting results, giving the win to Dumas, with 33 out of 54 votes on the initial ballot. The election is for a three-year term.

Voting was held during a two-day assembly of chiefs that wraps up Thursday in the northern Manitoba First Nation of Nisichawayasihk at Nelson House, located 80 kilometres west of Thompson. The assembly represents 62 of the 63 First Nations in the province.

The AMC confirmed the election, and in an email indicated the vote breakdown was a landslide for Dumas. The other four candidates collected a handful of votes each.

Dumas is not a stranger to leadership, having served in various capacities with northern-Manitoba based Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak, including as its vice-chief, and with the AMC as a proactive member of the executive, finance, treaty and self-government committees, said his campaign manager Rana Bokhari, former leader of the Manitoba Liberal Party.

He is held in well-regard for his focused and determined advocacy in the face of complex issues and difficult opponents, she said in a statement.

I am honoured to be so strongly supported by my colleagues along with my community members, family and friends, the statement quoted Dumas saying.

In his newly elected role as grand chief, Dumas is committed to working with all communities and their leadership and emphasizing the need for unity as an integral process to establishing a new and more promising future for all of Manitoba First Nations, the statement concluded.

Dumas is a northern Cree chief of Mathias Colomb First Nation in Pukatawagan, widely known in environmental and Indigenous-rights networks across the country. Raised on his familys trapline in Churchill and educated in an Ontario prep school, Dumass leadership has been credited for turning around the fortunes of the remote community north of Flin Flon once known as Dodge City of the north.

BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Derek Nepinak will be replaced as grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, in an election Wednesday.

First elected chief of Mathias Colomb First Nation at age 31 in 2008, Dumas famously fought mining interests in court over extraction rights. Later, he secured a memorandum of understanding with Omnitrax to buy the Churchill rail line before it was damaged in flooding in March. He remains head of one of two rival First Nation-led groups that want to take over the rail line to provide stable transportation in the provinces north.

By tradition, the office of grand chief rotates back and forth between between the provinces predominantly Cree northern bands and southern Ojibwa bands

Current Grand Chief Derek Nepinak, from the southern Ojibwa First Nation of Pine Creek, announced last fall he would not run for a third term, writing in a Facebook post at the time that he would not accept any more titles within the colonial system.

Five candidates ran for office but none had Dumass prominent public profile.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 18/07/2017 (1943 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The province is increasing the Affordable Food in Remote Manitoba (AFFIRM) retail subsidy rate to $1.60 per kilogram for milk, infant formula and fresh fruit and vegetables in Churchill.

The new rate is up from $1.20 per kilogram, and will slash $7 off the price of a four-litre jug of milk in Churchill.

With the interruption in rail services to Churchill, food costs are increasing as food now has to be flown into the community, Health, Seniors and Active Living Minister Kelvin Goertzen said Tuesday.

Food prices have tripled and governments are paying for food subsidies to partially offset these costs. Churchill Mayor Mike Spence

This increase in the AFFIRM subsidy will help reduce the cost of food in the community and, in particular, support more affordable access to healthy foods.

AFFIRM was launched in Churchill in October 2015 with a subsidy rate of $1.20 per kg. The new subsidy rate of $1.60 per kg is the highest rate offered to Manitoba communities in both the AFFIRM and Nutrition North Canada (NNC) program, provincial officials said.

Despite the announcement, Churchill Mayor Mike Spence repeated what hes been saying for weeks  the priority is getting the rail line fixed.

As a result of this inaction, re-supply bills continue to mount in Churchill. It is estimated that propane shipping and storage costs alone could be over $4.5 million, while major infrastructure projects that are already underway are facing millions in additional costs that government will be forced to pay, Spence said. Food prices have tripled and governments are paying for food subsidies to partially offset these costs.

As the bills add up, Northern Manitobans cant wait any longer, concluded Spence. The sooner governments take action the sooner re-supply costs go away and our community can start to rebuild from this emergency.

New Democrat MLA Tom Lindsey gave Goertzen some infrequent praise Tuesday: Its a good stop-gap measure, he said from Flin Flon.

Its still going to leave them paying more individually. It wont be back where it was. The answer is to get the rail line up and running.

The program reduces the price of milk, infant formula, fresh vegetables and fruit in eligible remote northern communities through a subsidy to participating stores, Goertzen noted in a news release. Each store is required to pass on the full subsidy to the customer by reducing sale prices of eligible foods. The amount of the subsidy is shown both in the store and on the customer receipt.

Eligibility for AFFIRM is determined by the provincial government, targeting northern Manitoba communities not directly served by an all-weather road and do not receive the full subsidy through the federal NNC program.

The NNC provides a subsidy to several other northern Manitoba communities and has worked with Manitoba to ensure a broader range of items, not including AFFIRM items, will be subsidized in Churchill at the $1.60 per kg rate during the rail disruption.

We know that families in Churchill have been facing a difficult challenge and we are pleased to work with the federal government to support the community, said Goertzen. This increased subsidy will help address some of the increased costs and provide support to area residents as this situation continues to evolve.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 18/07/2017 (1943 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA  The top ranger at Riding Mountain National Park says hes not expecting more noise, illegal camping and litter this summer, despite this years free entry luring more visitors.

Matthew Blackman, one of Riding Mountains four wardens, said the park is taking a holistic approach, focused on getting information out early.

Straddling the Manitoba Escarpment near Dauphin, Riding Mountain welcomed 339,441 visitors in the 2015-16 season. In the first six months of 2017, the park has seen a 1.2 per cent increase in visitors compared with the same period last year. Nationally, theres been a nine per cent jump.

Brandon Sun 20082016 Outdoor enthusiasts take advantage of the nice weather on Clear Lake in Riding Mountain National Park on Saturday afternoon. (Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun)

Thats because of the Discovery Pass, which waves park-entry fees for visitors to mark the 150th anniversary of Confederation.

To deal with the increase, parks such as Riding Mountain have added more private security staff, who monitor the park and report incidents. Cash-strapped Parks Canada, however, has resisted hiring more wardens, who can carry guns, arrest people and issue warnings.

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Instead, the agency has put up more signs, closed some higher-risk areas and boosted direct outreach.

While the Discovery Pass is free, visitors still have to request one online or in person, helping the agency track attendance and inform people about the rules. Rangers similarly instruct campers who buy permits and equipment.

Tamaini Snaith, who leads Parks Canadas law enforcement nationally, says the aim is to reduce the need for law enforcement through prevention. Just because were expecting more visitors does not mean that were expecting more issues.

Snaith also described Riding Mountain as a typical park, with an average number of incidents compared to its attendance figures.

Over a four-year period starting in 2011-12, the park logged between 221 and 340 incidents each year, which includes everything from arrests and tickets to warnings.

While more recent data wasnt available, Parks Canada provided the Free Press with a breakdown of the 265 law-enforcement Incidents logged at the park in 2015. The vast majority involve permit violations, unauthorized fishing and hunting, as well as ATV use.

Blackman said a fairly high number of incidents come from screening boats, to make sure that invasive zebra mussels dont gain a foothold in the park. He said the amount and types of incidents havent changed in recent years.

While Albertas busy Banff and Jasper parks logged a handful of nudists, none were recorded at Riding Mountain. Instead, there were 13 liquor violations and nine noise complaints, as well as seven infractions along Highway 10.

Alison Ronson, a national director with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, said shes glad Parks Canada is informing visitors about respecting nature, but argued the agency needs more money for conservation programs.

When you educate visitors about nature in the park, and how to embrace nature, you create this feeling of stewardship and responsibility for the parks, and that translates into better behaviour, she said.

Ronson said shes already heard of more incidents of visitors getting close to wildlife, and crowded access to some of the already popular parks. However, she added, she hopes the free entry pass will boost interest in less-frequented parks.

Manitobas only other national park, Wapusk, sits 45 kilometres south of Churchill. It has had between 193 and 252 recorded visitors for each of the last four recorded years, and netted four violations in 2015 which involved an ATV, wildlife and permits.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 19/07/2017 (1942 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The buddy bench, an initiative of the Danicas Village fund named after a girl who died last year on the Churchill River, is not really for sitting.

Buddy benches are for kids who dont have anyone to play with. When they sit on the bench, it means they really dont want to be sitting on the bench. Other children then see them and invite them to play.

SUPPLIED Prototype of the buddy bench that the Danicas Village fund is raising money to put in school grounds. The finished product will have Danicas name in the heart, and the logo Find Your Village Love them Hard on back.

That was the sweet nature of five-year-old Danica deLaroque. My daughter was always inclusive. She would never let another child sit by herself, explained mom, Toni deLaroque.

Danica died July 13, 2016 when her canoe capsized while she was viewing beluga whales  and her mother is speaking about her daughters tragic death to help raise funds for Danicas Village.

Danica could not survive the 5 C water temperatures in the Churchill River and died of hypothermia. Her then-four-year-old brother, Connor, also nearly died. Connor was flown to Winnipeg and placed in a medically-induced coma.

My sons survival is nothing short of a miracle. The doctors cant even explain his recovery, Toni said.

The family had no idea the water temperature in mid-summer could kill and that what they were doing was so dangerous.

The tragedy touched people far and wide. Toni had befriended women in the United States via a social media site for women who have suffered miscarriages. (Toni had a miscarriage before Danicas birth, making Danica a rainbow baby.)

These women, who I had never met but only talked to online, (five of them) hopped on planes and came to the service, Toni said. They all spoke at the service and helped fundraise for Danicas Village.

When people ask me how many kids I have, I say I have two children. One on Earth, and one not.  Toni deLaroque, Danicas mom

Tons of people have reached out to me, said Toni. People from Australia contacted her. A mother who lost her child in Churchill two decades ago reached out, as did other moms whod lost children or who had fatal canoe accidents.

Then there was the response from people locally in Grosse Isle, just north of Winnipeg, and across Manitoba. Community members dropped off 12 camper trailers with the deLaroques for people arriving from out of town. People cut the familys lawn and cleaned their house while they were at the hospital with Connor. People stocked their refrigerator, freezer and pantry.

Another group the deLaroques wanted to thank were the emergency personnel who worked so hard to save Danica, and without whom they would have lost Connor.

Toni, who works for the Canadian Grain Commission and was inspecting the weigh scales at the Port of Churchill grain terminal the day of the accident, recalled being told to make her way to the hospital as quickly as possible.

She arrived to find a group of 12 emergency and rescue workers taking turns performing CPR on her children. This lasted for hours before she was even permitted to see them. When I was allowed into the room several hours later they were still performing CPR and wrapping the kids in warm blankets, Toni wrote on her Facebook page.

Danica regained consciousness a few times and nodded she understood her parents. She seemed the child most likely to pull through at that point. Then she suddenly crashed. Emergency personnel began CPR again for more than an hour but she did not recover.

Everyone shared the familys grief, including the RCMP officer with a young daughter at home; he wept alongside Toni. Toni mentioned other extraordinary acts, such as Remi Allen of Sea North Tours leaping into his boat and pulling everyone to shore. She noted how the childrens father, Donnie, somehow managed to tip up the canoe full of water and dump its contents, and put the children back inside while he stayed in the river.

SUPPLIED Danica deLaroque died in Churchill last year when the canoe she was in with her dad and brother capsized.

With that in mind, the family resolved to fly to Churchill last fall to personally thank the nurses, doctors, RCMP, paramedics and firefighters, and to show them their efforts hadnt been in vain. Connor was with them and very much alive.

I thought it was really important for them to see Connor living and running around and smiling and being an amazing miracle, and that those countless hours of CPR they performed on our son were worth it, Toni said.

Since their visit, the community of Churchill, with about 800 year-round residents, has also dedicated a new wall mural to Danica. The mural, by artist Charlie Johnston, shows a beluga whale departing from an Inuit womans hands, with the northern lights in the backdrop. It is on the residency for nurses and doctors.

Its been a rough year for us. We relied on each other. We look for the beauty in things. Were always looking for a rainbow. Were always looking for my daughter in things that remind us of her, like dragonflies and butterflies, Toni said.

Danica remains in their everyday lives.

We always include Danica in our talk. We talk about her frequently. Were very open talking about her with our son. We dont want him to forget, Toni said. When people ask me how many kids I have, I say I have two children. One on Earth, and one not.

The buddy benches will be rainbow-coloured, with Danicas name in a heart on the front, and the Danicas Village logo, Find Your Village, Love Them Hard, on the back.

The benches are made of recycled plastic from milk cartons, which is very durable and never needs painting. They will be donated to Interlake schools and the Churchill community initially. The fundraising target is $10,000.

People can purchase mugs and T-shirts that say, Find Your Village, Love Them Hard, found on Facebook under Groups. (You may first have to send a friend request.) A format for making straight donations may be in place by today.

Grosse Isle recently held a bake sale for Danicas Village at a Canada 150 event, and more fundraising events are planned.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 19/07/2017 (1942 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last Tuesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi officially declared that the brutal nine-month battle to retake the city of Mosul was finally over. However, just four days later, explosions were still rocking the shattered rubble in the citys downtown core as the last of the Islamic State militants continued their fanatical resistance.

If one can be dispassionate about ISs evil ideology, then from a purely military perspective their prolonged defence against overwhelming odds was one hell of a martial feat. It was estimated at the outset of the siege that IS defenders numbered fewer than 4,500. On the attacking side, the U.S.-led alliance numbered more than 100,000 ground troops plus air power. This loose-knit coalition of disparate militias included Iraqi government troops, Shiite militia and Kurdish peshmerga.

The professional stiffening of these forces was provided by a large number of U.S. and Iranian military advisors. Canada also contributed to the mix with approximately 200 special forces soldiers in an advise-and-assist role. The Canadian troops are attached to the Kurdish militia, which is loyal to the Kurdistan Democratic Partys leader, Masoud Barzani.

FELIPE DANA / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES Destroyed buildings in the Old City of Mosul, Iraq. U.S.-backed forces won back Mosul from the Islamic State in July.

Although Canadians have repeatedly been told that our soldiers are not involved in combat operations, the commanders on the ground have taken extreme liberties with the word assist in their advise-and-assist mandate.

Such assistance to the Kurds has taken the form of using anti-tank missiles to destroy IS vehicles, and a world-record sniping shot that killed an IS fighter at the incredible range of 3,500 metres.

I am of the perhaps somewhat biased view that Canadian soldiers are not among the best in the world they are the best in the world. That said, this means that the IS defenders of Mosul were not only up against a staggering quantity of attackers, they were also pitted against an impressive quality of warriors.

Add to this mix the fact that the allied forces could call upon the unchallenged might of the U.S.-led aerial armada that included a fleet of unmanned drones capable of around-the-clock observation and missile-strike capabilities.

The fighting may finally be over, but the devastation is nearly complete, particularly in the western area of the city, which was ISs last bastion of resistance. Nearly every building in West Mosul has been destroyed.

To protect the ground troops from possible IS vehicle-borne suicide attacks, the allied air force deliberately cratered every intersection in the city with precision bomb strikes. The bridges spanning the Tigris River, which connected East and West Mosul, were all destroyed in the fighting, either by allied aircraft or IS demolition.

The pile of rubble is reminiscent of the Second World Wars aftermath of the Battle of Stalingrad. The devastation in Mosul is so complete that it makes al-Abadis claim of victory akin to U.S. General Westmorelands famous Vietnam War quip that in order to save the village, they needed to destroy the village. Only this time, the village was Iraqs second-largest city and the damage is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars.

The question now begs as to who will oversee the reconstruction of Mosul? It was the deliberate exclusion of Iraqs Sunni Arab minority by al-Abadis Shiite regime in Baghdad that led Mosuls Sunni residents to welcome IS as liberators in the summer of 2014. That was when Mosul was an undamaged metropolis, not a heap of broken bricks and destroyed infrastructure.

If history repeats itself, as it so often does in the Middle East, the Sunni minority will be further punished by the victorious Shiite militias, many of whom are woefully ill-disciplined and fighting a war of revenge against the Sunnis.

To the west of Mosul, IS retains control of the city of Tal Afar, which is a Turkmen enclave. The city is presently besieged by Shiite militia assisted by Iranian advisers. Neighbouring Turkey has warned that it will take military action if the Shia militia is allowed to enter Tal Afar and exact revenge upon the Turkmen.

As each domino falls, it seems this conflict only gets more complex and any notion of a victory remains undefined. Canada has no say in resolving any of these major issues, yet we have just committed our military to at least two more years in Iraq. We will very soon need to choose which Iraq we support, because it is very unlikely to continue to exist in its present form.

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 18/07/2017 (1943 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Omnitrax is a quirky company, and one of its quirkiest qualities is an insistence that a health and safety briefing precede the start of any meeting, interview or news conference.

And so it was on Tuesday when government officials, First Nations leaders and journalists gathered in a downtown hotel ballroom to get the first detailed update from Omnitrax on the damage to the Hudson Bay Railway from spring flooding.

An Omnitrax official worked his way through a health and safety checklist: designating the person officially charged with calling 911; identifying the location of the nearest AED device; instructions on what to do if a fire alarm sounded; the location of the nearest washrooms; and a warning to all those involved to be very careful about chairs and briefcases when walking around the room.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Peter Touesnard, Omnitraxs chief commercial officer, answers questions in Winnipeg Tuesday after a technical briefing on the assessment of damage to the Hudson Bay Railway.

There are two main conclusions that can be drawn from this highly unusual prelude to a news conference.

That Omnitrax has a hypersensitivity about health and safety that borders on paranoia. Or, that this is a company that is very, very deliberate and methodical in everything it says and does.

The latter theory works very well as an explanation for the mind-numbingly detailed briefing that Omnitrax delivered this week. In short, northern Manitobas most important transportation link has suffered an unprecedented level of damage from the worst spring-thaw floods in the last half-century.

That information was really not new; first-hand accounts confirmed weeks ago the horrendous level of damage. The new information came in the form of two critically important statements from Omnitrax chief commercial officer Peter Touesnard.

First, that it would cost between $20 million and $60 million to repair the railway.

And second, that Omnitrax is not prepared to cover any of those costs.

Because we have determined the rail line lacks commercial viability and now (faced) with millions of dollars of damage we cant justify the resources necessary to repair the line, Touesnard said.

Touesnards admission really confirms what most informed observers have suspected for weeks now  the company had been trying to sell the railway and the Port of Churchill even before the flood waters came. It seemed unlikely Omnitrax would spend money repairing the line above, perhaps, the normal cost of maintenance.

However, having now publicly admitted it wont pay for any repairs, Omnitrax has put the ball squarely in the court of the federal and provincial governments.

Ottawa and the province have not played well together on this file. However, with this latest salvo from the Denver-based Omnitrax, both governments need to present a united front.

Omnitrax clearly wants to be paid to leave Manitoba, but its refusal to pay for repairs could be, if necessary, used as a sign it wants to abandon the line, opening the door for government to take over. That is, however, the nuclear option and one that should not be employed lightly.

Should taxpayers just cover the cost of the repairs? In its briefing, Omnitrax provided ample reason to be suspicious about the companys intentions going forward.

First, the range of the cost of repairs is hilariously broad. Omnitrax did a good job of describing the many variables, including the availability of materials, rolling stock, specialized equipment and an experienced contractor. Still, the range of estimate suggests  even after six weeks of detailed analysis  that it is being cagey about the true cost of the repairs.

A similar concern exists with the estimate of the time to complete repairs. After spending nearly an hour detailing the horrendous damage, Omnitrax said the work could be done in 60 days. It was a shocking claim given the companys hyperbole.

And then there is the schedule that Omnitrax has set for repairs. With assessment done, Omnitrax said it needs another six weeks to complete a cost estimate and then award a contract. That would mean work on the line would start no sooner than Sept. 1 and be completed by Oct. 31.

That is also, coincidentally, the end of the shipping season. With the rail line out of commission, basic necessities such as groceries, diesel fuel and gasoline have been coming in by freighter to the port of Churchill. Once the shipping season concludes, prohibitively expensive air freight would be the only option for resupply.

Omnitrax spent weeks assessing the damage and then presented a plan Tuesday that really leaves government only days to make a decision about whether to pony up to save a transportation link that Manitoba surely cannot afford to lose.

What is government to do in a scenario like this? Oddly enough, Omnitrax may have unwittingly provided a way forward.

Touesnard said the railway should be viewed as a public utility. And he is probably right. With up to $60 million in repairs pending, it does not have commercial value. It is a transportation asset, no different really than a highway, although in strictly economic terms, the railway is much less costly.

For comparison, lets look at what you can buy for $60 million, the upper end of the repair estimate from Omnitrax.

If we spent that entire amount on the 800-kilometre-long Hudson Bay Railway, it would work out to a cost of $75,000 per kilometre.

For the same $60 million, you could build about 36 kilometres of double-lane highway.

That equation, plus the refusal of Omnitrax to invest in repairs, could be viewed as an opportunity for the federal and provincial governments to regain control over the future of northern Manitoba. The only question is whether they have the political will to seize that opportunity.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca

Omnitrax Technical Briefing Presentation
Buffalo County 4-H members were just a few of the hundreds of 4-H youth who attended the 97th annual Wisconsin 4-H and Youth Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus June 2629.

Lindsey Berg, Amy Losinski, Morgan Guenther and Hannah Noll joined over 500 other young people representing UW-Extensions 4-H Youth Development program in celebrating the 97th anniversary of the youth program in Wisconsin at the conference. The adult 4-H leader volunteers advising the county delegation were Jennifer Losinski and Angela Berg of Glencoe Hustlers 4-H club.

The annual four-day conference gives youth a chance to learn about a variety of 4-H and other youth programs, experience hands-on learning in a university campus atmosphere, strengthen life skills, gain knowledge to share back home and exchange ideas and form friendships with youth from around the state.

The delegates attended workshops and assemblies developed around the theme, Leadership  the Road Less Traveled, which highlighted leadership, individual responsibility, goal setting, healthy living, sustainability and living up to ones potential. Workshop topics included communication arts, building leadership skills, healthy living, STEM topics, youth citizenship, and a host of other exciting subjects.

The Wisconsin 4-H Foundation and the Buffalo County 4-H Leaders Association provided financial support for this conference and for the four local youth selected.
Fourteen soldiers from 12 states, representing seven Army National Guard regions will compete through July 20 at Camp Ripley in the Army National Guard's Best Warrior Competition.

"This competition will test the soldiers' ability to perform tasks that are vital to our ability to fight and win our nation's wars," said Command Sgt. Maj. Douglas Wortham, senior enlisted advisor for the Minnesota National Guard. "We will push them to their limits to test their endurance, strength and resilience - qualities that our soldiers must possess to be successful."

The four-day competition will feature several events to test the soldiers both physically and mentally. The soldiers will demonstrate their proficiency with weapons, their physical strength and endurance, their ability to perform military tasks and their ability to put their knowledge to use under pressure.

To make it to the Army National Guard level, the soldiers have already competed and won at the unit, state and regional level. The competitors come from New Jersey, Rhode Island, Washington D.C., Maryland, Georgia, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Arkansas, Oregon, Washington and Nevada.

Winona native Staff Sgt. Daniel Sebo, a medic and instructor with the Minnesota National Guard's 2nd Battalion, 175th Regiment Regional Training Institute, will represent Minnesota and Region 4 in the competition.

The competition will identify the top soldier (junior enlisted) and NCO (non-commissioned officer) to represent the National Guard in the All-Army Best Warrior Competition in October.

Contact Minnesota National Guard Public Affairs at mn.ng.web@mail.mil or call 651-282-4410 for more information.
The city of Wabasha has taken official steps to oppose dredging plans in the area.

The city announced late last week it will be pursuing what it called a comprehensive legal and political strategy to stop the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from pursuing plans to store dredged material near the city.

To that end, the city has hired a team of people including Flaherty & Hood P.A., a law and government relations firm from Minneapolis which specializes in regulatory and environmental issues; Bolton & Menk, an engineering firm with offices throughout Minnesota and Iowa; and Dan McDougal, a dredging professional who started the company Dredge America.

The next step will be to submit a request to the Corps to freeze plans to use Southside Fitzgerald neighborhood to hold dredged material, and to work with the city, state agencies, state and federal lawmakers and the public to select an alternative site.

The citys main concern is that the plan would put too much truck traffic into the area.

Announcing the citys opposition plan, Wabasha mayor Rollin Hall called the Corps plan simply bad for the city of Wabasha.

The plan would increase truck traffic by an estimated 70 trucks per hour going in and out of the neighborhood during the hauling period each year, along with the additional air and noise pollution caused by the diesel trucks and large, remaining piles of sediment, the city said.

While the hauling period is 75 days, the Corps plan is estimated to be in effect for the next 30 to 40 years.

It would result in a dangerous uptick in truck traffic, increased noise and air pollution, and hamper our communitys ability to grow in the future, Hall said in the announcement, not to mention directly affect the quality of life and property values for the residents of the effected neighborhood.

The city is not alone in its opposition to the plan, which outlines Corps requirement to remove and permanently place more than 10 million cubic yards of dredged material from the Mississippi Rivers Lower Pool 4 during the next 40 years.

The plan would use four on-shore placement and transfer sites with river access, which include two sites closer to Wabasha, a temporary site, and the Alma Marina.

That would require about 470 acres of farmland in Minnesota and Wisconsin to permanently store the sand, and there was potential for eminent domain to be used to seize the needed property.

Community members have packed meetings on the issue, and state and federal legislators from Minnesota and Wisconsin have said they would like to see a different solution.

Last month, U.S. Reps. Ron Kind, D-Wis, and Jason Lewis, R-Minn., urged for more time to be spent exploring options.

Sens. Al Franken, DFL-Minn., Amy Klobuchar, DFL-Minn., and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., sent a joint letter to the Corps of Engineers chief general saying that theyve heard concerns from citizens and disagree with the Corps stance that it is obligated to go with the cheapest option  which it says studies showed this plan to be.

The senators letter argued that Corps claims that they were required to go with the least costly option was not actually the law  but rather internal regulation  so the requirement could be waived.

Wabasha city administrator Chad Springer also disputed that the current plan was the cheapest, and said in a statement that the city had come up with several other cost-effective and more environmentally friendly sites, but the Corps has still gone ahead with the current plan despite the harm it would cause to the families and businesses in our city.

The city, and ultimately the community, including the permanent storage sites located outside the city limits, stand to lose big if this current plan is enacted, Springer said in a statement. We plan to fight it from all angles.

The Corps is, however, still stalling on the plans next step. It has extended the public comment three times since the plan was introduced May 11  from June 9 to June 23, and then through July 14, and now to July 28.

When announcing the further extension, the Corps said it will allow more time for the public to understand the document and provide alternative suggestions.

The stretch of water to be dredged is between Wabasha and Buffalo, Wis., and the area accounts for about 40 percent of the dredging in that district.
Winona State Universitys pedestrian tunnels, meant to keep students from crossing the Canadian Pacific railroad on the south end of campus, might not be ready for students this fall.

Lisa Pearson, interim planning and construction director for the university, said its more likely theyll open later in the fall semester. The two tunnels  one next to Winona States two newest residence halls, and the other next to the entrance to Maxwell Field  still need to be waterproofed and outfitted with security cameras, among a number of smaller finishing touches.

The project has been in the works since 2008, and has been under construction since the spring of 2015.

Its really exciting that were getting close to the completion of this project, Pearson said. Im happy to say well be able to provide this for our students and give them the safest environment that we can.

Waterproofing, according to Pearson, is the task most likely to further hold up the project. Each tunnel needs to be sealed to prevent the infiltration of groundwater (right now, there are puddles on the floor of each tunnel)  work for which the university still needs to take bids.

Thats probably going to take the most amount of time, Pearson said about the waterproofing. We want to make sure everything is sealed and airtight.

Before the tunnels can open, workers also must paint the floors and retaining walls, run electricity, mount security cameras and install railings.

Pearson said landscapers will also plant trees and perennials around the tunnels, creating a scenic link between the campus buildings to the north and the ball fields to the south.

Its a great way to connect our campus, she said.

The tunnels are a joint venture among Winona State, Canadian Pacific and the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Their completion has been pushed back a few times due to complications in their construction.

Since development began in 2008, at least two people have died on this stretch of railroad.

Bruce Ernie Streng, 51, was killed by a train in October 2009, when he seemingly tripped and fell on the tracks.

Derek Bute, 25, was killed in a similar incident in January 2016.

Pearson is hoping, she said, that no more pedestrians will cross these tracks after the tunnels are completed. They have ramps for people traveling in wheelchairs or scooters, and theyll be well-lit to attract peoples attention, she said.
My father-in-law is losing his health insurance, Pam told me. She stopped to chat as we perused the booths at the Stockholm Art Fair.

Stockholm, population 66, has one of the best art fairs in western Wisconsin. Judging by the license plates, the fair is high on the list for Minnesotans too.

The 44th annual fair was held on the grounds of the city park overlooking Lake Pepin, the widest spot in the Mississippi River. Over 100 artists were eager to share their health care stories and sell their creations. There were few bugs. Weather was warm, but not too hot. Colors were everywhere.

The air smelled of fresh roasted nuts, gyro meat and kettle corn. Organic beef, wood-fired locally sourced pizza and maple ice cream kept hunger at bay.

Talented regional musicians kept folks entertained as neighbors sat on straw bales under a tent. Many shared treasures and pointed out favorite artists.

Under the surface, though, folks worried. My conversations were almost exclusively about health care.

Pam told me how a local health plan, La Crosse-based Health Tradition is quitting the federal marketplace Healthcare.gov next year. Others shared how loved ones recently received letters from Anthem or Health Tradition dropping coverage next year.

Recently, Wisbusiness.com reported roughly 23,000 will be affected by the pull out of Anthem and Health Tradition. Insurers blame the uncertainty in federal operations, rules and guidance including cost sharing reduction subsidies. This statement translates into: as Congress debates cutting help to people who need it, companies realize they may not have the customers to make a plan work.

In the insurance world, the larger the pool, the lower the risk. But if folks dont have help buying insurance and younger people get cheaper plans, the folks that are left  sicker and older  end up with more expensive plans and, maybe, none at all.

The Affordable Care Act is not perfect. But it was carefully balanced to share the risk  the basic element of keeping health care affordable for all.

Many artists and musicians are self-employed. The Affordable Care Act and Healthcare.gov created a way for self-employed and small business owners to buy health coverage. Many artists I spoke with are older, coming to the profession later in life. Many of us over fifty have pre-existing conditions and need regular health care.

Artists expressed concerns about the limited health coverage available in Buffalo and Pepin counties. These counties recently joined the dubious ranks of counties with only one health plan under the Healthcare.gov marketplace. Because of federal uncertainty, five counties, include La Crosse, are down to only one provider next year under the marketplace.

Farmers feared losing health coverage or changing long-standing relationships with providers.

The fear of losing health care is stressful  I heard and felt it as conversation after conversation shifted to health insurance.

As I watched the vibrantly dressed people soaking in the imaginative art, I thought about how experiencing the art fair provided a balm for our stressful lives.

Gazing at the pottery I nearly bumped into a retired physician and his wife. He also saw the attraction people found to art as a way to heal our stressed world. He shared his experiences over the years.

When I ask How are you? what do you think is the number one complaint I get? he asked.

Patients say to me Im stressed, Doctor. When I open up the hood and look inside, I see stress.

Art brings beauty. It softens the heart, the doctor shared. The art fair helps make it better.

I watched men in florescent orange with camo, a woman in sheer black lace with her back covered in tattoos and another in a brightly colored African Dashiki.

People came together creating their own art among all the wares for sale. In all of this diversity was a beautiful harmony.

Somehow, we must take this approach to health care. A plan unique for each person. Respecting our own individuality and needs. Also, in harmony with others. Sharing the risk. Working for all.
Not only as an insurance agent, but also as a resident of this fine city of Winona, I want to say thank you to the firefighters, water department, 911 dispatch, and whoever else was involved in getting Winonas fire safety rating to go from a class 3 to a class 2.

The fact that there are currently no class 1s and only two class 2s in the whole state of Minnesota demonstrates how great an achievement this is. The improvements youve made benefit all of us to help prevent and successfully fight fires.

Jason Banitt and I look forward to seeing how this affects the home insurance rates with Farmers Insurance. As Winona Fire Chief Curt Bittle said, This is a big, big deal, and I couldnt agree more!
If youve spotted someone walking circles around a parking lot, or struggling to check out at a store, you might have been in a position to help a neighbor who suffers from dementia.

Advocates are working to make Baraboo a dementia-friendly community. That means training first responders and private sector workers how to recognize the signs of dementia and how to help.

Were trying to teach people how to work with people with dementia, because theyre everywhere, said Janet Wiegel, outreach specialist for the Alzheimers and Dementia Alliance of Wisconsin. We have to learn to live with it.

She heads up a regional branch serving Sauk, Columbia and Marquette counties. As of 2015, there were 1,203 diagnosed cases of dementia in Sauk County. That number is expected to nearly double by 2035 as the baby boomers age.

Wiegel said 70 percent of those diagnosed with dementia live at home. Some struggle to live independently as dementia affects their movement, as well as their verbal and cognitive abilities. Sufferers can become confused or angry.

Everyday citizens can help by identifying warning signs and taking action. Wiegel and Cathy Bindl, program coordinator with the local Aging and Disability Resource Center, have trained local law enforcement and the employees of some local businesses to address dementia.

During a half-hour training session, people learn that smiling, speaking slowly and offering help can ease a dementia sufferers distress. The simple little things can make a huge difference, Bindl said.

If you see someone using crutches, you hold a door open for them, right? Although their condition can be trickier to spot, dementia sufferers need similar acts of courtesy. Its their brain, not their body, that is ailing. With dementia, you dont see that physical change because its in your skull, Bindl said.

If you see someone staring at a gas pump because theyve forgotten how to fill their tank, ask if they need help pumping gas. If you spot someone walking up and down the aisles at the market with a full shopping cart, ask if they need help checking out. Rather than prosecuting a confused customer for shoplifting, a cafe might work with the family to establish a line of credit to ensure coffee and pastries are paid for.

The sad thing about dementia is people get embarrassed and isolate themselves, said Bindl, noting that dementia sufferers need daily interaction and stimulation to slow the conditions progress. We need to learn to deal with it before it starts growing.

Advocates already have trained 150 local law enforcement officers on dementia awareness, as well as the employees of Walgreens and Downtown Family Dental. They hope to reach church congregations, civic groups and libraries. We want to get everyone who is willing to be trained, Wiegel said.

She has helped form a task force and is looking to add members as part of the push to make Baraboo a dementia-friendly community. Baraboo would be the first community in Sauk County to be so designated by the lzheimers and Dementia Alliance of Wisconsin. The task force meets monthly, and members are asked to make an 18-month commitment.

Were looking at trying to get the community involved, Wiegel said. We need more people to make this effective.

Becoming a dementia-friendly community takes up to two years. Advocates chose Baraboo because its home to a regional Aging and Disability Resource Center, as well as nearby support groups and other resources.

Theres so many things already in place, Wiegel said. It makes it a natural step.
We all know how it feels to be trapped in the bank. Maybe youre in line behind a kid depositing his summer lemonade stand money one quarter at a time. Or youre waiting behind a customer like me, who never has any of the family account numbers on him and has to ask the teller to look them up. Or youre stuck for three hours inside an ATM.

Last week, a maintenance worker in Texas spent a good part of his Wednesday  he would no doubt call it a bad part of his Wednesday  trapped inside an ATM. He escaped by using an ability many of us perfected in junior high: Passing notes.

Heres the story, according to Americas leading authority on wokka-wokka wackiness, the New York Times: Just after 2 p.m., a person in Corpus Christi had just completed a transaction at a Bank of America ATM when a surprise slid through the receipt slot. Please help, read a handwritten note on a thin strip of paper. Im stuck in here, and I dont have my phone. Thats weird: When I get a surprise from the receipt slot, its a nastygram informing me the account is overdrawn.

The worker had been fixing a lock when a door shut behind him, trapping him inside the ATM. He noticed customers were using the machine, and tried passing notes through the receipt slot. Several ignored the notes, figuring it was a gag that would land them on Candid Camera. The guy might have had better luck if he had passed a $20 through the slot along with each note.

Finally one customer took the note seriously, spotted a police officer driving by  How about that? A cop when you need one!  and flagged him down. The officer suspected a prank, but heard a faint sound upon approaching the ATM. It was the workers muffled screams. The cop called the number the worker provided, confirmed he had been dispatched to the bank, and summoned help. A half-hour later, police kicked down the door and freed the worker.

So, how does a guy get trapped in an ATM? This one was attached to a bank that was under construction. A door led into a vault from which the worker could service the machine from the inside. He came to repair the locking mechanism, but when the door shut behind him, he was trapped.

No one involved  not the worker, the contracting company, the bank nor the customer who flagged down police  wanted to be interviewed. Thats a shame, because it would be interesting to find out how a man feels when he has access to all the cash he could ever want, but no ability to spend it. He was surrounded by $20s, but all he wanted was fresh air.

Fortunately he was resourceful enough to use a technique that probably is becoming a lost art. When I was in school, passing notes was a key mode of communication. Whats on the chemistry test this afternoon? Is it true that Bobby and Shannon broke up? Do these tight-rolled, acid-washed Guess jeans make my ankles look fat? Such questions wouldve gone unanswered without notes. Written on actual paper. With pens.

I imagine todays middle-schoolers Snapchat such questions and answers these days. They dont know about passing notes. And they have no idea what Candid Camera was.

These same youths probably never walk into a bank to conduct business. They use the drive-up window or the ATM. After all, theyd hate to get trapped at the bank behind some guy who cant remember his account number.

That being the case, kids today need to master the art of receiving a note. Whether youre executing a lightning-fast handoff with your best friend as you pass between classes or youre on the receiving end of a distress call coming from inside an ATM, knowing how to handle a note is critical. Someones life could depend on it.
Beaver Dam is borrowing $3 million after the Common Council approved a financing report on the 2017 Capital Improvement Plan, stormwater projects and tax increment district 7 debts on Monday night.

Carol Wirth from the Wisconsin Public Finance Professionals said $1.6 million of the general obligation promissory notes are for CIP projects and $472,000 for stormwater projects.

Engineering projects for this year include various street rehabs ($273,500), North Lincoln Avenue from East Maple Avenue to East Third Street ($55,000), North Spring Street from Maple Avenue to Mackie Street ($66,000), West Mackie Street from North Center Street to North Spring Street ($260,000) and the East Third Street parking lot reconstruction ($65,000). The Fire Department will borrow funds for water/ice rescue equipment ($170,500) and breathing apparatus program ($210,000). Police are borrowing $50,000 for an outdoor shooting range.

Public works only borrowing this year is for a front-end loader ($195,000).

The Parks Department will borrow for window replacement on the Municipal Building ($211,000) and Lincoln Park playground equipment update ($44,000).

Stormwater projects include North Lincoln from Park Avenue to East Third Street ($3,500), Hiawatha Drive from Scott Street to Grove Street ($10,000), West Mackie Street from North Center Street to North Spring Street ($55,000), library parking lot reconstruction ($15,000), Rosendale Street from Curie Street to Pearl Street ($137,500), Gilmore Avenue from North Center Street to York Street (209,000) and a stormwater system update ($42,000).

In addition, taxable general obligation refinancing bonds will refinance a 2017 state trust fund loan of $1 million for development incentives for TIF 7. This TIF covers the 151 Business Park located along Kellom Road. In a tax increment financing district, property taxes collected in a district are used to pay for the costs of the improvements there over a specified time.

The two resolutions were unanimously approved.
Donald Gehrke

Donald V. Don Gehrke passed away Friday, July 14, 2017, at Marvins Manor in Horicon.

Don was born Oct. 10, 1942, in Fond du Lac, to the late Victor and Josephine (nee Petrofsky) Gehrke. He graduated from Dodgeland High School in 1961 and from Moraine Park Technical Institute in West Bend. Don worked as a machinist and tool and die maker for 29 years at John Deere Horicon Works, retiring in 2001. He then had more time for Rock River Archaeological Society and Mid America Geographic Foundation. Don always loved the history of those who were here before us in the Dodge County area. He, along with RRAS members, worked many fulfilling hours on the establishment of Nitschke Mounds County Park, while learning much from Wisconsin state archaeologists who worked on the park starting in 2003. Don and his wife, Pearl, took many field trips throughout the Midwest and got to learn more with RRAS and MAGF. He enjoyed RRAS annual event at the DNR Education Center and getting the youths involved in corn grinding and fire starting while sharing Native American artifacts found in the Dodge County area. Don made many friends and learned much from them about Horicon Marsh history while sharing a few stories of his own. When Donald M. Miescke wrote his book, Horicon Marsh History, Don was honored to contribute chapter 3 titled Horicon Marsh Native American History.

A lot of camping was done with the Gehrke family with lots of stories told around the campfire. Kohler Andrae State Park was also a favorite destination. Locations for family vacations were chosen based on historical interest and helped learn about Mother Nature. Don was proud of his family and the close bond they shared.

Those Don leaves behind to cherish his memory include his wife of 53 years, Pearl; two children, Michael Mike (Heidi) Gehrke of Appleton and Julie (Tim) Cook of Waupun; seven grandchildren, Aiden and Jordan Gehrke and Skylar and Payton VanDenBoom, Benjamin (Macy) Cook, Kaytee (fiance Adam Gogert) Cook, and Ethan Cook; one great-grandchild, Kayden Gogert; a sister, JoAnn Gehrke of Beaver Dam; a brother, James Jim Gehrke of Wisconsin Dells; other relatives and many friends.

In addition to his parents, Don was preceded in death by a brother-in-law, Ted Wahlen and a sister-in-law, Lorna Adair.

A Mass of Christian burial will be held at noon Wednesday, July 19, 2017, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, 950 Washington St., Horicon. The Rev. Michael Petrie will officiate and burial will follow at St. Malachy Cemetery.

The Gehrke family will greet relatives and friends at the church Wednesday from 9 a.m. to the time of the Mass.

In lieu of flowers, memorials to Sacred Heart Catholic Church or Agnesian Hospice Hope are appreciated.

The Gehreke family would like to extend their heartfelt appreciation to Agnesian Hospice Hope, especially Larry, Macy and Bill.

Myrhum Patten Miller & Kietzer funeral homes have been entrusted with Dons arrangements. Additional information and guest book may be found at www.myrhum-patten.com.

As the last three sentences in Dons chapter state, There is so much one can enjoy in life that has no cost but is priceless. It is seeing and enjoying Gods world that I have found. Many before me have walked this land and found that peace.
In 2016, a team of Tribune reporters found many Chicago-area pharmacies shockingly lax in warning customers of potentially dangerous drug interactions. The resulting series, titled Dangerous Doses, revealed that more than half the pharmacies reporters visited failed to warn of a possibly risky or fatal prescription drug mix.

More than half. That finding got the attention of consumers, pharmacy chains, regulators and lawmakers.

It isnt just a local issue. Tens of thousands of Americans wind up in the hospital every year because of toxic drug interactions.

One major reason: Pharmacists often are in a hurry, sometimes filling hundreds of prescriptions a day, the investigation found.

The series prompted Illinois Rep. Mary Flowers, D-Chicago, to introduce legislation that would attack the problem. Her proposal would limit the hours pharmacists could work and the number of orders they could fill hourly. Her bill would mandate half-hour meal breaks and two extra 15-minute breaks on full shifts. And it included whistleblower protections for pharmacists who flag abuses or other problems.

Flowers bill died in Illinois spring legislative session. We credit her for an earnest effort to confront a major health crisis.

That crisis still demands attention.

But a heavy dose of regulation is not the right prescription. Illinois officials shouldnt be micromanaging pharmacy owners about how many prescriptions a pharmacist can fill in an hour or how often she needs to take a break. Companies rightfully decide those rules, and they have a strong incentive to make sure those rules dont compromise employee performance. If pharmacies fail to protect patient safety or treat their workers fairly, they risk legal repercussions. Company execs know it doesnt take much to ruin a companys brand image with consumers  or to provoke good employees to find jobs elsewhere.

Managing employee workload is not the whole solution. Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner has moved to tighten regulations to require all pharmacists to counsel patients on first-time prescriptions and any changes to a patients medicines. Under the governors initiative, inspectors would focus more on drug interaction issues and the state would dispatch mystery shoppers to test how well pharmacies are fulfilling their duties. We like that approach.

Leading pharmacy chains, including CVS, Walgreens and Walmart, say they already have taken significant safety steps at stores nationwide in response to the Tribune series. Some of the pharmacies say theyre improving pharmacist training and upgrading computer alert systems to flag dangerous interactions. These chains also are under pressure to create better working conditions for pharmacists.

If pharmacy companies follow through on promised changes, customers will be safer and employees happier. If they fail, or just pay lip service, they can expect Flowers and others lawmakers to return with even more intrusive government regulations. Take your pick, pharmacy execs.

Today, 1 in 5 Americans takes three or more drugs; 1 in 10 takes five or more. As the population ages and new drugs come into use, the peril of deadly interactions grows.

Consumers can play a vital role in preventing these interactions. If you have questions about medication, dont hesitate to ask. If your pharmacist is too busy to answer all your questions, dont hesitate to take your business to another pharmacy.
The Volunteers of Columbus Community Hospital will host a Euchre Card Party Tuesday, July 25 at 6 p.m. at the Columbus Area Senior Center. Players of all skill levels are welcome. The evening will feature cash prizes for top players, door prizes, sandwiches, beverages and sundaes donated by Culvers.

Admission is $5 per person. Tickets may be purchased at the door or in advance at the Volunteers of CCH Gift Shoppe.

Proceeds from the event are used to provide scholarships to graduating seniors pursuing a healthcare career.

The following 2017 recipients each received a $1,000 scholarship on behalf of the Volunteers of CCH.

Thomas Kolman, Columbus High School

Jared Gillett, Marshall High School

Chloe Slotten, Fall River High School

McKenzie Rybak, Sun Prairie High School

Kaleigh Ludeman, Waterloo High School
This weekend's Festa Italiana at the Henry Maier Festival Park on Milwaukees lakefront includes an exhibit featuring several artifacts from the Christopher Columbus Museum located in the Columbus Antique Mall. The items at Festa Italiana are available for viewing Saturday, July 22 from 11:30 a.m. to midnight and Sunday, July 23 from 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Every year the festival features different exhibits in the cultural tent and the Columbus Museum has contributed items of interest in the past. This year the focus is on one of Italys smallest regions, Liguria. This area is known as the Italian Riviera. It borders France, hugging the northern coastline along the Ligurian Sea, and includes the cities of Genoa, Imperia, Savona and La Spezia as well as five colorful fishing villages of the Cinque Terre. Genoa is the regions capital  one of the most important ports in the Mediterranean and home to Christopher Columbus and other explorers.
DETROIT  A certified pre-owned vehicle costs more than a regular used car, but it can give buyers some peace of mind in an often murky market.

Certified pre-owned vehicles are used cars that are backed by an automakers guarantee. Theyre usually newer cars, coming off two- or three-year leases. Certified pre-owned programs limit the miles the cars can have on them  under 60,000, in many cases  and put the cars through a rigorous inspection. They come with extended warranties and, sometimes, extra perks like roadside assistance or a satellite radio subscription.

If I want a car that hasnt been abused, this is one of the best ways to avoid all that guesswork, says Matt Jones, senior editor of consumer advice for the car shopping site Edmunds.com.

Certified pre-owned programs have been growing in popularity as the supply of used cars balloons in the U.S. New vehicle sales have risen for seven straight years and as many as a third of those vehicles were leased. That has left automakers with a steady stream of two- or three-year-old vehicles with limited mileage that are ideal for certified pre-owned programs.

U.S. certified pre-owned sales grew by 61 percent to 2.6 million between 2010 and 2016, according to Cox Automotive. Still, they only made up a fraction of the 28.7 million used cars sold by franchised and independent dealers last year.

Certified pre-owned status generally adds 6 to 8 percent to the price of the car, or between $1,000 and $1,500, Jones said. A Ford dealer in Michigan is currently advertising a certified pre-owned 2014 Ford Edge SEL with 22,748 miles on it for $21,943. A CarMax dealer in Maryland is offering a non-certified pre-owned 2014 Edge SEL, with 33,000 miles, for $1,044 less. By comparison, a new 2017 Edge SEL starts at $31,790.

For the extra cost, factory-trained mechanics will perform 150-, 160- or even 180-point inspections of the vehicle, which is usually less than five or six years old. Among other things, theyll check for any outstanding recalls and make those repairs.

After that, what you get depends on the brand. Automakers may include whatever is left over from the original powertrain warranty, which covers the engine and transmission, along with a shorter bumper-to-bumper warranty, which covers the engine as well as interior parts like the infotainment system or air conditioning. Roadside assistance is often included for at least some period of time. Some manufacturers charge a $50 to $100 deductible for repairs while the car is under warranty; others dont. Buick offers three months worth of OnStar and lets buyers return the car within three days if theyre not happy.

Dealers pay automakers a fee to certify a used vehicle. Kia, for example, gets $450 for every certified pre-owned vehicle sold, says Maria Williams, a senior certified pre-owned retail support manager with Kia. Whats more, she says, Kia is getting a relationship with buyers who will keep coming back to the dealership for service. In 2016, 47 percent of buyers who returned to the car market after owning a certified pre-owned Kia bought a new Kia, she says, based on data from the consulting firm R.L. Polk. That rate dropped to 33 percent among owners of a non-certified pre-owned used Kia.

Here are some things to think about if youre shopping for a certified pre-owned vehicle:

DECIDE IF ITS WORTH IT

Experts are split on this one. Jones, who owns a certified pre-owned vehicle, says a certified pre-owned vehicle is worth the extra cost because youre getting a higher quality car and the promise of less hassle. Dealers are also more willing to deal on a certified pre-owned car, he says, because theyve already paid the automaker to get it certified. But Consumer Reports advises against getting a certified pre-owned vehicle. The magazine says certified pre-owned cars may not be in any better shape than any other low-mileage used car and buyers are better off pocketing the $1,500 or so and saving it for repairs or putting it toward a new car. Consumer Reports says shoppers considering a used car should have it inspected by a trusted independent mechanic before they buy.

MAKE SURE ITS REALLY CERTIFIED

Certified pre-owned vehicles can only be sold by a brands franchised dealers. Independent dealers may sometimes call a vehicle certified or Carfax certified, but that doesnt mean its a manufacturer-backed program with the same quality guarantees as an officially certified vehicle. Check the details of certified pre-owned programs on automakers web sites or in dealership brochures so you know what you should be getting, and look for the certified pre-owned sticker or logo on the car.

READ THE FINE PRINT

Some certified pre-owned programs are more generous than others. Kia certified pre-owned buyers, for example, get whatever is left of the cars 10-year, 100,000-mile powertrain warranty, plus an additional year or 12,000 miles of bumper-to-bumper coverage. Honda certified pre-owned buyers get a similar deal, but the original warranty is for seven years and 100,000 miles. Lexus offers a two-year full warranty with unlimited mileage, a great perk for drivers who drive a lot of miles. Porsche will certify vehicles that are up to 8 years old, as long as they have low enough mileage. Familiarize yourself with the terms for the brands youre interested in and see what might work best for you.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  Straddling the world's most heavily fortified border, the Korean truce village of Panmunjom is a potential flashpoint where North Korean soldiers hacked to death two American officers at the height of the Cold War.

It's also where the rival Koreas have held rare high-profile talks, and top American officials have visited to demonstrate American commitment to defending South Korea.

A look at Panmunjom, a day after South Korea's new liberal president offered talks with North Korea at the village in what would be the Koreas' first face-to-face meeting since late 2015.



FARMING VILLAGE TO ARMISTICE SITE

Panmunjom, once an obscure farming village, is where an armistice was signed to pause the 1950-53 Korean War, with North Korea and China on one side and the American-led U.N. Command on the other.

No civilians live there, and a cluster of blue huts form a Joint Security Area overseen by North Korea and the U.N. Command.

It's located in the 248-kilometer (154-mile) -long Demilitarized Zone that forms the de facto Korean border. The DMZ is guarded on both sides by hundreds of thousands of combat-ready troops, razor-wire fences and tank traps. More than a million mines are believed to be buried inside it.

At Panmunjom, South Korean troops wearing aviator sunglasses stand in taekwondo poses with their legs apart, arms bent and fists clenched. North Korean soldiers use binoculars to monitor the South. The soldiers are often only several yards (several meters) from each other.

These days, it's also a popular tourist spot drawing visitors on both sides. Tourists from the South are often told by their guides to be extremely careful about what gestures they make so as not to antagonize the nearby North Korean soldiers.

The 1953 armistice has yet to be replaced with a peace treaty, leaving the Korean Peninsula technically in a state of war. About 28,500 U.S. troops are deployed in South Korea.



DEADLY CLASHES

In August 1976, two American army officers were killed by ax-wielding North Korean soldiers. The U.S. officers had been sent out to trim a 40-foot (12-meter) tree that obstructed the view from a checkpoint. The attack prompted Washington to fly nuclear-capable B-52 bombers toward the DMZ to intimidate North Korea.

In 1984, North Korean and U.N. Command soldiers traded gunfire after a Soviet citizen defected by sprinting to the South Korean sector of the truce village. The incident left three North Korean soldiers and one South Korean soldier dead.

In 1996, North Korea sent hundreds of armed troops into Panmunjom after declaring the armistice a "useless piece of paper." South Korea boosted its surveillance to its highest level in 15 years, and the North Korean troops later withdrew.

The rival Koreas have had similar violent confrontations along other parts of the DMZ in the past. No deadly clashes have occurred in recent years, but a 2015 land mine blast that maimed two South Korean soldiers pushed the Koreas to the brink of an armed conflict. South Korea blames North Korea for the explosion.

PRESIDENTIAL VISITS

U.S. presidents and other top officials have often traveled to Panmunjom and other areas of the DMZ at times of heightened tension on the Korean Peninsula. They have peered through binoculars across the border and vowed to boost the U.S. military alliance with South Korea.

In 1993, then President Bill Clinton visited Panmunjom when the North Korean nuclear crisis first flared. In 2002, President George W. Bush visited the DMZ a few weeks after he labeled North Korea part of an "axis of evil."

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited Panmunjom in July 2010, four months after the sinking of a South Korean warship blamed on North Korea killed 46 sailors. North Korea has denied responsibility.

In 2012, ahead of a planned North Korean long-range rocket launch, President Barack Obama visited a frontline U.S. military camp just south of the DMZ and told American troops they are protectors of "freedom's frontier." Obama's trip came days after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited Panmunjom.

In March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson began a visit to South Korea by touring Panmunjom. Hours later, in Seoul, he declared that all options, including pre-emptive military action, were on the table regarding North Korea.

In April, Vice President Mike Pence visited Panmunjom and later warned North Korea not to test America's resolve and military power.

SITE FOR RARE TALKS

Military officials from North Korea and the U.N. Command used to meet irregularly at Panmunjom to oversee the armistice. In recent years, it has been used for talks between the two Koreas.

South Korean President Moon has proposed that an initial round of talks on easing cross-border tensions be held Friday in a North Korean building in the northern part of the village, followed by a second round on Aug. 1 in a South Korean facility in the southern portion to discuss reunions of families separated by the Korean War.

The most recent high-profile meeting in Panmunjom was in August 2015, when negotiators for the rivals met for nearly 40 hours and reached a deal that allowed them to pull back from a military standoff triggered by the land mine explosion. Animosities flared again after North Korea conducted a fourth nuclear test in January 2016.

Panmunjom has also been used to arrange civilian exchanges and humanitarian programs, such as temporarily family reunions.
If you need a book, theres no better place to go than a library. Not only will you find an expansive collection of reading options, but everything on the shelves is impeccably organized.

That level of organized volume is what the Friends of the Portage Library is offering as the group prepares for its annual book sale fundraiser, which begins today.

Its coming along well, said Marvin Jensen, an FPL director. We have so many books  thats the real challenge now, to get them all in place by tomorrow night, but we will.

On Tuesday morning, the Portage Public Librarys Bidwell Room had folding tables covered with boxes of books and just enough room for a person to peruse their way between the tables and across the room. Side rooms were starting to fill and one volunteer sorted titles on the floor between Holidays and Sociology.

This is the most that we have ever had, Jensen said. We have an off-site storage unit which was entirely filled  there were 457 sorted boxes there and half of them are still there. At this point weve only been able to empty half of them.

The total is somewhere north of 12,000 books collected over the past year, leading up to the annual sale, which has been conducted for more than a decade.

Were fortunate to have the help of many volunteers, Jensen said. In the course of the year, we have around 80 volunteers working on this. So we have a monthly sort. The second Friday of every month, volunteers come in and they sort the books and box them for storage, so that helps us greatly when we get to this time of year.

Revenue from the sale, with items including books, graphic novels, CDs, DVDs, and audiobooks, mostly tagged at less than a dollar, goes toward funding library programs throughout the year.

In the childrens library, the funding has supported Preschool Story Time, Dads & Donuts, and the Summer Library Program. Among the snacks, accessories and other frills that make the programs possible are hundreds of free books for kids.

As part of the summer reading program, Librarian Dawn Foster explained, for every 10 hours of reading, participants get to visit the prize room, where they can pick a free book to take home. Foster showed that it has been working, with the selection starting to thin.

We couldnt run our department without their funding, Foster said of the Friends efforts.

For older kids and adults, book sale funds have supported author visits, calligraphy workshops, yoga classes and other programs.

They also support homebound delivery, Library Director Jessica Bergin said of the Friends personal contributions, and they can be counted on to bring some tasty baked treats for some of the programs.

Jensen said he would like to see at least two-thirds of the items sold over the weekend. The Friends of the Library group is in contact with Columbia Correctional Institution to help supply its library, and likewise the Federal Correctional Institution in Oxford, with any unsold items.

After a year of preparation and notices posted in 37 cities, towns and villages as far as Sun Prairie and Wautoma, the doors will open with a preview from 6-8 p.m. today for members of the Friends of the Portage Library, though membership is available at the door. The general public is welcome Thursday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., Friday from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
The expanded free Portage Summer Lunch Program kicked off in June and more than halfway through the summer, organizers are seeing results and getting ready for a new challenge.

The program offers free on-site lunches to any child under 18 every weekday in the summer. At the groups meeting Monday at the Portage Public Library, Karen Nelson, UW-Extension youth educator, announced the program was on track to serve 5,000 to 6,000 meals by the end of the summer.

As of the end of the fifth week of the program, 2,466 meals have been served, compared with 3,045 in all of 2016 and 1,036 in 2015.

The program expanded to serving four Portage sites this summer  the library, Goodyear Park, Lincoln Park and the school bus stop near the Columbia County Fairgrounds. The last location was added based on the number of school-age kids living in the area, but has not seen a response to match, which begged the question of whether they should pull out.

The answer was a definite no.

Theories included that the children arent there in the afternoons or that it has to do with the lunch stop being the last on the route, from 12:45 to 1:05 p.m. Nonetheless, with the stop only being 20 minutes and already established for the few regulars they do see, the group decided to leave the program unchanged through the summer and re-evaluate for the future. Leftovers are delivered to River Haven Shelter.

Columbia County has a child food insecurity rate of 16.9 percent, according to the University of Wisconsins Wisconsin Food Security Project 2015 estimates, reflecting the population having uncertain or limited access to a healthy amount of food.

Although there is a clear demand for food assistance programs in Portage and Columbia County, the area is comparatively fortunate, with Sauk County estimated to have child food insecurity of 18.5 percent, 19.9 percent in Juneau County, 21.2 percent in Marquette County and 23.4 percent in Adams County.

In Portage, Summer Lunch Program participation numbers have varied according to summer school schedules at Rusch Elementary, adjacent to Goodyear Park where the number of kids ranges between 50 and 60 on a typical day.

Lincoln Park is between 12 and 14 (kids) most days, and then we popped up to 32, Nelson said. At the library we were doing 33, but weve dropped back into the 20s.

Following an upswing in community interest, the Summer Lunch Program has since divided into two subcommittees of around a half-dozen core volunteer leaders each, one group focusing on the Summer Lunch Program and the other developing the Portage Weekend Snack Pack Program sponsored by the Library Foundation.

We could use more volunteers, Nelson said.

Theyre very good and theyre very consistent with it, the Rev. David Hankins of Portage Presbyterian Church said of the volunteers filling the delivery schedule. But its like there is a continual plea to help with this.

When the program started in 2015 with the help of a $2,000 grant from the United Way, it was as an extension of a Wisconsin Dells-based program supported by the Dells Schools District, Central Wisconsin Community Action and UW-Extension. Meals are delivered to Portage each day from Wisconsin Dells.

The Portage group decided to expand its program by two weeks (Aug. 22 through Sept. 1) to cover the entire summer, taking it upon themselves to make that happen. Without lunches being delivered from the Dells, the Portage program is getting assistance from Portage catering company Northwoods Inc. of Wisconsin and the local Pizza Ranch restaurant.

We are set and Northwoods will be packaging our meals for the last two weeks, Hankins said. But we need to figure out how to distribute them to the sites, adding that Pizza Ranch would be providing meals for the last two Fridays.

The program, which begins in June after the school year ends, has wrapped up the past two years in mid-August, so organizers arent sure how many participants theyll see in the expanded time period.

In these last two weeks, we have nothing to go on, said Dawn Foster, librarian at Portage Public Library. So we dont know what (numbers of kids) were going to get, flying by the seat of our pants, totally new.
An uncertain future for Amtrak is the opposite of "wonderful, wonderful, wonderful" to Margo Holzman.

The Poynette resident used glowing terms to describe her long use of the Empire Builder Line as she waited for the westbound train at Amtraks Portage station. The train  only 8 minutes late Monday night  would take her daughter and grandchild back to Minnesota. They had attended a funeral that day.

Susan and Mike Emmerich of Robinson, Illinois, waited for the eastbound train for Effingham, Illinois. Their train arrived 5 hours late, and they didnt mind that much. They had been visiting their daughter in Portage.

Two Amish sisters, Mary and Naomi Miller, were also on their way home to Cisne, Illinois. They had been visiting family in Dalton. They said they use Empire Builder four times a year.

What Amtraks Empire Builder Line provided last year for the 7,800 people who used its Portage station might get overlooked when compared with rail service in big cities  like Milwaukees 600,000 and Chicagos 3.2 million total users. But Portage wouldnt be overlooked by Holzman.

We need it, she said. Every time Ive used it, it was very important to me.

President Donald Trumps proposed 2018 budget would reduce Amtraks funding from $1.5 billion to $760 million, part of a larger package of cuts that trims $2.4 billion from federal transportation in all. That would end all of Amtraks long-distance routes  15 of them  including the Empire Builder, which stretches 2,200 miles from Chicago to Seattle with Wisconsin stops in Milwaukee, Columbus, Portage, Wisconsin Dells, Tomah and La Crosse.

As Congress decides Empire Builders fate, local leaders say the lines impact in small communities isnt told  completely  in the numbers. Empire Builder, which links Chicago and Milwaukee to St. Paul, brings people to and from vacations, families and business dealings  but the line also brings residents of big cities to the smaller places they might otherwise never find reasons to visit.

So what would it mean if Empire Builder were gone?

Where it stands

Sen. Tammy Baldwin said in an emailed statement to the Daily Register she is a strong supporter of reinvesting in passenger rail and is working across party lines to protect routes like the Empire Builder. Baldwin supported the 2017 federal budget that increased funding for Amtrak  from $1.4 billion to $1.5 billion  she noted.

Long-distance routes like the Empire Builder achieved a little victory late last week when GOP appropriators in the House rejected the White House proposal, National Association of Railroad Passengers President Jim Mathews said. The lawmakers released a draft that actually would boost spending for rail by $360 million over current levels, targeting repair work along Amtraks northeast corridor.

Rail investments were part of the House Appropriations Committee's $17.8 billion proposal that would be $1.5 billion more than the White House transportation plan but $646 million less than current levels, cutting federal transit dollars.

The White House proposal, which cuts $2.4 billion from federal transportation in all, still needs to be sorted out by Congress in the coming months, so long-distance routes like the Empire Builder have many steps yet to clear, Mathews said. His organization, NARP, is a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that fights for all forms of transportation, primarily passenger train services.

The proposed cuts from the White House wouldnt kill Amtraks Hiawatha trains that link Chicago and Milwaukee, so Wisconsin is not among the 23 states that would lose Amtrak service entirely under the propsal, said Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari.

While the budget is discussed behind closed doors, moving from committee to committee, the potential severing of the lines westward links has been a topic largely exclusive to the small communities it serves.

History is at stake, some of these communities' leaders say. Amtraks Empire Builder Line has existed for 46 years, and the link between the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest goes all the way back to Great Northern Railways operation of the line from 1929 to 1970.

On the map

Its an identity, Steve Sobiek, the city of Portage's director of business development and planning, said of Empire Builder last week. Portages service started in 1971, when Amtrak rerouted Empire Builder.

Sobiek in January had beamed about Amtraks future while addressing business leaders from the Portage Area Chamber of Commerce. The Portage Amtrak station had seen a 27 percent increase in ridership from 2015 to 2016, he told them, far exceeding the states average increase of 1 percent ridership. That was the biggest increase on the line in Wisconsin.

Possible expansion of Empire Builder makes it hard for Sobiek to separate the idea of the line ending from the idea of it doubling. Discussions as of late last year had begun in Wisconsin and Minnesota for adding another train in each direction, an expansion that Sobiek said last week would substantially increase train travel, locally and beyond.

By removing the limitations of only one train going in each direction per day, the appeal of the Empire Builder to rural residents would change dramatically, City Manager Shawn Murphy and the Chambers Executive Director Marianne Hanson said.

(Expansion) would have an impact on ridership in Portage by reducing waiting time and making more of those business trips more feasible, said Murphy, who along with Sobiek, Mayor Rick Dodd and the Chamber, meets annually with Amtrak representatives. This population is more sparsely populated, spread out  but thats why we think it is so successful, because it serves a clear need for these people.

Already, Hanson said, Portage is a destination for people who havent visited here because we have an Amtrak.

So if Amtrak has helped put small cities like Portage on the map, as Hanson suggested, subtracting it from the Amtrak maps is neither appetizing nor easy to picture for many people.

Down the line

Customers of Julies Java House in Columbus are well aware of Trumps transportation budget proposal. The owner, Julie Hornbacher, has made sure of it.

Hornbacher, whose business has been located next to the Amtrak stop for 14 years, is encouraging people to contact their legislators in an effort to save Empire Builder. Her customers know the phone numbers and addresses of local lawmakers  she has postings on the walls  and that means they know how to share what they feel.

Cutting it would affect all of the small communities, all the way out to Seattle, said Hornbacher, who when interviewed for this story last week was in the middle of her usual 80-hour workweek. Hornbacher works 60 hours a week at the coffee house and another 20 as a part-time contractor for Amtrak, she estimated. She became the caretaker host in Columbus shortly after it lost its ticket agent in May of last year. Columbus had a full-service station until, she said, the number of people who purchase tickets online grew to the point where Amtrak decided to send its Columbus agent to Milwaukee.

I open the station every day, I make sure its clean and I lock up at night, Hornbacher said. She also trots over to the station during the boarding and alighting periods to answer users questions and help with their luggage. A lot of the people she helps each day are first-time Amtrak users.

People come here and walk and shop and eat, Hornbacher said. Empire Builders disappearance from places like Columbus 'would be catastrophic,' she believes. Many Amtrak users in Columbus are Amish or elderly, she said, thinking of the population that would so totally feel the loss of rail service.

Her business itself, she added, would need to revamp how we do things  but it was difficult for Hornbacher to imagine the specifics of such a change.

Wed have to do something, because Amtrak is so much a part of us.

Americas rural population

Other Wisconsin communities that would lose their Amtrak stations include La Crosse and Tomah. Going up the Mississippi River to St. Paul and across the Great Plains  North Dakota and Montana  hundreds of thousands of Empire Builders users would lose service, people in rural areas who have fewer options for traveling to big cities.

In a statement emailed to the Daily Register last week, Amtrak's Magliari said the budget cut would significantly impact the more than 30 million people who depend on Amtrak across the nation.

Amtrak currently services 46 states  all the Lower 48 except South Dakota and Wyoming  and more than 500 communities, but the proposal would cut service in 23 states and shift major costs onto our remaining Northeast Corridor and state-support trains, imperiling them, Magliari said.

Losing 15 long-distance routes would end Amtraks rail services for 4.6 million passengers  15 percent of its total ridership and 22 percent of its ticket revenue. Amtrak serves 40 percent of Americas rural population with these routes  so theyd be lost too, Magliari said.

Funding sources

Though Amtrak is subsidized, almost 90 percent of its funding is non-federal, Magliari said. Non-federal dollars include state funding in some areas, and the money we bring in our own selling tickets.

Empire Builder generated $51.7 million in passenger revenue last year and its ridership of 454,000 was up 3.7 percent. Both revenue and ridership were at record levels  for the Empire Builder line and Amtrak's entire operation  Magliari said.

Trumps proposed transportation budget cuts came just a couple of years after the FAST Act authorized five years of increased funding for Amtrak, Magliari noted, with Congress recognizing, at that point, Amtrak services as a national transportation priority.

Additionally, Magliari wrote, there is broad consensus that significant capital investment in the aging infrastructure along the Northeast Corridor is essential to meet the long term needs of the Northeast region as well as the rest of the nation.

Empire Builder is Amtraks busiest long-distance route. But it does not make a profit like the Northeast Corridor. Amtrak is estimated to cover only two-thirds of Empire Builders total costs of operation.

Varied outlooks

Portage's station, which ranks 375th in ridership out of 534 Amtrak stations based on boarding and alighting numbers, has the fewest users among Wisconsins eight stops. That doesnt mean it has been overlooked by Amtrak, Sobiek said. The companys representatives always are looking for ways to boost ridership, and recently it put up a kiosk at the Portage terminal to help direct users to the downtown area.

Clearly, the area and city residents would have one less transportation option that is energy-efficient to travel to the West Coast and to the East Coast, including the Twin Cities and Milwaukee and Chicago, Sobiek said. People coming to Portage visit our restaurants, bars and retail stores and gas stations.

In Wisconsin Dells, which ranks higher than Portage in ridership  293rd in the U.S.  Empire Builder seems less significant when compared with Portage and Columbus. Bianca Johnson, assistant director of marketing and communications of the Wisconsin Dells Visitor and Convention Bureau, noted that her city is primarily a driving destination, a popular destination for people from all over the U.S., so the lines economic impact in Wisconsin Dells is minimal.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the rail lines were very important (for the Dells), she said. Johnson assumes that not many rural Wisconsin users could realistically use the line for work, even if they wanted to. Ive heard its not very reliable and often runs as much as two hours late.

That doesnt mean Johnsons hoping the Empire Builder option is ended. I think its fair to say the more options the better, for any tourist destination, she said.

Columbus City Administrator Patrick Vander Sanden  born and raised in the city that ranks 295th in ridership  said Empire Builder is key to showing off the historic value of the community. That includes its magnificent city hall and Farmers and Merchants Union Bank designed by Louis Sullivan, not to mention its antique mall and nice mix of restaurants downtown.

In Washington, D.C., Mathews and the others at NARP work their way through the bureaucracy that envelops rail service funding.

But the challenges rail services face are part of a larger pattern, where cuts, in general, overwhelmingly target poorer communities  and is part of an appropriations bills process that hasnt followed order for at least 10 years.

Thats not a train thing, Mathews said. Thats Washington.
George Inman, a 15-year-old from La Valle, ran away from home to join the Union Army during the Civil War. He was the drummer boy in the 12th Infantry, Company B. His story continues.

Inman and his unit also participated in the fall of Vicksburg and the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. During this last battle, he recounted an interesting anecdote.

Merton Edwin Krug wrote, The rebel Army was stationed high up on the mountainside, and the mountain was so straight up and down that they were unable to hit the Union troops close to the mountain below, in consequence of which fact the Rebels lighted the [cannon] balls and rolled them down the side of the mountain. Mr. Inman says that to prevent them from going off he and the others ran after them and pulled the fuses out. In this battle, Mr. Inman was wounded. It was only a slight flesh wound, but for a time he was unconscious. When he regained consciousness he was on a stretcher, being rushed to the rear. He made inquiry as to whither he was being taken, and, upon being informed, sprang from the stretcher, and returned to the field of battle.

Inman and his unit moved on to Atlanta and remained through the entire campaign, acting in his capacity as a drummer and skirmisher. He also assisted the Ambulance Brigade during and after the battles.

There were times when the food supplies ran low, and the men were sent on foraging expeditions. Inman describes one those expeditions to Krug, In one particular instance he and another fellow were out alone having been given permission to do so, but instructed to return in a short time, by his commander. Night fell upon the headquarters; dawn came again; then another day passed; another night, and so on until four days had passed. Then late in the afternoon, the two returned. When word reached the commander that the young foragers had returned he gave orders that they appear in audience, and decreed that they be court-martialed. Young Inman begged that they be allowed to explain and the commander went to see the two lads and what they had foraged. He was greatly amazed when he saw four wagonloads of foraged foodstuffs and a retinue of 300 Negroes who had followed the two youths in from the country through which they had foraged.

Inman was also a favorite among the soldiers and had many personal discourses with Generals Ulysses Grant and William Sherman. Many times did they share their tents and grub with the youngest drummer boy in the whole vast army, wrote Krug.

On the 24th of November, 1865, from Atlanta, began Shermans Grand March to the Sea. The call of the bugle, the tap of the drums, the stirring of such glorious songs as Tramp, Tramp, Tramp and Marching Through Georgia, how well does George Inman remember them till this day! With his drum and taps, beside the fife, miles and miles did he march, leading his company in the greatest march in American History, Shermans March to the Sea, noted Krug.

And then, the war of the rebellion was over. The Union had been preserved, and the citizens of the reunited states celebrated that occasion in Washington D.C. in May 1865. And Inmans unit was marching with thousands of other soldiers in the Grand Review.

The review was still fresh in Inmans mind when Krug interviewed him in 1928. A parade from morning till night, tens of thousands marching on the streets. There had been a band stand erected at a good point of advantage, where a large number of musicians were assembled, among whom was a lad of scarce 19, who had entered the conflict in 61 at the age of 15 and who now sat in the band stand, playing his drum for the endless train of humanity that filed by on that day of the Grand Review, wrote Krug.

After the events in Washington, Inman left with his company for Louisville, Kentucky, where they were all mustered out on July 16, 1865. Since Company B was mostly from the Sauk County area, they returned to Madison where the unit was disbanded on Aug. 9, and the weary soldiers, including La Valles drummer boy, returned to their homes and families.

Mr. Inman finished his story with a feeling of gladness, for the joy of living those days that, when being lived, had not been quite so joyous, was a pleasure he had not had in years. He is very proud of his record (of which he has a right to be) and has never regretted having entered the army against the will of his parents, wrote Krug.

Inman married in 1868, and to him and his wife Mary were born seven children. The family lived on a farm near Ironton for several years. They also resided in Iowa, and in Chicago, where Inman was the chief engineer for the pumping station. They returned to the farm and in 1912 came to La Valle to reside. Inman died in 1932, and is buried in the La Valle Cemetery.
[FACT SHEET] The state of South Africas prisons.

This fact sheet was compiled by Africa Check with research done by Gopolang Makou, Ina Skosana and Ruth Hopkins from Wits Journalism and the Department of Media Studies in the School of Language, Literature and Media at Wits:

South Africas most famous ex-prisoner wrote in his autobiography that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. In this factsheet, we provide data to show whats going on inside South African prisons.

In December 2015, the United Nation general assembly adopted the first update to minimum standards on treating prisoners in 50 years  and named it in late South African president Nelson Mandelas honour.

The UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners  known as the Nelson Mandela rules  contain 122 rules which represent, as a whole, the minimum conditions which are accepted as suitable by the United Nations.

The assembly further decided that Nelson Mandela International Day, celebrated on 18 July each year, be used to promote humane conditions of imprisonment.

In this factsheet, we provide an overview of South Africas prison sector and list the biggest pressure points.

Prison facilities

The Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services is the body tasked with overseeing South Africas correctional services and inspecting and reporting on how inmates are treated.

(Note: Two advocacy groups have launched a court bid to ensure the inspectorate enjoys the institutional independence that the constitution requires. It is currently receiving its budget from the department of correctional services and is administratively and operationally linked to it, making it very difficult for the inspectorate to hold the department accountable for violations.)

The inspectorates most recent annual report notes that South Africa had 236 operational prisons at the end of March 2016, with 7 under some form of renovation at the time.

SA prison facilities Total number of prisons 243 Operational prisons 236 Female prisons 9 Youth facilities 14

Source: 2015/16 Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services report

Two of South Africas maximum security prisons, Mangaung in Bloemfontein and Kutama Sinthumule in Limpopo are privately run, a spokesman for the department of correctional services, Tshifhiwa Magadani, told Africa Check.

Inmate population

At the end of 2016, South Africas inmate population stood at 157,013 people, Singabakho Nxumalo, spokesman of the department of correctional services, told Africa Check. Most were men (152,889), with women making up 2.6% of inmates.

A quarter of prisoners in the 2015/16 financial year were remand detainees, defined as people awaiting trial or those awaiting extradition. The number of these inmates has decreased slightly over the last 6 years, while the overall population remained relatively stable.

Remand detainees Sentenced offenders Average inmate population 2010/11 47,757 112,934 161,096 2011/12 45,898 113,044 158,942 2012/13 45,730 104,878 153,968 2013/14 44,858 107,696 152,553 2014/15 42,077 115,064 157,141 2015/16 42,380 116,951 159,331

Source: Department of correctional services annual report for 2015/16

Nxumalo also provided Africa Check with a racial breakdown as at the end of 2016.

Prisoners by race Race Number % Black 125,006 79.6 Coloured 28,568 18.2 White 2,559 1.6 Asian/Indian 880 0.6

In answer to a June 2017 parliamentary question, the minister of justice and correctional services said that 11,842 foreigners were being held in South African correctional facilities. Of these 7,345 had been sentenced and 4,497 were awaiting trial, with 1,380 being prosecuted for being in the country illegally. The majority were Zimbabweans (41.5%), followed by Mozambicans (24%).

Masutha also said that during the 2016/17 financial year it would cost an estimated R133,805.35 to house a prisoner. Considering the inmate population of 157,013 at the end of 2016, this adds up to R21 billion for the year.

Problems plaguing SA prisons

Lack of accurate data

In his 2016 budget vote speech, correctional services minister Michael Masutha said that the auditor-general still has serious concerns about the credibility of our records.

The auditor-generals report for 2015/16 stated that the departments reported performance information for its incarceration, rehabilitation and care programmes wasnt reliable when compared to the evidence provided.

This calls into question several crucial indicators, such as the number of inmates who had escaped, died unnaturally or were injured in an assault.

Overcrowding

At the end of March 2016, South Africas prisons only had 119,134 bed spaces available for its 161,984 inmates.

The main driving factor behind overcrowding is the remand detainee population, Clare Ballard from the advocacy organisation Lawyers for Human Rights told Africa Check.

Legal Aid South Africas Wilna Lambley told the Wits Justice Project that about 8,000 people who cant afford bail are in prison awaiting their trial. Clogged-up court rolls furthermore lead to delays and jam-packed communal cells.

Prisons in urban areas have the worst overcrowding rates. In the 2015/16 financial year, Johannesburg Correctional Centres Medium B was 233% full, which translates into a shortage of 1,736 beds.

Pollsmoor prison in Cape Town had the biggest shortage of beds (2,448) in 2015/16 financial year. Following a court challenge by Sonke Gender Justice and Lawyers for Human Rights, the Western Cape High Court held that the conditions in Pollsmoors remand detention centre were unconstitutional. Leptospirosis, a disease spread by rats, had by then claimed two lives.

The court ordered that government reduce overcrowding to 150% within 6 months.

Government met the ruling. As of 26 June, their statistics showed that overcrowding levels were 149%, national prison specialist at Sonke Gender Justice, Ariane Nevin, told Africa Check.

In the end, Ballard added, the cause of overcrowding is a poorly functioning criminal justice system  were simply not prosecuting crime at the rate and pace and with the effectiveness we should be.

Infectious diseases

Rule 24 of the Nelson Mandela Rules states that the healthcare of prisoners is the governments responsibility. This includes the treatment of infectious diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis (TB).

In a landmark constitutional court case, the states responsibility to take care of prisoners health was solidified.

Dudley Lee contracted TB while he was an awaiting trial inmate at Pollsmoor prison between 1999 and 2004. Lee sued the minister of correctional services for failing to implement the measures required by law to decrease the risk of disease in prisons.

After a seven-year court battle, Lee won his case and was awarded R270,000 in damages.

The Lee case requires an overhaul of health services and prevention in prisons. There has been an unprecedented influx of international funding from the Global Fund and PEPFAR for TB screening and testing in prisons, John Stephens told Africa Check. Stephens is a senior legal researcher at the activist organisation, Section27.

The departments 2015/16 annual report claimed that 1,239 of the 1,485 prisoners with TB in that year were cured, a rate of 83.4%. (Note: As for HIV, the department reported that 21,722 of the 22,142 prisoners who tested positive for HIV were on antiretroviral therapy, a rate of 98%.)

Screening, testing and treatment are critical, but unless we deal with the issues of overcrowding and ventilation we are throwing money away, says Stephens.

Human rights violations

The first of the Mandela Rules states: No prisoner shall be subjected to, and all prisoners shall be protected from, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, for which no circumstances whatsoever may be invoked as a justification.

Assault & torture

Dr Malose Langa, a lecturer in the psychology department of the University of the Witwatersrand,conducted an analysis of torture in South Africa. He focussed on cases reported in the annual reports of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) and the Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services (JICS) between 2007 and 2011.

Langa found that assault by prison officials was one of the most common complaints reported to the JICS (6,000 cases) and IPID, which received 1,778 complaints of assault and 89 of torture in the same time frame. According to Langas analysis, more than 200 inmates died of unnatural causes such as suicide and assault in the period.

In 2013, the Prevention and Combating of Torture of Persons Act was introduced, which criminalised torture in South Africa. The Acts definition of torture includes any act that causes severe mental or physical pain or suffering with the aim of extracting information or a confession from a person; or as a form of punishment or coercion.

Langa said that the introduction of the act has not changed anything in the prosecution of officials who torture inmates. IPIDs 2015/2016 annual report listed that 3 police officials were prosecuted for torture under the new act.

Despite JICS documenting 15 complaints of torture in its latest annual report, Luvuyo Mfaku, spokesperson for the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), couldnt provide the Wits Justice Project with the number of torture cases that have been prosecuted since the introduction of the act.

We dont categorise crimes in a specific database if they fall under general prosecutions, he said.

Segregation

Apart from assault, segregation  formerly known as solitary confinement or isolation  is one of the most common methods of torture used in prisons, according to Langa.

The Correctional Services Act defines solitary confinement as being held in a single cell with loss of all amenities which may be for part of or the whole day. It also lists the conditions under which segregation is permissible:

if a prisoner requests to be placed in segregation;

to give effect to the penalty of the restriction of amenities;

if prescribed by a medical practitioner;

when a prisoner is a threat to himself or others;

if recaptured after escape and there is reason to believe that he will attempt to escape again; and

at the request of the police in the interests of justice.

The prisoner furthermore needs to be visited by a medical practitioner every day and it may only be imposed for a period of 7 days, with prolonged isolation is only possible under strict conditions.

Despite these provisions, 4 civil society organisations operating in South Africa submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Committee that there is reason to conclude that solitary confinement as a form of punishment still occurs under the guise of segregation.

With thanks to the Wits Justice Project, which use investigative journalism to expose miscarriages of justice, for input and guidance in putting this factsheet together.

This article was used courtesy of Africa Check, a non-profit organisation which promotes accuracy in public debate and a partner of Wits Journalism. Twitter @AfricaCheck and www.africacheck.org  Africa Check 2017
W&M professors win awards for research on intelligence

Studying intelligence: Students perform an experiment during Camp Launch, the W&M Center for Gifted Educations camp for high-ability middle school students. A recent study by the center focuses on self-concept among gifted students  and the important role of peer relationships. Photo courtesy of the W&M School of Education Photo - of - Hide Caption

The Mensa Foundation  the philanthropic arm of Mensa, the high-IQ society  recently announced its annual Awards for Excellence in Research for outstanding research on intelligence, intellectual giftedness and related fields.

Several of the researchers receiving awards this year are W&M School of Education faculty members. Jennifer Riedl Cross, Mihyeon Kim, Tracy Cross, and alumnus Sakhavat Mammadov '16 from the Center for Gifted Education, along with colleague Colm O'Reilly from Dublin City University, were selected for their study, Social Coping and Self-Concept Among Young Gifted Students in Ireland and the United States: A Cross-Cultural Study.

Ryan McGill, assistant professor and director of the school psychology program, received an award for his study, Invalidating the Full Scale IQ Score in the Presence of Significant Factor Score Variability: Clinical Acumen or Clinical Illusion?

Studying giftedness in America and Ireland

As part of its mission, the Center for Gifted Education is interested in fostering "the talent development process and optimal functioning of high-ability individuals."

In 2015, researchers at the center collaborated with the Centre for Talented YouthIreland to explore one aspect of gifted students' functioning  the ways they cope with their giftedness  in a cross-cultural study.

The study examined social coping and self-concept among a sample of 115 Irish and 134 American gifted students in third through eighth grades.

Among U.S. students, positive self-concept was associated with helping one's peers or having a high activity level (e.g., sports or other extracurricular activities), and this was the factor associated most closely with a strong self-concept for them. In the Irish group, helping ones peers was the most positive predictor.

In both samples, the study found that denying the impact one's giftedness had on relationships with friends was associated with poor self-concept.

Among these children on both sides of the Atlantic, feeling good about yourself is associated with recognizing that your giftedness may, indeed, have an impact on your relationship with peers, said lead author Jennifer Riedl Cross. The poorest self-concept was seen in children who did not have this belief. We need more research in this area, but this tells me that gifted students may benefit from learning to recognize how their abilities affect those around them."

Cross and her fellow researchers hope the study will emphasize the importance of these relationships. It also offers insights that can help parents and educators of gifted students foster a stronger, more confident sense of self in their students.

If adults are concerned about their gifted students' confidence, they may want to encourage engaging in extracurricular activities and finding ways to use their exceptional abilities to support their peers, said Cross. We would also recommend helping gifted students become more aware of how their different abilities may have an effect on their peers' feelings toward them, although this is not something we understand quite as well."

Challenging a widely-held practice in the interpretation of IQ scores

For school psychologists, intelligence tests are frequently part of the standard battery of assessments used to diagnose learning disorders and recommend a course of action for students who arent performing well in school. Ryan McGill, whose research centers around judgment and decision-making in school psychology, received his award from Mensa for a study examining the validity of a widely-accepted but largely untested practice in the interpretation of these test scores.

Intelligence tests typically provide both an omnibus composite score of general intelligence, called the full-scale IQ score (FSIQ), as well as a raft of sub-scores based on more discrete abilities, such as spatial reasoning or long-term memory retrieval.

When students perform better on some of these component areas than others, standard practice within the profession is to disregard the full-scale IQ score in favor of the lower-level factor scores. School psychologists are trained to believe that a significant variability in factor scores makes the full-scale IQ sore an inappropriate focus for clinical interpretation and diagnostic decision-making.

The problem is, the full-scale IQ score has been shown again and again to most accurately predict achievement in school and career, while the validity of factor scores have been shown to be more problematic, said McGill. By encouraging school psychologists to ignore the full-scale score, were throwing out one of the most reliable methods that we have for measuring intelligence.

Through a series of psychometric analyses, McGills study demonstrates that despite its widespread use, this popular interpretive approach is not empirically supported. He concludes that until further evidence is provided, school psychologists should be cautious in relying too heavily on factor scores at the expense of the full-scale IQ score.




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I recently returned from a wonderful trip to Europe that was marred by a fall in Passau.

I fell flat on my face and bled extensively since I am on Warfarin. A German gentleman stopped the bleeding and called an ambulance that took me to the hospital, where the emergency room doctor checked me over, stitched two small wounds and ordered a CAT scan.

The total bill came to 110 euros or the equivalent of approximately $150.

We really need to do something about our health-care costs.
Nuclear an 'unconditional part' of green energy balance

19 July 2017

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Nuclear power has an essential role to play in achieving a 'carbon free' future, Rosatom deputy director-general Kirill Komarov said yesterday during the Expo-2017 conference in Astana, Kazakhstan.

Komarov spoke during a panel session Carbon-free energy as the energy of the future, which also included Helmut Engelbrecht, chairman of the World Nuclear Association, Luis Echavarri, former director-general of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, Dominique Miniere group senior executive vice president of nuclear and thermal at EDF, Takuya Hattori, former president of the Japan Atomic Industry Forum, and Tom Blees, president of The Science Council for Global Initiatives. Rosatom included their comments in a statement about their discussion today.

"Everyone remembers the decisions of the Paris climate conference, which declared the consolidation of efforts of most countries to create a green energy future. Now it is necessary to deal with details because, when people talk about eco-friendly energy, they mean solar, wind, and hydropower and often forget nuclear power, though this is undoubtedly part of the green energy mix," Komarov said. "Clean energy of all kinds should not be in competition, but be used in combination," he added.

Komarov noted that nuclear power is a reliable and predictable source of electricity that supports economic development by providing "clear conditions" that may be forecast 60 years ahead. It also offers "low volatility" because the "commodity component" in the cost of energy generated by nuclear power plants is very low - below 3%.

"For comparison, the cost of the fuel for gas and coal plants amounts to 60-70%," he added.

Komarov noted that scientists agree renewable energy should not exceed 40% of a country's electricity mix, since the grid could not support a greater share.

"This is not an absolute figure, but we should determine a place for each source of power generation. We believe the construction of 1000 GWe of new nuclear power plants by 2050 to be a realistic target," he said.

Engelbrecht added: "Nuclear power currently has an 11% share of the world energy balance. If we build nuclear power plants as we did in the 1970s and 1980s, then we'll be able to supply 25% of the world's energy by 2050."

He also stressed that it is important to observe international regulations on the use of nuclear energy, including agreements on the construction of nuclear facilities with neighbouring states.

Echavarri said it is necessary to develop sources of renewable energy, but at the same time baseload power must be provided, meaning nuclear.

Hattori noted the three main principles of the development of nuclear power: energy security, environmental safety and cost efficiency. Considering that Japan is currently importing all of its electricity from abroad, "everybody understands that we need nuclear power", he said. Japan's nuclear power industry is making "steady progress" with regaining public acceptance, and ten reactors are scheduled for start-up by the end of this year, he said. The country aims to reduce its CO2 emissions by 26% by 2030, he added.

Blees stressed that world electricity demand is forecast to increase by 30% by 2040. This, he added, excludes demand for power required for water desalination, the charging of electric cars and electric motors for airplanes.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

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First criticality achieved at Fuqing 4

19 July 2017

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Unit 4 of the Fuqing nuclear power plant in China's Fujian province achieved a sustained chain reaction for the first time on 16 July, China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) announced yesterday. The unit is expected to enter commercial operation later this year.

Operators in Fuqing 4's control room (Image: CNNC)

Following inspections of the unit, China's National Nuclear Safety Administration issued a licence on 9 June for fuel to be loaded into Fuqing 4. The process of loading the 157 fuel assemblies into the reactor core began on 13 June and was completed on 19 June.

CNNC said that after a series of critical tests, Fuqing 4 will start producing power and grid connection tests will be carried out on the turbo-generators. After that, a series of commissioning tests will be conducted at the unit, including a load test run and other relevant testing before entering full-power demonstration operation. It is scheduled to enter commercial operation by the end of this year.

CNNC's Fuqing plant will eventually house six Chinese-designed pressurised water reactors, the first four being 1087 MWe CPR-1000 units. Units 1 to 3 entered commercial operation in November 2014, October 2015 and October 2016, respectively.

China's State Council gave final approval for construction of Fuqing units 5 and 6 in mid-April. First concrete was poured for the fifth unit in May 2015, while that for unit 6 was poured in December. These will be demonstration indigenously-designed Hualong One reactors.

The Fuqing nuclear power plant project is owned by CNNC subsidiary China Nuclear Power Company (51%); Huadian Fuxin Energy Company (39%); and Fujian Investment and Development Group (10%).

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by World Nuclear News

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Lawsuits against Illinois legislation dismissed

19 July 2017

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A federal judge has dismissed two lawsuits seeking an invalidation of the State of Illinois' zero emission credit (ZEC) program. Introduced last year as part of the states' Future Energy Jobs bill, the program provides financial support to Exelon's Quad Cities and Clinton nuclear power plants.

Senate Bill 2814, the Future Energy Jobs bill, was passed by the state legislature on 1 December, the final day of both houses' 2016 veto sessions. Illinois governor Bruce Rauner signed the bill into law six days later. The bill will see Illinois expand clean energy production while protecting jobs and maintaining competitive electricity rates, with caps and protections to limit the impact on consumers and businesses. It recognises the contribution of nuclear power generation to the state's zero-carbon emission generation and ensures that the Clinton and Quad Cities nuclear power plants can remain open. Without the legislation, both plants had faced closure.

Two lawsuits were filed with the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois to challenge the zero emission credit program. The first case was brought by consumer plaintiffs including Village of Old Mill Creek, Ferrite International Company, Got It Maid Inc, Nafisca Zotos, Robert Dillon, Richard Owens, and Robin Hawkins. They are all delivery services customers of Commonwealth Edison in Illinois. The second case was filed by the Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA) and independent power producers Calpine Corporation, Dynegy Inc, Eastern Generation LLC and NRG Energy Inc.

Both the consumer plaintiffs and the generator plaintiffs brought claims against Illinois Power Agency director Anthony Star and the commissioners of the Illinois Commerce Commission seeking to invalidate the Future Energy Jobs bill. They claimed that the legislature's asserted goal for the statute, "environmental protection", was "a mere pretext for a bailout" for Exelon's Clinton and Quad Cities plants.

The plaintiffs alleged the ZEC undermined wholesale power markets that are the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government. The generator plaintiffs claimed they will incur millions of dollars in damages because they will lose power auctions they otherwise would have won, and will receive less revenue from auctions they do win. Meanwhile, the consumer plaintiffs said they will face higher utility bills as Commonwealth Edison and Amaren Illinois increase retail charges.

The defendants and Exelon each filed motions to dismiss the complaints.

In his ruling on 14 July, Judge Manish Shah said, "The ZEC program falls within Illinois' reserved authority over generation facilities. Illinois has sufficiently separated ZECs from wholesale transactions such that the Federal Power Act does not pre-empt the state program."

Shah concluded, "Defendants' and Exelon's motions to dismiss are granted. The plaintiffs' claims are dismissed in part for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction and in part for failure to state a claim. The plaintiffs' motions for a preliminary injunction are denied. The Clerk shall enter final judgement and terminate these cases."

On 17 July, the generator plaintiffs - EPSA, Dynegy, Eastern Generation, NRG Energy and Calpine - filed an appeal against the ruling with the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

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The mean global sea level has risen by 4-8 inches over the past century with the annual rate doubling in the past 20 years. This has been attributed mainly to three factors: thermal expansion, melting glaciers (or polar ice caps), and ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica. In general, island countries are the most affected by the rising sea levels, although countries who sit at a low elevation are also very much at risk. In this article, we will discuss some of the countries most prone to the serious problem of rising sea levels.

12. Tuvalu

The low lying beaches of Tuvalu.

Tuvalu is an island country comprising of nine islands in the Pacific Ocean. The rising sea levels are of a great concern as the islands are low lying at an average of 6.6 ft above the sea level. The highest point of the country is a mere 15ft above the sea level. The University of Hawaii tracked sea levels in the nation for 23 years, a project that began in 1978.Their study showed a rise of 1.2 mm annually. Gradual sea rise has no real threat to coral highlands since they are also growing. However, if the sea rises faster than the growth of the reefs, a real threat to the islands is posed. Tropical cyclones also pose a great danger to the citizens of Tuvalu.

11. Kiribati

The landscape of Kiribati has been greatly affected by climate change.

Kiribati is an Island country in the Pacific Ocean consisting of 33 atolls and one solitary island. There are four groups of islands, namely the Banaba, Gilbert Islands, Phoenix Islands, and the Line Islands. In 1999, two islands which were not inhabited were submerged in water after the heavy El Nino downpour. The United Nations has predicted a sea level rise of about 20 inches by the year 2100. This will make the bulk of arable land in Kiribati far too saline. A huge chunk will also be submerged. Although the risk of the entire country being submerged is low, there is a huge risk of cyclones stripping the low-lying island of their vegetation and structures.

10. Palau

The landscape of Palau is vulnerable to rising sea levels as brought on by climate change.

Palau is an archipelago of over 700 islands located in the Pacific Ocean. Traditionally, the people of Palau have learnt to live with the sea and depended on it economically and socially. However, in the recent past, the sea has covered parts of these tiny islands which has caused panic to the inhabitants. Increasing temperature of sea water also leads to massive coral bleaching and thus the country lost about 30% of its corals. The rising sea levels have also affected vegetation and agriculture in the area as sea water now occupies more land mass.

9. Solomon Islands

Houses on stilts in the Solomon Islands.

The Solomon Islands is made up of six major islands and more than a thousand smaller islands. The islands are low-lying which makes them vulnerable to the ever-rising sea levels. At least five of these islands have been reported to have been lost completely due to the rising sea levels. Another island, Nuatambu Island, has lost more than 50% of its area to the sea leaving more than 15 families homeless. Many families have been forced to relocate to higher grounds inland or even to other islands in severe cases.

8. Maldives

Eco sandbags are being used in the Maldives as a way to fight rising sea levels.

The Maldives is an island archipelago in the Indian Ocean atop of a vast submarine mountain range. It has an average ground level of 4 ft above the sea level, making it the worlds lowest country. The highest point in the island is only 7 feet above the sea level. There are about 1100 corals islands which are groups in a double chain of 26 atolls which are spread over 35,000 square miles. This makes it the most dispersed country in the world. Maldives is ranked as one of the most endangered countries in the world due to rising sea levels and flooding brought about by climate change. According to the Maldivian president, if carbon emissions continue at the prevailing rate, the country will be under water by the year 2020. There are plans by the Maldivian government to purchase land in India, Sri Lanka, and Australia to relocate the population which will be affected by the rising sea levels.

7. Seychelles

Seychelles exists at a low elevation.

Seychelles is made up of 155 islands in the Indian Ocean on the east coast of Africa. The majority of the highlands are not inhabited. 98% of the total population inhabit only 54 of the islands. The pace of rising sea levels in Seychelles has been unprecedented in the past hundred years. The sea has risen by seven inches which is about 10 times the average in the past 10 years alone. These developments have massive impacts on the economy of the country since about 85% of economic activities occur along the coastline. With the increased erosion along the beaches, tourism is likely to be negatively affected.

6. Vietnam

Editorial credit: xuanhuongho / Shutterstock.com. Flooded streets in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Vietnam is the easternmost nation in the Indochina Peninsula bordering China, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand among others. The country has a coastline of more than 2,000 miles. The effects of sea level rises has been most strongly felt in the Mekong River Delta where about 22% of the entire population lives and more than half of the entire countrys food is produced. It is estimated that in the coming decades, 40% of the delta may be submerged affecting more than 10 million people. The majority of the citizens at the coastal areas have felt the effects of sea levels and are migrating inland. Farming has also been affected by the high soil salinity levels.

5. Bangladesh

Bangladesh is home to a number of forests that are partially submerged in water.

Bangladesh is located in South Asia, bordering India and Myanmar. The country experiences natural calamities likes flooding, cyclones, tornadoes and tidal bores almost each and every year. In 1991, a cyclone left 140,000 people dead and even more homeless. In 1998, over 30 million people we left homeless by a severe flooding. 135,000 heads cattle were also left dead. It is estimated that the rising sea levels will create over 20 million climate refugees in the country in the coming decades.

4. Japan

The rising levels of the Chikugo River in Japan.

Japan is an island country in East Asia consisting of over 6,852 islands in the Pacific Ocean. The country is facing rising sea levels caused by global warming. It is estimated that a two degrees Celsius increase in the global temperature will submerge an area occupied by over 18 million people while if the increase reaches 4 degrees Celsius, more than 34 million people will be left homeless in the country. The countrys largest city which is also the capital, Tokyo, is also likely to become swampy if the rate of the rising sea levels is not checked.

3. Ireland

Flooding in Ireland.

This is an island with a coastline length of 1,738 miles with the highest elevation being 3,415 ft above the sea levels. Each and every year, the rate at which the sea levels are rising is increasing. The two main reasons given to this trend emanate from global warming. One is expansion of water due to sea warming and the other is massive melting of land ice. Some of the adverse effects of the rising sea levels to the country include; flooding, poor water quality, and adverse effects on fishes which are sensitive to changes in temperature.

2. United Kingdom

Floodwater from the River Thames.

The United Kingdom is a sovereign country in Western Europe surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom sharing a border with another county. Most parts of the country consist of lowland terrain with the North-western pats having mountainous terrain. The coastal parts of the country are extremely vulnerable to the ever rising sea levels since they are low-lying. A huge percentage of the British population comprises of the elderly, who are especially vulnerable to the adverse effects of flooding.

1. Netherlands

A car driving through a flooded street in the Netherlands.

Netherlands is the main constituent country of the kingdom of Netherlands. It is a highly populous country with a population density of about 1,068 persons per square mile. The country is also extremely low lying with over 26% of its land area being below sea level - only about 50% of the country is three feet above sea level. The history of flooding in the country dates back in the year 1134 whereby a storm created an island known as Zeeland. In 1287, another flood left over 50,000 people dead. Frequent flooding has made it very difficult for farming to be worthwhile. The high population in the country makes flooding a dangerous affair. The government has however invested heavily in the building of dikes to protect the country against the rising sea levels and flooding. Other measures taken include the construction of sea defenses and the room or the river project where the government has relocated residents from some areas to allow for periodic flooding. It is estimated that by the end of the century, the government of Netherlands will be spending about 1 billion Euros annually on flood control.
The Abu Simbel Temples are two rock temples located in Nubia, Egypt near the Sudan-Egypt border. The massive rock temples are a remarkable testament of ancient Egyptian civilization and were designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1979. Local legend has it that the temples were named after a local boy who led the first European explorers to the site in the early 19th century.

History Of The Abu Simbel Temples

The Abu Simbel Temples were constructed during the rule of Pharaoh Ramesses II in around 1264 BCE. The pharaoh commissioned the construction of the monuments as a commemoration of his victory against the Hittite Empire led at the ancient city of Kadesh during the Battle of Kadesh in May 1274 BCE. The temples were also meant to showcase Egyptian religious superiority to its neighbors. Archeologists and historians believe that it took 20 years to complete the temples which were dedicated to the Egyptian deities Ptah and Ra-Horakhty.

The Two Temples

The Abu Simbel temples are comprised of two massive temples, The Great Temple and The Small Temple. The Great Temple is the larger of the two temples with a height of 98 feet and 115 feet in length. The entrance features four huge statues, two on each side which resemble Pharaoh Ramesses II. Several smaller statues are also located on the entrance resembling the enemies defeated by the Pharaoh. The Great Temples interior is decorated with numerous engravings depicting the Egyptian victory against the Hittites. The Small Temple stands 40 feet in height and 92 feet in length and is dedicated to Queen Nefertari. The entrance to the temple features six massive colossi, four statues of Pharaoh Ramesses II and two of his queen Nefertari. The interior of the Small Temple is decorated with many engravings depicting the Pharaoh and his Queen making offerings to the Egyptian deities.

19th Century Rediscovery

After it was abandoned many centuries, the temples were buried in desert sand. In 1813 a Swiss explorer Burckhardt rediscovered the site of the temples and was reportedly led to the location by a young local boy known as Abu Simbel. While impressed, the Swiss did not have the capacity to excavate the temples and later informed fellow explorer Giovanni Belzoni of his discovery. Giovanni later traveled to the site in 1817 and excavated the sand from the temple (some historians believe Giovanni also looted the temples).

Relocation Of The Abu Simbel Temples

In the 1960s the Egyptian government began plans to construct the Aswan High Dam on River Nile. The resulting rising water levels led to a threat to the Abu Simbel Temples. An international campaign was subsequently launched to seek for funding to relocate the ancient temples. In 1964, a massive relocation operation was initiated and involved specialists drawn from many countries including archeologists, heavy machine operators, and engineers all who worked under the UNESCO banner. The operation involved placing the temples on high ground over 200 feet above the original site. The relocation process was on an unprecedented scale with the entire process costing over $40 million and involved the dismantling of the temples into 20-ton blocks and reassembling them. The relocation of the Abu Simbel Temples was completed in 1968.
A scan through a database of the world's deadliest serial killers reveals a long list of men behind the gruesome deeds. However, their female counterparts are often equally as deadly. Although most female killers use rather soft methods to eliminate their victims, some are more ruthless and brutal than some of the notorious male killers. The motivations of female murderers are often different from that of their male counterpart. Psychopathic characteristics and childhood abuse history are some of the major motivations for the majority of female killers.

Top Rankers

The United States

The United States tops the list with 835 female killers. The figure is higher than the combined female killers in Europe and Africa but stilly nearly a third of the amount of male killers in the US. Most of the female killers in the US are typically white, educated, have been married, and have held a caregiving role such as a mother or a health worker. About 40% have experienced some degree of mental illness. Financial gain was the most common motivation for killing while the common method of killing included poisoning and suffocation. The majority of the female killers knew all or most of their victims and most victims had little chance of fighting back. Some female killers in the US include Aileen Wuornos, Jane Toppan, and Kristen Gilbert. It should be noted that accurate and frequent reporting could be a factor behind this high number.

The United Kingdom

The United Kingdom, with 112 female killers, is at position two globally. Beverley Allitt, Mary Cotton, and Joanna Dennehy top the list of female killers in Britain. Of the suspects convicted of murder in the UK, about 10% were female. Female killers in the UK used different methods than that of their male counterparts. Most of the killers had a history of childhood brutalization, sexual abuse, and trauma. About 20% of the female killers carried out the act in the company of a male friend.

Canada and France

Canada and France, with 26 and 24 female killers, are in the third and fourth positions. In Canada, husbands and lovers topped the list of victims of the female killers. Elizabeth Wettlaufer has been convicted for executing eight homicides in two nursing homes in Ontario over the span of seven years. French female killers were mostly caregivers who worked in nursing homes or took care of children with elderly women being the main victims.

Australia

Australia with 22 female serial killers ranks among the top five globally. Katherine Mary Knight is perhaps the most evil woman in Australia. She killed her husband by stabbing her 37 times, especially on the vital organs, carefully skinned him and used his meat to prepare a stew for her family. Katherine was sentenced to life without parole.

Germany

Germany has 12 female killers, the third highest in Europe. A woman without a face is one of the most wanted female serial killers in Germany. The woman whose identity is not known is believed to have been on a killing spree for close to 20 years now. However, Germanys known serial killer accused of 18 murders and 17 attempted murders while serving as a caretaker for the elderly is currently in prison in Lower Rhine region.

Mexico and South Africa

Mexico and South Africa each have eight female murderers. In Mexico, Delfina and Maria de Jesus Gonzalez are accused of killing over 91 people. The bodies of 11 men, 80 women, and several fetuses were found buried in a property that was owned by the two sisters. Most of the girls killed were prostitutes who worked for them while the men were customers who seemed to have had a lot of cash. In South Africa, Daisy Smith was charged for killing her first and second husband and a son with the motive of inheriting their wealth. Her trial attracted unprecedented public interest with spectators waiting overnight to secure a place in the courtroom.

India, Russia, and Sweden

India, Russia, and Sweden have six recorded cases of female killers each. In Russia, Madame Popova operated murder-for-hire service that aimed at liberating women from cruel husbands for free. She was accused of murdering 300 people using her hands, poisons and hiring assassins. In India, Cyanide Mallika is currently serving a life term in prison for administering cyanide to seven women in temples with the motive of taking away their gold jewelry.

Austria and Belgium

There are five and four female killers in Austria and Belgium respectively. In Austria, an ice cream killer murdered her husband and boyfriend before dismembering their bodies with a chainsaw. She hid the bodies using a concrete mixing. Belgiums Marie Becker killed her husband to spend more time with her lover. When her lover could not satisfy her she dispatched him too. Marie opened a dress shop where she robbed and poisoned elderly patrons. She was finally discovered when she tried helping her friend dispatch her husband.

Other

Other countries with a considerable number of female killers include the Netherlands, Spain, Argentina, Finland, and Italy. These countries have recorded at least three female killers. Enriqueta Marti was a well-known witch-doctor who kidnapped children and killed them for rituals. She is accused of murdering over 10 children. Taiwan, Poland, Kenya, Pakistan, Nigeria, Nepal, Monaco, and Hong Kong are some of the countries with the least number of female killers with each country recording one suspect. In Kenya, Alice Njoki killed her deaf son to save her marriage from collapsing. She was sentenced to six years in prison in 2013.

Why and how do Women Kill?

Female killers are likely to kill for financial gains, pleasure, or as revenge. Unlike the male counterparts who target strangers as their victims, females are likely to kill people who are emotionally and physically attached to them, especially husbands and lovers. However, their victims are not confined to their lovers but also include children and the elderly. They often use quieter and less messy methods to finish off their victims than the male such as poisoning, drowning, suffocation, and stubbing. Female killers also operate in specific places they are familiar with such as their homes or health care facilities where they work. They rarely go out to look for victims in the open like male killers unless they are involved in a gang.
The following editorial appeared in the July 7 Minneapolis Star Tribune:

In some parts of the country, children who have delinquent school lunch accounts are still treated shamefully. Some lunchroom workers mark kids arms with embarrassing I need lunch money stamps, or serve cold cheese sandwiches as alternatives to hot lunches. In the worst cases, they trash the food, right in front of the kid with the unpaid bill and the rest of the students in the cafeteria.

Children should not be publicly humiliated or go hungry due to the failures of grown-ups.

Thats why federal guidelines that went into effect this month on handling school lunch debt are welcome. Beginning last week, the U.S. Agriculture Department requires school districts to adopt meal-debt policies and to inform parents about problems at the beginning of the school year.

Although the agencys directive does not specifically ban some tactics, it does encourage schools to work closely with parents to address delinquent accounts and to ensure that kids get meals. The smart federal action was taken following a 2014 Agriculture Department report that confirmed the widespread use of shaming to compel parents to pay bills.

Locally, in 2014, Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid surveyed state school districts and learned that more than 40 had immediately or eventually refused hot lunches to students who dont pay. To our states credit, many Minnesota schools took those reports to heart and developed different practices before the federal guidelines went into effect. Gov. Mark Dayton proposed and the Legislature passed a law requiring schools receiving school lunch aid to make free lunch available to all students who qualify. And by state statute, schools must ensure that reminders for payment of outstanding meal balances do not demean or stigmatize any child.

The states three largest districts  Anoka-Hennepin, St. Paul and Minneapolis  report that they make sure that eligible students receive lunches. In the core city districts, successful efforts to raise money privately to pay delinquent lunch bills helped support the program.

Anoka-Hennepin and some other districts say their nonpayment issues come from families that, according to guidelines, should be able to afford the $2.55 to $3.00 lunches. The reasons they fall behind vary; parents who have lost jobs and fallen on harder times could be eligible for free lunches without realizing it. Districts are now encouraged to reach out to those families to provide eligibility information.

Some who dont pay apparently believe that if other students get free lunches, they should, too. In some cases, when gentler efforts have failed, districts turned over outstanding bills to collection agencies. Parents who can afford the meals but choose to stiff their districts should understand that when schools must buy meals with general funds, resources may be removed from functions such as buying books or adding staff members.

But however school districts, which are accountable to taxpayers, rightly seek to collect money that is rightly owed, it should be done among adults  never by embarrassing kids.
Mountains have amazed and inspired humanity for thousands of years with many communities linking religious and cultural beliefs with the mountains surrounding them. While most mountains across the globe have attracted mountaineers and hikers, there are few that remain out-of-bounds with all human activities on the mountains being banned.

10. Ball's Pyramid

Ball's Mountain, Australia.

Balls Pyramid is a remnant of an ancient shield volcano situated 12 miles southeast of Lord Howe Island and is part of the Lord Howe Island Marine Park of Australia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, Balls Pyramid is the tallest volcanic stack in the world rising 1,844 feet above the surrounding waters. Balls Pyramid has been climbed in the past with the first recorded ascent to the summit being achieved in 1965 by a group of rock climbers. However, climbing of Balls Pyramid was banned in 1982 through provisions in the Lord Howe Island Act, but the ban was relaxed in 1990 to restricted climbing and climbers now are required to send an application seeking permission from the state minister.

9. Mount Omine

Mount Omine is a sacred mountain located in the Yoshino-Kumano National Park in Honshu, Japan. The mountain is officially referred to as Mount Sanjo but is named Omine due to its location in the Omine mountain range. The mountain rises 5,640 feet above sea level. Mount Omine is a sacred place based on believers of the Shugendo religion and is home to an 8th-century monastery which serves as the headquarters of the religion. Women were strictly banned from accessing or climbing the mountain as they were perceived of being unclean particularly during menstruation. However, the 1,300-year strict ban on women was relaxed and is currently voluntary prohibition with a sign being erected at the base of the mountain indicating that women are forbidden.

8. Mount Kangchenjunga

Mount Kangchenjunga.

Mount Kangchenjunga is a mountain located on the India-Nepal border and is one of the tallest mountains in the Himalayas. Mount Kangchenjunga is the tallest mountain in India and the third tallest in the world with an altitude of 28,169 feet above sea level. Mount Kangchenjunga is a sacred mountain to the Darjeeling and Sikkim tribes who worship the mountain and members are forbidden from climbing the mountain. However, other people from across the globe have ascended the mountain with the first recorded successful ascent being achieved in 1955.

7. Mount Gangkhar Puensum

Gangkhar Peunsum is one of the mountains which make up the Himalayas and is located in Bhutan. Mount Gangkhar Peunsum is the tallest mountain in Bhutan rising 24,836 feet. The name Gangkhar Peunsum loosely translates to The White Peak of The Three Spiritual Brothers. Mount Gangkhar Peunsum is commonly referred to as the highest unclimbed mountain peak in the world. In 2003, local authorities banned any form of mountaineering of the mountain out of respect to the mountains great spiritual significance. Before the ban, the highest point ascended on Mount Gangkhar Peunsum was Liankang Kangri, a subsidiary peak reaching 7,535 meters above sea level.

6. Spider Rock

Spider Rock, Arizona.

Spider Rock is a sandstone spire located in Apache County, Arizona in the United States within the boundaries of the Canyon de Chelly National Monument, a protected national monument. Spider Rock is the most distinct geological feature of the monument, rising 750 feet above the canyon floor. Navajo traditions believe that the spire is home to the Spider Grandmother. Climbing of Spider Rock is forbidden as a directive for an absolute and total ban on all forms of rock climbing around Navajo Country.

5. Shiprock

Shiprock is a monadnock located in Navajo, San Juan County, New Mexico in the United States. Shiprock has an altitude of 7,177 feet above sea level. The mountain is known as Tse Bitai in native Navajo which loosely translates to rock with wings, due to its distinct appearance. While the mountain had been climbed in numerous occasions, a tragic death in 1970 on the mountain led to the strict and total ban on the climbing of the mountain. Members of the Navajo community place great significance to Shiprock and the mountain a sacred place according to Navajo traditional beliefs.

4. Mount Machhapuchhre

Mount Machhapuchhre in Nepal.

Mount Machhapuchhre is a mountain located in Nepal and is among the mountains that make up the Annapurna Himalayas. The mountain is among the tallest of the mountains of the Annapurna Himalayas with an altitude of 22,943 feet above sea level. Mount Machhapuchhre is a sacred mountain revered by the local population and is considered as the holy place of the god Shiva. No one has ever been recorded to successfully reach the summit of Mount Machhapuchhre with the only attempted effort being in 1957 by a British expedition. Climbing of Mount Machhapuchhre is banned due to the religious significance of the mountain.

3. Mount Umunhum

Mount Umunhum.

Mount Umunhum is a mountain located in Santa Clara County, California in the US. The term Umunhum is a term which means the resting place of the hummingbird. With an altitude of 3,489 feet above sea level, Mount Umunhum is the fourth-highest peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Mount Umunhum is closed off from public access due to the presence of hazardous remnants of a Cold War-Era radar surveillance post known as the Almaden Air Force Station. However, there are plans of reopening the mountain for hiking and mountain biking by the summer of 2017.

2. Mount Banahaw

Mount Banahaw in the background.

Mount Banahaw is an active volcano situated in the Laguna region of Philippines and is one of the tallest mountains in the region with an altitude of 7,120 feet above sea level. The volcanic activity of the mountain has made it be revered by locals who used to conduct pilgrimages to the mountain. The mountain was also a popular destination for hikers before all hiking activities were temporarily banned by local authorities due to increased pollution along the hiking trails on the mountain. The ban was supposed to be lifted by 2012, but it was extended to a later date.

1. Mount Kailash

Mount Kailash, Tibet.

Mount Kailash is located in Tibet, China and among the mountains which make up the Kailash Ranges of the Transhimalaya. The mountain is situated near the sources of the large Asian rivers including the Ganges, the Indus River, and the Sutlej River. Mount Kailash is a holy mountain which is sacred to four major religions including Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, and Bon. Due to the religious significance of the mountain, a strict and complete ban on all mountaineering activity on Mount Kailash is in place.
The Sahara Desert is the largest low-altitude hot desert and the worlds third-largest desert. It covers a total area of approximately 3.6 million square miles, which is almost the size as the US. The Sahara Desert covers much of the northern part of Africa stretching from the Red Sea in the eastern side to the Atlantic Ocean on the western side. It is bounded to the south by the Sahel which is a semi-arid tropical savanna. Sahara is an Arabic plural word for desert. The Sahara desert is divided into several ecological regions, outlined below.

6. Tibesti-Jebel Uweinat Montane Xeric Woodlands

Tibesti-Jebel Uweinat montane xeric woodlands ecoregion cover the eastern parts of the Sahara. The ecoregion occupies two different highland regions and covers an area of about 31,700 square miles. The ecoregion experiences arid and subtropical climate but in the winter temperatures can reach 0 at high altitude. The region experiences irregular rainfall but are not as arid as other parts of the Sahara. Tibesti-Jebel Uweinat montane xeric woodlands support a large population of desert mammals including Addax, Dorcas Gazelle, and Cheetah. The ecoregion is fairly stable although hunting is a major threat to the large mammals.

5. West Saharan montane xeric woodlands

West Saharan montane xeric woodlands ecoregion covers a number of highland areas in the Sahara Desert. The ecoregion covers an area of about 99,700 square miles. The largest part of the ecoregion is comprised of volcanic lava. West Saharan montane xeric woodlands are cold and dry during winter and hot and dry during summer. Precipitation varies but averages below 100 mm annually with higher elevation experiencing a high amount of rainfall. Maximum temperatures within the ecoregion may reach 30 degrees C at lower elevations and 15 degrees C at the highest elevation. The vegetation varies according to the elevation and landscape features. The diverse vegetation hosts several animals including Waterbirds, white stock, cheater, and Barbary sheep. Much of the ecoregion is still intact and protected by its inaccessible location.

4. South Saharan steppe and woodlands

South Saharan steppe and woodlands ecoregion extend across the northern Africa and cover part of Western Sahara. The ecoregion experiences extreme climate with water being a serious constraint. The climate is hot and dry during the summer season and cooler in winter. The ecoregion is home to endemic species of both flora and fauna making it distinct from other regions within Sahara. Some of the common wildlife in the area includes four-toed jerboa, North African gerbil, and the Sand gerbil. The habitat of the South Saharan steppe and woodlands ecoregion is still largely intact but it is poorly protected exposing it to animal grazing. The threats are concentrated in areas that receive a high amount of rainfall.

3. Sahara Desert ecoregion

0The Sahara Desert ecoregion include the arid center of the desert covering the northern portion of Africa. The ecoregion covers an area of about 1.7 million square miles of the hot Sahara Desert. The ecoregion is characterized by a large track of sand dunes, salt flats, and sandy plains. It is among the driest and hottest places of the world with temperatures reaching over 30 degrees C. Daily temperature variations may be extreme (37 degrees C to -0.5 degrees C). Rainfall is scarce throughout the year with the ecoregion receiving less than 100 mm annually. The ecoregion is largely intact with the most threats occurring in areas with water.

2. North Saharan steppe and woodlands

North Saharan steppe and woodlands ecoregion form the northern tip of the Sahara. It covers an area of approximately 646,000 square miles and is characterized by hot and dry climate during summer and a cooler and rainy winter. The rainfall averages 100 mm in the north and 50 mm in the south annually. Temperatures may rise to 40 degrees C during summer and evaporation is much higher than precipitation. North Saharan steppe and woodlands ecoregion have varying habitat including sandy, rocky, wadis, and depression. The ecoregion is inhabited by snakes, lizards, mountain gazelle, and several species of birds.

1. Atlantic coastal desert

The Atlantic coastal desert ecoregion covers the western part of the Sahara Desert of North Africa. It covers a narrow line along the Atlantic Coast frequented by fog and haze. The ecoregion covers an area of approximately 15,400 square miles and borders the Atlantic Ocean with the ocean current giving it a higher atmospheric stability. The atmospheric stability in the desert reduces the amount of rainfall leading to an extremely dry climate with an annual precipitation of about 30mm. temperature ranges between 27 degrees C and 13 degrees C with an average daily temperature of 200C. The biodiversity is fairly endemic but has no endemic fauna. Plants consist of variety lichens and drought-resistant shrubs.
The global diamond market is represented by diamond mining and the trading of rough diamonds. Ninety-nine percent of the global diamond is produced in 9 countries with African countries being among the largest producers of diamonds. This article discusses the major producers of diamonds in the world.

Canada - 11.1 Million Carats

Canada is among the top five producers of diamonds in the world. Early exploration was unsuccessful until 1991 when Chuck Fipke and Stewart Blusson found evidence of commercially viable diamond deposits in the Northwest Territories. Production began in 1998 with Diavik, Ekati, Snap Lake and Victor being the largest mines. Most of these mines are located in the remote parts of the country, and some have been closed due to harsh weather conditions. In 2013, Canada produced 11.1 million karats valued at $1.9 billion; the diamonds are popular with consumers because they are not regarded as "conflict diamonds." Miners are paid well, and employers adhere to international labor laws.

Democratic Republic of the Congo - 12.3 Million Carats

DRC is Africas second top producer of diamond although the exact amount of diamond mined is unknown because it is mostly mined by the informal sector. In 2013, the country produced around 12.3 million karats of diamonds worth approximately $138.7 million. The countrys wealth has, however, come at a cost. Constant political turmoil, rampant corruption, and genocide in the country have led the minerals mined in DRC to be referred to as conflict minerals. Much of the mineral mines are located in rebel-controlled territories that do not adhere to labor laws and human rights.

Australia - 13.9 Million Carats

Australia is the world's leading producer of colored diamond particularly pink, purple, red, and yellow diamonds. Apart from the color diamonds, Australia also produces diamonds of low quality. Argyle mine operated by Rio Tinto is the largest diamond mine in the country producing approximately 12 million karats annually. Production has been on a decline due to depleted mines and insufficient discoveries of new mines.

Botswana - 20.9 Million Carats

Botswana produces the most valuable diamonds in the world and ranks second in terms of karat quantity produced. The average size of diamond mined is larger and of more value than those produced in Russia. Jwaneng mine in Botswana produces approximately 10 million karats of high-quality diamond annually earning it the title of the richest diamond mine in the world. Debswana; a 50-50 joint partnership between the government of Botswana and De Beers is responsible for mining the mineral in the country. Diamond accounts for sixty percent of the total exports from the country and twenty-five percent of the GDP. Most of the diamonds produced are of gem quality, dodecahedral nicely-shaped, and often greenish in color.

Russia - 40 Million Carats

Russia is the largest producer of diamonds in the world. The country is responsible for around 40 million carats worth of diamonds every year. ALROSA, a Russian company, is responsible for all diamonds mined in the country and sells the rough diamond to manufacturers of polished diamond in Hong Kong, Belgium, China, Israel, and India. In 2012, the Popigai asteroid crater was discovered and is suspected of holding "trillions of karats." ALROSA mined 36.2 million karats of diamonds in 2014 with much of it mined in the Siberian region.
Where is New Guinea?

New Guinea is an island of the Malay Archipelago and covers an area of 303,381 square miles. The island, located in the southwest Pacific, is the second largest island in the world and the largest in the southern hemisphere. With human occupation dating back about 40,000 years, New Guinea has a wide range of cultural and linguistic diversity. About 1,000 languages, categorized as Austronesian and Papuan, are spoken on the island. Various political groups of Europe have occupied the island since the 16th century, including the Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, and British. Australia also occupied the island after World War I. Currently, New Guinea is shared by two nations: Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

Political Divisions of New Guinea

Western New Guinea

The western half of New Guinea contains provinces that belong to Indonesia. Western New Guinea first existed as a territory of the Netherlands and later as a UN territory. Indonesia took control of the territory in 1963 its following efforts to eliminate the influence of Dutch powers. The president of Indonesia organized a council of elders who were pressured into voting for the union of western New Guinea with Indonesia. Papua and West Papua are the two provinces of Western New Guinea. Cities of the region include Manokwari and Jayapura. The region covers an area of 162,371 square miles and has a population of about 3.5 million people both from indigenous and immigrant groups. Native tribes in the region include the Dani, Manikom, Hatam, Asmat, Marind, Biak, Bauzi, and Sawi. Other groups include Indonesians, Austroasiatic people, Malays, and Malagasy. Western New Guineans have fought for several years against Indonesian rule of the territory, claiming they had no choice in the 1963 Act of Free Choice. This claim has led to several conflicts between Western New Guineans and the government, and lead to rebellions. Western New Guineans have reported instances of human rights abuses by the Indonesian government. Since 2014, international bodies and organizations have supported the independence of West Papua from Indonesia.

Papua New Guinea

The eastern half of New Guinea belongs to the nation of Papua New Guinea, and forms the country's mainland area. The eastern half of the island was previously occupied by the Germans, and later Australians after World War II. Papua New Guinea gained independence from Australia in 1975. Papua New Guinea operates as a parliamentary representative democracy, with Queen Elizabeth II serving as the head of state. Papua New Guinea has a population of more than 7 million people, and is credited as being one of the worlds most culturally diverse country's, with more than 800 languages spoken within the country. Papua New Guinea is one of the worlds least developed and most rural countries, with only 18% of its population living in urban areas. The country is a developing economy largely reliant on mining and natural resource sectors. The top minerals mined in Papua New Guinea include gold, silver, nickel, and cobalt. Top natural resources include forestry, although their exploitation has led to the rapid decline of forest cover. Papua New Guinea has a mainly rugged and mountainous terrain, which makes accessibility and infrastructural development difficult.
The Mordvins, also known as Mordovians, Mordvinians, or Mordva are members of an indigenous group of people mainly living in the Mordovian Republic and speak a Mordvinic language originating from the family of the Uralic languages. The Republic of Mordovia whose capital city is situated in the city of Saransk is located at the Volga-Oka River basin. The Mordvins can also be found in other areas of the middle Volga River region of Russia. Despite the Mordvin being a well-established group of people they have never consolidated as a nation.

Overview Of The Mordvinian People

Being among the larger indigenous peoples of Russia, the Mordvins are mainly divided into two ethnic groups which are: the Moksha and the Erzya. The two are also dialect groups with the Moksha Mordvinians speaking the Moksha language and the Erzya Mordvinians speak Erzya language. There are other smaller subgroups which include the Teryukhan, Shoksha or Tengushev, and Qaratay. The three groups are Mordvins who became fully Turkified and Russified during the 19th and 20th centuries. While more than two-thirds of the Mordvins are scattered in different regions and countries like the US, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Far East, Siberia, Central Asia, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, and Tatarstan. They are also found in Russian oblasts of Nizhny Novgorod, Orenburg, Penza, and Samara, only less than one-third can be found in the autonomous republic of Mordovia.

History Of The Mordvins

The Mordvin people originated from the common Volgaic group. The ancestors of both the Moksha and the Erzya have been distinguished by researchers by the variety of bronze jewelry, elements of their costumes, and most importantly the different orientations of their burial. Over the course of the 1st millennium AD, the Mordvin language started diverging into Erzya and Moksha. The Moksha lived further west and south of present-day Modrovia while the Erzya resided in the regions of the territory near present-day Nizhny Novgorod.

Appearance Of The Mordvins

Despite the Mordvins largely abandoning their language, the 1911 Britannica noted that their old national dress was still maintained. Mordvin women can especially be seen in their traditional costumes which feature profusely embroidered skirts coupled with numerous necklaces and original hair-dress, and large earings. The Mordvins were described as having blue eyes, dark hair, and a small but narrow build. The Britannica described the Moksha as having darker eyes and skin compared to the Erzya who have red or brown hair.

The Mordvinian Cultures

Despite the Erzya and the Moksha sharing several similarities, there is no common Mordvin Mythology. According to the Moksha mythology, Viarde Skai is the Supreme God. According to the Moksha legend, the world was created through several stages. The Giants of 99 archinnes were the first humans to be created and could live up to 800 years. According to the mythology, Mastoratia is the ruler of the underworld. According to the Erzya mythology, the Earth was the first to be created then the Sun, Moon, humankind, and lastly the Erzya; Chipaz the Sun God is the creator of humanity. Ange Patiai is the mother of gods. The mythology also suggests that superior deities were hatched from an egg. According to the 1911 Britannica, the Mordvinians have tried to preserve a significant part of their mythologies fusing them with the Christian religion. Other cultures that are believed to have been preserved include the worship of water, the moon, trees, thunder, the sun, and frost. The practice of kidnapping brides is still practiced by the less Russified Moksha. The Mordvins are also known to be masters of apiculture.
Regardless of what happens in court or the with the call back from President Trump, the Wisconsin Elections Commission will follow Wisconsin law and grant a request to release limited information about our voters as they must under our open records law. Information like name and address of voters, as well as when and where they voted, will be given to President Trumps commission if they pay for the records. But the secret ballot, party preference, Social Security number and date of birth is rightly protected by our laws. There is no other choice because our law on open records is clear.

However, violating our voters rights in search of fraud is a waste of time and a violation of privacy because the Republican claim of voter fraud has been proven false more than once. This national ploy will show nothing different.

Voters are not the ones committing fraud in elections. Politicians who pass laws rigging the maps so only they can win is the true voter fraud. This fraud is so great a panel of three federal judges overturned it and demanded new maps be drawn. This fraud is so valid that the U.S. Supreme Court now will hear how fraudulent our maps are, how dirty Wisconsin elections have become under this one party rule.

This should make no one proud. The voter fraud of rigged maps is what needs attention. Taking away the right to one person one vote, without political interference, is the crime.

Voters in this state work hard to access the ballot and that is not something that has been made easier with the elimination of special registration deputies and additional identification at every single election, not just when you register to vote. But these barriers and intimidation will not break the Wisconsin voter spirit. We have fortitude, we have strength, we are stubborn and we wont let Republican voter intimidation take away our right to vote.

Coming off an election where the party I belong did not perform well this optimism and faith in voters may seem misplaced. But the reality is I believe in the value of the right to vote. Even if people dont vote for me. The process of clean elections and the value of the right to vote is bigger than any politician, bigger than any party.
Welsh Government Pay For Literally Nothing  Cabinet Secretary Orders Revisiting Of Statutory Notice Review

This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Jul 19th, 2017

Millions of pounds are spent every year on official notices buried in the back pages of newspapers to keep the public informed, with the above example being pure white space paid for by the Welsh Government.

With print readerships declining we have written previously about the local cost of such public notices and have seen some changes by Wrexham Council to make more efficient use of paper based adverts.

Due to archaic laws, (perhaps not updated as those who decide such things do not want to upset the media), such notices are often required as part of a defined legal process. Often such processes were enshrined in law before the internet existed, and made more sense in the 1980s and 1990s.

Back in mid March we were sat enjoying a coffee and had a rare flick to the back pages of the Leader and Daily Post. There we saw public notices from Welsh Ministers over works to the A494, A55 and one about the A483 with whacking great white spaces by the sides.

Being fans of Neil Buchanans work on Art Attack we whipped out the scissors and visually worked out that if the white space was used creatively, half a new notice could have been produced  with each notice in our experience at looking at invoices for such advertising often costing several hundred pounds of your money. This example is not a one off, with several more published since this article was drafted earlier in the year.

Back in 2014 after we highlighted the local councils spending on statutory notices, with Wrexham Council specifically telling us they had trimmed white space, noting: The council has put in significant work in recent months to lower costs, such as reducing white space.

This has been backed up with action, as the notices placed by the council are now more compact and use space better and therefore more cost efficient, even though we think they are a terrible way of communicating things.

In January this year we highlighted how despite being paid via a Statutory Notices to spread the information it took 13 days for information relevant to the people of Wrexham to make its way from the back to the front page when there was local resurfacing on the A483  a great example of although the law is followed, the reason behind the law is missed and the people the information is meant for misses out. Previously we have run stories discovered via such notices, to then see the story appear in the paper the following week, despite them being paid to promote it in the first place.

UK Government have looked at changing how to bring Statutory Notices into the modern era, and as with all good consultations it was published two days before Christmas in 2014. 1m worth of pilot schemes outside of Wales was conducted in 2015, with the firm policy outcomes not yet known, and the status quo maintained in the meantime.

Elsewhere Northumberland County Council moved their public notice spend to a different publisher, from the Hexham Courant (circ. 11,000) to the Northumberland Gazette (circ. 6,700) which is around 40 miles away. This move was described by the Courants editor as robbing this newspaper of income, pointing out the legal obligations for their Local Authority plus how they believe the move was politically motivated. As always the comments on industry website HoldTheFrontPage.co.uk are well worth a read, including the observation that those who have democracy and information at heart would perhaps be happy to do such things for free.

Recently it was announced that a volunteer run newspaper in Hastings beat the legacy newspaper to providing local notices, with a circulation of just 7,500.

We asked local AM Lesley Griffiths about the white space spend and her wider views on statutory notices. She told us: Although statutory notices are an important process for ensuring the public is kept informed of local decisions, technology has advanced and the way we consume information has drastically changed.

News sites like Wrexham.com can certainly offer new opportunities and it is unfair they are penalised by outdated laws.

New options which could help improve visibility and reduce costs in a sustainable manner should be explored, and have made representations to the relevant Welsh Government Cabinet Secretary, Mark Drakeford AM.

The letter was responded to by Ken Skates AM, as our example noted a road traffic notice and it is part of his portfolio. Mr Skates noted a previous review took place at some point in 2012 (Wrexham.com started mid way through that year) and would be asking for the review to be revisited:

In May we spoke with Golley Slater over Loteri Cymru promotions in North Wales, and the Wrexham audience specifically.

We were told their promotions for that project was not based on any readership figures and said promotion was only via the mainstream titles and not Wrexham.com. The mainstream titles in question covering Wrexham were the Daily Post and the Leader.

As noted by the Cabinet Secretary, Golley Slaters advice is taken by Welsh Government over placing of advertising, although Golley Slater told us information on titles is sourced via Gorkana  and thus is likely several years out of date for Wrexham.com let alone any other title.

Golley Slater, like the disappointing majority of PR companies we speak with, have not requested details of any analytics or measurements for Wrexham.com or our various social media channels.

On the white space picture above, we popped the image on twitter offering a free coffee for anyone who could guess what it was. The single tweet was seen via twitter.com systems 8,578 times, with 1,629 total engagements, plus more when it was visible on the non-twitter.com measured embed system on Wrexham.com. Some of the guesses are below

Is it @wrexham .coms receipt from their account with @Kingstcoffee  Nick Holland (@nickholland75) March 20, 2017

@wrexham @Kingstcoffee a seating plan of some sort! Planning a wedding reception in king street?  Learn to Drive (@MurrayBren77) March 20, 2017

@wrexham plans of how to sort the traffic on the 483 that wxm council have just paid you millions as consultants to come up with  nick bell (@jn13ell) March 20, 2017

@wrexham @Kingstcoffee I see two paper people making sweet love.  Tim Ryan (@Tjr9696) March 21, 2017

@wrexham @Kingstcoffee Remains of address labels that have been cut.  Sueperb (@MrBumble38) March 20, 2017

(This article was initially drafted earlier in the year, but dropped down the publish pile due to a flurry of elections)
Welcome to new Chamber Main Street business partner, Furniture Rescue by Tami Rae, 830 N. Main St. in Viroqua. Tami Rae grew up in the La Crosse area and began painting and selling furniture as a hobby, and after a short period of time, it became her primary source of income. Tami Rae travels throughout the Midwest seeking estate sales, auctions and flea markets to purchase wood furniture in need of refinishing, repair, re-purposing or painting. Whether youre looking for wood furniture to add to your home or you have wood furniture in need of repair or painting, Furniture Rescue is available to help. To contact Tami Rae, call 608-387-6613. Current items available for sale are featured on her Facebook page, Rescue Furniture by Tami Rae.

Farmers Market, July 22

This Saturdays market will be open from 8 am to 12:30 p.m. Come to the market for a lovely variety of produce, baked goods, plants, meat and eggs, crafts, soaps, wool, fresh flowers, body art and so much more. Please keep your dogs at home. We are enforcing a new no dog rule at the market in order to comply with Health Department regulations and property owner regulations. Service dogs welcome. Reminder that the market accepts Visa/MasterCard and SNAP. For questions about the market, email farmersmarket@viroqua-wisconsin.com or call 637-2575.

Fly-in breakfast, July 23

Fly-in drive-in breakfast hosted by Viroqua EAA Chapter 1439 at the Viroqua Airport rain or shine. Events include: Breakfast (pancakes, eggs, sausage, coffee and milk), aircraft on display, helicopter rides (fee/early morning/weather permitting), MedLINK helicopter on display, Civil Air Patrol F-16 Flight Simulator, RC planes on display, fire truck and pedal plane. Come on out and celebrate aviation in your community at the Viroqua Municipal Airport. Breakfast cost is adults $7 and under 12 $3.

Intermediate soap making, July 23 Build upon your basic soap crafting skills and discover how to create more complex soaps at this class offered by Driftless Folk School. In this intermediate course, learn how to add color, layers and fun designs and textures into your final products. Basic essential oils, food-based additives and natural colorants will be provided by the instructor. Students are encouraged to bring their own from home if they desire anything specific. Class fee is $70. Class time is from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. For more information, visit www.driftlessfolkschool.org or call 608-620-3234

Wednesday Market, July 26

Wednesdays market has a large variety of vendors offering produce, baked goods, meat, eggs and crafts. The market is open 2-6 p.m. in the former Bluedog Cycles parking lot. Visa/MasterCard and SNAP benefits are accepted.

Co.Starters SOUP, July 25

Join us for Flight Night  the business launch finale for our Co.Starters entrepreneurs  at Kickapoo Coffee from 6-7:30 p.m.

Over the past nine weeks in partnership with Couleecap, weve been equipping aspiring entrepreneurs with the insights, relationships and tools needed to turn their business ideas into action through training in this bootcamp course. To celebrate the completion of the program, were giving each of our participants the chance to win some startup funds for their business. For $5, come to the launch event and hear each entrepreneur give a 5- to 10-minute pitch explaining their business and objectives. Eat soup and vote on which new business should receive the funds gathered from the door.

Quarterly Connection, July 26

The Quarterly Connection is a great time for member businesses to get together and share ideas and discuss upcoming programming. This meeting at Daves Pizza at 8 a.m. will feature a customer service workshop from Andrew Nussbaum of Travel Wisconsin. The public is welcome to attend. We will be awarding best new business of 2016 and recruiting for committees. We look forward to seeing everyone! For more information or to RSVP for this event, please email cwalters@viroqua-wisconsin.com. More information in next weeks Street Talk about Andrew Nussbaum and Travel Wisconsin.
A group of Gatlinburg residents and their supporters are organizing opposition to the mayors and City Commissions efforts to stifle discussion of the response to a wildfire that killed 14 people there late last year.

The Gatlinburg City Commission last month passed a resolution drastically restricting the basic democratic right of citizens to make public comments and raise questions at Commission meetings. Under Resolution 939 passed June 30, citizens would be required to submit no later than five days before a Commission meeting who they are and what question they want to ask if the topic is not on the Commission agenda. Comments or questions would be limited to three minutes.

Perhaps the most onerous provision is that elected officials can arbitrarily reject or refuse to respond to any or all questions.

Weve been asking questions, they sit at the panel and stare at us, Laura Meir, a member of Gatlinburg Wildfire Survivors, told Knoxvilles WATE television news.

The group has been circulating a petition to have the resolution repealed. To date it has been signed by 2,400 peoplea number made even more significant by the fact that Gatlinburg is home to just over 4,000 permanent residents.

Meir said elected officials have attempted to hide behind a gag order which never affected them. They always say they cant talk because theyre under this gag request, she said. The odds of the timing is very strange to me.... Five days isnt a problem for me. Its the part that they can vote to decide which questions get asked and which ones dont.

Last years fire began in the Great Smoky Mountains Nation Park near Gatlinburg, a popular tourist attraction.

Starting at a spot called Chimney Tops, what might have been contained under normal weather conditions became a massive wildfire driven by strong winds of more than 80 miles per hour and fueled by extremely dry drought conditions. The blaze edged down the mountain reaching the outskirts of Gatlinburg. The center of the city, which contained the main tourist attractions, was spared, but the surrounding dry, wooded areas became what one fire department official called The Apocalypse.

In the aftermath of the fire, two teenagers were initially held as suspects but were later released with all charges dropped. There is still no certainty on what caused the fire or why there were delays in emergency response.

Fourteen people were killed, some tourists and some local residents, and at least 175 others were injured. Approximately 2,400 structures were destroyed or damaged, costing an estimated $500 million.

In the months since the disaster, residents have raised numerous questions: Why were warnings not sent out sooner? Why was the necessary evacuation of some 14,000 people slow in coming? Why were emergency warnings not sent out to cellphones?

The biggest question from many is why elected officials are not forthcoming with more information and seemingly intent on blocking efforts by the public to get answers.

Since the arrest of the two teenagers, government agencies have cited privacy rules surrounding juvenile court cases as grounds to deny requests for records that in any other circumstance would have been public.

Until the teens were released, information from the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency (TEMA) and the Gatlinburg fire and police departments was withheld from the public. After a Sevier County judge ruled that such information should be released, state officials sat on the judges ruling for three weeks and kept it secret until the News Sentinel obtained a copy, the Knoxville newspaper reported June 27.

Since then, TEMA officials have given assurance that they will comply with the judges ruling, but they have not indicated how long it would take to release the records. Sevier County and Gatlinburg officials have merely stated that they are reviewing the ruling.

In the Gatlinburg petition, the group noted the timing of the city commission meeting resolution. Conveniently just days before we learned the gag order did not include officials (who have been saying they could not give us any information regarding the wildfires that killed our friends and destroyed our homes) they passed this resolution to limit the types of questions we could ask. Our city just experienced the biggest devastation in the history of the State of Tennessee. We deserve to speak freely to get answers on safety, accountability and actions taken the days leading up to the Gatlinburg Wildfire and the efforts to rebuild, the petition states.

Overall, Sevier County is much better off economically than Tennessees small rural and poor counties, thanks to the tourism generated by the Great Smoky Mountain National Park and other tourist attractions like Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, home to country music star Dolly Partons Dollywood, the largest ticketed attraction in Tennessee.

However, Sevier County residents who may find employment in the tourist centers may not be able to afford the $100-plus-a-night hotel rooms. Median income for a household in the county was $34,719. About 8 percent of the families and 11 percent of the population are living below the poverty line, including 13 percent of those under the age of 18, according to US Census figures.

Last years fire cut Gatlinburgs tourism by more than a third, destroying the livelihoods of many residents and leading to budget cuts. Much of the local budget depends upon the so-called amusement tax and taxes on hotel and motel use. Hotel/motel tax revenue fell by 51 percent after the fire, though it has improved in the summer season. The state of Tennessee receives a large amount of revenue from the tourism towns in the east; Sevier County alone generates about $2 billion a year.

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Wildfire continues to ravage Gatlinburg, Tennessee

[01 December 2016]
On Sunday evening, the leader and chancellor candidate for the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Martin Schulz, presented his so-called Future plan for a modern Germany at the partys headquarters in Berlin. Behind all the partys talk of securing the future, innovation, civil society and securing peace, the SPD is shifting even further to the right.

When Schulz announced an election campaign based on social justice several months ago, nobody took him seriously. Everyone knows the SPD has been part of government for 15 of the past 20 years. It is above all the SPD that is responsible for massive social, wage and pension cuts, and the subsequent social misery. The SPD is associated with the anti-social Hartz IV measures and duly despised.

The vast majority of workers have met Schulzs rhetoric of social justice with growing hostility. The SPD suffered one electoral defeat after another in the last three state elections (Saarland, Schleswig-Holstein, North Rhine Westphalia). The party has responded to this series of electoral snubs with a further lurch to the right, in two key regards.

In domestic policy, the SPD has adopted the Agenda policies of former Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and is preparing a new round of massive social cuts. This is behind the catchphrase Innovation alliance for German industry, which is aimed at increasing the competitiveness of German companies.

In foreign policy, the party is calling for greater independence from the US and has explicitly stated its aim of taking the path to a European army.

Schulz has gone so far as to adopt the slogan of former Chancellor Schroders Agenda campaign Innovation and Justice, with which the SPD wreaked social havoc 20 years ago. Germany is a country of entrepreneurship and must remain so, the SPD writes. This requires an active industrial policy and above all increased competitiveness, support for small businesses and the craft sector.

In the programmes section Work and life in a digitised society, the SPD promises more self-determination in the world of work. In fact, the same phase has been used for years to justify deregulation at the workplace. More self-determination are code words for the abolition of all forms of social security and the creation of precarious work. Workers are quite aware of this, and have only contempt and anger for the social-democratic wall of lies.

The SPDs announcement that state administrations should be modernised and digitised is the prelude to massive job cuts in the public sector and the intensification of exploitation at the workplace.

This Agenda 2020 is aimed at drastically intensifying exploitation to further increase corporate profits. It goes together with an aggressive foreign policy. The SPD presents itself as the party that can enforce the new great power policy of German imperialism in a more effective and consistent manner than the conservative parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU).

The Germany Plan includes a demand for a massive military rearmament. The programme section headed Against a new spiral of re-armamentfor disarmament unashamedly includes the demand: The Bundeswehr needs more money to carry out its tasks. The criticism made in the section of NATOs two-percent target has nothing to do with disarmament. The SPD simply wants to ensure that its plans for rearmament serve the imperialist interests of Germany, and not those of the US. To achieve these goals worldwide, the Germany Plan calls for the setting up of a European army under German leadership.

The benchmark used is the military power of the US. The efficiency of defence spending in Europe is just 15% of the US, the SPD writes. The army requires more money in order to fulfill its tasks, the plan explicitly states. To ensure that this military build-up serves German imperialist interests, it is necessary to clarify within Europe and NATO, what defence spending is being used for and for what purpose. This includes the consolidation of the armaments industry within the framework of a European defence organisation. The SPD will take the path to a European army.

Following the skirmishes that took place on the outskirts of the G20 summit in Hamburg, the SPD has openly appealed to the militarist layers attracted to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Leading SPD personnel are attacking Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and the conservative parties from the right, aggressively defending the police and stoking up crude nationalism.

Justice Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) has demanded the establishment of a European extremist file for left-wing radicals and has called for a rock vs. the left pop concert. The SPD executive has introduced the term protest terrorism to criminalise growing resistance to the countrys increasingly reactionary and militarist policies. As for Schulz, he begins his Germany Plan with the sentence, Germany is a great country. But Germany can do more. This inevitably recalls the slogans of the extreme right for Pride in Germany and Germany First.

The more resistance emerges to the prevailing anti-social policies and military rearmament, the more the SPD moves to the right. It presents itself as the official party of German imperialism and recalls that it was, above all, the SPD that defended bourgeois rule in crisis situations in the past century and did not hesitate to deal violently with the working class.

The Socialist Equality Party (Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, SGP) vehemently opposes the SPD and its right-wing policies. The main opposition partiesthe Left Party and Greenssupport SPD policy and have set their sights on a so-called red-red-green government coalition. The SGP is the only party to participate in this autumns federal election on the basis of a socialist and internationalist programme opposing war and social inequality and defending democratic rights.

We call on all those opposed to the return of German militarism, growing poverty and the growth of the far right to support the SGP and its election campaign. Join the SGP! Now is the time to actively participate in the construction of a new mass socialist party!
As the United States ratchets up tensions with China over the South China Sea, India is also becoming increasingly assertive in the disputed region, exacerbating the already sharp divisions between New Delhi and Beijing.

In defiance of Beijing, ONGC Videsh Ltd. (OVL), one of Indias principal state-owned energy companies, has accepted Vietnams invitation to continue oil exploration in the South China Sea.

Citing OVL managing director Narendra K. Verma, Reuters reported earlier this month that Vietnam has granted the Indian firm a two-year extension on a lease to explore for oil in Block 128 of the disputed South China Sea. The report noted, Part of that block is in the U-shaped nine-dash line which marks the vast area that China claims in the sea, a route for more than $5 trillion in trade each year (and) in which the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan also have claims. Indias Business Standard noted that this is the fifth extension OVL has been granted to explore Block-128.

According to an unnamed senior OVL official, interest in the block is strategic rather than commercial, given that oil development there is seen as high-risk and with only moderate potential. The official added, Vietnam also wants us to be there because of Chinas interventions in the South China Sea.

Asked about ongoing oil exploration and drilling work in the disputed area at a July 6 press conference, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said Beijing resolutely upholds its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea (and) firmly opposes unilateral and illegal oil and gas activities by any country, enterprise or institution in the waters under Chinas jurisdiction. He urged Vietnam to refrain from actions that would complicate the situation.

Indias agreement with Vietnam to conduct oil exploration in the South China Sea is part of a burgeoning strategic partnership with the Southeast Asian country aimed at extending New Delhis geopolitical ambitions in the region and countering China. In 2003, New Delhi and Hanoi signed a joint declaration on a framework for comprehensive cooperation. Four years later, the two countries formed a strategic partnership. The joint statement announcing the partnership highlighted intelligence cooperation, potential arms sales and military aid, and established a strategic dialogue at the deputy foreign minister level.

With Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi lining up more decisively behind the US military-strategic offensive against China since coming to power in 2014, New Delhi has expanded its strategic ties with Hanoi. Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung visited India in October 2014 and signed a series of military, trade and economic agreements, including two agreements for joint oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea.

At the same time, India provided a US$100 million credit line to Vietnam to buy military hardware. In 2016, this was expanded to a $500 million defense credit line. India is training Vietnamese naval cadets and also providing naval patrol boats and satellite cover to monitor Vietnams waters.

New Delhi and Hanoi are also in discussion about the possible sale of Indian BrahMos cruise missiles to Vietnam.

Hanois latest offer to extend ONLs South China Sea oil concession was issued while Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister Pham Binh Minh visited India July 3-6. While there, he held extensive discussions with Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj. An Indian government press release on their talks referenced last years International Court at The Hague ruling, on a case orchestrated by Washington, dismissing Chinas historical claims to much of the South China Sea. The press release also reiterated New Delhis support for freedom of navigation and overflight and unimpeded commerce, the pretexts the US is using to label Beijing an aggressor in the South China Sea and justify its deployment of vast military forces to the region.

Since Modi and US President Obama issued a Joint Vision Statement for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region in January 2015, New Delhi has regularly parroted Washingtons provocative anti-China line on the South China Sea.

Only days before the Indian foreign ministry statement on Swarajs talks with Vietnams Deputy Prime Minster, Modi and the current US President, Donald Trump, met in Washington and pledged to further expand the Indo-US military-strategic partnership.

Indias increasing involvement in the South China Sea enjoys the explicit backing of the United States and is being accompanied by the rapid expansion of bilateral and trilateral military-strategic cooperation between India and Japan and Australia, Washingtons chief regional allies.

Last spring and summer four stealth warships of the Indian Navys Eastern Fleet were deployed to the South China Sea and North Pacific, prompting an angry reaction from Beijing.

The US has publicly urged the Indian navy to mount joint patrols with its warships in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, including the South China Sea.

On Monday, Indian, US and Japanese warships concluded war games in the Bay of Bengal, the latest iteration of the annual Malabar Exercise. In an obvious rebuke of Chinas increasing naval presence in the Indian Ocean, this years Malabar exercise focused on antisubmarine warfare and air defense.

Indias assertive moves in the South China Sea take place amid the ongoing military standoff between Beijing and New Delhi over the remote Himalayan Doklam or Donglang Plateau, land claimed by both China and Bhutan. The Sino-Indian border dispute is being described as the most serious between the two nuclear powers since the two countries fought a month-long border war in 1962.

Aware that India is moving ever more openly into the US camp, Beijing is adopting an increasingly hardline stance in answer to Indias growing assertiveness and US-backed provocations. An opinion piece in the state-run China Daily, titled Indias moves demand strict vigil and published on July 10, linked Indias policies to its growing ties with Washington. Referring to Modis latest visit to the US, it noted that the Indian Prime Minister managed to sell the idea New Delhi is a key defense partner of Washington and  can serve as a counterweight to Chinas rise.

An editorial in the same edition described the Malabar naval exercise as the biggest of their kind so far and pointed out that the US approved a $365-million sale of military transport aircraft to India last week and a $2 billion deal for (naval) surveillance drones. The editorial argued: It is China that should feel security concerns, given the importance of the Indian Ocean for its trade and oil imports.
The inaugural meeting of the Coalition for Peace, Revolution, and Social Justice (CPRSJ) was held on July 14 in Los Angeles, California. A project of Socialist Party USA and a handful of anarchist and feminist groups in the Los Angeles area, the coalition advertised itself online as a new anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist, and anti-militarist coalition. This writer investigated.

One might have been forgiven for assuming that the terms authoritarianism, imperialism, and militarism related in the first instance to the United States. Instead, at the inaugural meeting of this coalition, which was attended by about 20-30 people, it emerged that the denunciations of authoritarianism, imperialism, and militarism were directed with special emphasis against Iran, Russia and China.

Kevin B. Anderson, University of California at Santa Barbara sociology professor and a member of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, made this plain in his remarks to the meeting. He stressed the need to oppose the wing of the peace movement that fails to criticize Russia and China as imperialist. He proposed slogans and banners for the coalition to bring to future demonstrations in Los Angeles such as, Stop Russian and Iranian imperialist war in Syria.

In addition to these dubious political positions, the meeting was remarkable for the internal dynamic that developed. A great deal was said about inclusiveness, focusing on agreements and not disagreements, listening, and coalition building. But not five minutes into the question and answer session, it was announced that the speakers list would be interrupted in the case of any microaggressions, suggesting that one audience member was already guilty of one. One woman sharply denounced the panel, consisting of three men and one woman, for being male dominated, indicating that she had wished her organization (Code Pink) to be represented. (She was promised a seat on the next panel.) Another attendee pointed out that the panel had failed to mention the disabled and ableism. An audience member who questioned the designation of Russia and China as imperialist was branded a white male lefty.

The term working class was not used once during the entire meeting. This social formation clearly does not form an integral part of any perspective being advanced by this coalition. Instead, more than one speakers analysis of the United States was that Trump has been produced by white supremacy, which was described as the essential political characteristic of America.

Meanwhile, there was something truly sinister about the deliberate effort to channel anti-war demonstrations behind denunciations of Russian imperialism and Iranian sub-imperialismeffectively transmuting popular sympathy for the Syrian population into justifications for more imperialist war. This is not terribly unlike the method of the New York Times, which exploits images of suffering children to justify humanitarian bombing campaigns.

Judging from the question and answer session, it must be said that this coalition is not off to a very promising start. No three people attending the meeting seemed to be from the same political organization. Many attendees were obviously there for one purpose only: to advertise their own coalition, group, tendency, picnic, demonstration, protest, fundraiser, newspaper, committee, or blog.

The meeting opened (30 minutes late) with the remarks of Frieda Afary, a member of a group calling itself the Alliance of Syrian and Iranian Socialists. The origins, program, and perspective of this group were not explained. The purpose of the speech was to praise the Arab Spring, the Syrian revolution, and the Green Movement in Iran, together with the Occupy movements in the United States and around the world.

According to this speaker, these movements have begun to recede as a result of sexism, class bias, homophobia, religious fundamentalism, and misogyny. They had also failed to be sufficiently inclusive. She warned of the dangers posed by the authoritarian left, meaning the political tradition that includes Lenin, Trotsky and the Russian Revolution. (This remark gave additional meaning to the groups anti-authoritarian slogans.)

With respect to Syria, she claimed that the Assad regime was using ISIS and other religious fundamentalist movements against the Syrian Revolution. She denounced interference in Syria by Russia, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. As for the United States, Afary claimed that it was mostly standing on the sidelines, and that it would be ridiculous to allege that the United States would do anything that might help the revolution.

Russia and China were characterized as state capitalist (even up to the present date, apparently) as well as imperialist. It was then claimed that Nazi Germany was also state capitalist and imperialistthus establishing that Russia and China are the modern equivalent of Nazi Germany.

Zach Medeiros of Socialist Party USA followed up these remarks with a speech in favor of solidarity with the Syrian revolutionaries. As to what groups, organizations, events, or even social classes are involved in the Syrian revolution, much was left unexplained. Local coordinating committees were praised and represented as the central core of the Syrian revolution. The so-called White Helmets also came in for praise. He denounced everyone who refuses to support the Syrian revolution as Syrias enemies.

Assad was described as a fascist who perpetrated gas attacks against civilian populations. Madeiros denounced what he called ridiculous conspiracy theories, including the idea that the US was supporting anti-Assad forces, and presumably also including Seymour Hershs recent article describing the Syrian attack on Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 as a conventional (not gas or chemical) weapons attack on a meeting of anti-regime Islamists.

Madeiros raised a demand for direct humanitarian interventionin the context, this could only mean intervention by the Trump administrationas well as the slogan, stand with Syrians. A glance at the Socialist Party USA web site reveals that this organization is devoting a great deal of its efforts to campaigns in support of the Syrian Revolution.

The meetings panel also included Javier Sethness, whose affiliation is to the Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation. This self-described anarchist made no attempt to relate his speech to the two previous ones, devoting his 15 minutes to praising communalist, autonomous, and indigenous movements in Latin America. It is probably not necessary to describe in detail the sort of jargon that filled these 15 minutes. He advanced the remarkable demand to halt economic growth. He called for a worldwide neo-Zapatista revolution. Sethness went out of his way to praise Bakunin and call for future revolutionary movements to be guided by a new utopia.

During the question and answer session, the theme emerged that more organization was needed, but no concrete measures were proposed or adopted. This is a common problem for the pseudo-left. It is acceptable in this milieu to divide ones allegiance among numerous different political organizations at the same time, as a matter of personal preference. One joins a coalition to promote oneself and ones views, but does not necessarily feel any loyalty to it.

There were also complaints that, despite founding this new coalition on the lowest common denominator, the organizers had failed to draw any new faces other than the ones that had already appeared in all the previous coalitions. Here, too, in concrete political experience, is a demonstration that the opportunist formulathe more you water down your program, the more people you can attract to meetingsdoes not always correspond to reality.

Even so, at least two attendees fretted about the use of divisive and elitist language, which ordinary people would not be able to understand. Another individual questioned the coalitions ten principles of agreement, claiming that the American population does not care about what happens overseas. One attendee simply shrugged her shoulders and said, Im not seeing it, meaning the coalition was not going anywhere.

As noted, when one person challenged the designation of Russia and China as imperialist, the response was to label him a white male lefty. It was explained that white male lefties think they have all the answers but need to learn how to listen. There was a general murmur of approval as the white male lefty was put in his place. As proof of the fact that Russia is imperialist, Zach Medeiros cited the recent New York Times article alleging war profiteering by Russian contractors in Syria. (See: New York Times voices moral outrage over profiteering military contractors ... in Russia)

Here is the pseudo-left in all its glory. Identity politics, in particular, has developed into a reign of terror in this milieu. Hostile to the working class, obsessed with gender and race, deeply subjective, aligned with imperialism, back-biting and jostling for personal advancement, these middle class layers inhabit a political encampment that is located ten thousand political miles from the workers movementand, in terms of its positions on Syria, not too many political yards from the US State Department, the New York Times and the CIA.
US President Donald Trump called for strong and swift economic actions against the Venezuelan government on Monday, raising the implicit threat of sanctions against that countrys oil industry, which would have a devastating effect on the countrys economy.

The threat from Washington follows an escalation of the right-wing oppositions campaign against the governments plan to hold a constituent assembly which would rewrite the constitution. This has culminated in a call for a 24-hour national strike to be held on Thursday, July 20.

According to a Reuters report, an expansion of targeted sanctions aimed at regime officials has already been prepared and needs only to be announced by Trump. Two figures thought to be targeted by the measures are defense minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez and Diosdado Cabello, the former speaker of the National Assembly and a key figure in both the Venezuelan military and the chavista United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). These new sanctions would involve a freeze on these officials US assets and prohibit business dealings with US companies and individuals.

This follows two earlier rounds of sanctions against officials of the Venezuelan government and state-owned oil company PDVSA. Most recently, the US Treasury Department announced it was blocking Vice President Tareck El Aissami from the US financial system for alleged involvement in drug trafficking.

According to a report published in the Financial Times, when asked about the possibility of a ban on Venezuelan oil imports, one US official reportedly stated that all options are on the table. The US receives around 25 percent of Venezuelas crude oil production, meaning that any reduction in imports would reduce the foreign currency available to the Venezuelan government to finance imports of food, medicine and other basic necessities, exacerbating already severe shortages.

However, there has been opposition to a blanket embargo on Venezuelan oil from US refinery operators who depend upon Venezuelan crude for their operations and would face difficulties in switching to other crude sources. The president of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers association, Chet Thompson, wrote to Trump saying, Sanctions limiting U.S. imports of Venezuelan crude would disadvantage many U.S. refineries, particularly those in the Gulf Coast and East Coast regions, that have optimized to utilize sour crudes produced in Venezuela.

Among the largest importers of Venezuelan oil are Citgo, the US subsidiary of PDVSA, Valero Energy, Phillips 66 and Chevron. As a whole, Venezuela accounts for around 9 percent of US crude oil imports. A reduction in the availability of Venezuelan crude would mean a rise in gasoline prices and even possible layoffs at refineries.

Because of the political difficulties involved in widening sanctions beyond prominent chavistas, much of the US pressure on Venezuela has come through its support for the right-wing opposition centered on the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) and its call for new elections and some kind of power-sharing arrangement based upon its control of the National Assembly.

This led on Sunday to a MUD-organized national referendum on the constituent assembly plan. Though held outside of the auspices of the National Electoral Council, which called the vote illegal, the MUD claimed a voter turnout of 7.2 million or 37 percent, with 98 percent voting against the constituent assembly. Such a figure lines up closely with recent vote totals for the MUD in national elections and apparently includes votes cast at polling stations in over 100 countries, including the United States.

On the same day as the MUD referendum, the Venezuelan government scheduled a dry run of its own constituent assembly vote, with pro-government news sources such as Telesur claiming that millions participated. The actual vote is scheduled for July 30. Once convened, the constituent assembly will be tasked to rewrite the constitution in order to consolidate the chavista hold on at least certain aspects of the Venezuelan government and economy.

Following the referendum, the opposition declared that it was zero hour for the Maduro government, and called for a 24-hour nationwide strike on Thursday. However, sensing the isolation of the MUD from the working class and broader social layers, Freddy Guevara, the vice president of the National Assembly and a member of the Popular Will party, said on Twitter that the civil strike this Thursday cannot come only from businessmen. The country belongs to everyone and everyone needs to guarantee to paralyze Venezuela. According to an Associated Press report, Venezuelas largest chamber of commerce even announced that employers would not punish workers for striking.

Reports are also emerging that there are high-level international negotiations over how to put an end to the crisis in Venezuela. The Financial Times cited an anonymous source who said that Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos is set to fly to Havana on Sunday at least in part to convince Raul Castro to lend support to a negotiated end to the crisis, possibly by even taking in Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, as political exiles. The private intelligence agency, Stratfor, also claims that Cuba is the nexus for indirect talks between Russia and the United States, in which former Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has been a key figure. Stratfor also noted that it has received persistent reports that he [Maduro] has considered asking for refuge in Russia or Cuba.

Cuba, Russia and China all have substantial economic interests in Venezuela and would be hurt significantly by being cut out entirely were the Maduro government to fall. By taking part in negotiations in which Maduro exits the scene, they hope to ingratiate themselves with the right-wing MUD and maintain their present relationships for as long as possible.

The chief obstacle standing in the way of any negotiated settlement to the crisis, or a palace coup, is the working class itself. For the working class, all of the proposed outcomes, based as they are on the maintenance of capitalism, mean continued austerity in order to shore up Venezuelas continually declining balance sheets and pay off its bondholders.
In April, an extensive neo-Nazi network was discovered in the German Bundeswehr (Armed Forces), which planned terrorist attacks against high-ranking politicians and glorified Hitlers army (the Wehrmacht). Barely three months later, leading newsweekly Der Spiegel has published an interview in which the military historian Sonke Neitzel praises the Wehrmacht and plays down the right-wing terror in which it participated.

Neitzel insists that the Bundeswehr must stand in the tradition of the Wehrmacht because it must be an instrument of battle. He declares that tank grenadiers and paratroopers can hardly be offered non-combative role models. They should be able to fight and kill, and therefore they cannot limit themselves to elements of traditions that correspond to liberal democratic principles.

The Bundeswehr is a military organization and not a branch office of the Federal Centre for Civic Education, the professor continues. This orientation is not consistent with accepting only the resistance [to the Nazis] within the Wehrmacht as the basis for inspiring traditions, he says. One can also act in an exemplary manner in a total war for a criminal regime for example, in providing leadership or as a successful soldier like [Helmut] Lent.

Lent, whom Neitzel praises, was a leader of the 3rd night fighter squadron who was styled a war hero by Nazi propaganda. In his funeral oration, Hermann Goring described him as a supporter of our National Socialist [Nazi] world outlook. Even the Bundeswehrs Centre for Military History and Social Sciences, which seeks to whitewash the history of the Bundeswehr, concluded that Lent was a career-conscious air force officer who largely conformed and complied with the system.

For Neitzel, not only Nazi propaganda heroes are to be revered for their military achievements, but Hitlers Wehrmacht as a whole. The initiative to want to win, to thrust forward, loyalty to dutyare all military qualities that remain valid, he declares.

His glorification of the Wehrmacht is directly connected to the relativization of the bestial crimes for which Hitlers army was responsible. The unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union, with the aim of destroying 30 million Slavic civilians, is presented by military historian Neitzel merely as a problematic war tactic.

There are decision-making possibilities in every war, states Neitzel, and the German army chose the most violent solution in many, many situations. But this should not obscure the fact that the Wehrmacht, as a fighting organization, was also successful.

One wonders what successes Neitzel is talking about. The massacres of civilians? The mass murder of communists? The annihilation of the European Jews? One gets a clue when the professor talks about Operation Zigeunerbaron, in which the victims included innocent civilians.

In fact, Operation Zigeunerbaron was a brutal anti-partisan operation in which all male civilians between 15 and 65 were arrested in the forests around Brjansk. The remaining population was expelled and their villages burnt down. Estimates are that only 20 to 30 percent of the more than 1,500 killed were partisans. The rest were civilians.

Neitzel himself implicitly declares the trivialization of such atrocities and the glorification of the Wehrmacht as tradition-making and necessary to make the Bundeswehr an instrument of battle.

In this, he outlines a project in which he and other professors, such as Humboldt University professors Herfried Munkler and Jorg Baberowski, have been working for some time. In the face of the revival of German militarism and plans for a massive upgrading of Germanys military forces, they are seeking to rewrite history. German imperialism is to be washed clean of its historic crimes in order to prepare new wars.

The political scientist Munkler summed this up when he declared in connection with World War I: It is hardly possible to conduct a responsible policy in Europe if one has the idea that we have been guilty of everything. With regard to 1914, that is a legend.

Neitzel himself went further and implied that Germany had only defended itself. According to Neitzel in January 2014, together with other authors in Die Welt, the German leadership pursued a defensive aim, driven by fear of losing [Germanys] position and its encirclement.

On the 75th anniversary of the 1941 attack on the Soviet Union, in a round-table discussion together with Baberowski broadcast by Phoenix, he questioned whether Hitler had planned the war of extermination in the east. Asked the question, Was that the execution of Hitlers long-cherished plan of Lebensraum in the east, or was he reacting primarily to the war situation? Neitzel replied: It was a bit of both. There is always the question of whether we can really believe that Hitler had a plan. This year, he claimed that Hitler had not used poison gas in World War II!

The trivialization of the historical crimes of German imperialism goes hand in hand with the trivialization of todays neo-Nazi networks in the Bundeswehr. The professor understands very well that such right-wing networks are not only a product of militarization, but also a prerequisite for a brutal army of intervention.

A suspected right-wing terrorist pops up and, fearing for her office, she picks a fight over traditions, Neitzel commented in relation to the attempts of Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen to cover her own tracks and make token gestures after the terrorist plot was uncovered.

But it was not, as Neitzel argues, a matter of a single presumed right-wing terrorist popping up, but an extensive neo-Nazi network that was systematically covered up by superiors. Two Bundeswehr officers were arrested because they stole weapons and planned terrorist attacks on high-ranking government officials and left-wing politicians and activists.

According to investigators, the immediate terrorist circle was comprised of at least seven individuals. But a broad support network was soon uncovered, situated at the Bundeswehr University in Munich and numerous other locations, and with close ties to the far-right movement.

Wehrmacht mementos and Nazi graffiti were discovered in a common room in the Illkirch barracks of the two chief suspects. Since the connection between the neo-Nazi terrorist cell and this glorification of the Nazi army was all too obvious, von der Leyen announced several investigations. But for Neitzel, this goes too far. He describes the search for supposed Nazi memorabilia as silly and proceeds to defend the Wehrmacht.

Neitzels trivialization of Nazi crimes and todays neo-Nazi networks must be taken very seriously. It is an expression of the dynamism and brutality of the newly revived German militarism. Neitzel himself is closely connected with the Bundeswehr and enjoys links with the highest circles. The War and Conflict Studies course at the University of Potsdam that he leads is based on direct collaboration with the Bundeswehrs Centre for Military History and Social Sciences.

In 2015 and 2016, he was involved in the drafting of the 2016 White Paper of the Bundeswehr, Germanys official foreign policy doctrine, which calls for more foreign operations and the deployment of the Bundeswehr domestically. In April of this year, in a commentary in the Suddeutsche Zeitung, he demanded that the German generals raise their voices and intervene in politics more vigorously in order to upgrade Germanys military capabilities and put them on a war footing.

Neitzel receives political support for his extreme right-wing theses above all from the Social Democratic Party. It was the Social Democrat Sabine Kunst, the then-minister of science in the Brandenburg state executive, who appointed Neitzel professor of military history in Potsdam in 2015. As the current president of Humboldt University, Kunst now declares all criticism of Baberowskis right-wing positions to be unacceptable and threatens critics with criminal prosecution.
A group dedicated to socially constructive conversation is calling Vernon County home for several weeks this summer.

Resetting the Table, an organization based in New York City, is bringing in more than 30 people to help facilitate discussions for the public and church congregations. Melissa Weintraub, co-director of Resetting the Table, said the work is being done after Novembers presidential election exposed wide political gaps between Americans.

Vernon County, along with the Midwest, she said, is an area with diverse political appetites. That means a need for discussion, Weintraub said, which is exactly what her movement seeks to achieve.

Resetting the Table works to build meaningful communication and connection across political divides, all over the county, Weintraub said. In the aftermath of the election, we felt concern over this immense divide that opened up across our county that manifested itself between costal and middle America, and urban and rural places.

The group plans to launch a listening campaign this summer, working in tandem with college students to conduct 400 one-on-one conversations in Wisconsin to determine the core issues affecting people here. In August, the listening campaign culminates with training for local pastors to carry on the work.

Eyal Rabinovitch, co-director of Resetting the Table and Weintraubs husband, said agricultural communities like the towns in Vernon County are often sidelined amid the backdrop of national dialogue.

In essence what we are motivated by is, in a broader sense, that the rural areas are uniquely misunderstood and underrepresented, Rabinovitch said. My hope is  people will join us in correcting that, in bringing a voice to the rural people of America that are too frequently unheard.

The organization said it plans to expand out of Vernon County while using the Viroqua area as a base, and local political leaders are aware of Resetting the Tables work in the county.

Karen Dahl, co-chairwoman of the Vernon County Democratic Party, said she is excited about an increase of political engagement in the region. She said her largest concern she wants addressed in conversation is gerrymandering, or the reordering of voting districts that critics say currently and unfairly favor the Republican Party in Wisconsin.

On the Republican side, Ron Hoff, president of the Republican Party of Vernon County, said his largest issue is the protests that the countys Democratic Party stages against his groups events.

Hoff said he hopes the presence of Resetting the Table can help heal that rift.

Weve been protested three or four times, Hoff said. Its hard for our party to understand that.

Resetting the Table, which got its start in New York City, faces a different social landscape in Americas heartland, according to Weintraub and Rabinovitch. And although Weintraub said people in this area have welcomed her with open arms, even inviting her to share a dinner, her group and mission can be viewed with skepticism.

Theres a different aspect of trust building when were outsiders in the community, she said. Some people are very private and have some concern about anything they might say be heard by their neighbors, because its a small place and voices carry.

She hopes that by directly addressing peoples concerns during interview sessions, more light will be shed on possible solutions.

Some of the stories will be shared anonymously in a report after the campaign wraps up, Weintraub said, and she hopes testimony will make it onto public radio broadcasts.

There are a lot of stories that are just underrepresented, and we think rural voices in particular are far less heard than they should be in the media and Hollywood, Weintraub said. It just amplifies the polarization in our country.

Resetting the Table is still in search of individuals to interview as part of their listening campaign. Weintraub said anyone who is interested can contact the organization at resettingthetable@gmail.com for more information.
SUWANNEE COUNTY, Fla. (WTXL) - New details are being revealed in the case of a Suwannee County man who's been missing for months that could lead to long-awaited answers to his whereabouts.

Law enforcement agencies, took Julian Valles Jr., Rudolfo DeLeon Jr., and Anthony Ridell James Jr. into custody.

They are facing charges including obstruction of justice, and concealment of a death in the case of Cole Thomas from Live Oak, who's been missing since November of last year.

Millenium Park here in Live Oak is where family and friends of Cole Thomas have gathered a number of times, praying for answers about his disappearance.

And Monday, after months of waiting, a breakthrough, with the news of the arrests of three men.

WTXL spoke to Cole's family in January, more than a month after he had gone missing. His parents left everything they had and headed straight to the city of Benson, North Carolina, where they stayed for several months looking for Cole.

His family here in Live Oak, trying to stay strong.

"We're searching. We're not giving up," said Darla Gatewood, Cole's aunt. "We're praying."

"I love you, my dear grandson, with all my heart," said Gwyn Herrington, Cole's grandmother. "So, please come home to us."

WTXL spoke with Cole's grandmother over the phone. She said this is a very emotional time for the family, which has been overwhelmed with calls and messages since news of the arrests.

We also spoke with the police chief of Benson, North Carolina. He said the department is not providing any more details about this ongoing investigation, including whether or not Cole Thomas has been found.

Meanwhile, his family is back together in Live Oak, but they're not speaking with the media.

We do know that Chris will be making his way back to North Carolina on Thursday and that another search will be conducted over the weekend to look for Cole.

Cole's father Chris posted a statement on a Facebook page dedicated to finding their son:

On the behalf of my family and I, we would like to make a statement concerning the recent arrest in my son's case, Cole Thomas. Today marks 235 days since our son Cole Thomas vanished from our lives, this has been the most devastating thing that has hit our family, ever. We have desperately waited for answers to where Cole is, we pray this will be the start of finding him. We cannot express our gratitude to all those who have supported us through this nightmare and all who are aiding in bringing those to justice; there are too many to name.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Florida State University is looking to help create its own energy.

The university unveiled Tuesday, the new "Smart flower" solar panels that will be placed on campus.

They're the world's first all-in-one solar system.

Instead of a typical rooftop panel, the flowers can track the sun's position throughout the day, making sure to get the best results possible.

Because the smart flowers aren't fixed to your home, they are mobile and can be moved with you, from house to house.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - The Children's Home Society of Florida joined WTXL for a question center Tuesday.

The WTXL Question Center was focused around children and representatives with the Children's Home Society of Florida made an appearance in studio to answer your questions.

WTXL spoke to the executive director of Children's Home Society of Florida, Charles McDonald.
The Ferryville Tourism Council is sponsoring a hike Saturday, July 22, at Sugar Creek Bluff in Ferryville as part of the annual River Bluff Daze celebration. Hikers should meet at the Ferryville Boat Landing (north end of town behind the Cheapo Depot) at 8:30 a.m. for treats, sign-in and handouts. Participants will carpool to the trailhead for the gradual hike to the summit. Please wear long pants and bring insect repellant.

Dave Troester, from the Crawford County Conservation Department, will be the guide. Troester has been up on this bluff many times and is knowledgeable about the plants and the area. Sugar Creek Natural Area is managed by the Mississippi Valley Conservancy.

After the hike, participants are invited to join in the rest of the River Bluff Daze activities, including a tractor pull at the Village Hall (noon), Ferryville Farmers Market at Sugar Creek Park (9 a.m. to 3 p.m.), Kids Carnival at the village hall (noon-1:30 p.m.) and fireworks at dusk. A free shuttle is available for going between Sugar Creek Park and the Village Hall.

Questions may be directed to Joanne White at 608-734-9018 or Sherry Quamme at 608-734-9077.
Its led by Elaine Krump. Call her before attending at 509-969-3615.

An Alzheimers Association support group for caregivers meets from 1 to 2:30 p.m. on the second Thursday of every month at Englewood Christian Church, 511 N. 44th Ave. in Yakima.

Save the date

The Alzheimers Associations Walk to End Alzheimers in Yakima is set for Oct. 14 at Sarg Hubbard Park, 111 S. 18th St. Registration opens at 8 a.m. and the walk begins at 9:30.

The Yakima Walk raised $32,346 in 2016, contributing to more than $82 million raised nationwide for care, support and research efforts for those impacted by Alzheimers.

Start or join a team at alz.org/walk. Learn more about the Hunter family and their continuing fight to find a cure at act.alz.org/goto/hunterfamilyfocus.
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YAKIMA, Wash. -- The first time Yakima firefighters saw Robert Hoss, it was in July next to the crumpled remains of his car.
Yakima County authorities have completed restructuring policy and staff in their code enforcement office in an effort to better deal with code violations which may include marijuana businesses in the Yakima Valley. (SHAWN GUST/Yakima Herald-Republic)
GRANGER, Wash.  For decades Grangers municipal criminal code has lacked legal language giving its police and court authority to enforce and 
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Last Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened an urgent meeting with Likud ministers. There is a lynch trial going on here, he told them. They are trying to bring me and the Likud down.

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Charles Lynch, according to Wikipedia, was a planter in the State of Virginia. During the American Revolutionary War, he gave suspects who were thought to be a part of a Loyalist uprising a summary trial at an informal court. The sentences included whipping, property seizure, coerced pledges of allegiance, and conscription into the military. White people in southern states adopted lynching as a punishment against black people. An incited mob would capture an innocent victim and hang him from a tree.

Is this what the police investigators, the Israel Securities Authority, the state comptroller and the media are doing to Benjamin Netanyahu these days? Is Netanyahu the new black person?

Are the police investigators, the Israel Securities Authority, the state comptroller and the media all hanging Netanyahu from a tree these days? (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg)

Thats an interesting question. The state comptrollers investigation in the Communications Ministry began with a report I published in May 2015, immediately after Netanyahu was appointed communications minister. The report specified eight communication-related activities presented by the website of the Shimron, Molcho & Co. law firm, the firm which serves Netanyahu twice: Partner Isaac Molcho is his diplomatic emissary, and partner David Shimron is his personal and political lawyer. They are both his relatives, his confidants and his representatives.

The firm played an important role in obtaining a variety of special communication licenses for its clients, the website stated. One of the companies handled by Molcho was Pelephone, which is owned by another one of Netanyahus associates, Bezeqs controlling shareholder Shaul Elovitch.

The comptroller approached Netanyahu and asked for clarifications. This is where things got complicated, leading to the state comptrollers report and to the scathing report released on Wednesday. It took Netanyahu five months to respond. In his response, he concealed his relations with Elovitch and his involvement, as communications minister, in decisions that helped Elovitch get richer at the publics expense. The conflict of interest disclosure form he filled out was far from the truth. To find out the truth, the comptroller had to talk to anonymous sources.

Netanyahu, Shimron and Molcho are the threads binding the two investigations togetherthe submarine affair (Case 3,000) and the Bezeq affair, which should be referred to as Case 4,000. Netanyahu insisted, in an unconventional manner, on handling the defense deals with the Thyssenkrupp shipyards; Netanyahu insisted, in a move which made no sense, on holding onto the Communications portfolio, in addition to the three other portfolios in his possession. The decisions in both cases were made by him.

Shimron was involved in the submarine affair as the lawyer of Miki Ganor, the shipyards representative in Israel; according to allegations published on Wednesday, Molcho was involved in it too, as the prime ministers representatives. The firms website can attest to the involvement of the Shimron, Molcho & Co. law firm in the Communications Ministrys affairs.

There is another thread binding the two affairs together. That thread is greed.

All the interrogees in all the affairs are innocent until proven guilty. Even if it turns out that some of the suspects have gotten into trouble with the law, it doesnt mean that Netanyahu has gotten into trouble with the law. But each of the affairs alone, and all of them together, give off a strong smell of corruption. Power tends to corrupt, Lord Acton said; so does time. A lot of power over an extended period of time corrupts sevenfold.

Behind everyones back

The argument over the number of submarines the Navy needs, the ways to maintain them and the supply rate is legitimate. So is the argument over the purchase of ships for the protection of gas fields. The question requiring clarification is what drove Netanyahu to handle the deal himself instead of leaving it to the Defense Ministry, which specializes in the field. This isnt just a case of government workers envy. The Defense Ministry includes the control system that is supposed to monitor the purchase process and detect any breaches in it. There is no such system in the Prime Ministers Office.

Netanyahu has yet to provide a proper explanation for his decision to go behind the backs of the defense minister, the General Staff and the Defense Ministry. The common explanationthat he was relying on governmental subsidization from German Chancellor Angela Merkelis lame, because the subsidization is given to provide the German shipyard with work, not to atone for the Holocaust.

Communications Ministry Director-General Shlomo Filber (L) and Bezeqs controlling shareholder Shaul Elovitch. The feeling in the media industry was that Filber was working for two peopleNetanyahu and Elovitch (Photos: Yuval Chen, Orel Cohen)

So far, we have received no real explanation why the international bid for the defense boats was cancelled, and why the Germans were selected. Another question was raised by former Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon and published by Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid on Wednesday: Who gave the Germans the approval to sell the same submarines to Egypt, going against Israeli governments stated policy? The German government told Major-General Amos Gilad, Yaalons emissary, that the approval was given by attorney Molcho on Netanyahus behalf. Netanyahu has denied it.

The questions raised by the Bezeq case are less irritating from a security point of view, but are related to the cost of living of every citizen. The investigation centers on Shlomo (Momo) Filber, who was personally appointed director-general of the Communications Ministry by Netanyahu. The feeling in the media industry was that Filber was working for two peopleNetanyahu and Elovitch.

As a regulator, Filber signed a series of decisions which helped Elovitchs Bezeq get richer. The explanation he provided was, in short, that Bezeqs huge profits would be invested in improving the Internet infrastructure. That didnt happen. The price was paid by the public.

Its too early to predict how the investigations will develop, but their effect on the involved parties is evident. Ganor, former Navy Commander Eliezer Marom, Shimron, Filber and Elovitch have been spending their days in the interrogation rooms. A large part of the money they have made will be invested in their legal defense. Elovitch lost in the stock exchange part of the money he earned in the regulation. Shimron and Molcho enjoyed the aura of being close to royalty. Now, they are living in the shadow of investigations. Shimron has been forbidden to contact the cousin who got him to this point.

The people heading the institutions investigating all the affairs were selected by NetanyahuAttorney General Avichai Mandelblit, State Comptroller Yosef Shapira, Police Commissioner Roni Alsheikh. He is the innocent, helpless victim, the black person hanging from a tree; and they are the incited mob, his hangmen. Some people may buy it.
The Trump administration told Congress for a second time Monday that Iran is complying with the nuclear deal and can keep enjoying sanctions relief, even as it insisted Tehran would face consequences for breaching "the spirit" of the deal.

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President Donald Trump, who lambasted the 2015 pact as a candidate, gave himself more time to decide whether to scuttle it or let it stand. Instead, senior Trump administration officials sought to emphasize their deep concerns about Iran's non-nuclear behavior and vowed that those transgressions won't go unpunished.

Trump (R) and Tillerson (Photo: Reuters)

In a shift from Trump's previous threat to "rip up" the deal, officials said the administration was working with US allies to try to fix the deal's flaws, including the expiration of some nuclear restrictions after a decade or more. The officials also said the US would slap Tehran with new sanctions penalizing it for developing ballistic missiles and other activity.

Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and "the entire administration judge that Iran is unquestionably in default of the spirit" of the agreement, one official said. That assessment carries no legal force, while Trump's certification that Iran is technically complying clears the way for sanctions to remain lifted.

The late-night announcement capped a day of frenzied, last-minute decision-making by the president, exposing deep and lingering divisions within his administration about how to deal with a top national security issue.

Since early last week, Trump's administration had been prepared to make the certification, a quarterly requirement. Trump first told Congress in April that Iran was indeed complying. With no final decision on his broader Iran policy, the White House had planned to let the status quo stand for another three months.

As planned, a public rollout began Monday morning involving close choreography among the White House, the State Department and other parts of government. The White House National Security Council distributed talking points to other agencies while national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin briefed outside policy experts who frequently comment on such issues in the media.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York (Photo: AFP)

Then, just as the White House was preparing to brief reporters, the announcement was abruptly halted and the talking points temporarily recalled as the president reconsidered the decision, according to officials and others briefed by the administration. Among the options Trump discussed with Tillerson and other aides was to extend the sanctions relief but refuse to certify Iran's compliance, several officials said.

With a midnight deadline just hours away, officials disclosed the final decision to reporters on a chaotic conference call on the condition that it not be published until the White House had a chance to formally notify Congress.

Ultimately, the president's decision was the same on the substance to what his administration had been planning all along. Although the language was toughened to add the declaration that Iran is "in default of the spirit" of the deal, Iran will continue receiving the same sanctions relief that it did under former President Barack Obama.

In April, when Trump made his first certification, he paired it with new sanctions for non-nuclear behavior to show there was no softening of his stance toward the Islamic Republic. Earlier Monday, the White House had told outside experts it would repeat that playbook, by punishing more than a dozen Iranian individuals, organizations and procurement networks involved in ballistic missiles and other nefarious behavior.

But the day came and went with no such announcement, although officials said they expected more sanctions would eventually be coming. It was unclear why the administration held off or for how long, but typically the Treasury Department prefers to issue new sanctions during business hours.

"We receive contradictory signals," Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations before the decision was announced. "So we don't know which one to interpret in what way."

In an interview with American bimonthly international affairs magazine The National Interest, Zarif discussed Iran's frustration over the US's "shortcomings" regarding their part of the deal, saying that "if it comes to a major violation, or what in the terms of the nuclear deal is called significant nonperformance, then Iran has other options available, including withdrawing from the deal."

Photo: AFP

For Trump, a vocal critic of the deal, the obligation to report to Congress on Iran's conformity has created an unwelcome, tri-monthly headache. Still undecided about whether to withdraw from the deal, Trump must either vouch for Tehran's compliance or try to claim Iran is breaching iteven though the International Atomic Energy Agency that monitors the deal says it is not.

In its condemnation of Iran, senior officials emphasized several longstanding US concerns about Iran's ballistic missile programs, human rights abuses and support for terrorism in the region. They also criticized Iran for detaining US citizens and limiting freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf.

Under the deal struck by Obama and other world leaders, Iran agreed to roll back its nuclear programlong suspected of being aimed at developing atomic weaponsin return for billions of dollars in sanctions relief. The deal does not address global concerns about Iran's non-nuclear activities, but also doesn't prevent the US and others from punishing Iran for those activities. Iran remains on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism for its support of anti-Israel groups.

Scuttling the deal would put further distance between Trump and foreign leaders who are already upset over his move to withdraw from the Paris global climate change accord. Other powers that brokered the nuclear deal along with the US have said there's no appetite for renegotiating it.
Jerusalem is built on decision makers and on seizing opportunities. They were all created and made by humans, from King David to Moshe Dayan. God had no part in what happened, even if people hasometimes spoke on his behalf.

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The best example is the Western Wall plaza, where people pray today. The Western Wall, with its ceremonies and quarrels, only exists thanks to the occupation and the necessary expulsion of Arabs. Fifteen contractors and bulldozers razed the Mughrabi neighborhood 50 years ago in an instant, as soon as the Six-Day War ended. The idea was raised by Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, and the Israeli government gave the approval. Since then, there is a Western Wall.

Had this decision not be made, the 650 residents of that poor neighborhood would have turned into thousands, the thousands would have turned into tens of thousands, and the Western Wall would have turned into another Arab neighborhood with a holy site Israelis are afraid to enter and the government avoids investing in.

Security forces outside the Temple Mount. In a theoretical word, we dont need anyones approval to make a decision. We are the sovereign power. In the real world, we decide nothing (Photo: Reuters)

A similar, yet opposite, decision was made about the Temple Mountthe Jewish Vatican that Moshe Dayan didnt want. For a short period of time, the Temple Mount was in our hands, before being handed over to the Muslim Waqf at the Israeli governments order. Israel evacuated the Mughrabi neighborhoods residents and brought in the Waqf people. it divided the heritage and the sanctity, and the gap between the ideal and reality has been growing ever since.

The right thing for the Temple Mount would be a preservation of the site by the Israeli government. Focusing on antiquities and archaeology, turning the place into an international visitors center, offering freedom of ritual for members of the different religions, a small museum, a kiosk for tourists, modernization and maximum security, as befitting a site that draws curious and crazy peoplethe basic rules for holy sites with an archaeological interest around the world, from Peru to Italy.

The reality, though, is completely different: the government has no control over what goes on there. A foreign organization is responsible for the sites operation on behalf of the Jordanian government. The archeology on site continues to be damaged, once every so many years. There are no alluring tour guides and no brochures for tourists, the freedom of ritual is only for Muslims, and security depends on the feeling of rage on the Arab street. Due to the lack of control, the site closes and opens according to what happens with the Palestinians.

The right thing for the Temple Mount has not been implemented in the past 50 years and isnt going to be implemented, either. There has never been a government that spoke so much about sovereignty and strength. There has never been a government with so many ministers who have sworn allegiance to the Temple Mount, drawing on dresses and making promises.

In theory, the right thing to do would have been to seize opportunities. An attack committed by Muslims at the Temple Mount as an opportunity to change the governmental chaos at the site. To put things in order. To stop treating that important place as if we were a third-world country. Its such a right thing to do, that everyone in the Right tweeted it and said it out loud.

In reality, this wont happen. Why? Because the government doesnt want to do it. The Temple Mount is referred to as a powder keg, and no one wants to deal with it. Whether its a right-wing government or a left-wing government, everyone is doing the same thing, wanting to get home safely.

Metal detectors on the mountain are not a change but a necessary security measure. The war on the Islamic Movements northern branch and on its inciters, or on Palestinian organizations operating on the mountain, is not a change either, but a necessity to reduce risks. So is the firm hand against the rioters on the mountain. Today and always. The powder keg remains a powder keg until the explosive is removed from itthe Israeli lack of control over what goes on there.

Fridays terror attack is painful and distressing, but it should have also served as an opportunity for a new debatean international one. Israel could have enlisted the international community, the Americans and the Jordanians for a direct discussion of the Temple Mount. The first Temple Mount convention. The goal would have been to create an international standard for the operation of the worlds most important religious and archaeological site. What the French, the Americans and the Saudis are allowing themselves to do would be adopted by the Israelis and the Jordanians emissaries (who were created by us at the site).

Renovations that have been required for years and are not being done for fear of riots, law enforcement against destroyers of archaeology, freedom of ritual and security checksin a theoretical word, we dont need anyones approval to make a decision on all of this. We are the sovereign power. In the real world, we decide nothing. We toss the words status quo into the air and keep our heads down until the next chaos. And it will arrive, unless we seize the opportunity.
Two and a half years ago, former US President Barack Obama announced the renewal of relations with Cuba after a stalemate of more than 50 years.

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On the sidelines of the announcement, Obama announced a prisoner exchange deal in which Alan Gross, a Jew from Maryland who worked in Cuba as an employee of a humanitarian organization and built Internet infrastructures, was returned to the US.

Alan Gross

Gross was arrested in 2009 on charges of smuggle into Cuba sophisticated technological equipment to undermine the government and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

He served five of them, was releasedand now lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, Judy, after immigrating.

Gross, 68, revealed the trauma he underwent in an interview with US television program 60 Minutes program. "They threatened to tear off my fingernails and hang me. I lost 50 kilograms and five teeth because of lack of nutrition." To stay fit, he walked in circles in his cell in a military hospital in Havana, where he was imprisoned.

In order to raise awareness of his condition, he even embarked on a hunger strike. He was released on the day of Chanukah in 2014.

Last May, the Gross family received permission to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return.

Gross told the Jewish American news agency JTA that he visited Israel "at least 60 times" before immigrating to Israel.

The couple has daughter who lives with her partner in Jerusalem, and another daughter who lives in Oregon.

Gross added that he likes to walk the streets of Tel Aviv and claimed that one of the reasons for his immigration to Israel was the desire to change the political situation: "If Jews do not like what is happening in Israel, the solution is to immigrate to Israel and vote."

When asked if he would go back to Cuba, Gross said, "Without a thought."
President Reuven Rivlin was the Israeli official who expressed his concern over Germany's intention to sell advanced submarines to Egypt in a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel during his visit to Berlin in May 2015 to mark 50 years of diplomatic relations between the two nations.

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Yedioth Ahronoth journalist Alex Fishman reported on Tuesday morning a senior Israeli official had expressed concern on behalf of the defense establishment to Merkel regarding the planned sale. On Tuesday evening, Channel 10's Raviv Drucker reported the official was none other than Israel's president.

Merkel and Rivlin (Photo: Getty Images)

In response to the president's concern, Merkel expressed embarrassment. After examining the matter, Merkel told Rivlin that a senior Israeli official had given Germany permission to carry out the deal with the Egyptianswithout senior members of the defense establishment or the president being aware.

The German agreement to sell four submarines and two anti-submarine ships to Egypt raised the possibility that behind the scenes there was a tripartite deal under which Israel would approve the German deal with the Egyptians and in return receive a substantial discount on the purchase of ships to protect offshore gas platforms.

The planned German-Egyptian submarine deal is the second such agreement between the two nations.

In 2009, then-Minister of Defense Ehud Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the Germans permission to sell less advanced submarines to Egypt, which was then under the rule of President Hosni Mubarak.

Photo: AFP

Following the ascension of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in 2014, another deal was made to sell Egypt submarines and ships. However, this time the deal encountered opposition from Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon and other defense ministry officials.

In contrast to the previous deal, this one involved advanced submarines similar to those purchased by Israel.

When Ya'alonwho only by chance discovered the dealconfronted Netanyahu about Israel allowing Germany to sell the vessels to Egypt, Netanyahu denied having authorized the transaction.

Only after Rivlin returned from Berlin did Ya'alon learn for the first time that Israel had indeed given the green light to the deal despite objections from top defense officials.

The Germans claimed these new agreements were made during their meeting with Netanyahu's representative, attorney Yitzhak Molcho. Molcho is a partner and relative of attorney David Shimron, who is a suspect in the police investigation into the sale of the submarines to Israel.

Miki Ganor during his remand extension hearing (Photo: Oriel Cohen)

One person who can aid investigators in solving the puzzle is ThyssenKrupp's representative in Israel, Miki Ganor, who was arrested last week on suspicion of bribery. Police are hoping to secure Ganor as a state witness by the end of the week.

Sources involved in the investigation believe that Ganor holds sensitive material related to other Israeli security deals and that if he becomes a state witness, he will implicate other officials in the defense establishment.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has decided to lower its profile in the fight against the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement (BDS) after the Ministry of Strategic Affairs under the direction of Minister Gilad Erdan has taken the dominant role in the fight.

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The Foreign Ministry decided to close its special department after the current head, Amir Ofek, was appointed Ambassador to Costa Rica.

Gilad Erdan (Photo: Motti Kimchi)

Sources at the Foreign Ministry noted that once BDS passed to the auspices of a different ministry, the Foreign Ministry became a marginal player and there was no need to maintain an entire department dedicated to the issue.

However, the source noted, "We will continue to deal with this issue, but with a lower profile and with a different emphasis."

The Ministry of Strategic Affairs under Erdan received a budget of NIS 250 million for 2017-2018. In the last two months, the ministry has succeeded in recording several successes in torpedoing initiatives aimed at harming Israel on the international stage.

The Foreign Ministry issued a statement, saying, "There is no change in the ministry's full commitment in the fight against BDS. We are acting and will continue to act on this matter. As part of the reorganization of departments, changes were made in the responsibility of units."
possible deal between Israel and Hamas to return three Israeli citizens and the bodies of two IDF soldiers being held in Gaza is reportedly stuck over an Israeli demand to get a video proving Abera Mengistu , Hisham al-Sayed and Jumaa Ibrahim Abu-Ghanima are alive, Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar reported Wednesday.

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In return to such a video, Israel is reportedly willing to release several female prisoners, minors and Palestinian parliamentarians under administrative detention.

Hamas has rejected the Israeli demand, pushing instead for the release of 55 prisoners previously released in the 2011 Shalit deal and arrested anew after returning to terror activity. Israel opposes this demand.

Goldin, Shaul and Mengistu

Furthermore, in addition to information about the soldiers' bodies, Hamas has demanded Israel to release the Palestinians arrested during the current ongoing round of violence.

Nevertheless, the paper reported some progress in the indirect talks mediated by Egypt, with inside sources saying "new proposals" were raised by Cairo during negotiations.

Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that "our commitment to return Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin home remains valid and true."

Speaking at a ceremony marking three years to Operation Protective Edge, in which the two soldiers were killed, the prime minister added that "we are not giving up on this holy mission until it is completed successfully. This is true concerning Abera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, citizens being held in the Gaza Strip by a cruel enemy."
German conglomerate ThyssenKrupp has frozen its relationship with their representative in Israel, businessman Miki Ganor.

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"Upon the publication of the suspicions, we immediately suspended all business relations with Mr. Ganor until the completion of the criminal investigation by the Israeli authorities," the company said in a statement.

Miki Ganor in court (Photo: Orel Cohen)

"Based on the investigative measures we were able to carry out, we found no concrete indications of corruptionneither with regard to submarine projects, nor in connection with the procurement of corvettes. However, these investigation results are explicitly provisional," the statement went on to say.

Ganor, who has represented the company in Israel since 2009, was arrested last week on suspicion of bribery. Police are hoping Ganor will become a state witness in the affair in order to implicate other senior defense officials in corruption.

As revealed in Yedioth Ahronoth by Yossi Yehoshua on Tuesday, the signing of the memorandum of understanding between Germany and Israel regarding the procurement of three submarines has been postponed due to the investigation.

Photo: EPA

German newspaper Handelsblatt reported Tuesday night the last submarine deal inked between Germany and Israel a decade ago could have been influenced by corruption as well.

The paper is in possession of internal documents from a ThyssenKrupp partner that was involved in the construction of submarines in the city of Kiel in 2004. The documents raise suspicion unusual payments were made in connection to the sale of two submarines to Israel. The payments were listed as being "usability expenses."

ThyssenKrupp declined to comment.
The Jerusalem Islamic Waqf announced Wednesday that all of the mosques in the capital will be closed on Friday in an effort to encourage worshipers to come pray at the gates of the Temple Mount, a move that could lead to more violent clashes.

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Earlier Wednesday, the Israel Police decided to close the Temple Mount to Jewish visitors after a group of Jews broke rules of visitation at the holy site.

Border Police on the Temple Mount (Photo: TPS)

Meanwhile, the international effort to find a solution to the standoff on the Temple Mount continues. The US government urged all parties to maintain restraint and reduce tensions on the Temple Mount as clashes continue between Muslim worshipers and police, an American official told London-based Arabic-language daily al-Hayat.

Police and rioters clash near Temple Mount (Photo: Reuters)

According to the official, the United States welcomes the commitment of all parties to abide by the understandings related to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and urges continued efforts to ensure security in the Temple Mount complex.

In addition to the United States, Egypt also issued a statement on Temple Mount tensions, demanding that Israel halt violence and respect freedom of worship in Jerusalem's holy places.

Police and rioters clash near Temple Mount (:  )

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The Egyptians further demanded that Israel ensure the right of Palestinians to worship freely and in security.

Egypt also warned of the dangerous consequences of Israeli security escalation in regards to the Al Aqsa Mosque, which the Egyptians claim put the life of former Grand Mufti Ekrima Sa'id Sabri in danger.

Former Grand Mufti Ekrima Sa'id Sabri after purportedly being injured in clashes (Photo: AFP)

The unrest has been fueled by the installation of metal detectors at the entrance to the Temple Mount, which has led to PA President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement calling for a "day of rage" in east Jerusalem and the West Bank in response.

In addition to calls for a "day of rage," Fatah also declared that Friday prayers would be held in the main squares of major Palestinian cities and sermons would be dedicated to the Al Aqsa Mosque and rallying against Israeli security measures.

Hamas is also preparing for a deterioration in the security situation, calling on the Palestinians to join the planned protest marches in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem on Friday after noon prayers.

In clashes outside the Temple Mount on Tuesday night, rocks and Molotov cocktails were thrown at police, lightly injuring two officers.

Police forces at the scene (Photo: Gil Yohanan)

In response to the violence, police issued a statement saying, "During the dispersal of rioters, two officers were lightly injured and treated at the scene. In the neighborhood of Ras al-Amud, stones were thrown at Border Police officers. Forces are currently searching for the suspects."
DUBAI -- At least 20 Yemeni civilians were killed and many others were wounded when a Saudi-led coalition air strike hit a village in the south, officials from the armed Houthi movement and the government said on Wednesday.

The U.N. said the victims of Tuesday's bombing, which hit al-Atera village in Taiz province where fighting between Yemen's two warring sides has intensified, were internally displaced people (IDPs).

Yemen's internationally recognised government confirmed that around 20 people were killed, including women and children. It gave no further details on the attack.

Yemen's human rights minister, Mohammed Askar, called for a government investigation into what he described as an "unfortunate incident." while Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul-Salam condemned it as a "monstrous crime."
DUBAI -- President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday new U.S. economic sanctions imposed against Iran contravened the country's nuclear accord with world powers and he vowed that Tehran would "resist" them, state television reported.

"Some of the actions of the Americans are against the spirit and even the letter of the (nuclear accord). We shall resist these plans and actions," Iranian state television quoted Rouhani as saying.

"One of the plots of the Americans is to act in such a way that would make Iran say that it is not following its commitments... I think the Americans will fail as we will always respect our international commitments," Rouhani said.

Iran's parliament agreed on Tuesday to discuss measures, including increased fun
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went on an unprecedented tirade against the European Union on Wednesday, calling the organization's treatment of Israel "crazy."

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"There is no logic here. Europe is undermining its own security by undermining Israel," Netanyahu said in a private meeting in Budapest with the leaders of Hungary and the Czech Republic discussing Iran, Syria, the Islamic State, and EU-Israel relations.

Netanyahu's hot mic comments were accidentally broadcast to journalists covering the prime minister's trip through their earpieces. The feed was cut off as soon as it was discovered.





Netanyahu with the leaders of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Photo: Haim Tzah, GPO)

Before that, however, journalists heard the prime minister criticize the European Union for conditioning technological cooperation with Israel on creating the political conditions for peace talks with the Palestinians.

"Europe is endangering its own development by endangering its ties with Israel over this crazy attempt to create conditions" for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he said. "Israel is right there and Europe is disconnecting itself from this massive center of innovation."

He went on to comment that, "If this were only about my interests, I wouldn't have brought it up. Don't undermine the only country in the region that is looking after Europe's interests. Stop attacking Israel, support Israel."

Hungarian premier Viktor Orban responded to Netanyahu in a conciliatory tone, telling him the European Union sets similar conditions to its member states as well. "We definitely understand what we're talking about," he said.

Netanyahu with the leaders of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Photo: Haim Tzah, GPO)

Netanyahu replied that "Europe must decide if it wants to live and prosper or wither and disappear. I see you're shocked because I'm not being politically correct.... We're part of the European culture. Europe ends in Israel. East of Israel, there's no more Europe... I suggest you first help us and Europe by expediting agreements with us and sending a message to your colleagues in Europe on how to help Europe."

The prime minister told the other leaders of Israel's good ties with world powers like China and India. "There's a strange situation here, I must say. The European Union is the only one in the world that sets conditions to its ties with Israel, which spreads technology in every region of the world," he said. "I've just been to China. President Xi told me, 'You're an innovation giant.' We have special ties with China and they don't care about politics. (India's Prime Minister) Modi told me, 'I need to solve the water problem, what should I do? I need to produce milk, what cow produces the most milk? The Israeli cow.'"

He also discussed Israel's ties with the US. "We had a big problem with US policy. It's different now. There's a stronger stance against Iran. There's a renewed American presence in our region and more bombings, and that's positive... I told (Russian President) Putin, when we see (Iran) transferring weapons to Hezbollah, we'll hit them. We've done it dozens of times."

Netanyahu met with leaders of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia at a regional summit Wednesday.
US officials say President Donald Trump's embrace of Russia is sparking concern among members of his national security and foreign policy team. They are said to be concerned about his previously undisclosed dinner conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 meetings in Germany last month.

The White House confirms the conversation took place. Officially, Washington and Moscow are downplaying the reports. A spokesman for the National Security Council says it was a casual chat between the two leaders that shouldn't be described as a "meeting." A Russian lawmaker describes it as "a secret conversation that didn't happen."

The chat between the two leaders is said to have involved Russia's translator but not one from the US. US officials say they are concerned about the president's tendency to shun the usual protocols for such meetings. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the meeting on the record.
Zabka, Warszawa, 166 m2

Lokal znajduje sie w budynku apartamentowym Unimax Development w inwestycji Viva Vitolin, przy ul. Grochowskiej 87 w Warszawie. Bedzie dostepny w 4Q 2023 roku (podpisanie umow przeniesienia wasnosci).
Washington: The US Supreme Court rejected on Wednesday a bid by President Donald Trump to include grandparents and other relatives in his travel ban on people from six Muslim-majority countries.



But in a partial win for Trump, the court gave the government more leeway to enforce a separate ban on refugees that was included in a March 6 executive order the president said was necessary for national security.



A federal judge had ruled against the government on the scope of both bans last Thursday, prompting the administration to seek Supreme Court intervention.



The high court`s decision means that, for now, grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, and siblings-in-law are not covered by the 90-day travel ban on people from the six countries who want to enter the United States.



The court`s action on refugees could block entry of up to 24,000 refugees who have a connection to a US resettlement agency, according to court papers.



The brief order said the court`s decision is temporary while the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals considers a separate appeal on the same issue. Three of the conservatives on the court of nine justices noted that they would have granted Trump`s request in full.



In a statement, Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin, who challenged the bans in court, said his office is preparing arguments for the 9th Circuit on the refugee issue and said the Supreme Court ruling validated Hawaiis position.



"This confirms we were right to say that the Trump administration overreached in trying to unilaterally keep families apart from each other," Chin said.



The Supreme Court also announced on Wednesday that it has scheduled oral arguments on broad questions on the lawfulness of the ban for Oct. 10.



The Trump administration last Friday asked the high court to overturn a decision on Thursday by a US district judge in Hawaii, which limited the scope of the administration`s temporary ban on travellers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and the 120-day ban on refugees.



Naureen Shah, senior director of campaigns at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement that the court`s decision on refugees "jeopardises the safety of thousands of people across the world including vulnerable families fleeing war and violence."



The latest round in the fight over Trump`s executive order began after the Supreme Court intervened last month to partially revive the two bans. Both had been blocked by lower courts.



The Supreme Court said then that the bans could take effect, but that people with a "bona fide relationship" to a U.S. person or entity could not be barred.



The administration had narrowly interpreted that language, saying the ban would apply to grandparents and other family members, prompting the state of Hawaii to ask Hawaii-based U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson to expand the definition of who could be admitted. He ruled for the state late on Thursday.



In his decision, Watson harshly criticised the government`s definition of close family relations as "the antithesis of common sense."



Watson also ruled that the assurance by a resettlement agency to provide basic services to a newly arrived refugee constitutes an adequate connection to the United States because it is a sufficiently formal and documented agreement that triggers responsibilities and compensation.
Patna: Amid uncertainty between Janata Dal (United) and Rashtriya Janata Dal, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar chaired a Cabinet meet that was attended by scam-tainted Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav.

What transpired between the two leaders remains unclear, however, if reports are to be believed, Nitish and Tejashwi are said to have reached a 'consensus'.

As per Zee News sources, Nitish has reportedly told Tejashwi to not step down from the post of deputy chief minister.

In the meeting, the deputy chief minister gave his explanation over the allegations that he faces right now, said the source.

The meeting, which lasted for about 50 minutes, was attended by Health minister Tej Pratap Singh and state Congress chief Ashok Choudhary.

Cracks in the Bihar ruling grand alliance had formed earlier this month after the CBI conducted raids on properties linked to RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav and his family for alleged financial irregularities, and lodged a FIR against Tejashwi for criminal conspiracy, cheating and criminal misconduct in the land-for-hotel deals.

What followed next was JD(U) asking RJD to come clean on the source of his assets after 'raids' episode with Lalu making it clear that there was no question of his son tendering his resignation.

On Saturday, Tejashwi had skipped a government function in which he had to share dais with Nitish.
Patna: JD(U) on Wednesday dubbed Tuesday's meeting between Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and his deputy Tejashwi Yadav as "routine," reiterating that the deputy chief minister should clear all accusations against him on the basis of facts in the public domain.

The JD(U) sought to dispel the notion that the impasse in the Grand Alliance government, cropping up after the lodging of an FIR by the CBI against Tejashwi Yadav allegedly for amassing huge wealth has ended following the nearly 45-minute meeting between Kumar and Yadav after the Cabinet meeting yesterday.

Yadav is an accused in the land-for-hotels case, allegedly involving the members of his father Lalu Prasad's family.

"It was a routine meeting of a Cabinet colleague with the CM over some governmental matters and not a political one ... Our stand remains the same that those facing accusations should reply to them in the public domain," JD(U) spokesman Ajay Alok said, attaching no political significance to the yesterday's meeting.

Another JD(U) spokesman Rajiv Ranjan Prasad termed the meeting as "normal" in connection with governmental works.

The RJD, however, rated high the meeting between Kumar and Yadav.

"There is no matbhed (difference in opinion) between us. Grand Alliance is strong," RJD leader and minister Vijay Prakash said.

His elder brother and RJD MP Jay Prakash Yadav claimed "Everything is fine."

Former RJD minister Shivanand Tiwari, who is in constant touch with RJD president Lalu Prasad, said "after the talks, the situation arising out of lack of dialogue has ended and the vehicle is now back on track."

The meeting between the two leaders took place yesterday away from the media glare. Mediapersons were barred entry into the secretariat, the venue of the Cabinet meeting, following a scuffle between Tejashwi Yadav and his minister Tej Pratap Yadav's securitymen and mediamen after the last one on Wednesday.

The press briefing by the Cabinet Coordination Department Secretary Brajesh Mehrotra too was shifted to the Public Relations Department office some distance away instead of at the secretariat as in the past.

The BJP and NDA leaders appeared unimpressed over the meeting and attacked Kumar for not taking a call on Yadav.

Senior BJP leader Nand Kishore Yadav urged Kumar to break his silence on Tejashwi Yadav.

JD(U) has sought "point-by-point" clarification from Tejashwi Yadav over the accusations against him. "A closed door meeting between the chief minister and deputy chief minister is not the proper answer to it," he told PTI.

Former Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi described the goings on in the Grand Alliance as "noora kushti" (friendly fight) to keep hanging to the power."
Mumbai: Kangana Ranaut didnt mince her words while accusing Karan Johar of nepotism on his own talk show Koffee With Karan earlier this year. The curly-haired beauty, who has had no godfather in the film industry, has three National Film Awards to her credit. She has earned her space in the industry by working hard and letting her acting prowess do the talking.

Recently, Johar took the much talked about nepotism debate to the stage of the IIFA 2017 event! He was joined by Varun Dhawan and Saif Ali Khan, who too took a dig at Kangana indirectly for talking about nepotism in the industry.

According to a report in Bollywoodlife.com, the Queen of Bollywood is least affected by the trios joke. On the contrary, she is focussing on her debut production venture  Manikarnika: The Rani of Jhansi.

In fact, it was Kangana, who had also said that she wouldnt like to work with any of the Khans, a statement no other ambitious actress could ever think of saying on national TV.

So Kangana isnt really someone who would give too much importance to what others are saying. She would simply focus on her work.
New Delhi: The CBI on Wednesday issued summons to Karti Chidambaram, the son of former Finance Minister P Chidambaram, in its ongoing probe against him in a corruption case, an official said.



The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), in its third notice to Karti, asked him to appear at its headquarters in south Delhi`s Lodhi Road on Friday.



The agency wants to examine Karti in a case related to Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance given to INX Media for allegedly receiving funds from Mauritius when his father was the Union Finance Minister.



The agency had issued summons to Karti and four others for questioning on June 27 and June 29, but they did not turn up.



Karti, through his lawyer, had then informed the CBI that he needed more time to appear.



The CBI on May 15 registered an FIR against Karti on charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating, accepting gratification by corrupt or illegal means, influencing public servants, and criminal misconduct.



Karti is alleged to have received Rs 3.5 crore from Mumbai-based INX media, now 9X Media, for helping it in getting FIPB clearance when it was run by Peter and Indrani Mukherjea, both accused in the Sheena Bora murder case.



The FIR does not mention the name of Chidambaram senior, though it says he cleared the FIPB approval for Rs 4.62 crore Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the FIPB meeting on May 18, 2007.



Karti left for London two days after the CBI registered a case against him.



In May, the agency had conducted raids at the premises of Karti, Peter, and Indrani at 14 locations in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Delhi National Capital Region in connection with the case.
New Delhi: India has told UK authorities that all wanted Indians, including liquor baron Vijay Mallya, will get equal treatment like any other prisoner in India and the facilities in its jails are no less than what European nations have, a senior official said.

This was conveyed by Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi to his British counterpart Patsy Wilkinson, the second permanent secretary in the British Home Office, during a meeting last week in London.

The Indian delegation led by Mehrishi told the British authorities that whoever is extradited from the UK, he or she will be lodged in a proper jail with facilities on par with European jails, said the official, who did not want to be quoted.

However, the Indian team made it clear that no extradited persons will be given preferential treatment but would be treated like any other prisoner and asked the British authorities to convey this to the court in London.

This bears significance as Mallya has challenged the Indian government's move in the court to get him extradited from the UK saying the conditions in Indian jails are below standard.

The Indian delegation told their British counterparts that the cells in Indian jails are bigger than European jails and all jails have medical facilities with a proper hospital, the official said.

The home ministry has already written to the Maharashtra government to improve the conditions of its Arthur Road jail, where Mallya would be lodged if extradited from the UK, he said.

Mallya, who is wanted in India for Kingfisher Airlines' default on loans worth nearly Rs 9,000 crore, has been in Britain since March, 2016.

A court in London is hearing a case regarding his return to India.

India has already assured Britain of all assistance in extradition matters to allow the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to present water-tight cases before the courts there against Mallya.

Mehrishi visited London in the wake of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's talks with his British counterpart Theresa May in Hamburg, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting there recently.

Modi had asked for Britain's cooperation in sending "economic offenders" back to India.

A joint team of the ED and the CBI is currently in London to brief UK prosecution, working on the extradition of Mallya, and to submit fresh proof in the case.

The visiting officials of the two central probe agencies will also submit the charge-sheet filed by the Enforcement Directorate in the case last month in Mumbai, said a senior official in the probe team.
New Delhi: A contented workforce has much to do with how flexible a workplace is, finds out a report.

Nearly 40 percent global candidates rate 'schedule flexibility' as one of the top three factors in making career decisions, as per the findings.

According to a research from ManpowerGroup Solutions, two-thirds of candidates believe that they do not need to be sitting at the desk to get their work done.

Flexible arrival and departure times and full-time work from home or location independence are generally the most sought-after attributes of flexible workplace policies, as per the survey of 14,000 individuals across 19 countries.

Asked about what matters to them in job search, 26 percent candidates said flexible arrival and departure times are most important, followed by the ability to work from home or any other place they choose (22 percent).

The rise in importance of schedule flexibility is driven by a wide range of local factors like presence of multinational companies or unions at a given location, the influence of technology firms in the marketplace, workforce composition such as proportion of millennials and public transportation that can impact commuting times.

Workplace flexibility does not just mean working remotely. It includes all types of working arrangements, from when to take breaks to working from home or caregiving leaves.

"While no employer can accommodate every option, they can provide a range that appeals to a variety of candidates," said Kate Donovan, Senior Vice-President of ManpowerGroup Solutions and Global RPO President.

Donovan further said organisations need to be ready to drop old work models that emphasise presenteeism over performance.

"It is time to shift the needle - employers who meet candidate expectations around schedule flexibility have the advantage in recruiting and retaining the best talent," Donovan said.

The survey noted that employers should take babysteps to align themselves with a flexible workplace. They should normalise existing flexible policies and align incentives with outcome.
New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Wednesday sought the response of Congress leader Sajjan Kumar on a plea seeking cancellation of the anticipatory bail granted to him by the trial court in a 1984 anti-Sikh riots case in which member from the community was killed.

Justice IS Mehta issued a notice to Kumar on a plea by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) seeking cancellation of the anticipatory bail given to Kumar by the trial court on December 21 last year.

The court posted the matter for the next hearing to November 10.

Earlier, two of the high court judges had recused themselves from hearing the matter.

The high court had on February 23 asked the SIT to inform it about the timing of each FIR lodged against Kumar in the case.

The timing of each FIR was sought as Kumar is an accused in several anti-Sikh riot cases and the court had expressed concern on how a person could be involved in each one of them.

The probe agency had informed the court that 10 FIRs were registered in Delhi against the Congress leader after the assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi.

The agency had on January 25 moved the high court seeking cancellation of Kumar's anticipatory bail.

While granting relief to the former MP on a personal bond of Rs one lakh and a surety of the like amount, the trial court had asked him not to leave the country without permission and to cooperate in the probe.

The SIT had earlier submitted before the high court bench that the cases filed against Kumar falling in the jurisdiction of Janakpuri and Vikaspuri police stations in west Delhi, were lodged after a delay of over 30 years as the complainant was "scared" to name the accused due to his "powerful" position.

The counsel for the SIT had also submitted that since Kumar's name has cropped up during the investigation in the case, he needs to be interrogated and his custody is also necessary as he has to be confronted with the evidence in the matter.

The SIT said that according to the complainant Harvinder Singh, whose counsel also sought cancellation of Kumar's bail, at around 11 am on the fateful day, the accused was seen leading a mob.

The complaint in Janakpuri pertains to the killing of two Sikhs -- Sohan Singh and his son-in-law Avtar Singh -- on November 1, 1984.

The other relates to Gurcharan Singh who was killed on November 2, 1984, in the jurisdiction of Vikaspuri police station.

According to the complaint, Gurcharan, who was half burnt, remained bed-ridden for 29 years. He died three years ago.

Seeking anticipatory bail from the trial court, Kumar had argued that his name had appeared in the case after 32 years and it was politically motivated.

The SIT had also submitted that the delay in the registration of the FIR and not assigning the investigation of the cases to an independent agency clearly suggest the influence of the accused/respondent at that time also.

The SIT, which was set up in February 2015 on the direction of the Ministry of Home Affairs to reinvestigate the closed case, said that it filed a detailed status report of the ongoing investigation before the trial court.
New Delhi: The Patiala House Court will on Wednesday pronounce its order on the police's plea demanding that real estate tycoons, Gopal Ansal and Sushil Ansal, who are convicted in the Uphaar fire tragedy case, should seek judicial permission before leaving the country.

The court had on July 6 reserved its order on the Delhi Police's plea seeking that the Ansal brothers should take permission before leaving the country, for July 19.

The decision on the plea by the Delhi Police came after it was reported by a magazine that Sushil Ansal is taking steps to flee from the country as he was selling his properties below the circle rates and transferring money to his foreign bank accounts in the UK and Singapore.

Prosecutor Ansari told the court that the news article which was published in December 2016 gives rise to a serious apprehension that the accused may flee from the country during the pendency of the present trial.

The counsel for Ansal brothers had opposed the police plea and said that accused are facing trial in the cases since 20 years and have attended court proceedings regularly.

Earlier in April, accused Gopal Ansal surrendered before the Tihar jail authorities after the apex court refused to grant him more time.

The court also directed senior lawyer Ram Jethmalani, who appeared for Ansal, to ask the real estate baron to complete the rest of his jail term.

The apex court sentenced Ansal to one-year jail term on February 9, while, his elder brother Sushil was ordered to skip his prison term because of his old age and ill-health.

As many as 59 people died and more than 100 injured in the subsequent stampede after a fire broke out during the 3-6 pm (Matinee show) screening of Hindi movie 'Border' on June 13, 1997.

With ANI inputs
New Delhi: Universities are required to compete globally for research-ranking to become world-class, President Pranab Mukherjee has said.

He said there is an emphasis on nation-building through institution-building and "we are now increasingly being called upon to think about the role of universities in the larger global context".

The President was speaking at the launch of a book titled 'Future of Indian Universities: Comparative and International Perspectives', which was released by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and edited by O P Jindal Global University (JGU) Vice-Chancellor C Raj Kumar.

"The universities of today are required to compete globally for research-ranking to help build World-Class Universities," the President said, adding that as the future universities gear up for global competition to find their place on the tables of institutional rankings, "let us not forget the difference between world-class and world-minded".

He said now the needs are much more complex, along with the post-independence emphasis on nation-building through institution-building and "we are now increasingly being called upon to think about the role of universities in the larger global context of an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world."

Speaking at the programme, the Nobel laureate emphasised on the need for freedom and autonomy of higher educational institutions in India.

"We need to think about why India does not rank among the top 200 universities in the world. The difference between Indian universities and those in other countries is that they are autonomous and free from political policies and obstacles.

"The mindset in this country needs to change to bring excellence and freedom in the field of education," Sen said.

Virander S Chauhan, the acting Chairman of University Grants Commission said that the quality of higher education in India has to be viewed not just by students, but by parents and teachers as well.

"Indian universities have tremendous potential and need to accelerate their pace. This can only happen if we have good leadership. The public sector needs a huge transformation in the field of higher education, and private universities need to be a model for quality and excellence," he said.

The book is a collaborative effort of scholars who have raised questions regarding the quality and excellence of higher education in India.

Professor Kumar, who has also compiled the book, said universities are compelled to rethink their roles.

"At a time when the state of universities and their value to the larger society is being increasingly debated, universities are compelled to rethink their roles and the role of the higher education system," he said.

JGU Chancellor Naveen Jindal, who was also present at the function, said the varsities of future must become central pillars of growth and development of a nation that churns out intelligent minds for the 21st century.
Panaji: Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar on Wednesday told the state Assembly that Sadhvi Saraswati`s controversial speech in Goa last month, where she said that beef-eaters should be hanged in public, did not contain any "religious sentiment".



In his written reply tabled on Wednesday during the ongoing monsoon session of the state assembly, Parrikar said that no FIRs were filed in connection with the speech because no complaint was received by the state police.



"The speech as reported, do(es) not have any issue of religious sentiment, nor has any complaint been received by police," Parrikar said replying to a question by Leader of Opposition Chandrakant Kavlekar.



Madhya Pradesh-based Sadhvi Saraswati, who was in Goa to attend a four-day All India Hindu Convention, had said that those who eat beef should be hanged in public.



"People who take eating beef as a status symbol, I request the Centre to hang them in public. People will then understand that cow protection is our responsibility," Saraswati had said.



Several legislators of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, including Deputy Speaker Michael Lobo, have in the recent past demanded that a FIR be filed against her for her "hate-speech".



Beef is popularly consumed by the state`s Catholic and Muslim minorities, who account for nearly one-third of the coastal state`s population.



However, to a question by Kavlekar, who sought to know the details of the action taken by the government against Sadhvi Saraswati as the "issue would spark communal hatred", Parrikar in his reply said: "No complaint has been lodged nor any religious matters were reported in media reports."
Shimla: The Himachal Pradesh High Court on Wednesday handed over the investigation into the Kotkhai gang-rape and murder case and also the custodial death of one of the accused to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

A division bench of the High Court consisting of acting chief justice Sanjay Karol and justice Sandeep Sharma directed the CBI to constitute a three member SIT,?headed by an officer not below the rank of SP, along with two DSPs, and start investigations.

The court also asked the state police to hand over the entire record of the case to the CBI and also took on record the affidavits filed by the Director General of Police (DGP), Somesh Goel, who was present in the court.

The state government had earlier moved the High Court seeking that the CBI be directed to take over the investigations.

Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh had also written a letter to the prime minister in this regard.

The state government had decided to get the case referred to the CBI for investigation following public outcry against the inquiry by the police.

People had taken to streets last week and there were allegations about attempts to shelter some influential persons involved in the heinous crime and that the six accused held in the case were not the main accused.

One of the accused persons held in connection with the shocking rape and murder case was allegedly killed in the lock-up by another accused last night, according to police officials.
Shimla: One of the six people accused of the rape and murder case of Shimla minor girl was found murdered inside his cell in Shimla district's Kotkhai tehsil on Tuesday.



As per Zee News, the deceased, identified as Suraj, was murdered by the other accused in the case, Suraj, inside the jail last night.



On July 13, the Himachal Pradesh Police had claimed a breakthrough in the rape and murder of a minor school girl whose naked body was found in isolated woods in Kotkhai tehsils Halaila village.



Later, the police arrested at least six accused in connection with the case and produced them before a court in Theog. They were sent to a seven-day police remand.



The police is tight-lipped about the inmate's death in the custody.

Meanwhile, the victim's family is claiming that the main accused in the rape-murder case, who belong to high-profile families, are being shielded by the police.

On July 4, a 16-year-old girl was raped and murdered at the Kotkhai area of Shimla district after she was offered a lift in a car by a group of people. Her body was recovered from the nearby Halila forest two days later.



A massive protest began in Kotkhai area of Shimla almost a week back that has refused to die down till now.



Succumbing to public pressure, the Himachal government on Friday ordered a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the case that has seen massive public outrage with a mob vandalising police vehicles outside the Theog police station. Calling the six arrests an 'eyewash', the crowd was demanding a CBI probe.


Shimla: In a shocking incident that took place in Shimla's Kotkhai, an angry mob set ablaze a police station on Wednesday afternoon.

The incident took place when angry villagers pelted stone and protested outside the Kotkhai police station after one of the six accused in gang-rape and murder of a minor girl died in police custody on Tuesday night.

The main suspect in the case Raju killed another suspect Suraj Singh by smashing his head on the floor in the Kotkhai jail. Suraj, a Nepalese, was one of the suspects in the case.

Also Read: Shimla gang-rape case: 1 of the 6 accused dies in police custody

Meanwhile, tension mounted in the area following the murder of the suspect after which irate mob forcibly entered the police station and ransacked it.

While struggling to control the situation, the police personnel fired in the air to disperse the mob that had gathered outside the police station.

On July 4, a 16-year-old girl was raped and murdered at the Kotkhai area of Shimla district after she was offered a lift in a car by a group of people. Her body was recovered from the nearby Halila forest two days later.

A massive protest began in Kotkhai area of Shimla almost a week back that has refused to die down till now.

Succumbing to public pressure, the Himachal government on Friday ordered a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the case that has seen massive public outrage with a mob vandalising police vehicles outside the Theog police station. Calling the six arrests an 'eyewash', the crowd was demanding a CBI probe.

On July 13, the Himachal Pradesh Police had claimed a breakthrough in the rape and murder of a minor school girl whose naked body was found in isolated woods in Kotkhai tehsils Halaila village.

Later, the police arrested at least six accused in connection with the case and produced them before a court in Theog. They were sent to a seven-day police remand.
New Delhi: A nine-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court on Wednesday commenced hearing to examine whether right to privacy is a fundamental right - a question pivotal to the challenge to the validity of the Aadhaar scheme.

The nine-judge constitution bench hearing the matter is being headed by Chief Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar. Other members of the bench include Justices J Chelameswar, SA Bobde, RK Agrawal, Rohinton Fali Nariman, Abhay Manohar Sapre, DY Chandrachud, Sanjay Kishan Kaul and S Abdul Nazeer.

The bench is examining the nature of privacy as a right in context of two judgements of 1954 and 1962 which held that right to privacy was not a fundamental right.

Shortly after the hearing began, petitioners' lawyer told the Constitution Bench that privacy is embedded in all processes of human life and liberty, according to ANI.

The matter came up for hearing in the apex court after a batch of petitions raised concerns over linking of Aadhar with PAN  a move which they call an attempt to dilute civilian liberties.

While hearing a batch of petitions challenging the Aadhaar scheme, a five-judge bench including Chief Justice of India JS Khehar had yesterday said, "It is essential to decide whether there is right to privacy under the Indian Constitution. We are of the view it has to be decided by a 9-judge bench."

The Centre argued before the court that the right to privacy is not in the Constitution and is not a part of the right to life, however, the petitioners countered it by saying that the right to privacy is inherent in the Constitution.

The Supreme Court then referred the matter to a nine-judge Constitution Bench to determine whether linking of PAN card with Aadhar breaches an individual's privacy or not.

The development came days after the apex court briefly stayed the linking of Aadhar to PAN cards amid concerns over breach of privacy.

Responding to it, Centre had then emphatically assured the Supreme Court that biometrics of Aadhar cardholders were safe and had not fallen into other hands.

Through its order, the Supreme Court upheld the validity of an Income Tax Act provision making Aadhar mandatory for the allotment of permanent account number (PAN) cards and the filing of tax returns, but imposed a partial stay on its implementation until a constitution bench addresses the right to privacy issue.

A bench comprising justices AK Sikri and Ashok Bhushan also upheld the legislative competence of Parliament in enacting Section 139AA of the Income Tax Act.

An eight-judge bench in 1954 and six-judge bench in 1962 had both ruled that there is no right to privacy.
New Delhi: Describing China as a "bigger threat to India than Pakistan", Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday asked the government to respond on the military standoff at Doklam.

Speaking in the Lok Sabha against the backdrop of tension between New Delhi and Beijing, the former defence minister claimed that China was ready to attack India in collaboration with Pakistan.

The veteran leader further asked the government to reverse its stand on the Tibet issue by supporting its independence.

He also claimed that Chinese military personnel have been seen in Pakistani military facilities in the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and China was also building roads there. It must be opposed at the diplomatic level, Yadav said.

"India is today facing a big danger from China. I have been cautioning central governments for many years. None of them paid adequate attention. China has joined hands with Pakistan. It has made full preparation to attack India.

"China is India's biggest opponent. What has the government done? In Kashmir, the Chinese Army has allied with the Pak Army," Yadav, known for his tough stand on China, said during the Zero Hour.

He also claimed that China had buried nuclear weapons in Pakistan to target India, adding that Indian intelligence agencies "would know better".

Without naming then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, he said the Congress stalwart made a "big mistake" on the Tibet issue and added that he had even then spoken against it. Tibetan leaders like Dalai Lama had always supported India, he said.

Time had come to support the independence of Tibet as it had been a traditional buffer between the two big nations and India should give maximum support to the Dalai Lama.

"China is a bigger threat to India than Pakistan. Pakistan cannot do anything to India. I have been saying this for the last 20 years. Now, it`s clear that China is conspiring against us. In Kashmir, China is supporting Pakistan even with arms and ammunition. This should be strongly protested," Mulayam Yadav said during Zero Hour.

It was India's responsibility to protect Bhutan and China was eyeing Nepal, he said.

He also spoke against massive amounts of Chinese goods finding a market in India.

"If China continues to help Pakistan and interferes in Kashmir, India should ban Chinese products. If need be, we should have a rethink on diplomatic relations," Yadav said.

He also demanded a complete review of India`s relations with China.

The stand-off between the armies of India and China in the Doklam plateau in the Sikkim sector has led to a strain in diplomatic ties, with the Chinese state-run media openly talking of war.

The government last week briefed the leaders of political parties and assured them that the issue will be resolved diplomatically.

(With Agency inputs)
Washington: Amid the ongoing standoff between Indian and Chinese troops at the Dokalam area, the US has urged the Asian giants to work together come up with some sort of arrangement for peace.

Addressing a news conference, State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert said, I know that the US is concerned about the ongoing situation there.

While responding to questions on India-China border standoff in the Dokalam area near the Bhutan tri-junction Nauert said, We believe that both parties, both sides should work together to try to come up with some better sort of arrangement for peace.

"We encourage India and China to engage in a direct dialogue aimed at reducing tensions," a State Department official told PTI on Tuesday.

US' reaction comes after Beijing on Tuesday told New Delhi to withdraw its troops from the disputed border at Doklam as a Chinese newspaper warned that Beijing was battle ready and not afraid to go to war with India in an "all-out confrontation".

India should not use "trespass" into the Dokalam area in the Sikkim sector as a "policy tool" to achieve its "political targets", China said, asking New Delhi to immediately withdraw its troops to avoid any escalation.

Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar on Tuesday briefed the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs on the Doklam stand-off and said that China has been unusually aggressive but India is trying to resolve the issue diplomatically and peacefully.

China and India have been engaged in the standoff in the Dokalam area near the Bhutan tri-junction since last month after a Chinese Army's construction party attempted to build a road. Doka La is the Indian name for the region which Bhutan recognises as Dokalam, while China claims it as part of its Donglang region.

India has said Beijing's action to "unilaterally determine tri-junction points" violated a 2012 India-China pact which says the boundary would be decided by consulting all the concerned parties.

The Indian Army is ready for a long haul in holding onto its position in the Dokalam area near the Bhutan tri-junction, notwithstanding China ratcheting up rhetoric against India demanding pulling back of its troops.

The Indian soldiers deployed in the disputed area have pitched in tents, in an indication that they are unlikely to retreat unless there was reciprocity from China's PLA personnel in ending the face-off at an altitude of around 10,000 feet in the Sikkim section.

A steady line of supplies is being maintained for the soldiers at the site, official sources said, signalling that Indian Army is not going to wilt under any pressure from China.
New Delhi: Even as a report in the official mouthpiece of Chinese military has said that its Army had moved tens of thousands of tonnes of military vehicles and hardware into the remote mountainous Tibet region, top government sources mainatined on Wednesday that there was no significant rise in deployment of troops by China along the Sino-India border.

The sources was quoted by PTI as saying that the exercise was a routine military drill by China and that its western theatre command has not made any major enhancement in its military might in the wake of the face-off that should trigger alarm bells in India.

The command looks after the 3,488-km-long border with India.

The vast haul was transported late last month, the report said but did not clarify whether the movement of the military equipment was to support the exercise in Tibet or for other reasons.

Referring to Chinese military's recent live-fire exercise in the mountainous Tibet region, the government sources said it was a routine drill and will be an exaggeration to link it with the border face-off.

China's military yesterday had said it conducted the exercise to test its strike capability on plateaus.

China has been ratcheting up rhetoric against India in the recent weeks following the face-off between the armies of the two nation in Doklam in the Sikkim sector.

Meanwhile, as per NDTV, Chinese presence along the border is being countered by elements of the Northern, Western, Central and Eastern Commands of the Indian Army.

The report said that deployments made by the Leh-based XIV Corps, the Sukma-based XXXIII Corps, the Tezpur-based 4 Corps, the Dimapur-based III Corps and the Panagarh-based XVII Corps were the core of India's defence.

The strength of the Indian Army here is said to be close to 2 lakh men and women.

The media house further said that the Indian Air Force had 22 airfields and was developing a network of smaller air landing grounds in the Eastern sector.

(With Agency inputs)
New Delhi: Budget passenger carrier IndiGo on Wednesday said it has decided to revoke the ban on flying TDP MP JC Diwakar Reddy on its flights.



"Senior IndiGo officials today met Honourable Member of Parliament Diwakar Reddy, at a lunch hosted by senior Member of Parliament YS Chaudhary, to resolve the issue of Honourable Member Diwakar Reddy`s ban on IndiGo flights," the airline said in a statement.



"The issue is amicably resolved between the two and IndiGo has decided to lift the said ban with immediate effect and Reddy is withdrawing the case he has filed."



The airline added that it has informed the Federation of Indian Airlines (FIA) about its decision.



As of June 16, all the major seven domestic airlines -- Air India, Jet Airways, IndiGo, SpiceJet, GoAir, Vistara and AirAsia India -- had barred the TDP MP from their flights.



It was alleged that Diwakar Reddy on June 15 created ruckus at the Visakhapatnam airport after he was denied a boarding pass for an IndiGo flight as he had not showed up in time.



The Telugu Desam Party lawmaker from Anantapur was also said to have damaged a printer and misbehaved with IndiGo staff.



The MP had apparently reported at the check-in counter 28 minutes before the scheduled departure of the flight against the regulation of 45 minutes. As the airline staff told him they could not issue him a boarding pass, he got angry and entered into a heated argument with them.
New Delhi: Noisy protests rocked both houses of Parliament as they convened for normal business on Wednesday after members from the Opposition created a ruckus over farmers' plight, spate of lynching incidents, communal clashes and Kashmir unrest.

According to ANI, the Opposition MPs raised the recent incidents of lynching in the name of cow protection and sought an explanation from the BJP government.

Replying to the Opposition charge, MoS Home Hansraj Ahir said, '' PM Modi had clearly warned that cow vigilantes not to take law in their hands. The Home Ministry also issued an advisory in this regard.''

''Dragging the BJP into this controversy is not right,'' he added.

While speaking in Rajya Sabha, Janata Dal United Sharad Yadav said, ''Farmers are in bad shape in this country.''

Farmers are protesting at the Jantar Mantar, what is the government doing for them?, Congress leader Digvijaya Singh said on his turn.

The issues of Indian hostages in Mosul, cow vigilantism, Indian-China border standoff were also raised by the opposition lawmakers.

As the din continued, the Rajya Sabha was adjourned till 12:30 pm.

The Lok Sabha was also adjourned till noon.

Earlier, the Congress MPs staged a protest inside Parliament demanding a special package for flood-affected North-eastern states.

According to ANI, Congress MPs staged a protest in front of Gandhi statue at Parliament complex demanding special package for flood-hit north-eastern states.

Delhi: Congress protests in front of Gandhi statue at Parliament complex demanding special package for flood-affected Northeastern states. pic.twitter.com/vYYKiSArTu  ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2017

Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) general secretary Sitaram Yechury had also issued a notice and called upon the Rajya Sabha to address the issue of "communal polarisation" and "attacks in the name of cow protection" in many parts of India.

The Lok Sabha was on Tuesday adjourned following an uproar by the Opposition.

The Lower House was adjourned for the day on Monday too after an obituary to former members and victims of the Amarnath terror attack was given.

The dastardly Amarnath terror attack was strongly condemned by the Lok Sabha MPs. The Monsoon Session of the Parliament will continue till August 11.

A united Opposition is also expected to raise the issues of China, Jammu and Kashmir and Darjeeling unrest and impact of Goods and Service Tax (GST).

Apart from this, the Centre will introduce 16 new bills in both the houses of the Parliament for consideration and passing.

Ahead of the Monsoon Session, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while addressing the floor of leaders of parties of the Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha at the national capital, said that for preserving the institution of democracy in India, it is important that all political parties support the government to conduct business in both Houses of the Parliament without disruption and constructive discussion takes place on issues of national importance.

Prime Minister Modi further urged all parties to extend their support to the government in fighting corruption and the issue of communal violence in the name of cow protection.

The Prime Minister also called upon all the parties to support the war against corruption, which has been initiated by the government.

With ANI inputs
New Delhi: The issue of lynching on Wednesday resonated in the Rajya Sabha where the Opposition alleged involvement of "some members" of BJP and Sangh Parivar in these incidents even as the government said communal colour should not be given to such violence.

As the House took up a discussion on the issue, Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said the government is equally concerned about the criminal incidents and everyone should speak in one voice to fight against "such destructive forces".

The Centre condemns such incidents, Naqvi said, adding the states should take stringent legal action against those involved.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had also made this clear during the all-party meeting recently, he added during the debate on 'situation arising out of the reported increase in the incidents of lynching and atrocities on minorities and Dalits across the country'.

He alleged that it's a "conspiracy" that some are trying to "defame" the government and divert its agenda in the name of such incidents as they think they could level corruption charges on the government in the last three years.

Initiating the debate, Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad attacked the government, saying the rise in these incidents was spreading the message of fear.

"Earlier it was done at an individual level. You may not like it, all lynching is done by some members of the ruling party and Sangh Parivar," he alleged.

It is done with a basic understanding and hence no arrests been made in the incidents that happened so far.

"They should have been jailed. Even I can identify hundreds. They are known to the media," the Congress leader said.

Insisting that no Opposition party benefits from these incidents, he said but "one political party, the ruling party is benefiting. This is done for political harvest."

Urging the government to take the matter seriously, Azad said, "This nation belongs to all. Your responsibility is more. You have to take the lead. We can help in creating an atmosphere. If you spoil the atmosphere..."

He urged the ruling party to give up "vote politics" and work towards making the country strong within to fight the external issues.

"This is not a religious battle. This is not Hindu-Muslim fight. This is everyone's fight for humanity. When our home is weak, how can we fight the external forces...Our house has always been strong. Don't break the house for votes," he said.

Azad said not a single place is safe, from Jammu and Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

"Lynchings are reported from all over. Such incidents are happening for the first time. This used to happen during the medieval age, not even during British times," he said.

He expressed sadness over the "disturbing trend" that no one comes forward to save a person being lynched.

Urging the Opposition to unite and speak with one voice in its fight against the destructive forces, Naqvi said: "Please don't give a communal angle to these incidents. If you give, you are helping them..."

"We should together defeat and isolate the destructive forces. We should speak in one voice. ...Please speak the truth on this issue," said Naqvi, who is also Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs.

Asserting that the government will not allow any "destructive forces" to dominate the development agenda, Naqvi said, "We do not wish any destructive forces to affect the government's development agenda and the country's culture."

He added, "The policy of our government and the party is clear that we will not allow any destructive agenda to dominate on our development agenda."

It would be a misunderstanding on the part of "destructive forces" to think that by "fabricating the issues", they can divert the attention, Naqvi said. "Then it would be nothing but "Mungeri Lal ke Haseen Sapne (day dreaming)," he said.

"This is a conspiracy. Anyone could be doing it. I am not taking any party names. I don't want to get into it."

Stating that lynching incidents were reported in the previous government regime too, the Minister said: "Whether lynching incidents happened before or now, strict legal action should be initiated against those involved."

Refuting the Opposition charge that no action was taken against those involved in lynching incidents, he gave details of arrests made in Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharashtra in the last six months.
New Delhi: Paramilitary forces and Army are not comparable on a one to one basis as there are differences in their retirement age and service rules, parliament was told on Wednesday.



Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju told the Rajya Sabha, in a written reply, that ex-gratia lump-sum compensation of Rs 35 lakh was provided to the kin of paramilitary personnel who killed on active duty and Rs 25 lakh for those died on duty.



The kin of the deceased personnel are also entitled to get liberalised family Pension (as per last pay drawn) under Central Civil Service (Extraordinary Pension) Rules 1939 and other pensionary benefits as admissible, he said, adding thus Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) and Army are not comparable.



The minister also said that five per cent vacancies are reserved in Group "C" and "D" for compassionate appointments for kin of the deceased personnel.



He said under the Prime Minister`s scholarship scheme, amount Rs 2,250 per month for girls and Rs 2,000 per month for boys is being released to the wards of serving and retired paramilitary forces personnel.



"Prime Minister scholarship is admissible to 1,000 girls and 1,000 boys."



The minister said that there was a reservation of 15 MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery) and two BDS (Bachelor of Dental Surgery) seats for the wards of paramilitary forces in the seats of central government quota for these courses.



"Central Police canteens at various locations in the country have been functioning. A welfare and rehabilitation board has been established for the welfare and rehabilitation of paramilitary personnel and their families including differently abled personnel," he added.
New Delhi: Counting of the ballots cast in the July 17 Presidential Election will be taken up here on Thursday to decide the fate of two contenders -- the ruling NDA`s candidate Ram Nath Kovind, who has a clear edge, and the combined Opposition nominee Meira Kumar.



Officials said all preparations have been made for the vote count and that all ballot boxes have already reached Parliament House by Tuesday evening amid tight security.



They said the counting will begin at 11 am simultaneous across four tables. There will be eight rounds of counting, and announcements made after every round.



Polling to choose the successor to President Pranab Mukherjee, who demits office on July 24, was held simultaneously at 32 polling stations -- one in Parliament House and one each in 29 state assemblies and two union territories with assemblies.



Lok Sabha Secretary General Anoop Mishra is the Returning Officer for the election, and will issue the certificate to the winning candidate.



Officials said the seals of ballot boxes will be opened on Thursday in the presence of representatives of the two candidates -- former Bihar Governor Kovind and former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar -- and the observers of the Election Commission.



In Monday`s polling, several states registered 100 per cent polling. The overall poll percentage was pegged at 99.41 per cent. A total of 776 members of Parliament and 4,120 legislators were eligible to cast votes.



In the electoral arithmetic, Kovind has a distinct advantage over his rival as parties like the Janata Dal-United and the Biju Janata Dal, otherwise not allied with the Bharatiya Janata Party, had decided to vote for him.



The Janata Dal-United has about 1.91 percent of electoral college votes, while the BJD of Odisha has 2.99 percent.



In addition, the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi in Telangana (two per cent), different factions of AIADMK (5.39 percent), and the YSR Congress (1.53 percent) also had announced their backing for Kovind.



The value of the vote of an MP is 708 while that of an Assembly member varies from state to state depending on the size of its population.





The total value of votes of the presidential electoral college is 10,98,903, and the NDA candidate is slated to get over 63 percent votes.



In the last Presidential Election in 2012, Pranab Mukherjee had defeated PA Sangma and got over 69 percent votes.
New Delhi: NDA candidate M Venkaiah Naidu so far enjoys committed support of 485 of the 788 members of the electoral college that will choose the next vice president on August 5, election managers of the former Union minister said.

With more than 60 per cent of the votes likely go in his favour, Naidu is set for an impressive win over joint opposition nominee Gopal Krishna Gandhi.

Sources in the BJP said they are confident about getting more support as the polling day approaches.

Though the electoral college's strength is 790, two members - Vinod Khanna and Anil Madhav Dave - both of the BJP, passed away recently.

The members of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha constitute the electoral college that elects the vice president.

The NDA's strength in the 544-member Lok Sabha (reduced by one following the demise of Vinod Khanna) is 337, while it has 77 MPs out of the total 244 in the Upper House.

Three non-NDA parties- the AIADMK, TRS and YSR Congress- have also announced their support to Naidu, taking the number of lawmakers backing him up by 54 in the Lok Sabha and 17 in Rajya Sabha.

In the NDA, the BJP's current strength is 281 in the Lower House followed by 18, 16, six and four of the Shiv Sena, TDP, LJP and SAD.

In the Rajya Sabha, the saffron party's strength is 56 followed by six of TDP, and three each of Shiv Sena and SAD.
Jammu: A Junior Commissioned Officer (JCO) injured in Pakistani firing died on Wednesday while a civilian was wounded in fresh ceasefire violations along the LoC in the Poonch-Rajouri belt of Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistani troops also violated ceasefire along the Line of Control in Nowgam sector for second consecutive day and in Uri sector as well, but there has been no casualty in these incidents, army officials said.

The officials said the Indian Army is retaliating to the Pakistani aggression in equal measure.

"Pakistan Army initiated unprovoked and indiscriminate firing by small arms, automatics and mortars from 11:45 hours in Poonch sector along the Line of Control (LoC)," a defence spokesman said.

"JCO Subedar Shashi Kumar, who was grievously injured during the unprovoked ceasefire violation by Pakistan in Naushera yesterday and was being administered treatment at Command Hospital Udhampur, succumbed to his injuries," a defence spokesman said.

The soldier was a native of Galon village in Hamirpur district of Himachal Pradesh. He is survived by his wife and children. "His mortal remains are being sent to his native village," the spokesman added.

Earlier in the day, the Pakistan army resorted to unprovoked firing on the Indian posts in Naushera sector in Bhimbher Gali around 08:45 hours.

Reports suggested Pakistan has resorted to heavy shelling in Balakote, Dhar, Lambibari, Rajdhani, Mankote, Sandote, Shahpur, Rawalakote, Gulpur in Rajouri and Poonch districts since this morning.

A civilian has been injured in the shelling in Sandote hamlet along the LoC and is hospitalised, police said.

During the past 24 hours, Pakistan violated ceasefire eight times -- in Balakote, Poonch, Naushera, Bhimbher Gali, Nowgam sectors.

Ten people, including eight soldiers, have been killed and 18 people injured in over a dozen ceasefire violations by Pakistan this month.

Yesterday, the neighbouring country violated ceasefire five times, pounding villages and forward posts with mortar bombs along the LoC. Two jawans were killed and six people, including three civilians, injured.

Over 8,000 people, including 3,000 in Naushera and 5,000 in Manjakote-Rajdhani-Panjgrain-Naika, have been affected by the shelling in the past two days.
Srinagar: Pakistani troops on Wednesday violated the ceasefire along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmirs Bhimber Gali sector.

The Pakistan Army resorted to unprovoked firing along the LoC at 8:45 am.

The Indian security forces retaliated to the Pakistani misadventure with full vigour.

Two Indian Army jawans were killed and another was injured as Pakistani troops pounded several places, including civilian areas, in J&K on Tuesday.

The Pakistani Army also targeted civilian areas and Indian Army posts along the LoC in Bhimbher Gali and Balakote sectors of Rajouri district as well as the Poonch sector triggering fear among residents.

There were over a dozen of ceasefire violation by Pak army along LoC in J&K in which seven people including four jawans were killed and 12 injured in the month of July this year.
New Delhi: The number of stone-pelting incidents in Kashmir has dropped down to 664 in 2017 as compared to 2,808 in 2016, the Home Ministry claimed in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday.

Within a span of one year, the 'reported' incidents of violence have gone down to 172 in 2017 as against 322 last year. In 2016, 247 people lost their lives including 15 civilians, 82 security personnel and 150 terrorists.

Minister of State for Home Hansraj Gangaram Ahir said this while presenting a report on the second day of Parliament Monsoon Session, in response to written questions by two lawmakers - Congress' Jyotiraditya Scindia and YSR Congress' M Raja Mohan.

The report compared the data of 2010 and 2016. It recorded incidents till July 9, 2017.

Security forces counterveiled nearly 95 terrorists operating in the Valley this year, the ministry said. A total of 21,695 suspected terrorists has been gunned down by them so far.

The ministry also claimed the incidents of violence have also gone down in the Valley. However, the number of civilians injured last year is nearly eight times higher than in 2010.

According to the Home Ministry, the Kashmir unrest has left over 40,000 people dead.

In response to an Right to Information (RTI) plea filed by Raman Sharma, Jammu resident, the Chief Public Information officer said that more than 13,000 security personnel were injured between 1990 to March 31, 2017. The officer also informed that the Kashmir conflict led to the death of 13,941 civilians over the past 27 years, reported India.com.

The RTI plea reply added that 2001 is regarded as the most violent year in the recent history of Jammu and Kashmir. It recorded the death of 3,552 human lives including 996 civilians, 536 security personnel and 2,020 terrorists.

However, the years 1996 and 1995 witnessed the maximum number of civilian deaths with around numbers 1341 and 1031 respectively.

The span between 2006 to 2012 has been comparatively peaceful as it recorded the minimum number of deaths.

The year 2012 witnessed deaths of 102 people including 15 civilians, 15 security men and 72 terrorists while 65 security men sustained injuries.
Mumbai: Indian banks may have to write off 60 percent of the value of bad loans from their 50 large stressed asset accounts, or a hit of 2.4 trillion rupees ($37.31 billion), ratings agency CRISIL said on Wednesday.

The 50 stressed companies, which account for 4 trillion rupees in soured loans, are largely from the metals, construction and power industries and account for nearly half of the total non-performing assets in the banking sector as of the end of March, CRISIL said.

The credit agency, part of S&P Global, estimated that banks have provisioned for only around 40 percent of their exposure to these assets.

Banks had total non-performing loans of about 7.29 trillion rupees, or 5 percent of India`s gross domestic product, as of end-March.

The report comes after rival India Ratings and Research had estimated banks taking 12 of the country`s largest defaulters to bankruptcy court would need to make additional provisioning of at least 180 billion rupees.
Kohima: In a significant political development, Nagaland Governor PB Acharya on Wednesday dismissed the Shurhozelie Liezietsu government after he failed to turn up for a floor test and appointed TR Zeliang as the new Chief Minister of the state.

Zeliang has been invited to be sworn-in as the Chief Minister at 3:00 pm today.

As per ANI, the Governor has also asked him to prove his majority on the floor test of the Nagaland legislative assembly on or before July 22.

"Zeliang will be sworn in as Nagaland CM at 3:00 pm today," PTI quoted Raj Bhavan sources as saying.

The development took place after Nagaland CM Liezietsu didn't turn up for floor test, which was scheduled to take place today following which the assembly was adjourned sine die.

Liezietsu was supposed to prove his majority in the state Assembly after the Gauhati High Court on Tuesday dismissed the Nagaland CM's plea to stay Governor PB Acharya's directive for a floor test.

Governor Acharya had directed the legislative Assembly Speaker to summon an emergency special session for the floor test.

Liezietsu, who is facing rebellion by 43 Naga Peoples Front MLAs led by TR Zeliang demanding a change of leadership in the present house of 59, had filed the petition on July 14 seeking a stay on the governor's directive.

The Naga Political Front, led by Lieziestsu, summoned an emergency meeting at which they decided to ask President Pranab Mukherjee to recall Acharya immediately so that the "sanctity of the gubernatorial Office in the State is maintained in future".

While issuing a whip to all its 47 legislators to vote in favour, the NPF, which is also a constituent of the ruling National Democratic Alliance at the Centre and in Manipur, decided to sever ties with the BJP, with which it has been associated for decades.

The 60-member Assembly also has four Bharatiya Janata Party members and eight Independents, while one seat is vacant.

The rebellion Liezietsu erupted as some leaders accused him of "nepotism" by appointing his son as his advisor with cabinet status and pay.

Liezietsu was sworn in as Chief Minister on February 22 after Zeliang resigned following violent protests by tribal groups, opposing his move to hold civic polls with 33 per cent reservation for women.
Kohima: Nagaland Chief Minister Shurhozelie Liezietsu didn't turn up for floor test, which was scheduled to take place on Wednesday.

The Assembly was adjourned sine die.

Liezietsu was supposed to prove his majority in the state Assembly after the Gauhati High Court on Tuesday had dismissed the Nagaland CM's plea to stay Governor PB Acharya's directive for floor test.

Governor Acharya has directed the legislative Assembly Speaker to summon an emergency special session for floor test.

Liezietsu, who is facing rebellion by 43 Naga Peoples Front MLAs led by TR Zeliang demanding change of leadership in the present house of 59, had filed the petition on July 14 seeking a stay on the governor's directive.

The Naga Political Front, led by Lieziestsu, summoned an emergency meeting at which they decided to ask President Pranab Mukherjee to recall Acharya immediately so that the "sanctity of the gubernatorial Office in the State is maintained in future".

While issuing a whip to all its 47 legislators to vote in favour, the NPF, which is also a constituents of the ruling National Democratic Alliance at the Centre and in Manipur, decided to sever ties with the BJP, with which it has been associated for decades.

The 60-member Assembly also has four Bharatiya Janata Party members and eight Independents, while one seat is vacant.

The rebellion Liezietsu erupted as some leaders accused him of "nepotism" by appointing his son as his advisor with cabinet status and pay.

Liezietsu was sworn in as Chief Minister on February 22 after Zeliang resigned following violent protests by tribal groups, opposing his move to hold civic polls with 33 per cent reservation for women.
New Delhi: One of the noted actors in Hindi cinema, Sitaram Panchal, who has featured films such as 'Paan Singh Tomar', 'Jolly LLB 2', 'Peepli Live' and 'Slumdog Millionaire' is currently suffering from Lung and Kidney cancer. The fine actor has been not able to work due to his severe health condition.

He even took to Facebook and briefed about his condition with fans. He sought help from his fans urging them to contribute monetarily. He wrote: "Bhaio, meri help karo meri cancer se halat kharab hoti ja rahi hai, apka kalakar bhai. (Please help me. My condition is getting worse due to cancer. Your artist brother - Sitaram Panchal.)"

Pinkvilla quoted his Facebook post. However, the post has been removed.

Several people flooded his timeline and offered to help. Fans and film personalities are passing on the word so that maximum help reaches Panchal in time.

Cine & TV Artistes Association (CINTAA) too took to Facebook and urged everyone to do their bit in saving the actor's life.
New Delhi: She is one actress who was seen as the biggest upcoming superstar during early 90s but she shocked everyone by quitting acting forever. We are talking about none other than 'Maine Pyar Kiya' actress Bhagyashree.

Yes! Superstar Salman Khan's co-star from this Sooraj Barjatya romantic saga was hailed as the next big star on the horizon and she had a promising film career knocking at her doorstep just when she decided to leave it all for the love of her life.

Bhagyashree in an interview with 'Humans of Bombay' revealed how she has absolutely no regrets in life and why quitting films never really bothered her. She even talked about her personal journey and the love of her lifeher husband.

Here's the viral post which 'Humans of Bombay' shared on their Facebook page:
Gurugram: The husband of Assamese actress Bidisha Bezbaruah, who allegedly committed suicide here on Monday, has been booked for abetment, a police officer said here on Tuesday.

"As per the complaint filed by deceased relatives, the case has been filed against her husband under IPC's Section 306 (abetment to suicide)," Gurugram police PRO Ravinder Kumar told IANS.

He said that a case has been registered and several police teams have been probing the death of victim, whose body has been handed over to family members after a post mortem examination.

Deputy Commissioner of Police, East, Deepak Saharan is heading the probe, the PRO added.
Jaipur: Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi, who was in Rajasthan to address a rally in Banswara, also visited the state capital on Tuesday to meet his relatives here.



Gandhi called on Katju family in the city`s C-Scheme area . The Katjus are related to the Nehru-Gandhi family.



"He spent about 40-45 minutes with the family before leaving for Delhi at around 6 p.m," a Congress functionary told IANS.



"Whenever he is in Jaipur, he tries to meet the family," he said.



Not many, including the media, were aware of his programme, and as soon as the word spread, several journalists and some Congress workers gathered near the house where the Katju`s stay.



While coming out of the house, Gandhi told the media: "As I said at the rally in Banswara, we will exert pressure on the state government to waive off farmers` loans and work for the welfare of farmers."



Some Congress workers shouted slogans hailing him and the party, while others were busy photographing Gandhi on their phones.
New Delhi: Realty major Lodha Developers sold properties worth Rs 2,300 crore during April-June period, its highest quarterly sales, beating demand slowdown in the real estate market, according to a top company official.

The Mumbai-based firm invested Rs 1,100 crore on construction of ongoing projects and achieved a record quarterly collection of Rs 2,600 crore during April-June period of 2017-18 fiscal, Lodha Group MD Abhishek Lodha said.

"For our India business, this has been a very strong quarter for us. We achieved a net sales of Rs 2,300 crore and a collection of Rs 2,600 crore. We delivered about 2,000 units during the quarter," Lodha told PTI.

The sales have grown by about 70 per cent from the same quarter of last fiscal, when the company did business of about Rs 1,300 crore.

Lodha said the company has been able to achieve healthy sales bookings because of strong focus on project execution.

"Our construction spend for the June quarter was Rs 1,100 crore. The focus on execution of projects is helping in huge employment generation. At present, we have about 26,000 workforce at our various project sites," Lodha said.

"We are strongly focused on delivery, which is a critical reason why customers are happy and investing in our projects," he said, adding that the overall investment on construction would be in the range of Rs 4,000-4,500 crore this fiscal.

Asked about new launches, Lodha said the company launched two projects during the first quarter of this fiscal and plans to have 8-10 projects more by March next year.

On London business, he said the company's sales bookings crossed 200 million pounds till June quarter.

Lodha's MD had recently pegged a sales revenue of 1.5 billion pounds (over Rs 12,000 crore) in the next three years from two ongoing housing projects in central London.

Lodha Group had forayed into the London realty market in 2013 with the acquisition of the landmark MacDonald House at 1 Grosvenor Square in prime Central London from the Canadian government for over GBP 300 million (Rs 3,100 crore).

The group acquired another site in central London, New Court at 48 Carey Street for 90 million pounds in 2014.

Lodha UK launched first project 'Lincoln Square' last year and the second project 'No 1 Grosvenor Square', located in the heart of Mayfair, last month.

Privately-held Lodha Group is currently developing around 41 million sq ft area and has 31 ongoing projects in London, Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Pune, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. It has a land bank of 350 million sq ft for future development.
New Delhi: Last week on July14, 2017 at 09:36 Moscow time, Russia's State Space Corporation Roscosmos successfully launched a record-breaking satellites  an Earth observation Kanopus-V-IK satellite,the main payload, and 72 smallsats  from the Baikonur Spaceport, delivering them into different orbits

And Mayak was one of 72 satellites sent into space aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket.

Developed by Moscow Polytechnic University (MAMU), Mayak (meaning beacon in English) is a standard cubesat roughly the size of a loaf of bread.

Mayak 3U-CubeSat is set to deploy a large tetrahedron-shaped solar reflector that could make the satellite as the third brightest object in the the sky only after the Sun and the Moon.

Created by young scientists, Mayake is the first crowdfunding spacecraft in history of Russia.

Check out the video of below released by the team, detailing the satellite, its mission and why it has been created.

Video credit: Mayak/YouTube

The team managed to raise more than $30,000 on Russian crowdfunding website Boomstarter, in order to launch their own small satellite.

According to the team, the aim of the project is about encouraging the younger generation to explore the sapce, showing them by their own example that there is nothing impossible.

For the coming month, the satellite will be orbiting Earth, about 370 miles (600 km) high, unfurling a giant mylar reflector with a surface area of 170 square feet.

Once unfurled, at night and in clear weather, Mayak can be seen as the brightest shooting star. In fact, the satellite could be visible in bright twilight and even during daytime passes as well, claims the team.

Interestingly, the team has a tracking app named 'CosmoMayak', in which donaors and all clients of RocketBank can use the app to track Mayak's position in real time.
Lucknow: All appointments made during the Samajwadi Party rule in Uttar Pradesh will be probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation and no guilty spared, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath announced in the Assembly on Wednesday.



While 1.5 lakh vacancies exit in the Police Department, thousands of appointments have been made in 10 years in the state but none is above doubt, he said adding that "all the scams will be unearthed and no one found guilty will be spared".



Referring indirectly to former Haryana Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala, who is lodged in Tihar jail after conviction in a teachers recruitment scam, Adityanath said by burning papers and official files no one will get away from the long arm of the law.



Responding to posers by the Opposition on the 2017-18 state Budget, Adityanath targeted the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party for what he said was the mess the state was in.



He patted Finance Minister Rajesh Agarwal for presenting a "balanced and development- oriented Budget".



The Chief Minister said the state had been dominated by caste and family politics in the past few decades, pushing it down on the ladder of progress and development.

Adityanath also took on opposition lawmakers who slammed his government on the law and order, saying that if he started speaking many people in the house will be exposed.



He said more than 1.53 lakh cases of land encroachment had come up in four months and said no one will be allowed to take law in their own hands.



"Neither will my government patronise criminals like the previous governments," the Bharatiya Janata Party leader added.



The Chief Minister accused the earlier government of patronising the illicit liquor mafia in Azamgarh, because of which 60 persons died last year.


Haridwar: The Uttarakhand Police on Tuesday recovered a suspicious object from Haridwar's Kanyar Yatra camp following which a combined search operation was carried out by police personnel and Bomb Disposal Squad (BDS) team.

The incident occurred at a pilgrims' camp in Bairagi.

The development took place in the month of 'Sawan', when thousands of devotees participate in Yatras that hold religious importance.

On July 10, at least eight pilgrims, heading back from Amarnath Yatra, were gunned down in a terror attack in J&K's Anantnag district.
Berlin: Berlin on Wednesday summoned Turkey's ambassador over the detention of a German human rights activist and issued a fresh warning about the NATO partner's respect for the rule of law.

"The Turkish government needs to immediately and directly hear the German government's outrage and incomprehension as well as its crystal-clear expectations in the case of Peter Steudtner, and this time without diplomatic niceties," foreign ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer said.

He said the envoy was told "in no uncertain terms" that the detention of Steudtner and five other activists including Amnesty International's Turkey director was "incomprehensible and also unacceptable".

Berlin demanded Steudtner's "immediate release" as well as consular access.

"The Turkish government representative said he would deliver this message immediately" to Ankara.

A Turkish court yesterday ordered six human rights activists including Amnesty International's Turkey director to remain in custody for allegedly aiding a "terror" group, a charge Schaefer branded "absurd".

Chancellor Angela Merkel has criticised the detention of the activists as "unjustified" and pledged to "advocate for (Steudtner) on all levels".

Schaefer said Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel would interrupt his summer holidays and return to Berlin over the "dramatic escalation in Turkish actions" to determine which "further measures" could be taken.

Relations between Turkey and Germany, home to three million ethnic Turks, have been badly strained, particularly since the failed coup attempt a year ago against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Berlin has voiced deep concerns over mass arrests and sackings of alleged coup plotters, and a host of other civil rights controversies.

One dispute centres on Deniz Yucel, a German-Turkish journalist with the Berlin-based newspaper Die Welt, who was imprisoned by Turkey on terror charges earlier this year.

Schaefer also mentioned the ongoing detention of German reporter Mesale Tolu, who has been in Turkish custody since April.

The NATO allies have also clashed over thwarted visits by German lawmakers to German troops stationed at Turkish bases.

Last week Turkey asked legislators to postpone a scheduled visit to a NATO base in Konya, the German foreign ministry said, expressing "regret" about the decision.

The dispute came after Germany last month pulled out 260 troops from Turkey's Incirlik base, from where a multinational coalition is fighting the Islamic State jihadist group, and redeployed them and their Tornado surveillance jets to Jordan.

Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said Wednesday that in the current context, any progress on Turkey's bid to join the EU was "not on the cards".

He pressed Ankara to consider what relationship it wanted to have with the 28-member bloc given the outstanding "questions about the rule of law" and democratic values in the country.
New York: Besides their 'overtime' bilateral meeting at the G20 Summit, President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, spoke for a second time on the same day.

"There was a couples-only social dinner at the G20. Toward the end, the President spoke to Putin at the dinner. No staff or Cabinet were at the dinner at all, for any of the countries," National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton told CNN of the previously undisclosed meeting.

Anton further informed that Trump and Putin did not go to a separate room for their conversation, but remained in the main room where the dinner was being hosted.

Reporters traveling with the White House were not informed about the second meeting, and there also was no formal readout of the chat.

The development was first reported by Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group think tank.

Trump and Putin sat at opposite ends of a long table at the G20 dinner. Putin was seated next to first lady Melania Trump during the dinner, with a translator between them.

President Trump had called on Putin to discuss the prevailing situation of Syria, in their first face-to-face meeting.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson informed the media persons before departing for the G20 summit that Russia has been given the major role to solve Syrian crisis and decide the fate of Syrian President Bashar al -Assad.

The United States and Russia have already achieved progress in establishing de-confliction zones in Syria that have prevented mutual collateral damage.

"The United States is prepared to explore the possibility of establishing with Russia joint mechanisms for ensuring stability, including no-fly zones, on the ground ceasefire observers, and coordinated delivery of humanitarian assistance. If our two countries work together to establish stability on the ground, it will lay a foundation for progress on the settlement of Syria's political future," Tillerson stated.
Washington: US President Donald Trump pressed his unproven claims of voter fraud on Wednesday at the first meeting of a commission he created to study the issue, and implied states that didn`t share voter data with the panel had something to hide.

The commission assembled against the backdrop of a series of federal lawsuits and the refusal of many state governments to hand over information about their voters.

In addition, the panel faced lacerating criticism from Democrats and voting rights groups that argued it could be a vehicle to prevent lawful voters from getting to the polls.

Despite evidence that voter fraud is rare in US elections, Trump alluded to his campaign claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the November 2016 election.

"Every time voter fraud occurs it cancels out the vote of a lawful citizen," he told the commission. "Any form of illegal or fraudulent voting, whether by non-citizens or the deceased, and any form of voter suppression or intimidation must be stopped."

State officials from both parties and election experts widely agree that such voter fraud is rare.

Trump won the state-by-state Electoral College tally that decides the presidential race, but he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes to his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

He established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May and assigned Vice President Mike Pence to lead it.

Civil rights groups and Democratic lawmakers have said the commission could lead to new ID requirements and other measures making it harder to vote.

Shortly before the commission assembled, members of the Democratic National Committees Commission to Protect American Democracy from the Trump Administration held a news conference to criticize the panel and vow to ensure it does not undermine voting rights.

"I can tell you, President Trump, that we will be watching your commission," said US Representative Terri Sewell of Alabama, an African-American whose district includes the civil rights landmarks Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham, where, she said, "people died, bled and fought for the right to vote."

The panel ran headlong into controversy last month when its vice chair, Kris Kobach, the Republican secretary of state for Kansas and an advocate of tougher laws on immigration and voter identification, asked states to turn over voter information.

The data requested by Kobach included names, the last four digits of Social Security numbers, addresses, birth dates, political affiliation, felony convictions and voting histories.

More than 20 states refused outright and others said they needed to study whether they could provide the data.

Trump questioned the states` refusal, saying, "If any state does not want to share this information, one has to wonder what they`re worried about? ... There`s something, there always is."

Before the meeting Kobach dismissed his critics` concerns that the panel would advocate voter suppression.

"The commission is not set up to prove or disprove President Trump`s claim. The commission is simply to put facts on the table," he said in an interview with CNN.

Several federal lawsuits have been filed against the voting commission. The American Civil Liberties Union`s suit alleged the panel failed to comply with federal transparency laws, the NAACP`s Legal Defense Fund alleged the commission was formed with the intent to discriminate against voters of color. Other lawsuits, including one from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, raised concerns about Americans` privacy.
Maiduguri: Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai was greeted with cheers by dozens of young women in northeastern Nigeria, where she spoke out for the many girls abducted under Boko Haram's deadly insurgency.

The 20-year-old Pakistani activist told The Associated Press she was excited by the courage of the young women who are undaunted as they pursue an education amid one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

"This is part of my girl power trip, visiting many parts of the world," said Yousafzai, who also met with the freed Chibok schoolgirls taken in a mass abduction by Boko Haram more than three years ago. "I am here now because of the Nigerian girls. Fighting for them and speaking up for them."

Yousafzai visited internally displaced camps in and around the city of Maiduguri, where thousands have sheltered from Boko Haram's violence. The extremist group continues to carry out deadly attacks there, often using young female suicide bombers.

"They have lived in the period of extremism," Yousafzai said of the young women around her. Many have seen family members killed.

Yousafzai was 15 when she shot in the head by Taliban militants in 2012, targeted due to her advocacy for women's education.

The Nobel winner said her Nigeria visit was significant because it was the partial fulfillment of what she advocated the last time she was there. In 2014, she pressed then- President Goodluck Jonathan to ensure the rescue of the more than 200 abducted Chibok schoolgirls.

On Monday, Yousafzai met with more than 100 who have since been rescued and now stay in the capital, Abuja, for what the government calls rehabilitation.

While she told the AP she shared their joy at being freed, she said she was not happy that the girls haven't been allowed to reunite fully with their families.

She said she hopes they will "live with their family, live a normal life."

Many others remain in Boko Haram captivity, "and the government must unite so that they should make sure that these girls are released," Yousafzai said.

"Boko Haram themselves should learn that in Islam, such things are unacceptable," she added. "This is against humanity, this is against Islam."

Yousafzai also met Monday with acting President Yemi Osinbajo, speaking up for the more than 10 million children displaced by Boko Haram and pressing for the declaration of a state of emergency for education in Nigeria.
Islamabad: Embattled Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday contested the graft charges against him and his family in the Supreme Court, saying the Panama probe panel did not produce any document to prove that he was the owner of the posh London flats which are at the centre of the high- profile case.

The apex court had started hearing the scandal on Monday after the JIT submitted its final report on July 10, recommending that a corruption case be file against Sharif and his family for alleged money laundering in the 1990s, when he twice served as prime minister, to purchase assets in London.

Sharif's lawyer Khawaja Harris stressed that the JIT "did not level any specific charge of corruption against Sharif."

He also said that the JIT has not produced any document to prove that Sharif, 67, was the owner of the London flats.

Harris's arguments were directed at the six-member JIT, two of whom were from the Inter-Services Intelligence and the Military Intelligence.

He said the JIT had overstepped its mandate given to it by the court and had based its findings on the documents, which were of no evidentiary value as per the Pakistani laws.

If Sharif loses the case in the Supreme Court, it could cost him his premiership, throwing Pakistan into a turmoil.

Sharif has refused to quit, calling the JIT report a compilation of "allegations and assumptions". His decision to stay in power was endorsed by the federal cabinet last week.

However, the three-member apex bench observed that Sharif has not provided the details of all assets and source of income in the form of his tax returns.

Justice Ijazul Ahsan said the Sharif family has not produced any document to prove that the prime minister's son Hussain Nawaz was the original owner of the London flats. He said JIT has found that Sharif's daughter Maryam was the real owner of those apartments.

Justice Ejaz Afzal told Sharif's counsel that the Sharif family has not provided the money trail to establish that the London flats were legally purchased.

"We have been waiting for them since day one to come forward and provide the money trail," he said, but added that the court would decide the case on the basis of evidence and it was not bound by the findings of the JIT.

Justice Azmat Saeed Sheikh raised questions about the sources of funds used to set up the Hill Metal steel company in Saudi Arabia, which is allegedly owned by the Sharifs.

The judges appeared quite aggressive and grilled Sharif's counsel about the source of money used to establish businesses in Gulf and the UK by the Sharif family.

"The real question is where did the money for [family] properties in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and London came from? We have not yet received an answer to this fundamental question," Justice Ijazul Ahsan said.

The bench also asked Sharif's counsel whether the court should decide the case by its opinion over the concealment of facts or refer the case to an accountability court for trial.

The counsel urged the court to decide it on merit and stressed that the JIT was biased and his client had done nothing illegal.

Later, finance minister Ishaq Dar's counsel began his arguments but the court adjourned the case until tomorrow.

The scandal surfaced when the Panama Papers leaks last year revealed that Sharif's sons - Hassan and Hussain - and his daughter Maryam - owned offshore companies which managed their family's properties. The assets in question include four expensive flats in Park Lane, London.

Opposition parties say the London flats were purchased through illegal money which Sharif and his family have rejected. But so far they are unable to satisfy the court about the source of money used to purchase these properties.
Budapest: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday denounced Brussels' repeated criticism of Israel as an "anomaly" and called on Europe to reassess its relationship with the Jewish state.

The EU has repeatedly condemned Israel's building of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and crackdown on civil society groups critical of the government.

"There is an anomaly, we are often criticised by western Europe, often more than any other place in the world. Israel is a bastion of European and western values in the heart of a very dark place," the premier said in Budapest on the second of a three-day visit to Hungary.

"It's time to have a re-assessment in Europe about the relationship with Israel."

Netanyahu made the remarks after holding talks with leaders from the so-called Visegrad Four group - Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic - whose nationalist anti-immigration stances have also put them increasingly at odds with Brussels.

The Israeli premier praised the Visegrad nations for supporting Israel "on several occasions" at European Union meetings.

Observers say Israel is seeking closer ties to nations that can help defend its interests in international forums.

"With their backing, it will be harder for the EU to pass resolutions critical of Israel," Middle East expert Peter Lintl told Austrian newspaper Kurier.

Netanyahu is the first Israeli leader to visit Budapest since the fall of communism in 1989.

His Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orban, a virulent opponent of Muslim immigration, has hailed Netanyahu as a "patriot".

"We share Israel's notion of protecting external borders," said Orban whose government has erected fences on its southern EU frontiers to keep out illegal asylum-seekers.

"If Europe does not cooperate with Israel, it is punishing itself," he added.

Both men are right-wingers enamoured of US President Donald Trump and with a disdain for the left-leaning liberal global order bankrolled, as they see it, by the likes of US Jewish billionaire George Soros.

Netanyahu's trip comes at a sensitive time for Orban, who is under fire at home over his running battle against Hungarian-born Soros and praise of a Hungarian Nazi-allied wartime leader.

Many in Hungary's 100,000-strong Jewish population - one Europe's largest - have accused Orban, in power since 2010, of turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism or even encouraging it to stave off growing support for the far-right.

However Netanyahu defended Orban yesterday, insisting that Hungary, as the birthplace of modern political Zionism founder Theodor Herzl, was "at the forefront" of countries fighting anti-Zionism.
New Delhi: In a strange incident, two frozen bodies have been recovered in the Alps. They were dressed in clothing which was in trend during the period of the World War II.

It is being suspected that the recovered bodies are of Marcelin and Francine who had disappeared at a height of 8,530ft.

The couple were heading to feed their cows in a field near the village of Chandolin in Switzerland. It has been 75 years since Marcelin and Francine Dumoulin disappeared in August 1942.

Reportedly, a DNA test will be conducted for the identification of the couple. A book, backpack and a watch had also been taken for forensic analysis, said report.

At the time of disappearance, Marcelin was 40 years old while Francine was 37. The couple was the parents of five sons and two daughters, the youngest of whom is 79-year-old.

A two-and-a-half month search followed by several independent searches by their children over the past years failed to discover what happened to the couple.

"I climbed three times on the glacier afterwards, always looking for them. I kept wondering if they had suffered and what they had become. I have the pleasure of having answers to these questions from now on", said Udry-Dumoulin, their youngest daughter.

After over seven decades, a worker from a ski-lift company, Glacier 3000, discovered the bodies on Tsanfleuron glacier above a resort, said police.

According to the company's director Bernhard Tschannen, his employee saw male and female shoes along with a part of a body under the ice. He also found some backpacks, tin bowls and a glass bottle. The couple had apparently fallen into a crevasse, he added.

"The bodies were lying near each other. It was a man and a woman wearing clothing dating from the period of World War Two," India Today quoted Tschannen as saying.

Following the completion of the formal identification process and release of the remains, the children of Marcelin and Francine have planned to arrange a funeral for their parents.
Riyadh: Saudi Arabia's national carrier said a US ban on laptops and tablets in the cabins of its US-bound planes had been lifted on Wednesday.

The kingdom's civil aviation authorities informed Saudia that the ban had been lifted after a US team inspected security measures at airports in Riyadh and Jeddah, the airline's spokesman Abdulrahman al-Taieb said.

Washington in March barred all electronic devices larger than a mobile phone in the cabins of direct flights to the United States from 10 airports in Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, only allowing them in hold luggage.

The ban was brought in after intelligence officials learned of efforts by jihadists from the Islamic State group to produce a bomb that could be hidden inside such devices.

Washington said it would abolish the ban for companies that implemented new safety measures.

Saudia, also known as Saudi Arabian Airlines, was the last carrier to have its ban lifted.
Dubai: Saudi police have released without charge a woman who was filmed in a miniskirt at a historic site in the ultraconservative kingdom, the government said today.

The ministry of information said police had released the woman last night and the prosecutor had closed the case.

Police said yesterday they were questioning the woman after she appeared in a series of videos, initially posted to messaging app Snapchat, wearing a crop top and a high-waisted miniskirt.

She had been filmed walking through the historic fort of Ushaiqer, north of Riyadh, and playing with sand in the dunes.

The videos were uploaded over the weekend to the "Model Khulood" Snapchat account.

The ministry said in a statement that the woman had confessed to walking through the site in a skirt with her hair uncovered but that the footage had been uploaded without her knowledge.

Women are required to wear long black abaya robes and cover their hair in public in most of Saudi Arabia, which has some of the world's harshest restrictions on women.

The kingdom does not allow women to drive and requires them to be accompanied or given written permission by a male relative - usually, a father, husband or brother - to study, work or travel.

The videos sparked heated debate among social media users in the region and beyond on questions of gender and rights in the kingdom.
YEREVAN, JULY 18, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian PR Awards named ARMENPRESS state news agency the best media of the year on July 18.

Naghash Martirosyan, the dean of YSUs Faculty of Journalism bestowed the award to Aram Ananyan, director of ARMENPRESS.

This award is the result of our entire team's work. I am grateful to our team, the organizers, and members of the jury for the high assessment, Aram Ananyan said.

The awarding event was organized by the Armenian PR Association scientific-informational NGO, with the support of Beeline.

In addition to ARMENPRESS, Sputnik Armenia and Traveler weekly were also nominated for the Best Media of The Year award.

Astghik Avetisyan, president of the Armenian PR Association said theyve scrutinized all ministries, the private sector, banking system and generally nearly all sectors that deal with the public and use communication as a method of management.

Weve delivered 2025 questionnaires to experts, weve monitored the work of the media outlets, analyzed the issues and made proposals, Avetisyan said.

Two new nominations were introduced this year, Innovative PR and PR Technologies.

Beelines CEO Andrei Pyatakhin also received a special award for valuing public relations and using literate communications technologies.

The guests of the event included Diaspora minister Hranush Hakobyan, Culture minister Armen Amiryan, politicians, diplomats and others.

Germanys Ambassador H.E. Matthias Kiesler won the Friend of Armenia award.

Artak Beglaryan, the press secretary of Artsakhs Prime Minister was also among the laureates.

Armenian foreign ministry spokesman Tigran Balayan was named Press Secretary of the Year.

Pope Francis visit to Armenia was named the Event of the Year.

Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan was named Public Figure Of the Year, while Opposition MP Nikol Pashinyan won in the Politician of The Year category.

The Aurora Humanitarian Award was named Initiative Of The Year, State Agency Of The Year  the ministry of emergency situations, Innovative PR of The Year  Tumo Center for creative technologies, Cultural PR of The Year  Yerevan Prospects International Music Festival, PR Technology Of the Year  Love Armenia  RPA.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. The headlines of the Armenia International Festival and Competition were contemporary composer Alexey Shor and his compositions.

In 2017/2018 he is the composer-in-residence of Malta International Piano Festival and Competition and eleven other competitions, including the Armenia. For about 10 days Armenian audience and connoisseurs of classical music who arrived in Armenia enjoyed the best compositions by Alexey Shor at different concert halls both within the framework of the festival and the competition.

Armenian audience has learnt about the Maltese composer due to the State Youth Orchestra of Armenia. Headed by the Artistic Director and Principal Conductor Sergey Smbatyan the orchestra has performed Verdiana, an overture to the Crystal Palace ballet and other compositions by Shor.The overture was a world premiere, while the whole ballet is being presented for the first time on July 21 in Malta. Shor surprises the audiences and critics with his commitment to long-established harmony, romantic emotionality and distinguished taste. His style is apparently simple, yet demanding and requires a strong personality and infinite devotion.

Shors compositions are being performed around the world by such orchestras as the Malta Symphony Orchestra, St. Petersburg State Capella Symphony Orchestra, Viva Musica, the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, the Bucharest Philharmonic, the Slovak Sinfonietta, etc and by world known soloists at prestigious festivals.

It is not accidental that within the framework of the 1st Armenia International Festival and Competition, organized by the State Youth Orchestra of Armenia and the European Foundation for Support of Culture, compositions by Shor were presented both by Armenian collectives (Philharmonic, Youth, Chamber orchestras, Khachaturian Trio, Abgar Muradyan Duo) and by many outstanding representatives of the classical field: violinists Maxim Vengerov, Roman Kim, Fedor Rudin, cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan, pianist Nareh Arghamanyan. Roman Kim (violin) and Armenian National Philharmonic Orchestra, headed by conductor Eduard Topchjan presented a piece for Violin and Orchestra "Flight of a Falcon" by Shor. The start of the festival was impeccable! Narek Hakhnazaryan also presented three pieces by the composer and was warmly welcomed by the audience. We are going to present an interesting program. We will perform Three Pieces for Cello and Orchestra by Alexey Shor.

This composition is an Armenian premiere! - the famous cellist noted before his concert. During another concert Fedor Rudin and National Chamber Orchestra of Armenia performed a cycle for Violin and Strings entitled The Four Seasons of Manhattan by Alexey Shor. Nareh Arghamanyan and the Armenian National Philharmonic Orchestra presented the world premiere of the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra entitled "Travel Notebook" by the composer-in-residence that received a long standing ovation that lead to multiple encores. I have already performed compositions by Alexey Shor in Kazakhstan, Germany, Malta. Alexey Shor is a wonderful contemporary composer.

His composing style is similar to Rachmaninoff, Chopin. It was a great pleasure to present the world premiere of the composition by Alexey Shor. I hope that I will have another chance to present more compositions by Shor in Armenia Nareh Arghamanyan noted. The peak of the festival was the concert of Maxim Vengerov. The world famous violinist and the State Youth Orchestra of Armenia, headed by conductor Sergey Smbatyan, presented a beautiful composition - Lonely Sail for Violin and Orchestra by Alexey Shor. Referring to the composition, Vengerov noted:  Superb music, very melodic. I think the audience will enjoy it!. The new rising talents  pianists, participating in the Armenia piano competition performed fragments of Childhood memories by Shor with their own interpretations. The audience welcomed all the compositions by Alexey Shor warmly and with great inspriation. This was the evidence of a great success! The composer confessed that he was proud that such famous musicians performed his compositions.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. Negotiations on relocating the business operators in Yerevans Firdus market continue, the City Hall told ARMENPRESS.

Back in 2017, the government declared eminent domain for the location, citing public significance. The governments decision must be realized for initiating an urban development project.

The relocation of twenty salesmen to other areas has already been solved, with thrity still in process.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. Armenia is classified as polio-free and malaria-free by the World Health Organization. Local measles and congenital rubella syndromes have also been eliminated.

The elimination of these diseases is the result of large-scale actions, especially preventive vaccinations, Lilit Avetisyan, deputy director of the National Center of Disease Prevention and Control told ARMENPRESS.

WHO recognized Armenia as malaria-free in 2011, and in 2002 as polio-free. No polio cases have been recorded even since 1995, when at that time this disease continued to be diagnosed in many countries worldwide, she said.

Malaria cases were diagnosed in Armenia since 1994, which was an obstacle for tourism. But through large scale work, this disease has been eliminated.

However, during the past 7 years Leishmaniasis is observed in Armenia.

In the last 5-7 years, more than one dozen cases were recorded. This disease hasnt been seen in Armenia for dozens of years, this activeness is associated with the presence of this disease in the neighboring countries, she said.

Avetisyan said the center and the healthcare ministry is taking appropriate and relevant actions in this direction as well.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. German lawmaker Sevim Dagdelen from the Left Party urged to issue a travel warning to German citizens for Turkey, Deutsche Welle reports.

In regard to the jailing of six activists, including a German citizen by Turkish authorities, the ethnic Turkish lawmaker said that from now on their citizens are under the danger of being taken hostage in Turkey.

The MP said Germany should change its policy. The time to wait, hope and ask is over, she said.

Another MP of Turkish origin, Cem Ozdemir from the Alliance '90/The Greens party emphasized that by detaining the activists Turkey is harming its own economy.

I dont understand how one can make secure investments in that country, he said.

Activists Idil Eser, Ozlem Dalkran, Veli Acu, Gunal Kursun, Ali Gharavi and Peter Steudtner have been jailed in Turkey.

On July 5, 10 activists were arrested in Istanbul. Four have been released.

The activists are accused for being members of terrorist groups. The jailed includes Amnesty International Turkey office head Idil Eser.

Amnesty International urged to pressure Turkey to immediately stop the prosecution and release them.

Germany and the US have condemned Turkeys actions.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. The Parliament of Artsakh has convened a special session today, where lawmakers will elect the countrys president.

In accordance to the countrys constitution, the Parliament will elect a president who will serve until the end of the current parliaments mandate  2020, after which a nationwide presidential election will be held.

Two candidates have been nominated for the presidential seat  the incumbent President Bako Sahakyan, and leader of the opposition Movement 88 parliamentary faction Eduard Aghabekyan.

The special session kicked off at 11:00.

The candidates will deliver remarks and present their programs.

Artsakhs lawmakers will then ask questions to the candidates, which will be followed by a voting.

The candidate who will receive 2/3 of the votes of lawmakers will be declared winner.

Three factions of the Artsakhi parliament  Fatherland, Democracy and Federation, have endorsed the incumbent president.
YEREVAN, 19 JULY, ARMENPRESS. Vice Speaker of the Armenian Parliament Eduard Sharmazanov finds it at least strange and odd that a EU member country  Latvia  is signing a strategic cooperation declaration with one of the worlds most authoritarian regimes: the Azerbaijani president.

In an interview with ARMENPRESS, the Vice Speaker reminded that the very European media and structures have numerously talked about the human rights abuse, corruption scandals and support to terrorism by Azerbaijan.

If the EU is the embodiment of human rights protection and democratic institutions, then how can one understand the cooperation of a EU member country and the most authoritarian regime of the world  moreover in the military sector. I, as the leader of the Armenian-Latvian friendship MP group, express my doubt to my European colleagues. This is unacceptable at least for me, because th European Union is first of all the protection of human rights and freedoms. And if you profess these values and sign a strategic declaration with a country which is thousands of miles away from protection of human rights, then this puts your reputation to doubt, Sharmazanov said.

Commenting on the ideas and assessments which were voices in Latvia, the Vice Speaker mentioned that they have serious discontent in this regard.

Latvia is a EU country, and any EU country must maintain the official EU stances in at least the official statements. In this specific statement and declaration, speaking on the process of Nagorno Karabakh settlements, it mentions peaceful settlement, territorial integrity, inviolability of borders, but there is not a word about the right of self-determination. To the consideration of our Latvian colleagues, it must be mentioned that a Minsk Group co-chairmanship format exists, where three principles exist. One of them is the principle of exercising the self-determination right, at least five statements of the Minsk Group co-chairing countries presidents are available on this. One of these co-chairing countries, France, is a EU member state, and not once has the EU, Mrs. Mogherini, declared that the three principles of the Minsk Group Co-Chairmanship, which include the self-determination right and the exercise of this right, are inviolable, he said.

He found it at least uncertain and unacceptable that a EU member country does not mention the self-determination right in the statement.

Speaking about Bakus assessments about the declaration, Sharmazanov said: If Azerbaijan got so happy about this declaration, let me remind that without the complete implementation of the self-determination right of the people of NK the problem cannot be solved, while territorial integrity has nothing to do with Nagorno Karabakh, because it hasnt been part of independent Azerbaijan for a single moment.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS/ARTSAKHPRESS. At this very moment the Parliament of Artsakh is convening a special session, where according to the Constitution, lawmakers will elect a president of the country who will serve until 2020  end of the current parliaments mandate.

Speaker Ashot Ghulyan delivered opening remarks at the session, and introduced the candidates for the presidential seat.

Afterwards lawmakers delivered remarks, with the Fatherland, Federation and Democracy factions backing the incumbent president Bako Sahakyan. Afterwards the opposition faction Movement 88 introduced their candidate  Eduard Aghabekyan.

Incumbent president Bako Sahakyan delivered a speech, followed by remarks from Eduard Aghabekyan, the other presidential candidate and leader of the opposition Movement 88 party.

The session currently adjourned.

Moments later voting will begin.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. A 18,2% increase of tourism visits to Armenia was recorded in the first quarter of 2017. Russia, Georgia and Iran are the leading tourism flow countries in Armenia by number of tourists, chairman of the state tourism committee Zarmine Zeytuntsyan told a press conference today.

298,533 tourists visited Armenia during the first three months of 2017. This, of course, is an unprecedented high number of us. Russia, Georgia and Iran are leading in term of tourist numbers in Armenia. Growth has been recorded from Turkmenistan as well  132%, Uzbekistan  nearly 200%, as well as from Iraq, Canada and Spain, she said, adding they aim to double the figures.

The tourism official said the figures of June have also grown by 27,7% compared to last years period.

Back in October we had marked the main target markets with which we are working: domestic market, Russia, Iran, Eastern European countries which have direct flights to Armenia, Germany, Persian Gulf countries, she said. The tourism committee is also studying other markets such as China and Japan.

According to border checkpoint data, the total number of visits to Armenia in the first six months of 2017 is 1,350,791  an increase of 24,3 % compared to 2016.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. Germanys Foreign Ministry has summoned Turkey's ambassador in Berlin to protest the pre-trial detention of six activists, particularly that of German citizen Peter Steudtner, Deutsche Welle reports.

"The Turkish government needs to immediately and directly hear the German government's outrage and incomprehension as well as its crystal-clear expectations in the case of Peter Steudtner and, this time, without diplomatic niceties," Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schafer said.

Schafer said German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel had interrupted his summer vacation to attend government consultations over the Turkish court's decision to jail Steudtner, a human rights trainer who was taken into custody earlier this month.

The spokesman said the point had been clearly made to the ambassador that Germany considered the activists' arrests to have been both unacceptable and incomprehensible, and that Berlin wanted Steudtner released immediately. "He now knows that we are serious about it," said Schafer.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday condemned a decision earlier in the day to detain Steudtner ahead of his trial, saying it was "absolutely unjustified."

The foreign ministry had issued a separate statement calling for the rapid release of the six activists.

Activists Idil Eser, Ozlem Dalkran, Veli Acu, Gunal Kursun, Ali Gharavi and Peter Steudtner have been jailed in Turkey.

On July 5, 10 activists were arrested in Istanbul. Four have been released.

The activists are accused for being members of terrorist groups. The jailed includes Amnesty International Turkey office head Idil Eser.

Amnesty International urged to pressure Turkey to immediately stop the prosecution and release them.

Germany and the US have condemned Turkeys actions.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. Russias Federation Council (upper house) has ratified the agreement on forming joint troops with Armenia, RIA Novosti reported.

Earlier on July 14, the countrys State Duma (lower house) had ratified the deal.

The agreement was signed on November 30, 2016 in Moscow. It defines the rules and regulations of forming and deploying the troops. Issues related to information exchange and technical matters are also regulated under the deal.



The detachment is formed in the Caucasian region of the Collective Security, with the purpose of timely discovery of military offensive preparations, to carry out control of the common land borders, as well as participate in the air, radio-electronic and information infrastructure defense, the State Duma said in a statement.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. On July 19, in accordance with the arrangement reached with the authorities of the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh Republic), the OSCE Mission conducted a planned monitoring of the Line of Contact between the armed forces of Artsakh and Azerbaijan, at the Omar pass, the foreign ministry of Artsakh told ARMENPRESS.



From the positions of the Defense Army of the Republic of Artsakh, the monitoring was conducted by Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office (CiO) Ambassador Andrzej Kasprzyk, his Field Assistant Ognjen Jovic (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Personal Assistant Simon Tiller (Great Britain).



From the opposite side of the Line of Contact, the monitoring was conducted by Field Assistant to the Personal Representative of the OSCE CiO Mihail Olaru (Moldova) and staff member of the Office of the CiO Personal Representative Martin Schuster (Germany).



The monitoring passed in accordance with the agreed schedule. However, the Azerbaijani side did not lead the OSCE mission to its front-line positions.



From the Artsakh side, the monitoring mission was accompanied by representatives of the Republic of Artsakh Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defense.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan on July 19 sent a congratulatory letter to President of the Republic of Artsakh Bako Sahakyan on his re-election as President of Artsakh, press service of the Presidents Office told Armenpress.

Dear Mr. Sahakyan,

I warmly congratulate you on being re-elected as President of the Republic of Artsakh.

The process of democratic and smooth formation of public administration authorities in Artsakh testifies to the irreversible nature of the Artsakh peoples choice to live in freedom. This is the right path for steady implementation of fundamental human rights and freedoms. On this path Armenias all public structures and Armenians worldwide will assist and support the Republic in future which has been created by brave and courageous people of Artsakh.

I am convinced that you will continue providing your honest service to Artsakh for the sake of our common progress and welfare. Let the dawns of our peaceful and heroic people be always peaceful, reads the Presidents congratulatory letter.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. Armeniatravel - Armenias official tourism website will launch in coming days. It will enable the tourists to clearly define their route and get accurate information on Armenia, Zarmine Zeytuntsyan  President of the State Tourism Committee, told a press conference on July 19, reports Armenpress.

The website will present official and coordinated information which today is really lacking. It will be interactive. Before visiting Armenia, a tourist tries to search information about Armenia. Today thanks to digital marketing tools we will be able not only to make our website a priority, but also we will enable a tourist to clearly develop his/her route, she said.

She informed that today they have already launched the collection by the announcement posted on Facebook page. According to the announcement, all those, who deal with tourism, can send information about them. After that the Committee will post the amended information on the website.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. Representatives of the Armenian, Kurdish and Yazidi communities of the US held a protest outside the Turkish embassy in Washington D.C., reports Armenpress.

The protest was also attended by US Congressmen.

Congressman Jim McGovern in his remarks said Turkeys Constitution should protect the freedom of speech and assembly, however, President Erdogan declared emergency situation and uses it as a justification to exert pressure on civil society. All these are being done for strengthening his power. We call this authoritarianism, clear and concrete. Fundamental human rights and freedoms are being violated in Turkey. Erdogan tried to use the same tactic here, however, it failed. This tactic doesnt work here, in the US. Raise your voices and let the Turkish embassy here that we will not be silenced, Jim McGovern said.

Congressman John Sarbanes stated that Erdogans aggressive and authoritarian actions do not allow Turkey to solve its problems.

We have seen violence and discriminatory practices which are being committed in Turkey at the state level against Kurds, Armenians, as well as other ethnic and religious minorities. I have never thought that I would witness these authoritarian manifestations here, in the US land. We have a right to peacefully raise our voice and protest against these manifestations, Sarbanes said.

The protesters were holding posters entitled Extradite Turkish criminals, Defend the N1 change of the Constitution, Erdogan: No violence on US soil, Free Demirtas now and etc.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogans bodyguards have attacked peaceful protesters in Washington D.C. The demonstration, which began at Lafayette Square at noon, was organized by a coalition of organizations, including the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) and the American Hellenic Council. Several different groups, which included representatives from the Armenian, Greek, Kurdish, and Assyrian communities, participated in the protest, while President Erdogan met with US President Donald Trump at the White House. Later the footage shows that Erdogan personally ordered the security detail to attack the protesters.
A Marriage & Sons miller has become one of only 24 people to be awarded the UK Advanced Milling Diploma in the past decade.

Simon White, who joined the business in 1989, has spent 18 months studying and developing his skills to qualify for the diploma.

W & H Marriage & Sons has been milling wheat in Chelmsford since 1824, and continues to use traditional techniques. One of Whites responsibilities includes the highly skilled job of re-sharpening the millstones, which wear over time.

He is the third of Marriages staff to have received the Advanced Milling Diploma  it was awarded to mill manager Dr Philip Bunn in 2008 and head miller Andrew Thain in 2011.

After nearly 30 years of working in the milling industry, I am really proud to have received the Advanced Milling Diploma  it was hard work, but worth it, said White.

He was presented with the diploma this month by Duncan Monroe, president of milling industry trade body the National Association of British and Irish Flour Millers (nabim).

Simons success helps to ensure that the UK flour milling industry continues to have the skills, knowledge and understanding that we need to provide the consistency and quality that customers demand in our flour, used in an enormous range of delicious foodstuffs, said Monroe.

Nabim president Duncan Monroe recently wrote for British Baker on the challenges and opportunities facing the milling industry. Click here to read the article.
Food industry groups including the Federation of Bakers and the National Association of British and Irish Flour Millers have set out 10 Brexit negotiation priorities to protect the food and farming sector.



A letter, signed by 26 trade groups from across the UK food supply chain, stated that abrupt change would have enormous consequences for our industry, its employees and for the choice and availability of food in this country.

The letter was sent to MPs days after an academic study warned the implications of Brexit for the UK food industry were potentially enormous. The study, written by Tim Lang, Erik Millstone and Terry Marsden, described the UK food system as like the rabbit caught in the headlights  with no goals, no leadership, and eviscerated key ministries. It warned the UK was currently sleepwalking towards a chaotic Brexit.

The joint trade body letter noted that food and drink was the UKs largest manufacturing sector and the largest employer in the service sector, employing four million people.

Looming skills shortage

The opportunities for our industry are huge, it read. But uncertainty around the shape of our exit from the EU, the future of our domestic farming and fisheries production, and a looming skills and workforce shortage threaten the viability of our businesses.

Our trading ties with the EU are deeply interwoven, in respect of both imports and exports. So, too, are the regulatory frameworks in which we operate. These complex relationships must be handled with patience and care.

The trade groups have told MPs they offer their expertise to deliver 10 key priorities they believe are deliverable by a government and parliament committed to securing the best possible outcome from Brexit:

Avoid any cliff edge by securing an adequate interim and transitional period to help us prepare for a new relationship with the EU. Quickly negotiate the right to remain for our valued EU workforce and their families. Recognise the unique nature of our relationship with Ireland by agreeing a series of special solutions on workforce, regulation and borders. Deliver continued zero-tariff and frictionless trade across borders in both directions to give consumers the choice they expect, at a price they can afford. Maintain consumer confidence in UK food safety and authenticity through a stable, equivalent regulatory framework to ensure seamless trade. Work with us to develop home-grown talent and consult us fully over the needs of industry ahead of any new migration scheme. Support our ambition for an industrial strategy sector deal to harness our industrys growth potential and improve productivity. Turbocharge exports support to help smaller food and drink firms take advantage of new opportunities so that we can grow our share of global trade. Provide a competitive supply base and ensure reforms to UK farm support  and to fisheries management  take full account of the needs of the rural and coastal communities, planning and investment horizons. Maintain the UK as the destination of choice for multinational food and drink firms, and encourage inward investment to benefit our local communities.

The trade groups that have signed the letter are: Food and Drink Federation; British Meat Processors Association; Northern Ireland Food and Drink Association; Council for Responsible Nutrition UK; Federation of Wholesale Distributors; Seed Crushers and Oil Processors Association; Association of Labour Providers; Seasoning & Spice Association; UK Tea and Infusions Association; British Poultry Council; Potato Processors Association and the Snack, Nut and Crisp Manufacturers Association; British Frozen Food Federation; Confederation of Paper Industries; British Hospitality Association; Health Food Manufacturers Association; Provision Trade Federation; British Oats and Barley Millers Association; International Meat Processors Association; Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers; British Specialist Nutrition Association; Federation of Bakers; The Packaging Federation; British Beer & Pub Association; Proprietary Association of Great Britain; National Association of Cider Makers; National Association of British and Irish Flour Millers
Those are the words of former UNC Law School Dean Judith Wegner who spoke to a reporter from the (Raleigh) News & Observer in May about her opposition to a proposed UNC Board of Governors resolution to prohibit UNC Centers and Institutes from participating in litigation.The resolution, introduced in March of this year by board member Joe Knott, is an attempt to get UNC to focus on its core mission.Knott told a reporter after a meeting earlier this year.[i]As expected, Knott's resolution generated criticism from the Left and many law school professors. In May, Wegner authored a seven-page memo to the Board of Governors in which she listed a number of academic standards the board could supposedly violate if it went ahead and shut down the UNC Center on Civil Rights.Wegner warned there would be a public outcry if board members, who normally don't deal with accreditation issues, continue "pushing forward with personal views."[ii]Wegner is - in so many words - telling board members to butt out. Why? She believes the resolution could potentially jeopardize accreditation. She is clearly uncomfortable with board members injecting their "personal views" into an area with which they are largely unfamiliar.Wegner's reasoning is flawed however, for several reasons. To understand, let's get the full flavor of what she's thinking.Wegner believes the proposed resolution only reflects the "personal" views of a board member or members. To her, it's not action taken in the interest of the institution. But who says? Decisionmakers' personal views are constantly tied to their public positions. The charge that the resolution reflects personal views is an astonishing statement. If the Board passed the resolution, does that mean the policy is no longer a personal view?In the same interview, Wegner continued in a similar vein. She asked rhetorically,[iii]In defending UNC against the policy, Wegner claims UNC is not owned by anyone: "It's the public's university." Having said that, she conveniently ignores that public institutions like the UNC System are accountable to boards - whose members must be approved by the legislature, who are in turn elected by the people of North Carolina. In other words, the board does in fact represent the public. Or does she expect all 10 million residents to weigh in on every UNC issue?Furthermore, Wegner claims that a resolution to prohibit UNC Centers and institutes from engaging in litigation could result in changes to the school's accreditation.This is a serious charge that is deliberately meant to gather attention - but it raises other weaknesses in her critique.Accreditation is an important matter for a variety of reasons. It is intended as an indicator of quality for students as well as taxpayers. The federal government requires colleges and universities to be accredited before students can receive financial aid. Moreover, various forms of federal research funding and federal subsidies can only flow to accredited higher education institutions.There is no legal requirement for schools to be accredited. The designation can be advantageous, but there is no state law requiring schools or colleges to be accredited.Law schools can lose and have lost accreditation. Currently the American Bar Association has two schools on probation . Their problems are much more widespread and serious than the impacts of the proposed resolution the Board of Governors is considering.It's important to note that, if the resolution is approved, practically speaking the changes apply to the UNC Center on Civil Rights, and the law schools at UNC Chapel Hill and North Carolina Central University. Law students would still have access to educational opportunities at other clinics at both law schools, all of which are in compliance with American Bar Association (ABA) guidelines. It's unlikely to think such actions would generate changes in accreditation.It might be that Wegner and others play the accreditation card because it often paralyzes policymakers and parents. While the public perception is that accreditation is an impartial process and an indicator of quality, the evidence is otherwise. Accreditation is no guarantee of quality. In fact, it essentially functions as a cartel with all the negative consequences.Wegner's error is a misplaced faith in the accreditation process. For example, Halifax County Schools, home of some of the worst-performing schools in North Carolina, is an accredited school district. So are many of the schools that are labelled low-performing or performed poorly on state tests.How do I know? Find out for yourself on by using a tool on the web site of AdvancED, the nation's largest accreditation agency and also home of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the major accrediting arm of educational institutions in the southeast.It's also interesting that Raleigh Charter School (RCS), for years the highest-ranked public school in North Carolina, does not have accreditation. In fact, early on RCS decided not to seek accreditation, figuring the process might not be consistent with its intended mission.[iv] That said, it should be noted that every year RCS graduates apply to and enroll in some of the top colleges in the country. Evidently not having accreditation hasn't damaged the school or limited the aspirations of its graduates.In addition to functioning as a perceived indicator of academic quality, accreditation also implies institutional commitment to a high set of academic, financial and institutional standards. That said, let's remember the academic cheating scandal at UNC-Chapel Hill went on for years. In 2015 because of several investigations UNC was placed on accreditation probation for failing to comply with a variety of accreditation principles such as institutional integrity.Considering the scope and the duration of the scandal, some have questioned whether probation was a sufficiently strong punishment. That can be argued. What can't be argued, however, is that none of the actions were taken until after results from several investigations were published. In other words, none of the activity noted in the investigations ever came up during the accreditation review process. And as embarrassing as much of the investigation has been to UNC, the institution kept its accreditation - albeit for a while on probation, a status that has since been lifted.In 2011, after the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) suffered through one of the worst test cheating scandals in US history, AdvancED and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) - the regional accrediting body for Georgia schools - placed APS on probation. The district was later "placed on accreditation with advisement," a status one step below full accreditation. Despite the scope of the cheating scandal and its impacts, APS never lost accreditation.[v]Proponents of accreditation such as Wegner seek to fiercely guard the process because they believe accreditation and its commitment to institutional, academic and financial principles serves to insulate and protect institutions from political forces. Hence Wegner's concern about injecting politics and personal views into board policy.In early February, the UNC Faculty Assembly drafted a letter to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in which it listed 17 actions by the legislature that violated accreditation standards. These included legislative participation in board meetings, interference in the presidential search process, passage of laws that limit board authority over admissions and tuition policy, and "packing" the UNC Board of Governors with Republicans after the 2010 election.Contrary to such claims, however, the truth is that accreditation is an inherently political process. There are numerous national and regional accrediting agencies around the country. They accredit schools, colleges and universities or various educational programs. Before any institution or program is accredited, the accrediting organization must be approved by the United States Department of Education. Becoming an accreditor is a lengthy process - too long to go into here. Suffice it to say, it's an expensive, arduous and time-consuming process. And only a limited number of accrediting organizations are approved.Even organizations like the American Bar Association (ABA) must gain approval from the government before it can accredit law schools. Last year it was reported that because commissioners were frustrated that the ABA failed to implement student achievement standards and had fallen short of completing a process audit of student debt levels, the ABA was on the verge of losing its ability to accredit law schools. Commissioners relented and the threat was not carried out.Still, such developments demonstrate where real authority lies - and it's political. When all is said and done, the U.S. secretary of education - who is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate - is largely responsible for determining which accrediting agencies are reliable judges of colleges, universities or educational programs.Federal involvement in the accreditation process dates to 1952, when the G.I. Bill required that receipt of student aid be tied to institutional accreditation. Through the years the growth of federal subsidies and federal research dollars has strengthened that link. The Higher Education Act of 1965 expanded the breadth of student financial aid programs and underscored those powers even more. Don't think that federal involvement in accreditation is limited to academic programs. In 2012 federal regulations regarding accreditation comprised about 90 pages of the Federal Registry, ranging in topics from academics to governance to finances. [vi] Five years later you can bet there are even more regulations.The largest accrediting organization in the United States is AdvancED of Alpharetta, Georgia. AdvancED's growth is in large part traceable to political connections. About a dozen years ago AdvanceED bought up a number of large prominent regional accrediting agencies and put them under one organizational umbrella, AdvancED.In 2009 Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia pushed through legislation that allowed him to remove sitting school board members in districts that don't have full accreditation. Mark Elgart, CEO of AdvancED, was co-chairman of a legislative commission that formed the outlines of the legislation. The legislation, which Governor Deal acknowledged was influenced by a critical accreditation review by AdvancED, rocketed the accrediting agency into prominence.Overnight accreditation became a major issue in Georgia and AdvancED was in the center of it all. A failure by AdvancED to accredit Clayton County Schools in 2008 resulted in students transferring and plummeting property values. ADvancED said the status was revoked because four school board members were removed due to ethics violations. The school won back its accreditation status two years later, but only after splitting a community.Much of AdvancED's work on accreditation involves not only academic issues but also relations between board members, the policy process and governance issues. AdvancED even asks if boards function well.[vii]Many believe such questions to be issues of policy and politics and outside the realm of traditional accrediting agencies. AdvancED disagrees. In 2011 AdvancED visited Wake County Schools after the Republican majority school board voted to dismantle an unpopular busing policy that was designed to maintain socio-economic diversity in schools. AdvancED reviewed policies and board actions but - in the end - didn't change the district's accreditation status. Many critics take issue with AdvancED's reviews and contend they overstep the normal boundaries of accreditation and wade into issues of politics and governance, all of which are best decided at the ballot box.It's a charge AdvancED officials dispute. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that the accreditation process is far from a black box insulated from politics, as Wegner and other proponents suggest.Besides being a poor judge of quality and having strong ties to dominant political forces, the accreditation process has other problems as well. Conflicts of interest are rampant. Regional accrediting associations are financed in part by colleges and university membership in the associations. Yes, that's right, colleges pay dues to the associations that determine their accreditation. In fact, it's not usual for representatives of accrediting agencies to rent offices in buildings on the campuses they accredit.[viii]Under these conditions one would suspect that accreditors would be less likely to deny accreditation for dues-paying members. The message seems to be: go along to get along. Such perverse incentives raise the ultimate question: Considering such entanglements, can accrediting agencies fairly assess institutional quality and determine eligibility for federal financial aid?Joe Knott's proposed resolution to prohibit UNC Centers and Institutes from litigating is intended to ensure UNC institutions remain focused on their academic mission and not be functioning as a public interest law firm. Opponents say the resolution threatens UNC's accreditation. Because other ABA-approved legal-educational opportunities would still be available through UNC and UNCC law schools, the loss of accreditation is unlikely.Conservatives shouldn't fear opponents playing the "accreditation" card. It would be one thing if accreditation was working. Do parents and the public think our public schools and colleges represent a quality education? Why is dissatisfaction with American colleges and universities so high? Accreditation agencies are doing a bad job of ensuring quality but an excellent job of performing their real purpose for the educational bureaucrats and other progressives: functioning as a cartel to control access to federal funds and the availability of educational opportunities.The accreditation process is in serious need of reform. A full discussion of the options can't be done here. However, the weight of the evidence shows that possible changes to accreditation are a weak foundation for opposing the proposed UNC resolution. The Board of Governors would do well to ignore the noise, consider the resolution and other proposed alternatives, and act accordingly.[i] "UNC Board takes aim at civil rights center's legal powers", by Jane Stancill Raleigh News and Observer, February 27, 2017[ii] "Could proposed litigation ban put UNC's accreditation at risk?" By Jane Stancill, Raleigh News and Observer, May 23, 2017[iii] Ibid[iv] Remarks from 2010 conversation with RCS principal, Tom Humble.[v] "Atlanta school district to keep accreditation after cheating scandal" Dorrie Turner, The Associated Press, November 2, 2011[vi] For a, thorough review of the federal government and accreditation see: Accreditation: Removing the Barrier to Higher Education Reform, Lindsey Burke and Stuart Butler, The Heritage Foundation, September 2012.[vii] For additional background see: School Accrediting Agency's Reach Questioned, Education Week, April 26., 2011[viii] Statement based on calls made to AdvancED state accreditation reps in various states as well as office locations. Calls made in 2011-2012.
BCN Contributor Austin Gross

In regards to the Russia Election Tampering matter: Is President Trump being treated fairly by core Democrats and the Mainstream Media? Yes, the new president is guilty until proven innocent. No, President Trump's treatment is dictated by the usual Democrat double standard. Don't care; there are more important issues facing America. 103 total vote(s) What's your Opinion?



poll#100

Is the concerted Democrat plan to obfusticate the purpose of government by the unprecedented delaying of President Trump's appointments, while galvanizing with the organized protesters' directive to obstruct the process of governing, at the federal level, working for the Democrat brand? Yes, Democrats will finally create a Socialist Progressive utopia if they remain banded together. No, the nation is in dire straits, on so many levels, and needs immediate repair. I'm busy with my important life, such as it is, and don't care. 68 total vote(s) What's your Opinion?



This week, California's Democrat Representative, Brad Sherman, introduced the coveted Articles of Impeachment against President Trump.This all comes in the midst of what has been perhaps Trump's most tumultuous week in the White House, with his son Donald Trump Jr., being in hot water after it was revealed that he had been in contact with Russian affiliates to the Kremlin, in regards to dirt on then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, with the potential to damage her during the last election cycle. The alleged story thus far is that Trump Jr. meant with a Russian attorney associated in some way with the Russian government, under the guise that the meeting would provide the then Trump campaign with information valuable to them. However, the story has been under constant change since it initially broke.While certainly unfortunate and not the best move for Trump Jr., or a good look for the Trump's White House wholesale, the movement to impeach President Trump is all but unwarranted.Trump is a man of many, many gaffs, no one would dispute that. His son did something that should elicit a negative reaction from both the left and the right. However, if we allow petty politics to infiltrate the high crime of impeachment, then we have surrender one of the last things that stands between a tyrannical president and ultimate power.Imagine, if you will, that each time there was a President, the opposing party in Congress filed for his impeachment. As time passes, the Articles of Impeachment, which have served as anvil for justice against President's in the past, even when not technically filed, would become nothing more than an insult, and a motivational force to the President to which it was filed against.After so many filings of impeachment and likely several failed attempt at it later, what are the American people to do when faced down the road with an actually criminal President? After years of our elected officials calling "wolf," would the American people be keen to believe that there is actually a "wolf"?Representative Sherman's overcommitment to the radically liberal, reactionary base of the coastal region of California has led him to put us on an extremely slippery slope. Luckily, his efforts have only garnered one signature thus far, Representative Al Green (D-Texas). In order for the impeachment effort to even go anywhere, a majority of the members of Congress would have to sign off, a less than likely possibility given the Republican majority in the House.Government officials should keep each other in check. I for one, certainly hope that the people you and I elected to Congress will oppose President Trump, or whoever is the President is, when it is necessary. As a conservative, I can pick many things out of the Trump agenda that I hope my representatives will speak out against. If something, that is actually collusion, comes of this neverending Russia investigation, and Donald Trump had Vladmir Putin on speed dial throughout the last election, or Putin all but pulled the lever for Trump, then by all means, let's begin the impeachment process against him. However, until that happens, let's save the high charge of impeachment for the President who may one day warrant it.
The U.S. government's ban on laptops and other large electronic devices in the cabins of flights from Saudi Arabia to the United States has been lifted, Saudi Arabian Airlines confirmed today.

From Reuters:

In March, the United States imposed restrictions on passengers carrying laptops and other large electronic gear in cabins on flights from certain airports in the Middle East and North Africa in response to unspecified security threats.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has inspected and cleared flights from Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport and Jeddah's King Abdulaziz International Airport from the ban, the state-owned carrier, also known as Saudia, said in statement on its website.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is to visit Saudia on Wednesday to confirm that Riyadh airport is complying with new security measures announced last month, TSA spokeswoman Michelle Negron told Reuters in an emailed statement.

A lifting of the ban would be based on visual confirmation by TSA officials that the measures were being implemented correctly, she said.

Earlier this week, the TSA said it had cleared Saudia's main hub King Abdulaziz International Airport and would inspect Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport.

Saudia is the only airline flying direct to the United States from Saudi Arabia.
Muslims in Quebec City are expressing new concern after a package containing a defaced Qur'an and a note suggesting they use a hog farm for their cemetery was delivered to the mosque where six men were shot and killed in January.

The anonymous package arrived at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City via Canada Post on Friday, two days before residents in nearby Saint-Apollinaire, Que., voted in a referendum on a Muslim cemetery in their town.

Quebec City police's major crimes unit is now working to determine who sent the package and whether charges should be laid.

"Certainly, we can only condemn that sort of gesture," said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who attended an event in Quebec City Wednesday afternoon.

"Quebecers understand that diversity is a source of strength and when we had that terrible attack in January here at the mosque at Ste-Foy, I saw myself how over 10,000 came out in the streets to recognize that that hateful act did not represent Quebecers or Canadians," said Trudeau.

News of the package was revealed at a meeting at the mosque Tuesday night to discuss the referendum result, in which eligible residents voted against allowing the cemetery.

Mohamed Labidi, head of the mosque's board of directors, said the board decided to keep quiet about the package until the referendum was completed because they didn't want to interfere in the vote.

The response was one of shock, he said.

"There was silence because [everybody] inside was upset. They thought to themselves 'Again? Again?," Labidi told CBC News.

'Tip of the iceberg'

"This is absolutely hideous, it is to be condemned, it is unacceptable," said Joel Lightbound, the Liberal MP for the Quebec City riding of Louis-Hebert. "To do it where  less than six months from today  we've had six innocent people killed is completely beyond me."

Lightbound said he spoke with Labidi Wednesday morning about the package, and found out it's part of a disturbing trend.

Story continues

"What they've made public, that they've received on Friday, is just the tip of the iceberg. They received hate mail and messages all year long and it hasn't stopped since the terrorist attack of January the 29th," said Lightbound.

"We know that hate crimes in Canada have diminished for all religions but have doubled for Muslims in recent years, so we know there's a problem there," he said.

'In a state of siege'

Montreal Imam Hassan Guillet said the Quebec mosque has become a symbol, a kind of "Mecca" for Canadian Muslims since the shootings in January.

"We wouldn't expect anybody to dare to come in and attack this symbol for us again," he said.

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FULL COVERAGE: Quebec City Mosque Attack

This latest incident has people afraid, he said, and many are saying they need a guard at the mosque 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"We seem to be living in a state of siege and we don't want that," he said.

The package, he believes, was meant to provoke Muslims and influence the referendum vote.

"It was a Machiavellian attempt to excite Muslims just before the referendum, thinking that Muslims will overreact," he said.

"They [wanted to] use the reaction, or bad reaction, to fuel the hate and the fear of the citizens of Saint-Apollinaire."

A similar incident occurred at the mosque in June 2016, seven months before the shootings occurred.

In that incident, the severed head of a pig with a note saying "Bon appetit" was left at the mosque.

The consumption of pork is prohibited in the Muslim faith.

Guillet said the Muslim community is doing what it can to build bridges, but "clearly there are people who don't want that."

He said Muslims need the "silent majority" of Canadians who oppose such acts of hatred to speak out.

"It's about time this silent majority becomes a vocal majority to make sure that our voice is heard and to isolate these racists and Islamophobes and these people who want to destroy our culture and our values as Quebecers and Canadians," he said.

A 'repulsive' act

Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard called the package that was sent to the mosque "unacceptable" and "repulsive" during a news conference in Edmonton, where he's attending a meeting of Canada's premiers.

He said the act was "not unique to Quebec" and it doesn't reflect the true attitude of most Quebecers.

"The true attitude, we saw it after the [January] attack, when thousands of people from Quebec City were in the street claiming their friendship and affection for their Muslim neighbours  that's the true reality of Quebec," he said.

"There's no room for this in a free and democratic society," he added.

Asked if such an act would cause his government to reconsider its Bill 62, which would ban face-covering religious garments in Quebec's public service, Couillard said no.

"On the contrary, we have to advance on this question and clarify it," he said.

"We remain convinced that we way in which we determine [religious] accommodation must be reasonable, it must be given a legal framework and public services must be delivered with the face uncovered  I believe that's the consensus in our society, and that includes the Muslim community."
By Martin Petty MANILA (Reuters) - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday asked Congress to extend martial law on the southern island of Mindanao until the end of the year, to grant him time to crush a rebel movement inspired by the Islamic State group. The region of 22 million people, which has a history of separatist and Marxist rebellion, was placed under military rule on May 23 after rebels from the Maute and Abu Sayyaf groups took over parts of Marawi City, plunging the Philippines into its biggest security crisis in years. Insurgents have put up fierce resistance, with scores of fighters still holed up in central Marawi after 57 days of government ground offensives, air strikes and artillery bombardments, in a battle authorities say has killed 413 militants, 98 members of the security forces and 45 civilians. "The primary objective of the possible extension is to allow our forces to continue with their operations unhampered by deadlines and to focus more on the liberation of Marawi and its rehabilitation and rebuilding," said presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella, reading a letter signed by Duterte. A hardcore of gunmen were on Tuesday clinging on to positions in a deserted commercial heart, which has been reduced to rubble by a bombing campaign that has angered residents with no homes or businesses to return to. Duterte has appointed a taskforce to rebuild Marawi, with a 20 billion peso ($394.81 million) budget. The brazen assault by organized, heavily armed militants who have pledged allegiance to Islamic State has fanned fears that extremists may have radicalized and recruited more fighters than was previously thought. The Marawi siege is the fourth battle between the Maute clan and the military over the past nine months and the country's defense minister, Delfin Lorenzana, has admitted the combat and planning capability of the enemy has been underestimated. Lorenzana on Tuesday met Singaporean counterpart Ng Eng Hen, who offered the Philippines urban warfare training and use of surveillance aircraft to locate militants, adding to reconnaissance support Australia and the United States is currently providing. Duterte has long warned that Mindanao faced contamination by Islamic State, and experts say Muslim parts of the predominantly Catholic southern Philippines are fertile ground for expansion due to their history of marginalization and neglect. BIG PROBLEM While few dispute that Duterte has a serious problem on his hands, his critics have derided his declaration of martial law across all of Mindanao, an area the size of South Korea. Martial law allows for deeper surveillance and arrests without warrant, giving security forces a freer rein to go after suspected extremist financiers and facilitators. According to several senate and congress leaders who dined with the president on Monday evening, Duterte had told them he wanted martial law for another 60 days. In the case of continuing martial law beyond the initial 60-day limit, the constitution does not restrict how long it can be extended, although Congress can challenge it. Senator Antonio Trillanes, Duterte's top critic, said such a long extension was a "whimsical misuse of power". "I have already forewarned the public of Duterte's authoritarian tendencies and this is another proof of it," he said in a statement. Martial law is a sensitive issue in the Philippines, bringing back memories of the 1970s rule of late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was accused of exaggerating security threats to justify harsh measures that allowed his regime to suppress dissent brutally. The extension would be the first time since the Marcos era that martial law was renewed. Outrage about martial law has largely been restricted to Duterte's main critics, with the majority of Filipinos behind his security measures, according to opinion polls. Lower house speaker, Pantaleon Alvarez, an ally of Duterte, said it was likely Congress would endorse the president's request to extend martial law until the end of the year. He also said Congress should look into possible intelligence failures that led to the siege, in particular, how the militants managed to stockpile so many weapons. (Additional reporting by Manuel Mogato; Editing by Michael Perry)
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thailand should ensure those involved in trafficking migrants are brought to justice, rights groups said on Tuesday, ahead of a verdict in a major trafficking trial involving 103 defendants that has been beset by allegations of intimidation. Thai and Myanmar nationals were arrested in 2015 following the discovery of graves in jungle camps used by traffickers to hold migrants near the Thailand-Malaysia border. The grim discovery prompted a Thai crackdown on smuggling and trafficking networks which led to smugglers abandoning boatloads of migrants at sea. That led to a regional crisis involving Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Indonesia which initially refused the boats permission to land. The trial, which began in 2015, has been beset by allegations of threats against witnesses, interpreters, and police investigators. The verdict reading at a Bangkok court begins on Wednesday and is expected to last three days. Rights groups say the arrests in 2015 were just the tip of the iceberg and that regional smuggling and trafficking networks continue to operate with impunity. A lead investigator in the case fled Thailand in 2015 and sought political asylum in Australia citing threats to his life. "It hasn't been without its challenges. Throughout the trial we saw threats against witnesses, we saw interpreters and investigators under threat," Amy Smith, an executive director of rights organization Fortify Rights, told Reuters on Tuesday. "We also documented physical assault on witnesses that were involved in the trial," said Smith. "Although these irregularities don't invalidate the judgment, it does raise concern about the fairness of the trial." Many of those abandoned at sea in 2015 were Rohingya Muslims escaping persecution in Myanmar's troubled Rakhine state which has seen renewed violence in recent months. The defendants include 21 Thai government officials, including a senior army general. They stand accused of trafficking Rohingya and Bangladeshi nationals. All deny the charges against them. The justice ministry initially provided protection for around a dozen witnesses in the trial. Reuters was not immediately able to contact the ministry for comment on Tuesday. Despite the crackdown, which has made smuggling more dangerous, people-smuggling across the Thai-Myanmar border has risen, Reuters reported in May. Last month the U.S. State Department left Thailand on a Tier 2 Watchlist, just above the lowest ranking of Tier 3, in its annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report because it did not do enough to tackle human smuggling and trafficking. (Reporting by Amy Sawitta Lefevre, Panarat Thepgumpanat and Panu Wongcha-um; Writing by Amy Sawitta Lefevre; Editing by Michael Perry)
LEXINGTON  A Cozad woman was sentenced to three years probation following her conviction for felony theft.

Candice Hasbrouck, 34, took more than $46,000 from St. Johns Lutheran Church while she was treasurer from 2009 through 2016.

It was announced at her sentencing in Dawson County District Court on Monday that full restitution, an amount of $46,109.37, had been made which was a condition of a plea agreement made earlier to spare her jail time.

Buffalo County Attorney Shawn Eatherton was appointed special prosecutor in the case.

Prior to sentencing, Eatherton said it is hard when someone in a position of trust steals. He said Hasbrouck made efforts after being caught to make things right and "that doesnt happen all the time."

He noted Hasbroucks repaying of the money in advance of sentencing was an "extreme hardship."

"I give her a lot of credit for that," he said.

Eatherton said because of Hasbroucks efforts, he felt she was an appropriate candidate for probation, but asked that a period of incarceration be placed at the end of her probation to let the community know what she did was not ok. He said the jail time could be waived if probation was successfully completed and that members of the church were agreeable to that recommendation.

Defense attorney Justin Herrmann said Hasbrouck had no prior criminal history. She is a full-time employee known for being prompt and a hard worker. She is also the primary caregiver to three children between the ages of 6 and 12, one with special needs, which is why the church requested no up front incarceration.

"She accepts responsibility and has taken significant steps to right a wrong," Herrmann said.

He said Hasbrouck is very remorseful and he is confident she will comply with the terms of probation and not be seen again in a criminal court in the future.

Hasbrouck declined the opportunity to speak before sentencing.

Judge James Doyle IV sentenced Hasbrouck to three years supervised probation, which includes attending various classes provided through probation including a victim impact restorative class. He noted restitution was paid in full and ordered the Clerk of the District Court to distribute those funds to St. Johns Lutheran Church.

He also ordered Hasbrouck to submit a letter of apology to the congregation.

Additionally, Hasbrouck was ordered to continue mental health counseling.

Hasbrouck was sentenced to 90 days in jail, which can be waived, or not served, if she meets the terms of probation.
Student Success

Indiana University Taps Tech to Optimize Course Scheduling

More than 100,000 students at Indiana University will soon have a clearer pathway to graduation, thanks to technology that streamlines the course scheduling process. The university today announced a partnership with Civitas Learning to implement the company's Schedule Planner app across the seven IU-administered campuses, including IU Bloomington, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, IU East, IU Kokomo, IU Northwest, IU South Bend and IU Southeast.

The Schedule Planner app integrates with IU's current systems so that students can manage the courses in their current degree plan, accommodate outside obligations, schedule break times and maximize credit hours. Administrators can use the system to enhance advising and planning services, fine-tune the master class schedule and balance course fill rates, a news release explained. The app will be available to IU students this fall, replacing a legacy home-grown tool.

Civitas Learning reports that to date, 3.2 million students across the country have built course schedules using Schedule Planner. "On average, colleges and universities report up to a 3.1 percentage point increase in student persistence and up to a 3.5 percentage point improvement in graduation rates when using the app," the company said in a statement.

"At Indiana University, it's our goal to provide a high-quality experience for every student enrolled, regardless of what campus they're enrolled at. This [partnership] provides a new opportunity to maximize the efficiency of course scheduling, and ensure that our students are on a path to success from the beginning," said Rebecca Torstrick, assistant vice president for university academic affairs, in a statement.

For more information on Schedule Planner, visit the Civitas Learning site.
Adaptive Learning

Oregon State U to Create Adaptive Chemistry Lab Simulations

Online students at Oregon State University will soon be able to perform lab experiments virtually, thanks to a new project with adaptive learning and instructional design company Smart Sparrow.

The collaboration, part of a campuswide initiative to use adaptive courseware to improve outcomes for the university's undergraduate online learners, will "allow chemistry faculty to design their own wet lab simulations to enhance the student learning experience in place of in-person lab experiments," according to a press release.

"Smart Sparrow's team of learning designers and engineers will work with subject-matter experts from OSU's Department of Chemistry to create wet lab support tools that will enable instructors to create and configure their own scientifically meaningful, adaptive chemistry lab simulations," the release explained. "OSU Ecampus distance students will be able to practice lab techniques and procedures in a risk-free, online environment, providing opportunities to build additional experience." The project, initially focused on OSU's general chemistry course sequences for non-science majors, is expected to be completed early next year.

Smart Sparrow's platform allows instructors to incorporate adaptive feedback into course materials as well as create adaptive pathways based on students' learning needs. The adaptivity can be changed or updated at any time. Instructors then receive real-time analytics on how students interact with the material, helping identify common mistakes and topics that may need additional coverage in class.

"Oregon State has long been at the forefront of technology-enabled learning and pedagogical innovation. Many of our instructors, particularly in the math and science fields, have extensive experience with adaptive learning technology," said Michael Lerner, professor of chemistry at Oregon State University, in a statement. "With Smart Sparrow, we see an opportunity to put instructors in the driver's seat, giving them the tools and real-time data to customize an effective personalized and adaptive lab learning experience."

"Oregon State's unique commitment to not just technological, but pedagogical innovation is reflected in the depth of experience and commitment of their faculty," said Dror Ben-Naim, founder and CEO of Smart Sparrow, in a statement. "This collaboration has the potential to further advance the field, by bringing the insights of pioneering faculty to bear on creating learning environments that engage and motivate students in challenging, but critical, lab courses."
In early July, President Donald Trump announced an additional nearly $639 million of humanitarian aid for the estimated 20 million people affected by food insecurity and violence in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen.

Tens of millions of people are in need of humanitarian assistance as a result of the man-made crises in South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen, all of which are driven by violent conflicts, and in Somalia, where ongoing conflict is exacerbating the effects of severe and prolonged drought, said Acting Assistant Administrator for the USAID's Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance, Robert Jenkins.

Despite the influx of aid that has helped to alleviate famine in some areas of South Sudan, and has so far prevented famine in Yemen and Somalia, the overall food security situation is worsening, and life-threatening hunger continues to spread in both scope and in scale.

In all four countries, conflict has been the primary driver of humanitarian need. In Somalia, conflict has made it difficult to reach some communities in dire need of food. In South Sudan and Yemen, civil wars have destabilized the economies, crippled agricultural production and trade, and sent the price of food skyrocketing. In Somalia and Nigeria, the regions that have been beset by violent terrorist groupsal Shabaab and Boko Haram and ISIS-West Africa respectively--are among those in the greatest need of humanitarian assistance.

Through this additional funding, the United States can provide additional emergency food and nutrition assistance, life-saving medical care, improved sanitation, safe drinking water, emergency shelter, hygiene and health programs to treat and prevent disease outbreaks, and protection for civilians who've been affected by conflict, including both those displaced internally and as refugees. This additional funding brings the total U.S. contribution to over $1.8 billion in humanitarian assistance for the four famine crises since the beginning of fiscal year 2017, said Mr. Jenkins.

We will continue to work with our international and local partners to provide this life-saving aid needed to avert famine and to support communities impacted by these crises.
The battle of Dunkirk remains one of the great mysteries of World War II. Why did Hitler order his troops to stop attacking an army in retreat, and in many cases aboard unprotected ships? Historians still argue about this crucial episode in the conflict that consumed Europe between 1939 and 1945. The Germans began the war on September 1, 1939 when they invaded Poland. The Allies, France and the United Kingdom, opened hostilities, ushering in what was called the phony war.

Supposedly protected by the Maginot Line, France and Britain faced off against Germany, but there was no fighting. Then in May of 1940, German tanks launched an unstoppable offensive, cutting through the Allied defenses like a hot knife through butter. By June 11, Paris had been abandoned by the French authorities and was an open city.

Aware of the disaster about to overwhelm them, British forces began preparing to evacuate France toward the end of May. This is the subject of British director Christopher Nolans latest movie, Dunkirk. The British government, anticipating these events, began to assemble a fleet, consisting of almost any boats and ships that could be found along the English coast, writes Richard J. Evans in his 2008 book The Third Reich at War.

If we dont continue, the English will transport what they like, under our very noses German Field Marshall Fedor von Bock

Despite attacks by the German air force, 700 boats reached the beaches of Dunkirk to help take as many soldiers back to Britain as possible. Some 340,000 troops made it home, thanks to Hitler personally ordering the offensive to halt, against the opinion of many of his generals. If we dont continue, the English will transport what they like, under our very noses, said Field Marshall Fedor von Bock. When the Germans resumed the offensive, it was too late and the evacuation had been a success.

Did Hitler wish to save his troops so they could reach Paris as soon as possible? Was he over-confident of his powers after the successes of the blitzkriegs of 1939 and 1940? Did he intend to reach agreement with the British before beginning the next phase of the conflict with the invasion of the Soviet Union? Or did he once again reveal his incompetence as a strategist? We will never know. The reality is that on June 6, 1944, some of the soldiers who had been plucked from the beaches of Dunkirk landed in Normandy to defeat Germany once and for all and exact their revenge.

English version by Nick Lyne.
The Trump administration announced on Monday that it is authorizing an additional 15,000 temporary work visas for foreign workers , after establishing that there are not enough willing and qualified workers in the US to perform seasonal, non-agricultural work in the fiscal year 2017.

Construction workers building a house in Boca Raton, Florida. AFP

The visas are of the H-2B type, which do not grant immigrant status. This type of visa is used to hire workers in the hospitality industry during high season, and to secure construction workers.

The announcement was made by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after consulting with Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta. The release said that the visas are meant for American businesses that will likely suffer irreparable harm without the ability to employ all the H-2B workers requested in their petition.

This is not the first time that economic realities have resulted in ironic situations for an administration whose motto is America First

Congress gave me the discretionary authority to provide temporary relief to American businesses at risk of significant harm due to a lack of available seasonal workers, said DHS Secretary John Kelly, as quoted in the release. As a demonstration of the Administrations commitment to supporting American businesses, DHS is providing this one-time increase to the congressionally set annual cap.

The DHS explains that Congress sets the annual H-2B cap at 66,000. A maximum of 33,000 H-2B visas are available during the first half of the fiscal year, from October through April, and the remainder, including any unused visas, is available starting April 1 through September 30. On March 13, 2017, the government had already received sufficient H-2B petitions to meet the full cap of 66,000.

The Washington Post reported that more than 120,000 petitions had been filed by American businesses this year.

A contradiction

The decision appears to contradict the official rhetoric of an administration that has blamed migrant workers for all of the countrys economic woes, in a message that seems to have resonated with the impoverished middle classes. The president has promised to investigate all visa programs that he feels may be harming American workers.

Donald Trump and John Kelly in a file photo. EFE

But this is not the first time that economic realities result in ironic situations for an administration whose motto is America First. Last March, managers of the vineyards owned by one of the presidents sons, Eric Trump, requested visas for 29 foreign workers.

Hotels and real estate developers are now getting relief from a president whose main business interests are in hotels and real estate development. Other sectors of the US economy have not been so lucky. Soon after his inauguration, Trump put a six-month freeze on the H1-B express visa program, which Silicon Valley uses to hire highly specialized workers in the fields of computing, medicine, engineering and mathematics. A procedure that once took two weeks can now drag on for eight months. No figures are available on the number of Americans who have been hired in Silicon Valley as a result of this decision.

English version by Susana Urra.
The appointment of a self-declared secessionist to head the Catalan police force has upped the ante in the political game between Madrid and Barcelona. Legal experts are now citing article 155 of the Spanish Constitution as the only ordinary way  short of declaring a state of exception  that the central government could legally take over the Mossos dEsquadra law enforcement agency if the latter decides to cooperate with the Catalan executives secessionist plans.

Officers with Catalonias Mossos d'Escuadra police. CARLES RIBAS

This hypothetical scenario has become more likely now that the head of the Mossos dEsquadra, the moderate Albert Batlle, has been replaced by an open supporter of Catalan independence, Pere Soler.

I hope we secede now, because I feel sorry for all you Spaniards

New Catalan police chief Pere Soler

Batlle resigned on Monday after three years on the job due to growing pressure from pro-independence circles. For over five months, secessionist parties such as CUP had been asking for his dismissal because, asked what he would do if a judge ever ordered the regional premier or the Catalan house speaker arrested for breaking the law, Batlle replied that he would obey the courts and arrest them.

His replacement, Pere Soler, has a public history of derogatory remarks about Spain. I hope we secede now, because I feel sorry for all you Spaniards, he tweeted on October 23, 2016. And on July 4 of this year, after attending a nationalist event to defend a referendum scheduled for October 1, he tweeted: We will vote on O-1. They cannot prevent it.

Pere Soler, new director of the Catalan police force the Mossos d'Esquadra. EL PAIS | ATLAS

Experts consulted by this newspaper explained that the 1994 law that gave Catalonia a police force of its own does not allow its members to act in violation of the Spanish Constitution, not even if they invoke due obedience to their regional leaders.

Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, said these experts, would be the only way for Madrid to take control of the Mossos if they should openly disobey Spanish legislation. The central government, as well as most opposition parties in Spain, oppose a new independence referendum in the region, defining it as illegal.

This article allows the state to adopt the necessary measures to force a regional government to obey the Constitution and national laws. It lets the government issue instructions to all the authorities in the region. But article 155 has never been used since Spain returned to democracy.

The ruling Popular Party (PP) holds that such a referendum would affect all Spaniards, and should therefore be previously approved by Spanish parliament. But Catalan premier Carles Puigdemont has promised to unilaterally organize a vote in October, and says that this one will be binding.

Catalan cities have been plastered with posters showing Francos face

His predecessor, Artur Mas, held a similar consultation on November 9, 2014 that yielded a majority in favor of independence. But this unofficial participatory process was viewed as skewed in favor of secession, as most opponents of independence stayed home that day. Mas was later tried and found guilty of disobedience, and barred from office for two years.

Meanwhile, pro-secession groups have been whipping up controversy with a new campaign featuring former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Several Catalan cities have been plastered with posters showing Francos face and a message that he seems to be personally sending Catalans: Dont vote on October 1. No to the Republic.

The campaign is the brainchild of Republica des de Baix (Republic from the bottom up), which said that the point was to bring historical perspective to the debate by reminding people that the Spanish state is the heir to Francoism and that it wont let Catalans express themselves through a referendum.

People like Franco did not want a republic. He said no to all that and it led to 40 years of dictatorship, said Antonio Banos, a former CUP leader, alluding to Francos uprising against the Second Spanish Republic in 1936.

Spains opposition groups reacted angrily to a campaign that appears to say that anyone who does not support the independence referendum is a Francoist

Spains opposition groups reacted angrily to a campaign that appears to say that anyone who does not support the independence referendum is a Francoist. Joan Coscubiela, spokesman for the leftist Catalunya si que es Pot, called it frivolous and said that in Catalonia, some people have an Inquisitorial attitude.

Ferran Pedret, a Socialist, said that to link both concepts is a very clumsy attempt at manipulating people.

English version by Susana Urra.
Miguel Blesa in the High Court over the black credit cards scandal. EFE

More information Miguel Blesa: a symbol of all that went wrong in Spanish banking

The former chairman of failed savings bank Caja Madrid, Miguel Blesa, was found dead this morning on a country estate in southern Spains Cordoba province.

Police sources said Blesa had arrived at the property, named Puerto del Toro, on Wednesday with the intention of spending several days there. Before going out hunting, he had breakfast with friends and told them he was going out to the garage to move his car.

It was an employee of the 1,600-hectare estate who called the emergency services at 7.50am to say that there was a man lying on the ground inside the garage with a bullet wound to his chest. Health personnel dispatched to the scene confirmed that Blesa died at 8.40am, according to the Civil Guard, which has taken over the investigation.

The former Caja Madrid chief was reportedly hurt at being described as a predator

These same sources are ruling out a hunting accident. Preliminary evidence suggests that Blesa died from a shot fired by a hunting rifle, and that suicide was the probable cause. At noon, a judge had the body transferred to the Cordoba Legal Medicine Institute to undergo an autopsy that will determine the official cause of death.

Blesa was one of 65 defendants found guilty in March of misusing millions of euros from the lender Caja Madrid through the use of tax-free credit cards in the so-called tarjetas black scandal.

The 65 people involved in the case spent a collective 12.5 million between 2003 and 2012 on tax-free personal expenses ranging from vacations and jewelry, to meals in expensive restaurants, all paid for with credit cards unofficially granted to them by the heads of the Caja Madrid savings bank, then later at Bankia, the entity that was created from the merger of seven struggling regional lenders.

Blesa was not depressed: sources Miguel Blesa had not seemed depressed or downcast in recent days, according to statements made by sources who knew him personally to Europa Press news agency. He did seem concerned at times over the legal battle that he had been caught up in for several years. The same sources said that his death did not come at a particularly bad time for Blesa, since he had high hopes that the Supreme Court would rule in his favor in the black credit card case following his appeal against the six-year prison sentence handed down by Spains High Court, the Audiencia Nacional. One of the toughest moments for Blesa, in terms of his public image, was when a prosecutor described the beneficiaries of these credit cards as predators. The former Caja Madrid chief was reportedly hurt by this description. In the toughest moments he never looked downcast, and curiously this was not the worst moment that he was going through; in fact, it was the quietest, said the same sources.

The top convictions in the case were for Blesa, who was sentenced to six years in prison, and for his successor Rodrigo Rato, a former International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief who was also deputy prime minister of Spain between 2003 and 2004. The latter was handed a four-and-a-half-year sentence. Both men appealed.

Anti-corruption prosecutors had initially called for Blesa and Rato to pay a civil bond to avoid jail. In the case of Blesa that figure was between 75,000 and 100,000. However, Spain's High Court chose not to impose the bond until the appeal was resolved.

Yet Blesa had already seen the inside of a jail  if only for 15 days  in June 2013, when a judge sent him to Soto del Real penitentiary in Madrid over his role in the acquisition of Floridas City National Bank by Caja Madrid on November 7, 2008.

Blesa, who approved the purchase for over $1.12 billion, was charged with overpaying by more than 50% and bypassing regional laws that required permission from the Madrid government for transactions worth more than 5% of the lenders capital. The Bank of Spain had also expressed misgivings about the Florida banks solvency.

Failed savings bank Caja Madrid was once Spains fourth-largest lender, with more than seven million customers and annual earnings of over 2 billion during the real estate boom. But over a space of 20 years or so, the flagship savings bank became a refuge for dozens of politicians who were granted a seat on its board as a reward for their loyalty or internal power.

English version by George Mills.
COZAD  Bob Runyan, a member of the Platte Valley Astronomical Observers organization, gave an eclipse education presentation on July 13 at Cozads Wilson Public Library.

Runyan, who lives in Shelton, talked about the upcoming total solar eclipse on Aug. 21, other solar events he has witnessed and about his love of astronomy.

Nebraska is one of the luckiest states in the country because this year it will get 467.5 miles of center line viewing access to the total eclipse, Runyan said.

He said the entire eclipse will last about three hours, with the first 1  hours being a time when the moon moves into totality, a term for the moon lining up with the sun, and the last 1  hours when the moon moves out of totality.

Because the moon will line up directly with the sun for the total eclipse, a person viewing it could then take off his or her sun glasses (a special pair for the event, not regular sun glasses) and see halos and coronas from the sun, he said.

He noted that the moon was 400 times smaller than the sun and that the sun was also 400 times farther away than the moon.

Runyan stressed the importance of seeing the total eclipse on Aug. 21 from a viewing place located in the center line, or path where the total eclipse could be viewed completely. If a person is not located in the path of the center line they will not be able to see the total eclipse, just a partial view, he said.

"Ive seen partials (eclipses) but Ive never seen this. It will take 74 minutes to cross the U.S. from Oregon to South Carolina, 17 minutes to cross Nebraska," he said.

Runyan said the closer a person gets to the center line, the longer they will have to view the eclipse in its totality.

In Cozad, viewers will get one minute and 15 seconds of viewing of the total eclipse in its totality, he said.

Both Runyan and Laurie Yocom, director of the Wilson Public Library, stressed the importance of safe viewing during the eclipse. This means viewers are strongly encouraged to wear eclipse glasses during the entire eclipse to protect their eyes.

The only time it is advisable to remove the glasses is during the exact moment of the total eclipse, Runyan said.

He said many Nebraska communities were reaping a huge economic windfall for the eclipse day, with Alliance and Ravenna expected to have thousands, even tens of thousands of outside visitors come to town to view the total eclipse, because both towns were located in areas of totality.

Runyan said it is common for hotels in towns located in optimal viewing areas to be sold out during the period of the eclipse.

At his home in Shelton, Runyan has more than 10 telescopes in his backyard. Runyan said he enjoys sharing his love of astronomy with others.
Police have recovered three of the five works of contemporary artist Francis Bacon that were stolen in 2015 from a private residence in one of Madrids most secure neighborhoods, sources close to the matter have confirmed. The theft is considered to be the greatest contemporary art heist in recent Spanish history. The five paintings by the artist, who was born in Dublin and died in Madrid in 1992, are valued at around 30 million by some estimates.

Two of the Francis Bacon paintings stolen in Madrid

The paintings are the property of Jose Capelo, 59, a friend of Bacons who inherited them after his death and has long been enamored with the artists work. Last January, police detained three suspects in Madrid who were connected to the robbery, while seven others had already been arrested the previous year. According to police sources, the three latest detainees are allegedly the criminals who broke into the house where the paintings were hanging. The people who actually plotted the robbery, including its mastermind, were arrested in May 2016 and are currently out on bail.

The crime was perpetrated in July 2015 at a private residence, just meters from the Senate building

The crime was perpetrated in July 2015 at the residence of Capelo, situated very close to the Plaza de la Encarnacion, a highly guarded area with little traffic located just meters from the Senate building. The thieves entered the house while the owner was away in London. The arrests last January were possible after investigations by a British firm specializing in art theft.

The alleged thieves behind the plot unsuccessfully tried to sell the paintings in Spain on at least two occasions. According to the police investigation and judicial reports, the most recent attempt was made during a meeting held in February 2016 at a modern three-story house on Madrids Duque de Alba de Majadahonda street.

The police operation into the theft remains open, with investigators keeping quiet about their progress. They do, however, trust that they will recover the two works stolen in the heist that are yet to be found.

Bacons work commands some of the highest prices on the market. His Three Studies of Lucian Freud  a friend and the grandson of psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud  was auctioned off in 2013 for a then-record $142.4 million (since surpassed by Picassos Women of Algiers). In 2014, British auction house Christies also sold Bacons Seated Figure for 32 million.

English version by Henry Hahn.
Swiss perfume company Luzi AG considers Azerbaijan as a regional hub to promote its products in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Luzi AG products have been presented in the local market for more than ten years. In 2014, the company began active promotion of products, and in February 2017, opened a regional office in Baku. To date, Luzi AG has been working in Azerbaijan with manufacturers of perfumes and cosmetics, and is also actively negotiating with local manufacturers of personal care products and household chemicals.

According to Luzi AG CEO Jurg Koller, within two years the company will increase the volume of sales and become one of the leaders in the perfume market.

Luzi AG is represented in the Middle East market and has earned the trust of leading manufacturers of finished products in this region. We are well known in the UAE, Iran and other countries of the Persian Gulf. In recent years, our products have been actively purchased from Dubai to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, and it was decided to open an official representative office in Baku. We plan that our representation in Azerbaijan will cover not only the Azerbaijani market, but will also act as a hub for the promotion of products in the markets of the Caucasus and Central Asia. At present, business development managers in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are already working in our office, said Jurg Koller.

Jurg Koller also added that the company entered the Azerbaijani market one of the last, and that is why it is quite complicated now to win new customers ready to replace the old supplier: The company's products are competitive at their price in the Azerbaijani market. Comparing with other similar products on the market, I can say that we are in the middle, or slightly above the middle category. I would also like to note that a high-quality product cannot be cheap.

Founded in 1926 in Zurich (Switzerland), Luzi AG is one of the oldest European manufacturers of perfume compositions. Among the customers of the company are manufacturers of high perfumery of both mass and niche directions.

Luzi AG is currently represented in more than 100 countries around the world. The company positions itself as a manufacturer of quality products that comply with all environmental standards. The entire production cycle is located in Switzerland, and the company is a member of the International Association of Aromatic Substances (IFRA), the regulator of this industry. In the production of perfume compositions, Luzi AG uses about 1800 different ingredients, including citrus extracts from Italy, lemon oil from Mexico, rose oil from Bulgaria, patchouli oil from Indonesia, vanilla oil from Madagascar, etc.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Seba Aghayeva  Trend:

The European Union (EU) supports the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, and this position remains unchanged, Fuad Isgandarov, head of the Azerbaijani mission to the EU and the countrys ambassador to Belgium, said in an interview with Trend.

The European Union has repeatedly expressed unequivocal support for the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and the countrys position on the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, despite the fact that it doesnt have a mandate to resolve it, noted Isgandarov.

This position was voiced by President of the European Council Donald Tusk, and EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini, as well as the European Parliament, as it was in 2013, when it was clearly stated that territories of a member country of the Eastern Partnership shouldnt be occupied by another member country of the Eastern Partnership, added the ambassador.

Meanwhile, it was clearly stated about the need to implement the four resolutions of the UN Security Council on the conflict and the withdrawal of all occupying forces of Armenia from the occupied Azerbaijani territories, he added.

The diplomat noted that heads of the EUs executive institutions have also repeatedly spoken about the support for Azerbaijans territorial integrity during their speeches.

Azerbaijans positive assessment on this position was expressed by the countrys President Ilham Aliyev during the visit to Brussels in February 2017, said Isgandarov.

Speaking about the relations of Azerbaijan with the European Parliament, the ambassador emphasized that they continued after a one-year break.

He reminded that these relations were frozen in 2015, both at the bilateral level and at the level of the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly after the adoption of a completely blatant and inadequate resolution against Azerbaijan by the European Parliament.

Subsequently, the Azerbaijani parliament adopted a relevant resolution, where it was clearly stated about the termination of cooperation with the European Parliament, continued Isgandarov.

However, in 2016, the European Parliament took several positive steps towards Azerbaijan in order to revive these relations, added the ambassador.

The Azerbaijani side reacted positively, and representative delegations of the European Parliament visited Azerbaijan in September 2016 and in May 2017. During these visits, it was clearly stated about the position of the European Parliament on supporting the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.

In this context, the relations are developing quite predictably, noted the ambassador.

According to him, there are also some problems in relations; a number of members of the European Parliament are trying to damage the relations with Azerbaijan. Criminal cases have been filed in Azerbaijan against three MEPs for illegal visits to the Azerbaijani territories occupied by Armenia.

Moreover, the ambassador recalled the rather strong reaction of many members of the European Parliament to the recent shelling of Azerbaijani civilians by the Armenian armed forces in the Alkhanli village of Azerbaijans Fuzuli district, as a result of which a two-year-old girl and her grandmother were killed, and another resident of the village was seriously wounded.

Such a reaction of MEPs shows the attitude of the European Parliament to the situation as a whole, added Isgandarov.

Attempts by unfriendly individuals to neutralize this position of the EU through attacks on Azerbaijan related to human rights are doomed to fail, said the ambassador.

For example, there are statements that Azerbaijan is allegedly not interested in reflecting the provisions on cooperation in the field of democracy and human rights in the new agreement, but this is not true. The draft agreement, presented by Azerbaijan, sets out these provisions in a detailed form, which were assessed very positively by our European partners, noted Isgandarov.

I want to emphasize that the negotiations on the new agreement are based on the project presented by Azerbaijan. This says a lot, added the ambassador.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

Trend:

Russia will be the main organizer of the meeting between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sargsyan, to be held by late 2017, Russian newspaper Izvestia cited a source in the Russia's Foreign Ministry.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

Trend:

The OSCE monitoring held along the line of contact between the Azerbaijani and Armenian troops passed without incidents on July 19, said the press service of Azerbaijans Defense Ministry in a message.

The monitoring was held under the mandate of the OSCE chairperson-in-office personal representative on the Omar mountain pass of Azerbaijans Goygol district, said the ministry.

On the Azerbaijani side, the monitoring was held by Mikhail Olaru and Martin Schuster, who are field assistants of the OSCE chairperson-in-office personal representative.

On the Azerbaijani territories occupied and controlled by Armenian armed forces, the monitoring was held by Andrzej Kasprzyk, ambassador and the OSCE chairperson-in-office personal representative, Simon Tiller and Ognjen Jovic, who are field assistants of the OSCE chairperson-in-office personal representative.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Seba Aghayeva  Trend:

The negotiations on a new agreement on strategic partnership between Azerbaijan and the European Union are being held thoroughly and fruitfully, Fuad Iskandarov, head of the Azerbaijani delegation to the EU, Azerbaijani ambassador to Belgium, said in an interview with Trend.

"Azerbaijan is the first country in the history of the European Union, which presented its draft agreement as a partner country, he said.

Azerbaijan handed over the EU its draft agreement on strategic partnership with the EU at the Eastern Partnership summit in Riga, Latvia in 2015, he said. The negotiations are held on the basis of this document."

First of all, the goal of the agreement is to establish equal strategic and future-oriented relations between Azerbaijan and the EU, the ambassador said.

"We do not rush to sign the agreement, he said. The content of negotiations is more important for us.

The negotiations were launched almost immediately after the visit of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to Brussels on February 6, 2017. President Aliyev and President of the European Council Donald Tusk launched the negotiation process.

The ambassador said that another round of talks on politics and security will be held as part of the new agreement in Brussels on July 19.

"In general, the negotiation process covers three spheres, namely, politics and security, economy and trade, sectors covering all other branches of bilateral relations, he saidc adding that the negotiations are held in all three spheres.

He added that the negotiations on the issues of politics and security are a dialogue on strategic partnership, where the sides discuss bilateral interaction on equal terms.

"This is a key issue for us and these directions cover a lot of issues, in particular, issues of political dialogue, regional and strategic security," Iskandarov said.

As for the economy and trade, the diplomat added that Azerbaijan has a very pragmatic approach to the cooperation with the EU in this area.

"We are establishing a political dialogue based on a good economic basis," he said. The Southern Gas Corridor is a serious project with a good economic basis for a fruitful political dialogue.

"We proceed from the very profound economic interaction, he said. By synchronizing, we are establishing our political dialogue on the basis of this economic interaction.

The negotiations on a strategic partnership agreement are the result of a pragmatic and equitable policy based on serious economic interaction, he added.

The diplomat added that the EU became the key trade partner of Azerbaijan and the countrys share of trade with the European Union in various years reached from 43.2 percent to 53 percent.

On November 14, 2016, the European Council issued a mandate to the European Commission and the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy to negotiate a comprehensive agreement with Azerbaijan on behalf of the EU and its member states.

The new agreement must replace the partnership and cooperation agreement signed in 1996 and must more take into account the common goals and challenges facing the EU and Azerbaijan today.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Elena Kosolapova  Trend:

A meeting will be held as part of the partnership between the Visegrad Group and the Eastern Partnership countries in Budapest, Hungary on September 11-12, Hungarian Ambassador to Azerbaijan Imre Laszloczki said.

Laszloczki made the remarks at a press conference in Baku July 19.

He added that the ministers of the countries, participating in the meeting, will take part in it.

This meeting will be a stage of preparation for the EU Eastern Partnership summit expected to be held in November.

Laszloczki added that V4 + cooperation format between the Visegrad Four and other countries has recently become popular.

The Visegrad Group supports Azerbaijans aspirations for intensifying cooperation.

It is interested in signing a new agreement on strategic partnership between Baku and the EU as soon as possible.

The Visegrad group includes four countries, namely, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia.

The Eastern Partnership is a project of the European Union. Its main goal is to develop the EU's integration ties with six countries, namely, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova and Ukraine.
Details added (first version posted on 10:50)

Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

Trend:

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev received Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Turkey Mevlut Cavusoglu on July 19.

President Aliyev noted the importance of a meeting of the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Turkey in Baku today.

President Aliyev said the 22nd Istanbul meeting of the World Petroleum Congress played a crucial role in increasing the influence of this organization.

The president recalled his meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the Congress.

The president noted that the Turkish foreign minister's visit to Azerbaijan once again paves the way for discussion of the issues relating to bilateral relationship.

President Aliyev hailed the strengthening of Azerbaijan-Turkey ties, saying good results have been yielded in all areas.

Cavusoglu extended greetings and best wishes of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to President Aliyev.

He noted that President Erdogan hails President Aliyev's attending the Istanbul-hosted 22nd meeting of the World Petroleum Congress.

Cavusoglu said that his country commends Azerbaijan for holding the events commemorating the July 15 attempted coup d'etat in Turkey.

The Turkish foreign minister also offered his condolences to President Aliyev and the people of Azerbaijan on the killing of Azerbaijani civilians on the line of contact as a result of the recent provocation of the Armenian military units.

Cavusoglu noted that the people of Turkey feel happy for Azerbaijan's achievements in all spheres under the leadership of President Aliyev.

Pointing out the trilateral meeting of the Azerbaijani, Turkmen and Turkish foreign ministers in Baku today, Cavusoglu hailed the importance of the event in terms of the development of regional cooperation and bilateral relations.

They exchanged views on the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

President Aliyev thanked for the greetings of President Erdogan, and asked Cavusoglu to communicate his greetings to the Turkish president.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Elena Kosolapova - Trend:

The representatives of the Senate of the Czech Republic will visit Baku in October, Czech Ambassador to Azerbaijan Vitezslav Pivonka said at a press conference in Baku July 19.

He added that the bilateral economic cooperation will be discussed as part of the visit.

Pivonka stressed that no other visits have yet been scheduled as the Czech Republic is preparing for the parliamentary election in October 2017 and the presidential election in 2018.
Details added (first version posted on 13:30)

Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Seba Aghayeva  Trend:

Azerbaijan, Turkey and Turkmenistan intend to bring the three countries economic relations to a new level, said Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.

He made the remarks at a briefing on results of the trilateral meeting of the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Turkmenistan in Baku July 19.

The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway will be used to develop cooperation in the transport sector, noted Cavusoglu.

The 4th meeting of the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Turkmenistan, Elmar Mammadyarov, Mevlut Cavusoglu and Rashid Meredov is being held in Baku July 19.

The agenda of the meeting of the three countries FMs includes the development of cooperation in the political, economic, energy, transport and humanitarian spheres, and the implementation of regional projects. The first meeting of the three foreign ministers was held in Baku on May 26, 2014, and the second meeting  in Ashgabat on January 29, 2015, and the third meeting  in Antalya on August 28, 2015.

Touching upon the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Cavusoglu noted that Turkey calls on the OSCE Minsk Group to strengthen its activity on the conflicts settlement. Turkey supports the territorial integrity and fair position of Azerbaijan, said the Turkish minister.

Cavusoglu again emphasized that Turkey condemns the provocation committed by the Armenian armed forces against the civilians of the Alkhanli village of Azerbaijans Fuzuli district.

It should be recalled that on July 4 at about 20:40 (GMT+4 hours), the Armenian armed forces again violated ceasefire and, using 82-mm and 120-mm mortars and grenade launchers, shelled Azerbaijani positions and territories where the civilian population lives, namely the Alkhanli village of the countrys Fuzuli district, thereby grossly violating the requirements of international law, the Azerbaijani defense ministry said earlier.

As a result of this provocation, the residents of the village Sahiba Allahverdiyeva, 50, and Zahra Guliyeva, 2, were killed. Salminaz Guliyeva, 52, who got wounded, was taken to the hospital and was operated on.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
LEXINGTON  A teen involved in a deadly crash in September has been sentenced to probation with a provision to educate other teens on distracted driving and a special request from the victims family to live a good life.

Hailey Boutin, 19, was the driver of a car traveling westbound on Road 751 that struck an SUV traveling northbound on Highway 21 on Sept. 19, 2016. Mary Robertson, passenger in the SUV, was pronounced dead at the scene.

Patricia Bock, Robertsons mother, delivered a powerful statement during the sentencing hearing in Dawson County District Court on Monday. She said her daughter had recently retired as Sergeant of Communications with the Newcastle Wyoming Police Department and had been named Wyomings Public Safety Communications Supervisor of the Year in 2010.

She said Robertson always stressed training saying, "lives depend on us succeeding."

She said after Robertsons death another daughter, sister to Robertson, commented that Boutin will now be living for two people, herself and Mary, and must become what Mary stood for.

"We hope Hailey will make it her goal to make the world around her a better and safer place," said Bock. "By doing so, Hailey will experience her own healing from this traumatic event, the loss of a human life."

She asked that Boutin be required to teach others about the dangers of texting and driving as part of her sentence and suggested an officer of the law could help her prepare and accompany her. "It could be restitution for the pain our family will carry for the rest of our lives and help Hailey find peace and healing in her heart," she said.

Deputy County Attorney Matt Neher said there is a duty and responsibility when someone gets behind the wheel of a vehicle to drive safely and the accident forever changes the lives of the Robertson family. He said the allegations the state could have proven were that Boutin had the glare of the sun in her eyes and that she was going about the speed limit when she went through a stop sign.

"She should have slowed down. She should have stopped. She should have made precautions and thats not what happened, he said.

Defense attorney Ken Harbison said Boutin had no juvenile or criminal offenses.

"Despite what the paper is touting, she wasnt texting," Harbison said. "She wasnt drunk. She wasnt on drugs," he added.

Harbison said Boutin wants to write a letter of apology, but isnt there yet in being able to convey her thoughts. He asked that the court impose that as part of the sentence to help in healing.

Harbison said unlike some cases he defends, he can relate to Boutin and her actions.

"This isnt what she intended. I have been driving and thought Oh crap, Im glad there wasnt a car coming. In her case there was," he said.

Boutin tearfully stated, "I just want to say that it does affect me every day. Im truly sorry. It was an accident. I send love out to everybody."

Judge James Doyle IV sentenced Boutin to 24 months of probation, noting Boutins actions were neglectful but not intentional.

Doyle said he hoped Boutin listened to the statement given by Bock. "She thinks the most important thing that can happen to you it hat you heal; live a healthly, whole life," said Doyle.

He said letters he received from Robertons family members said they want Boutin to live a good life, one that brings honor to self and others. "Even though shes not here, Ms. Robertson would forgive you," said Doyle.

He said although drugs and alcohol were not factors in the case, Boutin will be required to follow the usual probation restrictions of no drug and alcohol use, including not being allowed to be in places or around people where drugs and alcohol are present. She will also be subject to searches and testing for compliance.

Doyle also advised her to continue working with a therapist for the term specified by the therapist, ordered attendance at various classes offered through probation and ordered her to continue her education to graduate from high school, being specific that obtaining a GED was not a substitute.

A community service requirement ordered by Doyle will put Boutin in front of students in Lexington and Cozad, once a semester while on probation to do a presentation on distracted driving.

"I want you to go to the bigger high schools to have a larger impact," Doyle said. "Help people understand the seriousness of one small time of not paying attention."

He noted there are examples of distracted driving every day  when someone is not driving with both hands on the wheels or looking around  and that Boutin should educate others on all distracted driving issues.

Boutin was also ordered to write an apology letter to Mary Robertsons family members and give it to them before the 20th month of her probation.

Additionally, Boutin was given 90 days in jail at the end of the sentence which may be waived, or not served, if she successfully complies with the terms of probation.
Details added (first version posted at 14:11)

Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Seba Aghayeva  Trend:

Azerbaijani, Turkish and Turkmen foreign ministers have agreed to develop a Road Map for Future Cooperation for 2017-2020, Azerbaijans FM Elmar Mammadyarov said on July 19, at a briefing held after the meeting with his Turkish and Turkmen counterparts, Mevlut Cavusoglu and Rashid Meredov in Baku.

We had interesting and fruitful negotiations. The three countries are carrying out numerous regional projects and we have discussed the progress in their implementation, said the Azerbaijani FM.

He noted that the project for building the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway will be completed by the end of 2017, and subsequently great opportunities for cooperation will emerge.

Azerbaijan, Turkey and Turkmenistan also intend to use other ways for cargo transportation, via trunk lines and sea routes as well, Mammadyarov said, adding this issue was today discussed at the trilateral meeting.

Next year, the work will be completed on expansion of the port in Turkmenbashi, which will increase cargo transportation between the ports of Alat and Turkmenbashi up to 25 million tons per year, he said.

Azerbaijans capital, Baku, today hosted the 4th meeting of the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Turkmenistan, Elmar Mammadyarov, Mevlut Cavusoglu and Rashid Meredov.

The agenda of the meeting of the three countries FMs included the development of cooperation in the political, economic, energy, transport and humanitarian spheres, and the implementation of regional projects.
Title changed, details added (first version posted on 10:53)

Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Seba Aghayeva  Trend:

A meeting between Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was held in Baku July 19.

Cavusoglu is on a visit to Baku to attend the fourth trilateral meeting of the Azerbaijani, Turkish and Turkmen foreign ministers.

The sides expressed gratification with the political dialogue and the high level of development of cooperation in all spheres between the two fraternal countries.

The Azerbaijani-Turkish cooperation is the decisive factor having a stabilizing influence on the situation in the region.

From this point of view, the results of the activity of the Azerbaijan-Turkey High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council, including its recent meeting, were appreciated.

The successful activity of the Azerbaijani armed forces together with the Turkish armed forces in the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan was also stressed.

The negotiation process on the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict was also discussed.

The sides stressed that the continuation of Armenias policy of aggression and occupation against Azerbaijan is a serious threat to peace and security in the region.

The cooperation between Azerbaijan and Turkey as part of international and regional organizations was also appreciated.

The important role of the Azerbaijan-Turkey intergovernmental joint economic commission in ensuring long-term, stable development of trade and economic relations was stressed.

The importance of revitalizing the work of the commission was also emphasized.

The issues on the development of bilateral and transit transport opportunities (rail transport, maritime transport and road transport) in the development of bilateral trade and economic relations, as well as the importance of completing the implementation of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway project as soon as possible were also discussed.

The sides also stressed the successful continuation of the TANAP project implementation according to the schedule.

The fourth meeting of Azerbaijani, Turkish and Turkmen foreign ministers, Elmar Mammadyarov, Mevlut Cavusoglu and Rashid Meredov, is being held in Baku July 19.

The first tripartite meeting of the three countries foreign ministers was held in Baku on May 26, 2014, the second meeting - in Ashgabat on January 29, 2015 and the third meeting was held in Antalya on August 28, 2015.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

Trend:

Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree July 19 on additional measures to strengthen social protection of media workers.

According to the decree, five million manats will be allocated from the Presidents Reserve Fund envisaged in Azerbaijans state budget for 2017 for the State Fund for Support of Mass Media Development under the Azerbaijani president in connection with the improvement of living conditions of Azerbaijani media workers and the construction of another residential building for them to continue the measures implemented in the sphere of strengthening the social protection of mass media workers operating in the country.

The Ministry of Finance has been instructed to provide financing in the amount indicated in the decree.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

Trend:

Ambassador Cekuta opened the Kurdemir American Corner, located in Kurdemirs Central Library. The Ambassador delivered remarks about the importance of the American Corner as a resource for the local community. Representatives of Kurdemirs Executive Committee and Ministry of Culture were also present. Ambassador Cekuta presented new equipment, technology and materials to the library, as well as a gift of books for Kurdemirs Central Library. Ambassador Cekuta also met with future users of the Kurdemir American Corner to speak with them about their goals, and how the resources at the American Corner can help them and benefit their community. The American Corner in Kurdemir is now open for language learning and educational programming.

The American Corner Program, which includes a flagship Baku American Center at the Azerbaijan University of Languages and regional American Corners in Kurdemir, Ganja, Salyan and Xachmas, is an excellent resource for Azerbaijanis looking to improve their English, access information about the United States, learn more about educational or exchange opportunities, or participate in innovative high-tech projects at the Maker Space. The corners offer lectures, conversation clubs, and a variety of other activities, as well as free internet and computer access for everyone in the community.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

The financial and insurance sectors, the catering sector, tobacco industry as well as the industrial and construction sectors are of particular interest for Turkish investors in Azerbaijan, Nurettin Canikli, deputy prime minister of Turkey, said in an interview with Trend.

"As a result of the decline in oil prices in the world market, the Azerbaijani government focused on the non-oil sector development and investment in this area. President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly stated that in the short and medium term, it is necessary to develop the countrys non-oil sector," he said.

Since 2015, Azerbaijan has started to make quick decisions for investing in agriculture, animal husbandry, chemical, textile and tourism industries, Canikli said, adding that based on this, Turkish investors will not miss the chance to invest in various sectors of Azerbaijan's economy.

"There are many opportunities for Turkish investors to share experience with Azerbaijan in these spheres," the deputy PM said and noted that Turkish companies are ready to continue investing in Azerbaijan to support the countrys development.

Canikli said Turkeys direct investments in the Azerbaijani economy amounted to $6.2 billion in the past 14 years.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Azad Hasanli  Trend:

Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey are doing a great job for the Silk Road development, Aydin Aliyev, chairman of the Azerbaijani State Customs Committee, said at the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey trilateral meeting in Baku July 19.

Georgian First Vice Prime Minister Dimitry Kumsishvili and Turkish Minister of Customs and Trade Bulent Tufenkci are taking part in the meeting.

Aliyev said that many countries are working on the Silk Road development, but Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey pay much attention to it.

The three countries also pay special attention and carry out large-scale work in increasing freight traffic and ensuring energy security in the region, he said.

The political will of the Azerbaijani, Georgian and Turkish presidents plays the main role in the economic development of the three countries and their integration into the world community, Aliyev said.

In his turn, Kumsishvili said that Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey are implementing a number of joint projects, one of which is the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway.

"The projects which are being implemented by our countries are of strategic importance and important for us, he said. I believe that our cooperation will develop in the future."

Tufenkci stressed the importance of simplifying mutual trade between the three countries.

"We know that by taking some measures at customs checkpoints, we will be able to simplify mutual trade, he said. Today we plan to sign relevant documents. The corridor among our countries is very important. It will help ensure peace in the Caucasus, simplify trade with third countries and transport goods produced by our countries safely.

We have already solved a number of problems in this regard, he said. I believe that today we will be able to solve the remaining problems as part of discussions.

A meeting of representatives of the Azerbaijani, Georgian and Turkish customs bodies is being held in Baku July 19. The representatives of the embassies and other participants are also taking part in the meeting.

Two documents are expected to be signed as part of the meeting.

According to the Azerbaijani State Customs Committee, the trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Turkey amounted to almost $1.2 billion, while the trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Georgia - $270.35 million in January-June 2017. Both countries are on the list of the main foreign economic partners of Azerbaijan.
Details added (first version posted on 12:47)

Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Azad Hasanli  Trend:

Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey are doing a great job for the Silk Road development, Aydin Aliyev, chairman of the Azerbaijani State Customs Committee, said at the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey trilateral meeting in Baku July 19.

Georgian First Vice Prime Minister Dimitry Kumsishvili and Turkish Minister of Customs and Trade Bulent Tufenkci are taking part in the meeting.

Aliyev said that many countries are working on the Silk Road development, but Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey pay much attention to it.

The three countries also pay special attention and carry out large-scale work in increasing freight traffic and ensuring energy security in the region, he said.

The political will of the Azerbaijani, Georgian and Turkish presidents plays the main role in the economic development of the three countries and their integration into the world community, Aliyev said.

In his turn, Kumsishvili said that Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey are implementing a number of joint projects, one of which is the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway.

"The projects which are being implemented by our countries are of strategic importance and important for us, he said. I believe that our cooperation will develop in the future."

Tufenkci stressed the importance of simplifying mutual trade between the three countries.

"We know that by taking some measures at customs checkpoints, we will be able to simplify mutual trade, he said. Today we plan to sign relevant documents. The corridor among our countries is very important. It will help ensure peace in the Caucasus, simplify trade with third countries and transport goods produced by our countries safely.

We have already solved a number of problems in this regard, he said. I believe that today we will be able to solve the remaining problems as part of discussions.

A meeting of representatives of the Azerbaijani, Georgian and Turkish customs bodies is being held in Baku July 19. The representatives of the embassies and other participants are also taking part in the meeting.

Two documents are expected to be signed as part of the meeting.

According to the Azerbaijani State Customs Committee, the trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Turkey amounted to almost $1.2 billion, while the trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Georgia - $270.35 million in January-June 2017. Both countries are on the list of the main foreign economic partners of Azerbaijan.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Azad Hasanli  Trend:

Azerbaijan and Turkey have signed an agreement to create an electronic system for the exchange of information on transit vehicle transportation.

The document was signed by Chairman of Azerbaijans State Customs Committee Aydin Aliyev and Turkeys Minister of Customs and Trade Bulent Tufenkci.

On July 19, Baku hosted a trilateral meeting attended by Chairman of Azerbaijans State Customs Committee Aydin Aliyev, Georgias First Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Dimitry Kumsishvili and Turkeys Minister of Customs and Trade Bulent Tufenkci.

Representatives of the three countries border agencies, embassies also took part in the meeting.

Along with the mentioned document, the sides also signed a joint declaration on expansion of the trilateral cooperation in customs issues among the countries. The document envisages the establishment of a permanent commission for development of cooperation among customs authorities of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia, as well as between customs bodies and business structures of the region.

According to Azerbaijans State Customs Committee, the countrys trade turnover with Turkey amounted to $1.2 billion, and $270.35 million in 1H17 with Georgia.

Both countries are listed as Azerbaijans major foreign economic partners.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Azad Hasanli  Trend:

Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey are expanding cooperation in the customs sphere.

This is envisaged by the final declaration adopted in Baku July 19 at the first trilateral meeting of Chairman of Azerbaijans State Customs Committee Aydin Aliyev, Georgias First Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Dimitry Kumsishvili and Turkeys Minister of Customs and Trade Bulent Tufenkci.

The meetings participants have decided to create a permanent commission which will help to improve the relations among the customs structures of the three countries, as well as between business and customs authorities in the region.

According to the declaration, customs authorities of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey will jointly work on the development of transit cargo transportation, invest in the modernization of customs services, and create mechanisms for the exchange of information on subjects and goods passing through the borders of the three countries.

It should be noted that two documents were signed during the Baku meeting: a joint declaration on expansion of the trilateral cooperation in customs issues among the three countries, and an agreement between Turkey and Azerbaijan on creation of an electronic system for the exchange of information on transit transport by vehicles.

According to Azerbaijans State Customs Committee, the countrys trade turnover with Turkey totaled $1.2 billion, and with Georgia $270.35 million in 1H17. Both countries are listed as Azerbaijans major foreign economic partners.
Details added (first version posted at 14:41)

Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Azad Hasanli  Trend:

The construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railways section that runs through Turkey is planned to be completed by late 2017, said Turkish Minister of Customs and Trade Bulent Tufenkci.

He was addressing the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey trilateral meeting in Baku July 19.

In the past, there were certain problems with the project implementation but they have already been fixed, Tufenkci said, adding the BTK railway construction is completed by 85 percent.

Further during the meeting, Georgian Minister of Finance Dimitry Kumsishvili noted that one of the tasks of Azerbaijani, Georgian and Turkish customs authorities is to contribute to the increase of trade in the region.

I believe that the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway will allow us achieving this goal. Once the railway is commissioned, Kazakhstan will be able to join the project, which will in turn help us increase trade turnover and expand economic ties with Central Asia, Kumsishvili said.
Details added (first version posted on 13:38)

Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Seba Aghayeva  Trend:

Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Turkey have great desire to develop strong cooperation in a trilateral format, said Turkmen Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov.

He made the remarks at a meeting of the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Turkmenistan in Baku July 19.

Meredov noted that the parties wish to particularly develop cooperation in political sphere, energy, trade and expand cultural ties.

He said that there is a strong intention of the three countries to hold a summit of the heads of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Turkey in Turkmenistan until the end of 2017.

Our main goal for today is the preparation for the summit of the heads of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Turkey, noted Meredov.

The minister added that the issues of preparation for this summit were discussed during the Baku meeting, and he expressed hope that all the draft agreements prepared for today will be signed during the meeting.

Azerbaijans capital, Baku, hosted the 4th meeting of the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Turkmenistan, Elmar Mammadyarov, Mevlut Cavusoglu and Rashid Meredov on July 19.

The agenda of the meeting of the three countries FMs includes the development of cooperation in the political, economic, energy, transport and humanitarian spheres, and the implementation of regional projects. The first meeting of the three foreign ministers was held in Baku on May 26, 2014, and the second meeting  in Ashgabat on January 29, 2015, and the third meeting  in Antalya on August 28, 2015.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18

By Dalga Khatinoglu, Trend:

Iran has defined $200 billion worth of projects in up/mid/downstream oil and gas sector. They will partly be carried out by foreign companies.

However, Iranian government says the share of local companies in the projects would be high, especially, in upstream projects, where each foreign company must choose a local partner and transfer the modern technology and investment into the projects.

Saeed Ahangaran, secretary of the Society of Iranian Petroleum Industry Equipment Manufacturers (SIPIEM) told Trend that currently Iranian local companies have capacity to take some 70-percent share in downstream and 50-percent in upstream projects, in case modern technology is transferred into the country.

Recently, Iran signed a 20-year contract with a consortium, headed by French Total, to develop South Pars gas fields 11th phase, projected to cost $4.8 billion.

Total has a 50.1-percent share, while Chinese CNPC and local Petro Pars have each 30 percent and 19.9 percent stakes respectively.

According to newly designed oil contracts, called Iran Petroleum Contract (IPC), foreign companies should select a local company, bring investment and transfer technology to the projects, while the project operatorship would be changed between partners periodically.

The ownership of all investments and technology, brought by foreign companies and shared with Iranian oil companies, belong to National Iranian Oil Company.

Iran has introduced 49 upstream oil and gas projects for foreign companies to take part in.

Ahangaran said that about 70 percent of the needed equipment for refineries can be built domestically, but it depends on the government policy and usage of domestic might as well as technology transfer from abroad.

"Iranian companies can participate massively in piping or drilling operations, including construction of on/offshore rigs," he said.

Recently, Iran said that about $25-30 billion worth of investment is needed for construction of 20,000-ton platforms and mega compressors in South Pars phases to prevent production fall after 2023, when the field reaches dew point and faces pressure decrease.

Iran currently uses ordinary 1500-ton platforms there, and Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh announced recently that neither Iran nor regional countries possesses the needed technology for construction of 20,000-ton platforms.

However, Ahangaran said that local companies can participate partly as contractors in these projects as well.

The first mega platform with $2.5 billion worth would be constructed in 60 months by Total-led consortium for South Pars phase 11.

He added that currently Iranian companies are negotiating with French, Italian, German, Norwegian and Dutch companies on modern technology transferring into the country.

"The negotiations are focused from a range of issues including wellhead and well-in equipment, corrosion-resistant alloy (CRA) pipelines production, other type of especial pipelines, progressive pumps, compressors, etc," he added.

Recently, Iran signed an agreement with Spanish Tubacex to produce CRA pipelines.

NIOC signed a $630 million deal for a 50-50 joint venture between Mobarakeh Steel Company and Tubacex on May 24 to purchase 600 km CRA pipes, needed for the giant South Pars project.

Irans MAPNA also has signed deals with Europeans, especially Siemens for manufacturing turbo compressors.

Ahangaran said that there are great hopes for taking extra share by local companies in the oil and gas projects with getting western technology and investments.

--

Dalga Khatinoglu is the head of Trend Agencys Iran news service, follow him on Twitter: @dalgakhatinoglu
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 18



By Farhad Daneshvar  Trend:



Iran and Azerbaijan are expected to launch transporting goods and cargos through the International North-South Transport Corridor in the coming months, amid efforts to boost trade ties between the two neighboring countries.

Mohammad Ebrahimi, economic consultant at Iranian Embassy in Baku, told Trend that the goal of cooperation between the two neighboring countries will be fulfilled in the near future as the construction of Qazvin-Rasht railway segment which is an essential part of a worthwhile project to connect the two countries railroads is almost completed and it will come on stream soon.



In the meantime, the official forecasted that the under construction cargo terminals at Irans Astara railway station will be inaugurated in the near future.



The transportation of goods through the corridor will be launched shortly after completing of the inauguration of cargo terminals in Astara, Ebrahimi added.

Iran and Azerbaijan, within the International North-South Transportation Corridor, are making efforts to connect the two countries railways through Qazvin-Rasht-Astara route.

Azerbaijan earlier agreed to provide 60 million euros for developing railway facilities in Iranians city of Astara.



To complete the railway links of the transportation corridor, Iran had earlier agreed to construct inland railway segments in northern parts of the country in order to extend its railway network to the border area with the neighboring Azerbaijan through the two cities of Astara on both sides.



The initial plan included Qazvin-Rasht and Rasht-Astara railway segments. In the meantime, Azerbaijan has launched a construction project to extend its railway into Irans territory.



However, the sides still need to discuss the financing of the project for the construction of the 164 kilometer-long railway segment linking the two Iranian cities of Rasht and Astara.



According to the data available on the website of State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan, trade turnover between Iran and Azerbaijan over the last year surged by 78 percent to reach $221.2 million.

Tehran and Baku are apparently making efforts to boom trade turnover through the expansion of bilateral cooperation.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Fatih Karimov Trend:

Iran has exported 36 tons of trout to Russia via the Astara customs checkpoint, Bahram Pourzarb, head of the veterinary department of Astara city, said.

The consignment worth $144,000 was shipped from western Sanandaj city, Pourzarb said, IRNA news agency reported July 19.

This is the fourth trout package exported through Astara to Russia during the current fiscal year (started March 20, 2017), the Iranian official added.

He further said that 18 tons of cheese, worth $34,000 has been exported recently to Russia, the second package in the current fiscal year.

Iran currently exports fishery and milk products to Russia.
Irans Foreign Ministry has denounced the US move to impose new economic sanctions against Tehran over its ballistic missile program as cheap and useless, saying Tehran will respond with its own sanctions against the Americans, PressTV reported.

In a statement on Tuesday, the ministry condemned the US move to add new names to its list of illegal sanctions against Iran and said the Islamic Republic "will in turn impose new sanctions against a number of other American persons and entities that have taken hostile steps against the Iranian people and other Muslim nations in the region."

It added that the name of these new American persons and entities would be announced soon.

The statement came after the administration of US President Donald Trump said it was imposing new economic sanctions against Iran over the Islamic Republics missile program hours after the White House admitted that Tehran was complying with a landmark 2015 nuclear agreement it signed with the P5+1 group of countries.

The US departments of treasury and state said Tuesday that they were targeting 18 Iranian individuals, groups and networks.

Iranian lawmakers also on Tuesday passed a single-urgency bill, which designates US military forces and intelligence services as supporters of terrorist groups in the Middle East.

The bill, whose single urgency was passed on the Parliament floor, read, In view of the overt support provided to terrorist groups by the US government and the countrys military and intelligence forces and repeated confessions by American officials to having created terrorist groups and offered them all-out support, from the standpoint of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the entirety of the United States military and intelligence forces are considered as supporters of terrorist groups in the region.

Meanwhile, a senior commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Division, Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, said Irans hands should not be tied in the face of the enemys sanctions and pressure, emphasizing that the IRGC's suggestion is that the country should take retaliatory measures to counteract US pressure and bans.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Fatih Karimov Trend:

Irans president Hassan Rouhani has accused the United States of violating the nuclear deal, signed between Tehran and six world powers in 2015.

Some US plans and moves are at odds with the soul and even text of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA aka nuclear deal), Rouhani said July 19, the state-run IRINN TV reported.

Iran will stand against these plans and acts, said Iran's president.

The remarks came after the US department of treasury announced on July 18 that they were targeting 16 entities and individuals for engaging in support of illicit Iranian actors or trans-national criminal activity.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also said that the new US sanctions against Iranian individuals and entities "poison the atmosphere" and "violate the spirit" of the nuclear deal.

Zarif added that Iran is considering firing back with reciprocal sanctions and will "probably" expand its own list of banned US corporations and organizations.

Iran and the Group P5+1 (Russia, China, the US, Britain, France and Germany) reached the 159-page nuclear agreement in July 2015 and implemented it in January 2016.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Emil Ilgar  Trend:

Irans Guardian Council has re-elected Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, a conservative and hardliner cleric, as the secretary of Guardian Council.

The Spokesman of the Council Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei told Fars news agency that Jannati was re-elected as secretary for the next six years.

The Guardian Council is one of the most influential entities in Iran, currently controlled by conservatives. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appoints six of twelve members of Council and the remaining ones are nominated by the judiciary system, approved by parliament.

The Guardian Council has various duties, from qualifying candidates for parliamentary and presidential elections to approving the results of voting.

The 91-year Jannati has been a member of Guardian Council since the beginning of Islamic Republic in 1979 and has served as secretary of the Council the last 25 years.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19

By Elena Kosolapova - Trend:

A direct undersea pipeline to Turkey is still the most logical export route for Israeli gas because of its economic and technical feasibility, researcher in the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies (Mitvim) Gabriel Mitchell, focusing on energy policy issues, believes.

This route has its own unique political challenges - primarily the ongoing political dispute in Cyprus - but all of the current momentum suggests that Israel and Turkey are committed to somehow making this work, the expert told Trend by email.

At the 22nd World Petroleum Congress in Istanbul, Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said that Turkey and Israel plan to sign an agreement on gas pipeline construction until the yearend.

"We want to build a pipeline stretching from Israel to Turkey in order to able to export natural gas from Israel to Turkey," Steinitz said, adding that the Israeli gas could be delivered to Europe and to the Balkans through Turkey.

According to Mitchell, it is difficult to say how Israel's gas will be transported and consumed. He noted that a potential Israel-Turkey pipeline would require an estimated four years to build, and so much could change in the global and regional energy market between now and then.

On one hand, it makes perfect sense that Israeli gas would be linked into a larger energy system like TANAP (Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas) or a TANAP/TAP (Trans Adriatic Pipeline) combination once it reaches Turkey, expert said.

He noted that at the same time, one could easily envision an alternative scenario where the majority of Israeli gas is consumed in the Turkish domestic market.

According to Mitchell, given the limited quantities of Israel's offshore reserves, it is unlikely to make a significant mark on Europe's natural gas market.

That doesn't mean, however, that the export of Israeli gas won't play a role in increasing European energy security or that some future combination of Israeli gas with the reserves of other Eastern Mediterranean actors couldn't have greater influence, the expert said adding that however there is a tendency by Israeli officials to oversell its impact.

In Israel, two giant fields - Tamar and Leviathan were discovered in 2009 and 2010 respectively. Gas reserves of these fields amount to tens of trillion cubic feet.
Turkeys prime minister said Tuesday that Turkey will continue to conduct its fight against terrorism until the last terrorist is dead, Anadolu reported.

Speaking at the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party's parliamentary group meeting, Binali Yildirim said: "Until the last terrorist in this territory is killed, we will resolutely continue our fight against terrorism."

He added: "We will continue our fight against terrorism not only at home but also abroad using our rights based on international law."

This June Turkish security forces killed 270 PKK terrorists in nationwide counter-terrorism operations.

The PKK - listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S., and EU - resumed its decades-old armed campaign in July 2015.

Since then, more than 1,200 victims, including security force personnel and civilians, have lost their lives.

Turkey has been conducting operations in both Turkey and northern Iraq to fight the terrorist PKK.

PM slams main opposition leader

Yildirim also slammed main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) head Kemal Kilicdaroglu for his allegations that the July 15, 2016 defeated coup attempt had been a "controlled coup," saying that with such remarks Kilicdaroglu is relinquishing control to someone else.

Kilicdaroglu has repeatedly claimed that the government had advance knowledge of the coup plot by the Fetullah Terrorist Organization (FETO) but did nothing to prevent it.

"We can tolerate the remarks said to us to a certain extent. However, we will never allow someone to wrong our martyrs who lost their lives that night" of the coup, said Yildirim.

He added: "FETO, which wanted to occupy Turkey on July 15, is encouraged by Kilicdaroglu's recent remarks."

FETO and its U.S.-based leader, Fetullah Gulen, orchestrated the defeated coup that martyred 250 people and injured nearly 2,200.

Ankara has also said FETO is behind a long-running campaign to overthrow the state through the infiltration of Turkish institutions, particularly the military, police, and judiciary.

Cyprus talks

Yildirim also addressed the collapse of talks on the Cyprus issue last week in Switzerland, blaming the impasse on the Greek Cypriot side's uncompromising, unilateral attitude.

"The Greek side sending a ship amid at drilling in the eastern Mediterranean Sea dynamited the solution while the talks were continuing in Switzerland. This revealed Greeks insincere attitude towards a solution."

A drilling vessel is working in the region under so-called licenses unilaterally issued by the Greek Cypriot administration, a development Turkey has warned against.

Yildirim stressed: "Our government will use our rights to the utmost based on international laws against this lawless, unilateral attitude."

At the failed Cyprus talks, representatives from the EU, the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot leaderships, and the guarantor nations of Turkey, Greece, and the U.K. took part in discussions to resolve the dispute.

The island has been divided since 1974, when a Greek Cypriot coup was followed by violence against the island's Turks, and Ankara's intervention as a guarantor power.

The EU needs Turkey more than Turkey needs the EU

Yildirim also touched on remarks by European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker about the decisions made by Turkey's government and its future with the EU.

Yildirim described Juncker's remarks as a threat to Turkey's sovereign rights. "Those who want to speak with Turkey softly and carry a big stick should know that the EU needs Turkey more than Turkey needs the EU."

Yildirim suggested that Juncker refrain from such remarks, saying that they damage avenues of communication.
Turkeys prime minister late on Wednesday told his Iraqi counterpart Ankara was ready to help rebuild the city of Mosul, recently the scene of fighting with the Daesh terror group.

A source from Turkeys prime ministry told Anadolu Agency Binali Yildirim spoke to Haider al-Abadi about Iraqi forces clearing of Daesh from the northern city.

Yildirim told Abadi Turkey was ready to contribute to the re-construction of Mosuls Old City, which was significantly damaged while under Daesh control.

The Turkish premier also reiterated that Turkey was determined to maintain cooperation with the Iraqi government in terms of development in the region.

Once Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul was captured by Daesh along with vast swathes of territory in northern and western Iraq in 2014.

Last week, Abadi formally declared victory over Daesh in Mosul, the terrorist group's last stronghold in northern Iraq.
It is often asserted that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 proved that HWA was right and he really did see the future.

This of course is nonsense. Herbert W. Armstrong said that Christ would return within twenty years in his book Mystery of the Ages. (PCG has since deleted those words so someone in there knows HWA spoke nonsense.) How convenient for them to forget this.

Also Herbert W. Armstrong never said the Soviet Union would collapse. He thought it would survive intact until a few years after Christ's return. It shows how biased some many in the COGs are that they never seem to notice this. This inconvenient truth is just tossed into the memory hole.

It is true that HWA said that some Eastern European states would break away from Moscow's orbit and join the European Empire he said would arise at any moment. But he never talked of the Soviet Union collapsing. He did not teach that. Also he portrayed the rise of the European Empire to be far quicker then what has actually happened. In Mystery of the Ages Christ was supposed to return by 2005 at the most.

So assertions that the fall of the Berlin Wall somehow prove that HWA was right is just complete nonsense spread by people who, for whatever reason, are still in denial that HWA was a false prophet who merely talked out of his own "human reasoning".
KYODO NEWS - Jul 19, 2017 - 20:30 | All, Japan

A court dismissed Wednesday a claim by a pro-Pyongyang school operator in western Japan that it is entitled to participate in a government tuition waiver program covering most high schools in the country.

The Hiroshima District Court turned down the demand by the operator of the Hiroshima Korean School and other plaintiffs including its graduates that the government pay 56 million yen ($500,000) in damages and revoke the "discriminatory" decision to exclude Korean schools from the tuition benefit scheme.

The ruling was the first among five lawsuits filed around the nation against the state seeking to reverse the treatment of pro-Pyongyang schools with regard to the tuition waiver program for high schools in Japan. The school is expected to appeal the ruling.

The court basically backed the government's stance that since pro-Pyongyang schools are under the influence of North Korea and the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, also known as Chongryon, there is a risk that subsidies provided through the tuition waver program may not be spent appropriately.

"We find the state's decision to exclude it as not deviating from the scope of its discretion and not an abuse of power," Presiding Judge Hiroshi Konishi said in the ruling.

In April 2010, the Japanese government introduced the high school tuition waiver program as one of the key policies of the then ruling Democratic Party of Japan, the predecessor of the current Democratic Party.

The waiver program basically applies to all students, including those attending foreign schools with curricula similar to Japanese high schools.

The Hiroshima Korean School applied to join the program in November 2010, but the government postponed deciding whether to include pro-Pyongyang schools in the program, partly due to a lack of progress on the issue of North Korea's abductions of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s.

In February 2013, the government, led by the Liberal Democratic Party which took over power from the DPJ, decided not to extend the tuition waiver program to pro-Pyongyang schools.

The Hiroshima Korean School protested the decision as "unjust discrimination" against Korean schools, saying: "It is a cruel act that gives disadvantages to students who have nothing to do with the abdication issue and promotes discrimination against them."

The school also criticized the government for infringing their students' equal rights and right to an ethnic education.

Excluding universities, as of May 2016 there were 66 Korean schools in Japan teaching in Korean and providing a Korean ethnic education, according to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Their nearly 6,200 students include those with South Korean or Japanese nationality.

Similar lawsuits have been filed with district courts in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka as well as the Fukuoka District Court's Kokura branch. The Osaka court is scheduled to hand down a ruling on the matter on July 28.
Zermatt Switzerland glacier

A pair of bodies discovered in a shrinking glacier in Switzerland are believed to be a couple who went missing 75 years ago, according to a report in Swiss newspaper Le Matin.

Marcelin and Francine Dumoulin disappeared in the area in August 1942 while tending to their cows.

Bernhard Tschannen, the director of ski-lift company Glacier 3000, said one of his employees stumbled upon pairs of male and female shoes, some backpacks, tin bowls, and part of a body on the Tsanfleuron glacier, according to the Guardian.

Local police said in a statement that there were two bodies lying near each other  a man and a woman wearing clothing dating from the period of World War Two.

DNA tests have not yet confirmed their identities, but police said the bodies had identity papers, and were perfectly preserved in the glacier.

Tschannen told the Geneva Tribune that the couple likely fell into a crevasse and stayed there for decades, until the glacier receded. The bodies were found near a ski lift above the Les Diablerets resort in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland.

Marcelin Dumoulin, a shoemaker, and Francine, a teacher, left behind seven children. Their youngest daughter, Marceline Udry-Dumoulin, is now 79 and told Le Matin that the discovery brought her a deep sense of calm.

We spent our whole lives looking for them, without stopping she said. After their parents disappearance, Udry-Dumoulin said she and her siblings were placed with different families and eventually lost touch.

I was lucky to stay with my aunt. We all lived in the region but became strangers, she said.

Udry-Dumoulin said she plans to have a proper funeral for her parents, and wear white to represent the hope she never lost.

NOW WATCH: Check out this incredible footage from a drone that traveled deep inside a glacier





More From Business Insider


A pair of bodies discovered in a shrinking glacier in Switzerland are believed to be a couple who went missing 75 years ago, according to a report in Swiss newspaper Le Matin.

Marcelin and Francine Dumoulin disappeared in the area in August 1942 while tending to their cows.

Bernhard Tschannen, the director of ski-lift company Glacier 3000, said one of his employees stumbled upon pairs of male and female shoes, some backpacks, tin bowls, and part of a body on the Tsanfleuron glacier, according to the Guardian.

Swiss glacier bodies remains

Local police said in a statement that there were two bodies lying near each other  a man and a woman wearing clothing dating from the period of World War Two.

DNA tests have not yet confirmed their identities, but police said the bodies had identity papers, and were perfectly preserved in the glacier.

Tschannentold the Geneva Tribune that the couple likely fell into a crevasse and stayed there for decades, until the glacier receded. (The New York Times reports the Tsanfleuron glacier is losing 1.6 feet per year due to climate change.) The bodies were found near a ski lift above the Les Diablerets resort in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland.

Zermatt Switzerland glacier

Marcelin Dumoulin, a shoemaker, and Francine, a teacher, left behind seven children. Their five sons have died, according to the Times, and their youngest daughter, Marceline Udry-Dumoulin, is now 79. She told Le Matin that the discovery brought her a deep sense of calm.

We spent our whole lives looking for them, without stopping she said. After the couple's disappearance, search crews combed the glacier for two months, the Times reports. Udry-Dumoulin said she and her siblings were then placed with different families and eventually lost touch.

I was lucky to stay with my aunt. We all lived in the region but became strangers, she said.

Story continues

Udry-Dumoulin said she plans to have a proper funeral for her parents, and wear white to represent the hope she never lost.

This post has been updated with additional details.

NOW WATCH: Check out this incredible footage from a drone that traveled deep inside a glacier





More From Business Insider
Former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim ONeill is famous for his 2001 coining of the term BRIC, a framework he created to highlight the rise of Brazil, Russia, India and China in the global system. These developing countries not only have continued to rise, but its membersparticularly Russia and Chinaincreasingly dominate the news today.

ONeill said his idea for the term came to him right after 9/11, after thinking about the implications of the attack beyond the horror.

It kind of strangely in my head came to me that maybe this means in order for globalization to thrive going forward, it had to be more than just what it appeared to be in the previous twenty years: the never-ending rise of the Americanization of the world as such.

America doesnt have to be dominant to prosper

But ONeill told Yahoo Finance the reality of globalization without Americanization isnt necessarily a negative thing for America, and it could perhaps be a good thing if Americans can set aside their ego.

If we have a world by the mid-2030s where the combined GDP of the BRIC countries is bigger than the G-7, that is going to be very good for many multinational American countries, he said, pointing out benefits that include a reduced US trade deficit.

The United Kingdom provides a good framework, ONeill said, as wealth has grown in the country even as its super power status has diminished. The UK held superpower status into the beginning of the twentieth century. However, fighting two world wars along with the rise of the US and Soviet Union (both hostile to British imperialism) ended its superpower status, which many historians time-peg to the Suez Crisis of 1956.

Even though Britain no longer has anything like the global presence it did before the Suez crisis, its a country thats seen its wealth triple since then, ONeill said. The US is much more likely to be wealthier for more American people if China, India and others become very big economies in the future irrelevant of whether if theyre bigger than the US or not. I dont think thats going to harm the wealth at all of the average American. That is definitely the case of the United Kingdom.

Story continues

Meanwhile, President Trump seems to have embraced a nationalist rhetoric, emphasizing country borders and a zero-sum outlook where the rise of other countries (including China) would be negative for the US.

Globalization used to be equated with Americanization, but economist Jim ONeill that relationship no longer stands (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)

At the recent G-20 meeting, President Trump said in a speech, The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders?

While some, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, have said this confirms the breakdown of international order many have feared since the election, ONeill said that Trumps outdated rhetoric isnt necessarily as worrisome as many think.

Its forcing other countries to take a bigger leadership role in the world, ONeill said, pointing to areas like climate change.

The US could harm itself with trade policy

One area that could be negative for the US when it comes to not embracing globalization is trade.

This is one of the areas where the US could lose out and therefore harm itself, ONeill said.

Indeed, the European Union and Japan just announced a trade deal and Asian countries aim to move forward on the Trans-Pacific Partnership without the United States.

Trumps message about the ill-effects of globalization has resonated with many Americans, however, and ONeill said this is just the latest version of pointing-the-finger, which says has short-term superficial appeal.

Trumps strategy has been a more aggressive version of many repeated temptations like this going back for a good thirty years, ONeill said. I started out in the world of finance in the early 80s when it was very fashionable to blame Japan for all things going wrong in the United States. For the past 15 years, its now become China.

No longevity to controversial style from Putin

ONeill added that hes not worried about a potential rise of Russia, which has become a bad actor on the global stage.

It is also the case that Russia wont have any chance of becoming as big as the other three countries unless it can do something about its dreadful demographics, its excessive dependency on oil and gas, and its weak productivityIf the Russian economy doesnt start to improve in coming years, Putin is going to probably run into a serious problem.

Listen to full podcast

Nicole Sinclair is markets correspondent at Yahoo Finance

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Georgian farmer borderization russia

Russia has been slowly taking land from neighboring Georgia for years, and Moscow appears to have done it again in early July, moving its borders about 2,300 feet into the former satellite state, according to Yahoo News UK.

On July 3, Russia troops simply picked up a border sign and moved it farther into Georgian territory, Yahoo reported.

Georgia's security agency said the land grab was "illegal," according to The Independent.

This is a continuation of the illegal process of the so-called borderization, which not only violates the fundamental rights of local residents but directly damages the security situation, the Georgian security agency said in a statement.

Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and shortly thereafter recognized two parts of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as independent states. But most of the world still views these territories as part of Georgia.

Russia started using these "borderization" tactics in June 2008 when it set up a "military demarcation line" between Abkhazia and Georgia. The latest move came just days before a meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Germany.

Abkhazia has claimed independence from Georgia since an armed conflict in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union

Borderization, also known as "creeping," usually involves Russian troops setting up barbed-wire fences, signs, or other obstacles to occupy Georgian land in small enough increments that Georgia and the West do nothing more than verbally condemn the action.

[Money Basics: What is bankruptcy?]

The ongoing expansion appears to have intimidated Georgia, which "apparently bought into Moscows logic that Georgia would be blamed for "provocation and escalation," Vladimir Socor, an analyst for the Jamestown Foundation, wrote in 2013.

Story continues

Over the last nine years, these creeping tactics have split up villages and farms, as did the move in early July, which the Georgian government said affected local farmers.

A spokeswoman for Georgian embassy in Washington told Business Insider it's too difficult to estimate how much land Russia has seized since 2008 but that Moscow's main goal in such seizures is to stymie Georgia's efforts to join the EU and NATO.

Countries seeking to join NATO cannot have any outstanding territorial disputes.

Related:

For more news videos visit Yahoo View, available on iOS and Android.

NOW WATCH: Its an honor to be with you: Trump and Putin meet and shake hands ahead of their bilateral meeting at the G20





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Hamptons Free Ride

Growing up in the Hamptons, Alex Esposito and James Mirras knew one thing to be true: The beach was great, but the parking sucked.

Between the crowds and the permit-required parking lots, there was rarely an easy  or cheap  way to enjoy a summer day on the sand.

In 2009, Esposito and Mirras, now both 30, finished their undergraduate studies at the University of Florida and Bentley University, respectively. They toyed with the idea of starting a shuttle bus company as a solution to their childhood grievance.

But there were vehicle costs, like insurance, maintenance, and fuel, to consider. Plus, the two were eager to begin their professional lives; Mirras was off to work at Morgan Stanley and Esposito was pursuing his MBA at Bentley.

"We ended up putting the idea on the back burner," Esposito told Business Insider. That is, until a few years later when a discussion about using freebies as a tool to sell products came up in one of Esposito's business school classes.

"So, Starbucks gives away internet to sell coffee, Gillette gives away razors to sell blades. James and I kind of scratched our heads and said, well, what if we made our beach bus free?" Esposito told Business Insider. "We decided to put together this model where, if electric cars can cut out the cost of fuel, and if advertisers can pay to sponsor the service, then we can provide a totally free service for this one-to-two mile gap."

They ran with the idea  but kept at their day jobs  and founded the Free Ride in the summer of 2011, debuting with a few open-air, fully electric cars operating in East Hampton. Riders could either hail a shuttle from the app, or wave one down on the street for a ride to the beach or a local restaurant. The next summer, the network expanded to include routes in Montauk and Southampton.

Nothing more refreshing than an iced cold @cocacola! Tag a friend you'd share one with!  #thefreeride #shareacoke A post shared by The Free Ride (@thefreerideinc) on Jun 14, 2017 at 2:51pm PDT on Jun 14, 2017 at 2:51pm PDT

In a crowded summer destination like the Hamptons, Esposito and Mirras found companies were willing to pay big for innovative and interactive advertising. Big enough, in fact, that it covers operating costs, and riders don't have to pay a dime.

Story continues

By the following summer, Mirras had left Morgan Stanley to run operations for the Free Ride full-time. They added additional routes in South Florida and Santa Monica, California, and were soon partnering with household brands like JetBlue, Corona, Coco-Cola, and, later, L'Oreal. Since then, ad revenues have surpassed seven-figures, nearly doubling every year, according to Esposito.

Not only are the cars wrapped in fun, cheeky advertisements, some of the companies provide freebies, like cold drinks, snacks, and beauty product samples, to riders. Plus, an iPad inside each car doubles as an interactive video advertisement and photo booth.

Esposito eventually quit his job at consulting company Accenture to join Mirras to bring the Free Ride to other cities around the country.

"I think a lot of people nowadays look at startups as a way to get away from a desk job, but you really need to create the startup before you can take that leap, and I think that's something we both did well," Esposito said.

Pimp my ride! Catch a ride to #VVPalmBeach with @thefreerideinc! #EDSFTG A post shared by vineyard vines (@vineyardvines) on Apr 23, 2017 at 10:50am PDT on Apr 23, 2017 at 10:50am PDT

They recently started expanding beyond beach-only routes. Late last year, they partnered with the city of San Diego to launch FRED, Free Ride Everywhere Downtown, an e-hailing service covering about a two-mile radius within the city.

Esposito calls it a "micro-transit solution" because it fills a gap that buses, trains, yellow cabs, and even Uber and Lyft don't fill: short, free rides you can request via an app or hail from the street.

"The response was tremendous, we had over 20,000 people sign up for the app within the first six weeks of the program, and almost 4,000 rides a week in San Diego," Esposito said.

Esposito envisions a more efficient, eco-friendly, and data-driven solution to public transit, and says other municipalities have reached out to bring the Free Ride to their cities as well. "The idea of having three buses that carry 25 passengers running all the time is just horribly inefficient," he said. "That's really where our eyes kind of opened up and we said, why have three caterpillars when we can have 20 ants?"

The Free Ride currently operates a fleet of 82 shuttles  all driven by Free Ride employees rather than contractors  operating throughout the Hamptons, South Florida, Southern California, and the Jersey Shore, each with its own operating hours and pre-determined route. Cars that aren't being used in one market, like New York during the winter, are either transferred to a busier market, or used for private events.

To date, the company has given 1 million free rides.

"We haven't burned an ounce of fuel doing it and it's really been exciting seeing the business pivot from what was once a fun, little beach shuttle idea into now what we see as being a huge micro-transit solution that's applicable in areas all over the country and all over the world," Esposito said.

NOW WATCH: What it's like to take the 'Uber of seaplanes' from NYC to the Hamptons





More From Business Insider


TOKYO (Reuters) - Western Digital Corp's top executive is in Japan to meet government officials, aiming to resolve a dispute with Toshiba Corp over the Japanese company's planned sale of its chip business, sources familiar with the matter said on Tuesday. Toshiba and joint venture partner Western Digital are at loggerheads over the sale of the chip unit - the world's second-largest producer of NAND chips. Toshiba is counting on the sale to cover billions of dollars in cost overruns at its now bankrupt U.S. nuclear unit Westinghouse, while Western Digital says any deal would require its consent. Western Digital CEO Steve Milligan is meeting with officials who were recently appointed to senior positions at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in a reshuffle, the sources said. (Reporting by Taiga Uranaka and Makiko Yamazaki; Editing by Ritsuko Ando and Mark Potter)
Six Afghan girls who were earlier denied visas to attend a Washington, D.C., robotics competition have met with U.S. President Donald Trump's daughter, Ivanka, in Washington.

U.S. authorities had originally refused access to schoolchildren from a number of Muslim-majority nations to participate in the science contest, decisions that followed the implementation of stricter visa policies under Trump.

At the urging of Trump, however, U.S. officials reversed policy and allowed the six girls from the Herat region to enter the country for the FIRST Global Challenge -- a three-day international robotics competition that aims to promote science and technology among youths worldwide.

When the reversal was announced, Ivanka Trump tweeted: "I look forward to welcoming this brilliant team of Afghan girls, and their competitors, to Washington DC next week!"

The girls arrived in Washington on July 15, where they were greeted at Dulles International Airport by a group of supporters, including Afghan ambassador Hamdullah Mohib and acting special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Alice G Wells. The girls were presented with bouquets.



The Afghan girls are entering a robot they made that can recognize blue and orange and sort balls into correct locations.



Critics had argued that the denial of the visas was the wrong message to send to the people of Afghanistan, where U.S.-led forces have been helping to fight Taliban extremists for 16 years.

With additional reporting by AP and AFP
OTTAWA, July 18, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Contextere is pleased to provide details on a recent investment made by Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT). The $1.1 million USD investment will allow contextere, an emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) software company based in Ottawa, Ontario, to design, develop and deliver an intelligent personal agent for aerospace and defense maintenance personnel. The system will be applicable in field service and industrial inspection activities as well as more complex maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) tasks.



Lockheed Martin is making this investment as part of their Industrial and Technological Benefits (ITB) obligation for the in-service support of the 17 CC-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft, which were delivered to the Royal Canadian Air Force in 2010.

Our industrial software weaves together the power of enterprise AI with industrial IoT data to give blue collar workers the right information, at the right time on the right device, said Gabe Batstone, contextere CEO. Working closely with Lockheed Martin engineers to refine and test our algorithms in the aerospace and defence environment, will enable us to transform the future of work anywhere warm hands touch cold steel.

This strategic investment exemplifies how a Global Multinational aerospace company can collaborate with an emerging, innovative Canadian startup to solve critical business challenges, while delivering industrial benefits to the Canadian economy.

For Lockheed Martin, accelerating technology development and promoting a culture of innovation in Canada is critical to the success our business, said Charles Bouchard, chief executive of Lockheed Martin Canada. It is through our work with small, agile and responsive companies like contextere that we are able to advance innovative thinking and the development of new technologies.

The project with contextere speaks directly to the need to drive affordability and best value for customers at every level of the business. By tracking work-related maintenance performance and identifying systemic human error in procedures and processes, the contextere solution will help create a safer, more fulfilling and more productive workplace.

ABOUT CONTEXTERE

Headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario (at the Innovation Centre at Bayview Yards), contextere is an Industrial IoT software company focused on enabling the connected workforce. Contextere is transforming the future of work with an intelligent personal agent that delivers actionable intelligence via simple notifications to the last tactical mile. Its industrial software weaves together the power of AI and IoT data to give blue collar workers the right information, at the right time on the right device. With contextere, Fortune 1000 companies and their employees capture value through dramatic decreases in human error, equipment downtime and safety incidents. Learn more at: www.contextere.com

ABOUT LOCKHEED MARTIN

Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 97,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. For additional information, visit our website.

ABOUT LOCKHEED MARTIN CANADA

Lockheed Martin Canada, headquartered in Ottawa, is the Canadian-based arm of Lockheed Martin Corporation, a global security and aerospace company employing 97,000 people worldwide. Lockheed Martin Canada has been Canada's trusted defence partner for over 75 years specializing in the development, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. The company employs more than 900 employees at major facilities in Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, Calgary, and Victoria, working on a wide range of major programs spanning the aerospace, defence and civil sectors.

Media Contacts

For further information regarding contextere, please contact:

Leigha Cotton

Leigha@Nyrad.ca

613-797-4044

For further information regarding Lockheed Martin, please contact:

Cindy Tessier

Lockheed Martin Canada

cindy.tessier@lmco.com

613-762-5753
Re: A couple questions as I plan out my application process [ #permalink

Thank you--that is very helpful! I'll definitely apply in 2019, then. And I also appreciate the offer for a free consult--if you'd prefer to answer the below question within that consultation, just let me know and we can set one up.





I have one additional question, and it's a tricky one. I am trying to figure out if I should apply to Columbia Early Decision, and although I have a couple years to decide, I would greatly appreciate your input on this as well. I see a number of pros and cons to going ED:



1. I believe there's a good chance that applying ED will boost my chances of admission to Columbia. If I have a weak interview or some other part of my application (such as work experience) is lacking from the adcoms' perspective, the ED choice could make up for that. The results for recent years indicate that your chances of admission at Columbia may be much higher in the early acceptance round, though the applicant pools may also be different.



2. I also think that Columbia could be more likely to give me some scholarship $$$ if I go ED, although I know there's a lot of debate about this.



3. Really not as important, but it would be nice to be done with MBA applications if I find out early that I got admitted there; it would make the rest of the year much less stressful!



4. Submitting the application early (in June or July 2019, for example) would give me more time to work on my other applications. Columbia would be a Round 0.5 of sorts. I know I could also apply early for ED too and just get it out of the way, even if I won't hear back for a while.



5. Columbia' Loan Assistance Program would potentially allow me to pay back much less debt in the long run. If I'm $100,000 in debt when I graduate, but work for a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (which is my plan anyway) and get approved for the program, Columbia could pay off $10,000 in loan money a year for 10 years, which would ultimately be a lot more valuable than a $20,000 scholarship. I know that some other programs offer this as well, and many of them are also on my list of prospective schools.



6. Columbia is, in my mind, tied for "first choice" along with Harvard, UPenn, and Yale. I would be overjoyed to attend any of those schools. So I can say with a straight face that Columbia is "a" first choice school for me.





The disadvantages:



1. If I'm admitted, I won't be able to compare the scholarship/aid packages that any other schools offer me. If I get a substantial scholarship (or a full ride--I can dream, right?) to another school on my list, I won't be able to accept it.



Along with Yale, Columbia, Harvard, and UPenn (my top four choices), I'm also planning to apply to Duke and Cornell in Round 1. If I don't get in to any of those schools, I would plan to apply to Michigan, UNC, Virginia, and Georgetown in Round 2. (All of these are subject to change, of course!) So if one of those schools gives me a much better deal than Columbia, it doesn't matter, and I probably wouldn't ever know anyway.



2. Columbia's Loan Assistance Program looks great, and I think I'll have a good shot at benefiting from it, but I know that it's not an entitlement--so I might not receive money from it after all, or potentially a lot less than I'd expect. If I'm making less than $80,000 (which is quite possible given that I'm most drawn to the social services sector), I could be in rough shape financially for a decade. (This will be a potential problem regardless of what round I apply in, of course.)





What are your thoughts? I know that I have a good shot at getting into Columbia during regular decision as well, but I don't want to take anything for granted, and it seems that going ED could boost my chances. Oh, and declining the ED admissions offer is not an option for me.
Re: Low Undergrad GPA Success Stories [ #permalink

6 Kudos 2 Bookmarks

I'm going to add my own story to the mix...



I got a 2.8 GPA undergrad. I had a rough freshman year (I failed a high level calculus class 2nd semester) as I never learned a good work ethic. I was temporarily suspended from school (a good state school), but then came back and got on dean's list my first semester back. Unfortunately, I got lazy by the end and got just under a 3.0 my last semester in college.



My effort at work is completely different from that of my undergraduate career. I've worked for 4 years in Corp Finance at a media company and have been given an incredible amount of responsibility. Also, luckily, I scored a 750 on my GMAT (even though it took 3 times of taking it). I ended up applying to HBS (not sure why), Tuck, Darden, Fuqua, and McCombs. I was accepted at McCombs (with a bunch of money) and was waitlisted at Tuck, Darden, and Fuqua. I was recently accepted off the waitlist at Darden where I'll be matriculating.



I can offer the following advice for people with a low GPA. First, don't assume that it counts you out. I know I was waitlisted at the above schools due to my GPA (Tuck told me this), but if there's something else you can offer the school, they'll be willing to admit you. For me, I think it was my work experience, as it was very unique and my recommendations were very strong. Also, I genuinely enjoy interviewing, so I think that helped.



Also, try to find any sort of connections you have and ask for advice and ask if they can write a letter of support, it never hurts. If you're on the waitlist, don't be annoying, but try to keep a constant dialogue with the schools and give them a reason to admit you. Make it seem that it's their loss if they don't admit you. Lastly, don't give up. Getting in to school was really really hard (especially due to my GPA), but it's all worth it as I really loved Darden when I visited.



That's my story. Feel free to PM me if you have any other questions.



Matt
hogann wrote:

Originally developed by ancient Hawaiians, surfing appeals to people due to the sports unusual confluence of adrenaline, skill, and high paced maneuvering, an unpredictable backdrop that is, by turns, graceful and serene, violent and formidable, and the camaraderie that often develops among people in their common quest to conquer nature.



A. surfing appeals to people due to the sports unusual confluence of adrenaline, skill, and high paced maneuvering, an unpredictable backdrop that is, by turns, graceful and serene, violent and formidable, and the camaraderie that often develops

B. surfings appeal is its unusual confluence of adrenaline, skill, and high paced maneuvering, an unpredictable backdrop that is, by turns, graceful and serene, violent and formidable, and the camaraderie that often develops

C. surfings appeal to people is due to the sports unusual confluence of adrenaline, skill, and high paced maneuvering, an unpredictable backdrop that is, by turns, graceful and serene, violent and formidable, and developing camaraderie

D. surfing appeals to people due to the sports unusual confluence of adrenaline, skill, and high paced maneuvering, a backdrop that is unpredictable and that is, by turns, gracefully and serenely violent and formidable, and the camaraderie that often develops

E. surfing appeals to people due to their unusual confluence of adrenaline, skill, and high paced maneuvering, an unpredictable backdrop that is, by turns, graceful and serene, violent and formidable, and the camaraderie that often develops

A IMO.Reasoning:1. B and C are out because after "," we need a noun. surfing's appeal was not originally developed by ancient Hawaiians---- Left with A, D and E.2. D is out because "a backdrop that is unpredictable" is wordy in D which is replaced by "unpredictable backdrop" in A and E ---- Left with A and E.3. E is out because "their" is referring to people which is not correct. It has to be sport's.So left with A. What is the OA?
On Tuesday, July 18, Legit.ng earlier reported that 6 years old boy identified as Ali Ahmadu got his back broken 3 years ago when a Boko Haram bike man climbed his back during the kidnap of the Chibok girls in Borno.

It was further reported that Ali finally got a non-governmental organisation (NGO) to help him fix his spinal cord. Legit.ng got in touch with the NGO representative who revealed that the boy would travel to Dubai soon for a corrective surgery but needs $50,000 (N19m).

One of the directors of the NGO Nuhu Fulani Kwajafa disclosed how they got in touch with Ali saying: We have representatives of the Global Initiative for Peace, Love and Care (GIPLC) at Internally Displaced Peoples (IDP) camp in Abuja, who gave us feedback about his case and from there we visited his family and decided to help since it is one of the major reasons this NGO was formed.

Ali Ahmadu with representatives of the GIPLC organization

READ ALSO: Nigerian man Ali Muazu claims to be 150-year-old marries 8 wives, has 11 children (photos, video)

Kwajafa further said that the Chibok chronicles are incomplete without Ali Ahmadu heartbreaking story.

He said: He was 3 years old then. Boko Haram terrorist ran him over (on his back/spine) with a motorcycle. His mum saved him but lost a pregnancy in the process. Since then, he has been denied access to education, among other things and fundamentally, he has not been able to walk properly, or move without aid nor been examined by a medic, even at primary health care level. For the first time since this unfortunate incident, GIPLC has facilitated his movement from point A to B in the quest for proper medical attention. He has since been examined at the university of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital (UMTH), from where we have received diagnostic & scan reports which we have promptly forwarded to a specialist hospital in the United Arab Emirate (UAE). It was also discovered there that he sustained injuries on his spine but he can move his legs and can't walk. He needs $50,000 (N19m) for his 3 months stay in the country and his family is poor.

Ali Ahmadu with his parents in Chibok, Borno state

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On how the funds would be raised for Alis surgery, Kwajafa disclosed that the organisation got in touch with Senator Dino Melaye who has promised to show support and speak to other senators to help the little boy. Also on Friday, July 21, a press conference would be held in Abuja where Melaye would come to show his support.

6-year-old Ali is currently at the National Hospital in Abuja where he is receiving treatment before travelling to Dubai for his surgery.

6-year-old Ali Ahmadu

However, we also gathered that his mother who was about 4-5 months pregnant at the time the Chibok girls were abducted lost the baby in the process of trying to safe her dear son.

Watch Legit.ng video below:

Source: Legit.ng
Darjeeling, Jul 18 (IBNS): One activist of Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) was allegedly shot dead after the state police and the CRPF allegedly fired bullets aiming at Gorkhaland supporters during a clash between GJM and state's ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) supportersin Darjeeling's Mirik area on Monday late evening, reports said.

GJM president Bimal Gurung claimed that his party activist Ashish Tamang was killed on Monday night after police's bullet was lodged in his chest.

"Ashish Tamang, a 36-year-old supporter of GJM from Mirik's Magargunj area, sacrificed his life for Gorkhaland. His sacrifice will not go in vain," Bimal Gurung told IBNS. "My heart felt condolences to his bereaved family. May his soul rest in peace."

Earlier on Monday evening, a skirmish broke out between GJM and TMC supporters in Mirik and when police tried to intervene, they were allegedly attacked.

Later a heavy police force and CRPF rushed to the spot and police restored to lathicharge and lobbed tear gas shells to bring the situation under control.

"Protesters set a local police booth and few of our vehicles on fire and attacked our personnel. Besides few agitators, at least two policemen were injured in the clash," a local police official told IBNS.

"Police did not fire a single round of bullet yesterday to disperse protesters. We lathicharged, lobbed tear gas shells and fired few rounds of rubber bullets to restore the situation," the official added.

GJM leaders said that they will hold a protest rally on Tuesday with the body of killed activist, Ashish Tamang, in Mirik.

A huge security force have been deployed to the area to control law and order and to avoid further untoward incident.

Meanwhile, TMC claimed that two of its activists- Anand Rai and Navraj Tamang- were seriously injured during the clash.

Darjeeling has been witnessing strikes and violence in recent times.

The shutdown has been called by the GJM.The shutdown is going on for more than a month.


For many English learners, speaking is the most difficult part of the language to master. To improve your speaking skills, you need to be able to practice with other English learners or English speakers.

One way to do this is by joining  or starting  an English club. In todays Education Tips, we discuss how English clubs can be helpful to your language-learning process.

This is part one of a two-part series on English clubs. In this episode, we offer advice for how to start and organize an English club. In next weeks episode, we will suggest some fun and educational activities for your club.

English clubs for language learning

There are many reasons why English clubs can help learners of all ages and levels improve their English. The most important reason is that they offer learners a chance to practice English by actually speaking it.

There are other advantages, too. English clubs are less formal than a classroom setting. Many learners find them more fun than usual English classes. They also let learners practice English in more real-life situations. This can increase a learners desire to practice and learn on their own.

Bonnie Norton and Ernst Von Glasersfeld are learning theory experts. They say that using a language in authentic situations is very important for learners. So is being motivated to practice and improve, they say.

Now that you understand some of the benefits of an English club, lets discus how you can create your own club.

Starting an English club

Step1: Finding club members:

The first step in starting an English club is to find club members. There are different ways to do this.

If you are a teacher creating the club for your students, then the easiest way is to put up signs in classrooms advertising the clubs first meeting. You can also pass around a sign-up sheet in classes.

If you are trying to start a club at your place of work, you can advertise your club by sending an email around to coworkers. You can also put up signs about the club around the workplace.

If your club is open for anyone to join, you can use the internet to find members. Websites such as Meetup or Facebook are great places to announce club meetings and communicate with members.

Step 2  Find a meeting location:

Next, you must find a place for your club to meet. This step is very important. The location of your club will affect how many people come to your meetings. It is important to consider several things when choosing a location.

First, how easy is it for members to find and get to the location? It is a good idea to find a central location that is easy to get to. Otherwise, members may slowly stop coming. Second, it is important to find a location that is safe. You want your members to feel comfortable as they are arriving and leaving.

If you are a teacher, the easiest location is probably in a classroom or another room in the school building. English clubs often meet after school or work hours. This can make it easier to find an available room.

If you are creating an English club outside of a class or work setting, consider holding meetings at a cafe, restaurant or bar. These places often have enough space for large groups. Club members coming straight from school or work will also have a chance to eat or drink something.

Wherever you meet, make sure to speak with the owners of the business or building and get their permission.

 Step 3  Holding your first meeting

The third step is to hold your first meeting. The first meeting is important for every English club. It is a good idea to use the first meeting as a chance to talk with members about logistics. This includes how often and where the club will meet, whether or not there will be membership fees, and how the club leadership will work.

Club leadership

Club leadership is one of the most important parts of starting an English club. If you have a good system of leadership, your club has a better chance at lasting.

If your club is small enough, or more informal, sometimes all you need is one person to lead the club. The main responsibility of the one leader is to organize and lead the meetings. The leader also must communicate information to club members.

However, if your club is large, it is a good idea to have a group of people that can help run the club.

This kind of leadership is useful for many reasons. It divides the amount of work it takes to run a club among several people. It also helps club members practice speaking English with real-life tasks. And, if the members of your club are mostly students, it can help them develop teamwork and leadership skills.

It is also important to have rules for the leadership system. For example, how long will club leaders hold their positions? How will they transfer power to someone else if they must quit the club? You should consider holding elections to choose new leaders.

Whatever leadership system you choose, the goal of an English club remains the same: to keep your club members motivated to continue participating. So, club leaders should not try to do everything themselves.

In fact, it is a good idea to give tasks to many different club members. This makes the members feel important. They are more likely to remain committed to the club. And it can increase their desire to learn.

Final thoughts

English clubs can take many forms and serve many purposes. Following these steps will help any club have a successful start.

Join us next week as we talk about fun and creative activities to do with your newly formed English club.

I'm Jill Robbins.

And Im Phil Dierking.

Phil Dierking wrote this story for VOA Learning English. Ashley Thompson was the editor.

Hello readers! For part two in this series on English clubs, we would love to hear about your experiences and ideas for club activities. We are looking for people who are either in an English club or have had experience with one, or have started an English club. If you fit this description and would like to answer a few questions about your experience for our article, please let us know in the comments section below, or on our Facebook page, and we will get in touch with you. Thanks!

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Words in This Story

advantage - n. something (such as a good position or condition) that helps to make someone or something better or more likely to succeed than others

authentic - adj. real or genuine

benefit - n. a good or helpful result or effect

club - adj. a group of people who meet to participate in an activity

committed - adj. willing to give your time, energy, etc., to something 

logistics - n. the things that must be done to plan and organize a complicated activity or event that involves many people

motivation - n. the act or process of giving someone a reason for doing something

task - n. a piece of work that has been given to someone 
Many Native American artists are quitting their trade because they cannot compete with the low prices of fake artwork.

William Woody is the top law enforcement official at the Fish and Wildlife Service. He said that possibly as much as 80 percent of Native American art is actually not made by Native Americans. Instead it is made in countries like the Philippines.

Woody said it is difficult to confirm how much art is fake, but Native Americans artists are concerned. They have called on the United States government to take action against people who produce fake artwork.

U.S. Senators from New Mexico, Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, heard evidence from Native American artists earlier on July 7. Udall is the vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.

Harvey Pratt is a Southern Cheyenne artist. He said, When Indian artists are undercut by the sale of fake Indian art, the integrity of authentic Indian art and artists suffers. We are being robbed economically, culturally, and spiritually.

Native American art is popular worldwide. It drives many tribal economies.

The annual Santa Fe Indian Market hosts over 1,000 Native American artists from tribes across the United States. The market and festival lasts about a week.

Dallin Maybee is the chief operating officer of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA). He is both Northern Arapaho and Seneca. He said the market brings about $80 million to New Mexico.

He said, The Native American art industry generates millions of dollars a year throughout North America.

The First Peoples Fund helps support Native American artists. They estimate that about one third of all Native Americans are involved in traditional arts. Many live in poorer areas where there are not many people. They often depend on art sales.

But with all these knock-offs that have flooded the market, Indians cant sell their product, artist Harvey Pratt told VOA. So what ends up happening is that artists just quit making art, because they can no longer make a living doing it. And what this means is that they lose touch with their traditions.

Udall said fake Native American art is a serious problem that has gone on for many years.

He said Congress needs to see if the Indian Arts and Crafts Act can be strengthened.

The act was passed in 1935 and amended twice. It bans the display or sale of art that falsely claims to be Native American.

In early July, a case about fake Native American art was heard in New Mexico. Four people were accused of selling fake Native American jewelry. The jewelry was actually made in the Philippines. If they are convicted, the suspects could face a fine of $250,000, up to five years in prison or both.

Cases involving fake Native American art are often not brought to trial. Udall said that there are only two enforcement officers that investigate fake Native American art.

Udall said, We must take action to stop this assault on artists' ability to carry on deeply significant traditions that have helped hold families and communities together for generations.

U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement officials are trained to keep stolen cultural artifacts and fake electronics from entering the country. However, Pratt said, there are no programs to stop fake Native American art at the border. He added that there are few people who know enough about Native American art to identify fake artwork.

Pratt said, Youve got to have an investigative body, somebody that has expertise to run this stuff down at the border.

Im Olivia Liu.

And Im Mario Ritter.

Cecily Hilleary reported this story for VOA News. Olivia Liu adapted the story for VOA Learning English. Mario Ritter was the editor.

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Words in This Story

fake adj. false, not real

undercut v. to sell something at a lower cost than another person or business

integrity n. the quality of being real, true or honest

authentic adj. real

generate v. to make

knock-offs n. fake products

assault n. an attack or the threat of an attack

artifacts n. things made by people in the past

expertise n. special knowledge of a certain field of study or a special skill

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will make an additional 15,000 H-2B visas available for American companies to hire low-wage foreign workers.

In a written statement on Monday, DHS Secretary John Kelly called the move a "one-time increase.

President Donald Trump has supported a policy called "Hire American. He wants U.S. companies to hire American workers instead of foreign ones. He has also repeatedly called to limit immigration.

But a DHS spokesperson said without the extra foreign workers, some U.S. businesses could suffer "irreparable harm."

In order to hire foreign workers through the visa program, businesses must show there are not enough U.S. workers "able, willing, qualified, and available" for the jobs.

The H-2B visa

The H-2B visa is a temporary work visa for foreign workers to work in the United States at non-agriculture jobs. The U.S. limits these visas to 66,000 per year. That limit has already been reached for 2017.

According to the State Department, there were 85,000 H-2B visas issued in 2015. This was due to some returning workers being able to receive exemptions from the limit.

Congress, however, did not renew the returnees exemptions when they expired last fall.

Some U.S. industries, like the tourism industry, depend heavily on seasonal workers. They say they have struggled to hire enough people since the H-2B visa exemptions expired.

To address this problem, Congress recently permitted the Department of Homeland Security to go over the 66,000-visa limit.

The new rules will be published in the General Register later this week. Businesses will then be able to petition for additional visas.

President Donald Trumps business has used the H-2B visa program to staff his private club Mar-a-Lago in Florida. Trump has also used the club to host visiting heads of state several times.

Im Jonathan Evans.

Victoria Macchi reported this story for VOANews.com. Phil Dierking adapted her report for Learning English. Hai Do was the editor.

Do businesses depend on foreign workers in your country? We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

exemption - n. freedom from being required to do something that others are required to do

fiscal - adj. of or relating to money and especially to the money a government, business, or organization earns, spends, and owes

irreparable - adj. too bad to be corrected or repaired

petition - n. a written document that people sign to show that they want a person or organization to do or change something

qualify - v. to give (someone) the necessary skill or knowledge to do a particular job or activity
Samsungs Bixby voice assistant launched alongside the companys Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ smartphones in South Korea. But its taken a bit longer for Samsung to get Bixby to work properly for customers in the United States.

Last month the company launched a Bixby Early Access program for US English speakers. And now Bixby is finally available for anyone using a Galaxy S8 series phone in the US.

Bixby isnt the only voice assistant on Samsungs phones: you also get Google Assistant software which you can use to get answers to questions, conduct search results, set reminders, and more. But Bixby extends those capabilities by letting you control your phones core functions with your voice.

For example you can snap a photo, toggle the flashlight, or search for pictures. Samsungs built-in apps also support Bixby voice controls, and the company is hoping developers will bring Bixby support to third-party apps as well, allowing you to fully control your phone with just your voice (although I think thats going to be a challenge for some games and other applications that rely on touch input for more than just scrolling or selecting).

Anyway, at the very least this means that the dedicated Bixby button on the side of Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ phones has a purpose now if youre a native US English or Korean speaker.
Researchers at UT Health San Antonio, led by Rong Li, Ph.D., found a new, previously unrecognized function of the BRCA1 gene. When faulty, BRCA1 is associated with increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Credit: UT Health San Antonio

The human body holds many mysteries, and function of the BRCA1 gene is among them. Women who inherit a faulty copy of BRCA1 have up to a 65 percent chance to develop breast cancer by age 70. They also have up to a 39 percent chance to develop ovarian cancer.

Rong Li, Ph.D., and colleagues at The University of Texas Health Science Center, now called UT Health San Antonio, are building on 15 years of BRCA1 studies. Their latest discovery, reported June 26 in Nature Communications, is of a new, previously unrecognized function of BRCA1.

Explaining tissue specificity

"BRCA1 plays a very important role in DNA repair in almost any cell type you choose to study," said Dr. Li, professor of molecular medicine at UT Health San Antonio and a holder/manager of the Tom C. and Patricia H. Frost Endowment to Advance Cancer Research and Education. "This is a function of BRCA1 that presumably is important for every cell type in the body. But we also know there is a tissue-specific cancer predisposition associated with BRCA1. If a woman loses BRCA1 function, breast and ovary are the two places that preferentially develop tumors. Is there something else BRCA1 does that could contribute to this tissue specificity?"

The answer, fleshed out in this latest Nature Communications paper, is yes.

Study of human tissues yields insights

Dr. Li and his team obtained human breast tissue specimens from breast oncologists including those led by Ismail Jatoi, M.D., Ph.D., FACS, and Richard Elledge, M.D., at the UT Health Cancer Center of UT Health San Antonio, as well as Oscar Ochoa, M.D., FACS, at PRMA Plastic Surgery. The team compared tissues of BRCA1 mutation carriers versus non-carriers and found interesting differences:

Gene expression-related stress is higher in BRCA1 mutation carriers;

This stress is only higher in luminal epithelial cells, where BRCA1-related breast tumors originate;

Within the luminal epithelial cells, the stress is higher in estrogen-responsive genes.

Gene expression-related stress is a result of cells expressing (or switching on) genes to carry out functions. This process sometimes damages the genetic blueprint, DNA, resulting in abnormal structures that scientists label as stress.

"The breasts and ovaries are two major estrogen-responsive sites in a woman's body," Dr. Li said. "This zooming in on the stress location is the connection we sought to make between BRCA1 dysfunction and breast and ovarian cancer predisposition. This is a very attractive model to further test, and points to an interesting direction for drug development."

The study reported in Nature Communications focused on breast tissue. Similar studies of ovarian tissue will be conducted.

More information: Xiaowen Zhang et al, Attenuation of RNA polymerase II pausing mitigates BRCA1-associated R-loop accumulation and tumorigenesis, Nature Communications (2017). Journal information: Nature Communications Xiaowen Zhang et al, Attenuation of RNA polymerase II pausing mitigates BRCA1-associated R-loop accumulation and tumorigenesis,(2017). DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15908
The Joint Unit of Functional Neuroanatomy of the universities of Valencia and Jaume I de Castello has described for the first time the complete map of the neural connections of the anterior cortical nucleus of the amygdala, a key brain region for the emotional processing of olfactory stimuli of mice. The research has been published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology.

Researchers Bernardita Cadiz, Maria Abellan, Cecilia Pardo, Ferran Martinez and Enrique Lanuza have characterized the nervous circuit of the anterior cortical nucleus of the amygdala, not well understood until now. The work describes the relationship between this nucleus and the other structures from which it receives information, as well as the areas of the brain to which it sends information.

Enrique Lanuza, researcher at the Department of Cell Biology, Functional Biology and Physical Anthropology at the University of Valencia, says that olfactory information has an intrinsic emotional value. "This work shows that this information reaches directly into the anterior cortical nucleus of the amygdala, which is directly interconnected with areas that process pheromonal information, which plays a key role in rodents' sexual behaviour, and also with nuclei related to defensive and aggressive behaviour," says the expert.

In addition, the member of the Joint Unit of Functional Neuroanatomy says that this olfactory nucleus of the amygdala is connected with regions shown to be involved in Pavlovian learning, that is, associating a neutral stimulus with a reward or a negative experience.

"Although experiments have been performed on mice, these areas of the brain are evolutionarily highly conserved, and it is therefore reasonable to expect an important similarity with the human brain," explains Lanuza. In addition, "smells are particularly evocative stimuli, and often very pleasant or unpleasant, so that we avoid being in places where it smells bad. Thus, to smell good is a good social letter of presentation," says the lecturer of the Faculty of Biological Sciences of the University of Valencia.

The experiment was carried out with 15 female Mus musculus. The team has performed intracerebral injection of tracers (inert molecules), detectable by the emission of fluorescent light or by their chemical characteristics. In this way, thanks to the tracing of these molecules, the research team has observed the connections of this key structure in the processing of the emotional value of odours.

More information: Bernardita Cadiz-Moretti et al. Afferent and efferent projections of the anterior cortical amygdaloid nucleus in the mouse, Journal of Comparative Neurology (2017). Bernardita Cadiz-Moretti et al. Afferent and efferent projections of the anterior cortical amygdaloid nucleus in the mouse,(2017). DOI: 10.1002/cne.24248
William D. Gaillard, M.D., division chief of Child Neurology and Epilepsy, Neurophysiology and Critical Care Neurology at Children's National Health System. Credit: Children's National Health System

The number of available anti-seizure medications has exploded in the past two decades, going from just a handful of medicines available in the 1990s to more than 20 now. Once the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves each new medicine based on trials in adults, it's available for clinicians to prescribe off-label to all age groups. However, says William D. Gaillard, M.D., division chief of Child Neurology and Epilepsy, Neurophysiology and Critical Care Neurology at Children's National Health System, trials that lead to FDA approval for adults do not provide any information about which medications are best for children.

"With so many medications and so little data," Dr. Gaillard says, "one might think doctors would choose a wider variety of medicines when they prescribe to children with epilepsy."

However, the results from a recent study by Dr. Gaillard and colleagues, published online in Pediatric Neurology on June 27, 2017, show otherwise. The study indicates that doctors in the United States appear to have reached an unexpected consensus about which medication to prescribe for their pediatric patients.

The study is part of a broader effort to collect data on the youngest epilepsy patientsthose younger than 3 years old, the age at which epilepsy most often becomes evident. As part of this endeavor, researchers from 17 U.S. pediatric epilepsy centers enrolled in the study 495 children younger than 36 months old who had been newly diagnosed with non-syndromic epilepsy (a condition not linked to any of the commonly recognized genetic epilepsy syndromes).

The researchers mined these patients' electronic medical records for information about their demographics, disease and treatments. About half of the study participants were younger than 1 year old when they were diagnosed with epilepsy. About half had disease marked by focal features, meaning that their epilepsy appeared to originate from a particular place in the brain. Nearly all were treated with a single medication, as opposed to a cocktail of multiple medicines.

Of those treated with a single medication, nearly all were treated with one of five medicines: Levetiracetam, oxcarbazepine, phenobarbital, topiramate and zonisamide. However, the data showed a clear prescribing preference. About 63 percent of the patients were prescribed levetiracetam as a first choice. By contrast, oxcarbazepine and phenobarbital, the next most frequently prescribed medicines, were taken by patients as a first choice by a mere 14 percent and 13 percent respectively.

Even more striking, of the children who were not prescribed levetiracetam initially but required a second medication due to inadequate efficacy or unacceptable side effects, 62 percent also received this medication. That made levetiracetam the first or second choice for about 74 percent of all the children in the study, despite the availability of more than 20 anti-seizure medications.

It's not clear why levetiracetam is such a frequent choice in the United States, says Dr. Gaillard. However, in its favor, the drug is available in a liquid formulation, causes no ill effects medically and can be started intravenously if necessary. Studies have shown that it appears to be effective in controlling seizures in about 40 percent of infants.

Yet, levetiracetam's market dominance appears to be a North American phenomenon, the study authors write. A recent international survey that Dr. Gaillard also participated in suggests that outside of this continent, carbazepine and oxcarbazepine were the most frequently prescribed medications to treat focal seizures.

What's really necessary, Dr. Gaillard says, is real data on efficacy for each of the medications commonly prescribed to pediatric epilepsy patientsa marked vacuum in research that prevents doctors from using evidence-based reasoning when making medication choices.

"This study identifies current practices, but whether those practices are correct is a separate question," he explains. "Just because a medication is used commonly doesn't mean it is the best medication we should be using."

To answer that question, he says, researchers will need to perform a head-to-head clinical trial comparing the top available epilepsy medications in children. This study sets the stage for such a trial by identifying which medications should be included.

"Uncontrolled pediatric epilepsy can have serious consequences, from potential problems in development to a higher risk of death," Dr. Gaillard says. "You want to use the optimal medicine to treat the disease."

More information: Renee A Shellhaas et al, Initial Treatment for Non-Syndromic Early-Life Epilepsy: an Unexpected Consensus, Pediatric Neurology (2017). Renee A Shellhaas et al, Initial Treatment for Non-Syndromic Early-Life Epilepsy: an Unexpected Consensus,(2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.pediatrneurol.2017.06.011
Credit: Newcastle University

UK Armed Forces personnel moving back into civilian life and having difficulties with alcohol could be helped by the use of online tools, a new study has revealed.

The research led by Newcastle University, published in the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, shows that web-based programmes may be an effective way to tackle excess alcohol consumption.

Findings by the experts have now been used to develop new documents funded by the Forces in Mind Trust to summarise the effectiveness of interventions to protect the wellbeing of those in the military.

Research has highlighted that two in three men in the UK Armed Forces are defined as drinking harmful amounts compared with just over one in three in the general population.

Online support

The study, led by Dr Sarah Wigham, Research Associate at Newcastle University's Institute of Neuroscience, reveals that online support worked especially when it involved personalised feedback.

It also found some effectiveness of electronic reminders prompting medical professionals to give advice.

Dr Wigham said: "This research could offer a lifeline to someone leaving the Armed Forces, or their family, as it shows that an online tool can help them cut back if they are concerned about their drinking.

"We know that if alcohol is used to help someone cope it may complicate the process of moving back to civilian life, for example, by exacerbating any mental health symptoms, or causing further issues such as difficulty sleeping or relationship problems.

"These quick internet tools were shown to be useful to people who may otherwise be reluctant to seek help as a way of reducing the amount of alcohol consumed."

An information sheet on the study's findings can be found at the Forces in Mind Trust website as the charity funded this research. Later this year, two further documents will be published summarising the overall findings and interventions for wellbeing.

Unique pressures and demands

Brief interventions in the study included an individual recording online the amount of alcohol they had consumed recently, receiving personalised information on what this translates to in equivalent units of alcohol, calories, financial cost and other indicators which may be motivators to cut down.

It also includes information on mental health, pros and cons of drinking, setting goals and coping strategies for situations in which an individual may be tempted to drink more than usual.

Air Vice-Marshal Ray Lock, Chief Executive of the Forces in Mind Trust, said: "Most members of the Armed Forces transition into civilian life successfully, however, evidence indicates that a small number may have unhealthy levels of alcohol consumption. It can be difficult for these individuals to identify how to access support for their drinking, or even whether they have a problem.

"One of the Forces in Mind Trust's research priorities is alcohol and substance misuse, including effective and appropriate interventions.

"We would welcome further research to identify the positive impact these brief interventions could have specifically on the Armed Forces community to promote healthier transitions into civilian life."

Newcastle University's study showed that brief interventions can promote awareness of the health effects, and social or occupational effects of harmful levels of drinking.

Dr Wigham said: ''The study findings and the new documents will be of benefit to policy makers and service deliverers by helping to inform decisions on which interventions to fund and develop.''

The online tools encourage people to drink in moderation rather than enforcing abstinence and can prompt them to think about the amount of alcohol they are consuming, increase awareness of any negative health and social effects, and may help them make different choices or change habits.

Interventions found to have an impact on moderating alcohol consumption included those delivered over the internet and using personalised feedback, and that had been developed specifically for Armed Forces personnel.

Coping with change

Data was collected from currently serving and former male members of the Armed Forces in the USA.

The study focused on military personnel moving back into civilian life as this can require simultaneous adjustments to job, housing, location, finances, relationships and family life. For some, these life changes coming together may increase their susceptibility to stress which in turn can lead to people drinking more than the healthy recommended levels of alcohol.

The researchers examined a number of online programmes including 'VetChange' and 'Drinker's Check-Up' and further information can be found on the Forces in Mind Trust website.

Dr Wigham said: "This study will benefit those moving back into civilian life by highlighting the effectiveness of some alcohol brief interventions including those delivered online. This will help service providers develop and trial similar systems for the UK."

The study is a collaboration with Teesside University and Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust.

Dorothy Newbury-Birch, Professor of Alcohol and Public Health Research at Teesside University, is co-author of the study.

She said: "This is a really important piece of work which highlights, not only the levels of risky drinking former soldiers have, but also addresses ways in which we can help them to reduce their risky drinking.

"The research clearly shows that those leaving the Armed Forces are consuming higher levels of alcohol and more work needs to be done to support them in their transition into civilian life."

More information: Sarah Wigham et al. A systematic review of the effectiveness of alcohol brief interventions for the UK military personnel moving back to civilian life, Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps (2017). Sarah Wigham et al. A systematic review of the effectiveness of alcohol brief interventions for the UK military personnel moving back to civilian life,(2017). DOI: 10.1136/jramc-2016-000712
(HealthDay) Breathing problems during sleep may signal an increased risk for Alzheimer's disease, a trio of studies suggests.

And, the researchers added, treating conditions like sleep apnea and hypopnea (shallow breathing) might lower the risk of dementia, or at least slow its progression.

"What's exciting about these three studies is that they are looking at biological changes in the brain that may underlie a relationship between sleep problems and Alzheimer's disease," said Keith Fargo. He is director of scientific programs and outreach at the Alzheimer's Association.

Fargo cautioned, however, that these studies only show an association between sleep problems and Alzheimer's disease, and not a cause-and-effect link.

But it's possible that the development of the amyloid plaque that is a tell-tale sign of Alzheimer's is causing sleep problems, he noted.

People with sleep apnea should get treatment, Fargo said, because "even if you don't have Alzheimer's disease and will never develop it, sleep apnea itself can cause cognitive [thinking] problems, which can be turned around with treatment."

The three studies, conducted by researchers from Wheaton College in Illinois and colleagues, used data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. The findings were to be presented Tuesday at the Alzheimer's Association conference in London. Research presented at meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

Sleep apnea affects three in 10 men and one in five women; it occurs when the upper airway closes partially or fully, causing pauses in breathing during sleep, the researchers explained.

In the study, sleep apnea was associated with increased development of beta-amyloid plaque in the brain.

According to the researchers, sleep problems accelerate the development of amyloid plaque in both people without dementia and in those already suffering from dementia.

Specifically, the investigators found that sleep apnea was tied to increased deposits of beta-amyloid in the brain and decreases in beta-amyloid in spinal fluid. They also saw increased levels of tau proteinanother marker of Alzheimer's.

In one study led by Amanda Shim, from Wheaton, the researchers looked at the accumulations of amyloid plaque in the brains of more than 500 people who did not have dementia.

The findings showed that people with sleep problems had more of this plaque than those who did not have sleep difficulties.

Moreover, Shim's team did not find a connection between plaque and those who carried the APOE-e4 gene, which is a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's.

This suggests that sleep apnea may be independently associated with brain plaques, Shim said.

In a second study, Megan Hogan and colleagues did a similar analysis, which looked at the effects of sleep problems in nearly 800 people who had early signs of memory and thinking problems, called mild cognitive impairment.

Hogan's team also found that levels of beta-amyloid were higher in those with sleep problems than among those without them.

Although mild cognitive impairment doesn't necessarily lead to dementia, people with these difficulties are at risk of developing Alzheimer's or other types of dementia, Hogan noted.

"These findings indicate that sleep apnea may be facilitating cognitive decline," she said.

"Screening for and prescribing treatment for sleep apnea should be a high priority, especially in individuals with mild cognitive impairment. By treating sleep apnea, people may be able to stay cognitively healthier for longer," Hogan suggested.

In a final report, Dr. Omonigho Michael Bubu, an instructor of applied health science at Wheaton College, studied both groups in the first and second studies plus more than 300 people with Alzheimer's disease.

Bubu found an association between sleep apnea and beta-amyloid levels in patients with mild cognitive impairment and in those with Alzheimer's.

In addition, plaque developed more quickly in patients with sleep problems whether they had normal mental function or mild cognitive impairment.

Beta-amyloid also decreased in spinal fluid and increased in the brain more quickly, and tau also increased among those with sleep problems whether they had normal mental function or mild cognitive impairment, Bubu added.

Sleep problems, which cause the brain not to get enough oxygen, might be the reason for the increased development of plaque, he said.

"Since effective treatment measures exist for sleep disturbances, and sleep apnea especially, one way to potentially prevent Alzheimer's disease and/or its progression will be to effectively treat sleep apnea," Bubu said.

More information: Megan Hogan, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill.; Omonigho Michael Bubu, M.D., M.P.H., instructor, applied health science, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill.; Keith Fargo, Ph.D., director, scientific programs and outreach, Alzheimer's Association; July 18, 2017, presentations, Alzheimer's Association meeting, London, U.K. Megan Hogan, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill.; Omonigho Michael Bubu, M.D., M.P.H., instructor, applied health science, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill.; Keith Fargo, Ph.D., director, scientific programs and outreach, Alzheimer's Association; July 18, 2017, presentations, Alzheimer's Association meeting, London, U.K. For more about Alzheimer's disease, visit the Alzheimer's Association.

Copyright  2017 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Credit: University of Michigan

In the 1960s, the Beatles sang about wondering whether their true love would still love them as they grew olderafter they've lost their hair and are no more adventurous than wanting to knit a sweater.

A group of four studies led by University of Michigan researchers has found that however the hero of the Beatles song turns out, his healthand his wife's healthmay be dictated by their perceptions of their own aging.

"Beliefs about one's own aging are shared within couples, and these beliefs are predictive of future health above and beyond individual beliefs," said Shannon Mejia, a postdoctoral fellow at U-M's Institute for Social Research. "Husbands' and wives' individual experiences of physical activity and disease burden are important for their current shared beliefs and future functional health."

That is, couples who tend to view their aging negatively tend to become less healthy and less mobile than couples who view their aging positively. In addition, husbands' disease burden shape their attitudes toward both their own aging and their wives' aging. Mejia and colleagues surmise that the husbands' limitations stemming from disease negatively affect the wives' health because of the increased burden of caregiving.

Jennifer Sun, an M.D./Ph.D. candidate at the U-M Medical School who conducted the research as a psychology doctoral candidate, found that a person's self-perception of aging affects whether he or she accesses health care in a timely fashion. She found that the more negatively a person viewed his or her aging, the more likely he or she was to delay seeking health care and the more barriers he or she saw for seeking care.

This association between negative self-perceptions of aging and health care delay persisted even after Sun controlled for problems that can delay health care, such as low socioeconomic status, lack of health insurance and multiple chronic health conditions.

"While many studies have focused on financial and structural barriers to care, it is also important to consider how psychosocial, emotional and cognitive factors are affecting the decisions of older adults to delay medical care," Sun said.

A third study authored by U-M doctoral candidate Hannah Giasson found that people who experience age discrimination feel less positive about their own aging.

A fourth study found that as people aged, their explicit bias toward older peopleor how they would talk out loud about how they felt toward fellow older adultsimproved as they aged. But their implicit biashow they felt internally about fellow older adultsbecame more negative as they aged. Giasson and William Chopik, a Michigan State University researcher, led this study.

The papers are published today in a special supplement to the August issue of The Gerontologist.

"We're interested in the way people interpret their own lives," said Jacqui Smith, the principal investigator of a project on well-being in midlife and old age and second author on some of the published papers.

"We know that the images in the world and age stereotypes play a role in how people perceive their own aging. But subtle experiences of discrimination in interactions with strangers and sometimes with your own kids or partnerthat is feedback that people take to heart and either rebel against it or begin to believe it."

The AARP supported the publishing of the supplement ahead of the annual meeting of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics.

"Wherever these negative perceptions come from, the damage can be profoundfor individuals, communities and larger populations," said AARP CEO Jo Ann Jenkins. "We need to change the conversation about age and aging in this country. It's not about being 'polite.' It's a necessity."
The FTTH Council Africa recently stated that criminals are increasingly targeting fibre installers in South Africa.

Contractors are being robbed at gunpoint, hijacked, and taken hostage, it said.

A primary reason for this is that there is a big market for second-hand fibre equipment, Council CEO Juanita Clark told MyBroadband.

Feedback from the industry suggests there are about 400 teams around the country constantly deploying fibre, and each team consists of 10-15 people.

From the backlog on order books, though, there is a need for 1,000 teams.

Theres this massive void and this market needs to be filled, said Clark.

This opens the market to small startups which are desperate to get their hands on affordable fibre splicing and testing equipment  and which might not look too closely at where the equipment comes from.

Most-targeted areas

In 2016, Western Cape Premier Helen Zille said fibre contractors refused to work in Nyanga and Khayelitsha after repeatedly being robbed at gunpoint and having their equipment stolen.

While Nyanga and Khayelitsha are known as crime hotspots, fibre installers are being targeted in safer areas, too, said Niki Lankesar  sales director for Coral-i Solutions.

Installers have been robbed in Silverton in Pretoria, and Vumatel contractors have been hit while installing fibre in Johannesburg.

Despite the danger, contractors dont leave an area when they are hit by crime. Once a mandate has been made to roll out in an area, theres no going back, said Lankesar.

The infrastructure provider has made commitments to operators, which made commitments to residents and secured fibre pre-orders.

It just adds to the cost. They look at alternative means to get the work done, they wont do work overnight. It takes longer.

Crime costs broadband users

Chris Nel from Lambda Test Equipment said when work needs to be done on high-priority links, you have to do it between midnight and 04:00.

To ensure this happens safely, operators are dispatching security guards with teams, while guards have been placed at certain key connectivity areas targeted by criminals.

This all causes costs to go up, which means prices cant come down as they should.

Nel said equipment that gets stolen the most are splicers, optical time-domain reflectometers, and optical loss test sets.

This is expensive kit, with fibre splicers going for around R80,000 each.

All the devices have serial numbers printed on them and embedded in the hardware, however, making it easier to track stolen items.

The test equipment must also be calibrated regularly, and the companies which service devices are able to pick up if a piece of equipment was stolen if they have the relevant data.

It is for this reason the FTTH Council Africa is launching an equipment monitoring database, which will allow operators and contractors to check whether devices were reported stolen before buying them.

Nel said they are working on technology to blacklist devices in the same way as mobile operators block stolen phones from working.

Success in operators hands

The entire success of this is in the operators hands, said Clark.

Operators need to ask their contractors to submit serial numbers so they can track whether their equipment has been reported stolen.

Calibrators who service a stolen device will also track it back to the last legitimate owner and inform them it has been found.

To address thieves trying to fence their goods elsewhere on the continent, Clark said they plan to roll out the initiative across Africa.

She said their challenge now is to inform the thieves that it will no longer be profitable to steal from fibre installers.

We dont need the good guys to read this, we want the bad guys to, she said.

Now read: Fibre installers being robbed at gunpoint and hijacked
YEREVAN.  The Armenian community in France plans to launch active work targeted at international recognition of Nagono-Karabakh, co-chairman of the Coordinating Council of Armenian Organizations of France Murad Papazian said.

The French city of Alfortville signed an agreement with Berdzor [formerly Lachin located in Karabakh - ed.] This means that the French city recognized Berdzor as an Armenian city, and this is very important. It is necessary to make sure that there are as many examples as possible, he said.

Papazian noted, he has very serious ties both in the political and diplomatic and governing structures of France, and Turkey as well as Azerbaijan cannot mislead the French society.

The French are well aware of what is happening in Turkey, and what the Aliyev regime is like. Aliev's regime, by the way, is not popular in France. Everyone understands perfectly well there can be no long-term ties with Turkey and Azerbaijan, representative of the Armenian community added.

Papazian said that the policy pursued by Aliyev and Erdogan play into the hands of the Armenian side.

The French people know that Azerbaijan is not interested in peaceful resolution of the Karabakh conflict, and official Baku is the party that wants to find solution by using force, he added.
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Permanent representative of Russia to OSCE Alexander Lukashevich has informed about the possibility of a meeting between Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev, RIA Novosti reports.

Recently a meeting was held in Brussels with the participation of the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia. There is certain possibility that the presidents may also meet, Lukashevich stated at a press-conference.

He also informed about the intention of the OSCE Minsk Group to intensify their efforts.

Meeting between the foreign ministers of the two states is being prepared in New York, after which certain preparatory measures will be taken for raising the level of work with the sides in terms of preparing a new high-level meeting, he stated.

The Russian permanent representative also noted that the most important thing is to retain the dynamics of the dialogue and not allow the sides to go into resistance, which threatens to disturb the balance of forces in the region.
Armenian Ambassador to Iran Artashes Tumanyan paid a visit to Mazandaran province of Iran on July 15-16.

There he met with Governor Falah Rabi Jaladura, Deputy Governor Hasan Kheirianpuri and a number of other officials.

At the meetings, reference was made to a number of issues on the Armenian-Iranian relations, the Press, Information and Public Relations Department of the Armenian MFA informed Armenian News  NEWS.am.

The Armenian Ambassador presented the peculiarities of the Armenian economy, the business environment of the country, as well as the opportunities of implementing joint programs between the Armenian and Iranian economic operators.

In the Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture of Mazandaran, Ambassador Tumanyan met with the representatives of the business circles of the province. Iranian entrepreneurs were provided with comprehensive information on the business environment and free trade zones of Armenia, the investment policy of the country and ongoing projects, development of tax and bank, transport, energy and other infrastructure system, as well as the branches of economy declared as prioritized by the state (IT and telecommunication, renewable energy, agriculture, mining, tourism, etc.).

Ambassador Tumanyan also visited a number of enterprises of Mazandaran.

During his visit Artashes Tumanyan also has a meeting with the representatives of the Armenian community of the central Sari city of the province, during which he got familiarized with the issues of the community.

Upon the request of the meeting participants, Tumanyan referred to the Armenian-Iranian relations and the prospects for their development.
All eyes are on the tech sector as the five members of the big cap tech company group known as FAANG all announce earnings between now and August 1.

The tech sector dipped in early July with the S&P 500 Information Technology Index hitting a low on July 3 as investors worried that the tech stocks had risen too much year-to-date. But the tech sector has recovered since then as jitters have worn off.

"The tech sector is very attractive and very dangerous," chief U.S. equity strategist for Wells Fargo Funds John Manley told TheStreet.

While valuations are high right now and causing some concern, the fundamentals of the companies are what really matter, he said. The important takeaway from tech right now is that the fundamentals at many companies are surprisingly good, he said. While valuations aren't as important, they're still worth paying attention to because they can lead to volatility in the markets, he added.

Valuations are a starting point but it's better to look at the fundamentals, Manley explained. "You can trade around valuations and view corrections as a buying opportunity," he said.

Tech investors are particularly focused on Amazon (AMZN) - Get Free Report right now with the e-commerce giant going after the grocery industry with its recent $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods (WFM) , as well as the meal kit delivery service, which has weighed on shares of Blue Apron (APRN) - Get Free Report , which recently went public. Investors are wondering which industry will get "Amazoned" next or which company it will scoop up next.

Competing with Amazon is getting harder and harder, but time may slow it down, Manley noted. "Nothing can grow faster than the market itself indefinitely," he said. "There is a limit to this."

The top tech industry to watch out for in 2017 is business-to-business tech as corporations face pressure to raise wages, according to Manley. These companies are looking for technology to make work more efficient, he said.

Facebook, Apple and Alphabet are holdings in Jim Cramer'sAction Alerts PLUS Charitable Trust Portfolio. Want to be alerted before Cramer buys or sells FB, AAPL or GOOGL? Learn more now.

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Adidas (ADDYY) subsidiary Reebok Int.'l is making space boots for astronauts.

On Tuesday, July 18, the shoemaker released the Reebok Floatride Space Boot SB-01, made with "floatride foam technology" that the company said makes the boot "extremely lightweight." In partnership with David Clark Co., Reebok said it designed the boot because astronauts have essentially been wearing the same bulbous shoe since the U.S. landed on the moon in 1969.

As of May, NASA employed 44 active astronauts and 36 "management astronauts." Not a huge market for Reebok to get into, but the astronauts are likely rejoicing since they've historically lugged around in heavy, snowboard-type contraptions.

"Weight is a huge factor in space travel with just a single pound having big financial implications," Matt Montross of Reebok Innovation said in a statement. "Traditional space boots were made of rigid leather with firm soles and were not integrated into the actual space suit. Reebok Floatride Foam introduced three revolutionary elements to the space boot; it decreased the overall weight significantly, it brought the added comfort in a space boot and support that you would expect in a running shoe and it delivered a new level of sleekness and style."

Reebok expects astronauts to wear the new boot - complete with a feather-light midsole, single-layer engineered mesh upper and weight-optimized full-coverage outsole - as they travel to the International Space Station on Boeing Co.'s (BA) - Get Free Report new vessel, the CST-100 Starliner, which is estimated to take off sometime in 2018.

Read More:
Director of Korean Earthquake Research Center Convicted of Money Laundering

The director of South Korea's Earthquake Research Center at the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources was laundering bribes that he received from two seismological companies based in California and England through the U.S. banking system, according to DOJ.

The director of South Korea's Earthquake Research Center at the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources has been convicted of money laundering following a four-day jury trial, the Department of Justice announced, saying he was laundering bribes that he received from two seismological companies based in California and England through the U.S. banking system.

Heon-Cheol Chi), age 59, of South Korea, was convicted of one count of transacting in criminally derived property, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1957. His sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 2 before the U.S. District Judge John F. Walter of the Central District of California. Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, Acting U.S. Attorney Sandra R. Brown for the Central District of California, and Assistant Director in Charge Deirdre Fike of the FBI's Los Angeles Field Office announced the conviction. The charges alleged that the funds Chi laundered were proceeds derived through violations of South Korea's bribery law, according to DOJ.

"International corruption undermines the rule of law, threatens our national security, and harms honest companies who are playing by the rules," said Blanco. "As this case demonstrates, the Criminal Division will hold responsible the companies and individuals who are paying bribes to foreign government officials, and the foreign government officials themselves. For the second time in recent months, the Criminal Division has convicted a foreign official who solicited bribes and then laundered the illicit proceeds in the United States. We will continue to hold such individuals responsible and accountable."

Brown said Chi "used a bank account here in Southern California to conceal over one million dollars in bribe money obtained through the abuse of his public position. This conviction sends a message that should be heard around the world."
NTSB Announces Investigative Hearing for Fatal Alaska Commuter Flight Crash

The incident occurred on Oct. 2, 2016 near Togiak, Alaska

According to a news release, the NTSB has scheduled an investigative hearing for Aug. 17, 2017, in Anchorage, Alaska, as part of an ongoing investigation into flight 3153. The flight incident occurred on Oct. 2, 2016, near Togiak, Alaska.

This is the first investigative hearing held outside of Washington in almost 20 years, according the news release.

For context: Flight 3153 was a schedule commuter flight operated by Hageland Aviation Services, Inc. The plane carried two pilots and one passenger, and impacted mountains at 11:54 a.m., 21 minutes after takeoff. There were no survivors from the incident.

The NTSB is conducting this investigative hearing in Alaska because the majority of witnesses we want to hear from are in Alaska, said board member Earl F. Weener. We also believe that holding the hearing in Alaska will help increase awareness within the Alaskan aviation community of the issues surrounding controlled flight into terrain accidents and flight into instrument meteorological conditions.

Some of the issues that will be discussed at the hearing include: operational control, pilot training, and safety management.
Phuket, Thailand, 18 July 2017  Phuket Marriott Resort and Spa, Nai Yang Beach has launched its luxurious seafront sanctuary as the ultimate destination for dream weddings.

The secluded Nai Yang Beach, located on the pristine northwest coast of Phuket, provides the perfect place to pledge your life-long vows to your partner. As the only international hotel on this sublime stretch of sand, Phuket Marriott Resort and Spa, Nai Yang Beach offers not only stunning natural scenery, but also the service and facilities to cater for all types of dream wedding.

David Ippersiel, General Manager of the Phuket Marriott Resort and Spa, Nai Yang Beach, said that his goal is to become the wedding destination of choice for couples from across the world.

With its golden sands, azure seas and verdant palms, Nai Yang Beach is an idyllic destination for all types of wedding, Mr Ippersiel said. But spectacular scenery alone is not enough to ensure an unforgettable big day. At Phuket Marriott Resort and Spa, Nai Yang Beach, we provide the support and service to ensure that every wedding runs seamlessly.

From diverse dining facilities, including authentic Thai dishes, fresh seafood and excellent international cuisine, to a choice of different venues, our expert team of professional event planners we will make sure that all your wedding dreams come true. Phuket Marriott Resort and Spa, Nai Yang Beach really is a one-stop service for your big day, Mr Ippersiel added.

Mr Ippersiel and Francois Poletti, Director of Operations at the resort, recently welcomed members of the media to the resort to showcase the wealth of services and packages it offers to wedding planners. Following lunch at the resort, the journalists were given the chance to experience various aspects of the wedding day experience, including flower arranging activities, a wedding cake display by Chef Poss, Supolwat Eua-umakul, and the chance to see a mock-up of the wedding day set-up.

Since opening in 2016, Phuket Marriott Resort and Spa, Nai Yang Beach has developed a strong standing in the wedding sector. To date, the resort has successfully hosted ten weddings, building a reputation for exceeding the expectations of discerning couples.

All events are handled with a care and attention-to-detail by the resorts certified event planners, professional chefs, floral specialists and other wedding experts. With a choice of creative set-ups, dynamic concepts and distinct venues, Phuket Marriott Resort and Spa, Nai Yang Beach exceeds every expectation and delivers many wonderful surprises along the way.

From lavish occasions to simple ceremonies, luxurious ballroom receptions to casual beach parties, Phuket Marriott Resort and Spa, Nai Yang Beach provides a dream destination package for every couple.
Chris Clarkson of the University of Queensland talks with Djurrubu Aboriginal Rangers Vernon Hardy, Mitchum Nango, Jacob Baird and Claude Hardy at the excavation site in Australia's Northern Territory. Credit: Dominic O'Brien, Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation

When and how the first humans made their way to Australia has been an evolving story.

While it is accepted that humans appeared in Africa some 200,000 years ago, scientists in recent years have placed the approximate date of human settlement in Australia further and further back in time, as part of ongoing questions about the timing, the routes and the means of migration out of Africa.

Now, a team of researchers, including a faculty member and seven students from the University of Washington, has found and dated artifacts in northern Australia that indicate humans arrived there about 65,000 years agomore than 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. A paper published July 20 in the journal Nature describes dating techniques and artifact finds at Madjedbebe, a longtime site of archaeological research, that could inform other theories about the emergence of early humans and their coexistence with wildlife on the Australian continent.

The new date makes a difference, co-author and UW associate professor of anthropology Ben Marwick said. Against the backdrop of theories that place humans in Australia anywhere between 47,000 and 60,000 years ago, the concept of earlier settlement calls into question the argument that humans caused the extinction of unique megafauna such as giant kangaroos, wombats and tortoises more than 45,000 years ago.

"Previously it was thought that humans arrived and hunted them out or disturbed their habits, leading to extinction, but these dates confirm that people arrived so far before that they wouldn't be the central cause of the death of megafauna," Marwick said. "It shifts the idea of humans charging into the landscape and killing off the megafauna. It moves toward a vision of humans moving in and coexisting, which is quite a different view of human evolution."

Since 1973, digs at Madjedbebe, a rock shelter in Australia's Northern Territory, have unearthed more than 10,000 stone tools, ochres, plant remains and bones. Following the more recent excavations in 2012 and 2015, a University of Queensland-led research team, which included the UW, evaluated artifacts found in various layers of settlement using radiocarbon dating and optical stimulated luminescence (OSL).

This short video provides a look at the excavation process in Ausrtalia's Northern Territory. Credit: Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation

The new research involved extensive cooperation with the local Aboriginal community, Marwick added. The Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, representing the Mirarr people, joined much of the excavation and reviewed the findings, Marwick said. Researchers had both a memorandum of understanding and a contract with the community, which gave control to the Mirarr as senior custodians, oversight of the excavation and curation of the finds. The Mirarr were interested in supporting new research into the age of the site and in knowing more about the early human occupants, particularly given environmental threats posed by nearby modern-day mining activities.

Noteworthy among the artifacts found were ochre "crayons" and other pigments, what are believed to be the world's oldest edge-ground hatchets, and evidence that these early humans ground seeds and processed plants. The pigments indicate the use of paint for symbolic and artistic expression, while the tools may have been used to cut bark or food from trees.

Labs in Australia used OSL to identify the age range, Marwick explained. Radiocarbon dating, which requires a certain level of carbon in a substance, can analyze organic materials up to about 45,000 or 50,000 years old. But OSL is used on minerals to date, say, the last time a sand grain was exposed to sunlighthelpful in determining when an artifact was buriedup to 100,000 years ago or more. That process measured thousands of sand grains individually so as to establish more precise ages.

The UW researchers worked in the geoarchaeology lab on the Seattle campus, testing sediment samples that Marwick helped excavate at Madjedbebe. One graduate student and six undergraduate students studied the properties of hundreds of dirt samples to try to picture the time in which the ancient Australian humans lived.

Using a scanning electron microscope, the students examined the composition of the sediment layers, the size of the grains of dirt and any microscopic plant matter. For another test, the students baked soil samples at various temperatures, then measured the mass of each sample, said UW doctoral student Gayoung Park, another author on the paper. Because organic matter turns into gases at high heat, a loss of mass indicated how much matter was in a given sample. This helped create a picture of the environments across the sedimentary layers of the site. The team found that when these human ancestors arrived, northern Australia was wetter and colder.

"Together, we were working on establishing questions: What kind of environments did these people live in? What was the climate like? Were there any disturbances to the site, and were artifacts mixed up from different ages?" Marwick said. "I'm proud of being able to involve UW students in this research in a really substantial way."

Ben Marwick, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Washington, and other team members excavate the lowest reaches of the dig site. Credit: Dominic O'Brien, Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation

One of the authors, Mara Page, was a senior double-majoring in archaeology and Earth and space sciences when she joined the project. She analyzed stable carbon isotopes found in sediment, which can reveal the types of plants present in the past and the kinds of environments they lived in. She determined that the vegetation at Madjedbebe remained stable during the time of human occupation, which suggests that there was no major environmental change that might have prompted humans to leave the area.

"I feel that I contributed something important by being able to rule something out of the story we were telling," Page explained.

By placing the date of Australian settlement at around 65,000 years ago, researchers confirm some of the shifting theories about when the first humans left Africa. A common view is that humans moved into Asia 80,000 years ago, and if they migrated to Australia some to 15,000 years later, it means those ancestors co-existed with another early human in Asia, Homo florensiensis. It also means that these early Australians preceded early Europeans, who are believed to have entered that continent 45,000 years ago. A related question is whether these early human species left Africa at one time, gradually spreading the population through Asia, Europe and Australia, or whether there were multiple waves of migration.

In recent years, new evidence, obtained through DNA testing of a 90-year-old hair sample of an Aboriginal Australian man, suggests Australia was settled as far back as 70,000 years ago.

Marwick believes the Madjedbebe results, because they rely on so many artifacts and intensive analysis of sediment samples, confirm that early humans occupied Australia at least 65,000 years ago and support the theory that Homo sapiens, the species of modern-day humans, evolved in Africa before dispersing to other continents. The findings also suggest Homo sapiens' predecessors, Neanderthals and Denisovans, overlapped with humans for a long period of time, and suggest a larger role for Australia, and the Eastern Hemisphere in general, in the story of humankind.

Marwick, who advocates for open science, particularly in data collection and the code used to analyze it, noted that the Nature paper is also pushing new frontiers because it combines three strands of reproducibility. Researchers examined a field site that has been excavated in the past; they've made available their raw data and code; and they consulted an outside lab for third-party OSL verification.

More information: Chris Clarkson et al, Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature22968 Journal information: Nature
Professor Mina Hoorfar, Director of UBC Okanagan's School of Engineering. Credit: UBC Okanagan

Researchers at UBC's Okanagan campus have designed a tiny device built using a 3D printerthat can monitor drinking water quality in real time and help protect against waterborne illness.

Prof. Mina Hoorfar, Director of the School of Engineering, says new research proves their miniaturized water quality sensors are cheap to make, can operate continuously and can be deployed anywhere in the water distribution system.

"Current water safety practice involves only periodic hand testing, which limits sampling frequency and leads to a higher probably of disease outbreak," says Hoorfar. "Traditional water quality sensors have been too expensive and unreliable to use across an entire water system."

Until now, that is. Tiny devices created in her Advanced Thermo-Fluidic lab at UBC's Okanagan campus, are proving reliable and sturdy enough to provide accurate readings regardless of water pressure or temperature. The sensors are wireless, reporting back to the testing stations, and work independentlymeaning that if one stops working, it does not bring down the whole system. And since they're made using 3D printers, they are fast, inexpensive and easy to produce.

"This highly portable sensor system is capable of constantly measuring several water quality parameters such as turbidity, pH, conductivity, temperature, and residual chlorine, and sending the data to a central system wirelessly," she adds. "It is a unique and effective technology that can revolutionize the water industry."

While many urban purification plants have real-time monitoring sensors, they are upstream of the distribution system. Often, Hoorfar notes, the pressure at which water is supplied to the customer is much higher than what most sensors can tolerate. But her new sensors can be placed right at or within a customer's home, providing a direct and precise layer of protection against unsafe water.

And when things go wrong, they can end tragically. More than 17 years ago, four people died, and hundreds became ill, after drinking E.coli-affected water in Walkerton, Ontario.

"Although the majority of water-related diseases occur in lower- or middle-income countries, water quality events in Walkerton, for example, raise serious questions about consistent water safety in even developed countries like Canada," says Hoorfar. "Many of these tragedies could be prevented with frequent monitoring and early detection of pathogens causing the outbreak."

This research has been recently published in Sensors.
Scientists and students led by the University of Colorado Boulder and Rutgers University are calculating the environmental and human impacts of a potential nuclear war using the most sophisticated scientific tools available.

The lead researchers, CU Boulder Professor Brian Toon and Rutgers Professor Alan Robock, have been studying the threat in-depth for decades. They were among the first scientists to formulate the "nuclear winter" theory, which indicated that a nuclear war between two countries could cool parts of the planet and trigger famine and mass starvation, even in nations not involved in the war.

In 1983, Toon, Robock and othersincluding Cornell University's Carl Saganfollowed on the heels of Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen and now-retired CU Boulder Professor John Birks, who published a 1982 study concluding that smoke from burning forests, cities and oil reserves caused by nuclear blasts would block sunlight and cool Earth. The 1983 nuclear winter paper, which Toon co-authored, was published in Science and grabbed worldwide attention from scientists, politicians and the public.

"I find it surprising and frustrating that the potential catastrophic effects of a nuclear war have fallen off the radar of many people following the nuclear winter discussions that began in the early 1980s," said Toon. "One of our goals for this study is inform people how dangerous these weapons are by providing a solid scientific analysis of the issues."

Ongoing threat of 'nuclear winter'

The new study will calculate in detail for the first time the impacts of nuclear war on agriculture and the oceanic food chain and on humans, including food availability and migration activity, said Toon of CU Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. The team is using various scenarios to calculate how much smoke produced by fires in modern cities initiated by nuclear blasts would be produced by urban firestorms and their available fuels, Toon said.

"The most important factor is the amount of smoke which would be generated from fires started by nuclear detonations in cities and industrial areas and lofted into the upper atmosphere," said Robock, a distinguished professor in the Department of Environmental Science at Rutgers. "For the first time, we will model the fires and firestorms, using detailed estimates of what would burn, based on new credible scenarios of how a nuclear war might be fought."

Although the global nuclear arsenal was reduced by about 75 percent following the end of the Cold War in the 1980s, there are still about 15,000 nuclear weapons distributed among nine nations. While the United States and Russia have the bulk of the weapons, the other members of the world's "Nuclear Club" are Britain, China, France, Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea.

Toon stressed the threats of a nuclear incident have not diminished and could arise from miscommunications, international panic, computer hacking or malfunction, terrorism or action by a rogue leader of a nuclear nation. North Korea, which has 10 to 20 nuclear weapons, continues to flaunt its military powermost recently with the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile believed capable of reaching Alaska or Hawaiithat was condemned by many nations, including the U.S., Russia and China.

Supercomputers, climate models tell a nuclear war story

The team is using supercomputers and sophisticated climate models developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder to calculate the amount of fire fuels in major cities and how much smoke might be produced by nuclear blasts. The researchers also are using agricultural and world food trade models to assess the impact on crops from a potential nuclear war and the possibility of widespread famine.

"Calculations show there is enough food on the planet to feed people for about 60 days, and an average city has about enough food to feed residents for just seven days," said Toon, also a professor in the atmospheric and oceanic sciences department (ATOC). "The functioning of our society is based in large part on our ability to transport food, fuel and other goodsactivities that would be severely affected by a nuclear war."

In 2016 Robock and Toon authored a commentary piece in The New York Times titled Let's End the Peril of a Nuclear Winter. In it they point to their 2007 study on the potential impact of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with each country detonating 50 Hiroshima-sized bombs.

One result? Smoke from the explosions would make temperatures plunge, causing wheat, rice, corn and soybean production to be reduced globally by 10 to 40 percent for five years. The explosions also would cause severe depletion of the Earth's ozone layer, damaging human health and the environment, said Toon.

The new project is funded by a three-year, $3 million grant from the Open Philanthropy Project headquartered in San Francisco. Open Philanthropy focuses on funding projects in four broad categories: U.S. policy, global catastrophic risks, scientific research, and global health and development.

Students involved in research

As part of the Open Philanthropy effort, CU Boulder Professor Yunping Xi and his students will assess the amount of flammable building material in modern cities in various parts of the world, as well as the flammable contents in such buildings. CU Boulder Professor Julie Lundquist and her students will use sophisticated weather research and forecasting models developed at NCAR to run computer simulations on how terrain and surface roughness might impact fire behavior after a nuclear detonation.

Robock is working with several graduate students, including Joshua Coupe, who will be helping on climate modeling. Another of his graduate students, Guangoh Jheong, will work on agricultural modeling with University of Chicago postdoctoral researcher Florian Zabel. Rutgers Associate Professor Gal Hochman and graduate student Hainan Zhang will work on economic modeling for the effort, said Robock.

NCAR scientists Charles Bardeen and Michael Mills, who both received their doctoral degrees at CU Boulder, will use the latest atmospheric and aerosol climate models developed at the center to better understand the response of the climate system to the soot from fires. Based on current scientific knowledge, some could end up in the stratosphere 10 to 30 miles above Earth's surface and remain aloft for years or even decades, said Toon.

Working with Toon, Bardeen and Millswho previously collaborated with him on nuclear winter simulationswill track the injections of gases and aerosols from city fires, calculating their transport, removal and the interaction of the particles with clouds, incoming sunlight and climate.

In addition, CU Boulder Assistant Professor Nicole Lovenduski and students will be studying how the oceanic food chain might change in response to the climatic disruption and enhanced ultraviolet radiation from nuclear explosions.

"Our work will provide a much clearer description of the global humanitarian consequences backed up with state-of-the-art calculations of the fires, the climate change and the impact on food production, prices and restrictions for a number of different possible nuclear wars," said Robock.
The illustration shows an event that could be the sought-after decay of the Higgs particle in quarks. Credit: ATLAS collaboration

As part of the ATLAS collaboration, the Freiburg research group led by Prof. Dr. Karl Jakobs and Dr. Christian Weiser has contributed to finding strong evidence that, among other things, the Higgs particle decays into quarks. The researchers analyzed data sets that were recorded in 2015 and 2016 with the ATLAS detector at the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.

"The strong evidence that the Higgs particle, as predicted by theory, decays into quarks provides yet another essential piece to the puzzle about this particle," says Weiser, who leads the research activity in Freiburg. "The goal now is to prove the decay exists beyond a shadow of a doubt and, based on this knowledge, to measure the Higgs particle's properties more accurately."

As a result, measuring the decay is extremely important for the researchers in order to explain the short lifespan of the Higgs particle. Measurable deviations from standard theory's predictions could point to so-called new physics, which reaches beyond the Standard Model.

The discovery of the Higgs particle through the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC accelerator in CERN in 2012 presented a milestone in physics even as the particle's existence had been predicted nearly 50 years prior to that. It is a most short-lived particle that decays into other particles nearly the moment it is produced.

The rate with which decays into various particles occur can be computed within the framework of the underlying theory. Up to now, researchers have been able to fully prove the decay into other particles - so-called W and Z bosons, photons and tau leptons. But they had not been able to observe the Higgs particle's decay into a couple of b-quarks that is expected to occur with the largest rate of around 60 percent probability. The reason is that a number of other processes exist that are hard to differentiate from the Higgs particle's decay in b-quarks and that occur at a much higher rate.

But now they have discovered new evidence: The probability that the observed signal is feigned solely by other processes is only 0.018 percent. The presentation of these findings was one of the highlights of the conference run by the European Physical Society (EPS) that was held July 5-12, 2017 in Venice, Italy.
A picture from a photonic camera showing how using the coating can create a candle-like 'flame' highlighting shear stress distribution in a sample concrete beam. Credit: University of Leeds

Using the principles of light, University of Leeds scientists have discovered a new way to measure the strength of modern forms of concrete - giving industry a better way to understand when it could fracture.

Their approach was based on applying a complex light-refracting coating, designed to display stress positions, to the surface of concrete beam samples.

The epoxy coating is 'birefringent' - it has the ability to split light waves in different directions in relation to the amount of stress acting in those directions, and reflecting back to a photonic camera. The camera then takes a picture showing where the stress levels are most extreme before cracks or fractures occur.

While the coating itself is not new, this research project was the first time it had been used to measure shear stress and assess concrete toughness against fractures.

Dr Joseph Antony from the School of Chemical and Process Engineering at the leading Russell Group UK university, who led the study together with researchers at the University of Qatar, said: "There are other methods to measure stress and strain levels in the engineering sector, but we do not believe any of them can measure shear strain directly with high precision, which is most relevant to assess the failure strength of materials.

"The photonic method we developed can directly measure sheer strain, even on opaque materials. Until now, photonic and optical methods of measurement have only been associated with transparent materials."

The results using the new method compared favourably with conventional methods of stress testing, which have relied on combined experimental and numerical or analytical approaches.

The rise of composite concretes now used extensively in the construction industry prompted the team to look for new ways to study the material's strength.

Concrete has traditionally been made with cement, gravel and sand but has changed significantly in recent decades. It can now include numerous waste products including plastic pellets, in order to reduce the levels of natural materials used and to recycle waste products.

Dr Antony added: "Our study was aimed at developing a method by which plastic or polymer waste materials, in this case from Qatar, could be used as valuable ingredients in developing new engineering products.

"By working with industries which recycle the waste products into micron sized particles, we had direct insight into how they are used, meaning our study could be much more informed by industry requirements."

Finding a new way to show industry the precise toughness of these new forms of composite concrete meant there could be more reliance on their use as a building material.

Dr Antony explained how concrete made with waste plastic products had shown superior qualities to traditional ingredients, but his team wanted to ensure it could sustain service loads without fracturing.

He added: "We believe this new photonic or optical approach to fracture testing could be applied not only to develop sustainable manufacturing using materials that would otherwise be discarded as waste, but also in other diverse engineering designs including mechanical, civil, materials, electronics and chemical engineering applications."

The research was funded by the Qatar National Research Fund, and is published in Scientific Reports.

More information: S. Joseph Antony et al, Photonics and fracture toughness of heterogeneous composite materials, Scientific Reports (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-04782-7 Journal information: Scientific Reports
Climate change may be harming the future of African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) by impacting the survival rates of pups, according to one of the first studies on how shifting temperatures are impacting tropical species.

Led by scientists from ZSL (Zoological Society of London) and published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, the study highlights how African wild dogs - already classified as Endangered by the IUCN Red List - raise fewer pups at high temperatures.

Three concurrent studies, undertaken by ZSL, the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust, and the African Wildlife Conservation Fund, monitored a total of 73 wild dog packs at sites in Kenya, Botswana and Zimbabwe, over a combined 42 years of study.

Tracking with high-tech collars showed that wild dog packs spent less time hunting on hot days. When packs tried to raise pups in hot weather, more of the pups died, potentially because they received less food from individuals returning from hunts.

At the Botswana site, temperatures increased steadily over 24 years of monitoring. The average daily maximum temperature during the pup-rearing period was roughly 1C higher in the first 12 years of monitoring than in the second 12 years, and over the same period the average number of pups surviving per pack per year fell from five to three.

The study's lead author, Professor Rosie Woodroffe of ZSL's Institute of Zoology, said: "Our study shows the truly global impact of climate change. When most people think about wildlife in a changing climate, they think of polar bears clinging to melting ice, but even species who have adapted to tropical weather are being impacted by the changes to their environment.

"Worryingly, this new threat may be affecting wild dogs deep inside wildlife areas where we would expect them to be protected from human impacts. With habitat fragmented and destroyed in cooler areas, wild dogs have literally nowhere to go. Sadly, climate change may bring extinction a step closer for this amazing species.

"Now our team at ZSL is focused on identifying conservation actions which might reduce these climate impacts on wild dogs, and working out where they are most needed."

African wild dogs are one of the world's most endangered carnivores and their populations are in decline, with estimates suggesting that fewer than 700 packs currently remain in the wild.

Although considered one of the most successful predators on Earth due to the high kill-rate their cooperative hunting achieves, African wild dog populations are declining due to pressures including habitat loss and human-wildlife conflict.

Building on this study's findings, ZSL is conducting further research to explore whether and how climate change impacts on wild dogs might be mitigated. Find out more about ZSL's conservation efforts for African wild dogs at http://www.zsl.org/cheetahandwilddog.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, hydraulic fracturing accounted for more than one-half of US oil production and two-thirds of US gas production in 2015. That percentage is expected to rise as more states begin to adopt the practice. Credit: Penn State

Given Pennsylvania's abundant natural resources, it's no surprise that the Commonwealth has become a mecca for hydraulic fracturing. Researchers, however, have recently discovered that releasing millions of gallons of treated hydraulic fracturing wastewater each year into area surface waters may have longer-lasting effects than originally thought.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, hydraulic fracturing accounted for more than one-half of U.S. oil production and two-thirds of U.S. gas production in 2015. That percentage is expected to rise as more states begin to adopt the practice. Although studies show that hydraulic fracturing does produce less greenhouse emissions than older technologies like coal, it does come with other environmental concerns. At the top of that list is the wastewater it produces, which contains a multitude of potentially hazardous contaminants. In 2015 alone, Pennsylvania's unconventional gas wells produced nearly 1.7 billion gallons of wastewater. While there are facilities dedicated to treating the wastewater before its release, they provide only limited treatment, leaving many of the pollutants intact.

To gain a better understanding of the impact of these contaminants on the environment, Penn State environmental engineering professor Bill Burgos and his colleagues studied sediment samples collected from a reservoir in western Pennsylvania. The study was published in the most recent issue of Environmental Science & Technology.

"There wasn't a water keeper who was sitting in these rivers collecting these samples at a great continuous clip, so in a way, a lot of information just flowed by," Burgos said. "But in certain reservoirs, where sediments collect over time, there are layers of sediment that are like rings of a tree; you can look into the sediments and capture time and spatially composite samples."

The objective of the study was to use the sediments that had built up to reconstruct the industrial oil and gas activity that was happening during the boom of the Marcellus Shale development in Pennsylvania, from roughly 2008 to 2015, in order to gain a better understanding of the historical impact of oil and gas wastewater disposal.

"You need a lake or a reservoir that allows sediments to lay down undisturbed in those layers," said Burgos. "The words we use are a 'coherent temporal record.' You only get a coherent temporal record if it's a lake that continuously accumulates sediments and isn't subject to a flood or scour."

Xiaofeng Liu, assistant professor of civil engineering, developed a computer model to reconstruct the layers of sediment in order to identify the best sampling location. The researchers chose the Conemaugh River Lake in western Pennsylvania. This site offered high wastewater concentration and low wastewater dilution, as well as a dam-controlled reservoir.

Once the location was decided, the team began collecting samples.

"We inserted a tube in the sediment like you would put a straw in a Slurpee or a slushy," Burgos said. "You put your thumb over the straw, and you pull it out."

In this case, they used agricultural drainpipe, plastic caps and tape, rather than a straw and a thumb, to collect the sediment samples, which were immediately frozen to preserve the content and then brought back to the Kappe Environmental Engineering laboratory at Penn State.

Once in the lab, the researchers pushed out the samples like a push-up ice pop, cutting them into slices.

"We split them up into different sections so that we could run different analyses on them," said Nathaniel Warner, assistant professor of environmental engineering at Penn State and co-author on the study.

Warner said the researchers, in collaboration with Colorado State University, looked for high radioactivity signatures and measured the pore water and the radioisotopes to determine the age of the sediments. They also tested the major mineralogy, particle size and grain size, in an effort to develop a full profile.

The results determined that the discharge of oil and gas wastewater did impact water quality and sediment quality on a larger scale than previously thought. Large quantities of oil and gas wastewater with high loads of chloride, barium, strontium, radium and organic compounds left high concentrations in the sediments and pore water.

Specifically, two important types of organic contaminants were found: endocrine disrupting chemicals (nonylphenol ethoxylates) and carcinogens (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons). The highest concentrations coincided with sediment layers deposited five to 10 years ago, during the peak of Marcellus Shale activity.

"The isotopes confirm these are unconventional oil and gas wastes," said Burgos.

Some isotope ratios, such as strontium and radium, are rather unique to the Marcellus formation. A previous study conducted by Warner found that radium levels immediately downstream from one plant were roughly 200 times greater than in sediments located upstream of the facilities. This current study demonstrates that elevated levels were found as far away as 12 miles downstream from the treatment plants.

"These are contaminants that passed through these centralized waste treatment plants, and they can be transported great distances," Burgos said.

Though the findings show long-term contamination of Pennsylvania watersheds, the researchers say the effects on the environment and human health are still unknown and difficult to assess.

"It's kind of an unknown, unquantified risk," Burgos said. "The thing that you don't know is the synergistic effect of all of these things together, the combined effect of radium and lead and surfactants and salt, all together. Does the combined effect of those things ratchet up the toxicity?"

The study did show a significant drop in the amount of contaminants released into surface waters following the voluntary ban on discharge of Marcellus waste requested by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which began in 2011, suggesting that tighter regulations of wastewater do help.

The researchers now want to use the materials they've collected to measure the biological toxicity of sediment layers throughout time. They also plan to test sediment samples at locations farther downstream toward Pittsburgh to see how far the contamination has spread and to what extent.

"Maybe they never make it to Pittsburgh," Burgos said. "But the thing is, you look at a map and there are other plants upstream of Pittsburgh on the main stem of the Allegheny River and there's no reason to suggest that these plants aren't contributing the same thing."

More information: William D. Burgos et al. Watershed-Scale Impacts from Surface Water Disposal of Oil and Gas Wastewater in Western Pennsylvania, Environmental Science & Technology (2017). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.7b01696 Journal information: Environmental Science & Technology
Credit: Shutterstock

Robots have been taking our jobs since the 1960s. So why are politicians and business leaders only now becoming so worried about robots causing mass unemployment?

It comes down to the question of what a robot really is. While science fiction has often portrayed robots as androids carrying out tasks in the much the same way as humans, the reality is that robots take much more specialised forms. Traditional 20th century robots were automated machines and robotic arms building cars in factories. Commercial 21st century robots are supermarket self-checkouts, automated guided warehouse vehicles, and even burger-flipping machines in fast-food restaurants.

Ultimately, humans haven't become completely redundant because these robots may be very efficient but they're also kind of dumb. They do not think, they just act, in very accurate but very limited ways. Humans are still needed to work around robots, doing the jobs the machines can't and fixing them when they get stuck. But this is all set to change thanks to a new wave of smarter, better value machines that can adapt to multiple tasks. This change will be so significant that it will create a new industrial revolution.

Industry 4.0

This era of "Industry 4.0" is being driven by the same technological advances that enable the capabilities of the smartphones in our pockets. It is a mix of low-cost and high-power computers, high-speed communication and artificial intelligence. This will produce smarter robots with better sensing and communication abilities that can adapt to different tasks, and even coordinate their work to meet demand without the input of humans.

In the manufacturing industry, where robots have arguably made the most headway of any sector, this will mean a dramatic shift from centralised to decentralised collaborative production. Traditional robots focused on single, fixed, high-speed operations and required a highly skilled human workforce to operate and maintain them. Industry 4.0 machines are flexible, collaborative and can operate more independently, which ultimately removes the need for a highly skilled workforce.

The fourth industrial revolution. Credit: Christoph Roser, CC BY-SA

For large-scale manufacturers, Industry 4.0 means their robots will be able to sense their environment and communicate in an industrial network that can be run and monitored remotely. Each machine will produce large amounts of data that can be collectively studied using what is known as "big data" analysis. This will help identify ways to improve operating performance and production quality across the whole plant, for example by better predicting when maintenance is needed and automatically scheduling it.

For small-to-medium manufacturing businesses, Industry 4.0 will make it cheaper and easier to use robots. It will create machines that can be reconfigured to perform multiple jobs and adjusted to work on a more diverse product range and different production volumes. This sector is already beginning to benefit from reconfigurable robots designed to collaborate with human workers and analyse their own work to look for improvements, such as BAXTER, SR-TEX and CareSelect.

While these machines are getting smarter, they are still not as smart as us. Today's industrial artificial intelligence operates at a narrow level, which gives the appearance of human intelligence exhibited by machines, but designed by humans.

What's coming next is known as "deep learning". Similar to big data analysis, it involves processing large quantities of data in real time to make decisions about what is the best action to take. The difference is that the machine learns from the data so it can improve its decision making. A perfect example of deep learning was demonstrated by Google's AlphaGo software, which taught itself to beat the world's greatest Go players.

The turning point in applying artificial intelligence to manufacturing could come with the application of special microchips called graphical processing units (GPUs). These enable deep learning to be applied to extremely large data sets at extremely fast speeds. But there is still some way to go and big industrial companies are recruiting vast numbers of scientists to further develop the technology.

Impact on industry

As Industry 4.0 technology becomes smarter and more widely available, manufacturers of any size will be able to deploy cost-effective, multipurpose and collaborative machines as standard. This will lead to industrial growth and market competitiveness, with a greater understanding of production processes leading to new high-quality products and digital services.

Exactly what impact a smarter robotic workforce with the potential to operate on its own will have on the manufacturing industry, is still widely disputed. Artificial intelligence as we know it from science fiction is still in its infancy. It could well be the 22nd century before robots really have the potential to make human labour obsolete by developing not just deep learning but true artificial understanding that mimics human thinking.

Ideally, Industry 4.0 will enable human workers to achieve more in their jobs by removing repetitive tasks and giving them better robotic tools. In theory, this would allow us humans to focus more on business development, creativity and science, which it would be much harder for any robot to do. Technology that has made humans redundant in the past has forced us to adapt, generally with more education.

But because Industry 4.0 robots will be able to operate largely on their own, we might see much greater human redundancy from manufacturing jobs without other sectors being able to create enough new work. Then we might see more political moves to protect human labour, such as taxing robots.

Again, in an ideal scenario, humans may be able to focus on doing the things that make us human, perhaps fuelled by a basic income generated from robotic work. Ultimately, it will be up to us to define whether the robotic workforce will work for us, with us, or against us.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
African white-bellied Pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis). Credit: National Botanic Garden of Belgium

The hunting of pangolins, the world's most illegally traded mammal, has increased by 150 percent in Central African forests from 1970s to 2014, according to a new study led by the University of Sussex.

The first-ever study of its kind, published in Conservation Letters, shows the true scale of local pangolin exploitation across the continent. The international research team, which includes researchers from academia and conservation organisations, state that up to 2.7 million pangolins are harvested annually from forests in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Democratic Republic of Congo and Republic of Congo.

The team used data from 113 sites in 14 African countries to estimate the total annual harvest of pangolins. Worryingly the new study reveals the mammal, which is more sought after than elephant ivory and reproduces slowly, is now making-up an increasing proportion of all animals hunted in Central Africa. The researchers also found that snares are still being used to capture pangolins despite the practice being illegal in most Central African countries.

Pangolins are hunted and traded for food and traditional medicine throughout their range in Africa, and recent evidence has also shown an increasing trade of African pangolins to some countries in Asia. The researchers show that the price of pangolins has increased in urban African markets since the 1990s, with a 5.8 times increase in price observed for the sought after giant pangolin despite it being protected.

The team are calling on governments across the continent to increase the capacity to enforce international trade bans, embark on education and outreach programmes, and monitor pangolin populations.

Daniel Ingram, lead author of the study from the University of Sussex, said: "Our new study shows that African pangolins are at risk. We now have the opportunity to ensure that these species do not follow the severe declines of the Asian pangolins. If we do not act now to better understand and protect these charismatic animals, we may lose them in the future.

"Compared to other species, relatively little is known about African pangolins, only gaining international attention in recent years. With hunting increasing, it is crucial we investigate how this links to the illegal wildlife trade. The engagement of governments and local people will be critical to the conservation of African pangolins."

Professor Jorn Scharlemann, from the University of Sussex, said: "Overexploitation is one of the main pressures driving wildlife, like the pangolins, closer to extinction, yet data to evaluate the pressures underlying species' declines are scarce.

"Collating data from local studies collected by hundreds of researchers allows us to provide vital information on the regional exploitation of African pangolins at a critical time for the survival of these species. Bringing these individual studies together allows us to see the bigger picture that can help inform conservation policy and provide the evidence to governments across the world required to take action to use natural resources more sustainably."

More information: Daniel J. Ingram et al. Assessing Africa-Wide Pangolin Exploitation by Scaling Local Data, Conservation Letters (2017). DOI: 10.1111/conl.12389 Journal information: Conservation Letters
Researchers have discovered how to identify new examples of topological materials, which have unique and desirable electronic properties. The technique involves finding the connection between band theory, which describes the energy levels of electrons in a solid, with a material's topological nature. In the image, the lack of connection between the two bands indicates the material is a topological insulator. Credit: Nature.

An international team of researchers has found a way to determine whether a crystal is a topological insulatorand to predict crystal structures and chemical compositions in which new ones can arise. The results, published July 20 in the journal Nature, show that topological insulators are much more common in nature than currently believed.

Topological materials, which hold promise for a wide range of technological applications due to their exotic electronic properties, have attracted a great deal of theoretical and experimental interest over the past decade, culminating in the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics. The materials' electronic properties include the ability of current to flow without resistance and to respond in unconventional ways to electric and magnetic fields.

Until now, however, the discovery of new topological materials occurred mainly by trial and error. The new approach described this week allows researchers to identify a large series of potential new topological insulators. The research represents a fundamental advance in the physics of topological materials and changes the way topological properties are understood.

The team included: at Princeton University, Barry Bradlyn and Jennifer Cano, both associate research scholars at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, Zhijun Wang, a postdoctoral research associate, and B. Andrei Bernevig, professor of physics; professors Luis Elcoro and Mois Aroyo at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao; assistant professor Maia Garcia Vergniory of University of the Basque Country and Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) in Spain; and Claudia Felser, professor at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Germany.

"Our approach allows for a much easier way to find topological materials, avoiding the need for detailed calculations," Felser said. "For some special lattices, we can say that, regardless of whether a material is an insulator or a metal, something topological will be going on," Bradlyn added.

Until now, of the roughly 200,000 materials catalogued in materials databases, only around a few hundred are known to host topological behavior, according to the researchers. "This raised the question for the team: Are topological materials really that scarce, or does this merely reflect an incomplete understanding of solids?" Cano said.

To find out, the researchers turned to the nearly century-old band theory of solids, considered one of the early landmark achievements of quantum mechanics. Pioneered by Swiss-born physicist Felix Bloch and others, the theory describes the electrons in crystals as residing in specific energy levels known as bands. If all the states in a group of bands are filled with electrons, then the electrons cannot move and the material is an insulator. If some of the states are unoccupied, then electrons can move from atom to atom and the material is capable of conducting an electrical current.

Because of the symmetry properties of crystals, however, the quantum states of electrons in solids have special properties. These states can be described as a set of interconnected bands characterized by their momentum, energy and shape. The connections between these bands, which on a graph resemble tangled spaghetti strands, give rise to topological behaviors such as those of electrons that can travel on surfaces or edges without resistance.

The team used a systematic search to identify many previously undiscovered families of candidate topological materials. The approach combined tools from such disparate fields as chemistry, mathematics, physics and materials science.

First, the team characterized all the possible electronic band structures arising from electronic orbitals at all the possible atomic positions for all possible crystal patterns, or symmetry groups, that exist in nature, with the exception of magnetic crystals. To search for topological bands, the team first found a way to enumerate all allowed non-topological bands, with the understanding that anything left out of the list must be topological. Using tools from group theory, the team organized into classes all the possible non-topological band structures that can arise in nature.

Next, by employing a branch of mathematics known as graph theorythe same approach used by search engines to determine links between websitesthe team determined the allowed connectivity patterns for all of the band structures. The bands can either separate or connect together. The mathematical tools determine all the possible band structures in natureboth topological and non-topological. But having already enumerated the non-topological ones, the team was able to show which band structures are topological.

By looking at the symmetry and connectivity properties of different crystals, the team identified several crystal structures that, by virtue of their band connectivity, must host topological bands. The team has made all of the data about non-topological bands and band connectivity available to the public through the Bilbao Crystallographic Server. "Using these tools, along with our results, researchers from around the world can quickly determine if a material of interest can potentially be topological," Elcoro said.

The research shows that symmetry, topology, chemistry and physics all have a fundamental role to play in our understanding of materials, Bernevig said. "The new theory embeds two previously missing ingredients, band topology and orbital hybridization, into Bloch's theory and provides a prescriptive path for the discovery and characterization of metals and insulators with topological properties."

David Vanderbilt, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rutgers University who was not involved in the study, called the work remarkable. "Most of us thought it would be many years before the topological possibilities could be catalogued exhaustively in this enormous space of crystal classes," Vanderbilt said. "This is why the work of Bradlyn and co-workers comes as such a surprise. They have developed a remarkable set of principles and algorithms that allow them to construct this catalogue at a single stroke. Moreover, they have combined their theoretical approach with materials database search methods to make concrete predictions of a wealth of new topological insulator materials."

The theoretical underpinnings for these materials, called "topological" because they are described by properties that remain intact when an object is stretched, twisted or deformed, led to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in physics in 2016 to F. Duncan M. Haldane, Princeton University's Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Physics, J. Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University, and David J. Thouless of the University of Washington.

Chemistry and physics take different approaches to describing crystalline materials, in which atoms occur in regularly ordered patterns or symmetries. Chemists tend to focus on the atoms and their surrounding clouds of electrons, known as orbitals. Physicists tend to focus on the electrons themselves, which can carry electric current when they hop from atom to atom and are described by their momentum.

"This simple factthat the physics of electrons is usually described in terms of momentum, while the chemistry of electrons is usually described in terms of electronic orbitalshas left material discovery in this field at the mercy of chance," Wang said.

"We initially set out to better understand the chemistry of topological materialsto understand why some materials have to be topological," Vergniory said.

Aroyo added, "What came out was, however, much more interesting: a way to marry chemistry, physics and mathematics that adds the last missing ingredient in a century-old theory of electronics, and in the present-day search for topological materials."

More information: Barry Bradlyn et al, Topological quantum chemistry, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature23268 Journal information: Nature
View out of the window of the research aircraft Polar 5 during the flight campaign over the Mackenzie Delta. Credit: Picture: T. Sachs, GFZ

The thawing permafrost soils in the Arctic regions might contribute to the greenhouse effect in two respects: On the one hand, rising temperatures lead to higher microbial methane production close to the surface. On the other hand, the thawing subsurface opens pathways for old, geologic methane. This is shown in a study in the Mackenzie Delta (Canada), conducted by scientists from the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ, the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and partners in the U.S. The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Arctic permafrost acts like a gigantic cap of frozen material over mineral resources and fossil fuels. Scientists apprehend that thawing permafrost could lead to rising methane emissions. "We wanted to find out how much methane is released in a region and were looking for spatial patterns in gas emissions," says lead author Katrin Kohnert from GFZs section for Remote Sensing. In order to do so, a team led by GFZ scientist Torsten Sachs performed a study in a 10,000 square kilometers wide area in Northern Canada. Using the research aircraft Polar 5 of AWI, the scientists conducted airborne measurements of gas concentrations in the air during two extensive flight campaigns in summer 2012 and 2013, respectively.

The result was a high-resolution (100 m x 100 m) methane flux map of the Mackenzie Delta. "We found strong emissions solely where the permafrost is discontinuous, meaning parts where the permafrost contains areas that are thawed permanently," says Katrin Kohnert. "We think that the methane comes predominantly from deeper geologic sources and not from recent microbial activity close to the surface." Even though the hotspots only occur on about 1 percent of the area, they contribute 17 percent to the annual methane emission estimate of the study area.

The conclusion of the authors: The warming climate triggers not only the natural production of biogenic methane, it can also lead to stronger emissions of fossil gas. This contributes significantly to the permafrost-carbon-climate feedback. Kohnert: "Therefore, permafrost areas vulnerable to thawing warrant much more attention."

Map of the methane fluxes in the northern part of the study area. Credit: B. Juhls, GFZ

More information: Katrin Kohnert et al, Strong geologic methane emissions from discontinuous terrestrial permafrost in the Mackenzie Delta, Canada, Scientific Reports (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-05783-2 Journal information: Scientific Reports
Christian Binek has found that the elasticity of a material can be predicted from its magnetic properties  and that magnetism, in turn, might be tailored or applied to control elasticity. Credit: University of Nebraska-Lincoln

If Plastic Man, Elastigirl or Mr. Fantastic ever encounter Magneto, they'd better hope the iconic X-Men figure hasn't read the latest research from Christian Binek.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln physicist has found that, under certain conditions, the magnetic properties of a material can predict the relationship between its elasticity and temperature.

His finding may point the way toward controlling the elasticity of certain materials by designing their magnetic properties or applying a magnetic field to them. Given the ease with which magnetic fields can now be manipulated, Binek said, that could eventually mean tailoring elasticity with the mere press of a button or turn of a knob.

In the meantime, knowing that magnetism alone can predict how elasticity will respond  or not respond  to changes in temperature might help engineers better select or design materials for specific purposes.

Binek cited the 1986 disintegration of the Challenger space shuttle as a prominent example of elasticity's importance in engineering design. The hardening and failure of an elastic O-ring on Challenger's rocket booster  a consequence of cold temperatures  ultimately caused the shuttle to break apart, killing its seven crew members.

"So you can find materials that do not change elastic properties with temperature," said Binek, professor of physics and astronomy. "You may find materials that change with temperature at will. And you may find materials where you can, at a given temperature, change the elastic properties by an external control."

Thermodynamic duo

The laws of thermodynamics describe the relationships among many factors  temperature, entropy, volume, pressure  that affect how heat gets converted into other forms of energy. And it's long been known that these laws encompass the properties of magnetism and elasticity.

But by deriving a new formula from existing ones, Binek managed to show that the elasticity-temperature relationship is basically encoded in the magnetism of a material.

Binek's formula does have limitations. For now, it applies only if a material's magnetic behavior changes linearly with the magnetic field being applied to it. Likewise, the material's elasticity has to be linear, meaning that the amount of strain it exhibits has to be constantly proportional to the amount of physical stress being exerted on it.

Even so, the formula applies to materials featuring various forms of magnetism. That includes the form technically found in every material: diamagnetism, which describes a tendency to repel magnetic fields so weakly that it goes unnoticed without specialized instruments.

Superconductive materials  those that feature no resistance to electricity  display a pronounced form of diamagnetism below a critical temperature, at which point they begin completely repelling magnetic fields. Below that temperature threshold, Binek found something remarkable: The elasticity of superconductors no longer responds to temperature changes. That phenomenon held when he performed calculations for both ceramic and single-crystal superconductors, which have substantially different microscopic surfaces and atomic structures.

"My (mathematical) expression makes no claims about the material," Binek said. "It's very general. It only says: If the susceptibility (to magnetism) is constant, then the elastic property should be constant. If that is so, nothing else (about the superconductor) should matter, which is honestly a little difficult to believe.

"You wonder: How can something like an elastic property, which surely depends on structural details, be independent of anything related to the structure? But then you go to the (scientific) literature, apply your formula, and you find that, yes, it is correct."

The elastic-magnetic formula also applies to materials for which magnetic fields induce a weak attraction known as paramagnetism. And ferromagnetic materials  those strongly attracted to magnetic fields and usually synonymous with the term "magnetic"  obey Binek's formula above a certain temperature threshold that makes them behave more like their paramagnetic cousins.

Binek said the formula might even work for ferroelectric materials, whose alignment of positive and negative charges, or polarization, can be reversed by an electric field. Ferroelectricity facilitates the storage of electrical energy, making it useful in devices ranging from capacitors to random-access memory.

"Rather than tuning the elastic properties by a magnetic field, you may be able to tune them by electric fields," he said. "Technologically, that could be even more interesting.

"There are certainly many applications that one could think of, and I think many of them can be useful. I hope this is not the end of the story, but rather the beginning."

More information: Christian Binek. Elastic properties of superconductors and materials with weakly correlated spins, Scientific Reports (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-05238-8 Journal information: Scientific Reports
A new research tool to safeguard drinking water is now keeping a watchful eye on Lake Erie. This week, a robotic lake-bottom laboratory began tracking the levels of dangerous toxins produced by cyanobacteria that bloom each summer in the lake's western basin.

The goal is to provide advance warning to municipal drinking water managers and thereby prevent a recurrence of the water crisis that left more than 400,000 Toledo-area residents without safe drinking water for about two days in early August 2014 due to high levels of microcystin toxins.

The purchase of the $375,000 device, which is known as an environmental sample processor or ESP, was a direct response to the Toledo event. It is positioned at a spot on the lake bottom where it can provide about one day's notice if highly toxic water appears to be headed toward the city's water intake.

Tests will be done every other day initially, then increased to once a day starting Aug. 1 to coincide with the expected peak in bloom toxicity. Test results are automatically emailed to the inboxes of researchers back in Ann Arbor.

"Our number one goal is to protect water intakes and to prevent public exposure to these toxins," said aquatic ecologist Tom Johengen, associate director of the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR) at the University of Michigan. "If this device had been in place in the summer of 2014, it would have made a difference."

The project is a collaboration between CIGLR, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) in Ann Arbor, NOAA's National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. The robotic lab, which goes by the name ESPniagara, was purchased with funds from the federal Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which also helps pay the operating costs.

Two more ESPs will be deployed for testing in western Lake Erie next summer and should be in regular service in 2019, said Timothy Davis, a molecular ecologist at NOAA's Ann Arbor lab and leader of the GLERL-CIGLR harmful algal bloom monitoring team. Ultimately, toxicity data from the three autonomous labs will be incorporated into short-term algal bloom forecasts for the western Lake Erie basin.

"Hopefully, we will never have an event like Toledo again, because we'll be able to forecast bloom location, movement and toxicity with accuracy so that water treatment managers know when it's coming and can be prepared," Davis said.

More than a dozen ESPs are in use globally, but ESPniagara is the first in the Great Lakes and the first to test for microcystins, a class of toxins produced by certain freshwater cyanobacteria.

Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic organisms sometimes called blue-green algae. The Great Lakes are home to dozens of common cyanobacterial species, but only a few are toxic troublemakers. The Toledo water crisis was blamed on toxins produced by the common species Microcystis aeruginosa.

The ESPniagara "lab in a can" was field-tested in western Lake Erie last fall. It was deployed for regular service on July 11 and began routine toxin tests on July 18. It is located about 4 miles west of the Toledo municipal water intake at a depth of 18 feet. It will remain there until mid-August, when it will be retrieved for routine maintenance, then returned to the lake in September and October.

CIGLR research technician Emily Davenport spent the last few months getting the lab ready for its summer deployment. She grew up on the shores of Lake Erie in Catawba Island, Ohio, and attended Bowling Green State University.

"The local economies on the lakeshore depend on the vitality of the lake, so we all want Lake Erie to thrive," Davenport said. "I'm really proud to be working in Great Lakes water quality research, because it benefits people's lives in a way that's tangible.

"Sometimes it can be really hard to communicate the importance of science to the general public, but not in this case. We all need clean water."

In addition to her work with ESPniagara, Davenport is part of a CIGLR-NOAA harmful algal bloom monitoring team that makes weekly trips to Lake Erie to collect water samples for analysis back in Ann Arbor. Getting those test results typically takes 24 to 48 hours. But with ESPniagara, microcystin results are relayed to the researchers three to four hours after the device collects a water sample.

"The whole point of having this ESP is to get near-real-time, in situ toxicity measurements on a daily time scale instead of once a week," Johengen said. "The improved temporal resolution will allow us to provide more timely warnings to water managers and will give researchers new insights into the dynamics of bloom toxicity."

The team's weekly sampling trips to Lake Erie will continue and are part of a comprehensive harmful algal bloom research program that also includes analysis of satellite imagery, genetic studies of cyanobacteria and the issuing of regular HABs bulletins to the public. A significant portion of the team's $2.5 million annual budget is provided by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

On July 13, NOAA issued its seasonal harmful algal bloom forecast for Lake Erie, which called for a "significant" HAB to develop in the western basin this summer. The main driver of Lake Erie's harmful algal blooms is elevated phosphorus from watersheds draining to the lake's western basin, particularly from the heavily agricultural Maumee River watershed.

NOAA's harmful algal bloom forecasts predict the size, or biomass, of a bloom but say nothing about its toxicity. Levels of microcystin toxins in the bloom vary throughout the summer as the composition of its cyanobacterial community changes. ESPniagara provides a first step toward providing Lake Erie HABs forecasts that include toxicity information, Johengen said.

ESPniagara weighs more than 1,000 pounds and is lowered into the lake from the deck of a ship. It consists of a protective steel framework surrounding an analytical biochemistry lab inside a waterproof canister, along with a buoy that floats overhead.

The steel framework is called the ESP lander, and it rests directly on the lake bottom. The buoy is tethered to the lab by a plastic hose and a data cable. The buoy collects water from the surface and pumps it down the hose to the lab, and it is also fitted with a cellular modem to transmit results back to Ann Arbor. Water samples are also collected 4 feet above the lake bottom, the same depth used by many municipal water intakes.

Inside the custom-built wet lab, cyanobacteria cells are filtered from the water samples, then the microcystin toxins are extracted from the cells. The liquid extract is then processed using an ELISA analytical biochemistry assay, a common biomedical test that uses antibodies and color change to identify substances. Once the test is complete, an onboard camera snaps a picture of the result and sends it back to Ann Arbor, where the brightness of the image is used to determine the amount of microcystin in the sample.

"The Toledo water crisis pushed the issue of Lake Erie harmful algal blooms into the spotlight and showed how impactful they can be to people's daily livesand potentially to human healthby affecting one of the basic resources that we need for life, which is clean drinking water," Davis said.
Rwanda last year exported around 14 tonnes of essential oilsgeranium, moringa, patchouli and tagetesbringing in $473,000, according to the National Agricultural Export Development Board.

Inside a metal shed in southeastern Rwanda, Nicholas Hitimana brandished a plastic container holding a green liquid: geranium essential oil, freshly distilled and ready for export at more than $200 (175 euros) a kilo.

The pioneer of essential oils in Rwanda, Hitimana said he understood over a decade ago "the need to develop high-value crops" in his hilly nation of just 2.6 million hectares (6.4 million acres).

Agriculture accounts for nearly a third of GDP and employs four-fifths of the population and, as a result, there is "little arable land" remaining.

"On a hectare, if we grow beans, we earn about $2,000 a year, whereas on the same land, if we grow geranium, the income can reach $6,000 or even $8,000," Hitimana says.

The trained agronomist embodies Rwanda's ambition of diversifying its agriculture and increasing the value of exports by getting into the lucrative global market for essential oils. To this end, Hitimana has been importing geraniums from South Africa since 2004.

At the time the flower was virtually unknown in Rwanda, but Hitimana was convinced of the "great potential" of the essential oil sector.

Four crops a year

"In South Africa there can only be two harvests a year, but here, as there is no winter, it is possible to get up to four crops a year," says Hitimana, whose company Ikirezi Natural Products has since grown and diversified.

With 25 hectares of plantations, it produces 1,000 kilogrammes of essential oils derived from patchouli, lemon grass and eucalyptus as well as geraniums. The oils are exported to Canada, South Africa, the US and elsewhere for use in the perfume industry.

The company employs 70 farmers. "At first, it was not easy to convince them to abandon subsistence for commercial agriculture," he says, adding the work is more precise than growing beans.

Agronomist Nicholas Hitimana has been at the forefront of Rwanda's ambition to diversify its agriculture and increase exports by getting into the lucrative global market for essential oils.

"We need to plant on time, manure on time, hoe, turn the soil, irrigate and harvest on time", or risk a "drastically" reduced yield, Hitimana says, noting that it takes between 600-1,000 kilos of geraniums to produce a single kilo of oil.

A few years on, and the employees seem convinced. "Since I've been working here, I've been able to build a house with a tin roof, I can pay for my son's schooling and buy everything I need," says 55-year-old Stephanie Mukamana, busily weeding around a geranium plant.

Last year, Rwanda exported around 14 tonnes of essential oilsgeranium, moringa, patchouli and tagetesbringing in $473,000, according to the National Agricultural Export Development Board.

Rwanda is also cultivating pyrethrum, used in natural insecticides.

Growth market

According to the India-based firm Market Research Future (MRFR), essential oils are increasingly in demand in richer countries for use in cosmetics, food and pharmaceuticals. The world market is forecast to grow by seven percent between 2017 and 2022, says MRFR.

To get its share of the cake, Rwanda opened an essential oil laboratory three years ago, the first of its kind in the region, allowing quality control.

"One of the main challenges facing Rwanda is a growing trade deficit and a limited number of competitive companies that can meet regional and international export standards," says Patience Mutesi, Rwanda director for TradeMark East Africa, which promotes regional trade and helped fund the lab project.

The laboratory will "enable Rwandan companies to access new and lucrative markets... by strengthening consumer confidence in the quality of Rwandan products," she says.

Sitting in front of a brand new chromatogram in the Kigali laboratory, Antoine Mukunzi, a Rwanda Standards Authority official, is satisfied with his small country's progress: "We cannot compete in terms of exported volumes, but we can in terms of quality."

 2017 AFP
Eruption. Credit: University of East Anglia

New research by the University of East Anglia (UEA) shows that 'shadow networks' linking volunteers with authorities can help keep some of the millions of people living near dangerous volcanoes safer.

These informal networks see community members working in close collaboration with scientists and government officials on monitoring, communications, training and evacuation processes.

The study focused on the 'Throat of Fire' Tungurahua volcano in the Ecuadorian Andes, which is surrounded by several towns, with around 30,000 people living close by. The researchers examined how the official disaster risk management system, scientific monitoring and community knowledge have adapted and evolved over 15 years to be able to cope with long-term volcanic activity.

The findings, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, show that the network has helped make improvements in monitoring, decision-making, communication systems and evacuations in Tungurahua.

The team of interdisciplinary researchers suggest the success story there forms a blueprint for best practice community engagement in disaster risk reduction projects around the world  where more than 600 million people live close to active volcanoes, and around two million have been displaced as a result of volcanic activity over the last 30 years.

Ash fall. Credit: University of East Anglia

Lead author Dr Teresa Armijos, from UEA's School of International Development, said: "We argue that the shadow network around Tungurahua volcano has played a key role in improving collective responses to volcanic risk, allowing people to continue farming and maintain their livelihoods in relative safety during heightened volcanic activity, and minimising the need for forced evacuations, which are highly disruptive.

"By looking at the non-official interactions in combination with the official disaster risk management system, our findings also show how communities can adapt to the complex problems and environmental change created by a long-lived volcanic eruption. This relationship is vital to enable a strong response to hazards in the future and is a blueprint for how other communities can engage with authorities and scientists to reduce disaster risk in the longer term."

The team conducted 130 interviews with government officials, scientists, community leaders and people living close to the Tungurahua volcano. Tensions between public and experts are common in hazard assessment and communication. In this case, however, and as a result of the shadow networks, there has been increased trust in the authorities and scientists, enabling better communication between the different groups, with ad-hoc support from the military and local government to move people in and out of high-risk areas during periods of heightened volcanic activity.

Another key element of this shadow network has been its role in generating observations of the volcano in near real-time and communicating these with scientists.

Patty Mothes, from the Instituto Geofisico Escuela Politecnica Nacional (IG-EPN), is an investigator on the umbrella project Strengthening Resilience in Volcanic Areas (STREVA) and contributed to the research. She said: "This study is very important in that it documents the success of a local volunteer group who have stuck together for almost 20 years and their close relationship with the volcano, its activity and the scientists like us who monitor it.

Tungurahua. Credit: University of East Anglia

"There is a trust that has developed and is expressed between the volunteers and the monitoring scientists. This trust is maintained by having daily radio calls and also by working together in the field. There is a good dose of sharing, mutual trust, and the activity of the volcano to keep everyone interested."

The team carried out a detailed study of communication strategies and social responses during two periods of escalating volcanic activity in Tungurahua in 2006 and 2014. In 2006, an eruption killed six people and destroyed more than 50 homes. In the years before and after this eruption, intense ash falls have destroyed crops, killed animals, and damaged roads and other infrastructure. Despite this, hundreds of families continue to live and work on the slopes of the volcano to sustain their livelihoods.

By 2014, processes between community volunteers, local scientists and authorities had improved with a pan-volcano radio system and significant scientific adaptations including an improved capability to monitor and interpret the volcano's behaviour.

Co-author Dr Jeremy Phillips, of the University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, said: "By examining cases like this, we can learn lessons about the potential of community-based disaster risk reduction in other contexts. It provides valuable evidence for how to reduce volcanic risk in practice, which is a critical step in finding ways of increasing society's resilience to events of this nature."

Ms Mothes added that as a result of the lessons learned at Tungurahua, the IG-EPN is already involved in two other volunteer networks at active volcanoes, Cotopaxi and Cerro Negro-Chiles on the Ecuador-Colombia border.

'Adapting to changes in volcanic behaviour: formal and informal interactions for enhanced risk management at Tungurahua Volcano, Ecuador' is published in Global Environmental Change.

More information: Maria Teresa Armijos et al. Adapting to changes in volcanic behaviour: Formal and informal interactions for enhanced risk management at Tungurahua Volcano, Ecuador, Global Environmental Change (2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2017.06.002
Couples who live together share many things: Bedrooms, bathrooms, food, and even bacteria. After analyzing skin microbiomes from cohabitating couples, microbial ecologists at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, found that people who live together significantly influence the microbial communities on each other's skin.

The commonalities were strong enough that computer algorithms could identify cohabitating couples with 86 percent accuracy based on skin microbiomes alone, the researchers report this week in mSystems, an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

However, the researchers also reported that cohabitation is likely less influential on a person's microbial profile than other factors like biological sex and what part of the body is being studied. In addition, the microbial profile from a person's body usually looks more like their own microbiome than like that of their significant other.

"You look like yourself more than you look like your partner," says Ashley Ross, who led the study while a graduate student in the lab of Josh Neufeld.

"Can we link couples back together? The answer is yes, but not a very loud yes," says senior author Neufeld, whose lab focuses on microbial communities and their interactions.

Neufeld and Ross, together with Andrew Doxey, analyzed 330 skin swabs collected from 17 sites on the participants, all of whom were heterosexual and lived in the Waterloo region. Participants self-collected samples with swabs, and sites included the upper eyelids, outer nostrils, inner nostrils, armpits, torso, back, navel, and palms of hands.

Neufeld says the study is the first to identify regions of skin with the most similar microbiomes between partners. They found the strongest similarities on partners' feet.

"In hindsight, it makes sense," says Neufeld. "You shower and walk on the same floor barefoot. This process likely serves as a form of microbial exchange with your partner, and also with your home itself." As a result, partners end up with the same mix.

The analyses revealed stronger correlations in some sites than in others. For example, microbial communities on the inner thigh were more similar among people of the same biological sex than between cohabiting partners. Computer algorithms could differentiate between men and women with 100 percent accuracy by analyzing inner thigh samples alone, suggesting that a person's biological sex can be determined based on that region, but not others.

The researchers also found that the microbial profiles of sites on a person's left side - like hands, eyelids, armpits, or nostrils - strongly resemble those on their right side. Of all the swab sites, the least microbial diversity was found on either side of the outer nose.

Ross says previous research had shown that skin microbial communities vary within an individual from region to region, but she wanted to know what other factors - like cohabitation - help shape the microbiome. In previous work, she and Neufeld analyzed samples collected from door handles at the University of Waterloo to determine whether buildings could be identified based on their door-handle microbiomes. In the future, she says she hopes to see similar analyses of same-sex couples, or couples of different ethnic backgrounds.

Neufeld says the study is part of a larger research focus aimed at understanding how skin microbiomes adapt and change with their host - not only people, but other mammals as well. "Ultimately what we're trying to learn is whether skin microorganisms have co-evolved with their hosts over time," he says.
Researchers have used a new technique to create a polarizing beamsplitter for terahertz waves. Credit: Mittleman lab / Brown University

Brown University researchers have developed a new method of manipulating the polarization of light at terahertz frequencies.

The technique uses stacks of carefully spaced metal plates to make a polarizing beamsplitter, a device that splits a beam of light by its differing polarization states, sending vertically polarized light in one direction and horizontally polarized light in another. Such a beamsplitter could be useful in a wide variety of systems that make use of terahertz radiation, from imaging systems to future communications networks.

In the imaging world, the ability to deliver and detect radiation at different polarizations could be useful in terahertz microscopy and material characterization. In communications, polarized beams can enable multiple data streams to be sent down the same medium without interference.

"This stack-of-plates idea has advantages over traditional methods of manipulating polarization in the terahertz region," said Dan Mittleman, a professor in Brown's School of Engineering and senior author of a research paper describing the work in the journal Scientific Reports. "It's cheaper and physically more robust than other methods, and it's more versatile in what it allows us to do."

Rajind Mendis, a research assistant professor at Brown, led the work along with Mittleman, Brown graduate student Wei Zhang and Masaya Nagai, an associate professor at Osaka University in Japan.

The terahertz range is the swath of the electromagnetic spectrum between microwave and infrared frequencies. Use of terahertz waves in technological applications such as spectroscopy, sensing, imaging and ultra-high-bandwidth communications is growing, and researchers are working to develop the hardware components necessary to build these advanced terahertz systems.

Polarization refers to the orientation of an electromagnetic wave's peaks and valleys as the wave propagates. If a wave is propagating toward you, the peaks and valleys can be oriented vertically, horizontally or anywhere in between.

"Polarization is one of the key properties of any electromagnetic wave," Mittleman said. "Being able to manipulate polarizationto measure it or to change itis one of the important capabilities you need in any electromagnetic system."

Researchers have developed a new device that can split a beam of terahertz radiation by polarization state. Credit: Mittleman Lab / Brown University

In the visible light realm, for example, manipulating polarization is used to create modern 3-D movies and to make sunglasses that reduce the glare of reflected light. Polarizing sunglasses are made by arranging polymer strands horizontally within lenses like bars on a jail cell. Those strands allow light that's polarized vertically to pass through, while blocking horizontally polarized light, which is the dominant polarization state of light reflected off shiny surfaces like cars and water.

Existing methods of manipulating polarization in the terahertz range are very similar to the technique used in polarizing sunglasses, albeit scaled to the much longer wavelengths of terahertz light compared to visible light. Polarizing filters for terahertz are generally an array of metal wires a few microns in diameter and spaced several microns apart.

The new technique the Brown and Osaka team developed replaces the wires with a stack of closely-spaced steel plates. Each pair of plates forms what's known as a parallel-plate waveguide. When terahertz light is shined on the stack at a 45-degree angle, it splits the beam by exciting two waveguide modes. One beam of vertically polarized light passes straight through the device, while another beam of horizontally polarized light is reflected in a 90-degree angle from the original beam axis.

The technique has a number of advantages over traditional wire filters, the researchers say. The stack-of-plates architecture, which is knows as an "artificial dielectric," is easy to make, and the materials are inexpensive. The plates are also much less fragile than wires.

"The artificial-dielectric concept also makes the device more versatile," Mendis said. "The device can be easily tuned for use at different terahertz frequencies simply by changing the size of the spacers separating the plates or by changing the illuminating angle."

Another advantage is that with the addition of a second similar artificial-dielectric structure, the researchers were able to build a device called an isolator. Isolators are used on high-powered lasers to prevent light from being reflected back into a laser emitter, which could destabilize or even damage it. A terahertz isolator could be an important component for future high-powered terahertz devices.

The Brown and Osaka team is in the process of patenting the new artificial-dielectric devices, and the researchers are hopeful that these devices will enable the development of new terahertz systems with far better capabilities.

"In anything you might want to do with an optical system, it's useful to be able to manipulate polarization," Mittleman said. "This is a simple, efficient, effective and versatile way to do that."

More information: Rajind Mendis et al, Artificial dielectric polarizing-beamsplitter and isolator for the terahertz region, Scientific Reports (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-06297-7 Journal information: Scientific Reports
- Senator Buruji Kashamu's men reportedly dump PDP for mega party

- Organs of the PDP hold meetings at the partys secretariat in Abuja to discuss the future of the party

Following the fallout of the Supreme Courts judgement which sacked Ali Modu Sheriff as the national chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), some members of his faction in the south west have reportedly defected to the Mega Party of Nigeria (MPN)

READ ALSO: BREAKING: FG releases details of Paris club payment to states (full details)

Olalere Olayinka, the media aide to the Ekiti state governor who described the reported defection as good news in a Facebook post on Wednesday, July 19, stated that the decampees also included Buruji Kashamu's men.

See the post by Olayinka below:

Daily Post reported that the defections took place at the Mega Party of Nigeria (MPN) secretariat in Ibadan, the state Oyo state capital on Wednesday, July 19.

The decampees who were mostly Senator Buruji Kashamus loyalists include the senators senatorial liaison assistant (SLA), Otunba Adeleke Adekoya, Ebenezer Alabi, running mate to Jimoh Ibrahim, and the factional PDP Ondo candidate backed by Kashamu and Sheriff.

See some photos of the decampees below:

The MPN secretariat in Ibadan, the Oyo state capital, photo credits, Daily Post

The defections took place at the MPN secretariat, photo credits, Daily Post

Some of the PDP defectors who just joined the MPN, photo credits, Daily Post

The PDP defectors who just joined the MPN, photo credits, Daily Post

Meanwhile, top members of the PDP have met in Abuja to discuss the future of the party following the court judgement which resolved the leadership crisis which rocked the party.

Organs of the party have been having a series of meetings which began on Monday, July 17.

Some of the members who met on Monday, included former presidents and vice Presidents, PDP governors, national executive committee (NEC) members, Board of Trustees (BoT) members, National Assembly members, former PDP governors, former PDP Ministers and all former National Officers of the Party.

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In another meeting scheduled for Tuesday, July 18, the Board of Trustees (BoT) of the party met by 11am, while the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the party had a meeting by 2pm.

All the meetings took place at the PDP National Secretariat in Abuja.

In the video below, Legit.ng former president, Goodluck Jonathan, said that the PDP must work towards strengthening itself because Nigerians still have faith in the party.

Source: Legit.ng
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Microsoft Transitioning Windows PowerShell 6.0 into PowerShell Core

Microsoft recently explained its Windows PowerShell roadmap plans, which will increasingly focus on PowerShell Core, going forward.

PowerShell Core has capabilities for managing "the basic features" of the Windows PowerShell scripting language, according to an MSDN article, which described it as a "module." However, PowerShell Core essentially will be supplanting Windows PowerShell 6.0. The PowerShell team explained some of these details last week in an announcement of its PowerShell 6.0 roadmap plans.

The most recent version of Windows PowerShell for use in production environments is Windows PowerShell 5.1, which was released as two editions, according to Wikipedia's history. There was a Desktop edition for use on Windows systems. There also was a Core edition that was designed for the .NET Core. The PowerShell Core edition was bundled with Nano Server, the minimal footprint configuration option of Windows Server 2016.

At this point, it might be expected that Microsoft would be planning to release Windows PowerShell 6.0 as the successor to Windows PowerShell 5.1. Windows PowerShell 6.0 actually was released in beta form last year, according to a PowerShell team blog post and appeared as open source code. However, Windows PowerShell 6.0 instead will get subsumed by PowerShell Core, which is currently at the beta stage, having been released last month.

Here's how the team explained that change in plans:

The next release of PowerShell (6.0) was open-sourced last year and is currently in beta. However, it is PowerShell Core designed to run cross-platform on Windows, Mac, and Linux. PowerShell Core runs on top of .NET Core, a cross-platform, open-source version of the code base powering most of the Windows world. This version of PowerShell will be different than the Windows PowerShell edition you see built into Windows today.

Microsoft is now referring to "PowerShell Core" as "PowerShell Core 6.0." The nomenclature is confusing, since few people recall even a PowerShell Core 1.0 release. The important part, though, is that PowerShell 6.0 is going away, replaced by PowerShell Core.

This month, Joey Aiello, a program manager on the PowerShell team, responded to direct question in that regard, indicating that PowerShell 6.0 won't get developed in the near future:

The goal with PowerShell Core 6.0 and all the compatibility shims is to supplant the need for Windows PowerShell 6.0 while converging the ecosystem on PowerShell Core. So no, we currently don't have any plans to do a Windows PowerShell 6.0.

Aiello explained a bit about the editions of PowerShell. Windows PowerShell is built on top of the .NET Framework and goes by the "Desktop" edition name. It's built into Windows and Windows Server.

PowerShell Core is built on top of .NET Core and goes by the "Core" edition name. It's cross platform, and available for Linux, Mac OS and Windows.

Right now, Microsoft is trying to make PowerShell Core "as compatible with Windows PowerShell as technically possible," Aiello indicated. It's doing that by standardizing it on .NET Standard 2.0, a set of common APIs for the .NET platform.

With .NET Standard, Microsoft is creating one base class library for developers. They won't have to deal with the "three major flavors of .NET," said Immo Landwerth, a program manager on the .NET team. He explained in a 2016 blog post that Microsoft had forked the .NET code for various purposes "quite a bit over the years." It was done to support different operating system platforms, but the forking caused problems for developers. Microsoft expects that .NET Standard will make it easier for developers to share and reuse code between platforms, and it is targeting its compatibility efforts via .NET Standard 2.0, Landwerth added.

The drive toward compatibility is ongoing. Aiello noted that "most of the modules that ship as part of Windows (e.g. DnsClient, Hyper-V, NetTCPIP, Storage, etc.) have not been explicitly ported to .NET Core yet."

At this point, Microsoft wants testers to give feedback on latest beta release of PowerShell Core (currently at version 6.0, beta 4), which is housed at this GitHub repository. Verification that existing scripts will work with it will help advance PowerShell Core more toward production release, Aiello indicated. Microsoft is targeting the release of PowerShell Core 6.0 by "the end of the year."

As for Windows PowerShell 5.1, it'll be a "supported component of Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016," Aiello promised. However, it'll "likely not receive major feature updates or lower-priority bug fixes" over time, he added.
UPDATE: Israel Embassy Shooting in Jordan Deepens Uncertainties about Security at Temple Mount

Israel began implementing new security measures at entrances of one of the most holy sites in Jerusalem.

[UPDATE: July 25, 2017 8:00 a.m.]

An Israeli embassy security guard fatally shot two Jordanians in Amman Sunday after one of them reportedly attacked him with a screwdriver.

The incident prompted concerns that the increased security measures at Temple Mount might exacerbate tensions between the neighboring states.

The incident did not seems as if it is in direct relation to the placement of metal detectors at the entrances of one of the most holy sites in Israel, but many believe the incident could spark even more protests from those that believe the additional security is unnecessary.

Thousands of protesters took to the streets against the Israeli policies at the shrine motivating security officials to look into a compromise that would keep the temple secure but also let those who wish to worship inside at peace with the amount of security.

Security officials hinted that a solution is in the works, and will be revealed in time.

Original story posted below.

Following recent events in the country and around the world, Israeli authorities have decided to implement security measures, including checkpoints and metal detectors, at entrances to one of Jerusalems most sensitive holy sites.

The call for security began after three gunman killed two police officers at the sacred al-Aqsa Mosque compound just last week. The perpetrators, Palestinian Muslims with Israeli citizenship, were caught on police cameras shooting two police officers before darting off. Security forces tracked down the assailants and they were shot dead by security forces.

Immediately after the incident, Israeli police closed the mosque and prevented worshipers from entering the compound for the first time since 1967 in order to install the new security measures.

In an interview on Israel Army Radio on Sunday, Maj. Gen. Yoram Halevy, the Jerusalem District police commander, said knives, slingshots, batons, spikes and unexploded ordnance were found during a police sweep of the area after the two policemen were shot. Israeli police said the measures were necessary to secure the site and ensure there were no other weapons present while people come to worship.

The move was widely criticized by many in the Muslim world, who view the ramped-up security as an attempt to change the precious status quo at the site. Though the mosque reopened on Sunday afternoon, many boycotted, saying they would not be back until the security measures are taken down, something the Israeli police say they are not comfortable with.
Mexico to Strengthen Security on U.S.-Bound Flights

Electronics bigger than a cell phone will be subject to added security on flights heading to the United States from Mexico.

Laptops and tablets on U.S.-bound flights from Mexico will be subjected to heightened carry-on security measures beginning Wednesday.

The announcement comes just as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security requested an increase in security on electronics being boarded onto planes.

The department recommended that passengers travel with as few of those devices as possible, with electronics larger than a cell phone needing to be placed outside of carry-on luggage when going through security checkpoints. Those devices are subject to additional screening.

In March, the U.S. authorities banned cabin electronics on departing flights from 10 airports in the Middle East over concerns extremists could hide bombs inside of laptops.
Indonesia's government on Wednesday banned the local branch of Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, rejecting criticism from rights groups that the move was undemocratic. The government said it revoked the licence of Hizb ut-Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) because the group conducted activities that were against the state ideology. Hizb ut-Tahrir, which calls for Islamic law and wants to unify all Muslims into a caliphate, has been operating for decades in Indonesia and has tens of thousands of foillowers. "With HTI's legal status revoked, the group is therefore disbanded," the justice ministry said in a statement. HTI said it would challenge the decision. "This is a true form of abuse by the government against its own citizens," HTI spokesman Ismail Yusanto told AFP. The move came after President Joko Widodo issued a decree last week that strengthened the government's power to outlaw any groups which it deemed were opposed to the state ideology, or which spread hatred against other races or religions. The ideology, known as pancasila, officially encourages moderation and tolerance between different faiths. Widodo, a pluralist, has been under pressure to manage the growing influence of hardliners in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country. Rights activists said the decree could stifle a broad range of democratic institutions. Legal expert Refly Harun said it was the first time in the reform era that the government had disbanded an organisation without due process of law. "The presidential decree is a blank cheque for the government to disband any group without due process of law," he told AFP. Indonesia was under dictator Suharto for more than three decades until the iron-fisted ruler was toppled in 1998 and democracy began to flourish in the country.
By Aidan Lewis TUNIS (Reuters) - Buoyed by the end of a long military campaign in Benghazi and new signs of foreign support, Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar has been signalling his intent to extend his power to the capital, Tripoli. Haftar, a one-time ally of Muammar Gaddafi who fell out with the former Libyan leader in the 1980s, emerged as a strongman in eastern Libya over the past three years, using the Benghazi campaign to build up his forces whilst shunning a U.N.-mediated peace plan. His strategy now appears to be to forge the kind of local alliances used to advance into key oil ports and parts of the south over the past year. But it is a strategy that would be higher risk and harder to achieve in the capital. It also remains unclear how any move on Tripoli would materialise, and whether Haftar will shift to politics by standing in elections. His supporters paint him as the figure capable of ending Libya's disorder by crushing extremists and stamping out militias. Opponents from Libya's "revolutionary" camp, some former rebels who fought to overthrow Gaddafi in a Nato-backed uprising in 2011, fear a return to autocratic rule. Haftar, who lived for 20 years in the United States before returning to Libya for the uprising, has long hinted at his designs on Tripoli as part his plan to "liberate" all Libya, an ambition recently repeated. Addressing a large gathering of eastern tribal leaders late last month, he said time was running out for the beleagured U.N.-backed government in the capital. "Our families in Tripoli and our brothers want us to enter," he said. "We can enter, but we want to do it in peace, without spilling blood." 'INTENSE CONVERSATIONS' Victory in Benghazi, which Haftar claimed on July 5, followed a series of other advances by forces loyal to his Libyan National Army (LNA). In September, they took control of a string of oil ports southwest of Benghazi, and earlier this year they moved into strategic military bases in Libya's central desert, as forces from Misrata, a hub of military opposition to Haftar since 2014, withdrew. Progress was achieved largely by winning over local tribes and armed groups  a technique Haftar is said to be seeking to emulate further west. "A similar process is going on in Tripolitania on the coast, a really intense series of conversations," said one Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity and referring to the capital and surrounding region. "The intent is absolutely there, but he's trying to gauge when it's possible." Among those Haftar has been courting are the Warfalla and Tarhouna tribes, which have a presence in areas on Haftar's potential route to the capital as well as in Tripoli itself, said Mohamed Eljarh, a non-resident fellow of the Atlantic Council, based in eastern Libya. He said people close to LNA thinking were also expecting a move on Sirte, the coastal city on Libya's central coastline, where Islamic State established a stronghold in 2015. Since Islamic State was ousted in a Misrata-led campaign last year, the city centre has been controlled by a brigade of Salafists, ultra-conservatives who Haftar has worked with in the east and reportedly is also cultivating ties with in Tripoli. TWO CURRENTS But doubts remain over both Haftar's capacity and his intentions. "Within the LNA camp and Haftar's inner circle you have two different currents  those calling to be politically engaged and positively engaged, and then you have others who are saying, 'the only way to do this is through military victory,'" said Eljarh. For more than two weeks since Haftar appeared on television in a white uniform to declare victory in Benghazi, fighting has continued in one of the city's neighbourhoods. The LNA, which says it lost more than 5,000 men in the Benghazi campaign, has so far been unable to gain control over Derna, a city with a history of militancy further east along the coast. Misrata is divided, but likely to fight if it feels its interests are threatened. Winning Tripoli may depend on access to funding to gain backing from the capital's fickle armed groups, some of which fiercely oppose Haftar. "There is recognition that he needs a lot more money," said the Western diplomat. "He's looking for a chunk of cash for securing loyalties in Tripoli." That in turn may depend on foreign support, which Haftar has so far received primarily from Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. More recently, he has developed closer ties with Russia. Western powers still formally support the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli, and their envoys say they have told Haftar they will not support a military solution in Libya. But they have also repeatedly stated that Haftar must have a role, and have given more open recognition to the LNA's advances in Benghazi. European diplomatic visits to the east have become regular, and the U.S. ambassador most recently met Haftar in Amman on July 9. (Editng by Larry King)
By Andrew Osborn and Natalia Zinets MOSCOW/KIEV (Reuters) - The pro-Russian rebel leader of a breakaway region in eastern Ukraine proposed on Tuesday replacing Ukraine with a new federal state, in comments that could further undermine a 2015 peace deal that is already faltering. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko rejected the idea, describing Alexander Zakharchenko, leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), as part of "a puppet show", with Russia pulling his strings in order to relay a message. France and Germany, which are involved in diplomatic efforts to end the Ukraine crisis, also condemned the proposal. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian agencies that Zakharchenko's statement was Zakharchenko's own initiative and that the Kremlin had learned about it from media reports. Ukrainian officials contend that Russia wants to show the world, and the United States especially, that it can keep the crisis in a suspended state and deepen it if need be. A new U.S. envoy for the Ukraine crisis was appointed this month and Moscow and Washington are likely to start regularly engaging on the issue. Zakharchenko, who would scarcely have expected anything other than outright rejection from Kiev, said in a declaration that he and his allies were proposing a new state called Malorossiya (Little Russia) be set up with its capital in rebel-held Donetsk. Malorossiya was the term used to describe swaths of modern-day Ukraine when they were part of the Russian Empire in tsarist times and is one many Ukrainians today regard as offensive. Ukraine, a country of about 42.5 million people, declared independence from Moscow in 1991. "We are proposing to residents of Ukraine a peaceful way out of a difficult situation without war. It's our last proposal," Zakharchenko said in a statement. The new state would be federal, with regions enjoying a large degree of autonomy. He said the move was backed by delegates from various Ukrainian regions, but a statement from the neighbouring rebel territory of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic said it had been unaware of the initiative and did not support it. "SICK FANTASIES" His declaration cast a shadow over the faltering Minsk peace agreement between the rebels and the Ukrainian government, which has failed to quell fighting between the two sides and has only been partially implemented since a pro-Russian uprising erupted in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Russia denies accusations it has delivered arms and provided troops backing rebels in the industrial, largely Russian-speaking east. On Tuesday the Kremlin said it remained committed to the Minsk peace deal. Yevhen Marchuk, Ukraine's representative in the talks on implementing the peace deal, told Ukrainian TV channel 112.ua that Zakharchenko's declaration would complicate negotiations and looked like a Russian attempt to sabotage the process. France condemned the idea and demanded Russia do more to prevent a further escalation. A German government spokeswoman also criticised the move, calling it "totally unacceptable". Ukraine's top military commander, Viktor Muzhenko, said on social media that the Ukrainian people would "bury" Malorossiya, calling the plan one of the rebels' "sick fantasies". Three former rebel leaders told Reuters in May that a top aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin decides how the pro-Moscow administration of eastern Ukraine is run and who gets what jobs there, challenging Kremlin denials that it calls the shots in the region. (Additional reporting by Polina Devitt in Moscow, Margarita Antidze in Tbilisi, John Irish in Paris and Andreas Rinke in Berlin; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Gareth Jones and Richard Balmforth)
Casino at Solaire Resort and Casino. Photo: Reuters

A Singaporean woman has been rescued by Filipino authorities after being kidnapped in the Philippines, said a report by The Philippine Daily Inquirer.

The woman, identified as Wu Yan, was at Solaire Resort and Casino in Pasay City where she was forcibly taken by three men and a woman. The kidnappers then beat and threatened her in a room in Bayview International Towers where they demanded US$180,000 (S$246,000) for her release.

The Bureau of Immigration (BI) and the Philippine National Police carried out an operation on Tuesday (18 July) to nab a group of 45 kidnappers, who were all foreign nationals.

In a statement on Wednesday (19 July), BIs Fugitive Search Unit and the polices Anti-Kidnapping Group said that there has been a series of kidnapping incidents in the last few months targeting tourists who are casino high-rollers, which the group of kidnappers is believed to be responsible for.

A total of 26 foreigners were rounded up in the initial operation, but they failed to present any immigration documents and refused to divulge their identities.

Out of the 26 arrested, Wu identified three of them as her kidnappers. They were Malaysian nationals Ng Yu Meng and Goh Kok Keong, and Chinese national Zhang Fuxing, who is allegedly the leader of the group.

Nineteen more foreigners who are believed to be a part of the group were arrested in a follow-up operation. All 45 of them were then brought to the headquarters of the polices Anti-Kidnapping Group in Quezon City.

Other Singapore stories:
Two suspected rebels and an Indian soldier were killed Tuesday in disputed Kashmir along the de facto border with Pakistan, where the two sides traded fire for a second day. Army spokesman Colonel Rajesh Kalia said Indian soldiers exchanged fire with unknown combatants as they tried to cross the Line of Control (LoC) into Indian-administered Kashmir. "Two bodies and three weapons were recovered from the site of the firing," Kalia told AFP. In a separate incident an Indian soldier shot and killed his senior officer at a frontier post in Uri following a dispute between the two, Kalia said. An investigation by the army and police is under way. Pakistani officials meanwhile said that at least two civilians were killed and 11 others wounded in cross-border firing by Indian soldiers. "A man and woman were martyred and seven others were wounded in firing by Indian troops in Sumahni sector," local government official Chaudhry Guftar told AFP. Pakistan government official Raja Arshad said four people were also wounded when another volley of shots were fired across the border into Nakyal sector. Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since the end of British colonial rule in 1947. Both countries claim the Himalayan territory in full and have fought two wars over it. India and Pakistan regularly exchange fire at the border despite a ceasefire agreement signed in 2003, and accuse each other of killing soldiers and civilians. An Indian soldier and an eight-year-old girl died Monday in an exchange of fire at the border, just a day after Pakistan accused its regional rival of killing four of its troops.
And the dichotomy between US and UK filmmaking really came across in the video, did you have that planned from the beginning or did it come about naturally as the project progressed?

Yeah it was planned from the beginning  I had to show those two worlds because if I didnt, it would feel one sided. And I didnt want it to come across as showing independent videos as better, or commercial videos as betterit doesnt matter. You can do the mainstream stuff, then as Magee pointed out in the video, that commercial stuff is needed to push the independent stuff and keep people wanting something different. Ive always agreed with that statement, its something thats unspoken.

When Fully Flared came out, I dont think many would disagree that its one of the greatest skate films ever  just the way it was put together, the anticipation for the release, all of it. That was the first skate video I ever saw, so for me that was setting the standard. Then I saw Landscapes Horizons straight after and was like, How did I go from enjoying an hour long video that had a huge budget, slow mo, all that shit, to Horizons, which spoke to me in a completely different way? It made me want to be a London skateboarder, you know? I want to copy that style, I want to skate like Jin Shimizu, thats what that film did for me. Its just relatable. Nowadays relatable skateboarding has become even more popular it seems. So those two worlds, theyve both affected me in such a way, positively and in equal measure. I had to make my own experience clear on screen.

The video covers some vast ground with regards to who is interviewed  how hard was it to get hold of, and speak to the amount of people that you did?

You know what, it was and it wasnt hard. Now with social media, it seems so easyI Instagram messaged most of the guys and they pretty much all responded. I dont know why [laughs], maybe just the idea for them was quite interesting. Ben at Sidewalk helped me a lot with the UK side of things, but for the US guys, direct messaging them and having them get back to me, its still unreal to me. Youve seen the film now and their responses  it feels honest, perhaps Ive managed to catch a side of them that people dont often see.

And I guess no one has really touched this on such a scale before, which is going to catch their interest.

Break to watch mosher drop round 2, another bodyslam to cobbles

I should be filming this really! Oh fuck, did I just knock that beer down? Sorry, did it get you? But yeah, Im glad that no one has really  I talked about this with a few of the interview subjects and they all agreed that it hadnt. To have an original idea in skateboarding now, it feels almost impossible. Obviously I took influence from Sidewalk and The Berrics, as well as a few documentaries, but I like to think I hit a certain area of that subject that hasnt been touched.
Cyber criminals have come up with yet another way to get you to open an email. This months Comodo Threat Intelligence Lab report has identified a new type of phishing email. According to Comodo, the new scam involves emails disguised as a reply to a previously asked request for information. The emails also appear to come from a legitimate contact or familiar brand, the report says.

A New Type of Phishing Email

The particular phishing email campaign mentioned in the report occurred over a seven hour period on July 6, 2017. And while it lasted less than a day, it was able to target 50 enterprise customers with thousands of users.

The perpetrators of the attack used 585 different servers with IP addresses in North America, Europe, Australia and Turkey. Comodo says the speed and coordination to develop and deploy the attack shows a considerble level of sophistication and advance in phishing evolution.

The emails have been designed to look authentic. And if you are busy, a quick glance might lead you to believe it is a legitimate request. But once you click on the link, you will be directed to a different site, which will deliver its remotely deployed malware payload.

This screenshot shows an example of the phishing attack.

Fatih Orhan, head of the Comodo Threat Intelligence Lab and Comodo Threat Research Labs (CTRL), explains:

Phishing emails come in numerous types and formats. Cyber criminals always find new methods to trick users and convince them to click a bait link. This latest method is also an example of how they can be creative to attack enterprise business users.

This phishing campaign attacked more than three thousand enterprise customer users from 585 IP addresses. Comodo identified the following countries, with the US making up the lions share of the IP addresses.

What is a Phishing Attack?

Finding The Right Solution

Comodo analyzes millions of potential pieces of malware, phishing, spam or other malicious/unwanted files and emails 24x7x365 in over 190 countries around the world. Whether you choose Comodo or another vendor, make sure it monitors and protects your digital assets at all times. This is critical in order to catch the latest attacks and prevent any harm to your small business.

Help From the FTC and SBA

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and he U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) have launched a new website  ftc.gov/SmallBusiness  to address phishing and other digital threats to small businesses. The site has articles, videos, and other information to help owners identify, protect and avoid scams from cyberattacks and additional vulnerabilities.
The Dinner in the Sky event returns to the Slovak capital after last years premiere.

Dinner in the Sky (Source: Courtesy of Dinner in the Sky)

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More information about travelling in Slovakia

Please see our Please see our Spectacular Slovakia travel guide

The Bratislava in the Sky 2017 event takes place 50 metres above the ground, at a hanging dining table for 22 guests. The dining event, which takes place at a literal top level, has expanded this year.

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This years program will not just have a single chef but will feature a rotation of different chefs during the ten days of the event.

video //www.youtube.com/embed/t6etdvg6iLE

On July 20, Lukas Hesko will be the main chef, while between July 21 and 28, Roland Huber will take over. On July 29, Michal Konrad will cook for the guests, and Tomas Lysy will be the chef to serve guests on July 30.

The package includes a brunch, lunch, wine-tasting, champagne, cocktails and sunset dinner, all taking place in the sky. The meals have a one-of-a-kind atmosphere and give diners breathtaking views. The event will take place on Tyrsovo Embankment in Bratislava, the organisers website reports.
Slovak cyclist Peter Sagan complains about impersonal behavior of jury.

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After being disqualified from the Tour de France 2017, Slovak cyclist Peter Sagan is relaxing in Monaco where he lives. In an interview with Belgian television VTM Nieuws he stated that he accepted his fate but still considers the jurys decision to be wrong.

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I can accept that Im out of the Tour, but I cannot accept the jurys decision, the two-time world champion told VTM Nieuws. It was a big mistake, I think.

video //www.youtube.com/embed/rXwZczGqWls

In the finishing sprint of the fourth stage of the Tour de France 2017, Slovak cyclist Peter Sagan was excluded for allegedly, intentionally elbowing Mark Cavendish into a scary fall.

Cavendish, a rival of Sagan, ended up in the barrier after the latter pushed him away with his right elbow. Cavendish crashed into the barriers, at a speed of more than 50 kilometres per hour and fell to the ground. Consequently, John Degenkolb and Ben Swift also fell. The British cyclist was bruised and taken immediately to hospital for examinations.

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Real also: Peter Sagan was disqualified from the Tour de France after a foul at the finish Read more

When deliberating over the incident the jury was not interested in Sagans opinion. Moreover, he says, he was not personally told of their decision.

I was waiting for the decision on whether I would start the next day or not, Sagan told VTM Nieuws The answer never came. Why not? Its the 21st century.
They were all on one rope, when the ledge they were standing on broke away.

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One Polish and three Slovak mountain climbers were involved in an accident when descending the Italian side of Mont Blanc early on July 18, the TASR newswire reported.

They were all on one rope, when a rock was torn loose, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson Igor Skocek told the TASR. A helicopter came to pick them up in the morning when the visibility was sufficient and transported them to one of the hospitals in the Valle d'Aosta region. The Slovak consul in Rome has already established contact with them.

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Two of the Slovak nationals suffered light injuries, while the third was more seriously injured, Skocek specified.

The accident occurred at an altitude of 3,810 metres above sea level. The piece of rock on which the men, aged between 35-50, were standing came loose and they fell 50 metres into a chasm, where they became stuck in snow. It took four hours after the fall to find the injured and arrange transport to the hospital.
Slovaks have to defend themselves against the double quality standards in food, according to Prime Minister Robert Fico.

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The issue of double quality standards in food and other products, such as washing powder, is gradually growing into a considerable international scandal, stated Prime Minister Robert Fico of Smer, at a press conference in Bratislava on July 18.

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I can't accept that citizens of the Slovak Republic are being treated this way, said Fico, as quoted by the TASR newswire, referring to the fact that some products sold in western EU countries have a different content than the same products sold in eastern parts of the EU.

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Fico stated that he wants to discuss double quality standards in food at the Visegrad Four/V4 (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) session due to take place in Budapest on July 19.

Moreover, he wants to send a letter to, or meet in person with, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

This is a serious political issue, Fico told the press.

Fico went on to say that he views the measures taken by the EC in this regard as insufficient. The EC is still only collecting data, although there has been plenty of evidence already, stated the premier.

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If the Commission does not address the issue vigorously enough, Slovakia might introduce a couple of one-off measures as early as this autumn. These would include, for example, restricting imports of European products to the Slovak market and providing Slovak public canteens exclusively with products of Slovak origin for a certain period of time, according to the PM.

We have to defend ourselves, we can't accept this, Fico told the press, adding that he is aware that such measures would violate the rules of the EUs single market.

We only want people in Slovakia to have access to food of the same quality [as people in the west], he said, as quoted by TASR.
The controversial amnesties granted by former prime minister Vladimir Meciar were cancelled after 19 years.

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The police have initiated an investigation into the issuing of amnesties by former prime minister Vladimir Meciar, in the case of the abduction of former president Michal Kovacs son, the Sme daily reported on July 18 on its website.

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Meciar issued the amnesties as acting president in 1998. They relate to the abduction of Kovacs son and the murder, in 1996, of Robert Remias, who served as a contact for a key witness of the abduction. The amnesties also concern the thwarted referendum of 1997.

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After the Constitutional Court found this act to be in violation of the law, the case was examined by a regional prosecutor's office on the orders of Prosecutor-General Jaromir Ciznar.

The case has now been forwarded to the law enforcement authorities.

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The case was forwarded to the Criminal Police Department of Bratislava Regional Police Corps Directorate, the regional prosecutor's office spokesman Michal Surek told Sme.
Clients are expected to receive nothing.

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The Kosice-based insurance company Rapid Life has gone bankrupt. In mid-July, the National Bank of Slovakia announced that they imposed a receivership, or government-appointed administrator, on the insurance company.

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This is the second case of an insurer in Slovakia declaring bankruptcy, after the Dopravna Poistovna in 2001, the Trend weekly noted.

The insurer is insolvent and does not have enough finances to pay its clients and cover its operation, Vladimir Dvoracek from NBS stated as quoted by the Sme daily.

The administrator, Irena Sopkova, confirmed that she will file the official motion for the company to be sent into the bankruptcy procedure.

It is 99 percent sure that clients will receive nothing from Rapid Life, Sopkova said, explaining that the insurer has accumulated millions of euros in debts.

Rapid Life has over 15,000 clients, according to Sopkovas findings. Of those clients, 500 should have their policy concluded and paid off, and Rapid Life owes them some 3 million. To pay off the policies that will terminate by the end of 2018, the insurer would need 47 million, which it does not currently have and will not be able to earn from new policies.

Rapid Life has some 65,000 in its accounts, but all the money has been blocked for distrainment.

The NBS recommends that clients no longer pay insurance to Rapid Life. The administrator will file a criminal complaint against the former management of the company.
Ministry gives up idea of teaching pupils one type of writing only, for now.

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Do you use cursive when you scribble your notes or do you just stick to capital letters? An individual writing style seems to be growing less and less important as many people stick to typing.

Nevertheless, the Education Ministry decided to tackle an educated style of writing in primary schools towards the end of the past school year. They only dropped the idea of introducing a unified, compulsory style teachers should teach their pupils in the early years of primary school, after public opinion proved strongly opposed.

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How much space for individualism?

The education reform the ministry has in the pipeline, with a document entitled Learning Slovakia, keeps stressing individualism as well as a special attitude towards pupils and their needs with almost every point. Yet that attitude not reflected in the proposal Minister Peter Plavcan voiced, in introducing a minimum of writing script  continuous scripted writing.

This type of writing has been taught in schools around Slovakia before, but for pupils with learning disabilities, the school can make an agreement with parents for their children to learn so-called Comenia script. This is a discontinuous writing more similar to typing on a computer or text in books.

Comenia script was developed in the Czech Republic and in 2010  2012 it was tested at thirty-three schools. Comenia supports say that it is easier to learn for those who are left-handed and those with learning disabilities.

A petition arose signed by teachers and parents as well, calling for freedom in writing. The signatories of the petition believed that choosing what is best for pupils is in the hands of parent and teachers, not the ministry.

Special needs

The special educational needs of children may look differently and be of different intensity, agrees Viera Kalmarova, the countrys main school inspector.

In these cases diagnostics is the most important  a basic one done by a teacher or expert one done by specialists, Kalmarova explained for The Slovak Spectator.

As for pupils who have problems of smaller intensity, it is enough for teachers to approach the pupils individually  modifying the methods they use to the needs of each pupil. In this case it is necessary to stick with the national curriculum, including the syllabus and lessons that are part of it, Kalmarova noted.

But when pupils learning problems become more intensive, it is necessary to apply an individual pedagogical-educational program.

Experts also recommend methods and forms of education for each lesson, suitable teaching aids, different way of evaluating the pupil and so on, said Kalmarova, adding that it depends on the type and size of the disability if they also recommend modification in the content of the curriculum.

Pupils will still be able to choose

For now, Minister Plavcan has given up and schools will be allowed to freely choose what kind of writing script they teach their pupils.

Moreover, there was no debate among experts before the proposals voicing, nor did the ministry present any analysis stating that discontinuous script is better or worse for children to learn.

Pupils dont attend lessons to learn several types of writing. Nobody learned more than one in the first grade, said Martin Kriz, a teacher from a school where the Comenia type of writing is also used, as quoted by the Sme daily.

Common sense, as well as the national curriculum, says that writing serves us in knowing how to take note of speech, continues Kriz.

For that, one type of writing is enough, Kriz summed up, as quoted by Sme.
Youtubers give their viewers a sample of the mountains and streets of Slovakia.

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More information about travelling in Slovakia

Please see our Please see our Spectacular Slovakia travel guide

Two Youtube travel bloggers have posted videos telling their viewers to follow them to Slovakia - in fact, that is the title of both videos.

Patrik Paulinyi, has made videos showing countries across Europe and Asia, his video on Slovakia is special: Paulinyi wrote on his Instagram page that he spent a year collecting scenes of Slovakia - his home country and the country of his girlfriend, Andrea Zahurancova.

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The videos title comes from its filming perspective, which uses the "follow-me" techniqe to show Zahurancova leading Paulinyi through Slovakia by the hand. The video has no dialogue, and the style makes it feel authentic and organic, as if the person holding the camera had decided on a whim to record his surroundings.

video //www.youtube.com/embed/fbkEmW6PlXs

In early May "Follow Me To Slovakia" was posted by Kristen Sarah, creator of the travel brand Hopscotch the Globe, just over a week after another video called "Follow me to: Slovakia", was published on the Youtube channel What Ive Seen.

Sarah said that many of the people she met while making the video were eager to teach her about Slovakias history and about how it shapes the country today.

"It means a lot to them to educate others about what their country has been through," she told The Slovak Spectator.

The video gives a sense of Slovakias cultural and adventure activities. Sarah and her boyfriend, Siya Zarrabi, create a guided tour by stopping at popular destinations in various regions of Slovakia, including a medieval wine cellar near Hungary, Slovak Paradise National Park in Eastern Slovakia and Devin Castle in Bratislava Region. The trip was sponsored by Slovakia Tourism.

video //www.youtube.com/embed/hVPl5RCYqOg

The Youtube channel What Ive Seen shared a compilation video artfully connecting shots of the remote cliffs and lakes of Slovakia with the countrys recognizable landmarks, like the Cumil statue in Bratislava and the block letters of #TRNAVA near the citys main square.

If the goal of the videos is to encourage more visitors to come to Slovakia, then both might be successful. At the time of publishing, Paulinyis video of his home country has earned over 380,000 views.

Sarah suggested that experiencing the countrys laid-back atmosphere may have given her a new travel interest: "I loved all of the nature and appreciation the people have for it," she said. "I enjoyed just walking down the streets of Kosice and could see myself spending more time here."
Visitors can see modern solar exploration devices as well as a cosmic ray detector.

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More information about travelling in Slovakia

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The astronomical observatory, on the peak of Lomnicky Stit in the High Tatras, is inviting the public to its four open days taking place this summer. The first took place on July 15. The next three open days will be on July 22, August 12 and August 19, informed Pavol Schwartz of the Astronomical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAV) based in Tatranska Lomnica (Presov Region).

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Within the guided tour, led by scientific experts from the observatory, visitors can see modern solar exploration devices as well as a cosmic ray detector," said Schwartz as cited by the TASR newswire, adding that entry is free of charge.

During the open days, entry to the observatory will be from 9:30 until 16:00.

The construction of the astronomical observatory, situated at an altitude of 2,632 metres was carried out between 1957-62. Researchers working at the Lomnicky Peak Observatory study, among other things, solar coronal activity.

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There are two ways to get to the observatory. The more comfortable one is to go by cable cars (the lower station in Tatranska Lomnica  the mid-station Start  the upper station Skalnate Pleso  Lomnicky Stit). Those interested can go on foot, but there is no official tourist trail and those who wish to take this route are advised to order a guide and have proper boots.
Slovakia is far from fully tapping its tourism prospects.

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So far the state has been reluctant to introduce recreational vouchers while afraid of their negative impact on state money. Now it is pondering their launch when tourism in Slovakia is flowering. Businesses active in tourism, which for several years had called for the launching in Slovakia of such vouchers used successfully abroad, see the proposal as arriving too late. They argue that there are other problems that need to be addressed.

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In the time being this measure, also with respect to the increasing number of domestic tourists, is not a top priority or an instrument that should be inevitably introduced, Marek Harbulak, chairman of the Slovak Association of Hotels and Restaurants (ZHR), told Radio Lumen. He added that vouchers as a support for tourism is especially welcomed during economic crises.

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Hotels, restaurants and others active in the tourism business have been complaining about bad business conditions in tourism for several years, calling, among other things, for reduction of the value added tax on tourism services.

Recreational vouchers

Peter Durcek (SNS), state secretary of the Transport Ministry, which is also responsible for tourism, has arrived with the proposal of introducing recreational or holiday vouchers. These should work like meal vouchers, known colloquially as gastro listky.

Within this scheme employers would give their employees holiday vouchers of up to 500 per holiday spent in Slovakia. From it the employer covers 55 percent, i.e. up to 275. The employee covers the rest. The vouchers would be exempt from income and payroll taxes. Contrary to meal vouchers, holiday vouchers would be voluntary for employers.

The Slovak National Party (SNS), one of the three ruling coalition parties, wants to support local tourism in this manner.

In many municipalities and micro-regions tourism is the only significant employer and investor, and we think it deserves more support, said Durcek.

The main argument of the Transport Ministry in favour of this step is the effort to support domestic tourism and increase the interest of Slovaks in spending a holiday in their own country.

As much as 67 percent of Slovak holidaymakers prefer to spend their holiday abroad, the ministry wrote in its press release. It points out that the voucher scheme has worked in France for 70 years already and that it is successfully being used in Italy and Hungary as well.

The ministry still needs to discuss this proposal with other ministries, while the proposal needs be passed by parliament to become effective.

In the case of vouchers being exempt from taxation, this will reduce state budget revenues. But the Transport Ministry argues that in the end vouchers would bring more money into the state coffers.

Based on experience from abroad, the ministry assumes that revenues from consumption connected with vouchers to grow two- to three-fold compared to the total sum invested in the vouchers, and thus, the system would be able to generate additional benefits, said Karolina Ducka, spokesperson of the Transport Ministry.

Beneficial for everyone?

Alica Orda Oravcova, tax advisor and president of the Tax Forum of Slovakia, warns that the voucher scheme would be disadvantageous and discriminatory for socially weaker groups. These people might not be able to afford to pay the rest of the vouchers, i.e. 45 percent of its nominal value.

A more effective solution would be if the nominal value of the vouchers is lower, for example 280, fully covered by the employer, said Orda Oravcova, as cited by the Sme daily. This would be a real benefit for employees and a tax-advantageous way for employers to motivate employees.

As much as 58 percent of Slovaks cannot afford even one holiday a year, based on the data of the Transport Ministry.

Vouchers during the communist regime

Slovak workers had already enjoyed holiday vouchers in the past. It was during the former communist regime, when all members of the trade unions from that time  Revolucne Odborove Hnutie (Revolutionary Trade Unions Movement)  received holiday vouchers. Their holders could spend summer or winter holidays in hotels and other facilities owned by ROH while some of the chosen and privileged could spend their holiday also by the sea.

Hoteliers call for more action

Hoteliers and others active in the tourism business welcome the vouchers but call for the addressing of other problems too. They keep calling for the reduction of VAT on tourism services. In Slovakia it is higher than in other neighbouring countries. This reduces the competitiveness of Slovakia.

Harbulak, from the Slovak Association of Hotels and Restaurants, does not see introduction of the vouchers as a priority. He would also like to see Slovakia promoted abroad more when in Slovakia the ratio of domestic and foreign tourists is 60 to 40.

Other countries can only envy our ratio, Harbulak told Joj TV. Thus wed rather see here room for an increase of visitors from abroad.

The package

The recreational vouchers are only one of the measures the Transport Ministry has prepared to support tourism in Slovakia. It also proposes increasing the support of tourism from 7 million to 10 million; increasing support to cyclo transport as well as building a network of partners in Russia that would mediate visa proceedings; thus facilitating the travel of Russians to Slovakia.

Another proposed measure is to shorten the depreciation of non-productive real estate. A recent revision to tax laws prolonged the depreciation of non-productive real estate, i.e. office buildings, hotels and apartment blocks from 20 to 40 years.

Tourism is thriving

In 2016, Slovakia broke a record in tourist numbers when altogether 5,023,629 visitors came to the country. This was a 16 percent increase compared with 2015 while the number of domestic tourists increased by 15 percent. One of the reasons for this increase might be Slovakias Presidency of the EU Council during the second half of 2016.

But Slovakia is far from fully tapping into tourism. Based on data from the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) the total contribution of travel and tourism to GDP in EU member countries was about 10 percent on average in 2016, but in Slovakia it was only 6.2 percent. Out of these the direct contribution was almost 4 percent in EU member countries on average and 2.4 percent in Slovakia.

In competitive ranking regarding tourism, Slovakia is also lagging behind its EU peers. It is the second least competitive, after Romania, based on a ranking compiled by the World Economic Forum.
This year the support from consumers will be even higher.

Those harnessing the sun for generation of electricity received the most. (Source: SME)

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Slovak electricity consumers contributed a total of 464.7 million last year to producers generating electricity from renewable energy sources (RES) and through high-efficiency cogeneration, Radoslav Igaz, spokesperson for the Regulatory Office for Network Industries (URSO) told vEnergetike.sk, a website dedicated to energy issues.

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This year, consumers should pay even more to green electricity producers.

The planned supplementary payment for this year for RES and high-efficiency cogeneration is 517.6 million, said Igaz.

In Slovakia, production of green electricity is supported via a scheme of feed-in tariffs, in which producers of electricity from renewable energy sources sell the generated electricity for prices higher than those of electricity produced conventionally.

The end price of electricity for all consumers contains a special tariff for operation of the system. Within this tariff, they also support the generation of electricity from renewable energy sources and highly effective combined production of electricity and heat as well as support for coal mining used for the generation of electricity.

This method of support is often criticised as it increases the end price of electricity.

In Slovakia, there are roughly 2,700 energy sources, which are entitled to a supplementary payment from consumers for generated green electricity.

Out of the money paid out to green electricity producers, those harnessing the sun received the most - almost 210 million. Next with 93 million were electricity producers involved in cogeneration and biogas producers, who received contributions of over 64 million.

In the case of individual producers, the biggest supplementary payment last year went to the paper mill SCP Mondi in Ruzomberok, 14.7 million. Its six biomass power sources generated some 167,000 MWh of electricity.

Slovintegra Energy generated via high-efficiency cogeneration 290,000 MWh of electricity and received 13.4 million. The heating plant, Povazska Bystrica, obtained a supplementary payment of 13 million when it generated, via high-efficiency cogeneration, 271,000 MWh of electricity. The company Energy Edge ZC, operating two biomass-fired power plants, received 7.5 million. The steelmaker US Steel Kosice produced 185,000 MWh via cogeneration and obtained 7.3 million.
The nephews of the former parliamentary speaker were freed by the courts which insisted new evidence must be found.

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The lawsuit against the Paska brothers (Maros, Branislav and Martin) nephews of ex-parliamentary speaker, Pavol Paska of the ruling Smer party, has been returned to the Kosice I district court, the Sme daily wrote on July 19.

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The courts returned the original case file requesting that the investigator collect additional evidence. Both the district and regional court insisted that the right of defence owed to the charged men had been violated. Spokesperson for the Kosice Regional Court, Marcela Galova, said in January, that the police officer failed to notify the charged men in writing about the increased severity of the deed for which they were being prosecuted.

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The brothers stand accused of hooliganism and complicity in bodily harm, dating back to October 2015. They allegedly provoked an accidental fight with strangers which involved four people, two men and two women. They beat one of the men and a woman.

Maros and Branislav face two to five years in prison and Martin Paska a lighter sentence of six months to three years. After the high publicity of the case, Martin Paska had to leave his top position of technical manager at the Housing Company of the city of Kosice, Branislav lost his job as the head of public procurement at Kosice University Hospital and Maros was sacked from the police, Sme wrote.

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The recently acknowledged contamination of land and underground waters by waste from a former chemical plant has initiated analyses of selected private wells in the area.

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On July 19, the Water Management Research Institute began to inspect selected residential wells near the landfill containing waste from the former Juraj Dimitrov Chemical Plant in the Bratislava borough of Vrakuna.

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The Environment Ministry-sponsored measure came as a response to the concerns of local people following the recent revelation that the contaminated ground water from the landfill site might threaten drinking water sources in the area.

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Results of the wells analyses will be known within 15 working days. Further samples will be taken and analysed in the following days, The Water Management Research Institute general director, Lubica Kopcova, told the TASR newswire, adding that the analysis will focus on several organic indicators, such as chlorinated hydrocarbons and organo-chlorine pesticides.

Reaction to rumours and previous contamination

The launching of supplementary checks on the selected wells was announced by Environment Minister Laszlo Solymos (Most-Hid) last week, in response to the allegedly inaccurate and half-true information that has been recently spread.

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The 4.65-hectare landfill is estimated to contain some 120,000 cubic metres of waste taken there by the plant between the 1960s-80s. The contamination only concerns the city boroughs of Vrakuna, Podunajske Biskupice and Ruzinov, according to the ministry. The inhabitants of these boroughs were requested not to use water from their wells for bathing, showering, watering vegetables or filling pools.

The ministry has also launched a tender for remediating the landfill in Vrakuna. The cost incurred in eliminating the environmental burden is estimated at more than 30 million.
DXC Technology Company, together with its subsidiaries, provides information technology services and solutions primarily in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. It operates in two segments, Global Business Services (GBS) and Global Infrastructure Services (GIS). The GBS segment offers a portfolio of analytics services and extensive partner ecosystem that help its customers to gain rapid insights, automate operations, and accelerate their digital transformation journeys; and software engineering, consulting, and data analytics solutions that enable businesses to run and manage their mission-critical functions, transform their operations, and develop new ways of doing business. It also uses various technologies and methods to accelerate the creation, modernization, delivery, and maintenance of secure applications allowing customers to innovate faster while reducing risk, time to market, and total cost of ownership. In addition, this segment offers business process services, which include integration and optimization of front and back office processes, and agile process automation. The GIS segment adapts legacy apps to cloud, migrate the right workloads, and securely manage their multi-cloud environments; and offers security solutions help predict attacks, proactively respond to threats, and ensure compliance, as well as to protect data, applications, and infrastructure. It also provides IT outsourcing services to help customers securely and cost-effectively run mission-critical systems and IT infrastructure. In addition, this segment offers workplace services to fit its customer's employee, business, and IT needs from intelligent collaboration; and modern device management, digital support services, and mobility services. DXC Technology Company is headquartered in Ashburn, Virginia.
PBL

Teaching to the Edges Using Project-Based Learning

For these two teachers, PBL is the key to differentiating lessons for students of all ability levels.

What do special ed (SPED) and gifted students have in common? They both have unique educational challenges and are often removed from the classroom because traditional teaching methods don't "fit their needs." While some students struggle through a lesson, others speed through it and end up bored because they aren't being challenged enough. The age-old question is, "How do we teach a class of 30 students with a variety of learning differences, needs, and challenges  without isolating them?" Project-based learning (PBL) allows students to explore and discover at a level that fits their individual needs.

Here, two teachers discuss how PBL showcases their students' creativity and strengths, no matter what their ability level is.

Jamie Kumiega

Students in my SPED classroom have a variety of disabilities, which make specialized instruction in content areas necessary. In class, we focus on functional life skills that they need to achieve success in academic and post-secondary life. A project-based approach works exceptionally well for my students since it is adaptable enough to meet the needs of students on every level.

To help me plan my lessons, I use an online PBL resource called Defined STEM, which has hundreds of project-based performance tasks broken down by grade level, career focus and standards. The resource provides support materials like articles, videos, and rubrics  all in one spot. Many of my students have difficulty with traditional reading and writing tasks, so I use the videos and other visual resources to keep them engaged.

Because my students struggle with appropriate social interactions, we often focus on basic skills like how to interact with others. After students complete their research, I ask them to informally present what they've learned to myself and/or other students in the class. While sharing with others, the presenter is able to work on making eye contact, speaking clearly and comprehending what they've learned. The audience practices how to act when someone else is talking, which includes not interrupting, asking appropriate questions and sitting quietly. Although speaking to the class is stressful for some students, I've found this is a wonderful way to empower individuals to learn and help everyone feel part of the group  no matter what their needs are.

I use PBL to help bring the outside world into the classroom, too. For example, during a unit on the environment, my students acted as city park planners. I was able to customize the lesson for my students and make them think deeply about who uses parks, what sort of animals live in parks, what they eat, where they sleep at night and more. When lessons use examples that students can relate to, they're able to connect the dots and bring relevance to what they're learning. Connecting new information to something they already understand is at the core of education. The flexibility of PBL also allows students to create final projects that showcase their strengths. These lessons are also cross-curricular, so I am able to incorporate STEM, literacy and social studies into one project.

Brandi Zivilik

I see every student for 44 minutes every day in my social studies class. The SPED and gifted students remain in my classroom during this time. Groups that are at a higher learning level are challenged with various questions and pushed to further their knowledge; whereas groups that are struggling are guided, given websites to find their information and provided with other tools to help them succeed. PBL allows me to address each individual student's needs, and, in turn, I have found that all students are successful in the classroom.

My gifted students have a choice among the projects that they complete and are challenged using thought-provoking questions that they must research and respond to. I give them a lot of freedom to build upon their discoveries instead of sticking to a specific task.

I am fortunate enough to work in a 1-to-1 iPad district that also has a STEAM lab, a makerspace and a green screen room. For their final projects, my gifted students often choose to develop their own websites, build a model for their project or use TouchCast or other apps to demonstrate their learning. For example, one group of gifted students worked together to build their restaurant in Minecraft and then used TouchCast to record themselves sitting in their restaurant and going over all the details of it.

PBL really allows students' strengths and personal interests to stand out. For example, my students created a song in GarageBand to use for their iMovie they created to advertise their farm-to-table restaurant. I had another student use Stop Motion for her Advertising Analyst TV advertisement project. Students who enjoy drama and acting were able to develop and perform scripts as projects. Allowing my students to think outside the box and incorporate things they are good at and passionate about allows them to be successful and learn in my classroom.

Once you dive into PBL, you'll realize it is basically designed in a differentiated manner. Each student or group of students is working on a different project task and doing so at his or her ability level. The PBL model really allows them to push themselves academically and creatively.
The Macau Cultural Center (CCM) is presenting eight international films curated for younger audiences as part of its ARTmusing Film Carnival series this August.

The films in the series have different themes, ranging from growing up to pursuing dreams and facing difficulties. The films represent various genres including comedy and drama.

The first film is an animation titled Molly Monster, a story from the perspective of a little girl who will soon become a big sister. Ballerina is another animation using Pixar-level technology that follows the inspirational and moving story of a small girl on her brave journey to pursue a dream.

The Big Day is also a film about pursuing your dreams, telling the stories of four kids from different places and backgrounds who must rewrite their lives and break religious, gender and class barriers to assert their independence.

The award-winning film, Life Animated, uses both animation and a documentary format to tell an uplifting story that addresses autism. It tells the adventure of a boy who reconnects with the world through Disney characters, revealing the magical life-changing power of cinema.

Landfill Harmonic is a documentary about the environment that follows a group of Paraguayan youngsters who create musical instruments out of discarded garbage and form an orchestra. The film shows how the group is suddenly brought into the global spotlight guided by music director Favio Chavez.

Help! I Shrunk My Teacher, is a German comedy about a boy who shrunk his school principal. The story is a fantasy that can appeal to students who have daydreamt of mischievous treatments they would dole out to their teachers, if their positions of power were reversed.

The South Korean production titled The World of Us is a fresh and moving story on the delicate friendship between two little girls, while Packages from Daddy is a Taiwanese film about a familys journey after the death of the father.

This series captures different cultures and presents them in distinct cinematic styles that will hopefully provide insight and enjoyment to young children, teenagers and their parents.
KABUL (Reuters) - A private jet, which Afghan officials suspected was bringing back embattled Vice President Rashid Dostum from Turkey, was turned away when it tried to land in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, officials said on Tuesday Dostum, who flew to Turkey in May for medical treatment, has been facing accusations that he ordered a political rival to be detained and tortured in a case that drew strong condemnation from the Kabul government's international backers, including the United States. Dostum, a powerful ethnic Uzbek leader with decades of experience in Afghanistan's wars and turbulent politics, has denied the accusations. Afghan security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a private jet carrying seven Turkish engineers to Mazar-i-Sharif late on Monday was ordered to fly to Kabul for checks following indications that Dostum was trying to come back to Afghanistan. The plane instead diverted to Turkmenistan. A senior official from Dostum's Junbish party, denied that he had tried to enter Afghanistan, saying that a guest of provincial governor Atta Mohammad Noor had been due to land in Mazar but had gone to Turkmenistan because of technical issues. "If General Dostum wants to come to Afghanistan, no power can stop him because he is Afghanistan's vice president," said Junbish deputy head Shujauddin Shuja. However, witnesses said hundreds of Dostum's supporters, some carrying posters with slogans like "Welcome back our dear leader!" were waiting in Mazar-i-Sharif, the closest big city to Dostum's home region of Jawzjan, on the border with Turkmenistan. Dostum is the main leader of the ethnic Uzbek minority, a group estimated to make up some 9 percent of the population, and has been a vocal critic of President Ashraf Ghani. He has not been formally charged with any offence but his departure for Turkey was widely seen as a convenient cover that allowed the government to sideline him without the embarrassment of a public dismissal. However, the case has underlined growing political and ethnic tensions that have threatened the stability of Ghani's unwieldy government, already under pressure over deteriorating security across Afghanistan. Last month, Noor, the powerful governor of Balkh province and one of the main leaders of the Persian-speaking ethnic Tajiks, and deputy Chief Executive Mohammad Mohaqiq, a leader of the mainly Shia ethnic Hazara minority, met Dostum in Turkey. The meeting was widely seen as a possible prelude to a broad opposition movement against the government, which critics say is dominated by Ghani's Pashtun community, traditionally Afghanistan's strongest ethnic group. A spokesman for the NATO-led Resolute Support force, which maintains troops at the Mazar-i-Sharif airport under German command, said that international officials had no role in turning the aircraft away. "Afghan First Vice President Dostum's aircraft was not denied permission to land at Mazar-i-Sharif airport by German forces," Captain William Salvin said in a statement. "It is not the business of the Resolute Support mission to get involved in internal Afghan government matters." (Reporting by Hamid Shalizi and Abdul Matin Sahak; Editing by Robert Birsel)
China yesterday renewed a call for India to immediately withdraw its troops from disputed territory high in the Himalayan mountains, following a report that Chinese forces recently held live firing drills in the region.

Foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Indian forces had to leave the area to avoid an escalation of the situation.

We have stated many times that we hope the Indian side will get a clear understanding of the situation [and] immediately take measures to withdraw the troops that illegally crossed the border back to the Indian side of the border, Lu said at a regularly scheduled news briefing.

Beijing and New Delhi have engaged in more than a month of saber- rattling as officials from both sides talk of a potential clash even bloodier than their 1962 war that left thousands dead.

Lus comments came after Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported late last week that an army brigade equipped with rocket launchers, heavy machine guns and mortars recently practiced a simulated live-firing assault on an enemy position in Tibet.

The drills also involved tracking and targeting enemy aircraft, the report said.

The current standoff is in the southernmost part of Tibet in an area also claimed by Indian ally Bhutan, although the report did not say exactly when or where the drills took place.

China insists Indian troops withdraw before talks can take place to settle the most protracted standoff in recent years between nuclear- armed neighbors who share a 3,500-kilometer border, much of it contested.

The most recent dispute flared in June after Chinese teams began building a road onto the disputed Doklam Plateau.

Although China and Bhutan have been negotiating the precise border for decades without serious incident, the tiny Himalayan kingdom turned this time to help from India, which sent troops across the border from the northeastern state of Sikkim.

China retaliated by closing a nearby mountain pass that Indian pilgrims use to reach Mount Kailash, a sacred Hindu and Buddhist site in Tibet. Chinas foreign ministry has also presented to reporters historical documents that it says prove Chinas claims to the plateau.

Although the Doklam Plateau is not part of Indian territory, New Delhi has been particularly sensitive to Chinese building activity in a region with strategic significance. AP
By Joseph Ax PRINCETON, N.J. (Reuters) - By the time Princeton University graduate student Xiyue Wang arrived in Iran to conduct research for his doctorate in history, he had already spent years living and working in politically turbulent countries. The Chinese-born U.S. citizen previously worked as a Pashto translator for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Afghanistan and spent time in Uzbekistan while a student at Harvard University. Wang, 37, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on spying charges after his arrest last summer, an Iranian official said on Sunday. He is the latest American citizen to face jail in Iran for what the U.S. State Department has denounced as fabricated charges. His sentencing shocked his colleagues at Princeton, who described him in interviews as a quiet but collegial scholar whose intellectual curiosity stood out even at the elite school in New Jersey. Wang is married and has a 4-year-old son. In addition to Pashto, English and his native Mandarin, Wang is also proficient in Russian and Turkish and was learning Persian in Iran. His wife, Hua Qu, said in a statement on Tuesday that her husband "has been unjustly imprisoned for espionage that I know he did not and never would commit." "We fervently hope that the Iranian authorities will release him soon so that he can return home to his young family," she added. University President Chris Eisgruber said in a letter to the school on Monday that Princeton had kept his arrest confidential on the recommendation of advisers inside and outside of government. Wang, a history student at Princeton since 2013, was conducting field work for his dissertation, which is focused on how Muslim regions are governed. Iran accused him of scanning 4,500 pages of digital documents. His academic adviser, history Professor Stephen Kotkin, and fellow graduate students said in interviews that scanning historical documents  the ones Wang was studying were a century old, Kotkin said  for later review is a common practice for researchers. Kotkin said Wang was pursuing a "very ambitious" dissertation plan that included on-site research in Iran, Russia and potentially Afghanistan. "He's one of these kids who lives for research and ideas," Kotkin said. Several history graduate students described Wang as a respected scholar but declined to go into detail, citing the sensitivity of the case. The history department's chairman, Keith Wailoo, emailed students on Monday asking them to refer news media inquiries to the school's communications office. One student and friend of Wang's, who requested anonymity after Wailoo's email, said Wang was "very driven" to succeed, working hard to learn Persian to read source material in its original form. An official at Iran's interests section in Washington, the country's de facto diplomatic outpost in the U.S. capital, declined to comment in detail on Wang's case, referring questions to Iran's United Nations mission, which did not respond to a request for comment. After high school in Beijing, Wang studied in China and India before moving to the United States, according to a lecture he gave years ago. He graduated from the University of Washington in 2006 and earned a master's degree at Harvard University, where he travelled to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan for research. In 2008-09, Wang worked at a law firm in Hong Kong through Princeton in Asia, a programme that arranges fellowships in Asia for U.S. residents. "For better or worse, he still can't tell you what exactly he has been studying in the many years that have passed," a biographical note on Princeton in Asia's website said. "What he does know is that his dream is to walk the ancient Silk Road from Xi'an to Rome one day." (Reporting by Joseph Ax; Additional reporting by Yeganeh Torbati in Washington and Ethan Lou in Calgary; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
One speaker described dark-money spending in elections as a disease, and others said their First Amendment rights are at stake.

The provocative testimony was part of a public hearing Tuesday on Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Olivers proposal to impose new disclosure requirements on nonprofit and advocacy groups that spend big sums of money in New Mexico elections.

Nine people spoke in favor of the proposed rules and five spoke against them during the 90-minute hearing, held in Downtown Albuquerque at the city-county government center.

Much of the discussion centered on dark money  or donations to groups that spend to influence elections, but dont have to disclose their donors.

The rules proposed by Toulouse Oliver would require dark-money groups active in New Mexico campaigns to disclose their donors if they spend more than $1,000 on political advertising during an election cycle.

Gallup resident Michael Daly, speaking in favor of the rules, characterized undisclosed campaign donations as akin to syphilis  destroying our democracy.

Requiring disclosure when someone spends at least $1,000 is not only reasonable, but called for, given the flood of money in politics today, Daly said. Someone that vested in an election, itd be nice to know who they are.

Tom Greer, a Belen business owner and state field director for Concerned Veterans for America, said disclosure would open people up to harassment simply for donating to a small cause they believe in and have a chilling effect. The new rules should be crafted through the legislative process, he said, not handled by administrative rules issued by the secretary of state.

This proposal is an attack on our First Amendment rights, which include privacy, Greer said.

Concerned Veterans for America, a Virginia-based group, is backed by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch.

Large chunks of the rules proposed by Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, are based on a bipartisan bill passed by the Legislature this year and vetoed by Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican.

The debate is expected to continue today with a hearing in Las Cruces.

Toulouse Oliver said she hopes to issue new campaign rules in the fall, in time to cover the 2018 primary and general elections.
TONTO NATIONAL FOREST, Ariz.  The deaths of nine people who were swept away in a flash flood at a swimming hole in central Arizona have raised questions about whether the government should have done more to warn the public about the dangers of floodwaters in wilderness areas.

The nine people who died and a man who remains missing were swept away Saturday after a torrent of water from a thunderstorm upstream roared through the Tonto National Forest. Officials say members of an extended family who died in the flood had no warning about the approaching surge of water.

The storm dumped up to 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) of rain in an hour, prompting a flash flood warning from the National Weather Service. Though the service sent out a flash-flood warning over cellphone networks, service in the remote area is patchy at best. Unless they had a weather radio, the swimmers would have been unaware.

Crews, meanwhile, spent four hours Tuesday searching for 27-year-old Hector Miguel Garnica, whose wife, three young children and extended family members were killed in the flood. His family gathered at the mountain swimming hole about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northeast of Phoenix to celebrate his wifes birthday.

The search was suspended over concerns that thunderstorms moving through the area Tuesday would cause more flooding. Its scheduled to resume Wednesday.

Crews had hoped that Hector Garnica would still be alive. But Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management spokeswoman Tiffany Davila said crews who have searched for Garnica for three days now believe they are working a recovery effort.

Officials have said people headed to wilderness areas should check weather alerts ahead of time to determine whether its safe. They note that its hard to predict where rain will fall in the desert Southwest, and people should know that heavy downpours can cause flash flooding.

Even so, that hasnt stopped people from saying more should be done to protect the public from flash floods.

Steve Stevens, a volunteer firefighter with the nearby Water Wheel Fire and Medical District, said there needs to be a way for visitors to get flash flood alerts on their phones.

Stevens, who has lived in the area for 20 years, said the fire station and local church have extenders that provide cell service to the area around those two locations, but it needs to cover the whole forest.

There is no system currently in place to specifically warn people about the potential dangers of flash floods at the Tonto National Forest, said Forest Service spokeswoman Carrie Templin.

If our employees happen to be out in the forest at the time, and they hear a weather warning, they share that with members of the public they may cross, she said. There are also signs posted around the forest that warn of hazardous conditions, including potential flash floods.

Templin said there isnt a more comprehensive system in place to alert people because the forest is more than 3 million acres and there are over 5,000 roads.

Because there is a potential for a flash flood at any time, it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible to close parts of the forest when flash flood warnings are issued, Templin said.

Detective Sgt. David Hornung of the Gila County Sheriffs Office said his agency has no plans to add warning signs or close the forest during monsoon season.

Im not trying to be negative, but you could put up all the signs you want, and people are going to still want to come in here and recreate. We have a hard time, when they close the forest due to fire restrictions, of keeping people out, Hornung said.

___

AP reporters Clarice Silber and Paul Davenport in Phoenix and Michael Balsamo in Los Angeles also contributed to this report.
It would be hard to find a Republican who has suffered more than House Speaker Paul Ryan as Congress and President Donald Trump have struggled to turn GOP promises into reality.

More people now view the House speaker in a negative light rather than a positive one, 48 percent to 34 percent, according to a Bloomberg National Poll, conducted July 8-12. In December, 31 percent held a negative view, while 47 percent looked at him favorably.

Its a dramatic turn for one of the Republican Partys biggest stars and its 2012 vice presidential nominee. The approval rating decline for Ryan is the largest among GOP leaders measured by the Bloomberg survey  and exceeds the drop in approval for the party, Congress and Trump.

Its unusual to see this big a flip, especially for a guy who is somewhat behind the scenes, said pollster J. Ann Selzer, who oversaw the survey. But hes in charge of Congress and Congress is not delivering.

Congress has struggled to pass major legislation long promised by GOP leaders, including a replacement of the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, as Republican lawmakers havent been able agree about what it should look like or how to proceed.

Greg Bellamy, a 48-year-old pharmacist who lives in a suburb of Nashville, said Ryan hasnt pushed hard enough to repeal Obamacare and get the government out of health care.

Theyre trying to repeal and replace, said Bellamy, who voted for Trump and is an independent voter who leans Republican. They need to repeal and stay the heck out of it.

Ryan, 47, of Wisconsin, started the year promising a quick repeal of Obamacare to kick off an era of conservative victories with Trump in the White House and Congress under Republican control. Yet now, after he won House approval for his unpopular replacement by promising reluctant Republicans that the Senate would fix it, the upper chamber has abandoned its version of the legislation because it didnt gain enough support.

If the health-care bill fails, it will make another Republican priority  a tax overhaul promised by Trump and Ryan  even harder, the House speaker often says.

A majority of Republicans still see Ryan positively, though even those numbers are declining. Sixty-one percent hold a positive view of Ryan, down from 67 percent in December, according to the Bloomberg poll. His unfavorable rating is 21 percent, up from 16 percent.

Sixty percent of poll respondents said they view Congress negatively. The institution has had even lower approval in recent years, including 70 percent negative in June 2016 as the presidential campaign was underway.

Since Trump took office in January, Congress has approved some lower-profile legislation as the debate over Obamacare has delayed consideration of other major bills. Republicans used a temporary review period to undo Obamas last minute regulations. The House also passed bills to rework financial regulations and help victims of human trafficking  measures that havent been taken up in the Senate. A measure to improve accountability in the Department of Veterans Affairs was passed by both chambers and signed into law by Trump.

Relatively small advances are lost on the GOP faithful who have for years been hearing promises to dismantle Obamacare and lower taxes, according to Doug Heye, a consultant who worked in the House for former Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Among those Republican voters who are disappointed so far  and are mostly pointing fingers at Congress and not Trump  theyre going to want to see some points on the board, Heye said. If youre a conservative primary voter, really good smart legislation that theyve passed this year isnt what theyre looking for. Theyre looking for repeal and replace, and they want a tax cut.

Trump in recent weeks has been urging Republicans to give up on their unpopular health insurance plan and push forward with just a repeal, leaving a decision on a replacement for later. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday he will try to do just that, but Senators already say they are reluctant to support such a drastic plan.

As the Obamacare drama plays out, the public is growing frustrated with the GOP. The unfavorable view of the party jumped to 53 percent, up 9 points since December. The Democratic partys negative rating was down one point to 48 percent.

Theres no consensus among Americans on whether cutting corporate taxes would create jobs, according to the Bloomberg poll. Almost three-quarters of Republicans say it would, while an equal proportion of Democrats say it wouldnt.

One fiscal question where there is strong agreement: 70 percent say its not acceptable to increase the federal deficit to cut taxes. That will be a challenge amid disagreement among Republicans over how to offset deep cuts to the corporate rate and other changes to simplify the tax code.

Like Ryan and Trump, several top White House officials are viewed more negatively than positively. His chief strategist, Steve Bannon, is viewed negatively by 47 percent  a 10-point increase since December  and positively by 22 percent.

Trumps son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, is viewed negatively by 47 percent and positively by 29 percent. Trumps daughter and an assistant to the president, Ivanka, is viewed unfavorably by 42 percent, up 15 points since August.

The jobs of administration officials, however, really depend on one opinion only: Trumps. Ryan and his Republican majority in the House will be up for re-election in a little over a year, and may be held to account by voters if the partys biggest promises dont advance in Congress.

The telephone poll of 1,001 American adults has margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points and higher among subgroups. It was conducted by Iowa-based Selzer & Co.
A national conservation group made a stop in Albuquerque Tuesday to rally with New Mexican outdoor recreation advocates, outfitters and others who want to protect the current size of two of the national monuments in the state.

The stop was the second for the Center for Western Priorities groups road trip around the Southwest in an attempt to draw attention to President Donald Trumps April 26 executive order to review the designations of monuments over 100,000 acres, for a total of 27 monuments  two of them in New Mexico.

The Rio Grande del Norte monument near Taos and Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks monument near Las Cruces were established by President Barack Obama.

In his April order, Trump said he was targeting not just Obamas monument designations but also previous presidents unilateral decisions to put millions of acres of land and water under strict federal control  eliminating the ability of the people who actually live in those states to actually decide how to use that land.

But Kent Salazar, board member at the Hispanics Enjoying Camping, Hunting, and the Outdoors advocacy group and the western vice chair at the National Wildlife Federation, said that at least the Rio Grande del Norte monument preserves the ability of the people to use that land for generations.

We the community have been working on protecting it for 15 years. Hunters, anglers, rancher and businesses support the monument, which ensures it will be preserved for generations to come, he said. It has a lot of community support.

The southern monument near Las Cruces is a bit more controversial.

Designation as a monument puts restrictions on how the land can be used. Whatever was done on the land before designation, such as grazing or oil extraction, can continue but usually no new grazing or extraction is allowed  a sore point for ranchers, miners and oil companies. Cattle and rancher groups in New Mexico, along with Gov. Susana Martinez, support a review of the monuments.

Groups at the meeting Tuesday emphasized the economic impact of the monument designation, which they say increased the number of visitors to the area. The mayor of Las Cruces, the Taos Chamber of Commerce and the Las Cruces-based Dona Ana County Commission have endorsed the existing monuments.

The Center for Western Priorities, based in Denver, plans more stops along their tour the states most affected by the review, most of which are in the Southwest.
Copyright  2017 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  The board that essentially killed the University of New Mexicos last bid to build a new hospital is raising questions about its latest hospital proposal  chief among them: Is now the right time?

With the future of U.S. health care laws in flux, members of the state Board of Finance on Tuesday expressed doubt about whether UNM should proceed with plans to build what it is calling a modern medical facility on land north of Lomas and east of University. The project would ultimately replace what UNM officials argue are out-of-date and inefficient adult care facilities at its existing hospital, located east of the proposed new site, while also providing much-needed additional capacity.

As currently envisioned, the multi-phase project would have 408 beds (48 of them for psychological treatment) and could cost an estimated $700 million.

UNM has focused its attention on the first phase: a 120-bed facility and medical office building that would total 372,000 square feet and cost an estimated $230 million to $250 million. UNM has not determined the best financing route but has enough in reserves to cover the cost.

It needs permission from its Board of Regents to hire an architect and draft construction documents, something it says would cost about $12 million. But board President Rob Doughty said the regents removed the request from their May meeting agenda so UNM could first present its proposal to the Board of Finance. The board, led by Gov. Susana Martinez, would have the final say before hospital construction could start.

The school took a proposal to build a new hospital to the board in 2012, but the board never held a vote on the project and thus prevented UNM from moving forward.

The board on Tuesday heard an informational presentation from a UNM leadership contingent that included interim President Chaouki Abdallah, Health Sciences Chancellor Paul Roth and UNM Hospitals CEO Steve McKernan. No vote was scheduled or taken.

But some board members, including Martinez, showed skepticism. The three-hour discussion veered frequently into other areas, with the board repeatedly peppering UNM officials with questions about exactly how the hospital uses, and accounts for, the roughly $90 million in property taxes it gets from Bernalillo County mill levy collections each year. It even included talk of federal patient privacy laws and the substance abuse crisis.

But Medicaid  and possible cuts to the program under current Republican leadership  emerged as a recurring concern as it pertains to the hospital plan. About 40 percent of UNMH revenue comes from Medicaid reimbursements, and Martinez suggested it might be prudent to wait a year or two to get more clarity about the national picture. Board member Michael Brasher said he would hold off, while fellow member Del Archuleta asked whether pursuing such a project now could ultimately embarrass the state.

Can you see a situation that we would regret this action? Archuleta asked.

Absolutely not, Roth responded, adding that he actually views it as almost irresponsible for UNM to continue with a status quo that keeps it from meeting the needs of New Mexicans.

In 2014, UNMH took in 5,300 patients from other New Mexico hospitals; that number jumped to 6,100 in the past 12 months, Roth said, thanks to a more efficient system that allows it to transfer out less-critical patients to places like Lovelace to make more room for cases that only UNM could handle. But greater need still exists, Roth said, noting that UNM did turn away 1,000 requested transfers in the past year  25 percent of whom were critically ill or injured and either stayed in a facility that might not have the capacity to treat their condition or had to go to another place even farther away. UNM is the states only Level 1 trauma center and academic medical center, and it boasts some specialties and expertise some other New Mexico facilities do not.

That is not the level of care any of us would want for our mother, or loved one or constituent. That is sub-standard care, and what I worry about, although I have no data to support it, is I think there were many cases in which either morbidity or mortality for citizens of the state of New Mexico were compromised, because they did not have access to the right level of care, Roth said.

The governor fired back about making a statement that strong without data, and reiterated her concerns about proceeding without knowing how national health care changes might negatively impact hospital revenue.

The devil is in the details, she said.

In an interview after the meeting, Roth said health care is always changing and UNM could adjust its plans as necessary. It should wait no longer to pursue the project, he said.

Its unclear when the UNM regents might hear the request to hire an architect. Doughty said late Tuesday that he was waiting to discuss the matter with Roth before deciding how to proceed.

UNMs Modern Medical Facility proposal

According to UNM numbers presented Tuesday, the first phase of its proposed new hospital would include:

 120 adult care beds

 six operating rooms

 estimated construction costs of $232 million

 2,000 construction jobs

 300 permanent new positions for health care workers (once open)
Albuquerque mayoral candidate Ricardo Chaves had a tough time during Tuesday nights mayoral forum, tripping over his own words and at times appearing flustered; his campaign attributed the poor performance to Chaves being distracted by death threats he has received this past weekend.

Chaves campaign issued a news release early Wednesday morning acknowledging that he was a bit off during the Tea Party forum, and stating that police are investigating the threats, which were deemed to be credible. According to the release  issued three-and-a-half hours after the forum had ended  the death threats were accompanied by threats to steal his car and extort thousands of dollars from him.

We suggested to Ricardo that he pull out of the forum, but he insisted on participating and not breaking his pledge to show up for this important event, which was admirable, campaign manager Bob Cornelius said in the release. According to the campaign, Chaves was asked to not remain at his home for several days while police investigated the threats.

Chaves, founder of Parking Company of America, has had his vehicle stolen before.

During Tuesdays forum, which was moderated by the League of Women Voters, Chaves, 81, ran into trouble within moments of taking the microphone for the first time.

Im running for mayor to help save Albuquerque, he said, before pausing for several seconds. I have been a businessman my entire life, and I, um, and I have.

After another long pause, Chaves asked, Why am, why am I nervous?

He then continued, And I founded a family owned business. Ive managed um, um, Ive, businesses, Ive managed employees and, and my family has been here 14 generations.

He recovered after that, telling the audience that he was born in Albuquerque and has a deep love for the city.

Im running for three reasons: First, to restore safety and security. Thats No. 1. No. 2 is to rescue our economy, and No. 3 is to reduce the size of government, he said. He pledged to cut the city budget by 10 percent his first year in office.

The rest of the evening was hit and miss for Chaves.

In response to another question, he referred to Google as a big bad company.

The moderator asked candidates their positions on merging the citys police and fire services with Bernalillo Countys public safety departments.

I am totally opposed to merging one bad company with, one bad department with one good department, Chaves said. You end up with one big bad department. In business you never, ever merge a good company with a bad company because then you get a big bad company like Google. I would, I would consider merging them when you have two departments that are being run well, then I would consider merging because there are, there are a lot of savings that can be done when you have two, two good companies, two good companies merging. Thank you.

In response to a question about how candidates feel about Albuquerques Heading Home program, an initiative to provide housing for the most vulnerable homeless people, Chaves said his office is right in the middle of homeless downtown.

You see these people that need medical care, he added. Theyre all, theyre dope addicts and they need help and the city hasnt done anything for them. You know, it seems to me like they could pick them up and put them in some kind of shelter or something. 

All eight mayoral candidates were present at Tuesdays forum. While there have been a number of mayoral forums held since March, Chaves has missed several of them. He only jumped into the mayors race in April.

Chaves, a Republican, has already lent his campaign $500,000.